Swiss artist Matthieu Cherubini was kind enough to share some his thoughts and process behind the social bot rep.licants.  

rep.licants.org is a service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users.

The experience of an enhanced virtual self as users are invited to install a bot on ther favorite social network account and become a replicant.  Provided with “virtual prothesis for the social media introvert”, people who use the service have started to uncover what it means to automate social interactions.

GH: You are an artist! Why did you start working on rep.licants?  Is it similar to your other work?

MC: rep.licants is the work that I did for my master thesis. During my studies, I developed an interest about the way most of people are using social networks but also the differences in between someone real identity and his digital one. I do not have a big experience about creating personal projects, I began seriously to do it during the past 2 years, so previous to rep.licants I did two other “serious” personal projects and they were related to this thematic aswell. One The Pursuit of Happiness is about hacking into Facebook account of random users in order to steal their private messages for seeing what they were looking for on this social-network. The second one Afghan War Diary is about linking data coming from Counter Strikes servers and Wikileaks and displaying the result on Google Earth.

Back to rep.licants – when I began to think about a project for my master thesis, I really wanted to work on those two thematics (mix in between digital and real identity and a kind of study about how users are using social networks). With the aim to raise discussions about those two thematics.

 

GH: What was the process like for you?  

MC: At first I just had the idea about creating a webservice where people could subscribe on it and mix themselves with a robot. But I really didn’t know where I was going exactly. So I began the project as an experiment.

The first step was to study what people could do on Facebook (I began with Facebook only) and how a bot could reproduce those same actions by linking himself to other services that its user is using or by getting new informations on other sources. 

[img_assist|nid=3969|title=|desc=This schema roughly demonstrates how the bot is working.|link=node|align=left|width=400|height=142]

After I programmed a version of the bot, according to this previous study, with few functions and I asked to some of my teachers, tutors and classmates if they wanted to be volunteers for this experiment…I had 3 volunteers who did the experiment for like 4 months. I was asking them weekly what the bot was doing, if they were feeling the bot was lacking of something important, …  During this 4 months I redesigned a bot for Facebook by taking into account the feedbacks of my three volunteers.

In same time I also decided to do a version of the bot on Twitter and the process was almost the same as Facebook.

 

GH: What have people’s responses been?  Have Facebook or Twitter responded at all?

MC: The responses has been very mixed some are over negatives and some are very positive ! I’m happy about that because it’s very interesting: the negative responses are mainly from people who were thinking rep.licants is a real and serious webservice which is giving for free performant bots who are able to almost perfectly replicate the user. And if they are expecting that I understand their disappointment because my bot is far from being performant ! Some were negatives because people were thinking it is kind of scary asking a bot to manage your own digital identity so they rejected the idea.

For the positive responses it’s mainly people who understood that rep.licants is not about giving performant bots but is more like an experiment (and also a kind of critics about how most of the users are using social networks) where users can mix themselves with a bot and see what is happening. Because even if my bots are crap they can be, sometimes, surprising.

But I was kind of surprised that so many people would really expect to have a real bot to manage their social networks account.

Twitter never responded and Facebook responded by banning, three times already, my Facebook applications which is managing and running all the Facebook’s bots.

 

GH: How do people use it?  Have there been any interesting stories of how people have used rep.licants?  

MC: For what I know and after some questions/feedbacks received by users, I would say that some people use the bot:

a. Just as an experiment, they want to see what the bot can do and if the bot can really improve their virtual social influences. Or users experimenting how long they could keep a bot on their account without their friends noticing it’s runt by a bot.

b. I saw few time inside my database which stores informations about the users that some of them have a twitter name like “renthouseUSA”, so I guess they are using rep.licants for getting a presence on social networks without managing anything and as a commercial goal.

c. This is a feedback that I had a lot of time and it is the reason why I am using rep.licants on my own twitter account: If you are precise with the keywords that you give to the bot, it will sometimes find very interesting content related to your interest. My bot made me discover a lot of interesting things, by posting them on Twitter, that I wouldn’t never find without him. New informations are coming so fast and in so big quantities that it becomes really difficult to deal with that. For example just on Twitter I follow 80 persons (which is not a lot) all of those persons that I follow is because I know that they might tweet interesting stuffs related to my interests. But I have maybe 10 of those 80 followers who are tweeting quiet a lot (maybe 1-2 tweet per hour) and as I check my twitter feed only one time per day I sometimes loose more than one hour to find interesting tweets in the amount of tweets that my 80 persons posted. And this is only for Twitter ! I really think that we need more and more personal robots for filtering information for us. And this is a very positive point I found about having a bot that I could never imagine when I was beginning my project.

 

[img_assist|nid=3970|title=|desc=|link=url|url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/rep_licants_org|align=right|width=300|height=461]

GH: Have there been any interesting disasters or failures in the interactions as a result?  Or any surprising bugs?

