Room for Thought pairs two computer-generated video installations by Swiss artists Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer that reveal a fascination with internal landscapes of the mind. Hahn’s single-channel, interactive video projection Luminous Point (2006) allows the viewer to take a self-guided tour of a virtual simulation of the artist’s Manhattan apartment, using a remote control to navigate a gamelike labyrinth of spaces derived from digital manipulations of photographic and filmic records. Where Hahn’s hybrid space incorporates images of the real world, Netzhammer presents a poetic world of pure invention. Premiering at SFMOMA, his new three-channel, site-specific installation Furniture of Proportions (2008) incorporates highly stylized wall drawings, animation, and sculptural objects to create an intricate spatial narrative.

Organized by Rudolf Frieling, SFMOMA’s curator of media arts, the exhibition occupies adjacent galleries and represents two generations of artists who have consciously worked with the computer as a formal artistic tool and means of expression. Both Hahn and Netzhammer combine a variety of traditional media with computer techniques in order to articulate a deep concern with the histories of philosophy and art. The artists also share an interest in human thought processes and the interplay between external images in the world and internal images in the mind. Undertaken as an open-ended investigation, their art is concerned with transience and states of change, and deals in surrealistic effects, associative thinking, and temporal multiplicity.

Alexander Hahn: Hahn (born 1954) is widely regarded as a pioneer of new media. His experiments with digitally reworked animations combine documentary film and video, photography, and computer-generated imagery, conflating reality and fantasy. Filled with associative, often cyclical image-streams, his work generally revolves around problems of representation—specifically rules governing individual and collective memory—and raises questions about what it means to perceive, store, and recollect visual knowledge in both time and space.

Yves Netzhammer: Zurich-based artist Netzhammer (born 1970) has become known for his graphically dynamic drawings, animations, and sculptural installations that explore the interconnectedness of things. Dealing in extremely reduced forms, his mainly figurative imagery intentionally blurs the hierarchy among humans, animals, plants, and iconic objects. This abstract pictorial lexicon—or, “thought-imagery” to use the artist’s term—functions more akin to a system of encoded signs that, uprooted from reason and familiar context, stand in opposition to the world of everyday images.

Room for Thought: Alexander Hahn and Yves Netzhammer is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Support for this exhibition is provided by Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council.

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.]

Concept: The reasoning of the project takes into account the relation between the actor and the author, the relation of the character towards the actor, as well as the identification of a virtual character. On the main interface, there are 6 avatars waiting for the user to choose them. According to his / her choices, the avatar(s) will act one performance, each of them being a reference to literature, theatre, cinema, work of art.. etc and dealing with the question of identity.

Process of a sequence: Like any actor, the avatars will have a book of their background and the interactor will have the opportunity to choose among a list of the different roles they have performed up to now. A sort of an identity card giving the psychological profile of each avatar will also be displayed on the interface.

Realization: This project was realized by means of Chrystel Cerruti and Yannick Berthier, students (L2 / Communication & Hypermedia / IMUS) within the framework of their training course of the second year and the module Exhibition project. This is an academic mission directed by Daniel Bouillot, artist and teacher.

Exhibition: The project, entitled 6 Avatars in Quest of an Author, will be diffused on the box, developed by the artists Carol Brandon and Marc Veyrat. The box is an interface for digital works of arts. It takes position both in a physical and cyber environment. The user inside the box can choose and interact with the works presented while a camera is shooting him as he is acting, so that he can be seen by people outside on a video screen.

This two hour workshop provides an overview of open-source, third-party virtual-world server technology based on Second Life(TM), and the opportunities afforded to artists and experimenters who are now able to cheaply host tailored synthetic spaces.

The first hour will be devoted to a brief overview of Second Life and the “OpenMetaverse” initiatives (libsl, opensim, etc.) Bennett Goble of Ars Virtua will discuss features and show demos of the most popular alternatives (OpenSim, OpenLife & realXtend), their qualities, strengths etc.

We will consider the issues surrounding installation, maintenance and function of the OpenSim server and will be connecting participants through third-party clients and through modifications of the Linden Lab Second Life client.

During this session participants will have an opportunity to look at code, and to consider the space as a place for artistic experimentation and collaboration. Special consideration will be given to coding within the environment and control afforded by building and running servers.

