blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

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.

Brilliant blog about the way that people use technology in different regions in the world, based on the personal observations of a Tokyo-based Nokia empolyee. Might prove to be very helpful for my research.

As an intro for the coverage of my final project at UdK, here are some of the approaches that I’m currently working on

Relationships

The relationship between people and objects and the relationship between people and networked information has been well covered in both theory and projects. The new field that is currently opening up with the notion of electronically enhanced objects is the triadic relationship between people, information and the physical world. People and the net, although ever-changing, will be regarded the static elements here while the formerly static world of the material realm of things becomes the dynamic element in this relationship. This won’t be about an anticipation of future functionalities but more about the changes that this would introduce to the relationship as such.

Cultural customization

The culturally-influenced side of the electronic and digital world has so far mostly gone unnoticed by designers and manufacturers. The devices that we use inherently carry a western Weltbild in themselves, both in the way that they are made and in the services that they are expected to perform. At the same time, many different approaches towards the very same objects have appeared, for example Chinese funeral rites employing mobile phones made of paper or the African workshop-culture that evolved around the enormous spread of mobile phone usage. It would be challenging to see if there is any way of concieving less culturally coded devices than the ones we use today. These would either actively encourage the notion of customization or embrace it as part of it’s own nature as a new object.

Fake objects and instant realities

I believe that mockups or dummies of electronic objects have a certain power to them which is not easily explained. In a way, part of the (functional) properties of the original object seem to stay with the simulated item. There are different layers of reading and expectation with every object. In mockups these layers presumably get separated and reveal something about the connotation of the physical world and its relation to the individual. An example for that artistic strategy would be the the photography of Thomas Demand.

At the same time, the production technology of rapid prototyping is swiftly becoming more and more quotidian. The possibilities of creating physical objects from 3D-data are almost infinite and in the not-so-far future it will be possible to print working circuits as well, literally enabling us to download and produce hardware on the spot. Both of these approaches lead to one-of objects which might exist in a realm between functionality, expectation and implication.

While these subjects are still quite diverse, I strongly feel that there is a link between them. The subject that ties them together could maybe best be described as plasticity of the object.

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Ralf Schreiber is a friend and very interesting artist, whose Living Particles have developed into a whole analog-electronic nature of their own. He’s currently working at the Akademie der Künste and helped me construct a very simple, slightly unstable circuit of which Linda and I want to use several in an installation.

Lately, he has been tapping into making music with fantastic very simple instruments based on motors and rubberbands. Tonight, there will be a small performance and since we had such fun playing around with the machines, I was asked to join in. Starts at approx. 21h, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10. Maybe see you there!

With the presentation at this year’s open doors at udk, Jakob and I finished our project on the construction of identity and flickr. There are now three projects of which two have been realized. More about that soon.