Article 1: Vasseleu

Vasseleu, Cathryn. “Virtual Bodies/Virtual Worlds.” Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace. Ed. David Holmes. London: Sage, 1997. 46-58.

Vasseleu begins her piece by very briefly defining both cyberspace and virtual realities. She identifies cyberspace, on the one hand, as “the space within the electronic network of computers from which virtual realities, among other things, can be made” (46). Virtual realities, on the other hand, as “computer-generated system which use cyberspace to simulate various aspects of interactive space (that is, they are inhabitable computer systems of space)” (46). Saying that cyberspace is used to make “virtual realities, among other things” makes it sound like quite a malleable material. Her reason for positioning space in this way is because she seeks to parallel the space of the body and the space of the computer throughout the essay.

Vasseleu’s main argument is looking at “the material consequences of perspectives which disavow the corporeal basis of virtual technologies” (47). What I think she is getting at here is the way that our physical bodies are disconnected from what happens on screen. Even when we have some sort of avatar “in-world”, without any sort of sensory feedback loop between our physical and digital selves, our experience is flawed from the outset. In other words, our presence in virtual realities is troubled by this sense of disembodiment. To try to put this in context, I understand what she is saying through my experiences in Second Life. I see my “Mini-Me” running around the virtual environment; I know that I control it; it is supposed to be me, right? And yet I am always aware of my physical body that is at the controls. Vasseleu’s point is that in this relationship I have little sense of being embodied in my SL avatar.

So what is the big deal? Why does examining embodiment matter? “Many of the paradoxes and ethical concerns which appear to have been generated by virtual technologies,” says Vasseleu, “are themselves a kind of ‘emergent behaviour’ – unprogrammed effects generated within the tensions of more familiar systems of representation which have supposedly been disrupted and displaces” (47 emphasis added). Embodiment matters because virtual realities create an almost-but-not-quite condition among individual, avatar and space. What I see my (digital) body doing and what I feel in my (physical) body do not match up. Being disembodied in cyberspace, which is visually remarkably similar to physical space, leads to issues that we, as a society, have not had to deal with before. Vasseleu’s answer to these new concerns is the “virtual environment suit” (VE suit). Actually, embodiment tech operates on different levels. It begins with the VE helmet, then the VE glove, and culminates in the VE suit, which is the third and most complete embodiment experience. Each magnitude of embodiment (helmet, glove and suit) offers the user a deeper sense of being in the space and Vasseleu does a nice job of relating them to discussions of Kant, Copernicus and Descartes. With these heavy-hitters she addresses the relationship between vision and touch, as well as the how subjectivity of the individual plays in to spatial experiences.

Vasseleu points out that “the possession of an occupiable dimension has become the most urgent agenda of the agent/observer, the significance of simulation lies in its subjective legitimation of new imagined universal territories” (49). At the end of her piece, Vasseleu tries to tie her discussion of embodiment and spaces to an idea about gender. She mentions gender at the beginning when she that she is interested in “the extent to which such perspectives [which disavow the corporeal basis of virtual technologies] reproduce modes of embodiment with which many women are already familiar” (47). Essentially, I think she is pointing out the need to examine the consequences of equating bodies with spaces, as places to be conquered; and, she says, women have had to deal with this sort of thinking in relation to their bodies for a long time. This seems to be a valid and interesting tract to take, but Vasseleu only returns to gender in the last couple of paragraphs. Gender ends up, for me, feeling like an afterthought.

Article 2: Ostwald

Ostwald, Michael J. “Virtual Urban Futures.” Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace. Ed. David Holmes. London: Sage, 1997. 125-144.

Ostwald’s piece sounds a little like a comment on the Grand Theft Auto debate: “Overt virtual technologies, including the Internet, were blamed, like television before them, for the breakdown in the family unit, the rise in street crime and the decay of conventional Cartesian urban spaces” (125). Although Ostwald does not mention it, one could also say that this debate about “new media” and society goes all the back to youth being “corrupted” by the novel in the 19^th century. It is interesting to note the presumed threat that each of these mediums (the Internet, TV, and the novel) posed for this greater sense of the “community” at large. Community, for Ostwald, is the common denominator that he uses in his discussion to span the gap between physical and virtual spaces.

Ostwald’s argument is actually spelled out in his first endnote: “The aim of this chapter is to remove the boundaries that separate the ‘physical’ from the ‘virtual’, it is doubly ironic that such ambiguous terms must first be created and then used alongside the equally ambiguous terms ‘physical’, ‘virtual’ and ‘real’” (143n1). Personally, I am all for challenging and examining boundary conditions between physical and virtual spaces, but removing the boundaries? I like the idea of unpacking what is “real” and I do not believe that this has to be limited to physical space. But does that mean that distinctions like physical and virtual no longer have any meaning?

In relation to the community aspect that Ostwald sees as connecting physical and virtual spaces, he spends time discussion the agora. “Similarly the complex interplay of communal, spatial, cultural and political forces at work in the agora renders it an appropriate model with which to consider critically those spaces formed through the agency of virtual technologies” (134). For all his talk about community, he does not spend time on the individual community member. Leaving out any connection to the individual in favor of the community-at-large is too much for me. It seems to erode the term space too much. By this logic any place that community happens can be considered a space.

“There is a strong and growing need,” says Ostwald, “to consider that zone where the boundaries between the physical and the virtual are completely blurred” (128). Here is where Ostwald, for me, veers off the map. The blurred spaces that he uses as case studies, which represent both characteristics of physical and virtual spaces, are the shopping mall and the theme parks (127). Returning to his unifying idea about community, he says that, “spaces are linked and defined not though technology but through the way that communities form and interact in them” (127). And it is this sense of community that removes the distinction between physical and virtual spaces loses some of its importance. Ostwald works to show that malls, while physical, exhibit many of the same conditions as virtual spaces. First, malls are simulations; his example is a recreation of Bourbon Street that many mall goers, he says, think is as real as the one in New Orleans. Second, malls are forever temporary; their interior stores and layouts are readily changeable. And third, malls operate in the same sort of panoptic surveillance that we have seen in our discussion about the Internet. Malls blur the physical/virtual boundary because they have some of the same attributes as virtual space.

