A sketch I did of the great man a few years ago.
Rama, Heuristically programmed Algorithmic Computer: 9000 model, Stargates, 1:4:3, Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1, Space elevators, Clarke’s 3rd Law (how many times has a technologist or designer invoked that in a talk or meeting?), and of course, The Nine Billion Names of God.
Like many, Clarke’s work rewired my brain from a young age, and he’s got my thanks for that.
Whatever’s next for him, I hope it’s “something wonderful”.
RIP, Arthur.
Category: Culture
Eno vs Shirky at the ICA
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Shirky vs eno: raw notes, usual disclaimers apply – not a transcript by any means.
ICA
Monday 17th march, 7pm
Eno: Emergence of social communities through networks
1988 : joined the well
Felt like a fulfilment of mcluhan idea of the global village
Persistent on a mixture of honour and shame – which is what keeps small communities together.
93-95 internet had started to grow and it was obvious it wasn?t a 60s social experiment.
Large scale online games: not idealistic global villages -they need different sorts of tools and rules to run successfully. Not anarchistic or simplistic – but nothing like business as usual.
What is the difference between a trad business like ford cars and wikipedia?
Clay: The biggest difference is that large actions generally entail large transaction costs. Scale of decisions pushes you to add some kind of structure. Till recently this was always certainly hierarchically. Internet and social tools reduce coord costs so radically that groups can form and disband easily, but still produce action. Contribution of individuals can be lightweight and distributed.
Most people do almost nothing, and a very few people do an awful lot. Power law. The value of those minimal contributions, can be aggregated to a great effect.
The search for how to structure very large networks that are building value (e.g. Wikipedia, linux) that we are living through is the experimental wing of political philosophy.
Eno: We are poorly informed by our current news media structures (cf. Nick Davies book) PR culture means opinion is careful moulded by power and distributed by a hungry and resource-starved mainstream rolling news media.
Other sources of opinion are needed – the networks.
There?s a phrase of yours I like: ?replacing planning with co-ordination?
Clay: When ever you get a mobile phone you replace plans with co-ordination. What this does for p2p comms is now coming to groups. Great example: HSBC protests on facebook (clay mentioned this on STW)
Eno: a lot of the book is about how a quantitative change becomes a qualitative change. Enabled new situations to catalyse.
Clay: what?s changed is not the tools. Society doesn?t change because of tools, but when attitudes and behaviours change. The tools plus increased social density and comfort – means early adopter techniques have become mainstream social behaviour. The public can now take the sort of actions that they were locked out of just a few years before.
Eno: we?re in England and so we?re pretty cynical compared to people from the west coast. Coming from the most surveilled society in the western world. Can?t believe that governments are going tolerate these changes in power balance that online communities create.
If the co-ordination is mostly through the internet- it?s inconceivable to me that governments are not spending billions on figuring out how to control this. Doesn?t this co-ordination online make us vulnerable?
Clay: Well – I?m not from the west coast I?m from NYC, so my levels of cynicism is somewhere between Mountain View and Brixton.
Yours is a nightmarish scenario, but the thing holding it at bay is that the internet is the first thing that merits the name ?media? because it is genuinely general purpose and flexible. The choice that governments have therefore is connect or disconnect. Too much of what the government is doing is on the same network. The danger is that certain wealthy and controlling regimes will perfect some kind of point control to remove undesirable information from the public sphere before there is casual awareness (cf. The chinese firewall)
(Starts ref: the Leipzig / Minsk ice-cream protest story from ?here comes everybody? – information cascades)
Goes to questions…
“A jumble sale of the near future”
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Last week I went to the opening of the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year exhibition at the Design Museum.
The change from “Designer of the Year” to “Designs of the Year” is a stroke of genius on the museum’s part, and the exhibition is a wonderfully-broad church of great work.
