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Susan Chun, a founder of steve.museum —a museum-based project that is developing tools for collecting tags (or user-contributed descriptions of art)—will present some early and sometimes surprising results of the steve project’s research into what users see and say when tagging art.
Abstract
Western epistemology is linear or teleological, logical, and atomistic. Our classification does not adequately represent other cultures with holistic, circular, and inclusive worldviews. These issues are discussed through Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and deconstructed using theory discussed by Hope Olson. With the advent of the Internet, and the multiple possibilities of hyperlinks that are like a rhizome, hierarchical classification no longer needs to be an issue. Each item (web page) is a node of the rhizome and has the potential to be linked to infinite numbers of other nodes. All nodes are equal in value and extend shoots to other nodes. Borges' The Library of Babel represents the rhizome through a honeycomb of infinite hexagons.
Digital History at Western
* 01. The Infinite Archive
* 02. Open Source
* 03. Tagging and Folksonomy
* 04. Links
* 05. Code/Data
* 06. Atoms into Bits
* 07. Pattern Matching and Visualization
* 08. Spiders and Databases
* 09. Recombinance/Remixing
* 10. Machine Learning and Data Mining
* 11. Space, Place and Location-Aware Devices
* 12. The Internet of Things
* 13. Histories of the Future
Dark Matter: Radical Social Production and the Missing Mass of the Contemporary Art World
Gregory Sholette (Pluto Press UK, forthcoming, 2009.) The premise of this book is Tthat the formal economy of contemporary art is dependent upon a previously suppressed sphere of informal, non-market, social production involving systems of gift exchange, cooperative networks, distributed knowledge, and collective activities, which is becoming increasingly visible and potentially threatening to the symbolic and fiscal cohesion of high culture, especially in its most politicized form as interventionist art.
What would it mean if communication were exact? That, in spite of the real, material, spaces of message, channel, format, filters, modulations, mediation, and plain old error, it might be possible to exclude all noise and see through to some pure space of connection and transmission. Despite my curiosity, I suspect the result would be disappointingly dull, or simply redundant. The search for perfect communication is as pointless as trying to find an audio space not infected with electromagnetic waves, or a gallery space where only one work is apprehended at a time. Our communications spaces are always already determined by the varieties of noise that constitute their surfaces. In scientific and informatic models there are laws that repeatedly demonstrate the futility of any attempt to maintain purity as a static form. Key to these demonstrations is the role of entropy. Entropy is both a force and a probability measure.
Geert discusses book review and review of online content, as well as user-generated content as a 'trash for the readers, gold for the shareholders'.
The time had come to look for elements that compose a network theory outside of post-modern cultural studies (which marvelled at place-less space) and ethnographic social sciences (which recalled place-based space). The study of network culture is currently dominated by a science-centric ‘unified network theory’ (Albert-László Barabási). What network theory needs – to paraphrase Lev Manovich – is a ‘language of new networks’ that includes both aesthetic and political elements.
Patrick Lichty: Henry Giroux’s ideas on radical pedagogy influenced me a great deal in terms of electronic communication in education. Patrick interviewed by Trebor in prep for share, share widely:
Although Giroux has not addressed new media per se, his thoughts on radical pedagogy as agent of social change have had an influence in terms of activist writings and media tactics. In this day and age when our rights to free speech are being imposed upon so badly, one must engage in media tactics in order to get a full range of ideas across.
TS: Recently, there was an increased interest in notions of self-institutionalization, so called anti-universities, and 'free universities.' What can the self-contained institutional apparatus of the university learn from these 'collaboratories'?
PL: From a conversation with Steve Dietz about new terminology for emerging cultural forms several years ago I was inspired to use and play off Hakim Bey’s idea of the ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ (TAZ). Here, several individuals agree to create a brief social compact for a common aim. In Bey’s case, it refers to temporary communities like Burning Man, but in my conversation with Dietz (the Temporary Autonomous Taxonomy) my thought was to create ad hoc vocabularies for a given cultural situation to facilitate better understanding. I am arguing for temporary intellectual zones spinning off Hakim Bay's notion of the TAZ. I am thinking of a ‘Temporary Intellectual Zone’ in which groups might be able to create and exchange bodies of knowledge that can keep up with the rapid change of technoculture. These zones can address niche cultures that are so small that institutional organs like journals would not take notice. I am arguing for media such as micro- or on-demand journals, and communal electronic media like Wikipedia. These micro-institutions can manage rapidly changing aspects of culture while maintaining some legitimating functions to ensure the accuracy of their content.
