Interface nostalgia
Monkey Island, a videogame originally developed twenty years ago, came out for the iPhone this week [App Store link]. In order to avoid the shocking anachronism of blocky VGA pixels on the crisp iPhone screen, the developers wisely decided to update the game’s sound and graphics to make the old thing a bit more palatable to players who may be younger than the game itself. It’s a sign of a good game that a bit of spit-polish can bring it right up to date, but you might also think it’s a bit of a shame that the original classic has been papered over. Where’s the reverence? Nostalgic gamers must make up a decent chunk of the potential market for a smudgey Monkey Island, and they’ll miss out on reliving the original glory.
The developers did something else clever too, though, and this is the really interesting bit: players can toggle between the old and new version. At any stage, swiping across the touchscreen with two fingers rewinds the user interface by two decades to reveal the original artwork, fully playable. And I can tell you, it’s the most compulsive UI interaction I’ve encountered in ages.
There are two levels of memory triggered by playing the game with this feature. Entering a new location in the game, complete with up-to-date graphics, activates a narrative recollection of the original: oh, I remember the drunk pirates in the Scumm Bar, I remember insult swordfighting. In fact, nothing about the new design seems out of step with my recollection of the original game at all. I literally don’t register a difference. The situation and architecture, the general outline of the scene, are more than enough to bring it all back. The combined framework of game screens, the defined routes through them and puzzle objects reminds me of Kevin Lynch’s idea of imageability, where mental maps of cities consist of edges, paths, and nodes. Turn a corner in the game and the latent memories awaken, just like stumbling back into an almost forgotten part of a revisited city.
Only you’re not playing the game as your previously experienced it at all. The second facet of recollection comes with the UI switching. Flicking over to the old graphics — and I, for one, found it almost impossible not to do so on every screen — shows you the game as you originally experienced it, and it looks completely different. Suddenly you remember the old imagery too. Conceptual memory gives way to visual memory, in a clear illustration of how the mind functions on different levels. It’s an odd experience, first thinking you recognise something, then discovering that the original was in fact quite different, but that you now remember that too, as additional detail. In one way it’s a contradiction, and in another it’s sharper focus. You’re faced with how brittle your recollection must actually be, and how susceptible to persuasion and malleable memory is. It’s become a meta-game for me, trying to recall what’s different before flicking over for the reveal.
As I play through the game I’ll collect interesting before and after shots in this Flickr set.
Bonus link: Fans shouldn’t miss lead designer Ron Gilbert’s notes on playing Monkey Island through twenty years later.
Layers of change in Ireland
It’s been grim reading in the mainstream Irish news recently: the economy is screwed, the peasants are revolting and banking scandals abound.
A couple of other things have happened against that backdrop. They’re not as serious by comparison, but I think there’s a common thread linking these stories that’s worth pointing out. Everyone else in the country has been blogging like mad about these other things[1], but here’s a brief catchup for those of you that haven’t been around or paying attention.
Last month IRMA (the Irish Recorded Music Association, our version of the US’s RIAA) reached a settlement with Eircom (Ireland’s largest internet service provider) in which Eircom agreed that they would not oppose any court orders filed by IRMA requesting that they block all access to certain websites. IRMA said that they would start with the Pirate Bay and proceed to other sites that they disagree with, and sent letters to all Irish ISPs asking them to follow suit. In effect, Eircom has agreed to censor any website on the internet that IRMA tells it to censor. An online protest group was quickly established and no sites have been blocked so far.
The next one reads like more of a joke. On March 7th an anonymous Irish artist walks into two different Dublin art galleries and hangs his own work on the wall alongside the portraits of Yeats and Bono. The paintings are cartoonish nudes of Brian Cowen, Ireland’s Taoiseach (Prime Minister). Everyone laughs, except perhaps Brian himself, who one hopes is busy fixing the country. On Monday of this week RTÉ, the state-owned broadcaster, runs a short story on the paintings on the main evening news. The following night, having been contacted by a government press officer, the state broadcaster issues an on-air apology for the story and removes it from their website[2]. Meanwhile Today FM, an independent commercial radio station broadcast that they have received emails from the guerilla artist and know his identity. The day after that the police show up at the radio station’s office asking for access to the emails, explaining that “the powers that be want action taken” in response to this piece of political satire. Today FM refuse and are told that a search warrant may be served for access to the emails and that the artist is being investigated on suspicion of committing acts of public indecency, incitement to hatred and criminal damage (for hammering a nail into the gallery wall). The artist turns himself in to the police. Crickets, tumbleweed.
So what the hell is going on here? Well, most likely some unsavoury backroom dealings that we’d rather not think about right now, and a serious lack of understanding of how to deal with new types of problems. On a broader level all of these stories simply reflect changes in our society, but different types of change in each case.
