Digital Stigmergic Collaboration
I like the word “stigmergy,” which according to Wikipedia means “a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other.”
Now when we talk about the “emerging online practices [that] enable the extreme scaling seen in mass collaborative projects such as Wikipedia.org” that Mark Elliott wrote his dissertation about, we are starting to look at the new directions in the humanities that was the subject of a recent symposium at the University of Illinois. We heard John Unsworth talk about “The Value of Digitization for Libraries and Humanities Scholarship.” He outlined issues related to digital surrogates, and we discussed the two-way (at least) visibility of cultural heritage, in terms of audience and access. There were a number of interesting projects that John mentioned in passing that relate to stigmergy in one way or another: the InterPARES Project, The International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems, now in its third phase; the Open Content Alliance; Educause.
I have a long way to go to really wrap my head around text mining, Zotero scraping of a database, and so on. My immediate response to ways to preserve and highlight “cultural infrastructure” is that it may be a response to the recent and recurrent call for making the humanities count for something. Patricia Cohen in the New York Times (February 25, 2009) wrote “In Tough Times, Humanities Must Justify Their Worth,” that “traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation….Questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency.” She quoted Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education: “We’ve created a disjuncton between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals.” Rather than ONLY emphasizing the “practical and economic value” of the humanities, however, which in the short term is hard to gauge imho, I think digital humanities in stigmergic collaboration could go a long way to address a range of human needs, including learning across differences.
Long Live Activist Art!
Holland Cotter, an art critic at The New York Times, recently wrote an article called “The Boom is Over. Long Live Art!” I read the article with interest and several of us on the activist art education listserv exchanged reactions. I felt a little silly coming to Cotter’s defense because he hardly needs my defense and I don’t usually defend the New York Times. Still, I think Cotter is an ally, so here’s what I said:
“I don’t think Holland Cotter was addressing those of us on this list as much as those who never knew or chose to ignore all the other threads in the art world beyond the gallery/star system. While his comments–’It’s day-job time again in America’ (when has it ever been otherwise for most of us?) and ‘I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with’ (so general as to be meaningless)–are certainly open to challenge, I was heartened by the breadth of the artists he did name, and the sketch of (not-so-new) approaches that he articulates and appreciates: ‘Why not make studio training an interdisciplinary experiences, crossing over into sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, poetry and theology? Why not build into your graduate program a work-study semester that takes students out of the art world entirely and places them in hospitals, schools and prisons, sometimes in-extremis environments, i.e. real life?’ Why not, indeed? Easier said than done even for those of us in the academy.
He then remarks that ‘Such changes would require new ways of thinking and writing about art…. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality [or resistance, methinks] can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable…is the primary enterprise.’
While folks have been doing this for years, it’s good to have Cotter shout it out from the NY art world. I wonder, though, how to sustain these conditions of abnormality and resistance across social divisions, within global capitalism, with justice. Going forward is unknowable, so recentering art to support different people means that we are always experimenting, never getting it quite right. But I think our own work-places can be places of hope and art now; if we have to have ‘day jobs,’ let’s appoint ourselves arts-based workers in those jobs, as many have already done, and infuse the normal with the ‘abnormal.’ Cotter has consistently written about ‘marginalized’ art groups for years: Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre, the various feminist exhibitions, Asian art, and street artists. I don’t know him, but I have appreciated his rather singular voice in the NY Times, probably not an easy thing in his context. Of course we want activist art and its concerns to be front and center, whether in the NY Times or the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Institute for Community Understanding Between Art and The Everyday, Cabinet, n.paradoxa, etc.
And here’s what Richard Kamler of the University of San Francisco said:
I do think Cotter's article was fine, simply dated. Worn down by the weight of the NY market and not really open to what has been bubbling up and emerging and transforming culture these past 20 or more years. He does mention, in passing, work with communities such as prisons, hospitals, etc where many of us have been working, or worked, 30 years or so ago. The idea of an engaged art, of community-based art, (social practice, hate that phrase) is just not something that Cotter, or the NY market really knows what to do with....I subscribe to Vaclav Havel's model of "bringing the artist to the model!"
Technology as Spatial Lens
In early February I went to hear Paul Dourish when he was visiting the University of Illinois. He’s a professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science and in Anthropology. In addition to the Informatics program, he also teaches in the interdisciplinary graduate program in Arts, Computation, and Engineering (ACE). His research lies at the intersection of computer science and social science, with a particular interest in ubiquitous and mobile computing and the practices surrounding new media. His rather long title, “Accountabilities of Presence and the Commoditization of Location: Getting Beyond Privacy in Location-Based Systems,” didn’t mean much to me, but his talk was very interesting.
