And now for the best movie web site I’ve seen in a long time, Be Kind Rewind. The premise is that the web is erased (by Jack Black, presumably) and various other web sites have to be sweded, which has something to do with coming from Sweden (and “sweet”?). There is a two page PDF that explains it all and examples like a swede Google. It looks like paper reverse engineering of a web design.
Thanks to Calen for this.
How can art engage interactivity? Perry Hoberman’s work Cathartic User Interface (1995, 2000) is mentioned in Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media as a work that draws attention to the computer interface which is supposed to disappear. The CUI has a rack of keyboards at which viewers can throw balls as if at a carnival. Depending on what input they hit they get different images projected onto the work. For Zielinski, the logic of interface design is to become transparent (so we can do work) and artists like Hoberman remind us that the man-machine symbiosis is not that easy. Hoberman develops “dramaturgies of opposition.”
In an interview in the defunct art orbit, “Loosen Up the Loop”, Perry Hoberman talks about interactivity and seems to be taking issue with Manovich’s view that a painting can be interactive,
“I am happy to argue with anyone who says a painting is interactive because each person thinks different things when they look at it. I think the word becomes meaningless if you use it too broadly.”
Hoberman has a fairly open view of interactivity and nothing resembling an agenda. Rather he deals with the computer with humour, notably through his various alerts. But I could be in error.
Human Beans create provocative concepts.
We make fictional products by hacking commercial culture and we design new services by working with real people
Our aim is to challenge assumptions and point in new directions, we diffuse our thinking through spam, the press, shop shelves and exhibitions.
Rust’s article gives examples of a number of ways that creative practices can intersect with research without becoming research. Artists can generate a world within which researchers can understand and pose questions for methodological research. Artists can provoke questions. Artists can re-present knowledge in more communicative ways. Above all, for Rust, the contribution of the artist is not the explicit propositional knowledge that can be reviewed and tested. The contribution of an artist is something that the audience has to interpret and complete. It isn’t art if an artist studies the use of their work and tries to plan its interpretation to constrain a particular thesis. I should add that Rust seems to have been involved in the UK discussions around what we call research/creation here in Canada.
Peter O pointed me to a new phenomenon on the web that I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. That is the leveraging of human players for tasks that can’t be easily automated. Perhaps the best example is the ESP Game. The online game is described in “How to Play”:
The ESP Game is a two-player game. Each time you play you are randomly paired with another player whose identity you don’t know. You can’t communicate with your partner, and the only thing you have in common with them is that you can both see the same image. The goal is to guess what your partner is typing on each image. Once you both type the same word(s), you get a new image.
The game (and its Google Image Labeler spin-off) leverages fun to get image tagging done. Remember when we thought computer image recognition would do that? Now we are using online games to make it fun for humans to do what we do best – instant complex judgements about the visual. If you get enough people playing we could make serious inroads into tagging the visual web.
What is impressive about ESP is what a simple and powerful idea it is and this is Luis von Ahn‘s second sweet contribution, the first one being CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA.
While it isn’t quite as clean, a generalized version of the idea of people power is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The idea is that people can,
Complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. And, get paid for it. Learn more.
Choose from thousands of tasks, control when you work, and decide how much you earn.
Developers can register tasks, people can work on HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) and get paid for the work, and Amazon can become the largest labour market for small tasks.
Instacalc Online Calculator is a neat online sharable application by Kalid Azad of BetterExplained.com (which has some nice explanations of things like Ruby on Rails). It gives you electric math paper, not cells the way a spreadsheet does. It evaluates in real time and handles all sorts of everyday things you need to calculate like currency conversion. You can share a calculation like the budget for a workshop by sending a link so others can create variant versions. While I’m not sure how I would use it, I like the simplicity of it. What would a text analysis enabled version look like? Here is a tinyURL sample link to a Instacalc sheet with what text handling I could find. Here is the embedded object. Go ahead and edit in it live!
Digital woodcarvers, CNC for the home shop is here! CarveWright is a computer controlled router that can handle wood up to 15 inches wide, 5 inches high and many feet long. It comes with software that uses a “clipart” paradigm so you can combine ornate patterns and then “print” them to wood (or plastic or other soft materials.)
Sears Craftsman has issued the carver as CompuCarve and you can see their ad on YouTube.
I’m tempted to say that this could be a revolutionary product for home woodworkers. Woodworking has always had an element of danger (spinning saws) and an element of manual skill. With tools like the CarveWright it could become a form of output where the skill is in the use of the software not the struggle with the medium. Wood will become plastic – something to be molded as if it had no grain to cut along. For that matter, the CarveWright can be thought of as the first affodable 3-D printer (though it is being marketed to woodworkers first.) Just as CNC has had a dramatic effect on design and manufacturing, now affordable devices bring engineering into the home. What could you do with an all-material 3-D printer? Would you be buying plans for a stove instead of the stove itself?
I have fantasized about replacing all the dangerous tools in my shop with one CNC router big enough to do any shaping from undressed wood. Now that a scaled down version exists, I’m scared the craft of woodworking will fade away like typesetting. Why have a dangerous table-saw when the CarveWright will rip wood, and will do so safely (though slowly)? Am I afraid that anyone will be able to do projects I struggled over? Will it be like the 80s with desktop publishing and all the ugly newsletters and typesetters helplessly complaining? (Looking at the examples on the CarveWright site certainly suggests that bad taste dominates initially.) Or will it turn out just to be another shop tool that gathers the dust of good intentions?
