Infoaesthetics & Data Visualisation: The Expressivity of 'Virtual' Matter Itself

Information Aesthetics: Form Follows Data - Data Visualisation & Visual Communication (Infoaesthetics) is a blog dedicated to exploring the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualisation. Inspired by Manovich's definition, infoaesthetics relates to a series of new conceptualisations of form - emergent, distributed representation that is never fixed, within the set of parameters within software. (Data is to informationalism, what abstraction was to Modernism).

Bus Routes Data Sculpture - a 3D data sculpture of the Sunday Minneapolis / St. Paul public transit system, where the horizontal axes represent directional movement and the vertical represents time.

Infoaesthetics functions like an exhibition or art space, a project that has collated many different data collections & representations, such as the virtual mapping of human movement through space. As a blog, it is interested in data representations that acknowledge the importance of the emotional experience of users as information access is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives and therefore new approaches are required for information presentation which consider user engagement and visual aesthetics.

greenpix zero-energy massive LED display - the largest color LED display worldwide, & the first photo-voltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall in China. the display requires zero external energy, as the facade harvests solar energy by day & uses it to illuminate the screen after dark.

Following a Deleuzian populist approach to art - artistic production, extended to include all forms of expressivity and creativity, is a capability of many more things in the world than humans or a specific group of humans - atoms, molecules, geological phenomena, animals. It also includes the expressive representations of visual data and the circulatory or distribution processes that create these emergent forms.

Wifi Geographical Mapping - a set of "semi-abstract" circular visualizations of the WiFi encryption levels while traveling through the cities of London, Vescemont, Belfort & Barcelona.

Not All Bloggers Are Human...

Written by artist Eugenio Tisselli, JB Wock is PHP script who likes to keep a blog.

Posting nearly as regularly as each day, JB Wock's decision to post is determined by a random vairable, not disimilar to human bloggers who post based upon contingent factors or establish ritualistic posting procedures, often based upon contingent factors.

JB Wock finds phrases on the internet and manipulates this found text, 'twisting' it into something different - but still derived from a source text. The readers of this blog leave comments that riff off the short, poetic lines JB Wock posts. The recursiveness of leaving comments on others' blogs, as an intrinsic part of any blog's functionining, is heightened in this project.

I wonder if We Feel Fine has picked up on how this alogrithm is 'feeling'?

"It Must Be Free & Downloadable": Internet Art Communities As Flourishing Gift Economies

Art constitutes a non-rival material good if it is shared - the giver and the receiver would enhance the welfare of the artistic or creative community they both are a part of. This idea of sharing / gifting art would expand and diversify sites of access, collection and dissemination of art and associated writing or reponses. The web with its potentiality to circulate art works, projects and texts (widely and quickly) can massively expand artistic and creative communities.

Members of these online creative communities are producers (creating internet art or contributing to its creation in some way) as well as consumers (people are able to access the art works easily), as this system is about open, fluid and reciprocal gifting and exchange. It offers us an alternative to the prevailing art market or dealer economy (characterized by the impersonal exchange of commodities, or more specficially art, for money) as it is based on sharing and community building.

A gift economy is defined as “an economic system in which the prevalent mode of exchange for goods and services is to be given without an explicit agreement upon a quid pro quo.” It is distinct from the market economy in that it does not exchange commodities, the PennSound project is a good example. The mp3 sound files available at PennSound are not commodities that can be exchanged for money. Bernstein asserts that their will be no problems with rights (all are given to the poet) and there is no profit to be gained - because they can be accessed and downloaded by anyone who has been granted access to the Internet for free. They are gifts given by the poets to PennSound (given permission to use the sound material), an organization that then gifts to the Internet - using public free and downloadable poetry sound files. The site asks its users to reciprocate by way of providing any bibliographical information they might have about the material – a request for direct reader input. This idea of reciprocity in part relies on users to proliferate the ‘message’ and disseminate the concept of poetry readings as a social enterprise as widely as possible.

The gift economy will flourish in a cultural context where there is an expectation of reciprocity, in this sense the gift is always moving. This creates a ‘feeling bond’ which works to establish a community. The gift economy that is fuelling an internet art or web-based art community is built upon the very notion of trying to create community, an environment where ideas may be freely expressed and shared.

Harrison’s essay, which particularly focuses on the emergence of web poetry communities, demonstrates how the internet allows for a successful operation of the gift economy, and illuminates the potentiality of creating an interconnected community where the act of writing is no longer isolated to the individual. Art can be continuously disseminated if we take advantage of the technology the web offers, in terms of it being widely and easily accessible (although there are still issues of the Digital Divide that may render this piece somewhat utopian) and offering creative potential. Hopefully the resistance to commodification will keep the goals of the community at the forefront and combat any issues regarding sustainability that may arise.

