I was really inspired by the text "Slow Design Principles" in the sense that Carolyn F. Straus and Alastair Fuad-Luke take the long view of time, which I think is needed in today's fast-paced culture obsessed with, among other things, technology gizmos of every variety. Think of it as lifestyle design. I have to admit, I still don't own a cel phone. I KNOW you can't live without yours. And certainly I have occasion to use one. But I am the world's last holdout - never had one - never had a beeper or a pager either - ever. I seem to focus on their drawbacks. Being critical of technology is important. Part of this process is due to negative social conditioning. I get annoyed when people say "where are you" instead of "how are you" to begin a conversation. Listening to people talk very loudly about their private lives in otherwise quiet public space - irritates me to no end. The same people who are talking about going to the store to pick up anti-itch cream for their sister are the same people undoubtedly who complain loudly about privacy and surveillance. I also hate people who call me while they are driving or shopping in a store. If you call me from a moving vehicle on a hand-held cel phone, I will hang up on you for your own safety. But aside from observing how other people act publicly with their gadgets, I value the serenity of time without interruption. I also value the ability to plan, and organize. I think cel phone culture is creating an inability for some people to plan anything in advance - they'll just call when they get there. Take the example of Mr. X, who calls me once to tell me he's coming over to my house. Calls me a second time to tell me he's going to the store and going to be a little late. And a third time that he's almost there. By the time the doorbell rings, I'm astonished to see a human being. If you know me - you know that I tend to arrive early to events - this is usually for one or two reasons. Firstly I take public transportation and while public trans can be fairly efficient, there are vagaries of time over which one has no control, so I tend to plan ahead, and leave with enough cushion of time to be on time. This can be similar in an automobile, but there is an illusion of control in an automobile (more routes, speed control) that still tend to break down during relatively normal rush times.
Claire Pentecost also talks about this in "Autonomy, Participation, And"
We notice that the “auto” in autonomy starts to resonate with the auto, that all too precise symbol of individual freedom that appears indispensable to a life of agency in America. The auto that creates tedious traffic jams, respiratory diseases, wars, and deformed environments and, as long as we have one, saves us the inconvenience of coordinating our needs and desires with a larger populace. The lubricant of individual freedom so complicit in the erosion of community and social encounter that symbolic micro-gestures of participation are meant to salve.
So I think that a lot of technology and gizmos also give us those illusion of control over our lives - that having constant access makes us smarter, more productive, etc. They don't necessarily, especially if we allow them to run our lives. On the balance, I'm sure one day I'll get a cel phone. But for the moment, I'm planning my next technology move - rain barrels recycled from factory equipment.
The Bratton and Jeremijenko conversation discusses the information used to solve large problems like global warming and air pollution. The information found by either academics or government organizations is most of the time absorbed by our society without much questioning. What is being offered in this discussion is that there should be some kind of movement to allow the general population to find and take in their own data about the environment so they compare their own personal data and relationship with their localized environment, to the large-scale findings of institutionalized data.
The idea of using the model of a health clinic for environmental purposes is a pretty original idea that I thought made since. Placing environmentalism in the same category as social programming keeps the problem at a level which people can get their heads around. I wonder though how such an unfamiliar idea even though formulated after a health clinic would be taken seriously by the local community unless they knew such action would make them healthier and economically better off. I don’t think that they get into how they will educate the public why such an idea is a good one and why they should use a service like an Environmental Health Clinic. The public is use to listening to those government agencies and academics on why they should be doing and what to worry about.
The Slow designed Principles are described as a “new interrogative and reflexive tool for design and research practice that offer an opportunity to find fresh qualities in design research, ideation, process and outcomes.” Most importantly Slow Design is a unique and vital form of creative activism that is delivering new values for design and contributing to the shift toward sustainability. The Slow Design Principals include: revealing, expanding, reflection, engagement, participation, and evolution. This text, though it provides a certain framework that suggests that by following these ‘steps’ a project will be successful, in my opinion has the potential to choke off other opportunities a work may present. However, after rereading the text, I couldn’t help but think of other examples that I felt fit in to the Strauss and Fraud-Luke’s design strategies. As students I think that is wise to take in to consideration principles such as those presented within the text. They are open enough to be applied to any project as strictly or broadly as desired by the maker. Below are two projects that I thought were other examples of how these principles could/were applied to contribute towards the “shift toward sustainability.”
