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We're going to be in Oregon for a few weeks. Wondered if anyone fancied a coffee in Portland this Friday morning. Probably 11am. Not sure where. Any suggestions?
UPDATE: Well it seems to work for the likemind crew, so let's say Stumptown at 128 SW 3rd. I like it there. But let's make it a more civilised 11am. Friday.
Went to see Fulborn Teversham last night, at the Museum of Garden History. Really good. And I discovered a new drumming hero in Seb Rochford. Two drumming heroes in a week. Very exciting. And it's interesting recording the hidden little byways, connections and alliances that surround him and Polar Bear and Pickled Egg records, like this little page, which makes music feel handmade and personal.
Famous Rob's very kindly taking over the Post Of The Month thing. So, if you'd like to, go there and do that.
When I was growing up a big point in the week would always be the arrival of The Observer newspaper on a Sunday. The two bits I devoured immediately were Clive James' TV reviews and Tim Hunkin's Rudiments Of Wisdom. The Clive James stuff appealed to the pop culturist wannabe writer in me and I loved The Rudiments of Wisdom because I wanted to be an engineer, like my Dad. The education system and my own laziness forced me to choose between the two and I plumped for the non-mechanical arts, but I still loved Tim Hunkin.
After the rudiments were phased out of The Observer (probably in favour of some specious holistic doctor) Mr Hunkin popped up next on BBC2 with a brilliant homebrew-looking series called The Secret Life Of Machines. But that was in the days where you watched a TV programme and then it just disappeared, you never saw it again. And he did some stuff with the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, I remember seeing some of his machines in Covent Garden (I think). And then I got more and more swallowed up with the digital and I stopped thinking about building Hunkin machines.
But then, earlier this year, I bumped into Hukin-ness again at KInetica and read about his amusement arcade at Southwold Pier. And I got all excited again. And then I saw he was talking at We Love Technology and started to think of it as a pilgrimage.
He didn't disappoint. What a lovely man.
He pointed out that amusement arcades are in terrible decline at the moment. Video gaming at home is as good as you can get in most arcades and the relaxation in gambling laws means that more and more arcade territory is being given over to gaming machines. There's not a lot of investment in gaming fun. So, he thought, what could be a better time to reinvent the arcade? And he happened to live close to Southwold Pier and was given the chance to run the arcade there, so he did.
He's clearly always been a builder and a tinkerer but I think the thing that makes him different is this very clear thought - 'the best machine to make is a machine that makes you laugh'. That might be why his machines are so much more successful than other things you might think of as 'media art'. In the same way that comedy is clearly a higher and more difficult art than straight drama then making a machine that makes you laugh is a more interesting discipline than some media project that's designed to 'provoke' or 'make you think' or 'challenge contemporary notions or interpersonal modality'.
And, of course, the joy of his laugh-making machine success is that he doesn't have to apply for grants or talk in the language of funding applications. He justs goes and empties the cash out of his machines every week and makes a living at it. There's a purity of purpose to that which I imagine is very satisfying.
He's got a few machines which act like funny simulators - they simulate walking the dog, or compress a package holiday into three minutes. He said that he never bothers trying to match the movement on the screen with the wobbling of the seat - he reckons that if you wobble the seat a bit and there's some movement on the screen that's all you need to create enough illusion for you to get immersed. I like that. I bet there's lots of parallels with other things in there somewhere. Don't work to hard on making something believable, make it entertaining and the brain will fill it all in for you.
He also talked about the value of re-using stuff, not starting from scratch. In a very pratical way. A lot of his machines are built on the bones and frames of pre-existing machines - Atari things or treadmills or whathaveyou, and they've already invested millions of dollars in making sure those things comply with health and saftey regs etc. Which means that Mr Hunkin doesn't have to worry so much about that stuff.
The other big moment for me was his passion for working with his hands, he's recently taught himself to use CAD but he says he can't do it for long, he just yearns to get out in the shed 'thinking with my hands'. Apparently he's tried to get permission to go into schools and teach kids to use powertools (which are very rewarding when your hands are too small to do a lot) but most schools are frightened of the idea. Powertools for kids! I could get behind that as a campaign. (Along with Medium Amounts Of Things!)
But the key thing I got from Mr Hunkin - enthusiasm = good. Anyone fancy a day-trip to Southwold Pier sometime?
This was good stuff too. Plasticity is a an 'urban planning toy' -they've modeled Bradford city centre on the Unreal Engine (so it looks like a video game, it, sort of, is a video game) and you (or your character) can wonder around looking at and playing with the architecture. Though I like the way Mr Manthorp put it "if accurately models an urban centre and then allows you to monkey with it". I think that expresses the way they'd taken a very serious project and rendered it playful, and therefore more useful.
The introduction of nice British colloquialisms into techtalk is a good thing. Reminds me of the folksy hunt for a British version of 'beta'.
And then, that was it for the day because James arrived, tried to sneak in, got spotted and ejected so we went and had a cup of tea in Huddersfield Open Market, which is a fantastic place.
All in all a brilliant day, I think I got the same things out of it that Iain did. Must go again next year.
I've liked noticing the solidification of the internet recently, it seems to be becoming more like a thing and less like a service or process.
It's cheap, a commodity, you market it like fish and chips or pizza.
You can get it with vouchers.
Or it's just floating about like those kite marks you get on car windscreens, or like the visa/amex stickers in shop windows. At the edge of our attention.
Soon we'll just stop mentioning it.
Went to the Barbican this evening to see two bands who ended up feeling like a future for music. First was the Portico Quartet, doing a free gig in the foyer. Absolutely hypnotic. I first encountered them via a miscellaneous twitter, then saw them on a few last.fm lists, and delicious tags which led me to their myspace page for a quick listen. That took me to the Barbican, that led me to buy the CD. (And to think about buying a hang, though that seems tricky) That seems like a future for the music industry, doesn't seem a bad future. Just not a lot of role in it for large record companies.
I'd heard a bit about The Bays before too, always fancied them, never made the effort to go. I'm very glad I went this evening, it was magnificent stuff and Andy Gangadeen is my new drumming hero. They make smart use of web stuff too, you can get downloads of their sets etc, but the very clever thing they do is not record. They're entirely a live, improvised experience. Every night is different and it really feels special. It's an important lesson; in an incredibly mediated age, people will also value spectacle. I'm hoping to see them again. Lots.
As I said, I went with some chaps from Poke to a splendid conference called We Love Technology in Huddersfield on Thursday. (And, in passing, I might say that the fact that they go to things like this is one of the things that make Poke good.)
I didn't really know what to expect from it, didn't know anything of the people who were talking there, except that I'm a long-time worshipper of Tim Hunkin, (more of him later) but I knew it was going to be good when I saw they'd put a little food order pad in the attendees pack. The perfect thing for taking notes, cheap, the right size and lovely to write on. I wish we'd thought of that for Interesting. (My notes in full, with added notes are here, if you're interested.)
The thing I liked most about it all was that it was a tube popping up into a world I'd not really visited before. (Or a bridge.) It was the world of digital art, of stuff that's made by people who've received grants or 'funding' and who have different issues and approaches from those I'm used to. It was really refreshing to look at the world that way for a bit. (Again, Mr Hunkin was an exception, but, as I say, more of that later.) There was a rigour and dedication to it all which I loved. These were people who seemed to have built a life doing what they loved.
The whole thing was to be compered by Matt Locke but he'd been struck by lurgy and was replaced by Steve Manthorp who did an excellent job. But I presume Mr Locke had a hand in programming the thing, and if so, hats off to him.
