Author: Scott Coombs

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our news

New Society, New Voices: 2020 Digital Society Bursary Winners Announced

In 2018, Digital Transformations established the Digital Society Bursary to support any and all creative endeavours that seek a deeper understanding of the digitised society. This year’s bursary was aimed at graduating students in Ireland who are exploring the digital society within their practice. The digital society is throwing arts, policy, education, culture and business together in ways that only an artistic sensibility can really fathom.

The 2020 award was open to students in any creative discipline (visual, performing, musical, media, technology, literature). The submissions represented all these disciplines, and each had a revealing response to a society built on digital technology.

The 2020 winners

  • Nadia Armstrong (NCAD), for her video “Digital Native”.
  • Ellen Holmes Kelly (NCAD), for her virtual reality photography exhibition.
  • Diarmuid Farrell (NCAD), for his app prototype “Woven Chats”.
  • Katie Whyte (NCAD), for her glitch art installation “Inception/Generation/Degradation”.
  • Ellie Shortall (NCAD), for her video “Confessions from the Future”.
  • Luke Toomey (TU Dublin), for his podcast documentary “A Terrible Beauty”.
  • Tara Jay Burke (GMIT), for her interactive story “Genre Rework”
  • Aoife Donnellan (TCD), for her digital interpretation of the Táin “On Material Augmentation”.
  • Mingmei Hao (TCD), for her film project “Is it Apocalypse”.
  • Donal Kearns (TCD), for his interactive fiction story “Mental Quest”.

Each student will receive €1000 and will have their work exhibited in the first Digital Transformations group show, the details of which will be announced shortly.

In announcing the awards, founder Scott Coombs said “while all the projects are very different, some challenging, some entertaining, all of them demonstrate how deeply these students are thinking about digitisation and its impact on human identity, the human mind and voice.” Having planned these projects long before Covid, many of the students found ways to adapt to the new circumstances that revealed new insights into what it means to collaborate, and with whom we must collaborate.

Coombs said “I’m really looking forward to showing these works to as wide an audience as possible, and letting them hear these new voices and engaging with their ideas.”

For further details and upcoming exhibition dates, see http://digitaltransformations.org/investment/digital-society-award

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our news

Digital Society Bursary Applications Now Open

In 2018, Digital Transformations established the Digital Society Bursary to support any and all creative endeavours that seek a deeper understanding of the digitised society. We are delighted to be able to announce a second award in 2020.

This year’s award supports students who are exploring the digital society within their practice. The digital society is throwing arts, policy, education, culture and business together in ways that only an artistic sensibility can really fathom. Successful applications will reflect the themes of Digital Transformations within their work: Digital Human, Networked Personality, Art for What’s Sake, and Manifesto.

Who can apply

This award is open to students in the Irish higher education system who are due to graduate in 2020, at either undergraduate or postgraduate level, in any creative discipline (visual, performing, musical, media, technology, literature). The award will be made for work that satisfies the award year course work requirements for graduating students.

We are accepting applications from Tuesday 27th April to Friday 29th May 2020.

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our news

ARTIST USES €10K TO FISH FOR KNOWLEDGE IN THE DIGITAL SOCIETY

In Mayo this Autumn , the Ballina Arts Centre hosts one artist’s response to technological change

A €10,000 “digital society” bursary has been awarded by Digital Transformations to multimedia and performance artist Leah Hilliard. Acknowledging the award, she said “having been at the first Digital Transformations conference in Ballina earlier this year, I was inspired to think about knowledge as a river and how we try to capture and hold onto knowledge.” With the River Moy as a central part of her project Leah said “In the Arts Centre you can watch the anglers standing for hours in Ridge Pool. I wonder who we are in the information flow, fish or fisherman?”

Leah has a 20-year history of work in visual art and technology. She studied Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, specialising in video installation and performance, and earned an MSc in multimedia systems from Trinity College. Her work has been shown at the Liverpool Bienniale and Dublin Fringe, and she has been involved in Art House, the Dublin Art and Technology Association.

