metabolo.org - social

Wii Max Granu Boids gestural interface demo (featuring Howard Rheingold on Cooperation Theory)

gva — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 20:46:55 -0500

This performance demonstrates my evolving Wii-Max/MSP gestural interface prototype.

Beginning with Howard Rheingold's brilliant interview on cooperation theory, I used the Wii controller to manipulate audio with a granular synthesis patch, and filled the video track with flocking pixels based on Craig Reynold's famous Boids algorithm in an OpenGL Jitter implementation.

In performance I insert realtime video feeds of myself operating the wireless controller, grabbed from the onboard laptop cam. The purpose is to integrate my physical presence and gestures. This material may also be understood as a reference to Narcissus, whose reflected extension of himself was described by McLuhan as one of the first accounts of the narcotic effect of technology.

The demo was completed as part of my coursework for Master of Science degree with the Integrated Digital Media Institute, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn.

My approach to this project was roughly as follows:

The problem: prepare and present a five-min. audio/video performance using an external controller with a dataflow flow programming environment, namely Max/MSP/Jitter
Start with my previous WiiGrano_6 demo and extend it to include new functionality
Add Nunchuck controller to Wii remote setup for additional input control
Select jit.boids family of patches to modify and control for visuals (http://www.maxobjects.com/?v=objects&id_objet=3980)
Patch Nunchuck joystick, triggers and accelerometer data into boids patch
Select new audio sample material (Howard Rheingold on Cooperation Theory)
Optimize gestural control around interesting & sensitive feedback params.
Practice, record, and present integrated a/v performance

Privacy isn’t dead -- it never lived.

interfaced — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 01:53:45 -0500

Privacy isn’t dead -- it never lived. Personal information is currency in a consumer society. It allows for prediction and strategy. Rewards cards, credit cards, contests, transponders, websites, subscriptions, donations, investments, bill payments; they all require of tracking. Whether or not this is bad thing is the issue. If you look at your life as property, something you own, then you could classify this as theft. However, if you look at your life as a natural phenomena then observation can only further progress.

The more we learn about how people live, the more insight we will have on how we can change and grow. Unfortunately, most people take the ownership approach to their personal information. Even the phrase “personal information” sounds like a very private thing, which is why the issue is so deceiving. In a small town everyone knows your business. This is what allows for town meetings, participatory politics, and culture in general. When a population grows beyond a certain size, around 150, it becomes less of a cohesive unit and begins to rely more on institutional rather than communal organization. This is necessary for a large community to maintain it’s order.

Back to privacy though. Since people in this modern society no longer know the details of their neighbours’ lives, there are no lifestyle checks. To overuse a metaphor, we are like ants in many ways. Ants communicate to each other and send simple messages in a distributed way. There is no central organization and there is no privacy. If ants started keeping secrets, there would be no way to know where the food is, or what the next job should be. Likewise, in a society where privacy is prized highly, lifestyle is a very difficult thing to gauge. In fact, most people’s concept of the ideal lifestyle is actually based on a fictional image portrayed by the media. The only people’s personal lives who you see are celebrities playing real people. Obvious examples of the fiction portrayed by media include: characters never going to the toilet, never having credit card problems, being able to afford high fashion and plasma TVs with a part-time job. All of these examples are the new wave of advertising. It’s about product placement, but more so about lifestyle suggestion.
Since the only rubric we have is provided to us by a media source with a foremost interest in selling, we struggle to keep up to the lifestyle which we believe our fellow humans are leading.

The unfortunate point about all of this is that it has been brought on, not by the greedy corporation, but by the paranoid consumer. Consumer research firms have vast amounts of information about you that your neighbour or even relatives would have no idea about. The food you buy, the clothes you like, the sites you visit, the gum you like; all of these things are on record. Now, is this a bad thing? No, it’s not. How would a company come up with the idea that they need a gum with more punch if they hadn’t found out from statistics? Would you tell them?

Some businesses may be motivated by the sale, but the consumer is the one to please. Granted, most purchases are based on emotional sells, but once again, what is the problem? These information collection agencies spend tons of money to compile information about you. Why shouldn’t they get a share. Just as a scientist who discovers a new cure should get the credit, so should the person who discovers your email.

But they’re selling your information. They are making money from what you can provide for free. Why not step in and take your fair share? You can only get control of your personal information if you are willing to sell it at a reasonable price. Look at peer-to-peer file sharing: it is around because CDs cost too much and bootlegs are unavailable. Likewise, your information is not available from you so one must fall back on to specialized networks and pay top dollar.

Not only are you loosing money by letting others make the sale, you are also loosing out on a vibrant local community. Though mass amounts of information collected by these companies are available, neither you, nor your relatives, nor your close friends have access to it. GAP, McDonalds, Cokes, and all those big corporations you hate are able to survive because of your information. The mom and pop’s groceries store down the street can’t compete; they don’t have the capital to invest into paying for your information. Let me make this clear: local businesses cannot compete because corporate offices know more about those local residents.

So what is there to lose, why not give away your information? Well, the only people who have something to loose are those very people who have access to your information in the first place. Their advantage is that you are obsessed with privacy.

