Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall

August 19, 2010 at 7:04 am · Filed under play

“Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall…”

I have been wanting to play with Processing canvases that reflect one’s social state on the web, and I finally got around to it.

Above is a screen grab of my Processing canvas – the logic is simple – Dip into the twitter streaming api, if there is any occurrence of my twitter identity, then reveal more.

The revelation of the image (my own) is done through a simple algorithm – start from a single origin, and fork out slowly based on rate of twitter references.

The canvas, therefore, reveals the number of times a certain person is referred, and works best for twitter celebs.

I am still tweaking the visual style, and the underlying logic, but the framework already allows me to play with quite a few things…

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theory:praxis in emerging digital technologies and cultures

November 5, 2008 at 3:27 pm · Filed under play

So its official now: we are currently working on a book for Routledge India where me and Soum (with guest star Angad Chowdhry) will co-write a chapter on the work we do.  While I really have no idea at this point how the chapter will be organized — I increasingly believe in improvisation and semi-random iteration when generating new ideas — momentary closure was nonetheless achieved on the note that had to be sent to the publishers.  Can we use genetic algorythms as new metaphors for thinking?  What is the use of literary narratives of time such as sideshadowing and foreshadowing for understanding the future of technological development?  Though perhaps a bit academically dry for my tastes, I thought I’d like to share these here.

Theory:Praxis in Emerging Digital Technologies and Cultures in India
Angad Chowdhry | Soumyadeep Paul | Matti Pohjonen

Emerging digital technologies and cultures pose many challenges for traditional research.  For one, the classical academic method is based on a reflexive and critical distance from your object of study. But how do you research something that does not allows the luxury of distance because of the sheer speed of change that is taking place? The moment you slow it down for dissection, it has already changed, moved on to become something else.  Secondly, how do you research something that does not even perhaps exist in the traditional sense but is rather always-already one step in the future: a project under construction, a vision, an idea being developed?  What methods are best suited for such an amorphous and fleeting object of research? What theories are best suited to understand the complex narratives of time, change and becoming presupposed by contemporary digital technologies and cultures?

This chapter will look at emerging digital technologies and cultures in India — mobile phones, MMS, MMORPG, social networks, hacker culture, virtual realities — and the problems, challenges and opportunities these place for research today. It will argue for practice-based research as one possible methodology for better understanding these digital technologies and cultures today. Using examples of the three authors actively involved in working digital technologies and cultures in India, the chapter will look at some of the theoretical and practical problems that get raised when the boundaries between research and practice are blurred and the roles between the academic and professional often reversed?  What might be
the benefits and risks of such an approach?  What new ways of thinking and insights might these experiments engender?

The book itself, tentatively titled “Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change” will look at the recent changes in Indian media from a various perspectives and will combine some academic biggies (Laura Mulvey, Mark Hobart, Annabelle Sreberny) and some young gun researchers.  I will be also co-writing the theoretical introduction to the book on the theoretical complexity of understanding change in media and technology as well as co-editing the book so – I guess – I get to write and edit myself and go properly schizo?  The book description goes as follows:

Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change: Concept Note – Draft 0.1.

Rhetoric about India’s rapid economic growth and burgeoning middle classes suggests something new and significant is taking place. Something is changing, we are told: India is shining, the elephant is rising and the 21st century will be Indian.

Arguably, one key loci where such re-imaginings of India’s contested future take place is in its mass media. Yet much of the analysis on contemporary India has overlooked the complex role media has in articulating India’s economic and cultural landscape. The proposed book “Indian Mass Media and Politics of Change” aims to be an intervention towards empirically-driven yet theoretically-nuanced analysis of the politics of change taking place daily across the cinema halls, TV screens, newspapers and computer monitors in India today.

But what do we mean by change? French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once remarked that research should look at two things. The first is that the abstract does not explain anything but it instead must be explained; the second is that the aim of research is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal but instead is to find the conditions under which something new is produced (ie how things change). Similarly, the aim of the book is to provide a systematic analysis of the broader issues that underlie this abstract and often muddled notion of change.  What do these articulations tell us about the broader questions of tradition and modernity played out in the media in India today? How can it help us understand the problems of history, teleology and how the future is talked about? And how are these articulations of change ultimately implicated in wider political projects of development and progress?

