Free Blog 3: Autistic Activism in Second Life

Second Life has become a tool for autistic activists to raise awareness of the disability and redefine autism. The organization Autistics.org has established itself on Second Life as the “Autistic Liberation Front.” They encourage autistic persons to purchase land in the same area of Second Life, stating that they are “trying to turn all of Porcupine into liberated autistic territory.”

One woman has gone so far as to work to make her Second Life avatar mimic the ticks and autistic gesticulations she possesses in real life.

On Second Life, autistic users give themselves a voice and express their attitudes towards things like selective abortion and genetic engineering. The internet provides them with a means to express themselves in ways from which they are inhibited in real life as a result of their autistic symptoms.

I think this is a good example of the ways in which virtual worlds can be an aid to those with certain disabilities. A concern voiced in a television news piece on autism explains that virtual worlds, despite being an aid, may not be easily accessible to people with autism consistently, and that it is not an answer to the problems associated with autism.


I don’t think that the claim the Autistic Liberation Front, however, is concerned with encouraging autism on the grounds that autistic people are okay on the internet. I think their goal is more towards promoting awareness that, while they may not communicate normally, autistic people are not necessarily dissimilar from neurological normal people. This is easily one of the best and most practical uses of Second Life I’ve seen yet.

Purchase Events 3: Fields and Karl Blau, Guitars and the Loop Pedal

Two performances at Purchase this year featured musicians using the Boss RC-20XL Loop Station effect pedal. According to the manufacturer’s website, the Loop Station allows you to record up to eleven loops of music, each for up to sixteen minutes. This can allow for a single musician to record multiple voices and sounds, possibly even mimicking the sound of a full band, with just a guitar and a microphone (the pedal features two inputs, one for a microphone and one for an instrument). This has an effect on performances in some ways similar and in other ways dissimilar from the effect that computers have.

Fields is a single guitarist named Michael Perrone. He performs with a number of effect pedals, including the Boss Loop Station. Using the Loop Station, he is able to add multiple layers and voices, without the need of any other musicians. He creates a mixture of ambient background drones, creating entire droning chords by adding one voice at a time. His compositions can range from drone-y ambient pieces to bouncy, rhythmic pieces. Watching Fields perform and listening to the creation of a piece of music, one phrase of music at a time with increasingly complex rhythms, can make for a powerful experience.

Karl Blau is similarly a one man act, also using the same Loop Station pedal. However, Blau is more likely to create catchy, danceable songs than lengthy esoteric compositions. Using both a guitar and a microphone, Blau creates his rhythms with a combination of tapping into his microphone and beatboxing, recording loops of the rhythms to play for the duration of the song. Similarly to Fields, Blau also uses the Loop Station to occasionally create ethereal sounds, recording his own voice over and over, so that as one phrase is repeated he is slowly backed by his a chorus made entirely of his own voice.

Like the use of laptop computers, loop pedals can free musicians from certain limitations. With this technology they can mimic the effect of a band, and can take their more complex arrangements and visions wherever they can find an electrical outlet, without having to find or rely on other musicians. They can fit in smaller spaces or any other space that might not easily accommodate a full band or any large number of musicians.

Unlike laptop computers, it still necessitates some kind of performance. It does not heavily affect the relationship between performer and audience, except to allow for more intimate settings. Also, watching the performers manage both their personal performance of their music and the loops can be like watching someone play two instruments at once. While it still can’t compare to the experience of seeing a full band perform, it does provide a different kind of excitement.

Free Choice Blog 2: Make-A-Wish in World of Warcraft

One of my roommates was recently playing World of Warcraft when I walked into his room. With a sort of distressed look on his face, he explained that there was a new character added in World of Warcraft with a new series of quests, and an eerie voice. He proceeded to explain to me that, apparently, the new character, Ahab Wheathoof, was the creation of a ten-year-old boy with a terminal illness. My roommate, Alec, informed me that, through the Make-A-Wish foundation, the boy had been able to have a character created in WoW.

10-year-old Ezra Chatterton, who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, whose house had burned down, and whose parents are divorced, had initially wished only for access to World of Warcraft, so that he could play with his father who had been a WoW fan since the original release of the game.

The Make-A-Wish foundation arranged for Ezra to have a day-long session at Blizzard’s offices to work on the game. Over the course of seven hours, Ezra was able to design a new weapon for the game, a new character, and a new quest involving a dog modeled after his own dog in real life.

While this is in some ways a sweet story, something about it leaves me very unsettled. The idea that a child’s emotional satisfaction is being based around access to a video game. Video games can be a nice form of entertainment, but I have a difficult time entirely dissociating it with the corporate systems that accompany it. Not strictly speaking a work of art or culture with what I would typically regard as significant meaning, all I see in video games and the commercial systems surrounding them and the occasional release from real life.

