Kim H. Veltman
Keynote: “Culture, Creativity and the Internet”,
Continuity and Change, Die Schmiede, Hallein, 11 June 2005.
Published in: Prospective de l'Internet - Foresight of the Internet: Digital networks as structuring tools for the Knowledge Regions, Actes du colloque, Marie-Anne Delahaut. Ed.Préface de Viviane Reding, Postface de Markus Kummer, Namur: Institut Destrée, 2005, pp. 365-394.
Abstract
Much has been written on links between 1) electronic media and culture; 2) electronic media and creativity, 3) internet and creativity. This essay suggests that the future lies in a convergence of these three areas. To deal with these new developments we need not only digital libraries but also virtual reference rooms and virtual agoras. Involved is much more than a simple translation from analogue to digital. The new technologies are bringing an era of augmented reality, which brings with it new combinations of real and virtual, physical and digital. Implicit is an expansion of the concept of culture beyond tangible or intangible to include combinations of tangible and intangible.
These new kinds of cultural expressions require new kinds of collection, conservation, storage and display strategies, new search engines, and new kinds of virtual agoras, wherein they can be compared, shared and developed. Ultimately the challenge of online depositories goes beyond making accessible either universal paradigms (theorems, algorithms) or their particular expressions. They need to be accessible multi-lingually and multi-conceptually, There is also a need to use the diversity of expressions as a point of departure and inspiration for new expressions.Creativity is not simply a question of creation out of the blue (creation ex nihilo). It is a challenge of drawing on the cumulative memory of civilization to generate new ideas and expressions, of using the continuity of past ideas as a starting point for future expressions.Parallel with trends to convergence at a technological level there is thus a trend towards convergence of research on a) digital libraries, b) virtual reference rooms and c) new collaborative work and creativity spaces (virtual agoras). A combination of these three points to a Distributed European Electronic Resource (DEER), which could lead in the long term to a World Online Network of Distributed Electronic Resources (WONDER). In a sense this is also the vision of President Chirac who wants a European counterpart to Google. At the same time it goes further by suggesting that Europe’s sense of its past is a key to its future identities and expressions.
Table of Contents
1)Introduction
2)Electronic Media and Culture
3)Need for Distributed Electronic Resources
4)Internet and Creativity
5)New Kinds of Cultural Expressions
6)Virtual Agoras
7)Virtual Model and Pattern Books
8)Conclusions
1) Introduction
Links between 1) electronic media and culture; 2) between electronic media and creativity, 3) between internet and creativity are often discussed. A key to future research and creativity lies in new combinations among these three. Even before the Internet existed, Paul Otlet (1935) had a vision:
Man would no longer need documentation if he were assimilated into an omniscient being - as with God himself. But to a less ultimate degree, a technology will be created acting at a distance and combining radio, X-rays, cinema and microscopic photography. Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate creation, as a whole or in certain of its parts.[1]
By 1943, Paul Otlet foresaw a machine to imagine the world (machine a penser le monde), whereby knowledge and information could be made accessible to persons from all over the globe. Ivan Sutherland, one of those connected with the early Internet,wrote his thesis on a Sketch Pad(1963) that would allow one to develop ideas on a computer screen. This vision, via the Evans and Sutherland software, led to a multitude of sketching, drawing and designing tools. In parallel, there have been a multitude of editing, video editing, multimedia production and post-production tools.[2]At the level of commercial design, manufacturing and professional film and television production these tools are being used in online networks and linked with visions of grid technologies. The challenge remains to make these materials available for personal and collaborative research and creativity.
2) Electronic Media and Culture
For at least 35 years, memory institutions (museums, libraries and archives) have been engaged in a gradual process of “translating” first their catalogues and increasingly, the contents of their collections into electronic, digital form. This process has proceeded at two levels: 1) At a low level, minimal information from library, museum and archival catalogues is being made available online through the regular internet[3]; 2) the same memory institutions have also been engaged in high level cataloguing and digitisation of their collections. Whereas the low level versions have been made accessible by Internet, the high level versions have remained in house and inaccessible for research and creativity.
Twenty years ago there were simple technical reasons for this discrepancy. When the European Commission launched early projects such as Remote Access to Museum Archives (RAMA, 1990), high speed networks were not yet in place. Today, with the TERENA and GEANT networks this is no longer an obstacle, although many challenges in terms of the last mile, last kilometre, or even last hundred yards remain.
