A presentation of some of the work I have conducted in HUMlab, a digital humanities computing lab and studio at Umeå University in Sweden. The film is arranged according to three themes; Making Space, Media Places and Narrative as Interface. I present some projects I have been involved with in HUMlab and some of the thinking that goes into them. As well as suggestions for considering digital media and pedagogy in the future.
This film was shown at the Lärande i Fokus (Learning in Focus) conference at Umeå University, Sweden between 12-13 November 2013.
Click on the above image for the video stream of a keynote presentation I made in May 2013 on the perspectives and constituents of virtual space. Virtual space is becoming less virtual everyday because we live in it.
From the online and shared spaces of massive multiplayer games, to GPS
and the augmented and networked technologies of iPhones and wireless
connectivity, the peoples of affluent economies realize virtual spaces
everyday. What do these spaces mean for our understandings of the body?
How can we imagine the body, with its associated territories of gender,
sexuality and cognitive awareness, in this time of virtual space? This
presentation examines these questions in conjunction with selected
examples and proposes a conceptualization of the body based on the
virtual as a narrative of becoming. Many of the ideas and analytical
concepts expressed in this paper come from my doctoral dissertation
work, which will be publicly defended in the Autumn of 2013 at Umeå
University.
What is virtual space?
Virtual space is codified space. How I elaborate on this answer in
relation to bodies, expressions of identity is related to contemporary
discourse. What are the Codes of Virtual Space in relation to the body?
A video of my presention at the Social Media Knowledge Exchange
conference, Center for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities
(CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge 3 July 2013.
Abstract
Social media, or shared user generated content that is most often found
on the Internet within large communities centered on a publishing
platform, represents a part of an economy, or a system with values and
rewards based on exchange. By engaging with their work via social media
academics participate in a knowledge economy, at the center of which is a
projected or extended self. By developing expertise in the use of
social media value can be created in the knowledge economy related to
strength of network, profile and branding, prestige, access to
knowledge, dissemination and authority or expertise.
In this presentation I attempt to:
1. Construct a rational for using social media as an academic
2. Explore some of the principles for using social media
3. Suggest approaches to research on social media as objects of study or tools.
The companion site for this presentation is Transmedial Reality: A
Toolkit for Working with Social Media for Researchers at
http://transmedialreality.wordpress.com/
A webinar (Audio coordinated with slides, just press play) from the keynote presentation I gave at the conference "There and Back Again: Cultural Perspectives on Time and Space" which took place at Umeå University, Sweden 22-23 May 2013, organized by the Department of Culture and Media.
Virtual space is becoming less virtual everyday because we live in it.
From the online and shared spaces of massive multiplayer games, to GPS
and the augmented and networked technologies of iPhones and wireless
connectivity, the peoples of affluent economies realize virtual spaces
everyday. What do these spaces mean for our understandings of the body?
How can we imagine the body, with its associated territories of gender,
sexuality and cognitive awareness, in this time of virtual space? This
presentation examines these questions in conjunction with selected
examples and proposes a conceptualization of the body based on the
virtual as a narrative of becoming. Many of the ideas and analytical
concepts expressed in this paper come from my doctoral dissertation
work, which will be publicly defended 5th November 2013 at Umeå
University.
What is virtual space?
Virtual space is codified space. How I elaborate on this answer in
relation to bodies, expressions of identity is related to contemporary
discourse. What are the Codes of Virtual Space in relation to the body?
Brian Patten, one of the original Liverpool poets, explores how
radical, subversive and occasionally risqué poetry - rooted in the
counter-culture of the late 1960s - became available to a mass audience
at the end of a phone line for the first time.
In this radio documentary I speak about the role Giorno Poetry Systems played in my formative years and how we can today critically relate Dial-a-Poem to so much of the media ecology we have around us. Right click on the image and save link to hear an archived version of the production.
Dial-a-Poem changed the public face of poetry for generations.