How they will pick a winner from such a wide selection (as they have decided they must, bafflingly) I don’t know. As The Telegraph points out:
“Showcasing 100 projects across seven categories, the exhibition has something of the quality of a jumble sale of the near future. The variety of material on display is hugely engaging, but quite how the jury – which is tasked with picking an overall winner as well as individual category winners – plans to assess the relative merits of a photo-shoot for John Galliano, a budget laptop for use in the third world and the principal stadium of the Beijing Olympics, remains something of a mystery.”
For me, the best thing about it is the breadth.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a more exciting thing to go and see than “a jumble sale of the near-future”.
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Also the way it’s staged: categorisations blur into each other in the space in a way they don’t in a book or a website. Is the Wii product or interaction? Is StreetCar transport or interaction? Is that signage solution architecture or graphics?
Do we really care?
I was particularly impressed to see things like the Congestion Charge and StreetCar included – although I imagine the former will be the source of some controversy – Jonathan Glancey is extremely annoyed about it, for instance… But – service design interventions in a city as a design of the year! More of this please!
And just to put the icing on the cake – and this will please many: Tenori-On is nominated…
Despite my love/hate relationship with the Design Museum over the years, they were nice enough to invite me to be on the panel of 100 nominators for the show, ostensibly nominating work for the ‘interactive’ category.
I’ll probably post my personal list of nominations later – not all of them made it (Okami will have to settle for it’s EDGE award…), but a gratifying number did, including Trulia Hindsight, SharkRunners and FixMyStreet.
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As Sigi Moeslinger pointed out in her talk at IxDA Interaction 08, web services aren’t the most compelling thing when shown in a museum context, and the design museum hasn’t really done them that proud unfortunately, but hopefully there will be some intrepid souls who are willing to poke at an iMac for an equal amount of time as sigh at a Hussein Chalayan gown.
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There’s more at the CR Blog, but if you’re in London – do go. It’s a great show, and for me, marks the Design Museum as a progressive institution in the ascendant after some years in the wilderness.
—-
P.S.: Many thanks to Jaypeg for letting me use her excellent photos of the event.
“The Earth is becoming unearthly” – Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett
Geoff Manaugh/BLDGBLOG at The Bartlett, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.
Bldgblog
Bartlett
23.1.08
RAW NOTES:
Free software and access = no obligation so feeds enthusiasm ?like sunlight or vitamin c?
(He speaks very fast in a NE USA accent this is not going to be a transcript)
Archigram x Ballard x Philadelphia x depression x claustrophobia = start of bldgblog
A catalogue of enjoyment.
Changed his life.
> Map of climate zones in europe projected in europe 2071 from the guardian
How do design climate-appropriately for a rapidly changing climate? What is site-specificity in this dynamic context?
Refs “solastaglia” cf. Collision Detection (http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2005/12/solastalgia.html) – climate-change melancholy. Losing a homeland without moving anywhere
Will future pharma companies sell you pill to combat climate change
Obsessed by the fact that the earth is becoming unearthly
Showing projected maps of the future coastline is in some senses “adventure tourism”
Be aware of the risks of showing these images – might be exciting rather than prohibitive
Quotes from “The Drowned World”
> Shows billboard architecture
Could climate change refugees be clinging to billboards on the hammersmith flyover?
> Battleship island, japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashima_Island
> Bannermans island: private home of the world’s biggest arms dealer at the time of the spanish-american war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bannerman’s_Castle
Rumour was that he used faulty cannons as rebar-the thoughts of turning weapons into architecture is exciting
> Island fortress of the coast of india
> Maunsell towers off whitstable – influence for archigram
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunsell_Forts
Texas tower off the coast of new jersey – post-war
http://www.radomes.org/museum/documents/TexasTower.html
> Oilrigs by statoil
– Man standing on the seabed
Costs about the same as flat in downtown manhattan / camden designed by rogers
The premium offshore oil-rig market could be tapped into
Dubai terraforming
– The thing that you don’t realise is the scale
Dubai is very disappointing, very boring. Invest that much money and all you can come with is dumb homes for sports-stars? That much hubris, time, money and slave labour? And that?s all you come with? Islands in the shape of a palm tree?
