Author Archive
More Wii Hacking
QQ More
| Again, this seems relevant to the class and to particular projects (and takes place right after class, and includes a talk by Alex Galloway, who we are reading for next week):
QQ More |
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| Curated by Eddo Stern
Light Industry April 8, 2008 at 8pm Artist Eddo Stern presents a screening of fan-made machinima from the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, focusing on videos that operate outside the traditional reverence of fan art and the game world’s own parameters, such as those dealing with real-life death, pornography, and drugs. While only dubiously subversive, they nevertheless reflect a compelling phenomenon, one in which a more hermetic idea of “fantasy” as cordoned-off reality (seen in hardcore role playing) is being replaced by pseudo-fantasy genre games like WoW that spill over into the real world, and vice versa, through the homebrew manipulations of its multitudinous fan base. Featured titles, among others, will include: Rest in Peace Ignoramus Stern will also be showing his recent video Best… Flame War… Ever… (King of Bards vs. Squire Rex, June 2004), which recreates an argument about degrees of expertise within the computer fantasy game Everquest, as followed by the artist in June 2004 on the Alkhazam online gaming message boards. Rendered in 3D animation at once elaborate and oblique, it serves as a spot-on ethnography for a particular slice of 21st century nerd culture and the thorny political terrain that surrounds it. Followed by a post-show discussion between Stern and Alexander R. Galloway.Tickets – $6, available at door. |
Election ’08: How the Internet is Re-shaping National Politics
I can’t remember who was doing this as a topic and if it was for the second or third travelogue, but it should be an interesting event regardless and is very relevant to our coursework. Reposted:
Grassroots organizations like MoveOn.org and Meetup.com played a significant role in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election. Campaign ’08 has thus far been a very different project, with some of its most crucial points playing out across YouTube.com, viral marketing, and blogs. For Election ’08, leading critics, artists, and media strategists will address the increasing role the Internet and digital technologies have come to play in national politics and focus specifically on the ways new media have been used for advocacy in the run-up to the election.
The panel will be moderated by Jason Pontin, Chief Editor of the MIT Technology Review; Panelists include Farai Chideya, host of NPR’s News and Notes, and founder of PopandPolitics.com; Jonathan Askin, a strategist on Barack Obama’s Technology Advisory Board and Professor at Brooklyn Law School; Beka Economopoulos, artist and founder of The Change You Want To See; and Liza Sabater, founder and publisher of Culture Kitchen and Daily Gotham.
The event takes place April 11th at the New Museum and is $8 for non-members.
Microblogging and Social Network Fatigue
I sort of jumped into the “intervention” part of my third travelogue a bit early, signing up for all the micro-blogging and social networking sites I could find at once in the hope of really integrating myself into the sort of hyperactive culture of up to the minute instant updates. I had the most success by far with Tumblr, as it served my need for a simple blogging/bookmarking service with a clean and functional interface. Twitter never really took off since I don’t have any friends that use it and my cell phone broke one week into the project so I couldn’t update the site via SMS. The other sites fell by the wayside as I found other more effective or incorporated means of filling the same “needs”.
The trend seems to be moving toward full integration of multiple micro-blogging platforms and functions into one, elaborate interface. Facebook is leading this trend, incorporating social networking with “status updates”, music selections, applications, etc. Myspace is aping the trend almost directly copying Facebook’s “mini-feed” interface and pasting a shiny UI over the same old html. It has been suggested in the past few weeks that 2007 may be the year of “social networking fatigue” wherein users become overwhelmed by the diversity of social networking platforms and essentially check out. It has also been suggested that some kind of acknowledged standard or operating protocol for social networking would help alleviate this fatigue.
Micro-Blogging, or, please be my friend on Twitter
Since my last update I dove headlong into a bunch of websites that I otherwise would probably have never subscribed to to get a feel for the growing popularity of micro-blogging and other new blogging resources. Seeing as this is a sort of interactive participatory thing, I have begun blogging with varying degrees of success on a couple of sites and would invite you all to join up and be my friend…because not having any friends on twitter is pretty much the most boring thing ever.
WordPress, I curse thee
I wrote a brief update last night going over the readings and film that we are going to discuss in class today, and when I published it I was met with a dialog screen asking if I was sure I wanted to edit the entry (the page was unformatted and looked like a bug of some sort). I clicked no, the page froze, I went back, the entry was gone. I tried to check the main site, the site wouldn’t load, and the entry isn’t here or in my saved drafts this morning.
