Manikin reveals its internal structure through the user interaction. Manikin takes the form of a multi-user game that is set in a fictional city surrounded by a dome. In the city, players have the ability to interact with and manipulate the city’s inhabitants in two different modes, vector mode or developer mode. Each mode gives players a different perspective of the game and provides them with different options for interacting with the citizens of the city. The game play is organized around the same principles and rules that loosely define object-oriented programming. While experimenting with different strategies, players discover these rules and manipulate them in ways that allow shifts from centralized to decentralized systems. Players receive feedback in the form of game response.

Developer View

Vector View

Hardware Setup

Currently I’m doing a summer workshop with several different groups of high school students on new media literacy- specifically I’m spending a great deal of time having them analyze a variety of online tools and platforms that they personally rely on. This process has brought to my attention some specifics regarding the issue of online youth empowerment.

Within the groups I’m working with at the moment, an interesting dichotomy has emerged between the platforms they accept and those they reject. For the platforms or tools that they reject, they either exhibit extreme skepticism of their utility and a fear of privacy issues. These hesitations do not come from the direct experience with the platforms themselves, but rather through a general sense of wider privacy debates taking place in the media, and a youth cultural stigma against online interaction.

For the platforms that they do choose to accept, they tend to have a sense of the practical utility. They however have a diminished, if not completely non-existent sense of the larger functionality of the platform, particularly on issues of automated personalization and data ownership.

I’m continuing my work with these students and additional groups throughout the summer and into the fall. Currently they are working on analytical projects, but gradually we will be moving in to more practical projects based work. My goal through these workshops is to continue evaluating this dichotomy of acceptance and rejection, and also conduct research to address a number of questions that have emerged.

First, what criteria determine which platforms are accepted and which are rejected? For example, students are often dependent on facebook but reject twitter completely. There are clearly some obvious reasons for this, but interestingly, I’ve found so far that their largest criticism of Twitter is that it is a network for “stalkers”, however they don’t apply this same criticism to facebook, which shares many similar features. Often students seem to feel more comfortable using networks in which the parameters for use are clearly and strictly defined. Platforms with a more open-ended approach are generally disregarded. This pattern coincides with a greater educational trend that my colleagues and I have been encountering, where students are increasingly uncomfortable receiving assignments that do not have explicitly defined objectives and guidelines.

Second, both as educators and media makers, how do we foster a more sophisticated understanding of online functionality in youth users who both rely heavily on these systems, but are unable to leverage them in ways that maximize their personal, professional and social footing?

How do we allow them to simultaneously be aware of some of the potential risks and disadvantages of these platforms, while still enabling them to take advantage of the opportunities and benefits they offer?  Overall, how do we simultaneously create technical platforms and educational systems that create a sense of personal agency?

The look of the animation is starting to come together. Video data has been gathered, key frames are almost complete Now the real work begins.

and a test video for the actual compositing:

Exploring Tests from jennifer jacobs on Vimeo.

Statistical data indicate that in terms of numbers, American cities are in decline. Since 1950, the majority of metropolitan population growth, (around 90 percent) , occurred in the suburbs. Roughly two out of three Americans lived in the sprawl extending outward from cities (via the Washington Post). Many individuals who inhabit cities view this transition as a sign of a larger cultural deterioration.

taken from my plane seat AFTER the captain had asked us to switch off all of our electronic devices

­

The cultural merits or limitations of suburban life aside, it is often asserted that one of the defining features of urban life is the regular potential for unpredictable and unintended interactions with a wide variety of strangers in a diverse set of environments. Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities discusses this in her theory of the “ballet of the sidewalk. She states:

[Sidewalks] bring people who do not know each other together in an intimate private social fashion and in most cases do not care to now each other in that fashion…yet if interesting, useful and significant contacts among the people of cities are confined to acquaintanceships suitable for private life, the city becomes stultified. Cities are full of people with whom a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable, but you do not want them in your hair- and they do not want you in theirs either.

The probabilistic contact that the sidewalk and other public spaces provide allows for a form of interaction that is by in large specific to centers of high urban density. Because of the frequency with which people in these environments encounter strangers, the majority of interactions are limited to temporary occurrences without lasting effect. Despite this, the potential for significant interactions that result in creative output for the individuals involved is much higher because of the rate of interaction itself. As Jacobs elaborates, the rate of meaningful interactions with a creative outcome is high enough in a city like New York, that it creates the perception of New York itself as a catalyst for creative processes and cultural development. If a creative outcome is a goal in spite of the apparent decline of urban environments like New York, the question becomes, what new spaces, virtual or physical, foster creative, spontaneous interactions?

people on a subway platform

I propose that online,networked space has the saturation density and technical architecture necessary to facilitate a form of diverse, public interaction comparable to that found in a highly populated urban area. The current standard of online identity as anonymous increases the average individual’s willingness to engage in a communication framework with other people who are outside of their immediate community. In fact, some sites like 4chan and Chatroulette are predicated on this very idea. Despite the fact that these online spaces bring with them the cultural baggage of the Internet itself, they regularly facilitate developments that extend beyond the context of the sites they were generated in, and they defy the conventions of those sites in the process. Image macros developed on 4chan message boards have evolved into larger cultural Internet trends that reach astronomical distribution rates among online users, and are even referenced occasionally in offline culture. Whereas these occurrences are the exception rather than the norm, their persistent occurrence is a testament to the creative potential of certain forms of online networks in which spontaneous engagements take place.

