derBlog

I first gave this as a talk at Pecha Kucha Night New Orleans almost two years ago. I’ve been meaning to post my speaking notes and slides ever since. A lot had happened in the intervening time that has influenced my thoughts on play, including spending three weeks in the summer of 2010 with an amazing group of like-minded folks at the Humanities Gaming Institute (a National Endowment of the Humanities Digital Humanities Initiative). Currently, I’m teaching an Honors Colloquium course at Tulane called “Art Games” where I’ve had the opportunity to ponder the purpose of play in depth once again. I hope to write more on the topic here in the coming months, but I wanted to revisit this initial talk. It’s not very polished and has some contradictory statements in it (my thoughts on resolution are a bit unclear). These are just my speaking notes…I’m pretty sure I said a lot more than is here…but I wanted to put it down as a starting point.
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I am an artist. I make my work using various digital media. I spend a lot of time in front of computers. This is a selection of some of my work for you to get a taste of where I’m coming from, but I’m here to talk to you more about process than product.

Tonight, I want to talk to you about the importance of play. I’ve been in academia long enough to feel like I have to have a pretentious talk title with a colon in it, so there it is:

I had a much more pretentious title at first: “On the Importance of Play: Being a Presentation on the Willingness to be Non-productive, the Belief in the Power of Imagination and the Acceptance of Failure as a Learning Process”…but I tried to pare it down for you.

Part of this was inspired by a conversation I had recently with my mother. She wanted to buy a birthday present for one of my sons and wanted to know which Lego kit to buy. I told her past the first build, it didn’t matter, they just became Legos to build things with. That’s when she told me my brother-in-law glues his kids’ Legos together after they build a kit. This really bothered me.

Now, I have a bit of a problem with PowerPoint bullet point. But I couldn’t help it…I needed one for this presentation. It’s a really big one though. My big point is that I believe play to be essential to the creative process. When you stop playing, you put a boundary on your creativity. Sometimes to play, you need to simplify, to find the component parts. And sometimes to do that, you just have to break stuff.

Culturally, I think we have this assumption about resolution: that more is better. Bigger monitors. More polygons. When the truth is that low-res work just as good if not better many times. A lot of my fine art work explores this particular issue.

I think we also need to differentiate between games and play. Games are competitive and have a known goal: to win. Play is more open-ended. Both have rules though.

As a programmer, I deal with algorithms…which is just a fancy term for describing sets of rules or a sequence of actions. This graphic describes the algorithm for solving the top 2 layers of a Rubik’s Cube.

Algorithms can be complex and describe fantastically intricate images. They can as be quite simple and through repetition make something that appears more complex and has a higher degree of resolution. [I think my point here is that smaller, low-res things when repeated and aggregated can form complex, hi-res things. Hi-res itself doesn't have to be complicated and thus unattainable for normal folks. It doesn't have to be rocket science.]

Those same rules can describe something much simpler and through randomization show variation. This is a scribbling algorithm. Each circle uses the same set of rules to draw a different circle. Now, we’re going to implement an algorithm…a set of rules…and play together to see what we come up with.

[At this point in the talk, I attempted to get the crowd involved in an exercise, a living algorithm. First, I threw a red ball into the audience to designate the "SEED" then asked the audience to follow the following three rules. It was a bit chaotic. It didn't quite work...if you've ever attended a Pecha Kucha Night, you know that the time for the presos goes very quickly. I was a bit ambitious to get a crowd standing up and sitting down in rhythm in that short time....but it was a lot of fun to try!]

So, while we’re letting that develop… There are things like Legos that we are used to being in pieces, but let me suggest to that we need to start taking a look closer at things we take for granted as being whole.

One way of doing this is to play with an object’s function and make something new.

Another strategy might be to play with an object’s form. Ignoring its uses to make something new.

So these are some forms that we may have come up with so far, though my circles are aggregating here and not “sitting down” as I’ve asked you to do.

[At this point, I asked everyone to sit down, then I restarted the algorithm, this time throwing two balls into the audience as seeds.]

Now, back to the forms that can arise from our set of rules. By making small changes…to the shape for instance… we can repeat the rules and have a variety of outcomes.

Even more variation by making minor adjustments. This is the same set of rules. I’ve just added color and size as a variable. So you can see that very minor changes have big effects.

And that bring us back to the Legos. Legos are all about the potential of play. The potential for variety through repetition at a pretty low resolution. For me, the most essential thing about Legos is their capacity to come apart.

[I stopped the "living algorithm" at this point and asked everyone to be seated.]

I leave you with a quote from Jasper Johns:

Thanks for playing!

Once again, this December the Center for Computational Science at Tulane hosted a “Computational Art Show.” This is the second year in a row that they’ve hosted this event. Last year, I found out the day of the one-day affair and was able to arrange my schedule so that I could attend. This year, I didn’t find out till the week after, so I can’t even give a first-hand account of the show. It’s a shame really. This is exactly the sort of thing that I’d love to see more of at Tulane…but not in its current formation. In fact, it seems to do more dis-service to the ideals of interdisciplinarity and collaboration that I think it should represent than anything.

As I say, I didn’t get to see the actual show, so all I have to go on is a short blurb with video posted by the Tulane NewWave and a web page that has images and descriptions of several of the pieces in the show. While I agree with the basic assertion concerning the need for data visualization proffered by director of the Center (and de facto curator for the show), Ricardo Cortez  (“The computer codes give you back a bunch of numbers and you want to visualize what’s happening. … You can’t do that by looking at numbers or data. You have to look at figures or pictures.”), his further comments make it very difficult to know how to approach the work. Here is an excerpt from the NewWave notice:

In preparing work to be displayed in the art show, researchers are given the liberty to add an aesthetic element to the presentations, says Cortez, who also is a Duren Professor in the mathematics department.

“I think it’s freeing for scientists to do that because for once you don’t have to be accurate scientifically,” he says. “If my aim is to produce an appealing picture, I can do that.”

I know several data visualization professionals who would choke on their morning Wheaties if they read this quote. Right off the bat, any usefulness of the work as visualization is diminished. If the images aren’t accurate, then their usefulness in understanding the data is compromised. In other words, they can’t be trusted (then again, no image can be, but that’s another essay). I am all for taking liberties in the name of aesthetics, but if the purpose is to understand the data better, then those aesthetic choices must be in service of the data. I’m just not sure when aesthetics became an excuse for a lack of accuracy.

Of course, the flip-side of this discussion would be to meet these images as images, not as a representation of any particular data. Before doing so though, I’ll point out that I do not think this is what the students involved intended. If you read the descriptions of individual projects, it is clear that these are meant to be considered in relation to their data sets not as individual artifacts. If, however, we agree that the images have been relieved of the burden of burden of scientific accuracy, then what are we left with? Unfortunately, not much.

One of my main aesthetic criticisms of this work is the over-reliance on the default chromatic “rainbow” color palette. I say “default” because without really knowing what applications they’re using, I can’t say for sure, but it feels like a standard output setting for statistical analysis software. Anyone who has ever skimmed an Edward Tufte book would think twice before using this color palette. It might be a good for quickly understanding variations in data (which we’ve already established we aren’t interested in, right?) but as an aesthetic choice, it leaves something to be desired.

Really, the problem in the default output of a statistical analysis program is that it puts the emphasis on the numbers…or rather some overwrought visual understanding of the numbers. There is no subtlety here! But that brings us back to the data again. There is some underlying assumption that the beauty is in the data itself and so it doesn’t need the aid of aesthetic choices. Of course, that viewpoint is antithetical to Cortez’ description of the show which leaves us in a bit of a conundrum.

Of the images posted on the show’s web page, the one I’ve posted at the top of the page here by Priya Shilpa Boindala is the only one I find visually interesting in its own right. It could be a digital print or a pen and ink drawing, and it doesn’t matter to me that its represents the  “collective dynamics of microorganisms in viscous flow” though that fact adds some interest…if only I knew I could trust it as a representation of that fact… Most of the others seem to have very little intervention on the part of the students, and  the one image that clearly has been manipulated could have used some editorial guidance.

