Graphics Interchange Format (AKA: GIF) – The Birth of a Medium

Posted on by Osiris

Like all things set afloat in the web-o-sphere, the animated GIF format has exploded and nas been re-condensed into a twisted silent reliquary of Internet moments. Its near extinction can most likely be attributed to the success of Flash animation. However, what once was a distraction from content has now become the content, the animated GIFs are on the rise and are being created in underground art movements. Their small and fast big pixelled endless loops, turned into clean and perfect animation sequences, with rich concepts. Now that GIFs have reached a cult status, it seems we will be seeing plenty of creative works, like for example, the very promising spin-off trend called “cinemagraphs”, considerate to be a possible future to Photography. When Twitter appeared critics wrongly appointed its downfall to the fact that it only allows the user a maximum post of 140 characters. A similar limit as one encounters in a graphical sense when creating Gif narratives due to performance reasons. But creative mindes have written entire books on Twitter by adapting the written syntax, and similar developments can be expected to appear in a graphical sense in future Gif narratives.

The Video from PBS below shows the History Animated Gifs and its treands.

Understanding Giselle Beiguelman

Posted on by Osiris

About books
It came to my attention, the divergences between reading physical books and digital books, which led me to an interesting journey throughout Giselle Beiguelman’s work, one of the few women in technology, who are providing pioneering media work.

About Giselle Beiguelman
Giselle Beiguelman ( 1962, São Paulo) is a brazilian media artist and researcher. Although relatively unknown in comparison to other key media figures, her work has had an immense influence and impact in digital artists and media researchers.

Back in 1998, people were starting to understand the basics of Internet usage and structure, while Beiguelman was already writing about the machine as a writer, as a reader and as a selector of content. Her work «O Livro depois do Livro» focuses on some of the most important key aspects of digital content management. It also questions and compares them to printed media, regarding the differences of user interactions.

About Digital Content
Within the digital sphere, Beiguelman referred words are being recycled ― “content farms”, for instance, survive from computers which are generating / copying words from other content, in order to improve search engines; this philosophical aspect is quite interesting when we observe the role of the machine, as a learner and a provider.
Some native american tribes believe if someone takes a photo portrait of them, their souls will be stolen by this act, which is in a way like the idea of a machine re-writing content, by copying words, or stealing to create something different. In this constellation, we see a direct relation to Beiguelman’s mention of recycled words.
The bottom line is: do words themselves, hold more than their meaning, do they lose their spirit once they are copied and pasted by a machine ? Does the content lose its quality if a machine is generating and prioritizing the text itself ? The idea of an infinite book could be an interesting outcome of this concept.
Another aspect, Giselle Beiguelman talks about, is how printed books depend on their titles to be picked up by consumers, as opposed to the digital books, which tends to be picked up by its content ― content is king. Authors names, book titles are taking second stage. As a kid I remember often hearing a metaphorical phrase which sad “Don’t judge a book by its cover”, It seem that we needed technological aid to finally fulfill this philosophical issue.

About connectivity
Moreover, Beiguelman points out the fact that digital books are written with hypertext instead of plain text. This feature allows the content to interact, by using links or the notorious ‘share’ and ‘likes’ found on Facebook. These interactions enrich the content, by taking one step further to our personal interests. They enable us to manifest our opinions, by taking action directly with the content.
On the other hand, we find ourselves connected 24 hours a day, chatting, posting, e-mailing. The idea of losing Internet connection, would cause the digital generation to fall into a state of desperation. However, a printed book has no need for battery life or external cables, and a person can immerse within a word or a sentence, and experience the possibilities of wording as well as time, valuable necessity when compared to the fast pace of our digital lives.
By exploring the machine as an interface, Beiguelman focuses on the hardware ― a book or a journal have a clear size and volume, whereas a screen has customizable settings. Furthermore, she describes how we’ve moved from interacting with printed media by using our fingers, then we started using the mouse and keyboard interfaces, and we’re back to using our fingers, this time to interact with tablets.
In my opinion, by moving away from the printed format, not only we are making an ecological rationalization, we are also enabling information to be available anywhere, regardless of location. Another interesting fact is we have moved from scrolling to paging with different digital devices. Scrolling, was the most popular form of text handling due to the speed, but there aren’t enough evidences about this subject to tell if scrolling or paging affects readability performance.

Giselle Beiguelman’s work goes far beyond the issues I’ve pointed out in this short essay, therefore I highly recommend discovering her work, for anyone interested in Media studies.

Question: would this paper be more or less interesting, if you’d to discover it was auto-generated by a machine ?

