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.
You so often take me to wonderful places that I would never otherwise have discovered. Usually they have nothing to do with what I do for a living but are inspirational and thought provoking. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by: Peter A. Mello | July 15, 2007 at 06:43 PM
Fucking hell that Julius Popp water thing is good.
Posted by: Ben | July 15, 2007 at 08:43 PM
Wow that is a blog post I can get stuck into....I remember recieving a twit from Iain about huddersfield, 3 hours and his younger raving days....all has become clear!!!
R
Posted by: richard buchanan | July 16, 2007 at 12:49 AM
I wish I was there.. Thanks for sharing!
Posted by: Raimo van der Klein | July 16, 2007 at 10:28 PM
Speaking of technology:
here is a fantastic vision of how we will navigate the internet in the future (multi-scale medium).
Whats interesting is how you can use press ad space to generate mini content sites. The example shows a guardian quarter page (2 mins in) and look at the amount of info you can get in it???
amazing/jaw dropping stuff! worth spending the 7mins watching it http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
Posted by: ::greg | July 18, 2007 at 04:21 PM
Hi russell,
Glad you enjoyed WLT 2007. I was really disappointed to miss it.
I wish I was clever enough to have had a hand in programming the conference, but its all the work of the fabulous Lisa Roberts at BlinkMedia. I normally just turn up to top and tail it, and go away incredibly inspired by everything I've seen.
BTW - really disappointed to miss Interesting as well - are you doing another one next year?
matt
Posted by: matlock | July 21, 2007 at 05:50 PM
Thanks Matt - what a gent.
Yes I progammed WLT07 and till next year will be available for weddings, birthdays and Barmitzvas.
Posted by: Lisa Roberts | July 26, 2007 at 03:07 PM