[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on -empyre: New Year/New Tools and Technologies.

[B. Bogart]

Thank you Tracey for telling us more about your work.

A few things resonated that I wanted to follow up on, written inline...

On 15-02-08 12:09 AM, Tracey Benson wrote:
> I am currently using a tool called Aurasma which has its pros and
> cons, but generally a great tool to use. One of the cons is that it
> is only available on limited devices and I would like to work with
> software that is open source, free and accessible to any smart phone
> or tablet user. To this end, I am now working with a developer in
> Bangalore, who I met at a recent Ada Initiative ADACamp. Our plan is
> to create a tool for the purpose of creating an AR walk of Bangalore
> and our project is titled "Look both ways". We hope that by mid year
> we will have a pilot ready to test.

I'm also a FLOSS oriented person and have been using almost entirely 
free and open-source software since 2003 in my academic and artistic 
works -- the exception being the binary nvidia driver and related GPU 
processing tools I've been using in more recent work (for performance 
reasons).

I share your drive to use accessible tools that could be used by others 
and where knowledge, rather than equipment, is the central requirement 
for access. In the previously discussed Dreaming Machine and Watching 
and Dreaming projects I did have issues in selecting appropriate 
computer vision and to an even greater extent, machine learning (AI) 
methods. As a self-taught programmer, I found that there is a 
significant barrier in accessing these methods because access is not 
often a priority for developers who focus on novel methods, not making 
existing methods accessible. More often than not, it seems that industry 
is expected to provide this interface of broad use and academic 
development. New methods tend to be implemented in code that is never 
published, or serves as the basis of new proprietary code that an 
investor is expected to make money off of.

Tracey, I'd like to hear more about your interest in open-source in the 
context of mobile and social media systems. It seems we can aim for open 
access to these technologies, but I think there is a problem when they 
are only applied in very constrained and centralized corporate 
environments, like facebook, iphones, and even android devices. The 
increasing role of the mobile device as consumption platform 
(http://www.ekran.org/ben/wp/2013/the-nonuser-and-the-consumer-appliance/) 
is clear from the language around how apps and media products are 
distributed in "app stores". I think this is an illusion of 
accessibility. While a mall may be accessible physically, it's still a 
highly controlled corporate space with a specific function that differs 
greatly from true public space. In software and online worlds, it seems 
public space is even more rare than its shrinking physical counter-part.

So do you have any thoughts on access in online interactive art in 
relation to centralized corporate systems vs more open peer2peer 
networks, like mesh networks and (if seen optimistically) the Internet 
itself.

The needs of the provided of the spaces are clearly the central purpose 
of the environment. For example, to get back to gender, we have the 
dreaded "gender" box, with often only two choices, that we are expected 
to answer in order to provide a profile to the system to generalize what 
we are interested in (marketing wise).

Ben