matt:littlemore

‘If, as expected, the volume of digital content will increase 10x to 100x over the next 3 to 5 years then we are on the verge of a “big bang” in the communications industry that will provide the UK with enormous economic and industrial opportunities.’
The ‘Digital Britain’ white paper will among other things give Ofcom more responsibility to detect copyright infringement in the digital age. Perhaps about time some new rules are made, still a delicate balance between the protection of intellectual property and space allowed for individuals to express and grow creatively needs to be struck.
Chapters 4 (Creative Industries in the Digital World) 6 (Research, Education and Skills) and 7 (Digital Security and Safety) will be particularly interesting, but it is well worth checking out your rights and restrictions regarding the creation of any digital content.

Info on the Digital Economy Bill

Search for www.culture.gov.uk/images/…/digitalbritain-finalreport-jun09.pdf to view the White Paper

There are lots of incredible generative data visualisation pieces around at the moment, and some great inspiration for the forthcoming Creative Flows project. With our group already having an idea of what we are trying to achieve, some examples on the net seemed to immediately jump out as a benchmark.

Being very much a graphic design influenced team, the visual aesthetic was discussed almost before the actual concept. Digg BigSpy feeds the most popular stories ‘Dug’ by users and is definately close to how I imagine the news feed type aesthetic for our project. I like the minimal use of colour, varying type size and immediacy of the scrolling info as it comes in.

As we will be using RSS feeds, I also note RSS voyage by Andy Biggs. It’s a really immersive way of displaying usually linear snippets of info. You can integrate your own personal RSS feeds and browse them while you zoom in and out. As we intend to create a piece which requires no interaction but generates the visualisation automatically voyage will not be so much an influence directly, but I really like the smooth 3D space.

The NBC tweet tracker is also worth pointing out, as it is employing a similar approach to our own project. Using a more obviously accesible interface the most tweeted strories appear as larger images. Our Flow project will be a more abstract (and hopefully more indicative of the frenzy of ‘chat’ around olympic stories) version of this concept.

It is also worth watching Hans Rosling’s funny and engaging talk on the importance and future of data visualisation of publicly funded information
and his website www.gapminder.org

‘Combining Art with Science’. Some fantastic vintage news clips of Rick Dyer, creator of the classic animated arcade laser disc game Dragon’s Lair showcase his new technologies such as the Halcyon speech recognition computer and it’s implementation in a new, secret, interactive video laser disc epic which sadly never made it into production. The average sitting time was to be 3 hours… Perhaps wishful thinking for the parents of today. ‘We are estimating you’ll be able to play the game 20 hours a week for 6 months before you will have explored the entire world’.
Why did nobody ever make a video game which gets annoyed when you leave the room for a snack?

The idea of interactive film narrative has been around a long time, yet has never really made it to popular culture in cinema or the small screen. Kinoautomat was the world’s first piece of interactive cinema – part film, part performance, which premiered in Montreal in 1967 – “One Man and His House’. Created by Dr. Raduz Cincera, the narrative was determined by a majority vote at crucial parts of the story where the normally passive cinema-goers would push a button to decide the outcome of a particular scene. The votes (red or green) would display around the border of the screen, and the projectionist would switch the lens between 2 synchronised films depending on the result. Politically inspired, Cincera who was a Czech during the Cold War, was making a commentary on the illusion of control of voting. Although no ‘new media’ technologies were used, Kinoautomat was the first instance of interactive media.

The idea of user defined narrative took me back to the days of Fighting Fantasy books, with which I whiled away many childhood hours. The work of Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, such as ‘The Warlock of Firetop Mountain’ (1982) and ‘The Forest of Doom’ (1983) allowed the reader, armed with a pencil and 2 dice, to decide his own fate as the narrative was traversed. The format allowed the books a much longer lifespan, having many different outcomes. The series became hugely successful, putting the reader in control of the fate of the character, the idea closely related to the boom of simlar role playing games in the computer games industry.

