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Art & Culture My Projects Technology

This happened Edinburgh #2

Hop, by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (tinker.it)
Hop, by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino (tinker.it)

On May 4, the second This happened Edinburgh event will take place, in our swanky new digs at the Voodoo Rooms. The speakers are great: Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Jen Southern, Andrew Spitz, and Ben Dembroski.

The event sold out in under an hour! However, we’ll soon be posting videos of the talks, from this event and from the previous event, so stay tuned. If you want to follow all the This happened Edinburgh news, become a fan on Facebook, use the #thedi hashtag on twitter, or just keep an eye on the This happened website.

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Art & Culture My Lectures Technology

Extra Ears and Transhuman Dance Recitals

stelarc

I’m really pleased to be chairing a panel that will be exploring what our physical selves could be in the future at the upcoming Edinburgh Science Festival. Entitled “Bodies of the Future“, the panel will examine exactly that, but also the other issues around how technology shapes our relationship with the physical environment and the multifaceted identities we create.

Panelists Stelarc (Brunel University), Martyn Ware (the Illustrious Company), Andrew Shoben (Greyworld), and Dr Jonathan Freeman (Goldsmiths, University of London) will explore the shifting boundaries between the technologically adapted body, concepts of self, and senses of place.

While we’re touching on the subject, I can’t resist embedding this piece by video artist Jeremy Bailey. “Transhuman Dance Recital #1” humourously raises some of the questions around popular conceptions of transhumanism, that I’m certain we’ll also explore on the panel — among many other issues.

Panel details: “Bodies of the Future”: Stelarc, Martyn Ware, Andrew Shoben, Dr Jonathan Freeman, Chaired by Michelle Kasprzak. Edinburgh Science Festival, Wed Apr 15, 2009, at 19:00. Book tickets here. Presented by PEACH – Presence research in action, and supported by Edinburgh Napier University. Stelarc’s Ear PORTRAIT taken by nina sellars, originally uploaded by k0re.

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Art & Culture My Projects Technology

Creating Spaces: Net Art in the “Real World”

afk

A short while ago, I wrote a lead article for the latest issue of the electronic magazine of the Centre international d’art contemporain de MontrĂ©al (CIAC). CIAC was created in 1983 and since 1998, it has been producing the Biennale de MontrĂ©al.

In the article I wrote, Creating Spaces: Net Art in the “Real World”, I look back on Canadian net art history, filtered through the lens of projects that have strong links to occurrences and objects in the offline world. As I mention in the article, “These links between online and offline, net art and other forms, has proven to be one of net art’s most consistent strengths in recent history, underpinning the critical complexity of the works and adding to the durability of these works over time.” I discuss the work of Wayne Dunkley, Michelle Teran & Isabelle Jenniches, Willy Le Maitre & Eric Rosenzveig, and Risa Horowitz.

Image: AFK by Michelle Teran & Isabelle Jenniches

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Technology

What’s in a name?

facebook

As my attachment to online social networking sites (Facebook in particular) grows, my nitpicking about them seems to deepen. I’d like far too much control, in the form of having several different levels of “friends”, complicated veils of privacy control, and to do a bit more with the messaging options.

First of all, it’s incredibly difficult to choose which service to go for, because of the levels of complexity involved. Essentially what these sites are purporting to do is represent and mediate your entire social life, so this is no small task. Inevitably, many of us just join them all (see Anil Dash’s hilarious “Thanks for the Add!” post that underscores how far you can take this). Not only is this labour-intensive, however, it is also mostly a waste of time. Or, as Anil put it: “Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is stupid. […] hoping people manually recreate these networks over and over isn’t just an annoyance for really geeky people like me; It also acts as a barrier to people creating new, useful services, because it’s just cruel to ask people to clear this social networking hurdle yet again.”

However, let’s just say you are not as geeky as Anil Dash is (or as I am), and you only belong to one service. Let’s also pretend it’s paradise: everyone in the world is signed up to it and so you don’t need to send those pesky emails convincing friends to sign up. The next issue you face is that the whole thing is just too binary – someone is your friend, or they aren’t. Someone is in your “network”, or they aren’t.

I recently joined (and promptly let fester) an account at a new community/sharing/etc site called Pownce. In one of the shared conversations, Matt Jones had this to say about the binary relationships proposed by this type of site:

“I know I’m biased but I wish people would just ditch/rethink so much of the default language around YASNSs, e.g. Pownce’s “Fan, Friend, ‘you denied friendship’. It’s so autistic. My preference is to describe what is happening to the information, not your relationships e.g. ‘share messages with X’… A return to cybernetics, my “friends””.

Matt’s point is underscored by the trauma induced by refusing a “friend” request that Joshua Schachter describes:

“…since these systems make implicit relationship information explicit, deleting someone becomes a loud signal. In real life you would merely back off a bit, but the systems only allow you to express a binary sort of relationship.”

top friends
So, what to do? Something like the Facebook application Top Friends (picture above) is really the lowest kind of hack. Besides being rather Grade-Five-schoolyard in its approach, it’s a bit odd that an external application has to do the work of helping you to make these subtle (or not-so-subtle) shades of grey between friends. This kind of functionality should exist in the applications themselves, as they currently stand. Otherwise, no single one of them will stand out enough to truly save us from a list of site subscriptions as long as Anil Dash’s.

(Though OpenSocial looks to change a few things about how these sites might be used in the future…)