> Artifical reefs – what if archigram had been active in this area?
– Looks remarkable looks like chinese armillary spheres- jesuit astronomy instruments
– The reef has a brand on it.
– In 300yrs when this is a “quote/unquote” a natural object – someone will find a logo.
– Sovereign control of undersea structures: there is a feature under the sea between china and japan. Japanese are cultivating coral in order to grow an island so that they can make the territory claim.
What do artificial islands imply for the future of sovereign territory: is the future of colonialism reef science?
George Perec: worms/table/epoxy
http://www.amazon.com/Life-Users-Manual-Georges-Perec/dp/0879237511
China Mieville: slow sculpture
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/sciencefiction/0,,1312147,00.html
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/demolition-sculptures-or-sandblasting.html
The evolution of the landmass of north america >california is not solid ground – it is “the remnants of islands, former continents, lost indonesias”
Google Earth: Ron blakey geology maps
http://tinyurl.com/223rmr
San andreas fault is itself an assemblage of microfaults
Taipei 101 is activating the surface of the earth – causing minor tectonic faults – is it a long term weapon?
The interaction between architecture, weight and the earth’s surface could be further explored
The more people move to LA and build, the safer it will be to live there. The anti-taipei101. Pin the earth down.
We could be massaging the tension out of the earth surface with traffic.
A view to a kill – christopher walken and “terrestrial weaponisation”
US military: “Earthquake Array”
The us military is the real Archigram.
Modular, portable cities, temporary structures, flexible autonomous cities
Dungeon instancing/sharding: in WoW – what are the implications of that for architecture. If you had billions of dollars and very nimble stagehands you could perhaps achieve this effect in the physical world. If I walk into the same building 5 mins later to you? Is it the same?
Subterranea Brittanica
http://www.subbrit.org.uk/
Where have all the trapdoors gone? Why doesn?t pret-a-manger have trapdoors?
Border tunnels – hidden entrances in cargo containers on the border. Crosses through sovereign space into a store front in mexico. “The border is filigreed with this sort of thing. Landscape experiences that are not available to you if you are law-abiding”
Ground-penetrating radar – non invasive archeology
Underground cities could be faked? if you hack the GPR?
Biking under london from bethnal green to whitehall – in the 80s?
Urban exploration: burgeoning
Michael Cook/toronto: interview on bldgblog
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/drains-of-canada-interview-with-michael.html
Different tunnel technology sound different – you can almost sonically-navigate around
From underworld to offworld
Mars rovers are the landscape photographers of the future
The new landscapes of the sublime are off-world
Kim Stanley Robinson: comparative planetology is a new thought process for humans.
We’re exporting a earth-centric template onto the other.
> Columbia hills complex of mars of memorial sites for dead astronauts
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4143223/
“Mars is becoming earth through our melancholy”
Mars analogue site is being constructed on earth: mars conditions and appearance.
We are making mars like earth and earth like mars, either deliberately on a small scale like this or accidentally on a large scale through climate change :
These are interesting times – “The Earth is becoming unearthly”
Exploratory philanthopy and public-service content
While this might be a typically hilarious technocratic and somewhat bloodless statement by Bill Gates, you have to admire the project itself:
‘”LSST is truly an internet telescope which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it. [It is] a shared resource for all humanity – the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe,” he said.’
Gates gives $10m, Charles Simonyi gives 20$m. Various other software billionaires are exploring the human genome, or building space programmes.
In the past I’ve somewhat facetiously wondered what would happen if the BBC used it’s annual billions to move into space exploration, creating entertainments as spin-off.
A question I asked Max and Jack in the pub before Christmas was – what if these ‘exploratory billionaires’ made a land-grab for the public-service broadcaster’s territory instead?
Gates after all already owns Corbis etc., Google is mapping and measuring the Earth constantly for representation. While these are definitely for-profit enterprises, what if Larry and Sergey et al decided not to settle for just Google Earth but go after “Planet Earth” also?
