Materializing the Network

There’s a good front-page story in The New York Times today about data centers and power usage that I think contributes to the ongoing process of materializing the network in the public consciousness. The story engages in some useful fact-corralling–for example about the serious environmental impact of having roughly 10% utilization in most cases, so that 90% of a typical center’s humming, hot servers are drawing power from the grid and doing nothing most of the time. In the U.S. during 2010, these huge data centers consumed around 76 billion kilowatt-hours, about 2 percent of the total electricity used. “Worldwide, the digital warehouse use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants . . . . ” And the banks of diesel generators required for backup power are notable polluters, even when they’re only being regularly fired up for testing purposes. “Of all the things the Internet was expected to become,” the story points out, “it is safe to say that a seed for the proliferation of backup diesel generators was not one of them.”

Interestingly, the article gives these facts a cultural context, connecting them to what it calls the “mythology” of the Internet, “where lives are lived in the ‘virtual’ world and all manner of memory is stored in “‘the cloud’,” and it bluntly observes that the “physical realities of data” are very different from that mythology. Average users, even some power users, it suggests, have little or no sense of the physical dimension of the network, “no sense that data is [sic] physical or that storing it uses up space and energy.” This is the same perception gap that provided the occasion for the very good recent book about the physical infrastructure of the Internet by Andrew Blum, Tubes.

On the other hand, Blum’s book and this article can be seen as among the signs that the older “mythology” (or ideology) of the virtual and the immaterial is beginning to break up, like a cloud dispersing a bit, however unevenly.

Ignorance certainly persists, but the Times article may I think sell people short. They may not always remember, precisely, that the cloud requires cooling systems and generators and hard drives in a warehouses in Virginia or Illinois, but most people are dimly aware of these facts. Stories like this are crucial for creating environmental awareness, but they depend on the pre-existing conditions of the eversion. People are increasingly being made aware, in sometimes small and symbolic ways, of the physical (and monetary) dimension of data and the network that gathers and transmits it, starting on a mundane scale with knowing where the dead zones are around their home or place of business, moving around to look for “more bars” when accessing the cellular network, or monitoring their own or the family’s data plans from wireless carriers, and extending to the recent artistic interest in digital-to-physical glitches and other manifestations of the limits of the data flow. The Times article itself is another marker of the increasing public awareness of the materialities behind the mythology of the Internet.

Skylanders and the Semiotics of Eversion

There may be no better illustration of the eversion of the network we’re all living through right now than a kids’ game (and the best-selling videogame of the past year): Activision’s Skylanders. Collectible toys, plastic cartoony action figures, “come to life” inside the game when you place them on the Portal of Power, a small round glowing platform.

The action figure glows, the portal glows, and the character beams into the game moving and talking and fully playable, ready to go. You swap out the toy on the portal for another, and it appears. It’s a neat trick, but when you look a little deeper into the development of the game and get over the stigma attached to toys, there’s a lot more going on. As Roland Barthes said 55 years ago (though he was talking specifically about French toys): “toys always mean something, and this something is always entirely socialized, constituted by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life . . . ” (Mythologies, 53).

Barthes would have hated Skylanders, I imagine, since he railed against the “bourgeois” significance of plastics, “graceless material, the product of chemistry, not of nature” (54). The game’s action figures are the direct result of the spread of 3D printing and the resultant ability of a small shop to design objects in software that are then turned into physical objects. Barthes ends his brief essay sounding like a grumpy old man, with a nostalgic panegyric to wooden toys. Modern plastic toys, he says, “die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child” (55).

Skylanders might stand as a refutation of this conclusion, since the game can be read semiotically as an exploration of the imaginative life of objects in transit between physical and digital worlds (and back again). As the backstory motto goes, “frozen on the outside, alive on the inside!” The action figures are meant to be imagined as in suspended animation, their vitality stored as data on RFID chips to be brought to life in the digital game world. Every time someone puts a little plastic statue on the glowing portal and it appears, animated, inside the game, the process recapitulates in reverse the way that very figure’s prototype, at least, was produced: from drawings on paper and in a computer to a physical object hot off the printer. Besides the 3D printer–which is a kind of portal of power for everting digital objects–Skylanders development depended on various wireless and hardwired communication channels, RFID and USB, for example (the Portal platform conceals a circular copper wire that serves as a radio antenna). It was inspired by and prototyped using Nintendo’s WiiMote, which had already begun to imagine the game system as a network of devices, and to configure physical space as a place for hybrid digital and physical gaming. The developers at Toys for Bob are clearly part of the Maker subculture. They used Adafruit’s easy-to-program, small Arduino boards and LEDs to prototype the Portal of Power. Like the Wii, Skylanders imagines itself as a distributed system in physical space–a constellation of small portable processors and sensors–that mirrors the inversion of the network as a whole. But Skylanders is more far-flung than the Wii, cross-platform in significant ways, making the game feel to players like it’s happening out in the world, rather than being trapped in DVD or on a console or on the screen. Each action figure carries its updated stats with it, so that it can be taken across town and brought to life in a friend’s game, for example, or can travel from the Xbox or Wii or PC to the handheld 3DS to an online gameworld (Skylanders Universe) accessible from any computer.

