Background for Research

While individual human presence in this world has fundamental repercussions on be-ing, it is the ever-present and synergistic exchange between humans — forming what I call a “continuum of relation” — that governs much of life. This energetic field of human relation is sometimes fraught with difficulties and complications in spite of the rich and necessary dynamic it brings to life. Technology, as a ubiquitous factor in mediating human relation, often dominates while presented as providing the only opportunity for mediated connection and interaction between humans.

Presence, as apprehended by the Other, circumscribes a range of sensory inputs that require energy (from the Self) to stimulate and drive. The efficacy and sustainability of human connection builds on the very real and tangible transmissions and receptions of energy between the Self and the Other. An interconnected plurality of dialectic human relation may be described as a network. These networks, made up of a web of Self-Other connections form the base fabric of the continuum of relation. Technology appears in these networks as the mediating pathway that is the carrier of energy from node to node, person to person. Technological systems also appear to apply absolute restraints on and attenuation of the idiosyncratic flows inherent in that continuum of relation. The discrete objects that populate the (technological) landscape of the continuum of relation and that modulate the character of communications are literally artifacts of a materialist point of view. A primary assumption in my research is that a materialist or mechanistic view of the world no longer suffices to adequately circumscribe the phenomena occurring within the continuum of relation.

Our total sensual world is in part comprised of this dynamic and complex social system — an emergent system that embodies the expansion of the human population and the intensification of the global technological infrastructure. This contemporary social milieu may be described as a techno-social system which, among other affects it exhibits, more or less precisely prescribes the pathways of interaction between participating humans. This system may be modeled as a complex and multi-layered conflation of energized flows or signals which compete for both our attention as well as for the sources of energy which ultimately drive their expression. Sonic energy, given our evolutionary attributes, is a critical form for our energized presence and participation. The techno-social system that we have collectively constructed generates a tremendous variety of devices which impinge sonically on our lives and claim to offer practically everything including reproductive/evolutionary dominance and psycho-spiritual transcendence. But what of these devices, how do they form us and our relation with the world? How do they form the paths of impression and expression through which we establish and maintain our communities and our Selves? How do they arise within the techno-social system? How are our lives intertwined and affected by these pathways? How may we create sustainable systems of energy movement that augment the possibilities of human connection?

Amplification, as a fundamental process applied to different forms of energy, presents a model that is applicable across a tremendous range of systems from the basic biological to the complex technical. Amplification presumes the alteration of existing systems of energy movement from an ambient state to an altered one. This process of alteration has the effect of changing fundamental relationships of power within the entire localized (and distributed!) techno-social system through a process of energy density redistribution. All amplification systems rely on the existence of an energy source by which they accomplish their signal enhancement, and thus, their affects relate deeply to the contingencies of those sources among other factors. Amplification also introduces spurious flows of ‘waste’ energy into the situation. These flows often have destructive affects.

Amplification systems includes the entire range of electricity-based telepresence devices which are becoming ever more ubiquitous in our techno-social system. As a direct consequence, this system becomes more dependent on the structural and operational necessities that amplification requires. It is these requirements which apply deep formative forces on participants in the system as well as the system itself. When we use these devices, we are participating in a complex system that is characterized by fundamental and wholesale re-directions of energy. This re-direction is not a passive process nor does it affect trivial changes in the wider system. It forms an embedded matrix of alteration in the continuum of human relations — between individuals, collectives, and between human social systems and ‘natural’ systems. It affects all the fundamentals of human presence including those of place, memory, and be-ing.

A primary focus of this research is to extend and situate this model of amplification within the widest context, especially examining the effects of applied and ambient amplification on sustainable and creative cultural systems. As I note following in a basic outline of possible sources, this requires a wide exploration of whole fields of research (as the bibliography also indicates).

Specifically, though, I will explore the effects of amplification on creative action both from the point-of-view of the user as well as the entire system that the user is embedded within. For example, distributed creative action, as promoted by the availability of network systems such as “Web 2.0,” are completely dependent on complex systems of directed amplification. How do these dependencies affect the distributed creative processes taking place within? How do human networks interact with the formations of power and energy which are applied by amplification systems? How do the systems of amplification re-arrange relations of power in the social and the ‘natural’ system?

Personal Research Background

My own applied international research in distributed performance and tactical media over the last fifteen years centers around synchronous live network-based social activities. Engaging a wide range of technical solutions, my work is a direct utilization of digital networks as the locus for creative presence and action. As access to bandwidth has gradually increased, opportunities for collaborative performance utilizing digital networks as the primary form mediation have expanded greatly while changing character significantly. These areas of research experience include a variety of performance-based activities in theater, music, and other expressive arts in collaborative networked situations. As a self-proclaimed networker, an area of core awareness in my research is the concept of presence. Human presence is directly and indirectly affected by the digital network technologies that amplify and attenuate presence. I have a wide and deep experience base in expressing human presence across networked techno-social systems while exploring how that presence is precisely formed and informed by the impression of the technologies used.

