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Background: Literacy was once considered as the ability to sign your name and read the bible in Latin. Times have changed. There are now a multiplicity of literacies relating to all aspects of life- presenting copious amounts of choices, opportunities and potential outcomes.

Questions:
What new literacies are likely to emerge from the conditions present in today’s context?
How does literacy impact one’s ability to access and participate meaningfully in socio-cultural-economic systems?
What is the role of new literacies in the knowledge/experience age?
What can we learn from so-called pre-literate contexts?

Assumptions:
1) Literacy = Empowerment
2) Literacy = Imagination Potential
3) Lifestyle = Literacy
4) Imagination = Empowerment

Note: We view system ecologies as networks of dilemmas presenting multiple choices-possibilities and potential outcomes.

VUCA & THE ASYMMETRIC TRADITION

US Army War College credo, describes the qualities of our present context as being volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA). One might suggest that this context has long existed and is more of a tradition rather than a trend. Meaning that volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity within our systems and our environments has, for the most part, been the inspirational source and medium enabling for the emergence of literacy, imagination, innovation and change.

It is not our technologies but our literacies and their resulting imaginations that enable us to compete, achieve and survive.

ASYMMETRIC LITERACY (A WORKING DEFINITION)
It is beyond question that we do come to know many things indirectly, and that there appears to be an admixture of the indirect in every acquisition of knowledge. – J.M. Bochenski The Methods of Contemporary Thought

Literacy is a transformative “tool.” Literacies empower both the means and capacities required to identify and transform choices and opportunities in our environment into outcomes. Each literacy provides its own means of access and understanding through its own forms of knowledge acquisition and expression. Historically, literacies have emerged and evolved alongside social, cultural and technological change. The pace of this change is increasing, as are its implications on all aspects of human socio-cultural-economic achievement. The speed and ease with which we can now move from concept to percept has “catalyzed” the need for increased imagination and new forms of creative thinking around process and purpose.

An asymmetric approach to literacy would encourage development and refinement of unorthodox forms of knowledge acquisition and expression, in contrast and relative to, the symmetrical contexts of the learner/practitioner. Asymmetric literacy is acceptance and traversal of possibility beyond defined, practiced or codified limitations; in the ability to exploit and affect the most potential from the least characteristics latent or manifest within a system; and in promoting the ability to shape one’s own system of possibility and context rather than being shaped by another’s.

This form of literacy might emerge from a self-awareness and lifestyle that increasing one’s access to original experiences which people have had no prior contact or exposure. These experiences often result in obtaining new knowledge in turn augmenting one’s “scope of awareness and interpretation. It is assumed that the metaphors presented within these original experiences would help to fill in and bridge the gaps left over from symmetrical states of being and build a more complete and robust palette for the imagination. The goal of which would be to extend the breadth and depth of empowerment in individuals and organizations.

Conversely asymmetric literacy might focus on better understanding the characteristics and meanings of symmetries, patterns, codified limitations, traditions and conventions, whereby the asymmetrically literate would develop a careful appreciation for structure, harmony and balance in light of contributing and extending new benefits to the greatest amount of people.

How do we increase the capacity for individuals and organizations to identify- test and explore the conditions and possible experiences we wish to elicit from this atypical resource?

APPLYING MCLUHAN’S LAWS OF MEDIA TO ASYMMETRIC LITERACY:

What does it enhance?
Scope of possibility; empowerment
What does it obsolesce?
Symmetric Literacy; Perceived limitations
What does it retrieve?
Choice and Opportunity
What does is flip into?
Symmetric Literacy

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Purpose

The purpose of this material is to describe points of departure framing a foundation for exploration into nature of Asymmetry as it applies to Imagination, as a promising subject.  Our intention is to produce useful and teachable tools and methods for identifying business applications and identifying alternative and complementary knowledge products for education.

Introduction – Scope of asymmetry

Global Security defines asymmetry as it is described in the United States Army; “dissimilarities in organization, equipment, doctrine, capabilities, and values.”

For the purpose of framing our scope and use of asymmetry we describe Symmetrical Literacy as the widely held knowledge of, and participation in forms of learning, expression and living that are established and practiced. They are in balance with the way people read and write, interpret, intuit, act and interact towards and with each other and the world. Solely thinking within the constraints of this “space” limit individuals and organizations from making the leaps required to engage in new value creation.

}  Is there a shift of focus from symmetrical to asymmetrical literacy?

}  Are we facing an emergent need to combine and synthesize a spectrum of literacies into a more comprehensive whole?

}  Is there an all-encompassing ecology of literacies from which a more potent,

“full-spectrum imagination” can rise?

Both literacy and imagination standards are embedded within shared tradition of increasing complexity, competition and co-operation.  The imagination has always been, and will always be, the ultimate human resource: shaping and defining our achievements, or lack thereof.

We believe that multiple literacies add to and increase the “imagination potential” of individuals and organizations, and that this will emerge or be discovered more so within the realm of asymmetry.

Asymmetry is more than the opposite of symmetry, and represents a vast range of alternative possibilities to the imagination, beyond what is known and accepted. One form of asymmetry in action may be described as the unconventional, unpredictable, non-traditional utility of elements and properties found within everyday technological, political, economic social, cultural systems. We believe the complimentary concepts of symmetry-asymmetry are both present in every context and can be considered a continuum rather than a dichotomy. The shift in what is considered symmetric or asymmetric behaviors is always coming in and out of balance as technology, custom and routine are individually, socially and culturally negotiated. What is asymmetric is continually reframed and restocked by the rate in which ways of thinking are adopted and antiquated. Meaning we are defining what is symmetric by what we do collectively.

}  What great human achievement has not been asymmetric?

}  To what extent will the education of the left side of the brain, the concrete and sequential be automated?

}  Will educators of the future favor the study and development of the imagination as a discipline?

Forms of Asymmetry to be EXPLORED

}  Outside of the Known – Venturing into the unknown to survey new forms of possibility. Challenging perceived limits and barriers for the purpose of retrieving unique and beneficial knowledge.

}  Atypical Function, Typical Forms – Every variable in the environment can be leveraged either normally or abnormally. Inside or outside of conventional use, asymmetry in action is the nontraditional or novel utilization of resources disproportionate to another individual or organization.

}  Asymmetric Thought and Behavior – Exploring deviations from the excepted norms of how one should think and behave.  Seeing different, acting different and being different in light of motivations that exist for no other, providing glimpses into tomorrows normal.

Coping, let alone competing, within this context will be defined by individuals and organizations that; shape “issues” rather than be shaped by them (US Army); who have the ability to apply vision, understanding, clarity, and agility to volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous situations (Johansen); and integrate, non-linear approaches to seeing, knowing and doing- Integrative Thinking (Martin).

On the slushiest day of the year, Rafael Fajardo, a young game artist and media professor walks in our Toronto office with a bright green webkins frog. What proceeded was an informal discussion about serious games.

The University of Denver (DU), where Fajardo teaches, has staked a claim in doing “good” for humanity. The digital media studies department prepares graduates “with significant experience in three areas of investigation and aptitude: design, technical, and critical. Trained to establish and foster dialogue across these areas, DMS graduates are prepared to address the entangled, technology-fueled challenges shaping contemporary experience.”

Humane Games
Rafael’s personal interests lie in a concept he calls “Humane Games;” games that are educational through play and through their making. “Socially conscience games”, which serve to articulate and address a variety of perspectives on various social, political and cultural issues. He is also underway working on Humane Games as a concept that has medical and health value. These are games that have physiological advantages, aiding therapeutic practice and patient pain aversion. Humane games are games that are good for people. It is here where the design of games is considered as a component in forming a discipline around the development of games. Game development is described on the DU School of Engineering & Computer Science Game Development Programs website as:

“the academic field focused on the creation of electronic games. The field includes interactive graphics/animation programming, fundamental computer science, game design, studio art, electronic art, narrative storytelling, and critical game studies. The field is concerned with both entertainment and serious games.”

This marks a shift in games as they move from a weaponized nature rooted in a heritage of military simulation and wargaming, to a more holistic and diverse social and cultural expression. An evolution “from sword to plowshare”; from tactical to practical; from kill to chill. In our conversation it was discussed how game developers, by in large, create games for people such as themselves; they are “audience-creators” generally male, young and Anglo. Thus, the industry having been flooded with a spectrum of competitive, action and strategy driven games has come to a level of saturation, and is showing signs of waning in popularity. Rafael in his P4 initiative looks to enable the diversification of voices creating games, and tools to assist in making them mark entry points to relieve saturation and restore integrity to the medium.

Design is all about relationships. Games deal with contexts, decisions and outcomes; they are in effect a medium of fluid and dynamic relationships. Rafael asks in his work, “What are the relationships we wish to curate when designing games?” Could they be a form of editorial media for social and cultural critique and art? To find out he takes the complexity of serious issues and simmers them to an interactive “reduction” that one can engage and embody. Digital Games are a relatively young media, and the concept of games as social critic, action, or as a literary object is even more new. Games like Pax Warrior and Darfur is Dying are cause driven artifacts, suitable and viral pickets in an age of internet ubiquity. Games are also a medium of attention, which is all he asks us to pay.

“Can Games Handle Heavy Content?”
In finding the answer(s) to this question, which has defined his research and practice, he sets out to hear stories and enables people to express these stories in forms they never thought they could. The first project is Crosser*, a story about “Carlos Moreno, a clean cut hardworking man looking for a good future.” The game was born south of the US/Mexico border, from IBM “abandonware”, consisting of rejected computers and material, whatever his team could get there hands on. Of interest is the building of this game; where the waste of the “developed world” is transformed by the “underdeveloped world” at a critical junction, the border that separates and binds these two worlds. The team was a juxtaposition of Denver academics and underrepresented youth living near the Mexico-USA border. In Crosser, Rafael has included the process and context of creation as a critical object.

The objective is to cross the US/Mexico border in the face of a blitzkrieg of obstacles. The glitchy lag timed play milieu of a pastiche techno-creation process itself becomes a social, political and cultural comment. Positioning the crosser, an (il)legal alien as the protagonist or hero also adds to the work’s commentary, reversing the zeitgeist belief of crossers being criminal. Rafael, later communicated his discomfort in the one sidedness of the work, and set out to balance the scale.

La Migra was an addition to, and an alternate component of, Crosser. They are in fact two levels, or dimensions of the same game. LaMigra created a dialogical tension between the works, being a game composed of the perspective of the border police. The purpose of the works is to highlight the relationship and realizations that occur at the intersection of, in the tension between the two games, in the dual nature of the content and its emphasis. Further the graphical treatment, the GUI is sampled from arguably the best games of all time, Frogger and Space Invaders. The appropriation of this form of representation highlights that even lo-fi graphics can communicate heavy issues, as well as, emphasizing through contrast the light nature of purely entertainment driven industrially produced games.

It is intended and anticipated, that through varied game authoring tools and a diverse chorus of creation, the spectrum of stories being told and potentially the nature of conversations about the past present and future that occur within games and play media will expand.

Initial thoughts: 

Relational Representation
I attended a Digital Holography and 3d Visualization pilot course this year. It was a joint collaboration between the Ontario College of Art and Design and the University of Toronto. There were two professors, one from the optics engineering department and one from Holography department. They taught the principles of light, as well as the possibilities and affordances of holography as a medium of expression. The students were already split into Artists and Scientists. And this distinction was strengthened through the assignment of alternate deliverables, different materials and expectations. The course was supposed to be a ground in which to synthesize these camps, to learn from each other. However we spoke different languages, had different intents, and different ideas about what was salient.

If you’re an engineer or computer science student at the DU you may find yourself in a life drawing class in the art department, similar to the situation above. In his talk, Rafael emphasized the variety of skills it takes to create games. “You have to be good at creating visual experiences, creating experiential experiences as well as coding.” Rarely do you find polymaths that are fluent in all of these skills, for each one of the above fans out into a series of sub skills and capabilities that take years to develop, and their all taught separately. Not always in the same school.

Game Development as a discipline calls for the convergence of many academic fields, however may serve to do much more than “establish and foster dialogue across these areas” for the purpose of developing games. Areas such Art, Design, Literary Arts, Critical theory, Engineering and Computer Science are all part of the knowledge mosaic that makes for a good game. After experiencing first hand the dilemma of disciplinary difference, I wonder if games have potential to synthesize these alternative thinking models in a space that absorbs, samples and synthesizes jargon, tables, graphs, that describe dynamics and relationships. Games as a medium could serve as an arena to develop and evolve a new system of symbolic representation that can build bridges between alternative systems of disciplinary and cultural symbolic representation. Can games present Opportunities for semantic conflict resolution?

Will there be Regional and individual game representational dialects? And will future games allow for the plasticity to change in relation to peoples representational needs while retaining the deep structures of meaning intended by the game developers?

Action Games?
During the question period at the end of Fajardo evening presentation a fellow from the audience asked, “Where is the action, the real world resolution, in the end it’s just a game?” This question highlights only the infancy of games as critique, not their inability to contribute meaningfully to political or social change. This is an area Rafael expresses he had intended his games to eventually address. But for now its one step at a time, it’s about small victories.

This question did however point toward a perceived limit of games that may be obsolesced in years to come. As technologies become increasingly “human literate” tracking and recording the meaning of position, movement, and various transactions of people in depth I wonder if there is an intrinsic promise in haptic interfaces and locative media. Games have inhabited all forms of media dead or alive. One of the first things we do with new media is play with it, or kill with it, but technology by its very nature is neutral. It is shaped by our desires, our needs and our wants.

Locative technologies could easily record our trajectories through places and our actions in them, in a sense they and others, such as situational awareness and haptics may become a form of contextual and behavioral stenography. They will be a fertile ground in which to deploy location/behavior based passive or explicit multiplayer citizen games. Our data could be easily correlated with goal sets, point systems and envisioned victory conditions. These future games could also be grounds in which to dynamically negotiate rules goals and conditions, social responsibility and accountability and may quantify more readily that which was formerly unrecordable and qualitative. “You can be dead serious in your aims but playful in getting there“

Game Borne Products?
Game borne products are not about merchandising to support game narratives but emergent products born from human interaction and experiences in game. They begin as data, intangible in game behavior or custom which has the potential to be expressed as matter. Games, like 3d CAD and simulation software in the past could be appropriated to negotiate and author future products and services culturally before we chose to appoint energy and resources to their material production. Could we develop Experience and play driven micro production on a mass scale?

Engineering creations are certified mathematically through simulation and modeling, surgeons and pilots are certified through in game hours and examination. Can game-born products and services creations be validated experientially, and be translated into future real world products. Could in game prototyping, social evaluation or “massively authored value creation” be a staple component of near future manufacturing processes? As these interactive media technologies, desktop and just-in-time manufacturing practices mature, the speed at which we may move from concept to percept, or conversation to product shortens.

Fajardo’s next project is critical toys, think webkins meets Jane Jacobs meets Paulo Fiere. But each toy he has created thus far hail from his in-game dialogues, they sample from and are instantiations of the representational models he and his teams negotiated in the making of them.

There is no print button in games.

Yet.

Scenario: Saw-sees

My name is John Hammond and I can do almost anything you can imagine with wood. Ive spent the last thirty years building cabinets in my spare time, and mine are as good as any. Ivory inlays for days.

I’m considered a master.

I’m Xavier Borden, I’m an industrial poet and musician. I make kinetic sculptures that have a dual purpose as instruments. I transform, reform and perform, interact or die.

I’m considered an eccentric.

My friends call me Sady, I take consumer electronics, tools and vintage computers and build violent robots that’ll eat your kitsch installations.

I’m considered an artist

Call me John, Xavier or Sady, I’m a playlist of mastery, but my real name is DeWalt im a model 568X skill saw. Nice to meet you. My tricks, my trades are recallable at any time. Just ask my traces, they’ll shed light on an imagination that lived. The residual imprints of hands, paths, and purposes is my personality.

I’m considered innovation

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Significance:

I began to toy with the idea that objects can house avatars. There are many ways in which people can express themselves and their identity beyond pixel and volume. As objects become more literate of our behaviors they may one day house our gestural traces.

How would one “play an environment” like a conductor of a remote symphony in real-time? – Embodying an instrument, a section, or whole orchestra at any given moment, an expressive variance similar to that of emphasis in speech. My son should be able to bring a play-list of these “contacts” – live or residual- with him everywhere, for use in a wide variety of contexts. Making any wood shop his fathers’ wood shop. The right contextual links and personal inquiry could prompt, or summon residual knowledge, or “live” presence of an individual or mix of individuals which that a given situation requires – providing – in context, information rich, experiential-mash-up-swarms, with read write capability.

I wonder how something like this could change educational models, could El P be in my sequencer? When I buy a paintbrush, could you throw in Rembrandt too? It brings a whole other meaning to buying a pair of “Jordan’s.”

Objects will perform unimagined means and modalities of representation, vessels of personal and group communication. It is foreseeable that things with communications will enable the expression of our various forms of presence. It is likely that social networks will evolve within single and multiple objects. Merely using something is synonymous to pressing record.

These recordings will be entries contributing to the history of an object, a history that can be searched, recalled, annotated and resituated. Object that teach are nothing new. New is how object may provide a platform to direct the hands in a spectrum of meaningful ways, based on other hands. Like a scene from Ghost. Gesture is technique, and technique can be recorded, codified and expressed. Objects may come to teach, translating motions, motivations and intents into tutorials and curricula. There are stories to tell of the roles they’ve played in the lives of people. If only these walls could talk.