Plugimi (Sascha Pohflepp)

So here’s a wrap-up of the recent developments of my final piece:

Having researched about objects and contexts a lot in the recent months, I rethought the notion of context in relation to information made public. There are different kinds of (informational and physical) contexts which could be tackled by objects but, beside purely statistical data, one could argue that most of it is traces of people. Even if not, you need a person to interpret the information, so it seems that even many smart objects, or what ever you’d like to call them, act as mediators for human activity. Looking at the origins of the word context this seems to make sense, since ‘con textere’ literally describes the act of ‘weaving together’. So the contexts I’m looking for might be actually part of the framework that hold our world together and could as such even provide the means to position oneself with in the world. The contexts which we all share are very diverse but if you look closely, there are few that can really serve as common denominators for all living people. Essentially space and time and some more physical parameters of the world, laws of nature if you want. Time is what always interested me the most, at least it always managed to play an important role in my work, in both art and design projects.

Looking for objects that could smartly wrangle contexts in time, I came across something very familiar: a photo camera. This might sound very plain at first, but think about it again: That a still photo represents frozen time is plain to see and Roland Barthes wrote the most beautiful book about it. But, what started with the introduction of data-backs to SLR cameras in the late 80s is that temporal information got more and more explicit, while still being visible. With the introduction of digital photography this data-layer got much more sophisticated and also invisible.

Attached to every JPEG, there’s a host of information, including the date taken by second. At the same time, phones are replacing both watches and cameras, creating an super-object which is already enormously widespread and being used on a very casual basis to create time-related visual information. Combine that with the disseminating-power of the Internet, most likely Flickr and you get an enormous amount of spots in time that you can precisely locate and which are publicly available.

This of course wouldn’t mean anything if you can’t relate to them in any way, but I argue that you can, once you share a moment. If I got a photo up on Flickr and can get a glimpse what happened in the very same second in a completely random other place on the planet, just by the fact that them and me did the same thing - pushing a button - at the very same time, that would be a powerful thing. It maybe won’t tell me anything factual, but it will send me back to a moment to which I got an ‘emotional investment’ (as Jussi Ängeslevä put it) anyway, and have me imagine about that other. This leads to the first part of the project I’m currently realizing: a map of time. It’s kind of compulsory to render that information into a kind of information mapping ‘tool’ which can be accessed online and used to display other’s photos in a temporal relation, using your own photostream as a reference. Yesterday Richard pointed out to me that Jim Bumgardner already has made some Time-graphs which are formally very similar to what I had in mind and already made a sketch of thanks to Remmelt’s skills. Still, Jims focus is different in the fact that he positions the photos in relation to semantic aspects, i.e. tags. What I propose is a connection on a purely time-related level. What I hope is that seeing these moments displayed in a yet to be determined way (the two-axis graphs don’t feel quite right) will trigger some kind of emergent narrative, fueled by one’s urge to make meaning out of connected elements.

The second part of the project actually arose from the question of how to deal with people that don’t happen to have photos up on Flickr to reference to. This is an important point because it also brings up questions about how we make memories and how the biological memories exist in relation to the photographic ones. Personally, I got the impression that the more we rely on visual evidence of past events, the more our mental memory erodes around these islands in time. At the same time, the strict linearity gets superimposed on a more associative way of remembering. If one doesn’t have (or want to have) visual evidence of moments past, the task of an installation would be to make it possible to define a moment in time to reference to. Initially I thought of objects which one could touch and that would later reveal other’s visual memory of the very same instant. After a while, it became apparent that greater freedom would be required to really make meaningful memories to relate to, since a fixed installation would always create a memory of the installation. The idea of small, portable items arose: a thing that you could take with you and which features a button that you can press at a moment of your choice. You can hold it as long as you want, thus creating a duration, but you can only press it once. After you returned it, you get a photographic item of the very same second which you have a mental image of taken by someone somewhere. Essentially, this object is almost like a camera, but it’s void of everything but a clock and a button. The determination of the moment and the choice of subject/location are separated while the visual information gets replaced by a mental memory of the moment.

The button as the icon of decision plays an important part here and will require some more thinking and also trying out the ‘feels’ of different types.

It will take some time until the other’s image(s) arrives which is slightly reminiscent of handing in your negatives to a lab and getting the positives ‘developed’, which is even welcomed. The way of getting the image(s) is still not fixed but paper prints would be a way since they could have a size similar to that of the portable object. The tangibility might also have an impact on the way that one uses them to imagine, associate or even put them up at home as a ‘memory’ of that moment.

Feedback as always highly appreciated.

