18.12.19
Truffle, Frimaire, 228: A short post on vanishing states, sieges and maths.
Short one this week, thankfully. It’s been a week of slogging it through Christmas events and feeling the extra 10 bpm added to my heart rate in hangovers. Augury got a nice mention in an article in WIRED dot com magazine from Ben Vickers and Hans Ulrich Obrist. I don't know if it's just me and my own filter bubble but the amount of tech and occult work in current circulation seems to have shot up over the last twelve months.
I’ve been readingVanished Kingdomswhich I’ve had sat around for a while. It’s a dense book on the forgotten histories of forgotten states or particularly short ones. I just finished the chapter on Burgundy of which there were 16 different incarnations over a thousand years. The history is list-like, interspersed with quotes from contemporary sources. The whole thing is book-ended with sprawling descriptions of geographic features, or, as is the case with Burgundy, critiques of the way we remember these forgotten states in media. I'm struggling a bit with it because of the density and pacing which I suppose is a hangover of mostly consuming history through Wikipedia and podcasts.
I also bought and started playing This War of Mine which was on sale on Steam. It's a really nicely designed survival platformer focusing on resource management in a war-torn city. I have yet to win a game, it's super difficult and full of curve balls and depressing plot developments.
Things I Learned This Week
Thanks to This War of Mine I delved into a Wikipedia hole on the Siege of Sarajevo (from which the game takes inspiration.) The Bosnian conflict is one that I know vanishingly little about and is one of those ones that is so complex that it's hard to hold it in your head all at once. The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest-lasting siege of the modern age.
A colleague at UAL writes a thing called the 'Digital Transformation Brief' every Monday for staff. It's a really nice thing. This week he posted a link to this story from Brigham Young University about scalable water rendering. There's not a lot there on the process but it's a super interesting development when it comes to artificially simulating 'noisy' physics like water surfaces which normally take a bunch of calculations.
Check out the lineup of writers for the latest issue of Continent. Loads of stuff on tech and magic. Talking about tech and magic is cool now.
Channel Recommendation
I recommended maths YouTube channel Three Blue One Brown a while ago which uses really smart python animations to demonstrate complex mathematical ideas, this is another maths one, this one a bit more personality-driven: Standup Maths from Matt Parker. It's very geeky and often quite puzzle-based and involves him talking to other people more often than not. Check out this one on the Frog Problem:
I'll see about doing another post next week. I have a lot of reading and writing that I'm avoiding so this might give me an excuse to do that.
4.12.19
Cédre, Frimaire, 228; Project PROBE, Knowledge Capture in Design Part 3
If I put the titles to what these posts are about, they might be easier to find, though I do tag liberally to help.
Project PROBE
Last week I wrote that I’d started a new little vanity project. I find myself very happy learning new technical stuff and this project gives me the chance to combine some of the things I learnt about servos from Charismatic Megapigment with some of the other projects that have used geolocation maths like Augury. I'm not going to give much away on what it's about, just show process as I go.
I’m trying to get all the inputs to talk to each other this week. Without giving away spoilers; it needs to know exactly where it is in relationship to where something else is. So I need a WiFi module and IMU (inertia measurement unit), ideally with a magnetometer so it can figure out where north is. This way it can use WiFi beacons and the magnetometer to figure it's exact position on the Earth and it's orientation to the poles. Rather than plugging in a bunch of different components, the Rev2 pictured has a WiFi module and IMU built in so that’ll save on space and complexity (although I'm not sure the IMU has a magnetometer built-in.) However, the first challenge was getting it to talk. It wouldn’t talk to any Macs but when I hook it in to a Window’s PC; no problem.
The solution was a creeping reinstall (there's probably a technical name): I had to do a complete manual reinstall of Arduino IDE and all the drivers, starting with oldest to newest until I got one that worked. This meant going through the preferences menu to find Arduino’s cache and wiping it. This is risky if you’re dependent on Arduino projects but I don’t use it everyday so I think I’ll survive.
The second issue was getting it to connect to a WiFi network. Luckily there is a secret one at work that has only WPA encryption (no username, just a password) so I managed to sneak it on. Currently the standard Arduino wifi library – WiFiNINA – has no support for WPA Enterprise without a lot of jiggery-pokery.
The next step is finding a way to get its location in longitude and latitude. Google now charges for its geolocation API which is a pain on a vanity project and not something I wanted to go through the hassle of setting up. Unwired Labs LocationAPI which I found through this helpful tutorial allows you to track up to five devices free for 100 calls every twenty-four hours. I only need to track one device and since it should only need to call the API when it's first turned on this would easily suit my purposes.
