Plone as Social Software and Ambient Art

From LaurasWiki

caelorsi caolooloe Laura Trippi
www.netvironments.org
Slides are posted at plone.org: PresentationMaterials (http://plone.org/events/regional/nola05/wiki/PresentationMaterials)

Table of contents
1 Overview
2 Context: Network Society
3 What is "Plone"?
4 Trajectory of Creative Practice
5 Plone as Social Process
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Overview

  • Consider Plone within a wider social and cultural context
  • Frame and raise questions about
    • Plone's larger social function and potential
    • Effects of formal and procedural elements
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Context: Network Society

  • Accelerating pace of change
    • Technological drivers : Moore's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wgsimonmooreslaw001.jpg)
  • Unintended consequences (world system)
    • Mounting complexity
    • [The Planet Under Pressure (BBC) (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/04/sci_nat_enl_1096888217/html/1.stm)
    • Narrowing sense of “now” Long Now Diagram (http://www.longnow.org/about/longnowdiagram.htm)
    • Loss of sense of place and context
    • Approaching a threshold
  • Culture as a complex system
  • OSS & "social software"
    • Tools and toolsets designed by users
    • Iterative design and development processes
    • Foster and support human-centered innovation at the intersection of technology and culture
  • What doesn't get digitized gets left out?
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What is "Plone"?

  • Constellation/configuration of:
    • Software: Multiple layers of code
    • Network of developers
    • Diverse, interconnected communities of users
    • Knowledge, practices, and protocols produced by them
  • A "connective" social and cultural network
    • Neither individualistic nor "collective" in the traditional sense
    • Loosely interconnected
    • Fosters communication and tactical integration across the network
    • Fosters emergence : rapid, adaptive ("intelligent") change
  • Plone as a complex, evolving creative work
"Every element of the work can be compared to a thread joining human beings. The work as a whole is a set of these threads, that creates a complex, differentiated, social interaction, between the persons who are in contact with it."
—Mikhail Bakhtin
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Trajectory of Creative Practice

  • From modernism to postmodernmism
    • Gradual dissolution of art objects into dynamic social space
    • "Dematerialization" of art => re-materialization of the social field
  • From Russian avant garde through "institutional critique" to "project or social work"
    • El Lissitzky: Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect (1890-1941)
      • Architechture and the Demonstration Space (http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/digitized_collections/lissitzky/8_architecture/index.html)
      • Room for Constructivist Art (Dresden, 1926) and Abstract Cabinet (Hanover, 1927-1928, #72)
        • Designed to encourage viewer participation
        • Sliding panels, reveal or hide pictures, alter lighting, and pop up documents in a rotating case
    • Mondrian: Dutch abstract painter (De Stijl art movement) (1872-1944)
      • Abstract painting as a training ground
      • Training perceptual apparatus
    • Mondrain's notion of "dynamic equilibrium" (http://www.google.com/search?q=mondrian&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official)
      • Diverse elements held together by creative tension and interplay
      • Componentized at different scales
      • Creating the cognitive conditions of possibility for truly socialist -- bottom-up -- society
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Plone as Social Process

  • Parallels with work of El Lissitzky and Mondrian
    • Formal
      • Abstract, componentized, plastic space
      • Traversable across scales
    • Social
      • Turning "consumers" into participants
      • Elements held together in dynamic tension/equilibrium
      • Fostering communication across
        • Layers of code and content
        • Domains of design, development, content creation and management
      • Fostering fluid movement among roles
  • Plone as "Training ground": perceptual and social
    • Dynamics of bottom-up, object-oriented systems
    • Creating conditions of possibility for new, non-coercive forms of social organization
    • Coders become content producers and content producers become coders
  • Urgent need for such authoring tools in network society
    • Institutions not keeping pace with change
    • Innovation coming from local users, bottom-up
    • Holding open the creative space between coding and cultural production
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