Archive for June, 2010
The Firmware Effect
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Theorizing the Web on June 25, 2010
Image Courtesy of Chris and Lara Pawluk
The soundcard in my computer, for some unknown reason, makes a small click when you switch the output from speakers to headphones. Every time I do this – which is almost every day – I become inexplicably happy. Something similar happens when I click the eject button in some media player and the CD tray of my computer opens. Click. And then a small rush of pleasure as I hear it noisily open.
Something about clicking a button on a screen and producing a physical effect is intensely satisfying to me. In broaching the barrier of the material and the seemingly immaterial , it vaguely feels as as if one is performing magic. Or telekenesis. Or something.
Perhaps it is for this reason that I always look forward to new pieces of software or firmware for the hardware that I own. When I installed Windows 7 on my laptop, it was no longer the slow, clunky and expensive mistake it was with Vista. It was now the laptop I had wanted when I had bought it. When Sony release a feature-laden firmware for the PS3, I excitedly download it to experiment with what’s new. And, of course, most recently, I hurried to install iOS 4 on my iPhone – even though I knew it would slow my now-old 3G down.
Upon installing a new OS, my hardware changed. These things felt new because the manner by which I interacted with them also changed. A laptop or iPhone with a new OS is not the same object as it once was because it is a window onto a mechanism of interaction – and that window was now different. Or, put differently: my relationship to the object had changed because the software that, by definition, constitutes a relationship between user and hardware, had also changed.
* * * *
Now that iOS 4 is installed on my phone, I am having the strangest reaction.
I keep picking it up and, even if it only lasts for a fraction of a second,I feel something almost akin to surprise: this is still the same old phone. The back is not flat and straight and made of glass. This is not an iPhone 4. It is still the same phone. Huh.
In some ways, this is me living out the Baudrillardian nightmare. Apple’s marketing has so captivated me that the image of the new iPhone has now overtaken my actual one as the thing that is real; my lowly 3G is somehow now less real, rendered as the past on a timeline that is not only about Apple’s product progression, but about my own personal trajectory as well. This phone should be the new one because I should have it.
But at the same time, I am suffering what I call the firmware effect. When our relationship to objects can be reconstituted by software, this non-thing that itself is about constituting relationships, the fixed nature of materiality – its irreversible nature, the cold hard facts of its immanence – feels off somehow. The firmware effect is the result of the ineffability of interfaces, and is exacerbated by the touch screen, itself a mirage and shapeshifter of both form and function. Things that once seemed so solid – buttons that clicked so reassuringly and made things happen – are now replaced and obscured by minute electrical pulses coursing through me, full of intention. Yet they seem to return in unexpected ways, rewiring neural paths, until the clear line between the screen and the material world grows fuzzy.
Perhaps I should print this post out to remind myself of the limits of broaching the material-immaterial boundary. Or would words made of pixels then made manifest on a page only compound the problem and confuse me more?
* * * * *
The other day, my brother and I were driving to a bakery we had never been to before. At an intersection, I couldn’t quite see the street number atop a sign on the other side of the street. I leaned forward in my seat and strained and squinted. But the outlines that I knew would, with just a few more feet, resolve into recognisable shapes, into markings of a code I knew well, remained fuzzy and unclear.
And then, for a fraction of a second – a microscopic eon – I momentarily thought I should double-tap reality so that it would zoom.
So that, by pressing buttons, I would bring it closer to me.
What’s At Stake When Indie Bookstores Fade?
Posted by Nav in Electronic Reading, Literature, web culture on June 24, 2010
Courtesy of Flickr user erikheidstra
In what seems an all too familiar scenario, the Toronto Twitter-literati (Twiliterati?) are buzzing about the potential closure of yet another indie bookstore. People are bummed, and yet mobilizing. But beyond the usual empathy for those who may lose their livelihoods, it seems many are also sad to see what feels like another sign of the decline of independent publishing – and perhaps ‘book culture’ too.
Whether or not this is true – if in fact it’s harder to publish now; that less books are published; or that less people read today – is a discussion for another day. For now, the right question to ask seems to be this: what do we lose or gain if and when the indie bookstore becomes a thing of the past?
The benefit of the indie bookstore is – or perhaps was – very much about the ‘indie’ part of its name: it carried books you wouldn’t find at your local Chapters or Borders because they would sell too few copies to be economically viable to those large chains. That advantage has, of course, since evaporated. Though the economic benefits of the long tail may be up for debate, it’s clear that it’s often easier and cheaper for most people to find an obscure book online than schlep one’s way to a small bookstore.
