Ben Delaney: Cyberconf 2

The Second International Conference on Cyberspace
Santa Cruz CyberConf 2
by Ben Delaney

The International Conference on Cyberspace, by virtue of convening twice, is an old-timer in a young industry. This year, on April 19th and 20th, it assembled in Santa Cruz, California, on the fog-shrouded campus of UC Santa Cruz. Sponsored by the Group for the Study of Virtual Systems and hosted by Allucquere (Sandy) Stone, it enmeshed nearly 200 educators, theoreticians and developers in discussion and sometimes heated debate. The Conference was a two-day affair, and the organizers packed every minute.

On both days the schedule was packed; the first day included eight presentations and a sometime-rowdy panel discussion. The second day offered seven more speakers to the group. On both days what spare time there was, was filled with intense conversations and discussion of the preceding presentations. The conference concluded with an informal dinner, which provided a final opportunity for discussion with the fascinating people who had gathered.

Space restrictions preclude us from fully discussing each of the 15 presentations. Full proceedings will be available later this year from the conference sponsors.

The face of cyberspace

The conference was launched by Ann Lasko-Harvil of VPL Research. Her presentation, entitled Identity and Mask in Virtual Reality, addressed the nature of identity in virtual worlds. "You're going to look like something", she commented, "and in many ways, who you are will be decided by what you look like". This lead to an explanation of work VPL and others are doing to decipher the code of facial expressions, and to determine the amount of expression required to enable nonverbal communication in virtual worlds. She pointed out that "the human facial expression has incredible subtlety and we are highly evolved to interpret it." Facial expression in virtual worlds will make communication in those worlds both more simple and rich.

Stuart Moulthrop of the University of Texas at Austin followed with a discussion of narrative and fiction as antecedents to virtual reality. His presentation was entitled Paradise for Paranoids: the Critical Hermeneutics of Cyberspace. His major concern was the control and management of cyberspace. As one questioner remarked "there seems to be a lot of paranoia and very little hermeneutics in your remarks".
20,000 on-line users

Next on the agenda was a description of an existing cyberspace, the French Minitel system. In an amusing and insightful talk by Jean-Claude Guedon, the assembly learned of the difficulties encountered by the bureaucratic administrators of the Minitel system, and how it has grown, both due to and despite their administrations.
Minitel is a text-based computer network run by the French phone company. Minitel today includes more than six million terminals and over 20,000 on-line services. The system was quickly taken over by its users, who shaped it to meet their needs, especially on the so called "Chat Lines".

The chat lines are held to be largely responsible for Minitel's unanticipated popular acceptance. Chat lines are real-time, private, anonymous, 2-way communication channels. Thousands are active at virtually every hour of the day. The lesson of chat line cyberspace is, as Guedon says, "that humanity appears to be a lot more serious than it really is." Not only do people spend a great deal of time on apparent frivolity, but they do it with gusto.

Managing complexity

After lunch and conversation on the lawn outside the Oakes Learning Center, William Leler of the Banff Centre spoke about Managing Complexity in an Artificial Reality. He started with the premise that most VR tools now in use are derived from CAD tools, and therefore define virtual worlds in largely static and architectural terms. Every object in a virtual world, he submitted, should act as an independent variable, or filter, acting and reacting. "The interesting behavior we're going to see in virtual reality", he told us, "comes primarily from the interaction of independent actors, not from how interesting the actors are."

Following Dr. Leler's talk, Scott Bukatman discussed The Cybersubject and the Cinematic Being. This presentation focused on the value of narrative in the design of virtual worlds, through a comparison of the movie TRON and the William Gibson book, Neuromancer.

Collaboration, not interactivity

Bukatman passed the baton to Brenda Laurel and Scott Fisher, partners in Telepresence Research. Their talk, entitled Art and Artistry in Telepresence, recounted their background in cyberspace research, which is considerable, and the directions they hope the industry will take. These two are among the first pioneers of cyberspace, having worked together at Atari in its salad days.

Laurel threw down the gauntlet before an audience used to thinking of advanced computing in terms of interactivity when she stated bluntly "I feel that interactivity has been a failure. A large part of our quest at Telepresence Research is to develop an alternative to interactivity as we know it." She expects that virtual reality must go far beyond current levels of interactivity, by encouraging collaborative interaction between the VR system and the user.

Fisher then presented some of the work he did at NASA, where he was instrumental in the development of the DataGlove, head-mounted display, and 3D sound. His experiments included some of the earliest work in cyberspace and data representation. His current direction (working with Laurel) is to create viable telepresence systems. These will require, he said, a sense of space and mobility, and the control of viewpoint.

Dr. Kathleen Biddick of Notre Dame spoke next, discussing "Uncolonizing History in Cyberspace". In this paper she presented the view that cyberspace will give humankind the opportunity to rethink and perhaps rewrite history.

Really virtual

Dr. Biddick's presentation was followed by Michael Naimark's. Naimark is one of the old-timers in virtual worlds, having worked with Kay, Laurel, Lanier, Fisher, et al at Atari. His crowd-pleasing talk consisted primarily of six videotape clips which documented his work. These clips demonstrated what he called "bad VR". The last clip was particularly hilarious and disturbing. A San Francisco Art Institute project done in 1990, it was a spoof of potential VR commercials. It showed in quick succession a boy playing war games (with "real" bombs), a young girl riding a horse (on her father's lap), a couch potato playing tennis while supine, a lady in a kitchen munching crackers (seeing lemon meringue pie), and two children playing doctor (seeing actual open heart surgery). In each scene, the participant is shown wearing goggles and gloves. This spoof mocked the current media fascination with VR, but also raised serious questions about its potential for exploitation.

A fair share of abuse

After dinner on Friday, the public panel discussion convened in a large classroom. The panel was quite large and disparate, including John Perry Barlow (Electronic Freedom Foundation) , Michael Benedikt (Univ. of Texas at Austin), Kathleen Biddick (MIT), Scott Bukatman (State Univ. of New York), Jean-Claude Guedon (Univ. of Montreal), Scott Fisher (Telepresence Research), Eric Gullichsen (Sense8 Corp.), Barbara Joans (Merritt College, Oakland), Brenda Laurel (Telepresence Research), Vivian Sonchak (UC Santa Cruz), Natalie-Nichole Stenger (Human Interface Technology Lab), and Sandy Stone (UC San Diego).

This session was a high-energy interlude in the otherwise decorous conference. Loud, rancorous arguments transpired. Tempers flared. Good humor prevailed.

A group in the audience expressed their displeasure at the military use of the technology, apparently unaware that much of it originated in the military. Further discussion covered free access to telecommunications and technology, the status of women in technology, software patents, the ownership of cyberspace and the related terminology and whether or not developers should accept government funding. Regarding protection of intellectual property, Barlow remarked that William Gibson had once attempted to copyright the term "Eric Gullichsen", but without success.

The debate became especially lively when some in the audience challenged the propriety of military uses of VR technology, especially in the recent Persian Gulf war. Many on the panel felt that the audience members were somewhat naive, stating that this technology was largely responsible for Iraq's embarrassment, and the light casualties of the allies. Some on the panel viewed this use of technology as appropriate, others were upset by the military use of the science. Most panel members concurred that technology is basically neutral, and that the people who control it are responsible for what they do with it.

Some in the audience felt that the panel discussion was the high point of the conference, other found it a total waste of time. Regardless, it was good to see the academic community mixing it up a little.

Day Two
The dialogue continues

After she explained the modification of lunch plans due to unexpected rain (off the lawn, into the meeting room), the hardworking Conference Chair, Sandy Stone described her personal introduction to virtual systems and the subsequent founding of the sponsoring organization, the Group for the Study of Virtual Systems. For her purposes, Stone defines a virtual system as "any social group which is constituted around a technological object". This frames her research into the ways that virtual reality and other cyberspace iterations will effect culture and society.
EuroPARC

Three representatives of Xerox EuroPARC , made the next two presentations. Michael Travers and Alan Borning presented their virtual office research. They, in conjunction with MIT, have developed an interoffice system of real-time video conferencing, available on a casual basis. They have multiplexed voice and image information with data on a Sun workstation network. The highly experimental project is providing insight on the ways people work with, and against, such systems.

Matthew Chalmers then described work in which he is developing a system that analyzes and indexes documents among EuroPARC staffers. He is using multidimensional graphics to determine word associations and frequencies. The system is designed to aid memory, monitor progress and aid in classifying and retrieving documents. This working is very interesting, but is in the earliest stages.

