RHIZOME DIGEST: 5.5.02

discussion

Posted May 4 2002 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 5.5.02

RHIZOME DIGEST: May 5, 2002 Content: +opportunity+ 1. Dominique Fontaine: The Program of Grants for Researcher in Residence +work+ 2. Jonah Brucker-Cohen: ClipIt! 3. DIAN: DIAN Announcement for May 4. Curt Cloninger: TRAFFIC_REPORT +interview+ 5. matthew fuller: Richard Wright–Bank of Time interview + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 5.2.02 From: Dominique Fontaine (dfontaine@fondation-langlois.org) Subject: The Program of Grants for Researcher in Residence THE DANIEL LANGLOIS FOUNDATION LAUNCHES A CALL FOR RESEARCH PROPOSALS IN THE PROGRAM OF GRANTS FOR RESEARCHER IN RESIDENCE Montreal, May 2, 2002 - The Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology is launching a call for research proposals in the program of grants for researcher in residence. This program being in its second year, the Foundation hopes to foster critical thinking about how technologies affect people and their natural and cultural environments. Following an international competition open to historians, curators, critics, independent researchers, artists and scientists, the Foundation will enable two researchers to work in the collections and archives of the Centre for Research and Documentation (CR+D). The research project must focus on one of the Foundation's collections; a profile of the Foundation's collections is available at the following URL: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/CRD/index.html">http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/CRD/index.html</a> Twice a year, the CR+D will welcome a researcher for three to six months. The researchers will be given access to computer and audiovisual equipment, the Foundation's database and its documentary collections. Their research findings will be published on the Foundation's Web site. For more details on this initiative, consult the program of grants for researcher in residence in the Funding Programs section of the Foundation's Web site: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/programmes/bourses.html">http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/programmes/bourses.html</a> The deadline for applying is *August 31, 2002*. If you don't have Internet access, or if you have any questions about how to submit a project to the Foundation, please contact the program officer Jacques Perron. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/CRD/index.html">http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/CRD/index.html</a> <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/programmes/bourses.html">http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/programmes/bourses.html</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 5.3.02 From: Jonah Brucker-Cohen (jonah@coin-operated.com) Subject: ClipIt! ClipIt! Share your clipboard with the world. Link: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.coin-operated.com/clipit">http://www.coin-operated.com/clipit</a> ClipIt! Is a downloadable networked application that provides an ambient connection to other people's desktops by distributing the contents of each users clipboard. The project works as an automatic Post-It or sticky note that is meant to allow people to catch a glimpse of the daily activity on other people's machines. Copy and paste are ubiquitous elements of the modern computer GUI interface. They are both infinitely useful for working with computers and are integral elements to all computers across all platforms. Our use of these functions is so natural that we even forget we use them and without them our methods of computer interaction would change dramatically. ClipIt! centers on this background activity of copy and paste. Specifically, it looks at how we use, collect, distribute, and disseminate information. Instead of using foreground applications like Instant Messengers and email, where you have to actively connect to people, ClipIt! is deliberately intended for background use. When multiple users are connected, their clipboards are uploaded and shared with each other, thus providing an ambient link and direct window into someone else's activities. The project allows people to be aware of each other's computer usage and to "get a feel" for what they are working on or thinking about in real-time. * Technical Note* The system works as a downloadable application for both Mac (Os 9.x) and PC (WIN98/2K/XP) and is meant to run all day long in the background of your networked computer. Users do not have to 'paste' anything to ClipIt!, they only have to copy information as they would normally. The program loops through all of the active clipboards according to who logged in first and displays text and small graphics that are copied. If you are behind a firewall it will not work. ***WARNING: The information shared is not filtered so use it at your own risk.*** more info see: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.coin-operated.com/clipit">http://www.coin-operated.com/clipit</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ **MUTE MAGAZINE NEW ISSUE** Coco Fusco/Ricardo Dominguez on activism and art; JJ King on the US military's response to asymmetry and Gregor Claude on the digital commons. Matthew Hyland on David Blunkett, Flint Michigan and Brandon Labelle on musique concrete and 'Very Cyberfeminist International'. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.metamute.com/mutemagazine/issue23/index.htm">http://www.metamute.com/mutemagazine/issue23/index.htm</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 5.1.02 From: DIAN (info@dian-network.com) Subject: DIAN Announcement for May DIAN - Digital Interactive Artists' Network <a rel="nofollow" href="http://dian-network.com">http://dian-network.com</a> May: DIAN - Digital Interactive Artists' Network - Our focus for the month of May is ARCANGEL CONSTANTINI. We proudly present his work: "BAKTERIA" <a rel="nofollow" href="http://dian-network.com/navigation.html">http://dian-network.com/navigation.html</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ IT IS necessary to buy "Not Necessarily 'English Music,'" Leonardo Music Journal Volume 11. Not only is it curated by David Toop, but it includes a double CD. Tune in and turn on to the LMJ website at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://mitpress2.mit.edu/Leonardo/lmj/">http://mitpress2.mit.edu/Leonardo/lmj/</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 4.30.02 From: Curt Cloninger (curt@lab404.com) Subject: TRAFFIC_REPORT <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.lab404.com/data">http://www.lab404.com/data</a> TRAFFIC_REPORT On any given day, just walking around town, there's no way for you to know exactly who is watching you, and there's no way for others to know exactly whom you're watching. On the internet, however, there is a record of everyone who watches you (your site's visitor logs), and a record of everyone you watch (your browser history). TRAFFIC_REPORT is an experiment in data_voyeurism/data_exhibitionism. 32 designers, artists, programmers, and theorists publicly expose their visitor logs and browser histories. Taken together, this aggregation of in/out data paints a microcosmic portrait of the web as a personal communications medium. PARTICIPANTS: brent_gustafson nathan_shedroff nikola_tosic alex_galloway curt_cloninger kylie_gusset dirk_hine andrej_waldegg jemma_gura christina_wodtke nifkin chris_fahey mircea_turcan jimpunk xavier_pehuet nick_finck yoshi_sodeoka karen_ingram peter_rentz pete_hoang mark_bernstein damian_stevens casey_reas kris_krug jose_illenberger auriea_harvey andrew_childs adam_greenfield mark_allen ze_frank francois_naude arcangel_constantini <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.lab404.com/data">http://www.lab404.com/data</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 5. Date: 4.15.2002 From: matthew fuller (matt@axia.demon.co.uk) Subject: Richard Wright–Bank of Time interview Keywords: time, internet, interact, information, capitalism Growth through Idleness The following interview with Richard Wright covers material related to the Bank of Time. It was carried out by email over late March, early April 2002. Mac and Windows versions of the screensaver are available from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.theBankofTime.com/">http://www.theBankofTime.com/</a> + + + MF: Your recent project, The Bank of Time is a screensaver that also involves a variety of other processes. Can you give me a brief description of the work? RW: Yes I can. The Bank of Time is a screensaver that saves your idle time. It uses this idle time to grow virtual plants on your desktop. It also uploads this idle time to the web site where it ranks and displays everyones time in a Performance Table. Your idle time is turned into an investment that grows as you watch on your desktop. Growth through Idleness. An economy of lost time. The plants grow in (somewhat speeded up) real time by downloading time lapse images. After each plant has "matured" it goes on to decay and die. After which the user can chose another plant to grow in an endless cycle of boom and bust. The more idle time the user accumulates the faster the plant will grow. This also means that their name and plant will rise further up the Performance Tables as their growth rate increases. Soon everyone will be working hard to waste as much time as possible. MF: If people are going to use a screensaver, one that uploads data to a central hub, why would they not choose to use something such as Seti@home or the software produced by Oxford University's professor of computational chemistry which allows the use of 'idle' machines to search through chemical data to search for possible information on the structure of cancers or anthrax molecules? RW: Of course, that is turning idle time into an economic resource. That shows how the computerised environment can define and capture all forms of time. Even the irrational moments of absence or non-purpose can be absorbed into its economy. But the primal form of absent work is the investment. The form of "work" which appears at the dawn of capitalism. Investment is the way that you can create value without labouring, it is a way of "making your money work for you". Investment substitutes effort for risk. But that risk is only worth taking if you can be reasonably sure that your investment will continue to grow despite minor fluctuations. You wouldn't want your idle processor cycles to be used to try to solve problems like how many angels you could fit on the head of a pin. You couldn't be sure that such a problem could ever make progress. But perhaps problems like finding extra terrestrial intelligence or finding a cure for cancer will eventually prove unsolvable