But moreover, when Pages, perhaps the most prominent Toronto indie bookstore, closed earlier this year, it was clear that people weren’t simply sad about the loss of a place to buy books. Rather, it was that Pages was also a focal point for literary culture, deeply invested in both the book as an idea but also as genuine part of people’s lives. Pages ran reading series and supported both independent authors and presses to an impressive degree. To lose it wasn’t just about a bookstore; it was about a losing a home for books in a big, techno-friendly city.
But at the same time, the shutdown of these stores and the ensuing reaction also reveals the centrality of ‘the shop’ and ‘commerce’ to book culture. Without these stores, the community of independent presses and their readers – the people who, to deliberately invoke a mostly false dichotomy, read literature rather than romance novels, poetry rather than gossip blogs – have no place to meet.
To try and position this as some kind of marker of the inherent capitalist corruption of ‘like everything man’ would, of course, be naive. The indie bookstore forms an important node in the economic network that sustains independent publishing, providing a distribution point for a variety of small, often economically tenuous presses, while quite literally forming a physical place for aggregating both financial and cultural transactions that support ‘the industry’. This is the simple materiality of, well, everything.
But if the small book shop had two advantages – a specialized inventory and a dedicated community that it both relied upon and nurtured – and we know one is gone for certain, then are what the options in the face of an economic and possibly cultural inevitably?
Well, I have two suggestions, both of which are probably completely naive and idiotic. But stupid ideas are what the internet is for. So:
- The standalone indie bookstore ends in favour of the indie bookstore-slash-coffee shop/bar/clothing store/dry cleaner/dog grooming salon/whatever. I know, I know – but this is the new media shtick, right? When the marginal cost of something falls to zero – or people just start buying from elsewhere or not at all – you produce a new revenue stream by encouraging spending on once peripheral things. If the indie bookstore’s specialization is no longer a unique value, it seems that its capacity to foster a community of readers still is. So, in some sense, I mean ‘coffee shop’ or ‘bar’ somewhat metaphorically; all I’m saying is give people a reason to gather that also produces a new, supplementary revenue stream.
- ‘Course, if that now-hackneyed idea fails, there is always this: the increased cultural import of the library – not just as a place for kids to study or old people to learn how to use Google, but as a place that serves as a cultural home for literacy and literature. The benefit here is that you have a space that does not, in explicit terms anyway, run by strictly capitalist principles of supply & demand. Author readings, book sales etc. could be motivated less by market reactions and ‘saleable ideas’ than literary innovation (which, one hopes, will also sometimes be about form rather than simply content).
Naturally, this is partly motivated by my enjoyment of drinking various beverages with literary types (’cause apparently, I don’t do that enough?). But it seems that even if, through the rise of the web and ebooks, reading itself becomes less attached to the physical, it stands to reason that communities of readers are less likely to become equally ‘immaterial’.
We need a place to hang out, right?
Art and Interaction
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology on June 16, 2010
The first ever day of NXNEi ended today with a talk by Zachary Lieberman. Lieberman is an artist by training who, along the way, happened to learn how to code – and the combination produces some rather magical things. One such is in the video below, in which participants make lights dance on the side of a building. Another is ‘eye-writing’ which uses eye-tracking software to create things – even for someone who is totally immobile with ALS. Another hacks lasers and some simple tools to create temporary graffiti… on the sides of large buildings. Yep. You can tag the skyline.
In his talk, Lieberman argued that he approaches art differently. Rather than the struggling artist, working alone and suffering, Zach prefers ‘DIWO’ – Do It With Others. Moreoever, Lieberman argued that the kind of art he does is not solely about objects, but experiences.
But if art is no longer about objects, what happens to the subject?
Art is often structured to guide its reader/viewer in particular ways (see previous post). The gaze of a camera or structure of a narrative leads the reading-viewing subject through an aesthetic creation, often in order to attempt to produce a kind of reaction – or an ideological positioning. One can obviously resist this guidance and read against the grain etc. But referential art seems to operate through this basic subject-object relation in which an object is constituted among a network of aesthetics/ideology and then the reader-viewer establishes its relation to it through its own aesthetic/ideological processes of reading.
But it makes me wonder is something I’ve thought about before. I often call art ‘the flight and return’ – the aesthetic space we produce in order to reorient our relationship to the world. I suppose it’s simplistically Aristotelian, but it’s a start. But even under a model in which ‘everything is text’ – which is to say that our relationship to reality is constituted through the same basic textual moves as in fiction – the flight and return still exists in our willing suspension of disbelief. We still, even if ‘artificially’, construct an ‘out there’ in order to constitute an ‘in here’.
But if art becomes interactive – if the subject’s relation to the aesthetic object changes – does the function of the artist change? Is art then the production of what we might call ‘a frame’: a delimited, guided aesthetic experience meant to produce a reaction that reorients the subject’s relation to the network of texts that constitute their relationship to reality?
