HASTAC

My last post, also on an exhibition, ("Notation: Kalkül und Form in den Künsten"), was perhaps a bit lengthy, so I'm going to more concisely summarize Paul Virilio's recent curatorial efforts at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in "Terre Natale: Ailleurs commence ici."  Or rather, I should let Virilio speak for himself, which is precisely what he did in a life-size video of himself strolling across a French cobblestone street as he discoursed upon the show's theoretical foundations culled from recent French theoretical tropes: nomadism, population displacement, catastrophes, the changing notion of the city, etc..  Three different versions of this are available on the Fondation Cartier's website, and Virilio fans should be curious to see these nuggets of his recent philosophical-curatorial efforts in partnership with the photographer, Raymond Depardon.

You can also see an overview of the exhibition on the website-- the only difference between the French and English version is that the French version includes one helpful overview that the English does not.

Virilio: Global Catastrophe

The exhibition itself is quite small, as is the Foundation itself.  Virilio's curated contributions consisted of two pieces, video collaborations by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rubin.  Diller Scofidio + Renfro is an architectural duo whose performance and installation work I've definitiely seen in theatres and museums, but I've never taken to their typical slickness of design.  (Their website is beautifully seductive and absolutely worth a visit.)  They designed both spaces for Virilio, the first of which consisted of a suspended grid of white Apple monitors.  It featured waves of coordinated videos of migrants in the duress of transit.  The second space was a large, panoramic video screen that was a dramatic-graphic representation of refugees' movement during the last seven years, especially in relation to war and climate change.  Spectators had to sit on the ground in order to not block the screen.

Quick verdict-- (or is a "verdict" necessary?)  I didn't find Virilio's part of the show particularly interesting.  Diller and Scofidio's slick structures ultimately seemed like little more than seductive interfaces for the same old information, which would have been just as abstract, unintelligible, and horrifying listed in print.  Moreover, shouldn't it also be hard to justify the expense of this cutting-edge appartus when its ostensible subject is the migrant or refugee, who has less than nothing?  Were I more familiar with Virilio's writing, I might ponder whether this also applies to an overly idealistic attitude in thinking about the catastrophe and deriving a rhetorical passion from the force of its description...

Raymond Depardon: Vanishing Local Languages 

Before going to the show, I read that Depardon was a Magnum photograph, and I shut off.  In fact, I almost didn't see his work, which would have been an enormous mistake-- Depardon's two very large documentary video works were incredibly touching and artful.  The first was a series of seven or eight interviews with the representatives of disappearing languages, which ranged from patois in Occitan to disappearing populations in Bolivia, Chile, Ethiopia.  Each interview is short, but concentrated-- they've most likely been rehearsed by the speaker, who is endowed a sense of subjectivity rarely given to cultures  that may very well be wholly at odds with our own notion of the individual.  A little bit of these are available on the exhibition website, and I cannot recommend them highly enough.  Depardon also retains the best that Magnum's tradition of documentary photograph has to offer, namely, juxtaposed with the personal monologues concerning the experience of slipping into cultural and linguistic oblivion ("Who will be here to name things when I am gone?") are the remote lands in which these people live, which are gallingly beautiful, a natural beauty that would be somehow inconceivable without the life being eroded within it...

The Center for Cultural Analysis welcomed Lee Siegel yesterday to discuss his contentious book, Against the Machine.  I had expected the discussion to be fun and contentious, and Siegel didn't disappoint.  Here's the blurb for the book: 

From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics” comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet.

Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.

• HASTAC Scholars

I am MP:me. I use my laptop’s tiny camera, imovie, and YouTube to make and network small, “bad” videos as part of my femi-digi-praxis. In this attempt, I’m out seeking productive fake docs on YouTube. Care to help me?

In my book, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (which I edited with Jesse Lerner) I define the fake documentary as “fiction films that make use of (copy, mock, mimic, gimmick) documentary style and therefore acquire its associated content (the moral and social) and associated feelings (belief, trust, authenticity) to create a documentary experience defined by their antithesis, self-conscious distance.” Perhaps you’ve noticed, but such things litter, no really define, video on YouTube. Once the fake to a certainly dicey but notable real, on YouTube fake docs are the real to a decidedly disappeared belief, trust and authenticity. YouTube is dominated by mimicky gimmicks, glib repetitions, fake takes on the already untrue. So many media morsels gleefully winking at their near mirror image; so many video bloggers tipping their hats to their multiple fabricated selves. That’s the funny and fake vernacular of YouTube: this sincere attempt at academic discourse and communication withstanding. Hey: you try to be earnest, genuine, yourself, in this sea of irony. Believe me, no one will trust its really you…

Now, the productive fake doc is another story. In the book we included 15 chapters on the sub-genre. But look as I may, I can’t find ‘em on YouTube. I defined productive fake docs “as those that self-consciously and directly engage with history, identity and truth in a political and formal project that links and unlinks power to the act of recording the visible world and to the documentary record produced.” This is where you come in.

I’ve been invited to give some talks in early 2009 about shifting media boundaries—fake/real, documentary/art—and I know that this must be happening on YouTube. Everything does. But why go it alone–solo pundit braving it in the video wilds–when what I study is famously based upon the new structures of collective intelligence, the wisdom of crowds, and the out-sourcing of labor in the name of fun.

Will you send me your favorite productive fake doc and participate in the play (here, on YouTube or Facebook)? Share with me a link and make sure to add a comment if you want to convince me. And I’ll need it by early January to make the cut. If I like what I see and also what you say, I’ll include you in my glamorous upcoming talks in Iowa or at CAA. I promise.

Google has recently announced a competition for the best K-12 curricular applications of our model of ancient Rome (www.romereborn.virginia.edu), which was published last month in Google Earth as "Ancient Rome 3D." More information about the contest can be found at:

http://www.google.com/educators/romecontest.html

From that page:

"We're accepting curricula from all grade levels and K-12 subject areas including art history, math, social studies, physics, and philosophy, so whether you teach 5th grade art or high school engineering, there's glory and a nice prize package waiting for you.

Teachers submitting the top 6 examples alone or in teams will be honored as rockstar Google educators online and will enjoy a prize package including:

• Apple MacBook laptop
• Digital classroom projector
• Digital camera
• 3D Navigation mouse"

I would be grateful if you could help get the word out by forwarding this link to appropriate lists and to K-12 teachers you may know.

