Rave Fashion for Agoraphobics - Fashionable Technology
For the materials workshop with Martin et Martin from EnsAD in Paris Ross and I developed the VIP "Rave" Scarf. So you can wear your own personal party.
Rave Scarf by Lauren Slowik and Ross Leonardy. The scarf is controlled by a lilypad arduino interface so that introverts and agoraphobics can enjoy raves too.
preliminary sketch
scarf assembly
attaching LED strip
"Program or be Programmed" by Douglas Rushkoff - Major Studio 2
"In the long term, if we take up this challenge [of programming], we are looking at nothing less than the conscious, collective intervention of human beings in their own evolution. It’s the opportunity of a civilization’s lifetime. Shouldn’t more of us want to participate actively in this project?" Douglas Rushkoff has managed to articulate my own thoughts on the state of our networked world and has managed to metabolize several thinkers on the topic in an amazingly succinct way (Lanier, Postman etc). I found myself nodding in agreement most of the way through this short and sweet book. Writing ABOUT this book is challenging because Rushkoff's ideas are so dead-on that I'm in danger of simply quoting the entire book.
In the discussion in class someone, probably Dave Carroll, said that being critical about AND with technology is our main duty. I agree, and have agreed for years before I knew I agreed. Working in a corporate software and hardware technology environment for the last 6 year I was surrounded by people jumping into apps, analyzing and bitching about software update this or that. I was never fully engaged in those conversations as I had the distinct feeling that we didn't have the right to complain. That if we were so smart and wanted these magical toys to work the way we wanted them to we should be more involved. But I didn't know how easy that could be.
Then there is the anxiety. The knowledge that we constantly could and should be doing new and different things, wrapping up email conversations, posting new stuff, feeding the insatiable time suck of web correspondence. To paraphrase Rushkoff's first chapter on time: an anxiety sinks in because the computers are waiting for me to do something, we are never NOT connected.
My particular generation are strange middle children in all this change. I wrote some papers in school by hand, some were researched entirely online, all within two or three years of still being in grade school. I asked out a first date on IM, yet I refused to get a mySpace page until it majorly jumped the shark. Perhaps it is this broad scope of experience that has let me see two things clearly: I am more than my "likes" and I am responsible for everything I say and do in every sphere of public life, including the web. Identity is important on the web because there are social constraints that are more likely to be followed when people can connect an identity to the person saying things. But even I have been slow to reveal my real name, and things like spokeo.com are not helping to push me forward in that realm. Not because I am ashamed of what I do and say but because there are other people writing the rules about what can be done with that information. Which leads me to conclude that learning how to control these powerful tools is the most important thing I could learn, and I have known that for a long time but it took reading Rushkoff's book to articulate it. We have to grab our own destiny and not fall one step behind every great media innovation. If we do that, things like PIPA and SOPA would never be proposed because those with the power to do so would have no doubt that a rule so blunt and stupid would never work on us programmers. Perhaps they wouldn't even be the ones in power but we, the programmers, would.
7 in 7 Data Visualization - Major Studio 2
SOFT SCIENCE - A DATA VISUALIZATION
7IN7 1 - book scans that included images
7IN7 2 - books by relative size
7IN7 3 - how often I stuck with my algorithm
7IN7 4 - number salad
7IN7 5 - book topics, outliers excluded
7IN7 6 - relative amounts gained, as perceived by me
7IN7 7 - Numbers tell a story
For more information on the process and the inspiration see the previous post.
7 in 7 - Major Studio 2
A Process for Neither Haste nor Waste
"Devise a repeatable algorithm to find 7 items in the Gimbel Library (or Constoria library). Clearly document the algorithm, how artifacts were selected and the content documentation of the artifact itself. A project shall emerge by the 7th day from pure inspiration. Any combination of artifacts may be used towards the resulting project."
Haste nor Waste Why the title? Because I ponder, and fuss, and pick too much so this project will be firstly about speed. Not haste. Haste means something done without thought. I would like to constrain my thought to manageable increments so that excuses have no time to arise.