References: Joel Harrison 'Web Poetics & the Gift Economy'

Making Public: Internet Art On The Internet

Shamelessly conjuring up a hackneyed, tedious debate - "public art should be decided by the people", and "all public is shit" (I know, boredom) - but this article got me thinking... the web is also a public space... isn't it? Is the internet public or private? Obviously everything that is posted on the web is publicised in one way or another - it is no longer immediately private to the singular individual discloses - others may access it.

Our whole notions of what constitutes public and private are ruptured, as Andrea Slane (2007) writes,

"Many of the foundational socio-spatial practices of liberal democracy are challenged by cyberspace (private property, national boundaries, authority over the individual body), and these challenges have manifested themselves in legal battles over online trading in intellectual property; in the sanctity of homes intruded upon by spam, viruses, and unsavoury images; in jurisdictional controversies across national borders; and in the upsurge of legislative activity regarding online privacy (p. 85)".

Relating it to art, it makes me think that no art is not "public" art - every artwork has an audience, even if it is the creator alone is the audience... Perhaps labelling internet art as either public or not public is defunct when considering the capabilities intrinsic to the web as a communicative tool and medium for expression, or when imagining that which is "private" or "not public" in any externalised expression - which is in fact seems impossible. Even though the internet is a public space - perhaps internet art is not "public", considering our normative usage of the word preceeding another word, that being "art" - rather than positing all art/externalised expression as making public.



~ Works Cited ~

Slane, Andrea. "Democracy, Social Space and the Internet". University of Toronto Law Journal. 57(1), 2007, 81-105.

Electronic Disturbance Theatre - Politically Motivated "Non-Matrixed" Performing

“We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theatre of the action. A direct communion will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.” - Antonin Artaud

The performative avantgarde has long had connections to a political or critical social agenda - from Dada to Situationism to Punk. Working in the gap between art and life, or perhaps in such a way as to render this gap non-existent, the nature of theatrical representation is critiqued from within a performance space. Techniques & deceptions associated with theatre are avoided, by way of creating what Micheal Kirby describes as a ‘non-matrixed performance’ – that which is folded into/inseparable from life.

In 1998, Ricardo Dominguez and a group of collaborators engaged in online civil disobedience actions, in support of rebel activity in Chiapas, Mexico - the Zapatistas, a revolutionary cell fighting against generational government oppression, and are collectively known as the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). Combining artistic and political agendas, the group utilises virtual networks to promote its activities - encouraging supporters to download and run a Java applet called FloodNet.

Akin to hacker-tactics, or hacktivism, this applet continually attempts to open nonexistent Web pages at specifically targeted websites. By constructing fictional or "bad URLs" (Web addresses of pages that don't exist on the targeted server). For example, participants were asked to input the names of Zapatistas killed by the Mexican Army in military attacks on the autonomous village of Acteal, forcing targeted servers to return an error message each time one of these "bad" URLs was requested.

Aligning the project with conceptual or idea-based art, the fictated URL becomes inscribed in the server's error log as a way of virtually (symbolically) returning the dead to those responsible for their murders. Presumably if enough people run FloodNet simultaneously, the server would overload - so if a regular user tried to access the site, pages would load extremely slowly or not at all.

As Michel Kirby describes, “The materials of Happenings – performer, physical element, or mechanical effect – tend to be concrete. That is, they are taken from and related to the experiential worlds of everyday life. Within the overall context and structure, the details in Happenings relate to things and function as direct experience." EDT's virtual sit-ins operate like a happening (connect to performance/theatre), however with a more direct political resonance, analogous to sit-in demonstrations in which protesters block the entrance to a public building. Projects of EDT tactically utilise existing virtual-actual media networks and structures, Dominguez explaining their goal is to "disturb - and not destroy."

"Eye Candy For The Style Hungry" - Well, Its Certainly Got Me Wanting More...

Along with all things sweet, spending time each day pouring over fashion blogs - a new-found wealth of imagery, has become a new found love, some might similarly call an addiction - although would have to admit (depending upon my chocolate consumption) - both are harmless variations.

The impetus appears to be strong. There are so many amazing photographic projects undertaken by creative individuals - who post, sometimes as frequently as daily, results of their street fashion scouting online. I am struck by the diversity of approaches to the internet as an expressive medium for exhibiting the fashions of particular stylish people - resulting in blogs like Facehunter, HelLooks, Satorialist, becoming distinct social media objects - individuated from one another, each blog having its own identity.

This is apparent in not only the "kinds" of individuals that are chosen to be photographed (presumably, unless there is a call for people to send own photographs in, the blogger's attention will be captured by not everything, but a certain something), but also in the very way in which the blog is "present" within the diverse actual-virtual ecology that is the internet. The blogger must make particular editing decisions - actively controlling the expressive elements on the site, for instance how a user navigates, the layout, relationship between text and images, and associations/community listed in a sidebar.

