My presentation of tomorrow…

Eelco

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The Mamas & the Papas

It’s Monday again, after a beautiful week full of trying different food, walks through the city, sightseeing & shopping, arguing with richshaw-drivers, getting bitten by all different kinds of insects and attending really interesting lectures. We are getting ready for another great week in Bangalore, India. This week each group will be busy doing their own projects. At the end of the week all the work will hopefully be rewarded with a lot of people coming to the exhibition on Thursday afternoon at CKP from 4 to 7 pm.

After the usual bustrip we arrived at the Sristi campus. Getting tea, water & coffee before everything starts became a sort of a ritual and after practicing this ritual everybody was settled to get some serious work done.

Because my group & I decided to leave early we didn’t get to see what everybody’s been doing this Monday, so when I came back to the hotel I interviewed one person of each group about their developments. After this I will elaborate more on my own project.

Mini-interview Rosie & Eric

“In search of inbetweenness we decided to reflect on our own otherness”
“In a place of transit you should feel comfortable, but your not and this only because the color of your skin”

Rosie’s group decided to acted out a series of exercises in Majestic Bustreminal which will be documented. The main purpose for these exercises is to observe oneself and the other in transitional space. This state of inbetweeness was the trigger for deeper research on the subject matter. SPACE & IDENTITY bouncing back and forth. The first week was about looking at the other and this week will be about looking at ourselves through the other’s eyes.
- Avni, Rosie, Babitha, Ane, Eric

It’s interesting to see ones own reaction towards the other, and the change in collectively becoming the other solely based on your skin colour. After a couple of talks with my peers it became clear to me that they somehow feel (and these are my own words, a free interpertation of the situation) visually raped as the gaze of the “other” seems to constantly follow them around and watch them. In my case it’s completely the opposite, nobody bothers me with big eyes as if I came with a UFO from planet Europe. Funny to notice I had to fly across the world to feel completely at home.

The other exists, no matter what they say. It will take years of re-programming one’s mind to change these reflections of otherness and wholeness. We know that there is no such thing as the other and we can read untill we drop, but we won’t feel it. Maybe we should all spend a lifetime on a mountain sitting and contemplating our otherness and maybe we will become one with the universe, leaving things like “otherness”,” you”,” me”,” I” behind (for the record….i’m joking …but we should…… )

Mini-interview Eelco

‘Everything is solarrrrrrpowerrrr!!!’

Eelco & friends are working on a clock which gets its energy from the sun. The more sunlight the clock is able to process, the faster it will run. The stored solarpower in the clock will be used to sustain a microsociety which consists of little mechanical bugs. The project questions our notion of time and provides an alternative vision on time and space.
- Shibaji, Claire, Bhanu, Eelco, Clemond

We aren’t different only in culture, mentality, nurture and gender. Talking with Eelco made me also aware that even our notion of time depends on the location of where you are at a certain moment in time and space. The 24-hours (the only thing I thought we could agree upon, and the only thing that I thought of being equally divided amongst people) are going faster or slower according to the amount of sunlight. I’m wondering if we can’t at least have one thing in the world reality which is a certain fact and equal to men, besides birth & death?

Mini-interview Patricia

“The most beautiful part of the day was not missing the bus”

Patrica’s group will make a databank which will contain different sounds & images. The main purpose behind this project is to collect different data of the city which can be used as the building blocks for our imagination. Imagination needs objects from reality to deform & to play with. Every group in the workshop have acces to the databank. Also a musicband will play out the sound that the images make when they are converted to sound.
- Patricia, Doris, Sylwia & Kostas

Looking very much forward to hear the sound of images. I knew you could visualize sound, but to make sound of an image was a new approch of datavisualisation for me. Does the color red have its own sound? And what about the color blue, or green or yellow….and so on. Maybe we will be surprised and hear a beautifull harmony of sounds, singing beautiful words to us or maybe the sound will be a message for us. Finally images can speak out and tell us what they are thinking…….or maybe they will speak to us in angry voices for using them for all the wrong purposes………..who knows?

the sound of color…..

Note for the reader who isn’t in the workshop: If you are also extremeley curious about the sound of images, I suggest you visit the end exhibition on Thursday or check back on the blog after we upload the images and texts.

