History on Digital: Simulation and Distributed over the Internet

An assertion is made, "All war is a failure" and the 61 countries that were involved in World War One (1914-1918) is reduced to just 4 states and one empire. A series of tweets follows that could not be called a discussion, with a re-tweet and a counter assertion running parallel to each other. Is this public history (i.e. the creation of knowledge from and for historical paradigms in the public sphere)?

I follow history online. From the twitter account Real Time WWII to the spatial experience of Rome Reborn. Between these two examples are the millions of documentaries on YouTube (I can recommend All History Buff). I also use social media to teach cultural studies from a historical perspective. My area of research expertise is narrative studies related to technology and spatial representations. In this post I want to discuss an aspect of public history online that occupies a lot of my thought. I propose that the 'real time' of mediating history with digital media poses potential problems for critical method as we understand it today. This problem emerges from a long tradition of reading as arguably the dominant form of media consumption in relation to history.

The mediation of culture is widespread today (8-9 Kaun and Fast 2014). Part of that mediation is the presentation of history, often in 'live' 'real-time' or participatory modes using digital media. Digital media offer offers specific temporal and spatial perspectives on the presentation of history that result in immersive experiences and a strong sense of identification with the subjects of mediation. It is in this way, of activating space and time in narrative that Social Networking Sites (SNS) "should not only be considered as infrastructures that allow for social interaction, but as emerging actors in their own right" (Kaun and Fast 51).  

Examples of history in 'real time' via digital media such as Real Time WWII, the Virtual Harlem Project and the London Museum's Street Museum app are examples of mediation of history using digital tools that place people in the visual and temporal field of their subjects.



Many times I have opened Twitter and read @RealTimeWWII with the feeling I am reading newspaper headlines for the day.

Another example of this 'live' feel to history is @kokoda1942LIVE, a Twitter account of the New Guinea campaign by the Australian army against the Japanese in World War II. As well I have roamed the streets of Harlem in the 1920s and visited an empty Cotton Club, with jazz playing.

The question I ask is did I learn anything from being in a space that simulates the events or time that is the subject of the history? My answer is, I do not believe that simulation alone is enough for the advancement of historical scholarship. The positioning of a viewer within the representation does not mean there is knowledge produced.I contrast the above image from Virtual Harlem with one taken from Harlem in 1920s.

Virtual Harlem, Street Museum, @Kokoda1942Live and @RealTimeWWII are examples of digital media in the service of history with a strong element of simulation added. The three examples provide a suggestion of sharing something of the time and space depicted. They do not necessarily stimulate questions, provide multiple points of interpretation or the polyphony that is so often found in well researched history, anymore than a photograph or a sonnet does.

There are however, examples where I do believe digital media can be used for effective historical scholarship. Examples include Dr. Heather Richards-Rissetto’s work in Copan in Honduras with gesture-based 3D GIS system to engage the public in cultural heritage (Richards-Rissetto 2012 2013). Another example is Dr Cecilia Lindhé working in Sweden on ‘Rethinking medieval spaces in digital environments’ (Lindhé 2013).

Cecilia Lindhe's keynote paper - Digital Scholarship ‘day of ideas’ - Thursday 2 May 2013 from HSS Webteam on Vimeo.

The Rome Reborn Project is further example that builds models using digital media that are then tested against evidence:

"Rome Reborn is an international initiative whose goal is the creation of 3D digital models illustrating the urban development of ancient Rome from the first settlement in the late Bronze Age (ca. 1000 B.C.) to the depopulation of the city in the early Middle Ages (ca. A.D. 550). With the advice of an international Scientific Advisory Committee, the leaders of the project decided that A.D. 320 was the best moment in time to begin the work of modeling. At that time, Rome had reached the peak of its population, and major Christian churches were just beginning to be built. After this date, few new civic buildings were built. Much of what survives of the ancient city dates to this period, making reconstruction less speculative than it must, perforce, be for earlier phases. But having started with A.D. 320, the Rome Reborn team intends to move both backwards and forwards in time until the entire span of time foreseen by our mission has been covered."

