Introducing: A Wiki Debut

In order to gain some more insight in the inner workings of Wikipedia, I’ve created a new entry about the book Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay. A highly recommended history book about some of the worlds most amazing circus and sideshow entertainers and… Well, just read the entry. Let’s see how long it lasts before the tireless falcons of Wikipedia swoop down on my entry. Keep an eye on this post for updates!

Edit1: Hmm, received a “Proposed for Deletion” notification straight away. Apparently, some wiki bot with a distinct lack of insight into what constitutes entertainment value and cultural heritage labelled this book as “lacking notability.” Naturally, I removed the label from my entry and sent a message back extolling the virtues of this book. Does it pay to argue with a bot? Who knows. Lets hope its human overlords prove receptive.

Edit2: I now seem to have the attention of Fæ, a mighty botsmaster and somewhat of a cruel mistress. Fæ added the following:

"Searching Google News, Google Books and generally there appears to be little chance that the criteria for notability will be addressed in the near future."

My entry is now listed as AfD: Articles for Deletion. This is going well!

Edit3: I've caught the attention of another wiki admin called Racklever. Unfortunately, my article is now listed as an orphan. This makes me sad. It seems my entry will have to live out the last days of its short life in isolation, clinging desperately to that one thread that is its link to the author's page.

Also, more importantly, I just discovered this discussion page. There seems to be some discussion going on amongst the guardians of Wikipedia. Apparently Google Books does give some good hits and the book was named a notable book of the year. My entry may yet live!

Final Edit: My entry is saved! Deliberation amongst the Wikipedia admins has yielded enough support to maintain the page. I've added some more details and references and proudly removed the "Articles for Deletion" tag. Unfortunately, Wikipedia seems to be having some server issues so I can't save my update. I'll keep trying, though.

It's interesting to gain some insight into the inner workings of Wikipedia like this. My first reaction to this entire deletion discussion led me to think that all the admins were a bunch of hard liners who enjoy exercising their power over the lowly newbies. Also, claiming that a book is not notable enough because you can't find much information on it using Google seems short sighted and a nice starting point for an entire discussion on what constitutes notability and how to measure the relevance of a work. It's also a sure fire way to ensure the book remains under represented on the Web. A classic Catch-22. Obviously this book isn't Shakespeare, but is it fair to expect a heavy Web presence of a book that was published before the Web existed as viable platform?

All in all, I'm happy with how things turned out. I gained some insight into the activities of a wiki admin and was pleasantly surprised by the discussion that took place. To be fair, I knew this book was fairly obscure and that was exactly why I thought it deserved its own entry. Knowledge of its existence should be spread. For my next entry I'll be taking suggestions. Anybody know any other obscure books about peculiar topics that might trigger some admins?

Don’t Feed the Trolls

Back in 2006 when Ze Frank was still running The Show, he asked his viewers to help him find the creator of this funny audio clip that had been floating round on the Web. Frank’s community, his Sportsracers as he likes to call them, had been playing around with the song for months already and had produced many remixes, videos and album covers based on the original clip. Frank’s plan was to present the mysterious singer known only as Ray with their finished works. But how do you find someone if all you know is a first name and the sound of their voice? Apparently, it’s not that hard. Frank’s community managed to find and identify Ray within two days, which, Frank admits, is kind of creepy. In this case, Frank’s mobilization of his community was based on good intentions and fun was had by all, including Ray. But what happens if things turn a little more serious?

With this in mind, I’d like to discuss the 4chan community. The 4chan website is a collection of image boards that is as famous as it is infamous. The site houses boards on a variety of topics including the notorious Random board, also known as /b/. The boards are well known for their particular brand of humor and are the source of many of the Web’s memes. Though memes can be fun by themselves - the famous lolcats or rickrolling, for example - the 4chan community overall is often seen as abusive and at the same time very tight knit. One very peculiar aspect of the boards is that they allow anonymous posting. No user names are required, which leads to long meandering threads populated by apparently only one slightly unhinged poster known as Anonymous. As you can imagine, the anonymity is where a lot of the abuse comes from.

Though 4chan is the home of all things NSFW and the natural habitat of the troll, elements of the community sometimes band together in order to crusade against perceived injustices. For example, the /b/rothers of the Random board recently lashed out against the perpetrator of a videotaped piece of animal cruelty. They almost instantly found out everything they could about the woman in the video - including her address, phone number, work place and Facebook profile - and proceeded to bombard her with threats and insults, which eventually led to the local police placing the woman under their protection. All it took to unleash all of this was a single video of a cat. As whimsical as it may sound, /b/ loves cats (and even deifies them). Another recent example is the DDoS attacks on the MPAA website instigated by the anonymous masses of 4chan in response to anti-piracy measures undertaken by the organization. The most well known example of 4chan-crusading is probably the case of Anonymous vs. Scientology, also known as Project Chanology. This crusade kicked off with a video message to the Church of Scientology after they had taken steps to remove from the Web a leaked, non-public propaganda video featuring Tom Cruise. What is fascinating about Project Chanology is that it was not just a Web phenomenon; it also manifested itself in the physical world in the form of world wide protests outside of Scientology offices and as pranks with an attitude typical of the 4chan troll.

