Mass Innovation: Interface as Infrastructure Pt. 4

Notes to the next cup.

.

People tinker, they build, remix, they repurpose, reverse and perverse engineer.  They crack open the housing. Look under the hood. They view the source. We have always made things, and have been defined by what we make and how it was made. Today the ‘refresh rate’ of the majority of physical objects is in line with the just-in-time business processes responsible for the economic dance that synchronizes and coordinates time, resources, design, engineering, manufacturing and distribution. Emerging manufacturing technologies suggest that much of what we will produce materially in the future will be printed by mix of industrial and domestic multi-material fabricators and recyclers. Widespread adoption of these processes shortens lead times, speeding up manufacturing processes and thus the “flow of objects”. Begging a new question around why should something come to be? Is hyper-disposability and reproduction of the same matter a sustainable idea?   How might “just in time objects”, or a service-like time-share in a “pattern of matter” change expectations and experiences?

Just as the web moved from static websites to “feeds and flows” objects too are moving from static things to service driven production by newly minted ‘manufacturing- as-service’ practices. We may begin to see ‘things’ as instantiations of responsive and relational system of services, feeds and flows. As objects become considered information, they become more and more malleable, subject to change, edits, mixes and blends. Simultaneously giving birth to a new breed of unconventional value propositions and business opportunities. Could what Google did for information, be done with matter? Today’s adaptive and flexible digital manufacturing technologies and production processes lend themselves to the kind of ‘experience data’ varieties, and flow of designs stemming from an interplay of experience sampling infrastructure, user-annotation and user-guided design. Objects can become passports to experience and feedback, a platform for citizen consultants to sketch dream products and interactions. Foraging a direct interface between people and organizations.

Augmented Reality Game 電脳フィギュア

A new generation of mobile augmented reality games are gracing handhelds. Above is the first adult only one of its kind from Japan. For more on this check out ARToolkit. Rape aesthetic aside, I can see this influencing new forms of casual retail games revolving around “live packaging.”

Hard Things Soft Qualities Pt. 3

Google Candy: Information Society Information economy Experience economy Network Society Global Village Technopoles Technocracy The Digital City Semantic Place Semantic Web Relational Spaces Responsive Architecture Cybertecture Ubicomp Ambient Intelligence Metaverses MMORPGs Computational Perception                   The Singularity Automedia ‘Everyware’ Robotic-user-interface Utility Fog Spimes Blogjects Blobjects Physical Avatars Fablab Object-Hyperlinking Blooks          Things That Think Dynamic Physical Rendering Fabjects Arphids Semacode Device Art Biots Claytronics ‘Networth’ Ambient Devices            Molecular Manufacturing Mobile Commerce Foglets from-bit-to-it

.

The infusion of computation and communications into everyday life has synthesized global economy, nation states, organizations, cities, neighborhoods, architecture, down to lowly everyday objects into informatic and computational terms, in ‘soft’ terms.  In the writings of Jacobs, Castells, Latour, Gershenfeld, Mitchell, Kurzweil, and Hayles we see that this theme has evolved from science fiction techno fetish, to focused interdisciplinary academic study, to commercial pursuit. From dream, to meme, to theme.

Anew vocabulary is enabling us to discuss and negotiate these concepts that reveal a new territory between the world of bits and the world of atoms. The neologisms and statistically improbable phases in the tag cloud above offer a glimpse of how traditional concepts are being renovated as we move from architecture to responsive and relational space, or from objects to fabjects. Objects are a material language that enables us to externalize ideologies, values, beliefs and manage time and behavior. In this vein, they could be considered a way of preserving and codifying habit or ritual, a tangible system of knowledge management and well as a medium of personal and collective exploration. Similarly, language, as seen above, allows us to sketch and prototype abstract thoughts and ideas through words. Something is happening, and it is clearly being reflected linguistically, artistically, academically, and commercially. Objects are becoming as malleable as software, code and language itself.