Tactical media, a term coined during the rise of network culture, includes the use of media — especially those operating through distributed network technologies — that specifically supports idiosyncratic expressions of small-scale social systems. My research and facilitation work explores the (often troubled) relationship between the large-scale deployments of standardized global network technologies and the need for local expression. The question arises: is it possible to utilize one of these standardized technologies without that very process of standardization flattening out idiosyncratic expression? One conclusion that I have come to is that despite even a high degree of mediation applied by a technological system, it is still possible to have a meaningful exchange if participants are aware of the actual affects and mechanisms of the mediation. This would include a good understanding of the actual movement of energy across the network system — a movement without which, human relation fails.

Relevant Literature

(please note that references here are all contained in the online bibliography located at http://www.neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/biblio.html)

The ubiquitous use of digital devices arising from the rapid decrease in the relative cost of computing power has transformed information technology from an isolated domain for computer programming research into an integral part of a pervasive extended social research domain. And although the success of a contemporary social milieu is now often measured by the efficiency of integration of two broad distributed systems — the human (social) and the machinic (technological) — for the purposes of this proposal only, I will discuss previous research from this bifurcated point-of-view. It is important to note that there is significant cross-over and currently this particular dialectic is decidedly less productive.

In the specific topic of network theory, for example, advances spurred by research in previously unrelated fields such as genetics are creating totally new areas of research: bio-informatics. In this same light, existing research from a wide span of fields from cognitive science to consciousness studies to Quantum physics to genetics are also considered to be relevant to the production of the thesis. I will follow the technical and social sections by a few brief examples of possible research leads from other fields. As with any transdisciplinary undertaking this will be a core challenge: to be open to diverse threads of research, at the same time as not stretching too far. With this in mind, the primary hermeneutic goal is identifying fundamental principles from broad textual explorations.

Technical Research

Technical network research generally concentrates on the efficiency of power consumption, security, data transmission, software/hardware interface, and general materials constraints and usage — engineering issues of system structure and optimization.

For example, with the widespread deployment of wireless networks as communications signal amplifiers — where a majority of nodes are powered by batteries — there is great interest in techniques for optimizing fundamental energy usage and management (Papadimitriou, 2004, p.567; Kumar, 2005, p.415). Technological failure — the loss of system coherency and its subsequent inability to carry messages — is also an area of critical network research (Koroma, 2003, p. 47). In both these areas there is a direct correlation between the survivability and efficacy of network hardware systems as and the availability and efficient use of energy to construct, maintain, and operate such amplified communications system.

Research in network analysis proceeds either through sampling or capturing real network traffic (aggregate protocol and communications data) for generating metrics that determine the communicative topology and state of the network (Barabasi, 2001, p. 52), or through computer simulations of complex network systems. Simulation work subsists on the development of algorithmic solutions (often ultimately based in graph theory) which model relations between elements (objects and links) in the network occasionally combined with absolute energy optimization considerations. This range of research is characterized by projects like the Applied Network Research (ANR) Measurement and Network Analysis group (McGregor, 2001, et al). In considering the Internet as a whole, because of the sheer unregulated extent, mathematical simulations are less effective tools because they rarely capture emergent properties nor do they always reflect the actualities of such a complex system.

For example, a brief survey of commercial network diagnostic solutions shows existing metrics of which a primary one is the utilization of bandwidth. The bandwidth parameter has a direct correlation to the transmissive and receptive capabilities of a communications network (Danchak, 2001, p. 2). It is generally accepted that higher-bandwidth equates with better communications. Indeed, perceived progress in network technology is often predicated on availability of and access to greater bandwidth combined with less error-prone data transmission. Interestingly, higher-bandwidth systems (as signal amplifiers with access to more power) are also systems that have a greater amount of social capital energy invested in them, suggesting a correlation between the amount of total energy coming into a system and the level of order — where order in this case is measured by a favorable ratio of signal to noise (which can be seen as two types of energy being transferred by the system) — and where order is a direct expression of a non-equilibrium systems ability to controvert entropy.

Social Research

Social network research, also called simply network theory, is most often related to sociology, anthropology, social psychology, or organizational studies. It is generally concerned with the characteristics of emergent macro-level relationships between nodes (actors) within real or prototypical/simulated network systems.

There are, as well, areas of research such as HCI (human-computer interaction), CSCW (computer supported cooperative work), HCC (human-centered computing), that peripherally impact my research in their exploration of the ergonomic (functional-material), the semiotic (linguistic), and the broader social parameters of human interaction with others and interaction with computer-based digital systems. The process of knowledge-building, as one collective social goal of cooperative work, is an activity that has been modeled extensively and will provide input.

However, these areas of study rarely consider the combined scalar qualities of the dynamics of human relation that are mapped out between the (individual) Self and the Other — what I would call the granular level of a network. There is no general social network theory that specifically frames the nodes in a social network as the embodied Self and the Other as primary constituents. However, Alter (1999, p. 8) proposes a general theory of Information Systems in which he defines a “work system” as a “system in which human participants and/or machines perform a business process using information technology, and other resources…” Aside from the business reference, the equating of work with energy makes this an interesting approach that alludes to the fundamental relationship between energy (transfer) and granular/nodal systems comprised of interconnected humans — as they exist in the continuum of relation.

