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serial consign

serial consign
Serial Consign is the blog of designer and curator Greg J. Smith. The site serves as the nexus of an ongoing discussion about design, technology and culture. Content includes commentary on software and tools, reviews of exhibits and texts, the catalo

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kate armstrong interview
2008-02-29 04:34:00
[kate armstrong & michael tippett / grafik dynamo / 2004-2005] Kate Armstrong is a Vancouver-based artist and theorist with a panache for new media powered permutational storytelling. Her work questions the nature of narrative in light of computation, social media and contemporary urban space. She has exhibited widely and is currently en route to Turkey for the March 8th launch of PATH, a bookwork generated by "an anonymous individual living in the city of Montreal between 2005-2007" at the Akbank Art Centre in Istanbul. Above and beyond her creative practice, she is the author of Crisis and Repetition: Essays on Art and Culture, sits on the board at The Western Front artist-run centre and is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University's School of Interactive Arts + Technology. -- An obvious starting point in any line of questioning about your work would be the primacy of text. The vast majority of your projects could be described as machines for making fiction and you've explored s...
More About: Interview

two drawing machines
2008-02-24 18:28:00
Earlier this month, I was semi-inspired by a Dataisnature post on some recent work by Lia. In that post, Paul Prudence contextualized Lia's Isaidif project in relation to some of other great "drawing machines". To add to that list of projects: First up is The Plotting Machine, a modified wide format printer that can be outfitted with a variety of "print-heads" to produce a variety of imperfect output. The project was developed by You Don't Matter, a design collective comprised of Martin Borst, Sebastian Cremers and Daniel Schludi. The device can be equipped with blades, a variety of styluses, and the trio of designers have even conducted some long exposure photographic experiments with the contraption. The statement for the project outlines some of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of the content output on this machine: Most interesting and inspiring are all the little mistakes this machine produces, because of too much data, too much water, color, pressure etc. There are always gradi...
More About: Drawing , Machines

noise/music: a history
2008-02-19 05:58:00
Late last year, Paul Hegarty released Noise /Music : A History , a writing project which traces the phenomena of noise across various genres and experimental practices throughout 20th century music. After hearing about the text on Networked Music Review, I was quite excited to finally get to spend some time with this work over the last few weeks. The text is constructed as a series of short, thematic essays with the expected readings of Futurist Italy and Thatcherist England, as well as more involved analysis of proto-krautrock, the contradictions of "free" jazz and the noteworthy and enduring noise scene in Japan (with a well-deserved chapter on the enterprise that is Merzbow). Noise/Music is most easily appreciated as a "disturbingly succinct" history of 20th century music and perhaps the most appropriate text to compare the work to is Michael Nyman's Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond. However, where Nyman's text is a comprehensive "academy friendly" catalog of sequential progres...

eisenman vs. haneke
2008-02-15 18:47:00
[peter eisenman / house xi / 1972-1975] I have always felt a strong affinity for the architectural practice of Peter Eisenman. From his maddening and hermetic series of drawing board houses in the '70s and '80s through the larger civic, institutional and memorial projects executed over the last two decades, Eisenman has conducted an ongoing interrogation of architectural history and representation. I had the pleasure of hearing him lecture at al&d a few years back, and during this talk (entitled Architecture Against Itself) he attempted to delineate the backdrop against which contemporary practice was occurring, and the manner in which this context presented altogether different challenges than that experienced by his generation. The crux of Eisenman's reading of contemporary culture was that the era of close reading was obsolete and that this had led to a more informal type of creative practice. Eisenman name-checked the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke several times over t...

large-scale conversations
2008-02-11 22:58:00
Given the rapidly evolving nature of digital identity management and recent data portability movement, it is hard to ignore the imminent shifts in our understanding of online presence. Lifestreaming and interoperability are paradigms that have the potential to consolidate our online activity and connections across a multitude of platforms. Given these emerging developments, there have been several noteworthy developments in online "conversation management" over the last several months that are worth examining. The first application/platform to consider reconfigures the way we think about online reading. fav.or.it (pictured above) is a web based RSS reader that has been beta-testing for the last several months. What makes fav.or.it distinct from traditional news readers is the fact that the application integrates feed comments with content, so readers' responses to a post would show up as an addendum to the original post in your reader. fav.or.it describes this process as "full cyc...
More About: Scale , Large