The different chapters of the book provide snapshots from Indian media today where the articulations of change are refracted in myriad and different ways. By doing so, it provides the opening towards a more systematic analysis of the role the mass media has today, both in India and globally, in articulating the politics of change: this elusive boundary between the past, the fleeting present and the constantly re-imagined horizon of our open futures.

In any case, this can potentially be rather interesting because quite a lot of the work we do at BCG works at the boundary, the breach between different discplines and technologies — the transversal movement between academic research, artistic experimentation, old and new media, tactical technology and commercial design and development work, I suppose, is where the goodies and candies can increasingly be found.

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3.3 billion mobiles

February 25, 2008 at 11:09 am · Filed under play, technology

I was laughing recently at myself – always a good thing to do. I’m currently starting a research project into emerging digital cultures and Tactical media, especially in places outside the traditional US / Northern European domain that has been overcovered. So I’ve been doing the background info-rounds, locating the key focal points etc. So what repeatedly pops up everywhere is the importance of mobiles phones as the fastest growing technology of the future. For instance, an article in the Washington Post recently claimed that there are now an astonishing 3.3 billion mobiles phones on the planet – one for every second person! The article says, in specific

From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history — faster even than the polio vaccine.

“We knew this was going to happen a few years ago. And we know how it will end,” says Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Google. “It will end with 5 billion out of the 6″ with cellphones. “A reasonable prediction is 4 billion in the next few years — the current proposal is 4 billion by 2010. And then the final billion or so within a few years thereafter.
(LINK)

Wherever you look and read, it seems mobiles are emerging as one of the key technologies that we need to reckon with. But when my friends ask me, what do you really do? I tell them that – when in my research mode – I am interested in cutting-edge technology, future media and emerging digital cultures in the broad sense of the term. And then I pull out my own mobile – an old Nokia that has no additional functions excect shock protection and the ever-so-important flashlight. So I suppose I need to soon stop being the quentessential abstract academic who only talks about things and actually now get me one of these multi-function sleek sexy phones that I always predict that will probably have the most significant impact on how people communicate in the future. Just to have a look what the future feels like.

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AML – aesthetics mark-up language

February 13, 2008 at 9:46 am · Filed under design, play, technology

So in our never-ending quest for the Idea, we have been recently throwing around some ideas around AI, aesthetics and creativity. To understand this particularly strange one, however, I probably will need to provide a few words of background to the wider project that we are interested in. I will try to keep it simple. Basically, the problematic/question that I am working around has to do with the “image of thought” in today’s digital cultures. One of the key tropes we are seeing emerging today is that the universe is made of patterns; or “abstract machines” as I prefer calling them after the French philosopher Deleuze. Without getting into unnecessary theoretical complexity here, what this means can perhaps best be seen inflected and explained in two ways:

The first is that “things” (in technical language “identities” or “forms”) are the emergent outcomes of complex repetition of patterns through which complexity if formed. These can then be reverse engineered and computationally modelled so that, say, a fractal algorithm can be used to model complex patterns in nature. This is especially common today in some of the 3D and visual compositing software that we use today and all kinds of experiments with genetic algorithms and cellular automata etc – simple rules, complex outcomes.

The second is that human intelligence itself is made of, to a large degree, of such repetitions. This idea is rather much more elusive than the first but is one of the key presuppositions behind artificial intelligence research. Here the key question is that what algorithms could be used to model the way humans think and thus be used to guide machines to perform complex tasks. The philosophical implications of this are even more profound than getting a robot to recognize faces or clean a non-linear toilet bowl. That is, if human intelligence is, in fact, highly programmable, what then defines humans from machines? This goes two ways: machines-as-humans and humans-as-machines. In other words, AI defines rationality a certain way with certain presupposition of what logic, thinking and consciousness are and how they can be pragmatically simulated in computers. But as importantly, if we look at the concept of rationality and how it has been historically constructed, this has always presupposes a certain “image of thought” that has excluded all that would not fit into the sphere of rationality (intuitions, insanity, madness, illogic, spontaneity, absurdity ….). So how would we then understand the blurred boundaries of man and computer (as intelligent forms, which neither technically speaking are) and the human-computer assemblage that is making the old notions of rationality/humanity perhaps increasingly difficult to defend? Humans as (programmed?) repetitions: computers as programmed repetitions: natural intelligence: artificial intelligence: natural stupidity: artificial stupidity …

Anyway, all this probably seems rather abstract here. However, what was a concrete outcome of this philosophical babble was a project called AML (or what we like to tentatively call Aesthetics Mark-Up Language) that we are now currently trying to get our head around and develop. Similar to the more philosophical questions above, the idea here would be to experiment with how we detect patterns in certain visual styles such as certain genres in film etc. These patters could be then transposed/translated to other instances so that, say – yes, however preposterous this may sound – a Bollywood Film could edit a Hollywood film!