Mantu, Mpi, Piere & Nancy

“Locations rhymes with frustrations”

The group will make a movie about the most popular locations in Bangalore. Thinking about locations and the people we realized that every location has his own (body) language which we translated into ”actions”. For example, praying in a temple is accepted behaviour, but what will happen when you do it on the streets or in a park? Three movies will be played next to each other (Cubbon park, MG Road & a Hindu temple). In all of the locations one action from each location will be acted out. The main purpose is to see the people’s reactions.

Monday we started with filming footage for the movie. First we decided on doing four movies in which each of us played a role. But after being denied acces to the malls and with the request for filing for permission, the plan of four movies changed into three. The first location will be extremely commercial, the second location will be really “religious” and the third location will be “natural”. Tuesday we will be finishing gathering the footage and Wednesday is for editting, programming, hysteria & panic.

Last but not least I really really really want to share this picture. On MG road (Mahatma Gandhi Road)..….no disrespect but I almost p*ssed my pants laughing when I saw this quote. It reads: “an eye for an eye is making the whole world”. The poor guy forgot the last word which is “blind”. Or did he do it intentionally?

Sunday.
Sweet Sunday.
Sunday sounds like shopping.
Sounds like shopping and sun.

Open the brackets : A bunch of students gather at Cubbon Park at 15.45 – or even a bit later – and join Srishti faculty Deepak Srinivasan – artist, media practitioner, researcher and pedagogue. The group sits on a stone, as Deepak introduces the main topic of this Sunday afternoon walk – thoughts about public space – and asks the students how they relate to the particular context of Bangalore. The students of the DAI, the “white foreigners”, evoke the particular rhythm of this city : time seems expanded while travelling by rickshaw or by bus, given the size of the city and the traffic jams. When walking down the busy streets of Commercial Street, or by crossing a busy road, some feel like blending in a flow, an organic movement that materialises in making three steps to pass a rickshaw, wait for the bus to go and finally run to the other side in diagonal. Some of us have also witnessed people brushing their teeth in the streets, as if the private sphere had merged with the public space. Like in Cubbon Park, where families sit on the grass despite the do no sit on the lawn signs, Bangaloreans seem to take over the public space, to appropriate it.
Deepak then proposed a reflection on the way gender is performed in public, through an half an-hour exercise : students were asked to form pairs of men and women, walk in the park, observe the opposite gender, incorporate the gestures that characterise a man or a woman, and come back acting likewise. Thirty minutes later, the whole group hadn’t been very assiduous, but those who had, came up either with playful observations, or with a feeling of vulnerability, especially for women. Generally speaking, the very fact to be a white women in Bangalore involves a lot of emphatic looks from men; trying to walk like a man for the exercise made some women feel even more observed, and therefore uncomfortable. The mimics sounded like pure spectacle. The group seems to agree that it is easier to stand as an observer, which allowed Deepak to underline the notions of visibility and invisibility in public space. About the social and political context of Cubbon Park, Deepak mentioned that it was mainly used by lower middle class people, mainly Muslim families from Shivajinagar, the neighbouring commercial area. Throughout history, the park has been the main component of a subtle but menacing composition of city planning speculation (parking lots, government buildings, metro station), security policy and protests.

The walk headed then to Shivajinagar and its colourful, odour full and plastic-goods-full commercial streets. We passed a lot of wall paintings on our way, that I personally found beautiful. Deepak couldn’t agree, and mentioned the polemic in which these paintings have been involved, in terms of the nationalistic images of India that they present, but also because of a “Singapore syndrome” – understand the recent government’s quirk for clean streets. By replacing the Bollywood posters that used to cover these walls, this policy has also deprived income for the people who were living from the poster industry.

Further on, Deepak briefly explained the project that his collective, Maraa set up in Virapillai Street, where they displayed images that had been taken there, which depicted the area’s everyday life. This self-reflective work raised questions from the locals about the issue of the set-up : why does one show images of old buildings when the city is developing and growing so fast? Could they not better exhibit images from the new malls?
On the way back to Commercial Street Deepak also mentioned a project he set up last year with a group of Srishti students : in the flower market the undergraduates had to observe the traders and their gestures. After this ethnological survey, they spent a day working with the flower traders, dressing like them, according to their previous research.
An inscription in Tamil on a very colourful Hindu temple led Deepak to briefly introduce us to the tensions that divide the Tamil and Kannada groups in Bangalore. But that’s when the owner of the shop in front of where we were standing asked us to leave, because potential customers weren’t able to see his storefront. Negociating the public space…
Deepak left us in Commercial street, with its Western-style shops and its police station, which occasionally gathers street vendors demonstrations – another side-effect of the ‘Singapore syndrome’. Close the brackets.

