Florian Grote’s Journal

September 20 - November 16 at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; February 14 - July 29 at the ZKM, Karlsruhe. 

Can you really exhibit notation? Is not the “exhibitionist” notion one of creating a work, a piece, an artefact, something for others to look at that is complete as an example of art? If so, then notation is limited to providing a process to create art, but never to be art. Interestingly enough, artists of many times have felt the need to incorporate their creative process into the final pieces. This is one of the main aspects I see in the current exhibition at the AdK. However, this poses a new question: If notation is indeed not limited to providing a process without ever being art itself, then how do we separate notation and final piece? Do we have to?

Apparently the answer is yes, otherwise nobody would come up with an exhibition about notation. So do we see notation in art not as art but as something outside of art entering into the realm of art (but retaining its distinctive difference)? Although this exhibition certainly did not give me the definition of what notation is, it did help reformulating those questions.
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As we apply qualitative assessments in our descriptions of our roles in relationships and organizations, how much do we know about where those categories we apply stem from? What brings definitions of good and bad or efficient and unefficient into being? In an organization that tries to survive in the marketplace, the answer is likely quantitative. Concrete numbers will work as measures that can be tested against goals, and the evaluation of a situation will often use actual measurements to gain a qualitative outcome.

But what if the goals are not so easily identifiable as mere numeric values? What if they are of qualitative nature themselves? And, couldn’t we also identify a qualitative goal behind every desired quantitative outcome? Maybe it could be helpful to try to actually count situations that seem to lead towards a certain goal - qualitative or quantitative as it may be - and from there derive a strictly qualitative assessment of the general proposition towards this outcome. In a way, the counting of micro-situations could lead to a grounded assessment of the macro-situation with regard to a certain direction in which it is desired to develop.

This brings up questions about how we want to deal with those numbers. Where do the values we use as thresholds to gain qualitative statements (such as good or bad) come from? Are we at the beginning of the loop again? Quite the opposite, I would assert, as we now have gained access to a valuation order on another level, a level we would normally not be able to observe. And that is a qualitative value in itself.

Reading a document inside the frame of a website may seem redundant, but an elegant implementation can give back some of the gratification we find in experiencing a book in our hands. A good example, at least as far as technical realization is concerned, is Scribd.com and their incredibly slick iPaper viewer. This takes in all types of documents we deal with in our software offices all day, and transforms them into an interactive flash movie. Now, the frame inside the frame turns into a full-fledged playground in its own right as the viewer allows for fullscreen display, text search, and a zooming and scrolling behavior that feels much more rounded off than my desktop pdf reader. So this is immersion at its best on the web: The inner frame seems to escape its framing website, the captured document feels more flexible than its original version. But not all is good in Scribd-land, as the company exhibits its corporate nature via control efforts against too much liberty in dealing with documents. For example, outbound links are no longer allowed inside the viewer. Well, with this in mind, let’s turn to one of my favorite finds: The Tibetan Language for Beginners

Update: As Jared from Scribd has pointed out in his comment to this post, outbound links are once again allowed in iPaper, but there seem to be technical difficulties in the Pdf conversion that sometimes still prevent links from showing up correctly.

As more and more people turn to online resources for everything from news to product reviews of all sorts, fresh marketing money pours into the realm of web-based publications. Although the absolute size of most budgets may not grow, but rather shrink (at least in the world’s benchmark market, the US), manufacturers of goods start to realize that the consumers aren’t necessarily where their ad money is. So they want to change the balance between online and offline spending. Problem is, how do they know where to go? In the society of the printing press, circulation numbers used to be the holy grail of marketing assessment. With magazines giving away more than half of their print run and two thirds of their paper paved with advertisement, the suspicion arose that quantitative data may not really have so much to say anymore.

In the online world, reader attention can theoretically be measured with great accuracy. Unique visits can be counted, and it is even possible to determine how long readers stayed on certain websites. Mighty tools such as compete.com and websitegrader.com do induce a feeling of power. However, it can only be a good sign that even these services warn you not to blindly trust their data. Combining data sources with qualitative research is what’s called for. The mere time a website is open in a browser window doesn’t tell you very much about the communication going on. The number of hits on a website can only vaguely hint at its relevance for certain target groups.

With this post, I want to kick off a series talking about possibilities to create a methodology for the integration of qualitative and quantitative analysis that could help find ways for better assessments while raising awareness for the complexity of the matter.

Whatever it was with this year 1997, something must have been special about it. Not in world politics, but in the homey world of the German Electronica (as it was still called then) scene. Somehow, social dynamics must have reached a point in 1997 that drove many of its protagonists to turn institutional. First shouts go out to De-Bug Magazine, of course. They are joined in their celebration by labels Sonig, Karaoke Kalk, Shitkatapult, and Sonar Kollektiv, to name a few. Coincidentally (??), two of my institutional backgrounds were founded around that time as well, with Native Instruments already having celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2006. But the Project ((audio)) at the University of Lueneburg can also claim the magic 1997 as its founding year. A great example of social dynamics - involving technology such as mp3 - building up to a point where an institutionalized organization of cultural practice “suddenly” seems to make perfect sense.

In a microeconomic experiment, unemployed inhabitants of the area around Kottbusser Tor, Berlin, were given the chance to develop concepts for unused decks of a massive parking garage. The top deck was used for agriculture, while the deck below it had a mixture of grocery vendors and small repair shops. A group of illustrators creating custom comic strips on demand seemed to draw the most customers. All in all, the atmosphere was not much different from a pre-Christmas bazar in any given old-folks home, though. Good will was showing, but there was no emergence of new socio-economic practice in the air. The problem with such microeconomic experiments: If you still use money as medium of success, you reference the entire socio-economic complexity of today’s society. Not a good start for an escapist experiment. Read more on the project page (in German language).

The grassroots approach of last.fm already proves extremely powerful in regulating our access to music at our desk. But one more important connection has been made in last.fm: The pooling of global links with local interaction. Based on your taste profile, you get recommendations for concerts in your neighborhood. Thus, last.fm provides a viable structure, making links in communication between global and local possible that used to require complex promotion embedded in the roots of the local music scene. The selection appears as contingency, but is that really true for everyone? Make no mistake: Last.fm may look grassrootsy, but it is already an institution of social power.