Sam and I have been working again on the eigenvectors paper - trying to get an analytical hold on the design principles that operate on (digital) media and mediation.

see my comments on digital humanities last year

Archaeology - looking at the design of things, in time, history, in relation to materiality.

Made some breakthroughs
- we had begun with the aim of developing some media eigenvectors - independent summaries of complexity and variability - we now realize that the notion of eigenvector (as an independent summary) is not right for what we are doing - we are developing a set of interrelated elements
- digital media are material processes (operations performed, such as computation)
- that an archaeology of media involves a focus on this materiality, in a genealogical frame

Hopefully this comes through in what we have written here.

Aims

to discuss and describe media in the abstract, that is as distinct from technical and material properties
to develop a set of terms and methodologies for proactive design of media forms - tools for product design

These terms will also function as components of a history of media and of (media) design.

Premise and timeliness - media and design in the light of the digital

Design is here seen as heterogeneous engineering (that is not presupposing any particular definitions of materiality, virtuality, the technical or the cultural) and not presupposing anything about the components (people, materials, values, concepts).

The aims imply an analysis of the components of product design today in a digital world - creativity, collaboration, research, analysis, styles, and with the digital involving an erosion of conventional distance between the real and the virtual.

The digitization of media removes artifacts from material culture. This allows a more rigorous and abstract analysis of media forms and a more deliberate construction of them for specific tasks. The goal is to put forward a set of well-defined terms and methods for doing this analysis and construction.

Alternate way of expressing this: the digitization of media replaces the media artifacts of material culture with different artifacts of digital culture.
(See also the Metamedia Lab discussion document on digital media as modes of engagement)

Definition of medium

A medium is a formalized method for conveying structured information to some participants (known or unknown). The manner in which this happens is subject to control and negotiation. Usually there has to be some agreement over encoding and decryption. Historically the notion of medium has been intimately associated with and constrained by material and technology, e.g. paint, paper, etc. And also certain institutional forms that controlled the technology. Now it’s becoming less constrained because of the increasing digital nature of communication. More worldly information is becoming fungible and therefore amenable to computational processing and therefore transformation between media forms is accelerating.

In this regard it is better to think of medium as process of mediation, and as mode of engagement and symbolic manipulation.

More and more parts of society and culture are becoming available to computation and therefore can be considered as media - as mediation, as modes of engagement.

The digital does not just mean static information - it is about computation - process, actions performed, temporal structure, context,
(the equivalent of archaeology in the digital realm is to understand these processes - to track back from digital form - perform genealogical analysis).

All digital media are trivially reducible to binary data. There is no literal materiality at this level. Materiality is in the algorithmic context of the media form - the compression, encryption, interaction, latency, redundancy and temporal context of the media form. This is the digital equivalent of materiality - the context in which the content of a digital media form has to be understood, manipulated and transformed.

This grounds the ideas here in the traditional study of culture.

Conventional terms/definitions/components

Media Studies are well established as a branch of cultural studies. Topic - cultural production.
Consider also the importance of the theme of creativity - creating in a cultural sphere.
(And here culture is often oppposed to material infrastructures in that it is seen to consist of ideas, values, images/representations.)

Components of such a cultural studies

technology - eg TV
tools as extensions of the person and the group
material form - paint, film, paper
rules and norms
qualifications for entry
archives/storage
gatekeepers
organisational architectures - TV studio, movie studio
groups, communities, producers, consumers, institutions, organizations
relations of cultural production
power relations - access, control
ideology critique - mass media as ideological state apparatuses
semiotics - communication - signifier-signified-referent
narratology and applications of literary theory/cultural theory
media history

media components/parameters - ELEMENTS

Latency

The delay from changing information to it being consumed by other participants. E.g. IM is extremely low latency, email has this weird asymmetric latency - it’s fast to respond but may be slow to read. Newspapers are very slow. Blogs are very fast. Most digital media have low latency. Except eg digital layout for conventional print media.
People notice latency.

Latency is often relative to expectations within the task at hand. A 10 second delay in the context of IM is noticeable and annoying, but in the context of web publishing, is nothing. Hydra is another good example of this.

Persistence

How robust the medium is, how long the data persist without active maintence. Email is fairly persistent, IM is not. Documents are mostly about persistence.
issue here of materiality and curation - in relation to archives
matter here of the archaeology of media

Redundancy

Persistence is related to redundancy. Digitization gives us the choice of how much redundancy we want, and this is an economic choice and we always choose the short-term most economically efficient path. So, we tend to have very ephemeral digital media, because there’s no (economically acceptable) way to choose robustness.

Temporal Redundancy - data can be redundant across time, as in a source code control system where a given document has an existence in a timeline (tree), and its relationship between other versions and branches is as important as its current state. ie it has a significant genealogy. Archives are an aspect.

Spatial redundancy - local and distributed. Local means, how high a degree of error correcting is in the actual format. Distributed means, how many copies of a given bit of media are there in the world. - The latter meaning is typically ignored in most modern systems, except for specific applications.

Format redundancy (algorithmic or combinatorial) - a good example of this is error correcting codes - the data can be locally redundant, so small damages to the data can be repaired. DNA is a good example of this as well. This property is definitionally in opposition to compression and efficiency, and is typically referred to as entropy in information science literature.

Visuality

‘realness’ - richness - how close to human senses the final output is. Email (text) is artificial, not really directly experienced, but cerebrelly experienced. Video or sound is more directly experienced. A medium is said to be “rich” if it facilitates a more direct experience for the end user, ‘poor’ if it does not. Richness is often a sideeffect and not inherent in the medium, e.g. sending images via email. This is an unique vector - it is subjective, and not an inherent property of the medium.

Raw email text may not be very rich - is very flat - a haiku may be very rich - layout may increase the richness of text.
NB McLuhan?s hot and cold media

I (MS) think of this as something to do with people liking naturalistic media.

Complexity

In an information sense this is related to entropy (how much disorder is there?) eg a string of digits is non-entropic because it can be easily compressed - compression is about finding non-entropy/order - and high entropy looks like random noise.

Digital media can be more complex - they are more entropic - more difficult to compress. But, this is not inherently true. The previous sentence is much easier to compress as ascii text than as an analog waveform (spoken text). Digital media are often more capable of describing complex structure, though even here there are challenges from the analog world (e.g. the fractal nature of physical items).

Encryption

- compression is related to encryption (the encrypted form looks highly entropic)

A painting therefore doesn?t look very complex - eg digitally curating the Mona Lisa might result in a high res compressed file of 10MB - but this is not very redundant.

Network topology

- the nature of the transmitting community and audience addressed. Perhaps this might be more generally described as the nature of the communication network (graph). This gets even more complicated with things like dark nets where the nodes are connected, but hidden from each other. (NB Latour on black boxing).
A broadcast factor (1-1, M-M, etc)
Node-link balance
how much priority is given one over the other
dendritic - hierarchical/linear/distributed structures

Transparency

can you see who you are talking to?
why does it matter?

Computational accessibility and Structure/formalism

Text vs video vs paint vs XML - eg trying to create semantic webs - semantic computation as a project that ignores (usually) the sociology, the culture
a new factor is available computing power - Google has lots of computing power

Programming language, HTML, vs raw text, etc - the degree to which it is parsable (and is therefore computationally accessible). Going back to digital materiality, this is how well you can describe the desired mode of interaction with the content. E.g. an HTML parser is rigidly describable, a parser for english text is not. This can also have a social element, depending on how much cultural data the reader needs to decode the content.

Structure and CA, are often at odds with people. This can be solved, and is more and more, with additional computation. eg Google. Or, my ‘mood indicator’ on my email program, etc.

Lots to think about here with respect to grammar and formal anaylsis.

NB also langue/parole

Forgivingness

How well a message has to adhere to the agreed format to be accepted. HTML is a not well specified media form, so the browsers are typically forgiving. But, JPEG is well specified, and the JPEG parsers are not forgiving. Because most programmers have programmer mind and are themselves rigid, most digital media to date has also been rigid. HTML isn’t only because of the intrusion of lots of non-programmer minds into the medium.

Accessability

If normal people can author a media form directly, it tends to be more forgiving (e.g. HTML vs JPEG).

Temporal structure

The ability to capture, index, retrieve data over time.
also - synchronous communication/concurrence - also NB speech and text, image v movie
also genealogy - tracking changes in a wiki

genealogy is a crucial component in new digital media

genealogy (tracking changes in a text eg) has become cheap

Transactional costs

- go down across the board with computation and digitization. E.g. painting with oil vs painting with Painter Pro. wet plaster v Epson printer - NB the sociology of this and matters of democratization/ status/prestige goods/media) WWW has low transactional costs v TV (with its studios, licenses, organizations)

Maintenance costs

- are related to compression, richness, redundancy, and even the physical form.

