Cultural Production, Hidden and Ordinary Affects

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disjunctures and Generativities

(an attempt at loosely tracking the generativity of some emergent things in Caché, and perhaps more importantly, practice in this type of mapping – please skip to next paragraph for formal analysis)

We watch and wait, scanning the screen, looking for something substantive to take shape out of the ordinary. Something happens. The video tapes that arrive are accompanied by violent drawings, perhaps made more disturbing in their familiar, child-like quality. One is of a beheaded chicken, blood splashes from the wound. A childhood event Georges hasn’t thought about for years resurfaces viscerally in a dream. The memories of Majid and his deceased parents are tangled up with the year of 1961, references of the Algerian massacre, blood, and his own mother’s eyes lowering at the mention of the orphan. A historical happening spreads rhizomatically across the time horizon, and no one that was ever involved, that ever existed, knows the extent of it. Suddenly it becomes a memory and a dream, a history and a present story (because things become and things happen). It becomes a frame through which Georges can make sense of the tapes. A recording of road signs and hallways that can be paused and examined, initiates the (re)crossing of paths. Trajectories led to, lead, and diverge from here. Majid was once a child, and so was Georges. This used to be the last time they saw each other. Georges refuses to be a perpetrator. He refuses to be a victim. He tells Majid this, threatens him, but Majid is calm – it’s Georges that seems to be scared. The only character that witnesses Majid weeping after the encounter is the camera. How might this have effected Georges had he witnessed it? Would he have been as certain about an uncertainty? The kitchen is small and cluttered, where Majid’s body convulses gently in weeping. The camera captures but doesn’t move. His mother sees that something is bothering him, it’s registering in his facial expression, his tone of voice, despite the words he chooses – and she presses him further. Georges resists telling her…something. Memories, dreams, past and current events, are all gyrating in his head, forming…something. They say goodnight. Before he leaves the room, he hesitates, asks her if she wants the light off, a banal and momentary gesture of consideration. She says to leave it on. They exchange a third or fourth bonne nuit, and he shuts the door. The film documents the encounter through the end, where another film might have cut off. What does this register for the viewer? That Georges is a good son, a thoughtful son, a troubled son, a son? Georges is a father. Pierrot is a youth. When Pierrot walks in late, Georges asks him where he was. When Pierrot forgets to call, or doesn’t want to call, or doesn’t care, Majid and his son are detained by the police, who needed something to happen before they took any action. What happened was not what they thought. At Pierrot’s swim meet there are video cameras on either side of Georges and Anne; they don’t register, they only sideline the event. Georges isn’t going to say anything at all about the mysterious delivery during the dinner party, but Anne feels no reason to hide her assumptions. Everyone at the table is curious about who disrupted dinner by ringing the doorbell. Anne dishes out food onto plates, as she explains the situation to their guests. Georges seems upset by Anne’s openness; he is in front of the camera all the time, it’s his job, always public, but perhaps there are some things he would like to remain private. He doesn’t have control over this however, the timing of deliveries, the way his viewers will perceive him, his wife and what she reveals to their friends - things are happening in real-time. There is tension between Georges and Anne. Anne looks tired. Their family could be in danger; the potentiality is as distinct as the possibility that the deliveries will cease. Georges is hiding something from her, trying to construct something private or preserve something public, a plan of action perhaps, or a mode of protection and/or resistance; Anne sees it as something different. Georges wants to know and Anne wants to know, but there is friction in between their seemingly similar desires; she stands and he sits while they go back and forth until something he says triggers frustration and resignation, and she walks out of the middle (or end) of an argument. “Waves of desire lap at their feet”…Georges wants to forget, Anne wants to put her arms around her son, Pierrot wants his mother to admit a trespass, Majid’s son wants Georges to do the same, and Majid wants to die. This isn’t all that they want, and it won’t be what they always want. The desires of the surveillant remain hidden. The footage simultaneously documents and impacts. In the last scene, we see something at the last minute, out of the corner of our eye, we stop, rewind – another viewing produces another result, but not a resolution. The video tapes look like benign black boxes, but hidden inside are politics, flows, force, ordinary affects.

 

“the inchoate but very real sense of the sensibilities, socialities, and ways of attending to things that give events their significance…gestures not toward the clarity of answers but toward the texture of knowing” (Ordinary Affects 129)

In Caché (Hidden), Michael Hanecke utilizes stationary, single-take shots to emulate the position of a surveillance camera; his unexpected transitions between the video footage being viewed by the film’s characters and scenes from the actual film narrative shift the planes of time, perspective, and viewer position. The film concerns itself with Stewart’s “ordinary affects” that work “not through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds” (3). Unlike other recent films that map connections between events that seem to “lend themselves to a perfect, three-tiered parallelism between analytic subject, concept, and the world” – Crash, Babel, Syriana, etc. - Hanecke’s direction maps a “problem or question emergent in disparate scenes and incommensurate forms and registers; a tangle of potential connections…in motion…defined by their capacity to affect and be affected” (5). Many things remain unclear within the narrative – memories, dreams, intentions, etc.; the film traces the ordinary affects of the characters’ lives emanating from different pressure points (the delivery and viewing of the tapes, the drawing of a be-headed chicken, a massacre that happened in the past, etc.) and all the ambiguity that surrounds them. It effectively conveys a subject, where the subject is both character and viewer, “caught in the powerful tension between what can be known and told and what remains obscure or unspeakable but is nonetheless real” (Cultural Poesis 1028).

