ludic pyjamas | stories about play and cultural [net]working

Unmanned, playing tolerance to reality

By ludic pyjamas | Published: May 12, 2012

Unmanned, Molleindustria, unmanned_molleindustria.jpg

[short review for neural]

Molleindustria’ s games have traditionally aimed to put the player in a rather uncomfortable or unusual position. Previous games have asked users to run McDonald’s businesses, to hide church scandals in Italy, or to supervise child labour in Congo. The team of radical Italian game designers have launched their latest challenge: ‘Unmanned‘ invites you to become a UAV pilot and follow the character throughout his daily routine. Players attempt to not cut themselves shaving (and that’s the only ‘real’ blood you will see) and to be a good husband while talking on the phone; to try not to miss a moving living target via a radar at work and play first person shooting games with sons at home. Every time you succeed in your role different medals await you. But as with all Molleindustria’s games, this is not the point. Unmanned is not about checking or developing your skills and competencies but rather about realising your indifference and tolerance to an existing reality. The game will remind you of the Collateral Murder video, leaked by wikileaks two years ago and it will most likely freak you out. It will make you wonder about the sense of playing it in the first place. But that’s only because Unmanned shows the power video games have as a medium for addressing human sensibilities. Games are about choices, just like life itself. Imagine what happens when fiction and real terror come so close.

Posted in Ludic Thoughts, neural | Tagged political games | Leave a comment

Interview with Ian Bogost

By ludic pyjamas | Published: May 12, 2012

from Neural

You are known as a game designer, a writer, a critic, a researcher, a professor. You have an intense presence and activity in the field of independent gaming, although you come from the field of comparative literature. What attracted you the most into the gaming realm? Were you a gamer yourself, since a kid?

It’s not so big a shift as it may seem. I grew up with the microcomputer, like everybody who grew up I the 1970s or 1980s. I didn’t have them at home right away, but we always did at school, and at friends’ houses. And I learned LOGO and then BASIC, and played the Atari and the Intellivison and so forth. So, from an early age, I had a strong relationship with and interest in computing, and in videogames. But then, I was always also interested in other things: books and art in particular, and later philosophy. Eventually I took degrees in philosophy and comparative literature, but I started out in university in computer science. Then the 1990s tech boom happened, and I worked in the technology, advertising, entertainment, and gaming industries most of the way through undergraduate and all the way through graduate school. Games were (and remain) my attempt to bridge the worlds of computing and culture, of machines and ideas. Unlike most other kinds of software, games have the greatest similarity to other forms of cultural creativity, but then they also have something different: a toe dipped in the conceit of rationalism, of mathematics, of science.

The gaming field has definitely changed and expanded a lot though the last years. Your recent book “How to do things with videogames” offers a great insight into the different fields games nowadays intersect with. “Games are models of experience” you write. But how do things change when our life experiences look more and more like game experiences? Could they become more pleasurable, as gamification supporters would argue? Could we become addicted to certain life practices just like we may have become addicted to games?

Perhaps one of the differences between the gamification perspective and the games-as-medium perspective (which is what I offer in How to do things with videogames) has to do with the amount of overlap between games and world. The gamifiers want to make life “better”-or at least more structured and game-like-thinking that games offer a better or more efficient or more predictable model for behavior. But I feel just the opposite: games offer a place we can go to experience the weird differences between the world and models of it. In the past I’ve called this a crisis, a “simulation fever” or “simsickness” that the game imposes by temporarily formalizing and accounting for reality. This approach can apply to a variety of domains-in the book I cover art, advertising, music, politics, pornography, relaxation, transit and many more. But perhaps we don’t really want our life experiences to be more like game experiences. Perhaps we’re mistaken about that. What if we are, and we build that world anyway?

The social web is probably one of the terrains where gamification has become more apparent. By counting numbers of friends, likes, comments, following our newsfeed board and joining social games like Farmville, we become -consciously or unconsciously- the new social gamers of our times. Your Cow Clicker project was a humorous critique towards gamification’s strategies. People were invited to simply click on cow every six hours and they would earn more… clicks. This beautiful irony was however unexpectedly received as a social game! Thousands of people around the world were clicking and clicking.What does this say for today’s emerging social gamer?

For one, it says that you can’t choose your successes. But it may also suggest that I underestimated the game, that it was in fact possible to create this crisis zone that is Cow Clicker, and through that strange apparatus to ask questions about the current moment of numerical socialization. But then, perhaps it also suggests that everyone’s a sucker, or that the human will is weak, or that we’ve so surrounded ourselves with compulsions that one is just as good as any other-it doesn’t really matter what “content” they present. Or maybe it means all these things and more all wrapped into one.

Clicking like liking, friending, following, checking in places. But for whom? Are we getting addicted to new forms of immaterial labour through games and their mechanics?

One of the facets of our contemporary media environment is immaterial labor, the fact that we have become the “product” for companies like Facebook and Google, and we work for them for free, without even knowing. There’s an increasing acknowlegement of that fact, thanks to books like Siva Vaidhyanathan’s The Googlization of Everything. But another aspect, one we notice even less, perhaps, is that we’re now living in an ecology of compulsions. Email, Google, Facebook, TwitterŠ we’ve inadvertently constructed and amplified a media environment in which we are conditioned to return, habitually. There’s always something to see, and something to miss if we’re not there to notice. We tend to talk about “addiction” rather than compulsion, but the later is perhaps more accurate: ours is a world of urges and drives, but also of obligations, of pressures, of duress. One can no longer choose not to participate.

Generally one could say that you, as a game designer, were never really following standard game mechanics and dynamics format for your works. Your newsgames, anti-advergames, political and educational games are not about winning but rather about processes, ‘procedural rhetorics’ as you have defined it. Could you explain this to Neural? T

he overall idea in my work is that games are capable of producing a variety of effects. Some of those effects are persuasion (Fatworld), some are frustration (Disaffected!), some are journalism (Points of Entry), some are education (Stone City) some are critique (Jetset), some are lingering (A Slow Year). If we think of a videogame as a model world in which we can play some interactive role in context, then the kinds of models and roles and worlds are enormous in type, and the possible aesthetic effects of those roles are even larger.

And what do you think is distinctive about indie games? Do they address to a different group of players ?

I’m not certain that “indie games” means much, but I don’t know that it’s the fault of indie game makers or players. The very idea of “independent” media may be increasingly complicated by the facility with which art of any kind can be made and disseminated. So in that respect, games diversified after indie film and indie music had already become somewhat obsolete terms. “Independent” used to mean “independently financed,” that is to say, unburdened by the lowest-common-denominator corporate demands of big business, and therefore able to tackle themes, styles, audiences or other approaches that would otherwise have been impossible. By contrast, today in games, “indie” has come to signify its own aesthetic and community. So, games like Super Meat Boy and Fez and VVVVVV may be interesting and appealing and lovely, but very little about them is “impossible” in the commercial industry (even if all of these games were also independently financed). In that sense, “indie” has come to refer to a style, I think, instead of a sensibility. That’s fine, and it may even suggest a new audience. But I’m not sure it’s as radical a domain as many players and creators think it is.

You have also developed very interesting games for the Atari VCS. “A Slow Year” is a chapbook of game poems the player is invited to observe , while the “Guru meditation” is a slow yogi game. These are games with no strategy and no action; they are works demanding our concentration and attention. Do you see a potential form of counter-power in these games? Is slow gaming a notion similar to slow reading or slow eating which have appeared as an attempt to disrupt the increasing speed of our everyday life?

Guru Meditation and A Slow Year were each made to explore very specific ideas, which were inspired by external factors. In the first case, it was the obscure Amiga Joyboard peripheral and a story, perhaps apocryphal, about how the early Amiga OS programmers attempted to calm themselves with it during long compiles. And in the second case, it was the experience I felt programming the Atari itself, which brought to mind the poetic tradition of Imagism, naturalism, and a kind of contrapuntal response to environmental “non-games” like those of Tale of Tales. Certainly one can connect these themes to movements like slow eating, but one could also just take them as the games that they are. I’m not very interested in thinking of my work as resistant or contrarian, working against some power structure or economic regime. I’m bored by this kind of predictable oppositionalism, which is so commonplace, so banal, that it can’t possibly be political anyway.

