Euphoria &amp; Dystopia: Individual Identity in New Media

Sara Diamond

Identity—individual and collective, fragmented, conjunctural, or enduring—was articulated and theorized in almost all events of the BNMI. Identity formed a theme in its own right, with specific gatherings created to explore issues of its relation to new media. Technologies are actors; they are not neutral. Technologies are material forces that enable and facilitate the behaviour of their users. Technologies are engineered with assumptions about the identities of their users implicit in their design, as well as in the affordances of their components. These assumptions about users are active at every layer: in the content produced for or by the technology, at the interface layer and in the software that runs on machines, right through to machine code and platform engineering. Assumptions in turn act back on users to construct the ways that they perform through and with the technologies, hence shaping their identity.

Published by Banff Centre Press, Riverside Architectural Press Copyright © 2011 Banff Centre Press, Riverside Architectural Press All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions would be corrected in subsequent editions. Publication Design and Production: Philip Beesley Architect Inc. Art Director: Hayley Isaacs Copy Editor: Claire Crighton eBook Development: WildElement.ca Riverside Architectural Press, www.riversidearchitecturalpress.com Banff Centre Press, www.banffcentre.ca/press Printing and binding by Regal Printing Limited This book is set in Zurich Lt BT and Garamond Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Euphoria & Dystopia : the Banff New Media Institute dialogues / edited by Sarah Cook and Sara Diamond. Accompanied by HorizonZero DVD. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-920159-71-2 ISDN 1-894773-24-1 1. Art and technology. 2. Banff New Media Institute. I. Cook, Sarah, 1974- II. Diamond, Sara, 1954- N72.T4E97 2011 700.1’05 C2011-905947-9 Black CMYK Pantone THE BANFF NEW MEDIA INSTITUTE DIALOGUES EUPHORIA & DYSTOPIA EDITED BY SARAH COOK & SARA DIAMOND Banff Centre Press . Riverside Architectural Press Contents 5 SOCIAL & INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY IN NEW MEDIA SARA DIAMOND 502 Introduction Distributed Creativity: The Banff New Media Institute’s SANDRA BUCKLEY 529 Strategies for “Making New” J.C. HERZ 546 Big Game Hunters, 1998 LEV MANOVICH 551 Big Game Hunters, 1998 TERRY BORST 555 Big Game Hunters, 1998 SUSAN BENNETT 558 Big Game Hunters, 1998 JOSEPHINE STARRS 567 Big Game Hunters, 1998 NATHALIE MAGNAN 570 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 BERNIE ROEHL 577 Emotional Computing, 2000 RALPH GUGGENHEIM WITH KEN PERLIN, 583 Artificial Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence, 2002 ADAM FRANK & MIRIJAM ELADHARI MATT LOCKE 591 Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 LUCY KIMBELL 597 Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 TOM KEENAN 600 Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 JOANNA BERZOWSKA 603 Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 GILES LANE 607 Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 CHRISTOPHER SPENCE 610 Synch or Stream, 1999 DAVID MOSES 611 Synch or Stream, 1999 JOSEPH LEON 613 Synch or Stream, 1999 SABINE BREITSAMETER 615 Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 ZAINUB VERJEE & NARENDRA PACHKHEDE 619 Bridges II , 2002 STEPHEN MARSH 622 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 CHERYL L’HIRONDELLE 624 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 SYLVIA BORDA 625 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 NATHALIE MAGNAN 626 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 OLGA GORIUNOVA 627 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 FATOUMATA KANDÉ SENGHOR 628 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 VERA ROBERTS 629 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 MERVIN JARMAN 633 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 CAMILLE TURNER 634 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 SONIA MILLS 636 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 CARLOTA BRITO 637 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 CHERYL L’HIRONDELLE 638 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 SYLVIA BORDA 643 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 OLGA GORIUNOVA 646 Skinning Our Tools, 2003 5 Social & Individual Identity in New Media SARA DIAMOND 503 Identity—individual and collective, fragmented, conjunctural, or enduring—was articulated and theorized in almost all events of the BNMI. Identity formed a theme in its own right, with specific gatherings created to explore issues of its relation to new media. Technologies are actors; they are not neutral. Technologies are material forces that enable and facilitate the behaviour of their users. Technologies are engineered with assumptions about the identities of their users implicit in their design, as well as in the affordances of their components. These assumptions about users are active at every layer: in the content produced for or by the technology, at the interface layer and in the software that runs on machines, right through to machine code and platform engineering. Assumptions in turn act back on users to construct the ways that they perform through and with the technologies, hence shaping their identity. This may seem to be a mechanistic approach. In fact, users are also disruptive, finding applications for technologies that defy these assumptions. As well, design has embraced usability and user participation, broadening the personas represented by machine interfaces. The BNMI sought ways to excavate the identity-forming mechanisms of technologies, looking at broad social effects as well as the ways that individuals and groups used and adapted technology. Until recently, much of the philosophy and science behind human-computer inter- action (HCI), artificial intelligence, and interface design has been focused on the individual rather than the collective. Even productivity—often a goal of technology adoption—is understood as being individually enhanced by technology. Yet digital technologies—including social media, games, mobile technologies, and the net- works that connect them—have effects on group productivity as much as individual productivity. Contemporary technologies are often used in highly collaborative or social ways, forming identities well beyond the individual. This chapter considers identity in many different ways. Some excerpts consider the materiality of technology and its effects on identity. Other excerpts discuss the experience of the audience (or the user or player), considering point of view, as well as individual and collective experiences, whether in gaming, web-surfing, searching, or texting. The analysis of narrative structures in new media bears relevance here. TH E UE P HMOAT R IEAR&I A DY L KSNTO OWP IN A :ATSHD E ATA B A N F F N E W M E D I A I N S T I T U T E D I A LO G U ES Other excerpts examine identity through the lens of the social, cultural, and political 504 context in which technology and new media are deployed, considering the mediations that shape individual and collective identities. Some excerpts look at the ways in which people change the intention of technology, redirecting technologies to unexpected means. Artists do this consciously. Many of the excerpts in this chapter are drawn from events that occurred before or on the cusp of the explosion of social media, but speak to its precursors—such as chat systems, blogging, instant messaging, and Internet discussion groups—and explore efforts to build collaboration or community. Another persistent theme of BNMI dialogues was the relationship between machine and human identity. Some technologies are modelled on ideas about the structure of the human brain and of consciousness; the BNMI explored how much is given over to the machine. This topic is relevant not only to this chapter, but others in this book such as Chapter 3 (“Becoming Machine/Staying Human”). The delineation or erasure of cultural difference in relation to the rise of Internet and new media was a significant concern of the BNMI. These conversations were shaped by identity politics and the translation of these—or the failure to translate these—into new-media practices. These ideas were placed against arguments that posed the Internet as a space free of real-world identities and conflicts, or at least a space offering a mediated opportunity to step away from the constraints of physical conflicts, boundaries, and roles. Other events asked whether tools, new-media artworks, designs, or games could embody the lived experience of differentiated individuals and groups, making these meaningful to global communities and even offering means of expression that would promote equity. The BNMI activities directly addressed the possibilities of exclusion, providing an intervention against a looming digital divide. They addressed Aboriginal cultural inclusion, gender inequity, globalization, and cultural difference with structured programs and consistent attention to the invitation list. In reviewing BNMI summits and workshops, there were many that were devoted to other themes but included panels, prototypes, or keynotes that addressed the concerns of individual and social identity discussed above. These include The Documentary Deluge: What’s Fuelling the Documentary Revival? (1996), which tracked the transfor- mation of auteur cinema in the digital age; Bell Canada and MediaLinx Present Big Game Hunters (1998), with its discussions of point of view and gaming experience; and Navigating Intelligence: A Banff Summit (1999) and Artificial Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence (2002), summits that included considerable explorations about the ways that artificial intelligence (AI) had imagined and modelled human identity in order SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK 505 Camille Turner performs as Miss Canadiana, escorted by Skawennati Tricia Fragnito. Skinning Our Tools: Designing for Context and Culture, 2003. Courtesy of the BNMI. to translate it to machine culture. Synch or Stream: A Banff Summit—A think-tank on networked audio and visual media (1999) proposed streaming media as a means to build alternative cultures online and included a significant focus on Aboriginal radio. The millennium years saw artists and scientists expressing concerns about the ways that technologies shaped identities, with events such as Emotional Architectures/Cognitive Armatures: Cognitive Science in Interaction Design (2001), which delved into the con- structs of cognitive science as well as ubiquitous and immersive experience. Smart, Sexy, Healthy (2001) imagined the ways in which disability could be redefined, enabling inclu- sion through new media. Unforgiving Memory (2001) explored the differences between human and technological memory, as well as the tension between digital replication and the unique object. Human Voice/Computer Vox (2001) celebrated the voice as the first human technology, and in part explored the ways that various applications of voice have shaped and expressed identity. Psychoanalyst Jeanne Randolph1 offered a scathing critique of online identities and drew attention to a perceived loss of agency that 1 Jeanne Randolph, MD, FRCP(C). For more than 25 years, Randolph—psychoanalyst, theorist, critic, art writer, and performer—has published consistently and lectured widely in universities and galleries across the country and abroad. Her lectures have evolved into performative events that are better understood as a form of research interpreting art and culture. She was peer advisor for the Big Rock Candy Mountain Residency in Visual Art. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA resulted from the mass adoption of new media and virtualization, at The Beauty of 506 Collaboration: Methods, Manners and Aesthetics (2003). Some events—such as Telus Presents Avatar! Avatar! Wherefore Art Thou? Art, Software Design and the Science of Identity (1998) and Emotional Computing: Performing Arts, Fiction and Interactive Experience (2000)—had an almost exclusive focus on identity in new-media culture and on the relationships of individual and collective identities and machines. The first Bridges Consortium for Art + Technology (2001), a co-production between the Banff New Media Institute and the University of Southern California (USC) that took place in Los Angeles, looked at the conver- gence between the previously distinct identities of “new-media artist,” “designer,” “engineer,” and “scientist.” Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones (2002) revealed the dramatic impact of mobile computing in redrawing boundaries of private and public space, and that of wearable technologies in redefining the boundaries of the body.2 Workshops and summits that looked at inclusions, exclusions, and cultural and gender differences were Bridges II: A Conference about Cross-Disciplinary Research and Collaboration (a partnership between The Banff Centre and the USC Annenberg Center for Communication) (2002) and Skinning Our Tools: Designing for Context and Culture (2003). Both are described in the introduction to Chapter 7 (“Production & Distribution in Models of Collaborative Practice”). I N C LU S I V E D ES I G N — A B I L I T Y, D I S A B I L I T Y, A N D H E A L I N G The BNMI held an ongoing interest in the rights of the disabled, assistive and inclusive technologies, and the opportunities and threats that technology innova- tion might hold. New technologies promised to offer support to those previously constrained due to physical disability, whether through assistive devices, personal- ized interfaces, or biotechnology. Genetic engineering suggested that disability could be engineered away—and not always in the interests of diversity.3 Online 2 Later summits Bodies in Play: Shaping and Mapping Mobile Applications (2005) and Bodies in Motion: Memory, Personalization, Mobility and Design (2005) added the analysis of new technological capabilities such as location- and context-tracking and high-grained personalization, as well as establishing the impact of these on boundaries of social and individual spaces and identities. 3 This was evidenced in events such as Growing Things: The Culture of Nano Tech, Bio Tech and Eco Tech Meat Art (2000) where the ethics of whose genetics are designed for and by whom was debated, and Smart, Sexy, Healthy (2001), a forum attended by the able-bodied and the disabled, described in the program agenda as “dedicated to capabilities of networked and immersive technologies to educate, heal, and redefine sensory perception and experience.” SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK 507 Participants guide one another through a blindfolded multisensory exploration of the wilderness. Skinning Our Tools: Designing for Context and Culture, 2003. Courtesy of the BNMI. worlds offered the cloak of anonymity and invisibility, allowing the obscuring of differences. Events such as Growing Things: The Culture of Nano Tech, Bio Tech and Eco Tech Meat Art (2000) and Interactive Screen offered reflections on inclusive design and raised significant ethical questions. Smart, Sexy, Healthy (2001) was an intimate summit with 26 participants. It derived from conversations with disability ethicist Gregor Wolbring, who had proposed a symposium excavating the notion of empathy. Disability posed social challenges, demanding tolerance and inclusion, not pity. Smart, Sexy, Healthy showcased compelling research using virtual reality and interactive systems. The event was premised on user-centric design and domain expertise. A number of participants used wheelchairs or were sight-impaired. Disabled participants wore multiple hats; they were present as representatives of disabled organizations, as artists (Laura Hershey 4 and Rita Addison 5), as leaders of technology companies 4 See www.laurahershey.com. 5 Virtual-Reality Designer and President and Founder of Rita Addison Associates Inc. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA (Vincent Dureau 6), and as researchers (Anita Silvers 7; Dominic McIver Lopes 8). 508 The summit acted as a de facto test of The Banff Centre’s ability to support inclusive events, residencies, and participants, and existing provisions—in par- ticular, mobility features around the campus—were found to be lacking. At the end of the summit, the BNMI and event participants held a debriefing meeting with Campus Services at Banff in order to assess what the challenges were for disabled participants and to offer solutions relevant to campus design.9 “Smart technologies” could adapt to the individual user and his or her needs. The summit proposed the requirement of building a personally adaptive “useful generative graphic-user-interface (GUI), which could be added onto, in succes- sive generations or builds but providing a solid template or model for this type of interaction.” 10 The term “sexy” addressed not only the “healthy, fit, and lean” economy of desire within contemporary society, but also the need to recognize the sexuality of all bodies. The summit looked at the potentials of new “empathetic” technologies or experiences created by scientists and artists, which might provide the means to experience embodiment—whether disabled or able-bodied—through the development of simulations, interactive experiences, or virtual environments. Technology might allow the able-bodied to explore the experience of disabil- ity in order to foster deeper understanding. A debate erupted on the values underlying the concept of “empathy.” Speakers with disabilities testified that although they might lack access to all senses, they mobilized another range and depth of senses that had become augmented and enhanced in their own right. This experience offered an opportunity to translate the qualities of one sensory experience to another (for example, visual to auditory). Dominic McIver Lopes provided an example in his discussion of the ways that painting—which is traditionally thought of as a visual medium—presented an exciting challenge. Perspective could be translated into a more schematic language, which could be repurposed in the creative endeavours of the blind. This could be understood 6 Chief Technology Officer, OpenTV 7 Professor of Philosophy, San Francisco State University 8 Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of British Columbia 9 Vincent Dureau proposed a holistic approach to the refashioning of the campus, focusing not just on one building at a time—wisdom that has hopefully proved valuable to new builds at The Banff Centre. 10 Mathew Kabatoff, “Smart, Sexy, Healthy Conference Proceedings” (report, Banff New Media Institute, Banff Centre for the Arts, 2001). SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK as empathetic in a physiological sense. The question of what constitutes human ability was further re-examined when panellists were reminded that the entire 509 population would be less able with aging. Activists opined that the health care system could be a dangerous place for disa- bled people, as their bodies are placed in vulnerable positions, given that medical treatment can exacerbate issues as much as cure them. Discussion emphasized the need for an ethics of evaluating impacts in the face of increasingly invasive medical engineering. The summit examined the possibility of developing new strategies for healing that could make effective use of the Internet, providing communica- tion and support even at a distance and moving toward a zone of interdepend- ence as opposed to seeking a specific cure. Speakers noted that the lineage of both psychoanalysis and Aboriginal shamanism support “talking cures”—beginning healing through communication.11 Laura Hershey later gave a keynote speech (excerpted on page 382) that asked, “What Can Technology Design Bring to People with Disabilities?” 12 Skinning Our Tools continued discussions about the ways that inclusive design could enable full participation in society. The Canadian Network for Inclusive Cultural Exchange (CNICE) team13 and the Assistive Technologies Research Centre (ATRC) group 14 led the BNMI’s blindfolded exploration of the outdoor environ- ment, where participants were guided by other workshop participants. The team 11 Ibid. These topics arose several times on the “Imagining the User Experience: Intimate Technologies/Cultural Concepts” and “Healing Sciences: Psychology, Physiology and Technologies” panels. 12 For Hershey, the answer to this question must flow from conversations and dialogues formed between engineers and the disabled. She focused on affordability and scalability, and proposed six challenges and six solutions: 1) Adaptation—Considering different ways of doing things than is common practice; 2) Difference—Creating a world receptive to those who must live differently; 3) Perspective—Looking at larger frameworks of humanity and empathy; 4) Oppression— Fighting for tolerance; 5) Community—Developing spaces and places where people can connect and share; and 6) Pride—For disabled people to feel a sense of immense self-worth. 13 The BNMI and the Assistive Technology Research Centre of the University of Toronto were successful in securing funding from the Department of Canadian Heritage in order to undertake research into the aesthetics of inclusive design and created CNICE, a Canadian Heritage–funded, New Media Research Network–funded project. The BNMI was a partner. The team was composed of Jan Richards (User-Interface Design Specialist), Vera Roberts (Researcher of Adaptive Technology), Wendy Porch (Project Coordinator), Charles Silverman (Project Coordinator, ITM/Centre for Learning Technologies, Ryerson University), me, and Michael Boyce (BNMI Research Fellow). 14 ATRC was dedicated to developing ubiquitous access to the online world for disabled individuals and groups of disabled individuals, such as the hearing- and sight-impaired. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA used this experience to provoke awareness of perception mediated by limited sen- 510 sory access—suggesting the possibilities of using synaesthesia as a design method.15 G E N D E R, M E D I A , A N D N E W M E D I A Gender representation was a preoccupation of the BNMI, and organizers sought out women who were leaders in science; computer science; new-media technology develop- ment; computer-games development; the digital, communications, and broadcasting industries; and new-media art and design. Although the technology sector was pre- dominantly male-dominated, there were significant women inventors during the early period of new media. This remained true during the period covered in this book—if anything, there was a growth in the number of women entering digital industries. The same cannot be said of the post-millennium era. Although women are present in social-media companies and remain a force in the broadcast industries, they are few and far between in telecommunications, and virtually invisible in current generation of information and communication technology (ICT) and digital-media start-ups. The BNMI undertook interventions meant to build the number of women in creative and leadership positions in commercial media. Women in the Director’s Chair began in 1995 as a direct response to the lack of women behind the camera in Canada.16 As artistic director of Media & Visual Arts, I linked up with Carol Whiteman of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), as we were both were compelled to take action. The workshop continues to this day, taking a dynamic approach to traditional fictional storytelling for film and television by combining classroom theory with opportunities for practical, hands-on experiences.17 The format involved a leading female director from Canada or abroad providing role modelling, creative leadership, and mentorship. The list of directors includes Norma Bailey, Patricia Rozema, Nanci Rosov, Lynn Hamrick, Nancy Malone, Stacey Stewart Curtis, and Anne Wheeler. Over time, the workshop 15 The same team led a participatory design workshop later on in the summit that developed methods for commercial producers to build inclusive technologies. On a later panel, Gregor Wolbring discussed “Participatory Design with Disability Communities,” arguing for the importance of inclusivity in conceiving of technologies. 16 The impressive list of graduates can be found in the program descriptions at the back of the book. 17 The workshop description offers the following: “Working with senior mentors, peers, and professional actors from the Association of Canadian Television and Radio Actors (ACTRA) and crews from the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC) and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) the mid-career participant develops her personal style of storytelling for screen along with important leadership skills and techniques.” SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK grew to an almost million-dollar budget, with support from all of the Canadian production unions as well as from the federal government, the provinces, the 511 National Film Board, and the broadcast industry. The CWC/Corus New Media Career Accelerator ran four times (2002, 2004, 2006, 2008), supported by social-benefit funds from Corus Entertainment. It was an inten- sive six-day executive-training program available to members of Canadian Women in Communications (CWC). The program was aimed at women in management positions who were facing the first phase of convergence—that is, the coming together of tradi- tional media, interactive media, and online delivery, which would enable them to excel in their careers. Women participants came from throughout the Canadian commercial- media landscape.18 The program was constructed to be challenging but enjoyable, taking the participants through the technology, terminology, and possibilities of new media. The participants were given hands-on experiences in building basic digital web-based applications in order to quickly overcome fear of new media.19 Examples from the program provide a sense of its depth. The sessions opened each year with an address by Corus Entertainment (David Kincaid and Deborah Beatty) on the state of convergent media, moving between case studies. Following this was an overview of user-driven design (with Roma Khanna of Snap, and others); an analysis of the female audience, games, and convergence (from Laura Groppe); a discussion of team management, the new-media budget, legal issues, and rights (from Christine Hirschfield); a talk on high-tech convergence and leadership (from Ellie Rubin); and an exploration of branding strategies. Both years included presentations and key- note speeches from women in the science world. Canada Research Chair Sheelagh Carpendale inspired great excitement when she spoke of her journey from the arts into computer science, in a talk entitled “Close to the Machine—Women Inventing Technologies.” In the first year, Dr. Elizabeth Cannon addressed “Women and the Future of Science” and Dr. Kathleen Sherf spoke about “Women and the Future of Communications.” 20 Case studies included an analysis of Mobile Bristol by Jo Reid, a 18 Firms include CTV, Canadian Cable Television Association, Alliance Atlantis, Cité-Amérique, the Toronto Star, Rogers Media, Transcontinental Media, Corus Entertainment, the telecommunications industry (Aliant, Lucent Technologies, and Bell Canada), and the federal government (HRDC). 19 Trainer Elizabeth Vander Zaag led the first-year workshop on basic web design and the use of the web for research, as well as the second-year workshop on blogging and Photoshop (to create self-portraits). 20 Both were faculty at University of Calgary. Dr. Sherf was the dean of the Faculty of Communications. Elizabeth Cannon is now the president of the University of Calgary after serving as dean of Engineering. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA Hewlett-Packard senior researcher and a close collaborator of the BNMI’s, who show- 512 cased outdoor and media entertainment for children that used mobile tablet com- puting, GPS, and rich-media content to create learning and adventure experiences. Elizabeth Churchill performed foresight analysis that focused on mobile computing and social computing. 21 Evenings contained improvisation workshops, led the first year by Lizbeth Goodman (SmartLab), and the second by Colin Funk, associate program director. In addition, British new-media artists Blast Theory, who were in a co-production residency, shared their compelling interactive-art projects. Each year included cross-country ski days—the first year, the courageous group set out at minus 34 degrees Celsius—and soirées at my home and The Banff Centre. Women partici- pants have gone on to take up leadership positions throughout the emerging digital landscape, and they remain a closely allied support group. A B O R I G I N A L N E W M E D I A : C U LT U R A L P R ES E N C E, T R A I N I N G , A N D T H E D I G I TA L EC O N O M Y Support for Aboriginal cultural expression was a priority of the Media & Visual Arts program at The Banff Centre and the BNMI. Aboriginal artists, technicians, and researchers spoke at myriad events, such as Interactive Screen.22 There were two cycles of Drum Beats to Drum Bytes (1994, 2002), which interrogated Aboriginal presence on the Internet. The BNMI allied with Aboriginal Arts at The Banff Centre to provide unique learning experiences for Aboriginal participants through a series of workshops that were geared toward building an Aboriginal publishing and new- media industrial capacity. The Aboriginal Interactive Media: Electronic Publishing and Multimedia workshop (1997) occurred in partnership with the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance, delivering an orientation to multimedia, electronic publishing (CD-ROM), and the World Wide Web. In the 1998 workshop, 22 participants from all over Canada produced websites with support from faculty and technical staff; these were bundled into a CD-ROM.23 Sharing circles throughout the workshop set expecta- tions for the program, allowed participants to assess their progress, and provided 21 Senior Research Scientist, FX Palo Alto Laboratory 22 These speakers provided perspectives on computer games, installation works, virtual reality, narrative and storytelling, language systems and digitization, archives, and many other topics. 23 The workshop was led by Vern Hume, Melanie Printup Hope, Sheryl Kootenayoo, and Gordon Tait, with assistance from work-study student Ryan Johnston. Each day of this workshop started with an orientation and a lecture followed by discussion, a practical workshop (on Photoshop, Claris Home Page 1, etc.), and assignments. The afternoons were devoted to working on websites, with participants grouped to take advantage of their widely differentiated skill sets. The evenings included “show-and-tell” case studies, informal presentations, and fireside chats. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK evaluation at the end. Participants expressed their excitement at building a national network using digital tools that would end their sense of isolation.24 513 By 1999, the BNMI had moved into an exploration of the dynamic world of stream- ing technology and its expression, through pirate and alternate radio as well as video. Susan Kennard, Heath Bunting, and Yvanne Faught had established Radio90, a low- band FM and streamed radio environment that housed resident artists and provided a platform for music, sound art, and commentary at Banff, linking the BNMI not only to the local community but also to the world movement of alternative radio. Aboriginal radio stations around the world were adding streaming capabilities to their low-band FM, allowing them to share programs at a global level. For this reason, the next workshop, in 1999, was Aboriginal Interactive Streaming. It focused on streamed media, providing individuals involved in Aboriginal radio, video production, distribu- tion, and broadcasting with the opportunity to develop the basic skills needed to stream audio and video content onto the Internet. A second workshop, Aboriginal Streams: Aboriginal Radio on the Internet (2001), included 34 participants. The work- shop was directed at Aboriginal media makers, radio stations, publishers, and artists, and explored current and future possibilities of streamed media and the World Wide Web as a broadcast, narrowcast, and circulation environment appropriate to the needs of Aboriginal artists and their communities.25 Aboriginal Streams was attended by leaders of the Aboriginal radio community and included hands-on training in streamed media and interactive design as well as ses- sions that shared history and philosophy, such as a panel on “Culture/Community Based Programming: Content, Creation and Producing” moderated by Elaine Bomberry with presenters Keevin Lewis,26 Brian Wright,27 and Allan Brant.28 Strategy sessions on how to build and resource a robust Aboriginal radio and streamed radio community continued throughout the event, interspersed with practical workshops, project time, and a “Net Jam!” 29 Community building and cultural celebration were woven into the fabric of the event, with live performances and music by local 24 A report on the workshop is available at http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/1998/ aboriginal_media/reports/aboriginal_IM_1998_report.pdf. 25 The workshop was facilitated by Heath Bunting, Susan Kennard, and Cindy Schatkoski of Radio90, along with Melanie Printup Hope, Ryan Johnston, and Sheryl Kootenayoo. They were assisted by Shane Breaker, Darlene Miller, and Laurie Clark. 26 National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Community Services: Radio/Artists Fellowships 27 McLeod, Renegade Radio, CKLN, Toronto 28 CKWE 105.9 FM, Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte 29 This involved mixing music live and online. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 514 Participant Fatoumata Kandé Senghor of Senegal evaluated Bridges II: A Conference about Cross-Disciplinary Research and Collaboration (2002) on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation. Courtesy of The Banff Centre. Aboriginal communities, which were also streamed over the Internet, as well as a field trip to Lake Louise, a parting brunch, and discussion circles. This was the final Aboriginal-specific interactive-media training workshop that occurred during the years covered in this book, although a second digital-media strategy session, Drum Beats to Drum Bytes II, occurred in 2002, led by Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew almost 10 years after its first iteration. It evaluated what, if any, progress had been made by Aboriginal people to establish a claim on the Internet, and looked at strategies for creative expression and education. One session of the summit Synch or Stream (described in the introduction to the Chapter 7) concentrated on efforts to bring Aboriginal community radio sta- tions to the Internet, considering “Issues in Aboriginal Broadcasting: What is Aboriginal Radio, What Role Does It Play? What Are the Implications of Going Digital?” Joseph Leon demonstrated Native America Calling, a significant effort to bring American Aboriginal radio coverage online. His comments are excerpted SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK on page 613. Aboriginal radio leaders David Moses and Christopher Spence provided case studies about their FM stations and discussed the potential that they 515 saw in streaming—these observations are also excerpted. Jason Lewis and Elaine Bomberry discussed specific content initiatives. Sessions also contemplated the disruptive impacts that streaming could have on the existing media-distribution economies, and debated rights and “the future of networked media.” These issues were amplified many times over in presentations during The Banff Centre Presents @ the Banff Television Festival and Interactive Screen, and are discussed in Chapter 6 (“Money & Law”). I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A R Y A N D I N T E R C U LT U R A L I D E N T I T I ES Bridges II (described in the introduction to Chapter 7) acknowledged the growth of interest in new media in the developing and emerging worlds, bringing a truly international group of practitioners to The Banff Centre. Aboriginal and African new-media makers and researchers mingled with one other and with other artists and researchers from around the world, including the new-media “old guard” of art and technology centres. Bridges II acted as an intervention into a new-media art world that was predominantly white and centred in Europe, North America, and Brazil. For example, an early panel was entitled “Do Cultural Perspectives Shape How We Understand Collaboration? Implications for Methodology, Policy and Practice.” 30 Fatoumata Kandé Senghor, a visual artist, educator, and researcher from Senegal, discussed the ways in which gender, ethnicity, and religion combined to influence the ways that women and girls use tech- nologies in Islamic cultural contexts. Governments on the African continent have made a strong commitment to science and technology, through the financing of Western countries, NGOs, and agencies. Senghor found evidence that suggested that the position- ing of high-level female professionals in key technical posts was assisting in “engender- ing” science and technology policies and programs—opening the doors to women. Senghor argued that it was equally important to place women in the arts and in emerg- ing quasi-technical forms like new media. Senghor wrote an evaluation of Bridges II for the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the organizations that helped to fund the event.31 30 I co-moderated this panel with Andrew Chetty, then Performing Arts and New Media Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, London. 31 See http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2002/bridges/reports/bridges_2002_report_ fatoumata_kande_senghor.pdf. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA Zainub Verjee 32 and Narendra Pachkhede gave a paper that defined the bounda- 516 ries between globalization and transnationalism; it is excerpted on page 619.33 In an almost diametrically different approach, looking at the threats and opportuni- ties to the sustainability of Canadian cultural content, Janice Dickin 34 and Frits Pannekoek 35 spoke about the Internet as a “Site of Citizenship” and evaluated the presence and absence of Canadian content on the Internet. Aboriginal methods and philosophy as applied to interdisciplinary practice and the construction of knowledge formed an important part of the dialogue. Cheryl Bartlett 36 and Bernie Francis 37 presented “Remaking Science from an Aboriginal Perspective—A Collaboration.” They described the ways in which the Integrated Science Program at the University College of Cape Breton had “reworked science education from an Aboriginal perspective,” creating a curriculum that attracted and retained Aboriginal science students. The program integrated the perspectives of language, spirituality, and nature to create a framework acceptable to Francis and the Aboriginal partners. Francis described the central role that language plays in creating a worldview. He said, “Benjamin L. Wharf, an engineer turned linguist, realized how amazing the world-view was of the Hopi people. Their language was structured in such a way whereby the verb, or things in constant flux, was king. There is a conceptual difference that exists between the English language and my language, Mi’kmaw. These variances in thought processes may actually be of benefit to anyone who wishes to have a more rounded view of science.” 38 Analysis after Bridges II 39 identified seven key questions that pertained to social, collaborative, and individual identities. Firstly, participants pondered “old knowl- edge and history.” Some speakers, such as Senegalese art historian Taki E’Bwenze,40 argued that the development of new media should be seen as an instrument of pas- sage, drawing on history and tradition to enrich new media. He had discussed 32 Media Arts Officer, Canada Council 33 “Science, Art and Technology: Truth, Beauty, and Metamorphosis—Exploring the Intersections, Collaborations and Policy Frameworks—Transnationalism versus Globalization” 34 Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary 35 Director, Information Resources, University of Calgary 36 Professor, Biology, University College of Cape Breton 37 Professor, Integrated Science Program, University College of Cape Breton 38 See the Bridges II transcripts. 39 See http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2002/bridges/reports.aspx for a series of reports discussing the outcomes, including the Leonardo online article. 40 Director, Grafrica, Musee Virtuel (Dakar and Montreal) SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK the digitization of African masks “as an instrument of transformation from one state to another—state of being, of consciousness, of knowledge, of development— 517 prompting intercultural dialogues with traditional African Art.” A second issue was a need for a conjoined ethics of collaboration between science, social sciences, and art. An ethical framework would depend on a flattened hierarchy of mutual respect. Participants saw the need for policies that embodied best practices, as well as incen- tives to support collaboration both locally and on the global front. A related consid- eration was the need for inclusion in policy making. Thirdly, participants identified the challenge of ownership and appropriation between and across cultures, as well as the need to collaborate without overtaking those with scarce resources. The fourth set of issues dealt with the need to establish requisites (such as tools and networks) for interdisciplinary learning to succeed, and to effectively train a future generation of interdisciplinary researchers, even in the face of violence and war. The fifth concern was the need to place new media within an artistic continuum. Disciplinary silos were breaking down to make way for cross-disciplinary collabora- tion in science, arts, social sciences, and humanities. Some speakers described an integrated professional personality (a mix of cultural producer and inventor); others described teams that developed new identities through collaboration and hence blurred the disciplinary boundaries. A sixth issue emerged from the need to codify collaborative research practice and to describe and compare methodologies.41 The final imperative was the importance of designing culturally appropriate tool systems and forms of remuneration, which must respect the rights of Indigenous people to sustain their culture and intellectual property while also contributing to the development of scientific and technical knowledge. Delegates from Aboriginal and African cultures shared models of collaboration that integrated culture, science, and law. Respect for community, nature, and collective process were noted as key elements of grounded research. Bridges II ended with a desire to continue discus- sions along the line of the last theme at a further summit. In response, Skinning Our Tools was organized for 2003. That summit began with a snapshot roundtable that focused on the material effects of technologies on practices: “How Do Technologies Constrain What 41 For example, Dr. Robin Barger, then director of Hexagram (Canada) proposed that artists should adopt the scientific method in order to guarantee reproducibility of results through peer review, reference, and domain application. Dr. Sha Xin Wei, then at Georgia Institute of Technology, argued for the value of the social science alternative of actor-network theory, a form of cultural anthropology, which provides tools to deconstruct methods. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 518 We Can Make? Are Cultural Values Built into Tools? How Do These Manifest? What Are Some Ways of Approaching This Problem?” Keynote speaker Nathalie Magnan 42 discussed design process in a talk entitled “Imagining the User, Gender and Technology Design: Are Technologies Gendered? Do ‘Women’ Use Tools Differently than ‘Men’?” The summit imagined the ways that ceremonial and traditional practices might provide models for new-media experiences and could also introduce protocols and related tools for interface design. On the panel “Aesthetics of the Sacred,” Carlota Brito 43 and Cheryl L’Hirondelle 44 presented “Songs, Performances and Histories: Projects and Tools.” These talks are excerpted in this chapter. Other panels discussed the relationship of computer code to human language; the production of convergent media with and for specific communities, using participa- tory documentary approaches; the concept of “skinning” and whether it was a racialized practice in computer games; and “localization”—the challenges of adopted content from one context into another. ST R U CT U R ES, A EST H E T I C S, N A R R AT I V E, A N D I D E N T I T Y Early on in the history of the BNMI, I organized Big Game Hunters along with Joshua Portway of Real World, in order to spur creative content and gaming, develop a criti- cal vocabulary to evaluate the games experience, and re-evaluate the developer/publisher economy.45 Portway and I dedicated a considerable portion of the summit to understanding the ways in which people play computer games and how playing transforms their sense of individual and collective identity. Speakers drew their commentaries from their empirical observations of gamers and from their own experience, applying poststructuralism, narrative theory, and game theory to the task. Three themes within Big Game Hunters are featured in this chapter: community building, individual play experience through narrative and other devices, and gender experience. The first draws from a lively session that explored “Social Identities/Social Communities/ 42 Professor, École Nationale Superieur des Beaux-Arts de Dijon 43 The curator of the Emílio Goeldi Museum (Belém, Brazil), Brito discussed the Goeldi Museum Projects, co-creations with Aboriginal peoples in Amazônia. 