On October 31st I attended the first ASCA matinee with speaker Jussi Parikka from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. His talk, titled “Dead Media/Live Nature: Media Ecologies of Animal Intensities,” focused on the transpositions of media and nature through recent art projects such as Harwood, Wright and Yokokoji’s Eco Media (Cross Talk) and Garnet Hertz’s Dead Media lab.

In preparation of his talk we were sent three readings:

1. Matthew Fuller (2007), “Art for Animals.“
2. Jonathan Sterne, “Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media,” in Charles Acland, Residual Media.¹
3. Garnet Hertz (2009), Dead Media Project

On the Future of New Media

Sterne describes how the “new” in new media consists of two types of newnewss for scholars:

In short, there are really two models of “newness” to which scholars of media change need to attend: (1) the “newness” of a medium with respect to other media, and (2) the so-called state of the art in design and function within a given medium.  Scholars, journalists and many others who write about computers have tended to collapse the second sense of newness into the first. (p. 18) [...] In a weird, recursive way, new media are “new” primarily with reference to themselves. (p. 19)

What constitutes the new is the halfwayness² and planned obsolescence of new media:

Combined with the “halfwayness” of most new media, planned obsolescence guarantees the continued recursive experience of digital media as “new”. The newness of new media is sustained by people continually disposing of the equipment they have in anticipation of something better. (p. 23)

I admit. I am one of those people. Last summer I replaced my fully functional 30 gig iPod video with an 16 gig iPod Touch because it offered me something more advanced and something better. Not so much storage wise but purely in functionality. I no longer see my iPod (Touch) as my iPod but as a small portable computer device (with tons of great and useless apps) that happens to play music. My other iPod is now obsolete, it lies in the corner of my room waiting to be used because it is still fully functional, yet I have discarded it as old and no longer useful. Yet, I do not throw it away. Sterne attributes this to the fact that equipment is expensive so we do not immediately throw it away after we have discarded our obsolete hardware. However, once we do, it becomes part of the junkyard of computers which leads to environmental problems. This is where Garnet Hertz’ Dead Media Project comes in.

Dead Media Project

In Hertz’ Dead Media Initiative he addresses the crossroads of media archeology and media ecology. The project links between themes of nature and technics and points to the material contexts of media. The Dead Media Project has three interests:

1. Repurposing media as a creative artistic project: it addresses the problems of electronic waste (gasses etc). A new temporality: cycle of consuming, human time of use value.
2. Extending media beyond individual use: Media as a community and artistic production as seen in do-it-yourself  and circuit bending practices. It aims to extend media to what is at hand.
3. Innovation through analysis of media history. It entails a shift of emphasis that looks as the usefulness of obsolescence: it offers us cheap research and design. The dynamics of media change.

Media as the death of nature

According to Parikka there are new waves of media studies: media archeology, media ecology and dead media studies. These semantics point to a crucial need to rethink media culture that takes into account the overlapping and boundaries of nature, technology and culture. Jussi Parikka addresses the animal forces within technology.

A medium is often described as a communication network, which is a broad definition. The Cross Talk project looks at new media spheres that pass through humans where the body becomes part of the media network. Its objective is to try to find processes in the natural world, for example bodies, as conduits for communications. What are natural technics that can function as carriers of signals or messages?

Relationality is the approxamity of relations. If you want to understand an media essemblage you have to look at its relations. What are the compositional dynamics that constitute media ecologies?³ Parikka is interested in the links between the themes of nature and technics and the material contexts of media. In his Spam Book he describes the Anomalies of Network Society which connects to his current research because it is a way of looking at media in ways it is not usually looked at. Nature has been seen as secondary signification, especially in the UK based strand of Cultural Studies which focusses on the politics of media. Nature is seen as merely  an affordance.

In a non-representational approach/analysis we could ask what kind of objects are circulating within media ecologies? Moving to the field of Software Studies, software may be used as the basis for the study of non-human autonomous agents. Examples of this type of research is focused on swarms (for example Galloway on Swarm Games) and object-oriented programming. These swarms are algorithmic insects and they are what produce second order effects.