The first paragraph of this post is about the relationship between long-established institutions and the government, both of which are being forced to react to something; they are adapting slowly to unexpected environmental change, and are struggling to steer their extremely large and cumbersome boats. The driving force behind this environmental change, the economy, is a nebulous and somewhat unpredictable beast that changes a bit more readily. In the Eircom and nude painting stories, there’s a similar change going on, but at at a faster pace. A more open culture is forcing change upon the infrastructure of society (media distribution, art galleries, radio stations) by undermining how it previously worked. The agents of change here are large or autonomous groups of people who are starting to operate outside of the normal boundaries that had previously been established for how we access information or think about the presentation of art.
Both of these things — the economy and culture — are a bit like the weather, with many different indefinite signals going into a system, and a tangible result coming out. Sometimes we’re prepared for the changes that this system can throw at us, and our buildings can withstand a storm, and sometimes things get washed away in a flood.
One of my favourite books ever is Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. In it he presents a diagram representing the “shearing layers” of structural change within a building. These layers range from the “stuff” on the inside that can change easily and quickly through to the core “structure” of a building, which resists change and adapts slowly. So a building is really made of a number of different sets of components sliding over each other, changing at different speeds.
I don’t know about a direct mapping of layers, but it seems to me that this diagram could also apply to changes in society.
In the center we have the fast-moving layer of culture, the stuff that changes as fashions come and go. Here anything new like an industry-toppling website or a piece political satire can pop up out of nowhere.
Outside that is the space plan, or how we rearrange this stuff around us individually to be a fun or comfortable part of our lives, such as new ways of easily consuming content or poking fun at politicians.
Another layer out is the infrastructural services like centrally controlled telecommunications networks or curated white cube galleries, which can’t always keep up to contain the fast-moving progression of culture within them. Resistance to change starts to creep in, and hacks are required to make our latest stuff work. Services that fail to keep up will become obsolete before too long.
Structure is a combination of cultural norms — what is acceptable and what isn’t — and the laws that reflect and encourage those norms to be abided by. This is the most resistant layer to change, because it requires a long-term shift in thinking and sometimes a tearing down of old parts of our composition that previously served us well, like laws against stealing property or an unquestioning reverence for our leaders.
The last layer, skin, is more easily changed though. It’s like government, defining our appearance and how we are represented, but it’s really just a public face for what we would currently like to project ourselves as. It is easily changed once we tire of how it makes us look.
The outer layer — site — is the only truly immutable, eternal one. That’s Ireland.
More blog coverage about the Eircom thing, and the nude painting thing.
Satire, an essential part of a functioning democracy, has traditionally had a hard time on Irish television and radio: Scrap Saturday was cancelled by RTÉ at the height of its popularity (Dermot Morgan blamed political pressure, and went on to create Father Ted in the UK with Channel 4), and last week the writer of the RTÉ sketch show Nob Nation was told to “go easy” on the Taoiseach. Go figure.
Instapaper (analogue edition)
I love Instapaper, except for one small thing. I recently built up a hefty backlog of unread articles, and the prospect of reading them all on a laptop or iPhone screen seemed like more of a chore than a pleasure.
Something had obviously gone wrong. I had personally curated a series of articles, blog posts and essays that I was genuinely interested in, but somehow the resulting collection felt like a to-do list, yet another inbox on my computer waiting to be un-bolded. What I really wanted was a nicer user interface to these articles.
So I copy-and-pasted the text of my unread articles from Instapaper into a PDF, uploaded it to Lulu.com, and ordered a single book. Naturally I thought about scripting all of this but Instapaper doesn’t provide an API to retrieve articles, and I didn’t really want to bother with authentication headers and screen scraping and all of that hackery. I just wanted the book.
I know books are supposed to be old media, but there’s something that feels futuristic about holding this one. It’s imperfect, disposable, personal. I can scribble on it and dog-ear it, and read it lying down. It cost around $10 and arrived in less than a week.
So I’m off to read a book now.
Burn Your CDs
We moved house a while back, and I’ve been gradually getting rid of rubbish that I don’t use any more. It’s almost worth moving house just to force yourself to do this. I decided to try whittling the number of CDs in my collection down to my current age. As completely arbitrary targets go, it seemed as good as any, and yet sneakily still allows for some wiggle room in future.
I got down to 33.
