Michael Naimark presentation

Michael Naimark Presentation/Demonstration August 22, 2006
Biography
Michael Naimark is a media artist and researcher with over 25 years of experience investigating "place representation." He has worked extensively with field cinematography, interactive systems, and immersive projection. He was instrumental in the founding of several world-renown research labs and his art projects exhibit internationally. Naimark was on the original design team for the MIT Media Laboratory in 1980 and was a founding member of the Atari Research Lab (1982), the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987), and Lucasfilm Interactive (now LucasArts, 1989). He joined Interval Research Corporation, a long-term lab funded by Paul Allen, as it opened in 1992, and worked an additional year after it closed in 2000 on his webcam spinoff venture, Kundi.com. Several patents have been granted for his work. Naimark's art projects are in the permanent collections of the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and the ZKM | Center for Arts and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. His 3D interactive installation "Be Now Here," produced by Interval with the cooperation of the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, toured in the ZKM's "Future Cinema" exhibition in 2002 and 2003.
www.naimark.net/bio.html
He is a visiting associate professor at the Interactive Media Division of the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television and a visiting committee member at MIT Media Lab. He is also member of the Society for Visual Anthropology.
Presentation summary:
"What's Wrong with this Picture?: Realness, Artifact and Intention in First-order Global Place Representation"
Naimark began by introducing the question of the distinction between 'realness' and the perception of the senses, or in other words, the distinction between what is psychophysics and what is expression ("How do you know I am not a movie?" was the question broaching this topic he provocatively asked a class of 5th graders). Colleague Rachel Strickland used to argue against his use of the word 'realness,' which she argued would be better termed 'verisimilitude'. Naimark has begun using the term 'realspace imaging,' as a way of representing what happens 'behind the brain'.
Naimark was interested in exploring what is at stake in place representation and in developing and agreeing upon a vocabulary to discuss such things. He discussed some critical terms and concepts: 'artifact'; 'fabric of space and time'; and 'liveness'. 'Artifact' is concerned with the notion of intention – when we make representations, when are artifacts intentional, and when are they glossed over in a technocratic way? 'Fabric of Space and Time' is an feature of place representation, which is like a fabric in that you can tear it, stretch it, warp it, keep it as is, and the sense of representation will be changed accordingly. Finally, 'liveness' affords a sense of simultaneity, of witnessing something special or unique. We felt a sense of simultaneity at particular points in time (e.g. Moonwalk; O.J. Simpson chase; 9/11). Naimark asked us to imagine if most video cameras were live and connected to the grid – what is the effect of everything being 'live'? It will happen. (via Web cams and so on).
Naimark then presented some projects in place representation he has been involved with beginning in the late '70s. Included were several works on Moviemaps and Panoramas (1977-1997). Moviemaps involve place representation through spaces, while panoramas are place representations looking around a particular space (or lateral versus angular representation). The goal of many of these projects was not to simulate an environment but to convey particular sensations.
Naimark came to certain conclusions from his experiences working with these media: often place doesn't matter. But often it does. One cannot represent everything. By claiming that you do, you're abdicating artistic responsibility. The camera always affects the environment [He wondered whether this is still the case with button-sized cameras]. Or in other words, the medium biases what classes of content will go through. Finally, he remarked upon the extent of the power held by whoever controls representation.
Naimark then talked about some of his VR studies, which contrasted with his previous work which was in some sense 'dead media' (his turn of phrase) in that it had all been pre-recorded. In his work with Kundi.com (Interval Research, 1998-), Naimark and his colleagues are working on the following problem for webcams and streaming media: the question of time. Search engines are not equipped to find events as they happen. So Kundi developed a 'hot now' button for users to send an alert when something of interest occurs in a webstream. (Can you herd people to a site on the internet through this mathematics of propagation?)
A series of webcam studies in Japan dealt with the bandwidth problem. Where does the breakdown begin in place representation? When you have the same moment in time and a representation of different places, you are trying to get more with less, perhaps produce a hyper-representation. Michael has also been working with Gigapixel imaging.
Naimark concluded his talk with some considerations of what is at stake in place representations, focusing his comments on the Google Earth phenomenon and alluding to the possibilities of the 'Flickrisation of Google Earth,' i.e. the project of collectively tagging and providing on-the-ground, rich visualizations for the satellite imagery captured by Google Earth (based upon 'Ground Truth Model').
There is a question of representation and control: who is making this model?
In what we might consider an antidote to the surveillance aspects of this technology, Michael discussed his Camera Zapper project (Japan, 2001-02). This was a way of using a laser to obscure the camera's images (the limitation was that one would have to know where the camera was in order to 'zap' it). Q & A
Q. Some are arguing that there's a plateau that's been hit in developing memory. Will it continue to go up or are there barriers that will get in the way?
A. It's a question of use. Will it be full of a newer high-bandwidth media or 60,000 hours of video? The arts community has an opportunity to compete. Re: quantity, a project that someone should do. Source data is owned but metadata is up for grabs. What if a web project began to parse every movie and assign tags to every scene?
Q. Any thoughts on the difference between experience and immersion?
A. Rachel Strickland would quote Merleau-Ponty re: experience vs. immersion. Negroponte: first paper was called 'idiosyncratic systems. Message was that machines of the future would know their users. 'aquaintanceship'= if you know that I know something about you. It seems that meaning is ultimately a series of onion skins beginning with 1st order representation and then with social norms and family norms…
Q. You focus on making technology as close to our lived experience as possible. What if we have so much information that we don't even have normally. That seems like hyper-reality (google jockeying and so on). Having so much of an influx of information.
A. Heard at a conference: "Give me more bandwidth or give me death." (Archetypal engineering/Western approach.) There's a certain seduction. But I see myself as a translator who passes in both communities.
Q. Given the possibilities for surreal panoramas and so on, is anyone getting away from verisimilitude and using them as spatial storytelling machines?
A. A lot of Google mashup activity. Not generally thrilled with most of what I see. Project working on with Perry is to seamlessly Flickrize google. Potential for sophisticated narrative stuff is high. Potential for hacking is really high too.
Q. IMSC project to link webcams together. What are they doing/what is it about?
A. USC campus project. Looking for openly accessible webcams. There are equally mundane webcams available and not copy-protected. www.opentopia.com
More than 1000 or more than 10,000 unlocked webcams: What if every cell phone is a live video camera? What if you have a real-time alert system. Live playing field. All available. Millions of channels. That's the vision of how the Internet's going to end up. Different from youtube.com.
Q. In relation between real and hyperreal, Edgar Popper proposes a different take/ethic. Embeddedness has a certain kind of meaning. What sorts of ethics it produces?
A. Difference between egocentric and exocentric p.o.v. When technology becomes small enough that it's cell phone or wearable. It becomes 'hey, look at what I'm looking at' rather than 'hey look at me'. That's a different form of embeddedness. Proponent of cnn or natl geographic planting webcams. We could get primal, high immersive point of view. Which would be individuals' own point of view.