First time at Reboot, whose theme this year is "Human?", and very enjoyable. I must admit that I treated it more as a holiday than a conference, and hung out in the sun with people, ate many hotdogs sleeved in baguettes, talked shite, drank beer and fisherman's friends, and swore a lot. There are pictures and drawings.
I turned up slightly traumatised, having not quite finished Cormac McCarthy's harrowing but excellent The Road, a post-apocalyptic, post-humous, post-technology - post-everything - vision of hope, fear and death. Its desolation perhaps influenced me to keep my laptop shut for the three days, and I steered clear of the IM/Jaiku/Twitter background radiation.
Notes from some of the talks, my comments in brackets. I'd have to say that there weren't any epiphanic moments for me (possibly because I've been lucky enough to go to the pub many times with several of these presenters in the last year or so), but there was plenty of material to think on.
- Humans are willing to lose money to ensure fairness [this sounded optimistic: I thought there was plenty of research suggesting that we're willing to lose money to ensure that other do worse than us. But I might be wrong.]
- Emotions more efficient than intelligence [or as the evolutionary psych people might put it: we have stone age brains]
- People are not things, but flows [cf De Landa]
- 1.5 tonnes of matter passes through us yearly [Who was it that described humans as a pipe for food/shit/sex with legs attached?]
- If 98% of our atoms are replaced yearly, then how does this potato remember my childhood?
- dare/care/share -> attention -> sex, jobs, recognition
- [there follows a techno-utopian description of a return to nature, "the link age" etc, with a hint of Bruno/Viconian cycling of history, back to the hunter-gatherer mode]
- [So if he's prescribing that we increase the flow, should we merely eat more, shit more?]
Adam Arvidsson, Humanism 101 (presentation)
- philosophically humanism [henceforth H] starts with belief in human agency as distinct from Medieval view of destiny-centred world [he's going at 1,000 mph, must... write... faster...]
- humans/humanity to be considered different, [apart from nature, god etc]
- citizens to engage with common cause (res publica)
- individuals increasingly separated from a becoming distant god, applying reason and industry
- humans shape world (agency), consciousness shapes humans (Kant's a priori) [and sudden fear-flashback to university]
- humans qua humans equal; human development is a civ's goal
- relating to humans as subjects (humans as ends not means)
- Modern humanism: shape selves through choices; Sartre: existence before essence
- Empirical anti-H: Freud: ego is not the master - we're not in control of our systems; Marx: humans inside large, uncontrollable structures; Hegel: retrospective [flawed] rationalising; Foucault/Heidegger: man is contingent of/on/from social forces [contrast evol psychology]
- Moral anti-H: H exerts values upon individual = repressive
- Postmodern anti-H: [dead white males etc]
- Eco anti-H: Peter Singer: questions notion that humans should be considered different, in eco context
- Techno anti-H: infotech/biotech greatly complicates H
- Religious underpinning: Christ the universalist: "all who believe in me are saved"; fundamental essence/soul
- "technology is the way (the medium) that Being comes to language" (presents itself) [that's in the manner of Heidegger. Also of Derrida: tech includes language/writing, thus the possibility that language is the way we construct what is real to us]
- book/print-driven Christianity constructed a view of a rationalised, individualised human
- H today: "dividuals rather than individuals"; humanity not as a pre-given essence, but as a project/act. Magic/pragmatism. Acting always in conditions of fundamental insecurity [contingency?]
- thus H as a constructing project, therefore entities with human-ness
- [with the greatest of love and respect to my friends, I enjoyed this talk the most because it was new. Would love to see it expanded. However, would have also liked to have seen Jeremy Keith's Soul (presentation)]
Aram Bartholl, Online symbols in the offline world
- Quake boxes in real life are nice. Pixellated. [sandpaper for the eye]
- first person shooter glasses
- avatar names hovering above you [the helper ensuring they present correctly to the camera, thus to only one point of view in physical space]
- random screen pixel display [classic low-tech to simulate high-tech effort, with tea lights lighting and rotating beer can screens]
- [generally, humorous - projects seem to poke fun at online tropes]
Tom Armitage, Uncanny Valet (presentation)
- protocols documented [less useful], manners vague [more useful]
- UIs set precedent behaviourally [interesting; wanted more on this, and how we might deal with disfunctional behaviour!]
