Interesting projects at Art Center

Two interesting project I saw yesterday at the Pecha Kucha organized at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena:

A Machine Frame of Mind by Brooklyn Brown:

"As the computational environments that surround us rapidly become more sophisticated will we continue to trust them more? If the computer can’t see something, does it not exist? When the world can be read by humans and machines, the way we perceive and interpret it will be radically different. (...) This research trajectory reveals the machine perspective as a source of pleasure, the result of radically different analytical capabilities, and the complicated creation of the abstract, computerized self.

The project suggests that the machine-readable world is something we are both constructing and should continue to design for in order to demystify and expose advanced technological processes."

Be My Satellite by Bora Shin About geospatial literacies:

"BeMySatellite is an initiative that aims to allowevery individual on Planet Earth to be uniquely documented by satellites.

The ultimate goal of this project is for everybody to appear at least once in a publicly accessible satellite image (such as on Google, Yahoo and Bing).

Using social network systems like Twitter andFacebook, we will assign instructions for participants to make a mark in certain locations when satellites will be passing overhead."

Why do I blog this? Two intriguing projects that I find relevant. If the former is close to "machine culture" issues that I'm interested recently, the second one is close to my long-time exploration of geospatial practices.

Summer project: Curious Gestures

So, as I mentioned the other day, I'm in Los Angeles this summer, being a visiting researcher at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The project I'm working on there is called "CURIOUS RITUALS: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday" and we've just set up a blog about it.

It's actually a 7-weeks project conducted by Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon, Walton Chiu from the media design program and myself.

This research project is about gestures, postures and digital rituals that typically emerged with the use of digital technologies (computers, mobile phones, sensors, robots, etc.): gestures such as recalibrating your smartphone doing an horizontal 8 sign with your hand, the swiping of wallet with RFID cards in public transports, etc. These practices can be seen as the results of a co-construction between technical/physical constraints, contextual variables, designers intents and people’s understanding. We can see them as an intriguing focus of interest to envision the future of material culture.

The aim of the project is to envision the future of gestures and rituals like the one above based on:

  1. A documentation of current digital gestures
  2. The making of design fiction films that speculate about their evolution

Summer in Los Angeles

... oh and btw, I've been quiet here because I've been busy on different fronts: - relocating to California for the summer, doing a "visiting researcher" residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, working on a project about gesture (that I'll blog about as soon as there is something to show) - writing the game controller book which is going to be published in French in January 2013. Called "Joypads! Le design des manettes" and written with Laurent Bolli, it's going to be an overview of the evolution of video game console controllers over time. We're of course looking for an English/American edition if anyone here has en idea about how to proceed - near future laboratory projects (a short project about car culture, a design workshop that Julian mentioned few weeks ago, planning Lift13 and Lift France 12) - experimenting what it's like staying in one city for two months (and avoiding travels)

Flawed "trends" circulation

Just saw this intriguing link called "5 Digital Trends Shaping the Consumer Experience" sent by @iamdanw and I found it fascinating.

The post lists so-called "trends" (a term commonly employed by consultants and marketing persons to refer to a particular form of culture that emerged at a certain moment in time) that can be relevant for "consumers".

What struck me as curious here is simply the way certain concepts that appeared in different fields are defined and eventually understood by the author, whom I expect to be representative of a marketing crowd. See definition examples:

"Calm technology refers to applications that cut down on the digital noise of high-volume data to show the user only enough information so that he or she is able to focus on a task. Mark Weiser is considered to be the father of “ubiquitous computing,” a synonym for calm technology."

The "one-liner" approach to define things makes the concept so basic that it's only vaguely connected to what the persons behind it wanted to express. For people who read Weiser's take on calm computing, this is only a pale version of the research papers.

Nothing new under the sun here, this kind of problems happen all the time. And I don't wanna play the grumpy academic being sad about this. However, what I find fascinating is that it enables to see the various process at stake when concepts circulate.

There's also simplication and confusion, as "game theory" seems to equal "gamification":

"Game theory is one of the key components in the theoretical research surrounding singularity. Marketers can make the argument that by having multiple people taking the same action at once, in ways that are deemed safe by them, they can drive massive change. According to Gartner’s 2011 study of Gamification,"

But the best part comes when the marketing person tries to grasp a concept that is elusive and only meant to spark debate in a community of practitioners or researchers:

"Currently, the new aesthetic remains fragmented and extremely hard to put into a coherent example that would allow a marketer to grasp its full potential. But, because the subject matter of aesthetics relates to how beauty is perceived and valued by us as humans, retailers are making strides to test it via digital consumer experiences."

