Monday, February 14, 2011

[Yasmin_discussions] Next Step Publishing: some considerations and questions

dear Yasminers,

artist Lisa J. Murphy performed this publishing experiment

http://tactilemindbook.com/

from the website:
"A BOOK OF NUDE PHOTOGRAPHS FOR THE BLIND / VISION IMPAIRED"

and

"tactile mind is a handmade thermoform book consisting of 17, 3-D tactile
photographs on white thermoform plastic pages with the visual image and
descriptive Braille accompaniment."

This simple, yet wonderful, experiment is insightful for more than one
reason and it raises interesting questions.

the Tactile Mind book shifts domains, as vision switches to tactility, and
it suggests wonderful areas for exploration that move across senses.

digital technologies actually make these explorations accessible and also
enable entirely new ones.

information can be published into clothing garments such as in
Struckmaschine

http://www.flickr.com/photos/klapauzius/1363347438/

or as in the News Knitter

http://casualdata.com/newsknitter/

or as in Gelsomina, the Voice Knitting Machine

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2007/09/gelsomina-by-ma.php

These are very interesting projects that merge disciplines and techniques
and, at the same time, manage to raise some interesting questions about
economic sustainability, innovation in production, the creation of business
and operative models, but also on the concepts of the representation of
information, on the evolution of display surfaces and on the possibility to
create means of fruition that create engaging, multi-sensorial, narratives
as well as providing functionality, usability, accessibility and
manageability.

But researches go even further in ways that are sometimes wonderfully
playful. As for example in the project "Animal Superpowers"

http://chriswoebken.com/animalsuperpowers.html

in which artist and researcher Chris Woebken manages to publish entire
senses onto the bodies of children and adults.

These are only a few of the possible scenarios, which are currently
expanding towards architecture and towards multiple other areas of our
lives.

What senses are stimulated in the project "The Voices of Oakland"

http://www.augmentedenvironments.org/lab/research/design/voicesofoakland/

created at Georgia Tech, in which information is published directly onto
graves and cemetery architectures? It is not only vision and hearing, but
also other new senses in which memory, space and information merge with
imaginaries, visions and poetics.

And the people at Common Sense

http://www.communitysensing.org/index.php

are merging social interactions and technologies to create entirely new
networked sens(orialiti)es and publishing directly to channels that build
new forms of human awareness.

These are all emergent forms of publication: books that are open-ended and
generative, and that are based on the possibility to interconnect and
disseminate.

As Simone Arcagni and Massimo Canevacci were suggesting, these possibilities
completely change our experience of the world. And as Roger Malina was
suggesting, they also bring forth entirely new issues concerning
intellectual property, economic sustainability, privacy, freedoms.

New models (economic, expressive, sensorial) will probably emerge at the
intersection of disciplines and practices. The progressive externalization
of our capabilities to devices and services and the evolution of ethics and
of the possible forms of awareness suggest possible directions.

I was wondering how our discussants (and all Yasminers) view these
evolutions: new business models? new economies? new collaborative practices
creating new ethics and new forms of exchange? new types of services
creating information and added value in unexpected places? new environments
sitting across geographies, data and bodies creating dynamics that are at
the same time social, cultural, economic, emotional?

best,
Salvatore
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