rodcorp

Timo Arnall/Immaterials and Improving Reality

Notes from the Immaterials show and the Improving Reality conference, Brighton, Sep 2013.

(Immaterials: Light painting WiFi project by Timo Arnall)

Immaterials

• the show by Timo and Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen, Jack Schulze and Matt Jones at Lighthouse is put together well - beautiful images and films that make visible the RFID, Wifi, GPS and machine sensor fields we walk through and bathe in.
• The Fischli & Weissy Nearness film with Schulze is delightful. The early Experiments in Field Drawing. (Confession: it's impossible to review something with Timo, Schulze and Jones in it with any objectivity.)
• The faint wobbliness in the light lines in Light Painting WiFi - the experimenter's unreliable hand.
• Tiniest quibble: the stills from Wireless in the World fall slightly short of the rest, by appearing decorative.
• The twitchy object rec algorithms in Robot Readable World.
• The recent Satellite lamp is beautifully sputnik. 
• Timo's background to the show.
• [and this is how much I like it!]

Timo's talk at Improving Reality

• Technology: the frictionless and seamless glowing, slidey, textureless glass rectangles. Little of the technology is apprehendable or graspable (think of Heidegger: ready to/present at hand).
• The importance of making the invisible visible (of showing the seams) so that we can understand the tech, the system. The difficulty of the same, because seamlessness is so desirable and seductive.
• And yet in our experience technology can often be a lightning rod for very human concerns (as if an antenna receiving and amplifying). When you deploy a new application on new mobile phones to an organisation, human questions are immediately raised: do we have to use this? Does it track us? Is this why X lost their jobs? 
• So the technology might be invisible, but it can also make human concerns visible.
• Light painting - the photographic technique - came from employee time and motion studies
• user Stockholm syndrome (Sterling?) - the act of becoming dazzled by user considerations/needs and forgetting the other parts of the jigsaw, eg materiality
• Julian Oliver et al, Critical Engineering Manifesto.

Keller Easterling

• Extra-statecraft
• Dense talk - a sense that there's some substantial stuff to unpack here, but hard to follow. (Performative exemplification? Or I am stupid.)
• Contemporary architecture's power-ideological bias, cartoons unfolding in time.
• How to un-develop, to subtract architecture?
• "ESC researches global infrastructure as a medium of polity. Some of the most radical changes to the globalising world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of infrastructure [... infrastructure] generates emergent new constellations of national, international, intergovernmental and transnational administration and generates undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate it" - from Extrastatesraft.

Frank Swain

• Entertaining on the fictions in maps. 
• Though of course all maps are fictional to some extent. Though of course so is reality.

The second session, Re-imagining reality, was energetically hosted by Simon Ings. What a shame though that we didn't hear from him directly - his books (The Eye, Dead Water, etc) are excellent.

Paul Graham Raven

• Raven's An Introduction To Infrastructure Fiction.
• Infrastructure fictions, a manifesto rather than a literary mode - explicitly a call to "think about the box", not to write, er, more stories about bridges
• Intent: lightbulbs were invented to sell electricity - source? (related?).
• Resist "flat-pack futures" - Scott Smith.
• A preoccupation with engineering ("how", goal) vs design/art ("why").

Maja Kuzmanovic

• Baffling. 
• "'patabotanists" was good. "Prehearsal" however sounds like "pretending".

