The new links for my exhibition are:

URL:         http://www.myebook.com/index.php?option=ebook&id=61085

Embed: <a href=”http://www.myebook.com/index.php?option=ebook&id=61085” target=”blank”><img src=”http://www.myebook.com/assets/frontend_file/embed_image/ebook_id/61085.png” border=”0″ alt=”Myebook – Technotexts – click here to open my ebook” /></a>

Have a great holiday and see you next semester.

Jonathan

www.uhhuhmarketing.com

sorry for the mix up. the blogspot site was when I was still using vuvox

Best,

WJ

Taimi Toffer Anderson at the 1956 Allentown, PA, Science Fair! - Smithsonian Institution Archives: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/4406433642/

Liz Lenkinski: Friends Forever: The Materiality of Digital Connection

Laura Crestohl: Mapping our Worlds [Vuvox]

Antonio Varas: From Books to Bytes

Nikhil Kamineni: Modular Audio Effects

Christo de Klerk: Materiality of Deletion

Jonathan Lukes: Technotexts [password: Technotexts -- note that this is case-sensitive!]

Alex Campolo: Cassettes: Endgames of Obsolescence

Andrew Nealon: On A Wire: twitter and the telegram

Farah Momin: Magazines and Materiality

Willis Chan: Gastroporn and Advertising Materiality

Angeli: facebook persona: Iamb Nobedee

Wes Jackson: Hip Hop Started Out in the Park

Yeong Ran Kim: Soundscape of the Diaspora

]]> http://wordsinspace.net/2010/Fall/mediamateriality/?feed=rss2&p=594 9 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ http://wordsinspace.net/2010/Fall/mediamateriality/?p=588 http://wordsinspace.net/2010/Fall/mediamateriality/?p=588#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 04:45:15 +0000 shannon http://wordsinspace.net/2010/Fall/mediamateriality/?p=588

No, not those kinds of links!

I’ve copied over this comment from Christo:

So I’ve been thinking about how we may be able to link between projects. One way may be to draw attention to the physical location at which our projects are hosted by posting links of our various projects on a map. While certainly not 100% accurate, it is an interesting visualization of a material aspect of links that is easily taken for granted and takes our conceptualization of place past the internet suffix. I’ve started a map on Google Maps – it is open for collaboration to anyone in the class who is interested in participating. You can find your hosting service’s location using this. I’ve used the link button in the top left hand corner of Google Maps to copy and embed the map on to my web exhibit. Displaying this kind of cross linking may make more sense for some projects (those dealing with maps and transmission) than others.

What are you “handing in” on the 16th? Your dossier and your draft website. See the “Expectations” section of the website for more information about the draft exhibition and the purpose and format of the dossier.

How “drafty” should this “draft exhibition” be? Think of it as if you’ve completed your first full draft of a paper – or, if you’ve been slow to start, think of this as a fleshed-out outline. Of course there’ll be stuff missing. Of course you could do a little more research on certain topics. Of course there’ll be some awkward transitions. Of course not everything’s formatted perfectly. But I should still get a sense of where you’re going with the exhibition as a whole — and there should be enough “stuff” there to give shape and substance to each section or node or sequence that contributes to your larger argument or narrative. And by this stage of the semester, after you’ve had a full month devoted solely to your own project research, your dossier should reflect a good amount of research and collection activity.

How do you submit this work? Please send me, via email, a link to your exhibition. If you’d prefer to keep your exhibition private for now, while it’s still in development, you’re welcome to password-protect it; just make sure to tell me how to get in!

As for the dossier itself: because it might be difficult for some of you to find a share-able form in which to submit this to me, you’ll be showing your dossier to me in class on the 16th and quickly walking me through it. You’re welcome to present it in whatever form makes most sense for you: you can post a virtual dossier somewhere online, you can bring a printed portfolio or physical scrapbook, you can bring your laptop to class and give me a tour of your files, etc.. Please don’t spend much time formatting and cleaning up your dossier; I’d rather you share it with me in all its glorious chaos (remember, the primary reason you’re sharing this with me is so that I can appreciate all the [potentially messy] background work that went into your exhibition) and that you devote your time instead to the exhibition! I’ll be spending five to ten minutes with each of you to review your dossiers. Because we’ll be reviewing these dossiers together (and because I don’t want to ask you to do any unnecessary “busy work” writing), you NEED NOT compose any explanatory text for the dossier itself. (You might remember that originally, when I imagined each of you submitting a research scrapbook of some sort and me looking through this material independently, I had asked you to write an introductory text and a short text framing each section of the dossier. There’s no need for you to go to this trouble if you’ll be sharing the dossier with me in-person.)