From an initial Flickr-related project that I’ve started together with Remmelt Pit and a meeting with Jussi last week, a few insights emerged for me. Most importantly, that the true advantage of people and things blogging might be the fact that we are creating a rich fabric of interrelations which enable the different participants to position themselves within.

To make it a bit clearer: It’s kind of a given that we all and everything around us exists in a temporal framework which moves on in a linear manner (at least on an everyday-experience level). Same for space, everything has its unique spot on the planet. These are very basic truths and yet it’s kind of hard to imagine the existence of zillions of things and billions of lives being lived and millions of words being said in every instant. With the rise of the technologies that we are talking about, namely the semantic web and the rise of identities for things, nothing has changed (and never will) except the fact that the amount of informational traces that all the activities leave behind seems to be exponentially growing. These traces are providing an increasingly rich framework of information, about who, what, where and when they were created by either human (most likely communication) or thing (most likely information).

What’s interesting to me, is that this continuous stream of information can serve as a tool for the individual to relate him- or herself to the world with. Think of it as a marker that ultimately tells something about the whole. I guess that this is pretty much what McLuhan was referring to when he spoke about the shift in scale that happened with the introduction of satellite-imaging which suddenly changed “nature” into “ecology”. Tapping into the information that is dispersed by individuals or things might have a similar effect, but on a much more personal basis. It might actually give you a feeling for the raw synchronicity in which the world is happening, both uniting you with it and alienating you from it.

This can be used in a fairly statistical manner to get a glimpse of the Zeitgeist or on a more finely-grained level as in Golan Levin’s gorgeous Dumpster , a portrait of romantic breakups collected from blogs in 2005. Or on the other hand, the same information could be used in a very personal level, maybe not even decipherable at all to other people. One could use specific posts, dates or objects located in space to make one’s own history more palpable. Think of pointing at a very personal informational item and telling the web to show you everything that happened at the same time, or a day later in the same spot, or on the exact other side of the world.

Loosely but significantly related is the work of Tim Hawkinson who has made a lot of amazing objects about the way that time flows through both the world and him. Also my all-time favorite La Jetée by Chris marker in which a certain memory of a man is used to get a hold on time-travel comes to mind. (In a scene refering to Vertigo the relation is even graphically plotted out)

I also love the site that Julian Bleecker pointed out the other day, Flight Aware. Being able to follow planes on an individual level has something very poetic about it which is very close to what I try to express with my series of contrails entitled Trajets. Contrails seen from the ground are a strange symbol for both connectedness and detachedness, equally strong. Wouldn’t it be beautiful to follow a single aircraft, linking it to your ways somehow?

Might really be a keyword, since it seems to include a multitude of aspects here.

What if you could buy objects that come with a informational purpose? Say, you buy a toy-robot you can put on your desk. You can connect to it through your computer and tell it the keywords it’s supposed to look for. Expose it to both power and Wifi and it will look for the information you specified and collect it over time. It will be giving visual feedback and accumulate information on its site that naturally generates a feed as well which other people/objects can subscribe to in turn. It seems like a bit of a hybrid between a blog and a news aggregator since it will both collect and create content but it will have a body and you can physically interact with it (the means of interaction being as diverse as the realm of objects). I like the aspect of creating a physical token of information about something or someone. Imagine giving an object which accumulates stuff about a certain band to your friend who happens to be their biggest fan. It will freak out once it finds out that they are gonna play in her town. The ultimate object would probably be the one which collects information about one’s own traces on the web, a narcissist’s gadget. (Or does it rather look for its own traces?)

I also like the idea of hooking up objects to information which streams from objects that they are related to. Julian Bleecker at the Blogjects-workshop pointed out that the longest-blogging objects have been airplanes. Imagine how cool it would be to have a scale-model of a certain plane which you can hook up to an individual plane. It would make engine-sounds when the actual plane is over the atlantic, flashing its lights and adjusting the cabin-lights to the time of day at the plane’s position.

Still thinking about the relationships between networked objects and their environment. The money-track is highly interesting but maybe a bit complex to be easily subverted with such a project since it tends to automatically include everthing in its mechanisms. The bottom line is that it’s not the money that connects all things but their imposed value as Michel Foucault points out in “The Order of Things”. With this system, every object on the planet could theoretically be traded for any other one since fixing something’s monetary value is the common cultural technique for assessing its worth in every meaning of the term. Money only serves as a temporary object here but is an object in its own right since it can be traded as a commodity itself. Does that make eBay a giant value-assessment machine for circulating commodities? Also, how does the assessment work differently in various cultures? The most prominent example being haggling where basically two individuals link to assess the networking capabilities of a given object (its price) which is then being exchanged.

