In the paper presented at TEI in 2007, the authors describe how this sensory mapping creates an expressive and emotional interface allowing couples to communicate through touch, gestures, and body language.

See also her paper: The aesthetics of touch in interaction design! See also Mutsugoto by Tomoko Hayashi, Stefan Agamanolis and Matthew Karau. [Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure]

Susan Elizabeth Ryan, What is Wearable Technology Art? Susan Ryan proposes that wearable technology projects contribute to a history of projects that might not seem to be linked together or thought of as part of a cohesive practice.

Patrick Lichty, Building a Culture of Ubiquity - Patrick Lichty’s presentation, originally given at the Emotional Architectures summit at the Banff New Media Institute in 2000, illustrates changes in the culture of ubiquity that is based on the proliferation of (mobile information devices) and discusses the impact of wearable computing on the relationships between body and space.

Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Dress For Stress: Wearable Technology and the Social Body - Susan Ryan considers the work of artists, designers, and activists who, since the 1990s, have worked with clothing as survival mechanism and social tool — a “body of records” of technological, biological, and performable wearables that are vehicles for ideas and collective experience.

Susan Elizabeth Ryan, A Virtual Interview with Geert Lovink - Susan Ryan discusses communication- oriented wearable technology with media theorist, critic, and activist Geert Lovink who teaches at the Institute for Networked Cultures, University of Amsterdam.

Laura Beloff, The Curious Apparel: Wearables and The Hybronaut - Laura Beloff investigates wearable artistic experiments that explore concepts related to ubiquitous computing and to the merger of virtual and physical space in a hybrid space. In her research, she introduces the figure of the Hybronaut, a person coupled with a wearable device, who exists in hybrid space.

Daniela Kostova and Olivia Robinson, Negotiations - Negotiations by Daniela Kostova and Olivia Robinson, an interactive performance system consisting of two connected costumes, explores issues of cross-cultural communication using readily available digital effects and surveillance technologies.

Anne-Marie Skriver Hansen, The Body-as-Interface: A possibility to merge mind spaces with hybrids of physical and virtual worlds The essay proposes a set of ideas behind physical interfaces that provide us with the ability to express abstract concepts in the hybrid of virtual and physical worlds. It considers the types of communication that may arise as a result from the linking of body and mind, and it debates the use of stimulus in the communication with other people and our surroundings.

Sarah Kettley, Crafting the Wearable Computer - Sarah Kettley outlines a novel methodology for the development of computational wearable artefacts as everyday sites for authentic engagement. This methodology comprises a set of preliminary protocols for craft in design, a novel approach to the identification of distributed user groups, and a new method for the evaluation of wearable artefacts.

intelligent agent is a service organization and information provider dedicated to interpreting and promoting art that uses digital technologies for production and presentation.

Editor-in-Chief: Patrick Lichty
Director: Christiane Paul

Shadows Never Sleep tells the story of a restless shadow on a nighttime adventure. This “zoom narrative” introduces a new storytelling format that takes advantage of the multi-touch interface of the iPhone and iPod Touch, allowing readers to swipe their fingers across the screen and zoom in and out of images instead of turning pages.

This project was the centerpiece of Karpinska’s Master’s thesis at Brown University’s Literary Arts program, a suite of five stories investigating the potential of digital media for children’s literature. Her advisor, digital media writer John Cayley, has observed that “While the average person in contemporary culture may see a break or rupture between expensive, high-end mobile phone and storybook, a child will reach out towards a readily accessible toy and begin to simply to read, to allow its story-teller to begin. Karpinska has put the story-teller into the device.”

Nick Dalton programmed the application and Roxanne Carter posed for the shadow silhouettes.

To download the application using your iPhone or iPod Touch, launch the Apple Store and search for “Shadows Never Sleep.”

On a Mac or PC, launch iTunes and search the iTunes Store for “Shadows Never Sleep,” then
sync to your iPhone or iPod Touch. [link]

If you don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch, go here to view Web and video demos of the work.

