Category: Internet

  • About cybism, viractualism and Immersion into Noise

    About cybism, viractualism and Immersion into Noise

    Art world is in direct contact today with science and technology. But, net-art is in difficulty since web 2.o explosion and this thing represent a new artist situs. I discussed about the curent artist situs, about cybism and viractualism with Joseph Nechvatal.

    Joseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses. Since 1986, Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information, computers and computer-robotics. In 2002, he extended that artistic research into the field of viral artificial life through his collaboration with the programmer Stéphane Sikora. Books: Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006), published by Edgewise Press in 2009, Immersion Into Noise, Open Humanities Press/ 2011.

    Rares Iordache: What is the current artist situs in digital culture? The idea becomes a machine that makes the art, says Sol LeWitt. After some good years net-art seems to enter in obscurity. I have to say that web 2.0 introduce the relative in scheme, and user became (v)user. Everything is relative to clicking, to be online. What is the current trend in art world?

    Joseph Nechvatal: Cybism is a new sensibility emerging in art respecting the integration of certain aspects of science, technology and consciousness – a consciousness struggling to attend to the prevailing current spirit of our age. This cybistic zeitgeist I identify as being precisely a quality-of-life desire in which everything, everywhere, all at once is connected in a rhizomatic web of communication. Therefore, cybism is no longer content with the regurgitation of standardized repertoires. Rather I detect in art a fertile attraction towards the abstractions of advanced scientific discovery – discovery now stripped of its fundamentally reductive logical methodology. Moreover, cybism can be used to characterize a certain group of researchers and their understanding of where cultural space is developing today. Cybists reflect on system dynamics with a hybrid blending (cybridization) of the computational supplied virtual with the analog. Digitization is a key metaphor for the cybists only in the sense that it is the fundamental translating system today.

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    RI: I said recently that we live in a viral culture, were information spreads very fast and we are all affected by technology. The mechanism is similar to virus spreading, even rizhomatic. You connect your theory, viractualism, with this technological stage. In a recent essay you talk about viractualism in webbed digital age and viral viractualism.

    JN: My concept of viractuality-and viractualism-emerged out of the research I conducted in virtual reality at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, in the U.K.. It begins with the realization that every new technology disrupts previous rhythms of consciousness. I believe that the viractual realm is now the authentic domain of art in the information age. This concept is central to my work as an artist. The basis of the viractual conception is that virtual producing computer technology has become a significant means for making and understanding contemporary art and that this brings us as artists to a place where we find the emerging of the computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This merger-which tends to contradict some dominant techno clichés of our time-is what I call the ‘viractual’. The blending of computational virtual space with ordinary viewable space indicates the subsequent emergence of a new topological cognitive-vision of connection between the computed virtual and the uncomputed corporeal world.

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    RI: In your book, Immersion into Noise, you theorize the immersive noise consciousness, as a ontological unification stage of consciousness. It seems to be a phenomenological operation, which is based on self-re-programmablity. Everything is put on the brackets, and after that is re-composed at another level. What is immersive art-of-noise role in this ecuation?

    JN: Immersion Into Noise is intended as a conceptual handbook useful for the development of a personal-political-visionary art of noise. On a planet that is increasingly technologically linked and globally mediated, how might noises break and re-connect in distinctive and productive ways within practices located in the world of art and thought?  That is the question I explore in Immersion Into Noise.

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    RI: Can we talk about noise as a relevant element to re-symbolize, to stabilze the instability of an existent body/mint rupture?

    JN: The method used in Immersion Into Noise reflects on the insights noise suggests to the traditional western history of unified being (which indeed engenders extraordinarily deep conflicts). This entailed a review of past and present approaches towards ontology and an analysis of a variety of artistic maneuvers. I thus outlined an integrative noise philosophy by tracing the visual noise impetus through its various expressions so as to examine the immersive noise philosophy from all possible sides. Of principal interest was the discussion of subject/object cognition.

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    Interview published in Net-Art 2.II

    Towards an Immersive Intelligence: Essays on the Work of Art in the Age of Computer Technology and Virtual Reality (1993-2006) was published by Edgewise Press in 2009.

  • Occupy the Internet! Why is so viral this expression?