Do you think that we are in an urge for game ethics?

I think people want earnestness. They deserve it. They want objects and experiences that are purposeful, that exist for good reason, and that treat them honestly and respectfully. That deserve to exist in the world. That are doing more than just trying to get their money or their attention or their data. So, there’s ethics in the sense of, what does a game represent, and how does it help us ask questions about our lives and the world? And there’s much to be done there. But there’s also ethics in the sense of, how does a game try to exist in the world, what is it trying to accomplish, and how earnest is it in those efforts I know there’s a trend today to think of gamers as these magical beings that accomplish superhuman acts merely by harnessing the mystical power of games. But I’m much more circumspect about this. The future I dream of is not one a utopia in which games facilitate a society of play, but a normal world, an ordinary world, in which games help us become more comfortable and tolerant of uncomfortable and intolerable complexity. Life is made of rusty gears and out of bright plastic toys. Do we really want to give either one up for the other?

Posted in Interviews, Ludic Thoughts, neural | Tagged games, gamification | Leave a comment

We are not biometric data, ZTOHOVEN

By ludic pyjamas | Published: December 26, 2011

from Neural # 39

1.Could you tell us who are the ZTOHOVEN and what do they aim for?

ZTOHOVEN is a platform, which brings together people, who don’t want to stay passive to problems of the social environment where they live. At the moment, there are 11 of us who are involved in our current project Občan K aka Ciziten K. (Občan K. sounds the same like občanka in Czech language, which means ID card). We don’t want to put answers on table, but prefer question marks. In a word, we don’t want to do art for art, or just think about problems with a glass of beer in hand. We want to live and investigate the problems through our projects. This is a sociological aspect of our practice– we provide our bodies and minds to researching a problem, which we find as crucial one.

2. Would you describe yourselves also as artists?

Our projects are local driven and problem driven. Our aim therefore is not to be just another body who does a kind of art. Each project starts with an important problem that we are facing. We don’t care if we are artists, criminals, guerilla or gorillas. The question is not who we are, but what our projects can tell to the people. In a word, for us it is important to ask how we can contribute to the world where we live in. We don’t need to be categorized. We don’t ask ourselves what we are and if we are asked probably each of us would give different conflicting answers.

3. As you said your your projects are “local- driven” and „problem driven“. All of them have taken place in your country. Would you say then that they address solely the inhabitants of the Czech Republic?

Our motivation to do projects is local driven as we can react only to the problems we go trough. Are other people faced with similar problems? Not only in Czech Republic, but all around the world? Maybe I try to answer by referring to some examples: The first project , back in 2003, we did was local and concerned the end of presidency of Vaclav Havel who was a symbol of apolitical politics. During the socialistic era he was dissident and after Velvet Revolution in 1989 he was elected as a president. There was a big shining heart installed on the roof of the Prague castle, a dominant monument of the city of Prague, in the end of his presidency. Believing that a question mark would be more appropriate as a symbol of the period , we covered half of the heart and one big shining question mark was appeared over the castle. People loved it and Havel even rescued us from Police. He said if there would be a open debate about public space in Prague, he would be happy. This was actually possible in the Vaclav Havel presidency era, but now we live in another world full of destructive neoliberal politics which dont like neither question marks nor hearts. For our second project in the same year, we overlapped almost all citylights placed in Prague subway. The point of Raped subconscious project was to show to the people the power of advertising in public space. Please note that there was no advertising during socialistic era. For our third project in 2007, we simulated an atomic blast in Czech TV, highlighting the problem of manipulation of reality in media, especially on TV. In our current project we are looking into the issue of Identity. It is up to a reader to ask her/him self if such problems like advertising, manipulation of reality and identity are invading his everyday life and privacy.

4. What do you think characterizes your country today and what are you fighting against with your interventions? Would you say that there is still a certain national and social identity being formed?

I cannot answer this question, because there would be as many answers as we are in number. But my opinion is that our country is still a very good and free place to live and we fight against various forms of power which try to disturb our feeling of freedom. I think not only Prague but also Czech country is good to visit when somebody wants to experience a spirit of lightness. We try to guard this quality as many other people and groups do all around the world on other interesting localities.

I would say that Identity is a crucial timely theme and a problematic concept at the same time. But I am sure, that in every era there are powerful subjects who try to influence the construing of identities. In our last project we tried to question how people want to let various invisible subjects participate at construing of their identity. That’s why citizen K. states: How frail and how easily abused is that which should serve us. We are not numbers, we are not biometric data, so let us not be mere pawns in the hands of the big players on the game board of these times. If we do not wish to fear our own face, we must save it!

5. What do you think is the role of the media today? You mentioned before a project of yours, „Media Reality“ where you faked a nuclrear explosion. Do traditional media like the TV still influence our thinking and perception? Have things changed in the era of the internet?

This is big question and I would like to be proved wrong when saying that everything that could be abused, will be abused at some point. There is a lot of intimate information which people share online, like in Facebook for example. Sometimes I don’t know if I should smile or cry when reading what people are able to write/share on the internet or on the TV. I don’t watch TV but I am sure that “moving pictures” are the core medium through which people have learnt to recognize and understand world. TV and internet are really interesting inventions, the problem is their content.

6. But what is the cost of turning against the media? For “Media Reality”, you were actually taken to court while interestingly enough, for the same project at the same time you were honored with an award from the National Gallery. Some people seem to have been disappointed by your accepting the award and the amount of money corresponding to it. Do you think that there was some contradiction in your actions at this particular time?

We tried to show the absurdity of society and its system. We accepted to be judged in the same way we would be honored. The money from the award covered the penalty from the court. Maybe those who think that there is contradiction assume that we are white and we want to be in opposition to somebody or something black. But this question is still open between us and that’s good, I guess. It is better than seeing only “good” and “bad” things. We try to study the world and find new ways to interpret it. But I understand those who criticized us for accepting the award. And this could be our response to them is: We are looking forward to hear about your project more than just hear how you would rather do it if and if and if..

7. Your latest project, Citizen K, tackles the issue of control and surveillance characterizing today’s society in the name of security. Merging two faces into one, playing with biometric data, and creating one fake ID card for two people at the same time, you clearly doubted the system and revealed its holes. How does Citizen K connect to the totalitarian systems of the past and the networked society of today?

We live in a country where history was rewritten by each new ruler: by Nazi during the WWII, by Socialism until 1989 and by neoliberalism until today for example. Most of the Czechs are careful when they feel signs of totalitarianism. But the problem is that new forms of power are very smart and people don’t understand that for instance shops of full commodities does not mean freedom. We just want people to realize that everything depend on us – not only regarding our world, but also the world of our kids. We should all be careful and responsible for our behaviour. This is not a kind of paranoia, but a proposal of resistance towards the apathy related to public questions which still may pander a totalitarian system for our society.

8. How difficult was it to perform Citizen K? Were you afraid of getting caught?

To be honest it is not so easy to be faced with charges of criminal persecution. Imagine getting a letter from criminal police that you are under investigation, or being picked up you from your bed in morning. It is not easy, but it is part of our project. Soon it will be visible who is smarter and who is one step ahead. The police can think that they pursued us, but who knows. Maybe we just play a game with them and they don’t know about it. Citizen K. is not finished yet!

9.You seem to imply sometimes that in your place there could be any citizen wanting to take action. Is this a tactic of inviting the public to become involved, engaged in the problems society faces today?

Of course, we would like to live in a world, where people are interested and involved in the public process. But sometimes I feel like the transition between socialism and capitalism has both sides – good and bad. We are here to kick the Czechs’ ass and say: hey its also up to you where our children will live! Citizen K. believes in a dialog between various opinions and he was born to motivate people to not be ashamed and to say their opinion out loud. It’s the same as in ZTOHOVEN, we are of different opinions and lifestyles, but we are able to meet and draw question marks over big issues of today. Question marks are namely better than exclamation marks and full points which usually indicate totality.

http://www.ztohoven.com/

Posted in city, neural | Tagged activism, anonymity | Leave a comment

Interview with the Men In Grey

By ludic pyjamas | Published: December 26, 2011

from Neural # 37

> >> What is hidden in the air?

