I was planning on writing about the reasons behind the recent decline in Facebook platform developers, but there's another story that I've been mulling over for a little while for it's absurdity.

In his 20s, Guy Debord began to develop what would end up being an elaborate, chess-like war simulation game. The late 70s saw this game released in limited quantities, with a book following a decade later. As non sequitur as this may at first seem coming from the author of The Society of the Spectace, it does go hand in hand with that text's inherent longing for a simpler epoch.

Regardless, Alex Galloway - who teaches at NYU and whose work I've written about a number of times on this blog - created an online version of the game called Kriegspiel in an effort with the Radical Software Group. Galloway has been looking into real-time strategy games such as Starcraft for some time now as an expression of - if not metaphor for - network culture, so such a move on his part would seem largely academic in nature.

It was a bit of a surprise, then, to learn that Galloway and NYU received a threat of a IP infringement lawsuit from Debord's widow. Surely she sees the absurdity in taking such a strict stance in defending the intellectual property rights of a seminal member of the Situationist International? If not that, then she at least could recognize that Galloway's repositioning of her dead husband's game can only serve to nurture its success - at least as much as a game heralded for its opaque complexity can be judged so.

Then again what more bitingly appropriate way to remember Debord than for both sides to conjure multiple signifying representations of the deceased thinker.

Posted by Nathan at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There has been so much happening this week that it seems impossible to write about anything else. As I write this entry, the "super Tuesday" results in the primaries are rolling in, but earlier in the week, a certain sports team brought disappointment to my doorstep and Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo!. At least the first and third topics would be fair game for this blog, but the first and second have occupied much of my mind. Two items that have caught my eye this week, however, have been:

• Lauren Cornell's review of Bad Beuys Entertainment on Rhizome.org: On the one hand, I enjoyed this review because of its subject rather than its substance - the clever name, the pointed use of video, and the approach of the collective (criticism through embrace). Yet the reason I cite the review rather than the collective is Cornell's brief observation that "[l]ong before the onset of video-sharing platforms, the [late 90s video work of the collective] would be an amazing Youtube find: an amateur homage to the culture industry that winds up as a critique not only of media's power, but our own consumption of it." In a way, an observation like this provides a glimmer of hope for a culture that increasingly looks to its YouTubes. These tools do indeed make it easier for more people to engage in cultural critique - knowingly or otherwise. Yet it is only through a type of nostalgia that we can see exactly what we are experiencing now.


• Jean Babtiste Bayle's MyOWNspace: admittedly, I did find this thanks to the previous item, but it is worthy of its own mention. MySpace is nothing if not an easy target for cultural and artistic criticism. There is an unrefined, raw, unselfconscious air about the site and its users' pages that lend themselves easily to parody and theoretical target practice. The site sports sorely dated designs in a design conscious Web 2.0 net-world, and relies on crude markups and hacks for users to personalize their little corners. MySpace is technostalgia alive and well. MyOWNspace serves as a particularly clever parody. The creator has fun in sending up every little detail, from the premise, to the Google ads. It is parody as it should be, fun yet insightful.

Posted by Nathan at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Read about "the social web burn out blog" at JavaMuseum.org. Created an account, logged in, checked out the place. Looks promising for shared, tagged and networked experience. Have not made a network though, not yet.

The social web burn out blog chronicles the exploration of social media services from the perspective of an ingenuous Web 2.0-phile. Martinsson's first few entries demonstrate a wide-eyed awe (and anxiety) about such 2.0 features as tagging, blogging, and "networking":

"Today we would probably say, 'I tag therefore I am,' as a great deal of our social software has become tagged experience. But, I don’t have tags installed here in my [we]blog (I could, but it would cost me a few bucks, or could you help me out here?).

Instead, I’ll have to do with categories. I don’t know if that counts as tagged experience, the drawback being that there are no tag clouds to display… Does the absence of a tag cloud diminish the socially networked experience? Yeah, a question that needs pondering, maybe we’ll see an academic paper in the not too distant future unless there already exists one on this very difficult topic. "

Ultimately Martinsson succeeds in creating a believable and at times charming parody of the naive, navel-gazing, technophilic Web 2.0 blog - check this blog's early entries if you need examples of the object of her parody. She tracks the progress and ultimate frustration of a user attempting to familiarize herself with the speed and much-touted utility of social media technologies. And what better medium than a blog to fully enter this character? Blogs are the stereotypical medium for the techno-ingenue and Martinsson identifies that voice in her entries.