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eBooks:

Project Nr. 9 – Stairs

Posted on by Osiris

The Project: It is a media object that demonstrates the sensitive dependence of conditions, where every change in a nonlinear system results in a different narrative. The dynamical system displays sensitive dependence on conditions but results as a unique storyline for each viewer.

The Technical Side: The movie is never-ending, never-repeating. It is generated by 4 videos and 1 random variable that decides whether the user moves up or down the stairs. The RND movie checks on every decision, what floor the viewer currently is on and calculates the new floor number he will be on.

http://webart.logic2magic.com/stairs/

Research Paper: Modern happenings: how social media works as an extension for a new generation of creative minds.

Posted on by Osiris

“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows” (Sydney J. Harris, Journalist for the Chicago Daily News, date )

There have never been more windows into our world, as there are now. History is being recorded and can be re-experienced by future generations through social media. Webart 2.0, stands for the beginning of a great new art movement, staged within our digitally augmented physical world. A promised land not bounded to the laws of nature like gravity, time or space. Even if not fully understood, digital tools are offering new possibilities to art works. If we believe the combinatorial evolution described above, we can envision the mixture between intellectual knowledge and a multidimensional global playground for creativity.

Osiris Roost, 2011.11 Zürich

Pdf:  Modern happenings.pdf

Project Nr. 8 – Modern Times 2

Posted on by Osiris

The Background: Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his iconic Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin’s view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization.

The Project: Modern Times Part 2 is a project that tries to alert the viewers about today’s Great Depression, by using original movie material from Chaplin’s masterpiece and RSS feeds.

The Technical Side: The movie is a never-ending, never-repeating loop. It is generated by 5 random variables and its content comes from RSS news. Through its modular structure, the RND movie can be expanded at any desired time.

http://webart.logic2magic.com/moderntimes2/

Project Nr. 7 – Vertigo

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Vertigo is a type of dizziness, where there is a feeling of motion when one is stationary. The symptoms are due to a dysfunction of the vestibular system in the inner ear. It is often associated with nausea and vomiting as well as difficulties standing or walking. This piece was influenced by M.C Escher’s famous drawing called “Relativity” from 1953 and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological thriller also called “Vertigo“.

http://webart.logic2magic.com/vertigo/

Understanding Jean Baudrillard

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Baudrillard was born in France after World War I, and lived through WWII. This might constitute the most likely reason why his work is frequently associated with postmodernism and post-structuralism, and he is so often called a provocateur. However, most important of all, he was a philosopher interested in the present and future, instead of the past.
During his lifetime, he worked on different sociological and philosophical concepts, starting with what he called “The object value system”, focused on consumerism and constructed needs and opposing Karl Marx’s approach ‘that needs are innate’. His second major publication and his most revolutionary work, was published under the name “Simulacra and Simulation”. Baudrillard starts “Simulacra and Simulation” based on Marshall McLuhans famous saying “The medium is the message”, ending up disagreeing with the sentence and drifting away from McLuhans research. While McLuhan focuses on the medium of communication, Baudrillard researches the nature of communication and networks. Simulacrum from the Latin simulacrum which means “likeness, similarity”, and is defined by Baudrillard as composed references with no referents, or a hyperreality. His concept is most commonly known as storyline of the movie “The Matrix”, where Baudrillard’s book even appears in Neo’s hands. In Baudrillard’s numerous talks, he gives very simple and understandable examples of what “hyperreality” is: “There is an Italian restaurant up in the mountains, on the wall we see a big picture of Marlon Brando in the movie The Godfather.” he says, and he goes on “Can anybody tell me why is this a symbol of Italy ? Marlon Brando was a American, the producer is American, the movie was about a family living in America, and still we assume this as a symbol of Italy!”; another interesting example he often talks about is a situation in a theater, “Imagine you go to the theater, and as soon as everybody is seated, the curtain opens. And you see a group of spectators sitting on stage in front of a second curtain, waiting for it to open. Soon after you see the second curtain open and there is a third group of spectators siting on a second stage in front of a third curtain. Now everybody around you will start to look back to see if there is a group of spectators behind them as well”. As entertaining as these examples are, he looks at “hyperreality” as a very dangerous assimilation of reality. One of his most controversial examples were his three publications affirming that the ‘Golf War’ never existed, where he states that it was a media and machine driven ‘war’ and that fewer US soldiers were killed in this ‘war’ than would have died in traffic accidents had they stayed at home. Baudrillard goes as far as saying: “(…)The US-led coalition was fighting a virtual war while the Iraqis tried to fight a traditional one”.
In my personal opinion hyperreality invaded our lives as soon as we started using Hypertext in our private lives, and similar as Nicholas Negroponte’s futuristic view called the “Daily Me” (an online journal adapted to the readers’ interests), Baudrillard shows us how fast we lose reality and with it, the understanding of the object value system. At the end, Baudrillard sees the destruction of humanity, and after analyzing some simple daily habits I tend to agree.
By trying to understand, for instance, the value of a friend, I see how my friends represent a number on my Facebook friends count, and by imagining one of them would die, I understand that there are still 499 other friends to comment on my daily posts. Or by wondering why I look at reality through the screen of my mobile device to see augmented reality, like reality would not be enough. Or the fact that most things I treasure , can be copy-pasted, or downloaded.
Exactly this kind of observations, were upon my understanding the source for Baudrillard’s third big publication called “The end of history and meaning” published around 1990. A work where he argued that history had ended or “vanished” with the spread of globalization, because the speed society moves ahead and by doing so destabilized the linearity of history. I would exemplify this in a more common way, if all media we consume is adjusted to our personal interest, two things are likely to happen: first of all, we will never learn new things, because the chance factor is taken out of the equation; secondly, if what we consume is adjusted to us, we have a filtered view about on-going events, and for this reason a different reality and history (hyperreality). A interesting question is what will then be taught to the next generation in class rooms on the subject of History? Will teaching material be a community generate digital content, similar as wiki? Or will it be narrowcasted for every student ? Instead of books will we travel throw history by visiting people’s Facebook walls? Will we ask Google instead of teachers?

