RHIZOME DIGEST: 7.12.02

discussion

Posted July 11 2002 20:00

RHIZOME DIGEST: 7.12.02

RHIZOME DIGEST: July 12, 2002 Content: +announcement+ 1. shu lea cheang: call for garlic harvesting +opportunity+ 2. matthew fuller: teaching position, media design, PZI rotterdam +comment+ 3. Joy Garnett: jaron lanier - minority report report +feature+ 4. Lev Manovich: Learning from Prada (part 5 - FINAL) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 1. Date: 7.11.02 From: shu lea cheang (shulea@earthlink.net) Subject: call for garlic harvesting A CALL to New York area old and new media makers - Please join us for Garlic harvesting in Andes, New York July 27-August 4, 2002 "St(r)eaming the fields" is a field harvesting and public network project conceived by Shu Lea Cheang for "Challenge to the Field" Award granted by Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund for Independent Media. Borrowing from Argentina's "El club del Trueque" (Club of Exchange) that advocates parallel economy reciprocity practices and speculating on a post-capitalist, post-arts funding, "after the crash" scenario, "St(r)eaming the fields" project aims to realize a media exchange and digital commons shared network using organic garlic as social currency to establish a media trading system. In collaboration with organic farmer Tovey Halleck, the project's first phase of production (July 27- August 4) calls for the independent media field to congregate at the green fields in upstate New York (3 hour bus/car ride from New York City) where garlic crops are expected to be ripe and fresh for harvesting. During this week of harvesting season, we invite and welcome media makers and friends to join as garlic harvesting crew hands. As we dig garlic bulbs out of rich soil, we exchange and reflect on the grounds of current media conditions. Food and board are traded for Labor and thoughts. The collective garlic harvesting sessions are documented as net streaming data. For the second phase of the project, a website <RICH-AIR.COM> will be launched in the early September for online media trading using virtual garlic as credito. The third phase of the project will take place at the end of September. We bring in truckload of harvested garlic to New York city for trading - virtual garlic credito for edible garlic and edible garlic for public access wireless network in public spaces. In early October, we distribute garlic bulbs for global shared network at NAMAC (The National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture) conference in Seattle and return to the green fields to reseed the garlic cloves for next generation harvesting. For project proposal and more information: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://WWW.RICH-AIR.COM">http://WWW.RICH-AIR.COM</a> To participate in garlic harvesting during the period of July 27 to August 4 please send an e-mail to Shu Lea Cheang (shulea@earthlink.net) <a rel="nofollow" href="http://WWW.RICH-AIR.COM">http://WWW.RICH-AIR.COM</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) publishes monthly issues exploring the work of contemporary artists, scientists, developers of new media resources, and other practitioners working at the intersection of art,science and technology. Subscribe now at:<a rel="nofollow" href="http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/INFORMATION/subscribe.html">http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/INFORMATION/subscribe.html</a>. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 2. Date: 7.11.02 From: matthew fuller (matt@axia.demon.co.uk) Subject: teaching position, media design, PZI rotterdam Teaching Position .4 Tutor, MA Media Design Piet Zwart Institute A practising designer in digital media with experience of work in education is required, to start work this coming academic year. The MA Media Design, and its related programme of research, is a new initiative. A fundamental analysis and reinvention of digital media in its broadest and most precise political, technological, social and aesthetic sense is underway here - and we're looking for someone with the right skills to be part of our teaching team. Salary is a .4 fractional appointment on a full-time equivalent of between 2238,- and 3804,- Euros gross p/m. The Piet Zwart Institute is the postgraduate and research institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy, Hogeschool Rotterdam. (All teaching and other work is carried out in English.) For more about our work, please go to: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/">http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/</a> For further information and a job description, please contact Femke Snelting, F.Snelting@hro.nl (between 15-30 July only email matt@axia.demon.co.uk) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 3. Date: 7.09.02 From: Joy Garnett (joyeria@walrus.com) Subject: jaron lanier: minority report report an interesting article about imaging technological utopia and/or angst by Jaron Lanier, in 21C Magazine: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.21cmagazine.com/minority.html">http://www.21cmagazine.com/minority.html</a> A Minority within the Minority By Jaron Lanier A while back I was asked to help Steven Spielberg brainstorm a science fiction movie he intended to make based on the Philip K. Dick short story "Minority