The unprecedented growth of information puts new pressures on contemporary societies. We need to invent new ways to interact with information, new ways to represent it, and new ways to make sense of it. How are artists, designers, and architects are responding to these challenges? Rather than trying to defend ourselves against “information glut,” can we approach this situation creatively as the opportunity to invent new forms appropriate for our information-rich world?

Since 2000, Lev Manovich has investigated these questions in a project called Info-Aesthetics. The concept of info-aesthetcis allows us to relate together a wide range of cultural phenomena, including some of the most interesting projects in a variety of areas of contemporary culture: cinema, architecture, space design, fashion, interface design, motion graphics, visual art, computer science, and, of course, information visualization. In his presentation Lev Manovich will report on his latest findings, showing some of the most exciting projects produced to date.

Lev Manovich is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department, University of California San Diego. He is also Director of the Software Studies Initiative at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and a Visiting Research Professor at the iCinema Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney and at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmith College, London. This presentation is a part of Professor Manovich’s forthcoming book Info-aesthetics: Information and Form. [Go here for archived talks from the series]

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer will be presenting work in progress from her residency that explores the motion of knitting and the motion of code. Some of the work includes a knit zoetrope, interactive virtual knitting, knitting with the Nintendo Wii and others. She describes the interactive virtual knitting as demonstrating the motion from the knitting actions are tracked and translated into a visualization of knit code displayed on screen (and eventually on the web). The action of engaging or knitting with the piece naturally produces a physical cloth, while it also shows that code is constructed from the same types of patterns to create a type of virtual cloth (or software). Visually the piece will reflect our bodily interaction with machines, tracing the circular motion of the needles to our body’s give and take of working at a machine. Cloth is often seen as an element of comfort and protection. Machines are perceived to assist us with advancing technology and communication while they are also harming our bodies with carpel tunnel syndrome, back pain, sore eyes, and other strain as we interact with them. This piece explores that delicate space in-between.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer considers her Commodore 64 Computer and Fischer Price Loom to be defining objects of her childhood. She creates tactile representations of cyclical data structures in candy and knitting and is currently exploring the intersection of textiles, technology, and the body in contemporary art practice. Rachel Beth is currently working as an Artist in Residence at the University of Brighton, Lighthouse Brighton, and Furtherfield London as part of the Arts Council England Initiative, commissioned by Distributed South and curated by SCAN and Space Media.

Rachel Beth Egenhoefer received her BFA from the Fiber department with a concentration in Digital Media from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and was an MFA fellow at the University of California, San Diego where she also was a graduate researcher at UCSD’s Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA). Her work has been exhibited internationally in the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) London, the Banff Centre for the Arts, ISEA 2004 and others. She formerly worked on the editorial staff of Artbyte Magazine in New York City, and continues freelance writing on art, modern society, and media culture.

‘The model was then taken into Rhino and contoured into horizontal and vertical 2d layers. The intersections were set and vectors cleaned in illustrator. After that individual parts were cut with a laser cutter and assembled into the final work.’

The density of the cell sites reflect the speed and frequency of movement within the city. The more often Andreas visited a place, the more cell sites were added to the map. Aside from the aesthetics, the work was aimed at making people aware of the German telecommunications data retention act (Vorratsdatenspeicherung) which requires the telecommunications providers to collect the connection data of all customers. This is a good example of the confluence of two growing areas of interests within the computational art scene, abstract data visualisation and digital fabrication. [posted by Paul Prudence on Dataisnature]

Also: YesYesNoNo’s Invisible Journey’s (Datalooknise) project aims at mapping fields of Wi-Fi node signals during bike and car trips. Using various kinds of representation systems to visualise different properties of the nodes (such as encryption settings) these abstractions act as timelines of the journey and, at times, give the impression of some kind experimental music notation. Detailed information on the methods used to collect and apply the data is annotated with each image in the development sequence. More >>

Join us in Berkeley for a three-day symposium and festival of new media and art hosted by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and the Berkeley Center for New Media. This event is timed to link with 01SJ: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge, so come spend the week in the Bay Area and be part of the biggest explosion of new media art in the nation. [On June 2, Embodied Media, the first of a two-part symposium.] June 3:

8:30 - Introduction by Steve Wilson, Leonardo board member since 1983, about the 40 years of Leonardo ISAST

9:00-10:30 - “Osmosis”: What can the arts do for the sciences?

Art-Science interaction is a two way process. The impact of science and technology on the arts is much discussed and well documented. This panel seeks to examine the influence of the arts on the sciences, and the benefits that science can derive from the arts.

- Bronac Ferran
- Jim Crutchfield physicist at UC Davis
- Chris Chafe at Stanford’s CCRMA

11:00-12:30 - Brilliant Noise: how data becomes experience for artists and for scientists

Most information about the world we live in is now mediated by instruments. This data is often visualised and sonified both to aid analysis and to communicate with other researchers, but artists too can make this data meaningful and “sensual”. The same data sets can lead to very different kinds of work. One person’s noise is another person’s sound.

- Michael Joaquin Grey, artist and inventor
- Laura Peticolas, geophysicist at the Space Sciences Lab in Berkeley
- Douglas Kahn, UC Davis Technocultural Studies Program

12:30 - free-form meeting of the interested audience with Leonardo ISAST board members during the lunch break

1:30-3:00 - The New Sensuality: Epistemologies of the Very Very Small

Human cognition is bounded by the inadequacy of human senses to allow us sensory contact with the world on scales larger or smaller than ourselves. To perceive the nano world one needs extended senses or new senses. The nano world requires a new ontology and a new epistemology.

- Ruth West artist with background as a molecular geneticist
- Gordon Wozniak former nuclear scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Wayne Lanier microbiologist at the Hidden Ecologies project of the San Francisco Exploratorium

3:00 - Closing event of the two-day conference for the audience to mingle with the speakers of the various panels and with Leonardo board members.

All the time in the World extends the conventional notion of a world clock, which commonly concentrates on capital cities in different time zones, by linking real time to places with exciting associations. It allows passengers to extend their imagination to the great natural wonders of the world, the highest mountains, the most beautiful lakes, the tallest buildings, the longest rivers, ancient cities, museums with untold treasures, dream islands and exotic deserts, thereby subverting the hard function of the traditional world clock into a poetic, fictional tool. GMT, London’s local time, forms the heart of the clock display, and any places west of London are situated to the left of the large clock, and equally, any places east of London are to its right.

For All the time in the world we developed a new typology of electroluminescent displays, called ‘Firefly’, which relies on a custom-designed segmented typeface (patent pending). Apart form its incredible thinness (less than a millimeter), our display boosts high aesthetic impact and an extreme versatility in the characters displayed (up to five different fonts can be shown in our arrangement). This modular approached also allowed us to animate the letters as if they were hand written onto the display, a feature that was at the very origin of our research.

The resulting display has unique properties: it doesn’t cast light and disturbing shadow on its surrounding, it can be curved, and is extremely competitive compared to other display technologies such as LED if text only is required. Based on a vectorial design, its advantages are all the more noticeable in large scale (like here) or very small. The technique is transferable to other emerging technology such as OLED, PLED or E-paper. This is the first time that a display system of this kind has been implemented worldwide.

All the Time in the World now stands with 100 Firefly character modules arranged in two rows, and 4 giant (1.6m high) modules for the large London GMT clock. Bespoke electronic drivers have been engineered to control its 7000 segments.

The meetings will focus on conceptual discussions and project presentations and, as far as possible, on the development of prototypes and tools.

Schedule: A monthly session will be held on the following Thursdays from 4:30 to 9 pm.

Core subjects:

• Light and the city. Urbanism, media-façades, the fusion of physical and digital urban spaces.
• Augmented Reality, the use of projections on three-dimensional surfaces and physical objects, the use of light as a material.
• Set and stage design and the creation of atmospheres through the projection of light: perspective, optical illusions, etc.
• Investigation of the qualities of our visual perception and its limits.