Network effect/stickiness

- how easy it is to transfer content from one media form to another. ASCII text is easy, it’s an open, simple format with a lot of tools. Word is hard, they deliberately obfuscate and complicate the format, and change it often. There’s a high barrier to entry to write any kind of transfer tool.
eg everyone uses Word, and hates it, and Powerpoint doesn’t work.

Centralization

how ditributed, controled
part of network topology, and more

Interactivity

Personal accountability/anonymity - whether a participant is known or anonymous, affects the structure and nature of interaction.

notes

What we’ve found is that media always has a social context, even when there is no physical manifestation.

We need some vectors with more social/political implications - control, accessibility, hierarchy.

NB cross linkages
persistence/robustness/archive - related to complexity, entropy
Examples, with their vectors
- email
- Hydra
- blogs
- video
- instant messaging
- google
- newsgroups
Analytical methodologies

event engineering - this is partly what the new media do
and media are now so evidently about social/cultural groups making themselves via things/interactions/information transfers - as they always were
what does it mean now to invent a new medium?
eg - is this blog a medium?

At University of Wales Lampeter we found that almost half of our undergraduates had chosen to study archaeology because of their fascination with fantasy worlds of the likes of Tolkien’s.

I went to see the latest in the movie trilogy again tonight - to try to get a handle on this. (And beacuse I can’t understand why people think this is a great movie.)

Put to one side the formulaic plot (or sublimely mythical - depending on your sympathies). And the undoubted spectacle.

The movie is set in an indeterminate time before history. An age of heroes when men mixed with the godlike, the supernatural. The societies and cultures echo nineteenth century archaeology and anthropology (though I can’t find any studies of Tolkien’s archaeological influences - does anyone know of any?). Savage and brutish half-humans or hominids. Peaceful village agriculturalists (though the hobbits seem to live in Tellytubby houses built in Surrey). Nomadic horse-breeding steppe dwellers. Much of the detail of such a time is taken from northern European (pre)history. Celtic design is in abundance.

(Romanesque and gothic too I guess - maybe it’s better to say it is an eclectic mix.)

This is a familiar chronotope (Bakhtin’s great word for a spatio-temporal location or scenario).

As well as being prehistoric, before, or out of history, the movie’s geography is a space between worlds. Uncharted, to us. Marginal. Beyond. But it is, of course, a world of universal truths, of mythical origins, of cosmogony, of how people navigate the stuggle of good and evil. Like legendary Arthurian romance, it is almost historical, has roots (real and mythical) in history (Tolkien’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic and Finnish sagas sees to that). Its narrative is of an order to the past, a story spanning and unifying millennia. Not history, but a story of the past, this chronotope has the same narrative components as (pre)history - the rise and fall of familiar culture types.

Here is the hook - the world, the chronotope, is immensely comforting and familiar (and the apparent authenticity of immense detail is seductive - particularly the computer graphics in the movie), but is also opposed to conventional history and our understanding of the deep past, offering a more spiritual, unorthodox, and even anti-establishment account. (Familiar, regressive and radical - there are the potential roots of its fascism.)

That so much of the past has been lost invites fantastical speculation. This is the chronotope of fringe archaeology (lost Atlantean civilizations, denied histories, lost wisdoms, facts that don’t make sense in orthodox archaeology etc - here is a link). And, as we now well know, “the truth is out there”, if you have the determination to challenge authority and piece together the evidence.

Just set up NetNewsWire with a bunch of subscriptions to archaeology news sites (syndic8.com lists 21 archaeology feeds like the Cotsen Institute’s Phluzein, Archaeology Magazine, Archaeology Data Service.)

It is revealing to see all the current archaeology news together.

It is all pretty much the same!

A new discovery here. Another there. Some claimed to totally change our understanding of the past.

Actually, archaeology doesn’t work like this at all.

The overall story told of the past has hardly changed since the nineteenth century. It is of social evolution from savagery to civilization (or whatever new gloss is given to those terms), the rise and fall of civilizations and empires, cultural flowering and dark ages, of the refinement of technologies (stone age through to industrial revolution), of key historical moments (agriculture, cities, Graeco-Roman civilization and the west), of the origins of nations and nation states (the coming of the Greeks, Celts, whatever).

No new find has ever challenged this overarching story of the past.

But the story is tired and discredited. My new book aims to replace it with some of the new ideas that have been developing in archaeology since the 70s. Watch this space!

Two articles this weekend about the Parthenon marbles.

