The Social Networking project is an examination of the complex networks
of economic, cultural, technological and military systems operating throughout
the social fabric of the present day. The vocabulary used by diverse
organizations provide a reference point for how each of these organizations
situate themselves within this context. The project will be realized by
'scraping' text from the websites of a broad range of organizations (everything
from Apple.com to Rhizome.org). Vocabulary usage will be analyzed, and
associated with latitude and longitude data for a spatial reference to each
organization. The four systems mentioned (economic, cultural, technological and
military) form axes along which vocabulary usage data can be visualized.
The physical installation, intended for a public space, will consist of a world
map that functions as both a sculptural installation on it's own, and a
substrate for a digital projection. Using the collected/analyzed text and the
lat/lon data, the projection will consist of a dynamic, color-coded, subtly
animated visualization. The data will be constantly updated, allowing the
project to remain installed for a long period of time and still engage with
vocabulary usage as it happens. The project is intended to remain installed
beyond the ISEA2006 Symposium, for a period of three to five years.
The residency was designed from the beginning as a collaboration between artist Antoni Muntadas and a group of CADRE students. Muntadas is an internationally recognized media artist. A few of his recent projects include The File Room , and the On Translation series - the most recent incarnation of which, On Translation : I Giardini , represented Spain at the Venice Biennale.
The students involved in the project are CADRE students Vera Fainstein, Chris Head, Aaron Siegel, and Ethan Miller (coordinator for the project). The opportunity to work with Muntadas has been of tremendous value to the students. Beyond learning form his experience and vision, the project has been a collaboration in the true sense of the word. From the beginning Muntadas was interested in creating a dialog with everyone involved. It has created an environment of participation and critical engagement.
The political and economic space of the Pacific Rim represents a
dynamic context for innovation and creativity framed by issues of
economic globalization, isolationist nationalism, regional integrations
and environmental change. Convergent practices involving art, science,
architecture, design, literature, theatre and music are being
manifested in new forms of cultural production, academic research, and
information technology-based industry. The body, code, genetics, privacy, gaming, gender, and karaoke are some
of the ideas explored by both SWITCH writers and contributors from
around the globe.
While not ever truly pin-pointing one set definition of transvergence,
SWITCH sought out questions and explorations that transcend the
interdisciplinary and attempt to form a hybrid of cultural experiences.
Using Marcus Novak’s "Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes on
the Production of the Alien" as a spring-board, SWITCH Issue 20
vectored into ideas from artists, scientists, futurists, educators,
linguists, and even the man on the street.
We videotaped Cory Arcangel's NES mods, asked Alex Galloway whether he
identifies with hacker culture, got to know one of the biggest
technical problems Jim Campbell has ever solved, and played golf at the
Silicon Valley Golf Classics. We contacted old-school technology artist
STELARC and hypothesized about fear oriented programming. Meanwhile,
students from the Human Machine Interface class studied and produced
blogs en masse while others ran an exhibition downtown San Jose in
cooperation with Phantom Galleries.
Issue 18Interface: Software as Cultural Production
As software is continuing to gain importance, the CADRE Laboratory has
been looking at the cultural embracement of software. This absorption
into wide areas of our lives is occurring at times when software has
already established a clear trajectory. It has had a highly military
and commercial background and it is aiming at a reduction to "default
software" in the tradition of Word, Photoshop and Yahoo Mail. Looking for alternatives is not a technical concern anymore but it is a cultural one.
In 1995 SWITCH began what has become a valuable historic documentation
of the evolving theoretical and critical discourse within new media.
With the launch of Issue 17, Collaboration, we have evolved this role
even further by introducing an experimental platform for exploring new
content publication models.
Influenced by the open-source approach of the very software we were
utilizing, we began to look at ways to open the publication process to
the public. While we will still have featured content from invited
authors, we now encourage input and dialogue from all of our readers
through comments and submissions to our "Discourse" section. The
"Projects" section also allows active new media artists to submit works
for curating, or, as in Ron Goldin's "Rivets + Denizens," explore the
structural underpinnings of collaborative curating itself.
If any social system functions and exists within a describable,
measurable network structure, then the question at hand is: can any
network structure be described as a social system? In this issue Social & Networks
we explore, describe, define, represent and even test social network
theories on individuals, organizations, art and technology. Like most
social theory we are looking at how individuals, organizations, and
software exist and behave within a network. With the bombardment of
interactive capability in the past few years our social networks are
quite extensive and complex. They have become increasingly more
difficult to describe and visually represent. Switch aims to look
beyond the expected and into areas relevant to artists today.
