How can knowledge, research, and pedagogical practice in the arts and humanities drive the design and development of emerging digital media (and vice versa)? To what extent can the arts and humanities set the agenda for digital invention and innovation?  If so, what shapes might that agenda assume and how might it interact with traditional definitions of arts and humanities knowledge and practice that place the emphasis upon retroactive critical reflection upon objects, actions and events belonging to the past? These are the questions that the SHL/Inventio seminar on Digital Design and/in the Arts and Humanities aims to explore. The seminar is taking place in room 252 in Pigott Hall on April 20-21.

Participants:

Bolter, Jay David:  Mixed Reality, Performance Theory, and the Question of Liveness

Our research group at Georgia Tech, the Digital Performance Initiative, stages digital mediated performances in an effort to address questions posed by media theory. We seek to address these questions through a combination of critical analysis and qualitative audience studies. We report here on some of our early experiments. Performance and media studies have long discussed whether television has changed the cultural category of “liveness.” We should now expand the field of inquiry to include digital media. Are MMO environments such as Second Life “live”? What is the status of Mixed Reality experiences that combine human performers with avatars or situate human performers in virtual environments? How is the notion liveness related to presence in mixed reality and more generally in the performative situations of social computing? These questions are now available for cultural negotiation in an age of pervasive computing.      

Drucker, Johanna:  Diagramming Interprettion

What are humanities tools in a digital context and how can their design inform our understanding of interpretative activity? What are the design challenges for creating such tools? And how might the task of modeling interpretation help create a dialogue between digital humanities and the home disciplines of the humanities?  

Grøgaard, Stian:  Aesthetics, Art Theory & Theory Informed Artistic Practice

To what extent does theory about art inform the conduct of artistic production and expression? Which are the procedures in this kind of theory–practice relationship and how do they change over time? Relevant examples from art history, the "paragone" between mechanical and liberal arts in Leonardo´s Trattatto della pittura, will be compared to a seminal work of modern aesthetics, Kant´s Critique of judgement (1790), to outline an epochal shift from poetic production to aesthetic reflexion, from skill to taste, and to what has been labelled modernism's "deskilling". The end of the aesthetical regime in later artistic developments like Conceptual Art, dominating art theory since the 1960s, takes place in a society and a form of life increasingly styled and aesthetizised. A final question is to what extent such historical examples are relevant to the current convergence of art theory/aesthetics and digital art?

Liestøl, Gunnar:  'Situated Simulations' – A Possible Digital Genre?

Rhetorical and aesthetic aspects of digital textuality tends to lag behind developments in hardware and software. Constructive humanistic approaches to digital media may prevent this deficiency. The talk reports on a project where digital genre design is conducted as a method to invent innovative expressive solutions and document structures based on the ongoing convergence of mobility, broadband, high resolution graphics and GPS-positioning technology. The prototyped genre – Situated Simulations – is a kind of augmented reality system based on the iPhone, where there is approximate identity between the users visual perspective on the real physical environment and the users visual perspective of a 3D graphics environment as it is presented on the screen. 

Lowood, Henry:  From the Creation to the Curation of Virtual Worlds

The touch point of these two threads – creation and curation of virtual worlds – is provided in Ivan Sutherland’s remarkable 1965 essay, “The Ultimate Display.”  For Sutherland, the ultimate display was short-hand for a synthetic world that could be programmed for the purpose of experiencing an alternate reality, the “Wonderland into which Alice walked.”   He argued that, “By working with such displays of mathematical phenomena we can learn to know them as well as we know our own natural world,” thus putting into focus the potential and the problems of curating the computer-based worlds created decades later.   On the one hand, we can anticipate that future historians will investigate these worlds as intensively as the "real world."  On the other, we are faced with the ephemeral and derivative nature of such "mathematical" worlds, such that curators of these created realities will face choices that determine how much of their history will remain for future generations to study.

Løvlie, Anders Sundnes: Geo–literary browsing: How can literature studies and creative writing be enhanced by loctive media?

How can the arts and humanities contribute to the design and development of digital media? To do this, one needs to formulate research questions within the humanities that can best be answered through a process of experimentation with digital design. That is, one needs to identify possibilities within digital technologies to explore issues that are of interest to the humanities.