The Guardian reports a video making a case for the return of the marbles sent to 1000 members of Parliament in the UK. The New York Times yesterday ran an article about the guilt instilled by a new museum on the slopes of the Acropolis in Athens, to be built for the marbles, still in London.

Tschumi’s design.

There are various organizations now campaigning for the marbles to leave London for Athens.

Issues of cultural property again. And the usual tensions.

But note the key point. The Greek Government is now accepting the British Museum’s ownership (they would be on long term loan in Athens). This means they will almost certainly return to Greece.

The Parthenon Marbles are indeed extraordinary works of art. For some this means they belong to all humanity. So it doesn’t matter if they are in London, New York, Berlin, whatever. Indeed it has been argued that they have been, and maybe still are, better off in London. Because they might not have been as well looked after in Athens (even perhaps until recently), and London is a major art and cultural city - it is good to have them alongside other great works of art, so readily accessible in the metropolis. With the British Museum the legal owners (I think there is little dispute about this), why should they go back to Athens?

But many see the marbles as quintessentially Greek. The ultimate artistic achievement of the ancient Greek miracle. A symbol of what it is to be Greek. How could they not be in Athens?

Both these arguments are, for me, dangerous. Yes - dangerous.

In the first argument, art is seen as a form of cultural capital whose ownership marks and even accrues to an advanced and civilized sensibility. The European imperial powers of the nineteenth century had it, and it is found still in their great cultural centers and institutions. It is opposed to lower cultural forms and barbarism. It needs protecting.

On the second, I argue that the sculptures are not somehow essentially Greek.

Identity does matter, of course. But to see identity as somehow inherent, an essential quality, is just the kind of notion that has led to all kinds of internecine conflict, bigotry and discrimination.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make a case for the marbles being Greek. You could say that contemporary Greeks are the heirs to classical Athens of the fifth century BCE. That the art (and all the culture) of those times therefore belongs to contemporary Greeks, even though it may heve been bestowed upon all humanity since then. (Doesn’t this sound all too familiar). But this is an argument or assertion, an act of creating or reaffirming identity. Think of the enormous changes between then and now: the people who have come and gone; the great cultural changes that break this supposed continuity of inheritance.

Instead, why not see culture and identity as ongoing processes, projects, works, things we get involved in and work at, because they matter to us.

The sculptures are art works- this is the best argument for their return. They belong with the building they were designed for.

See also what I said last year about the looting of the Baghdad Museum and culture as property - the notion that fuels the market in illicit antiquities.

Heritage is a key term here. Are the marbles Greek heritage? Or humanity’s heritage? (UNESCO promotes the listing of World Heritage Sites.) Or neither?

Heritage is usually defined as the past’s legacy to the present - the cultural capital the present has inherited. Here again are notions of owning cultural property. Instead, think of heritage being about different kinds of relationship with the past. What kind of relationship depends upon what you want to do with the past.

So when David Lowenthal, our most astute commentator on heritage, criticizes it for being antithetical to real history (because heritage may not involve factual accuracy), he is missing the point. Heritage may indeed be quite historical. Or not. It depends on the project.

Gorgeous. The movie. “Girl with a pearl earring”.

At the heart - the simulacrum - the exact copy of an original that never existed.

The PR and website for the movie are all about a delicate understated relationship, implicit in a finely crafted painting, a love story (the publicity stills show the main characters staring wistfully). I think, I hope, the director had more in mind. At least, we found so much more last night when we saw it at the Guild in Menlo Park.

Delft in the mid seventeenth century. Johannes Vermeer is painting a commission. The subject is a servant girl in the household. His subject, his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law, all have emotional investments in his work. And all revolve around relationships with goods. His perception and representation of people and items in interiors. The mother-in-law’s concern with the financial security of the household. The daughter’s competition for attention. The wife’s affection for fine things. The girl’s sympathy, intelligence and understanding of his work.

We follow all this through a series of beautiful mis en scËnes - cinematographic compositions that attend to the material textures of everyday life - meat, clothing, silverware, jewelery, pigment, candlelight … . And in spite of the superficial richness, the story is all about what is going on underneath.

Cinematography is here entirely appropriate for the subject - the lusciousness of film; the resolution on the big screen; the (digital) manipulation of focus, color, lighting (of course, the side-lit interiors). Foregrounded, in this very self conscious way, are relations with things and their setting, an attention to surface and the way things present themselves to us.

