Blur 02 User Experience : Lisa Strausfeld

Clay Shirky | James Love | Lisa Strausfeld

Out of the Fog: What Blur Revealed About Digital Culture and its Impact on Art and Design
Lisa Strausfeld, strausfeld@informationart.com

Last spring, as I was considering whether to participate in a graphic design conference later in the year in Las Vegas, I attended Blur 02. It convened at The New School, a two-minute walk from my apartment.

After the first session, I decided I could pass on Las Vegas. That's not to say I've eschewed graphic design conferences, because I haven't, but rather that at Blur I found a community of people convened in New York whose work overlaps with mine. Blur is a professional gathering that, like me, crosses disciplines (in my case: architecture, software design, and information art). Few of us would feel at home at a pure technology conference, but our common terrain is digital culture.

Blur brought together new media innovators and multi-disciplinary artists, technologists and theorists. In this essay I hope to convey some of what I—a designer/artist—took away from Blur 02 and why I would look forward to a Blur 04.

Blur 02
I start out by confessing—and forgive me—that the Blur conference last April (like most things that happened last Spring) is a bit of a blur. Oddly, I agreed to write about the event despite this because I immediately recognized that over the last year Blur 02 has had a subtle but significant impact on my thinking, my work and my community.

After polling some of the other participants (almost all of whom I met for the first time at the conference), I discovered a consensus experience of Blur 02. Like me, they were convinced of the overall benefit of the event despite their admission of being slightly foggy on the goals. Also like me, they agreed to participate because of the caliber of the attendees and the hosts: Creative Time and The New School.

As for my recollections of the event itself:

Although I didn't think I was particularly interested in games, I was intrigued by the subject of "structured play," as described by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen and demonstrated cleverly by Eric Z. and Marina Zurkow in a real-time get-to-know-you card game.
Lev Manovich, author of one of my favorite essays on digital culture "Database and Symbolic Form," spoke on "the Flash generation." He described these new media artists (software artists) as conspicuously non-critical of media (unlike their earlier media artist counterparts) and thus, "the new modernists."
I distinctly recall Clay Shirky starting his presentation with the declaration: "It's not Britney's fault"—a fascinating and geeky statistical reading of musical tastes as they are expressed online.
Meg Hourihan of Blogger.com introduced me to the concept of weblogs—the popularity of which I didn't quite appreciate at the time. Who would have thought that making the process of posting content to a website just a little bit easier would become a web phenomenon? This epidemic-like, community behavior pattern peaked my curiosity. This dovetailed with a discussion of tools like the music creation software Max (presented by David Ziccarelli) and the concept of open source.
One of the most memorable participants was James Love, an activist from DC who has worked with Ralph Nader. James spoke on a panel focused on the legal implications of an open source model for the future of innovation. The US music industry was an obvious hot topic, but James's projects were of a more international and humanist scale. I recall him describing his organization's effort to work around a slow-moving bureaucratic FDA approval process to expedite the international distribution of AIDS medication.

During the second day of the two-day event, the 50 or so invited participants divided into work groups focused on exploring specific issues identified at the end of the day in a brainstorming session energetically moderated by Sara Diamond and Katie Salen. One group tackled the problem of "Cultural Security Distribution" and another group created a "Ministry for Art and Social Change."

My group produced an "Interactive Art Media Generation Engine" (IMAGE) after a long and, for the most part, instructively dysfunctional process. Because we failed to reach a consensus about the problem we were solving, we finally agreed to create a problem-solving system. I now regard this experience as reflective of the moment and the meeting. In hindsight, my group's efforts reflect a significant design trend that has moved away from the creation of static artifacts, and, instead, towards the creation of systems, tools, and infrastructure.

Systems as Art
These discrete, somewhat "snapshot" memories of Blur 02, ultimately merge into a more unified idea about the potential influence of digital culture on contemporary art and design. If I were to relay this idea by example, I couldn't do much better than an installation entitled Listening Post, which exhibited this winter at the Whitney. The artists—not incidentally—are two Blur participants, Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen.

Displayed on an open 8 by 16 foot grid of LEDs, the piece "performed" a voyeuristic collection of songs or "scenes" based on parsed text from thousands of online chat rooms. Under the same roof as Jackson Pollock's Number 27 and Jasper Johns' Three Flags was a piece of art that changed minute by minute, reflecting the unpredictable, yet familiar topics of the day.

LEDs in the gallery context may forever be associated with Jenny Holzer, but Listening Post represents an emerging art form where the artist, like a programmer (and quite often as a programmer) encodes change. Ben and Mark created a physical structure and a narrative program for the piece and connected it to an ever-changing source of information. The artifact created is not fixed, like a painting, a sculpture, or even a piece of time-based media. It is a system.

Beyond digital culture, an interest and preoccupation with systems appeared to be the common denominator for Blur 02 participants, whether these systems be embedded in media art installations, games, tools, protocols, or policies. What's more, a particular type of emergent system surfaced at Blur that characterized much of the discussion.

Like most designers working in the realm of digital media, I have been working on the level of systems for a long time. With rule-based systems, you can leverage the power of computation to automatically generate vast numbers of design "solutions." For an artist or a designer of a system (imagine a game designer), the primary creativity lies in the generation and the encoding of rules. Systems can be thought of as design machines that continually produce individual artifacts, but they can also be conceptualized as a space of possible design solutions. The rules defined by the designer essentially delineate the boundaries of this space.