If, as Barthes said, toys “prefigure the world of adult functions” (53), then the semiotics of Skylanders suggests a world in which the normal relationship to the network and its data takes the form of repeated easy transit back and forth across a porous boundary between the physical and the digital in mixed-reality spaces.

Interview on Codename Revolution and Wii U

Our interview about the Wii and Wii U just appeared on Fast Company’s co.create website. It was good timing. This week’s Nintendo news out of E3 has been underwhelming for some journalists. Overall, the Wii U is just a less emotionally compelling design than the Wii was back in 2006, harder to grasp in an instant. But we found that Mr. Iwata’s pre-conference video and the press conferences confirmed much of what we said in Codename Revolution about the direction the new system represents as a successor to the Wii. In the book, we cited Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone (1) and suggested the Wii was designed to address the problem of isolation through a very Nintendo kind of retro-innovation, by using motion control to turn the living room into a mixed-reality gamespace. Our icon for this design goal was the coffee table that signifies this old-school social gaming in shared physical space. This week’s Iwata video cited Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together on the isolating tendencies of today’s technology, showing an slide with an image of a family sitting in a circle in the living room, all engrossed in their separate devices and screens, while Mr. Iwata said the goal of Wii U would be to counteract that tendency, to bring people together in local social interactions–to make the living room a better place, a physical space, for social interaction.

“Together better” is the lame slogan, but the goal is actually concretely tactical: to undermine the TV’s tendency to monopolize its space, instead distributing gaming and viewing and control among a constellation of devices, including especially the new tablet-like touchscreen control pad. Someone can use it as a personal handheld console while someone else uses the main console and TV (or just watches TV), it can serve as a touchscreen remote for the TV, and videos on the handheld can be “flicked” to the TV to share with everyone in the room. (There’s even a theatrical curtain animation that allows you to cue up a video, send it to the big screen, then open the curtain to reveal it.) New game designs are planned that make use of the tablet controller for “asymmetrical” play–one player as the ghost chasing everyone else in the room (they’re using Wiimotes), or a karaoke game that allows you to face the room when you sing, reading lyrics off the tablet, while others match dance moves on the big screen behind you and sign along at the right moments. There’s a new emphasis for Nintendo on online interactions in the “Miiverse,” though it’s still no Xbox Live. (One story out today revealed a plan for live screening of chat posts by Nintendo employees to keep the Miiverse family friendly. The result, reportedly, might be a 30-minute lag.) But, aside from recapturing some core gamers (demos were heavy on AAA titles and there’s even an Xbox-style gamepad with all the buttons), the real heart of the system would seem to be an extension of the design goal of the Wii, the deliberate use of the system as a constellation of devices for reconfiguring the living room as a mixed-reality possibility space, a space for digital and physical social gaming.

QR-encoded desire to communicate

What is this? Yet another QR code that links to a website, but which has to be accompanied by instructions, in this case in the form of a pictogram that (apparently) says “scan using your cellphone’s radio waves.” Yes, I know, like other pictograms, it’s meant to be ergonomically efficient, a faster way to communicate (“dispose of trash here” or “don’t walk!”). But for whom is this glyph + QR code intended? It looks a little like the Pioneer spacecraft icons that Carl Sagan helped develop in the 1970s for communicating with aliens, etched plates with line drawings that “said” something like “male and female humans on the third planet from the Sun,” sent to eldritch Others who would be capable of decoding the semiotics of the images. But the QR code is encoded data, encrypted for transmission. When it’s included with the image, the example above is reminiscent of the related Arecibo message, which was also beamed out into space, but in the form of a binary string to be decoded into a pixelated pictogram saying the same sort of thing: “We are Earthlings.” In a sense, that is what QR codes like this are doing: beaming out encoded messages to unknown but nominally intelligent life out there on the streets–somebody with a cellphone who can scan with it and thus link the van to the less terrestrial realm of digital data (in this case, just a website).

