Manovich Response

In video games of the past, the plot and the interactive part of the game was very focused and linear. Even in games where the ability to go everywhere was advertised, there were still certain hints and certain boundaries that you could not step out of. In this sense, the old video game was similar to the literature of movies and books. Some might say that these video games are giving us freedom, since, if you take video games as metaphor for our own destinies as human beings, we have a direction but are still allowed to venture out. However, I argue that this freedom is not accurately presented in any form of media, be it new media or old. The key to all of this is that video games, books, movies are created. They are written and planned and executed, reviewed to perfection. In this sense, nothing can really truly imitate a true writerly text. Even those games that allow you to choose your own ending and boast having thousands of different possibilities are created. Every last possible ending is made up or, by way of some algorithm, made into being. These are not true writerly texts. A real writerly text is one that allows the reader to make up EVERYTHING and anything. No endings set up already, no backgrounds already made up. Nothing can be premeditated. Manovich said in “Navigable Space” that “in contrast to modern literature, theater, and cinema, which are built around psychological tensions between the characters and movement in psychological space, these computer games return us to ancient forms of narrative in which the plot is driven by the spatial movement of the main hero.” All video games are like this, regardless of what their manufacturers tell us.

Friday 11am Section- Space

As I was rereading Manovich, the idea that "space becomes a media type" stood out to me as particularly interesting. At first, one is resistant to accept space as something to be compared to video or audio. After all, I'm sure almost everyone can remember the last time they downloaded a video or a song. But if you asked most people the last time they downloaded space, many would look at you like you had two heads. But the more I think about it personally, the more "space" I can remember downloading. Video games (which have progressed tremendously in the ten years since Manovich wrote this), especially shooters, are becoming more and more prone to including "map editors." These tools essentially allow players to toy with space as they see fit and customize it by means of terrain and topography, weapon placement, physical structures, and more. After they're done, the player can save the new map and share it with their friends and perfect strangers. Likewise, in recent years, players have been paying for space more and more frequently. The idea of the "map pack" is becoming increasingly common and increasingly profitable. Essentially, players pay game designers (real money represented by fake money, in most cases) for new spaces to play in. The distinction between who pays for space and who doesn't gets interesting when players are kicked out of games that randomly cycle to the new maps if they haven't purchases them. This often makes players pay for maps they don't really want just to avoid the frustration of constantly being removed from games.

S03 More Manovich

In “Navigable Space,” Manovich makes the point that “in contrast to modern literature, theater, and cinema, which are built around psychological tensions between the characters and movement in psychological space, these computer games return us to ancient forms of narrative in which the plot is driven by the spatial movement of the main hero.” We can think about games like Tomb Raider, The Legend of Zelda, or any number of other games in which the objective is to quest through different locations within a world or number of worlds. “If the player does nothing,” Manovich writes, “the narrative stops.” These games do not depend so much on interactions with other characters within the game (who usually only serve to provide clues or are actually threats to be eliminated) but rather on interactions between the player and the environment (that is, the hidden caves, treasure chests, giant spiders, etc.) The games center on building the characters in terms of experience levels, accumulation of knowledge/clues, and fighting techniques; the focus is not on the psychology of the character. I would like to think about, however, how games that involve intense, constant interaction with other human users might be a move back toward that “nineteenth-century European novel” model. It will be interesting to experience Second Life next week, to see how important—if it is indeed especially significant—the psychological space is in such a game.

Of course, unlike the novel in which the reader follows the thoughts and emotions of the character as the narrative, the psychological space is not as explicitly navigated in a game like Second Life. The psychological component, however, is felt more strongly by the player, who is much more aware of relationships between herself and other real people through the avatars. Actions do not just have consequences on the world and objects or monsters, but on other people.

A couple of my suitemates have been playing Japanese visual novels, computer games that play out in a similar fashion to a choose-your-own-adventure novel. Characters and the world are fairly static, although the player can navigate through different locations (this navigation is not crucial to gameplay). The player mostly just chooses (out of two or three options) what to say, whether to ignore someone or not, etc. The emphasis is not on the navigation through space as much as it is on the navigation through the plot. I’m not sure how well these novels fit into a Manovich’s discussion, but as an example I’m posting a link to a novel called Narcissu: http://narcissu.insani.org/

Video Games and Writerly Texts

In response to Leah's comment on Doom as a writerly text:

I think the idea of a video game coming close to the idea of a writerly text is fascinating. We could consider that the game doesn't exist unless one is playing it - it is not observable unless it is being experienced (one can look at a book, look at words on a page without reading or experiencing it). Especially an internet game - we may know that the site is there, but unless we play it, we cannot see it - whereas an analogy could be drawn between a closed book and a video game disc or cartridge. This analogy begs the question: does the essence/identity of the game lie in the physical disc or cartridge itself, or in the coding on the disc/cartridge? (Does the essence/identity of a human lie in the body or the mind?) Regardless of the answer to these questions, the issue of coding brings me to the conclusion that Doom is not a writerly text, though it was intended to be manipulated, changed, and individualized by users. One of the resons a writerly text cannot exist is because the process and the work are bound by language - written, spoken, thought. No matter how many times Doom is hacked and added to, the hacker will always be using the same coding system - code is a structure that cannot be ignored and cannot be escaped; it prevents any video game from being a writerly text.

Emily Martin for Matt's section

Cyberspace and Totality [S03]

Frederic Jameson’s concepts of totality, as well as the efforts of those within totality to cognitively map their way through it, recalls Manovich’s notions of the navigability of cyberspace. Both worlds explored in the essays, the real world (Jameson) and the virtual (Manovich), have become spaces through which we must navigate, which begs the question of how cyberspace and the spaces of real totality are related and might intersect. Jameson ponders the “new aesthetic” (347) which might successfully represent the cognitive map of totality – perhaps the internet/cyberspace is the form which might achieve this goal. The Internet seems to me, with its proliferation of various media and information and its limitlessness spatially (the Internet has no borders or boundaries, in theory), to be an aesthetic representation of totality, a form which encompasses the entirety of social relations and society itself. Like Jameson’s totality, the Internet cannot be fully, completely comprehended by any one individual (one cannot possibly have seen all webpages in existence); the process of exploring the Internet, then, is the process of exploring totality through this new form and the media/representations which reside within it. Thusly, to use the Internet is to navigate one’s way through its totality, or, in Jameson’s terms, to cognitively map one’s way through the totality of cyberspace. It seems to me, then, that the Internet is Jameson’s long-awaited form that might aestheticize both totality and the cognitive maps through which an individual attempts to grasp it.

