Shakespeare and the Network Revolution
p2pnet news view P2P:- One of the more interesting shifts in the technology world over the last quarter century has been the way that cultural organisations have gone from being the late adopters, inheriting office-oriented computer systems from business and making do with them, to being those leading the digital revolution in many areas.
When I worked with the Community Computing Network in the late 80s it was hard work persuading charities and voluntary organisations that having a computer to handle their member databases and print letters was worthwhile.
But now that there really is a computer on every desk and word processing, spreadsheets and databases are standard, arts organisations seem to be far more willing to engage and experiment with the latest tools, especially online.
Many are making expert use of social media, moving from MySpace and Bebo to Facebook to follow the audiences, but also finding out how Twitter and other services can be used to help them engage and interact with people who may be interested in their art.
The much-loved Pilot Theatre brought in virtual worlds expert Caron Lyon to built them a stage set in Second Life. The team at Hoi Polloi used video diaries, Facebook and Twitter to establish an online following that has supported them as they tour from their Cambridge base as far afield as Australia, offering new audiences a chance to discover their work in all its strangeness while also ensuring that fans – including me – know what they are up to while they are away.
When it comes crossover organisations like Hide&Seek, who recently ran a social gaming festival in London, it is impossible to separate the art from the technology, and their work offers a real inspiration to those who wonder what the arts will look like in a digitised world.
This cross-fertilisation is important in several ways. It obviously makes sense for those committed to experiment and exploration in the arts to embrace new technologies as a way of exploring the creative potential of a new domain of human activity, just as painters explored the radical new technology of oils for for many decades, or sculptors turned from marble and limestone to work with welded iron or novel materials like frozen blood.
But there is something else going on, something deeper and potentially more important, because in working through the creative potential of new technologies artists of all types are helping us to find new ways to think about these tools and working out how to integrate them into our wider cultural and commercial practice.
They are helping us to explore the latest chapter in the ongoing conversation between human psychology and the capabilities of modern technology, something which will matter more and more as the network becomes pervasive and digital devices penetrate every area of our lives.
The point was made clear to me at Shift Happens, a conference on the ways arts organisations are using new technologies that took place this week at York Theatre Royal.
Over a day and a half the audience, mostly made up of practitioners, was treated to a fascinating selection of arts-based technology, or technology-based arts, from the interactive animations of the always-engaging Sancho Plan through calls to ensure that tech-based arts are environmentally sustainable from Envirodigital and a demonstration of how to subtitle your online video from Internet Subtitling.
It quickly became clear that the network revolution is already happening in the arts even if its success on the political stage is sometimes sadly limited, as we saw this week in Iran.
One problem in talking about this is that relatively few people understand the underlying technology sufficiently well to be comfortable with it. We have few stories that talk about technology and few workable metaphors or analogies that let us convey complex technological issues in ways that people really grasp.
I wonder, however, if we can take some old stories and use them to explore the new world. Take The Tempest, for example, Shakespeare’s last play and one of his finest. Set on a remote island where Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, lives with his daughter Miranda and a strange creature called Caliban, the Tempest explores issues of redemption and forgiveness and the use and abuse of power.
Prospero rules his island thanks the the spells in the books he has studied in his exile, commanding the spirit Ariel to torment and manipulate his former enemies, who have been shipwrecked on the island by a tempest created at Prospero’s command.
A modern reading this tale would see Ariel as a representative of the digital realm, created from bits but able to have a real effect on the physical world. We discover during the play that Ariel was locked into a forked tree until released by Prospero, a good analogy for the effort needed to liberate the power of the digital revolution, represented by Prospero’s books of spells.
We can take this further. The witch’s child Caliban believes himself the true inheritor of the island as his mother was banished there before Prospero arrived and fails to realise that Prospero’s books have given him power over the unseen world that far outstrip Caliban’s physical prowess, just as the rulers of analogue distribution fear the world we have conjured from our code.
