Dense and beautiful story from George Dyson about emergent, unprogrammed models of computing, digging back into ancient computing history and forward to the rise of Google’s international data centers
There’s understandable outcry about revelations that reporters covering the Olympics in Beijing will be using censored internet connections which block access to sites on sensitive topics, like human rights and Falun Gong. In classic fashion, a Beijing Olypics spokesman, Sun Weide, offered statements that verge on self-parody: “I would remind you that Falun Gong is an evil fake religion which has been banned by the Chinese government… I said we would provide sufficient, convenient internet access for foreign journalists to report on the Olympics…”
* 512/512 it costs 7712.5 RMB (1,131.20 USD);
* 1M/512 it costs 9156.25 (1,342.95 USD);
* 2M/512 it costs a whopping 11,700 RMB (1,716.05 USD).
Those costs are for a single month’s worth of access. I guess if you’re planning on uploading videos from the games, you’re making a pretty serious investment in your filtered bandwidth. As Lih points out, not a big deal for the NBCs of the world, but tough for smaller entities.
I’m sitting in a conference room at Microsoft right now and remembering just how much filtered internet sucks. I realized that most filesharing ports were blocked when I tried to download footage from the last day of the Nagoya basho – no go, without tunneling through ssh or via Tor… not something I really wanted to do. This morning, as we tried to set up a backchannel via IRC, we discovered those ports were blocked, so folks are now IRC’ing via Mibbit.
The temptation in these cases, I think, is to find creative ways to break the filtering and thumb your nose at the authorities. At the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia – ludicriously held in a nation that extensively censors the Internet – a favorite game was to use proxies to evade censorship, then photograph the evasion with a WSIS backdrop visible. The photo above is of me loading the (censored) website of Citizen Summit, held by a Tunisian human rights organization in opposition to the summit with the map of the WSIS booths in the background. (I don’t think there’s any utility at all to this sort of nose-thumbing, but it does feel really good when you’re frustrated by a situaltion.)
For a little more than a year now, I’ve been carrying in my wallet a $500 Zimbabwean bearer cheque, an odd form of currency designed to expire after a few months, a recognition of the overwhelming inflation in that country. The $500 bill, worth roughly one US dollar when I bought it, was the $500,000 before Gideon Gono, the central bank governor, knocked three zeros off the bill in a campaign he called “From Zero to Hero”. That bill is now expired, but it’s a nice complement to the bill a friend just bought me from Zimbabwe – a $50,000,000,000 Agro Check. That’s fifty billion… a mere hundred thousand times the face value of my 21-month old bill. Of course, that Agro Check is now worth less than a US dollar… and it will be worth less by the time I post this note.
It’s a good conversation starter – I’ve been trying to use it for paying for drinks at bars – but it’s not very much fun if this is the bill you actually need to use to pay your debts. Doing math with sums that rapidly hit the quadrillions if you’re trying to buy something like a laptop is pretty surreal. But you’re unlikely to be able to buy that laptop with cash – there’s a restriction in the Zimbabwean banking system that prevents people from taking more than $100 billion out from a bank each day. This leads to some difficult catch-22 situations – it can cost more to go to and from the bank than you can withdraw in a single transaction. Sibangani Sibanda in the Zimbabwe Times reflects that it’s now impossible to get money in Zimbabwe without first borrowing money from friends… and that there’s less money and less friends in Zimbabwe these days.
Fortunately, Gideon Gono is here to rescue us again. Not only will the government introduce a new $100 billion bill – not enough money to buy a loaf of bread, unfortunately – but they will also lop some more zeros off the bills, possibly six zeroes. Gono is confident, saying, “This time, we will make sure that those zeros that would come knocking on the governor’s window will not return. They are going for good.”
Good luck with that, Mr. Governor. Inflation is now somewhere above 2.2 million percent, suggesting that those zeros will be back in no time. In the meantime, people are doing what they do in situations where the currency collapses – they use a hard(er) currency in response – US dollars, UK pounds and South African rand. That’s illegal, but since it’s basically impossible to use the Zim currency, it becomes pretty essential.