Thank you very much.

Yours,
Bernie

--
Bernard Frischer, Director
IATH
University of Virginia
www.iath.virginia.edu

by Kevin D. Franklin and Karen Rodriguez'G, ICHASS

In this series of articles Kevin D. Franklin and Karen Rodriguez'G examine computational tools and approaches at the interface of humanities, arts and social science.

18thConnect: Digitizing the Canon

For the humanities scholar who may have only recently mastered library and archival finding aids beyond the archaic card catalog, the possibility of retrieving source materials at the flash of a keystroke (well maybe a few...) is very heady stuff. Very. But even as scholars rub their hands together and salivate at the possibilities that advanced computer technologies bring to the archival table, questions of open access and issues of intellectual ownership and copyright infringement have emerged as fast as the world's knowlege repositories (and Google) are digitizing texts. Accessibility is particularly important to historians, for example, where research in primary sources can often only be accomplished with an expensive plane ticket, extended sabbatical leave, and a pocketful of increasingly dwindling research monies ...

For Laura Mandell and Robert Markley, professors of English at Miami University-Ohio (MU) and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), respectively, the possibilities of internet-enabled research are tremendous. Mandell and Markley are the lead organizers of 18thConnect, a collaboration between MU, UIUC, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which will provide the first comprehensive means of digitally organizing materials produced before 1800 ...

Please click here to read the full article from HPC Wire. To see 18thConnect's website, click here.

About the authors

Kevin D Franklin is the Executive Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science (ICHASS), Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Research Professor - Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and Adjunct Associate Professor - African American Studies (UIUC). Karen Rodriguez'G is Public Relations Liaison for ICHASS and a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UIUC. Founded in 2004 at UIUC, ICHASS charts new ground in high performance computing and the humanities, arts, and social sciences by creating both learning environments and spaces for digital discovery. ICHASS presents path-breaking research, computational resources, collaborative tools, and educational programming to showcase the future of the humanities, arts, and social sciences by engaging visionary scholars from across the globe to demonstrate approaches that interface advanced interdisciplinary research with high-performance computing.

Thanks to Jim for an interesting post on collaboration in Wikipedia. He argues that wikipdia isn't so much a wisdom of crowds phenomenon, but a mass collaboration that happens among actors who may or may not know what will become of their work. 

I've been worrying about the wisdom of the wisdom of crowds myself lately. "Wisdom of crowds" is a Silicon Valley religion, like libertarianism and liberal ideals. (I'm going off of participant-observation from 10 years of being a valley citizen myself, but Fred Turner documents these threads carefully.) I find "wisdom of crowds" to have a dark side to "wisdom" that comes from slivers of contributions made by people who don't know what they're contributing to and likely don't have a chance to profit from their participation. Amazon Mechanical Turk, where many people make about a dollar an hour making extra cash to make ends meet, is an example of this dark side. What are ethical conditions under which crowds should labor? (I asked 67 Mechanical Turk workers this very question myself: 67 Turkers Bills of Rights...more on that later.)

Not only do conditions of work become difficult to account for when the workers are millions of microtime workers. Emergent genderings, racializations, and other modes of differential injustice also are hard to track down. Wikipedia's story of open participation and user agency becomes a cover story for not worrying about how power and authority gets distributed. For example, I strongly suspect there's a bias against women in who is considered notable enough to have a biography. I've known several women who have had the appopriateness of having wikipedia biographies challenged (danah boyd, for example) while less notable men go unchallenged. Like with the liberal politics of individual choice markets, lots of people get a vote but the powerful often set the agenda and win. And like neoliberal racial politics, when everything is about individual choices and agency -- when practically anyone can edit an article -- we don't have to talk about race and gender, right?

We are pleased to announce a forthcoming special issue of Leonardo, presented in collaboration with SIGGRAPH 2009. The issue will feature SIGGRAPH 2009 Art Papers and the SIGGRAPH 2009 Juried Art Gallery, "Biologic: A Natural History of Digital Life."

Full announcement on Leonardo

Submissions for Art Papers are due Wednesday 8 January 2009.

Submissions to BioLogic Art [Juried Art Gallery] are due Wednesday, 18 February 2009.

Steve Anderson and Holly Willis, faculty at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, believe that educators who work with digital media and film should be able to teach without worrying about being sued. But the copyright industry’s obsession with lawsuits has made most educators wary of teaching with any digital content they do not own or license. In response to this culture of fear, Anderson and Willis founded CriticalCommons.org, a knowledge network designed to help educators learn about their rights and responsibilities under fair use, and a sharing tool for teaching.

In October of 2008, representatives from the Motion Picture Association of America held a major summit in Los Angeles to discuss how to combat piracy on campus. “They didn’t mention fair use once,” says Anderson, underscoring how tightly those in the content community guard copyright. “If fair use comes up at all, it is in the context of libraries being able to make backup copies of their DVDs, not for classroom use and certainly not for any kind of media-rich electronic publication.”

An example: Part of the ritual of renting a movie is sitting through the FBI anti-piracy warning, a message so sacrosanct to film makers that it is defies fast-forwarding. And while most of us have read the warning label, few realize that the first sentence is not completely true.  

“The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.”

Filmmakers are not alone when it comes to copyright misinformation. Other media warn us to get “the express written permission” of copyright holders for any kind of use. The truth is, in many cases the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of copyrighted work is simple fair use—the very essence of which requires no authorization or permission. Our country, our culture, and creators depend on fair use, which stems from no less an authority than the United States Constitution, “to promote the progress of science and useful arts.”

But exercising this simple right risks engaging the content community’s full legal arsenal, who are ready to fight regardless of whether fair use is in play or not. Educators, in particular those who work with digital media and film, have the law on their side but lack legal teams to defend their fair use of copyrighted works. Perceived risks for the average person are just too great.

So what can fair use advocates and educators who work with media do? In 2007, Anderson and Willis won a HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning grant to create CriticalCommons.org, a knowledge network bent on putting the fair back in fair use. Critical Commons will function as a social network for advocacy and education, a media-sharing tool, and a safe harbor, making commonly used media samples available to scholars, students and researchers in a critical context.

