First and second generation of the internet

I recently stumbled across this tweet:

And although I can see it's intention I do think that I somewhat disagree on that.I also understand that there is naturally the ambiguous nature of concepts like 1st gen. and 2nd gen of tech. But as I understand it it means the generations of digital technologies and the internet. It could just as well mean the generation of cars of the old and contemporary cars. It would not make that huge a difference.

If we look at the internet in it's 1st generation, I would say that was a real time of personalization and humanization of the internet. Learning to script your way through to get your first web page showing, or starting a blog with LiveJournal or movable type felt, and was personalization in the internet at it's best. It was before the internet was monetized. (and maybe I am just old fool who thinks everything was better back when.)  True it did take effort to get something to the web. But that is part of human experience. If I just hit a sticker to a piece of paper and call it my painting, I rarely have the feeling of accomplishment. (Unless it's an artistic statement on fine art of course.)

Now the second gen of internet offers as a "web 2.0", social media and the like. It is so easy to write and share. And we even have stickers now on Facebook!

By making something easy is not humanizing or personalizing.

Under all this machinery that makes this easy are large corporation collecting and mining our personal data. To probably be sold to marketing firms. Or in the case of Google or Facebook to be used as a value to offer to marketers to get into their platforms. 

One good example is the sudden fame of tilde.club

And if we don't talk about the internet, but tech at large. Then the 1st gen wins there too. With a little knowledge or with a book from the library we could, if we wanted, fix our cars, clocks, radios, phones even. But now it's almost impossible. 

If we think how new tech with smart watches and smartphones brings us personalisation and humanization, we have to realize that at the same time they bring the opposite. Algorithms that suggest you new music, new exercises, new restaurants are just bunch of code. All that may be happening is that we are left in a filter bubble instead of hearing something little (or lot) out of our comfort zone - And maybe end up liking it.

I would agree that the fight we are having right now is to bring humanization back to the tech. But I wouldn't say it's a fight against the first generation, It's the fight against corporations and to the whole attitude of tech industry: What is needed is not new solutions by engineers, but civic engagement and realization. Like Sherry Turkle said in her book "Alone Together" we must realize that the internet and digital technologies are not done and ready but they are in their youth. We need to take a step back and think what we want and need from technology. 

It also very well may be that I have misunderstood the tweet completely wrong, which is so common in the era of trying to say something in little space and as quick as possible. But I got to write this nevertheless.

Big Data, Small Politics

Evgeny Morozov recently gave a talk on the relationship of digital technologies and their relationship with societal and political systems in Collegezalencomplex Radboud University, Nijmegen. It's a lomg talk, but worth a watch. Even the first half an hour sheds light to the complex problems that may arise when internet-solutionism and data surveillance are married with governments that outsource more and more of their services to private sector.

Big Data, Small Politics Lecture by Evgeny Morozov Thursday October 16, 2014, 19.30 - 21.30 hrs, Collegezalencomplex Radboud University, Nijmegen Organised by Soeterbeeck Programme


Creative coding in art education. Presentation at FADS 2014

FADS is a Finnish Art Education Doctoral Studies network and Im glad to be a part of it. We held our first symposium at Pyhätunturi this october. Here is my presentation.

Here is some short notes for each slide:

Slide 1

I am doing my dissertation at Aalto ARTS in Helsinki and the subject of my thesis is ”Creative Coding in art education” 
I have started my dissertation this January and In this presentation I want to present some starting points in my research. 
My research question is that if and how creative coding can be used as an emancipatory force through art education? Interesting subquestion is that how creative coding can join digital and analogue worlds together in a meaningful way?
My study is in a way tottering between the borders of education, technology and arts. Or in a wider perspective culture, education and technology.

Slide 2

I will start with creative coding. 
It is most commonly affiliated with electronic tools aimed at the creative market and to art world. It includes different kinds of programming languages and development kits such as processing or open framework, but is not limited in the software world. For me Creative coding refers to using cheap electronic components, new manufacturing tools and wide array of other digital technologies with artistic freedom and curiosity. 
In a way it is using the digital tools at their most rudimentary form.
I have some examples about creative coding, to give some kind of idea what I am talking about.

