050505
Today I joined a group of about sixty designers, media people, artists, scientists, gamers, mathematicians, social networkers, architects, professors, and at least one “ethnographic engineer” for 050505, a symposium on transitions at U.C. Berkeley.
Our host is the Center for New Media, a multidisciplinary program drawing people together from the humanities, art, and technology.
I’ve been harping on this simple model to encourage considering activities as processes.
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This event is about the red arrows. It also deals with transitions from real to virtual with intermediate stops with no name as yet.
Leaving one’s comfort zone increases learning. Just about everything I’ve heard today seems to inform by research of Informal Learning.
Comments in red are Jay’s observations.
UC professor Yahuda Kalay, director of the Center for New Media, kicked things off.
Turning On
Serious Games
Tom Kalil on New Media, Science, and Learning. He works out of the Chancellor’s Office, developing new programs. Screenshot of nanotube mass conveyor. Tom fosters interdisciplinary, student-led innovation. There’s a large payoff from investing time and resources in interdisciplinary, student-led activities, e.g. the Berkeley Nano Club. Tom landed an unrestricted grant and, “having no adult supervision in his job,” could choose where to invest it. His choice: Serious Games. Kids are hooked on the environment, spending 5+ hours online and console games. “I live in Norrath and occasionally visit the real world” (=Everquest).
How to get it going? Project-oriented course. What serious games should exist? How combine storytelling with the science of learning? How convince game publisher to allow reuse of assets such as game engineers? Key leverage points?
Financial vs Social ROI. Serious games pay off in social ROI but perhaps with low financial ROI. A problem of mismanagement.
Rabbit Holes
Jane McGonigal is webby-award winning game (for innovation). “I Love Bees.” Down the Rabbit Hole. We’ll pay attention to Alice’s trip a la Lewis Carroll. Burning with curiosity, Alice notices a rabbit checking the time on his watch before jumping down a rabbit hole.
Five design strategies surrounding rabbit holes that could change how we can learn from them:
1. What is a rabbit hole? Illiusion to Alice in Wonderland. In gaming, the only entrance to a new game, an opportunity to interact, a secret that can be shared.
2. Alternate Reality games have rabbit holes. They hide in plane sight. Everyday reality is the backdrop for MMPGs.
3. Why do they need rabbit holes? They are never announced as fictional or real. The games are played in public spaces, so they require an opt-in. They identify who’s playing the game.
4. How do players find a rabbit hole? Accident. Rabbit-hole finding sites.
5. When can I be certain I have one?
How to make it work? Attention, affordance, action, feedback, replayability.
Rabbit holes create community, build a learning culture, (check Henry Jenkins at MIT), increase sensitivity (focus), produce vertigo. And virtualize everyday life.
jane@avantgame.com, avantgame.com
New employee orientation could benefit from rabbit holes. Combine it with some sort of treasure hunt that requires interaction and exploration. Is anyone doing this?
Play within a play note: The A/V system makes jarringly loud noises as two-minute warning. At the 12-minute mark, the A/V goes off! It turns out this control system is programmed in the next speaker’s software. This enables the MC to keep up a rapid pace but it is the most jarring of transitions imaginable.
Deception in Media
Max MSP enables artists to program and communicate with engineers. David Zicarelli. He doesn’t do PowerPoint or give demos. Talks without digital reinforcement. “I’m going to read you something.”
Truth irrelevant? By trying to read the speaker’s mind? Led David to thoughts of deception as part of interactivity. This is the case for other arts: the circus. Fake interactivity is rampant. Stuttgart gamer runs out of time, turns to creating the illusion of interactivity. Nonetheless, the game worked well. The important aspect is getting inside the head of the artist.
Some things such as sexual transparency are exciting. Once you’ve designed in a feedback loop, you’re on the way to deception. Soft AI is the perception of intelligence rather than perception itself. It’s like the Turing test: not intelligence but convincing someone the intelligence is there.
Our experience of interactivity can be magical while unreal. The method is engineering but the result is magic. We embrace it in a Disney movie but not … Propose self confessional.
Dance Dance Revolution
Irene Chin designs Dance Dance Revolution. Image of pasty-faced, immobile gamer in front of screen. Not so in public arcade dance-on-the-spot games. Rhythm-action games require physical action: playing, dancing, etc. dance upon projected arrows. (When I’ve seen people playing (performing?), they hop around like a frog on a hot stove.)
Carnal + abstract. Both dance and simulation of dance. Identity confusion, potentially can reflect other kinds of being other. Reality boundary blurs.
X-box characters, take your choice: white blond named lady or large black man named Afro. Pick your identity icon. Relationships are fuzzy. Some voyeurism. Figure or ground are difficult to identify.
Coherence of identity impossible if characters include, say, a purple mole. Letting go opens the door to exploration. “Not real dance.” Yet AI assisted surgery quickly becomes real.
