The Art of Mixing Realities: Virtual Art in Physical Spaces

In The Art of Mixing Realities, Sallie Jane Norman discusses the convergence of consensual physical reality with virtual reality through the means of art-making. Norman defines art as “taking the stuff of (our experience of) the world, and framing it in a sensible, perceptible form so that we can adopt a contemplative and/or critical distance from it.”

She believes that in order to contemplate or critique reality through art, it is necessary to compare the art to everyday realities as a reference. In the past two decades, new technologies have enabled art that not only allows for full emersion, detached virtual environments but rather the possibilities of using the internet as a tool to overlap live action and virtual worlds.

Since the rise of virtual reality art in the 1990s, technologically enhanced art has increasingly moved further in the area of augmented realities. Beyond art, researchers in scientific fields of ergonomics, ethnography, and psychophysiology are interested in researching augmented technologies to solve real issues involving robots entering hazardous environments, laser surgery, or anything that involves superhuman mechanical precision. More recently, artistic visions have merged with IT research to help build tools for communication purposes. Xerox Park, Sony CSL and other research groups have solicited artists to use their ingenuity to come up with augmented reality solutions to technological problems.

Case Studies:

Norman details four case studies in which artists mixed realities of the physical world with the technical world using the internet as a tool of communication.

Anonymous Muttering

The first piece titled Anonymous Muttering was created by Knowbotic Research in 1996 for the Rotterdam Dutch Electronic Arts Festival. The work has participants both on the web and in a physically located place. Users both online and offline collaborated in the creation of sound and light events that were played back in both digital interface of a live webcast as well as in outdoor locations. The sounds came from Djs who produced music from several different clubs and their works were transformed into digital fragments. Online, visitors are able to fold a graphic interface to transform the sound. In the physical world, visitors folded a silicon membrane to manipulate sound. Lights were also displayed through stroboscopes to experience both visual and audio stimuli. The visitors both on and off line were participating in manipulating the sound and light simultaneously making it impossible to distinguish which sounds/lights came from which source.

Vectorial Elevation

Vectorial Elevation was created by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in 2000. His work combined historical qualities of urban locations with the Internet to reshape the cityscape. Internet users were able to design light sculptures that were then displayed live in Mexico City’s Zocalo Square. Eighteen powerful searchlights that could be seen with 15 kilometers were controlled by online 3D simulation. The project had more than 800,000 participants from 89 countries over the course of two weeks. Beyond the numerous participants online, many locals physically came to the city center to experience the work.

The original website www.alzado.net is now being used a decade later to design light during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. Users can manipulate where the strobe lights will shine by moving graphic light images across a google map of the city. Afterwards, the user is then able to watch their own work of art live through four multi-view webcams.

Acoustic Space Lab

The Acoustic Space Lab is an audio mixed reality project launched in 2001 by the International Acoustic Space Research Programme.  30 artists were gathered in Lativia with a radio telescope nicknamed “Little Star”. Little star was ranked among the world’s top ten high precision radio telescopes and together with Little Star, artists experimented with the potential of the radio telescope in three different ways.

“The Acoustic Group”- explored the acoustic possibilities of the actual dish and focused on picking up noise and nature sounds in the Latvian forest. “The Surveillance group” used little Star as a spying device switching the feed horn to pick up communication on satellites. “The Radio Astronomy group” used the dish’s more traditional powers and used it as a tool of planetary observation and harvested data. After four days of these experiments, the artists hosted a six-hour web cast in Riga, with remote participants in Vienna.

Manhunt: Can you see me now?

Can you see me now? is a game simultaneously played online and on the streets with teams. The concept was initially tested in 2001 by Blast Theory, a London artist group. The game is a virtual and reality chase where players in the physical city chase players on the Internet. Handheld computers are given to runners in the physical world showing the positions of online players on a loose map of your city. Up to twenty people can play at a time. Tactics and strategies are involved and audio streams on walkie-talkies are allowed to hear the pursuers on the streets in the city. The runners win the game when they “catch” the virtual player.

All four of these artworks have innovatively converged the fields of physical reality with virtual reality. In Actualizing Bodies, Abstracting Selves, Anna Munster discusses critical key issues of virtual reality.  One critique of full emersion, isolated virtual worlds is the enlarging gap that separates the digital form the material world. She states Janet Murray’s argument that virtual experiences involve a degree of making strange by separating the digital world from everyday experiences. An example of this is animated virtual reality rides in Disney world. These rides have a specified place with an entry and exit point. The immersion occurs but in an unreal place. With these particular case studies however, virtual reality elements are augmented with very real places. The light sculptures over Mexico City are an example of how elements of virtual reality can be combined with the everyday to create a new piece of work.

Munster also discusses the key issues in the digital production of virtual time. She argues that the digital reconstruction of time, when used to re-create realism fails to match up with the past becoming a poor imitation or too perfect. She sees digital reconstruction as a way to produce new kinds of sensations that promotes the imagination. Munster exemplifies this by portraying BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs. Munster uses the show as a positive way of using technology to re-tell history. The show does not pursue the course of realism but rather contemporary technology of animation, modeling, and uses vibrant imagery of pre-historic visecerality. Acoustic Space Lab digitally reconstructed sounds from a radio telescope left by the Soviet Army after its 1993 withdrawal from the Baltic States. Instead of using the radio for its original intentional use, the artists created a new way to make sounds.  Rafael Lozano’s Vectorial Elevation used new technologies to re-shape Mexico City’s historic square in a collaborative and imaginative way. These artworks used the physical space, reflecting back on history but instead of recreating a poor imitation or a too perfect world, they combined the use of participation, collaboration, and technology to augment historical spaces in new ways.

_________________

Munster, Anna. Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, 2006.

Norman, Sallie Jane. The Art of Mixing Realities, 2003.

What is Causing the Decline in Wikipedia Participation?

Wikipedia is considered to be the largest online database of information. Launched in 2001, Wikipedia has had exponential growth and have celebrated it’s 3 millionth article in August 2009. However, in the past month, both Times Magazine and Fast Company have written about the decline in user participation in Wikipedia in the last two years. In 2006 declines in the number of article posts surface and in 2007 users began participating less frequently in editing articles.

Times pointed out one reason behind this decline.

The site has simply hit the natural limit of knowledge expansion. In its early days, it was easy to add stuff. But once others had entered historical sketches of every American city, taxonomies of all the world’s species, bios of every character on The Sopranos and essentially everything else — well, what more could they expect you to add? [1]

This is certainly the case with Wikipedia. In my own attempt to write a new article on the site, I had to research for possible topics for several hours before finally finding that an article on “Krause Springs” had not been published yet. Creating new articles in English are especially difficult now that millions of articles have already been published.

A more significant argument on the decline of Wikipedia correlates to the rise of editorial management on the site. One of the major criticisms of Wikipedia is the power the site community gives to certain users to edit and delete articles over others. Fast Company writes,

Those passive editors who make just a single change per month see around a quarter of their changes erased or modified by other, more active editors (the rate was just 10% in 2003). [2]

Number of users are declining

System Operators on Wikipedia are given more access to the site and therefore have more power than other users. [3] In the past few years, Wikipedia has become more aggressive in editing and deleting content which is a positive move to become a more “reliable” source of information, but also extremely negative in terms of attracting new users to participate and give their own opinion. If potential new users attempt to publish articles only to have them heavily edited or deleted, these participants become discouraged and revert back to just being passive observers, thus perpetuating the already slanted demographic in the Wikipedia community. In order for a more diverse population to participate and for future growth to develop, Wikipedia will have to create a more user friendly system where new users are not constantly battling with Wikipedia authorities to participate in the community.

[1] Times Magazine

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1924492-2,00.html

[2] Fast Company

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/clay-dillow/culture-buffet/wikipedia-decline-scientists-search-answers-wikipedias-numbers

[3] Criticisms of Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Wikipedia

Blog about Amsterdam

Hi friends. I recently started a new blog called Muntthee about life in Amsterdam. I will be posting pictures, videos, events, anything relating to Amsterdam on this blog. Let me what you think!

Review of Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet

Lisa Nakamura’s book Digitizing Race and Culture: Visual Cultures of the Internet covers a range of issues involving race and gender on the internet. Nakamura is an associate professor in the Institute of Communication Research with a joint appointment in Asian American studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

She begins by giving a historical background of race in American politics in the nineties. During the Clinton-Gore administration, a new movement of neo-liberalism brought about racial “colorblindness”. The idea being that it would be more progressive to avoid the subject of race and not address racial differences in politics. By omitting racial discussion during the emergence of the internet, relevant research of race on the internet was never produced.

Instead of covering blatant racism by hate sites and focusing on the more radical case studies, Nakamura covered five very different areas involving race and gender on the web. In the first chapter she discusses the visual culture of AIM buddies. AOL Instant Messenger graphic icons are hugely popular on the internet. Many websites are just for the creation of these icons. Users especially like to take part in creating these icons and many have racial identities attached to the icon such as an animated GIF of a cartoon girl wearing an all American flag outfit with the words “Never 4get 9-11.” These user generated icons visualize the need internet users have of identifying themselves based on race and culture to their peers on the web.

Nakamura then introduces the website www.alllooksame.com where users take a quiz by guessing if the person on the screen is Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. Many Asians think they are able to distinguish between different Asian nationalities but the average person who takes the quiz gets 7 out of 18 images right. This average low score proves that one cannot make judgment based on visual representation of a person (I am of Japanese descent and got a 6/18). I find this website extremely interesting because advertisers or companies are not profiling people, rather the user initially profiles the person and surprisingly discovers that race is more complicated than previously thought.

“Users of alllooksame.com bulletin boards commiserate with each other about their low scores; and importantly, the low scores that most users get confirm that seeing is not believing- the “truth” about race is not a visual truth, yet it is one that is persistently envisioned that way. Alllooksame.com is an apparatus that deconstructs the visual culture of race.”

Within this chapter she also discusses the problem with language and how racism occurs with language due to web biases towards English as the main language for the web. As a case study, she discusses the language divide in a country like India. It is very costly to type in a language like Hindi, therefore many who do not speak another language other than Hindi are left out of cyberspace and even those that speak English has to give up “ typographical purity of Hindi to enter the digital commons. Thus the internet will produce impure or inauthentic expressive forms.”

Nakamura also covers how race in cyberspace is portrayed in film and advertisements. She illustrates the problems with the “whiteness” of the users engaged in high technology in The Matrix Trilogy and The Minority Report. She also discusses Apples famous ad campaign where alpha channeled images in black of people are dancing with their sleek white ipod. Although all the images of the people are completely silhouetted in black, Nakamura argues that race is still represented by stereotypical signifiers based on their clothes, type of music, and attire.

In the fourth chapter, the focus shifts towards feminism when Nakamura introduces www.babydream.com. Just in the past few years, pregnancy websites, forums, and discussion boards have gained popularity for women who are trying to conceive, pregnant, or just given birth. These are websites where women can discuss hopes, fears, problems, and progress of being pregnant and giving birth. This is a very interesting way of studying femininity and race because all of these women have graphic images or real pictures portraying the pregnant status in a visual way. Similarly to the AOL Instant Messanger icons, pregnant women can create their identity by creating an image or choosing from images that most favorably represents them visually. These pregnancy websites can be studied to understand activity of a sub-genre of women on the web.

Finally, Nakamura studies the measurement of race on the web. She discusses the many problems and stereotypes that are involved with web activity among minorities. For example, Asians are considered one of the “model minority” groups and considered to be among the more fluent in technology and more involved in the web. However many studies that prove these results are based on phone interviews in English, thus only taking in to account a small English speaking Asian population and leaving out the rest. This chapter clearly brings about the errors in the ways that research on demographics is performed on the web.

“Many of these surveys design questions that hew to this paradigm by querying respondents on what types of services and activities they engage in, rather than asking them about their cultural production, such as postings to bulletin boards or creation of Web sites or other forms of Internet textuality or graphical expression. Thus Internet use by racial minorities may be misunderstood as being on a par with usage by the white Internet majority in the United States if “access” is the only criterion considered.”

Without asking the right questions when doing web research and going about the research in a multilingual and broader medium, it is difficult to really know which demographics participate in the web and in what way they engage with the internet.

Lisa Nakamura’s research on race and the web is thorough, diverse, and thought provoking. I was glad to discover the different variety of web based race research through film, advertisements, pregnancy bulletin boards, instant messenger, and race based websites. I was fascinated by the way language contributes so largely to race and racial representation on the web and would like to have read more developed research on language and demographics. I found the last chapter to be the most intriguing since it deals with current problems of web demographic research and ways to improve our current study on the web in order to collect a more accurate portrayal of race on the internet.

Callie & Paige

In Amsterdam!

Callie

Paige

What is Google Wave?

I actually knew nothing about Google Wave until today. If you want to learn about this new web communication tool, check out the two videos below.

This first video is a three minute condensed review from Cnet. Check out this video if you don’t have time or don’t care about Google’s in depth overview.

This is Google’s official video on Google Wave. If you want to learn everything about Google Wave and have over an hour to spare, then check this one out.

IKEA Font Craze

I read about Ikea changing fonts from Futura to Verdana on the headlines of New York Times the other day! Who knew that a company changing fonts could cause such an uproar. Another example of how the web is changing the look of company in the physical world.

New York City

Had reunion with my Amsterdam friends in New York City. So nice to see them again!

My love for New York increased by 50% when I discovered Korean food in Queens. This meal was $2.99!

There was a guy eating a sandwich next to this. New York, New York!

Queens

Looks like you need more shit talking skills than actually playing basketball.

Amsterdam Love!

West Texas

Took a road trip with my dad to Marfa, Terlingua, and Big Bend National Park. It was really nice to see some beautiful parts of Texas before I left America.

Marfa, Texas

Big Bend

Going Away Party

Celebrated my moving to Amsterdam at Austin Parks and Pizza this past weekend. It was awesome.

go karts!

Best part of the night!