We have observed increased sublimation of human thought into the application
layer of the Internet, proportional to both the number of computer users and the
emergence of new protocols.

Of particular interest to our organisation currently are emmissions from 802.11
devices, resulting in the formation of The 802.11 Division. Packet switched
airborne transmissions from these devices propagate in the 2.4, 3.6 and 5 GHz
frequency bands and are rich with information about the user, the intended
recipient and the devices used.

Devices in this class include those used by notebook computers, various mobile
telephones and wireless routers.

> >> What are you doing with it?

Our 802.11 Division is responsible for the collection, dissection and reflection
of information captured in the air back into public space. Most information
available to us comprises citizen-to-citizen, citizen-to-public and
public-to-citizen transactions across the Internet.

We observe significant reductions in overall transmission from 802.11 devices
when packet streams comprising electronic mail, internet chat, images and
internet web pages are captured, reconstructed and then reflected back into the
corporeal public domain.

Packet payloads may be incidentally modified, distorted and/or routed to other
networks or recipients during this process.

> >> Which side are you on?

We are the direct manifestation of a citizen’s Network Anxiety. Our reach is
limited only by the material and technical capacity of the networks people use.

Please refer to RFC14 (removed by Vincent Cerf) for more information.

> >> What do the M.I.G aim for?

Fear is indigenous to every network. We are an expression of networking itself.

http://meningrey.net/

Posted in city, Interviews, neural | Tagged anonymity, insecurity, networks | Leave a comment

Interview with Julian Oliver

By ludic pyjamas | Published: December 26, 2011

from Neural #37

1. Artvertiser is an augmented reality project of yours that approaches the city as a place of exhibition, intervention and interaction, replacing street advertisements with works of art. How do you think that the web affects our perception and interaction within the public space? Do nowadays cities look more and more as interfaces?

While some aspects of cities seem to increasingly take on the appearances of interfaces, what’s more interesting to me is the expectation that they ought to function as such.

My generation grew up with advertisements for various services that depicted the perfect social and economic subject, organising their finances, their dinner dates or their home renovation using telephones and more recently the web. Today it’s these idea(l)s of transactional instantaneity, traveling without moving, selecting, tracking and the expectation of connectivity that are increasingly positioned as vital organs for living capably. It’s inevitable they’ll carry over into how cities are used and what will be expected from them in future, I think.

2. Was Artvertiser in this case a proposal for the unexpected, or rather as you say the improved – instead of augmented – reality of an urban context? Could it be considered also as a counter – proposal to current uses of augmented reality? Cause advertisement companies seem to embrace this technology to invade the cities once again, only this time through the screens of our mobile devices.

The idea of Improved Reality is certainly precocious. I started using it to highlight the Augment Everything goldrush of recent years, where it seems the tool of AR is increasingly mistaken as an end purpose in itself. The Artvertiser however is a sincere attempt to make these proprietary read-only surfaces we’re exposed to day on day negotiable -even if just temporarily- by recycling them as surfaces for the presentation of art (or anything else for that matter!).

That AR is used as a core part of this process is not so interesting to me. Rather, I’m more taken by the broader challenge of intercepting –indeed hacking- space between a billboard and the visual cortex. In this way I think The Artvertiser is just one strategy within a longer history of critical adbusting, rather than as a self-celebrating technological wonder..

All said, Damian Stewart and I do very much consider it a capable exhibition platform in itself and look forward to working with more cultural organisations to produce exhibitions for the street.

3. In any case, one can not ignore the excitement augmented reality brings to users. levelHead must have been one of your pieces that have been loved and enjoyed by people of all ages. You actually successfully hided and embedded a spatial memory game in three small “magic cubes” as visitors have often called the very levels of the game. What were the challenges behind this project?

Hmm, there were quite a few indeed. I can’t resist a little context here though.

I’ve often said Computer programming is first and foremost a process of self-humiliation; you quickly find out what you need to learn to live up to your expectations of yourself as someone that can think with clarity and ingenuity. Secondly, computer programming is the process of breaking down large problems into smaller ones, producing new problems if necessary, until the larger problem is dealt with. Somewhere in the middle of this picture is a computer and a compiler. I’m not yet convinced they are entirely necessary!

IevelHead was a good example of a project that doubled very nicely as both self humiliation and AR game development.

Thankfully because the problems were so interesting I found levelHead very rewarding to create. Keeping track of all the connecting rooms was quite tricky, especially while debugging. I had to write a primitive physics and collision detection system, trigger network and other features normally found in a game engine. Achieving that principle effect where the rooms appear neatly inside the cube was a little tricky as the C++ API I was working with was significantly lacking in helpful documentation.

All said, the real challenges with levelHead weren’t in development but in fact after the project was complete. Once I’d uploaded videos to YouTube and Vimeo the project started getting a lot of traffic, doing the rounds in some big blogs and magazines. It was at this point everyone from toy companies, cigarette makers, entrepreneurs and ad agencies started getting in touch wanting a way into the project. That wasn’t at all intrinsically bad in itself, of course, but there were several factors which made this sort of direction difficult.

The primary issue was that a lot of them hadn’t done their research as to what AR really comprised; they somehow thought that the cubes really were a kind of magic, not needing an external computer or camera. The other issue were the requisite patent sharks; it seems it simply wasn’t possible for any company to conceive of investing in the project without significant and low level IP buy-in. The fact I both don’t believe in software patents, let alone consider software patentable, soon meant we’d be doing no business together..

The project now lives on quite happily in museums and exhibitions. I’d be happy to see it develop into a larger game one day.

4. Space seems to have played a principal role throughout your work. Although different studies and practices lie behind each piece, I think that there is always a common ground related to the intersection and the interdependence of the digital to the physical. In your psWorld you actually argued for the dependency of the computers to the world around them. This can be read mostly as a metaphor but could you give us some examples behind your thoughts?

You’ve certainly done your research! Only recently did I pick out that same thread in my work..

psWorld is a complex little hack. To talk about it requires some background:

Computers can be considered a kind of ‘Closed World’ in that as systems they are intrinsically inward looking.

In order to function a computer must have facility for monitoring processes, resources and events, executing decisions that look after the running health of that system over time. These are normally implemented in the form of special processes called daemons and take care of everything from log cleaning , monitoring CPU temperature and screen saving while the kernel itself manages memory and abstracting over the hardware. With the exception of electrical supply no computer is strictly dependent on the stability of processes outside of its own enclosure. Even input events and various network services are managed, anticipated contingencies.

With psWorld I’m interested in implementing -in software- the kind of fragile dependence any organism has on the relative stability of its environment. By mapping all running processes on a computer to actual features in the visible world the health of the operating system becomes immutably bound to the consistency of its ‘perceptible’ environment. In this way psWorld can be considered a kind of primitive phenomenological bridge for computers, a meta-application that plunges the host computer into the world and ties its vitality to all the complexity therein..

5. You also seem to like playing with the fake, with false perceptions based on the possibilities given by the digital process. Your Insertion Series are such a case. Huge sculptural digital elements appear in videos which sovereign, alter and augment the space while floating within it. Our perception is hacked although we can tell they are not real. Why false perception is also important?

Interesting question..

Each video insertion represents a conversation between me and the place I’m working with, a manifestation of what I see or would like to see in that site. As such these insertions are way of being in a place, a way of sharing it with my imaginary for a moment; I don’t make the work with the audience in mind and so false-perception (as a strategy) doesn’t direct each insertion. That said, I’m working on a new series that will feature some very well known sites, inevitably playing into (and with) the experiences of others. I’m waiting for the heart of the Berlin winter to keep filming however – it’s just so bleak and lovely on camera.

I’m often asked why I don’t work on trying to implement these insertions in a real-time context, using natural feature tracking techniques with an AR outcome.

The truth is I’d never have the kind of control afforded by archival footage and a 3D modeling suite, at least with current generation technology. Regardless, I find working this way immensely enjoyable; each insertion already requires a lot of careful conspiring with the site, its light and geometric complexities. A holiday from hacking on code.