Following Gell, who examines the social context as art - the production, circulation, and reception, rather evaluating art upon whether it is of aesthetic value or some other merit - like innovation or originality, an examination of the social context of fashion blogs is an appropriate way to examine these blogs as art. While there are evaluations of blogs upon the basis of aesthetics or sophistication, (this site here is an example, although I must say I appreciate their focus on independently produced blogs), it is perhaps more interesting or suitable to examine the ways in which certain social processes have brought about the production and circulation of fashion blogs, and would better explain why the internet has been used for this type of social and creative activity.

I have noticed fashion bloggers are commonly preoccupied with exhibiting the images they collect from a particular city, usually the one they live in. However Facehunter is seen to travel across the Continent and to North America even, collecting images for his now, extremely well-known, blog. Perhaps fashion blogs are a new way to "image" the city or a new form of urban art?

Examining the social context as art, allows us to evaluate why street fashion blogging and photo sharing between geographically distant cities has become so popular in the last few years, and enables an appreciation of the diverse creativity and expressivity found online.

The above images are some of my favourites all taken from Facehunter archives.

Constituting Spatiality: Wearable Computing, Cognitive Mixing

Viewer wearing HMD

(http://lincolnlab.net/freespace.html)

Erika Lincoln's, work-in-progress, Free Space Loss, is comprised of a seemingly elaborate, although described as low-fi, wearable computing system. The artist has created a series of HMD's, which link the participant/viewer to a feedback mechanism where by the sensors pre-installed inside the helmet measure the temperature, light and acoustic levels of the body wearing it. Measuring or quantifying the viewer's physiological "output" or environmentally mediated bodily responses, implicates the viewer's body & bodily responses in the art work, as determining variables for the viewer's particularised spatial experience. This data is firstly transmitted to a computer software program, which creates four different 3D landscape planes that the viewer "experiences", as this landscape is transmitted back to the internal LCD monitor installed on the HMD.

Inside the artist's studio ...

(http://lablog-lincolnlab.blogspot.com/)

The syntactic arrangement of the words in the title, Free Space Loss, on first glance, seem to instantiate an oxymoron. However the accompanying image of wireless signals spreading out over time and distance, illustrates the simultaneity of freeing/opening/expanding virtual spaces at the cost of "losing", perhaps reducing or altering would be better here, the materiality of actual space, or requiring a reconsideration of our invested certainty in actual spatial realities.

Interested in the communicative potentialities of embodied experience, the actual bodily responses to specific experiences generating data that may be translated into shifting topographical planes through the mediation of a software program. Landscape image projected initially onto the monitor will be one the viewer perhaps recognises as the artist is using images collected from the actual landscape surrounding the gallery. So prior to installation the artist describes how she goes for walks gathering images, which will be transformed into emerging 3D topographical maps as the HMD and software system are sensitive to physiological changes the viewer undergoes. Consequently these changes are reflected in the landscape the viewer "sees" - presumably from visually recognisable spaces to unfamiliar imaginings or representations, to something that no longer correlates with the actual space because the viewers embodied experience has brought about radical alterations. Interestingly Lincoln has also installed an audio channel enabling a dialogue between viewers. Upon discussing what they observe on their monitors, collectively they can organise the behaviour of the landscape plane.

Image of virtual landscapes as seen from inside helmet

(http://lincolnlab.net/freespace.html)

Choosing the term, Virtual Virtual Reality (VVR) over say, mixed reality, suggests the artist wants to emphasise that images are literally taken from actual life and "altered", through the embodied perceptual processes of the viewers - mediated through both the wearable computing and software systems. Heightening the separability, rather than a fluid interpenetration, of actual and virtual realms. However Lincoln does address the "mixing" evident in her work by describing the "interchange between individuals, environment & [technological/augmentative] devices as creating a mixed cognitive space." She points out that the viewer must negotiate between their knowledge of the physical world outside of the helmet and the visual topographical and aural based knowledge they gain from watching their monitor and discussions with others, within the helmet. This actual-virtual negotiation of space, that which is actual-virtual simultaneously, creates a distinct experience of space.

Close up of one of the planes

(http://lincolnlab.net/freespace.html)

The images on the monitor continually interact with the viewers' own bodily responses and discussions with others, and so are not articulated through clear-cut frontal perception (Hansen 197). In fact embodied perception produces the changing landscape planes, "tonal responses to" an ever adjusting body (Hansen 197). Embodiment is the medium through which this work is experienced, "space becomes wearable when embodied affectivity becomes the operator of spacing" (Hansen 175). Space is literally worn on the body (by way of the LCD monitor installed on the HMD), and becomes fully wearable as embodied perceptual processes coupled with the physiological bodily changes (which are inextricably linked to the affective embodied response and experience) operate and constitute the spatial experience of the art work itself (Hansen 197).

~ Works Cited ~

Hansen, Mark. Bodies in Code. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Protecting As Relinquishing: Creative Production & Publishing Online (Oh, The Anxiety!)

In response to some comments left on my previous post Post(Your)Secret(s)... I was similarly alerted, like the respondent, to some things I had not given much thought to or attention to in my discussion, namely intellectual property rights, online publishing and ownership of material, in this case actual-virtual. (Presumably, creative production online is covered UCC, defining a copyrightable expression as one that is fixed in a tangible medium of expression – I am sure, irrespective of whether people are still arguing over this, readers of this blog will agree, online publication/posting is in fact a tangible medium of expression).

It does appear that corporations are ripping ideas off individuals who publish them online, with a disturbing amount ease, or perhaps more to the point, identifying how easy it is to do so (the short answer here - simply because there is so much material published online). I think this connected to an interesting issue Samuels raises, although I should point out that she is specifically concerned with verbal ideation in her argument – “idea-mongers might hike out to very foreign parts, those not covered by the UCC, and have some very stimulating conversations…then use those ideas with absolutely impunity in their “works” " (372). This is similar to coming into contact, while browsing online, with an interesting, small creative project posted by an individual online that seemingly no one really knows about or one that is not apparently copyright registered .

I am going to refer particularly to the case of NBC claiming that in fact they were “inspired” by a film and not the online PostSecret blog project, for their new show Fears, Secrets & Desires (thank you Pareidoliac for pointing this article out to me). It is interesting that they are able to simply circumvent accusations by proving the idea for the show was planted before the PostSecret project began. Considering that they may have had any number of “ideas” for a new show in the mix before coming in contact with the project's website itself, so who is not to say that this effected the shape and form of a show they already had an “idea” for?

While I think this brings up several interesting threads for discussion, I am going not going to follow any of them here in this post. I will instead focus on a counter-comment that could be made in response to the occurrence of corporations “sourcing” (or stealing) their “ideas” from individuals, “[who] could be more protective of their intellectual property so as to commercialize for their own profit”. This points to a double-edged sword for many artists, writers, musicians and creative people who do publish their work regularly online, and would like to protect their creative output. Part of the attraction to the internet is its capacities to deliver “our” ideas or projects to the world. The more you present your idea to others; circulate and distribute – with your name as author/creator attached, the more likely people are to recognize/associate you with that particular idea or creative production. Thus the internet is a hugely efficient medium for achieveing this, capable of reaching a large number of people in a relatively short amount of time. This is illustrated by the following and publicity the PostSecret project has gained, it was obvious to many that NBC was ripping off them off, because many already knew about the project and recognise the recycling of its central idea.

However, on the other hand (ambivalence sets in…) I must acknowledge that which some find threatening, with an increased number of people who know about your idea or have come into contact with your project, there is an increased likelihood that some of those people will be so fond of your idea or project they will either claim it as their own or recreate something astoundingly similar.

I think that currently, from the sample of online creative projects & blogs I have been looking at, the circulation ideas and creative production online is more focused upon sharing and forming communities (and hopefully it will remain this way), rather than worrying anxiously whether someone is out to steal your ideas (I have not noticed many blogs that are actually copyrighted for example). I am not suggesting that this should not be a concern, but I do not think, therefore you should make your idea/project especially “marketable” (if you do in fact just intend to simply share a thought). For instance, those who participate in PostSecret project by contributing a postcard are not recognized individually (putting aside the fact that individuals would not want to be associated with the secrets they send and anonymity is crucial component of the project), they participate in order to contribute to and re-generate the art project, rather than protecting their individual intellectual property rights to the particular postcard they created.

The efficacy of putting energies into the actual project itself, and working to get your name attached to it, by distributing and circulating it (the internet offering this potentiality) is telling - especially as so many recognised the striking similarity between NBC's new show and PostSecret. I am not suggesting that intellectual property rights should not concern those who publish their ideas and work online, however I do not think it should be a reason not to publish, circulate or distribute ideas or work at all – the threat of someone potentially ripping you off should not overcome the sharing impetus to publish ideas or projects in the first instance. As Samuels points out, “ideas are “public” and once a good idea is exposed…” (361), and this suggests the only guarantee for the protection of your creative idea is to expose and publish, distribute and circulate the idea as that which is yours as widely as possible (Samuels 361).




~ Works Cited ~

Samuels, Lisa. 'Relinquish Intellectual Property'. New Literary History. Vol.33, 2002, 357-374.

Technologically Mediated Bedtimes

In 2002, the above poster was circulated by Susana Mendes Silva. Visually identical to any number classified advertisements promoting particular services, Artphone essentially made the artist available to discuss contemporary art related subjects with anyone that called her. By dialing the number advertised on the poster above, a user of the service was directly dialing the artist's personal cell phone number. In an effort to entice, she writes “Don’t be afraid to ask everything you always wanted to know about contemporary art”, simultaneously revealing her intention for the project.

