‘Playful Identities’ research blog

Thursday, June 29 Esther Polak in cooperation with Virtueel platform has organized the workshop Mobile Habits about mapping and mobility in the Balie in Amsterdam. Since I work together with Esther and Ab in the Fulani project, I attended.
About 25 artists, designers and scientists showed up, which turned out to be a very inspiring mix of people. Overall the most surprising and stimulating of the whole day in my opinion was that all more or less spoke the same language.

Apart from a couple of interesting talks by Esther Polak and Christian Nold, Hanne Kirstine Adriansen and Ab Drent, there were also session were the audience had to ‘work’.

Read Auke on Informationlab.org

Click the link below to read some notes I scribbled down during the day. The sign > means a personal thought that occurred to me while listening.

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This Friday, Mylene and I did a bit of a crazy thing and drove over 200 kilometers east to Essen and back again at the same evening to see the Visual Power Show. It was held in a former industrial complex called Zollverein, in the cole-washer to be exactly. They are transforming many old factories in the Ruhr-area into ‘creative zones’ now as a way to preserve them. It was tamed wildness: you couldn’t wander around and explore the building or the terrain. Finding the venue turned out to be a real pain: first we drove the wrong way to Essen, then we arrived on the terrain but had to find out where it was, together with some indignified Germans.
Although the show sometimes leaned toward platitudes about modern day consumerism, I thought it was really fun to watch. A lot of speed, rapid changes between speakers, who held their presentations very brief (10 min max). Unfortunately we didn’t stay to see the whole show because we didn’t want to get back too late.

Friday June 17 I chaired a session which I had organized about the theme of ’social inclusion’ during the second Holland Open Software Conference. Speakers I had invited were Yuwei Lin (researcher Manchester Univ.), Soenke Zehle (teacher at Saarland Univ.), Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (UNU-Merit - Maastricht Univ.), and Arjan de Jager (IICD). Below an impression from the session:

Rishab thinks the term social inclusion does not cover the point, i.e. F/OSS main opportunity lies in the fact that it is software that can be used to learn from. Rishab stated it is not only access that matters but also skills and participation. Europe and the USA lead in F/OSS world, but there is hardly a country in the world without any F/OSS development. The main obstacle for tapping into this emerging talent and energy is that there is little interaction between developers worldwide (e.g Chinese and European) except through some middlemen. And then there is a net-flow of talented developers to the USA, since most chances are found there (hey, even Linus Torvalds works there now..)

Arjan agrees with Rishab in renouncing the term “social inclusion”. He gives an overview of some of the obstacles to F/OSS use in developing countries: lack of awareness, lack of bandwidth, need for certificates and certified personnel, little attention given to open standards, decision support models especially for developing countries are lacking. Arjan raises the question whether certifications should be leveled according to GDP, since the standard price is a huge barrier for people in poorer countries?

Yuwei confronts the audience with the male bias in F/OSS developers culture. She hardly meets women in the F/OSS world. And if so, they are confined to ‘less technical’ work of documentation. Perhaps F?OSS culture is too much of a “we against the others”, which is an attitude of exclusiveness. Yuwei passionately pleas for more women key note speakers at F/OSS conferences!

Soenke gives an overview of the institutional origins of information technology policies - or “info-development” - which is a combination of political rights issues and social/material rights issues. The latter led to “access for all” ideas. Soenke also raises the issue of corporate accountability and human rights issues in open source companies. These organizations shouldn’t forget the ideological origins of the free software movement.

Last week, Saturday June 18 I was at the “Old curtains, new screens” conference, organized by our colleagues from the NWO-TKC project. The conference was mainly about the use of internet for/by minority groups in eastern Europe. One of the more interesting talks was by Aniko Imre. She discussed ludic aspects in a Hungarian anime-film, translated as The District. Some ludic aspects that were brought forward are: the medium (an anime, which is normally connected to children’s entertainment), ludic use of techniques (weird flat bodies with natural-looking heads based on photographs of real people), playing with identities through language-use, confirmation yet also reversals of stereotypes (The Gypsies, the lower-class, the police, the Russians, women, etc.) and a kind of meta-ludic statement that playing with identity is fun!