The two strands of Media ecology (Neil Postman & Matthew Fuller) seem to be merging where, according to Parikka, media ecologies becomes less of a critique but more of a new strand.

The origins of the field of media ecology lie in the Toronto School and the New York School. In ‘What is Media Ecology?‘ Lance Strate⁴ describes it as

technological determinism, hard and soft, and technological evolution. It is media logic, medium theory, mediology. It is McLuhan Studies, orality–literacy studies, American cultural studies. It is grammar and rhetoric, semiotics and systems theory, the history and the philosophy of technology.

Neil Postman, seen as the father of Media ecology, defines it as follows:⁵

Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. [...]

It tries to find out what roles media force us to play, how media structure what we are seeing, why media make us feel and act as we do.

Media ecology is the study of media as environments.

What Fuller and Parikka contribute to the Postman’s Media ecology is the increasing solidification and naturalization of the non-technological within our society. By doing so it would like to expand media studies’ agenda by borrowing from nature. Approprating and expanding our standardized uses and understandings by reconsidering what on earth have we have previously considered as media and why. Koert van Mensvoort examines this reconsideration of media and nature in the Next Nature blog. In the Next Nature publication Michiel Schwarz describes this reconfiguration of media ecology through media, technology and nature:

In the age where we have genetic engineering, artificial beaches, nature-identical food flavourings and virtual environments, what we traditionally used to view as ‘nature’ has now become an object of human design. ‘So-called nature’ has become a culturally-constructed nature in a mediated world. In this world, it is perhaps fitting that we now manipulate not only what we believed to be nature, but we happily also manipulate our images of nature. (..) What the images of multiple natures reveal to us, then, is the ‘new ecology’ in which we now find ourselves. A new ecology, where natures, technologies and media are all caught up together. (Schwarz)

1. Acland, Charles R. Residual media. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. p 16-31.
2. As described in: Pacey, Arnold. The culture of technology. MIT Press, 1983.
3. Fuller, Matthew. Media Ecologies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005: p. 131
4. Lance Strate, “Understanding MEA,” In Medias Res 1 (1), Fall 1999.
5. Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum.” in A.C. Eurich, ed., High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education (1970

Lifetracing. The Traces of a Networked Life

Identity on the web has changed by the assemblage of social software platforms, engines and users. Four major platforms for presenting the self online have developed over time: the homepage, the blog, the social networking profile and the lifestream. They each have their own specific way for presenting the self online. It should be mentioned that the shift has taken place from the centralized identity on the homepage to the distributed identity on a website with the lifestream.

The homepage is a self-secluded manually coded website containing its content on its own server. With the introduction of blog software the act of self publishing was made available to the public and the blog shows that it is part of a larger network with the embedding of external content from other services and platforms. In this era of the social web, the social networking profile has become a popular way to present the self online. The latest trend is the website containing a lifestream serving as an aggregation point for the distributed identity across various social media platforms.

The advent of the search engines has had a major impact on both the construction and the presentation of the online identity. Search engines do not only index the platforms identity is performed on, but they also organize and construct identity online. They act as a central point where identity performance is indexed. Since search engines have become the main entry point to the web, the idea of identity management has become very important. The case of Nina Brink, for example, shows how Search Engine Reputation Management tactics have been used to adjust online presence for the search engines.

The networked identity has proliferated as a result of the social media user recording the self online. Once content has been published online it becomes part of a larger network in which platforms can automatically exchange data and search engines can index data. The role of the user in this new situation is such that the user has become both content provicer and data provider. User data is used by the search engines for commercial gain but ironically it is also offered to the users in exchange for a ‘free’ account. Users gain access to their own statistics by providing their statistics. These statistics are used to measure the self and to show off the self on the social web.

Identity construction and identity performance have significantly changed since the advent of the engines, which calls for a reconsideration of identity. It can be argued that the assembly of platform, engine and user has constructed a new type of identity: Identity 2.0. This type of identity, placed within the period of Web 2.0, is always under construction, never finished, networked, user-generated, distributed and persistent.

Read the whole chapter of Lifetracing. The Traces of a Networked Life.