as well. There is a risk involved. Perhaps all those processor cycles will have been invested unwisely, the scientific equivalent of the dot.com bust. The Bank of Time project tries to complete this image of risk. In financial promotions the germinating plant or seedling is a constantly recurring image. For savings accounts, shares and investments it expresses the myth that your money will grow naturally and inevitably towards its maturity. There may be an element of risk, but it is possible to minimise this through wise management and faith in the potential of modern economic policies. The fact that the plant will wither and die after its mature phase is conveniently ignored. But this fact is recognised in certain cultural forms such as during the Baroque. At that time the image of the faded flower was a constantly recuring motif that expressed, in contrast, feelings of insecurity about the current state of European affairs and the instability and transience of the political and economic climate in the C17th. So I would say that people would chose The Bank of Time over any of those other geezers because at least they always know what the result of their "investment" will be, even if that result is not in accord with the most Bullish forecasts for our economic and scientific futures. MF: The design aesthetic of the site is notable for looking absolutely disimilar to an artists site. No nods in the direction of low-tech, info-accidents or quirkiness of structure. It looks like a small organisation web-site, designed by someone trained in graphic design. Why? RW: The design of the web site is a pastiche of the design of web sites for bank and financial services. I didn't want a web site that told the viewer that this was an art web project. I wanted something that would appear unthreatening to people from outside the art community. It seemed unlikely to me that many "normal" people would take the risk of downloading an executable from an unknown web site and entering their email address unless it looked safe. The unusual function of the Bank of Time is quite explicity stated and does appear to be in contrast to the pedestrian design of the site, but I wanted to see what would happen if people were lead more gently to the full implications of what was intended, like a trojan horse. The design also means it fits quite comfortably into magazine cover CDs, shareware and screensaver download sites. Of course, this may have had the effect of putting off people who are from the media art world who might see it as an innocuous hobby site, but they have had things tailored to their tastes for long enough. And besides, the art world has had a tendency to slavishly follow trends in popular media rather than recognise already existing projects by artists that address similar issues. So one day if the project continues growing in popularity it could become a trojan horse for the art world as well. MF: I recently heard from Lynda Morris, curator at the Norwich gallery, that one of the important functions of art is to act as a repository for memory outside of the 'productive' time of capitalism, a form of time which serves to erase memory and differentiation. She was referring to elements within art on a representational level, such as Gerhard Richter's paitings of the Red Army Fraction, or the art historical memory of the refusal of a visa to Picasso by the US because of his party communist opposition to war. This creation of a space for memory or of valuation over time is also often a capacity of specialised cultures in general. You can think of political or religious currents obviously, fan cultures, music scenes, emulators. It seems you use the space of art to describe a different potential for time, though not of memory but idleness. RW: I once described my work as trying to get people to remember things that they would rather forget - the Eighties, the Millennium Bug, etc. And in The Bank of Time there are references to the dark side of commercial iconography that is always ignored. Such as the use of images of young plants and seedlings in advertisements for investments and savings banks to suggest an idea of financial growth leading to maturity and dividends. The fact that after a plant has reached maturity it will inevitably wither and die is never acknowledged of course, that part is forgotten just as the fact that your investments can go down as well as up is relegated to the small print. But in The Bank of Time the users have to witness the plant proceeding through its entire life cycle from germination to death. So there is a level at which I try to restore a full image that has been partially forgotten. But also it is true that media allows you to move beyond representation just as the information society is not just about representing social entities but actually constitutes the very fabric of society. And this gives you some access to peoples patterns of behaviour through how they are constituted by computerisation and their desktops for instance. The Bank of Time visualises the users idle time which is not really the same thing as repesenting it. It means that the user can control the image by becoming aware of and learning to regulate the growth of their idle time, a form of perception which occurs as much through the mechanism of work patterns and time management as it does through the mechanism of memory. There are all sorts of