burak arikan interview
2008-02-06 07:19:00
Last summer, Cati Vaucelle at Architectradure tipped me off about Meta-Markets, a project which created a means to buy and sell units of social media. I penned an enthusiastic review of the project in the fall and continue to be engaged by this ongoing thought-experiment. Meta-Markets was authored by Burak Arikan, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab who is currently based in Brooklyn. This Friday, Burak will be taking part in a panel discussion entitled Real World Implications of Virtual Economies at the Turbulence Mixed Realities Exhibition and Symposium in Boston (and streaming live in Second Life). Burak's work touches on a number of the topics discussed here on Serial Consign, and he and I have spent the last few weeks firing emails back and forth that delve into economies of exchange, data portability, information visualization and how these themes are explored through his work. -- Ever since your 2006 A Stock Market in Life project you?ve exhibited a fascination with incorporatin...
More About: Interview

remixing rotterdam
2008-02-05 04:39:00
Last summer, I became aware of the work of Frank Dresmé, a Netherlands based designer and illustrator. Dresmé's thesis, Project 360°, was a series of elaborate psychogeographic illustrations documenting specific routes through Amsterdam. These drawings were complex assemblages of architectural photography, illustrations of signage and street furniture and subjective annotation. Aside from their brilliant execution, what really struck me about the work was that Dresmé was reading the entire city as a unified construct. I've been staring at glamour-shot renderings and precious perspectives for several years now, and it is extremely refreshing to see this much energy poured into representing urban space on a whole rather than highlighting a specific structure as a "point of interest". This morning Dresmé posted a preview of a project that he currently working on for the City of Rotterdam . He has been commissioned to create a series of illustrations to co...

technical difficulties
2008-02-04 21:26:00
I woke up a bit earlier than usual on Saturday with the intent to run a routine site upgrade. What was supposed to be a relaxing weekend of writing and drawing ended up as a semi-manic crash course in database repair. Somehow a chunk of the archives were garbled during my upgrade and then in restoring things I zapped a bunch of the site functionality. Apologies to anyone that tried to access the site over the weekend, I certainly learned a valuable lesson and will take my time in upgrading to Drupal 6. I am happy to report that I used the site downtime to do some UI housecleaning, so please note the rejigged sidebars and content taxonomy. I'd like to send a big shout-out to Crispin Bailey and Jordan (the problem solving princess) for putting up with my increasingly incoherent ramblings on Saturday. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...
More About: Technical

submachine 5 / device art
2008-01-30 09:10:00
[mateusz skutnik / submachine 5] It has been an exciting night in the studio. Just as I finished my daily writing session some great new media materialized. The much anticipated fifth installment of Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine point-and-click game series was launched tonight. The Submachine games stand out amongst the rather bloated "escape the room" genre of games due to puzzle-box level design and hyper self-referential narrative. The series is rendered with a bleak graphic novel finesse and the sound design is equally dreary and dissonant. If you're interested in learning more about Skutnik's work I've written about it before, but I suggest you just go explore the gamespace of Submachine 5 yourself. [ryota kuwakubo / video bulb] This past weekend I went to the Inter(PR)Axis: Mapping a Practice of Media Art symposium at OCAD. The event was organized by Nina Czegledy and presented by OCAD as well as Interaccess and several other cultural and academic organizations and institu...
More About: Device

dorkbot toronto
2008-01-29 02:56:00
[michael bartosik / model of parking lot usage patterns] This past fall, my friend and peer Liav Koren began programming the Dorkbot Toronto artist tech-talk series. Since taking the reins (Kristin Trethewey ran the Toronto chapter of Dorkbot for the previous two years) Liav has curated a diverse range of events which have tackled distinct topics such as how technology-based art is deployed in rural and urban contexts, public space and emerging democratized tools. That last topic is of particular interest to Liav as he is pushing to organize a RepRap research group at Interaccess, a local artist-run, new media/technology focused gallery. Of the talks given at the first three events, the talks given by Cary Peppermint, Stan Krzyzanowski, Patricia Rodriguez and Michael Bartosik have really resonated with me. These artists not only presented great work, but were able to hyper-articulately contextualize their intent, process and the means of production driving their various creative pra...

