[Jonathan Schipper / Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle / 2008]

I'm still spending a lot of time in Liberty City. It is a peculiar addiction that I can't quite shake and it utterly confounds my girlfriend (she hates the cascading gunfire). There is some intangible quality to GTA IV, an aesthetic pleasure that emerges from the combination of the clunky controls, the velocity and the spot on specular reflection - I just can't stop playing. I haven't seen the surfaces of automobiles so lovingly rendered since David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash, which is of course based on the 1973 novel of the same name by JG Ballard. On the topic of Ballard, please note the following:

Ballard saw cars as the signifying symbols of the 20th century. James Dean, John F. Kennedy, and Lady Di are just three of the many pop culture figures that died in car accidents. Ballard even renders the assassination of JFK as a car race in the essay "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race". Class differences in Grand Theft Auto IV mostly manifest in car brands. The vehicles Niko drive get better and better throughout the game. Yet the great efforts Niko Bellic undertakes to further his status only push him deeper and deeper into a swamp of corruption and violence. Towards the inescapable crash. The city is in a state of downfall, ridden by corrupt police forces, street crime, poverty, mentally deranged inhabitants and unscrupulous politicians. A sign at the highway reads: "The world needs a strong America to tell it what to do". GTA is a synonym for cynicism, Liberty City the antithesis of the American Dream.

This excerpt is culled from Grand Theft Auto IV Considered as an Atrocity Exhibition, a text on GTA IV by Martin Pichlmair in the most recent issue of Eludamos, an online journal for computer game culture. Although categorized as a "review" Pichlmair's text reads more like a minor aesthetic treatise, a qualitative summation of the game in light of Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. The brief text is worth a read as it contextualizes the game quite expertly. It also hints at what game reviews could be if the medium wasn't (primarily) written about with the same pizazz as consumer electronic reviews. If you're interested, here is a link to Pichlmair's text.

As promised, I'm going to recap a few of the highlights from the Visible Memories Conference held at Syracuse University this past weekend. Due to the magnitude of the proceedings, and the multiple breakout panels presenting at any given time, I only was able to attend a portion of the talks. However, the dozen or so presentations that I saw were of a very high calibre and I'm now somewhat intoxicated by the many exciting multidisciplinary research projects that I was able to taste test. Leading up to the event, the panel that I was most looking forward was Digital Aesthetics and Mnemonic Interfaces and what follows are brief synopses of two presentations from that session.

David S. Heineman is faculty in the Communications Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. David presented a talk entitled Collective Memory and Digital Aesthetics: Redefining Democracy in God of War, 300 and HBO's Rome, which explored specific representations of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire in gaming, film, and television. I wasn't so surprised to hear that Heineman was scrutinizing the CGI-constructed aesthetics of Zach Snyder's gorgeous 2006 film 300 (pictured above) and SCE Studios' God of War franchise - as both have been benchmarks in production design in their respective mediums. What did catch me off guard about Heineman's research was that he was using these precedents and the HBO series Rome to think about contemporary conceptions and representations of democracy.

Heineman's presentation really clicked when he showcased various scenes of legislation and governance in Rome and 300 alongside some examples from the contemporary American political arena (like the podium and stage-set for the 2008 Republican Convention pictured above). I appreciated the manner in which his research combined media and cultural studies while keeping an eye on representations of the past - in the present. I only wish David unpacked God of War a little more as it didn't seem to get as much attention as the other precedents.

Kevin Hamilton and Ned O'Gorman's presentation Nuclear Memory at the Interface was undoubtedly my favourite of the entire conference. Diving right into the thick of the Cold War, the two researchers sketched out the "interface aesthetics" of the nuclear age. The duo started out by introducing military theorist Bernard Brodie's famous assertion that the arrival of the atomic bomb rendered most military theory obsolete. They then proceeded to catalogue numerous instances of interface technology being used as the key image to facilitate communication about nuclear arsenals and protocols from military command centres out to the general public. Evidently the military assumed the blinking lights of a sterile control panel coupled with the figure of an educated technician tending to it conveyed a sense of machine precision and infallibility. This conversation is definitely poignant and maps quite nicely on to contemporary discussions about bomb/interface politics and aesthetics when you consider mobile, low-tech contraptions like Richard Reid's (aka the Shoe Bomber) kit above.

Also discussed (and something I'm planning on looking into) was the output of Lookout Mountain Laboratory, a Los Angeles-based military facility responsible for the production of a number of films and images for the U.S. Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission between 1947 and 1969.