A quick response to the Autonomy, Participation, And text by Clair Pentecost:
I found this text to be incredibly enlightening and valuable to read within the context of this course. As a student it found it interesting to read her notion of how we must produce work that becomes condensed to fit within the gallery setting to be ‘accepted’ and even then, depending on the type of work, it must jump through several sets of hoops to be shown, the more prestigious the gallery, the more hoops to jump through. Though I am guessing my thoughts have strayed from the points of the article I found it interesting to read these two selections together. Though they both touch on many similar notions, I can’t help but think that the Slow Design Principles are trying to set up a framework to aid in work production where as Pentecost’s text, though encourages and gives several examples of successful works, in the beginning points to the lack of freedoms in making art. Pentecost says “We will accept the rules because we will have worked so hard to get there, and because in every way we are starved for validation” not necessarily discourages art practice, but does highlight the problems one will face regardless of whether they follow design principals or not.
Strauss and Fuad-Luke present in this paper a series of “guiding principles” or flexible rules that can be used to attain what they have coined as “Slow Design”. I am not usually a fan of rules of thumb, or theories that over-simplify a whole practice to a series of rules that, if applied correctly, lead to a successful finished product/idea/design… or whatever they are dealing with. Therefore I was somehow skeptical about the paper at first, but, after reading the guides, and even more important, the examples they give to each of the guiding principles, I have to say that I changed my mind.
I consider the guiding principles they present to be open enough to allow them to be applied to a very broad set of fields (all design related fields too, of course), and this is clearly seen by the range of examples they present. Personally, I have to say that the idea that really captivated me was “[…] slowing the metabolism of people, resources and flows”. I just think the societies of developed countries need this idea, but not only applied to design, but to every single field.
Nevertheless, regardless of my personal inclination to the idea of slowing our metabolisms (through revealing, expanding, reflecting…etc), I found the description of the workshop that Fuad-Luke run to be quite less deep into the matter than it should. Maybe it is just a matter of the short description of the workshop that is presented, but from my perspective, it looks like a methodology to create collaborative designs. That is to say, even though it is an interesting methodology, it does not go as far as the Slow Design principles state. Collaborative design is not a groundbreaking idea (and its not their only point), so I believe the workshops they create to introduce the Slow Design principles should go a little bit further in how they change the methodology of design (which I found very interesting an potentially positive).
I think Slow Design is a misnomer and they ought to have named it different. When someone asks you to slow down, stop living life in the fast lane and ponder slowly the curious surroundings in which we live in. It misled me when I first heard about it. I would rather call it 'Meditative Design'. Slow design speaks of realization of the self(the designer) with respective to his/her environment, meditate on them, let the gravity of the situation digest and walk through a space where time stands still, let's say Matrix mode or like when Hiro stops time. Then meticulously planning, usually in a group (a commune) that is global, online and extremely collaborative, the realization of this design that not only makes a statement about the environment in which we live in but also be aesthetically pleasing as good design ought to be.
Buddhist monks meditate while the take slow steps across an enclosed space in circles. I look at these designers like monks with a purpose, trying to realize their place in the world through their designs. They communicate with nature just as spirit seekers do and get to a place where time slows down, the heart rate is magically relaxed, the blood flow is fresh and nervousness and anxiety is unheard of. There is a facebook note I found that echoes my opinion of how Slow Design is something that must have come out of Zen meditation and stuff like that.
Bratton and Jeremijenko cover quite a numerous amount of topics in this conversation styled text. One of the topics focuses on criticizing some aspects of information visualization and how the so widespread beautiful ‘data smogs’ have not so good outcomes or consequences, as they have are entailing the “spectacularization of information “: information that, in fact, distances people from their abilities and responsibility to act upon their environments. Further on, they talk about how the data of these kind of projects is collected (in relation to her Jeremijenko‘s project How Stuff is Made), which I totally agree.
I have to say tough, that regardless of the relevance of the topics they discuss, I found some aspects of the text quite superficial and unjustified. When they for instance criticize the spectacularization of information I feel they just leave their opinion there without a sound series of examples to get a little bit deeper into the matter. I think “The Environmental Health Clinic” and other initiatives they describe are relevant enough by their own without the need to criticize other practices (specially when I didn’t find consistent examples in the text). Of course the ideas of co-production of knowledge, one-to-one talk, participation, or locality that they present, pose interesting directions to work on.
One of the main points they make, in my view, is the idea of locality as a necessary ingredient for people to get involved. I think its pretty clear that the “natural” selfishness of human beings make it quite difficult for us to act upon something, unless we see a clear connection to our daily lives. In relation to this idea (and also to complement the great image posted by JD), I would like to post Eliasson’s project Green River, which places the attention on the very matter that surrounds us, as a way to increase our awareness in our environment (in a visually striking manner).
The Situated Technologies Pamphlet series concentrates on the exploration of the “implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism. Specifically this series addresses how our experience of space and the choices we make within are affect by the range of mobile, persuasive, embedded, or otherwise situated technologies.” Within this text Bratton and Jeremijenko discuss self-advocacy, environmental protection, and various human rights and social injustices. To address these issues both Bratton and Jeremijenko take a close look at the value of data collection and the importance of its purpose and more importantly how those doing the collecting sway its importance and presentation.
In regard to data collection, they present us with many examples of devices that utilize different types of sensors to detect non-human organisms to provide important information about their conditions. Thus allowing a new form of data collection and ultimately an important, useful, and informed method for activating data to spark change and awareness.
I was specifically interested in the “Death of the User” section of the text (pgs. 51-53). Specific to my work/ideas and that of many other current artists, how we structure non-human agency poses a great opportunity to integrate non-humans at the instigation point of distributed interactions where the otherwise human user would be. By biodiversifying who is represented in agricultural, urban, and suburban contexts humans pay closer attention to those with which we cohabitate. More importantly by investigating data found from works that sense non-humans we can “reconsider structures of ownership, including private property and how it extends to these non-human agents in the environmental commons”.
Though I agree with much of what Jeremijenko discusses in this section and feel that she is calling attention to very important ideas, I do not agree that the user, in Bratton’s terms, has “died”. Rather, I feel that the user has simply changed from human to non-human. Though many would argue that non-human organisms cannot be users because they do not comprehend their actions, there are many accounts where data of human behavior is being collected and they too are not aware that they have the ability to manipulate data (i.e. using hidden cameras and infrared sensors to track a particular event in any project).
Ultimately what is important that through these non-human sensing works, we can begin to recognize a “non-human-centric world” and can begin to see to see a non-human point of view that would allow us to act upon our surroundings and provide better solutions for our environment issues.
Feral geese, like other populations of urban animals are either disdained, hunted, or at best ignored. They are not the 'wildlife' that environmentalists heroically seek to protect, and yet their survival testifies to a functioning urban ecosystem - they have critical functional, remediative and arguably redemptive roles to play in an urban ecosystems that are poorly understood. They are the most hopeful of environmental agents precisely because they demonstrate adaptive strategies that we have not observed before, and do not understand. There is a great deal to learn from them. Moreover, they demonstrate that we and our urban environment are inside nature, not separate or distinct from it. When animals make autonomous choices to inhabit places that we do not recognize as 'natural' they teach us that we live in something natural.
OOZ takes the urban animal habitats that animals themselves have initiated as its starting point. These contexts provide an opportunity to learn what the resources and structures animals themselves have exploited by directing our attention to the architectural and adaptive innovations these nonhumans have made
There are numerous intriguing ideas presented by Jeremijenko and Bratton in this text. The primary concepts revolve around ubiqiutious computing and emergent political structures, but they are able to superimpose these principles in various areas. They pay a great deal of attention to the value of data, specifically to what value data has: how is it collected? By whom? For what purpose? The framework is basically that ubiquitous computing can lead to direct data consumption that could support direct, local political engagement; replacing a strong, representative central government and bringing issues such as climate change to the site in which the specific problem can be addressed, which causes a type of emergent political structure to begin to form.
They provide some interesting examples of sensing structures in which non-human entities become aggregate political groups, e.g. co2 sensors on trees. Also, the portions of the text in which they discuss the role of the artist as an additional individual engaging science as "model citizen and naive scientist.” This is similar to artists like Vibeke Sorensen working alongside scientists at the San Diego Supercomputer Center in the capacity as peer, as early as the 1970s. They valued the perspective that Sorensen brought to any project she worked on, perspectives that were outside of rigid scientific method and therefore fostered innovation. Jeremijenko and Bratton make the excellent point that perhaps artists are the only beings that could take the vast clouds of data and create an “image” that has some sort of cultural/environmental/emoitional currency beyond merely a sexy data visualization.
I think Jeremijenko’s How Stuff Is Made project provides the provenance of manufactured objects in a way that is very accessible. Rather than the common extremes of showing the cost/benefit of our culture through either consumable media coverage or white paper dissection, How Stuff Is Made democratizes the contemplation of where our stuff comes from.