44 Independent Interdisciplinary Artist (Dundurn, SK) 45 The event described itself as the mind-shaking, news-breaking event of the season—an elite professional development think tank that brought together senior games designers, artists, writers, and key leaders from television and the World Wide Web. It was built upon The Summer Summit at the Summit (1997), which was attended by many in the computer-games creative world. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK New Markets.” 46 It debated “How People Play Together, Gaming and Building Communities,” looking at the ways in which new collective identities emerge 519 within the process of game play and evaluating a number of games in relation to community building and the qualities of their communities. The session also traced the rise of online games and the disparity and incongruity between authors, users, and players. Big Game Hunters delineated the ways that AI and artificial life (AL)—with their technical restrictions and philosophical assumptions—structured communities and identities, “playing with people, playing with programs.” 47 A sec- ond session, “Lean Back versus Lean Forward Aesthetics” 48 (excerpted on page 551), was committed to understanding individual experience within gaming, including the ways in which identification with game characters emerges. The summit papers noted “the ways that gaming influences and is influenced by other media, including music, cinema, architecture, dance, literature, and board games and their histo- ries.” 49 Theorist Lev Manovich gave a paper entitled “Brecht Versus Hollywood: Cinema and Game Play,” examining the ways in which game design flips point of view and deploys alienation affects to move players through a game, which is akin to Bertolt Brecht’s use of alienation in theatre. Susan Bennett, a renowned Shakespearean scholar, discussed performance theory in gaming and other media forms and applied these concepts to game play, deriving the concept of “lamina- tion” as an embodied identification within the game, in which the player is fully immersed in his or her character. Considerations of narrative and its operations within gaming in creating point of view, identification, and collective identity came up a number of other times dur- ing the event. The panel “The Violence of Narrative,” moderated by designer Karlin Lillington, calibrated the ways in which conflict drives narrative, comparing games to story structure through the devices of story, plot, diegesis, character, conflict, space- time dimensions, suture, and suspension of disbelief. The panel heard arguments on “classic and debated narrative forms” from poststructuralist French theorist and editor Sylvère Lotringer, who proposed an inherent violence within both narrative and play. Talks discussed earlier in this chapter are excerpted below, including several that derive from Artificial Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence and feature Ken Perlin, Adam 46 Saul Kato and I moderated this session. 47 Speakers included J.C. Herz and Kian Wilcox, who discussed the multiplayer text-based online game Gemstone III (one of the world’s longest online games, started in 1988), and Allucquere Rosanne Stone, who discussed virtual communities and play. 48 Carl Goodman, director of the Museum of the Moving Image, was my co-moderator. 49 This statement is found in the agenda for the summit. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA Frank, Mirijam Eladhari, and Ralph Guggenheim debating whether it is possible to 520 design human-like emotion into AI–driven bots and artificial characters. A follow-up session focused on the use of point of view in gaming, drawing examples from third-person God games, first-person shooters, and second-person narrative, which implicates the player. Finally, a panel entitled “Bag the Big Bad Girl Gamers, or A Girl’s Gotta Do It” critiqued the position of women as gaming- industry workers, reflecting on how women are represented as players or as charac- ters within computer games. It asked whether women play differently than men. In an early analysis about women as gamers, Katie Salen spoke about “How Women Play Games, Quaking Sex: Overcoming Images to Feed Those Desires, or Love Them DDD Cups,” an ironic play on stereotyping in games that also recognized the growing number of women gamers and their play strategies. The panel featured alternate game works by women designers and artists such as Natalie Bookchin and Josephine Starrs (the latter is featured in this chapter). Six years later, Simulation and Other Re-enactments: Modeling the Unseen (2004) came back to the theme of simulated characters and their believability. The sum- mit grappled with the aesthetics of simulations and visualizations, seeking to understand audience and user experience. A panel asked, “Is Realism and Reality the Goal of All Simulations? How Does the Suspension of Disbelief Operate in a Simulation? How Do Agency, Character, and Fantasy Operate in Games and Animation?” In an answer to these questions, Robert F. Nideffer 50 discussed the technical biases in games technology (his comments are excerpted in chapter 2). Ken Perlin,51 a frequent participant at the BNMI, discussed graphics intelligence and artificial characters, indicating the ways that accurate human gestures in thinly represented graphic figures read as realism. Warren Sack 52 presented a cogent paper, “Plato Versus the Sophists: Is Mimesis a Good Thing?,” which discussed the history of AI and its representation within the aesthetics of information visualization and its insistence on teleological approaches and realism. Speakers at Emotional Computing explored artificial intelligence—this time in the context of building and driving characters and structuring narratives—thus consider- ing the relationship between human identity and artificially constructed identities, 50 Professor, Studio Art & Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine 51 Professor, Department of Computer Science, NYU Media Research Lab, New York University 52 Software Designer and Media Theorist, Film & Digital Media Department, University of California, Santa Cruz SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK such as bots. A panel about building identity within networked experiences and tools asked the question “How Does Networking Affect the Individual and the Group 521 Experience Of Performance? How Do Experiences and Concepts Of ‘Identity’ And ‘Community’ Necessarily Shift in Such Environments?” Joshua Portway of Real World and www.stain.org discussed sociality within the emerging world of networked games. Joseph Leon 53 gave a powerful presentation entitled “The Truth Can Tell,” discussing the rise of online documentary practices, participatory journalism, and the ability of these practices to create emotional states and mobilize collective identity. He provided a case study of the Chiapas uprising and the implementation of streamed-radio, which assisted with organizing and solidarity building. Bruce Pennycook 54 shared his research on “music, interactivity and emotion, and the ability of collaborative music- making to create both feelings and new forms of collectivities.” 55 Shelley Ouellette, a Big City residency artist, discussed the challenges of translating artists’ works online. French designer Thomas Cheysson presented his interactive 3D story environment, ISOBEL, as a case study, asking, “What are the most powerful emotions that you have felt while playing computer-based entertainment or learning?” 56 His session explored the potential for games to elicit powerful emotions—a recurring theme in the emerging games industry. Two emerging areas of interest presented by Celia Pearce were augmented-reality gaming and extended-reality gaming, in which the physical world is incorporated into online, television-series, or platform game play that occurs through the use of actual locations. Online tools provide instructions or plot elements that engage the player between both worlds. Clues are embedded in locations and players receive instructions online but must interact in the real world. These practices have grown with smart-phone technology and augmented-reality tools, but were first invented in the ’90s. The summit evaluated these new gaming practices in terms of audience engagement, point of view and player identity. Elizabeth Vander Zaag discussed her software SAY (Speak And Yell), voice analysis tools that map the emotions of speakers and allow speakers to control their voices.57 Talk Nice, a co-production with The Banff Centre, is a video installation in which 53 Director, Native America Calling 54 Vice-President of Research, McGill University 55 He spoke on these matters during his talk entitled “Music, Interactivity and Emotion, Distance and Feeling, Networking Music” at the summit. Audio documentation available at http://www. banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2000/emotional_computing/listen.aspx. 56 This quote derives from his presentation during the summit. Audio files available at http://www. banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2000/emotional_computing/listen.aspx. 57 Vander Zaag originally created the software to teach herself to stop yelling at her teenage daughter. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA audiences try to control the narrative emerging between two female teenaged speakers 522 through modulating their voice tone by using “uppisms.” 58 Vander Zaag argued that “bringing affect into the arena of interactivity creates new roles for the user by asking, ‘How do we map inflective content to narrative dynamics?’” Tom Calvert 59 shared his many years of building digital dance choreographic tools, looking at animation as a means to express “authentic movement” and build viewers’ identification with the dancers’ bodies. Janice Ross of Stanford University 60 added another level to this dis- cussion by discussing audience reaction to movement and providing models of digital tools that could be applied to calibrate audience reactions.61 Telus Presents Avatar! Avatar! Wherefore Art Thou? The Art, Software and Science of Identity investigated the rise and apparent decline of online virtual worlds, in order to understand their future potential.62 The topic was particularly relevant because the BNMI was experimenting with virtual reality modelling language (VRML) and other 3D web-design software. A central focus of the summit was to question “the ways that we design our identities on the Web and the Internet, and the emerging complexity of virtual worlds and spaces.” 63 The workshop catalogued virtual-world models by Digital Village, Canal Plus, Worlds Away, and Fujitsu, as well as avatars and artist spaces from Brazil, Canada, India, Mexico, the United States, Asia, and Europe. It compared graphical worlds without story—in which users hung out, chatted, and cruised—with story-driven worlds, including early text based multi-user dungeons (MUDs); MUDs, object oriented (MOOs); and online games. Some speakers suggested that the aesthetics of virtual worlds were defined by a particular era and subculture, and were not open enough to new forms of expression. Others felt that the lack of take-up was not due to constraints on user creativity, but due to the fact that design tools were not easy enough to use; there was an unclear business model and not enough bandwidth to build rich experiences. In order to create an engaging world of fantasy, the summit asked, “Do virtual worlds need a story teller?” The event included contributions from Canadian 58 Uppism refers to a way of speaking in which one ends sentences in a question-like manner, with a note that is at a higher point in the scale. It is common among North American teenaged girls. 59 Vice-President, Research and External Affairs, Technical University of British Columbia 60 Professor, Drama Department, and Director, Dance Division, Stanford University 61 Denis Gadbois and Sheelagh Carpendale, both of the University of Calgary, demonstrated 3D design tools. 62 This summit was also a result of The Summer Summit at the Summit. Out of the Box explored immersive physical environments and Avatar! Avatar! explored their online correlatives. 63 See summit agenda, available at http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2000/ emotional_computing/agenda.pdf. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK television personality Ann Medina—who spoke about the structure of classical narrative and its relationship to the virtual—and Rebecca Allen,64 who had created 523 The Bush Soul, a game-like 3D virtual world that explored an animated savannah. Technology writer Sue Wilcox facilitated discussions about online world applica- tions such as education and medicine.65 Mark Rudolph and Yannis Paniaris, both VRML experts, provoked a debate about realism, as participants argued about whether functional virtual worlds (such as school applications) needed to emulate the real world—when they could instead develop their own configurations and aesthetics and be tailored to communities within an institution. An important part of the summit was a debate about whether real-world cultural identities carried forward into virtual worlds. Moderated by Ann Medina, it featured Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, Jane Prophet, Mark Pesce, and Josephine Starrs. Pesce had argued for a separation of the virtual and the real, while other panellists pro- posed that people carried their assumptions about identity into virtual space. Amy Jo Kim presented a compelling ethnographic study of the ways in which role-playing and exchange systems created “social scaffolding” in Ultima Online, and traced the ways in which gamers in the virtual world had compelled changes in the world’s economy and norms. Much discussion revolved around the aesthetics of avatars, their relationship to their modellers and users, and the role of avatars in online eroti- cism and online comedy. A session entitled “Leaving Your Body Behind” unleashed artists’ imaginaries on topics such as merging with artificial life forms (Jane Prophet), hacking (Heath Bunting), and the extropian ultimate fantasy of living eternally online (Bruce Damer). The problems of online identity—including access to build- ing an avatar and political and economic liabilities—were also discussed.66 Human Voice/Computer Vox was a millennial summit that had a fundamental interest in individual and social identity. It saw the voice as the first cultural technology that humans had created. The program stated: “The creative use of computers has its deepest original soundings in vocal computation, in the works of composers, radio hackers and computer programmers. In the Human Voice/Computer Vox summit, we investigated and celebrated the concept of voice as moderated, mediated and 64 Professor and Founding Chair, University of California, Los Angeles Design/Media School 65 These discussions included Bruce Damer and Scott Gardiner. 66 Other participants at the summit included artist Mervin Jarman; designer/animator Marina Zurkow; activist Camila Vitale; artists Andy Best, Merja Puustinen, and Vernon Reed, creators of the 3D world Conversations with Angels; artists Rachel Baker and Simon Pope; Dating Game designer Ron Deutsch; games designer Eric Zimmerman; programmers William Leler and Cynbe Ru Taren; and choreographer Thecla Schiphorst. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA expressed through technology.” 