NotThisBody

Memetic Cartography – metamaps.cc

NotThisBody — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:35:54 +0000

New blog and work in collaboration with @gavinkeech

Metamaps.cc – concept mapping as evolutionary strategy

Metamapping is the process of being able to take the things that exist in our heads and make sense of them; model behavior, strategize on best practices, approaches, processes and workflows. We share these as frameworks for others to use, adapt and modify for their specific use.

Through the process of collaborative network weaving, concept mapping, dialogue mapping & strategic decision making, metamapping is useful for conflict identification, identifying beneficial cooperation, conflict resolution & amplifying intentions in all types of networks.

Metamapping gives us the ability to “zoom out” to see a more complex representation of subjects and issues than we’re able to see when limited by perspective.

TOP(OS) BLUEPRINT GEN002

NotThisBody — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 20:39:25 +0000

a metamap of networked action, as part of Junto. in collaboration with @venessamiemis, design by @gavinkeech. be watching Venessa’s blog Emergent by Design for updates…

find a large version HERE. also on spacecollective HERE

I am a psychoterrorist…

NotThisBody — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 00:12:47 +0000

…or that’s what they call me.

I remember an early example of AUREC – aura recognition (formerly referred to as augmented reality). it was called Add-Art – a firefox plugin (remember that?) that blocked all the adds on websites and replaced them with curated art, it changed every two weeks. i remember not seeing ads for years – the art worked is magic in its immersive native environment – it probably affected me more subconsciously than consciously. we saw in it possibility of freedom and control over our own experience of C(_)yberspace, unmediated by a purely economic interest.

the big brands gave up on billboards and benevolently handed dominion over Default to the old school street artists and the smaller brands, while passing out contacts locked to branded layers to the people that couldn’t afford the technology, with the money they saved on printing and renting billboard space. Why pay rent on a billboard when you could just as easily create a layer of reality, offer some value and watch the population grow, right?

the fragile consensus reality, as predicted, did fracture, fractallize, into a multitude of collective realities. we didn’t move quick enough. maybe we couldn’t have moved quickly enough. the Brands did – creating unique layers of reality and incentivicing habitation – sweepstakes, gifts, contexts, services, affiliate systems, hard to turn those down – a huge fucking pyramid scheme, completely unregulated. fucking addictive. The more time you spend dialed into one reality, the more value you get in return. or so they make you think. some are walled gardens. some are exclusive and private – like those members only clubs in the airport, only for the big spenders – or the influential. not to say they aren’t all bad – at the beginning there was some real creativity. But basically the message was, don’t inhabit your own reality, inhabit ours. fucking tricked into thinking that you’re active but its passivity all over again, bullshit Pavlovian model of freedom of action -a complete fucking unconscious subversion of the subjective experience. the population numbers of top layers are just as closely watched as the stock market. the most common of these layers follow the exact same model as in 2010 – providing a service to its inhabitants and offering them value in return, while auctioning your data and attention of to the highest bidder.

I am a psychoterrorist, shifting the phase of the layers – blending, compositing – planting triggers – creating entrances and exits into alternative layers. This is my art. Triggers act as a virus encountering a host – a simple access command interaction with an every day object, and perception of the current layer is imperceptibly, or perceptibly, shifted. Sometimes we want to create a juxtaposition of layers, simply that. my colleagues, some are drawn to a simple addition of metadata to an everyday object – some do the same as the early street artists but paint with code. Some are satisfied with a simple prank, some with a statement, a simple but basic change to the virtual scenery, but the layer is quickly debugged. The more subtle the trigger, the better – users may not be even aware of the change at first. but the act of subverting one user’s view of a collective reality within the context of networked vision and the collective view starts to get buggy as vision systems try to resolve the error. like a virus – the bug propagates itself as more views clash and collective networked vision deteriorates until the virus renders the host incapacitated. Then someone somewhere decides its time for a full system reload, but only at the worst case – the layer is not likely to gain back the population it had before after an attack.

The breaking apart of a collective reality gets messy, sometimes. psychoterrorism is a considered a serious offence. the government has opened up state mental institutions again, more every day, research laboratories, case studies, experimental test facilities, to deal with the newest in brain diseases and conditions that come more as a consequence of schizophrenic branded realities than the actions of psychoterrorists (not to say there weren’t some mistakes).

I live in collage, dial in, drift out through networked visions, inhabit several layers and identities at once. my reality exists within the shifting perception and interaction with the multiple layers of metadata, simultaneously creating the hypersynapses between. with each migration, we grow stronger. this is the biggest banyan tree i’ve ever seen.

there are still many who live in Default. but the barrier between the two, a line drawn in drifting sands. this membrane is permeable at its most solid. what i’m most afraid of is the bliss of ignorance.

Am I the psychoterrorist? or are they?