Hanecke’s almost juxtapositional style - the lack of a film score, his execution of transitions, his use of stationary shots and long takes – resists sentimentality, judgment, or mapping meanings for the viewer; instead he provokes and confuses, forcing the viewer into a self-conscious, performative viewing in which they must question what they have seen (or not seen). I immediately took the first scene of the film to be an establishing shot based on my knowledge of film conventions, and I thought the rewind effect was some malfunction of my dvd player. Once I realized what Hanecke was doing, my attention was brought to how my own assumptions and frames of reference (grammar of actions?) had already started to shape the narrative for me. The viewer’s attention is constantly brought back to her or his own role as co-author of potential meanings, and this force is further illustrated by the protagonist’s inter/re action with the captured footage, which is I think Hanecke’s intention.

The actual surveillant is never revealed, and so the captured footage is anonymous – there is no “discrete, physically localized entity” exerting tangible force upon the characters. Force materializes through the different characters’ reactions, assumptions, interpretations, and trajectories, “rhythms of flow and arrest” (19). There is no resolution, and indeed the “problem” itself remains elusive and vague; “these stories don’t end in a moral but are left to resonate with all the other ways that intensities rise out of the ordinary and then linger, unresolved, until memory dims or some new eruption catches our attention” (75).

Communities and Crisis

“The great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also subjectivities. They produce agentic subjectivities within the biopolitical context: they produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds – which is to say, they produce producers” (Hardt and Negri – 32)

“Technology-mediated consumption practices” require work on part of the consumer. Lillie clarifies the immaterial labor of e-commerce by dividing it into “symbolic-analytic services” (brokerage) and “affective labor” (helping each other out). eBay’s community of workers is a prime example of a networked, mediated marketplace where the boundaries between consumption, “play,” and “work” start to blur. Members of the eBay community do not only take on the roles of seller and buyer, but of monitoring, marketing, customer service, etc. – actual business administrators or “pinks” participate very little in the community. While branded in a utopian rhetoric of the empowered individual and communities of shared interest working together, Lillie points out that “rather than circumnavigating the retail sector, then, eBay should be seen as actually extending their reach” (101)…a reach vast enough to pull partial-luddites like William Gibson out of net-hiding.

The reach is not only external, but internal as well. Desjardins shows how members of eBay social networks, specifically fan communities, construct identities through the exchange of objects in relation to those communities – eBay member IDs, narrative pitches constructed around commodity objects (what Desjardins calls divestment and possession rituals), self-identity through display of objects, etc. She argues that the community experience of fans/collectors, characterized by these mediated fan practices, parallels the embodied experiences of these communities, and in that sense eBay is able to make claims to a “humanized” marketplace; at the same time, transactions between fan communities on eBay are often ephemeral and ultimately centered around commodity exchange.

 

Affective labor is a key ingredient in the networked society of e-commerce - netflix, amazon, etc. - as well as advertising - facebook, widgets, etc. It can both reinforce and challenge the “dominant paradigm of material production and consumption” – we see challenges put forth in the Creative Commons and Wikipedia communities. Lillie suggests using the collective knowledge “about how material value is created, as well as product manufacturing, pricing, retailing, and so forth” (103) created by the eBay community to promote “critical consumption literacy.” Shaviro claims that in the network society, “collective collaboration and cutthroat competition both flourish”; he warns - “The ‘pirate utopia’ of freewheeling experimentation gives way to a carefully ordered regime of capital accumulation” (248).

“The absence of any cognitive grounding for our actions is precisely their condition of possibility” (224)

I find really interesting the tensions between expenditure and scarcity, equilibrium and crisis that Shaviro discusses. Crisis and desire perpetuate themselves, keeps us coming back for more, and “the system is driven, in spite of itself, to the convulsions of unproductive expenditure” (222) or extravagance. The spaces of flows are characterized by unpredictability – influencing networks from the market to evolutionary biology – and there is resistance to this variability, where it is easy to “reject the idea that anything found in nature or society could ever be arbitrary, meaningless, or irrational” (213). There is a sort of paradox between networks as fundamentally self-organizing and volatile. The tensions between pattern recognition and tracking movements as methods of analysis relate to understanding these tensions; I also think it’s so much easier to fall into the static methods of pattern recognition than it is to practice following fluid and ephemeral movements. Shaviro says these are the metaphysical conditions that properly conceptualize the network society, where “crisis remains the condition of possibility for change, the metaphysical extravagance that alone can open up chinks in the otherwise impenetrable armor of the real” (224).

Possible Discussion Links

-Memes are ideas that are culturally spread - transmission is enhanced by the network, but unlike viruses, they are changed during transmission - which allows for bifurcations or irregularities - intense connectivity means the network can be thrown by something small - a small event can elicit a large consequence i.e. run lola run

-How do Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) mediate not just your consumption practices, but your social practices in general?

-How does scarcity affect your experiences in virtual environments such as Second Life?

-What does it mean to track movements or flows as opposed to recognizing patterns? How do you go about doing this?

-What do YOU use online social networks for?