Like the work of Dr. Heather Richards-Rissetto the Rome Reborn project attempts to triangulate known facts against a three-dimensional model and the existing theory, to come to some new conclusions about how Rome developed as an urban space.

Kinect and 3D GIS for Archaeology from Jennifer von Schwerin on Vimeo.

The glaring conclusion here is that the powerful reach and popularity of digital media should be considered according to specific needs when practicing public history online. The feedback and interactive potentials of digital media should be separated from the popularity of digital tools. Each has affordances, but they are not necessarily in the service of each other. There are enormous opportunities and great possibilities to be gained from working in history with digital tools in the public sphere. But a literacy needs to be developed along the way, as well as distinct goals and methods too.

Designing Media with Blixa Bargeld with Erin Zhu

Blixa Bargeld, former guitarist with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, leads an innovative industrial Goth-rock band called Einsturzende Neubauten, based in Berlin. Band members work with whatever readymade scrapheap objects they can find to act as musical instruments, hence the label industrial rock. Blixa's wife, Erin Zhu, an American originally from China, has extensive experience working in Internet start-ups. Soon after their marriage, Erin was able to help the band develop an elaborate Web-based fan subscription experiment that bypasses the traditional music business, allowing them to release the album Alles Wieder Offen in 2007. They have continued to develop this model because without the sponsorship of a record company they rely on fans to donate subscriptions for exclusive editions of the CDs and DVDs plus privileged access to the musicians and the entire creative process.

Blixa Bargeld has been leading an innovative industrial rock band based in Berlin for decades and has accumulated a loyal and enthusiastic community of fans. Working in the traditional relationship to music publishers, he was never able to do more than cover the costs of production and even that level of support was steadily eroding. In the next interview, with Blixa and his wife, Erin Zhu, we learn how a band like his can bypass the traditional music business, developing a self-supporting economic model based on subscriptions from fans, enabled by the Internet. - http://www.designing-media.com/interviews/BlixaBargeldErinZhu#sthash.0CEfbG1t.dpuf

Event Management in Real-Time Collaborations Across Mixed and Transmedia Realities

Presentation for AHRC Social Media Knowledge Exchange (SMKE) at University of Cambridge on "Managing Real-Time Event Collaborations Across Mixed and Transmedial Realities". This presentation is for the first of two workshops.

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.

Workshop 1 – Event Management (20 February 2013, Wednesday, 9am – 12 noon, CRASSH)

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

Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin

Opening of a lecture I gave at Amsterdam University:

'Frankenstein’s Monster Comes Home: Digital Remix and the Ends of Origin'

Prezzi and the links to the videos shown during the presentation 

“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)

Pirate Philosophy- steal this!

Pirate Philosophy explores how the development of various forms of so-called internet piracy are affecting ideas of authorship, intellectual property, copyright law, fair use, patent, trademark, content creation and cultural production that were established pre-internet.

Professor Gary Hall looks at a number of ways in which the Arts and Humanities can engage their ideas outside of the traditional field of academic publishing, and how open access has the potential to liberate academia from its many constraints.

Please liberate/pirate this lecture from us, and feel free to remix it and do whatever you want with it.

Visit http://www.garyhall.info/ to find out more about Gary's work or visit http://coventryuniversity.podbean.com/ to find more great Coventry University lectures and talks

New Works from Jason Nelson

Three new poems from Jason Nelson. Each inspired by the landscapes and locations of Australia. Enjoy.

Sydney’s Sibera
An interactive and infinitely zooming digital poem


Birds Still Warm from Flying
An interactive/re-creatable poetry cube


Wittenoom and the Cancerous Breeze
Digital poem created from ten sections

Banned Again From Chatroullette?

I have been using the web based peer to peer video chat system Chatroulette for a couple of months now. Playing music, making performances and conducting actions regarding media critique and the gaze. I have been banned several times for doing this. I do not do anything obscene. In fact it is all just sound and language based.

