Two years ago at TimeWarp we performed the Meta-Control set for the first time. Since then it’s been developed further, practiced more, and forked to various versions. Today we will perform these fresh Meta-Control pieces at TimeWarp 09 on a bright LCD screen setup.
Also as part of the TimeWarp Festival we participated in the panel Forum Kreative Stadt where we discussed how Ali Demirel and I did long-distance collaboration while building the Meta-Control set. It was moderated by Bernd Fesel. Other participants included Gerfried Stocker of Ars Electronica, Kai Beiderwellen, Jochen Hörisch, Monika Fleischmann, and Wolfgang Strauss.
Photographs from last night’s image check at the venue.
If you are near New York this Friday by any chance, please stop by our show titled “New Media:Why” at Neuberger Museum of Art. I participate with MYPOCKET, other participants are Margot Lovejoy with her cybernetic confession booth, Douglas Irving Repetto with his humongous networked sound installation, and Paul Vanouse with his fantastic DNA racing “Latent Figure Protocol”. The show is curated by Jacqueline Shilkoff, associate Curator/New Media and the Digital Museum. Also see the preview on New York Times:
Above is a growing set on Flickr, starting with installation photos and will progress with the documentation of the show.
New Media: Why
March 15 – June 28, 2009
South Gallery
New Media: Why is the fifth in a series that explores aspects of technology-based art. The exhibition will investigate how artists use dynamic, interactive technologies to reveal the logic, structure, and beauty inherent in experimental, non-traditional applications. The exhibition will be presented in the South Gallery and online where audience participation is encouraged. Artists include Burak Arikan, Margot Lovejoy, Douglas Irving Repetto, and Paul Vanouse.
“MYPOCKET”, Burak Arikan
“Confess”, Margot Lovejoy
“Nearly Human”, Douglas Irving Repetto
“Latent Figure Protocol”, Paul Vanouse
New Media: Why was curated by Jacqueline Shilkoff, Associate Curator/New Media and the Digital Museum.
Neuberger Museum of Art
Purchase College
735 Anderson hill road
Purchase, NY 10577-1400
New work, Ergenekon.tc will be exhibited by Deluks on February 18th 2009 Wednesday. Official announcement below:
Deluks 01:
Burak Arikan – Ergenekon.tc
Music: Baris K.
Opening: 18.02.2009 Wednesday 19.00
You can visit the exhibition on Thu – Fri – Sat between 17.00 – 20.00.
“Every society has its diagram(s)”*
Ergenekon.tc shows the diagram of the society depicted in the 2455 page Ergenekon bill of indictment. Ergenekon is an illegal covert network found in Turkey, the lawsuit is in progress. Connections between the actors of Ergenekon including people, institutions, groups, places, theories, ideologies, and beliefs, together form a crack in Turkey. The complexity of this crack can not be explained with a single leader nor with a complete hierarchy. Ergenekon does not have a center, it is a decentralized network. Ergenekon network existed because it was able to diffuse in to hierarchical structures such as government and military organizations.
The Ergenekon.tc project does not look for a meaning in the complexity depicted by the Ergenekon bill of indictment, but signifies its complexity.
Ergenekon.tc combines two computer programs. The first program reads the 2455 page bill of indictment document, filters the nouns, and connects them based on their distance in the text. The second program visualizes this networked structure. In the resulting map, the size of fonts represents the frequency of the names, the relative distance represents relationship weights, dark colored areas show the centers formed by high connectivity.
The inspiration that triggered the Ergenekon.tc project is the digital illiteracy of the way bill of indictment presented by the Turkish court. The bill of indictment was first written in a digital form, then printed, scanned as images, made a PDF file, and distributed in this digitally illiberal form.
Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher who focuses on creating networked systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. His work confronts issues ranging from cultural sustainability to micro labor and politics in networked environments. He shows the instances of these systems online and onsite through diverse media including prints, animation, software, electronics, and physical materials. His work has presented and performed internationally at institutions including Venice Biennale, MoMA, Ars Electronica, Neuberger Museum of Art, Sonar Festival, DEMF and at independent venues such as Art Interactive, Turbulence, Upgrade! International, and Hafriyat. He has lectured at institutions including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rhode Island School of Design, New York University, Istanbul Technical University, and Istanbul Bilgi University. Arikan is also a contributing author at dugumkume.org. In 2006 Arikan completed his master’s degree at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Physical Language Workshop (PLW) led by John Maeda.
Delüks aims to generate ‘intellectual capital’ by converting the surplus time, place, and labor that fails to yield ‘financial capital’. We suppose that it’s possible to invest this capital in any medium that interests us. Since we are a distributed, un-hierarchical network of individuals from various backgrounds, our set of instruments extend into a suite that includes art, activism, cultural studies, criticism, etc. As demonstrated in ‘Ergenekon.tc’, a Delüks activity might consist of getting involved and providing support for anyone with a fresh perspective we trust.
December 25th, 2008. I went to Istanbul for doing a 3 day workshop on networked information visualization, which was kindly supported by Istanbul Bilgi University. Worked with a diverse group of participants from various schools with backgrounds from visual arts to computer science. We covered basic network structure, network topologies, and clustering. We did hand drawn diagrams. Collected data by hand and by programmatic methods. Visualized relations using templates. As the final project, we worked on the database of the national elections in Turkey from 1960 to 2007. Turkey generally has 10 to 20 political parties per election. We looked at how the same representatives elected from different parties at each election. Above image shows the network of all the political parties between 1961 and 2007 (some parties do not exist today). The diagram is created by Mumin Aydin. Line thickness shows the amount of transfers between the parties. I didn’t know that politicians can change their ideology this much. Participants created network of political parties as well as cities connected by representatives. We concluded the workshop with a mini exhibition on the corridor, which was ironically overlapping with a conference titled Marxism 2008. Full documentation will be up sooner than later.
December 27th, 2008. Did a performance at the Gozel Geceler party, which was a technical fiasco. After the disastrous NYC Minitek Festival, this was the second time I had to go on the stage without sound / image check. Never recommended.
January 6th, 2009. New year’s first lecture at Bogazici University Complex Systems Research Lab. First, presented the principles for what I do, how I use the network structures and dynamics in my thinking and the network itself as the medium in my practice. Second, showed examples of work from 2005 to 2008. Discussed large scale networks and creative processes with Chris Stephenson, Haluk Bingol, Suzan Uskudarli, Onur Gungor and students from the Bogazici University.
January 28th, 2009.Basak Senova kindly invited me to do a presentation at the Upgrade! Istanbul meeting. I organized the talk around the criticism of micro labor in social network services. Started with a recipe on how to create a social network service. Followed with the measurability of the contemporary social environment, and discussed how even physical activities can easily be measured and are part of the digital cloud. Showed instances from the MYPOCKET project. Described the relations between a platform owner, an application developer, and a user in terms of the social web services. Showed instances from the Meta-Markets project.
January 28th, 2009. After the Upgrade! Istanbul meeting did a Meta-Control performance with Klaustro’s music at Peyote. A fascinating Istanbul night of electronic music and live computer visuals. Video above by Devrim Kadirbeyoglu.
February 05th, 2008. Did a 2 day Networked Information Visualization Workshop in Kayitdisi Events at Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul. Participants studied the structure of networks and did basic network visualizations based on hand picked data.
After today’s bailout rejection and the big stock market drop, I checked out the full red Map of the Market, there was one spot still green, guess what: gold (Barrick Gold ABX). It is time to go back to make things, sell things, and count the money by hand.
Last minute operation! After the Minitek show today, on Saturday night I will do another Meta-Control performance with Richie Hawtin at the Nocturnal Festival in LA. It will be at the Beatport Stage, see you if you are around. This time the Meta-Control pieces will be on a monster LED display, which looks something like the one in the image above (without the front rectangular screen).
This a 3 day party (12-14 Sep) of electronic music and art. I will perform three new pieces and new versions from the Meta-Control set (starting at 3am). Also Paul Prudence is performing on Saturday, Marius Watz is showing his Neon Organic, and James Patten is showing his super self-actuated table in the innovation pavilion.
A network diagram, or a graph, can be represented as text in many ways. We want it to be a structured text so that it can be read by computers. A graph is a set of objects called nodes or vertices connected by links called lines or edges depending on the context (physics, computer science, sociology etc.). The diagrams above are different examples of graphs. A basic representation of links between nodes could be written in this way:
john -> brent
brent -> amber
amber -> john
As you can tell this is a three person social triangle. The widely used graph visualization tool Graphviz uses this syntax, called the DOT language, to represent the basic network data (with semicolons at the end of each line). The DOT language can get quite complex for representing more detailed attributes of graphs.
In our Creative Networking course we started to draw imaginary network diagrams first by hand (see images from earlier workshops), then this week, we will translate them to structured text. We will use an XML file format called GraphML to represent the graph in text. We use this XML structure because it is web friendly, emerged as a standard by many contributions, easy to share, aka the ultimate man-machine readable data format.
GraphML is an easy-to-use XML format for graphs. It consists of a language core to describe the structural properties of a graph. Since it is XML, quite flexible for your application-specific needs. Its main features include support for directed, undirected, hierarchical and mixed graphs, also references to external data. Here is the graph above in basic GraphML:
We use XML-attributes (source=”something”, id=”1″, directed=”true” etc.) to declare graph properties such as directed, undirected, weight, or ID. To store extra data in the nodes and edges we use nested XML. Extra data declarations are called GraphML-attributes, which are defined with the <edge> tag. Also we can declare parser info for optimized parsing. You can learn more about GraphML, see how to, and examples here in GraphML Primer and GraphML Specification.
This week at the Creative Networking class we will study network topologies. That is the study of the arrangement or mapping of the elements (nodes, edges, etc.) of a network. I manually prepared GraphML data for each type of network topology that we will cover in the class. These images below are prepared by the Processing program that I prepared as a template for this class (will post it tomorrow after I clean it up the code). You can also grab the printable PDF version of the diagrams below.
Centralized, Decentralized
Centralized that is all nodes connect to a single node, a hub. It is hierarchical. Single authority. No cross-linking on the periphery nodes. Decentralized network is the multiplication of centralized networks. Many hubs, each with its own dependent nodes.
A distributed network has no central hubs. It is a mesh. Every node is autonomous. Multiple routes to go from one node to the other. A tree is obviously hierarchical, each node has multiple children, but only one parent. No cross-linking between branches.
Core-periphery networks are highly interconnected in the middle and sparse on the edges, few connections from periphery to the core. In a fully connected all the nodes connected to every other node. My friend Ali Miharbi once said that a football team’s 11 members during a match can be considered as a fully connected network.
Social network analyst Stanley Milgram coined the term Small World to describe tight clusters connected to other clusters with a few bridges. Scale-free network as defined by Albert-László Barabási, is the network whose degree distribution follows a power law. In such networks few nodes have large number of connections, some nodes have moderate connectivity, and many nodes have very few connections.
The relationship between form and text in art today somehow inherit in the relationship between data and code. When the data is relational so that it makes a graph, how do we approach it in the context of the arts? This is what we study in the Creative Networking course.