Locative media seem to offer one such possibility: To explore the relations between places and the media texts associated with the places. Since the so-called «spatial turn» a decade or so ago, scholars in various fields of the humanities and social sciences have shown an increasing interest in spatial and geographical relations. In literature, Franco Moretti has advocated a new field, «literary geography». For Moretti this is a field of interest to literary sociology, but it seems equally interesting to explore from the point of view of literary aesthetics and creative writing.

The textopia project is an attempt to explore the aesthetics of literary geography through locative media. An online database of place-bound literary texts is made available for browsing on location- aware mobile devices, making it possible for users walking through the city of Oslo, Norway, to hear literary texts that talk about the places they are passing by. Moreover, since the database is in a wiki format, writers can write texts specifically for the system, actively playing and experimenting with the notion of place-bound literature.

One way to view textopia is as a dynamic, spatial hypertext. The database of texts, in which each text fragment is tagged with gps coordinates, creates a textual overlay over the physical world of the city, which can be «browsed» by moving through the city space. In fact this overlay is divided into different temporal layers of texts from various periods of history up until today, and so the user may move both spatially and temporally through this textual universe by making different selections from the database.

In order to get some initial evaluation of the project, a creative writing competition was arranged in the fall/winter of 2008/2009. Without any budget for advertising, the project received 46 different contributions from amateur writers as well as professionals. The experiences from the competition, as well as feedback from the contributors show that the system is functional, and that some users are able to find basic inspiration in the use of technology to connect their texts with physical spaces. There are also several challenges that need to be adressed in future development of the system, both in making it easy for users with low technical skills to play and experiment with the system, as well as in making the system easily accessible for users accross platforms. These challenges relate in equal amounts to concerns of digital design and literary and aesthetic sensibilities.

Miller, Carolyn:   Rhetoric and Digital Design: New Challenges for Invention and Delivery

Walter Ong’s account of Ramist rhetoric and dialectic as a result of the print revolution in Western Europe can serve as a suggestive analogue for exploring how the art of rhetoric can contribute to understanding the challenges of digital design. In segregating the constituent arts that dialectic and rhetoric had traditionally shared, assigning invention and disposition to dialectic and style and delivery to rhetoric, Ramus effected the division of substance from form, of message from medium, of agency from transmission. Further, this division helped sharpen the distinction between theory and practice, which had never been strong in ancient conceptions. It is to this configuration, a legacy of print culture, that the digital media pose their challenge. A newly reconfigured art of rhetoric might not only bring invention back but could also give new attention to style and delivery. It could also rebalance the relationship between theory and practice. We may be able to use such a reconfigured rhetoric to understand the onslaught of digital innovation; can we also use it to inspire, imagine, guide, and manage the development of digital media? 

Morrison, Andrew:  Co-designing Collaborative Mobile Fiction

This presentation looks at the co-design of a collaborative GPS-enabled mobile fiction called NarraHand. The story centres on Africans living in Oslo, Norway. We reflect on conceptual and front-end elements in this co-design. This entails the interplay of narrative intent, mediational means and technological affordances in experimenting with emerging genres of mobile fiction. We frame this research within a sociocultural perspective on communication design.

Müller, Kjartan:  Things, Places, People and Stories

The museum is about things, 

Found in places, 

Where people lived, 

Of whom there are stories to be told.

This project is a sub project of my main project Digital Media in Situ. In my main project I will combine platform/software studies with new rhetorical genre theory where the concept of (rhetorical) situation and typification is central. The premise is that in order to study genre change one also has to have an understanding of the opposite – the consolidation of genre through a typification process. The platforms involved can be seen as stable configurations of hardware and software layers, and are in a way also a result of a typification processes. The question is how these processes are intertangled, and how and where the sources of genre change can be found in this triangle.

In the Things, Places, People and Stories sub project the case in question is the Museum of Cultural History in Norway. This museum will soon move into a more modern building situated at historical ground in Bjørvika in Oslo, close to where the city originally was founded and the city centre during the Middle Ages. The project will research the museum as situation(s) with regard to what platforms are involved producing what sort of texts. The practical part of the project is based on a hypothesis that the new physical location combined with the possibilities of new digital media technology in a way constitutes an exigence in the situation that needs to be resolved by new kinds of texts through design in and between the two lower corners of the triangle. 

Some central questions for the project which I shortly will discuss in this presentation are:

- How constraints, possibility space, and competence related to platforms afflict the design of texts.

- In that regard, what are the role of tools, like authoring tools, in relation to platforms and genres? 

- What happens when the distinctions between the software layers of the platform and meaningware layers of the texts are being blurred when the texts of a museum collection can be accessed through API’s and so in a way are being moved into the platform.  