Dr. J. Storrs Hall of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing expands this notion further in his talk ‘Nanotechnology: As Hardware Becomes Software’

‘Designing a microprocessor has more in common with programming than it does with designing a steam engine. Similar tools—specification languages, simulators, rule checkers, profilers—and a similar level of complexity dominate over the distinction between matter and bits as the output.’

“Someday soon, we could download hardware from the Net just like we download software today.” predicts James C. Ellenbogen of Mitre Corp., a Pentagon-funded research center. Bruce Sterling, a science fiction author and futurist, suggests that things are becoming more informational than material; for increasingly they begin as information and end as information. Physical object-hood, it seems, is a mere phase state in the evolutionary streams the informational concept lifecycle. The softness of data and information, its potential and applications are more valuable than hard objects, or so suggests the emerging consensus.

The ‘softening’ of ‘things’, which have newfound structural and representational variability, now have a kind of flexability and dynamism that matches in pace the ‘everyday’ genesis and processing of human conventions within social systems of meanings and means. Sometimes the means are not always available for new goals to be met. In a sense these ‘soft things’ signify exploration for the eventual standardization of ‘fluid means’ for ‘openly determinable results’ that may potentially re-symbolize our understanding of object-hood. This is not an arbitrary assertion intending to commit ontological anarchy, but a descriptive account of real world developments in how material culture and context is produced, engaged with, and understood.

How might our habits and rituals change, be amplified or obsolesced?
In what ways might this new species of things reflect our values, facilitate in new ways the realization of our goals, motivations, desires?

A fellow colleague once shared with me a life changing moment he had in his first year of university. He reveled in the idea that humans had built our environment – that it was all considered in its own way, shaped. Spoons, cups, shirts, sidewalks, buildings – all made by people. In times when we see our hardware increasingly behave like software, we will undoubtedly ask “What informs the morphology and genesis of things?” Who “programmed” this? What shaped this? Why is this like this? Will the forms that constitute our objects reflect the kind flexibility that evolving languages exhibit, or will they inherit traditional qualities of proprietary material goods? Can the ‘negotiation of things” begin to resemble a collective conversation?

O’Rielly’s Web 2.0 ‘meme map’ communicates some regularities of next generation software that may prove useful and relevant sampling of characteristics.  The Web 2.0 core competencies for the purposes of this paper are, Services not packaged software, Architecture of participation, Remixable data source and data transformations, software above the level of a single device, and harnessing collective intelligence. Concepts that relate to these qualities are hackability, right to remix, perpetual beta, and ‘software gets better the more people use it.’ The result is the strategic positioning of the ‘web-as-platform’ for emergence and innovation. As object functions and forms become more soft and sensory, we may see the control of their variations and functions become transformable as object use becomes a sketching and programming platform. Examples of such software are Google , Youtube, Amazon and Facebook. In the near future the examples of organizations that produce hard goods like P&G, IKEA and General Electric may begin to populate this list, Philips the creator of Shapeways already has.

The emergent nature of human negotiation of meaning differs greatly in control and interests from the practices of existing business processes surrounding the production of commercial products. Yet, working models exist and successes have been had in the unique business models of web2.0 software-as-service start-ups that fuse qualities of each of these contrasting practices. These models are becoming more and more relevant as objects adopt increasingly “soft” qualities [Hall, Ellenbogen, Sterling]. New models that can create value through in-context, user experience based design sketching of real world objects will become important in years to come. Especially as ‘millennials’ grow to expect their hardware to be as responsive and malleable as their childhood software. These users have no qualms about privacy, and wouldn’t be surprising if simple object use flipped into a form of use performance that pays for the object itself.

Meaning and Things Pt. 2

stillborn-furniture

What dilemmas can we foresee at the outset when developing a system that acquires and communicates meaning through gesture, movement and morphology? By asking questions we invite ourselves into an exploration into theories of meaning, along with the relationships people inherit and build around objects and spaces through experience. Quite a networked onion really.