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg

• Food for astronauts is always constrained to flat, light high energy seaweed and other nutridusts, but what feeds their psyche? 30 tonnes of food needed to sustain a team to Mars and back.
• GM bacteria that change colour - as health diagnostic. Bacteria-tinted shit. "As someone with crohns disease. Shit as an interface would would be super useful".
• Human foot-cheese bacteria cheese (same bacterium as certain cheese so why not make it into real cheese), armpit bacteria cheese.
• Why is it that everything we can separate from or expel from the body revolts us as soon as it is separated? Shit etc obviously, but think of hair and saliva. And even when it is identical to something else - foot-cheese bacteria - it remains no less revolting.
• bacterial-mediated fruit that grow on electricity rather than sunlight
• Is synthetic biology part of/apart from nature?
• Questions about design vs art, science vs culture, science vs non-science

Tobias Revell

• Get your futurism bingo cards ready!
• "Design can be a political movement [...] technology can be a territory" - now when stuff like this comes from my own keyboard it is a string of shining pearls, but when someone else says it in a talk I just hear reckony air - ah, such is the hypocritical tyranny of the spectator in a hot, dark room. Sorry.
• His 88.7: Stories From The First Transnational Traders was very good.

Tom Armitage/Jeff Noon, The Literary Operator

• Charming story machine by @infovore and @jeffnoon: you stroke a book with its puck and it Burroughs into the text, printing you a voucher.
• Eg this from Chandler's The Big Sleep: "Our breaths met and mingled, our eyes were slaty [...] Canino look like a clock".

Farida Vis, Georgina Voss, Paula Le Dieu, Justin Pickard

• Unfortunately the improving reality of life intervened, and I missed the third part.

There's no reason why Improving Reality cannot simultaneously appeal to realism and attempt to augment/transcend it, but even so I am slightly uncomfortable about the conference's name. 

Cruising above both show and conference is the invisible drone-father James Bridle, and in the luminous clouds above, Ben Cerveny and Kevin Slavin watch over us and keep us real.

250m between

An October 2008 revision to the tube map adds a few distance markers to the map. It's 250m between White City on the Central line and Wood lane on the Hammersmith & City. And to the right, 100m between Shepherd's Bush Central line and overland. There's a similar thing at Canary Wharf Jubilee line: it's 200m from Canary Wharf DLR and 150m from Heron Quays DLR. I particularly like the angle they're drawn at - like an elegant version of the walklines I was trying out a long time ago.

But this isn't quite so successful: there's 100m between West Hampstead overland and West Hampstead Jubilee line, and the latter also has a comment that West Hampstead Thameslink is 200m away from the tube. The tube map used to simply show the tube and overland stations as a single node on the map, which I think was better.

Previously: Tube Map with walklines showing when it's quicker to walk. See also Walk the Tube to get healthy, Walkers Tube Map and Adjacent stations.

The Underwater Death Trap (c.1978)

The small schooner chugged away at sea. We had to go carefully because of the great Barrier reef up the eastern side of Queensland, New South Wales and more parts of Australia the largest Island in the world. Suddenly we struck the reef itself then we got our diving kit and dived 10ft down. We clung on, I saw great big thick pieces of seaweed that looked like tentackles We both grabbed one piece each and pulled as hard as we could. The "seaweed" as to our horror turned into an angry octopus we turned tail and swam for our lives. to the boat. We jumped in to the boat which immediately started to sink faster than ever so we hopped on to the coral which the Octopus was using to climb out. He got Jims (My Friend) legs and arms so I got an air tank and whacked the octopus on the Head. The Octopus looked dizzy and it sank slowly back to its tropical home in the sea.

When we had dived down in to the deep I saw a giant pole about sixteen cms or eight inches wide we found it was the mast of a ship we went lower down we swam to an old door it opened without much difficulty. The ship was near a chasm. In the room where the old Oak door was opened it looked like the Captains cabin some clothes had been parted to shreds lower down we found some more cabins and the kitchen we both opened an Old Oak door which was quite hard to do so. giant containers when we prised them open to our surprise contained gold! Some bars as long as our arms or legs but mostly they were about 22cms long we went to the surface and found we were about quarter of a mile away from an island I reckoned to be about a good mile long.

