ecopolis

The Bedazzle Studios has directed a movie entirely shooted inside Second Life. It all started from Eric Call, senior artist at Linden Lab, that came across the story of Silver Bells and Golden Spurs in a book of cowboy poetry several years ago, then he decided to shoot it. He started realizing a screen play adaptation and creating some of the stanza of the film, but it was too big to realize it alone. One day one of Linden Lab’s engineers demoed a QuickTime movie applied to an avatar face mesh and Eric realized that he could try to shoot his cowboy movie using this new Second Life’s feature.

So it started the making of the first movie shooted inside Second Life. Eric started the research phase made of visits to several mining and ghost towns in the Sierra Nevada to gather reference material and textures for the production and readings of books and surfingon the Internet to find images of the right buildings, clothing and props.
Then he needed some help and he find it by the Bedazzle Studios artists for recreation of the film.

On the “making page” of the film Eric Call explains deeply all the process, talking also about the research goals that he saw during the production phase that could serve as a proof of concept for several features, particularly speech emulation.

Also he talks about the acting of the avatars: “All of the actors were given a library of character animations they could manipulate through control scripts, and I directed them to perform specific actions during video capture. This allowed them some creative freedom so they could personalize their character, and at the same time assured me that I’d get the kind of actions I wanted.”

And about the goals: “Uncovering bugs, developing techniques for building and texturing, and revealing areas for improvement are just a few of the benefits to Linden Lab. Bells and Spurs sets new goals for quality and creativity in resident creations. It promotes a level of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that will empower residents to use more of Second Life’s capabilities.”

Cristophe Bruno is a french artist always reflecting in his works about communication and language. In his last work logo.hallucination, he monitors the web trough a pattern recognition software, that looks for logo copyright infringements. We talk about privatization of the glance, mash up aesthetic and personal profile.

ECO: What do you mean with “privatization of the glance”?
CB: The idea of “privatization of the glance” comes from a general tendancy that can be perceived in the transition from market capitalism to network capitalism. At first, there is a postmodernist “dematerialization” phase, which unveils the emergence of libertarian ideals of sharing and freedom but ends up with commodification of the ultimate “atoms” of human relations ; this is what happenened in the realm of language with The Google Adwords Happening. The post-fordist ideas that are at play in the economic dynamics of global structures like Google show the rise of 2.0 markets for these networked commodities involving “long tails” phenomenons (the Adwords/Adsense system for instance). According to contemporary graph theory (cf Barabasi: Linked), the “long tail” (or web 2.0 or “aristocratic network”) phenomenon is the mode according to which globalization is achieved in a closed unregulated networked ecosystem ; by definition it is an extension of the concept of the fordist object to the globality and variety of the human desires.

The new stake of capitalism is the control of these “global objects” through what I called “colonization of intimacy”: for instance when they bought Blogger, Google took a strong position towards the control of Language as a global 2.0 object, because they took hold of the gold mine of mankind’s intimacy.

Finally, there is an unavoidable rematerialization phase because this 2.0 trend invades all sectors of economy. Here there are some limitations because strictly speaking, 2.0 markets need low storage costs, typical of the dematerialization phase, cf: The Long Tail – but this becomes less and less important as “on demand” production increases.

In the panoptic environment of networked capitalism, the question of the accounting of glance (cf for instance a piece of mine from 2001, Fascinum) is quite similar to the question of the accounting of language introduced by Google; and the question of privatization of the glance arises then quite naturally.

It is also worth to say here that we cannot think of the Web as separated from other media phenomenons. The Web – and specifically Web 2.0 – allowed the final implementation of society of control, but the whole enslavement mechanism (which I called “taylorization of speech”) involves the spectacular society (TV, Web 1.0…) as well. In this approach I tend to consider that the main transition is not the rise of the Web, but the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, contemporary to 911. Web 2.0 is not just the next craze of the Internet. If you digg a little bit you realize that the ideology of Web 2.0 (scale-free networks theory of Barabasi, small worlds, rich get richer, long tail…) is nothing but the updated neoclassical theory of value (Walras, Pareto etc.). The law of diminishing marginal utility or Pareto law, which is just the precursor of the long tail, was an epistemological break with the classical economy (Smith, Ricardo, Marx) based on the labor theory of value. This epistemological cut is far from being digested…

ECO: Is the mash up the new aesthetic of the interconnected global world?
CB: Let me quote Walter Benjamin in the Epilogue of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“, which deals precisely with the question of mash up and aesthetics:

“The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its *Fuhrer* cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values.”