MC: One surprising bugs was when the Twitter’s bots began to speak to themselves. It’s maybe boring for some users to see their own account speak to itself one time per day but when I discovered the bug I found it very funny. So I decided to keep that bug !

I do not know if it is a disaster or failures but sometimes I really felt bad for some people who were having nonsense discussion with a bot without knowing it is one. There is a collection about this kind of discussions on the Bot’s Diary.

 

GH: My own experience with rep.licants revealed to me an aesthetic of antagonism.  What does an aesthetics of antagonism mean to you?

MC: I’m not sure but maybe something which is hostile in my project ? Or maybe the way the bots are running ? As they are very buggy, they do a lot of things which could be opposite. One time they could find a content which is absolutely match to the user but the next one is absolutely opposite of what the user is or like.

One of the things I’ve discovered during my own use of a rep.licants Twitter bot is that it likes to retweet messages I’ve exchanged with an acquaintance – sometimes even the same mmessage more than once.  This has a somewhat awkward effect of bringing attention to that interaction when it wasn’t really warranted.

Around the same time Matthieu and I conducted the interview, this video of a chatbot having a conversation with itself went viral – perhaps in part because the conversation immediately turned towards more existentialist questions and responses.  The conversation was recorded at the Cornell Creative Machines Lab, where the faculty are researching how to make helper bots. 

The best part of the video happens when one chatbot implores that he is not a robot – but rather a unicorn. How the bot determined that is not widely known, but it does invoke an important visual element and narrative theme from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – where the main character Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) has dreams of unicorns. The character of Gaff (played by Edward james Olmos) is also seen making origami unicorns – an apparent reference to his knowledge that Deckard is replicant.

The questions that rep.licants poses are deep human and social ones – laced with uncertainties about the kinds of interactions we count as normal and the responsibilities we owe to ourselves and each other.  Seeing these bots carry out conversations with themselves and with human counterparts (much less other non-human counterparts) allows us to take tradition social and technological research into a different territory – asking not only what it means to be human – but also what it means to be non-human.

Service design is the practice of translating insights from social research into enabling resources.  Using tools from cognitive psychology, sociology, and  behavioral economics, service design organizes the cognitive, social, and physical infrastructure to help people better serve each other.  The goal of service design is to improve service outcomes, procedures, and communication by enabling highly coordinated cooperation among participants and stakeholders. Service design is different from, say, interaction design because instead of focusing on the narrative and form of specific forms of artifacts that users engage with, service design turns its attention to a range of artifacts and narratives all with the goal of organizational change to meet the needs of participants and users.

As the community of service design practice expands, tools are needed that will help people make sense of the formal elements and purposes of service design. Organization and classification are common practices within any emerging discipline.  Service design is no different with its formative history marked by rich discussions over definitions, core practices and procedures, value to society, and relationships with other disciplines.  Genre is one technique for managing the diversity of elements in service experiences.  Meaning ‘type’ or ‘kind’, genre has a cognitive benefit that helps orient people towards the common bonds of a medium or work of art.

Service experiences are dematerialized, elusive, and open to different interpretations.  A genre approach can provide techniques for understanding the impact of different service elements while adding perspective across different experiences and tactics. In doing so, a service genre approach should able to describe the formal elements and narrative structure of service experiences, enable comparisons and historical accounts, help us understand how services change over time, and further elucidate the link between service production and consumption.

An Approach to Genre

Drawing on literary theory and film criticism, genre can be applied to service experiences as a way of understanding existing patterns and identifying new ones.  One of the most influential approaches to film genre was described by Rick Altman. Altman recognized that films are described semantically in terms of formal elements like costumes, locations, temporal setting, lighting, cinematography, sound, and props, and so on, while also being described as a syntax involving relationships of the story, plot, narrative structure, and interactions between formal elements. Altman described this as a semantic/syntactic approach to genre.

A common example of genre in film is the western, where semantic elements like a cowboy hat, horses, and gunfights provide the visual substrate for syntactic themes of conflict over honor and values, rebirth, and individual agency.  Similarly, sci-fi genres use alien creatures, spacesuits, distant planets, and novel technologies to advance themes about humans and their environment, exploration and discovery, and the conflicts that arise between society and technology.

Altman’s Approach to Genre

Genre helps make sense of stabilizing, creative and disruptive processes in service experiences, and this can help us anticipate and generate new trends.  Rick Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach resolved three contradictions that emerged when films were classified by existing genre definitions by highlighting the tension between semantic elements and syntactic themes. This approach demonstrated how semantic “things” and syntactic “arrangements” work together through conflict and synergies to generate emergent new genres and creative churning within existing ones.

