The starting of the new year (and having a few days off) was a good opportunity to work on updating my blog and portfolio sites.

A couple of things have been changed or edited:

• There’s now a navigation bar on top of the page to more easily switch between the main sections;
• (As a personal ‘landmark’ while making this bar I incorporated CSS sprites, which works quite nifty in the end);
• The portfolio has been updated with a couple of recent projects such as Aarbeien en zo and Lammermarkt;
• The projects list ordering in the portfolio was updated;
• The biography widget in the right column of the blog was updated (it now links to a longer biography);
• Minor styling updates: adding round corners, updating colors and spacings, CSS tweaks, adding Google Web Fonts etc.;

All in all, I think the changes are a step in the right direction. Feel free to comment!

In his presentation at MOTI‘s “I don’t know where I’m going but I want to be there” theoretical neurobiologist Mark Changizi elaborated on the research method he applies to investigate the field of why it is that the human brain processes optical information like it does. Instead of trying to look for answers in and around the exact ‘wiring’ of our brains, which largely is still a black box, Changizi in his books looks at the natural and evolutionary indicators that have influenced how our brains process imagery.

Rather than looking at why the brain responds like it does to visual cultural artifacts, this approach of looking at how natural selection affected visual perception, to Changizi, seems more fruitful when discussing design as something that has emerged out of cultural selection. Since the visual and oral tradition is a predominant aspect of society, Changizi describes culture as “a new kind of blind watch maker”.

In his books, “The Vision Revolution” and the recently published “Harnessed“, Changizi seeks out parameters that have their origin in nature such as color, the starburst shape, writing and music. For example, the starburst shape which is commonly used in design, can be found moving quickly through space (streaks start appearing from a center point). What is eventually applied in design is an optical illusion of movement; it generates the perception of how the world will look in the matter of a second.

One of the other disciplines that can be explained through natural selection is music of which the variables can be traced within the sounds made by humans. For example, beat and rhythm can be connected to gait, pitch to direction, loudness to distance and tempo to speed. Eventually, the binding factor in the relation between music and human dynamic can be found in that they share the property of having a trajectory; “a fictional story of a movement in space which can be ultimately understood through nature”.

In conclusion, Changizi believes that in order to understand why aspects in design and visual and oral culture exist and operate like they do, neuroscientists beyond looking at the brain for results, should not shy away from a nature-harnessing methodology to “fill in the unexplanatory”.

From video artist Joanne Richardson (GER) was invited to give a presentation in the session called “Online Video as a Political Tool”, she immediately had problems with the terms ‘online’, ‘political’ and ‘tool’. As Marx had wrote in the Economic Transcript, a social revolution will “not get to the next stage” when the state is used as means to overthrow the state. Here’s the opposition between Heideger (using the available tools) and Nietzsche (somehow doing something completely different) becomes relevant in considering the subjectivity of activism and the traps of deconstruction, a few of the central topics in Richardson’s work.

As Richardson was a participant in the Romanian ‘indie media’, the question of “what is it that makes our media other than other media?” started bothering her. Even more, the online tools that had been made available had proven to be largely a celebration of openness and accessibility itself. Making video users into producers would clearly not have brought new models of producing, “what makes video activism different other than putting it into the hands of the users?” To come back to Marx’ point: don’t these approaches by the masses still follow the same ways of production as with ‘other propaganda’?

After stumbling upon a film of Jean-Luc Godard that displayed a political struggle, for Richardson this was the shift from “[political] content to the mode of production.” Following from this shift of production were different strategies to depict political agendas. The first one, that of image reference, is about the relationship that truth claims. By questioning the image and the reference political film-making would act as a ‘counter-documentary’.

Another aspect, that of form and content occurs when “the form is made of elements that don’t fit, [consequently] it asks the audience to take its part and create meaning.” Richardson here mentions the a montage method in which footage from different political events are mixed together and suggest a collective social struggle while in fact the ideological contexts were hardly comparable.

In “2 or 3 Things About Activism“, Richardson deconstructs the effects of montage. In the former work, she uses different kinds of fragments which gradually fall apart and thus create a distance between the viewer and the objectivity of the image. Overall, Richardson stresses the importance of this ‘critical distance’, as the viewers “should not create identification but [...] make them think for themselves and reconsider the relation to the image.”

Photo by Anne Helmond.

In Friday’s first session called “It’s Not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic Database”, media archivist and researcher Teague Schneiter (US/CA) took off with an elaboration about the ‘IsumaTV‘ project she’s currently working on. The people behind this initiative aim to set up an accessible infrastructure for streaming and uploading video content in indigenous subcultures. This is not only a technological challenge, but also requires a lot of media literacy within these communities. Other than with traditional heritages, it doesn’t focus on the long-term storage but instead prioritizes the accessibility of the users.

