"The complex relationship of sub-systems and their larger wholes."

Currently at the Media design seminar here at the Geneva School of Art and Design, we discussed this interesting way to explain the notion of modularity. Called, "the parable of the two watchmakers", It's from Herbert Simon and it nicely explains the relationship of simple and complex systems (organic and social):

"There once were two watchmakers, named Hora and Tempus, who made very fine watches. The phones in their workshops rang frequently and new customers were constantly calling them. However, Hora prospered while Tempus became poorer and poorer. In the end, Tempus lost his shop. What was the reason behind this? The watches consisted of about 1000 parts each. The watches that Tempus made were designed such that, when he had to put down a partly assembled watch, it immediately fell into pieces and had to be reassembled from the basic elements. Hora had designed his watches so that he could put together sub-assemblies of about ten components each, and each sub-assembly could be put down without falling apart. Ten of these subassemblies could be put together to make a larger sub-assembly, and ten of the larger sub-assemblies constituted the whole watch."

Why do I blog this? This looks like a good way to introduce the notion of modularity, using an analogy which is understandable (as opposed to the use of fractals by other authors).

8-bit reggae: an interview with @goto80

The writing of the 8-bit reggae book relied on a variety of sources: books, LPs, cassette tapes, soundcloud tracks, FB groups, meeting with artists and producers, etc. Among them I had a fruitful exchange with Anders 'Goto80' Carlsson (see also his weblog), who is a chipmusician and demoscener since 1992. Goto80 actually made a special track for the book, which is great:

And here's the interview also featured in the book; it basically explains a lot of this sub-genre:

NN: We talked about reggae/dub and chip music for this case study, that's obviously the basis for producing this track. Beyond that starting point, how did you compose it?

Goto80: I realized that I had never made my own version of Stalag[1] so I loaded defMON[2] on the Commodore 64, made the bassline, and took it from there. During the past years I've been making quite "associative" arrangements, where the song never ends as it starts. I realized while composing this that the technique fits really well with dub. As long as you keep the bassline you have a lot of freedom to add bizarre sounds and melodies.

What make the song sound like dub is essentially bass line, tempo and ornamentations like echoes. When it's accompanied by hi-hats and off-beat chords (arpeggios) you get the reggae vibe too. I did this one in major, to get that easy kind of vibe, with simple and slightly fragmented melodies that echo out in space. A good example of that is also my "Papaya Dub" from the Papaya 7" from 2001

I consider dub not so much as an aesthetic as a way of working. I like to "put hens on the mixer" as Lee Perry did. But instead of putting hens on the C64, I program it manually. I become the hen, because in dub there should be things that stick out, make no sense and explode your expectations. Sometimes you make lucky mistakes that give that feeling, sometimes you have to make an effort to get it in there. It's always a challenge to not resort to the usual digital glitches or the platforms' typical tricks, and instead tap into the reggae world. This is tricky, since chip tools are so strongly connected to traditional Western conceptions of rhythm, tonality and arrangement.

NN: What makes reggae and dub relevant (or original) for chip music?

Goto80: When making dub/reggae with chiptools there are some things that are extra tricky. Three examples:

• Rhythmically there is usually a kind of swing that runs throughout a dub/reggae song. Individual percussive elements can also be triggered slightly off-beat to emphasize it, or make it more groovy. It can be very very tricky to program something which sounds like something that can come very natural when playing the instrument live.
• Instrumentation-wise, it can be tricky to get percussive instruments to sound good. The C64 can produce very complex sounds, but due to the bugs, it can be complicated to make them sound snappy.
• Finally, ornamentation is hard. Especially with music that is supposed to sound like it's being played live. To get the pitch bends, vibrato and slides to sound like an instrument being played by a human. Also, simulating echoes and reverb can be quite a challenge. There are various ways to do it, but it essentially means programming the echoes by hand. While this seems like limitation and a waste of time, there is something very positive about it too. It means that you can control the echo and change it over time. When you use normal dub technology you have very limited control of the echo once you've started it. But in defMON I can change the notes of an echo and turn it into a new melody, for example.

One thing that makes the C64 suitable for dub, is that the hardware is a bit unpredictable. You get different pops and clicks each time you play a song due to the so called ADSR-bug. It's possible to fix it in software, but I often choose to keep it raw. This, in my opinion, relates to dub production with lo-fi and slightly out-of-control machines. If you allow yourself to put external effects on the C64, you can get a very rich sound (see my 2SLEEP1 release).

Something else that unites dub & chipmusic is that both have a very strong focus on the tools or the process. Chipmusic can be pretty much anything made with an 8-bit platform (according to some), and you can make a dub version of pretty much any song (according to some). There is something robust at the base of chip & dub, with a strong connection to technology, which makes these genres a bit more stable than for example R&B or House which today sounds extremely different from what they once did.

NN : Can you elaborate on the importance of glitches/bugs in this track/your work? Is that something that forces you to change the approach in composing reggae/dub tracks when using chip tech?

Goto80: For me personally, dub is supposed to be a bit messy and mistakey. I like that. I'm sure they had many tricks to create that intentionally, except for just making stoned human mistakes and so on. So for me the unpredictable character of the SID-chip reinforces this. This is something I use for all my music, not only dub-stuff, but I feel that it's important in chip dub. It adds dynamic to rhythms, timbres and even harmonies and melodies.

Take for example “Bababy dubub”, this was composed in a modern setting (Renoise for PC) with samples of C64-sounds. Underneath all the reverb and delay, the sounds are very clean. Static. The same all the time. So you get less feedback from the machine, so to say. So my Renoise dub is softer than my C64-dub. I released some non-chip stuff (made in Renoise) as Extraboy, like “Kix Sunday Favourite” and “Flintskall dub” which also illustrates my point, I think.

Unpredictable features can be extremely inspirational. It alters your original ideas, makes you come up with new ideas... In extreme cases it can change the song completely, but that's normally caused by a combination of soft- and hardware. The odd breaks in the middle of the song is an example of this. It was a surprise for me, and I decided to keep it. It's much more fun to let the machine come up with those things than to create it by hand.

But uh, to answer your question: you are free to choose if you want to force the SID to be cleaner than it normally is (which is possible with enough work) or if you want to stay with the dirty ways, and perhaps even amplify it. But I'd say that the biggest difference in using chip tools - compared to dub tools - is the limited polyphony and the lack of effects.

NN : What's the difference between "programming by hand" and the way musicians or producers made reggae/dub without chip-technologies?

Goto80: I don't know the details of how dub producers work. But I guess with chip-tech you have to program every instrument and compose all the patterns yourself. I suppose dub producers often worked with recordings of other people's music, or at least with pre-made sounds and live-played compositions. For them it was possible – perhaps essential – to make the version live, in real-time. Whereas chipstuff is composed asynchronously because most chip software is pretty crappy for live composing, improvisation and manipulation (defMON and LSDj being good exceptions). I think that's important to keep in mind.

Having said all this, I think the lack of reggae/dub in the chipworld is as much if not mostly caused by culture rather than technology. If you look at the kind of sounds and compositions and tools that exist today, they prove that this could basically have been done in 1985 too. But home computers were simply not used like this back then. But that's not because of "technology".

C64 could have replaced drum machines, bass machines, monophonic synthesizers, etc. With Amiga you could've replaced everything, since it had decent sampling abilities. But it wasn't. Not just in reggae/dub but in general.

[1] The Stalag version riddim is a popular reggae rhythm, written and performed as "Stallag 17" (named after the 1953 war film) by Ansell Collins, and released by Winston Riley's Techniques record label in 1973.

[2] C64 SID tracker made by Frantic http://csdb.dk/release/?id=120965

Thanks again Goto80!

"Thomassons" = architecture relics

This is one of the books I brought by back from Tokyo last week. I don't read Japanese but I noticed that it might be intriguing. Flipping through this tiny booklet, I noticed the use of curious pictures. The architectural structures in Black and White, presented alongside a main essay seemed a bit weird. The only text I could parse – aside from numbers – was the name of the author (Genpei Akasegawa). A little later, with the help of a search engine and the good work of bloggers and podcasters, I managed to get a better sense of the content of this piece.

These images indeed represent what one might call architectural relic or vestigial urban remnants: these structures which have evolved over time to serve no purpose. See for yourself:

According to Roman from 99%, these relics "caught the attention of an artist in Japan named Akasegawa Genpei" back in 1972:

"Akasegawa started noticing similar urban leftovers, and treasured them as artistic byproducts of the city. He photographed all the things he could find that were both vestigial and maintained. He began publishing his findings in a magazine column, accompanied by musings about each object. People began to send Akasegawa pictures of similar architectural leftovers that they found, and in his column, Akasegawa would judge all submissions on two criteria: 1. Were they truly, completely useless? 2. Were they regularly maintained? In 1985 Akasegawa published a book of these collected photographs and writings, in which he coined a term for these kinds of urban leftovers. He called them, 'Thomassons.'

The term comes from Gary Thomasson, an American baseball player who was traded to the Yomiuri Giants, a team in Tokyo, Japan. Thomasson was paid exorbitant amount of money for a two year contract. But in this new country, on this new team, the great slugger Gary Thomasson lost his game. He actually set the all-time strikeout record in Japan in 1981, and was benched for much of his contract. For Akasegawa, Gary Thomasson was “useless” and also 'maintained.'"

Why do I blog this? Thomassons are part of the things I'm interested in when wandering around a city. It's quite extraordinary IMHO to find this concept via a book in a Japanese bookshop without any propre understanding of the local language; but I guess the images were evocative enough to make me buy the booklet. Also, it seems there is an English version of the book. It's called Hyperart Thomasson (published by Kaya Press). Thomassons' seem like a neighbor category of "white elephant": "a possession which its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost, particularly that of maintenance, is out of proportion to its usefulness." (Wikipedia).

I now should go in my Flickr stream and tag the Thomassons I spotted before knowing about this term.

Ursula Le Guin on Science-Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin accepts the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards on November 19, 2014. A quote I find stunning:

"we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom, poets and visionaries, the realists of a larger reality."

Why do I blog this? It's moving this great author on stage stating this purpose so eloquently. The role of Science-Fiction as stated here is a direction i'm interested in; and a common issue at the Laboratory. Plus, the other bits about book writing and the market are important as well.

'Curious Rituals' at Future Fiction (Z33)

Future Fiction is an exhibit currently held at Z33 (Hasselt, Belgium). Focused on "world-building", it explores "how contemporary artists, designers and architects relate to future thinking and imaging". The projects presented there highlight how they can uncover, map, criticize or question the parameters that shape our future. The list of participants is quite impressive: Neïl Beloufa (FR), Nelly Ben Hayoun (FR), Blueprints for the Unknown (UK), Bureau Europa (NL) / Lara Schrijver (NL), Dept. Architectuur UHasselt (B), Theo Deutinger (AT), Dunne & Raby (UK), FoAM (BE), El Ultimo Grito (ES), Arne Hendriks (NL) / Monnik (NL), Shane Hope (US), Speedism (B/DE), Near Future Laboratory (CH/SP/US), Hans Op de Beeck (B), Pantopicon (B), The Extrapolation Factory (DE/US), Atelier Van Lieshout (NL), Chris Woebken (DE), The Xijing Men (JP/CN/KR), Liam Young (AU).

As described in their mini-catalogue (pdf):

"Z33 wishes to draw attention to what future thinking and imaging can be. Not pretending to know what our future will be, nor which inventive solutions will solve our present-day problems, we rather aim to explore a set of different visions/fictions that artists, designers and architects put forward using different methods and tools for future thinking and visualizing. [...] the fictions are of course not completely out of touch, nor are they pure fantasies. The visions explore and/or extrapolate certain societal, economic, political, cultural or scientific evolutions. Based on these extrapolations, artists, designers and architects create."

Karen Verschooren who curated the exhibit contacted us at the Near Future Laboratory last year in order to show Curious Rituals; which is featured there with a video of the design fiction project we did back in 2012 with students from the Media Design Program at Art Center in Pasadena (Nancy Kwon, Katie Myiake and Walton Chiu). 

photo (c) Kristof Vrancken / Z33 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

photo (c) Kristof Vrancken / Z33 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Thanks Karen and Z33 to present our work in such good company!

The Institute of Culturetronics : "modular domestic electronics"

I finally found some time last week-end to read the material produced by/for the Institute of Culturetronics. Proposed by Henrik Nieratschker, it's defined as "a framework for an ongoing number of projects and design activities that look at the intersections of local culture and modern technologies, discussing issues of technological development and adaptation as well as the local problematics and opportunities that come with them." The first phase of this observation-based design project is based on a field trip in South Africa.

Why do I blog this? What I find intriguing here is the diversity of material produced for the projects. I take the posters, video, booklet and  artifacts as a series of artefacts that encapsulate the design researcher's findings about DIY electronics. It's very interesting from an ethnographic perspective, as a way to illustrate and describe field observations.

The presentation starts from a description of visites sites, along with a series of pictures. It then moves to a section with "personal observations" that reflects – subjectively – on some topics (repair culture, informal economies, etc.) using textual vignettes. Then, this material is turned into prototypes of "modular domestic electronics":

"The electronic products in this proposal exist as modules operated by communities. These modules are owned by the individuals in the community and some members are also involved in the development of new modules that tare then introduced to the community. All the modules are borrowed from individual to individual within the community, so everyone can take advantage of the total sum of possible applications. The system embraces experimentation to widen the total applications and functionalities as far as possible. On the software side the modules are programmable via sound that can easily be cut and rearranged by using a tape recorder and can also be transmitted via radio. This makes it easy to copy and introduce new programs to the community."

Objects from Japan

Spent last week in Tokyo for a workshop. A good opportunity to wander around and run across objects that I found typically from there. A short list, it's definitely a selection, can't be exhaustive.

My favorite, it's pervasive and fascinating. A plastic weight with an handle used to stabilize different things here and there in the City.

Most of the people I've seen used this model of umbrella. They sometimes leaves it in different places.

Umbrellas a pervasive but hats are important too. This one's in a university office, just in case an earthquake appears.

Towels need to be warmed, don't they?

I'm not entirely sure about it but it feels like it's meant to protect the brand new metro ticket you buy at the counter. Lovely design.

The conspicuous vending machines and their touch/SUICA-enabled interface.

This category deserves a whole blogpost/book/encyclopedia. Ah, game controllers.

The frog-like bins are intriguing too.

Why do I blog this? Material culture is fascinating to observe. The design of all these objects is interesting and highlight the way mundane activities are conducted. Such artefacts reflect needs and correspond to expectations or situations... and can act as potential stimuli in workshop/research to show alternative to how things are done/made elsewhere.

"Six approaches to empirically research algorithms"

An interesting read this morning:

Kitchin, R. (2014). Thinking Critically About and Researching Algorithms, The Programmable City Working Paper 5, Available at SSRN.

As indicated by its title, this paper address the ways to investigate algorithms and the difficulties in doing so. Based on an extensive review of the literature, it highlights the issues at stake in the field of software studies that emerged in the last ten years. It's quite pragmatic with a focus on six ways to empirically research algorithms: "examining source code (both deconstructing code and producing genealogies of production); reflexively producing code; reverse engineering; interviewing designers and conducting ethnographies of coding teams; unpacking the wider socio-technical assemblage framing and supporting algorithms; and examining how algorithms do work in the world." In a discussion of these approaches, Kitchin highlights that they should be combined in order to provide more thorough perspectives

Why do I blog this? Both because it's a resource that may be useful for my students working in this domain, and bc I'm currently writing about algorithmic cultures.

Datahotels are the new datawarehouses

A billboard encountered at Haneda Airport in Tokyo this week. I find it interesting to observe the criteria chosen by the cloud company: we understand here that the service should be easy and that a reliable support might exist (24 hours). This looks quite common in the tech industry. However, I find the two others characteristics quite intriguing: "public cloud" and "system architect" sounds a bit abstract and strange. Perhaps the latter corresponds to the idea of a well-designed system, but I wonder about the notion of "public cloud" itself: what does that mean? Although it might suggest a public access to data, it may consist in something else (perhaps there's a Japanese thing I'm missing here) as it's difficult to sell people a service where all your data are made public.

The graphic design of this ad is also revealing: the blue evocation of the sky – would a cloudy sky be too much in an ad? –, the rolling cloud which looks like seawaves drawn out of a Saint Seiya episode, the use of white fonts, and a logo that reminds of the Air France logotype's comma. That's how a complex technology is presented here. Perhaps one needs ai aircraft carrier's mindset to manage data in the cloud.

And finally, the name is also revealing. "Datahotel" is the new "Datawarehouse". The vocabulary is important here. Our data are now taken care of in an hotel; with a dedicated type of services (and their "system architect"). What's next? Datahavens? Dataheavens? or shall we return to the cyberpunk data-banks from the 80s (only accessible via Ono-Sendai's consoles)?

Why do I blog this? Working on a Cloud Computing project makes me curious of how things are communicated in this domain. As shown here, the whole cloud metaphor is utterly weird and quite disconnected from the infrastructure these services rely on.

Energy Babble: networked radio broadcasting internet content

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez – who leads a workshop at ECAL this week for the IIClouds project – pointed me to this intriguing project he was part of, with fellow colleagues at Goldsmith (Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, and Alex Wilkie). It's called "Energy Babble" (see the paper published at the Nordic Design Research Conference 2013). It's a networked radio appliance drawing content from online sources:

"Synthesised speech files are published from a server for immediate playback by the devices. These sound files are derived from texts from a range of sources, including twitter accounts and policy and activist news publishers. Speech files are also algorithmically generated by the system drawing on historic utterances, also triggered by energy events, and taken from user contributions via the devices’ microphones."

Why do I blog this? Matthew's currently leading a workshop about "botcaves", the hardware required to run bots. He mentioned this project that I find interesting as a way to materialize the aggregation of digital content.

"Real Prediction Machines"

Real Prediction Machines (Auger-Loizeau with Alan Murray and Subramanian Ramamoorthy, 2014) is an intriguing design project about prediction and anticipation based on the explosion of digital data. As explained by Auger-Loizeau:

"This project explores how data and algorithms could be reclaimed for personal use - individuals can select a specific event to be predicted such as a domestic argument; the likelihood of ones own death or the chances of a meteor strike. A service provider then determines the necessary data/sensory inputs required for an algorithm to predict the event. The output from the algorithm controls a visual display on the prediction machine, informing the owner if the chosen event is approaching, receding or impending."

Why do I blog this? I find it relevant to wonder about how specific products and objects can reflect and make tangible the so-called predictions algorithms can provide based on digital data. That's the point here with Auger-Loizeau's project and I'm intrigued by the "modern-mechanical" aesthetic and the absence of a screen; which is an important aspect I think.

New book about 8-bit reggae

A new dispatch from the Near Future Laboratory: this book that documents the curious collision between video-game culture and reggae music. It's called "8-Bit Reggae: Collision and Creolization" and it's co-published by Volumique (Paris) and the laboratory. The book can be bought on their online shop at the following URL.

As described on their shop:

"it's a book about the unexpected and intriguing culture collision between video game culture and reggae/dub. Why were 8-bit machines like the Commodore 64 or the Nintendo NES used to recreate Jamaicans riddims ? How did such a curious assemblage of rhythms, objects and game systems happen ? Was it because of the nature of the various sub-cultures ? Or was it just a fortuitous exchange between reggae music and 8-bit computing ? This book answers these questions and address the unlikely encounter of Jamaican music with the video game world."

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Photo by Ferdinand Dervieux.

Although this kind of topic is super niche, it's part of an ongoing effort at the Near Future Laboratory to document intriguing digital practices. After an earlier project about game controller and their evolution, this one's more focused on a niche community that tells a lot about cultural production/consumption.

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Photo by Ferdinand Dervieux.

Thanks a lot Etienne Mineur for the support/art direction/interest, Julie Chane-Hive for her design contribution, Michèle Laird for the proofreading. Special thanks to Joël Vacheron and Basile Zimmermann for their insightful comments and discussions about this work; the project would have never ben possible without you. Big up to Dubmood, Goto80, Disrupt, Blaise Deville, Paul-Edouard “LEGO Sounds” Mias, Pupajim, WellWell Sound, and Takashi Kawano for their time chatting about 8-bit reggae music.

The Internet of Things at the flea market

I think it's William Gibson who said that part of his speculation process was based on thinking how a piece of technology might end up on the dusty shelves of a pawn shop. That thought came up this morning while running across these two boxes of the Nabaztag. It's intriguing to see "the second first wireless rabbit" (that is, the 2.0 version of the Internet of Things posterchild) in a crappy box along with an air blower, a set of glasses, a polaroid and a deck of playing cards.

Coincidentally, I've heard that the Nabaztag, after almost ten years of bons et loyaux services, is going to be discontinued. So long and thanks for all the fish!

Green background for VFX?

The green (and sometimes blue) blank billboards in the corridor of the Paris subway are always fascinating to me. It feels like the sudden backdrop for virtual effects. I guess there's a reason for this but this possibility leaves me curious about its potential.

Possibly more intriguing than boring Augmented Reality apps.

Futures? An interview with Sophia Al-Maria

After the interviews of Warren Ellis and Bruce Sterling for my book about the disappearance of "big futures", design fictions, the role of science-fiction, etc. here's the discussion with Sophia Al-Maria on Gulf Futurism:

Nicolas Nova: Gulf Futurism, as I understand it, corresponds to a clash between traditions and modernity in the Gulf, related with the pervasive influence of various sorts of technologies (smartphone, camera, networks among others). What makes it unique (considering other places experienced a similar influence)?

Sophia Al-Maria: My original thinking around Gulf Futurism as an umbrella term for a wide array of things happening to the people and the places around me was to do with the quiet tragedy occurring. People were losing freedoms and a grip on reality. They were narritivizing a history that never really happened. I guess I was also reading a lot of Baudrillard at the time and it all made sense, this sort of exodus from reality into something climate controlled and out of touch with ‘nature’ and truth. There was/is  an abdication of control to circumstance. An easy adoption of technology is also key. When I was 16 for a girl to have a mobile was shameful. Now my 12 year old sister has an ipad but barely enough to eat every day from the rations divvied out between 14 people in a on-salary household. The focus is totally upended. Survival = being on the next level. Not sustaining your body.

NN: How do you see the situation evolving in the coming years (because of social/political/technological change)? Do you see this kind of aesthetic evolving?

SAM: I’m wary of aesthetics. They are a distraction. And seem to be everywhere these days. Maybe that’s why I’m not a very good visual artist. Of course there are people forging an ‘aesthetic’ out of the cultural specifics of the region. See the GCC collective.

NN: How does this notion of Gulf Futurism translate into everyday life/culture in the Gulf? (I'm thinking about music, visual arts, everyday products, packaging)

SAM: The mall is the stage for the transitions taking place and so the most important symbol of Gulf Futurism next to the mobile phone.

I think there is a global alienation becoming clear in the sort of hyper-refined and homogenated corporate omni-presence. There was a charming sort of … amateurism – maybe that’s the wrong word but – yeah- something unperfect in local products or at the very least a cultural specificity in imports like Miswak toothpaste from India or dairy from Saudi which is almost gone. Now it’s the mallmentia effect. I can’t tell if I’m in Hong Kong or LA or Dubai half the time I walk into a mall and that happens more and more these days because the mall is the dominant structure of a certain class group of which I am part. I literally find myself in malls whether on holiday or on my way home from work or on a weekend even and I am frequently confused as to how I even got there. It’s a place of weird pilgrimage in an era where to consume is to absolve yourself.

Joyce Nelson compared the mannequins in store fronts to statues of saints and apostles at the entrance of a cathedral and the  changing room to a confession booth in her 1991 essay The Temple of Fashion and I think it’s true. An insidious evangelism has taken place without us knowing.

I observe this in the Gulf but it’s happening globally. Perhaps it’s more visible in the Gulf due to obvious cultural signifiers. And the darkness of things like segregation and the ‘public’ space of a mall becoming changeable.

futNN: Why "Futurism"? What's the future component of these phenomena?

Originally I threw that word out there because of the speed. The acceleration with which money has forced us to change, the speed of the hideous youth-in-car crash which is a daily sight. Bodies in the road. Casualties from our tiny local population lie on the side of the road in my daily commutes, thrown through their windshields, indifferent. There is a really bleak nihilism in youth culture. Also, I was thinking about the sort of basic concepts of ‘futurism’ in the classical sense before I had truly understood how dead the future is. I’ve gone through the process of grieving the ‘future’ as the 20th century imagined it. The Gulf is just a location where it experienced a brief flurry of possibility.

SAM: I'm generally intrigued by how cultural trends influence people's representation of the future. This is why I'm curious about Gulf Futurism. I wonder: how do you think such aesthetic and cultural phenomenon can be important or relevant for Westerners (let's assume there is such thing as "Western people")?

Assuming that, I think whatever aesthetic one might align with an idea of Gulf Futurism is again, a culturally non-specific one. A corporate one. An isolated one. A shiny, glitzy version of the dystopia rising elsewhere. Here you don’t have to experience suffering. It will be regulated, medicated etc. You don’t have to see the grist of the mill, they will be hidden as is the case with labor in the region. That’s not to say there isn’t a cultural stamp of Arabness on this. But I find it to be much more to do with corporate culture and aspirations and very occasionnally what shards are left of the failed utopic dream of pan-Arabism which sometimes rears its head in the Gulf in strange places.

"Computational journalism"

This idiom is new to me but I guess it makes sense these days. It's also an event ("symposium") with a live coverage here. The material in there is impressive and curious, see for yourself:

"Journalists and computer scientists increasingly are working together to develop innovative methods of reporting and telling news stories. Consider:

• Journalists are mashing up drones with GPS-equipped cameras to automatically create 3D models of newsworthy structures.

• Bots are programatically writing news stories that the public views as just as credible as those written by humans, according to one study.

• Computer scientists are creating software programs to help journalists identify and correct false rumors spreading on Twitter.

• Journalism students are using electronic sensors that monitor dust and noise to investigate construction sites.

• Journo-hackers are developing tools that use artificial intelligence to pull story ideas from big, complicated data sets."

Why do I blog this? Im polishing a manuscript on algorithms and cultural production, which is strangely orthogonal to this set of examples.

IICloud(s) – Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s)

Update from the front here: a new project I recently started at the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève) with my colleague Charles Chalas, along with Patrick Keller, Christophe Guignard, Christian Babski (fabric/ECAL) and Lucien Langton from ECAL, as well as the architecture team of Dieter Dietez (EPFL) and EPFL-ECAL Lab (Nicolas Henchoz) in Lausanne.

Funded by the RCSO (a local research body here in Switzerland), it's called "IICloud(s) – Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s)" and it addresses the design and the user experience of personal clouds. Here's the project proposal abstract:

This design research project explores the creation of counter-proposals to the current expression of “Cloud Computing”, particularly in its forms intended for private individuals and end users (“Personal Cloud”). It is to offer a critical appraisal of this “iconic” infrastructure of our modernity and its user interfaces, because to date their implementation has followed a logic chiefly of technical development, governed by the commercial interests of large corporations, and continues to be seen partly as a purely functional, centralized setup. However, the Personal Cloud holds a potential that is largely untapped in terms of design, novel uses and territorial strategies. Through its cross-disciplinary approach, our project aims at producing alternative models resulting from a more contemporary approach, notably factoring in the idea of creolization. From a practical standpoint, the project is intended to produce speculative versions of the “Personal Cloud” in the form of prototypes (whether functional or otherwise) of new interfaces, data processing, reactive environments and communicating objects. To do this, the project will be built around three dimensions forming the relevant pillars of a cross-disciplinary approach: interaction design, the architectural and territorial dimension, and the ethnographic dimension.

Our intention is to address the following questions with a series of workshops:

-    How to combine the material part with the immaterial, mediatized part? What functions are given concrete form through physical means and what others through digital means? Does physical concretization involve nearness to the Data Center? Can we imagine the geographical fragmentation of these setups? (Interaction design, architecture).

-    Might new interfaces with access to ubiquitous data be envisioned that take nomadic lifestyles into account and let us offer alternatives to approaches based on a “universal” design?[v] Might these interfaces also partake of some kind of repossession of the data by the end users? (Interaction design, ethnography).

-    What symbioses can be found by occupying the ground and the space between men and machines? Where and how is this ground, are these “expanses”, to be occupied? Are they to be camped in, to maintain mobility? Settled on a long-term basis? How do we factor in obsolescence factors? What setups and new combinations of functions need devising for a partly deterritorialized, nomadic lifestyle? Can the Cloud/Data Center itself be mobile [vi](Architecture, interaction design, ethnography).

-    Might symbioses also be developed at the energy and climate levels (e.g. using the need to cool the machines, which themselves produce heat, in order to develop living strategies there)? If so, with what users (humans, animals, plants)? (Architecture, ethnography).

More about it here.

"How you can hack your blood pressure implant to provide fake and healthy data to an insurance company"

Intriguing:

"how biomedical data sent wirelessly from a human body, might be re-appropriated by services other than the remote healthcare. This discussion about data monitoring was developed in Nelly Ben Hayoun’s project Cathy the Hacker. Hayoun designed props and made short films documenting “how you can hack your blood pressure implant” to provide fake, healthy data to an insurance company that is monitoring the fictional Cathy’s lifestyle in order to make decisions on the premium she should pay on her health insurance. Through an interview and follow up conversations with Murphy, Hayoun devised hacks which included attaching a sensor to an energetic pet cat, in order to generate a surrogate data set, while “The closing spin cycle of the washing machine also does a good job”

Find in: Kerridge, T. (2009). Does speculative design contribute to public engagement of science and technology? Proceedings of Swiss Design Network Symposium‘09, Lugano.

Why do I blog this? A good example of a phenomenon that may or may not happen in the near future.

Networked lingerie for book reading

Some people are never short of good ideas, so to say. I run across this ad in Paris the other day. The notion of a networked pyjama seems slightly odd (slightly in the sense of "everything's can be connected to the network these days I'm not surprised). So I typed different combinations of keywords into a common search engine and I discovered that Etam – a French lingerie company – decided to create a weird contraption: a QR-code-enabled (this is the "networked" bit) panty/nuisette/pyjama that allows the owner to read short stories on a smartphone. Because yes, it's the rentrée littéraire these days in France (the period of the year in which more than 600 books are released) and people may find it fun to read stuff by scanning underwear... which is why this is the first collection of networked PJs. This thing is designed by Smartnovel, a company focused on new reading experiences.

Why do I blog this? Well, I didn't expect this kind of networking ability, I originally thought this would be some sort of huggable pyjamas but it seems far weirder. It would intriguing to know who actually used it this way (a common question with QR codes these days) and whether anyone conducted a focus group to ask what people may think about when told they can have a connected piece of lingerie. What's next? I mean, the kind of stuff we've put in the TBD catalog is definitely not far-fetched compared to this.

Futures? a short interview with Bruce Sterling

This is the second interview of the series I started last week, based on my recent book about future, sci-fi and design fictions. After Warren Ellis, here's Bruce Sterling (whose blogging have moved to this wonderful tumblr called 'Wolf in Living Room':

NN: In your opinion, as a science-fiction writer, how to you perceive this difficulty to go beyond the standard visions of "the Future" (from flying cars to humanoid robots)?

BS: At SXSW 2014 I was on a panel with Warren Ellis, Joi Ito and Daniel Suarez where an interesting atemporal design-fiction issue came up.  We science fiction writers were discussing the problem of inventing something far-fetched, satirical, extrapolative or socially critical and then discovering that it was already commercially available on the shelves of Wal-Mart.  This was immediately called the "Wal-Mart Problem."

Atemporally speaking, it’s clearly possible to write a form of "futuristic" science fiction in which all the "sci-fi gadgets" are already real objects in Wal-Mart. No science-fiction reader can possibly know the entire Wal-Mart catalog, so it might be possible to write a thing like this without anybody realizing it, as in recent William Gibson books where the weirdest and most far-out things -- airborne fish, giant Ekranoplans and so forth, are all existent technologies.  

Now that social crowdfunding is available it will probably be impossible henceforth for any journalist, critic or historian to determine if a gadget ever "really existed," or for how long, or in what precise circumstances.  So the apparent lines between designs and design fictions will get more and more blurred.

Daniel Suarez, who is a rather literal-minded guy with a lot of engineers and coders in his readership, is quite worried about the "Wal-Mart Problem," he feels it hurts his credibility. My own feeling is that it’s not a "problem" but a condition which will get bigger and bigger.  I even wonder if it’s possible to LIVE in the Wal-Mart problem deliberately, like literally furnish an apartment with items of these kinds.

NN: Sure it hurts SciFi writers’ credibility (and probably scientists’ credibility as well) but – I would say – what can he do ? The only tech realms where this problem might vanish corresponds to hard science like quantum physics, hyperchord/string theory and/or crazy neuroscientific exploration… simply because this type of science can be unlegible to normal humans. But what can he do? 

BS: He can write fantasy about alien planets, vampires, zombies and flying dragons, of course. That’s where the genre in fact went, as a commercial enterprise. Nobody fusses about the Wal-Mart problem in GAME OF THRONES.

I’ll pose you this puzzle: if there’s a "critical design" that’s brilliantly illuminating as design fiction, and it turns out that it once really existed among a small group of Belgians in the period 1998-2001, does that make it any better or worse as an act of critical design?  Why is that even a criterion of success in the first place?  The Near Future Laboratory video "Corner Convenience" has caffeine in Jack Daniels, but anybody can put caffeine in Jack Daniels, you just pour some whiskey into your coffee.  That doesn’t dilute the conceptual impact of that diegetic prototype within the space of the Near Future Lab video.

Of course this "Wal-Mart Problem" mostly applies nowadays to modest gadgets of the Makerspace and Wal-mart shelf variety, nobody is going to Kickstarter for a nuclear power plant any time soon. 

NN: You have an interest in the role of new media artists and designers in exploring future scenarios. Do you think it can be considered as a good follow-up work to what sci-fi writers used to do?

BS: Yeah, the means of production and distribution in the early days of science fiction and design were much cruder and more folksy, and characters like Ford, Edison and Marconi, were very much weird, self-educated tinkerers. Hugo Gernsback’s early radio experimentation magazines were hugely similar to MAKE magazine nowadays, and "Popular Mechanics" is so much like Makers that the latest issue of Popular Mechanics is all about Makers.  Design and science fiction were emerging out of the same print-cultural compost heap of the pre-radio, pre-TV 1920s.

However, when you point out that design has "taken away the baton from Sci-Fi,"  it would be more accurate to say that the baton has been taken away from all forms of print media, including journalism and history. Only search engines have that baton now.  They don’t hold that baton very well at all.

The "Wal-Mart Problem" isn’t so much a problem as a new historical sensibility.  In my book SHAPING THINGS I was postulating that we might get to a space where nobody really cares if a "real" object really "exists" at all; a spime can probably be made to exist if enough energy is thrown at it, and the real social issue is figuring out how to get rid of them, not to invent them or conjure them up.

I’m always happy when my pet interests in dead media, atemporality, network society, ubiquity and augmentation reveal some deeper unities.  There’s a metaphysical issue there: how do we know what we know that we know? -- and if the media mechanisms by which we build canons of futurity and history are in disruption, then atemporality must be the order of the day, it seems to me. In that Transmediale speech I was urging people not to fear this prospect but to creatively experiment with it, and "design fiction" seems to me to be properly suited to do that; more so than science fiction, which is always trying to sneak into the literary dignity of paper book covers and proclaim, look at me, I’m a classic for the ages now, just like Wells and Verne.