User:Cristinac/Methodology

“Sight is the most theorised, most contested over, yet in some ways least contested of the bureaucratised senses.”(Simon Pope and Matthew Fuller, 1995)

When talking about multimedia in the 1990s, Pope and Fuller refer to the eye as a “unifying and explanatory media in itself”(Simon Pope and Matthew Fuller, 1995), and seek out to reveal its authoritative privilege over all other senses. Fuller accused the eye of a monopoly of the sensory faculties in regards to meaning making. However, this is a position that has been bestowed upon it by engineers and designers and that is currently shifting. Conversational interfaces are becoming better and better at interpreting the speaker's queries and providing useful feedback. Still, despite all technological advancements, or perhaps due to them, the eye is taking on more roles: the role of the camera, the role of the interpreter, the role of the analyst. Coming from a graphic design background, the eye as a medium is a notable notion.

Over the course of the second trimester I've been concentrating on the flow of information starting from sign display up to cognitive processing. Reading becomes a software application in itself that takes the platform on which the information travels as an input. As such, there is a sort of materiality that is ascribed to the act, which has caused many a debate: if we read on a tablet, from a newspaper, from books or from our phones, this will alter our experience. However, with the accelerating intake of data, this action is becoming more and more similar to viewing images: searching for key interest points on a page and jumping from one signal to another instead of a slow and methodical procession of each word.

With that in mind, I worked on a project wherein the entirety of a book's words was replaced with CAPTCHAs. By using CAPTCHAs, which have a history of being computational hieroglyphs that can only be deciphered by humans, I tried to slow down the meaning making process by inviting the reader to ponder upon each word. I was interested in how you could organize someone's attention. By manipulating the reading interface, the user is forced to adopt a mathematical attitude: he or she has to go through each line to understand the whole, as opposed to ‘literary’, ‘close’ or ‘deep’ reading where the user can take the liberty to read words selectively. It is interesting to think how this system has surreptitiously infiltrated itself in the daily noise of browsing online, so much so that it only recovers visibility when it asks for a particularly unusual combination of words, thus drawing attention to the exchange between access and knowledge.

There is a lot to say about CAPTCHAs, it's a rich subject that also raises questions about the labour that is being performed when we are providing the answers. While originally it represented a step forward in digitising printed matter and advancing the distribution of knowledge, it has now become a ubiquitous form for training algorithms of corporations. The system transforms the reader into a scribe that must provide the correct answer to the Sphinxian algorithm in order to continue his or her journey. But what does it mean that we are reduced to scribes? It seems like a return to the pre-print era, when the copyists would turn oral knowledge into written form, the medium of the voice into the medium of paper, except that now we are transforming the medium of the paper into its digital equivalent.

In the process of completing this project I have employed several algorithms: generating the images, renaming them and ordering them by name. There was a sort of satisfaction in reversing the situation and dictating to the computer, as well as having the possibility to decide which texts I would spend my time deciphering: now I could be reading together with the computer, instead of only reading for it. Since the idealistic purpose of the labour that goes into CAPTCHA is being replaced by companies like Google with the trade of personal information about our searching habits for access (see NOcaptcha), I would like the further development of this project to involve creating an interface that facilitates the customized creation of a database of the user's favourite text, which can then be implemented as a regular testing process. Though at the moment my technical skills are not up to the challenge, this is something that I consider doing in the future.

“How can one facilitate the communication of a certain bit of information? By reducing the number of the elements and possible choices in question: by introducing a code, a system of rules that would involve a fixed number of elements and that would exclude some combinations while allowing others.” (Eco, 1989, p. 56)

In early communication theory, information was understood as a logarithm of the number of choices present, in which noise (sometimes also described as entropy) was perceived as a threat (Eco, 1989, p. 46). The role of the observer was to correct the errors of the algorithm, similarly to the situation described above, but also in current machine training. We've since learned that observers contribute their own noise to the equation which in turn is not a hindrance to the process, but can generate new information.