I thought many times throughout this text about various efforts of artists recently present a non-data based image of environmental impact--for example, many of Burtynsky’s photos.
If 'advocacy' means the act of arguing for a cause, idea or policy and providing active support to the cause in a positive sense I advocate it. The problems that are in the process of being solved by artists like NJ at NY using techniques like situated advocacy and tactical sensing, are valid problems that when tackled produce a positive outcome. I personally feel by dedicating energy to projects that aim at improving the environmental conditions that we live in the artists are being environmental activists in some way. Collecting data from a particular park and surroundings getting an idea of what is causing the most pollution really helps to decide what is wrong. But, what happens after that, do they actually close down that chemical plant nearby? Or do they stop vehicles from plying around the park? What is actually the end result? A bunch of numbers that show that the teens have collected valuable data which now they can use to prove to the authorities that there needs to be some change around here. Calling to attention is not enough I think. In India housing colonies who have their own management just add a lot of speed-bumps around their houses along with a steel bar at the start of a road at 8 ft or so to prevent heavy vehicles entering.
But, still I could see some evidence of helping an ecosystem by creating interventions in their work. For example the fish display thingy in the Hudson river which responds to fish movement and also enhances people interactivity by having them feed the fishes with food that apparently removes bad stuff from them. I also thought such interventions might some time negate the positiveness they promulgate when people start throwing in lays chips wrappers, hot-dog packages and other crumbs of waste stuff into the river and start polluting it themselves.
I found the site/project "How stuff is made" very interesting. I absolutely subscribe to the notion that knowing how stuff is made, where does it come from and the processes that are involve in its creation are of critical importance to rise responsible consumerism and production methods. On the other hand, it is well known that Nike employees people in third worlds countries, pays them $0.001 a day and sells its products with %400 of profit. The fact that the public is aware of this situation didn't seemed to change neither Nike's profits nor the its methodologies. Who do we blame for this? Maybe the designers how made such nice shoes, or us for keep buying them, or the governments for not prohibiting Nike to commercialize its products. Let us consider the designers for a moment, in the Slow Design reading we meet Julia Lohmann, a designer how "believes that acknowledging the origins of a product is the first step towards making more informed and ethical choices about what we consume." What does Julia designs taking into account this premise? Lamps made out of cow stomachs:
I find the lamp pretty gorgeous, I know that is a cow's stomach and I still want one, even more, because is a cow's stomach I want one!!!! By having this lamp I will be more empathetic towards the cruelty inflected to the cow's, by having this lamp I'll be a responsible consumer. I wonder how much it will costs me to buy 100 lamps, we will need 100 cows. It seems to me that being a responsible consumer has turned out to be another good strategy for selling. Examples of this phenomenon can be found everywhere: "if you buy this water, you will be contributing to starvation" To buy is to change the world.
I chose activity number four, Research and Debate from the Yes Men’s Teaching and Action Guide. The part that struck me the most about this activity was the question; who pays the price for those cheap goods we take for granted? I also wanted to touch upon the ridiculous things people think they need at unrealistic low prices. I decided to change the activity a little, and to make a video piece that would invoke debate about our consumption of absurd products at a high cost to our environment and humanity. The video piece is a mash-up of an old 1950’s propaganda film about capitalism and why it’s so important for our way of life. I inserted in this film what makes our capitalistic system function today, in order to make things such as lower costs for competition purposes possible. I also tried to find the most absurd product I could find that no one would ever need, but some might think they need. The product I chose was an MP-3 playing toilet paper dispenser. I imagine the people making these things for the American market must think we’re the biggest idiots. The tag line for this little number was as follows; “Now you can Enhance your Experience in any room with your favorite music from your iPod.” And the price was even better at only $29.99 with free shipping. Amazing! I hope the video will make people think twice about what they really need to live their lives, while also causing them to think about their impact on others and the world in which live in.
I chose activity #3 of the Yes Men Fix the World Teaching Guide , interpreting the option of taking on the subject of corporate social responsibility to make a TV ad about FEMA, entitled “Duets.” It is an alternate history of sorts, creating a scenario involving Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Government and the then President of the United States (George W. Bush). The goal was to generate a sacharrine TV spot in the manner of melodramatic, sentimentalist commercials one sees so often today (e.g. Dow "Human Element" Ad Campaign). By showing what might have happened had our government responded as it should have to Katrina, the perception of their utter failure is heightened.
