Studije filma i /ekranskih/ medija: Srbija 3. 0, 2019
The cinematography of the 21st century moves away from the concept of a ’grand narrative’ replaci... more The cinematography of the 21st century moves away from the concept of a ’grand narrative’ replacing it with that of a spectacle, as Debord would define it: an affectation, a sensory construct in which the act of storytelling is but a prosthetic tool through which intensities as spectacles are projected. Cinema becomes the ultimate playground for the latest advancements in special effects as senses stimulating technology, and the audience solely a platform for this process to materialize itself and enter dominant cultural streams. The overarching process of digitization of culture, and thusly cinema, eventually led to the dominant position of the human meta-language defined as langue being overtaken by that of the machine: the digilangue. This event and the liminal point in time in which human language finally loses its dominant position in the cultural ‘food-chain’ is marked with the term cultural singularity. Beyond its horizon, a new, procedural aesthetics is being borne, informed and dictated by algorithmic processes of the machine.
The collective monograph New Perspectives on Consumer Culture Theory and Research follows the int... more The collective monograph New Perspectives on Consumer Culture Theory and Research follows the international conference Consumer Culture: Between Aesthetics, Social Distinction and Ecological Activism held at Palacky University in Olomouc (7 – 9 October 2010) and comprises the most interesting and valuable conference contributions covering three thematic areas: (i) Consumer Culture in Post-socialist Countries, (ii) New Prospects on Consumer Culture Research, (iii) Consumer Culture Critique. The book was prepared by Pavel Zahrádka and Renáta Sedláková (editors) and Steven Schwartzhoff (translator and proofreader). Among the authors are not only leading or young European academic researchers from diverse disciplines, but also representatives from the commercial sector who deal with research, production and innovation in consumer culture. The book will be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in December 2012.
Savremene definicije opisuju signal kao merljivu fizičku veličinu ili impuls (npr. električni
nap... more Savremene definicije opisuju signal kao merljivu fizičku veličinu ili impuls (npr. električni napon ili magnetno polje) koji imaju mogućnost prenosa informacija. Živimo u vremenu u kome je svaka arhitektura komunikacije i kulturalne razmene direktno uslovljena transformacijom i medijacijom kulturalnih artefakata, njihovom dekonstrukcijom, prevođenjem u set digitalnih signala i tek putem interfejsa rekonstruisanog u željeni interpretativni objekat. Distanca između inicijalne realnosti artefakta i njegove pojavnosti, načina na koji se uključuje u kulturalne diskurse postaje sve veća, toliko da se artefakt i njegova manifestacija gube, nestaju na horizontima tog diskursa, dok signal postaje to rastuće značenjsko telo ili po rečima Bodrijara simulakrum dobija kvalitet ontološkog entiteta: kopija bez originala postaje entitet po sebi, nastavlja da samostalno funkcioniše i cirkuliše u celokupnim institucijama društva i kulture, proizvodeći čitav niz novih interpretativnih i teorijsko-problemskih praksi koje zbirno nazivamo kulturom signala. Kultura signala dovela je do dramatičnih promene u industriji advertajzinga, kroz redefinisanje teorija publike, politike identiteta, sa posebnim akcentom na fenomen automatizovanih digitalnih persona, ali i dovela do pojave novog pravca u umetnosti – Data Art, u kome mapiranje samog signala, njegova vizuelna ili akustička registracija, nezavisno od sadržaja informacije koju prenosi, postaje predmet jedne nove, proceduralne estetike i novog načina interpretiranja i valorizacije umetničkog dela.
he history of advertising is heavily tied to the history of audience studies. Starting from the h... more he history of advertising is heavily tied to the history of audience studies. Starting from the hypodermic needle model (where the messages were uncritically addressed to everyone), over uses and gratification model (where people would be addressed with specific advertising messages based on their socio-demographic profile) and audience reception theories (where psychographics, emotions and emotional needs become crucial), advertising has eventually gave birth to an idiographic signals model, where no human is really targeted, but our respective digital personas, rather. And by digital persona I mean a digital trace, a palimpsest one leaves behind when interacting with messages within an online world. Most of the advertising success measures are consequently done not against real people, but against their digital personifications. Therefore all the optimization measures, how we produce creative advertising messages, what they look like and how they are deployed is also defined accordingly. But let us ask ourselves, does this really matter? As ultimately, maybe our digital personas are the ones making the purchasing decisions after all.
Although Neuroart is related to the concept of Neuroaesthetics (S. Zeki), which is based on a sci... more Although Neuroart is related to the concept of Neuroaesthetics (S. Zeki), which is based on a scientific approach to aesthetic perception of art, and to the concepts of Neuroplastic arts (G. Novakovic) and Neuromedia (J. Scott) endorsing collaboration between artists and neuroscientists, it is at the same time distinct from them. We are using the term literally to refer to those artworks that are based on neural / brain waves signals and the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) or more specifically, EEG headsets in the production and display of artworks. We focus on EEG-based sound art, visual arts, interactive installations, and performance arts, and we identify Neuroart as a novel, emerging form or sub-genre of new media art.
However, we do not limit Neuroart to human-generated artworks only. Given that Neuroart applies to detection or inspection of neural electric signals, we claim that the electric nature of those signals also applies to processes inherent in machine processing or neural computing such as Google Deep Dream and other generic platforms that lay the foundations for computer and/or AI generated art forms including database art, software art, visualization art, sonification art as well as those artworks that result in material artifacts presented in traditional exhibition format.
We additionally claim that regardless whether the artworks of Neuroart are driven by a human or machine, they can have the same aesthetic discursive value, but within a context of a newly defined discipline of aesthetics that is Procedural Aesthetics. The Procedural Aesthetics (or the aesthetics of signal), can be understood as the discursiveness of the very process of signals (intensities) emission before they enter the sphere of conscious cognition. It is a pre-receptive and pre-semantics phenomenon. It deals with the processes otherwise not available to human perceptive apparatus, trying to reveal them, unmask them, by offering them to interpretation as cultural artifacts. And in order to do this, it relies heavily on technology and technical equipment allowing us the access to these ‘invisible’ processes through visualization, sonification, textualization, mapping and other forms of interpretable representations displayed as artworks.
Contemporary theory analyzing cultural phenomena as well as meaning making practices of today foc... more Contemporary theory analyzing cultural phenomena as well as meaning making practices of today focusses in great deal on understanding trends and manifestations as they appear within latest art practices, behavior of individuals, masses or even conglomerates, and their impact on the overall cultural consumption. Still, very rarely are the brands, which stand at the forefront of the global cultural consumption of today, the subject of such an analysis. The practice of brand storytelling as the one of creating imagery, desire and longing for a set of values, statements and attitudes surrounding a product, creates narratives which get projected into our realities and impact heavily the way we perceive and interact with the world around us. It is these stories built around products which make these products brands, the mythologized artifacts with their own sphere of meaning making and needs gratifications.
Within this paper I would like to propose a new way to analyze brands as cultural phenomena, and that is in a form of a Brand Atlas - a set of multidimensional maps, visualizing multiple, dynamic relations of a brand and its stories as they get created, amplified and spread-out around the diversified centers of collaboration, illustrating the full complexity of the world a brand lives in. A Brand Atlas is a tool to map out the complexity of the relations and points of interaction between brand’s different assets, from physical spaces (e.g. events it endorses) to its mythology and stories shared; from the pragmatical usage, to the points of personal identification and subjectification. Every Brand Atlas thusly represents a snapshot of dynamic relations of brand stories’ interpretations across different platforms, channels, audiences, virtual and real worlds as they take part in the overall process of cultural consumption.
New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the ways in which we understa... more New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the ways in which we understand terms of \index{reading} reading and reception. Reading strategies are no longer products of a reader’s own intentions, or the author’s. Dominant readers of the new media texts based on digital code become machines. Not only do the machines read the digital texts, but they also do that based on a digilangue, a new meta-language, which becomes a dominant language of the new software culture. The change in the very reading process demands also for the basic notion of aesthetics to be challenged. Reading digital arts means evoking a specific art experience we shall mark as procedural, post-semantic aesthetics. It rises on the horizon of a liminal transition of capitalistic culture of signification into the digital culture of software performativity, where machine intelligence takes command.
Veronica Mars was a Warner Bros. series running from 2004 until 2007. Even though it did not achi... more Veronica Mars was a Warner Bros. series running from 2004 until 2007. Even though it did not achieve high viewership results, it gathered a very loyal community
of fans active even 6 years after last episode was aired. Warner Bros. therefore decided to make a Veronica Mars movie, but for the first time by crowdsourcing the
capital needed for the film production through Kickstarter, inviting fans to support the project financially. In return fans were offered a range of ―goodies‖ (e.g.
tickets for the gala premiere). Only in the first 5 days the project already managed to gather 3,6 Million USD from 55,000 fans. Does this mean that we are facing
a new model of financing the industry of entertainment? Many have already written (e.g. Scholtz, Terranova, Levy ) about monetizing online labor by selling
users‖ clicks, likes, tweets or any other computable trace that they leave behind thinking that they are doing a self-gratifying activity. Are we facing the same
mechanism in film production? Where fans will need to ―chip-in‖ in order to see their favorite characters brought to life? Rob Thomas the author of the show has
rationalized that this project offers fans good deals for the objects they would otherwise not be able to get (e.g. a speaking role in the movie for ―only‖ 10,000
USD). As he puts it: “We wanted to create packages where people look at what they're getting and think, 'Wow, I got a script and a digital download and a t-shirt
for $35. I would pay that!'”. But the industry of entertainment is the one creating the fans out of content they produce. Would it be fair to say that they firstly
create the addiction for free and then offer the consumers the product they are addicted to at the ―reasonable price‖?
A metacharacter is an evolutionary construct or the abstratized entity accounting for the unified... more A metacharacter is an evolutionary construct or the abstratized entity accounting for the unified sum of all the film roles a respective actor has played. It is a liminal being which exists between fiction and reality, fine-balancing its life on and off screen. Once a character gets depicted on-screen, its life does not end once the film’s theatric life-span is over. When the curtains are down it keeps residing as a discursive flow surrounding an actor depicting it. It is a flux which develops and grows waiting for its next point of actualization. Every next role thusly is just one of the numerous possible intersections of the flux, its momentary evolutionary state. While off-screen the metacharacter flow becomes inseparable from the actor him/herself. It is not only because the character played influences the personal life of the actor, but moreover because the character played becomes the extension of the private life. The metacharacter arises only once the on-screen character can be understood as a natural extension of the actor’s off-screen presence. This liminality between film and reality, between a dream and vigilance where every state is conditioned by the other makes the metacharacter a superior being bearing mythic power. It has a multipersonal semantics, but the ontology of oneness. It is at the same time a being and a narrative and this twofold nature is used by the industry of entertainment to promote and idolize its own causes.
Let us introduce the example of Denzel Washington and the evolution of its metacharacter: from a sergeant Nicholas Styles in The Ricochet, Malcolm X, Rubin Carter in The Hurricane to major Ben Marco in The Manchurian Candidate and Eli in The Book of Eli. A metacharacter Hollywood grew out of Washington is none of the formerly mentioned characters. It is all of them at the same time. It is the construct evolved not from a role of a sergeant to the one of the last prophet, but a persona which has by fighting for justice actually travelled the road from the legendary boxer to the savior of human faith. This development has been as real as Washington’s own personal upbringing: from the modest origins in Harlem to the Oscar-winning hero. His very growing up, as well as patriotic semantics of his name is inseparable part of Washington’s metacharacter. His own personal life odyssey becomes therefore the trait not of the way he portrays Eli but the trait of Eli as he is.
A metacharacter is thusly a potentiality of unified narratives existing as a discursive flow of power being actualized, as per hegemonic need either in the form of a film character or a personal life story of the actor depicting it.
После четири године реконструкције, реновирана Народна библиотека јуче је отворена за посетиоце. ... more После четири године реконструкције, реновирана Народна библиотека јуче је отворена за посетиоце. Шест стотина места у библиотеци опремљено је интернет прикључцима, ту је читаоница за слепе и слабовиде, електронска, мултимедијална, као и друге специјализоване учионице. О најмодернијој информационој опреми, виртуелним корисницима Народне библиотеке Србије, дигитализацији нових књига, великом броју рачунара намењених корисницима и томе шта значи бити библиотека информационог друштва за 21. век, уживо у емисији Дигиталне иконе Радио Београда 2 у уторак 13.09.2011. године, говоре гошћа Весна Ињац, заменик директора и руководилац Сектора за програме и пројекте. У наставку, Никола Марковић, председник Друштва за информатику Србије, критички ће се осврнути и дати извештај са Округлог стола под називом "Расте моћ друштвених мрежа", који је одржан прошлог уторка у Привредној комори Србије, а чућете и наставак разговора са др Иваном Успенски и докторантом Јеленом Гугом, које су свој научноистраживачи рад посветиле културалним праксама у новомедијском окружењу и тим поводoм недавно одржале предавање у галерији "Озон".
Уредница и водитељка емисије је Тамара Вученовић.
С нама у студију биће директор ИНЕТ-а, предузећа за пружање провајдерских услуга, дипломирани инж... more С нама у студију биће директор ИНЕТ-а, предузећа за пружање провајдерских услуга, дипломирани инжењер Војислав Родић. Најавиће округли сто под називом "Расте моћ друштвених мрежа", који се данас од 11.00 одржава у Привредној комори Србије. Говориће и о улози интернет мрежа у области комуникације, о примени и злоупотребама, а прокоментарисаће и најновије вести о криминалу на интернету.
У наставку емисије Дигиталне иконе Радио Београда 2 у уторак 06.09.2011. године, наше гошће су докторка Иванa Успенски и докторант Јелена Гуга, које су свој научноистраживачи рад посветиле културалним праксама у новомедијском окружењу и тим поводoм недавно одржале предавање у галерији "Озон".
Sveopšta digitalizacija kulture, odnosno široko rasprostranjena upotreba kompjutera kao medija pr... more Sveopšta digitalizacija kulture, odnosno široko rasprostranjena upotreba kompjutera kao medija produkcije, prezentacije, arhiviranja i komunikacije dovela je do radikalnih promena u doživljaju sveta oko nas i načina na koji u njemu učestvujemo i na koji se u njemu predstavljamo.
Masovno umrežavanje omogućilo je prevazilaženje prostornih i vremenskih granica, odnosno kontakt svakog sa svakim, sto je znatno ubrzalo procese razmene informacija i akumulacije znanja. U takvom okruženju prepoznaje se novi fenomen kolektivne inteligencije. To zapravo znači da kolektivno delovanje putem Interneta rezultira izuzetno brzim povećanjem kapaciteta znanja, znatno većim nego sto bi čovek ili mašina pojedinačno to ikad uspeli da postignu. Ovaj fenomen biće bliže opisan kroz odabrane primere kako umetničkih tako i drugih društvenih praksi.
Primer navedenog je socijalni softver Facebook, koji nudi različite metode online komunikacije, u cilju građenja specifičnih online identiteta. Biće obrađeno nekoliko osnovnih modela tekstualne razmene karakterističnih za Facebook (poruke na zidu, komentari uz fotografije, komentari uz postove). Takođe, biće razmotreni sistemi formiranja lične prezentacije, kroz uvezivanje podataka pribavljenih od strane samog korisnika sa intervencijama drugih, u procesu kreiranja hibridnih narativa.
Konstruisanje identiteta i procesi identifikacije mogu se pratiti kroz dve različite, ali međusobno povezane faze evolucije Interneta, a to su Web 1.0 i Web 2.0 platforme. Dok su Web 1.0 platforme bile zasnovane na tekstualnoj reprezentaciji i igri identitetima u smislu da možemo biti sve ono sto nismo u fizickoj realnosti, Web 2.0 platforme, odnosno društvene mreže uvode naše realne identitete u domen virtuelnog. Ipak i ti realni identiteti u virtuelnom okruženju jesu konstrukti, s obzirom da su zasnovani na selektivnoj reprezentaciji idealizovanog jastva. Povratnom spregom, to dalje pokreće pitanje ne samo kvaliteta uspostavljanja međuljudskih veza i komunikacije, već i nacina na koje dozivljavamo i definisemo sebe u fizickom okruzenju.