DAY 1
My first day at the library I immediately saw six research guides for each of the main topics displayed in colorful paper right at the library entrance. These would be my touchstones for the first 6 days. I will pick a book from one of the call numbers from each of the 6 sheets and then a random 7th artifact of my choosing. By the sixth day I will have learnt the layout of the library well enough that I will challenge myself to choose the 6 subjects and the 7th random without the aid of the research guides. The choosing of artifacts today will be done by listening to the 7th song on a random album in my iPod. once the song is 1:17 seconds in (77 sec) I will stop and choose a book from that section and call number. The book must have a 7 somewhere in the call number.
Once I have selected the books, I will choose seven illustrations/images/designs/paintings etc from each book and scan them.
That is all I can think of for the algorithm for now. I am allowing myself to change the mechanics of the search once a day though not necessarily every day of the 6 days. This will help to encourage fresh thought and trump any redundancies that might occur in the search algorithm.
DAY 2 Today I arrived at the library and had the impulse to find the 7 smallest books I could from each section of the library. Within each tiny book I endeavored to find the smallest image. Sometimes that smallest image wasn't that interesting so I opted for small but more interesting. It was really delightful to find all these tiny books. Tiny books tend to be very focused on their subject. The little-ness also helped me to keep from pondering too much, there was always an obvious choice even if it wasn't the most exciting one.
DAY 3 Today I arrived and decided that I would search for 6 books based on the research guides and a 7th totally random using the constraint of the name of the author or the title had to start with an F (F is the seventh letter of the alphabet). I would then scan the 7th and 77th (and if applicable, the 777th) page of each book. This yielded some interesting results but made the selection of the images a little excruciating since I had no choice in the matter of what was depicted on the 7th and 77th pages of each book.
DAY 4 Today I made an amazing discovery: there are 5 more research guides to choose from with whole sections of the library yet to explore!
So I took to mixing and matching and decided to go by color, taking all warm-toned research guides and finding books from those respective sections that matched those colors and then furthering the algorithm by choosing a photo from inside the book that matched the cover color. I'm pretty pleased with the results. At this point I've abandoned the original search algorithm almost completely in favor adding further randomizing complexity by making a new agolrithm each day. The constants so far have been: 7 books, 6 based on research guide sections, the last a totally unrelated choice.
DAY 5
It's Super Bowl Sunday and I'm planning on celebrating like every good American: eating a lot of meat at a friends house. But first the algorithm. I've brought Nick along and I think I'm going to ask him to compose the strategy for today's selections.
At first I waited, not knowing how he was making his selections. He came back with 7 books, all with covers featuring red and blue prominently, the colors of both teams playing in the super bowl tonight.
Then we headed up and started scanning, with him marking a page quickly and handing it to me. I also marked a page that I selected almost at random, with some quality control to be sure there was image content on the page. Only after a few scans did I realize that Nick had chosen the 77th pages of every book. I was more than pleased with results.
DAY 6 - the last day in the library
Today I arrived at the library wanting build on the loose algorithms I've been developing. Today was all white, or as much white a cover as possible from every aisle until I had 6 appropriate books and the 7th i chose from the Design And Technology section of the stacks in honor of my program. Then I began searching for images within the books that had as much white space as I could find.
"The Urban Speaker" - Design for This Century
Public art interventions are an interesting artifact for analysis: interventions use a variety of devices to communicate their intended effect; their contexts may be specific but their outcomes are broad; therefore, interventions are simple in their implementation but produce a complexity of experiences leveraging the cultural context in which they operate. A valuable aspect of public behavior in urban settings is that they are controlled by unstated but widely understood social conventions. The Urban Speaker by Carlos J. Gómez de Llerena uses these widely understood signifiers to instigate interactions confronting the hegemonic phenomenon of the loudest voice wins.
