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