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Janet Cardiff, Orson Welles and Augmented Space

10 May 09 · Shelly Nadashi

In a previous blog I wrote about Augmented Spaces. I would like now to present Janet Cardiff’s work in relation to the notion of augmented space and in comparison to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, which I’ve also discussed here before.

Cardiff is a sound artist famous for her audio walks in which she records herself and creates audio tracks especially for certain walking roots. Her audience is asked to wear headphones and to walk in a certain path while listening to an audio track.

Janet Cardiff

The example of Cardiff’s work is applicable for the discussion about War of the Worlds because both hers and Welles’s work is essentially an audio work based upon a narrator’s voice and other sounds which give a sonic interpretation to physical reality. In both cases, a technological layer in being posed over physical reality.

However, while Cardiff is mostly targeting her work towards a specific audience of art consumers – she uses CD players as her audio projection devise – Welles used the radio as his projection devise, and he knew well that War of the Worlds will be consumed by a less sophisticated audience, which might not recognize the fact that this news broadcast was actually a theatrical piece (or an art piece). In this sense his work is experimenting more with the consequences of what might be caused by augmenting another layer of technology over physical reality. In other words, whilst Cardiff work is playing with the notion of augmented space within the safe environment of the art world – Wells’ work functioned in areas beyond this world and resembled more to a real social experiment.

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Cold Intimacy

8 May 09 · Shelly Nadashi

We are recently witnessing a phenomena related to media and technology; a unification of all media forms into one form, the digitized one. Television, radio, newspapers and telephone have all been shifted into the Internet lately. This unification makes the Internet a devise with a vast amount of utilities as well as with great emotional depth and importance for many people. It makes the Internet a confusing place to be as well; managing a private mailbox for instance is actually an act with a social complexity much bigger than writing letters or having a phone conversation. It requires greater emotional management skills and communication sophistication; once one connects into the Internet she or he are connected to an entire net of different utilities and people, thus they must make a clear and conscious choice in regard to how they will use and with whom they will communicate at the given moment.

Pr. for sociology Eva Illouz in her book Cold Intimacies points out that the Internet is a psychological technology and not only a technology for information distribution; it has a major effect on the way we feel because of the split it creates between body and mind. When discussing an emotion such as love she is making an argument about the role of imagination in the process of falling in love: whilst the traditional model of the act of falling in love is based mostly upon an idealization of the other person and of physical attraction, the model for Internet love or Internet imagination is made out of two fundamental systems: text and image. The kind of knowledge created by this sort of imagination is thus based upon a mental perception of the other person rather than a sensual one.

Developing a critical awareness to this kind of intense engagement with technology is important I believe in order to understand the way in which we communicate with each other today – and the impact that the Internet carries in it, beyond the technical one.

Bibliograpphy:

Illouz E. (2007); Cold Intimacies – Emotions and late capitalism; Polity Press

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Augmented Space

8 May 09 · Shelly Nadashi

Lev Manovitch has a web site which I like very much because it combines a professional over view of his activity together with a personal perspective.

in his essay The Poetics of Augmented Space he is making a distinction between two kinds of technology based environments – the Virtual Reality and the Augmented Reality. He is suggesting that the second term is describing more precisely the way in which technology is effecting physical reality. Manovitch wrote the article in the 90th but I believe that it is still relevant today.

Augmented Reality is a notion that has been discussed especially in relation to surveillance methods, ways of mapping geographical space and ways of controlling different actions in it. It portrays a situation when a technological layer is being placed over physical space to create a third space different from the two others; this space if full of information about itself, and like in a life size map perhaps, it becomes a place to live in and to monitor at the same time.

Many of our physical environments today are being technologically mapped in order to control them and hypothetically, to protect us or improve the conditions of our life.

Video still by Ran Slavin

Ran Slavin is a video artist who’s work I find much about the poetics of augmented space in urban culture.

Biography:

Manovitch, L. (2005); The Poetics of Augmented Space.

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Google.org flu trends

6 May 09 · Shelly Nadashi

Dr. Tirza Hechter in her blog* is writing about the Internet as an information resource at times of danger, global catastrophes or emergency situations. She is referring especially to the recent health crisis of swine flu, to the danger of disease dissemination and to the importance of Internet search engines in such circumstances. Hechter points out that in the first days of the swine flu outbreak in April 2009, the term Swine Flu became the most viewed word combination amongst Internet search engines such as Google or Yahoo. She also mentions the fact that Google has recently launched a new project that is meant to forecast disease spreading. In a relatively new web site Google.org flu trends, the company offers forecasting information services about flu activity in the U.S.

“News is taken to be what is not routine, a departure from the ordinary. Journalism therefore, tacitly divides the world into the seen-but-unnoticed regularities of daily existence and the news, which is seen, noticed, and commented upon as a departure from those regularities. News both focuses and defocalizes attention simultaneously.”

At a time when news broadcasts (as an event in time) have become outdated due to the constant accessibility to news editions on the Web, we might see web sites such as Google.org flu as the new form of News broadcasts. Google.org flu is an example for a web site dedicated to a topic of public concern.It comes to give an organic reflection of what is happening in this area in real life whilst also aspiring to actually prevent the spread of the disease in the physical space. The web page picks up information from “real life”, accordingly places an output and then expects to change what is happening in real life; a kind of an analog – digital – analog process.

Oh! I’ve just noticed that Manki also wrote about this.

Bibliography:

Hechter T. (2009); http://www.notes.co.il/tirza/55892.asp

Kuhn A. (1990); Alien Zone – Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema; Verso.

*Sorry, the blog is only in Hebrew.

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Internet Rape

12 April 09 · Shelly Nadashi

“One day I learned of a virtual rape. One MUD (Multi User Domain) had used his skill with the system to seize control of another player’s character. In this way the aggressor was able to direct the seized character to submit to a violent sexual encounter. He did all this against the will and over the distraught objections of the player usually ‘behind’ this character, the player to whom this character ‘belonged’. Although some made light of the offender’s actions by saying that the episode was just words, in text based virtual-realities such as MUDs, words are deeds.”

Sherry Turkle’s story emphasises the extent to which virtuality and the cyborg space are embedded in language. Language is the symbolic system through which we construct common mental places or common imagination. Virtuality is successfully constructed when language is merged with a non-linguistic experience, with emotions or with physical feelings.

Could a situation happen in the future though, where words and physical actions actually become the same? Reading Karly Burns’s blog The De Bono Code, I can identify with the idea that language is becoming a “barrier to advancement” – however, creating a kind of code is just inventing a new type of language when I feel what we actually need is finding ways to combine more our body with our technologies, rather that our mind and technology.

Bibliography:

Turkle S. (1996); Identity in the age of the Internet; From: The Media Reader: Continuity and Transformation edited by Hugh Mackay and Tim O’sullivan.

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