How can you get feedback on your project? You have a couple options; please choose whichever would be more useful to you. (1) I could review your exhibition online and send you an email with feedback. (2) Or we could meet in-person, sometime during the week of the 15th, to explore and discuss your exhibition together. Please sign up for an appointment via Doodle (scan the columns to make sure no one else has already reserved a particular time slot). All meetings will take place in my office, on the 13th floor at 2 West 13th Street (You’ll want to take the east set of elevators (the ones closest to 5th Ave) up to the 12th floor, then take the stairs opposite rooms 1213/1214 up to 13. I’m in the back office.) If none of these times work for you, we could meet somewhere off-campus on the 19th, 20th, or 21st.

The Museum Campus contains links to brick-and-mortar museums with an interesting online presence. Most of these sites will have multiple exhibits from their collections (or, in the case of the Smithsonian, displays of items not on display in the Washington museum itself).

The Permanent Collection displays links to exhibits of particular interest to design and advertising.

Galleries, Exhibition, and Shows is an eclectic and ever-changing list of interesting links to collections and galleries, most of them hosted on personal web pages. In other words, it’s where all the good stuff is.

While the first two sections do contains links to some extremely valuable resources offered by noteworthy organizations, the third section is indeed where the good stuff is. The titles of some of the galleries are often intriguing enough, despite being simply a description of the objects themselves. For example:

-       Museum of Questionable Medical Devices

-       International Hotel Door Hanger Collection

-       Gallery of Vintage UFO photography

-       The Art of the Shiv

-       International Toothpaste Museum

-       Bad Paintings of Barack Obama

-       Gallery of German Television Test Patterns

-       The Fried Chicken Pantheon

-       Gallery of Japanese Matchbox Labels

-       International Collection of Vintage Soap Labels

-       Gallery of Vintage Poison Labels

-       Gallery of Cambodian Pulp Novels

-       Awesome Cassette Tapes From Africa

-       Archive of American Gothic Parodies

Each of these sites feature vastly different presentations ranging from a gallery on Flickr, to an outdated website from the 90’s. The presentation itself is often a reflection of the collection’s creator. Indeed, what is on display in each of the collections is the person that created them as well as the items that populate them. The fact that someone decided to make a website entitled The Fried Chicken Pantheon can be indicative of many things far beyond that of an interest in fried chicken.

In this section, we have a kind of modern wunderkammer of cultural artifacts: a collection of oddities that have, through the process of curation, been transmuted from mere things into objects. This, naturally, leads to the question of what distinguishes things from objects. For Bill Brown, “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation” (4). Much like Einstein’s theory that space and time do not exist apart from each other, but are in fact combined in a single continuum, Brown is suggesting that relationship between subject and object (and by extensions, things, as these are what objects arise out of) are all part of the same continuum, with our relationships to the objects being the qualities that defines an objects status. It is only the fact that someone has taken the trouble to collect and collate various labels from soaps over the years and organize into a series of digital images that these things become objects. Brown notes that “Things lie beyond the grid of intelligibilty the way mere things lie outside the grid of museal exhibition, outside the order of objects” (5). Through the curation and exhibition of these collections, these things are brought into the “grid of museal exhibition” so to speak. The fact that the ‘actual’ or ‘real’ items are not present in the exhibitions further illustrates that the relationships between the objects, things and subject are the defining qualities. As Brown notes, “The real, of course, is no more phenomenal in physics than it is in psychoanalysis – or as in psychoanalysis, it is phenomenal only in its effects… even objects squarely within the field of phenomenality are often less clear (that is, less opaque) the closer you look.” (6)

Also part of this section is a three-part film, entitled The Curators, that explores three of the featured galleries’ and interviews its creators. The first two parts of The Curators are a good example of two highly contrasting types of exhibitions that can be found on this site.

The Curators Part One

The Curators Part Two

The first part is about Bill Keaggy’s Grocery List Collection, which is about an ever expanding, highly-revealing, and often amusing collection of grocery lists sent to him. What’s interesting about this is that the value of this exhibition is not in the individual items, but the mere fact that they exist. The connections that these items have to their original creators and what it reveals about them is what defines the exhibition. As shown in the film, Keaggy stores most of these notes carelessly in a duffel bag, and remarks about the advantages of not having put effort into taking care of the individual items. With a more traditional exhibit, it would have been sacrilege to have treated its contents with such disregard, but with this one it is the exact opposite. Spending any significant amount of effort in the preservation of a collection of what must in large part be made up of mundane and banal grocery lists could certainly even be considered an indicator of some kind of psychosis. However, when it is photographed and presented online as a collection, it is deemed an exhibit, and even worthy of being made into a book.