    Occupy the Internet! Why is so viral this expression?

    The animated occupation soldiers are in front of the line and they espect the orders to occupy the internet. This is a real battle, because people took to the streets of internet to show their messages. Many websites are occupied, in fact there is a list with the websites currently being occupied. fffff.at published here a list with such websites and you can use the Occupy Service. You copy and paste a code into any HTML page to your website or to websites you control (or, attention, you can get control of).

    This thing represents the effect of some acts like SOPA, PIPA or ACTA. Occupation movement implies an “army

  • Google Gets an Upgrade

    Google Gets an Upgrade

    According to Google’s Grzegorz Czajkowski, many of the things people are involved in can be represented in the form of graph, including professional activities and personal relationships. The company was the first to use advanced graph analysis methods like PageRank to get more from the Web.

    Using graphs in a dynamic environment like the society brings a new angle to computational power and scalability. Google applies the Bulk Synchronous Parallel Model in its scalable graph analysis by using a framework known as Pregel. Pregel simplifies the calculation of PageRank and scales clusters autonomously without requiring programmers to intervene manually. As a result, the software engineers have more time to concentrate on the algorithm itself.

    The Basics of PageRank

    PageRank uses the random suffer model that assumes that Web surfers use a linear method when following links until their interests stop or they stop browsing. All the clicks away from the source documents reduce the PageRank. Of course, the actual process is more complex, with the typical value of PageRank dampening being 0.15.

    The entire Web can be treated like a graph, where all the pages and index-able files are regarded as ‘vertices’ and the links as ‘edges.’
    The vertices are usually initialised with starting values that, interestingly, make no major influence on the end-result. Pregel runs
    through a series of super-steps after initialisation by updating values and sending messages to other vertices.

    Related Frameworks and Methodologies

    According to Bill Slawski of SEO by the Sea, there’s more behind Pregel and Google, which uses other techniques like FlumeJava and Dremel. The company uses Pregel because it is ‘expressive’ and easy to program.
    Software engineers have designed their own frameworks and toolkits, especially when dealing with multi-step graph operations.

    Characteristics and Benefits of Dremel

    Nested data

    Interactive speed

    Trillion-record, multi-terabyte datasets

    Columnar processing and storage

    Aggregation tree architecture

    Spam analysis

    Analysing crawled Web documents

    In situ data access

    Crash reporting for Google Products

    OCR results from Google Books

    Tracking the install of Android Market apps

    Resource monitoring for work run in Google’s data centres

    Debugging map tiles on Google Maps

    FlumeJava

    Google users started using FlumeJava in May 2009. It is simpler than MapReduce and can control executor and optimizer if necessary. Hundreds of people use pipelines with processing capacities ranging from gigabytes to petabytes every month.
    Google employs interchangeable tools and systems that multiple groups can use.

     

    References:

    http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.2261
    http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1201/1201.2261.pdf
    http://arxiv.org/a/petrovic_d_1

  • WWW12 Conference: Transformation of the Social Web

    WWW12 Conference: Transformation of the Social Web

    This year the World Wide Web conference (or WWW12) is taking place in Europe (Lyon, France) . It was first conceived as an idea in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva while the first conference of the series was held in 1994. Ever since  then World Wide Webn has became an annual event changing location between North America, Europe, and Asia. The official keynote speakers are announced,  and we can expect interesting forum for researchers and practitioners in Web technologies to discuss and exchange positions on current and emergent Web topics.

    The WWW Conference series aims to provide the world a premier forum for discussion and debate about the evolution of the Web, the standardisation of its associated technologies, and the impact of those technologies on society and culture. The conferences bring together researchers, developers, users and commercial ventures – indeed all who are passionate about the Web and what it has to offer;  it is stated as the primary mission of the conference. The series provides an open forum in which all opinions can be presented, subject to a strict process of peer review.

    What is interesting for WWW12 is that this year the specific focus is the most important topics on a global concern in information-communication and web technologies in our society.  The focus is on the social evolution on how web changes our world (World Digital Solidarity), how to reduce digital divide and social inequalities using the web (remember previous discussions of mine on digital divides and what I said). Another is Web Accessibility initiative that aims on “web for all