Tonight I received this message:

"Basically, three people in last 5 minutes didn't like what you have broadcasted and that's why you've lost this game. You've been blocked for 40 minutes."

After repeatedly sending out the Situationist International slogan:

"There is nothing they won't do to raise the standard of boredom"

Here is a shot of me in action and the last reaction I met with before being thrown off the site.



It may be Chatroulette trying to ease the user load on their servers, currently approaching 7 million users (which will probably be overtaken in a day or two).

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

This Is What Democracy Looks Like (1:08:28)
This film, shot by 100 amateur camera operators, tells the story of the enormous street protests in Seattle, Washington in November 1999, against the World Trade Organization summit being held there. Vowing to oppose, among other faults, the WTO's power to arbitrally overrule nations' environmental, social and labour policies in favour of unbridled corporate greed, protestors from all around came out in force to make their views known and stop the summit. Against them is a brutal police force and a hostile media as well as the stain of a minority of destructively overzealous comrades. Against all odds, the protesters bravely faced fierce opposition to take back the rightful democratic power that the political and corporate elite of the world is determined to deny the little people. Please support the makers of this documentary. [a3] this is what democracy looks like [69m VTV xvid] (seattle 1999 DEMOCRACIA EN LAS CALLES spanish subs) indymedia [3B60C966].avi Environmental Activism, Wealth, Poverty, Peace Activist, Environmental Protest, Riot, Seattle Washington, Civil Disobedience, Labor Union, Media Coverage, Media Manipulation, Police Brutality, Political, Protest March, Protest Song, Arrest, Beating, Bill Of Rights, Corporate, Economics, Environmentalist, Industry, Mayor, Natural Resources, Policeman, Politics, Trade, World Trade Organization, Independent Film This film, shot by 100 amateur camera operators, tells the story of the enormous street protests in Seattle, Washington in November 1999, against the World Trade Organization summit being held there. Vowing to oppose, among other faults, the WTO's power to arbitrally overrule nations' environmental, social and labour policies in favour of unbridled corporate greed, protestors from all around came out in force to make their views known and stop the summit. Against them is a brutal police force and a hostile media as well as the stain of a minority of destructively overzealous comrades. Against all odds, the protesters bravely faced fierce opposition to take back the rightful democratic power that the political and corporate elite of the world is determined to deny the little people. Please support the makers of this documentary. [a3] this is what democracy looks like [69m VTV xvid] (seattle 1999 DEMOCRACIA EN LAS CALLES spanish subs) indymedia [3B60C966].avi Environmental Activism, Wealth, Poverty,

Iran.Media.Image.Change

Like many others I have been following the text emerging from what has been tagged #IranElection on Twitter. I stare fascinated at the screen as horror and hope are mixed in dizzy ratios with short sharp statements and links to media.

I did the same thing back in January when the last Gaza War raged. It is different this time. The Iran twitter cascade has recourse to a sophistication that the desperate Palestinians and ideological Israelis seemed to miss. Iranians are online and have been for a long time. The use of blogs in the nation is famous. Watching the images from the street demonstrations and battles from Tehran I see young people dressed in designer jeans and tops, all carrying mobile media devices. One video I watched this morning has a group of young people gathered in a chaotic bunch around a supine body of a young man. He appears to be dead, but as some try to open an airway and clumsily maneuver his still head, others thrust mobile cameras into his still and bloody face. I began to feel something I remember from 1989.

When the students gathered in Tienanmen Square in Beijing China in June 1989 (strangely exact 20 years ago) I understand they had little collective idea of what their goal was beyond 'democracy'.

The protests lacked a unified cause or leadership; participants included disillusioned Communist Party members and Trotskyists as well as free market reformers, who were generally against the government's authoritarianism and voiced calls for economic change and democratic reform within the structure of the government. Wikipedia

Nobody is sure how many died in Tienanmen square. We know the 100 000 protesters gathered there faced tanks. That local regiments refused to attack them and they were replaced by soldiers from outlying regions who would do the job. I remember seeing then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke weep as he read out a report of what had happened, tanks rolling over the bodies of students in the square.

While the catalyst for the present wave of protest in Iran is the alleged (but looking at the track record, likely) rigging of an election, the thousands on the street in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and so on seem to be mostly young and mostly just fed up with living in a theocratic dictatorship. So far I have seen 'freedom' used in numerous contexts related to #IranElection. These include American folk music of the 1960's folk variety, the words of Che Guevara (the short, pithy phrases found on T-shirts around the world), and even reclaim the streets style tactics including artificial traffic jams that are blocks long. The diverse collection of concerns pointing towards 'freedom' through spontaneous protests that are becoming increasingly blood soaked bind it all together into a mediated frenzy.

It will take a while to determine what is happening in Iran beyond the images that are being re/produced and recycled around the theme/meme of #IranElection. Something that impressed me back in 1989 following Tienanmen was how the students had been basically let down and left to their fate by what little leadership they had (which also suffered greatly as a result of their own actions and limited abilities to bring about change). While Mousavi may be the figurehead for this movement, I am not sure he represents it. As well, his own abilities to do anything are severely restricted by the present political structure of Iran (hence the impetus for change). In the meantime the images of what this movement could be and what it is circulate around the online world. Distinguishing between the two, even for those involved, seems to be a difficult thing. Not being able to distinguish between them can be a very dangerous thing for those running through the streets and campuses of Iran just now.

Media professor/expert Paul Levinson on new media influence

"Conventional broadcast television is on its way down."

Philosophical interview about the state and future of the media with Fordham University's Chair of Communication and Media Studies, Paul Levinson. Levinson is the author of numerous fictional and nonfiction books including "Digital McLuhan" and "The Soft Edge" and has appeared in countless media venues from PBS to Fox to offer his insight on media issues. Levinson discusses the current exponential rise of new media and what this means for us all in terms of expression, information and challenge. He also discusses his thoughts on the iconic Marshall McLuhan and what he would think of the extraordinary digital age we live and now create in.

Mumbai and New Media

Having spent several weeks in Mumbai during my first trip to India (1990) I, like most people, are sort of stunned by what is happening in the city. Like a nightmare come to life.
It seems that network social media and citizen journalism is covering the events in a round the clock constant feed to the web. Videos on Youtube on the Mumbai attacks seem to be being updated every few minutes. Google Maps is running a dynamic map of the attack sites. Live blogging from central Mumbai is happening here. Twitter is also being used to get out information: See Mumbai, Bombay and #Mumbai. Flickr is also running up to the minute images from the attacks.
I hope it all stops very soon.

Live Webcast: Trends and Technologies in Where 2.0

For Europeans: Tuesday 23 September 2008 19:00
Europe Daylight Time (GMT +02:00, Paris)

Tuesday 23 September 2008 13:00
Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -04:00, New York)

Duration: 1 hour

Description: In this live webcast, geospatial web expert Andrew Turner will discuss the current evolution of Where 2.0 and how it is affecting the entire landscape of Web 2.0 and next generation applications. Open standards such as GeoRSS, KML, and Microformats provide a huge wealth of information for mashups and applications, and libraries such as Mapstraction can be used for cartographic visualization. To illustrate the power of these tools, Andrew will talk about some interesting applications and hacks that have pushed the boundaries of the GeoWeb.

We'll also take a look at the future of location-enabled applications and services that developers can use today to provide users with better contextualized and localized information. Mobile sensors, augmented and immersive reality, and geo-games are just a few of the next generation Where 2.0 domain.

Andrew will also give a short demo of the just-launched GeoCommons Maker.