Producer: Llinos Jones
A Terrier production for BBC Radio 4.
John Giorno with the Dial-a-Poem telephone set up in 1969
“One day a New York
mother saw her 12-year-old son with two friends listening to the telephone and giggling.
She grabbed the phone from them and what she heard freaked her out. This was
when Dial-A-Poem was at The Architectural League of New York with worldwide
media coverage, and Junior Scholastic Magazine had just done an article and
listening to Dial-A-Poem was homework in New York City Public Schools.” - John
Giorno, August 1972
“Every faggot hiding in bar/political
prisoner/Every junky shooting up in john/Political prisoner” - Diana De
Prima, Revolutionary Letter No. 49
Dial a Poem began in 1968 when New York artist, actor, poet John Giorno linked up 15 connected telephones to reel-to-reel tape players and made it possible for anyone to call a telephone number and listen to a poem recited by an established, often radical, poet or author.
Millions called. "The busiest time was 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., so one figured
that all those people sitting at desks in New York office buildings
spend a lot of time on the telephone," wrote John Giorno, the founder of
Dial-A-Poem. "The second busiest time was 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. ...
then the California calls and those tripping on acid or couldn't sleep, 2
a.m. to 6 a.m" (New York Times).
Comparisons with current information systems are obvious. With Dial-a-Poem a network was established that created a space for experiencing language. Along with this experience of language came a lot of assumptions about culture, often related to gender, sexuality, class, generation and political affiliation. Giorno and his associates (William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsburg, Diana De Prima, Clark Coolidge, Taylor Mead, Bobby Seale, Anne Waldman and Jim Carroll) created a radical space that anyone with a telephone could access.
Burroughs in his dry cackle describes an old Mexican assassin "with eyes
the color of a faded gray flannel suit." Diane di Prima talks calmly
about the proper use of knives and Molotov cocktails. Clark Coolidge
drags out every four-letter word he can think of: taps, buns, keys,
cans, arms. Taylor Mead sputters like a motorcycle. Bobby Seale
charismatically hates white people, while people cheer. Ms. Waldman
singsongs about her sagging spirit at age 26. Jim Carroll coolly reports
how he took off his shirt, then his pants, for his coach, when he was
12, to try on a new uniform. "He told me it fit perfectly over my body" (New York Times).
The space created by sound is a space of
potential dissidence. This began a long time ago. The audio of song, music,
poet breaks up official space, monumental space, and gives time to the carnival
or the revolution. This is why we have noise ordinances in urban spaces. To
break through the wall of an apartment building with music is to reclaim space
for the purposes of joy. The experiments of William S Burroughs came to similar
conclusions:
“Could
you cool a riot by recording the calmest cop and the most reasonable
demonstrator? Maybe! However, it's a lot easier to start trouble that to stop
it. Just pointing out that cut/ups on the tape recorder can be used as a
weapon. You'll observe that the operators are making a cutup as they go. They
are cutting in Chicago, Paris, Mexico City, Kent Ohio with the present sound
effects at random and that is a cutup.” - The Electronic Revolution (http://www.poetspath.com/transmissions/messages/burroughs.html)
Space is
communicative in media according to how it can be “tied to the relations of
production and to the ‘order’ which those relations impose, and hence to
knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to ‘frontal’ relations” (Lefebvre 33). In
the design of digital narrative works on the World Wide Web similar
relationships between signifying elements in space, such as emphasized
structures, repeated components and specific perspectives, make up this
communication. In this sense the signs and codes that operate in space form a
symbolic order in the digital works. The reading subject can only approach the
works according to these codes, which compose “the locus of communication by
means of signs, as the locus of separation and the milieu of prohibitions”
(Lefebvre 134-135). The interpretive responses to these signs inevitably call
upon a separation, an interpretive distance and as a result a set of
prohibitions, between the reader and the work. With Dial-a-Poem the radical space of the poet has admitted you the listener for the duration of the telephone call.[1]
Prohibitions are encoded into representational space. Thomas Nolden clarifies this further:
For Lefebvre,
‘frontal relations’ of production codify power relations, for example, in the
form of buildings or public monuments: ‘Such frontal (and hence brutal) expressions
of these relations do not completely crowd out their more clandestine or
underground aspects; all power must have its accomplices – and its police’ (33)
(Nolden 128).