The 4chan community as whole and the regulars on /b/ in particular seem to fit the profile of the insular community with its own peculiar customs as described by Sunstein quite nicely (Sunstein, 2001). Also, the examples of 4chan vigilantism mentioned earlier seem to match with Sunstein’s theories on group polarization on the Web. I can’t back up the following claim, but the 4chan community seems to be highly integrated into the fabric of the Web. Even though Barabási describes the fragmentation of the Web’s communities into continents and islands as an inevitability of its directed link nature (Barabási, 2002), the highly diverse backgrounds of the 4chan members and their general Web savvy seemingly allow them to get their tendrils into all of the Web’s divided continents. Nothing seems to escape their watchful eyes. Though Web enabled social activism can be considered a good thing, the particular brand of activism served by 4chan’s members seems to unpredictable, erratic and in some cases downright harmful.

4chan’s ad hoc distributed approach to retribution ties in nicely to Haggerty & Ericson’s concept of the surveillant assemblage (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000). According to Haggerty & Ericson, surveillance is no longer the domain of the panopticon guard once described by Foucault, but is now distributed throughout society. Not only is everyone observing everyone else, but it also allows individuals to band together and focus their gaze on the once privileged institutions. The difficulty with 4chan however is that it is next to impossible to predict what will draw their wrath, as well as how extreme their reaction is going to be. The vigilante-detective antics of 4chan therefore make an excellent case study on online activism as well as why it is important to keep track of what traces of yourself you leave behind on the Web. Though the actions of the Anonymous legion are of course extreme, they do illustrate that any and all traces you leave behind can be used to either target you directly or an organization you are affiliated with. With the tendency of 4chan’s crusades to spill over into the physical world, they are also a reminder of how the Web is not an isolated dimension separate from our own. In this case a particular piece of Web wisdom seems appropriate: Don’t feed the trolls. I know it can be difficult to not have a Web presence nowadays, but that doesn’t mean you have to make it easy for the trolls.


Sources:
Barabási, Albert-László. 2002. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 123-142; 161-178.

Haggerty, Kevin and Richard Ericson. ‘The Surveillant Assemblage.’ British Journal of Sociology, 51(4), 2000: p. 605-622.

Sunstein, Cass. 2001. Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 51-88.

The Good, the Bad & the Downright Crazy

A Collection of Many Problems by Garnet Hertz - A review.

Mail-by-rocket, cat pianos, astrolabes, Inca quipu knots and musical fingers. Seems like a fairly random collection of things, doesn’t it? They do have one thing in common, though. They’re all dead forms of media; either because they’re downright silly or impractical - like the mail-by-rocket and cat pianos - or they’ve outlived their time and usefulness - like the astrolabe and the quipu knots. All these objects and more can be found in a wonderful little book called A Collection of Many Problems.

Meticulously collected and assembled by Garnet Hertz, A Collection of Many Problems contains a staggering variety of media. Presented without words or commentary, the reader can leisurely browse through one form of media after the other. For those well versed in the history of media, it’ll provide a well crafted, compact overview of media throughout the ages and will possibly contain some old favorites. For those less involved with media and its developments, the book can provide a fascinating eyeopener into mankind’s almost primeval need for representation and its struggle with how to get a message across. At the very least it should illustrate to the reader that ‘the media’ didn’t start with the invention of the newspaper, cinema, radio, and television.



Garnet Hertz, the curator of this catalogue, is a California based scholar and artist who is affiliated with a wide number of research and teaching institutes, as well as a contributor to festivals such as DEAF and SIGGRAPH. A Collection of Many Problems was featured in an exhibition titled “In Memory of the Dead Media Handbook” in Milan, Italy in October 2009. The title of this exhibition refers to Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project and its call for a Dead Media Handbook. The goal of Sterling’s project was to chronicle the history of media with a particular focus on long forgotten and obsolete technologies. The project ran as a mailing list and managed to collect over 600 notes in total. In his Dead Media Manifesto, Sterling proposed that this collection take the form of a Dead Media Handbook. According to Sterling, there existed a clear need for:

"...a book about the failures of media, the collapses of media, the supercessions of media, the strangulations of media, a book detailing all the freakish and hideous media mistakes that we should know enough now not to repeat, a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn't make it, martyred media, dead media."

