Redirect question

08Feb10

Some of you were struggling to get your server to pick up your index.html files before your index.php files.

  1. Check if your site has an .htaccess file (if it does wait and do this when I can supervise)
  2. If not then create a new file in a text editor (notepad or text wrangler) and save it as .htaccess (with nothing before the .)
  3. The file should contain the following line of code – it doesn’t need to include anything else: DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
  4. Upload the file into your root directory (where the two index files live).

This should sort out the problem. Let me know if it works. I haven’t tested it but I couldn’t resist scooting round for the code:)


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The Power of the Network

08Feb10

HUBS AND MEANING-MAKING
We might not realise it but we are all part of a network. Even if we largely keep to ourselves we use networks to navigate the world. Roads, trains, telephones, computers, friends associates – everything basically from the structure of our brain and arterial system in our bodies to the way we communicate and learn – is part of a network. Networks are powerful structures with the emphasis on interconnectivity and this interconnectivity gives us the ability to learn.

HISTORY
Of course we had maps and plans and ways of systematizing information well before we understood about neural networks or had the Internet to study – but the earliest instance of modern complex network theory can be found in the work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy from the 1940s. His General Systems Theory was part of his grand project to map hard sciences, social sciences and humanities, technology and art. He employed a set of descriptive notions:

  • System
  • Network
  • Metabolism
  • Openness
  • Closure

This concept, in turn, was passed on to those taking a radical constructivist stance (scientific knowledge is constructed by scientists and not discovered from the world) and then lead to Chaos theory which in turn fed into cybernetics.

NETWORK TYPES
As network theory itself began to take shape in the latter part of the 20th century it was discovered that networks can take differnt shapes. The two distinct types being scale-free networks and random networks.

Scale free networks are characterised by what’s known as the power law distribution and the clustering coefficient distribution. The power law distribution allows for a fault-tolerant design as:

major hubs are closely followed by smaller ones. These, in turn, are followed by other nodes with an even smaller degree and so on. This hierarchy allows for fault tolerant behaviour in the face of random failures: since the vast majority of nodes are those with small degree, the likelihood that a hub would be affected is almost negligible.

The structure of scale-free networks are likened to the structure of the Internet because of these decreasing sized hubs and clusters.

NEURAL NETWORKS
What conforms to this scale-free model?

  • Scale-free networks are pervasive in biology
  • Scale-free networks are pervasive on the Internet

Scale-free networks contain components with a highly diverse level of connectivity. Some components form highly interconnected hubs, while other components have few connections, and there are many levels of interconnectivity in between. Scale-free networks are pervasive in biology. Computer simulations at the University of Chicago show that scale-free networks are able to evolve to perform new functions more rapidly than an alternative network design.

What’s all this got to do with Digital Media?

Until the advent of the Internet, network theories were concerned with the interfaces I’ve mentioned above. There was no example of a global network that might operate in the way the Internet does because it didn’t exist.

Early media theorists enthusiastically adopted McLuhan’s concept of media – perhaps because they’d rather have McLuhan than the cybernetics model (which is more rooted in the behaviourist theories). However, McLuhan’s assumption that “the medium is the message” and that machines might have their own agenda meant that the media theorists would be grappling with problems that went beyond behaviourism.

Six Degrees of Separation – the small world theory

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE?
Meanwhile the bods at Google are trying to use neural networks to better understand face and speech recognition on the Internet. They too (of course) have realised that the way the human brain is wired is very similar to the way the Internet has evolved and are trying to exploit this understanding to make the Internet even more like our brains.

Have we, perhaps unwittingly, created an Artificial Intelligence in our own image – by the back door?

Is the seeking, connection making imperative that works in our brains (neurons and synapses) reflected in our digital structures? We are hard-wired to constantly seeking for connections and in this connected digital world we are somehow striving – on the Internet to make the ultimate brain.

Or as Olga Goriunova from dxlabs maintains should we try and remember that:

  • feedback is not interaction
  • computation is not cognition
  • storage is not memory
  • data is not knowledge
  • telecommunication switches are not social networks
  • cybernetic mapping is not the cultural territory.



