Seminar: Digital Cultures, March 20 2009, University of Sydney

Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney.

This seminar will feature presentations from Chris Chesher, Kathy Cleland and John Tonkin.

Friday, 20 March, 2pm.
Kevin Lee Room, Level 6 Lobby 14, Main Quadrangle, University of Sydney.
(Take the lift near MacLaurin Hall stairway to Level 6 and the Kevin Lee Room is to your left).

The seminar will followed by drinks at Manning Bar. All very welcome!

Chris Chesher
This short paper will use the example of the productiveness of critical comparisons between network theories from a number of disciplines to illustrate what digital cultures might be. The contrasting (possibly even incompatible) approaches of social network analysis, Network Society and actor network theory offer different insights into social networking applications.

Chris Chesher is director of the Digital Cultures program at the University of Sydney. His research focuses consistently on digital mediations of cultural practices, but across a range of cases and themes. Recent work has revisited Innis's theorisation of the materiality of media in the light of digitality; examined the rhythms of mobile media uses before and during a U2 concert; and explored the processes of learning to share language with machines.

Kathy Cleland
This talk will explore human-technology interaction by looking at some of the different ways new media arts are using digital media technologies to create new forms of interactie engagement between artworks and audiences.

Kathy Cleland lectures in the Digital Cultures program at the University of Sydney and is a freelance curator specialising in new media art.

John Tonkin
This short paper will present a number of artwork, and discuss the interdisciplinary nature of their production.

John Tonkin is an Associate Lecturer in the Digital Cultures Program at the University of Sydney. He has been making digital media art projects since 1985. In 1999-2000 he received a fellowship from the Australia Council's New Media Arts Board. Tonkin's works have often involved building frameworks / tools / toys within which the artwork is formed through the accumulated interactions of its users. His recent projects have used real-time 3d animation, visualisation and data-mapping technologies. These include Strange Weather (2005), a visualisation tool for making sense of life, and time and motion study (2006). Many of his artworks have explored science as a cultural form. These projects have often used humour as a means to engage with complex ideas.

RSVP/Apologies to Fiona Allon (fiona.allon@usyd.edu.au)

trying a Mac utility called GrandPerspective, because I have to get one

trying out a free Mac disk utility called GrandDesign

Our Nic gave up marriage with Tom Cruise for a Sunday Roast... I mean Rose: (Remember http://ping.fm/jYdY7 ?)

posted the first post to Blogger since 2005 ('Grand Theft Empathy'): http://ping.fm/ZNS68

Grand theft empathy

After playing Grand Theft Auto IV over a few weeks now, I feel mean, stressed and empty. The initial sense of awe at the detailed gritty realism (and extraordinary visual richness) of Liberty City has receded, leaving me gradually to descend into an uncanny valley of grim, money-grubbing and compromised characters. I really don't like myself as Niko Bellick.

The inhabitants of Liberty City live in that uncanny valley where the people are almost life-like, but that almostness makes their presence cold and cadaverous. The uncanny valley was famously founded by roboticist Masahiro Mori, who observed that increasingly realistic robots (and simulations) reach a point where more realism suddenly creates negative affect in those relating to it. The valley is a dip towards the right of a graph that plots degree of realism along the horizontal plane, and familiarity on the vertical. You don't feel for the almost real. This sensation certainly also applies to video games, as an article in Slate observes in 2004.

The earlier GTA characters like Tommy Vercetti (Vice City) and CJ (San Andreas) also lived in complex crime worlds where life was cheap, but their cartoonish aesthetic (imposed partly by the limitations of last generation consoles) made their antisocial deeds more of a caricature. The mise-en-scenes of faux-1980s Miami beach / Scarface (VC) and black American crime movies (SA) referenced popular culture more than 'real' life.

This time the designers have dropped these postmodern affectations and returned to a dirty realism (closer to the first 3D GTA game, GTAIII). Even the comical figure of Niko's cousin Roman is too believable in his deluded enthusiastic celebration of what, against all evidence, he sees as a land of opportunity. And yet, he is one of few sympathetic characters in a world in which everyone is compromised, self-obsessed and at least slightly insane.

The very realism of the gameplay is alienating. The gunplay is more brutal and unforgiving than earlier games. Most graphical is the way my avatar dies. In earlier games, the camera floats off above the body, as if ascending to heaven. At the point of death in GTA IV the world shudders and blurs, the scene turns to high contrast black and white, and almost all control is lost, except for a momentary capacity to glance around at the world as your character's perception fades. Often Niko's limp body is literally thrown around with rag-doll physics. Sometimes the character who has just fired the fatal shot makes a sarcastic remark as the life drains from your avatar's corpse.

The unattractive character flaws in the game are most true of my own avatar, Niko. His relentless opportunism and venal amorality in accepting missions from anyone — to steal, murder and pillage — reinforces a sense that I am actually becoming this cold and uncanny cyborg. I hate myself.



(image from http://images.wikia.com/gtawiki/images/1/1a/Gta4-niko-bellic1.jpg)

CEBIT 2005

I popped in the CeBIT in Darling Harbour (24th-26th May 2005) for a quick look around... four hours later I completed the circuit, and there will still things I didn't get to see. This is the biggest CEBIT yet, and you really feel it.

Every year in exhibitions you tend to get a different emerging technology that has prominence. This year's offerings manifested the emergence of broadband Internet, with technologies like Voice over IP and video conferencing having a big presence on the exhibition floor.

I had a play with the demo of a desktop interface developed at the Smart Internet CRC (at Sydney Uni) which used pens to drag around images, resize them, duplicate, flip, 'write' on the back, attach audio and throw into a 'black hole'.

The NICTA stand showed some of the work going on there (not particularly compelling yet -- and still far too narrowly driven by traditional ICT research paradigms). They did give me a demo of a scheduling application that I thought we could use at Sydney Uni! The new version (ERS-7M2) of Sony's AIBO is a bit sleeker than the old model -- more a working dog, and less a lapdog. It seemed pretty responsive and lively in the demo.

Another cool demo was a commercial product called KEEpad that allows a lecturer to invite those attending to respond to questions using an infrared remote control. The questions are presented on regular PowerPoint slides, with an extra plug-in. The system registers each remote's entry, and immediately tallies the votes and displays the results, as well as saving these results to an Excel file. The most recent version doesn't run on a Mac; and I'm not sure how well it would be suited to Humanities teaching, but it represents a different mode of interaction that gives the audience some limited capacity to give immediate feedback in a lecture setting. It could even be a good platform to allows students to create experiments for interaction.

Interactive television presentation

This week's Technocultures class featured a talk from Justin Hewelt, who manages the Broadband Bananas website, and works as a consultant. Interactive TV seems to be reaching a threshold point.

The most compelling applications he showed used IPTV set-top boxes, the standard that seems closest to delivering video-on-demand. It runs over IP and ADSL to the home, but is not the Internet as much as a custom TV service. It is somewhere between broadcast/satellite/cable interactive TV (that sometimes have back-channels over phone lines, for example) and Windows Media Centre.

He also pointed to an excellent resource called Enhanced TV cookbook, which features detailed documentation of different standards for enhanced TV.

The lesson from his talk for consumer advocates is that (surprise! surprise!) interactive TV developers are looking to strategies to maximise their returns. It's worth contesting these standards as they emerge, and before they become entrenched.