Yet, despite her parodic success, I am left feeling unsatisfied by Martinsson's critique. Naive views on the cultural roles of social media abound and are an all too easy target. Her studied simplicity ends up communicating more of an aloofness than a genuine interest in her subject. Some of the more successful blog art pieces out there revel in their complicity and medium, rather than side-stepping it with parody.

Posted by Nathan at 10:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today in the Rhizome Artbase I cam across a couple of interesting pieces by Martin John Callanan: I am Still Alive and I Wanted to See All of the News From Today. The works play with the notion of immediacy - on the web and in text message communication respectively.

News brings together (or at least claims to) thumbnail images of the front pages of every national, daily newspaper from around the world. The web page is filled with the evenly spaced images and interrupted only by a small text box in the top right of the viewer's browser stating "I Wanted to See All of the News From Today: [today's date], Martin John Callanan." Alive, on the other hand, claims to involve a device that searches local wireless networks for open, connected devices like PDAs or cell phones, and when it finds one, sends the message "I am still alive" - translated appropriately for the country of course.

What I enjoy about both pieces are their direct and simple nature. News presents nothing more than "the news" in the form of its most prominent signifier, the national daily paper. Alive does not discriminate between phones more than it has to for delivery and presents the surprised recipient with a message that states a simple, if slightly bewildering statement.

Where News succeeds is in its critique of online news and news aggregators. The project earnestly, ingenuously, and almost feyly approaches its stated goal - one it shares with Google, CNN.com, and of course the New York Times own "All the News..." claim. Yet in doing so, it points out the quixotic and ultimately sisyphean task it really is. In this way, News also parodies the larger project of the socially networked internet: totalizing archivization and the myth that "everything is at your fingertips." The work shows that in fact, when everything is at you fingertips - it's actually just a bit too much and perhaps what we're looking for after all is a different sort of archive. Thus Callanan successfully mocks the major online news outlets' earnestness at the same time as he nods to the enormity of their common project.

What I enjoy about Alive is how it plays with the notion of immediacy in media like text messages or social networks. In these media, users/participants are constantly engaged in a project of updating and enhancing. MySpace users continually fiddle with their profiles to convey just the right message for the moment - Twitter users somehow find the need to update friends and followers with minutiae (and these friends and followers find the need to pay attention). These are media of archivization of the present, where a steady stream of information implies life and a cessation of the flow signals death. This is not only corporeal death - as that certainly is evidenced in suddenly static texts and profiles - but also a halting of participation, which is the equivalent of death in these media.

So in choosing "I am still alive" as the message sent to unwitting participants, Callanan has brilliantly honed the basic sentiment in every message that we send or profile update we make. Every message may as well say "I am still alive" since that message is the function of all such communication. Not just an odd phrase to rouse curiosity, the message is crafted to make the recipients aware of the medium itself.

I really was impressed by these two works and their deadly simple, yet pithy delivery. I strongly suggest that readers take a look.

Posted by Nathan at 09:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wired put up a gallery of a variety of steampunk creations the other day. The gallery itself is great, especially considering that most of the designs are individually created projects. I'm not sure how instructive it is to compare steampunk to 8-bit revisitations and such however:

"Retro-futurism is all the rage these days: antique computers, 8-bit game art, classic cases for modern gear, anything to make the onslaught of new technology less disposable. The yearning for timelessness in a constantly renewing tech culture has led to a spike in interest in the steam-powered, brass-encrusted world of steampunk."

Posted by Nathan at 07:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I just read an interesting piece by Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleischer of the Piratbyran in Sweden that the latter sent to the Nettime mailing list (as well as posting here). In it, Eriksson and Fleischer reiterate their call for an end to the debate on copyright as we know it, but more interestingly they lay out their vision of the music industry as it stands. While reading their perspective, I couldn't help but think of the similarities between what they are describing and the shifts in the labor economy that Paolo Virno describes in A Grammar of the Multitude.

"Let's try to define what a live performance is: Something that happens in real-time, a specific time and place. Something establishing an [sic] relation between different people sharing a similar taste for something. An experience you are part of creating. These features can also be observed in the actual uses of recorded music; in the domains where people share music, meta-data, tags, ratings and stories."

The example Eriksson and Fleischer use to illustrate this also highlights the role of metadata as a means to convey affect:

"Think about sharing musical taste with Last.fm. The most significant effect it has on us, is that it suddenly makes listening to MP3's a two-way activity: While music is streaming from our loudspeakers, metadata are sent back to a central server, continually building on your personal profile, which you know will be used not only by the system for calibrating you personal radio, but also by other humans to judge you. In short, that makes listening to MP3's a performative act. Listening overtakes traits from artistic performance, to some extent."