Confidently assuming she could answer any question addressed to her, this cell phone mediated performance was repeated three years later but with adjustments and a change of format. Instead simply making herself available by being just a phone call away, Mendes Silva infiltrated an online video chat room. Mendes Silva created Art_room, an online chatting performance where again, anyone could meet the artist online, and once again, by asking everything they wanted to know about contemporary art (provided they had internet access and the correct plug-ins).

These projects are working within pre-existing actual-virtual networks and communities, and simultaneously temporarily shifting and renewing their functionalities for the duration of the performance. Clearly Silva Mendes' agenda is markedly different from say making artful objects, hence the reliance upon audience participation was not only essential in the reception of the performance but in the performance's creation. The audience viewing the performance were also constituting it, by way of engaging in a dialogue with the artist, either using telecommunication or internet networks.

Such artistic methods and concepts provide the ground for Silva Mendes latest, related work, A Bedtime Story, created for INTIMACY: Across Digital & Visceral Performance (2007) , a series of events designed to address an aesthetically and formally diverse set of responses to the notion of ‘being intimate’. Art works included sought to address proximity and hybridity in performance, particularly digital and live art performance practices were set up as agents to further a vibrant discourse and practical exploration of intimate inter-actions. (Click here to be directed to the Intimacy website).

To follow a detailed discussion of how A Bedtime Story operates as a performance piece please click here. Essentially, someone either emails and phones Silva Mendes to book in story time, and then artist and participant meet online at the agreed time. Using skype the artist tells a 30 minute bedtime story, a similar concept to the two aforementioned projects of Mendes Silva.

Mendes Silva describes "the outcome of each performance [as] very interesting. The first minutes were used to chat a little bit and to ensure that each person had the right environment at home. A lot of participants were alone, but some people asked me to listen to the story with someone else, which created a deeper communal sense. One participant didn't have microphone, so we could only interact by chat. This was very strange because i had no immediate feedback, like sounds of movement, breathing or sighing..."

Quote taken from http://a-bedtime-story.blogspot.com/2008/05/about-performances.html

The technologically mediated performance is dependent on the interactions between the artist and the participant, to both set up the booking and during the actual reading of the bedtime story. Mendes Silva offers very specific instructions to her participant, asking them to recreate real conditions under which you would normally sleep. Creating a certain kind of space for this performance could potentially be done by replicating a nighttime or bedroom space in a normative gallery/exhibition space, akin perhaps to relational aesthetics, where participants could hear bedtime stories and fall asleep in the recreated space. The artist however is not promoting a service that could be recreated in a normative gallery space, but infiltrating particular networks and communities, whose spatialities are expansive and diverse - traversing immediate geographical separations (that would not need be overcome in a gallery).

Not only are humans, the artist and the participant, mediating the performance, internet technologies play a central role in this work, and furthermore interactions with embodied perceptual processes and human activity. The boundaries separating the virtual from the actual are progressively blurred as individuals spend an increasing amount of time inhabiting both realms simultaneously. Distinctions made between the virtual and the actual are obscured as, for example, the artist is using skype as an apparatus that enables a transmission of a live stream of sound, her voice reading the story to the pre-arranged participant. This describes the concept of "mixed reality", (Milgram & Kishino, 1994; Strauss & Fleischmann, 1999; Hansen, 2006) envisioning a fluid interpenetration of virtual and actual realms.

The actual-virtual artist-participant interaction online poses some interesting ethical questions, the artist identifies that "there is an implicit degree of mutual trust and discreetness, as you might actually fall asleep", and perhaps therefore, "the performance [is] not recorded." Interestingly the artist allows the participant to interrupt the story, they may speak to the artist at any moment. This not only protects the participant and artist from any discomfort they could experience, but also heightens the improvisatory nature and role of chance in Mendes Silva's projects. Suggesting perhaps all in the performance is improvised - except the choice of the story (the participant selects in advance), that which may not necessarily put the participant to sleep.


Links to:

A Bedtime Story Blog: http://a-bedtime-story.blogspot.com/

Artist's site: http://www.susanamendessilva.com/

Project at Rhizome: http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/27963/#50781

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS

SIDELINING INTERACTIVITY,

ILLUSTRATION & COLOUR

THE USER FOLLOWS A KINETIC

TEXT / CONCRETE NARRATIVE

WHICH RHYTHMICALLY

NEGOTIATES DIGITAL SPACE.

~

WE FIND,

AND WHILE THERE IS A

DISTINCT FOCUS ON

THE PRESENCE & EXPERIENCE

OF SOUND & TYPOGRAPHY/TEXT,

ACHIEVED BY EMPLOYING

A SIMPLE FORMAT,

COMPLEXLY EVOCATIVE &

IMAGINATIVELY LAYERED

NARRATIVES ARE ESTABLISHED.