- Do you engage with electronic organizations and businesses (networks) such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Netflix, Amazon, eBay, etc.? How do you participate and/or contribute in the affective labor associated with these entities?

-How do you feel about the blurring of boundaries between work, play, and consumption?

-What are some things that contribute to your own understanding of what it means to live in the “network society”?

The Network Society

The New Social Formation
The new structure of dominant processes and functions: interconnected networks of variable geometry (504). According to Castells, we are entering a new era in human experience, one that has superseded the historical forms of social organization expressed through the relationship between culture and nature; just like Baudrillard’s notion of the real and hyperreal, it is no longer a question of culture versus nature– nature itself has become a cultural form, expressed through information and its flows (“the key ingredient of our social organization” - 508).

 

Fluctuating Time Horizons
Biological (attached to the rhythms of the life-cycle) and mechanical (attached to socially determined sequential ordering) time has given way to what Castells calls “timeless time” which is simultaneously eternal and ephemeral. Social dynamics of the network society…instantaneous communication, information overload, multi-tasking, etc. etc.… are mobile and non-linear, unbound by sequential time, where “elimination of sequencing creates un-differentiated time, which is tantamount to eternity” (494). Flex-time is processed through the network.

 

Politics Is Local
The top down hierarchical model of power relationships has given way to the decentralized network, where “the power of flows takes precedence over flows of power” (500); every node/hub of the network, despite its relative position within the network, is subject to the volatility of these flows. The dominant spatial logic of the networked, informational society has detached itself from the notion of geographical location or “place” (similar to DeCerteau’s differentiation – see Tensions in Interface Design response), and instead has become procedural, what Castells calls the “space of flows.” The space of flows can be understood through the network of which it constitutes, that is, different points within the network (nodes and hubs), the exchanges of flows between those points (electronic exchanges made possible by information technologies), and the social actors that exert influence on the directions of these flows – “no place exists by itself, since the positions are defined by the exchanges of flows in the network” (443). Castells says we must think of the informational city not as a form, but a process, “characterized by the structural domination of the space of flows” (429).

 

A Game of Chance
Shaviro references Castells – “financial markets are ‘systematically volatile’; they are systematically resistant to any form of stabilizing systematization” (41).” Economic value is a hyperreality. The financial market, like the network society, is an open system in a state of perpetual and nonlinear transformation or fluctuation. If we use the Prigogenian terms that Shaviro references to conceptualize this process – the network society is a self-organizing system in a far-from-equilibrium state (a dissipative structure), where at any bifurcation point, the system may reorganize itself in unforeseen ways - a singular (and marginal) event can have dramatic and far-reaching consequences. Instability gives rise to transformation. Tsing’s friction comes into play. Scientific models of analyses – physical, social, what have you – must direct themselves away from Newtonian universals and toward Prigogenian dynamics/Tsingian contingencies/Haylesian pattern/randomness dialectics. A framework of analyses must be one of probability and not determinism, temporal, nomadic - able to traverse the in-between. Complex systems do not work in a linear manner - Shaviro: “No panoramic view is possible, for the space is always folding, dividing, expanding, and contracting” (7).

 

Nature and Culture: Viruses and Memes: Cultural transmission.
Viruses and memes require a host to reproduce. If we think of viruses as biological and memes as cultural, the two differ in that the dominant mode of transmission for diseases is replication (mutation is possible, but much less common), where as representations are always transformed during transmission: “There’s an irreducible gap between replicator and vehicle, between genotype and phenotype…in short, between the ideality of a repeating informational pattern, and the contingency of any particular material embodiment” (Shaviro 15). So then we must understand cultural transmission as something that is always fluctuating and contingent, while at the same time prolific. Shaviro applies this to his discussion of viral marketing and the way the “algebra of need” is interiorized in the individual. Social based advertising models, such as the one just introduced by Facebook, provide an immediate example of the network society’s consumer-producer as corporate shill. The media industry is in a constant state of crisis – trying perpetually to adjust itself to rapid network changes, that is, reorganizing itself around these bifurcations. Targeting/behavioral marketing has emerged as the current dominant media business model in response to the dynamics of the informational society (the model itself is in a continual state of transformation) and content models are now based around users, where content is generated through immediate feedback loops between consumer-producers. The “viral” powers of the social (personal recommendations as the most effective form of marketing) and the mobile(static banner ads do not proliferate nor engage the user the way widgets do) - in marketing terms - can be seen in widget advertising networks such as Clearspring ; widget ad networks are incorporated into the new Facebook model, where you can affiliate yourself with brands through the Facebook network, or through the widget network . From the current rapid evolution of open application platforms, we see how this freedom of mobility is co-opted by the market; while users may now traverse different platforms with liquid ease, they have a job to do.

 

Biopolitical Production
Part of understanding what it means to live in the network society, I think, is understanding that information is commodity is subjectivity. Labor and capital have become primarily (though not exclusively) immaterial. Shaviro says, “my selfhood is an information pattern rather than a material substance”; on Facebook I can now express my “self” through making “friends” with corporations and through informational packets called widgets, in which I can define myself through brand and product - I am a producer and a consumer and a product. As a space of flows, capital has power. Another example: Shaviro mentions digital rights enforcement – privatization, through encryption – again, the market is constantly finding ways to co-opt digital technologies for its own uses. Information, commodity, and identity are spaces of flows; as part of the network, they are subject to us and we are in turn subject to them.