The idea here is to ask the Arduino to compile a list of nearby WiFi routers and their signal strength, send them to Unwired Labs and then receive a longitude and latitude, same as the Google Geolocation API. The code in the tutorial is pretty useful but there’s always a bunch of problems to be un-kinked when building a system from different components. The version of the Arduino WiFi scanner library being used in the tutorial had a handy ‘BSSIDstr’ function that converts the byte arrays of BSSID (the mac addresses of nearby routers) to strings so you can feed them into a JSON string. Essentially, the format that the mac addresses are scraped in are in the wrong format to send to the API and you get mangled gobbledy gook if you try. However, BSSIDstr no longer exists so I had to mangle in a ‘sprintf’ bit to do that for me. Sprintf is one of those things I've never properly understood so it was useful to learn how it and byte arrays work. FYI, just for fun, the order of the bytes is backwards so you need to lace the string backwards to get the BSSID in the right order. Then there just some tweaking around with the URL for the API request since it’s all changed since and it was good to go. Et Voila, my Arduino knows exactly where it is on the surface of the world as pictured to a remarkable degree of accuracy.
I already have a magnetometer working from an earlier test so I'm not hugely bothered by the amount of work there so once that's integrated the Arduino will be able to know it's position and orientation when it turns on easily. Most of the stuff that seems to happen in the early stages of these projects is versioning; tutorials use out of date firmware, terms have changed or been removed etc. etc. So most of what you end up doing is chasing around dates and versions to get everything to talk to each other.
If I get any more time I will be looking in to what turns out to be some exceptionally complicated geometry problems which I hitherto had considered child's play. Who knew there are different versions of time?
Knowledge in design part 3; cognitive dissonance and sympathy,
This is more of a short addendum than an entire new line of thinking. A lot of activities last week kept me from reading as much as I’d like but I met up with Yosuke Ushigome of Takram fame on Monday night and we discussed some of this stuff since he at least apparently reads this. We were reflecting briefly on the history and state of speculative and/or critical design with regard to our peers from MA Design Interactions: Why did the canon there struggle to respond to issues that were beyond a limited temporal window and individual scale?
The easiest answer to me is in design’s aesthetic history of tackling human problems on Maslow’s hierarchy; where to live, how to eat and sleep, how to communicate and share information etc. All of these things can be interfaced or encountered within the human sensorium and consequently design’s aesthetic sensibility is drawn from the human body and it’s scale. It’s only in recent years that design has attempted to address ‘systems’ and even these are human-oriented with solutions and products largely being aimed at the interface of the human and the system; different information flows and architectures, levels of access or responsiveness. This is as opposed to the approach of an activist or artist who might address the system in total as an artefact rather than as an inevitability.
Take for example, Suzanne Triester’s work; Hexen 2.0 (left) which examines the history of computation through a quasi-occult, quasi-conspiratorial lens. The goal here is not to improve the system or design it in a different way but to give us a pan-historical reading of it that challenges our comprehensive model and presents alternate narratives.
This is opposed to any number of brilliant design projects on computation that address the way we interface with the very notion of computation through the interface. For example, the amazing work of IF and their catalogue of data patterns almost all of which feature a hand, a phone, a laptop. They address the system at the point of interface where design is most appropriate and comfortable. This is how cognitive understanding is built between the audience of the design and the idea of the design. We all have hands, phones and laptops, we can project ourselves into the alternatives that IF propose for data patterns. To a degree, Triester exploits the same sympathies by drawing on an aesthetic sensibility of diagrams and visualisations with which we might be familiar and so are equipped to interpret the work and put it in a certain frame of reference.
If I was to think about Auguryas a project about computation then I’d say it is further abstract than Triester’s work. It draws on some familiar aesthetics; the audience having to look up indicates it’s about something above us, there are flight numbers and names of airline companies to conclude it has something to do with planes. Though it draws on a popular ancient practice of divination, this was less familiar to the audience which was perhaps a failing. Connecting this ancient divination technique with a contemporary technological equivalent – planes’ instead of birds’ flight patterns used to predict the future – was a knowing cognitive leap rather than one meant to create cognitive sympathy. The project exploited the idea that the audience might question why these things are together as way of teasing them towards the absurdity of computational prediction without having to reduce it to human terms (phones, laptops hands) that would make it more comfortable. From the perspective of my practice I find the only way to deal with things maybe beyond the human scale is to exploit cognitive dissonance as it's impossible to make these things sympathetic to human understanding in their entirety.
While a design project might draw on a more familiar aesthetic sensibility to provoke the idea of the absurdity of computational prediction by exploring alternative device interfaces or human interactions, in Augury Wes and I were keen to highlight the supra-human qualities of computation by placing it in the world of the supernatural. It’s hard to then draw on design aesthetics and logics for this kind of framing, there aren’t really (arguably) tenants, principles or methodologies for designing the supernatural. There are certainly designed aesthetics; colours, shapes, styles but not many functional models.
Let’s put this back into the question; ‘Why did Formafantasma design a chair about e-waste?’ which seems to have become the locus for this thinking. Ore Streams draws entirely on a comfortable and sympathetic design aesthetic – the chair – to engage with a bigger-than-human (I’ve been trying out various words here, you may have noticed) idea/issue. But, they draw on elements of sympathy and dissonance; it’s a chair with which we can all connect experientially but it is also provoking a discussion about e-waste with a particular audience. Consequently the audience might ask ‘why is the chair made that way?’ I am going to stop banging on Formafantasma now, I really do love their work and I’m sorry they’ve become a lynch pin that seems to be unduly criticised here. I do think Ore Streams is great, I’m just using it as an exemplar project for design projects that don’t give me a good sense of why did they do it that way? The follow on from which is what is the best way of doing this? Which is basically a PhD right.
Restoring some regular features - things I learned this week.
A while back I said I liked reflecting on what I've learnt. Obviously it's a bit of a cheat this week because:
I learnt a lot more Arduino stuff, particularly what is and how exactly 'sprintf' works and loads of other stuff about using Arduino with online stuff.
I've been listening intently to my Arabic philosophy podcast and have learnt a lot about Al-Razi who spent a lot of time refuting Galen and was mostly known as a heretic so most of his writings are only known by how they're refuted by later Islamic scholars. He dared to suggest that four things preceded God - soul, matter, the universe and time.
The folks at Wikimedia are super cool and have a lot of really interesting stuff going on. (Bit of a cop-out this one, I'll own it.)
And – Channel recommendation
I've loved Girlfriend Reviews since they first started. Witty and irreverent reviews of games which are becoming increasingly more critically engaged in discussion of the industry. The latest one on the new Star Wars game which received lavish praise is brilliant as a piece of media criticism on how games reuse and reconstruct tropes but also now hilarious for my new catch phrase; 'Have y'all lost your minds cos I'll help ya find 'em!'
I've already started notes for next week's blog and it's currently Tuesday so I guess it's going well. I hope you enjoy something and it's not too tiresome.
Hi, I'm doing well in carving out time to think, work and make things. I started a little vanity project yestertoday which is in embryonic stages but should give me an opportunity to learn some new stuff. I'll try and blog it up and put it on Instagram stories. It's not particularly conceptually clever but I just happen to have the bits lying around at the moment. In the picture you see a 9-axis accelerometer/gyro/manetomoeter (I forget the acronym for these things). This project needs to know exactly where it is on the Earth's surface to work. Today a Wi-Fi shield is arriving. I leave it up to you to guess.
Formafantasma again, this time about knowledge
Following on from my diatribe on Formafantasma last week, which might be best summarised as ‘why make a chair about e-waste?’ It was useful to crack the spine on The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts at the weekend. In the second chapter ‘ Pleading for Plurality’ by Norwegian academic Søren Kjørup there is a careful, though somewhat dated analysis of the different ways in which ‘artistic’ research (broadly defined so as to include other forms of creative practice) creates and disseminates knowledge. Here he discusses the work of embroider Hans Hamid Rasmussen who produces textiles that examine ‘intercultural experiences.’ Kjørup points out that the knowledge created in this process is two-fold; first a communication of those experiences and secondly the development of those methods of communication or as he puts it; ‘[Rasmussen’s] works not only claim that ‘intercultural experiences are like this’, but also that ‘intercultural experiences may be expressed like this’.’
This conforms well to Christopher Frayling’s 1993 categorisation of research through, for and about art. Rasmussen uses his art to talk about intercultural experience (through) but also developed new means of communication (for). These are categorisations that we are relatively used to. That the process of creative production uncovers new knowledge on the subject but can also push the whole field forward by demonstrating ways in which that knowledge is produced. However, though Kjørup takes about Rasmussen’s contribution to the field of embroidery in regard to talking about issues like ‘intercultural experiences’ doesn’t follow up with why this is a good way of communication. Suggesting ways in which an abstract notion like intercultural experiences may be expressed could be rather simple since they could be expressed in any number of ways across media and form but the value of this research is surely in discovering and sharing what media or forms are most appropriate and effective.
It is perhaps telling for this critique that Kjørup refers to the word ‘expression’ while I use ‘communication.’ Perhaps this is another separation of a designerly approach from an artistic one; consideration of audience. I might express an idea in any number of ways if the comprehension of the audience is secondary to finding a means of expression based on other criteria, for instance, dynamism, critical craft or tradition. However, where the audience’s comprehension is the primary aim then I need to think about appropriateness and accessibility and evaluate why ‘expressing [communicating] something this way’ is most effective for my objective.
This is where Formafantasma’s Ore Streams chair again becomes another useful example. If I, with a designerly mindset and sure in my understanding of my role as a designer, were to embark on a project aiming to engage an audience in discussion of issues of e-waste, I would not make a concept chair. I might consider making a viral video since these travel well and can be viewed by millions. I might consider using design-led policy development methods to affect local and national change through lobbying and appropriate use of data. I might even conduct an investigative project and find interesting and clear ways of visualising it for use by others in similar enterprises. Fortuitously, this approach was validated at the weekend when Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s were awarded Design of the Year for ‘Anatomy of an AI’ - an investigative visualisation of Amazon’s entire AI ecosystem.
However, I could reevaluate my critique of Ore Streams with the question ‘who was the audience?’ It’s quite possible that Formafantasma were not interested in a piece of mass communication so much as using their significant platform within the boutique design world to engage a specific audience of other designers, design critics and journalists. The earlier iterations of critical design [image] were for this purpose too after all. The idea of engaging practitioners and theorists in critical practice was to help them think better about their own practice as an educational and research tool. (Tangentially, this is why I’ve never had a good response to the ‘isn’t it just design for designers?’ question because, well, yes, it is. That was always the idea.)
Kjørup returns to Rasmussen’s work with the regrettable conclusion that the knowledge that Rasmussen produces and shares is ultimately read by others in the write-ups of the project he does that accompanies his work. The embroideries themselves are read by the research community as part of the process of uncovering knowledge that is ultimately validated only once written down. This tension between the formalism of the natural sciences and the plurality of creative subjects is the thrust of Kjørup’s chapter which he examines by demonstrating the value of the plurality of ways in which knowledge is generated through creative practice.
In doing so he introduces the taxonomy of Willhelm Windelband’s new terms of ‘nomothetic’ and ‘idiographic’ sciences. ‘Nomothetic sciences are the ones that search for general laws… as most of the natural sciences [but] even a humanistic discipline like history.’ While ‘…idiogrpahic disciplines are the ones that study these subjects in their specificity.’ Here there is another way of examining Ore Streams; it does not seek to establish general laws or frameworks like a policy design piece or a stunning work of infographics, but for Formafantasma to explore their own (and those of their immediate peers’) practice in the context of the general knowledge/laws/frameworks of e-waste.
Kjørup neatly summarises the value of these debates in his notion that artistic (etc.) research is ‘pre-pardigmatic.’ We do not have a Newtonian or Aristotelian framework for artistic research that is ‘sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity’ and is ‘sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.’ (Quoting Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1970, p.10) Interestingly, while summarising how paradigms bring ‘values’ to science he reiterates Thomas Kuhn in his note that ‘science should or (need not be) social useful.’ This is an interesting formulation of the idea that science should be socially useful or not at all with the implication being that it should not be socially destructive. By the scientific values that dominate conversations o knowledge creation, Ore Streams is certainly not socially destructive, so my critique of it could also be flawed by assuming that all creative endeavours have to be socially useful to have had their knowledge made valuable.
The pre-paradigmatic nature of research in arts and design (although I would argue that Frayling’s work is pretty paradigmatic) makes considerations of how knowledge is generated, for who and by what means it is evaluated still worthwhile and contentious in a positive way as the paradigm might be formed at a time when social issues of inequality, accessibility and privilege feature prominently in discussions of knowledge.
I’ll confess to sinking more time into the Playstation than I should at the moment, something about these early dark evenings. I’ve decided to lay off Death Stranding until I’ve done a big chunk of other work I can reward myself with. Did you see that Valve announced a new Half-Life? But the thing is only going to be VR and probably on Steam's own platform? Millions of people hesitantly let out a sigh of relief they've been holding for 15 years this morning. Still it's a good technique to push us all into VR gaming.
decline.online is still working. Remarkably. I went to visit it to see how messed up it might be but most of it, apart from the Air Quality indexes, were all there. I’m going to spend some time at Christmas improving it, adding new data sources and figuring out a better scrolling mechanism.
WTF Targeting
I came across this fascinating targeted post on Instagram from a housing developer. I suppose the targeting is pretty easy to figure out: As a recent homeowner I’m still targeted by things related to a search history of someone who has recently bought a flat. The image falls easily into the remit of rendered development images we’re used to and isn’t anything particularly remarkable in that regard. It has that aesthetic that we might call ‘instructions to photons.’ From a distance it appears real enough but the execution is all wrong: As usual, the selection of render ghosts have light coming from different directions, the lack of contact shadows and ambient occlusion means they appear to float just in front of the image, they have no reflections in the glass. The textures on the black metal and paving slabs repeat too regularly and are too clean to be believable. It’s as if you’ve taught someone how light works really well but they’ve never visually experienced it.
I’m used to seeing these images and have talked about them quite extensively. To be honest, I find them remarkable in their unremarkableness. An aesthetic of rushed imperfection against the noisy ur-reality of CGI cinema has been normalised. However, I then read the text:
Join us in Chinatown for the launch of our brand new development on the 26th November. Chinese experts will be on hand 6pm-9pm. Discover more about life in an unrivalled, Zone 1 location. RSVP to confirm your place.
Well goddamnit if that isn’t the most remarkable little bit of marketing guff I’ve ever read. Let’s unpack the obvious errors and park some of the further questions they open up:
Tottenham Court Road station is not in Chinatown. It’s arguable that it’s at the North-East corner, but even according to Chinatown’s own map, it’s nowhere near.
The follow up question is then, why is Chinatown the point of appeal and not Soho which is geographically more proximate?
So in that case what are ‘Chinese experts’? Are they Chinese folks who are experts in London or London folks (Chinese or otherwise) who are experts in Chinatown? And why would you need that?
Anyway, I'm in the midst of trying to do some digging to find answers. I spoke to Wes about it and suggested the text was fil-in-the-blanks algorithmically generated. He reckons it's just a bad intern and Instagram thinks I'm a Chinese oligarch. Either way, I figured the reason it struck me is it's basically spam mail. There's no attempt at sophistication or individuality. It's just a meaningless sentence that for one very specific group of people (that I'm clearly not in) will make sense. The transaction cost for the developer is so low that for every 10,000 people that see this, they just need 1 to click so they can afford to be completely nonsensical to 9,999 people.
Attitude, Formafantasma, Art and Deisgn.
I started reading Alice Rawsthorn’s Design as an Attitude at the weekend. I never read her columns but like anyone in design am deeply aware of her significant and positive impact in the field. The book seems to offer a pretty coherent overview for folks from design and perhaps even non-design fields of the shift from functional or decorative practice of the industrial eras to ‘attitudinal’ practice, drawing on Maholy-Nagy’s notion of design as contributing to social good and ‘being generally resourceful and inventive.’ It’s not pitched super high and it is littered with great historical and contemporary references so it’s definitely going on my student reading list.
However, something in it is making me uncomfortable; I often run into a problem with these texts, conversations and exhibitions where the sense of the subject doesn’t align to my own. Perhaps it’s where I sit at an intersection of media theory and media art and design ‘thinking’ and that needs some reconciling with design literature but to me Rawsthorn’s book (so far) draws heavily on the materialistic version of design that litters Salone, Clerkenwell Design Week, Dezeen newsletters and Instagram. She spends the opening chapters of this book exploring design's journey form the crafts to industrial production, through decoration and now into critical practice but with little reference to how the methods and intellectual frameworks have changed: From ceramics to machines to recycled furniture but with (so far) no reference of piecework, Fordism, cybernetics, ecological theory and even design thinking as the theories with which these practices were/are in dialogue.
To explore an example of this division, which reductively could be seen as a focus on practice at the cost of theory; almost every chapter (sometimes every page) in Rawsthorn’s book (so far) makes reference to Formafantasma. I have no particular issue with this apparently renowned studio I’d never heard of until about six months ago. I really like their work, I think it’s clever, challenging and insightful. However, in the long established discourses of critical technology and media studies I’ve been engaged with throughout my career they just don’t figure - not in exhibition, conversation or text despite their clever exploration of critical technological issues like e-waste. This isn’t in anyway to undermine the importance of their work but simply to say that there is a very apparent dissonance in orientating points which – looking at Formafantasma’s follower count – would imply it’s more my ignorance than anything else but nonetheless speaks of a design world that is not acknowledged in this book.
In the design world of Formafantasma's value often seems to be captured in the production rather than the process. What I mean here is that the object itself is the thing to be celebrated as a sort of idol of intellectual enquiry. Time and effort is invested in perfecting the aesthetics of a product to slide it into the high-end world of luxury design. This is a clever subversion but at the same time undermines the criticality of the work: The response is; ‘oh you made something beautiful and it says something’ rather than ‘oh you created knowledge which we can now use to improve the human condition.’ This fetishisation of design outcomes occludes the intellectual frameworks, varied, complex and contested though they are that design has birthed through an understand of materials and how these frameworks are applied elsewhere. It makes these designs remarkable and headline-worthy but the knowledge they produce unreachable.
Formafantasma's Ore Streams. Found with the caption 'formafantasma uses electronic waste to create office furniture concepts' on Designboom (2017)
Formafantasma’s work remains highly exclusive in its audience of European design students and bloggers. Take, for example, Ore Streams. It’s clear from first glance that the primary consideration is aesthetic. Clean, beautiful, viral aesthetics in concept furniture are a great way to bring people in to the ideas of the project, but the subject and issue is still beyond reach. It tells me nothing about what I can do about e-waste, no data about my devices or products or organisations I can go to. There are a series of interviews on the project's website with almost entirely white male academics and industry leaders prevaricating on the issues but no clear designerly guidance on how to improve the social condition that Rawsthorn stipulates in her introduction as the responsibility of design.
Going back to this idea of production versus process, Rawsthorn mentions Fixperts (now FixEd), another design-led organisation dealing with e-waste. However, rather than focussing on a high-end engagement with the boutique design world, Fixperts develop iterative policy, education and technical methods and interventions that engage ‘publics’ in a real way with e-waste. Again, Rawsthorn mentions these folks so it’s no criticism of the scope of her work, but Fixperts (so far) get none of the careful analysis of Formafantasma; their work is brushed over as simplistic and functional.
Again and again, I don’t want to criticise Rawsthorn’s excellent work here but there’s a mismatch in what design is in my perception. So far, the book has made little reference to the significant impact of service and policy design methods in impacting e-waste at governmental and corporate levels or the work of critical and investigative practitioners in unveiling and communicating systems which produce e-waste. I would argue that these processes are firstly much more ‘designerly’ in their approach of design as investigative and probing tools and secondly much more impactful than the work of Formafantasma.
Rawsthorn ends this chapter by glossing over the art/design argument. That's fine; I’m not particularly interested in this argument either. When it comes up I tend to dismiss it as I find the distinction relatively meaningless so I agree with her rhetorical question that ‘does it matter whether a piece of work that explores a theme equally adroitly is described as art or design?’ However, there’s an insistence at this point in the text that Formafantasma’s projects epitomise a design ‘attitude’ because they are functional and something is understood about design in their production. But this function and understanding is incredibly exclusive. Formafantasma themselves have begun to understand something of the design process in the production of their work but they’ve done a terrible job of communicating that understanding. A beautiful concept chair made from e-waste tells us nothing about the financial systems that perpetuate e-waste’s production nor does it provide a pragmatic, scalable solution, nor does it expose the means of its production. And their chair is functional only theoretically; I doubt they’d allow you to perch on it for a break while stomping around Salone for hours on end. Its function is a statement piece in the context of an incredibly wasteful luxury design industry. Ore Streams is an idol to Formafantasma’s own exclusive understanding of the work that bears little of the generosity and clarity of what I understand design to be. In this I would make the argument that it sits more firmly in the art camp - exclusive both physically and intellectually; requiring an aesthetic sophistication (read: level of understanding) in its audience to insinuate meaning and a physical proximity to examine.
I guess this leaves me looking at my own hands a bit. The work I’ve done in the last few years; Charismatic Megapigment for example, which I’m trying to figure out how to write about, is also exclusive. It can stand in for any of the art projects I’ve done recently; exclusive, elusive, intellectual. I’m quite open about this and I call it ‘art.’ I make these projects because I want to learn more about the technical and intellectual processes behind, in this instance, robotics, machine learning and working with a proper fine artist. I don’t consider it a communicative piece in the same way as a great piece of data visualisation or even a policy document – it’s not meant to be generous. This doesn’t relegate it or promote it above designerly practices but I certainly wouldn’t, in a discussion on designerly, publicly meaningful and impactful discourse on greenwashing, hold it up as an epitome, (except for selfish reasons).
Charismatic Megapigment draws on the same mechanics as Ore Streams for engagement with subject and audience and in the use of a designerly (read: inventive, resourceful, methodical) process for production, and maybe a handful of people were impacted by it, but that’s not what it’s for and I would feel uncomfortable pitching it that way.
Gee, thanks for getting this far
That was exhausting and still not quite right but perhaps has helped me untangle this knot of practice a bit. Even just a slight budge is good.