I can’t, however, deny the significance this must have for Ezra Chatterton. In a matter of life and death, I think my concerns would be grander, and based in the physical world. Something is incredibly depressing to me, to think that this boy is satisfied by access to a computer and a video game. The best I can say is that WoW may provide the child with a way to alleviate the pressure of what must be an extremely stressful point in his life. It also breaks down spatial boundaries, allowing him to easily spend more time with his father.

This is a tricky area for me with discussion of virtual worlds: on one hand, they certain offer opportunities for people in any kind of unhappy situation to relieve themselves from their physical lives to pursue fantasies in virtual worlds; on the other hand, I see virtual worlds as being a venue people can become dependent on to escape from a real world where access to happiness is unevenly distributed.

I think the majority (though not all) of discussion we’ve seen in class from authors on cyber-reality has been focused on simply exploring the nature of social life in virtual worlds. I’d like to see more works investigating more explicitly the effects of virtual worlds on the physical lives of those who inhabit them most frequently.

Purchase Event 2: Off the Grid at the Neuberger

The Neuberger Museum was recently host to a selection of artists whose work made use of various media to communicate different uses of new technology and our relationship to them. Trevor Paglen looks at knowledge hidden by the government and covert operations by the C.I.A., and methods at exposing these things. Louis Shock uses new public media, sometimes typically used for advertising space, to remind onlookers about tragedies largely ignored in public spaces. Seth Weiner looks at social interaction with technology and its implications.

Trevor Paglen’s work is interesting in how technology can be an aid in the dissemination of information. Photographing “black ops” military bases in the Middle East and using assistance from planespotters on the internet to track unregistered government airplanes, he showed how technology can be used to inform the masses of things being done behind their backs.

Louis Shock appropriated public advertising spaces to display photographs of victims of domestic abuse and murdered prostitutes. Displayed alongside the letters “NHI” (for “no humans involved”), these displays showed how some victims are not recognized as human if their deaths are not socially acceptable for conversation, or not topics we find pleasant to discuss.

Seth Weiner provided a number of perspectives on social ideas of technology. Providing a fish with the capacity for movement beyond its fishbowl, looking at the Unabomber’s cabin, he seems to be interested in exploring the implications of new technologies in different contexts.

Trevor Paglen and Louis Shock are both interested in how explorations of different technologies and new media can be used as agents of social activism and social/political awareness. Seth Weiner provides a broader perspective, not simply looking to use new media and technologies, but looking at the way in which they are used.

Purchase Event 1: Culture Shock: Computer Shock

There were a number of acts performing at this year’s Culture Shock that featured computers in lieu of actual instruments. Particularly YACHT and Men were laptop-focused. This is a trend I’ve noticed running in live performances by young groups. The focus in the performance was not on musicianship, but either on dancing or the spectacle made by the performers, unrestrained by anything but microphone wires.

YACHT, a due made up of Jona Bechtolt and recently his girlfriend Claire, stood onstage with a Macintosh laptop in the back, hooked up to the P.A. system. While Bechtolt’s electronic compositions buzzed out of his laptop, he and Claire walked around the stage, singing and either doing what could be described as dancing or just making weird gesticulations.
Men, made up of the members of Le Tigre (with the exception of Kathleen Hannah), DJed off of a pair of laptops. The music was essentially remixes of 80s pop and dance hits, not really bearing any similarity to what I had expected knowing about the connection to Le Tigre. There was not really any performance to speak of here, except that it was possible to see JD and her partner bobbing behind their computers, clearly enjoying themselves.

There was easily more of a performance to observe with YACHT than with Men, but it was still not very much. Being a musician, I usually attend music shows hoping to see musicians so that I can either almost studiously observe how they do what they do, simply be impressed by their talent, or both. When the musician is taken completely out of the picture, I’m a bit lost and perplexed. I’m not someone who dances. Actually, the second I make any kind of dancing-type movements beyond jumping up and down, I am overwhelmed by self-consciousness. So, without something to watch, I’m typically either uninterested and bored, or slightly embarrassed and anxious.

While musical performances where the emphasis on the band or musicians is put to the side in favor of focusing on a singer or on dancing is not something new, it’s becoming increasingly popular to dispose of the traditional rock band set-up, even in what have traditionally been rock music-focused circles. I read an interview a few years ago with a member of the band Death From Above 1979, where he claimed that he preferred to go to dance clubs than see bands, and that if he does go to a show where a band is playing, he never looks at the band. At the time this struck me as incredibly obnoxious, that he was expressing his superiority over duller show attendees like myself.

Now it almost looks like a sea change in show-going etiquette. Where it had been expected that one should enjoy themselves however they like, there is a growing pressure to “enjoy yourself” the “right way.” The changing relevance of the musician in new trends of live music “performance” seems to be encouraging this. I don’t believe that the rock band paradigm is totally fading away, but that, even within the subculture of independent music in the U.S., these new trends towards the way music can be made is leading to new dogmatic attitudes toward behavior.