Shaviro: “Money and information transform whatever they encounter into more money and more information” (40)

Hardt and Negri: “Production and reproduction are dressed in monetary clothing” (32)

Friction

“Friction refuses the lie that global power operates as a well-oiled machine” (6)

Tsing proposes a more constructive model for looking at global connections, one that is based on the metaphor of friction. This flexible model is informed by the “contingency of encounters,” negotiations of difference, and a dialogue between the polarities of the particular/local and the universal. Her point that global capitalism is not an all encompassing determinant but rather “operates in friction” (12), is an important thing to think about when resisting the temptation to relegate oneself to the absolute power of capitalism.

Tsing attempts to ground her analysis of global connection “not in abstract principles of power and knowledge, but rather in concrete engagements” (267). She accomplishes this by using ethnographic narratives of environmentalist struggles and collaborations; her story of the Indonesian village of Manggur, where native inhabitants, nature lovers, and environmental activists were able to collaboratively and successfully stop corporate deforestation, even as the three groups had different understandings of the forest’s history and people – is one example. Rather than trying to piece the stories together to form or find a unified truth, Tsing juxtaposes them in order to illustrate the ways different agents’ understandings and motivations engaged productively to accomplish a common goal; in other words, unity of vision was not the force these groups needed to accomplish their goal, but rather the productive interaction of their incompatibilities (friction).

She also asks us to re-think the local and global not as separate entities, but as things that act upon each other. A more productive understanding of the “universal” is not as a “self-fulfilling abstract truth” that can never live up to its promises, but as an aspiration or “unfinished achievement” that can engage with the local and travel across difference in order to mobilize social change. She says: “Actually existing universalisms are hybrid, transient, and involved in constant reformulation through dialogue” (9). I thought her discussion of traveling stories – how activist allegories, specific in their cultural context and universal in their representations of global solidarity, are co-opted, modified, and translated (or even avoided) by different cultures – was a great example of this.

Tsing’s model for understanding global connections is not only more useful, but more hopeful as well; the contingency of encounters short circuits the absolute power of any dominant cultural force, an equally important analytical as well as inspirational tool for researchers, activists, and others interested in positive social/political change.

Identity and Power

Hillis contends that virtual subjectivity through the use of avatars is an imagistic “middle ground” similar to the text-based literary device of free indirect discourse, where desires and identity cannot be fully assigned to either the character or author. Hillis points out the potentiality for avatar identification to be reinscribed into the production and labor (commodity) power structure, where commodity fetishism is enhanced and multiplied through the fracturing of identities (while still being connected to a transcendental understanding –desire?- of identity), an “increasingly mandated disarticulated self” (87). This spatial and temporal fracturing of identity serves market forces well because the “fractured subject on the move…will purchase many things, avatars included, to satisfy the wants established by various identity claims” (88). A good lens with which to look at Second Life is of course the virtualization of desire, and how commodity fetishism plays a role in peoples’ use of virtual worlds. Back to something I talked about in an earlier response – Shaviro’s discussion of the implementation of scarcity in virtual worlds – how does the creation of scarcity relate to a user’s enjoyment and use of a virtual world, and what can this tell us about cultural and individual identities and desire as it resituates itself on a virtual platform?

“the careful guarding of sense in language is not just analogous to but entirely complicit in the careful guarding of sense in life, and that possibly well-intentioned activity systematically squelches curiosity, change, variety, & finally, all delight in life. It promotes common sense at the expense of all others” (247)

I thought Jackson’s piece was wonderful, one of the more engaging treatises on hyper and non-linear text that I’ve read, and I found it difficult to pull quotes from, as the whole piece is quotable. From here on out, when I refer to hypertext, I mean not just computerized hypertext, but non-linear text in general. Identity and body are patchwork (“it’s possible and maybe preferable for the self to think of itself as a sort of practice rather than a thing, a proposition with variable terms, a mesh of relationships” 246), as she indirectly points to in her introductory paragraph by essentially removing her author identity from the text. How does a byline and the presence of an “author” affect one’s reading of a text? The piece goes on to illuminate the dynamic and emergent properties of hypertext, its ability to empower the reader to create her or his own meanings, and as meanings become fluid rather than static (through forking and nonlinear channels of reading), hypertexts are also (to borrow Hakim Bey’s term) temporary autonomous zones, escaping appropriation by cultural paradigms and other power schemes that will gladly (and I don’t really mean to personify the forces of power relations here) formulate meanings for the reader.