Soon we were getting quite used to living on the island we caught shellfish to eat and sometimes even octopus or eel. There was shark-bay at the bottom which was rather unusual and lookout-point at the top of the Island and quite a few rivers near to the middle and to the bottom and forest right across the top of the Island. I had made a tree-house  near the top on the eastern side of the Island. I liked the treehouse so did Jim. One day we were attacked by Pirates they swarmed up on the bottom  of the island so we dug traps which were covered  with leaves brittle bamboo sticks. And then we bombarded them with logs After they had been "logged" we bombarded them with boulders and then they fled and never came back. Then a few days later a container ship appeared over the horizon. We set a fire to attract them then the ship came to the island and we all helped to bring the gold up and we all went back to England.

(This is somewhere between 1978 and 1979 I think, and the Willard Price/underwater/adventure/danger theme continues - previously: The Deadly Battle. Jim is perhaps borrowed from Jim Hawkins.)

The Deadly Battle (c.1978)

The old Octopus came from his cave and fish swam away. But the great eel waited to become king of the coral old killer the octopus saw the great eel. He darted to one side and attacked a tentackle then old killer turned around and deceided to squeeze the great eel. I in my diving sauser found it Interesting then I saw the two fighting deceided to creep up to them.

I slid up behind a big rock or was it? My rock the old giant turtle moved off in to darkness. I had to move quickly now the pirhanas joined in on the fun. The Octopus got a bite and was bleeding he did not give up. The eel was flatter but wide he was struggling. In a few minutes I was behind a large clump of seaweed as two killer whales and some sharks moved in to it.

The eel had been devoured and the pirhanas, sharks and Octopus went away.

(This is somewhere between 1978 and 1979 I think, and I must have been putting Willard Price books together with Commando comics. Posted to remind myself that I need to find the ability to write without burying plot underneath layers of performative ornament. See also The Underwater Death Trap.)

I'm not angry

I was walking in an unseeing cloud of frustration after a tiring work day, but when I got to the tube station I was humbled.

I step into the lift and a man there says "Is this going down?"
"Don't know. Should be," I reply curtly, without any warmth.
"I'm not angry. I can't see. I'm blind," he says, though perhaps he saw enough of the flush on my face as I softened. I try not to wince at my own embarrassment and the lift descends.

There's a silence until I say, "Can I help you at the bottom?"
He turns to me, and his chameleon eyes fix me uncertainly. They waver as if behind thick glasses and for a moment I have an image of Joyce's dimming sight. There's a shiny tracheotomy scar in the V of his rugby shirt. "I'm very disabled. I'm blind," he says.
"Where are you heading?," I ask over the sound of the lift doors opening at the bottom.
"I'm not angry. South."

"OK, here we are. Would you like to take my arm?"
"I'm not angry. No," he says. We get out of the lift and turn left, and my hand hovers palm up, to guide and support if required. He walks slowly, lurching a bit. He stops. "I had a terrible accident. Smashed my brains."
He takes another step and then stops again, turning to me. "I'm disabled... can't see."
"Yes..."
"I was in a hospital in Spain for five years. They saved my life," he explains.
"Oh."
"I'm not angry...," he says, an explanation and a self-preserving ritual. And then he surprises me: "I was a stuntman. I had an Oscar nomination."
"A nomination for what?," I say quite loudly, because a train is approaching. He holds up a hand defensively.
"I'm not angry. I'm... Die Another Day," he says, eyebrows raised. The train is just about to arrive at the platform.
"Wow, the Bond film. Brilliant!" I say, and then quickly, to cover my insensitivity, "Which station are you going to?"
"I'm not angry", as if to say so why are you?, with a little indignation. The doors of the train are still open and we're just stepping onto the platform. "Euston. Is it this train?"
I look. "Yes, this train..."
"Quickly," he murmurs.
"... goes to Euston, but...," I say, because the doors are going to close any second. He doesn't hear me say but because the train is beeping its doors-closing alarm and he's taking a step forward and up into the doorway. The doors start to close but he holds them open easily, and then the doors are pushed back and open by arms as strong and sure as if they were pistons in the door's folding mechanism.

