received today in Flickrmail:
“Hi, I couldn’t find an e-mail address for you on your website, so this is the next-best thing.
I just wanted to let you know that I’ve finally unsubbed from your “work” RSS feed today, because I could no longer handle the overwhelming churn of snapshots and del.icio.us links that were drowning out your writing. Is there some place I could get a no-flickr and no-delicious feed out of your site?
Thanks!”
Oh well. Please yerselves.
Alan Moore, interviewed:
"There’s an awful lot of synasthesia, I mean one of the greatest writers, a lot of the greatest writers, one of my favourites, Vladimir Nabakoff, he was a synasthetic…to him, the letter âO’ was white, the word âMoscow’ was green flecked with goldâ¦olive green, flecked with gold. I can see that. And it’s a good thing to try and develop. Synasthesia is a great literary tool. You’ll be able to come up with perfect metaphors that are really striking and strange, because they maybe jump from one sense to another â try describing a smell in musical terms.
Actually, it can be quite easy. Also, it’s how we tend to do things anyway. They’ve just proven that â you know when Jilly Gordon gets on a roll on The Food Program and she’s talking about: â..it’s a kind of buttery, composty, tractory â I’m getting peat, I’m getting burning tyresâ¦â. Now they’ve done tests – those people who describe the flavour and bouquet of wine, they’re not describing the flavour or the bouquet at all â they are synasthetically describing the colour. They’re taking visual cues. They did things where they’d put an odourless and tasteless colour agent into white wine to make it look like red wine, and then they’d note the kind of language the wine-tasters were using. When it was white wine they were using: ââ¦buttery, new-mown hayââ¦you know, yellow, basically, was what they were saying, whereas when it was red wine they were saying: ââ¦its wonderfully fruity, blackcurrantyââ¦talking about red things. It’s synasthesia. It’s how a lot of our sensesâ¦I think synasthesia is probably a lot more common than the sensory aberration that it’s made out to be, and there’s probably a key there, somewhere, to how we sense everything. Synasthesia. There’s something there."
I hope so.
It would be wonderful to harness synasthesia in the UI of mobile devices. Going beyond multimedia output and multimodal interfaces – delivering meaning in Gladwellesque thin-slices of preattentive recognised patterns.
I’ve got about a month of my time in April to look into this at work. I’m thinking of looking at the Mindhackers, Damasio, Hiroshii Ishii, Ben(s) Fry and Schneiderman, and Ambient Devices as a start.
I’m very aware this is far from an exhaustive list; and moreover, it’s only the cognitive science / interface research worlds I’m thinking of so far.
I have a feeling, inspired by Alan Moore’s thoughts, that looking into other fields of sensory endeavour might also be revealing: sculpture, painting, drama – or ritual, religious or otherwise – ways of constructing feelings and understanding through all our senses.
It it looks like we have at least 21 of them to play with…
With recent announcements of the increasing capabilites for new visual possibilites (Flash, SVG in Nokia mobiles) and coincident pronouncements on the constraining nature of the WIMP interface hangover into the mobile context, I think it’s a good time to look into this.
Anyway – if you have any thoughts or contributions, or want to get in touch about the subject, leave me a comment, trackback or drop me a line to the usual address…
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See also, Abe Burmeister’s reflections on the seminal "Interface Culture" some 8 years on from the publication of Johnson’s book.
From Onion AV Club interview with Howard Scott Warshaw, creator of Yars Revenge and Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Atari 2600 – his theory on how Steven Spielberg is an Alien Mind Gangster :
"I had this theory that in the early ’80s, we were very close to contact from aliens and other planets and stuff like that. I felt that if the aliens were going to come down, if people were smart enough to visit Earth, then they were smart enough not to come down and say "Hi!" They would send a recon team, a sort of advance team to culturalize the planet, and prepare it to meet the aliens; not like in The Day The Earth Stood Still.
Spielberg had done a couple of movies like E.T. and Close Encounters, some of the first movies that had portrayed aliens as non-threatening people to us. Those movies became hugely successful. They were seen all over the planet, literally. So my theory was that Spielberg was the engineer of the advance team. His job was to make movies that showed aliens in a positive light.
O: Now he’s making War Of The Worlds. What does that do to your theory?
HSW: Maybe they didn’t follow through with their bonus check."
Found via Gonzalo’s Ludology.org
On the advent of Barley’s arrival on UK TV (rendered by the dream-team of surreal bile lovers everywhere Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris), Momus asks himself the question that all in the late-90s who stared into Brooker’s dark twisted mirror have surely asked – whether he is Nathan Barley:
"Nathan was listening to drum’n’bass, looking at websites on his Nokia
Communicator, or reading an issue of Sleazenation magazine in a Tokyo
hotel room. So was I. Brooker observed these foibles with black Nazi
bile, though, and condemned Barley to die a thousand ignominious
fantasy deaths for them. On the strength of the trailers,
the actual TV show looks a lot milder, though funny and promising.
Perhaps the sins of the 90s have been exculpated by the much worse
excesses of the Naughties."
And, speaking of "excesses of the Naughties" it seems that Nathan lives on, and if anything has moved further to the dark-side. This from Monday’s MediaGuardian "How to be a creative director" article:
"Half my day is a managerial role and the other half
is helping the creative team with ideas. My
computer skills are still fairly rudimentary, but my colleagues are on
hand for the technical elements while I create the concepts. Glue started off doing simple
web banners, but now we’re making games, consumer-facing websites,
campaign-led microsites and on line interactive video content. All this
is helped by the spread of broadband. We’re always looking for new
things to do and we don’t just put offline ideas online. One of our
biggest projects recently was producing the online rebuttal to Super
Size Me for McDonald’s."
No comment.
Flickr Mosaic: "Tyger"
Originally uploaded by jbum.
William Blake’s poem assembled from Flickr images of single letters. Part of the series of innovative collective works being assembled there by Krazydad.
I had a random friday afternoon thoughtfart while listening to Paul Morley/Strictly Kev’s 1hr remix of ‘raiding the 20th century’.
Listening to Morley‘s* cultural history of the cut-up on top of Kev’s sonic critique made me think how cool it would be to hear Melvyn Bragg and the "In our time" gang’s thursday morning ruminations on, for instance, Machiavelli – cut-and-pasted over mashed-up madrigals.
Putting this fancy to one side for one minute… it made me think of other superlayered participatory critique and knowledge construction – the Wikipedia.
If there were a transcript of "In our time" (is there?) why couldn’t that be munged with wikipedia like Stefan did with BBC news… and what if then new nodes were being formed by Melvyn, his guests and his audience – together, for everyone, every week, and cross-referenced to a unique culutral contextual product – the audio broadcast.
The mp3 of "In our time" sliding into the public domain and onto the internet archive’s servers, every thursday rippling through the nöösphere reinvigorating the debate in the wikipedia, renewing collective knowledge.
"In Our Time" is great ‘campfire’ stuff – you have The Melv as the semi-naive interlocutor and trusted guide, the experts as authority to be understood and questioned… but it’s only 30 minutes and 4 people… what about scaling it way out into the wikinow?
How good would that be??!!!!
Of course a first step, a sheltered cove, would be to set up "In Our time" with their own wiki for Neal Stephenson Baroque Cycle / Pepys diary style annotations of the transcript and mp3..
The Melv’s own multimedia mash’d up many-to-many mp3 meme machine.
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Update: over the weekend, Matt Biddulph showed another example of how powerful mixing BBC web content with web-wide systems might be: with del.icio.us tags extending BBC Radio3’s content. Fantastic stuff.
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p.s. from a Bio of Morley found at pulp.net:
"Morley
earns a farthing every time Charlieâs Angels, Full Throttle is shown or
trailed, owing to his contribution as a member of the Art of Noise to
Firestarter by the Prodigy, which features a sample of the Art of
Noise’s Beat Box, used in the film. The pennies are mounting up."
From GameGirlAdvance:
"The interesting thing about war games is that the default state of a
war game is peace. Think about it: what if you started up a multiplayer
game of WarCraft III and none of the players built
anything but workers and buildings? The natural state of the world is
for the races of WarCraft to peacefully coexist (although you would
eventually run out of resources), and this tranquility is shattered by
player actions.So the way you make a peace game is to create a world where the
default state is conflict, and the player must act to calm the violence
through a variety of means. That’s the trick: you’ve got to show peace
as something that’s challenging to achieve, not a default state."
I’m currently reading "The Shield of Achilles" by Phillip Bobbit, which certainly underlines that last sentence of the quote.
Clive Thomson wonders if there is an Anti-Carsian conspiracy theory in the games industry…
"In my more cynical moments, I think this whole pursuit of narrative is
the industry’s sneaky way of forcing gamers to buy more products. When
a game has a story that "ends" after 40 hours of play, you have to
throw it awayâand go spend another $50 on the next title. That’s
movie-industry logic, not game logic. Chess doesn’t "end." Neither do
hockey, bridge, football, Go, playing with dolls, or even Tetris.
Worse, by selling "narratives," game publishers can cover up the fact
that they rarely create truly new forms of play. In any given year,
I’ll play a dozen first-person shooters with different storiesâSave the
world from Martian devils! Penetrate an island full of genetic freaks!â
that are all, at heart, exactly the same game."
From his Slate article, and more at his blog, including his pick of the narratologist backlash against the piece.
Amazon’s A9 Yellow Pages search has been causing some buzz around the place, some of it from dear curmudgeonly friends suggesting it is nothing new and that there have been many projects like this over the last 6 or 7 years.
I would suggest the difference is not that A9 have not just made the bear dance, but made it tango.
The user-experience of this service is pretty fantastic compared to predecessors – easy-to-use and with plenty of opportunities for users to refine and feeback on the information.
Inviting users to feedback on which is the most useful picture of a business or landmark is particularly clever, and could generate some fascinating insights for students of Kevin Lynch and other academics of urban persuasion!
Also – the Amazon feature of inviting customers to contribute images could lead to a mappr-like photographic annotation of the United States…
I guess it goes without saying that this would become a must-have service if it could be ported sucessfully to the mobile phone, especially if you were trying to find places of high digital repute with pretty anonymous physical presences.
p.s. Dylans in San Francisco that I’ve used to illustrate this post is to my knowledge the only Welsh-themed pub in a world overrun by theme pubs centred around our other celtic cousins, the Irish… I went there a couple of times when the SF Sapient office was around the corner, and they gave me free beer for being able to pronounce Llanfair P.G. in full, bless ’em.
With so many stories in the media about individuals being sued for blogging, and big corporations cracking down on their blogging employees, it’s heartening to find big Euro-ISP Wanadoo have set up Pixelbox for their designers, researchers and developers to share their interests.
From their ‘about’ page:
"We intend to raise the profile of design across the Wanadoo Group,
drawing together design professionals from across Wanadoo’s European
businesses, Orange, France Telecom, Pages Jaunes and the wider design industry. We seek to create a vibrant design
community from these interests – sharing expertise, curating our
knowledge and sharing work, ideas, inspiration and initiatives."
Very cool.
UPDATE: Just found out from one of the designers there who is a friend of ours that they are incentivised for posting to the blog! Her bonus is tied to how much she posts…! Fantastic!!!
Petafloptimism 