Temporality is an important distinction to make when discussing affective or virtuosic labor in archival contexts. Much of the concept of virtuosic production relies on singular experience, but within these new environments, what conceptual changes must we make?

Posted by Nathan at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The following is a review of the net art piece, The Last Tag Show, orginally written for furtherfield.org.

The Last Tag Show, a live “net performance,” took place on Last.FM on April 14, 2007. Last.FM is a social networking site centered around tracking its users' music listening habits and creating a profile based on that data. As a user listens to music, the track title and artist name are sent to his/her profile and listed publicly, allowing the service to create connections between users and the musicians they listen to. Another notable aspect of the service is its reliance on user participation, through wikis, in the creation of artist profiles.

The Last Tag Show cleverly took advantage of Last.FM's technical structure to pull off a 24 hour performance. As the allotted time progressed, viewers saw tracks and artists appear in succession on Last.FM user profile lasttagshow's profile page. These were no ordinary songs however, the artists instead altered the metadata of audio tracks such that when they were uploaded to the Last.FM servers they appeared as a multi-character dialogue. The principal personages in the performance include “Moderator,” “Hannah,” “Voiceover,” “Instructor,” “Marck,” “Zita Vass,” and “Gregg,” with occasional guest stars like Thom Yorke. Since each of these characters take the role of a musician in Last.FM's data-centric view, each of them have a dedicated user-editable artist page, which The Last Tag Show took full advantage of by developing the identities of their subjects in these spaces. As such, Moderator, for example, existed beyond his archived snippets of speech, complete with a photograph and short biography.

Yet while this was a particularly clever subversion of Last.FM's intended use, judging by their own description of the piece, it seems that the artists failed to fully think through the conceptual implications of their performance. The very idea of a “net performance” is immediately suspect especially when in the context of a social network like Last.FM for whom archivization and aggregation takes precedence over the immediacy and ephemeral nature of live performance. So while inventive and whimsically guileful, The Last Tag Show as a performance was starkly out of place in an environment existing in the future as much as it looks to the past.

Yet, it is from this oversight that perhaps the most interesting aspect of the piece arises. After the performance was finished and the Show creators had moved on, their once purely diegetic characters began to take on a life of their own outside the confines of that single 24 hour period. It seems that there are a number of other Last.FM users who listen to tracks in which the artist is listed as “Voiceover” or “Papa” (another character in the Show) and a number of other names. As these other users consume their oddly labeled tracks, the artist profiles, which served as a stable signifier for the Show's players, began to change. Suddenly their “most listened to tracks” were not out-of-context snippets of dialogue, but what seemed to be...actual songs; and the very real possibility of users coming in and subtly changing Gregg's biography comes to mind.

Indeed, the fact that these fictional characters have the ability to continue to “live” - produce and be produced - long after their utility to the performance has ended, is what makes The Last Tag Show so interesting, and the limited period of its run-time so constricted. Where the creators began this piece as a “hack” of a social networking site, in the end it may turn out that they are the ones hacked - by their own creations.

Posted by Nathan at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

EMI announced today that they will begin selling non-DRM MP3s in the iTunes store, starting this May. This is a step forward that as recently as two days ago I was claiming would take six months or more. I see this as an admission that centralized control (as exemplified by DRM) is no longer necessarily the best route for industry to take. DRM is insisted upon by the major record labels as a tool to prevent what they see as inappropriate uses of recorded works - sharing over P2P networks, multiple copies, recontextualization, etc. Yet the cultural perception of a recorded work changed when suddenly these works became non-scarce and increasingly ingrained into an experience of social interaction.

I don't mean to down play the economic shift that occurs when the cost of distribution and promotion plummeted, undercutting what the major record labels had grounded their business models on. This alters how any player in the industry has to interact within it, but not enough attention is focused on how digitization tweaked the interactive experience of recorded works in such a way that is completely in accordance with wider cultural, subjective, and economic shifts in a post-Fordist world.

The move to digitization in the music industry, and the correlative decrease in scarcity that comes with the ability to quickly and efficiently copy a digital file, can be read as a shift in importance from poiesis to praxis in the music industry along the terms that Virno describes in A Grammar of the Multitude. The production of the recorded work as a physical commodity (poiesis) is no longer holds the central role for a song that it once did. Increasingly - and for some artists, almost completely - the purpose of the recorded work is an affective one, a form of praxis designed to lure the listener into the experience of the music/musician.