When the doors close again I'm turning away, but have just enough time, through the scratched-translucent panes of glass in the doors, to glimpse him starting to speak to a woman in the carriage.

Larger

A tall man in his late forties stepped carefully onto the Northern Line yesterday evening. He was about 6' 8" and broad, large enough that he had to stand right in the centre of the carriage, and even then he had his head bowed slightly. He wore a black suit and some black Puma trainers that looked like they were size 15 or 16. His stance was controlled, as if he knew the damage his size could do if he moved thoughtlessly, and the averted head was the only thing that stopped him from being physically intimidating. In his left fist was a plastic bag, in which could be seen a packaged ream of foolscap paper.

Crowd psychology: evacuation behaviour patterns

Evacuation

A few weeks ago I went to Heathrow to meet up with and see off my beloved aunt and uncle, who'd been visiting the UK from Melbourne. I got the tube from North London, they a taxi from Harefield. But I didn't see them because Terminal 3 was evacuated due to a bomb scare. I hung around in the crowd in case I managed to see them afterwards, and started thinking about the behavioural patterns below (disclaimer: obviously, I'm not a psychologist), some of which seem equally applicable to workplace situations.

Stages of acceptance and information desire

Disbelief: waiting to be told several times in case the officer and tannoy announcements aren't really serious. The choruses of "tcha" and "gah!" and "typical" that progress through the crowd. (Is there a Kübler-Ross progression of denial, rage and later acceptance at work here?) There's an irritable obedience, as if the inconvenience is deliberately and personally targeted at us. And that obedience is minimal  - "No, keep moving back please, further back".

There's a profound information need: people want a lot of info and context, immediately and continuously. Desire to manage/minimise uncertainty/danger (and to be reassured); it's also a participatory voyeurism. If we're going to be held up and miss the plane, we want it to be something good rather than a false alarm (also because this legitimises the officials).

Authority and gossip

Officials should be omniscient: we assume they all have total information. Police and officials need an air of calm authority - they should and would never say "I don't know what the situation is". That they're bristling with kit and guns helps. But where there's an insufficiency of information, gossip and rumour necessarily emerge spontaneously. A police officer turns to another and murmurs, and we strain like night-time deer to catch and sift the sounds. News provision: many of us call or text friends to share news, boast of hardship or solicit sympathy.

Copying: if one officer stands at the border answering questions, then they'll get a steady stream of people all asking what's going on - we lurch forward, twitching that we might not be left out of the loop. (Here is where a constant broadcast of information, either over a tannoy or via mobile, would be useful. Except that often there is no news to convey.)

An hour in, there's a sound exactly halfway between a gun shot/explosion and something heavy crashing into a large metal object like a skip. Perhaps this is the destruction of the suspect package. It's an obvious sound, but none of the police react to it at all.

Herding and positioning

Herding/clustering of people: together generally. In areas of perceived value: closer to terminal (ultimate goal, minimal effort), closer to the action (immediate goal: info - again, the psychological benefits - curiosity/rubbernecking, gossip, privilege), out of rain, near seats (comfort for longer waits),  local gatherings: families, friends, people that are identified as similar. Is there an unconsciously ethnic/sociodemographic herding happening? Grudging retreat, as a herd, if a valuable area is devalued by police officers pushing people further back.

We're shooed further away from the terminal by the police, into a space usually used only for the regulated movement of cars and buses - on foot it's a no-place, the interzone. We're held here as if this vehicle corridor is a real place, outside a processing space attached to the aerial corridor.

An awareness that when the evacuation is over there will be a rush: hence positioning is important. The Dunkirk spirit is very mild at best. We're too put out by the delay, and too aware that when movement is restored, it's a zero-sum game at the bottlenecks. That awareness is like a background hum.

Advantage and prestige

The hum, that awareness - a crowd throb. Heightened awareness of factors that confer power, privilege, position or prestige. When some people move forward it's contagious: no-one wants to be demoted in position. We watch the officials closely for indicators. We're gradually jostling for position.