Technology brought me to this place. I’ve honestly never seen the point of hard drive raiders who copy someone else’s entire MP3 collection onto their own computer. I don’t say that in a music snob way, because I take pride in not being a music snob, but because where do these people get the time to listen to all that music? My home computer’s iTunes has got 21GB of music on it which I know isn’t much by some standards but take it from me, that’s an awful lot of music. Songs sometimes even come on that sound familiar but that I still can’t name. Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive collection of all the music I know and love, carved down to 12.2 glorious days of continuous playback. Not even close.[1] I’ve loved and lost many times over the years, first to archived records, then unraveled cassettes, then scratched CDs and finally forgotten MiniDiscs, most of which were never replaced. So I don’t even “own” a lot of my favourite music. But that’s the nub of the thing; I would never be able to compile a definitive collection of all of my favourite music ever even if I tried, so as a work of curation any CD collection I tried to assemble would be a failure anyway.
Those CDs that are there have been neglected and slowly forgotten. Anything new that I buy is ripped once and filed away, never to be taken from the shelf again. Sitting there, mocking my foolishness. My CDs have joined the ranks of of all those promising formats that came before them, those others that I also once placed such faith in but have since shuffled off sadly and slowly to obscurity. There’s no denying it, and why should I want to? What a waste of emotional investment doing that again would be. The truth is, I have suffered the very minor misfortune of amassing my modest collection during the brief reign of the least romantic music format that ever was. I know, what a cross to bear. But to hell with CDs. They are crude, plastic, lifeless things, and even the most considered attempts at packaging them in delicate handmade gatefold cardboard sleeves can’t disguise the fact that the compact disc itself is an ugly, finicky object of no beauty or romance.
At one stage I thought I owned all of those albums. Although I primarily enjoyed the music that they allowed me to hear, I admit that I also took a strange pleasure in amassing a collection of these shiny objects that each represented something personal to me. I was equal parts music appreciator, packrat, and showoff. But what a crass, commercial way of expressing a love of music.[2] I still feel like I own those albums today, or at least the ones I eventually grew to love. The difference now is that I’ll continue to own them even after I’ve dropped the CDs off at the charity shop, never to be seen by me again.
They’re all there, laser burned into the quieter folds of my brain, in high-fidelity DRM-free gapless playback, unlimited storage of free and legal music, better than they sound over any overpriced headphones or speakers. Yes, it’s true: music is not actually a physical object! I know, right? Yet somehow I own it all completely, the way nobody else in the world does, bootleg versions that nobody else will ever hear, because when I try to play back a song in my head, the things I love, hate and remember about it — my unique interpretations and associative experiences — are louder and clearer than they are in any other format. My perspective is singular, my appreciation internal. That’s the essence of owning music, surely. In any definition of love, narrow and deep beats broad and shallow.
(While getting rid of other stuff before the move — not CDs, just other junk — I used a “have I used this in the last six months?” metric to force myself to justify keeping something. Here’s a corollary for music evaluation: look at the track listing on the back of a randomly selected CD (or playlist), and think about track four. Can you hear it?)
I must now admit that I ripped a lot of those CDs before getting rid of them, so it’s a bit disingenuous of me to slag off people who hoard MP3s. I suppose throwing out CDs or collecting MP3s isn’t really the point at all. The thing is, music can only be experienced temporally and serially — you have to put in time to actually listen to it! There’s no way around it. It’s like the idea about memory, that when you learn something new an old fact gets pushed out of your brain. Not true of memory at all of course, but completely true of music listening habits; if I start listening to Talking Heads a lot, I have no choice but to stop listening to so much of The Books. There’s only so much time I can spend actively listening to a single artist regularly. If I really want to know and own more than a tiny amount of music, I have no choice but to throw it all away, fall happily into memory, let new stuff wash over me and then stick or float away, and use all that new shelf space for something useful or pretty.
Likewise (and no doubt prompted by my gawping Sontag/Morris fanboyism), I’ve wondered about the value of taking photographs all the time, instead of simply savouring the moment and enjoying the memory, perhaps imperfect but still unfettered. Maybe anything else is a fleeting attempt at bottling lightning. In a cheap plastic bottle that someone is going to try to sell you again in a few years time anyway.
I know a lot of people have realised this long before me.
- Have you heard of Dunbar’s Number? It’s the biggest number of social contacts (friends, if you don’t spend enough time on the internet) that some sociologist guy decided you can realistically maintain a meaningful relationship with. More than that and your attention becomes overloaded and diluted, and it becomes all too much to keep up with. Look it up on Wikipedia. Mr. Dunbar reckons that number is 150.
Anyway, I am herefore officially coining and defining Connolly’s Number, the largest number of songs that you can realistically maintain a meaningful relationship with: 1,000.
- BTW, I’m not knocking commercialism in music; pay money for the music you love.
Trailers Objectified
I know I shouldn’t judge a film based on its trailer. I know this, and in fact, I usually make a point of avoiding trailers (and reviews) of films that I think I might end up liking. More often than not they spoil the actual film by revealing too much in advance, or worse, by subtly altering your expectations through selective editing. When you’re watching a trailer you’re being manipulated, at some level, by the part of the filmmaking process that wants you to part with your money above all else.