Today the major obstacles to sharing are psychological and political.Institutions are rightly concerned about making their high level texts and images generally available on the Internet.[4]At the same time, these resources are of enormous interest to the research community where such problems of trust and commercial gain are not really an obstacle. A network of research institutions, bound by codes of honour and a basic agreement to use materials only for research will have a great impact on the advancement of research and creativity.
3) Need for a Distributed Electronic Resources
If technical reasons were once the chief obstacle to this vision, today, the technical dimension providesunexpected new reasons for networked sharing of resources. Initially the experiments in memory institutions involved small amounts of material, backups of which involved only a few discs. This has changed dramatically. By 2000, the Library of Congress was involved in backups of 40 Gigabytes daily. The C2RMF’s European Research Open System (EROS) today entails over 15 terabytes. There is an urgent need for online frameworks, which ensure offsite backups a) to ensure permanency of the new resources for our collective memory and b) to ensure that these materials become available to researchers in order to make the European Research Area into something more than a vague political slogan.
A practical way forward is to combine the results of research projects[5] and make these available to the research community. Combining the resources of such specialized databases and collections will provide researchers with the cumulative results of numerous research efforts and thus provide an important stimulus for future research. These results include both new facts and new analytical methods which will lead us to reassess anew the meaning of cultural objects.The proposed EuropeanUniversity of Culture based at Paris 8 (Saint Denis), is an obvious home for such an effort. This provides an initial base of four universities: Bologna, BerlinParis, and Madrid, which can be gradually expanded to include members identified by E-Culture Net.
Virtual Reference Rooms
Putting these materials on the equivalent of an intranet for researchers is a necessary first step. Unlike traditional memory institutions, which typically had their catalogues in a single language, the new distributed resources need to be available multi-lingually at a new level, reflecting not only all the languages of the resources, but also the many languages of their users. The EROS database offers very impressive, practical demonstration of these potentials. The Accès Multilingue au Patrimoine (AMP)[6] group have outlined further dimensions in this process, which need to be integrated with the more recent MICHAEL[7] initiative.
Needed is work on new kinds of virtual reference rooms, whereby the knowledge and information of databases such as EROS, becomes linked with classification systems, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, bibliographies and other reference materials associated with traditional reference rooms in major libraries. In the longer term, these virtual reference rooms need to do more than provide multi-lingual access to resources. They need to offer access to different knowledge structuring systems, knowledge systems (world views) and enable a balanced comparison of their approaches. We are confronted by an important choice: Either we remain limited to metaphysical and potentially physical wars concerning a dominant and domineering paradigm. This path tries to reduce diversity to a single unity. Or we develop tools to bridge between different world views and different ways of knowing. This path leads to a unity of diversities (cf. Ruffolo[8]) and is perhaps our only hope for real tolerance in a world, where many cultures are a reality.
3) Electronic Media and Creativity
While one community has focussed on new digital access to our collective memory through memory institutions, another community has been working on new creativity. The advent of word processing tools led to rhetoric that everyone could potentially become an author. Similar rhetoric is associated with new tools in other domains, drawing, multimedia, video and film editing and post-production tools. The experience of history allows us to look more soberly at such rhetoric. The number of Dantes, Shakespeares, and Tolstoys has remained small compared with the great number who were able to write. Even so the challenge remains to encourage talent such that the number of authors major and minor will continue to increase.
Personal Creatvity
Many tools for personal creativity exist. Often these are subsets of very expensive commercial software developed for the military or industry and often even the prices of these subsets are beyond the range of artists. An excellent overview of developments is provided by the Centre Pompidou’s Encyclopaedia of New Media.[9]Such new media expressions fall into two main categories: a) those which are neatly contained on a computer screen and b) those which are installations. Inevitably both categories of expression typically involve specific hardware and software that reflects the limitations of technology at the time they were made. For conservators this poses enormous challenges in terms of conservation and continued access. Meanwhile, although progress has been much slower than visionaries such as Douglas Engelbart hoped a half century ago, commercial tools are becoming ever less expensive while
the number of freeware and Open Source tools available for creativity continues to increase.[10]
Collaborative Tools
In industry and the military there are many tools for collaborative design and work. There are also a number of commercial games for collaborative play. At the research level, there are numerous projects for collaborative work, Even so, collaborative play and creativity tools are not yet readily available to private groups. This is one of the challenges for the next decades. One interesting development in this context is the Hyperfun[11] project, which entails interactive Function-based Shape Modelling and has projects on virtual embossing, virtual carving, virtual sculpting and painting[12]
The problem is not simply a technical one. Major hardware and software firms continue to assume or at least hope that they will control the digital production chain and are thus creating frameworks that would exclude the contributions of individuals. Major film production studios (e.g. Hollywood) and major television and broadcasting companies (e.g. the BBC) also have aspirations of controlling the same digital production chain. These interests are bound to remain. We need to explore new models, which enable large commercial visions and small group activities to develop in parallel and mutually stimulate one another. Increasingly such efforts will shift from work on isolated machines to a networked context wherein internet and creativity are integrally linked.