This idea of a safe harbor is critical for educators, since they should be focusing on teaching, not worrying about whether the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, or the Association of American Publishers is out to sue them. The good news is that Congress created a fair use safe harbor for educators who use copyrighted media. However, to qualify for that safe harbor a user must understand the fundamentals of fair use – not an easy task when fair use is obscured by misinformation.

In October, Hastac Scholar Veronica Paredes hosted a forum at Hastac.org to discuss fair use, held in conjunction with Critical Commons’ Fair Use Day at the University of Southern California. Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law at American University, addressed the audience of scholars and students, pointing out that, “we live in a golden age of fair use.” Paredes, reporting on the event, agreed with Jaszi’s comment, noting that “Fair use has been the safety valve that reduces the pressure of copyright law, but that is changing. The landscape has changed and fair use is becoming really tough to use and difficult to employ. And yet in recognition of these paradoxes, a fair use renaissance has emerged.”

By shaping and sharing best practices, by building a showcase of legitimate claims to fair use, by helping educators argue for ethical and valid claims to fair use, Critical Commons will help ground the copyright debate, and help give the academic community a firm grasp of fair use—so essential to teaching, learning, creating and inventing in the 21st century.


Written by Sheryl Grant, Director of Social Networking for the HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media & Learning Winners’ Hub, and  David Lombard Harrison, Associate Vice President for Legal Affairs at the University of North Carolina.    

Jessica Fraser is part of Mobile Movement, one of 17 HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media & Learning winners, and she posted a wonderful update over at the Digital Media & Learning Winners' Hub that we felt really captured the essence of what Mobile Movement is doing with digital media. Read on! And feel free to comment or ask questions.

"We are learning to make more connections, and to use them in service of a greater vision."
-Leba Haber Rubinoff, artist

Alright everyone,

Here is what you’ve all been waiting for…the second update to our blog. And for those of you who scrutinized our first posting with wonder and excitement…please note that there have been some changes to the process and schedule based on our work in Nairobi and discoveries we’ve made upon testing the concept with the youth groups, the administering NGO, thinkers at UN Habitat and our own insights. Rest assured, the concept is still the same:

1) We are going to change the way people support grassroots youth projects with direct telecommunications, and

2) We are energizing our generation with a new culture of philanthropy: one that is accessible, cool, fun and full of passion.

However, we are not telling the story of five out of fifteen youth groups (this would create imbalance among and between the groups who are equally impressive, spirited and seeking to uplift themselves and their communities against tremendous odds.) Instead, we are using ‘one’ video as a positioning piece about how inspiring these young people are and positing the question to North American audiences, ‘if your community was filled with garbage, rife with disease, had skyrocketing unemployment and no education for the poor…what would you do?’ The a-ha being that with the advent of globalization – and technology collapsing distance – we all do live in this ‘community’. In addition to this positioning piece, there will be several portraits – a walk around a slum; garbage collection as a means of cleaning up neighborhoods and in turn reducing fatal diseases and generating income; youth-led merry-go round microfinancing; jewelry and clothing production; and how young people are schooling orphans and children too poor to pay nominal public school fees.

As a consequence, our test user site will not profile two youth groups but ALL the youth groups…and we will not be asking for our philanthropists to donate to one group in particular but to an urban entrepreneurship fund that will administer tools, equipment and training to the fifteen youth groups and their members. In effect, we have learned about merry-go-round financing from the youth (where everyone pools their resources and then they start financing their members) and will similarly be pooling donors’ resources to pay for items necessary for the youth’s businesses to flourish. This decision was also influenced by the experience and expertise of Environmental Youth Alliance: the cost of administering individual micro-loans will prove too expensive and take away from the efficacy of the program.

We have just returned from Nairobi, all the shooting has been done, we are editing up a storm, all meetings have been had, not to mention many bottles of wine drunk…

Who are we? Leba Haber Rubinoff, artist, our creative leader, interactive designer and filmmaker who with Karun Koernig, head of the international wing of Environmental Youth Alliance, conceived of the idea of Mobile Movement. Melanda Schmid, fearless corporate refugee who decided to take her rising star status in Hotel HR and apply it to development. We’re talking ‘fearless’ folks. This woman, who had never learned to drive in Canada, got her license in Nairobi and has proceeded to drive around facing accident fatalities at every corner. Scott Smith, celebrated feature filmmaker and television director, and Jess Fraser (writer of the second installment of the blog and therefore deeply uncomfortable with any description beyond extraordinary producer/filmmaker with limitless talent.)

What we have discovered has been very powerful…and some of our questions have already been answered. What is clear is that these young people are incubators of change. Products of a lost generation that was unable to provide leadership, the young people we are working with in the slums are taking things into their own hands, determined to become role-models for their peers, the community, and the children coming after them (more than 60% of the population of Kenya is under the age of 30).

Upon our arrival we gave each youth group a mobile phone, and then delivered a crash course (I believe it’s described as media training in our outline) on how to transmit media (emails, photos and short video clips). By giving them the mobile phones, the idea is that the youth groups can continue to tell their own stories…allowing story to unfold, the narrative to continue. Beyond the immediate advantage this gives their organizations (conducting business, dealing with clients, networking) – the youth recognized it as a communication tool that could help them engage with their North American counterparts.

On a personal note, I was very conscious of driving into the slums in the proverbial 4x4 range rover-esque vehicle. Tumbling out with sunglasses affixed to ours heads and camera equipment carried in our hands or slung over our shoulders. The time spent with the groups was real…intimate in a way. And yet we always left, after a few hours, or at the end of the day, heading home to our starkly opposite existences – not only in Nairobi but also in the States and Canada respectively. I have been struggling with this contradiction…aware that I want more for Mobile Movement…that the story, the technology, will truly build some form of relationship…that it won’t simply be a to means for people to click pay-pal and for that to be the end. Rather, I am hoping that Mobile Movement will stimulate a beginning. That we can create intimacy and teamwork between people who have never met each other; that this will this lead to great connections and partnerships between the developed and developing world.

A friend recently sent me a speech by Adam Kahane*that has helped me deepen my approach to this question… this journey that we are on. Kahane writes, “If we want to be able to address our toughest social challenges, then we have to become bilingual. We have to learn to speak fluently two languages that are not translatable one into the other. We have to learn to speak both the language of power and the language of love." He uses two particular and unusual definitions of love and power, from theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich said power is "the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity." So power in this sense is the drive to achieve one's purpose, to get one's job done, to grow. And he said love is "the drive towards the unity of the separated."