The notion forwarded by the conference organizers, that we can design semantics alone, in a ‘systematic and scientific way’, ignores the emergent, natural relationships that occur in the dynamic between human experience and the material world where meaning is cultivated.

“The symbol is not the sign that veils something everybody knows. Such is not its significance: on the contrary, it represents an attempt to elucidate, by means of analogy, something that still belongs entirely to the domain of the unknown or something that is yet to be. Imagination reveals to us, in the form of a more or less striking analogy, what is in the process of becoming. If we reduce this by analysis to something else universally known, we destroy the authentic value of the symbol; but to attribute hermeneutic significance to it conforms to its value and its meaning.” (Jung, 1953)

If meaning resides, and is latent in, possible relationships we may form, then the dominant emphasis on the artifact is insufficient. Rather, our attention belongs to the relationships and experiential processes that exist ‘in-between’. We need to move away from the notion of considering our objects and spaces as absolute reified things, instead seeing them as tools that afford potential roles and relationships. This step transforms the criteria by which we create, use and understand our objects. Such an outlook on our material world opens ‘things’ up to further interpretation and negotiation of ‘what they can be’, which is as malleable and dynamic as our intentions, desires and goals.

“In fact it can be asserted in the history of philosophy that, for example, the are no things, only properties or relations” (Bochenski)

As a cultural construct, the form of an artifact has the potential to both consecrate meaning, and to confound it. In essence, form has no meaning. (Thomas, 2006) Meaning is cultivated through the relationships that arise between the properties of things and the goals of people. (RH +Mc) Form is an invitation, a window to possible experiences which can give rise to a myriad of meanings. Events and actions, following no common rules, clarify temporary instances of meaning in the act of experience. The human production and attribution of meaning to objects and spaces can be seen as an untapped renewable resource. The spectrum of user-forged relationships offers an intangible inventory that can be tangibly expressed through the medium of things.

‘The meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, e.g. in perception, thought and decision-making.’(Block)

Block asserts in this statement that the meaning of any-thing or non-thing is the life it lives in the lives of people. Meanings of things are malleable human constructions. It could be said then, with certainty, that meaning is emergent. An attempt to affix meaning to form neuters ones perception to see what it can do or be. A thing is as much a question, as it is a material solution to a given need or want to achieve something. The loss of this dialogue is essentially what is at stake.

Conventionally forms are inanimate participants in the effort to reify and manage meaning. [Graves-Brown] As they continually become recognizable references for former experiences where meaning was formed and transformed. Here artifacts, interfaces included, have a role in the production, preservation, recall and engagement with meaning. As differing worldviews, values, metal models and motivations evolve, they frame existing structures of meaning in different ways through the creation and socialization of things.

IED Cellphone

The fear is that the semantic tyranny of industrial age design of artifacts will be carried over into a new class of objects that offer a new range of affordances. People, seduced by the surface magic of black box material culture often do not participate in the vision of things, their purpose, their role, and their possibility. [Latour] The stealth danger is deploying technologies and products like a form of non-democratic legislation. Individuals who live in materialist cultures are deeply effected when products, services and technologies come to define patterns of social life and order. In the domain of every day experience, ‘live’ moments become a form of real estate. People then are continually faced with the prescription and ingestion of the prefabricated artificial experiences, presented as social constructions of what is, and what should be, without explicit opportunities or access to contribute in a meaningful way.

How then can we explore and prescribe the criteria of systems that are based on the way in which meaning is produced, perceived, transferred, preserved and obsolesced in situ. Can we design into objects the affordances and techniques to identify what humans attend to, choices they make, what behaviors and habits are being born. By considering the relationship of form to meaning while engaging in a critical and open-minded conversation about people as producers and vessels of meaning, we can assemble a deeper understanding, one that will inform the development of new species of form-as-interface, embedded in, and inseparable from, a dynamic “ecology of means and meaning”.