If Google decided to beat the BBC’s Natural History Unit at it’s own game, what would be the result?
What if they decided to devote technology, money, phd’s and determination to mapping, recording, simulating, visualising and telling stories of the natural world with data rather than film. A kind of Quokka-for-nature, might be one possible outcome I guess.
What if they offered all of the data and assets they gather to scientists, students, schoolkids, storytellers with an open license? What if they gave it to games developers, educators, exhibitions to be used in playful, interactive, engaging ways?
Currently in the domain of natural history, there are efforts to build a ‘commons of content’ such as ARKive that are, pretty good, (although the Terms of Service are not exactly inviting) but you can’t help thinking if someone of the GOOG mindset and resource-base got their hands on it, it would be truly, literally awe-inspiring.
I guess the thrust of my question is what happens when software people with serious resources behind them get very, very serious about what’s traditionally seen as the preserve of ‘content’ or ‘editorial’.
Often at ‘content companies’, especially notable public-service broadcasters (ahem) – the great teams taking technical, systemic approaches to knowledge are indulged and somewhat encouraged at early stages, but if there is a spark of promise then ‘of course someone editorial will be brought in’ above them.
This does not often end well.
The troubling thought, that even in core areas of expertise with glorious heritage such as natural history, we’ll see that public-service broadcasters can, and will get dis-intermediated in a world where data is played with as much as stories are told.
Based on the rise of ‘exploratory philanthopy’ that aims to create “a shared resource for all humanity” as evidenced in quotes like Gate’s above, this might not be a bad thing…
Dare to be Digital at The London Games Festival
The Dare to be Digital event that I raved about back in August is going to be showcased at the London Games Festival, with the games available for free download if you take your laptop along to the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane.
My favourites – ClimbActic (Teaser Trailer above) and H20 will be on show, and you can also download them from the Dare to be Digital website, if you register.
Toy/Story
I asked one of my favourite questions on Facebook: Toys or Stories?
I got some lovely answers, which I’ve rendered anonymous to share/store here.
So far, toys are ahead, by a narrow squeak at 14 ludological fundamentalists, to story-fans’ 12. Three respondents opting for the indivisible wave-particle duality of the Toy/Story.
“Toys beget stories. It’s only the other way around when capitalism comes out to play.”
“Toys that are not attached to a story (i.e. unbranded generic toys). Not Transformer toys (or Toy Story toys, for that matter)”
“The two can never be torn apart.”
“Toys. Will Wright’s TED demonstration of Spore as a ‘montessori toy to help kids think long-term’ blew… my… mind. ‘Tis the next gen’s literacy, and potency. But I do like to submit to a good story at times. Kind of geronto-therapy, these days.”
“stories. through stories comes the invention of toys”
“Toys so long as it is old Lego not new – my own stories are better.”
“Toys! Stories come with them for free!”
“Stories! Let your imagination run wild…”
“Stories. Stories stay with you, toys end up in landfill.”
“Stories, a toy is just a story in Vinyl form :)”
“Toys…cause you can make up your own stories with them ;)”
“it all depends on which kind of toys…”
“If it were J, toys and if it were N, stories. Depending on the time of day.”
“stories!”
“Toys. Most stories are just made up anyway.”
“Why has no-one said both, surely not an either/or question – not for my two boys anyway…”
“Toys. Because you can use them to create your own stories.”
“Narrative first always. Expanding narrative through imaginative play second.”
“Stories! The merchandising deals come after the original IP!”
“Toys!”
“toys then as i like plastic things”
“You can have stories without toys but not toys without stories. Maybe that’s where Pixar started from, there are always stories that go with the toys. Epic, life-defining stories. Now I feel the need to go get more toys.”
“Stories; as they force you to use your imagination more, and that’s richer than any manufactured experience. However, a crappy DVD could be a story and a stick and ball could be a toy, and the stick would involve you using your imagination more.”