The DreamLoading project, created by Rafael Beznos, consists in a set of researches, installations and interactive interfaces integrating multiple technological media, artists and collaborators from all around the world, uniting music, video projections, fine arts, architecture, graphite, interactive programming, 2D and 3D animation and digital art in the creation of multimedia experiences, among them interactive samplers of audiovisual for touch-screen or tabletop surfaces (projection over an interactive film on glass or acrylic), interactive art and video exhibition with related animation. For each exhibition it is developed a theme and form related to the place where the work is performed. There have been already several exhibitions of the Dreamloading installations since 2006 - Castelo Branco (PT), Londres (UK), Almeria (ES), Devon (UK), São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre (BR) in the last three editions of the FILE (Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica).

Rafael Beznos is graduated in recording and phonographic technology. He is also musician, producer and DJ, researcher on multimedia and interactive art, programmer, web artist, screenwriter, composer, video maker, VJ and animator, uniting in this diverse path of production the necessary experience to develop the Dreamloading and its derivations, that cause learning, enjoyment, inspiration, information and creativity for those who experience and interact with the work.

This exhibition presents for the first time, both in Spain and abroad, a representative selection of over sixty artists and more than one hundred artworks that, by means of its thematic curatorial concept, will make it possible to retrace the principal aspects of production in art, science and technology that have been carried out in Spain from the earliest manifestations to the present day. In it, the 13th century is linked to the 21st through a modular approach that focuses on five key themes representative of the artistic condition: the formal code; the visual code; the sensory and space-time code; the body and the identity; and the construction of reality.

The consolidation of art involving audiovisual, computer, digital and telematic technologies is a fact, but in the visual arts, technology is much more than a mere instrument. The works in this exhibition do not necessarily contain technological media, but they are based on innovative proposals rooted in technology and science. The show features painting, sculpture and photography alongside interactive installations, experimental film, video and the Internet.

The first section addresses the formalization of language, something first proposed by the Majorca philosopher Ramon Llull (13th century), who created rules of binary combinations to achieve a universal language. Six centuries later, digital computers, automation, artificial intelligence and cybernetics were all developed upon this foundation. Artists such as Barbadillo and Alexanco, pioneers of computer art in Spain, applied combinatory practices and the generative system in their works. More recently, Leandre and Lozano-Hemmer continue to develop this line of investigation.

The drawings and micro-photographs of the famous scientist and Nobel Prize winner Santiago Ramón y Cajal, which open the second section, enabled the invisible to be visualized modifying our perception of our immediate surroundings. New fields of vision and action are explored by artists such as Daniel Canogar, Moisés Mañas and Agueda Simó.

The third section, “Acting on the sensorial [space-time] code”, analyzes, through José Val de Omar’s pioneering experimental films, the capacity of the media to overcome the traditional limits of space, time and the senses. The installations of Eugènia Balcells and Pedro Garhel, among others, offer the spectator multi-sensorial immersive experiences.

The body as interface and the way in which the idea of identity is constructed are some of the issues addressed by artists such as Pilar Albarracín, Marcel•lí Antúnez, Javier Codesal and Begoña Vicario. The body becomes a surface for exploring the individual as a perishable being, as well as an instrument for relating to society and questioning traditional concepts of gender.

Reality is a subjective perception which depends on how the subject is observed; that is the idea explored in the fifth and last section, entitled “Ating o the reality interface”. Technoogicl means enable us to make clear the coincidence between fiction and reality. The artists whose works feature in this section raise questions about the relations between the subject and the surrounding social environment. Pioneers such as Miralda, Rabascall, Montes-Baquer / Salvador Dalí, Muntadas, Torres and Fontcuberta, as well as artists forming part of the latest generation, such as Cajaraville, Marino, Ruiz de Infante and Valldosera, present artistic proposals of special interest that touch on this broad question.

