micromusic.net

At my second tutorial yesterday, Helen suggested I look at Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems edited by Joasia Krysa. I read three essays that discuss how participatory online environments work.

In “Flexible Contexts, Democratic Filtering, and Computer-Aided Curating: Models for Online Curatorial Practice,” Christiane Paul explains how “networked environments enhance the potential for democratisation and increase the public’s agency in several respects – for example through enhanced distribution, filtering, and archiving mechanisms that give importance to an ‘individual’s voice’; through the fact that interventions (in the broadest sense) are not necessarily bound to a geographic space any more; and through a largely decentralised rather than hierarchical structure” (83).

As a result, “any form of agency is necessarily mediated, and the degree of agency is therefore partly determined by the levels of mediation unfolding within an artwork. The agency of the creator/user/public/audience is highly dependent on the extent of control over production and distribution of a work” (83). More broadly, any participatory platform (not just creative ones) allows a different degree of agency to every participant. The internet allows myriad configurations of these agencies, depending on how much power the creator gives the user, and the broad affordances of the internet itself.

In “The Participatory Challenge,” Trebor Scholz defines these platforms as extreme sharing networks. He outlines how a network can succeed by motivating people to participate. “[N]etworkers [must] understand themselves as free agents and not as followers,” and a “social network needs to be able to connect” (202).

Finally, in “From Art on Networks to Art on Platforms,” Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin examine three platforms where users create and share art. The authors write that a culture of openness attracts participants to these platforms. The sites also have interface features that contextualize and develop the art practice, like discussions, filters and rewards. The platforms develop to the point where they become centers of their artistic communities.

I was particularly interested in their discussion of micromusic.net because I’ve participated in the chiptune community, both online and offline. A lot of the positive characterizations rang true to me, but I’ve also observed interactions that come with any real-life community but play out online: hierarchies, stratifications, and petty drama, as well as moments of extreme joy. I’m fascinated by those frictions that develop within participatory communities.

Overall, these texts examine networks used for creative and collaborative production. I found that this focus is limiting and also plays into capitalistic goals of production. The online participatory works that most captivate me often don’t have defined goals. Rather, they aim to create novel, emergent, strange experiences and connections between people.

References

Krysa, Yoasia, editor. Curating Immateriality: The Work of the Curator in the Age of Network Systems. Brooklyn: AUTONOMEDIA, 2006.

Jennicam by Jennifer Ringley

At my first tutorial, Rachel Falconer suggested that postphenomenology would be a useful framework for me to investigate participatory internet art. This week, I reviewed “A Field Guide to Postphenomenology” by Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek. The postphenomenological framework fits my project because I’m investigating the relations between humans and interactive online art, a specific technological artifact.

Postphenenomological studies “investigate how, in the relations that arise around a technology, a specific “world” is constituted, as well as a specific “subject” (31). Here, we can understand the subject as a person interacting with an online game, which forms part of the constituted world.

Rosenberger and Verbeek extensively cite Don Ihde, who outlines four basic forms of technological mediation. The ones I find most relevant to participatory internet art are embodiment relations and alterity relations.

The authors write that “when a technology is ‘embodied,’ a user’s experience is reshaped through the device, with the device itself in some ways taken into the user’s bodily awareness” (14). They cite how cell phones “[transform] a user’s capacity to communicate with others over a distance” (38). As I discussed earlier with digital witnessing, online games can open up new topologies of viewing and communicating, particularly in their technologies of livestreaming and chat. I always find the experience of viewing a livestream uncanny: like my vision has been augmented, like I’m partially in a different place, like I’m seeing something I shouldn’t be able to see.

Ihde relates embodiment to transparency, “the degree to which a device (or an aspect of that device) fades into the background of a user’s awareness as it is used” (14). The notion of transparency is interesting for online artworks – they often present a novel way of interacting with technology, foregrounding it. Certainly, the more a viewer interacts with the artwork (which online games permit by allowing long-term and persistent play), the more the technology can be sedimented (“the force of habit associated with a given human-technology relation” (25)). But In my experience, the technology never recedes into the background, because the unique interaction design is often the point of the artwork.

Rosenberger and Verbeek also discuss alterity relations, where “sometimes we encounter a device as itself a presence with which we must interrelate” (18). This adapts the phenomenological concept of other, the “special experience of engaging with another human being” (18).

I noticed that other people were absent from the postphenomenological analysis. The relation is always between I, the technology, and the world. In participatory art, humans interact with other humans through technology. A person is at once a subject and an object to other people. Online interactive artworks definitely present others in new, surprising ways. I’m curious as to whether there are postphenomenological texts that incorporate multiple subjects and the relations between them.

References

Rosenberger, Robert and Peter-Paul Verbeek, editors. Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015.

No Fun by Eva and Franco Mattes

This is my response to a class free writing exercise. For 8 minutes, I wrote about my visceral, affective experience with my research project so far.

I want to create that visceral experience for my viewers/players. After leaving the session with Rachel I felt like I needed to recreate a moment of friction, an interesting social experiment, in order for my project to be valid. I would hold a play test; I would call everyone in a room. I’d reach out to the anonymous author of Twitch Plays Pokemon. I don’t know why I’m so shy and reluctant to engage online but I want to research these things at a distance. Like animals at a zoo. I get scared even to log on to Twitch and show people my name.

