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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
During the Free Cooperation conference, I had the pleasure of viewing new work-in-progress in virtual drama called 'The Trial The Trial' by professor Josephine Anstey <http://www.ccr.buffalo.edu/anstey/VDRAMA/TRAIL/index.html>.
Professor Anstey's work places the viewer of a virtual reality space in the middle of a dramatic situation and forces the viewer to make choices. As part of this new work, she is working with artificial intelligence experts in developing dramatic characters with intelligence.
In one scene, the viewer and a character have been making a pilgrimage together and reach a sacred site where they meditate for a few moments. This scene was particularly interesting to me because I had been reading Rebecca Solnit's 'Wanderlust, A History of Walking' in which she devotes an entire chapter to the history and significance of pilgrimages. I have mentioned Solnit's writings in this blog before, referring to a book called 'River of Shadows' about Edward Muybridge and the American West. I am always inspired by the way Solnit combines the cultures of media, the personal, and the political, and had been thinking about walking in relation to interactive media.
The experience of virtual reality can be likened to the experience of a pilgrimage. Solnit calls the pilgrimage 'walking in search of something intangible' According to Solnit, during a pilgrimage, one develops a changing sense of time, experiences a heightening of the senses, and finds a new awareness of the body and the landscape. Certainly the experience of virtual reality creates similar sensations.
In virtual reality, the viewer understands that he or she no longer has the same identity, the viewer takes on a role or a persona and in Anstey's work, plays a character in a drama. This phenomenon was most clear in the networked VR demonstration in which participants in VR spaces around the world joined in a kind of 'Soul Train' dance party, each person represented by a simple graphic avatar.
Pilgrimages can be solitary activities, but many Solnit talks about consist of large groups all traveling the same path. In this way, the experience of VR is very different from the pilgrimage. The typical VR experience is solitary. Perhaps this is what drives Professor Anstey to develop characters with a form of artificial intelligence, perhaps to counter the lonleiness of the experience of the virtual world.
Quick notes from the Freecooperation conference (freecooperation.org) at the University of Buffalo. Just sat in on part of a symposium on digital poetry with Alan Sondheim (asondheim.org) and Simon Biggs. Listened to Sandy Baldwin (www.as.wvu.edu/~sbaldwin) discuss how information theory has evolved in tandem with modern poetics. He presented some inetresting experiments in cryptography by Claude Shannon.
aside: some background from Christian Dalager's blog (dalager.com)
"Claude Shannon and Alan Turing met in the Bell Laboratories in New York during Turings work for the US cryptoanalytic department in the second world war. Shannon had already worked out his famous communication model: A message travels from a sender through a channel with limited capacity to a recipient. Passing through the channel the message is subject to distortion by noise that may render it unintelligible for the recipient. Both men were interested in logical machines."
Baldwin discussed some of Shannon's work exploring the stochastic structure of the English language, exploring how redunancy is built into the language ('English is 50% redundant') through experimenting with human's ability to guess the next word in a book or story. In other experiments, Shannon created texts by randomly choosing words and groups of words from books. One such result was the text:
"THE HEAD AND IN FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH WRITER THAT THE CHARACTER OR THE POINTIS THEREFORE ANOTHER METHOD FOR THE LETTERS THAT THE TIME OF WHO EVER TOLD THE PROBLEM FOR AN UNEXPECTED"
Interesting text in both that the text seems like real language although it was generated randomly, but also interesting in its content or meaning if one reads it metaphorically or poetically. Shannon himself is experimenting with the automatic or machinic generation of language and the text itself seems to refer to this removal of the author as an 'attack' on the writer (perhaps Shannon himself)
Perhaps the part of Marcuse's 'Aesthetic Dimension' comes in part 3, when he asks how revolutionary art can speak the language of radically different experience. He speaks of an abstract autonomy of art in which the:
"private arbitrary invention of something new, a technique which remains extraneous to the content, or technique without content, form without matter."
However, he quickly reveals the impossibility of this autonomy, stating that no matter what the technique, it is still the transformation of a given material, and in that cultural material, art is inextricably bound to the society, its cultural context.
Now, new media art's ephemeral nature holds the promise of transcending the connection to material, therefore transcending the social and cultural context, but paradoxically in practice new media art actually more dependent on cultural and social context than traditional media. The 'material' of new media art, complex software and hardware, is the result of the previous work of countless individuals and groups, all who created the medium within a social context. Tracing the history and social implications of any piece of hardware and software can reveal conflicting social morals and values. If an artist is to create new media art, there are many choices of media, but each media when investigated reveals a checkered past: most have a military origin, many rely on questionable labor practices. The only solace a new media artist can take is to consider this history the way a stone sculptor considers the checkered past of stone as a material. Stone may have been used as a weapon in the past, slave labor may have been forced to carve stone, and although a work of art can address this past, the work can also choose to address only formal qualities of stone, or other aspects of stone's cultural history.