-_-”
Obviously it’s too late to recreate this entry now, and I’m not entirely sure if I was supposed to post it in the first place, but I apologize and will do an amazing job discussing the reading in class today. I swear. For real.
ADD Blogging
I’m having trouble thinking of a good topic for my next journal, but I’m throwing this out there to see what people think. I’d like to explore the rash of new blogging services intended to speed up the blogging process and make blogging a casual, quick thing that the average person can do on a daily basis.
I’m thinking not just of things like digg, del.icio.us, and reddit (which seem to me to be more web 1.0 than post-blogging 2.0), but newer sites like twitter, tumblr, ffffound, etc. I’m hoping to open accounts on all these sites and try to actively use them and track my experience asking questions about things like ease of use, transparency, privacy (or a lack/desire thereof), etc. I’m purposefully starting big and then will narrow down the topic as I go and find out which services serve my needs best. Mostly I want to think about how this is changing the face of blogging and casual internet use. Maybe even think about how bookmarking sites could come to effect or bypass the beast that is google. Lots to think about, lots of sites to sign up for.
Multi-Touch Conclusions
It seems as if my project has gone from a general fascination with the future of multi-touch interface, to a discussion over the production of new media hardware. While open source programs and add-ons are common and relatively accessible to consumers, the production of hardware with which to access and interact with such software is largely corporatized. Hacks of popular hardware, such as the iPhone, have garnered large communities, but the obstacles to hardware construction seem greater, or perhaps there is simply less enthusiasm for homemade electronics (outside of custom PCs).
I do think the community is growing, however, and it is being aided greatly by new media artists and producers who manipulate the technology not necessarily with the goal of functionality and usability, but whose work can drive innovation from the bottom up. While large corporate efforts such as Microsoft Surface seem interested in projecting future uses onto their products that – while shiny – do not necessarily follow the organic development of use, more low-tech efforts seek to solve basic problems at a low cost and often with no proprietary restrictions.
As for multi-touch interfaces, it would seem as though it is a technology that is finally being taken seriously and being put to consumer use. After all it took the mouse over a decade to be adapted for use in a consumer electronic, it only makes sense that it should take time for multi-touch to find its niche. It should also be emphasized that Minority Report-esque interfaces are probably not on the horizon. Instead multi-touch will most likely be implemented within the contexts where it makes the most sense: in the visual and graphic work. But it will remain a shiny futuristic gimick until the technology becomes affordable enough to be readily accessible to consumers (and hackers). I’ll leave you with another Johnny Lee video, because he’s my new hero:
Some light reading…
Seemed relevant to several of our class discussions:
Wired article on the rise of “freeconomics” and the google marketing system that has overtaken web 2.0.
Cory Doctorow rant on the use and abuse of intellectual property and why it no longer makes sense.
I’ll actually post a wrap-up later when I’m not messing around at work.
Oh, and for Max and his computer
New Interactivity and Multi-Touch*
I’ve continued my research into the history and development of multi-touch interfaces, starting at one of the sources. In the video I posted above Jeff Han mentions Bill Buxton as one of the first of many to work with multi-touch interactivity, and on Bill Buxton’s site he has posted a brief but comprehensive article on the issues surrounding multi-touch and the history of such interfaces, beginning in 1982.
It would seem as if multi-touch interfaces are by no means a perfect science, nor are they capable or ideal for handling all situations. However, their extreme adaptability would suggest that there may come a time when many different surfaces can be variably interactive. Also, while it is often our first impulse to make direct adaptations of 2D point-and-click interfaces or even 3D keyboards and keypads into touch surfaces, in gaining adaptability you may lose precision or the “feel” of these objects. Along with that feel, you lose a particular functionality. While the traditional mouse and GUI may not be a “natural” or “intuitive” interface (and in the case of qwerty, even designed to be non-functional), they do serve particular functions well. Spreadsheets, compiling data, arranging code. All of these are structured around ascii input that could be emulated with multi-touch design, but would not be precisely replicated. It would seem, then, that we should be looking at this from the standpoint of functionality. Perhaps it’s not that the old ways have died out, but that we have invented new ways of doing and interacting that have expanded beyond the limitations of these traditions.