Rasmussen, Terje: Phenomenological ideas in digital design; their relevance and shortcomings

The year 1998 was the year of innovations such as the blog, web 2.0 and Google. The same year, the Swedish designer Pelle Ehn issued his ”Manifesto for a digital Bauhaus”. In the manifest, Ehn argued for a recombination of technology and aesthetics to work for visions of democracy and a good life. He argued that: ” What is needed is a humanistic and user-oriented education and research that will develop both a critical stance to information and communication technology and at the same time competence to design, compose and tell stories using the new mediating technologies.”

With reference to the Bauhaus school of design in Berlin in the 1920s, he argued for the unification of ”nerds” and ”digerati” to explore human action and meaning in a digitalised society. The modernist Bauhaus school of design idea was roughly that aesthetics could serve the functionality of products, their materiality and production processes and still be aesthetically successful. Design, in other words, could serve both functionality of the product and the quality of use. This tradition was quite different from the more commercial tradition in the US at the same time, which emphasised consumer appeal and the styling of products in order to reach the overall purpose; not higher quality of products and use processes, but increasing sales (45).

And for that very same reason, the US tradition understood the sociological significance of design better than the Bauhaus school, as a wider perspective on the cultural significance of design and its relationship to consumer appeal, marketing, social status and lifestyles was developed. There can be little doubt that the US tradition has been the dominating one in western capitalist societies since the Second World War. Pelle Ehn’s approach followed the Bauhaus school in searching for quality in not only products and devices but also in the use of them. He stressed tacit knowledge and the skills of users, and the tool-dimension of technology, the approach and its political-ethical visions, did not sufficiently incorporate central social insights about the power of marketing and consumer appeal, which so fundamentally penetrates the social world of personal media use today. 

After the emergence of graphical user interface for desktop PC and the World Wide Web, the current new steps of HCI is development of applications for small personal (mobile) media and network services (web 2.0). This latter development has not only raised the interest for the devices themselves, but also challenged the notion of the user context. This brings some new optimism to the possibility of reconnecting digital design with older considerations about design, form and practice, which was at the agenda of central thinkers in design research like Winograd, Kapor and Ehn. At the same time the drive towards consumer appeal is stronger than ever. The question raised here is how phenomenological and experiential approaches to design may lead to a critical analysis of structural conditions for use and appropriation of new personal media.

Although the phenomenological inspiration in design is quite old, the concept of user experience received its more distinct meaning in HCI circles in the beginning of the millennium. Designing User Experience (DUX) refers to annual conferences and a wider perspective on use and appropriation than the usability orientation in the HCI area and is clearly reaching back to the US consumer appeal tradition, combining commercial thinking with sociological insights about life-styles and social status. The design experience approach seems to manifest itself as one approach within HCI-area (81) drawing upon phenomenology (Heidegger, Husserl), philosophical pragmatism (Dewey 1934) and Bakthin.

With the experiential reorientation in design research around the millennium-shift, design is reaching wider into the social and cultural world of the user – a user that is also a consumer, citizen, client, and family member. Whereas the usability-orientation is relatively poor in theoretical terms, the experience-orientation incorporates essential aspects of the actual social significance of the products and their design. However, since this new orientation is influenced by the consumer appeal-orientation, there is a risk that it cannot make sufficiently sense of its wider view in actual design work. If social and cultural knowledge about materiality in society is only translated into commercial language, important structural aspects are left out. How can this problem be approached in design? 

Shanks, Michael:  Archeology and the Presence of THINGS

Schnapp, Jeffrey:  A Sirikata-based Humanities Metalab

The SHL Humanities Metalab project weds the implementation and launch of a state-of-the-art open source virtual world named Sirikata to a cluster of innovative research endeavors. The aim is to bridge the engineering//humanities, technology//content divides: on the one hand, to drive the development of a virtual world platform by means of the end-user demands of humanities researchers; on the other hand, to model the iterations of scholarship that the platform will enable in ways that are integral to the platform’s development.The word Sirikata has two meanings both of which underscore the Humanities Metalab’s ambitions as a research engine that is transformative over the short term and sustainable over the long term. The word designates populations of meerkats who choose to work together in underground burrows; and translates the Japanese phrase for ways of knowing.  The research that the Humanities Metalab aims to enable is based on principles that have been less prominent in humanities scholarship than in the natural and social sciences:


-- large-scale collaborative research

-- curation of cultural corpora as a mode of augmented scholarly practice that complements traditional scholarship

-- experiential models of research, analysis, and teaching as a complement to traditional print models

-- collisions between fields staged around shared cultural corpora

--“animating the archive” (open architectures for assembling and analyzing cultural repositories

-- cultural mapping (visualization in problem asking/solving)

-- the capture, study, preservation, and archiving of phenomena weakly captured by traditional approaches to documentation       

                 practices

                -- the meshing of quantitative and qualitative methods within humanistic research

                -- collapsing the boundary lines that separate universities, museums, libraries, and archives as spaces

                   for the production, reproduction, and dissemination of knowledge

             -- the training for new generations of humanities scholars through hands-on work in collaborative settings

Schrank, Brian: Videogames: Avant-garde and Kitsch

Modernist concepts prominent in the 20th century: “form,” “art,” “shock,” “expression,” “kitsch,” “avant-garde,” and of course, “medium,” are increasingly resurrected to address videogames in the 21st. Even within academic discourse these concepts do not seem to be applied from interest in acknowledging the differences in the culture, media, technology of these two eras. To generalize: videogames are usually discussed in the context of art to lift them up from postmodern entertainment into middlebrow art. The problem of thinking in a modernist fashion in a postmodern, technocultural environment is to be blind to the avant-garde maneuvers and play practices being generated today. This talk traces a spectrum of contemporary avant-garde activity around videogames and locates some key obstacles created by contemporary discourse which too often block their view. It is based on my dissertation and a book coauthored by Jay Bolter: Avant-garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture (in contract with MIT Press, forthcoming early 2010).

Tveiten, Oddgeir:  Contact Education – Virtual Classrooms

In 2002 I began taking my students in political communication to a WW2-memorial site and peace education center in the city of Kristiansand, in Southern Norway. In my capacity as R&D coordinator of Stiftelsen Arkivet (www.stiftelsen-arkivet.no), my first task was to develop a website for an institution that thought it did not need one. The result was immediate and solid: The website had a modeling effect on how the institution collectively viewed itself – it became a structuring, organizational narrative in a very short period of time. When I subsequently began introducing my 2^nd year BA students to the local stories of war and occupation found at Stiftelsen Arkivet, a second level of experience took hold: With few exceptions, students were attentive in ways completely different from the usual classroom situation. Touching things, hearing stories of local war atrocities, and wandering around in a basement moist with darkness, recorded water pipes dripping eerie sounds, as you peered into a remodeled Gestapo office – emerged for these students as History education, Democracy education, and Cultural education – of a different kind.

The spatial boundaries and temporal configurations of what I’ve called Contact Education Pedagogy, brings into view the logical sequel – which is the Virtual Classrooms framework, where narrative and hence also rhetoric is fused more consistently with other approaches to media-rich and multimodal learning philosophy.  My next project:

Stiftelsen Arkivet, through its narrative approach, has attracted considerable international attention, among the results an ongoing collaboration with the Robben Island Heritage Museum outside Cape Town, South Africa.

            Some reflections: 

-                   Virtual classroom pedagogy is (of course) already a fact – one might add that its epistemologies are social scientific, humanistic and also technical in orientation. User proliferation runs up against technological and educational standardization - fast becoming a key issue in educational policy.

-                   From the simple to the complex such epistemologies may for instance involve a teachers’ website, a business virtual boardroom, gaming networks or airplane simulators. They may range from the basic to the highly specialized. 

-                   From the teachers’ point of view, technology now enables Virtual Classrooms while its aesthetics and functionalities remain vague in their known pedagogical doxa.

-                   From the point of view that new web standards most likely will emerge, they will steadily drive educational standards towards more technology-intensive and user-friendly modes of teaching and studying.

-                   To the extent that Virtual Classrooms will also improve – they will further blur, remove or rename distinctions between the real, realistic, virtual – and, virtualistic? 

-                   In play is a renaissance technology.

-                   Social media-technologies like Second Life, Qwaq and/or Sirikata – are positioned to (potentially) remove economic, technological, conceptual and proprietary limits currently barring open-source and large-scale technology immersion in education.

-                   Modeling a virtual classroom for teaching and studying Democracy/Civil society has implications beyond its own subject matter.

-                   Stiftelsen Arkivet rests essentially upon a good story – does that story’s authentic quality survive technology nativization?  An empirical or a philosophical issue?