Another nostalgic favourite from the same era was the arcade game ‘Dragon’s Lair’ (1983). Created by Rick Dyer of Advanced Microcomputer Systems, it was the first of a number of Laser Disc games, which used real animation footage where the narrative was decided by the choice of the player at critical points. The story was delivered by jumping to the chosen scene on the disc. This was very much an example of interactive video – very different to the coded arcade games of the time and with a graphical detail which was to really stand out against the pixel video games surrounding. And so it should, 6 years in the making, costing Bluth (Don Bluth – The Secret of NIMH) Studios $1.3 million to produce the 22 minutes of animation, some individual seconds using 24 hand painted cels – much higher than the industry standard. However, the initial magic (and commercial income) was to be short lived with players becoming bored with the memorizable play and operators with the unreliability of the units. Despite the emergence of some other laser disc based games such as MACH III which used video footage with the game overlayed on top, the interactive laser disc technology was to disappear from the arcades in the early 90s.

Of course, media technologies continue to make ideas more accessible, cheaper to produce and more portable. You can now download Dragon’s Lair for your iPhone and play Fighting Fantasy on your DS.

Inspired by the Colour of Sound Weekend I dug out my old Casio PT-50 childhood keyboard with the idea of bringing my toy of the 80′s into the 10′s. I knew she would come in handy one day so was stored with my other nostalgic 80′s electronica. Despite a few dodgy slider contacts no doubt clogged from 3 decades of forgotten toy cupboard dust, with a new set of batteries and a good shake the PT-50 was ready to be wacked into the mac to see how she fared in a new digital age. And I must say, even just using Garageband for a bit of extra echo, reverb and fuzzbox it actually sounds half decent! And so, research pointed me to the idea of Circuit Bending where I found an example of that very keyboard…

Reed Ghazala – self styled multi media artist, hailed as the Father of Circuit-Bending, pioneered the transformation of the existing circuitry of basically any sound making toy or device. His other-worldly creations, controlled by transplanted switches, movement and sound itself saw a new kind of instrument genre. Musical artists such as Tom Waits, Peter Gabriel, Faust & Towa Tei wishing to push musical boundaries were quick to commission instruments for themselves.

The legacy continues… poor teletubby

The era of the digital native has brought about the rise of a new generation of digital media producers who are often free from the constraints of artistic convention and legal consideration. The new guerrilla media revival utilizing experimental media as resistance, parody and subversion is alive and thriving in the digital world. The result is some daring creative experimentation with narrative and form, fresh artistic visions largely unaware of but rooted in the avant-garde tradition. In his book exploring the social and cultural contexts of subversive cinema ‘Film as a Subversive Art’ (1974) Amos Vogel says:

The avant-garde offers no solutions or programmatic statements, but a series of intricate challenges, hints and coded messages, subverting both form and content. in this fundamental sense, it is by definition an aesthetic and a political movement… In its works, film is sacked, atomized, caressed and possessed in a frenzy of passionate love.

The description lends itself comfortably to the ideals of the YouTube ‘Vidders’ and remixers. A large proportion of YouTube content is made of ‘fanvids’ which although have a flagrant disregard for intellectual property and copyright law are generally a celebration of pop culture which are intended as a display of appreciation for a particular band, artist or celebrity to share with other fans. Rather than subversion they see their work as adding value to the site, acknowledging credit to the creators of video and music and as there is no profit to be made consider the results free advertising for their favorite artists. Some artists react positively to the exposure, realising the videos may actually create more sales. As the players in the remix culture use ‘found’ materials (sharing a lineage to Marcel Duchamp and the surrealists who used and repurposed found objects) they often skirt copyright laws, the interference from the corporations who own the material only serving to make them more savvy to use clever workarounds to confuse the censors and bots which detect infringements.

The use of social networking and new forms of digital communication has allowed people to become participants in an organic production and consumption cycle, using the relatively anonymous platform for creative expression and resistance – the success or failure of their work to be judged by their peers. With the availability of easily obtained music and video archives, remix aesthetics, blogs and web 2.0 new styles and formulas are quickly played out, imitated and subsequently devalued and replaced more quickly than ever before. In this way, the unnamed guerrilla artist is reshaping the very visual culture of new digital media and directly challenges the ideological and political power of mainstream media. In the 1971 book ‘Guerrilla television’ Michael Shamberg and the Raindance Media Collective say

Community video will be subversive to any group, bureaucracy or individual which feels threatened by a coalescing of grassroots consciousness… it puts people in touch with one another about common grievances.