Mass intelligence as I’ve defined the term in my PhD thesis is seen as non-critical and arbitrary... more Mass intelligence as I’ve defined the term in my PhD thesis is seen as non-critical and arbitrary global gathering and accumulation of human knowledge data and information by softwares/machines (e.g. Google Page Rank, people-meters), in such a manner that it is presentable numerically. Thusly it means that it can be expressed by numbers and additionally statistically analyzed in order to give clearer insights into respective phenomena. Every time one clicks on a ‘like’ button on Facebook, visits a web-page, leaves a comment on a forum or leaves any sort of media consumption trace which can be gathered, counted, sorted and analyzed as data, one becomes a part of mass intelligence. In these terms, TV ratings collected via peoplemetric softwares which present media viewing habits as numerical data are typical example of mass intelligence. As James Surowiecki has put it in his work “The Wisdom of Crowds”, even non-critical and arbitrary data if demonstrated by large groups of people can point to correct solutions and predict certain phenomena. In the paper I propose for the conference I would like to present a research I’ve done in Serbia on TV viewing habits and parameters in relation to FIFA World Cup 2010 which can demonstrate how TV ratings taken as mass intelligence were able to point to which teams were biggest favorites for winning the Championship, as well as implications this sort of analysis can have for other media-related fields.
New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the traditional ways in which... more New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the traditional ways in which we
understand terms of reading and reception. Reading strategies are no longer products of a reader’s own
intentions, or the author’s. Dominant producers of the new media texts (I call them digitexts) become
cybertexts as ergodic machines (how Aarseth defined them). Not only do cybertext machines produce
digitexts and their reading strategies, they also produce the new media reader. This means that in the
reading process, which is understood in Escaprit’s terms as global cultural consumpition, the reader
oneself becomes a commodified construct, a merchandise which can be bought and sold and obviously
nowhere more than in the on-line advertising industry, guided by Google’s Page Rank algorythm.
I call this new media reader commodified due to the fact that the basic purpose of producing readers in
new media surroundings, especially on the Internet is for them to be converted into clicks, exposures,
demographic data, transformed into merchandise. Every time one clicks on a link or checks the ’like’ box
on Facebook, one is transferring one’s own piece of intelligence and feeding it into cybertext, which then
uses thusly acummulated intelligence for its own profit and benefit, basically exploiting the product of the
new media reader’s work. This is the phaenomenon I mark as mass intelligence – the non-critical and
arbitrary global gathering and accumulation of human knowledge, by offering readers mass-interests
texts which they can read, to which they can react, comment them or hyperlink them with the sole
purpose of making these readers quantifiable goods and therefore able to be added material value in the
form of price. As opposed to collective intelligence, mass intelligence is not a productive force it is a
commodity.
In the last decades of the 20th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow, ... more In the last decades of the 20th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow, mature and reach their pinnacles by analysing, each from their own disciplinary perspective, two of the same core phenomena: that of media as the environment, transmitter and creator of stimuli, and that of embodied human mind as the stimuli receiver, interpreter, experiencer, and also how both are affected by each other. Even though treating a range of very similar problems and coming to similar conclusions, this still has not brought these two disciplines closer together or resulted in their interdisciplinary approach. They did coalesce in regards to traditional media such as film, but more points of connection are needed for untangling interactive and immersive media environments and their effects on human cognition, action, and perception. With the rise of VR and VR-like systems, especially as they start to evolve into the Metaverse as their main platform of interconnectivity, the ti...
In the last decades of the 20 th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow,... more In the last decades of the 20 th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow, mature and reach their pinnacles by analysing, each from their own disciplinary perspective, two of the same core phenomena: that of media as the environment, transmitter and creator of stimuli, and that of embodied human mind as the stimuli receiver, interpreter, experiencer, and also how both are affected by each other. Even though treating a range of very similar problems and coming to similar conclusions, this still has not brought these two disciplines closer together or resulted in their interdisciplinary approach. They did coalesce in regards to traditional media such as film, but more points of connection are needed for untangling interactive and immersive media environments and their effects on human cognition, action, and perception. With the rise of VR and VR-like systems, especially as they start to evolve into the Metaverse as their main platform of interconnectivity, the tissue of the body becomes almost physically intertwined with that of the virtual surrounding it inhabits through immersion. Simultaneously, the interest in these disciplines arises anew, and especially the need to use their concepts in an interdisciplinary way. This paper's main interest is to bring these disciplines together in problematising the position of a physical body and its sensory-motor capabilities and their development within synthetic surroundings as Metaverse and anticipate potential downsides of Metaverse's uncontrolled growth. We will do so also by looking into Metaverse as an artificial-lifelike phenomenon, following artificial-life rules and evolving a completely new 'corporeality', a body which is completely adapted to virtual spaces. We call this body the Dry Body, an entity sharing cognitive resources with the physical body it is not a physical part of, but has to extend to.
Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, 2014
Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by... more Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, the current project on New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression recognizes the global shift toward the visual and the virtual in all areas of textuality: the printed, verbal text is increasingly joined with the visual, often electronic, text. This shift has opened up new domains of human achievement in art and culture. The international roster of 24 contributors to this volume pursue a broad range of issues under four sets of questions that allow a larger conversation to emerge, both inside the volume’s sections and between them. The four sections cover, 1) Multimedia Productions in Theoretical and Historical Perspective; 2) Regional and Intercultural Projects; 3) Forms and Genres; and, 4) Readers and Rewriters in Multimedia Environments. The essays included in this volume are examples of the kinds of projects and inquiries that have become possible at the interface between literature and other media, new and old. They emphasize the extent to which hypertextual, multimedia, and virtual reality technologies have enhanced the sociality of reading and writing, enabling more people to interact than ever before. At the same time, however, they warn that, as long as these technologies are used to reinforce old habits of reading/ writing, they will deliver modest results. One of the major tasks pursued by the contributors to this volume is to integrate literature in the global informational environment where it can function as an imaginative partner, teaching its interpretive competencies to other components of the cultural landscape.
New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the traditional ways in which... more New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the traditional ways in which we understand terms of reading and reception. Dominant producers of the new media texts (I call them digitexts) become cybertexts as ergodic machines (how Espen Aarseth defined them). Not only do cybertext machines produce digitexts and their reading strategies, they also produce the new media reader. Thusly, new media reader gets involved in a new media reading process in a manner which is both processual and cybercentric. It rizes on the horizon of a liminal transition of capitalistic culture of signification into the postdigital culture of affective processuality.
Studije filma i /ekranskih/ medija: Srbija 3. 0, 2019
The cinematography of the 21st century moves away from the concept of a ’grand narrative’ replaci... more The cinematography of the 21st century moves away from the concept of a ’grand narrative’ replacing it with that of a spectacle, as Debord would define it: an affectation, a sensory construct in which the act of storytelling is but a prosthetic tool through which intensities as spectacles are projected. Cinema becomes the ultimate playground for the latest advancements in special effects as senses stimulating technology, and the audience solely a platform for this process to materialize itself and enter dominant cultural streams. The overarching process of digitization of culture, and thusly cinema, eventually led to the dominant position of the human meta-language defined as langue being overtaken by that of the machine: the digilangue. This event and the liminal point in time in which human language finally loses its dominant position in the cultural ‘food-chain’ is marked with the term cultural singularity. Beyond its horizon, a new, procedural aesthetics is being borne, informed and dictated by algorithmic processes of the machine.
The collective monograph New Perspectives on Consumer Culture Theory and Research follows the int... more The collective monograph New Perspectives on Consumer Culture Theory and Research follows the international conference Consumer Culture: Between Aesthetics, Social Distinction and Ecological Activism held at Palacky University in Olomouc (7 – 9 October 2010) and comprises the most interesting and valuable conference contributions covering three thematic areas: (i) Consumer Culture in Post-socialist Countries, (ii) New Prospects on Consumer Culture Research, (iii) Consumer Culture Critique. The book was prepared by Pavel Zahrádka and Renáta Sedláková (editors) and Steven Schwartzhoff (translator and proofreader). Among the authors are not only leading or young European academic researchers from diverse disciplines, but also representatives from the commercial sector who deal with research, production and innovation in consumer culture. The book will be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in December 2012.