There's a casual swaggering from those that are official or quasi-official (seen it all before... I am apart from the crowd...) - they have a carefree world-weariness as a defence mechanism: I'm good enough that can afford not to pay attention or look alert. As a counter to this ploy, I find myself immediately imagining offering help to the police on the dubious credentials that my company does some IT for police services - it's a clear desire to separate myself from the herd.

Correspondingly, a just-perceptible hierarchy is being expressed amongst the officials: passengers < airport staff < staff with badges < staff with uniforms < police < police with small guns or in small vehicles < police with big guns/in big vehicles < specialist police with unusual uniforms or sniffer dogs < the unseen police commanders in the radios...

Taxiing and takeoff

A pair of false starts: staff go back into the building, but many of us assume that passengers can move too. These movements starts others off too. Then, an after shock: as we prepare to head back in, there are police radio rumours of another device, and we are held up another ten minutes. (How many of us are thinking of Ballard, and casting off our raiments of civilisation and rising up in a tide against the thin blue line of police and airport officialdom? Or worse, that we'll never leave, and will become tribes of T3.)

Later, as the all-clear is confirmed, there's the extraordinary sound of a thousand luggage trolleys setting off and accelerating across rough tarmac all at once: a stampede.

Notes on Reboot9: human?

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.

Tor Nørretranders, keynote

• 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]

Jyri Engestrom, Microblogging

• 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.]

Stamen - Data n(arr)atives

Notes from Stamen's About Our Stuff talk by Eric Rodenbeck, Michal Migurski and Tom Carden, 14 May 07 at the National Maritime Museum, London. Organised by NMM's Foe Romeo.

My own comments and asides in [square brackets].

Data viz is a medium.
Data viz is not primarily tooling, technology or methodology.

They work with live/vast/deep data, but increasingly the live.

Earlier projects:

• EricR's history at Quokka: sailing has clearly been like most sports for years now - the data and its understanding/visualisation happens outside the athlete and their immediate tools-of-trade, in a support boat, [or in the F1 pits, or at the side of the pitch.]
• Graffiti archaeology: layers
• Moveon: helping the community get a live sense of itself
• Flickr/Mappr: use of tags to anonymously aggregate information - participants don't know each 0ther. But once they learn of aggregating tools they may change their behaviour (eg users deliberately adding more tags)
• [there's a strong a thread here about making an activity understandable by making it visible, turning it into a graspable story. Data narratives.]

Digg R&D:

• wanted more distance from their data in order to be able to see it clearly (and act upon its stories). "mile high view".
• Digg Swarm: mesmeric realtime data viz: stories surrounded by dancing, moving users.
• [interesting visual metaphor: they look like sunflowers in which the petals - the users, round yellow dots - are also the bees pollinating the flower]

Cabspotting:

• With Scott Snibbe, [whose Myrmegraph is still a delight 8 years on]
• background layer of aggregated historical data building up, foreground layer of live activity.
• [GPS is good for stuff that remains outdoors most of the time: vehicles]
• When Cabs changed their GPS timings and tech methods, the viz broke slightly: eg 1 GPS fix per 3 min (instead of per 1 min) suddenly meant that the street grids itself (the right angles) was no longer being described.or broke completely: becomes completely meaningless [though still attractive to look at].
• [So there's a need here to fit the viz to the data. Don't show the street map underneath if the data on it doesn't fit. Also: be more aware of what services (the infoviz) depend on the data underneath]

Oakland crime maps:

• pulling together data from public sources, releasing functionality part by part [this is a great project, and we must see whether it can be done in the UK/Eu too]
• modest maps
  • Flash code to pull in map elements from other providers eg Google, MS etc. BSD licence.
  • Great for projects that need higher level of control than Google provides. Not so great for getting-going-really-fast.
• side effects: start to expose patterns of policing behaviour: eg prostitution is policed in periodic sweeps rather than a background no-broken-windows activity
• interoperation: SF and Oakland refer to same crimes with different names [no-one involved in inter-agency criminal justice and policing will be particularly surprised at this]