For:

-architects and urban planners interested in the use of light in public spaces
-visual artists
-set and stage designers
-programmers (applications in real time, generative and visualization systems…)
-physicists and specialists in optics
-sociologists, anthropologists
-psychologists, neurophysiologists
-other interested persons

Participants will be chosen according to the following criteria:
-Personal interest, artistic and/or research experience in the aforementioned areas

(more sessions will be scheduled for Fall)

Context:

The sun’s shadow is the earliest type of projection known to us, and Egyptian and Greek sun dials are the origin of controlled projection. With the advent of artificial light sources, controlled projections were developed, such as shadow plays and magician’s illusionary techniques. In recent history, controlled artificial light sources and their use in photography, the cinema, and moving pictures have multiplied new projection possibilities. These include the use of light as a material to the projection of moving images on a variety of surfaces: buildings used as screens, research in physics on the qualities of light or ways of altering visual perception through controlling light.

Axel Bruns - The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage

In the emerging social software, ‘Web2.0’ environment, the production of ideas takes place in a collaborative, participatory mode which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as much as producers of information and knowledge, or what can be described as produsers. These produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in produsage – the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement. This paper examines the overall characteristics of produsers and produsage, and identifies key questions for the produsage model.

Mitchell Whitelaw - Art Against Information: Case Studies in Data Practice

This paper makes a critical analysis of new media art working with data interfaces and visualisation – data practice or data art. Pursuing the distinction between information and data, it is demonstrated that data art often turns away from information in an attempt to present the data itself. In the process, data art constructs figures of data as unmediated, immanent, material and underdetermined. A critical analysis of these figures underpins reflections on the wider significance and potential of such data practices.

Jim Bizzocchi - The Aesthetics of the Ambient Video Experience

Ambient Video is an emergent cultural phenomenon, with roots that go deeply into the history of experimental film and video art. Ambient Video, like Brian Eno’s ambient music, is video that “must be as easy to ignore as notice” [9]. This minimalist description conceals the formidable aesthetic challenge that faces this new form. Ambient video art works will hang on the walls of our living rooms, corporate offices, and public spaces. They will play in the background of our lives, living video paintings framed by the new generation of elegant, high-resolution flat-panel display units. However, they cannot command attention like a film or television show. They will patiently play in the background of our lives, yet they must always be ready to justify our attention in any given moment. In this capacity, ambient video works need to be equally proficient at rewarding a fleeting glance, a more direct look, or a longer contemplative gaze. This paper connects a series of threads that collectively illuminate the aesthetics of this emergent form: its history as a popular culture phenomenon, its more substantive artistic roots in avant-garde cinema and video art, its relationship to new technologies, the analysis of the viewer’s conditions of reception, and the work of current artists who practice within this form.

D. Fox Harrell - Cultural Roots for Computing: The Case of African Diasporic Orature and Computational Narrative in the GRIOT System

Cultural practices and values are implicitly built into all computational systems. However, it is not common to develop systems with explicit critical engagement with, and foundations in, cultural practices and values aside from those traditionally privileged in discourse surrounding computing practices. I assert that engaging commonly excluded cultural values and practices can potentially spur computational innovation, and can invigorate expressive computational production. In particular, diverse ways of representing and manipulating semantic content and distinctive relationships between humans and our (digital) artifacts can form the basis for new technical and expressive computing practices. This idea is developed using the example of the GRIOT system. GRIOT is a platform for implementing interactive and generative computational narratives. Its underlying theoretical bases are in algebraic semantics from computer science, cognitive linguistics, and semiotics. Initial systems built in GRIOT enable generation of poetry in response to user input. GRIOT is deeply informed by African diasporic traditions of orature and socio-cultural engagement.

Caroline McCaw - Art and (Second) Life: Over the hills and far away?