Contradiction One: Classification of Form versus Structure

Altman identified the first contradiction as one that arises when films are organized by their formal elements, on one hand, and as canonical examples of a genre on the other. Genre classifications before Altman would pivot on a tautology where westerns, for example, were characterized by images of the American West from 1840-1900, or, alternatively, if taste and meaning made certain films more relevant than others for describing an overall generic structure.  This contradiction is evident in a movie like Star Wars, which is a western based on its narrative themes, but because it takes place in space, it would be excluded from some lists of westerns.

Contradiction Two: Divergent Communities of Practice

The second contradiction is the difference in discourse between critics and consumers.  On one hand, film interpretation by critics and industry channels sets out certain expectations of genre for audiences.  However, audiences also construct their descriptions and uses, providing an entirely separate set of interpretations.  The difference is what many would call an expert-layperson divergence, but this does not necessarily indicate superiority of one or another.  It is specifically because of their different approaches and social relationships that each group is able to bring forth different sets of interpretations.  The implication of this separation is that genre definitions are highly dependent on temporal interactions within groups, such as previous scholarship or significant local events, where historical processes influence the emergence and disappearance of narrative structure and formal elements.

Contradiction Three: Degree of User-Focus

In the third contradiction, Altman described relationships to genre as either ritual or ideological, or bottom-up and top-down, respectively.  The ritual approach to genre centers on the audience whose use of film genre is an indicator of their preferences and beliefs.  Participation through film spectatorship is an act of authorship by the audience, and their expectations and desires are reinforced in the process of consumption.  In ritual, genre is created by the audience.  The ideological approach views genre as an organized attempt of business and political interests to shape discourse and use-practice.  In contrast to the ritual approach, the ideological approach would focus on Hollywood’s interest in scripting audience behavior to serve its own preferences, rather than responding to social pressure from “below”.

In service design, these three conflicts are evident to varying degrees.  However, classification based on form and/or structure is often more a question of good versus bad outcomes, processes, and communication.  This often depends on how well the experience was able to bridge divergent communities of practice and focus on the needs of the users.

Service designers identify and order goals in service systems.  Service systems are a unit of analysis for an exchange of skills and capabilities which leads to the production of value in use (Vargo et al., 2008).  Service systems are developed though the creation of value, where reinvention can transform the relationships of use and practice. Service systems are characteristically intangible, heterogeneous, simultaneous in production and consumption, non-perishable, and grounded in times and places that maintain their meaning and value (Kimbell, in prep).

One of the ways that designers understand service systems is by using a variety of approaches and concepts that isolate or concentrate focus on the relevant aspects of a system so they can drive experimentation and change. An example of this is a touchpoint, which means the aspects of the service are visible and come in contact with the users of that service (but see this discussion of its origins). You may have suspected that in a relationship of co-creation, touchpoints multiply quickly when production and consumption are linked since users are creators and vice versa. Another example that designers use is the line of visibility. This is similar to the touchpoint, and it describes what users see and experience in their relationships with a service system. It helps in rendering a system so that its processes and organizational structure are visible.

A draft diagram of a business process showing the line of visibility between the user and the organization dedicated to providing a service.

Because touchpoints and lines of visibility exist not only as tools but in practice, service experiences are tightly bound to tied to the production of narrative. Suspense in particular is a common experience for users when parts of a process, system, or set of relationships are hidden from view.  Just imagine a time when you were the creator or recipient of a service.  Much of your uncertainty or satisfaction was probably driven by what you knew or could expect about the outcome as well as the communication process that was taking place while the service was being delivered.

Richard Allen discusses suspense in his book about [Alfred] “Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony”. Allen cites Meir Sternberg’s distinction that, “suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiosity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as such it often involves and interest in information for its own sake.”

So when working in service design we should decide if we desire to create curiosity or suspense and design our process accordingly. Allen also incorporates Ian Cameron’s view that suspense is a “channeling of emotions”. Clearly emotions can be powerful, but how and why? In Allen’s analysis, suspense is something that happens in us as we are forced to take up the prospect of narrative outcomes that are contrary to the ones we desire. Suspense is constructed out of moral uncertainty, balancing our expectations with potential outcomes.

Allen discusses Hitchcock and develops descriptions of two types of suspense: pure and impure. Pure suspense is broad and objective, prolonged by tension, delay, and narration that is unrestricted, moving between vantage points and locations. It leads to an anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as the deadline looms. Arbitrary delays segment time and increase the tension because a bad outcome seems close at hand. Often, the audience sees a threat before the protagonist and surprise happens through the manipulation of time. The outcome almost always favor of the moral victory, especially in popular media.

