Blog posting written by Sharon Lin Tay, Map Open Space curator and film/video/new media theorist at Middlesex University, England

A weekend in sunny Rome saw me playing the tourist at the Colloseum. Looking down at the arena from my vantage point several floors up in the seating area, I tried to imagine the gladiatorial spectacles that would have taken place there. I tried recalling all the bits of Roman history that I had studied at college in order to make sense of the ancient ruins I see before me.

Much of the original arena is gone, but I was able to see the outlines of what would have been the subterranean floors where convicted criminals, prisoners of war, and assorted wild animals were kept. The flat, horizontal structural outline of the subterrenean levels was fascinating and pleasurable to look at, and I had a good few minutes of picturing Russell Crowe on an imaginary arena fighting the lions.

I suppose it's a similar thing when we think about maps and remote sensing. Unlike other vertical representations of space and landscape, satellite images, aerial photographs, and Google Earth omit the human perspective. In a catalogue article on an exhibition called Beyond the Picturesque, John MacArthur makes an interesting observation about aerial photography:

"We can see everything, but from exactly where, at what altitude, and at what inclination is impossible to determine from the image. It is this elision of the viewpoint that makes the massive descriptive power of the aerial photograph into a pretext for reverie and imagined passage on the ground."

The omniscience of such a particular viewing position, the imaginative possibilities, and sense of control it provides gives much pleasure to viewers of maps, aerial photographs, and Google Earth. Tracing one's fingers along a route on a map or aerial photograph gives a tremendous sense of imagined mobility and power.

Yet, the flipside is also true: such a vantage point is unable to decipher the material relations on ground level. That, precisely, is Ursula Biemann's criticism of digital imaging in many of her video essays.

Coming back to my reverie staring at the Roman Colosseum's arena, fantasizing about gladiators fights and other gory spectacles didn't do that much more to further my knowledge of Roman history either.

Dale Hudson is an assistant professor at Texas State University–San Marcos and co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of Map Open Space exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

Try to remember a time when it wasn’t possible to book your own flights or make your own hotel reservation online, when it wasn’t possible to pay your credit-card bills and your manage bank account with a few key stokes?  It’s like trying to remember life before mobile phones.  How did people manage?  Or, phrased differently, who performed labor before everything became self-service?

It seems that almost any service can be rendered online.  Do it yourself — no bother of scheduling one’s time around someone else’s office hours, no bother of taking the subway to some remote part of town or a train out to the suburbs.  Just open a web browser, upload personal data, and click a mouse.  DIY service is now a marker of convenience.

This convenience, of course, is another form of outsourcing.  As consumers, we work for transnational corporations.  Sometimes we’re paid in discounted prices or special offers; other times, we’re not.  When we play online, we’re often also working.  At the very least, we’re performing the labor of data input.  Tap the keys for ‘hot or not’, ‘like’, ‘become a fan’, ‘following’, ‘followed’—it’s all information in a larger database, whether for marketing or for surveillance.

So how do we begin to talk about work and leisure, labor and play, mediated through information technologies and across distributed networks?

For anyone in New York, check out The Internet as Playground and Factory, which begins today at the Eugene Lang College of the New School.  Organized by Trebor Scholz, the conference proposes to interrogate ‘dramatic shifts restructuring leisure, consumption, and production since the mid-century’.  The conference explores all aspects of the increasingly complex nexus of digitized labor, consumerism, and sociality in forms as diverse as paid bloggers, gold farming, and image-tagging games. 

‘Every aspect of life drives the digital economy: sexual desire, boredom, friendship — and all becomes fodder for speculative profit,’ writes Scholz in his introduction to the conference; ‘social participation is the oil of the digital economy.’ 

From our social relations to our personal identity, we digitize our labor and identities—unwittingly, obediently, at times defiantly.  We interface almost seamlessly with a matrix of databases, where our digital selves can be tagged and sorted, ranked and rated, traded but seldom deleted, according to algorithms that most of us can’t begin to hack.  We upload our boredom, bookmark our sexual desires, and register our addictions; and somewhere on the planet a corporation downloads our boredom in yen, distributes our desires in euros, or copyrights our additions in dollars.