We will also discuss the relative merits of running sims on cloud systems (such as Amazon’s EC2/S3) and instantiating a foothold sim for further experimentation.

For more information see Aldon Hyne’s ‘An idiot’s guide to OpenSim.’ (http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/2956)

“Typically, people running OpenSim set up a grid, similar to the Main Grid, the Teen Grid or the Beta Grids that Linden Lab runs.” - Aldon Hynes

The workshop will be held from noon - 2 p.m. Friday June 6 in room 237 of the art building on SJSU campus. This workshop is free and open to the public.

Bennett Goble is a synthetic world junkie, new media artist and info-addict that spends 12+ hours a day overviewing dual computer monitors with his independently operating eyes. He is heavily involved within the digital world Second Life, working on coding, design, and art projects.

Ars Virtua is a new media center and gallery located in the synthetic worlds. It leverages the tension between 3-D rendered game space and terrestrial reality, between simulated and simulation. AV has active initiatives in Second Life, World of Warcraft and in the open source simulator space. Ars Virtua is sponsored by the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

The 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge is North America’s newest and largest festival of digital arts, and a great deal more. Festival organizers expect it to be a perspective-altering experience that entertains, enlightens, educates and involves attendees in a new understanding of our changing world.

Imaginary Property, a new research project of the Design department, initiated by Florian Schneider, aspires to explore new potentials for design practices across various registers. The project is set up as a realm of experimentation at the intersections of design-theory and image-production. It is a laboratory where emerging concepts and terminologies are set to a series of tests.

What challenges emerge from the paradoxes that research into ‘imaginary property’ has given rise to? How could these potentially generate new rules of production, bearing in mind that property relations are constantly exchanging meanings? Against this background: do we have to rethink and re-evaluate the notion of ‘design’ as such?

The research project Imaginary Property consists of three parts that are inextricably linked up with each other and are to be addressed simultaneously rather than consecutively.

The first part is analytical in nature and traces the primarily non-juridical impact as well as the practical implications of the concept of ‘imaginary property’ through various disciplines such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, economics, cybernetics, architecture, new media and design theory. The analytical part will start off with a symposium (on 6 June) that shows the scope of the project and its impact on contemporary design practices. The symposium will bring about an interview and lecture series in which guest speakers partake.

The second part consists of a series of evaluations and examinations of experimental design, ‘counter-design’ or ‘re-design’ projects. Specific proposals for new models of ownership based on open-source and free circulation of networked images will be developed and realized. Supposing that images are the products of struggles for imagination, this part examines in a practical way how social relationships are configured, designed and performed in connection with the images that are supposed to be owned, used and displayed as one’s property.

Imaginary Property deals with the imagination and the redrawing of social relationships with people who could also use and enjoy images, modify or alter images, play images or play with images. Is it possible, practically and conceptually, to (reverse) engineer ‘imaginary property’? How to show highly valuable images and visualize processes in a way that anticipates and allows for modulations, modifications and unpredictable proliferation? Can a museum redesign a show and make it or even parts of its collection freely accessible through the digital public domain? Is it possible for a political campaign to go fully ‘open
source’? How can such a public release be realized and what would it actually look like?

Thirdly, the results of the analytical part and the examinations will be documented more or less in real-time and made accessible on a multimedia website. The idea is further to make a publication in print as well as a collaborative, networked video project.

The research project Imaginary Property is looking for design practitioners who wish to tackle fundamental issues and query conventions of disciplines such as film, multimedia, web design, networking and architecture. It further seeks to involve theory-minded researchers who are not afraid of ‘an image’.

Symposium: 6 June 2008, 4 PM Speakers: Franco Berardi, Anselm Franke, Florian Schneider

Candidates interested in this project can apply with a research proposal. Selected candidates gain the position of researcher at the Design department of the Jan van Eyck Academie.

Deadline applications: 15 June 2008.

The project will start as of Fall 2008.

For application details and form, see: http://www.janvaneyck.nl/_devices/frames_applications.html
or contact: leon.westenberg@janvaneyck.nl

Showings must be strictly limited to six people per session, so we ask that you get back to us at this email address — cayley at shadoof dot net –with your first and second choice of a preferred session. These spaces will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis and we apologize in advance if we are unable to accommodate you.