I wonder why Rachel Falconer really leaned into the introvert part of me and framed it as a personal journey. She doesn’t know anything else about me. Maybe it was an interesting thing to grab onto? Does art require going outside your comfort zone. At any rate, there’s this personal, visceral, interactive side and then there’s the theoretical reading, which I am also removed from. Maybe I can find some way to write speculatively. The speculation in this lecture was not the kind that I was envisioning. Here it was black, alternative histories, alien encounters; very woo. I want to learn more about speculative design. I wonder if that’s even relevant.

I have to think of one interaction, one moment that I think is new, interesting, challenging, and find out how I can stage it in microcosm. If we’re all play acting in a room it’ll be different but immediate. If I send out a survey, or send out the site, it’ll be hard to get traction. I could send it to the whole Comp Arts (Comp RATS, was my typo) and IGPED chats. I’m sure it’ll get some traction there but there’s really no substitute for long term, addictive engagement in something. The kind you stay up at night to watch, like Shibuya Crossing, not the polar opposite of my timezone like it was in NYC, but now just 7, sometimes 8 hours away.

I should write about what attracts me and challenges me to these games. Difficult interactions. Challenging configurations. Uuugh, not something I want to put myself through. But I have to. Maybe i’ll emerge on the other side of it. With more questions. like Chris Salter. A different person, for sure.

Porn (Corpus: The Humans), Adversarially Evolved Hallucation by Trevor Paglen

I’ve recently been using FaceOSC, a face recognition software that can output to various programs. FaceOSC doesn’t reliably work when I have my glasses on. It makes it very hard to program when I must use my face, because I can’t read the screen at the same time. This experience of unreadability came to mind when I read the texts for this week on machine seeing.

Ten years ago, I remember chagrin among my Asian friends when news came out that cameras sometimes couldn’t recognize our eyes, asking if someone blinked. I found a Time article from back then which gave a technical explanation:

“The constant flow of images is usually too much for the software to handle, so it downsamples them, or reduces the level of detail, before analyzing them. … An eye might only be a few pixels wide, and a camera that’s downsampling the images can’t see the necessary level of detail.”

In the Time article, the founder of 3VR, which creates face recognition for security cameras, claimed that “A racially inclusive training set won’t help if the larger platform is not capable of seeing those details.” I thought that this was a convenient excuse; how likely was it that they had a racially inclusive data set? Had they included Asian people in the development process who could have spotted this problem, and made efforts to fix the technology?

In his essay “Ways of Machine Seeing,” Geoff Cox writes that “‘machine learning’ techniques are employed on data to produce forms of knowledge that are inextricably bound to hegemonic systems of power and prejudice.” Ramon Amaro explains how this applies to face detection in his essay “As If”:

“… common facial detection libraries are often trained on normalized spectrums of data that are prone to false negatives without proper light conditions. In other words, they are trained on image data that includes primarily white subjects. The white phenotype then becomes the pre-existing condition and the prototypical assemblage from which all future human characteristics are measured.”

Furthermore, machine seeing reduces individuals into a norm. Amaro writes that “the basis of simulation here characterizes the living as an emanation of pre-existing conditions, reducing the operation of individuation, and primarily the differences amongst the living, to no more than an assemblage of contradictions that are negated and subsumed into a higher, more homogenous, unity of existence.” Two eyes, two eyebrows, a nose, and a mouth.

For my Machine Learning module this week, we had to pick an artwork which uses machine learning. I chose Trevor Paglen’s Adversarially Evolved Hallucinations, where the artist trained an AI to recognize images from a corpus and then generate new images. The image above was generated from an AI trained on the corpus “The Humans.” When I saw them in a gallery, I was taken by their glitchy beauty, but after reading these texts I realized that all of the images generated from “The Humans” are white.

In “Porn,” we see the object of desire abstracted, but still recognizable as a white woman. Since the data is pulled from porn, this is expected, but still symbolic of the ways that white women are seen as sexualized bodies. For an intersectional analysis as described by Safiya Umoja Noble in “A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies,” we must pay attention to the ways in which machine seeing encodes gender and racial identities together. The computer can’t see me as both sexualized and asleep.

References

Amaro, Ramon. “As If.” e-flux architecture vol. 97, Feb. 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/becoming-digital/248073/as-if/.

Cox, Geoff. “Ways of Machine Seeing.” Unthinking Photography, Nov. 2016. https://unthinking.photography/articles/ways-of-machine-seeing.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. “A Future for Intersectional Black Feminist Technology Studies.” Scholar & Feminist Online, Issue 13.3 – 14.1, 2016. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/safiya-umoja-noble-a-future-for-intersectional-black-feminist-technology-studies/.

Rose, Adam. “Are Face-Detection Cameras Racist?” TIME, 22 Jan. 2010. http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1954643-1,00.html.

Data’s Entry by Katherine Behar

I was really struck by Katherine Behar’s Data’s Entry performance. I liked how she rendered the concept of the burden of optimization as a physical weight, an awkward object which resists the human dancer. In her talk, she spoke about how she was inspired by Butoh and the Judson Church in using exhaustion, labor, and slow movement to counter the weightless virtuosity of classical dance. I’m a performer who uses movement, but I’ve never been trained as a dancer. Rather, I highlight my flailing and sudden movements for an immediate, confrontational effect. I will look further into this history for inspiration.