A successful language of form and movement cannot be designed. What is possible is the design of s platform in which user-based formal design, semantics and functions can emerge through negotiation.

Such a debate about the inherency of meaning in form could potentially overturn how we produce, interact with, and communicate our relationships with form. People continually contribute to objects through use and “misuse”. We may, as user-creators, begin to enrich product, service and environment interactions and make them much more intimately engaged in people’s everyday lives. Form-as-interface, to manufacturing-as-service, may reveal a whole new landscape of habiture that organizations did not know their existing things/products satisfy. Conversely, it may also reveal whole new platforms, product categories and territories that may contribute to the creation of new behaviors, habits and rituals. We may succeed in democratizing authorship of product functionality, beyond a small privileged priesthood of creators.

What are the properties and dynamics of the process of social emergence of meaning? And how then can we design in, from, and through this process?

Through discussing a series of  weak signals we can begin to describe a system of behavior-enabling, experience-driven material production that is both empathetic and inclusive. A second objective is to identify new market opportunities associated with emerging technologies along with processes and models.

Hard Things, Soft Qualities. Pt1

Its been a while since Ive posted anything, Started an exciting new job, traveled a bit, and I’m back. Since I have been away, I’ve been writing a lot, and would like to get some things out as I move into new material. This ones called Hard Things Soft Qualities.

It has 5 parts:

1. Beyond Form and Movement
2. Meaning and Things
3. Hard Things Soft Qualities
4. Human Theater Object Audience
5. Mass Innovation: Interface is Infrastructure

.

As I looked around the room I found it difficult to imagine a purpose that could bring together such a motley crew of professionals; here were behavioral scientists; psychologists; sociologists; engineers; industrial, interface and experience designers; human-computer interaction researchers and tangible computing wizards gathered in the iconic setting of Eindhoven’s Ovoluon to discuss the future of how objects will communicate with us and with each other. Seductive demos and massive projection screens revealed a parade of impressive pong playing robots, shape shifting latex boxes, and Japanese kinematic vending machines. The work looked like engineering and smelled like art. Speakers championed prototyping and sketching, showed smashable alarm clocks and empathetic cell phones.

This kind of rare but not isolated event is becoming more frequent as multiple disciplines and professions begin to recognize the steps needed to create and care for tomorrow’s objects. Welcome to DeSForM, the second annual conference on the  Design & Semantics of Form and Movement, a wunderkammer of strange things and larval theory exploring the virgin frontier of “dynamic object semantics.”

The purpose of this gathering, I learn, is to facilitate a dialogue between complementary schools of thought around object behavior. If an objects moves, changes shape, texture or color, what does it mean? A very intriguing and pre-timely subject in light of recent developments and conversations around ubiquitous computing, the real world web, the Internet of Things, “spimes” and ambient intelligence or whatever techfasionista title is hot right now. To “develop design semantics in a scientific and systematic way… focusing on the meanings conveyed by the products and how they behave” puts emphasis on the side of object expression, where there seems to be an equally fertile opportunity to explore object perception and observation. Right? Wheres the dialogue?

BEYOND FORM AND MOVEMENT

If objects have evolved new ways to ‘speak’, they are also acquiring, new ways to ‘listen’. More important is the roles these technologies will fill in their maturity. What might they sense, and how might they act upon their sensations in meaningful ways? How might this augment our senses, our physicality, reach and location.