This conference asks us to consider ways that we might have grown increasingly acculturated to performing digital labor even in our recreation.  The conference also asks us to consider ways that art and activism can reroute the locked-down technologies of transnational corporations and distribute digital labor according to more ethical terms, such as swarming or crowdsourcing.

For anyone not able to be in New York this week, check out the video interviews on vimeo, linked to the conference home page.  Hear what established and emerging thinkers — Jonathan Brucker-Cohen, Brittany Chozinski, Patricia Clough, Ursula Endlicher, Alexander Galloway, Orit Halpern, Dominic Pettmann, Hector Postigo, Andrew Ross, Stephanie Rothenberg, Saskia Sassan, Tiziana Terranova, and Ken Wark — have to say about the outsourcing of labor as play, as well as democratic and autocratic potentials for networked media environments and new media ecologies.  Captured by Assai Ghawami’s handheld digital camera, you’ll also get to see their expressions and gestures as they speak, as well as the backs of some of their heads and the bathroom sinks where they wash their hands!  Who said that the academic work can’t be playful?

What do you have to say about your participation in these digital spaces?

Blog written by Sharon Lin Tay, film/video/digital theorist and curator, Middlesex University

The Borders bookshop near where I live has a little section dedicated to local history. Trying to while away 15 minutes while waiting for someone to show up this weekend, I browsed through Gavin Smith's Islington in Old Photographs.

It is interesting to see photographs of what your neighbourhood looked like in the 19th century. In particular, I was particularly struck by pictures of the Archway Bridge.

The Archway Bridge sits above the Archway Road (duh!) between the Highgate and Archway tube (subway) stations. It's not a particularly salubrious stretch of road; in fact, I look at it as a stretch of cement to be endured to get from one place to another.

It doesn't help that Londoners regularly refer to it as The Suicide Bridge.

Yet, in that book of old black and white photographs, the Suicide Bridge looks rather more dignified.

I learnt that it was once a much narrower gateway, and one photograph depicts it with dense foliage on either side. At some point, it was extended to widen the road, I suppose, to allow more traffic to pass through. Voila, The Suicide Bridge as we know it today.

Those photographs let me see the Suicide Bridge with fresh eyes. It wasn't always so sad looking and ladened with such grim connotations. Landmarks and geographical spaces have cultural and historical memories.

The present is composited with layers of the past, alongside with the social and the political. Looking at old photographs of your intensely built up neighbourhood that was once traversed by horse and carriage, and which once boasted swathes of farm land, makes one acknowledge the temporal dimension of space.

Blog written by Dale Hudson is an assistant professor at Texas State University–San Marcos. His work on global cinemas and new media appears in Afterimage, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Screen, and Studies in Documentary Film. He has been a co-curator of new media art for FLEFF since 2006.

The more waiting lounges that broadcast the CNN Airport Network, the less news seems to travels, particularly on September 11th. The static of U.S. patriotic affirmations can effectively generate a ‘media blackout’ on the day’s events.

Despite the cable network’s statistical claims in its press kit, I did not feel better informed about what was happening in the world, nor did I feel that its special news broadcast enhanced the airport environment. As CNN blasted on the LCD flat-panel display screens that surrounded me, I quickly realized it was not a day to get stuck in an airport without access to a 3G network.

I was waiting in the baggage claim area at Newark’s Liberty Airport for a phone call from my future mother-in-law, who’d graciously come to get me after my future father-in-law had been delayed in Manhattan traffic. As I waited, I thought that I’d check email. My network access was impaired, but I did receive am email message about FLEFF 2010.

If FLEFF was investigating and instigating open spaces this year, then U.S. airports, it seemed, can be fairly closed spaces. Not simply for visitors whose eyeballs and fingerprints must scanned and converted into digital code for easy sorting and labeling, but also for documented residents and visitors with 3G-network-enabled handheld devices. Sometimes, communications are detained.