Keeping It Real (Alternatively)

Even though I am well aware that the entire universe is simply the product of my wild imagination convincing my brain there are objects, sound and light all around me, at times this "reality" seems so convincing that I start to question less convincing realities like cyberspace.

With computers, the code driven graphical user interface becomes what seems to be a portal into another space. The light emitting diodes of my screen are real, and these words that I am writing are real words, but some might argue that the GUI displaying them to you is fake. Some may elaborate on this idea by citing that what is really behind this GUI is the computer code sending instructions to your screen's pixels. But these arguably fake spaces (those that comprise cyberspace) have become so thoroughly integrated into our physical world that I'm completely ready to call them real (like Pinocchio at the end of his story, only not a boy).

What is a "real" window? Something you look through to see a bird tweeting, or something you look through to see your friends tweeting? Since Facebook came out, poke-related injuries have drastically declined in frequency, and flirting in general has become less physically and socially awkward (but it's still real enough for you to be able to wake up and turn over and have no idea who you poked last night and why). What is a "real" scrollbar? If you were to see one in the physical world outside of computer screens, I assume you might chuckle and exclaim, "that's not a real scroll bar!"

In a class I'm taking on contemporary curating, one of my classmates, Lydia Magyar, curated an online exhibition titled old media. A few of the works she shows can be described as physical manifestations of arguably unreal aspects of what I would call our alternative reality digital cyberspace world. One piece shows scroll bars in a real world setting, where they are arguably less real then when they have a tactile intractability and function. Another piece shows a pixelated image, which in fact is not pixelated but made from crayons. That's just totally wack, you can't use crayons to create images, only pixels! Get real! The last she includes is a performance piece where real human language (a novel by Proust) is translated into real binary code (zeros and ones) then translated back into real human language by a fake CPU (i.e. a real human), emulating the digital process.

At times I find I can navigate cyberspace better than the physical world, and I've had lasting relationships with people (for me, most notably through my music) online who I have never met in person. The question of what is real in our new cyberspace-accepting world is a complicated one, but I feel unreality should be left to things that don't exist. We should stop being so disrespectfully matterist, cyberspace is space too (separate, but equal, to some even superior): alternative yet reality.

Jameson and manovich and new media....OH MY!

Jameson talks about history as an "absent cause" because it does not tangibly exist in our physical, and daily lives that we experence as "the present". Howerver, history still causes things to happen. It causes debates, controversy, leads us to draw conclusions. History is used pervasively in understanding current phenomenon (MCM deals with historical modern ideology to understand the present state of our culture). history creates racial tensions in the present. We look to history to understand how to act and not to act in natural disasters like Katrina and Hati.

This idea that the imaginary force of history can and does drive real world consequences, relates to the earlier class discussion of representation in so far that representation can shape real world outcomes.

Jamesone also quotes from Althusser's definition of ideology; "The representation of the subject's imaginary relationship to his or her real conditions of existence". So how do we even begin to define: "Real conditions of existence". If it is everything experienced first hand then, second hand experiences like language wouldnt be considered part of our "real conditions of existence".

Manovich's uses in narratology to understand some aspects of how navagable spaces function.

For me its interesting to think about navagle spaces as immersion without language. In video games it uses visual cues that substitue for language. So does that mean that by minimalizing the use of langauge a person can more readily access an expereince closer to the real? Do navagable spaces reflect an individuals relationship with his "real conditions of existance"?

How does the relationship of the imaginary to the real "map on" to our expereience and attraction to new media forms as an ALTERNATIVE to langauge? Why do so many people seem to be putting down the book to watch film, play video games, use the internet, their iphones, and other more "navagable" spaces?

Level of Writerly vs Degree of Navigability

It may seem like I’m beating a dead horse, but Manovitch’s description of the game Doom really reminded me of Barthes’ idea of the “writerly” text. Doom involves traversing many narrow hallways in straight-line motion to progress through the various levels. Manovitch writes that Doom, “encouraged the players to expand the game, creating new levels…hacking and adding to the game became an essential part of the game.” Instead of the player as simply a “consumer,” both in the sense of buying the game and “consuming” it as a static entity, he is also a producer. He takes the basic structure and tools of the game and creates new additions and changes to it as he sees fit. For Barthes, the author’s text supplies a framework of sorts for the reader to work off; the reader is supposed to take it apart and change it around in order to find new meanings and form a new, original text. With a game like this existing, and new ones coming out all the time, does it mean that Barthes’ writerly text is leaving the world of the “ideal” and coming closer to becoming a real possibility?

Myst on the other hand, despite being very non-linear and exploratory (it doesn’t really have levels to beat like most conventional video games), seems to be more of a “readerly” text. Manovitch compares it to a piece of traditional artwork, as “something to behold and admire rather than take apart and modify,” and he calls it a closed system. That is because there isn’t really any (what gamers call) “customizable content,” and while the world of the game is vast and expansive, it is still all pre-programmed. The player does have more choice in how they go about playing the game than games of the past allowed, but the fact remains that Myst lacks the interactive, creative aspects that made Doom such a landmark work.

It’s interesting that the game with more linear and straightforward gameplay (Doom) is actually more writerly than the game based around free-form navigation (Myst). Apparently the degree of open navigability does not directly correspond with how writerly an NMO is.

Friday 11 AM Section

Friday 11 am Section

In Monavich’s Navigable Spaces he asks the question “should we oppose this spatialization?” In reference to how steadily more and more aspects of life are becoming represented in navigable space instead of reality. He goes on to say “there is no space in cyberspace.” This statement in the literal sense is obviously true, cyberspace is everywhere and yet it is nowhere (kind of like the matrix). However, cyberspace can be as real a space as any. What define real spaces, I would say, are interactions with other people and objects in that space. So could cyberspace, which can consist of the interaction between people and objects as in online gaming or forums, then be considered a real space as well? “What is missing from computer space is space in the sense of medium – an environment in which objects are embedded…” This view of computer space is becoming outdated. As technology improves digital spaces in video games are becoming more and more realistic. If technology continues improving on its present course it is very possible that “computer” space will become so real that we can actually “walk” around in it. What I’m talking about is virtual reality. Once computer space reaches the point of being virtual reality, there will be nothing left to separate cyberspace from real space. Everyone will have to choose which space they define as their real space.