There’s a certain dark humor to a situation like this – at a certain point, it likely costs more to print these bills – which still feature security threads and watermarking – than they’re worth. This situation is called “negative seigniorage” in the currency world – it’s a topic of discussion in the US, where it might now make sense to eliminate both the penny and the nickel, but it likely will be a major discussion in Zimbabwe, now that the country’s currency provider is no longer willing to sell paper to the country to print more notes.
Update – Gono plans to lop 10 zeros off the currency, turning $10 billion into $1 new, new Zim dollars. (Keep in mind that a previous revaluation already removed three zeros, so we’re talking about a currency where $10 trillion from two years ago will now equal $1. Estimates suggest up to 9 million percent inflation.)
One of the best parts of this gathering at Microsoft is not the cool new toys coming from Microsoft research, but the ideas presented by nine design schools who’ve been invited to the event. In a two-hour session this afternoon, the teams present their work for critique by a group of MS and other design experts.
Ennea, a project from students at the Eindhoven University of Technology is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a long time, developed during a six week design class. The students focused on an interesting problem – the problems incoming Dutch high-school students have in building socialization skills. The Dutch education system doesn’t have middle schools, so students go directly from an elementary school to high school, a transition that can be difficult and stressful. Schools assign “tutors” to groups of pupils, and they meet for an hour a week to work on socialization skills. The designers talked with tutors and realized they had very little information about how their students were doing, and designed a fascinating social tool that works as a very clever form of surveillance and behavior tracking.
The designers produced a set of small, cute, wireless-aware objects that students carried with them for a few weeks. The objects measured interactions between children, timing the interactions each child had, and whether they were with individuals or groups. This information allows the designers to describe each child’s interactions in a two-dimensional matrix based on interaction diversity and intensity. (Meet a lot of people and you’re more diverse. Spend a long time with a person, and it’s more intense.)
Rather than scoring the children on good or bad types of interaction, the device characterizes a user as one of nine animals: Lions are very diverse and very intense in their interactions. Their opposites are Polar Bears, who interact infrequently and briefly. Users can change roles over time – the device vibrates when your state changes, but you can only see what role you’ve taken on by “mating” your device with another person’s device, giving the opportunity for conversation and interaction. For “complementary” roles, the animal icons will glow gold.
While the students only see what animal currently represents them, the tutors get rich data on student interactions and can see how individual students are doing. Both have evidently found it useful in prototype – I can imagine scenarios in which tutor “surveillance” becomes worrisome, especially if certain behavioral patterns lead to interventions from the tutors. But it’s a lovely way to generate useful feedback data from wireless social interaction, and it’s possible that this will become used within Dutch schools. (The devices are quite clever from an engineering point, including an Arduino mini controller and an XBee wireless module – those aren’t hugely expensive devices, and it’s concievable that these devices could be mass produced.)
Undergrad students at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing has build a truly beautiful system called “Tai Chi Master“, designed to teach the martial art and meditation to a new generation of Chinese people. The students observe that the abstract ideas of Yi, Li and Chi are extremely difficult for masters to help students visualize. And they’ve noticed that office workers are often not able to practice in public parks, as a previous generation did.
Tai Chi Master is designed as a system to allow individuals to practice Tai Chi in their apartments with feedback from Tai Chi masters. The system is gestural and opens when the student makes a Tai Chi gesture, the motion of opening a fan. It’s designed to be an immersive environment and films the activity of the user, while providing a wide-screen demonstration of the motions as performed by a master, entered into the system by motion capture. What’s especially striking are the gorgeous visuals the system uses – the team dropped ink into water to create smoke-like clouds that emenate from the master’s hands and feet as he creates movements. It’s a lovely way to visualize the sorts of energy channeled within the Tai Chi movements.
Two projects from US universities focus on the thorny problem of personal finance. A team at Carnegie Mellon wants to introduce a credit card that monitors and stores your spending via a very pretty interface. Called current.c, the system lets users make budgets that are available visually on the card, showing how much one has spent towards each month budget, and lets them monitor their spending, assigning funds from one budget to another in the case of an impulse purchase. The card continuously monitors progress towards larger spending goals. It’s hard to imagine credit card companies issuing one, but it’s easier to image an iPhone ap that spoke to a web service that uses credit card information. The system doesn’t nag or mother – it just shows the current situation in a powerful visual way.