This paper will consider possible connections between the emerging art practice, environment and economy of DC Spensley (aka Dancoyote Antonelli) working in Second Life, with particular colonial art histories documented over the last 150 years in order to consider emerging features of new spaces for art.While the main centre for development and discussion surrounding Second Life appears to be San Francisco, USA, this paper considers how examining an online art practice may provide a tool to better understand the role of artists in new places. Can emerging art practices in online environments such as Second Life point out gaps in the ways that we think and talk about art? Or are traditional theoretical and methodological values surrounding art reproduced?

Scott Rettberg - Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature

The Dada movement was a multimedia avant-garde art practice that began in Zurich during World War I and flourished in Berlin, Paris, and New York from 1916 until 1920. Beginning as a disgusted response to the war and the blithely nationalistic bourgeois attitudes the Dada felt were at the root of the conflict, the Dada developed and refined the notion of “anti-art” as an expression of dissatisfaction with the dominant contemporary ideology. Although the period in which Dada was an active organized cultural movement was quite short, its legacy is widespread and profound. Through readings of works of electronic literature, the essay argues that while techniques have been adapted to the media-specific affordances of the networked computer, many of the practices popularized by the Dada during the early twentieth century form the basis of methods utilized by new media artists and writers today. By comparing the art and activities of early Dadaist artists to the work of contemporary digital writers, the essay advocates a critical approach to new media writing that both accounts for the specific properties of literature produced for networked computer environments and also examines these artifacts within the contextualizing historical framework of the avant-garde.

Simon Penny - Experience and abstraction: the arts and the logic of machines

This paper is concerned with the nature of traditions of Arts practice with respect to computational practices and related value systems. At root, it concerns the relationship between the specificities of embodied materiality and aspirations to universality inherent in symbolic abstraction. This tension in embodied in the contemporary academy, as embodied arts practices interface with traditions of logical, numerical and textual abstraction in the humanities and the sciences.

The computer may be viewed as the reification of a rationalist world view in that the hardware/software binarism, and all that it entails, is little but an implementation of the Cartesian dual. Inasmuch as these technologies reify that world view, these values permeate their very fabric. Social and cultural practices, modes of production and consumption, inasmuch as they are situated and embodied, proclaim validities of specificity, situation and embodiment contrary to this order. Due to the economic and rhetorical force of the computer, the academic and popular discourses related to it, are persuasive.

Where computational technologies are engaged by social and cultural practices, there exists an implicit but fundamental theoretical crisis. An artist, engaging such technologies in the realization of a work, invites the very real possibility that the technology, like the Trojan Horse, introduces values inimical to the basic qualities for which the artist strives. The very process of engaging the technology quite possibly undermines the qualities the work strives for. This situation demands the development of a ‘critical technical practice’ (Agre).

Brian Degger - Technology transfer present and futures in the electronic arts

We are entering an era where creating the fantastical is possible in the arts. In the areas of mixed reality and biological arts, responsive works are created based on advances in basic science and technology. This is enabling scientists and artists to pose new questions. As the time between discovery and application is so short, artists need imaginative ways of accessing new technology in order to critique and use it.

These are the new paints that the majority of artists cannot afford or access, technology to enable cloning of DNA, to print channels on a chip, to access proprietary 3G networks. Currently, partnerships or residencies are used to facilitate artist’s access to these technologies. What would they do if technology was available that enabled them to make any art work they so desire? Are the limitations in current technology an advantage rather than a disadvantage in some of their works? Does interaction with technologists make their work more robust? Are there disadvantages? How do they get access to the technology they require? Open source or proprietary? Or have they encountered the situation where their vision is greater than technology allows. When their work breaks because of this fact, is their art broken? Blast Theory (Brighton,UK), FoAM(Brussels, Belgium and Amsterdam, Netherlands), SymbioticA (Perth, Australia) are organisations pushing technological boundaries in the service of art. This paper addresses some questions of technology transfer in relation to recent artworks, particularly I like Frank in Adelaide (Blast Theory), transient reality generators (trg) (FoAM) and Multi electrode array artist (MeART) (SymbioticA).

Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Celia Pearce - A Game of One’s Own: Towards a New Gendered Poetics of Digital Space

The techno-fetishism of computer game culture has lead to a predominately male sensibility towards the construction of space in digital entertainment. Real-time strategy games conceive of space as a domain to be conquered; first-person shooters create labyrinthine battlefields in which space becomes a context for combat. Massively multiplayer games offer the opportunity for non-linear exploration, but emphasize linear achievement within a combat-based narrative. In this paper, we argue for a new gendered, regendered and perhaps degendered poetics of game space, rethinking ways in which space is conceptualized and represented as a domain for play. We argue for a more egalitarian virtual playground that acknowledges and embraces a wider range of spatial and cognitive models, referencing literature, philosophy, fine art and non-digital games for inspiration. Reflecting on a variety of sources, beginning with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, feminist writings of Charlotte Gilman Perkins, Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Judith Butler, Janet Murray, and including contemporary game writers such as Lizbeth Klastrup, Mary Flanagan, Maia Engeli, and T.L. Taylor, we will argue for a new gendered poetics of game space, proposing an inclusionary approach that integrates feminine conceptions of space into the gaming landscape.

Jaakko Suominen - The Past as the Future? Nostalgia and Retrogaming in Digital Culture

Digital culture of today is becoming increasingly a field of retrospection. James Newman draws attention to this issue in his recently published textbook on digital gaming (2004). In a chapter on future gaming he mentions three modern trends in gaming: mobile games, on-line games and retrogaming. Newman refers to retrogaming at two levels: firstly, retrogaming means present-day gaming with the genuine, 1970s, 1980s and the early 1990s game devices and applications. Secondly, it means the use of emulators in playing the games. On the other hand, Petri Saarikoski (2004), who has studied the history of computer hobbyist cultures, defines retrogaming somewhat broader as a general term for subcultures that appreciate old computer games. This phenomenon includes the collecting of old games and game devices as well as their active playing. Both scholars see retrogaming as a form of gaming culture that is partly marginal but which is becoming more common. Typically current retrogaming refers particularly to the use of game devices that were used before the PCs (common since the early 1990s). In this paper I will seek answers the following questions: Does the change in computer user groups explain why retrogaming has become more popular? Has retrogaming had an influence on the contents of contemporary games and the appreciation of gaming? What sorts of different hobbies are associated with retrogaming? How has the increased interest in retrogaming been used, then, to benefit financially? Finally, I conclude and discuss how familiarity and nostalgic interests in “older” technologies are incorporated to technological change and innovation.

Kenneth J. Knoespel and Jichen Zhu - Continuous Materiality Through a Hierarchy of Computational Codes

The legacy of Cartesian dualism inherent in linguistic theory deeply influences current views on the relation between natural language, computer code, and the physical world. However, the oversimplified distinction between mind and body falls short of capturing the complex interaction between the material and the immaterial. In this paper, we posit a hierarchy of codes to delineate a wide spectrum of continuous materiality. Our research suggests that diagrams in architecture provide a valuable analog for approaching computer code in emergent digital systems. After commenting on ways that Cartesian dualism continues to haunt discussions of code, we turn our attention to diagrams and design morphology. Finally we notice the implications a material understanding of code bears for further research on the relation between human cognition and digital code. Our discussion concludes by noticing several areas that we have projected for ongoing research.

Burak’s work touches on a number of the topics discussed here on Serial Consign, and he and I have spent the last few weeks firing emails back and forth that delve into economies of exchange, data portability, information visualization and how these themes are explored through his work.

Ever since your 2006 A Stock Market in Life project you’ve exhibited a fascination with incorporating the (data)aesthetics and interface of commodity exchange in a large portion of your work. You were one of the architects of OPENSTUDIO and also launched Meta-Markets last year. Both of these projects deal with trading and speculating on creative goods in quite distinct contexts. I stumbled across the word artonomics on the OPENSTUDIO site - could you discuss this term in relation to your ongoing project of creating platforms for economic simulation?

