• Fark Yaralari = Scars of Differance
• Multitude of Blogs
• Museum of Accidents
• Discourse Notebook
• AAAARD.ORG

However, as counterpoint to Janneke Adema’s echoing of John Perry Barlow’s well-known declaration that “information wants to be free“, it should be reminded that information does not just want to be free. As Goldsmith and Wu put it in Who Controls the Internet?:

“The Internet has been celebrated for allowing open, universal communication. ‘Information wants to be free,’ John Perry Barlow famously declared. But information does not, in fact, want to be free. It wants to be labeled, organized, and filtered so it can be discovered, cross-referenced, and consumed.” (Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006: 51)

With so many texts now available online, in searchable pdf format, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they could be searched, cross-referenced, tagged, etc. before downloading? The kind of possibilities – conceptual, and research-wise – this would open up for scholarship is mind-boggling if taken to its conclusion.

Initially, Hillebrand’s team could fit only 128 characters into that space, but that didn’t seem like nearly enough. With a little tweaking and a decision to cut down the set of possible letters, numbers and symbols that the system could represent, they squeezed out room for another 32 characters.

Still, his committee wondered, would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, they based their initial assumptions on two “convincing arguments,” Hillebrand said.

For one, they found that postcards often contained fewer than 150 characters.

Second, they analyzed a set of messages sent through Telex, a then-prevalent telegraphy network for business professionals. Despite not having a technical limitation, Hillebrand said, Telex transmissions were usually about the same length as postcards.

The U.S. State Department has announced it is sponsoring a “New Media Technology” delegation to Iraq to “explore new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq’s emerging new media industry.” Of all of the areas in Iraq in desperate need of attention, its “emerging new media industry” is not the one that pops to mind. Things like clean water, electricity, right of safe return for refugees and an end to the occupation seem more pressing than increasing Nouri al Maliki’s Twitter followers. But unfortunately, that’s how U.S. priorities in Iraq seem to work.

Anyway, the super star tech delegation, according to the State Department press release, includes “a mix of CEOs, Vice-Presidents and senior representatives” from “AT&T, Google, Twitter, Howcast, Meetup, You Tube and Automattic/Wordpress.”

But the final company listed as participating in the delegation begs for some sort of special review: Blue State Digital, a firm which boasts its services were “Critically important to President Obama’s victory” in the November election. Indeed, federal campaign spending records indicate that the Obama campaign paid the firm at least $2,864,138 in 2007-2008, including more than $700,000 on election day.

But I wonder if Scahill’s anger is slightly misplaced. This project doesn’t seem to be occurring at the expense of, or instead of, other infrastructure projects, so to phrase it that way is a little misleading. I don’t think a prioritizing of projects is necessarily the central issue here.

According to the State Department’s press release:

During their visit to Iraq, they will provide conceptual input as well as ideas on how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building. As Iraqis think about how to integrate new technology as a tool for smart power, we view this as an opportunity to invite the American technology industry to be part of this creative genesis.

Is this old-fashioned economic colonization, only this time channeled through new media and information technology corporations, or is it a genuine attempt to put in place potentially-democratic tools and infrastructure conducive to coordination and transparency?

'Stammbuch des Johann Christian Sigmund Mönch aus Jena'

I love the idea that, as Ulla remarks in the comments, “we are really not that much more advanced than the 1700’s …” Perhaps we do, on the whole, tend to overestimate the degree to which new forms of social ties are historically novel. Maybe Facebook is merely the next phase, or version, of a much more sustained mode of interaction, one based on “signatures”, quips, and periodic renewals of fading relationships, rather than on, say, friendship and intimate conversation. That one happens on paper and the other on a screen likely isn’t as decisive a factor as we think it is. BibliOdyssey explains:

“Stammbücher appear for the first time in the 16th and 17th centuries in the German- and Dutch-speaking areas of Europe, where it had become fashionable among graduating university students to have one’s personal bible signed by classmates and instructors. Soon inscriptions went beyond simple signatures to include reminiscences of common experiences, good wishes for the future, or a favorite passage from literature or poetry. Publishers foreseeing a lucrative market printed bibles with empty pages and soon also turned out small decorated books with only empty pages.

