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Tuesday, April 13
One of my favourite weblogs is back at home. Right on.
10:39 | p-link
[ no comments ]Monday, April 12
My childhood school report cards say that I didn't like to share. And that's mostly true. I didn't want to have to play by other people's rules, so I wouldn't share with them. But as I grew up, I realised that if sharing is understood as "soft" sociability - or ways of interacting with others that don't rely on "hard" rules - I actually like the sense of reciprocity, and even obligation, that comes with it.
Avoiding the "hard" sociability (the structural or totalising aspects) of Mauss' gift economies or game-theory, sharing is a "soft" form of gift-giving or exchange. As a practice, sharing also involves long histories of local and global interaction, and the associated power relations between people, objects, activities and ideas - but it does so in less formal or directed ways.
Most simply, sharing binds us to each other; it is a classic example of intimate sociability.
And so I was thinking about intimacy, soft sociability and technology when I was able to try out Diego Doval's new (beta) file-sharing application CleverCactus Share. I won't pretend to know anything much about the technology behind it (you can read about that here and here) but I can describe why I enjoy using it.
Like Matt Webb's Glancing, Share seems to appreciate the more ambiguous and subtle aspects of sociability. And it has something in common with FilePile (maybe my favourite example of sociable software).
Share is soft and intimate, and quite beautifully communicative. Instead of sending email to certain friends, I have taken to sending them songs and pictures to communicate what I am feeling, or simply to let them know they crossed my mind. We have always liked to share artefacts-of-all-sorts, and every file sent to me is like getting a little surprise, not to mention a sweet challenge to reciprocate. Sometimes we have direct contact - we chat - but I think I may be more comforted by the always sense of indirect connection and playfulness.
Never entirely impressed by social networking sites, I nonetheless appreciate their sense of serendipity - something I see stifled in Share. So I was a bit surprised to find out that I also really like being surrounded only by those people I consider to be friends (whatever that means to me). The setting is informal, I already trust these people, and the software simply allows me to add another layer of communication to our relationships.
How simple, even elegant. This moves much closer to my idea of sociable technology, and I look forward to seeing how it develops.
17:09 | p-link
[ no comments ]When I think of the Gopher protocol I smile fondly. In that time "before the clutter and commercialization of the Web" it was the first way I accessed the Net. And, apparently, it isn't dead.
In Gopher: Underground Technology, John Goerzen explains that "Put most simply, gopher is fun. Any programmer with experience with network programming can write a pretty much full-featured gopher server or client in a couple of hours." He also sees gopher as a solid alternative for mobile devices, and is interested in "using gopher as a protocol for dynamic information exchange in a way similar to XML-RPC and SOAP." Hmm.
On the topic of text-only web pages, I also love, and still regularly use, Lynx. (Ever wonder how your site renders?)
Completely unrelated, but damn fascinating, is the Museum of Unworkable Devices. I've always been taken by things like luminiferous aether and alchemy, and if you've ever had an interest in perpetual motion and free energy machines, you'll like this too. (via)
The Gallery of Ingenious, but Impractical Devices includes some lovely things like the Water Kiss Fountain, where you can drink from the lips of a beautiful woman carved of stone. But I got stuck on the static/dynamic trap - where people "draw, and analyze, a static picture of an unmoving wheel, and use the results to draw inferences about a rotating wheel. [Or] sometimes they do it the other way around."
I understand maps (or any sort of representative account) as static portrayals of things in motion. The problem of correspondence (of truth-making) is most interesting to me here. But when I read about correspondence in mathematics and economics, I don't understand. Are maps seen to have predictive capacities? Are they understood as facts in-and-of themselves? How are social network maps mapped onto software? What are the static/dynamic tensions at play?
In a paper on playful mobilities I wrote a few months ago, I was thinking about playful ways of mapping technologies and I looked to Alexander Calder's sculptures for inspiration:
What if we were to imagine socio-technological assemblages as mobiles? What kind of mobility might that be? What if we instead imagine them as stabiles, as assemblages that suggest or represent mobiles at particular points in space and time? And what if we imagine these assemblages as standing mobiles, where the fixed elements are autonomous forms and not just support for the mobile elements?
13:18 | p-link
[ no comments ]Thursday, April 8
Here be systems (and tensions)
Adam Greenfield's End to ends:
My dissertation research has brought me back to this question over and over: what are the relations between mobility and stability, platforms and actions, stages and performances? Is it really just a matter of scale? And how, exactly, does power come into play here?
08:47 | p-link
[ no comments ]07:58 | p-link
[ no comments ]Wednesday, April 7
Scientists seek 'map of science'
And to appease Liz, I will mention the map-territory problem :)
13:04 | p-link
[ no comments ]Random notes on remembering and forgetting
I just don't seem to have the time to work on my forgetting machine as much as I would like right now, so I keep filing away things I read about memory.
Matt Jones recently wrote about the role of the hippocampus in newly formed memories and how, after a period of time, memories seem to consolidate outside that part of the brain:
But I'm having a hard time connecting this to my interest in how we remember - and in what forgetting has to do with remembering...
In Photographs and Memories, Douglas Rushkoff writes:
There is much I want to say about this, but for now I am reminded of:
Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory
And Deleuze's Bergsonism, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image
See also:
Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonian Film Project by Donato Totaro
Images of Thought and Acts of Creation: Deleuze, Bergson, and the Question of Cinema by Amy Herzog
10:46 | p-link
[ 1 comment ]Tuesday, April 6
Camille Paglia on the dangers of understanding moving but not still images (via)
Steven Shaviro on DJ Spooky, hybridity and utopian rhythms
Dan Hill on the beauty of stacks
Tom Coates on the differences between singular and communicative voices
Andrew Otwell on hierarchical trees (which, of course, makes me wonder about roots/rhizomes...)
10:22 | p-link
[ no comments ]Monday, April 5
I'm off to London on the 24th, and will be spending the 26th & 27th participating in CREATIVE CROSSINGS: Location, Community and Media.
On the 29th, I'll be heading to Manchester for Mobile Connections (more here) at Futuresonic 04. On the 30th, you can find me in the Locative Media panel - with Ben Russell, Anthony Townsend and Marc Tuters - "exploring the potential of location aware technologies within wireless environments for social networking and collaborative cartography." Sweet.
Also looking forward to seeing Katherine and Jonah again - Katherine is giving a workshop on Oscillating Windows and Jonah is presenting Wi-Fi Hog - great work!
I'll be in the UK and Ireland for most of May - anything else of interest going on?
08:16 | p-link
[ 2 comments ]Sunday, April 4
The Hellenistic poet Meleager wrote that Sappho's poems were "few, but roses" and this phrase, with its emphasis on quality, was taken up by 19th century aristocrats and 20th century urban and cultural planners. Reyner Banham reminds us of its implied corollary, "Multitudes are weeds" and suggests replacing it with "a new slogan that cuts across all academic categories: 'Many, because orchids'."
Many, because orchids. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds wonderful.
18:23 | p-link
[ no comments ]
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