DIVVY/dual.symposium.04 [Discussion]

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Duration: 28 minutes and 11 seconds

Country: Japan

Language: Japanese

License: CC Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike

Genre: Instructional

Producer: NTT InterCommunication Center / NPO Gadago / Mozilla Japan

Director: Dominick Chen

Views: 390 (13 embedded)

Posted by: dominick on Apr 22, 2007

DIVVY/dual symposium at NTT ICC on 09.24.2006. Discussion with comments with Hiroo Yamagata, an expert in open-source and free culture philosophy and critique of euphoric 'sharing' paradigm. Transcription and initial translation by: - Ashley Rawlings - Tomomi Sasaki - Lena Oishi - Chihiro Murakami - Dominick Chen Related links: 0] DIVVY/dual 1] TokyoArtBeat 2] NTT ICC 3] Mozilla Japan

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My father developed Alzheimer's in his 80s.
I thought it was unusual, but apparently a lot of my students' relatives also had it.
As I realized how common the disease is, I felt a certain 'fear'.
I have the same genes, so perhaps I too will have the disease in a few decades.
A TV program the other day stated that we will have a cure in 2 years.
And I thought 'Yes! I don't have to worry about it then'.
I saw my father's brain scan and was shocked. It's shrinking.
I was faced with the reality of his brain physically 'disappearing'.
Seeing Endo san's work now, I'm afraid I think that the details are still rough.
It's more frightening if the letters shrink while you contemplate. You're forced to type anything at all.
The material/physical manifestation of the brain, i.e. the text, might disappear at any moment.
If you change it to shrinking font, I would want this software.
But it only shrinks slightly. You might just notice it if you leave it for an hour.
Not radical shrinkage, but very subtle, delicate, but changing for sure.
I think you can create a 'fluctuation' in the text, visually.
This way, the reality of 'facing your own text' is expressed more vividly.
Disappearance is more frightening than becoming larger, I think.
In the early days, the first kanji that appeared were related to 'sacrificial victim' and 'curse'.
Kanji's roots stem from 'sacrificial victim' and 'curse'.
It was Baudrillard who said that 'white' is radical.
The kanji for 'white' is 'haku', meaning 'death's head'. Human scull. Skeleton.
Apparently the kanji for 'white' is based on the two holes of a scull's nose.
We communicate with people using such tools full of curses and jinx everyday.
We are exchanging 'curses' that our ancestors created. I got goosebumps when I first read this.
The reality of reading a book that gives you goosebumps. Can media art give you goosebumps too?
Unless we evolve to a phase where an unfathomable reality gives you goosebumps,
media art itself is in trouble. The question is, how to go about this.
Tsubaki san mentioned that 'we have to move towards the everyday'.
Endo san and Matuyama san's piece itself is not art.
Rather, when the installation, and the project is seen as a whole
the whole thing becomes one art piece.
However, what is the difference between distributing free software online,
and an artist displaying the work as 'art'?
I wanted Endo san's opinion.
This application was not created intentionally as open source art.
'How does Yamagata san write his reviews?'
These are the questions that we wanted to reveal in our work.
So in this sense, maybe it's not art.
We talked about the concept of 'platform' before.
Rather than saying 'Yes!' to the piece itself, it's the process of creation that's important.
So in a sense, maybe this is like the 'platform'.
Yes. Everyone uses words, and the reason why we deal with spoken language in
is because words are universal. Anyone can use them.
Many language don't have characters, but every language is spoken.
It's not a special skill, like being good at drawing.
But everyone writes a lot of text.
Even a sentence like 'Wow, what's this?' undergoes various raw processes before it's confirmed.
It's fascinating, and I want to keep working with this.
Rather than knowing everything then and there, on the spot,
I feel like we're trying to breed a habit.
Endo san mentioned the word 'Type-do' (art of typing) before.
I wrote about 30 comments in the experimental stage. You really need to focus.
You're forced to write rapidly, or else the font gets bigger and bigger.
I think the effects can be adjusted easily, as Tsubaki san mentioned.
Diminishing font, for example. We also thought about the idea of words smudging away like ink.
The different effects might influence the way you write.
If it's an entirely new writing experience, then that might influence your thoughts too,
You might experience an entirely new reality.
Maybe this offers an alternative reality of sorts.
Yamagata san's serial at the Kyoto Art Center made me think of this.
Yamata san writes a serial called 'Dear Text', you can read it on his home page.
He writes about his radical stance towards art.
At the end, he mentioned 'scientific art' and whether unduplicable, original art exists.
Sorry, this is a very rough summation.
He concluded that softwares are already very open,
and that maybe they hold the possibilies for the future. This was in 2003.