The sun has gone.
But the shopping still goes on.

Saturday 12^th of March

The journey is on its half -way, time to think and to rethink, start and restart in order to go on.

After an intense and concrete week, that helped us, the participants of the Space the Final Frontier, to think about the possibilities of using technologies in order to open a dialogue with the Space, Saturday seem to be the day that all these lectures, presentations and conversation, had the chance to take form through the different projects that will be realize the following five days.

Saturday morning it was the day that we had breakfast late around with some people of us to start our day with a hangover from the previous night’s drinking at the living room of the first floor at Aranha’s home.

There was no schedule for the day, except it was the shopping for the projects. So every group that needed electronics, meet up around eleven close to the town Hall, in an area that exists many stores with electronics. The participants from the Solar/Time project was there and they bought what is necessary to built up their idea, discussing also what is next for the project, the meeting finished and Eelco brought the Solar Panel and the sensors etc back in his room that started to transformed it slowly into a lab in the afternoon.

For the rests seem that was a “free” day but the fact that the projects just begun, found every group to had arrange meeting in the morning and in afternoon.

The Bangaluru Data Bank {BDB }project had a meeting in a cafe at Brigade street, after sharing ideas and questions of the next step for the project, such as how to built the data bank and trans-coding the data, the participants had a walk to the nearby mg road and commercial street, experience the bangalore markets, collecting data, and made shopping.

The BDB group end up at Aranha’s home, starting searching for couple of hours.

 Same story for repositioning inbetween space project they had the meeting in the afternoon at the church street, to ,discussing the different possibilities of the projects, buying books and making research.

For thebreaking the Bangalore surface group it was a day that decided to work individually and to have a meetingon Sunday.

 The participants form the Dutch Art Institute, met at Koshy’s restaurant that some of them enjoy the concert of Jazz music by Ms. Shilpa Bavikatte from Chicago, Illinois, US, Accompanied by
Drums   Mr. Gopi,  Bangalore, Keyboard  Mr. Floyd Santimano, Goa, Guitar Mr. Praveen David , at Koshy’s Chill Out.
After that they had dinner all together at Koshy’s restaurant, exchange the different experiences of this day, having nice Indian food and drinking lasi and beers, relaxing at the end of this day.

 Returning at the hotel with different rikshaw’s ending the saturday night at Bangaluru, again in the living room of the hotel without drinks this time, seems that we starting to experience an every day routine, while at the same time we experience something completely diffrerent far away from our every day life.

Friday March 11, 2011, Bangalore, India.

Space: The final frontier

These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise

Its 5 year mission

To explore strange new worlds

To seek out new life and new civilizations

To boldly go where no (hu)man has gone before

First officers blog, blog entry 5.

Earth, Stardate 2011, 07:38am IST, GPS 12.963638,77.63861; Bangalore ;

A new adventure starting..

All the crew got out of their downtime on the holo deck alright. After having breakfast at the officers mesh, the crew had to report at the flight deck at 07:35am IST.

Some of the crew members had to be gathered from their quarters to report on the flight deck immediately.

Just a few minutes to eight the brand new USS Enterprise arrives and all the crew boards. We will use the warp drive to get to our destination..

Well… we would have wished for that. It is just another bumpy ride through the already awakened but still quite fresh city of Bangalore.

The ride takes about an hour as normal. The crew is already starting to get used to this new rhythm and where able to shift their bio clock to the local time zone. We arrived at the Srishti N2 (new-new) building without any irregularities. As everywhere the people that live close by are the latest, so we are the early birds. And we all manned our position at the bridge. A pleasant surprise arrived, ‘regular’ coffee!!! (for all the caffeine junkies that are in desperate need for some while now).

Yesterday the assimilation started into different collectives. Today this will continue in between the presentations and talks that are scheduled. The Peter Brothers will share their thoughts with the engineers and technicians of the USS Enterprise.

The start of today:

• 10:00: Vasanthi’s presentation

Dr. Vasanthi Mariadass has a doctorate in Cinema Studies. Her specialization is in Film and Literary Theory (including poststructuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies and feminist studies). Her current research is on the works of a German documentary filmmaker Harun Farocki.

Vasanthi’s presentation addressing:

The reading of Zizeks Science of Appearance, Politics of the Real.

