DEOPSTUFF.NL
Dropstuff.nl is a project in the Netherlands that is experimenting with new technologies and its influence on and interaction with the freedom of speech. The central location of the experiment is a travelling sixty square metres led light billboard that sows messages (text, video, photos etc.) that people send in and art that is especially made for this project by some artists. In addition to the main screen there is a network of more than 40 screens spread out over the whole country in public and semi-public places like shopping streets, museums, governmental building etc. that show the same content live.
One of the artists is Zesbaans, an artist group actually. For the work ‘De Megaphone’ they also use the audience, both to produce and to interpret messages. People can send a text they want to be shown on the billboard and then a software program that is loaded with more than 2000 elements of graphics, animations, fonts and compositions will show the message, but within a visual context, interpreted and created by the program itself. So what happens is that at the moment people send in a message they loose control over it and are depended on the program how other people will be confronted with the original thought they send. What happened was that someone texted “Turken zijn de baas” (Turks are boss) and the machine translated this in a bling-bling scene on a monkey hill. Together with the 60m2 billboard, a crowded square and 40 different screens throughout the country we get the picture on how the context of a message is important for its meaning.
THE POWER OF CONTEXT WITHIN A CONVERSATION
So what happens when somebody in a museum in Leiden sees this message, that was produced in Amsterdam, on a screen. On the bottom of the screen there is a number whereto a new sms can be send and so the person in Leiden will do in our imagination. To be short, there will develop a conversation between people in which there is a mediating device that not only makes the context less transparent, but will completely replace it with another. Will these two people ever be able to have a decent conversation? I guess not, but what does that mean for any other message that is unleashed within a network, say published as a blog and copy pasted onto a different site? Do we explicitly need a special program to distort the context?
I think the project shows the potential of the network on a blown up scale, but its function is not far away from reality. It only takes one session of copy paste to make the context change explicit, but what to think about the pre or external programmed environment of almost all places where people publish their thoughts? My comments on a blog might seem perfectly in place when I publish them, but even if this where a fact (which I doubt to be possible), that environment has the capability of completely changing its character within a second, by the publishing of a new article, a change of background etc. etc.. With this change the meaning of our message is transformed as well and we don’t say what we intended to any more.
It is not unfamiliar to anyone I recon to speak to someone live instead of using an email if you want to explain a complex situation, but with the shift of the public debate to the new media we are more and more confronted with the property of context within a conversation. I don’t know if it is particularly a bad thing, some brilliant ideas might arise from the confusing conversations, but we have to be aware of this ‘noise in the channel’. We cannot trust blindly on the trustworthiness of contextual meaning of messages any longer. This is already problematic when we are talking to somebody face to face, I admit, but at least we have thousands of years of conventions that help us out here. And maybe that is the key and there will be the formulation of new conventions that are based on the repetitive conduct within the digital sphere. I wonder how these conventions will differ from our current ones, or in other words: how our new language will have meaning.
