dean terry

This is the first of a series of posts called “Re-imagining Location” about location, place and the mobile web as it relates to academia, research, and the arts. For the past three years I’ve been heavily engaged in projects in a collaborative research and creative group called MobileLab.  As we are entering a period where notions of location are beginning to be discussed in these circles I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve been thinking about along with students and colleagues.

In 2012 mobile web access will eclipse desktop access. This means a lot more than shrinking the web so it fits on a mobile screen. The mobile web is not just a smaller desktop web. In the mobile web context is key. It is the central component that differentiates the mobile experience from the desktop one (what I like to call, semi-jokingly, the Late Desktop Era). And location / place is a critical contextual layer.

Understanding location and place in the mobile ecosystem is something that, from my experience over the last several years, takes time and concrete examples. There are a number of location applications that can be used to provide a very basic (if misleading) experience of location. These applications are all commercial, very early, and are based on simplistic, even crude concepts of place. Still, they allow us to begin to think about our location, our social networks, our data, and the web at the same time. The goal is to get the basic experience of a digitally enhanced place, or the networked location.

My graduate level Emerging Media + Communication class is called MobileLab and we are looking at the current and near future state of the mobile space for media, research, education, and experimental creative projects. I am requiring everyone in the class to get Foursquare accounts. Why? It’s not because Foursquare is the best way to understand location, space and place – it’s not. It is an ambient game centered on “checking in” to locations built by a startup whose whose aim is to make media and retail deals. Providing a robust location tool and vehicle for expression and place annotation is not part of the plan (even though people are using this way anyway – more on that later).

We are using Foursquare because it is an accessible, easy to use platform that is, being location based, uniquely mobile in orientation. It is an app that only makes sense in a mobile context. (Looking at the non-geo web on an iPhone is not a mobile experience. It is a shrunken down desktop experience.) It is a way to stimulate discussion about the meaning of location and place as it relates to the emerging mobile Internet and experience. It is a start on getting your head around location.

When using a location based social application it may seem at first as if you are just “sharing location” but you are also: 1) leaving information in places (in this case a micro history and ‘tips’), 2) changing other people’s experience of places by the information you leave, and 3) beginning to create a contextual layer in the location. These are things we will all be doing more and more in the near future: creating and interacting with geolocated media and extending the idea of place and adding layers of context.

Foursquare is a very early take on location and looks at places through a narrow game centered and commercial lens. Locations are, by default and intention, retail restaurants, grocery stores, bars, etc. Foursquare calls them “venues.” One result of this is to reinforce a consumerist orientation to place. You never check in to a neighborhood, or area, or place where something meaningful happened, or could or will happen. You check into Pizza Hut.

In some ways it makes places not mean anything, and contributes to the further sense of unplaceness. You are at a Best Buy. I’m at a Best Buy. But they are 20 or 2000 miles apart. It’s never I’m in the favorite corner of my favorite room. There are no ‘hoods or haunts. (Note to self: write a post entitled “Looking for ‘Hoods and Haunts”)

Because of these limitations, and because we want to think about place in more interesting ways than checking in to specific venues, we’ve taken to inventing places. In MobileLab, it happened spontaneously. A couple of us experimented with making up places, and then everyone started doing it. Naming a place is a way to give it meaning, to make sense of it and to situate it in a social context.
In the building that houses our two degree programs we’ve created a whole overlay of named locations. Some are just classroom names. Others are “my off white office” which, originally, was supposed to mean my office, but now my colleague David Parry uses it. (In fact, he’s trying to wrest it from me in a gaming sort of way.) There are also names for specific classes and research labs. Beyond our building, some of us have created imaginary locations like “a happy place,” “an uncertain place,” and even “1 : 1.618034” – the number for the Golden Mean. And I spent several weeks thinking about a imaginary place called “Club Silence” (more on this soon).

The point is we very quickly ran up against the narrow limits of Foursquare. We wanted to make places. We wanted to name things. We wanted to play, experiment, express. We wanted to define space. Foursquare, with its checkins and pointless points, mayorships, and badges instantly became unsatisfactory. What it did do was to expose a need we did not know we had. We wanted to label locations and name places, making them personal and social objects. Turns out we wanted something like a psychogeography app. (We’re working on it – see Placethings)

Pushed a bit, these initial gestures can become a form of location/place related media, writing, art or transmedia. I’m writing another post that goes into this in detail. For now, part of the thought is that if I have to check in to all these rather droll places, why cant I “check in” to an interesting one, a place that engages the imagination the same way it would with a scene in a novel. Or what about imagined virtual political gatherings – places you checked into to to express solidarity with a cause or political viewpoint. As we get better services and more media attached to places there can be more film, game, and emergent narrative experiences.

