New Blog! A tribute to fascinating artist and techie Kristin Lucas

Back on December 3, I went to see a New Media lecture featuring multi-disciplinary artist Kristin Lucas. Her art centered, seemingly, on using virtual reality ideas in multiple styles and media of art (sculpture, video, graphics, portraits, sketches, etc.) to capture the rapid transience of our modern society, where technology is so ubiquitous.

At least, that was my first response, based on the description of her talk....

"A paradoxical and insubstantial explanation of the inherent problem of simplifying a complex set of concerns related to the phenomenon of over-identification with an inanimate object such as a computer and its consequent animations and manifestations. The artist will present recent work including "Refresh," in which she becomes the most current version of herself in a court of law, and "More Melting", a beeswax-cast memorial about an electronic medium's finite reality. Kristin Lucas is a recent transplant from California's Bay Area to the Hudson Valley. Transformations and portraiture are the focus of her work as she investigates visions of future, the effects of an accumulation of rapid-spread flash-in-the-pan technology on the human condition and the environment, and the impact of the digital medium on perception of time and space."

Indeed, the description above is quite a mouthful. After reading the first sentence, I got the feeling that this was going to be a bit of a cynical talk from an artist who, perhaps, is on a mission, to capture and criticize with social commentary the trite and superficial-yet-supercilious nature of modern society and its arrogant belief in omnipotence and omniscience through technology by providing, in effect, a caricature - a parody, a satire, visual and verbal/auditory - of this society, through her "paradoxical and insubstantial" explanation. Now, if this had been the subject of the lecture, then that alone would have been a great draw to the lecture for me, as I am a bit of a fan of such things (Sci-Fi, social criticism, etc.), and I would expect to get a great kick out of how she is so sublimely capturing the problem with society by giving her talk about how we, as a society/culture, foolishly try to simplify all our complex problems always by using the computer/modern electronic technology as an ultimate tool/panacea/deus ex machina for all problems, in a "paradoxical and insubstantial" way! In doing the talk in that silly way - not by being an actual lecturer on society and culture, but by simply expressing herself in a way that is full of contradictions and devoid of any explanation of the points she is making or the logic she is following - that, I figured, would be what turns the talk, and the imagery, into art, such that the substance of the talk is NOT what is paramount per se, but the "paradoxical and insubstantial" aesthetic that is imbued into the artwork and presentation. Put it this way - if she were simply talking about how society is troublesome in that it "over-identifies" with the computer and its "manifestations" as the be-all-end-all tool which over-simplifies life's complex set of concerns, she would not really be talking about art, but would rather probably be a journalist/writer writing books about the shallowness of high-tech, electronic society, similar to a recent guest on "the Colbert Report" who wrote a book about how our over-use of technology and its ability to give us information instantly on demand has made us very shallow in our true intellect since we think that we are omniscient and can understand all in our brave new "all access" world, which leads us to really not understand much as we no longer have the DISCIPLINE to study things in detail in such an on-demand world (Colbert, in his typical throes of bombastic whimsicality within his "rude jerk interviewer" role, corroborated his guest's point by making the joke of being the character who embodies the social problems about which the guest is talking when he pretended to be on his iPhone for most of the interview, and constantly asked the guest to repeat what he was saying since he was too busy looking at Wikipedia!).

That was my initial reaction to what was possibly coming in the presentation. I was half correct....