REGISTER

Moral Panic and (New) Media

The press ombudsman for Sweden, Yrsa Stenius, sees no alternative than to legislate against the spread of restricted material via internet peer to peer sites.
It was reported today on the Swedish National Radio station P1 Medierna that both Stenius and the Swedish Justice Minister Beatrice Ask believe it is necessary to introduce legislation into the Swedish parliament concerned with "begränsande etiska filter på internet" (restricting ethical filters on the internet).
This is following the torrent distribution of autopsy images of two small children that were brutally murdered in Arbåga, Sweden earlier this year. The torrent is hosted by The Pirate Bay, which currently hosts around 1.3 million torrents.
The distribution of the autopsy images by the Pirate Bay was described by both the Press Ombudsman and the Justice Minister as 'publishing'. The nationally owned commercial television station TV4 which broke the story also termed it 'publishing'. In each instance of the use of the word 'publishing' it is attributed to the Pirate Bay.
Behind the moral questions surrounding the incident there is a broader network of concerns related to digital media and how un/informed government officials are in regards to how it functions.
Someone obtained the pictures from the high profile Arbåga murder of the young victims, they created a torrent and allowed them to be downloaded from their computer. In many ways such an action is similar to what Wikileaks and The Smoking Gun sites do. Once information is in circulation, especially if it is in digital form, there is always the possibility it may move out into the public sphere.
With 1.3 million torrents it is very unlikely that the handful of people who are the administrators of The Pirate Bay know what they are distributing. While search functions can target obnoxious material, it is only a matter of labeling it as something else and unless it is viewed no one knows what the torrent delivers other than the person who is seeding it. In a sense there is no single group or individual/s running The Pirate Bay. Rather it is a network that repairs itself, maneuvers around blockages and even feeds itself (when one torrent dies another takes its place until the material it distributes is no longer in demand). Publishing is more linear between a source and a receiver. Who is legally responsible for the material that is indexed by the Pirate Bay? Well that's the problem. Nobody knows yet.
The reactions around the Arbåga torrent is fascinating. Often via non-digital media those that are believed to be responsible, the administrators of the Pirate Bay, are asked to explain themselves. In an opinion piece for the National Broadcaster Jonas Andersson claims that the Pirate Bay site is a "commercial actor" and an "influence on public opinion regarding copyright and freedom of information". The size of the users body of the Pirate Bay is so vast that it is "monolithic in P2P file sharing".
The emphasis of Andersson's language is consistently to return the debate to the terminology and understanding of old one-to-many commercial media. This is interesting when one considers his research area described on the Goldsmith College website:

My aim is to thus expand and problematise the alleged ideals and norms which are implicit in much of the current dichotomised discourse saturating the phenomenon [P2P file sharing], through critically relating the users’ reasoning to the material and technocultural context.

Anderson is right in regards to his focus on the materiality of the medium. His stereotypical descriptions found elsewhere in his work of 'hackers' is less sound. Finally the concept of "dichotomised discourse" gives the game away as far as his approach is concerned. The discouse is not dichotomised, it is dual because it is set up that way in the media which is simultaneously reporting it and constructed by it. There is no normative center other than that proposed by the center/s of power (something Andersson seems to refer to very infrequently- never in this paper). How can one outline a critical relationship between technology and culture based on discourse without mentioning power?
But back to the issue at hand. Both Justice Minister Ask and Ombudsman Stenius have spoken earlier on an ethical guide to blogging, that would function as a regulatory system. Ask has also said the Internet is a "fantastic invention" (OMG) but it can lead to crime, "degeneration" (Sw: avarter) and we therefore need a Net Police. Now with the posting of the Arbåga torrent it seems there will be more calls for a moral internet.
However, before the Swedish government sets up a net filtering system it should reflect on the experiences of Australia. Under the morally indignant Howard government a national scheme to protect children from the dangers of the Internet was set up in 2007, but in 2008:

The Australian government has officially declared their internet filtering program, which they started about a year ago as an attempt to protect kids from pornography, a complete failure. Only 144,000 copies of the software were downloaded or ordered on CD-ROM with only about 29,000 actually being used. On top of that, kids were able to hack them anyway.

This wouldn’t be so bad if the Australian government hadn’t spent 85 million dollars on this program (it is a central part of a larger initiative that cost, all in all, 189 million dollars); quite a nice amount to throw away for something that anyone who has a clue would have declared a failure right from the beginning.

Their failure can be Sweden's beginning. How very Web 3.0.