Eventually these albums were not only passed around at graduation but accompanied a student throughout his life, gathering entries from relatives, friends, and important acquaintances. Others also took up the custom, especially those who traveled as part of their training or social upbringing, such as aristocrats, tradesmen, military officers, poets, or musicians. Stammbücher were usually circulated at a time of parting and served the bearer not only as a sentimental remembrance but as a collection of references by association in his pursuit of a professional or social career. Inscriptions were personal, yet frequently included literary quotes, showing the writer’s—and by extension the bearer’s—social and intellectual standing. The messages emphasized values such as intellectual and political freedom, hard work, honesty, forthrightness, self-reliance, and friendship. Good wishes for happiness, health, good fortune, and prosperity were always included.”

Source: *“Dies schrieb Dir zur Erinnerung. . .” From Album Amicorum to Autograph Book* by Antje Petty, Director of the Max Kade Institute For German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Visualization of the frequency of the words 'socialism' (orange) and 'capitalism' (green) in New York Times articles since 1981. (by Jer Thorp)

Jo Guldi of Inscape has a provocative post up describing how she used available web-based tools to produce a rather sophisticated analysis of the use of the word pseudoscience in Wikipedia entries. Her hypothesis, to paraphrase, is that “pseudoscience” is less a rigorous, ’scientific’ term than a discursive ‘marker’ for attempts to delegitimize opposing arguments.

I started on a hunch, and that hunch involved one of my favorite twentieth-century words for starting a fight. The word “pseudoscience” was one of the twentieth century’s most powerful tools for turning a pleasant argument into an all-out jam-throwing mud-in-your-eye punch fest. Establish something as a “pseudoscience” and you dismiss the evidence offered out of hand. The processes to which pseudoscience refers are very modern: expert communities, institutional truth, public discourse, and the body of scientific thinking. [...] I suppose I’m attracted to things labeled pseudoscience in part because they represent communities whose thinking is out-of-time or out-of-place, and twenty-first-century interlocutors frequently have problems determining which and why. Take acupuncture. The elemental metaphors relating bodily organs to the seasons appear to be whacked out-of-time from the perspective of twentieth-century western science. But acupuncture’s reliance on communities of practice, responding to the experience of the patient, frequently surpasses western medicine in its skills of communicating with the patient, treating the physical ailment, the psychological, the psychosomatic, and the patient-doctor relationship as parts of an entire whole. If anything, acupuncture isn’t out-of-time, it’s out-of-place, the creature of a tradition external to the west and frequently misunderstood by western practitioners. That doesn’t stop western pracitioners from labeling acupuncture a “pseudoscience,” or cultural anthropologists from accusing the category “pseudoscience” of incorporating western bias. Pseudoscience is a great term for pointing to fissures.

Guldi’s methods for identifying rhetorical instances of the word could just as well be used to identity other ‘fissures’. To be sure, a more robust (and affordable) means for sifting through, and refining, the large sets of data to which humanities scholars now have access, has long been overdue. (The whole ‘tag cloud’ phenomenon shows just how desperate we are for a handy, user-friendly data visualizer.) Here’s what she did:

I asked DevonAgent (a personalizable search agent for automatically pulling big sets of text from the web without cut and paste, ~$25 education rate) to find me all the Wikipedia articles that reference pseudoscience, either in the class heading, the article itself, or the backboard discussion. Those articles range from articles explaining Popper’s definition of pseudoscience to clearly discredited theories (phrenology, flat-earth theory) to controversial subjects from the borderlands of western institutional knowledge (e.g. acupuncture).

The resulting database of articles is a collection of knowledge fissures: places where one group of researchers has attempted to tell another to shush.

