Nmherman on 17 Feb 2001 22:56:50 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] A very old post by Max Herman all about SPACE |
Subj: Fwd: Identification, Mapping, Starrynight, and Genius 2000 Date: 6/4/99 1:30:36 PM Pacific Daylight Time From: <A HREF="mailto:Nmherman">Nmherman</A> To: <A HREF="mailto:GENIUS-2000@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM"> GENIUS-2000@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM</A> ----------------- Forwarded Message: Subj: Fwd: Identification, Mapping, Starrynight, and Genius 2000 Date: 6/4/99 1:08:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time From: <A HREF="mailto:Nmherman">Nmherman</A> To: <A HREF="mailto:list@rhizome.org">list@rhizome.org</A> Daily Post for June 3, 1999 (The enclosed forwarded message is from an online discussion on Shock of the View, December 1998. It is relevant both as a single internet text, as well as a map for reading other internet texts and objects that deal with mapping, identity, community, and other current discussions of internet topology.) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Information generated digitally and distributed via highly complex networks is defined mainly by two kinds of processes: identification and maps. Most of the time, identification is a process directed by the user, whereas mapping is directed by the producer or provider. Identification involves one or more of several actions initiated and carried out by the user. The first and only necessary requirement is to obtain access to a PC and the web. Other identification-style actions are: to register one's e-mail address with a site to permit filtering if necessary; to select an address or starting point, generally a website or ftp file; and to pay attention to the data built by the provider. These might be called first-order identifications. Second-order identifications might involve a subscription or other decision to be involved with a collective use of the provided material, and for your participation to be listed on your posts (i.e., Rhizome_Raw: Identification, Mapping, Starrynight, and Genius 2000). There are also psychological issues, like trusting or admiring the providers and believing that their efforts, while commanding more and better technology than your efforts, are essentially in your best interest. For example, one might say "I really like the whole Rhizome project. They are increasing public interest and awareness of new media art, and that's one of my goals as well. They are doing good work; I support them; they make good use of their technology." Trying to define third-level identification, and get on with the essay, illustrates how mapping and identification are really not discrete categories. With third level ID, the provider is becoming more involved. The identification is not chosen by the user, but assigned to the user by the provider based on the user's activity or history. This is not simply recording the user's address or username. It means that the provider is classifying the user in some way, and shaping the provided content accordingly. For example, if a user attends a lot of pornography sites, registering with an e-mail address, a provider might decide to add the user's name to mailing lists recommending hot new porn sites. Because the user's information is legally confidential, advanced third-order identifications are rather limited, but they may become far more prevalent in the future. Certainly the technology is there. At the point where the provider begins to make most of the decisions, mapping is a better word to describe how the information is organized. Because the user no longer has the technology or the desire to shape the content any further, the provider takes over, ordering the terrain according to whatever concepts they find appropriate. News sites select the news and do layout, create links, and obtain advertising. Museum sites decide what to display, and how the user will proceed through the information. Net.art sites decide what images and audio will be available, and how the user's path will thread or theme (two concepts used in shopping mall design). The initial creation of the site content and dynamics is first-order mapping, the most basic level of the provider's activity. Second-order mapping consists of content-modification based on user's actual use of the site. This information does belong to the provider and can be used to instantly modify the content provided. For example, a commercial site can record which ads get the most hits, and alter their ad strategy accordingly. A news site can monitor which stories get the most hits, and decided to run similar stories. A net.art site might involve some kind of algorithm by which certain decisions by the user result in particular versions of the information being either presented or withheld. Third-order mapping occurs mostly in the provider's head; and here the distinction between identification and mapping blurs again. The provider looks at the whole situation in toto, and may make alterations in the content based on their own recognitions and reflections. The general response to the site, and more intangible factors such as external developments and the cultural climate, become the focus of the provider's process. The provider creates a mental picture of the site and its context, and may reorient the content radically depending on whatever realizations or insights occur. Here the actual physical data input by users is out of the mapping process, which occurs in the brain of the provider. At this point, mapping begins to revert to identification. The provider takes on an internal decision-making or image-making role. The content is only relevant in terms of the creative process, the process of envisioning the medium and its use. The material technological disparity between the provider and the user, which forms the primary basis for the distinction, is not active during third-order mapping, because this is an internal cognitive process. Clearly, technical knowledge, the awareness of future access, and cultural knowlege play a huge role in this phase of production, and for the most part inertially maintain both the thinking-patterns and future actions of the person in question. Providers tend to third-order map like providers, and remain providers in their future actions, while users third-order map like users and remain users in their future actions. This inertia is intellectual, at this stage, and not physically technological. This