Slide 3

First example is installation work I did with my brother. The piece projects different datasets as graphs, so you can compare them. You can interact with the piece by placing different fruits or vegetables on the tray. Each vegetable has it’s own dataset embedded in it.It is a humoristic comment on big data. You can read more about the installation here: http://www.thispagehassomeissues.com/blog/2014/10/30/fractalnoia-11-eleven-datasets-you-dont-believe-just-happened

Slide 4

This is one example of the conclusion our ”algorithm” would do based on the presented data. -Fractalnoia, 2014

Slide 5

The second example is an art work, made in Art & Craft school Robotti’s winter-camp 2014. All the participants were 7-9-years old. In the camp we used littlebits- electronic building blocks that attach together by magnets. It is easy and informative way to got to know how different electronic systems work. 

Slide 6

In Art & Craft school Robotti we also have three ongoing gropus. Two for 7-9 years olds and one for more experienced makers. Drawing bot’s were made with Arduino and programmed to draw different random things with Arduino-

Slide 7

Three examples doesn’t really do justice to creative coding and its practices, but may give a bit larger perspective into it: Creative coding is not just sitting in front of computer.
Creative coding has many connections to diy-culture and specially to maker-movement. For me the aspects of exploration, hacking and tinkering are important forces when thinking about creative coding in art education. 
It is about going from consuming to creating - in taking control of our digital life. 

Slide 8

Another important viewpoint for me is the idea of code literacy.
Digital technologies surrounds us and alters the way we interact with the world.
Digitality creates inequality -digital divide- between those who understand it and those who dont.
Main thing in all of the digital technology is that it is based on code.
Code literacy is about being able to read and write in code. Still it is not that anyone has to become software engineer -We learn to read and write in schools and not everyone becomes a writer or a poet. I will next present three perspectives why I think code literacy is needed.

Slide 9

First is individual perspective.
It is about our freedom as an individual. The freedom to choose what we do with computers and how we’d like to do it. This is wishful thinking of course, but something to take into consideration. Understanding code is almost crucial if we want to partake in this freedom. For example free software movement is not a movement without people participating in it.

Slide 10

Second perspective is about the nature of code. It’s own biases. One clear example is the origin digital technology: It’s binary nature. A computer is either on or off, 0 or 1, yes or no. For digitality there is no maybe, it is all based on the binary and dual idea, adapted from Leibniz. We can off course program hundreds of yesses and nos to get to finer granularity, but it is very different in it’s nature to our life.

Slide 11

Third perspective is about social issues. Code is not some force of nature that has been discovered by scientist. 
No. It is a plastic model created entirely by humans and can be changed by us anytime we want it. 
- But the code that we are using is creating it’s own structures and laws, which we must obey, if we want to use that particular patch of code. Be it a operating system like windows, mac or linux or word processor etc.

Slide 12

One of the main problems with the code is that is often untested and unthought in societal sense. It is commonly created by white young american males, in few spots in US. Software maybe the gold rush of our age, but at the same time it creates a wide array of political and societal problems. These problems are presented into our society from the backdoor.


Slide 13

I am interested in bringing critical pedagogy into digitality. Freire himself asked for the proper use of technology in education. He collaborated with Seymour Papert, a researcher at MIT who already in seventies had interesting ideas on how to use computers in education. But I want to bring maybe even more critical thinking into this. Critical thinking that aims at emancipation of the digital culture -Not to abandonment but in reflective use of digital technology.

Slide 14

I have realized that the world created by code is a complex and it’s use very widespread. The explosion of internet and the rapid development of computers have led into lot’s of new kinds of problems. Privacy, search engines, big data, and algorithms to name just few. Code forms and reforms our world all the time. We live in data-driven world.
I have been thinking about a good term for this, but I think Morozov nails it.
Computational arrogance.
For me this includes the whole field from algorithms that do the stock trading, choose our hit songs or even compose them, to big data and the alteration of our culture by software products. 

