www.followthemoney.nu (video availabe)

Conference on 14.01.2010 at de Balie

Short summary by Juliana Brunello

First Welcome: Hans Maarten van den Brink welcomes us participants to the conference. He shortly explains that this is the 11^th edition of the circuit of conferences done by Mediafonds, Sandberg Institute and for the first time with Erasmus University. The speaker points out, that the theme of today’s conference, which is actually more of a ritual due to its periodicity, is not data visualization, but about ruling the world.

Introduction:  Annelys de Vet starts her introduction with a funny graphic representation of the efforts put into preparing this conference. She concludes that summing all of the costs involved in it, it is as if each one of the participants was paid 117,65€ to be here today.

She continues by asking some important questions: how do we deal with overload of information and numbers? Do we need data visualization to understand it? “If the database is the new narrative then what is the role of visualization?” (Lev Manovich)

She concludes her intro by asking the participants to continue researching about it after the conference; otherwise if there is no interest in doing so, one should leave the conference, as it does not pay the immense effort to put the conference together. Since no one left, she introduced the first speaker and the actual conference started.

Fist Speaker: Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens. Unfortunately for me it is in Dutch. Therefore I have nothing to report.

Second Speaker: Koert van Mensvoort. Money as a Medium

The speaker made a very entertaining and informative presentation, showing new speculative ideas on how the future system could look like. His presentation involved the themes money, media, data and reality. He stated that money is one of the oldest virtual realities in our culture. This also shows that the virtual has a deep penetration our society. “We are moving from the world of things to the world of information. Virtual economy is booming nowadays, the opposite is to say of the real one.” (Not his exact words, but sort of) As an example he shows one of the new millionaires due to second life.

“Virtual money is a pleonasm. Money has “always” been virtual.”  In the beginning cattle had been used as trade object and it was not virtual. Tools were also used as currency. In China, these tools became smaller, just representing the object itself, and then they became round, becoming virtual. These were made of metal, which was too heavy to carry around, so that paper money was developed. Other places they were made of expansive metal. Later on the credit card found its place in our society: physical and virtual at the same time, “but just plastic”.

The speaker continued by showing the difference between implicit weather data (as seen from the window) vs. explicit data (as seen in numbers). Financial data is explicit, but how can it be implicit visualized? There are no natural phenomena in this case. An interesting case in Kenya showed how prepaid airtime became a de-facto monetary value in the country. In this case “the signifier becomes the signified”. Will then telecom providers become banks and v.v.? Who will make the money? Government or corporation?

Mensvoort stated then that database has become our reality. Our days were consisted of things, now of databases (“are we already living in the matrix?”). He also spoke of the concept of Noosphere: the sphere of human thought. It transforms other systems, like the biosphere. Is this therefore a natural phenomenon? Are the financial and virtual systems a kind of ecosystem? If one compares two ecologies: rainforest and financial system – one is stable and the other of rapid growth – one is self sustainable and the other feeds on biosphere – however, both are threatened. A proposed solution was to link the financial system to the environmental one. To deal with climate change we need system change. The proposed solution: Environmental value needs to be monetized.  The eco currency (separate currency) should be created. One would earn to preserve and depending on the environmental urgency, the currency would fluctuate. However, there are many problems involving its implementation.

He finishes his presentation by expressing his hopes, that geosphere, atmosphere, biosphere and datasphere will live in harmony. I hope so too.

Third speaker: Christian Nold

The speaker introduced the idea of Bijlmer Euro, an experimental currency that should support the development of local identity. This way, data visualization can change the local. It is a very interesting project and I will no longer discuss the it here, but suggest a visit to the following website:

http://www.bijlmer.softhook.com/

Forth speakers: Floris Douma

In Dutch…

Fifth speaker: Richard Rogers. Mapping for people

Very interesting and entertaining, sometimes ironical, presentation about mapping. He started his presentation by explaining what the use of mapping is: it is to find out things that actually help who are looking for it. Activists, NGOs, IGOs, States, celebrities and the common men can find use in it.

Activists want for instance to know how big is the movement they are involved with. They collect URLs and map it in order to visualize the scope of the movement. However, cluster maps have its pros and cons, sometimes provoking a sense of concurrence, which was not the initial goal. NGOs can with the help of mapping find out important relationships. INGs can for instance visualize “who spoke during which issue?” and “which issues which delegate speaks or stay silent?”. States can recognize who their allies are per issue, by for instance mapping in clusters of terminological blocks. Celebrities can check how popular they are, what kind of issues they should be associated with and therefore which kind they should support: children, mine bombs or organ donation?

Rogers points out that maps can show and at the same time construct reality. They send out an invitation to enter a symbolic world. They prompt people to rethink their strategies, for instance to make one’s position higher in a hierarchy, as it has large impacts on how one thinks about himself.

For more information check www.govcom.org

Sixth speaker: Staffan Landin. Gapminder

Landin is a very enthusiastic speaker and a true believer in Gapminder. He explained that the data brought from the world is in a “strong” way transformed in statistical data. However, when statistical data should be brought back into the world producing knowledge, it is done in a “weak” way. This enforces the prevalence of pre-conceived ideas, which are actually wrong. Gapminder should make it easier for people to understand statistical data and therefore grasp the knowledge they transmit in a better way.

The graphics shown in the presentation were really nice ones, very entertaining. I do recommend a visit to their website. However, one must keep in mind that it is very ease, even with nice techniques of data visualization, to misinterpret data. One can for instance confuse cause with effect, of join two variables that actually have no connection to each other making it looks like it does.

Check it out at www.gapminder.org

Seventh speaker group: Yuri Engelhardt, Martijn de Waal and Raul Nino Zambrano. Data stories

The central question of this presentation is “how can one use database to tell stories?” One of the speakers explains, that all we do today is stored in databases. This opens up a range of opportunities to get data and tell stories with it. But how? Documentary and filmmakers have been doing that. A new genre has emerged, a new discipline. However, this is not completely new. Minard designed a graphic in 1869 that “told the story” of Napoleon’s march. Another example of the early development of storytelling with graphics is e.g. Land of promise; Rotha (1946), a city speaks (1947).

