dean terry

Placethings, a student created social media platform for mobile devices is a finalist in the Accelerator Competition at South by Southwest (SXSW), the world’s premier emerging technology event held each March in Austin. “Accelerator at SXSW searches coast to coast and across oceans for the next big thing in the tech business by the most ambitious talents in the world” Placethings competed with hundreds of other companies to become a finalist and will present at SXSW on March 15.

About Placethings: Placethings mobile media platform creates personal, shareable layers of media on top of real world locations, connecting places with “stories.” Tell people about your trip, guide them through a city, tell stories about where you’ve been, what happened, and what is important with video, pictures, sound, and beautiful, shareable maps. More about Placethings

Placethings was developed in EMAC’s MobileLab research group and was co-created by undergraduate ATEC student Nicholas Spencer and EMAC graduate student John Syrinek in collaboration with Professor Dean Terry. The project is a transdiciplinary and includes contributions from students in The School of Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Management. The project is supported by the Office of Research and RIM, makers of Blackberry and has also been featured at Mobilize.

[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.

So you are in college and looking for a good gig. What do you do in the age of GooTube? You make a video of course. And you claim you can serve a tennis ball 140 mph and bench press 495 pounds. Wait, no, maybe you shouldn’t do that.

Actually I don’t think Yale student Aleksey Vayner knew he was living in the age of web 2.0 and GooTube – his video was part of a supposedly confidential application to UBS for an investment banking job. If your video is digital, you should assume everyone will see it, at least until we have better permission layers on Internet media.

Social networks can connect you and make you popular, but they can also bring you 15 minutes of shame.

I’ve been working on my avatar in Second
Life. His name is Blake Wake (and he just bought a virtual island from Anshe Chung for some reason).

There are two basic approaches to this. One is to develop a character that more or less mimics your real life persona. The purpose of this is to represent yourself in 3pointd space for often pragmatic reasons: the journalist or entrepreneur that needs to maintain a level of transparency and develop trusted relationships that transcend a particular virtual world.

The other approach – one which I find much more compelling – is to develop an alternate persona. The could-have-been or the wish-I could or simply a doppelganger with better hair and fewer skin imperfections.

In my case I am fancying the idea of developing an avatar or two that represent a set of ideas particular to the virtual world. Unfortunately most of the ideas in virtual worlds are shovelware – ideas shoveled from the real world into virtual space. Some have argued this is jut what we should do – create virtual version of real world people, events, and transactions. Certainly there is a role for this, but I’m more interested in the imaginative possibilities of
these spaces.

There are two areas that are of interest. One is architecture and the other is religion. On the architecture front Blake Wake is, er, I am working on a “theory of virtual architecture.” Or maybe it is a theory of place making. Either way, someone needs to do something. Most of the building going on in Second Life mimics real life structures. Now much of this is due to the fact that SL has modeled itself on the real world, even down to the problematic land ownership structure. Yes there is still an up and a down, and avatars look like humans, but you can fly and teleport yourself anywhere instantly. Your buildings can float. Right now coming up with a “theory” is basically ridiculous considering the size of SL. But this is an early adopter playground and at some point in the near future there will be a metaverse and people will build places. The question is what to take from thousands of years of place making and what to jettison and develop new ideas appropriate for the varying rules of virtual spaces. Stay tuned for Blake Wake’s ideas.

The other area of interest is religion, and many of the comments above apply here as well. If you think that SL and the metaverse should mostly be a place that RE-presents (read presents again) the real world, then having churches and praying to Jesus makes some kind of sense – even though there are so many layers of mediation going on it is befuddling. On the other hand – and its way to early for this – there amy be a kind of religious experience that can only be mediated through virtual space. If not only, then substantially. A virtual church is no more abstract and no less symbolic than a real one. More on this later as well.

Of course the contrast I present here is in many cases much more of a blur. The typical MySpace or Facebook profile is in some sense an avatar, and a selective, online version of the person. The question is whether avatars like Blake Wake, insofar as I decide to distinguish him from my real life person, are substantial, meaningful entities. Right now they are attached to games and worlds like Second Life, but this will change.