Rhizome.org

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  Flamingo Breeze, Part 4 (2010) - Matrix Metals: Video by Ivan Gaytan

  Posted: 26-February-2010, 6:00pm CET by Ceci Moss

  
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  Interview with Sinan Ascioglu: OpenProcessing Architect

  Posted: 26-February-2010, 7:00pm CET by Tim Stutts

  "Driving through Iceland? sketch by dotlassie. Winner of Rhizome's Tiny Sketch Competition.
  

  [OpenProcessing.org] is a site that has built a community around sharing visual coding examples created in Processing. As user number 36, I had the unique privilege of watching the idea take shape, while in a thesis group with Sinan at NYU?s Interactive Telecommunications Program. During it?s first two years of activity, the site has grown to host thousands of user-generated sketches and subsequent conversations between artists / programmers, teachers, and students from around the world. Sinan and I escaped the snow recently at a café outside Washington Square Park to discuss OpenProcessing?s origins, Rhizome?s collaboration with OpenProcessing in the Tiny Sketch competition, and what we can expect for the future. - Tim Stutts

  Tim: How did you first come up with the idea for OpenProcessing?

  Sinan: I guess the first thing to talk about is OpenVisuals, which was my Master?s thesis project at ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program, New York University). I was reading Edward Tufte?s books at the time, and I became very interested in data visualization. In the meantime I was also fascinated with the social revolution that was happening on the web, through a class I was taking at NYU with professor Clay Shirky. Before studying with Clay, I didn?t understand Facebook?I didn?t even have a Facebook account. I knew I was missing some concepts, and wanted to understand what was going on. Through his classes, I decided that my thesis would have a social component. I also discovered ManyEyes, a site where users can upload datasets, and choose between different the visualization methods for augmentation. Users comment on each other?s visualizations, and may even suggest other ways of looking at or representing the dataset. What was missing from ManyEyes was the ability to contribute new visualization methods. During this time, I was involved with the Processing community, where many users were creating visualizations, and I thought, why can?t there be a platform for bringing visualization artists and dataset owners together? That?s when I started building the OpenVisuals platform, which utilized a Processing library to mix datasets and visualizations. That library made it possible for a visualization to work with any dataset. While I was working on this, my advisor, Daniel Shiffman, who used Processing to teach programming classes, was thrilled that I?d come up with a way for people to upload Processing projects onto a website and attach datasets to them. He pushed me to expand my approach and wanted to know if I could make a website where users could upload any kind of processing applet, not just data visualization. The Processing community didn?t have a space for that?the Exhibition section on the Processing website is just handpicked projects, that linked to works that individuals had uploaded on their own blogs or websites. So one night I just copy / pasted all of the source code from OpenVisuals server to a new server for OpenProcessing. After that I found initial users by testing it out with students in Daniel?s classes taught at ITP.

  Tim: Did you pursue OpenVisuals anymore?

  Sinan: I took it down, because I didn?t have the time and resources to keep it up. OpenVisuals required more attention, because it was focused on Data Visualization. Plugging your data into something another user created was a very a complicated concept. The target audience was also very small, compared to the core Processing user-base.

  Tim: For OpenVisuals, do you also think it made more sense for potential users to have those visualizations exist on their own websites or blogs, where they might have more relevance to the message they were trying to get across?

  Sinan: I think that to make a site like this work, one needs to think about the value. Why do you post photos on Flickr, as opposed to your own blog? So you need to improve the value of a website, which requires devoting time and attention responding to people and a great deal of development effort.

  Tim: Can you describe an example of an effective data visualization done in OpenProcessing?

  Sinan: The right word is ?shared? in OpenProcessing. One thing that comes to mind is an Obama speech visualization that shows which words were used the most in his speeches. ?Obama Victory Speech Word Cloud? by Iain Sproat
  

  Tim: OpenProcessing is also about sharing visualizations and their source code. This code can be seen as a separate entity and point of critique, from the actual visual result, which sets OpenProcessing apart from other user-generated sites, like YouTube and SoundCloud, that may also provide a commenting layer, but lack an additional layer for a script or score. What percentages of users are using the site to share and comment on source-code, versus simply showing the visual result of some piece code?