So everything is silently networked anyway, if you want. The interesting point about the more actively networked objects that are starting to appear might be that they stand in between their informational and their bodily environment. In case an object has a blog (or some other networked representation), that exposes it to a double context. On the one side, there are the physical properties like position and certain environmental qualities, on the other side there is the information which is linked and being accessed or streamed in various ways. Consequentially, the more networked an object is, the more it will resonate between these two contexts. As Jussi pointed out, being a truly networked object is more than linking two elements. It means that the objects informational representation will emerge from the object and its context and – ideally – vice versa. So there would be a high interdependency between the two natures of the object and “if you took away the physical representation, [the virtual one] would seize to exist”.

I asked myself how this reciprocity could work and what the gain would be. For the information it would surely be the fact of the embodiment. Linking a website with an entity opens up a lot of possibilities. Both form and content could be linked in a lot of ways to the object. Maybe the site is only accessible when it’s in the sun. The site might look differently depending on where it is on the world or how the network feels like. Maybe the site changes content depending on which direction the object is faced.

The other direction is a bit more tricky but an intriguing advantage might be the greatly enhanced visibility that the object or its owner gains through being networked. Through its presence on the web, an object gets a life online, can probably be googled, geographically located and thus will (directly or indirectly) accumulate a history of itself, leaving a track of data even if it ceases to exist. Furthermore, there is of course the ability to interact with the world through linking with other objects and having an indirect agency.

Apparently, a networked object has two sides to it in between which there is an exchange going on. The object gains an informational existence and the possibility of interacting with the web. The information in turn gains a body which enables it to reference itself to the physical world. Since one can’t really exist without the other (the object could, but would maybe be dysfunctional), this creates an object which is half real and half virtual and thus resonates in between both world and web.

technorati tags: blogjects, design, research, plugimi, context

Diving deeper into thinking about double-natured objects, I was strangely drawn towards various topics of economy in the last days. I’m having the feeling that if you want to have objects which live in-between their context in physical reality and the realm of information exchange (i.e. the internet), it might be a promising way to short-circuit that with aspects of economy as the manifestation of the “real” in a wider sense. (Related: The Chinese gold-farmers in World of Warcraft and their reciprocal effect)

Following a hint, I looked up the theory of commodity fetishism which basically leads to a similar assumption: that products have dual properties to them, use and value, which can ultimately even form a paradoxical state in which something useless can be extremely valuable and the other way around. The effect of fetishism leads, according to Marx’ 19th-century analysis, ultimately to a situation where the objects’ users become objects themselves in the process of commodfication as all their relationships get substituted by the exchange of objects/money/capital. Both Baudrillard (The System of Things) and Foucault (With his notion of self-control) have further developed this approach in the second half of the 20th century. What Marx eventually proposes is establishing of an intelligent system which both directly links the (human) effort of production to an objects value and oversees production in general. This is very difficult to do and all attempts of planned economy (which in fact were still monetary systems) badly failed.

In my view, this has also to do with the tremendous complexity that a system of six billion autonomous individuals and their environment has, which must pretty much defy what one can plan. Consequentially, the only thing that has proven to work is the use of a common denominator for all the effort, resources, ideas and what not that moves within the system: money! It never occurred to me this obviously, but the system of the representation of value (which is apparently a still undefined term) through the idea of a universal means of exchange which is both object and virtual instance and represents as well as exists in itself (and is able to act on itself) is in some ways so similar to the ideas sketched earlier. Question is, where to fit the notion of technological networking here, because it is so ultimately networked already. Still there is great promise in coping with this complexity or counteracting the mechanisms with technology without neccessarily trying to flip over the whole western system.

Take for example the idea of an exchange-based economy that is often referred to as the romantic ideal in anti-capitalist literature. This can work only in small tribal communities but at some early stage you need to reference to some common denominator to buffer the complexity which then in turn starts to abstract the whole previous relationship too. The net holds enormous promise for establishing direct relationships and offering platforms from which to facilitate exchange of goods or actions or information while also finding a value for it in the process. (Or is that eBay?). This might also become important with a possible rise of home fabrication. Markus Kison is currently working on a great project based on the idea of remotely exchanging action which is pushing in a similar direction.

Another aspect would be the networked object that knows its own value, because it knows its own history and context as well, which maybe could help in (re)binding different aspects of the immaterial realm to the actual physical manifestation.