Now that we’ve established in advance that I’m wrong, the way is clear to say that there’s something that makes me ever so slightly unsettled about the trailer for Objectified, an upcoming documentary film about industrial design.
Quite simply, the blatant conspicuous consumption on display doesn’t seem to fit with the times. Unfortunately for Objectified, it may be coming out a couple of years too late. The economy has been sliding steadily for a while now, and suddenly the trailer looks like an early artifact of a decade defined by hyper-consumption and irresponsible levels of personal debt. I’m not one to talk, having paid above the odds for the occasional nice Apple and Muji product myself, but from what’s shown in the trailer it seems like the filmmakers are putting forth a narrow view of what design can be.
By focusing on attractive early 21st century product design, the film may be stuck with a field that has not changed its fundamental design aesthetic, has not revised its driving principles, at least since the introduction of the Powerbook G4. The overarching trend since has been ever towards refining the veneer, polishing the surface. Which is fine in itself, I suppose, but there’s something about that resistance to more fundamental change that doesn’t exactly fit with the mood of the day.
It’s a pity, because it may be a missed opportunity. Even in a company like Apple, infamous for attracting an almost fetishistic response to the objects that it creates, the really interesting work has arguably happened around service design. The smartest invention to come out of Cupertino in recent years is not the iPhone (the near-perfect but ultimately obvious execution of the same smartphone approach that has been around for years), but the iPod/iTunes symbiotic relationship. That’s a design that has now changed the face of the entertainment industry, altered how people interact with music, and elevated a computer company to a position of huge power in the media world. That shift to thinking about how people experience design, thinking about the design of service and not just form, stands for a more holistic and mature approach to design.
But apart from a single shot of a potato peeler, everything on show in the ninety second trailer is an extremely expensive luxury item. The insinuated equation of good design with high cost brands is what’s really troubling to me. I’m not saying these are not examples of great design; I’m saying that taken together they define design in narrow and exclusive terms, and now more than ever that’s a lazy way of thinking about design. Solving problems is design; just making things look nice is decoration. Making things that are a joy to behold is an important part of the design process, but is it enough to support a documentary? A film that compliments only the facade of objects is in danger of missing what truly innovative design is.
There seems to be a distinct lack of critical response to the trailer. Most online reactions that I saw were unbiased one-line linkups, devoid of any commentary or opinion; smooth-edged, disengaged, utilitarian, flat, compliant. Where’s the visceral reaction? Yes, this looks nice, but does it really do anything?
In any case, the director is probably being very honest in his approach. The title of the film makes no bones about what it pretends to be. I just hope its not too late to cut in a dash of critical perspective.
Again I feel the need to apologise for jumping the gun or being too dogmatic on this. I have only seen the trailer. Trailers are the objectification of films as fetishistic objects, where we are invited to make a critical judgement based only on the facade of appearance. They fail to convey anything about the real quality of cinema, but rather promote a surface-level overview, selling the promise of an experience just like shiny design does. Good trailers are often by definition dishonest, crafted to appeal to our magpie-like sensibilities.
So it’s not cool of me to say all this based on ninety seconds of footage and assume guilt. Oh, and I loved Helvetica, to which this is pretty much a sequel. In one sense it must be difficult for a filmmaker to see their art reduced to an advertisement, and it’s important to remember that a bad trailer does not necessarily mean a bad film. On the other hand, it may perfectly reflect the full film and make no apologies for that fact.
In tough times, many people are forced to reassess the difference between wants and needs. Objectified may look nice, it just may not be the film we need right now.
The Touch of Evil memo
In 1957 Orson Welles made Touch of Evil for Universal. The studio disliked the rough cut, ordered Welles off the movie and drafted in another director, Harry Keller, to edit the film heavily and shoot additional scenes.
Before it was released, Welles was given one opportunity to view the revised version of the film. He sat with Universal executives and took copious notes throughout the screening. The following morning he delivered a typed 58-page memo to Universal, outlining the minimum changes he thought the film needed. What a night that must have been! Welles had by then been completely removed from the editing process by the studio, and the memo is a passionate but necessarily civil set of directions on how to treat the film. Considering that he only saw the film once and only had a single night to draft his reaction, the memo is a great piece of technical film criticism, tempered with the need to placate the studio.
By all means retain, in its main lines the edited form of this reel as you now have it put together. Little of the admirable labors of Ernie Nims and his assistants in behalf of clarity need be lost, but let me urge very earnestly that the cutaway from Grandi - in which he was just starting to menace Susan (the scene’s deliberately anti-climatic quality, not at this point, having been established) be retained.
Universal disregarded the memo and released the film virtually unchanged in 1958.