The confluence of fine art with various emerging technologies in the
past 30+ years has had its' impact felt within a variety of art
institutions. There has been much discussion of the entry of the
various "new media" and technology arts into traditional museums, and
the birth of new institutions whose sole mission it is to support such
media. (Such as the venerable Ars Electronica Center, the relatively
newly minted ZKM, or institutions still in the forge like the
Eyebeam-Atelier Chelsea Center in New York, and the Beale Center for
Art and Technology in California.) But there has been far less
discussion of the entrance of new media and technology art into art
academics. This collection of interviews with representatives of degree
granting institutions in the new media art field simply represents a
modest attempt to collect some basic research about such institutions
into one place.
One of the most important developments of the 20th century was the
proliferation of the database into every fiber of Western cultural
fabric, (which of course has had profound global impact). The rise of
companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Wal-Mart, AOL,
and Oracle Corporation are among the notorious manifestations
(including the Internet itself), that have in one way or another reaped
the benefits of database. From "just-in-time" delivery and picking
systems to inventory, process, and financial management, database
enables significant and culturally transforming productivity gains that
are manifested ultimately in the distribution of atoms and the actual.
No doubt, the roots of this revolution can be traced through figures
such as George Boole, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Kurt Gödel, Claude
Shannon, Alan Turing and E.F. Codd, but the changes wrought by this
revolution have been most intense in the very recent past.
Forums of public intersection between computer games and art have
surfaced with accelerated frequency over the course of the last year.
To briefly chart some of the recent terrain, The Doors of Perception Conference in Amsterdam took place in the fall of 1998 with it’s focus on Play and included some games by artists, the Synworld conference and exhibit at Public Netbase in Vienna occurred in May of 1999, the Interactive Frictions conference and exhibit met at USC in Los Angeles in June of 1999, the Game Over exhibit was presented at the Institute of Design in Zurich in July and the upcoming online Re: play
Panel organized by Eyebeam Atelier and TechBC is scheduled for July and
August of 1999. Computer gaming is emerging as the dominant form of
media interpolation into shared social apparatuses even at the expense
of television and film. As an entertainment form linked to online
network data flow, computer gaming is at the present time more open
than television ever was to reinvention and rearticulation of its
genres and modes of interactivity, sign systems and politics of
representation. The time seems ripe for critical intervention from
artists and theorists, who follow in the wake of the fervid cultural
sabotage and shape shifting of the game fan players and hackers
themselves. Equally imperative is an examination of the historical
underpinnings of given computer gaming tropes in military and filmic
simulation technologies and early computer programming.
1998 has been an interesting year for network art.
At the beginning of the year, the net.art
lists were alive with the controversy surrounding the identity thefts of the likes of
Mark Amerika, Peter Weibel, and Timothy Druckrey. That particular performance, still unclaimed
by its author[s], conceptually underscored the weaknesses of treating liquid identity and becoming
in cyberspace as the ontological foundations for dematerialized network art forms.
Most authors, as it turns out, don't want to be unstable identities. Even Deleuze and Guattari
put their own names on their books! Related to
this problem of liquid identity as art form is the relative dearth of development in another of the
often speculated foundations for computer art practice: virtual reality. Simulations of Cartesian
space and virtual worlds wherein the artist is conjured as author/storyteller have not progressed
significantly; except perhaps in the realm of industrial strength gaming. The ontology and identity
of the author, still a contested space, continues to suffer from the received habits of
narrative literature.
This issue of Switch developed out of the Chik Tek '97 conference and
exhibition held here in San Jose, California, last November. In that
forum, participants discussed various aspects of women artists working
in/with technology, including whether women needed to have a
gender-specific forum at all. These questions triggered a debate that
could have continued and which Helen Wood took up in her series of
post-conference interviews (see "Chik Tek Symposium Revisited").
In this version, Volume 3 Number 3, Winter 1997, Switch is proud to
present an interview with philosopher, technologist and former
front-line artist Manuel De Landa. In his latest work, One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History,
De Landa challenges methodologies that view history through the lens of
linguistics, texts, and economics by instead examining the relationship
of societies to the flow of matter, energy, information and the related
technological escalations. In his previous book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines,
he had explored the life-like qualities of physical phenomena at points
of singularity, along with the mechanical physics of military conflict
viewed from various organizational levels, in order to speculate the
convergence of the biological phylum and machinic phylum in a
contingent and ultimately inseparable evolutionary complex.