A Collection of Many Problems is Hertz’s attempt to address this need. The end result is an accessible, bite sized book and a strong attempt at media archaeology at that. In a time where media are developing and evolving at an increasing pace, it seems all the more relevant to keep an eye on the past, either to be inspired or just to make sure the same mistakes aren’t repeated. Even though the book provides little detail on any of the featured media, it does manage to illustrate the highly relative nature of the term ‘new media’. What does it mean to be new? If anything, it demonstrates that there have always been new media and that more will undoubtedly follow long after our current ‘new media’ have faded away and become old, dead media themselves. To me the book is a lovely collection that allows me to wander throughout the ages and be amazed at the wonderfully creative solutions - failed or otherwise - mankind has developed in order to cope with its need for representation. It reminds me of the originally Renaissance era phenomenon of the cabinet of curiosities or Wunderkammer. Rooms where well-to-do individuals would collect and display curious objects from all corners of the world that seemed to defy classification. If the idea of a media Wunderkammer appeals to you, you should definitely pick up a copy of A Collection of Many Problems. I doubt you’ll find a collection as accessible as this one anywhere else.



Full details:
A Collection of Many Problems
by Garnet Hertz, 2009
Available for sale here.

Eskil Steenberg's Labour of Love

In a media landscape dominated by online collaboration, DIY content and crowdsourcing, it may seem like the notion of the Renaissance artist-savant really does belong to an age long since passed. The idea that an artist must have a keen grasp of mathematical perspective, optics, geometry and anatomy can sometimes seem distant on a Web ruled by lolcats. What I would like to do is remind you of what a single individual can accomplish with enough skill, determination and the right tools. I would like to talk to you about Love.

 

Love is an online multiplayer game conceived, designed and built by Eskil Steenberg. The core concept of the game is to cooperatively build and maintain a settlement while gathering resources and defending against AI controlled settlements. Even though the gameplay warrants a proper discussion all of its own, I would like to focus on the amazing visual presentation of this game and the technology that lies at its base.



The image above is what the game actually looks like. Steenberg has managed to create a painterly visual style that leans heavily towards Impressionism. The official screenshot gallery is filled with dreamlike images that are quite literally out of this world. Seeing this game in motion is a whole other experience. I highly recommend you watch Steenberg’s demo video and see for yourself how wonderfully immersive and otherworldly Love can be.

Love isn’t just an artistic triumph, though. Technologically speaking it’s an amazing achievement as well. Steenberg has managed to create this game all by himself using an array of incredibly smart self designed tools. The technology relies heavily on procedural generation and adaptive AI routines. Not only does this provide a unique world filled with responsive and adaptable AI’s, it also elegantly circumvents Steenberg’s biggest handicap: he is only one man. Creating a multiplayer game (aimed at around 200 players per server) is a massive undertaking. World building, modelling, texturing and scripting usually consume large quantities of development time. Steenberg manages to avoid these hurdles by making the software do all the hard work. For more details on this I suggest watching the tools demo (the Verse application is particularly impressive).



To me Eskil Steenberg is a shining example of the artist-savant. The man possesses technical skill and artistic vision and manages to combine the two in a beautiful whole. Could one go so far as to say that Steenberg is an auteur in the grand sense of the Auteur Theory? Without a doubt, Love is the product of a man with a singular vision who purposefully twists conventions of style and technology. I don’t recall ever seeing a game that looks even remotely similar to Love and I dare to speculate that uniqueness was at least one of Steenberg’s goals. Technology wise Steenberg deliberately ignored existing tools in favour of creating his own. Does all this make him an auteur, though? In a way, I think it does. The fun part for me lies in what exactly he delivers as his product. Steenberg’s tools are all available as free open source downloads, opening up avenues for further use and development. If anything, Steenberg is not an auteur jealously guarding his secrets. And what about Love itself? The game is an open world, collaborative experience that thrives on players experimenting with the world. It’s a sandbox with endless potential. This is where Steenberg’s Love making is different from, say, Godard’s À Bout de Souffle. Where Godard had a singular vision that led to the unique viewing experience that is À Bout de Souffle, Steenberg had a singular vision that led to the creation of Love, an open world game that allows players to craft their own emergent experiences; it lets the narrative unfold based on the interaction between the players and the world.

So yes, Godard and Steenberg can both be considered auteurs in the classical sense, but they are very different in what they produce. Both are strikingly unique productions, but the difference lies in how the player/viewer engages with the material. The level of interaction allowed by their respective media is the key difference. If all this talk has gotten you in the mood for Love, please try out the free client first to see if it will run properly on your computer.