Vasanthi explains why her presentation is fragmented but still to be concidered integral.

For us not to worry about why it doesn’t all connect and for us to take it as discrete things and see where it flows rather than trying to engage in particular situations.

From humiliation (Copernicus, Darwin, Freud and others) to technology, where substantial reality is disturbed by for instance virtual reality.

Psychoanalysis is challenged severely by recent brain sciences.

The quasi-autonomy of appearances:

Reduction of ideology to economic base.

Freuds’ notion of fantasy (the Subjective/Objective subversion)

Drives – quasi-theological drives. De-centering of objective unconscious. Split appearances and reality.

Bhaktain: Chronotopology (chronos and topology )

Because reality is always shifting; different scales are required..

To put it in more StarTrek language:

Real entities and particals, constantly moving, constantly in a Deleuzian flux.

To engage with something that is in constant motion is almost impossible.

There are split appearences within reality. The thing is that these parallel anomolies reflect on our daily realities.

For example: as if the transporter beam malfunctioned and a person appears at 2 places at the same time.

Or as we used the replicator for an object, so that it exits in 2 places in the same time.

A space-time anomaly?

“Kirk: Come on. Spock, why didn’t you jump in?

Spock: I was trying to comprehend the meaning of the words.

McCoy: It’s a song, you green-blooded…Vulcan. You sing it. The words aren’t important. What’s important is that you have a good time singing it.

Spock: Oh, I am sorry, Doctor. Were we having a good time?

McCoy: God, I liked him better before he died.

-Star Trek V: The Final Frontier”

Demystification of concepts: 19th century: Marx, Freud

With their bodies, with their minds, with their desires

They reappear and haunt you, and you don’t know what, where and how (20th century: Zizek)

Narcissistic illnesses: exponential growth of technology.

Husserlian phenomenology: as such in their economy…the line is opened up through Bergson, Deleuze, Wittgenstein: becoming with regard to real entities.

Peter Hitchcock – ‘Chronotope of the Shoe’

About the shoe being manufactured in Indonesia, and sold for a lot of money in the States.

What is the concept of chronotope ?

Chronotopes and Architectonics

(in this article it states Michael Jordan was a Olympics runner, but I do believe he was a basketball and baseball player…)

It deals with relation: coincidental and transparent and in the end becoming and flux.

Harun Farocki => Still Life.

>Screening of 15 minutes of Farocki his film Still Life (IMDB link)

Harun Farocki – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Then we discussed fetishism, starting with what fetish means, and eventually winding up with Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ (add link) taking into account the above. The point being how advertisement adds value to simple commodity objects (food, clothing, shoes, etc) and our desire becomes ever greater. This is always in a state flux, value placement is subjective and constantly in motion.

At around 13:17 IST we tuned out of Vasanthi’s informing and interconnecting presentation to break for lunch and discuss the concepts the 5 groups are developing.

Over lunch there will be the possibility for the groups who didn’t do it so far to talk the concepts through on technical details with the Peter Brothers.

Some people had problems with a time and space displacement:

14:18 IST

Lunch break is over, all the cadets report on deck again and we will continue with the program:

• 2:00 Nishant’s presentation

Nishant Shah is the Research Director at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), Bangalore. Prior to CIS Nishant worked as an information architect with Yahoo, Partecs and Khoj Studios, was a Research Analyst for Comat Technologies and designed and taught several courses and workshops on the aesthetics and Politics of New Digital Media, for undergraduate and graduate level students in different universities around the world. Nishant has done his Ph.D. doctoral work from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.

Via a series of conversations Nishants wants us to shift out of our comfort zones a bit.

After clarity, enlightenment, knowledge forms, there will be no answers, but souls searching questions.

Space:

What is our response to space:

Exchange?

Medium for expansion?

What is place? What defines it?

Location based, materially available and geographical mappable (even when virtual or time or server, browser, screen…). It is always to say, this is where I am. Somebody can verify it , yes this is where you are.

There is a clear distinction between the physical present or not.

The not present being like in art , faith, Irrationality

etc.

So what is the distinction between space and place?

An entity without borders? Abstract?

How we deal with space as a value we don’t know.

Isolation, closed room?

Space is a mental concept, but in reality, time and place are physical.

Notions of space are relational and transactional.