Distracted: Questions Around Attention in Digitally Mediated Cultures

Interesting discussion from the Australian ABC radio program Late Night Live on the interupt culture and problems with critical thinking and attention span in the digital media age. It touches in places upon the concept of literacy and ends in a semi-positive light, however the consensus seems to be we are heading for a "Coming Dark Age". The voices belong to Phillip Adams (Interviewer) and Maggie Jackson (Interviewee)

In America a study has found that workers not only switch tasks every three minutes during their work day, but nearly half the time they interrupt themselves. Moreover, once someone's been interrupted it can take up to 25 minutes to return to the main task.

Maggie Jackson has been researching this syndrome and other ways we get distracted and has written a book about it. The premise of her book is that the way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention. In other words it's attention that is the greatest casualty of our high-tech age.

Maybe the 'syndrome' is a boring job? Comes via the excellent Peoples Geography (who host the player...thanks guys)

The Pool and The Mirror

The Pool

Bacchus Marsh police contacted the FBI so MySpace could be ordered to close the false account.

Detective Sergeant Coxall said the investigation was ongoing and parents should discuss with their children what they were uploading about themselves to sites like MySpace and Facebook.

"One act done on the internet creates a record that is not only traceable but the likelihood is that the images are never actually erased."
FBI called in over teen sex clip

The Mirror

A 44-year-old father and three children have been found dead in a suspected murder-suicide in a car on an "old hippy commune'' in a remote bush property 50 kilometres west of Eden after police were called to the scene by a neighbour.
'Valley of Failure' murder-suicide: father and three children found dead

These two recent news items are taken from the Sydney Morning Herald website. The murder suicide story, a horror of isolation, violence, abuse and power ran for few days as the police put together the pieces to the puzzle of how the event came to take place. The linked story above is the final entry for the story so far, which summarizes the previous two or three accounts. No doubt lives have been destroyed in the wake of such an event, not to mention the loss of three children. The MySpace story is from today. Most obviously the MySpace story is not of even similar emotional dimensions to the horrible murder-suicide story.

What struck me about these two news stories is the connotations in relation to media. As the investigating police officer points out:

"One act done on the internet creates a record that is not only traceable but the likelihood is that the images are never actually erased."

The potentially 'eternal' nature of the MySpace images has distinct resonances with the horror of the murder-suicide story. How could anyone touched by the events recounted in the news item forget such a thing? But the news sites on the net (and I assume in the printed form) have 'forgotten' the terrible events recounted in the story. I read this as a variation in media form, one that I metaphorically term the 'Pool' and the 'Mirror'.

The Internet and other digital media formats are like a pool. Liquid that reflects and can immerse and hold representations, that ripples when touched, issuing out impressions over its surface. The larger the impact a story has upon its surface the larger the ripples. The more often the imprint is made on the surface of the pool, the more often the event comes again 'to life'.
On the other hand the recording device of the paper newspaper, and other non-digital media, are like a mirror. Fixed in form and function, able to exhibit highly defined representations of events but only for a short amount of time. The newspaper follows a story while it is current, 'alive' and then when it ceases to be so, it is not longer part of the surface of the mirror.

Gonzo Works to be Streamed Simultaneously with Airing

In my post from yesterday on the piracy situation in Sweden, nobody in the radio broadcast spoke about the velocity of the media allowing for so much piracy to take place. A cinema release in the USA can be on hardrives in Helsinki within a few hours. So this innovative approach from the Japanese animation studio GDH is very interesting:

The Japanese media company GDH has announced that the YouTube, Crunchyroll, and BOST online video services will be streaming new titles from GDH's Gonzo animation studio — worldwide and on the same day as their Japanese broadcast. The video streams, which will be in Japanese with English subtitles, will start with The Tower of Druaga: the Aegis of Uruk and Blassreiter anime series. Druaga will premiere on April 4, and Blassreiter will premiere on April 5.