aspects of the Bank of Time that are included for reasons of visual aesthetics. When I first built the project I remember having discussions with colleagues who tried to get me to drop the whole notion of having plants growing on the desktop. They found this aspect superfluous to the central idea of rationalising and resourcing idle time. Without this, the screensaver would simply have consisted of a display of the users accumulated idle time and related statistical information. But this one dimensional conceptualism that currently dominates avant garde art and media art is harmful. I would say that without the motif of the growing plant the Bank of Time would not really be understandable. MF: One of the interesting aspects of the work is related to this accretion of visual modes. In a way it's kind of like the display on a video game, where you might have say, ammunition and health indicators, direction info, plus a 'realistic' main view with layered depth: a compound visual space in which a patchwork of styles and rythmns operate in the same frame. In Bank of Time, there's a strip of user data like a news-ticker giving the extent of use in seconds, user name and plant species; a foreground image, sharp photographic, of a patch of soil which leaks a plant; a changing backdrop which looks like a kind of painterly cloudscape; sveral different typefaces; a few types of rain spatters, which look as if they are hitting the inside of your screen as a window, a lense; the software logo and a link to the website; a small version number and copyright declaration tucked into a corner. It a very mixed visual space, with some elements operating in relation to others, others discrete. Your work in video is also very dense visually. Here though there seems also to be a certain density of interfaces to data-architectures as well as symbolic styles. RW: Yes, it's the info image, the image that incorporates many data objects by reducing things to numerical representation (or visualisation). But unfortunately that also implies a kind of info perception, that the viewer can absorb and integrate a variety of different levels of perception - affective, informative, symbolic and so on. A growing problem with the video work was of coming up against the practical limits of this in a format that is viewed in linear time, especially in a theatrical context. Multimedia is a way of accomodating this, specifically by building into the structure of the work the specific temporal conditions in which the work is to be viewed. I suppose this is what they mean by "logistics of perception". The Bank of Time tries to base its particular "logistics" on cultural forms - Baroque allegory and the iconography of the time economy. The Bank of Time is technically an animation of a plant growing, but where the viewing logistics of the animation have been reconfigured. The frame rate of the animation is controlled by the user's idle time. The more idle time they accumulate the faster the image is updated. It is a form of film making in which the cinematic representation of time is reconstructed by the computerisation of the viewers organisation of their time. This was where the idea for the work originally came from in fact. MF: Perhaps related to this is amount of time it takes to 'watch', or simply to be aware of. The life-cycle of a plant is shrunk down, but at the same time, you extrude the length of time which would normally be spent looking at any one piece of visual material, a film, installation, picture, and so on. It's longer than a novel, but less than a garden, but also the way in which you experience it is less direct, it's something that goes on in the background, in the corner of your mind's eye. RW: Like a Warhol film, it has a lot to do with the experience of duration. Can you feel time passing? In the early stages of a real plant you can almost see it grow, maybe a centimeter or two a day. The ability of time lapse cinematography has already changed how we can feel time. We can compress the life history of a plant to a few seconds and suddenly we can see what was there in front of our eyes. We can see the plant moving, it has a choreography. The Bank of Time might be said to reverse this point of view by intensifying the experience of our own cycles of time through the image of a plant. MF: Following on from the work's relationship to more familiar art practices, I heard Pit Schultz say recently something along the lines that Network Art or Media Art will never be 'properly' established as art practice precisely because it is too much already a part of media culture. There is no distinction, in both sense of the word. Obviously such a situation has its advantages, but it also seems interesting in relation to video. There is a desire, stuck on perpetual loop since its inception, within video art scenes to establish some kind of functional distribution mechanism for the work. Might we see in the way that BoT has circulated an example of how Net Art achieves this distribution, but in a way at the cost/advantage of a certain institutional invisibility - because it fuses so much with general, popular, media cultures? RW: Is it too subtle? Too cunning for its own good? Has it been set to "auto-recuperate"? At least I have made no money from it so I cannot be accused of acting in bad faith. The Young British Artists are also now part of media culture - their work is part of media because it is Art, while the Bank of Time is part of media because it is Media (Art). So everything is absorbed, high-brow or low-brow, it's a question of whether you can pull it off on your own terms. At least media artists presumably go in with their eyes open, it is a practice that can at least recognise and reference its own position in the media universe. The curse of the Avant Garde - to find ever new ways to be even more painfully aware of your own marginalisation. But that's still a step in the right direction… MF: Yes, but perhaps there are also many scales and speeds of media culture. Not just those that are implemented as mass culture for sure. In that sense, I think the comment was intended to talk about a potentially wider, or more varigated, field of play available to such activities. RW: I would say the terms in which the original question was put is the problem. The original comment seemed to be concerned with the way in which media culture prevented media art from becoming established as a canonical form. Media art could become a specialised media culture, a network of officially sanctioned web sites and distributors, which is what has pretty much already happened. But of course this isn't really the kind of media culture that we like to imagine. The big opposition to this is seen by the establishment as being mass culture, from which Bourdieu teaches us it must "distinguish" itself. Whether media artists can create yet another more "varigated" alternative is a different question, not necessarily of interest to the "proper" art world (nor, unfortunately, to Bourdieu). As far as setting up your own media art "ecologies" is concerned, that's fine. As long as you realise that you always need an "interface" with the rest of the masses, otherwise it's just media art cliques. Other than that, this is just too big a subject to take on here. MF: I like the idea of non-local time-agglomerations being networked, a particular pocket of a time space being linked via network to other such pockets. (And you can see this also in companies working across timezones, love affairs via text, any set of relations which accentuates certain kinds of shared time.) Obviously such relationships between time and space are not only cosmological, but political - think of the extraordinary condition imposed on Mexico's joining NAFTA that it adopy Daylight Savings Time. Bank of Time seems to form another, topological and intensive rather than cartographical and extensive relationship between time and space? RW: I suppose generally once the regularity of events or relations can be recorded, ordered and compared then you will get pockets of time space emerging extemporaneously, Captain. In fact my work days are frequently conducted under the auspices of the TV schedules - "Womans Hour" is breakfast, "Crossroads" is dinner time, and "The Simpsons" is tea time. And I feel comforted that millions of workers over the nation share a similar time space depending on their sense of humour. I just hope nothing funnier that "The Simpsons" is ever transmitted at 6 o'clock or I will be in danger of choking on my chipolatas. MF: Following on from that, has any cross-networking of Bank of Time users occured? RW: Such cross-networking may have happened as there are now thousands of users subscribed, but that's up to them. I wouldn't have imagined so as the relationship between the users is not personal. One thing that I wondered would happen and actually does happen is people in the same workplace all installing the screensaver and then racing them on their machines. It just goes to show how desperate people are to relieve the tedium. It's not too dissimilar to the kind of spy software that employers use to track the work patterns of their employees. But given the right incentive, we see that people are only too willing to give away that sort of information - as long as it's spy software that ensures people waste more time. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.theBankofTime.com/">http://www.theBankofTime.com/</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization. If you value this free publication, please consider making a contribution within your means. We accept online credit card contributions at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/support">http://rhizome.org/support</a>. Checks may be sent to Rhizome.org, 115 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012. Or call us at +1.212.625.3191. Contributors are gratefully acknowledged on our web site at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/10.php3">http://rhizome.org/info/10.php3</a>. Rhizome Digest is supported by grants from The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome Digest is filtered by Alex Galloway (alex@rhizome.org). ISSN: 1525-9110. Volume 7, number 18. Article submissions to list@rhizome.org are encouraged. Submissions should relate to the theme of new media art and be less than 1500 words. For information on advertising in Rhizome Digest, please contact info@rhizome.org. To unsubscribe from this list, visit <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/subscribe.rhiz">http://rhizome.org/subscribe.rhiz</a>. Subscribers to Rhizome Digest are subject to the terms set out in the Member Agreement available online at <a rel="nofollow" href="http://rhizome.org/info/29.php3">http://rhizome.org/info/29.php3</a>.