by Carol Bales
We began this semester by examining art movements and theories that envision how new technologies can be used to bring about social revolution. The Futurist and Bauhaus movements passionately desired to break with the past by subverting the dominant cultural and social paradigms of the early 20th century. Early 21st century artist collectives seek to do the same thing. As a powerful communication tool, digital media is used by powerful elite to advertise and conduct business and by social activists wishing to subvert those same messages. In this paper we will discuss the affordances of digital media as both a dominant paradigm, and the means to examine its role as such. We’ll discuss the fact that digital media is a powerful means to facilitate collaboration and communication. And we’ll discuss the ability to use digital media to create transformative, immersive experiences in gaming and virtual reality.
Digital media as a dominant paradigm and the means to examine its role as such
Harking back to Marshall McLuhan once again, we examine that the “message is the medium.” Digital technology in the form of the Internet has connected millions of people across the globe. Vast good works are underway to transfer the printed and recorded body of human knowledge to the digital sphere so that everyone with access can share in it. Advances in online technology to facilitate collaboration and communication have given rise to a philosophy of “Web 2.0” and the myth that everyone has the ability to access content, co-create content and to democratically assign importance to the content. Because of the power of this technology’s ability to network people and information it must be continually examined in order to appreciate how the medium is being used and by whom, and the extent to which it is living up to its potential or bringing about dystopian versions of the world. It is important to recognize that while digital technology has potential to create democratic and socially balanced interactions between peoples, it also dramatically fails to do so when placed in the service of totalitarian power structures.
Artists and social activists seeking to thwart dominant paradigms and compel us to rethink our conceptual understanding of the world use both traditional conformist forms (mock advertising) and radical activism (product espionage) to do so. The Tactical Media Group wrote a manifesto for Tactical Media (1997), calling for the use of digital media to record, express and share individual experiences, creating media of “crisis, criticism and opposition.”[1] An answer to this manifesto, the Preemptive Media group uses test and experimentation methods used by corporations and the scientific community in order to work to the advantage of regular citizens. In the “Swipe” project (2003), the stored data on driver’s licenses were examined in order to uncover what information about an individual is being stored and shared and between what entities.[1] The ®™ARK Web site includes a database of projects and ideas designed to thwart corporate hegemony. While some activities can be done anonymously and by the public at large:
§ “Take old filthy clothes you are going to throw away, affix price tags of $100 or more, and place them on hangers on the racks of your local GAP, Abercrombie and Fitch, etc.” and
§ “Find out which politicians voted for allowing drug testing in the work place, and lobby for them to have their urine tested too. Write letter as their constituents demanding they have their urine screened regularly.”),
others must be done by those working on the inside of the organization being attacked
§ “Insert realistic collector cards into cereal boxes, each with a photo and description of one of the many workers that has been killed or maimed at the cereal manufacturer's factory.” and
§ “Establish a grant for television and movie makers who do negative product placement, or 'product displacement.' Examples: The FedEx package arrives late and mangled; someone throws up after eating at McDonald's; someone spits out their Starbucks coffee and says it tastes like shit; cameo of Rev. Billy being thrown out of a Disney store as characters walk by; characters cursing at their Microsoft software or AOL, etc.”[2]
Here technology is used as a communication and collaboration tool to connect like-minded activists and spread ideas and achievements. Additionally, these activist/artist’s collective Web sites are a means to share the tools of activism including Powerpoint files, printable JPEG images, video recordings, banner ads and posters that can be printed or added to other Web sites. The fact of these Web sites out in the open and on the Internet for anyone to fine is in itself and powerful statement of defiance.
The power of technology for open source and cross-discipline collaboration
In another example of shared tools, digital technology can be “open source” and therefore the very tools to create complex systems can be shared with the community at large and built upon. [3] Game “modders” take open source game mechanics to add to or subvert the original game structure and create new themes or styles of game play. In Counter-Strike, a team of modders created an overlay in which a whole new story was enacted within the game mechanic of Half-Life.[3] While this was a departure from the original game story, it was developed by gamers for the purpose of entertainment and did not challenge any of the existing modes of game play. Other modders took more radical moves and created mods that contained political statements about the competitive, destructive nature of first-person shooter games. In Velvet Strike, Anne-Marie Schleiner created a mod for Counter-Strike in which guns shoot anti-war graffiti instead of bullets.[3] The name recollects the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s in which peaceful demonstrations rather quickly and peacefully brought about the end of Soviet rule. Invoking this brilliant comparison with the totalitarian dominance by the USSR, Schleiner radically condemns the thug mentality that still dominates popular digital game play – where the only possible interactions within most games are violent, murderous confrontations and collaboration only occurs in the pursuit of defeat of a shared enemy.
Perhaps only slightly less controversial, art/science collaborations such as those sponsored by the National Research Council seek to create laboratories of research and exploration where artists and scientists work together to explore the affordances of new technology and how technology can support creativity.[4] The desired results of these sponsored collaborations are open-source software, funding opportunities, conferences, academic and collegiate programs to support creativity within the sphere of information technology.
Digital media as game and virtual reality is a powerful means of creating immersive experiences that can be transformative
Recalling the New Games Movement, Pearce, et. al (2005) invokes the potential for game play as transformative when performed in digital realms. In the New Games Movement, game designers Stuart Brand, Pat Farrington, and Bernie DeKoven designed games for “meaningful play.” In these games, groups of people perform structured play activities in which dominant paradigms of competition are thwarted and new paradigms of cooperation toward a common goal are explored and embodied. In our world today, it is indeed a radical and activist notion that global goals can and should be achieved through mutual cooperation.[5] One great challenge to a digital upgrade to the New Games Movement is the inherent goal to create an embodied experience for physical and psychological health. The tendency for current-style computer mediated game play to affix the players in their seats for long sessions in front of a computer from isolated locations acts is seen by many as inherently unhealthy.
The nature of the game experience is that while games are scripted or rules-based, the actual experience of the game is up to the individuals at play. Scripted virtual worlds such as SecondLife, Twinity and the Sims allow players to create their own experiences within the game worlds. In SecondLife the mechanics of the game environment include tools for making things in the game world for use by your avatar. With such robust tools for making things, players can create their own environments, machines, clothing and other objects to interact with. The field of mixed reality / virtual reality is still new and the opportunities for healthy, balanced, empowering and democratic interactions between people is a visionary dream that should be pursued.
1. Preemptive Media. Available from: http://www.preemptivemedia.net/.
2. R TM ARK. Available from: http://www.rtmark.com/.
3. Pearce, C., Games as Art: The Aesthetics of Play. Visible Language, 2006. 40.1(Special Issue: Fluxus After Fluxus).
4. Mitchell, W.J., et al., Beyond productivity : information technology, innovation, and creativity. 2003, Washington, DC: National Academies Press. xv, 249 p.
5. Pearce, C., T. Fullerton, J. Fron, J. Morie, Sustainable Play: Towards a New Games Movement for the Digital Age, in Digital arts & Culture. 2005: Copenhagen.
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