~

UTILISING FLASH,

AND CREATE FAST-MOVING,
TEXT-BASED WORKS THAT
ARE SYNCHRONISED TO
SHORT ACOUSTIC LOOPS.

RIFFING OFF FAMILIAR
JAZZ SEQUENCES
TO CREATE ORIGINAL SCORES,
HEAVY INDUSTRIES
ALSO REUSES A
SOMEWHAT UNIFORM
TEMPORAL SEQUENCING &
ICONIC MONANCO FONT AND

All the above images are stills from YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING, 2007 part of their project for the New Museum, New York. HEAVY INDUSTRIES have expanded their usual single-channel format to create an unprecedented seven-channel installation that tells a chilling story of abduction and assassination from seven separate points of view, set to an eerily laid-back bossa nova score. The installation is at once as nostalgic as a 1960s suspense film and as current as the daily headlines.

Links to: Rhizome & NewMuseum.org for more details about the particular project mentioned above, to the YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES site for access to their artworks and an interview with the collective.

Post(Your)Secret(s)... And they will remain confidential...

A postcard is an easily identifiable and recognizable social object, distinguished by its regularized size, flatness and double-sided appearance (one side usually presents a visual image of some sort, and on the other a blank space where a message or note is typically written). Sharply contrasted with the expansive format of the letter, a postcard offers scope for brief and compressed linguistic expression. Envelope-less, a postcard is the perfect choice for sending a souvenir whilst on travel (which has been its normative historical function). The postcard, along with letter writing has been replaced by the enabling speedy and efficient capabilities of email and internet communication that which manages to circumvent the postal service altogether.




Accompanied by a precarious art history of its own (eroticized dusky maidens enticing visitors to a South Pacific paradise come to mind as one of many examples), the postcard, has also been exploited for commercial art purposes. Most galleries and museums now cheaply reprint, the most well-known and iconic canonical art images, from Monet to Warhol, onto postcards and make available for purchase.

This is at odds with the use of postcards for the artistic trading activities and processes of exchange that characterized the international mail art network and movement beginning in the 1950s & 60s. Via the postal service, artists gifted and received a multiplicity of ephemera. Ranging from postcards and handmade books or zines to images made from photocopied materials or with rubber stamps, and other found objects and materials usually relegated to the margins of artistic productivity.

(Useful resources for mail art online - Mail-Art, International Mail Art Archives, EMMA)

Based upon ideas surrounding of freely exchanging art objects and critiquing the dominance of art institutions, mail art “focuses [up]on the social context of art production, circulation, and reception, rather than the evaluation of particular works of art” (Gell 3). This focus is closely linked to a contemporary community art project that similarly makes use of postcard format. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard to a postal address. From here they are "posted" onto the PostSecret blog (blogging and mailing postcards as two forms of "posting"). Sharing secrets has extended to artists using video formats and book publications of the collected postcards.

PostSecret is a mixed reality work. Real life experiences and activities, transferring a deep dark secret onto a postcard, are mixed with the virtual activities of, posting the postcards onto the blog itself and users experiencing the art project online. Exposing secrets to wide internet readership and constructing secrets, literally reifying that which is essentially considered to be a ‘feeling’, ‘regret for past action’, or a ‘worry’ into a concrete object, are expressive and "performative" processes, resulting in the production of a vast range of social media objects.


From the humorous and trifling …

... to a confession of either superficiality or desperateness

... to a statement of guilt, perhaps commenting further (and maybe beyond the creator's intention) on the effects of political correctness and the ways in which marginal groups are socially "visible".

If a secret is understood as that which is kept hidden from knowledge or view, that which we kept internalized, concealed, and do not express, our very notion of ‘secret’ or ‘secretness’ must shift when a secret is shared between individuals or materially expressed in some way. The intrinsic format of the postcard makes a posted secret constantly in visible. It cannot be concealed at any stage of the circulation process, between its initial creation, postal processing and reception on the internet.

And yet these "secret-spillers" remain anonymous. Evading vicious gossip discourse, the project protects its creators by making it impossible to discover their identity. But because secrets have been shared and exposed this potential curiosity seems to be already in effect satisfied. Perhaps more importantly considered is the nature of the ‘secret’ itself and our notions of ‘secretness’. Is a secret still a secret when it is expressed and shared with a large audience?


PostSecret writes that “Sometimes a secret we keep from ourselves only becomes true after we read it on a strangers postcard.” The capabilities of social agency instantiated by the project goes beyond the creator’s intention (Gell 3) to perhaps simply "get something off their chest." Reading the secrets of others can potentially make us realise that we perhaps hold that secret too.


Works Cited

Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1998.

From: N. “cl[e]ap.s” E

To: ".dirtee codah."
Date: Monday April 7, 2008 8:11pm
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b[u]t [up] [on]] a part.I.cularly i.nte.rest.Ing scale.