No doubt about it. The Web is expanding at a phenomenal rate. Daily, thousands of new sites are being submitted to search engines. Amid this explosive number of web sites, artists are exploring a new territory. In our collaborative efforts, the Switch
staff determined a distinction between "art of the Web" and. "art on
the Web." Numerous discussions and sometimes heated debates over the
past few months have led us to the conclusion that this is an immense
and developing subject, -- a unique area with which artists are
attempting to form a relationship. It was decided that in order to
examine its many facets, the best strategy would be for us to cover the
subject in two issues.
Switch, in this issue,
examines online interactive narrative. Virtual environments or spaces
created by text such as MUDs, MUSHes, and MOOs are described by Sherry
Turkle in her recent book, Life on the Screen:
In MUDs, instead of using computer hardware to immerse themselves in a vivid world of sensation, users immerse themselves
in a world of words. MUDs are text-based, social virtual reality.
How does this world of words create what some
call psychotherapy and otherscall addiction? Online users are intrigued
with the ability to create and take on multiple identities. Many find
they feel less inhibited and begin to develop the persona onlinethat they would like to beoff line.
This issue of Switch focuses on an area that includes a broad
spectrum of artists and theoreticians who possess innovative and varied
ideas. They use creative thought and experimentation with new
technologies to speak the ancient language of "Sound" in new ways.
Rudy Rucker's article describes some of the simplest forms of artificial life:
small self-modulating algorithms that leave trails of colored pixels on
a computer screen (cellular automata). Using the word "life" for these
graphic traces tugs at our sense of credibility, especially since they
appear similar to many screen-savers which are, as we all know, just
programs.
Welcome to our second issue of Switch. This time we focus on Virtual
Reality, with its seductive promise of three-dimensional immersive
environments. The desire for multiple convincing worlds available at a
command comes from an imagination desiring to escape the limits of the
everyday world. We want to explore a simulated fantasyland and replace
for a time the difficult one we know.
Issue 22 focused on the intersections of CADRE and ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006. We reviewed the projects that students at the CADRE Laboratoryhad been collaboraing on with artists on two different residency projects
for the festival – “Social Networking” with Antoni Muntadas and the
City as Interface Residency, “Karaoke Ice” with Nancy Nowacek, Marina
Zurkow & Katie Salen. Carlos Castellanos, James Morgan, Aaron
Siegel, all gave us a sneak preview of their projects which were to be
featured at the ISEA 2006 exhibition. Alumni Sheila Malone introduced
ex_XX:: post position , an exhibition celebrating the 20th anniversary
of the CADRE Institute that ran as a parallel exhibition to
ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006. Also, we had SWITCH on the Radio!
The political and economic space of the Pacific Rim represents a
dynamic context for innovation and creativity framed by issues of
economic globalization, isolationist nationalism, regional integrations
and environmental change. Convergent practices involving art, science,
architecture, design, literature, theatre and music are being
manifested in new forms of cultural production, academic research, and
information technology-based industry. The body, code, genetics, privacy, gaming, gender, and karaoke are some
of the ideas explored by both SWITCH writers and contributors from
around the globe.
While not ever truly pin-pointing one set definition of transvergence,
SWITCH sought out questions and explorations that transcend the
interdisciplinary and attempt to form a hybrid of cultural experiences.
Using Marcus Novak’s "Speciation, Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes on
the Production of the Alien" as a spring-board, SWITCH Issue 20
vectored into ideas from artists, scientists, futurists, educators,
linguists, and even the man on the street.
We videotaped Cory Arcangel's NES mods, asked Alex Galloway whether he
identifies with hacker culture, got to know one of the biggest
technical problems Jim Campbell has ever solved, and played golf at the
Silicon Valley Golf Classics. We contacted old-school technology artist
STELARC and hypothesized about fear oriented programming. Meanwhile,
students from the Human Machine Interface class studied and produced
blogs en masse while others ran an exhibition downtown San Jose in
cooperation with Phantom Galleries.
Issue 18Interface: Software as Cultural Production
As software is continuing to gain importance, the CADRE Laboratory has
been looking at the cultural embracement of software. This absorption
into wide areas of our lives is occurring at times when software has
already established a clear trajectory. It has had a highly military
and commercial background and it is aiming at a reduction to "default
software" in the tradition of Word, Photoshop and Yahoo Mail. Looking for alternatives is not a technical concern anymore but it is a cultural one.
In 1995 SWITCH began what has become a valuable historic documentation
of the evolving theoretical and critical discourse within new media.
