locative media interstitial social spaces

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locative mediainterstitial social spaces

• 17.10.06

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announcement

• DRC note-taker

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recap

• on what we should get from Pie and Afternoon
• illustrations/examples of the narrative theories
  in Dovey
• formal structures or, relationship between form
  and content
• how is a story presented? (no story is without
  presentations, without form
• fabula/sjuzhet spatiality (temporality)

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recap

• lonelygirl15 in terms of fabula/sjuzhet and space
  (time)
• told in first person/direct address
• through dialogue (rather than narration)
• but also collaboratively, through commenting
  questioning idea of single author
• http//www.youtube.com/profile?userlonelygirl15

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transition

• interstitial social spaces
• interstitial a space between a compound an
  unsolicited ad page on the web
• fabula/sjuzhet meaning between the form and
  content (actually content is only produced
  through form)

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transition

• Julian Dibbell, A Rape in Cyberspace
• spatially
• an early, widely circulated and influential story
  about digital space, especially in relation to
  physical space
• interstitial the space between

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transition

• Julian Dibbell, A Rape in Cyberspace
• temporally
• moving from an earlier period in which digital
  and real space were seen as separate
• to the present, where they are multiply
  integrated
• locative media/arts
• ubiquitous/intimate computing and technologies

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MUDs MOOs

• MUD multiple user dungeon (later dimension,
  domain, dialogue)
• created in late 1970s in UK
• role-playing games (based on Dungeons Dragons)
• text-based, multiple user, UNIX platform
• later became more social in focus (TinyMUDs)

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generic MUD map

• mappingcyberspace.com

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MUDs MOOs

• MOO MUD object oriented
• social focus
• creating characters, creating rooms, interacting
• LambdaMOO
• created by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC, Oct. 30
  1990
• objects and verbs (and properties)
• www.moo.mud.org

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LambdaMOO map

• mappingcyberspace.com

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Julian Dibbell

• pay attention to his language -- the form and
  rhetoric
• he uses it to play with our assumptions about
  reality
• to play with the borders between real virtual
• his interest is not in whether these events
  really happened
• more about the status of reality and action
  itself in the context of social networks
• reminds us that there is never an unmediated,
  unformulated access to reality (fabula w/o
  sjuzhet)

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Julian Dibbell

• language
• MUDs semifictional digital otherworlds
• story about
• an elusive congeries of flesh and bytes named
  Mr. Bungle, and of the ghostly sexual violence he
  committed in the halls of LambdaMOO, and most
  importantly of the ways his violence and his
  victims challenged the thousand and more
  residents of that surreal, magic-infested mansion
  to become, finally, the community so many of them
  already believed they were.

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Julian Dibbell

• It asks us to behold the new bodies awaiting us
  in virtual space undazzled by their phantom
  powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting
  out the socially meaningful differences between
  those bodies and our physical ones. And perhaps
  most challengingly it asks us to wrap our
  late-modern ontologies, epistemologies, sexual
  ethics, and common sense around the curious
  notion of rape by voodoo doll -- and to try not
  to warp them beyond recognition in the process.

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Julian Dibbell

• They say repeated 4x in opening paragraph
  why?
• final time
• . . . I can assure you that what they say is
  true . . .

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Julian Dibbell

• The facts
• time/place
• location
• description
• the remaining facts tell us. . .

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Julian Dibbell

• These particulars, as I said, are unambiguous.
  But they are far from simple, for the simple
  reason that every set of facts in virtual reality
  (or VR, as the locals abbreviate it) is shadowed
  by a second, complicating set the "real-life"
  facts. And while a certain tension invariably
  buzzes in the gap between the hard, prosaic RL
  facts and their more fluid, dreamy VR
  counterparts, the dissonance in the Bungle case
  is striking.

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Julian Dibbell

• Ludicrously excessive by RL's lights, woefully
  understated by VR's, the tone of exu's response
  made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap
  between them.
• Which is to say it made the only kind of sense
  that can be made of MUDly phenomena. For while
  the facts attached to any event born of a MUD's
  strange, ethereal universe may march in straight,
  tandem lines separated neatly into the virtual
  and the real, its meaning lies always in that
  gap.

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Julian Dibbell

• what happens inside a MUD-made world is neither
  exactly real nor exactly make-believe, but
  nonetheless profoundly, compellingly, and
  emotionally true.
• how is he differentiating these categories?
  (real/make believe/true)

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locative Hemment

• locative arts
• The exploratory movements of locative art are
  located b/t the art of communications and
  networking and the arts of landscape, walking,
  and the environment (349)
• For locative art to exceed the sterile precision
  of its own axiomatic abstract, rule-governed
  system, it needs to act upon or through material
  bodies and substances, engage in the ambiguity,
  dirt, sweat, and smells of the world, and
  acknowledge the importance of rain, hail, wind,
  pestilential air . . . (354 qt from Deleuze
  Guattari)

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locative Hemment

• locative arts
• situated between the abstract data (data sphere,
  data base) of its technological aspects and the
  dirty, messy material of everyday life.
• mixed reality of intersected virtual and
  physical
• or, something produced in between a fold
  between virtual and physical, data space and
  geographical space (354).

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locative background

• Situationist International
• founders in 1957
• l-r Guiseppe Pinot Gallizio, Piero Simondo,
  Elena Verrone, Michele Bernstein, Guy Debord,
  Asger Jorn, and Walter Olmo.

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locative background

• use of situations rather than artworks to
  manifest points of life and desire in a world
  that is otherwise alienated through capitalist
  state socialist forces of production
• détournement (detouring, de-turning,
  appropriating)
• dérive (drift, wandering aimlessly)
• psychogeography creating new mental/political/soc
  ial maps through dérive crossing psychic and
  social zones

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The Naked City (Guy Debord, 1957)
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Abolition of Alienated Labor (Giuseppe
Pino-Gallizio Guy Debord)
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Essentiellement detourned comic"The very
development from class society to the spectacular
organization of non-life leads the revolutionary
project to become visibly what it already was
essentially."
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locative background

• Richard Long
• conceptual art
• everyday activity as art
• walking as art
• http//www.richardlong.org/