  Sinan: It?s a tough call to give a percentage. It?s hard to measure because, as you?ve described, whatever you upload is both a visual and source-code. You can?t upload pieces that are only visual or only source-code. In general, people on the site seem to enjoy going through the source-code of the examples that they like, and trying to reverse-engineer how these pieces were thought up or created algorithmically. Like any user-generated site, most of the comments are along the lines of, ?awesome,? ?great,? ?I really love it??but the rest are about the source-code. Sometimes it takes just two lines of code to produce a very exciting visual result.

  Tim: How does an open-source community creating and sharing work change the relationship for those involved identifying as artists or programmers?

  Sinan: Processing is sitting at a very interesting juncture between those two paradigms that didn?t really exist before. It promotes the idea that a programmer can be an artist and that an artist can be a programmer. If you ask the people whether they identify as a programmer or artist, often they just pick one of these titles. I, for example, wouldn?t identify myself as an artist for the pieces that I do in Processing?I would call myself more of a programmer. But that?s not entirely correct, because I am using my programming skills to make creative choices that produce visual effects. And maybe a third category to consider would be a designer, who finds a visual solution through programming. But back on the topic of artist versus programmer, look at Casey Reas?s work. He?s using programming to generate the art algorithmically. He creates art, which draws on principles such as recursion and inheritance, which are expressed in the art form that he?s creating. It is very hard to make a distinction if what he is doing art or programming. It is definitely a new category, a combination of both.

  Collection for Interactivity (DMA 28), Winter 2010, UCLA
  

  Tim: Do you think sharing source-code for a piece can make it less valid as an artwork? Exposing the source-code can remove a lot of the mystique around how a work is generated, and open it up to being copied. Will this impact a work?s perceived monetary value?

  Sinan: That?s a tricky question, but I would say in general, that sharing source-code results in the creation of better things. It?s for the greater good. The breadth of the source-code becomes the brush of the artist. How you use that brush defines the visual output. Speaking to the monetary value issue, look at painting. Would you be interested in seeing how Van Gogh uses his paintbrush? Yes. Would this lower the price tag on his paintings? I don?t think so. Coding involves copy/pasting at some level, but we?re to a point now where we?ve skipped passed this concern of ownership, and are focused more on building something else on top of it, rather than just blatantly copying it. With OpenProcessing, people are also doing proper attribution to each other?credit given, where credit is due.

  Tim: Did the Classrooms feature, which you?ve defined as ?a place where one learns or gains experience,? and Collections, ?a group of objects or an amount of material accumulated in one location,? come about for that reason? Did you see people building on examples and want a way for that to occur within a defined space? No doubt collaboration is happening within OpenProcessing, but it can be rather difficult tracing the social aspect without searching through tons of applets and conversations.

  Sinan: Classrooms can be used in whatever way those who create them choose to use them. For example in one of Casey Reas?s classrooms, students are building a robot in their first class. The next applet demonstrates how to move that robot. In every lesson students add something onto that initial robot. Showing the source-code each step of the way, breaks down the traditional model of having students come up with something entirely on their own. They can copy and reuse the code, so the assignment becomes more about modifying code. In my undergraduate studies, we were disciplined for sharing code with each other. But nowadays, in more and more classrooms, it?s perfectly acceptable to share and collaborate with your fellow students.

  Tim: A feature implemented earlier on in OpenProcessing was being able to tag an applet. You might leave the meta-tag, ?object-oriented? or ?amoeba? on a recently uploaded applet, and this would enable users to view all applets, with this tag. In a sense these form a kind of collection. How do you distinguish pre-defined Collections or Classrooms from these tag-based collections?