lev manovich on remixing cinema
2008-01-25 06:46:00
Last November the Department of Image Science at the Danube University Krems (Lower Austria) hosted the fourth installment of their TeleLecture Series. The event was entitled Remixing Cinema : Future and Past of Moving images and featured presentations by media theorists Lev Manovich (pictured above) and Sean Cubitt. These lectures were recorded and the video from these proceedings was just archived online. The writing of Lev Manovich is often referenced or at least invoked here on Serial Consign. He is a key voice in contemporary thinking about cinema and digital culture and in this talk he catalogs an "inventory of effects" of the widespread adoption of digital technology in the image arts in the mid-90s. The discussion draws connections between various facets of contemporary media production including splash screens, broadcast graphics, photographic conventions, film title sequences and motion graphics. He weaves together observations on each of these paradigms to outline what he ...

structure-image, possibly for music
2008-01-24 07:03:00
For the past two nights I've been sitting in my studio, obsessively scrutinizing Jonny Greenwood's magnificently bleak score for There Will be Blood. The first time I heard the shrill syncopation of Prospectors Arrive, the centrepiece of the work, it immediately reminded me of a project I came across last year that I had intended to write about here on Serial Consign. The above image is the score for two movements of Circalles, a 2007 composition by Martijn Tellinga, a Netherlands based sound artist and electroacoustic musician. Circalles is Tellinga's second experiment with what he refers to as "Compositional Objects", a term that resonates with his clinical manipulation of the clusters of modulating tones that populate these works. If the graphical representation of the work doesn't make it clear how overtly spatial the composition is, it should be noted that the piece was originally prepared for presentation in an 8-channel environment (a stereo excerpt is available on Telli...
More About: Music , Image , Structure

kristina luce interview
2008-01-21 08:10:00
This fall, while emailing back and forth with Nicholas Senske, I learned about Kristina Luce, a Ph.D. candidate at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Michigan. Kristina studied environmental design and architecture at Miami University in Ohio and is currently a pre-doctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute. Her research is dedicated to exploring the role of drawing in architecture and how it has shifted over the last several centuries. There aren't many architectural scholars with whom you can discuss the origins of perspective AND emerging digital paradigms - I simply couldn't resist asking Kristina to take part in a conversation about her work. -- Broadly speaking, your research aspires to forge connections between the birth and development of architectural drawing conventions (i.e. Renaissance thinking on perspective projection) and the evolving computational paradigm. What can we learn about contemporary architecture and drawing by ...
More About: Interview

weewar: kriegsspiel 2.0
2008-01-16 04:46:00
[the game of war / from alexander galloway's 2007 talk at mediamatic / photo: silvertje] Once you start peeling back the layers of discourse that cut through game culture, one of most developed discussions you'll find is on the relationship between gaming and the military (see my previous post Information and Warfare). Ed Halter dedicated an entire book to exploring the Military-Entertainment Complex with his 2006 text, From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games and he continues to blog about the topic at War and Video Games. Alexander Galloway is no stranger to "gamer theory" and gave a talk this past fall at Mediamatic where he presented a Java prototype of Guy Debord's Game of War that his Radical Software Group had been working on (see Anne Helmond and Michael Stevenson's posts for more info on this presentation). [my moderately successful attempt to fortify my borders] As per the endorsement of Iman Moradi, I recently started dabbling with Weewar, an online turn-based strat...
More About: Piel

database aesthetics
2008-01-14 02:56:00
[c5 / softsub] Quite possibly the publication I most anticipated in 2007 was Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow, a recent addition to the excellent Electronic Mediations Series published by the University of Minnesota Press. The book, edited by Victoria Vesna, is a compendium of essays and projects which engage the database as a critical and creative paradigm. Many of the projects and texts in Database Aesthetics were originally shown or published around 2000-2001 but the consolidation of this material into a single volume accentuates the importance of this body of work in the present day. The text includes Lev Manovich's seminal essay "Database as Symbolic Form" from The Language of New Media. Norman M. Klein and Bill Seaman's contributions both contain engaging responses to Manovich's discussion about the future of narrative. Klein's essay "Waiting For the World To Explode" contains a particularly juicy passage which lays bare the shortcomings of the d...

