[-empyre-] July on empyre: Screens

[Simon Biggs]

Thanks Simone

I'd like to add to Simone's list of screen-forms that of the chemically active screen. When working at Cambridge, during the previous decade, we worked with new screen-like media known as liquid crystal elastomeric polymers. These are polymer membranes that include in their composition liquid crystals. Depending on how they are chemically programmed the crystals can react to different stimuli (heat, light, pressure, etc) in different ways (change colour, transparency, refractivity, shape, etc). Experiments are also taking place with similar elastomers using carbon nano-tubes, that have similar polarising properties to liquid crystals. OLED's are a related technology. What excited me about these sorts of screens was that you no longer needed to have a screen driven by another device. The state of the screen (and its many components) was a function of its internal structure and its environmental context. As such, the screen was a chemical computer - it computed its own state, depending on its interactions. These screens remain laboratory experiments but once some technical issues (with cost, chemical and mechanical stability and health and safety) are resolved we can expect them to be commercialised. There is real potential for such technology to add another dimension to how screens occupy and mediate our environment, offering us screens where agency is materially integral - in so far as any agency can be integral.

best

Simon
 

On 9 Jul 2012, at 11:08, Simone Arcagni wrote:

> Thank you Simon,
> I am following this very interesting discussion and I am very happy to partecipate...
>  
> I would like to present the most important topics of my research.
>  
> The "core" topic is urban screen. Urban screen means (1) big public screen, (2) media architecture and media facade and (3) portable device.
>  
> I study tecnhologies and experience, public space and interaction, new media, ICT and the contemporary concept (and vision) of the city.
>  
>  
> Contemporary urban space is no longer an “informational city”, a place where flows and devices are located, it is also a space that embeds computers and informational flows. Mitchell, Sassen, Catsells and Harvey describe the “informational city” as a place where comunication in real and virtual space coexist. Now something different is happening.
>  
> Last week Martin Rieser wrote:
>  
> Given the growth of mobile and pervasive media forms, all dependent to some degree on screens, this changed condition really forms a new paradigm, variously described by  researchers who now tend to regard the screen as a window into an extended  “Hertzian” space,  ‘hybrid space’, ‘augmented reality’, ‘mixed reality’, ‘pervasive space’; or from the user behaviour end as forming  ‘trajectories’ (Benford) , and even as ‘sculpture’ ( Calderwood) .
>  
> Objects, architecture, comunication, devices and virtual space are hybrydizing . An in-depth hybrid city, with a new digital DNA (the definitions I’m using are those that Lev Manovich used to describe the new post-media or macro-media system and the augmented space)
>  
> This vision goes beyond even the “media city” or the city as medium Kittler envisioned. More than a place where media combine and coexist, it is instead a post-medial augmented macro-medium.
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> Mark Shepard calls this in depth hybrid city, “computer city”. A city charachterized by “computerization of all things”. And, in particular, characterized by 2 technologies: Ubiquitous computing and Locative media
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> The city that Mark Shepard also calls “Sentient City”. In Shepard’s words...
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> Today, as computing leaves the desktop and spills out onto the sidewalks, streets and public spaces of the city, we increasingly find information processing capacity embedded within and distributed throughout the material fabric of everyday urban space
>  
> He then goes on to say...
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> Ubiquitous computing evengelists,   herald a coming age of urban infrastructures capable of sensing and responding to these events and activities transpiring within the city
>  
> Internet of things is the system and Augmented Reality is the technology... and the question is: what technologies are charachteristic of this new augmented space?
>  
> 1-Sensors (Simon Biggs wrote: “Kinect literally works like that, turning everything into a screen” and we can also think about the large use of microsoft Kinect for new screens like the Ubi’s 3d screen)
> 2-Microchips (toward the computerization of all things and Internet of Things)
> 3-New connections (with the development of RFID and WIFI, but also the low-fi digital radio waves)
> 4-Clouding computing
> 5-Geolocalization (with the development of GPS systems and Location-based Services - LBS)
> 6-New screens
>  
> New screens are computer screens... we are definitively in a postmedial era (someone cited Rosalind Krauss) so they are windows, mirrors and cameras, tv and computer screens... interfaces, doors for a space of comunication where – according to Bruce Sterling – objects and people are “intermediate”. Doors for communication, information, advertisement, entertainment...
>  
> These screens are interactive and connected, they are interfaces of a new augmented communication that is a new expanded urban space that I call “Citynet”. 
>  