The decay of the aura of the object has several developments. The first one was the “transfiguration of the commonplace” (cf Danto) and the antidialectic cut performed by Pop Art towards the concept of “absolute merchandise” (cf Baudrillard: “De la marchandise absolue”).

The second one is the postfordist web 2.0 phenomenon – ie the mashup – which consists in a fake return of the aura of the object. According to the “long tail” rule, the object is supposed to match the intimate desire of each individual. In this adaptation of markets to the individuals one may ask if there isn’t a breakdown of the reproductibility of the object, that one could be perceived as a return of the aura of the object. Indeed, in the limit of perfect mashup, each object is now meant to become not-duplicable – not because of a lack of technology, but because it is made to be adapted to one individual only. But in fact, because capitalism has enter this new 2.0 phase, reproductibility is still here but has reached a new stage: what is now reproducible is the experience of the encounter consumer-object, and not only the object alone ; capitalism is now supposedly able to massively produce not only objects, but indefinitely many encounters between subjects and objects (for instance in the Google Adwords Happening, this encounter is defined by the click on the ad, which is precisely the unit – ie the root reproducible element – on which the whole Adword economic system is based). The experience of consumption (and its affects) has also become an act of production that enters the optimization process of capitalism 2.0.

So we have a fake return of the aura of the object, and a decay of the aura of the performative (the encounter which becomes reproducible). The paradox that lies in Benjamin’s text enters new developments: in the same way as the aura was reinjected into the fordist object by Pop Art, the aura of the HIC ET NUNC at the postfordist globalized era is reinjected into global brands (for instance Google as the brand of Language ..) whose aim is to be present EVERYWHERE EVERYTIME in the performative life of individuals and to control global 2.0 markets, a stage which was not totally reached in the fordist era where there was still some large opaque (ie not-yet-colonized) regions in the space of intimacy. This EVERYWHERE EVERYTIME, as opposed to the HIC ET NUNC, is nothing but the definition of the privatization of the glance.

ECO: What do you think about the “informatic profile” of every web citizen? In a way it depends on the pattern recognition algoritm that is used….Does it means my pubblic web image depends on values decided by ….Google?
CB: Sure but behind this question lies another one which is more tricky. It is definitely a problem that a private company may tune their algorithm so that the image of an individual would in a way reflect more the criteria of the company than the identity of the individual… By the way this is a very general and universal property of the concept of “image”, that computer science will not be able to solve; there is no objectivity here but instead an interplay between subjectivities (the subjectivity of those who wrote the program in that case).

What these companies want when they use pattern recognition to decide for instance if they are going to grant you a loan, is to have the most reliable universal method to predict your behaviour and evaluate their risk. Because there is no such universal theory, they have to use modelizations which depend on some arbitrary considerations and parameters and hence they have to make arbitrary choices. Now a problem arises when the method used is falsely claimed to be indeed universal and true. This is what is actually happening nowadays with the current expansion of technologies of control and there is a great danger that we are lead to a totalitarian mechanism.

But there is also a paradox. At some point, companies have in fact no interest in cheating and pretending they have a universal scientific method. This attitude is actually a modernist attitude which has been outdated by postmodernity. Any company that would do that takes the risk of being sooner or later suspected and despised. Moreover by imposing a normativity they lose track of what lies ouside the norm. Since what lies ouside the norm may become the seed of the markets of the future, this may reveal to be a self-contradictory strategy. In a 2.0 globalized world, if they put barriers to freedom, they are just unable to optimize the whole process because they lose data!