S03. Mentally Mapping the Virtual Space, Wearing a Second Skin

Having finished both the Manovich and Jameson readings, I see a confluence between Jameson’s problematic notion of the possibly nonexistent “totality” and his conception of “cognitive mapping” with Manovich’s discussion of character building and gameplay through a navigable 3-D space, specifically in the example of the MMORPG World of Warcraft, especially as it is depicted in the recent documentary, Second Skin.

In World of Warcraft, players from all over the world begin at the same point. They build an avatar for themselves and start from scratch in a new world. In Second Skin, this idea is seen as a major reason for the game’s popularity, because it provides an escape for players who feel dissatisfied with their physical “real” lives. Anyone can rise to power in the game through perseverance and ability, with no constraints placed on them other than their own “merit”. This is where I see Jameson’s totality. All users start off equal, at the same point of inexperience, with no issues of talent, inheritance or society to stand in the way of their progress.

Referring back to Manovich, especially with his parallel between American Fiction narrative and modern game play, and Geert Lovink’s “Data Dandy”, this form of character design takes on new meaning. Each player begins at the same level, with the same number of relatively weak items. Characters gain experience through completing quests and defeating enemies, and once they have reached their peak, seek to collect the greatest assortment of in-game items available.

In this sense, each player is a “Data Dandy”, “wrapped in the finest facts and the most senseless gadgets…” They seek to better themselves both for the sake of improved performance, and for the sake of having a higher level/ better equipment than their peers. In Second Skin, this is explored further, by looking into the “underground” black market surrounding gold farming and character buying, in which players will pay a foreign (usually Chinese company) to mine gold for them or to build up a character for them with real world money. Similarly to Lovink’s theory that “the new dandy deregulates the time economy of info= money”, players are willing to pay money less for the gold/object itself, which has no real world value, than for the time they saved by having someone else do it for them.

On another level, part of what makes the game so enthralling, is the fact that its virtual world is thoroughly mapped, allowing each player to conceive of the virtual space within their heads, and navigable in all directions. As Jameson states, drawing from Kevin Lynch, “Urban alienation is directly proportional to the mental unmapability of local cityscapes.” Because players all share the same 3D navigable space, in which their avatar selves travel, experience and grow, they feel like they are part of something larger. In many ways, the game has also given them a sense of purpose, for while they might hold any number of “dead end jobs” to support their game play and occasionally pay off a Chinese player, for the first time they get to feel one with the mythic conception of the hero discovering his potential and going out on an adventure.

Friday 11 AM Section - Post #4

Once the association of any particular politics is removed, Jameson's idea of cognitive mapping still provides an interesting concept to ponder. It is essentially a method of connecting the local sphere to the global sphere. The local in this case is the individual who is trying to situate him/herself in their environment (the global). While reading this article, I immediately thought of a current ABC show, Flashforward. This show is premised around a plot where the world experiences a global blackout for over two minutes. During this blackout, everyone has a vision of what they will be doing six months from now. Of course, once everyone wakes up, mass panic ensues. However, to see why this reminds me of Jameson’s article one has to look at how the authorities react to the global blackout. They decide to create a web database called Mosaic, where everyone can post the details of their visions. The hope is that collectively everyone's visions can piece together the future and understand it a little bit better. Mosaic really is a cognitive map in action.

An actual map is not exactly what Jameson is referring to, but instead he is suggesting the emergence of a global consciousness. The question is then: Can digital (new) media create this global consciousness? Unfortunately, I do not think digital media is the answer. It can facilitate this global unification but it cannot force its existence. One of the reasons I am doubtful of the achievement of cognitive mapping through digital media stems from the fact that the global sphere depends on the individual. Yet one has to consider the incredible personalization that is possible with digital media. What then are the incentives for the individual to leave this comfort and expand to the global?

Friday 11am section, Matt G

In response to Manovich:

The idea of navigable space in relation to Doom and Myst plays off of our innate desire as humans to experience that which we cannot experience in the confines of our normal, daily lives. While this is understandable and valid, I have a hard time making distinctions between the interactive experiences we have while playing a video game versus the "real" experiences of our non-digitized lives.

If you think about it, everything that we do is a product of our creativity and cognitive ability (video game or not). The architects and curators of museums play a similar if not identical role to the designers of video games. Both groups of people have the intention of creating an experience that will be of value to the user, based on their product's ability to attract the attention of the viewer through original stimulation. Museums do not contain typical household items, just like the interactive worlds of Myst and Doom are not meant to mimic the user's neighborhood and daily routine. Whether you agree with this or not, both the museum and the video game are products of creativity and can only be comprised of what their planners can imagine. Therefore, the user's experience is subject to the same limiting factors and constraints in design, which makes the two forums innately similar.

Manovich describes the characteristics that effectively portray navigable space in games such as Myst and Doom: "the majority of navigable spaces mimic existing existing physical reality with out proposing any coherent aesthetic program. What artistic and theoretical traditions can the designers of navigable spaces draw upon to make them more interesting?" Manovich goes on to discuss the Kino-eye interface - a different way in which to overcome the limits of human vision. What are the architectural limits of human vision in cyberspace? Architecture does, in fact, stand on grounds (literally and figuratively) of rules and order, so to what extent can we stretch the limits of human vision in digital architecture?

Blog Post #4

In his essay Cognitive Mapping, Jameson’s discussion on the dilemma of Marxism strikes me:

It is, as well, supremely social and cultural, involving the task of trying to imagine how a society without hierarchy, a society of free people, a society that has at once repudiated the economic mechanisms of the market, can possibly cohere. (355)

In short, according to Jameson, the dilemma is how to imagine utopia. So according to this theory, Marxism's problem is that a communist society is unimaginable and therefore it is not possible to map it? I have difficulty understanding this statement. Does the difficulty of imagining a communist society lie in the fact that we do not live in one at the moment? So that communism does not enter the cultural/ideological system of mapping, and that it does not constitute a piece of the totality of the world that we carry in our head? But then isn’t this a problem that anything that is new and potentially subversive has to deal with? How do we ever initiate change if change is impossible unless it is first mapped in that totality? And how does this relate to the Jameson’s discussion on the League of Black Revolutionary Workers:

Most ironic in our context, however, is the very success of their failure: the representation – the model of this complex spatial dialectic-triumphantly survives in the form of a film and a book, but in the process of becoming an image and a spectacle, the referent seems to have disappeared, as so many people from Debord to Baudrillard always warned us it would. (352)

Does the movement enter a process of deformation precisely as it starts to work on creating an image of itself, making itself imaginable? Should we see it as incorporating itself into the totality as it does so? And, is it because of this incorporation that it ultimately comes to its own disappearance? If that’s the case, how do political movements find a way to represent themselves while avoiding this fate?