One Laptop Per Child News is a blog about the OLPC project that I have blogged about before. Reading this well-written, critical, and thorough “independent source for news, information, commentary and discussion” makes me worry about the project. The price keeps creeping higher (somewhere between $180 and $205 now), governments aren’t ordering, the software is non-standard, it looks like a kids toy, and production slips. What if it eventually costs $400 a laptop and feels like a kid’s toy? Why not buy PC laptops in bulk then? Will this be another ICON – a custom educational computer that can’t compete, at the end of the day, with commodity computers.
What is more interesting to me are the presuppositions behind the OLPC. The project is based on the hope that networked laptops would allow poor children to leapfrog their educational limits. There is a belief is the power of the Internet over schools in the project. There is a Western belief in technological fixes – a belief in the magical saving power of computers, behind the project. Why not start with something like TCOT (Twenty Kids One Teacher) for $100 a kid? (Because you couldn’t get people to donate to that.)
But, to be fair, at least the project is trying to help on an ambitious scale and in a way computer folk can contribute. And … there undoubtedly will be children touched by this even if it isn’t cost-effective for the 3rd world.
Christopher Alexander of Pattern Language fame has developed a second generation of pattern language that focuses on process rather than outcome.
A generative sequence may be thought of as a second generation pattern language. (From the Pattern Language Website)
Reading around the web sites I am struck by how Alexander has woven computing into his second generation ideas. Could it be that Alexander was influenced by the way computer scientists responded to his pattern language ideas?
Now a sequence is something that looks very very simple and is actually very very difficult. It’s more than a pattern; it’s an algorithm about process. But what is possible is to write sequences so that they are easy. You follow the steps in a sequence like you follow the steps in a cooking recipe. (From A Just So Story)
Reading A Just So Story (subtitle “How Patternlanguage.com got its name”) suggests to me that the way the computing community took to his ideas led Alexander to think about processes and code. In his The Origins of Pattern Theory) 1996 address to the OOPSLA he calls the overlap of ideas “a deeper coincidence in what you are doing in software design and what I am doing in architectural design”.
It is also worth noting how Alexander describes generative sequences as recipes (which we have been using to help people understand text analysis):
After all, every recipe is a sequence of steps. Is a generative sequence anything more than a series of steps like a recipe for cake or omlets. (From Uniqueness of Generative Sequences)
Elsewhere he talks about unfolding and recipes synonymously.
I think there is an interesting thread to pursue through the criticism of Alexander’s sometimes naive mysticism while also experimenting with its application to methods in the textual disciplines. Patterns and recipes are evocative and useful, I’m not sure I buy the Heideggarian philosophy the Alexander thinks they are grounded in.
The web materials under Patternlanguage.com are, to make matters worse, confusing to browse. (They are under “method” to begin.) Alexander has another site, Building Living Neighborhoods which is much better organized and is aimed at the neighborhood activist. It illustrates what he is talking about better than the home site.
I need to say something about Alexander’s site and books. They are poorly designed and undermine his message. If he followed a process for developing his web site I would call it the “use frames when you don’t need them, use tables within tables so that people can’t help but see them, and randomly add things when you think of them.” Consistent navigation or design is not a priority. The second series of books The Nature of Order, published by The Center for Environmental Structure, also suffers. At CAD $100 a book it feels cheap and the images reproduced often look like they were scanned from newspapers. If you look at the nested boxes on the cover (click on image) of his second series of books you can see how attached he is to coloured tables and boxes. If you look closely at the cover you can also see how sloppy it is. I wish Alexander and The Centre would practice in web and book design what they preach for architecture. These ideas are too important (and too close to mysticism) to be tainted by cheap and amateur design.
As Alexander puts it in a strange misspelling about the shift from patterns to sequences,
In fact, both A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way Of Building say that the pattern language is to be used sequentially. In practice, however, this feature dropped out of site, and was not emphasized in use. (From The Origins of Pattern Theory)
Did it drop out of “sight” or out of the Patternlanguage.com “site”?
I was in Montreal today and visited the CCA (Centre for Canadian Architecture) which has a show called Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky and one called Clip/Stamp/Fold 2: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X.
Lessons from Bernard Rudofsky is a thematic retrospective on the architectural critic (and architect) Rudofsky who wrote Architecture Without Architects and other books. The exhibit includes panels from the Architecture Without Architects show at the MoMA in 1964 showing organic architectural forms that evolved without modern architects to design them. He also tackled fashion (making money from a simple series of Bernardo sandals) and everyday life. He was in a tradition of anti-modernist thinking that influenced Christopher Alexander.
Clip/Stamp/Fold has its own web site here. It is an exhibit of the lively “little magazines” of architecture of the 1960s and 70s. The little magazines include student publications, underground magazines, and newsletters. What stands out is the graphic design of these magazines and the way they use the medium to communicate ideas that would never be built. Why, afterall, need architecture be only about what is/can be built?
Microsoft is getting a lot of buzz for their preview of Photosynth which can analyze large collections of photos of a space (like St. Marks in Venice) and then reconstruct a 3-D space by stitching the photos. The 3-D space can be used to navigate the photos. Microsoft has a preview that runs on Windows XP SP2 and Vista.
Photosynth is based on the work of U of Washington Computer Science Ph. D. student Noah Snavely and his advisors. He has a page on Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D with a cool Java demo with datasets like the Trevi Fountain.
A related Microsoft technology demonstrated at TED is Seadragon which allows smooth scaling and transition of high resolution images so you can zooming can become navigation. See Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo (video).
Thanks to Matt and others for pointing these out to me.