LECTURE @ PURCHASE – Inge Bruggeman – Connections to flat-panel digital displays

On March 26^th, I went to see one of the School of Art and Design lectures, given by a guest lecturer named Inge Bruggeman, a visiting art professor who specializes in Letterpress and Book arts at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. She gave a lecture on how she does her specialty prints of books using hand-operated “windmill” presses that allow for her to create her own text-based artwork. She focuses on the visual nature of text and the subjectivity of reading and defining. To be more specific, she uses the way the text is formed on paper in order to create art such that the way the text is formed on the page will add to the meaning of the words, or will add simply a new perspective on looking at the text as a work of art. Bruggeman’s goal, after all, is to get us, the observers, to look at the text for longer that it takes to read it in order to have us appreciate the graphics that go into creating the words that we see in every day life.

Among the things that were shown in Bruggeman’s presentation were a multitude of books and poems that she used as examples of how she did her art. Among the works she showed were a book of poems where she had drawings of sound waves that were used to illustrate the nature of the poetry in the book (the poems all had a certain type of rhyme scheme). Another work was something called the “Mickey Mantle Koan” which was a book that was printed entirely on leather in order to reflect the desires of the author. Since the book was printed on leather, Bruggeman had to press deeper down and work a little longer in order to get the text to set into the pages. She also needed to use a special ink in order to get the words to set into the leather. She said during the lecture that her preferred means of conveying images onto paper was to use photopolymer plates that were able to essentially be made from molds of metal that would then be pressed down into the paper in order to make illustrations and etchings that had nice laminated sheen before being taken back to the artist for coloring.

After listening to this presentation on letterpress printing, I thought of an article I had read long ago (all the way back in February 2004) in Scientific American on new display technologies that had the potential to replace the standard LED technology that we find today in our various consumer electronics – flat-panel TVs, cell phone displays, digital camera displays, GPS systems, and anything else that requires a display to show the output. These two new types of display technologies – OLED (organic light-emitting diode), and PLED (polymer light-emitting diode) – provided the potential not only to be used as the material for small, hi-res displays used in laptops, PDAs, digital cameras and home TVs, as a replacement for the more costly, less energy efficient and more difficult to manufacture LCD and LED technologies, but also the potential to be used on a wide variety of receiving materials – among those flexible plastic and metal foil! In essence, we would be able to create displays that can roll up into and out of tubes for easy storage! Besides being remarkable in its own right, the potential of these new display technologies led me to believe that perhaps the printed word was now under SERIOUS threat from the world of electronics. I wonder now that if companies like Pioneer and Samsung really start using this display technology (which, based on the date of the article, Feb. 2004, would only be a few years from now), that the printed word would now truly be dead, and people would seek their books to be read on fold-out plastic OLED displays instead of by the printed word….

Still, I imagine there are plenty “analog” art enthusiasts out there who would still love to see the remarkable art of people like Inge Bruggeman in the real incarnation. For in order to appreciate this art, I remember Bruggeman allowing us to go up to her examples that she brought in and touch them. Indeed, though this may be an uncommon experience, it shows you that art can not necessarily be boxed into a virtual, digital electronic display that would only allow you to see the image of a book from the calculated angles given by the photographer, rather than being able to analyze the book from your own vantage point, where you choose to see the actual book from whatever angle you would like to look at the book, even being allowed to touch the book if the museum so permits you to do so. But still, the threat to the printed word still looms. If books are put on these roll-up plastic displays, then that may still be enough to make books so unpopular that people like Bruggeman would no longer be able to sell their books, and thus their businesses would die out by attrition. That would be sad. Perhaps the key would be to allow such wonderful art to be generated in such a place like the matrix of Neuromancer, since such a place would perhaps allow for the art to co-exist alongside the technology, since it is a place where resources are less constricting and would allow for such co-existence – the unity of virtual and real, authentic “analog” art within a digital realm. Whether any of my fears or hopes comes true, however, remains to be seen…

Blog #7 - Reading Response #2 - Neuromancer and the many types of virtual reality

Virtual Reality (VR) is a common thread throughout many spheres of academia. In Science Fiction, Cyberpunk visionary William Gibson has two paradigms for his novel, Neuromancer – “simstim,” a special type of VR that allows users to experience sensations not readily available to themselves in the real world (such as eating a virtual chocolate bar), and “the matrix,” which represents an entire alternate reality in which users can exist and accomplish tasks using the large amounts of information available to them in this virtual world they “jack into.” In the 4 articles I read alongside Gibson’s Neuromancer, I see similar threads of this theme.