The process through which these connections are made, discovered and reflected is the result of a form of semi-objective exploration. Research being done about communities like twitter, facebook and wikipedia demonstrate the emergence of a demographic of users who browse through these communities in a non-patterned, non-hierarchical fashion. Their objective is exploratory and abstract, and while there are connections between the media they view and individuals they associate with, the path they follow to access them is in many respects the digital equivalent of wandering. In her 2009 talk on social media use, media researcher Danah Boyd likens the exploration of the non-objective online user to Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur (link), an individual who walks the city to understand it. These online users play a similar role as people who come to understand the space they inhabit by progressing through it without a determined purpose. Similarly, like the flâneur, their presence helps to shape the larger group behavior of the spaces they inhabit.

hooray for flow charts! (click for enlarged version)

A project is currently in the works to study the parallels in public interaction between physical urban space and online network space. I intend to examine how the role of the individual unfolds in both of these situations. I specifically want to demonstrate any contrasts between risk and depth of connection, chaos and control mechanisms, security and surveillance, and levels of engagement. I will explore contrasts using time-based work created with a combination of animation (both traditional and generative) and video. The video will be taken of real physical urban environments and serve as the backdrop for an animation, which will define the individuals who engage in various forms of interaction.

The comparison between these two spaces will be achieved by viewing one in the visual language and mechanics of the other. In this case, the elements of the urban street network will be filtered through the structure of an online network. The differences between the way we actually experience these spaces and how they are conceived in the piece will be emphasized through massive and non-linear jumps in context- a practice that is naturally facilitated through the hyper-structure of the web, but realistically inconceivable in a physical environment where rules of linearity and travel time are explicit. The city will be treated as a database, and its elements will be organized in an indexed structure. The underlying narrative of the piece is of an uncertain search- a process of looking for something that the searcher has yet to define. The piece will trace the path of an individual as she travels through a fictional city on this search, documenting her encounters along the way. The points of interest along the journey and the interactions she has with other people will be familiar to an urban audience, but the way in which these points are referenced, displayed and changed will be in accordance with database and hyper-media architecture rather than the rules of physical space. Non-linear access, user variability, aggregation, and duplication will influence how the experiences of the individual are displayed.

stay tuned- Next week: Storyboards?!?

Last week I completed my first experience with true anonymous public art. Today, I returned for the first time to the place of the act and found my works had been vandalized and destroyed. This was the end result I fully anticipated when I began this project, however despite that, I was left with feelings of antipathy. I’m not sure exactly who or what these feelings were directed at, however I was surprised to find that they existed all the same. Thinking more on the issue raised a great deal of personal questions for me about the concept of true public art and where it stands in context to the individual.

As I recently learned, the idea of art as an elevated form of creation is a relatively new idea. It makes sense that in our highly individualized culture in America, this mode of thinking would be reflected by an idolization and elevation of the figure of “the artist”. Inevitably we focus on the creator to contextualize their creations rather than holding the works in the sphere of public response and effect. It is not what is done but rather, who has done it. This may be natural within a conventional art setting, but I find it interesting that it has also become a large part of the discussion of non-conventional street art and other forms of public work. Works that are created with a degree of anonymity are now, through the landscape of mass media instantly attributed to an individual or if the individual is not directly known, speculated upon. This identification of authorship can be the work of the audience or the artist, it often varies, however the end result is the same. We hold the meaning of the pieces in terms of the nature of the character of the artist and their previous works. Perhaps this process is inevitable, but it does have the ability to color our opinion on what is perceived as valid and what is not. If a stencil can be attributed to an artist with a reputation like Banksy, it instantaneously holds more credit in someone’s mind. This credit is not necessarily irrelevant, however it is somewhat ironic given that an artist like Banksy initially created work in an undistinguished nameless process that was as essential to his ends as the completed pieces themselves.

These ideas, taken in terms of my own art have left me uncertain of my motivations. I have always created art as a way of personal reflection, both literally and mentally. But now, I am beginning to wonder how much of my motivation has been completely rooted in the desire to promote my individual quality over the motivation to produce actual work.  I think that some level of introspection is always necessary when producing art. The question is, when, if ever does that introspection transform itself into something independent of the creator. Can the work and the artist ever be fully separated or is that impossible considering the nature of our society?