Ultimately collaborating is sharing.
There is a certain degree of courage that enters into the process where we surrender ourselves to the moment and others engaged in our creative work. There is an additional collaborator: Digital Technology. This new technology in is continual transfomation. For the first time we have a technology that objectifies and brings identity to collaborative process.
Digital technology has been making the virtual world an alternative to our visions of reality. We have speculated that each of us perceives our own different reality and the new technology has permitted us to construct our own virtual worlds. In addition, Internet creations are making new environments for exchange, and video games create virtual environments that often consume more time than one's conventional world.
Much of what is going is our teaching the machines how to become us. To the extent that we codify all of our actions, beliefs, dreams, and needs, such efforts create a database for the machine. That was essentially the state of reality that forms the major premise of the popular film The Matrix. Reality is reduced to conscious and unconscious perception.
Perhaps two qualities make digital technology almost irresistible: immediacy and spontaneity.Immediacy has formed an essential element for the World Wide Web. Even in the earliest days this was a medium responsive to our ideas as we published our webpages as soon as we finished, or as soon as we wanted. Often we published in spurts, and a page emerged as different versions of itself as we endlessly edited our chimerical inspirations.
As pages became interactive, we experienced a digital spontaneity that transformed images and text as we moused over the surface of the page. This spontaneous quality sent us searching for dynamic web environments. More and more, the digital environments of the WWW are changing, transforming and mutating into alternative worlds, inviting the visitor to explore the pages, images and text are clues to hidden treasures.
The illusion of parallel universes exist in this virtual context. Quantum Physics has uncovered eleven dimensions of our current reality. And even now, Physics has begun to explore the reality of parallel universes. Often human imagination anticipates new discoveries in the world of science. Perhaps our consciousness is the ever-changing reality that is revealed through our imagination. New realities lurk on the outskirts of our conscious awareness.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Marshall McLuhan & Internet2
Marshall McLuhan is sometimes described as the father and prophet of the electronic age. Certainly no one understood media as intuitively as McLuhan whose ideas literally exploded upon academia as a new field of media ecology was created in response to his work.
The Internet had not yet erupted, but McLuhan seemed to understand the implications of the electronic age that was now emerging as an age of new media. In Understanding Media (originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1964 and now by MIT Press, 1994) McLuhan observed:
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?
Some three decades ahead of their time, McLuhan's words describe the emerging electronic consciousness, the neural network that makes up the Internet, and Internet2 takes us closer to this "spiritual form of information" which has served to fire the imagination of scientists, academicians, and artists. Indeed each advance of media and digital technology is articulated through smaller and smaller devices in which all functions continue to merge and overlap in astonishing leaps and bounds. Print media, mixed media, images, photos, radio, TV, video, and film all merge into a single device, an additional brain outside our bodies, connected through dynamic interactive networks where knowledge and process are housed in distributed servers around the world that know no boundaries. While Internet2 is guarded by the high priests of the Consortium, enterprises like Skype are transforming distances into the immediacy of communication.
Now the artist is perpetually at the point of knowledge and understanding, and creation is an interactive perpetual exchange which is never finished. The creative process starts to become synonymous with the collaborative process. Ideas and expression take precedence over authorship. Ownership surrenders to spontaneity and change. Yes, Miranda, it is indeed "a Brave New World" ...but more than brave... a bountiful world compressed into binary code, a splitting the atom of imagination and creating a new equation of the infinite expanse of conscious awareness and objects dissolving in the energy of process.
The Internet had not yet erupted, but McLuhan seemed to understand the implications of the electronic age that was now emerging as an age of new media. In Understanding Media (originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1964 and now by MIT Press, 1994) McLuhan observed:
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?
Some three decades ahead of their time, McLuhan's words describe the emerging electronic consciousness, the neural network that makes up the Internet, and Internet2 takes us closer to this "spiritual form of information" which has served to fire the imagination of scientists, academicians, and artists. Indeed each advance of media and digital technology is articulated through smaller and smaller devices in which all functions continue to merge and overlap in astonishing leaps and bounds. Print media, mixed media, images, photos, radio, TV, video, and film all merge into a single device, an additional brain outside our bodies, connected through dynamic interactive networks where knowledge and process are housed in distributed servers around the world that know no boundaries. While Internet2 is guarded by the high priests of the Consortium, enterprises like Skype are transforming distances into the immediacy of communication.
Now the artist is perpetually at the point of knowledge and understanding, and creation is an interactive perpetual exchange which is never finished. The creative process starts to become synonymous with the collaborative process. Ideas and expression take precedence over authorship. Ownership surrenders to spontaneity and change. Yes, Miranda, it is indeed "a Brave New World" ...but more than brave... a bountiful world compressed into binary code, a splitting the atom of imagination and creating a new equation of the infinite expanse of conscious awareness and objects dissolving in the energy of process.