Reading Response 3: Dialogue, on Chris Burns’ “What is New Media?”

I think all artists need to ask themselves what their work is about. A sound theory or philosophy of art can keep work coherent and meaningful. I suppose this depends, though, on what the artist really wants. Works in New Media, like the pieces up in the Neuberger gallery we looked at in class show the possibility of these sorts of projects to work towards effecting social change, exploring new modes or paradigms of social and political life, or simply disseminating information in an artful, aesthetic way. At the same time, it’s possible to completely avoid that kind of work creating only attractive images for consumption without any attempt to convey any larger meaning or purpose.
I think particularly new art or work that is not coming out of traditional art techniques needs to ask itself questions. Of course, this depends on what the artist wants. New Media, I think, is somewhere in flux. The kind of work New Media students are looking at is a product of consumer-fed technological development, not time-honed or (necessarily) culture-bound like most visual arts. As a result, I think it finds itself somewhere on a new field between the avant-garde and commercial work. Artists in New Media can study the same work and want to be a new Pablor Picasso or Max Ernst, creating imaginative images invisible in the world outside their work, or look at Andy Warhol as a role model, where meaning is vague and obscure if present at all.
Not being a New Media student, myself, I’m not sure how the program is framed here, but it seems to me that the space for New Media was opened in the realm of “high art” by the Fluxus artists in the 60s. The attitude of these artists was exactly the question “What is art?” They worked to incorporated varieties of media into their work, using things like radio and television sets. New media for work began to be explored in the mid- and late-1960s, and continues today, as more new technology becomes available to larger audiences.
Similarly, pop art is bound to be an influence on work in New Media. As a moment in art where artists looked to incorporate the new world that had been created by the technological advancements newly made available in the 1950s and 1960s, the perspective of pop art is fully relevant to the New Media artist.
I agree that, like you say, New Media shouldn’t be strictly confined to newly emergent technology, or experimental uses of machinery. I think it’s much better used to refer to recent trends in art where things like graphic design and other, recent audio/visual technologies have been incorporated into work by new artists. But New Media, as a new paradigm in the world of art, needs to be certain of what it is. Reflecting on your work and your studies can be a major aid to finding your direction in your field.

Blog 7 - Webcomics

The internet has opened a whole new avenue for artists to distribute their work and reach their audiences. For comic artists this has been especially significant. A whole culture of webcomics has arisen where the kinds of comics which had previously been kept to the margins (found only on alternative weeklies like the Village Voice or other regional periodicals like fanzines) can proliferate. Community sites (such as http://www.webcomicsnation.com or http://webcomics.com) have popped up, to allow quick and easy access to varieties of webcomics and information on how to make your own, encouraging growth in the community.
Community is also found in the form of different webcomics banding together, and forming their own affinity groups of sorts. Collectives such as Dayfree Press and Boxcar Comics feature a number of different webcomics who are invited by members to join their ranks. Then there are sites like Modern Tales, who accept submissions from authors of “high quality” to be part of their subscription-only service. Modern Tales also features s selection of free strips and even downloadable long-form comics, such as would be found in a comic shop.
The internet opens new dimensions for exploration in the medium. Because the comics are not dependent on any specific spatial dimensions, authors of webcomics can open themselves up to new ways of presenting their work. The comics can be entirely horizontal, forcing you to scroll sideways, or vertical, forcing you to scroll down. A lot of interesting takes on more traditional comic strip forms can also be found. A Lesson is Learned… completely eschewed the traditional linear, three- or four-panel layout in favor for experimentation on communicating flow and direction, sometimes telling stories within what is essentially one frame.
Some comics, such as Dinosaur Comics or Death to the Extremist, use the same technique as David Lynch’s strip, The Angriest Dog in the World, where the same strip is shown with each “episode” with only the dialogue changed. Dinosaur Comics and particularly Death to the Extremist have both used this layout to explore self-referential humor to what may be its furthest reaches. Death to the Extremist took to this minimalist approach with fervor, and used it as an opportunity to play with narrative techniques and experiment in the narrative structure of the comic.
While being born on the internet, webcomics are not cursed to be left there. They can compete (at least to some extent) with print comics on their own terms. Comics like Cat and Girl and Achewood have had successful anthologies of their own work released (albeit, by themselves). Some webcomics have gone on to be syndicated in the same sort of weekly magazines to which alternative comics were traditionally banished, and some webcomics authors have found illustration employment in weeklies and otherwise. The comics anthology series Attitude: The New Subversive Cartoonists has even published a volume on cartoonists whose work primarily appears on the internet.