It’s worth mentioning that far more people encounter Augmented Reality in the form of archival video online anyway and so one can talk about an ‘AR effect’ often having more cultural value than experiencing the given implementation itself. As such, AR is a kind of popular imaginary, a technological metaphor through which people can reposition the world as improbable and mutable.

The immense interest in AR right now says a lot about how willing we are to distrust, and then reinvest, our perception. This is a positive symptom of the AR goldrush, I think!

6. You have yourself been very interested in the role of perception in art, and you have actually also written about this highlighting the playful character that several experimentations with perspective and perception have had in art history. How has this influenced your work?

I’ve had a long interest in directly targeting the visual cortex as a site for both exhibition and reflexion, something Illusionists and Op Artists have of course been preoccupied with for a long time. While I’d like to say that my study of optical illusion art and visual perception has influenced my work directly (that’d certainly look cogent in a catalog, or interview like this), it’s not the case. My interest in exploring the way I perceive goes back as long as I remember, well before an interest in art history.

What my study in this area has helped a lot with is contextualising much of the work I’ve been doing within the longer human history of strategic, phenomenological perversion. Art touches on just a small part of that old project..

7. And what about video games? You have worked extensively on this field, being part of the game based art scene. How has your involvement in game creation, in appropriating, modding and subverting affected your own perception of space and of intervening within it?

This is something I think about a lot. Recently I’ve had to admit to myself that
3D graphics programming has had a fairly lasting influence on the way I think. Spending so much time projecting forms in a Euclidean universe has to eventually manifest as habits of thought, something increasingly apparent to me when dreaming up a new project as certain metaphors and mathematical reductions keep popping up.

What’s been important to me however is maintaining a critical relationship with this influence; I’m very interested in tensions between Space (in the mathematical sense) and Place, in the worldly yet personal sense- as it’s experienced.

We can say that Space, just like the number 812, doesn’t exist in nature. Space refers to a body of ideas, or formalised abstractions, that help humans distill the world as a field of estimations. The fact that these estimations often prove correct – that a long flat bridge designed in adherence to trigonometric rules will actually hold, that we can chart our course observing stellar bodies – knit Space ever deeper into the world as though it were always a part of its fabric. Other times however these models let us down – a place is always more than a point on a map and the Earth, given infinitely small units of measure, must have an infinite circumference, for example.

It’s been tremendously useful for me to learn the mathematical language of Space, if only to antagonise contemporary investment in it or explore how this abstraction and the numberless world might collide. It’s alluring stuff and I hope to do quite a bit more work along this line in the years to come.

8. Talking about interventions between Place and Space, the digital and the physical, between false and real, is there room for an emerging “common” space? Does creativity play a role in this formation? Or is it just an illusion?

A big question!

I think that much creativity of the kind that yields Art is so bound up in a market of strategic self-differentiation, as a currency in itself, that it’s difficult to invest in art as something indicative of a commons anymore.

It’s not easy to talk about art and the making of it now without considering the impact of late capitalism on cultural development; a precondition that orders societies through the forced internalisation of competitive interest. So it follows that more and more art is made in the interests of excelling within the group, than excelling the group as a whole.

A culture of creativity that I do see to be very transformative -one that shapes whole economies, thought and earth- is that of Engineering. I’ve come to enjoy this frame of thinking about my work (and the knowledge communities around it) that I (alongwith my studio partner Danja Vasiliev) find it’s more useful to refer to what we do as a kind of Critical Engineering than Art, or Media Art, as such.

Engineering, I believe, is a potent and richly creative language of our time. It just needs more people using it critically.

>>www.julianoliver.com

Posted in Interviews, Ludic Thoughts, neural | Leave a comment

Data Bodies Networked Portraits

By ludic pyjamas | Published: August 6, 2011

Critical reflections on today’s interconnected self

Fundacion Telefonica, Lima, Peru
As part of the MMcLuhan100 program
July 7 – August 28, 2011

We have been living in a networked world for 15 years now. Interconnected sets of nodes, as sociologist Manuel Castells described networks, seem to have progressively become the context of our everyday life, of our work, leisure and socialization. Our thoughts, interests and desires have moved to immaterial spaces of the digital sphere that have opened accordingly the way for new challenges, experiences and modes of being. While participating, communicating, sharing and collaborating in the digital social networks today, our identities are being shaped within them. Networks have become the new homes, the new environments of intimacy and belonging, which are located nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Dispersed and interweaved, with no here or there, no inside or outside, the reality of the networks became the new common reality the connected world shares. Heterogeneous, polyphonic and multicultural, this charming networked condition is based on two fundamental elements: on the growing wealth of data being provided, controlled and exchanged on one hand and on the multitude of users contributing this data on the other.

The exhibition Data Bodies – Networked Portraits aims to explore the ways identities are being formed, captured and portrayed in the networked sphere. Two notions complementary to one another, the data body and the networked portrait, become the reference for this examination as they can present the important duality and ambiguity existing behind every online persona being built nowadays: for every feature assigned or attributed to us, a trace is left behind. Our profile pictures, our interests, our friends as well as the places we bookmark, the photos and videos we upload or vote for, are all part of databases forming today’s networks. In this context, the networked portraits are formed by us, the users. They represent how we want to be seen and how we see the others, revealing our need to appear interesting, popular and attractive towards a community of users. The data bodies, on the other side, are a direct outcome of the informational society. They are based on mechanisms of aggregation and control. They are fed by the manifestations of our networked self, by marks of our communication, of our transactions and movements. The networked portrait and the data body are thus two different sides of the same coin, of images of a self shaped by us and of descriptions formed by systems of data. But do we realize their particularities? Do we really recognize ourselves through them and how secure do we feel in this duality?

Aiming to situate and highlight the particular aspects and features of today’s connected realm, the exhibition proposes a reading of the networked sphere through a rich variety of portraits, as seen through the artists’ eyes. Through data aggregations, visualizations, hacks or re-appropriations, “personas” are being revealed and are critically approached. Group portraits, networked heroes, maps of digital identities, as well as violations and identity thefts seem to all address a central question: What does our digital identity at the end depend on? On ourselves, on communities of users, or on informational systems of control? The artists as an antenna of society, as Marshall Mcluhan once said, may be the ones – once again – that can offer new modes of perception for the environments proposed by media and technology; this time by emphasizing and reclaiming the elements that mostly become the objects of controversy and power, our data.

Daphne Dragona

Participating Artists: Christopher Baker (US), Heath Bunting (UK), Paolo Cirio & Alessandro Ludovico (Italy), Gabriela Florez del Poso (Peru), Matthias Fritsch (Germany), Aaron Koblin & Daniel Massey (US), Men In Grey, MIT Sociable Media Group with Alex Dragulescu, Aaron Zinman, Fernanda Viegas & Scott Golder (USA) and Jon Rafman (Canada)

http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com.pe/centro/MMcLuhan100_artistas.htm

Posted in Events, Ludic Thoughts, Self Promotion | Leave a comment

Codes of Disobedience & Dysfunctionality

By ludic pyjamas | Published: March 7, 2011

The National Museum of Contemporary Art in the framework of its collaboration with the University Research Institute of Applied Communication (U.R.I.A.C) of the University of Athens presents from the 5^th until the 25^th of March 2011 the project Codes of Disobedience & Dysfunctionality realised by British artist Martin Rieser and an interdisciplinary team of students, researchers and artists. The project will be based on the outcome of a preceding workshop, organised by the University Research Institute of Applied Communication of the University of Athens. The workshop is part of the action “Global Gateway” and of the EU funded program “Civil Society Dialogue – Istanbul 2010 European Capital of Culture” in which U.R.I.A.C participates.

“Codes of Disobedience & Dysfunctionality” proposes a different trail and a new narrative for the city of Athens and its contemporary transformations. Inspired by the posters and the graffiti of the city and taking advantage of the possibilities given by mobile communication technologies (GPS, QR codes etc) and the internet, Martin Rieser and the workshop team will aim to connect the urban surroundings of Athens to opinions and statements of its inhabitants regarding the challenges imposed by the current social, political, and financial circumstances. Anger, disobedience, opposition, dysfunctionality. The features of the contemporary metropolis in the midst of a period of crisis will be the main focus of the project. Can the new possibilities offered by technology really capture the needs and the atmosphere of a city like Athens? Can they embrace life itself?