I must have had Data’s Entry in the back of my head when I wrote my proposal for my final project in my Machine Learning module. I’d like to perform the process of machine learning. To do this, I’ll train the model in real time during the performance. The graphic will first respond with a one-to-one relationship to my gestures, but it will later develop emergent, dynamic behavior from machine learning. I’ll struggle against it and ultimately lose control of it. For an ambitious goal, I’d like to have motors instead of a projection, to make the power of machine learning have physical effects on my body. The graphic entity will symbolize artificial intelligence and its relationship with the human.

In our culture, we’ve been surrounded with alarmist narratives about artificial intelligence. It will take our jobs, it will make us humans useless. Even in the terminology “machine learning,” we afford machines a human-like agency to learn. I’m excited about machine learning because of the emergent behaviors it can generate. I can tie this to Ian Bogost’s concept of alien phenomenology, where the majority of computation happens without humans in a “secret universe,” and things don’t need the perception of humans to exist.

Finally, we talked about the ideas of the user versus the programmer, both as part of an assemblage of affective bodies with equal agency. This relates closely to my research project, back to theories of interactive artworks and games. The artist or programmer may set up an environment, but the users make the interactions. The system itself also has a kind of agency in circumscribing the actions that users can take.

Ice Poseidon

In this blog post, I’ll use the concept of power topologies from Nishat Awan’s essay “Digital Narratives and Witnessing: The Ethics of Engaging with Places at a Distance” to analyze the phenomenon of IRL (in real life) livestreaming, particularly the case of Ice Poseidon.

Ice Poseidon, whose real name is Paul Denino, is the “most notorious of what are known as I.R.L. streamers” (from Ice Poseidon’s Lucrative, Stressful Life as a Live Streamer by Adrian Chen). Denino livestreams his life and viewers influence it by watching, commenting, and even affecting his physical life by regularly accosting him in the streets and swatting his home.

Awan uses the term power topologies “to describe the ability of actors to affect places across distance and proximity.” The instant communication of the internet collapses physical space and makes it possible to act across it. She further describes how technology creates these topologies:

“Topology in this context highlights the intensive nature of the world that such technologies create because as power reaches across space it is not so much traversing across a fixed space and time, as it is composing its own space–time.”

Awan describes how the internet makes places in crisis like Gwadar visible, and how digital witnessing “contributes to the portrayal of certain parts of the world as being in a permanent crisis, but one that can be influenced from afar with the click of a button.” There is a power imbalance between the privileged, first world people wielding this technology, and their depiction of these places as being in conflict.

IRL livestreaming also makes visible experiences that weren’t before, in a very different way. We are allowed continuous access into someone else’s life. The power topology is different, as all people involved have access to livestreaming technology and the time to engage with it. The streamer willingly broadcasts his life, but becomes entangled in economic realities. Chen writes that “the fact that fickle viewers are also a live streamer’s investors makes this balance more precarious than it is in perhaps any other form of entertainment.”

Awan’s topology of digital witnessing sets up viewers are empowered and the viewed are victims. In a way, Denino’s livestream also positions himself a victim. Denino is open about his mental illnesses, and viewers attempt to exploit them and upset him. The streamer makes himself visible at all times, and controls the conversation by being the object of attention. Viewers are invisible but they have the infinite agency afforded to them by the internet. Perhaps this anonymity empowers them to remotely harass Denino. Chen writes:

“Swatting has exploded in popularity in recent years, owing in part to the rise of live streaming. Previously, the hoaxer would have to imagine his target’s distress when a team of heavily armed police officers broke down his door. But, if the target is broadcasting himself live, the hoaxer can see his handiwork play out in real time.”

In this way, remote control is not only beneficial, as in the case of giving aid to people in crisis. It can also enable disruptive violence that viewers would not be inclined to do if they weren’t seeing the person affected live.

References

Awan, Nishat. “Digital Narratives and Witnessing: The Ethics of Engaging with Places at a Distance.” GeoHumanities, 2:2, 2016, pp. 311-330.

Chen, Adrian. “Ice Poseidon’s Lucrative, Stressful Life as a Live Streamer.” The New Yorker, 7 Sep. 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/ice-poseidons-lucrative-stressful-life-as-a-live-streamer.

Take Care of My Plant

For my Approaches to Play class, I read the book Pervasive Games by Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waeren. I found that the genre and its theoretical underpinnings were very relevant to my research project. In this blog post, I’ll summarize the relevant theoretical concepts behind pervasive games, and write about how they can apply to participatory internet art.

I’ve previously written about Johan Huizinga’s concept of the magic circle, the artificial boundary between game and life – specifically when discussing Mirror, my physical interactive performance from last term. For the authors, the blurring of this separation is part of what defines pervasive games, which “expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially.”

Pervasive games infiltrate into the players’ lives. Internet technology enables this by making games accessible at all times, and situating them in a variety of contexts. The authors cite Jane McGonigal’s concept of “infinite affordances: Players can use any property in their environment to conduct infinite variations of game moves.” The authors write how infinite affordances and unpredictable environment “produce emergent gameplay.” I discussed emergent disruptive possibilities of Internet games in my last post, including hacking and swatting.

Montola, Stenros, and Waeren also discuss player interaction and community. The book authors define an “online game community… as a group of people (players, spectators, and other kinds of participants) doing something together with a shared purpose.” This extends the definition beyond gaming to encompass the participatory experiences I’m researching. First, multiple players can band together online with “collective intelligence” to solve puzzles impossible for a single player. Furthermore, “any form of player-to-player interaction gives the interacting players a stronger feeling of player identification.” Finally, “being part of a game community extends the presence of the game outside play sessions.”