Unlike the subtle artistic gestures and reified metaphors associated with the New Aesthetic, the much-maligned QR codes are useful precisely because they are so crude, because they so nakedly reveal the gesture of connecting data with the physical world, in fact reveal the desire to make that gesture. The New Aesthetic includes glitches as revealing signs of the eruption of the digital into the physical world. QR codes like this one are visible glitches in the process of eversion itself. Sometimes they’re nothing more than glitches, nothing more than failed gestures. But they’re everywhere, reminding us of what’s at the heart of the metaphor of eruption: the process of encoding/decoding. The QR code + pictogram above may also encode an anxiety about the acts of translation involved in this process–from digital to physical to digital again. That process, with that anxiety, is the point, the semiotic meaning of the image, not the ostensible goal of getting someone who is parked behind the van at a stoplight to point their cellphone at the image in order to open the company website. These codes often feel like someone hopes to communicate with invisible, unknown intelligences out there somewhere in the ether–in the digital realm.

Agrippa, the Eversion of Cyberspace, and Games

The Oxonian Review has just published today an interview with Kevin Begos, the publisher behind the experimental multimedia artist’s book and transmedia happening, Agrippa (1992). Agrippa the work included at its center a poem, “Agrippa,” by William Gibson, which appeared ten years after Gibson coined the term “cyberspace.” The poem was found on a floppy disk physically embedded in the book, and the text of the poem famously encrypted itself as it was read, disappearing as it scrolled down the screen for the first and last time.

Except that the text of the poem was very quickly released into the wild, out on the Internet, and remains available in various versions to this day, as documented and thoroughly analyzed by Matthew Kirschenbaum in his brilliant book, Mechanisms (the book takes its title from Gibson’s poem), and on The Agrippa Files website on which he collaborated with Alan Liu and others, a good example of what Peter Shillingsburg has called a “knowledge site,” a kind of collaborative, multimedia archive of the larger work that is Agrippa.

Back in the 1990s, the work was represented by many as a paradigmatic example of the immaterial, disembodied nature of the network and its hacker elite–a text that appeared to literally dissolve into thin air! It took Kirschenbaum’s forensic and materialist textual analysis to reveal that it was actually something very different, a prime example of multiply material textuality in the digital age.

I would add that Agrippa as a work–digital poem, physical book including artwork, performance and “transmission,” afterlife on the Internet–is the far-flung network it spawned, something like a distributed game of meaning, a view that would seem to be supported by remarks made by Begos and his interviewer, Courtney Traub, in today’s piece.

Begos: . . . I doubt that there would be any publisher ready to experiment with such innovation, which tends to be driven by artists and designers rather than the companies themselves.

I would contrast this to the enormous investment that online game makers have made. It’s come out of virtually nowhere to become this multibillion-dollar world market. Hypercompetitive but constantly evolving—there’s this incredible competition to make games more realistic and more experimental, and it’s attracting a lot of creative people.

Traub: I think many people might argue that much of the true narrative experimentation is taking place in the games realm. The experimentation people thought would be happening with books is going on more in gaming.

Begos: I think that’s completely true. That’s where the real developments are taking place and legitimate breakthroughs in terms of how people interact with artwork and with each other. They’ve built platforms that will evolve.

One way to further our understanding of Agrippa now, I’d suggest, would be to compare it to games, and especially trans-platform games such as ARGs, which deliberately play with the interpenetration of digital data and physical objects and spaces. Kirschenbaum recently suggested on Twitter that Agrippa anticipated the New Aesthetic. I’d argue that it’s an early harbinger by the inventor of cyberspace of the eversion of the network, its transformation out into the mixed-reality experienced most effectively and widely embodied today in games. Agrippa appeared in 1992, ten years after “Burning Chrome” introduced the term “cyberspace.” But The Agrippa Files, and thus the involvement of the new Digital Humanities with this mixed-reality artifact, went online in December 2005–a crucial moment when, as Gibson was just then on the verge of saying in print, the network was everting. The timeline is meaningful, and the connections between Agrippa, the new Digital Humanities, the eversion of cyberspace, and games, are richly suggestive, as I’m beginning to see.