Official press release:
WE INVITE YOU TO PARTICIPATE . comment, revise, translate, submit a chapter http://networkedbook.org

Two years in the making, Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) is now open for comments, revisions, and translations. You may also submit a chapter for consideration.

Please register and then Read | Write:

THE IMMEDIATED NOW: NETWORK CULTURE AND THE POETICS OF REALITY
Kazys Varnelis
http://varnelis.networkedbook.org

LIFETRACING: THE TRACES OF A NETWORKED LIFE
Anne Helmond
http://helmond.networkedbook.org

STORAGE IN COLLABORATIVE NETWORKED ART
Jason Freeman
http://freeman.networkedbook.org

DATA UNDERMINING: THE WORK OF NETWORKED ART IN AN AGE OF IMPERCEPTIBILITY
Anna Munster
http://munster.networkedbook.org

ART IN THE AGE OF DATAFLOW: NARRATIVE, AUTHORSHIP, AND INDETERMINACY
Patrick Lichty
http://lichty.networkedbook.org

TAGS: active, aethetics, aggregators, authenticity, authorship, BEN FRY, BEN RUBIN, BURAK ARIKAN, collaborative, communication, data, data mining, digital traces, distributed, DIY, EDUARDO NAVAS, everyday life, flow, GOLAN
LEVIN, identity, improvisation, Internet, JANET CARDIFF, JASON FREEMAN, JODI.ORG, JONATHAN HARRIS, latency, lifelogging, lifetracing, MANIK, mapping, MARK HANSEN, MARTIN WATTENBERG, MAX NEUHAUS, Mechanical Turk,
mediation, memory, music, narrative, NastyNets, NATHANIEL STERN, net art, network, NICK KNOUF, nonlinear, OLIVER LARIC, participation, performative, persistance, PETER TRAUB, platform, postmodernism, presentational, privacy,
prosumer, prosurfer, ranking, realism, reality, real-time, relational, remix, representation, research, RYBN, SCARLET ELECTRIC, SCOTT KILDALL, search engine, self, self-exposure, SHIFTSPACE.ORG, social networks, software, sousveillance, STEVE LAMBERT, storage, surveillance, tactical media, telepresence, THE HUB, THEY RULE, TrackMeNot, transmission, TV,
user-generated, visualization, web 2.0, webcam, widget, Wikipedia Art, YES MEN

BACKGROUND

“Networked” proposes that a history or critique of interactive and/or participatory art must itself be interactive and/or participatory; that the technologies used to create a work suggest new forms a “book” might take.

In 2008, Turbulence.org and its project partners — NewMediaFix, Telic Arts Exchange, and Freewaves – issued an international, open call for chapter proposals. We invited contributions that critically and creatively rethink how networked art is categorized, analyzed, legitimized — and by whom — as norms of authority, trust, authenticity and legitimacy evolve.

Our international committee consisted of: Steve Dietz (Northern Lights, MN) :: Martha Gabriel (net artist, Brazil) :: Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures, The Netherlands) :: Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute for Technology, MA) :: Anne Bray (LA Freewaves, LA) :: Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange, LA) :: Jo-Anne Green (NRPA, MA) :: Eduardo Navas
(newmediaFIX) :: Helen Thorington (NRPA, NY)

Built by Matthew Belanger (our hero!), http://networkedbook.org is powered by WordPress, CommentPress and BuddyPress.

Networked was made possible with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (United States). Thank you.

We are deeply grateful to Eduardo Navas for his commitment to both this project and past collaborations with Turbulence.org.

Jo-Anne Green and Helen Thorington
jo at turbulence dot org
newradio at turbulence dot org

Here’s my design for Software Takes Command by Lev Manovich using an image I took while visiting the Software Studies Workshop led by Manovich at UCSD.

Last week I gave a lecture on ‘Blogging, software standards and template culture’ at the Dutch Film Festival at the SuperPowerPointCinema mini-conference with Bruce Sterling and Eboman organized by Mieke Gerritzen and Koert van Mensvoort.

I do not have a transcript of the actual presentation (which included a few improvised extras) but here are my prepared notes:

1. Blogging, software standards and template culture
Thank you very much for inviting me. My name is Anne Helmond and I am a New Media Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam where I conduct research with the Digital Methods Initiative within the emerging field of Software Studies.

