Category: Digital Humanities

Pixel Pour and the Eversion

Over on the Tumblr for my forthcoming book, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, I’ve just posted about Kelly Goeller’s iconic street-art creation, Pixel Pour. A recent conversation with the artist cleared up for me some questions of timing and materials of this “8-bit” installation and helped me understand the viral spread of images of the work, which has become an icon of the eversion.

Pixel Pour
Kelly Goeller, Pixel Pour
(http://kellotron.com)

Mr. Penumbra and mixed-reality publishing

A recent book review in The New York Times of Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore quotes Kathleen Fitzpatrick on “the anxiety of obsolescence.” As it happens, I’m finishing a chapter that also puts Sloan’s novel alongside Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence. My argument supports and helps to explain an observation made on Twitter by Matthew Kirschenbaum, that Sloan’s book is “quite likely the first novel of the digital humanities” (Nov. 26, 2012). Sloan (who used to work for Twitter) responded to Kirschenbaum, “Dunno if it’s the first, but I definitely had the digital humanities community in mind while writing it.”

Sloan is part of a group of technologically savvy creative types, writers, designers, book people and typography geeks, who have seen themselves as participating in what they call (taking the term from blogger and designer Jason Kottke), “Liberal Arts 2.0.” Carmody and Sloan co-edited a collection of essays in 2009 called New Liberal Arts, which might in fact be understood as a project in the “vernacular” digital humanities. The collection began as a group blog, was printed as a limited edition chapbook (which sold out), and was also made available online in PDF and HTML forms under a Creative Commons noncommercial license. The physical book, the editors said, was meant to be “a beautiful object,” their way “of keeping faith with the past. For all this fuss about new-ness, we know the score: Books are pretty great techne.”

Sloan’s novel is I think truest to digital humanities now in its expression of a desire for a mixed-reality, physical and digital creative culture, a desire also expressed in almost every interview Sloan has given about the book. It’s a desire that grows out of the real physical/digital maker culture (of which Sloan’s a part). This aspect of the technology culture over the past decade amounts to a central ethos, one that’s only recently starting to be widely reported, and that can too easily be misread as mere nostalgia, or as part of an analog backlash. It’s instead, I think, based on a healthy skepticism about the “frictionless” immaterialities of digital publishing, a way of resisting the easy oppositions between “print” and “digital” that have riven publishing in the past couple of decades. This ethos has much to say to emerging digital humanities scholarship as it tries in a critical way to reinvent its own forms of digital publication and scholarly communication while also turning outward, to address developments in the world at large.

What Fitzpatrick’s book on (mostly academic) publishing expresses so well–and what the MLA Commons project she’s spearheading also addresses–is that publishing in the digital age has to begin by recognizing the constraints and affordances not just of “ebooks” or “screens” versus “pages” but of new publishing platforms. Those platforms have to be recognized as social, mixed-reality “stacks,” layered systems that connect writers and readers through materialities of various kinds, for various purposes, and that for now will participate in “book culture” even as they bridge to other forms of communication, other, emergent forms of making public (which is what publishing means) in this era of the eversion. This is true for a variety of digital humanities experiments both inside and outside the academy.

Analog backlash?

There’s an anti-digital backlash going on, tied to an interest in the “artisanal,” and ultimately connected to the maker movement. Or at least it looks like and anti-digital, pointedly analog backlash. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes gets called the “anti-kindle,” for example, because it allows us to remember the tactile and physical qualities of books (by carving them up with a die-cut method). Appeals to paper and boards and glue and thread, and the weight and feel (and smell) of those things, have recently been made in the context of the artisanal turn in general. Partly this is a countermovement in response to the digitization of everything. As Andrew Piper says, “The more screenish our world becomes, the more we try to insert tactility back into it.” He rightly argues in Book Was There that we’re in a transitional or “translational” moment requiring increased humanistic and technical understanding of what is at stake in the different materialities of our different platforms for reading.

In fact, the most interesting instances of the apparent analog backlash, the bookish resistance to digitization, often contain within themselves the evidence of the very translational complications that may seem at first to be trying to escape. Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s Publishing has produced a number of books with flagrantly physical bindings, for example, not the least of which is Eggers’ own 2012 novel, A Hologram for the King, with a textured, gold-foil stamped cover. It’s a book that says “Book”–no accident, surely, in a novel that tells the story of a crazy boondoggle to set up a hologram-based communication link in the Saudi desert.

McSweeney’s interest in this area is diverse. In December it will publish musician Beck Hansen’s latest “album,” Song Reader, which as the publisher’s advertisement says, comes “in an almost-forgotten form–twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded.”

Complete with full-color, heyday-of-home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case, Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012–an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together.

If you want to hear the songs, the announcement concludes, “bringing them to life depends on you.” In a digital era when analog synthesizers, vinyl records, and analog tape recordings are retro-hip, Beck has out-analoged the analog fetishists (like the grandson of a Fluxus artist that he is).

Beck’s preface to the album has just appeared at The New Yorker website.

We started collecting old sheet music, and becoming acquainted with the art work, the ads, the tone of the copy, and the songs themselves. They were all from a world that had been cast so deeply into the shadow of contemporary music that only the faintest idea of it seemed to exist anymore. I wondered if there was a way to explore that world that would be more than an exercise in nostalgia . . . .

But the final twist to the project is that (of course) performances of the songs will be recorded, are already being recorded, by known artists and unknown amateurs, using digital technology and the conventions of social media (of course), and selections of these performances will be posted as videos for download on the album’s official website. So the event or happening that the album is meant to cue is very much what Piper calls a translational event, a hybrid, analog/digital affair, and is ultimately dependent on the Internet for its own successful publication, its being made public, rather than remaining many isolated,  individual experiences with ukeleles and pianos.

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.

Skylanders-on-portal-of-power

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

QR code on truck

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.