The social networks we are all used to were born in the Late Desktop Era. The mobile era is upon us and will evolve more quickly than the desktop web era and it is not the same. The competence and confidence we’ve all developed in desktop era social media and digital literacy will be significantly altered by the mobile web and it’s new contexts. Location and place are central to it all. My point of using location apps was to introduce this experience in an immediate, if immediately lacking, way. Everyone in my MobileLab class can see what’s missing now and what the landscape is beginning to look like, at least in outline. And that’s all I can hope for in an emerging media and communication course.

[This is a repost of a guest blog post on PBS Station KERA's Art & Seek site]

The winners of the last decade on the Internet were YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. All of these are all social networks where the content is 100% created (or re-purposed) by the participants – not by some official content producer, publisher, broadcaster, or curator.

It’s old news that we’re all curators now in an interwoven, multi-layered dialogue rather than a monologue. But publishing and promoting our own work has another side. People have changed their expectations about how they participate with the arts. They no longer expect just to be consumers of art and content – they are also producers, and at the very least want to talk back.

A growing 24% of social net users are creators themselves, and contribute their own work right alongside that of long established artists and institutions. People do not want to be simply talked at or presented to. Publishing or presenting without some form of participation, in the emerging networked environment, comes off as something like yelling over someone in a conversation. Broadcasting, presenting, or publishing something is just the beginning, not the end.

This is not technical evolution but a cultural one – there are changes in the way people create and interact with art, but also with the creative process itself.

The internet, and specifically the social tools that have come along more recently, facilitate an ability to collaborate in ways that were simply not present before. And the idea of the solo genius and singular voice as the principal model is breaking down. It’s still there, still important, but now there are new ways to work with others, and the notion that art comes solely from a solitary mind, often in isolation, is not the only model.

Some projects do not work well with conventional collaboration or multiple authors, though this may change. Recently a major problem in mathematics was solved collaboratively on a blog. Might we see this approach widely adopted in areas previously thought the domain of the solitary artist? Even where this is difficult or impossible, it does not mean that work cannot benefit from input via a (hopefully carefully crafted) social network. This is especially true when the process, often carefully guarded, is exposed (or, in the language of our times, shared).

Some artists are now sharing their process on a daily basis, creating a much more active feedback loop with their audience. Former receivers of completed artistic output are now often participants in the creative process in terms of how they influence the work. So, while many artists still control the content, none of them control the conversation around it.

When I was in graduate school everyone had their own private studio. The idea was that you would go in and not come out until your latest solo creation was complete. The process was invisible, and often obsessively secretive. Process was discussed in frequently stiff, wordy “artists statements.” Now, happily, we have the opportunity to share our creative problems and process with others. It’s ongoing, open, and iterative. With practice – and this is an evolving model – it should result in richer experiences for everyone.

All of these changes in the arts and the new possibilities in collaboration and process sharing are just beginning. They are accelerated and will be changed even further by emerging mobile technologies. The current and near future wave of the mobile internet will mean a substantial evolution in the way we connect and relate to people, places and information. This new mobile Internet ecosystem presents radical new ways to think about how the arts can evolve. And the voice part of your phone, if you still use it, becomes an afterthought. Welcome to 2010.

This is an extended version of a two part interview conducted by Chris Jagers and published in Glass Tire.

People inherently care about communication, but why is “mobility” so profound?

Yes, but they also care about information and expression. Increasingly, these things are shared and related to place.  For a long time the online world (and its data and resources) was disconnected from the everyday world beyond the desktop. The traditional Internet experience assumed you were sitting somewhere and it didn’t particularly care where you were.  We normally consider the data we create and consume as being on a hard drive or “out there” somewhere on the Internet. This is because the Internet was designed around computers that didn’t move, and were unaware of their location in real world terms. Even laptops never established a relationship with physical place.  With the emerging generation of mobile platforms, everything has changed. With this change brings shifts in perspective and expectation about “where” our media is, and where we are. It also changes how we think of our connections to other people, and the nature of these connections. In a sense, you are carrying your network of people around with you all the time. You are co-present with them and able to share a variety of information, both intimate and environmental. In some ways this group is like an extension of your own mind. Thoughts and ideas can be developed in real time among a group of collaborators.