Impure suspense on the other hand is local and subjective. It is developed from points of view that provide different sources of knowledge often through the eyes of the protagonists and antagonists, keeping the audience informed while the characters remain unwitting. Deadlines are set early on and acceleration commonly heightens the alert attentiveness of the spectators who are active participants in the construction of the suspense. Knowledge is not made by the director. It is made by the audience in cooperation with the information provided to the characters. All too often, the audiences senses the outcome before the characters do by filling in blanks sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Impure suspense favors empathy for the character, as if we were living through them. The moral outcome is less certain and often unrealized.

In order to try to make the differences between pure suspense and impure suspense more tractable, I imagined what users in a service system might say if they were experience one or the other.  The result is in the chart below, and it adapts these distinctions and starts to resolve how one might go about implementing different narrative objectives for a service system.

References:
Vargo, S. L., Maglio, P. P., & Akaka, M. A. (2008). On value and value co-creation: A service systems and service logic perspective. European Management Journal, 26(3), 145-152. doi:10.1016/j.emj.2008.04.003

This was a post that I initially wrote for the ‘Telling Stories’ discussion group that is made up of recipients of the Wellcome Trust’s International Engagement Award.  The group practices public engagement with public health and science from a variety of different perspectives and goals.  In this post, I was exploring the role of narration and also looking at the idea of suspense as created by communication (or the lack of) between researchers and members of the public.

Part 1.
I can start by locating the visual arts as a source or medium for engagement. The answer is: myriad. In the last ten years or so (and even before) the arts domain has taken on science and technology in bushels. Some of the response of the arts has been driven out of curiosity and the desire to take on the mantle of science for aesthetic reasons. For others it has been a source of tactical engagement with the very substance of knowledge production in the sciences, defense and military establishments, and the diffusion of technology in everyday life.

There are way too many example to adequately cover here, except to say that the Wellcome Trust is a major stakeholder in this area and has been for at least a decade as far as I know. I remember a festival in South Kensington that I happened upon almost ten years ago called Sparks which featured may artists working specifically with the life sciences in some form or another. Exhibitions were held at the Royal College of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum, among others (http:/ /news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2000/festival_of_science/91…). It was largely a cultural series of events, continuing a dialogue which I have witnessed firsthand in many forms and places afterwards. It seems to me that the role of the arts in these debates has largely been restricted to Europe, but I have seen some signs in the US and now in Asia that the visual arts are playing a more tactical and more integral role in the development of engagement vectors with the public, practitioners, and policy makers.

Some examples:
Last year we conducted a workshop for artists at NCBS (http://cema.srishti.ac.in/content/bioart) which focused on introducing cell and molecular biology methods to artists so they could use them as media for performance, communication, and engagement. It was conducted in collaboration with Oron Catts, a well-know bioartist from Australia (http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/) with extensive experience in using the trappings and discourse of the lab to open up critical thinking about future scenarios and paths of social and technological development.

A group of our students is taking part this week (and won an award) in the international genetically engineered machines (iGEM) competition held at MIT in Boston, USA. This is a group of art students working at NCBS (our host in Bangalore) to develop synthetic organisms, in part to provide a forum for engagement and critical dialogue at these meetings that is not just motivated by the accumulation of capital wealth or basic functional research via biotech (http://hackteria.org/). The result was a highly influential discussion about the role of amateurs in creating public knowledge using science and technology.

Project Vision (htt p://symphysis.wordpress.com/designing-for-converging-cultures-a-diplo…) is an ongoing project here in Bangalore that uses new media (i.e. web 2.0, sensors, physical computing, interactive story-building software, locative media like mobiles and GPS) to develop forms of intimate science where urban, poor, school-aged students run their own experiments and communicate first-hand experiences with nature and their environment.

Moon Vehicle is a community project maintained by Joanna Griffin (http://www.aconnectiontoaremoteplace.net) that bridges storytelling, artifacts, and arts-based methodologies to create peer communities between the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), astronomy buffs, schoolchildren, and others in order to reconstitute new narratives of science and technology as they apply to satellites, space exploration and the once and future missions to the moon.

Another timely example comes from Denmark. The Rethink exhibition (http://www.rethinkclimate.org/) combines contemporary art into political debates surrounding climate change responses in anticipation of Copenhagen.

In the US, The Center for Post-Natural History (http://postnatural.org/) takes on biotech and the conversion of biological organisms to intellectual property.

There are many, many others. But I think it’s safe to say that they have had varying impact and effect. Unfortunately (in my view) we haven’t yet developed a coefficient of art to assess its effect on other domains. Some of the examples I have cited have a distinctly critical edge. Others are more about raising awareness or, more to the point, about connecting different social communities and groups (e.g. science practitioners and schoolchildren).

One of the most important things I have learned in the last few years about public engagement with science comes from the field of science and technology studies. Sociologists, philosophers, and historians have started to demonstrate the value of media (especially visual) in the production of science and technology and the resolution of debates about scientific truth and public acceptance. The production of artifacts, objects, and “things we can wrap our heads around” is very important it turns out.