2. The “new” media effect: Software Studies // Software Culture // Template Culture
This SuperPowerPoint Cinema mini conference is part of the re:vision2008 series titled ‘The New Media Effect’ which aims to address important questions including

1. Is there such a thing as a language of new media &
2. Does this lead to a new image aesthetics?

Lev Manovich addressed the first question in his book, appropriately titled, The Language of New Media (2001) in which he argued that new media does have its own distinctive language, or rather distinctive languages. He states that media have become programmable and that we need a new field of study to address the issues that arise from this turn in our culture. Not only has software quietly penetrated our daily life but it has also become invisible. The ubiquity and so-called transparency of software renders it invisible but at the same time it points out the importance of studying it. ‘’From media studies, we move to something that can be called “software studies” — from media theory to software theory.’’

3. Software Studies
Our current society is penetrated by and shaped by software and should thus be subject to appropriate critique. The ubiquity of software has led to a software culture and we are now living in a software society. What does it mean to live in such a software society instead of an industrial society? A world which is created by software is opaque and that is why we need to study software.

4. Software Culture
“We live in a software culture – that is, a culture where the production, distribution, and reception of most content is mediated by software.” Manovich
Software has become a cultural force….

5. Template Culture
The language of new media produces new visual aesthetics which are clearly visible in what I would propose to call a Template Culture.

This Template Culture is especially visible in popular Content Management Systems such as Joomla, Drupal and the blog software WordPress. The aesthetics of the content created within these systems are based on software standards, default settings, themes and templates.

6. Defaults
Templates define or reinforce a certain aspects of software culture as a culture is shaped by its medium and practice. What do templates say about the medium and practice of blogging? The WordPress default theme points to the ‘easy publishing’ model of blog software which supposedly no longer required HTML knowledge to publish online. However, it also implies that you don’t know how to change the adjust the stylesheet and code or change the software settings to escape the default. One blogger thus ironically named his blog “Default Settings.”

7. h4ck3r
The practice of blogging changed with the introduction of blog software as coding knowledge is no longer required. Easy-to-use blog software introduced the practice of blogging —that previously belonged to (semi) tech-savvy web users— to the ‘average’ web user. However, customizing the blog requires a move back to code. Subverting the defaults requires CSS and PHP skills.

8. Database aesthetics
The blog, blog software and the blog theme act as an interface to the underlying database where the blog posts and some of the content is stored. A theme determines which content is retrieved and where it is displayed.

If we see the blog as a database we can also see theme hacks that focus on the database. This means that we can build themes that retrieve the information in the database in different ways that defy the regular blog structure of reverse-chronological order and its accompanying aesthetics.

9. Widgets and plugins
This is an exceptional hacked customized WordPress theme. According many researchers within the field of Software Studies hacking plays an important part in opening up our understanding of software.

However, if we want to look at the common web user to make sense of software culture on the web we should take a different approach. Most of us who use and study software don’t hack, we are part of the template culture. We are defined and restrained by templates in which dragging and dropping widgets offer a small degree of personalization.

10. The Widgetized Self
Widgets are pieces of code that you can drag and drope into your template and have become a popular way of ‘accessorizing’ and personalizing the blog. Widgets are used to embed the scattered self into one place, the blog, creating ‘the widgetized self’ (Baym, 2007). Small customizations and modifications in the backend of the blog are a major practice within the blogosphere.

On the web, the practices of the drag-and-drop and modding user show the workings of a template culture as an important part of software culture.

11. Thank you! Questions?

Tomorrow I will give a lecture (in English) on ‘Blogging, software standards and template culture’ in Utrecht at the Dutch Film Festival.

Unfortunately Lev Manovich won’t be able to make it but Eboman and Bruce Sterling are! We’d love to see you there.

General Information
Mini Conferentie SuperPowerPointCinema
Datum: Woensdag 1 Oktober
Locatie Hoogt1, Utrecht
Aanvang: 14:00 – 16:00 uur
Tickets: 8,50 (Met Gouden Kalf pas: 5,00)