Monday, February 5, 2007
Early Internet Collaborations: The Cassandra Project
A very early experiment for Internet collaboration began with a December 15th, 1996 exchange among dancers at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, musicians at a loft in Greenwich Village, NYC, and actors at a studio stage at New York University known as the Cassandra Project. A few remnants of the posted event still linger on servers somewhere. The link posted here may work for a while, but like all web events, websites become ephemeral phatoms that come and go and the preservation of the history of the Internet and its artifacts has been very haphanzard to say the least.
Some of the key artists were choreographer/dancer Lisa Naugle at SFU, Director Alistair Martin-Smith with actors from NYU's Educational Theatre, and musicians and composers at the loft of webartist Pierre de Karangal, led by composers Dinu Ghezzo and John Gilbert. Chianan Yen engineered the cound at the loft site and later produced a CD of the sound events.
The flavor of the times gave a special pioneering feeling to these early beginnings. Artists were experimenting on many levels. The atmosphere was that of a frontier, and engineers and artists found a new framework to explore and extend their work.
The format of this 1996 event was very simple: Using the theme of Cassandra, each group of artists posted short improvisations on the WWW. Each site viewed and listened to the work of each other and created responses which were in turn posted. A structured improvisation by the three sites later led to an exchange of video and sound-ytacks which were used in a stage production in May, 1997.
From these simple beginnings works of depth and richness have evolved, and I2 has begun to come into its own as an artistic medium. There are artists seriously at work in incorporating media and distance collaboration as the substance of their creative performances.
However, recently exploring the I2 site, I have been struck by the apparent lack of innovation. Mostly there seem to be experiments using the I2 pipeline as a distance education classroom, or a professional artist giving a lesson to a student at a distance, or the broadcast of a recital to a distant location. Telematic Dance has definitely merged technical and artistic innovations as I2 events. Unfortunately these events have not been seriously reviewed, and publication noting details of the events is often not forthcoming.
Yet there is something about the way I2 dissolves boundaries and exists in its own unqiue time space that suggests we have yet to discover the true artistic idiom of this new medium.
Some of the key artists were choreographer/dancer Lisa Naugle at SFU, Director Alistair Martin-Smith with actors from NYU's Educational Theatre, and musicians and composers at the loft of webartist Pierre de Karangal, led by composers Dinu Ghezzo and John Gilbert. Chianan Yen engineered the cound at the loft site and later produced a CD of the sound events.
The flavor of the times gave a special pioneering feeling to these early beginnings. Artists were experimenting on many levels. The atmosphere was that of a frontier, and engineers and artists found a new framework to explore and extend their work.
The format of this 1996 event was very simple: Using the theme of Cassandra, each group of artists posted short improvisations on the WWW. Each site viewed and listened to the work of each other and created responses which were in turn posted. A structured improvisation by the three sites later led to an exchange of video and sound-ytacks which were used in a stage production in May, 1997.
From these simple beginnings works of depth and richness have evolved, and I2 has begun to come into its own as an artistic medium. There are artists seriously at work in incorporating media and distance collaboration as the substance of their creative performances.
However, recently exploring the I2 site, I have been struck by the apparent lack of innovation. Mostly there seem to be experiments using the I2 pipeline as a distance education classroom, or a professional artist giving a lesson to a student at a distance, or the broadcast of a recital to a distant location. Telematic Dance has definitely merged technical and artistic innovations as I2 events. Unfortunately these events have not been seriously reviewed, and publication noting details of the events is often not forthcoming.
Yet there is something about the way I2 dissolves boundaries and exists in its own unqiue time space that suggests we have yet to discover the true artistic idiom of this new medium.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Imagined Homeland
For me, my imagined homeland has been for quite some time a lost continent within me. I have found myself dreaming of Atlantis, but that is not my homeland---it is only a metaphor for my homeland, an undefined terrain that is strangely enough linked to my current encounter with the digital technology of the Internet and its implications for identity.
What is the homeland but a place where we can be ourselves in the full disclcosure of ourselves? Homeland is inextricably linked to Identity, and becaause this new technology offers us a place where Space and Time are virtual, we slip into the virtual presence of ourselves, a defining moment where we might discover ourselves by surprise or by serendipity.
I have much the same feeling when I compose music, or, better, when I improvise without any notion of where I am going, but discover myself in bits and pieces along the way. I am scattered in those pixels... in that binary flashing of zeroes and ones... in the code that is somehow a new DNA of Being.
My homeland is at once ancient and the future. It is full of wonder and silence... of fullness and emptiness... I look for borders and there are none... only the outskirts of myself with vacant lots and rolling prairies.
What is the homeland but a place where we can be ourselves in the full disclcosure of ourselves? Homeland is inextricably linked to Identity, and becaause this new technology offers us a place where Space and Time are virtual, we slip into the virtual presence of ourselves, a defining moment where we might discover ourselves by surprise or by serendipity.