Rule-based systems are predictable and only marginally interesting. In essence, you are getting out only precisely what you put in. Things get more interesting if a design system can incorporate changing content or if it allows for participation. Now a user, or multiple users are allowed to make choices or even roam freely—but still, of course, within the boundaries of the space defined by the designer.

Over the years, designing at the level of systems has continued to become more complex and interesting. Consider the transformation that has taken place in the development of software over the last 20 years. Programming used to be procedural and linear—essentially rule-based: "If this happens then do this, else if this happens then do that." This coincided with early projects in Artificial Intelligence that were built on more centralized models of the mind. As these models became decentralized (see Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind), the monolithic structure of software systems broke apart and was replaced by a collection of objects that communicate with one another in a very limited and structured way. Listening to programmers talk about writing code has become like the cliché of listening to broadcast censors talk about their oblivious audience: "[object x] does not need to know about anything except [object y]." Basically, the dumber and the least dependent the objects are, the better.

This decentralized model of code has allowed for larger and more complex software systems to be built by larger and more autonomous teams of developers. Programmers can work independently on their own objects. All they have to negotiate is what are called APIs (advanced programming interfaces) for their code objects. As more and more standards and protocols are established, these negotiations have become less and less necessary, allowing software to evolve almost biologically. The result is effortless collaboration on a massive scale.

What surfaced for me at Blur was yet one more fundamental shift in the model of systems. If you permit each simple and autonomous object in this interactive system to respond and adapt to conditions of the environment, then you get a system that today exemplifies the holy grail of software development: emergence.

Steven Johnson, in his book Emergence, describes such systems this way:

In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent "executive branch." They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. They get their smarts from below. In a more technical language, they are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behavior. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.

Digital Culture and Contempory Art
In hindsight, Blur's presentations and discussions were centered on two general themes: social networks and emergent systems. While the concept of emergence was not referenced explicitly at Blur, much of the discussion did center around the larger scale and long-term consequences of low-level rules, systems, tools, protocols, policies, and infrastructure.

Although I found the discussion engaging, as a designer and information artist (read: not a game or a tool designer), the impact of these discussions on my work was not initially apparent. Nearly one year later, I'm starting to appreciate the possibilities. The understanding of digital culture inspired by Blur is leading us to works of art and design that go beyond "interactive," what Lev Manovich calls "software art," and what I call "information art." Perhaps we can call it "infrastructure art" or "systems art."

Designing at the level of infrastructure is not new to legislators, master planners, architects of great public spaces, and in digital space, tool and game developers. What the fast pace of digital culture is revealing to all of us impatient digerati is the incredible long-term power of designing at the low level of simple tools and protocols. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell models social change on epidemics that emerge from small-scale, bottom-up behavior. We've seen, with examples like Napster and Blogger, that this type of social behavior occurs an order of magnitude faster online. Ironically, it may be that the accelerated view of emergent systems afforded by digital culture is what will inspire us to lengthen rather than shorten our time horizon, as we grasp the power of working at a smaller, local scale, at the level of rules and systems. One example that immediately comes to mind is Natalie Jeremijenko's OneTree project where a piece of software installed on a printer tracks the amount of paper usage and prints out a cross-section of a tree each time a tree's-worth of paper has been used.

"Systems art" can be conceptualized as a contemporary version of both site-specific and media art sited on the largest public media space in the world: the Web. With its mission of commissioning and presenting "adventurous art in the public realm," it follows that Creative Time would extend its space of exploration from physical space to the Web as a site for public art. As one of the most significant patrons of site-specific and media art in New York City, Creative Time has been working, in a sense, at the most creative level of infrastructure for years in its curatorial role of commissioning artists and partnering with the city to access sites such as Grand Central Station, Times Square, Battery Park City, and Ground Zero. With Natalie Bookchin's Metapet, Creative Time appears to be taking the same curatorial position with online art.

Future projects of interest include those that allow us to understand the impact of our local actions on a global scale over a long time horizon and those that operate between online and physical space. A recent powerful example was the online "viral" coordination of anti-war protests around the world.

The Future of Blur
Digital culture has obviously influenced the way we produce our art, but perhaps it has done this in a way that is not so obvious: Programming, our exposure to computing, and the Internet have promoted a way of thinking—namely, at a level of systems, infrastructure and rules—that doesn't require digital technology at all for its power.

Blur was a way of surfacing trends, of tapping the zeitgeist of digital culture at a time of maturity and at a time when we are finding remarkable structural connections between fields. What emerged from Blur 02, in the end, was an emphasis on systems, and the particular power of emergence.

Interestingly—and apparently intentionally—the specific goals of Blur 02 were not only opaque to the participants, but to the organizers of the event as well. As Robert Ransick put it, he and Carol Stakenas were trying to create a "transitional space or zone"—a space for the unknown and unpredictable, a space to explore. To articulate tangible goals for the event, according to Robert, would have been counter to what Blur is about. Opportunities for artists to present work already exist. Instead, Blur was intended as an environment for peer-to-peer communication that could enable the group to address challenging issues related to the intersection of art, technology, and the public realm.

As a way of experimenting with edges and professional boundaries, Blur 02 worked best as a space for exploring the context and conditions of our work. In hindsight, the desire for more clarity, expressed by some, would have been best applied only to the boundaries of our space rather than the goals of our meeting. Perhaps Blur is best viewed as an emergent system that needs to be read with some distance, over time.

Something obscure, confused, or moving too quickly to be clearly perceived isn't an obvious good, but when you're looking for something new—to innovate—it often helps to squint. Blur is a way of looking and leaping at the same time.