This is representational space, which
Lefebvre defines “as directly lived through its associated images and symbols,
and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’. [...] Thus representational
spaces may be said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more
or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (Lefebvre 39). Similar
representational space exists in digitally mediated narrative as “non-verbal
symbols and signs”, which evoke “not ‘stories’ but suggestive markings” and
“trigger reactions in players in order to help them to create their own
interpretations” (Nitsche 44). These ‘suggestive markings’ I equate with the dry rattle of Bill Burroughs' voice as he speaks of hipster junky life in Mexico in the 1950s, the excited chant of Ginsberg, and the echo of De Prima as she tells you where you are; “Every faggot hiding in bar/political
prisoner/Every junky shooting up in john/Political prisoner”. You are in the same prison she is in, and that which connects you both is the telephone and the voice you hear holding it to your ear. Like the visiting rooms in prison they show in the movies on TV, but only now you are there holding the phone and listening.
Works
Cited
Lefebvre, Henri. The
Production of Space. Oxford: Basil-Blackwell, 2007.
Nolden, Thomas. “On Colonial Spaces and Bodies: Hans Grimm’s
Geschichten und Südwestafrika.” The
Imperialist Imagination: German colonialism and its legacy. Ed. Sara
Friedrichsmeyer. Sara Lennox, Susanne Zantop. Michigan: University of Michigan
Press, 1998. 125-141. Print.
Brian Patten, one of the original Liverpool poets, explores how radical, subversive and occasionally risqué poetry - rooted in the
counter-culture of the late 1960s - became available to a mass audience
at the end of a phone line for the first time.
I also understand the great biographer and friend of Burroughs and Gysin, Barry Miles is included in the program. You can tune in online here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/
[1]Interpretation, linguistic or spatial, always
includes the possibility of misreading. Interpretation is structured toward
multiplicity and the digital works are no different. I do not need to account
for my readings as preeminently ‘correct’,
merely demonstratehow narrative can be
read and how the digitalworks attempt
to guide this reading.
Two half-day workshops on using shared digital media for cultural and academic professionals
Social media is more than a Facebook account or a blog. Today there
are many social media platforms that can be used as effective and
inexpensive tools for event management and/or for participation and work
in the knowledge economy. These two workshops, conducted by a social
media professional with more than 10 years of international experience,
will develop and share effective practices, experiences, tools and
platforms on managing real-time events across a range of social media in
professional contexts related to culture, arts and the humanities.
1. Identifying practical digital tools for using in event management – a list of 20
2. The boundaries of space in mediating events; the virtual present and the presence virtual
3. The ethics of crowd contributions, or, “Watch out, I am behind you!”
4. Archiving the event; tagging, storing, streaming and collating
5. Designing an event with digital infrastructure
The Folk of Digital Primitive "This is not an urban avant-garde but a diffuse collection of people who came of age in a world were the image knows no boarder and sounds are free. Many live outside the major centres but communicate and publicise their work via the Net. Dowloading, uploading, forums and streamed media has created a global network of digital primitives who play the sort of folk music that few dreamed of 20 years ago. However, the present day bone and electricity groups follow in the footsteps of such luminaries as the Sun City Girls, The Flower Travelling Band, to name but two.". Jim Barret
The Internet in the last decade has produceed a global network of music made by low-fi, at home, DIY groups and released on CDRs by tiny music labels. Bands such as The Jewelled Antler Collective, Sunburned Hand of the Man and The North Sea have plied their sounds on labels such as Foxy Digitalis, Secret Eye, Manhand, Music Your Mind Will Love You and Fonal Records. This sonic lecture will examine the rise of this unamed and untamed musical genre. From his personal experience as founding member of the group 6majik9 and the Music Your Mind Will Love You collective amongst others, Jim Barret will talk about the intersecting Internet communities of these bands, the sounds they make and the creative arts model they represent.