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Understanding Nicholas Negroponte

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Everyday we admire Apple’s technological leaps and revolutionary thoughts towards new solutions and functionalities. In 2007 they changed the mobile phone market by releasing the iPhone, the first mobile phone using a smoothly functioning touchscreen. The next generation even had multi touch functions, where we could rotate and amplify content.
It is not a known fact that Nicholas Negroponte had conceived this idea much earlier. In 1984, he gave a very interesting talk at TED where he explains the mouse’s lack of performance vs. multi-touch HD Screens.
And in Negroponte’s book ”Being Digital” released in 1995, he describes future HCI to become a mixture of multi-touch, voice and thought-controle. Functions often seen in futuristic movies like: 2001: A Space Odyssey 1968; Tron (1982); Star Trek (1994); A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001); Mission: Impossible III (2006).

The First Digital Revolution, or as Negroponte prefers to say, the time of mass digitization. Is a era where a transformation was occurring away from an “atom-based” economy, and towards one focused around the creation, manipulation, communication and storage of electronic binary digits or “bits”. Even businesses strongly supported Negroponte’s proposition that digital bits were starting to become more valued than physical products made from atoms. And as for consumers, the advantages of opting for digital media in particular include improved quality, potential customization, and the dematerialization of on-line access. Among Negroponte’s revolutionary concepts we find lots of tools today used on a daily bases, as for example a on-line journal he had called the “Daily Me” (a on-line journal adapted to the readers interests) or teleconference and voip (Voice over ip).

Considering all of Negroponte’s work, from creating the Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or founding the Wired magazine. I think that his most important work is the OLPC (One Laptop per Child), witch fits perfectly in to the ground concept of the second digital revolution, mostly defined by a era in which an increasing number of computing-enabled devices are permitting the everyday development of computing, with Internet-access and other digital technology almost constantly available.
Negroponte stared the OLPC project in 1982 in Dakar, 20 years be four the second digital revolution had even began. He wrote “to offer education to any child, we need to develop in every city, village and slum the necessary infrastructure. Such as school, teachers, library, books and electricity. Witch is a impossible task, except if all this was to be offered in one very cheep device, the OLPC”.
This laptops would be build so they can be powered by human actions (External manual power options include a pull-string generator designed by Potenco, and a clamp-on crank generator), and resist the harshest conditions. Furthermore they are completely open-source and offer all necessary software pre-installed (Fedora Linux, Web browser, Word processor, Online chat and VoIP programs, Music sequencer, Audio and video player software and Python 2.5 is the primary programming language). The distribution is free of charge in any poor communities all over the world, giving them access to all the knowledge first world kids have.
Soon skyping between tribes, or googleing became daily routines as making bread or getting water. Most of the kids developed a very good knowledge of mathematics and geometry by using drawing tools and even read English as a second languish. Today they are connected do the world and wiki, read, chat and surf the Internet on a daily bases.

As a technological pioneer and by understanding new media, Negroponte tries to help the worlds children to a bright future by creating a learning revolution. Please have a look at the different story’s published on the website from OLPC “http://one.laptop.org/“, and take action if you have the possibility to do so.

 

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Internet linguistics

Posted on by Osiris

Language is most certainly todays source of communication, but to understand the universe of linguistics we have to go back anthill linguistic activities that date at the Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC)) , with the analysis of Sanskrit. Over nearly 3000 years, one can find dramatical language changes every time any geographical/technological change/revolution happened. This changes are so outstanding that they are used as one of the key reverse engineering tools, to study the human history throughout time. This science is called socio-linguistic anthropology.