So I asked the machines who was involved in the fights. ManyEyes, a free collection of visualization tools from IBM, will let anyone look for recurring grammatical relationships between certain words in a given piece of text. When ManyEyes looked at the Wikipedia Pseudoscience database, it quickly recognized certain names coming up regularly. It knew that they were names only from the grammatical construction of a personal relationship, i.e., the word was followed by an apostrophe-s, e.g. Freud‘s book, Sheldrake’s claim, Popper’s hypothesis. So I asked ManyEyes for a list of the players who appear in the fights over pseudoscience. Here they are, to the best of the machine’s knowledge.

Guldi’s general thesis – that certain words or phrases mark disciplinary fissures — is compelling, if limited in application. Not every fissure, of course, manifests itself with semantic markers, nor does every regular accusation suggest a deep break, but generally speaking a great deal of authoritative research could be done with a method such as this one.

Guldi also points the way to scholarly uses of web-accessible archives for purposes other than mere ‘visualization’, and her timing couldn’t be better. Over the last five months or so, The New York Times has been rolling out a series of APIs for interacting with its 158-year corpus, an ambitious project that culminated recently in the February 20 Times Open developer seminar. Artist-developers like Tim Schwartz and Jer Thorp have since produced some interesting visualizations of the archive — of the frequency of “socialism” vs. “capitalism” between 1984 and 2009, for instance — and there are other artists doing similar work without APIs –  Jeff Clark’s News Spectrum or Dave Bowker’s “One week of The Guardian” — but, again, these projects are for the most part aimed at producing visually-pleasing representations of data and take little interest in identifying discursive ‘fissures’ or mining historical archives for definitive ‘macro’ patterns. But it’s only a matter of time before social scientists and historians like Guldi turn their attention to archive APIs like the Times‘ and begin making all sorts of interesting discoveries.

The sense that virtual reality was of fundamental importance came from artists who communicated it immediately to the public through their work. In addition, many aspects of virtual reality including full body participation, the idea of a shared telecommunications space, multi-sensory feedback, third-person participation, unencumbered approaches and the data glove all came from the art, not from the technical community.

Which is to say, the exploration of perception, immersion, and the self through VR technology really is, at heart, an open exploration, rather than, say, a practical, directed, task-oriented affair. This changes the popular narrative tremendously. Whereas one might previously have thought that data gloves (for instance) are simply a technological ’solution’ to a problem, their development is in fact intimately tied, historically speaking, to theoretical, artistic projects.

Most artists attracted to work with virtual reality as a medium want to create imaginative interactive environments where they can control all the objects or all the spatial coordinates and sound in order to achieve an aesthetic effect. Powerful computers are used to generate visual experience and to track body movements through the use of prosthetic devices such as data gloves, head-mounted displays and body-suits which encase the body in fiber-optic cabling. Fully immersed in a completely controlled artificial environment, the visual, aural, and tactile capabilities of the body become totally absorbed in following three-dimensional representations which are continuously modeled and tracked through computer monitoring of the body’s every movement. Participants experience environments which seem to be located in three-dimensional real space. The effect is that of a technological invasion of the body’s senses and a relocation of what can be seen and experienced to the realm of a synthetic private world severed from other potential observers.

In any event, thanks to a post by Paul Prudence of Data Is Nature, we’ll be able to follow similar developments through the upcoming Technocultures: The History of Digital Art panel, on which Lovejoy will speak.

Friday, March 6, 6 — 8:30pm
School of Visual Arts
133/141 West 21 Street, Room 101C
Free and open to the public

The MFA Computer Art Department at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents Technocultures: The History of Digital Art–A Conversation, featuring influential historical practitioners and researchers on digital art. Department Chair Bruce Wands will moderate. The panel will trace the history of digital art through vignettes and personal anecdotes of four pioneers: Kenneth Knowlton, Margot Lovejoy, Kenneth Snelson and Lillian Schwartz. They will be joined by Jeremy Gardiner and Nick Lambert, who are working with Birkbeck College, University of London, and the Victoria and Albert Museum on a project called Technocultures.