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Flickr Test

08Feb10


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Is virtual, digital?

01Feb10

When we think of digital media some us might think about interactivity and the world of participation that gaming and the internet has opened up for us – but for the photographers, specifically, in the room it will be about a once drawn out process being made simpler with the advent of technologies that allow us to shoot and print our work without the conduit of the ‘development process’. A simplification – if you like, that gives the maker more freedom.

Is digital virtual? Or is virtual digital?
When we use the word virtual what do we mean? Is it something that exists exclusively in a cyber environment? For example if we print a digital image does it stop being virtual – or does it exist now in a physical AND a virtual way?

Oliver GRAU

Oliver Grau in his book “Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion” (a recommended text on this module) says that while virtual reality is often viewed as a totally new phenomenon (and by that I mean late 20th century onwards) these “immersive” techniques have been around and utilised by artists throughout history. Grau’s work is comparative and historical and examines how virtual art fits into the art history of illusion and realism. He does this by tracing the history of the image through to the present day and examining how the immersive techniques of the ancients continue to impact on the aesthetics of New Media.

The earliest artists were concerned with creating illusions, and fantasies – just as image makers and game creators and movie makers are today. Look at Avatar for example – I have recently read twitter posts about people feeling depressed that Pandora doesn’t exist – there’s even a forum on the film’s website where people have been supporting one another through their post-Pandora crises.

There is something fundamental about art and image making that touches the human heart – something about creating fantasy. Of course not all artists/photographers are concerned with this. Many photographers in fact want to show people the truth. Photography was viewed as ‘true representation’ – the camera never lies! There have been and will continue to be huge discussions on that topic but here’s an interesting piece from Culture Wars.

We are more inclined to think a photograph is an accurate representation than a painting or a sculpture, the former of course having the advantage of immediacy and spontaneity so the ‘artist’s touch’ can be more easily hidden.

Truth aside – the question I want to ask is “Does the making of a representation immediately move it into the realm of the virtual?” In a way you can say that any image or representation is a fantasy even if the image is of something prosaic or everyday – even if it is true. The mere fact that it isn’t real – or that that moment no longer exists in real time but is still able to be viewed without being real gives it (or the subject matter) an existence in virtual time and space.

Grau goes further and argues that the aesthetic preconcepts of virtual art are traceable and seamlessly connected to the present incarnation of New Media with its “real time computation, sensorial interactivity, relational databases, distributed networks, knowledge engineering, artificial intelligence, telepresence and artificial life functionality. ” (Joel Slayton)

 

Seems strange to think that artists working before the birth of Christ could have been preoccupied with immersive concepts, let alone interactivity or virtual reality as we know it today. But if we replace the words virtual or digital or immersion with illusion then maybe we can get a bit more of a handle on these techniques.

Let’s look at the broad, primarily European tradition of image spaces of illusion. From Pompeii

More recently visual artists have tried to add an additional playful element. Liu Bolin and his distinct – Urban Camouflage

Or here – street artists Kurt Wenner and Julian Beever go to town with chalk and murals

So Grau is, in a way (as is Manovitch – see his introduction to The Language of New Media) saying that digital/virtual and traditional have exactly the same purpose – to create illusion – to give us, the viewer the opportunity and sensation of experiencing an alternate reality – and, we can argue that this is one of the primary functions of art. Even the ‘true’ representations of photojournalism go through a process of choice of subject, setting up (it was revealed last year that Capa’s famous ‘Falling Soldier’ from the Spanish Civil War was ’set up’), developing, editorial veto etc etc.

I also want to look at some of the most recent incarnations of ‘Digital Art‘. If there’s time I’d also like to look at the work of some photographers rather than ‘digital artists’ who are taking Photoshop to a new level.

Finally I’d like to leave you with a quote from Lev Manovitch’s book The Language of New Media.

Whose Vision is it? It is the vision of a computer, a cyborg, an automatic missile. It is the realistic representation of human vision in the future, when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed from noise. It is the vision of a digital grid. Synthetic computer generated imagery is not an inferior representation of our reality but a realistic representation of a different reality.


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UK-Cheapest

25Jan10

Or should that be UK-Frustration?

Good news is I’ve worked out how to sort it – so don’t despair. I can show everyone how to set permissions next week so that all the theme documents are editable and you can upload images etc.

Rick – if you can contact me via email I will endeavour to troubleshoot your issues from this end.

In the meantime choose a nice WordPress theme, blog about your production/FTP/WordPress issues and start to research the concepts outlined in the creative brief (document to follow). You should be using a mixture of primary research (locations, subjects/models, ideas) as well as secondary research (photographers, styles, genres, theory, kit). Blog about all that too of course.

Well done – it was a difficult workshop (am and pm) but the techie nightmare will soon be over and the frustration will be cancelled out by the sense of achievement…. honest!


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Lecture: The Internet and Digital Data

25Jan10

We know from our own browsing experiences that the World Wide Web has changed dramatically. The Way Back Machine – utility allows us to take a look at how the Internet looked 10 years ago. But this is just about the way the pages look. Has the Internet – its actual infrastructure changed? If you got round to reading the week one handout you’ll know that the architecture of the web (Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) and its attendant layers) have changed little over the last 25 years. IP versions have changed (we’re now on IPv6) but the model remains pretty much the same.

What has changed?:

  • the type and amount of traffic
  • the size of the pipes
  • the speed of connectivity
Client Server Model

Client Server Model

In the client-server model (week one handout) we looked at how the delivery of content was dependent on the technology available to deliver that content. The emphasis in Web 2.0 (and necessarily) 3.0 is on the separation of content from its presentation.

  • Content = words, pictures, interactive elements
  • Presentation = design, layout, fonts, sizes (look and feel) of content elements

History
Initially when the web started and HTML became available as a mark-up language for Web pages people composed their HTML code in a text editor, then editors like Dreamweaver. They were static, separate pages. With the advent of LAMP led to the rise of the content management system or CMS.

CMS
CMS systems underpin most major websites today. They are made up of open source templates that draw content from a database. The content and presentation are separated. The video below explains WCM (web content management) systems in plain English:

This is what has paved the way to user-generated content as the systems have simplicity of use built in – basically – any one can do it. Over time more and more people create their websites using these tools with the obvious consequence of information on the web growing exponentially because the new tools have collaborative features built into the design.

Searching
Once a site had been created then the next challenge is to make sure it could be found. In the past the emerging set of search engines provided registration mechanisms (sometimes for free, but as time went on, for a fee). It was getting competitive and the sheer volume of file types proliferating on the web (images, audio, video), which could all be downloaded and shared, paved the way for a new attitude towards information.

P2P

P2P Network

P2P
The old client server model was not going to work for some of these interactions – especially things like downloading huge video files. If a video server had to complete a request for a large movie from a client it could be kept busy for hours simply completing this request. And until very recently, constant rates of download were hard to guarantee. This help up holding up video on demand – something we take for granted now.

Notice that this video problem is not just a question of bandwidth – it is the also the matter of a single server being tied up with a request for significant amounts of time. The alternative was peer to peer (P2P) networks. These give up the idea of the central server that has to take care of all the incoming requests and relies on the computing power and bandwidth of ALL the participants in the network. Thus nodes on the network can be connected ad hoc.

P2P networks don’t have the notion of the client. Any node can be client or server or both. In fact a P2P system are complete, decentralised, self-managed resource sharers.

Since every entity (or peer) in the network is an active participant, each peer contributes certain resources to the network, such as storage space and CPU cycles. As more and more peers join the network, the network’s capability increases. Hence, as the network grows, it strengthens. You won’t find that kind of scalability in client/server architectures.
The Jxta solution to P2P By Navaneeth Krishnan, JavaWorld.com

HTML v XML
The LAMP (a common acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) manifestation of the open source world has brought along a considerable number of tools through which software development is supported today. And employing these tools has been instrumental in the advent of XML. Using HTML a document can quickly be created using tags. As we know tags follow simple syntactical rules and are often used to describe both the content and the structure of a document.

The separation of presentation and content became an issue when web pages began to be rendered on more and more devices, each with their own capabilities and restrictions:

  • computer terminals
  • laptops
  • mobiles
  • PDAs

Web pages started to be created ‘on the fly’ – content pulled into a template from a database. An online database will rely on the assumption that no layout information needs to be stored for its content, but that this information will be added once its content is being accessed for display. In HTML presentation can be specified within the document or separately on a Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) file. HTML tags are predefined and although there are ways of including additional tags (embedding scripting language for example) tags cannot generally be defined by the user. What was needed was a language that was pure information (content) separated from the presentation (display).

This would allow pure information to be carried and then displayed or delivered, if you like on all the new devices proliferating.

So along comes XML which has no predefined tags at all. The author can create his/her own tags. XML is a software and hardware independent tool for carrying information.

  • HTML is about displaying information
  • XML is about carrying information.

For more info on XML: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_whatis.asp

How does this separation benefit us?:

  • Pages on the fly
  • Elegant web search
  • Syndication
  • Mash-ups
  • Multi-platform data distribution

Associated links:

Jeni Tennison’s practitioner’s blog
Semantic Web Wiki
Editors – Streetview
Data.gov


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Extend your Blog

18Jan10

Well done to all getting your blogs working today. Most people managed to get their wordpress on site and databases installed. Please make sure you have made a note of all passwords and usernames so you can get to your WordPress dashboard.

For those who haven’t got a blog working use Freehosting to set up some server space and use Softaculous link in the control panel to install wordpress. Make sure you bring all access details next week.

During this week find the theme and layout of your choice
Remember you can install the theme via the Appearance – add new theme command in your dashboard. Here, you can also search and preview themes or upload themes you have found and downloaded from 3rd party sites on the web.

This video tutorial will show you how to do all of the above:

You can also add gallery plugins in the same way via the Plugins – add new plugin command. Always look at plugins working on a web site before you install so you can be sure you like the way they function. So have a look at gallery plugins as well – make a note of the web address where you’ve seen them running and add the links to your new blogs as part of your research.

Relevant links:
WordPress.org – extend – you can browse most free to install themes and plugins from here


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Digital Media: A level playing field?

18Jan10

The ‘democracy of technology’ is often discussed with reference to the fact that with the advent of the digital age power has been put into the hands of the people – the masses. The Center for Democracy and Technology

  1. Access to information on a scale never before imagined has been achieved through the exponential growth of the Internet.
  2. Real-time communication using the Internet and mobile phones has meant that even in countries where the population’s access to information is ‘controlled’ the authorities are finding it harder and harder to exercise that control.

We have pocket-sized devices that can take images, record movies and audio and connect to the other estimated 5 billion mobile users around the globe.

With examples like social media and the Iran election and Google lifting restrictions on web searches in China after it discovered the Gmail accounts of human rights activists in the country were being systematically hacked you can be forgiven for thinking that in the west we’ve got freedom of information nailed.

Knowledge is Power
It was Sir Francis Bacon, writing in the 17th century, who first said Knowledge is Power. He aspired to a Utopian vision where “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendor, piety and public spirit” were the commonly held qualities.

We consider ourselves to be more sophisticated than our 17th century counterparts don’t we? We know when we’re being duped, hustled, lied to – we know the difference between advertising, spin, propaganda and the real, unassailable truth. In fact if we want to know anything we have the world’s largest and most sophisticated database at our fingertips. The Internet.

The tensions of global information
You don’t need me to tell you that there are problems with this simplistic analysis. The global dissemination of information can create tensions not least because there is SO much information out there it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not.

The Yes Men:

Activists have  learned to harness the power of this new digital landscape. But there are other, possibly more prosaic problems with the glut of information we have to wade through. How do we tell the real from fake?

Sinister forces at play?
Naomi Klein – shock doctrine – show video

How do we know that something is even written by a human?