The TV spot features many generic techniques that are very popular with modern ad agencies--time-lapse shots of nature, personal sentiment (between a corporate entity and the viewer), still image transforms (so-called “Ken Burns Effect”) and the use of famous Opera arias that are present in poor or inaccurate context.
The inspiration for the subject matter is directly related to the disgust I felt when I was able to reflect on how poorly the Federal Government handled Katrina relief, how FEMA mismanaged resources and “lost” billions of dollars and how the disparity in natural disaster relief seems to point to bigoted ideology in the Federal Government. In hindsight, it is apparent that the funds and resources were present, but the government would not or could not help the people affected by Katrina. With this project I wanted to both show what could have been and what should have been--that a strong, centralized government in the form of a Republic should be able to quickly and effectively respond to these types of situations using funds taken those that are affected via taxes, etc.
After working as a photojournalist for 4 years for a paper that reached nearly 35,000 people on a daily basis, my love for the newspaper and all news media died. Off assignment, I would spend hours sitting by a police scanner, waiting for a deadly car accident, a house fire, a business robbery, anything that would constitute for an ‘exciting’ news feature. If a day went by without some kind of tragedy, it was slow and the supplemental photographs taken to fill in the feature news spots were usually seen by the editors as less exciting than those depicting what I could only think of as calamity. Nonetheless I thrived on the stories that were dangerous, and apparently so did the public. With every day and every story that had some sort of negative note, following a murder trial, covering crooked politics, and going trigger-happy over deathly incidents, I found myself becoming uncomfortably desensitized to emotion. While I did cover my fair share of “happier” news features, county fairs, concerts, local charity events, the stories that I always heard people talk about were those of a ruinous nature. No one ever really remembers or cares about the kid who raised 20,000 dollars for a charity event helping autistic children when people died in a shoot out down the street. Unfortunately it seems like we thrive on tragedy and useless celebrity gossip.
Though many complain about the negative nature of the news and throw out the old saying “no news is good news,” these same people are often the ones who still purchase or support in some form (via the internet) their local newspapers. This readership, though riddled with complaints, is what keeps these stories alive and splashed across the front page of every section. Though some of it is viable news, and there are a few quaint stories of hope, the majority of the news, be it on TV, the Internet, or in the newspaper is rarely indicative of anything good going on in our world.
Following the Yes Men Fix The World Teaching guide, I will be completing a variation of the News Paper Activity. My action plan is to re-appropriate 3 stories from both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune so that they read the way that I feel an “ideal” version of the story should be. I will be making 2 separate blogs to post these stories and will also bring in the actual copies of the stories from both newspapers as well as a print out of the blog postings. These blog postings are meant to be a humorous poke at issues within these stories and try to focus on the injustice and sometimes nonsensical actions taken by governmental and corporate institutions that are presented to us in our daily news.
When I saw the clip from the Science Channel called "PopSci's Future of: Immortal Avatars", from their "Future Of" series, featuring Project Lifelike from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at UIC, I got an uncomfortable feeling from it. The idea of big $$ science being used to make a former NSF administrator immortal seems like an egomaniacal effort of the sort evil dictators would commission. The spin of the real actual clip seemed to point toward the death-tinged joy of interacting with corpses.
The clip reminded me of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, Frankenstein. The story is a cautionary tale regarding modern uses of science. In the story, a rogue scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, ignores the warnings of his more level-headed colleagues and works to revitalize the dead. In the popular 1931 movie adaptation, Dr. Frankenstein's monster is played by Boris Karlov. The monster goes on to kill an innocent child, and a mob of villagers eventually burns the monster.
In "Towards the Automation of Figurative Techniques," in Oliver Grau's book, Media Art Histories, Edmond Couchot discusses autonomous systems and their application to art. While on the one hand he discusses purely generative systems, he differentiates autonomous systems as specifically an extenuation of cybernetics and the body (via interactivity). He also says that autonomous systems have many applications in the sciences. I am concerned about the bad mojo and uncomfortable feeling I got from the clip. It seems as if the happy death imagery serves to distance a public from questioning the very creepy aspects of this work while being portrayed as fun, popular science.
Perhaps EVL should get a better handle on their public relations. The original clip which aired on the Science Channel and is linked on their website (www.evl.uic.edu)might actually be doing them a disservice. My pastiche video, on the one hand, exaggerates and twists the original video, but on the other hand, reveals, as the Yes Men do, that we should hold accountable those who serve in the public trust.