One point in the essay that really speaks to my project/interests is when he says, “The technological revolution is changing how information is used and global communications networks have reduced the perceived effect of spatial displacement” (128). But what are the implications of this? The reduction in spatial displacement here seems less convincing than what he was saying earlier about community’s role in equalizing the physical and the virtual. In my view (and this is my argument in my project) the whole idea of communication networks is directly related to spatial nesting, which is most certainly about (an increase in) spatial displacement. That said, this whole notion of spatial displacement is where I am in my own work and something that I have not yet been able to tease out. Ostwald, obviously, sees displacement diminishing and boundaries evaporating. Boundaries or no boundaries? A sense of displacement or spaces merging into one loose conglomerate? I am just not sure yet…

Article 3: Green

Green, Nicola. “Beyond Being Digital: Representation and Virtual Corporeality.” Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace. Ed. David Holmes. London: Sage, 1997. 59-78.

This essay by Green is the closest to my own interest in nested, or overlapping, spaces. She cites work by two new media theorists, Lanier and Kramerae:

Both Lanier and Kramerae rely exclusively on an interpretation of the digital representations generated by virtual reality technologies as independent spaces bounded by technological artefacts. They thereby tend to marginalize the ways in which human/technical artefact systems operate as spaces which institute embodiment in ‘virtual’ locations; that is, in worlds which overlap, and which are simultaneously digital and non-digital. (63)

What Green is saying here is, for me, a merging of my other two articles by Vasseleu and Ostwald. She is interested in issues of embodiment, or the space of the body, and the simultaneity of spaces this introduces. How are spaces defined/bounded? Walls? URLs? Bodies? Avatars? In the last few classes we have talked about ontology. Green says that “the ontological status of virtual worlds is worked through at the level of embodiment, in the ways people negotiate ‘being digital’ through the pragmatics of organic and physical activities” (73). I am curious about the assumptions we bring to virtual spaces when we try to think of them the same way we look at physical spaces and embodiment.

Green claims that “the digital status of economic exchange relations, of long-distance communications, of imaging techniques and of writing are just a few of the ways that produce bodies as already digital before encounters with virtual reality systems” (73). (Note: the “virtual reality systems” are the sort of full emersion helmet/glove/suit experiences talked about more in Vasseleu.) This makes me think that Green is saying embodiment extends to virtually any of mediating systems. But where are our “bodies” in writing? She cites Mark Gottidener in regards to the relationship between sign and materiality: “The ‘expression’ is the appearance of shape of objects. The expression of a sign refers to ‘object themselves…which exist materially, even if that materiality is simply a text’” (Gottdiener qtd 64). And further, “The ‘content’ refers to both generalized sets of ideas and cultural mores, and more specific sets of ideological relations that are coded in particular ways in specific modes of social interaction” (Gottdiener qtd 64). I think she is saying that embodiment is about expression and content, about having some sort of representational element and set of cultural guidelines that determine how I engage with this element.

Green takes a different view than Vasseleu (you’ll have to read that post for a deeper explanation of her work) with respect to the issue of embodiment. Essentially, for Vasseleu, disembodiment is caused by the lack of sensory connection between the avatar and the physical body. She focuses on the body’s knowledge of where it is when and how that knowledge doesn’t exist with respect to the avatar body. Green, on the other hand, sees disembodiment in two ways. First, disembodiment occurs because of digital avatar’s infinite reproducibility: “The representations are digital and their substance is etheric, so the ‘disembodiment’ of these bodies is articulated through their ‘immateriality’ in juxtaposition with and opposition to the material substances of organic bodies” (65). Green’s second aspect of disembodiment is actually tied to the first when she point to the generic nature of digital avatars. Here I should point out that she is using as a case study the game Dactyl Nightmare (DN), which came out in 1991. Also, DN is a helmet-based virtual environment experience, which means you have a helmet, or goggles, and a joystick controller. Further, Green points out that “These devices code disembodiment and an opposition to more everyday material embodiments by representing bodily impossibilities and underscoring the otherness of digital embodied experiences” (66). Here is Green’s third qualification of disembodiment: the bodily “otherness” associated with digital games. For example, the ability of the avatar’s to fly, have heightened senses, or come back from the dead.

I think Green’s piece is about complicating her broad conceptualization of embodiment in digital contexts (expression and content) with the sort of disembodiment that occurs in virtual environments. She sums it up in her last line: “Being digital is one means of embodiment, virtual corporeality is another” (75).

Online Poetry

So, I fully admit that this poem is pretty tired and cliched. I've been playing with word-art poems for Lane's class, and this poem came from some extra pieces I liked but never got to use. Also, I'm not sure if I followed the assignment Anne set for us. If anyone has any suggestions, they'd be much appreciated.

Rainbows End Update

Here's a link about contact lenses that enhance vision. Possible uses: "virtual displays for pilots, video-game projections and telescopic vision for soldiers". Whoa.

Chun 2.0

I'm still interested in Chun's use of space as example of her control/freedom discussion. In the second half of the book, she identifies the paranoia of bodily space as the point when "the boundary between self and other, self and self, freedom and control, begins to collapse" (245). In seems ironic that the Cartesian reason for separating the self from the other—gaining *truthful* knowledge—is the very division that is being troubled by the knowledge/information that was gained. Chun notes that this dissolving of boundaries occurs when "orienting the reader/viewer, enabling him or her to envision the world as data. This twinning sustains--barely--the dream of self-erasure and pure subjectivity" (195). Not only are we challenging the notion of spaces, but we are also challenging the notion of our body as space.

