Re: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance

[Helen Thorington <newradio@turbulence.org>]

Hello again: 

This will be my last post as I leave shortly for SIGGRAPH where Michelle and
I will be conducting a panel on (guess what?) networked performance, with
Julian Bleecker, Susan Kozel, Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. But before
saying goodbye and thanking you all for participating, I want to return to
two quick comments I made and a concern, which I trust is shared with many
of you.

I mentioned the 12 chips per person figure in my last post; and that many of
these chips are connected through the Internet. This was not to just throw
out a fact; nor was it intended to invite questions about access, although
there surely are those.  Rather it was to suggest an important fact about
contemporary environments.  Just multiply twelve chips by the world
population, which crossed the 6.5 billion mark this month.

Our environments are crowded fields of telecommunicative possibilities. And
people are using them  ­ they are not hidden.

Wade Roush, in his recent article, Social Machines, in Technology Review,
calls what is happening ³continuous computing,² as over against ³ubiquitous
computing² with its implication of invisibility. There¹s really nothing
invisible about what¹s going on at all.
In fact today¹s social software boom ³rests on common devices such as mobile
phones, computers, digital cameras and portable music players ² ­ all quite
visible.

And like ³Hole in Space², as people have become aware of them, they have
determined their use and their meaning. But remember too the Manovich quote:
³?one day every surface may potentially function as a screen connected to
networks,² and then check out the post Jo recently put up on the
networked_performance blog called ³information rain,² where your hands
become the screens onto which advertisements are projected?

The social will be commodified; a broad range of communicative possibilities
that could enrich the telecommunicative experience will be lost; others will
never be developed.

 Somehow the artist must find his/her way in this: initiating new
explorations, and at the same time helping to broaden the scope of what is
possible ­ moving from the purely functional  to something that will help
enlarge the beauty and pleasure of everyday life?

I had hoped to give you a few more examples of work that is being done with
this in mind? Maybe there will be an opportunity later.

Anyway, thank you, thank empire,

-- Helen 
newradio@turbulence.org