I’ve observed these principles in online communities outside of games. One of the examples I cited in my proposal was Take Care of My Plant, where a plant waters itself based on daily vote on a Reddit forum. The majority vote wins, so players discuss the plant’s appearance and humidity levels, as well as their own gardening knowledge, to convince other players to vote their way. Players have developed shared narratives around the plant, naming it Jeff and mourning it when it died. Because /r/takecareofmyplant is a subreddit within a larger site, the game can pervade as users browse other forums on Reddit. Because of Reddit’s algorithmic feed, I’ve had my browsing experience interrupted by the clarion call to water Jeff, and gotten pulled back into the community of remote gardeners.

References

Montola, Markus, Jaakko Stenros and Annika Waeren. Pervasive Games: Theory and Design. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2009.

In this post I’ll reflect on Mirror, the interactive performance we staged for our group project, and explore how its concepts can be applied to online participatory art, which I’m investigating for my final research project.

In our presentation, I talked about creating a magic circle during our performance, where the artificial rules defined by the performance space replace reality. In some way, it’s easier to create this boundary in physical space and time, because we can clearly define a zone for the interactivity to happen. The audience can focus only on the performance.

On the internet, the interactive artwork occupies the same context as everything else the user can do in their browser. The time when users interact is asynchronous, and the spaces are diverse and unknowable. At the same time, online artwork has the possibility to permeate into everyday life. The genre of pervasive games exploits this; I’ll explore this in a future post.

Our different performance iterations made us realize it’s important to set up a structure for interaction, with set rules and affordances. Our audience interacted more readily with the frame, because we had demonstrated a structure for them to act in: copy the person on the other side. Interacting with mirrors and laptops was much less defined, so our audience didn’t know what to do.

Online, the structure is determined by the user interface. Encoding structure makes the rules more rigid, as the code determines what the user can do. However, there are many ways for users to act disobediently online. Code can be hacked. The internet also enables emergent ways to disrupt. I recently listened to a Reply All podcast episode, “I’ve Killed People and I Have Hostages,” which reported on how viewers of Twitch livestreams can swat the streamer, making police officers show up on the stream. Online creators have much less control over what audience members can do, and the internet opens up so many disruptive possibilities.

Finally, in Mirror, we used technology as a prop and an allegory. We used laptop cameras to film and process audience members’ faces, and hoped to evoke the culture of surveillance. However, we didn’t explore the networking capabilities of technology. The curator Rachel Falconer raised this question in her feedback to our presentation, asking whether we could expand the technology to remote presence and control. In my research project, I hope to explore the potential of network technologies in interactive performance.

I’m reflecting on the touch exercises we did in class in week 9. Since then, I’ve been making work on touching and looking, mediated by devices. The exercise has informed:

• my group research performance, Mirror,
• my phone game for Approches to Play 1, Chromapose,
• my current game for Approaches to Play 2, which builds on Chromapose,
• and my final research project for this class.

In class, I touched fingertips with my partner for a minute and thirty seconds. Then I wrote.

“look at each other for 10 seconds but only so you don’t violate anyone’s comfort. wheretf else are u supposed to look for 1 min and 20 seconds.”

Then I filmed her with my phone.

“felt a power imbalance. i felt it easier to look at the screen than to look at her. … she felt more performative, more rehearsed. but if i smiled she would smile back and only one camera would see it. … i felt more like i was violating her privacy.”

I became aware of how inserting one object, a phone with a camera, unbalanced the power dynamics so deeply. Recording someone with a phone is a common, accepted activity in our society – much more than touching fingertips together. But she was aware of it and looking right back at me. An object both powerful and vulnerable.

For both Mirror and Chromapose, I designed game structures which incentivized people to interact with each other. I like the idea of touch but – as I rediscovered with this exercise – actually touching is awkward for me. I had to create a magic circle, where normal rules were suspended and players could be comfortable to move with each other. Just the right amount of unease. For Chromapose, this is why I designed the phone interface to direct players to  move in a specific direction. I choreographed their movements with their phones’ gyroscope, and they arranged themselves in space by looking at each other. Still then, I couldn’t get them to touch each other. For my Approaches to Play project this term, I’m extending Chromapose to choreograph a dance between two players, mediated with phones and glances and maybe even contact.

In some ways, we recreated the contact exercise for our Mirror performance we did a few days after it. I touched a stranger with a frame between us. I looked straight into his eyes. Afterwards, I felt shy to talk to him whenever I saw him elsewhere. The magic circle was gone. We also staged “contact at a distance” with technology in between, by putting laptops with cameras in front of our faces. I was blind. I felt at once exposed and hidden. The audience could see us but only our prerecorded faces mixed with their live ones on a screen. We hoped to evoke the unequal, mediated ways of looking and interacting with each other in our mediated society.

How do the topologies created by devices and their cameras choreograph our movements through the world? I think smartphones open up so many new ways of looking and moving, from zombie walking in the street to extending your arms with selfie sticks to FaceTiming someone on the other side of the world. With the advent of smartphones, anything can be recorded covertly, posted on the Internet without your knowledge. People self-police themselves to be undetected by cameras above (surveillance) and below (the topological network of everyones’ phone cameras).