By Qian Yin

Anna Fisher session

Virtual Realities

In the article "Navigable Space," Manovich argues that video games allow people to enter alternative realities and explore different environments. She writes: “In Doom and Myst – and in a great many other computer games – narrative and time itself are equated with movement through 3-D space, progression through rooms, levels, or words.” These games provide players the ability to navigate through space, allowing them to approach objects from various angles and interact with them directly. They are usually presented in a first-person perspective view, which creates a sense of control and immediacy. Graphically, they are designed to keep players within the diegesis; the beautiful images and special effects work together to cultivate a rich, immersive experience, one that places an emphasis on creating mood and atmosphere.

To connect this phenomenon to current events, think about James Cameron’s innovations in movie technology, particularly in regards to his newest film – Avatar. Cameron included both live-action sequences and digitally captured performances in a three-dimensional, computer-generated world. As viewers, we were required to wear 3-D glasses, which, in my opinion, removed us further from reality; with this virtual entertainment headgear, we watched our fantasies (the utopian world of Pandora) flash before our eyes. We felt more like participants than observers.

Manovich: Thurs 1pm section

While reading Manovich's "Navigatable Space", I found the section about the distinction between reality and virtual reality in video games specifically intruiging. Manovich says, "instead of creating virtual spaces that have nothing to do with actualy physical spaces, or spaces that are closely modeled after existing physical structyures, such as towns or shopping malls, we may take the middle road." I immediately took this perception of virtual realties and connected it to a show I saw recently called 'True Life: I'm addicted to video games'. My initial feeling about people addicted to video games do so to escape their own reality. However, Manovich's passage helped me understand that it's not only escaping our own reality, but being involved in a whole separate reality within the mind.
Virtual reality can trap the mind into a blurred sense of distinction between the two. In doing so, players engage in a new reality and begin to feel as if they are truly navigating in open space.
To be honest, I find it terrifying that virtual realities, such as those in video games, can have the capability of confusing the human mind to the extend where realities are blurred and/or mixed. Also, being a fan of video games myself, I hope to look more into how these manmade realities can affect the mind.

Section 3 Friday Matt

As I read Jameson's peace on aesthetics and Marxism, I began to think back on a class I took last semester pertaining to Japanese ritual and the art. The Japanese hold their aesthetics to a high ordeal. A few examples include mono no aware (meaning an empathy towards things), mujo (impermanence), yugen (mysterious), etc. Their culture interests me in many ways, one being they hold one of the largest capital societies in the world while still maintaining their traditions, morales and ideals. While reading Jameson's essay I came across the quote, "The emergence of this kind of space will probably not involve problems of figuration so acute as those we will confront in the later stages of capitalism, since here, for the moment we witness that familiar process long generally associated with the Enlightenment, namely, the desacralization of the world, the decoding and secularization of the older forms of the sacred or transcendent, the slow colonization of use value by exchange value..." (Pg. 349)

Now, why is it that Western culture has compromised its aesthetics, its values and morales? Jameson feels that we gave those things up in return for "the truth" otherwise known as harsh reality and economics. Did we leave behind our beliefs and religion for a new, scientific Utopia? Or have we just become so enthralled with our magnificence in terms of creating new technologies and media that we have forgotten our roots? How is it that Western culture has left behind its aesthetics? Are we better off, or are we missing something that could possibly be the key to unlocking our true potential?

Personal Space

While reading Lev Manovich’s “Navigable Space” I was really interested by his theorizations of Myst vs. Doom, and the navigable spaces that they provide. While they are both “spatial journeys” (p. 245,) they are very different in how they ask the user to examine their spaces since they “obey different conventions” (p. 248.) When Manovich says that “new levels [of Doom were] widely available on the internet for anyone to download” (p. 245,) I realized that by removing the control that game developers usually exerted over their games id Software, Doom’s developer, made the game more readerly as they also “encouraged the players to expand the game, [and] creat[e]…new levels” (p. 245.) However, while the game is more readerly in the sense of it being more individual and more personal to the user, the user is still playing Doom on their computer and id Software is still getting the profits from the sale. While on the other hand, Myst, the more exploratory game involving the user to think, is seemingly very individual; however, “it is a closed…system…[which] only the original creators can modify” (p. 245,) so it gives the game itself a sense of freedom, but not a customizable one.

This made me think about what else is marketed as personal. The first thing that came to mind is the personal computer; however, we do have many options as the consumer to choose different products. Then HP’s slogan “the computer is personal again” popped into mind, so I thought of one item that is easily customizable. When you choose just one device whether it is a PC, and iPhone, or any other device that is customizable, you feel free to explore. Manovich’s concepts don’t just apply to video games, as we navigate through app stores, the Internet and other places to customize our devices. We are still buying into the system and companies that created the devices we live by, thus we are free to roam, but not free to leave. This theory also goes back to my last post; however, Manovich’s ideas further back up the point that I made by adding onto the idea of a control environment where the user has the illusion of freedom and customization.

www= wild wild west

I thought Manovich's comparison between the internet and the American Wild West was interesting.

Thus we may connect the American ideology of democracy with its paranoid fear of hierarchy and centralized control with the flat structure of the Web, where every page exists on the same level of importance as any other and where any two sources connected through hyperlinking have equal weight.

(Thus we have bands that become popular through MySpace and word of mouth, blogs scooping the main stream news media on a story, etc.. the internet as a tool for circumventing traditional authority, a tool for perfecting democracy.)

