Sitting on the floor next to a trashbasket smelling of apple cores, as the room is full up and the chairs are all taken, thinking about visible and invisible.
===Tuesday Morning
Keith Armstrong, University of Queensland
Towards an ecosophical praxis of new media space design
Part of a PhD that Keith just handed in, CONGRATULATIONS Keith!
eco-sophy-- Wisdome (sophia) of the dwelling (oikos) -- a combination of ecology and philosophy
Keith is an nterdisciplinary artist, using large public spaces to install art and practicing. "Creative engagement in terms of ecology."
We are facing a crises of subjectivity.
New media is powerful in focusing contexts for conversation, a way to practice critical reflection and action, with a continual refinement of methods, data, and interpretation. As an artist, there are many ways to approach practice and research.
Keith refined a series of questions about what an ecosophical praxis might be by installing work and looking at the results. An ecosophical praxis might be:
SIte specific, sensory, collectively interactive and reactive, evolving and emerging
Data flows/operation allude to energy flows within ecological systems
In one of his pieces, Public Relations, he looks at a station as n ecological metaphor, gathered passenger thoughts, and installed the work. The work is an installation of lines and an LEd screen with poetry n the train station so people can watch it. Reactions ranged from I love it to it makes the mine think to its a load of rubbish.The LED screen messages changed over time as Keith a A collaboration between artist and public. He interviewed passengers at the scene of the artwork and receiving input through submission methods, reflected on the input, and modified the artwork.
Now working in interactive installations across networks, researching affordable, cross platform solutions for wartists
Future Works
Intimate Translations, networked globally dispersed interactive installations in Australia/Europe/Asia
Network for Extreme Weather: Flaoating and buried interactive Modules in Noosa, Alice Springs, and Brisbane.
www.outlook.com.au/keith
Dan Fleming, Hypertext and Empire (some footnotes)
Dan has taught a hypertext workshop at the University of Ulster, watching students struggle with constructing hyperlinks and playing with Ted Nelson's cosmic book reader. This reader "makes the hyperlink literal, you get lines for lyperlinks where lines persist. This is a lot like Storyspace lines, but they are in the node itself, which makes it seem powerful. He is working on a hypertext about the developing the Canadian prairies from the 1800s till after the first world war.
The paper is about hyperlinks and multitude.
Theory must be able to live inside everyday representations of the world, take these as the starting point of the argument, and be able to transform those represtentations into an adeqquate undersatning of the world...paraphrased from Craib.
The hyperlink today is a transparent presentation of choices, an open receptive stepping into space. We are developing links into what Mark Bernstein terms as an airlock, an intermediate zone of where you have come from and where you are going to.
Hyperlinking as a transcoding of multitude-
A cultural perspective
Wished for world
Contrast this
Structural knowledge acquisition
This interest predates the web
Is an instrumental perspective.
Wished for knowledge
See
Antonio Negri Time for Revolution, New York: Continuum, 2003
"So each of you becomes a singularity in the c onstellations of multitude because you can harness the productive power of communication."
Virtual worlds, hypertexts, online communities are examples of multitude appropriated, incorporated by empire. They absorb the potential of multitude at the very point of the historical and cultural emergence.
Can we still understand hypertext as having a handle and connections of multitude?
The semantic web will fix hyperlinking and make the information more accessible.
Nick Monfort, Stuart Moulthrop
Close reading of Varicella, an interactive fiction by Adam Cadre which focuses on one character, Princess Charlotte. Princess Charlotte functions as a "wise fool"--her bridegroom was shot at the wedding, and she has been locked up in a room in a straitjacket since then---mad with grief?
Princess Charlotte greets the hero of the interactive fiction with "Face it, Tiger, you just hit the jackpot." This is a reference to a spiderman cartoon--which implies that the hero has just met a hot chick.
The effectiveness of this piece is that it is both a narrative and a game. In Varicella, an extensive prologue describes the character, the historical situation, the rivals, the surroundings. Aftter all of this, you don't expect the comptuer game to throw you a ball. You expect to confront a simulated world, to solve an overarching problem or puzzle in this world.
Nick then contrasted Varicella with Marrku Eskeelin's expectations and definitions of games and narrative. Nick argues that the idea of expectations is not so clear cut--in theory, story, or in game.
Princess Charlotte's dialogue invites interpretations, hunting allusions, which are strategies in interacting with narrative. Yet this may be termed a game. WARNING SPOILER: Charlotte must be used as a murder weapon to "win the game" of Varicella. We look for surprise and revelations in a character--she acts in a way known in consistent behaviour, but takes that to a new level. She reveals things about our world and helps the interactor to gain a fuller understanding of Varicella's world. Charlotte comments on aspects of the computer game that as a character she should not know about, which merges the metaleptic comment level with the story/game level.
Interactive fictiion is not served well if seen as floorwax and desert topping--a game with a story laid on top to make it more palatable. Are game and story incompatible or in opposition? Varicella functions enjoyably because it is a good game and offers good reading, provides a story that a purely ludic game cannot provide on its own.
===Session two
My paper-Glide is a website, a novel, a language composed of 27 symbols. -I showed how to translate Glide into English and create poems and meaning--a hefty task for ten minutes as usually learning languages takes years. It took me a long time to understand how to use it.
Julianne Chatelain, independant scholar presented LiveGlide, which is a way to experience the glyphs and language of Glide--you can step into the glyphs to transform one glide into another glide.
Why LiveGlide? Slattery wants to abadone the alphabet, to break with natural language. Matthis: to open our minds so that we can think differently, a way to visualize the fourth dimension: "A figure and its movement in the n dimension."
Glide escapes from the very structure of language and alphabet.
Truna (Jane Turner) Betwixt and Between: A performative introduction.