More presently, the film “an inconvenient truth” (Guggenheim, 2006) provided a kind of prototype to the “powerpoint” cinema. However the graphics don’t do all the work, rhetoric is also needed. (At this point the speakers show the part of the film of an animated data graphic with al gore explaining the development of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.)Other good examples of contemporary films of this genre are “The federal debt” I.O.U.S.A. (Creadon, 2008) and “The crisis of credits” (Jarvis, 2009)

Second genre: Geography data used to tell stories. The example the speakers have chosen is “Britain from Above” (BBC, 2008), which uses for instance GPS data from Londoner taxis and other satellites images to make a film.

Third genre: Database Cinema. The exemple used here is “What a life” (Canada), in which they use several devices, like quizzes, to create a story. One is invited to explore the areas of the website.

Forth genre: Interactive web graphics, with the characteristics of being interactive and online. E.g.: “they rule”, a database that shows the concentration of power. One can upload the maps they created by searching data. Further examples: the “baby name wizard”, “how Americans spend their day” and “we feel fine”

I strongly recommend a visit to the websites they cited for an educational look and good entertainment.

Eight speaker: Judith de Leeuw.

In Dutch.

Ninth speaker: Ian Forrester. BBD Backstage

Missed big part of it…. Sorry…

Tenth speaker: Joris Maltha. Catalogtree

Catalogtree is involved in designing data visualization. At the moment they are doing data visualization mostly to American magazines. However, at the presentation he spoke of their approach to design. He emphasizes the meaning of self organization as design tool.

He showed some projects in which social data of people behaving in a certain way has been used. He presented one in which the theme was cultural norms vs. law enforcement, by using data of a research that showed diplomats parking their car incorrectly and the corruption indexes of the CIA.  The conclusion of this research was that corrupted countries have more diplomats that park their car incorrectly. Biased? Maybe… (flocking diplomats nyc 1999-2002) Using this data they produced different designs in form of posters. You can check them at http://www.catalogtree.net/projects/diplomats

Another example of their work, which also involves social behavior, was a map that became useless because of its continuous use, and the habit of people touching it with the finger where they stood. This part of the map was so worn out, that one could not recognize it anymore.

Further example was “the blue marble”, not done by Catalogtree, but for NASA.. In this case, satellite data should be made understandable to a larger audience. Oceans were painted blue, forests green, etc. It looks like photography, but it is not.

In the end of the presentation there was a weird discussion about the design involving diplomats, if it was biased or not. Fact is, that there were only pictures of their cars, in different sized considering the amount of time they were parked incorrectly. There was no citation to countries or so. Someone pointed out one could still influence something, by changing the color of the poster, that it would make a difference if it were red of white. I don’t see the point… I believe that the speaker also didn’t, as he decided at a certain point to just leave the podium.

Eleventh speaker: Mieke Gerrizen. Infodecodata

In Dutsch, so I left home, as it was the last presentation of the day.

Conclusion:

The conference was very informative and entertaining. I learned a lot just being there and came out with new ideas. I will definitely keep my attention on the subject. I do understand now how data visualization can “control the world” now. One can use it to prove a point, to influence, to convince and not to mention it: to lie. Very tricky thing…

What will happen to web cinema as we shift from learning to see and how to feel to learning how to participate in this new electronic space of modernity?

Andrew Clay is the first speaker in the morning session and talks about web cinema; Mind the Gap! He is lecturing in Critical Technical Practices at the Montfort University, Leicester and program leader of BSc (Hons) Media Technology in the Faculty of Computing Sciences and Engineering.
Andrew never heard about Video Vortex before, nevertheless he gave an interesting lecture closing ‘prosumption’ (producers and consumers) and widening between online moving image participation culture and traditional theatrical culture.

Technology has been used to materialize the use-value of film – film as aesthetic experience commodified. BMWFilms.com is an example of how we engage with expanded cinema as viewers and collectors of new forms, new genres that are at the same time old forms – the new as the ever-same of modernity as conceived by Walter Benjamin. SWK culture demonstrates participation in production as imitation of the strategies of traditional media.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbOhDK1MKm8[/youtube]

The web via the internet is a gateway and a delivery system for film as material digital files that can be seen as resonant cultural objects, ‘fetishes-on-display’ in the web arcades. The web is also a ‘cinema of distractions’ and ‘attractions’, a digital playground allowing playful enchantment of utopian non-work and the hybrid work-leisure of user-generated content achieved through proximity to electronic machines, and this is where our hopes and fears for web cinema are made material, where our love of film is tested.

Web cinema shows us that we should be fearful about the exhibitionism of online audio-visual culture. The BMW Films advermovies mobilize Hollywood resources to web short film production bringing viewers into new relationships with advertisers. The ability to make films available to others is greatly extended, but participatory film production is not inherently progressive. One might hope that participant production will bring progressive forms of more democratic media, and certainly there are interesting experiments such as A Swarm of Angels, a ‘groundbreaking project to create a £1 million film and give it away to over 1 million people using the internet and a global community of members’ So, there is still the possibility that we might become trained in good habits.

James Provan a Scottish student, songwriter and video producer, uses especially stop motion techniques. The stop motion animation Pancakes took him 90hours to make.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UG5gO4nlLRQ#watch-main-area[/youtube]

In terms, then, of our symbolic engagement with films as commodities, we have used technology to materialize the aesthetic experience of cinema-going. I grew up watching films on television and I learned to love film. I received a film education watching a range of films from different cultures and historical periods in my ‘home cinema’ as well as visiting public cinemas. In both cases the engagement with the physical existence of film as celluloid, and the series of commercial exchanges associated with it were quite remote. They were more experiences than material engagements with physical objects. The introduction of the videocassette recorder (VCR), films on Video Home System (VHS) tape and subsequently on disc formats began to change this.