Technocultures traces the history of digital art though recent acquisitions by the Victoria and Albert Museum consisting of a collection of approximately 500 digital prints from Patric Prince, a noted digital art collector in the United States and the British Computer Art Society. “This is a historic moment in digital art,” states Bruce Wands, adding, “The Victoria and Albert Museum is taking the international lead in creating permanent archives of early digital work.” The discussion will move from how each of the panelists got involved in digital art and what attracted them to it, to what they are doing today and how digital art is viewed in relation to contemporary and future art practice.

Staring at Cat Staring at Cat Staring, 2007, by Steve Bishop

If wondering what it’s like to be a bat, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel famously did in a 1974 essay, no longer sates our appetite for the futile, designing simulations for them might. For more than thirty years now, as chronicled in Richard D’Eath’s extensive review, “Can video images imitate real stimuli in animal behaviour experiments?“, the use of immersive technologies in the study of animal behavior has struggled against an elusive, perhaps ineradicable anthropocentrism.

At first, to be sure, scientists gave little thought to the videographic apparatus and simply used television monitors to test animal vision. But soon enough it became clear that the animal audience neither perceived the image realistically nor responded appropriately. Mate preferences changed, attention levels fluctuated, learning curves emerged and interfered with results. Just what was the animal seeing? they wondered.

With new limitations in place, the overarching goal gradually shifted from simulating natural environments, which remained largely unintelligible, to testing vision and perception itself. In the 90s, a new wave of studies showed that not only do television monitors generally fail to induce a sense of presence, they disturb it tremendously. Diurnal birds, for instance, see ultraviolet light in addition to the human visible spectrum, but since video equipment can’t capture UV — and televisions themselves emit it — plumage patterns become dulled beyond recognition. To say nothing of Wolf spiders (a popular test species), who perceive the world through vibration, vision, and chemical senses, or of certain reptiles, which have three or four cone types, see UV, and also, with the exception of snakes, see (like birds) through oil droplets, assumptions concerning the perceptual systems of other species were revealed to be strikingly anthropocentric and, to make matters worse, difficult to identify.

Even so, the question of how to induce a sense of presence, however limited, in an animal subject persists today. Constrictions, both technological and philosophical, are considerable, however. For one, a global correction of the image is not possible. Adjustments, when possible, must be made for every part of the picture — and there’s no questionnaire for the animal subject to fill out and return for inspection. Retinal analysis is just as uncertain, in that so much processing takes place further down the neural chain. Like so, the scientist’s dream of creating an immersive virtual environment was traded in, piece by piece, for a much more limited, pragmatic approach. Instead of an ‘experience’ or complete ‘world’, the animal would now be submitted to discrete, targeted ‘cues’ designed to elicit specific behaviors. As a result, in part, of this shift, the ethological models on which many of these studies drew took a turn for their behaviorist roots. Invoking ‘instinct’ and ‘drive’ as the key methodological principles, studies would now deploy virtual stimuli in search of a regular ‘innate’ response.

In this way, the old debate over animal consciousness has given way to a more nuanced elaboration of unconscious, physiological states. Factory farms, naturally enough, are interested, and continue to fund a great deal of the research. How, they ask, can multimedia displays be used to induce a greater sense of calm in an overcrowded chicken coop, and so reduce the threshold where costly ‘agonistic behavior’ sets in amongst the population? In spite of these transgressions, however, the question of presence itself has served to open a new space for the study of animals in their full complexity — not as simpler, dim-witted versions of humans, but as beings in their own right, with their own perceptual orientation to the world and their own inimitable ways of life.

After having elicited a body-swap illusion in the test subjects, Ehrsson and Petrova conducted a variation thereof using a “dark green rectangular box of the same height and width” as a human body, to show that the subject can’t simply swap bodies with anything.