All three video services offer their content via streaming, although GDH also mentioned "fee-based download of high-resolution movie files" in its press release. America's Viz Media offered NTV's Death Note episodes for download within half a year of their Japanese broadcast, but GDH's new initiative is the first global, simultaneous streaming of multiple series from a major anime studio.

GDH added that its "decision to provide its content globally in parallel with Japanese broadcast is an effort to offer equal accessibility and new viewing opportunities to fans around the world, while at the same time showcasing a legal online alternative to illegal file-sharing and downloading." GDH also emphasized that these services are for foreign viewers only; the company already has deals in place to stream its content through services within Japan.

From Anime News Network via Warren Ellis

New Media Writing and Digital Art

The New River journal of digital writing and art Fall 2007
All the News That’s Fit to Print by Jody Zellen :: The Wave by Heather Raikes :: Digital Paintings by Karin Kuhlmann :: A Sky of Cinders by Tim Lockridge :: Marginalia in the Library of Babel by Mark Marino :: Semantic Disturbances by Agam Andreas :: (NON)sense for to from Eva Hesse by Carrie Meadows.

New Media Writing and Digital Art

In the new tradition of including the realm of digital art in the journal, there are several pieces in this issue that can be considered solely digital art, and those that bridge the line between art and hypertext. Karin Kuhlmann’s three-dimensional algorhythmic works create a similar satisfaction to viewing a traditional canvas, but are amazing in their digital method.

Digital writing rarely appears in such a way that demands the reader remain within a sequential order of screens. Hypertext relies on surprising associations and non-linear linking to keep the reader’s interest. There are several pieces in this issue that bridge the distinctions of new media writing and digital art. For instance, Jody Zellen’s “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” uses text from The New York Times to create a beautiful and effective piece of interactive art. Zellen’s work incorporates a type of found poetry consisting of juxtaposed headlines which the reader can keep clicking to create new lines. This is work that is both visually satisfying and pertinent. The reader is able to create her or his own meanings with each new page. In a similar way, Heather Raikes’ “The Wave,” uses choreography and visually stimulating links along with original text to create the world of the piece.

The work of A. Andreas also functions as digital art. Andreas’ pieces do not move from node to node, as the aforementioned works, but exist as artistic compositions that use movement and color to create the tone of each work. Words appear unexpectedly, in a less linear fashion, and contribute to the associations the viewers make for themselves.
Lauren Goldstein, Managing Editor

The Third Screen: The Wave has Hit the Beach

In yet another indication that small screen media is developing, Isabella Rossellini is making a series of short (1 minute) films called Green Porno. Green Porno is a series of very short films conceived, written, co-directed by and featuring Isabella Rossellini about the sex life of bugs, insects and various creatures. The films are a comical but insightful study of the curious ways certain bugs “make love”. “Green” echoes the ecological movement of today and our interest in nature, and “Porno” alludes to the racy ways bugs, insects and other creatures have sex, if human, these acts would not be allowed to be screened or air on television, considered instead as most filthy and obscene.
Each film is executed in a very simple childlike manner. They are a playful mixture of real world and cartoon. Each episode begins with Isabella speaking to the camera “ If I were a…(firefly, spider, dragonfly etc.). She then transforms into the male of the species explaining in a simple yet direct dialogue the actual act of species-specific fornication. The costumes, colorful sets and backdrops as well as the female insects contribute to the playfulness of the films. The contrast of this “naïf” expression and filthy sex practices adds to the comicality of Green Porno.
Green Porno is an experiment specifically conceived with the third screen, namely cellular screens, computers and ipods.

"Fire and the Story"

The documentary "Fire and the Story" developed by Cape York Elders and Clan Groups regarding traditional fire knowledge and the problems with it's absence in the environment and urban areas in Australia today. The film is a product of the grass roots Traditional Knowledge Revival Pathways (TKRP) project and is a bid to educate the broader public, nationally and internationally, in the benefits of reapplying Indigenous burning techniques. The range of chapters and stories that make up the film are based on real experience with Elders on country assessing the issue first hand.
Preview (Film)
Read More (PDF)

My News and the Myth of Media Transparency

The Swedish public service television has begun a new format for news broadcast. In an effort to bolster lagging ratings the SVT 9pm broadcast has done away with ties on men and now show long shots (5-10 seconds) of camera men scurrying around as presenters move about the scene, dominated by a huge plasma screen, chroma key video screen and a warm orange and red backdrop set.