From the 5^th of March onwards, in the premises of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, on the internet and at the centre of the city (in the streets of Skoufa – Navarinou – Tzavela), the museum visitors and inhabitants of Athens, will be invited to follow the project’s trail and discover the spots where parts of the narrative are hidden. Special QR codes will be placed in selected locations of the city and by scanning them with a mobile phone, access to the audiovisual material created during the workshop will be given. Combining elements of installation art, urban intervention, gaming and performance, “Codes of Disobedience & Disfunctionality” reflects Rieser’s long term practice on art and technology.

Professor Martin Rieser is joint research Professor between the Institute of Creative Technologies and the Faculty of Art and Design at De Montfort University. He has always been fascinated by the possibility of creating fragmentary narrative structures and interactive stories using new technology. As an artist and researcher this has led him into his current explorations using mobile and locative technologies and large-scale interactive video experiences. Professor Rieser’s art practice in mobile and internet art and interactive narrative installations have been seen around the world including China, Australia , USA and Greece, France, Austria, and Italy.

http://empedia.info/maps/41

Posted in city, Events | Tagged locative media, play, QR codes | Leave a comment

Can the new urban frontiers be sabotaged?

By ludic pyjamas | Published: February 7, 2011

Matteo Pasquinelli is a writer, curator and researcher. On the opportunity of his book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, Daphne Dragona and Ilias Marmaras discussed with him on endocolonisation, the creative cities and the new form of a productive sabotage. Published in Konteiner 14

In the post-Fordist age, as we are used to say today, there is no longer an outside of the capitalistic exploitation, in the sense that any space of life is exploited. At the scale of the city, this situation gives birth to a new form of colonization, or better ‘endocolonilization’. As Neil Smith underlines the city can be considered today a new sort of ‘urban wild nature’ to colonise, that is equivalent to the Western perception of Africa, Latin America and Asia in the past. Could one say that the new process of endocolonization is based on gentrification and does this defines a new form of class conflict?

Gentrification is one of the symptoms of the new dimension of economic rent and speculation affecting material and immaterial production: this has been always clear in the case of the stock market but today even the real estate economy of the city is following the same destiny of the stock market. Indeed the dimension of the ‘new urban frontier’ was introduced by Neil Smith some years ago to describe the metropolitan space and the real estate economy as the new places of a new ‘primitive accumulation’ integrated with cultural production and the social fabric itself. Endocolonization is the financialisation of any squared meter, but also of something else, that is the speculation over our ‘bios’, the production of ideas, culture, communication, social life, etc. that is the exploitation of the whole ‘common wealth’ we produce outside the capitalistic system. To simplify, as we are doing an interview, we can say that: as once profit was extracted from the factory, today rent is extracted from the city. Which are the forms of conflict associated to economic rent? Gentrification is just one of this.

In the era of biopolitics and endocolonization, the notion of ‘creative city’ emerged. In your writings you describe it as a hijacked idea that aims to serve economic profits based on real estate and rent profit. Can you explain us the origins and the strategies of deception that are in use to turn cities into ‘creative’ ones?

The idea of ‘creative economy’ can be considered indeed a form of biopolitical governance rather than a proper economy itself (It’s not clear at all who is making money out of it! The creative workers? I doubt!). The image of the ‘creative cities’ are these glossy marketing campaigns to cover and disguise cognitive capitalism at the scale of the city. It is one specific form of capitalism. Cultural production and social capital are used here to increase the general rent interest of local investors and attract more consumers. On the other hand, the definition of ‘creative industries’ (that is a different concept), is a delocalized economy and it is usually separated from this ‘sense of place’, as it refers to immaterial production to which intellectual property revenues can be attached (copyright, patents, etc). However instead of complaining again and again in a moralistic way about the alienation of the creative industries, we should identify the axes if production and value accumulation. If the ‘creative city’ is a new institution of biopolitical governance and indeed it represent the institution of a ‘fictional common’, as a response new institutions of real commons should be conceived and founded.

You also seem to believe that the multitude, the habitants of the ambiguous “creative cities”, often contribute to the gentrification process. You specifically write that gentrification is based on the collective belief empowered by activists, artists and resistant residents. Which mechanisms function for the formation of this new hype that you name as “gentrifiction” and who are at the end today’s gentrifiers? Realising that the current anti-gentrification tactics fail, and examining new possible forms of resistance, you are proposing the stance of sabotage; a sabotage which does not call for an uncreative or unproductive confrontation but rather for a positive and value productive one. Could you describe us the differences between the two notions and give us some characteristic examples?

There is a family of biopolitical concepts like financialization, gentrification and precarisation that refer to new intensive lines of conflict trasversal to the extensive vectors of conflict of the past. But here the notions of endocolonization as well as biopolitics reprent the diagram of an impasse. This is the problem and the drama of all the political analysis that insist on this biopolitical dimension. How can you rebel against your own life, when it is your own life with its desires, need of communication social relations, lifestyles, etc. that became productive of value? How can you sabotage your own life? That’s ridiculous. It is not a surprise that the response to the anonymous form of financial crisis and metropolitan speculation is sabotage and riots. How to reply politically to the anonymous forms of financial capital and corporations? When command is faceless, it is clear that the gesture of resistance become even more desperate, disorganized. Biopolitics, gentrification, financialisation is this becoming faceless of power, where the dispositif of governance take the place of the institutions of government.

The point here is this typical impasse of the postmodern categories and dispositifs. The reason why a lot of activist prefer to focus on ‘traditional’ forms of protest (local governments, environment issues, antifascism, etc.) is because it is too difficult to identify and respond to to the new forms of rent, speculation and governance. How to respond to gentrification for instance? In Berlin they are trying to develop tactics of ‘sabotage of the symbolic capital’ that become ‘sabotage of economic rent’. Practically, they are trying to make some district less fashionable for the middle class, less attractive for hipsters and people without a political consciousness. Does it work? One of the problem of cognitive capitalism is that once symbolic capital is accumulated, it takes a while to de-accumualate it as it is indeed ‘immaterial’ and it is distributed on a global mediascape. The other way to respond to this ‘fictional common’ of the creative cities and hip districts is with new material institutions of the common, new local councils, a visible and not anonymous presence on the territory.

Since last May, Greece is under the control of IMF, serving as a space of experimentation for the rest of the Eurozone. At the same time, the historical center of Athens is facing a full operation of gentrification. A coincidence, a symptom or a specific strategy in a specific time? A gentrification under siege and under pressure? What would be your point of view?

I have been in Athens only one, so I dont know very well the context of these processes. Usually gentrification happens in period of economic expansion. However western capitalism is so desperate and approaching a neofeudal stage that I would not be surprised to see real estate speculation at work in time of recession. However gentrification should not be confused with the simple real estate speculation, it is material speculation (economic rent) associated to immaterial production (culture, symbolic capital, etc.).

Posted in city, Interviews, konteiner | Tagged athens, city, gentrification | Leave a comment

Mapping the Commons, Athens

By ludic pyjamas | Published: January 18, 2011

Mapping the Commons, Athens is a collective study, a contemporary reading and an open cartography of Athens and its special dynamic. In a difficult financial period in which the contemporary metropolis seems restless and vulnerable, the Hackitectura collective in collaboration with an interdisciplinary group of young researchers and students seeked for, examined and documented the points of the city where a new form of common wealth can be located. Seeing beyond the “public” and the “private”, new types of commons were mapped which were based on collectivity, sociability, open and free access, gift economy or peer to peer practices. During a seven day workshop a different image of the city was thus formed full of promises, but yet fluid and unstable. Although the new common resources and places that were located within the urban environment are outcomes of the knowledge and the ideas that the multitude of the metropolis possesses and shares, at the same time it was noted that the new common wealth can not easily escape cases of exploitation and appropriation. Contradictions and questions occurred while examining and processing the material of the workshop: How can the commons be secured? Why do they sometimes serve the interests of a new “creative” city? What role do they really play in times of a global financial crisis? How can the citizens re-appropriate the commons, and form through them a new type of resistance? The online collaborative map that was created and the audiovisual material accompanying it, aims through representative examples and case studies to comment on such issues, making clear the need for a re-invention of a new common experience and memory, which can only be born through collaboration and sharing

http://www.emst.gr/mappingthecommons/index.html

After the completion of the workshop which took place from the 1^st until the 8^th of December, the following outcomes are presented in the Project Room of the museum and on the internet:

- The Open Research Map of the workshop including categorized entries for the commons located in the city of Athens.

http://meipi.org/mappingthecommons

- The non interactive AutoMap which presents video case studies on the commons selected, modified, or directed by the participants for the project Mapping the Commons, Athens.

http://cartografiaciudadana.net/index.php/Mapping_the_commons

- The blog which presents in detail the concept, the structure and the program of the workshop as well as contributions, updates, photos and videos that capture its process.

http://mappingthecommons.wordpress.com/

Workshop Team:

Concept, workshop and project development:

José Pérez de Lama de Lama & Pablo de Soto (Hackitectura) in collaboration with Jaime Díez and Carla Boserman

With the support of cartografiaciudadana.net

Curated by: Daphne Dragona

Participants: Efi Avrami, Elena Antonopoulou, Mariana Bisti, Maya Bontzou, Dimitris Delinikolas, Eleni Giannari, Aliki Gkika, Anastasia Gravani, Alexis Hatzigianis, Dimitris Hatzopoulos, Melina Flippou, Zaharias Ioannidis, Angela Kouveli, Veroniki Korakidou, Daphne Lada, Olga Lafazani, Natalie Michailidou, Yiannis Orfanos, Stratis Papastratis, Maria Dimitra Papoulia, Yorgos Pasisis, Carolin Philipp, Maria Pitsiladi, Manos Saratsis, Athina Staurides, Iouliani Theona, Eleana Tsoukia, Sonia Tzimopoulou, Antonis Tzortzis, Dimitris Psychogios

Scientific Advisors: Nelli Kabouri (Political Sciences, Panteion University), Dimitris Papalexopoulos (Architect, Associate Professor NTUA), Dimitris Parsanoglou (Sociologist, Panteion University), Dimitris Charitos (Assistant Professor, Department of Communication and Mass Media, University of Athens)

The work Mapping the Commons, Athens by Hackitectura was realized in the framework of the series EMST Commissions 2010 at the Project Room of the museum, with the kind support of Bombay Sapphire gin.

Posted in Commons, Events, Networking | Tagged athens, cartographies, common wealth, hackitectura | 13 Comments

The play ethic, an interview with Pat Kane

By ludic pyjamas | Published: December 6, 2010

From Konteiner #11

D.D: Let’s start from the basics! Could you tell us what the “play ethic” is and how you locate it in today’s society and culture?

P.K: Simply put, the play ethic is what comes after the work ethic. If the work ethic is the mindset that enabled generations of communities to accept their position, and perform their duties, in the industrial system, the play ethic is the mindset that gets modern people ready for living in an age of information, networks and everyday globalisation.

Play is an adaptive faculty of experiment, flexibility, optimism and resourcefulness for complex mammals, and supremely so for humans. It’s exactly these faculties that our current age of incessant change requires from us, as paradigms of production, environment and culture continue their transformation in the 21st century. In my view, the great promise of play becoming our dominant way of doing, being and creating value is that it keeps us open towards, and energetic about, fundamental reform of our systems and structures. As players, we are much more aware of the rules of the systemic games we are embedded in, and the possibilities that they might be amended, abandoned or imagined anew.

D.D. In your work discussing play, you very often refer to the “soulitarians”, the bearers of the play ethic as you say, the new generation of workers who are culture’s active soulful players. “Not proletarians, but soulitarians”… the ones who “were allowed to download their lives for free” and share it without second thoughts, to travel around the world with cheap airlines and base their lives on their emotional and communicational capabilities taking advantage of the possibilities the digital era offers. Is this the charming side of the new creative, affective and precarious class that emerged in the oughties? At the turn of the decade how would you now comment on their role?

P.K: Yes, I think it’s true that part of my aspiration for the “soulitariat” was infused with an early-2000s moment of techno-optimism – and that nowadays, they are as much a “precariat” as a “soulitariat”. I may be wrong here, but I have a specific take on the student and generational unrest in Greece (and elsewhere). Does this unrest indicate that the “expanded souls” of the digital generation (or Millenials as they are described elsewhere), forged in open networks and with a joyful experience of digital plenitude at their fingertips, has run into the reality of scarcity-and-hierarchy-dominated Western economic life? I was already quoting from people like Antonio Negri and Paulo Virno when the Play Ethic book came out in 2004, who posit a communicationally-formed “multitude” that’s gradually coming to realise the power that it holds, as an affective and cognitive collectivity. These ideas really informed what I called the “soulitariat”: those who retain their “soul” (the interiority and conviviality that communicational capitalism needs to function), and redeploy that in order to imagine and live out new lifestyles, or (maybe now, in more straitened economic times) protest against the limits and false promises of the existing order.

I’m also beginning to think much more than I did five years ago about how this playful techno-capacity will respond to a low-carbon horizon for societies. Can this experience of ingenuity and digital making be translated into other zones of self-production? Or do we need to be aware of how playful interactions with software platforms can be engagingly programmed to distract us from this climate crisis? I’m exploring this relationship between play and sustainability in my next book.

D.D. In your writings you clearly emphasize on the importance of the work of the psychologist Brian Sutton- Smith , The Ambiguity of Play (Harvard, 1997) and in particular on the significance of the “adaptive potentiation” of play he is talking about . What does this element mean? Would you say that play may help us to adapt, to recover, to be less vulnerable in times of uncertainty?

P.K: That is indeed the function play has for complex mammals, and other organisms with more developed brains and rich social networks – it’s a zone of experimentation and simulation which helps us to rehearse and test out our social lives, our cognitive visions, without these experiments costing us too much, in terms of risk of injury or waste of energy. I have been talking recently about the “ground of play” that seems to be shared between the lion-cubs frolicing on the savannah, and our performances within the end-to-end network of the internet. A complex-mammalian ground of play is 1) loosely but robustly governed, 2) ensures a surplus of time, space and materials, and 3) is a zone where failure, risk and mess is treated as necessary for development. The point of describing this zone is to get away from the overly individualist conception of the “adaptive player” that often comes through from self-help or business literature – some tensile, labile creature leaping from niche to niche in the capitalist jungle. For me (and forgive my teleology!), the evolutionary story of play points towards a societal arrangement – which the social-democratic settlement first demonstrated, but which may take other forms – where liberalism and security, risk and governance, exist in fruitful and healthy tension. Again, returning to the low-carbon reformation that’s required in the next few years, a play-oriented policy-change might well be a wholesale, all-sector reduction of the working week (heading towards 21 hours), combined with a social wage policy, which would unleash a great flourishing of social and cultural experiment, moving us away from positional consumption to engaged poiesis and production. Again: governance, but of a loose yet robust structure – that’s the real evolutionary power of the play moment.

D.D. You often work as an advisor for institutions, organizations and companies, introducing play in their work system and structure. Embracing the inventiveness, the liveness, the openness of play you seem to argue that it will form healthier and more sustainable institutions. You are actually also talking of an “open source” leadership. How feasible is this? Could you give us some examples?

P.K: It’s not easy to find that many! My experience with organisations has largely been that public sector and educational institutions are more amenable to a “zone of play” opening up within their operations – they often already see the need for occupational and professional development, putting their employees on away-days and training courses. My provocation to them is to imagine that these temporary, revivifying “play-days” can actually begin to affect the existing structures of the organisation. Initially this might be about giving employees much more self-determination and autonomy within their particular functional area (a version of the Google 20 per cent rule, where their engineers get one day a week to follow freely their on-job enthusiasms). But ultimately – and this is where I haven’t been successful! – the aim would be to indeed devolve and “open source” the very strategic direction of the enterprise itself. In the private sector, my work with creative start-ups and arts/cultural organisations has been much more fruitful. They’re aware that their best commercial moves are sustained and enriched by a hinterland of lifestyle and sensibility – which they have to devote time, space and resources to developing and nuturing. The worst experiences have been with large private corporations, for whom the play ethic is mostly regarded as a way to retain bright sparks in the ‘war for talent’.