The catalogue, 600 pages, is undoubtedly the most complete publication ever produced in Spain on this theme. It contains hitherto unpublished historical and reflective essays by prestigious artists and theorists who are specialized in the field, such as Eugeni Bonet, Amador Vega, Román Gubern, María Pallier, Javier Echevarría, Simón Marchan Fiz, Muntadas, José Val del Omar and José María Yturralde, among others.

Curators: Claudia Giannetti is an expert in contemporary art and media art, a theorist, writer and exhibition curator; Antonio Franco is Director of MEIAC, the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo of Badajoz; Peter Weibel is Director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media of Karlsruhe (Germany).

The net art can be seen at the virtual gallery on the exhibition website. Read ARTS WITH THE CODE AND OF THE CODE - Ars combinatoria, generative art, software art: the Spanish perspective by Claudia Giannetti; and WE ARE ACCELERATED OBSERVERS by Peter Weibel.

Multidisciplinary artistic creation platform boDig is organizing a series of events called boDig 08 on bodies & technologies within the frame of the International Project Absent Interfaces Lab. The partners include L’animal a l’esquena (Celrà/Girona) and Centre for Drama Art (Zagreb).

boDig 08 includes stage performances, installations, artists’ labs, workshops, public meetings and club events around live arts and new media technologies. boDig focuses on innovative and experimental works without restricting the medium, and this year encourages the applying artists to approach the theme of “absent interfaces” in their installation works. The selection committee will give priority to artworks that use an intellectual and critical approach to the embodiment of current technologies. For more info and application form.

Selection Committee: Dr. Bernhard Serexhe (Head Curator, ZKM- Media Museum); Philippe Baudelot (Multimedia Consultant); Defne Ayas (Curator, PERFORMA); Derya Demir (Art On Stage); Aylin Kalem (boDig).

boDig is an Istanbul based contemporary arts association founded in 2007, focusing mainly on the issues of the body in contemporary arts and digital culture. Its artistic understanding has a multidisciplinary scope, bringing a variety of fields together, like dance, performance, visual arts, design, architecture, new media, engineering and medicine, in order to bring forth a reflection and artistic creation around the issues of the body in its contemporary and technological context.

Turning the machine inside out - Creating Worlds as Interface by Eric Kluitenberg: It is always a good thing for artists who work with technology and technological media to study the inner life of the machines. Break open the box and look what is inside. This helps to foreclose an overly naive relationship to the medium. Obviously, it also seems a good thing for artists to simply know their material, understand their medium. This is hardly any different today for media-artists than it was, for instance, for Fresco painters in the grand hall of Sienna’s Palazzo Publico in the thirteenth century. Still there might be more at stake in the case of digital machines, something that moves beyond the usual questions about the artist’s material.

That something might be the creation of Worlds as Interface. This speculative idea was suggested in the proposal for a new physics by the physicist Otto E. Rossler. An approach he named Endophysics. The main problem for Rossler was the apparently insolvable question of how to define an explicit model of the world in its entirety, in which the implicit role of the observer was accounted for, given that the observer is always inextricably implicated in what can be observed of the world in the first place. It would require an explicit model that includes the observer. Such a model would, however only be possible to construct from an ‘exophysical’ location, a position outside of the world (in its entirety), which is by definition impossible.

The world according to Rossler is defined by that what transfers between the observer and the ‘real’ world at the interface. It is the interface to the world that defines what can be observed about the ‘real’ world. This interface constitutes a ‘cut’ across the ‘real’ which remains in itself inaccessible, as it is the very implication of the observer in the observed. The riddle of the necessary but impossible inclusion of the observer and the interface in the picture of the world would appear as a problem without solution. But Rossler suggest there might just be a little escape hatch from this unresolvable implication. He describes it as the construction of model worlds that include the model-observer and their interface with that model world, which allows us, by deferral, from our meta-position outside the model world, to study explicitly the implicit implication of the observer into the microscopic phenomena that transpire in the model world, and their influence on macroscopic phenomena in that model world.