Why do I blog this? Being interested in digital culture and the circulation of concepts in this context, this kind of blogpost is curious as it reveals various underlying assumptions: the necessity for some people to turn any concepts or novelties into something that help selling or communicating (while some notions are not intended to go beyond pure speculations) or the over-simplication of the world.

Of course this happens a million times everyday and I don't know if it's important to pay attention to it... but analyzing the arguments and the simplifications at stake seems important to me. That's perhaps something I'll add in my course next year.

"I've been playing the same game of Civilization II for 10 years"

The other day, in a conference about video-games I co-organized in Lausanne, I instagramed this presentation by Brice Roy in which the game designer mentioned a game that can only be completed in 250 years. One of my contact (@carinaow) wondered about the very fact that "it's longer than a lifetime" and that "nobody can vouch for it". Sure, that's quite big amount of time but the point of the game is to question the notion of trans-generational play.

250 years is certainly very long, especially for a digital program to continue its life on different generations of devices. However, this notion of "long play" is interesting as it's close to another weak signal that caught my attention: the story of this guy who has been playing Civilization for ten years.

The guy said he grew fascinated with this particular game and that we wanted to see how far into the future he could get and what sort of ramifications he could encounter. Here are some excerpts of what he learnt doing this:

"The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation. (...) The ice caps have melted over 20 times (somehow) due primarily to the many nuclear wars. As a result, every inch of land in the world that isn't a mountain is inundated swamp land, useless to farming. Most of which is irradiated anyway.

As a result, big cities are a thing of the distant past. Roughly 90% of the worlds population (at it's peak 2000 years ago) has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm. Engineers (late game worker units) are always busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn when the enemy goes. So there isn't any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout. (...) You've heard of the 100 year war? Try the 1700 year war (...) Every time a cease fire is signed, the Vikings will surprise attack me or the Americans the very next turn, often with nuclear weapons. Even when the U.N forces a peace treaty. So I can only assume that peace will come only when they're wiped out. "

Why do I blog this? These kinds of accounts of long-time play are so scarce that it's great to find one of them. It would be so fascinating to watch a replay and see how a narrative of such play could be inscribed in book or movie, surely an intriguing project to be done.

These new aestheticians were a bit too literal, weren't they?

Why do I blog this? Probably because this encounter with a weird table, whose shape has been generated by a computer program, seem to exemplify the excess or the mere simplicity of adopting this approach in design/art. We'll probably see more and more things like that.

Perhaps this signal can also be connected with some of the insights Regine brought up in her interview with Jeremy Hutchison. This artist contacted a bunch of manufacturers around the world asking them to produce an item which had to be imperfect, come with an intentional error. In this blogpost, i was fascinated by this part:

I got a frantic call in the middle of the night: Waleed was at the customs port. The authorities had seized the ball. When he explained than an Englishman had ordered a ball with errors, all hell broke loose. They said it was illegal to fabricate incorrect products, and they would revoke his company's trading licence. I explained that this product wasn't incorrect since it was exactly what I'd ordered. Days passed: nothing. Lost in the bureaucracy of Pakistani customs, I eventually got through to the high commissioner in Islamabad.

She was very apologetic, and explained that 20kg of heroin had recently passed under the radar at Sialkot customs. So everyone was feeling a bit paranoid. She issued a document stating that "the sculpture/artwork looks like a football but in fact is not a football and primarily this object is not for using as a football but is an artwork." But it was too late: someone had destroyed the ball, and it disappeared without a trace. I never quite found out who.

The intentional creation of failed object and the influence they can have on people or organization's behavior is always a fascinating research avenue.

Lessons from teaching design approaches to engineering students

This year, I had the chance to teach a year-long course at EPFL about design and creative approaches with my colleague Daniel Sciboz. This class is part of the social science/art/design program which corresponds to a set of courses engineering students have to take as part of their general curriculum. Since EPFL doesn't have researchers in these domains, this program is taught by external experts coming from the University of Lausanne, the University of Art and Design Lausanne (ECAL), and the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) to which I belong. Since this was the first year teaching that course, I found it relevant to describe what we did and some lessons we learned in the process.

The purpose of this course was to "give students the opportunity to discover, understand and apply various creative approaches, by highlighting the diversity of methodologies and the relevance of subjectivity or intuition". The year was divided in two parts:

  • First semester with lectures and workshop activities:
    1. Research and concepting approaches: ethnography (observation/interview), iconographic research, group brainstorm, mood boards.
    2. Creation and prototyping techniques: physical and paper mock-ups, repurposing of standard software (powerpoint, excel).
  • Second semester devoted to students personal/group projects.

In order to narrow down the possibilities and make the course more focused, we chose "reading in mobility" as a general topic.

Here are some remarks and comments I wrote down during the two semesters. They exemplify some of the issues we noticed and I describe them here as "difficulties" encountered by some of our students. They are quite interesting in terms of teaching design approaches to engineers and I think we may build upon these in next year's course.

One-way / One-time This is the most striking issue we noticed: when confronted with a design brief, students picked up one way to deal with it (generally the most obvious idea) and developed their answer based on that. This answer, be it a storyboard or a physical mock-up, was then implemented with lots of details without any consideration of alternative paths.

A good example of this is a student who worked on school billboards: in his "observation" phase, he noticed that they were quite messy and tedious to "update" since people had to physically go to the billboards and duct-tape his/her poster. His proposal was to design an interactive systems with displays and a web platform to update everything remotely. In this case, the student's perspective was seemingly driven by the need to complete this project quite quickly (we're competing with other classes in terms of students' attention!), his interest/expertise in computer science and his belief system (that classifies digital technology as the go-to solution for problem solving). Even when we asked him to go make other observations or "users" interviews and consider alternative solutions (with or without technologies), it was hard to make him change the course of the project.

This was certainly an "edge case" but others had similar issues as well: making observations and interviews allowed another group to redefine the brief a bit better and clarify the design space. However, once the group chose his "potential solution", they didn't want to change their trajectory, as if it was a "one-way and one-time" course without any exploration (through research and prototyping).

I analyzed this as a difficulty to deal with uncertainty: selecting the end point of their project was a good way to have a purpose and move towards it by making incremental choices. Each time we encouraged the groups who suffered from that problem, it was hard for them to cope with these advices. Either because it may alter the outcome they had in mind and because it would require too much time/energy to do it. One of them even told me that "it can't be changed at this point". My hypothesis here is that designers may be more at ease with uncertainty but I thought this was also a skill would have to master (see this paper if you're interested in the link between creativity and ambiguity/uncertainty).

A side-problem was the difficulty to use "making" as an exploration approach to problems or situations. In a very engineering-oriented way, some had to plan everything on paper (with words and sometime sketches) before building a rough prototype. Of course, we had lovely and surprising exceptions but they were less common.

The implementation bias and reluctance to iterate

Another related issue was the "implementation bias": this happened when a group of students formulated an interesting design avenue but got sucked into creating their prototype with lots of tiny technical issues. The group then had to focus on solving these problems and not thinking about the global picture. Similarly, a student was quite pissed when we told him his web prototype was highly detailed but did not correspond with the context of use he planned it for... when we asked it to redo it in a different way, he felt that what he had did before was useless and a waste of time... it was hard for him to understand that it was an important lesson he couldn't have learned otherwise.

Nevertheless, the reluctance to iterate might have been cause by the number of credits allocated to this class, with regards to others courses which are "more important" for them.

A lack of attention to formal elements and an intriguing relationship to details

We also noticed a tendency to consider formal elements and general aesthetic as something not really taken care of, or only thought of as the end of the project. It was as if some students took their project as writing with LaTeX: they focused on the "content", i.e. the substance of the project and then realized at the end they had to think about shapes, colors and how potential users may use it. This was a difficulty to consider a design project as a whole, in which the discussions about the role of the proposal and the way it's implemented (behavior, shape, aesthetic, etc.) can be inter-related.

This is quite intriguing given that some did lots of super detailed things (i.e. a list of menu items on an interface), while, at the same time, using unrealistic personas or wrong props. For instance, when a group created a video about am artifact to be deployed fifteen years ahead, the general atmosphere was not really planned to give the impression of a distant future.

Risk reluctance

When we started the projects during the second semester, what surprised me most about their ideas was the reluctance to take risks (by trying to explore weird ideas). It was as if they integrated the same risk-averse attitude as one can find in corporate culture. Especially for those who focused on direct digital transcriptions of what exist already (from visual ads to location-based ads, from messy paper-based billboards to screens). Some said things like "we have to find a real need" or "it should be based on a problem we found in the field research phase". This led to good discussions about how observations, interviews or even brainstorming can be be deployed to find ideas, which are not necessarily conventional and related to a standard problem.

We had to push them considering alternative paths and not the sole basic ideas and solution that generally already existed. Not necessarily because we only want to have weird and off projects but simply given that the point was to invent something new, beyond the current products and services on the market.

Why do I blog this? Because we're planing next year's class and it's always good to reflect on what we've done.

Maybe the main reason why these remarks are interesting for me is that the confrontation between design culture and engineering culture allows shedding some light on how designers' do things and their expectations. By looking at how designers responded differently, it enabled me to see that the assumptions I have (or the one designers have) are different from the one of engineers. It would also be interesting to write a blogpost about the common traits between both cultures, but I guess this for another occasion.

The portrait painted here might be a bit critical and negative but it was actually a great class and the comments above only express my frustration to go beyond what we've done. Most of the projects in the end had something intriguing in them. Some were more creative than others but there was always a detail that caught our attention either in the idea explored or in the implementation. This will give us ideas go modify the course next year, for instance by giving incentives to design several design iterations and alternative paths.

Also, the problems I mentioned here are not always inherent to engineers and we encounter similar issues with design students.

Monster sticky note on cell-phone screen

Last month, when involved in a teaching seminar in France, I ran across this utterly curious scene. It's basically a cell-phone with a piece of paper that shows a drawing, stuck on the device's display. The drawing features a sort of animal quickly scribbled.

This is exactly the sort of artifact that I like to find in my peripheral vision. Quick drawings, paper, duct tape and a technological devices: those are the ingredients that generally leads the observer to spot a bottom-up innovation of sort. De Certeau at its best probably. Seeing this, I thought that the user of this device had a specific use for this: perhaps aesthetical (a kid's present), most likely functional.

Fortunately, the "user" of this phone was close and I had the opportunity to ask her what it meant. She told me it was a reminder. Interestingly, in French, a reminder is called "pense-bête": literally "a reminder for stupid people" but "bête" not only means "stupid", it's also a term employed for "beast". This user thus created a drawing of a small beast on a piece of paper as way to signify it's a reminder.

The thought process is clear here: the stick note is put in a convenient place (the phone display) and for both aesthetic/functional reasons, it takes the form of a piece of paper with a quick drawing. It's also stunning to see how the phone screen is used as surface to put additional information (and subsequently cover up the screen itself!).

Why do I blog this? This is a fascinating example of bottom-up creativity that corresponds to how users create their own personal (and meaningful) personal solutions in everyday life. What is important is that the phone itself supports that very same functionality (reminder/virtual stick note). However, the user preferred the use different material (paper, pen, duct-tape) to do it. This can be seen as a good example of the difference between a feature and its instantiation from the user's POV. It's not because the phone has a reminder system that it's going to be used... simply because the whole system is different and does offer the same level of personalization.

http://betaknowledge.tumblr.com/ as a compilation of weak signals about the future

Btw, I started a tumblr few days ago to accumulate insights, data points and "weak signals" in a very basic/raw way... I use to put that material into delicious but I'm not satisfied with the service anymore. It's called beta knowledge and it can be seen as material that can be turned into long posts here on Pasta and Vinegar, in articles/books/reports, or, even better, into design objects.

I'm trying to integrate that into the feedburner RSS feed.

Virilio on "statistical image" and perception #newaesthetic

Read in Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine:

"But by way of conclusion, let us return to the crisis in perceptive faith, to the automation of perception that is threatening our understand- ing. Apart from video optics, the vision machine will also use digital imaging to facilitate recognition of shapes. Note, though, that the synthetic image, as the name implies, is in reality merely a 'statistical image' that can only emerge thanks to rapid calculation of the pixels a computer graphics system can display on a screen. In order to decode each individual pixel, the pixels immediately surrounding it must be analysed. [...] As a mode of representation of statistical thought today dominant thanks to data banks, synthetic imagery should soon contribute to the development of this one last mode of reasoning."

Why do I blog this? As usual, there's always a French philosopher to refer to something we're discussing nowadays. Although I'm not necessarily a big fan of Virilio, I'm often fascinated by some insights one can find in his essays. The above quote struck me as interesting with regard to the New Aesthetic meme.

Z/Z/Z/ describing the dimension of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language

Via Daniel Rehn:

Z/Z/Z/ is a project hatched by Daniel Rehn and Sarah Caluag dedicated to “describing the dimension of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language”. This endeavour deploys a custom visualization workflow to break down footage from film, animation and games and reconstitute this source material into stills and animated GIFs using a range of image analysis techniques. (...) While the underpinnings of Z/Z/Z/ predate our creative partnership, its dual-mission of research and aesthetic-production mirror the goals of our overall practice. The ability to analytically, quantifiably describe these visualizations while also revelling in their beauty is ideal for us

Why do I blog this? Intriguing approach/objective/purpose. Relevant for an upcoming course.

Robot Mori: a curious assemblage from the Uncanny Valley

Perhaps the weirdest piece of technology I've seen recently is this curious assemblage exhibited at Lift in Seoul: it's called "Robot Mori" and, as described by Advanced Technology Korea:

"Meet Mori, the alter ego of a lonely boy who wants to go out and make friends but is too shy. Mori, on the other hand, isn’t shy at all. He swivels his head, looking around for nearby faces. Once he detects your face, he takes a picture and uploads it to his Flickr page."

Why do I blog this? The focus on face, and the visual aesthetic produced by the whole device is strikingly intriguing. Definitely, close to the Uncanny Valley... which made me realize that whatever sits in the valley often belong to the New Aesthetic trope. I personally find it fascinating that robots can have this kind of visual appearance and wonder whether some people might get use to that after a while... in the same sense that they got used to moving circle pads as vacuum cleaners.

"Recombinant food"

Reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, I ran across this notion of "recombinant food" (pp. 219-220):

"Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midwestern/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient. (...) The recombinant food thing was a declaration of mental bankruptcy in the complexity of modern material culture."

Why do I blog this? Food made with already processed elements is something I already noticed recently, not just in the US but also in Europe. Last examples that come to mind have been encountered in France: tiramisu or speculoos ice-cream, desserts made of and banana mixed together, snickers-based recipes.

(Picture by the divine dish)

Even though I'm not much of a food expert, I find this intriguing as a way to show how material culture (yes I include food as part of material culture) is in a constant process of hybridization and recombination. It's particularly interesting that Stephenson use this term coming from chemistry and genetics as it reveals the underlying principles: some basic components (units in Ian Bogost's perspective on #ooo or "cultural waves" in Basile Zimmermann's parlance) can be combined... to create something potentially new and original. Which is of course tight to the notion of creolization I already mentioned here.

This kind of phenomenon is spot on what I'm interested in lately as the process that led to this sort of type of food is the key to understand potential futures. I'm currently working on this for an upcoming talk at the Hirshhorn Museum in June.

"you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works"

Read in Wired 3.05, May 1995 (via):

"Kevin Kelly: If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do?

Brian Eno: I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, This is a good output, reinforce that, or replay it, or feed it back in. I would love to have this machine stand for me. I could program this box to be my particular taste and interest in things.

Kevin Kelly:Why do you want to do that? You have you. Brian Eno: Yes, I have me. But I want to be able to sell systems for making my music as well as selling pieces of music. In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box. Or you could buy a Brian Eno box. So then I would need to put in this box a device that represents my taste for choosing pieces."

Why do I blog this? Well, simply because that's good quote that partly reflects the discussions about New Aesthetics (and the audio side of it as I mentioned the other day, but I guess it's applicable to other creative fields... think about architecture and Frank Gehry's work for instance).

Robot-produced languages as part of #newaesthetic?

As a follow up to my blogpost the other day about New Aesthetic as not-only-visual-but-also-something-else, I kept wondering about other possibilities. Overall, what I find interesting in NA is that algorithms produce new cultural forms... and that it's not just about visual representations. One of the cultural form that can produced by robots/algorithms for that matter is certainly language and communication. Researchers in Artificial Intelligence indeed work on that avenue for quite some time and it would be relevant to consider the "language" produced in this context by (ro)bots... and see whether it fits with the New Aesthetic meme.

A good starting point for this is Language Games for Autonomous Robots by Luc Steels:

"s. A language game is a sequence of verbal interactions between two agents situated in a specific environment. Language games both integrate the various activities required for dialogue and ground unknown words or phrases in a specific context, which helps constrain possible meanings. Over the past five years, I have been working with a team to develop and test language games on progressively more sophisticated systems, from relatively simple camera-based systems to humanoid robots. The results of our work show that language games are a useful way to both understand and design human–robot interaction."

Talking Head
Talking Head

This is done through various experiments such as the "Talking Heads experiment" shown on the following picture. It's hard to find a video of such work but this one might help to get a sense of what's happening (it's a guessing game though).

As shown by Steels in this paper:

"During a three-month period, the agents played close to half a million language games and created a stable core vocabulary of 300 words (they generated thousands of words overall). Our experiment showed not only that the language game approach is useful for implementing grounded dialogues between one human and a robot, but also that the game might be useful as an explanatory model for how language originates"

And this is exactly where you can find what can be part of New Aesthetic: the "language" that emerged from these robot interactions. One of my project as a graduate students in Cognitive Sciences was about that and I remember being fascinated by the work of researchers such as Frederic Kaplan or Bart de Boer. More specifically, the latter investigated emergent phonology, i.e. how iterations of imitation games in a population of agents can led to the emergence of sound systems emerge that look remarkably like human vowel systems. It's not necessarily the fact that is used to model language evolution that interest me here. Instead, what is strikingly stunning is to see the results of such emergence and what it can produce.

Here's the process:

"The agents that are used in the computer simulation use vowels to “communicate” with each other. For this purpose, each agent has its own list of vowels. The lists of vowels for each agent are initially empty, and will be filled as the agents engages in interactions with other agents. (...) The experiments presented in this work are concerned with the emergence of a coherent and useful phonology in a population of initially empty agents. In order to investigate how this can happen, the agents engage in exchanges of sounds, so-called imitation games, the goal of which is to learn each other’s speech sounds. If necessary, speech sounds are invented, in order to get the communication started, and also in order to introduce more possible sounds in the population."

The result part of the paper is quite dense and describes the phonemes and vowels produced by the robots.

Why do I blog this? Of course, in this case, the goal is to model natural languages but it would be curious to play with the constraints to see how various sorts of language systems can emerge depending on the model parameters. And this is exactly where the result can be part of a cultural form that can belong to New Aesthetic.

On a different note, the problem, from the collection angle (that is quite important in the NA theme), is that it's hard to find audio or video pieces that can help us to listen to these languages games. I'll try to dig into that.

Representing the city as it's lived: livelihoods

It's been few days that I'm following the the livehoods.org/ and it's quite interesting.

The project is defined as follows:

"Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people's checkin patterns at places across the city, we create a mapping of the different dynamic areas that comprise it. Each Livehood tells a different story of the people and places that shape it. (...) The hypothesis underlying our work is that the character of an urban area is defined not just by the the types of places found there, but also by the people who make the area part of their daily routine. To explore this hypothesis, given data from over 18 million foursquarecheck-ins, we introduce a model that groups nearby venues into areas based on patterns in the set of people who check-in to them. By examining patterns in these check-ins, we can learn about the different areas that comprise the city, allowing us to study the social dynamics, structure, and character of cities on a large scale."

Why do I blog this? Working on a similar topic, I quite enjoy this kind of research work. The idea that social media data can be employed to understand areas as lived by people is fascinating and highly intriguing to test. It's somehow what one can call a "social map" and we now have more and more data to see how it would look like.

"The Unknown Glitch"

Read in SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums by Steward brand (1972):

Alan Kay: "They had a thing on the PDP-l called 'The Unknown Glitch' ["Glitch" - a kink, a less-than-fatal but irritating fuck-up]. They used to program the thing either in direct machine code, direct octal, or in DDT, In the early days it was a paper-tape machine. It was painful to assemble stuff, so they never listed out the programs. The programs and stuff just lived in there, just raw seething octal code. And one of the guys wrote a program called 'The Unknown Glitch,' which at random intervals would wake up, print out I AM THE UNKNOWN GLITCH. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, and then it would relocate itself somewhere else in core memory, set a clock interrupt, and go back to sleep. There was no way to find it."

Why do I blog this? Working on the chapter of a book about game controllers, I am collecting material about Spacewar! and it's interesting to see how this work parallels other current interests (such as New Aesthetics). I wish I could have seen this sort of glitch.

Bot activity on Wikipedia entries about Global Warming

Looking for material for an upcoming speech, I ran across this research project (by digital methods initiative) that inquires into the composition of issues on Wikipedia by contributors, and consequences for the (possibility) of carrying out public debate and controversy on articles surrounding Global Warming. The bit that intrigued me is exemplified by the following diagrams... that look into the role of bot in article interventions and the link with controversies:

No crazy take-over from bots but I would find it intriguing to observe the evolution of this.

Why do I blog this? This is a fascinating topic to observe. I see it as an indicator of something that can have more and more implications, especially on the production of cultural content. One can read more about this in Stuart Geiger's article "The lives of bots:

"Simple statistics indicate the growing influence of bots on the editorial process: in terms of the raw number of edits to Wikipedia, bots are 22 of the top 30 most prolific editors and collectively make about 16% of all edits to the English-language version each month.

While bots were originally built to perform repetitive tasks that editors were already doing, they are growing increasingly sophisticated and have moved into administrative spaces. Bots now police not only the encyclopedic nature of content contributed to articles, but also the sociality of users who participate in the community"

Is the New Aesthetic only about visual stuff?

The panel about New Aesthetic at SXSW last month left me with the impression that NA is all about visual representations:

"One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious), and a useful visual shorthand for that collaboration has been glitchy and pixelated imagery, a way of seeing that seems to reveal a blurring between “the real” and “the digital”, the physical and the virtual, the human and the machine."

Reading Simon "Retromania" Reynold's twitter feed the other day, I found this:

At first, I found it interesting, especially considering the follow-up blogpost by Reynolds which was basically a reaction to Bruce Sterling's essay about NA. In this short post, the author describes what can be the equivalent of NA in the audio department of material culture:

"what seems overtly, blatantly digital in today's pop -- to draw attention to its digital hyper-reality -- are all those AutoTune treatments and various other vocal-science effects (stutters, glitches, drastic pitchshifts from high to low) etc that you get routinely in chartpop in recent years-- that, and the general sheen of too-perfectness on both vocals (through AutoTune) and on the entire sonic-surface of songs -- a digi-gloss - there seems to be an attempt there, semi-unconscious most likely, to make music keep up with the high-definition crispness of flat-screen TV, CGI in film, skin-tone even-ness and other digital touching-up effects as used in glossy magazine photography and (i believe) also in TV and films."

This all good and well but I think this is the surface of things. As a result (and I do not want to imply that Reynold's wrong in there, I simply had the same thoughts), my impression is that this way of framing what is NA (regardless of the fact that NA is something *to be framed*) misses the point. As a matter of fact, what I find interesting with the New Aesthetic trope is not a focus on the way things look or sound, it's way beyond that. As James has put it on his humble tumblr about NA (i wanted to make this assonance for a while): "Since May 2011 I have been collecting material which points towards new ways of seeing the world, an echo of the society, technology, politics and people that co-produce them".

A good example, in the audio domain for once, of New Aesthetics as I find it interesting is the way the music experience is created, mediated and co-produced on a platform such as Soundcloud. Using it for some time, I am fascinated by the interface the user is provided with:

What strikes me as mesmerizing here, is the use of the spectrogram as the direct interface with musical content: not just an indicator on your screen to see the level of the sound... A machine-produced and machine-readable indicator is used to navigate in the track AND - and this is what I find intriguing - a mean to comment on specific part. Of course, that's curious IMHO for one reason: the practices that were common on the web (commenting/tagging/starring/linking) have basically circulated to something as common as a playing a musical track and turning it into a social object that people can comment on! What's next? Permalink for musical excerpt in a track? This example shows another category of NA that I find interesting. Perhaps the upcoming step is to find this kind of spectrogram with comments on concert poster or street graffiti but this is not the point. The main take-away is that the way we use things are changing and the things we are using too because of this co-production that Bridle described in the aforementioned quote.

Why do I blog this? This is maybe half-baked and confusing but I started accumulating material about creolization/recombination/hybridization, and I am curious to see if there a way to tie-in this with the NA meme. My impression is that there's a hidden variable in there: something that my friend Basile Zimmermann calls the circulation of cultural elements. More to follow later on. And of course, this seems to be related to the object-oriented ontology that Julian blogged about the other day. Let's read more about that.