Slide 15

This brings us into the the art world. Where similar problems are echoed and also maybe unanswered or even unquestioned.
Digital divide is the inequality between those immersed in code and those who have no clue. We use digital tools like they were analogue. Photoshop like it was a paint brush.

Slide 16

Last I want to bring some ideas on how I think this all ties in with art education. Art education offers a space for exploration, space to use and misuse code and other digital technologies. 
To form and reform our thoughts by doing. 
Seija Kojonkoski-Rännäli says it well: The thought in our hands. 
(In finnish we use the term käsittää where the base for the world comes from hand - käsi,  when we understand or aspire to understand something. )
Understanding OR different kind of understanding of digitality can maybe be made by mushing it together in our hands. 
Kojonkoski-Rännäli talks about the apprehension of quality. Meaning quality in an ethical sense, creating an understanding of that which is good. 
For me as an artists this bodily understanding and thinking makes a lot of sense. And I think is something that creative coding can bring to digital world
So here in a condensed form were some of the, lets say, starting points in my research that I wanted to bring about. Right now I am writing an article about Maker movement and when looked from the perspective quality as coined By Kojonkoski-Rännäli or from Marjo Räsänen’s experiental art understanding, it can bring about the understanding of quality.

    

 

Fractalnoia -11 eleven datasets you don’t believe just happened.

FRACTALNOIA

- 11 datasets you cannot believe just happened. 

 

The collection of data is increasing exponentially and it is more and more available to the general public as private databases are opened up. This Big Data holds promises of new insights, unparalleled innovation, even articifical intelligence. However, the ubiquity and availability of data connected to our human desire to see patterns where none exist means that humans have to deal with increasing amounts of meaningless data analysis, "fact-based" conspiracy theories and click-bait infographics. As the data is all digital, it morphs easily into whatever we want, releases itself from the context and appears on fashionable graphs that may look nice, but carry no meaning.

In our installation, we want to show how arbitrary and easy it is to make "data analysis", deduce causations from correlations and combine different datasets. In addition, we want to give the audience a physical feeling of the datasets, although it is inherently false, to further point out how the context of the dataset can be chosen. The audience gets to manipulate the data by placing everyday physical objects, such as fruit, to a table. The objects present different datasets and graphs are created based these datasets. We thus combine a primitive action of moving common objects to the digital world of information technology and project the resulting graphs for the audience to see. By being able to literally grasp the data and create any type of combination of the datasets, the audience gets to experience both the ease and complexity of drawing meaning from data.

 



Starting a hackerspace for kids

This january we started weekly teaching for 7 to 10 year olds in Käsityokoulu Robotti, which could be translated as arts & crafts school, but also as a hackerspace or as a makerspace.


Käsityökoulu Robotti has a permanent space in Espoo Pikku Aurora art house. We have standard makerspace equipment such as 3D-printer, laser-cutter, computers, microcontrollers and some standard tools. But we also have suitable electronics for younger makers called Little Bits, which allows even 3 to 4-year olds to try out electronics and build things.

All this equipment is not there to just to impress or amaze, but it truly allows us to empower children to make, tinker and create new kinds of things. To learn how technology works, how to take control of it and how to use it creatively. This is very important point for us. The whole reason why we first founded Käsityökoulu Robotti a few years ago and started giving workshops was because we wanted to show children that they needn't just to be mere users of electrical toys or computer games but that they could also be makers and tinkerers in the electronics and software. 

Children are natural makers, they create worlds filled with the most creative things. Children naturally design, engineer, create things in their own play. The problem with many modern electrical and software toys are that they don't allow any "hacking", making tinkering natural for children. You can just use the toy as intended and then discard it. Naturally childrens curiosity dies fast. What we wanted to show is that you can actually make your own electrical things or software. Or you can open your broken RC-car and fix it or mod it. Give it a new life.