Savremene definicije opisuju signal kao merljivu fizičku veličinu ili impuls (npr. električni
nap... more Savremene definicije opisuju signal kao merljivu fizičku veličinu ili impuls (npr. električni napon ili magnetno polje) koji imaju mogućnost prenosa informacija. Živimo u vremenu u kome je svaka arhitektura komunikacije i kulturalne razmene direktno uslovljena transformacijom i medijacijom kulturalnih artefakata, njihovom dekonstrukcijom, prevođenjem u set digitalnih signala i tek putem interfejsa rekonstruisanog u željeni interpretativni objekat. Distanca između inicijalne realnosti artefakta i njegove pojavnosti, načina na koji se uključuje u kulturalne diskurse postaje sve veća, toliko da se artefakt i njegova manifestacija gube, nestaju na horizontima tog diskursa, dok signal postaje to rastuće značenjsko telo ili po rečima Bodrijara simulakrum dobija kvalitet ontološkog entiteta: kopija bez originala postaje entitet po sebi, nastavlja da samostalno funkcioniše i cirkuliše u celokupnim institucijama društva i kulture, proizvodeći čitav niz novih interpretativnih i teorijsko-problemskih praksi koje zbirno nazivamo kulturom signala. Kultura signala dovela je do dramatičnih promene u industriji advertajzinga, kroz redefinisanje teorija publike, politike identiteta, sa posebnim akcentom na fenomen automatizovanih digitalnih persona, ali i dovela do pojave novog pravca u umetnosti – Data Art, u kome mapiranje samog signala, njegova vizuelna ili akustička registracija, nezavisno od sadržaja informacije koju prenosi, postaje predmet jedne nove, proceduralne estetike i novog načina interpretiranja i valorizacije umetničkog dela.
he history of advertising is heavily tied to the history of audience studies. Starting from the h... more he history of advertising is heavily tied to the history of audience studies. Starting from the hypodermic needle model (where the messages were uncritically addressed to everyone), over uses and gratification model (where people would be addressed with specific advertising messages based on their socio-demographic profile) and audience reception theories (where psychographics, emotions and emotional needs become crucial), advertising has eventually gave birth to an idiographic signals model, where no human is really targeted, but our respective digital personas, rather. And by digital persona I mean a digital trace, a palimpsest one leaves behind when interacting with messages within an online world. Most of the advertising success measures are consequently done not against real people, but against their digital personifications. Therefore all the optimization measures, how we produce creative advertising messages, what they look like and how they are deployed is also defined accordingly. But let us ask ourselves, does this really matter? As ultimately, maybe our digital personas are the ones making the purchasing decisions after all.
Although Neuroart is related to the concept of Neuroaesthetics (S. Zeki), which is based on a sci... more Although Neuroart is related to the concept of Neuroaesthetics (S. Zeki), which is based on a scientific approach to aesthetic perception of art, and to the concepts of Neuroplastic arts (G. Novakovic) and Neuromedia (J. Scott) endorsing collaboration between artists and neuroscientists, it is at the same time distinct from them. We are using the term literally to refer to those artworks that are based on neural / brain waves signals and the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) or more specifically, EEG headsets in the production and display of artworks. We focus on EEG-based sound art, visual arts, interactive installations, and performance arts, and we identify Neuroart as a novel, emerging form or sub-genre of new media art.
However, we do not limit Neuroart to human-generated artworks only. Given that Neuroart applies to detection or inspection of neural electric signals, we claim that the electric nature of those signals also applies to processes inherent in machine processing or neural computing such as Google Deep Dream and other generic platforms that lay the foundations for computer and/or AI generated art forms including database art, software art, visualization art, sonification art as well as those artworks that result in material artifacts presented in traditional exhibition format.
We additionally claim that regardless whether the artworks of Neuroart are driven by a human or machine, they can have the same aesthetic discursive value, but within a context of a newly defined discipline of aesthetics that is Procedural Aesthetics. The Procedural Aesthetics (or the aesthetics of signal), can be understood as the discursiveness of the very process of signals (intensities) emission before they enter the sphere of conscious cognition. It is a pre-receptive and pre-semantics phenomenon. It deals with the processes otherwise not available to human perceptive apparatus, trying to reveal them, unmask them, by offering them to interpretation as cultural artifacts. And in order to do this, it relies heavily on technology and technical equipment allowing us the access to these ‘invisible’ processes through visualization, sonification, textualization, mapping and other forms of interpretable representations displayed as artworks.
Contemporary theory analyzing cultural phenomena as well as meaning making practices of today foc... more Contemporary theory analyzing cultural phenomena as well as meaning making practices of today focusses in great deal on understanding trends and manifestations as they appear within latest art practices, behavior of individuals, masses or even conglomerates, and their impact on the overall cultural consumption. Still, very rarely are the brands, which stand at the forefront of the global cultural consumption of today, the subject of such an analysis. The practice of brand storytelling as the one of creating imagery, desire and longing for a set of values, statements and attitudes surrounding a product, creates narratives which get projected into our realities and impact heavily the way we perceive and interact with the world around us. It is these stories built around products which make these products brands, the mythologized artifacts with their own sphere of meaning making and needs gratifications.
Within this paper I would like to propose a new way to analyze brands as cultural phenomena, and that is in a form of a Brand Atlas - a set of multidimensional maps, visualizing multiple, dynamic relations of a brand and its stories as they get created, amplified and spread-out around the diversified centers of collaboration, illustrating the full complexity of the world a brand lives in. A Brand Atlas is a tool to map out the complexity of the relations and points of interaction between brand’s different assets, from physical spaces (e.g. events it endorses) to its mythology and stories shared; from the pragmatical usage, to the points of personal identification and subjectification. Every Brand Atlas thusly represents a snapshot of dynamic relations of brand stories’ interpretations across different platforms, channels, audiences, virtual and real worlds as they take part in the overall process of cultural consumption.
New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the ways in which we understa... more New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the ways in which we understand terms of \index{reading} reading and reception. Reading strategies are no longer products of a reader’s own intentions, or the author’s. Dominant readers of the new media texts based on digital code become machines. Not only do the machines read the digital texts, but they also do that based on a digilangue, a new meta-language, which becomes a dominant language of the new software culture. The change in the very reading process demands also for the basic notion of aesthetics to be challenged. Reading digital arts means evoking a specific art experience we shall mark as procedural, post-semantic aesthetics. It rises on the horizon of a liminal transition of capitalistic culture of signification into the digital culture of software performativity, where machine intelligence takes command.
Veronica Mars was a Warner Bros. series running from 2004 until 2007. Even though it did not achi... more Veronica Mars was a Warner Bros. series running from 2004 until 2007. Even though it did not achieve high viewership results, it gathered a very loyal community
of fans active even 6 years after last episode was aired. Warner Bros. therefore decided to make a Veronica Mars movie, but for the first time by crowdsourcing the
capital needed for the film production through Kickstarter, inviting fans to support the project financially. In return fans were offered a range of ―goodies‖ (e.g.
tickets for the gala premiere). Only in the first 5 days the project already managed to gather 3,6 Million USD from 55,000 fans. Does this mean that we are facing
a new model of financing the industry of entertainment? Many have already written (e.g. Scholtz, Terranova, Levy ) about monetizing online labor by selling
users‖ clicks, likes, tweets or any other computable trace that they leave behind thinking that they are doing a self-gratifying activity. Are we facing the same
mechanism in film production? Where fans will need to ―chip-in‖ in order to see their favorite characters brought to life? Rob Thomas the author of the show has
rationalized that this project offers fans good deals for the objects they would otherwise not be able to get (e.g. a speaking role in the movie for ―only‖ 10,000
USD). As he puts it: “We wanted to create packages where people look at what they're getting and think, 'Wow, I got a script and a digital download and a t-shirt
for $35. I would pay that!'”. But the industry of entertainment is the one creating the fans out of content they produce. Would it be fair to say that they firstly
create the addiction for free and then offer the consumers the product they are addicted to at the ―reasonable price‖?
A metacharacter is an evolutionary construct or the abstratized entity accounting for the unified... more A metacharacter is an evolutionary construct or the abstratized entity accounting for the unified sum of all the film roles a respective actor has played. It is a liminal being which exists between fiction and reality, fine-balancing its life on and off screen. Once a character gets depicted on-screen, its life does not end once the film’s theatric life-span is over. When the curtains are down it keeps residing as a discursive flow surrounding an actor depicting it. It is a flux which develops and grows waiting for its next point of actualization. Every next role thusly is just one of the numerous possible intersections of the flux, its momentary evolutionary state. While off-screen the metacharacter flow becomes inseparable from the actor him/herself. It is not only because the character played influences the personal life of the actor, but moreover because the character played becomes the extension of the private life. The metacharacter arises only once the on-screen character can be understood as a natural extension of the actor’s off-screen presence. This liminality between film and reality, between a dream and vigilance where every state is conditioned by the other makes the metacharacter a superior being bearing mythic power. It has a multipersonal semantics, but the ontology of oneness. It is at the same time a being and a narrative and this twofold nature is used by the industry of entertainment to promote and idolize its own causes.