Platformers and Dimensionality

Braid and other platformer games with which it shares a family relation are obviously about movement through gamespace, left to right, mostly, jumping or climbing up and down. The fact that 2D side-scrolling gameworlds have in some cases been supplanted by 3D versions and in other cases have been crossed with them, making strange hybrids, suggests that the whole genre has continued to be about exploring the dimensionality. The Mario franchise embodies the whole history of this exploration, from Donkey Kong to Super Mario 64 to Super Mario Galaxy. Super Paper Mario famously built in the ability to toggle between dimensions–the player can switch from 2D to 3D views for brief periods, literally adding perspective on puzzles–and Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 made sandbox puzzles out of planetoids, each of which is a (game)world of its own with sometimes weird physics to deal with. Yes, the preoccupation of indie art games with 2D side-scrolling platformers is in part about employing a knowing, lo-fi, retro aesthetic, and is in part about what’s practical or even doable by a single person or small team on a limited budget; either way, it’s about making a virtue of the necessities. But I think it’s also often an attempt–especially true in the case of Braid–to return to foundational questions about gameworlds, starting with the question of what happens when you add a dimension (literally) to the gameworld, or are aware of multiple dimensions as possibilities for gameplay.

This question is obviously what lies behind the design of Marc ten Bosch’s promised Miegakure, which has only been seen in preview glimpses. It’s an art game about adding a 4th physical dimension (Braid toys with some 2D vs. 3D spatial elements but most centrally plays with the dimension of time).

What strikes me about Miegakure is how its multidimensionality is narratively or figuratively structured: as the irruption of one dimension into another. The player swaps between dimensions, yes, but especially in order to cause a block or other object to protrude into a dimension where it was previously invisible or inaccessible. Warps, wormholes, cracks in the fabric separating one dimension from another, are where strategy unfolds and the key moves are made. (In this respect, Portal is a related experiment, and so is Super Paper Mario, not to mention another indie art game, Fez.) In other words, gameplay in Miegakure–and in many related platformers–is about negotiating the extrusions and eversions between dimensions.

In this context, the plaformer as a genre explores some of the same metaphorical territory as novels such as Danielewski’s House of Leaves, or Pynchon’s Remains of the Day, or Murakami’s 1Q84, or traditional SF works such as Flatland and, most significantly, H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, with its eldritch horrors from another dimension, “from beyond,” that are only partly glimpsed when they break through briefly and extrude themselves into everyday reality: “. . . strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers,” one character declares, then reports, “I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting though buy supposedly solid body.” And passages like the following one really resonate in our current media climate, which includes the New Aesthetic, or the spooky live performance at Coachella by Tupac’s weird Idoru hologram:

“Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the elements of consistency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theatre. . . . I saw to my horror that they overlapped . . . . the newly visible world that lies unseen around us” (H. P. Lovecraft, From Beyond).

In his digital humanities work on visualizing the discourse of TV Tropes, Elijah Meeks associates this Lovecraftian uncanny, this breaking-through from a parallel dimension, with “the weird geometry of the Internet.” I can’t help but see Lovecraftian dimensionality as a figure for the general eversion of the network, which as Gibson has said, is “leaking out into the world,” especially via mixed-reality or augmented reality experiments, which, to use Lovecraft’s terms, superimpose digital realities–a “newly visible world that lies unseen around us”-on “the terrestrial scene,” suggesting that a weird geometry connects them at points of overlapping layers, extrusions, places where the unseen turns inside out and reveals itself as a potential layer of experience.

Anyway, it seems reasonable to speculate that art games’ fascination with platformers may have something to do with the possibility of exploring this kind of multidimensionality (and the eversion itself) in a procedural, playable way.

Signs of the Eversion II: the New Aesthetic

If QR codes are the crudest and most obvious signs of the eversion (except maybe those tall, fabric teardrop banners standing on a sidewalk that seemed designed to look like flags in Google Maps), there are subtler signs everywhere, increasingly. One group of designers and artists and others looking for these signs goes under the umbrella of the New Aesthetic. In a recent essay on a panel presentation by some of these folks at South By Southwest 2012, Bruce Sterling both praises the potential and critiques the limitations of what he accurately calls the design fiction of this movement or aesthetic, and especially as represented in James Bridle, whom Sterling calls “the master of the salon.” Sterling is particularly targeting their incipient obsession with AI implied in their interest in how machines see the world, and the nostalgia of 8-bit imagery, and the general sense that so far the movement has collected an under-curated “heap of eye-catching curiosities.” But what I like about the ongoing collection and Bridle in particular is the engaged curiosity that sees everywhere signs of “something coming into being,” as artists and designers give “the real world the grain of the virtual.” These two worlds, Bridle recognizes (in a fall 2011 talk I’m quoting here), were once contracted as separate but are now “eliding” everywhere you look, representing an “irruption of the digital into the physical world.”

