Games: Drawing Closer to (Virtual) Reality

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I'm writing a paper about the production of the beta-released sim game, rFactor 2, so I thought I'd share some thoughts on this forum.

The cybernetic tradition of communication immerses itself in the interaction between human and machine and of course machine and machine. Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics, explained that the way machines communicate is not overly different from the way humans communicate. Really, no matter how fantastic a video game is, the extension into imaginative world and characters, gaming really allows us to place ourselves into the environment. The game is designed around the inputs of a human controller and to communicate with the player in a way comprehensible to the human experience. And with further advancing computing technologies, gaming really draws closer to simulation than it does fantasy.

Think about graphics, a primary example. Each year visual effects get better and better, even if what is being depicted is far from reality. Lighting and environment mapping draws closer to what we would expect to see in reality. We might imagine a world of monsters and fairies on a parallel planet, but heavens forbid we imagine a world without reflective surfaces and lush sunsets! Then you've got games like Grand Theft Auto. Back in the third installment of the series it was an arcade experience at best. Think about our experience playing GTA IV last week now. The driving model simulated the real-world experience, albeit half of earth's gravity, and the experience of being a felon in the city was advanced just a bit closer to a realistic experience. Do take that with a grain of salt please.

In the world of consumer demands for drawing closer to realism, there's the old jolly bunch called the sim racers. A bunch of guys who want a racing experience so close to reality they practically feel the pressures from sponsors to perform well! rFactor 2 evolves from past games to try to tear down the LCD screen and millions of dollars that separates players from real racing.

It's not just the realistic driving model that renders us guys and girls so jaded. Sure when I lose at a game of Mario Kart I complain my rear tire pressures were too low and my differential lock was at too high a percentage to hold the corners, or we really like tinkering with suspension stiffness to try to gain 1/100th of a second from a lap time. But we want to feel the environment around us, not just in the car.

rFactor 2 simulates time and weather for added experience. The sun goes down then comes up again, it gets cloudy and darkens portions of the race track, then it starts raining. When the rain ceases, the track slowly begins to dry up. I said games are drawing closer to simulating real things, well the sim has no choice but to get it spot on.

When modders produce track for the game, they often consult Google technologies for data on the surrounding area, or they go out and take photographs themselves. Everything must be exact, down to the fence that encircles a cow pasture barely visible at 140mph.

There's much too many examples to go on. At what point, if ever, do we achieve a cadence to this pursuit of realism? Will there be a point where shooting someone in GTA is proceeded by a mortified spouse running to the streets and pleading why you commited the act? Will the death of NPCs cut short a long train of simulated life, perhaps that of the everyman who was just driving to work one day to feed his family? Sure one's game is of a fantasy genre, emphasizing creative creatures and worlds, but when will visual aesthetic hit that point where one says, "that's perfect, it does not need improvement." Will I ever admit rFactor Nth is real enough so no other feature ever needs to be implemented?

Are games an escape or just a mediation of reality? Our relationship with the machine (computer) seems to be one where we want the machine to be the simulacrum of the real world. We could just go outside for a walk, but an on-screen simulation rich in detail is far more impressive, but why? Stepping back in history, computing machines were designed to simulate the actions of humans in real environments with a machine that would shoot down planes on its own. The trend continues where we want the machine to simulate human narrative and action in worlds we could imagine existing in as much detail as technology facilitates. We destine relationships with machines that do as we do.

I was thinking about Deuze's lecture some weeks back where he discussed the polarized window computer. This just might be the future of computing: just a filter applied to the real world, or, our experience has been so deeply integrated with the computer it becomes mediated through it. With the video game we are not trying to segregate the real world for a fulfilling experience with the machine. I sometimes think were are working towards an overlay to real life. A  layer of game experience in a real environment to be discarded when the fun ends. 

It's a little scary, but I'll play a round or two.

Watch this video, about the proposed Google Glass 'augmented reality'. Is this when the computer becomes full integrated with real life? How could this change gaming?

 

 

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Hark! Music boxes and Silicone Chips! I am Thine Noble Machinist!

I am not a cyborg my friends. I haven't got wires dangling to and fro, the lenses from which I peer at the world through are indigenous to my own eyes, my hips are of bone, not ceramic, I can't give birth. I am flesh and blood, a pink bag of meat. 

Close your eyes friends, Shh, can you hear it? Listen, very closely, the music, listen! Alas no, for the music is in my head, you cannot hear the music, because the music only exists in me, and it is totally natural. The music has not been disrupted by the mediation of soundwaves, has not been misheard by inept ears, it is immaculate. I would like to hear it, for I never have, really. But to do so, I no longer can be the musician, the creator, but only the controller. It is me operating a plethora of sound machines, who will then make the music.

Awesome. Really though, when you think about all the favourite tunes you play on the old juke box, you're listening to machines making sounds. The artist 'performing' the piece is really long past. Michael Jackson on the radio? He isn't singing that, he's dead. What we're hearing is the beautiful noise of mechanical reproduction. The musician, other than being the intellectual property holder, is just the machinist who made it happen.

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I harness my instrument, and begin converting my thoughts to vibrations, to electromagnetic signal. Off it goes through a cable to meet new devices.

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The signal is modulated to a signal that will be later amplified. I adjust the many dials and knobs, trying to match the mechanized noise to what I've imagined in the beginning. My voice too becomes a signal, picked up by electromagnetic plates and sent to another instrument panel.

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I twist more knobs, slide faders, needing to create this mechanized version of me. I don't hear me, I don't hear my music, I hear a result, an aftershock. This bulk of electric signal is sent to the computer.

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See that, I'm on the computer. That's the sound visually represented by amplitude and time. The greyed-out wave form closest to the bottom is what remains of my voice. 'Sound exists only when it is going out of existence', Walter Ong has mentioned, and the sound from my vocal chords has long left, all that remains is the distortion it once made to electric current,= that could be captured and saved. This is a distortion of my thoughts, my voice. I've dialed-in, distorted and manipulated what once was it really is just a distortion. Speak into a microphone. That isn't you being amplified, it is the reaction circuitry has made to the disruption your voice has caused it.

I am not a cyborg, but I am an actor. I am the machinist in this relationship, the instruments, boxes, panels, computers and speakers are my musicians. I began a sort of chain reaction that led to what we classify as music (I hope at least, or I'm doing it really wrong!). Go to a social gathering and await that beautiful statement: "hey put the ipod on". It doesn't matter that that instant who should be making the music, who was the 'machinist' behind the work, but that the device which plays the music should be put to work to make music.

Did the song I made every really exist anyways before going out of existence? It was assembled in parts.

 

 

 

The Network of the City

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I was thinking about Kittler's piece from this week and some of the things I've read about urban development over the past week. Ultimately the city comprises a network in itself and within a larger network of capital, cultural and people flows.

Kittler mentioned that cities originally formed from the meeting of major passage or waterways. It's no surprise that a city is either on a major waterfront or alongside some major highway. This 'place' became a stopping point, and interchange, a place of commerce. Applying computer theory, Kittler discusses the term bus. On a computer, a bus is a circuit pathway through which information can travel. Here's an example: USB stands for Universal Serial Bus. Information from a wide array of devices can travel in unified fashion on this bus to the processing components. In the city we understand a bus as a major vehicle on which we can travel through the city network with ease. Now, with cities we also need to understand there's a difference between the vehicle we travel in, and the roads on which that vehicle travels.

Computer_city

If you look at a computer's guts, it's not hard to perceive it as a mini city, the circuits forming the roadways, the capacitors and chips representing buildings. If we think of the city from a computing perspective, we can see that the intersecting roads facilitate information and goods to travel through its own network and out to others. Underground or above, there is a network of wires and pipes that carry other 'flows', forgive the pun, the former exclusively carrying information throughout. The processor and RAM forming buildings, their jobs are to deal with these information flows- calculate and order them- and to store important information, respectively.

So I was reading a little more about urban revitalization and some of the strategies involving restructuring the certain industries in the urban core- manufacturing to information- and some of the ways the streets and facade are upgraded. Ultimately the aim is to re-engineer a variety of different flows. First is capital flow. More capital is suggested to go through a city that, in this state of the economy, better facilitates more capital flow. The vast money spent on arts and entertainment and the need for brains to design new high-tech things needs a good network to flow through efficiently, hence a city designed to handle these flows efficiently!