Notice necktie missing. Here added by the SVT editorial to draw attention to the fact that it is missing.

So far nothing so extraordinary about a news broadcast reskinning. What is interesting about the 'new' SVT news is the ’Open Editorial’ broadcast that is now available on the website. Here, through a series of short videos 'we' are shown something of the processes behind the 30 minutes of news sent nightly by SVT at 9pm. The composition of these videos is interesting:

"But the question is, what will the editorial team achieve. Will Anna Hedenmo record a false direct (live on tape) with a Danish Police officer or will he [sic] go direct live with a link. It depends upon that he [sic] must translate."

To me these rhetorical questions suggest reality TV, which in a sense it is. What I find more interesting is the concept of transparency that is implied by ‘Open Editorial’. I agree with Jay Bolter, that media transparency is not only a myth; it has the potential to be dangerous:

The problem was that the operators [of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979] did not question their interface. They treated the valve indicator as if it were a transparent window on the level of water inside the reactor. The operators should have been prepared for that possibility; they should have looked at the indicator rather than through it. Under the pressure of an emergency, however, they made the assumption of transparency. (Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, 54), ( taken from The Myth of Transparency)

While we are looking through the ‘Open Editorial’ at the scene of the news making, we are perhaps being encouraged to believe that it is not being 'made' but rather is happening. We join our presenters at the scene:


Meanwhile at the desk side, a discussion of possibilities unfolds

In this image one should notice that we are at eye level with each of the participants and sharing the space with them from that perspective. All of the videos are constructed in a similar fashion. If the participants are sitting down then the camera is shooting from the eye height of someone sitting down (usually from the chair next to them).
In the next shot we gaze upon a reporter hard at work and the computer he is using is clearly branded. The national television network SVT is non-commercial, and has a policy against branding. But when we go behind the scenes we become aware of a level of branding that is probably inevitable in such a form:


The news is brought to you by Dell Computers

Finally, I would like you to compare SVT 'Open Editorial' with another form of 'open' news broadcasting. 'OhmyNews' is a citizens news network based in South Korea but that reaches all over the world:

"OhmyNews is a South Korean online newspaper with the motto "Every Citizen is a Reporter". It was founded by Oh Yeon Ho on February 22, 2000.

It is the first of its kind in the world to accept, edit and publish articles from its readers, in an open source style of news reporting. About 20% of the site's content is written by the 55-person staff while the majority of articles are written by other freelance contributors who are mostly ordinary citizens.

OhmyNews was influential in determining the outcome of the South Korean presidential elections in December 2002 with the election of Roh Moo Hyun. After being elected, Roh granted his first interview to OhmyNews.

OhmyNews International is an English language online newspaper that features "citizen reporter" articles written by contributors from all over the globe. Its content is almost 100% citizen reporter.

On February 22, 2006, OhmyNews and Japanese firm Softbank signed an investment contract valued at US$11 million. In 2006 OhmyNews started to build a Japan-based citizen-participatory journalism site called OhmyNews Japan, launched on August 28 with a famous Japanese journalist and 22 other employees working under ten reporters. These journalists' articles were the object of much criticism, on Nov. 17, 2006, the newspaper ended the citizen-participation aspect of the paper. The South Korean newspaper admitted that OhmyNews Japan had failed.[1]

The 2nd Citizen Reporters' Forum was held by OhmyNews in Seoul, Korea from July 12 to 15, 2006.

The 3rd International Citizen Reporters Forum was held by OhmyNews in Seoul from June 27 to 29 in 2007." Wikipedia

While the differences between 'Open Editorial' and 'OhmyNews' are clear and not surprising, it seems that the ambition of the former is to be more like the latter.