>> Andres Monroy-Hernandez: Let’s get started. Hi. My name is Andres Monroy. I am a
researcher in [inaudible]. Today I have the honor to introduce Luis Blackaller. He is an Art
Director at Wemolabs, and he is also a lecturer at the USC. He’s going to be talking about some
of the different projects he’s been working on connected to social computing and art. So with
that, please.
>> Luis Blackaller: Thank you. So, first of all, I wanted to thank Andres for inviting me to come
here and have this conversation with you. I think we're going to have a great time. I plan to
talk as a little bit more of a lecture format, but since we are not that many and the place is
relatively small, let's try to, like if you want to turn into more of a conversation I'm willing to do
that, like stop and chat about things that might raise questions or require clarification or
whatever. That's it.
I'm going to start by talking a little bit about me. My name is Luis Blackaller. I was born in
Mexico City. And I met Andres in the MIT media lab where we were both graduate students. I
currently live in Los Angeles where work as an Art Director and User Experience Designer in
digital creative studio called Wemolab. Prior to the Media Lab, I spent more than a decade
working in film and making art. I come from a traditional visual arts and visual storytelling
background, and this has greatly influenced my relationship with technology.
But let me explain a little bit about art for a minute. In the frame of traditional arts, the work of
art is thought of as a static object that is meant to be possibly absorbed by its audience. A
painting, a book, a photograph, a movie, are all good examples of this kind of art. During the
course of the 20th century, a lot of things happened that gradually changed this. And I think
there is a parallelism with concept that emerged through the development of what we now call
digital media. Information theory and cybernetics are both examples of these kind of ideas. I
was able to experience these changes over the course of my own artistic practice.
There was a time when I was preparing a presentation for the evaluation committee of a
scholarship I had, and the final product was going to be this, which is graphical
italation[phonetic] made with assembling a bunch of aluminum models that have like prints in
them. So I made a little scale covered model for this and I went to see the committee, and
while I was showing them how I was planning to assemble this, I suddenly realized the
members of the committee were more interested in the coming up with their own
configurations on their own designs than the design I was trying to show them.
This raised a number of very interesting questions to me. To what degree was authorship
shared if I chose one of the configurations over mine? What if I changed my design to present
the final piece as a configurable object that people would then assemble in the gallery or the
museum where it was shown? This interactive feature would definitely improve engagement,
but I am not completely sure, even to this day, that this engagement would be more
meaningful than the actual contemplation. I mean, was there any space for reflection after the
configuration time was over? The story of art in the 20th century has dealt with a lot of similar
questions.
Let's go over a few famous examples. Here is the oldest one in my list, which is not that old,
but, you know. Here is Art is Action, and then this is Pablo Picasso drawing with light. These
drawings do not exist in the material form. They were captured by a photograph. Here we
have Jackson Pollock working in his studio in 1950. To Pollock, and this is something that he
couldn't like stress more, the process of making the piece was as important as the finished
piece. If you didn't understand what he went through to put together his piece you didn't really
understand or have a chance to really understand the final art.
Artless programming. Sol Lewitt, Wall Drawing No. 65 first executed in 1971. National Gallery
of Art, Washington. This one is from 2004. So Sol Lewitt basically would like write little
programs basically that people would then execute in different locations. And to him, the art
wasn't this like sets of rules or programs rather than the result. So he could give you a sheet of
paper that said, find a white wall, create a set of four colored pencils, the red, green, blue, and
yellow, for example, and then start making lines following a simple principle like make the first
one in more or less what you think is the center of the wall, then start trying to cross them
until, in a certain way until you finally cover the whole wall, which is more or less what happens
here. It's definitely an interesting idea. But the art are the rules as opposed to the actual
painting.
>>: How did people get the tasks? Like, did they have a piece of paper?
>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah. This is part of a conceptual art movement that Sol Lewitt was actually
leading. He would just write them down and form teams and have these teams make the art.
One piece that I really love of his, it’s probably like my favorite one, it required like a
whiteboard like this, and the first rule is: just make a line as straight as you can with your bare
hand through the center of the whiteboard, then change colors and just follow the line as
closely as you can on the bottom. And keep doing that until you reach the bottom and then
start up. And the resulting image is always fascinating because by the time you're here, I'm not
going to do that because I would bore you to death, but by that time you're here you have
these [inaudible] landscapes and the colors just like kind of flow very nice. This one is easy to
find on the internet just by looking at images through his name.
This is art of computation. This is the first of my examples that actually shows that digital
technology in it. This is from Vera Molnar in 1998. How to Remove the Rack from its Hinges is
the title. Well, the title is in French, but I won't try to pronounce that. She actually thinks as
the computer as an extension of her drawing process. Like she is actually drawing with the
machine instead of his hands. But she's also an interesting take, took a number of artists in a
different direction.
Then, artist interaction. Myron Krueger’s Small Planet, from SIGGRAPH in 1993. In this work
you are controlling that the navigation through a computer-generated 3-D landscape by moving
like an airplane [inaudible]. This is a very important example because Myron Krueger was very
convinced that having the audience and the art object in a relationship together, he believed
that the art happened just in between them, that the art was the interaction between them. So
this is a very important idea that defined a lot of what many other artists pursued later on.