Since the introduction of the VCR, it is widely possible to ‘possess’ film, or at least the right to own a viewing copy. Subsequently, the cinematic heritage has developed more physically through the ownership of films in personal video collections as well as a memory-based recall of viewing experience. This physicality, of ‘getting our hands on’ film, is further developed using the web and the ‘next-point’ of the technological materialization of the film and video experience – mobile devices that can store downloaded moving image products. Television and the computer have been used to bring cinema into the home, and mobile devices such as phones, laptops, PDAs and multimedia jukeboxes are bringing cinema into new public spaces outside of cinemas. The web, like television, is not just a viewing space of aesthetic experience but it is also the source of material objects that can be saved and archived. The web continues the expansion of cinema from experience to materialism through the downloading of films to the hard drives of the PC.

Furthermore, in contradiction of the common view that digital media promote dematerialization, digital technologies such as the web do not dematerialize film as commodities, but instead allow them to be re-materialized as part of a historical process, most recently subject to the conditions of ‘hypercontextualisation’. Peter Lunenfeld (2002) uses this term to identify the real interactive potential of cinema and new technologies whereby the film text is just one element in a wider network of intertextual commodities such as DVDs, videogames and websites – a condition of marketing, promotion and responsive consumer participation.

Benjamin recognizes that there was a growing trend for readers to become writers in published media that began in the press with letters to editors. In the same line of argument he points to the progressive potential of film to offer ‘everyone the opportunity to rise from passer-by to movie extra’ so that ‘any man might even find himself part of a work of art’ (1935: 114). However, the development of video and computer technology has facilitated a level of participation in cinema that goes beyond the ability to appear as oneself in a film. Digital video technology enables the production of web cinema and web technology provides the distribution channels and exhibition spaces. The real ‘jolt’ of web cinema is the invitation to participate so that spectators become film-makers just as readers have become writers.

Andrew lectures also about the departure from the screening culture of production and consumption. Advocating ‘de-participation’ – rolling back of video interpersonal, social media communication of online video and the promotion of the web as a modified theatrical screen culture. Within this topic he shows a video of Howard Rheingold used as a social media communication of which he was quite shocked about. The movie is about learning to participate – teaching media literacy, interactivity and participation begins early.

He concludes with: ‘I would like more WeScreen and less YouTube’.

System Flaws and Tactics

After the opening speech by Bram Crevits (Cimatics) and Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures), the 5th edition of Video Vortex kicked off at the amazing Atomium in Brussels.

The first session addressed System Flaws and Tactics. This session was inspired by the inherent errors, disabilities and restrictions of online video technology that often conduct our behaviour but can also provide inspiring new insights. Liesbeth Huybrechts and Rudy Knoops gave the first presentation of the day, titled ‘Playing that video’. They work at the School of Communication and Multimedia Design (C-MD) in Genk, Belgium, where they lead the research group Social Spaces, on the topic of social, societal and spatial issues, using the internet as a tool and interface.

After pointing at the rules of play and playground, and building on theory of tactics and strategy as defined by De Certeau, the presenters explored the diffuse difference between work and play in the age of new media. Knoops pointed out that Google employees get to spend 20% of their time ‘playing’, i.e. working on their own projects. In his recent work, Julian Kuecklich refers to this conflation of play and labour as ‘Playbour’. Knoops and Huybrechts showed impressive work by the C-MD students in Genk, and called for play as a critical tool, and encouraged a practice of tactical play.

Next up was Brian Willems, who lectures in media culture as well as British and Irish Literature at the University of Split, Croatia. In his talk, titled ‘Blindness: the inability of YouTube to read itself’, he argued that online video often demonstrates blindness,as theorized by Paul de Man, Agamben, and Proust, and rather than being readable. He presented two cases of online video: The Rodney King Story, and Natalie Bookchin’s installation ‘Mass Ornament’, which was presented by the artist herself at the Video Vortex conference in Split (2009).

According to Willems, the Rodney King story demonstrates how difficult it is to read video. In the video, King, lying on the ground, tried to get up when the police attacked him again. The police later stated that they considered his standing up as aggressive behaviour. The video does not clarify whether this was indeed the case. Therefore, Willems argues the video demonstrates its blindness. In this respect, the work by Natalie Bookchin is equally hard to read. Inspired by the chorus lines of the Tiller Girls, she selected and sorted YouTube dance videos so they form a chorus line, through montage, soundtrack and composition. Willems pointed out that the amount of screens, layers and motifs makes this video hard to read, and therefore confronts you with its illegibility or blindness.

Rosa Menkman, artist, VJ and PhD candidate at KHM presented her Glitch Studies Manifesto, in which she called for a more drain approach of technology studies, which includes the study of its flaws and failures:
1. The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been, and will always be no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma.
2. Dispute the operating templates of creative practice by fighting genres and expectations!
3. Get away from the established action scripts and join the avant-garde of the unknown. Become a nomad of noise artifacts!
4. Use the glitch as an exoskeleton of progress.
5. The gospel of glitch art sings about new models implemented by corruption.
6. The ambiguous contingency of the glitch depends on its constantly mutating materiality.
7. Glitch artifacts are critical trans-media aesthetics.
8. Translate acousmatic noise and soundscapes into acousmatic video and videoscapes to create conceptual synesthesia.
9. Speak the totalitarian language of disintegration.
10. Study what is outside of knowledge, start with Glitch studies. Theory is just what you can get away with!

The session ended with a presentation by the artist Johan Grimonprez, who guided the audience through his You-tube-o-teque. And while the sphere of the Atomium was shaking because of an autumn storm, grimonprez created his own whirlwind, going from the history of the remote control and the invention of zap-proof commercials, to hitchcock pastiches and the swine flu vaccine scandal from 1976. (www.zapomatik.com)

The Society of the Query conference is covered by bloggers on www.networkcultures.org/query, photographers (check flickr, tag sotq) and a twittering audience (#sotq).

