Artist brings war to peaceful corner of the internet

I found this fantastic work, ‘Shadows From Another Place’ by Paula Levine on Rhizome.org. Grounded in current global politics and geography, it uses the ephemeral space of the internet to propose a new approach to cartography through the amalgamation of the local and the foreign.

Levine has overlaid a map of San Francisco onto one of Baghdad, showing civilian and military sites related to the first U.S. attack on Baghdad in 2003 superimposed onto San Francisco geography. Literally bringing the war home, Levine used GPS technology to digitally relocate the Baghdad bomb sites within San Francisco. Each bomb site on the hybrid map is represented by a photograph of the corresponding location in San Francisco, and a soundtrack on the website plays a looped recording of the explosions in the March 2003 attack. Sounds of shattering glass make the images of the sunny, peaceful streets of San Francisco seem surreal.

I can imagine that this work would have a severely disquieting effect on a resident of San Francisco; however for an Aucklander, there is simply the by-now-familiar feeling that it’s all foreign from here anyway. Levine’s work proposes the integration of a local sensibility into humanity’s global dealings, but it also creates an incoherent non-place where time and geography cease to make sense. The serenity of the photographs of San Francisco juxtaposed with the violence of the events in Baghdad, through the distancing of the internet seem to suggest that the viewer is somehow looking back in time, at representations of a single locality before and after a traumatically violent event.

Why artists are liars, and Zimbabwe may be a mass hallucination ...

Recently a friend was telling me about a particularly successful Wikipedia hoax he had been reading about, and this coupled with class discussions regarding fun with Myspace identity trickery got me thinking about online misinformation generally.

The Wikipedia post in question provided information about a certain Henryk Batuta, a Polish communist who participated in the Russian Civil War and was commemorated with a street name in Warsaw. The entry lasted 15 months before the hoax was exposed, and as Eric Arthur Blair points out in his blog:

“In his short but meritorious 15 month career, Batuta was cross referenced by editors of 17 other articles.
Now this hero of the people is now being slandered by the so called “Army of Batuta,” a group of Poles (wouldn’t you know it) who claim to have invented him to promote the reactionary notion that mere repetition of something does not guarantee the reality of it. They want you to believe, comrades, that Batuta never existed, and that the people cannot make their own world.”

Despite the best efforts of the army of Batuta, it appears that people can, and are, making their own world. Tom Parfitt from the Guardian reported on the Batuta hoax, and also claimed that Batuta was reported to have been a friend of Ernest Hemingway’s. I can’t find any reference to substantiate Parfitt’s claim in the original Wikipedia entry (perhaps he made it up?) but nevertheless, a Google search for ‘Henryk Batuta’ returns both Parfitt’s and Blair’s pages within the first ten results, supporting the Hemingway association.

The mediatised nature of our society creates a situation where the population is extremely vulnerable to misinformation. Most people gain their knowledge through the consumption of reprocessed information, reported from the source through a chain of interpreters. It is the ultimate breeding ground for conspiracy theorists: we often have very little way of knowing whether ‘the news’ is fiction or fact. How does your average New Zealander know, for example, that Zimbabwe really exists? Most of us haven’t been there; we simply have to trust that our information providers have no reason to go to the trouble of lying.

I found a hilarious chronicle of April Fool’s style dupes online at the Museum of Hoaxes, some, like the Flemish Secession Hoax, perpetuated by news institutions you would have expected to put far more stock in maintaining the integrity of their reputation.

The relative anonymity afforded to users of the internet when compared with other media, and its massive potential audience, allows unprecedented abuse of people’s faith in the accuracy of media reportage. Another prank immortalised in the Museum of Hoaxes was one perpetuated by compulsive attention seeker Dan Baca of California, who became a minor celebrity after his photo was posted online with the tag ‘gorgeous guy’ by someone who had seen him at a bus stop and wanted to meet him:
“This initial posting initiated a flood of follow-up messages. The Gorgeous Guy at the bus stop became the talk of San Francisco’s online community. People theorized about who he was, whether he was single, straight, gay, etc. Then people began going to the bus stop to see him in person.”
After the national media had picked up on this ‘phenomenon’, reporter David Cassel discovered that Baca himself had posted most of the online commentary under various pseudonyms.