In a sense, it always has been. The novel is, after all, just that. But what if interactive art merges the temporal specificity of the performance with the kind of experiential or didactic qualities of representational/referential/mimetic art so that the definition of ‘the aesthetic object’ changes into an open-ended structure. Do we end up with slightly tired yet overwhelming questions like ‘is it still art’? Or worse still: “no, it’s just the same thing, but in a new form”. Because something always feel so off about that answer.
Naturally, my mind moves towards the video game. More than anything else, I still feel that games do something different. I just haven’t been able to articulate what.
I’m so often wrong when I start to ramble so. But I guess I’m asking this: is there a difference when an artist asks you to literally rather than figuratively step into her or his world?
The Ideology Valve: Then there will be cake [Guest Post]
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Gaming Theory, Video Games on June 16, 2010
Regular readers are probably familiar with me starting a post with “my friend and I were chatting about this over wine the other day”. Well, after unending cajoling, that anonymous friend – who’ll we’ll call “m” – wrote something pretty great, and he has kindly allowed me to share here. I think those of you familiar with the ‘primary text’ in question will enjoy it.
So, like everyone else, I went back to play through Valve’s Orange Box last week. It was my first chance to see the new graphics upgrades, and I took the time to listen to the developer commentaries.
What did I learn? I learned, most of all, that many of my apparently intuitive and clever decisions had been carefully pre-planned through product testing. I must admit, it was a little deflating. The commentaries describe game-tester mistakes, and then describe the scenes created exclusively to train our reactions and eliminate any future non-enjoyment. This creates an odd benevolent-dictator feeling to the commentaries. Gabe wants to hear from you, but he probably already knows what you have to say.
Please don’t think I’m naive. I know, obviously, that HL2 is linear. I even like it that way. But the extent and quality of the control is surprising. We need the player to see or do or think X, but how do we ensure that this will happen? Often the solution simply involves physical barriers, which are very obvious, but the commentaries also explain many less obvious, non-physical, seemingly “artistic” kinds of control. The player is more likely, for example, to visit the most relevant building first if it’s painted a brighter colour. (I distinctly remember feeling proud about choosing the correct building!) Similarly, the architecture of the rooms produces certain kinds of behaviour in both AI and players. Valve knows this, again, because they’ve tested the structures. When I adopt a particular strategy of protection or observation in a room, who exactly is deciding? How many of my attempts to be a good gamer and to successfully inhabit this world were pre-programmed, even when there were no physical constraints to stop me from doing something else?
And isn’t this really the perfect figure for ideology? To some extent I know that I’m being controlled, but I still feel like there’s some important, irrepressibly human part of me that nevertheless makes valuable contributions. But these games not only control my obvious decisions, they also work by opening up the space for other kinds of decisions that function by feeling “free.” Without these apparently free decisions, the game loses its fun.
There are a number of implications here. First, I’m wondering about Roger Ebert’s (much-despised) argument about video-games and art. He suggests that the very “game” quality of videogames is holding them back. He seems to be suggesting that, in “winning” a game (e.g., a game of chess), we lose the capacity to work through more complicated ideas. Chess games are artful, sure, but they’re fundamentally just a constrained contest, which is different from, say, reading Proust. But what exactly is this odd level of control that we find in HL2? Are these constraints the same as the ones we find in a chess game? It seems to me much easier to compare HL2’s highly organized world with the ones created by movie-makers, painters, or novelists. I mean, artists can make us feel like we are having a spontaneous experience. We forget that we’re watching art, and instead feel “there.” In actuality, of course, those are precisely the moments when the artist has us most completely.
So, second thing. If this a model of ideology, what is it teaching us? By the time I arrived at the White Forest Inn in Episode 2, I was tired of having my spontaneous reactions explained to me by Valve employees. So I broke the script. After the big hunter battle, I was supposed to walk back up the road to find the power-source that fed the force-field that was holding my car. Instead, I piled up some boxes and jumped up a seemingly impossible ledge. Fuck Valve.
Whatever scripts were supposed to be triggered by my long walk along the road weren’t triggered. In the end, I ended up in the right place, but I arrived from the wrong direction. Alyx sprinted up and delivered a few lines, but everything she said was useless because there wasn’t anything to do or anyone to fight. And then she just stared at me.
And it was there, looking into her cold dead eyes, that I realized the real ideological lesson. I had (in some kind of virtuo-Lacanian ethics) traversed the fantasy and moved toward the object. I had shaken the lozenge and exposed the emptiness of the Other. But I was just bored. The result was—nothing. I was freer than I’d ever been, but I also had nowhere to go. So I jogged in little spurts back down the road until the scripts started up again, and I was rewarded immediately when a Combine helicopter swept down and filled me with bullets.
