Remote Spaces Research Articles

Datascape: A Synthesis of Digital and Embodied Worlds

Digital and synthetic worlds are often conceived as self-contained entities that exist in abstracted and remote spaces. The author elaborates an approach to hybrid space that instead focuses on local contexts of digital information correlated with the embodied spaces people inhabit—an informational substrate that both describes and regulates human activity. The author presents a mobile interactive art installation as a way to bring geographically referenced information out of databases and into everyday experience of traveling through the world. Datascape enables a hybrid ecology whereby participants author dynamic geographic narratives that compose a digital world coextensive with the planet Earth. A vehicle-mounted digital periscope engenders action between passengers and a visual and sonic landscape that unfolds and emerges based on conversations between people, data, and dynamic representational entities that compose the landscape. By allowing people to view and interact with information descriptive of the location in which it is encountered, Datascape enables awareness of and engagement with the hybrid digital/physical spaces people traverse and inhabit in their everyday lives.

OBLIGING INDIGENOUS CITIZENS?

This paper discusses how understandings of culture and place are deployed in governing colonial Aboriginal1 subjects in contemporary Australia. Recently, Australia's conservative Federal Government has sought to reorientate Aboriginal affairs away from debates about rights and inheritances, to the ‘responsibilities’ that communities must accept in order to be provided with infrastructure and services from government. Discourses of mutual obligation and responsibility target Aboriginal populations and are linked to claims that Aboriginal communities themselves have requested more overt and tailored interventions from central governments. The new ‘Shared Responsibility Agreements' (SRAs) signal the formalisation of these shifts and oblige Aboriginal communities to conform to a series of specified disciplinary practices (such as improving personal hygiene, maintaining clean households, and preventing school truancy) in order to receive access to health care and other basic social services and supplies. We analyse how a hierarchy of ‘culture’ is articulated in SRAs, and highlight the particular complexity of governing remote colonial subjects and spaces at a distance. Although SRAs appear to indicate a novel policy direction, our analysis reveals how they mobilise longstanding colonial discourses of Aboriginal people and communities as welfare dependent and ungovernable, and reinstate donor/recipient relationships characteristic of earlier colonial rationalities and citizenship practices. Our case study demonstrates how governing practices are constantly reconstituted through knowledges of the governed, and through techniques that hybridise early illiberal practices with new neoliberal discourses. We argue that the act of governing remains thoroughly mediated by the inheritance of colonial visions of place and culture.

Virtual environments for creative work in collaborative music-making

Virtual environments are beginning to allow musicians to perform collaboratively in real time at a distance, coordinating on timing and conceptualization. The development of virtual spaces for collaboration necessitates more clearly specified theorizing about the nature of physical copresence in music-making: how the available communicative cues are likely to affect the nature of visually mediated rehearsal and performance. Pilot data for a project carried out at the New School for Social Research demonstrate some important factors relevant to designing remote spaces for musical collaboration, and suggest that virtual environments for musical collaboration could actually enhance the feeling of being together that creative musical expression requires.

Last clock

The Last clock displays a space's history and rhythm. Trails behind its hands paint the clock face with a video feed, creating a mandala of archived time. The Last clock began as an investigation into representations of time. The goal was to use the mutable properties of digital technology, hoping to create something aesthetically pleasing, interesting, and ever changing without having to succumb to randomness. The clock reveals the rhythm of events and spaces. It provides a record of and a means of reflection for what is happening and what has happened. With the Internet-connected streaming version, the clock can connect two or more remote spaces so that people feel a sense of each other's presence. The clock does not show precisely the activity in the space, just a filtered version of it. Beyond being an aesthetic object, Last serves a real purpose as a display that shows an overview of a given space's dynamics and history. By borrowing the form of a traditional analog clock, Last becomes an easy-to-read visualization of complex information, which includes the type of activity captured, the pace and volume of motion, and the point in time that this activity happened. it shows all this information in a continuously updated, live, single image. This article is available with a short video documentary on CD-ROM.

From Psycho to Cyber Strategies: Prosthetics, Robotics and Remote Existence

The body needs to be repositioned from the realm of the biological, to the cyberzone of interface and extension – from genetic containment to electronic extrusion. Strategies towards the post-human are more about erasure, rather than affirmation – an obsession no longer with self but an analysis of structure. Notions of species evolution and gender distinction are remapped and reconfigured in alternate hybridities of human/machine. Outmoded metaphysical distinctions of soul/body or mind/brain are superseded by concerns of body/species split, as the body is redesigned – diversifying in form and functions. Cyborg bodies are not simply wired and extended but also enhanced with implanted components. Invading technology eliminates skin as a significant site, an adequate interface or barrier between public space and physiological tract. The significance of the cyber may well reside in the act of the body shedding its skin. As humans increasingly operate with surrogate bodies in remote spaces they function with increasingly intelligent and interactive images. The possibility of autonomous images generates an unexpected outcome of human/machine symbiosis. The post-human may well be manifested in the intelligent life form of autonomous images.

"Ornitorrinco" and "Rara Avis": Telepresence Art on the Internet

THIS PAPER IS A DISCUSSION OF AESTHETIC IMPLICATIONS AND PRACTICAL implementations of the author’s telepresence art. Ornitorrinco in Eden and Rara Avis , two recent examples of worldwide networked telepresence installations presented publicly over the Internet, are discussed in the paper. A framework is presented to introduce theoretical and cultural aspects of this work. It is proposed that the use of electronic media in art to physically act on remote spaces constitutes a new aesthetic element, compared to the more traditional representational use of such media. It is also proposed that a new aesthetic is emerging out of artistic experimentation with operation of telerobots, co-existence in virtual and real spaces, synchronicity of actions, real-time remote control, man-animal-plant-robot interfaces, and collaboration through networks. In a technical appendix, Ed Bennett describes the design and implementation of the hardware and software used in Ornitorrinco in Eden and Rara Avis. This is followed by a glossary defining the main technical terminology of telepresence systems.

Remote Rural Women's Ideologies, Spaces and Networks: Country Women's Association of New South Wales, 1922-1992

The Country Women's Association is one of Australia's oldest and biggest service organisations. The Country Women's Association of New South Wales is an organisation with its origins in the remote rural parts of the State, but today a large proportion of its membership is in metropolitan areas and in the more densely settled coastal regions. This article examines the characteristics of the C.W.A. of New South Wales: its pride in past achievements, its network, and its growing recognition that it needs a revised mission. Using the C.W.A. Motto and Objects as a starting point, the ideology of the C.W.A. is examined, particularly the concept of 'countrywoman' and the C.W.A.'s 'service' role. Finally, potential new directions that could be incorporated into a revised mission are identified, in the context of the concepts of network, spaces, service and ideology, seen in the light of contemporary social change.

The Unity of Modern Problems

Of all the sciences, philosophy is the most concrete and comprehensive. The sense of cold, remote spaces which it is apt to generate in us is the result of this very width and concreteness. The philosopher has to condense the many-sided variety of human life and express it through the symbols of a common language. The symbols are at best only semi-transparent. Abstractness descends upon him the moment they become opaque. Philosophy, in fact, is useless to us unless we can see through it. If we cannot, the fault may be ours. If it is the philosopher's, then his failure is a failure to be wide enough or concrete enough. He needs above all to be sympathetically sensitive to the wide range of human interests, because it is this as a whole that he is bidden to systematize. He must give a single answer, and for that he must formulate a single question. Therefore his first problem is to discover the unity of problems.