I admire Jan Chipchase’s blog(s) for the way he seems to be locating elements wherever he is that: relate to his research, suggest questions, represent ideas or, generate concepts. He is exploring active connections between his mind and the artifacts he encounters. He documents these interactions and posts them in a way that, to me, suggests that a blog is a shared thought object – as much about the content provided by the author as the fact that it will be seen and considered by whoever happens to find it. Jan’s posts are expressing his interests while asking “what do you think?”. My experience has been that I leave his site and take his observations and, perhaps more importantly, his observational practice into my offline experience, where they integrate with whatever happens to be on my mind, and expand the dialogue I seem to be having with my own environment. In short, Jan’s work seems to have made me a better, more willing listener.

Jan is a scientist and researcher, and works for Nokia. As such, we can assume that his efforts are close to the ideas of the mobile web, perhaps the internet of things, maybe even Web2.0. This makes sense to me as I experience the mobile web (cell-phones, pda’s, rfid, semacode, qr, ar, wifi, bluetooth, etc…) as extending the form of the www beyond the desktop. The de-centralized, personally customizable, collective, interactive “form” of the web is being mapped onto the offline. As the points of contact and interaction within any environment are expanded, the electronic gizmos we haul around with us will have an increasingly active and overt role in the meanings we harvest from time spent within different spaces. This seems to be a model of something familiar.

A couple of years ago I was teaching a course on computation and interactivity and was preparing a lecture on how we use tools to compute our identities. I was motivated by something Ron Kuivola had said during a meeting while I was a grad student: “we train to the medium”. In preparing for my lecture I read some of Dr. John C. Lilly’s writings about his experiments with sensory deprivation tanks, and was struck by his findings that after several hours in the tank, subjects would emerge having forgotten key elements of their identities: name, age, where they lived, etc… slowly this information would return to them once they were out of the tank, but I was intrigued by the idea that our memories are embedded within our environments, that our identities are formed and exist at the active intersection of internal and external, and are not stored within our individual brains, somehow apart from the external world. After doing some research I concluded that we, as a species, have sensed this, and acted on it, for a long, long time.

It seems we are always pinging the environment and adapting accordingly. I heard an interview with the physicist Julian Barbour where he mentioned that the human body is producing and destroying 100 million million hemoglobin molecules every second, and that if one were able to view this life-death-life cycle through a powerful microscope the structures we would see second by second would be indistinguishable from each other. My point is that with each second we are coming into being and probably engaged in a persistent act of connecting, interacting, and establishing a relationship with our environment. Over the past few hundred years, however, we (especially in the west) have become fascinated with breaking things into discriminate parts, atomizing and analyzing our experience – our consciousness as very much “ours”, creating dialectic arguments based on the polarities of two concepts that are proven to be irreducible to each other: robust categorical thinking, sites of discernment, focal points of discrimination, development along a trajectory of greater and greater mastery of one distinct activity at the cost of a radical limitation of other potential experiences, etc…

The development of the internet seems to have coincided, or simply be an aspect of, another form of development, and we seem to be experiencing a shift towards understanding relationships between things, systems, interaction, and integration – a developmental trajectory of greater integration and broader experience.

Much of the latter seem embodied in the internet, and are expanding with it into the mobile web, which seems to be an excellent model of a dynamic, integrated, and interactive relationship between our selves and our environments.

As long as we don’t forget that it is a model, and, like any model, that its purpose is to create better understandings of our experience, leading to other, increasingly accurate models that will undoubtedly supercede what we are working with now, we will be ok. If we fetishize our current tools and prize them above the ideas they embody we will have some problems.

The tools of the mobile web and their potential for explicate, overt networking both locally and globally within various spaces are modeling our dynamic relationship with our environment, providing tangible forms to explore the idea, specifically, that “we” exist at the intersection of the internal (individuality, brain, sense organs, consciousness, ego) and external (that which is beyond our skin, the non-human, inanimate, built, collective), and the elements of both are engaged in active, persistent relationships of mutual influence – intercourse, in other words, where one does not exist without the other, and where both are tightly coupled and dynamic. The categories, the differences, don’t matter: what counts is the interaction.

“We train to the medium”, so said Ron Kuivola. There is a responsibility with creating objects, as the objects, made by someone and an embodiment of an idea, speak their intentions and interests to those who use them.