Kevin Hamilton and Ned O'Gorman are based at the Art and Design and Communication Departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I'm definitely interested on catching up with this research once it is published.

Here are two events that I'm involved in that I'd like to give a little plug...

I am currently scrambling to put together a presentation for the Visible Memories Conference at Syracuse University this weekend. I'll be demoing my (hopefully) soon-to-be-launched Critical Sections project as part of a panel entitled Urban Memory. The conference programming looks quite strong and I'll definitely be posting about some of the proceedings as there are several presentations on archives, visualization and digital aesthetics that I am particularly keen on (including a lecture by George Legrady who I recently mentioned in my post on the IMA Dashboard).

Vague Terrain will once again be co-curating an evening at the X Avant festival with our pals at the Music Gallery. The show will take place on Thursday October 23rd and feature multimedia performances by Sebastian Meissner (aka Klimek), Keith Fullerton Whitman and NAW. Full event details are available here and if you are in or around Southern Ontario please considering joining us at the festival - where else would you hear the Sun Ra Arkestra AND Tim Hecker? You can check out the Music Gallery site for info on the rest of the programming and it is also worth mentioning that I interviewed Sebastian Meissner about his work last year.

I've decided to start semi-regularly posting dispatches as to my current reading list. If I didn't bookmark so compulsively with delicious I could use that services auto-publication feature but I've decided I'd rather be a bit more selective in highlighting writing (online or otherwise) that has caught my eye. I'll probably be posting these .txt messages two or three times a month and the content will generally fall within the scope of discussion here on Serial Consign.

• Witold Rybczynski takes designers KBAS to task on their recently dedicated Pentagon Memorial. Rybczynski critiques the statistics driven design methodology of the project and charges that it fails to deliver anything beyond a superficial reading of the tragedy of American Airlines Flight 77.
• This week Theo Honohan published a succinct essay on web/space/social media artist Aram Bartholl's Friends workshop (pictured above) which was held at Futursonic earlier this year.
• I enjoyed new media researcher Anne Helmond's Software Studies presentation, so it is great to have access to her full Masters thesis Blogging for Engines. Blogs under the Influence of Software-Engine Relations - which is introduced and downloadable here.
• Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb provided a great overview of the role of current.tv and twitter in augmenting and annotating the presidential debates on Friday.
• In regards to that archaic "book" technology, I'm currently reading Ian Bogost's "comparative video game criticism" text Unit Operations (and my head is spinning).

Here is a project you won't see on Interactive Architecture any time soon. The above image, aptly titled Blue Screen of Death was shot by Toronto photographer Sean Galbraith last November. It captured several large display screens on a downtown Toronto retail building in a rather vulnerable state. This is the side of media architecture that we don't see documented on design blogs as failures, glitches and malfunctions don't exactly reinforce the idea of building envelopes as a surface for a seamless media experience. There is something unnerving about error messages at an architectural scale - perhaps they are flickering reminders that even the city needs an occasional reboot. [via blogTO]

[Civilization Revolution]

This morning my first contribution to Mez Breeze's excellent Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1 "GAM3R 7H30RY" blog went live. In the coming months I'm going to be developing a series of posts for Augmentology entitled Tentative Spaces which will explore the cultural and spatial quality of interface and information overlays in gaming. I'm interested in how gamers occupy these spaces and how they sit outside and "on top" of narrative. I plan to use this writing project to formalize and further develop many of the ideas I've explored in past posts on gaming like Ways of Seeing Digital Space, Notes on Operational Narrative and Learning from Liberty City. So rather than say any more, here is a link to the post.

Pictured above is a screen capture of the dashboard for the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), an interesting web project that came my way via the always reliable delicious account of Dan Hill some weeks back. Having just visited the Newseum in Washington (which I'll post about soon), and given the scope of the Curediting issue of Vague Terrain, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the relationship between exhibit space and media.

Perhaps in a bid for increased institutional transparency, the IMA has opted to port a wide variety of operational data onto a dedicated microsite. As evidenced by the capture above this includes new additions to museum holdings, work on loan, membership information, student visits, volunteer hours, power consumption as well as web related data such as the length of the average website visit and Facebook fans. An excerpt from the mission statement for the dashboard:

The goal of the Dashboard is to seek to quantify and report out on areas of activity of general interest to museum observers and to particular interest to museum studies specialists, colleagues, and patrons.