How far can you take this "self-erasure"? Erasing your body? Erasing cognitive synapses that constitute you? But doesn’t there always need to be some amount of filtering or designating? Otherwise there is only raw data, bits of us and our spaces that are unmoored. So, is she saying that one aspect of the paranoia is losing the conception of ourselves? I suppose that her idea of agoraphobia being not about spaces but about identity politics of public spaces means that the answer is, yes (247). I wonder how we will deal with this. Perhaps re-imagine the Cartesian model. Or, perhaps come up with some new, more fluid way of constructing the self. Is it the fact that we have physical bodies that we feel the need to spatialize and divide one space from another? But this is changing: "Significantly, the Orient is first and foremost a virtual space. Said contends that the Orient is not a 'real' space but rather a textual universe (that is, created by supposedly descriptive Orientalist texts)" (192); or, it's all in our heads. But can't this be said for all spaces? A place is nothing more than what we designate it to be, and because of this it function as much more than it physically is. Digital spaces solidify for us that to be some place is only to imagine it.

"Technological empowerment and the threat of being left behind are no longer benign" (255). Is this a new fear? How does this compare to how people felt post-WWI and industrialization when the machines that promised new and fantastic lives actually caused massive death. Then, people felt betrayed, but now? Her big argument here, the paranoia being left behind technologically is what drives us to acquire and master new tech. But she’s also saying, every technology has a dark side, don't be fooled by the sappy advertisements. I would be interest to explore contemporary feelings of technological betrayal, and how we are responding.

2nd Life

I have spent some time in Second Life, and I'm actually quite interested in the way it can be used to redefine what we consider to be space. Using the "Unofficial Guide to SL," I hit a number of the highlights in the book. My favorites were Midnight City and Landing Lights Island, which is part of Democracy Island. The latter is in fact and in-world design framework setup to generate design options for a park in Queens, NY. Once at Landing Lights you teleport to a smaller scale version of the park site, complete with runways, street, and buildings. You can add and manipulate objects and post your design. Cool. Oddly, there were weapons lying all over the place, guns, lightsabers, and sai--what is with that?! Weird.Honestly, the thing that struck me the most was how few people I saw in-world. As I was logging in there was a banner claiming that 53,746 people our also online. I think I saw about a dozen. Where was everybody? And the people I saw were sitting on a bench that, I think, would pay you for sitting on it. I bet those people were out to a movie or eating dinner. Assuming the numbers are true does lend some credence to the enormity of SL. However, I find it troubling for my ability to appreciate the environment as a space without other people around. I think that socializing and connecting are the biggest parts of how I define space. The biggest question/critique I've heard when talking to folks about SL is, What the heck do you do there?! Answer: the same stuff you do out here in physical space: work, socialize, explore new places. It's a space if you want it to be, if you dive in and participate.

Another point about space: When I clicked on the above image in my email, it sent me to a map of SL and then asked if I wanted to dive back in. I really like this idea of nesting spaces and the vast number of possible connections. Now SL is in my inbox, which is on my desktop, on my physical desk, in my room... The delineations of spaces don't really seem to hold up. Like what Chun said about the fluidity of place, and how we need to stop thinking of places as relating anymore to physical spaces or finite URLs.

Final Project 1.0

So, if it's not obvious from my last post, I'm interested in the slippage between physical and synthetic spaces. Specifically, this plays out in the nesting of synthetic spaces (on cell phones, laptops, etc) within physical spaces, and how this trouble/extend the relationship between spaces and places. Again, Chun's notion of dissociating place from our desire for spatial containment is important here. My question is: if de-spatialized synthetic places are becoming interspersed in our physical spaces, how do they trouble or redefine how we ascribe meaning to spaces (or what I consider their place-ness).

For the project, since I'm interested in moving through layered spaces I've decided to try my hand at Flash. My idea is to begin with an image of a coffee shop (like the Grind in the library) with various people engaged in various spatial mediums (cell phone, laptop, book...). The user would be able to click on each of the different mediums and "dive into" the layers associated with it. Also, I would like to talk about the limitations of all the spaces: physical, synthetic, textual, visual, etc; not only the limitations of the medium, but limitations in the sense Chun talks about, the danger of assuming freedom without any sort of control.

Paranoid Cyber-droid (Chun)

I would like to spend this post on Chun's first chapter, "Why Cyberspace?" I'm increasingly interested in the blurring definitions of "space" and "place" as we migrate back and forth between the physical and the synthetic. I looked up Barlow's declaration and was fascinated by his ethos (right term?): "Governments of the Industrial World...I come from Cyberspace...You have no sovereignty where we gather" (web-cite). And, then again at the end, "We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before." Out there, but limited because, I believe, that as we flow between the physical and synthetic spaces everything will change.

More precisely, I'm interested in Chun's assertion that cyberspace "freed users from their bodies and their locations" (Chun 38). She describes cyberspace as space-less because it lacks "all reference to content, apparatus, process, or form, offering instead a metaphor and a mirage, for cyberspace is not spatial" (39). I'm not so sure about that. What does "space" really mean? How are we interpreting space/place in synthetic environments? And, how do these interpretations reconfigure who we are and how we view physical spaces/places? Personally, I define "space" as potential; whereas "place" is what is done within space, or more ethereally as meaning.

Deeper still, her comments about Manovich's "databse complex" and how that limits our conceptualization of cyberspaces further dissolve our definitions. "The metaphoric use of place," she says," blinds us to the Web's fluidity" (46). So, if we're spending all our time ascribing "place-ness" to cyberspaces, we're missing out on its fluidity, its innate ability to be many cyber-places all at once. Also, Chun is addressing here non-games cyberspaces, or typical websites: Amazon, ebay, etc. The previous post on PMOGs (passively multiplayer online games), I think, is right in the middle of this discussion. Later she talks about navigability defining "new media" and our navigation of non-contiguous URLs/cyberspaces, therefore, defining who we are in these space-less spaces.