After seeing the presentation by Lucas, I realized that the presence of paradoxes does not necessarily imply that she is trying to make a satire. Upon reflecting on what she presented in her artwork - photos/CGI drawings/videos/performance art experiments - I realize that she is making a bit of a statement about how our society is so strangely entangled in a massive sea of information that make things quite a mess that can easily ensnare those who are not careful. But I realized that it is not necessarily a negative, satirical or cynical statement. Indeed, through the paradoxical nature of her artwork and presentation, she is actually trying to simply - to use her own words - EMBODY the modern digital media of today in order to understand it, but not necessarily judge it or criticize it, just allow herself to come to be absorbed into it so that she can simply, perhaps, be a MIRROR of the nature of media - not a judge, jury, or executioner, who stands on a Manichean pulpit determining what is good and evil about media, its creators or consumers, but just a drifting spirit who uses her art and "performance" as a means to be the anthropomorphization of the world of New Media, to be interpreted as the beholder sees fit. Rock fans can say that Ms. Lucas is searching for "the Spirit of Radio", to use the Rush song as the pitching phrase to describe her art's purpose, but here, since we are in the 2000s, not the 1980s, we can now say that it is not only the spirit of "radio" per se, but the spirit of ALL media! After all, with the rise of the Internet in 1990s to its ultimate position of eminence as the "information superhighway", we are now seeing the convergence of media - printed word, video, music, radio/audio and interactive software (video games, etc.) - emerge very quickly. Indeed, the world of information transfer through technological mediums has grown quickly, from the dominance of the printed word to the rise of all these other technologies - radio waves that transfer sound, television technologies that transfer visual information, and now the computer, which makes all media - word, visual and audio - infinitely malleable to all who can have this machine, professional and amateur. It is amazing and scary at the same time, that we have created these powerful tools in such a short time period, and even scarier that we are simply picking them up so quickly and allowing them to become so integral a part of our existence and experiences without stepping back to the twilight zone outside of the bubble just to see what is really happening. Herein lies the great profundity, I guess, of Ms. Lucas's craft. By attempting to embody the media by exploring all its facets through her art, she may be aspiring to be an important paragon of our age by acting as a medium herself through which we can perceive the nature of our rapidly evolving media - the media's media, the one who watches the watchers. To be such a thing, I now see, is a very profound and altruistic action by Ms. Lucas, although I feel anxious for her, as I worry about her health as she takes on such a massive endeavour as giving us a portal to the foundation of new media. Could her desire to embody the media and thus permit all its innards to wash over her mind without any floodgates to control the deluge lead to illness? Still, the act is profound and more than just social criticism through artistic statements - it is just art meant to characterize the future, the finite reality of electronic media, its effect on humanity, perception of reality and ultimately, finding the balance between virtual and real that may allow for some kind of progress through its lack of stance or substance, but its welcoming of all viewpoints, not just, say, my original viewpoint, which may bring us better understanding, in fact, and away from the ignorance that people like Stephen Colbert parody.

Now, finally (this is taking too long), I want to address just a few of the works Ms. Lucas showed in her presentation, which reflect on her balance of viewpoints toward technology that can corroborate how exactly she can, in fact, come to embody all media, done by describing a work that represents, very literally, a transition in her life.

Let me do this in another blog, and I'll see if I can connect the two blogs....

Open Blog (FINAL) – Virtual Reality in Iron Maiden’s album Virtual XI, song Futureal

(Cover Artwork)

http://www.maidenfans.com/imc/?url=album11_vxi/lyrics11_vxi&lang=eng&link=albums

For my final blog on an open topic, I decided to do something a little different. Instead of writing about a particular article that I read and found interesting, I’ve decided to go out in a different way by showing off one of my favorite bands to which I enjoy listening – Iron Maiden. Back in 1998, they actually made a concept album called Virtual XI that has a few songs that can be related back to the virtual reality theme and string of concepts that I believe is actually important to the interpretation of why people turn to online games and synthetic worlds, and I’ve decided to share that with you.