Let us introduce the example of Denzel Washington and the evolution of its metacharacter: from a sergeant Nicholas Styles in The Ricochet, Malcolm X, Rubin Carter in The Hurricane to major Ben Marco in The Manchurian Candidate and Eli in The Book of Eli. A metacharacter Hollywood grew out of Washington is none of the formerly mentioned characters. It is all of them at the same time. It is the construct evolved not from a role of a sergeant to the one of the last prophet, but a persona which has by fighting for justice actually travelled the road from the legendary boxer to the savior of human faith. This development has been as real as Washington’s own personal upbringing: from the modest origins in Harlem to the Oscar-winning hero. His very growing up, as well as patriotic semantics of his name is inseparable part of Washington’s metacharacter. His own personal life odyssey becomes therefore the trait not of the way he portrays Eli but the trait of Eli as he is.
A metacharacter is thusly a potentiality of unified narratives existing as a discursive flow of power being actualized, as per hegemonic need either in the form of a film character or a personal life story of the actor depicting it.
После четири године реконструкције, реновирана Народна библиотека јуче је отворена за посетиоце. ... more После четири године реконструкције, реновирана Народна библиотека јуче је отворена за посетиоце. Шест стотина места у библиотеци опремљено је интернет прикључцима, ту је читаоница за слепе и слабовиде, електронска, мултимедијална, као и друге специјализоване учионице. О најмодернијој информационој опреми, виртуелним корисницима Народне библиотеке Србије, дигитализацији нових књига, великом броју рачунара намењених корисницима и томе шта значи бити библиотека информационог друштва за 21. век, уживо у емисији Дигиталне иконе Радио Београда 2 у уторак 13.09.2011. године, говоре гошћа Весна Ињац, заменик директора и руководилац Сектора за програме и пројекте. У наставку, Никола Марковић, председник Друштва за информатику Србије, критички ће се осврнути и дати извештај са Округлог стола под називом "Расте моћ друштвених мрежа", који је одржан прошлог уторка у Привредној комори Србије, а чућете и наставак разговора са др Иваном Успенски и докторантом Јеленом Гугом, које су свој научноистраживачи рад посветиле културалним праксама у новомедијском окружењу и тим поводoм недавно одржале предавање у галерији "Озон".
Уредница и водитељка емисије је Тамара Вученовић.
С нама у студију биће директор ИНЕТ-а, предузећа за пружање провајдерских услуга, дипломирани инж... more С нама у студију биће директор ИНЕТ-а, предузећа за пружање провајдерских услуга, дипломирани инжењер Војислав Родић. Најавиће округли сто под називом "Расте моћ друштвених мрежа", који се данас од 11.00 одржава у Привредној комори Србије. Говориће и о улози интернет мрежа у области комуникације, о примени и злоупотребама, а прокоментарисаће и најновије вести о криминалу на интернету.
У наставку емисије Дигиталне иконе Радио Београда 2 у уторак 06.09.2011. године, наше гошће су докторка Иванa Успенски и докторант Јелена Гуга, које су свој научноистраживачи рад посветиле културалним праксама у новомедијском окружењу и тим поводoм недавно одржале предавање у галерији "Озон".
Sveopšta digitalizacija kulture, odnosno široko rasprostranjena upotreba kompjutera kao medija pr... more Sveopšta digitalizacija kulture, odnosno široko rasprostranjena upotreba kompjutera kao medija produkcije, prezentacije, arhiviranja i komunikacije dovela je do radikalnih promena u doživljaju sveta oko nas i načina na koji u njemu učestvujemo i na koji se u njemu predstavljamo.
Masovno umrežavanje omogućilo je prevazilaženje prostornih i vremenskih granica, odnosno kontakt svakog sa svakim, sto je znatno ubrzalo procese razmene informacija i akumulacije znanja. U takvom okruženju prepoznaje se novi fenomen kolektivne inteligencije. To zapravo znači da kolektivno delovanje putem Interneta rezultira izuzetno brzim povećanjem kapaciteta znanja, znatno većim nego sto bi čovek ili mašina pojedinačno to ikad uspeli da postignu. Ovaj fenomen biće bliže opisan kroz odabrane primere kako umetničkih tako i drugih društvenih praksi.
Primer navedenog je socijalni softver Facebook, koji nudi različite metode online komunikacije, u cilju građenja specifičnih online identiteta. Biće obrađeno nekoliko osnovnih modela tekstualne razmene karakterističnih za Facebook (poruke na zidu, komentari uz fotografije, komentari uz postove). Takođe, biće razmotreni sistemi formiranja lične prezentacije, kroz uvezivanje podataka pribavljenih od strane samog korisnika sa intervencijama drugih, u procesu kreiranja hibridnih narativa.
Konstruisanje identiteta i procesi identifikacije mogu se pratiti kroz dve različite, ali međusobno povezane faze evolucije Interneta, a to su Web 1.0 i Web 2.0 platforme. Dok su Web 1.0 platforme bile zasnovane na tekstualnoj reprezentaciji i igri identitetima u smislu da možemo biti sve ono sto nismo u fizickoj realnosti, Web 2.0 platforme, odnosno društvene mreže uvode naše realne identitete u domen virtuelnog. Ipak i ti realni identiteti u virtuelnom okruženju jesu konstrukti, s obzirom da su zasnovani na selektivnoj reprezentaciji idealizovanog jastva. Povratnom spregom, to dalje pokreće pitanje ne samo kvaliteta uspostavljanja međuljudskih veza i komunikacije, već i nacina na koje dozivljavamo i definisemo sebe u fizickom okruzenju.
Mass intelligence as I’ve defined the term in my PhD thesis is seen as non-critical and arbitrary... more Mass intelligence as I’ve defined the term in my PhD thesis is seen as non-critical and arbitrary global gathering and accumulation of human knowledge data and information by softwares/machines (e.g. Google Page Rank, people-meters), in such a manner that it is presentable numerically. Thusly it means that it can be expressed by numbers and additionally statistically analyzed in order to give clearer insights into respective phenomena. Every time one clicks on a ‘like’ button on Facebook, visits a web-page, leaves a comment on a forum or leaves any sort of media consumption trace which can be gathered, counted, sorted and analyzed as data, one becomes a part of mass intelligence. In these terms, TV ratings collected via peoplemetric softwares which present media viewing habits as numerical data are typical example of mass intelligence. As James Surowiecki has put it in his work “The Wisdom of Crowds”, even non-critical and arbitrary data if demonstrated by large groups of people can point to correct solutions and predict certain phenomena. In the paper I propose for the conference I would like to present a research I’ve done in Serbia on TV viewing habits and parameters in relation to FIFA World Cup 2010 which can demonstrate how TV ratings taken as mass intelligence were able to point to which teams were biggest favorites for winning the Championship, as well as implications this sort of analysis can have for other media-related fields.
New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the traditional ways in which... more New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the traditional ways in which we
understand terms of reading and reception. Reading strategies are no longer products of a reader’s own
intentions, or the author’s. Dominant producers of the new media texts (I call them digitexts) become
cybertexts as ergodic machines (how Aarseth defined them). Not only do cybertext machines produce
digitexts and their reading strategies, they also produce the new media reader. This means that in the
reading process, which is understood in Escaprit’s terms as global cultural consumpition, the reader
oneself becomes a commodified construct, a merchandise which can be bought and sold and obviously
nowhere more than in the on-line advertising industry, guided by Google’s Page Rank algorythm.
I call this new media reader commodified due to the fact that the basic purpose of producing readers in
new media surroundings, especially on the Internet is for them to be converted into clicks, exposures,
demographic data, transformed into merchandise. Every time one clicks on a link or checks the ’like’ box
on Facebook, one is transferring one’s own piece of intelligence and feeding it into cybertext, which then
uses thusly acummulated intelligence for its own profit and benefit, basically exploiting the product of the
new media reader’s work. This is the phaenomenon I mark as mass intelligence – the non-critical and
arbitrary global gathering and accumulation of human knowledge, by offering readers mass-interests
texts which they can read, to which they can react, comment them or hyperlink them with the sole
purpose of making these readers quantifiable goods and therefore able to be added material value in the
form of price. As opposed to collective intelligence, mass intelligence is not a productive force it is a
commodity.