  Sinan: I like playing with this idea. Initially Collections were created to find a way out of the tag model. There was a long tag in German that was being used a lot as a unique identifier for a collection. Then I noticed that this was a class from Germany that was taking their sketches and tagging with something no one else would use, so that you could click on this tag and view all of their applets. So Collections were created to allow anyone to place an applet within a larger group, whereas Classrooms were created to give instructors their own space to post applets of their choosing. It?s not surprising that there are more applets tagged ?tree,? than there are in the ?Tree? Collection. The tag identifies an element of the applet, which could scale anywhere from being a small aspect of that applet that is tree-like, to something whose entire form is a tree. That?s where Collections are useful.

  Tim: I?m thinking of the Flickr group, ?One Tree Photo,? where every image is a photograph of one tree.

  Sinan: Exactly. It makes sense to put those things under one collection?they really deserve their own space. Tags in Flickr are more about adding keywords that reflect elements of your photo that could occur at any level. So you can use the group as a way of getting to a place, and then follow the trends outside of that group by navigating the tags.

  Tim: Can you talk about Rhizome?s Tiny Sketch competition, which was run through OpenProcessing? It?s interesting to me that the initial constraint was to create a very compact applet that would fit into a single Tweet. This competition harkens back to the Demo scene of the early 90?s, where audio-visual programmers would try to pack an executable file down into a very small file size.

  ?the_flow? sketch by Ryan Alexander for the Tiny Sketch Competition.
  

  Sinan: Tiny Sketch is a great topic to talk about in terms of where source-code fits in. The source code of submitted sketches became more of an art than the resulting work. The idea came from Rhizome after they emailed me wondering about the character limit for applets and what could be possible. The initial idea was to create guidelines limited by an entry that could be submitted over Twitter using a custom hash-tag, one that would require the program to be under 140 characters. Rhizome wondered if that character limit would be enough to create an interesting program. Could the limit be made shorter or would it need to be longer? Initially I sat down to do a sketch consisting of 140 characters and then another of 200 characters to learn about the different limiting factors. One thing I discovered right away is that if you wanted something that incorporated motion, you needed to include setup() and draw() functions. Adding those could take 20-25 characters. If you wanted to include Mouse interactivity, it added even more characters. In the end we settled on a 200-character limit. It was amazing to see people crunching code, finding those hacks to make the source-code shorter and shorter. After a while someone discovered that you didn?t even need to use the setup() function all. In another instance, someone realized that to type text on the applet, you didn?t actually need to load a fonts at all?there was a default font that could be called simply be typing a few characters. Processing Co-creator, Ben Fry, even blogged about this. Not surprisingly people were also creating single-letter variables, and assigning the variable types within related groups (i.e. int t, m, n). All the while there was a lot of collaboration taking place through comments left below the entries by other participants.

  Tim: Could people go back and re-upload a new sketch, once a shorter way of coding was discovered?

  Sinan: Yes they did. For example, if you?re a beginner to Processing you learn about the size() function, which determines the width and height of the applet?by default this is 100 x 100 pixels. With the OpenProcessing website, you can set the size using parameters that exist externally from your source-code, by way of an HTML text-entry field, when you upload a new applet. So once that was realized and discussed on the site, people went back and removed size() from their code and re-uploaded.

  Tim: Do you know what Rhizome?s criteria for a winning Sketch was? Did it have more to do with how much one could pull off with minimal code, how visually impressive a program was or was there some other criteria? What was the outcome of the competition?

  Sinan: The winner was chosen via vote by Rhizome?s members, and the criteria was pretty open as long as they followed the rules. It didn?t seem to be big deal of who was selected to be the winner though, because the whole competition was engaging and rewarding for everyone involved. The actual monetary award was only $200. I?ve seen comments participants left where they said how much they learned from these sketches. It was a challenge that brought people back to the fundamentals of the language. It often came down to an innovative use of math functions?a noise() function allowed you to created a road.

  Tim: How much time during the week do you devote to maintaining OpenProcessing? What do you enjoy the most about working on this project?