the persistence of vectors
2008-01-09 08:41:00
[CAD space / banal but efficient] As an intern architect, I spend more than my fair share of time constructing and administrating digital drawings. My relationship with the drafting board is quite similar to my understanding of the chemical darkroom. I think of it as a tangible space for abstraction, one which demands rigor and expertise with a number of precise and increasingly esoteric tools. It would be naive to think that the digital domain is more advanced than the paper space on which graphite expresses ambition. In fact, when closely considered, the vast majority of digital technical drawing completely emulates historical modes of production. It is only recently that building intelligence modeling (BIM) and parametric modeling are challenging conceptions of workflow and fabrication across a variety of design disciplines. I can't help but notice the irony that I am now spending my formative years as a designer in the same space that I spent my formative years - within the rea...
More About: Persistence , Vectors

alessandro ludovico / neural magazine
2008-01-08 14:41:00
Régine Debatty recently posted a fantastic interview with Alessandro Ludovico on the freshly redesigned We Make Money Not Art. Ludovico is extremely active throughout the new media world as a theorist, educator and practitioner. I'm particularly fond of Neural , a magazine and companion art blog (pictured to the left) that he edits. I've been enjoying Neural for several years now and beyond the excellent art and media writing the publication also features engaging discussion and reviews of contemporary electronic music (a rarity in the digital art world). While the entire interview is quite interesting, I was particularly stimulated by Ludovico's description of his writing project(s): Sometimes I think of Neural as an info-gallery, the best info-gallery I'd want to read. If you want, it'd be defined as my personal narrative of the digital culture evolution, formed by important chunks of information condensed in a limited space... I always thought that the more cultural efforts ...
More About: Magazine

anatomy of an assassination
2008-01-04 05:50:00
Recently, I've been thinking about information visualization in print journalism. This has been inspired in equal parts by recent comments made by Mike Danziger at Visual Methods and some of the research of Alberto Cairo. This past weekend I came across an incredible project by DDD Infographic and Walid Raad, which was published in Bidoun last year. The project (pictured above) diagrams a UN investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in early 2005. This infographic consolidates and schematizes a complex event with geopolitcal implications, and is able to communicate this narrative in the space of a few pages. [the players connected to the assassination of rafik hariri] I touched on the idea of mapping and diagramming in forensics with my Anatom y of a Crime Scene post last spring, but this expansive territory (crime scene investigation, telecommunications, organizational hierarchies and geography) is deeply intriguing. Be sure to check out ...
More About: Assassination

lifestreaming 101
2008-01-03 06:19:00
A few weeks ago, Michael Surtees posted an engaging commentary on his iPhone and how it related to quarterbacking his blogging and wider online presence. This thoughtful text included a diagram from his sketchbook (pictured above) which really got me thinking about digital identity management and the ever-changing landscape of online presence. Between the explosion of micro-content platforms (i.e. twitter, jaiku, tumblr), and the methodology of these services being deployed on more widely used social networking sites ("status" in Facebook), people are warming up to the idea of broadcasting their activities on a minute to minute basis. [jeremy keith's lifestream] My first introduction to the idea of lifestreaming was through Jeremy Keith's Streaming My Life Away a post made in 2006, which speculated on possibilities for data aggregation that are becoming increasingly commonplace: Every time I ping Twitter, the message is time stamped. Every time I post a link to Del.icio.us, that?...

thanks for reading!
2007-12-28 20:05:00
[a well earned nap with pico] I took some time earlier this year to tip my cap at the many great sites that republish and distribtute content from Serial Consign. Well, with that said I'd like to extend my gratitude to anybody that reads this blog on a semi-regular basis. I don't subsist on attention from others, but I certainly find feedback engaging and I've really enjoyed watching this blog provoke and inspire discussion elsewhere on the net. I also feel like I've grown into myself as a writer as this publishing platform has made it clear to me that a lot of the discussion here falls between the cracks of various niches. I'm happy there is an audience who would be interested in reading content about economies of information AND digital aesthetics. So thanks for tuning in! While the holidays have been somewhat leisurely, I'm planning to ramp up the post volume considerably in 2008. Starting next week, you can expect a more regimented stream of commentary as well as more freq...
More About: Reading