Soon after the event, the presentations will be online as video on demand. Thanks to the crew and of course all speakers, moderators and participants. And for everyone: enjoy the last day, and don’t forget the evening program full of Google art!

More info: www.networkcultures.org/query

By Elena Tiis
October 21, 2009 Felix Meritis, Amsterdam
In the crowded top floor room of the Felix Meritis, the moderator asks what the composition of the crowd is. Raise your hands. They go up at music labels representatives, managers, producers, artists, IT people, some students of this or that. Possibly the single most unifying aspect of this melange is the frequent ownership of an iPhone… Music & Bits was a pre-emptive kick-off to the Amsterdam Dance Event unfolding from the 22nd to 25th of October 2009. It consisted of a Hack Track in the morning for the technically inclined, and of a conference in the afternoon. In the following, I will loosely sketch out the course of the conference.

The talks begin by an exchange between the Berlin-based SoundCloud’s Eric Wahlforss and the DJ Speedy J. They strike quite a relaxed pose; no powerpoints and no notes, just an exchange to which the audience was invited to participate quite heavily. First, Wahlforss is describing how he’s been involved with music and “web stuff” for 15 years to date. But these have largely been parallel tracks for him. Frustrated with the limiting landscape of Yousendit and MySpace on the web for the purposes of sending and being exposed to new music, and the rote of sending/downloading/emailing in order to participate in it, his musicianship was beginning to move into the direction collaborative software creation. Music had become links that you pass around on the web since 2005, and SoundCloud began two years later. Wahlforss notes that there’s a big value for instant exchange and the new opportunities that technology provides. At this point, a manager of some kind from the audience prompts him about the legality of the matter – “how is this allowed?” In response, Wahlforss acknowledges that there is a grey area of content on the web, and there are certainly mashups of pieces that haven’t been cleared legally, but these form only a fraction of what SoundCloud contains.

Speedy J notes that it’s rather surprising that the first audience question should gauge the legality of grey use only. Importantly, a lot of the musician’s craft is in abusing technologies, and pushing these to uses not set up for them. Stretching these to their limits does the difference, it makes music interesting. At the beginning of his career, about 10 to 15 years ago, he had to often wrap his head around non-musician systems which meant often trying to enter the head of the instrument producer in order to create music. To this respect, SoundCloud is distinguishable by its musician-friendliness: it’s exploiting its possibilities to the fullest.

As concerns the audience question about the limited publicising capacity of SoundCloud, Wahlforss notes that the platform is not really oriented towards it: for the moment it mostly caters for people who already have a network. “We are before viral spreading yet, there is no “viral button” you can push.” Its use is as a tool with which to solve specific problems. SoundCloud’s business model is rather like that of Flickr – one can buy a pro-account in various forms, from single use to labels for their back catalogues but what mostly constitutes it is free use. A live application might be coming out soon, but at the moment it is not too mobile, computer-based, perhaps soon one can use the iPhone as a field mike…

Muxtape’s Justin Ouellette is next with a history of his application. He traces the beginnings of Muxtape in about 2003 when he hosted a college radio and wanted to have log of the tracks he played online for other people. Further, even before that the concept of sharing and mixtapes was inspired by the late 90s culture of turntablism, DJs and remix culture. Muxtape launched in early 2008 as a site hosting mixes of other people’s music but was shut down in late 2008 by the RIAA. In 2009 it resurfaced again as a platform for bands. Ouellette expands upon this aspect. As well as, importantly, on his preoccupation on keeping it stylistically simple.

Five things about design that dealing with Muxtape has taught him:
1. Focused design is all around.
It is centered around experience and engages the everyday. To this purpose, he devotes some time to what seems like an ode to the Galanz microwave in his NY apartment. It fits the space and the controls are simple and present a good user interface. This fascination with simplicity translates into Muxtape’s outlook.
2. Clean does not equal simple.
3. Event or the context are important for the experience.
For instance, in most car stereos there are too many buttons. Using it to listen to music therefore becomes a kind of exercise in frustration; and when an application frustrates you already before you start listening, there’s something off with the design.
4. Don’t throw away old models.
Muxtape itself is modelled after the analogue cassette tape. There is charm to old forms.
5. Limitations can be deceiving.
Mixtapes are 90 minutes long, which makes it easy to understand its limits. One packs concentrated effort into creating a mix in stead of trying out a few off the cuff like with a digital playlist now. The maximisation of choice, like in huge supermarket, is not necessarily the best; the charm of mixtapes was always about how people collaborate to delimit choice.

In response to audience question of whether Muxtape was singled out as a poster boy for the copyrights crowd, Oubliette notes that there might be something in that because Muxtape always was so self-evidently about music and did not couple it with blogging or other types of uses which would have meshed with easy categories. For the moment, he is concentrating on developing the second generation Muxtape as a promotion site for bands. The first generation Muxtape cannot come back because it seems that the industry is not yet ready for it!

Next, Brian Whitman of the Echo Nest gives “a short personal history of computers listening to music, 1999-2009”. He begins with tracing out his own beginnings as a producer of IDM in the New York scene, and his eventual dissatisfaction with the dynamic of “guys sitting in front of laptops looking so serious”. Software making is something that has made him a better musician. He took a PhD at MIT in information retrieval, in an environment which was looking at music as a file and at audio like a text. Algorithms do not understand music, however, to which respect he is very much concerned about figuring out how to get music into music analysis. To illustrate, or rather to soundbite some of these concerns, he played some automatically generated holiday music based on a statistical reproduction of 1,000 Christmas songs. It’s a strange disjunction; I for one can’t hear the holidayness in the machine’s rendering of the 1,000 such songs. He argues that it is necessary to understand language and audio at the same time.

As for Echo Nest itself, it grew out of the understanding that the best music experience is still manual. Data is actually hard: collaborative filtering (recommends other things that people have clicked on) is a bad recommendation system – it “destroys music”. If only collaborative filtering is the only system of online recommendation, the popular acts will eat the minor ones. Music forums like “I Love Music” capture some of the excitement of people about music, and it forms a much better palette of recommendations.

