Buttons pushed

Ulises Ali Mejias on the irrelevancy of the near:

 

“First, I am interested in analyzing the nature of Virtuality and its relation to Reality, specifically how technology influences the degree of relevancy with which we perceive the world. In other words, how technology mediates our perception of things being Near or Far, not just physically but epistemologically (things being known or unknown) and ontologically (things being real or unreal). I argue that before modern communication technologies, what was near physically was also near epistemologically and ontologically (i.e., the physically near was also known and real). But modern communication technologies have effected an interesting inversion. Now, what is far physically can acquire a nearness in epistemological and ontological terms, while what is near physically can appear to be less known and real. I refer to this phenomenon as the Irrelevancy of the Near, and I explore its history, cultural manifestations and societal impacts in my work.

Second, I undertake an investigation of the process of delegation of human agency to Code (computer language). Through this delegation of social agency, new forms of communication and sociality (such as hybrid online/offline social formations) are engendered, with potential benefits and liabilities. The delegation of social agency to Code per se is not always negative and need not always contribute to the Irrelevancy of the Near, as it can facilitate new social formations that were simply not possible before such technologies were available. In order to examine this process in more detail, communities and networks can be differentiated by the way social agency is distributed amongst humans and Code. Communities, under this definition, allow individuals to retain their social agency, while networks mandate that individuals relinquish most of their social agency to Code. I am interested in researching the links and interstices between communities and networks, as well as the complex ways in which humans assert their social will as users or through Code.”

 

Mechanical mass-production and a culture concerned with speed, upgrades and the new has created an environment where what thrives is the temporary – and the temporary tends to break easily, so instead of using our hands to adapt the whatever to work better for our specific goals we throw it away and get something else: irrelevancy of the near.  We know it’s not going to last so we don’t get psychologically close to it – and we are surrounded by this stuff  – and I’m thinking that this lack of connection alienates us from the gear we keep near, and perhaps trains us to look always elsewhere for that deeper connection.   Communication technologies allow us to re-connect – to communicate, to interact, to integrate our experience into our environment – this is why the net in all its forms is expanding so quickly – its message and potentials satisfy a desire to be heard, to listen and learn, and a will to interact.  What we see with ubiquitous/pervasive computing is the embedding of communicative properties back into the near and the moment and our hands.

 

Speaking of which, Buttons a work by sascha pohflep, pushed my buttons (sorry…). It inspired and provoked me and I am thankful for the experience.

 

I love the idea that within certain moments we have connections with each other that may not be obvious via the five senses – and the net certainly provides an opportunity to explore this idea.  The net, in fact, seems to be model of something like species consciousness.

Buttons struck me initially as an elegant, poetic meditation on the idea of an expanded, multidimensional moment.  “Here” as a site of profound integration and connections beyond the individuated self.  But after spending a bit of time imagining what it would be like to experience the piece, based on watching the video and reading about it, its lack of interaction, and its minimization of user agency made me conclude that I’d rather use similar tools to conduct some research on just how connected we really are, and how participant’s actions may be logged so that people may in fact be put in contact with each other to explore otherwise hidden connections collaboratively.

In short, the work seemed to render the near irrelevant, minimize the agency of the user while maximizing the agency of Code, and produce a shared moment that seemed “shared” – somehow meaningless – but, again, I love the idea, it just seems that there might be a better way to model it so that the ownership of the event is more explicitly shared between the two participants, and less authored by sascha via Code.

I was thinking about this when Ricardo Dominguez gave a great talk to our department last night and raised some ideas about research/empirical data vs. mass-hallucinatory actions (no disrespect intended, quite the contrary) that, to me, relate clearly to the issues raised above and below – how the poetic/hallucinatory express the illimitable and the empirical expresses atomization and rigid categorization – but I’ll get into those in another post.  In the meantime, here’s what I’m wondering:

What if both users could take actual photos and have them uploaded and exchanged  – so that my photo of whatever at, say, 17:34:06 would be sent to another user who took a photo at that time, and vice-versa? 

 

What if there was an option for exchange of more data, so that the initial gesture could be used as an entrée to an examination of possible, previously unknown relationships?

 

Along these lines, what if the button was augmented so that it could gather more data then just the time.  I’m thinking of Manfred Clynes’ isometric sensor the Sentograph (described in his out of print Sentics) and I’ve built a prototype with a few FSR sensors, a micro, and a 16 bit ADC.

 

I figure that using a custom database rather than flickr, and something like imgSeek along with the above might provide some interesting data.

 

Lucky for me I have a few exhibits coming up in the near future to try this out.