These various streams of data provide a curious, if somewhat fragmented view into various curatorial, institutional, infrastructural and web realms that the IMA occupies.

The top half of the above image displays the thumbnail gallery a IMA web user receives when clicking on "Works of Art - New Works on View". This gallery allows a user to drill down and get information about a recent acquisition. This isn't really anything to write home about considering the web presence of other similar institutions but piping all this additional information online is quite novel.

While I applaud the effort of this interactive venture, I do think it is strange that the IMA has dropped their holdings into an array alongside the somewhat banal metric tracking the average length of a web visit - a rather curious juxtaposition. Stranger still is the fact that the "front page" of the dashboard contains links to social media stats but a user has to root around to find the (really interesting) financial analytics for the museum. Since when does anybody in the art world care about meter readings? We clearly want to get the skinny on the endowment keeping our favourite art institutions afloat.

What does interest me about this web project is the manner in which it sits both alongside and outside the scope of the main IMA site. If a user starts examining work through the dashboard there is a possibility that they may be rerouted into one of the more obscure IMA collections, perhaps one they may not have selected to examine otherwise. My earlier navigation and layout grumbling aside, it is refreshing to see an institution willing to take some chances on their web presence and deviate from the generic museum and gallery "high culture institution" flavoured templates.

[Google Analytics - display & interface]

Poking around the IMA dashboard got me thinking about other possibilities for the conflation of institutional and web analytics. Since it is not an "online gallery", why is the IMA so concerned with displaying their web stats? Let's be clear, the work is catalogued online, it is not net.art. In my opinion, what could be much more interesting would be to track the "performance" of pieces of art in the display space and put this information online. Why not employ proximity and motion sensors to track crowd density and "average linger lengths" at each piece? It could make for some interesting analysis of holdings and help study how visitors engage the work on display. Perhaps the IMA should give George Legrady a call if they are bent on connecting the gallery floor with the screen space of the web.

[Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.ORG) / Perpetual Self Dis/Infecting Machine - Custom made computer infected with the virus Biennale / 2001-2004]

A new issue of Vague Terrain has launched and I'm quite excited to help spread the word about this provocative body of work. Vague Terrain 11: Curediting-Translational Online Work is a CONT3XT.NET organized survey of contemporary thinking about new media art, online curation and broader web culture.

The issue includes work from: Joasia Krysa, Laboratorio 060 (Lourdes Morales, Javier Toscano, Daniela Wolf), Annette Finnsdottir, Eva Moraga, CRUMB (Beryl Graham and Verina Gfader), Ela Kagel & Ursula Endlicher, Michelle Kasprzak, Furtherfield (Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow), Geoff Cox, Jodi.org (Joan Heemskerk, Dirk Paesmans) and Domenico Quaranta. Neil Wiernik and I also contributed a text on our experience in developing Vague Terrain as a publishing/distribution platform over the last three years.

I'm extremely impressed with the work that CONT3XT.NET (Sabine Hochrieser, Michael Kargl & Franz Thalmair) have assembled and it was a pleasure to work with Franz in consolidating this material over the last few weeks. Please take some time to examine Vague Terrain 11: Curediting-Translational Online Work.

The Serial Consign post hiatus is officially over. I'll be making an announcement about Vague Terrain tomorrow and I'm working on a gaggle of posts and interviews. I'm hoping the sounding of the death rattle of summer will help me focus on this project once again as the last few weeks have been a haze of polygons and CSS.

I am happy to report that a new skin/framework for this site is under construction. I had a great conversation with the amicable Michael Surtees while he was visiting Toronto several weeks back and it got me thinking about the separation between design and content in blogging. In addition to rethinking the basic skin and functionality of this site I've been spending a lot of time reconsidering how content is classified and archived and how it can feed into external writing projects. I want to move beyond viewing this site as a "collection of posts" and towards integrating it with my broader creative practice. So that said, I plan on playing with the format of post "types" as well as refining the overall scope of discussion on Serial Consign in the coming months. So, existential web-presence angst aside, let's get started...

I'm currently in Washington for several days of R&R. I've decided to take a break from posting on Serial Consign for a few weeks. I have aspirations to migrate the site to Drupal 6.x soon and want to take some time to plan the redesign. Beyond this, I have some other writing projects that I'd like to get started on. Posting will resume the week of September 7th - enjoy the rest of your summer!