While researching Linguistics, the name David Crystal appears over and over. His enormous amount of books and talks make him one of the leading specialist about English linguistics. David defines the Internet linguistics to be a sub-domain of linguistics, that studies new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the Internet and other New Media. This helped me to narrow my research field from nearly 3000 years to the last 20 years of linguistic activity.

The first surprising fact David states, is that there have not been created a lot of new words in this digital revolution, most of the Internet slang we consider to be new war create in Victorian times. Research shows that minimalist words like CUL8 or T2UL, war used by Lewis Carroll as word games and poems. “The biggest change is not in the words but in the punctuation. Today we give different interpretation to words by using typography and emoticons” he says, and I find this to be very interesting as there is some similarity to Egyptian times where the hieroglyphs offered a alternative writing language, only readable to a certain class of people. Even if David explains that today people use this words not because they don’t know how to spell, but because it is cool and more economic and by reducing keyboards size on mobile devices and  limiting communication services to 140 characters, we need to be more efficient in our communication form.

The second interesting explanation David talks about, is that 80% of todays communication platforms are used by adults. So this is definitely not a young trend, even “the guardian” sms poetry competition had more then 7500 entry’s coming from users between 10 – 80 years of age. Today we have sms novels, that are distributed on a daily bases in 160 characters rhythm, or twitter that offers a maximum messages size of 140 characters. And all this tools give every user the power to publishing information, read by a global market that affects more readers then any TV news program.

If we take the scientific approach we find that in communications, media (singular medium) are the storage and transmission channels or tools used to store and deliver information or data. This information or data consists mostly of text and can be broken into three categories or subfields: the form, the meaning, and the context. While form and context is mostly defined by the creator, meaning depends on the readers experiences, and can cause ambiguity. The ability to understand another speaker’s intended meaning is called pragmatic competence, so an utterance describing pragmatic function is described as metapragmatic. Pragmatic awareness is regarded as one of the main problems, challenging todays aspects of language learning, and even more when communicating over digital platforms.

Articles online:

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_linguistics
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_lingo
  • http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/ling/about/what.html
  • http://www.zompist.com/langfaq.html
  • http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/internet+linguistics

Videos online:

  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbiJq7bDqcQ
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2XVdDSJHqY
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Boj8VYzDAy8

Pdf Files:

  • http://www.google.ch/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCEQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.davidcrystal.com%2FDC_articles%2FInternet2.pdf&rct=j&q=what%20is%20internet%20linguistics&ei=KQQKTveeAdD1sgbNoazSDg&usg=AFQjCNF_xdju4DquHWaHDVWgAcFA7yYMaw&sig2=0-2t-izR1P1EPP8MtXx62g&cad=rja

 

Could Cyber Space be our 5 Dimension ?

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Everyday we hear words like Blogs, Emails or Social networks, but what exactly defines this kind of communication exchange platforms. I spend the last 3 weeks trying to understand Cyber Cultures, how they are built and how they function.

First and foremost, Cyber Culture derives from traditional notions of culture, as the roots of the word imply. In non-cyberculture, it would be odd to speak of a single, monolithic culture. But as there is only one Cyber Space we consider all to belong to the same Cyber Culture. The first trace I can find of the word “Cyber Culture” is in the Oxford English Dictionary (1963), when A.M. Hilton wrote, “In the era of cyberculture, all the plows pull themselves and the fried chickens fly right onto our plates.”. Interesting is that it doesn’t establishes the link to the Word “Cyber”, which comes from a Greek word which means ‘Control’, this is an important element of Cyber Culture, we can control our lives on the internet, particularly our Cyber personality.

I think that the reason why all definitions up to today are incomplete, is most likely the seeped in witch the digital environment changes. We can state that today the word “Cyber Culture” generally refers at least to the cultures of virtual communities (Social networks, Games, Chat, file sharing, Virtual worlds, Emails, etc.). But if one would try to define tomorrows Cyber Culture he would first need to understand topics like, Identity in Cyber Culture, Architectures of credibility, Qualities of Cyber Culture, Security and Organics of Cyber Cultures.

An other very interesting point for me was to understand how the Cyber Cultuer absorbs and changes our fiscal world. One of the most fascinating phenomenons is that it creates lot of links to our fiscal world. Albert Einstein defind the 4 dimension (space-time), but can we consider Cyber Space to be the 5 dimension. And if the 5 dimension is Cyber Space, it is the first unstable dimension.

What would exactly happen to a society if it loses one of their dimensions, or turn off Cyber Space ?

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Books in English: