What’s computational media? As grad students presenting our ‘computational media’ research, we get asked that a lot.

We all have different backgrounds, and use different approaches, so our answers vary necessarily. But then why are we colleagues? What’s the shared struggle?

In this article, I propose a map of audiences for computational media research, i.e. stakeholders in its practice(s). As scholars, we need to recognize the spaces our audiences occupy, where they coincide or not.

From the top going clockwise, we consider
a) the expressive capacity of the medium,
b) its use in mapping out complex systems,
c) its use in maintaining the complex systems of present society, and
d) the educational capacity of the medium [1].

Introduction

Do you recognize yourself in one of these camps, as your work is influenced by computing?

  • Artistic interest, whether the work performs an unnecessary process [2] well.
  • Professional interest, whether the work performs a necessary process well.

How about these ones, as your work depends on others’?

  • Academic interest, whether the work contributes to institutionally structured education.
  • Autodidactic interest, whether the work contributes to self-guided education.

This variety of concerns leads to specific pitfalls, when we address an audience inappropriately.

Say, the intrinsic quality of the work does not help if the problem has either been solved or doesn’t exist yet (from an academic perspective). Yet the novelty of the work cannot substitute for its skilled craft yielding a polished experience (from an artistic perspective).

Simultaneously solving for all such constraints is difficult and unnecessary. It is in fact prone to reduce the quality of the work and/or consume all working time, until only the intersection of the audiences approached (tiny, usally consisting of one’s collaborators) is interested.

Of course, this grouping is loose. Many artistic audiences, many professional audiences, etc., share concerns but not particular interests.

Case Studies

Our alignment chart contains two axes, arbitrarily chosen.

But wait - are ‘Autodidacts & Academics’ mutually exclusive? ‘Artists & Professionals’? We claim it’s harder to realize a successful work in either framing.

We consider autodidacts (responsible for self-guided education) and academics (responsible for institutionally structured education) as the active researchers, who determine whether things are novel. Theirs are the communities which engage with repositories of human knowledge out of intrinsic interest; which at their worst, elevate impractical knowledge. They are not self-funding.

We consider artists (responsible for unnecessary processes) and professionals (responsible for necessary processes) as the active developers, who determine whether things yield sustenance. Theirs are the communities which engage with the material world productively; which at their worst, produce banal blockbusters. They cannot value originality for its own sake [3].

Thus the sustainability of a line of inquiry depends on its having artistic (crowdfunded) or professional (business or government-funded) application. Yet its legacy depends on its valuable contribution to academia (societal knowledge), or autodidactics (individual knowledge).

Finally, it is vital to not collapse any type of audience to one personality stereotype or another. While the incentive structures of each particular audience are similar within a type, their attitudes toward ingroup and outgroup mature independently. For instance, it is possible to be heterodox relative to a publishing-based incentive structure, or orthodox relative to incentives arising from emotional self-regulation.

Case Studies - Autodidacts

explorable explanations; smalltalk on the dynabook

Case Studies - Academics

dramatic encounter, experience of interfaces; quantitative social science, validation of interactives

Summary

A wide range of existing materials, each legible to different audiences, can be read as texts of computational media. They are distributed on different platforms, carrying various amounts of context with them, sometimes traversing between communities (depending on where the funding is, or how the experience happens to resonate).

These computational media-like projects run on different timescales, a constellated view into the technology of ideas about computing. If it is a proposal of hardware for children (and their process of seeking out epiphany), or an encoding of social constraints on dialog (and their failure causing emotional outbursts), there is a human subject either way.

A human intends to interface with a computer. What aid does it give them, depending on who they are, and what institution they represent? How does it serve the human subjects whose data (or algorithm) it represents, in one form or another? How does it stage the encounter with this mark left by another person?

Computational media pertains to all interpretations of patterns of information which are hidden, in cables, and airwaves, and databases. It pertains to all expressions of collective behavior, and learning, and play. It pertains to agents who act, and are acted upon, often by forces much larger than themselves, which often are only the movements of other agents.

Speaking to many kinds of institution is within the field of computational media.
And so is the work of being heard, for all the ubiquity of computers and play.