Vermeer’s wife is obsessed with owning, fingering, examining, and wearing the pearl earrings; her proprietorial attention is appropriately photographic. When she finds that the servant girl has worn them in a portrait sitting, she is furious. As in photography, the excess of attention to detail confirms the materiality of the world and the faithfulness of the representation. In seeing and so knowing the detail, our ownership is confirmed. The photographic can mark ownership - as in the insurance inventory, the holiday postcard laying claim to a piece, however fleeting, of the place visited.

But painting is not photography, of course. Vermeer in one scene has the girl slowly open and close her mouth several times. He wants to see just the right expression, pose, look, as in many of the long sittings. The irony is simple - the painting, with its months of observation and working paint upon surface, is not a photographic instant, though it may look photographic, capturing the sparkle in a glass of wine, the folds of a silk dress. Painting may not be photography, but both here share a similar mode of engagement with people and things. And the tension is revealing.

It is a forensic obsession - any slight detail can make the difference. Just as at the scene of crime, anything could be relevant. The portrait needed the pearl earring; the mouth needed to be open just the right amount, to convey insight into the nature of things.

This forensic attention to surface (and implied reading of allegorical depth) is an archaeological one. The archaeologist articulates surfaces and depths, sifting through the past to find the material fragments, the few remaining details that reveal its character.

I dealt with this connection between archaeology and photography in a couple of essays in the mid 90s - one was for a fascinating seminar in Paris organized by Laurent Olivier and Alain Schnapp on the archaeology of the contemporary past.

A connection with Bill Viola’s current exhibition The Passions. He has similarly attempted to reveal (emotional) depth in a sublime attention to expression (and similarly he based his work on painting). Viola used slow motion high definition video. Here we have film and a narrative setting in early capitalist Delft. More effective I think.

Peter Greenway’s Draughtsman’s Contract. Scenario - an architect commissioned to draw a house and its landscaped garden in the seventeenth century. A similar obsessive attention to the look of things, here landscape, the household in its setting. And its representation. The draughtsman frames and arranges beautifully, but constructs a series of mis en scËnes that seem to record a crime unfolding. But in this mirrored world of simulacra, we don’t know which details are important, to which perpetrator they point.

Barry Katz and I started a new course this quarter for Stanford Continuing Studies.

Design - ten things: ten conversations

sixteen kinds of object - just some thoughts

made - comforting - evocative - signifying

alienated - original - useful - everyday

iconic - itself - mine - subversive

mute - found (accidentally or deliberately) - fetishized - uncanny

Colin Renfrew in Stanford.

Here to join me and Bill Rathje in a conversation about archaeology, for our book Archaeologists with Attitude.

Gave a fascinating talk this evening - “The Sapient Paradox: cognitive archaeology from institutional facts to material realities”.

He sketched out his interest in what he called material engagements - how people get on with things, and how things are active in making people what they are. And, in sketching a cognitive evolution that stressed sedentary life as a moment of radical change in people’s dealings with things, he drew on contemporary art.

Antony Gormley’s interest in material corporeality and anthropometrics (see my blog from last year)

Richard Long’s work on place, human scale, practice, monumentality.

He is exploring what I am calling the archaeological - taking up exactly the kind of interest I was proposing in my book Experiencing the Past, back in 1991.

BBC Science/Nature has picked up on the occurrence of red ochre dating back 90k years at Qafzeh cave, Israel (after a recent article in Current Anthropology). Associated with burials, the pigment is taken to indicate symbolic and ritual thought (red=dead).

The typical argument then goes that this is a momentous leap in human evolution. And the date is early - much earlier than the usual date of c50k or later, the middle/upper palaeolithic boundary, when all sorts of evidence appears for cultural and symbolic practices. You might, as many have done, call it the origin of the modern mind.

So did it all actually happen much earlier?

And what are the implications?

We can quickly get into the old culture/biology debates. Did a genetic change trigger this behavior? (My colleague here at Stanford, Richard Klein, seems to think this.) Or was it to do with sociality? Was it associated only with anatomically modern humans? (Apparently not.)

How about putting aside this obsession with biology versus culture, and the search for simple origins and causality (a gene changes and history begins)? Let’s note that there was no revolution of human consciousness (it took at least 50k years, and probably more like 100k). Let’s not make this radical division between biology and cultural behavior - they have been associated for some 100 thousand years, and the linkage is not entirely unique to humans.

We are so bogged down in these old stories of simple narrative causation - this happened and caused this - and the further back you go, of course, it has to be biology that triggers it all.

We need much more complex thinking that transcends origins and culture/biology splits.

What took so long? And look what heppens when people started living much closer together in villages - that’s when things take off.