In her essay ‘Photographic Evangels’ Susan Sontag discusses the problems faced by photographers in the first half of the twentieth century in attempting to have their work treated with the same seriousness as the older ‘fine art’ disciplines. Sontag refers to the “distrust of mere likeness which has inspired painting for more than a century” (120) and argues that, like modernist painting, art photography derives its importance as an artistic medium from its refusal to be satisfied with mere mimesis. Although photography by its nature has a more direct relationship to perceived reality than painting, Sontag presents Henry Peach Robinson’s claim that “photography is an art because it can lie” (127-8).

Like the Batuta hoax which sought to draw attention to a problematic social truth (the glorification of Soviet officials of questionable moral standing in contemporary Poland) through the medium of fiction, artists often creatively reinterpret facts in order to communicate other sorts of truth. The institutions of knowledge set up to discriminate between ‘creative’ truth and empirical truth (museums, art galleries, universities etc) are having a hard time adapting to the more fluid play between fact and fiction on the internet. Even Wikipedia, that bastion of the new era of democracy in knowledge, is perhaps struggling to reconcile its utopian aims with the requirements of the online community.
“As more and more Wikipedia articles are brought under "semi"-protection, Wikipedia is abandoning its early utopianism. It's becoming less the encyclopedia that everyone edits, and more the encyclopedia that a narrow team of volunteers protects from wiseguys ... Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.”

( http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm )

Sontag, Susan, 'Photographic Evangels', in On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 115-152.

Photograph: The perpetrators of the Batuta hoax uploaded this doctored photograph to Wikipedia of the street name "ulica Henryka Batuty" (Henryk Batuta Street) to add credibility to their claims.

Society for the Prevention of Defamation of Wolves and Stepmothers

The stories that a society tells itself, the fables and myths sung in lullabys and written into Hollywood films, can be seen as an index to that society’s ideas about morality. Little Red Riding Hood is a cautionary tale, designed to reveal to children the dangers of not heeding a parent’s instructions and fraternising with strangers. It also paints a pretty negative picture of wolves and equates the death of a wolf with the survival of a human family unit. Snow White is one of many European fairy tales which equates beauty with innocence, and creates a dichotomy between two female archetypes: the pure young innocent and the corrupted older charlatan. Of course, male figures in fairy tales are, like the prince in Cinderella, generally expected to be heroic and rich.

A web artwork created by Jolaine Blais, Jon Ippolito and Keith Frank in 1999 called Fair e-tales interrogates the simplicity of these founding myths. Presenting re-worked versions of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Rapunzel, Fair e-tales is a tongue-in-cheek advocation of equal opportunities for all characters. It uses the web format to enable multiple versions of each story to exist within the same frame and without hierarchy. Viewers can choose to read Cinderella from the perspective of the (gay) prince as he forms a strategic alliance with the (lesbian) step-sisters to prevent his unwanted marriage from taking place, or Rapunzel from the perspective of the witch (who was actually a concerned midwife trying to save the infant Rapunzel from her murderous parents). Viewers may also be surprised to discover that Little Red Riding Hood was not so innocent after all, and her mother was right to worry.

This work shows that morality is contingent on perspective and circumstance, and cleverly uses its digital medium to undermine the linearity and fixity of traditional texts. History may be written by the victors, but hyperfables are more democratically inclusive.

Illustration of Red Riding Hood is by Gustave Dore

Is it cold in space, Bowie?

Reading Pia’s latest blog (Ever wondered what Jupiter sounds like?) I was pretty excited about the idea of the world-wide web facilitating off-world experiences. I was also reminded of something I came across a couple of years ago: my father is personally and professionally interested in astronomy and he told me about a piece of software called Seti@home (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/) that he had downloaded on his computer. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and this particular project enables researchers to harness the computing power of internet-connected personal computers around the world to process the huge amounts of data constantly being recorded from space.

Developed by the University of California Berkeley, Seti@home uses radio telescopes to listen for signals from space that would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology. Anyone with an internet connection can download software which enables their computer to download and process data as it is recorded by these telescopes, and then email the results back to the SETI scientists. Because this process only happens when the computer is in screensaver mode, Seti@home effectively exploits what would otherwise be wasted computing potential without impacting on individual users.

