Capiderm: The Anti-Consumerism Patch (2006)
Tired of falling prey to the wrath of consumerism? Addicted to the exhilaration of burning through your paychecks through the purchase of useless name brand items? Can’t resist the hypnotic spectacle of commercial spaces?

Introducing Capiderm - the anti-consumerism patch.

Capiderm uses active Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS) tags to trigger anti-shoplifting alarms on EAS gates. Being EAS is a standardized system implemented in most chain stores, one active EAS tag is effective for all EAS-equipped stores.Through the use of Capiderm, your desire to shop is curbed through the triggering of store alarms upon your entrance. Through this action, the quality of your shopping experience is compromised, deterring uncontrollable consumerism habits.

GotHacked.com - Starbucks Hack (2005)
in collaboration with Chris Barr and Chris Ferrari

Another day, another five dollar cup of coffee from a homogenous corporate chain. Well, at least not today. With this action we set up a small table next to Starbucks on Buffalo’s Elmwood Avenue. The table held fresh brewed coffee, cream, sugar, cups and spoons and was equipped with a sign that read “Free Coffee & Conversation.”

For a few hours on a chilly day people walking down the busy Elmwood Avenue could have a free cup of joe and some decent conversation. With a simple gift of a cup of coffee people began to become open and willing to share their stories and ideas. Our invitation offered people a place to interact with each other in public unbound from the role of consumer.

Hotdogs for Communism (2002)
in collaboration with Chris Ault, Jim Bromley, Greg Chapman, Maris Malejs, Brandon Merkel, Jeff Walton, and Chad Williams

Hotdogs for Communism was a installation in Fredonia, NY. As people filed out of a orchestra concert, we gave out free hot dogs amongst the cold grey walls of King Concert Hall. Surrounded by giant video projections displaying short segments of video, the audience was confronted with situation which was both spectacular and absurd.

Below is excerpts of work which I contributed to the event.

Posted: November 30th, 2007 under personal work.

Posted: November 27th, 2007 under Uncategorized.

I just stumbled across an absolutely brilliant video made by Douglas Coupland (yes, the author of Generation X and jPod). All I want to do now is spew out quotes from it. If you read this, please watch the videos. I love this guy. (part1/3, part2/3, part3/3.) 

Posted: November 26th, 2007 under Personal Thoughts.

All of this code below I have written in the Arduino environment for Open Columns, a project headed up by Omar Khan, a professor in the School of Architecture at the University at Buffalo. This piece had its opening on 9/15 for Beyond|In Western New York at Buffalo Art Studios in the Tri-Main Building, and it will be there for 3 months. I strongly feel that since I wrote 100% of this code, I have the right to do what I want with it. So here in this blog, I will put it into the public domain. Use it for reference, copy it, do what ever. It is open source.

So here it is.

Posted: September 17th, 2007 under Code.

Rules:
Each player controls three boys. Whoever has one boy successfully upgrading to Pope wins the game.
There are four stages in this game, altar boy, priest, bishop and pope.

Players roll the dice to progress. Altar boy can only go forward. However, priest, bishop and pope are allowed to go any directions they want.

There are two upgrading zones on the board. But players can only upgrade alternatively in the two zones. You can not upgrade in the same zone consecutively.

There are two confession zones on the board. If a player lands on the zones, he is sent to the confession room on the side. The player loses a turn and has to answer the other players’ question honestly.
There are two pray zones on the board. If a player lands on the zones, he has to roll the dice again. If the dice shows six in number, his prayer comes true. He can move himself to wherever he wants except the upgrading zone. Otherwise, the player loses a turn.

When opponent players land in the same grid. Priest and bishop can put altar boys to confession room. Bishop can put priest back to altar boy. If they are in the same level, both go to confession room.

The Secret Society Rule: There is an entry to the choir schools. Only altar boys can enter choir schools. After enter choir schools, they have to go through the purple zone before leaving. A choir boy gets upgraded when landing in the same grid twice with a priest or a bishop. Upgraded choir boys can kick a priest or bishop that has helped him upgrade out of the game if he is now in a higher level than them.

Posted: September 11th, 2007 under Designed Play.

According to Huizinga play is:
Free. Play is voluntary. Players involved are never obligated to play a game have the freedom to remove themselves from it at their own will.

Not Real. Play as a system occurs outside the domain of the real world.

Repetitive. The rules involved with play are repetitive and can be replicated not only within the play itself, but as a function to repeat the play.

Limited. The ‘playing field’ in which games take place is closed, not only in the context of space, but in other contexts such as time.

Ordered. All play has an order to it. Often time this order is embodied in rules. These rules, regardless of their complexities, must be mutually understood by the participants.