I have much the same feeling when I compose music, or, better, when I improvise without any notion of where I am going, but discover myself in bits and pieces along the way. I am scattered in those pixels... in that binary flashing of zeroes and ones... in the code that is somehow a new DNA of Being.
My homeland is at once ancient and the future. It is full of wonder and silence... of fullness and emptiness... I look for borders and there are none... only the outskirts of myself with vacant lots and rolling prairies.
The Wizard of Courant
Jefferson Han has the future of computing in his hands. Like the wizard in the tale of the Sorcerer's Apprentice, Mr. Han has transformed the computer into your slave rather than you being enslaved by the physical environment that is based on the old typewriter technology. Jeff Han is a Research Scientist at NYU's Courant Institute and an article in Fast Company, a leading edge technology and web design publication, celebrates Han as the guru of future computing. Observe!
If you would like an alternative view of his presentation at the TED Conference in Monterey (Technology, Entertainment & Design), check out Remapping the Universe at Fast Company's website. Once there you can click on the article in Fast Company that describes the fabulous work of Mr. Han. His demo has become one of the all-time hits on YouTube.
If you would like an alternative view of his presentation at the TED Conference in Monterey (Technology, Entertainment & Design), check out Remapping the Universe at Fast Company's website. Once there you can click on the article in Fast Company that describes the fabulous work of Mr. Han. His demo has become one of the all-time hits on YouTube.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
The Water Buffalo Movie
Among the most moving recent stories of the Internet was how it served as the catalyst for Robert Thompson's loving gesture of giving the gift of a Water Buffalo to a small, poverty stricken family in China that consisted of four people in which each member of the family was a different generation.Robert Thompson is a violinist and composer who moved to the Yunnan province in China to get married. Now he blogs (Robert Thompson's Still Point), and reaches out to his surroundings in an effort to create change and share the common bonds that unite us as fellow travelers on this small blue marble in this brief moment against the backdrop of eternity. One of the most poignant messages is the simple principle of Do it Now.
He began his Odyssey of the gift of the water buffalo when he appeared on Philip Greenspun's Weblog investigating the claim of a website that a donation of $250 would provide a poor family in China with a water buffalo that provides a means for livelihood in farming for fifteen years or more. But upon reading further, the website explained that there were was no water buffalo or needy family. The claim was made as a metaphor to illustrate how much a small donation would mean to farming families in Asia.
Philip Greenspun asks Robert Thompson if given the money could he buy a water buffalo and give it to a family in need. He agrees, and in this simple journey he buys the water buffalo and discovers an extraordinary family. Thompson documents this journey in a short video he titles 4 Generations. Underlying this simple, eloquent documentary is Thompson's narrative and original music he composes and performs adding depth and presence to the the singular moment of giving the gift of a water buffalo in China.
This is a story that is beautiful in its pure simplicity and takes on a certain lustre through Thompson's narrative and the music he creates and performs that echoes through the moments eloquently. One gets the sense that his music provides him with a special way of seeing and knowing. This special sensibility gives him a special way of relating to the world and to the people of this story. It almost carries the essence of a fairy-tale, a "once upon a time there was a family..." magical quality that makes us all realize that if only we would do something rather than just talk about it, we could make a difference in the world.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Web2.0 and Internet2
Web 2.0 marks a new era in Internet practice where the spirit of the new digital technology is to create an atmosphere of creative exchange and sharing of ideas, resources, and content development.
Internet2 is a consortium of institutions that are exploring leading edge ideas in the use of multiple site sharing for purposes of scientific and artistic development. Projects are defined and produced, usually within time specific constraints, since I2 exchanges are based on high speed broad band connections that move data along the I2 highway with little or no traffic or impediments. This affords a multichannel approach of sending several channels of audio and several channels of video that can be freely edited, mixed, and processed by the partipants of the project, creating new and different experiences at each site from the same resources.
From a communication and artistic standpoint, Internet2 emerges with characteristics of a new medium, containing powerful possibilities for multimedia production, imaginative new forms and structures, and collaborative processes that form new relationships and practices among artists, scientists, theorists, technologists, and digital multimedia creators.
Internet2 is a consortium of institutions that are exploring leading edge ideas in the use of multiple site sharing for purposes of scientific and artistic development. Projects are defined and produced, usually within time specific constraints, since I2 exchanges are based on high speed broad band connections that move data along the I2 highway with little or no traffic or impediments. This affords a multichannel approach of sending several channels of audio and several channels of video that can be freely edited, mixed, and processed by the partipants of the project, creating new and different experiences at each site from the same resources.
From a communication and artistic standpoint, Internet2 emerges with characteristics of a new medium, containing powerful possibilities for multimedia production, imaginative new forms and structures, and collaborative processes that form new relationships and practices among artists, scientists, theorists, technologists, and digital multimedia creators.
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