I think the lessons from history and sociology leads to some clarifying questions such as “What is the material basis for engagement?” and “What is engagement made of and where does it live?”

Part 2.

My perspectives
Many of my perspectives on public engagement are shaped by my experiences as both a practicing scientist studying evolution, ecology and behavior in lab and field settings, as an artist and designer working to develop communication and engagement tools, and now working to assess options for better decision making in public health, energy, and infrastructure.

As a biologist, my perspective is further shaped by host-parasite dynamics and their implications for disease in populations. I am also influenced by network science and complex systems. As such, the interaction is the focal point of engagement. How the interaction is created and maintained is significant for me.

As a designer, so-called design thinking influences my approach to engagement. This often means thinking critically about how the engagement process can transpire as part of everyday life–that is, part of the daily routine that people struggle with and recreate everyday.

I think the questions raised in previous posts about the motivation behind “science’s” engagement with the “public” and who makes up the “public” are critical because they help to identify the costs and benefits of engagement and the location of engagement as it pertains to the public. Still I think we need to constantly open up our assumptions further to scrutiny.

Of Scientists and Risk
I know scientists to be a very heterogeneous community involved with many others in the production of knowledge. In general, the people are exceedingly nice, driven by their own curiosity and desire to create understanding that will make a difference, however far downstream. Science, however, is also composed of lots of others, including the organisms and the tools used to develop new hypotheses and results. By far the most practical defining feature might be its place–where it is done and how that place structures the kind of interactions that in turn lead to what we call new knowledge.

Let’s be clear. In the West, science and by extension public health is hardly the product of scientists alone. Many individuals are involved from students, to researchers, financial managers, glassware technicians, viruses, lab rats, secretaries, publishers, reviewers of literature, politicians, middle-school teachers, clergy, university boards, ethics review panels, biotech company shareholders, news media and so on. All of these individuals are possibly working to do one thing–identify sources of risk and manage the uncertainty that arises out of the everyday interactions of people and their environment. If they can scrape out a living in the meantime, all the better for them. So yes, in a sense I would also say that because risk and uncertainty are trying to be minimized, science and technology have a lot to do with securing and locating ways to create wealth. And yes, all of this scales greatly with the complexity of the science (think: CERN or the HapMap project).

I prefaced this as part of the Western tradition 1) because it is of direct lineage from Christian emphasis on divine intervention and design, and 2) because I have found that (in Asia at least) very different traditions underlie the identification of risk and the communication of uncertainty. My sense is that in Asia these are intrinsically related to variation in the ordering of time, and I’m anxious to discuss this with others that know more than I do.

“The Public”, User Needs, and Witnessing
On the public side, I would prefer to say civil society–that is those who are engaged in social contracts relating to economics, technology, common goods, governmentality and so on. And I agree that it is correct to say that it is an even more heterogeneous group.

One way to think about civil society is much like designers think of their users. There is a simple axiom that underscores the work of many successful designers: user needs drive the acquisition of a product or service. Public heath knowledge and science can be that product. Yes, this is a very functionalist way of looking at it, but this principle of participatory design involves end users in the design process to help ensure that it meets user needs and is usable. It has been a successful strategy for architecture, software, and business (the customer is always right, right?). Why should science and its cognitive technologies be an exception?

By adopting user perspectives the scientific community can recognize that its practices may or may not resonate with user needs: socially, by ensuring equal access for disenfranchised groups, economically: by creating new opportunities for capital development and financial transactions, and politically: by improving the quality, speed, and sensitivity of social technologies to the needs of local users. It’s not that science doesn’t already do these things. It just isn’t always evident to the average user. In the realm of health, sometimes it’s just a matter of making the benefits clear so that they justify whatever costs there are in the user’s mind.

One of my favorite case studies come from evolution and its approximately 50% public acceptance in the United States. Margret Evans, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, studies some of the ways that children, potential users of evolutionary theory and biology, acquire evolutionist and creationist beliefs. Evans describes how Western religious and philosophical traditions emphasize essentialism, teleology, and intention, and in the process limit the cognitive appeal of natural explanations for the origins of species. She argues that because these ideas tend to show up repeatedly in public representations, they constrain the inferential reasoning capacities of the developing mind. It’s an observation that suggests science’s own predilection for categorization is at the root of evolutionary biology’s social friction.

I think these cognitive biases come into play often, for good and bad. I’ll want to describe some others, but I need to take a detour first.