Through this deferral it is possible to make explicit the relationships between the observer, the interface, and the ‘real’ world. While the true nature of the ‘real’ world remains as such unknowable, since all knowledge is a product of an interface whose structure and effect cannot be determined as there is no external position to the ‘real’ world from where this could be judged, this deferred study suggests next steps to bring the analysis closer to our own world. First of all Endophysics recognises the necessity to include the study of the human brain, the biological material substructure that structures the interface to the ‘real’ world. It attempts to bridge the gap between physics, neurophysiology and the subjective, the object of psychological study and psycho-analysis. Endophysics understands the world as something specific to each observer, defined and constituted by the specific structure of the observers’ brain and experience, but still attempts through this deferred study and return to the original observer to come closer to an explicit understanding of the interface that defines the world this observer inhabits and escape ‘mere subjectivism’, even if the interface itself remains ultimately inaccessible for external scrutiny.

It cannot be a coincidence that Rossler chooses his terminology of the interface as a ‘cut’ across the ‘real’ that we know so well from Lacanian psycho-analytical theory. In a Lacanian understanding it is the symbolic order that ‘cuts’ across the ‘real’, which is always in its place but is itself unknowable. The symbolic order, language par excellence, but also the wider objects of semiotic study, open the real as in a cut, without a sense of where or how this cut is applied. The subject is thus stumbling in the dark of that what cannot be known - the ‘real’ itself.

What the interface creates, both in Rossler’s conception as well as in Lacan’s, is not an access to the world, but the world itself. As such we can never study the world in its entirety as it s structured by the interface that exists prior to this world, but escapes its own detection by the observer - us as human subjects - being nothing more than the effect of an unknown interface that links us to a an equally unknown ‘real’. We continue to stumble in the dark, playing around whit the effects of the interface and delimited by its structural limitations, the structuring principles of which are unknown to us. When we try to observe them at their microscopic (fundamental) level they change as a result of our action. When we want to see place we cannot see time, when we want to see moment we cannot see space. The state of the fundamental building blocks of ‘reality’ is unknown to us until we look inside Shrodinger’s box, but when we look inside we produce the reality we observe. Outside the box the state of that reality remains undecidable, it can be one or zero, we just cannot know. Rossler also refers to Kurt Godel’s undecidability theorem that shows the limits of formal (explicit) reasoning in a thus far undisputed mathematical expos?.

What to do then, if we cannot extricate ourselves from the world to study the interface that produces our world as an ‘effect’? Should we give up trying to understand hat world, our world, our relationship to that world, as we are entangled in a senseless circulatory motion that will never get us closer to the ‘real”, closer to understanding, to ‘enlightenment’? Or is this all just a formal game, a puzzle, a fancy at best? Surely there are still ‘real’ passions, joys, pains, beauty and sublime suffering to engage with?

Rossler suggests one possible trajectory: the construction of model worlds. He sees them embodied in our times in virtual worlds, in simulations that can run on digital brains, in finite schemes of explicit description.

Well…, perhaps. But over the years (as a personal note on this) I have become increasingly disaffected with the sterile aesthetics and anaemic experience of virtual worlds. They simply do not capture my soul, or haunt my dreams. They do not stir my passions, as the dramatic foreshorthenings in a grand Caravaggio painting do. So I am wondering, can there be another way in which we can build a deferred reality that includes the observer and the implicit interface, suitable for explicit study? Such an undertaking would not simply be the construction of formal model worlds in finite schemes of explicit description, but much rather a more visceral experimental practice. Its object would have to be the construction and simultaneous deconstruction of the interface; the conscious explication of an interface with the aim to study the interfaces that implicitly structure our world - not just our experience of the world, but notably the world itself.