Students at the University of Washington have tried a different model. They’re building a cellphone plan for teenagers called Emu. The system has a weekly limit of minutes. Those minutes can be saved week to week, and they earn interest if saved. If a user gets good at saving minutes, they end up with excess minutes they can spend on wallpaper or ring tones. If they run out of minutes, they move into restricted modes, where the phone might only be able to call parents or make emergency calls. Parents don’t have to play the bad cop – the phone attempts to persuade the users to behave differently and to learn about money – minutes – management on their own. If they can persuade a phone company to offer the plan, they’d like to get increasingly sophisticated, including the ability to make loans of minutes or to invest them in some sort of a stock exchange. I love the recognition that cell minutes have become money (something true throughout the developing world) and wonder whether this would actually provide helpful feedback to kids who are just learning how to manage money.
Lots of beautiful and interesting ideas here. It’s always encouraging when the projects from the design students are more impressive than those from the established computer scientists…
In the spirit of attending OPCs – “other people’s conferences”, conferences where you’re invited, but not part of the demographic/professional group the conference is aimed at – I’m now at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. I’m not a computer scientist, not university teaching faculty, and I’m not doing any research sponsored by Microsoft… all of which turns out to be okay, as it’s a pretty interesting gathering looking at current research topics in computer science, with a strong emphasis on the study of social networks… something that interest me, even if I’m not doing a ton of active work on the topic.
This emphasis on social network studies helps explain why I’m currently sitting in a packed conference room, learning about an extension to Excel. Even at Microsoft conferences, Excel extensions don’t usually get this type of attention. But the extension, .NetMap, has been developed by Marc A. Smith, a pioneering researcher on social networks who’s done important work on analyzing relationships in Usenet groups in his time at Microsoft Research.
Much of Marc’s recent work has looked at behavioral patterns in technical support newsgroups in Usenet. As it turns out, these groups are still hugely important for people looking for technical support (even in the days of pervasive spam) and Microsoft is interested in cultivating the utility of these networks. Rather than analyzing the content of these newsgroups (hard to do, as they’re huge), Smith and his team looked at structures. They did a great deal of network mapping, graphing the posts and responses, and seeing the structures that emerge. At least three types have emerged:
- Answer people – these people almost never post new threads, but answer the queries of a large number of unconnected people. In network terms, they’ve got high out-degree and low in-degree. These folks are utterly essential in the functioning of technical newsgroups, as they’re the folks that newbies end up getting support from
- Reply magnets – some people have a gift (or a technique) for posting in a way that gets responses. Reply magnets are the opposite of answer people – they post infrequently and everyone answers. Smith sees roughly 0.5% of these people in newsgroups, but their posts get 30% of the responses from roughly 30% of all users. Basically, these folks are specialists in setting the agenda, which has interesting implications for political discussions in newsgroups, as these folks are capable of nominating agenda topics with much more success that the average user.
- Discussion people both post and answer a lot, and have long, sustained connections with lots of people. They’re the classic discussion group user, but they’re less common that we tend to assume.
If we can ennumerate these discussion types, we can characterize different ecosystems in terms of what users live in what ecosystems. It’s possible that these roles change over time – so far, Marc observes that most people seem to stay in their roles, but attenuate over time, becoming less active. It would be very interesting to see whether there are networks where people become more interactive over time. (Facebook, for instance.)
Smith observes that as social media becomes the dominant media online, we’re moving from the anonymous to the “named” internet – content created generally has an identity, real or psuedonymous, attached to it. As such, we’re getting incredible sets of data that social scientists can study, because “all social media leaves ties”, and “our relationships are increasingly self documenting.”
Here’s the thing – it’s increasingly easy to find this data, but hard to map it in meaningful ways. Smith observes that there are a couple of good Java toolkits for social network mapping but, oddly, no feature in Excel. So he and his group have built one. Using their tool – .NetMap, which can be downloaded at Codeplex, Microsoft’s Source Forge-like repository for open source projects, plugs into Excel and lets you enter a list of relationships, and get output as a network map. The tool is integrated with Windows to provide one of the coolest demonstration feature – the tool will index your mail and graph your personal social network based on your mail interactions.