Description In the words of de Llerena, the Urban Speaker is “an art installation that transforms public space into an instant stage for mass communication. This portable urban furniture allows people to broadcast their voice in public by calling a telephone number from their mobile phones.”1 A tripod disguised as a construction barrier supports a pole with two aluminum signs placed at the top. These instruction signs use typography and layout typically seen conveying public information and traffic laws. At the top of the pole is a loudspeaker connected to a smartphone and a large battery, both of which are hidden in the base. This battery and smart phone configuration makes the project quite portable. The signage asks the viewer to call the posted number to “speak in public” and also offers a QR (quick response) code that directs users to urbanspeaker.mobi to hear other calls, watch video and find out when and where the next Urban Speaker will be set up. Users who call the specified number are automatically answered by the system and can speak their mind publicly for sixty seconds after which the call is terminated. The intervention was installed at the south end of Tompkins Square Park for one day, October 8, 2010, from 3-7 pm. The project was developed by de Llarena and the Wooster Collective as part of the Conflux 2010 festival in New York City. Video documentation of the interaction shot by de Llarena shows passers by confused by the voices emanating from the speaker and looking to the camera for clarification. Several users attempted to call the system at close range only to accidentally broadcast their own feedback loop. The experience has little instruction beyond advertising the ability to amplify whatever you say into your phone out to the world.
Issues Freedom of speech and expression are the primary issues addressed in the Urban Speaker project. On de Llarena’s website he states that “temporary interventions such as this seek to re-imagine what our personal and social experience of public spaces can be in an age of ubiquitous nonstop communication.”2 As an intervention the project addresses the culture of public space ownership within an urban setting and specifically how New Yorkers use their valuable public spaces. Many public places in New York City are often private or facilitated at the expense of a private entity. Nonetheless the culture cultivated in and around these spaces can especially potent and the Urban Speaker makes visible such a contentious nature.
Reviews in local papers and blogs noted the perceived threat of profanity or statements of violence being broadcast through the park, with the Village Voice pointing out that park regulars the “Tompkins Junkies aren't exactly going to be happy about [the Urban Speaker].”3 The broadest audience addressed by de Llarena’s piece are members of any democratic society attempting to use a public space as a place of discourse. Anonymous commentary on society and government is an important element of public discourse. Anonymous satirical writings were published as pamphlets to foment the Colonialist’s cause for the Revolutionary War and have remained a staple of American democratic discourse. Public statement of opinions fosters discussion and with which citizens might be able to more fully express their frustrations with society and governance at large. From this context de Llarena is taking this democratic tradition and using the medium of instant telecommunication to explore and expand the meaning of speaking in public in the 21st century.
Contexts The openness of the Urban Speaker project due to the unscripted content embodies the practice of anonymous commenting on discussions boards and websites. Public forums have rapidly become an integral component of democratic society but have receded from real life into the blogosphere. Communications technology facilitates immediate response within the public forum of the internet, but anonymity and unidirectionality create non-contextualized streams of opinions and reactions that, when viewed outside of the immediacy of their context, can be read as hyperbolic and bombastic. These commentaries are meant to instigate readers (listeners) to similar action, creating a loop of argument with little problem solving value and no focused goal.
The location of the piece in Tompkins Square Park is not an unconsidered one. The history of the park is marked by many protests including the Civil War Draft Riots and later in the 19th century was a hub for labor organizing. In 1874, the Tompkins Square Riot occurred when police crushed a demonstration by thousands of workers, marking the beginning of an unprecedented era of labor conflict. In 1988 a riot erupted when the police tried to clear the park of homeless people and afterward the park was adopted as a symbolic location for tenant’s rights activists to gather.
Illustration of how J.R. Baldwin’s “The People’s Skype” works in response to Zuccotti park’s rules restricting use of amplified sound within the park.
It is illuminating to compare the Urban Speaker’s implementation with how similar tools are being deployed in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Urban Speaker presaged the OWS movement by nearly a year and both of these public interventions pull into focus the current state of public discourse. At Zuccotti Park occupiers were speaking out in public daily but were prohibited from using amplification to broadcast speeches to the ever growing crowd. A method called “The People’s Mic” evolved out of this prohibition. First, a speaker says a few words in a normal voice, no more than half a sentence at a time. The speaker will then pause while many people sitting nearby will repeat the same words together loudly, thus amplifying the speaker. Those sitting at the far edges of the circle will repeat the same words again, to let the speaker and facilitators know that they are being heard clearly by everyone in the group.4
A contrasting project to the Urban Speaker is J. R. Baldwin’s “The People’s Skype”, a one-way conference call system designed to facilitate a distributed PA system at OWS General Assemblies5. This project sprang from a context of great need and a focused goal of spreading public speech that was being directly curbed by the denial of a PA system permit within the privately owned Zuccotti Park.