Engagement, Stories, Suspense, Scenarios, and Fallacies
I personally feel that if scientists, policy-makers, and funding bodies are willing to involve cultural workers like artists and designers in the process of science and its associated applications, there is good news for broader participation because they cultural workers tend to excel at reconfiguring essentialist categories, and they often like to do it in public. There is some indication that this may be a general rule because visualization involves so much codification, creation of meaning, and translation of concepts and ideas into tangible, material artifacts for cognition and discourse. In effect, the sensory object is a vector for witnessing.

Witnessing
In their book, Leviathan and the Air Pump, authors Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer describe three types of public witnessing of science: the direct performance of experiments in social spaces (imagine if the laboratory were a chapel or temple), reporting experimental methods in a manner that enables someone to replicate the experiments themselves (like primary journal articles that recount the plot), and virtual witnessing by producing in a reader’s mind an image of an experimental scene that displaces the need for direct witness or replication (this, I argue, is much like a story in someone’s mind constructed from the plot). We need more of this public witnessing if science is going to connect with society in a dynamical way.

Suspense and Narration
The idea of witnessing in science is intimately tied to the production of suspense in narrative. Richard Allen discusses suspense in his book about [Alfred] “Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony”. Allen cites Meir Sternberg’s distinction that, “suspense derives from a lack of desired information concerning the outcome of a conflict that is to take place in the narrative future, a lack that involves a clash of hope and fear; whereas curiousity is produced by a lack of information that relates to the narrative past, a time when struggles have already been resolved, and as such it often involves and interest in information for its own sake.” So when thinking about public engagement we should decide if we desire to create curiosity or suspense and design our process accordingly. Allen also incorporates Ian Cameron’s view that suspense is a “channeling of emotions”. Clearly emotions can be powerful, but how and why? In Allen’s analysis, suspense is something that happens in us as we are forced to take up the prospect of narrative outcomes that are contrary to the ones we desire. Suspense is constructed out of moral uncertainty, balancing our expectations with potential outcomes.

Allen discusses Hitchcock and develops descriptions of two types of suspense: pure and impure. Pure suspense is broad and objective, prolonged by tension, delay, and narration that is unrestricted, moving between vantage points and locations. It leads to an anxious uncertainty and an increased expectation of a bad outcome as the deadline looms. Arbitrary delays segment time and increase the tension because a bad outcome seems close at hand. Often, the audience sees a threat before the protagonist and surprise happens through the manipulation of time. The outcome almost always favor of the moral victory, especially in popular media.

Impure suspense on the other hand is local and subjective. It is developed from points of view that provide different sources of knowledge often through the eyes of the protagonists and antagonists, keeping the audience informed while the characters remain unwitting. Deadlines are set early on and acceleration commonly heightens the alert attentiveness of the spectators who are active participants in the construction of the suspense. Knowledge is not made by the director. It is made by the audience in cooperation with the information provided to the characters. All too often, the audiences senses the outcome before the characters do by filling in blanks sources of meaning that haven’t been provided. Impure suspense favors empathy for the character, as if we were living through them. The moral outcome is less certain and often unrealized.

The difference between surprise and suspense is also relevant. This passage from a conversation between Francois Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in the book Hitchcock/Truffaut helps to make the difference clear.

“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the audience knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!”

“In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed.”

Suspenseful Science?
My reason for taking this detour is to try to show some of the different narrative techniques that can be used in the construction of public health engagement and of science in the collective mind of civil society. Curiosity, surprise, and suspense (pure/impure) are all narratives tactics for engagement.

Curiosity is important for people attending to and learning on their own, but I don’t think it necessarily develops in people unless the benefits are of satisfying it are known to them.

Surprise is also relevant and critical to sensations of astonishment–and of being placed in a new reality that will cause dissonance and therefore growth.

Suspense, while composed and related to surprise and curiosity, has a more pedagogical function. It builds up knowledge of scenes and constraints using what I think Shapin and Schaffer described as virtual witnessing. The audience/spectators build the story themselves, creating it from the narration and plot to fit their own needs, and to adapt it to their own context and location-based experience. I think this is especially true for impure suspense because pure suspense rings of master narratives and the hindsight needed to create contrasts among moral outcomes. Life is not so much like that. Impure suspense allows us to decide the moral outcome during the process. We are never sure if we have chosen the right one, and we may not know even after the “movie” has ended.

So how can public engagement efforts use suspense to build better acclimation and participation among its audiences?

Scenarios and Fallacies
One possibility lies in the construction of scenarios about the future. Scenarios are descriptions of alternative future states where narration helps to articulate the shape and distribution of actors, procedures, and resources. Scenarios can be general or highly detailed, and they can be shown or represented in a variety of ways from verbal description, acting or role playing, visualization and imagery.