What the EchoNest does is trying to know everything about music and its listeners by processing data, which they sell to social networks, labels, video games etc. It has produced a range of products such as Fanalytics (a toolset for artists), and maintains an open source remixing community and code base which has produced, among other things, Morecowbell.dj for adding cowbells to songs… In the end, Echo Nest aspires to be something like a Google Earth of music.

Andie Nordgren and Martin Roth of RjDj present the concept of reactive music, and the possibility of having a sound studio in one’s pocket. Music not necessarily linear, they claim: encoding music can be done so that it is different every time. They begin with something of a timeline: in 1998 the sound studio becomes software, in 2008 the sound studio is found in the personal music player. This changes the consumption, distribution and production of music.

To make this audible, they showcase recent project: Kids on DSP’s reactive minimal techno. While demoing it live, Nordgren is talking/blowing/clicking fingers into the iPhone microphone which feeds it back into the music in distorted form. Someone with an iPhone tweets their fascination about this to their Twitter account right in front of me.

The RjDj ecosystem is composed of the reactive music player, music scenes which can be uploaded to the iPhone and composer tools. There is an online recording and scene community where recordings can be uploaded and which contains a search catalog. RjDj is not composition software of itself, neither is it attempting to build this up. It is rather about tapping into a “sweet spot” for a listener, to modifying sound in reaction to the environment that a person is moving in. … explains that they were taking technological concepts from, for instance, sound installations for the creation of a mobile experience. RjDj needs artists construing a base scene that the iPhone user can download to be reactively played. So it is a way of making interesting the value of someone else’s recordings. In audience prompt about the nature of their web presence, Nordgren notes that the site does not contain networking aspects yet but it might be on the roadmap. It is an API for musicians, not developers and the app is just a transport medium.

Next Last.fm’s Matthew Ogle climbs up to talk about the online music ecosystem. He stresses that he does not want to give a historical presentation about what has been happening with the application during the 7 years since it was first inaugurated. Human years are like dog years in the Internet world, so Last.fm – as a big dog – is over 50 about now.

In 2002 what would become the Last.fm of today started as two projects: a personal online radio which learns over time and an audioscrobbler which is a desktop media player plugin that tracks what you listen to. In combining the two, the developers got a feedback loop for crowdsourced music recommendation. 2009 was tough in the ad-supported music space because Last.fm’s music licensing and revenue model was constrained to the US, UK and Germany at the same time as the radio service was truly world wide. Making radio listening by subscription only in non-ad supported countries, caused some controversy and a fair degree of hate mail but the application has been weathering this quite well subsequently.

Music is not a product and not a service, but it exists within a “shifting ecosystem of discovery and use”. Last.fm in this sense is guided music delivery, the “connective tissue for your online musical life”. Ogle notes that it is true that Last.fm must be self-critical at certain points: they must acknowledge their own ecosystem – community of users and influence – and communicate better with it. This last point was engaged better in the case of the inactivity bear sign – a bear pops out when the user has been listening for a long time without doing anything. This actually managed to engage a lot of playful response in the form of people submitting various different versions of the inactivity bear. Currently the team is working on combo radios, multiscrobbles and party radio intersections (although everyone’s average music is not necessarily the best of the people involved) as a way of making the online radio listening a more fluid concept. There is also a project for Xbox with Microsoft.

Hypem or The Hypemachine (Anthony Volodkin and Last.fm’s artistic director Hannah Donovan) talk of the inevitable effects of style on music websites. Hypem aggregates what music people talk, or blog, about. In their talk about style, they start with noting that visual designers often last looked at when it comes to developing new applications. Good art doesn’t match your sofa and there are certain principles than need courting in the creation of a good website: user experience design (user needs), limitations, interaction design (user feel), content and visual design (looks). All of these have to be considered together, they cannot be separately developed and fused together later and their grouping like this should not necessarily reflect the order of importance although they are executed like that quite often.

When it comes to a evaluating a site, start with the “ooh” metric. However, it is hard to impress with style alone when this is not paralleled by content. The applications that take or track your data must create an “atmosphere of trust” with people. To this extent, Volodkin and Donovan flick through examples of sites that overstyle and detract from the point of a music site – that is, the music – to sites that are afraid of styling at all. Also, certain examples tap into a very restricted audience – there is an indie feel to the redness of Last.fm to which extent they’ve added the option of “paint it black”. Donovan argues that MySpace can actually manage to be communicative, connecting the public of a band with the music with the help of customisable aesthetics, for instance the page of the band Beirut. One can style without stylizing, which the route that Last.fm has taken.

The look of a social networking site has to contain visual shorthand for: “this site has social stuff on it”. Design culture can grow pocket-like, geographically specifically on the web, for instance Muxtape and tumblr tap into a certain New York geek look to Japanese sites disliking white space, to the extent that they are striving for being as crowded as possible. In short, sites do not exist in a vacuum, and music is messy so there is no reason why it can’t be presented in messy ways online too. Also, a site has to be conscious of what it wants to be when it grows up: does it want a mainstream audience or is it merely wanting to capture a certain audience. All in all, style does not necessarily mean stylisation.

As a last minute surprise revelation, Henrik Berggren from Citysounds.fm offers the audience the invitation to test the iPhone application to be launched next day. Citysounds.fm adds cities and location – pictures from Flickr – to music – from SoundCloud – so that cities have musical landscapes. The popularity ratings come from Twitter.

By Elena Tiis

Sitting in the plush, red chairs at Filmtheater ‘t Hoogt in Utrecht on the 15th of October, I listened in to the lectures of the “Accelerated Living” conference dealing with the ecologies of time & speed, and media technologies’ capacity to impact contemporary time experience.