Questions of space:

1)Questions of the body (location, ability, relations)

2)Space is not always predefined and doesn’t’ exist at same time for every one (it is not static, it is in a process, it is time based)

Space is almost fragile and is more open to protest.

3)Space is necessary in a state or rationality. Not only you define space, but also the other objects things/animals etc. (real and imaginary) define space.

It is a point of transaction and emerges over negotiation with other objects/things.

An example would be Robinsoe Crusoe.

Day four, Thursday March 10th

This day started as always early, quick breakfast and bus to Sristhi.

First on our schedue was a lecture by Ajai Narendran about mutual subjects connected with internet, databases, web and digital imprints and counterparts.

In the introduction we focused on semantic web which is particulary  a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand. We discussed about the differences and possibilities in this relation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

The Semantic Web is a mesh of information linked up in such a way as to be easily processable by machines, on a global scale. You can think of it as being an efficient way of representing data on the World Wide Web, or as a globally linked database.The Semantic Web was thought up by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the WWW, URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There is a dedicated team of people at the World Wide Web consortium working to improve, extend and standardize the system, and many languages, publications, tools and so on have already been developed. However, Semantic Web technologies are still very much in their infancies, and although the future of the project in general appears to be bright, there seems to be little consensus about the likely direction and characteristics of the early Semantic Web.

Later on we focused on data containers and Christiane Paul thoughts. What data base is ?

store information, in a set of columns. 

While a database is now commonly understood as a computerized record keeping system, 

it is essentially a structured collection of data that stands in the tradition of ‘data containers’ such 

as a book, a library, an archive.

Databases can be distinguished according to different ‘data models’–that is, data containers and the ways in which data are 

stored in and retrieved from them. Among the most common data models (some of them subsets 

of others and sometimes used in combination) are: 

• Hierarchical Databases that arrange the data in hierarchies similar to a tree structure with 

parent/child relationships. 

• Network Databases that are still close to the hierarchical model but use ‘sets’ to establish 

a hierarchy that allows children to have more than one parent and thus establishes many- 

to-many relationships. 

• Relational Databases, the most common form, are based on the research of Dr. E. F. 

Codd at IBM in the late 1960s and relies on the concept of tables (so-called ‘relations’) 

that store all data. Contrary to hierarchical or network databases, relational ones do not 

require a close understanding of how exactly information within the database is 

structured since each table can be identified by a unique name that can be called and 

found by the database. 

•  Client/Server Databases, which come in various forms and allow multiple ‘clients’ to 

remotely and simultaneously access and retrieve information from a database server 

around the clock. 

• Object-Oriented Databases that are designed to work well with object-oriented 

programming languages (such Java and C++) and make entries (objects) in the database 

appear as programming language objects in one or more languages.  

all Christiane text is available here in PDF version :

http://classes.dma.ucla.edu/Spring06/259M/readings/paul_christiane-final.pdf

From databases we went to web 1.0, web 2.0 and web 3.0

Trying to see the relation beetween them, and also the progress that has been made.

Web 1.0 – That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 – This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 – This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

In the last part of lecture the question “How google works” has been asked and so we went into all this process on pictures, to make it easier to understand.

In a short drawn illustration it looked like this :

            After this breathtaking lecture we went on the rooftop to eat lunch and have another brainstorm. The teams were supposed to be chosen and annouced soon, and we were discussing our ideas and possible projects.

After lunch the lecture went into Natural Language Processing NLP. 

(Google trademark secrets)

There’s a nice video from google/sic!/ about this issue up here :

Then on we were searching for a nice online open source project alterantives like 

http://www.ohloh.net/ and VISIMO.

And in the end we went on the John Brickman Edge Foundation that is focused on promoting inquiry into and discussion of intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and literary issues, as well as to work for the intellectual and social achievement of society.

http://www.edge.org/

We also spoke about the antropologist Gregory Bateson 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Bateson

Bateson also viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems.This supreme cybernetic system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as the Mind.While the Mind is a cybernetic system, it can only be distinguished as a whole and not parts. Bateson felt the Mind was immanent in the messages and pathways of the supreme cybernetic system. He saw the root of system collapses as a result of Occidental or Western epistemology. According to Bateson consciousness is the bridge between the cybernetic networks of individual, society and ecology and that the mismatch between the systems due to improper understanding will be result in the degradation of the entire supreme cybernetic system or Mind. Bateson saw consciousness as developed through Occidental epistemology was at direct odds with the Mind.[