For those living in present times, the promise of the ‘future city’ is imagined as a special place designed to eliminate social ills, provide care-free living, and induce happiness for all. Yet time and time again, the utopian visions of future thinkers are met with the mundane realities of living inside these ‘golden dreams.’ Ubiquitous computing is here, but it remains a controversial idea that could foster an all-knowing, Big Brother style society. The vision for new cities such as the constructed Songdo City include luxuries aimed at catering to citizen’s needs and whims as well as offering peace of mind. In this case, the world of the possible has much more of a draw than the world of the actual.

Songdo is not the first utopian city—Brasilia is one example, which at its completion in 1960 promised a utopian urban experience with almost no imperfections. Today, Brasiliense families manifest their rejections of utopian design by reasserting familiar values, conceptions, and conventions of urban life. Songdo, scheduled for completion in 2015, will likely function in a similar pattern.

It is not every day that a corporation has the carte blanche opportunity to design a city from the ground up. The developer is Gale International, and the technological infrastructural designer is Microsoft. Thus, the city is a corporate venture which not only privatizes public space, but private lives. Questions have been asked such as, “So will it be the sort of place where the authorities will know instantly if you don’t recycle your drinks can? “We will build in all this functionality,” answers Catherine Maras, Microsoft’s Director of Worldwide E-Government who is involved in the Songdo project. “Really it’s opt-in or opt-out. Whatever the citizens want to make their lives easier.”

In my work I explore the ways in which everyday experiences of technology reflect, or create, phenomenological experiences. Experiences with technology are interdependent and symbiotic, creating meaning in a mutual fashion. In making a PERFECT.CITY, I embody and perform the utopian visions of both urban space and notions of technological progress that are always bound to historic periods of innovation, where dreams pass into action and back again. Though these cycles are complex, the work minimizes the aesthetics to feature the beauty of the mundane: both on the programming side, and within the everyday life that a future utopia would present.

PERFECT.CITY is an installation consisting of a large double-sided video projection of SIMS machinima and live action.

On one side of the large hanging screen, I perform as a representative from Gale International and Microsoft and recreate the design process of the city backwards and forwards through time. As I research and plan, the video takes on a kind of documentary of the making and placing of digital files in the planning of Songdo city in The Sims 3. The video offers a time-lapse massive recording of the planning and construction of the virtual city in fast-forward on one wall. The performance of “speed coding” is also a part of this work as the constructed vantage point is shown in present, past, and future all together.

On the opposite projection field, extreme slow motion close-ups of corners and peasantries and perfectness of the fabled future city transform time relative to our everyday experiences. Each video runs a total of 23 minutes.

The scenes are blank, boring, and unimaginative. The future city is a sonambulist, unattached to no history, unless one looks to the site itself, a 1376-acre piece built on a landfill “about the size of midtown Manhattan.” Commonplace scenes such as people walking by and pointless pedestrians point to the weary, stale, and unprofitable experience of techno-utopianism. The video offers viewers a space within a space, a utopia that contains continuous, everyday interactions that point to the imagined space of a utopian planning endeavor as more real than the actual environment the planning process will create. This spectacle of idealistic delirium comments on the never-ending need for people to fail to see the amazing things around them and celebrate them. “To hear planner John B. Hynes tell it, the rise of New Songdo City will be as dramatic as the resurfacing of Atlantis” (Poire 2004).

The Machinima work calls into question the imagined, constructed nature of this and other simulations and cities, and the short time used in decision making and modeling, which results in perhaps oversimplified rulesets and interactions. The character’s dull interactions become one of many datapoints in the constructed city.

software / network / computer

When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure… At that time it was also hoped that a clarification of humanity’s basic mysteries […] might be found. …
There are official searchers, inquisitors.
I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words.

–Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1)

visit [search] ; visit [search] and other projects at the Mapping Transitions site

Information technology has become an indespensible element in communication, play, and work. For example, a recent study shows that a typical office worker relies more on e-mail communication than face-to-face contact to share knowledge.(2) Almost every computer user relies upon Internet search engines to gather information, seek entertainment, and find pleasure. Search engines are deeply embedded into daily activity-they are the primary way people in the 21st century seek information …”we depend upon them so utterly.” (3)

Searching the internet, however, is regularly confusing and chaotic. Like Borges’ inquisitors mentioned in the passage above, searchers are regularly besieged with lists of thousands of results, and no systematic keyword system has yet developed to standardize the language of the search.(4) Searching can be frustrating, and the material discovered is often inaccurate. Searchers themselves offer to the mix complicated requests, misspellings, and odd X-rated content descriptions; the kinds of things people search for might seem disturbing, petty, or peculiar.