The kick off was with John Tomlinson’s (UK; Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham) lecture on the culture of speed. Taking a broadly historical approach to what speed is, Tomlinson describes it as a condition of immediacy, a most spectacular transaction between time and space, that Marx describes as the “annihilation of space with time” (Grundrisse). Speed in general is under-researched; it fades from view in considerations of modernity, except for Virilio to an extent. Marinetti in “The Futurist Manifesto” talks about omnipresent speed, about capturing in art countercultural appropriations of speed. Interestingly, Tomlinson characterises Le Corbusier as a mainstream version of speed appropriation because the Swiss talked how a “city made for speed is a city made for success”, imagining how the speedways of the Voisin plan would serve businessnessmen as they swished to and from work. This type of speed was the mechanical, physical speed that could putatively transform the whole world.
Contemporary “fast capitalism” is facilitated by ICTs. The integration of media is a key dynamic for understanding of how this type of fast speed works, how it leads to the general increase of intensity and mobility. High speed speculative activity has the capacity to induce crisis.

To characterise this condition of fast capitalism, Thomlinson introduces the concept of “immediacy”, which is instant/has no lapse and proximate/close. It is a quality of cultural experience, containing a new sense of compulsion in life – that of communicational imperative or demand. To this effect, he treats a Blackberry ad as Derrida’s pharmacon – both a poison and a cure – because it is useful for both work and leisure. It also signals the bleeding of work-related emails outside of work hours, in a Marxist sense this is exploitative because these emails come to constitute unpaid labour, but on the other hand it has the advantage of being flexible. Consumers often start facing the burden of service, for instance they are required to buy their own plain tickets, to check in, to selecting seats etc. all of which demands their time.

The second major concept that Tomlinson introduces is “legerdemain” or lightness of hand. In the first sense, it is the body-work of touchpads and keyboards that seems effortless, something like gesturing as opposed to real work. This lightness has the capacity of bringing with it associations of immediate accessibility. In the second sense, it is a world of illusion and delusion, like a type of magic that conceals and deceives; the interface is hiding the complexity of the whole.

The baseline promise of immediacy is that “stuff arrives”, and in the manner of a cargo cult consumer use attains a casualness and even thoughtlessness. Finally, there are political and environmental costs to all of this because these media do not penetrate everywhere and are not accessible by anyone. There is also a sense that there is no broader narrative for current features of speed, unlike during the machine age when a strong narrative of speed operated on the assumption that there are disjunctions between home/abroad, now/later and desire/fulfilment. Now there is no gap to close so there is narrative of closure. To conclude, Tomlinson argues for the importance of ensuring that distinctions do not collapse and that one must keep in view the sight that there are broad, cultural-political reasons for us doing what we do.

Mike Crang’s (UK; Lecturer in Cultural Geography at Durham University) more geographically inflected take on spatial and temporal reach examines how to combine the fragmentary pattern of speeds and scales on different places. One must not forget extension, or the spatial distanciation of multiple temporalities. New technical possibilities shape world spaces where “bits [are] over borders”, where patterns of flows are connecting across physical boundaries. Crang showcases various examples of mapping these new realms, e.g. NYTE who map global conversation space from the perspective of New York. (http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte/)

He also emphasises the usefulness of drawing out Virilio’s dromo-chrono-politics, which is a way of collapsing distinctions that puts forward the question: what type of governance for ICTs?
GAWC’s world city index maps the propinquity of cities based on the shape of their communications and flight connections, showing that even these new forms build on old connectivities, especially those of colonial origins. One can also talk of the production of centrality, for instance when hub airports become gateways like in the case of the Helsinki – of itself it is not a big airport, but by virtue of its good Far East connectivity it can characterise itself as a major gate. Sekula also notes that we must not forget the sea as transport space: most global steamer routes haven’t changed much in fact, and these are mostly how as Tomlinson would put it “stuff arrives” as if by magic.
Crang devotes some time to the space of chronopolitics. This is to mean the way in which cities “shut down” at different times; time, in fact, is populated by different chronopolitical topographies. Crang proposes a typology of spatial and temporal fixings, which also involve social coercion. Flexible space involves trading on the real spaces of poor countries, for instance when New York time is transposed to Hyderabad where employees must use various locational masking techniques –
as well as working at inconvenient times of day – in order to service their employer.

Next, Carmen Leccardi (IT; Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca) takes a broadly philosophical approach to the restructuring of time. Her key terms are detemporalisation and acceleration society, which she compliments by a consideration of the ways in which “young people” bring into being new notions of time by engaging in anti-globalisation movements and new ways of constructing biographies. Taking her cue from Rosa, Leccardi defines acceleration society according to its three motors – economic (profit driven, neoliberal), cultural (need for experiences) and structural (rhythms of social change). Aside from this, it encompasses three levels: technological, political meaning and the role of social change, what she conceives of as the different meanings of institutions (which could constitute a point of contention because one might want to keep an analytical distance from the meaning of social change and institutional realities). Rosa’s “acceleration society” traces how technological acceleration means that time is growing in scarcity which manifests as a contradiction shaping our lives. Thus, how can we build civic space?

Leccardi spends time on the reconsideration of the idea of the future. Lübbe’s monster term of “Gegenwartsschrumpfung” – the contraction of the present – means that the present is not available for use and one must rely on the future for conceptual package. The building of identities in this interface is challenging, as it is the situation in question and not the over-all life-plan that matters in the end. Again, there might be some rigidity in Leccardi’s notion of these two; she seems to think of them in terms of their reflection in institutions and as their own separate spheres which tend not to interact.

Her guiding term “detemporalisation” means that time loses the character of being a dimension of experience, that the sense of duration is reshaped and operates in relation to the future. The unpredictability of the future is making life-plans irrelevant, therefore the “young people” of today are rather learning to act flexibly and contingently. She enlists two examples of this. First, antiglobalisation movements are resisting the violence of time/space commodification, think in terms of values and re-establish the connection between cause and effect in what is happening. The second feature are biographical constructions, which are concerned with mediating unpredictability and developing responses that neutralise fears of the future. I think that there might be more flexible ways of considering how notions of time are changing than simply from institutionalised to a non-life-plan. Be that as it may, Leccardi rounds up the first session of general introductions to the notions of speed from the perspectives of different academic disciplines.