New Moon

NotThisBody — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 18:45:45 +0000

short video document of the New Moon performance

sound - Podington Bear – Weavy Glass

From Citizen Kane to Knowmadism – a conversation

NotThisBody — Fri, 28 May 2010 17:25:58 +0000

Citizen Kane -> aesthetics -> story -> reality -> perception -> senses -> information -> infocologies -> privacy -> Facebook -> data mining -> personal narratives -> human freedoms -> government control -> sur-, sous-veillance -> commodification of personal data -> data-mining personal and collective infocologies -> knowmadism

(75:18 min, 192 kbps, mono mp3 – 51.7mb, DL it HERE)

“that’s some pretty trippy shit, Mr. Ishan” – a student
This is a lecture I gave on May 25th to a class of 14 year old high school freshman. For the last 4 months I’ve had the opportunity to teach three levels of Film courses in high school as a long term substitute, with about 100 students from 14-17 years old. In this time, I’ve asked them to take a closer look at the ongoing sophistication of our relationship with media as consumers and creators, and the roles of story in our identities and existence, individually and collectively – a conversation that is sorely lacking from the education of today’s youth.

I see outdated paradigms worm their way through the plasticity of the minds, solidifying the worldview of these students and I know that its not too late. That if we have the conversation together, they are open, willing and able to reframe their understandings. These Millenials, these Digital Natives (of which I suppose I am one) have an inherent flexibility to adapt to new paradigms – we update ourselves with each new generation of technology that emerges, migrate social networks and services, and live a life of multi-linear existence – its native to our OS.

But this multi-linear existence is being forced to inhabit an old paradigm of knowledge gathering, learning, and perception of the world around us that is propogated by the current system of education. It’s this dichotomy which kills the ”culture” – distractions reign. Since we’re not being told what changes technology brings to our models of reality, we tend to fall into a passive understanding of the world around us based on outdated consensual understandings.

Yet – and the hope is strong – I’ve learned that if you can have the conversation with the youth – tell them something that breaks apart their conceptions and provides a basis on which to build them anew and embrace other points of view – …well, that’s all that you can do.

We have to have the conversation when the youth is young. To implant ideas and concepts in their minds when they are still fresh, models of mind that allow the inherent plasticity of mind that comes with that youth to extend through our lives - that which so many who have lost that plasticity work so hard to overcome.I’ve had the luck to learn from these students during the process of sharing with them – its forced me to learn to communicate my own points of view simply and clearly; it’s deepened my understanding of the reality I’m living through with them. This is a thank you to all my students who have been open and willing to share with me.

In my humble opinion, every teacher must learn to have this conversation with their students – to contextualize what they teach to students with the flow of knowledge and events surrounding us, in our daily existence – to learn how to learn with them, not to teach from a static information ecology, to embrace the fractured flow of information coming from each mind and mutually co-create the narratives our of existence.

- Ishan Shapiro

OFFF 2010 – Paris

NotThisBody — Sun, 23 May 2010 05:48:00 +0000

June 24 – 27, 2010.10

www.offf.ws

A series of images From F.up Fairytales by Notthisbody will appear in the 2010 Catalogue @ the OFFF International Festival for Post-Digital Culture

Dance of Tennis

NotThisBody — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 06:01:29 +0000

Notthisbody shares

We went out to help with the Dance of Tennis in East LA, and took some video while we were at it.
This is what we put together for them.

NTB & #Junto development

NotThisBody — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 21:34:44 +0000

Notthisbody has been active member of the development of #Junto – a radical open telepresence prototype spearheaded by @venessameimis (http://emergentbydesign.com) , coded by @aquarious, with the collaboration & participationof many others.

Notthisbody’s involvement is mentioned in the following posts regarding #Junto:

http://emergentbydesign.com/2010/03/22/junto-discussing-ideas-worth-spreading/

http://emergentbydesign.com/2010/04/17/junto-is-born/

http://emahlee.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/me-we-and-junto/

One of the most interesting facets of this experience is that the prototyping and development is happening on the platform we are developing – a reiterative, immediated process from the start.

Junto Alpha is open for anyone’s participation already – join in the discussion at http://dave.parsons.edu/junto.

more info to come soon.

New Moon Ritual

NotThisBody — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 01:19:00 +0000

with Noah Crowe

On the 14th of April, our friend Noah did a performance [in process] – New Moon – an homage to the Beuys’s 7000 Oaks.

Notthisbody did the documenting

[Video coming soon]

NotThisBody & ThisIsMeta share…ShiftShapers

NotThisBody — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:26:57 +0000

NotThisBody & ThisIsMeta share…

ShiftShapers: an immediated autodocumentary

I heard a quote from somewhere, forget where… “The baby boomer generation will be known more for what they do in their 60s than what they did in the 60s.”

Zubin, the visionary behind The Walk, brings together a group of innovators to discuss creating transformative experiences through cutting edge technologies.

Shiftshaping implies:

(1) Sharing our individual experience, motivations, wisdom & vision
(2) Consolidating individual wisdoms towards collective actions
(3) Minds open to the evolution of ideas/approaches/methods
(4) A willingness to share resources
(5) A strong commitment to collaboration

Licensed under:
CC Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0

*Extended discussions will be put up online over the next couple weeks.
* thanks to Gabriel Shalom for discussions around Immediated Autodocumentary