Analysis and Assessment Aspects of the Urban Speaker project attempt to empower the individual and on the surface de Llarena achieves that goal. The Urban Speaker engages in the discussion of rights to public speech with a random sampling of members of society in Tompkins Square Park. Any number of the users of the intervention might not be aware of their public speech rights. Many are satisfied with declaring their opinions in a private conversation or anonymously online. What de Llarena does most effectively with this project is take a device, the mobile phone, and translate ownership of one into a method for public speech, empowering everyone, even those with landlines in their homes, to speak out in public. Every citizen has a voice and de Llarena wants everyone to know that with technology ones voice is amplified, perhaps even more so than without technology. The Urban Speaker illuminates the messiness of direct democracy, how a random sampling of park goers in an afternoon will produce just as many opinions. Once the novelty of speaking out unexpectedly in public has worn off a user might wonder at other opportunities to voice their opinions. Private phone calls and likewise anonymous rants on the internet facilitate an isolation from any consequences of public speech. The portability and broad accessibility of the Urban Speaker connect those consequences to the reality of a public forum.
But these same technological advances that enable amazing consumer gadgets like iPhones and the creation of the Urban Speaker also help to fuel ominous government surveillance projects. In his paper on the government use of information technology John Villasenor determines that “the ability of information technology to shift the balance of power away from repressive regimes and in favor of their opponents are temporary.”6 Free public speech is at greater risk of being curbed as it becomes cheaper and even more effective for governments, especially authoritarian ones, to record and monitor everything that is being said and has been said even before the speaker becomes a target of observation.
Hegemony as related to the control of information in the name of protecting democratic ideals is nothing new. As Alexander Meiklejohn has argued, “Democracy will not be true to its essential ideal if those in power are able to manipulate the electorate by withholding information and stifling criticism.”7 The implementation of these observation techniques is already well established. The Thai government recently jailed a Thai-born American citizen Joe W. Gordon for 2.5 years for posting links to a translation of a banned book on his own blog8. The signing of the USA PATRIOT Act into law in 2001 made broad sweeping changes to established laws governing surveillance of American citizens, allowing extensive government surveillance phone and email communications. So while de Llarena’s project attempts to empower the individual he does not achieve social empowerment of disenfranchised groups in the context of modern information technology’s facilitation of communication between citizens.
The Occupy Wall Street movement does a better job of avoiding the establishment a power structure by not declaring a leader. Oppressive power structures are interested in maintaining the status quo and are apt to stifle the free flow of discourse. The presence of a voice speaking in public at Zuccotti Park requires the speaker be identified and that what they are saying be reaffirmed by the crowd participating in the speech via the People’s Mic. The People’s Skype is an excellent example of social empowerment via the individual empowerment of a mobile communications device.
Lessons/Implications The implications of the recent OWS would lend more serious context to the Urban Speaker project. From the point of view of a participating protester, one might see the project as a precursor to the voices raised in unison on Wall Street less than a year after it was installed. Originally setup as an outlet for general frustration the Urban Speaker evolved into a collective voice of discontent, unified by a technology that can often be isolating. When viewed from the point of view of a city official granting park permits today they might judge the Urban Speaker as a harmless art project granted permit for amplification. But a voluble social movement like Occupy Wall Street? No permit would be granted but that only makes for more challenging situations and the innovative tools we can create to change our existing situation into the preferable one.
1 http://www.med44.com/pages/urbanspeaker.html
2 http://www.med44.com/pages/urbanspeaker.html
3 http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/10/art_stunts_urba.php
4 http://www.litkicks.com/PeoplesMic
6 Villasenor, John (2011) Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments. Brookings Institute.
7 Marlin, Randal (2002). Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. Broadview Press. pp. 226–227.
8 http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/08/world/asia/thailand-american-insults/index.html