And when Caliban, wandering the island with shipwrecked sailors Trinculo and Stephano, hears an invisible Ariel playing on a pipe he tells them:
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Today the thousand twangling instruments that Ariel and his sprites conjure up are replaced by millions of tweets, status updates, but they still fill the world with sweet sounds, and offer us a vision of a digital world that can be as rich and full of delight as we choose to make it. It’s reassuring to see that some of our best artists are working hard to make that happen.
Bill Thompson – andfinally.com
[Thompson is a UK-based writer and broadcaster. He has a weekly column on the BBC WebWise site, and contributes both on and off-line to The Guardian, The Register and The New Statesman, among others. His "inappropriately-titled 'billblog' "appears weekly on BBC News Online in the technology news section.]
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July 7th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
I presume that you made sure to get the permission of the woman in the background of that photo before putting it up on the web?
July 7th, 2009 at 9:24 pm
(Uh-boy!)
X (
July 7th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
“(Uh-boy!)
X (”
What’s wrong?
I’ve pointed out in the past, the impracticality of securing the permission of each and every person who might appear in the background of a photo and you told me in no uncertain terms that the difficulty of doing so was no excuse. You stated that it’s not only wrong, but illegal to take anyone’s photo without permission – period. Now Jon has a perfectly innocent looking photo of Bill Thompson, and he’s clearly the focus of the photo, however a woman also appears in the background of the photo. Was she asked for permission before her photo was taken? Does Mr. Thompson know her well enough to be absolutely sure that she wouldn’t object to having her photo on the net? Even if Mr. Thompson or the photographer secured her permission before or after the photo was taken, was such permission presented to P2PNet? I’m sure that Mr. Thompson is a trustworthy person, but do you really want to start relying on second-hand statements for permisison to use people’s images? Somehow I doubt that you’d be ok with Google accepting verbal permission, delivered second-hand.
Because of your strict opt-in stance, I figured you’d be firmly behind me on this, and demand that Jon either get permission directly from the woman in the photo, or edit it to remove her. Either the rules about having permission before photographing someone apply in every case, or not at all. You can’t just pick and choose when to apply the rules, based on what best suits your agenda.
After all, you wrote;
“It is currently illegal in Canada and the US to arbitrarily capture people in photos or videos without getting their informed consent.”
Somehow though, I suspect you’ll come up with some twisted logic of why using this woman’s photo without her express consent, is perfectly ok in this case, but everyone else still needs to get permission before even pointing a camera in someone’s general direction.
July 8th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Also you should get permission from the rightsholders of the colors black, white and grey. (And also gray– which split off from grey in 1997 and is in a protracted legal battle over various shades.)
July 10th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
The silence is deafening…
I guess that means that you finally understand just how impractical it would be to get the permission of every single person who happens to appear in a photo?
July 10th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
“The silence is deafening …”
Nah. There’s not much point in belabouring the same obvious points to people who just can’t grasp them.
Cheers!
July 12th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
“Nah. There’s not much point in belabouring the same obvious points to people who just can’t grasp them.”
What belabouring? First you tell me that nobody should ever have their picture taken or used without their express permission and then you put up a photo with a woman in the background, who most likely wasn’t consulted prior to having her photo taken and put on the net. By your own stated beliefs, isn’t it wrong of you to use her photo without verifying that you have her permission to do so? If you have her permission (written of course), why not just say so?
Or are you admitting that it’s impractical to get the permission of every single person who appears in the background of a photo?
I honestly want to know why Google needs to get everyone’s permission before using photos taken in public, but you feel you don’t need that woman’s permission before using her photo. Aren’t you indirectly profitting from the use of her photo just as you claim Google is indirectly profitting from its Street View pictures? As far as I can tell, the only difference is in the scale of the use. Is that your justification for not practicing what you preach? That a little unauthorized use of a person’s photo is ok, but large scale use isn’t?
Or does the opt-in rule only apply to companies you don’t like?
You may see this as trolling, but it’s a valid question: Why are you doing exactly what you said nobody should be allowed to do?