The Emergence of the Digital Humanities

We Have a Cover

Thanks to the brilliant artwork of Kelly Goeller (http://kellotron.com ) and the designer at the press, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities now has a cover design! As I posted earlier, for me nothing captures the perceived eversion of the digital into the physical better than this iconic piece, Pixel Pour, and especially since its own history and construction as a work of street art reminds us of the ineluctable materialities of both digital and physical in the world around us.

AR-token Mixed-Reality Games

I’ve posted elsewhere and written in the book about Skylanders and Disney Infinity as models of mixed reality. Like everyone else, when I first saw Skylanders I made the connection to Pokémon, and now it’s confirmed that Nintendo will indeed release a game for Wii U with collectible NFC-chipped figurines, Pokémon Rumble (“Scramble” in Japan). The trend extends to mobile platforms as well, as I was reminded by Stéphane Vial, who referred in a recent talk and slideshow to the charming AR games for tablets and phones by Les éditions volumiques. These treat the handheld devices as data-enlivened gameboards of one kind or another and chip-enabled toys as tokens, pawns, action figurines, and in one case, a spinning top.

What all these smart-token games have in common is conceptual: they evert the relationship between device and gameworld. Rather than serving as portals to an immersive cyber(game)space, devices are openly treated as augmented or mixed reality things. Digital data and connections turn physical tokens and figurines, along with the tablets and phones with which they interact, into mixed-reality objects for play.

Field Trips to Local Fab Labs

Last week I crossed the heavily designed campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, where my hosts from the Humanities department had arranged for me to drop in to see the fabrication and rapid-prototyping lab, the Idea Shop at the University Technology Park. Someone was demonstrating finely machined parts in various materials, but mostly plastic, wheels within bearings, for example, hot off the 3D printer. At the table where he stood a box full of colorful 3D-printed prototypes or experimental objects (it was hard to tell the difference just by looking) were spread out like interesting toys.

Most had been built up out of melted polymers squirted onto a base, extruded layer by layer according to the specifications of computer assisted design (CAD) files converted to STL (stereolithography) files converted into physical objects.

What exactly, again, was my reason for asking to take this tour, one of my hosts politely asked? Why was I so interested in visiting this kind of machine shop and design lab, where “technology transfers” and start-up companies shared space with students, interns, and faculty members (some of whom were creating those start-ups)? Good question.

This week I visited Northwestern University’s Segal Design Institute, where I was met by Michael Beltran, Mechanical Engineering’s CAD/CAM/CAE teaching lab instructor and lecturer. He explained a number of different 3D printers and fabricators of various kinds, and we watched one working as it started (slowly) to build up a part. But out in the middle of the room there was yet another big table of displayed tests and prototype bits, very similar to the table I had seen at IIT.

It reminded me of archaeology labs in college, with pottery shards laid out to be labeled, or art studios with dust on the floor and bits of failed sculptures lying around—a different kind of shop, maybe, one closer to the heart of humanities practices than it might first appear to be.

Pixel Pour, the New Aesthetic, the Eversion

James Bridle has been associated with the so-called New Aesthetic, which is based on noticing signs of “something coming into being,” as artists and designers give “the real world the grain of the virtual.” These two worlds, Bridle recognizes, were once seen as separate but are now “eliding” everywhere you look, representing an “irruption of the digital into the physical world.” For me, the New Aesthetic’s irruptions—and the New Aesthetic itself—are signs of the wider eversion.

One vivid example of street art Bridle has included in his slideshow presentations is a piece that he presents as anonymous but which is actually Pixel Pour by Kelly Goeller (http://kellotron.com), made by converting a mundane pipe on a New York street into a spout from which pixelated blue water with white foam appeared to be pouring.

Goeller tells me that it was created in mid April 2008 on a sidewalk on 9th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues—and was quietly removed within a few days. (She created a second version, Pixel Pour 2.0, in SoHo, on Mercer Street between Howard and Grand.) She made the “pixels” (or “voxels,” really, since they’re 3D, though the painted surfaces look 2D from a distance) from MDF particleboard squares, then painted them with acrylic and pieced them together with wood glue. The illusion of a 2D pixelated irruption of the digital from the 3D black spigot in the physical world was of course created using mundane physical materials, with the artist picturing in an imaginative overlay the “digital” water.