It seems to me this is exactly what we are trying to achieve – and what we have learned from the young people in the slums of Nairobi: the potential to realize one’s life despite the incredible hardship and that we are all interdependent…that we have an opportunity to join one another, that we are one.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a student of Tillich. In one of his last speeches, King spoke about the imperative of reconciling power and love. "Power without love," he said, "is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. This collision of immoral power with powerless morality constitutes the major crisis of our time."

So how do we ensure that we are all using our power and our capacity to love… that we don’t trip into accepting immoral power or immerse ourselves in powerless morality?

Time will tell.

I have had Cathy Davidson's "Collaboration by Difference" blog post bookmarked for a few days now because it offered me so much to think about. Her discussion of collaboration intersects with a dissertation chapter and a presentation that I've been working on about community and collaboration.  As I've discussed in previous blog posts, I've been thinking a lot about "speed" and "collision" lately.  For me, this latter term is one that has a whole lot to do with community and collaboration.  Various competing and conflicting purposes and goals collide on the Web, and what makes the Web so interesting is that these collisions can become collusions regardless of any conscious choice.

Cathy describes collaboration by difference this way: "you start with people who do notshare assumptions, who do not share backgrounds, who do not shareinstitutions, who do not share ideas, and who may not even share thesame goals. And you see what happens. No game plan."

Her primary example is Wikipedia, which is perfect for me...since it's the case study that grounds my dissertation.  Here's how Cathy describes Wikipedia in terms of "collaboration by difference":

"The form of collaboration by difference that is Wikipedia isparticularly satisfying because people who have expertise are the onesmainly responsibile for all of those entries that cater to my 'weakinterests.' That is the brilliance of the volunteerism or what we callthe participatory learning aspect of collaboration by difference. Thatis, if I am passionate about something, if I am an expert in it, I wantto share that expertise and there are only so many dinner parties onecan ruin (ah, this is getting personal) by talking about dopaminelatency and new models of associative learning. (It's a conversationstopper, believe me.) But on Wikipedia, one can write to one's heart'scontent as long as you meet the community rules of Wikipedia. Anyonecan then read your entry and they can choose when to stop reading aboutyour obsession. They are not bound by the temporalities of the dinnertable. They can dip in or dip out, they can follow links into thestratosphere...This form of contribution and participation is not simply the 'wisdomof crowds.' It is the contribution of one's singular expertise to acommunity that can challenge, emend, review, or augment that expertise."

Cathy, it seems to me, has hit on one of the largest misconceptions about Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 phenomena.  The "wisdom of crowds" narrative is often tossed around in a way that does not at all describe what's happening on the Web. Wikipedia is only a "hive mind" if you consider that the hive mind is a collection of slivers of intelligence or "singular expertise" that end up forming a collaborative enterprise. 

That is, all of these colliding chunks of knowledge and rhetorical purposes will have been a collaboration. When "you start with people who do not share assumptions...and you see what happens," there's no plan or blueprint ahead of time.  But that doesn't mean that collaboration won't happen. In fact, the most interesting collaborations on the Web seem to come when we collaborate unknowingly.  This is why movements like Creative Commons are so interesting to me.  I create something, and I invite others to re-create it.  But I have no idea how that will happen (or, if it will happen).  This isn't necessarily a group of people saying "let's get together and do this thing."  But that doesn't mean it's not collaboration.

Community and collaboration emerge from colliding interests and "singular expertise."  For me, this is the lesson the Web teaches us about community and collaboration.  (Incidentally, those who are concerned about the "hive mind" not only misunderstand what's happening on the Web, they misunderstand what's happening in the mind.  As people like Edwin Hutchins - Cognition in the Wild -  have shown us, cognition is distributed...it very much relies on collisions that become collusions.)  This also offers a great deal of hope.  Cathy's post also noted that collaboration can become too insular and lend itself to groupthink.  But if projects like Wikipedia can remain hospitable to various collisions, then we leave open the door to many voices.  This disrupts groupthink, even if it also leaves the door open to vandals. 

Collaboration by difference means that collisions become collusions regardless of anyone's conscious choice.  This might mean that we are in communities that we did not choose, and that seems to be a source of great hope because it offers us some ways to speak across our various divides.

I'm sure many HASTAC readers have already heard this news, but it's worth repeating: Processing (the fantastic programming language and development environment born in the MIT Media Lab in 2001) finally left beta earlier this week.

Of course people have been using Processing to make beautiful generative artwork and visualizations for years, but this is still an important milestone, and a good excuse to point out again how much fun this software is.

If you're not familiar with Processing, take a look—it's a great way to inspire students (or yourself) to start playing around with code.

(Via why the lucky stiff.)

• HASTAC Scholars

I happened to see Quantum of Solace last night and, at the dinner afterwards, with two friends and two teenage boys, we began asking lots of questions about filmic continuity, geography, and politics. This morning, I went to Wikipedia for some answers and they were all there, in this weighty entry on the latest Bond movie. That exploration led to another, and another, and another, and I began thinking more about collaboration by difference, the HASTAC model and the one, I suppose, that I'm responsible for pushing and exploring and, of course, writing about, not only in this blog but in papers and in some books that will be coming out soon. Here are this chilly Sunday morning's thoughts on one of my favorite subjects.

First, I do not think collaboration is intrinsically and in all situations the ideal method. Sometimes going inside oneself and being solitary is the best way to arrive at a major, conceptual breakthrough. (I've blogged a lot about that this year as well, in my "Thinking on Leave" postings about the necessity, after a few decades of being so engaged with the academic world, of needing this year to read, to think, to walk, to disengage in order to reengage, what Toffler calls learning, unlearning, and relearning.) Collaboration is useful when it works but is not the only method that works.

Second, I agree with many of the conclusions in the splendid studies by Jonathon Cummings that collaboration sometimes accentuates commonalities. And that is not always a good thing. That is, if there are inherent, shared assumptions, collaboration can reinforce rather than contest those assumptions. He works with distributed, multiuniversity, multidisciplinary science teams that do research together and sometimes their "weak ties" lead to work that takes longer and, in some situations, is narrower in its final, net ambitions than it might otherwise have been. I love his research and follow it avidly and I sometimes read his conclusions a little differently than he does (that's a funny sentence, no?). I think one reason for the inefficiencies of collaboration is rooted in the unarticulated form of those collaborations. In certain kinds of collaborative work, everyone compromises at the edges. I'm not even sure if those entering the collaboration are aware of constant self-adjustments they are making in the course of a collaboration (Dan Gilbert's work and also Dan Ariely's would suggest they aren't aware of it at all). During my years as an administrator, I saw this a lot. Sometimes you aimed very high but, given budget, personnel, rules, timelines, and circumstances, you ended up with something more circumscribed, less lofty, but workable and, in the end, actually working. The difference between theory and practice is often a matter of smoothing out edges, even edges that sometimes would have made the project more interesting but pose insurmountable obstacles to its successful implementation. As someone once said, you can't always get what you want but, if you try, sometimes, you find you can get what you need. (Who said that again? Emerson?)

Third, in collaboration by difference, you start with people who do not share assumptions, who do not share backgrounds, who do not share institutions, who do not share ideas, and who may not even share the same goals. And you see what happens. No game plan. We did this when we came up with the idea for the HASTAC Scholars. It's been fascinating to see the range of topics, the level of engagement, who contributes and who does not, who prefers the quick jab, who the long flow. That mix is what makes the Program interesting and vital. I hope the HASTAC Scholars start to use one another as resources . . . you often, for example, can't have a panel with all participants from your own university or just on your own pet topic, but HASTAC Scholars allow for a some great topical opportunities across institutions, with different disciplinary approaches. We'll see what comes of that.

Fourth, back to James Bond. So Sandy and Nathaniel were wondering out loud with Priscilla, Joe, and me about deserts in Bolivia, filmic continuity, who Vesper was and what she did or didn't do in the last Bond film, whether the movie was filmed on backlots or locations and what locations, and what Giancarlo Giannini had been doing since those Wertmuller movies of the 1970s. I went to Wikipedia this morning and spent the next half hour lost, far, far from the Quantum of Solace, clicking from link to link to link out into the information stratosphere. (Peter Lamont designed the sets, which were my favorite part of the movie; I was shocked to read he was born in 1929, sixty years worth of work as a film set designer. My other favorite part of the movie was James Bond's knifeblade-sharp Tom Ford suits and then the American CIA-agent's schlompy cotton shirts and dowdy ties worn on a slouchy posture that must have been fun for the costume designer Lindy Hemming and the actor. I was also interested to find that the plane battle sequences were filmed in thirty-second segments for safety reasons. But I digress . . .)

Here's the point: I rarely go to movies. But when I go, I find I am interested in just about everything, from the sets and the FX and the CGI to the acting methods, the production, the location, the politics, the colors, the costumes, the design. As with most of us, I have many areas of interest that, analogous to weak ties, might be called "weak interests," matters of curiosity but not expertise. The form of collaboration by difference that is Wikipedia is particularly satisfying because people who have expertise are the ones mainly responsibile for all of those entries that cater to my "weak interests." That is the brilliance of the volunteerism or what we call the participatory learning aspect of collaboration by difference. That is, if I am passionate about something, if I am an expert in it, I want to share that expertise and there are only so many dinner parties one can ruin (ah, this is getting personal) by talking about dopamine latency and new models of associative learning. (It's a conversation stopper, believe me.) But on Wikipedia, one can write to one's heart's content as long as you meet the community rules of Wikipedia. Anyone can then read your entry and they can choose when to stop reading about your obsession. They are not bound by the temporalities of the dinner table. They can dip in or dip out, they can follow links into the stratosphere.

This form of contribution and participation is not simply the "wisdom of crowds." It is the contribution of one's singular expertise to a community that can challenge, emend, review, or augment that expertise. You do not have to be bound by the "workability" factor that governs so much collaboration by research teams or by administrative taskforces--or the polite dinner party guest. Because others who are going to profit by the entry have the volition to enter and to exit, your contribution can be proportionate to your interests not theirs. You do not need to calibrate your contribution to a presumed, rather homogenized or statistically median interest of an implied audience the way you would for an article or book manuscript.

That is a key aspect of collaboration by difference. I may find something I never expected to find out because my expectations of an outcome are not governing your participation toward that outcome.

That is a new model of collaboration. In a subsequent posting, I will discuss the ways that online affordances promote this particular variation on the collaborative method in ways that other kinds of affordances, adjacencies, and intersections do not. We are just beginning, I believe, to parse the newness of new media and, to my mind, the most interesting aspects are the human, social, organizational possibilities that most of us are only now beginning to fathom together. Between a globally interconnected financial crisis of epic proportions and the success of the Internet-enabled-community-organizer-Chicago-Aldermanic-Web 2.0 model of the Obama presidental campaign, we are getting a crash course these days in how collaboration by difference works.

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Special thanks to Flickr community member Gin Girl Jen for this delightful collaborative image. I like the image (all her images are great---click on this one for full documentation and her photostream) and I like the concept, I jump, you jump, we all jump.

Ruzena Bajscy's visualization research team at University of California, Berkeley, has once again teamed with dancers to use holographic projections as part of a stunning performance that also raises deep questions about touch (the least studied of the senses), virtuality, absence, presence, and loss. This brilliant collaboration with Merce Cunningham and his dancers is given additional power by the long histories that this scientist and this choreographer/dancer bring to their colleaboration. Ruzena is a professor emeritus at Berkeley and has previously been head of one of the directorate's at NSF. She has been a HASTAC leader from the very beginning, and uses cutting-edge engineering work to make the most exquisite of performances. Cunningham, of course, is one of the pioneers of contemporary dance. He worked with John Cage, Rauschenberg, and others early on for multimedia performances of music, dance, and art.

Here is the documentation:  http://www.kodakgallery.com/ShareLanding.action?c=18vmlsfb.8ilxcpx7&x=0&...

