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