Art

then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Nature has reported that American Association of Publishers (AAP) has hired a seasoned PR veteran to fight against open access scientific articles Journal Publishers Hire PR ‘Pit Bull’ to Attack Open Access I guess they are starting to take this “threat” (or rather, eventuality) rather seriously.

Well, I called it: In in class I took with Eben Moglen I predicted in a class discussion that pictures on the internet would soon be indexed: Re: video cameras (Feb. 11, 2005) Many people in the class were skeptical… Well, here it is, less than two years later: Face Search Engine Raises Privacy Concerns Of course, there are standard objections to the two primary critiques of surviellance “paranioa”.

1. If I am not breaking the law, why should I care?
2. There is so much informatoin being gathered, who could possibly sort through it all?

The responses to these objections should be well rehersed.

Monday night I went to the ITP’s end-of-semester show. A friend of mine is in the program and I went to check out the scene. ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, is part of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. ITP has been around since ‘79, and lies somewhere concetually between the MIT Media Lab and Mary Flanagan. When I visited the MIT Media Lab this summer I began to understand how it was really operating as a pooled R & D lab for corporate interests (with plenty of military funding). I got the vibe that ITP is coming from a different place with different priorities, but I don’t really know the full back story. Here are some of the highlights of the many many projects I saw the other night:

Free as in ‘Free of pollutants’, ‘free of politics’, and ‘conducive to human freedom’, not ‘free as in fusion’ or ‘free as in beer’. On Wednesday night I saw Jeffery Sachs present at the CSSR series. I have seen him talk before, but he is a great orator, so it is a pleasure to listen to reruns. Besides, Gia’s situation continues to deteriorate at such an alarming rate that everytime he speaks I learn how things have gotten worse. I have been wondering for a while how technology and new media could play a role in saving the world, and I posed this question to Jeff after the talk:

Well, midterms have come and gone, and somehow I managed to complete my two papers on time, somewhere between San Francisco and PloneCon in Seattle. In my class on the Social Impact of Mass Media I was really impressed with Peter’s Speaking into the Air, and wanted to revisit the Phaedrus. While reading it I was making connections to read-only/read-write culture, and wanted to explore that connection to Plato’s analysis of writing. Also, his conversation has everything in the world to do with my thinking on the effects of Technology on Epistomology itself, and Memory in particular. Still, when I sat down to write the paper, I kept getting drawn back into conversations around OLPC, until I realized that’s exactly what I should be writing about! Plato and the Laptop: Prescribing Educational Technology for Society’s Ills

I had an interesting conversation with Brian Taptich, the VP of Business Development at bittorrent.com and gained an insight into the machinations of the industry. I learned that “Big Media” only now appreciates how good they had it back in Napster days, when every file download was logged and tracked through the central Napster server. Now that they are starting down the barrel of true peer-to-peer networking (which bittorrent – the protocol, not the company – affords), they have the perspective to appreciate in hindsight the benefits that omni-present surveillence provides for them. You could even speculate that bittorrent.com’s value proposition is to turn the bittorrent protocol, back into Napster. If they become the central clearinghouse of bittorrent seeds, they can (and will) keep records of all of the network activity. What files are being exchanged, and who is exchanging them. In bittorrent, the seeds are the servers, and technically these seeds can be distributed all across the Internet. I was really surprised to learn that Brian was actually aware of an obscure branch of Austrian code for the PloneMultimedia product which auto-generates bittorrent seeds (which we helped merge into the trunk at the Big Apple Sprint). Apparently, The Lawyers were getting all antsy about the existence of tools which make seeding all too easy. Right now, it takes a degree of technical know how to create these ad-hoc bittorrent servers, but once the auto-generation tools make it out to the premier blog, wiki, and CMS platforms, there won’t be much stopping them. The delicate balance between the overly concentrated power of centralized services vs. their practical usefulness is a theme I began to explore in my post on Serenity. I have also imagined other contexts (e.g. Creative Commons licensing) where simply landing an important feature in the top dozen authoring tools could really shift the scales in terms of adoption. I continue to actively wonder what features could be introduced to these tools to promote equality, democracy, and social justice. Someone should tell the lawyers that the cat’s head has already wriggled out of the bag, and when she gets out she is going to teach her peers the same trick.