Truna shows how to use a media experience and how to create it--somewhere between those groups you need simple and logical tools. The new worlds we move to play within, streamed to us via cyberspace can be seen to have parentage--antecedents or analogy.
Who are the authors of this space and what are they thinking of? Each interface has an author.
How are these works put together: object action design: create a model where objects break down into units and actions break down into steps.
Why are things so difficult to learn? Why do interfaces treat us as if we are simply stupid--good clip of clippy saying "Excuse me I think you are writing a lecture?"
People who hit poor interface design think it is their fault rather than questioning the design itself.
To be literate: you have a triangle of identities, the user role, the tool outcomes, the designer role. Literacy is the understanding of the text and the ramifcations of the text being.
The cage is more attractive than the real--there is a seduction to illusion.
Zork and similar environments dont become worlds until they are connected by social connections and networks and experiences.
See: Unlocking the Clubhouse: teaching gender issues in IT.
The conceptual model of communication is still the telephone--one to one communication.
Phone is a subversive item.
Interfaces which are visible and allow you to play with the interface--technoMOO.
Majestic--game where designer has access to your real world through SMS--interface between design and reality.
===Panel 3 Tues.
Oh dear oh dear too MUCH to go to! This was the most torn for me of the panels--I wanted to hear all of this
Rob Swigart gave William Gillespie's paper---on how Beatles collaborated, playing with length of sound, recordings. As Beatles started out creatingtraditional ideas and went on to longer more untraditional works. The Unknown started in a similar way, to write criticism of our own writing (a default genre). As an accessory tot he book of criticism, we would publish a work of our poetry and writings. The hypertext was a publicity stunt for the real serious work, but the hypertext took over. Used drugs to ensure the momentum of the euphoria.
Teri Hoskins, University of South Australia
Terms of engagement: How is the discourse of digital arts incorporated
See Power Books for the Virtual
Noah Wardrip Fruin, Brown University, From Instrumental Texts to Textual Instruments
Lone survivor of a panel, this panel became a short paper.
What is an instrumental text: a text meant to be played, provide an affordance for such play much as muskcal instruments do--such as frets on a guitar. these provide opportunities for practice and award master.
STrickland proposed as artist panel, Noah interviewed Stuart Moulthrop, forthcoming in the Iowa Review Web.
These are analogous to computer games--as you practice youi achieve mastery and get different affects.
Analogy of games may be more accurate--you can get many effects from a game.
Noah has done some work that might be instrumental text:
Talking Cure, collaboration first presented at the 2002 ELO symposium. (I saw this at ELO, you see a screen of text and move your arm and body and discover other layers of text and story.) You play the text and get different ways to achieve the text.
Screen, collaboration shown at 2003 Cyberarts Festival in Boston. This projects text onto the wall in a VR space. Text then can peel off the walls, you hit it with your hand, text goes back into available spaces. (texts are about memory, virtual experiences). Text peels faster and faster, break apart, and intensify the interaction with the text. When too many words peel off the wall, the reader is overwhelmed with the text.
Claude Shannon--gave us the mathemeatics of communication. Liked to play geeky games--pick up a book, chose a word, scan until he found the word, take the word that followed the word which would be the second word in the sentence, scan for the second word and use the word that followed that as the third word in the sentence. This is a 2 gram, scanning for the first word and using the second. You could do a 3 gram now, called n-grams.
Cayley did a 2 gram hypercard work, Indra's Net??
Used to create textual toys (DOS program Babble)
Brion Moss Prate at http://prate.queeg.com is a textual toy that use n-games.
How can n-gram text be played? How can we work within a given document structure rather than add to a word and create a buffer?
hmmmmm....this could be a lot of fun to generate texts and to see the potential n-gram chains--how the chain could have gone in different directions. In a way, Glide is an n-grammatic text that provides potential space where you can choose a meaning to follow a meaning....
Noah is working on a way to alter a document in place, as his Impermanence Agent does. this would have to loop back within a reasonable distance (in two senses). This can't be too long or land too far away.
Regime change is a fixed text (US armed forces news release) that plays with ngrams using the Warren Report on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
News reader would be a dynamic text whichplays with n grams.
Daniel Parman, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Word as Code, Code as World
Game research falls into two camps: come from theories with hypertext, literature, film which is concerned with narrative and story, others from anthropology which are concerned with using games, social interactions, etc.
Daniel is from the second camp, and looked at a MUD (a great definition of MUD--a MUD is: show a picture of dungeon and a battle that looks like this: show a picture of text).
Ethnographic studies concentrate on what happens when playing the game. This looks at people who graduated into core players: magicians, who are system developers and programmers. If they weren't computer hackers when they started, they are now, as they manage the code.
Garnev built a system of magic to use in the MUD, to formalize magic to incorporate it into the game. He researched magic, categorized it, showed spell attributes, requirements, interactions. Created a magical language that could be calculated by putting together spell attributes.
hmmmmm....what would happen if we took all this creative energy of building worlds and societies and networks in imaginary worlds and harnessed it? I am thinking of the Child Buyer by Hersey now, one of my early sources of nightmares...what a diablolical way of using all this potential, all of the thinking and energy and work. But how would you harness this mind energy and action and what would you use it for?
Overlaps between computer programming, role playing games and fantasy literature/science fiction. What is this overlap and why does it appeal to certain people?
Imaginary worlds are complex but logical and controllable systems. They are made up worlds governed by internally consistent roles.
See Tolkien, MAR Barker Tekumel (Realized through the rule system of a role playihg game and has a detaile dhistry socila, cultural, linguistic, political systems),
Resiska varlden--stockholm group spent 20 years creating a world of their own, used an island as a map and transformed it into a board game.
Why do people spend so much time and energy creating these elaborate worlds?
Posted by at May 20, 2003 01:49 PM