Here's the press release:


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: October 30, 2008

60 DANCE MAKERS, ARTISTS, SCIENTISTS, ENGINEERS, ROBOTICISTS AND DIGITAL
GAMES MAKERS COLLABORATE TO CREATE THE 1960S INSPIRED PANORAMA: A
MULTIMEDIA HAPPENING FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 14, FROM 5--7:00 P.M.
FREE AT UC BERKELEY'S PAULEY BALLROOM

MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY'S TWO WEEK RESIDENCY AT CAL PERFORMANCES
HAS SPURRED A VARIETY OF FREE PUBLIC EVENTS INCLUDING PANORAMA, A TALK
WITH CUNNINGHAM; A COMPOSER COLLOQUIUM; AND A HAPPENING AT THE
MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES RESEARCH INSTITUTE TITLED THE JOHN CAGE LEGACY:
CHANGE IN MUSIC AND MATHEMATICS

BERKELEY, October 30, 2008---Campus involvement in the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company's two--week residency hosted by Cal Performances reaches a
crescendo on Friday, November 14 with Panorama: A Multimedia Happening.
The free public event will unfold in synchronized looping patterns from
5:00-7:00 p.m. at Pauley Ballroom, located in the Martin Luther King
Student Center on the UC Berkeley Campus. Directed by Lisa Wymore of UC
Berkeley's Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies (TDPS),
Panorama, will use large-- and small--scale projections juxtaposed with
live dance, robotic cameras and tele-immersion and audio technologies to
draw audience members to participate in the performance at any time. The
event is inspired by Nine Evenings: Theater & Engineering, seminal 1966
performance pieces instigated by artist Robert Rauschenberg and
featuring such artistic and technological luminaries as John Cage,
Yvonne Rainer, Frank Stella, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay and Meredith
Monk, among others. Panorama brings together more than 60 students,
artists and scientists from UC Berkeley and other universities. The
event honors the pioneering explorations at the heart of the
Cunningham--Cage--Rauschenberg legacy.

Many of Panorama's co-creators are UC Berkeley faculty who actively
pursue multi-faceted research and performance. The happening is
presented by Cal Performances in association with Theater, Dance and
Performance Studies (TDPS), Center for Information Technology Research
in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), Berkeley Center for New Media
(BCNM), Center for New Music and Audio Technology (CNMAT). The public
event is free.

In addition to Lisa Wymore (Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts), the
participants include Sheldon B. Smith (TDPS, Mills College Dance
Department and Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts); Ruzena Bajcsy
(Electrical Engineering and Computer Science); Ken Goldberg (BCNM,
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Information School and
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science); Greg Niemeyer (Art
Practice and BCNM) Abigail De Kosnik (BCNM and TDPS); and UCB Graduate
Student Jen Wang (Department of Music and CNMAT). Additional
contributors are Klara Nahrstedt (University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign Department of Computer Science) and Renata Sheppard
(UIUC Dance Department).

At the center of Panorama will be 22 dancers, including UC Berkeley
students and members of the dance theater company Smith/Wymore
Disappearing Acts. The troupe will perform choreographed
movement---including excerpts from Merce Cunningham's work---plus
movement structures co-authored by computers through a series of
algorithms. The performers will also recite text derived from
computational models written by Sheldon B. Smith. Robotic cameras
developed by Ken Goldberg will capture dancers' movement, a direct
reference to Cunningham's 1972 work titled T.V. Rerun. The dancers'
movement will also be influenced by a musical score generated from
sensor data being streamed live from Zellerbach Hall. The sensors,
created by Greg Niemeyer, will collect sound data, CO2 changes, light
changes and temperature fluctuations from Zellerbach Hall that will be
sent electronically to the performance site at Pauley Ballroom. Composer
Jen Wang will capture the fluctuating live data streams from the sensors
to create the music for the happening. Abigail De Kosnik will mix all of
the data collected during the performance into large and small scale
projections.

The Panorama promises to be visually and kinesthetically exciting.
Audience members will be encouraged to experience the happening from all
angles by moving around the performance space and to become part of the
event by stepping into one of the two tele-immersion pods to experience
virtual touch. The tele-immersion technology is created by Ruzena Bajcsy
and fellow UC Berkeley engineers, along with University of Illinois
engineer Klara Nahrstedt and dance artist Renata Sheppard.

"We are becoming more continuous with our technologies; boundaries are
blurred between who is controlling the development of new systems. New
technologies are extensions of our humanness, and vice versa," explains
Wymore. "Panorama is a performance piece that brings to the foreground
this intimate connection of the human body to technology."

The inspiration behind Panorama is Nine Evenings: Theatre & Engineering
(1966), a legendary series of theater, dance, music and performance
organized by artist Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Labs scientist Billy
Klüver and performed at New York City's 69th Regiment Armory. These
groundbreaking, large-scale performances were a result of a 10- month
collaboration between 10 artists and 30 engineers and scientists. The
use of as-yet-unknown technologies in art, such as video projection,
wireless sound transmission and Doppler sonar, all common today, came
from the joint effort. Recognized as a major artistic event of the
1960s, the Nine Evenings: Theatre & Engineering series still resonates
today with artists who use technology as an intrinsic part of their
creative work.

ADDITIONAL CAMPUS AND COMMUNITY EVENTS
The Merce Cunningham Dance Company will be in residence at Cal
Performances for two weeks, November 3--15. A series of events, many of
which are free and open to the public, has been arranged in conjunction
with the company's performances. A Composer Colloquium with Cunningham
musicians Takehisa Kosugi, Christian Wolff, John King, Stephan Moore and
David Behrman will be held Thursday, November 6 at 4:00--5:30 p.m. in
125 Morrison Hall, followed by an Artist Talk with Merce Cunningham at
7:00 p.m. at Wheeler Auditorium; both events are located on the UC
Berkeley campus. The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI)
will present The John Cage Legacy: Chance in Music and Mathematics: a
happening @MSRI, with the musicians of the Merce Cunningham Dance
Company on Wednesday, November 12 at 5:30--7:00 p.m.

A film series titled Merce Cunningham Dance on Film will be held on two
evenings at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA). The
first evening, Sunday, November 9 at 5:30 p.m., will feature two 1991
films by Elliot Caplan, Beach Birds for Camera, a dancefilm, and
Cage/Cunningham: A Film, a documentary about the artists' 50--year
collaboration, with archival footage and interviews with artists,
including Robert Rauschenberg, Viola Farber and David Tudor. On
Thursday, November 13 at 7:30 p.m., Locale (1979) a dancefilm by Charles
Atlas, and CRWDSPCR (1996), a documentary by Elliot Caplan about the
yearlong process of creating a dance, will be screened. Tickets must be
purchased for these screenings.