It seems like a wonderfully utopian scenario, not only due to the brilliantly economical use of existing resources, but also the very notion of building a community through the shared act of scanning the extraterrestrial ‘horizon’ for potential friends (or foes!). In line with a common thread developing in my blog postings regarding collaborative online authorship, I was interested to see that active community participation between Seti@home volunteers is encouraged by the organising team. Staff and volunteers post personal information about themselves and chat on a number of different message boards. The enthusiastic voluntary engagement in this project by surprising numbers of people has led to the extension of the concept to other research projects, for example: “AfricaMap is a joint venture of the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, and the University of Geneva designed to review satellite images of the African continent. Volunteers who join AfricaMap will be scanning high-resolution images of remote regions in Africa where maps either do not exist or are sadly out of date. Their job will be to mark the precise locations of roads, rivers, villages, etc., thereby assisting efforts to aid impoverished regions and documenting the effects of global warming on the continent's landscape.” David Anderson, the director of Seti@home, refers to this organised mass collaboration as ‘citizen cyberspace’.

As globalisation undermines the centrality of local communities in the lives of many millions of people worldwide, the internet, one of the tools of globalisation, also provides the opportunity to reformulate new sorts of community. A common fascination with outer space has united Seti@home volunteers from around the globe, expanding the boundaries of the ‘local’ to global proportions and consolidating a community with the shared goal of searching for an extraterrestrial other.

A great new product for time-poor Idle Dreamers

In last week’s blog I mentioned Douglas Bagnall’s Video Game Machine which was shown at Te Tuhi earlier in the year. Due to the uncontrolled sprawling ways of the Internet, where for every one thing you look for at least three things are found, I came across another great work by Bagnall which was exhibited at Enjoy in 2006.

The Cloud Shape Classifier is a machine that Bagnall created, charitably, for people who “lack the spare time in which to look upwards”. Fully excercising his wonderfully wry sense of humour, Bagnall’s Classifier is designed to help time-poor people efficiently enrich their lives through assisted cloud-watching. The machine records cloud activity during the day and allows users to not only review what it has recorded, but to ‘train’ it to focus on their personally preferred cloud type.

Users adopt a login and password, and by identifying their preferred clouds from a given selection, input data which the software then uses to gauge which clouds they will be most interested in viewing: thus considerably streamlining otherwise time-consuming cloud-watching activity. It is possible for people with a more casual attitude to cloud-watching to use an open-access Classifier, but as Bagnall sagely notes:

“If you don't give your classifier a password, it becomes a public or shared classifier, and other people can help train it. The advantage of this is that your classifier can learn well with little effort on your part. On the other hand, other people might train it to like ugly clouds.”

The idea of training a piece of software to share your aesthetic sense sounds as absurd as the notion that some clouds are beautiful, whereas others are ill-favoured (or even downright tacky), but it does have an interesting resonance with ideas that Sherry Turkle has discussed about artificial intelligence. Bagnall presents his robot-assistant Classifiers in a way that clearly personifies them:

“Classifiers start off in a confused state, and need to be taught to recognise good clouds … At first its opinions will fluctuate, and will often be terrible. But if you persist, it should be able to catch the drift of your taste.”

Like a wayward child or a naughty puppy, your Classifier must be taught right from wrong through discipline and diligence. Turkle traces the evolution of popular ideas about personal computing and artificial intelligence in her 1995 book Life on the Screen. The attitudes of the early 1980s, where “people were often made nervous by the idea of thinking about computers in human terms. Behind their anxiety was distress at the idea that their own minds might be similar to a computer’s ‘mind’ ” (page 24), had shifted within two decades to the normalisation of digital/organic interaction, where “machines were touted not as logical but as biological, not as programmed but as able to learn from experience” (page 24), and the comfortable characterisation of an artificial creation as something capable of thinking and understanding while remaining a tame, or even cute, assistant.
Bagnall’s Cloud Shape Classifier, like his Video Game Machine, also investigates the idea of artistic collaboration through technology. Bagnall creates software to act as his ‘stand-in’ as co-collaborator with his audience. As the user interacts with and instructs the Classifier, they are in effect enacting a series of pre-programmed instructions which Bagnall orchestrates through the movements of his mechanised prosthetic ‘student’: the user being guided as much as they are guiding the machine.

[Cloud illustrated is cloud #36849]

Crayons, snips, and code: Where Playschool meets online gaming

Low and high tech collided in two charming re-examinations of the video game in Auckland in recent months. Te Tuhi’s exhibition of Video Game Machine by Douglas Bagnall closed on February 10th, only a few weeks before Window hosted a “special one-night only videogame show” on Friday 28th March entitled ‘Play It, Make It’. Curator Luke Munn invited game designer Jeff Nusz to run a two hour high-speed low-tech game making workshop involving paper, snips, markers, a xylophone and no adult supervision. Attendees were invited to contribute a drawing of a character or a recording of a sound to the collaboratively produced game.