But the Wild West gets tamed eventually. Will the wild space that we have discovered in the internet become similarly compartmentalized? For example, the New York Times will no longer be free, google searches display "sponsored links" before other links that more precisely matched the query that was inputted, exclusive websites for shopping such as Gilt are thriving.

What is the relationship between the internet and democracy?

Unique Moments

After seeing today's presentation of the Speaking Clock, I was reminded of this project I saw earlier:

http://www.polkadot.it/sunbeam-poem-projector

(Do watch the time lapse video)

I think it really resonates with idea of every moment being unique and unquantifiable into a generic mass-concept of time, seeing as every day the presentation will be a little different just because of differences of sunlight angles and weather patterns; it will either go faster, or slower or maybe it will be interrupted because of clouds (although one could argue that if you do this in the equator you'll get the same display every day, or that the presentation will be the same next year on the same day. Still, it's quite amazing seeing as they are doing this with nature and not with randomizable code!) It also is a very interesting way of using space and surface as a medium for artistic presentation because the writing and its legibility will differ on different surfaces. You'll also have to enter the dome to be fully able to read the poem, which ties back into the idea of the spectator becoming the spectacle because you'll be seen interacting with the media and become a part of it to other observers.

Blog 4: Land Use, Suburbanization, and Navigable Cyberspace

During the early to mid-19th century, census data began to show a gradual sprawling of the population across major British and American cities (Briggs, 1963). Interestingly, according to Morris and Rodger (1993), a leading driver of this sprawl was a desire among the elite to separate work and home. Unlike the city, the suburbs offered the promise to privacy, domesticity, and the nuclear family. Meanwhile, as Bobic (1990) might argue, the suburbs empowered man to exert control over his rhythms as well as space-time relation. With the rise of the automobile, the 20th century gave rise to suburbanization en masse (particularly in the United States). This suburbanization could be read as a drive to exert control over physical place and as the expression of a desire for permanence or security (as opposed to the transience and insecurity of urban life).

Cyberspace fundamentally disrupts and destabilizes the security of place promised by the suburbs. Yi-Fu Tuan notes, "place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to one and long for the other." As Professor Chun explains, space then destabilizes place by catching it 'in the ambiguity of an actualization.' In describing our relationship to cyberspace, Manovich coins the term 'virtual flaneur' (16). As Baudelaire explains, the flaneur is home only when moving through a crowd, where he is both "away from home, and yet [feels] at home." Similarly, the virtual flaneur, Manovich notes, "is happiest on the move, clicking from one objects to another, traversing room after room."

I'd like to continue exploring and thinking about this interesting relationship between place (and the human desires that lead to its physical forms) and navigable cyberspace.

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Texts: Manovich, "Navigable Space"; Bobic, Milos. (1990) The Role of Time Function in City Spatial Structures Past and Present; Morris, R.J. and Richard Rodger. (1993) The Victorian City: A Reader in British Urban History 1820-1914; Briggs, Asa. (1963) Victorian Cities; Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life"

WS The Flâneur and the Cowboy

In Lev Manovich’s text, “Navigable Spaces,” Manovich discusses the aesthetics and implications of navigation through virtual space and what it might be for devices such as narrative, visualization, and in terms of subjectivity. For me, this can be seen in the two figures of navigation/exploration that Manovich posits: the flâneur and the cowboy.

For the flâneur, space is something that allows for navigation for a creation of place through movement and new trajectories. For the cowboy, however, space seems to be treated and interacted with differently. As Ellen succinctly phrased in her blog post this week, “ ‘With its metaphors of navigation and homesteading,’ the internet is a lot like the frontier of the American west. The idea of being able to conquer the internet, this endless abyss, requires that the web be spatialized into a map, or outlined once someone discovers new places.”

         Thinking of the internet in terms of mastery of place through space versus exploration through experiences of new trajectories, Manovich points to the different subject position that each occupies. For the cowboy,“subjectivity is constructed through conflicts between the subject and nature, and between the subject and his enemies, rather than through interpersonal relations within a group.” For the flâneur, subjectivity is one of intersubjectivity, “an exchange of glances between him and other human beings.” Both of these subject positions seem to need more pressure put on them. The tension that seems to exist between these two conceptions, the cowboy and the flâneur, is something that I would like to further explore in section.  

Also, the discussion of the flâneur is filled with 19^th century Romanticism and although De Certeau’s ideas of the flâneur are provocative when thinking of them in terms of navigability of new media, what is at stake in De Certeau’s appropriation for new media theorists?

Monica Garcia

S03 - Navigable Space

I find Manovich’s discussion of the distinction between the flaneur and the explorer to be extremely interesting, especially because I think that many examples of navigable space in popular video games today provide us with a flaneur-explorer hybrid rather than a distinct appearance of one archetype or the other. For example, Manovich’s discussion of these two archetypes led me to think about how something such as Second Life functions. While Manovich says that “the user navigating a virtual space assumes the position of the…explorer” rather than the flaneur, I think there are myriad counterexamples that provide that navigable space provides a hybrid of the two. For example, the inherent nature of Second Life assumes interaction amongst users rather than simply individual exploration on the part of each user. Second Life no longer functions as “Second Life” when users try to make themselves either wholly explorer or wholly flaneur. As its name implies, Second Life attempts to be a virtual instance of real life – and just as real life is dependent on both exploration and interpersonal interaction, Second Life relies on the interplay between flaneur and explorer to achieve its true purpose.

Second Life, however, does not purport to provide an exact reality, just a reflection of reality. I think the distinction between flaneur and explorer becomes even more interesting when one considers navigable spaces that are meant to be exact representations of the real world. The first example that came to my mind is how real estate companies provide online “tours” of various properties. The user is now able to act as an explorer of a real location, yet they are not exploring something that is actually real. They must then become a flaneur in order for their exploration to have any ramifications in the real world – they must interact with the agents, sellers, etc. in order to create the interpersonal dynamic required in real estate. Thus the “tour” exists as more than a simulation of the real property, but becomes a necessary aspect of the overall home buying process. Navigable spaces require a flaneur-explorer hybrid when purporting to show an exact reality, while in spaces such as Second Life, the flaneur-explorer hybrid is only incidental.