In an interview with Virno, Branden W. Joseph poses John Cage as a comparison the Virno's use of Glenn Gould in the role of the musician as commodity-producing laborer. This is a particularly limpid comparison because Cage relies so heavily on what Virno refers to as virtuosity - direct affective production. A John Cage recording is far from a commodity in the sense of a Glenn Gould recording - it exists merely as an affective and often incomplete surrogate for the creator himself. It takes the role of praxis-at-a-distance, rather than the poiesis embodied by Gould, who refused to perform live. This is not happening solely in music, economies are increasingly reliant on affective labor and virtuosity rather than the physical production of commodities. In truth, as a profession, musical production was an entirely affective one until recording devices became prevalent - introducing scarcity and poiesis over praxis.

EMI is acknowledging that the freedom to copy, share, and recontextualize has pushed the music industry into affective production. Allowing a digital file this freedom de-commoditizes what really hasn't been a commodity for years. The entities that focus on the production of the experience over the production of the commodity will ultimately be the ones that survive these steps into a post-Fordist world.

Disclosure: I work for Lime Wire, a company increasingly involved in this space. What I write here has absolutely no official relationship with the company and should not be attributed to anyone but me, independent of my other associations.

Posted by Nathan at 02:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before I launch into this post, I want to note a couple things: First of all I'm going to be at South by Southwest all of next week for both the interactive and music portions. If you're interested in meeting up, drop me a line at swarming - at - gmail.

Secondly, an excellent new curatorial blog called New Climates has just started up. New Climates is investigating the intersection of art, climate change, and network culture and it has a seriously top-notch line-up of artists contributing. I strongly suggest that you check it out.

I'm in the middle of reading Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude - a blissfully short and refreshingly pithy text. In the very beginning pages, he makes a keen observation connecting the concept of the multitude with a sense of dislocation, a "not feeling at home":

"The people are one, because the substantial community collaborates in order to sedate the fears which spring from circumscribed dangers. The multitude, instead, is united by the risk which derives from 'not feeling at home,' from being exposed omnilaterally to the world."

The linkages between feelings of dislocation and web-based interaction have been documented from the internet's earliest days. This has been commonly seen as a medium which collapses distance and makes regional or national identity inconsequential (I would argue that this isn't necessarily the case and that it has just as much ability to strengthen regional networks as it does global ones, but that is for another entry). While this perceived erasure provides a certain type of freedom, it also results in explicit dislocation. This is especially true with the rise of archived social media, in which our identities are projected and retained within the network, because after we sign off, our projected identity retains its interactive ability. Simply put: when you're asleep, people can still interact with your MySpace page. This is true with blogs and any other networked medium that archives its content. As a result, our dislocation as users becomes constant - it has not been relegated to our times of active participation as it might be with a chatroom or even a telephone call. So at the same time as our labor practices have become less secure, more mobile, more modular, our very subjectivity has been imbued with a sense of "not feeling at home" as Virno puts it.

This "not feeling at home" is concurrently the driving impulse of nostalgia which has the ability to provide a brief, if false, connection to this home. Svetlana Boym makes the distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia - the former leading to nativist action and a sense of cultural superiority, the former resulting in a sense of melancholy and creative production. Within the context of web-based interaction, however, this distinction nostalgia is expressed in the formation and defense of new identity-groups and cultural practices divorced from regional identity. Blogging has become the nostalgic act of this generation, an implicit lament for times of imagined past when social life revolved around the town square/market/green, or even for the time when we all read the same papers and watched I Love Lucy.

These new forms of distributed, networked, and archived interaction have lead us to a widespread state of nostalgia. A nostalgia for the territorialized self resulting in the search for various forms of affective and subjective relocation.

Posted by Nathan at 09:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been wanting to write on the issue of death in social network sites for sometime now, but I've always held off because it is such a daunting topic that it would require far more space than any blog could tolerate. Death, memory, nostalgia: each changes within these new media. How does forgetting function in an archival network? How that which has passed affect that which will occur now as opposed to times before the advent of these network cultures? This is stuff more suited to a lengthy, exhaustive study than to a weekly, often extemporaneous, entry. Yet, the entry "Mourning and Digital Culture" from We Make Money Not Art popped up on my del.icio.us after one or two clicks today.