Steve Manthorp started off with a list of ten things he loved about technology. It was a very good list. These are the things that stood out for me:
BEAMbots. I was sitting quite a long way back for this bit and couldn't really see the screen properly, and I didn't really hear either so I only caught a vague glimpse of it and couldn't quite tell what he said. Beadbots? Beanbots? (I love it when this happens. This is often how good ideas happen. You misunderstand something and are therefore forced to think through an incongruity - trying to make sense of something nonsensical - from this you tend to get good ideas, because you have to find something novel that closes a gap.) So in trying to imagine what beadbots or beanbots might be I thought of something half-way between jewelery and lego mindstorms, not in an etsy sort of way, but something both functional and playful, like a rudimentary technological familiar.
I was, of course, wrong.
BEAM it turns out, stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics and it's a school of robotics that uses simple technological stuff to do relatively simple things but with great ingenuity and bags of charm. A lot of the charm seeming to come from the fact that they're deliberately modeled on the behaviours and characteristics of natural organisms, and they're often solar-powered and light-seeking, which gives them a sweet sense of purpose. As you can see, I don't know much about these things, except they're good and I've ordered a kit from here.
I mentioned semi-living worry dolls yesterday. The phrase still bangs round my head. I suspect it's one of the things that will stop me signing on permanently with a large corporation again. Until the phrase, big-pension-go-home-early crowds it out.
You probably all know about wikileaks but I'd completely missed it. What a brilliant idea. Go have a look. This chimed again for me in the afternoon as I was chatting with James Boardwell, who knows far more than me about how things of the web are actually made. I'd never really thought about the fact that wikipedia isn't just built on a tremendous social insight about the power of co-operation but that it's also technologically very smart, and that it's ability to scale and disambiguate (dread word) could provide useful models for all sorts of things. (Though it's probable I've misunderstood something in there.)
And then there's the Hansen Writing Ball. I don't like sticking images on here that I didn't make myself or don't have permission to use. But this thing is so beautiful I couldn't resist. This picture is from the Virtual Typewriter Museum and there are a ton more there so go and see. The Hansen is a very early typing machine and it proof that, at least in terms of aesthetics, word-processing has been going backwards since 1867. Nietzsche was apparently a fan of the writing ball and called it a schreibkugel. Thinking of him banging his words out on here somehow makes you appreciate them more.
Usman Haque was up next. I ususally find the discussion of architecture impenetrably dense. And this wasn't. But it was quite dense. Dense enough that I don't think I got it all and I may have made up my own meaning, as discussed previously. His big point seemed to be that technology used to mean a science or description of how something worked and now it tends to mean the object itself. ie we talk about an ipod as a great bit of technology but we don't talk about a frog as a great bit of biology. I guess that's true. What seemed interesting about that was Mr Haque's suggestion that what was stimulating and useful to think about was the larger system that something was part of, not the object itself.
I understood this most when he said that when we claim to build technology that's inspired by biology we're fooling ourselves, because we tend to be inspired by biological objects not broader biological systems. (I guess, my summary would be that we design stuff that looks like a frog, we should design stuff that works like a pond.) Biology is the process, not the object. We should copy that.
There's an echo of this in Matt's thought from Interesting about scales, and the quote he shared from Eliel Saarinen - "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a
chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an
environment in a city plan." It also seems connected to Cradle To Cradle thinking, which I guess is also about thinking about the next largest context, but in time, not space. And I'm sure there's all sorts of clever experience design stuff that thinks about all this, but I don't know what it is. (He also pointed us at howstuffismade.org which is an interesting picture of the future for manufacturers of anything and again illustrates the simple power of a wiki.) There's probably a connection to this too.
The best bit about this talk was that it inspired me to look at Mr Haque's work and it's fascinating. Strange, imaginative, low-tech and normal. And only slightly drenched in jargon. I'd like to see more of it in the world. There's also a video interview with Mr Haque at the redoubtable PingMag which is worth looking at. (And I've just noticed that there's a write-up of this talk at We Make Money Not Art, and Regine was clearly taking better notes than me.)