As Cheney said recently, "So?" Does this discussion about spatial/platial fluidity have any bearing on physical spaces/places? The notion that cyberspaces/cyberplaces are defined by their lack of indexicality would imply no. But, as these cybers become more ubiquitous and nested in our various physical spaces (technology and new devices are key), then I would contend that the indexicality of our physical spaces are becoming blurred. The space-ness, the potential, of a physical space is losing the reference of its physical characteristics when we can be on the phone and on the bus, or cross-nationally video-conferencing online in a university union. Or...maybe the dispersion of cybers actually increase the potential of our physical spaces, adding to their meaning, adding to the capacity of place-ness we are able to ascribe to them.

Is the cyber world staying cyber?

First, here's a link about WoW and terrorism. Apparently, there's been a run lately of bio-terrorism in World of Warcraft that some folks think will help us thinking about terrorism in a physical context.

Second, PMOG, or Passively Multiplayer Online Games. The idea is about turning the web into the playing field for your interactions with friends. Check out the article, but i think this is a really cool because it addresses the Web at large as the game space not just specific realms like Second Life or WoW. In my mind this spatializing of online non-spaces like Facebook and the like (you can make booby traps for your friend, or collect points by surfing) is pretty exciting and hints at our inability someday to distinguish the difference between the two.
Here's where you can download the PMOG program.

Internet Archive

Here's a link to a slide show put out by WIRED. It's about the Internet Archive's goal of digitizing public domain books. So far it's done about 350,000. Also, there's mention of a machine that can print a book in 10 minutes for $10 plus a penny a page. This seems to erase the idea of "out of print". Also, here's the link to Internet Archive itself.

Footnotes Forthcoming

There will be a new set of footnotes posted in a week or two. Here is a list of the new constraints:

1) text only: black on white or white on black
2) no distortion of letterforms
3) incorporate radical scale shifts
4) incorporate figure/ground reversals (implied by #3: ask me if this is not clear)
5) select subject words either randomly or with the "N+7" method.

Please post any other suggestion. Thanks.

Footnotes to the Footnote

Below are three shorts I made for my 782 class with Lane Hall, "Visual Narratives." This project asked us to, "Create a text that uses forms appropriate to conceptual strategies culled from our investigation of experimental literature."

In Lane's class as well as my 709 class with Anne Wysocki, "Visual and Digital Rhetorics," I've been interested in the slippage between image and text, especially in terms of digital production. With that in mind, the three shorts explore the calligram, which is a work that uses text to construct an image; or, as Foucault calls it, "A figure in the shape of writing" (This is Not a Pipe, 23). One of Foucault's points about calligrams that interests me is that, " The text must say nothing to this gazing subject who is a viewer, not a reader. As soon as he begins to read, in fact, shape dissipates" (24). I think this is a particularly important relationship to explore in the context of new media.

Also, I have incorporated Peirce's three kinds of signs: icon, index and symbol. Gillian Rose, in her book, Visual Methodologies, describes the three: "In iconic signs, the signifier represents the signified by apparently having alikeness to it...In indexical signs, there is an inherent relationship between the signified and signifier...[and] symbolic signs have a conventionalized but clearly arbitrary relation between signifier and signified" (83). I feel that adding these elements expands the notion of the calligram beyond the one-off text-as-image in favor of a more in depth relationship between text and image.

Finally, in his discussion of calligrams, Foucault uses the examples of "a bird, a flower, or rain" (24). These seemed as good a place to start as any. Enjoy.

Movement 1: Bird

Movement 2: Flower

Movement 3: Rain

Parallel Worlds

It's good to see the "social production" model used on Benkler's own book: posting it to the web for comments and critique. Imposing himself as the "scholarly lawyer" is also interesting given our discussion of Weinberger last week about the three areas of rhetoric. Here's Benkler posting his in-process book in the hopes of not only getting feedback on it, but, like the band that gives its CDs away, he can now charge a greater amount of in-person shows. Also, I wonder how this model contributes to keeping the book current. As we talk in class following the second-half of Nakamura, it's hard to keep media-related books from sounding dated. Benkler's strategy seems like it gives him the option to post a draft (get his work/name out there), revise it and have continued coverage of his work. Seems pretty savvy.

All that in mind, I'm not entirely sold on his idea of "social production" for the rest of us. He mentions it at one point that, yes, this is for a limited range of people at the higher end of developed nations. Taking this a step further, what happens if the world does adopt this new way of functioning, what happens to everyone who is left out? Leaving that big one hanging, I mostly agree on his biggest point: "the relative economic role of sharing changes with technology (120), yes, but there are a lot of conditions related to who is sharing (gender, social class, economic status), if you're not fighting to stay alive, you have more leeway to be generous.

Last week I posted on Weinberger and Corbu about creating more tagging/density as a solution to disorderly piles of information and overcrowding. Now Benkler says, "As the size of the audience and its geographic and social dispersion increased, public discourse developed an increasingly one-way model" (29). Information had to be generic and wide-reaching in order to be cost-effective to address such a diverse audience. Now, let's reconnect everyone. Get everyone talking together and we'll close theses gaps of generic, filtered information and get at the real deal. My jury's still out on this one. As I posted, upping the density failed for Corbu, but these other guys, the results remain to be seen.

The problem I have is that it sounds like the implementation of his ideas would result in parallel economic worlds. Yes, it's great that people will share and contribute out of the goodness of their hearts, but I'm skeptical. Maybe its the result of growing up in the capitalist environment, but all I can think is when are theses folks gonna get paid? And assuming they don't, what are their day-jobs? The cynic in me thinks that if people participating in a task that is "unrelated to 'making a living'" seems unlikely in on a grand scale.

