How Social Media changed my shared images: context of presentation space

I am attempting to understand what more I can learn about how social media has affected the images I posted on flickr and facebook.

The main thing I’ve noticed is that I can see how many views they’ve had, and how few comments in comparison. I have also noticed that the images viewed are the 10, in two batches of 5, that appear as thumbnails on my blog. No one has gone on to look at images further into my photostream

While I’m pleased to see that people have looked at some of what I’ve posted, I’m not sure how to interpret the lack of comments. On the other hand, I often do the same thing – look at images people have posted without commenting. I guess this is because there is just so much to look at, and you can’t comment on all of it unless you have no other real life. I find that I only comment on things that affect me really strongly. A lot of what gets posted is social, so it doesn’t really affect me enough to comment.

That is why I posted some of my personal work, thinking it would generate more comments that party images. Not necessarily.

The other thing that is changed by social media is the way images and videos circulate. Things get forwarded, favourited, and passed around in a way that would only happen at a party otherwise. In fact, it’s not at all like a party, because that would generally be a finite number of people, over a limited duration, and with some kind of common connection and physical presence.

Flickr and facebook allow everything to be endlessly distributed via links well beyond your own social network. The good thing about this is that it can provide a much bigger audience for your work. The bad thing is that it can eliminate your creative attribution in the process. If authorship isn’t important to the work, that’s fine, but when it comes to art, it’s more difficult for me to accept. It also facilitates people re-using or re-working your images in whatever way they like. From a collaborative viewpoint you could see this as positive, but personally, I don’t like the idea much. Of course this is true of any internet-based image, whether in social media or otherwise.

One other thing I dislike about flickr is that while I can group work into different albums, which I have done, I cannot control the sequence that they appear in, including what appears next to each other. This is very frustrating! Context and relationships between images are important, and flikr destroys that. Perhaps there is a work-around to this, but I haven’t discovered it yet.

 

Reflections on “Watching”

I have to start by saying that this course has provided the most meaningful and thought-provoking critiques of any class so far at Ryerson, and wins hands-down for Production Course of the year. Both Alex and Steve are insightful about questioning how we approach our work, and the work of others in New Media, and at suggesting alternative approaches along with rationales for them. The level of discussion, feedback and real, applicable suggestions throughout 18 crits has been just amazing. Thanks to both of you for cracking New Media practice and thinking wide open for us! A special thanks to Steve for helping us with arduino, max patching, coding and sensors, all new territory for everyone in our group.

Project Summary

Our project was based on ideas about watching, including notions of both surveillance and voyeurism. Originally we saw this as a rather playful piece that had seriously “spooky” undertones. These undertones were derived from the widespread prevalence and public acceptance of surveillance cameras, the massive amount of online erotica, and the largely invisible co-opted ownership and mining of personal information and content underpinning the explosive growth of social media. Questions about who is watching who and for what purpose have never been so relevant.

We set up 3 cameras to record a performance in a washroom stall, as though the subject was unaware that he was being watched. We were alluding to the pornographic, which was part of our original intention, but we decided to play this down by displaying hot “boarding boys” instead of overt porn. Our intention was to subvert the watching process, by turning the watcher into the watched by turning their own gaze on themselves.

For a more detailed description of the project, please visit this link on my blog.

How did the outcome differ from or correspond to your expectations?

The project turned out to be extremely close to our original conception and intentions. However, there were a few problems we hadn’t foreseen. These included the surprising amount of time, effort and and coding needed to construct and implement what seemed like it would be a fairly simple idea; the apparent lack of clarity in the installation in regards to how people should interact with the work; and the entirely unexpected perception that the projected image of the peephole could be perceived as the toilet, seen from above.

In addition, the sensor, operating via an Arduino, a breadboard and MaxMSP, did not trigger the image swap between the intended still image and the live video feed. In the end this didn’t really matter, because the image from the live feed when no one was interacting with it appeared to be a still image anyways.

Why did the outcome differ or correspond to your objectives?