Next there's the flow of people. A knowledge economy needs knowledge sector professionals to form the bits of information that allow its function. Of course, the flow of people needs optimization on a physical level. The constant redesign of roads to accomodate bike lanes helps facilitate the flow of people to and from work seemingly better. The installation of a rapid transit system gets these people to where they need to go, within the confines of the city and out, better. 

Computer engineers make a career out of making electronic currents flow in higher volumes, more efficiently. Drawing comparisons to a real world city, we see that there are a number of flows too that need to be upgraded to handle the flows of information, capital and people, particularly capital nowadays. The city is thus re-engineered, often in very abstract ways, with the aim of making these different flows more efficient.

 

TL;DR - Cities are like computers in terms of networked flow.

Suspending the belief: Active Suspension and Dant's Driver-Car

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I just finished reading an article by Tony Dant, The Driver-Car, in which he explores Latour's actor-network theory (ATN) in the realm of the automobile. I found this to be a great starting point for my final paper.

So what exactly am I writing about? Drawing from an earlier blog post, I'm going to be unpacking the use of computerized, 'active' suspension systems in formula one and the controversy that led to their subsequent banning. I'll get to some gritty details in a moment.

ATN derives from the Social Construction Of Technology tradition, which acknowledges that technological innovation is in part shaped by social conditions. There are networks, which encapsulate the human and non-human actors (latter- actants) and the social conditions which permit and shape the actors within. A car for example requires a network including roads, gas stations, gasoline! (Dant, 2004 p. 68).

Dant then understands how human actors and automobile technology must function together in a way that forms the driver-car. This is a specific collaboration where the human actor and car need one another to function, although the human can still exist autonomously, though not as a driver. The driver-car is a type of assemblage.

Another point that is compelling is Dant's discussion of the driving field. For those of you who have driving experience, there is a field by which you understand the oncoming outside world when driving. Obviously there is the ever-necessary visual field, but there's more. Consider the resonance of the engine and vibration in the pedals when it's time to shift gears. When you brake for a stop light, consider how you monitor the stoppage power through the forward inertia and the vehicle pitching forward. This all form our field for driving, very much an engagement with the vehicle in many ways. So what if certain components of this field were eliminated from the equation.

The ATN discusses delegation, where certain tasks of human actors are instead performed by a technological action. This is a form of translation according to Dant, as the objects perform particular scripts that act as intermediaries for actors (p. 70).  What is the point? Active suspension basically works like this: A normal car's wheels are connected to the car through a system including a spring coil and an oil-filled shock absorber. When the wheel runs over a bump in the road, the wheel is pushed upwards to dampen the shock of the bump on the chassis and quickly springs back down (rebounds) to keep the car stable at speed. With active suspension, the springs and shocks are replaced with a hydraulic suspension system connected to a computer and monitoring equipment. It is designed to keep the car perfectly stable at all times.

 

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Discussing active suspension and other banned for 1994 innovations. From Grand Prix Review '93 (Autosport), 1993

So how do driver's respond? Normally one would feel a bump on the road, or the car pitching during acceleration and braking, rolling as it turns a corner. The driver now loses this component of his field; the task is delegated to a computer and hydraulic system. This is inasmuch as in 1987, when a driver's rear tire began deflating, the suspension compensated for the drop in ride height on that corner of the vehicle, masking what was going wrong with the car mechanically.

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From Autosport, July 30th, 1987

The technology was banned after 1993 in part of a controversy that the driver simply wasn't doing enough, well, driving. Technological innovation is governed by social forces. The social network of Formula 1 stated that drivers needed to be responsible for the car to a certain level, one that was not satisfactorily met by the current state of driver aids embedded in the vehicles. This is where I acknowledge a limitation in Dant's article: He does not seem to go into the electronic monitoring technologies that are commonplace in road vehicles, like all the gauges in the dashboard. With technology like active suspension, he does not elaborate on how this kind of delegation practice can dramatically alter the driver-car assemblage. The driver is now less attuned to what the car is action doing at high speeds. Moreover, what happened after the technology was banned. I need to research further into specifics, but there were complaints about how many 1994-spec cars were designed around active suspension systems, suddenly having to revert to a 'passive' (spring) system. Driver's were unable to adequately monitor the erratic handling of the cars that would have been compensated by the computer and were prone to crashing.