- anthropomorphic representations destroy users' sense of achievement - creepy bellboys [or by babying them]
- Nass - computers as social actors: people treat computers like people [Pace Nass, in speechrec telephony at Eckoh in 2001-3 we found that users want to know that they're talking to a computer, even if our speech recognition/synthesis was good enough to occasionally pass as human. That uncanny valley again.]
- 12:00 - Can't set the clock [at this point I am overcome with a vision of Tarmitage as Frank T.J. Mackey. Respect the clock. Tame the cu-, erm, -ltural manners of your app.]
- breaking frame is rude
- desktop manners are inappropriate for web
- tools adaptive [good], services prescriptive [not so good]
- [some of this stuff seems to build on Webb circa 2005 (no bad thing in my view: building-upon is important), but Tom has taken the material further and presented it well]
Matt Jones, Travel and serendipity and Dopplr
- "travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness" - Mark Twain
- "serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter"
- can't automate the future, have to declare it [I want a provision for the fuzziness of the future: I might go here. Probably on those dates. Would go there if X did too.]
- "While Twitter isn't our particular coral reef [quoting Winer], we are a creature in a hole on a reef" - Jones [guppies: oh hai]
- [Matt sounds more Welsh when he talks. In the future, we'll all want to be exotic and Welsh. Q&A very funny. He is a performer.]
Nicolas Nova, Hybridization, fusing, melting, coalescence and salmagundi (presentation)
- [got the schedule all wrong and missed all of this except...]
- elevators had a big effect upon the politics of vertical space. The premium space suddenly goes from the bottom to the top of the bldg
- train schedules and mental models [imagine a heartbeat graph, "value" on the y and time on the x]
- a spectrum from beat to hum: beat -> videos, blogs, photos, microblogs, presence -> hum
- [again, got the schedule all wrong and missed nearly all of this. Possibly due to being fairly sunburnt and dehydrated by this point.]
Marius Watz, Human lessons from generative art
- [We're looking at Stelarc-style bodymod art pictures whilst nibbling our salmon starter - it's weird]
- [Some very pretty visuals and animations and technically impressive, but it appears to end at process-as-process and spherical-space-looks-better aesthetics. In addition to the aesthetics-plus-process, I want there to be more ideas or narrative underpinning the project or some context/meaningful design embedded in the aesthetics, because the former seems insufficient - or so I've found in my own art work anyway. Many Rebooters absolutely loved Marius's work.]
Sascha Pohflepp, Blinks and buttons
- Tim Hawkinson, Secret Sync [secret clocks]
- camera ubiquity [we are a camera]
- [try polaroid frames on non-polaroid pics]
- archives of experience, exposed
- buttons are machine sensors for the human will [nice reversal, see also XXX in Bleecker's talk]
- Buttons/blind camera gets a picture taken by someone else somewhere else at the same time, but it takes a while to arrive [the received picture as a hyper-invested emotional gift, a souvenir/token, an aide to remembering the moment qua moment]
- Mediamatic's Katharina showed a phone [when?] that turns to find the nearest, but unidentified, friend
- [Pohflepp has an aesthetic of hiding the workings, presenting the product/artobject in a retro-futurist design...]
Marko Ahtisaari on Attention (and Blyk)
- mobile email the most interruptive media (if we're considering how interruptive mobile ads might be) [sadly, he's right: CrackBerries force you to take responsibility for your own actions, how much work and life leak into each other, and many of us find this hard]
- service marketing: users sharing in the value
- what takes attention time: clock, text, call
- Blyk ads will be rich in interaction, not in pixels [understandably vague on biz model details]
Dan Dixon's Quantum Mechanics and Web Design (presentation) I'm very annoyed I missed.