The reason why I am going into all this is that some of these thoughts were triggered by one work in particular I had the privilege of seeing ‘under construction’ (always the most exciting phase of a technologically invested art work, in preparation for the Piet Zwart Institute’s Media Design MA graduation show of 2008. An installation work by Danja Vassiliev. The monstrous machine he created felt like a psychoanalytically ambiguous tunnel that allowed a view into the very belly of the beast, as if we are looking at the inner life of the machines themselves. It looked a bit like the wonderfully kitschy culmination scene of the Matrix trilogy, where the story’s protagonist Neo visits the heart of the machine empire to negotiate a truce between men and machines.

Vassiliev constructed a patently absurd machine, called m/e/m/e/2.0[1], and finds himself (inadvertently or not) in the best company of a long tradition of ‘avant-garde’ artists who created various sorts of absurd, ironic, impossible, sadistic, insane or ridiculous machines. His likes are the creators of ominous bachelor machines (Duchamp, Lautreamont, Picabia, Roussel, Kafka), self-destructing machines of the Tinguely type, right down to the magically autistic robotic anti-sculptures of Allan Rath.

In his comments Vassiliev showed himself sceptical of the current infatuation with disembodied information, especially the world-wide web with its inapt page metaphors that suggest a stability where only flux and impermanence are the rule. To counter the loss of materiality in the info- interface, Vassiliev constructed an elaborate machine that allows us to look, through the tunnel in the installation an via a web cam on the web (yes the object of criticism is part of the work) at a stunningly analogue ‘interface’. The information is printed or drawn on half transparent sheets of circuit board material and becomes visible by a light that shines through the sheet from behind, like an electrical viewing box. To make the whole thing ‘interactive’, Vassiliev constructed a tunnel of surgically removed and reinserted cd/dvd computer drives, mounted at 45 degrees angle relative to each other, and hollowed out their sliders. The sheets are now covering the slide and the drive places a different sheet in front of the light - at the click of a mouse!

“My main problem was to get the camera to focus automatically”, said Vassiliev, as the slides of the drives necessarily had to be placed at different distances from both the source of light as well as the relative position of the observer/camera. So here some complex algorithmic manipulation had to be put in place to give us a readable ‘in-focus’ web cam image on the website - what would the point of the whole web-interface otherwise be if the image be systematically out of focus…?!

The interesting point of Vassiliev’s machine is that we can witness it in two forms at once, as a physical interface to a limited universe, five or eight half translucent sheets (depending on the number of drives mounted in the machine) containing some printed information, or maybe one or two hand- drawn images, whatever might be stored on those few lowly sheets, illuminated by the artists’ light from behind. Captured for us lower mortals by a cheap mass-consumption web cam and made visible again in an indirect exposure emanating from the computer screen in the from of a web page containing the webcam feed.

We need this double perspective to understand the nature of the interface, as a principle. We can witness it simultaneously from within the model world constructed by the artist (the feed on the web page), and from the outside as a materialised structure (in the installation). Obviously here the ‘content’ is not the point of the work. Neither is the medium the thing under scrutiny. Much more it is the interface: The way in which our relationship to whatever it is that is mediated is structured by this interface. By extension we can understand our relationship to the ‘real’ world as a question of interface and mediation through this deferred but still visceral model world.

One word of caution, though: The analogy of the biological brain to the electronic machine should not be taken too literally. We have witnessed over many century’s of scientific and engineering discourse a recurrent recourse to mechanistic models of the mind. Most recently within Hard A.I. research. According to this latter doctrine a symbol processing machine such as an electronic digital computer, should, if it is able to perform ‘typically’ human tasks (of symbolic processing) offer us a possibility, by analogy, to understand the mechanisms of the human mind and the workings of the human brain as a biological symbol processor. However, leaving the obvious contestations of scale and complexity aside (the complexity of the human brain outranks that of current computers by an enormous magnitude), these models offer very little insight, quite likely none whatsoever, into the workings of the human mind and brain. For the simple reason that human minds do not only process symbols, but also many other sensations. The brain itself is not independent of the rest of the body, most notably the nervous system. The biological brain is not silicon-based, and therefore essentially (physically, quantum-mechanically) different from electronic digital machines. And finally, humans are part of living cultures that transform with and through them, while the electronic digital machines are little more than a mere product of the same, without any significant immanent transcendent potential[2].

So the central issue in these experimental practices is not to create a literal analogy to the biological brain as such, but much rather to explore the question of the interface in a visceral manner. In fact virtually all works represented in the Media Design graduation show exemplify and embody this central point. They investigate, externalise, and manifest the interface to the domain of information, which lies at the heart of the digital machine.

In the case of Michael van Schaik’s Archus Browser[3] project he investigates simultaneously the (so far) never delivered promised of the semantic web, an information structure based on ordering by association of meaning and semantic properties, rather than syntactical and physical (and therefore often arbitrary) links, and the emerging practice of social tagging. Van Schaik’s project is the most purely informational of the group, but through its emphasis on extra-medial structuring and social praxis it clearly explores the interface as problem and suggests alternative approaches to the information interface.

Maria Karagianni’s project “Notations under Provisions” creates a linkage between the informational and embodied realm by creating a system in which Laban dance notations can be interactively performed with the help of a digital machine. But the linkage then exceeds the relationship of notation and performance by capturing this instant performance and putting it under copyright, utilising legal provisions that enable the copyrighting of a first-time performance of a dance score. The interface between the informational and embodied realm is thus extended into the social, institutional and legal realm. Copyright itself, of course, is a purely informational construct, and deeply contested one for that matter. The interesting transformation is the movement from the informational (a digital rendition of Laban notation) through the corporeal (the performance) back to the informational domain (the legal regime). Here again we can be both inside and outside the system to witness how the interface between these domains produces new realities as an ‘effect’.

In Gordan Savcic’s project “PlaySureVeillance”, similarly the interface between a physical game console, a game, and a hidden profiling system creates a play of entertainment and security politics. Player’s of hacked version of Nintendo’s Terror Toad are recorded, profiled and automatically presented and tracked on Facebook. In the course of the game more and more information is gathered of the participant and stored in a public record. The sinister politics of social coercion in the revered social web are revealed as a problem of unwarranted interfacing.

During my studio visit Ivan Monroy Lopez showed me a version of his algorithmic typography generator, where the typeface could be dynamically generated using a midi controller to influence seed parameters for the system. While the final version should be implemented in a web interface, this haptic interface seemed all the more prescient to the interrogation of the interface-problem, so it seemed to me.

Linda Hoffling’s “Remote Control / Democracy Player” fits in a series of projects that have attempted to deregulate the tight editorial control of mass-media channels - the ultimate tool for social normalisation. Here she proposes a series of participatory tools to influence the content and programming of a local Copenhagen TV station, subverting the logic of tight top-down control of the mass-brainwash-medium TV - it should include the on/off switch, which might have a devastatingly stroboscopic effect on the TCV transmission…

Salvador d’Souza’s Traditional Ritual Information System (TRIS)[4] explores the abyss of post-colonial transcultural misunderstanding. Investigating how to build web-based tools to support the study of symbolic and visual anthropology. In this case d’Souza is looking at the representation of Ghanaian Chieftaincy rituals and their relationship to world cultures. While these rituals are regularly and often erroneously framed as exotic and authentic (in the sense of untainted by external cultures), d’Souza reflects on the complex interrelations between Colonial history, migration and translocal linkages, as for instance in the Libation Pouring ritual, which as a local Ghanaian phenomenon is entirely dependent on De Kuyper’s Schnapps from Schiedam, another local but distinctively not Ghanaian product. The question is how the essential translocal and borderless nature of the world wide web relates to such local/translocal practices and linkages.

That in virtually all these projects the information interface and the inner life of the machine are at the heart of the works produced here is certainly no coincidence. Under the leadership of the Media design MFA, first by Matthew Fuller and now Florian Cramer, there has been a deliberate attempt to question the structure of the machine and the construction of the interface from its inception. Both Fuller and Cramer understand this necessity to dive into the machine, to turn its bowels inside out, to make explicit the implicit interface, to deconstruct and reconstruct it in visceral examinations. Some of the projects presented this year take this objective quite literally, while others imply the interface as a border and as a problem; a locus of activity even if the interface is ultimately a non- locality (because of its essential inaccessibility).

We could maybe even call this approach a ’style’, though both Fuller and Cramer would probably abhor such a notion. It is certainly significant, however, that the machine is turned inside out here to reveal that the interface is a permeable border which can be reconfigured through such visceral, sometimes haptic acts.

Eric Kluitenberg,
Amsterdam, June 2008.

[1] http://k0a1a.net/meme20/
[2] Granting some transcendent potential to self-programming machines - but only very little and limited…
[3] http://archusproject.org/
[4] http://tris.ofamfa.org/

[This essay was commissioned for the graduation catalogue of the Media Design M.A. of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam, and will appear in the graduation catalogue designed by Open Source Publishing, Brussels. For more information on the graduation show YOU ARE PWNED at WORM Rotterdam, 4-6 July.]

“Literary hypertext and hypermedia have been made for 15 years with a wide variety of development systems. When the ELO curated its first Electronic Literature Collection in 2006, in an open call for works, the 60 selected were made in some 10 different development systems, from HTML to VRML. Who is in this game, and how do we draw in new readers and players? Our featured artists answer this question in our interviews.

In a world that challenges (and sometimes defeats) writers with its constantly multiplying means, we chose to focus this issue of TIR-Web on two committed long-time practitioners. Donna Leishman, coming from both a fine arts and commercial background, creates finely wrought narrative based on folkloric or historic myth, using very few words. Jason Nelson, coming from a print MFA program and self-taught in software, creates poetical / fictionary “creatures” in great numbers, many of whom use text he has written or appropriated, while others focus on screen morphology or interface, as if “interface” were itself the real “critter” at issue…”

There are a few things to say about manufacturing, design and digital arts. First, we’re not talking about manufacturing. Manufacturing is about making things on a large scale using machinery. Manufacturing evokes cavernous, cold, awesomely huge assembly lines with scales all out of proportion to the experiences of mere mortals. Factory floors throwing sparks, littered with metal shavings, huge overhead cranes moving impossibly large masses of steel - this is what manufacturing means. Half million ton crude oil-carrying super tankers are manufactured. The Airbus 380 is manufactured. Millions of Herman Miller Aeron Chairs are manufactured. Billions of cellular phones are manufactured. These things have meaning in the idiom of manufacturing. Manufacturing is the engine of growth and despair of the 20th century.

If anything, we’re talking about a kind of materialization of ideas. Slick connections between an your imagination, a circuit board and a 3D printer. It’s artful for its scale and personalization. Small-scale, passionate, individual ideas made material. Why is this different from manufacturing? Because manufacturing deals in enormous scales - scales of time, material, logistics, operational fortitude, finances, consumption of natural resources. Ultimately, manufacturing endeavors are impossible imbroglios of spin-doctors and reassurances, speculation, trust and hope as much as they are supply-train logistics and CAD systems. Just ask the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” team. Is it advanced avionics and carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic skins or spin-control and renegotiated contracts that’ll make that perpetually delayed endeavor a success?

The sad consequences of manufacturing’s scale is that it defaults to the least common denominator. Manufacturing on a mass scale can only be an effective business enterprise when you make one thing that millions and millions of people are convinced they need to buy. Customization as a manufacturing process has not moved much beyond Henry Ford’s Model T color option - you can have any color, so long as it’s black. An iPod is an iPod is an iPod, hand-painting and laser etching not withstanding. True customization means materializing one’s own designs, one’s own imagination. This is where we begin.

