LO

From the Guardian G2 Special 'The Internet Turns 40' 23/10/09

It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is. But 29 October 1969 has a strong claim for being, as Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, outs it today "the day the infant internet uttered its first words". At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP (interface message processor), which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message. Samuel Morse, sending the first telegraph message 125 years previously, chose the portentous phrase: "What hath God wrought?" But Kline's task was to log in remotely from LA to the Stanford machine, and there was no opportunity for portentousness: his instructions were to type the command LOGIN. Still, Klienrock recalls a tangible sense of excitement that night as Kline sat down at the SDS Sigma 7 computer, connected to the IMP, and at the same time made telephone contact with is opposite number at Stanford. As his colleagues watched, he typed the letter L, to begin the word LOGIN.
"Have you got the L?" he asked, down the phone line. "Got the L," the voice at Stanford replied.
Kleine typed an O. "Have you got the O?"
"Got the O," Stanford replied.
Kliene typed at G, at which point the system crashed, and the connection was lost. The G didn't make it through, which meant that, quite by accident, the first message ever transmitted accross the nascent internet turned out, after all, to be fittingly biblical:
"LO."

Oliver Burkeman

I love this story.

Notes on The Practice of Everyday (media) Life - by Lev Manovich

The first part of the essay has lots of statistics about media use, can you add any personal experiences to support or contradict these facts? - I think it is difficult to obtain complete meaning from many of the statistics Manovich uses. For instance I have a myspace account but I haven't accessed it in over a year, however I would probably still be included in statistics as a user. Also although i do agree web 2.0 opens up opportunities to communicate in a new and different, not necessarily everyone will exploit this and this is a more difficult data to record. For example, I have a facebook account but i do not feel i use it in such a unique way. I feel i use it to communicate with friends in pretty much the same way i always have. i.e. I might share an event between friends using the network whereas before i might have handed them a flyer i hand picked up but it is pretty much the same sort of action. Web 2.0 is often a facilitator for human behaviour rather than changing it.  I also feel the following statistic is not very helpful, "in the middle of 2000s every track out of a million of so available through iTunes sold at least once a quarter. In other words, every track no matter how obscure found at least one listener. This translates into new economics of media: as researchers who have studied the long tail phenomena demonstrated". I think iTunes is far from comprehensive* so you are limiting yourself if you just purchase music from there. Also I feel it is easier to discover music randomly through analogue media, i.e. you might buy a record in a car boot sale because you like the sleeve art (or anything indeed, i think accident plays a bigger role in analogue media. since the user has less choice, for example I often end up listening to radio 4 shows and enjoying them because they happen to come on whereas i wouldn't choice them as a podcast. I think what really comes across from this data is it is HOW digital media is used that is important. Manovich questions "If one person gets all her news via blogs, does this automatically mean that her understanding of the world and important issues is different from a person who only reads mainstream newspapers?", but I think this is a difficult question to answer because as individuals we self-select according to what we want to hear anyway. For instance I read the Guardian because I like to reinforce my lefty-liberal views. The source is only part of the issue of communication.

* As an aside i decided to test iTunes to see if it is any good since I have always been snobby about it. I searched for three favourite songs of mine and. actually did a lot better then i expected. It had House Party, Fred Wesley. It also had Girls on Pills, The Droyds but unfortunately only part of a dj mix (i.e. edited) rather than the single version. It didn't have the K C White version of Anywhere But Nowhere but it did have one by Simplicity People. I compared with spotify (had nothing), last fm (had anywhere but nowhere! mentioned house party, but not available to play and again only edited versions of girls on pills) and youtube (only house party). These songs, i would say are a bit obscure but well known amongst people who are into music.

Manovich suggests the merging and even reversing of De Certeau’s categories of ‘strategy’ and ‘tactic’, do you agree with this point? Is there a democratising of media or is it still in the hands of ‘big business’? Does the mappability of web 2.0 structures mean that De Certeau’s categories are now irrelevant however you answer the question above? - I agree with this to a certain extent but whereas Manovich seems to see this as a positive to me it is more troubling. Design that incorporates customisation is strategic as it is designing to accommodate tactics and thus attempts to bring them under control. Manovich seems to suggest that tactics have taken over strategies but to me it seems the other war round. De Certeau suggests subversion must be 'unmappable'. Tactics relayed through facebook etc. are mappable and this is indeed how such companies make money, but having access to our personal data. I think it is an interesting thought that user-created content has just become a way of getting people to buy consumer electronics. One could even agree that under Web 2.0 'subversion' has become impossible. This worries me as 'tactics' seems an essential and instinctive way we guarantee freedom and personal liberty. As an artist this idea about the world seems particularly important as a good definition of an artist seems to be one who communicates through tactics, i.e. creates personal responses about the world that reveals or questions something about it.

What do you make of Manovich’s statement, ‘ it is only a matter of time before constant broadcasting of one’s live becomes as common as email’? - I don't think email is a very helpful comparison. Email serves a particular and obvious purpose. Indeed a significant proportion of email correspondence is probably what previously would have been communicated in a different way, be it telephone or internal mail in a company or on a poster. The purpose of constant capture and broadcast is harder to define, other than being a sort of self-generated 1984 where we put ourselves under constant surveillance so that capitalist powers that be can observe and exploit. There is obviously a potential for expression through such media, however I feel that the constant and instant nature detracts from this. I think some kind of editing and reflection is important in order to express oneself well, otherwise anything interesting can become smothered in a hail of unnecessary communication. Manovich does ask the interesting question though of whether Web 2.0 renders redundant the romantic/modernist model of creativity of “making it new.” Are the masses assimilating what was previously confined to artists and professionals, who in a sense have always worked in a multimedia (i.e. tactical/creative) way? Manovich talks a lot about the influence of 'prosumers' but these are the people who will go on to become the establishment and are hence not a completely new and creative voice. In conclusion, after reading this essay, I felt more aware of the potentials of communication through the internet, its abilities to redefine boundaries of space and time but in contrast to Manovich I feel the internet is a facilitator rather than an instigator of change.   

