Need for Speed in Toronto

Another tragedy that is being tied to computer games. On Thursday one of two teenagers racing their parent’s Merc T-boned a taxi driver killing him … days before he would become a Canadian citizen. The Globe carried it on the front page with a photo and diagram, see A Canadian dream cut short.

One of games in the EA series, The Need for Speed was in the crashed Merc.

The video game police found in the car allows players to select custom-made cars to race in urban traffic, Det. Lobsinger said.

“You have this game that’s all about fast cars and racing through city streets. It’s actually really ironic,” he said.

Is there a causal connection, or is it just irony?

External Cognition: How do Graphical Representations Work?

Likewise , as we argued in describing the resemblance fallacy , making assumptions that the internal representation is a mental model or image-like may simply give the illusion of solving the processing-internal representation-external representation riddle. (p. 209)

Do we understand how visualizations work, if at all? Work on visualization seems to be premised on the intuition that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. External Cognition: How do Graphical Representations Work? (PDF) by Scaife and Rogers (Int . J . Human – Computer Studies (1996) 45 , 185 – 213) is a metastudy that questions what we really know.
Continue reading External Cognition: How do Graphical Representations Work?

GarbageScout

Interesting uses of Google Maps are cropping up all over. Vanessa sent me a note about GarbageScout.com. For those in New York it shows the location and images of interesting garbage that you might want to recycle. Contributors can e-mail a photo to GarbageScout with information about the location of the goods.

Poetic Research

The notion of poetic research emerges from a questioning of practice (design) which tries to locate parts of its creative drive so that it may be brought through in regard to research. The poetic in research can be seen as an attempt to develop a technicity of the “hunch”.

Can a tradition of reflecting on “poesis” (poetics – or the making of art) help us understand research/creation? Drew Paulin, reading my entry on Research/Creation, Again pointed me to a paper by Terence Rosenberg titled, “‘The Reservoir’: Towards a Poetic Model of Research in Design”. What is interesting is how for design students the challenge can be how to weave the creative into research projects, rather than the other way around. Further, a poetic model is, to some extent, always about creative practices, whatever else it is. The practice is part of the object of research/creation. (There is much else to reflect on too in this essay.)

Neil Gaiman: American Gods

What happens to the gods of immigrants when they come to America? Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is a tour through displaced mythology pitting the old world gods (and demons) like Loki and Odin against the new gods of television and the computer. Told by a wandering Shadow, perhaps a native spirit, who slowly learns about the underground network of forgotten entities stranded in the new world.
Gaiman is better known for working on comics some of which are being adapted into movies (Terry Gillian is working on one), but he has written some fine dark fantasy like Neverwhere which, like Philip Pullman‘s work, is both social commentary and metaphysical. American Gods is hard to classify; it is barely fantasy, more magical realism woven out of a tour of mythology. I think he is heading towards a view that American’s are animists – endowing their new technologies with volatile wills. Think of how we talk about computers as if they were imps with a mind of their own.

Research/Creation, Again

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Models of Research/Creation: Click for PowerPoint Slides
Yesterday I presented at OCAD on Research/Creation: State of the Art. I was surprised at the anger in the audience with this SSHRC program. Some were there to learn about it, but some where there to question the program and how it has been run. We didn’t have a full airing of the grievances, but I think some of them are:

  1. The Canada Council is sending university artists to SSHRC and SSHRC is saying we only fund research/creation (not art)
  2. The adjudication panel was not made up of practicing artists
  3. It isn’t clear how research can be woven into creative practices
  4. There is an emphasis on teams and training of graduate students which disadvantages artists whose practices are solitary

How to respond? One side of me was surprised at the sense of entitlement behind some of the questions, as if SSHRC should be funding art. On the other hand, if people are telling university artists to use this program and not to apply for Canada Council grants, then we have a problem. Perhaps it is fair to say that SSHRC tapped into a need which they couldn’t meet with just one program and without the Canada Council. What they are doing is great, but we need a greater variety of programs and more funding. (Then again, who doesn’t feel they need more programs and more funding?)
Continue reading Research/Creation, Again

Satellite Radio

Jack Kapico of The Globe and Mail has an article (“update”) on satellite radio coming to Canada, The radio war (Thursday, Dec. 1, 2005). He asks how traditional radio will survive the two satellite services that have been licensed, XM Canada and Sirius. His conclusion is that local radio that includes local talk shows, local news and, yes, local advertising, will not be affected, but stations that just play lists of tunes with ads will suffer because satellite radio offers the tunes without the ads. So, for example, he sees CBC Radio 1 surviving and Radio 2 suffering.

We’ve lived in a world of local radio for so long we have little idea of what a universe with (inter)national radio might be like ‚Äî even the CBC breaks away frequently for local content. We might in fact be surprised by how many people want local news, local sports and its accompanying boosterism, local weather conditions and on-air personalities’ happy talk (we’re all part of a huge local family). This will be the first real test of how wedded we are as a market to local interests.

A second point he mentions, but does not follow up on, is how people are paying not to listen to advertising. The iPod generation now has affordable alternatives to ad-heavy radio and they are voting 99 cents at a time just as they subscribed to ad-free movie channels. Are we revolting against saturation advertising such as found on commercial radio?