See http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=52781&podiumid=media for the program.

Thursday, 30 March 2006, V2_ in Rotterdam hosted an evening on internet use in China.

The Great Leap has become a popular metaphor to describe China’s turbulent and fast-paced economic modernization process. Many Chinese citizens have seen their private freedoms increase significantly but official policies of ‘opening up’ have neither changed the political system nor the state control of public media. TANGENT_LEAP brings together a group of experts and activists using bottom-up media such as the web, e-mail, blogs and sms as forms of self-organization to create an emergent middle landscape, somewhere between the official media rhetoric, and the private sphere.

Speakers were Karsten Giese, Zhang Ga, Isaac Mao, Martijn de Waal, and Guobin Yang. The latter spoke to the audience via Skype, apparently a very popular way of communicating in China too. He spoke about ‘play’ on the Chinese internet and gave many examples of ludic expressions on the internet. His thesis is that politics is mingled with play in the Chinese internet, saying that “all politics and no play makes the internet a dull place”.

Guobin also published an article on this topic in a newsletter special by IIAS (International Institute for Asian Studies) on the Chinese internet (#33, dated March 2003).

It was a pretty interesting evening. Nice to hear some informed stories about the current state of the Chinese internet, instead of the regular doom stories about government blocking and censorship. Most participants were confident that the internet will develop as an area for free speech anyway, in spite of efforts by the government to hamper this.

Last thursday, December 8, the full Playful Identities Group (P.I.G.) got together at Waag Society for a meeting amongst ourselves and later with a couple of people from Waag Society. Eva Nieuwdorp, the third AIO of the group, joined us starting December 1st 2005, so all 6 of us were there: Jos de Mul, Valerie Frissen, Joost Raessens, Jeroen Timmermans, Eva Nieuwdorp and myself. We introduced ourselves to the others and talked about some practical matters.

At 14:00 Waag Society joined in, chaired by Henk van Zeijts, head of the division Creative Learning. First, we introduced the research topic, and separately introduced our individual topics. After that, Waag Society introduced a few of their projects, specifically those that have to do with identity, mobile communication and learning. Waag Society are looking for more scientific depth, and we are looking for ways to collaborate with organisations that ‘produce’ new technologies.
The most interesting project I believe was Frequency 1550 that will be transformed in the future into Frequency Nu. It’s a project that explores the way ubiquitous computing/communication can be introduced into a learning environment.

Below the preparatory notes a made for the meeting, briefly discussing narrative identity, some shortcomings, and some ways in which the central concept of ‘play’ should be introduced into a ludic theory of identity.

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Saturday, November 19, the 27th Dutch/Flemish Philosophy-day took place. The motto was “Thinking without Borders: challenges for philosophy in the 21st century” (Grenzeloos denken: uitdagingen voor de Filosofie in de 21ste eeuw). It was the first time I attended. The programme started at 10:00 in the morning, which I of course didn’t make quite on time… I’m not that much of a morning person, especially not on a weekend day :).

After seeing the last part of the plenary session I attended the breakout session “Man & culture” chaired by Jos de Mul. The papers presented by both Flemish & Dutch PhD researchers were pretty technical in my opinion. As I lack serious background in philosophical thought - and probably even more troublesome: acquaintance with the discourse by which philosophers tend to express themselves - I had a hard time understanding what was said from time to time. Nevertheless, some speakers provoked thoughts in me, so I made a few scribbly notes which I have transcribed below. Here we go:

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What: opening exhibition “Alter Ego” - photo’s of gamers and their online avatars
Who: British artist Robbie Cooper
Where: Home Gallery, Prinsengracht 548, Amsterdam
When: 9 - 24 november 2005 (Thursday - Sunday), 13:00 - 19:00
URL: www.alterego.net & www.seeingtakesasecond.com.

Wednesday evening, November 9, I was at the opening of the exhibition “Alter Ego” at Home Gallery. I was kinda late, supposed to meet my GF there at 21:30, but got stopped along the way by a police woman for cycling without light. She gave me a ticket, what a bummer… }:-(.
Anyway, the gallery is located in a nice old canal house between Leidsestraat & Spiegelstraat. About 25 large images are dangling from fish cords on the wall, each displaying a photograph of a ‘real’ person on the left hand side and a screenshot of his/her virtual personality on the right side. The split-images are accompanied by a text that tells the individual’s story: who he/she is in real life, who she/he is online in what game, and what motives he/she has for choosing this particular character.