                I am fascinated not merely by the presence of a socially-guided assemblage of car and driver, but how the delegation to computer changes the very essences of driving. Then, in plucking out these technologies, how is this assemblage altered again  when a task for a computer system is in turn delegated to a human actor? Simply put, we cannot just replace the driver with a computer or vice-versa, the assemblage here is a much more delicate phenomenon.

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Enframing the window, and other thoughts

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About a year ago I was introduced to heidegger's 'question concerning technology' which was challenging to absorb. I'm happy to have gone through this piece again and it is highly appropriate for a media archaeology course.

Parallels can be drawn to Agamben's work as well, the latter of which draws comparison's to Heidegger's piece in his work. I understand that humans as a social being have this drive to uncover the world; grasp its essences, understand how it functions and how it can be employed. Technology at its essence is this process in practice. Technology is not its artifacts but how materials and conception are learned to be worked together in a particular way by humans. Through this 'revealing' we begin to see parts of the world not as things of nature but as standing-reserve. The ordering of human techne and standing-reserve constitutes 'enframing' This word I was taught to mean warehouse shelving. So our learned concepts of how to produce objects combined with our capacity to utilize worldly resources to produce them are stacked and ordered in a form of shelving. In other words, we might want to use the word apparatus here. Technology seems to be constituted by a conceptual apparatus of knowledge.


On Monday I attended Mark Deuze's lecture where he discussed some new media technologies and suggested how we could be becoming zombies in our use of them. It's interesting how we can apply the concept of Foucault's apparatus here. There seem to be non-physical laws that govern our approach to these media, like something that establishes how we use them everyday. The way we experience the world at times seems entirely through a screen. But it is not just this point that matters here. At one point in his lecture Deuze discussed how windows are soon to become interactive screens. If we think about the apparatus of the house, not the physical structure beneath the paint and drywall, but what we understand the 'essences of house' to be, we can think of certain components like rooms, floors, a roof, and even windows. Going beyond this there came a point when humans began seeing the beach not as a soft sand substance but as standing reserve- that the sands could become glass to make windows and function in a house.So when windows as screens become dominant as a component to the house apparatus, that one should see through to outside, but also further, to the whole world, our conception of window-ness changes too. That this glass has new possibilities as being an object to interact with, and our enframing of 'glass' and 'window' fall are slotted into new categories within computerized networks.

What also resonates is how the notion of standing-reserve applies to many things in the world that were revealed to us, and have taken new understandings. Think about all the mining ongoing to produce coltan for electronics? What about the mining for lithium so we can make them battery powered? The world transcends being an amazing collection of natural wonders to being merely resources to be used. They form part of the INFRASTRUCTURE to human production. interestingly, Heidegger discusses a runway as being standing-reserve, not used until a plane needs to take off or land. But we have an infrastructure roads too, they are conceptualized, planned based on particular apparatuses of how they should be laid out, constructucted, their width, etc. Comparing the industry of electronic technologies with road systems, we can at least identify how their infrastructures are formed from components of standing reserve and governed by an enframing of these and knowledge.

 

I've hammered off a number of points here to expand my thinking. I am still working hard to understanding Heidegger more, but I think he makes some compelling points about how technology is an enframing or an apparatus of certain knowledge.

Blackout Baby, Blackout!

'With the power lines down and the city in distress, have we forgotten how to function without them, no less?'

 

Two weeks ago we were discussing historical origins of electricity with the AC DC battle between Tesla and Edison. We also expanded on the notion of the 'ether' and how we've arrived at a point in our progress (once again this taboo word appears) that we may soon be doing away with wires as a medium for carrying electrical charges. Amazing! Just imagine your phone charging in your pocket, your laptop never needing to be plugged in, actually achieving the minimalist aesthetic in an entertainment space.

We've come a long way my friends. <Blackout> It all stops. The lights are out, the systems are down.

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Everything we think we've achieved through our research in electricity is diminished when the electrical current ceases to flow. Think about it, the university had to close this afternoon; the reliance on electrical systems rendered classrooms useless -classrooms situated in windowless spaces were designed with the electric light in mind- communications were gone. We were left wondering what we were going to do about school work and tutorials! The electric current, as I've past commented, may be a life essence, a medium, for our mobility and vital functions, but it is our medium for connecting outwardly to the rest of the world. Even our memories are remotely stored, with those intricate networks of wires feeding the information back to us in some form.