In retrospect, DesFoRM could be considered a emergent signal of the blurring of the borders between software and hardware, wherby the nature of the object becomes a form of networked media. In this realm, objects also become textual, code; their layered semantics to be continually re-determined and evolved through time as behavior and custom becomes codified material objects. The ITU’s Digital Life report, and the Internet of Things report, record and foresee an increase in the pace and forms of innovation brought about by better systems of networked communication and access to authorship through the internet. Authorship, as an idea has expanded far beyond literature and the Internet, and now encompasses almost all vestiges of human creation as anyone can sit down and read/write reality, beginning with text and image, ending as matter, place, interaction and experience. Taken together, the following ideas proposed in this paper forms a system capable of offering a new form of innovation supportive of human behavior and technology that may come to comprise the emerging internet of things. Julian Bleecker of Near Future Labs recently stated in his Manufacturing paper for Share 2008,

“These are distinct kinds of digital objects that mix physical space, digital technology and design …. The weak signals suggest kinds of design-art-technology that are growing tired of the screen.” [Bleecker]

When objects shape-shift and change their properties to communicate something they become both screen and interface. The question here is, who will have the authority to deeply program these channels, to tinker, and how is this new form of ” hard content” created? Can we evade the illusion of empowerment and engage ‘object behavior’ in a manner that interfaces with, records and enhances, deep individual and collective narratives in everyday living? First and foremost this conference inspired me to start thinking about the kind of future infrastructure of material culture that could holistically address presence and the human experience, the production of meaning, computational perception and expression, and emerging manufacturing processes. Such an infrastructure could create a ‘new dialogue’ between people, artifacts and places. The purpose of this paper is to aggregate promising methods, models, processes, technologies and theories that form a new way of creating and thinking about our ‘stuff’ in a future were the lines between – will, desire, object use and manufacturing – begin to blur.

To the reader I would like to say, this paper is not intended to blindly evangelize about technology, but to explore how such developments might deeply affect the landscape of social life they are unfolding within.  Reflecting on the origin of the term Technology in this context may serve as a humanizing starting point. ‘Technology’ comes from the Greek word Technologia, or ‘techne’ meaning ‘craft’, and ‘logia’ meaning ‘saying’. In the forward to The Technological Society, Robert Merton defined technique as, “any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result” It is in this vein that I would like to focus on technology in so much as it is an expressive intersection between the personal and collective processes of situated goal-setting and the human refinement of actions to reach said goals. Technology is neutral, but this human process is a dynamic ballet of ever changing intents, values and beliefs. There exists an asymmetry that has come to contribute to the reification of things. People on the most part, are able to express verbally what they would like to craft, yet are unable to craft what they are able to say. The programming languages, engineering knowledge and equipment involved in the creation of today’s objects are not designed to be within the majorities reach in the same way that store shelves are.

Due to the highly relational discourse between material form development, software, interface, this discussion opens up the conversation much more broadly than interaction considerations.  It opens up a series of questions about how people naturally engage with, transform and understand objects. What is potentially the most fruitful, mutually beneficial interface between people and artifacts and the organizations that produce them? Not so much how do we design a language of form and movement.

Most importantly, what are the  what are the opportunities for ‘mass innovation’ in which the object becomes a platform of user sketching, annotation and user-guided creation?
Next: MEANING AND THINGS

Mediated Advocacy in a Geoweb Era

.

Causes, values, motivations and concentrated actions become destinations as people and places become increasingly findable. How do situated technologies augment the lifecycles of these elements?

Through locative and social technologies what was once qualitative speculation now has the ability to shift into the domain of the measurable and recordable, generating a new species of data around the relationships between individuals, groups and their environment. Organizations such as Microsofts spinoff company Inrix “tracks the behavior of 750,000 vehicles, cell phone users, and others with digital devices to determine how Americans would react to different situations.” vividly illustrates the growing interest and unique opportunity to harness human geospatial data. Experimentation with this form of information makes practices like Suprise Modelling thinkable.

Intrix, being such a novel geographic information retrieval company is a weak signal pointing toward our data traces becoming a new form of communication that creates a social metric, which diversifies the voices authoring geographical data. As urban computing is further embedded in our daily interactions new potentials for informing decisions and revealing choices can be realized. Through our data traces we will be able to co-author custom, space, policy and our material culture in new ways. In the background of this emerging context personal behavior will become personal advocacy. Our implicitly authored data may be used to cast votes, leave gestural and locative commentary. It may become a new voice, and new way to speak.