Usually the design of a user interface involves smoothing out and reducing the noise. This sometimes results in configurations of a product's surface and not a reflection of its intrinsic way of functioning. I am interested to see what a noise-friendly architecture would look like and to what extent it would encourage intervention. [See: Flusser’s art theory; Calvino Cybernetics and Ghosts]

One of the goals throughout my work last trimester was to make readers aware of the strategies that are at work to nudge them into the desired behaviour by product manufacturers. There are a lot of choices that are delegated to programmers and designers, for good reason, but this is often forgotten or intentionally veiled, which sometimes results in the illusion of objectivity reflected on the particular software or platform. Encouraging the users to see the tool as an extension of themselves makes the involvement of their makers invisible and disguises the limits of the program as limits of the ourselves. This feedback loop that is established through the exchange between software, hardware and user forges new modalities of experience. For this reason, more transparency about what informs the decisions that happen in the background, be that through conversation with the maker or a log of their choice making would be a welcome contribution to dismantling the black box effect.

I attempted to approach this subject through the disturbance of the interface. While learning to work with Javascript for the first time, I devised a couple of projects dealing with these issues. With ‘disappearing fAct’, a bookmarklet that can be rather easily installed, the user is given the option to erase all hyperlinks on a Wikipedia article and render the page static. Multi-tabber, on the other hand, is a tab that multiplies itself when it is closed. The purpose of the project is to sabotage the browser to the point of incapacity.

Writing about the projects now makes me realize that the theme of node isolation shows through, which is not necessarily a solution that I endorse, but one that I intentionally exaggerate. In 'Critique of Information' the social theorist Scott Lash stresses that in the global information order there is a generalized notion of outsourcing, that goes as far as outsourcing the unconscious. By this he is referring to memory being replaced by databases and the outsourcing of the inner dialogue onto an externalized one triggered by “images, media or information”(Lash, 2002, p. 208). Reflexivity is no longer a product of our own labour, but becomes a result of gathering and collecting from sources other than ourselves. We start focusing on the nodes in the information network we are building and not on the space in between. Cultural phenomena such as Kenneth Goldsmith’s university course on wasting time on the Internet is a relevant example, where he instructs his students to fully immerse themselves in a “digital haze” (Goldsmith,2014), to drift in unarticulated directions and to adopt a constant state of awareness. His techno-centric technique is based on collecting and rearranging elements plucked from various online media and explores the connections that are arise by forceful combination. As opposed to Goldsmith's approach, what I am aiming to create through my work is a space of reflection that is still rooted in the digital by encouraging the misbehaviour of the user, their removal from the network.

Currently I am looking into patents as a means of defining the delimitations of an object. The tension between an application's rigid formality and the ambiguity of language is very interesting to me. Often the loophole that language provides is exploited and creates exceptionally vague descriptions revealing the paradoxical situation of a system that is trying to capture ideas that may or may not have been materialized. The monopolization of a patented idea is however limited to a lifespan of 20 years according to American and European laws, after which it enters the public domain. For the thematic project of the third trimester I will create a temporary database of patents that are expiring in a specific time frame, thus pinning down the moment of transition between disappearance from one database and appearance in another.

Something else I would like to address is the abandonment of projects. Recently I read the phrase “poetics of potential” and it has occurred to me that rarely do I return to a project that has reached some sort of completion. This also has something to do with the difficulty with which I reach a decision. By doing this, an opportunity to build a stronger argument is missed. Over the summer, I will revise and flesh out some of the projects that have been started this year.

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Throughout my studying time there have been a few topics that brimmed to the surface. These have been the means of information dissemination, sense-making, interference with the interface and human-machine communication. I would like to continue on these threads.

Bibliography:

'Scott Lash, 2002, Critique of Information, SAGE Publications

Simon Pope and Matthew Fuller, 1995, This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder, http://bak.spc.org/iod/WARNING!.html

Kenneth Goldsmith, 2014, Why I Am Teaching a Course Called “Wasting Time on the Internet”, http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/wasting-time-on-the-internet

Umberto Eco, 1989, The Open Work, Harvard University Press