Part of the difference between the group’s original objectives and the end result, for me, was that my ideas and concerns related to this topic evolved over the 2 weeks we had to work on it. The more I read, the more concerned I became about “privacy” and ownership issues inherent in the use of the internet and social media like facebook. I also researched artists who are using surveillance cameras to reclaim ownership of imagery recorded by pervasive public security cameras.

These ideas didn’t become part of the conceptual development of the piece. By the time the group began to discuss them it was the day before the presentation, so there was not enough time to consider how they might be better reflected in the piece itself. Once we agreed on the original idea, the group’s focus turned toward producing the physical and technological realization of the individual components, rather than further developing its conceptual sophistication.

This was also part of the dynamic in working collaboratively within a group. We divided the physical work once the video was shot, and did not re-focus on evolving or fine-tuning the initial concept. Everyone was taking care of particular aspects of the project, which we brought together in the very last day. In future, I think an ongoing discussion about the concept’s development or evolution should be part of the process, even if only to affirm that there is nothing that needs to be discussed or changed.

In the end though, the piece functioned very much as we originally intended.

The issues around how to interact within the physical space couldn’t be clearly imagined until we had actually set everything up. (Like Marie puts her finger in the peep-hole to see how it looks – nice!) Since we set up the installation in its entirety for the first time less than an hour before the presentation, we had no opportunity to test the presentation with an audience beforehand. I can see that this is critical, and that you can’t assume people will just “get it” the same way that you do. As Steve pointed out, this needs to be done repeatedly, and small changes that may not even appear noticeable in the entire presentation may really improve the final experience of the work.

There was no way that I could have anticipated that the peep-hole might look like a toilet to someone else. However, this observation did provide a valuable warning that people may not see the same things that you do.

What would I do differently?

1. Continue to discuss and clarify the concept as it relates to the presentation while work proceeds on the physical and digital pieces. The concept should drive both the content and presentation methods, not the reverse.

2. Set up and test how the piece works with an uninitiated audience, more than once, if possible. Watch how people use or interact with the space, get responses, and answer and ask questions. Pay attention to scale, layout, navigation and don’t assume anything.

The idea that the peep-hole projected on the wall resembled the toilet bowl hole as seen from above never occurred to us. Just goes to show you don’t know how people will connect things.

3. Make what’s in the peep-hole totally engaging!

The magazine was OK, but this could have been a much bigger pay-off that reinforced the concept in a more meaningful way.

The box could have been bigger, and could have had 2 (or even 3) peepholes, top, side (and bottom?) to echo the 3 camera views in the washroom. The interior could have been divided to provide multiple viewing experiences related to surveillance, voyeurism and use of personal information/content. These could be displayed as porn viewed on a monitor, as a live surveillance camera feed from the washroom, and as a composite of Hollywood or TV clips about “spying” projected within the box. (Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” comes to mind.) Another option might be showing the YouTube video about Facebook’s perpetual rights to whatever you post there. (see my earlier post on our project for further discussion on this subject).

This is a recent take on things. We certainly didn’t have time to produce 2 or 3 additional works for inside the box. I’m also not sure that the rest of the group would agree with these ideas, so let’s just leave it at a single engaging and more conceptually relevant viewing experience inside the peep-hole.

4. Collaborations can be difficult and complex. Allowing everyone to feel equally invested and represented in the project is a delicate process. Balancing ideas, egos, schedules and workload is no small task. I might try to put more effort into determining what others wanted to do and get out of working on the project and try to articulate that into the common goal.

What did I learn from this process?

1. The importance of the need for clarity around the method of physically engaging with the work.

2. The effort involved in the entire new media process makes considering a more thought-provoking or emotionally engaging experience worthwhile. Once you get people to peep into the box, what is there to further their understanding, broaden their knowlege, raise questions, or engage/entertain them?

Getting the mechanics of everything built, edited and functioning took more time and energy than we put into fine-tuning what should be in the box. We should have resolved all of the content towards the goal of clarifying an idea more than worrying about physically mastering the construction of the hardware, software, video and sound components. However, time was short, and once we agreed on the idea we just forged ahead to get it built. In my opinion, this was our biggest failing, but it is also the easiest thing to remedy.