This entry links to some of the critical pieces that address these issues like Elliott Malkin's Cemetery 2.0 and MyDeathSpace and several others. The first of these two examples explores what happens when death is brought into a networked environment in which it had previously not existed, by an ancestor of the decesased. On the one hand this raises questions of identity and subjectivity - the data entered is that of a real person, this data interacts as though it were this subject, and yet it has been done by someone else. On the other hand it only makes clearer the networked aspects of traditional expressions of mourning and posthumous network culture in genealogical practice, an inherenly nostalgic act. Just as my grandfather explored the memories and legacies of his biological predecessors, recording them through the collection of text, dates, and narrative, Malkin records his ancestor through means that have recently become known as the interactive means of youth. This brings a new perspective on services like Geni, which allow people to create personal genealogical histories: essesntially allowing people to enter their ancestors into a type of socially interactive network, albeit one focused on the on the dead.

The second, MyDeathSpace, in a somewhat opposite manner, operates by highlighting the death that arises within social network sites. The MySpace pages (and pages of any other social network site for that matter) of those that die also references genealogy, but more in the archival, archeological, or perhaps social sense. By preserving the recorded interactions of the deceased we engage in genealogy, but by preserving ephemeral interactions in socially archived networks we are at once foregrounding the future recording of death as well as the the guarantee of continued subjectivity, though perhaps in the form of forced collective memory or nostalgia. This archived network speaks death at the same time as it records life.

This is best continued another time.

The final section of (The) Audience (2.0) will be posted in two or three days.

Posted by Nathan at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just seen the web version of a piece by the British new media artist Stanza called "YOU ARE MY SUBJECTS". The piece addresses a familiar topic in new media art - surveillance - especially as is operates through the ubiquitous British CCTV system. While in the gallery, YAMS is meant to be displayed on three large screens in London with the imagery originating in New York. On the web, the viewer is limited to a single image frame with multiple simultaneous audio tracks. The image itself is sensitive to the position of the viewer's cursor in relation to the frame, displaying a series of blurred and distorted still images that only come into focus when the cursor comes to a stop.

In creating a piece meant to critique surveillance through closed circuit television, Stanza has managed to integrate only a thin illusion of liveness and avoid almost completely the specificity of CCTV. Yet, I don't mention this as negative criticism, but to point out that the stated goal of the piece (revealing a state surveillance apparatus) is not necessarily the effect, intended or not.

First of all, it's key to note that a large portion of YAMS viewers will not be in the gallery, but on their computers viewing it in their web browser - like me. This contrasts with the idea that the piece addresses CCTV as a specific medium of surveillance. Stanza has opened the illusion of surveillance to any who choose to access it, essentially feeding not only a desire to see without being seen, but also the parallel desire to be seen that we see so often in new media. The images are vague enough to imply liveness and immediacy without actually breaching those boundaries. This allows the viewer to place him/herself on both sides of the screen. We are, in a sense, viewing ourselves as much as others.

YAMS does indeed tackle surveillance, though not in the subversive manner it seems to want to. Instead of revealing a grim reality of the modern state, it undermines its outlying purpose and allows an outlet for the fulfillment of scopic desires that we see in action in so many places on the web these days (do I even need to mention them here anymore?).

Posted by Nathan at 07:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This week I found an essay that hits particularly close to my own interests, "The Work of Artists in a Databased Society: net.art as on-line activism" by Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga. It hits all the key points I hit on this blog: art, new media, identity, control, etc. He even references a very similar base of work that I'm familiar with including the Surveillance Camera Players and Allan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive." Yet while nothing he writes is inherently disagreeable to me, there is one underlying assumption running throughout the piece that doesn't recognize fundamental protocols of interaction on the web.

Zúñiga begins with the familiar (and entirely correct) theme of dismantling utopian visions of the internet as some sort of idealized Habermasian public sphere. Yet from this he jumps to the idea that it is necessarily a distopian space where corporations surveil the masses - clearly delineating the individual and the crowd. I can't disagree that the internet has proven to be the best data mining tool ever known, but I think the implication of "data mining" is short-sighted and not recognizing either the construction of "the corporation" or "the masses."

Data mining implies an unseen few taking data from the seen and unknowning many. This isn't exactly what's happening. This doesn't want to acknowledge is that the process of archiving the data takes place, increasingly, of our own volition. We can't simply say "data has been gathered" as though some man in a suit came to my door with a bag into which he put all my data. We have to recognize that interaction has been designed - or has developed, depending on how techno-determinist you are - in such a way that the archivization has become a primary interactive protocol. That's just the thing about the corporation as it is outlined in a piece like The Postscript to Societieties of Control: it is less and less the few deciding how to control the masses - largely by defining them as such - it is ourselves taking on the role of both the mass and the few. When Deleuze writes about "the corporation" in Postscript, he is speaking less about Coca-Cola specifically than a social construction in which the individual is concurrently affirmed and aggregated. This is the concept of corporation that we must take into account when discussing archival interaction via the web.