Bad boys shake things up

The self-proclaimed "bad boys of cyberspace" made the next presentation. Chip Morningstar and Randall Farmer are the designers of the popular Habitat system, which is available on-line, at low cost, in Japan, and in certain areas of the US. They used their experience in building and attempting to control Habitat as the jump-off point for their analysis of cyberspace as the next frontier.

They like the metaphor of cyberspace as a colony, rather than a creation. They argue that while cyberspace is indeed created, "it is created by no one person or group: while each part of it is designed by somebody, the totality is not. It is the product of human action but not of human design."

Morningstar and Farmer created a bit of a fuss when they methodically discussed, and flippantly dismissed, several "popular ideas [they] frequently encounter in forums like this." They listed, then dramatically X-ed out the following terms/concepts; Consensual Hallucination (dangerous and misleading), The System Can Take a Different Form for Each Participant (communication is facilitated by shared environments), Cyberspace Must be Free of all Constraints (impossible), Seven Principles of Cyberspace (they hadn't read them yet).

They then discussed how point of view affects and modifies a cyberspace experience. In suggesting that the first person point of view so often accepted as the norm may not always be best, Morningstar explained that "it's one thing to see an animated character under your control get shot, stabbed and punched, and another thing entirely to see a virtual fist coming straight at your real nose". He provided a new model of four points of view, not corresponding directly to the classic literary points of view, which he feels will be useful in describing cyberspace interactions.

Politics in cyberspace

Lunch was highlighted by a demo of TiNi Alloy's tactile feedback system by Paul Cutt and of Habitat by Randy Farmer, who missed his own lunch in the process. Immediately following, Nichole-Natalie Stenger made an off-the-cuff comment urging that no techniques or technologies be excluded because they do not meet the expectations of certain observers. Responding to comments about demonstrations involving video, 2D and 3D graphics in their various guises, she pointed out that each virtual reality includes three components: technical, social and perceptual. The state of the art is not far enough advanced, she observed, to dismiss any technique simply because of the equipment it employs or the mix of components involved.

Donald Byrd of the State University of New York at Albany then presented his paper, entitled Cyberspace and Proprioceptive Coherence: a Proposal. In his talk, Byrd built an epistemological ladder from the Greek sophists to today's VR theorists.

Following Byrd, Pam Rosenthal, a programmer at the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco, explained the reality of Cyberspace: Utopian Workspaces in a Dystopian World. She described her workplace, where over one million financial transactions happen each day. (The actuality behind the virtual reality metaphor of which John Perry Barlow is so fond; "Where your money is right now".) Rosenthal explained that the clerks and programmers who have created and maintain this massive transaction load share a very real spatial hallucination: a multidimensional cyberspace of complex economic relationships.

James DerDerian, from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst continued the afternoon's presentations. He discussed Cyberwar, Video Games and the New World Order. His premise is that "we just fought the first cyberwar, and it won't be the last." His talk was liberally illustrated with images from TV broadcasts made during the Persian Gulf War. He made the point that this was a new type of war, a war of speed, a war of perception and a war of spectacle. The media was outflanked he said, and like many generals, was fighting the last war. In remarking on the most powerful images of the war - the logos of the TV networks' coverage - he emphasized that cyberspace, with its violent potential, needs to be dealt with politically as well as theoretically.

The final paper of the conference was presented by someone new to us, Dr. Barbara Joans, director of the Merritt Museum in Oakland, California. It was a challenging look at cyber-society. We feel that Dr. Joans' presentation, Cyberspace: A Wedding, is so important and thought provoking that we are reprinting it in its entirety.

In conclusion

The strength of this conference lay in its adept integration of the technical and the philosophical. It is important that we keep historical perspective and our philosophical roots in mind as we create brave new worlds. Sandy Stone and the conference committee did a fine job of balancing different viewpoints to provide a cohesive and valuable experience.

If the Second International Conference on Cyberspace had a failing, it was the lack of free time in which to interact with the others there. Everyone tried to make up for that at dinner, with table hopping taking on aspects of Olympic preliminaries. The evening concluded with an award to, and a gentle roasting of, Dr. Michael Benedikt, the highly appreciated architect of the First International Conference on Cyberspace.

Proceedings of the Second Conference on Cyberspace will be available later this year. The Third International Conference on Cyberspace will be held in Montreal, Quebec, May 22-24, 1992.

Contact: The Group for the Study of Virtual Systems, 408 459-4899