In fact, Marcuse addresses this very problem:
"This contradiction is preserved and resolved in the aesthetic form which gives the familiar content and the familiar experience the power of estrangement-and which leads to the emergence of a new consciousness and a new perception."
In other words, by transforming the medium of the computer, an artist can create a new history of the medium.
A tranformation of the social history of networked media was in recent history achieved elegantly by Napster. Napster was the first internet music sharing application that became widely popular internationally. Napster exploited the nature of the internet as a peer to peer network, changing public perception which had primarily seen the internet's abilities as a one-to-many broadcast network. Once the public saw this potential, their behavior changed on a scale large enough to create a political and social crisis that highlighted previously unrecognized conflicts between social and political groups.
Marcuse could never have predicted the way an aesthetic invention (I'm taking the liberty of calling Napster an 'aesthetic invention') could directly address the media saturated climate, but he was able to identify the conflict inherent in media saturation:
"We are experiencing, not the destruction of every whole...but rather the rule and power of the whole, the superimposed, administered unification. Not disintegration but reproduction and integration of that which is, is the catastrophe. And in the intellectual culture of our society, it is the aesthetic form which, by virtue of its otherness, can stand up against this integration."
The aesthetic forms created out of the medium of the computer, the programming of systems that redefine how reproduction and integration function in our society, is the revolutionary art form of today.
The ideas Marcuse puts forth in The Aesthetic Dimension can be applied to New Media art. Marcuse says that art can be called revolutionary by fulfilling several criteria:
First, if it represents a radical change in style and technique. Certainly New Media historically represented a radical change in style and technique. I think Marcuse was referring to changes within existing media, but clearly changes in the media with radical changes in capabilities (such as interactivity) creating an entirely new discipline fits this definition of revolutionary.
Marcuse goes on to point out that thes radical changes in style and technique anticipate or reflect substantial changes in the society at large. Now, this is where in my view Marcuse doesn't go far enough and New Media can be seen as a model for an even more radical transformation. In my view, the emergence of New Media not only anticiapted and reflected substantial changes in society, but it was instrumental in creating those changes. Interactive and networked media first informed the public of what was possible with the technology, then provided models of what this technology could most effectively be used for (and most of these models spoke very specifically of social change), and finally created a demand for these technologies.
Marcuse believes that the 'technical' definition of revolutionary art, that of an art that through radical change in style and technique anticipates or reflects radical change in society does not reflect the quality, authenticity, and truth of the work.
It seems that his definition of quality, authenticity, and truth therefore implies a moral dimension of the work. As I try to look for examples in New Media that follow Marcuse's line of argument, I can only consider the social impact of the work in terms of black and white: was a particular technology or application of technology on the whole beneficial to society or not? Although such analysis of work is important to consider (one might consider the environmental impact of digital media and create technologies that allowed for more sustainable media for example) I believe there can be benefits to the work that transcend this social impact and speak instead to furthering mankind's understanding of consciousness, truth, and the universe.
A couple of days ago, I met with Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, Dr.. David Rind, and Dr. Rich Goldberg of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies <http://www.giss.nasa.gov/> to discuss a collaborative project in the sonification of climate data. The climate change group works on developing and verifying models of climate to determine the ways that climate will change and how those changes will affect human experience. The group had just put out a regional climate change report that showed that predicted changes in climate in the next 20-50 years will have a dramatic effect on life in the New York area.
As a first step in our collaboration, we will be sonifying observed data from Central Park from the past 100 years. Central Park is an important space in the city, one that holds rich metaphorical meaning (see post from August 4, 2003 Central Park and ARPANET) Designed in 1856, it was a place that was a great work of art in itself, creating an endlessly changing landscape, that served to bring together urban dwellers from all walks of life into one aesthetic experience of the natural world. The next step will be to sonify the climate changes predicted for the next 100 years again cenetered around the space of the park.
In both of those sonifications, the prevailing metaphor of the sound is one of time travel. That is, the listener experiences the change in the climate by remaining stationary in one location and listening to the climate change in that one location over time. This is similar to what we did with the storm sonifications, although on a much smaller temporal scale (a scale of one day versus 100 years).
Dr. Rind has suggested another kind of metaphor that we haven't yet tried but is very intruiguing. He has suggested that the sound experience actually be an experience of traveling through both time and space. Essential to the creation of climate models is seeing how weather conditions in various locations interact, and the climate models in use by the GISS group range from coarse models of 100 km or more to very fine models of 3 km. Conditions at each geographic point are modeled over time, so the possibility exists that a listener could travel through space and experience weather conditions at many points. As Rebecca Solnit observes in 'Wanderlust', setting the body in motion and experiencing the changing world by traversing a path through the world can heighten awareness and create new insights. Traveling a path also has strong metaphorical meaning.