This presentation demonstrates that cooperation over borders is possible between individuals and groups dispersed over space using online three-dimensional virtual worlds. This cooperation occurs in the production of art, research, teaching and learning, and performance as well as in building social, professional and personal contexts. The borders that are crossed are geopolitical, linguistic, generational, spatial and embodied. Throughout the various ruptures offered by virtual world technology, a sense and understanding of place is required for cooperation in order to maintain coherence for the interlocutors and to be able to meet, talk, build, write, perform and exchange. In this talk, I will use examples of machinima - videos made using screen-capture software on computers, to film places and avatar actors in virtual worlds - to demonstrate how these environments can offer places for cooperation.
Tomorrow seminar at Stockholms universitetsbibliotek (kl 12.00-17.00), Växthuset for Initiativ för ett Kulturens Europa "En digital kultur i rörelse" Twitter: #DigiCultEU
Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin
“The
labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever
fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
“One
text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry
would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.”
Avital Ronell, Body/No Body (in conversation with Werner Herzog)
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley (published 1818) represents a historical and literary
divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is a significant
reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism. It is the
contention of my presentation that in contemporary digital works of art
and narrative we are witnessing a re-marriage of science and poetry.
However, this union should be no automatic cause for romantic joy, as
the present situation in the education sector of most Western
democracies indicates. Today, the natural sciences are separated from
and weighted favorably in relation to the production and analysis of
culture. There is little to indicate that this is an effective strategy
in light of present global ‘network culture’ initiatives. Today, the
union of science and poetry in digital media is felt most acutely in
reading, or the performative interpretation of imaginative works.
Computer games, websites, digital works of literature, apps, virtual
worlds, interactive art, and spatial media (GIS, Kinnect, GPS, Wii) are
interpreted as they are performed and often require some knowledge of
the medium by the user in order for the work to function. This situation
represents a form of reading that has not been practiced widely in
Western academic and literate circles for several centuries. We are not
witnessing a return to what Walter J. Ong famously terms a “secondary
orality” (10-11), but rather we are seeing a form of inscription rapidly
emerge that is spatial, multi-temporal, performed, place-bound, visual,
sonic, and navigated. Two central concepts are important for
understanding how digital works are generally interpreted, and these are
simulation and remix. Representation has become the domain of mediating
objects, both virtual and physical, while reading is as much about
arranging and appropriating as it is about reference, symbolism,
iconography and interpretation. Based on a relatively small selection of
digital works this presentation examines reception practices involving
digital media, which suggest an expanded concept of reading where the
material technology of a work determines meaning as much as its
representative elements do. In this examination I demonstrate how
performance, participation, co-authoring, and remix make the reading of
the digital works. These works are
Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson (1995)
Last Meal Requested by Sachiko Hayashi (2004)
Façade By Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern (2006)
Second Life http://youtu.be/9g-kYvK3P-Q
CONSTRUCT by salevy_oh (2011)
The Celebration by Iris Piers (2011)
Patchwork Girl is a work of electronic literature by American author
Shelley Jackson. It was written in Storyspace and published by Eastgate
Systems in 1995. It is often discussed along with Michael Joyce's
'Afternoon, a story' as an important work of hypertext fiction.
"Shelley Jackson's brilliantly realized hypertext Patchwork Girl is an
electronic fiction that manages to be at once highly original and
intensely parasitic on its print predecessors."