D.D. Can an openness then driven through play break down certain hierarchies and borders? Cause a major issue for every period according to its different features lies upon inclusions and exclusions. Who gets to play? Who gets to decide the rules of societies’ games? If play can form tactics against games’ strategies, if play can be political, could a new common decentralized playground arise for today’s multitude?

P.K: Possibly. For me the rise of play as a civilisational keyword, and as a mode of action and thought, in the developed West has been the result of two things: the persistence of post-Sixties counter-cultural values, and the rise of a communicational infrastructure – the internet – which provides tools for the realisation of those values, resulting in new kinds of groups, organisations, networks and movements. Play becomes the emotional overtone of the awareness that, as the 90′s anti-globalisers put it, “another world is possible”, demonstrated by their “carnivals” against capitalism. I would point your readers to the work of Michel Bauwens and his Peer-to-Peer Foundation (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/) – he has worked out very carefully how we transition from a capitalist to a more collaborative economy and society, and factors different consciousnesses (including the openness and improvisation of play) into that transition.

For myself, I believe that the positive valuation of play in areas of policy, research and advertising is a sign that a shift of values is taking play – overturning, at the very least, the Puritan bias against intrinsically-motivated, joyful activity. It sits alongside positive accounts of precarity, or slow living, or idle cultures – all of them demonstrating a profound disillusionment with the idea of heteronomous work, and a desire for a more integrated and satisfying life. Of course play subtends all human existence and arrangements, our neotenic advantage over other animals. But we may be getting closer to collective and productive arrangements that allow it to be the true seat of our social nature.

Pat Kane is the author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com), and consults globally on the power and potential of play. He is also one half of the UK pop group Hue And Cry (www.hueandcry.co.uk).

Posted in Interviews, konteiner, Ludic Thoughts | Tagged kane, networks, play | Leave a comment

Τhe 9 eyes of Google

By ludic pyjamas | Published: October 10, 2010

Sorry. This post in not available in english.

Posted in konteiner | Tagged de Certeau, flusser, google earth, google street view, gordon | Leave a comment

Global Safari (Powered by Google), the formation of the world’s image

By ludic pyjamas | Published: September 28, 2010

From Neural

Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man Villem Flusser wrote in his well-known book “Towards a Philosophy of Photography” back in 1983 where he analysed the transition from prehistoric, traditional images to posthistorical, technical ones. No longer formed by authors, but by anyone who operates a camera, an apparatus, technical images have been opening windows to our contemporary world. Images meant to be maps for the world, became screens according to Flusser and one thus learnt to trust these images and the situations captured as extensions of one’s eye.

But, how were technical images to change our perceiving and imagining of the world when they would become maps, screens and interfaces at the same time? How was our view of the globe to be modified when a geographic information program would take over the role of the apparatus operator? Global Safari by artists Wellington Cancado and Renata Marquez is an exploration and a deep dive into one of the most popular contemporary apparatuses, Google Earth.

A navigation film shot within the program itself takes us to a journey in 10 different cities around the world in 12 minutes. Starting from Chicago, ending in Tokyo, moving vertically and horizontally, zooming in and out in city locations as Google Earth allows, the film is at the same time a visual narration and a documentation of a performative mapping. It is a safari of images, where the artists discover the possibilities and the limits given for seeing places and moments in the internet reality of our times.

“What is the meaning of making a photographic safari without a camera in the streets chasing the capture of the decisive moment?” the artists ask while remembering the magic and unique moments saved in time by photographers like Henri Cartier Bresson[i]. What do the satellites, aircrafts and cars of Google really haunt and capture? There is no author, no specific photographer deciding for the images forming the world within Google Earth; there is instead an automatic trustworthy process of capturing images as well as a matrix of user generated images related and attached to it.Â In this frame, where Google programs seem like the outmost sovereignty of Flusser’s automata for their imagery, Global Safari seeks for situations and moments that entail intimacy within them. Passengers at the streets, people playing tennis photographed by chance and appearing as the closest zoom in a city life through Google are being re-captured by the artists. Their moments are being re- froze on purpose and the presence of the eye taking the picture returns, questioning a new authorship on a found photo through a program.

Global Safari is a project on the changes on the formation of the world’s image, its influence by the continuous advance of technology as well as on the demolition of the value of scale. The project reminds us of “Powers of Ten” (1968/1977), a film by Charles and Ray Eames which if watched today seems like an omen of Google Earth. The camera in Eames’ film also moves steadily far back and then forth, zooming in and out, with the aim to show the relative size of things. From the human scale of a man lying at a park, to the image of the globe, “Powers of Ten” like Global Safari was a film about our desire and capacity to imagine the world. Cancado and Marquez referring directly to Eames’ film wish to show as they say how the possibilities for this imaginary world journey changed in the era of googols. While the technologies of Google have made a journey to the world possible for anybody with a computer and an internet connection, at the same time Google earth territories follow a new form of scale and pose new questions around what the artists call Myopia Index. “The scale of cloudiness varies in the different territories captured; resolution changes from centers to peripheries.” How is this defined? Which geopolitical mechanisms finally influence our view on the world today? Why is the world accessible but filtered?

In the networked era, the roles of photographers, cartographers and explorers interweave but can they/we influence what we see? Maybe we are still in the need of the critical awakening and approach that Flusser was discussing. Global Safari’s artists take such a stance, one that implies a need of critical attitude towards digital culture itself, that questions the liberation we are faced with when navigating within virtual geospatial environments. A call for restructuring, rethinking while being involved is what today we are in need for.

“Freedom equals playing against the apparatus”.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged eames, google earth | Leave a comment

Laborers of Love (LOL)

By ludic pyjamas | Published: September 28, 2010

This post is not available in english

Posted in Interviews, konteiner | Tagged labour, MTurk, sex | Leave a comment

The (total) Google Wave

By ludic pyjamas | Published: July 2, 2010

This page is not available in english.

Posted in konteiner | Tagged google, open source | Leave a comment

Esse, Nosse, Posse: Common Wealth for Common People

By ludic pyjamas | Published: April 21, 2010

gearbox

The network society and especially the internet culture of the last twenty years has changed our mode of working, communicating and living. The numerous and continuously evolving digital networks of people, institutions, movements and organisatations have been based on the new possibilities of technology but have also given birth to new forms of economy and value that fit into the immaterial time and space of flows. The elements of collaboration, collective intelligence, free and common knowledge have now become principal and have empowered a multitude of people that believe in the new potentialities given in the networked reality. This digital multitude, the new contemporary creative working class, surpassed the borders between work and leisure, driven by a desire to learn, to share, to collaborate. The notions of the attention economy, the gift economy, the common wealth, the immaterial, affective but also precarious labour are frequenty used to describe the phenomena of our era. But, what is the meaning of these new features of economy in times of global financial crisis?

What role do the networks really play? Can the offer alternative and sustainable models of collaboration and production? Or they are a contemporary illusion that contributes to the difficulties and adversities that the contemporary multitude needs to face?

The new online exhibition hosted in the website of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, aims to focus on the new forms of labor as well as on the new values and costs emerging in the new connected reality and it therefore presents:

-       artists’ projects and critical perspectives commenting on the new forms of internet economy,
-       initiatives and open platforms by independent creators who encourage the use of free and open software, the exchange of knowledge and experience,
-       texts by critics and media theorists on networks, economy and the arts.

Contributing artists and theorists: Burak Arikan (Τurkey), Samuel Bianchini (France), Michael Bielicky, Kamila B. Richter (Chech Republic/ Germany), Marcelo Expósito (Spain), Furtherfield (UK), Pat Kane (UK), Carlos Katastrofsky (Austria), Dmytri Kleiner (Germany) , Nicholas Knouf (USA), Tobias Leingruber (Germany)/ Jamie Wilkinson (USA)/ Greg Leuch (USA), Aarton Koblin & Daniel Massey (USA), Geert Lovink (Netherlands), MediaShed & Eyebeam (UK/ USA), Molleindustria (Italy) Ge Jin aka Jingle (China), Matteo Pasquinelli (Italy), Platoniq.net (Spain), Juan Martin Prada (Spain), Kate Rich (UK), Stephanie Rotenberg & Jeff Crouse (USA), Trebor Scholz (USA), Anders Weberg (Sweden)

The online exhibition “Esse, Nosse, Posse: Common Wealth for Common People” has the form of an open platfrom aiming to be continuously enriched and updated with proposals, works, initiatives and texts on the specific field.