“We also conducted an experiment to examine our prediction that the body would need to look like a human to be experienced as one’s own. Pilot experiments suggested that the illusion did not work with objects that do not resemble a human body, such as boxes, chairs and tables. Thus we conducted an experiment where we applied threats to the mannequin or to a rectangular object of the same size, after a period of synchronous or asynchronous visuo-tactile stimulation to the respondent and the object.”

While these results suggest that a nearly exact correlation between forms is necessary for a truly immersive illusion to follow, the choice of a box, as counter-model, passes over a vast terrain of possible human-like, if still non-human, surrogate forms. Elicited out-of-body experiences like Jaron Lanier’s VR jaunt as a lobster, which I briefly went over here, is one example of the many extra-human immersive possibilities obscured by the box counter-example.

The study concludes however with a ‘common sense’ remark that the body-swap illusion is only possible with bodies that “resemble” one’s own, but, again, it is simply not clear what constitutes resemblance. We already know from experiments with immersion that non-human appendages can localize sensory experiences and that sensory-motor adaptation can radically exceed its original configuration. To what extent, then, can these kinds of limits be pushed or rearranged? Is it possible, for instance, to design a sophisticated training regimen that could progressively coach adaptation to surrogate forms that would otherwise not be immediately psychically acceptable? Perhaps in the coming years experiments will take a greater interest in manipulating the seemingly permanent forms of body identification.

Mark Tansey's "The Innocent Eye Test" (1981) uses the cow's iconic blank gaze to represent a failure of perception.

If animal scientists have traditionally assessed primate “intelligence” with explicitly anthropocentric criteria — language capacity, for instance — it should also be pointed out that these assessments have been carried out at the neglect of the ways in which animals actually do experience the world. As Kaplan & Rogers (2002: 502) recently observed:

“In the main, studies of communication in orangutans have been focused on vocalizations […] Studies specific to nonvocal communication are less common. There has been limited research on facial expressions and of nonvocal communication […] but no detailed investigation of eyes and eye movement.”

Some of the resistance to locating ‘intelligence’ in animal perception, in general, and vision, in particular, can be attributed to mainstream conceptions of animal gazes –- which, if pop-culture is any guide, are typically represented as forming a vision devoid of thought, a blank stare or empty gaze. To be sure, little in the way of scientific rigor separates the concluding remarks of one study on dolphin vision –- which found that “the most parsimonious and logically defensible position is to assume that cetaceans (like most primates) have clever brains but blank minds (Humphrey, 1982)” (Gallup 1995: 228) –- from, say, Mark Tansey’s celebrated painting “The Innocent Eye Test” (1981), above, which uses a cow staring at a painting of a cow to represent the stupidity or simplicity of certain art critics.

In human video studies, analogous views are just as difficult to find: for instance, the experimental film scholar Catherine Russell has recently described Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (1986) as evidencing the

“failure of the animals to return the gaze. They look without seeing. We cannot know what they are thinking, if they are thinking; the eye becomes a mask. Viola may catch his own reflection in the eye of an owl, but nothing and no one looks back at him with any interest” (Russell 1999: 119-120).

The animal eye, in this view, functions as a mirror for the gaze of the human; it arrests the human’s, admits of nothing, and so fails to engage in the coveted mutual exchange of glances. In a single symbolic move, the eye becomes a mask for the animal and a mirror for the human.

(That is, where (since Plato perhaps*) many have sought to discover in the eye’s disappearance into the gaze a foundation for sociality, love, and truth, in the eye of the animal the reflection of the human obstructs, and so limits, the powers of inspection. Indeed, many of the (anthropocentric) experiments that fail to find satisfactory evidence of animal intelligence betray a curious disappointment, as if they were expecting to find a human behind the mask.)