67 Human Voice/Computer Vox is discussed in Chapter 3 524 (“Becoming Machine/Staying Human”), with several excerpts from the event. A number of speakers reviewed the important role that radio played in building individual identities and cultures, including the early use of radio as a medium for artistic expression. Heidi Grundmann presented a paper entitled “Radio Art, Human Voice, Asserting Space, Identity and History—Recycling Back to Origins in The 1970s.” A panel moderated by Susan Kennard was entitled “Radio, Power, Imagination” and included Sabine Breitsameter speaking on “The Birth of Radio Art from the Spirit of the Networks” (excerpted on page 615); Raitis Smits and Martins Ratniks from Electronic Arts and Media Centre (E-LAB) and Centre for New Media Culture in Riga (RIXC), new-media art centres in Latvia; and Hildegard Westerkamp of Simon Fraser University discussing the responsive qualities of radio in her paper “Voice that Listens.” The emotional qualities of the voice and the new technologies meant to sustain and even amplify its affect were explored during the panel “Technologies of the Voice: Recognition, Memory, Emotion,” in which scien- tist Sharon Oviatt discussed voice-recognition technologies.68 I N T I M ACY, S O C I A L I T Y, A N D S U R V E I L L A N C E Intimate Technologies, Dangerous Zones focused on the growing invisibility and ubiq- uity of technology in daily life, as well as the aesthetic and ethical implications of this condition. Poised at the beginning of the pervasive presence of mobile phones, the summit premise stated that “The immaterial aura of signal and bandwidth influences the very fabric of our beings, moving us into a realm of constant connectivity—a dangerous, seductive zone where the frontier between liberty and control, mobility and invasiveness, utility and dysfunction, comfort and menace is blurred and leaking.” 69 67 See program description for summit at http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2001/ human_voice_computer_vox/. 68 Elizabeth Vander Zaag again presented Talk Nice, Ken Gregory showed his audio installations Acceleration + Position = Dream and Divination by Oscillation, and Andy Schloss (School of Music, University of Victoria) discussed efforts to infuse voice technologies with emotion and hence identity. 69 See program description athttp://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2002/intimate_ technologies/. The panel “Story Telling Traditions and the Power of Voice and Presence: Aboriginal Story Telling” explored the history of the voice in Aboriginal culture and storytelling. Led by the expert storyteller Louise Profeit-LeBlanc, it became a mesmerizing session of spellbinding stories about the nature of time; the session is excerpted on page 420 in Chapter 3 (“Becoming Machine/ Staying Human”). Performance artist Archer Pechawis screened Memory, a performance that explored Aboriginal story traditions as mnemonic devices that interplayed with computer memory, mixing drumming with neo-traditional music. SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK To address this challenge, the summit examined emerging technology platforms; the architecture of privacy and security systems; wearable, mobile, and ubiquitous designs; 525 and artworks. A significant element of the summit considered the ways that individual and social identities—including definitions of public and private space—were shifting through the impact of mobile and ubiquitous technologies and early social media.70 As these discussions also apply to concerns regarding immersion and ubiquity, the summit is also discussed in Chapter 2 (“Physics, Perception, Immersion”). Intimate Technologies, Dangerous Zones asked, “How intimate do we want our technologies to be?” and incorporated questions such as “what is intimacy? Do we want it? What do we give up for it? Is intimacy the same as 24/7?” 71 The presenta- tions included case studies, commercial analyses, and theoretical frameworks pro- vided by Tom Keenan,72 Lucy Kimbell,73 and Matt Locke, which are excerpted in this chapter.74 A panel on “Very Personal Technologies: Personalization-Defining the Individual in the User Community” prefigured the current trend toward per- sonalized technologies, signalling the benefits of customization but also pointing to insidious associated technologies, such as packet sniffing and data gathering. This panel brought up the questions “What are the social implications of design- ing for the individual consumer? Is this a desirable state when it requires provid- ing key personal information to consumer outlets?” 75 Speakers included Tom Donaldson,76 who had developed a precise personalization technology for mobile use.77 These presenters approached the issue of intimacy and the embedded assumptions that go into designing products and services from distinct perspec- tives. They provided examples of the varied use of mobile technologies and 70 I shared the moderation of panels and presentations with Matt Locke (then Creative Director, BBC Imagineering), Sha Xin Wei (then Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology), and Nina Wakeford (then Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey). Jean-Claude Guédon (Professor, Département de littérature comparée, Université de Montréal) acted as reporter and intervener. 71 See program description http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2002/ intimate_technologies/. 72 Dean, Continuing Education, University of Calgary 73 An artist and management consultant, Kimbell presented her project The Intimacy of Data. 74 Christiane Robbins (Associate Professor and Director, Matrix Program for Digital Media, University of Southern California) also spoke on this panel. 75 These questions served as the title of the panel. 76 Chief Technology Officer, Escape Velocity Software (uk). 77 Other speakers were Simon Pope (Artist and Lecturer, Business School, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff), Stephan Meyers (Senior Research Scientist, Nokia), and Perry Hoberman (Artist). T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA shared projects of their own. Nina Wakeford 78 and Jenny Terry 79 presented their 526 research on the gender-based use of mobile phones.80 Two experts in the use of computer communications systems for training, Peter Hope 81 and Jill Attewell,82 shared their perspectives and projects. They discussed computer delivery of just- in-time learning (wherein individuals can access information they need to solve an immediate problem through their device and the Internet), asking, “Where can knowledge be embedded and retrieved? What are the security concerns about wireless delivery of knowledge?” 83 The technologies and practices of surveillance were the subject of the panel “24/7—Data Bodies/Actual Bodies, New Boundaries, Changing Identities, Old Concerns,” which responded to the statement “Artists and theorists have long raised concerns about surveillance, the overwhelming presence of information and media. Our identities are lived, but also represented.” 84 The panel addressed the gaps, alignments, and tensions involved in representing data and lived experi- ence in the world: “It may well be time to rethink our notions of privacy in any case. What is the role of design, engineering and art in defining and opening boundaries? How do we reconcile the violent use of technologies with the need for security and domestic stability?” 85 The panel offered criticism and artistic interven- tions and provocations that used or critiqued ubiquitous technologies. Konrad Becker 86 argued passionately for a tactical media counter-surveillance practice. Lucas Bambozzi, a Brazilian artist, described his meta4wall projects, which opened up parts of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to public art and scrutiny. Giles Lane 87 (whose talk is excerpted in this chapter) discussed the use of locative sensor sys- tems to build neighbourhood histories.88 78 Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey 79 Theorist and Professor, University of California, Berkeley 80 Marilyn Burgess (then Media Arts Officer, Canada Council) and Nichola Feldman-Kiss (Artists) also provided a case study. 81 Director, Training and Education Policy, Defence Learning Test Lab, Canadian Armed Forces 82 Program Manager, Learning and Skills Development Agency, UK 83 See the agenda for the event, available at http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2002/ intimate_technologies/agenda.pdf. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid. 86 Director, Institute for New Culture Technologies (Austria). 87 Research Fellow, Royal College of Art (UK). 88 Other speakers were Karen Wong (Programming Coordinator, Studio XX, Salon 40) and Nina Czegledy (Artist, Curator, President, Critical Media Art Society). SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK The summit was planned during the open studio walkabout of the Up Front and Personal multidisciplinary Visual Arts residency. Its themes were intimacy, reality 527 television, autobiography, and surveillance cultures. Screened at the summit, the con- troversial reality-television and web show Smart Hearts (directed by summit attendee Victoria Mapplebeck 89) provoked discussion about the emerging genre of reality tel- evision and the ways in which surveillance constructs behaviours. Mapplebeck intro- duced her made-for-television film and answered questions following the screening. The excerpts in this chapter cover a wealth of dialogues about identity—indi- vidual and social—in the digital age. It begins with a conversation about the ways that virtual communities emerge through the process of playing computer games. The chapter then continues with computer games, uncovering the means through which narrativity, character construction, and play dynamics create pleasure, immersion, and identification inside the game experience. A playful but critical exposure of gender bias in gaming and online media follows. The chapter moves on to uncover the mechanisms for emotional experience and character identifica- tion in 3D worlds and online environments, and probes some of the tools—such as AI—that drive character interaction. The discussion moves to balance the pleasures and promises of intimacy against the invasive nature of data extraction and surveillance. We move on to explore issues of cultural identity, discussing the powers of radio and the compelling role of Aboriginal voices. We end the chapter with a dialogue about the relationship of tools, protocols, culture, and context. The early 21st century witnessed the significant engineering breakthrough of peer-to-peer (P2P) computing. Some technologists and theorists proposed that P2P went hand in hand with open-source software developments. These models were broken down in relation to mobile phones because these systems were pro- prietary (such as the Symbian development platform) and difficult to program; it was thus challenging for artists to develop alternate mobile content. A panel entitled “The Democratic Revolutions—Peer to Peer Meets Open Source— Design, Philosophy and Engineering” suggested that these engineering models provided social and cultural paradigms not yet present in the mobile space but relevant for other “intimate technologies.” 90 Another technical panel 89 Writer and Filmmaker, 24/7 Productions (UK). 90 Jeremy Cooperstock (Professor, Electrical Engineering, McGill University) was joined by Sidney Fels (Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia) and Anne Nigten (Managing Director, V2_Labs)—a strong proponent of open source—as well as Saul Greenberg (Professor, Computer Science, University of Calgary), who builds collaborative tools. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA discussed the challenges of designing for “Reconciliation—Global/Local, 528 How Can we Design Communications Systems for Access, Exchange, Privacy, Communication?” and compared local area networks, wireless, “and the connec- tions in between.” The panel also examined the “future economy of the wireless world.” The contributors included scientist Lynn Sutherland,91 open-source artist Daniel Garcia Andújar,92 researcher Arnold Smith,93 and Philippe Hanset,94 who had developed one of the world’s most sophisticated “wired campuses” at the University of Tennessee. The panel “Wireless as Palate: Designing Mobility Experiences in the Personal Intimate Zone” presented case studies of mobile platforms, including wearable technologies that artists and designers had cre- ated. It featured Marc Tuters 95 (who had created a graffiti system for virtual spaces), Fee Plumley,96 Ben Jones,97 Carol Stakenas 98 (who commissioned mobile experiences), and Joanna Berzowska (whose presentation is excerpted in the chapter). The summit included a playful evening—“Beauty Makeover: Beyond Wearing”—where summit participants brought “objects, body parts, clothing items, something that you would like to make smarter, more responsive, more present or perhaps just easier to find” 99 and spent the evening designing an alter ego to be used throughout the rest of the summit. The Internet and new-media experiences have provided opportunities to create new forms of social community, heralded the emergence of social media, and established global understandings and networks. At the same time, these tech- nologies have brought intensive localization, individuation, and brand focus. Access and intrusion sit side by side. Sandra Buckley’s essay and the transcripts that follow elaborate these complex continuing contradictions. 91 Director, Programs, i CORE (Alberta) 92 Artist, Technologies to the People (Spain) 93 Senior Research Scientist, NRC Information for Information Technology (Ottawa) 94 Research Associate, University of Tennessee 95 Artist and Theorist (Canada) 96 Producer 97 Creative Director, the-phonebook.com (UK) 98 Deputy Director and Curator, Creative Time (USA) 99 See event agenda at http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/programs/archives/2002/intimate_ technologies/agenda.pdf SARA DIAMOND & SARAH COOK 529 Distributed Creativity: The Banff New Media Institute’s Strategies for “Making New” SANDRA BUCKLEY In preparation for this essay, I read some 100,000 words of transcripts of selected BNMI presentations and workshop discussion panels spanning the period from 1998 to 2004.100 The collected perspectives on questions of “the social and indi- vidual identity” were as diverse and numerous as the speakers and the events that stretched across this seven-year period. As I struggled with the notion of how to write an essay that could be relevant to the breadth and heterogeneity of all I had read, I was suddenly struck by what this mass of pre-edited transcripts had in com- mon. The unifying element lay in my own experience of reading line after line of transcription. For days, I had struggled to make sense of it all—not because it made no sense, but because the sense of it lay in the failed communications, the lack of continuity, the talking-over, the interruptions, the unfinished sentences, the hesita- tions, and the corrections. The raw transcripts abounded with explanatory nota- tions from the transcriber. “Foreign language” designated gaps experienced when speakers moved out of English for an exchange or used non-English terms and names. “Inaudible” designated things not captured by the microphone, or spoken over by someone else. The symbol “(?)” represented a myriad of uncertainties, from misspellings to homonyms, unknown or misheard proper names to acronyms that refused to render up their unabridged identity—simple and not-so-simple 100 The period of the BNMI’s activity covered is 10 years, but at the time of writing Buckley had read available transcripts for those seven years. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA ambiguities. While it could be said that all this is the nature of transcription, 530 this would be to miss the point. “All this” is the nature of the space created by the BNMI, and it is essential to the institution’s unique role in the continuously unfolding landscape of the cultural and intellectual production of new media. The transcripts—with all their gaps, notations, and inscriptions—created hybrid visual-textual narratives that perform not only the more obvious Derridean struggle between the written and spoken word. Simultaneously—and more importantly for the purposes of this essay—these transcripts perform the lived experience of the various spaces created by the BMNI for the continuous renegotiation of “the social and individual identity” in and through new-media environments. With the proliferation of digital networks across new media platforms, we are now facing not only the challenges and potential of distributed computing but also the provocative and intimately linked implications of distributed identity and creativity. Many of the gaps, pauses, and silences (i.e., “…”) punctuating the BNMI transcripts can be interpreted not as disruptions but, rather, as multiple “event-spaces” that promote divergent flows away from individuated identity or familiar identifications and formations of sociality. These flows are distributive and dispersive rather than channelling, and move contrary to the currents that produce predictable sedimenta- tions and conglomerates around self, affinity, and community. The duration of such event-spaces might be as short as the intake of breath that finds a sentence diverted along an unanticipated trajectory, or as long as a meandering segue that may or may not return to the mainstream of the initial flow. The duration of the event-space may not follow a simple linear timeline with a beginning and an end, but may unfold in a multitude of surfacings and minor eruptions, even as the microphone is handed on to the next speaker. An event-space is seldom resolved and often repeti- tive: more a stutter than a statement. There may be a sense of circling around and around the same question or issue and myriad attempts to find another way (or any way) of saying something—not the “right” way, for this would revert to familiar syntax rather than invention and experimentation. The dynamic of the event- space is not one of elimination and focusing but of proliferation and intensity. It is expansive. The silences and gaps can be experienced not as empty or void but rather as dense and volatile. There is an abandonment of the project of translation and its assumptions of equivalence and mutual intelligibility. In this environment, it is the failure of transcription and translation that exposes the emergent processes at work. Misunderstandings abound. Questions asked beget N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES unrelated answers. Clarifications sought compound uncertainty. The BNMI speakers gesture and (re)mark (upon) these conditions of flux and ambiguity: “I am not sure 531 if I am making myself clear …,” “I may be misunderstanding …,” “I’m sorry I can’t explain it better …,” “I’m not sure I am getting what you are saying …,”, “It’s sort of like … I mean … it’s kind of … Well, anyway …,” “I don’t really have the right word …,” “We don’t have the words for this …,” “ … need to invent a vocabulary.” I imagine that a lot of these marks of ambiguity will in fact fall out of the edited final transcripts, as they seem superfluous or empty—and yet, that is exactly their value. They signal that meaning is everywhere and nowhere at once: emergent, in process, and unstable. This volatility of meaning—this richness of failed communi- cations—occurs at the interface of a multiplicity of differences. In the event-space, intelligibility cannot be taken for granted; it must be worked at. The BNMI has, over the years, become a crucial worksite for the negotiation and invention of shifting languages—of not only new media, but also of the dynamic processes of the emer- gent socialities of digital environments. One thing that stands out is how often in the transcripts self-descriptions were neg- atively framed, in anticipation of the gaps and potential for/of misunderstandings: “I am not an expert,” “There are people here who know more about it than me,” “I don’t have background in …,” “Theory isn’t my thing,” “I’m not a techie,” “I don’t see myself as a nerd.” These descriptions invite a step beyond familiar framings of position rooted in the certainty of who “I am.” These statements of who “I am not” encourage boundary blurring and crossing through the humility of gesturing to the far greater space beyond the singular confines of a well-defined individual or group identity. The rest is a vast landscape of engagement. Starting from a statement of who “I am not” signals an openness to influence from “the rest”—a comfort with ambiguity rather than an insistence on certainty and its related claims and rights. Much of the interaction of the transcripts occurs out of the willingness to listen rather than the familiar act of speaking to/at. This is implicit in the openness to talking-over and interruption, which are experienced and received positively. When we start from a position of who “I am not,” we abandon “voice” and all its associ- ated notions of power and authority. We can only address when we speak from a well-defined position (in all of the senses of that word). The communications captured in these transcripts are the opposite of the address. The transcripts abound with silences and pauses to seek input and alternatives—to encourage challenges and engagement without the intent of overwhelming or eliminating difference. There is no such thing as an interruption in this context, as the assumption is the T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA open-endedness and porosity of communications. This is not a politics of tolerance 532 but a diplomacy of respect: ethical encounters that assume the legitimacy of all individual and group (social) identities and the singular right “to act” (rather than “to be”) outside the hierarchies implicit in the politics and practices of tolerance. Tolerance reverts to address, both as a strategy of communication and as a strategy of location—hierarchies of positioning driven by those who tolerate over those who are tolerated. “Diplomacy of encounter” respects and promotes difference—not as a static condition but as movement, a process of change, of making new. It abandons position and the related politics and practices of entitlement. A commitment and ongoing performance of this diplomacy of encounter distinguishes the space and work of the BNMI’s projects from the dynamics of the familiar circuit of conferences and symposia that tenaciously reduce the radical potential of new-media technolo- gies to the conservative structures of academic narrative. The challenge of this book is to avoid such reductive strategies. The transcripts I read came from selected presentations and discussions from the fol- lowing summits: Bell Canada and MediaLinx Present Big Game Hunters (1998), Synch or Stream: A Banff Summit—A think-tank on networked audio and visual media (1999), Emotional Computing: Performing Arts, Fiction and Interactive Experience (2000), Human Voice/Computer Vox: Art, Software Design and the Science of Identity (2001), Artificial Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence (2002), Bridges II: A Conference about Cross-Disciplinary Research and Collaboration (2002), Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones (2002), Skinning Our Tools: Designing for Context and Culture (2003), and Simulation and Other Re-enactments: Modeling the Unseen (2004). The focus of Big Game Hunters was primarily the impact of gaming environments on notions of identity—individual and community—in the contemporary gaming environments of the late ’90s and in terms of future experimentation, at the level of both software and hardware.101 The sessions explored equally the limitations and potential of then- current technologies. Not surprisingly, MUDs were widely discussed and, interestingly, some of the comments regarding these multi-user environments serve equally well to describe the environments created by/at the BNMI. J.C. Herz related the need for the user experience of MUDs to move beyond the realm of serial tourism toward some- thing closer to a vacation home linked into everyday life.102 Herz also 101 See the full event description in the back of this book, which includes lists of speakers. This information is also available on the Banff Centre’s website. 102 J.C. Herz, “How People Play Together: Gaming and Building Communities” (lecture, Social Identities/ Social Communities/New Markets, Banff New Media Institute, Banff, September 21, 1998). N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES described a preference for continuity over discontinuity and used the term “stickiness” when speaking of the investment in virtual environments that might transfer or be 533 retained—not just from one game session to the next, but into the non-gaming expe- rience of the everyday. A participant called for the extension of the digital experience beyond the accumulation of levels, jewels, player history and reputation, etc., to what is described as an attempted “conservation of sociality.” 103 Quite some years ago, Bev Brown 104 and Simon Watney 105 separately used the term “smuggling” to describe a similar movement of traces between another marginal space—pornography—and the everyday. From the almost undetected smuggling of new formations of intimacy and community suggested by Herz, to Josephine Starrs’s promise/threat of a viral bleed of new-world disorder from the feminist cyber-terrorist activities of All New Gen,106 Big Game Hunters believed in the importance of developing the software and hardware needed to sustain immersive and interactive narrative architectures that took the user beyond disconnected, quarantined experiences of virtual serial tourism. Similarly, the BNMI works to create spaces of cultural and intellectual produc- tion that are not rarefied or quarantined from the everyday. The dynamics of unbounded interaction between users, software developers, engineers, industry, academics, and artists encourage embedded initiatives: a creativity that pro- motes “smuggling” between digital environments and everyday life as it works to undermine that very divide. An invaluable and distinguishing feature of the BNMI projects has been the creation of “sticky” spaces. This stickiness promotes smug- gling and piracy. I am using “piracy” here not in the limiting and legal sense tied to notions of propriety, property, and position (address), but in the volatile and productive sense of distributed creativity. The BNMI environments are experienced as an experiment in distributed creativity and the evolution and application of a related—if still tentative—ethics of col- laborative engagement or encounter. It is this same tentativeness that we hear in the utterances of who “I am not” among participants entering into these spaces of engagement. That tentativeness is not a lack or weakness, but a commitment to respecting “the rest” and resisting the more familiar desire to position oneself 103 Ibid. 104 Beverley Brown, “Pornography and Feminism: Is Law the Answer,” Critical Quarterly 34 (1992): 72. 105 See Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media (London : Methuen, 1987). 106 Josephine Starrs, “Bitch Mutant Manifesto” (lecture, Bag the Big, Bad Girl Gamers or, A Girl’s Gotta Do It, Banff New Media Institute, Banff, September 21, 1998). T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA autonomously, with its tendency to trigger hierarchical relations. Within distributed 534 creative processes, contested and competitive hierarchies are displaced by a fluid field of relationalities: processes of productive interaction and interactive produc- tion. The creative tension of affirmative differentiation offers alternative trajectories to the tired dynamics of competition for and between contested position(alitie)s: the emergent processes of “making new” work against authorship and ownership. Distributive creativity is always “not yet,” “not mine,” and nowhere yet everywhere. There is no “new,” for the new is always already redundant in the zero-lag environ- ment of new-media technologies. There is the “making new,” and this is not an individual endeavour. An economy of contribution and collaboration creates the intensity of a singularity of individuals rather than the singular intensity of an individual, which marks success in a traditional economy of “the” artist or “the” author/researcher. The by-product of distributed creativity is distributed identity: the letting-go of the certainty of who “I am” for the uncertainty of the unfolding processes of engagement and encounter with who “I am not” and “the rest.” To adapt a line, “behind every strong multimedia artist is a strong team” (pro- grammer, engineer, acoustics, graphic designer, editor, actor/performer, script- writer, etc.). Almost no one can legitimately claim to be “doing it on their own.” And behind most professors of new media is a bevy of computer-savvy graduate students. This is not a criticism, just a statement of the new reality that is often not made, a fact glossed over by too many individuals, who still insist on foreground- ing themselves as auteur and ignoring the increasing fragility of the claim. Perhaps the problem lies in the tenacity of the economics of the cultural and academic marketplaces and granting agencies, which continue to rely on outdated modes of measurement and assessment and—despite rhetoric of collaboration and team- work—continue to over-valorize the “primary researcher” or individual artist. This act of erasure of the work of collaboration reinserts the relations of power of the old—and still dominant—economies of cultural and intellectual production. By contrast, it is not an accident that the technical teams essential to any BNMI project are visible and always acknowledged. Unlike many facilities—where technical teams are hidden away behind a wall, in a soundproof box, behind a curtain or screen, in unread footnotes or the fast-flowing fine print of credits no one reads—the BNMI accustoms its event participants to the sight, sound, and movement of the technical team and their equipment. These technical experts are not relegated to “support” roles, but are foregrounded and named as the essential architects of any initiative or activity. The apparatus is visible. Credit is given to all involved as part of the pre- and post-amble of any event. There is no “behind the scenes.” N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES “Collaboration” has surfaced over the last decade as an increasingly prominent issue circulating through formal and informal discussions at and about the BNMI. The 535 term derives from the Latin for “work together.” Its association with the negative connotations of collaboration and collaborator in the context of World War II con- tinue to taint the term in European languages. “Alliance” and “partnering” are often taken up as alternatives for this reason, and yet neither term captures the same focus on action and labour: the shared work of collaboration. The online descriptions of the nine BNMI projects I looked at each mention—in one way or another—the diver- sity of the participants.107 Synch or Stream brought together policymakers, broadcast- ers, radio artists, network designers, and other communities of practice. Emotional Computing found artists, choreographers, engineers, and programmers working together at the frontiers of interactive experience. Hackers, composers, and program- mers explored digital sound at Human Voice/Computer Vox, and Skinning Our Tools was the product of collaboration across the multiple levels of difference between the School of Creative Media, Hong Kong University; University of San Diego; CALIT2; and the Banff Centre’s Aboriginal Arts program participants.108 Website images of participants in Skinning Our Tools being led blindfolded through the Banff woods encapsulates the spirit of collaboration. Differences are embraced and engaged, as the territory of the unexpected leaves all who enter that space of encounter changed, marked by the traces of the experience. The willing- ness to take risks is essential. No one would be so simplistic as to suggest that a simple walk blindfolded in the woods could create an understanding or equiva- lence of blindness. The blindfolded walk in the woods, like any event-space, is not a space of confrontation—of conquering, overcoming, defeating, or eliminating distance and difference. Nor is it a space of identification—yet another dynamic for the elimination or minimization of distance and difference. It is an event-space of encounter and engagement. The goal is not translation—the correspondence or coincidence of meaning or experience—but the act of the encounter, a willing- ness to engage without the desire to master or the assumption of the possibility of understanding or transparency. There is a surrender to the untranslatable territory of affect, where equivalence breaks down as other flows of collective or communal experience emerge beyond language and representation. The blindfolded 107 See event descriptions on the BNMI website. 