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September 2010
A chance of redemption! Mr Drummond came to the Do Lectures to do a talk and a performance of the 17. Once again my fear of participating defeated me and I just sat outside the tent and listened, taking the occasional photo of Mr Drummond's magnificent Landrover.
This blog - 10 years old today.
Summer 2008 - Not Derby
Toby invited me to take part in Mr Drummond's Slice Through Derby project (part of The 17). I was very excited. In the end though my fear of participating in any sort of group event with strangers meant I made an excuse and didn't go. I regret this a lot. Would have loved to have done that. Not enough to actually do it though, obviously.
It's a long time since I've heard a radio play I liked but this afternoon's was brilliant. You should listen.
It was funny and sad and beautiful, all that, but it was also different - it wasn't like a regular play, it wasn't like regular radio. It mixed interviews, acting, songs, reminiscence and lies - which makes it sound awful - but it was actually electric.
I read How Literature Saved My Life the other week, by David Shields. It continues the argument of Reality Hunger, if argument is the word. I guess I'd sum it up as: the novel just isn't that good any more at telling us about the world we're in, or at least, not as good as other forms we have now, or at least, not as good as the forms we're about to invent.
Encounter, Cristopher Green's play, sounded like the things I'd like to read now. It sounded, somehow, connected, collaged, networked.
I've been going on about secondary attention and sound for a while. But it's been hard to get over what I mean, or to find anyone who thinks I might not be mad. I've even been trying to build some examples of my own, but it's been slow going. I've now settled down to hoping I'll be able, one day, to build something on the BERGcloud.
In the meantime - choir.io is a lot of what I mean. A bit like Peep but made for now. Here's how they explain it:
"Choir provides a programmable interface to translate events into a rich set of context-aware sounds. Our users mark events with emotions and intrusivensses and we take care of the rest.
...Choir has three killer applications.
First, ambient sound monitoring. By associating user or server activities with different sounds, you can stay aware of the current statuses without having to look at the graphs. If something unusual happens, you would hear the changes almost subconsciously. Failed login requests, rejected credit card transactions, 500 errors are a few good examples here.
Second, notify without interruptions. Today your notifications are mostly delivered via email or chat room messages. You have to bear the cost of context switches to checkout these messages. Choir can provide you with a more fine grained control over different type of notifications. For example, you might choose to play a pleasant, low-intrusive sound when a user gives a kudos to a support ticket, but you would probably want to select a negative and intrusive sound, maybe a sea monster roar, if a user just unsubscribed from your service. If you hear too many of the scary sea monster noises, you will know something is wrong.
Third, celebrate with others. Some companies would hit a giant gone when they close a new deal. It is a great morale booster to bring the whole team together and share the excitement of successes. Now you could configure Choir to play a cheerful sound when a new paid user sign up for your service."
I suspect they're also foreshadowing is the solution to the Google Glass stare. Google shouldn't be using your eyes for this, they should be using your ears. Stick all the same information in your background attention, via your ears, and you solve a lot of problems. Anything where you need the actual information can be done via text to speech. You've seen how it works - it's Jarvis.
I don't know why but I'm starting to get slightly obsessed with broadcast / sensor arrays.
August 2007 - Tate Liverpool
We were on the Wirral visiting Anne's parents and I popped over to hear Mr Drummond talk at Tate Liverpool. In my head it was at Christmas but the facts seem to suggest it was August. He handed out copies of a poster he'd made for the City of Culture but which never got posted. I was very excited about it, but it's gotten lost somewhere. I'm not sure where. This depresses me.
He also gave us all mugs from his project twinning Kensington in Liverpool with Kensington in London. This cheers me.