Strengthening the message that our online viewing and social media habits are supplying content, personal information and preferences that are collected, logged, mined and used to target us for other purposes could make the piece more powerful and engaging. Our predisposition towards “watching” is enabling us to be watched.

3. Just how much time and effort is involved in coding, testing and creating what originally seemed like a simple piece.

4. The need to consider more carefully how people navigate the physical space, and the placement of elements within it, to creative a more cohesive experience. This includes thinking about angles, positions, scale and the physical separation between the elements.

Steve’s comment on how positioning the peep-hole on the top of the box and looking down into it would more closely echo the view of a surveillance camera, as would black and white video footage, is an example of this. However, we were not trying to re-create a surveillance camera’s imagery.

5. Taking the time to set things up and observe how people interact, move and respond needs to be part of the cycling developmental process. It is an essential component of developing the work, and should not be left until the last minute.

6. Just because it’s clear in your own mind what you want people to do in the space doesn’t mean it will be obvious to them.

For example, colour-coding the peephole box to the distinctive colour being projected behind it might have made it more obvious that the box and the projection were connected to each other, and should be investigated as such.

7. While it was not our intent to make the clips look like traditional surveillance footage, the discussion about the difference between voyeurism and surveillance arose. I’m not certain that the piece needs to answer this question to be effective, but in a piece with multiple interior views, as I speculated on above, this could be addressed.

To respond to further to this question, I believe that the difference between the two is based on intent. Voyeurism implies (a possibly guilty) pleasure, whether sexually derived or otherwise. Surveillance is more about security and safety, rather than pleasure for its own sake. The former is driven by gratifying interior motives within the watcher’s psyche. While the need for security is also derived from interior needs for a sense of safety and control, its focus is on exterior elements, such as property or physical boundaries, rather than the interior, personal domain of fantasy or pleasure.

8. Max patch? Arduino? Breadboard? Resistors? Circuits? Random Narrative? Sensors?
These words don’t scare me anymore!

How does new media affect or not affect my practice?

New media will certainly affect my practice, though I’m not yet sure to what extent. I did projections on multiple layers of sheer fabric and multi-dimensional installations in galleries when I graduated from OCAD in 1982, but the only electrical devices involved then were a slide projector and a small fan.

The use of new media tools in installation-based work seems inevitable. These are useful tools whose potential and possibilities are part of the contemporary art-making landscape. Since my work has often been based on evoking the intangible, new media technologies may be very helpful creating environments that can help to do just this.

 

New Media Project: “Watching”

We have created a new media project that plays with the concept of surveillance in a performative and interactive manner. We used three cameras to capture multiple perspectives of a live performance. This documented performance positions the subject as unaware of the multiple cameras stalking him, in what is usually a private place.

With the rapid adoption of web services, cell phones, GPS systems and social media today, the ever-watching eye of Big Brother has never been more easily and closely trained on our every move and preference. Less and less remains within the strictly private realm, particularly for those using the web and social media today.

Several artists and musicians, most notably in Britain, the most surveilled country in the world today, are using surveillance camera footage in innovative ways to reclaim public spaces and cameras for private use. (see my earlier post for more details).

Also see surveillance-footage-gets-a-starring-role.

While our piece does not use public surveillance techniques, we hope that it will be an entertaining and necessarily participatory, embodied experience which will raise questions about who is watching who, and to what end. While voyeurism may entice us by carrying the allure of pleasure and the forbidden, how do we feel when we become the unwitting subjects of a hidden camera? And, once captured and recorded, who has ownership and access to these images, and for what purposes?

In addition to the generally widespread use and acceptance of surveillance-as-security, personal information and content is also being collected, mined and usurped for profit in surprising ways. A striking example of this use of your personal information can be found in this video about what you are agreeing to when you sign up for a facebook account today:

For me, this represents a bigger issue than just who is watching who, and gathering what information. The far-reaching extent of the uses for these documents and data may not really be understood for years to come.

Our piece uses video clips from the original performance, played back in random sequence through a MaxMSP patch. Amongst the random clips is one longer, edited, narrative clip. The clips will be screened on a wall via a media projector.

An extreme angle of the projection creates deliberate keystoning of the projection, which adds to the disorienting feeling already created in the performance and the playback themselves.

On a table next to the projection is a 20″ x 20″ black box with a small, crude hole on the front panel. A sensor, controlled by an Arduino in conjunction with a breadboard and MAXMSP, turns on 2 tiny lights inside the peep-hole box and triggers a live-feed from a small video camera, also hidden inside the box, when the light in front of the peep-hole is blocked. One light inside the box displays the magazine used in the performance. A second light and a small, hidden video camera inside the box are activated by the sensor when someone blocks the light by putting their eye to the peephole. The second light illuminates the viewer’s peeping eye while the camera provides a live feed onto the wall behind the person peeping via a second AV projector. The camera shows the viewer’s own eye peering at themselves from behind. The viewer can never catch their own eye watching themselves. When the sensor is not activated, a still image is displayed.

The idea is to play with variations on notions of watching. As the viewer watches the performance playback they will be enticed to peep into the box that sets off the sensor and records them looking. The projection behind the person peeping into the box creates the situation where the eye is now watching the watcher. In fact, it is their own eye, watching themselves unaware of being watched.

Here is the sketch of our project proposal:

To me this represents how delightedly we look at our own and other people’s posted information and creative content online, largely unaware of the larger mechanics that are tracking us, while snatching the rights to any content we create and upload, in perpetuity, even after we may have removed it from the web.

In the process of developing our ideas for this project we thought that it would be nice to use the emails we generated about this project as the source for creating audio files, as music or tones (not voice) to accompany the visuals. We also recorded ambient crowd and skateboarding sounds, since it is a skateboarding magazine used in the clips.

Converting text to non-voice audio proved to be a much bigger challenge, one that I was unable to solve in the short time available. However, in trying to research how to do this, I was directed to Soundhack software, which after much reading, testing and fiddling, allowed me to create sound files directly from the visual signals of video files. The resulting sounds, after some tweaking, are quite surreal and strange, and even border on sounding like running water, birds and insects at times. Also airplanes, vacuum cleaners and UFOs. I love the fact that the audio is derived and mutated from the video clips being projected, and that they add another disturbing, abstract and disorienting layer to the entire piece.

My technological goals for this project were to learn the necessary programming skills to apply the arduino and sensor technologies to turn a live feed camera projection and a light on and off, by applying these to a fairly simple project, which could then be further developed for my thesis installation.

 

How Flickr changed the understanding and experience of my photographs

As per our New Media assignment, I put a selection of my photo-based artwork on Flikr a few weeks ago. Doing so has changed my experience and understanding of them, but not via public engagement or participation. Although 1 or 2 people have left comments, which was nice, in general, I realize that just putting work online doesn’t necessarily attract any attention without some kind of promotion.

I also realized that the nature of these images, which had previously been “personal”, and whose presentation had previously been largely controlled by me in terms of their scale, lighting, sequenceing, etc., was suddenly completely beyond my control. I realized that anyone could use, change or claim them, and that I wouldn’t know about it. I also realized that their appearance and size would be different on different monitors, and would not ever approach the kind of experience intended in the gallery setting, where some images were shown in human scale, at 8×12′, and 8×8′.

In particular, the 8×8′ image changed a lot in the gallery space, appearing as a huge, crisp image as you entered the gallery. The figures of 3 children appeared life-sized, and the image became quite three-dimensional, since you (the viewer) became the fourth person in the image as part of it’s projected experiential space.

As you moved through the gallery towards the image, you became more and more a part of it, until it began to break down into an abstract kind of pointillism at about 3 feet away.

All of this is entirely lost online.

This loss of control is somewhat disturbing. On the other hand, the opportunity for a wider audience is interesting. Using meta-tags or adding links to other sites may have drawn more viewers, and more feedback, which might have offset the feeling of loss-of-control.

The other issue, also connected to loss of control, was noted in reading Flikr’s fine print. They assert their right to anything uploaded to their site. Even if you remove it from the site, they make you acknowledge their right to back up the site and to use these back-ups if they wish.

While I guess anything you put online is vulnerable to this, it’s a good reason to consider carefully what you want to make available or not.