Or a networked object that generates value from “selling” what it knows about its surroundings, much like the Google AdSense-object which not only knows about what’s happening but actively acts on it, selling the gathered information or even getting credits for successfully influencing its surroundings.

Thoughts on that please! Is that a promising direction to pursue? The bottom-line is that I’m pretty struck by the fact that we’re using a hypernetworked object day by day without really reflecting on (or understanding) what it represents or how it works.

Good Paper on the “Social, Economic and Ethical Implications” of smart objects.

I’m getting a bit more sure about the general boundaries of my research and work. I believe that the triadic relationship between people, smart objects and the net might be the most interesting trail to follow at the current moment. This is, because it seems to me that there’s the possibility of conceiving objects which have kind of a double nature. They are physical but also have one foot in the virtual realm. They know something about where they are, what they are and what they are being expected of. As Bruce Sterling points out, even a bottle of wine has this double nature already since it contains a barcode which connects it to a whole world of information processing and its different representations and accounts. But without anything else, it remains rather passive unless a person acts on it, e.g. scanning the code in the shop or typing in the manufacturer’s website at home.

A next step would be to let the object act. I used context-consciousness earlier, but I found out that context-awareness is a term coined by Ted Selker and Anind Dey. While they were researching about stand-alone objects that have a certain flexibility in respect to their situation, the networking-aspect might allow us to go even further in terms of how objects change in relation to a situation because they can utilize both other objects and the net.

What’s striking to me is that something which is in between can not only wrangle and transmit information about the reality which is surrounding it but would also be shaped by the net, thus truly mediate between the physical and the virtual.

The first basic example that comes to mind would be a real-life Google AdSense. A screen or other display that sits on the table and listens to what is surrounding it. It knows what it is (an ad), it knows where it is (in a café in berlin for instance) and it is smart in the way that it can listen to people’s conversations. It doesn’t have to know or understand anything itself, because the net knows better. Google looks at the words that people speak, puts them into context and finds the sites/products/events tagged with the fitting keywords. Then, the backflow of information would enable the little object or screen to change itself and adapt to the situation around it.

What’s nice about this is that it puts the contextual background in a very important position, which also relates to my initial thoughts about cultural customization. Since things are often being dropped into context as Jussi pointed out, it would be exactly this context which continously shapes them.

While doing some thinking about the fake objects there are some new aspects that popped up in respect to the relationship between people and devices. I was reading some text by Martin Heidegger, actually to research about the notion of the “Weltbild” but as it turned out, it also includes a very deliberate exploration of the differences between thing (Ding), object (Zeug) and artwork (Werk). It’s really interesting how he points out that the jump from thing to object occurs in the moment where the things gets assigned a purpose. That implies that there is also always some degree of expectation towards the object involved and that every object is to some degree technological. I wonder how these expectations work and how they are culturally coded. In a classical view of the world of things, the relationship is pretty clear in the way that a person uses a tool which has a clear purpose (”Dienlichkeit” as Heidegger puts it). That relationship only works in one direction. Now that there’s more and more connected in the world, there could be some shift to that.

There are some projects that probe into the implications of that, for example Monika’s objects which introduce an amount of reciprocity in the described relationship or the Needies, plush dolls that are networked and exchange information about being hugged, resulting in the other Needies plotting against the one that’s currently getting their owner’s attention. I believe that it might really be the networking aspect that’s making a difference because this allows for a single object to profit from the all the amount of streams and information on the net and/or remote information processing to vastly enlarge its capabilities. The biggest impact I can currently think of would be some kind of awkward shift of roles where a certain object, although seeming innocent, might be treating the person in a funny way, gathering information, tagging him or her and most likely communicating about it with the net or other objects.

This might go back to this brief conversation with Jussi as we were standing in front of a pretty pointless projection. Just when I had said that it pretty much sucked, it slightly changed. For a brief second we were suspecting that it actually had heard me and acted accordingly, either to please me or make fun of my judgement. Another example that struck me this week is Régines brand new Aibo which actually takes pictures of her and her apartment, adds comments to them and blogs them somewhere.

What I’d really like to do is to include that element of expectation in a project, working about the way that people expect technological inventions and updates to actually improve their life. Whether in some western idea of adding efficiency and purpose or some other direction. An object could actually work in the way expected or not, the important point would be that it might also work in another way, for itself or maybe even against the user, both proving and ridiculing the notion of the internet of things. A similar approach of the deceptive object can be found in my earlier project Herman the Liar which tries to seem as a peaceful resting place only to reveal that it’s a trap once a person sat down on it. Imagine using a teapot that senses your clumsy way of using it telling both the cup and its blog that you’re most likely a moron.