There's a design revolution coming out of North America. It dares to imagine the welfare of the entire human race.
One of the most important things we did was take the visual out of design.
If you said to me, ''Make something,'' I would say, ''What?'' I wouldn't have the foggiest idea of what to do.
Eight percent of Americans live in mobile homes, but I have yet to meet a mobile-home architect. The entire field of architecture turns away from it, because it's mass production.
Design has emerged as one of the world痴 most important forces and nature itself has fallen to the regime of design. Design has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility where all economies and ecologies are becoming totally global, relational, and interconnected and there exists one complex network of dominion over the forces of nature.
It is also multi-modal, with an international exhibition, a book, public events, a radio program, an online forum and a film project. The website is divided into sections: Urbanization, Manufacturing, Movement, Health & Living, Energy, Markets, Materials, The Image, Information, The Military, Wealth & Politics. Each section is prefaced by a brief "statement," such as:
The enormous changes we have instigated have the potential to create wealth on an order of magnitude the world has never seen. They are part of a global movement that is at the heart of our project � the welfare of the entire human race as a practical objective. Massive Change is a story about distributed problem solving, global cooperation, generosity, openness, and connectedness.
Design and its capacities promise to make this century a new era of wealth, worldwide. When we say wealth we don稚 mean strictly monetary wealth, but rather the wealth of life, the wealth of liberty and health, the wealth of human thought and action, the collective wealth of common language and culture.
The statements are followed by a series of posts, some from "editors" and soem from the public. In these early stages, they mostly seem to be announcements of related projects, etc. and it remains to see whether or what kind of debate the project will engender on the website.
Posted by Steve Dietz on September 25, 2004 12:05 AM
I heard David Em speak on a panel with Yoichiro Kawaguchi
at SIGGRAPH. It was a fascinating ramble through the corridors of various research labs before there was really such a thing as digital art. I took some awful pictures from the back of the lecture hall, but fortunately Em has put up what is essentially the website of his talk, and it is full of gems:
The words on the page don't really convey the "I'd seen the future" of Em's voice, but taking a year to draw a 3D bug gives you a sense of the obsession.
His story is also the story of Moore's Law, and he writes that in 1991, "it was clear to me that my days of depending on big labs to do my work would soon be history."
I'm unconvinced that access to cutting edge technology is ever important for most digital artists, and to the extent that we make the general case for art and technology an issue of innovation, we are making the weak case for art.
Posted by Steve Dietz on September 21, 2004 7:58 PM
Like the Valley itself, local philanthropy will be innovative
By Gordon Knox
Dana Gioia's recent essay (Perspective, Aug. 22) presented a timely challenge. Gioia compares Silicon Valley in the past 20 years with Florence or Flanders in the 14th and 15th centuries, during periods of global transformations in technology and finance.
But Gioia also asks where is the support for the arts that should flow from the wealth and vision of today's entrepreneurial leaders. He points to the absence of a world-class opera, orchestra or museum in San Jose as signs of a failed philanthropic spirit.
I disagree. Why would today's innovators recreate familiar institutions born centuries ago? Philanthropy will flow from Silicon Valley, and it will do so in ways that reflect and support the dexterity of thought that created the wealth in the first place.
We can expect that the cultural organizations emerging in Silicon Valley will themselves be innovative. The Valley's view is that innovation, exploration and expression are linked and that the confluence of technical, creative and scientific genius sustained and energized the global transformations initiated by the Valley.
The cultural terrain is not as bleak as Gioia believes. There are a number of hopeful developments, and it appears that the Valley is preparing to put its philanthropic money where its heart is -- into innovation, exploration and the re-integration of art and science.
San Jose is fortunate to have one of the nation's most talented public arts commissions, which is currently working on a large public art project at the new San Jose airport terminal.
Another hopeful example is the San Jose Museum of Art's initiative to open an entire building exploring the intersection of art and technology. In addition, the Tech Museum and Zero/One will bring the International Symposium of Electronic Arts to San Jose in 2006. Initiatives such as these suggest what the Valley's enduring philanthropic contributions will look like.
Not the largest, but perhaps the most striking example of the Valley's emerging cultural philanthropy is on a hillside in Saratoga. It is the result of extraordinary initiative, persistence and vision. A handful of passionate individuals and a wide group of supporters have built at Villa Montalvo the world's newest and perhaps finest facilities for an international artist residency program anywhere.
Artist residencies provide time and space for energetic, creative minds to develop their work, and the new $10 million facilities at Montalvo provide the ideal setting. They also embody the new philanthropy of the Valley. Artist residencies support the creative process by encouraging new collaborations. They provide an opportunity for creative minds to experiment, to return to an old problem, to turn to something new, to hunker down and focus, away from the distractions of daily life.
The international multi-disciplinary program at Montalvo places this creative brainpower in the cultural and technological context of one of the world's most diverse and creative communities and will provide connections to its businesses and educational and cultural institutions.
Gioia is correct, we should expect major cultural contributions to flow from the wealth of the Valley. It should surprise no one that cultural developments that first take hold here are those that support innovation and the creative process. As with technology, the global impact follows.
GORDON KNOX is director of the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo. He wrote this column for the Mercury News.
Guest Curators: Dennis Summers and Choy Kok Kee (gxgallery[at]astn.net)
The Leonardo Electronic Almanac Gallery is inviting submissions in conjunction with the Leonardo Global Crossings Initiative. The Gallery is looking to make visible the work of international artists, professionals and scholars who live and work in a wide variety of situations where access to established venues for exhibition, display and publication is limited. Difficulty of access may be attributed to cultural, geographic, ethnic, institutional or disciplinary diversity, or issues related to the North/South divide, age, gender, etc. Through this Gallery we seek to showcase little-known work in the art-science-technology field and to counter the
natural tendency of networks to be inward looking, thus reinforcing established points of view.
We are looking for work that considers the global earth in some fashion or another. It can be work that addresses global social, political economic, spiritual, etc. issues. It can be work that physically or metaphorically lies in multiple locations on the planet, it can be work that may have personal relationships to multiple locations on the planet. Or anything else that loosely falls along the concept of being "global" in nature.
LEA encourages international artists / academics / researchers / students to submit their proposal and explore global crossings in an open context in their creative submissions and work. We particularly encourage young authors outside North America and Europe to send proposals.
Posted by Steve Dietz on September 17, 2004 11:56 AM
On a recent trip to San Jose, I checked into my hotel too late to go right back out the door after I was welcomed by this sign next to the elevator:
Warning: This Facility Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer and/or Birth Defects Or Other Reproductive Harm.
When I asked the desk clerk, she assured me that all hotels in California have to post this warning and gave me a brochure, which clarified matters a great deal.
California's Proposition 65 (Safe Drinnking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986) reqquires businesses with 10 or more employees to provide warnings prior to exposing individuals to chemicals known to the State to cause cancer, and/or birth defects or other reproductive harm.
These types of chemicals are found within this establishment. This brochure provides you with information on what chemicals are present and what your exposures to them might be.
The brochure identified such hazards as smoking, alchohol, fish that can contain elevated levels of mercury, brass keys, which "if in use" can contain a number of Proposition65-listed chemicals, hot tubs that use chlorine, and when "any time organic matter is burned, Proposition 65-listed chemicals are released into the air." Etc.
This type of warning is what I would call a difference that does not make a difference - except that I probably won't return to that hotel, of course, even if the same "problems" are present in every single hotel in California.
What I really need is something like Eric Paulos'sLimelight (via Jonah'scoin-operated)), which provides "the user with an awareness of the current condition of actual threats that should be of concern" [emphasis added]. Thank you Eric! Although you do have to wonder whether his shift from selling pathogens via a vending machine (Dispersion, 1999) to warning indicators of actual threats isn't a sign of the times, like this Crop Art work (sorry, I didn't get the artist's name) recently on display at the Minnesota State Fair.
Posted by Steve Dietz on September 16, 2004 12:34 AM
If you're in Maine this weekend, check out Games: Making and Unmaking the WorldStill Water program for network art and culture at the University of Maine, organized by Joline Blais, featuring artists Natalie Bookchin, Ruth Catlow, Mary Flanagan, Alex Galloway, John Klima, and Anne-Marie Schleiner.
This series of discussions and workshops will explore the increasing prevalence of electronic war and conflict simulation in military and entertainment contexts -- raising issues about the construction of gender in the context of gameplay and game narrative, and also provoking some discussion on issues related to the upcoming election.
Posted by Steve Dietz on September 10, 2004 10:53 AM
I just finished the second novel in Neal Stephenson'sBaroque Cycle,The Confusion. Even though it's taken me ages to read, I've been flogging it to friends and unsuspecting airplane seatmates alike for making the Enlightenment "moment" a believalbe mishmash of genius, imperialism, alchemy, luck, and, well, confusion. I just ran across (via a map credit in Shanghai Diary) Stephenson's Metaweb site for Quicksilver, the first novel in the trilogy. It's set up like the Wikipedia and Stephenson writes:
My own view of the Metaweb is pretty straightforward: I don't think that the Internet, as it currently exists, does a very good job of explaining things to people. It is great for selling stuff, distributing news and dirty pictures, and a few other things. But when you need to get a good explanation of something, whether it is a scientific principle, a bit of gardening advice, or how to change a tire, you have to sift through a vast number of pages to find the one that gives you the explanation that is right for you. Generally this is not a problem with the explanations themselves. On the contrary, it seems as though a lot of people like to explain things on the Internet, and some of them are quite good at it. The problem lies in how these explanations are organized.
In the ongoing New-Media-Curating list discussion about taxonomy, Andreas Broeckmansuggested, as a response to how to write a heterogeneous set of accounts of new media that is also, in some sense, authoritative:
i would like to put forward the wikipedia as a site where a critical and diverse genealogy of media art could be developed - i find this a very appealing project to pursue by a community like this one.
Metaweb seems to be a kind of instance of this. It is separately hosted, but it is easy to imagine an article on Robert Boyle in Wikipedia referencing and linking an article on him in Metaweb, where he is a major character in Quicksilver. Of course, this doesn't completely solve how the link between metaweb and wikipedia is privileged over potentially thousands of other Robert Boyle links, which is the issue Stephenson starts with, but I still like the idea of extending Wikipedia for the uses of particular communities, whether it is Baroque Cycle afficionados or new media junkies.
As a kind of p.s. to the possibility of social knowledge and tools for social research, the Faculty of Taxonomy at the University of Openness - of which I am a member - along with the faculty wiki, uses del.ici.us as a keywordable bookmark aggregator, and I'm quite enamored of how easy it is to use.
P.P.S. At the end of The Confusion, Jack Shaftoe, "King of the Vagabonds" and one of the two main characters, stares up at Isaac Newton, who has recently taken over the Royal Mint (don't ask - it's all about the shift from land to commerce as an economic engine and Newton's authority, despite his penchant for alchemy, is required) and vows a good fight. The third volume, The System of the World, goes on sale September 21!
Art Science Technology: The weak case vs. the strong case
Posted by Steve Dietz on September 4, 2004 11:47 AM
The Timeshift conference at Ars had two panels on Thursday, Progress and Disruption. Guest curated by Michael Naimark, all of the panels had an interesting setup. A "younger person" was asked to go through the Ars archives and give a 20 minute talk about the past 25 years. The "older persons" were asked to prognosticate about the next 25 years. The thought and effort that Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Aleena Williams, and Nadja Maurer put into their presentations was remarkable, and hopefully they will be available in the archives soon. The thought and effort that the older crew put in was variable.
On the Progress panel, Esther Dyson suggested that progress is the dimunition of entropy and told us stories about having lunch with former Intel vice presidents in Budapest the previous day and how her experience at ICANN proved that online was not a forum for making decisions. She is still a very busy person and had to check her email while the other speakers presented.
Roger Malina gave an inspiring fire and brimstone speech about how little we know - only 3% of the composition of the universe is stuff we can say we understand what it is. The rest we call "dark matter" (25%) and "dark energy" (70% ), and we might just as well say Hic sunt dracone: "Here be dragons."
[Imagine each of these as admonitions belted out in a passionately rising voice and multiple hand gestures, if not podium thumping for emphasis.]
Our knowledge of the universe is of the irrelevant "flotsam and jetsam."
Most of the universe our bodily senses are not equipped to even sense. It is as if insects with only the sense of touch discovered there were things beyond their reach like light, but they could only reason with the physics of touch and did not even have any language about light, not even an alphabet.
Rather than study the world, we study databases about the world. And what is in the databases, someone has decided to put in the databases.
This leads to an "epistemological inversion" (Boorstin), where our scientific process is retrodictive, not predictive.
In the 19th century we were meaning rich and data poor. Now we are data rich and meaning poor.
The direction of scientific research is culturally contingent. For example, it is George Bush who decided to explore Mars and not stem cells.
The intersection of Art / Science / Technology (AST) is one approach for explicitly recognising the cultural contingencies and embedded-ness of science and technology.