On a more prosaic note – can we be sure that something we read online isn’t ‘auto-generated content’? Freddie Ayer and Alan Turing kick-started the modern discourse on machine intelligence in the early to mid 20th century. AJ Ayer in his book Language Truth and Logic asserted:

The only ground I can have for asserting that an object which appears to be conscious is not really a conscious being, but only a dummy or a machine, is that it fails to satisfy one of the empirical tests by which the presence or absence of consciousness is determined.

The Turing Test: In Alan Turing’s now famous paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950) he asks whether a machine can be made that would be indistinguishable from a human being when subjected to particular criteria.

  1. Captcha – Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
  2. Caffeinated content – automated marketing.

Faking it in Premiere and Photoshop – the new unreality

Lev Manovich ch3. pp 136-145 in The Language of New Media uses the movie Wag the Dog as an example of how digital compositing is used to create seamless fake realities using digital compositing. The movie came out in 1999 and in a more light-hearted way explores how a US President tries to take the heat of his personal misdemeanors by creating a fake war.

FBI sucks at Photoshop: Even yesterday the FBI got in trouble for using pictures of a Spanish politician to illustrate how Osama Bin Laden may have aged over the years causing a furore in the press. The mistake here not being the use of Photoshop itself but the arrogance of the artist in assuming he/she need not check the source of the image being used.

We are used to Photoshop disasters in advertising. But with the advent of software like Photosketch – we are more and more having to be vigilant to the new unreality of digital media.


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Hosting

17Jan10

For those of you who have done this already – look away…. for those who have not yet bought hosting here are some links that might be useful. The final link – FREEHOSTING – looks as though it might be good. It seems to have all the required functions and cost …. nothing! Sorry to those who have missed this I only just found it.

  • One.com – domain name and hosting free for one year (but with admin charge and NO control panel)
  • UK-Cheapest – £1.59 p/m plus domain – one click CMS installation (not sure if this has control panel)
  • Vision Internet – £35 a year for ‘home-plus’ option – all requirements met WITH control panel
  • Freehosting – just found this and it looks OK & costs nothing – also seems to have all the required functions

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IMPORTANT info for absent students

13Jan10

Dear Digital Media students

As the weather (!) stopped so many from turning up to 214MC on Monday there are some urgent things you need to do before next week:

1: Make sure you subscribe to this blog using the link at the bottom of the right hand nav. Use your personal email address to be sure you get an alert each time I put a new post up.

2: **IMPORTANT** Buy a domain name and hosting. Hosting requirements are:

  • 500mb minimum of webspace
  • MySQL database
  • PHP 5.0

You should choose a domain with a .co.uk suffix and a name such as johnbrown-photo.co.uk. Keep it short, keep it relevant.
3: Cheapest hosting: http://www.one.com/en/ – however cheapest isn’t always best. One.com doesn’t have a control panel but this is not a drawback. Control panels are easier but cost a little more. UK-Cheapest has a control panel: http://www.uk-cheapest.co.uk/ (I will explain control panels in more detail next session but if in doubt go for a host with a control panel)

YOU MUST BRING THE ACCESS DETAILS TO YOUR HOSTING WITH YOU NEXT WEEK – your host will send you these details via email once you have signed up so make sure you can access these emails from your ISP (host).

4: Groups:
Morning – 9.30 ETB06 – Jessica Cooper, Matthew Farmer, Paul Hogan, Hannah Jones, Harpreet Khara, Marta Kochanek, Cosimino Lisbona, Ed McCulloch, George Rippon
Lecture: 12-1pm ET130
Afternoon – 1.30 ETB06 – Rick Medlock, Danielle Muir, Joanna Ornowska, Alex Situnyake, Catherine Slade, Ed Taylor, Bo Wu, Ola Zagozda, Carsum Din, Katy Katz (?)

5: Watch the screening for lecture 1 (in the post below this). And make sure you download and read all the relevant documents (module booklet, feedback proforma, assignment brief etc) on the DOCUMENTS page.

Groups and times may change throughout the term so always check the blog. I will also put some more links on the links page throughout the week – and always check the document page for new readings/items of interest as you won’t be alerted to page changes – just new posts.

See you next week and email me if you have any problems

Mez


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