Near Future Laboratory Top 15 Criteria That Define Interactive or New Media Art

The Julianipedia entry for “New/Interactive Media Art” has been finalized by the guys and gals on the editorial floor here at the Near Future Laboratory officeplex. After several years of review, discussions with leading experts and practitioners we’re finally ready to release our conclusions. And what better place to release them — here, in Linz Austria, and after a 3 year hiatus from Ars Electronica while I was teaching at an interactive media program where I would get in trouble for missing boring faculty meetings and a class or two because I thought it’d be useful to my pedagogy to go to the world’s pre-eminent interactive media exhibition (but no one ever got the business for going to the Game Developers’ Conference, so..there’s that.)

Here at Ars Electronica is where we did an unscientific qualitative test of the criteria devised to define New/Interactive Media Art. Now we deliver to you the conclusive results, and do so in the spirit of the David Letterman Top-10 Countdown, only with a Top-15 rather than 10, cause we found 15 things.

Forget all the New Media “Theory”; we’ve got your empirically derived criteria right here.

The Near Future Laboratory Top-15 Criteria for New or Interactive Media Art are…

15. It doesn’t work

14. It doesn’t work because you couldn’t get a hold of a 220-to-110 volt converter/110-to-220 volt converter/PAL-to-NTSC/NTSC-to-PAL scan converter/serial-to-usb adapter/”dongle” of any sort..and the town you’re in is simply not the kind of place that has/cares about such things

13. Your audience looks under/behind your table/pedestal/false wall/drop ceiling or follows wires to find out “where the camera is”

12. Someone either on their blog or across the room is prattling on about the shifting relations between producers and consumers..and mentions your project

11. Your audience “interacts” by clapping/hooting/making bird calls/flapping their arms like a duck or waving their arms wildly while standing in front of a wall onto which is projected squiggly lines

10. Your audience asks amongst themselves, “how does it work?”

9. The exhibition curators insist that you spend hours standing by your own wall text so that you can explain to attendees “how it works”

8. It’s just like using your own normal, human, perfectly good eyeballs, only the resolution sucks and the colors are really lousy..plus the heat from the CPU fan is blowing on your forehead which makes you really uncomfortable and schvitz-y

7. Someone in your audience wearing a Crumpler bag, slinging a fancy digital SLR and/or standing with their arms folded smugly says, “Yeah..yeah, I could’ve done that too..c’mon dude..some Perlin Noise? And Processing/Ruby-on-Rails/AJAX/Blue LEDs/MaxMSP/An Infrared Camera/Lots of Free Time/etc.? Pfft..It’s so easy…”

6. Someone in your audience, maybe the same guy with the Crumpler bag and digital SLR excitedly says, “Oh, dude. That should totally be a Facebook app!”

5. It’s called a “project” and not a “piece of art”

4. You saw the "project" years ago…and here it is again…now with multi-touch interaction and other fancy digital bells and Web 2.0-y whistles

3. Your audience cups their hands over various proturbances/orifices at or nearby your project attempting to confuse/interact with the camera/sensor/laser beam, even if it uses no such technology

2. There’s a noticeable preponderance of smoothly shifting red, green and blue lighting effects

1. People wonder if it wasn’t all really done in Photoshop, anyway

3 Bonus Criteria!

0. There are instructions on how to experience the damn thing

-1. You can’t “collect” or buy it. Heck, if you did, you’d need to get AppleCare or hire an IT guy in the bargain

-2. Crumpler guy says, “Oh, I thought of that already..”

There it is. The Near Future Laboratory Top-15+3 Criteria Defining New/Interactive Media Art!

Safety In A Ubicomp World

Timo et al Mediamatic have created a superb physical instantiation of safety in an era when the network leaks rather perniciously into the physical world. Their RFID safe enclosure protects your near-field communication objects from being scanned by faulty equipment or data muggers discretely consuming the swarms of RFID krill floating around most alpha tier urban centers. A lovely instantiation to help think through how people’s concerns around safety, security and trust always seem to leave opportunities for the always entrepreneurial accessories marketplace.

Well done.

Drift Deck

Drift Deck. For Conflux 2008, NYC
confluxfestival.org/conflux2008/.

For Analog Play (batteries not required.)

(Some production documentation above; click “Notes”.)

The Drift Deck (Analog Edition) is an algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets. A deck of cards is used as instructions that guide you as you drift about the city. Each card contains an object or situation, followed by a simple action. For example, a situation might be — you see a fire hydrant, or you come across a pigeon lady. The action is meant to be performed when the object is seen, or when you come across the described situation. For example — take a photograph, or make the next right turn. The cards also contain writerly extras, quotes and inspired words meant to supplement your wandering about the city.