I’d like to point out some elements of Oliver Grau’s “Into the Belly of the Image” that relate to VR and show that the Virtual is a concept that existed long before computer technology was created. The latter is an interesting piece of art history analysis that tells of how virtual reality is something that humans have been striving for since long before computers became popular For, you see, VR can entail an area of ritual action where people gather to perform some sort of common action in order to celebrate or accomplish something within a spiritual ceremony, or a place where political power can be exercised when politicians, military or governmental leaders decide to exert their influence through a particular type of device that conveys the images that fully engulf the viewer. The connection between virtual reality and art extends through art history into the modern in Grau with the description of Osmose, which is a virtual reality installation where a person can glide through a virtual landscape of “glinting dew, translucent swarms of insects, and the thickets of dark woods.” In a sense, the Osmose installation is like the “cyberspace deck” that Case uses in Neuromancer to maneuver his way through the matrix & cyberspace. Any interface that intimately nestles itself into the senses of a viewer and causes an intense immersion into the art or imagery being used can be considered a virtual reality device (VR), and thus by weakening that viewer’s sense of psychological distance between image and reality, puts the relationship between art and consciousness into question (Grau, p.366).

To continue on this thread of contemplating the nature of virtual reality and its crossover into history, virtual reality goes beyond simply just art and technology. In Rob Shield’s writing “the Return of the Virtual,” we learn that virtual reality’s history extends into the realms of ceremony in religion, art and even politics. In religion, there is the debate between the Catholic Church and the burgeoning Protestant movement of the time of the Reformation over the Virtual nature of the Eucharist. The Catholics persecuted those who questioned the nature of the holy sacrament, but one of Reformation Theologian Martin Luther’s largest qualms in his major document, the “99 Theses” was, in fact, that he felt that the Eucharist was not in fact the transubstantiation of Christ, but just a piece of bread like any other. Luther claimed that the Eucharist was only “virtually real.” Likewise, according to Shields, the Hague in the Netherlands, among other places, has a panoramic piece of art called the Mezdag Panorama, which allows one the sensation of being at a place called the Mezdag, a seaside resort in which the creators attempted to best reality by creating an experience that would immerse the viewer, even bringing real sand to the edges of her feet to complete the illusion. The article also goes into the concept of marriage ceremonies as being “liminoid virtualities” such that couples who go through a marriage ceremony pass through a liminal barrier – a threshold – that is created virtually by society to allow them to pass on to a new type of relationship – that of the married couple. Indeed, virtual reality, according to Shields, can be present in many activities involving changes in nature or society through art, technology or religion, politics and such.

So, why is virtual reality so ubiquitous in our lives, our art, our technology and our ceremonies? The answer to this question can be found in a way in S. Paige Baty’s article “e-mail trouble.” In this article, Paige details how she became an e-mail addict as a professor at Williams, and she equates her e-mail trouble to female trouble, such that she thought of e-mail as being in the “matrix,” a place where she could reproduce in a virtual sense by writing streams of words to her fellow friends and colleagues. You see, her desire to get caught up in the Internet, stems from her inability to give birth as a woman because of her endometriosis that caused her to bleed excessively such that she needed to have menopause triggered early so that she could survive albeit without the ability to conceive. Thus, she continually refers to the Internet as “the matrix” because the definition of the matrix is womb, uterus, or cave, a place of birth! In this sense, Paige is both looking for the things she is missing in her life while at the same time, escaping from reality, which are two very important reasons why people turn to virtual reality in the first place whether it be in the form of art or technology or whatever. This is similar to how Case attempts to escape from reality again and again by turning to drugs and alcohol after he is rendered unable to return to the matrix, and how he ultimately is brought into the “matrix” in its original definition, according to Paige, when he has sex with Molly shortly before Armitage gives him the ability to return to the, well, Internet-like matrix to complete the missions for Armitage of finding Wintermute.

Ultimately, the last article is a counterpoint to the last few articles which show the wonders of VR and how its many forms let us escape and enhance reality. In the article “Attack of the Zombie Computers” by John Markoff, we learn that today in the real world, sinister hackers use spyware, program loopholes and such to commandeer computers in an attempt to create swarms of malicious computers called “botnets” that are capable of committing dozens of Internet crimes at once. According to Rick Wesson of San Francisco-based Support Intelligence, the counter-measures being taken “are losing the war badly,” and that “even our technology vendors understand that we are losing this war.” In a sense, we see that now that the VR world has grown, thanks to technology, to become as sophisticated as our real world, we see that it is now like the Wild West or the 1920s era of gangsters and such in that now the virtual world has become full of crime and is no longer just an independent threshold or art work or e-mail server or any lovely escape into the ether. Thus, VR has become more than just a phenomenon in science fiction, art or religion, but as William Gibson says in Neuromancer, “a consensual hallucination believed by millions daily.”