It’s not all 8-bit or pixel art Bridle is noticing, but to me the examples that invoke game platforms are particularly suggestive, not because it’s how machines see the world, but because it’s how games have modeled it.

Signs of the Eversion: QR codes

If the network is everting, turning mundane and imminent, there may be no better sign of the trend than the QR code. Mundane as can be, they currently serve mainly as “quick-response” gateways or portals between physical objects or places and the web. Mostly their use seems to be limited to advertising, taking people to the URL of a product or company. They became widespread shortly after smartphones gave large numbers of people a way to scan them wherever they were encountered. You see them in shop windows and on real-estate signs, on flyers for campus events or on badges at conferences. Often they’re just used as a kind of magical talisman of connectedness, or of the desire for connectedness. They say “This thing or place is networked,” or “data is here,” but often in the predictable, simplified form of opening an URL on your phone. Often their appearance and display betrays a general uncertainty surrounding their use, the vague suspicion that they’re nothing but a gimmick. Sometimes they’re given a graphical shadow so the cryptic square itself looks like an object, a large black and white stamp layered on the poster or print ad of which it’s a part. Sometimes you see them printed on an 8.5 X 11 inch sheet of paper with instructions added in large black type, just in case users are still unfamiliar with them: “Scan This With a Mobile Phone App.” Just printing the URL would be easier and save toner. Presumably at this stage the relative novelty of QR codes entices some people to try scanning them in situations where they’d never stop to type in or write down an URL. But if you think about it, the significance of all those QR codes seems worth thinking about. Even magic talismans–maybe especially when their practical uses are not quite clear–can have cultural significance. For example, just in terms of design, there’s something intriguing about the fact that QR codes go the bar code one dimension better with their matrix layout–and that they “encode” in more than one sense the idea that the network and its data are connected to the physical world and that those connections can be revealed by way of readily available, cheap and ubiquitous acts of dimensional translation.

Codename Revolution podcast (and a new project)

The MIT Press’s monthly podcast series featured our book Codename Revolution for February. Chris Gondek of Heron & Crane Productions interviewed my co-author, George Thiruvathukal, and me over the phone. Chris was in an Oregon Public Broadcasting studio, I was in my English department office, and George was in the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities across campus, so there was something of a conference call feeling to the experience. (Once I was interviewed by Scott Simon for NPR; he was in D.C. and I was in a Chicago Public Radio studio, but there was at least a technician in the room with me.) Despite that, the interview was fun, and Chris did a really good job of producing it to reflect the conversation we had in real time.

When I saw the link on the MIT Press podcast page I noticed we were preceded in January by B. Coleman. I took it as a sign, since I’m reading and enjoying her book, Hello Avatar, now as I research my own next book in progress: The Emergence of the Digital Humanities. Coleman’s concept of an “‘X-reality’ that traverses the virtual and the real” (3) is consonant with Katherine Hayles’s idea that mixed reality is the current, fourth stage in the history of cybernetics, and with William Gibson’s exploration in his most recent trilogy of the idea that cyberspace is everting, turning inside out and colonizing the physical world. I can’t help but notice that the recent rise of the digital humanities–at least its emergence into public consciousness and a new presence in the academy–has roughly coincided with this eversion of cyberspace, a shift in our collective understanding of the network: from a world apart to a part of the world, from a transcendent virtual reality to a ubiquitous grid of data that we move through every day. It’s not really a coincidence, I think. Digital humanities, in its newly prominent forms, is both a response to and a contributing cause of the wider eversion, and that’s the connection my book will explore.

Kindle edition as first edition

The Kindle edition of our Platform Studies book, Codename Revolution, is just out, a couple of weeks in advance of the hardcopy. It was fun to download it and see it on the iPad and iPhone via the Kindle app–which is what I use to read most commercially purchased ebooks. But it wasn’t a startlingly new experience, since we had composed the book (wrote it and read it and rewrote it) in a string of environments, from early conversations on Google Wave to drafts in Google Docs, then out into MS Word and Apple’s Pages (and I think my coauthor George drafted some portions in LaTeX), from which we regularly exported PDFs for sharing and viewing–and especially for viewing the illustrations on mobile platforms. We’ve experienced the text in various electronic platforms since its inception. We’ve only seen it printed out once, as page proofs. So handling the hardcopy print edition in March will be a much stranger, more exotic experience, in many ways, than downloading and reading the Kindle book was this morning. This is all of course perfectly ordinary for text production of all kinds these days. The usual relatively closed genealogy of electronic texts descended from electronic texts. This is one reason all the talk of ebooks in the popular press sometimes seems so weirdly, willfully idealized.