Continue reading “ARTIST USES €10K TO FISH FOR KNOWLEDGE IN THE DIGITAL SOCIETY”
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our news

Digital Transformations funds a €10,000 digital society bursary

This bursary provides a significant opportunity for practitioners of any discipline (visual, performing, musical, literature, media, technology) to deliver a project responding to the emerging digital society. The bursary will be open to individuals and groups in Ireland and abroad and the recipient will be launched at the Digital Transformations conference in Ballina on the 19th of May.

An information session for potential applicants will form part of the conference programme.

The purpose of the bursary is increase awareness of the digital society and to make artistic responses to the digital society a more central part of the debate around the digital society.

The winner of the bursary will be required to consider the themes of the digital transformations conference in developing their work: Digital Human, Networked Personality, Art for What’s Sake, and Manifesto. Studio, rehearsal and accommodation space at the Ballina Arts Centre in Mayo will be made available and the recipient will be required to provide some educational outreach and workshops at the centre.

“I’m thrilled to be offering this bursary as a way of supporting people who want to explore the digital society in their work, and to put that response centre stage in the debates happening today about what kind of society is emerging via digital technologies,” said conference director Scott Coombs. “Enriching human contact and the human voice is essential for this transformation to be beneficial,” he said “and this artistic response needs to be heard not just on the street, but in classrooms and boardrooms as well. The digital society is throwing arts, policy, education, culture, media, technology and business together in ways that only an artistic sensibility can really fathom.”

See http://digitaltransformations.org/bursary for full details.

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Digital human

Glitch art: subverting authorship and authenticity

Speaker blog: Ian Keaveny

Glitch art is everywhere , but maybe you don’t know it , adverts from Adidas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sotun9qMyrw

films like ‘Ghost in the shell’

music and music video Kanye west – ‘Welcome to  Heartbreak’

groups such as Autechre, Aphex Twin and genres such as chiptune and Vapor-wave , and fashion.  In the wild it’s a broken screen announcement on your daily commute  or a rain hit satellite dish turning neighbors or the six o’clock news into a gibberish of blocks and melting faces  and halting sound or an unfinished bittorent download that turns flesh into torrents of broken wax and colour.

Glitch art works to subvert  both software and hardware to render images, sound or physical objects (deliberately editing 3d software objects  exemplified in the work of Mark Klink)  into something other, often unreadable and often painful to watch or listen – born on computers and the early Internet through artists such as Jodi  its gallery is the screen , and the screen is everywhere .

What is it not? It is not  ‘New media’ , that vague phrase used by the art establishment to co-opt technology and new forms into its lexicon , rendering it open to learned criticism and curation, it leaves curation behind through the mechanism of its transmission, through Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook , it is to a large degree self-curating through likes, reputation and sharing . It is not a filter applied through using photo-shop or after effects (these are obvious and generally frowned upon), it takes many of its tools and philosophy from the open source and free software movement, software and hardware are political as closed source hardware and software do not allow for tinkering and playing and restrict the freedom to experiment , inducing a mindset of consumption rather than creative participation .

It is also problematic to older ways of looking at authenticity and authorship , much of its source, or sauce , is found material, material often than not under copyright , if it can be found on the Internet it will be used , and thus has much in common with remix culture, see Antonio Robert’s (hellocatfood)  whats your glitch.

It could be argued that Glitch art holds much in common with pop art but  it is much more cannibalistic and far more ruthless .

When a paradigm crashes it takes no prisoners and the language you have used before no longer makes sense.

Ian Keaveny holds a BA Hons Fine art painting/printmaking from Winchester school of Art and has had a number of solo and group shows. Since 2012 worked almost exclusively online and in digital media. Ian will be introducing the new art form called Glitch Art or “Dirty New Media”. If technology normally tries to trap and “handle” error – Glitch Art celebrates error. Ian will provide us with a brief survey, with examples of the rise of Glitch art with reference to its influence, issues of copyright, in relation to traditional art forms and practices, and its aesthetics.
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Digital human

Is there an emoji for schadenfreude… or, what is digital?