108 All partners of all BNMI events and summits are listed on the website and in the events listing found in the back of this book. Partnership is discussed in chapter introductions and in the introduction to the book. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA individual is stepping into an event-space where unresolved difference (affirma- 536 tive differentiation—“I am not blind”) provokes engagement with “the rest.” The volatility and fluidity of affirmative differentiation fuels an unstable unfolding away from “I am” toward the potential of an “I” who is always “not yet” —an imminent identity. This formative (rather than formulaic) identity is perpetually constitutive and always relational to “the rest.” The political potential of the event- space lies not in the encounter itself, but in the instant of exiting and the strategies for smuggling the traces of that affective experience into the everyday tactics of engagement that constitute the negotiation of sociality. There is some debate surrounding the derivation of the word “caucus,” but one version traces the word back to an Algonquin term for “bringing together to incite action.” In this sense, each of these BNMI sessions could be said to be a caucusing. In its contem- porary usage, caucusing has become associated with the internal workings of political parties or the internal sidebars of a team. Historically, among the First Nations, a caucus could also bring together otherwise warring or unallied tribes to incite collaborative action. The stamping of feet and beating of chests in dance (the caucus) used the body as an apparatus of affirmative differentiation. The flow of blood from an increased heartbeat and pumping adrenaline promoted an affective energy and volatility that could be channelled into the unlikely temporary collaborations of the event-space. In Synch or Stream, the discussions of streamed media and First Nations communities by David Moses, Christopher Spence, and Joseph Leon each grapple with new-media technology as apparatuses that draw attention to difference within community, between communities, and between First Nations and “the rest.” 109 In Skinning Our Tools, Mervin Jarman, Camille Turner, and Sonia Mills describe the impact of new media as an apparatus for “releasing social creativity” through a discussion of a grassroots intervention (The Container Project) that is both a social space and a space of cultural production.110 Yet they focus not on the technology but the essential element of the apparatus—“Jamaica’s underutilized natural resource” 111— Jamaican youth. Carlota Brito and Cheryl L’Hirondelle explore the tensions between the sociality encoded and enacted in tradition and ritual, and the potential impact of 109 Christopher Spence, David Moses, and Joseph Leon, “Issues in Aboriginal Broadcasting: What’s on Aboriginal Radio, What Role Does It Play? What Are the Implications of Going Digital?” (lecture, Synch or Stream, Banff New Media Institute, Banff, May 16, 1999). 110 Mervin Jarman, Camille Turner, and Sonia Mill, “Case Study in Content/Technology Design and Transmission: The Container Project” (lecture, Skinning Our Tools: Designing for Context and Culture, Banff New Media Centre, Banff, October 2, 2003).See http://www.container-project.net/ for details about The Container Project. 111 Ibid. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES new interactive technologies that both breach and generate cultural protocols as they threaten familiar hierarchies of knowledge and power linked intimately to the 537 ownership, protection, and transfer of stories, icons, ceremonies, and artefacts.112 New-media technologies of archiving and dissemination promise preservation and conservation while also promoting diffusion and dilution. The transformative impact of these technologies on cultural practices and everyday life are already creating sharply drawn lines of dissent within and between communities at the same time that they are providing the networked communication for that dissent. New-media digital technologies—such as community-based streaming and satellite radio; web- based documentation and archiving; Internet-supported communication between remote and urban communities; long-distance learning environments; and online medical, welfare, and diagnostic services—all offer invaluable opportunities for enhanced community life. However, digital flows are not one-way or easily restricted or protected. New-media environments are distributive and expansive and easily experienced as invasive—where the digital goes, commercialization and commodifi- cation are not far behind. A number of the BNMI sessions attempted to negotiate this ongoing tension between the potential new media brings to First Nations and other minority and Indigenous communities (urban, rural, and remote), and the risks these same technologies are perceived to pose to tradition and heritage. The question of protocol occurs a number of times in the various transcripts that describe these areas of dissent. In fact, protocols are mobilized as the mechanism for transforming the competitive and contesting dynamics of dissent into processes of affirmative differentiation. Protocol, with its distinct histories of usage in traditional culture and digital culture, appears to have been taken up as the term of interplay and experimentation between the two. The contest of positions is displaced by protocols for the recognition and respect of different experiences and relations to both tradi- tional practices and new technologies within and between communities. What is opened up is a field of encounter for the negotiation of the possibility of coexistence and collaboration in a climate of respect: an ecology of ethical practice. The protocols of this ecology can be understood as the terms of engagement that facilitate the diplo- macy of affirmative differentiation over the politics of contestation and hierarchies of tolerance. Protocols, unlike laws of nature or laws of governance, are in flux and, by 112 Carlota Brito, “Co-Creation with Aboriginal People in Amazônia: The Goeldi Museum Projects” and Cheryl L’Hirondelle, “Songs Performances and Histories: Projects and Tools” and “Aesthetics of the Sacred” (lectures, Skinning our Tools: Designing for Context and Culture, Banff New Media Institute, Banff, AB, October 3, 2003). T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA definition, infinitely negotiable. It is this fluidity that affords the constructability and 538 sustainability of an ecology of ethics. Ethics are not given; they evolve. The dissent and anxiety surrounding new-media technologies resonates with other older stories: the commercialization of Inuit art; the transfer of traditional motifs onto canvas; the notion of “good” and “bad” Indigenous art in the auction halls of Christie’s and Sotheby’s; the commodification of iconic memory as souvenirs; taped books popularizing Indigenous myths aimed at a primarily white, urban market; the divergent agendas of Green Peace and Indigenous hunting practices; traditional versus compulsory education; Indigenous justice or federal law and access to mainstream media for remote communities. Far from having resolved any of these issues, new-media technologies have accelerated and disseminated the debates across a far more diverse and diffuse field of engagement while intensifying and complicating the perception of both risk and potential. The protocols of encounter encourage collaborations that respect traditional identity and community while also seeking out opportunities for a distributive creativity engaged with “the rest” that protects against the vulnerabilities of any isolated cultural practice(s)—traditional or not. New-media technologies offer apparatuses for a mobili- zation of tradition: a “making new” that is not predicated on conquest or abandonment. In the ethical engagement between the distributed creative processes of networked digital environments and traditional practices, there is the potential for event-spaces that produce intensity rather than a diffusion, density rather than dilution. The BNMI has consistently maintained a commitment to offering access, resources, and support for the critical encounters between marginalized communities of knowledge and cultural production and new-media technologies. Similarly, there has been a concerted effort to extend global access and involvement across regions and communities that might otherwise have pursued new-media initiatives in isola- tion. This is another example of the BNMI’s strategy of “stickiness.” The BNMI has itself focused on the question of how successful its collaborative strategies have been and faced, head-on, challenges and criticisms in a spirit of engaged encounter rather than defensiveness. Success, however, is not the measure of the BNMI’s impact or value. The collaborative spaces and processes of the BNMI do not produce outcomes that can be measured simply. Strategies of stickiness create scattered, distributed impacts that erupt unexpectedly across time and locations. The lack of timely, tan- gible, measurable outcomes could be mistaken as failure, but it is the accumulation of just these failures that creates the richness of potential that is the BNMI’s value. The work of strategies of stickiness exceeds the time and space of Banff, and will be experienced over time not captured in immediate results. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES By creating the raw conditions of emergence of event-spaces, the BNMI encour- ages unlikely engagements that have proven historically to be tenaciously sticky. The 539 rapidly proliferating technologies of communication provide the conditions for per- petual connectivity that support the new intimacies of distributed creativity across distance and time. From satellites to supercomputers, from distributed computing to local servers, and from LANs to internet-ready mobile phones, the BNMI and its diverse multi-sector partners facilitate access at the appropriate scale for each element of any collaborative project. The issue of scale is also common across the transcripts. How big is too big? The enormity of achievable scale of both the technology and the deliverable networking capabilities can be daunting, whether at the level of an indi- vidual, a team, or a community. There is always the risk of over-scaling if technology drives a project instead of the desired scope of the project driving the level of tech- nology. If the relation to technology overwhelms or inhibits the relationalities of the network engaging that technology, then scale has become distorted and distorting. There are some moments in the transcripts in which technology is described as the dominant player, taking on its own virtual identity that seems more real than that of the users. But it is exactly this moment that the distributed creativity of these BNMI collaborations is working to undo. The participants in summits such as Artificial Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence, Human Voice/Computer Vox, Simulation and Other Re-enactments, and Emotional Computing cannot simply be described as users. They work the technology as they innovate and invent beyond the scope of current capabil- ities, teasing the limits of the collaboration between human and digital: the relational apparatus of distributive creativity. As engineers, systems designers, programmers, mathematicians, and physicists interplay with performers, artists, hackers, academ- ics, community activists, filmmakers, and others, new economies of investment are invented in the between of the multiplicity of difference in play. These collaborative investments are not about returns—the inflows and outflows of the familiar economy of production—but about new circulations of knowledge and cultural production driven by contribution rather than attribution, and distribution rather than accumu- lation. From enhanced access to supercomputers and mainframes, to broader, more flexible, more accessible distributed computing systems and individually accessorized wearable digital devices, the work in progress is scalable. The individual walking down the street SMSing on her Internet-ready, hybrid MP3 phone may self-limit her network to communication with immediate family and friends and use the phone as a just-in- time, need-to-know web-access device, or she may expand her network outreach and connectivity to maximum scale and perform complex functions linked into main- frames and distributed networks. A 2005 advertisement for new GPS phones shows T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA a Brazilian Indigenous person mapping plants and wildlife as he moves through the 540 jungle, photographing, locating, and archiving his environment. Plus, he can use the same device to make a simple phone call! 113 At any given moment, an individual can be transiting or exiting multiple spaces of connectivity of divergent scale. Role-switching reflects this contemporary condition of identity-in-flux. A businessman is participating in a global conference via video stream while text messaging his daughter to wish her a happy birthday. An architect puts his client on hold while he checks the specifications of a new building material on the website of the laboratory where the material was developed, and then verifies the arrival date of the container carrying his test samples via an online GPS-based shipping locator. Three elders sit together in a remote Australian Aboriginal commu- nity “talking” online with a group of “young ones” in juvenile detention in Sydney. These young ones were born in the city and have never seen “their country,” but the elders are still the caretakers of their “dreamings” and are striving to connect across a virtual landscape to engage beyond the limits of the many levels of distance that separate them. Relationalities are increasingly mobile, fluid, and perpetually immi- nent. The notion of the located, autonomous individual dissipates across networked environments, as who “I am” gives way to engagement with “the rest.” Inhabiting multiple roles is not new (e.g., working mother), but now we experience these roles simultaneously, in a layering of the complexity of identity, rather than discretely or sequentially. We are increasingly comfortable within a sociality that is always evolving, whether it is expanding or contracting at any given time. New-media technologies facilitate scalable relationalities from one-to-one to many-to-many, within a room or globally. Yet, even in the moment of engagement we are already potentially exiting. Who “I am not” is experienced as movement, engagement, and exiting in relation to “the rest,” and as such is always an unfolding into “not yet-ness.” This movement is not the same as moving on. The ecology of our encounters is indeed sticky; while we may exit, we are, intentionally or not, smuggling the traces of our engagements, one into the next and the next. And each exit is a prelude to a new encounter. Even in the act of a return there can be no assumption of sameness. 