Search engines map, through phrase-like inquiries, our desire to find knowledge. Monitoring such desires allows us to read and live through other people’s interests.(5) To further explore this very critical aspect of Internet life, I developed [search]. [search] is an internet-based application which explores the human desire for information and knowledge through real-time monitoring of internet search engine inquiries from around the world. This research ties in specifically with my internet-based artistic practice, pushing the performative, live, and user-influenced aspects of pieces such as [remotion] (2002), [collection] (2001) and [rootings] (2001).

The work conceptually explores everyday life: how do people use technology in their daily lives? What are the commonalities of human desire? How is the desire affected by the internet’s inherent immediacy? What kinds of language do people bring to search engines? Does the kind of language used by searchers tell us something about how people view the internet and technology? Do people search for material or experiential items? How much time do people spend searching for sex, drugs, or money? Do people spend an equal amount of time searching for friends, god, and spirituality? Are our human values exposed through search engines? What is the data most sought after?

[search] is programmed using the Lingo programming language. Users click on words in the live search feed as they find words in others’ searches which interest them. These words separate, and conduct their own searches on themselves. Users can drag two words together which interest them to produce associative searches.

At this point, who is the searcher? What is being searched?

Acknowledgements:

-This project was funded by a commission from the University of Colorado @ Boulder.
-Special thanks to Brian Brantner, software engineer on the project. He can be found at http://www.marcotte.com.
-AskJeeves.com is used for the search engine feed
-EAT: Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus, a psycholinguistic database, is used to search joint searches from dragged “wordcloud” items

____________

1 Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” Labyrinths. New York: New Directions, 1964, 55.

2 “Survey Shows Office Workers Rely More Heavily On E-mail Than Face-to-Face Contact to Share Knowledge; AIIM Attendees Surveyed on Work Practices.” Business Wire March 7, 2002, 2393.

3 Toto, Christian. “Web Wise.” Insight on the News, Dec 10, 2001.17:46, 32-34.

4 Guernsey, Lisa. “The Search Engine as Cyborg.” The New York Times. Technology Sect. Jn 29 2000.

5 Garrity, Bronwyn. “Some Cyberspace of Her Own: Escapes From the Dark Horrible Sucking Trail of the Lost Voice.” The Nation, March 19, 2001. 272:11, 25.

software / computer
[rootings] is a collection of experimental games in which player participants explore experiences of time and memory within a set of game/narratives.

The individual components in the work are loosely based around different life episodes that have to do with time-passing, skipping, rewinding, time travel, and memory.

Elements of quantum mechanics and string theory open the door to scientific inquiry about time in the 21st Century, inquiries which can begin with our daily domestic, personal experiences. We can think about remembering an episode in one’s life within the context of scientific theories of time, for example, as more like a simultaneous event, parallel world, or constant, not simply a memory or a past happening. This project uses scientific background in perception of time and the physics of time in string theory to tease out ideas about time in narrative, mental order/disorder, and interactivity.

In [rootings], we encounter time in unusual ways; each string or episode itself is a recurring or cyclical event which takes the form of an abstract yet interactive “arcade style” game. Here, I am using game systems as materials and methods by which to explore these boundary zones, involving both intellectual hypotheses and the commonplace as locations and manifestations of socio-technological phenomenon-both the conditions of time and memory are extremely difficult to study and are heavily subjective.

The main interface of [rootings] is based on a reverberating circuit diagram. The brain, an organ composed of over 50 billion nerve cells, is connected by axons and dendrite conduits. Any type of activity in the brain (hearing a sound, problem solving, reading) sets off neural circuits throughout the nerve cells. While every experience creates new pathways, some of the circuits created repeat over and over, marking out a fixed location and becoming part of memory. These reverberating circuits start with input which produces a signal, which in turn becomes encoded within a neuroloop, producing a short-term memory function. A reverberating circuit, for example, creates physiological memory.

[rootings] encourages players to begin digging around in these circuits, using the physiological actions of clicking, tracing, and the repetitive process of game play to reinscribe memories from maker to player.

The heart of this research project is based around recent readings in physics, neurology, and most notably, string theory, which support the idea of tangible simultaneities, much like real, visceral memories or deja vous. The work deals directly about time and memory through rich imagery and sound and through the perspective of a woman maker and through the use of stories and relationships in personal, everyday, almost mundane occurances to show that such slips of time are equally everyday happenings.

[rootings], like other web art projects, is not “created” unless users are interacting with it. The work becomes a blend between research, process, and performance. Like Andre Breton and other critic/makers, I celebrate lapses in time, perhaps because in the very act of making creative work one loses oneself to time utterly.

software / network

[meme.garden] (2006) is collaboratively created software which allows participants to search words, find clouds of associated words, and “plant” their word searches to create “forests” which may or may not have relationships with other participants in the system. Participants’ plants grow through time and reflect network changes through time about their interests. The [meme.garden] software was commissioned by Turbulence.org and created by Mary Flanagan, Daniel Howe, Chris Egert, Junming Mei, & Kay Chang.
[meme.garden]

[collection] is a networked computer application that gathers up found material from various users’ hard drives and collects them on a centralized server. Going from computer to computer, [collection] scours drives and collects bits and pieces of user’s data – sentences from emails, graphics, web browser cached images, business letters, sound files-and creates a mobile mix of user experiences, operating system files, and normally hidden materials.

