25/07/2005
Back from a thoroughly enjoyable weekend spent exploring the streets of Brussels.
The man who is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theatre, the bazaar. In every city of the empire every building is different and set in a different order […] This - some say - confirms the hypothesis that man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, the individual cities fill it up.
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
See also Italo Calvino sparks obsessions, Illustrated Invisible Cities
06/07/2005
In a piece of good news, the EU Patents Directive was overturned by a large majority this morning in the European Parliament. One of the speakers in the Exploiting Potential symposium last week discussed this issue at length, and a couple of days ago I emailed the Irish MEPs to express my opposition to the proposal.
I actually heard the news this morning from none other that Dublin MEP Gay Mitchell, who emailed me back:
Thank you for your recent email. The European Parliament this morning voted to reject the draft directive on computer-implemented inventions. It does not seem likely that the Commission will bring forward an alternative in the near future. A consensus seems to have evolved in the Parliament that no directive is better than a bad directive.
Seems like Gay was on the same page as Associated Press:
“It was a mess. Better no directive than a bad directive,” said Tony Robinson, spokesman for the Socialist group in parliament.
Still, good for him for emailing back.
04/07/2005
A friend asked me what LAMP in the previous post means. It stands for Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP — a robust and stable collection of Open Source programs used for web development.
I checked out the entry for LAMP on Wikipedia, and noticed that a Microsoft Windows/Microsoft IIS/Mysql/PHP developing environment is, of course, known as… WIMP.
03/07/2005
Back and recovered from Bristol and Submerge, where much enjoyment was had.
As part of the Submerge exhibition, my most recent Masters project, Re-News, was officially launched and on display in the exhibition, and even picked up third prize in the Innovation category of the Submerge Graduate Awards (well done to nice people Ruairi and Chris who took top spots in that category).
In installation form, Re-News consists of a bunch of recycled computer parts (affectionately known as ‘The Bucket’) running LAMP and the software itself. News feeds from mainstream media sources are regularly aggregated, analysed, output and presented according to a quantative algorithm that favours repetition of content — essentially, the news media is recycled.
You can check the software out online at re-news.org.
It is, of course, best viewed on a dangerously overheating homemade computer in a cheap plastic basin running opensource software.
21/06/2005
The action has been slow around here lately, but rest assured things are plenty busy in the background. I’m going to Bristol next week where I’ll have a piece in the Submerge 2005 exhibition — more on that as it happens.
14/06/2005
Looking over the archives here, I’ve noticed the style of posts has changed quite a bit over time. As you can see from the last few posts, I seem to be quoting quite a bit. Back in September 2004, for example, it was all about one line links to interesting sites, and lots of them. Recently, the posts have been a bit longer, but less frequent.
This is partly due to the fact that I now use del.icio.us to to publicly bookmark, so those single link posts are all but gone. (I’ve also been posting photos to flickr.) It’s probably also a reflection of the flurry of aimless research that marked the start of my Masters studies, whereas I am a little more focused now. Unfortunately, I don’t do enough actual writing here to improve all that much.
Anyway, at this rate, expect an essay every month for the next year, and a thesis every year after that.
29/05/2005
Goodbye, you had to say to every room
When as a child you went out.
Those rooms might not be there when you returned.
Even now, when you’ve been out,
You like to creep back and stare through your windows
As if to catch the rooms by surprise,
To see what they look like in your absence
Or to snatch a glimpse of yourself.
The house a mirror which might make that self seem true.
From Home by Mark Roper.
Published in Whereabouts, transcribed from The Enchanted Way (28/5/05).
24/05/2005
Brian Eno on creating the Windows 95 start-up sound:
The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.” The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.” I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
17/05/2005
Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags provides a decent overview of the failings of a traditional system of content categorisation when applied to online content, the alternatives provided by user-developed classification, and it’s roots in hyperlinking on the web.
The Library of Congress has something similar in its second-order categorization — “This book is mainly about the Balkans, but it’s also about art, or it’s mainly about art, but it’s also about the Balkans.” Most hierarchical attempts to subdivide the world use some system like this.
Then, in the early 90s, one of the things that Berners-Lee showed us is that you could have a lot of links. You don’t have to have just a few links, you could have a whole lot of links.
…
If you’ve got enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The links alone are enough.
09/05/2005
If we produce a work of art that is based on data aqcuired from a locative device such as GPS, Bluetooth or WiFi the fact that it tells a story of some sort, is a given. It’s inherent. To produce the data, the device would have to physically move from point A to B to C etc… the fact that it describes a story is unavoidable.
If I’m made aware of the fact that this is a GPS tracklog, I know that there must be some form of narrative regardless of whether or not I’m actually able to read any of it. This is one of the most important aspects of locative media as an art medium. Regardless of how we choose to present it, it’s always a record of a sequence of events. A story.
On narrative, abstract and location [PDF], Pall Thayer
04/05/2005
A congervence of a number of recent interests has led me to become increasingly keen the idea of a combination of spatial annotation and folksonomic social networks. I really think there are going to be huge developments in this area in the next year, and especially once GPS-enabled cameraphones become available.
There’s already a debate developing in relation to how “geo-annotation/geotagging” will manifest itself, and how users will respond to it. The Institute For The Future predicts that it will be a social act, done for the benfit of others:
Every one of these personal geo-annotations boils down to “I was here” or “You are here”. People will take the time to compose a message and tag that message to a place because they want you to know that they were there, or because they have information that will be relevant to you later when you’re in the same location, or some combination of both.
Peter Merholz disagrees:
Why would you want to annotate space for yourself? For whatever reasons you would use del.icio.us. While del.icio.us thrives as a “social bookmark” site, it depends on the me-ness of the activity — by and large, I’m saving items to del.icio.us that interest me, that I might want to return to later, and the posting-for-others aspect is largely secondary. It’s an added benefit, but not the raison d’etre.
I would say that individuals’ motivation for using a given system could be either of the above. However, the success of previous examples (Flickr, del.icio.us, Audioscrobbler) has been based on both the mining of community data, and the system’s ability to capture individual’s data unobtrusively — satisfying both types of users.