Paper #3 - [DIS 2014] Encouraging Ambiguous Experience: Guides for Personal Meaning Making

This paper looks at the idea of creating pieces or works that are intentionally ambiguous, that allow the user/viewer/reader to create their own meaning through interacting with the work. The main way it does this is by looking at project undertaken by the author, wherein a class was tasked with engaging with Gertrude Stein's collection of prose poems Tender Buttons (1914) through the mediating mechanism of a notebook filled with prompt-style questions and gridded space for drawings. The paper explores whether this mediation of the students' engagement with the text was helpful or intrusive - it is notable that the response from the class is mixed, as some found it helpful at guiding them through, some found that it blocked or waylaid their personal experience of the work, and others found the mediating notebook to be more of an engagement than the work itself [1].

I found this paper particularly intriguing because it engages with something I've been thinking about a lot recently, which is the fact that often a large part of the enjoyment I get from a work, be it a book, a film, a piece of art or even an installation or interactive piece, is in the exploration and personal interpretation of it, the fact that I have to grapple with it in order to unearth or tease out meaning. More parochial works, works that assume an average reader and prescribe a certain reading approach, what Umberto Eco and others refer to as "closed" works [2], lack something for me. I enjoy reading above my own presumed reading level, so to speak. I enjoy encountering something I do not understand, that I must wrestle understanding from as an active participant.

The Stein quotes used in the paper reminded me of an artist I mentioned in the previous post, Katie Rose Pipkin. Her work in generative art is highly ambiguous by its very nature, and all the more intriguing to me for it. I was particularly reminded of a curatorial chapbook collection of algorithmically-generated poetry she released last year, picking figs in the ˚̥̞̞̽̽ͯ garden while my world eats Itself.  The work is initially alienating - it throws the reader - and yet attempting to wrestle meaning from an essentially meaningless thing is the very intent of the collection. It is consciously asking us whether these machine-written poems are any less compelling or meaningful than those with a real human mind behind them [3].

inflorescence.city, another of her collaborations with Loren Schmidt, also calls to mind a similar feeling, and that aspect of "thrownness" mentioned in the paper at hand, the idea of a work plunging the audience into a seemingly fully-realised world with little explanation, and have that feeling of disorientation be a conscious affect. This is something present in some of my favourite novels by authors like William Gibson and China Miéville, who's books force the reader to learn the language of the world in order to understand the novel, and Umberto Eco, who's collection of semiotic essays The Role of the Reader: Exploration of the Semiotics of Texts (1979) is referenced in the paper itself.

China Miéville has mentioned in interviews his love of pulp surrealism in particular, in which there is "radical alienation," the "aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation," and an attempt to "constantly surprise the reader" [4].

See also this BBC book club interview with Miéville: http://bbc.in/1kQFj8r

The fact that there is similar thinking in more multidisciplinary fields such as those dealt with at conferences such as DIS is important to me, as ambiguous experiences, those that not merely ask for but require the active exploration by and participation of the audience, are for more interesting and vital from my point of view than more "closed," packaged, and mediated work which tends to proscribe broad or conflicting interpretations.

[1] Daniel Carter. 2014. Encouraging ambiguous experience: guides for personal meaning making. In Proceedings of the 2014 companion publication on Designing interactive systems (DIS Companion '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 61-64. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598784.2602782

[2] Eco, U. The Role of the Reader: Exploration of the Semiotics of Texts. Indiana UP, Bloomington, 1979.

[3] Pipkin, K. R. picking figs in the ˚̥̞̞̽̽ͯ garden while my world eats Itself. Self-published, 2015. Available online at https://katierose.itch.io/picking-figs

[4] Marshall, R. The Road to Perdido: An Interview with China Miéville. 2003. Accessed 25/02/2016, available at http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville.html

Paper #2 - [DIS 2014] Crafting Code at the Demo-scene

This paper [1] was more high-level than the previous, concerned with looking at the practice of coding as craftsmanship, making special reference to the way sociologist Richard Sennett approaches the subject [2] as a broader definition that can cover not just manual labour, but the work of programmers, doctors, artists, and so on; craftsmanship as skill not merely in making things by hand, but as artistry in a particular craft no matter the medium. The paper looks at the demo-scene, wherein coders use their skills to create audiovisual art, and accesses the idea of coding as craft by explicating how the act and practice of coding plays into the ideas of craft engagement, craftsmanship rhythm, and craftsman expressivity.

