Just found this interesting quote by James Carey (in "McLuhan and Mumford: The Roots of Modern Media Analysis." Journal of Communication 31 (Summer 1981): 162-78): "all of the claims that have been made for electricity and electrical communication, down through the computer and cable and satellite ...
Traces of time and people interaction
Several examples of how people's activity and interaction with objects transform their appearance. Stairs in a bookshop (above), a door handle and the floor of the parisian subway are all victims of the passage of time. Of course, these traces (or patina) can have an intriguing aesthetic functio...
Lucasarts material
People interested in the history of video-games and in the material behind production may be intrigued by "Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts" (Rob Smith) I received my copy the other day and focused my attention on all this curious prototypes and documentation of game design. Maniac Mansion o...
20 years of the WWW afterthoughts
The other day at CERN, one of the thing that intrigued me most was the discussion around the first webpage. Tim Berners-Lee showed us the HyperMedia Browser/Editor, represented above. What's important there is the notion of a read/write piece of software, which reminds us that the "write" (i.e. "p...
Paleo-future textures
The city of the future was supposed to have a certain kind of texture and rugosity. Seen last week in Paris, in the Front-de-Seine neighborhood, where I encountered an intriguing set of paleo-futurist buildings. Why do I blog this? ... this material goes straight to my set of futurist architectur...
Battlestar Galactica and UN
A curious article in the NYT about the presence of Battlestar Galactica's creator at a United Nation meeting: "Representatives from the Sci Fi Channel approached the United Nations early this year. “They came to us and explained that there were themes common to both the show and the U.N.,” Mr. Bran...
20 years of the first paper about the World Wide Web
Yesterday I attended "World Wide Web@20" at CERN in Geneva where Web founders celebrated the 20 years of the "Original proposal for a global hypertext project at CERN" (1989). Tim Berners-Lee, Ben Segal, Jean-Francois Groff, Robert Cailliau and others gave a set of talks about the history and the ...
Manhole covers from the 21st century?
Street "traps" or elevators are definitely an interesting feature of cities that I am noticing lately (Paris and Lyon above, Geneva below). These devices definitely remind me of the pipes in Mario Bros, sort of tubes that allow people to be transferred to some underground secret world: Beyond ...
Social practices around mobile gaming
This picture of kids I encountered in Japan in 2004 playing with a game-boy exemplify one of the most intriguing feature I observe in gaming: a situation where only one person has a game device and the others are participating without it, in their own way. This is a common situation in gaming, one...
How to define a "failure"
An interesting reaction to my talk at Lift09 last week is the one by Tim Leberecht from Frog Design: "He presented a nonchalant history of product flops (from the picture phone to the smart fridge to location-based services), which were in his judgment all hampered by "over-optimism," "lack of kno...