Adrian, you might be interested in this. I haven't tried it yet since it doesn't work on Firefox but it was described in the book Wendy gave me as something like "a browser that shows entire websites at once" and is trying, in a internet-sonar-type way to make a database of every single web page on the internet. www.c5corp.com/1to1
Also for Adrian: Trevor Paglen photographs the satellites -- http://www.paglen.com/pages/projects/other_night/index.html
Lizzie, I think you'll be into this too. It's a bit choose-your-own-adventure-ish: http://www.teleportacia.org/war/war.html
Now some half-ideas I've had recently:
The discussion in the aforementioned book (I don't have it with me which is why I keep referring to it this way) on telecommunications having converted space into time in terms of data transference reminded me of the photo-finishes from track events where the runners are all photographed individually at the moment they cross the finish line but the images of all of them are shown on the same page with the relative distance between them being the amount of time between their finishes, with time as the x axis. Here's a good example: http://coachdeanhebert.files.wordpress.com/2007/08/100-photo-finish.jpg
I guess it is really sort of the opposite of telecommunications in the sense that it converts time back into space.
An "objective facebook" where users create the pages of their "friends" instead of their own pages. The obligation/responsibility of the user is to portray their friends accurately. The only control over one's own page is the ability to choose who one's friend are. Each item on a person’s page is easily traceable to its author so there is accountability. What about disagreements among users about how their friends should be portrayed? Lizzie suggested not being able to see one's own page and having to get someone else to show it to you if you are ever going to see it. Do you think this would function more as a social experiment, a therapeutic social exercise, or could it actually be something people enjoy using and find a purpose for? Considering the amount of work it would take to create anything like this that is remotely functional, this is probably just a theoretical proposition but to me it's an interesting idea.
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ReplyDelete- I think it's important to note that time is not "being turned into" space. This is about data being re-mediated into a different (visual) form, and the richly evocative emergent meaning humans can consequently see there. The "merely contingent configuration of of numerical values" has been re-mediated by digital technology, taking the resonant and "interpretively rich" form of a visual cue (Hansen, 9 and Hayles, 106). I think this picture speaks to the emergent meanings that humans can read in numerical data, when data is filtered through a program that produces pixels, which in turn can be read as images.(Although this terminology--filtered through--implies a purity of original material that I don't think exists). I think this picture is more about the material facilitation of different meanings by digital technology than it is about time and space. It's about representational strategies and how they are made. I think the question of how they are read (the importance of and working of the visual sense) would be a cool place to go with this line of thinking.
- For the "Objective Facebook". I don't think you could make a successful site with the arbitrary ethical guideline of being honest and creating "accurate" profiles. I think if we were to hypothetically make this site, it we'd have to reward users for being candid-- maybe by allowing their profile to slowly emerge? I think it would be cool to plumb the entire network to construct some kind of requirement of consensus, so you'd have to get other users' agreement with your facts in order to publish them. This accumulation of network-wide consensus over data could be visually embodied. Maybe people have to get "agreement hits" (sort of like the "likes this" app) in order to have statements published. Maybe more "agreement hits" would color the information visually in a certain way, like deepen the "pigment" of the text as it appears on the person's profile. Maybe if people get a lot of "agreement hits" on the "facts" they publish on other people, parts of their profile page start to become visible, maybe with a corresponding deepening of pigment. Maybe people's own profiles wouldn't correspond with the perceived accuracy of their info on others, but instead on others' perceptions of them. Maybe the "darkest" printed words on your page are the ones that the fewest people have agreed on, and the more and more people give an observation an "agreement hit," the lighter the "pigment" becomes, until you can't see the character trait or piece of information on you. This would be a cool way to both privilege and play with the idea of a page and authorship--who's "writing" on this page, and what happens if their "mark" has a reverse effect on readability?
I think the agreement/pigment concept is really really cool. The second part about it corresponding conversely to agreement on your own page confuses me but I'm intruiged; are you saying this would be the way that one would see one's own page but it would look the opposite way to everyone else?
ReplyDeleteas long as we're tossing around hypotheticals, what about a program that doesn't actually involve any effort on the user? not an 'objective' 'inversed' or 'honest' facebook but a tracking facebook. something that visualizes, even arbitrarily, the traffic migrations populations etc. of other users on your pages, your pictures. this could be through mouse movements, hyperlinks, viewing duration, and so on.
ReplyDeletewhat comes to mind immediately are some 'flow visualization' videos i just got out from the library. they're basically experiments set up to watch how flowing liquids (with variables of viscosity) interact with objects (with variables of size and shape). but of course, the inverse works as well, such as an object being moved through a liquid.
so in this new, trampled facebook, user movements, including your own, makes indentations, scratches, waves of patterns and colors on your page. it turns your page into a virtual map. but it's not really about transparency, it's about decay, which is rarely encountered on the internet. in this program the more use, the higher popularity of any given page, ends up distorting and destroying it, rather than making it a more popular search item. (and maybe the longer someone looks at a page, the more it becomes 'exposed', like photo-sensitive paper to light).
thoughts?