When it comes to the technological part of accessibility, the project would require a solid approach to work for the across different communities. Since the Inuit areas are largely isolated from ‘regular’ broadband services (the costs / bandwidth speed ratio is one of the aspects that widens the ‘digital divide’), the organisation introduced special media boxes into these indigenous communities. Through this local server network, the IsumaTV network performs much better than mainstream platforms like YouTube or Facebook would have. Moreover, having a stand-alone video platform overall increases the feeling of (reclaiming) ownership, “it helps with having a good relationship with the users.” Even though the technological trade-off is that the network updates with a delay of about a week, this is still acceptable for a project with a goal to preserve cultural heritage.

In the end, the project seems very worthwhile. Especially in the “era of of rapid change, [in which] indigenous groups seek to preserve their subculture”. Since the project started in 2008, over 2000 videos in more than 41 languages have been uploaded as well as pictures and text. Content-wise, it proves to be valuable to have the locals themselves act as curators, instead of having slightly related ‘outsiders’ maintain the archives. The fact that the communities rely mainly on verbal communications is another point that video creates a lot more insight into the different cultures.

Future plans with this initiative are to attract more sponsors like repositories, institutes, museums and participatory media (especially now the Canadian government has cut the budget), as well as to add crowd-source (subtitling or voice-over) features as well as further improving the network its accessibility.

Photo by Anne Helmond
.

All in all, it was a helluvalot fun to be a part of this weekend of developing, discussing, stressing out, and very little sleeping.

You can download the game here. To play, unzip the package and run the .SWF (from your web browser) or open the .EXE file if you run Windows.

I worked on this with Rhys Davelaar, who covered some programming, and Marc Stumpel, who managed the project. It was a nice and small project to work on alongside the usual work.

Although I was unable to squeeze out 20 minutes of music within the weekend, I had some fun fooling around on my roommate’s MIDI-keyboard. What surprised me the most towards the ending was the enthusiasm and the richness of the community, I got to meet some nice people and liked a lot of different things that were posted within the extremely short production period.

All in all, if you like it or not, I might give this another try this year.

(*Drumroll*, and here’s the result:)

Hometaping 2 by Shoord

That said. The second update is that I blogged for the Economies of the Commons 2 event on Saturday. The conference consisted of seminars, and intense theoretical as well as straight-forward practical presentations. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to follow the stream during for the entire conference (due to office occupations), but the third day I contributed to the blog with two articles, the first one being a report of the presentation by Harry Verwayen (about Europeana) and the second being about Dolf Veenvliet’s talk of ‘opening up’ as a 3d artist.

Participating in a group of enthusiastic bloggers has been a good experience, and it also helped that I enjoyed the conference (or at least, the few sessions I was able to join) in general quite much. I’d definitely look out for similar opportunities in the future!

Hard-drive hiccups

When I just started to browse through my previous work, one of my major back-ups (a portable LaCie hard-drive), seemed to have crashed while plugging it out. With an unreadable disk, I was afraid to have lost every project I had worked on for the last five years. Fortunately, a disk recovery application did its work properly (though it prompted an inconvenient list of generated file-names), also, many files resided on the Google Mail servers as well. I’ll just take this incident as a note-to-self to install a few time-machines.

Launch

Anyhow, the portfolio is now up and running and filled with old and new work!

Cheers!

Disclaimer: I only tested the site in the Mac-versions of Firefox and Chrome. Please notify me when things appear broken in other browsers.

Ibb and Obb – The production of an indie-game

The first speaker of the evening, Richard Boeser, elaborated on the production of an indie game called Ibb and Obb. What started out as his graduation project his Industrial Design program in 2007, four years later, he had assembled a production team to work on the game – ranging from a programming studio (Codeglue) to a music composer (Kettel).

The is basically a side-scroll platform game with a strong emphasis on co-operative gameplay. As the game characters are able to traverse the top and bottom of the surface, they clear their path from enemies and obstacles.

Design process on steroids

The project’s research phase was very straight forward; as Boeser explains, the starting point was to develop a gameplay mechanic which genuinely appealed to him. The sketches that followed then, were excessive form experiments that seemed to push the boundaries (at least visually) of the 3d engine he used at the time. Finally, with the same engine, a mock-up was created that resembled Ibb and Obb. At that point, Boeser immediately felt that, while it was merely a ‘simple’ toy, it had great potential to grow out to a game.

After three of his post-grad years, which Boeser called this the ‘in-between phase’, he started a company named Sharpweed, and financed the production of the game by funds such as Gamefonds and Rotterdam Media Fonds. Technically, more and more mechanics were added to the gameplay. Also, the team tries build a community on Facebook to pitch ideas and designs to.