Wednesday, May 14
- Session 1: 6:30-7:10
- Session 2: 7:10-7:50
- Session 3: 7:50-8:30

Thursday, May 15
- Session 1: 6:30-7:10
- Session 2: 7:10-7:50
- Session 3: 7:50-8:30

Friday, May 16
- Session 1: 6:30-7:10
- Session 2: 7:10-7:50
- Session 3: 7:50-8:30

By Monday, May 12, there will be a program with some details of the pieces to be shown accessible on the Writing Digital Media website: http://writingdigitalmedia.org

Please also visit the CCV website: http://www.ccv.brown.edu/

With thanks to Prof. Jan Hesthaven (CCV Director), Prof. Clyde Briant (Vice President of Research), Sharon King, Sam Fulcomer, everyone else associated with CCV and the Cave, and special thanks to CCV’s John Huffman.

An art project by Andre Lemos, Mari Fiorelli and Rob Shields to “write” on Google maps…

[From the website: GPS Writing, SUR-VIV-ALL - The idea came from the crossing of my reading of the book by Margaret Atwood, "Survival," with my research on locative media, city, mobility and new technologies. In the book "Survival", the author defends the thesis that the relationship with the survival is a pattern in the imagination of Canadian literature, both of prose and poetry: fighting the forces of nature, the natives, and the animals. . So, from my research on locative media, I plan to "write" the city of Edmonton (on 40 km) with a GPS Tracker, and mapping some hotspots along the way (using iStumbler, Loki, Google Maps, Google Earth...). What I was looking for here, in addition to entertainment, was a way to get closer to the city, to understand and feel their spaces, their dynamics. But, basically, a way to see my "survival" here.

The word "SURVIVAL" has been changed to "SUR-VIV-ALL," trying to create different meanings in English and French, the official languages Canada, and in Portuguese, my mother language. In French we can see or inferred "SUR VIV (R) E / VIE ...", something like an excess and a lack of life, just when survival is the least and last resort of existence. In Portuguese, "VIVA", claiming to live, an imperative. In English "survival", has its original meaning, plus the "ALL" that calls for a social dimension, the public and community.

What is at stake here is the imagination of the city, the relationship with extreme temperatures, the use of cars as standard displacement, the empty spaces, the invisibility of electronic processes (written by the GPS is invisible as well the hotspots Wi - Fi) on the actual structures in the midst of public space. We have photos, videos that attempt to capture this relationship, but with the thread to link with the outside world, the nature. The "Waypoints" on the map will show (as soon as we fished the data transfer) this multimedia content, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots open (we've accessed some networks on the street) or closed. - André Lemos]

[blogged by Rob Shields on Space and Culture]

With more than 73 million participants in online games and social networking sites such as EverQuest, Legend of Zelda, Second Life and World of Warcraft (to name but a few), and the recent introduction of motion-sensitive controllers such as the Wiimote, an opportunity exists to develop an innovative artwork engaging embodied users in a highly networked environment.

Applications will only be accepted from teams who fulfill all the grant requirements, including having the necessary artform experience. Artists who have professional experience in more than one artform can include this as part of their submission.

Location One presents its first ever Virtual Residency Project in the form of a call to artists and other creative individuals with the express purpose of fostering collaboration and creativity across geographical expanses and areas of expertise around the topic of the 2008 US Presidential Election. The goal of this residency is to find 3 participants who are not necessarily physically proximate but who are willing to collaborate with other artists / engineers / scientists / writers / musicians / poets / activists to develop a project using such non-F2F (face to face) interfaces such as webcams, email, chat, video, blogs, Second Life, MIDI, skype, walkie-talkie, snail mail, radio or POTS (plain old telephone service), tin cans on string, or any other means of collaboration to develop a project that will be presented at Location One in the fall of 2008, in advance of the US Presidential election.

Please send CV, url or any materials to virtualresidency [at] location1.org.

