The Screenless Office - Jeu de Paume Proposal
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Intro / Description
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The Screenless Office is an artistic operating system for working with media, without a pixel-based display. The office presents a radically alternative form of everyday human interaction with media. It is constructed using free/libre/open hard- and software components, especially for print, databases, web-scraping and tangible interaction. Currently, it exists as a working prototype with software "bureaus" which allow a user to read and navigate news, web sites and social media entirely with the use of various printers for output and a barcode scanner for input. While our existing software allows for interesting new ways of consuming media, we propose to expand the system to make it capable of publishing content and thereby, enabling a provocative possibility for active participation in contemporary social life.
By calling this creation an "Artistic Operating System", we assert that it should be unique and personal, even peculiar in its way of representing and interfacing with the rest of the media world. In this sense, it is freed from the implicit social requirement that new technological projects conform to standard principles of progress, universality and efficiency. There's no need to claim to be the "Next Big Thing" or to even suggest that anyone, other than the creators of this device, should use it. However, its existence serves as a polemic for a more diverse, inclusive and participatory interface culture where new technological systems might be judged for their poetic qualities instead of marketability.
Removing the screen is a radical gesture denying conformity to the dominating forces of contemporary interface culture. By getting rid of the display, we force digital text and images back into the old conventions of print culture. While this might have a superficial nostalgic appeal, more importantly, it puts us into the role of acting like amateur media archeologists, investigating the history of modern visual, literary and bureaucratic systems both technical and social. At the same time, by taking newer forms of digital media and packing it into the old container of print, we open up a new experimental field of analog-digital hybrid forms. Our goal is to open up novel ways of living in the digital world which might be more informal, expressive and embodied.
Topic, Concept & Goals (no more than 1p (max 2 pages)
Current interface culture is dominated by a few large corporatate players: google/Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft. For many of us who spend countless hours working, socializing and amusing ourselves while using technical media, these powerful players have a huge influence on our experience of everyday life. Our perception of the world around us and how we see ourselves in, it is mediated by the decisions of a few privileged managers, programmers and designers, mostly male and white on the west coast of the United States. To suggest any other way of living in a networked society is to risk being percieved as blasphemous, uncool, out-of-touch, escapist or simply absurd. These interfaces have become so embedded in our conception of reality that we now have a crisis of the imagination, where it is difficult to even think of anything different.
Human Interface Guidlines (HIG), Material Design, User Interface Standards: terms for these standardized official forms of screen-based presentation, are all based on the old modernist idea that it is possible and indeed commendable to try to design in a way that is universal. While this principle has roots in a socialist idea of creating products for everyone, it is easily coopted by large companies that want to centralize control and leverage monopoly power. We can admit that some of these systems are visually quite attractive and indeed helpful in dealing with complexity, but we feel it is time to make a plea for a diversity of perspectives and situations. We beleive that it is imperitive to try to create interfaces that might reflect various aspects of social identity and personality: gender, sexuality, race, class, subcultures. We want to work towards an interface culture for diverse, utterly unique people who all have correspondingly various needs and desires such that they might some day have interfaces that reflect their situation. We cannot build all of these systems but we hope to make a case that maybe they should exist.
"...the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." - Herb Simon, 1971
Another aspect of contemporary screen-based culture is the constant psychic conflict often referred to as the "Attention Economy". In just trying to watch one youtube video, a typical user is confronted with dozens of other appeals to focus somewhere else: comments, ratings, related videos, advertisements, video responses, etc. Because screen-based interaction is premised on temporal immediacy, we are, as users forced into a state of hyper-attention where we must constantly fight against the, largely commercial, attempts to make us look at something else. When we remove the screen (and by necessity, simplify the interface) we introduce a new form of temporality, where the speed of interaction might more accurately reflect our ability to percieve and understand information.
And by slowing down the interaction, without removing our access to information, we return a bit of control to the user who is now free to integrate these printed artifacts into her physical surroundings. Instead of contorting our bodies and focussing exclusively on a square of glass, we bring the digital into a tangible world where we are free to move around, rearrange our desk and incorporate them in our embodied social life. Instead of contorting our homes and offices with complex, error-prone IT systems as proposed by the "Internet of Things" (IoT), we create "things of the internet", dumb objects which we can simply toss into the recycling bin when they are no longer relevant.
form and the implementation (1 page)
The Screenless Office, exists as a working prototype right now and has several modular software "bureaus" which allow a user to consume and navigate news, email and social-media with output printed on a standard office printer or small reciept printer. We propose to expand the system to incorporate a document camera which will allow us a wide range of input and make the system more capable of acting as platform for publishing as well as consuming media. Once our screenless "Publications Office" is functional, we will use it to maintain a web site and social media presence to document the project and discuss it on the internet.
Our software is programmed based on the software engineering design pattern known as a "Microservices Architecture". In such a system, software is broken up into smaller, more or less independent components which can then communicate with each other requesting data or the performance of particular actions. In our case, the components are referred to as "Bureaus" and are modeled after the typical organizational structure of a large corporation of the 20th century. There is a Management bureau in charge of starting, stopping and monitoring all other bureaus. Inhuman Resources keeps a record of all services and commands provided by each of the other bureaus. The Public Relations Department is in charge of social media. The Publications Office takes care of web browsing and eventually creating web pages. The Photography Dept. makes images at the request of other bureaus, etc. Many more bureaus are planned to provide everything from music and radio to archival search and retrieval services.
We propose to document this work through a kind of internet-based performance. First, we will create a web site which will be entirely produced and maintained using the Screenless Office. This site will contain an artistic polemic for a new kind of interface culture, documentation about the general system as well as information about of each of the component bureaus. We will also use the software of the office to begin a kind of campaign in social media attempting to draw attention and start debate around the themes that we are investigating.
All software will be published under free software compatible license and available for free download. It is programmed in such a way as to encourage extension and variation for other artistic interfaces. It is modular and simple enough that programmers with limited experience should be able to quickly start experimenting. As there are no graphics requirements, it is easy to run on cheap commodity hardware like 15 year old PCs or Raspberry-Pi and similar single-board computers. High quality print output is possible using just about any old laser printer and surplus reciept printers commonly found at flea markets.
Participants:
Brendan Howell - Artist, engineer, Verw. Prof. at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig
Mikhail Pogorzhelskiy - Interaction / Industrial Designer, Design Researcher at Humboldt University, Berlin
Manuel Kretzer ????
Graphic Design - Dan??? OSP? Femke?
Institutional Partners:
Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Braunschweig - Dept. Vis Communication, Industrial Design
Humboldt Univ. ???
Constant VZW Brussels???
Hartware Medien Kunst Verein, Dortmund
Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Basel
Proposed Presentation:
Jeu de Paume - Online exhibition and social media performance
Transmediale Berlin - festival presentation
Piksel, Bergen Norway - Festival presentation
Node Festival Frankfurt
OSP Summer School, Brussels - Workshop
Autocenter/HMKW Summerschool - Workshop
Plan of Operations
before 06.2016 - Develop Working Prototype and Extensible Software Architecture (done)
06 - 09.2016 - Build prototype document camera, email and social media software modules
10 - 12.2016 - Build finished Camera and Publishing software system.
01 - 02.2016 - Debugging, Composing Content, Graphic Design Rework
03.2016 - Public presentation / performance. Official release of software.
Budget (provisional)
Artistic fee: 3000
Construction Materials: 1000€
Computer, Printers & Electronics: 1000€
Prototype design: 500€
Printing: 500€
Translation: 500€
web hosting: 50€
travel: 450€
TOTAL -------- 7000 €