If we accept the web as model of a collective, evolving form it can teach us to become better listeners, and, if we chose to learn to listen, and take that knowledge with us into other interactions then regardless of what forms our models take we will develop along a trajectory of increasing empathy and greater integration within our species and our environments.

in re: some comments emailed to me on the previous post: there are aspects of buttons that I love, and some I’m critical of. This, for me, is an ideal condition.

Years ago while studying musical composition with Charles Jones we were discussing a work we had both heard the night before. He said “the intention of any work is to reveal ideas that lead to the next piece, as there is always a next piece. Any work is as much about now as it is about later – and trying to say everything in such a way as to make any future compositions redundant and pointless is really an attempt to end art.”

Looking at some moblogs it occurs to me that the often minimal nature of the postings: an image, maybe with a word or two underneath, reveals the web itself as a shared thought object. Clearly to get to the point of viewing someone’s posting a series of actions and technologies must be engaged (going online, surfing, etc…), and each of those technologies and actions caries with it various ideas and understandings. Media, in other words, as an ensemble of actions. Meaning as a form of associations in the mind structured around the image/sound/text of the posting – of course this model exists in many other areas of experience. The mind of the beholder is always a constellation of associations/ideas/experiences present at that moment – the image/text of a specific posting an invitation to try different relationships with the things in mind – or at least that’s the way I chose to think about it.

If the mobile web with its tiny screens and awkward keypads induces us to limit our discourse to an exchange of slogans which are intended, just like an ad campaign, to mean/signify only one, clear thing to “everyone” then the promise of an expanding field of integrated connections suggested by the web at large will be reduced to a cliquish, severely limited landscape of buzzwords and icons – a channel that only plays ads, a trip to the supermarket, and little else. Clearly we can choose to be so much more than that, and we have the tools in our hands, right now, to make experience so much more interesting – to create models of human interactions that may be ever more accurate representations of our authentic experiences, to develop forms that expand our conceptions of online/offline, etc., but we may have to fight to maintain those potentials – and we should bear in mind that we tend to train to the medium. If everything gets overly simplified and too narrowly targeted and the tools we use are designed to facilitate that goal then we will become what we the tools we haul around with us can do, and we will have missed a tremendous opportunity to develop along a trajectory of a more vast integration and a deeper empathy. Instead of becoming increasingly more alike we will develop a greater ability to understand, respect and explore the ways we are similar. How the subtle variations that exist among different cultures expand our understandings of ourselves – not separate us. I digress.

I’ve been thinking about creating a work that might make the web of associations more explicit – creating a Bohm type dialogue using the tools of the mobile web (there are many forms “dialogue” and David Bohm was not the only person who explored it [the linked article was a collaboration between Bohm, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett]. The general idea is a practice that explores the ideas of collective intelligence through the technology of the spoken word, Bohm wrote a great book on the subject and the linked essay I find very useful). The general idea is to create a database of participants and introduce a topic – a general topic, that would go out via email and sms, and to encourage participants to think, to take their time, and to allow whatever associations come to mind to remain suspended and available, and to share those associations with the collective when they feel a correspondence between their association and other ideas introduced into the dialogue. The text, sound and image capabilities of cellphones provide participants on the move a way to contribute associations/content derived from their immediate location: text, image, sound – whatever they feel corresponds with the emerging content of the dialogue. The dialogue could go on for long periods of time (as the traditional dialogues often do) and could coexist with whatever else is happening in each of the participant’s local lives, as periods of silence are common within dialogue. Users could upload text, image, sound, from wherever – desktop, or mobile device, and would receive all of the content from other users. The idea is not to have a discussion (Bohm makes the distinction between dialogue and discussion [and it’s semantic relationship to concussion/percussion] clear), but to create a constellation of associations that would be as much about the topic as the relationships of the group to each other and the participants to their local environments. An exploration of the local as a focal point of the global, and the global as a complex form of shifting associations and relationships.

How does the general topic and the series of associations it generates from the geographically dispersed group reflect/resonate with the local experiences of the participants? Are the activities of the geographically dispersed group somehow simultaneously rooted both “there” and “here”? How might this practice relate to investigations in context awareness? Ever read anything on the static universe theory? Here as a site of profound integration. Here as the only place we ever are.

I’m developing this project now and should begin some trials this month.

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.