Then artist communication or telematics. Roy Ascott, Aspects of Gaia from 1999. This piece
featured a number of networking installations across the world. And users were able to
experience remote changes made by others in real time. So if I was in Mexico City and you guys
were here and somebody moved something here, I could see that like change in the
configuration back there. It was in 87 when Simon Nora and Alain Minc coined the term
telematics to describe something, the new electronic technology, to describe the [inaudible]
technology derived from the convergence of computers and communication systems. To me,
this is really funny because I've always thought of the digital medium, I've always thought of it
as essentially communication. Not necessarily computation first, but communication first. But
this reminds me that there was a time when computers were not so deeply intertwined with
communication systems like they are now. And they were looked at more as a computation
tool, right? They are still that, but for us, it's very hard to think about them without the
communication component attached to them.
Artist participation. This is from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, very active artist that actually just
opened something very nice in York city. Relational architectural for Vectorial Elevation. This is
from Mexico City in the New Year between 1999 and 2000, Y2K year. Vectorial Elevation is an
interactive artwork designed to transform the Zocalo Square in Mexico City. A website allowed
people to control 18 robotic searchlights located around the Plaza, and a webpage was made
for each participant with photos from three webCams. This piece was employed in January
2000 after receiving around 800,000 visits from all over the world in Mexico City.
And art as personalization. Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman, Reface [Portrait Sequencer],
2007. The artist that performed process that results from the construction of a recombined
self-image. This is also another example of a very important idea which is having the capacity
to interact with the audience in these new, different ways. One possibility that emerges is that
the members of the audience effectively become a part of the art. So here, this participant is
putting her face in the art. So the art is her, in a way, which is a very empowering and a very
interesting idea.
How are we doing so far? Anybody wants to ask something? Okay. So all these examples
diverge from the traditional idea of art as a static object in at least one thing, reinforcing the
importance of at least one of these concepts: process interaction emergence communication
and participation. From all the examples we just saw, one of them deserves special attention.
Roy Ascott was as interested in art theory as he was in art practice. Over time, he developed
what he describes as the five characteristics of contemporary art.
Now this, when I read through it it’s going to sound very, it's a little obscure I guess, the
language, but the way I would think through what this word mean you will realize they are
actually fairly simple concepts. And these five characteristics are connectivity between the
parts and persons, which means network communication between the piece of art and all the
members that are interacting with it, users or audience, whichever way you want to call them;
immersion into the whole, thus dissolving subject frame and ground, that means taking the art
out of the frame and embedding it in the environment; interaction as a very form of art. Just as
Myron Kruger used to say, transforming art from a behavioral of forms to a formal behavior.
And transformation or process as the perpetual flux of image, surface, identity this is just an
ever-changing piece of art, right? Some transformative element to it. And finally, emergence
which is a perpetual realization of ever changing unexpected meaning. This we know very well
about what happens when we build simple systems and I'm showing complex behaviors that
were not expected or part of the design. These five characteristics can easily be set up to
describe Digital Media and in extension, Digital Art.
>>: This applies to anything that is contemporary art, right? It’s not only [inaudible].
>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah. He was talking about contemporary art. The thing is, an interesting
thing about this is when all this discussion was happening in the late 80s, there was no parallel
discussion trying to talk about what digital art is. Even now, it's a relatively obscure topic in the
[inaudible] theory. And if you start researching about it, there's digital art and computational
art and communication art and new media art and all these things kind of like overlap in places
but don't really answer the question of what is an art that is digital? What is the characteristic
of this medium that makes, that could make things different?
But what is it actually, you know? What is digital art? And that's a funny thing because the
traditional idea that the work of art is a static object has actually managed to influence the
perception of digital art outside of the art world in pretty much that way. And to prove my
point, let's look at what a couple of search queries on the internet will reveal.
And this is what Bing gives us. Interesting blue pallet, which is funny. And this is what Google
gives us with also a blue hue over it. That's just a random accident, right? But we can see here
is that there's a lot of 3-D and there's a lot of Photoshop, right? Here, in these images, the
digital medium is just the structures to help produce things that could've been made without
computers anyway. Just in an easier way. When we go to Wikipedia, even here, digital art is
treated as an art object. At least Wikipedia does go a step further and treats digital art as art
that is made with digital technology to talk about digital technology. So it starts featuring these
kind of installations or like, this is kind of like experimental prints and these computers have a
library of images in them that are encrypted so nobody can see them but the images are
actually there, so it's a statement about like what is this kind of thing? Very conceptual, but it's
still just an object that you go and see, right? And think about. There's nothing wrong with
that.
And it is actually behind the scenes, in the way computers are and the web are used to share,
distribute, and remix these images and their elements that the digital media realizes its true
potential where tools and platforms become a new canvas. When I joined the media lab, that
was me right there, I was obsessed with the idea of tools, digital tools. Programming magical
pencils that make musical dancing drawings and things like that. I didn't get the social system
aspect of a digital network as an artistic playground yet like this kind of shape from formal to
social and from tool to platform. Luckily enough, one of the specialties of the research group I
joined, the Physical Language Workshop, was precisely that. And one of my first assignments
was to join the design and development team of a project called Openstudio. The purpose of
Openstudio was to combine an online social network with a creative arts economy. Upon
signup, new users would receive a starter’s amount of BURAK currency. And it was up to them
to build a relationship with the community by purchasing art, selling art, making art, or
transforming purchases art using the tools provided by the Openstudio system.
Art was made using an SBG like vectors drawing standard called SMPL, and because of this, art
was treated by the system as code making its digital nature ebullient. Every modification was
[inaudible] even after that duplication and transactions occurred. Kind of like forking
[inaudible]. And it was possible to track the evolution of every part of a drawing all the way
from its conception to its incorporation in any other piece of art. The social graph was defined
through commerce. Two users were connected only if one of them purchased art from the
other. And every user was able to modify and remix any part of anything they may have
purchased as long as the original creator authorized further modification of their art to
[inaudible] creative [inaudible] schema.
There was no support for the art communication between users. No wall, no chat, no inbox. To
communicate directly, users would need to do it through their own art. Here's the homepage
of this system. It featured a new art feed and there's also a feed for recent transactions,
galleries, prices, here's my profile picture from that system. This is recent art. This is a job
summary management thing where you can see the jobs I'm working on for someone else and
the jobs that I contracted from someone else. There is a list of people that are showing my art,
after that comes a list of people whose art I'm showing. And there's a gallery space and a
portfolio space and a job space. The difference between the gallery and the portfolio is
basically that the portfolio is where I show things that I made and the gallery is where I show
the stuff that anybody else could have made.
It featured numerous open views for historic data including account status and history. This
was kind of like an experiment that we tried to make which was all the financial data from
every user was open to everyone else. So we were just trying to think about what would
happen in a financial system where all the finances are just disclosed to the public?
Prominence from the original author of the drawing going all the way up to all the
transformations. And this can be rendered at as a tree because there could be duplications and
there could be like pieces that are taken and used in something else. And also history of the
transformations of the piece itself.
There was also a tag system which we called the Artsonomy which is not just a classification
system, it was also used to socially commenting on the work. When tagging a piece, users were
shown which other members were tagged similarly, and these tags bubbled up to the tag level
of each user. You can see those tags that I get on the pieces I create, tags that I get on the
pieces I collect, and tags I used to comment on other people's art.
This is a job offer page where the user Raquel is requesting from me as specific commission that
is going to pay the name of this virtual currency was three [inaudible] and the description of
what the work was and then whether I decide to continue with this task or not. And this is a
timeline that we attached to the tag lab of the time. We wanted to see how trends were
bubbling up or disappearing. Over the course of a few months we can see how cute became
more important than bloody, which is pretty funny.
Talking about emergent behavior, some users started making frame by frame animations. The
funny thing about this is that if you were to do this, the way you're making the animation, it’s
not really a function that this system has. It something that the user discovered, that if you
quickly draw the sequence of frames of a particular animation and then you just hover over the
feed, you will see the preview of those images being replaced by each other and then
performing the animation. But all this guy needed for someone else to ruin this animation is
that somebody just saved another drawing halfway between the process of producing these
two, for example. So this resulting state of a homepage is just a lucky accident.
>>: How long did it last?
>> Luis Blackaller: This? Oh, well it just gets pulled down, right? It actually stayed that way.
They just managed to get their little chunk of, the timestamp for these drawings is all in
sequence so they were just saved that way. Now let's talk about much more simpler system.
The tiny Icon Factory is an anonymous aggregation tool for making a three by 13 pixel blackand-white icons. This is a 30 times enlargement for that. The drawing tool is so limited that it
became extremely easy to use. Anybody could create content in a few seconds with this. We
decided to keep the barrier of entry as low as possible by allowing users to publish in an
anomynity. This is the adjacent [inaudible] object for one of these icons.
I actually formatted the string little bit because in the real object it would just be a single string
of zeros and ones. But by splitting up into 13 character long strings we can show, and this is
something that we were trying to do a lot of the time, have like a sort of transparency
correlation between the data and the generated image it was representing. So if you actually
[inaudible] here, you will see that the drawing will come back because the zeros are black and
the ones are white. So is just that, and you have all this other data. We were tracking, again,
the evolution of the piece through its history, you could be able to load one of these, edit it,
and resave it and we would know where it came from. Things like that.
This is the front page. We also learned that on anonymity will turn your website into a
bathroom hall very quickly. That's just the way things are. And we have a critical and very
simple search, API, and everything. If you go to the website and click on the search link, you
will see instructions about how to build a very simple URLs that will return your images or
adjacent objects or things that corresponds to that query like log or heart or swastika.
>>: [inaudible]?
>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah. They have to be tagged. They don't tag too much, but the ones that
tag, the funny thing is their relationship because the ones that are tagged and the ones that are
duplicated, for some reason ,and people duplicated more tagged then non-tagged icons.
Probably the people that tag them are more careful about making them.
In terms of production volume, the Tiny Icon Factory became by far the most successful project
I worked on collecting hundreds of thousands of icons. Investive power users, again, started
making frame by frame animations, and some of them figured out that they could write in
reverse and started message each other. Of course, there was no user model here, no sense of
identity. There was no way to know where the things come from, who were they attributed to?
There was no real user component to this. But it always amazes me the amount of time that
people get to put when they like a system like that. Like those animations, there’s tons of
them. It's just crazy.
I got a little lost. Yeah. Picture access is another one of these systems. It's a picture aggregator
similar in spirit to the Tiny Icon Factory. It pictured anonymous posting, tags, and anonymous
commenting and tracing tool, a user-based censorship system, and search by [inaudible] color
in addition to the default tag search. We have collected our own 40 to 45,000 images before it
was turned off in January of 2010. This website lived in the MediaLab servers. I wanted to take
it out, but I still can't afford hosting it on my own. I will have to come up with a way to make
money off it and then put it in there. So like, whatever. So this is the homepage and again, it's
a very simple experience. This is how picture looks like in the picture’s page. Once you activate
the tracing tool, the tracing tool active in a similar way as Openstudio in the sense like every
time you used it it was a different layer though it was presented to the user as a flattened
object in the end. Here is the censorship system and the [inaudible] average color thing which
was pretty fun.
>>: So people censor areas of the photo?
>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah. You would basically like drag along and you could like enter whatever
text you wanted. That was funny. A comparative analysis between picture access and the Tiny
Icon Factory reveal some interesting insights about creativity and participation. We were
interested to know if there was a relationship between posting versus browsing or how many of
the visitors to these websites were active versus passive. And that's very easy to calculate just
by roughly calculating the ratio between visits versus posts every day. And it was not surprising
to realize that these post systems basically accumulate opposite behaviors over time. If you
think about it, the Tiny Icon Factory offers a pretty simple and pretty rewarding creation
experience. You just go there and in a few seconds you made something, and it's there and it's
kind of cute, but it's also funny and it's like you could make 10 of them in one minute. It's just
done, done, done, right? Looking through them, however is, they are kind of small and they are
kind of plain looking and there's a ton of them, so like browsing through them doesn’t feel to
me that this is the more relevant aspect of this experience.
On the picture access website, on the other hand, it’s a huge collection of pictures, rich and
visual content, that is very well organized to be searched through. So like if you wanted to look
at robots you could look at robots for a while and then whatever. And I think [inaudible] it’s an
experience that doesn't add anything to you. It's just you have to go and choose what picture
to upload and the uploading is just like anywhere else and on top of all that there is no user
model. So there's no way you can actually claim authorship to your post. You can't really say
look, I posted this cool picture. It's just another cool picture appeared and nobody knows
where it came from. So there's, I don't think enough there's enough of a reward to make it
more relevant to post than to just browse. How are we doing so far? Anybody wants to say
something? Ask? Comments?
>>: With the picture one, [inaudible] so you offer a photo and then you draw on top of it, right?
>> Luis Blackaller: That's not part of the core flow. The core flow is just to upload. The drawing
on top of it was an addition that we made later just to see if people would scribble through it,
and it was not very successful in that regard. The most of the [inaudible] flows were, the other
thing you would have to do is upload and tag. That would happen at the same time and the
rest you will actually have to kind of like know your way through the tool to do it. Yeah?
>>: How did you guys attract users to these services?
>> Luis Blackaller: Well, usually very heuristically, kind of like we were part of a research lab, so
the first thing we do is hey, we just have this. So [inaudible] promote it and all the people in
the lab would get the URL and start using it and send it to their friends. And then we would
blog about it, and we would send it to all our friends and family and we would tweet about it.
Some of this talk is even before we knew Twitter existed. So it was pretty organic. There was
no real strategy about how to do that yet. Anyone else wants to say something?
>>: Sort of a question about these systems is they’re very limited and yet the design space, and
I’m trying to remember, there's a game designer who made a stupid Facebook game called
Poke a Cow and basically, or Click a Cow. You click on it and then six hours later you can click
on it again. And he was actually, he wrote about how amazed, the amazing things people did
with this stupid system that was intentionally designed to be frustrating and limited. And he
said there was more of like an indication of people's creativity when faced with something
that’s so limited and boring and stupid and it’s more of an indication that the creativity of
people rather than it's a good system. And so I was wondering your response because these
projects are very, very limited in their scope yet you get amazing variety and amazing content
out of that where people figure out that you can make animations or actually post messages to
each other. So I wonder if like this sort of emergent behavior is, were you expecting any of that
or what can you say about the system's design?
>> Luis Blackaller: We were deliberately looking for that. That guy you mentioned is called E.
M. August, and yeah, that was pretty famous thing he did. We were looking for precisely that.
Trying to make this really, really simple and very constrained interactions and see what could
come out of them that we were not expecting. It was part of our design decision to do that.
And, at the time, it was already known that this could happen. People's creativity would find
space through cracks of the limitations they had. But we didn't try to make them be stupid or
anything. We just tried to make them very simple and limited as interactions. We were still, I
mean, the point of all these experiments is to explore using creativity in a way and what
triggers it and in which ways that can be used to force their conversations that emerge from
this creativity. So it was part of the design. Does that explain it more or less?
>>: Yeah. Thanks.
>> Luis Blackaller: Okay. Cool. And just because of that, it may stand to sense, but I already
planned it that way. Let's talk about community a little bit. A user model or any other sense of
identity combined with tools for communication between users is probably all we need to
experience the emergence of community. During its time, Openstudio featured a small but
vibrant community of around 3000 active users. And going back to the discussion about
limitations and simplicity and all that, this particular system was actually, I mean it doesn't
belong to the same breed as the picture access on the tiny one because it was actually very rich
in features, and even though it had like the very strong the limitation of not allowing their users
to communicate directly unless they used their own art, there were a lot of tools for them to do
that in an expressive way. I mean, you could just, if you want to get just write in the drawing
tool.
People would set up art shows and advertises special discount rates on their galleries. They
were organized enough to vault for features and communicate them to us, the developers.
There were art matches would people would throw a piece of art back and forth between each
other and the properties of the user model were rich enough to facilitate a space for all these
interactions throughout creation, commerce, gallery spaces, etc.
Let's see some like interesting fun examples. This is hijacked, Declaration of Love. So this Chia,
which I happen to know, and Paul too, are now married, and she made this declaration of love
to Paul. And it happened that someone else bought it before Paul ever saw it and decided to
say no when it was a clear yes. And it was just funny. This is a chess game. So somebody
draws the board and the pieces and has like a little messaging thing and puts it up for sale.
Whoever wants to, with the first move, whoever wants to pick up the match buys the piece,
makes the second move, puts it for sale again. There's a flaw the system, right? Which is, how
can you make sure that your competitor will get the piece from you back, right? Because what
ended up happening is like this very strange kind of like financial drawing or something where I
would see that after the second move, purchase it because they do it for cheap so they don't
spend too much money, right? I purchase it and then I know the other guy want to continue
their game, right? So I just put like, I bump up the price and then nobody buys it and the
game’s over. These kind of things happen a lot. It's just interesting.
People would write instructives. So how to do things in the system for people that couldn't
understand it or whatever. So this one in particular is telling you how to put things for sale.
>>: Did anybody buy this one?
>> Luis Blackaller: I don't remember. It was not that long ago that we did this, but long enough
ago that. Just like every time I start search and dig through stuff for these things like something
else that comes up that I didn’t notice before. Self-promotion. Policy voting. So this
happened, the idea of the original investor, this is not artificial intelligence, the idea of the
angel investor came through before I got into the lab. And when I was, when I got in there was
a full-blown discussion between the developers, which was the members of the team I just
joined, and Local 00110 Pixel Pushers Union which is some union that like a group of users put
together to suggest features or opposed to features.
So, at some point, somebody is from the team, that I can't remember who it was, suggested to
create angel investor program within the system where we would track specific users that were
producing specific kinds of art and we would decide that, for some reason that we were
completely arbitrarily stipulating, this art or their behavior in the system deserved to be
sponsored by an angel investor. And so we would throw big chunks of visual currency to these
users and see what happened. This was announced in the website's blog, and users didn't like
it. So they made this contract and started throwing it around. I did vote against it. I thought it
was very weird. But it just kept going and we never implemented it.
A good question to ask is like are these things still pieces of art or not? Right? Is the art the
whole thing? This is another one. This is kind of, this came from the union as a proposed
feature that they though was fair to users that came up with an original drawing or original
content would get one percent profit every time this drawing was resold. So every time there
was a transaction, regardless of like how many transformations were made, the person that
saved the first version of the drawing would get a little bit of money. And I don't think, it never
happened. I don't remember if anybody ever bought it. I couldn't find any other version of this
thing in the database.
And at some point some users decided that they didn't want to be people. They wanted to be
art institutions. So, for example, this guy, Daniel King, he came up with the social contract to
behave like a museum instead of an artist. Because there was this thing like you were an artist,
but you also had your gallery and you can sell people that you bought from other people, art
that you bought from other people, so you would be also like an art dealer as much as an artist
and the gallery and why not? So I guess there was probably the need to narrow the behavioral
space of the user to something that probably mirrored the real world a little more or something
than the system did. And so this guy created his museum. It behaved like a museum. It was
fine. Then we got like a train for banking museums and people get the contract and just
duplicate it, change the name, change the signature, it's completely valid too, and then you got
another museum. It started to be a museum competition and things like that.
This is an art show flyer. This artist commissioned a bunch of other artists with the bloody thing
specifically attached to the commissions and then made the show where she sold all this art
that these people made for her that she paid for. So it's kind of like the entrepreneurial artist
curator thing. And, of course, there was just like tons and tons and tons of art.
The Tiny Icon Factory is on the opposite end of this spectrum. Even though it is a fertile content
creation machine, it's only one of the systems that’s still alive. And the reason why this can
happen is because it's so simple in design that it’s reflected through the implementation and it's
very easy for us to keep it alive and maintained and not make it impact other aspects of our
postgraduate student life. But it has no social features to sustain a sense of identity, thus
nobody knows who they are talking to. And the foundation for a community can't be laid out.
In any case, there is something else that I've always wanted to explore, which is the direct
contact with pre-existing communities. I wanted to meet with a community and learn from
their needs to provide them with a system that could help some creatively communicate with
each other. For this, a degree of fieldwork [inaudible] and whatnot was going to be required.
That's a lot of talking.
A few days ago, I stumbled upon this book called The Be Kind Rewind Protocol written, by
Michel Gondry, the film maker most famously known for the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind. This book describes how to set up an art show workshop where visitors are grouped
together as teams and guided through a labyrinth of sets with the necessary guidance and
equipment to make a short [inaudible] movie in just a couple of hours. The experience will end
in a small theater where the participants will watch the movie they just made. And the cover of
the book reflects that moment. Some of them were technicians, some of them were actors.
This project doesn't rely on computers or digital communication systems, but I like to think it is
digital in spirit; and I believe that's kind of directive agency is a great way to inspire members of
a given community to engage in a conversation by creating cultural content.
Let's look at the project I made called Honey I shrunk Red Hook, which could be labeled as
collaborative public action and installation. This is from 2009. Red Hook is an interesting
neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City. A street called Richards splits it in two. Southeast of
Eight we have projects, housing projects and 99 cent stores inhabited mostly by an AfricanAmerican and Caribbean population. And on the other side we have hipsters, artists, and all
that comes with them in the New York City environment. Both communities live their lives
politely ignoring each other.
When my friend opened a gallery right here, I found it to be an excellent opportunity to test
some ideas about community and participation, the goal being to have these communities
interact and communicate through art. After some deliberation with my collaborator and the
[inaudible], we decided to set up the following program. We would make a scale model of the
neighborhood section around the gallery and put it inside the gallery. Then we would figure
out the cheap way to make dolls out of photographs which with the laser printer, a laser cutter,
a lot of Elmer glue and many hours. Then we walked around the neighborhood asking people if
we could take their picture. And then, while we were doing this, taken this picture, we explain
them that their doll would be made and that they could go play with it in the model in a couple
of weeks later when the gallery was open with the finished thing.
We also launched an online program asking for nonresidents to submit their pictures so that we
could have tourists to play with. Yeah. So here you can see this is like one of the corners of the
gallery and you can see here is this model is actually a direct scale representation of the
building across the street. Here, that's me taking the back picture part of what was going to
become the adults that represented these two guys here. People just love this thing. Here they
are in pictured inside the installation with all the other people.
This is the local BMX bike guy, which I bet he would have never ever gone inside of our gallery
if it was not because of this. And that they are inside the gallery. They are the art, right? There
is this thing, they become part of the piece of art which is, I believe, very and powering.
Another resident with her dog. We made a bunch of images based on real landmarks of the
neighborhood just to kind of like create that atmosphere that they were in a cartoon reality of
their own lives. Here's the laser cutter in action working through the gallery’s assistant. That's
her with her doll and her hammer, ready to put everything together. This is a simple online
brochure, which is a very simple thing that we would just send to people and then we would
make the pictures. And we made a bunch of them.
After collecting around 100 dolls, we enjoyed a few weekends where we succeeded at bringing
people into the gallery were who had never visited an art gallery to talk about art with people
that do it every weekend. So there's a good collection of them. Any questions about this one?
Yeah?
>>: What's going on in the top left corner? You were in that.
>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah. That's a Mexican wrestler. He made that. [inaudible]. It’s one of the
tourists.
>>: He's a tourist?
>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah. So from all these people can you tell who it doesn't belong to Red
Hook?
>>: The corner, maybe? This person?
>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah.
>>: Is there anyone else?
>> Luis Blackaller: There is, this guy is from Mexico City. And this lady here and [inaudible]
because she is [inaudible] lady at the MediaLab. She also sent a picture. It was pretty cool.
Like, you know. Okay. Anything else anybody would like to ask or something? Okay. Let's
move onto the next one.
>>: I have a question. Did you have anyone say they didn’t want their picture taken?
>> Luis Blackaller: People were extremely friendly in that neighborhood. I think we probably
got a couple of persons that said no, but I can't even remember that. People would just say
okay. It was really funny. We encountered some situations that were kind of like hostile, but
not too hostile. We took, sometimes there would be cases where like people would become
like doll groups, like with this attitude, keep them together if their arms overlapped or
whatever. There was these three people which was like a pregnant girl and two dudes. One of
them was her little brother and the other one was her, what I learned after was her like, I
should use an appropriate word, right? We are on camera. He was not such a good boyfriend.
And we learned about that later. We took the picture perfect, and then we met the kid later
The baby was already born and like the girl was crying, and it was just like they never made it to
the gallery because they were too busy having this kind of like crazy tragedy at home. So there
were some of those. But people were very friendly. Extremely.
>>: Did you end up make cutouts of the people who didn't want their picture taken?
>> Luis Blackaller: No, because if they didn't really want their picture taken that we couldn't
take it. So that wouldn't even happen.
>>: Yeah. I just wondered if you represented them, like a form of>> Luis Blackaller: Like having like>>: I don't know. They exist somewhere out there>> Luis Blackaller: We didn’t think about that.
>>: I don't know.
>> Luis Blackaller: We were like okay, they don’t want it, they won’t get it. But it's interesting
though. It's an interesting idea. Like, going more into the kind of like societal aspect of the
interaction. Like what happened there? Because this is more like already all the way into this
side, right? I mean, there's not much we can know about them by this. It was just about
bringing them together. And that was the main goal, to like, to bring all the people that were
not into the arts there. There were children; children loved it. It was pretty cool.
>>: Did anyone take theirs after?
>> Luis Blackaller: Everyone did.
>>: So, that's cool.
>> Luis Blackaller: It was part of the thing. The final day of the exhibition was like a party, and
we actually destroyed the town and gave them their things. We were like, okay. Some
pleasure out of that big art. Okay. How are we doing on time? Are we doing okay?
>>: You have 10 minutes.
>> Luis Blackaller: And that’s it? So because, I have only one project left and it is actually pretty
short. So this is, again, label it Remotely Connected Interactive Public Performance, whatever.
In 2012, an experimental theatrical performance artist called Constanza Micras[phonetic],
contacted me to collaborate with her on a piece in the forest in North Wales. She wanted
something digital to be part of her performance piece without really knowing about what she
meant by that.
After going over pretty much everything I've said here and a lot more, of course, we agreed to
design some kind of feedback communication system between the performance in the forest
and the remote audience back in the city of Cardiff. This is kind of a map of the lower part of
Great Britain, and here is Cardiff, which is the capital city of Wales. And in the northernmost
part of Wales, like this is actually this part is like you drive 10 miles to the east and you are not
in Wales anymore. It's kind of like in the border. There’s actually, it's called [inaudible] Park, is
actually a castle there which is kind of like where the Welsh finally lost against the English and
they kind of took over them.
And this performance was happening through the forest and it was kind of this kind of like
theater thing with contemporary dance and all that. And there was a live audience there that
would follow the performance through the woods and that was kind of like the core of the
show. But Constanza wanted to add something extra trying to connect it to these area of
downtown Cardiff. And it you will see why that makes sense in a second. Let me give you a bit
more of a back story about why this connection arrived because just out of the blue it doesn't
make any sense.
So the community we wanted to engage with, for some reason, every Friday night people in
Cardiff dress up as pop-culture icons and walk around that area I just showed you, which is the
club zone in downtown Cardiff, getting wasted. And by that, I mean like really wasted. Like if
you go to this Flickr set here, this guy is a pretty good journalist photographer, and he has like a
huge collection of what happens through [inaudible]. I don't know. These pictures are just like
beautiful. One of my favorite ones is kind of like, it’s like a long shot of a back alley and there's
light from the other end and there's debris and parking debris like chips and red cups and
whatever and Superman is just walking away like really tired, like this. It’s just a beautiful
scene.
So that's what these nights are about, and Constanza was actually, her theater piece, before it
became a combination of theater and whatever digital, was about this, in a way. And she
wanted to take one of these characters, with [inaudible], and transport him to the forest where
he would experience a fairytale dreamlike journey through the woods. And she wanted the
people getting drunk in Cardiff, these guys here and all the other people with them, to be able
to witness and even somehow interact or even affect the hero’s adventure in the forest.
So we came up with a pretty crazy rig where we were filming people in the streets and
broadcasting to televisions in the forest and transmitting the action in the forest back to a big
screen in the street. Passersby, who also SMS’d to a special number, and their text would
appear not just on screen, on that screen in the street, but it would also be received by a cell
phone carrying actor that would respond to their messages with action. And here is, we are in
the street taking video, there was a lot of, not everything we did here for budgetary reasons
was automated or whatever, so it was kind of like we would take the video live and then quickly
composite it and then broadcast it. So there was a delay. But the people were there all night
so we thought we could get away with that.
So we are filming this girl here and that girl, and she will be wandering around those streets for
a while and then maybe 20 minutes later she will see herself in a television screen in the forest
interacting as part of the environment that is surrounding these actors in the forest. So that's
kind of like a couple of scenes where like the televisions were pulled here. The Smurf, even
though it was a guy Smurf, it was performed by both males and females. So these are people
that were in the street like that. We had like a black mat around their heads and so we were
only transmitting their heads. And they were just talking. We did a slow-motion pass on them
so they just, they were like this, kind of like the Cheshire Cat rom Alice in Wonderland figure,
they would be in these moments of the story when the Smurf would have to like make a
decision or change the route or something. And this is the screen in Cardiff with some of SMS
that somebody wrote. Anything to ask or say about this one? It's pretty weird. I don't mind if
you have questions.
>>: Did you see people exploit, you [inaudible] that people tend to turn into a bad [inaudible]
at all in this?
>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah, but in this case, I'm glad you mentioned that because I completely
forgot about it because in this case, this was a BBC production and all the data was fed into a
website they have called the Space where everything was going to be collected and tweeted
about and all that stuff. We actually had to have like a filtered channel where everything that
was not appropriate enough was just discarded in real-time. We had somebody monitoring all
the SMS. So that way it didn't happen. It was anonymous, but not really, because we recorded
your phone number. But it doesn't matter. It's harmless, so I guess it doesn't matter. Anything
else? I’m sure I must’ve mentioned a lot of stuff about this one. That was really fast.
Okay. Let's move on. I feel these have all been great experiments in form, proofs of concept,
even if you will. In a sense, I feel we are going through a phase similar to that period in the late
19 and early 20th centuries when people like Edward [inaudible] or [inaudible] or Windsor
McKay or the Lumiere Brothers or Marcel Duchamp, even, were experimenting with ideas and
techniques that were to shape the moving picture as a viable communication medium in their
futures. We are surrounded by moving pictures now, but at some point, this was something
that nobody else had made before.
That's Muybridge studies of the Horse in Motion. This Etienne Marey and his
Chronophotographic gun. I don't know if any of you knew about this invention. But it's really
awesome. Of course, I bet you some user experience product designers told him you have to
not have it look like a gun if you want to make this into something that will be absorbed by
people. And so this gun basically goes and like shoots, it’s basically, I don't know why he made
it like a gun, but it basically shoots like a multiple exposure thing and the same negative, and he
took pictures like that around 60 years before Doug Egerton[phonetic] started making because
you know, later on, the strobe light was invented, and then you would just like to shoot once
and then the strobe light would take care of giving you effect. But at this time, that was not
available.
The Lumiere Brothers and the first movie camera, of course. Marcel Dechamp’s, this is a purely
conceptual exploration he made in 1912 about multiple exposure, you could say. This is a
photograph that somebody else made 50 years later using a strobe light. And this is the first
cartoon in history, Gertie the Dinosaur, by Windsor McKay. When I put all these examples next
to a standard [inaudible] movie, for example, or when I think about film and television as a
whole, I can see an evolution of a medium that has gone from discovery to maturity. And I
can't help but wonder where all these digital experiments will take us. We see them all around
us, these like interactive network communication created systems just are bubbling up
everywhere, right? I mean, something like Twitter is even is one of those, right? They are just
everywhere. There is too many of them, and we’re kind of like coming up with sort of like a
way of understanding what these things are and how we can use them to create meaningful
content, I guess.
We're shaping a brand-new breed of cultural atoms this way. And what kind of matter will they
make? To find an answer to these questions, there lies my challenge. Thank you. And here's
some information if anybody is interested and now let's just chat. It’s your turn.
>>: All of these are active, or>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah. All of this works.
>>: What do you think about the new social networks that are more like the instagram that has
the [inaudible], that have more of the artistic sort of tool rather than just communication like
Facebook?
>> Luis Blackaller: I think that's very nice. You know, it's funny that you mentioned them
because they are actually a lot more limited systems in their design than other systems that are
not targeting creativity, right? Like buying is extremely simple. It’s just the limitations it forces
you to assume are great. It’s just a six or eight second loop and that's all you have, right? A
little square and that's all. But, for example, in that case I really think they did a really great job
with the user interface of making the video where like it's just tapping. The actual video and
there's no controls. I kind of thought that's a very interesting way to go to think about how can
you make the medium itself be its own interface, right? As opposed to having like, because
most of our controls are legacy from buttons and levers are things that come from machines
that are in the real world. And, of course, we are going to be able to empathize with that and
use it. But the option of exploring what could things be if we discard that as a base design, as a
legacy, it's very interesting. So I appreciate that about [inaudible].
Instagram is also very simple. At least originally it was very constrained the same way, right?
Just take a picture, put the filter, upload. One thing that everybody thinks about, everybody
asked the question about why Instagram became Instagram, right? Because there were a
number of other systems prior to it that were almost Instagram, but not. And they would do
the same things but they have like little things like, I don't know if anybody ever used to
[inaudible]? [inaudible] was just like Instagram except they made the mistake of letting you
upload high resolution pictures. So they would take the picture at the original resolution that
the cell phone took and you would upload that. So half the time or more they upload would fail
because the network connectivity was bad. So that kind of stopped it from being so popular I
guess. I don't know. Is that more or less goes in the direction you were>>: Yeah.
>>: How much slack do you give the types of creativity that are unleashed around these
different experiments as opposed to just within the experiments?
>> Luis Blackaller: [inaudible]?
>>: So people interact with these systems and they express themselves [inaudible] in the
system, and I think there's also a way to think about their creativity that's inspired by the
system but isn’t actually captured within that. Do you ever think about that when you’re
coming up with these things?
>> Luis Blackaller: Yeah. That's the whole [inaudible], which is actually I can't really go and
touch all these aspects of this discussion because it will just become like a semester long graph
course or something. That's the subject of a completely different talk that I could give. And if
you're interested in that kind of stuff, there's a lot of stuff, both in research and resources and
my own that take on what that could be from back then four or five years ago, is written in my
thesis here, it’s, my thesis project was actually about thinking about the artist, the art object,
the studio, and the audience as a combined system where like they all become the object and
what happens when you do that?
>>: Where is the art?
>> Luis Blackaller: Pretty much, right? Because it's hard to tell. Like, in the Openstudio system,
all those drawings, if you ask an art person if those are art, they will say no. But they might end
up deciding that the actual system as a whole is art, right? So the creative process of, it's a
tricky question. It's a difficult one. But I definitely think about that a lot. And without reaching
any conclusions, there's a lot I wrote about at that in there if you're interested. It's not very
dense. It's funny.
>>: [inaudible]. Thank you.