  Sinan: I would say an average of 20 hours. It?s a side project for me. When I was setting up the Classrooms feature, I was devoting a lot more time to it than I would usually. Another time I wanted to do a redesign of the entire application, and worked every night and weekend for at least a month on the site. With personal projects it?s really hard to count the time. Sometimes you?re just on the subway thinking about it. I?m also responding to emails about OpenProcessing. I do a lot of browsing on the web to find out what people are saying about Processing, and from that I try to anticipate what?s next for the site. The greatest enjoyment I get from OpenProcessing is the community aspect. I see myself as more of a designer of a social platform. I define the methods of communication between users on the website, influence how people might understand sketches, and provide ways for people to browse through the content. What sets OpenProcessing aside from many other user-generated sites, is that people actually want to contribute to a knowledge base?it?s not just a way of cataloging media or being entertained.

  ?Bar Graph Example? sketch by Ekene Ijeoma
  

  Tim: What is in store for the future of OpenProcessing, especially given the challenges with Java and browser compatibility? Are there any features coming up that you can give us a sneak peak at?

  Yes, a big concern is what is happening with Java applets in terms of browser compatibility, particularly with Apple (iPhone doesn?t support them) and Google (Chrome browser for Mac currently doesn?t support them). For that reason, ProcessingJS ( www.processingjs.org/source ) has been a great contribution to the community?it allows you to copy / paste your Processing code into an HTML5 page and run it in JavaScript. There is also another solution someone has worked on, where you can copy / paste your code and it will run as a Flash SWF file. Java is really becoming a challenge for the industry to support, and the Processing community is one of the few groups still working with Java on the web. Occasionally there is a little Java widget for uploading a photo onto a website, but all of those websites make sure to offer another option through JavaScript or Flash. OpenProcessing, however, doesn?t have another option right now?it works on Java. ProcessingJS is probably going to be the best solution in the long run. Right now JS faces issues like not allowing developers to debug from within a webpage?errors are generated in the backend of the browser, where they go unseen. There are a couple websites that get around this issue by allowing you to code live on web. That?s a great idea, and something I was actually trying to do at some point. Mozilla is also working on a project in this vein called Processing for the Web. Another feature I am working on is the ability to select a portion of the source code from a sketch and comment directly on top of it. All in all there is no set direction in terms of where things will go with OpenProcessing. I?m looking to the community to drive it?I will continue to observe what they need and make it happen.

  Tim Stutts is a designer / programmer currently living in San Francisco. More info: www.timstutts.com

  
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  Videocracy (2009) - Alden Volney

  Posted: 26-February-2010, 4:00pm CET by John Michael Boling

  
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  World Community Grid Water Features (2010) - AIDS-3D

  Posted: 25-February-2010, 7:00pm CET by Ceci Moss

  
  
  

  A fountain and its natural form, the spring, are symbols of the miraculous life-begetting 'élan vital' that permeates the universe. In fact, life on earth is now thought to have begun in the nutrient-rich plumes of undersea hydrothermal vents, real-life fountains of life. But, when the image of the source is mimicked as Water Feature, a merely decorative, self-contained electric fountain, the maternalistic life-force is perverted into what amounts to abject MILF porn. The Water Feature is so wasteful and self-indulgent that it becomes the straw man in the argument against contemporary art as useless blubber for the tasteless elite. But? can't home and garden decor give back a little bit? Can't we efficiently retrofit some of our 'criminal ornaments' for a fairer future? If there is some leftover space inside their faux-marble fiberglass hollowness, we can definitely squeeze some useful nanotech in there? right? Let's finally answer Joseph Bueys famous challenge, ?Kann Plastik die Welt verandern?"?can sculpture change the world? with a resounding ?YES!"?as long as that sculpture contains a state-of-the-art-kick-ass-energy-efficient-linux-micro-PC that is totally discovering a cure for cancer.