Curated by Daphne Dragona

http://www.emst.gr/commonwealth

Posted in Events, Self Promotion | Tagged attention economy, common wealth, gift economy, multitude, net art, open source | Leave a comment

Σκέψεις για ένα μέλλον που θα ελέγχεται από σκέψεις

By ludic pyjamas | Published: February 23, 2010

Sorry this page is not available in english.

Posted in Ludic Thoughts, Velvet Magazine | Tagged Avatar, BCI, games, Surrogates | Leave a comment

e-MobiLArt

By ludic pyjamas | Published: May 16, 2009

The group exhibition titled “e-MobiLArt” is taking place during 20 May – 10 June in the context of the European project e-MobiLart (European Mobile Lab for interactive media Artists) scheduled activities. The project is sponsored by the E.U. and is coordinated by the University of Athens (Greece), Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Laboratory of New Technologies in Education, Communication and Mass Media. The exhibition is organized by the State Museum of Contemporary Art and is taking place as a parallel event of the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale.

The 11 exhibited interactive installation artworks are the result of collaboration amongst 33 participating artists, supported by a team of established theorists, artists and scientists, active in the intersecting fields of art, science and technology. These artworks involve the use of interactive media, ubiquitous computing, communication networks, mobile and locative media technologies.

The e-MobiLArt process and its artistic results, which are presented in the exhibition, are the subject of a two-day symposium that is organized on May 21st-22nd in the Seminars venue in Warehouse C, Thessaloniki port. During the symposium a short presentation of the project and its activities will take place and the artists’ groups will talk about their collaborative experience and will present their exhibited artworks. This will be followed by two panel discussions on the curatorial, the artistic and the organizational perspectives into the collaborative process. Invited lecturers in the symposium are Roger Malina (astrophysicist and executive editor of Leonardo, the most important journal on Art, Science and Technology published by MIT Press), Claudine Dussolier (director of the cultural organisation ZINC, Marseille), Ekmel Ertan (artistic director of the international festival AMBER, Instanbul) and the creative team NeMe (Cyprus).

May 20th – June 10th
Warehouse Β1, Thessaloniki Port 20/5, 20.00

www.thessalonikibiennale.gr / www.media.uoa.gr/emobilart

Posted in Events, Networking, Velvet Magazine | Tagged collaborative, e-MobiLArt, interactive, interdisciplinary | Leave a comment

Enter

By ludic pyjamas | Published: April 15, 2009

post available only in greek

Posted in Events, Velvet Magazine | Tagged adapt, enter, festival, prague | Leave a comment

Tag ties and affective spies

By ludic pyjamas | Published: March 9, 2009

The social web, commonly known as web 2.0, resembles a mixture of promises and contradictions that refer directly to its main components, those of sociality and participation. In the new public spaces of the contemporary info-sphere such as those of the YouTube, the Facebook or the flickr, people meet, interact and inter-define themselves while they are producing and consuming, they are spying and being spied . Through uploading photos, videos and posts and through tagging and linking, the users share beliefs and experiences, they construct different sides of their subjectivity and they also form the content and the structure of web itself. The era of subjective taxonomies, known as folksonomies, brings about a new situation composed by elements that are changeable, interconnected and rhizomatic.; personified, exposed and therefore easy to become exploitable.

Tag ties & affective spies presents a selection of online works that refer to the aspects and features of the social web , to the elements that render it powerful and vulnerable at the same time. Exploring the functioning modes of the social networks and the ways users interact within them, a new form of artistic practice is being formed that comments, critisizes and subverts their structures by altering their semiology and formalism. Posing questions, and approaching the social media in a playful way, the works presented aim to raise awareness about the different possibilities that are now opened up to the users.

Participating artists: Christophe Bruno, Gregory Chatonsky, Paolo Cirio, Wayne Clements, Jonathan Harris & Sep Kamvar, Jodi, Les Liens Invisibles, Personal Cinema & the Erasers, Ramsay Stirling, George Holsheimer – Mirjam ter Linden – Daan Odijk -Patri Sadiqah & Raoul Siepers

Organised by: National Museum of Contemporary Art
Curated by: Daphne Dragona

http://nextnode.net/sites/emst/wp/

Posted in Events, Networking | Tagged folksonomies, Ludic interactions, resistance, social media, web 2.0 | Leave a comment

#griots

By ludic pyjamas | Published: January 30, 2009

post available only in greek

Posted in Ludic Thoughts, Networking, Velvet Magazine | Tagged #griots, athens, life, play, social media | Leave a comment

The big plot…interview with Paolo Cirio

By ludic pyjamas | Published: January 1, 1970

- What is the plot behind “the big plot” and how does it evolve for the viewers?

There are two meanings for the world ‘plot’, one is related to the storytelling field and the other to the political conspiracy. Both are included in the project, as experimental way to tell a story as well as to infiltrate a real conservative political movement with a super sentimental love story, until the effective plot of doing home made espionage with spying the life of a real spy.

- You have characterised it as an example of recombinant fiction.
Can you tell us a few words about that?

The most interesting aspect of this new form of fiction is its expression, which penetrates the reality and bring the audience in a real story. It’s like a subjective shot in cinema: social networks are recording our experiences, sentiments, relations, etc, so many stories are already there, and people like stories, that’s why we like to spy the gossip of our friends, or of unknown people. Unfortunately most of the stories of common people are boring, that’s why i tried to do something of more exciting with actors and thrilling stolen identities.

Recombinant Fiction is a label that i had to define after realizing that other former experiments of cross-media storytelling were weak of theory, probably because they are often advertising or games (Guerrilla Marketing and Alternative Reality Game) and there weren’t just stories but always with commercial purposes or with a challenge of a final tangle to solve.

I found that the Recombinant Theatre theory by Critical Art Ensemble fits very well most of the aspects of this new way of doing active political fiction. In particular CAE has suggested about the way of how performers should be, basically nowadays in order to enact a character of a story is needed to include all stages, real and virtual, where the role plays. Social Networks phenomenon underline the identities matter, so now any performer should care about the electronic identity as well the costume depict the character.

- “The big plot” as well as older works of yours is a critique on the use of the popular social networks of our times.To which elements of the web 2.0 are you mostly referring to?

There so many topics in 2.0 phenomenon. – Sociologically: the compulsory use of social networks sounds like narcissistic and exhibitionistic urge, in one word the egocentrification. Then the dysfunctional sociality that is being created about the concept of friendships and relationship – Segmentally: the privacy matters, like with Facebook, we are self declaring everything about ourself, as advertisers become more sophisticated about behavioral targeting – Politically: the Stasi’s main objective was to rebuilding the network of dissidents, names of other insurgents is the first question asked under torture ever and always rebels tried to crypt their connections, i still saw it just few years ago in anti-G8 demostrations. But now is enough a query in a database in order to know all people who participate in any outcry. The recent events in Egypt and Croatia are examples of tactical mistakes of using Facebook as political tool.

However media like social networks may have incredible potential of networking, sharing of knowledge and aggregation of people for claims. I think social networks will replace political parties with a more direct participatory democracy, of course, not with corporative and commercial platforms but with P2P technologies.

- How have people reacted to the big plot? How do you think that they perceive these forms of “resistance” to the web 2.0, that are proposed by media artists today?

So many people around the world joined the story, they are interacting with the personages and some participants proposed to act in it, however as the story is still running i can’t say which will be the end and what will happen!
At the moment most of audiences are gamers or random people, they are not interested in politics or in network critics, and it has been an objective of the project as it’s a form of Invisible Theatre (theory by A.Boal which i linked with the Recombinant Theatre by CAE), so the fiction should have a maieutic function and brings people to thinking about their beliefs and behaviors.

http://www.thebigplot.net

Posted in Interviews, Networking, Velvet Magazine | Tagged paolo cirio, plot, social media, spy, story telling | Leave a comment

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