I keep hearing the phrase “mobile augmented reality.” What does this mean and what is a simple example of this?

Augmented reality is basically the idea being able to see overlays of information on the display of your mobile device. The information is geo located (specific to your gps location) and can be anything from pragmatic information, like who is in a building, to game content, to virtual art installations. All of the data is invisible until you look through your device, which detects where you are, where you are looking, and then overlays the appropriate images and text over the scene. When you look though the device via the camera virtual objects can be overlaid on real ones based on position and direction.

But augmented reality is also a way for artists to annotate the world, leaving their own images, video, text, conversations, and objects in a particular location. Our own project, called Placethings, is in development and will be a tool for location based art, cultural and historical content. For a 3D example, take a look at a new product called Layar.

What new hardware innovations are you looking forward to?

In terms of technology, some of the most interesting things to look forward to are the addition of a variety of sensors to the mobile device. This further contributes to the intimacy factor. We recently did a project with Ericsson where, working with our colleagues in the Computer Science and Engineering department at UT Dallas, developed a body sensor network. The network would transmit body data like heart rate, temperature, and other information though the network and to the web and mobile devices. The network was installed on people racing bicycles so they and their coaches could monitor body states and later, review the information to improve performance. These kinds of sensors, and many others, will be showing up as bluetooth connections to your mobile device. I think it is an interesting area for performance and installation artists to explore.

What are the biggest challenges to this wave of innovation?

Technology is not in short supply. Creativity and imagination are, particularly collaborative forms. A creative, collaborative environment is difficult to cultivate and all too easy to destroy. Our struggle is to encourage a climate of openness and shared knowledge in an environment that integrates people from different disciplines both inside and outside the university.

Creativity can be applied in a number of ways. I was trained, like many who may read this, as a fine artist. This is a particular form of applied creativity. The way I learned it it was a solitary effort and people often protected their ideas.  Even the layout of the studios where I went to to graduate school (Claremont in California) were like silos, focused on individual achievement. Solo work will continue to be important, but our charge is to work in the emerging media space. Doing this successfully requires a shared form of creativity. In the new Arts & Technology building we are designing on the University of Texas at Dallas campus there are no solo spaces. Everything is about enabling group work, public spaces, and encouraging serendipitous encounters within the community.

I am involved as of this writing in a collaborative art and performance project that takes place online in social network sites like twitter and 12seconds.tv. The group, called inter.sect is run by UT Dallas MFA graduate Christi Nielsen and involves responding to text and video prompts sent over twitter and 12 seconds.tv. The artists, many of whom have another primary form of work, respond and post videos and audio from their mobile devices.

Art making is usually thought of as Intimate. Mobile devices are usually thought of as a mass consumer product. But you combine both, so what kind of status does the mobile phone have for you?

The mobile phone is the most intimate piece of technology most of us have. It is with you  – and very close you  – all the time. It’s with you in the bathroom, next to your bed (or in it), everywhere. How does it feel when someone touches your phone? This intimacy distinguishes the mobile experience from the work-like, static desktop experience where you are in a fixed location, indoors, working on software that is unaware of anything but itself, and on an Internet that does not take into account where you are or who is around you.

The mobile device is potentially a powerful art making machine. It captures and manipulates images, sound, video all while tracking your social network and location, which connects you to place. A lot of art over the centuries is about place. Artists have an opportunity to think about place in new ways, creating a layer of digital information that the mobile ecosystem exposes.

Artists who may have had no interest in new media art in the past may find new kinds of ideas possible. They may use the mobile device as a kind of sketchpad, taking photos, recordings, voice notes, archiving web links and messages from friends. My friend and colleague John Pomara, a painter, uses a small camera this way and has worked it into his process, with some very compelling results.

You don’t have to go anywhere to “make art” when a mobile device is your tool. You are always already there. Students often ask me how to get better at photography and video, for example. In addition to learning the history and theory, what I tell them is to take hundreds (or thousands) of photos and videos per day. Most of them have phones or small cameras that do this. I advise them to have the device ready to record within a few seconds – not at the bottom of a bag or pocket. Take advantage of it’s immediacy, which is part of it’s intimacy.

