User:UBIQsound/sandbox

Content Blackout
Content Blackout was a small tech-startup based in Brooklyn, NY, from 2009 to 2011. Though most prominent for their social media application the Perfect Human Application, the company moonlighted as audio engineers and consultants for the performing arts venue Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM link). They were acquired by Klout in 2011.

History
In 2006, Isaac Weinstein, Sam Heartfield, and Jeremy Berger decided to turn their drunken laments into a profit. The group had met during their freshman year at NYU, where all three studied sound engineering. After graduation, they founded Content Blackout, a small company devoted to creating new media tools that aimed to inject critical discourse into function. In 2011, Klout saw them as a potential threat to their social media application, and acquired the company. Isaac now works as Senior Engineer at Klout, but the other two men are nowhere to be found — they seem to have fallen off the face of the traceable universe.

The Perfect Human Application
The Perfect Human Application (PHA) was a social networking application that tracked and aggregated the quantity of user interactions made on smart-devices and social media accounts in order to generate real-time statistical information on a user’s functioning, putting an emphasis on the quantity of interactions, not their quality. Novel for it’s era, the PHA calculated a competitive Perfect Human Score, which allowed a user to track his or her progress toward perfection, i.e., a greater (or lesser) quantity than yesterday. More importantly, the PHA allowed users to compare their perfection to that of friends and family as well as to a greater community of users. Through this process of scoring, the application metaphorically turned the user into a set of dynamic data, making it easy for users to see just how perfect they were, and even easier for them to gauge how perfect they could become.

User interactions were divided into six distinct “Categories of Perfect Functioning,” with each category representing a different grouping of online actions made by the user throughout a 24-hour period. The Content Blackout team jokingly named these categories after the offline goals of their collegiate friends. For example, “Communication Skills: Texting is the New Hugging” was an aggregate of all the minutes users spent talking on their phone, as well as any text or voice mail they sent using their phone. The process reflected the offline importance of the networking and interviewing skills they needed to hone as recent college alums. “Looks: It’s What’s on the Outside that Counts” measured the number of photos a user was posted in online, referencing the misleading beauty that a flattering angle and good lighting can produce.

Each of the six categories tracked a set of online actions and were tallied to calculate a total Perfect Human Score, which was then presented in the application’s interface as both numerical and graphical (pie-charts) data.

Influence
The application was Inspired by Danish film director Jorgen Leth’s 1967 short film The Perfect Human, and aims to update Leth’s examination of human perfection. By critically examining the measures of perfection apparent in contemporary society, both the film and the application question the parameters of perfection that drive the existential nature of constructing self-hood.

In the film, Leth, simultaneously narrator and objective scientist, investigated how the perfect human of 1967 functions — how the beautiful Danish man and woman adhered to superficial societal ideals of perfection in the 1960s. After enumerating a number of “perfect functioning” activities, the movie’s focus pivoted during a “very delicious” dinner, when the woman mysteriously disappeared. Her absence provoked a strange turn of events. Leth narrated: “What is the perfect human thinking? … About the food he eats, happiness, love, death?” And to answer, the young man, while chewing, contemplated: “Why is joy so quickly done? …Why did you leave me? Why are you gone?”

With this line of existential questioning, Leth was no longer investigating the qualities of perfection, but rather asking: What is perfect(ly) human? He urged us to consider the universal, timeless, and existential themes that make humans human. The smiling, lighthearted, handsome young man is — regardless (and it is this word “regardless” that makes the word “perfect” so perfect) of the era he lives in, the accumulation of his grooming, his age, his experience, his knowledge — his lack of knowledge, his confusion and the resulting loneliness. This confusion stems from the unknowable questions of existence, from the desire to understand the stand alone “I” that he is. As a result, he longs for companionship and acceptance among others as a validation of ‘self’ in the face of inevitable death. And so, as the perfect human must, he asks questions whose answers, if they even existed, would offer no comfort.

The PHA commented on this quest. It turned this existential questioning into a number — a number that has meaning only in relation to other numbers. And though each number represents a possible sating of the need for validation, the number is distanced from its meaning and the potential for companionship that it represents. As the user would only be interested in his or her score, in winning the game, he or she would forget that on the other side of the number is an interaction with another user — another human. Leth’s young hero, the perfect man, revealed his perfection by his fear of loneliness and constant questioning. The theme that defined us in the 1960s is unveiled in the PHA, by the application’s ability to bring to the forefront the difficulties of negotiating “real” companionship in the digital landscape.

By tracking and quantifying a user’s connected actions, the application updates the desire of Leth’s perfect human for companionship. And in imitating Leth, the application doesn’t offer the user simply a quantification of acceptance, but the opportunity to confront the fear of loneliness and death in our tethered world.

The Perfect Human Application was a facetious comment on the ritual of coping with the existential fear of being alone, and how we construct value about our self-worth in a landscape evermore drastically shaped by digital media. It reveals an ideal user whose focus is on quantity not quality, on scoring rather than experiencing, thereby conflating companionship and solitude. The perfect human application user — in an attempt to understand herself relative to others, in an attempt to define her identity in society — focuses only on the numbers, and her relative score. The application mocks our pleasure as we receive more and more comfort from the number of friends we collect and curate on Facebook and other social media sites.

The Weeping iPhone
When Klout acquired them in 2011, they had just begun to prototype the Weeping iPhone, a series of video alerts that would update users of their poor scoring. After much user testing, it seemed that users of the Perfect Human Application were put off by the complex matrix of scoring. And in an era when we expect our smartphones to take responsibility for so much of our responsibilities, why should users have to check the application to retrieve their results? So the Content Blackout crew decided it would only make sense for the smartphone to be responsible for monitoring and responding appropriately to users’ ever-changing scores. Though this update never reached the public, it both embraces and mocks our fear of expression emotional vulnerability. We expect too much from out iPhones, it suggests. Could we really expect them to take the role of identifying and expressing emotion? Especially when we ourselves have such a hard time with that task? Had it been released, the Weeping iPhone would have been a notification system consisting of 30-second animations triggered by extreme scores from the Perfect Human Application.

Characterized by their disruptive nature, these “notification” videos would interrupt the user’s ability to use the phone. For example, if a user’s Perfect Human Score dropped below the 10th percentile, the phone would assume its user was feeling imperfect, unloved, and worthless: like a loser. It would automatically play a 30-second video in which a woman’s voice would tauntingly chant: Loser, loooooser, who do you think you are? You are nothing but one big fat loser. Meanwhile a collection of Apple “x-in-a-bubble” icons would accumulate in mounting piles at the bottom of the screen. If low scores persisted over several days, the phone would take on the burden of expressing the depression caused by the isolation of imperfection. No longer able to function normally, the phone would play the sound of a human wail in tandem with adjusting its brightness, as if sending out an SOS to its (hopefully nearby) owner.

If triggered, these videos would have to play through to finish, thereby imposing on the surrounding environment the emotional distress coming out of this machine, most likely to the dismay and embarrassment of its owner. On the surface, the Weeping iPhone act turned the phone into an object with needs, prompting the owner to attend to it and to his or her “perfection.” the Weeping iPhone’s short videos ridicule the fervency with which we attend to our cell phones, and the reliance that ensues.

Significance
In retrospect, it is clear that the ventures of Content Blackout into new media design were mocking our social entanglement with the digital. The Perfect Human Application and its complex matrix of scoring forced users to reconsider the importance they gave their iPhone and the interactions and relationships it enabled. And the Weeping iPhone alerts would have compelled unfeeling users to turn away from their devices as they rolled their eyes and waited for the wailing to stop. Smartphones have unexpectedly finagled their way into the most personal and intimate moments of our lives. These videos, in conjunction with the PHA, rather ridiculously suggest that if we have given away so many of our parameters of self-worth to social media and our connected actions, we may as well give over our ability to express our most vulnerable emotional states as well.

UBIQ
UBIQ, short for ubiquitous, is an anonymous sound artist. His work includes public performances, or “soundings,” in which he uses existing sound infrastructures to give voice to new media technologies. UBIQ's works call upon the public to recognize and accept the sounds of connectivity as symbols of our growing entanglement with new communication and technology infrastructures. He is asking us to pause and come together in harmony — not as individuals, but as group alongside machine — to listen and celebrate, and to consider how we can better harmonize with these devices, not as sounds, but as new infrastructures in our lives.