Ideology works through enjoyment. The real fear involved in anti-ideological struggles is that, in success, we will lose ourselves by losing the specific frame of our enjoyment. Alenka Zupančič talks about this in relation to Kant: “[The subject] fears finding herself in an entirely new landscape, a featureless territory in which her existence will no longer be confirmed by what she feels.” We may obliterate the guarantors of our enjoyment (Nation, Racial belonging, Family, and so on). That is to say, we’d rather be attacked by a helicopter than venture into the empty abyss that we have no language to understand.
And I think this becomes even more interesting when we add Portal into the equation. I think Portal is perhaps the most perfect expression of contemporary ideology. Why? Because when you break the frame in Portal, when you escape the game world, it keeps on going. Yes, I know that you can do odd things and break the structure in Portal as well, but in this particular game the resistance is written right into the narrative. You crack out of the game itself only to find more game. And, you know, the cake is always there, offered as a final promise of enjoyment. Others will tell you the cake is a lie, but you know different, right?
And I think that’s exactly where we are, which is also why I’d say that Ebert’s definition of art needs to be questioned if it doesn’t include Portal. Portal seems to understand that the world we live in is a kind of game-world that specifically opens up spaces for our resistance. The recent task for ideological systems has been to provide us with new fantasy frames designed precisely for this world of rebellion “outside” the mainstream. As the final song reassures us, smashing the Other is now actually a “triumph” of the Other. And in the most recent updates to the game, we see our avatar, Chell, slowly retrieved as a valuable object: still alive and still inside. And we are all her, a shell, a new kind of proletariat.
Spreading the Seeds of the Self
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Culture of Technology on June 3, 2010
For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been vaguely been thinking of the ‘death of privacy and how it may or may not relate to Roland Barthes article “The Death of the Author”.
My thinking goes loosely like this. The inversion at work in Barthes stemmed roughly from the idea that words can function without the presence of their author. The perceived threat in this reinterpretation of how written language works is that it kinda’ blows meaning wide open. If what an author meant to say is no longer the gold standard, by what criteria are are you supposed to judge what things mean? What if Aristotle had really meant for people not to take things so seriously? What if the Bible were actually a non-specific parable about the spiritual? By dislodging the connection between the vaunted status of The Author and some perceived, singular sense of truth, Barthes and other post-structuralists opened all kinds of texts to new readings.
But in some sense, what Barthes was arguing was also predicated on the notion of the public self – of the idea of the subject existing beyond the body in a world of ideas and words. Fundamental technologies – written script, referential images – invoked something almost like a kind of transubstantiation – the self transmogrified into nothing so much as air. This, I would guess, is the fear at the core of having your picture taken – your self will exist elsewhere, out of your control.
It was an idea that Tim picked up on Twitter and pushed a little further:
The problem is when you get print vernacular mass literature. Now what used to be private & controlled is open to anybody. // And that’s when you need an author. A figure who’s responsible for the text, its father, who the state can punish. // So: it’s almost as if the death of privacy through technology is prior to/generative of an idea of authorship. Maybe?
Smart, right? ‘Cause what it means is what we have now is the technnologisation of a ‘death of privacy’ that happened a long time ago. But if the web (as Rex liked to say) has blurred the once clear line between communication and publication, now the exchange of information between people is scattered far more widely across the ‘global canvas’ of the internet.
So the death of privacy is, beyond the obvious reasons, threatening because of a twofold situation: one in which the pre-existing public signs and texts of the subject are discursively arranged into an ordering called ‘the self’ that carries a particular kind of cultural currency (‘what kind of person is s/he?’); and the fact that those subject-ive signs are then scattered and potentially repurposed against the ‘author’ of those signs. The death of privacy is, on one level, basic, important stuff: corporations may use your data; you might live in a conservative town and inadvertently come out. But in another sense, it’s also a fear of the ‘disembodying’ of the self – of the idea that things that can have a material impact on you occur in a way that isn’t in any way connected to your material self.
The other day, I twittered something lame about how lame my twttering was. Someone responded with something like ‘you Twitter less than you used to’. I had no idea who this person was. But they knew enough about me to not only remember my identity, but to have some sense of a change in my behaviour over time. Weird.
So yeah, privacy, the public self, technology, the web as not only an interconnection of links, but also an exchange of signs – linguistic and ‘subject-ive’ – that seem to operate without an author or an origin… or something. I dunno’.
But. It seems better to think about the ‘Death of Privacy’ not as the logical extension of the death of the author – but as the logical extension of sperm banks.
Right? Refigured reinstantiations of the self that are like the self but not, remade in an image entirely beyond one’s control.
