Assignments

Due Next Week: January 28 (The Collective Narrative)

1 – Reading

Galloway, K. & Rabinowitz, S. “Welcome to Electronic Café International,” (1992) in Packer, R., & Jordan, K. (Eds.). Multimedia : from Wagner to Virtual Reality ([Expanded ed.). New York: Norton, 2002

Be prepared to discuss the essay in class and see the WordPress assignment below.

2 – Research Critique I: The Collective Narrative

You will be assigned an artwork to research for a short 250 word hyperessay about the work, the artist, and how it relates specifically to the topic of next week. Incorporate the reading (see above), as relevant, into your research post, discussing how it relates contextually to the work you are critiquing. Use next week’s Lecture Notes in The Collective Artwork page of the Syllabus to prepare your research, where you will find documentation and links about each of the works.

Here are additional instructions for the research critique:

• Create a new post on your blog incorporating relevant hyperlinks, images, video, etc
• Add a featured image
• Apply the “Research” category
• Apply appropriate tags
• Post a comment on at least one other research post prior to the following class

3 – Micro-project II:  The Collective Body

Using Flickr, we will create a “collective body” made up of all of our body parts randomly reassembled and reconfigured into a single composite body:

• Micro-project II in Project Assignments
• If needed, review the Flickr section of Media Integration from the OSS User Manual (scroll down page)

Outline

Hyperlecture Week 2: The Open Source Studio

OSS Workshop

Social Media

We will be incorporating social media extensively into our work this semester. Here are some of the platforms we will be using and how we need to prepare:

• Facebook: I would like everyone to join our Facbook Group: OSS NTU. Everyone click on this link and ask to join the group and I will approve. If you don’t already have a Facebook account, create one now.
• Flickr: We will be participating this semester in the use of Flickr, in order to collectively push images to the OSS Class site from the Open Source Studio NTU Flickr group. I will invite everyone to join.
• Twitter: Twitter is also an important aspect of the course, learning to use this public social media to share events and situations. We will maintain a Flickr feed on the class site as a way of learning to share information via Twitter. If you don’t already have a Twitter account, create one now. Everyone will provide me with their Twitter address.

WordPress

Review last week’s WordPress installation and create for any new students. This week we will go over the following:

• Check avatars still not working
• Using categories and tags, slugs and parent categories and understanding the database function of WordPress Taxonomies as represented in the post aggregator and student site tag clouds. See the category and tag section in Creating a Post in the OSS User Manual
• Installing Widgets in the student site: tag cloud, category list (if needed). See Widgets in the OSS User Manual

Taxonomies

A taxonomy is a naming system that allows us to group things together through specific names or keywords. Taxonomy is in a sense the language we use to speak to the database. It is important to realize that WordPress is a database, that it is storing and archiving our work, and that the real strength of OSS is its ability to aggregate our work and comments. However, unless we participate in the collective use of shared taxonomies, that is the organization of keywords, the database will not be as effective and useful. A useful reference is the WordPress description of Taxonomies.

It is also useful to see how I am using a system of taxonomies on my own blog, Reportage from the Aesthetic Edge. Note that my categories are organized hierarchically using parent categories, which helps to archive writing and media for specific projects and themes.

Note that you can create a category feed of specific posts within a category. This is done by adding a menu item. Let’s do one with the category Micro-Project. This way you can access a list of all your past projects. You will find this very useful for accessing and finding work. We will discuss working with menus next week.

Review Micro-project 1: Video Double

We will review Micro-project 1: Video Double to better understand how we use media to transform ourselves, our work, our artistic identities.

• What does each video reveal about the author/subject?
• Were effects used for the construction of self and identity and “effect” did they achieve?
• How does social media play into our representation of ourselves and our identity, such as through the avatar or profiles? How do you present yourself on Facebook in terms of what you post and what is in your profile?

Discussion of Reading: “Open Source as Culture/Culture as Open Source“, Sida Vaidhyanathan

Some questions concerning open source ideology to consider:

• Why do we think of open source as “utopian,” “free-spirited,” “anarchic,” “risky” or even “impracticable?” What is the fear of open source in an economically-driven society that values and protects proprietary methods?
• What was the impact of Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ decision to “sell” software in 1976, when up until that time it was strictly the domain of hackers and software enthusiasts and hobbyists who wrote software purely for purposes of sharing and trading for free.

Here is a quote to consider by Yochai Benkler, Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School:

“Regulators concerned with fostering innovation may better direct their efforts toward providing the institutional tools that would help thousands of people to collaborate.”