In the last decades of the 20th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow, ... more In the last decades of the 20th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow, mature and reach their pinnacles by analysing, each from their own disciplinary perspective, two of the same core phenomena: that of media as the environment, transmitter and creator of stimuli, and that of embodied human mind as the stimuli receiver, interpreter, experiencer, and also how both are affected by each other. Even though treating a range of very similar problems and coming to similar conclusions, this still has not brought these two disciplines closer together or resulted in their interdisciplinary approach. They did coalesce in regards to traditional media such as film, but more points of connection are needed for untangling interactive and immersive media environments and their effects on human cognition, action, and perception. With the rise of VR and VR-like systems, especially as they start to evolve into the Metaverse as their main platform of interconnectivity, the ti...
In the last decades of the 20 th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow,... more In the last decades of the 20 th century we have seen media theories and cognitive sciences grow, mature and reach their pinnacles by analysing, each from their own disciplinary perspective, two of the same core phenomena: that of media as the environment, transmitter and creator of stimuli, and that of embodied human mind as the stimuli receiver, interpreter, experiencer, and also how both are affected by each other. Even though treating a range of very similar problems and coming to similar conclusions, this still has not brought these two disciplines closer together or resulted in their interdisciplinary approach. They did coalesce in regards to traditional media such as film, but more points of connection are needed for untangling interactive and immersive media environments and their effects on human cognition, action, and perception. With the rise of VR and VR-like systems, especially as they start to evolve into the Metaverse as their main platform of interconnectivity, the tissue of the body becomes almost physically intertwined with that of the virtual surrounding it inhabits through immersion. Simultaneously, the interest in these disciplines arises anew, and especially the need to use their concepts in an interdisciplinary way. This paper's main interest is to bring these disciplines together in problematising the position of a physical body and its sensory-motor capabilities and their development within synthetic surroundings as Metaverse and anticipate potential downsides of Metaverse's uncontrolled growth. We will do so also by looking into Metaverse as an artificial-lifelike phenomenon, following artificial-life rules and evolving a completely new 'corporeality', a body which is completely adapted to virtual spaces. We call this body the Dry Body, an entity sharing cognitive resources with the physical body it is not a physical part of, but has to extend to.
Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, 2014
Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by... more Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, the current project on New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression recognizes the global shift toward the visual and the virtual in all areas of textuality: the printed, verbal text is increasingly joined with the visual, often electronic, text. This shift has opened up new domains of human achievement in art and culture. The international roster of 24 contributors to this volume pursue a broad range of issues under four sets of questions that allow a larger conversation to emerge, both inside the volume’s sections and between them. The four sections cover, 1) Multimedia Productions in Theoretical and Historical Perspective; 2) Regional and Intercultural Projects; 3) Forms and Genres; and, 4) Readers and Rewriters in Multimedia Environments. The essays included in this volume are examples of the kinds of projects and inquiries that have become possible at the interface between literature and other media, new and old. They emphasize the extent to which hypertextual, multimedia, and virtual reality technologies have enhanced the sociality of reading and writing, enabling more people to interact than ever before. At the same time, however, they warn that, as long as these technologies are used to reinforce old habits of reading/ writing, they will deliver modest results. One of the major tasks pursued by the contributors to this volume is to integrate literature in the global informational environment where it can function as an imaginative partner, teaching its interpretive competencies to other components of the cultural landscape.
New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the traditional ways in which... more New media convergence culture has introduced significant changes to the traditional ways in which we understand terms of reading and reception. Dominant producers of the new media texts (I call them digitexts) become cybertexts as ergodic machines (how Espen Aarseth defined them). Not only do cybertext machines produce digitexts and their reading strategies, they also produce the new media reader. Thusly, new media reader gets involved in a new media reading process in a manner which is both processual and cybercentric. It rizes on the horizon of a liminal transition of capitalistic culture of signification into the postdigital culture of affective processuality.
Digital code, on which all software is running, has unquestionably become a new alphabet this new... more Digital code, on which all software is running, has unquestionably become a new alphabet this new language, understood as langue, is based on. This common digital language, or digilangue in de Saussere’s words enables computers to receive information, compute it and with the help of a software and an interface present it to people. But digilangue at the same time enables machines to easily communicate between themselves. And this part of the communication, without software as translator and interface escapes us.
Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by... more Begun in 2010 as part of the “Histories of Literatures in European Languages” series sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association, the current project on New Literary Hybrids in the Age of Multimedia Expression recognizes the global shift toward the visual and the virtual in all areas of textuality: the printed, verbal text is increasingly joined with the visual, often electronic, text. This shift has opened up new domains of human achievement in art and culture. The international roster of 24 contributors to this volume pursue a broad range of issues under four sets of questions that allow a larger conversation to emerge, both inside the volume’s sections and between them. The four sections cover, 1) Multimedia Productions in Theoretical and Historical Perspective; 2) Regional and Intercultural Projects; 3) Forms and Genres; and, 4) Readers and Rewriters in Multimedia Environments. The essays included in this volume are examples of the kinds of projects and inquiries that have become possible at the interface between literature and other media, new and old. They emphasize the extent to which hypertextual, multimedia, and virtual reality technologies have enhanced the sociality of reading and writing, enabling more people to interact than ever before. At the same time, however, they warn that, as long as these technologies are used to reinforce old habits of reading/ writing, they will deliver modest results. One of the major tasks pursued by the contributors to this volume is to integrate literature in the global informational environment where it can function as an imaginative partner, teaching its interpretive competencies to other components of the cultural landscape.
International Scietific Journal: Film and Media Studies, May 2013
With every technological breakthrough in film production, film industry is making one step furthe... more With every technological breakthrough in film production, film industry is making one step further in erasing the border between the film and the real world into which it is being projected. Still, there is one phenomenon which often gets unnoticed and that is the subtle inflow of film characters into the objective world. This paper introduces the concept of a metacharacter which has from the last two decades of the 20th century become a dominant model in building Hollywood’s big film narratives.
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napon ili magnetno polje) koji imaju mogućnost prenosa informacija. Živimo u vremenu u
kome je svaka arhitektura komunikacije i kulturalne razmene direktno uslovljena
transformacijom i medijacijom kulturalnih artefakata, njihovom dekonstrukcijom,
prevođenjem u set digitalnih signala i tek putem interfejsa rekonstruisanog u željeni
interpretativni objekat. Distanca između inicijalne realnosti artefakta i njegove pojavnosti,
načina na koji se uključuje u kulturalne diskurse postaje sve veća, toliko da se artefakt i
njegova manifestacija gube, nestaju na horizontima tog diskursa, dok signal postaje to
rastuće značenjsko telo ili po rečima Bodrijara simulakrum dobija kvalitet ontološkog
entiteta: kopija bez originala postaje entitet po sebi, nastavlja da samostalno funkcioniše i
cirkuliše u celokupnim institucijama društva i kulture, proizvodeći čitav niz novih
interpretativnih i teorijsko-problemskih praksi koje zbirno nazivamo kulturom signala.
Kultura signala dovela je do dramatičnih promene u industriji advertajzinga, kroz
redefinisanje teorija publike, politike identiteta, sa posebnim akcentom na fenomen
automatizovanih digitalnih persona, ali i dovela do pojave novog pravca u umetnosti – Data
Art, u kome mapiranje samog signala, njegova vizuelna ili akustička registracija, nezavisno od
sadržaja informacije koju prenosi, postaje predmet jedne nove, proceduralne estetike i
novog načina interpretiranja i valorizacije umetničkog dela.
However, we do not limit Neuroart to human-generated artworks only. Given that Neuroart applies to detection or inspection of neural electric signals, we claim that the electric nature of those signals also applies to processes inherent in machine processing or neural computing such as Google Deep Dream and other generic platforms that lay the foundations for computer and/or AI generated art forms including database art, software art, visualization art, sonification art as well as those artworks that result in material artifacts presented in traditional exhibition format.
We additionally claim that regardless whether the artworks of Neuroart are driven by a human or machine, they can have the same aesthetic discursive value, but within a context of a newly defined discipline of aesthetics that is Procedural Aesthetics. The Procedural Aesthetics (or the aesthetics of signal), can be understood as the discursiveness of the very process of signals (intensities) emission before they enter the sphere of conscious cognition. It is a pre-receptive and pre-semantics phenomenon. It deals with the processes otherwise not available to human perceptive apparatus, trying to reveal them, unmask them, by offering them to interpretation as cultural artifacts. And in order to do this, it relies heavily on technology and technical equipment allowing us the access to these ‘invisible’ processes through visualization, sonification, textualization, mapping and other forms of interpretable representations displayed as artworks.