Another very important point in teaching children these skills is that our society is becoming more and more digital. Understanding how all of this works is not just a benefit but critical skill for everyone in our society. Digital native is almost worn out buzzword associated with children born in digital age today. Meaning being that they have a innate way of understanding digital devices. Unfortunately this is not the whole story. What children are good at is that they understand how the user interface works and how to consume the digital devices and it's content. What we want to give them is the understanding and the possibility to look beyond that and to create the whole world themselves. This is also the reason we are called art & craft school. We are not only focusing on programming or electronics, rather we’d like to think we have a larger picture in mind. We like to join together art and science. Creating and thinking. Creative thinking or doing something completely silly. Enjoying your hands work. Making art. Many of our teachers have artistic backgrounds, some from film, some from fine art, some from media art and most of us have background from art education. For us this this sort of ” creative and free” art educational thinking comes naturally. And I think it suits engineering and programming wonderfully. Sure we know how to program and how structured that needs to be, but we also value the lessons you get when you make errors and the stuff you get when you trail off to side paths. I think programming should not be taught as a dry mathematic manner, nor should it be taught as a gamified manner. That takes a way the seriousness of the thing. -Art and playing is serious business after all! Making your own art piece or your own robot is nothing to be laughed at and is so much better than completing some level in some programming game.

Käsityökoulu Robotti is based on the same ideas as normal makerspaces or fablabs in the worlds. We want to give children the same opportunities to discover new technologies as we adults now can have. From the start we also decided that it is important that we use as much open source technologies as possible. This is important in that it truly enables children to learn read the code of the programs they are using (-if they so wish) and open source also makes it affordable if they wish to get the software or hardware for themselves.  

One thing that might differ us from your ordinary hackerspace (if you could yet call hackerspaces ordinary?) is that we also have pedagogical structure to guide us. I think this is important as we are dealing with children and is also natural to us as we are teachers by profession. Our main pedagogocal inspiration comes from Reggio Emilia and constructivist learning theories  These happen to be roughly the same theories Maker movement draws it's ideologies from. Specially important for us is Reggio Emilia with it's respect for childrens own creativity, thinking, rights and needs. Reggio Emilia also gives special significance for the environment as it regards it as a third teacher. We feel that our school and the cultural center in Pikku Aurora really helps nurture childrens own thinking and creativity. Reggio Emilia approaches founder Loris Malaguzzis poem ”The Hundred Languages of Childhood” really could be out of a maker motto and is something we value in Käsityökoulu Robotti. 


"The Hundred Languages of Childhood
The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
A hundred languages
A hundred hands
A hundred thoughts
A hundred ways of thinking
Of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
Ways of listening of marveling of loving
A hundred joys
For singing and understanding
A hundred worlds
To discover
A hundred worlds
To invent
A hundred worlds
To dream
The child has
A hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
But they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
Separate the head from the body.
They tell the child;
To think without hands
To do without head
To listen and not to speak
To understand without joy
To love and to marvel
Only at Easter and Christmas
They tell the child:
To discover the world already there
And of the hundred
They steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
That work and play
Reality and fantasy
Science and imagination
Sky and earth
Reason and dream
Are things
That do not belong together
And thus they tell the child
That the hundred is not there
The child says: NO WAY the hundred is there--
 

-Loris Malaguzzi
Founder of the Reggio Approach" 


From ideological standpoint making and letting children tinker on their own lets children build the knowledge they need and let’s them build on to  the knowledge they already have. We feel that our job as a school is to give children tools and necessary information to let them discover the world around them. Digital technologies need not to be restricted sandboxes nor illegal or dangerous places but could and should be places for empowering and emancipatory action.

Last week we just started our first class that meets every week to learn new things. We started with Arduino and learning to code. We are really looking forward for the spring and see what we can learn together. I will be posting about our progress, what we have learned in this blog later on this blog.

Besides the continious teaching we are also offering weekend workshops, winter camps and summer camps
and are looking forward to expand our activity next autumn. If you are interested in our activity you can find out more from our website at www.kasityokoulurobotti.fi (In finnish only) or from me.