What drew me to this paper, and why its content interests me, is the fact that I have been following a number of creative individuals for a year or more now who fit this descriptor of the coder as craftsman, who are skilled coders that use code as an expressive tool, as an artistic medium in and of itself. The contribution of this paper, while building on previous work such as Sennett's, is doubtless important. The broad field of modern art still struggles with the idea of digital objects created with code as art (for example, critics and publications are always grappling with the idea of games as art, often in profoundly wrong-headed ways that try to insist that games be closer to films, or art installations, or what have you), but I find the work of these individuals just as compelling as more traditional forms, and this paper supports a sense I've been getting about how they work and the new ways in which I'm beginning to look at coding as a result.

One of my favourites is Katie Rose Pipkin, an artist who started out in fine art but has since moved into creating twitter bots, data art, and other web-based digital artifacts. While her work is often reliant on generative methods and randomness, there is an undeniable personality to it all, and concern with certain recurrent pieces of imagery or subject material - hallmarks of well-crafted art.

catalpa
certella arfottia pic.twitter.com/2bfpWpI9J6

— moth generator (@mothgenerator) February 19, 2016

(an example of Katie's moth generator twitter bot, a collaboration with Loren Schmidt)

(a video diary of Katie's initial explorations in maxmsp, showing the intersection of coding, hardware, craftsmanship, practice, and artistic expression. Note the personification of the digital, of the programmatic - this is a very Katie thing)

See also this talk she gave at Pecha Kucha Austin, wherein she begins by linking fine art illustration to the idea of information storage.

The paper also made me think of game designer Brendon Chung, who designs independently under the banner of Blendo Games. In designing his upcoming game Quadrilateral Cowboy, he's taken to live-streaming and recording his process. Look at any recent video on his YouTube channel, and you get a sense of him as a craftsman expressing himself artistically, albeit through C++, Blender, and the Dark Radiant engine. All the elements talked about in the paper are there: engagement, rhythm, and expressivity.

[1] Nicolai Brodersen Hansen, Rikke Toft Nørgård, and Kim Halskov. 2014. Crafting code at the demo-scene. In Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems (DIS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 35-38. DOI=http://dx.doi.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2598510.2598526

[2] Sennett, R. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008

Paper #1 - [DIS 2012] Discursive Navigation of Online News

This paper was concerned with developing a new way in which to think about and implement a new way of navigating online news that is closer to the ways in which our brains process information and memories, delving into discursive models like Foucault's Discursive Formations and Deleuze and Guattari's Rhizome (both of which are adequately detailed in the paper itself to provide a good basic understanding) in order to arrive at a possible solution.

The solution arrived at in the paper (that of a networked structure of nodes grouped emotionally and in terms of subject matter, which can be dialed to the user's inclination) is interesting in and of itself as an alternative way of looking at news items in aggregate, but my main interest in this paper is in the possible applications of this mode of thinking to all manner of written media online, not just news sites.

As the paper mentions, nearly all news sites are largely static, hidebound places delineated strictly into sections and sub-sections, where moving from one article of interest to another across sections is prohibitively difficult. I spend a lot of time reading articles on websites like these, some news, some games journalism sites, some opinion pieces, and they all have the blog problem - each piece is largely isolated. What I like about this paper is that it posits the idea of a holistic online reading experience, where pieces can be seen in situ as part of a continuum of other writing and reportage, public opinion, and larger events.

Many of us - though I can only speak for myself, I suppose - tend to want to treat the internet as an extension of immediate thought processes, constantly tapping in to current events and flipping from place to place at the speed of, well, thought. This, unfortunately, usually leaves us floundering without a good idea of the bigger picture (I mean, unless we tune our Twitter feed just right), getting news piecemeal from single, disparate sources. The idea of a thoughtfully discursive and relational way of viewing reportage online such as that posited in this paper is a seductive one, especially to fidgety digital magpies like myself.

Symon Oliver, Guia Gali, Fanny Chevalier, and Sara Diamond. 2012. Discursive navigation of online news. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 82-85. DOI=10.1145/2317956.2317970 http://doi.acm.org.cit.idm.oclc.org/10.1145/2317956.2317970