There are two cases for AST. The weak case:
interaction of artss and scientes lead to "better" science.
introduction into sci or tech into the arts, leads to art that is "appropriate", "resonant" with our times. E.g. computer art.
The strong case:
"new leonardos"
what is art when 97% of universse unknown
AST interaction will lead to different cases of science + tech
different science, different technology, new methods within science -> re-imagine what art and science might means as the connected planet develops "collective" behaviors leading to a mind at large
I'm not sure I can follow you all the way to the "mind at large," but thank you Roger, for such a clarion call, and I think the argument that we have been making the "weak case" for AST, and we need to develop a "strong case" is right on target.
Posted by Steve Dietz on September 3, 2004 2:09 PM
The Ars festival continued its rolling opening Thursday with a panel on the "Digital Avant-Garde" - also known as a few of the past Prix Ars Electronica winners - at the Lentos Museum of Modern Art.
Benjamin Weil made the interesting point that when the Prix winners were shown earlier in the year in New York, they hadn't been seen so much by a North American audience and were presented at media-specific institutions: Eyebeam and American Museum of the Moving Image. Presented at Ars again, they are presented in a new context at a contemporary art museum. The only problem is that besides the museum itself, the primary context provided for the works was a xeroxed sheet of paper, which seemed to be printed from the website text, for example regarding Jeffrey Shaw'sLegible City:
"The user can ride a stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of an urban setting consisting of computer-generated letters. The real architecture is replaced by one consisting of text, and the journey through this urban space becomes a literary excursion.
"The texts have been conceived as discrete narratives, each of which has its own specific geographic setting within the urban sphere. Accordingly, the virtual city is a three-dimensional book that can be read in any sequence and in which each person encountering it construes his/her own meaning.
It's not inaccurate, but it seems like a missed opportunity to truly re-contextualize these key works in the history of new media.
This image of Earth痴 city lights was created with data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS).
The highlight of the day was Brian Holmes's rousing talk "Crisis Cartographies:Stratified Power and the Dynamics of the Swarm" for the Language of Networks conference for which his subtext question was "Is the power law distribution a destiny?" I cannot possibly reproduce his rhetorically powerful argument, but after viewing a NASA map of cities at night, showing primarily the so-called first world lit up and comparing it to a skitter map of more than 11,000 peering sessions globally (showing only one named node in Pretoria for the entire continent of Africa), he suggested that these "raw facts of location and information flow" conformed to traditional (ca. 1992) analyses of centers and peripheries in the world. There appears to be no substantive resistance to the dictates of capital and in light of this, "how do people create free associations" - in both the anarchist and psychoanalytic sense? He then talked about the importance of "weak ties" (most network mapping is coded and deciphered according to the strength of connections). For example, unemployed people find jobs through the "strength of weak ties" - the friend of a friend of a friend. He was arguing that random links (weak ties) can lead individuals outside of their world, and that is a good thing. He also talked about transduction and how stable equilibrium can be altered through the introduction of a singularity. He then analyzed the migration of indymedia software as an example of the success of open source software. This segued into analysis of analyst Thomas Barnett, who was working with both Cantor & Fitzgerald and the Pentagon, the two sites of finance and military attacked by Al Qaeda. The thrust of Barnett's work is to identify a swathe of the world, "the Pentagon's new map" - a "non-integrating gap" roughly analagous to the dark spots on the NASA map or the absense of peering session nodes on the skitter map - where all American interventions have happened since 1980 and where it is important to export security or, as Holmes put it, Barnett argued that the U.S. should "give them networks at the point of a gun." And it is precisely the attempt to subordinate network processes to hierarchical control that has led to such disastrous consequences, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. To paraphrase his reference to Guattari, "what matters is not to represent these events after the fact but how to configure them, how to bring them down to earth." Ending with: "cartography is not just surveying from above / the past, but tracing social dynamics that describe a possible future."
Posted by Steve Dietz on September 2, 2004 7:37 PM
I attended part of the Language of Networks conference the afternoon before Ars officially opened. Some good technical discussion of representation of networks. Anne Nigten from V2_lab gave a nice talk about mental mapping and announced the launch of D-Tower by Q.S. Serafijn and NOX Architects. Selected residents of Doetinchem in the Netherlands fill out a questionaire.