In recent years, commentators on game culture and ludology have undertaken the task of analyzing and structuring play. Such work has been strongly influenced by the Dutch researcher Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study of play, Homo Ludens and Roger Callois’s later structuralist elaborations of Huizinga’s research. In this article I want to draw upon a different stream of thought from the mid twentieth century, also informed by Huizinga but not exclusively, that of the Paris Situationist artists and architects, including Guy Debord and Gilles Ivian (also known as [Ivan Chtcheglov). A number of important engagements with play and games by the Situationists are newly relevant today. Rather than offer a historical assessment of Situationism's theories, I will take cues from their writings to reconsider the potential of games in art. I find useful their critique of play within but nevertheless resistant to capitalism (and by extension imperialism and militarism), their architectural proposals for "player" navigation and transformation of urban "psychogeographic" zones (what we might call "ludic architecture"), their analysis of leisure and non-leisure activities, and their repurposing of Dadaist negativity. These proposals all have direct relevance to what MacKenzie Wark calls our contemporary condition of "Gamespace." (MacKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory, Harvard University Press, 2007)

Lesson 1: Freeing play

A promising tactic for the early Situationists was the unpredictable yet forceful potential of play -- what anthropologist Victor Turner termed the "liminoid," or the freeing and transformational, moments of play when the normal roles and rules of a community or society are relaxed (via Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures, Open University Press, 2006). After these temporary (TAZ like) situations "players" settle once more into fixed roles. The Situationists proposed to adopt this liminoid "subjunctive mood", when anything can happen, the carnival, Anarchy Online the RPG, the Society of Creative Anachronisms, into a more general approach, a way of doing and being in the everyday, in order to transform material life with ludic actions.

"We must develop a systematic intervention based on the complex factors of two components in perpetual interaction: the material environment of life and the behaviors which it gives rise to and which radically transform it. Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type." Guy Debord, (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Situationist games do not respect the boundary between play and work, leisure and non-leisure, between "real life" and Huizinga's "magic circle", the separation from "normal space" that facilitates immersion in games and play (Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play). Situationist games are not sports and are not relegated to sports stadiums, arcades, or Playstation home entertainment set-ups. Situationist games bleed into the city, the workplace, the buyplace, the personal computer, the mobile phone, public and private transportation and communication, and into and inside escapist rule-based game environments themselves. In transgressing the "magic circle," a Situationist gaming tactic attempts to give transformative potential not just to play but to "normal" life.

Lesson 2: Wretched winnings, or challenging competition

"The feeling of the importance of winning in the game, that it is about concrete satisfactions -- or, more often than not, illusions -- is the wretched product of a wretched society." Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

The Situationists were critical of the competitive aspects of play, Callois' "agon". For them, competition was complicit with capitalism, with the British working class fan's mindless absorption in football, with the struggle to obtain material goods, investing in lucrative defense stocks, doing whatever it takes to be the last Survivor on the island, playing to get the biggest family home in the Sims neighborhood. The Situationists, like avid gamers, rejected the capitalist derived division between production and consumption, active work vs. passive leisure. Nevertheless, they did acknowledge that an element of competition might be necessary in their games:

"The only success that can be conceived in play is the immediate success of its ambiance, and the constant augmentation of its powers..[ ]..play cannot be completely emancipated from a competitive aspect.“ Guy Debord (Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

In our adaptation of Situationist games, perhaps we allow for a degree of competition, among other motivating playful components. Moreover, for the Situationists, ludic actions were also ethical navigations, and therefore the goal of a competition should always be questioned. (Guy Debord, Contribution to Situationist Definition of Play)

Lesson 3: Virtual game worlds: Toward a ludic architecture

“The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism, October 1953 printed in Internationale Situationniste #1)

Situationist Russian architect Gilles Ivain imagined a “playful-constructive” movement through a city’s “psychogeographic” zones, urban zones defined not only by streets, buildings and businesses but also by how people inhabit the city and the collective psychic ambiances they project. Or as Guy Debord later wrote, while describing the now famous Situationist notion of derive, or drifting through a city: from a derive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. High speed surveillance cameras tracking shopping patterns in stores like the Gap map these hidden currents, a time based techno-capatilist development of the study of psychogeographic zoning the Situationists did not forecast for their fledgling “science.”