In the end, I wish that Cortez and his associates would have reached beyond their own domain to engage in a dialogue with the Art Department perhaps. We may not be data visualization experts, but we do have a bit of experience in the aesthetics department. I, for one, am quite sure that I am often too focused on my own work and would welcome the chance to collaborate with mathematicians and engineers. The possibilities of collaboration might just turn an event that is seen as lagniappe for one department into a richer experience for our students and ourselves as artists and researchers across a much larger section of the university.

/der

I blogged this project a while back, but they’ve got a new video and you can buy kits now to trick out your bike so I thought I’d post again. Cool. Elegant. Technology. Bikes! What more could you want?

Bright Bike site. Nice holiday gift for your urban bike geek friends!

Bright Bike v2.0 from Michael Mandiberg on Vimeo.

RadioTweet was born out of necessity, as they say…or at least out of a desire to figure out how and why a new technology (Twitter in this case) might work for a particular purpose. My friend, Derek, DJs on WTUL, Tulane’s radio station, every other week…among the many other things that he does… He’s been co-hosting “Stage and Screen” for almost 15 years (FYI: Sunday mornings…currently scheduled at 10am). Last spring, several of us had begun to use Twitter in earnest and Derek began to wonder how he could use it in tandem with his show.

The DJs at WTUL already log each track that they play as part of internet streaming licensing agreements (you can listen to WTUL live on the web here). WTUL uses a web service called Radioactivity to take care of this task. A bonus of the need to log each track is that playlists can then be easily shared with your audience. So you can see all of WTUL’s playlists posted on their Radioactivity page where you can search by date or by show.

So, Derek was already logging his show, the question was how to wire this up with Twitter. My answer was to sit down and write RadioTweet.

Not a lot of planning went into this. I happened to be using Processing for some other projects and had been looking at some of the Java libraries for Twitter to see how easy they might be to implement in Processing. Derek’s problem of posting his playlist to Twitter just gave me the opportunity to try it on a real problem.

After a couple of tries…going back and forth between screen scraping the data and using the RSS feed (which to this day breaks on a regular basis)…we got something that is stable and workable. Its not pretty, but it does the job it needs to do. Check out Derek’s Twitter feed every other week and you’ll be greeted with a stream of Tweets listing each track that he’s playing (…sometimes to the chagrin of some of his regular followers!). We know that it is pretty successful because we can track the bit.ly link that we use in the Tweet and see the spikes every two weeks (click the image bellow to see it bigger):

Again, we’re not talking about thousands upon thousands of clicks here, but its a noticeable tick every two weeks. And I think that is my point here. Software development doesn’t always have to be for the next greatest iPhone app or a multi-platform, immersive game or even another word processing clone…or for that matter even a website… Sometimes, it can just be a down-and-dirty answer to a problem that is right in front of you, right now.

I think this concept of homemade software really hit home to me when I was reading Visualizing Data by Ben Fry (the co-creator of Processing). Several times in the book, he writes a short program to manipulate some data. The program is only used once for a very specific thing. Almost more than anything, this concept seemed very empowering to me (though the rest of the book is very cool!). Really, this is the core of the Processing philosophy as well: make your own tools. Processing is primarily concerned with visual representations (which is why I use it in my own work and in my classes), but it…or Flash…or any other language you happen to know…can be used for much less glamorous, if every bit as useful, stuff.

Of course, this requires some programming literacy, and its been this particular thought pattern that has convinced me of the the need for programming literacy. You can see the popularity of physical production skills in the DIY/Maker movements of the last couple of years. The DIY software movement is gaining ground as well, but is still far behind…and perhaps a little bit more difficult to explain and justify to those without any programming experience. But hopefully little projects like RadioTweet will show when and where homemade software might be useful and inspire some folks to explore programming for themselves.

RadioTweet may have now run its course. Radioactivity is testing a Twitter feed of the WTUL playlist. We’ll have to see if their implementation serves the DJs at the station. Really, even more than all the DJs at the station, we’ll have to see if it serves Derek. Because it was Derek’s problem that it was built to solve in the first place…and if he has his way, there will probably be another version of RadioTweet coming in the future (he’s asking for Facebook integration in the next revision…).