New dialogues of power occur at the intersection of human behavior, emerging technology, and inherited infrastructures and processes. Locative technologies point toward real-time visualization that offers a new individual and collective vantage, which will undoubtedly inform urban “logistics of perception” deeply effecting social dynamics and personal action. How might near-future “geo-strategic” identity building, expression, and management demand a “re-socialization” between individuals and their environment? How will people adapt?

Locative technologies, situational awareness and mobile haptics are a form of contextual and behavioral stenography. They offer a fertile ground to deploy location and behavior based “passive or explicit multi-player citizen games”. These future games (or “systems”) could also act as a base for dynamically negotiating rules, goals, conditions, and social accountability. We discuss current weak signals in our environment, such as serious games like World Without Oil, and the BCN Formula Game that contain elements that can be recombined and resituated as a robust infrastructure for effective democracy populated with informed citizens engaging in civil participation through new media.

“Social learning/training” based on the affordances of locative technologies and a “re-socialization” around the concepts of city and citizen could be proposed. Consider the environment itself as an agent – that is, the city would be, communicable and mutable rather than only a background. It is possible to reinvent the social space of the street as a much-needed infrastructure of expression and presence to facilitate and realize influential social relations. These emergent systems can be designed as educational frameworks for interacting and understanding converging literacies in the new environment. A new literacy and curricula are a vital to better equip people for emerging contexts that will require augmented political and social mobilization.

The need for a new educational framework is evident. However, the curriculum and implementation is up for debate.

A Return to the Sensus Communis

INTRODUCTION

How is it that we truly know the world?

What is the true nature of things?

Science tells us that the true nature of things lies beneath the surface. If we look upon a chair and ask, what is that, the common answer would be, but of course – a chair. And who would deny this? It is after all what we have learned.

A chair is not a chair however. Beyond the surface of the chair are a whole series of phenomena that are invisible to the “naked” eye. The chair is actually made up of atoms, tiny particles that are the building blocks for everything. A desk, a chair, even humans are made up of atoms. And atoms themselves are made up of even smaller subatomic particles.

Science and the scientific pursuit have proven this to us through instruments that measure, and through experimentation. The scanning tunneling microscope used for observing atoms, for example, presents us with a reality that is objective and rational. Or so it seems.

But is this really how we know the world?

Knowing seems to be indicative of a deeper visceral engagement with the world. One that is mediated through the senses and understood only after repeated sensory impressions.

Experience is the mother of all invention.

Reality is not objective and rational. Rather it is a subjective experience dependant on the one doing the perceiving. And it is precisely this dependency that has given birth not only to the apparatus for sensing, but also to that which the senses pick up. There is a certain mutuality or reciprocity to the phenomenal world in the way that acts of expression and perception form mutually co-dependant relationships. If the bee cannot smell the pollen what good is it to the pollen producing plant? Thus, our perceptual ways of knowing are tethered to the world itself, intimately weaved, and not separate from it.

Science and technology however have distanced themselves from these corporeal ways of knowing preferring instead a rational and objective outlook. And has as a result of these extensions created a gap between nature and us. Between the mind, and the body.

Take for example, the term “naked eye” as it is used above. As if the eye that is naked is insufficient without the prosthesis of scientific technology. The assumption itself that the eye is naked to begin with is skewed. These assumptions, that have in essence made their way into a common language suggests a deeply engrained prejudice that displaces the senses from their natural ability to pick up what is given, and instead suggests that the true nature of things somehow lie beneath all appearances. This way of thinking has not only displaced the senses from their inherent right to know, but has distanced us from what I would call proper ways of thinking about the world and our place in it, by privileging a rational techno-scientific outlook over one grounded in the bodies corporeal ways of knowing.

I would like to close that gap and reclaim the rightful place of the Sensus Communis as an intelligent and rational faculty that can, and should inform our forages into technological and scientific pursuits.