 

I Heart New York!

Yes, corny, but oh-so-true!
I feel so inspired and energized. (photos coming soon!)

The MOMA, as ever, was one of the stars, displaying fabulous classics from the collection, including about 15 of their 300 Rauschenbergs, Merit Oppenheim’s “Object”, which is a fur-covered and fur-lined tea cup and spoon, and too many more to mention. (The surrealists are always a thrill for me.) They also have a new expanded design area, which now includes 3 Urban Vinyl “art toys” prized by collectors of lowbrow, or nobrow art. Lowbrow moves up in the world!

Also at MOMA, Olafur Eliasson’s “Take Your Time” show used lights, colours, mirrors, strobes and smoke to create different immersive environments. Take the online tour here. Dara Birnbaum’s “Wonder Woman” that Ed Slopek assisted on was also there, filling a large wall at the foot of the escalator (hey – guess what? It’s not the first time Ed’s had work at the MOMA!), and there were several other very interesting video pieces, especially those by Sigalit Landau, some of which included sculptural installations. (Check out the still image of her bare torso doing an endless hula hoop with a large circle of barbed wire, if you dare.) Lynda Bengli’s layered video images of herself mouthing her own mouth and tongue was captivating, as part of the “Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now“ exhibition. Bernd and Hilla Becher had a large exhibition “Landscape/Typology”, which reminded me of Tory’s archive project for Blake’s class. Actually, I like Tory’s project more than their originals – thanks Tory!

Dinner at the magical wonderland that is Panna 2 restaurant after the MOMA was great, and seems to be becoming a tradition, thanks to Ed.

Another highlight was playing David Byrne’s sound installation in the fabulous, if a bit run-down, Battery Maritime Building, on the waterfront. An old pump organ in the middle of a vast, skylit room, had numerous tubes and wires running from it to various parts of the building. In playing the organ, you were effectively playing the building. I will post a video of it shortly and provide a link in this post. As the light streamed in diagonal lines through the huge, grand-decaying-dame of industrial space, the quircky, random sounds were sublime.

Of course the Staten Island Ferry, free and serving cold beer, was a must to cool off afterwards, since it was about 40 degrees that day. The Statue of Liberty says “hi”.

Fabulous beyond words was an experimental dance and theatrical performance in the Ontological Theatre in an old church, owned by avante-garde playwright Richard Forman. The performance, called “Vicious Dogs on Premises” by the group Witness Relocation, who were the recipients of the 2007 NY Innovative Theater Awards for best choreographer, best sound design, and best production, was hysterical, intense, incredibly energetic and constantly innovative and surprising.

Sadly, the Whitney Biennial (see a video clip of the show) left me scratching my head, disappointed and confused as to what most of it was about. There were some redeeming pieces, primarily a fabulous video dyptich “The Casting”, by Omer Fast. Fast used video as posed, still shots to illustrate 2 interwoven narratives as he describes an unfortunate incident as a soldier and several disturbing ones within a new relationship.

Jeff Koons giant metallic ballon sculptures on the roof of the Met were a delightful change from seeing his work contained in galleries, and were a suiting companion to the Super Heroes Fashion and fantasy show on at the same time. Of course the Met could take a week in itself, and we only had a few hours, but it was a refreshingly playful take on some aspects of art and pop culture.

Cai Guo-Qiang at the Guggenheim was just closing, but we did get to see some of this most heart-stopping show. Beautiful, horrifying and provocative, I had to buy the catalogue to see what else I had missed. They were dismantling the exhibition, carrying hundreds of stuffed wolves out of the museum one-by-one when we were there, which was a show unto itself!

 

“Video Sniffing”: British Artists using CCTV (security cameras) to make ART

Following a link on Heather’s blog to the University of Openess, I came across an interesting article on how artists in Britain, the most surveilled country in the world, are performing for and capturing images from security cameras, then using the footage to make their own movies.

“Video sniffers” intercept wireless camera signals using basic electronic receivers, similar to a device used to pick up television signals. This, connected to a camcorder, allows the sniffer to view images from nearby closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras.

A wonderful way to get something back, and some kind of control, over security cameras!