/der

I’ve seen chainless bikes before, but this on dispenses with the bottom tube as well. That + the placement of the peddles makes me wonder what it would ride like. You think it pivots at the top tube/front fork?

Hmm….

I’ve been meaning to write this post for over a month…ever since SIGGRAPH. I’ve titled it like a doctoral thesis, big words and colons, more to satirize the endemic navel-gazing of modern academia than anything, but the tension between making (knowledge, in this case) and teaching has certainly been at the forefront of my thoughts in the last several months. Questions of what an “instructional technologist” should be doing, wrestling with my own identity as a teacher and a trainer (two different things, I think), not to mention as an artist…all have made for an interesting ongoing–unfinished–inner dialogue.

One central question has been the place of technology in education. For years, I’ve explained my position as “teaching teachers to teach better with technology.” Aside from the obvious alliterative enjoyment of such a turn of phrase, what it really came down to was helping faculty members to communicate better with their students…or at least to communicate less badly…using technology (chalk to computers). Breaking it down further, it often came down to trying to rescue really bad PowerPoint presentations. However, at some point, even this had been done. I’d reached a level of audience saturation. This is common among all instructional technology groups at institutions of higher learning.

Of course, thanks to Moore’s Law…and Mr. Bill…there’s always another version of PowerPoint or some other new technology (blogging? Twitter? etc.) to keep us going. What we have going could be described as the technology-academia complex. We believe that we have to keep up with the ways in which our students communicate or somehow we’ll be left behind. In my opinion, the crisis is not in how we deliver our teaching as much as it is in what we are delivering and how we’re selling it, but that’s for another time…

Now, back to SIGGRAPH and the real reason for this post. Among the many mind-blowing things I saw at SIGGRAPH this year was a presentation on a project out of Ohio State University called “Synchronous Objects for One Flat thing, reproduced.” One Flat Thing was a dance choreographed by William Forsythe back in 2000. Working with Forsythe and a host of others, Maria Palazzi and Norah Zuniga Shaw, both from OSU, created “Synchronous Objects,” a project that takes the dance as data then analyzes and visualizes it in an effort to “reveal the interlocking systems of organization in the choreography.”

What this team has built though is more than just an analysis of a form; they’ve built a new way of understanding choreography, not just a visualization of data but new knowledge, new pathways of thinking. In other words, this is not just about teaching the dance (pedagogy) but about the production of new forms and new understandings (epistemology). And none of it could have been done without digital technologies.

I’ve come back to Synchronous Objects several times since SIGGRAPH. I think it offers a model for what “instructional technology” should be: an instrument of instruction. This gives instructional technology the latitude to be both pedagogical in the sense that it can be used as a tool for teaching, but it also, and I think more importantly, allows it to be a constructor of new knowledge from within that pedagogy.

As educators, we sometimes forget that the classroom can be a collaborative, productive environment. The sciences do this better than the humanities. University labs produce new knowledge. There is room for the production of new knowledge in the humanities as well. “Synchronous Objects” demonstrates this. What kind of change in academic culture would it take for such a goal to become widespread though? Is it the administration? the faculty? the students? all of the above?

And what role can instructional technology play? Certainly, it is not about better PowerPoint presos. Or at least, that is but a small part of the answer. Tulane has been involved in a couple of projects that begin to broach the possibilities although mostly from the perspective of a University service. As long as a project is defined in terms of a client relationship, the possibilities will always be compromised because it will be seen as a matter of content and delivery. Instead of synthesis, it will always focus on translation. “Synchronous Objects” isn’t about recording, display or demonstration. It is about revelation, a remarkable “Eureka!” of a moment where interdisciplinary collaboration has produced new ways of seeing. This one is going in the bookmark file, to be revisited often as a reminder of the possibilities.

/david

So, I’ve been interested lately in trying to create some visualizations, specifically to hang in the front of the ILC’s offices here in the Tulane’s library. After spending some time wandering through Tulane’s website, I found some data to play with. The problem is that the data has already really been parsed, so the questions have already been asked and answered. There’s no way to cross-reference data, for instance.