Huizinga made a relationship between play and feast, and more broadly play and ritual. In his analysis of this relationship, Huizinga makes the observation that ritual complies with a definition of play. However he points out that play and ritual fundamentally differs if look at the consciousness of the participants. In other words, in ritual the participants are not required to realize it is not real. If is often the case in ritual where the participants mistake ritual for reality. It is here where Huizinga starts to imply the importance of play’s role in real life ritual practices, namely religion. Play in his words “leads us deep into the problem of the nature and origin of religious concepts (Huizinga, 25).”

I think Huizinga has a point here. On the surface religious practice seems to have its methodological roots sunk into play. Thinking about this religious ritual whose operational rules are practiced by its participants seem to also act upon an unknown set constituative rules. Looking at religion, play methodology seems to best fit well with its practices which fall outside of reason and evidence. Religious practice emphasizes blind acceptance and discourages the attempt to understand constituative rules. It is here where the study and understanding of play demonstrates a potential strategy to understand the practice of religious ritual.

To explain how the constituative rules and operational rules intersect beyond the formal rules to create a unique game identity, it is first important to define both terms:

Constituative rules are the rules that make up the fundamental logical and mathematical structure of a game. Compared to operational rules, constituative rules are abstract and can be thought as the back-end structure of a game.

Operational rules are the rules that the participants enact in order to play the game. It is essential that the players are aware of these rules to successfully play the game. Because of this, these rule often have a written version which accompanies the game.

Together, these two sets of rules help compose the formal identity of a game. Even though the (implicit) constituative structure of a game does not always mirror the (explicit) operational rules, the operational rules must somehow be mapped onto the constituative rules for the game to make sense. In my understanding of this relationship, the constituative rules behave much like the source code of a website, and the operational rules behave like the user interface. Because of the consistency of web page interfaces, the user readily knows how to navigate (operate) from one web page to another. Often the user does not know of or understand the underlying source code behind a web page, which is not usually important to web site navigation.

In the game Rock-Paper-Scissors, both the constituative and operational rules are pretty straight forward…and closely mirror each other. The operational rules in this game can be understood as:

The players substitute the three elements of Rock, Paper and Scissors with representative hand signals. These hand signals are delivered simultaneously by the players.

The Outcome of play is determined by the following:
Rock wins against Scissors
Scissors wins against Paper
Paper wins against Rock

Write the previous set of statements as a computer programmer would write it and figure out the probabilities of each of the actions and you quickly have your constituative rules.

Chess on the other hand, is a very complex game with very different constituative and operational rules. Even today in the game of chess we have computer scientists whose supercomputers are still trying to determine a more accurate set of constituative rules. In recent years, the machine has eclipsed top chess human in the understanding of these rules. This is demonstrated as computers such as Deep Blue have consistently defeated masters such as Garry Kasparov. Meanwhile the operational rules of chess are simple enough to be understood a 5-year-old. For example, pawn pieces can only behave in certain explicit ways while bishops behave in another way.

Checkers, a game whose constituative rules has been recently ’solved’ also has a much simpler set of operational rules.

Posted: September 4th, 2007 under Designed Play.

“All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude” - Marcuse

In the past half-year it has occurred to me that the economic strategy of sites such as Myspace and Friendster as well as Blogger not only depend on voluntary self-disclosure but thrive on it. I have had multiple discussions, both within and outside classes, which have revolved around the topic of social networking sites sociological function. These discussions have brought up the realization that social networking sites serve as efficient tools in the maintenance of strong ties through the creation of self-disclosing social environments. This purpose is even expressed in the title of social networking sites. Names such as LiveJournal and Myspace imply the very purpose of the voluntary revealing of personal information.

This observation immediately sets off a red flag to me in the sense that social networking sites make revealing personal information not just a popular, but social networking sites make it recreational to reveal personal information in a proprietary domain. The very existence of the social networking phenomenon has emerged out of a proprietary capitalist system owned by a handful of powerful economic interests. Sites such as Myspace, valued in the billions of dollars, wield much economic power. What is extremely problematic about this fact becomes the notion that the same powerful interests who own social networking sites also implicitly encourage self-disclosure in their property space. Furthermore there interests take a power advantage through their ability to have the informational advantage.

Before I go on, I wanted to make a distinction and point out that personal information is NOT private information. Even if this is the case, the social acceptance of self-disclosing of personal information in a forum that is public does effect the line of what is socially considered private and what s socially considered public.

I have stated that sites, such as Myspace, are implicitly encouraging the revealing of private information as a recreational activity. Not only is the broadcast of self-disclosures popular perceived as recreational, but the self-disclosure practices on Myspace is a integrate part of the social network culture.

Bringing in the idea of culture into social networks, the idea of tradition also sets in. By bringing up tradition, I am referring to repeated cultural patterns of practice or belief. A less appealing definition would include a set of general, and often unconscience, cultural habits.