This is exactely what a company like Google understood. Google has a VERY long term stategy. They keep promoting freedom of speech and avoid any normative positionning because they know that this attitude is the basis for the optimization of their adwords/adsense system which is a neverending process. This is the paradox: freedom of speech has become a tool of totalitarianism (cf Benjamin text) and instead of modernist totalitarianism we are witnessing the rise of totalitarianism of the hypermodernity. This trend is a large scale trend. As the world-system reaches its EXTERNAL limitations (depletion of natural resources, expected end of low-cost labour, the end of the ideology of liberalism, the fading of desire, etc.), capitalism tries to relaunch its machinery by pushing back its INTERNAL limits. Thus freedom of speech is revealed to be the prerequisite for the scientific colonization of intimacy as well as collective hallucination is the prerequisite for the privatization if the glance.

THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Adorno-for-idiots) by Andrew Keen.

1. The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism’s most seductive delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology — in the form of blogs, wikis and podcasts — will enable everyone to become widely read writers, journalists, movie directors and music artists. It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has something interesting to say.

2. The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism. “Good taste” is, as Adorno never tired of telling us, undemocratic. Taste must reside with an elite (“truth makers”) of historically progressive cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless.

3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular space between Frankfurt, Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology threatens to undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a 21st century version of “The Castle” or “The Library of Babel”. This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction. But real life, like art, shouldn’t be fantasy; it shouldn’t be fiction.

4. A particularly unfashionable thought: big media is not bad media. The big media engine of the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and publishing houses has discovered and branded great 20th century popular artists of such as Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald (the “Vertigo” three). It is most unlikely that citizen media will have the marketing skills to discover and brand creative artists of equivalent prodigy.

5. Let’s think differently about George Orwell. Apple’s iconic 1984 Super Bowl commercial is true: 1984 will not be like Nineteen Eighty-Four the message went. Yes, the “truth”
about the digital future will be the absence of the Orwellian Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth. Orwell’s dystopia is the dictatorship of the State; the Web 2.0 dystopia is the dictatorship of the author. In the digital future, everyone will think they are Orwell (the movie might be called: Being George Orwell).

6. Digital utopian economists Chris Anderson have invented a theoretically flattened market that they have christened the “Long Tail”. It is a Hayekian cottage market of small media producers industriously trading with one another. But Anderson’s “Long Tail” is really a long tale. The real economic future is something akin to Google — a vertiginous media world in which content and advertising become so indistinguishable that they become one and the same (more grist to that Frankfurt-Prague-BuenosAires triangle).

7. As always, today’s pornography reveals tomorrow’s media. The future of general media content, the place culture is going, is Voyeurweb.com: the convergence of self-authored shamelessness, narcissism and vulgarity — a self-argument in favor of censorship. As Adorno liked to remind us, we have a responsibility to protect people from their worst impulses. If people aren’t able to censor their worst instincts, then they need to be censored by others wiser and more disciplined than themselves.

8. There is something of the philosophical assumptions of early Marx and Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in its holy trinity of online community, individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership. Most of all, it’s in the marriage of abstract theory and absolute faith in the virtue of human nature that lends the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual Casanovas like young Marx and Rousseau.

9. How to resist digital utopianism? Orwell’s focus on language is the most effective antidote. The digital utopians needs to be fought word-for-word, phrase-by-phrase, delusion-by-delusion. As an opening gambit, let’s focus on the meaning of four key words in the digital utopian lexicon: a) author b) audience c) community d) elitism.

10. The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development will be social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and in continual flux. Everything will be in motion; everything will be opinion. This social vertigo of ubiquitous opinion was recognized by Plato. That’s why he was of the opinion that opinionated artists should be banned from his
Republic.

Cultuur 2.0 is a 2-day international conference and laboratory to introduce a Web 2.0 mindset into the creative processes and strategies of cultural institutions.
Cultuur 2.0 borrows from Web 2.0, the new generation of internet applications and practice that emphasize generating, sharing and classifying content, collective intelligence, collaboration, sharing, reviewing, ranking, rating, and empowering users. In which ways can such developments be applied in the cultural sector? Will cultural institutions generate other forms of content or approaches by embracing the 2.0 mindset and connecting to the active internet user – or would this mean the end of culture as we know it?

More information about the programme and the speakers you can find here.

Interview wirth Dmytri Kleiner, an anarchist hacker and a co-founder of Telekommunisten, a worker-owned technology company specialising in telephone systems. It’s a biref talk inspired by the article InfoEnclosure 2.0, wroted for the Mute magazine.