  A group of spectacular cast-fiberglass fountains stand together on an elevated server-room floor. A Fit PC 2 (the smallest PC currently available, 96% more energy efficient than a standard desktop) is installed in each water feature. Whenever the fountains are plugged in, the Linux PC's will automatically boot up and run World Community Grid software, a distributed computing project which uses a massive network of PC?s around the world to model solutions for various humanitarian problems, such as: ?Clean Energy Project?, ?Influenza Antiviral Drug Search?, ? Fight Aids@home? and ?Nutritious Rice for the World". The delightful splashing of the water and twinkle of the energy-efficient LED?s act as relaxing and meditative status-light for the computers, tirelessly laboring within. Although there is no screen visible in the installation, the computation progress can be remotely monitored through a dedicated website.

  -- DESCRIPTION FROM THE EXHIBITION OF "WORLD COMMUNITY GRID WATER FEATURES" AT GALLERY NIKLAS BELENIUS

  
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  Whispering Pines 9 (2009) - Shana Moulton

  Posted: 25-February-2010, 8:00pm CET by Ceci Moss

  
  Originally via Flash Art
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  Ages ? (2010) - Spirit Surfers

  Posted: 25-February-2010, 4:00pm CET by Ceci Moss

  
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  feedback land (2009) - Andrew Benson

  Posted: 25-February-2010, 5:30pm CET by John Michael Boling

  
  
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  Using, Using, Used: Digital Folklore Reader, edited by Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied

  Posted: 24-February-2010, 6:00pm CET by Kevin McGarry

  
  

  Within the pages of Digital Folklore Reader, Olia Lialina, one of the book?s editors, refers to a claim by the social media researcher Danah Boyd, that some American teenagers identify as Facebook and others as MySpace?preferring a conformist and clean interface persona, or a rebellious and visually pimped one, respectively.

  This book, co-edited by Dragan Espenschied, is by all outward appearances a MySpace, brimming with exuberant design elements culled from all over the net and reaching deep into online history. The dust jacket repeats a background image of a unicorn perched on a boulder at sunset under a meteor shower. Its reverse is wallpapered in 32 by 32 pixel gif icons representing the gamut of popular user-generated online imagery: cartoon characters, porno ladies, geometric designs, quotidian objects, flags, logos, landscapes and text, from WTF to FREE TIBET. One layer deeper, the cover and back of the book are white, or, probably (in RGB concept), nothing. The spine is also nude, showing off the motley sequencing of pages inside, the first and last of which are a flat, vibrant #00FF00 green, allusive of web-safe color and maybe of a green screen, primed for content to be transposed onto it.

  Published by Merz Akademie Stutgart, Digital Folklore Reader is divided into three sections: ?Observations? (the core texts, mostly republished essays by the charming, prescient editors), ?Research? (insightful student papers) and ?Giving Back? (documentation of student projects). Folklore can be considered history told from the perspective of a certain cultural group, and this conception of folklore is precisely what the book endeavors to record. Digital culture involves all kinds of players, including inanimate ones that transmit and present information, and this folklore belongs specifically to users. The fact is writ large, literally, right before the table of contents, in big neon letters spelling out the eerie, friendly question, ?DO YOU BELIEVE IN USERS??

  
  
  

  True to the spirit of folklore, from among the nuanced, idiosyncratic accounts and observations that make up part one, there is a repeated narrative that defines the historical significance and instability of users. It is a trauma that practitioners of net art experienced along with all early internet users: digital culture?s abrupt shift from utopia to? something else. And this something else has long since revealed itself to be ordinary. Online terrain, like any other, is ripe for colonization by the corporate mechanics that pilot Western society. It?s hard to predict the future, but it seems that as of 2010 most of these stories are past tense. Users, whose autonomy is already diminished, remain in constant threat of being squelched out like the Na?vi. (A side note in keeping with the book?s multi-tiered, multi-tasking structure: the data cloud directory on page 16 confirms that ?Users,? tagged 17 times in the book, and ?Money,? 12 times, are indeed the number one and two most frequently occurring keywords.)