With the launch of Issue 17, Collaboration, we have evolved this role
even further by introducing an experimental platform for exploring new
content publication models.
Influenced by the open-source approach of the very software we were
utilizing, we began to look at ways to open the publication process to
the public. While we will still have featured content from invited
authors, we now encourage input and dialogue from all of our readers
through comments and submissions to our "Discourse" section. The
"Projects" section also allows active new media artists to submit works
for curating, or, as in Ron Goldin's "Rivets + Denizens," explore the
structural underpinnings of collaborative curating itself.
If any social system functions and exists within a describable,
measurable network structure, then the question at hand is: can any
network structure be described as a social system? In this issue Social & Networks
we explore, describe, define, represent and even test social network
theories on individuals, organizations, art and technology. Like most
social theory we are looking at how individuals, organizations, and
software exist and behave within a network. With the bombardment of
interactive capability in the past few years our social networks are
quite extensive and complex. They have become increasingly more
difficult to describe and visually represent. Switch aims to look
beyond the expected and into areas relevant to artists today.
The confluence of fine art with various emerging technologies in the
past 30+ years has had its' impact felt within a variety of art
institutions. There has been much discussion of the entry of the
various "new media" and technology arts into traditional museums, and
the birth of new institutions whose sole mission it is to support such
media. (Such as the venerable Ars Electronica Center, the relatively
newly minted ZKM, or institutions still in the forge like the
Eyebeam-Atelier Chelsea Center in New York, and the Beale Center for
Art and Technology in California.) But there has been far less
discussion of the entrance of new media and technology art into art
academics. This collection of interviews with representatives of degree
granting institutions in the new media art field simply represents a
modest attempt to collect some basic research about such institutions
into one place.
One of the most important developments of the 20th century was the
proliferation of the database into every fiber of Western cultural
fabric, (which of course has had profound global impact). The rise of
companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Wal-Mart, AOL,
and Oracle Corporation are among the notorious manifestations
(including the Internet itself), that have in one way or another reaped
the benefits of database. From "just-in-time" delivery and picking
systems to inventory, process, and financial management, database
enables significant and culturally transforming productivity gains that
are manifested ultimately in the distribution of atoms and the actual.
No doubt, the roots of this revolution can be traced through figures
such as George Boole, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Kurt Gödel, Claude
Shannon, Alan Turing and E.F. Codd, but the changes wrought by this
revolution have been most intense in the very recent past.
Forums of public intersection between computer games and art have
surfaced with accelerated frequency over the course of the last year.
To briefly chart some of the recent terrain, The Doors of Perception Conference in Amsterdam took place in the fall of 1998 with it’s focus on Play and included some games by artists, the Synworld conference and exhibit at Public Netbase in Vienna occurred in May of 1999, the Interactive Frictions conference and exhibit met at USC in Los Angeles in June of 1999, the Game Over exhibit was presented at the Institute of Design in Zurich in July and the upcoming online Re: play
Panel organized by Eyebeam Atelier and TechBC is scheduled for July and
August of 1999. Computer gaming is emerging as the dominant form of
media interpolation into shared social apparatuses even at the expense
of television and film. As an entertainment form linked to online
network data flow, computer gaming is at the present time more open
than television ever was to reinvention and rearticulation of its
genres and modes of interactivity, sign systems and politics of
representation. The time seems ripe for critical intervention from
artists and theorists, who follow in the wake of the fervid cultural
sabotage and shape shifting of the game fan players and hackers
themselves. Equally imperative is an examination of the historical
underpinnings of given computer gaming tropes in military and filmic
simulation technologies and early computer programming.
1998 has been an interesting year for network art.
At the beginning of the year, the net.art
lists were alive with the controversy surrounding the identity thefts of the likes of
Mark Amerika, Peter Weibel, and Timothy Druckrey. That particular performance, still unclaimed
by its author[s], conceptually underscored the weaknesses of treating liquid identity and becoming
in cyberspace as the ontological foundations for dematerialized network art forms.
Most authors, as it turns out, don't want to be unstable identities. Even Deleuze and Guattari
put their own names on their books! Related to
this problem of liquid identity as art form is the relative dearth of development in another of the
often speculated foundations for computer art practice: virtual reality. Simulations of Cartesian
space and virtual worlds wherein the artist is conjured as author/storyteller have not progressed
significantly; except perhaps in the realm of industrial strength gaming. The ontology and identity
of the author, still a contested space, continues to suffer from the received habits of
narrative literature.
