Author: MK

At last, I am back on Canadian soil! For you statistics junkies, here are some numbers generated during my two month jaunt:

40 Kg of luggage on the return flight (those dratted festival catalogues!)
12 lighters lost or stolen (mostly in France)
6 countries visited (France, Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Austria, England)
5 airlines (Air Transat, Finnair, Wizzair, Tyrolean Airlines, Ryanair)
5 conferences/workshops/festivals attended (Rencontres Internationales d’art Contemporain de Chizé, ISEA 2004, TCM Progress Workshop by Makrolab, ARS Electronica, UbiComp)
4 types of currency spent (Euro, Hungarian Forint, Estonian Kroon, UK Pounds Sterling)
3 gigs scored as a result of attending the above noted events (one writing gig, two lectures)
2 computer crashes that required zeroing of the hard drive (one in France and one in Hungary)
{{popup haircut.jpg makrolab barbershop 300×403}}1 impromptu haircut (on Suomenlinna Island)

Perhaps “fisticuffs” is a bit dramatic, but there were certainly some conflicts on the panels this year at ARS. A bit of conflict is refreshing, as it gets tiring going to conferences were everyone agrees all the time, non?

A notable clash happened during the “Disruption” panel, moderated by the clever and engaging Jonah Brucker-Cohen. Bruce Sterling gave his “When Blobjects Rule the Earth” speech, which he had previously delivered as the SIGGRAPH 2004 keynote. Sterling painted a rather bleak portrait of the future: the elderly will blog everything, because they love complaining and will have nothing else to do; we will be more or less in thrall to “spimes”, which are objects that are “smart” and have email addresses and other amenities; and that people who love their gadgets already do a lot of free work for the corporations that make them, and this situation will only become more severe, as corporations rely more and more heavily on the early adopters to do the alpha testing for them. There’s a transcript of his speech, more or less, on boing boing.

Krzysztof Wodiczko, looking very princely and having just delivered an eloquent lecture that outlined some elements of his practice using technology in public space to give voices to those who may not always feel they have a voice, stepped up to confront Sterling. In his considered, serious way, he spoke for a few minutes about his dismay at this vision of the future, of his desire to strive for a utopic vision to counter Sterling’s dystopic vision, and of the need to not simply submit to this prediction for the future but to strive for something better. The audience responded with enthusiastic applause. Wodiczko’s comments provided an essential counterpoint to Sterling’s rapid-fire description of our relationship with technology in coming years.

Another rousing moment occurred on the “Spirit” panel between Marvin Minsky, computer science pioneer, and Geetha Narayanan. Minsky was making some fairly controversial statements about culture being irrelevant (to a roomful of mostly artists). Geetha neatly shot him down by letting him know that that was a pretty easy thing for him to say (being an old white male) and that of course culture plays a major part in nearly everyone’s lives (except maybe for hermits!) Sherry Turkle tried to mediate this rift by stating she thinks that technology is increasingly becoming part of people’s culture and daily reality.

And conflicting views didn’t just exist on the panels. I didn’t spot this parody of the ARS Electronica poster, but I am grateful to Katherine Moriwaki for telling me about it and posting a picture on her blog.

Last evening Marc Tuters and I hosted a discussion session. The intention was to spark the creation of the manifesto/policy/common practices document that the group here at Makrolab hopes to create.

The discussion was long and fruitful, and began with simply showing case studies of the following projects:

->Amsterdam Real Time A map of Amsterdam emerges as people traverse the city with GPS receivers
->Elephant Paths Mapping of paths that people make that stray from paved/marked paths
->[murmur] Cellphone-driven, site-specific archival audio project
->Teletaxi GPS-triggered video clips playing in the backseat of a taxicab
->HP’s Cooltown HP’s sanitized vision of the smart future
->BioMapping Track your emotional reaction to the city by wearing body sensors
->Trace Mapping Wi-Fi zones in SF
->One Block Radius Obsessive mapping of one block in NYC
->PDPal Track your “emotional GPS” with the Urban Park Ranger in Times Square

There were a few main points that were raised in the discussion after the show and tell of case studies that really resonated with me.

Money and time are constant problems for creators to confront unless they are affiliated with a research lab/corporation/institution. This leads grassroots creators and artists to become opportunistic, that is co-opt the systems made available to them by institutions/corporations (witness Teletaxi’s co-opting of a failed advertising medium, and the widespread use of GPS which was developed as a military technology, etc.) Visionary practice, on the other hand, would involve attempting to author our own vision of the future, instead of just accepting “bones” thrown to creators from large institutions.

Governmental and corporate decisions drastically impact opportunistic creation practice (as opposed to “visionary” practice, which would try to forge out on its own and have some degree of autonomy). Do creators really understand how beholden they are? Do they really know how GPS works? Do they just use these technologies without a deep understanding? But that begs the question: how deep do you need to grasp the technologies you use? It’s one thing to understand GPS and satellites, but shall we also take it as far as understanding where the electricity that powers your laptop comes from? This understanding is obviously informative and in some cases necessary, but does it ultimately matter since there are usually ways to sidestep a system should it be shut off (ex. tomorrow the United States decided to turn off GPS.) Refer to Chris Heathcote’s 35 ways to find your location (PowerPoint file) for a good summary of alternative processes to determine location.

Also, are we interested in making Swiss Army knives or a really great absinthe spoon? Specialization vs. generalization is an old problem. Schuyler showed an example of a very minimalist driving directions map that reduced the path you are intended to take to a nearly context-less line. This is an example of an elegant and perfect absinthe spoon. It only has one function, but that is all it needs.

The full notes are online at the workshop wiki, as are the developing manifesto notes.

On the first night of the Makrolab workshop here on Suomenlinna Island, Jo and Schuyler gave a great presentation called “Maps Tell Stories”, which outlined a number of examples that illustrate the narrative power of maps.

Schuyler provided an imaginary example of visualizing what Europe would look like if the sea level were to rise 10 metres – which would quite significantly change the shape of Europe (we would completely lose Amsterdam, for example). This example in particular made me reflect on the possibilties of maps to tell whatever story you wanted them to tell. This speculative map feeds an environmentalists’ argument that we risk losing Amsterdam if we pay no heed to the global warming problem. A conservative might, for example, attempt to map immigration patterns and use it as an argument for stricter controls.

Using mapping to display contradictions and speculations is undoubtedly a powerful narrative tool, that can be used for pure fantasy or political manipulation. Maps are often taken for granted, and seen as benign, but it is clearly important to question the source of the map and the intention behind representing a particular subset of data within it.