One thing that becomes very clear is that you want to filter these maps – with some pretty simple excel manipulations, it’s possible to filter a map to the strongest ties and to visualize the vertices in different ways. As Marc gives his talk, one of his collaborators crunches a set of data from Digg and is able to demonstrate that there aren’t small, competing groups within Digg who upvote on only certain topics – what there is instead is a core of highly active users who tend to upvote across different topics.
I’m looking forward to using the tool, but a bit disappointed that it currently works only on Windows – I suspect a lot of social scientists are using alternative platforms, and hope that as the project moves out of the research space and into the mainstream, it will be more widely supported.
I’ve spent three days hanging out at the Creative Capital retreat at Williams College. Creative Capital is an arts development organization that supports artists both fiscally and via extensive coaching – these retreats give the artists sponsored a chance to show their work, and a couple of days where artists and consultants can work closely together. It’s intended as a sort of “venture capital” model, where succesful artists are expected to pay back the foundation. That’s not likely for many of the artists supported, but a small number have returned some or all the money invested by Creative Capital.
The most striking piece of work I saw at the Creative Capital retreat yesterday wasn’t made by any of the artists in the room. It was designed, built and decorated by prisoners at the Graterford, PA correctional facility, who were working with Williamstown-based artist Peggy Diggs. Diggs became fascinated with the idea that global warming could lead to major environmental catastrophe in the US, and that Americans could find themselves living as refugees, keeping with them a small number of posessions. What sort of architecture and technologies would we need in this mobile, difficult life?
She put the design challenge to a group of colleagues, inmates at the Pennsylvania State correctional institute in Graterford. This isn’t an entirely new idea – Temporary Services, a Chicago-based arts collective has done some excellent collaborative work with “Angelo”, an inmate who shared with the artists the wealth of technical creativity developed and shared behind bars. Diggs went a step further, putting a specific design challenge to inmates, and got a wealth of interesting ideas back. The strongest of the ideas was the “Greater Fit”, an elegant storage unit that turns into a desk (the name is a pun on Graterford, the name of the facility.) Diggs explains that she was only able to bring certain materials into the prisons – fabric, masking tape, cardboard and paint. Her collaborators were able to manufacture tools capable of working the cardboard into quite precise shapes, and were able to collaborate with some of Philadelphia’s finest graffiti artists on decorating the pieces.
The pieces can’t be sold, and most are being donated to a retirement home in Philadelphia, where some inmates have friends and family members. Diggs is interested in finding ways that the design – available as a downloadable PDF – can be shared and disseminated. Seems like a logical technology to be adopted by projects like Architecture for Humanity, or Strong Angel 3.
Amelia Kirby and Appalshop, an artists and social change collective in eastern Kentucky, are looking for a different sort of dialog with people imprisoned in Appalacia. Kirby has produced a weekly radio show – Holler to the Hood – which features hiphop, community affairs discussions and shout outs from prisoner’s families to inmates inside the prisons. Her work is now morphing into a larger project, A Thousand Kites, which is a multimedia exploration of the US prison system, examining not just life inside, but the relationships between prisons and the communities they’re housed in.
Kirby’s was one of several projects I saw at Creative Capital which I could have just as easily imagined seeing at a conference on the future of journalism or on online community activism, the sorts of conferences I usually attend. (This weekend has gotten me thinking a lot about OPC, “other people’s conferences”, events where you’ve got the chance to attend and participate, but you’re not part of the demographic/psychographic/professional group the conference is being held for. They’re really fun, really provocative, but bad for your ego – no one knows who you are or what you’re doing there. I suspect I should go to more of them.) Several of the documentaries I saw would work as well as activism or journalistic projects, I suspect, including Lynn Hershman Leeson’s documentary on feminism and art, “(H)ERrata: Women, Art and Revolution“, a project she’s been involved with for forty years. The film is both a thorough overview of the emergence of women’s response to systemic exclusion to the “serious” art world, and an invitation for collaboration, including a wiki where others can add to the history of the emergence of feminist art.
Eve Sussman, still from “White on White”, film still in progress.