Mezangelle (the language Mez is writing in) forces together human reader codings and computer reader codings and has developed as a language over the last twelve or thirteen years.

While it looks visually interesting, I encourgae one to absolutely experiment with reading Mezangelle aloud.

I should point out that above is an "imitation" of Mezangelle, and that such a rendition of Mezangelle actually takes it out of its original web context, where hypertextual links activate the virtual dimensionality - you can view an example of Mez's work - pro] [tean] [.lapsing.txts. - by clicking here.

Mezangelle exceeds a "restricted economy of meaning".

An endless variety of reading effects and possibilities are created by non-normative usages of punctuation, syntax and word fragmentation. What is interesting about Mez’s work besides its interruption of normative reading processes is that I noticed many different things about my own personal reading procedure and how I usually "work through" any piece of writing. I typcially experience a lot of horizontal backwards-forwards movement during reading (not dissimilar to most reading of normative print books where reader's often flick back and forth between pages). So while Mez interrupts our normative reading procedures, an awareness of what constitutes normative reading procedures is potentiated.

I engaged in multiple re-readings (and re-articulatings) of syntactic flows, creating shifting and mutliple dynamic specificities, concerning namely pace and "meaning" (usually at the level of a word or "sentence"/"line"). These altered depending on what “interruptions” I recognized and how I recognized them, and in what o[h]r.d[e]e[a]r.

The combination of human and computer reader coding creates tension not only betwen processes of writing and reading, but the multiple and diverse processes of reading. Mez evades conventional poetic undertakings by illustrating that poetry itself cannot be contained by normativity. pro] [tean] [.lapsing.txts. for example, displays the process of its own making, that which constitutes it, as a piece of writing. It requires a reader to navigate both the hyperlinks and linguistic irregularities, to engage in "paradgimatic reading". Reading over or past these non-conventional "interuptions" results in flattening linguistic embodiment into mere furnishings or accoutrements.

Be directed to other projects by Mez by clicking here and link to _knott404_ a very interesting blog project.

The Hack-Able Curator Project

day 78: Inspiration by moirabot (flickr)

This project is really interesting in terms of its efforts to diffuse some of the 'power', prestige and authority a curator has in terms of selecting artworks for shows and exhibitions, across a diverse social network. The works that make up ‘imaginary exhibitions’ found on The Hack-Able Curator Project website are chosen from flickr. flickr is a network that literally makes millions of artworks, (photographs primarily, although people often scan illustration, collage and other media) from both professional and non-professional artists (labels that, during my recent internet art searches, are proving to be futile), available to the public, like day 78: inspiration pictured above.

This idea of the artwork selection process as a random one is polyvalent. Works for The Hack-Able Curator Project 'imaginary exhibitions' are not selected as they typically would be for a normative art show or exhibition, based on conceptual or aesthetic merit, for example. The selection is computer generated, and then controlled by users who vote on the curator’s choices, and therefore influence the subsequent choices the curator will make. Users also have the opportunity to upload their own images into the pool, and can therefore also influence the curating process in a more direct manner.

The images are chosen by means of a robot arm controlled by simple algorithm, based on the full set of tags associated with the images.

Aleatory procedures are at play in The Hack-Able Curator, and even though we may think this project is reversing art world hierarchies, that exist between the curator and the artist, I also think that it obliges us to consider whether the premises of normative curatorial practices, are anything other than this, anything other than, random. Sometimes works appear to be randomly selected for shows, random in the sense that they are chosen just because they are considered to be "good" or "important". To me, this "goodness" or "importantness" in relation to establishing a show is often arbitrary and the reason for selecting a particular work therefore seems random. The “importantness” or “goodness” of a work is decided prior to the assessment of its appropriateness for the show's main concept or goal it is chosen for. Shows may be "randomly" created because a group of works has been selected to be in a show, for one reason or another, they are considered important to a particular movement, or to be definitive of an artist’s career, not for "a show" in itself.

The Hack-Able Curator project illuminates our assumptions about role of curators - their position and worth, within our art institutions, and the purposes of art exhibitions, which in itself, all judgments, for better or for worse aside, is particularly interesting.

Fields of Dream - How To Write a Poem, Randomness & Anti-Randomness

The small, not like careened around the bend, nearing the burnt, it was a bloody stars day for sighing heavily in the christened crash sighing

Maw bit ate a clefting parchment and fell into a cuddle, leaving home it was a raining night as "animal" talk to me

The tight, blackened careened around the bend, nearing the burning holes, it was a stampingly day for nevertheless in the dusky aeons

Tell like cold, and with decided warbling over.



