Public/Private Literacies, Interactive Granular Art, and Multi-Subject Experiences

Perth.
The last day of PerthDAC has started now. Jill Walker Rettberg compares the developments around the Web with phenomena around the introduction of the printing press. We're now heading out of the parenthesis of the print age, and this requires the development of new network literacies (enabling users to create, share, and navigate social media) beyond the read and write literacies of the print age. Print and its literacies had introduced a private/public divide where the private self is distinct and separate from what takes place in the mediated public sphere; in the network age, private and public collapse into one another as the self is connected to the network. With the rise of print literacy, reading created a solitary and private relationship between the reader and their book, as Roger Chartier has put it; this is a privatisation of reading, and the library becomes a place from which the world can be seen but where the reader remains invisible. This is a unidirectional relationship, though - as Plato put it, if you ask a written text a question, it will not respond; and similarly, writing is a solipsistic engagement, as Walter Ong has said. But what about blogging, then - is it social or solitary? William Gibson described blogging as boiling water without a lid - a less focussed, dissipating activity -, but is this also true for those who are natives of the blogosphere?

What about the fate of the public sphere in a networked world, then? Jill references Jürgen Habermas's speech at ICA last year, which is sharply critical of the idea of a networked public sphere (and notes my post commenting on Habermas's misunderstanding of the network). Habermas sees us as overdosing on the vitality of networked information, and thereby drowning in a sea of information. In this environment, even reading is no longer anonymous, and lurking is becoming impossible (Google's Web History service, for example, now allows users to track their use of the Web - and share that information with Google, of course). Passivity may have been the logic of earlier media technologies, as Richard Sennett has said, but today, the text reads the reader (see e.g. Amazon), and writing is not unresponsive as it was in Plato's day. This changes the relationship between readers and texts, and between readers and readers; this is a time of transition, and where print created the lurker, the Web allows us to delurk, and easily.

Next up is Karl Willis, whose interest is in participatory art that allows users to be actively creative (and he shows Light Tracer, one of his own works, as an example). Such work relies on interactive granularity - the ability for users to master relatively small building blocks which can be utilised to compose artworks interactively -, and of course it ties into a wider discourse of participatory culture and Web 2.0. (See for example the Flash game Line Rider and the set of YouTube clips it has spawned, or Karl's Sony Computer Science Labs project Twelve Pixels.)

What exists here is an interactive specification loop - moving beyond instruments and platforms to adaptive computational and structurally adaptive frameworks which also enable the system to act autonomously to some extent. Sonasphere is a further example for such projects - a sound effects software which introduces some sound modification elements whose operation is not immediately clear to the user and which may not be able to be controlled effectively. In such cases, is it possible to predict all ways in which interaction will take place? Is it possible to predict all outcomes which will result from interaction? Can the output of the system be evaluated as a positive and/or negative outcome (and by what standards)? We are no longer naive in dealing with our technological interfaces, and expect them to adopt more agency in the interactive process. Do such systems amplify our own creativity?

Finally, we're on to Julianne Chatelain, who has worked in the hypertext field since 1979. Her focus here is on multi-subject experiences, that is, experiences which are both collective and collaborative (including collaborations with machines and other elements). They encompass both work and play, both games and art, and explore commonalities across and amongst them; examples include the Internet Movie Database, Burning Man, flashmobbing, World of Warcraft, and many others. Can a single person alone encountering an artwork or game have a multi-subject experience, then? Such interactions may count as asynchronous interactions with the artist, but then all experiences may potentially be included; at the same time, all humans are (functionally) alone with their perceptions, and the term MSE becomes similarly meaningless.

What is common to all MSEs is that they have a 'party phase' and an 'organisational phase' (a fun phase and a not-so-fun phase); Julianne now runs through the history of Burning Man to exemplify this development. (Burning Man has been gradually commercialised and copyrighted in recent years, according to some participants.) Parties are also related to gift-giving (and a gift economy), and this, then, also indicates a point where fun dissipates as the economic framework shifts from gift to monetary economic structures. The party phase, then, is characterised by appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration which pays little attention to conventions of intellectual property; things go bad (the party is over) once people begin to hoard their intellectual property ownership. What is necessary, then, is to explore the fertile middle ground where people control some rights and gain meaningful benefits from such control, but still contribute to a healthy public domain. It is necessary to relinquish what are now meaningless controls on culture that impoverish the public domain. This relates to a larger project which Julianne calls "Fun of the Future"

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