I read another media-oriented book by another economist, Edward Castronova, who is also overreaching slightly the ability for the digital/virtual/synthetic world to imprint its structure onto real life. Castronova also says that, "all things being equal", the activity that is most pleasurable wins. Therefore, he says (and I'm oversimplifying), that the real world will have to adapt to the strategies of the synthetic worlds in order to keep people from migrating there. Soon jobs will be based on leveling-up (like Super Mario Bros.) not on politics or resumes...right. Also his notion of "equal opportunity", which Benkler also raises seems far fetched. The notion that everyone can participate and the redundancy of it all will result in the cream rising to the top, doesn't square. Here redundancy is supposed to work because it's cheap? And in the future, everyone's doing it for free, so who cares?

This idea of taking economic/social models from synthetic environments and overlaying them onto real life seems unlikely and utopic to me. Yes, it sounds cool and empowering for everyone to have a voice and to contribute, but can a functioning economy, in real space and real time, actually be based on such a model? Obviously, I'm skeptical.

Tag, you're it

Rainbows End, here we come: Here's an little article about the invention of a pair of goggles that we can now use to record and TAG our physical environment. Wow. If we are close to merging digital capabilities physical reality, what then?

Corbu

Corbu's famous quote is, "The house is a machine for living in." This sentiment can be seen as akin to Weinberger's first order of order: a place for everything and everything in its place.

Corbu is writing roughly in the early to middle 20th-century and is reacting to what he sees as the unrestrained, disorderly evolution of cities. Old cities like Paris kept getting the Frankenstein treatment as more and more people crowded into them following the turn of the century and the Industrial revolution. Their cobbled-togetherness could not sustain the numbers who had taken up residence there. The result: green spaces diminished, natural lighting was poor, utilities were underdeveloped and families were unable to sustain a healthy existence balancing work, family and leisure. There were just too many people mashed into these unaccommodating spaces. One way to look at this problem is to see it as gigabytes of raw, untagged data. Without the metadata, as Weinberger says, it's just a messy pile of information.

Corbu's proposal: more density. The city as he saw it was in limbo. Too many people for the resources available, but not enough to make mass-production and -consumption possible. By radically upping the density there were now enough people to make this new city of shared green space, utilities, facilities possible. His plan, therefore, called for razing the city and going vertical. Separated by massive green space are even more massive housing complexes that contain community kitchens, laundries, and childcare. It's pretty widely agreed that this sort of urban planning is a gross failure, but this idea of taking a problem, pushing it to an extreme and using it as a solution is an intriguing one.

So, how does this relate to Weinberger and his call for, "More tags! More tags!"? Well, tagging isn't necessarily a problem, but it does disrupt the functioning of the 1st and 2nd orders of order. One simply can't keep the structure of a ledger or card catalog functional with the influx of more and more metadata muddying the waters. But is there a saturation point? Is there a point where, like Jay wrote in a comment to the earlier tagging post, when the metadata becomes more important than the data itself?

Perhaps it could be said that Corbu was moving from the failed 1st order that was the structure of the old city to the bright and shiny newness of the 2nd order city. Here, elements were separated (cataloged) according to transportation, eating, leisure, etc. But this doesn't work. People don't function in the well with this sort of regimentation. Enter Weinberger, and here's where metaphors mix: he's talking about moving 1st and 2nd *information* to the 3rd order of order. What does that look like in a spatial context? Is something like that even possible in a physical realm? ...

Nuts, I've got to run to class, I'll try to tie this up after lunch...

tagging

In my Visual Narrative course on Tuesday, Lane showed us this demo of Photosynth. It's an amazing piece of software (still a few versions before beta) that does, I think, what Weinberger is talking about. The presenter talks about the assembling of meta-data that is "greater than the sum of its parts" and from that assemblage is produced a new version of our "collective memory."

I admit that I am pretty taken by the idea of shared memory/shared meta-data. Yes, there is a level of utopianism that I'm drawn in by, but it feels like the right move. This collectivity gets at some of my initial concerns about blogs, which for me epitomize the glut of information that seems impossible to sift through and that is therefore scary. The ways we are developing to classify and filter ALL this data is really powerful. In the past I've felt hamstrung by the fact that there was just too much to look at, too much to take in. How do we cut this stuff down? I really think Weinberger's ideas hold promise.

Anne has asked a couple of times about the differences between blogging and traditional response papers. It has certainly been different for me, but I've been unable to articulate why. At the end of the text, Weinberger says that "in conversation we think out loud together, trying to understand" (203). This sums up my feelings on blogging for this class. I feel like we're all conversing in a way that just wouldn't happen otherwise, even if we all read everyone's traditional response paper or uploaded them to D2L. "Knowledge--its content and its organization--is becoming a social act" (133).

I apologize for trying to shoehorn space into all of my blogs, but... Weinberber points out that, "tags may become more useful, meaningful, relevant, and clearer the more there are" (168). I'm struck by the similarity in reasoning to the modernist architect Le Corbusier and his feelings on density, which are something along the lines of: the solution to city's problem of density is more density! While I don't necessarily agree with his argument in regards to livability, I think the underlying drive to both of their statements is very similar. And while schemes based on hyperdensity were virtually all disasters, his thinking was revolutionary. Maybe Corbu was just 80-or-so years too early with his thinking.