113 See Marc Tuters’s Geograffiti, a co-production with the BNMI using wireless interactive media. The Geograffiti project proposes a creative application for a GPS that, in essence, will allow the artist and tomorrow’s networked mobile users to post digital graffiti to a virtual scale map of the earth. See http://www.banffcentre.ca/bnmi/coproduction/archives/g.asp#geographiti. N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES In 1983, Time magazine took the bold and, at that moment, controversial step of naming the computer “man” of the year.114 It was the first time that a machine was 541 awarded the title. On the cover of the issue was the proclamation “The Computer Moves In.” The lead article explored both the threat and potential of this domesti- cation of the computer (and digitalization of the everyday), as the miniaturization of chips facilitated the movement of digital technology from the massive structures of corporate and institutional mainframes to the desktop of the smaller office and the family home. The article ended with this quote: “The future lies in design- ing computers that people don’t realize are computers at all.” 115 Freed from the desktop, the computer has become increasingly mobile with the development of each progressively miniaturized and more-mobile digital platform. The 1983 Time article predicted—even championed—just this level of ubiquity. The computer did indeed “move in,” but is now, two decades later, in the process of “moving out,” again. Static platforms like the desktop are more and more limited to archiving, as fewer functions are bound by specific spatio-temporal compartmentalizations of our lives—public/private, work/non-work, office/home. We are surrounded by “computers that people don’t realize are computers at all.” 116 Some are mobile and we engage knowingly with them (cell phones, laptops, Blackberries) and some are embedded in the fabric of the everyday (surveillance, identity scanning, comput- erized transport systems, automated banking and credit, etc.). As the computer “moves out,” we are more and more “not at home,” just as our identity is distrib- uted—everywhere and nowhere—across our networks. Where I live can no longer be described by an address—be it a street address or email address. Individuated identity is elusive, or perhaps an illusion, in the immersive environ- ment of our daily lives. The notion of “identity theft” could be said to be simply the extreme consequence of the porosity that has replaced traditional boundaries of self. “I” am now exposed and accessible on more levels than I can possibly manage or contain. “I” can be appropriated—at least at the level of everyday operations, functions, and online profile/reputation. An individual can choose to prioritize or foreground one or more elements of her identity in a temporary enactment of who “I am” (e.g., “I am female,” “I am black,” “I am Asian,” “I am gay,” “I am transgen- dered,” “I am married,” “I am a divorced single parent,” “I am an academic,” “I am dyslexic,” “I am a victim of violent crime”), but this choice is strategic and the 114 Roger Rosenblatt, “The Computer: The Machine of the Year,” Time, January 3, 1983. 115 Ibid., 5–6. 116 Ibid., 5–6. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA taxonomy is always only partial. The performance of positional identity can only 542 be sustained for as long as complexity can be kept at bay. There is a deception of wholeness and certainty implicit in who “I am.” The engagement of who “I am not” with “the rest” abandons the fallacy and embraces the fluidity and volatility of a distributed identity that is no one and not one. Over the period from 1994 to 2004, the BNMI promoted, researched, performed, and documented the emergence of the new-media technologies that now permeate the fabric of the daily life of our networked digital environments. The BNMI has taken on the project of rendering visible the invisible workings of digital new media and of creating a third space for the consistent and relentless questioning that attenuates the risk of naturalization of the emergent digital condition, while also exploring and encouraging the potential of these same processes. In its commitment to providing the collaborative resources that create the conditions of emergence of event-spaces, the BNMI has promoted the risk taking and play of many unexpected and unpredictable encounters. The work of these collaborative engagements has, in turn, facilitated unfamiliar and erratic flows of creative energy that have leeched through or been actively smuggled beyond the duration of the event-space into the everyday. In the laboratories, studios, and other spaces of the BNMI, heterogene- ous clusters of cultural and knowledge producers converge in a shared commit- ment to the work of collaboration. Like the technologies they work with, their collaborations are expansive and distributive. Affirmative differentiation within an ever-emergent ecology of ethical practices provokes a creativity that flourishes in the between of the affective energies of the encounters. The affective apparatus of the human and digital is also seen as an extension of the practices of collaboration, further obscuring attribution and ownership. The BNMI could itself be described as an immersive interactive architecture that takes the user beyond the disconnected, quarantined experiences of a virtual serial tourism: the challenge posed by the Big Game Hunters summit. The actors who move into this space are invited to leave who “I am” at the door and step into an active engagement with who “I am not,” in a conservation of sociality. This does not mean an abandonment of identity but, rather, a willingness to experiment with new practices of engagement and collaboration with “the rest.” The shared work of these collaborations is the provocation of unpredictable event-spaces that produce the processes of “making new.” These processes, in turn, influence their environment and affect the emergent conditions of the ethics of encounter underway. The “making new” unfolds across the field of human and digital relationalities—between human, N . K AT H E R I N E H AY L ES non-human, and digital—inviting the continuous renegotiation of affinities and inti- macies between who “I am not” and “the rest.” As we follow technology as it “moves 543 out,” we too are increasingly “not at home” and faced with the perpetual renegotia- tion and reinvention of identities—in process and in movement, everywhere and nowhere, distributed. The Banff New Media Institute hosts this risky diplomacy and facilitates the dynamics that ensure these encounters are not quarantined but actively “smuggled” through strategies of engagement that are, above all, “sticky.” T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA 5 TRANSCRIPTS J.C. HERZ Big Game Hunters, 1998 LEV MANOVICH Big Game Hunters, 1998 TERRY BORST Big Game Hunters, 1998 SUSAN BENNETT Big Game Hunters, 1998 JOSEPHINE STARRS Big Game Hunters, 1998 NATHALIE MAGNAN Skinning Our Tools, 2003 BERNIE ROEHL Emotional Computing, 2000 RALPH GUGGENHEIM with KEN PERLIN; ADAM FRANK & MIRIJAM ELADHARI Artificial Stupidity/Artificial Intelligence, 2002 MATT LOCKE Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 LUCY KIMBELL Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 TOM KEENAN Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 JOANNA BERZOWSKA Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 GILES LANE Intimate Technologies/Dangerous Zones, 2002 CHRISTOPHER SPENCE Synch or Stream, 1999 DAVID MOSES Synch or Stream, 1999 JOSEPH LEON Synch or Stream, 1999 SABINE BREITSAMETER Human Voice/Computer Vox, 2001 ZAINUB VERJEE & NARENDRA PACHKHEDE Bridges II, 2002 STEPHEN MARSH Skinning Our Tools, 2003 CHERYL L’HIRONDELLE Skinning Our Tools, 2003 SYLVIA BORDA Skinning Our Tools, 2003 NATHALIE MAGNAN Skinning Our Tools, 2003 OLGA GORIUNOVA Skinning Our Tools, 2003 FATOUMA KANDÉ SENGHOR Skinning Our Tools, 2003 VERA ROBERTS Skinning Our Tools, 2003 MERVIN JARMAN Skinning Our Tools, 2003 CAMILLE TURNER Skinning Our Tools, 2003 SONIA MILLS Skinning Our Tools, 2003 CARLOTA BRITO Skinning Our Tools, 2003 CHERYL L’HIRONDELLE Skinning Our Tools, 2003 SYLVIA BORDA Skinning Our Tools, 2003 OLGA GORIUNOVA Skinning Our Tools, 2003 What follows are a series of dialogues about individual, social, and, community identities within 546 computer game play, narrative, and identity. At Bell Canada and MediaLinx Present Big Game Hunters (1998), J.C. Herz elicited a debate about identity and community in computer- gaming culture, and Lev Manovich presented narrative strategies in computer games. The discussions that follow include the voices of Terry Borst, Susan Bennett, and others, who consider narrative structures and identity in relation to the gaming experience, social identities, and gender. J.C. HERZ Big Game Hunters, 1998 J.C. Herz / Transcribed: CD 1 Track 2 in full / Talk: “How People Play Together, Gaming and Building Communities” / Panel: “Social Identity/Social Communities/New Markets” / Event: Bell Canada and MediaLinx Present Big Game Hunters / Date: Monday, September 21, 1998, 9:45–11:15 a.m. J.C. Herz is the author of Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds and Surfing on the Internet, which was described by William Gibson as “post-geographical travel writing.” She was the New York Times’ first computer-game critic and, at the time, was producing a docu- mentary on the history of videogames for PBS. Herz serves on the National Research Council’s committee on Creativity and Information Technology. J.C. Herz: One of the things that I always refer to is Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where each chapter is named after a ruler. These are new cities that are being described by Marco Polo to Genghis Khan. At some point, you realize that the stories that Marco Polo is telling about these various cities are all based on some axiom, some principle. There’s one city that’s a Mirror City, where there are things that happen, and then things happen in the reflection of the city in parallel. And there’s a city where there is always unconsummated desire. People walk around and they glance at each other and all these fantastical things happen between them—but not really, they just keep walking by each other. It is a kind of trembling-with- desire city. Then, at some point, you realize that not only are these cities not real, but that there’s a debate going on between the idea of storytelling and fiction and architecture and memory— about the way that you create a space by remembering it, by constructing the memory of it. If you travel and never go back to that actual physical place, the invisible city is the model of it that you make in your mind, and it is about the axiom that you thought: “this city is about this.” Then you tell your J.C. H E R Z story, and that’s what the city is. There’s one incredible moment in this book. The emperor says to Marco Polo, “But there is one city that you never speak of, and, 547 that is Venice. Why didn’t you ever tell me of Venice?” Marco Polo says, “Every time I describe a city, I am talking about Venice.” He then states, “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.” 117 So, there’s this process of constructing the sense of place that goes on in the person’s head, when they go to this place, especially if they take part in its construction. You give people this entire playground—“Here! Have fun! Go kill each other!” —and that’s one thing. But what happens when they actually are made part of it? You see this in the MUD s and MOO s 118—you’re suddenly invested. It is one thing when people go to one resort and then they go to another, and then they go to another, and they just want something new every time. It’s very different from having a vacation home, where you constantly go and there’s this dialogue that happens between you and your normal life and your day-to-day activities. The other place that you go becomes this significant other place that you are invested in because you’ve built things there. Just by repetition, every time you go back there’s another memory there. It builds up in this sedimentary way. And so this place is a part of you and you’re a part of it. This is what I talked about in my book when it came to Ultima.119 Ultima is this incredibly interesting space, because Richard Garriott uses tactics through various technological innovations.120 The first Ultima was a “vectorland” 121—it was nothing for 10 years. And then, gradually, it got more graphically rich. He kept it for 10 years, so things gradually resolved over 15 years. By the time you get to Ultima Essential or Ultima Online, people have been living in this place for over a decade, and it’s like that place you went every summer. You might have had a little house on the 117 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). 118 A multi-user dungeon (MUD) is a multiplayer real-time virtual world described primarily in text. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat. A MUD, object-oriented (MOO) is a text-based online virtual reality system to which multiple users (players) are connected at the same time. Players can author new rooms and objects, create new generic objects for others to use, and change the way the MOO interface operates. 119 J.C. Herz, Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Boston: Little, Brown & Co, 1997). 120 Richard Garriott is a British American video-game developer and entrepreneur. He is also known as his alter egos, Lord British in Ultima and General British in Tabula Rasa. A figure in the video game industry, Garriott was originally a game designer and programmer and now engages in various aspects of computer-game development and business. 121 A vectorland is a simple vector graphics world. T H E M AT E R I A L K N O W N A S D ATA

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