FUTUREAL

(Video)

(Lyrics)

http://www.maidenfans.com/imc/?url=album11_vxi/lyrics11_vxi&link=albums&lang=eng#track1

The opening track on the album represents the heart of the theme of virtual reality that surrounds the album with its artwork (displayed above). The song seems to depict the life of an online gamer who is addicted heavily to the game and cannot get out of it because he has fallen “in far too deep” as the lyrics suggest. He or she shows all the telltale signs of spending way too much time at the game – a distorted sense of time (“I’m running out of my time”), physical illness (“in the day, I feel like death!”), and a disregard for sleep (“…now its getting so I can’t sleep at night…”). Indeed, when people get so involved in a synthetic world that they start to feel physically ill, they usually are so committed that they ultimately end up going out of reality and into somewhere else – to the point that if things go wrong in the game, then that leads to the person letting what goes wrong get to her to the point that she may commit suicide! This represents the surprising turn in “Futureal” that comes out in the second verse – “Sometimes it feels like a game of deadly hide-and-seek, and when you’re reading this, and then I will be gone! Maybe then, you will see!” Ultimately, while there are the majority of people who are capable of playing in synthetic worlds without getting in too far that they take it way too seriously, there are, indeed, weaker minds out there that get so entrenched in the game that they are led to question…. “Do you believe what you hear? Can you believe what you see? What is real?” The excellent Iron Maiden website known as “the Iron Maiden Commentary” (http://www.maidenfans.com/imc/) has commentary on “Futureal” that features four articles on Internet & Computer Game addiction. According to one of the articles, research at a medical university in Berlin, Germany, those who play games excessively share important reactions with drug addicts. People who play games excessively react in a similar way to addicts when they are presented with certain “trigger” associations – if they enter a building in which they have frequently used the drug, for example. According to another one of the articles featured on “the Iron Maiden Commentary,” addiction is described as “a psycho-physiological disorder involving tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, affective disturbances and interruption of social relationships.”

However, the article quotes Edward Castronova himself, author of “Synthetic Worlds: the Business and Culture of Online Games” in saying: “When people spend dozens of hours weekly at their computers, or on the internet, or playing video games, it is almost certain that some other activities will suffer. The question is: when does this behavior warrant the label 'addiction'? Addiction is a strong word, calling for both renunciation on the part of the subject and forceful intervention by others ... a behavior becomes problematic when, and only when, it degrades other important things in life. A 60-hour-a-week compulsive EverQuest user who fails to speak to his children when they come home from school is engaging in problematic behavior. But consider the same user, living alone, with all his friends being online and in the game – is his devotion of time to cyberspace problematic? In the end we can only judge whether presence in the virtual world is good or bad by reference to the ordinary daily life of the person making the choice to go there. For some people Earth is where they really ought to spend their time. For others, perhaps the fantasy world is the only decent place available.”

Most certainly, it is not necessarily fair to categorize all gamers who play in synthetic worlds for long periods of time as addicted. To do so would result in a shortsighted profiling of people who may not have any other alternative to the synthetic world.

THE CLANSMAN

(Video)

(Lyrics)

http://www.maidenfans.com/imc/?url=album11_vxi/lyrics11_vxi&link=albums&lang=eng#track4

"The Clansman" is a song that is supposed to be loosely based on the Mel Gibson film "Braveheart," but I believe that the lyrics to the song allow it to have a transcendent, general meaning about freedom from the constraints of our world that goes along with the virtual reality theme of the album. When you look at the lyrics and see the narrator, talking about "them" grinding "us" down, and the urge to not let "them" take anymore, then it is easy to extrapolate. You could easily interpret "them" as being the troublesome bosses or co-workers in your life, or the forces in general that conspire to take you down, whether those forces are real or not ( you may, after all, imagine aliens taking over the earth or something....). In this respect, "the Clansman" is a song that can motivate you to not let those forces bing you down, and perhaps the way that can be done in the Virtual XI backdrop of the virtual reality theme is that one can play a game where she becomes William Wallace and fights in a synthetic world! If one interprets the song in this more abstract way, based on the general theme of the album, and on the intentional ambiguity of the lyrics to the song, one can easily see that "the Clansman" is a great anthem that explains perhaps why the addiction that is moderately vilified in "Futureal" is so attractive. It is also fitting that a song that was inspired by such a setting as Medieval Scotland is in the album, since medieval places, indeed, are popular settings, or so it seems, for virtual reality romps in synthetic world games.