The resulting game, now available to play online through Window’s site, is extremely simple, but sweet in its deliberate naivety. The Playschool craft aesthetic of the drawing workshop has survived the transition into cyberspace as players navigate through diorama style landscapes by clicking on, and animating the hand-drawn characters. Munn is obviously a bit of a low-tech video game specialist: a work of his entitled Click Clack was exhibited through Window online in late 2006 (and is still available through their archive):

“A series of 5-second Flash sequences, Click Clack by Aucklander Luke Munn illustrates what computer games become when stripped to an essential gaming cycle of problem and solution. The micro-games test the user to interpret, orient and understand each situation and then to respond before the 5-second time limit expires.”

Reducing video games to their bare bones of action and reaction reveals the interaction of player intentionality with the language of gaming. Each 5 second sequence in Click Clack functions like a mini IQ test: as a riddle to be quickly solved. The simplicity of the task is offset by the wit of the designer: for example, the juxtaposition of an instruction to ‘rock’ with the image of a fist requires the player to make the digital hand into the universal symbol for “I’m having a great time at this rock concert”. With each successfully solved riddle, the player moves ‘up’ a level on a graphical representation of a hillside: scaling the metaphorical mountain indicates an understanding, or commonality, of symbolic language.

In this sense, video gaming can be seen as a form of community creation. Players apply common interpretations of symbols, interacting with the computer and by extension with the designer of the game, and through their success in understanding prove their affinity to the group.

This sense of community was strong in the workshop at Window on the 28th. Exhibition openings inevitably attract members of a particular social scene, but participants on this particular occasion also enjoyed a shared understanding of gaming and an appreciation for getting involved with craft: mixing physical creativity with collaborative digital authorship.

Bagnall’s Video Game Machine at Te Tuhi openly invited visitors to the gallery to produce a drawing with supplied paper and crayons. His software would translate these images into a game that could then be played in the art gallery. This method, where the software operates as a stand-in for the artist’s collaboration with the player, is obviously a more mediated approach than the physical collaboration that took place at Window, but in a step which allows players to fully engage with, and potentially completely rework the project, Bagnall has published his software online http://halo.gen.nz/tetuhi/code.html.

Another reason the ocean must be destroyed

It’s possible that working in a library awakened the latent word nerd in me; the Dewey decimal system seems to resonate with a deep respect for etymology and classification that exists in my soul. Not to say that I’m the sort of person who gets flustered by disorder, on the contrary I think a healthy dose of anarchy nicely invigorates any calmly ordered system. I think what I enjoy is the arbirtrary nature of the meanings of things.
So I was quite pleased to stumble across www.urbandictionary.com. It’s an online dictionary that operates a bit like Wikipedia: users can submit words and definitions and also rate other peoples words and definitions. There are many online dictionaries which document ephemeral, new or slang language (Double Tongued Dictionary at http://www.doubletongued.org , also http://wordlust.blogspot.com) but urban dictionary is the first one I’ve seen which is user-created. This means, of course, that a large proportion of the content has some degree of obscenity, and some of it is just silly, but there is the occasional gem. I like creative redefinitions such as the entry for ‘Hurricane’:
A temporary alliance formed between the ocean and the sky with the goal of killing people. The ocean's ability to attack the land is limited, so it lends the sky some of its water and energy so it can assault people farther inland then it normally could.
Hurricanes are far more powerful then the storms the sky creates on its own. They are just another reason the ocean must be destroyed.
Without quite going so far as to say that a linguistic revolution is poised to sweep the world, I think the open collaborative definition, or redefinition, of words is a really interesting exploitation of online public space. Language has always evolved fluidly, but the internet provides an excellent forum for the active collaborative reconstruction of a system of classification which has always been largely determined by the information elite in universities, museums and libraries.
This train of thought reminds me of an exhibition I saw about Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a French writer, thinker, friend-of-artists and all round clever guy. Bataille produced a magazine called Documents in which he included regular entries of what he called a ‘critical dictionary’ where he re-defined words in an attempt to subvert language as a system of meaning (see http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1768599,00.html for a good overview of the aims and achievements of Documents).
To redefine the verbal topography of your world is to determine the way it is described, represented and understood, and to question the assumptions that are inherent in any system of meaning.