Over the past several years I have been deeply engaged with a body of work that advocates for the inclusion of the human senses into a common practice. One that states that the senses are the foundational support for everything we experience and for everything that we create as a result of those experiences. As such, the senses are something we should be paying more attention to, and giving them their due credit.

In consideration of the many facets of multi-sensorial intelligence, this paper will briefly touch on three aspects I think are important in bringing to bear the relevance and significance of a return to the Sensus Communis.

FOOTNOTE: “Sensus Communis”

Aristotle postulated a central faculty capable of uniting all the senses, synthesizing what each sense picked up to form a coherent whole in the mind. He called this the “Sensus Communis”.

A New Dialogue Redux

Original Doc: A New Dialogue - Original

A New Dialogue Redux

Introduction
The central concerns of the following text focuses on addressing the cultural meanings attributable to form, and initiate a discursive dialogue with respect to the inherency of meanings which potentially reside within forms themselves.

The former instantiation of this text was written for a conference DeSForM: Design & Semantics of Form and Movement in the Netherlands which purpose is to develop a platform of products that communicate information through a dynamic language of form and movement. The question posed by the organizers was how might we set forth to design this system of symbols in a systematic and scientific manner. The meaning of form is a human production, as it is both malleable and undefined. As a cultural construct, it has the potential to consecrate meaning as well as confound it. New definitions of form semantics can be revealed through the examination of the intersection of human behavior and emerging technological discourse in the present social climes, a language of form and movement cannot be designed, but a platform in which this language can emerge through negotiation can be.

Form Has No Meaning
The capability and meaning of any form can be defined by the limits of people’s ability to imagine what it can be physically or represent spiritually or intangibly. In essence, form has no meaning; it is an invitation, a window to possible relationships which produce a myriad of meanings. Meaning resides, and is latent within us, in the relationships we perceive and cultivate in our minds and through what we negotiate with others.

What can we learn from these characteristics of forms and how can we, as designers, challenge the need for designing explicit meanings?

How can we create a new dialogue between objects and people to harness the emergent properties of meaning within the human experience?

Time Matters. Location matters. Context matters.
Form triggers multiple meanings. A gun locked safely at a hunting lodge has entirely different denotative and connotative associations than the same gun in the hands of a man in a dark alley. The sign itself, the gun and its function, within the context of alternative environments, is pollinated with probable outcomes that are associated with location and situation. Context influences interpretation of the purpose of that form, shaping the message it conveys. It is through the process of negotiating meaning between social actors, place and location, that form evokes multiple meanings, and likewise meanings can inspire multiple forms. Physical properties in differing contexts can trigger landscapes of ulterior meanings around and between people determined by their personally and culturally informed associations. Context again alters the meanings that forms and motions may trigger, influencing their social role at a given time. The introduction of new information and the mutation of old information alters associated meanings because of what is accumulated, paired and lost during the reallocations and migrations of forms in multiple contexts.

How can we enable forms to embrace this continual process of the production of meaning? Is it our objects that adapt, or do we?

Can a form change its mode of expression to fit those who are present?

How can a single meaning be maintained through multiple modes of expression in multiple contexts?

How can these unfolding dialects, migrations and morphologies of the compositionality of meaning over time be documented?

Will context be the dominant hypermedia form? Will it be the request, the curator, the aggregator and synthesizer in relation to ones identity and state, emotional, situational and physical context?

Le Confiture: Intro & Overview

PREAMBLE:

Once upon a time not long ago – when people whore tag jammers and rendered life on the low – when laws were stern and justice stood – and kids were misbehaving like they aught to should – There lived a little toy who was mislead – by another little toy and this is what he said: Me and you kid we’re gonna craft some fame – posting up drama while tagging his name. They hit some spots – fame came with ease – but one couldn’t stop it’s like he has a disease…

-Adapted from Children’s Story By Slick Rick 

The  scenario to follow is a “day in the life of” story about a Graffiti Writer overcoming and subverting what we might call “writers block”: the combined chilling effects of materials prohibition, pervasive surveillance technologies, inaccessible mediums, shrinking spaces for expression (aka habitat destruction) and the inattention of fragmented audiences lost in an over mediated fog of advertising. How does the artist overcome and adapt?