> They embeds tv broadcasting, cinema projection, computer trasmission. They are the result of what Bolter and Grusin (developping a McLuhan theory) call “Remediation” and what Francesco Casetti calls “Re-location” and the raise of convergent screens)...
>  
> Analyzing new screens means describe and understand the new technological horizon, the new dimension of the communication (in my opinion the most important contribute is the study about the Internet and complexity by Albert-Lászlo Barabási), the new users experiences. 
>  
> Watching the promo movie by Cornig "A Day Made of Glass" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38) we can observe 4 interesting trends:
>  
> 1-Glass
> glass is the most interesting of the emergent materials (for examle in Samsung’s Smart Windows or Zuniga’s Augmented Reality Shop Windows)
> Glass means transparency and being able to definitively embed screens in architectural structures and everyday objects (the camouflage), trasforming mirrors, walls, windows, desktops (at home, in the office, in public spaces) into screens
>  
> 2-Holographic images (Simon cited)
> The second trend is the development of images toward 3D holographic, solid, images (for example Holorad and its holographic device)
>  
> 3-Touch screens
> Touch screens provide interactivity (whether the glass is actually touched, the screen is activated by the movement captured by sensors)
>  
> 4-Connected and geolacalized screens
>  
> In my opinion these trends are drawning a new screens dimension (screens without frames, screens without media, micro screens, elastic screens, everyhere screens...) and are driving the screens beyond the screens, toward the end of the screens...  
>  
> ... to be continued...
>  
>  
>  
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> 
> 
> 
> 
> Il giorno 09/lug/12, alle ore 11:08, Simon Biggs ha scritto:
> 
>> The second week of our discussion on screens begins. I would like to thank our invited discussants Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli and Martin Rieser, and the many other contributors, who have kicked the week off in such dynamic style. I hope that Martin, Kriss and everyone else who has been involved sustain their engagement with a debate that has been wide and vigorous, involving discussants and many list members, even the occasional lurker - which is gratifying. There has been considerable attention paid to how the screen can be defined, both medially and socially. The material and immaterial nature of screens and just what elements of the apparatus should be considered within the scope of the definition of the screen and what shouldn't were recurrent themes. The initial introduction proposed that our historical understanding of the screen is not adequate for dealing with what, in a time of post-convergent and ubiquitous interactive technology, the screen has become. The affect of this upon us, who can be considered as both makers and occupants of what can appear to be spectacle and dispositif, remains to be addressed.
>> 
>> We would like to welcome this weeks invited discussants. They are:
>> 
>> Simone Arcagni, Turin; University of Palermo; NABA, Milan, Italy.
>> Simone is a researcher in Cinema at the University of Palermo and teaches “Postcinema” at NABA in Milan. He collaborates with "Nòva", “Bravacasa”, “Close-up”, “Oxygen”, “Segnocinema”, “Tutto  Digitale". He maintains the blog Postcinema (http://simonearcagni.nova100.ilsole24ore.com), advises the publishing house Kaplan and collaborates with the Share Festival, Turin. He has written for “Bianco & Nero”, “Imago”, “Fata Morgana”, “I Quaderni del CSCI”, and has written and edited various books including: Music Video (with Alessandro Amaducci); Oltre il cinema – Metropoli e media; Simone Arcagni, Giovanni Spagnoletti (edited by) Dal Postmoderno al post-cinema and Cinema e web.
>> 
>> Charlie Gere, Lancaster University Institute of Contemporary Arts, UK.
>> Charlie Gere is Professor of Media Theory and History in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. He is the author of Digital Culture (Reaktion Books, 2002), Art, Time and Technology (Berg, 2006), Non-relational Aesthetics (with Michael Corris, Artwords, 2009), and co-editor of White Heat Cold Technology (MIT Press, 2009), and Art Practice in a Digital Culture (Ashgate, 2010), as well as many papers on questions of technology, media and art. In 2007 he co-curated Feedback, a major exhibition on art responsive to instructions, input, or its environment, in Gijon, Northern Spain. He is co-curator of FutureEverybody, the 2012 FutureEverything exhibition, in Manchester. His new book, Community without Community in Digital Culture (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), will be out later this year.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Simon Biggs
>> simon at littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk
>> 
>> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
>> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/  http://www.elmcip.net/  http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
>> MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices
>> http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?id=656&cw_xml=details.php
>> 
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> 
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Simon Biggs
simon at littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk

s.biggs at ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/  http://www.elmcip.net/  http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices
http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?id=656&cw_xml=details.php

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