“With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental derives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive, Les Levres Nues #9, November 1956, reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #2, December 1958)

Beyond the remapping of existing cities as psychogeographic zones, new city forms were imagined. In “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, from the first edition of Situationist, Gilles Ivain describes a futuristic situationist city’s quarters, and public and private architecture that would be in continuous flux and modifiable according to the whims of the inhabitants, including zones such as a Bizarre Quarter — a Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — and a Sinister Zone. It is this last example that games have provided countless imaginings, and Ivain described the Sinister Quarter in a way that predicts the contours of many video game worlds:

“The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those hellholes, those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters, that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines.” Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov, (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

In contrast to a current rule-based "algorithmic" emphasis in academic ludology publications, some game researchers such as Chaim Gingold and Henry Jenkins have made convincing arguments for the importance of spatial poetics in structuring game play. (Chaim Gingold, Miniature Gardens and Magic Crayons, Master's thesis at Georgia Tech, 2003, and Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture in the anthology First Person, MIT Press, 2002) This latter approach can be informed by the psychogeographic characterization of the city provided by the Situationists. Rather than seeing games as solely algorithmic rule machines, there is a significant attraction in players' exploration of virtual game spaces provided by games like Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, and the classic exploratory Myst.

Activities within these games incorporate spatial puzzles and goals tied to specific psychogeographic locations within the virtual game environment or city. For level design of more action based shooter games like Halo and Quake, ludic architectural design of multiplayer fighting terrains, (for hiding, for sniping, for jumping, for flying), and the placement of enemies and obstacles are a significant portion of game level design. The avid gamer's extensive time involvement in level modification, as was once common with PC games like Doom, Quake and Unreal, is motivated by a desire to focus on and transform not the telic aims of the game but the paratelic space of the game world itself, invoking the Situationist's call for modifiable, changeable architecture.

"Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants." Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] (Formulary for a New Urbanism)

Lesson 4: Situationist games beyond the virtual: intervening in real cities

Situationist games are not necessarily confined to virtual digital game space. Guy Debord describes the original Situationists playful exploits into Parisian cityspace:

“Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the derive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.” Guy Debord (Theory of the Derive)

This description, like much of the Situationists’ practice, anticipates the emergence of new forms of game play as art practice today, most clearly in the example of the London-based artist collective Blast Theory. Blast Theory projects Can You See Me Now? and Uncle Roy All Around You reinscribe urban space with the rules and scenarios of their games. Can You See Me Now? players carry GPS modified devices which contain a simple graphical Pacman style game interface displaying the location of other players in the city. Running panicked through the city streets of Rotterdam in the first performance of Can You See Me Now?, players tried to escape these non-corporeal pursuers who were less restricted by the actual geographic and urban obstacles such as traffic and traffic lights, pedestrians and hills. Similarly, Uncle Roy All Around You repurposed existing city infrastructure like pay phones and car rides to play a mysterious detective style game on the streets of London. Clues and game play advance through text instructions to players’ mobile computers and planted “actors” (who seem like artificial intelligence players in a computer game played by humans). Blast Theory explained:

“The city is an arena where the unfamiliar flourishes, where the disjointed and the disrupted are constantly threatening to overwhelm us. It is also a zone of possibility; new encounters.” Blast Theory

Converging ludic activities and “real” cityspace are not the exclusive domain of Situationist inspired artists. The Situationists did not foresee that mega-players within the “superstructures” would also engage in playing their games. For instance, during the annual E3 game industry conference in 2003 in Los Angeles, the United States Army staged a “playful” publicity stunt for their free recruitment shooter game America’s Army. They catapulted soldiers from a helicopter into downtown Hollywood. Passersby on the street were confused and frightened, and civilian city space became militarized through an intervention blurring the distinction between a soldier’s job and playing soldier in a game. The use of game tactics and play to equivocate and familiarize urban warfare has become increasingly common. In one of the most extreme examples of the post-9/11 military shooter games, KumaWar presented gaming as analogous to soldiering.

This episodic game enterprise released shooter game missions based on current American military events in Iraq. In KumaWar, whose designers regularly solicit advise from a retired United States general, the player always is an American soldier battling “insurgents” in Iraqi cities. Distinguishing civilians from insurgents becomes an important skill for success in the “game”. Again city space (civilian space), military space and game space are conflated.