The service on my 3G network was spotty. Reminders of safety/security regulations bellowed from the airport’s PA system, interfering with my phone’s reception, reducing the number of reception bars. Still, no voice service.

The PA system, however, did not overpower the volume of CNN on the ubiquitous LCD screens. Squeezed between reports of ceremonies and remembrances, CNN’s efforts to clarify its earlier reports of shots fired on the Potomac echoed throughout the physical space of the baggage claim area.

I waited patiently. No voice service inside the airport, but sporadic SMS and even some data services. The ‘news feeds’ on FB flashed onto my handheld screen, almost keeping pace with CNN on the LCD screens.

I read about Nick George  on the FB news feed. The story was pushed less aggressively to the public than the CNN Airport Network, circulating virally in news feeds and blogs. Apparently, the Pomona College student had been detained for 45 minutes in the Philadelphia airport when TSA officers discovered that he was carrying Arabic-English flashcards, including ones for the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘explosion’, in his backpack.

Unreported news — or some variation of astroturfing

My FB friends are well informed and repost lots of important reports, but what about other news? I was in a closed space, but people generally have access to more than CNN and FB.

Do corporate and user-generated content really did define the contours of digitally mediated information today?

What’s open, what’s closed? How do we even know the difference?

Still, no voice service.

I have heard that cable news networks prompt people to pray for technological advances that would allow airport LCD screens to function like Orwell’s telescreens . The screens’ capacity for surveillance alongside misinformation would, at least, offer an illusion of agency, of thinking differently—thinking openly.

For others, UGC is unreliable — too open, too unverified, too ‘anything goes’. CNN itself has been accused of replacing investigative journalism with web trolling on social networking sites, bulletin boards, and blogs. Not the use of FB and Twitter associated with its coverage of the protests against Ahmadinejad during the last Iranian presidential election, but its news in general.

Sites that host UGC can also be deceiving. They can be closed despite appearances of being open. They can be controlled and controlling.

Who owns the information? Who controls access to it?

The New York Times reported that FB users asked who owned the information that they upload with every quiz. CNN  itself blogged on AT&T’s blocking portions of the image-based bulletin board 4chan.

How people navigate information? Who can design a map through the information? What other options exist?

In our ‘ubuntu.kuqala’  exhibition for FLEFF 2008, Sharon Lin Tay and I learned ways that Ismail Farouk and Babak Fakhamzadeh hacked GoogleMaps to map the pluralities of the histories of Soweto in their web application mashup, Soweto Uprisings . com

Last year, the ‘sticky-content’ exhibit included a preview of the collaborative, led by Hart Cohen, Peter Dallow and Sid Newton, that used GoogleMaps fly-through function to propose an alternative interface for access to the database of archival materials relevant to the Arrernte (Aranda) community.

As I navigate through video, audio, and text streams of information from corporate, user-generated, and even the occasional state sources, I wonder what maps other have devised or discovered.

From Sharon Lin Tay, online digital arts curator for FLEFF 2010 and professor at Middlesex University, London, England

As I began writing this blog, I am hoping that I won't die from the three large painful blotches on my legs that show no sign of subsiding--despite overdosing on antihistamine.

I got them from some nasty bug while digging in my friend Carol's allotment in the English countryside over the weekend.

I'm cultivating my green fingers,  and  volunteering as farm labourer in the late summer when the fruit and vegetables are ripe for harvest is a very good way to go about it.

There are more tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, and raspberries than Carol knows what to do with. I have carted home enough vegetables to last a week.

Most readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with the mad and obsessive way in which the English garden and the allotment function as a visual and soil testament to the inalienable right to garden.

The community garden is a space of congeniality and collectivity. There are unwritten rules and codes about respecting (and not meddling with) your neighbor's plot.

It used to be that the allotment provided much of the food for poor families in the 19th and early 20th century. But as development increased, the amount of land provided for allotments progressively declined.

However, allotmenteering is seeing a resurgence of interest in these uncertain times where questions of food security and environmental sustainability abound.

The last time I checked,  allotmenteering has become so fashionable that you'll have to wait 12 years for a plot in and around London.