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Why would I even bother writing about this? We all know how much we rely on electronics, we all know what happens when the power goes out, there's nothing new to say. We mediate ourselves outwardly in many ways through electric current and we're well aware of it. The amazing thing is what happens to people as social beings when the abundance of electricity disappears. Today I was in DAWB and in lieu of the outage, I had lively conversations with a number of professors and friends in the hallway. News of the outage's severity and school closure was communicated by word of mouth by strangers. This information was repeated, confirmed, updated so everyone could know. As I walked home, the traffic, devoid of working lights, needed to communicate to other drivers about when to proceed through an intersection. They needed to do the communicating with other drivers and pedestrians, for the most part, they needed to work together.

Communicating it has been suggested, is a means for us to overcome our condemnation to death. In all the 'progress' we've made, new forms of mediating ourselves through electricity and it's devices become a new way to connect with others, and it's a good thing really, until the power goes out! Perhaps what is more amazing than the sudden awareness of ourselves literally being cut off from our remote selves, is that we revert back to the social beings we are calibrated to be. I suppose this primeval method communicating is never entirely replaced through technologies, we're always talking to others in person. I think we're just not well aware of how attuned we are at achieving social tasks without delegating them to a device.

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So as the DC backups drained out their charge this afternoon, strangely, a certain peace seemed to overcome everyone I spoke with, despite being crippled by the power outage. It was a burdening situation for many, but for at least one moment, maybe a burden was in fact lifted? Let's hear your thoughts!

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How Much 'Progress' is Actually Marked By Formula 1

You don't need to be a connoisseur of motorsport's pinnacle to know about Formula 1. Surely you've heard about it from somewhere or some junkie like me who gets up at ungodly hours to watch the races.  In this week's post, I'm taking a step away from media proper to talk about some myths of technological progress surrounding the sport.

Formula 1 is a sanctioned racing discipline and cited as the pinnacle of motorsport for good reason. They are cars designed to race around paved asphalt tracks and governed by a dense book of rules. The rule book for car designs are in excess of a thousand pages and regulate the dimensions up to the millimetre. Most notably, they are characterized by being the quickest, but not the fastest cars; that is, there are cars that can go faster in a straight line,  but the closest comparable cars are over 10 percent slower than F1 cars. This is because of the R & D costs involved with the sport. A top ranking team will employ a workforce of over 200 designers and will have an annual expenditure in excess of US $300 million per year!

So what does this have to do with the myth of progress?  We would like to think that that much investment per year means that the cars will go faster around the tracks each successive season. This isn't true. In fact, the current roster of cars will be slower than the cast this time last year. Why is that? Formula 1 above all has a priority with safety. There's nothing safe about driving at 300kph, but mandates over the past three decades have minimized accident related injuries so much that there hasn't been a death since the tragic demise of Ayrton Senna in 1994. As a result, rule changes have been implemented to slow cars down to a safer speed. Also, the aerodynamic downforce of cars has been reduced to make cars able to actually race against one another.

As a result, the technological progress in Formula 1 is not simply a linear process of improving upon car designs by year, but working to find clever loopholes in the rules to make them quick around the track. So the cars of 2012 are not direct descendents of the cars from 1992. Quite the contrary, their designs are innovative reactions to rules that have sought to slow them down.Let's look at a few examples.

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This is a car from 1985. It had a turbocharged engine that produced over 1000 horsepower. Deemed too fast, turbo boost was restricted until turbos were banned entirely after 1988.

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 This is the championship winning car of 1993. It was loaded with a number of electronic gadgets including ABS brakes, an automatic gearbox and active suspension. The latter 'driver aid' replaced typical passive springs and dampers in the car's suspension with a computer-tuned hydraulic system. No matter what speed it was traveling at, or how tight the corner, all four corners of the car were kept at an ideal height above the tarmac that ensured optimal aerodynamic performance. If you watch old videos of this car, it looks like a hovercraft with wheels. This technology was subsequently banned after 1993 after being deemed to take away from drivers' skill, of course, with disastrous effects. The rule changes meant many cars designed around active suspension had to employ a passive system for 1994, which made them frightfully unstable at speed. This may have something to do with the number of injuries sustained by drivers that season.

In a bid to slow the cars down in 1995, rule changes mandated the front and rear wings to be smaller. Clever designers began opting for a raised nose design; the front of the car had more of a pointy, cone shape, which helped channel more airflow under the car towards an aerodynamic device called a diffuser. Really, the cars were getting quicker.

