The Fabrication of Idenity

The meaning of a portrait is entirely dependent on the social, cultural, and historical context of its creation (the artist), commission (sitter), and viewing (audience). If one were to glean anything from Brilliant's writings on portraiture perhaps it would be that identity is a fabrication of A) the "artist's imagination", B) "desire and role of the subject", and C) the social context of the portraits presentation to society.

Portraiture in this way is a framework for defining the relationship between the self & the world. It is about capturing an aspect of the nature of identity, and re-presenting for a social purpose. We present and represent the self as Art, Biographical Documentation, Historical Information, Personal Memorabilia, Political Iconography, Memorial Imagery, the list goes on.
In light of the multitude of roles it can play, from the empty images of Marolyn Monroe to the iconic & stoic portrait of Weber, how will the tools and context of the information age transform portraiture? Will portraits still try to capture a "timeless" self, unique and yet comfortably portrayed in the generic type roles of their day? Does interactive portraiture allow for a more "authentic" view of identity?



Oscar Wilde said that Portraiture is really a portrait of the artist (p. 82). Jon Gerrard attempts in his works to overcome the subjectivity of representation by presenting super-high resolution images of his subjects in three dimensional views with Matrix like 360 degree rotation. The viewer can change the angle of viewing by rotating the video image along an arc in the gallery.

The feeling I got in the gallery was of a sort of hyper reality, where the iconic role of the subject is lost and the sense of a likeness dissolves into a clinical view where one sees many more details than you might in your everyday perception of the same person. We see people in different lights in our everyday lives and as locomotive creatures have a holistic representation of their form, but we don't often flatten this perception into a massive quantity of data and present it in such a surreal way.



Gerrard and Bill Viola both use portraiture in this way to evoke how the role of technology can amplify our experience of portraits by slowing down time and increasing detail - somehow our iconic representations of each other are lost and we move beyond our idea of identity. Shearer West said that portraiture is about body and soul - these portraits seem to leave the soul behind the facade of the exquisite copse.



I have also been living and working with a portrait series by Orit Zuckerman called Influence. I'm sure everyone at the Media Lab is familiar with it - to me it is the most authentic representation of people in a social context that I have ever seen. Influence is an interactive artwork visualizing how collective behavior emerges from decentralized interaction in a small social network. Individual people are affected by the behavior of people around them, and as a result, they influence the people around them as well. As I have lived with it I have come to appreciate how accurately and sensitively Orit and Sajid approached their subjects - and how considerate they were about how the subjects were presented. A remote control interface allows a viewer to explore the personalities and reactions of each viewer.

So in each of these examples I would say that yes, they function as portraits - but not in the same gnomic way of the past - instead they posit new technological and social contexts for viewing a person and place the act of portraiture into the role of observing itself. (as Escher did but by placing himself in the eye of the viewer).

Time, Memory, Representation

Click to Enlarge, 1024 x 4400

Sunday from 9:30 to 3:30 I tried to pay particular attention to the time, documenting it in 3 ways. It's been a year and a half since I have taken pictures. This is in part because I am curious how people are affected by the act of photo taking and how much this dominates their memory of things (does our memory become mechanized). I think this is critical find more flexible ways to show how we perceive representation of time from a more holistic standpoint.

From top to Bottom in the Collage you can see the Progression from (1)Memory to (2)Documentation to (3)Visualization of Time.

1) Memory, Pre-Photo Review - What do we remember before we allow our photo taking to structure our memory? I jotted down everything I could remember on the bus ride just after the 6 hour period elapsed.
2) Documentation, Photo Review Process - (see middle section above) - How different is the feeling of the story without the spacial and undocumented aspects of memory, feelings, ideas, mental models.
3) Visualization, Post Memory Collage. I tried to imagine if you could reorganize the layout of a photo show to emphasize the subjective emphasis or as roland barths would say - the "puntum" in the image sequences.

Online & Offline Conversation

Online conversations are more direct and succinct. Social convention requires less formality and often encourages a playful invention of new syntax - a short hand convention that tries to make people feel like the space is slightly more intimate. Often it is understood that interruptions and delays in response are normal - but social norms encourage people to explain the delay with a short phrase that acknowledges the interruption.

I thought it was interesting how he noted that most conversations are not about the information being obtained, but about reinforcing relationships. I would argue that online, people seek information more than companionship - or they are interested in building relationships that will later be person to person conversations. In forums the speaker addresses everyone - but in life we make eye contact with one individual at a time and there is a sphere of influence in our conversational realm.

I tried to create a dynamic animation of such a conversation where two people are visiting a three person home to inquire about possibly living there as well. In the text landscape you see spheres of influence, the amount spoken, and who the speaker is. Online, the relationships develop in a more web-like fashion, the spheres of influence are broader and more democratic.

Here is the animaiton of the conversation (I can't embed swfs here):
http://web.media.mit.edu/~hunters/personal/conversationMap.swf



And here is a conversation from an online space, click to open.

Response 2: Interactive CoMedia Shared Histories

Please Click to ENLARGE!

CoMedia Shared Histories - An Interactive Chat for SubTextual Comments & Mutual Viewing

In considering a context for a 2-D chat environment Kate & I realized that we would only really want to participate in a space if it was very context specific, a defined topic with layers of rich cultural interpretation and previous discussion. Kate mentioned that John Maeda once said to her that the problem with the web is that it is Lonely. We can't see that other people are there. I agree.

