creativity/machine

Hurrah - the Counter-Heroics and Counter-Professionalism in Cultural Studies Special Issue of Continuum, which grew out of the ‘Fields of Uncool’ panel at the CSAA conference way back in 2004, is now out!

Thanks so much to Mel, Kris, Jane and Will for one of the most energising and productive collaborations I’ve been involved with so far. More at Mel’s blog.

This couldn’t have come at a better time. As I continue ‘writing up’, which for a good part of each day feels like dragging a pig through mud, while simultaneously herding cats and carrying a heavy basket into which I have put all the eggs, it’s good to see that ‘forthcoming’ things turn into real ones eventually.

Some colleagues of mine have just started a new interdisciplinary email discussion list that should be of interest to anyone working on cities/urban spaces:

multipliCity — Conversations on cities

Multiplicity is an online discussion forum for all matters urban. As paradigmatic of the modern and postmodern experience, the city remains defiantly at the epicentre of a conflated, de-centred multitude of discourses and disciplines.

The aim of multiplicity is to generate discussion and foster ideas that can illuminate theoretical and creative approaches to the city.

Multiplicity, as its title suggests, celebrates the diversity and eclecticism that are irrevocably associated with actual cities as well as city discourses. A broad range of informed discussion topics, conversations and perspectives are sought.

Please join us!

I love Wired, it is just so blatant:

For the last decade or so, companies have been looking overseas, to India or China, for cheap labor. But now it doesn’t matter where the laborers are – they might be down the block, they might be in Indonesia – as long as they are connected to the network.

Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.

In the most cynical of worlds, this is the payoff of the ‘creative commons’. Not cultural democracy, not universal cultural enfranchisement, but this. Well, what did I expect, I guess.

Geoffrey Batchen defines vernacular photography like this:

The term ‘vernacular’ literally means the ordinary and ubiquitous but it also refers to qualities specific to particular regions or cultures. Its attachment to the word ‘photography’ allows historians like myself to argue for the need to devise a way of representing photography’s history that can incorporate all its many manifestations and functions. A vernacular history of photography will have to be able to deal with the kind of hybrid objects I describe above, but also with, for example, photographies from outside Europe and the U.S. It may mean having to adopt non-traditional voices and narrative structures. It will certainly mean abandoning art history’s evaluation system (based on masterpieces and masters, originality and innovation, and so on). In short, the term ‘vernacular photography’ is intended as a provocation and a challenge.

There’s also this post on the subject from juniorbonner.

A lot of the time the term ‘vernacular photography’ also seems to be synonymous with ‘found‘ photographs - particularly old, faded, crumpled photographs found lost or abandoned in a shoebox at a garage sale - someone else’s memories, with their technical and aesthetic ‘flaws’ left bare, their subjects left unidentified, and their narratives subject to the inventions of imaginative or curious viewers.

I sometimes talk about a tension between ‘usability and hackability‘, and somewhat pessimistically about how, most of the time, technology (in the broadest, most social sense of the word) teaches us what we should do with it, and how we should do those things. I need to get more across current thinking in interaction design/critical design theory though. This patient, careful post by Dan Hill, a transcript of an interview where he outlines his contribution to a forthcoming book on the subject, is a big help:

The discourse around hackability is often littered with “hooks, sockets, plugs, handles” and so on. With adaptive design, drawing from the language of architecture more than code, we have a more graceful, refined vocabulary of “enabling change in fast layers building on stability in slow layers”, “designing space to evolve”, “time being the best designer” and so on. This suggests that there could be a distinction; that adaptive design is perhaps the process designed to enable careful articulation and evolution, as opposed to hackability’s more open-ended nature.

However, they still draw from the same basic concepts: of design being an ongoing social process between designer and user; of products evolving over time; of enabling the system to learn across an architecture of loosely-coupled layers; of not over-designing.

[…]

My favourite sentence:
In adaptive design, designers must enable the experience/object to ‘learn’, and users to be able to ‘teach’ the experience/object.

Current thesis word count: 27,117.

This is from the preliminary stages of a little textual analysis experiment I’m thinking about designing. It’s to do with the way that ‘architectures of information’ invite particular forms of subjecthood, particular constellations of values, and particular kinds of participation, and those forms of participation in turn work to shape the architecture in their own image.

See also race, age, work, identity, ethnic and gender.

There are obvious limitations to which of these terms ‘make sense’ as flickr tags in the first place, and in what ways, but still, interesting results so far. ‘Identity’ and ‘work’ to my mind are the most interesting - and the least silly in terms of what we might reasonably expect users to tag their photos with.

And more deterministically, Truscello says: “architecture, whether it refers to buildings or databases, constructs subject positions through the spatialization of power.”

Anyway, what other forms of ‘clustery goodness’ should I try?

[update]: speaking of the construction of subject positions and the spatialization of power and GoogleZon/Silicon Valley values (and the vanity of following your own incoming search strings): earlier today this Google search string spat this post out as the top-most result. My apologies to the searcher, who stayed for precisely 0 seconds.

I captured this ‘event’ in my morning commute for Glen (well, and a little bit for me re: gender and the mastery of technologies).

Current thesis word count: 26,733 (URGH).

I wrote something like 7,000 words this week. The next step is to tidy up, remove the most embarrassing notes-to-self, and hand it over to the supervisors to get some feedback and fuel up for the next leg of the journey. I’d prefer to wait until it’s finished before anyone is allowed to see any of it, but that isn’t really the way it works.

So in that spirit, here is my last sentence of the day:

If cultural agency is measured by access to the space to self-mediate, create and engage, then it is in plentiful supply in the imagined futures of contemporary commercial democracies. Web 2.0 developers need their users to be co-creators, active participants, and even ‘good citizens’.

Current thesis word count: 26,171

Ross Mayfield has made a nice graph of a continuum of participation in social software and online communities:

I use something similar in my PhD, talking more specifically about ‘creative’ and ‘network’ literacies. But I was struck by the way that the continuum moves from ‘passive’ consumption through to mastery and control. Something that I’ve struggled with all along in my research is theorising the pay-off of increased literacy and cultural participation - that is, participation in what? and what for?

So, I was thinking, what if the pay-off was something other than (or in addition to) the growth of profit for social software developers, or even ‘innovation’ and ‘knowledge creation’? What if I started again and thought about how cultural participation through consumer-created media might actually have positive implications for cultural citizenship? Would the graph look different? So I made this to try and think it through:

Current thesis word count: 25,355

In this videoblog remix, I think Trine begs to differ. Lovely stuff.

I’ve been thinking as well that perhaps ‘the everyday’ is the currency of videoblogging in a way that is more muted for (personal) text-based blogging. Not that everydayness is more or less present, but that it is more important in creating whatever affective power the genre has. I’m speculating very tentatively here, but maybe it has something to do with the illusion of more immediate self-mediated representation - not ‘truth’, exactly; maybe it’s about how mundane details (washing up in the background, dogs barking in the distance, whatever) creep in without being written in. It’s certainly something to do with multimodality. I wonder if Trine, or anyone else, has any thoughts on that?

I haven’t started work for the day yet, so no word count