Touch of Evil is famous for its opening scene, a single long tracking shot (remember, this was filmed over fifty years ago). Welles was unhappy with Keller’s treatment, though.
As the camera roves through the streets of the Mexican bordertown, the plan was to feature a succession of different and contrasting Latin American musical numbers - the effect, that is, of our passing one cabaret orchestra after another. In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each blasting out it’s own tune by way of a “come-on” or “pitch” for the tourists. The fact that the streets are invariably loud with this music was planned as a basic device throughout the entire picture. The special use of contrasting “mambo-type” rhythm numbers with rock ‘n’ roll will be developed in some detail at the end of this memo, when I’ll take up details of the “beat” and also specifics of musical color and instrumentation on a scene-by-scene and transition-by-transition basis.
In 1998, working from Welles’ memo, editor Walter Murch produced a “director’s cut” of the film, including a revised version of the opening scene that replaced the theatrical score with street music and removed the credits. Although everything else about the scene remains the same, the difference is remarkable. Welles never made another Hollywood picture after Touch of Evil.
TTTTUMBLWAX!
Here are some interesting images that I collected throughout the year. It appears that I am predisposed to blurry, grainy photographs, letters, and the odd diagram. Click through to see them full size.
View From a Park Bench
Here’s what you do. You load this podcast onto your iPod, and you go to a place where there are lots of people around: a bus or train, or a café, or a park if you can manage it. This will only take sixteen minutes. Press play.
Ambient software
I’m a sucker for soundtracking experiences. In the past few weeks I can recall listening to music (Mogwai on a train at night, LCD Soundsystem while running) that was intentionally chosen to shamelessly, blatantly augment the atmosphere of the moment. Movement plus music creates my own personal tracking shot. Like most people, I strongly associate certain music with a place and time too, and I’ll grab onto that as an indulgent cinema of the self.
Related to the Brian Eno stuff from the other day, RjDj [via] is a new iPhone app that would seriously tempt me to go out and buy an iPhone. It listens to the sound of your surroundings though a microphone, and on the fly transforms those sounds into ambient Eno-esque music. This sample video gives a clearer picture. I showed this to some people at work and they were thoroughly unimpressed, but I would marry this idea, and not just as an abstract concept — I can totally see myself actually using this, walking around town with this software as a soundtrack.
In the Eno book notes I mentioned Bloom, the new iPhone app that he just released. I tried it and was pretty disappointed. It claims to produce generative music and visuals, but really it just seems to act as nothing more than a simple 2D keyboard. I was surprised at this, because in the diaries Eno goes to great lengths to make the distinction between generative (grows from a crafted seed) and random (sprawls without guidance). Maybe I’ve missed something; I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
I’m reminded of two other art projects. RjDj is very reminiscent of Ambient Addition, a 2006 project that does pretty much the same thing and seems like a really beautiful implementation. The Interruptor from this year is a wired notebook and camera that intermittently prompts you to document your surroundings. I love the physical design of the object in this one.
Last year I made an art project called Adaptive Spaces that records audio as you walk around, and plays back audio that other people have already recorded in the same place. Even though I vaguely knew they were coming, there was no such thing as an off-the-shelf, programmable, networked, GPS-enabled camera and sound recorder iPhone available at the time, so I made it work by shoving a laptop and a bunch of peripherals and wires into a rucksack. And now I get to sound like an old man because the kids nowadays, they get all of this in their front pocket. Maybe my project was a very rudimentary precursor to RjDj (in my mind I can also draw a line from another old project I did to The Interruptor), or at least was attempted in a similar spirit. My point is, the short history of this type of thing — intimate software — has reached a point where the means of producing a
thing that can integrate seamlessly into a person’s everyday activities is widely available and popular.
There’s now an opportunity for software like these examples to develop into something we think of more like music, as an ambient addition to personal experiences. Most software requires you to be actively up to your elbows in it, fully engaged without leaving space to do much of anything else at the same time. Contrast this with the affordances that music permits. You let your guard down with music, and that’s how it gets in. I suppose a lot of its formality and directness comes from the workplace origins of software, and as a result we probably still have a fairly primitive concept of what interaction with software can be (in fact, Eno rejects the label of “interactive” for a certain type of art, suggesting instead the more affording “unfinished”). I recall reading somewhere that creative thinking flows much more freely when attention is not focused directly on a problem, but rather when the mind is allowed to wander (think of racking your brain to remember someone’s name, only to have it come to you later while thinking about something else entirely). There’s sometimes a benefit to doing two things at once, or at least to allowing your mind the freedom to not try so hard all the time, and instead marinade itself in surroundings that may provoke a new idea or mood.
So that’s what I would like: software you can live with. Software that feels like music.