As a outgrowth of sociometry, Social Network Theory (SNT) (Barabasi, 2003, et.al.) grew out of quantitative analyses of social relation, and is currently a very active field of inquiry. Social network analysis applies algorithms from graph theory to identify both patterns and variables in the structural relationships of these networks (Wasserman, 1994, Kadushin, 2004). As with other threads of network analysis, SNT tends to weigh the collective over individual attributes, and the relation of the theory and its algorithms to the actual mediative network technology is not always explicit. It is, however, a useful direction of approach to the question of mediation and the architecture of relation which it obliquely includes.

Another approach is the social construction of technology (SCOT) which “distinguishes in its presuppositions and its metaphysical roots, between people and societies on the one hand, and the world of artifacts (and the natural world too) on the other.” (Law, 2003, p. 3) This approach provides an initial synergy, although the absolute division between things and people is a problematic relic of materialism which informs, but at some level is the anti-thesis of the model I am developing.

Actor Network Theory (ANT) is an approach of interest to “understand the mechanics of power and organization” (Law, 1992, p. 2) and because one of its base tenets is a form of scale-independent heterogeneity, a principle which is more inclusive of disparate elements (both abstract and material) and factors in modeling the dynamic of a social system. Law also posits that knowledge “always takes material forms,” and in doing this, he makes a clear connection to what we think of as the material world — though I will take this several steps further and describe the connection between material manifestations and energy relations. Although I do not see a precise application of ANT to my model, Law sees it as a means to a more holistic analysis of combined social-technological systems which are fundamentally dynamic processes, not objects — it is a promising starting point for connecting to current research.

Overall, the analysis of real networks is facing a complex challenge to be able to cope with large, adaptive, multi-agent systems. Computational tools are limited by incomplete data sets and the basic complexity of real — and consequently dynamic — networks (Carley, 2001, p.12). It is precisely the weakness of detailed computational (algorithmic) solutions that suggests that more holistic models, ones that contain fundamental principles “combining the methodologies of social networks and computer science” (Ibid) along with other innovative world views are necessary.

Other Areas of Research

Significant lateral input will come from areas of inquiry outside the general sphere of applied telecommunications, electrical engineering, computer science, and sociology. Areas of research in hard science (especially cosmology, Quantum physics, thermodynamics, and biology), social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, education, media and culture studies, and philosophy), cognitive science, management and organizational studies, consciousness studies, bio-informatics, and bio-genetics among other alternative model systems provide fundamental inputs — further interrogating the efficacy and robustness of the model.

For example, recent trends in network-based sonic collaboration also touch on the real dynamics of perceptive and energized human relation as well as the specific contingencies of amplified telecommunications networks (Barbosa, 2003, p.53). This trans-disciplinary technical research and artistic production dates back to the mid-1970′s and the California-based League of Automatic Music Composers in Local Area Networks (Bischoff, 1978, p. 26).

Relevant areas of cognitive science research examines abstracted social (linguistic) levels of interaction as mapped over systems of knowledge acquisition and propagation in the process of creating models for the mind, consciousness, or intelligence. This field of research presents several interesting paradigms which inform the relationship between individual presence and collective/social existence.

Although there are some who reject the metaphor of genes holding and transferring ‘information’ as a causal source for evolutionary impulses (Griffiths, 2001, p. 6), recent developments in gene regulatory networks (GRN) modeling, a branch of systems biology (or bio-informatics) also provide some interesting insights into cellular systems which are not modeled simply as information-processing devices, but as distributed metabolic signal amplification systems that appear to function as emergent scale-free networks (Jeong, et al, 2000, p. 652). By examining the specific links in a metabolic network, it is possible to map biochemical reactions which may also be characterized by absolute energy (state) transfers which are, essentially, amplifiers. As this area of interest matures, it is likely that research into metabolic network systems will produce insights that can be productively carried back to social and technological network theory.

Quantum computation, as it relates both to real energy state analysis of nano systems and algorithmic computational models also explores relevant issues that consider real energy state relations as (digital) computational systems. These nano-systems exhibit parameters governing energy flows that are quite different from normal macro-scaled high- and low-voltage circuitry and may provide fundamental insight into energy dynamics.

General Quantum, as a fundamental energy-based model, portrays the universe as a space-time continuum in which energy fields are the phenomena underlying all observed reality. Quantum provides a provocative point-of-view that supersedes the limits of traditional mechanistic thinking. In this sense alone it serves as an important guide for moving the model beyond dominant mechanistic perceptions of reality.

Conclusion

There are many possible threads to examine in contemporary research around the concepts of amplified (tele)communications, networks, and human relation. Many of the traditional disciplinary boundaries as well as socio-cultural frames-of-reference are being re-formed by the rapid pace of research, development, and deployment of telecom solutions.

The dialectic of human vs machine is a bit dated, though, and represents a conservative conceptual space that has to be transcended — initially it is a convenient conceptual tool — but a more holistic consideration of that hybrid system, the techno-social system, as it exists within the continuum of relation, is necessary.