It’s interesting that location-based innovation is happening simultaneously with “real-time” communication tools, like Twitter.

Mobile changes how you think about time. I noticed at one point that I often only had 30 seconds at a time to make a video or take a photo or to write something. Having a couple of mobile devices with me all the time gave me a few options, all of them compressed in time. I called it “expression compression” and dubbed this manner of working and its results “microart” and described it as “microexpressions of the multitasker.” Last year I designed an exhibition around the idea called Real Time, which was shown at the Dallas Contemporary, and then travelled to the Pompidou in Paris via a mobile film festival. The idea was to subject other artists to this same restriction and time compression. So, with John Pomara, who co-curated the show, we gave them mobile phones with video capabilities and had them make 30 second videos every day for 2 months. The day the show opened, there was no art. The art came as people sent in the videos from their phones everyday. The public were also invited to send in videos. Everything was projected on walls at the contemporary and presented on the web simultaneously.

iPhone 3Gs?

As I write this, I await the arrival of a new iPhone 3Gs. For years, millions of people have had camera phones. Now millions of people will have video cameras in their pocket. But these are mobile video cameras that can record anything, anytime, and, more importantly, can be shared on the network instantly. They also record exact gps location. The commonness, ease and extent of transmission of this kind of video causes behavior changes, and this changes what video is and means.

So yes, the mobile experience is changing how we think of video. But it’s still fixed. It’s still linear, and not inherently interactive or participatory. But the conditions under which video is taken (or as I prefer to say, performed) are quite different, and I wonder if we are entering a post performance world. Being on film or video has gone from being special and rare to common and disposable. I have noticed that in a social media context the expectation and standards for performance and authenticity have changed. Being on video, in the past, meant “performing” because it wasn’t all that often that people were on camera: parties, events, etc. Now many people are “on camera” every day. Sometimes only for a few seconds. Most of the time, what they are doing is not special or particularly interesting. It is not interesting, but it is much more important socially. It may be that you are in someone else’s video nearly every day. And you may be aware of it or you may not. You are always potentially in someone’s camera lens. There are opportunities for artists to explore, critique, invent, and subvert this area.

Is your Mobile Lab research primarily for art, business or both?

We work in a university setting, which gives us the ability to not be under immediate revenue and business development pressures. This luxury is a benefit to our partners who are under these pressures. We try and look forward beyond the next quarter and anticipate future uses and implications of next generation technology. We spend a lot of time brainstorming, arguing, testing, and imagining not only how people might use emerging technologies, but how they affect relationships, social capital, and culture.  We take these discussions and formalize them into collaborative research projects. Some of these projects are for art, resulting in exhibitions, experiments, and tools that artists and others can use for expressive uses. Others have a business component to them, but also always a cultural aspect, a mindfulness about how what we are doing interfaces with society.

Can you talk more about the relationship between art and business?

Regarding art and business, there is a large amount of befuddlement and mythology surrounding the relationship between the two. (The idea of art as a part of business never came up in my two years in graduate school, not even once. It’s as if everyone is pretending that what we were doing was somehow separate from the rest of the economy).  Art is a business of course, it is a “content” business with a particular economic structure and a set of business models. Insofar as it’s model is based on scarcity and control it is threatened by the Internet.

How does this relate specifically to traditional artists?

One of a kind works will generally continue to follow the old model, but with significant changes in the power of artists to market their own work via the network. I know a couple of painters, Steven LaRose and Dennis Hollingsworth, that write interesting blogs and use other social tools to extend their community. One test is to type your name in Google. What comes up? Is it what you want? Do you have control over it? In my view, it’s your responsibility to control your search stream and online identity. In many respects, you are who Google says you are.

The challenge for art, like with other content businesses like music and media, comes when you have work whose native form is digital. You still see people artificially limiting their work to create rarity so that they fit into the conventional model. It doesn’t make sense. It is analogous to charging for content on the Internet. Better to give it away and reap the benefits of a larger audience.

Regarding the artists relationship to business, the applied creative thinking that artists provide is valuable to business culture, though you sometimes have to look for groups that see the value. It’s better to influence products and services early on than be frustrated or manipulated by them later. Diversity of perspective is a good thing, and it’s obvious when things are designed without it. We recently did an exhibition where Samsung provided phones to artists who then gave them feedback on the camera and communication functions.  The engineers there were very curious how what they had made worked in an art context.