Beyond phones, the Internet has made possible myriad configurations of remote viewing and control. For my final research project, I’m putting even more layers between people – the whole Internet. It’s still possible to have meaningful contact, in some sense of the world, but it’s mediated through so many networks and structures. Livestreaming. Chat rooms. So many topologies of looking, so many different possible configurations. I hope to design a online participatory artwork which produces novel ways of interacting with people.

clairekwong.com/touch
(open on mobile phone and touch with multiple fingers)

I developed this mobile game in a 2-hour game jam in my Approaches to Play class. We were given minutes to think of an idea, and I thought of the introduction to Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing by David Parisi I read earlier that week. I wanted to try coding with multitouch in JavaScript. I also wanted to exploit the sensory disconnect that arises when you look at sticky, pliant flesh and instead feel a flat phone surface.

I’ve been interested in using touch in art and play experiences for a while now. I think touch as a sense is underexplored. As Parisi writes, our technological experience of touch is circumscribed by device capabilities: flat surfaces, vibrating phones. He describes this as “touchscreen’s homogenization of previously diverse sites of physical interfacing.” Furthermore, “vibrational feedback (rendered with increased precision by new algorithms, motors, and actuators) becomes the means of recapturing and recalling the lost materiality of those media and objects subsumed in the touchscreen.”

Parisi writes of a “haptic subject [which] functions as both a driver and an outcome of research on the tactual senses; it is not only a subject who actively touches (consistent with Foucault’s questioning, listening, seeing, and observing subjects) but also a subject who was passively touched, poked, prodded, shocked, and caressed by scientific instruments, with the goal of revealing the nature of a touch that transcended the confines and peculiarities of an individual body.” He situates this in the context of operationalizing touch in technology and scientific knowledge.

We are still haptic subjects. We touch: we tap, swipe, and caress our screens. We are touched: vibrations provide haptic reciprocation under our fingers, and jolt us from our pockets to call attention to an incoming alert.

I’ve been exploring touch, specifically in mobile games. My first iteration of my game Chromapose involved two people touching their phones and each other. The phones would vibrate to give feedback. Very quickly I realized that iOS web browsers prohibit the JavaScript vibration API. This is understandable; vibration drains the battery, and I can imagine it being abused by ads and other things vying for the user’s attention. In my touch game above, I saw that the multitouch API only allows 5 fingers to be recognized at a time. I had been brainstorming ways to force multiplayer collaboration by requiring 11 fingers on the screen. This is an example of how technology is built around a haptic subject; presumably, a single person who only uses one hand or two thumbs to touch their screen.

There are also psychological and sociological dimensions to touch. My instructor Phoenix Perry referred to her experience developing her game Bot Party to show me how difficult it was to overcome social boundaries to get people to touch each other. I ended up making players look, speak, and move with one another, but not touch. I’m interested in iterating on this game for the second term, and perhaps build opportunities for closer coordination and maybe even touch.

References

Parisi, David. Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Exhausting a Crowd by Kyle McDonald

What is the overarching area of research?

I will research participatory internet art and design a speculative interactive online art project.

What are the key questions or queries you will address?

• How can online participatory art create social structures between people?
• What are the (para)social and interpersonal dynamics of these relations?
• How do internet technology and interfaces facilitate and influence this?

Why are you motivated to undertake this project?

I’ve long been fascinated by participatory online art and the communities they create. I investigated interactive performance in last term’s group project, but I’d like to see what changes when it goes online. Participatory internet art is a relatively new medium; it’s becoming more prominent now due to improved internet technology. These kinds of projects may not be framed as art, so academic analysis is lacking. I’d like to analyze this medium through theoretical frameworks, particularly interactive art, performance art, and game studies.

Examples of participatory online art projects:

• “Twitch Plays Pokemon,” where a chat controls a Pokemon game through text commands
• “Take Care of My Plant” by Tyler Jay Wood, where a plant waters itself based on daily community vote
• Ice Poseidon’s Twitch channel by Paul Denino, where he livestreams his life and viewers influence it to extreme lengths
• “Exhausting a Crowd” by Kyle McDonald, where online viewers comment on people in a livestream of a crowd
• “Die With Me” by Dries Depoorter and David Surprenant, a mobile chat room that users can only join if their battery is less than 5%

For the practice component, I’ve never designed an online participatory project and I’m excited to explore a new medium. I’m interested in transposing the interpersonal complexity of performance and interactive art onto a networked space. I’d like to fully explore the social and emotional possibilities of this medium.

I’m choosing to design a speculative project because this assignment focuses on theoretical rather than technical achievement. Also, participatory online artworks can require a lot of complex technology, and it’s difficult and uncertain to get players to interact. I’d like to take advantage of the speculative nature of this project to design at a large, ambitious scale. Depending on the outcome, I may realize the project in the future.

What theoretical frameworks will you use in your work to guide you?

• Interactive and participatory art
• Performance art
• Game studies
• Internet and network studies

What theoretical frameworks will you use in the analysis of your project?

• Interaction design
• Speculative design

How will you document your project?

In my paper, I will write analyses of a few participatory internet art projects. I will also explain the reasoning and design process behind my own speculative project.

I will develop a front-end web prototype that simulates my participatory art project. The user should be able to interact with it as though they were really participating.

I’ll also write descriptions and diagrams of how the back-end technology should work. Finally, I’ll write about the ideal participatory outcomes of the project.

Timeline for project milestones

• March 4: Select texts
• March 18: Read texts
• March 25: Annotated bibliography
• March 25: Select interactive online artworks to analyze
• April 1: Develop idea for participatory online project
• April 15: Design participatory online project
• April 29: Develop web prototype
• May 13: Write paper
• May 13: Post to blog

Budget

• Domain name – ~£20

Annotated Bibliography

Burrough, Xtine, editor. Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design. London: Routledge, 2011.