I’ve recently delved into the techniques of scenario development. They serve a number of important functions for individuals and organizations. The most important is perhaps building out aspirations and ideas of what the future could hold–even if the present lacks those characteristics. In this way preferred futures can be imagined, but even when the future is imagined to contain destructive relationships, it aids the processes of critical thinking and adaptation. For individuals, recognizing opportunity and constraint is the first step to capitalizing on it or avoiding its pitfalls. Arjun Appadurai has been highly influential in defining aspirations, or the capacity to aspire to a better future, as an important feature of cultural capacity. Scenarios, as extensions of aspirations, are a way to work forward, to rearrange the systems and see what new hybrids emerge and how they might affect well-being.

For organizations, scenarios can help create common ground. The dredge up assumptions and interactions to create a big picture where knowledge can be exchanged. When scenarios are combined with games and simulations, they provide an opportunity to work through challenging situations, to create memories of the future, and out of these take the confidence to undertake critical adaptive change without incurring any of the risks that real experiences entail.

One of the discussion themes asked what happens when artists and others ‘misinterpret’ the science or present it in a biased or misleading way. Rather than seeing this as something necessarily counterproductive, creative interpretations provide circumstantial detail that may be critical for the social fluency of science. A creative depiction of evolutionary technologies, such as Chris Landau’s The Flocking Party (http://theflockingparty.com/), should therefore be seen as a ‘minority report’, suggesting possible avenues for experimentation or areas of conflict between science and society.

On the contrary, critics of scenarios have argued that they aren’t effective in the development of policy precisely because of the detail they incorporate into their ‘worlds’. Morgan and Granger (2007) have argued that scenarios come with an implicit expectation of liklihood–that any particular scenario is more likely to occur in the future. As I already stated, predicting the future is not a goal for scenarios, but critical responsiveness to uncertainty is. Morgan and Keith based their argument on a common fallacy (and I will include another) that I think are important for us to consider as we take on public engagement through narrative.

In adding detail to a scenario or, let’s say, a compelling tale of science, we create compounding descriptions that run the risk of invoking the conjunction fallacy. A frequent example was developed by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. They gave respondents the statement:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

and asked: Which is more probable?
1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

Logic and probability tell us that #1 is more probable since it is increasingly unlikely that she is both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement.

The issue here is that we want to include more detail and visualization in our stories, but in doing so we possibly risk compounding peoples’ expectation of what is and is not likely to happen.

Vividness is another concern. According to wikipedia, “The logical fallacy of misleading vividness involves describing an occurrence in vivid detail, even if it is an exceptional occurrence, to convince someone that it is a problem. Although misleading vividness does little to support an argument logically, it can have a very strong psychological effect because of a cognitive heuristic called the availability heuristic.”

The availability heuristic says that we often place events we have just seen or experienced in our memory more prominently, even if we know them to be less frequent occurrences. I can’t tell you how many times my Mom called me late in the evening when I was in college to warn me abut something she might have just seen on the evening news as a possible risk. The detail that many forms of media and engagement provide can also bias judgments that we would otherwise weigh more carefully.

I think somewhere there is a sweet-spot. I like this account of The Critical Art Ensemble as a group that routinely replicates scientific experiments in public spaces such as malls and parks in an effort to publicly verify political claims ranging from the presence of GMOs in the food chain to the terror threat of biological warfare. One of CAE’s projects with co-collaborator Beatriz de Costa is described by Regine Debatty from the blog we-make-money-not-art this way:

GenTerra is essentially a participatory “theater”…Scientists and artists are talking the public through the process and implications (whether they are purely profit-driven or feature some utopian qualities) of transgenics. Materials are then provided to allow people to get a hands-on experience by creating their own transgenic organism…After that they become actively involved in risk assessment by deciding whether or not to release bacteria from one of petri dishes of the release machine.

Even if the feedback generated doesn’t make it back to the lab or policy office, it’s a form of participatory design that seeks out users of science.

Another example was developed in Europe and has now spread. Some of you may have read about Science Shops as one possible form of engagement that pits user needs in direct contact with professional researchers. Here is a blog post about this that I wrote awhile back (http://blog.cstep.in/?p=319).

Ulat bansi from CEMA on Vimeo.

Jay Silver is a researcher in the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. I first met Jay when I arrived in Bangalore about ten months ago. While he was there, he made all kinds of cool things that allowed us to interact in interesting and fun ways with our environment! His recent work has been looking at how to make touch, sensation, and interaction with the world around us astonishing, especially for kids! I made this video while discussing his work with him in the Media Lab.

environmental camera from Gabriel Harp on Vimeo.

Not the first movies depicting plant sex, but perhaps the first dedicated theater. What I’m wondering is why it would necessarily be visual at all. My question is how other species (in this case plants) would sense and respond to suggestions of sexual display. For plants, it’s often interspecies mediated. Does a non-pollinating insect then provide stimulation if not fertilization?