What Macro changes do you see happening?

With an entire culture “creating” now – photos and video and all manner of content – it is an opportunity for artists to provide inspiration for new directions and to make critiques where needed.  All this is especially true in emerging technology where the developers often have little idea how their inventions will be used. Twitter did not anticipate many of the uses it has been put to (including 140 character novels, performance art, a protest tool, new forms of journalism, etc). Think of the role of Twitter in the recent Iranian uprising. The same is true of mobile technology. For example, I want an external bluetooth microphone for iPhone video documentary projects. Until someone in Apple’s hardware engineering understands this, it cannot happen. This is one of the key roles of MobileLab, to influence products so they are better creative tools.

There’s also the startup experience, which you, Chris, have experience with. I found intensive training as an artist was excellent, if not complete, preparation for building a startup. It takes every ounce of creativity, energy, and focus you can muster. I think of my experience in the dot com period as one big performance art piece. I was playing the role of “startup founder” in a highly fluid and exciting time and place. I see successful artists and successful startup founders I know as having very similar traits.

I had lunch with a friend today who, like me, went through the art school mill and now teaches at a university. He came to talk about a business idea that he had been working on. We noted that business in general and entrepreneurship in particular were variously ignored, frowned upon, or downright despised in contemporary art circles. Of course this is complete bullshit. Art itself is a business – one with it’’s own peculiar and quite elitist economy – and artists spend a good deal of time pretending that it is not a business.

The denial is wrapped up in the whole mentality of being a modern or contemporary artist. Get your MFA, work some crap gig, and live in a dirty, dangerous urban environment, preferably an industrial park. I did it for a year or so in the
early 1990’s in downtown Los Angeles and then discovered the beautiful canyons
of Sierra Madre. It didn’t take much to burn down that mythological house. Living in squalor did not give me the warm fuzzies. I had enough grime, chaos, and noise in my own head and didn’t need the inner city to make me feel “authentic”or “connected.”

Early on, I too had the view of business that it was just evil, pointless, greed driven piggishness – and sure, much of it is. During the 1990’s when I ran a serious of businesses I often had the feeling of my soul draining to the floor as I sat in a meeting, a visceral feel of time slipping by in the wake of crushing meaninglesness. But at least I could sit down while my soul drained away. At art openings they make you stand up.

But as with so many things, I hated what I didn’t understand.

What I learned is that the same processes involved in “creating” in the fine arts are present everywhere in society, including and most especially in entrepreneurship. Many of the fine artists I have known are totally spineless. They are beholden to a power structure – critics, curators, collectors (the 3 C’s) – that they rarely question. The fakery is no less thick than the most tasteless marketing pitch from a mattress company. The difference is that business lies right to your face while art pretends it isn’t lying.

I’m completely devoted to the creative life, but I have learned not to restrict it out of ignorance to things traditionally labeled “the arts.” It’s everywhere. That feeling of wanting to create something new is the same whether it’s a film, a recording, a virtual island, or a start-up. You just begin with different constraints, established methods, and expectations.

After being burnt out from the dot-com era, over the past year I’ve been feeling more and more like there may be another run to make. Creating a business requires you to bounce your ideas against the unbending nature of physical reality. Of practical, economic reality. It requires you to use the materials of real time, real people, and to create something that works in the face of enormous uncertainties. This is especially true in technology where the ground is shifting beneath you constantly. It is exactly like studying metaphysics, or painting.

Hopefully a lot of the way people in the arts view entrepreneurship will change. There are signs. The fact that you can build your own network and market yourself
with various Internet strategies is a major change. It’s an unstable and evolving scenario, but the “long tail” effect is a real one, and the opportunities for a significant level of creative independence for artists with a strong, personal , authentic voice are promising.

Yes, it’s easier to give your cultural product to “the man” – music label, gallery, publisher, etc. – and then let them market and distribute while you stay completely in the dark about the process. But the ability to control the entire enterprise is much more empowering, interesting, and liberating. The whole idea about “marketing yourself” changes from fake cheek kiss networking with those who would present you to the world to using distributed networks on the web to connect directly to an audience.

My friend thought up a way to make money from the backwardness of the art system. I wish him the best in his entrepreneurial and yes, creative endeavor.