ECO: When a hype end to be useful to engage people on a new technology and become rather a way to improve corporate investement?
Dmytri Kleiner: Finance Capital is primarily interested in profit, thus it will always chose the most potentially profitable investment even when the end result is not the most useful. It is for this reason that Investment flows to centralized approaches, such as those characterized by Web 2.0, and not Peer-to-peer solutions.

ECO: Investment flows prefers controls to innovation?
DK: When the source of that Investment is private profit-seeking finance capital, yes. Profit depends on the extraction of surplus value, which requires control.
Innovation is rarely funded by venture capital, usually simply exploited by it after the fact.However, other more social kinds of investment are possible, such as what I suggest in venture communism.

ECO: Web 2.0 means also a lot of personal datas collected by few companies, and the digital realm is just a part, because for example ChoicePoint (http://www.choicepoint.com/index.html) does the same in the real world, but why do the state need all this datas?
DK: Well, the State “needs” this to carry out it’s central task of controlling and terrorizing the people on behalf of the rich. To facilitate then transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. This includes both using data to create barriers to opportunities, such as Jobs, health insurance, homes, etc, but also insure than no-one can escape the “long arm of the law.” The primary purpose of the law itself being to terrorize the poor into submission.

In other words reduce access to opportunities to ensure that the poor stay poor, and thus have no choice but to sell their labour to the rich and no leverage with which to demand any more than subsistence as there wage.

ECO: The primary purpose of the law itself wasn’t “being to terrorize”, when did it switched his pourpose?
DK: It has never switched, it has always been so. The law is created and enforced from above by the State and the private interests that it serves. It’s purpose is to legitimize the use of force, primarily to protect private property.

ECO: The interfaces and the possibilities of Web 2.0 application, talking about real relation, are quite near to a karaoke rather than real cultural exchange, instead of every one is an expert digital technology it became everyone is a Schizophrenic, with “personal” soundtracks and Ronnie McDonald as”friend”? Is there a problem of tools or the net is wide but superficial?
DK: I’m not sure about this. It is true that in general many people, especially in suburban communities, live quite isolated, culturally bankrupt lives, thus it should be no surprise that this is expressed on-line in that the cultural exchange is generally banal and relationships in on-line communities are often artificial and superficial. It is even true, to a point, that the tools and context available online facilitates this banality and false community. However, I am inclined to believe that it is the fact that the users are scarred by the emptiness of suburban consumerist culture and thus the online communities just give us a window into a degraded society. I believe participating in online communities will reduce isolation and increase cultural diversity, but this can not happen over night.

ECO: can you describe the telekommunisten project?
DK: telekommunisten is a part of the venture communism project. Starting from the belief that political change can only follow a change in the mode of production, venture communism is an attempt to create a mode of production that will expand socialism by reducing the labour available to be exploited by property.
We have formed a small technology company that is completely worker-owned, and starting with no money of our own, nor any external financing, we have launched a long distance calling product called Dialstation.

If the project succeeds, it will enable us to expand our own activities, as well as helping others attempt similar efforts to build a workers-controlled economy.

ECO: what do you mean exactly with a “mode of production that will expand socialism by reducing the labour available to be exploited by property“?
DK: Socialism is defined as a mode of production where the workers own the means of production, and especially the final product.By withholding our labour from Capitalists and instead forming our own worker-owned enterprises we expand Socialism.
The more labour withheld from Capitalists, the less they are able to exploit.

www.telekommunisten.net

Google Inc. said on Wednesday unifing its different Web search services into one “Universal Search” service that will show Web sites, news, video and other results on one page.

This new features means that on a single page, without surfing between Google.video, Goggle.images, etc….. the users will diplay on a single page different media for every subject related to their research.

Also there’ll be a automatic translate engine, that will translate the reasearch in other languages, and then translate back the results, so the web will be broader for the users of the selected languages.

via Reuters

I means… the intuition is great. Life is a web of organisms. So let’s network it, and let’s Life be more accesible and comprehensible to every one. Maybe new generation will be more aware about the fragility of our planet.

From Wikipedia:
Intertwingularity is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.

Nelson wrote in Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974):
“Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged, people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.”