We made up the term “artonomics” to define the axes of arts, economics, and the participatory social web. In the PLW (Physical Language Workshop at the MIT Media Lab) we focused on building networked infrastructures for creative people, so that they can get economically more powerful and eventually affect politics. In OPENSTUDIO an artwork is a digital drawing. By the time a drawing is completed, it is in the market for sale. From your studio to the market there is no distance. When you buy a piece, you own a share in that person’s body of work. OPENSTUDIO members experience semi-ownership of creative capital. Well this type of living is the promised future right, what if you experience it now, future not only becomes more visible, but also actionable and debatable.

I am particularly interested in collectivity in creative work, which brings in techno-social protocols and economic models for self-organization of large groups of people. In such economic models money represents information. You buy things not because you need it but you show interest in it. In the end, I don’t necessarily consider this type of work as economic simulation or computer simulation, because participants spend real time and energy (aka micro-labor) within these systems. They draw, they click here and there, they decide on things, write comments, tag, mix, edit, vote, recommend etc. These are real relationships woven through experimental and modifiable protocols that organize network of social relationships and economic transactions.

I think today what we see on the social web is that the definition of creative work is changing. Is it an image, a movie, a sculpture, an installation, a process, a response? In this networked world, it is more clear to me that the substance of one’s creative work is not only a material, a recipe, or a code library, but it is also materialized information flowing in multiple layers of networks which are modulated by market forces, power relationships, past events, and future predictions.

[meta-markets performance & entity info for a bookmark of grand text auto]

Meta-Markets is essentially an exchange for social networking entities. In this simulation, social media like del.icio.us bookmarks or Feedburner syndication subscriber counts take on a life of their own and a community of speculators collectively determine the value of this data. I think one of the most interesting things about this project is that it creates a sort-of double presence for these services where users can determine the worth of individual articles of social media that stands outside of the generic web 2.0 chatter about valuation and venture capital. How do you see Meta-Markets in relation to the actual web economy?

The current web economy is not open enough. With Meta-Markets we aim to raise the bar of openness for existing social web services. I don’t mean the locked in data in Facebook or similar web services. I support efforts like DataPortability, these are very important steps to release our data from centralized databases. For us the problem is that the value of our labor is not open in the current web economy. In other words, what we get for our online work is not clear for us while it is clear for the service providers. This problem has been emerging because of the blurred boundaries between work and play, because information is no less real than physical matter, because information is commodity, because of the changing roles of consumers and producers, the prosumer phenomenon as discussed elsewhere. The solution is to have more transparent services, so that both the users and the service providers equally know the value of the work put in the services. Of course this is a complex task, that’s why we approach it collectively by creating a stock market for socially networked creative work.

[burak arikan / terms & conditions / 2007]

You posted an excellent commentary on the economics of Facebook which broadly outlined the disconnect between the bottom-up “social” investment by users and the top-down scramble by management to implement an efficient contextual advertising engine. You quite concisely identified the paradox as follows:

I work for Facebook everyday but I am not getting paid. In their recent Social Ads announcement Facebook says “It is an ad-supported service. It is a free service.” Pause. Did we sign a contract? How do you measure my labor and serve accordingly? I don’t know how you measure the value of my informational content, the value of my informational content uploaded by my friends to your server, the value of my relationships, the value of my activities…

Google’s OpenSocial begins to address the ownership that users are entitled to over their information and social connectivity. How do you see OpenSocial influencing the direction of Meta-Markets?

