Traversing the Online/Offline Gap

Today I am finalizing my presentation, my final project for the CMC11 MOOC.

Until just now it was called "Bridging the Online/Offline Gap." I had already eschewed the tired old phrase "the Digital Divide," and it just hit me ... I am not talking about bridging. I also eschew "Bridging"!

Here are the notes I just made for myself. If you watch my preso you will hear me talk about this. If you don't, I'm sharing my notes here as food for thought. MOOC for thought...

"Digital divide" calls to my mind a thin line that we can step over ... and for the past 15 years or so the phrase has been used by those who believe that simply by putting computers in schools we will erase that line.

The online/offline gap is bigger. It is multi-dimensional. It is not only about economic status. It is generated within the differences in culture, geographic location, language, age bracket, literacy, resource availability, and, yes, economic status. It is generated between what is happening in community rooms, church basements, barber shops, nail salons, youth drop-in centers, and the buzz on social networks and virtual collaboration spaces. It happens in the space between the Amazonian medicine man and a nurse living in Canton, Ohio. It exists in the empty space between an Aboriginal father teaching his son their tribe's portion of the Songlines, and downloading the latest mp3.

The "digital divide," to me, reeks of "first-world" superiority -- those poor folks who are not connected need to learn from us and need to receive computers from us and then we can bestow (impose?) our information upon them.

The "online/offline gap" speaks to the veritable chasm between worlds within our world. As things stand now, I believe both sides are losing. The "gap" speaks to the wisdom that could be lost by not directly hearing the voices of offline communities. For "the connected" to document those voices and then post online is not the same as hearing those voices and engaging in exchange with those communities.

"Bridging the digital divide" has been used to impart the sprouting of a lifeline from those of us who consider ourselves Privileged to those whom we consider "underprivileged". It implies value in making everyone more the same.

"Traversing the Online/Offline Gap" implies a continuous two-way journey between different realms, with communities and people on both sides each having unique value. it is about honoring and understanding and celebrating our differences as much as it is about recognizing our shared humanity.

For my final project I am inviting you to explore how we might make that journey real, how we might establish a web of connections that traverses the gap. Until we do so, if we believe we have established an "Open" platform and are communicating "globally," we are deluding ourselves. We are missing out. We are qualifying what is important based on whether it can happen on the Internet. So, how do we traverse the online/offline gap? After spending time observing face-to-face exchange, reading and watching others' ideas about in-person meetings and activities versus online interaction, after looking at existing and unfurling modalities for human exchange that hint at the kind of gap-traversing I want to see flourishing on the planet, after stuffing it all in the corners of my mind to percolate for a while, and after somehow making it through CMC11 with my sanity intact, I propose that the key will not be "getting everyone online" but, rather, will lie in the hands of Online/Offline Ambassadors.

If you are in the CMC11 MOOC please tune in for this evening's presentation. If you are not, at some point soon after I finish this semester at Empire State College, should I survive, I will be uploading a narrated slideshow and will come back here to post the link. 

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Creativity: "a queer divine dissatisfaction"

I have been a much happier person since the day I shifted my view of creativity from being something I need to struggle to make happen, to understanding that it is something I need to surrender to. It is a force that I believe exists inside everyone, that is hammered out of us by (1) school systems that find it easier (for teachers) to have all the children doing the same exact work in conformed units of study, (2) by a society that is threatened by free thinking and creative expression, and (3) by a learned obsession with judging the work of ourselves and others according to established, artificial criteria imposed by whatever era and culture we live in.


In browsing around for material on "Week 5: Synthesizing and Refining Creativity" for the CMC11 MOOC, I found this story in which Martha Graham shares her philosophy with Agnes de Mille. Graham sees creative work as something that cannot and should not be judged, weighed and measured, and she speaks to the need to be open and to pursue "the urges that motivate you."