And then there are the pieces that remind you that this is very much an arts gathering, and that some of this work won’t come to life without systems and mechanisms that support creativity and innovation. Eve Sussman is writing and filming a noir mystery, set in contemporary Kazakstan. Called “White on White“, it’s the story of a nation moving from communism to capitalism, and the wildcatters looking for oil and water who are transforming the country. It could easily be a didactic documentary… but it’s not. It’s a lovely, lyrical art film and mystery story and I cannot wait to see it.
Cauleen Smith’s work couldn’t be much further from Sussman’s, but I’m waiting anxiously for her film as well. She’s fascinated by Nollywood, the huge, profitable and chaotic film industry in Lagos, Nigeria, and decided the best way to learn about the field was to make a Nollywood film. (I guess Franco Sacchi’s documentary, This is Nollywood, makes it a little harder to make an art film about Nollywood.) Visiting Lagos, Smith found that her contacts were more interested in holding her for ransom than letting her make a film. But they were generous with their critiques of her ideas for films, rejecting most of them, but finally embracing the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s psychodrama, Rebecca, which one of her collaborators/captors calls “a very African story.” I have high hopes that she’ll both remake Rebecca in Nigeria and release a film about her own obsessions, explorations and encounters with Nollywood – I’d pay to see both.
Many thanks to Creative Capital for letting me sit in on this gathering and giving me much to think about. And now, for something completely different: Microsoft Research Faculty Summit in Seattle – I’m heading there tonight. Wish me luck with the cultural whiplash.
Put eighty artists in a room and you’re going to get some overlapping ideas. One of the ideas to emerge in the last few presentations at the Creative Capital summer retreat is the power of the superhero.
Kenseth Armstead has multimedia ambitions for his superhero, Spook ™. Spook is James Armistead Lafayette, a double agent spy and slave, who provided the key intelligence used to force the surrender of Lord Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown. Armstead discovered the revolutionary figure when researching his own name, and has decided to reanimate his memory with the goal of “adding a name to the list of founders.” Turning Armistead into a Hollwood hero, Spook, is a truple entendre, playing off images of ghosts, spies, and derogatory terms for African Americans. While Armstead’s tongue is firmly in cheek – I think? – he’s trying to launch a feature film and a videogame, as well as a website, Spook1781.com.
The artists behind “Otabenga Jones and Associates“, a Houston-based collaborative of four artists and educators who work under the tutelage of the (fictional) Otabenga Jones (named for Ota Benga, a Congolese pygmy who was displayed in the Bronx Zoo in 1906 next to an Orangutan.) Their work hearkens back to Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s, invoking historical clashes like the Watts riots (represented by an upended police car in a gallery, accompanied by music) and arguments over ideology (a two-man protest outside an exhibit of African art, including protest signs that read “My blackness is bigger than your white box.” An upcoming piece will create The Uhuru Squad, a set of action figures designed “to get the truth to Black youth.” What does a Harriet Tubman action figure look like? And do plastic superheroes advance an educational agenda or make fun of older ideas of Black nationalism? Both?
Brad Lichtenstein believes that DJ Spooky is the hero who can lead us to the promised land of the Common. Recognizing that yet another speech about the importance of the creative commons will likely fall on deaf ears, Lichtenstein, legendary guitarist Vernon Reid and Spooky are collaborating on a remixable movie that features DJ Spooky on a hero’s quest: What We Got. Ready to play a show, Spooky discovers that his samples have disappeared due to overagressive copyright enforcement, and he’s forced to search for the commons. The project will be released with a software widget, the WeJay, that allows viewers to scratch and remix the footage, and which will allow for visualizations of the social networks that allow people to track how creativity moves through groups of people.
If there’s an anti-hero at a gathering of American artists, it’s probably President George W. Bush. He’s the central character in Chicago’s Theater Oobleck’s “The Strangerer“, a collision of “the untheatrical theatricality of a presidential debate” and the President’s unexpected interest in the works of Camus. The setting is the 2004 first Presidential debate, and Bush is Meursault, determined both to kill the moderator, Jim Lehrer, and to have the audience – the nation – applaud the murder. It’s designed to ask two questions, “Why does our president want to murder innocent people? And what will it take to have the whole nation applaud?” It’s evidently a popular idea – it’s the most successful piece Oobleck has ever produced and is currently opening off-Broadway in New York City.