So what happens when we push this way of reconnecting the world, the meta-verse, to its limits? Personally, I'm fascinated about the physical implications. Everything Weinberger talks about is in regards to the assemblage of digital information. If tagging and meta-data are the holy grail of information, I have a hard time believing that the physical world will be content in existing in the Dewey Decimal format. He talks about bar codes and RDF tags, but is there someplace between these and the fantasy of Rainbows End that could coalesce into a "meta-space?"

wiki-ocracy

Here's an article from Friday's Slate Online that talks about Wikipedia and Digg. Unlike Weinberger, the article's author, Chris Wilson, isn't so optimistic about the process of neutrality that Weinberger lauds. So if you thought Weinberger a little too utopic, Wilson is on the other side of the "isn't-online-democracy-great" line.

Two examples Wilson says do it better than Wiki and Digg are Slashdot and Helium.com.

(eye)Movie

Premise:
--the mediated view
--seeing through...
Constraint:
--all images must be captured by cellphone camera
Note:
--please turn on your speaker volume

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction

First off, here's a link to one of the "reborn" babies Nakamura mentions. Not wanting to get a nasty post, I'll try to cite the seller: name is "piphel", Helen Jalland Gerba; the reborn was sculpted by Marissa May; selling price is around $3,600! If the link gets broken, here's a photo -->


This "reborn" is actually a pretty good opening to what struck me about the second-half of the text: namely, the influence of technology on the relationship between original and copy. Nakamura raises a great (albeit overly-long) question which she relates to the Matrix movies: "Do images of characters rendered via a computer interface--that is, images of humans that are digital from the ground up--threaten the notion of authenticity, singularity, and identity...?" (101). This is a great question, but not just about the construction of synthespians. Connecting this idea to that of Benjamin, the question becomes one that asks about the reproducibility of ourselves (in literature, painting, sculpture, digital imaging) and the implications of these actions.

Nakamura touches on this in a variety of ways throughout her last three chapters. For example, the notion of American Girl Dolls paralleling the replicants from Blade Runner with respect to the process of "self-replication" (141), or the idea she borrows from Stabile about how medical technology is turning the body inside out (156). This goes to the heart of Nakamura text as a whole, that in the digital age the "work of art" that we are reproducing is ourselves, and that this medium has provided us new and more complex ways of doing so.

Within the conversation of physical vs. virtual, she says that "Random access is an essential principle of the structure and logic of new media that respatializes media experiences" (111). If random access causes what Manovich calls a "flattening of data" with respect to information, what does this do the hierarchy of our various on- and off-line identities? Nakamura quotes Haraway who says that this flattening results in " 'self-alienation' and dispossession of the body as a result of technoscience" (96). But is self-alienation really an accurate term? If we were to take a liberal (and idealistic) psychoanalytic approach, we might say that the flattening and fracturing of identity allows for the examination of multiple sides of ourselves. Which raises the question that goes back to Benjamin again, what happens to the original? Which "me" is the "real" one?

Here I'm reminded of a movie trailer I saw a while ago called The Nines. It looks like one of these shows that you've got multiple versions of the main character struggling to find out who they are, how they relate to each other and what is real. Is this a new problem? Why is this so much more pressing now that representations have become so visual and so good? Does it stem from this facet of the interface Nakamura is warning us about, the immediacy that is the result of the transparency of the technology? Does this transparency interfere with our ability to distinguish between our various avatars, or does it help to extend our perception of our disseminated identities? I would submit that, yes, each individual avatar we contribute to can be codified and used for dataveillance against us and therefore needs examined. However, collectively perhaps these replicas of ourselves create a more diverse and thorough picture of ourselves than even we were aware and in a manner of reverse-production, produce the original.

Throwies

These folks are called the Graffiti Research Lab. Their message: "Alter your environment". If you've got a minute, it is so worth it.

Nakamura 1.0

Point of interest from the text:
1. immediacy of communication and the struggle between text and visuals;
2. IM as supplementary (not replacement) for the body, in terms of race and identity

1. "AIM buddies are tools of person-to-person communication in a way that other avatar, such as gaming avatars from nonnetworked games, are not" (43). I have to take issue with her on this point. First, if a game isn't networked, of course it wouldn't be good for communication. The only people you'd be connected to would be the same room with you playing the same game. Second, I am unconvinced of AIM's superiority in the context of communication. If prefaced by the notion of multitasking and communication while completing some other task as so many of us have used IM for, then yes. In an endnote to the above quote, she bases her point on the fact that networked and online games like the Xbox system and WoW are more focused on completing a mission or a quest than conversing, and MMORPGs charge a fee which can discourage usage. Although Second Life allows for a limited access, free membership, she doesn't feel this compares with IM's accessibility. I feel that a distinction needs to be made, perhaps "committed communication" (Second Life) and "multitaked communication" (IM), based on the level of attention the user needs to give the interface. I've done some research on Second Life, and while people use it for a variety of activities, a major one is connecting with other people. The author of one book, I, Avatar, talked about all the time he spent sipping wine, enjoying the sunset and chatting with friends. While this still seems a little odd to me, it's representative of a much deeper form of communication (visual, spatial) as opposed to IM (textual). So maybe what's more at stake here is the issue of time. Because while both IM and Second Life span distance, which is the hallmark of communication these days, Second Life require constant, real-time attention akin to actual conversation. IM is more forgiving. I'm curious about how time and distance, in addition to textual and visual, factor into notions of communication?

2. What, then, about the notion of supplementing vs. replacing the body? From page 49, Nakamura bases the supplementary imaging of IM on the fact that individual already know the race, gender, nationality of their friends and these visual elements add to that knowledge. Whereas in Second Life again, the user is replaced by a "physical" avatar representation of themselves. Often, users feel these avatars embody another part of themselves and sometimes "have a mind of their own" in that people act differently in virtual world than in the the real world. If you "replace" your body with an identical avatar, do you eliminate your race/ethnicity/nationality? She says that supplementing race/gender/etc accentuates what other already know about you. Her big question is based on the fact that the internet is becoming increasingly visual and that therefore we need to be more diligent about diversity of how we represent ourselves. Given how badly I and everyone else did on alllooksame looking at pictures of people and guessing their ethnicity, I wonder how we would do if we guessed at people's buddy icons, or even their Second Life avatars.