From the angle of knowledge creation, social networks as genera
visitor feedback / voting in physical exhibition:
The selection and placement of the projects on view will be determined by visitors' choices rather than by a predetermined curatorial agenda; Web sites that receive more attention will rise toward the screens nearer the skylight, while those sites that languish will sink back to the rotunda floor.
There are three aspects that have to be taken into account if you want to build a free cooperation. The first is that all rules in this cooperation can be questioned by everybody, there are no holy rules that people cannot question or reject or bargain and negotiate about - which is not the case in most of the cooperations and organizational forms that we know.
And the second aspect that has to be guaranteed for free cooperation is that people can question and change these rules by using this primary material force of refusing to cooperate, by restricting their cooperation, by holding back what they do for these cooperations, making conditions under which they are willing to cooperate, or leaving cooperations. They must be guaranteed the right to use these measures to influence the rules and that everybody in the cooperation can do this.
And the third aspect - which is important because otherwise it would be just a blackmailing of the less powerful ones by the more powerful ones - is that the price of not cooperating, the price that it costs if you restrict your cooperation or if the cooperation splits up, should be …not exactly equal …but similar for all participants in this cooperation, and it should be affordable. That means, it can be done, it's not impossible, it's not a question of sheer existence to cooperate in this way.
Delusive Spaces is divided into four main sections, ‘Archaeology’ tracing alternative histories of technology; ‘Politics’, questioning the politics of media and information; ‘Anthropology’ asking how to live in a digitally networked world; and ‘Art’ exploring the relevance of artistic strategies in a society dominated by global machines.
TS: Earlier we spoke about Martin Buber's influence on your work and how you mobilize his ideas of dialogical space.
JH: I use the term dialogue", borrowed from Buber -- which I define as an energized exchange between the self and the other. A bi-directional exchange, not just verbal but a full exchange of human energies. This is what dialogue is about.
Starting from this concept -- talking about distributed exchanges. Martin Buber's essay "Genuine Dialogue and the Possibilities of Peace" deeply struck me as it promotes dialogue as the pathway to a more democratic, caring, just, and sustainable world. He proposes that societal changes are made on a granular human to human level and not on a world political scale. Otherwise, he claims, we are just playing around with social systems. My personal idea of an energized encounter is a full-spectrum dialogue between the self and the other. It requires a shifting into a space modeled by quantum physics, Taoism, and Tibetan Buddhism: the universe as a field of energies. When two people meet and they walk away with more energy than they had prior to this encounter then something has happened. When we engage with the other and an excess energy remains after we part-- that is inspiration. My teaching is a facilitation of open frameworks, of platforms in which these inspirations can grow. I am of course also sympathetic with Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zone."
My endeavour is not to explain the history of the media as a consecutive retrospective, but to move from reflections about the deep time history of arts and sciences to speculative projections that occasionally might reach into the present and into the future. Our work on deep time relations between arts, sciences, and technologies does not seek to re-invent the concepts of the media or the arts. The aim is to open up both media and the arts via their interactions with scientific and technological processes.
My endeavour is not to explain the history of the media as a consecutive
retrospective, but to move from reflections about the deep time history
of arts and sciences to speculative projections that occasionally might
reach into the present and into the future. Our work on deep time
relations between arts, sciences, and technologies does not seek to
re-invent the concepts of the media or the arts. The aim is to open up
both media and the arts via their interactions with scientific and
technological processes.
The Entailment Mesh research project is based upon a conversational and learning systems theory. In the late 1970's systems theorists Gordon Pask and Paul Pangaro at MIT developed the conceptual framework for a machine conversational and learning system called DoWhatDo. DoWhatDo is a method in which knowledge emerges from conversational interaction involving differing expertise. Using a relatively simple set of action/reaction algorithms that enable conversant associations through relational filtering and substitution processes we are able to generate multiple layers of knowledge distinct from the original expertise of participants.
Their significant accomplishment is a recognition that learning evolves from conversational interaction in which the outcome is driven by the conversation itself and is something that cannot be entirely predicted. They also clearly establish the role of human subjectivity involved with inferencing as a central feature in the evolution of meaningful knowledge.
WonderWalker
Well, a blogject is like an object with social tendencies, worldly. It wants to be more than inert, more than a physical object. It has a tendency to be unique and contribute to conversations in specific, situated contexts. And they do this because they are net-savvy, and know all about the latest and greatest of sharing and circulating information in the connected world.
Related is this idea of the theory object as my colleague Tara McPherson has taught me — an object through which one can come to understand what the object is here for, how it works, how it can work differently. This is much like Rich Gold's Evocative Knowledge Objects.
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A collection of resources and sites that relate to research around curating online and the implications to the presentation of ideas within networked systems
Updated on 2009-04-10
Created on 2008-04-25
Category: Entertainment & Arts
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