The 2008 work resonated widely. Besides Bridle’s (anonymous) use of it to illustrate the New Aesthetic, media studies specialist Julian Bleeker photographed it in three stages—when it was new, after it was tagged with graffiti, and the empty sidewalk and spigot after the work was removed—and his Flickr set was noticed with a positive comment (“Dang”) by science-fiction author Bruce Sterling. Last month, a promotion for the animated feature film Wreck-It Ralph turned a London street, Brick Lane, into a display of constructed 3D “8-bit” objects, including a knock-off (and unattributed) version of Goeller’s Pixel Pour.

The effectiveness of the original work depended on the play between 2D and 3D, pixelated and “normal,” objects from a digital dimension out in the physical world. It worked so well because, as spontaneously installed (and uninstalled) street art, it figured, like a particleboard metaphor, the feeling of encountering sudden unexpected irruptions of the digital. For me, Pixel Pour has become an icon of the eversion.

Microsoft’s IllumiRoom as AR gaming?

Microsoft just showed off at CES its proof-of-concept technology, IllumiRoom, which uses Kinect and a projector system to map the game world onto the living room outside the boundaries of the TV screen. As the company puts it, the idea is to “blur the lines between on-screen content and the environment we live in allowing us to combine our virtual and physical worlds.”

This continues the trajectory started with the Wii (2006) and then the Kinect (2010) towards mixed-reality console gaming, as we argued in Codename Revolution. As best I can gather from the video and news coverage, its effects appear similar to the Wii U’s (in which the Wii U GamePad acts as a viewer, allowing you to turn and see “into” a wraparound game world).

A report from CES on The Verge says that IllumiRoom “combines the virtual and physical worlds of a TV and living room for true augmented reality.” Maybe so. But it’s a little hard to tell from the teasers just how far the physical environment will play a collaborative role in the AR experience, and how far the room will just serve as a wraparound projection surface. (Maybe this was clearer at CES.) A hint in one video (embedded below) of an arguably “true” AR feature makes what looks like shockwaves ripple across the objects in your room, bookshelves, etc. This is the kind of thing Kinect should be able to do, with its cameras and sensors: capture and include physical objects in the mix. I’m curious to see how far it does so, and how far it’s an attempt at a home-console version of what we used to experience projected around us on the smooth walls of an immersive CAVE. Meanwhile, it’s interesting that the marketing is using that language to claim the system “combines the virtual and physical worlds.”

AR book, Between Page and Screen

At the Modern Language Association conference in Boston a week ago I enjoyed getting to handle Amaranth Borsuk’s terrific AR book, Between Page and Screen at the Avenues of Access electronic literature exhibit.

The pages of the artist’s book contains machine-readable glyphs, looking something like simplified QR codes, which, when viewed with a webcam while at the book’s website produce an augmented-reality experience: text pos up off the page in varying 3D patterns, animates, disperses, little digital concrete poems (the term seems ironic in this case) that turn out to be, as the book’s website says, “a series of letters written by two lovers,” which “do not exist on either page or screen, but in the augmented space between them opened up by the reader.”

It works really well, though you have to cooperate with the camera a bit to get the viewing angle right, and it’s Flash based, so no iOS devices. I couldn’t help imagining being able to view the book, open on the table, through my phone—like playing AR games on my Nintendo 3DS—rather than having to point it at a laptop.

Hello World

This blog is dedicated to materials related to the book I’m completing, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, forthcoming from Routledge in late summer, 2013. The book connects what William Gibson has called the eversion of cyberspace, the network’s turning itself inside out and leaking out into the world, with the rise of the digital humanities (DH). So augmented reality, mobile computing, casual and mobile and AR video games, the Internet of Things, the New Aesthetic, social software platforms, fabrication and 3D printing, the GPS and GIS, and hybrid publishing experiments are all relevant subjects, examples of the digital being combined with the physical, which is I think also the context for understanding the new-model DH that emerged around 2004-2007.