Navigable Space - Friday, 11am Section

It was very interesting this week to be reading about how the internet and video games relate to navigable space. I thought it was particularly intriguing to think about video games and how they’re similar to the classic American story of exploring a frontier. While I’ve always thought of video games as an act of exploration and character development, I’ve never perceived any connection between them and written literature. In my mind, I’ve thought of narrative in video games and written narrative as separate things, but this chapter has now blurred that distinction for me. I suppose I’ve always had a bias (because of the visual nature of video games) to compare games to movies, but definitely not books.

Another section that I enjoyed reading was toward the end where Manovich talks about how our interactions with computerized data and media have consistently been framed in spatial terms. The names of the two most popular browsers at the time tie in perfectly into this argument. He discusses how Netscape Navigator alludes to the navigating flâneur of Baudelaire while Internet Explorer refers to exploration. Like with video games, Manovich’s distinction between the French flâneur and the American explorer makes me think of internet navigation/exploration in a new light. For example, social media didn’t exist when Manovich wrote this text (at least not in the way that it does today), but it applies perfectly to the idea of the flâneur navigating a crowd. I can navigate through Facebook profiles in very much the same way that I can navigate through a crowd. Moreover, a Facebook poke could be the modern split-second virtual affair. There is also an element of exploration to Facebook too though. Exploring profiles involves entering unknown territory that over time creates a mental map of social networks. Such navigation is systematic and like games, involves larger and larger territories. I’d be curious to see where else these distinctions would apply in a Web 2.0 world.

Is the virtual medium a "writerly text?"

A passage struck me in the Manovich reading this week:

"His constant concern is the viewer's attention and what she will encounter: "The reaction of the viewer during her movement through the installation is the main concern of the designer... the loss of the viewer's attention is the end of the installation." This focus on the viewer offers a lesson for new media designers, who often forget that what they are designing is not an object in itself but a viewer's experience in time and space." (12)

This passage immediately evoked for me the concept of a writerly text and the question of the viewer or reader's role in creating her own experience with the work. In fact, I might even complicate the passage above by questioning whether the new media designer is really "designing... the viewer's experience in time and space." The way I see it, the new media designer is setting up an interface that will influence the viewer's experience - not necessarily "designing" that experience in full.

It’s easier to see the way that virtual experiences function as writerly because it’s obvious that without the viewer’s participation, the experience simply does not exist. As the same time, am I right in thinking that this does not mean the virtual experience is purely writerly? While we didn’t get to play Myst tonight, we did watch a short video of the game’s introduction and while, technically, the character we saw playing the game could have made some alternate choices, it was pretty clear what was to be done and in what order in order to get the plot to progress. While I trust the game as a whole does not function this way, the intro sequence had to run in a very linear way to set up the information needed by the player and, in this sense, the game was being readerly – or maybe “playerly” – in that it could be played but the player was not truly actively creating the game experience. I’d be interested to see a game that could be coherent without some readerly elements.

Wednesday Section

I thought Sean's point on the inability for mapping technology to envision the totality theorized by postmodernism was poignant. The "suppression of distance" brings about a notion of simultaneity which causes the crisis of saturation in contemporary society. Furthermore, the suppression of distance, does away with the notion of perspective based on spatial relations between a subject and her surroundings. With this "view" gone what, if any, is left of the subject? With no privileging of perspective (not even a supposed neutral, thus secular one), would this new totality be inaccessible in forms of media that attempt a representational mode of communication?

Suppression of Distance

In Jameson's "Cognitive Mapping", I first found very interesting a paradox he suggests when discussing the second stage of capitalism, "Monopoly Capital" or "Stage of Imperialism". He recognizes the multinational influence on every resident of an imperial nation. Because of this, he suggests that the views of a resident is a distortion of reality. Although there are these complex global influences, an individual (writer) focused on their small, confined perspective. Jameson even suggests that our welcoming of such opinions for our edification is an early form of "irony".

I find this passage particularly interesting in light of the implications of Jameson's desire for some type of aesthetic or art that captures the totality of the third stage of capitalist, what he calls "late capitalism". As suggested earlier by David and Sean, such a cognitive mapping may be possible, or closer to possible, with new media. However, the effect of new media, especially the internet, may be more than the possibility for cognitive mapping. While in the stage of imperialism, people were unaware or unable to grasp the international influences on their lives, the "suppression of distance" in late capitalism, and especially the effects of the internet, cause a hyper-awareness of global linkages for virtually all individuals. What is interesting to me is that this may result in a distortion of reality just as great as in the previous stage of capitalism. Having the whole world at our fingertips makes everyone "an expert", makes everyone "knowledgeable". Thus I think its possible that the aesthetic of the present day may extrapolate this knowledge to false causation, or false understanding of global linkages. In fact, new media may allow a common understanding of traditional historical influences, but there is no way to understand at this time the effects of this medium, new media. For this reason, I doubt any real possibility of cognitive mapping of the totality of the modern age.

(Although I suppose we should know by the final project...)

[Wednesday] Strategies and Tactics

Both Jameson and Manovich come up against strategies and tactics. Manovich discusses strategy in relation to Kabkov's work, "Kabakov uses strategies to impose a particular matrix of space, time, experience, and meaning on his viewers; they, in turn use 'tactics' to create their own trajectories...within this matrix" (24). In this passage the strategy seems to capture the collective experience while tactics capture the individual response. The matrix, as Manovich describes it, seems similar to the totality of class structures that Jameson discusses.

Although not a formal part of his essay, Jameson is asked whether cognitive mapping is conceived as a strategy or tactic. His answer does not directly address this distinction but the goal to which both the tactic and strategy address is "the legitimation of the discourses of socialism in such a way that they do become realistic and serious alternatives for people" (359). In not addressing cognitive mapping as a strategy or tactic, does Jameson suggest that cognitive map transcends the idea of a strategy or tactic? Are these categories helpful for thinking through the concept of cognitive mapping? What other terms might prove helpful in understanding cognitive mapping?

WS Navigable Space and Hypertext

How are games like Myst similar to hypertexts like Patchwork Girl? They are both an adventure and, as Manovich said, an “elaborate dance” through a material, may it be a written narrative or navigable space. You can move forward or move in circles, looking at text or space over and over again. Both hypertext and Myst afford the power of spontaneous navigation that normal texts and movies do not. Are video games simply an extension of hypertexts to a new dimension? Putting the participant into the 3D world that is narrated through looking and acting on the environment. Do these games afford more freedom to the user or are they simply a visual expansion of a hypertext. I would like to discuss in section how creating navigable space changes the experience and control that the user has over the narrative, and how this may be the visual hypertext.

Friday 11AM section

Why are we settling for navigable space as cyberspace?

“We are not moving any closer toward systematic space; instead, we are embracing aggregate space as a new norm, both metaphorically and literally.” Manovich explains our society’s acceptance of cyberspace as a new type of space, and our settling with it. This is disconcerting to me. I understand that this space can represent a plethora of worlds: from the interface of a video game (an entire world in something like SecondLife) to the world that is the internet- simply an abundance of connected files. Why, though, have we settled for this as cyberspace?
Professor Chun alluded to this settling in one of the first lectures. Before the Internet existed, people had grand visions of what we called “cyberspace.” It was to be something you could enter virtually and live a virtual life. Neuromancer is a great example. It is a stylized version of cyberspace. Professor Chun even said that William Gibson was very disappointed with the first computer and the Internet. Furthermore, The Matrix serves as a good example. That is an actual space that one can enter. Our modern version of navigable media space is far from this.
Have we completely given up on the idea of an actual virtual world? There is still a separation between us and any space interface, even if that space is one of virtual reality. Is it possible to collapse the area between us and the media space enough so that we can enter it? I hope our society continues to aspire to this. Manovich’s text should serve as an explanation of our current spaces, but not something to settle upon.

PS Professor Chun- I have the Ivy League Swim Champs from tomorrow to Saturday, so please don’t call me out in class because I posted my blog early! I won’t be there!

Space and Psychological Frontiers

I think it is interesting that this week pairs Jameson with Manovich and to see the extent in which space can be taken as a theoretical object of inquiry. Jameson's paper, "Cognitive Mapping" begins with a call for a "new aesthetic," though it is one of which Jameson "know[s] nothing whatsoever" other than its nonexistence (347). This "new aesthetic" would for Jameson seek a a conception of totality in whatever means possible in the "new space" of postmodernism. This new space Jameson argues,

involves the suppression of distance (in the sense of Benjamin's aura) and the relentless saturation of any remaining voids and empty places, to the point where the postmodern body--whether wandering through a postmodern hotel, locked into rock sound by means of headphones, or undergoing the multiple shocks and bombardments of the Vietnam War as Michael Herr conveys it to us--is now exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed. (351)

In this space of "immediacy" there is a fundamental problem of conceiving a "social totality," which for Jameson, from his Marxist framework, results in a situation in which "no properly socialist politics is possible." It is interesting to think if Jameson's call for the cognitive map prefigures something like new/digital media, like David has suggested, could be a possible means to recognize the aesthetic that would make a conception of the "social totality" possible. What I think is most interesting though is not how we can think digital media as means of exposing "power" structures (I think Jameson might be disinterested in this term), but rather how these emergent technologies and media reinforce the "suppression of a distance." I wonder how technologies that supposedly can map, even in real-time, hinder our ability to actually imagine totality and reinforce notions of a mapped, connected, or networked globe that further distance a graspable social.

Wednesday Section

"There comes into being, then, a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience." (349)

- Fredric Jameson

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this one. How can an experience's authenticity or truth be based on its individuality? To help clear things up, I looked up some definitions:

true: consistent with fact or reality; not false

authentic: conforming to fact and therefore worthy of belief

Based on these definitions, the passage can be understood to mean that if an individual (personal?) experience is believable, then it must be fake. And if the respective scientific model is true, then it couldn't be experienced by just one person.

The second part makes some sense to me. If something is a scientific fact, then it has to be reproducible. But the first part still eludes me. How can believability lead to fakeness without fail? I found a lot of the rest of the paper to be confusing too, and I'm pretty sure there is some key piece that I'm missing, so maybe this passage will clear up when I better understand the paper as a whole.

Theory vs. Practice

“Whatever its defects and problems, this positive conception of ideology [“the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence”] as a necessary function in any form of social life has the great merit of stressing the gap between the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class structures in which he or she is situated, a gap between the phenomenological perception and a reality that transcends all individual thinking or experience; but this ideology, as such, attempts to span or coordinate, to map, by meanings of conscious and unconscious representations” (353).

Jameson argues that individual experience is severed from structure and that private experience becomes further and further estranged from the reality of our situations. Is this the same as saying that theory and practice are distinct entities that, as time goes on, do not necessitate one another? Theory attempts to understand/predict the practice in its absence while, simultaneously, practice implements the theory in its absence as well? Yet, both are separate in that theory can never fully bear on actual experience and practice never really lives up to the theory. This is similar to how, when the Internet came out, theory predicted that it would be ungovernable and mind blowing but in practice the Internet became rather mundane and vulnerable to government forces and censorship. Is the internet an attempt to represent absence and the “real conditions of existence” or is it the space which we attempt to map? I guess what I am asking is whether the internet is the method by which we map meanings of conscious and unconscious representations or does it itself need to be mapped?

Wed Section, Space to be conquered?

"With its metaphors of navigation and homesteading," the internet is a lot like the frontier of the American west. The idea of being able to conquer the internet, this endless abyss, requires that the web be spatialized into a map, or outlined once someone discovers new places. Movies and video games have given us a vision of the internet to that stays in our heads while we are surfing the web, but in reality there is no way that a physical map of the internet could ever exist.

Instead of being made of places, as we discussed in class on Monday, the internet is more of a space. A space to explore, learn, and speak opinions. Instead of being able to create a map of locations and places, websites give us space to leave our opinion. We leave our mark via blogging, commenting, and sharing files. These message boards and online discussions are proof that humans explore the new frontier, even if nothing physical can be mapped.

Reading other people's posts remind the user that they are not the first to explore a particular site. While exploring western America was a race to see who could discover places first, the internet is the exact opposite. The longer you wait to visit a site after it is created/posted, the more interesting it is to read as you can materialize other opinions and see the marks they left behind.

The only case in which this isn't true is when shopping online. If one waits too long to log on and purchase items, certain items may be sold out. While this is an elementary use of the internet, this proves an interesting connection between the internet being an ethereal space vs. physical place. Online actions that are materialized (ie, something physical is delivered that you virtually ordered) do not fit into the theory that one can always wait to visit the site. The site itself will will exist for a very long period of time, but items may be sold out quickly. Uses of the internet that provide tangible results need to be treated differently than blogs and opinion sites.