A disembodied character is protected from attack. The Dance Dance is billed as a simulation of dance, not dance itself. The desire to join with the technologically rendered other on screen takes away the dangers of the real world.
Sacar el Cuerpo
Marcia Ochoa on Sacar el Cuerpo: Transformista Embodiment, Worldmaking and Transformation.
Born male, living as female. Some online. Jarring divide between seedy reality and idealized new media reality. Gender is materialized in our bodies but transformation is a poetic (in the sense of poesis) process. Sacar el Cuerpo means to bring out from the body via silicon, hormone, makeup. For transformistas, they are bringing out what’s already inside their minds, not changing from one gender to another.
Discussion.
I suggested an amalgam of all the presenters’ concepts. The game: Lose Weight. Aerobic Dance, Dance. Be deceived by the on-screen avatars. Transform your body.
Zoning Out
Music and Sound at a Distance
Matt Wright, matt@ccrma.stanford.edu
Beyond Being There
Tech mediation is never as good as being there, so leverage media for capabilities you don’t get IRL.
Music: Being there. Almost (music in one room of studio), you on headphone. Trying to be there (internet is in between; jam over the net – speed of light is a problem). Why the net will never be as good. Latency and jitter; other guy’s at fault.
Chris Chafe cc@ccrma.stanford.edu
Installation for distalation
A work in progress. Phonebooth in Zurich online to Bay Area.
Two cell phones, uncertain of locations, what’s the space in between. Where is your consciousness? Discourse analysis. Shows active attempt to gauge the other’s speaker’s consciousness. 1.2 million people are talking on cell phones while driving…with less attention to the road than a drunk’s.
Can project the ambiance of the other speaker’s surround. Leads to awareness of “distal consciousness.” All audio communication is extremely different from any video.
Gokce Kinayoglu
Networked Soundscapes
McLuhan. Sound. Plays ambient sound before photo of cablecar climbing Hyde St Hill.
Soundscape. An acoustic environment or an environment created by sound (natural, artificial, imaginary). Practices and conceptions of an era, related to the production and consumption of sound. 20th century soundscape.
1. Radio is a 1:many oneway soundscape
2. Telephone is duplex 1:1
3. Phonograph carries sound one place to another, extending life
4. Cinema: multi-source to edit to multi-speaker replay
Corporations have been tone deaf in spite of multimedia capabilities. It’s extremely rare for any recorded scene in training to have ambient noise, yet it would make things feel more realistic.
Whispering Walls. Mariachi bands in SF, Berkely, and Stanford play at a virtual 30’ from one another
Virtual Cairo. Virtual reality (game like) enables you to walk through Cairo with sound. Brings the situation alive.
Meredith Hoy.
Interzone layers
The Shape of Song (Wattenberg): Chopin Mazurka in F Minor. Music recalls place and time without specific representation. Visualization of pattern.
Music carries symbolic and allegorical restoration provides a curvilinear adjunct to the material world.
The speakers have absolutely wonderful presentations but, being mainly PhD candidates, their presentation format is the reading of papers. Having someone read a paper the audience does not have a copy of is obviously not the optimal way to learn things. Words sail by once and if you miss it, well, you’ve missed it for good. The speaker is talking about the phenomenological aspects of music …infinite… undifferentiated space … music of the spheres … synesthesia a la Wassily Kandinsky trying to visualize music … Bergson and temporal flow. Hyperbolic differential curve options coordinate grid curvilinear geometry Lucretius vertical falling atoms .. curving mediation .. diagram of Madonna song Like a Prayer … wave forms You get the idea. I could understand this about as well as if the speaker were speaking Tibetan.
Anthony Burke, professor of architecture at U.C.
Out and Out
Buckle up. Transitions something architecture is against. Smooth them out.
Designing information space. Ecology of info. Geo tags. A topography. Transition to media intermediated: wall. Geo tags let environment read who you are. Trying to integrate space and the information space itself. Public display wall shows your messages when you’re there. Grow a building. Apartment pictured grows from unit to unit to unit rather than from the whole.
Everything becomes a series of relationships. Relationship diagram more meaningful than photos.
Dymaxian globe: network vision. Network, network, network. Handshaking between networks. History on a chart….
CMU mathematician Scott Draves
Electric sheep.
Animates artificial life forms. The more you view something…. Runs on server farm. 10 hours to generate 4 seconds? 10,000 participants watch.
First level of environment of interaction. Votes communicated in real time. Reproduction of winners. Flock learns to please the audience. 400 people vote per day.
Next level of involvement is to become a genetic designer. Mix of human contributed and machine generated forms. Ten design contribution/day.
Next level is to change the framework. Download.