(some of) the best of 2007
2007-12-26 05:35:00
While wandering the net this year I've encountered an abundance of great writing, media and commentary. Some of this material has made enough of an impression on me that it remains with me in my day to day thoughts. What follows are some personal highlights from content published this past year. [bruce sterling - man of many decals / photo: brianfit] Culture / Politics While most of the techno-chatter emanating from South by Southwest this year was about Twitter, it was Bruce Sterling's closing talk that left a real impression on me. This fall, Naomi Wolf delivered a fantastic lecture, The End of America: Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot, which meticulously outlined the erosion of civil liberties in post-9/11 America. I've been too busy reading about database aesthetics to get to Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine yet, but I certainly enjoyed the short film Alfonso Cuarón created to promote the book. Aside from Left, Right & Center, techPresident is probably my favourit...

microphone bouquet series
2007-12-24 20:29:00
Last week, I spent some time working through the portfolio of my friend and peer Corwyn Lund. One of his recent projects resonates quite nicely with my interest in media and journalism. This past summer, Corwyn presented Microphone Bouquet Series at Seducing Down the Door, a group show at Mercer Union here in Toronto. The project uses the unique sculptural qualities of clusters of microphones as a springboard into a discussion on tragedy. An excerpt from Lund's statement on the project: Clusters of microphones are a ubiquitous aspect of news conferences worldwide. Floral in form and color, each microphone appears to clamor toward the speaker like flowers toward the sun. As sculptural arrangements, they are the handiwork of television, radio, and print media reporters all vying for proximity to the head of state who is speaking. Within the world of this project, each "bouquet" is a placeholder for the tragedy that has brought these recording devices together. [corwyn lund / tehran,...

the laws of cool (design)
2007-12-21 09:00:00
Over the last week and a half I have been savouring Alan Liu's incredible text The Laws of Cool : Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. This text, published in 2004, is a comprehensive dissection of interface, ideology and the workplace in the information economy. This section of the text excavates a large body of 20th century management theory and uses this to read the transformation of the dominant "work" paradigm from the assembly line into the cubicle farm. Considering the banal quality of a lot of this source material, Liu does an incredible job of weaving this material together into a nuanced discussion on production from Ford through the first dot-com implosion. Liu's text also presents an extended discussion on the notion of "cool" and the friction between counter-culture and the detachment (professionalism) associated with participation in contemporary office space. The tone of the text is a bit grim at times, and there is an extended discussion about the manner i...
More About: Design

mckenzie wark interview
2007-12-17 07:09:00
[mckenzie wark does this spartan life] McKenzie Wark is a author and educator with an active interest in technology and critical theory. Wark's most well known works are A Hacker's Manifesto and Gamer Theory, both of which are engaging texts and explorations into the process of writing. Gamer Theory (2006-2007) is a compelling reading of contemporary culture in light of the ludic and narrative structure of recent gaming titles such as The Sims, Katamari Damacy and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I reviewed the project on Serial Consign last spring and the text continues to confuse, confound and inspire me. This interview was originally published in Vague Terrain 08: Process. -- A Hacker's Manifesto was dedicated to the memory of Kathy Acker. Since appropriation and emulation figured prominently into her writing and your project reconsidered Marx's Communist Manifesto against a dot-com backdrop, could you discuss the connection between her writing and your text? It was largely perso...
More About: Interview

facebook fiction / why some dolls are bad
2007-12-14 02:33:00
For the most part I've steered clear of posting about Facebook here on Serial Consign. Outside of discussions about lifestreaming (which I intend to address at length in the near future), I'm not really interested in dissecting Facebook on this site. What does intrigue me is social media content as a tool in creative practice (i.e. turning a Facebook profile into a commodity on Meta-Markets). This past spring Facebook opened up their API to third party developers, and tools and widgets began appearing in droves. This surge of applications has been a bit of a double-edged sword: on one hand, the move was a step towards more involved user-generated content, but this has also led to scores of tacky applications, wannabe viral media and profile-page clutter. Yesterday I discovered Why Some Dolls Are Bad, a project by Vancouver-based artist and curator Kate Armstrong, that utilizes Facebook as a means of generating and distributing content within the space of a permutational graphic n...
More About: Fiction

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