I wrote a bit last year about the idea of “incrementalinfrastructure“. Basically, the idea is that there might be a future for infrastructure projects in Africa that build small pieces of infrastructure and either join them together, or simply make a profit serving a local community. One of the major vectors proposed was working with mobile phone companies to build power infrastructure, an idea stolen shamelessly from the brilliant Russell Southwood.
Russell gets credit for tipping me off to today’s incrementalism link: an announcement by Indian telecoms vendor VNL that they’ve developed a solar-powered, battery back up low power GSM tower. These towers won’t provide enough excess power that they can sell energy to local villages – which is what Russell and I had proposed companies might start doing with diesel generators, but they’ll certainly be more environmentally friendly than diesel generators, and they point to both the increasing practicality of photovoltaic generation in sub-Saharan Africa, and the value of designing products specifically for difficult infrastructure markets.
There’s a lot of work being shown at the Creative Capital workshop at Williams College that’s political and provocative, but not much that’s laugh-out-loud funny. Thank god for Golan Levin.
Levin is a Pittsburgh-based artist and a professor at Carnegie Mellon. He’s interested in the phenomenon of interactivity, and currently interested investigating vision tracking as a way of producing artwork that looks back at you. There’s been great work done that’s sensitive to the position of the viewer – the beautiful video installations of my friend Camille Utterback, the lovely, meditative “healing pools” that Brian Knep showed today. Levin’s work is built around an even more complex technical hack – it tracks your eye movement to figure out where you’re looking and responds to that movement. “Reface” overlays different pieces of viewers faces onto each other, creating a mashup of the viewers in a gallery, an ongoing “exquisite corpse” of facial gesture. “Opto-Isolator” takes vision tracking to its simplest form – it’s a robotic eyeball against a black background that follows a viewer around the gallery, responding to your eye movements and blinking. (It’s very odd, and a little disturbing.)
And then there’s Double-Taker. Mounted on the roof of a campus building, it’s an eight-foot long robot arm with a one-foot googly eye on top. Based on vision tracking software, it follows viewers around a space. It “communicates its own sense of surprise at having visitors,” in an extremely life-like fashion. It’s an amazing technical hack – Levin makes it clear that eye tracking is really hard to do – but has a wonderful sense of humor as well, and grabs the attention of everyone in the room here.
Sutton Beres Culler, a trio of Seattle artists, aren’t short on humor either. Their projects tend to intrude into everyday urban life… occasionally in ways that get them into trouble.
Above is a piece called The Island. It was twenty-feet in diameter, featured a palm tree and was inhabited by the three artists wearing tattered suits. The plan was for the island to float near the 520 bridge – that proved a major distraction and traffic problem… until the wind picked up, the anchor cable broke, and the artists had to be rescued. Now that’s an art piece.
These guys have also locked themselves in a 32 foot square crate within a gallery space – when the crate was finally opened, Sutton Beres Culler had built a full-sized and functional Chinese restaurant in the gallery, called Three Dragon Restaurant. Their “trailer park” is a small city park, complete with bench, grass and water feature, but towed behind a car on a small trailer.
Their latest work is something of a hybrid of all these ideas – Mini Mart City Park is a project designed to turn a defunct convenience store into a city park. They’ve had a tough time finding the right space – ultimately, they’ve settled on a former gas station in the Georgetown neighborhood, a business that opened as “TW Pumps” in 1924. Now more or less an abandoned lot, they plan to turn both interior and exterior into a greenspace, repurposing refrigerated cases into planters. The project is a “recontextualizing”, and is designed as a possible “eco-arts franchise”, replicable in other disused spaces. (Amusingly, because the building isn’t big enough to contain their imagination, they’re having to build a mini-mart extension to turn into a repurposed mini-mart. I think this may constitute cheating, but all’s fair in love and art.)
Matthew Moore is a man who understands the transformation of landscapes. A fourth-generation farmer, he’s keenly aware that he’ll be the last farmer in his family, as the city of Phoenix slowly swallows farmland, turning it into suburban homes and big box stores.
In 2003, Moore rented a barley field and hoed out the floorplan for a house, producing the piece above: “Rotations: Single Family Residence“. A later piece portrays a 250 house subdivision in sorghum and wheat, visible as a nest of cul-de-sacs from the air.