The skeletal structure of social networking sites has been erected, but who generates the content? Who habitually creates the meat of Myspace, or Friendster, or Blogger? It is the users. I find this incredibly interesting since the emergence of user-generated sites, the broad majority of the users seem to lack the criticism dealing with user-generated information. If I was to bring this observation up to a user, I would speculate that they would generally understand my point but have not thought critically about it before.

Because of a lack of awareness, the users, or more descriptively the produsers*, are at a disadvantage when if comes to issues like control and power. In the mind of the creators and owners of social networking sites, to withhold the social awareness that there sites are user-generated is crucial. The amazing thing the administrators of social networking sites have realized is that social networks are cultures themselves. What is additionally amazing is that these owners have used the cultural traditions as an exploitive device against the participants’ privacy interests. What seems to be happening in this case is the exploitive pitting of the consumers against themselves. The consumers are duly acting as the employees, collecting data on themselves, and posting it in a organized and digital environment, owned by a business interested in data collection. Even if this is the case, I don’t think that the labor issues involved is exploitive. There is a trade-off: The users get a new tool to maintain interpersonal ties for their labor of placing the content. What I feel is the exploitive practice lies in the consistantcy in the underlying site structures themselves. The administrators of these sites set rules forcing users to submit information within the easily aggregatable site structure. The hegemonic methods implemented in social networking site administrators, not only generate cultural acceptance of broadcasting potentially private information in a public setting, but exploit the use of the consumers themselves as part of the mechanism of the surveillance structure, namely a structure which caters towards efficient data aggregation by anonymous parties. It is here where cultural pressure, user privacy unawareness, and 3rd party agency to collect data coverges. At this vulnerable spot, the privacy of social networking site users compromised.

* “Produsers” - a neologism coined by Dr. Axel Bruns to describe the phenomenon of users acting as their own content producers.

Posted: August 31st, 2007 under Privacy, Social Networking.

I was thinking today about the relationship of individuals social network site profiles to other individual profiles and I could not shake off the Hofstadter’s term “implicasphere.” I know that other ideas such as Habermas’ public sphere or people such as Barry Wellman could better illustrate the structure of a social network in different ways, but for some reason I really wanted to see if I could inject another model.

When Douglas Hofstadter coined the term “implicasphere” in Metamagical Themas, he was referring to the radii of associations which encircle each ‘word’ passing through the imagination. Therefore, if I was to speak to you the word ‘green’, you might readily think of money, or envy, or trees. Each of these associations closely encircle the word green within it’s implicasphere. Common adjectives such as colors have enormous implicaspheres mainly because the number corresponding associations. More specifically, nouns such as ‘parrot’ usually have smaller implicaspheres due to the lack of close idea associations. Hence in an implicasphere, the word, idea, or speech act, represent the focus, and the distance the associated word, idea, or speech act away from the focus represents the closeness of association. Thinking about Barthes and Semiotics, it almost seems like one could derive an equation for the length of the radius based on the number of common signifiers in both of the ‘words’.

Interestingly enough, it seems to become a common practice for an artist to reach for a specific speech acts with have few associative signifiers, yet remain within the same implicasphere when composing a work. less common associative signifiers in their visual arrangement of speech acts. It is here where an artist’s creativity reaches into the hyper-implicasphere to find workable solutions.

Comedians also seem to practice the same exploration of the hyper-implicasphere. Why are riddles funny?? Because the punch lines are barely associated with the set-up, riding on the threshold in-between making sense and not making sense!! Why do ducks have webbed feet?? To stamp out forest fires!! What’s the difference between Picasso and Smurfette?? They both have blue periods!!

But I’ve digressed…

If we look at individual profile within a social network and if we look at the links, sub-networks, etc. present on the profile, a different type of implicasphere emerges. This cultural implicasphere, centered around the individual contains multiple spheres of associations. From the readily accessible direct links from the profile to discriminating and cultural terms which requires an external search engine to find links, the cultural implicasphere starts to accumulate strange associative complexities. So in this sense, social networking profiles can be seen a conglomerate of associated cultural terms, hyperlinks, and keywords.

Anyway during today’s internet derive I came across something quite interesting: an implicasphere ‘game’ named Human Brain Cloud. Basically what it is…here, I will directly quota Kyle Gabler, the creator of the game: “The Human Brain Cloud is a massively multiplayer word association “game” or experiment … or something. The idea is that given a word, a player types in the first thing that comes to mind and the results are combined into a giant network.” Personally, I think the links between word association webs (implicaspheres) and social networks are interesting and speak directly about the culture in which they are associated.

Posted: August 30th, 2007 under Social Networking.