After lunch, there is a change of moderation as well as an inexplicable change in the order of the talks. Stamatia Portanova speaks before Steve Goodman, who, due to the moderator’s confusion about the timeframes had his lecture cut tantalisingly short. This session begins to showcase talks of more specific inflection – as concerns choreography, music and visual perception.

Stamatia Portanova’s (IT; PhD in Digital Cultures at East London University) talk proposes a redefinition of the digital age as a neo-Baroque age. Her dense, dextrous presentation dealt with Bifo’s manifesto for a postfuturist age (http://eipcp.net/n/1234779255?lid=1234779848). Using futurist notions of time and movement as points of departure, she investigates more corporate conceptions of rhythm and topography. Movement is a sensation not a perception. Sensation is a vibratory wave crossing through bodies. As the body becomes a framer of spatial information in media interface, the liberation of the body is a biophilosophy that turns towards the affect, or embodied aesthetics. Intensity is understood as Deleuzian desire; an energy that is in itself and not for something. Aesthetic style with its technological present is controlling the body possible and creating a different ontology: Deleuzian desire and ICTs interfacing in the creation of energy as information. The digital is an idea, a concept before becoming reality. In this it is attuned to the Baroque in its striving for dissection, for a microscopic notion particles and the technological idea of the cut. Portanova’s contention is that we can find an openness in technology that is not only dependent on the imitation of life. Chronological and metric notions of time can allow us to imagine an infinite succession of time that is alive.

Steve Goodman’s (UK; teaches Sonic Cultures at East London University) talk was badly interrupted, so the promised exposition of the concept of speed tribes and the development of music cultures did not manifest. Even so, his brief talk was beautifully evocative of the forthcoming book “Sonic Warfare” (2009). Like Portanova, he begins by departing from Bifo’s provocation; how is it possible that futurism could become passé? He proposes a consideration sonic ecology, the competing corporate and grassroots initiatives in contemporary sonic culture. By contrasting futurism with afrofuturism, he is tracing the things that could be retained of futurism. Afrofuturism presents more complex ideas of speed than futurism’s god of speed. The sonic warfare concept is evoking the art of war in the art of noise. Afrofuturism is a colonised culture’s way of striking back through sound. As expounded by Kodwo Eshun in his “More Brilliant Than The Sun” (1997), it is a nexus of black musical expression, the city and the cybernetic in electronic music. Eshun’s concept of the future rhythm machine evokes the sensual mathematics of music as non-conscious counting. Afrofuturism is rewiring alienated experience through urban machine musics, presenting a landscape that extends into possibility space. Simon Reynolds’ description of the dystopic metropolis of warrior clans and robber corporations creating a city as a warzone and ecologies of dread in the 90s wanted to examine the intersection of underdevelopment, technology and race in the city, thus attains a different type of futurity. In contrast to Marinetti’s and Russolo’s unilinear notion of history with its white metallicist Übermensch, Eshun’s afrofuturism is polyrhythmnic, bred from cyclical discontinuity, aligning the future paradoxically. In the intersection of roots and futurism, memories are those of the future – the future scifi alien abduction actually happened in the past when black people were subjected to slavery! According to this, the sonic avant-garde of high modernism were actually afraid of rhythm. At this point, Goodman is forces to “skip about 20 pages” and concludes that in view of corporate co-option of musics, afrofuturism is not necessarily scifi but has proliferated as something that – aside from selling record – has the capability of affectively mobilise people.

Dirk de Bruyn’s (NL/AU; Senior Lecturer in Animation and Digital Culture at Deakin University, Melbourne) lecture dealt with the “after-image as a traumatic event” by using Prensky’s distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants as a way of tracing out inherencies in the way that people tend to interact with the medium and Brewin’s notions of VAM (verbally accessible memory) which deals with the context and SAM (situationally accessible memory) which deals with perception. These always intermix; the categories are not useful so rigidly. Flusser’s notion that “we all are immigrants now” repositions the migrant experience as that of globalisation itself. This has impact on our relation to technical literacy: we remain illiterate if not engaging in criticism of technical images. The issue is about how to critique technologically mediated images on their own terms, by the realignment of senses as in the case of the perceptual apparatus adjusting and sometimes fooling the viewer.

The final session could be said to attain to a type of microspecificity, first in relation to maps in video games such as Civilisation and Charlie Gere’s talk which managed not to consider nothing related to digital media, or the 21st century for that matter. This was followed by a presentation of two artworks by two British artists operating in the ambiguous interface between visual art and online media.

Sybille Lammes (NL; Assistant Professor of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University) spoke of gameplay and digital ludic cartographies. In particular, she explored the changeable status of minimaps in gameplay with recourse to De Certeau’s and Latour’s concepts. Is there something at stake in what games do to analogue maps? De Certeau’s notion of spatial stories – of touring – contrasts with the rigidity of mapping especially after the Renaissance period. In the middle age, the two senses were fuse: a map would show a place as well as an “experience” or a perception of it. Such touring traces are performative iterations. In games, minimaps are looked at and altered by the player as a way of exploring vast spaces. Further, Latour’s “immutable mobiles” concept provides a way of describing the image as technology: it can be moved around but still depends on inscription. The player is a mediator, mutating the map by tactically interacting with space but also constantly erasing earlier versions, or inscriptions.