Now that 3 years have passed, I wonder what you think about it now.
Can I ask your opinion regarding this matter?
My thoughts since then haven't changed, although I am confused about one thing.
I've talked before about how wonderful free software is.
Also, I've supported the loosening of copyright and protective influences
like Creative Commons. But lately, my thoughts have changed.
It's related to the idea about what makes art and the act of creation possible.
There is one thing that Levi-Stauss said. It's also online.
He says that creativity and originality is most realized
when you have a vague idea but can't obtain the actual thing itself.
For example, say I was impressed by a film or a painting.
I only have a vague image of a strange lady smiling.
When I try to paint it myself, I come up with something entirely different or new.
This is when creativity is realized.
If everyone suddenly starts buying Mona Lisa replicas
then the potential for originality goes down.
So to have a situation where free-for-all artworks are distributed digitally,
maybe this is bad for breeding originality.
Things like artist's copyright, open source...
Open source here means 'ability to share' or 'openness' from both sides.
Are they really beneficial?
As soon as restrictive copyrights increased dramatically,
the potential for replicability or digitization (they mean the same thing) also increased.
I think that this is symbolic.
This subconscious need to 'supress' the situation of 'free replicability'
may have always existed in the collective knowledge of humans.
So then, people who used to think 'That guy is copying me, oh well'
might start to think 'Hmm, maybe I should stop them before it's too late'.
In other words, does open source really promote originality?
Maybe interrupting open source with things like copyright promotes originality even more.
So then, I begin to question whether everything should become open source.
But this is just the big picture. I still think that things should partially be much more open.
But I'm realizing that not everything must be open.
Perhaps open source isn't the only way for future art.
Of course, it's great to have people involved in a piece.
For example, Endo san mentioned the possibilities of social hacking.
People at the website '2 channel' created 'Tashiro-guns'
and tried to get 'Masashi Tashiro' on the cover of time. That was great.
I can even consider it as art, if I must.
But not everybody agrees with this,
I'm beginning to think that 'open source' and 'art'
are not entirely compatible. Only partially.
Thank you. Yamagata san's opinion in the 6th or 7th 'Dear Text' called 'The Future of Originality'
relates to this discussion about open source, but it's also more universal.
As Yamagata san said, when people's assets are shared and parallelized,
I wonder whether people can actually create and gain from that.
The Fruxus score that Kusumi san introduced at the start was free at the time of release,
but 30 years on, it's become a fetishized item that sells for 300,000 to 400,000 yen.
Using Yamagata san's words, this is probably 'the consequence of a subconscious collective knowledge'.
Creative Commons is often misunderstood.
People think that it's about 'overthrowing copyright', promoting everyone to stop using it.
I was very disappointed when an American lawyer emailed me saying similar things.
But this isn't true. As Lawrence Lessig often states,
it's 'the restoration of balance'.
He says that the aim is not to make everything open or subject to creative commons.
It's tough having to go around explaining yourself all the time.
The reality is that it's difficult for people to imagine a middle ground. How about you, Tsubaki san?
Dominick's comment about not being able to imagine the 'middle ground' refers to a fundamental human bug.
We deliberately omit detail. Biologically, we like to dichotomize things.
'Morning and night', 'man and woman'. All twos, right? It's not 'man, woman and alien'.
Dichotomizing is part of us. It's like flicking a switch.
The question is, how do we present the details?
Unless we bring the details back, we'll be wrapped up in ideological conflict.
We have to increase the level of accuracy and ...
There was an interesting piece in SIGGRAPH.
An interface called VooDooI/O
There are many stakeholders, so I think it's important to talk about specific numbers.
This is true for creative commons too. We want to quantify things.
Rather than 'Should we have copyright, yes or no',
we tried to quantify it, like '6:3 or 78%'. But it didn't go well.
The environmental ministry did an interview about a project.
When they mentioned 'global warming', everybody assumed that it was about the rising seas.
Elementary schools teach that global warming leads to higher seas. How do we fight this propaganda?
So artists have to fight the social trend of being either 0 degrees or 100 degrees.
How to adjust this. Our job is to introduce accuracy, and say 'Wait a minute'.
If someone says 'It's like this, right?'
we would say 'No, that's not true. Look at it from this angle'.
When we create works that people can touch and experience for themselves,
they are made to reconsider the way they think. Like, if everyone downloaded the typing software.