• How might proprietary or “elite” control of technology be limiting or constraining to development and innovation?
• What does the emergence of “peer-production” hardware/software such as the World Wide Web or Wikipedia or Linux tell us about the power of open source ideology? And what is meant by “peer-production?”
• What is “open source journalism” and what are the implications of participating in the global information ecosystem? How is blogging a form of open source journalism?

“Creativity as a social process is the common denominator… the act of creation is a social act… a node in a network of relations.” – Vladimir Hafstein, associate professor of folkloristics and ethnology at the University of Iceland

• How do the concepts and ideologies of open source thinking impact and shape our study and creation of art?
• How is OSS, based on open source thinking, a platform for peer production that will help catalyze our learning process, both collectively and individually? We will continue to discuss this.

Open Source Live Performance

Dialtones: A Telesymphony, by Golan Levin

Dialtones (A Telesymphony) (2001-2002: Golan Levin, Gregory Shakar, Scott Gibbons, Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Gruber, Erich Semlak, Gunther Schmidl, Joerg Lehner, and Jonathan Feinberg) is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones. Before the concert, participants register their mobile phone numbers at a series of web terminals; in exchange, new ringtone melodies are automatically transmitted to their phones, and their seating assignment tickets are generated. During the concert, the audience’s phones are dialed up by live performers, using custom software which permits as many as 60 phones to ring simultaneously. Because the exact location and tone of each participant’s mobile phone is known in advance, the Dialtones concert is able to present a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures, such as waves of polyphony which cascade across the audience. Dialtones was presented at the Ars Electronica Festival in September 2001, and at the Swiss National Exposition in May and June of 2002.

Why is this work open source? How does it involve collaboration? How is it a form of peer-to-peer interaction and creativity?

We will discuss the collaborative, open nature of the project, in which audience members are invited to participate through their cell phones. Note the staging of the piece: there is a large mirror above the stage so that the audience sees themselves during the performance. Why is this? How does this contribute to the collaborative nature of the work?

This video documentary of the project will reveal the Golan Levin’s concept of create a symphony of dialtones:

OSS Concepts of Collective Research

The Collective Body micro-project from Media & Performance, documented in the OSS Flickr group.

Much of the work we are doing this semester is of a collaborative nature, culminating in the performance with Annie Abrahams via Adobe Connect. It is important to understand how this course and the Open Source Studio project is based on open source ways of thinking and working together.

Open source thinking is critical to the OSS networked practice of art, research, and pedagogy. For many, “open source” is a challenge to proprietary forms of thinking, an activist position, situating creativity and innovation ahead of exclusivity. Open source depends on the ideology of the “common good,” that we are in it together, that we are not out solely for our own individual gain. Collaborative thinking is fundamental to a productive social environment, and in the context of arts education, it underscores the interdisciplinary nature of the media culture we participate in today. With OSS, the open source approach is a commitment to using online technologies to publish in new forms, to develop modes of artistic creation inconceivable without the Internet, and the notion that an educational community can only benefit when the collective process is open and transparent.

No one works in a vacuum: the reciprocal nature of the artistic process, of collective research and collaborative creative activity is essential to OSS. Methods of online writing have been developed to incorporate essential techniques of hyperlinking and media archiving to support forms of online documentation that can be accessed via the network. When the artistic process is approached in this way, each participant has more exposure to the work of others, a dynamic that is fundamental in the studio process. Regularly published updates of project work keep the artist in a fluid mode of writing, creating, and exchanging ideas. Each participant provides a window into their process, which tends to inform and activate the work of others. Rather than the studio being a solitary environment for private reflection, the virtual studios of OSS support forms of peer-to-peer practices that create a more transparent and open space for exchange, dialogue, and critique.

Preparation for next week’s Collective Body Micro-Project

Now that everyone has a Flickr account, we will have a practice session in order to activate your account to get pushed to the Flickr feed on the Media & Performance class site. This generally takes a few days so we will have this session now, so that when you do the project on your own later in the week, your photos will appear on the class site.

• Shoot six photos with Photo Booth following the instructions in Micro-Project II: The Collective Body
• Access your Flickr account and upload to Flickr using the “Upload” button on the main menu
• Click on “Groups” and Open Source Studio NTU
• Click on “Add Photo”
• Choose the six photos and click on “Add to Group”
• Click on “Photos” to see your photos appear on the Flickr group feed
• Now go to the home page of the Media & Performance site to see if it appears on the Flickr feed. It may take a few days for this to work.
• Do the project again on your own during the week. By next week’s class all the photos should appear on the class Flickr Feed.

Review additional assignments for next week

• Assign artworks to each student
• Review the concept of the research critique
• Review the use of the syllabus to prepare research by reading next week’s lecture notes.