And so, I close my blog with the statement that Virtual XI provides a couple of songs that represent interesting statements on the double-edged sword of virtual reality. The synthetic worlds can help you cope with daily life and prevent "them" from taking what is rightfully yours, or they can consume you and become another debilitating force...

Open Blog – The Birth of the Semantic Web

REFERENCES

(1) Feigenbaum, Lee et al. “The Semantic Web in Action.” Scientific American December 2007: 90-97

(2) “Semantic Web” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. 21 Apr 2008, 21:59 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 23 Apr 2008

(3) Sean B. Palmer “The Semantic Web in Action.”

There is yet another new movement underway to change the nature of the World Wide Web as we know it. In the early 2000s, the ideas of blogging, Wikis, and later, social-networking sites made the World Wide Web (just one type of the many forms of the Internet) more open to the masses of consumers and thus led an even greater surge of people to walk through the gates of tomorrow. Now, we are on the verge of making advancements in the services of the World Wide Web yet again. This new development in WWW technology is known as the Semantic Web, and it is an idea that was come up with by the creator of the original WWW, Tim Berners-Lee. In a quote from 1999, Berners-Lee stated that he had “a dream for the Web [in which computers] themselves become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web,’ which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted will finally materialize.” (2) And so, 8 years later, in the December 2007 issue of Scientific American, it appears that Berners-Lee vision is starting to come of age.

According to the Scientific American article “the Semantic Web in Action,” the Semantic Web is, indeed, “a set of formats and languages that find and analyze data on the World Wide Web, allowing consumers and business to understand all kinds of useful online information.” Another way to think of it is to think of the Semantic Web as a means of allowing our computers themselves the ability to understand and interpret the information contained on the WWW so that the computer itself can help us organize our information and make it easier to understand. Among the things that allow the Semantic Web to work are the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format for defining information on the Web, the Web Ontology Language (OWL), Inference Engines and other technologies such as the SPARQL and GRDDL languages (1). The RDF format works by grouping two pieces of data, and a link that connects the data together, into one unit called a Universal Resource Identifier (URI). The data and their link is called a triple, and an example would be “Spot is a Dog,” where “Spot” and “Dog” are the two pieces of data, and the link that connects them is the phrase “is a.” By doing this method of identifying resources online, people can organize their disparate sets of data about dogs named spot into one space, thus allowing for merging of knowledge bases on large scales. The Ontology Web Language (OWL) allows individuals or groups to define terms and data they frequently use that may have multiple meanings in one place using this standard that is compatible with the RDF. By doing this, we can be sure that terms that may have multiple meanings (and perhaps multiple pronunciations, like “bass” as in fish and “bass” as in guitar), are compatible with the RDF and are usable in the database. Finally, inference engines work a level above the ontologisms in the database in order to allow the URIs to make inferences based on the data they have in order to find new relations among terms and data in the URI. Finding relations between data is the first step towards being able to understand data much better, and thus accomplishing the goal of allowing the computers themselves to understand the data that is inputted into them. (1) For example, the inference engine allows the URI to have “Spot is a Dog” be connected to and become “Spot is a Mammal” based on the existing data of “Dog is a Subclass of Mammal,” where “subclass of” is the connecting link piece in the latter triple. With this software being the engine of the Semantic Web, the WWW can now use semantics to understand the content of all the information on the Internet, thus bringing us an even easier-to-use and more versatile service.