A Situationist-style game more covertly complicit with militarization of civilian space through ludological means was the innovative I love Bees designed by Jane McGonigal. Microsoft hired McGonigal, then a doctoral candidate in ludology at the University of California at Berkeley, to design a viral marketing campaign and Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for their upcoming X-box release of Halo2. In public places like pay phones, players of I love Bees retrieved information and advances in the game story (a sci-fi “War of the Worlds”-like scenario leading into the storyline of Halo2). When they received game information players would make an ironic military salute (echoing the gestures of futuristic American style soldiers in Halo) and were thus able to identify other I love Bees players in public places like concerts and streets. ILB players posted many photos of this military salute on the web. Overall, the civic space of the city became militarized — even if for a fictional conflict.

Lesson 5: A dash of Dadaist negativity: illegality as play

“The dadaist spirit has nevertheless influenced all the movements that have come after it; and any future constructive position must include a dadaist-type negative aspect, as long as the social conditions that impose the repetition of rotten superstructures [..] have not been wiped out by force.” Guy Debord (Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action, June 1957)

Debord, after describing the role of Dadaism in combating “stale bourgeois culture” and fascism in post-WWI Europe, postulated that a dadaist-type negative aspect would be a necessary component of Situationism as long as undesired social structures were still in existence. These conditions continue today — rapidly globalizing capitalism, imperialist exploitation and increasing militarization, border closures and increasingly hedged in civil liberties in the post-9/11 War on Terror are some powerful present day “rotten superstructures”. Beyond the apolitical or complicit works described above, Situationist tactics have also been adopted as tools in activism.

One artist group who have been playing some urban interventionist, Situationist-like games with a dose of Dadaist negativity is Yo Mango, an Italian/Spanish art collective based in Barcelona. Yo Mango, slang in Spain for “I steal”, regularly stage playful actions such as potlucks where every dish must contain an element of stolen food, Tango dancing in a chain supermarket while stealing, and distributing stylish Yo Mango patches to cover the holes left in stolen clothes by cutting out the plastic security clip. (They recommend stealing only top designer brand name fashions.) Some members of Yo Mango are also loosely connected with the European Squatter Movement, an organized youth movement in opposition to private property who also participate in other activist activities like protesting against gentrification.

Mexican Artist Rene Hiyashi is another artist creating ludic interventions in public space. In India and Argentina he has realized playful architectural structures for street children. In 2006, in collaboration with Mexico City based artist Eder Castillo, Rene Hiyashi created Guatamex, an imaginatively constructed island with computers with Internet access for illegal immigrants, floating on the river dividing Mexico from Guatemala. (His own laptop keyboard was water-damaged during this project.) Like the anti-corporate antics and publicity stunts of the Yes Men and Rtmark, the older public interventions of Critical Art Ensemble, and many of the political art actions that took place during the 2004 New York Republican National Convention, Yo Mango’s and Rene Hiyashi’s artwork can be described as ludic activism in which societal rules (the laws) are willfully broken. Within activist culture itself, maybe since the anti WTO demonstrations in Seattle of 1999, Dadaist humor and ludic activities are more prevalent. (Brian Holmes, The Revenge of the Concept: Artistic Exchanges and Networked Resistance, Nettime 2003)<

Lesson 6: Games inside games: Interventionist tactics in virtual spaces

In their handbook for game designers, Salen and Zimmerman repeatedly emphasize the importance of the “magic circle” and the investment of the player in a separate, pretend space of play (whether abstract or photorealistic, virtual or non-digital). They stress the pleasure in following the rules of games within the clear-cut boundaries of this magic circle. Situationist gamers, however, are more akin to the creative cheater, the game “griefer” or the hacker. They blur the peripheries of the magic circle, taking pleasure in changing the rules of the existing gamespace, which they see as problematic in a fixed state. Situationist mods and hacks intervening inside preexisting games can be more entertaining than the original game.

For instance, the popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) Second Life has been playfully manipulated by the avatar Gazira Babeli, one of the members of the Second Front collective of Second Life artistic hackers. Her Gray Goo hack was an infestation of Second Life space with out-of-control repetitive self-replicating objects, inspired by nanotechnological disaster scenarios. Grey Goo took various forms, from endless Mario character replications to rampant Velvet Underground bananas. It was so effective it slowed down Linden Lab’s game servers, interfering with game play system-wide.