WORLD’S FIRST PORN THEATER FOR HOUSE PLANTS OPENS IN CALIFORNIA
Chico Gallery Hosts Revolution in Film for Non-Humans Beginning September 10th

August 24, 2007 – In a bid to increase movie audiences exponentially, and to dominate the motion picture industry, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has announced plans to produce film and video for other species — from rose bushes to almond trees — using specialized new techniques. “Humans have more entertainment than they can endure,” explains Mr. Keats. “Yet organisms with populations far greater than ours are routinely ignored by MGM and Disney.”

Mr. Keats came to appreciate the potential impact of arts and entertainment on non-human audiences while choreographing ballet for honeybees at Chico State University last year. “Dance comes naturally to bees,” he says, “less naturally to trees. But all plants can perform photosynthesis. They’re sensitive to the play of light. As an entertainment form, cinema was practically made for them.”

By projecting specially-prepared video directly onto foliage, Mr. Keats found an effective way to share films with bushes and brambles, even entire forests and jungles. Yet he chose to open the first movie theater for the botanical kingdom at 1078 Gallery, an alternative arts space in Chico, California. “Chico has the advantage of being an agricultural town,” he explains. “In a place like this, my venture is likely to be appreciated.”

Still an essential question remained: What genres of film would appeal to flora? “This wasn’t the sort of situation where I could learn the audience’s mindset,” admits Mr. Keats. “The only thing that would be a sure hit, I figured, was sex.” Accordingly, the artist dutifully filmed plants getting pollinated, editing his uncensored footage into a gritty black-and-white porn video.

“I think it must be very titillating, if pollination is your thing,” says 1078 exhibition committee member J. Pouwels. Mr. Keats, who’s already looking into further venues for plant porn, believes that the theater might even be intriguing to people. “Watching movies in a cineplex is partly about absorbing the experience of others in the audience. On the big screen, our point of view is enlarged. I see no reason why shared experiences with other species can’t further expand our perspective.”

A Cinema Botanica trailer can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZqzr5ANi7I
* * *
Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist, fabulist, and critic. Recently he exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. He has also attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish, in collaboration with scientists at the University of California, and petitioned Berkeley to pass a fundamental law of logic — A=A — a work commissioned by the city’s annual Arts Festival. He has been awarded Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships, and his projects have been documented by KQED-TV and the BBC World Service, as well as periodicals ranging from The San Francisco Chronicle to New Scientist. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. For more information, please contact Mr. Keats at jonathon_keats@yahoo.com, or see http://www.modernisminc.com/artists/Jonathon_KEATS/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H1S9d5h-Ps

Rudolf Arnheim, a pathbreaking psychologist of visual experience in the arts, died at the age of 102 in Ann Arbor, Michigan on June 9, 2007.

Roger Malina, Editor of the journal Leonardo, had this to say:

Arnheim was a giant in our community, a long time Leonardo Editorial Advisor and seminal figure bridging the era that saw film theory develop to the era of new media.

Arnheim was an honorary editor for the journal.

An obituary by Marvin Eisenberg is forthcoming from the Ann Arbor News.

wikipedia’s entry on Rudolf Arnheim

This is a response to Carl Djerassi’s post on the topic of IMAGING IN ART AND SCIENCE as part of the Virtual Symposium On Visual Culture and Bioscience.

The public discussion is at http://visualcultureandbioscience.blogspot.com/

Immaculate Misconception! What a great title! I would love to see the play; it sounds very interesting.

This series of comments reminds me of the similarities between scientific narrative as it is presented in, for example, journal articles and the dramatic narrative evident in theater and film. The common narrative arc for science (introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion) depends very much on cause and effect and follows closely the style of narration in film (exposition, some change in knowledge, a goal-oriented plot, investigation, and finally the climax).

I’m curious about the didactic quality often associated with information transmission and its role in pedagogy. Alfred Hitchcock remarked that, “Suspense is the most powerful means of holding onto the viewer’s attention… It is indispensable that the public be made perfectly aware of all the facts involved… [The] conditioning of the viewer is essential to the buildup of suspense”.

Suspense is vital to narration in theater and film and is implicitly embedded in scientific communication both within the discourse of science and between researchers and the “public” audience.

One might argue that the usual style is a broad kind of suspense that keeps the audience in the dark about what will happen next and creates uncertainty. This kind focuses only on the protagonists so that when anything significant happens, it is a surprise to the viewer. As such, their responses can vary more widely depending their prior knowledge, which may or may not prepare them.

A second kind of suspense keeps the audience attentive through the use of deadlines and frequent shifts in perspective from the protagonist to other “actors” human or non-human.

I’d be curious to hear what theater folks and others who deal with stories and plot structures have to say about the use of these tactics to shape and moderate scientific narration.