The people portrayed are pretty diverse, considering that game culture appears to be mostly restricted to Asian and Western - American - cultures: there are pictures of physically disabled people, two black men, quite a lot of females (Asian & Western) and of course the (stereo)typical geek.

A lot of people make their online character into a ‘better self’: the men often create a sort of super-hero character and the women a strong, beautiful female warrior. Not everybody though: there is a portrait of this US redneck kinda guy who plays a beautiful heroine, and two good-looking Asian girls tell that they switched to playing ugly creatures after being harassed all the time by men in the game.

The stories can be roughly devided in stories that are about “becoming” in the sense of developing oneself: from being a bit shy at first to becoming more and more friendly and sociable, from being averagely handsome to being beautiful. Another theme is “escape”: escape from boredom (the trucker fantasising about playing a spaceship), escape from physical constraints (the handicapped people), escape from social/cultural pressure (the Chinese gay boy playing “guys he wanted to meet” & the US macho-guy playing a woman). The theme of “sameness” in the sense of “living one’s identity”, or simply “being” is apparent too: someone says he behaves the same way online as offline, and the Texan business woman tells she likes bossing around online just like in real life. Finally, attention is given to the economics of gaming culture: a few people explain that they make quite a bit of money from gaming, whether it’s by developing characters for other people, or by writing software that can upgrade players levels by playing for them at night, or a girl that has become popular through gaming and has become a professional model.

Some critical remarks: the split screen portayal of people & their online identity suggests that people have only one online identity instead of multiple. By choosing a form of presentation that juxtaposes offline and online identities, the artist stresses the devide between them in a visual way, although the artist probably intented otherwise. On the other hand, the split-screen portayal suggests that offline and online characters are equal in some way: the online character being the ‘mirrored image’ of the real life character. And finally, the artist seems to have deliberately wanted to portray a diverse group of people, while underplaying the homogeneity of game worlds, as apparent from one of the group photo of an ‘old’ game guild (I forgot the name) that is almost totally white and predominantly between 20-40.

The exposition is sponsored by EA (Electronic Arts - the largest (?) and best-known game developer in the world); Playstation2 by Sony. The gallery itself is a space owned by Dutch party/event-organiser Duncan Stutterheim from ID&T. Certainly no marginal players in the leisure economy …;-)

The BBC has an article about the project: news.bbc.co.uk.

The pictures (and even some more than exibited) + stories can be dowloaded as a PDF file from
www.seeingtakesasecond.com/images/examples_preview.pdf (9 MB).

Last thursday Willem - a friend of mine - and I attended a lecture by Lev Manovich at the V2 “Institute for the Unstable Media” in Rotterdam. Quite a number of people showed up, so finding a good place to sit turned out to be problematic. There were two nice seats in front still free, some cocktails on a table next to it, so Willem suggested we sit there ;), but we ended up behind a pillar. Following Lev wasn ‘t always easy, as he spoke a bit incoherently from time to time. Nevertheless, I found his main point interesting: that we should look at new technologies as quantitative change leading to qualitative changes, as well as his remark that all art is in fact a compression of the world.

Below the notes I made

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I am just home from a really interesting mini-seminar in Eindhoven, organised during the Dutch Design Week 2005. The meeting was about Ambient Intelligence and ways in which artist make use of these tools. The organiser René Paré had invited a couple of interesting speakers to tell about their work: Elmo Diederiks from Philips Media Interaction, Edwin van der Heide, an autonomous artist that explores the relations between architecture and sound, and Alex Vermeulen, an artist working on the faultline of technology and art.

Especially interesting was a remark made by Edwin that he tried to avoid the notion of narrativity in his work, as he feels that it constrains him too much. Instead he explores the creation of interacting and learning environments.

A little more info about the workshop at:
http://www.dse.nl/~mad/events/WAA/index.html.

Read the full notes I made of today below.
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