This issue of Switch developed out of the Chik Tek '97 conference and
exhibition held here in San Jose, California, last November. In that
forum, participants discussed various aspects of women artists working
in/with technology, including whether women needed to have a
gender-specific forum at all. These questions triggered a debate that
could have continued and which Helen Wood took up in her series of
post-conference interviews (see "Chik Tek Symposium Revisited").
In this version, Volume 3 Number 3, Winter 1997, Switch is proud to
present an interview with philosopher, technologist and former
front-line artist Manuel De Landa. In his latest work, One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History,
De Landa challenges methodologies that view history through the lens of
linguistics, texts, and economics by instead examining the relationship
of societies to the flow of matter, energy, information and the related
technological escalations. In his previous book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines,
he had explored the life-like qualities of physical phenomena at points
of singularity, along with the mechanical physics of military conflict
viewed from various organizational levels, in order to speculate the
convergence of the biological phylum and machinic phylum in a
contingent and ultimately inseparable evolutionary complex.
No doubt about it. The Web is expanding at a phenomenal rate. Daily, thousands of new sites are being submitted to search engines. Amid this explosive number of web sites, artists are exploring a new territory. In our collaborative efforts, the Switch
staff determined a distinction between "art of the Web" and. "art on
the Web." Numerous discussions and sometimes heated debates over the
past few months have led us to the conclusion that this is an immense
and developing subject, -- a unique area with which artists are
attempting to form a relationship. It was decided that in order to
examine its many facets, the best strategy would be for us to cover the
subject in two issues.
Switch, in this issue,
examines online interactive narrative. Virtual environments or spaces
created by text such as MUDs, MUSHes, and MOOs are described by Sherry
Turkle in her recent book, Life on the Screen:
In MUDs, instead of using computer hardware to immerse themselves in a vivid world of sensation, users immerse themselves in a world of words. MUDs are text-based, social virtual reality.
How does this world of words create what some
call psychotherapy and others call addiction? Online users are intrigued
with the ability to create and take on multiple identities. Many find
they feel less inhibited and begin to develop the persona online that they would like to be off line.
This issue of Switch focuses on an area that includes a broad
spectrum of artists and theoreticians who possess innovative and varied
ideas. They use creative thought and experimentation with new
technologies to speak the ancient language of "Sound" in new ways.
Rudy Rucker's article describes some of the simplest forms of artificial life:
small self-modulating algorithms that leave trails of colored pixels on
a computer screen (cellular automata). Using the word "life" for these
graphic traces tugs at our sense of credibility, especially since they
appear similar to many screen-savers which are, as we all know, just
programs.
Welcome to our second issue of Switch. This time we focus on Virtual
Reality, with its seductive promise of three-dimensional immersive
environments. The desire for multiple convincing worlds available at a
command comes from an imagination desiring to escape the limits of the
everyday world. We want to explore a simulated fantasyland and replace
for a time the difficult one we know.
SWITCH is the new media art journal of the CADRE Laboratory
for New Media of
the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University. It has been published on the Web since 1995. SWITCH is interested in fostering a critical viewpoint on issues and developments in the multiple crossovers between art and technology. Its main focus in on questioning and analyzing, as well as reporting and discussing these new art forms as they develop, in hopes of encouraging dialogue and possible collaboration with others who are working and considering similar issues. SWITCH aims to critically evaluate developments in art and technology in order to contribute to the formation of alternative viewpoints with the intention of expanding the arena in which new art and technology emerge. SWITCH is overseen by CADRE faculty Joel Slayton and Rachel Beth Egenhoefer.
As San Jose State University and the CADRE Laboratory are serving as the academic host for the ZeroOne San Jose /ISEA 2006 Symposium, SWITCH has dedicated itself to serving as an official media correspondent of the Festival and Symposium. SWITCH has focused the past three issues of publication prior to ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006 on publishing content reflecting on the themes of the symposium. Our editorial staff has interviewed and reported on artists, theorists, and practitioners interested in the intersections of Art & Technology as related to ideas such as Transvergence and the Pacific Rim. While some of those featured in SWITCH are part of the festival and symposium, others provide a complimentary perspective. In addition SWITCH will be covering the Festival and Symposium by updating their current issue with fresh content during ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA2006; providing pod casts of events, interviews, and happenings throughout out downtown San Jose; and working with NPR (neighborhood public radio) to broadcast their own daily news show throughout the week of ZeroOne San Jose/ISEA2006.