Over Memorial Day weekend I attended Fleet week, and made a few new friends. They happen to be robots, of the autonomous flying variety. These little gadges come in a wide range of sizes, from wasp not much bigger than two hands all the way up to the predator, which is now armed with hellfire missiles. For the time being, these robots are unarmed, but are all equipped with survaillance cameras. This explosion in optical feeds helps explain the urgency behind programs like Carnegie Mellon’s Informedia project (Is Anyone Watching Grandma?). These craft already realize Ender’s Game scenarios, with hs dropouts controling live ammunition in the Iraqi theater of combat from the safety of a bunker in New Mexico. But even without carrying missiles themselves, these robots have become part of the weapons system. A soldier explained to me how the targeting systems for the large guns on the decks of US ships are now wired to the data feeds coming from the remote drones. With the click of a lightpen, what the plane sees is targeted from the ship’s guns, damage assesed and trajectories corrected. Killer robots are a topic I have been thinking about for a while, but it was truly amazing to see these devices in person. In many respects this hardware is identical to the remote control airplanes from the ’50s. The only major new advancement is the software controling them. Here is the model that Bush is planning on deploying to patrol the Mexican border. How long before local law enforcement gets a few of these to play with? How many do they need before the start assigning them to track individual suspects?

A recent visit to the new 5th avenue Apple store made me realize that the war for the living room console is effectivlely moot. For years manufacturers have been vying to create the hybrid computer/tv, destined for the position formely occupied by the VCR. What I realized was that this compititiion is a bit like the telcom companies fighting over landlines, while everyone else went out and got themselves a cell phone. Portable media players, combined with docking stations mean that I can have my music, movies, games, pictures, etc on my person, at all times. Inconvinient to carry your xbox, ps3, or mac mini in your car, to your office, or to your friends house. It’s all too easy to forget to factor in Moore and his law.

I am bummed at the failure of politicians and the media to connect the issue of Net Neutrality to the issue of China’s internet censorship. The issue of internet censorship in China led to congressional hearings where:

“The House International Relations subcommittee’s top Democrat, Tom Lantos, told representatives of the companies that they had accumulated great wealth and power, “but apparently very little social responsibility”. “Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace. I simply don’t understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night,” the Associated Press quoted him as saying.” (bbc news)

April 7th I heard Lev Manovich talk at Pratt. I am a big fan of Manovich’s written work, and the Language of New Media was instrumental in my analysis of tagging. Friday night Manovich showed us ideas in progress, and bravely admitted that they were not completely formed. He talked about describing the evolution of media in evolutionary terms. As in, the next logical progression after getting all our media digitized (i.e., simulating physical processes w/in the digital environment) is the breeding and hybridization of the media. He is claiming that some of what we are now seeing in ‘moving graphics’ or ‘design cinema’ is actually a new form of media, distinct from what came before it. And he is interested in identifying the trunks and branches of this media evolution. Plaid Itsu was a film he used as an example of a completely new form. Whereas multimedia was the assembly of multiple forms of media adjacent to each other, metamedia is the combination of these forms into a new unified whole. He pointed out the live action photography, combined with traditional design aesthetics, combined with graphics, etc etc. Not sure I bought it, but it was an interesting assertion. The best question from the audience alluded to a longstanding disconnect between media and communication theorists. Manovich is looking exclusively at the end product of the media being created, and not examining the cultural and social conditions that lead to its creation. There may be mileage from this rarefied approach, as some patterns are discernible, but it does seem to be lacking the depth to explain the creative dynamics and underlying motivations. After the talk, I began to this relate his line of reasoning to Arthur Young’s theory of process: The Theory of Evolutionary Process as a Unifying Paradigm Theory of Process Poster (too bad this isn’t really visible online) Which I first became exposed to through the work of the Meru Foundation: letter matrix It seems to me that the evolutionary forces that Manovich is documenting conform to the trans-disciplinary evolutionary process that Young articulated. For what its worth, the hybridization of media that Manovich claims we failed to predict, was foretold back in this book on the MIT Media Lab, published in 1988.