Paula has mild tinnitus, and she puts on the same album almost every night while going to sleep to distract from the ringing sound (and honestly, I just stumbled to this realisation now, perhaps because I don’t even notice it any more). The music has to be something you can fall asleep to, so it can’t be too noticeable or attention-grabbing. It can’t be unfamiliar, so it has to be the same album every time. So I’ve probably heard Brian Eno’s Music For Airports many, many more times than any other piece of music.
A Year With Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno
Although borrowed, the format of this post is accurate: I do dog-ear my books. The part of me that’s sympathetic to the tics of an OCD-suffering perfectionist can appreciate how each dog-ear could be considered a tiny folded travesty, but still I’ve come to embrace the practice. Beyond the obvious benefit of marking pages of interest, there’s something nice about a book bearing the physical mark of having fulfilled its purpose of being read; the stamp of an individual reader’s unique interpretation of what parts of a book were important or interesting. It’s always a small wonder to discover bookmarks or margin notes in a second-hand book. I also love finding handwritten messages on paper money. Anyway, no shop-fresh crackless spine or uncreased pages for me.
My usual technique is to fold down the top corner to mark the page I last finished reading, and fold up the bottom corner to mark a page that has a passage of interest. If there’s something good on both sides of a single sheet it gets folded twice, once on the first side, and then doubling up from the already folded corner overleaf. It’s simple but it does the job. A few pages into A Year With Swollen Appendices: The Diary of Brian Eno, though, I grabbed a B pencil which stayed lodged in place as a bookmark for the rest of the book. This meant that by the time I was done reading it the book was even more battered and misshapen than usual, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.
It actually took me quite a while to finish the book, not least because it’s well over an inch thick. I suppose a diary doesn’t necessarily conform to the control over pacing that other forms of writing adhere to (or at least should adhere to, if the writing is half decent), and so there’s often a huge amount of ideas and experiences condensed into just a few pages. After a couple of weeks of Eno-time I was usually full, so it took quite a few sittings to get through the entire year. Actually the appendices of the title, a bunch of more lengthy essays and letters that make up the second part of the book, were much easier to tear through than the daily diary. That’s not to say that the diaries weren’t enjoyable, they were just whiskey to the appendices stout.
Eno is indeed funny and clever, and leads a pretty interesting life (if somewhat unbelievably charmed and immodest). He’s honest though, and the truth about what a famous person actually does on a daily basis is intriguing (e.g. chatting on the phone with Bono and Bowie, enlarging bottoms in Photoshop). Although I suspect that as famous people go, Eno keeps himself unusually busy. Over the course of the year he produces four albums, travels a lot, gives lectures and tutors art students, exhibits his own art, does family stuff, helps to manage a charity, corresponds with Stewart Brand, and generally lives the life of the mind doing whatever else he pleases. The diaries cover all of this activity, interspersed with his ideas about music, art, cooking, computers, women and men. Sometimes the bits that stood out for me were the throwaway single-line thoughts that followed his dinner recipes.
Finally, the potential reader should be aware that this is a book written by a cranky man with little patience, and one who won’t suffer fools (i.e. almost everyone else) gladly. I’m not sure how entertaining popular entertainment would be if Eno had his way, and he’s at least sometimes wrong and quite often disagreeable. Which is to say, I don’t necessarily think that all these quotes are correct or wise, just that they’re interesting.
22 February (p58), on Hollywood:
How determined people seem to be to aim for exactly the same target again and again. A charitable interpretation: by doing so they evolve better tools for everyone else, creating vocabulary out of metaphor. Like those pathetic computer artists who are so thrilled when they’ve finally produced a picture of a daffodil with a drop of dew upon it — indistinguishable from a real photo. To me this would represent total failure, but in fact it’s probably those people who propel the evolution of tools.
28 February (p67), on an approach to photography:
Don’t be predatory. Sit in one place and pay attention or surrender. What looks bad is constant tramping about, a greed for undigested experience. The photograph is digestion deferred: ‘So that’s where I was’.
7 May (p109), on writing music with computers:
New piece of music this morning — lyrical, heterophonic, with rare chord changes. How difficult or discouraged are changes when working with sequencers! The effect of computer sequencing is to split music into vertical blocks with sheer edges. The whole feeling of the dynamic between ‘locked’ and ‘unlocked’ — so important in played music — is thus sacrificed in favour of ‘always locked’. The result is literary linearity rather than musical all-at-onceness.
11 June (p132):
Cooking is a way of listening to the radio.
From a 30 June letter to Stewart Brand (p144), on software design:
I myself crash repeatedly into the brick walls of computer culture, and realize more and more that the hype is somewhat premature. As long as the software is nerdified, and major conceptual limitations are built right into the systems at that level, then it cannot get far. This is a philosophical question: when people program — i.e. decide on which set of possible options they should make available — they express a philosophy about what operations are important in the world. If the philosophy they express is on anything like the level of breathtaking stupidity that the games they play and the internet conversations they have are, then we are completely sunk. We are victims of their limitations. It’s as though we’re using a language that has lots of words like ‘cool’ and ‘surf’ but not one for ‘organism’ or ‘evolve’ or ‘synergy’.