10.4.18
Speedrunning or Playing the Playing the Game
I spend a lot of time watching other people play video games. I like playing video games myself but watching other people play has a cathartic, sublime quality to it. It's how I imagine people feel about golf or snooker. I like seeing how people think their way through problems and make choices and I like, that with increasingly better CGI, watching a video game may as well mean watching an ok movie. Some really skilled players can be clever with the camera and build cinematic narrative into the way they play. Machinima has its origins here and has since expanded to include, for instance, VaatiVidya's lengthy but addictive expositions on theories in the Dark Souls games all set to stunning visuals. In these streams, the 'players' use the game's architecture, its physics and mechanics to create alternative narratives unintended by the games' developers.
These videos can be deeply impressive but an even richer vein of games-like media is found in the art form of speedrunning. Just as with machinima makers, runners develop a nuanced understanding of the architecture and mechanics of a game but for different purposes. Speedrunning is essentially the act - or art - of completing a game or part of a game in as short a time as possible. In its simplest iterations, this can simply mean being very good at playing the game, accomplished in its principles and behaviours, able to lazily and mechanically respond to the actions of enemies and the environment that have been rehearsed a thousand times so as to optimise the 'run' - the journey from the beginning of the game to the end.
At its best, Speedrunning is responsible for some of the most unfalteringly stunning acts of mastery and showmanship that I've seen in any discipline. And I mean mastery in a very real way. Unlike, for instance, tennis, cricket, football, cycling or any other form of sport or game where mastery is measured by and conflated with just being very good at performing the sport within the confines of the rules, speedrunning rewards 'play' in the truest sense of flexing the edges of the technical construction of the game. Speedrunning is the art of exploitation of simulated environments.
Speedrunning comes in a wide variety of forms, records are held all over the place with Speedrun.com being an easily searchable database of games and records. Games are generally accompanied by a video that shows the run with lists and descriptions of techniques and constraints on the run. A culture has even grown up os intense analyses and breakdowns of specific runs. There are events and festivals, variants on 'GDQ' - Games Done Quick - being the most popular.
Speedrunning challenges the notions of how we 'play' and 'beat' games. Generally, in normal 'play,' these terms are used to mean 'the game was followed and finished within the confines of the way the developers intended.' Speedrunning, on the other hand, challenges the world the developers have built; it abuses and exploits glitches, cuts, tricks, shortcuts and hacks to defy the world that was created in the first place. This is true play, the pushing and testing of the boundaries that structure the world (of the game.) The most well-run games are dissected and broken down to their very code, every element of their construction is poured over by a community of rabid runners looking for any microsecond edge over their competitors. Wikis spring up to log techniques, routes and strategies as well as to debate the finer points of what exactly constitutes a run. Meanwhile, the streams will generate hundreds of thousands, if not millions of views.
The leaderboard on speedrun.com of Legend of Zelda; Ocharina of Time. This twenty year old game is still continually played by speedrunners to shave microseconds off play time. The tabs at the top are different conditions for runs; 'any%' means any level of completion is acceptable as long as the game is finished. This is a common category across most games. 'no IM/WW' means no item manipulation or 'wrong warping' which are techniques specific to the mechanics of Zelda; OoT.
It may read as piratical and anarchic, but the world of speedrunning is incredibly rule-bound and has fervent and effective testing and validation procedures to insure the communities against 'cheating.'
Speedrun fans will look for evidence of cheating in video and audio tracks that are uploaded. In this case a Donkey Kong player was caught 'splicing' by analysis of the audio track.
Cheating isn't cheating in the sense that we might understand it by the rules of normal gaming where, for instance, clipping through the map, using terrain to move around boss fights or overpowering your character would be at best considered poor sportsmanship and at worst outright cheating. Cheating in speedrunning is essentially the disingenuous reporting of a run. 'Splicing,' one of the most heinous of cheats, is the editing of the run together from smaller pre-recorded parts. Fans will spend hours pouring over videos to watch for signs of splicing such as skipped frames or mis-matched inventories. In fact, the debates over techniques for detecting splicing in a certain game - which can also mean looking for in-game cues - are as varied as the techniques used for speedrunning. In the table below, the frames of a loading sprite animation in Super Meat Boy which has a regular 40 frame cycle of 'up' and 'down' are analysed from screen to screen to detect any irregularities that might be due to splicing.
Photoshopping footage is obviously a common cheat with some cheaters changing numbers that appear on screen at the end of levels. This has led to the emergent behaviour of moving the cursor of the console or PC around and over the times shown on screen to show that it isn't photoshopped.