This quality of transmutation is also present in the exhibit that is the subject of part two of The Curators, Very Small Things. The cataloguing and collecting of mundane, tiny little objects, replete with it’s on codex, also demonstrates this mechanism whereby things can be turned into objects. However, what is different is that in the Grocery List Collection there was a complete disregard for the physical items and emphasis on what the item revealed about the creator, whereas in Very Small Things, there is a fetishization of the object as shown by the careful collection of the items with tweezers and specimen tubes. At the same time, this highlights other issues, such as the effects that a consumer based society on the generation of physical clutter. One starts to contemplate the amount of obsolete items that we are surrounded with and where they came from and where they will all end up. In many ways what is said about these Very Small Things can also be said about the Museum of Online Museums as a whole. Each of the exhibitions represent cultural artifacts that would have been otherwise disregarded and forgotten about, destined to inhabit the corners of our culture like pocket lint or dirt under fingernails.

Refernces

Bill Brown, “Thing Theory” Critical Inquiry 28:1 (August 2001)

Wheeee!!!

GROUP ONE

GROUP 2

GROUP 3

Over the past decade, a great deal of sound mapping projects in the cities have emerged along with a growing scholarly and artistic interest in the relation between sound and urban experiences with a feat of communication technologies. Locative media devices made the audience participatory sound mapping possible. Most of projects use Google Maps API, which provides free service for non-commercial purpose websites, for a platform of sharing recorded sounds. On the map, the locations in which recordings are taken place have a signpost, showing the connection of place and sound in a visual way.

Capturing distinctive sounds in cities, the exhibitions try to materialize the everyday urban life in a sonorous form, rather than in a visible form that has been dominant for a long time. It is interesting to see how sounds become materialized on virtual spaces by digital recording and preservation and mediate urban experiences based on certain places. Also, they provide a totally different form of embodied experience compare to listening to audio CDs of sound archiving. Audiences become participants in the process, manifesting the characteristics of the urban spaces defined by sounds that they experience in everyday life.

I examine three sound mapping projects designed to foster participatory experience. Although they aim to invite audiences’ participation and makes exhibitions collaborative, rather than controlled, the ways in which audience’s level of participation varies according to the curators/artists’ design of the space. Even depending on the same map application, curators/artists make different choices in terms of framing, tagging, mixing, etc. in order to crystallize their concepts and ideas on urban sounds and urban experience.

Examples:

1. Sound-seeker http://www.nysoundmap.org/

Sound-seeker is a map based participatory sound recording project in New York City area since 2006. It’s a part of NYSoundmap project of The New York Society for Acoustic Ecology (NYSAE). According to their statement, the project aims to “[reach] across the city’s geographic, economic, educational, cultural and racial divides,” which eventually constitutes “a historical record and a subjective representation of the city” by recording and sharing sounds via the internet. The structure of this project is quiet simple. Participants can record sounds and submit them via email and mail CD or minidisk. The map presents where the sounds are recorded. Simply clicking on one of the pins on the map, audiences can listen to the sound. Recorded sounds are varied. Many individuals, including the artists who participated in the project, recorded sounds which might have special resonance in them. Listening to each sound itself could be a meaningful experience.

However, their map setting as satellite by default seems problematic because the ways in which satellite based map is not automatically in sync with the time when the sound was recorded. Although it’s interesting to see the visual image of place, the audience should be reminded that the satellite images have taken at a different time. Otherwise, it might give incorrect information and could affect how one receives the sound.

NYSAE’s objective, an integration of city’s geographic, economic, educational, cultural and racial divides through recording and listening to sounds, fails to provide logical explanations and significance of various sounds for its own purpose. In what ways does a sound recording capture such aspects at the first place? What sorts of sounds deliver a representative value of the city? I think they need to contexualize their work with more developed and a better setting for such exhibition they intended; otherwise it might appear an open platform archive (with low participation), contrary to its own purpose of an exhibition.