The actions of the avatar, which is the identity of its operator in SL,
conform to the traditions of Varjrayana Buddhism. The combination of the
actions of the avatar and the audio is a two fold signifying structure,
with the operator of the avatar at the center. In a simulative sense
the operator of the avatar is enacting a practice that is firmly
contextualized in religious and social contexts.
Last Meal Requested is an interactive net art work by Japanese/Swedish
artist Sachiko Hayashi. It deals with themes of gender, state power,
violence and the rhetoric of the image. The original work can be
accessed at http://www.e-garde.net/lmr/lmr2.html
Selavy: What happens when you write in a diary? Of course, some people
write down “got up at 7am, drank a coffee, had lunch with Jim, went to
bed early”, but that’s not the type of diary I’m referring to. It is
rather the idea of keeping a record of selected thoughts, feelings,
moods, ideas, etc. The important part is, of course, that you do that
regularly. And that is exactly what I did in CONSTRUCT: I added one room
each day. Every one of the 75 days of the residency has its own room,
often relating to the topic of the residency itself, a time capsule of
ideas, artifacts, or reference to other work. If you read a diary, you
may get an idea about the writer and her life. If you visit CONSTRUCT,
you may get an idea about Selavy Oh and her residency.
The Celebration "combines a circular display of flatscreens, reminiscent
of a giant zoetrope, containing amateur film footage from the
1910's-1940's with different soundscapes that can be manipulated by the
audience" (Piers).
How the audience manipulates the various audio and images, and how they
combine to create an interactive and immersive space, makes The
Celebration an engaging work of interactive digital art.
The visitor enters a darkened space, where the only available light
comes from the 10 screens showing the films of The Celebration. By
moving around the space and judging their own distance, speed of
movement, posture and height in relation to the (largely invisible)
Arduino trackers, a dance begins with the audio and the cracked black
and white images from almost a century ago.
Each of the screens that make up The Celebration has an Arduino tracking
sensor attached, which maps the movements of the body of a visitor, and
implements pre-programmed changes in the presentation of images and
sound.
Unknown faces stare out from the screens, mostly laughing, talking
(unheard) and often looking straight at the camera, and at the audience.
As these faces watch, the visitor dodges and weaves, hops and slides,
while the images and sounds change. At the same time the visitor is
watching the faces, along with their bodies, their families and friends,
competitors at sports events and classmates, neighbors and colleagues.
It is according to this arrangement that a circuit of movement and gaze
is achieved by the programming of The Celebration.
Façade is a prototype of interactive drama, a new genre of character and
story-intensive interactive entertainment. Façade is freely
downloadable at interactivestory.net. In Façade, you, the player, using
your own name and gender, play the character of a longtime friend of
Grace and Trip, an attractive and materially successful couple in their
early thirties. During an evening get-together at their apartment that
quickly turns ugly, you become entangled in the high-conflict
dissolution of Grace and Trip’s marriage. No one is safe as the
accusations fly, sides are taken and irreversible decisions are forced
to be made. By the end of this intense one-act play you will have
changed the course of Grace and Trip’s lives – motivating you to re-play
the drama to find out how your interaction could make things turn out
differently the next time.
In this video Facade is used to promote an abstinence program.
On Wednesday, June 8, 15:00 to 17:00 CET (6:00 to 8:00 am SLT), NVWN will have its monthly project meeting. Items on the agenda include an update of the project’s activities and a presentation by Jim Barrett of HUMlab of Umeå University. From 16:00 to 17:00 (7:00 to 8:00 am SLT), Jim will present an overview of HUMlab’s virtual world activities.