The program explores a workstation’s architecture and a user’s personal history with the machine, creating this material into a moving, three dimensional, continuously shifting map which has been compared to a visible, virtual, networked collective unconscious. It also questions notions of authenticity and authorship in the digital age, breaking the conceptual line separating, for example, and emotional letter from html or a help file.

The program is downloadable for pc for all users to access. [collection] is currently downloadable in compressed (ZIP) and in uncompressed (the .EXE) form. First download the application and log in with your the name you wish your material to be identified with. The program will do the rest! Have patience while [collection] scans your hard drive for material. The larger and fuller the hard drive, the longer the search process.

[collection] is significant because it calls into question the nature of memory as a network through its allegorical use of the internet as a collective memory space. By mapping a user’s, or group of users’, unique experiences-through images, downloads, web sites visited, emails-it creates spatial memory maps that not only reflect the computer and technoculture in content, but the user’s artifacts from his or her interactions. Most software art projects are not about the user him or herself. [collection] becomes unique to the user or group of users participating, bringing long-forgotten content from the hard disk to light and reminding us that memory can sometimes be too persistent.

The software only visits users who have installed the prerequisite “transference” software so rights of privacy are not violated. No data is destroyed; the bits and snippets are copied into the ‘unconscious’ on the server.

[collection] has been exhibited onscreen and as an installation in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Barcelona, and Sydney among other venues.

created by Mary Flanagan, Wu Fu Che, + Ho Chien Chang

Cyberspace is a socially mediated construction, made clear through the use of avatars, or personal representations in virtual worlds. By putting ourselves into digital worlds, we lose the self and become one with virtual spaces’ new elements. It seems that an aspect of identity is released as an electronic element. By putting ourselves into digitally constructed realities, we call into question the nature of the self in a digital culture and the ways the new selves are created. What are the elements which construct that reality? What is our relationship with the virtual personae and figures we create in online space? What is our relationship to our own data, our bodies sampled with the latest digital technology?

But what is, in fact, natural? Digital culture’s dominance, and ultimately, construction of landscapes and bodies has been a way to create new cosmologies, new elements. The creation and discovery of elements is a fundamentally human endeavor, as are the creations of new systems of representation, identities, and experiences in VR. We work to abstract and distort reality in order to apprehend it. Like language, we name, categorize, and quantify our surroundings.

[unnatural elements] presents images of researchers/artists from Taiwan and the USA which demonstrate that the conversion from the image of the physical body to the image of the virtual is not the typical smooth computational process Hollywood would have us believe.

The images featured in [unnatural elements] show the effects of the creation of a digital nature and digital elements. Most researchers working in 3D technologies strive for “perfection.” However, our team was interested in sampling one real and watching the translation between earthbound identities and virtual ones. What would human data create in cyberspace? The images were created by using 3D head scans of the artists from composited images produced by a video camera and stitching them together with custom software. Interestingly, the process generated “natural” eruptions inherent to the heads, and each scan seemed to take on forms reminiscent of “natural” eruptions we see in earth, fire, water and wind.

Here, our new bodies erupt with artifacts and take on unexpected resemblances to earthbound natural elements. The “random” patterns we see in rocks, water, and other natural elements are not random at all but naturally occurring algorithms. Thus the computer, in creating artifacts, is effectively doing nature’s work. In a sense the computer is much more “real” (disturbingly so) than WE are – when it creates artifacts it is acting on “natural” algorithms.

Offering us a way to critically examine the body in cyberspace and our conventions and ideals of interactive avatars and the drive for 3D art “realism,” these pieces work to provoke a dialogue about the real and “natural” our media is trying so desperately to produce in digital space.

This collaboration was made possible by funding from the U.S. Fulbright Scholar Program and the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, 2001, and took place in Dr. Ming Ouyoung’s CML, NTU, Taiwan.

software / paper / models / computer

[arborescence] is an interactive installation using the gradual growth patterns of forests and trees as a metaphorical structure to map time, space and language. Making physical the routine internet actions of searching, tagging and streaming RSS feeds [arborescence] creates a contextual time-scape in which interests grow and change over time.

Participants enter search terms and the software forms virtual trees on a large screen based on these terms. The type of tree or leaf varies by the word or theme entered and participants are encouraged to explore the myriad of shapes and sizes available. Participants can find clouds of associated words and “plant” their word searches to create forests which may or may not have relationships with others in the system. These trees and forests “grow” over time to reflect network changes about their interests.

The [meme.garden] software included in the exhibition was commissioned by Turbulence.org and created collaboratively by Mary Flanagan, Daniel Howe, Chris Egert, Junming Mei & Kay Chang.