4) Internet and Creativity
Again, at the commercial level this is already a reality. While Hollywood continues to be an important address for film production, through the realities of a networked world, there are over 300 post production houses in Toronto (e.g. Side Effects[13]) linked directly with Hollywood. Increasingly these post production houses are being moved to more distant time zones such that work can continue during the day elsewhere in the world, while it is night in Los Angeles. As a result work on productions can continue 24 hours even though most of the home team works a regular 8 hour day.
In Europe, there was a vision of doing something similar, which proved premature:of reviving the Babelsberg studios near Berlin in a networked environment.[14]At the level of the European Commissioner there was a vision of Minister Oreja, to create a Film and Television Network for the whole of Europe.[15]Recently European Ministers of Culture met in Cannes to discuss potentials of the Internet for the European Film Industry.[16]The traditions of film production especially in France, Italy, Spain and Germany predate those of Hollywood. In the new Europe they entail larger audiences than the North America and hence there is no reason why they should not become as important as their U.S. counterparts.
In parallel with this, projects such as Archeoguide have been exploring how one can use augmented reality to superimpose virtual reconstructions of temples and other buildings on actual ruins in physical landscapes. This principle can be extended to include multiple interpretations of the same temple, such that one can compare Greek, American and French reconstructions of the same monument. Major television studios such RAI (working with CINECA) have been exploring the potentials of using blue rooms to link television footage of such archaeological sites with virtual and augmented reality reconstructions of the same. In future, such combinations could potentially become an important new source for e-learning. Students would not just read about Pompeii. Virtual environments would link television documentaries and reconstructions to give students a vivid impression of such historical sites.
These developments also offer important new possibilities for new creativity. With respect to texts we have a well established tradition which distinguishes sharply between a) copying without acknowledgement (plagiarism) which is undesirable and b) citing, or alluding to bits of other works (especially via quotes and footnotes), which is one of the central activities of both scholarship and new creation. Dante is not just a great writer because he works in isolation: he builds on the traditions of the Bible, Virgil and a range of other classical authors.
Major filmmakers such as Lem, Tarkowski, Kurosawa use such techniques. At a banal level, some Hollywood spoofs such as Spy Hard do the same. The news media are constantly lamenting the dangers and realities of piracy (wholesale plagiarism of copying complete pieces). But to date we have no regular equivalent to quotes and footnotes in everyday multimedia. Being able to quote from a picture, a video, film, or television programme as easily as we can quote from a written text would greatly increase the range of an author’s creativity and lead to new kinds of expression multi- and inter-media expression.
Major television companies are slowly becoming aware of these potentials. For instance, the BBC has established a Creative Archive Licence Group[17] which potentially offers new possibilities for a) broadcasters, b) small production groups (the SMEs of creativity), c) researchers and d) creative individuals. These latter groups will bring new understanding concerning what has been done in the past and provide new creative expressions in the future.
In Europe, developments in memory institutions have traditionally been treated quite separately from developments in the audio-visual (radio/television/film) sectors. Historically, the political advantage of this distinction was that one could insist on separate rules for creative industries (exception culturelle[18]) from the everyday forces and taxes of the commercial marketplace. In adigital world some dimensions of this distinction remain valid. At the same time, there are new challenges to extend the range of contents from memory institutions to include audiovisual media: music, radio, video, television and film. Only in so doing can we increase the range of our collective memory to include the whole gamut of expressions.
5) New Kinds of Cultural Expressions
Entailed in these developments is something considerably more profound than a process a) of translation from analogue digital or b) of making these results available online. Traditionally cultural expressions were thought of in terms of concrete, tangible expressions: i.e. in terms of paintings, sculptures, monuments etc. Over the past 30 years, UNESCO has made us aware of the importance of intangible heritage in the form of language, music, dance, and other customs. Accordingly culture was thought of as being either tangible or intangible.