Zúñiga's view is certainly true with more traditional data mining such as spyware, but these methods will fade in time as the population grows accustomed to these technologies. This is why we must see controlling archivization as being enacted through ourselves and our peers and encouraged by the Deleuzian corporation.

A section of the piece that also highlights the distinction between the few and mass that I'm taking issue with is in his discussion of Brooke Singer's "SPV2". This piece involves a variety of digitized surveillance methods aimed at the artist herself and opened for participants to view and enter information themselves. Zúñiga describes it like this:

"By publicly revealing her data-self, Singer turns the user into a data-voyeur while giving the user a glance at the sort of data that exist within the Internet in relation to each one of us. To further drive this point, Singer has also included the Join Me! category which allows users to enter one’s own name and/or zip code to effect the visual representation and give one just a taste of her/his own data-self."

Posted by Nathan at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I wrote this piece as an article for a local Providence, RI publication a little less than a year ago. Specifically I wrote it for publication in late January/early-February 2006. As I was going through my personal archives this weekend, I realized that a lot of it still has significance.

As you read it though, keep in mind that this is almost a year old and it was written for a slightly different audience than that which reads this blog. Any way, technostalgia it is:

Be it through a blogger evangelizing the merits of 'Web 2.0' or your awkward co-worker ‘friending’ you on MySpace, it's become clear that it won't be long before we're all enslaved by our sleek new machines. This won't happen through any sinister plot on the part of your Dell laptop or that shifty-looking eHarmony man: it's going to happen because it’ll just be too easy and convenient not to succumb. We'll willingly offer control of our relationships, identities, careers, and entertainment to the machines and their software, which know so well how to please us. As Simon Ings wrote in his 1999 science-fiction novel, Headlong: “When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”

So what's left for us if digital enslavement is only a pleasurable and useful matter of time? Is there any form of resistance to the rise of these convenient machines and their handy programs? It has been trendy of late to reminisce about a time when we had control of our digital inventions. The mid-to-late 20th century was a period when the slow crawl of the buffalo and the speedy hunting-spin of the westward-bound farmer (oh, come on, the banker was too easy!) not only demonstrated our dominance over the American continent and its fauna but, more importantly, our dominance over computers. This of course refers to Oregon Trail, the terribly awkward, unrealistic, and clunky program. I can't help but believe that part of the pleasure in the game came from knowing that we were, in every way, superior to the machine through which we played. Today, when Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games rule the roost, Oregon Trail has reappeared as a nostalgic alternative.

This isn't the only outmoded technology to reemerge from the techno-cultural depths. PowerGlove, a Boston-based speed-metal band, is one of many to dust off their favorite SNES game soundtracks and play elaborate cover versions. In fact, the collective fixation on late-20th century entertainment technology has gone further than some might think: for one, some on the somethingawful.com message boards have made a hobby of feeding popular songs into SNES emulators and bringing them down to the low-tech level of Super Mario Brothers. These characters are more widely known as chip-tune artists.

However, the phenomenon goes beyond an 8-Bit rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” or a blistering power-metal emblazoned version of the Tetris theme song. This technostalgia has been developing as a natural byproduct of the increasing infiltration of new media and new media networks into our everyday lives. Perhaps the most interesting case of primitive-digital resurrection is the reappearance of the animated GIF. Displaced by the superior quality and dynamic capabilities of Flash animations, the animated GIF has long been relegated to the “I Have My First Internet Websitepage!!!1” style of production. But with the unstoppable, iron-shod march toward digital domination, some have begun to take a second, comforting look back to the time when GIF was king. Or, rather, when Man was king and the animated GIF was but our lowly page.

Choosy Media Artists Choose GIF

GIF, which stands for Graphics Interchange Format, was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 as a (then) high-quality compression for images. Among image compression formats, there are many superior to the GIF: JPEG, for example, has 16 million colors to GIF's 256, and PNG has even greater compression. Back in the pre-Web days, however, GIF was a step above the rest. An animated GIF is merely a sequence of individual GIFs in a single file and displayed in a specific, timed order. We've all seen them before: that stutteringly spinning logo that reads “NEW!” or “FREE.” What you're witnessing is an animated GIF in action. This is the dormant form it has taken in the dark corners of the Web, waiting for the day when it would once again be appreciated. GIF was the first among the image compressions that are still in regular use, and it seems to hold a special place in our hearts: It's that old dog limping to the corner to die.