2. Soundcities (www.soundcities.com)

Different from Sound-Seeker, a collaboration-based work, Soundcities is developed mostly by one artist, a.k.a. Stanza. Although the project also is designed to invite public participation for archiving sounds, much of listed recordings have already done by him. Organized by one artist with a clear direction, the exhibition maintains consistency. Stanza recorded sounds in many different cities, trying to define representative sounds of each city and culture for 12 years. According to the instruction on the website, Soundcities is the first online open source sound map (2000) and sound database (2004) of cities. It is an independent online exhibition and does not have external funding or connection to institutions.
Stanza mentions that the project aims to “create an aural experience that evokes place,” exploring “how the sounds reflect [cities’] identities and re-impose characteristics back onto the location or environment” based on the inert musical compositions of sounds. He recorded laughing, talking, street music, etc. at almost every cities so that this project provides the archives of everyday life sounds from various cities, illustrating distinctive cultural identities. On the other hand, the musical composition of urban sounds is tagged into the following categories: ambient, rhythm, beat, boredom, noisy etc.
Overall, the exhibition organized well along with the artist’s intention of recording urban sounds. Also, by establishing the exhibition first with artists’ works and then opening to the audiences to be participated in, consistency of the exhibition could remain afterwards. This project shows a good example of a Net Art, which an artist works as a curator for the sake of the exhibition.

3. sound@media – Seoul sound map (http://som.saii.or.kr/campaign) + YOU.MIX.POEM (http://som.saii.or.kr/ymp/)

Sound@Media is a “webzine/on-line project featuring audio culture and sound artistic practices in Seoul, initiated by Saii, funded by Seoul Foundation of Arts and Culture.” They launched a Seoul sound map project as a “campaign,” with its aim to bring attention to sounds in mundane life and build up an open source sound archive in Seoul, 2010. The way of sound mapping is pretty similar to other projects. What is distinctive of their project is that they provide listings of various urban sounds on which a new sound project is based.

YOU.MIX.POEM project, drawing from mundane background sounds of Seoul Soundmap provides a great example of participatory sound arts. YOU.MIX.POEM composes of two different sections – recorded poetry and background sounds from Seoul Soundmap is designed to invite anyone to utilize with these resources and create their own work. The curators of YOU.MIX.POEM developed poetry readings in different voices (gender, age). Curators, in collaboration with web designers, utilize a popular form of time-based editing applications so that one can easily get access to the application for mixing. The objective of this project, featured in their website introduction, is to bring gift economy with no cost as well as to foster opportunities for lay people audience to take part in sound art and share one another for free, thereby celebrating digital age.

Shown in their website, numerous people have participated and listed their new creative sound artwork. They do not just blast fanfares of digital age but more importantly provide detailed guidance and examples so that one can actively engage in the concrete, accessible, and fun creative ideas for participatory sound artworks. Thus, Sound@Media truly becomes an exemplary Net art what Christiane Paul (2006, 85) describes “a space for exchange, a collaborative creation and presentation that is transparent and flexible”.

Paul, Christiane, 2006 “Flexible contexts, democratic filtering and computer-aided curating: Models for online curatorial practice”, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5.

Explore 9/11 is a free iPhone app commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, the private non-profit responsible for the management and redevelopment of the World Trade Center site in New York City.¹ It is a popular mobile app. Though only launched on August 26th, the app was downloaded a 100 000 times by September 10th.²

The foundation describes the mobile app as “a guide to understanding 9/11 through the eyes of those who witnessed the events.” It is among a set of sites for remembrance that include the preview exhibition at 20 Vesey St and the “Make History” website, both focused on aggregating photos, stories, and objects associated with the September 11 attacks. The app was built by Local Projects, a media design firm responsible for the Museum’s “Make History” website and a lead designer for on site exhibitions.

Users of the iPhone app are presented with a simple three button screen upon start-up: Tour, Explore, Timeline. The tour is a Google Maps based guide around the World Trade Center site. There are seven stops along the way along presented upon the familiar interface. Each stop is noted with clear blue pins, connected by lines on the map, and accompanied by written walking instructions. At each stop, the user is presented with a slide show of photos accompanied by the narrated story of a survivor, witness, or rescue officer. Together with the photos, the story recreates an experience or vision of events that took place where the user stands. The seven short stories present a range of experiences by taking place at different points along the circumference of the site and on different points of the timeline along the course of the tragedy. The Timeline is part of a unifying theme across all three platforms. It is presented within the app as a scrollable list that begins with “Before 9/11” and ends with “Years After 9/11”. Clicking through an entry in the timeline draws up a description of the event and a link to related photos. The photos on the app are part of the Explore section. Here the photos are placed upon the map and are represented as double sided cards with a title, description, and timeline tags on the back. The photos can be browsed either pinned to the map and within proximity of the user or they can be viewed against a camera overlay in the “AR” mode of the app.