Processed in collaboration with Dawn Lozzi who did all of the graphic design and production.

For exhibition at the Conflux 2008 Festival, NYC, September 11-14, 2008, and hosted by Center for Architecture located at 536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY 10012

The motivation for Drift Deck comes from the Situationist International, which was a small, international group of political and artistic agitators. Formed in 1957, the Situationist International was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations.

Guy Debord, one of the major figures in the Situationist International, developed what he called the “Theory of the Dérive.”

“Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.”

Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as the “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Psychogeography includes just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.” The dérive is considered by many to be one of the more important of these strategies to move one away from predictable behaviors and paths.

http://is.gd/1Gy1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dérive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography

The cards will be available for festival visitors to borrow and return for others to use during the Conflux Festival.

Design and Implications by Julian Bleecker and Dawn Lozzi. Creative Assistance and Support from Nicolas Nova, Pascal Wever, Andrew Gartrell, Simon James, Bella Chu, Pawena Thimaporn, Duncan Burns, Raphael Grignani, Rhys Newman, Tom Arbisi, Mike Kruzeniski and Rob Bellm. Processed for Conflux Festival 2008.

Special Joker Cards featuring compositions by Jane Pinckard, Ben Cerveny, Jane McGonigal, Bruce Sterling, Katie Salen, Ian Bogost and Kevin Slavin. Joker illustrations by Rob Bellm.

Original Proposal

www.nearfuturelaboratory.com/projects/drift-deck/

Part of a long, proud line of land mapping technologies that includes PDPal, Ubicam Backward Facing Camera and Battleship: Google Earth, and WiFiKu.

Lift Asia 2008

Lift Asia will be happening in a couple of weeks and I encourage you to attend if you are at all able to. (I promised myself Ars Electronica this year, which conflicts, unfortunately.) The line-up is a fantastic list of creative all-stars, as well as what sounds like a great queue of “locals” from Korea. This is an exciting time for Lift as it expands geographically and, more importantly, expands its audience. This is significant. There are still lots of productive and fruitful bridges to be created. It’s not an “unexploited territory” kind of exploration. Rather, despite Friedman’s assertions to the contrary, “flatness” does not exist. In China, it’s not Facebook. It’s QQ. In Korea, it’s Cyworld, not MySpace. This is intriguing — what are the local distinctions and specific ways in which online social practices create communities. Can’t all be the same, right? There really isn’t just one canonical Googlenet, right? Go to Lift Asia and find out what’s really going on, plus a whole lot more.

Timing

Next step, testing the PCB edition of the PSX. I’m back to using a slow, low STK500 to do some debugging. Now that the firmware is fairly well squared away, most of the debugging is either a poorly solder-pasted pin (knock-wood).

I did find a curious little 30 minute bugaboo today. While I was making sure that data was being read properly from a controller by itself, I noticed that bits were being consistently dropped. It looked as though things like button presses on the controller were toggling two bits instead of one, and, for example, the first byte that indicates button presses for things like Start, Select and the direction buttons, was always missing the least-significant bit.

It turns out that the way I am emulating requests and data transfers to the controller is particularly sensitive to timing. I’m not 100% sure what the deal is, but the controller I had been using a few days ago was okay with an 16uS clock period. Now, these two I had lying about the studio weren’t working so great with that period — when I changed the clock to a 40uS period, things clicked back into shape.

(I’m sort of wondering whether the series resistors for the firmware generated clock I’m using is too high — I ended up putting a 1.8k resistor rather than the 1k resistor I have in the breadboard prototype, just cause that’s what I had handy.)

In any case that problem got me to thinking that, as other folks have mentioned, the controllers are sensitive to timing — I may need to add one additional control register to the set up so that this timing value can be adjusted easily, rather than sticking it as a constant in the firmware.

History of Consciousness Hiring

My UCSC Grad Program, History of Consciousness, is hiring, Associate or Full Professor level. It’s the only interdisciplinary program of its kind, with a strong reputation for critical thinking both inside and outside of academia. This is the first hire since I was there from 1993-95, when I served on the graduate student selection committee, so it’s kind of a big deal for the few hundred alums scattered about. The link below is to a flyer which, if appropriate, please circulate and post.