Recognizing that his current farm isn’t economically viable in the face of encroaching development, Moore has become a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farmer, producing a small crop of vegetables delivered to local families. This is a radical change from his previous practice – “I harvest 100,000 pounds of carrots, but I’ve never seen them in a grocery store.” To address this disconnection – and perhaps as a commentary on the ways CSAs address it – he’s building a new piece that places audio and video in grocery stores, talking about the work and time that goes into producing agricultural crops. He’s planning a web component that would allow you to “download your grocery list to your ipod” and listen to a narrative of the food you’re purchasing. It’s easy to imagine this being done in a cheesy fashion, but not by Moore, who’s got a lovely, simple vision executed on a very grand scale.
There’s a lot of very, very good art being shown here – far too much, as each artists gets to speak for exactly seven minutes and there’s no time for questions. On the other hand, I’m supposed to have 20 minute conferences with seven artists tomorrow and offer something helpful and insightful, which could be a real stretch as I know nothing about art or the economics that surround it. But that’s tomorrow’s problem. Today’s is digesting 37 presentations given in a single day, stretching from 9am to 10:30pm (not continuously, thank god.)
In other words, it’s beyond me to summarize everyone who’s speaking. I’ll give you quick notes on people and pieces that caught my eye:
- Daniel Sousa’s work may be the most visually striking thing I’ve seen today – surreal, painterly, ethereal images combined into striking animations. His film Minatour focuses on the childlike rage of the mythical figure. Fable is a tale of a man and a woman who can’t be together, except when they’re animals, in which case they’re mortal enemies – an image of human footsteps coming from a pool of stag’s blood is one of the lasting impressions of the day. His new film, Kaspar Hauser, explores the story of a child locked in a basement without human contact through his childhood through the lens of the artist’s own childhood and imaginary worlds.
- Eddo Stern is an artist who’s played way, way too much World of Warcraft and other massively multiplayer online games. That’s the only explanation I can come up with for a piece that involves building – in the real world – a giant portal like the ones that appear within the game world. His new project, Dark Game, works through some familiar territory – it’s a game designed to allow the blind, deaf and sighted to play together, by denying different senses at different times. For a sighted player, most of the interaction comes via voice updates and tactile stimulation, through a sinister-looking headpiece. The narration, delivered by a preternaturally calm female voice includes passages like, “”You’re facing Southeast. Your blood is spilling.” Sounds like a good time to me.
- Luke Savisky projects film and video onto things – sides of buildings, passing freight trains, clouds of vapor suspended in a tree, the walls of venues where the minimalist band Stars of the Lid plays. His latest project involves taking video of eyes, watching the city of Austin, and projecting the image of that eye on a water tower. The effect – a human eye watching over the city in a beautiful and disturbing way.
- Susie Brandt and Kristin Woods make rope, and they’d like you to make some too. Their project, the Rag and Bone project, invites people to donate old fabrics and participate in a “ropewalk”, the traditional method of making rope by twisting and plying fibers. It’s a particularly beautiful form of recycling, a meditation on disposability and consumerism, and a useful reminder about the history of one of humanity’s oldest and most important technologies.
- Julie Wyman’s documentary, “Strong!”, may be the feelgood seven minutes of today. The documentary focuses on Cheryl Hayworth, an extraordinary US weightlifter, a woman who began breaking international records at 15 years old. As Hayworth prepares for the 2008 olympics, where she’s likely to do very well, Wyman looks at other aspects of her life, wrestling with the challenge of being both the world’s strongest woman, and a young woman who weighs over 300 pounds. It looks like a truly fascinating documentary, one I’m looking forward to seeing.
I spent yesterday in a conversation at the Berkman Center about possible models to support “difficult” journalism – important news reporting that’s hard to support fiscally. Today, I’m at an event at Williams College, my alma mater, at a meeting of Creative Capital, a summer retreat for over 200 artists, consultants and advisors.
Creative Capital is investigating alternative models to support innovation in the arts. Supported by the Warhol Foundation and other arts funders, CC gives money to artists in a very interesting way. They give modest grants to artists throughout their projects, in the early phases of planning, to support a premiere or opening, and to promote the work. At the same time, CC gives lots of professional support and training, helping artists develop technical, business and professional skills neccesary to succeed. For artists who are succesful, there’s an expectation that CC’s investment will be treated as a loan and paid pack.