What we are talking about are emerging “materialization” - not manufacturing - processes. What makes it worth talking about is that it is the power of creation that manufacturing is able to achieve, but done at an entirely different scale - quicker, cheaper, individually, with fewer intermediaries and fewer incumberances. This is the crucial element - there are fewer and less awkward hurdles, deals, negotiations and alliances to be formed in the process of materializing an idea. The power of the idea and its “moment” is not lost through the trials of enrolling people, machines, enterprises, financiers into your cause. It’s as if a sketch in a notebook can materialize immediately. No more fumbling around with awkward descriptions of your weird idea - let the material object speak for you.

What else can be said about this different kind of idea-manufacturing? How does it integreate with design and digital arts? It relies on “toolkits” consisting of digital software and hardware, fab machines, CNC “Robodrills” and 3D modeling. As importantly, the toolkits are also the far-flung networked communities of craftspeople and designers, artists and technologists sharing ideas and insights. The practical tradecraft starts from the bottom and works its way up. We’re familiar with the elements of this process, and the activities taking place in various corners of the digital arts and art-technology communities. This is an emerging practice informally taken up by thoughtful designer-tinkerers. It is a practice that will find greater adoption within more formal and conservative design, engineering and art communities as its significance is refined.

The “tooling” for this practice includes open-source firmware for inexpensive microcontroller-based kits like the Arduino; hacked Nintendo Wii controllers; low-cost, rapid-turnaround printed circuit board production houses; free development environments like Processing; online knowledge sharing communities; parts suppliers with no minimum orders, and so forth.

The “manufacturing process” is a kind of extended sketching activity. Ideas are first expressed informally, perhaps with a simple “wouldn’t it be cool if..?” question at a moment of inspiration. But the question should be answered - and it can be, often enough, with a quick pen drawing, some poking around the net for practical answers or to source some parts or other material - perhaps even finding other people who have asked the same question and thereby entering into conversations with all the other similarly inspired folks out there on the networks. In short order a refined, functional technology engine is created using small-scale surface mount printed circuit board techniques so as to fit within the refined contours of a fab’d surface model. Now you have a fully functioning materialization of your idea - much easier to answer that initial question with the real-deal. You can share it, put it in other people’s hands and work through the nuances of your idea.

What does this all mean for an emerging design-art-technology practice? At present, the evidence of something compelling centered around new interactions is indicated by a richly stocked cabinet of curios - expressive artifacts and objects that, like early Net Art, stitch together inputs and create expressive outputs. Only — and this is important - they do so off the computer screen, and with no keyboard and mouse. Rather, these expressive objects form their interactivity around physical actions that may include the Nabaztag’s articulating rabbit-like ears, or Clocky the coy alarm clocks that roll away when you try to hit the snooze button, or Maywa Denki’s punch-drunk dancing BitMan character. These are distinct kinds of digital objects that mix physical space, digital technology and design.

We know that the art of digital media continues to emphasize the screen, the keyboard, the mouse and the network. The weak signals suggest kinds of design-art-technology that are growing tired of the screen. Digital art is ready to move beyond the confines that Douglas Englebart and his contemporaries created in 1968 with their patent line drawing depicting the now canonical assembly of keyboard, screen and mouse. If there is a “new materiality” to digital arts, it will emphasize material interactions in physical space, embodied experiences and contexts beyond the typically sedentary confines of the screen/keyboard/mouse/network assemblage.

For this new process to do something new, it must become a ployglot practice steered by undisciplinary craftspeople who believe in the possibility of creating fictional, unbelieveable, even preposterous objects that say as much about what they’re moving away from - the uninspired, least-common denominator landfill-destined plastic device - as they say about what sort of near future world we could have. What is emerging is an ability to make your own stuff - not just “skinning” your mobile or modding an MP3 player. Materializing ideas is about making your own - “whatever” - unanticipated, unknown, visionary, expressive things. It is not a manufacturing process. This is a process that requires multiple perspectives and multiple skills thoroughly mixing engineering-design-art into a hybrid sensibility. It is a process that’s strictly for trouble-makers and boundary crossers. Nothing expected and everything unexpected will come from this. [blogged by Julian Bleecker on Near Future Laboratory]