User:Andre Castro/2.1/semniar-2012-10-10-summary

Project Proposal Draft

Short Description

Departing from today's unstable notion of what constitutes a book, I would like to further problematize it by introducing into to books, material that until recently has considered unsuitable to be featured on print.

Currently, specially with the great popularity of e-readers and print-on-demand services books are becoming more and more like the web, not only in their underlying technology, but also in relation to its publishing mechanisms. Similarly to what happened before with the blog boom making online publishing possible to anyone in the possession of a computer, the current book publishing revolution (with ebooks and print-on-demand services as two of its main agents) is opening the book medium to amateur writers. At first sight it appears to be an extremely liberating possibility, allowing writers to break away from dependency to publishing houses in order to have their work "out there".However such possibility also appears to bring along fears and anxieties, due to the lack of control over what is published. When the validating mechanisms are no longer in practice, what knowledge will be considered legitimate? Will books' authority still hold up to all these changes?

Simultaneously printed material seem to hold a certain degree of authority, at least more than the web. Once a textual material is printed and bound into a book it gains another status and ask for a more attentive mode of readership. As an example, we Wikipedia giving users the possibility to compile various article into a book, which they can download of buy a copy.

What will happen when we are presented with a book based on textual detritus, on material considered unsuitable to be featured into a book?

The project I intend to develop will focus on the publication of books based on spam email messages. My plan consists in find strategies which, no only aim at generating large quantities of text material based on spam, but also disguise them a literary genre, namely folk tales.

Description of my works in the past year

To begin with I started by writing on the performativity of code. Departing from Katherine Hayle's notion of code performativity I went on looking at how does code perform. How does code, rather than being a descriptive tool, has the capacity to act, to change things in the real world, similarly to a performative speech-act, such as a judge stating: "I pronounce you guilty of the crime", and often with very direct and material effects.

Simultaneously I developed and online map of the streets of Rotterdam. This map - a striped-down version of the original map of Rotterdam - only displayed the city street names against a black background, on the browser. By clicking on each street a request was made to the City of Rotterdam's Archive to provide information on that particular street's name origin. That information was then displayed alongside the map.

What I seemed to be creating here was an interface to access city's archive through a different channel. By having the indexes of the archive - the street names - displayed on the screen I might see and ask for information on streets that I wouldn't be normally interested in. It opened up the possibility for a serendipitous navigation through the city name's history.

The same serendipitous exploration made its way to the next project, Radio Liberté Egalité Beyoncé (RLEB). RLEB was an online radio-station with a schedule composed of audio content fetched form Internet Archive. One-hour long cycles presented the listener with ten-minutes chunks of various sound materials, picked at chance the archive, from within a specific categories, such as french talk-shows, hiphop, poetry readings, ambient music, etc. The design of website where RLEG was hosted presented a drawing of radio, with which the listener had to interact in order to get the radio playing.

The essay written alongside the RLEB began by tracing the archive's historical ties to power, functioning as a legitimator of power and knowledge. It mentioned the ideology which underlies any archive, even folkloric archive such as Youtube, an which can be best perceived through what is kept from entering the archive. Never-the-less important differences exist between a physical offline archive and a digital online one: the latter has the potential of a wider access, and also to let its item be taken by visitors, without risk of impoverishing it. These differences result in an invitation for appropriation and transformation of the digital archive. When one of its items is taken and transformed, a new version of it appears, and a certain confusion emerges over its origin - which one is the original and which is fictitious? When remixed versions surface, they change the archive into a space of dialogue and emergence of discourses, rather than a site aimed at legitimizing power and knowledge.

Data Factory looked at direct marking companies' acquisition of consumers data, with the aim to target individual consumers with products which they might be more inclined to buy. It consisted of a small archive of recordings from phone-calls made to such companies. During the calls I tried to sell them their business main ingredient - consumer data - with the catch being the fact that "consumer" here meant only myself. Through the reactions to this simple short-circuit the ideology behind such business model became more apparent. The calls were gathered together in a website, with a certain corporate style, in which they could be listened to, in parallel to images illustrating or ridiculing what was being said.

The essay The Work of Audiences departed from Dallas Smythe's work On the Audience Commodity and its Work. In Smythe's view, the audience job consists in creating demand for advertised goods. What advertisers buy when placing an advert on a magazine, TV-show of website is the audiences' attention and their capacity to buy what is being advertised. It happens that the labor of this immaterial work-force changed under the Web 2.0, as noted by Andrejevic. Audiences are no longer simply asked to generate demand for advertised goods, but also to put their creativity to work in producing many of the contents that surround those adverts, and also make the Web. By doing so audiences also develop a community around their creations, and produce information about their behavior, which will be used in targeting advertisement directed at them. In exchange audiences receive a small amount of control over their creations, which are ultimately property of the company hosting them. Following this line of thought I asked whether there was a difference from the work of audiences on platform like Youtube to one like Wikipedia. The situation seems to be that although Wikipedia also lives on audiences' free creative labor, they are given more control over their creations, and engage in discussions over the functioning of Wikipedia. Is this difference enough for the work of audiences to be classified as less exploitative than on Youtube?