In 1943 Agnes de Mille was sipping sodas together with Martha Graham in a New York restaurant after the opening of Oklahoma, which met with "flamboyant success" that de Mille had not expected to receive. She thought about her prior works that she herself considered to be finer examples of her art, but which had gone neglected by critics and the public. In her 1991 book Martha: "The Life and Work of Martha Graham," she recorded the exchange with Graham:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly:

'There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.'

CMC11

Graffiti down the tubes?

Sue Thomas posted this pic of a great bathroom grafitto-Q, Why don't people write on toilet walls anymore? ... and wonders whether the "Because people are too busy facebooking of texting" graffito-A is true.

click on the picture to open a larger version

CMC11

Classroom

a box, a
yellow box
with motionless
           figures
   sitting, stranded,
         each wrapped
up in
       his own
   thoughts, worries,
                  feelings,
and bits of trivia
                 flying,
trying
           to find a
       poor, unsuspecting
head to enter
         and
     fill the spaces
       from which the
          dreams evaporated.


(c) ilyse na'omi kazar, 1972, age 15
written while desperately bored in Spanish class

with lasting gratitude to my English teacher Alex McKay
who submitted the poem to Typog (where it was published)
even though the picture the poem draws of school made him sad.

CMC11

The Multi-dimensional Transliteracy of Martin Rieser

I recently stumbled on the work of Martin Rieser when researching the Songlines of the Australian Aborigines. I had intended to blog about songlines, but for now that is deferred as I explore Rieser's site, YouTube talks and works.

Rieser was an early pioneer of interactive electronic and digital art:

Martin Rieser's Electronic Forest

In 1988, he exhibited at the First International Society of Electronic Artists (FISEA) conference held in Utrecht. In 1990, he created an interactive exhibition utilizing giant digital panels and interactive sound installations with an accompanying multimedia program on the theme of the Electronic Forest.

This collaboration with Electronic Musician Edward Williams featured 12 panels of Rainforest scenes created in Adobe Photoshop and Freehand and initially printed out in 120 A4 sections per panel.

Interactive sound devices based on "Soundbeam" were ceiling mounted and as an audience passed among the panels they triggered stored recordings of Rainforest sounds. Because the device was based on ultra sound detection, variations in visitor height would change the pitch and duration of emmitted sounds.

Fast-forward through many unique and fascinating projects to Rieser's artistic exploitation of mobile locational technologies.

A site-specific proposal for Manchester, Riverains is a multi-user mobile story game, which collaboratively maps an imaginary world onto a cityscape. Riverains are souls tied to watery energies, running under our cities in rivers, cables, sewers and tunnels. They travel unseen by these invisible routes and cluster around sites of past experience. Participants can use their mobile phone like a douser to discover this hidden world, which will correspond to real underground locations aligned with the sites of notable events, and, then use the Riverain’s overheard tales to map those sites and find clues and directions to others.

One can play as a team and eventually add one’s own stories and avatars. Manchester has a rich underground world of hidden or “lost” rivers, nuclear fallout facilities and command centres and Second World War bunkers, in addition to Victorian sewers and underground railway system. It also has an archeology going back through medieval to Roman times. The Riverains will be drawn from this rich history and from the City’s annals of poverty, industrial revolution, political protest, commerce and innovation, gang warfare, gun crime and uncanny happenings. The project will map video sprites and stories across a large area of central Manchester. 

The reason I consider Rieser's work to be  "multi-dimensionally transliterate" is because it melds digital technologies, including communications technologies, into real-time-and-space (3-D) installations, and many of his projects such as Riverains are mapped along a timeline  (now we're up to 4-D). But Riverains and other installations in his CV "fold time up" by using modern media and living human input to tour ancient times and mythologies, adding superimposed commentary from the present onto the record of and even infrastructure from the past.

How many dimensions do we count, then, now that we're talking about messing around with linear time, and incorporating dynamic unpredictable input arising from human interaction with his work?

CMC11