Self-portrait

Me, myself, and the viewer

So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and try for a psychoanalytic approach to this piece. Keep your fingers crossed.

Let's begin with the notion of "scopophilia" (the pleasure of looking), and who is looking at whom. Here we have at least two layers of viewing. First there is the person, presumably "Alison," who is looking at a drawing of a person; as the viewer of this picture, I am looking at both of them; the eyes of the drawing appear to be closed indicating a desire or inability to look at Alison. This last relationship brings up the next point from psychoanalysis, the unconscious.

Rose says that, "the unconscious is created when a very young child's drives and instincts start to be disciplined by cultural rules and values" (110). Immediately obvious is that the Alison and the drawing are wearing almost the same clothes and hairstyles. Wikipedia says that the artist is Alison Bechdel and she is a lesbian. I bring this up because when I first saw the picture I thought she was a he. Both Alison and the drawing appear androgynous at first blush. However, an examination of the drawing, which because its orientation to the viewer is in profile, highlights some elements that mark it as feminine: breasts, the style the pants are drawn in (very tight), and the small frame of the body. This is important because Alison orientation to the viewer eliminates any of these gender-defining elements in color of her shirt and the bagginess of her pants.

It is notable that although Alison's body is facing front, her head in turn in profile to face the drawing. So, if we are to assume that the drawing does indeed represent Alison's unconscious in this instance, it is interesting that she is turning to face it since Rose says that "the unconscious remains beyond the self-consciousness" (110). And yet, it appears to be the unconscious, drawn self that is unaware of the conscious, physical self as noted by the drawing's apparent speed and attempt to push past Alison with its upraised hand. Perhaps this actions symbolizes the unconscious forcing its way past the conscious self despite any and all efforts of the conscious; even though in the picture Alison's resistance amounts to little more that blocking the way through passive immobility.

What is to be made of the fact that the forceful and hurried unconscious in only a drawing? Give the medium (photography) Alison could easily have inserted another photographic image of herself that would have been an "equal" at least on medium-based terms. As mentioned before, both Alison and the drawing are androgynous, as opposed to one of them being more masculine or feminine. Together this could suggest that her conscious and unconscious selves are in some form of agreement on her projection of her sexuality.

Thinking back to other psychoanalysis I've read, everyone focuses on the "castration complex." I'm not sold on this idea, and Rose brings up that this theory breaks down quite fast when applied to women. However, given the ambiguity of the piece, I'll throw this in because "psycho-analyzers" always mention it: Notice how in the picture and the drawing a hand is covering the groin. The picture is less noticeable because it is walking, but when compared to the picture, it could be a consistent element. In the picture Alison is striking a decidedly formed pose with her hands crossed in front of her. Her left hand is also in front of her groin. Does this cover the "lack" that psychoanalysis is so fascinated with? I'm not convinced of this, but it interesting in lieu of the other elements already discussed.

Finally, how does this work position me? I feel left out. Alison is having a relationship with her drawing as demonstrated by her turned head. This is further emphasized by the fact that her body is facing me (the viewer) but her head is turned away, effectively excluding me. This image is about her, and as a viewer I am not told not to not view, but I am visibly ignored.

I would be interested to be in a room with Alison and to view her view this picture. I wonder how the physical Alison would interact with these two reductions of herself. Perhaps that is a question for semiology.

Photoshop w/ Text

Do Rainbows End?

I found this book to be fascinating. This book overlays the digital onto the physical world in a way that raises a lot of big issues that are tied up with our newfound digitality. Here are my highlights:

1. On page 33, Roberts comments on the watching other people flail around as they are communicating with other people virtually, or are experiencing a virtual overlay that Roberts can't yet see. He calls this "a parody of cellphone discourtesy." The term that I've heard used for this sort of public discourse is "mobile privacy." Personally, I hate talking on the cellphone on the bus or in a crowded place, but it's become a common occurrence for us, and one that we are expected to ignore or, at best, tolerate. I think this gets back to my first post about who is blogging and why, and how it seems we're becoming a culture where are lives are "in view" on a constant basis. I believe much of this has to do with the technology (simply having the ability to be on the bus and talk with someone who isn't on the bus with you). But is this "mobile privacy" based on our constant going, our need to squeeze productivity into every moment of our lives only now facilitated by the technology? Or, did the technology raise our expectations for productivity?

2. Mobile privacy is predicated on the notion that everyone else around you doing the same thing; they are also always connected and plugged-in. That brings me to the next point of interest from Vinge's book, the idea of "crowdsourcing." Vinge construct this notion in two parts. First, on page 214, as Tommie is talking about how he came up with solutions for getting them into the biolabs, he effectively says that he sent the information/problem out to the whole web community, but he broke it up and had it solved piecemeal. This is a fantastic idea. But I think that it is part two of Vinge's crowdsourcing that really makes waves. On page 189, Vinge reverses the idea of sending information out to be solved when he brings up the idea of a single person collecting the information. The Mysterious Stranger says to Robert, "Knowledge is piled metaphorical light-years deep. Given that, the truly golden skill is the one I possess--to bring together the knowledge and abilities that make solutions" (189). This sounds like a page out of Lev Manovich's work on the role of the database. As I recall, for Manovich the database is the foundation of new media. Rather than new media or new technologies creating new experiences for us, now new experiences will come from the indexing of millions of pieces of information and our role in sorting them and putting them together into something coherent. We as individuals will have the power to customize any and all based on our proficiency in databasing. This speaks to my initial post as well, in that knowledge has now become an issue of filtering. It is rapidly becoming the case that information is no longer hard to come by, but rather we need to be able to sort and process these mountains of knowledge and distill them into something manageable and usable.

3. Along with my interests in space and place, I was interested by Vinge's discussion of the physicality of the university and of the library itself. For example, on page 116 when Vinge paraphrases the bible, "What shall it profit a university, if it shall enroll five hundred thousand, and lose its own soul?" And later on 268 when, during the virtual battle, the library "decides" the victor. In my other class this semester, Visual Narratives, we've been looking at Dada and Surrealism and, of course, have come across Duchamp and his readymades. For Duchamp, it was the idea of the artist "nominating" a bottle rack, a urinal, a piece of junk as art. The artist had the power to proclaim anything art despite what the rest of us saw as artful. The reason I bring Duchamp up is that I'm curious how "spatial nomination" works in Vinge. If a person can overlay any sort of virtual covering onto a physical space, does that space lose its sense of meaning? What happens to the notion of "place" when a person can "experience" it from anywhere? Robert's caveat it similar to my own about the blending of virtual and physical space: if we all see what we want to see, how do we see, and more importantly, be collectively? Doesn't the joy of physical places come from sharing the same experience?

4. My last point is more of a question for the class. On page 39 Vinge notes that, "For Robert Gu, real creativity most often came after a good night's sleep...'sleeping on it' worked for him." Much later on page 277, Vinge says, "Rabbit was not always fast...he had to sleep on it." Wow! What are we to make of this? At first I thought that Rabbit was somehow Robert's disconnected creativity or soul. Going back to Dada and Surrealism, is this Vinge positing a commentary on the separation of mind and body in the new digital age? Why do these two characters share the same process for creative problem solving when it is something that seems very personal and unique? I put this out there for anyone with any ideas on the subject. I'm stumped and am excited to hear what others have to say.

The Wide, Wide World

(I typed this part last but thought I should bring it up front because it's more to the point than the rest of my scattered thoughts, see below for the beginning)
So, what sort of world do I want to live in? ...I'm currently doing research on Second Life and I'm finding out that there are the same sort of problems in the digital world as there are in the physical one. That leads me to think, that perhaps "What sort of world do I want to live in" is looking at the wrong end of the situation. Maybe the way to look at it is "How do I want to live in the world. What sort of me?" Instead of thinking about the medium or the interface, what if we think about the message that WE bring to the equation? Does that line of thinking reject the aim of this assignment and even the class? And yet, the question of digital text and digital space only becomes pertinent, I think, when it is interacting with a user. But then, where/how do medium-specific issues come into play?

What sort of "me?" I suppose on some level I feel an amount of anxiety in the physical world. Insurance, bills, grades, work, the environment--yeah, yeah, I know, glass-half-empty. But how do we go about addressing these very real concerns? Ultimately I would like to be more comfortable with these issues. Is there any "world" that can facilitate that? Can the digital help with that in some way? Is there a digital Buddhism? This conversation seems to be turning more and more to hybridity. What about "born digital" elements? I hope this question continues forward throughout the course this semester, and beyond, it is crucial for all of us to grapple with.

(This is where I started writing, and how I got to the above paragraph)
In class last week we were asked to imagine what sort of world we wanted to live in. Hard question. How is one to conceptualize a response to this? Do I focus on a grand-scale, like world-peace? Or, maybe, something more individual, like how my street could function better? My academic interests revolve around space and architecture, and currently I am fascinated by the possibilities (and limitations) of blending the physical with the digital. I'm also at a loss for knowing how to connect these two concepts that seem impossible to interweave. Responding to this question in class, I wrote things like: I want a world of constant revision; I want a world where text and image merge (what does that mean?); I want a world where writing becomes a physical act; I want a world of mutually experiential texts.

Now, if we address the notion of interface (writing v. reading, physical v. digital), what sort of different "worlds" do each of these create for us? How does the type of interface alter our perception of that world (writing a book v. reading a book)? Our class is focused on writing and how it is changing in the context of the digital. In addition to this, I am also interest in how space-as-text changes in relation to the digital. However, there seems to be a fundamental problem with the idea of space as digital text. What about the body? I was enthralled by Vinge's book "Rainbows End" (I'll talk more about the book in a later post). Perhaps this is the sort of world I want to live in, one in which the digital has been integrated into the physical. Does that means I want "enhanced life?" What's wrong with analog life?

ready, set...

1. Do I read blogs? Yes, I think so. I'll often waste time by going to Wired magazine or Slate.com (assuming that the content of each can be counted as blogs), but I don't read any of them regularly. More often I click on what looks interesting that particular day. I often find myself wondering who the heck all of these people are. On a different but related note, why would anyone want to read my own ramblings? That raises the question of who (beyond the class assignment-as-catalyst) am I writing for? Am I writing to hear other people's responses and enter into a conversation, or am I just writing to work through my own thoughts? If it's the latter, why am I doing this on the web? I journaled a lot while I was in the Peace Corps, why is blogging better than what I was doing overseas?

2. Setting up the blog was a piece of cake. The hardest part was trying to come up with something witty for a title, which didn't seem to work out anyway. I have no better reason for choosing 'blogger' than the fact that I already have a gmail account, and I just wanted to keep my number of accounts to a minimum.

3. I picked the template I did because I like the colors and boxes that section off and delineate the little bits of the blog. (I'm curious how much someone could glean about the blogger by analyzing her/his answers to these questions...)

4. Yes, writing here is different. It seems a bit like journaling, but in this odd way that other people will see it. It feels a little like "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" in the sense that I can say anything, but I don't have to be present for anyone's reactions. Also, I think I can distance myself more from the blog-as-text better than I could from tacking an essay up by the elevators in Curtain Hall. Maybe here there's more freedom because the accessibility creates less legitimacy... maybe there's more legitimacy because there are less filters on the results. Obviously, I'm a novice, but I'm cautiously curious about where all this will lead.