We don’t experience the body as whole, but as a phantom body, an intersection of bodily and embodied experiences, and although our minds work on an associative and fragmented continuum, we have a “catatonic obsession with stasis, centrality and unity” (240). It’s difficult for us to give up our understanding of self-identity as something stable and/or transcendental; this carries over to our readings of text, which we also want to be clean and unified. How does this desire become problematic, not just in its denial in the actual workings of mind, body, subjectivity, but in a social/political context? How does hypertext challenge this type of desire? She points to language as being a desiring machine, and that it must be recognized as such, where the “possibility of pollution is its only life” (250); desire/meaning can be formulated in texts through a passive and codified reading or an active and permeable reading. Jackson says, “Hypertext is schizophrenic: you can’t tell what’s the original and what’s the reference. Hierarchies break down into chains of likenesses” (242). She champions hypertext as a way of evading power structures and the reterritorialization of productive desires that Hillis mentions; instead hypertext invites questioning, transformation, it “leaves you naked with yourself in every leap; it shows you the gamble thought is, and it invites criticism, refusal even” (245). My associative thought runs to Taoism, one tenet of which is letting go of polarized dichotomies and being comfortable with paradox and ambiguity (indeed, chaos) as a way of understanding the nature of the world more deeply (though not necessarily, rightly). How does the idea of stable identity, authorship, and plagiarism/intellectual property reinforce dominant power structures? And who owns and produces the language and ideas in hypertext? The threads of identity, desire and power in the two pieces we read were particularly interesting to me as a useful way of looking at Second Life; Second Life as fiction, latent with hypertextual possibilities but also a desiring-machine functioning within a capitalist context.

Some hypertext fictions:

A Party in Woodside

Hegirascope

The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot 

Second Class Learning

My second class meeting in SL was more fun than the last one – still some technical difficulties (why do I seem to have more technical difficulties during class sessions than I ever do when I’m on my own?) but we ended up going to some really great places. The first sim we went to was a giant dollhouse, with an alien theme going on (they were called “greenies”). You entered the giant dollhouse through another dollhouse, so that when we first walked in I thought it was just a regular house – not a dollhouse within a dollhouse – or was it a dollhouse within a giant house? Whichever it was, the play on different realities was pretty cool. We roamed around for awhile, and I found a giant ashtray with giant rolling papers (Sizla brand vs. Rizla brand), a giant cigarette pack (they were “Whatever” brand cigarettes), and a giant joint (surrounded by stoned-looking greenies) sitting behind a giant framed picture on a giant shelf. It was fun.

After we finished with the dollhouse, Kamran teleported us to a 3D Van Gogh museum, which was pretty amazing. The landscape of the sim comprised a 3D version of well-known Van Gogh paintings, and then there was the museum itself which had paintings on the walls. The architecture of the museum was pretty cool too. I thought of my RL experience at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam (and actually, many of the paintings in that museum were reproduced at this museum) and it was interesting to compare the experiences. On the one hand, it was much more impressive to see the paintings in RL – they have the whole physical artifact thing going for them, they are “originals” – but ultimately, it was the visual quality of the SL versions that made them inferior, and naturally affected the viewing experience for me. On the other hand, you do get desensitized from the reproductions you’ve been exposed to all your life and, unless perhaps aided by some Amsterdam-quality mushrooms, you can’t really roam around inside the paintings like you could in the SL museum, which was a really novel experience. In terms of the 3D paintings/the environment, this sim was pretty top-notch graphics-wise. I immediately recognized the 3D version of “The Café Terrace at Night” and it was surreal and fun to explore it in a spatial way.

We all stayed in the Van Gogh museum for awhile, and then Kamran teleported us to what he called the holodeck (I think) which was a simulation room that gave you a choice of environments it could simulate (represented as photos on a wall). It took awhile for the environments to render, but when they did, it was like being inside of a photograph (unlike the primarily animation-like imagery that comprises most of SL). I kept on wanting to walk into the walls in order to explore further, which probably means that it was a good simulation. A classmate had introduced us to a person in SL, and he or she took us to a sim called the Cloud Chateau. I ended up having technical difficulties at this point and lost sight of Kamran and the others, so I never really got to see how cool this place was (until later). Our final destination was an airport/beach. Underwater at the beach there was a lot of information about tsunamis, and apparently there was a way to trigger a tsunami simulation – which is why Kamran brought us there – but we were unable to get it to work. Naima and I were the only ones left at this point, and while we were waiting for Kamran (who was looking for a way to trigger the Tsunami) we heard alarms signaling the tsunami which never came, and oddly enough I felt a bit alarmed. It reminded me of how I can get scared when I play certain video games, and how strange it is – having cues that trigger instinctual fear, whether virtual or real, produces the same results.

We finally gave up on the tsunami, and just as Kamran was leaving another classmate (Loran) showed up. I ended up showing her some of the places we went to during the class meeting, and afterward it felt like we had actually kind of hung out together for awhile and gotten to know each other a bit better, even though we’ve barely spoken in RL – which was interesting and kind of strange. In fact, I’d say with pretty much anyone in the class, I’ve spoken much more in SL than I have in RL. All in all, was a good class meeting. Some random notes: I’m going to try to be more social in SL and meet some new people, since it is probably an important part of doing research here and I have been really bad about it; this means I will probably have to go to more commodified areas since they seem to the most populated and social. Also, I was just thinking about how limited in movements our avatars are – we have to run scripts in order to do most of the actions that are social (but transparent and unconscious) in RL – which really brings your attention to how much body signals contribute to communication and social interaction. I wonder if they will make avatars more flexible in the future – it would be cool if you could control your facial expressions similar to the way you control bodily movement (or to have facial expressions at all, for that matter). Finally, something Loran brought up that I had been thinking about - why do so many people dance in SL / why is dancing such a prevalent activity? Does the physical (and often personalized) movement of dancing help people validate the “reality” of their avatars? Is it because they want their avatars to do something when there isn’t much else to do i.e. a virtual version of being unable to stand still? It’s definitely an interesting virtual phenomena – and I wonder if more capabilities in avatar expression would change this.