inertia or pattern-consistency during third-order mapping shares many similarities with identification. Knowledge, role, and access are defined internally, and the provider may choose to close down the site and go back to surfing. A user may decide to become a provider, set up a site, or buy a server. Also, a provider may decide to think like a user in order to predict the most effective content. This is a sort of spiritual or psychological process of communal awareness in which the roles of user and provider may blur into a hybrid of identification and mapping in complex permutations. ++++++++++++++++++++ This description of the basic modes of contemporary digital information makes a lot more sense if we look at particular examples. Because the categories of identification and mapping are only distinct in practice (in the distribution of technology) and because of a certain cultural climate (knowlege and beliefs), it can become difficult to understand the actual significance of this historical formation. Many people believe this distinction is irrelevant or trivial, simply a fact of life in which some people are artists and others are audience, some govern and some are governed, some rich and some poor, some enlightened and some unenlightened. If we consider a net.art production like Rhizome's Starrynight, however, it becomes impossible to overlook the user/provider dynamic at work. The providers--in this case the Rhizome site-builders--have chosen a particular way to offer access to a content-base of articles. The content is displayed using a visual depiction of stars, an interface which brightens particular stars if they are clicked, and a way of indexing the content according to categories like video, feminism, CD-Rom, access, utopia, funding, etc. Some of the articles, it seems, have been purposely selected. (I get this impression from seeing an article from 1996; perhaps every article ever printed in Rhizome is shown as a single lit pixel.) Taken as an autonomous work of art, Starrynight is based on certain roles being played by the site-builders and the users or contributors of text, as well as users of the interface itself. From a personal aesthetic standpoint, I find the presentation of content too library-ish--a very confusing and unnavigable library--lacking the freshness of the immediate work being done on the Raw newsgroup. I also find the pseudo-interactivity of different stars getting brighter with each reading a very patronizing and frankly obnoxious concept of the role of the user. It's like the song, "Everybody is a Star." Like a lot of Rhizome, I think Starrynight works best as a hideous monstrosity ironically masquerading as utopia. Carnival ugliness without the roar of the crowd to render it comical. Of course, my opinion of the applet is based on my own concerns about net.art and information culture in general. Many users may find Starrynight illuminating and pleasing to the eye, a harmlessly metaphorical interface with new media art criticism. In my work, I am primarily concerned with subjecting the net.art world to uncompromising scrutiny, to prevent the untimely ascendancy of destructive traditional concepts within the media of the web. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ In closing, I would like to mention a few details about my own work as part of the Genius 2000 Project, as a point of contrast to Starrynight. 1. Starrynight uses the image of the illuminated point of light as a visual metaphor of the creative engagement between user and provider. The metaphor is technologically correct but conceptually absurd. The concepts of user and provider, identification and mapping, are horrifically oversimplified in a piece of kitsch that rivals Disneyland in its cheesy self-promotion. The Genius 2000 Project, on the other hand, uses the rigorous concept of collision and intersection to express a complex and postmodern understanding of history (content) and cognition (use). 2. The Genius 2000 Project both conceptualizes and enacts the transient dynamic of user and provider, identification and mapping. By identifying one's self and one's work as part of the Project, the entirety of which is mapped according to a single fractal algorithm, awareness of the connectedness of use and production is constantly rejuvenated in flux. Both cognitive and technological actions are identification and mapping simultaneously. The technology-driven categories are thrown into the proverbial garbage can. 3. Starrynight uses a cosmological metaphor of a point of light, varying in luminosity, to describe the interaction of use and content. The Genius 2000 Project uses the much more effective concept of the dark pixel to negate the false equation of technology with cognition. The dark pixel preserves Marx's distinction between work and capital, while the point of light image only reinforces (by omission) traditional models of production. +++++++++++++++++ Max Herman The Genius 2000 Project Video Available Now www.geocities.com/~genius-2000 ----------------- Forwarded Message: Subj: You should buy an early number First Edition for Anthology, $19.99, John Date: 6/1/99 9:51:19 PM Pacific Daylight Time From: <A HREF="mailto:Nmherman">Nmherman</A> To: <A HREF="mailto:cinemania@erols.com">cinemania@erols.com</A> Subj: A Genius 2000 World and how it Works Date: 12/12/98 To: <A HREF="mailto:simon@babar.demon.co.uk">simon@babar.demon.co.uk</A> To: <A HREF="mailto:shock@rhizome.walkerart.org">shock@rhizome.walkerart.org </A> In a message dated 12/11/98 2:45:02 AM Pacific Standard Time, simon@babar.demon.co.uk writes: > You know how official language works. How > would it work in a Genius 2000 world? Perhaps for Max Herman? Official Genius 2000 language for "people" is people, meaning variously: human beings per se; all the people right now; all the people ever; some specific set of people now, past, or predicted. Also, "people" means shiny happy genius-people, and year 2000 exodus let-my-people-go people. "Nation" gets low ratings in any Genius 2000 world because it has too much 2000 and not enough Genius by half, anymore. Instead of "nation," we prefer "The worship of God is, Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best. Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God." Of course, this phrase is also a bit thick with 2000, but most intellectual types have a touch of 2000 on the brain. How about "Albion"? Max Herman www.geocities.com/~genius-2000 _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold