PERSPECTIVE NUMERIQUE:EsthetiquePerspectiveNumeriqueEngl

Aesthetics of the Digital Perspective

Aesthetics of the Digital Perspective by Olivier Auber "From a landscape other", said Anne Cauquelin. I propose to explore this historic transition through experience, both practical experience and thought, and through an evolving concept, that of "Digital Perspective". Transport and treatment of our eyes, our actions and our identity, the speed of light through interfaces and networks, it seems to rise to an unprecedented topology: the perceived lapses, the time spent flees, the code arrives. However, we remain crampons first two categories with which we are used to gauge our universe. We are still blind to the third. It follows a kind of individual and collective maladjustment to the world that we create ourselves, a radical inability to assess situations and take relevant decisions; chaos because of contradictory gestures. Say what effect will this blindness is perfectly out of reach. The unpredictability radical appears s'imposer only as a benchmark. This is not unrelated to the "code leak" in the heart of the digital perspective. The generator Poïétique The experience for our proposed exploration called Poïétique generator. She was born in 1986. This is a collective network which has some traits in common with the "Game of Life, created by John Conway? In 1976 to model the evolution of a population of microbes. Pixels representative bodies, arranged in a matrix, can move from black to white, or vice versa, depending on the status of their immediate neighbors. With this experience as founder today on "artificial life," Conway has shown that there is an isomorphism between the "parties" Game of Life and logical statements that regulate behavior Neighborhood microbes , So only population that survives forever, is a "real" and vice versa. In the wake of the Game of Life, the generator Poïétique poses somehow the question: "What will happen if we replace the microbes by men? ". We, the players, are not represented by a single black or white but by a small colorful mosaic of an arbitrarily set at 20 by 20 pixels. We are not forced, as microbes Conway, by rules of behavior on our immediate environment, everyone is on the contrary free to modify as it sees fit his design staff and its shares are reflected in real time within the global matrix consisting of the juxtaposition of individual drawings. The overall design, given continuously by everyone, allows everyone to identify his personal involvement. Therefore, committed a feedback loop: changes its sign each local office of the state of the global picture and the overall state varies depending on the shares. No one controls what happens. Yet a kind of graphic narrative emerges from this setting that presence, after the fact - when it connects the film trade - appears to be endowed with a certain consistency. It should be noted that the generator is also Poïétique of exquisite corpse? of the Surrealists, by two aspects: the immediacy of the collective interaction (not that it is global through the Internet) and the visibility and standing as the overall design of the individual (the Surrealists hiding, on the contrary, their picture before the following continue). The main difference between these three experiments lies in the intentions of their authors: research on formal logic for Conway, speculation on the unconscious to the Surrealists, and for me, a questioning of prospective anthropological. Namely: "What will happen when everyone will see everything all the time? Or a minimum: "Technology can give everyone a kind of vision, usually reserved for God, along with the vision of its place in all this? " That's how I made it in 1986. Of course, I was aware that this was a teleological question that probably never answered. But I thought I had found a convenient way to experience it to a very small scale and compare the technology to its own myth. So I made this game The first generator Poïétique experience took place in 1987, using Minitel. I then developed on the Internet in 1995 with the help of researchers from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (ENST) in Paris. Since then, tens of thousands of people were able to participate in experiments poïétiques whose traces are stored on-site poietic generator.net, yet living today. That shows the generator Poïétique? I would say at first approximation, paraphrasing Conway, there is an isomorphism between the "parties" Generator Poïétique, ie narrative self emerges, and the rule that governs the interaction of participants, so that a population, which produces a self-organized a kind of collective consciousness, is a "self rule" and vice versa. In contrast to the microbes Conway, whose "conscience" is limited to the horizon borders with their neighbors, men perceive not only all of the design but also the artificiality of the framework for action that is required ie of the device. So when we talk about rules, legitimate or not, these are the rules of interaction within the device, but also the broader society which offers or imposes this Thursday In early 1988, I became interested in these internal and external rules, and I had the feeling that they were acting like the rules of spatial perspective of the Renaissance, also called "legitimate perspective." Conceptualize how this experience and his status would undoubtedly a better understanding of devices involving in general. The spatial perspective For artists of the Italian Renaissance was to find a system of representation of space in three dimensions on the two-dimensional surface of the table. After some precursors, the architect Brunelleschi showed his contemporaries, with the actual experience of tavoletta conducted on the site of the Cathedral of Santa Maria delle Fiore in Florence, that this representation could be achieved only through the d a single vanishing point, the counterpart of the painter's eye, substantially on file at the center of the table. Since this leak is fixed, simple rules can trace elusive and give fair proportion of the various objects in the scene. In other words, at the heart of representation, there is as medieval tower impressively on golden background, a hierarchical system of values following categories of political, religious and symbolic, it is a simple geometrical construction, orderly a vanishing point, unique and elusive that renews a radical concepts of infinity and the unknowable. Alongside the political and cultural revolution that has led or accompanied, was also a technological revolution, because the prospect has become a language enabling architects, artists and engineers to interact. So that we can provide, large traits, the history of centuries that followed such as refinement, and the industrialization of this space, machinery and photography of the nineteenth century, and film and Virtual reality today is not that ultimately extensions as the analysis Jean-Louis Boissier. Speed and time perspective It is precisely in the bowels of modern machines secreted by the former system of representation that took root a new perspective, this time time. We are, indeed, faced a century since a phenomenon on which the classical perspective space offers no prize, because it involves completely: the speed. Today, the question is no longer represent the three-dimensional space, typically "objects", "territory" or "city", nor even to represent the movement of "public opinion" of Organized around a population centers, it is to find a "legitimate representation of a collective communicating with horizontally at the speed of light." There is, of course, no definitive solution, but the concept of time perspective and, later, the prospect of digital may propose a generic system. Central and essential point: the spatial perspective, the [PerspectiveTemporelle time perspective]], although focusing on the description of a world of information moving at the speed of light, it also revolves around a vanishing point. The vanishing point time In 1988, the generator Poïétique worked in a version through a centralized server. This server then I seemed similar to the vanishing point space of the Renaissance. Indeed, information from users converged to him and it re-shipped immediately to users in the form of an updated picture. More generally, I therefore conceived the "vanishing point time" as a "computer" located somewhere, responsible not only for switching, ie the switch information from each subject, but also Production of collective representation emerging retroactive so that both comprehensive and personalized on each. As in the case of spatial perspective, the vanishing point is the temporal counterpart from the viewpoint of the author who created the representation (the device) and the rules of interaction implemented bear the mark of his intention . But in my opinion, which essentially characterized the vanishing point was not only about the spatial (the computer is located somewhere in space physics), but the order of temporality. The term "time horizon" lights in effect noting that the "vanishing point time" makes a clear distinction between information that are not yet arrived and he had already re-shipped. It is located at the intensive infinity of time, the resolution of nearly beat the clock on the mainframe. This point rule and the subjective time of the collective that borrows from its creator to form its representation. The time perspective is a beginning of expression in the Internet as we know it today. The sites, which implement the most readable, are running "real time", for example, summarizing smartmoney.com stock exchange in a single image constantly evolving. However, when we look more closely, we find that the structure of most of these media differs subtly conceptual design of the time perspective in terms of internal or external rules they implement. The smartmoney.com example to illustrate this very easily. In fact, while the image transmitted in real time through this site is actually the result of collective interaction, no one is able to identify its contribution in the estate speculation. No one can pretend to switch his weight only one of values, unless they are extremely rich and powerful or possessing confidential information, for example by committing insider. The rule imposed by the interaction smartmoney.com site, and behind it by the stock market as a whole, is alienating the meaning of the term cybernetics, namely as Heinz Von Foerster was defined in 1974: "It alienation is when the party can find its traces in all. " With the arrival of Web 2.0 and said social software, such as Flickr, MySpace, YouTube, Second Life, etc.., There is an avalanche of systems calling for participation. All, except systems Peer-to-Peer discussed further work to date through a detention center by any company or institution. As noted by the sociologist Dominique Cardon, during the Spring 2006 University of New Generation Internet Foundation (finger) if publishers social platforms (blogs, in particular) are careful not to implement process overall visibility and reciprocal between their users, perhaps, they suspect that these processes could differ from group dynamics to objects that exceed what they expect ... Some try nevertheless provide some transparency in their functioning. The encyclopaedia Wikipedia could contribute in this case be a successful model, as to the legitimacy of the time perspective it implements. But in their great masses, the media or systems of political representation and economic today, whether real time or not, are still building similar lines from a cybernetics, to those courses Middle Ages. If the instrumental rationality pushes inexorably towards real time, they do not provide a clear and distinct from the individual in the community. It is as if filters hierarchical, that of experts or of certain powers, had always hide feedback to individual sometimes disable the construction time yet implemented. To these experts, as noted by Keynes, it is the role of "best guess that the crowd, that crowd will do." As noted also Jean Pierre Dupuy, in a report on the panic prepared for the Department of Defense: "Thus, as the economy, science of sound, very logical going out to its consœur lower, the specialist 'Irrational collective psychology of the masses. " Is this the sign of a fundamental banned? Every reason to believe it. How indeed, political representation, economic and social could take place in strict observance of a principle almost geometric, guaranteeing strict equality of all, what is more, on a principle at the core of which is a incognitae radical? No, the Renaissance as now, established social structures can not long sustain the image of the ideal city ". The construction of the Representation on the principle of time perspective gives its full potential in the field of art, because it is the only area where prohibited can be circumvented. Art is in effect only in a position to knowingly operate the reduction of man to his representation. Art can celebrate in full light the sacrifice of ethics in the field of aesthetics. And in a rollover involving motionless throughout the universe, it has the power to designate precisely what eludes the reduction, which is common and eternal: the invisible, the imprésentable the ininstrumentalisable. The digital Perspective In 1995, I was forced to change slightly my conception of time perspective when I had access to my research, thanks to the support of ENST, an experimental Internet infrastructure called the Multicast Backbone, or Mbone , Which links various research centers in telecommunications around the world. The network, which foreshadowed the new Internet standard called Ipv.6, which should soon be set up globally on the Internet, already theoretically possible to achieve commutation "all-all", a-focused and therefore potentially out of a central server, to implement the generator Poïétique. And that's what we did. On the dynamics of the image and the internal rules of interaction behind it, nothing new, but everything had changed in terms of reticular structure, and therefore potentially on the external rules. My vanishing point having time off - more central server - and I started looking for a new paradigm in trying to understand the magic of this experimental network. I can not explain in detail here. But the principle is fairly simple. The computers of users connected following the protocol, said "Multicast" can share a code, said group number, under which all can simultaneously send and receive information on a particular application. This code is similar to a radio frequency that would allow a set of walkie-talkies to operate simultaneously, except that the Protocol Multicast to avoid overlap and interference. Thus, the overall image Generator Poïétique do more in a particular point (the server) but at the computer for each participant. But then where is the vanishing point? Well precisely this kind of frequency common code shared digital! Therefore, the "time horizon" is more than a case of a broader perspective: the "Digital Perspective". Although the future of the Internet, which will make full use of these opportunities, in my opinion is still far enough, it is possible to have a taste by examining two examples: the phenomenon of viruses and systems Peer-to - Pair. What indeed a virus, if not an attempt to substitute a code (that of Microsoft, for example) for another (specifically the virus). The successful alternative is creating a community real-time focus of the owners of computers planted or erased hard drives. The systems Peer-to-Peer leave happily expect some more positive, which could be summarized in the creation of small and large communities spread over the planet and permanently sharing all kinds of information objects relocated. However, to date, the center concept has not completely disappeared in these systems, there are always knots with specific functions. As Peer-to-Peer implements two-way communication from machine to machine, the size of the Assemblies sharing the same object at a precise moment is necessarily limited. More importantly, none of these systems was implemented for the moment, devices allowing each player to get a vision of its action in the whole and thus consciously participate in the regulation of the whole. An aesthetic view digital? We know from all eternity the crowd Space "meeting in public, driven by a head, a watchword, a show or a stream, which, when it was abruptly closed, yields to panic. The time perspective creates a second type of crowd: a crowd, interacting in real time without limitation distance through a "time of flight", which when it loses the wire transfers to panic (crack Scholar ). The digital perspective in turn creates a third type of crowd: a crowd-centric real time, unified by a "code leak." What other misfortunes expect our poor digital crowd? What hierarchies will fail to contain? The relationship between infrastructure supporting the collective interaction (the device) and behaviors is an emerging field of research quite blank. None of the authors did interested in the crowd for a century: The Good, Freud, Canetti, Keynes, Moscovici, not even Jean-Pierre Dupuy do enough for my taste finely topology of the infrastructure through which the crowd to exist. More importantly, none of these authors does lighting that art can bring to these phenomena. There has to be done. The digital perspective, as a pure product of the instrumental logic, will not be updated in all areas of human activity in conjunction with communication technologies. The digital crowds will be even more difficult to understand that the crowds time and space. I think they can be observed in fields related to medicine and biology. Indeed, my thesis is that the code leak - it is arbitrarily constructed in real-time networks or is decrypted and then modified by the genetic industry - is the place of commutation of the group 's serving as a sign of recognition, without any calculation, the mathematical or computer, is not necessarily the way. As the vanishing point and time of flight, the code leak is the seat of a prohibited fundamental, namely the inclusion of unambiguous local the global. Today, two extreme attitudes aesthetic clash in art and technology. The first is to build wildly reticular devices, without showing their flight codes and processes of representation they imply, by not highlighting their renowned power and wonderful opportunities. This, I believe the vast alliance attempts bottling of society. The art is not outside the world. According to the paradigm of digital perspective, always expressed an intention to create a code of flight and in the process of representation that creates. As is well known that the social body resists, it is expected that prohibits the fundamental, which sits at the heart of perspective, reserve a few setbacks, for example, advocates of "collective intelligence" in any case when is assisted by technology. The second attitude, so feared fatalistic (or called for, which is the same) hybridization is widespread confusion and all media until the final creation of a post-humanity which swept all its banned . It overlooks the fact that men are also able to collect (and for some theorize) the process of representation, to try to escape panoptic monstrous they continue to build elsewhere. That is what the history of spatial perspective has already shown in his time. Alongside these two attitudes, other channels can be searched. The rational and scientific methods can not provide much help to take (give or take) a code leak if paradoxical, in any event, at which he would one day be seized, ie say that of the mass. The only way to catch is "thinking" by a kind of cultural ingestion painless who would receive an optically-arbitrary, together with the relative legitimacy of the process involved. It is merely a goal that could give an "aesthetic view digital. The intent is at this aesthetic look legitimate forms of code-sharing flight, so that everyone can agree to succeed another to contemplation from this point of view, the sublime performance of the network. Olivier Auber, in January 2007.