To perhaps see more what we mean by this, please find below an excerpt of some of the behind-the-scenes work-in-progress. The email conversation explains the idea better than I could re-write.

In film theory, for instance, the following elements are often talked about in the semiotics of the filmic image (well it is more complex but bear with me for the time being …)

1) Images;
2) Phonetics = speech;
3) Noise = background noise etc;
4) Text
5) Music.

For our purposes, we will probably have to stick to images for now. Tracking classical elements of film, in the beginning, is far too complex to get started with. Such as depth of field, montage / contrast etc. So what could be easily tracked to get started?

Let’s start with images. We could start off with the following variables:

- movement (speed of movement = speed of change in pixels?) This could be later used to analyze some rhythm of change.

- brightness and contrast (how would this be tracked = the relationship or average of pixels in any given location on the video?)

This could also later be use to analyze things such as harmony of composition, direction of lines in the mise en scene, etc. We would have to come up with a set of principles from art history and composition and see how these could be determined in the screen etc?

- color range (this would probably have to be RGB values in the image itself). This would probably move us into the realm of things such as monochromatic color schemes, bright colors, harmonious colors, contrasting / oppositional color … ie to use some notion of color theory to provide patterns in certain styles of video etc. I’ve
studied this in high school so will be fun to revisit some principles of classical painting.

So I suspect what we need to do is set up a very simple experiment / structure in place that can be developed and extended depending on need. In other words, we need to develop … AML (Aesthetics Meta Language) … a basic language structure that would describe what the variables are within any analyzed video. This language, I suspect, could be then developed into the interface between the language of aesthetics and the computer. Something like this:

//AML: “DEBBIE DOES DALLAS”

<contrast>
<high>134</high>
<low>12</low>
<average>58</average>
<mean>22</mean>
</contrast>

You get the point. The interesting thing about such an approach would be that we would be developing an entire syntactics of the aesthetics-computer interface that could be taken to any given direction we want. And then, of course, transposed back to how we would edit any clips or piece of media that we choose to run through the framework.

So how would this relate to the aesthetics machine? Basically, determining before hand the parameters for aesthetics is impossible. In film theory, there are some ideas such as structuralist semiotics that try to describe the language of different films but – as you know – aesthetics is notoriously difficult to pinpoint, especially when we are stuck with pixel-level pattern recognition on the computer. So what the aesthetics machine could be is the extension of the AML meta-language that would emerge from experimenting with as much visual material as possible. Say, we make AML public and get film-buffs and media-freaks to go through the entire ouevre of, say, German Porn genre to see what patterns emerge. These are then described in the wider structure of the AML language that we start developing So we get:

//AML: “DEBBIE DOES DALLAS” AESTHETIC STRUCTURE

<crossfade>
<number>12</number>
<duration>145</duration>
</crossface>

<contrast>
<high>134</high>
<low>12</low>
<average>58</average>
<mean>22</mean>
</contrast>

etc etc. Perhaps we could even open this language up so that some elements could be done analogically by volunteers (ie Amazon Turk Model) to further build the language beyond what is possible through pattern recognition. As this language develops, then the aesthetics machine will then merely be the instantiation and translation of these variables to other media material.

So if this approach would be the best, we need to develop / conceptualise three things:

1) The pattern recognition engine to get started experimentation with
simple data;

2) The syntactic structure that would describe any given visual material and that could be populated both by computers as well as analog humans;

3) The basic experimentations of how the AML language could be then
used to edit / re-mix some other media element.

So one reason why we are interested in Processing is exactly that it is the ideal platform for such experiments to emerge. In any case, watch the space here as our ideas eventually develop and we start getting the first concrete experiments up.

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