Charlier Gere (UK; teaches New Media Research at the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University), for the whole of his lecture on ecology and messianic time, did not address much of anything to do with new media. In stead, his concern was to trace out Ruskin’s complex relationship with environmental issues to the point of the latter’s positive theophany of nature. In his soi-disant “vicar mode”, Gere was continuously on the verge of getting utterly distracted by long quotes from Ruskin peppered by autobiographical jabs at the author’s many odditities and failings. This domain-bridging presentation dealt with an eschatological mode of experiencing nature, through Ruskin’s description of the “messianic/apocalyptic” storm cloud of the 19th century. Via references to Derrida’s spectrality, or the reproducible virtuality of technology, to Agamben’s political ecology of messianic time in reference to Pauline notions of it, he ends up with images of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima (the flash of the bomb took “photos”) to Tsernobyl’s radioactive fallout, arguing that invisible radiation is the storm cloud of the 20th century; its messianic narrative. At the end of this complex, flighty and quoty exposition I was left wondering where it is that we are then at the beginning of the 21st century – there are still about 90 years to think up/bring about the apocalyptic storm cloud of digital media and environmental depletion.

To conclude the day, artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead (UK) showcased two pieces of their work which deal with data by attempting to represent its two facets: the procuring information and the contrast between live and dead data. The exploration of the materiality of their material is at the crux of their endeavours.

* Beacon takes a live stream from search engines, functioning as a “useless clock”, portrait and a landscape whilst also managing to reveal a particular type of intimacy in people dealing with a search engine.

* A Short Film About War (part of Desktop Documentaries) is a collation of Flickr images and log texts accompanied by blog pieces spoken out loud. The film scrutinises the browsing experience and mediatic war through the net (web 2.0), especially by the use of Collective Commons images. The act of editorial becomes a sort of surrogate browsing experience for this collation of multiple strands of images and stories of war.

Video Vortex V: The Moving Image Online
Location: Atomium, Brussels
20-21 November 2009

Video Vortex V is organized by Cimatics festival 2009 in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam and supported by KASK (Faculty of Fine Arts, University College Ghent) and the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA).

On November 20-21 2009, Cimatics festival is hosting the 5th Video Vortex conference. Two years after its first edition, Video Vortex returns to Brussels, this time hosted in one of the great icons of mid 20th century modern architecture: the Atomium.

The past two years, the conference series – which focuses on the status and potential of the moving image on the Internet – has visited Amsterdam, Ankara and Split, growing out into an organised network of organisations and individuals. Time for an interim report, perhaps. We asked some participants of the first Video Vortex editions and publication, as well as new ones, to reflect on recent developments in online video culture.

Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasingly prominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone’s reach, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What does YouTube tell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?

More info:
Conference Programme
Practical information (Location, tickets)
About (about VV, about Cimatics)

By Urte Jurgaityte

On the 2nd of April, 2009, The Amsterdam University of Applied Science (HvA) organized the 5th HvA Education Conference at the Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam. The conference, with the theme of ‘The Learning Community,’ started with an informal lunch with about 800 participants. Most of the attendees were HvA employees, (lecturers, staff and management), as well as the research depts. (’lectoraten’) such as the Institute of Network Cultures, and labs like MediaLAB Amsterdam. The opening speech by Dymph van den Boom, rector magnificus of the HvA, was followed by the two interesting keynote speakers Trude Maas and René Jansen, who addressed the importance of community building and networking.

In the afternoon, everybody split into small groups to have roundtable discussions about a variety of important topics related to education and research. The roundtables were arranged according to 8 main themes: Learning Community, ICT and Education, Learning the Big City, Young Teachers / Professionalizing, Excellency / Masters, Divergent Perspectives, Study Success, and Environment Awareness.
The Institute of Network Cultures led a discussion about the use and possible value of social networks within higher education, with the title ‘Is your EduHyves LinkedIn yet?.’ At this roundtable, moderated by Geert Lovink and Paul den Hertog, social networks were discussed from an educational and policy perspective. What could a HvA fabecook be? And should it be accessible for both students and teaching staff? Who is it for? And what are the pitfalls of yet another social networking platform? The outcomes were of great value for the further developments of the HvA social networking tool that Paul den Hertog is designing.
Another roundtable in the ‘Learning Community’ theme was initiated by three students from the MediaLAB Amsterdam. Daphne Gautier, Rochus Meijer and me were responsible for a discussion about Open Courseware. We did a short introduction about Open Course Ware at MIT and TU Delft and introduced IAM Open Courseware project. We debated whether the HvA is ready for an open culture in which knowledge sharing could facilitate education, and examined the possibilities of Open Course Ware at HvA.

For more information about the project IAM Open Courseware, see:
http://ocw.medialab.hva.nl/

part 1

Session 2: Search Engines and Power

Theo Röhle – Dissecting the Gatekeepers

Theo Röhle is a PhD candidate in media culture at Hamburg University. His dissertation seeks to establish Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Foucauldian concepts of power within search engine research.

Where does the power of search engines exist? One position of power is established in everyday discourse through images of anxiety and fear. Giving power a face however, tends to obscure the complex relations underlying it. As ANT suggests, there is no fixed source of power, just a temporary stabilization of a network.

Defining the actors in the power network, Röhle locates the search engine as intermediary between user and transparency, and between webmaster and attention. As Google enters the picture, it diverts all actions through its own network. From an ANT perspective, this makes it the obligatory passage point for both user and webmaster.

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This Saturday, November 8, I had the pleasure of attending the well organized World-Information Institute conference Deep Search: The Digital Future of Finding Out in Vienna, Austria. With Deep Search, conference editors Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder set out to address the social and cultural dimension as well as the information politics and societal implications of search. An impressive line-up of eight speakers, divided over the sessions ‘Search Engines and Civil Liberties’, ‘Search Engines and Power’ and ‘Making Things Visible’, promised to make it an information-dense and interesting day.

As this will be a rather full report, I will post it in two parts. Be sure to keep an eye on the conference website, as the organizers promise to make a full video archive of the conference speeches available soon.

Keynotes

Paul Duguid – The World According to Grep: Both Sides of the Search Revolution

After a timely start and a word of welcome, Konrad Becker introduced the first speaker of the event: Paul Duguid, former consultant at Xerox PARC (1989-2001) and author of The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Currently, Duguid teaches History of Information and Quality of Information at the University of California in Berkeley.

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