Julian Bleecker, New Interaction Rituals (presentation)
- prehistory of the keyboard: Gilbreths (studied bricklayers, trying to mitigate fatigue)
- Gilbreths' Standard Motions 1919: select, grasp [sounds Heideggery], position, assemble, rest to avoid fatigue, etc
- Apollo 11: astronauts had minimal screens/keyboards so memorised tasks and the inputs they required [cf ChrisH: more buttons on mobile handsets = more sales. Fact.]
- Dan O'Sullivan: humans as seen by a computer: an eyeball and two ears for input and fingers [cf Bartholl above, and I am widget, an inadvertent copy]
- new interaction rituals ... need new computational practices
- how to "expand" the button gesture?
Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity
- 31 art projects, 30 transport [toread!]
- complexity of systems/networks is growing [is it? or is it that we want to map/model more? that we fetishise maps and visualisation?]
- CIA world factbook [has neat words-on-sticks infovis]
Christian Schade's Posthuman I managed to miss whilst collapsed in the sun. Again.
Leisa Reichelt, Ambient Intimacy (presentation)
- cute friendly bee swarms [stinging us with their love, before disappearing forever, leaving us starving and living out McCarthy's The Road]
- AmbInt messages: background, low intensity, warm, short shelf life, personal
- who's inside your monkeysphere? [= sphere of multi-dimensional, ie properly meaningful, contacts]
- exposing more surface area for others to connect with
- Gregory cartoon: "I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to pointless, incessant barking" [a legion of Rebooters look up from their incessant Jaikuing to laugh. I am cynical aren't I? Did you read this far anyway?] [cf other dog/language: We3 GUD DOG; on the internet no-one knows you're a dog; Vexorg, destroyer of worlds]
Matt Webb, Products are people too, keynote (presentation)
- [in the Stewart Brand 6-S layers diagram, what do the thickness of line and freq of arrow mean specifically?]
- perturbation theory - but maybe we can't simply iterate to a solution by starting with utility
- Vac man [still gets laughs]
- [It is so hot that Rebooters are dying in their seats - it's a miracle he was able to stay coherent. Too hot to take notes, I stop and just enjoy the S&W flow.]
OK, enough notes: I am but human.
[With edits for clarity and added linky.]
Hi Rod, stumbled across your capsule review of my talk via my blog referrers. I like your quote "...it appears to end at process-as-process and spherical-space-looks-better aesthetics.", will have to remember that.
You're right, there is no narrative or explicit ideas underpinning my work. My interest is in formal systems and kinetic behaviors as compositions. Not everybody's cup of tea, I guess.
Posted by: Marius Watz | June 11, 2007 at 12:04 PM
I'm glad you like process-as-process but of course I now feel like I've been too blunt in my comment. I guess I tend to take "art" and "design" and pull them apart fairly brutally, requiring different things from each (and the inherent problems in both those labels and in any binary art/design opposition there being totally acknowledged...).
Meant to catch up with you afterwards and say hello - next time perhaps.
Posted by: rodcorp | June 11, 2007 at 12:42 PM
No need to worry about bluntness, it's rare to find direct commentary of any kind on blogs.
I don't think what you're talking about is a question of art vs. design. It seems to me that you're looking for something in the work that would resonate with your own expectations, essentially that the work should carry "meaning". My work doesn't - or at least not in a classical sense. But then neither does a Malevitch or a Rothko.
So I would tend to think that my work simply doesn't do it for you. Which I actually don't have a problem with at all.
Let's hook up next time and talk about it over a beer!
Posted by: Marius Watz | June 11, 2007 at 03:10 PM
Jyri's beam-hum spectrum is slide 72 of his presentation, here:
http://www.slideshare.net/jyri/microblogging-tiny-social-objects-on-the-future-of-participatory-media
Posted by: rodcorp | June 17, 2007 at 09:21 AM