Is it the transformation of metaphor into algorithm? From metaphor, which creates meanings and reveals truths that cannot be expressed literally, to algorithm, which defines facts that can be interrelated?

In addressing the year 2000, Jean Cocteau said back in 1962 “I’ve always preferred mythology to history. Because history is made up of truths which eventually turn into lies, while mythology is made up lies that eventually become truths.” In addressing the year 2000, Jean Cocteau said back in 1962 “I’ve always preferred mythology to history. Because history is made up of truths which eventually turn into lies, while mythology is made up lies that eventually become truths.”

Of course, there are a lot of ideas about what digital is:

[slide-anything id=’435′]

A simple phrase, but no real consensus on what it means.

Or is it this?

The video, scripted by DELL-EMC, shows a fender-bender in which the driver who’s been hit continues his journey within 2 minutes, after the accident is automatically detected by sensors in his car, a drone is dispatched to take pictures of the accident, a tow-truck to collect the vehicle, and an Uber driver to take him to his destination. In the background, the insurance company has prepared the claim (including checking the other driver’s insurance record), and all the first driver had to do is approve the claim via his smartphone.

Wonderful, in a lot of ways – though it wouldn’t require much imagination to come up with a lot of dystopian variations.

But two aspects of the little sketch makes it fundamentally different to the world we’ve been living in heretofore:

  • Intent is inferred, not expressed. When we communicate, we do something explicit such as speaking, turning a door handle, filling in a form, or pushing a button. These things are vehicles for expressing our intent, our will to something, whether that something be to issue instructions, enter a room, apply for a loan, or book a flight. If I want to enter a room, there is no way of knowing unless I turn the door handle. If I want to make an insurance claim, there is no way to do that except to tell the company, and the actions I take – phoning or emailing – have that explicit purpose. Any other intent, any thought or feeling I may be capable of expressing, is private and held “inside” until some action is taken to express it and publicise that intent. Not any longer – the driver doesn’t have to report the accident, prepare any documentation, organise any repairs or alternative transport. All the information from which the driver’s intent can be inferred from other actions  – the condition of his car, the journey he was on – not from any express decision he had taken. As a corollary, our ability to choose which thoughts are expressed is reduced, as is our freedom to ascribe no thought to our action. In a digital society, every action is a trigger of some process, every action is presumed to express an intent and which is explainable in some declarative way. In short, the digital society is based on the presumption that every human action has a meaning and that we can determine what that meaning is.
  • Human experience is digitised, not just the customer or user experience. Most of the diagrams that attempt to illustrate the essence of the digital transformation limit themselves to the public realm – the market place, the civic space, the cultural space, and presuming that there is still some private place in which we still inhabit, and from which we enter into the market, the classroom, the hospital, the legislature, and the gallery. In a digital society, there is no interior, no secret self, no “me who is not me”.

In his seminal publication “The conduit metaphor”, Michael Reddy showed how words with a meaning in a particular context carry that meaning into another context and generate new meanings in the new context. As Anna Sfard pointed out in “Thinking as Communicating”, the metaphor is not just a literary gimmick, but is an essential way of organising experience.

Metaphor emerges in ways and from places that is unique to us and at the same time shared. Will the digital society make it harder to share these experiences, or will it, in “reading us” based on our behaviour, simply make it much much easier to share our experiences through predetermined meanings?

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Manifesto

The 1960s, in plastic

The future happens to us a lot quicker than it used to.

The late Douglas Adams, of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, was interviewed for a documentary. He recalled a magazine article written in the 1960s, speculating about what the 1990s would be like – society, fashion and mores, appliances and the built environment. Two things struck Adams – first, to one who’d seen what the 1990s actually looked like, it was obvious these predictions were really projections of the fascinations of the 1960s. The 1960s, in plastic, he joked. But the other thing that struck him was that the biggest change came from something that already existed in the 1960s but was entirely absent from this future world of the 1990s – computers.

Something else is striking about this anecdote: Thirty years. To an inhabitant of the 1960s (unless you were Rod Serling), it would be ridiculous imagining how different society would be in ten years, since it would be largely the same, assuming of course that we all hadn’t died in a nuclear holocaust. Transformations take much longer to work themselves out.

Apart from the changing climate, which is really the working out of physical processes and not the outcome of humanity’s infinite and irrational variability, would anyone dare predict the society that will attend in even 10 years’ time?

Despite all the talk about from business and industry about disruption and transformation, business craves stability. Maybe not technological stability, but certainly regulatory stability, financial, political, social stability, and of course environmental stability. Stability is a state of affairs that persists over time. It is the antithesis of disruption.

And, in an era where everything is changing so rapidly, the period in which a state of affairs can remain stable is shrinking . And that is an inherent threat to business planning.

If a business needs to plan over a 5 or ten-year period, their ability to predict the state of affairs is going to be increasingly difficult. They are more likely to succumb to the 1960s-in-plastic syndrome: transferring superficial aspects of today’s world into the future, missing the profound and subtle changes taking place now, and assuming that everything else will remain equal.

In another interview – the last TV interview before he died – Adam’s was asked about the impressions he’d like his work to have on non-readers. “Some people think it’s some kind of vision of the future, which it isn’t.” He explained that he invented the hitchiker’s guide, a precursor of handheld mobile devices, and the Babelfish, a precursor of universal instantaneous translation, as a way of solving narrative problems he had and the whole satire as a way of “looking at us”. He wasn’t trying to predict the future, and yet the future seemed to make his stories seem predictive.

If what artists create take a generation to become part of the world around us, then these creations are of no immediate concern to business. But what if it takes only 5 years? Can wise decisions be taken, a case be made, and money spent when the Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns” are so close, so present, and so central?

Businesses, especially tech businesses, both shape and serve reality. But the relevance of the arts to this activity is even more important because the world being ushered in by digital transformation is even more uncertain, unstable, and unpredictable. It is artists that venture into that realm and create the ideas that lead to the realities in which business seeks its return on investment.

And as the Australian writer Richard Flanagan wrote, “what reality was ever made by realists?”

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Art for what's sake Digital human

…but not as we know it

Assume creative expression is a system, and let’s try to reduce it to its basic elements. We build this model of creativity not because it’s right, but because it might help us see how much of our ideas about arts and creativity make sense only in a non-digital society, and how a digital society might turn those ideas on their head. All models are wrong; some are useful.

Anyone who performs a creative or interpretive act exists mostly in a social setting – mostly, because it is generally accepted that we all have access to some interior personal space that is both unique to us and not directly accessible to others. Together (the exterior and interior spaces in which we live) a person sees, hears, and feels the world around them and reacts in some way and for some purpose – that reaction is manifested in the working in some medium, some object we can transform to embody what we want to express. The result of that working then exists outside the person or persons that created it. The intent of that work is then received by someone who didn’t participate in its creation, but the work has meaning to the extent that the recipient reacts to it, drawing on their own external/internal experiences.

And of course the creator and the receiver are human beings. And of course the medium has no consciousness or will of its own, and is inert until the creator acts on it and invests his/her vision in it.

Just about every part of that attempt to abstract the creative process could be challenged, but this is a model not scripture so let’s play the game.

Take the world as we’ve known it, with its creators, its painters, sculptors, writers, playwrights and poets, and on the other side its audiences, its readers, viewers, theatre-goers, and in the middle the work, both the embodiment and the vehicle of what the creator has to say.

Can you think of any part of this world that isn’t being radcially transformed by the digital society?

Start with the creators: where is that line between the internal and external, when so much of what was private is now public, when what we see and hear in the world around us is filtered through algotrithms that are supposedly determined by our own behaviour and preferences?

Take receivers: well, there might not be any in a digital society. We are all “content creators” at some level. All we have to do is accept the terms and conditions of some cool thing that makes our lives easier, more fun, or that just makes us look good. We are being exhorted to control our own brand – our own interior lives are commodities too.