Report". A team of "futurists" would imagine what the world might be like in fifty years, and I would be one of the two scientist/technologists on the team. The other team members included an anthropologist (Steve Barnett), a city planning expert (Joel Garreau), and so on. Various past and present demos I've worked on were given design makeovers and portrayed in the film, such as the advertisements that automatically incorporate passers-by, the interface gloves (which are already considered out-of-date in 2002!), and so on. I also seem to have influenced the script, by suggesting the idea that criminals might gouge out eyeballs to fool iris-scan identity-matching machines (though in fact such machines can already tell if an eye is alive or not). I did NOT come up with the transportation system, by the way- that was mostly influenced by Neil Gershenfeld of the Media Lab, who was the other science/tech person. The movie seems to me to have turned out really well, and it also seems to be well-liked by critics and my friends who have seen it. I wonder if I'm biased. I feel myself to be part of the Internet Age, which at its best is a period of participatory culture, so I probably find this movie easier to appreciate because I participated in making it. I usually find "big" movies terribly distant and alienating because they are produced so far away from me and relegate me to such an extreme position as a consumer. What I'd like to comment on here is the nature of optimistic imagination in science fiction. Spielberg was intent on finding a positive message and a happy or at least happy-ish ending, which on the face of it was not a viable idea. Philip K Dick was not a happy ending sort of guy. The Dick-to-Spielberg bridge in the last reel ended up working more successfully than I had imagined it could. The script seems to me to make a classic existential point. Here, approximately, is the message I think the movie ends up expressing: "Belief in free will makes itself so, but also makes so a certain level of uncertainty, danger, and chaos, which is a worthwhile and noble price to pay." There's also an assertion that American civic traditions, like the Miranda rights, will take on even greater significance as technology moves forward, defining a sense of personhood beyond the reach of technologists. I say "ends up expressing" because big movies are made collectively, even in a case like this where there's an extremely powerful director in control. So the meaning of movies can't be fully premeditated. A movie isn't a person. I remember one afternoon when an almost tangible transition occurred in the room. Before that moment the movie's identity had seemed elusive and convoluted, twitching between Dickian ennui and paranoia and Spielbergian fascination and idealism. The early visualizations of Minority Report's world even looked like classic 1950s science fiction illustration, the very sort of idealized future that Dick was reacting against. After a sudden, curious, and magical moment, the movie's identity somehow coalesced, and even though it was still early in the process, it was clear that the project would gel as a whole. Suddenly everyone was seeing the same imaginary world. This was a thrilling experience for me, but one that was tempered by some disappointments. Let me get a personal one out of the way first. It's annoying to fall through the cracks of the Hollywood ontology and not get a screen credit, even though we experts have been prominently acknowledged in the film's publicity. Caterers are part of the Hollywood machine, so they get screen credits, but "futurists" are not. Oh well. A more important disappointment for me was that I think there's an essential kind of optimism that ought to be portrayed in science fiction, but it seems to be beyond our imagination at present. Instead of making existential points by pitting people against technology, why not portray people using technology beautifully and creatively? I presented all sorts of ideas for what information technology might look like in fifty years, but the least noble of these were the only ones that stuck. Nowhere in Minority Report do we see people interacting with each other creatively using technology, nor do we see people inventing wonderful virtual things for each other. We see no children inventing their own technological culture, as is already commonly happening today. Philip K. Dick didn't live long enough to see that, and I want to believe that if he had he would have been forced to write a different kind of science fiction. The characters of Minority Report are uniformly either consumers (who are used by the advertisements, the animated cereal box, etc.) or elite controllers (the precrime officers who get to use a zippy interface.) Three-dimensional displays are used for recorded images, but not for live contact. The optimism I longed to see at the end of Minority Report was not only an assertion of what it is to be human, but also a synthesis in which those empowered humans would then use technology well. I would have loved to have seen Tom Cruise's character use that fancy glove-based interface to make a warm and charming virtual greeting for his pregnant wife, instead of posing with her with no technology in sight. This is the happy ending that Hollywood seems incapable of portraying. Here are some of the reasons