 

At the end of 1997 the rules were drastically changed once again. This time the width of the cars was reduced and grooved tires were implemented to try and slow them down. In the picture below you can see the differences between the '97 and '98 Ferraris. Large aerodynamic devices called 'tower wings' were installed on many of the '98 cars to improve their downforce, all of which were subsequently banned.  

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The designers had to get even more innovative. Aerodynamics were reworked and engine power increased, and F1 cars were at their quickest between 2002 to 2004. The governing body began regulating the amount of down force cars could produce to slow them down further. To help reduce costs, engine regulations changed from 3.0l V10s, producing about 900 horsepower to 2.4l V8s, producing about 750 horsepower. More small aerodynamic devices were installed on cars to help channel air flow more efficiently, to the point that cars were extremely difficult to chase through corners. Allegedly this severely compromised the racing spectacle, so for 2009, the rules were drastically changed once again. Most of these 'winglets' were banned, rear wings were made taller and narrower, and front wings were made lower to the tarmac and wider. See comparison below.

 

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But this didn't stop designers, they had a few tricks up their sleeve. Moving to the rear of the car, the diffuser, which is a device that accelerates air from under the car, thus reducing pressure and sucking the car to the track, may have been reduced in size, but designers found ways to add to their intricacy. The infamous 'double-decker diffuser' gave several cars an advantage on track, forcing other teams to mimic the design. By the end of 2009 they were banned. In 2010 some cars were fitted with an f-duct, which was a clever design that channeled a pipeline of air to the rear wing to effectively eliminate its aerodynamic drag when activated, this increasing the car's speed on straights. Banned. In 2011 a much hyped exhaust blown diffuser (EBD) was created. This pointed the engine's exhaust pipes towards the diffuser, increasing airflow and thus effect. While going through corners, the car's computer would keep the engine revving to help add downforce while cornering. Banned.

 

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Main: The F-Duct design. Inset: Double-Decker Diffuser

For 2012, in a bid to improve a potential safety issue, the rules required that the nose of F1 cars be lower. To avoid compromising airflow to the rear of the cars, we're seeing some strange 'platypus' designs like this.

 

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In the end, the technological ingenuity in F1 keeps increasing, but to say they are the top of technological design is more of a myth. The 1992-1993 cars probably were the most technologically advanced, while the cars of about 8 years ago were more or less the quickest. What does an archaeological sign through the sport's perpetually changing designs tell us? Well, one car is going to say very little to the untrained eye, other than us questioning why they appear the way they do. But the archaeological approach helps us look at each component of a car, understanding them as an innovation, a reaction, a trial approach. You may not think F1 cars are aesthetically beautiful, but these limited examples I've provided help prove that their beauty is well below the service; in their history.

Enjoy!

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What medium will you use? Electricity!

Dude, I'm a better antenna than you. Listen how much better the reception is when I stand here.

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Image Credit: Alex Grey http://alexgrey.com/

In the readings this week, in particular Sconce's, we get a good orientation on the concept of 'medium'. A scientific and following suit, a spiritual fascination with electricity began in the 19th century, not only for its value in creating light, the prospect of electric appliances, but also as a means to transport messages. This all seems to be governed by a principle we are all too familiar with: Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only changed in state.

                An obsession developed with the idea of disembodying the voice from the body. Is this something we are less aware of, in a sense, because we are all used to it? But just imagine for a second, in uncovering all these different media that can send our voice or image afar, the true medium is electricity.   Whether complex circuitry, an arrangement of mirrors or the simple amplification of minute vibrations, we harness electrical current to become the ghosts of our past utterances. The telegraph, which conjured much amazement with its introduction, uses the transformation of electrical signals to carry an encoded message across the country or ocean. The talking on a telephone converts our voice to a signal, which will later be converted back to audio the apparatus of a speaker. We have created our own ghosts, or phantasms, as Durham-Peters would call them, which are transmitted and stored through electrical currents. Look for the oldest video or digital photograph you have on your computer. While it may only be a couple years old, this is a phantasm of yourself from the past, stored in a converted state from when it was first taken; that light which bounced off your body and surroundings and was stored electro-magnetically, then transferred to its current home.