  There is a semi-structural, manifesto-ish quality to much of part one, which is both instructive and playful. Text is organized into narrow columns, two per page, which keep a reader?s eyes constantly scrolling. Espenschied?s article ?Put yer fonts in a pipe and smoke them,? about the control system that maintains the abysmally limited selection of browser-compatible fonts, is itself rendered in something like handwritten fine point blue marker. This playfulness, and cohesiveness, makes a great vessel for persistent and at times rigorous analysis of online life, which itself has always been rooted in exploration, discovery and excitement, and benefits from complimentary conveyances (especially when things get technical!).

  
  
  

  Building upon the contextual foundation laid by the bubble-bursting end of Eden fable (which, I should say, is rarely harped on as such), the essays in part one?including Dragan Espenschied's on online idioms finding influence offline, and Jörg Frohnmayer?s on virtual reality, written in collaboration with Espenschied?linger on other touchstones and tangents, such as Lialina?s provocation in ?Who Else is the Cloud?? (2008) that computer culture is underdeveloped because computing power is mainly spent on making computing invisible (no wires, increasingly slimmer machines). She points out that this direction is making people forget about computers. This alludes to a kind of role reversal, in that without a clear vision of the tool used by a user, it is less certain as to whether the user is really the user or the used (that would be: the tool).

  Part two, ?Research,? features four recent essays examining four contemporary online phenomena and could be read as products of the folkloric tenets outlined in part one. Each is crisp and informed, and their topics? each a bit cheekily pop, to varying degrees?are approached with a pragmatic consideration for history and scholarship. In ?I Think You Got Cats on Your Internet? (2008), Helene Dams takes on the trope of the lolcat, seizing on the importance of the funny online kitty lexicon as ?a gigantic, global insider joke.? This is an oxymoron that quite profoundly demonstrates the internet?s facilitation of an alternative economy in which content can carry multiple possession statuses at once?as examples: both public and private; or all of individually owned, shared, and free. An insider joke isn?t diminished by infinite insiders (or nurtured by exclusivity). Total dispersion forms social gospel.

  
  
  

  This system of abundance and ambidexterity is what marketers study to orchestrate the internet?s capitalistic effects. Specifically they look at user behaviors within the system, which is a subject of Dennis Knopf?s paper ?Defriending the Web? (2009). He begins with well-chosen industrial/post-industrial parallels, noting the late nineteenth century philosopher Georg Simmel?s observation that the urban-dwelling (thus more besieged by technology and interfaces) ?metropolitan type of man? copes with her surroundings by shifting from a reliance on the heart to ?that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality.? Knopf relates this to the further stripping away of personality that occurs nowadays when a user constructs an online profile. Further, just as Fordism (mass production?supply courting demand) was usurped by Toyota?s ?post-Fordism? (mass production, to-order?demand dictating supply), the author explains how progressive marketers make use of this wealth of indexical personal information to discern what consumers want produced (so that they can consume it, duh). Netflix, with its algorithmic recommendations, is appraised a perfect example of this Sisyphean modern convenience.

  Isabel Pettinato?s inspection of viral media?s attributes, uses and historical trajectory, ?Viral Candy? (2009), identifies the effective Viral as ?susceptible to imitation? by other users, thus proliferative. The essay synthesizes (probably by virtue of part two?s order) ideas about user behavior and economic power structures, touching on aspects of Dams?s and Knopf?s. Pettinato explains how Chris Crocker, the blond, electrifyingly distraught Britney Spears fan ?became an Internet celebrity via the dynamics of cultural participation alone," which is essentially an apocalyptic example of the post-Fordist user want?realization machine, in which the commodity that is produced began as and remains a user himself! When the author pinpoints the plot and genre qualities that make for a successful Viral she summons Henry Jenkins?s interpretation of a Cadbury commercial in which a huge Gorilla performs the stirring drum solo in Phil Collins?s ?Something In The Air Tonight?. Jenkins states that ?[The Viral?s] absurdity creates gaps? (in the words of John Fiske) ?wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them.? Just as with the interior/exterior pleating of the lolcat paradigm, the individual viral video is read to contain an unlimited potential for expansion, based on its ability to open up attentive experiences in an environment carrying a serious attention deficit.