SHARE: supporting collaboration in new media communities

gva — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:34:20 -0400

Here's a reference from one from my fellow grad students:

SHARE.global
http://share.dj/global/

* new york
* montreal
* wiesbaden
* san diego

SHARE is an organization dedicated to supporting collaboration and knowledge exchange in new media communities. Local SHARE groups hold free, open jams and workshops in their communities. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others' signal and perform live audio and video. SHARE furnishes the amplification and projection. SHARE happens weekly to monthly in cities around the world. Interested in starting a SHARE gathering? See the do it yourself page.

What’s in a Name? Insect Social Systems

gva — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 21:02:33 -0400

Choosing a name for this site was tough. The interdisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) focus of my research is one issue. Most important to me was to allude to nature or biology with a term that operates something like the way "biomimicry" does.

This intriguing page provided one of several deciding factors. Deep within its text I discovered that "metabolo = change."

Insect Social Systems - "The study of insect social systems is an active and fascinating field, encompassing many important issues in behavioral ecology, evolutionary theory and even genomics." [del.icio.us/gva]

About Metabolo: From Mechanics to Mimesis

gva — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:56:21 -0400

Far from becoming tamer, the far-reaching effects of electric technology that were presaged by Marshall McLuhan seem to be waxing wilder, penetrating ever more deeply into our personal and social lives. Is it alarm we’re sensing, or the thrill of recognition – a quickening? Are we attempting to maintain control, or building a portrait of our environment and ourselves that is beginning to rival the responsiveness and creativity of the natural world?

We wonder aloud whether we’ve traded too much privacy for convenience and access, meanwhile scarcely noticing that all these musings have migrated into that ever-widening and ever-converging data stream that suddenly seems more real and more -- accessible? -- than ever before. This veritable Mississippi of data offers more manipulability and meaning as the tools, their default settings, and their recombinant interactions increasingly evidence startling levels of transparency, empathy and relevance to daily life....

Our brains, our bodies, our social relationships, the webs of life that nourish and sustain our physical selves and natural environments, no longer are these being taken for granted, denigrated, made incidental -- at any rate, not in the same blind and wholesale way. On the contrary, these are being methodically rediscovered and appreciated as irreplaceable, unique, meaningful, and worthy of support, research, emulation, connection, amplification, celebration.

As a candidate for the Master of Science degree in Integrated Digital Media at Polytechnic University, I offer this space to the investigation of these developments and these questions.

In this discursive space I intend to share and solicit interdisciplinary research interrogating emergent effects at the intersection of three organizing discourses: technology and design; biology and social behavior; ecology and environment. The diagram that follows illustrates broad relationships and selected patterns characteristic of the intersections:

I will survey the literature pertinent to these intersections, including historical texts as well as emerging theoretical and practical developments from both academic and professional sources. The underlying theoretical and methodological framework and vocabulary will be informed by the closely related discourses of cybernetics, systems thinking, complexity, and network studies. My objective will be to document and explicate applicable laws and principles in order to forge a new level of synthetic understanding with an eye to guiding the design and implementation of beneficial systems.

To assist the analysis and communication of my findings I intend to use appropriate techniques in media production that may include data modelling, visualization, and/or motion graphics. The resulting thesis will seek to articulate and demonstrate design principles in response to the critical question: “Can we learn to design for emergence, in order to develop and distribute more human-friendly and ecologically responsive social and technical systems, by studying and mimicking deep patterns originating in the realms of biology and social behavior?”

Following is a preliminary and partial list of sources to be consulted:

Biomimetics; Sociomimetics; Social Software; Networks
Barabasi, A. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Perseus Books; 2002.
Benyus, J. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. William Morrow; 1997.
Hock, D. Birth of the Chaordic Age. Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 1999.
O’Reilly, T. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228
Reed, D. P. The Law of the Pack. Harvard Business Review; Feb. 2001
Surowiecki, J. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books; 2004.

Commons; Cooperation
Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books; 1985.
Bricklin, D. The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor. http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm August 7, 2000.
Creative Commons. http://www.creativecommons.org
Hardin, G. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 1968;162:1243-48.
Lessig, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books; 2000.
Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books; 2002.
Rheingold, H. and Institute for the Future. http://www.cooperationcommons.com/
Wright, R. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Pantheon; 1999.

Cybernetics; Systems Thinking; Complexity
Capra, F. The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living. Anchor Books; 2002.
Weiner, N. Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. M.I.T. Press; 1961.
Weiner, N. The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin; 1950.

Emergence
Fromm, J. Types and Forms of Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0506028
Fromm, J. Ten Questions About Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0509049
Helms, M. Design That Improves With Use. Ambidextrous. http://www.stanford.edu/~judywen/ambidextrous/page36-39.pdf
Johnson, S. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner; 2002.
Van Alstyne, G. From Induction to Incitement: Inside the Massive Change Project. What People Want: Populism in Architecture and Design. Ed. Michael Shamiyeh. Birkhäuser; 2005:188–205.
Van Alstyne, G. and Logan, R.K. Designing for Emergence and Innovation: Redesigning Design. Publication pending; 2006.