Mirjam Struppek was up next and she immediately made me feel very old by telling us about the project that had made her fall in love with technology, many years ago, in 2001. Good grief. That project was blinkenlights. I'm sure we all remember this and most of us probably think of it as a cool, hacky thing that you read about in Wired, Ms Struppek pointed out though the socially transformative effect it had on the square where they did it, which hadn't really occurred to me before.
She's also made me look at urban screens more carefully. As she points out so many are co-opted for commerce but have the potential to do other things, potentially more interesting things for the city they're in. Again, I didn't follow a lot of what she said, but it's made me want to think about it more.
Last before lunch was Julius Popp, and he was excellent too. He makes robotic/technological things as art, they have a simple, graceful, elegant quality. (Though being shallow fools it's both Iain are I were immediately taken with his exotic continental spelling. It does sort of matter though, technologie is somehow different to technology and mashines somehow more exotic than machines. It's like magick and magic. Spelling matters.)
I liked micro.adam and micro.eva a lot. Robots designed to adapt to a single factor - gravity - but the big thing he talked about was his bit.fall project. It's a hard thing to explain, perhaps the simplest thing is to imagine it as a huge printer that uses falling drops of water as pixels in a temporary display. But then that's the genius of YouTube, I don't have to explain it, you can just watch it:
Lovely isn't it? The text is generated through an algorithm that searches the web for buzzwords, I think the whole thing is supposed to be about the temporariness of ourselves and our culture, the changability of the flow of information and a nice thought about the haziness of our 'personhood'. (A theme in Popp's work which I think he stems from a childhood incident which meant he lost consciousness and became acutely aware of the fragility of person-ness. Or something like that.)
I liked Popp's modesty and ruefulness in the face of public reaction to his work. He's trying to make serious and thought-provoking stuff but the form he's chosen - words written in falling drops of water - can't help but make people smile. I liked his shrug in the face of that. You also have to admire his quiet persistance in pursuit of his vision. The finished product looks incredibly simple but it's obviously taken him years of work to do; unexciting, determined work. You've also got to respect his wish to keep it un-commercial since I bet every marketing person who looks at is immediately imagines it as an advertising medium.
I got home from the conference, was looking at his site, and admiring his singular persistance in making this thing work when I read about this. I do hope he's not going to be rolled over by MIT.
I think not though. He's already working on bit.flow which uses water in tubes to create robots which can make 3D images with water and examine their own behaivour. Good man. Excellent stuff.
This is turning into a long post. Maybe I'll do the afternoon later. Must do some work now.
Then we had lunch.
Rob's just posted his feedback on the marathon Account Planning School Of The Web assignment he hosted. Top marks to him. Andrew Northern Planner's up next. Any volunteers for after that?
Went to this fantastic conference yesterday in Huddersfield - We Love Technology. Really good stuff which I will write up later. But one phrase has not stopped ringing around my head since yesterday when Steve Manthorp mentioned it in his introduction - "semi-living worry dolls". It's the name of this art project but it keeps striking me that it's the perfect encapsulation of all my worst days, particularly my worst days as an employee. Looking back I've spent many days as a semi living worry doll. Must try and make it less so in the future.
Radio things have been coming together today. Firstly, Mr Bowbrick and I have knocked up a little blog called speechification which is designed to be a celebration of / curation of / alternative way in to - BBC Radio 4. Have a look and a listen if you're not busy.
Secondly, BBC pods and blogs has done a brilliant three hour programme on 'the future of radio' which is well worth listening to; especially Danny Baker's magnificent rant about the horrible creative bankruptcy of most commercial radio and the joy of podcasting. (About an hour and a half in.)
UPDATE: Here's the Danny Baker bit (hope that's OK)
It's all got me thinking about radio again, hoping for good things from the 4 Digital Group. I've long wondered why no commercial entity has gone after Radio 4's audience, which must be a valuable one, maybe 4 Digital will. Surely there's room for intelligent audio content that people will pay for, sponsor or advertiser in. Maybe I should try and do episode two of In Our Own Time.