Mapping Dutch vacant buildings

The second speaker of the evening would be landscape architect Ronald Rietveld, who created a Dutch pavilion as a part of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2010. Initially, the invitation for the submission came from Nederlands Architecteninstituut (NAi) who asked them to “contribute to societal issues” and to “connect vacancy to the potential of knowledge economy”. The focus here  shouldn’t be on office blocks (who would want to promote those on a biennale?), but rather on historical buildings like monasteries, bunkers, fortresses et cetera.

The question that was posed was – with the creative industries being high on the Dutch political agenda, together with i.e water management – how to reinvent and facilitate not only the buildings themselves, but their use and its dynamic. From a critical perspective, one could ask what the relation between ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘creative industry’ is (as Rietveld often mentioned them together) in terms of progress, economic benefits and production. As far as I’m concerned, the concept of the ‘creative industry’ exists “only in the heads of bureaucrats” as Geert Lovink puts it (Lovink, 2008: 47).

Some of the visitors wouldn't even notice the ceiling ..

With the Vacant NL, Rietveld Landscape indexed the range of monumental vacant buildings, and subsequently mapped them in CAD software. These architectural models were printed with a 3d printer, and a giant installation was assembled with these prints. Indeed, the installation together with “The Dutch Atlas of Vacancy” presents us with a great potential for the emergence of creative hot-spots. Although, I’m a bit skeptic (and I suspect the audience was as well) about the political ambitions of the project. Especially, with the current threat of the ‘cultuurkaalslag‘ (subsidiary cuts), the revolution in urban planning that is needed for the growth of the new (pluriform) creative industry seems to become increasingly unlikely.

Playing and gaming in Rotterdam South

Third up, after the break, was director of The Patching Zone, Anne Nigten. In ‘her’ laboratory, teams consisting of post-grads, post-docs and other professionals develop social, local projects through ‘artistic play’. With their current project ‘Go-for-IT!‘, commissioned by Rotterdam South Pact, the consortium of boroughs in the district, the city counsel and housing corporations, the institute seeks for ways to improve the living quality and to enhance the cultural richness in Rotterdam South.

The roadmap for their projects aims to involve the target group, called ‘stakeholders’, as much as possible. They are often asked to assist with creating and test prototypes to really gain a feeling of being co-owners of the project. (This is done to prolong the project’s lifecycle.) Meanwhile, research teams that are initially not familiar with the environment, reside in the project’s neighborhood.

In the Go-for-IT! project, the team searched for ways to incorporate the ideas of ‘embodied interaction’ (Dourish, 2001), in which through “tangible and social computing” a shared experience emerges. The original concept was to have a space consisting of tiles that form the user interface, subsequently a range of games was developed and tested by the local community. Although the prototype was still a bit buggy, it would run for at least a year before the team could start developing again.

Radioscape – Loafing around in with antenna’s

In the last presentation, sound artist Edwin van der Heide, elaborated on his Radioscape project. As he explained, the development telematic soundscape ecology (sort of an instant collaborative RjDj-experience) with using radio transmitter technology become bothersome multiple times (I will spare you the technological obstacles.)

While originally the idea of sending and receiving was first to be implemented in Japan, Van der Heide soon found out that the transmission of radio-waves isn’t all that reliable in terms of scalability. (For example: if users would stand in close spaces, transmitting soon becomes too noisy to be useful.)

As Van der Heide explains: “we are not used to sending and receiving with ‘normal’ radio”. Yet, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger discusses the cause for this is not only the lack of technological progress:

“Every transistor radio is, by the nature of its construction, at the same time a potential transmitter; it can interact with other receivers by circuit reversal. The development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium is technically not a problem. It is consciously prevented for understandable political reasons. The technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance.” (Enzensberger, 1970)

Eventually, Van der Heide set up a prototype in the Leidseplein in Amsterdam, for the square’s not too crowded, wide and open. The antenna people were carrying along would transmit sound loops that would be transformed with the slightest move, due to the amount of parameters, the participant would feel that the sound was generated at random instead of out of a recognizable pattern.

Radioscape was also set up in Dordrecht

The device would also consist of a map that would display the active area. Since there were two antenna’s, and stereo headphones attached to the device, people could navigate towards a signal and experience the spatial acoustics.

Food for thought

To wrap this post up: This Happened #7 was quite inspiring. Richard Boeser’s indie-game showed a lot of potential by introducing a fresh and solid game-mechanic. Rietveld Landscape with their installation showed there’s a vast opportunity for the knowledge economy to redeem historic buildings. After the break, Anne’s elaboration on the embedded research and ‘play & create’-philosophy in Go-for-IT! seemed like an interesting, unconventional and especially respectful one. And finally, the Radioscape project introduced interesting (social and spatial) dimensions of radio transmission, while using radio technology as a broadcasting apparatus.

FYI: The eight edition of ‘This Happened’ will be held November, 22th.

Sources:

• Photos by Kars Alfrink, some rights reserved.
• Dourish, Paul. Where The Action Is (2001).
• Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970). In ‘The New Media Reader’.
• Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments (2008).