Author Archives: Duncan

Co-Cinema Poster presented at Boundary Work

Posted on by
Reply


Boundary Work, 12th-27th November 2010, Wandesford Quay Gallery, Cork.

Boundary Work is the first in a series of exhibitions designed to facilitate a survey of work that operates in the space between art and science and as such aims to encourage a dialogue between the sub-disciplines of these fields. The exhibition therefore is a representation of work that treads the boundary between art & design and science and an invitation to participate was extended to artists, designers, and researchers in practices particularly relating to science and/or technology.

Visit: Boundary Work

Co-Cinema presented at Atmosphere, Inspace

Posted on by
Reply

Atmosphere, Inspace

Co-Cinema is a ten minute interactive movie experience that involved three sequences from Jacques Tati films – ‘Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot’, ‘Mon Oncle’ and ‘Playtime’. The work was exhibited during the Atmosphere programme at Inspace, Edinburgh, which ran parallel with the Edinburgh Film Festival. The cinema screen was cut up into 40 pieces, each piece corresponding to a seat in the audience. Each person sitting in the audience could ‘flip’ their movie segment to one of three different film sequences by scanning one of three QR codes that are located next to their seat with their smartphone.

The experience began with one cohesive image, but as members of the audience ‘flipped’ their own parts, it became broken up as 40 people tried to watch three movies at once.

Developed with the support of New Media Scotland, Inspace and the University of Edinburgh.

RememberMe presented at FutureEverything 2010

Posted on by
Reply


12 May – 15 May 2010, Oxfam, Manchester

The RememberMe artwork is a collaborative project with the Oxfam shop, near Contact Theatre. Leading up to FutureEverything, a research assistant will be based in the shop and recording brief stories about the donated objects into a microphone: where they acquired it, the memories attached and any associated stories. This audio clip will be linked to an RFID tag and QR code.

During FutureEeverything all tagged items will then join the shop’s stock. Customers, including conference delegates, will be invited to use our bespoke RFID readers, or their own smart phone to browse artifacts, displayed amongst the many thousands of other objects.

Once triggered, RememberMe labeled objects, will replay the story through speakers located in the shop, evoking ghosts of the past. Tagged objects will be in the public domain for purchase by other members of the community. Our iPhone and Android apps will allow them to access the story for years to come.

FutureEverything delegates are encouraged to bring something to the conference to donate to Oxfam, and to record a story with it.

The project is developed by the TOTeM project, a UKRC Digital Economy funded project to explore the social potential of the Internet of Things.

Visit: RememberMe, FutureEverything 2010
Watch: Video of RememberMe at FutureEverything

Abstract submitted to Research on Education and Media Journal

Posted on by
Reply

Inmemory: social memory, locative narratives
Gianni Corino & Duncan Shingleton

Locative media as a term shares with another term, the ‘Internet of Things’, the very up-to-date attempt to define the technical and cultural shift anticipated in the society as it moves to a ubiquitous form of computing in which every device is ‘on’, and in some way connected to the Internet. Through different location based technologies, we create a data sphere for the Internet that offers up new possibilities to locate or ‘attach’ the digital to objects, space and people.

This is the starting point for rethinking our relationship with the physical world, and we can begin to imagine scenarios where the physical and digital spheres collapse onto each other. One important element in the equation refers to the kind of agency objects and spaces will have in this relationship. As a case study the article will present a project titled Inmemory, developed and presented in Edinburgh at the Inspace gallery in June 2010. Inmemory aims to explore how personal or collective stories coupled to objects and/or spaces could transform our current value system across communities and society. Inmemory main aim is to investigate in practical terms the emerging field of the ‘Internet of Things’ culturally and technologically. The creative, artistic and interactive potential of the ‘Internet of Things’ is the central point of investigation in relation to three main elements: object, memory and agency.

Paper presented at Web Studies Congress 2010

Posted on by
Reply

Web Studies Congress 2010

The 1st international congress on Web Studies was held at Monterrey Tech in Toluca, Mexico. It aimed at providing a venue for researchers and professionals from different backgrounds for discussion, study, practical demonstrations, sharing, and exchange on new developments and theories regarding the World Wide Web. The congress therefore invited contributions from a heterogeneous set of fields and domains such as: Web systems, computational intelligence, human-computer interaction, digital theory, Web sociology, and well as interactive and digital arts.

Download: The Memorable: Applying the Internet of Things to Small Communities
Download: Web Studies Congress Book of Proceedings

hallo welt!

Posted on by
Reply



A ‘Hello World’ program is usually the first computer program that people use when learning a programming language. It simply prints ‘Hello World!’ on a display device and is typically one of the simplest programs possible in any computer language. Following this tradition, ‘Hallo Welt!’ combines both human and machine languages in real-time into a multilingual machinic confusion of tongues. The live-performative aspect is what makes it like speech in that it both says something and does something at the same time. This is political in as much as it relates to the act of free speaking.

View: http://www.anti-thesis.net/contents/projects/hello/helloworld.html.

hallo welt! is a collaboration between Geoff Cox and Duncan Shingleton. It was shown as a projection at BV Gallery, Linz (July 2008). It was also shown as hello world! as part of AFTER THE NET, at Peninsula Arts Gallery, Plymouth (Sept-Nov 2009) and at Tecnologico Monterey, Toluca, Mexico (March 2010).

Short Paper submitted to Web Studies Congress 2010

Posted on by
Reply

The Memorable: Applying the Internet of Things to small communities
Shingleton, D., Sutherland, K.

RFID, radio frequency identification, is a technology that is now rapidly being developed by corporations and governments who see the possibilities and advantages of managing large bodies of objects. By seamlessly embedding an RFID chip into an object, it is possible to assign it a unique identification, allowing databases of specific item/location/relationship information to be generated, providing for real-time identification and tracking over the course of its life from cradle to grave.

