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will be scanning high-resolution images of remote regions in Africa where maps either do not exist or are sadly out of date.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.