As we enter the increasingly global, mobile and interactive digital age, so the social impact of new media becomes ever more important. Becoming part of everyday activity much earlier in life than print literacy of previous generations, parents of the first generation of ‘Digital Natives’ (John Palfrey & Urs Gasser) will probably struggle to keep up with the ever changing face of social media while those kids ‘Born Digital’ will continue to shape the future of our culture, economy, politics and social roles in the global digital world. Media literacy is essential to promote the analysis and production of various texts & media through greater access to information and the tools required to produce them. Whilst it is important to teach the foundations of new media within education systems, it is out of the classroom where students will produce, distribute and critique the cultural pieces they create through global open source networks. The freedom of expression that has been unlocked is not without its potential pitfalls and brings along new concerns of safety & legality but as is already evident will feed the tidal wave of inventive creativity which will change the way we experience art, music & life.
In ‘On Photography’ Susan Sontag describes the transformation of the photograph through industrialization -

“That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was gratuitous, that is an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. as industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.”

Parallels can be drawn with the domestication of digital media – no longer the specialized knowledge of the academic or wealthy and increasingly open source resulting in the snowball effect of creativity and skill of the ‘amateur’. Interactive social communities and Web 2.0 sites allow content to evolve to that which the users want to experience. This in turn changes social consciousness as the consumer becomes more than a viewer – producer, critic and collectively, content editor.

Read New Guerrilla Media

James Vicary was a market researcher, best known for popularizing the notion of subliminal advertising in 1957. He used a movie theatre in Fort Lee, New Jersey he tested subliminal messaging on over 45,000 movie goers over a 6 week period. While the patrons watched a movie (called Picnic) Vicary displayed 2 subliminal messages – ‘Eat Popcorn’ and ‘Drink Coca-Cola’. The messages were text based subliminal messages and were displayed much faster than the human eye can see – they flashed on the screen for 3/1000s of 1 second – and they were displayed once every 5 seconds. Results were taken by comparing the current 6 weeks sales of Coca Cola and popcorn to sales figures from the previous 6 weeks. The difference was phenomenal:
Popcorn sales had risen by 57%
Coca Cola sales rose by 18.1%
These figures suprised even Vicary himself. At the time the findings caused somewhat of a hysteria, further research started to be done into the influence of subliminal messages, and they were soon banned from being used within advertisements. However no detailed study of his findings was released and no independent evidence turned up to support his claim. Eventually, in 1962, Vicary admitted that the original study was fabricated.

Khaled Sanadzadeh recalls an interesting story of unnoticed musical subversion in the 1980s – ‘The strange case of Western electronica and psychadelia being beamed out into every home across Iran at it’s most anti-western extreme’. It was the 1980s. Iran was at war with Iraq. Officials were encouraging youths to go to the front defending their country. Residents of Iran dealt with planes that were dropping bombs on them. These bombs were made in the USA and the chemical ones were from West Germany. Iranians had strong revolutionary feelings. They had denied westernization just few years before that. In such a situation, to endorse the West and its culture was an unforgivable sin. However, somewhere at the heart of the anti-West propaganda machine, Iranian TV and radio, weird happenings were taking place.’
‘For a long time, no singer appeared on Iranian TV or sang on the radio. They always used instrumental music in between or at the beginning of their programmes. In the mornings, there were educational programmes about physics, chemistry and biology. The afternoon was the time of war-propaganda and soldiers’ happy faces going to fight with an evil creature called Saddam Hussein were shown. At night, it was the news and stories of successes of Iranian army. Since Mozart and Beethoven’s pieces did not fit these subjects, and people were fed up with Iranian traditional music, they opted to utilize other things; electronic and ambient tunes… There was a programme called ‘The Analysis of the Week’s Politics’ on Iranian TV and they occasionally talked about Germany and France helping Iraq in the war. The sound themes were works of Klaus Shulze and Jean Michel Jarre!’