My presentation at Association of Internet Researchers 11th conference 2010
The representation of place and space are powerful narrative tools in digitally mediated stories today. Virtual online worlds are one example of how space and place is realized in stories using avatars and navigation. In a seemingly distant tradition, the narrative systems that are collectively referred to as the Dreamtime Stories of the Australian Aboriginal peoples, with their constructions of space and place, are also highly developed and complex multimedia networks that rely on navigation. In both of these systems, along with place and space, performance and participation are the means to relating to the narrative. The individual contributions to narrative creation that are part of these systems are based on participant agency. The potential empowerment granted with participation in the narratives suggests a resistance to what M. M. Bakhtin terms single voice, of monologic narrative discourse (Bakhtin 1984). In the global perspective, the recognition of narratives from indigenous (often marginal and silenced) cultures can be argued to have democratizing and inclusive effects for the global community. That these societies have witnessed long-term survival also supports their status as sustainable, and by implication, that these practices are passed on through their narrative traditions. By paying attention to such old stories, and in particular how they integrate place and space into their transmission, we can re-purpose vocabularies for what are often described as the ‘new media’ stories of the digital age. A direct relationship to place, through narrative, is proposed as one of the positive results of this attention to old stories in the new media. An awareness of the interconnectedness of elements in ecology, for example, is a further possibility from these narratives, which set both characters and places on equal footing.
From the presentation I did today for the National Association of Librarians of Sweden conference ”Men den var ju min!” – om ny medieförmedling och upphovsrätt (But that was mine! On New Media Connections and Copyright). Nice afternoon spent..
(There is a link from the image in slide 10 to a short video)
This presentation discusses a selection of examples of what I term ‘rhetorical holiness’ created using Second Life (SL), a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) on the internet. Second Life is a three dimensional persistent space made up of thousands of islands (called sims). In SL a person is represented by an avatar, a body which they manipulate in the environment. The avatar can travel around the huge space of SL in real time visiting themed sites, buying and selling virtual commodities and participating in social and cultural events with others. The shared online three dimensional spaces of SL include religiously themed sites where the holy is one of the main defining criteria of interaction. The sites in SL that I have examined are the Buddhist island of “Bodhi Sim: Land of Buddhadharma - a Second Life fansite” and two mosques built in SL; the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and the Cordoba Mosque. Finally the Koinonia Congregational Church of Second Life is a Christian church which operates entirely in SL. For the purposes of this presentation, these sites are examined for the use of symbols from three established religious contexts that have been re-deployed in the virtual environment. The purpose of such an exercise is to identify a system of rhetoric within a larger literacy for such three dimensional virtual environments.
On Wednesday 8th October at 7pm (19:00) I will be giving a two hour presentation on Computer Gaming and Art at Luleå Konsthallen. I will be showing a lot of works and discussing them under three classifications: Art in Games, Games as Art and Art made with Games. The talk will be presented in the peculiar variety of Swedish which I speak, a sort of Ghetto Swedish with rural Australian syntax. It should be interesting. If you are in the neighborhood come on down and talk gaming and art with me...
Tomorrow I will be giving another presentation to a group of librarians about Second Life. This time I will talk a bit about online virtual worlds generally as being applicable for libraries. Today I spent over an hour trying to organise an account for two 16 year work experience students visiting HUMlab in Teen Second Life. It was basically a fiasco and unless one lives in the USA it is not possible to log into Teen Second Life. We used ActiveWorlds instead (felt liek going back in time for me), which looks good (and loads super fast) but is totally empty (600 worlds and 54 accounts active). I tried to log into adult Second Life today 4 times and the computer crashed every time, with 39 000 accounts active.
The vision of the Internet Archive led by Brewster Kahle is one that online virtual worlds such as Second Life (and Google for that matter) ignore at their peril. In two years Second Life could easily become the ActiveWorlds of today as some other new platform is overrun with accounts. But a completely collaborative network project such as the Internet Archive will continue to grow as its users build it. According to this video the archive has managed to scan in 250 000 books with libraries paying for doing it so as to keep their collections truly open. While the catch cry with Second Life is that all the content is "user owned and created" where else are you going to take it as there is nowhere else to run the LSL script outside Second Life? The servers are all run by SL and the contents are theirs. I believe an open system is a distributed system.
