I have been in a bookish phase of my research this week. I am tempted to call it ‘The Book Phase’ (or to use a more formal term such as the ‘The Literature Review’) but from experience I know that a Fordist approach to research simply does not work for me. I find myself working in a much more iterative manner going from practice to literature review to technical research in a series of spiraling cycles which run parallel with each other for awhile before fusing, splitting off or fizzling out at key junctures. It looks like chaos when taken as a snap-shot at any single point but I have learnt from experience that if I document enough of my thought processes (including the ideas that I think are naïve or stupid) and self-posed questions (some of which I never really answer in any kind of obvious way) that things happen. I think of myself as being engaged in something that is more animation than a formal flow-diagram.

I think that the self-posed questions are particularly important because they act as a record of the wider questions that I am interested in. In a sense they are the breadcrumbs of the meta-research project that never quite gets formulated as part of a research brief but nonetheless is working away on the background. They are what I am about, even when I don’t realise it.

So what have I been reading?

Well the first thing I have been reading is ‘Nam June Paik: Video Works 1963-88’. This is the exhibition catalogue for the 1988 retrospective exhibition at the Haywood Gallery, London written by Wulf Herogenrath. It is full of fascinating pieces (and it was a serendipitous find whilst browsing the stacks for the books that did come up on my computer search for ‘computer art’).

Herogenrath’s text has some wonderful anecdotes about Nam June Paik (1932-2006). For example, it tells the story of Paik cutting off pieces of John Cage’s shirt and tie during a performance of Chopin. Paik announced the end of that concert by ringing up by phone from outside the auditorium. Herogenrath makes the interesting claim that this was the first time that the telephone "had been used as an artistic medium" (page 11).

I tend to find statements of originality and uniqueness useful provocations for thinking through issues around art so I decided to google ‘history+telephone+art’ and see what I could turn up. Interestingly, both Peter Lunenfeld and Adriana de Souza e Silva begin their histories of this kind of art back in the 1920s with a description of a piece by Lázlo Moholy-Nagy. I guess it is question of what we mean by first, telephone, art and medium!

Herogenrath also gives some sense of Paik’s approach to the issue of the relationship between artist and technology. He describes Paik engaging in months of do-it-yourself work adapting “functioning and semi-defective TV sets to receive new signals"(page 11). He quotes Paik as saying "one must know technology very well in order to be able to overcome it"(Page 30). This aphorism resonated with me mainly because I have found myself scoffing recently at my own naïve claims at overcoming technology through technological engagement (particularly with Adobe Flash).

In another strand of my research reading I have been re-sampling the delights of ‘Chris Crawford on Games Design’. This is a book stuffed full of rumbles and grumbles and insightful turns of the mind. I was particularly interested in CC’s thoughts about software tools. CC notes:

“Every tool is like a road: It takes you somewhere quickly. A truly fine tool is like a freeway: It gets you there especially quickly. Of course, like a freeway, a fine tool attracts a great many users, all of whom end up going to the same place, and if you take the freeway, you end up at a crowded beach." (Crawford, 2003:123)

I think that the ‘freeway’ metaphor holds up quite well for the ‘work’ developed using flash at the beginning of the format. The tool was deemed to be good for certain solutions and an awful lot of work ended up looking and feeling quite similar. However, I am not sure that the metaphor holds for what happened next. The tool set acted much more like a map of a road, rather than the road itself. It indicated certain potential sets of interest rather than over-determining them. Similarly, the pre-existing interests that artists brought to their engagement meant that the influence of the technology was modulated by their many different culture contexts. To use the map metaphor once more, we might have been staring at the same map but we were driving to and from different locations for different reasons. Finally, there was a feedback loop between the flash users and the wider technological community which meant that issues: such as the fact that it was a semi-closed format; that it was a proprietary technology; and that technologists and artists could use it in conjunction with a bewildering array of other technologies meant that it became just one tool in a highly competitive toolbox.

However, the experience of the ‘tool-ness’ of flash was particularly good for me because it meant that I gained a personal insight into processes which I had understood in a rather detached and intellectual manner before. I got to SEE the determination of technology.

I would argue, therefore, for technological engagement not so much to make the case for ‘overcoming’ the technology (or the cultural construct surrounding it) but to able to ‘see’ it, briefly, in an instructive way. It sounds rather un-heroic when I express my manifesto like that. But I guess I am not St George trying to slay a single fire-breathing monster. I am more like the poor mug tied to the stake tying to figure out their lot in the whole dragon/iron-clad moron economy.

Now remind me again what happened to person who got tied to the stake!

Britain is a Dataveillance Society

It seems like the issue of surveillance has finally claimed some wider public attention. The BBC are reporting an important contribution to this debate titled A Report on the Surveillance Society . This academic report was produced by the Surveillance Studies Network for the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners' Conference in London convened for the office of Richard Thomas the UK Information Commissioner. In their reporting the BBC note that this report touches on surveillance issues as wide as "US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles". The BBC also report the publication of statistics from Privacy International which indicate that Britain is the worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy". You can see the worst offenders (including the UK) picked out in black on this map. It is 'nice' to see dear Old Blighty up there with the likes of China and Russia. PI describe us as being an "endemic surveillance society"( the executive summary, overview of privacy, threats to privacy, highlights and country reports of the PI report are all available online).

One of the most interesting things, for me, in all this reporting was the role sketched out for artists in the surveillance world. A Report on the Surveillance Society offers a glimpse of the world of 2016 which they capture in the metaphor 'The Hall of Mirrors'.They predict that:

Protesters, artists and surrealists all play with and resist pervasive surveillance in all sorts of ways, including disabling public surveillance devices, using ‘sousveillance’ technologies or counter surveillance."

They also sketch out the case for a new narrative form which they call 'life-logging' in which artists and others use the technologies of surveillance to record every aspect of their lives. However, they also note that :

"Life logging is also not all that is can seem and with increasingly sophisticated data management and video production software, lives can be adjusted or even entirely created for purposes from pure entertainment through subversion to fraud."

Many of these activities are already part of artistic culture. There was rash of work awhile back that exploited webcam technology. In the JenniCam project, for example, Jennifer Ringley mounted a images from her personal webcam on the internet that showed her daily life. There was also a rash of interesting spoofs of this idea of mediated ordinary life. In Online Caroline, for example,Rob Bevan and Tim Wright of XPT used "a mixture of simulated web cam feeds, personalised emails and telephone messages" to create a "BAFTA-award winning online drama about one woman’s attempt to find an online friend".However, I believe that the authors of the report are right to assume that these activities will continue to develop and to play an increasingly important role in future relationships between art and a technological society. The question than arises of how best to prepare for this world. Should one train oneself to "play with and resist pervasive" technologies? It certainly pays not to be asleep when deploying a technology. I was interested to read an article tagged on the end of the WIKIpedia entry for webcams that reports that a trojan horse program can be used by hackers to activate a computer's camera without the user's knowledge (this article by Kevin Poulsen from 2005 certainly made me think about webcams in a new way). It made me wonder about the relationship between artists and technology; about who and what is being play in this scenario.

Now remind me where did I leave the manual for my web camera?