Hyperrealities and Screens Within Screens

While I really enjoy picking random spots on the map and teleporting to them as a way of navigating and exploring SL, and while the ability to teleport makes this somewhat practical, it does get tedious traveling this way. The majority of sims I pick at random tend to be pretty boring, un-interesting, private (as in, I get ejected out of them) and/or soullessly commodified. So in an attempt to find more interesting places more effectively, I started using the search tool as a way of navigating. I try to keep it random by plugging in random words to see what comes up, and often the places that pop up will seemingly veer away from the search terms I enter, although in the end it is grouped by a non-random algorithm. But it is a good way of weeding out the places I’m definitely uninterested in going to, specifically, places centered around commerce. So far, I’ve been able to find a few interesting places this way. I’ve noticed my exploratory interests in SL are focused a lot on the sims themselves, as opposed to the social parts – in RL exploration, it’s much more of an equal balance. In particular, I like places that are visually interesting and interactive.

One of the places I found by using the search tool was an Alice in Wonderland theme park which I got really excited about (a hyperreality, within a hyperreality, within a hyperreality), only to be let down later. At the entrance of the park, you were instructed to take “the red pill” which allowed you to then access the rabbit hole. After falling through the rabbit hole however, there was little interactivity. Lots of statues based on the literary characters and some decent scenery, but I didn’t really like the visual interpretations of the characters and it was essentially a statue garden more than a amusement park. When I think of an RL theme park, it is by its nature interactive – there wasn’t even a ride at this park, although there were tracks that made me think there might be one somewhere. Eventually I got tired of looking around, and the feeling of being let down made me wonder what it was exactly that I expected from the park. I knew I had wanted it to be more interactive, but did I have expectations based on the story itself? Did I want to act out the adventure (and constructed narrative I so love) of Alice in Wonderland? Not that I didn’t have a reason to think that the park was somewhat lame, but it did make me wonder whether I was unconsciously seeking out a game-like experience in my use of SL; not only that, but what kind of game-like experience? I came to the conclusion that I did expect a game-like experience, not necessarily one like the videogame Alice which is fun but in the end constructed, but I guess something more like a hybrid experience of narrative and open-ended simulation - Hamlet on a malfunctioning Holodeck, to re-phrase Janet Murray.

Interestingly enough, the next place I went to after the park was the “Matrix,” the visual motif based of course on the film. Inside the Matrix, I sat on a talking chair that took me around on a tour matrix-style (I’m thinking movement wise); it told me what kinds of things you could do there, which wasn’t really that much. Basically you could dance (who would’ve thought?), watch TV, buy stuff, get free stuff from the different colored balls floating around, or parachute off the roof. The only thing I ended up doing was parachuting off the roof. Again, a bit of a let down although not quite as much since it wasn’t a theme park so much as a themed building. It was a tiny bit more populated than the theme park (which had been completely deserted), but as with most places I’ve been to in SL – not a lot of people.

Searching under the term “science” brought me to a little theater where you can watch episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, which I thought was pretty interesting, not just because the show is somewhat obscure but also because of the viewing dynamic. The show is about a guy and his robot friends who are forced to watch (mostly) bad sci-fi movies, and the episodes are comprised for the most part of them sitting in front of a screen watching the film and making culturally referential comments; so then, watching MST3k in SL is particularly interesting because you are essentially watching through 3 screens – the computer screen, the SL theater screen, and the theater screen within MST3k. A lot more could be said about this – perhaps later, but if I am making comparisons between this type of viewing and RL viewing, it begs the question of why I would watch MST3k in SL if I could watch it in RL on a much more visible-friendly screen. Regardless, I did watch almost an entire episode.

The Borgesian nature of my experiences in this session of SL (shifting realities, blurred boundaries, and mirrors, but minus the forking paths) was really fun, despite the disappointments. It only made me wish that SL fulfilled more of its potential – why create scarcity and boundaries? Why remove physical constraints, only to employ cultural ones? Ideally, I’d like to fly aimlessly from sim to sim without running into private property issues or commodified wastelands. I already navigate through search terms, directories and maps in RL – why should I have to do that in SL? I spent several hours in SL this time, stopping the session only because I had RL responsibilities to attend to.

First SL Class Meeting

My first class meeting in SL was a bit marred by technical difficulties. Even though the meeting lasted a really long time, I didn’t feel like we covered much ground, literally. Well, I guess I mean virtually. We got to see Kamran’s home (our professor), which was nice, although after walking outside we were immediately bombarded with all the gentrification that Jason (also our professor) had talked about in class. The land around Kamran’s home is being developed into a virtual electronic music venue, with large screens, stages, lights, etc. We watched one of the DJ videos that could be played on one of the screens, which was an interesting experience (viewing things through 2 screens), an experience I was sure I would come across a lot more in the future of my SL travels. The owner of the DJ venue who is trying to buy Kamran’s land actually showed up while we were there, so they spent time talking about that; he even teleported us to another sim that he owned which he suggested he could trade for Kamran’s current property. The situation was really interesting to me – the issues that rise up with the gentrification of virtual property don’t seem all that different from RL, but you really wonder why it shouldn’t be. Again, the whole idea of scarcity in a virtual world. After that, we made a pit-stop somewhere – forget what it was called - with Jesus pictures on the wall and if I remember correctly, some scripture quotes and a fireplace. I didn’t get a chance to ask what this place was – a religious meeting place? a joke? – but I’m not going to lie, I thought it was a little bit creepy, the way that religious things can be creepy. After an unsuccessful attempt to go to a billiards place, we ended the class meeting at the art museum I had been to before; while there, I think we met the owner of the museum whose avatar looked a bit like a fairy godmother, and she told us to vote for it at as a popular place at the voting box near the entrance of the building – something I’m noticing a lot of places are doing.