MERCE CUNNINGHAM DANCE COMPANY PERFORMANCES
Choreographer Merce Cunningham is one of the most creative and
influential artistic figures of our time---"the high priest of the dance
avant-garde" (The New York Times). The Cal Performances engagement of
Cunningham's company includes four distinct programs performed by the
14-member troupe Friday and Saturday, November 7 and 8, plus the
following weekend November 14 and 15; all performances will be at 8:00
p.m. at Zellerbach Hall. Works to be performed include Second Hand,
originally choreographed in 1970, BIPED (world premiere at Cal
Performances in 1999), iPod friendly eyeSpace (2006) and the most recent
work XOVER (2007). The four multi-instrumentalists that comprise the
Cunningham ensemble are MCDC music director Takehisa Kosugi, John King,
David Behrman and Christian Wolff. Two Bay Area artists will join the
ensemble: Aurora Josephson (soprano) and William Winant (percussion).
Additionally, a new site-specific work titled Craneway Event will be
performed Sunday, November 9 at 1:00 and 3:00 p.m. at Ford Point in
Richmond.

"The Shapes Project" as installed at the ADK in Berlin

The above photo is of the space as installed in Berlin; "The Shapes Project" visually dominates the wall, and in the background, it's possible to make out Peter Kulbelka's film. Anthony McCall's "Landscape for Fire" is just off-screen to the right, as is Mel Bochner's piece. Certain aspects of McCollum's work can be deduced from its appearance, which consists of vast rows of black, amorphous, Rorschach test-like shapes against a white background. Each image is unique-- a little background material reveals that McCollum has created 31 billion such unique images using vector imaging on a home computer-- and individually enclosed in an identical black frame, designed to look like a commercially frame sold for personal photos. The frames are a none-too-oblique reference to the invariable loss incurred in the process of representation, and likewise, McCollum's odd irony resonates with a sense of violence that is foreign to McCall's solid light films. To get a sense of this, I suggest clicking on the link in the paragraph above to download his .pdf introduction to the project, which includes sample shapes. I also stumbled upon a different installation view (seen below) on McCollum's website, which I find much more striking.

Allan McCollum, "The Shapes Project" (2005/6), as installed at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York (2006)

(The Idea of) Architecture

McCollum's interest in an endlessly variable sequence without repetition is also investigated in Greg Lynn's Embryological House sequence. Within the exhibition, Lynn's project stands out because of his fame rather than the unassuming visual display of his work, ten or so palm-sized plastic models of his houses, such as this:

Greg Lynn, An Embryological House

Architecture is not my forte, and the complexity of Lynn's project doesn't lend itself to Saturday morning Google sleuthing. Furthermore, I'm not sure why the curators would choose such mundane, plastic models for Lynn's seemingly digitally dynamic, overtly "morphing" forms. On the wall behind this display were drawings by Friedrich Kiesler, a mid-century architect with connections and influences to surrealism and other movements of the 20s/30s European avant-garde. Below is one of his studies for his "Endless House," which self-evidently visually connects to Lynn's embryo-like structures, as well as sharing a thematic interest in the spatial continuity achieved by infinite singularity of variation.

Friedrich Kiesler, Model for the Endless House (1959)

Post-War Drawing, Surrealism, and The Theatre of Cruelty

Kiesler's connection to the avant-garde seems to be a deliberate point of emphasis within the exhibition's constellation of materials, as is the contrast between forms of mechanical reproduction and drawing. Accordingly, the exhibition featured two small works apiece by mid-century Americans Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly (I cannot remember which exactly)

(Twombly)

(Tobey)

However, even if these works seemed somewhat peripheral in the exhibition, they might be seen as providing a bridge between traditional graphic practices of artistic representation and the more purely private work of writers, such as a drawing by surrealist poet Henri Michaux (although not exactly the example from 1960 below, which belongs to the MOMA):

Henri Michaux (1960)

or this even this extremely apropos piece from 1951, entitled "Movements":

Henri Michaux, (1951)

Michaux's practice, of course, was ultimately an artistic practice intended for a public, even if quietly reserved and obviously inflected by his activity as a poet. The next step into the writer's archive in "Notation" might be observed in the diaries, notes, and manuscripts included by writers, such as Michaux's surrealist "colleague" (to what degree did they know each other?), Antonin Artaud. This was not one of the most striking pieces in the exhibition, but Artaud's essential place in the history of my discipline, Theatre Studies, made it particularly memorable (the below image and self-portrait was not in the exhibition, but conforms to its unruly mixture of scribbles and sketches):

Antonin Artaud, excerpt from journal

Archival Aesthetics: Diaries, Notebooks, Manuscripts

These diaries were primarily grouped in the area directly following the focus on conceptualism. Artaud's journal was placed between two larger, wall-length archival collections of materials from Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee. As an especially interesting gesture, the Klee materials were not drawings, but rather his teaching materials for color theory. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but given that there is currently a blockbuster exhibition of Klee at the New National Gallery in Berlin, the turn away from Klee's graphic is significant-- consistent with the retreat of the visual as such that marked the exhibition's initial interest in Marey's smoke studies. The materials from the Walter Benjamin Archive, housed at the exhibition site, Berlin's Academy of the Arts, (there is a also a beautifully printed new book of the archive's materials, in English and German) are extraordinary, especially for a neophyte Benjamin enthusiast such as myself, (and I likely need not mention the relevance of Benjamin's presence as one of the foremost thinkers of the tradition and conditions of technique and reproduction.) These materials consisted of two types. The first were Benjamin's notes for his late essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," which resembled continuous surrealist text drawings.

Walter Benjamin, Notes for "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

Although these drawings might be dismissed as odd, albeit fascinating, exercises that demonstrate the strength of surrealism's influence on Benjamin, I was quite unprepared for the idiosyncratic graphic index he had developed during his readings of Baudelaire in preparation for writing "The Arcades Project":

Walter Benjamin, Notes on Baudelaire for "The Arcades Project"

This was one of many bookmarks found in Benjamin's personal copies of Baudelaire. The signs on the upper third of the sheet are different colored, simple geometric shapes, (triangles, circles, plus signs), some of which have an "X" through them. The exhibition contained five or six such examples, each of which arranged a similar three-column pattern of such symbols in a different order. Next to these was an incomplete index, in which signs were depicted next to a series of keywords or notes that Benjamin was presumably investigating in the construction of "The Arcades Project." My none-too-specialist-guide seemed to indicate that the researchers at the Benjamin Archive had expressed little hope at deciphering the precise intentions of this private notation system, but nonetheless, I think Benjamin's recourse to a graphic organizational structure-- one, furthermore, that would never be seen by a reader-- is itself of pivotal importance in understanding the visual relative to Marey's smoke, or perhaps, the singularity of the event.

