User:Cristinac/presentation

Where I was:

This semester started with two very exciting and full events for me, one being the Cqrellations workshop in Brussels and the other being Transmediale, both of which have contributed to my understanding of issues in the contemporary media landscape. The topics that were discussed were similar in nature, both falling under the badly adopted umbrella term 'big data', though their approach differed from one another. In Brussels, what I found interesting was going deep into the structure of the code and analysing it from a critically social perspective. The emphasis was set on the annotator, whose reasoning is some sort of bridge between subjective and objective classifying. There was an attempt to make the decision process of the annotator more transparent so that there would be space for debate around more sensitive issues which succeeded by recreating the whole environment of annotating. This reliance of the software on human judgement is something that I would also encounter in the development of the thematic project. On the other hand, at Transmediale I became more enticed with the notion of gamification, the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems and increase users' self contributions. It was interesting to understand the self improvement logic behind what pushed the participants and relate this back to some of the topics I previously engaged with, one of which was the combination of info stress and competition in a neoliberal environment. Games encourage competitiveness and create an artificial sense of achievement. A strong critique of gamification is that it shifts the focus from the experience to the reward. A very good example of this are websites such as Duolingo or Codecademy, which constantly praise their users and encourage brief interaction with the subject at hand. Not only is it creating a reward crazed culture, but by participating in games that train your mind or improve your running, you are also generating data for corporations to profit on.

Where I am:

The Kickstarter that we did in the first semester dealt with similar issues of being pressured into what is generally referred to as “attention economy”, which is a concept based on the idea of choice and preferred by the liberal and conservative generations. When attention becomes a commodity, it implies that it is also scarce. In this fictional promo, whose aesthetics is only accidentally similar to that of the Transmediale advertisement, the product being sold is a robot that will drive away any human conversational partner by repeating what they are saying with a delay. Perhaps playing the video will say more about it.

After playing this to a couple of tutors, it was suggested to me to look further into the echo and its psychological significance, which is something I am planning to do in the future, especially after thinking about it in combination which the concept of a data double.

This idea of gamification also reoccured in a group project that I did together with Julie, Manetta and Ruben for Steve's class. In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun's essay, ‘On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge’, she makes a claim that software is a functional analog to ideology. Galloway expands on this and explains further that software has the asset to take shape in various ways, which is why it becomes a simulation of ideology and not a vehicle for it. In trying to understand the ideology that hides behind the graphical user interface, we created a game in which you are automatically assigned to a side depending on what device you are using. There are two groups: the clickers and the swipers. Clicking represents the ideology of precision, of knowing what impulse triggers which button, much like the precision of communication through morse code. It is quick and accurate. Swiping, on the other hand, represents the ideology of mechanized naturalness and seamlessness. Swiping is a much more languid gesture, it is slower and closer to the body's natural movements. The ethos of each team is communicated through the message they receive at the beginning of the game: WE ARE THE CLICKING TEAM We must fight to defend integrity upon everything. Decisions for the community have to find their basis in reason and be supported by facts. Emotions and politics is a dangerous cocktail. We believe that this is our responsability to ensure citizens receive the necessary education to develop skills leading them to autonomy.

as compared to: WE ARE THE SWIPING TEAM We must fight to defend what makes us humans and not machines. We are not binary creatures but potentially heroic individuals.  We are sensualists and intuition guides us. We reject the idea of an objective truth because we're all unique. We are all in a quest for the sublime and we believe it is at our finger tips.

I particularly enjoyed thinking about the interface and what effect it has on someone's behaviour, which led me to questioning the idea of interactivity. There is an element of interaction in GUIs that has more to do with control from one end to the other, rather than a mutually reciprocal communication process, whether it is between user and database or user and user. It is interesting to note what Andy Lippman thought of as ideal interaction: “mutual and simultaneous activity on the part of both significants, usually working toward some goal, but not necessarily.” In his opinion, this would require mutual interruptibility, consisting of limited look ahead, no default and the impression of an infinite database.

Looking back on some of the projects I did, there is also a notion of disrupting the interaction one has with the interface and creating an unresponsive system, or one that misbehaves. By doing this, the projects aim to attract attention to the way our navigation on these platforms is guided by visual cues and hierarchy, elements that belong both to the design and the programming area. Two small examples would be 'disappearing (f)act', which is a bookmarklet that when accessed on wikipedia will erase all links when the mouse hovers over them. Another example is 'tabbing' which will multiply the tabs once closed endlessly, forcing the users to shut him their browsers.

Both of these projects make a reference to the already critically exhausted idea of information economy. At the beginning of the thematic project, I had started reading about open access publishing in academic research. Knowledge production and economy has been one of my main interests, without having the vocabulary to describe it until now. This was a path I found increasingly aligned with the trajectory of my previous research, which has led me to the attempt of formulating a visual representation of the process of digitisation of books and the idea of open access publishing for the thematic project. The overall theory of open access refers to unrestricted online access to peer-reviewed scholarly research. What captured my attention with this was not necessarily the political implications of such a system, but moreso the dichotomy of open and secret. In a pile of research papers, it would be more difficult to find relevant information. As Geert Lovink accurately observes: “A century after Freud, the anxiety shifts from forgetting to finding. We no longer blame ourselves for forgetting names of friends and family, but instead are upset if we fail to find the right file folder or enter incomplete query terms.”

CAPTCHAs are representations of words in such a form that they cannot be read by a computer and need the assistance of human intelligence. The original reCAPTCHAs were taken from fragments of scanned text that couldn't be processed with the help of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. The act of scanning a file and producing a .jpg, .png or .tiff image for compression is in a way equivalent to the act of pressing the shutter on a digital camera: it captures 3D objects indiscriminately and transforms them into data.

By generating my own CAPTCHAs, I am forcefully creating images consisting of the same building blocks of photographs, that are abstract to the computer, but can be read by humans. This is the same reliance that I found interesting in the Brussels workshop between computational and human intelligence. However, while this differentiation between the two types of intelligence is intrinsic to this form of verification, for this project the more relevant aspect of CAPTCHAs is that of sensemaking. Sensemaking relies on people's ability to give meaning to an experience; it is a prevalent term in human-computer interaction, information studies and organizational studies.

The making of the book meant running each line of The Open Society through a script that would distort the writing in a random fashion and add noise to it, then putting all of the .png files in the original order of the text. Reading the book is turned into a slow process of digesting each line and requires a mathematical understanding of the text: normal reading is fluid, it allows you to skip fragments and leaves the necessary space for your mind to fill that in, however, mathematical reading is more exhaustive, it builds itself up with each line. The conversion from image to text happens in the mind of the readers, so in a way it could be said that until they decipher the meaning behind each word, it remains an image. Running the pages of the book through OCR, for example, would prove this realization.

Taken from Geert Lovink's essay “Psychopathology in the age of information overload”, the question the book was trying to answer became:

How do we design in favour of the attentive thought?

For the digital book, I created a website that would display one CAPTCHA at a time and would allow you to move further only by passing these verification tests.