  
  
  

  On a lighter note, Leo Merz in ?Comic Resistance? (2009) investigates the symbolic significance of the cult font Comic Sans, tracing its origin to a failed Microsoft operating system, and linking its embrace by the electronic music scene to their co-morbid affinity for Roland synthesizers, whose originally intended purpose was also failed. Merz explains that "electronic musical instruments like the Roland and Comic Sans were both conceived as solutions to specific functional needs," and after their services were no longer required, they were repurposed through a transgressive act of abuse, that is ab-use: wrong use?a semantic framework that underpins much of the section?s concluding essay.

  The book?s third part, ?Giving Back,? reads more or less as an appendix. It is a sampling of projects made by new media and interface design students at Merz Akademie, presumably under the tutelage of the editors. One work, by Florian Kröner, cleverly titled Emolator (i.e. emo-generator), is a web application that applies template looks consisting of jet black, razor-styled hair, melodramatic body markings, etc., to user-uploaded photos. In effect, while a desired facade is achieved, the self-styled entity in the source image is immolated, amounting to a tight little double entendre. If the project is not particularly moving as an artwork, it does, as do many featured in ?Giving Back,? have a prolific life as a user interface, having served thousands around the world.

  
  
  

  The users involved with Tobias Leingruber and Bert Schutzbach?s Hoebot and LoveBot (2007) have also been served. Both bots infiltrated online communities of ?crazy parties and hot girls? on the German counterpart to Facebook, studiVZ, to conduct a creative anthropological experiment. The former automatically posted misogynistic, beer-oriented comments on the hosts?s walls, and in turn received access to personal data about the girls, along with invites to keggers. The latter utilized the information gathered by Hoebot to tell compatible subjects that they should get to know each other, earning a reputation as a creep and social pariah.

  Overall the projects are simple, practical exercises testing many of the topics discussed throughout the book. While in one sense I found the section to be a bit anti-climactic, it is interesting to consider these students as examples of users, in terms of how users have been positioned throughout the book?that is, as active entities, but as ones that are nevertheless subscribed to external protocols (commercial software, website templates, etc.). The students are more or less subscribed to the protocols of their teachers and to the ideas presented in this book. I don?t fault this at all. It?s a further illustration of the compromised but vital role of the user, as an evolutionary figure whose contributions to culture come by tests and trials, rather than mastery and molding. Similarly, Digital Folklore Reader is honest, inventive and comprehensible rather than comprehensive, chronicling what in digital culture is going and gone, while pivoting for the even longer trail of what is yet to be completed.

  Kevin McGarry is a writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a founding co-director of Migrating Forms, an annual festival of new experimental film and video, whose 2010 edition will run May 14-23 at Anthology Film Archives.

  
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  Call for Applications: Rhizome Internship

  Posted: 24-February-2010, 4:00pm CET by Rhizome

  
  

  Rhizome seeks a focused, responsible and mature candidate for a part-time internship. Responsibilities include assisting with the daily administrative upkeep of the organization, research and production support of the Rhizome website, coordination of organizational projects, correspondence with artists, members, and press, and management of various social media platforms. Interns must be familiar with contemporary art and savvy with the web and new technologies.

  The position is 8 - 16 hours per week and can be worked from home or at the Rhizome office, which is located at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Manhattan. The intern will report to the Senior Editor and Associate Director. Candidates must be based in New York and must be able to commit to 3 months. This position is unpaid, but academic credit may be arranged.

  QUALIFICATIONS: Candidates must be well versed with social media and the online environment. A keen interest in online marketing is a must. Education or advanced experience beyond the undergraduate level is highly desirable. The candidate should have strong writing and analytical skills. Knowledge of Microsoft Office software is required and basic experience with graphics and video editing programs, like Photoshop and Final Cut, is preferred.

  TO APPLY: Please email a cover letter, resume or c.v., to editor[at]rhizome.org. Review of applications will begin immediately.

  
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  ThingPit (2009) - Taras Hrabowsky

  Posted: 23-February-2010, 6:00pm CET by John Michael Boling