But, wait, there's life in the old girl yet!

The resurgence of the animated GIF has been slow and almost imperceptible because it never really left us. One of the best-known places to find a fine GIF, animated with a something of a creative eye, is ytnmd.com. You're The Man Now, Dog hosts many simple, idiosyncratic animations coupled with looped sound files. The site gets its name, and the contributions their style, from the founder’s original image depicting a tiled image of Sean Connery in Finding Forrester. Over this is written the words “YOU'RE THE MAN NOW DOG.COM” in ‘zooming’ black letters, as an audio file of the actor exclaiming phrase repeats. Though this is not an animated GIF, it has spawned many “YTMNDs” that are. More importantly, though, ytnmd.com's word-of-mouth success has helped establish the animated GIF as a friendly home for pop-culture, the very subject matter that has fueled the medium's comeback.

What is it about animated GIFs and pop-culture that have led them into a symbiotic relationship? Animated GIFs provide a humorously awkward lens through which to view familiar images of popular culture. These creations contrast with our increasingly accessible and customizable popular culture feeding technologies. Netflix will deliver a bewildering variety of movies to your door, Last.FM will predict your music taste with alarming accuracy, and with TiVo, who needs network executives to dictate programming order? We are welcoming these technologies into our lives with such speed that consumer convenience and product adaptability have become expected in a growing number of cultural outputs. In stark contrast, the new breed of animated GIFs are deliberately reactionary, shoving a brick in the smooth-flowing, customizable entertainment environments we're building around ourselves. Ironically, it is the popularization of individualized, user-friendly technology that has made the creation and distribution of animated GIFs open to anyone who wants to invest 30 minutes of time learning how to make them. Thus the animated GIF is being reborn as populist detournement, using not only the images of the dominant culture, but the tools as well.

Giffords and the Gallery

Two signs that the animated GIF and the retro-techno trend has strong footing in the art world: First, The New York Times ran an article on January 21st [2006: this dates the article] about a show at Pace Wildenstein in Chelsea featuring artists including Cory Arcangel, whose hack of Mario Bros. for SNES deleted everything in the game except for the sky and clouds, and collective Paper Rad, whose GIF-laden site, paperrad.org, says it all. Secondly, I recently came across an animated GIF created by influential net artist, Olia Lialina. Her activity in this area, alone, should convince even the most hesitant to recognize the medium and its artistic significance.

A closer look at Lialina's Animated GIF Model reveals that she is, in some ways, missing the point, the essence of the GIF. Her animation depicts three versions of herself in different costumes, engaged in three different activities: spinning, hoola-hooping, and playing the accordion as different colored backgrounds scroll from right to left. She certainly captures the playfulness of the medium, but trips up in two major aspects that may prove troublesome should artistic practice for the animated GIF continue in her direction: the subject of the piece is her own image, and it’s just too smooth. The essence, the very charm, of the animated GIF lies in its inability to keep up with itself, the fact that you really could see something much fancier just about anywhere. The artist's focus on herself also fails to live up to the outward-looking potential of the form; despite her personal position within pop-culture, the animation is about her rather than her as Olia Lialina, the well-known artist. In the end, the piece begins to mirror the very ego-oriented and slick techno-culture that the animated GIF has come to rebel against.

A more optimistic path for the animated GIF has been laid out by the creator of umeancompetitor.blogspot.com, known only as “893.” Affectionately calling them “giffords,” 893 not only creates brightly throbbing animated GIFs that are simultaneously engrossing and amusing, but he instructs readers of his blog how to make their own “giffords.” The result is work that eerily reworks pop-culture imagery and retains the populist spirit of the medium while demonstrating that the animated GIF can be more than an old-school video game rip-off – more than a hobbling image compression format.

It may not be much, but the return of animated GIF—along with other technostalgic excursions—is a pacifier as our culture and society move inexorably toward a sleek and customizable, entirely technology-enslaved future. We look back on the days when our machines pitifully and playfully attempted to impress us with 8-Bit graphics and an assortment of “beeps.” Perhaps Oregon Trail tells the story best. We've traveled far with a westward home in mind only to face the question of whether to pay for the ferry or take our chances rafting the river. And as always, though we know it ends up in the same place, we'll take the river, if only to linger on this side of the final barrier for a moment longer. The resurgence of the animated GIF and whatever technostalgias that may follow are only momentary diversions as we march toward our Oregon of mechanized, all-encompassing convenience.