My friend Lewis Hyde is a board member of the organization and he told me, “After a day of presentations, you’re going to have a much more complicated definition of what constitues ‘art’.” That seems likely, just given the sheer volume of projects we’re seeing – something like six hours of presentations today, with a different grantee every seven minutes. Mel Chin, one of the first artists funded by Creative Capital, seems like an excellent person to make this point. He rapidly presents three projects, the most striking of which is Fundred.org, a project that encourages children to draw currency, hoping to collect $300 million in child-designed money, which he hopes to trade to Congress, for real money spent on lead abatement. Talking very briefly about a dramatic cartoon about 9/11 and a widget designed to help people track their carbon impact on their iPhones, it becomes pretty clear that Chin’s ideas and projects span a wide range of interests. Thanking CC for their support, he declares, “I in turn will support any wild-ass thing you come up with.”
A lot of these wild-ass things are connected to war, terrorism, 9/11 and surveillance. Hasan Elahi, a Bangladeshi-American artist, monitors and publishes online enormous amounts of data on himself and his movements, down to the food he eats and the toilets he uses. It’s a response to a six-month ordeal he experienced when detained at DTW under suspicion – completely spurious – that he was involved with terrorist activities. Elahi now tries to overwhelm the FBI with data about his life, calling attention to the absurdity of perpetual surveillance.
Cat Mazza’s project, Stitch for Senate, offers a more participatory response to the endless war on terror. She hearkens back to Eleanor Roosevelt’s wartime effort, “knit your bit”, which encouraged ordinary citizens – not just women and children, but off-duty firefighters – to knit gloves and helmet liners for American soliders. She’s now recruiting knitters to produce helmet liners for US senators and displaying them on busts organized in the seating pattern of the senate. “I just dream of seeing Hillary Clinton wearing one of these.” They’re tangible manifestations of an earlier idea of war, one that seems archaic and surprising when looking at modern war.
Naeem Mohaiemen, a Bangladeshi audience who works both in New York and Dhaka, is interested in the post-9/11 security environment, but approaches the issues less directly. His new film and installation examines failed revolutionary movements, looking in particular at a Maoist guerrila movement in Bangladesh between 1972 and 1975. The installation includes clothing, diaries, weapons and other items from the time, as well as video footage from propoganda films, overlaid with audio of Maoist “training tapes”. One of the messages is that these movements have unintended consequences, strengthening the right-wing, supporting efforts of the government to surveil and monitor populations. Mohaiemen wonders about moments in history when these utopian movements seemed possible, not doomed.
There’s a wealth of pieces focused either on Iraq or Katrina – Iraqi artifacts reproduced as Iroquois beadwork, films about Guantanamo and New Orleans. There’s another large set focused on political issues that artists feel a deep, personal connection to – an audio installation about civil conflict in Cyrus, Anita Chang’s Tongues of Heaven, a documentary about disappearing languages in Taiwan. At a certain point, I found myself wondering about the blurring line between art and journalism. It’s not hard to imagine some of these pieces succeeding as magazine articles or videos on Frontline, rather than in galleries or art festivals. I can’t tell if this is good news for journalism or for art.
Two of the pieces that struck me were ones where it was harder to understand the historical or personal narrative that led the artist to make a piece. Kianga Ford’s work focuses on walking. “The Story of this Place” is a set of walking tours of small corners of Baltimore, less traditional histories than invitations to contemplate people, places and the musical score. Her new project is called Walking Home, and involves her… well, walking home. She plans to walk from LA to central Florida, taking video of the entire trip and inviting veejays to remix the footage. Why? It’s about migration, segregation, exile, and, simply, about walking home.
The piece connected, for me, with Braden King’s film HERE, a “road movie” about an American satellite mapping engineer, who’s travelling in Armenia, checking the accuracy of satellite images via a process called “ground-truthing”. The film is a romance, not just between two characters who meet, but betwen the filmmaker and the landscape. I liked wht I saw not just because I love the Armenian landscape, but because it wasn’t obvious to me why King chose to tell this story.
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