Here’s his abstract:
The development of mobile and ubiquitous computing applications is typically attended by concerns about privacy and disclosure. However, despite much effort over many years, the problems of privacy seem as difficult as ever. Opinions differ greatly. To some, privacy is a major obstacle to the development of location-based technologies; to others, privacy simply doesn’t matter. Perhaps the problem is that the term “privacy” isn’t very useful? In order to ground these questions empirically — and to see our way past the problems of privacy as a concept — colleagues and I have been studying a group for whom it is not a useful conceptual framework. Paroled sex offenders tracked via GPS have, as far as the law is concerned, forfeited any right to privacy — and yet the ways in which they are accountable to various other groups for their movements and their presences highlight the complex, contingent, and fluid practices that lie behind a simplistic notion of privacy.
He gave a clear presentation, with a graphically elegant power point.
He started by talking about privacy being a performance, in that it is what we do, how we interact, rather than something we have. The concept of privacy obscures other social relations that may be more relevant or important.
Dourish introduced the term technocorrections to describe the uses of databases to track sex offenders using lifetime monitoring with GPS units. In California, where Dourish conducted his study, two sets of laws–labeled Megan’s law and Jessica’s law—were passed based on emotional responses to victims of violent sexual crimes and not on whether the spatial monitoring of sex offenders was effective. With Jessica’s law, the definition of “sexual” offender became quite Draconian, so that many more people are now being monitored. There is no gradation of risk for sex offenders in California: all are labeled high risk. Parole officers are overwhelmed with data and have very little face-to-face time with the people they are monitoring. There is no rehabilitation, just surveillance.
The experiences of the parolee wearing the device are remarkable. For example, wearing a GPS anklet disciplines the body: people wear multiple socks to pad the device and/or to hide the device. It is easily damaged and any damage is a parole violation. The wearer cannot take it off, cannot get it wet, and must recharge it while wearing it, so those things affect the jobs that the wearer can get, the way in which the wearer can get clean, and how long the wearer can be away from an electrical outlet. The battery can be damaged by overcharging it, so one cannot charge it while sleeping! This device, then, affects the ways a person carries their body, marks a person (like the Scarlet Letter), if it is visible, serves as a constant reminder of a conviction, and, for some, has the positive aspect of providing an alibi, since the person’s whereabouts is always known. The device structures a person’s time, through the necessity of battery recharging.
Space is also structured by forcing people to wear a GPS unit. There are prohibited spaces, and spaces of danger and safety for the wearer. Many end up living near prisons, because there are no schools in the vicinity, so they are not in violation of their parole conditions. Sex offenders are not allowed to get online, so they have to rely on physical maps or circumstance to learn the locations of parks, playgrounds, and schools.
Dourish then moved into broader issues related to the spread of locative technologies, and social contexts that lend location meaning: legibility of space, from within, as lived; and from without, as representational schemas, or presence and traces; technology and the body where locative devices affect comportment, among other things; commodification (actually he called it “commoditization”) of location in which relationships are dissolved (ie, between parolees and officers); transforming data to location, and transforming location to intent (why were they there?); and recovering accountabilities; accountability of presence that is beyond a “privacy” debate; heterogeneous accountabilities that are productive of space rather than responsive.
25 Things
Friends on Facebook the last couple of weeks have been playing a game called “25 Things.” It’s been great fun to read people’s lists.
Rules: Once you are tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits or goals about yourself. At the end, choose 25 people to tag.
I have no intention of tagging anyone, but here’s my list, on a Sunday evening.
1. I worked in non-commercial radio for several years in the 1970s. I began a show of music by women called “Herdles.”
2. I hate it when people misspell Frederick Douglass’s last name, and Mohandas Gandhi’s last name as well. Although with Gandhi, since it is a transliteration, it is less annoying.
3. I have been in five car accidents, never as a driver.
4. Because of one car accident, I moved in with the Saravia family in Guatemala City in the summer of 1967, learning Spanish and living under martial law.
5. I was in the Upward Bound program for teens in New Orleans in 1966, at Xavier University, because the houses of the families of the southern whites who had been recruited were firebombed.
6. That summer I thought about becoming a nun, which was an amazing idea for a Quaker kid.
7. I love cats, but have none at the moment. I like Labradors too.
8. My son was born two months prematurely. It was very traumatic for all of us.
9. My son turns 20 this year and is an amazing artist and actor.
10. My daughter is phenomenally talented in music and community organizing.
11. I had a miscarriage between my two children.
12. I am a pessimist, and usually rather subdued.
13. I do not believe in God, gods or goddesses, though I do pray: to what or whom, I don’t know.
14. I love to walk, in all weather.
15. I love to eat, too much.
16. I still think of myself as an art historian, even though I haven’t ever made (much of) a living that way.
17. I dropped out of high school in the spring of 1969. I was bored.
18. I started college at the school where my father taught sociology in 1969. I lasted four months. I tried again the next year and lasted six months.
19. I dropped out of college four times, I think. I took seven years to get a B.A.
20. During graduate school I was an editor at the American Bar Association.
21. Writing is extremely challenging for me, but something internal impels me to do it.
22. The best choice I ever made was to marry Reed. He is rather impatient in many ways, but very patient with me. I am so blessed.
23. I can be very hyperactive and distractable; that is a mixed blessing.
24. My father is politically one of the most radical people I know.
25. I still miss my mother, Betty, very much; she died in 1985.