In this video, Karl beats a 15-year-old record for the Dam level in Goldeneye at 52 seconds. There's almost no play in it in the way the game is conventionally understood but a fascinating and dense understanding of its construction to the point where he is following ground textures for a route. Goldeneye was a common source of Photoshopped finishing times for years because of the ease of just copying the numbers on screen. Pixel pattern analysis (as in the below image) is performed at the by fans to detect when numbers have been copy-pasted.
Another cheat is using an emulator to simulate one piece of hardware on another without reporting it. This can give the significant advantage of faster frame rates on a modern PC or the ability to slow the frame rate down for faster responses which can make all the difference when every microsecond counts.
Then there are nuances on where cheating begins. 'Menuing' for example is when a runner has to perform actions quickly through the game menu. This could be something rudimentary like moving inventory items around or something more sophisticated like rapidly saving and loading to reset an enemy or using a 'quitout' to respawn in a different location. Item manipulation to exploit glitches is allowed as any others are which are permitted by the architecture of the game. However, most western audiences will not allow the use of a turbo controller (a controller that will automate the rapid or continuous pressing of buttons) while Japanese speedrunners are respected for their mastery turbo controller menuers.
Even 'glitchless' runs where none of these tricks are used are up for debate and still causing controversy on 20 year old games to this day. The GIF above shows a technique which is a hot point of contention in Zelda players. It's a 'frame perfect' technique - a technique where a sequence of actions has to be performed to the exact frame in the right order - where there can be as many as sixty frames a second (!!!) - that was previously only thought possible with 'tools' - editing the programming of the game.
Arguments over what contributes 'cheating' in an activity that is about bending rules is responsible for one of the oldest schisms over questions of appropriate methodology in speedrunning: One of the capabilities of early games like Doom and Quake was to record 'demos' - these were essentially recordings of controller directions that could be re-played by other players. These demos made for much smaller files than streaming video at a time when bandwidth couldn't handle the transfer of vast amounts of video footage. Speed Demos Archive began as a forum for Quake players to share demos of their fastest runs through the game. This quickly spun out in to other games including Metroid 2002 where a common trick was to use 'secret worlds' or 'out of bounds' play' to speed up runs. These are techniques that involve the player accessing parts of the game architecture that were never originally intended to be accessed by the game developer including going outside the level or into unfinished or cut parts of the map. However, debateensued for years on the SDA forums about what exactly constituted being 'out of bounds' with the design of different games leading to vastly different interpretations.
This out of bounds Portal run simply involves using some acrobatics to take a path through the game that players wouldn't normally take were they 'following' the path set by the game...
...while this Nier Automata technique involves clipping through the map to move outside the physics area of the game.
The leader of the SDA community - Radix - was keen to lay down a common rule set for all speed runs across all games and so outlawed going out of bounds while Twin Galaxies, a more general game records site, allowed individual rules for each game based on its architecture. This became much more popular and is now the standard way speedrunning is done, with the community around each game discussing and suggesting rules for runs and popularly arbitrating on what is considered 'cheating.' Looking through Speedrun shows how each game allows for its own variables. Some games still won't allow certain techniques like glitching because it means that the run becomes basically void. For instance, as in the run below, it's possible to use glitches to complete early Pokemon games in a time of 0.00 which voids any notion of competition and makes a glitched run a pointless exercise. However, the community around it has set variables that still allow for challenges.
The sheer level of accomplishment in the community of speedrunners is staggering, the dedication to iterative play over, and over, and over again to find ever more perfect runs beggars belief. I can gladly extoll the virtues of certain techniques, runners or games for hours but there's something richly and politically nascent about speedrunning that isn't identified by the community. (FYI, I can't speedrun, or anything like it.)
The sophisticated mastery of a system of the type a leading runner accomplishes allows them to explore beyond the bounds of the architecture and mechanics of a game, to see it as an artefact contained by its construction and thus manipulable in all the permitted ways. They change their relationship with the developer and the game and their position in it. Any game is a system of interacting parts that fit together to perform certain functions. Speedrunners understand these mechanics so keenly that they are able to turn the system to new uses, to use the game in toto as their own playground, not one defined by the developers. It reminds me somewhat of a section of the preamble in Georges Perec's Life; A User's Manual:
...puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.
In speedrunning is a model for interacting with systems, playing them properly, not just operating within their confines as I've previously identified being the failure of contemporary political action. Speedrunners play the playing of the game. As we build a rule increasingly structured by software and the confines of simulations and predictions, a mentality that shifts to re-constructing the rules and playing in a true sense has enormous potential.