this might be true: One is that movie people as a whole have trouble understanding the joys of interactive media. It's just a different culture. A distopian movie about virtual worlds, like The Matrix, can make its way through Hollywood and be distributed, but a utopian movie about an interactive future seemingly cannot. Movie people are subliminally terrified by interactivity. It spells not only a loss of creative control, which movie people would miss more than you can imagine, but also a loss of business model. Napster lurks implicitly inside every shared virtual world that's under the control of its users. The world that seems utopian to me is distopian to Hollywood. To be fair, there's another problem. The utopia I dream of is a world we are in the process of inventing. I don't yet know how to describe it myself. I find this exhilarating. Could Les Paul have imagined the Beatles when he made the first multitracked music? Could early digital sound experimenters like Max Mathews have imagined Hip Hop? I hope to be massively surprised some day by cultural invention inspired by virtual worlds and fancy interfaces. I can hardly expect movie people to fully imagine this stuff today. And yet, I still feel we all ought to try. Even a partial result would be joyous. The fact that the task is hard masks the fact that it's also taboo. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.21cmagazine.com/minority.html">http://www.21cmagazine.com/minority.html</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +ad+ **MUTE MAGAZINE NO. 24 OUT NOW** 'Knocking Holes in Fortress Europe', Florian Schneider on no-border activism in the EU; Brian Holmes on resistance to networked individualism; Alvaro de los Angeles on e-Valencia.org and Andrew Goffey on the politics of immunology. More @ <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.metamute.com">http://www.metamute.com</a> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + 4. Date: 7.08.02 From: Lev Manovich (manovich@jupiter.ucsd.edu) Subject: Learning from Prada (part 5 - FINAL) Lev Manovich (www.manovich.net) The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada [May 2002] PART 5: Learning from Prada [posted 7/08/02] Venturi wants to put electronic ornament and electronic iconography on traditional buildings, while Lars Spuybroek, in Freshwater Pavilion, does create a new kind of space but reduces the changing information to abstract color fields and sound. In Freshwater Pavilion information surface functions in a very particular way, displaying color fields rather than text, images, or numbers. Where can we find today interesting architectural spaces combined with electronic displays that show the whole range of information, from ambient color fields to figurative images and numerical data? Beginning in the mid 1990s, the avant-garde wing of retail industry has begun to produce rich and intriguing spaces, many of which incorporate moving images. Leading architects and designers such as Droog/NL, Marc Newson, Herzog & de Meuron, Renzo Priano and Rem Koolhaus created stores for Prada, Mandarina Duck, Hermes, Commes des Garsons, and other high-end brands; architect Richard Glucksman colloborated with artist Jenny Holzer to create a stunning Helmut Lang¹s parfumerie in New York which incorporates Holzer¹s signature use of LCD display. A store featuring dramatic architecture and design, and mixing a restaurant, fashion, design and art gallery became a new paradigm for high-end brands. Otto Riewoldt describes this paradigm using the term ³brandscaping² promoting the brand by creating unique spaces. Riewoldt: ³Brandscaping is the hot issue. The site at which good are promoted and sold has to reinvent itself by developing unique and unmistakable qualities.² Rem Koolhaus¹s Prada store in New York (2002) pushes brandscaping to a new level. Koolhaus seems to achieve the impossible by creating a flagship store for the Prada brand and at the same time an ironic statement about the functioning of brands as new religions. The imaginative use of electronic displays designed by Reed Kram of Kramdesign is an important part of this statement. On entering the store you discover glass cages hanging from the ceiling throughout the space. Just as a church would present the relics of saints in special displays, here the glass cages contain the new objects of worship Prada cloves. The special status of Prada cloves is further enhanced by placing small flat electronic screens throughout the store on the horizontal shelves right among the merchandize. The cloves are equated to the ephemeral images playing on the screens, and, vice versa, the images acquire certain materiality, as though they are objects. By positioning screens showing moving images right next to cloves the designers ironically refer to what everybody today knows: we buy objects not for themselves but in order to emulate the certain images and narratives presented by the advertisements of these objects. Finally, on the basement level of the store you discover a screen with Prada Atlas. Designed by Kram, it maybe be mistaken for an interactive multimedia presentation of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaus¹s studio) research for his Prada¹s commission. It looks like the kind of stuff brands normally communicate to their investors but not to their consumers. In designing the Atlas as well as the whole media of the store, Kram¹s goal was to make ³Prada reveal itself, make it completely transparent to the visitors.² The Atlas lets you list all Prada stores throughout the world by square footage, look at the analysis of the optimal locations for stores placement, and study other data sets that underlie Prada¹s brandscaping. This ³unveiling² of Prada does not break our emotional attachment with the brand; on the contrary, it seems to have the opposite result. Koolhaus and Kram masterfully engage ³I know it is an illusion but nevertheless² effect: we know that Prada is a business which is governed by economic rationality and yet we still feel that we are not simply in a store but in a modem church. It is symbolic that Prada NYC has opened in the same space that was previously occupied by a branch of Guggenheim museum. The strategies of brandscaping are directly relevant to museums and galleries which, like all other physical spaces, now have to compete against the new information, entertainment and retail space: a computer or PDA screen connected to the Net. Although museums in the 1990s have similarly expanded their functionality, often combining galleries, a store, film series, lectures and concerts, design-wise they can learn from retail design, which, as Riewold points out, ³has learnt two lessons from the entertainment industry. First: forget the goods, sell thrilling experience to the people. And secondly: beat the computer screen at its own game by staging real objects of desire and by adding some spice to the space with maybe some audio-visual interactive gadgetry.² Conclusion In a high-tech society cultural institutions usually follow the industry. A new technology is being developed for military, business or consumer use; after a while cultural institutions notice that some artists are experimenting with it as well, and start incorporating it in their programming. Because they have the function of collecting and preserving the artworks, the art museums today often looks like historical collections of media technologies of the previous decades. Thus one may mistake a contemporary art museum for a museum of obsolete technology. Today, while outside one finds LCD and PDA, data projectors and DV cameras, inside a museum we may expect to find slide projectors, 16 mm film equipment, 3/4-inch video decks. Can this situation be reversed? Can cultural institutions play an active, even a leading role, acting as laboratories where alternative futures are tested? Augmented space which is slowly becoming a reality is one opportunity for these institutions to take a more active role. While many video installations already function as a laboratory for the developing of new configurations of image within space, museums and galleries as a whole could use their own unique asset a physical space to encourage the development of distinct new spatial forms of art and new spatial forms of a moving image. In this way they can take a lead in testing out one part of augmented space future. Having stepped outside the picture frame into the white cube walls, floor, and the whole space, artists and curators should feel at home taking yet another step: treating this space as layers of data. This does not mean that the physical space becomes irrelevant; on the contrary, as the practice of Cardiff and Liberskind shows, it is at the interaction of the physical space and the data that some of the most amazing art of our time is being created. Augmented space also represents an important challenge and an opportunity for contemporary architecture. As the examples discussed in this essay demonstrate, while many architects and interior designers have actively embraced electronic media, they typically think of it in limited way: as a screen, i.e. as something which is attached to the ³real² stuff of architecture: surfaces defining volumes. Venturi¹s concept of architecture as ³information surface² is only the most extreme expression of this general paradigm. While Venturi¹s logically connects the idea of surface as electronic screen to the traditional use of ornament in architecture and to as such features of vernacular architecture as billboards and window product displays, this historical analogy also limits our imagination of how architecture can use new media. In this analogy, an electronic screen becomes simply a moving billboard, or a moving ornament. Going beyond surface as electronic screen paradigm, architects now have the opportunity to think of the material architecture they are normally preoccupied with, and the new immaterial architecture of information flows within the physical structure, as one whole. In short, I suggest that the design of electronically augmented space can be approached as an architectural problem. In other words, architects along with artists can take the next logical step to consider the ³invisible² space of electronic data flows as substance rather than just a void something that needs a structure, a politics, and a poetics. July 2002, Berlin (The complete article is available at www.manovich.net) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Rhizome.org is a 501©(3) nonprofit organization. If you value this free publication, please consider making a contribution within your means. 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