The Semantic Web is already seeing use in the healthcare and Drug Discovery industries as well as even on the consumer market. An example of the Semantic Web’s influence on the consumer market is in the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF), a grassroots, decentralized social networking site that has grown through enthusiasts themselves creating a Semantic Web vocabulary for describing people’s names, ages, locations, jobs and relationships to one another in order to find common interests among one another. FOAF users can post imagery and information in any format and then seamlessly connect it all (1). In the Drug Discovery world, a research team at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center is leveraging semantic capabilities to find the underlying genetic causes of cardiovascular diseases (1). By using Semantic technology, the researchers can save themselves loads of time in place of having to painstakingly search through 4-5 large databases for each individual gene in order to determine what each gene is and whether it affects the risk of cancer or cardiovascular disease. Finally, in the public health sector, an initiative deployed by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston called SAPPHIRE (for “Situational Awareness and Preparedness for Public Health Incidences using Reasoning Engines”) uses data from local health care providers, hospitals, environmental protection agencies and scientific literature to address a wide variety of problems, ranging from the treatment of HIV cases to the spread of influenza.

The Semantic Web, indeed, represents a remarkable step towards a smarter, easier-to-use and even more versatile Internet that can do everything from save lives by yielding advances in medicine through proper data management, to simply making consumers lives easier and more fun by allowing social networks to provide their members with even more clever toys with which to play. Indeed, as the web advances in leaps and bounds like this, we may soon see it becoming more like…. the “matrix….”

FURTHER READING

“W3C Semantic Web activity.”

Reading Response #3 – On Gaming Science, Philosophy, Economics and Politics

The readings I did for this week’s reading response were a fascinating, all-comprehensive survey of the nature of gaming and the gaming industry. Clive Thompson’s “Science of Play” presents an inside look at how games are created through a look at how Halo 3 was play-tested, and how that influenced the design process. McKenzie Wark’s “Gamer Theory 2.0” presents an interpretation of the deeper themes and concepts that are covered by various games, such as Katamari Damacy and Deus Ex. Also, we get an idea of the nature of business and economics within “synthetic worlds” – games (mostly multiplayer online games, or MMORPGs) whose spaces of play, whose worlds are always active & persistently in action. It turns out that these worlds have more than play action and fighting going on within them. They also have social politics between the people who interact with each other with in them, and even economics, as the currencies within these worlds can actually trade against other currencies in real life! Through these three readings, I can see that gaming has become more than a staple of impetuous youth, but rather, it is now its own cultural phenomenon worthy of academic study, complete with its own politics, business and philosophy. Gaming is transcendent even in many other ways. It is art & design, it is emotion & passion, it is story & literary, introspective & exhilarating, political & personal – it is an alternate universe that can yield a whole lot of promise for our brave new world, as the new media that it is.

Games are, first and foremost, art and design. Clive Thompson’s article “The Science of Play,” deals with the amount of effort it takes just to create the virtual worlds that have such intriguing dynamics after they are created. It deals with the amount of effort it takes to work on the design & architecture of the worlds – the very foundation of everything else in our world and the gaming world, and the amount of effort it takes to complete tests that make sure the worlds work properly. To be more specific, the game covers the extensive amount of effort that Bungie, the company that created Halo 3 and the rest of the Halo series, put into testing the game so that they could make sure that everything ran smoothly and nothing was wrong. To do this, according to the article, Bungie took advantage of the highly advanced testing facility that Microsoft (theirs, and the Xbox’s parent company) gave to them in order to undertake more than 3000 hours of game play testing conducted by some 600 everyday gamers in order to analyze every last detail, from favored weapons to how often and where, down to the square foot, players would get killed. The article dubs Halo as the “Star Wars of the thumb stick generation,” and so in order for Bungie to live up to this reputation, they are determined to make Halo 3 perfect. In order to achieve this goal, Bungie hired an experimental psychologist from the University of Cincinatti in order to help do all the game testing. In order to take care of details in the game, from things fluctuating from being insanely easy to downright impossible, the psychologist’s team quickly moved towards building tools for extracting game play data, and when players interacted with elements of the game, in order to complete weekly tests and find the snags that needed to be found in order to make the game perfect – a mutant alien that was far too powerful, a lava pit that too many people would fall into, etc. These steps all culminated in a vote made by the players on a 1-to-5 scale that would rate how fun the levels were. The psychologist’s team pushed for all 5s. Ultimately, this is the amount of effort it takes in order to get a game perfect.