Keywords: Neuroart, Procedural Aesthetics, brain-computer interface (BCI), neural computing, signal aesthetics.
Within this paper I would like to propose a new way to analyze brands as cultural phenomena, and that is in a form of a Brand Atlas - a set of multidimensional maps, visualizing multiple, dynamic relations of a brand and its stories as they get created, amplified and spread-out around the diversified centers of collaboration, illustrating the full complexity of the world a brand lives in. A Brand Atlas is a tool to map out the complexity of the relations and points of interaction between brand’s different assets, from physical spaces (e.g. events it endorses) to its mythology and stories shared; from the pragmatical usage, to the points of personal identification and subjectification. Every Brand Atlas thusly represents a snapshot of dynamic relations of brand stories’ interpretations across different platforms, channels, audiences, virtual and real worlds as they take part in the overall process of cultural consumption.
of fans active even 6 years after last episode was aired. Warner Bros. therefore decided to make a Veronica Mars movie, but for the first time by crowdsourcing the
capital needed for the film production through Kickstarter, inviting fans to support the project financially. In return fans were offered a range of ―goodies‖ (e.g.
tickets for the gala premiere). Only in the first 5 days the project already managed to gather 3,6 Million USD from 55,000 fans. Does this mean that we are facing
a new model of financing the industry of entertainment? Many have already written (e.g. Scholtz, Terranova, Levy ) about monetizing online labor by selling
users‖ clicks, likes, tweets or any other computable trace that they leave behind thinking that they are doing a self-gratifying activity. Are we facing the same
mechanism in film production? Where fans will need to ―chip-in‖ in order to see their favorite characters brought to life? Rob Thomas the author of the show has
rationalized that this project offers fans good deals for the objects they would otherwise not be able to get (e.g. a speaking role in the movie for ―only‖ 10,000
USD). As he puts it: “We wanted to create packages where people look at what they're getting and think, 'Wow, I got a script and a digital download and a t-shirt
for $35. I would pay that!'”. But the industry of entertainment is the one creating the fans out of content they produce. Would it be fair to say that they firstly
create the addiction for free and then offer the consumers the product they are addicted to at the ―reasonable price‖?
Let us introduce the example of Denzel Washington and the evolution of its metacharacter: from a sergeant Nicholas Styles in The Ricochet, Malcolm X, Rubin Carter in The Hurricane to major Ben Marco in The Manchurian Candidate and Eli in The Book of Eli. A metacharacter Hollywood grew out of Washington is none of the formerly mentioned characters. It is all of them at the same time. It is the construct evolved not from a role of a sergeant to the one of the last prophet, but a persona which has by fighting for justice actually travelled the road from the legendary boxer to the savior of human faith. This development has been as real as Washington’s own personal upbringing: from the modest origins in Harlem to the Oscar-winning hero. His very growing up, as well as patriotic semantics of his name is inseparable part of Washington’s metacharacter. His own personal life odyssey becomes therefore the trait not of the way he portrays Eli but the trait of Eli as he is.
A metacharacter is thusly a potentiality of unified narratives existing as a discursive flow of power being actualized, as per hegemonic need either in the form of a film character or a personal life story of the actor depicting it.
Уредница и водитељка емисије је Тамара Вученовић.
У наставку емисије Дигиталне иконе Радио Београда 2 у уторак 06.09.2011. године, наше гошће су докторка Иванa Успенски и докторант Јелена Гуга, које су свој научноистраживачи рад посветиле културалним праксама у новомедијском окружењу и тим поводoм недавно одржале предавање у галерији "Озон".
Уредница и водитељка емисије је Тамара Вученовић.
Masovno umrežavanje omogućilo je prevazilaženje prostornih i vremenskih granica, odnosno kontakt svakog sa svakim, sto je znatno ubrzalo procese razmene informacija i akumulacije znanja. U takvom okruženju prepoznaje se novi fenomen kolektivne inteligencije. To zapravo znači da kolektivno delovanje putem Interneta rezultira izuzetno brzim povećanjem kapaciteta znanja, znatno većim nego sto bi čovek ili mašina pojedinačno to ikad uspeli da postignu. Ovaj fenomen biće bliže opisan kroz odabrane primere kako umetničkih tako i drugih društvenih praksi.
Primer navedenog je socijalni softver Facebook, koji nudi različite metode online komunikacije, u cilju građenja specifičnih online identiteta. Biće obrađeno nekoliko osnovnih modela tekstualne razmene karakterističnih za Facebook (poruke na zidu, komentari uz fotografije, komentari uz postove). Takođe, biće razmotreni sistemi formiranja lične prezentacije, kroz uvezivanje podataka pribavljenih od strane samog korisnika sa intervencijama drugih, u procesu kreiranja hibridnih narativa.
Konstruisanje identiteta i procesi identifikacije mogu se pratiti kroz dve različite, ali međusobno povezane faze evolucije Interneta, a to su Web 1.0 i Web 2.0 platforme. Dok su Web 1.0 platforme bile zasnovane na tekstualnoj reprezentaciji i igri identitetima u smislu da možemo biti sve ono sto nismo u fizickoj realnosti, Web 2.0 platforme, odnosno društvene mreže uvode naše realne identitete u domen virtuelnog. Ipak i ti realni identiteti u virtuelnom okruženju jesu konstrukti, s obzirom da su zasnovani na selektivnoj reprezentaciji idealizovanog jastva. Povratnom spregom, to dalje pokreće pitanje ne samo kvaliteta uspostavljanja međuljudskih veza i komunikacije, već i nacina na koje dozivljavamo i definisemo sebe u fizickom okruzenju.
understand terms of reading and reception. Reading strategies are no longer products of a reader’s own
intentions, or the author’s. Dominant producers of the new media texts (I call them digitexts) become
cybertexts as ergodic machines (how Aarseth defined them). Not only do cybertext machines produce
digitexts and their reading strategies, they also produce the new media reader. This means that in the
reading process, which is understood in Escaprit’s terms as global cultural consumpition, the reader
oneself becomes a commodified construct, a merchandise which can be bought and sold and obviously
nowhere more than in the on-line advertising industry, guided by Google’s Page Rank algorythm.
I call this new media reader commodified due to the fact that the basic purpose of producing readers in
new media surroundings, especially on the Internet is for them to be converted into clicks, exposures,
demographic data, transformed into merchandise. Every time one clicks on a link or checks the ’like’ box
on Facebook, one is transferring one’s own piece of intelligence and feeding it into cybertext, which then
uses thusly acummulated intelligence for its own profit and benefit, basically exploiting the product of the
new media reader’s work. This is the phaenomenon I mark as mass intelligence – the non-critical and
arbitrary global gathering and accumulation of human knowledge, by offering readers mass-interests
texts which they can read, to which they can react, comment them or hyperlink them with the sole
purpose of making these readers quantifiable goods and therefore able to be added material value in the
form of price. As opposed to collective intelligence, mass intelligence is not a productive force it is a
commodity.
Papers by Ivana Uspenski
napon ili magnetno polje) koji imaju mogućnost prenosa informacija. Živimo u vremenu u
kome je svaka arhitektura komunikacije i kulturalne razmene direktno uslovljena
transformacijom i medijacijom kulturalnih artefakata, njihovom dekonstrukcijom,
prevođenjem u set digitalnih signala i tek putem interfejsa rekonstruisanog u željeni
interpretativni objekat. Distanca između inicijalne realnosti artefakta i njegove pojavnosti,
načina na koji se uključuje u kulturalne diskurse postaje sve veća, toliko da se artefakt i
njegova manifestacija gube, nestaju na horizontima tog diskursa, dok signal postaje to
rastuće značenjsko telo ili po rečima Bodrijara simulakrum dobija kvalitet ontološkog
entiteta: kopija bez originala postaje entitet po sebi, nastavlja da samostalno funkcioniše i
cirkuliše u celokupnim institucijama društva i kulture, proizvodeći čitav niz novih
interpretativnih i teorijsko-problemskih praksi koje zbirno nazivamo kulturom signala.