Museums and Phenomena

I went to two museums in SL for the first time. One was an art museum and the other one was kind of like a science museum, but I gave it the name of “phenomena museum” because it wasn’t easily classifiable. The phenomena museum had some really interesting exhibits, most of which were interactive. One exhibit demonstrated the different sounds that objects make in SL, based on the RL material that they simulate i.e. glass, metal, etc. You interacted with the exhibit by dropping different objects on the ground to hear the sound that they made. As simplistic as the interaction was, it made me think about the way aural cues are incorporated into SL to make simulated objects seem more “real.” Another exhibit demonstrated the “Muller Lyer” illusion, one of many 3D optical illusion exhibits they had – for this exhibit you tried to move an arrow in the exact center, between two other arrowheads on a line, where your depth perception was influenced by which direction the arrowheads on either end of the line were pointing. Some of the exhibits just kind of playfully contemplated on random phenomena – the note card that accompanied one exhibit (a visual representation of a cat that falls and lands on its feet), said this:

“How Far Can You Fall?

 

There have been studies conducted in New York City regarding cats falling out of high-rise buildings. During summer, pet owners often leave their windows open to enjoy the warm weather, and occasionally one of our furry little feline friends takes a dive.

The studies have shown:

> Cats have excellent survival instincts and they don’t deliberately jump from high places that would be dangerous.

> Because cats have little fear of heights and enjoy perching in high places, pet owners assume they can take care of themselves.

> And here’s the kicker: oddly enough, cats are more likely to survive falls from higher stories, and be killed from falls as low as two stories.

“We know the worst falls are from second to sixth stories in height,” say Dr. Louise Murray, director of medicine for the ASPCA’s Bergh Memorial Animal Hospital in Manhattan. Over six stories, the cat has time to right himself. Landing on four feet instead of one point, the impact is spread out. And when they get into the correct falling position, they become more relaxed for landing.”

This strange and humorous exhibit reminded me distinctly of the web writings of William Poundstone, a very postmodern writer who writes a lot about obscure things and random phenomena (utilizing narrative!) that eerily generate humorous, surprising and sometimes profound connections. Another exhibit, located far above the museum building in the sky, was called “The Orbital Experience,” a simulation of the orbits of the planets in our solar system; you chose a planet and after sitting on it, went for a ride along its particular orbit around the sun (how accurate was this simulated trajectory? I don’t know). I really liked this museum a lot, and it made me think about all the latent educational properties of simulations, where you learn by interacting with a thing.

The art museum was nice as well – I enjoyed the Bob Dylan lyrics and e.e. cummings poems that popped out of some exhibits, although found it a little perplexing as to how they correlated with the exhibits. There was an interesting contrast in the types of art displayed in the sculpture garden; while all of it was essentially digital art, some of the art emulated “real” art, as in the referential Marilyn Monroe sculpture, and some of the art was…and I don’t really know how to articulate this well…but computer art, in the sense that they were 3D mathematical representations (algorithmic, geometric, etc.). Inside the building, there was a piano and I virtually played it; not surprisingly, it had little to zero comparison to playing a piano in real life, which is of course characterized by the body/embodiment tension. Inside, the art was mostly pictorial. I noticed that for me, the virtual pictorial art was much less engaging than the virtual, spatial sculptures (one of which, I was actually able to walk around inside of); in contrast, in RL museums I am normally more engaged with the pictorial rather than the sculptural, not counting contemporary installations and interactive art. I noticed the art museum was situated very similarly to an RL museum, with clear-cut path and sculpture garden leading up to the main building. The phenomena museum was less like RL, with a non-linear layout and of course, the exhibit in the sky. It was fun to roam around in the virtual museums, and I landmarked them so that I could return later, making a note to try to find more museums in the future.

Tensions in Interface Design

The principle concern of all three authors in their discussion of computational interface design seems to be the limits of current linear and formal design paradigms on user experience – where interactive design should enhance rather than encode. They each offer perspectives that lie outside of the formalist design box, so to speak, in favor of paradigms that allow for emergent user interaction/experience, flexibility and narrative. Interactive design should foster play, movement, engagement, exploration, experimentation, action, etc.