[BTW, if you want to see what type of software Eno is making more than a decade after writing that, check out his music and imagery generating iPhone app.]
From a 2 July letter to Brand, on tools:
You see, I’ve become more and more convinced that the actual physical activity of using equipment has to be commensurate with other physical activities in the same realm. Musical composers that require you to constantly use a typewriter to put your whole mind into a different mode — one which doesn’t necessarily preclude the making of music, but does strongly bias towards a particular type of music. Just as your handling those stones in Avignon, feeling their weight and shape and solidity, would lead you to make a different kind of building with them than if you were dealing with virtual stonelike lumps in your computer, however wonderfully 3D they were… But I think computer users should really start showing their support for things that work with them, and strenuously rejecting things that don’t.
16 August (p178):
Culture is everything we don’t have to do.
27 August (p186):
‘Ah, sweet mystery of life. What a gift — huh? Ain’t you lucky you got in?’ Rubin Levine, violinist in Conversations in Taxis. I love that ‘you got in’ — as though it were a crowded theatre, a hot show that everyone wanted to see.
From a 31 August letter to Stewart Brand (p144), on generative systems:
I’ve noticed that all these complex systems generators (such as ‘Life’ and ‘Boids’ (the flocking one) and ‘The Great Learning’) have something in common — just three rules each. And these three rules seem to share a certain similarity of relationship: one rule generates, another reduces, another maintains. I suppose it’s obvious, really, but perhaps it’s not trivial to wonder if those three conditions are all that you need to specify in order to create a complex system generator (and then to wonder how those are actually being expressed in complex systems we see around us).
16 October (p221):
I also asked Anthea to guess how many mature oaks she thought it would have taken to build a top-of-the-line ship in Nelson’s day. She guessed ten. The astonishing answer (from Brewer’s) is about 3,500 — 900 acres of forest oak. She said, ‘I wonder what we’re doing now that’s as wasteful as that.’ I said it’s still called Defence.
16 November (p250), on generative music:
I gave a talk about self-generating systems and the end of the era of reproduction — imagining a time in the future when kids say to their grandparents, ‘So you mean you actually listened to exactly the same thing over and over again?’ Interesting loop: from unique live performances (30,000BC to 1898) to repeatable recordings (1898– ) and then back to — what? Living media? Live media? Live systems?
From a letter to Tom Sutcliffe (p357):
One suggestion is that the whole basis of human specialness is our ability to cooperate — and to cooperate you have to be able to imagine what it would be like to hold another picture of the world. You’re unable to cooperate unless you can be mentally in at least two worlds at once — your own and that of the person with whom you’re working. The failure to grasp other pictures of the world is what we call autism, and in its extreme from is something we regard as a sever dysfunction. Well, all animals are by our standards relatively autistic — unable to see into each other’s minds, lacking empathy.
So how do we develop this ability to experience and speculate about other ways of thinking and feeling about the world? I think we do it by continually immersing ourselves in cultural experiences that rehearse us. This is obvious in films and novels — where we quite explicitly enter an imagined world and then watch imaginary quandaries. In doing so we develop a lot of surrogate experience about what it is like to be someone else, somewhere else, with different assumptions.
From the essay ‘Miraculous cures and the canonization of Basquait’ (p368):
Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences (Roy Ascott’s phrase).
From the essay ‘Unfinished’ (p402):
People are starting to make things that implicitly invite ‘mixing and matching’ instead of presenting us with neatly finished pieces. You can see this breakdown of the singularity of the art-object most spectacularly in the remix movement in popular music… and of course it can’t be very long before we are routinely faced with the awesomely tedious prospect of having to mix everything ourselves at home, the artists just selling a CD-Rom ‘kit of parts’ which you then assemble…
Once we get used to the idea that we are no longer consumers of ‘finished’ works, but that we are people who engage in conversations and interactions with things, we find ourselves leaving a world of ‘know you own station’ passivity and we start to develop a taste for active engagement. We stop regarding things as fixed and unchangeable, as preordained, and we increasingly find ourselves practicing the idea that we have some control.
There were other things that aren’t exactly quotable, but that were good nonetheless. I liked the accounts of trips to Dublin to work with U2 and what he thought of the place. It’s always fun to spot things you recognise from your own life in books and movies. I also really liked all of the stories from the recording studio. It’s clear that Eno takes a reasoned, calculating but very involved approach to his role as record producer; judging value, curating ideas and managing the whole process. A good producer is partly a lot like a critic, but in a much more interesting and challenging way, because they not only have to diagnose deficiencies with the music being made, but also come up with creative solutions. Nice work if you can get it.
Of course, the diary reads a lot like a blog, and a fairly fine one at that. Since it was written in 1995, we’ll forgive the lack of comments and permalinks. It would be great to republish each entry as a daily blog for a year though.
Triathlon
Last Sunday afternoon saw the culmination of my summer project when I crossed the finish line of the Loughrea Sprint Triathlon. A sprint triathlon is exactly half the distance of the Olympic standard, so it was a 750m swim, then a 20k cycle, then a 5k run.
I finished in 1 hour, 40 minutes, 23 seconds, coming in 232nd out of a field of about 300, including relay teams. I am very happy with this result. I was racer number 47. I know this because it’s still written in permanent marker on my right shoulder and left calf, and it won’t come off.
Not being a strong swimmer, my days before the race were filled with visions of being towed out of the lake by a safety kayak. Before we started I found a nice spacious area in the water at the very rear of the pack (triathlon swims are notoriously aggressive), and hung in there for the 24 minutes it took me to finish the swim. I got out of the water with about twenty people out of the whole race behind me.
Despite that fact that it lashed rain throughout the entire race, I made up some time after that. I actually found the cycle quite easy going, maybe because we were forced to ease off a bit due to the surface water on the road, maybe because I could have been pushing harder. The end of that last sentence, by the way, is what I suspect drives many competitors back to do it all over again in subsequent races. Although I remember feeling that the race was incredibly tough at the time and pushing myself to the limit, somehow now I can’t quite appreciate how that actually felt. And so part of me can’t be sure that I couldn’t do better. I am nearly certain this is due to some evolutionary trick of self-preservation that my brain is playing with my memory, because the rational part of me knows it hurt like hell.
Coming off the bike and transitioning to the run was quite tough. My legs were pretty wobbly and at the start of the run and I was practically dragging my toes along the road. I found my stride after a few minutes though, and by the end of the run I was feeling fine, almost like I could have kept going. Another mind trick, no doubt. But that was it. 1:40:23. I went home and had the most glorious shower of my existence.
Lessons learned? Take your feet out of a bicycle’s toe clips well before trying to dismount. Endorphins should be bottled. Don’t listen to advice you read online; anyone who bothers to write anything about a specific subject on the Internet is too consumed by their respective interest to be considered impartial. Sports psychology is a really deep subject.
I trained for about ten weeks before the race. It wasn’t enough to just run around in big circles though; I had to run around in big circles, and then make graphs about it.
Getting better at running is difficult in the same way that it’s hard to notice someone get taller or older-looking. You really need to look at the marks on a height chart or flip through a photo album to appreciate the gradual change over time. When I started training for the triathlon I wrote a simple script to tally up the number of runs I had done and overlay the output on my desktop, a constant reminder that I was actually making incremental progress. I’ve basically ported that script to the web, and you can use it if you like. If you’re on Twitter, send a message to @pedometer with details of your run and it will appear on Twitter Pedometer. It’s like a lo-fi version of the Nike+/iPod thing. Over time, you’ll hopefully notice yourself getting better. Here’s what I did to prepare for the triathlon.
(For more of this type of thing, check out Kevin Kelly’s blog The Quantified Self and funny-but-true apps Daytum and Mycrocosm.)
How Buildings Learn documentary
Google Video: How Buildings Learn
I’m contractually obliged to post this. Author, futurist and all-round Thoughtwax hero Stewart Brand has uploaded all six parts of the documentary based on his book How Buildings Learn to Google Video.
This six-part, three-hour, BBC TV series aired in 1997. I presented and co-wrote the series; it was directed by James Muncie, with music by Brian Eno. The series was based on my 1994 book, HOW BUILDINGS LEARN: What Happens After They’re Built. The book is still selling well and is used as a text in some college courses. Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people. But I knew that; that’s part of why I wrote the book. Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like. Please don’t bug me with requests for permission. Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project. Historic note: this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital— shot digital, edited digital. The project wound up with not enough money, so digital was the workaround. The camera was so small that we seldom had to ask permission to shoot; everybody thought we were tourists. No film or sound crew. Everything technical on site was done by editors, writers, directors. That’s why the sound is a little sketchy, but there’s also some direct perception in the filming that is unusual.
Parts one, two, three, four, five, six.
There’s also a short clip of SB telling the story of the Oxford Oak Beams on Google Video. I photographed a print of the story when I visited the Long Now Foundation (which Brand co-founded) in San Francisco last month. The documentary’s music is by Brian Eno, whose diary I’m reading right now, and I’ve got a biography of Brand lined up to go next. So nice timing for me.
(via the excellent Smashing Telly)