CoMedia Shared Histories, please click to see the full design, presents an interface for doing the following:

MACRO:
1) Choose a realm for context of interaction (SEE TOP BAR):
a) Share, Collaborate, View the same information (documents & Files & Desktop)
b) Add SubText to Services connected to Media (Flickr, NetFlix, GenArt) CoFlix, CoGen
c) Poll or Aggregate opinions on in a Geographical Space on Specific topics.

2) Filter the History of Information by:
a) Related community - friends who share similar or disimilar categorical interests, or the case of the CoFlix - genres, or values.
b) Filter by VALUE PROFILE, things that you prioritize in your search for new or existing material - authenticity, dialog, character dev, natural lighting....
c) Filter By Date, Rating. See Drag bars on the top and bottom of the picture.

Filtering provides a way of turning on and off different layers of information, and adding comments to those context specific layers. People interact in a Geographical Space that reflects their History, Preferences, and links them with similar people in a large community.

MICRO: Viewing Specific Content within a Distribution Matrix:

In this case I have choosen to illustrate CoFlix - a system for mutual viewing of a NetFlix movie at the same time. Within this application viewers can focus on the following:

A) Specific Points in the Timeline of the Film, and types of comment layers that might show up within that Chapter or Scene.
B) Interpretations and Directors Commentary - comments that have been signified as valuable and integral to the production.
C) Meta Relationships and Links to similar scenes - and peoples thoughts around those.

As people interact with the system it records their preferences and updates their Profile History. This provides a framework for determining where their comments might show up later for other people looking at a film a second time and leaving their own notes and comments.

The depth of such a system allows for Realtime Interaction and Chat - but also builds a History of interaction with the Medium that is context aware. This would solve the problem of aimless chat and focus the discussion on the medium at hand, utilizing the most immersive medium in popular culture, film.

Response 1: Social Metaphors

Knowledge is Discussion (forums) is Community is Information is Knowledge

Beyond Being There stipulates that we need to focus on the needs behind our forms of communication over trying to recreate face to face communication: “it is not so much distance that will be abolished, but rather our current concept of being there.” The Archival, anonymous, and semi-synchronous benefits of a system like a forum or an electronic billboard do go beyond being there, but must be rooted in a common goal that either requires tools to manage it’s complexity, or tools to manage the distance between us. Rather than phrase the question in terms of “being there” or going beyond reality - I would sidestep the question and phrase the problem in terms of “tools that seamlessly integrate and enhance our current forms of communication”. The effort to create forums that united distributed and specialized communities, and push to create mobile devices that can exchange logistic information and integrate our digital a physical lives are focused on this type of cooperative relationship.

Forums like the New User Interface Group (NUI), a social network for the development of multi-touch tables that I am a part of, use the metaphor of the “forum” an architectural space of Gecko-Roman origin, as a means of information exchange and discussion. They rely heavily on the advantage of searchable archives and shared problem solve for the DIY communities of hackers around the world. I might lack social compatibility or even language compatibility with many of the people in the forum, but we share pictures and links as a way of enabling community research. The interesting metaphor that seems most present in the forum is a pseudonym, this acts in part to allow “newbies” to post entries in the forum without being shy, and administrators to appear informal - we are all in this together with a common goal and initiative. Not only a first name basis, but nicknames and syntax reflect the democratization of information that has become the tacit goal of many online groups - to provide a “bottom up” distribution of information that allows anyone to engage. This requires the initiative and vision of a few committed organizers and low level voluntary commitment of a larger community.

The forum approach is limiting in the sense that “topics” of conversation often start “threads” that are linear and users will complain that a topic has already been discussed. Issues are not relevant once they have been solved. Another difficulty is that the forums don’t provide a means for determining if an issue is solved, or summarizing the outcome of the discussion. People have to dig through the entire archive of correspondence of all the members to understand context - even when a search engine brings up results of a particular thread the things that come up don’t necessarily correspond with the heading of the first post. Similar dynamics occur in a classroom when one or two people initiate the topic of conversation and don’t allow for a lot of deviation from the threads.

---

Icons as Visual Metaphors: a database of iconic images?

The concept of vision as “the primary medium of thought” - and that without the nervous systems activity the mind does not function well, is reinforced by the efforts we have to present information in a visually dense but informative manner - using less symbolic constructs than text. This led me in a new direction of thought regarding visual representation:

Has anyone ever created a visual database of icons in vector or scalable format? A collection of cultural images that by popular vote that are simple line drawings in and shape forms immediately recognizable as our modern system of hieroglyphics?

I'm looking for images with a uniform look and feel that could be substituted for words when people speak. What if I translated your words into images realtime? Would that process make you think of the content of your words in different terms? If such a database existed and could be accessed like a wiki - wikicon would be the title of the project.

If an icon is an essential visual metaphor - the treatment of images would rely primarily on peoples semantic and historical notion of concepts: see Building a Visual Database for Example-based Graphics Generation (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=857735)

If shapes are concepts that icons are refined from a collective consciousness (gestalt approach) . I want to utilize an icon browser in some way that harnesses the intelligence of our perceptive minds... we hardly ever see out of context - p44 (Visual Information) - so why not transform or interpret the context realtime?

What underlying metaphors would such a system reveal about the manner in which we speak and our visual representations of those concepts? If concepts are structured in metaphorical terms, ie Love is Acceptance or Love is a Journey - It would be interesting if someone typed Love and saw images of those Metaphorical associations: IE: A hug or a person traveling down a long road come up when someone types love. Surprising and thought provoking results? We sometimes understand concepts in new ways through images - in a more cohesive way than we do when replacing them with more words.