Blog #6 - OPEN BLOG - Should Information be as free as software? The Ins and Outs of Web Scraping

The definition of free software, according to the GNU project, encompasses the freedom to run a program for any purpose, to have access to the source code so that you can study the program and adapt it to your needs, to redistribute the modified code to your neighbor so you can aid him or her, and the freedom to release your modifications and improvements to the public so that we all can benefit as a community from your work, all with the condition that you let us keep these rights once you have redistributed the modified code. [1] These principles define the Free Software movement and are what Richard Stallman has in mind when he talks about defying the paradigm of “intellectual property.” in favor of the principles of “copyleft,” [1] which keep the open source and free software communities grounded in allowing those who support them to continue to create software that is as free as our country’s principles can make it, such that we are allowed to modify said software if it does not serve us well.

This concept of freedom in software (not necessarily free in price, “free speech, not free beer” [1]) now seems to be having its limits tested. According to the January 2008 issue of WIRED magazine, a common commitment to open access and cooperation has led small “data mashup” websites to become a massive new force in the Web 2.0 phenomenon [2]. What these websites do is use special software bots, codenamed “spiders” or “web crawlers,” coded in scripting languages like PHP, Java or Perl to go out on the internet and search the larger, Internet giants that hold large amounts of data in their coffers like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. [2]. The bots then extract information from these sites in a process called “scraping” (more politely referred to as “importing” [2]), and then bring the information back to the website where it can be reused by the creator of the website for the purpose usually of presenting the information in such a way that it makes the information easier to use that when it was in its previous incarnation on the major website. In a sense, according to [2], the giant web companies position themselves as “bountiful gardens” full of data for the smaller companies to use to create inspired new products. Companies like Zillow, which pulls map information from several partners like Navteq, GlobeXplorer and Proxix to create not only maps but also combine the map data with real estate data from public records to estimate what a house is worth, as well as Microsoft’s Photosynth, which allows you to make 3-D images from photos taken from Flickr. These innovative products are all forged from data taken from companies like Google, and Google itself is a company that encourages the growth of Web 2.0 since it thrives on the metadata of other websites in order to power its search engine [2].

But, the issues that loom over this seemingly smooth symbiotic relationship between information provider and smaller start-up websites also loom large. This unregulated exchange of information is still having its rules being sorted out, and if the large providers of information decide to cease their services, then web 2.0 dogma be damned [2], then these companies that try to start their businesses on the fruits of companies like Google are left out in the dark. If the flow of information is stopped, then these great little innovative start-ups will have their lifeblood taken away and there will be no more business for them, all because they may hurt traffic on their provider websites by causing too many queries which slows down traffic on the main site (Google, Yahoo!, etc.). These are the cons of these great start-up websites like Ryan Sit’s Listpic website that once reorganized posts from craigslist before receiving a cease-and-desist order, and Ron Hornbaker’s Alexaholic service that presented data from Amazon’s Alexa web statistics page in a friendlier interface before being shut down by Amazon and reborn as the page Statsaholic. The ease to which these small companies can be dispatched of means that there are not going to be many investors who are willing to invest money on such a risky, volatile small business like the latter. [2].

So, what is the solution? What in-between ground can be found for companies that depend on scraping information from the large Websites so that they can survive? One way, according to Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb, is that websites will learn to interpret their own information, and information will be understandable to both humans and computers and no longer so esoteric [3], as we progress towards the semantic web by means of APIs (fully, “application program interface”) provided by companies like Amazon that will allow for the bigger companies to control how much information they are giving out to smaller websites so that the problem with scrapers is no longer an issue, and so that the companies like Amazon and Google that provide lots of information will ultimately start profiting off of it. Of course, legal issues and scalability/traffic issues may be a problem, but it is not a matter of if the data will continue to be used in such a way in order to create new data mash-up services, but when [3] according to Iskold, so the larger companies had best try to adapt to these new paradigms of APIs in order to keep the transition smooth. This free flow of information would be something that would perhaps make these large companies more well-liked in the eyes of someone like Richard Stallman, who, as stated in the beginning, supports free information and “copyleft.”…

REFERENCES

1. “The Free Software Definition,” http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

Copyright 2007, Free Software Foundation. Boston, MA

2. Josh McHugh, “The Data Wars,” WIRED, January 2008: 137-139, 159, Copyright 2008 Conde Nast Publications, San Francisco, CA.

3. Iskold, Alex, “Web 3.0: When Web Sites become Web Services,” http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/web_30_when_web_sites_become_web_services.php. 2007. Copyright ReadWriteWeb.