Posted by Nathan at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Upon launching One Small Step: A MySpace Luv Story, a new browser window opens and fills the screen with bright, flashing, provocative, and twitchy one-inch square tiled boxes, refreshing with a new image every five seconds. The experience is nothing if not overwhelming, the viewer is bombarded with animated GIF after animated GIF, each one expressing some form of the lust, hatred, love or angst, so natural to the turbulent teenage social life. We shift suddenly from a vaguely familiar, mohawked pop-punk singer frozen in mid-scream as the words "I hate everything about you" blink next to him in a jagged font, to a flashing close-up of a cherry and the words "pop me." Before we can attempt to make sense of this juxtaposition, however, we are told in the next image to "hey, shut the fuck up" and accosted by the zombie-like girl from The Ring.

Anyone who has visited MySpace lately and clicked around has surely encountered many of these little "badges" which users post on their own profiles, or on others' through comments. They are used to grab attention, make a profile unique, and, ultimately, as a tool of self and social-classification. Each of the images displayed in One Small Step can be seen as a modular, reified emotion. The user can take their heartbreak and move it around their page, marking themselves - or, rather, their page as one of many facets of networked identity - with a physical sign of emotion. They can copy and paste their angst and loneliness. As with any of our other numerous tools of online social interaction, a MySpace page is but one tendril of our larger, multiple projected identity. We use it to interact within a specific environment, with specific people, for specific purposes, and we shape it accordingly. We do so through a process of self- and social-classification. I list my interests, you comment. One teen posts the "cutie with a bootie" badge, another professes love in the form of PHP. All this is a process of fitting ourselves into a number of socially defined classifications: I am a student, I am a fan of this band, I am in love, etc. This is done all the time in everyday life through clothes we wear, how we speak, where we hang-out and more; what makes MySpace and all of our 'Web 2.0' fanciness interesting is that it adds the social-classification aspect. Now we classify not only ourselves, but we let ourselves be classified by others to a degree not before present. As danah boyd has written, part of the point of interaction through MySpace for teens is to leave comments for each other, giving rise to a hierarchy of who leaves what for who. Did Shelly post that "bite me" badge on Tammy's page? Uh oh. It looks like Mike has a lot more friends than Sam. These are only some of the ways that classification has become increasingly social through these new media, and FlawedArt's One Small Step is beginning to touch upon the issues of spectacle and identity that work into it.

The piece draws from a database made up of these badges from MySpace, specifically ones dealing with these over-blown emotions. The fast pace of change from one image to another and the tiling try mimic the actions of these emotions among the teenage users. Rapidly shifting from lust to love, then to hatred and frustration, these images fill the screen as they no doubt fill the minds of the piece's subjects. They exist to grab attention, to make the tagged user stand out among many, to become a spectacle, yet it does so through these repeated and frequently re-used, copied images. Individuality through mildly modulated conformity. All this is very clearly communicated through the piece, and, while interesting, it is by no means a difficult conclusion to come to through a quick browse through a series of profiles. My criticism of this piece, though, lies in its misunderstanding of the users' interaction with these badges as modular, reified emotion.

The typical teen MySpace user who would post these badges does not interact with them in such a linear, monocular way. By essentially enlarging these small badges in the attempt to mimic the emotional impact of the expressed emotion, the artists have removed the key characteristics of these objects. These badges are important to the teens because they can be changed, moved, deleted, and combined with any amount of other data. FlawedArt's presentation of the objects makes the badges the center of spectacularity rather than the user, thus erases the interactivity that these badges imply within the context of a MySpace profile. It is significant that they are referred to as badges. Badges exist, one among many, on a piece of clothing to express a unit of information, changing meaning among different contexts, badges. When these items are endowed with a self- and social-classificatory trajectory, to make them into an overpowering force, as they are in One Small Step, fundamentally misreads their use and importance.

Overall, the FlawedArt piece is brave enough to approach this largely ignored territory for net art. MySpace and other arenas for creative social interaction have the potential to be fertile ground for the interaction between art, artist, and participant that so much net and electronic art has strove for in the past. Artists have only begun to take steps into this area, but as they do it is necessary to keep in mind the aspects that make these networks unique, what makes them operate.

[found thanks to networked_performance]

Posted by Nathan at 01:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)