Babeli’s COME.TO.HEAVEN similarly exploited a loophole in Second Life which allows players to create gigantic avatars in proportion to the Second Life world, resulting in unexpected interesting glitches. While the identity (identities) behind the Babeli avatar are kept secret, the code for her Second Life interventions are always made public by posting it online so others can learn from it and reuse it.

A similar, Situationist-themed interventionist game strategy is offered by Pierre Rahola, a French gamer and DJ. During the early phase of the US war on Iraq, Rahola and his collaborators would spray anti-war graffiti inside online shooter games. When I interviewed him in Paris in 2005, he admitted that “intervening in games is more fun than playing the game.” Around the same time Pierre and his friends were playing online shooter games with an activist edge I began a body of work I would describe as situationist gaming. In collaboration with the artists Brody Condon and Joan Leandre, we initiated Velvet-Strike, tagging the then-popular online soldier shooter game Counter-Strike with anti-war graffiti. Velvet-Strike was not only visual modification but also included “recipes” for disruptive actions designed to interfere with regular Counter-Strike gameplay, like one for making friends with your enemy. Recipe for Friendship:

1. Find a Counter-Strike server with 0 or 1 other player on line. (If you go to an empty one most likely someone will show up to see who you are.)
2. Shoot a few times at your enemy.
3. Tell them you are newbie and ask them to show you how to plant the bomb.
4. Ask them which country they are from.
5. Ask them all about themselves.
6. Arrange to meet another time.

Operation Urban Terrain (OUT) was another project I initiated to warp an existing gamespace — the free US army propaganda game America’s Army. With OUT, I wanted to counter the convergence of military and civilian space with a kind of activism that merged virtual urban game space wirelessly with cityspace. I invited many people whom I had met online through Velvet-Strike to participate, including Chris Birke, one of the original Counter-Strike game texturers, Mexico City architect Luis Hernandez and Pierre Rahola. We projected our live performances onto the walls and surfaces of Manhattan and Brooklyn, connected wirelessly to five players around the world during the NYC Republican National Convention of 2004. I matched virtual locations within the America’s Army game servers with physical New York City sites, projecting a live performance of a virtual sit-in inside a tunnel with yellow taxis onto a building in midtown Manhattan, where there were many yellow taxis, and pairing a red brick warehouse in the game with a brick building in Harlem. For the last location I merged a live soldier dancing performance in the popular America’s Army map “Bridge” with projection onto the Manhattan Bridge in Brooklyn.

Riot Gear for Rollartista, another game inside a game, was a series of machinima performances calling attention to European and British police abuse of Islamic and African immigrants, with players wearing padded “riot gear” costumes designed in collaboration with artist Talice Lee. In the first performance of the project, two player/performers roller-skated around the small Spanish city of Castellon projecting the Playstation2 games Narc and Mechwarrior from an ultra light projector attached to one of the player’s helmets, (technology had developed since the heavy battery and projector of OUT). At each projection location in the city, one player “roller-danced” and handed out flyers with stories of immigrant abuse to interested passers-by while the second player performed with a portable Playstation, controlling a dancing policeman character who violently beats up on civilian city dwellers.

Conclusion

The Situationists predicted an age of expanded ludic possibilities for artists and for anyone. Paraphrasing and remixing both gamer Rebecca Cannon and Situationist architect Gilles Ivain, we are bored with shooter games. We are bored with the suburbs, the stale imperialist sexist engineering biased corporate game industry, and with new academic ludology that reifies existing superstructures. We are ready to play reality TV off camera. We are frustrated with our governments and the military superstructures that control gamespace. We don’t want to play by rules we never agreed upon in the first place. Anyways, even if we had fun playing those games to begin with, it is now more entertaining to mess them up, or to invent new unsanctioned games inside gamespace. If big players are intervening in gamespace, then it is time for Situationist gaming.

Anne-Marie Schleiner

Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play: Lessons from Situationist Gaming will be resented next week at Homo Ludens Ludens in Gijon, Spain. [via nettime]