"This questionnaire contains 360 questions. Every other day, four new questions are made available to the inhabitants of Doetinchem. An example: 'Are you happy with your partner?' Possible answers: 'very much' - 'yes' - 'a little' - 'no' - 'absolutely not' - 'not applicable'. Each answer has a score."
These score can be mapped to the respondents' emotional states - specifically love (red), hate (green), happiness (blue), and fear (yellow). Their answers along with their postal codes are used to create a dynamic, emotional map of the city, showing which parts have a happier profile, for instance. The really cool part, I think, is that a tower at the edge of town (webcam view at left) is lit by a combination of colored lights that represents the emotional state of the town that day. If it's too hateful or fearful, you might want to stay away.
Which is what New York might be, I suppose. I ran into Zhang Ga, who had just arrived from there, and he said that about 1400 people had been arrested so far. This is not news that I'm getting on CNN Asia in the evening, the only English-language news in my unwired hotel room. I'd like to be able to consult a D-Tower map of Manhattan.
Hot tip. Zhang Ga's The Peoples' Portrait will launch in Singapore and Times Square on the Reuters Building in November. He has 5 minutes of every hour from Reuters for the project, so if you want to see yourself many stories high, get to the Times Square Information Center early and often. It should be very Blade Runner, although I think that Zhang Ga's intentions are less noir.
W. Bradford Paley also gave a spirited presentation of Textarc at the Language of Networks conference, along with some of the background to his process. He argues that there is a universal process by which the human sensorium comprehends, which goes from sensation -> differentiation -> segmentation -> recognition -> interpretation -> association -> comprehension, and that one of his goals is to take advantage of this process and offload, so to speak, as much of the information visualization to the earlier stages as possible. Quite convincing. He also spoke briefly about his new project at Ars, which is a social networking project. He is distributing 1,000 stick pins that will anonymously tag - he didnt' say the mechanism, but I am assuming RFID - every time the wearer has a conversation - its length and the other person (assuming s/he also has a stick pin). He'll then create a visualization of the conversations of these 1,000 people over the course of the conference. When you walk up to the visualization wearing your pin, it will automatically identify your node(s) as well. Should be fascinating, although I heard a rumor that the pins had been held up in customs so far.
It's still a day before the official opening of Ars and wandering around there is the usual state of disarray that will turn magically into (mostly) functioning projects overnight. Sitting in the office at OK Centrum where most of the Prix winners are shown, an artist walked in asking if any of us had a 1 ohm resistor on us. I had just given my last one away, unfortunately.
I checked out Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen'sListening Post, which is one of my alltime favorite projects and which one the Golden Nica for interactive art. Yeah! They had everything pretty much under control, even though their equipment had arrived 3 days late, and they had had a minor electrical fire. Ben was chasing down a hum the lights were causing and also preparing to enter by hand thousands of instructions for the audio sequencing, as the version of their sound board at Ars was an early one and couldn't download the program automatically, apparently. When Listening Post is shown at La Villette Numerique later in the month, it will have a 300-foot sight line, so Mark was working on a new font for a new "movement" they've added to the program, which briefly displays ALL CAPS MESSAGES from the chat rooms. Mostly, they think they'll get FUCK YOU and LOSER and similar INVECTIVE. Quite an attract sequence.
The one criticism of Listening Post, which I've heard - and agree with - is that it only has a male voice. Mark explained that there are different levels of text-to-voice synthesizers available and at the most sophisticated end of the spectrum, which they require, the female voice is buggy. Hopefully, this will be fixed by the manufacturer at some point, and they can add more variety to the piece then.
Ran into Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki, and was excited to hear that they'll be demoing umbrella.net - which I mention in my "Locative = 'Yes'" selection for low-fi net art locator - at Spectropolis in New York at the beginning of October. The umbrellas are custom-designed with LED lighting and Ipaq units for messaging whenever an ad hoc network is established. Wish I could be there to try it. It sounds ripe to me, for corporate sponsorship at some golf tournament. You'd really be able to track the dealmaking going on, like a physical version of Josh On'sThey Rule.
On a recent trip to San Jose, I checked into my hotel too late to go right back out the door after I was welcomed by this sign next to the elevator:
The brochure identified such hazards as smoking, alchohol, fish that can contain elevated levels of mercury, brass keys, which "if in use" can contain a number of Proposition65-listed chemicals, hot tubs that use chlorine, and when "any time organic matter is burned, Proposition 65-listed chemicals are released into the air." Etc.