Next, after the game is created, one must see how the players interact with each other in-game, and how and whether this may form the rudiments of society. This is where Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds comes into play. Castronova’s book details MMORPGs (which he calls “mor-pegs”), in order to see how, when the game becomes more than a game, but an entire world unto itself that is always active, and never settling – what happens? We see that there are four types of players who decide to traverse the world – Adventurers ( people in the game looking for a challenge), Explorers ( people who wish to see new worlds and what they are like), Socializers ( people who join the world to make new friends), and Controllers ( people who join the world simply to domineer over others). We also see currencies that, thanks to the fact that people decide to sell in-world items online and make money through the time and effort they decide to put into the world, trade in real life, and thus bring validity to the synthetic world as a reification of our economy. And we also see people who exert their influence in places like Second Life in order to show off “synthetic” social status in order to gain prestige amongst others in the “synthetic world.” Indeed, after the tireless work of game design is done, the game’s intricacies only grow as the people who play the game themselves bring such thorough and complicated personalities and politics to the game to add another layer to play within the synthetic world.

Finally, McKenzie Wark’s “Gamer Theory, 2.0” brings the next level of civilization development to the world of gaming – theory and philosophy. For this, I chose 2 chapters whose philosophy I shall highlight – “COMPLEX” on the game Deus Ex, and “ANALOG” on the game “Katamari Damacy.” “Katamari Damacy’s” chapter talks of the game as being an analog because it seems to represent a process analogous to the trials of Sisyphus, who was forced to roll a ball up a hill for all eternity. In this way, the game seems to represent an artistic analogue, according to the book’s chapter, on the creation of the universe through the stars, and the excruciating effort that that had to take…. Deus Ex’s chapter, on the other hand, is called “COMPLEX” because it details the detailed topography and topology of the complicated relationships in the game between the four factions that are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes not, such as those who are for merging (Omar), versus those who are not for merging (Apostlecorp), those who are for separation (Templar) versus those who are not for separation (Illuminati). By analyzing games in this way, Wark seems to have brought a final layer of high culture to the world of gaming – first there was the creation of art, then the art was given life, an economy and society in “Synthetic Worlds,” and now finally, with the philosophical musings of “Gamer Theory 2.0,” we have high culture imbued into the world of game, synthetic worlds and all.

As one can see from these three readings, gaming shows all the details of reality and culture of our world, reified in a new domain – cyberspace. Whether this represents the future, who knows?

Second Life Sex Change-scapades

When I changed my gender in 2L, I did notice that some things changed. As a man, I initially decided to make my gender male in 2L. Doing this, I thought, would actually not be that ordinary a thing to do because I chose to be a Harajuku Male, which is modeled after the guys who dress up in androgynous, gothic fashion anyway and wander around the shopping districts of Tokyo in very tight, sleek looking clothes with svelte physiques. To summarize – I didn’t look like your average male character, or so I believed, and yet there was still a significant change in the way people approached me when I changed my gender to female. Men, or course, were a little more interested in me, and came over to look at me when I was walking around, and some even asked me out on dates, but then I decided to break the bad news that I wasn’t who I seemed to be, they then proceeded to ask me if I was gay or not. I thought, “Geez, is it really that uncommon for a guy to try out what it’s like to be the other gender in 2L?” It was more interesting to look at all the dresses women have available to them and try them on when I went to various freebie stores, as well. I figured that lots of guys might get off on trying to become a woman, but I was surprised to see that no one was really into it, based on their reactions when I told them that I was a guy. Clearly, as Lauren Bans pointed out in her article on 2L, it is far from the post-race, post-gender utopia that it was believed to become, since most people were probably simply presenting slightly more idealized versions of themselves to me, rather than actually going out on a limb to try something different, like change their gender.