By slowing things down, you prevent major catastrophes.
My job is to constantly offer information to prevent such major catastrophes.
I think that this is a very important function of art.
And we should promote it through things like creative commons.
In other words, I want to increase the number of 'notches' up to every millimeter, every angstrom.
This is one thing I'd like to keep doing.
This relates to what you just mentioned, but I think information will continue to increase.
People can change the code or contents of an open source piece.
For example, you might spend 3 hours remixing your favourite song,
and suddenly discover what sort of sounds they were using.
Or you might be using Illustrator or Photoshop
and suddenly realize all these connections when you start deconstructing the image.
This ties into Tsubaki san's idea about increasing 'notches'.
I think that this creates a new form of critique.
Endo san's piece intervenes from an entirely different angle.
It's not the same as that dophin helper that pops up in Windows and Excel.
It's important for art to offer 'intervention that people don't necessarily want'.
I was previously involved in 'intellectualization of space'.
The users wanted agents to help them out, so I created noise instead.
Very violently, too.
Art collapsed because the way we created noise did not accurately adhere to the times.
Society kept changing.
'Art is an explosion!', 'What sort of explosion?' 'It's an explosion, that's all'.
This rough generality doesn't pass anymore.
But it's a fine line. Endo san's software intervenes on a daily level.
In the 'intellectualization of space', it's important to determine at which level interference should occur.
On one end, there's Dr. Kawashima's 'Brain Training' for Nintendo DS.
That's a sign that people want to stimulate themselves in some way.
They're afraid that they're degenerating in an increasingly automated society.
So people are watching Dr. Shibaki on TV or playing Dr. Kawashima's game on DS.
Art can offer noise to stimulate their consciousness,
and technology would be a significant part of that.
I'm anticipating ICC to create some sort of vivid action.
I have a question.
Open source software has a clear aim,
which is to become better and faster.
So if a piece or project became open source, how can we measure whether it's better or not?
In other words, does it become better if 100 people participate in the project?
For Tsubaki san, the question would be whether Radikal Dialogue can be measured like that in quantity.
We're trying to think about art in an open source context.
When open source is a method, to what extent is it valid?
And can this be considered as 'noise', as discussed earlier?
Our aim is to offer noise, right?
What is the incentive for 100 people to come together to maximize that noise?
One successful example of Tsubaki san's point would be 'post pets'.
You'd be writing normal emails, and a bear would appear and lose the email or send dummy mails.
People embraced this.
Microsoft's dolphin Kyle was hated,
but people were happy to be interfered by 'post pets'.
So one aim would be to create something that the market would embrace.
Using Tsubaki san's example, one reference is to see how many people created that Tashiro wallpaper.
But whether it's good art if more people participated is an entirely different matter,
and depends on Tsubaki san's overall goal.
Participation doesn't make the piece better or more powerful,
but if more people participate, the more it's connected to the market, so there's more value.
This is one way of thinking about it.
The next question would be whether it's successful if it sells.
That's a major issue, and should be discussed seriously.
Takashi Murakami always pops up in these discussions.
His way of pinpointing certain angles is successful overseas.
He's also involved in 'Geisai'. That's open source in a sense, right?
But people don't participate in Geisai because it's open source.
They come because they want to make money with art.
They think: 'I'll be discovered and become rich' or 'I'll be shown at Tomio Koyama or NY'.
The system looks open source from the outside, but the inside is entirely different.
But the content is quantifiable, and it's rated highly.
That's why people participate. Same with 'post pets'.
It's difficult to say whether popular art that sells is 'good'.
I'd say it is, at 7:3 odds.
'Post pets' are good, and Takashi Murakami's 'Geisai' is another such system.
I wonder what ICC can offer.
Rather than rejecting everything, it's good to innovate possibilities through media and technology.
There are a lot of possibilities out there.
People around the world access that dodgy Palestinian website.
Even access from Palestine. There are so many possibilities.
I'm not very skillful, so I can't offer everything. But the possibilities are there.
You're right. The question of how to distribute media art in the market is huge.
This project aims to distribute software for daily use, for free,
and see what the long-term consequences are.
I agree that this is a critical point of discussion, but I'm afraid we've run out of time.
I'd now like to take one or two questions from the audience.
The question can be to one person, or the panel as a whole. Please raise your hand.