Net Works provides case studies of internet art projects, grouped into themes. The chapter particularly relevant to my project is “Crowdsourcing and Participation.” Burrough herself designs participatory projects for networked publics. She analyzes one of her own projects, “Mechanical Olympics.” This chapter presents a theoretical discussion of crowdsourcing, though it focuses more on labor than social relationships. The chapter also provides a history of developments in online communication, and how that influenced net art.

In their chapter “Google Maps Road Trip” from the same section, Peter Baldes and Marc Horowitz describe their project which involves livestreaming and a chat room. This provides insight into how participatory online art facilitates interpersonal relationships.

Other relevant chapters to my project are “Communities,” “Surveillance,” and “Performance.” In the “Surveillance” section, Lee Walton writes about his project “F’Book,” which uses existing tools (Facebook) to subvert his social community. In the section “Performance,” Jonah Brucker-Cohen describes his participatory artwork “Alerting Infrastructure,” where online viewers affect the physical destruction of a building. The text delves into how the bidirectional relationship operates between viewer and artwork.

The book is structured as artists describing their own artworks. This provides a valuable insider perspective of the artists’ intentions, technical development, and conclusions. However, these perspectives may lack objectivity. Because the book only focuses on specific artworks, its scope is limited. The tone is for the casual reader rather than academic. I found that there wasn’t enough analysis of audience behavior. The book was written in 2011, and the technologies and internet it describes are already slightly dated.

Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016.

Isbister writes from the discipline of game studies. In her chapter “Social Play,” she presents a sociological approach to game design, where developers create social situations for players to interact together. She introduces three building blocks for social digital games: coordinated action, role play, and social situations. All of these are applicable not only to games but more broadly to interactive art.

While Isbister writes about interactive games, she also brings the theoretical framework to online play. In her chapter “Bridging Distance to Create Intimacy and Connection,” Isbister examines how networked games can create “connection, empathy, and closeness” through “asynchronous mass play.” She covers several ways game designers can foster networked relationships through “powerful minimalist tools for coordinated action and communication.” She also describes how multiplayer networked games can create communities organizing for collective action. I’ve seen similar communities emerge around interactive online art projects.

Though I believe game design is a useful framework for looking at interactive art, it can be limiting. Isbister’s case studies only encompass established games like Words With Friends and Journey, rather than interactive art projects. Moreover, the interactions she describes between players are mostly positive moments of closeness and connection. I’d like to explore more complex relationships that this medium can facilitate.

Kwastek, Katja. Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013.

In Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art, Kwastek presents a theory about the aesthetics of interaction, which focuses on “describing and analyzing the actions and the processes of perception and knowledge acquisition that are made possible through engagement with interactive media art.”

Kwastek begins by offering historical context for interactive digital art. She writes about performance art, social sculpture, and games, and describes how principles used there are precursors to contemporary interactive art. She outlines how the internet enables telepresence and remote control, and how art can use these capabilities.

In the chapter “The Aesthetics of Play,” Kwastek outlines the theoretical principles of both play and performance. In the next, “The Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art,” she breaks down interactive art into components of actors, space, time, and interactivity. The modular nature of these principles makes it easy for me to apply to analyzing other interactive artworks.

Finally, Kwastek presents case studies from interactive artworks. She focuses less on internet art and more on physical spaces. In the internet artworks she covers, “Agatha Appears” by Olia Lialina and “Bubble Bath” by Susanne Berkenheger, the viewer’s role is mostly as an observer. However, Kwastek also writes about how Sonia Cillari uses the “performer as interface” in her physical performance “Se Mi Sei Vicino.” I can apply those ideas towards my own analyses of performative internet art.

This book is a valuable theoretical grounding for my project. I can analyze existing participatory internet art projects as well as develop my own with Kwastek’s framework.

Reference list

Burrough, Xtine, editor. Net Works: Case Studies in Web Art and Design. London: Routledge, 2011.

Candy, Linda and Sam Ferguson, editors. Interactive Experience in the Digital Age: Evaluating New Art Practice. Nottingham: Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2014.

Greene, Rachel. Internet Art. London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2004.

Himmelsbach, Sabine, editor. Gateways: Art and Networked Culture. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011.

Hope, Cat and John Ryan. Digital Arts: An Introduction to New Media. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2016.

Kholeif, Omar, editor. You Are Here: Art After the Internet. Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications, 2014.

Kwastek, Katja. Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013.

Human Sensor by Kasia Molga

In this week’s seminar, someone proposed that we might trust data at the expense of trusting our own senses. Nowadays, electronic sensors are all around us and have become ambient parts of our lives. I check the weather app on my phone more often than holding my hand outside the window. I trust “expert” and scientific data about the weather, distilled into a number of degrees, more than my own sensations, even though I’ll only be feeling my own sensations when I step outside.

With the advent of consumer microcontrollers like the Arduino, electronic sensors have become more widely available. The Arduino has been adopted by the maker movement and digital arts, as it’s taught in our Physical Computing module here at Goldsmiths. Sensors are also being used throughout industry, with movements like the Internet of Things (IoT). I worked for a company that created an IoT platform, and I watched us shift our focus from hobbyists to industry. From the maker movement to Industry 4.0, people have used sensors to promote the narrative that we can more easily understand and control the world.