“Life is stories. Toys are the friendly characters and landmarks. (My two-year-old says Jemima Puddleduck is scary… but he then admits he’s joking. Jokes — the shortest stories around.)”
“stories are always best – and most in demand – as they require interaction and contact. that said toys enable self produced narrative in the years before writing. mind you toys are cool and provide problem solving & physical fun (blocks/puzzles/autobots)”
“Stories, because they don’t precipitate the opening of out of town warehouses branded ‘Stories R Us'”
“Oral stories because even the worst ones can be mass-produced without causing waste. :)”
“Stories. They feed the imagination and can help you turn anything into a toy.”
“Object is story. Toy is object. Toy is story.”
“story-telling toys (like the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, not Teddy Ruxpin)”
“toys: the reassuring teleology of narrative appeals only to the weak of spirit (in a nice way)”
Nintendo DS adverts on the tube.
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Sometimes you have to grudgingly admire the nous of advertisers/marketers.
Reaching out to non-gamers by making a piece of gaming hardware seem appealling by
- avoiding all the games industry marketing cliches
- making it look (superficially) like a generic advert for pharmaceuticals / insurance / beauty products.
- advertising a boredom-destroying device on the tube where people are bored, by giving them something quite dense to read about said boredom-destroying device.
I have yet to see a rash of Nicole Kidman-a-likes on the Central Line however…
Dare Protoplay vs Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2007
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Just came back from the Edinburgh Interactive Festival – a curates egg, I think it’s fair to say.
Revealing, fascinating sessions such as an interview with stage actors about how they approached motion-capture work for Heavenly Sword on the PS3, bumped up against unrevealing corporate slideware and old boy’s club self-indulgence.
Apart, of course, from my boss at the BBC’s spiel (ahem), other stand-outs included Ren Reynold’s virtual societies panel (which wasn’t just about Second Life! Hurrah!) and Hilmar Petursson of Eve Online’s funny and thought-provoking talk on emergence in online societies and breaking the Dunbar number.
He also revealed he was on a secret mission from the Icelandic government to find the Scottish rats that had gnawed through a cable depriving Iceland of internet in the past…
But, it was often more frustrating than entertaining.
A few of us gathered over beers at the end of the first day and came to the conclusion that, now that in various forms there has been an interactive entertainment festival in Edinburgh for five years; it’s time for there to be a ‘fringe’ – where risks can be taken, old boys clubs can be left behind, and up-and-coming creators can have a platform.
Except.
It so happens that it already exists… Sort of.
Just before I had to go to the airport I skipped out of the last session and kidnapped a couple of colleagues to visit the Dare Protoplay event, where young teams of games creators were showing playable demos of their efforts – I guess a bit like the indie games jam.
There were some little crackers there too – ones that stand out for me right now would be the delightful heaven2ocean, a collaborative climbing game who’s name I forget but which I really do hope makes it onto Xbox360LiveArcade, a steampunk pilotwings-a-like using hacked Wiimotes, and a novel stealth game that used sound – amongst many others.
Enthusiasm, fun and actual punters (mainly kids visiting the Dynamic Earth centre) abounded… with a tinge perhaps of disappointment that they hadn’t seen that many industry delegates from the EIF come down there.
They missed out.
They really missed out.
The likes of the Dare Protoplayers should get the assistance for next to mount a real creative fringe to the EIF, where they can talk of SKUs and IP till the cows come home – while the new skool just gets on with delivering the fun that should be the lifeblood of the industry.
“We are boring”
Says John Riccitiello, the new CEO of Electronics Arts
âWeâre boring people to death and making games that are harder and harder to play,â
The report by Om Malik goes onto say:
“EA and the video game industry at large has a massive problem: one that of attention. Video games are no longer the only game in town when it comes to digital entertainment. Riccitiello himself says the games are âat risk of being a little less interesting than Facebook and iPods and the next cool cellphone.â
I guess EA need to stop stripmining just one of the rhetorics (play as power), before the others are colonised…
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Petafloptimism 