Hard disk holds 75 gigabytes of sheep. Point of passive static playback device is home experience. You get an “intimate experience with the sheep.” You hear the machine talk to you. Continuous wow shuts down the verbal part of your mind. Parallel to meditation. Puts one in a trance. Evolving to become more beautiful. Will it evolve into something more like Las Vegas? Perhaps things will fork, some to Vegas, another more tranquil.
Came about when Scott was 10, using computers to create graphic patterns that he would stare at. Scott told me the only money he makes off Electric sheep is donations and $15 for a DVD; I bought one.
190 lines of code
Jeffrey Heer…. Toolkit for others to develop interactive relationship diagrams, as in Visual Thesaurus.
Topic is CODE. Source code and applications are separate worlds.
Code is command. Mediated itself: base 16, etc.
Code as competition. I will hack you! Mine is prettier.
Code as user interface. Programmers write code that other programmers will use. API = application user interface for which programmers are the users.
Code as communication. It’s a social media for programmers.
// this is a total hack!
// TODO: do this the right way
Learned great patterns from reading great code.
Think of code as written for communicating with other people as well as machines. The iterative design of programming interfaces… cycle of design, prototype, evaluate, formative field studies, evaluate usage by programmers, interview
Studying programmers: Documentation: only when I need it. Prefer not to write it. Interrupts their flow. Hence, bricolage of sample code. Bricolage of sample code. Perceived as shameful, bad design practice. But everyone does it. All participants do it regularly.
Jeff and I talked more about this. I would not have learned HTML without “View Source.” He’s investigating ways to put a “View Code” option in other programming environments. Novices take large chunks of code and try to run them (with variations) while experts take snippets and eventually make them their own.
I imagine this same pattern occurs in making presentations, writing letters, having conversations, telling stories, and many other non-programming practices.
Papert and Turkle. Top down drives women out of computer sci.
Models of learning. Epistemological pluralism. Documentation as detachment. Doesn’t communicate process.
Situated learning, by performance and example, exploration and play, apprenticeship by proxy. Experts wean off bricolage quickly; novices take bigger chunks.
Structuring learning through strategic sample code design. Ramp of increasingly complex code. Introduce holes between examples.
Marc Davis. School of info management and systems.
Retracing social space.
Finding media by content analysis doesn’t work.
Cameraphones help us capture contextual metadata.
Capturing and shareing contextual information…
Signal to Symbol programs: Semantic Gap. (fundamental problem)
Sensory gap bwteen how an objecgt appears and what it is. Different images of the same object can appear dissimilar. Image of different images can appears similar. There’s some contextual knowledge that lets you tell the different.
Drunk, in gutter, wake up in foreign land, can’t read, etc. That’s what computer vision is like. Contextual info enables us to see what’s going on.
Camera phones as platform. Media capture. You can write programs for a camera.
Today label is 93475.jpg. Mobile Media Metadata Idea. Leverage the spatio-=temporal context and social community of media capture in model devices.
Context … Community … Content
Where/when who what
Share space, time, social with. Familiar strangers connected in media sharing.
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SPATIAL
SOCIAL
But we’re not alone in this. We each map a unique space. How might we share our overlap? Social prostheses for media sharing. Context-aware recommender systems.
Social retracings. Alternative structure for mapping human activity in the world.
LUNCH
Steve Dye works at SF MOMA. They have a problem with obsolete media. He recently installed a show that depended on 8-track tape. Amazingly, reel-to-reel tape is no longer being manufactured.
Holding On
Danah boyd
Ethno engineering
HCI background, now enthographic engineer with Google.
Friendster 2003. example: friends of Giant Squid
People just want to have fun. Pop with Burning Man geeks and NYC gays. Burning Man fans thought the site was theirs; the gays thought Friendster was a gat dating site.
People spent 14 to 16 hours a day on Friendster making things up. Characters named Salt and Pepper had an online affair – and would converge on food characters’ pages. Protests against Fakester genocide.
Issues: Autistic social software. Are you my firend? Social awkwardness. Collapsed contexts. None of this is real. Configuring the user (battle for control).
Orkut: Are you my friend? Yes or No? Awkward. Leads people to goof around.
Clay Shirky posts picture of old white guy as his portrait.
Eric Paulos
Delicious Hullabloo
Focus on the city. Wireless everywhere. Mobile phones. What are the possibilities now? We spend lots of time in the “middle space” on the way to our destinations. Urban atmospheres. Proactive archaeology of our urban landscapes and emerging technology.
· Not familiar ubiquitous computing turf
· Not entirely driven by efficiency and productivity
Asking questions: urban probe methodology. “Body storming.” Intervention.
e.g. trashcan. What are the patterns? Watched the trash can for hours, documented every interaction people had with the can. In 75%, out 12%, search 5%, etc.