The lines of the poem above were created using Fields of Dream, a literary game where participants can do one or both of the following two things. They can write fill-in-the-blank texts, called dreamfields, that are then left as templates on the site for someone else to populate, with their own words. Or participants can blindly combine their own words with the words of the template, so within the dreamfields, that have been set up and left by previous users. The participant is blindly combining words because they do not know what the dreamfield they are inserting their own words into actually looks like. A template never exists for long, ten dreamfields are always available and by creating a new one, an existing one is erased, similar to a dream that may be forgotten upon waking up. It soon becomes obvious that there is no randomness within fields of dream; fields of dream explains “we are anti-randomness. Or rather, any randomness should come from [the participant's] mind, not from the server's pseudorandom number generator”, or aleatory computer generated procedures. For example, you may enter any word or part of speech when it asks for a noun - “There is no provision for editing what you have submitted; we are anti-editing, just write what you feel like writing at the moment and throw your words together with someone else's.” So while the participants inserted words may be completely "random", the template within which they are working is somewhat deterministic. The radomness is always determined, not by what a participant writes in - but by way of the syntactic structure of the lines. Compare the first and third lines of my poem. The project is collaboration between Nick Montfort and Rachel Stevens. Click here to play Fields of Dream.

Pantoume - Some of the Pleasures & Possibilities of Hypertext

There were days in that city when I would not face its streets, previous experience of leers, catcalls, projected identities brute incentives to pull out, if only for 24 hours. Foreign women were defined by an influx of game students who frequented the clubs and, by proxy, the rest of us too were divorced from local femininity, marked for an extraordinarily rampant mitigation of social mores. Pale-skinned, blue-eyed, so tall I could rarely find trousers of the right length in shops, sans camouflage, I was effortlessly Other.

- Text and image, by Kai Fierle-Hedrick & Marianne Morris, respectively, from their collaborative project Pantoume.

Pantoume is a new media project by Kai Fierle-Hedrick & Marianne Morris published in How2, an online journal that is interested in exploring innovative writing projects, non-traditional directions in poetry and scholarship by women. Pantoume exists as an interactive hypertext art work, you can visit Pantoume at How2 by clicking here. Marianne Morris' visual pieces were also exhibited at Cambridge Experimental Women Writers’ Festival. (Click here for a link to that festival).

Sophie Robinson has written an introduction to Pantoume as well as written her own poetic response to the work, titled Sugar and has interviewed both Kai and Marianne about the project.

I think this work particularly interests me in terms of what I have been reading about interactivity and differing levels of user participation across the myriad of new media works. I am particularly alerted to a comment Julian Stallabrass quotes in Internet Art to illustrate his and others' point that user/screen interactivity, that which necessary for new media works (having someone behind the computer screen clicking on the hyperlinks to "move through" the works for example). However, he argues this does not necessarily mean the work should be marked out as "interactive", considering the base level of audience "interactivity" that is required to "read" (that is to view or experience) any work of art, whether materially object-based or hypterextual. It does seem perhaps unusual to mark out these works as interactive when any viewer in any art space, actual or virtual, is required to "move through" the space in order to "read", view or experience the work(s). This actual bodily movement in space does not seem so differentiated from hypertextual leaps. We may conclude that all artworks are indeed interactive, although require different levels of participation from the spectator, viewer or user.

I think our tendency to think of a painting, for instance, as not necessarily interactive comes from our thinking about it as an art object, one that we stand before, in awe and contemplation. Because new media works require a user to activate them, it is difficult for us to perceive them as objects, in the way we do with painting or other works that exist in the actual. I also think that this (non)differentiation has to do with the passivity/interactivity binarism heavily engrained into our thinking about art that exists in the actual and art that exists in the virtual, a binarism that helps us describe how virutal based works are differ from works that exist in the actual. However as I was reading Pantoume, I recognised there is the possibility of reading the piece, by clicking on the hyperlinks, without actually "reading" each page. The presence of hyperlinks makes it easy to "move through" the piece without actually reading Kai's text or really engaging with Marianne's collages, which makes it seem as if the user is missing out on what these works have to offer.

However, in saying this, I think that hypertext makes more tangible (rather than limits) possibilities for reading that exist in the actual. Alternative ways of reading are made more "real" in virtual space. These alternative ways of reading are always possible and may occur in "actual" reading, however our dominant mode of reading a book "cover to cover" in the actual is sharply contrasted with the demands of hypertext. I think it is also useful to consider our normative ways of viewing artworks aswell. Hypertext seems to free us from the linear mode of reading where we feel that we must read every word on the page to understand or make sense of the narrative, and in doing so it makes it possible for us go on reading the book. (Although I do acknowledge there are projects and books that resist this and the argument that "actual" reading has always been hypertextual, I just want to point out that the linear normative mode of reading still prevails - and on the other hand, I think that perhaps there are those who attempt to carry this mode into viewing and "reading" artworks online).

So does moving through hyperlinks at hyper-speed mean we are no longer "interacting" with the work and therefore we should equate with a kind of passive spectatorship? This seems to undermine our capacity to register and reflect upon all that we may see (or interact) with, even if it is only for a fleeting moment.