Literalism and Magic:

In his overview of the Alternate Reality Kit, Smith talks about the tension between interface design features that enhance usability versus functionality (where “functionality” is distinguished from a specific function and understood as a user’s capabilities). He points out the utility of basing interface design on known metaphors i.e. the physical world, in terms of its “learnability” for users. These “literal” features of the interface reduce learning time for the user, thus enhancing the usability of the interface. Smith contrasts literal features with “magical” features which are harder to learn because they break with the metaphor, but provide more user capabilities and thus enhance functionality. One of the magical features of ARK is the “interactor” feature which allows users to play with the physical laws of nature, even as the interface is based on a standard physical metaphor. By removing the constraints of the laws of physics, the gravity interactor allows ARK users to navigate a “physical” world they recognize, but with more options and enhanced capability that are absent within an RL instantiation of the metaphor; this in turn empowers the user in terms of exploration, creativity, etc. ARK can be likened to Second Life, as a simulation based on a physical metaphor but with magical features that empower users to “build their own magic spells” and explore the “magic latent in computers” (Smith 67); an emphasis or consideration of the “magical” over the “literal” is parallel to Hallnas and Redstrom’s focus on “presence,” where “usability becomes subordinated to expressiveness” (118). Smith’s observations of human subject interaction with ARK elucidate the constraints of metaphor, particularly interfaces that operate on a single metaphor, even as its utility becomes apparent through evidence of abstraction as an integral component of human learning.

Use and Presence:

Hallnas and Redstrom propose a change in the design focus of computer systems from “efficient use to design for meaningful presence” (108), that is, designing not for the computational device’s specific use but for its everyday presence in the user’s “lifeworld.” They argue that while human-computer interaction is currently dominated by “functional descriptions…based on general notions of use” (107), as new media technologies become increasingly ubiquitous and transparent in users’ everyday lives, the context of human-computer interaction changes; so then, a design focus in a device’s “expression” (meaning) becomes more useful than a focus in its use, where design is grounded in aesthetics (versus prescribed function).

As human-computer interaction becomes more transparent, users increasingly understand information technologies through existential definitions (based on its role and context in the user’s life) and less through literal, functional definitions. Understanding a thing by its existential definition, is essentially understanding it through a narrative and contextual lens, in which it is imbued with meaning; existential definitions are dependent upon the intersection/interaction of temporal, spatial, cultural contexts, and thus are emergent “expression-identities” as opposed to static ones. An example of a cell phone’s emergent expression-identity in a hypothetical parent’s lifeworld: portable communication device –> teenager monitor device/worry-reducer device; here an understanding of a cell phone’s functional capacity is superseded by its presence in the parent’s life. So then design considerations must include the literal function of a cell phone, as well as its performative functions which are determined through its many “presences”. H and R reference Bormann’s notion of “focal things” which are “things that ask for attention and involvement; they desire a practice that cannot be characterized by consumption but by engagement’” (114), and must be understood in practice, through the dynamics of that engagement.

I was reminded of Michel DeCertau’s tension of space and place (in the context of narrative stories) which layers H and R’s tension of use and presence (in the context of design), particularly their conceptualization of presence. H and R assert that “if we want to understand what it means for an artifact to be part of someone’s everyday life – and eventually design for this – we have to consider its presence beyond just being physically there” (108). In stories, place indicates the “being-there of something,” while space is determined “through operations…the actions of historical subjects” (The Practice of Everyday Life 118). DeCertau differentiates between “place” and “space,” where place is understood through its distinct and static position and location, and space is “composed of intersections of mobile elements” (117), that is, it is situated by its presence and expressions (he references Merleau-Ponty’s contention that “space is existential” and “existence is spatial”). A street is a place as a location on a map, and a space as it is oriented by the action of people walking on it. The expressions, spaces, focal things are defined by human interaction.

Process and Improvisation:

Dourish’s “Accounting for System Behavior” almost struck me as a treatise for autoethnography, which could be equated with his “causally-connected self-representations,” what he calls “accounts.” His accounts model of system architecture addresses “the failures in the notion of ‘abstraction’ in software engineering” as well as “thinking of computational representations as resources for action.” Where autoethnography – reflective self-representations - provides a stage for action (“they use narrative as a source of empowerment and a form of resistance to counter the domination and authority of canonical discourses” – Ellis and Bochner 749), so the “story that a system tells about itself” empowers the computational user “not only to describe behavior, but also to control it.” In his data transfer example, the user would have a framework from which to understand the system’s behavior in relation to the specific circumstance (partial file transmission) and thus be able to improvise a solution or take an informed course of action, without being trapped behind an “abstraction barrier.”

Like personal narratives, accounts are partial and specific, thus the issue of “accuracy” becomes one of accountability instead: “essentially a form of constructed consistency…based in the direct relationship between action and representation…and which distinguishes accounts from simply simulations.” The autoethnography and the account allow for modification of the system, which is important if we are to avoid the domination of static ideological paradigms; “changes in the system are reflected in changes in the representation, and vice versa.” Specificity versus universality (subjective versus positivist truth) allows for questioning and open exploration where we are not trapped by the totalizing effect of grand narratives. A phenemonological approach to the disciplines of design and study can better explore the emergent and dynamic landscape of cultural development in the posthuman era because it is emergent and dynamic itself. The common thread between all these models of design is their inter-active nature, they empower rather than dominate the human subject; positivist truth collapsed with the crisis of representation and one negative effect was the immobilization of human agency. These active models restore it by putting our new understandings of human subjectivity to use. What are the implications of prescriptive versus performative approaches to interface design? What are the ethical considerations for designers who wield the power of influencing the way human agents interact with systems?