Who Are We: Racial Construction in Cyberspace

Lisa Nakamura, in “Head Hunting in Cyberspace,” investigates how racial identities are presented in cyberspace. Looking at the “chatspace” Club Connect, which is related to the African-American-issues-focussed site, NetNoir, she wants to see to what extent racial diversity can be found online. She finds that there are few avatars on the site presenting themselves as particularly dark-skinned. Also, there were no Asian-presenting male characters, only female Asian-presenting.
Tara MacPherson looks at the construction of identities of race and place on the Internet in “I’ll Take My Stand in Dixie-Net.” She looks at how cyberspace is localized and raced, counter to arguments that the Internet is a free, democratized space.
Cameron Baily, with “Virtual Skin: Articulating Race in Cyberspace,” looks at how the Internet is raced by discussing the nature of race as a social construction.
I hadn’t thought about race in these terms prior to the reading. Baily asks early on if race is corporeal, immediately following with the explanation that it is a social construction. If race is not just simply based on one’s appearance or body, if it’s something more abstract, then I can easily see how it would translate onto the Internet.

Virtual Reality, Both Social and Physical, and the Significance of Narrative Construction

Digital technology provides an opportunity for us to reshape and rethink our world by providing us with alternatives. Establishing virtual realities provides us with a possible reality which we can shape and mold to our choosing.

Randall B. Smith, in “Experiences with the Alternate Reality Kit,” discusses the virtual reality of a computer program in terms of how the program exists as a metaphor for reality. Smith explains that virtual reality has two dimensions particular to it, literalism and magic. The “literalism” of virtual reality, however, is only the degree to which the actions taken by the program or the user of the program correspond to the metaphor established by the programmer. The “magic” is the malleability of the program, the ability of the user to shape the virtual environment.

While the Alternate Reality Kit (ARK) was still sort of early in the development of the digital computer interface, the basic ideas are still thought provoking. Now that people are socialized to interaction with computers and computer interfaces are standardized (I was taught to use computers all throughout elementary school), the surprise Smith refers to may not be very common among most adults, and even children as young as eight or nine are probably used to intuiting how the computer interface functions. However, the ease of basic commands and uses of the computer means that more complex functions come more naturally.

Underberg and Congdon’s piece on the website Folkvine.org explores how social realities can be created, or replicated, and shaped on the internet. They discuss how local folk culture had been chosen for representation on a community “documentary project.” An important dimension to this project is how social and cultural reality is particularly revealed to be malleable and how, on the internet, there is a capacity to shape and mold social reality, similar to how the Alternate Reality Kit that Smith discusses can shape and mold a virtual physical reality.

Placing social reality in these malleable terms creates room for more focused methodological criticisms that might remain vague in strictly textually based discourse like academic journals, and also opens the door for new ways to examine social reality, similar to Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. The page-by-page juxtaposition and arrangement of different cultural and social artifacts like folk art and discussion creates a strange new context in which to perceive them. The way these social worlds are arranged, apparently in the attempt of providing a concise illustration of them, may also distort the narrative of the worlds or decontextualize them, or also bring to the surface elements not so easily available to someone who encounters them normally.

Lev Manovich, in “What is Digital Cinema,” appears to concerned with something along these lines. Manovich wants to explore how digital cinema can capture reality in different terms than traditional cinema. He explains “spatial montage” as a technique where, instead of simply picking and choosing certain moments to be captured, all moments exist together on the screen. Rather than a strictly linear temporal model of cinema, where moments are captured regardless of where they are, all moments exist simultaneously at different points on the screen. This would allow the construction of a narrative that is not developed just in terms of a sequence of events, but a sequence of events in the now visible context of space.

A Matter of Liberty: Second Life Response for 2/25/08

The Free Software movement is concerned with the availability and accessibility of technology to anyone who might desire to work with it and modify it or use it to his or her own needs, even if they go beyond the intended uses of the technology. They recognize the pervasive nature of technology, how it has become an intrinsic part of many people’s lives, and see the attempted regulation of the internet and other computer technologies as an attack on our basic human liberties and equate the freedom of software to the freedom of speech.

Second Life can be seen as a sort of theoretical arena where those with heavy concerns about the connection and relationship between life and free software can try to imagine and experiment with their ideas. However, it might be less of a place where software integrates with life as much as a place where life integrates and interacts with software. The distinction being that, while whatever is coded in Second Life does not have immediate effects with real life, we can explore social possibilities and implications of new technologies in Second Life.

Computer Love

The song “Computer Love” by German electronic band Kraftwerk was released in 1981 on the album Computer World and also as a seven-inch single.

Versions of the song have been recorded by the bands The Album Leaf and Glass Candy. The song "Talk" by Coldplay borrows the melody but is a completely different song.

Another song, also titled "Computer Love", was released by Zapp and Roger in 1985. This song is completely unrelated from Kraftwerk as far as I can tell.