Indiana 911 service:

• live viz shows which call centres in Indiana are taking 911 emergency calls [surprised that one state has seems to have 20+ call centres, even though it's 6+m ppl]
• One metropolitan call centre has so much activity that some visualisations aren't able to handle it - a heatmap had this one call centre literally eclipsing others. (a problem of both scaling and viz type).
• important: showing clarity/meaning in the data they already have, not offering a predictive capability.
• [this project looks really impressive, but I imagine selling clarifiying-your-existing-data can be hard.]

Varying precision [a topic close to my heart recently]:

• "odessa" vs "odessa, texas, zipcode, latlong" - use the input to zoom in but how to express the degree of confidence?
• Oakland: literally blurring the data points. Also showing social shadows or "residual hauntings": something that implies a trailing impact historically after a crime incident [so this is a metaphor, right? It's not a description of some measured quanta of social impact, but a metaphor for it - it reminds us that there are downstream effects.]
• Cabspotting: because the Bay bridge is on two decks, they have good GPS data for the top, E->W deck (the taxis follow the line of the bridge, but on the lower, W->E deck the taxis appear to shortcut across the water as there are fewer GPS data points recorded to connect up.

[So there's a sense there that when we step back [oh look! Another metaphor - they're everywhere aren't they?] from "raw data" to something more like an abstracted, approximation visually we can sometimes better understand it. A visual metaphor. Become less precise in order to get a better view. If metaphors are useful for understanding or for decision support when do they go too far and become mere ornament?]

[This is an interesting area. We're currently working on how to present information in ways that don't immediately break when you mix consistent and precise data together with inconsistent and vague data. The other day I described this to Eric as "making apps that were all about the 'probably'."]

Other stuff:

• How much data do we need for it to be meaningful? Personal relevance/knowledge of the domain/locale means often very little.
• communicability: making urls still relevant and pinpoint even when user pan-drags a map.
• notion of increasing visualisation literacy/expectation
• Carden: viz serves the data; viz as a way into the data, not the end result of the data.

[Smart guys, and great to meet them.]

'If the route': The Great Learning of London [A Taxi Opera], 9 Mar 2007

I have come to an art performance with Karl, who's just got back to town after three months home in New Zealand. ‘If the Route:’ The Great Learning of London is a collaboration between artist Beatrice Gibson and musician Jamie McCarthy. It's also a radio work. It's based on The Knowledge, the navigational rite-of-passage that all licensed cabbies must learn, and the mnemonic techniques used to learn it.

A complex and fascinating mathematics of the everyday, The Knowledge involves learning 320 routes or runs mapped within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. Traveling approximately 26,000 miles across the city on Honda C90's, knowledge students memorize a total of 30,000 streets. ‘Calling over’ entails that after the completion of the days run[s], students must call them out, reciting them out loud. Partners form to call over runs to one another, using recital and repetition as a means to remember the city. Knowledge Point on Caledonian road, one of several taxi universities students may attend and whose curriculum includes a series of mnemonic devices to aid in their endeavor, is filled with pairs of men and increasingly the odd woman aurally reciting sets of directions to one another. Entering it is to be surrounded by the city fragmented and auralized into sets of sentences and street names, a veritable symphony performing the city as text.

The map that comes with The Great Learning hints at Tom Phillips's 20 Sites N Years, probably because it too is circular rather than the cartographic rectangular norm. Of course taxi fans should read Will Self's The Book of Dave. I didn't see Dave Rudman in the audience, though he is mentioned in their documentation.

The process of elevation to cabbiehood is fascinating: first, the students drive the routes, learning the world through physical activity: mapping, repetition. Then, there's a mnemonic conversion (more repetition) of that physical/visual learning, because the world must exist as routes remembered and envisioned on a map held in the student's mind before, thirdly, it (and the student) can exist in the world, executing the routes as a driver.

The performance bit of the project is at the Studio Voltaire in Clapham. There are two types of people present: the Knowledge students/performers and the families, and the art/music folk. (We might call them: drivers and passengers.) A family member is loudly eating from a bag of Monster Munch, earning her glares from the trendy art types that she remains oblivious to.

The performers are paired, and ask each other to "call over" a route. Some pairings are characterised by a jocular competitiveness, others are muted and almost fearful. Some are clearly wooshers, students who call a run so fast that it can't be followed. Whether this is confidence or the concealment of unKnowledge is hard to say. Some of these students are in agonies remembering their routes, and look to the skies or clasp their heads are they try dredge up the call points in order. Other calmly look into the middle distance, intoning metronomically. Sometimes this turn-taking breaks down into a simpler call and response, the rules for which are hard to divine, though we're all consulting our our mental A-Zs to try find the streets as they ring out. Pat Kahn will later email to point out that the pairs each used different paired hand gestures that seemed to develop during the performance rather than being scripted:  

They developed during the route recitations – as the piece built in sound layers, the blond woman started to mark left, right and forward with her hands, and her partner picked this up. The next pair towards the centre started gesturing later; their patterning was different but again they mirrored each other. A couple of other pairs gestured too, but in a less articulated fashion.

"It's like a charismatic prayer meeting" Karl whispers to me, putting his finger on the catechistic nature of the performance. London cabbies are clearly the practitioners of a mystic navigational liturgy of back-chat, routes, private language, road signs, highway politics...

Bea's interview with cabbie Stewart McLaren (great name) is interesting.

You actually learn it, you understand it and then once you have it it's like you have a map in your head and if directions are fired at you you know exactly where you are going. It's purely mental. [...the brain] allows you to compute that, you're able to do it in your mind and falls in line, that's how it works. It puts a whole map in your head and the computation is, if you say oh I'm in Oxford Street, through Theobalds Road, Clerkenwell Road, straight across, although that's very simple and that's a straight line those computations come in a thousand and one varieties or 10,001 varieties. You can retrieve things in multiple configurations. The city appears before you as a map, and that map allows you to see in every direction, north, south, east, west and so on and you formulate routes based on that.

He's describing the brain as a cross between computer and Ricci's memory palace, with the routes as computational procedures that are used to both sift the data ("the map of London") down to something managable ("starting at Oxford Street, I...", and to traverse the map in the mind and on the street ("... head across Theobald's Road, and then..."). I'm starting to imagine the architecture of the memory palace reconfigured as a map, with streets, underground diagrams and airline routes maps on it.

I wonder whether The Knowledge will be made obsolete by The Satnav systems at some point, though. Perhaps such a displacement might happen via the reverse route?: that once the streets are clogged with cars all of whom are following routes determined by the same algorithms, ex-cabbies might lend their memory machines to satnav companies to provide premium services, finding optimal routes where satellite logic finds only dead-ends.

Steve Reich and Philip Glass once had a removal company together in New York. I wonder if they used mnemonic songs - Music for avoiding narrow streets, or Mapnycaatsi perhaps - rather than a printed map to chart the best route.

The radio parts of the project take place on 104.4 Resonance FM, 9pm Wednesdays from 14th March to 25th April. It features other artists and musicians commissioned to translate Gibson and McCarthy's score, including Celine Condorelli, whose architecture and thinking is strong (and who drives, with Bea, a taxi), and Tom McCarthy, whose book Remainder was rather good - a French lit remix of Toby Litt's Corpsing, meditating on memory, repetition, obsessive detection and re-enactment.

The Great Learning and here. Photos of the performance.

Karl's flagging a bit with the jetlag now - or perhaps it's taxilag - and we head off afterwards across Clapham's streets for some food.