I could go on and on with examples, but I instead want to move to us as electric beings. In this time of amazement with telegraphy, scientists were uncovering more truths about ourselves. Sconce discusses how the 19th century gave way to knowledge that our bodies were actuated by electrical current. Humans, and animals alike, are great information processing machines, determined by the transformation of electricity. We process information, think, ultimately communicate through electronic pulses. Our muscles enable our mobility through the pulsing of current, discovered through some gruesome experiments performed on prisoners.

    I guess what I think is the real trip about all this is that our memory, which seems like an inseparable essence in the realm of communication, as if communication becomes secondary to what we already know or have stored, is a complex system of electronically actuated neuro-receptors in our brain. Like the self is governed and maintained by electric phenomena.

So all this new found knowledge gave way to a very problematic set of Spiritual experimentation, according to Sconce. It seems like spirits of the dead are conducted through the air and can effectively be picked up by the human antenna. In light of my opening line, we are awesome conductors of electric current. As young women were believed to be the ideal mediums, they were effectively hooked up to copper wires in order to help spirits transmit a signal to the human medium. This whole topic leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It is  possible that a human can pick up a signal, but believing in connection with the dead is a different scenario. I want to think it's all manure, but if energy can only be changed in state, what happens to the electric activity when the body ceases to withhold it upon death?

To close this delightful overview of this week's readings, I return to McLuhan. The medium is the message, like how the electric light illuminates a scene, and makes it visible to the participant, the scene becomes the content of the electric light. Like the email we read, or the voice we hear over the radio, we need to look beyond the technologies we (1st years maybe?) so erroneously cite as media, and praise the unsung hero, electricity, the ultimate medium. Setting aside the notion that our livelihood is enabled by electric current, our modes of communicating become more efficient as we learn to convert ideas to an electric signal, and back to an 'original' state in the presence of the recipient. If the medium is the message, then thoughts and messages are electric current, and humans are complex conductors and demodulators.

The internet as speech, speech as communicating

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In this scathing post, let's use our wild imagination for just a few moments:

In a radical attempt to condemn piracy, the Canadian government will follow suit with an American proposal by installing a new mandatory device in each newborn child. This device will use sophisticated speech recognition systems to monitor words that are uttered. It will have a mechanism which can override the contractions of the vocal chords, and a micro transmitter which will transmit gathered speech telemetry to central servers dispersed around the country. Orality will become regulated and privatized.

For about $55 a month, Rogers will allow the full vocal range the human subject is born with, but one may only speak for two hours per day. Smaller speech service providers will pose unlimited speech for a smaller price, however the vocal range will be limited to half an octave. Singing will be permitted, however, if you sing a song written by an artist, the device will throttle off your voice temporarily. Likewise, quoting someone's intellectual property will have a similar effect. Repeated offences will result in a bill being mailed to you for compensation of your constant use of others' IP. 

What is horrendous about this example? You likely are thinking that the private control over someone's capacity to speak is a direct violation of your natural rights to communicate. It is isn't it, but it's already happening elsewhere. Let's move to the internet. So the first red flag to raise with this comparison is that the internet is a service available external to the body. The regulations and costs do not violate your presumably natural means of communication. But there are more similarities than you think.

Disposing of technological determinism: Technology didn't invent itself, nor does it decide how it will manifest itself in society. Human actors appropriate technologies into their lives and they become naturalized in everyday use. This is exactly what has happened with the internet, in our civilization at least. We're all students and in 2012, we absolutely cannot take courses without internet access. Believe me, I tried it, albeit unintentionally, in September when my ISP was absent without leave. I was in trouble, yes me, for not having regular internet access and a moral panic arose within my household throughout the three week ordeal, even though I could do nothing about it. Finally, consider this: You can take an online course and through the three month duration evade speaking entirely. I dare you to try the inverse, it doesn't work. So in support of Finnegan's article, we really need to understand that we as a society have generated the importance of these modern forms of orality, to the degree that we cannot imagine a feasible way of 'going back'.

 But the internet is a private affair, obscurely so, because public funds provided the means of laying down the infrastructure for mass computer networking to be possible. We gifted large telecom companies with a new facet to make money of an electronic successor to orality, and nothing's changed, even though it is a necessary means nowadays. But now other big companies, who profit from the distribution of IP see a bottleneck in their moneymaking techniques, and they want the ISPS and policymakers alike to put a stop to it. What things be like when in the current succession (from primary to secondary orality, to this electronic orality), becomes limited based on the capitalist intentions of large corporate entities?