Finally, the medium: Steve Woodall, a book artist (and Collections Specialist for the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts San Francisco) who used the relatively new technology of Xerox photocopiers, once said anything that shortens the distance between the artist and the audience is a good thing. The digital society creates the illusion that this distance has been illiminated – a potentially dangerous illusion since traditionally if you couldn’t acquire the raw materials of your medium yourself you could purchase them and in either case once acquired you were in control. In the digital society, you acquire the materials for free (subject to terms and conditions) and once acquired the product controls you. You rent, you pay for use, and you sell your interaction with the material back to the owner. But also this medium is not inert, the way a page that you write on is, or clay that you mould. It is intelligent. It shapes you as much as you shape it.

And of course all of them or none of them may be human beings. And these changes are not confined to artists and audiences. They are happening to all of us. The author and philosopher Bill Neblett wrote in Sherlock’s Logic that you can’t say you know what you mean to say if you can’t in fact say it – that thought outside expression can’t be known. Or as Wittgenstein said “whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” Whatever we may think in our heads, it can’t be understood until it gets out of our heads and onto the page, the stage, the codebase, or wherever. In a traditional society, the inarticulate private space is fairly large and largely sacred – it is the source of personal value and dignity and is accepted at least in part as being outside of the public world we try to share with each other. In a digital society that private space is small because so much of it is now public, and what’s left behind is denigrated. How many of you have been asked to prove your friendship to someone by sharing one of their posts? And without a private personal unrecorded experience where is the room for history – the telling and retelling of stories, and the truth about human experience that stories can reveal – when experience is equated with the sum total of ones public interactions?

 

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Art for what's sake Articles

Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways

Jeremy Rifkin was in Germany in 2017 to help launch the EU’s Smart Europe initiative and while he was there he gave a talk entitled “A history of the future – the world in 2025”. Rifkin is an environmentalist, economist, social theorist and author of The Third Industrial Revolution, and The Zero Marginal Cost Society. We are moving from ownership to access, he said, from markets to networks as the basis of wealth. And along with it, our post-Westphalian ideas of freedom, power and identity will change. Power will not flow from hierarchies but from networks; freedom, not from individual sovereignty and exclusive rights, but from sharing and collectivity; identity, not from location, but from a global consciousness.

Referring to the millennials as “prosumers” – people producing and sharing at the same time “for free” – he said “we’re going to have to move from ownership to access, from markets to networks…and you’ll make money by managing these networks”. It’s going to be so cheap and efficient to make things, he maintains, that a whole new economic system will emerge as a result: “part of the day, our young millennials are in the marketplace, as sellers and buyers, as owners and workers…. But part of the day the millennials are in the sharing economy and they’re producing and sharing all sorts of virtual goods with each other, at zero marginal cost.” Young people are producing their own YouTube videos, news sources, and content with each other “open source, [with] no intellectual property”.

If I can crystallise the challenge this presents to artists in particular and to culture in general it would be in this way: art has always been a product, something that is made – and made by an artist, a human being. The means for sharing it was always external to it, in that the museum, the book, the theatre, the channel was meant to deliver it without becoming a part of the work. If Mr Rifkin is correct, that products (both physical and virtual) will become so cheap and abundant that the only valuable things will be the means of accessing them, how valuable will producers be? And will a dumb network that simply carries things from place to place be less valuable than smart network that modifies as carries? If it costs nothing to make something, there is no value in preserving it, in treating it as unique and irreplaceable. Will the only valuable creation be a pattern – a means of making things instead of the thing itself?

In another way: If networks and the means of sharing become the currency, instead of what’s being shared, then two things follow. First, since these networks are “smart” they will both adapt to our behaviour but equally our behaviour will adapt to it – so where is the possibility of an inner life that exists outside this system, and how will we tap into it especially if artists cannot compete with a million intelligent content-bots? Second, will those people wishing to retain that intangible freedom be forced to go off-grid and live in the kind of savage reservation Huxley imagined in Brave New World?

Jeremy Rifkin warned the audience that as the third industrial revolution gathered pace, so much of what the first and second revolutions created would become “stranded assets”.  Perhaps another warning is to prevent that “old poetic feeling” from being stranded as well.