For electronic sensors, all physical phenomena can be translated into voltage levels from 0 to 1. Sensations become numbers. In her chapter “Sensing Climate Change and Expressing Environmental Citizenship,” Jennifer Gabrys writes:

“The basis for understanding environmental change as change is understood through modes of systematicity that focus on particular variables over time, so that shifts within variables establish the evidence for degrees and intensity of change.”

This creates the illusion of understanding, but is biased by the tools and systems of measurement. This is also reductive, ignoring many of humans’ subjective senses. The complex behaviors of the world are reduced to what an Arduino can sense through commercially available sensors. In class, we talked about how computational art that uses sensing aestheticizes the data. Processing sensory data through a microcontroller also aestheticizes it. At my job, I implemented graphs which translated raw data into beautiful infographics which aimed to create a sense of understanding.

Sliding down the spectrum from science to art, we looked at Kasia Molga’s artworks “Coral Love Story” and “Human Sensor” in class. Our class seemed to critique the pieces more on an artistic level than a scientific one. If an artist aestheticizes a problem (coral bleaching), does it lose its scientific validity and impact? I wasn’t aware of coral bleaching before watching the video, and now I am. But I don’t feel compelled to do anything about it, or know that I even can.

Similarly, “Human Sensor” aimed to convey air quality into a performance, but the performance itself was quite abstract; it relied on a projection which described the piece and its message. I often find that the wall text of an artwork does a lot of conceptual lifting, and should be considered part of the piece. Also, perhaps there wasn’t a direct sensory connection from the air quality to the dancers’ suits. I think that performances don’t necessarily have to have working electronics to make an impact. The audience only sees what’s on the surface, and the artist shouldn’t need to create a working electronic system if that’s not the focus of the piece. (We discussed this in Atau Tanaka’s module on live performance.) In this case, the aesthetics and the message was more important. Art can be speculative.

Art is commonly considered subjective, and science objective. We trust science, not art. I’m interested in finding the midpoint where an artwork is aesthetically pleasing and digestible to humans, but still conveys a scientific message.

References

Gabrys, Jennifer. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Electronic Mediations). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

I enjoyed Sarah Wiseman’s guest lecture on repurposing emoji for personalized communication. I found it very relatable. In my last job, my coworkers made a game out of combining Skype’s animated emojis into company in-jokes. Since leaving, I feel a loss at losing those weird emoji, since I rarely use Skype now. I can use the 🤮 emoji, but it won’t look the same – the animated face won’t reluctantly eat up its last drop of vomit before starting the loop again. (This relates to Wiseman’s discussion about the changing appearance and meaning of the 🍑.) And it won’t mean the same thing when it’s not typed furtively, subversively into a work chat window.

The question, whether other people use emoji in personalized ways, seemed a little odd to me to be investigated in such a scientific way. Repurposing emoji seemed to me to be a natural affordance of the medium. Where people like word play, they’ll also play with emojis. But maybe it seems natural to me because I do it and I’m part of a target audience who would do it – millennials who use text as a primary mode of communication.

I think grounded theory is a fitting way to approach this question. Emoji use is personal and subjective, so it can be categorized into themes. At the same time, emoji are succinct symbols, and the problem can be easily distilled into questions – why emoji? Why that emoji? Who are you communicating with?

I’m really interested in private internet behavior like this. I have my own that I’ve never told anyone, and I see bits of others through social media, forum posts, and think piece series (Rabbit Holes at Slate, I Think About This A Lot at The Cut). Has everyone curated their social media feeds to the same extent I have? Has anyone else spent hours reading about cryptids on Wikipedia? As discussed in a previous blog post, who else feels anxious when their fat finger hovers over an Instagram post?

Can we use grounded theory to investigate other kinds of private internet behavior? I think it can be a good approach, but it can run into limitations. Not all research questions are as contained as emoji use. I can formulate questions about a particular behavior, but these will probably be reductive and won’t be easily gathered into a spreadsheet. Peoples’ private behaviors online are sprawling and varied.

I thought it was interesting to discuss grounded theory as a scientific approach, when it’s applying rules to subjective experiences. At every stage, the people involved impose their own subjectivity: the researcher surveys a small, self-selecting group, the subjects describe their own behavior, the researcher assigns themes that they see. The researcher doesn’t read theories about the subject beforehand, but if they’re already immersed in that world, I think it’d be difficult to avoid it completely.

Maybe an objective, universal theory is impossible, so it’s not the goal here? At what point does a process gain or lose scientific validity? Are there other ways to research more complex private internet behavior?

References

Wiseman, Sarah, and Sandy JJ Gould. “Repurposing Emoji for Personalised Communication: Why pizza slice means “I love you”.” In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p. 152. ACM, 2018.

Answer Me by Anri Sala at New Museum, New York

For this week’s reading, I found it interesting to compare curators’ perspectives on exhibiting digital art to my own experiences as a spectator.

I’ve observed the same thing as Boris Groys when he writes, in “Curating in the Post-Internet Age,” that “the audiences of contemporary art exhibitions are often local, while the exhibited art is often international. This means that contemporary art does not have a narrow, elitist view, but, on the contrary, a broader, universalist perspective.”

The Internet is global, and it’s at once a distinct place and placeless. As I’ve traveled throughout the years, I’ve observed the same artists showing up in every new media art exhibition. The ultra-modern aesthetic of each place, often designed by a starchitect, supersedes its local context. I’ve seen this described elsewhere as the Airbnb or WeWork aesthetic, where every urban space collapses into the same feeling. Perhaps these samey museum spaces are like the collapsed contexts of Twitter or Instagram where these same artists (more natively) display their work.