In past civilizations we have seen people punished for saying what they ought not to, we've seen book burnings to 'silence' the spread of certain information, which we have quickly realized violates our right to communicate information, which is after all a vital component to our living existence. Yet today we passively accept the increasing control over our CMC, wincing briefly at notions of surveillance and increased regulation before letting it proliferate our lives.

We wouldn't want seemingly absurd restrictions being placed on our speech. But as we are beginning to see in our texts, new communication technologies are inherently new forms of our speech, since they manifest spoken words in new ways. Why should someone gain the nod from the state to put a price on transmitting, and limit our communicated thoughts for their own monetary gain? It's us who decide how technologies are used and controlled, not technologies, and equally should not be capital. Let us not revolt against internet regulations as limiting access, but as limiting our natural rights to communicating.  

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Life in a Vacuum (Tube)

So you're sitting around with friends one evening, and amidst the beer nursing, one of them suddenly becomes compelled to announce a new addition to their vinyl collection. So you start really thinking to yourself, "didn't that medium phase out in the late 80s?" Well it did, for the most part, then it came back didn't it. And many are now getting a piece of the warm analog charm.

The anecdote has ceased and frankly, this post really isn't about record players. What I'm getting at here, is that by understanding each subsequent medium in a string of developments as 'progress', we're entirely ignoring the fact that people, for numerous reasons, go back to old technologies. Actually to really drive my prior anecdote home, for a society that often embraces this progress, isn't it a bit hypocritical for us to be using a thirty year old technology; CDs, from which most of our mp3s are extracted from?

So before that music gets pressed into vinyl, or CD, then spread about over the internet, someone has to make the music, which is where I am going to take my aforementioned point here.

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That's me playing guitar. When your audiophile friends are not debating about listening formats, they're probably disagreeing about whether solid state or tube is superior. Wait what? This isn't a lecture on electronics, so let's just simplify things by saying that at one point in time, amplifying an electric guitar required a set of vacuum tubes to amplify the electric current going through it. As technological developments happened, this process could be done with transistors and chips soldered onto a circuit board, know as solid state. The latter method is less expensive to do, requires less maintenance, and is significantly more efficient (The concept of entropy from this week's readings fits perfectly here), think about how much heat a light bulb produces. But solid state architecture is rather unloved in the music world.

Some argue that solid state amps sound too 'digital', others much prefer the natural, warm gain of tube amps. The CD versus vinyl is really coming through here! The progress we've made, from a technological standpoint, on amplifying an instrument is losing out to century-old technology. Even with the sound of vacuum tubes quite accurately simulated by their solid state counterparts, it has become almost common sensical to use the older technology these days.

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Inside solid state technology. This device, known as a stomp-box, creates heavy metal guitar distortion through this complex circuitry.

Newer isn't always better. It is amazing how seemingly archaic the music industry can be from a musicological sense. Yes studios can be as high tech as can be, with effects produced through sophisticated computer software and peripherals, but not always. For example, to get a nice echo effect in my guitar, I simply play in my unfinished basement, where the sound chaotically bounces off the hard surfaces. By contrast, simply adorning walls with egg cartons allows the reverberating sound to be absorbed. There are newer ways of doing things, but sometimes the old, archaic methods result in a preferred sound.

On to guitars: Really this technology has remained unchanged for the past century. Hollow body acoustic guitars look and function much like they did centuries ago. Take your typical symphony orchestra arrangement as a side point. They aren't using fancy electronic effects (for the most part) are they? Electric guitars employ the same passive magnet setup they did from their introduction. Newer technology uses solid state components to shape the guitar's tone, known as an active pickup system, but the passive system  remains dominant amongst musicians. Guitars are often constructed of carbon fibre rather than wood, as the material resonates much like wood, but this also has yet to enjoy mainstream popularity.

We need to step outside this notion of new technologies rendering past ones obsolete. In cases such as the music realm, older methods of making music seem to win against newer and more advanced ways of doing so. Media archaeologists will identify that such technology does not form a progressional line of development to the present forms, but often skips back and forth, where older technologies enjoy a renaissance of their usage.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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