As Manovich explains, "navigable space is subjective space, its architecture responding to the subject's movement and emotion." Most websites, other than shopping sites, will exist for months, even years, for users to revisit and take note of all the other users that left their mark behind.

Wednesday Section, Space

Right before the start of the semester, I finished my very first videogame, Dragon Age: Origins. It was, in a word, awesome. I was completely taken with the intricacy of it—the strategy used to win fights, the careful diplomacy used to coerce other characters. My exposure to videogames (RPG or otherwise) before this was basically none. Instead, playing DAO was a journey in which I had to teach myself a completely new technology, or, to reference Daniel’s post, a set of “tools” by which I could navigate this completely fictional world (mainly, learning how to manipulate the game controller).

My experience with this ridiculously cool RPG reminds me of Manovich’s argument that computer games “return us to ancient forms of narrative in which the plot is driven by the spatial movement of the main hero [me].” This is entertainment, I’d be quite happy playing a game exactly like this for an indefinite amount of time. The storyline was derivative, yet I still was hooked. I didn’t feel the need for any expansion of the space the game gave me, in terms of story or in terms of the “virtual world” is presented—there was so much there already.

Yet, it seems that Manovich seeks to push the possibility of navigable space in new media; he sees we are “not moving any closer toward systematic space; instead, we are embracing aggregate space as a new norm.” Do we need to try harder, then, not settle for the default on computers? The reversion to older narrative, the quest, seems well-suited to the enjoyment of a videogame—it works. So, drawing that out to the Web, which is what Manovich discusses, the lack of "perspective", is it a function of immaturity, or does it simply just work, which is why it hasn’t changed? To briefly reference Jameson, who charts 3 different stages of political development, says “urgent political dilemmas are all immediately functions of the enormously complex new international space” (351). If one is a function of the other, does that leave room for the reverse to be true? I suppose in short I’d like to see to what extent society informs (the conceptions of) space/space informs society.

Wednesday 2pm Section

The nice thing for me about reading Jameson is that at least he's always explicit about his political aims. The guy is a Marxist through and through, and we can expect him to always be forthcoming with the political motivations for his analyses. In the example he gives in "Cognitive Mapping" of the failure of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers, I was struck by how a revolutionary political movement was stymied by the very structure of the dispersal of power (and, for that matter, concentrations of people) in the nation/state/city model in America. He puts it succinctly thus: "one of the enormous strengths of the superstate and its federal constitution lies in the evident discontinuities between city, state, and federal power: if you cannot make socialism in one country, how much more derisory, then, are the prospects for socialism in one city in the United States today?" (352).

I wonder about this in the context of new media as maybe the one great hope for the cognitive mapping project Jameson gestures at but cannot envision specifically. For him, this would represent the salvation of Marxism as a radically revolutionary enterprise, and it seems to me that new media, the internet, and the new ways in which we interact with the computer, as we have said, may both reinforce and undermine the traditional divisions of power within our national framework. However, what seems to me most interesting is the question of to what extent does new media and the internet expose the operations of the division of power in the US to a degree which was never before experienced? That is, since we can fairly say that the internet enables us to elide differences in the spatial location of its users all over the country and world, can we then say that it may render those differences moot, or at least trivialized?

Wed. Section; Being in Control.

"Instead of narration and description, we may be better off thinking about games in terms of narrative actions and exploration." (Manovich)
"'We are creating environments to just wander around inside of. people have been calling it a game for lack of anything better, and we've called it a game at times. But that's not what it really is; it's a world.'" (Manovich)
"'A lot of them [fiction writers] develop their individual characters in detail, and they say what is their problem in the beginning, and what they are going to grow to learn in the end. That's not the method I've used ... I have the world. I have the message. And then the characters are there to support the world and the message'" (Manovich)
"Given that new media are most often experienced, like paintings, via a rectangular frame, virtual architects can study how painters organize their spaces within the constraints of a rectangle." (Manovich)

During section, I would like to focus on the above quotations from Manovich's article. I find it fascinating that he differentiates the terms "narration and description" with "narrative action and exploration." In particular, I would like to focus on the map versus an exploration/visit/tour. When explorers navigated physical space, they used maps and there are certain ways and protocols involved with reading a map (along with different sets of tools). First with map, you can figure out where you are by using a compass and looking around your surroundings to see if the river is flowing a certain way, or if there is a moutainpeak there etc, etc to orient yourself. With the Internet and videogames, you aren't sure where you are. The map of the internet is so vast and so expansive that you can't for certain say that "YOU ARE IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS OF NEW HAMPSHIRE" as you would be able to if you went there. However, with the Internet, you can't just say, "Oh I'm on a blogging website" or "I am on a website about China." No, because these aren't specific enough....

I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to say here, but I just would like to talk about the sets of tools that the interface has in order to "orient" ourselves within the unreal space. The "go back one webpage" button or the "ctrl f" button or the "return to home" or even on this website "dashboard" "my account" "help" "sign out" "view blog" and so on. There are so many choices and so many places to go, which allows for one to get lost in the space, AND/YET feel "secure" about being lost because you can always just type "gmail.com" or "google.com" and click the "back one page" button. So I guess I would like to point out and discuss how Internet, video games (the pause button, the return to home, the save key) all take in to account of our fear of insecurity. I can be sure that when I type in gmail.com, I'll be able to check my email and confirm an interview that I have this Friday...

And does this also play into our the idea that the grass is greener on the unreal side? And how is this problematic? Could this ever create a society of control -- but this is somehow not possible due to its distributive creation (i.e. how Internet/video games are now a writerly text)? And then just as a technical question, why is it that we prefer the navigation in this 2-D model and we haven't made advances with the the 3-D interactive computers? Perhaps this has to deal with our desire to feel "in control" and secure in our ability to exist both in the real world and the unreal world simultaneously.

html malfunction

Hello everyone,

Just to let you know I just realized and fixed some problems with directing html navigation. The Project is now fully functional.

Assignment #1: Getting Hypertextual

Find it here.

Monica Garcia

Control[led] Reproductions

Control[led] Reproductions: A Reading of "Postscript on the Societies of Control"

By Sean Feiner

Introduction

Experiment

Commentary

Midterm Project

Apres Moi, le Deleuze