Kultura signala dovela je do dramatičnih promene u industriji advertajzinga, kroz
redefinisanje teorija publike, politike identiteta, sa posebnim akcentom na fenomen
automatizovanih digitalnih persona, ali i dovela do pojave novog pravca u umetnosti – Data
Art, u kome mapiranje samog signala, njegova vizuelna ili akustička registracija, nezavisno od
sadržaja informacije koju prenosi, postaje predmet jedne nove, proceduralne estetike i
novog načina interpretiranja i valorizacije umetničkog dela.
However, we do not limit Neuroart to human-generated artworks only. Given that Neuroart applies to detection or inspection of neural electric signals, we claim that the electric nature of those signals also applies to processes inherent in machine processing or neural computing such as Google Deep Dream and other generic platforms that lay the foundations for computer and/or AI generated art forms including database art, software art, visualization art, sonification art as well as those artworks that result in material artifacts presented in traditional exhibition format.
We additionally claim that regardless whether the artworks of Neuroart are driven by a human or machine, they can have the same aesthetic discursive value, but within a context of a newly defined discipline of aesthetics that is Procedural Aesthetics. The Procedural Aesthetics (or the aesthetics of signal), can be understood as the discursiveness of the very process of signals (intensities) emission before they enter the sphere of conscious cognition. It is a pre-receptive and pre-semantics phenomenon. It deals with the processes otherwise not available to human perceptive apparatus, trying to reveal them, unmask them, by offering them to interpretation as cultural artifacts. And in order to do this, it relies heavily on technology and technical equipment allowing us the access to these ‘invisible’ processes through visualization, sonification, textualization, mapping and other forms of interpretable representations displayed as artworks.
Keywords: Neuroart, Procedural Aesthetics, brain-computer interface (BCI), neural computing, signal aesthetics.
Within this paper I would like to propose a new way to analyze brands as cultural phenomena, and that is in a form of a Brand Atlas - a set of multidimensional maps, visualizing multiple, dynamic relations of a brand and its stories as they get created, amplified and spread-out around the diversified centers of collaboration, illustrating the full complexity of the world a brand lives in. A Brand Atlas is a tool to map out the complexity of the relations and points of interaction between brand’s different assets, from physical spaces (e.g. events it endorses) to its mythology and stories shared; from the pragmatical usage, to the points of personal identification and subjectification. Every Brand Atlas thusly represents a snapshot of dynamic relations of brand stories’ interpretations across different platforms, channels, audiences, virtual and real worlds as they take part in the overall process of cultural consumption.
of fans active even 6 years after last episode was aired. Warner Bros. therefore decided to make a Veronica Mars movie, but for the first time by crowdsourcing the
capital needed for the film production through Kickstarter, inviting fans to support the project financially. In return fans were offered a range of ―goodies‖ (e.g.
tickets for the gala premiere). Only in the first 5 days the project already managed to gather 3,6 Million USD from 55,000 fans. Does this mean that we are facing
a new model of financing the industry of entertainment? Many have already written (e.g. Scholtz, Terranova, Levy ) about monetizing online labor by selling
users‖ clicks, likes, tweets or any other computable trace that they leave behind thinking that they are doing a self-gratifying activity. Are we facing the same
mechanism in film production? Where fans will need to ―chip-in‖ in order to see their favorite characters brought to life? Rob Thomas the author of the show has
rationalized that this project offers fans good deals for the objects they would otherwise not be able to get (e.g. a speaking role in the movie for ―only‖ 10,000
USD). As he puts it: “We wanted to create packages where people look at what they're getting and think, 'Wow, I got a script and a digital download and a t-shirt
for $35. I would pay that!'”. But the industry of entertainment is the one creating the fans out of content they produce. Would it be fair to say that they firstly
create the addiction for free and then offer the consumers the product they are addicted to at the ―reasonable price‖?
Let us introduce the example of Denzel Washington and the evolution of its metacharacter: from a sergeant Nicholas Styles in The Ricochet, Malcolm X, Rubin Carter in The Hurricane to major Ben Marco in The Manchurian Candidate and Eli in The Book of Eli. A metacharacter Hollywood grew out of Washington is none of the formerly mentioned characters. It is all of them at the same time. It is the construct evolved not from a role of a sergeant to the one of the last prophet, but a persona which has by fighting for justice actually travelled the road from the legendary boxer to the savior of human faith. This development has been as real as Washington’s own personal upbringing: from the modest origins in Harlem to the Oscar-winning hero. His very growing up, as well as patriotic semantics of his name is inseparable part of Washington’s metacharacter. His own personal life odyssey becomes therefore the trait not of the way he portrays Eli but the trait of Eli as he is.
A metacharacter is thusly a potentiality of unified narratives existing as a discursive flow of power being actualized, as per hegemonic need either in the form of a film character or a personal life story of the actor depicting it.
Уредница и водитељка емисије је Тамара Вученовић.
У наставку емисије Дигиталне иконе Радио Београда 2 у уторак 06.09.2011. године, наше гошће су докторка Иванa Успенски и докторант Јелена Гуга, које су свој научноистраживачи рад посветиле културалним праксама у новомедијском окружењу и тим поводoм недавно одржале предавање у галерији "Озон".
Уредница и водитељка емисије је Тамара Вученовић.
Masovno umrežavanje omogućilo je prevazilaženje prostornih i vremenskih granica, odnosno kontakt svakog sa svakim, sto je znatno ubrzalo procese razmene informacija i akumulacije znanja. U takvom okruženju prepoznaje se novi fenomen kolektivne inteligencije. To zapravo znači da kolektivno delovanje putem Interneta rezultira izuzetno brzim povećanjem kapaciteta znanja, znatno većim nego sto bi čovek ili mašina pojedinačno to ikad uspeli da postignu. Ovaj fenomen biće bliže opisan kroz odabrane primere kako umetničkih tako i drugih društvenih praksi.
Primer navedenog je socijalni softver Facebook, koji nudi različite metode online komunikacije, u cilju građenja specifičnih online identiteta. Biće obrađeno nekoliko osnovnih modela tekstualne razmene karakterističnih za Facebook (poruke na zidu, komentari uz fotografije, komentari uz postove). Takođe, biće razmotreni sistemi formiranja lične prezentacije, kroz uvezivanje podataka pribavljenih od strane samog korisnika sa intervencijama drugih, u procesu kreiranja hibridnih narativa.
Konstruisanje identiteta i procesi identifikacije mogu se pratiti kroz dve različite, ali međusobno povezane faze evolucije Interneta, a to su Web 1.0 i Web 2.0 platforme. Dok su Web 1.0 platforme bile zasnovane na tekstualnoj reprezentaciji i igri identitetima u smislu da možemo biti sve ono sto nismo u fizickoj realnosti, Web 2.0 platforme, odnosno društvene mreže uvode naše realne identitete u domen virtuelnog. Ipak i ti realni identiteti u virtuelnom okruženju jesu konstrukti, s obzirom da su zasnovani na selektivnoj reprezentaciji idealizovanog jastva. Povratnom spregom, to dalje pokreće pitanje ne samo kvaliteta uspostavljanja međuljudskih veza i komunikacije, već i nacina na koje dozivljavamo i definisemo sebe u fizickom okruzenju.
understand terms of reading and reception. Reading strategies are no longer products of a reader’s own
intentions, or the author’s. Dominant producers of the new media texts (I call them digitexts) become
cybertexts as ergodic machines (how Aarseth defined them). Not only do cybertext machines produce
digitexts and their reading strategies, they also produce the new media reader. This means that in the
reading process, which is understood in Escaprit’s terms as global cultural consumpition, the reader
oneself becomes a commodified construct, a merchandise which can be bought and sold and obviously
nowhere more than in the on-line advertising industry, guided by Google’s Page Rank algorythm.
I call this new media reader commodified due to the fact that the basic purpose of producing readers in
new media surroundings, especially on the Internet is for them to be converted into clicks, exposures,
demographic data, transformed into merchandise. Every time one clicks on a link or checks the ’like’ box
on Facebook, one is transferring one’s own piece of intelligence and feeding it into cybertext, which then
uses thusly acummulated intelligence for its own profit and benefit, basically exploiting the product of the
new media reader’s work. This is the phaenomenon I mark as mass intelligence – the non-critical and
arbitrary global gathering and accumulation of human knowledge, by offering readers mass-interests
texts which they can read, to which they can react, comment them or hyperlink them with the sole
purpose of making these readers quantifiable goods and therefore able to be added material value in the
form of price. As opposed to collective intelligence, mass intelligence is not a productive force it is a
commodity.