I’m starting to ask around though and have some promising leads to more granular/raw data that might prove more interesting. In the meantime, I went ahead and created the map above. It shows geographically where the freshman class of 2008 came from. I’m not really satisfied with it, but I think it works as a proof of concept. I think being able to unroll a poster in front of someone might show them the concreteness of the project. We’ll see…

In the mean time, tell me what you think of this poster. And let me know what kind of questions you’d like to ask of student population data. I’ll try to post a picture of the poster itself soon….if I can remember to bring in my camera…

/der

So, I started back at Tulane’s Innovative Learning Center today. It’s a sort of a homecoming for me. I helped to build this center and spent 7 years here before going back to school full-time to work on my MFA. The last year was spent as an adjunct in the Art Department. I love teaching, but the economic downturn dried up all of the full-time teaching gigs I was hoping for, and it happened that the ILC needed an Instructional Technologist again.

Really, it’s a great fit. I still get to teach in the Art Department (the one class that I’d contracted for), and I get to work on design & development projects around the University. I’m in the classroom as a practicing teacher (micro) and working with other faculty on projects that improve their classrooms (macro). I’m really excited about it, and I’ll share some of the projects that I’m going to be working on in coming posts. But first…

As I come back to the ILC, the Innovative Learning Center, as the instructional technologist charged with innovation, I’ve been pondering just what it is I’m supposed to be doing. What exactly is this “innovative” thing of which they speak? “Innovative” sounds all perky and cutting edge. It sounds like a widget built solely to feed a consumer’s lust for the new. It probably smells like red leather and costs twice as much as last season’s. It probably starts with a lower-case “i” and ends with a decimal point number…definitely above 1.0.

Is this the “innovative” thing that I’ve been charged with? And how does that fit into an educational setting? I have a real problem with casting education as business. (Yes, I understand the fiscal realities of an institution of higher education, but I also believe that those realities do not justify the positioning of that institution as just another version of the Gap with ideas instead of jeans for sale.) And so the thought of introducing newness for newness sake sends me reeling.

Of course, nothing I’m saying here is new [sic] in any way. These things have been said for many years, in the ILC and elsewhere (not always heeded by the institution…), but as I said, I find myself in the ILC anew. So I am pondering these issues once again, trying to understand where my own mission lies within this position in this center and this institution in particular.

In an attempt to get a handle on this, I tried going back to a basic dictionary definition. Of course, “innovative” is one of those self-reflexive words that refers back to its verb root, “innovate.” The basic definition goes something like this: “to introduce (something new) for or as if for the first time.” This makes sense to me in that I’ve always felt like one of the primary jobs of an instructional technologist (at least here at Tulane) is to help make introductions….connections between people, between people and technologies, and between the technologies themselves. The part phrase that I like a lot in that definition is the “for or as if for the first time.” (emphasis mine)

From this perspective, being “innovative” then does not mean that you have to be the first to do something. It means that you need to treat everything as if it were new…look at it as if you’ve never seen it before and try to figure out how it might be useful to you or those around you. Sometimes these new things aren’t very useful by themselves but paired with other things become very interesting.

The one thing I know that I won’t be doing is attempting to use the archaic definition of innovative: to alter. The institution seems too big (and self-absorbed). Reformation will come from the ground up as faculty and students change their habits (and they are changing). And if institutional reformation doesn’t come, then the institution will probably cease to exist (at least in its present form….but that’s for another post….). I’m looking forward to just looking at things anew…new to me at least and maybe being introduced to or making some introductions “as if for the first time.”

/der

Here’s one more student video from the first class. No one from the second class was interested in posting their work. (hmmm…) That’s one of the problems with many students these days…they don’t see their work as having purpose or life beyond a given class. Perhaps that’s just teaching art in a liberal arts setting where most of my students will only ever take one art class…but that’s a discussion for another post. Here’s the last video. This time on Vimeo since it exceeds the 10 minute limit set on YouTube:

How to Kick Ass