OpenSocial is hyper-modern politics, so is any other network protocol. Today defining standards and lobbying for the industry to adopt a standard are common political practices of the networked world we all live in. If standardization can happen by the participation of many voices, it becomes more democratic. Although I support current efforts to unlock the centralized databases, I don’t believe it is enough. The benefits of open communication standards are always publicly discussed from the point of view of the user or the developer, but who really benefits are the service providers. When you move your data anywhere, yes the user has the data anywhere, yes the developer builds write - once - works - with - any - other services, but the service provider is also happy because they have free context and free trust networks, which are generated by users’ labor in other places and carried to this service. We may call this distributed free labor. Data portability without ethics is the multiplication of the exploitation of micro-labor. When we use a service, the value generated by our action should be clear and open for all the involving parties. This is not easy, it involves political and economical struggles, but with the Meta-Markets community I believe we can make progress in this endeavor.

This conversation about transparancy and data portability is very interesting given your recent MYPOCKET project for Turbulence (pictured above). In this work, you’ve developed an algorithm to predict future purchases based off the analysis of an archive of receipts. Credit card companies employ similar algorithms to flag sudden shifts in spending habits so that potential credit card fraud can be prevented. I guess it is safe to assume you’re not doing R&D for Citibank so what exactly are your goals with MYPOCKET?

Spending habits are not only for prevention of frauds, but also for modulation of living. With MYPOCKET I see what my spending behavior is, this is probably what a financial analyst sees. I share it with general public to raise awareness and to make closed-door-analysis of our spending behavior debatable. MYPOCKET is also an exploration of the bidirectional adaptation between human and software. Between my behavior and the prediction process there is a feedback loop. Both negative and positive feedback. Positive feedback happens through confirmation of a prediction, which increases weight of that category / item in the database. Negative feedback happens through certain transactions, which have rules. For example a $40 ATM cash withdrawal means that I will not need cash for 4 days, approximately every $10 cash = 1 day, or a $70 metrocard spending (monthly unlimited ride for the NYC subway) means I will not buy a metrocard for another 30 days. These rules, some obvious some specific to me, are added as negative feedbacks in the loop. Over time the software will make smarter predictions about my spending behavior. Sometimes I verify the predictions, sometimes I don’t mind, sometimes I am not conscious, sometimes the predictions determine my future choices, creating a system in which both myself and the software adapt to one another.

[burak arikan / tense / 2007]

All of my questions have approached you as some kind of artist-economist - that is not entirely fair as it is clear you are interested in addressing other issues with your work. You obviously have an interest in the aesthetics of information, networks and connectivity. This is evident in the projects discussed thus far, but many of your other works (i.e. Meta-Control, Tense, Arb, etc.) Could you discuss your approach to visualization?

My interest in geometry ties my seemingly separate practices. Geometry provides instruments not only for organizing space but also for understanding concepts in political philosophy. I started creating dynamic visual compositions in 2002. Since then I work directly with the code, write processes that modulate the geometry and the kinetics, explore the micro relationships, observe the macro behavior, tune, play, contract, scale, stare, change, iterate. My early dynamic compositions are repurposed as peformative artifacts in Meta-Control. Arb and Tense are the same processes, an exploration of growth in networks. From few to many, from simple to complex, from instant contractions to subtle settlements, while the network is being built, nodes push and pull each other, connections paint the color of the forces.

I create systems, they are not visual, visualizations are the visual manifestations of an instance of a system. My OPENSTUDIO visualizations show relationships built in the OPENSTUDIO economy, Micro Fashion Network visualization shows relationships of colors based on how I generate the data. Rather than creating visualizations based on other systems’ data, I prefer to create the system on my own or through collaborations. Like Meta-Markets and OPENSTUDIO, these systems can be living processes which involve many people’s time, energy, and intellect. Manifestations can also be in physical or in other forms. MYPOCKET is a living digital/physical process, which is manifested in three core forms for information: a list, a graph, and an object.

More recently I understand that the systems I create are vectors, vectors as McKenzie Wark, or Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker use the term. A vector is a medium in which information moves. I hope and work for more people to create such liberated systems. [posted by Greg Smith on Serial Consign]

The Climate Clock Initiative is a collaboration between FUSE: cadre/ montalvo artist research residency initiative and the City of San Jose Public Art program in cooperation with ZERO1.