The use of RFID in conjunction with database technologies allows us to understand a truly ubiquitous network, an Internet of Things, which offers up new possibilities in which our environment becomes a conduit of information transfer between people to people, people to things, and things themselves. This generates a new perspective in the way we view and interact with the Internet. No longer are we outside this mass of information, curating its content in a web 2.0 model of tags, keywords and trackbacks, instead we share the network with objects capable of communicating what they are, and what is going on in the space around them; active members of society, contributing not only to the social web, but also the physical world.

Abstract submitted to the XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology

Posted on by
Reply

You’re Part of the Global Network
Duncan Shingleton

Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is a technology that is now rapidly being developed by corporations and governments who see the possibilities and advantages of managing large bodies of objects. By seamlessly embedding an RFID chip into an object, we now assign it a unique identification, allowing databases of specific item/location/relationship information to be generated, giving each object its own identity for real-time identification and tracking.  RFID allows for more accurate inventories, automated re-ordering and improved market analysis; data capture that takes place without the need for line of sight or physical manipulation.

This paper reflects beyond the logistical benefits of the technology, and instead attempts to identify the social benefits that might arise. Tagged with an RFID chip, an object will have a unique digital identity and play a pivotal role in joining the physical world with the digital.  As this technology moves into products, sensitive documents and even the human body, an Internet of Things will emerge consisting of blogjects, spimes, cybrids, technemes, wearables and smartifacts; networked objects that are capable of communicating what they are, and what is going on in the space around them.

As we see what can only be defined as a truly ubiquitous network environment emerging, it offers up new possibilities where our environment becomes a conduit of information transfer between people to people, people to things, and things themselves. This generates a new perspective in the way we view and interact with the Internet. Now we are caught inside of the net, in an always-on, invisible stream of data transfer. No longer are we outside this mass of information, curating its content in a web 2.0 model of tags, keywords and trackbacks, instead we share the network with objects that become active members of society, contributing not only to the social web, but also the physical world.

Paper submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society

Posted on by
Reply

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Tagging: Overcoming the Public Fear of Tagging Culture.

Burke, M. Shingleton, D. Speed, C. Hudson-Smith, A. Karpovich, A. O’Callaghan, S. Simpson, M. Barthel, R. Blundell, B. De Jode, M. Leder, K Lee, C. Macdonald, J.

Abstract

Many people associate tagging with negative situations, for example, to track “criminals” or to track journeys and locations. RFID and other forms of near field tagging are being adopted for logistical purposes by commercial industries and governments alike and the UK public remain fearful of the implications of a tagging culture. This paper reflects upon the extent of “tagging culture” fears and identifies them as a significant problem that is preventing widespread public acceptance of the technology and hampering its social, economic and technical benefits.

As a form of recovery for this dire situation, the authors present information concerning an EPSRC project that uses a fresh tactic to encourage the public to actively use tagging technologies themselves and to reap the benefits. TOTeM (Tales of Things and Electronic Memory) is a three-year funded pan-UK project that focuses on the archiving of people’s memories associated with specific objects. Through the technical development of simple interfaces aimed at the home user, people are encouraged to tell a story about an object, to record the associated memory and to ‘tag’ their object in a unique way that will always associate their memory with their artefact.
Continue reading →

The Memory Economy: Revaluing everyday objects

Posted on by
Reply

Duncan Shingleton
Edinburgh College of Art

Appadurai proposes that the circulation of commodities in social life can be summarised in the follow way.  ‘Economic exchange creates value.  Value is embodied in commodities that are exchanged.  Focusing on things that are exchanged, rather than simply on the forms or functions of exchange, makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics.’ (1986, p.3)   Since Marx and the early political economists, there has been little mystery about the relationship between politics and the production of commodities.  Economic models drive forward consumption, where goods follow the traditional teleology of cradle to grave.  This paper poses the question: what economies are created if memory, not politics, becomes the link between exchange and value?

Proust states that ‘consumer goods aren’t really consumed at all – but experienced, either in memory or right now, as key elements of identity itself’ (1927 cited in Kwint, et al., 1999, p.xiii).  In western traditions, objects serve memory in three main ways.  Firstly they furnish recollection; they constitute our picture of the past.  Secondly, objects stimulate remembering, not only through the deployed mnemonics of public monuments or mantelpiece souvenirs, but also by the serendipitous encounter bringing back experience which otherwise would have remained dormant, repressed or forgotten.  Thirdly, objects form records: analogues to living memory, storing information beyond individual experience (Kwint, et al., 1999, p.2).

It is clear that memories are intrinsically linked with objects; time and memory are embodied or encoded in our perception of everyday things.  Draaisma refers to memories as a ‘store of precious items’ (2000, p.2) and like objects they too have a lifetime, part of a persons own cradle to grave cycle.  The advancement of technology from development of writing surfaces, to photography and cinematography, Edison’s phonograph and now a days numerous ‘artificial’ memories assist us in ‘arming ourselves against the transience implicit in the mortality of memory’ (Draaisma, 2000, p.2) by recording what the eye and ear take in.

This paper examines whether the latest advancement of tagging technologies in the manufacturing process, designed to streamline economic supply chains, can unexpectedly become a new platform for memory storage and transform inert objects into vessels that allow for the imprint of experience to be shared over time.  Is this the moment where objects move beyond the material value to their owner, or the corporation that built them, and instead become desirable artefacts that challenge our ideas of value in this consumer society?

References

Appadurai, A., (1986). Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In  A. Appadurai, ed. The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ch. 1.

Kwint, M., Breward, C., Aynsley, J., (1999) Material Memories, Design and Evocation. Oxford: Berg

Draaisma, D., (2000) Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press