What Noise Is In Digital?

- Analogue noise is what is created by the constraints of the technology. The excess sound created by the physical means of reproduction e.g. the hiss of a vinyl record, the grain of a photograph etc. It can be minimised but can not disappear completely.

- In digital recording 'bits' may be directed to remove such noise - 'headers'. There is a choice to remove or not remove rather than a variable.

- Digital recording is indirect in that it is encoded so there is no physical mechanism to create such 'noise'.

- Digital noise is perhaps in the concept of 'multimedia' where bits may rearrange themselves. Data is muddled rather than restricted or clouded.

- Insufficient memory or excess compressing will lead to a loss of information, hence the 'noise' of a pixelated image.

- Digital data displayed as binary code will resemble noise or nonsense to the average person. It must be re-assembled to make sense.

Some Other Thoughts On What Digital Is

- Commonly difficult to define, digital is often used in context rather than having a specific meaning i.e. digital watch etc. it is the opposite of analogue but the meaning of analogue can be troublesome as well. It is thought of as a continuous entity whether digital breaks down into bits etc.

- Are humans digital in our thinking, how we perceive the world etc.? Language can be thought of as digital

- It is more important to be knowledge-able rather than knowledgeable? The key skill is finding the information, knowing which information to take on board.

- Digital is a common identity, a universal language and means of communicating, it can put people on the same level and is without conventional borders.

- "Re-framing consciousness" what is reality? Does living in a digitalised world mean we have to be continually questioning what is real and what is not? Where is the line drawn? i.e. a haptic arm can give digital feedback so handling a virtual tool feels the same as a real one.

- Digital, for an system based on order, has had messy origins, many pioneers were eccentric.

- Walter Benjamin wrote on art in the mechanical age in the 1930s. How art was changed by the rise of new technology of reproduction then (photography, industrial printing etc.), has links to how art is being changed now in the digital age. The changes brought by the digital era can even be compared to those brought by the invention of the printing press.

- Grey matter theory - the point where a computer can better itself and therefore could exist without humans. This starts to question what makes us human. What is post-human? The cyclical nature of the three laws of robotics stops robots from becoming self-determining.

- The digital exists in the 'ether' but also data-centres are required, it is physical in some respects but not others. The origins of the internet were in ARDOnet, a network without a centre.

- How might the action we take now shape the development of technology in the future? How might we anticipate it? e.g. The man who created the integrated circuit chip and went on to develop the concept of open-source, set up an open-system of team work contrary to management ideals of the time. This may have been because he came from a small co-dependant community where everyone's input was recognised as a necessity. Such revolutionary thinking which is needed to make such breakthroughs comes from a context.

- The democratising nature of the digital creates fear i.e. the firewall of china. Will this change/hold up development?

- The on-line environment is perhaps neither positive or negative but different.

Digital Is...

- "The Digital Revolution is a Revolution of Random Access" Graheme Weinbren
- Korean Artist Nam June Paik 1963 installation Random Access (audio tape on a wall)
- "Random access Computing, noun. the process of transferring information to or from memory in which every memory location can be accessed directly rather than being accessed in a fixed sequence : [as adj. ] random-access programming."
- Basis for processing and assembling information. Paradigm of controlled randomness. Too much freedom can have a negative effort, boundaries necessary for understanding

RANDOM infinite possibilities, infinite combinations of 1 and 0
ACCESS opportunity, availability, interactivity, a path through the numbers which is chosen by the recipient, control, choice

- The contrast, tension between the two, is at the heart of what digital is and why it is difficult to define. The tension between the possibility of knowledge and the recipients choice (question of who welds the choice?)

BITS are...

- either in the state of on or off, 1 or 0 the smallest particle in the DNA of information

- can be combined infinitely to represent anything

- able to deliver informationable to move at the speed of lightweightless

- without physical boundariesare as hard to price as knowledge and that value varies according to who is using them and how

- able to be mixed up and rearranged hence 'multimedia'

- able to contain information about other bits hence 'headers'

Some Initial Thoughts about The Digital in Art

- I think the first and easiest way for me to think about the digital was to think of as a system and to work digitally was to work within that system adhering to (or working against) those formal instructions. 

- Thinking about the internet,  it is an infinite number of paths and there are ways to create different paths through it. An artwork could be a set of rules that can only be carried out through the internet. In a way, a hide-and-seek and the viewer/protagonist creates their own route from A to B and back to A.

- The digital in its most basic form is the notion of something being on or off, at 1 or 0, it is the infinite possibilities that make it complex.

- In terms of art there are strong links to Dada, Fluxus and conceptual art in terms the role of formal instructions, concept, event and participation. i.e. Maholy-Nagy's 'virtual volumes' -'the outline of trajectory presented by an object in motion' concepts of digital art can exist without the technology. OULIPO, Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle saw creative inspiration as an intellectual game.

- Inherent in the digital is the interplay of randomness and control, its inherent interactive nature. "The digital revolution is a revolution of random access". The artist is a mediator/facilitator. 

- Digital art brings about the question of documentation.

- Manipulation; the reality of 'what is' at a certain point in time is constantly open to question.

- Recontextualisation; the relationship between copy and original.

- 'Hyper-real'; neither artificial nor authentic, a fiction is created.

- Question of the digital image not being representational because it is encoded. Does not record or reproduce physical reality? No continuality with a real world. Computer drawing; loss of relationship with the mark?