Timeline and Explore Functions

Explore 9/11 reveals a formal materiality experienced as a materiality of proximities. The original experience is not recorded to the network, but rather a reconstruction. The photos and stories told were taken and experienced right here, we might say. While the user can upload photos to a place on the map, the photo with its zoom setting, its GPS reading perhaps a few feet off, or pinned on the map to an object rather than to the location where it was taken means place is seldom exact. Likewise for the viewer, the reading is an experience of proximity. Not experienced as a reading from a server, but a reading right here. This happened right here, we might say. But we’re not standing exactly where the story was told, this is not the exact place of the photo, the scene not perceived through the same lens or set of eyes. Where content on the computer screen “present a premediated material environment built and engineered to propagate an illusion of immateriality”,³ locative media might propagate the opposite: an illusion of materiality, that the content really is here.

The only introduction to the first person narratives is a title screen introducing each individual by their name and their location within the story. The user hears these voices while standing around the World Trade site amid the din of construction, traffic, and 9/11 memorabilia hawkers. As Ariel Kaminer of the New York Times describes it, “instead of reading quotations inscribed in granite, you are listening as someone whispers them in your ear while you cradle the phone and strain to hear more.”⁴ The result is “much more personal, and therefore much more powerful” she says. Jeremy Hight has worked for the past decade on locative media projects and is particularly concerned with what he calls narrative archaeology, an emerging method of reading and writing stories “into this world, the physical world”.⁵ The Explore 9/11 user may experience this as they listen to the storyteller and align photos from the slideshow to their surroundings. The experience matching Hight’s measure of an effective locative media presentation: that “narratives are read by voice actors and appear only as sound in headphones upon activation not only enhances characterization and tone through speech pattern, cadence and inflection, but creates a sense that every space is agitated (alive with unseen history, stories, layers). The city is to be read and publication becomes one of the streets, zeroes and ones in code, and in the air.”⁶

The stories in the air are stored in a database. Local Projects designed the website and the app to share a database. This means significant flexibility for presenting and visualizing the content that is uploaded by users or the museum. On “Make History” uploads are presented on Google Maps or by overlaying it on a Google Streetview. On the app, uploads are made available under the Explore and Timeline tabs, organized by the content’s GPS and timeline specific tags.

It also means significant potential to aggregate content. Anyone can upload content at the website or at the Memorial Preview Site’s recording booth. Again, the idea of uploading encodes in the content a material sense of inscription to place, certainly not a database. Though for Local Projects this online database driven exhibition is a realization that “it takes thousands of people to make history.”⁷ The exhibition then is a virtualization of democratic ideals upon the substratum an urban landscape.

There are challenges in concluding that the open endedness of the combined web and app exhibition really works. Separating the guided tour from the user submitted content does work. The guided tour is simple, clear, and effective. That anyone can submit and add material certainly increases the breadth of the collection, but the forensic exactitude of the content ought to limit their inclusion on the live database. Methods for limiting clutter or information overload will depend on the scale of a project. The primary method for managing user submitted content is through a set taxonomy. All content can be tagged with the strictly defined, timeline oriented tags. However, this still leads to tagging that may be incomprehensible to most users and thereby decrease the usefulness of elements of the exhibit.

For a project as large as the 9/11 Memorial I would suggest a staging database where content can be evaluated for material exactitude and historical relevance. This could be done publicly on a wiki-like collaboration platform or it could be done privately with a clearly stated editorial policy. Furthermore, the database is not suitable to user submission of artifacts, such as hand made boards, sculptures, art, found objects, or collages. There are photos as documentary evidence of these artifacts, but no high quality captures. Instead these may be better suited to the on site museum or a different approach to an online exhibition.

perhaps more suitable for another kind of exhibit?

“Artifacts stabilize experience of the past,” wrote Thomas Schlereth.⁸ At the site of the World Trade Center, an app is part of that stabilizing experience. Though the voices, stories, and photos are heard and seen in the air and on the landscape, they are in a database, on hard drives, transmitted from elsewhere over telecommunication infrastructure in response to a request from a location sharing media device. The stabilizing artifact is somewhere between the landscape and the infrastructure. Writing on the effect of various World War 1 memorials, historian J Winters wrote of the Cenotaph in the city of London: “It is a form on which anyone could inscribe his or her own thoughts, reveries, sadnesses. It became a place of pilgrimage, and managed to transform the commemorative landscape by making all of ‘official’ London into an imagined cemetery.”⁹ Locative media may fundamentally change our experience of digital media, and we may mistake the materiality of digital media for its projections. However, the challenge will be to reconcile that imperative with the burden of memory, loss, and grief, that realization that indeed, every space is agitated and alive with unseen history, stories, layers.