It is nonetheless otherwise understood that “monkeys and apes are able to follow the gaze of others” (Itakura 2004: 216) and that domestic animals especially are able to interact with humans, follow their gazes, engage, and respond. Which presents a curious, if familiar, paradox: in one discourse, animals are regarded as self-evidently social, intelligent, and ‘conscious’, while in another, the same animals are regarded as unconscious, unaware, and, in an almost literal sense, unperceptive. (Sara Shettleworth’s ridiculous question, “Do animals know that they know?”, from her essay of the same name, seems perfectly symptomatic of this paradox pushed onto the animal.)

The critical task, then, is to see more than ourselves in the gaze of the animal. Which, in terms of experimental design, amounts to discerning and eliminating anthropomorphic bias in the construction of studies and the analysis of results. (The history of animal behavior experiments is thus also, in its way, the history of the human animal’s negotiation of a seemingly unthinkable, inaccessible difference.) In coming posts, I’ll take a look at some of these experiments.

Notes

* “Have you already noticed that the face of one looking in the eye appears there as though in a mirror? Thus we call it our pupil (pupille), that is to say small doll (poupee), because on it there is an image of the one who looks into it. When the eye looks into another eye … it recognizes itself” (Plato, Phedre, 255, and Le Premier Alcibiade, 132d; quoted in [Melchior-Bonnet 1994: 230]).

References

Gallup G (1995). Mirrors, minds, and cetaceans. Consciousness and Cognition, 4, 226-228. [Link]

Humphrey N (1982). Consciousness: A just-so story. New Scientist, 95, 474-478. [Link]

Itakura S (2004). Gaze-following and joint visual attention in nonhuman animals. Japanese Psychological Research, 46 (3), 216-226. [Link]

Kaplan G, & Rogers L (2002). Patterns of gazing in orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus). International Journal of Primatology, 23 (3), 501-526. [Link]

Melchior-Bonnet S (1994). The mirror: A history. KH Jewett (Tr.) New York: Routledge. [Link]

Russell C (1999). Experimental ethnography: The work of film in the age of video. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. [Link]

Shettleworth, Sara J (2001). Do animals know that they know? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5 (9), 404–405. [Link]

Obsession with the details also does not fly well in an age when what we are supposed to be doing is creating generalizing social science. So perhaps connoisseurship as a model of anthropology has drawbacks both for the politically engaged and the scientifically neutral. Still, I think we should try giving it a run for its money again.

To which Kerim, in a post titled “The end of the connoisseur?”, responds:

Anthropologists traditionally deployed their authority as connoisseurs to shape and contextualize the context within which “we” learned about and encountered “other” cultures. Hell, we even had a role defining how people learned about and encountered anthropological knowledge. But now that carefully cultivated connoisseurship is becoming less and less important as Google algorithms and Web 2.0 recommendation engines become the primary gateways.

Thus, for Rex, connoisseurship fundamentally runs against the dominant strains of anthropology; while for Kerim social media has rendered connoisseurship unimportant. In each case, the connoisseur concept or archetype appears to be lagging behind more contemporary concerns.

While it’s probably true that connoisseurship is no longer a talked-about category for understanding culture –- i.e. it doesn’t come up very often, as a word or framework –- this isn’t to say that the practices it refers to aren’t still in practice. Recommendation engines may make a mockery of taste and aesthetic judgment, but this shouldn’t prevent us from appreciating other Web 2.0 platforms — social media sites, lifestreaming, even blogs — as forms of connoisseurship. If the connoisseur is obsessed with details, then it would seem that the ’social media turn’ points to a veritable resurgence, rather than disappearance, of discourses built around a special, targeted, some would say, ‘niche’, focus.

Likewise, to Rex’s point, who’s to say that a form of connoisseurship – the Benjaminian flaneur, for example, who wanders the city in its entirety, applying his discriminating taste everywhere he looks – isn’t compatible with that global, generalizing picture demanded of anthropology today? Lifestreaming services in particular seem to mesh both perspectives — a diverse, global distribution of content, on the one hand, and highly focused, niche authorities, on the other — so, in a certain sense, Rex and Kerim might just be on to something when they bring up this seemingly antiquated, but in fact much revived, concept of connoisseurship.