Special trash can shows interactive display of the trash out on the sidewalk in front. Send messages from can on receipt of red trash. I think you have to see this to appreciate it. www.urban-atmosphere.net
Victoria Vesna, chair department of design UCLA
Feeling and Believing
Social networks, cell phones, ubiquitous computing. Interested in bodies and invisible network of bodies. Lover of nature, the most amazing designer.
Bucky Fuller. Expo 67 dome mathematics led to discovery of the 3rd instantiation of carbon, now known as the Buckminsterfullerne, now an icon of nanotech.
Scanning tunnelling microscope. Most of an atom is empty space.
Tibetan monks. LACMA. Monks meet nanoscientists. (Monks surprised that it takes so many things to understand nothingness.) Create mandala. Shot 300,000 digital images. Recreated center of mandala and put under scanning tunnelling microscope.
Sound: critical when we think of visual realm. Cell vibrations. Looking at the vibrations of living cells and communicating it over our cell phones. Most of a human body is empty space.
Billion atoms in a grain of sand.
Cabalistic Spiders
Matthew Tiews, executive director of the Townsend Center. The optical telegraph. Disruptive in its day. Closed system. Paris to Lyons in an hour. Historic oddities and strange events. The snail telegraph. Secretive signs. The optical telegraph, invented in France in 1791.
I’ve had to move to the side of the presentation area to plug into an outlet for a recharge. I’m missing a presentation or three (it’s like listening to a cell phone cutting in and out) but the topics and pace are boring to me anyway.
Breaking Up
Melancholy Images
Nancy van House
Personal photos. New technologies incorporate new issues.
Picture of couple on beach. Then the next three images… Big waves. Tsunami kills them. Contextuality is key.
Power of narrative. People prefer to tell the story accompanying photos f2f. also, people want their own images as proof that they were there.
Digital photos are transitory, prints enduring.
Digital pics, esp. phone pics, are casual, prints intention and posed
Now collective, not individual process
People trash email pics but keep prints
Self expression
Sending – like a kiss or a hug
Social uses of personal phones.
Self presentation
Personal photo – universal, democratic m more experimentation, more access, tech of memory and tech of communication
Norway
Arlo Borlan
Looking at Communications Failures
Compactness of zone of communication. I’m not grokking this. AV problems messed up the debut. Ray Charles comes on screen. Giant applause when he launches into Georgia. Ray continuously directing the band; a total backseat driver. There’s performer – audience communication going on but I find it hard to track.
Bandmember told Alro, “If that man were not blind, I would crush my trumpet on his head.”
Watching the screens of several presenters sitting with me in the front row, I see that they’re surfing the web and writing mail rather than paying attention to our speaker. (I’ve forgotten the damn password to get online.)
Steve Dietz
Aerozone (Instant City)
ISEA 2006 Symposium + ZeroOne San Jose
August 5-13, 2006
San Jose becoming the tenth largest city in the U.S. The transition from backwater to getting on the map as an INSTANT CITY. Culture festival brought in by dirigible.
Big urban game. Community Domain. (Digital storytelling, participatory mapping).
Too Close for Comfort
Ken Goldberg
Privacy, surveillance. Google satellite system. CCTV project: 1,000,000th camera in the UK. Camera phones.
Public and Private. Designed for the Whitney. Public: belonging to the group. Private: dividing oneself away from the group.
$1200 camera on fifth floor overlooking Sproul is online. Anyone could operate the camera 24/7 until October. Zoom is amazing, from the entire plaza to about a square foot filling the screen.
Camera sabotaged eight hours after installation.
Legal? No one knew.
A directional microphone would have been illegal.
Ken.goldbert.net
Capstone Presentation
Bill Mitchell, MIT
Head, Media Arts & Sciences Program
Fusion Space
Meeting of digital space and architectural space.
Imagine designing a one room apt. You end up with a series of differentiated spaces.
MIT classroom. Wireless laptops. New concept comes up in class and students immediate Google it and feed it back into the discussion. The prof can no longer maintain your intellectual superiority. The role of the instructor changes to channelling, injecting energy. It’s as if class and the library have been jammed together. Workplace of choice: a café table. Another example of a fusion space, food+work. The activity of learning is moving to the former excess spaces. That’s where the productivity occurs. Architects can’t tell productive space from non-productive space. Spontaneous meetings.
In the old days, a room to show A/V couldn’t have natural light. Now powerful projectors work in ambient light so classrooms have windows.
MIT $1 billion in new buildings. Robust technology. Now can have openable windows. Gehry: a non-repetitive building.
Incredibly efficient. One walks away from an open space, someone else takes their place. Tech disappears into the woodwork, architecture can be designed for people.
Bill Mitchell wrote City of Bits, a wonderfully prescient book describing virtual architecture. This was the first book I ever read in its entirety online. We talked briefly about it and I will be interviewing him for the Informal Learning project.
Visiting dignitaries “broke ground” for the new Center for New Media in Moffett Library.