John Cage and The Impossible Score

In regard to such a singular, evanescent aesthetics, a personal favorite piece in the exhibition was a late (1988 or so) painting by John Cage. It might even be a watercolor, (as is the piece below), which would be quite to the point.

John Cage, late painting, circa 1988

This isn't exactly the correct piece-- the included work lacks the black streak in the middle of the canvas, and instead has a series of footprints moving from right to left across the canvas. Consistent with Cage's earliest work, the footprints highlight the process of the painting's production and entreat its spectator to reconstruct its progress as an event. It's a work full of details-- the imprint of Cage's sneakers, the traces of his uneven pattern of steps and distribution of weight-- Cage's inimitable humor, and the inevitable disappearance of his movements into the black mass at the left end of the canvas.

Cage might also be seen as marking the intersection of two related tendencies in the exhibtition: the introduction of referential instability into traditional graphic forms of representation and the emergence of the aesthetic in purely notational forms, especially scores. Such expanded scores might be either musical or choreographic, and indeed, Cage is a figure engaged in both of these worlds.

It is thus no surprise that among the significant dance documentation of archival materials belonging to Mary Wigman, Gret Palucca, (both German Expressionist dancers from the 20s), and examples of Rudolph Laban's notation system one would find a drawn score by Merce Cunningham, one of Cage's oldest and closest collaborators. However, the most striking choreographic contribution were three small drawings from the mid-seventies by Trisha Brown, an original member of Judson Dance Theatre. I recently saw an evening of her recent works, which were quite disappointing, but Brown's drawings are precise and rigorous:

Trisha Brown, "Defense" (1980)

The piece above is only an example of the most freeform of the three drawings, the other two of which were aligned on clearly delineated horizontal and vertical axises, which I believe corresponded to temporal and spatial components. Even beyond the evident epochal resonance of Brown's grid-based drawing style to the minimalist/conceptual strategies so crucial to "Notation," Brown's scores assume a life and aesthetic value of their own apart for the event that they are intended to record, recognize, and render reproducible.

This was equally true in the collection of musical scores that dominated the final room of the exhibition, which focuses on post-war serialism (Xenakis, Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti, etc.)

Mauricio Kagel, "Heterophonie" (1959/61)

Stockhausen, "Klavierstück X" (1961)

Morton Feldman, "Intermission 6" (1953)

A Few Concluding Considerations

(After)Life and the Event

Rather than a conventional exhibition, "Notation" is an act of creative scholarship, an investigation that poses, but does not overtly enunciate, a number of possible critical connections in the assembled body of materials. Indeed, it would be inaccurate to say "works," as the curators have sought to produce tension between archival materials and the work proper. Their interest in the archive is quite to the point-- the archive is precisely that reservoir of possibilities excluded from the event's visible field. Broadly speaking, the immanently posed critical efforts of "Notation"'s three curators suggest the possibility of re-evaluating the visual vis-a-vis the archive. Of course, among these stakes is life, a theme strongly suggested from the exhibition's outset by Anthony McCall's almost autonomous solid light films and Etienne Jules-Marey's the relation between body, soul, and film.

Absence of the Social

However, the very potential of such an archival aesthetics is undermined by the exhibition's aggressively formal, idealistic aesthetics, which evidenced virtually no interest in the social. Accordingly, there was almost no connection to the lines of critique that ensued between 1970 and the present, be it gender studies or the postcolonial. Quite to the contrary, the social experience of exclusion was as elusive as Marey's smoke and as abstractly removed as McCall's mesmerizing, white geometric shapes...

Just because nobody seems to have noticed, but maybe you did, I thought I would post a recent fabulous intervention by RTMark and conspirators; for those interested in gaming see DeLappe's proposal to channel tax payers' funds to the creation of a new game intitled "America's diplomat" to replace the army recruiting and training game America's Army:   

http://www.nytimes-se.com/

que viva el juego.

• HASTAC Website

• Information and Systems Security
• Information System Applications
• Data Mining and E-Commerce
  This conference is sponsored by IEEE Computer Society, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing Institute of Technology and Wuhan University. All papers accepted will be included in IEEE Xplore and indexed by EI. For more information,  please contact : ism@scirp.org.

I discovered this cool project called “Picturing to Learn” today while talking to a friend who works for Dr. Rachael Brady. (Dr. Brady is the founder and head of the Visualization Technology group as well as the faculty advisor to the interdisciplinary studies and information sciences program at Duke University.) (Read more about it at here.)

The goal of Picturing to Learn seems to be getting students to understand concepts better as well as helping teachers learn how to explain ideas in a way that students unfamiliar with the material can relate and digest.  This idea stems from the fact that people understand things better when they are forced to explain it to someone who knows nothing about the topic.

They are “testing” on undergraduate students by asking them to “clarify their own understanding of scientific concepts and processes by creating drawings that explain these concepts to non-experts”; With the help of students and researchers from Harvard, MIT, Duke, Roxbury Community College, and the School of Visual Arts in New York, they already have 4,000 drawings in their archive.  You can look here to see several drawings that aimed to explain different types of chemical bonding. Thought processes definitely varied. Some tried using analogies while others went directly to the technical stuff. It would definitely be interesting to see if there is a drawing that appeals to a majority of people, or if it’s more of a to-each-to-it’s-own deal. Either way, a huge archive of these drawings could be really useful for students, who have yet to learn the concepts, and teachers, who might be able to gain insight from the different types of pictures and even the inaccurate ones.  

My friend is a computer programmer working on the database development part of Picturing to Learn, so I asked her where the project is right now. She is using Prefuse, an online visualization tool for Java, to organize the student drawings that have been archived. I looked on their website, and it seems as if PTL is aiming for such a database – “searchable metadata for each drawing to help inform production of a visualization tool.” Following the idea of using the power of the collective whole underlying sites such as many eyes, digg, and youtube, perhaps the database could be made accessible on the world wide web, where students would be able to vote on which drawings were the most effective.

• HASTAC Scholars