Perhaps through experiencing this series of sonifications we can ask ourselves 'Where are we going?' in the near future through our action (or inaction) addressing global warming.
Today to escape the crowded city, I drove to the base of the Verrazano Bridge that connects Brooklyn with Staten Island. There is a wonderful path long the base of the bridge and the East River (although at that location the 'river' starts to widen considerably). The location, depth of the water, and extreme height of the bridge makes it a place where gigantic commercial ships pass to gain access to and from the city. The drive was bumper to bumper until it suddenly cleared, right at the moment when the water came into view from the highway. I walked along the path until I was right under the bridge. The day was overcast and several large ships were stopped near the bridge or traveling under it. I heard a faint whistling sound that combined with the sound of the water and a slight rain that had just started created a beautiful soothing soundscape. Searching for the source of the sound, I turned my head toward the large ships. I thought that the whistle was coming from the a yellow and blue freighter nearest to me. I realized that the sound was coming from above my head, and I looked up to see the bottom of the suspension bridge far above my head. Although I couldn't see the cars streaming over the other side, I realized that the wheels of the cars and trucks on the bridge were causing the bridge to vibrate like a cymbal to create the sound. As I listened closer, I could hear the sound become louder when presumably a large truck passed overhead.
I had come to that place to think, and for inspiration I had brought Rebecca Solnit's book 'Wanderlust' that traces the history of walking, and through it, the history of thought. She traces the social, political, and aesthetic meaning of walking.
There is a fascinating museum of automatons in Monaco. Every hour or so, visitors can observe the lifeless mannequins awake and perform the most exquisite lifelike sequences of actions. Most of the automatons are performing acrobatic feats, as if underlining the human-as-machine metaphor inherent in their form. The underlying machinery, although skillfully hidden in most of the automatons in the museum, is revealed in some and proves to be even more exquisite and beautiful to behold as a testament to the creative potential of the machine. If only this was a true depiction of humanity's relationship with the machine.
I'm currently reading Herbert Marcuse's excellent critique of Marxist Aesthetics called 'The Aesthetic Dimension' in which he posits that an autonomous art is necessary for a free society. He argues that by virtue of its aesthetic form, art is autonomous of social context. Through autonomy, art subverts and transcends the dominant consciousness. He first speaks of art as an escape from reality that shifts consciousness from the dominant, capitalist motivation (money = happiness) to that of the inner essence of the human. Certainly the automaton attempts to transcend the limitations of the human being, but at the same time, the automaton is highly stylized and limited in its repertoire. The work of art (in Marcuse's view) through form and context attempts to find an essence of existence. Marcuse relates aesthetic form with autonomy and truth, stating that art attempts to 'define what is real' in a universal sense, that which is 'more real than reality itself'.
Following Marcuse's line of thought, then, the popular contemporary 'automaton' experience, 'The Sims' serves as a work of art critical of its social context in that the goal of the game is to gain the most capital, 're-presenting reality while accusing it.' Marcuse addresses a difficult problem in aesthetics, then, when he addresses how an artist might represent the horror of Auschwitz (see the earlier post on the video game '911 survivor')
He states:
"Art draws away from this reality, because it cannot represent this suffering without subjecting it to aesthetic form, and thereby to the mitigating catharsis, to enjoyment. Art is inexorably infested with this guilt. Yet this does not release art from the necessity of recalling again and again that which can survive even Auschwitz and perhaps one day make it impossible. If even this memory were to be silenced then indeed the 'end of art' wil have come"
The desire for the art to transcend even its creator is a part of the obsession with the automaton. As much as art must take a physical form it 'cannot sever itself from its origins'. However, in that statement, Marcuse is defining the 'origin' of a work of art not as a specific individual (the artist) but human nature itself. He perceives the limit of art to be the inherent limits of freedom and fulfillment of the human being. The automaton, in its artistic form as a representation of an idea, seems to transcend these limits. However, as a physical form, the automaton (or cyborg) is limited by its origins, by its very physical being. When speaking of acts of violence against an automaton, then, are these closer to theatrical acts (catharsis) than true violence?
The lines are blurred in our contemporary world through networked media. The avatar is like the automaton in that it is a representation, but it is very different from the automaton in that the avatar is not autonomous, its agency depends on a real human 'actor'. For an excellent discussion of the social implications of this, read Julian Dibbel's 'A Rape in Cyberspace'
Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension Beacon Press, Boston 1977
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