User:Cristinac/Methodology

not final

-Introduction, critique of information

In 'Critique of Information', the social theorist Scott Lash stresses that in the global information order there is a generalized notion of outsourcing, including the outsourcing of the unconscious. We now rely on databases instead of memory just as much as we have replaced the inner dialogue with ourselves with an externalized browse over bite sized decontextualised pieces of media wisdom. Reflexivity is being pushed more and more into the corner of our mental space as we start focusing on the nodes in the information network we are building and not on the space in between. We see this in cultural phenomena such as Kenneth Goldsmith’s university course on wasting time on the Internet, where he instructs his students to fully immerse themselves in a “digital haze”, to float in unarticulated directions and to adopt a constant state of awareness. Acknowledging the fluctuating states that our attention will take can only lead to a better understanding of the formation of habits.

Over the course of the second trimester I've been interested in 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 action, 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: 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.

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

When talking about multimedia in the 1990s, Matthew Fuller refers to the eye as a “unifying and explanatory media in itself”, and seeks out to reveal its authoritative privilege over all other senses. Fuller was right in accusing 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. Communicational 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.

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, you force the user to adopt a mathematical attitude: they have 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, which draws attention to the transfer of access and knowledge. There is a lot to say about CAPTCHAs, it's a rich subject that also makes me think about the labour that is being performed when we are providing the answers. While originally it was a step forward in digitising printed matter and helping the distribution of knowledge, it has now become a ubiquitous form for training the learning algorithms of corporations. The system transforms the reader into a scribe that must provide the correct answer to the Sphinxian algorithm to continue his or her journey. But what does it mean that we are reduced to scribes? It seems like a return to the preprint era, when the copyists would turn oral knowledge into written form, the medium of the voice into the medium of paper, only now we are transforming the medium of the paper into a digital medium.

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 my computer, instead of only reading for it. Since the utopian purpose of the labour that goes into CAPTCHA is being replaced by companies like Google with trading access for personal information about our searching habits (see Nocaptcha), I would see the completion of this project only as creating an interface to facilitate the customized creation of a database of the user's favourite text. Though at the moment my technical skills are not up to the challenge, this is something that I consider doing in the future.

In early communication theory, information was understood as a logarithm of the number of choices present, in which noise was a threat. The role of the observer was to correct the errors of the algorithm, similarly to the situation above. However, we've since learned that observers contribute their own noise to the equation which in turn is not a hindrance to the communication process, but can generate new information. “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.” Umberto Eco, The Open Work

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 and Umberto Eco The Open Work; Calvino Cybernetics and Ghosts]

-Demystification

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 the 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 hidden, which sometimes results in the illusion of objectivity reflected on the particular software or platform. Having a history option on your browser means that you can keep track on your logs, but it also personalizes the browser to the extent that it knows more about you than you would like your closest friends to. Having the option of multiple tabs encourages you to distribute your attention to multiple sources. Similarly, having the option to save bookmarks allows you to create your own encyclopedia of knowledge to refer back to. All these options encourage the users to see the tool as an extension of themselves. The feedback loop that is established through the exchange between software and user forges new modalities of experience.

-Unruly interface, noise, choice architecture

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 suggested but an exaggerated solution.

-Future

In the future, one idea is to make a browser extension that gives you feedback on your performance: if you spend enough time on a website you get positive reinforcement and perhaps points too, which allows (funny expression: “allow”) you to compare your performance with that of your circle of acquaintances. It would be a means of regulating your own attention taken to an extreme. It has a sort of pathetically humorous aspect to it, I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I find that's the case with quite a few of my works.

Quantifying your running, thinking or reading habits and recording your achievements on a platform is a rather strange reward system in which you perform for algorithmic praise. The Foucauldian notion of the care of the self or technology of the self has been present in the collective consciousness for a while, not exclusively in self-help books that promise to teach you how to be successful and productive. Now the same concepts are wrapped in a different skin that provides instant feedback, instant reaction. I’m interested to see how these techniques shape more reflexive processes. [give examples]

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. For the sake of irony, this is something to be considering for future not past projects.

-Conclusion

The initial reason I joined this course was an expansion beyond the discourse of graphic design.