a sea of eyes, an actuated minimalism

The Sea of Eyes is a virtual projection, a digital, realtime representation of a shifting perceptual reality. The eye has its own, very rich contested history and exists here as a diagram, a metaphor and a reflection of itself. The eye is disembodied and in this way abstracted, objectified, particularized. The image is undermined as a purely representational device. The user is compelled to see more than just themselves; they are thrust into the full range of (contested) narrative landscape. There is no stable ground, either in the physical here-and-now or in the virtual construct (in a "suspension of disbelief"). The user oscillates between the two, aware and yet fully engaged, inhabiting the interface as much as anything. In this reciprocal hybridization, new modes of interaction, beyond contest/consensus, are implicated.

agency in multiplicity

It is important to be clear about what is meant by contested space. It is not about contest; contest is the process by which contested space is packaged, constrained, delimited, framed, turned into content, embedded with the marks of power-domination. Rather, contested space contains the many layers of history, points of view and positions that surround any thing/idea/understanding. As a construct, contested space is fundamentally ambivalent, a dataspace representing the range of intellectual, emotional, political negotiations and divergences. It does not frame this dataspace in any way, but remains smooth, fluid, amorphous, isotropic. This raises the question of interface. What are the characteristics of an interface into this dataspace such that it can be embedded with (transient, self-recursive) meaning/organization - that it can be folded onto itself - without introducing contest/consensus as a mechanism of control and definition? In other worlds, can an interface be conceived which allows agency without disrupting multiplicity?

memorial minimalism

Case Study: Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005)

I said all along that I wanted people to have a feeling of being in the present and an experience that they had never had before. And one that was different and slightly unsettling. The world is too full of information and here is a place without information. That is what I wanted...

...I was against the graffiti coating from the start. If a swastika is painted on it, it is a reflection of how people feel. And if it remains there, it is a reflection of how the German government feels about people painting swastikas on the monument.
- Peter Eisenman (interview transcript here)

Many great images of the project here.

Eisenman takes the position that minimalism is necessarily in contemporary memorial-making. For him, the introduction of content by the designer always leads to sensationalization.

The Holocaust memorial is a case study and a foil for the re-conceptualization of the landmark (of which memorial is exemplar). The effort is to understand the relationship of the landmark to content/narrative and to speculate on the potential of the landmark to be responsive, context specific, and ultimately, deployable or perhaps, ubiquitous.

recursive dots

here is the output from a simple processing code. not sure how this will play into the jerusalem project, but i love the aesthetic. two iterations using the same control parameters (with a random variable modulating number of branches and angle of repositioning):

contested histories

The lesson of Wikipedia is one of contested histories. Under the surface of each content page exists a world of contention, negotiation, politics, intervening identities. The edit history pages are a catalogue, a genealogy of vacillation, and in this sense remain inherently ambivalent. The content pages "pop out" from this body of contention, digested, calcified (at any given moment), framed, ready for consumption and proliferation. This emergence is inherently violent (like any birth); it stems from utility and yet contains within itself all of the marks of power-domination:

The relationship of domination is no more a "relationship" than the place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in ritual, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies. It makes itself accountable for debts and gives rise to the universe of rules, which is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy it. Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence.
- Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History

Notes from Desk Crit with Gregory Thorpe (10/12/2007):
- remapping wikipedia: the landmark as the "content page" of the urban landscape - i.e. an act of control/ repression/ reframing/ consensus/ etc. - packaging of culture and the urban space - it is an architecture of controlled history.
- the alternative to this, what does it mean to have an architecture of contested history?
- in this effort, I necessarily take a position of ambivalence
- in that case, how do i reinsert myself (back) into the system/process?
- here is the critical issue of authorship in the open-source/ ambivalent mode of cultural production..., in fact this defines what art IS/has become.
- sine wave video editing as a tentative example
- re-define existing landmarks or create new ones - or both?
- using processing to diagram patterns of landmark use, both in physical and virtual terms
- indexing landmarks - news feeds, placeblogger, overlaying different perspectives as a generative process
- hyperlocal vs. hyperglobal data feeds

the ecology of wikipedia

Evaluating the verifiability of wikipedia:
http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/

Re-linking identity with content:
http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

seems inevitable that i would end up here

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

entering the edit wars

1) Diagramming a Wikipedia page, understanding the degrees of freedom offered on the surface (the content pages themselves) and in the subsurface (the underlying discussion/history pages).

2) Understanding the Wikipedia community in terms profiles, relationships, hierarchies, definitions - the Edit Wars and the politic of Wikipedia.

3) Specific interventions - understand the implication of the beans-up-the-nose warning - and the ethical considerations of flamers - is it possible to fold Wikipedia back on itself without engaging in a useless expenditure of "energy." I'd like to push the limits of content embedding in Wikipedia, see what is retained, what gets pulled down. But I also don't want to engage in gratuitous disruption, to "wildly de-stratify" the construct, that seems utterly counterproductive. Sock puppets, Trolls, Vandals, Self-Promoters, these are useful examples, perhaps all the more useful when transfered to other venues, but in the context of Wikipedia they seem a bit played-out.

4) Tracking specific webpages - both created and existing - visualizing change through animation/video of refresh screenshots.

* this is an evolving post, directed at friday's review, and an overall effort to coalesce the research strings into a venue and a directive for design.

learning from flaming fuckwads

"People will play World of Warcraft for 80 hours a week.
There's no difference between that and playing Wikipedia
for 80 hours a week.  It's even more fun because of none
of the characters in World of Warcraft think they're what
they are.  People on Wikipedia, some of them think "hey,
I'm contributing to the sum of human knowledge."  You can
fuck with those people, that's extra bonus time.  So, 80
hours a week on Wikipedia, who cares, that's pretty cool,
that's pretty neat.

So it's not a waste of time to these people, and they're
right.  If they're able to successfully screw with an
article, a lot of people will see it.  I'd buy entirely
that the Penny Arcade theory, which was normal person,
plus anonymity, plus large audience, equals flaming
fuckwad.  That's the mirror that Wikipedia is presenting
to us, and I think that we can learn quite a bit from
it."

-Jason Scott, The Great Failure of Wikipedia
(audio)

make yourself a (B)ody (w)ithout (O)rgans

"You don't reach the BwO by wildly destratifying...Staying stratified -- organized, signified, subjected -- is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times."

- Deleuze + Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

the network surface and its clumps

OK, this is the final general/metaphorical/metaphysical post until after friday's crit. It was written earlier today, as a result of conversations with Aurthur, and thoughts spun off of his intriguing blog, trapped in the green box.

I'm interested in this notion of the "network surface." It is really provocative and no doubt accurate visual metaphor, and yet it seems deeply pessimistic. It paints an image of an undifferentiated landscape of data; a liquid film spreading out over human thought and culture.

It is apparent that the network surface has the capacity (particular with the introduction of Web2.0) to fold back onto itself, clumping around particular, often transient nodes. This clumping is more or less what I mean by patterning. I'm thinking of DNA, which is nothing more then a linear array of data, most of which is junk. This is obviously limiting, and yet the organism has created all sorts of strategies - from the physical folding of the DNA chain, to chemical messenger pathways - to link disparate elements of the genetic code. This give the genetic content the capacity to jump out of the constraints of the physical/chemical structure of the code and cross-fertilize, an essential feature of any adaptive, self-referential, intelligent system.

But I'm still stuck in generalities, so maybe this is no help...