Along with the help of a growing creative insurgency made up of home grown hactivists, moonshiners, code breakers, trackers and map makers; Graffiti Writers do their best to bypass the barriers standing in between them and their pursuits of mediated presence, dialogue and fame. What is the future Graffiti  experience? Where does it take place?

Le Confiture (The Jam) takes place “once upon a time” several decades after the disappearance of graffiti, as we know it today. Technological progress, privatization and public paranoia has forced Graffiti Culture out of its more familiar and tangible surroundings- causing its migration towards freshly augmented realities and virtual worlds that present themselves as blank canvases (Habitats) to express on and speak from. Within this new context, Graffiti lives on.

Unfortunately, many of these augmented realities and virtual spaces apply and enforce the same laws, codes of conduct, and logics that squeezed Graffiti from its original habitats. Within this new paradigm, security, cost of production, bandwidth, connection speeds, traffic volume and membership agreements frequently determine the artist’s potential for self-actualization. Which often finds it-self half rendered and lagging. Further adaptation is required. How does one make their mark within this plural context?

As method to this madness, graffiti artists rely more heavily on soft-tools and semi-autonomous agents, also know as “toy soldiers”. These agents are designed and programmed to help the artist achieve and maintain a plural-all city- digital graffiti presence, now necessary within the complex mixture of overlapping worlds. These agents are, all at once, collaborators, students, and works of art; always evolving in style, sketching themselves out, questioning, collecting, learning from, and commenting on, the landscapes and experiences that surround them. Graffiti writers are their “imaginations”, temporary masters, and mentors guiding their actions, teaching and training them towards achieving mutually beneficial outcomes. What is the nature of this collaborative relationship? What is gained and what is lost? What is the role of imagination in a world of automation?

Within this highly mediated theatre known as Dataspace, the Graffiti Writer and his agents are just one in a billion actors fighting for space, bandwidth and attention on a massively multiplayer mixed reality stage; Performing for an always on and lurking audience inhabited by people places and things. Graffiti is the anomaly always acting up to be seen. What does this mean?

Graffiti has  evolved; writers embrace performance, playing more seriously with time-context-medium, and most importantly message. Graffiti shouts out at you; knowing it will be seen, heard, captured, broken apart, re-assembled and transmediated back into- and across other worlds, contexts- spaces and times by the all seeing, all appropriating audience.   

 

Le Confiture

LE CONFITURE is a scenario-based exploration of expression, identity, learning and collaboration within a futuristic and intentionally dystopic – ubiquitous computing landscape otherwise known as Dataspace. The scenario introduces and projects existing political, socio-cultural, technological, and economic signals into a panoptic world inhabited by yet another generation of Graffiti artists and their culture jamming  hacktivist agents. The narrative explores their motives, logics, values and experiences as they struggle to make their mark within a feudal and over saturated attention economy controlled by pervasive and chilling DRM infrastructures, advanced materials prohibition, and networked surveillance. Furthermore, the scenario explores the context of multiple networked identities, master-mentor and actor-author-audience dynamics, and how new forms of digital media literacy might emerge within a transmediated (Plural) landscape where even the subtlest forms of temporary presence and participation can guarantee new and unimagined forms of permanence, fame and legacy.

 Keywords

Graffiti 2.OH!, Remix Culture, Prohibition, Digital Rights, Collaboration, Ubiquitous Computing, Dataspace, Transmediation New-Media, Expression, Virtual Identity, Surveillance, Telepresence, Trespass, Plurality, Asymmetric, Literacy, Attention Economy, Feudalism, Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Recognition, Mapping, RFID,