History of Consciousness Flyer

Refining

I’m getting closer to have a second prototype of the PSX project. Strangely, I seem to be building the breadboard prototype (lower image) simultaneous with the PCB prototype (the thing on top). I think the breadboard prototype is mostly for working on the firmware for the Propeller, which is going better than I had hoped, especially seeing as I’ve never developed for it, and that I’m mostly in Spin assembly (not so ugly, but still..bleech..) The breadboard version is basically a core Propeller with some wiring for programming and for chatting to an EEPROM for permanent firmware storage. I started playing with this PCA9306 bidirectional level-shifter, which is sitting on the right half breadboard. This is basically the same circuit as what goes on the surface mount PCB, except for the addition of a LP2985 3.3v regulator.

This is a curious approach, getting slightly ahead of things, but it’s been a circuitous, round-about project from the original “hey..wouldn’t it be cool if..?” motivation that I thought would maybe be a weekend’s work of getting an Atmega324 to emulate a PSX controller. That’s the one in the image above, from last fall. I began the design last summer thinking I’d be done in short order. It should be..I’ve just got grease in my head or something. I was anticipating perhaps some trickiness because I took the trouble to pull out the boundary scan signals to the edge of the board so I could do some JTAG debugging. What went wrong? Well, mostly timing related things. This project motivated me to get my own logic analyzer so I could figure out what the heck was going wrong. There were mostly timing-related problems that I sort of pushed to the side to pursue another possible solution, which led to this current (v07) design.

How did this all start? I thought it’d be an interesting little bit of game controller provocation to have a controller that “got tired” just as one’s avatar might in a video game. To do this, I figured I’d have to

Sketching From Ideas to Material

Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands is an important piece on the ways that “sketching” in hardware can become a way to invigorate a relationship between creativity and materiality. It features some friends from the Sketching ‘08 workshop that I was at a few weeks back at RISD. (Link to some stuff.)

The highlight here (besides the nice quotes from Mike Kuniavsky and Dale Dougherty) is the interesting reversal implied. Rather than CAD (computers used to aid design, or computer aided design), we’re seeing some motivation to use physical design as a way to evolve and shift the meaning of computation. The Montessori-like tinkering with hard, material objects that are somehow “energized” through simple electronics (lights, motors, gears, all kinds of electronic sensing devices, switches, accelerometers, etc) can create richer insights into what computation can be. It’s more than just the excitement around a new programming language, or a new operating system. Those are the things that, more often than not, one ends up doing a bit of a shrug after the initial excitement with an updated version of Photoshop or something. The shift is quite a bit more fundamental in the sense that one begins to re-imagine what the machine is and what it can be — what “computation” means begins to shift subtly when it’s no longer just a keyboard/screen/mouse/network assemblage. When a data processing entity is able to have some sense of the physical world around it, more than the sliding of a mouse, or even more than accumulating or dispersing bits of data hither-and-yon across a network, you begin to imagine a world that’s differently invigorating.

The fundamental relationships here are between the digital and physical, or 1st Life and 2nd Life and finding the sliding-scale of in-betweenness. Typically, we might consider “digital” stuff to be things that are somehow ephemeral, on a screen exclusively or in a database. Neglecting the actual physical character of this stuff anyway (it’s all atoms when it comes down to it), thinking this way is a convenient design trope — it makes it easy to construct a binary. Digital stuff is in the computer. Physical things? Well, they’re out in the “real world.”

What this kind of hardware sketching is able to do is create some good trouble for this binary. As soon as you start connecting your computer up to lights and motors and such all, and writing simple programs that allows your program to whir some motors, you’ve created a bridge from the digital to the physical. Your mind wanders away from the binary. Where does it wander too? Well — that’s the exploration. And thinking too hard about where you’re going kind of ruins the fun.

There’s a conceit here that working with your hands (more than punching little plastic squares and pointing at pixels on screens) produces a transformative kind of design. I tend to agree. It’s hard sometimes but mostly because those are muscles (in the hands, as well as the brain) that are little exercised in the world of computer-related stuff. We’re more flexible with the soft, brainiac world of computer creativity. But the world of hand-craft is less flexible. The tools are still infantile in relationship to where the folks living in the near future would like, and need — although many fold more complete, easy-to-use and much less expensive than they were about a dozen years ago when I was more of an electrical engineer than I am now.

Another very interesting note is that the tools are made by the community of practice. It’s like building your own saw and hammer to make your own house. This is important. It has the ring of real barn-raising sensibilities, with the meta-upside being the way the tool-building knits together the community of practitioners who become more able to construct their own visions of what the future looks like. (It’s not for everyone, but reading the Adruino developers’ list can be fascinating if only for the various negotiations and compromises that are shaping what these hammers and saws do, for whom and why.) The tools are open-source, so the process if proactive and engaged, rather than distanced relationships to proprietary tool builders. You can be the future you want, rather than waiting around for someone else’s vision of a closed, stymied future.