General Methodology of Work

The methodology I have employed in the constructions of my works generally begins by encountering a problem or frustration. I come across something in which I see a great potential, but due to some blockage, it is under-explored. As an example, I found a great wealth of audio material available at Internet Archive, however its interface tended to conceal most of the material. This frustration led me to ask how could the diversity and quantity of material become more apparent and accessible.

A stage of experimentation and research generally follows. At this point I try to broaden my question, find possible angles to approach it, find other approaches to similar problems, in short, contextualize it. Also important component of this stage is loose experimentation, not too concerned with the outcome, and regarding this stage as a exploratory and testing ground. Returning to the IA sound library example, I went on looking at other online audio archives, focusing on their access interfaces, I explored IA in depth, and tested strategies for accessing large quantities of audio material. From the loose exploration a more precise idea of the materials, and the system I am engaging with is formed. Experimenting usually also allows the final approach to surface organically, almost by itself. It can be seen as process of exclusion and adaptation of ideas, through doing.

The following stage is one of concretization of the elected approach, bringing it from its experimental stage, through various prototypes to its presentable shape. It is at this point when most decisions are made, such as what to include or exclude, in what context should the project exist, how it will function, what will be its appearance. In the example I have been giving, I decided for an online radio, exclusively based on audio material from IA, that would group the sound materials under given programs with specific genres.

The resulting object is rarely, a solution for the problem which initiated the whole process. Rather that providing an answer it will be an imaginative solution that ought pose more questions, and show the problem under another, perhaps unexpected, perspective. Hopefully such approach will challenge the value of the system/object in question, and allow it to reveal itself in another form.

Project Methodology

To achieve my project goals I intend to induce spammers to write folk-tales.

The way I see it developing involves several stages, namely

• A) Creation of series of online entities (bots) with active online life. These bots will work hard to publicize their email address and wait for unsolicited emails to arrive.
• B) Upon arrival of a spam email each bot responds to it, beginning an exchange with the spammer. At this stage the bot is suppose to create an intrigue in which the spammer become, a character, a player, and which fuel the exchange and the production of texts.
  • B.1) I would like the intrigue to borrow from a folktale structural organization
• C) The tale is concluded. (Final must be arranged. Possibly the resulting text is offered to the spammer, inviting him to publish it a make a profit out of it).
• D) After several texts are produced using this approach, the results must be compile and published under a (print and electronic) book.

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<strick>My project methodology will be divided in three sections, that in broad terms apply the same methodology, encompassing the following steps:

• Engage with Source

Approach and engage with an area of text production considered marginal or non-literary. The found text from each of those areas will become the source material. The possible areas include:Spam email messages, social network profiles, human-chat-bot dialogues.

For the past month I have been collecting spam email messages, and diving under categories corresponding to different spam strategies (eg: phising, Spanish prisoner, spam lit, dating). I have experimented with ways displaying and organizing the database of emails, so I can have a sense of the whole material I am dealing with. Effort will also be put on tracing spam's ecosystem - where and by whom it is produced? What techniques are use to produce it? Is its only aim to generate a profit or are there other intentions behind it?

• Writing Machine

A strategy - a writing machine - that brings users to playfully, and based on the source texts, assemble new texts belonging to a specific genre (folk stories,poetry,etc).

The strategy I am currently developing consists in abstracting folktales' structure and (basing my research on Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale) through a game situation, bring users to assign spam email sections to specific parts of the folktale structure, in order to end with a full tale formed by phrases extracted from the spam email messages.

• Publishing

A mechanism that allow for a quick translation of the generated text material to electronic books containers (pdf and epub), the creation of a cover, the choice between several license (copyright, public domain, creative commons), and direct channels to book selling/sharing platform (Kindle store, Lulu, Internet archive). </strick>

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To Do

• add links to texts
• develop 1.3 - Methodology: engaging with the system, but diverging from it.
• proof read

leftovers

From Short Description:

As new book publishing infrastructures, such as ebooks stores (e.g. Kindle Store) and print-on-demand(e.g. Lulu) which detach themselves from traditional book publishing circuits, gain more popularity, book contents are bound to change. This change in content results from the absence of editorial mechanisms which ensured that only certain proper contents were brought to print. When one decides to publish a book through Kindle Store or Lulu, one can do it, with no necessity to go through any editorial control. Any textual content is bound to be put on sale under these bookstores. Consequently books with all sorts of content proliferate these online bookstores, even books where the same content(normally a public domain literary work) reappears under a different container, exhibiting a different titles, author's names, and cover design. We must than ask what is a book, its content or its containing envelop? If the same content, but presented differently gives origin to more that one book is content then relevant?