But Internet art in physical space holds my attention. I’m there to look at art, as opposed to the distractions of the Internet. I also find that the artworks that I enjoy most are site-specific spatial installations that mix new media with space and could not exist online. In “New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art,” Christiane Paul wrote that “video art is now presented less frequently on monitors and more often shown as projections or even elaborate installations, automatically lifting the context” (35). This kind of work succeeds when the artist has designed it specifically for the installation context, or thoughtfully transposed its original Internet context into physical space.

Groys further writes:

“Even if all data on the internet is globally accessible, in practice the internet leads not to the emergence of a universal public space but to a tribalization of the public. The reason for that is very simple. The internet reacts to the user’s questions, to the user’s clicks. The user finds on the internet only what he or she wants to find.”

This is true not only of art. I’ve written about filter bubbles earlier on this blog, and how they can shape thought and communities. There are certainly distinct spaces on the internet – Art Twitter, for example – shaped by who people choose to follow. At the same time, the Internet is centralizing into a few large social networks, like Twitter and Instagram. I see parallels between this centralization and the similar Airbnb aesthetic of large cities.

Paul asked in 2008 “whether Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (created by mini-societies that live outside social conventions) can be translated into “Cultural Autonomous Zones”-as online spaces of creative practice where established cultural and institutional contracts do not apply.” I disagree. There are rules of the Internet, just different ones, and they’re shaped by the social platforms we publish content on. I don’t think there’s ever such thing as a true autonomous zone.

As a sidenote, I found Groys’ assertion problematic: that irritation about globalized contemporary art exhibitions “is often the same kind of irritation that migration provokes today in Europe.” Migrants are far from the elite creative class of international artists. Sure, the world may be trending more xenophobic, but these are very different categories of people – one with much more privilege than the other.

References

Groys, Boris. “Curating in the Post-Internet Age.” e-flux journal, #94, Oct. 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/94/219462/curating-in-the-post-internet-age/.

Paul, Christiane, editor. “New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Excellences and Perfections by Amalia Ulman

When I was thinking of a disobedient intervention into Instagram, my mind went to two extremes. One is using the platform to broadcast subversive narratives. I think of Amalia Ulman’s artwork “Excellences and Perfections,” a fictional narrative told through Instagram about the dark sides of image obsession. Or computer generated influencers like Lil Miquela. The subversive pop star Poppy. All these artists are playing with self-expression on Instagram and commenting on Instagram as a platform for it. But any expression within Instagram is still using and playing within their system. More likes, more views, more ads. I also couldn’t help but associate pushing falsehoods on Instagram with the darker pattern of fake news and misinformation.

The other extreme is being a ghost. I want to focus on a dark pattern of Instagram, of broadcasting viewing activity without explicit consent. I don’t post much on social media, and I prefer to look. I was horrified when I realized (from a thirdhand source) that when I viewed a person’s story on the new Stories feature, that person could see that I had viewed. I didn’t know what this notification looked like, so I imagined something really violating, like a real-time notification that someone had looked at you. Instagram doesn’t make you aware of this unless you post your own story, which can be a pretty vulnerable thing to do. This – telling people that you’re looking at them, without your explicit consent – is a new social optics that is unnatural in our physical society. It’s a dark pattern that I’ve noticed more and more on social platforms.

To a lesser extent, I worry about accidentally double-tapping to like a picture that I maybe shouldn’t have been looking at. Even where my swiping finger is, if it hovers precariously over a like button… it induces anxiety in me that I might push something I shouldn’t, that my private browsing will be exposed. This is an interface where it’s too easy to physically slip up and have real social consequences. Perhaps accidentally watching or liking something isn’t really that bad, but we don’t know how people will react. Feeling fragile and paranoid of being seen isn’t a good feeling to have on social networks.

I avoided looking at Stories for a while, feeling self-conscious. I used a Chrome browser extension to watch them for a while, but I could never be sure whether my views were being recorded. If they weren’t, my story watching experience became less efficient, as stories began to repeat themselves. I decided that my own privacy was less important than my convenient user experience. This is how it happens – how new dark user patterns begin to be accepted by society.

For my disobedient intervention, I’d use the Instagram API to pull images and stories onto a separate site which I can fat-finger my way all around without causing unnecessary social drama. Conceptually, this would be a sort of screen which disables interaction as you scroll through Instagram or any other social network. All of my activity would be hidden from Instagram and other users of the site. I wouldn’t see any ads, and when I would go on Instagram, they won’t be targeted at me. (Unless Instagram has ways of tracking API use, which I wouldn’t be surprised at.)

If I made this widely available, it would make social networks less social. It’d strengthen parasocial interaction while stunting real social interaction. Interaction would become more of a conscious, active thing, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing. It would promote stalking in the lighthearted sense, of being more curious to look at people without repercussions, but also enable it in a real, more sinister sense. I would feel more comfortable, but perhaps it would be more unequal for the people sharing. Self-presentation is easier when you know your audience, and this would make the audience a little bit more anonymous. Instagram wouldn’t be able to sell ads as effectively. The social network would know less about us. It’d be better for people like me who just like to look.

Original sociotechnical map of Instagram (created with Izzy McLellan and Elina Virdziniece):

Map of my refigured disobedient version: