Missing the gap (day 112)

Yesterday I listened to a Stanford lecture on depression.  It was a link from the Open Culture blog (which I highly recommend).   The lecture was an hour long and fairly engaging but throughout I couldn't shake the feeling that the facts we currently hold to be true are in fact quite brittle.  He kept saying "it's not a matter of just getting over it...there are real physical obstacles, physiological changes...".   The experiential gap there is so massive that it's really hard to believe him.   I cannot picture a mental state that I couldn't affect by doing something different...however small.  I can't imagine not being able to bootstrap myself out of a situation.  It's almost like in hearing his presentation I lost touch with the idea of free will (which I know is a problematic concept but let's just say free will with a very small f).  Surely there remains in a depressed person a small gap where something different could happen?   It seems that the manipulation of neurotransmitters is a pretty coarse tool, and not a sustainable one.   It seems that by saying 'it's not their fault, they can't do anything about it' we confirm the helplessness they feel.  The professor in the lecture anticipates my reaction and says we would never say something like that about a diabetes patient.  He has a point except he's relying on an arbitrary definition of disease.   There are lots of diseases that weren't diseases just 5 years ago - especially diseases of the mind or behaviour.  To be clear, I have no qualifications to be saying anything categorical about depression.  I just want to believe in personal agency for change and I'm suspicious of the language we use around depression.

The same applies to alcoholism.  The accepted fact is that an addict is an addict for life, there are recovering addicts but they can never take a drink again because they can't control it.  They appeal to a higher power, etc, etc.   I know it is useful to draw a strict boundary between drinking and not drinking, to help break the habit.  But is it sacrilegious to think an alcoholic could ever return to normal social drinking patterns?  It seems so.   A quick search on google points to circular definitions - "if you are able to go back to social drinking, you were not an alcoholic to begin with".  It's suspicious.  Again I have no deep knowledge in this area, just wondering how something can be such a one way street.

On the other hand, lately there's been lots of talk about the plasticity of the brain and how much we can change.  We've come a long way from the story that was around when I was young when neurons died every day and were never regenerated.  Every day you became less smart.  At least now we know that the brain is a bit more resilient than that.   So how does one resolve the plasticity with the unequivocal statements of inability to change?

A song for this post.

Embarrassing nudge (day 111)

I started the self-surveillance project almost a month ago now.   At some point I was telling someone about it and they asked if I was also taking a picture of myself every 15 minutes.  I had thought about it but decided against it because I thought it was a bit tacky to include pics of myself in an art context.  But after talking with this person, I reconsidered.  I reasoned that one can never be too rich or have too much data.  So last week I started taking pictures of myself on the macbook, the only one of my computers with a built-in camera that could easily be coaxed into taking the picture. 

This experiment has not been good for my self-esteem.  But it may be good for modesty.   Almost none of the shots are flattering.  In almost all of them I'm looking absent-minded, bored, or just unhealthy.  Granted, some of this is from the camera angle and the bad lighting but still looking at a computer is not the most embodied experience, and it shows.  The best pics were when I was watching a TEDxSV talk...I think there was some sort of performance that I was really enjoying.  There were also some pretty intense pics when I was updating my web site profile.

But here is the upshot of all this.  Knowing that the camera will spring to action every 15 minutes, I've become more conscious of my body.  By virtue of seeing shot after embarassing shot, I've trained myself at least a little bit to stay present -- an unexpected benefit from an unlikely source.

And now to conquer some of my fear...here is an example of an embarrassing shot.  It's not the worst.  I'm not that advanced yet.  The next shot is one of the intense ones.

A song for this post.

Who thought it first (day 109)

I wonder about ideas and who they belong to.  I've been listening to talks from the TEDxSV symposium and I can't help but be impressed with the insights and talents of some of the speakers/performers.   Today I also scanned the Top Ten Products of 2009, many of them having to do with social networking, idea spreading, the cloud, and so on.  I also listened to Spark talk about copyright legislation.  We are becoming very good at knowledge spreading and with that, there seems to be an anxiety about acknowledgment and reward.  The cold fact is that the larger the spread of an idea, the more likely it is to be appropriated.

But I'm also interested in where the ideas that eventually spread like crazy come from.  Because when we are talking in the hive we are thinking collectively, bouncing ideas around to see what sticks.  No different than brainstorming in a physical group in concept, but quite different in possibilities because of the sheer numbers involved and the potential reach of a sticky idea.  The issue is that even though the hive may have produced the idea, the authorship remains important.  Authorship is what gets people paid and promoted.  Having been in the academic world for a while I see the anxiety of authorship, I sometimes personally feel it.  I see people getting included or cut out,  getting scooped, getting copied, getting cited.  When information is free as is mostly the case with academic works, authorship is currency.

Obviously there many shades of grey in what I'm talking about here but in a general sense I wonder about what will happen to authorship in the future.  I wonder if the performance of information spreading will become more important.  We see this trend already with 'star' bloggers and tweeters.  We probably also see it with TED speakers that are chosen based on their ability to perform in front of an audience.  There may be someone out there with deeper knowledge of the subject but without the ability to perform that knowledge for half entertainment and half edification.

If authorship fades in favour of performance, then we are faced with the same problem as the recording industry:  who pays the knowledge producers, the ones that are not necessarily performing the knowledge?  When authorship becomes separated from the means of spreading the product, there is a problem of credit distribution.   This gets even more complicated when authorship is muddled by the means of production as is the case for mash-ups and other collage type of activities, not to mention the hive thinking by sharing.

I have no solutions or even predictions for any of this, just observations.  I see individuality being eroded for the benefit of the collective.  At the same time I see performance gaining some ground.   These are contrasting trends.  Their co-existence is of interest to me.

A song for this post.

Sleep before snow (day 108)

Just a quick post today.  I have to go to bed so I am at least partially awake for the defense tomorrow.  This student may have an advantage for having scheduled a morning defense with me as external.

So they said snow and everyone get excited.  I got excited.  But there is no snow, just rain.  I was so hoping to wake up to a quiet snow covered city.  Maybe next week.

I'll end with a video of the wearable technology I'm going to hear about tomorrow morning:



A song for this post.

Tale of an inefficient review (day 107)

I spent the day reading a thesis today.  I'm an external on a MSc defense on Tuesday.  I'll read it again tomorrow and formulate some questions.   As I was reading I wondered how I could be more efficient at making notes on what I was reading and formulating questions from the notes.  Also wondered how the system could in turn be useful for the student when revisions are necessary.

I prefer reading the thesis on paper and make notes in the margins.  I would prefer the notes be stored electronically with appropriate context.   I don't really want to stop reading to open up my computer and type so perhaps an e-book type of idea would work.  Adobe has done lots of work on a system for review and annotation of documents but I can't say I've ever used it officially.  I've left tons of comments on grad student papers submitted to me as pdf but I haven't enabled a shared review of any kind.   I think it would be useful for my students to dialogue back and forth on the comments.   It's like all the pieces of the puzzle are around but they are just not integrated. 

Ideally, the thesis would be submitted to me on an e-reader with a stylus and could write my comments in the margins.  The review would be shared with the student and other committee members but only after the defense is finished.  While the defense is going on, I would have easy access to my comments (visual list) and could modify them based on the student's input and the input of the other committee members.  After the defense she can look at my comments and ask me more questions.  Each time I open up my e-reader I could see comments that are awaiting a reply.   This would be my ideal situation.  As it is, she will do the same thing that I did: take 3 paper copies with her and flip through to consolidate and address each point.  This is tedious and it may actually miss some crucial points like sections of the thesis that were flagged individually by all committee members for slightly different reasons...pointing to a general problem with the section.  Add to this the fact that I used a black pen to make my comments (should have used red!) and her revision task will not be as efficient as it could be.

A song for this point.

A collective cozy (day 106)

I feel Christmas less than I used to.  Every year it feels a little more arbitrary than the year before.  I watch the lights go up and hear the peripheral chatter about gift buying.  The cards trickle in.  The party invites beep into my inbox.   Most of it feels like someone else's concern.   Despite feeling it less, I do love this time of year.  Especially right after school ends when there is a quiet anticipation of the silence in the city on Christmas day.   For a few days there is a collective relaxing that I really appreciate.  When it's ok not to check email because we've collectively agreed that business can wait.  It's a magical time but it has nothing to do with the usual descriptors of christmas.  It's a magical time because culturally we're taking time to look around.

January 1st marks the end of the magic but the start of a slightly different direction -- sometimes subtle but always hopeful.  It's hard for me to imagine that feeling of renewal right now.  Like many people who are tied to an academic schedule, this time just before the Christmas break is frantic and a bit hazy from the accumulated exhaustion.  It's like seeing the finish line accentuates the tired but also triggers a kind of third wind.  I am curious how it will feel on January 1st.

I'm looking forward to taking some time to work on my projects and read some books.  I might even do nothing for a couple of days.  Let it snow...

A song for this post.

What does online feel like (day 105)

I had an interesting discussion with Miles today about what the feeling of being online.  I've been thinking about this a lot lately because of my self-surveillance project that snaps a picture of my desktop every 15 minutes on all 3 of my screens if they are active (and sometimes my iPhone too, though that is not automatic).   I've now collected close to 500 screenshots and looking at them in a fast (10 screenshots/second) sequence it doesn't even get close to the feeling of being online.  I'm going to investigate varying the duration of each frame by random amounts and see how that changes things.  I've added a bit of blur to the movie for privacy but here is what the movie for one my screens looks like for now:


226 screenshots (test) from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.

The feeling of being online is hard to describe.  It's not embodied but it can feel vast and rich.  It sometimes feels social but sometimes anxious.  Much of my time is spent processing the information that is coming at me (the social network as recommendation engine).   Making decisions about this information seems to be the source of a low grade anxiety stemming from a reluctance to spend time and the fear of missing out (FOMO).  There are moments of relaxation into a time commitment such as watching a show, scanning family albums, or programming an application.  There are quick smiles like interesting pictures in twitter.  There are lots of interruptions, little blips and popups.  Email anxiety is never far but seems to ebb and flow depending on time of day and how much the physical world needs my attention.  There is a both a satisfaction to answering email and an anxiety about the conversation progressing too quickly from there.  There are moments of boredom when there is not enough will to separate from the online but not enough interest to continue (the feed has slowed and the stand-bys are exhausted).  There is definitely a feeling of being in the flow of information but it is usually interrupted by having to click or type which brings me back to the screen.  A bit like being into a novel and someone asking you a question about work.

The more I think about it the more the rhythm seems to be important.  I'll see about adding different timings.   I also thought about doing a character recognition scan which would give me a data set to maybe assign an emotional 'score' to an image (many of my screenshots are mostly text).  Either way I'd like to play around with adding an emotional curve which can then be mapped the lung breathing pattern.

A song for this post.

Empty bookcases one day (day 103)

e-ink had been just over the horizon for so long it seemed like it would never get here.  But here we are at Christmas time with more e-readers than we can shake a paper-cut finger at.   I read a lot but so far the urge to get an e-reader registers at about a 2 on the gadget Richter scale.   First off, the Kindle is gimped in Canada because we can't download over 3G (who decided that?  I dunno...but it smells suspiciously like a BRT downer...)  What's the use of a reader without a connection?   The Nook is a possibility but it's not out yet.  The Sony reader is out but it also has no connectivity (by design, that one).  But it does have a stylus for notes.  Then there is the mythical Apple tablet which may make a miraculous appearance next year.  As always, the urge to commit is hampered by the imminent.  My wish list for an e-reader:

• easy on the eyes, good in the day and night.
  
• some cue about how much I've read, how much is left
• a nice page-turning feel or something completely different than page turning...either way something to cover the length of the book with some sense of context within the book.  This may have to do with book design more than interface, or maybe both.   Maintaining contextual awareness without the physical cue of the book is an interesting design problem.
• annotation for reviewing papers, and making marginal notes.  A way to add voice annotation. 
• good interface for browsing annotations, including a group's annotation if need be.
  
• wireless connection
• ability to lend and borrow books
• good collection browsing...ability to browse my friends' collections
  
• durable and light
• private
• open
  
• interoperability with my other devices
  
• color (though I'll deal with b&w for now if the above features are there)
• video (though I'll deal with static for now if the above features are there)
  

I do love the smell of paper and the feel of a book but I'm quite willing to trade them in for the benefits of e-reading.   I sure won't miss moving boxes of books.

A song for this post.

The phone is smarter than its carrier (day 102)

I think today is a rant day.   The best rant topic is cell phone companies.   Have I already ranted about this?  Probably.  I'm convinced that whoever runs Bell, Rogers and Telus (BRT) are just not passionate about the cell phone business.  They're big and got fat on another technology.   They are just not that hungry.  Add to this the fact that we have a sleepy CRTC that got fat on the crumbs dropped by BRT and you get a public that is getting extorted for the sin of wanting a smart phone.    I have limited data to back any of this up.  I have no idea to what extent the CRTC is getting lobbied.  I have no idea how hard it is to run a cell phone network.  Intuitively, though, it seems that having a smart phone shouldn't be an automatic $90/month.   And even if the profit margin wasn't %30 (I do have a news report to back that up), surely a mandatory 3 year contract is just over the top arrogance for a market that has almost no competition.  Before the smart phone,  you could refuse the contract, buy the phone and get yourself on a month to month plan.  With the iPhone (for example),  there is no good way around the contract.  Even if you buy the phone full price, you still need a contract to get on a data plan.   The iPhone is not very useful without a data plan.  I find the whole idea of a contract offensive.   Being tied to a company means they have stripped you of a pretty fundamental power as a consumer - the power to walk away if the service sucks or if the price is too high.  Not only am I not getting the service I want, I have to pay to switch.  Injury+insult.  A further insult comes when I realize that the phone I bought is useless on another company's network unless I commit the illegal act of 'unlocking' the phone.  That's even if I paid full price.  If I complain about my indentured servitude,  I suspect their internal dialogue is a version of "Oh well, I see you're still with us for another two years...oh you're still talking?".    They have a steady stream of new contracts that basically means they don't have to innovate to keep people around.  The consumer feedback loop is sluggish at best.   It's a lazy approach to business.  With so few players in the market, don't tell me they need contracts to stabilize their business.  Even gyms have done away with contracts.  I suspect if contracts were declared unacceptable business practice, prices would come down and service would go up.  I don't know what the CRTC should be doing, but this seems like pretty easy pickings for some great PR. 

A song for this post.

Inside/Outside awareness (day 101)

I created another test of the lungs breathing.  The breathing pattern is the calm breathing that I had worked out with the egg.  The videos are the same two videos of the pelicans and garden.  One video plays on the lungs and the other on the trachea and bronchi.  The lungs fade out at the top of the in breath and fade back in at the bottom of the out breath.  The video slows down at the in breath and goes to normal speed at the out breath.


I was trying to emulate a feeling I have when I meditate of the out breath being a little anxious with only a slight pause at the top, and the out breath feeling more relaxed with an extended pause before the next in breath.  In that pause there is lots of space and a feeling of being more aware of the outside.  This is why I ended up with the fade in at the bottom of the out breath.  I initially had tried it the other way (fade in at in breath) but it somehow didn't work. 


The next step is to get the video to slowly come in to the trachea/bronchi as the breath comes in.  I have to write a small shade to do this.  I'm hoping to have some time tomorrow.


Here is a video.  Unfortunately it's only 2 minutes long.  It's really  nice to keep breathing with the lungs.  Very calming.  Next time I'll make the video loop.  It's too late right now to rectify that little oversight.



fade out lung test from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.


A song for this post.

But I don't want to know (day 100)

Michael Boyce tweeted "i resent knowing about tiger woods without even trying to know about tiger woods".  So well put.   In talking with some friends at a party last night we figured that the metaphor is of the information superhighway super crowded with billboards.  You can't help but be assaulted with drive-by celebrity trivia.   But in this case, the Tiger Woods story I think was more of a celebrity crash where we were implicated as implicit if not complicit rubberneckers.  You see, Tiger crashed from a great height.  He wasn't exactly a jumper...more of a tight-rope walker that we watched with fascination waiting for the stumble.  Even those that weren't watching couldn't help but overhear the story of the one that fell from a great height.

There's not much I can do about celebrity drive-by's but I do improve the scenery by using a firefox plug-in called Add-Art.  It replaced ads with art.  After I first installed it, I sort of forgot about it.  I still catch myself thinking things like 'what IS that?' when I see a piece of art where an ad should be.  It's such a strange thing to be seeing that it catches my eye almost every time.  I highly recommend it.

No I'm not linking to Tiger Woods.

A song for this post.

When can you move in (day 98)

Sometimes you get what you wish for but time has passed and you don't want it anymore.  That happened to me today.  I think it did anyway.  I will re-evaluate my degree of want in the morning when I've had time to contemplate my future with or without the thing that has come.   The 'road not taken' situation is so hard.  This one is particularly hard because this crossroad has come up before and at the time I wanted to take the path that is now offered but it was denied.   Priorities change and the heart warms to the current situation.  It's harder to change when it's not necessary.  It's always best not to resent choice but at this very moment I wish this situation had come up about six months ago.

A song for this post.

Google waved and people craned their neck to see (day 97)

Google Wave made a splash.  It broke on the beach of cloud tools.   It was a private beach though everyone could see something was going on from the parking lot.  Soon there were paparazzi posting unauthorized pictures, and who you knew became something to be evaluated and mined.   This has happened before.  I remember not having a gmail address.  I remember who did.  I remember how I became in.  How early was I into the wave?  What number was I?  I want to know but much like my Francis Bacon degree of separation (2),  I wonder what such a number really buys me besides social anxiety.  Soon everyone will be in the wave and we'll all be wondering what we're supposed to be doing.

I don't think I've ever opened a tool that confused me as much as Google Wave did at first glance.  It really stumped me.  The feeling was uncanny...like familiar and foreign at the same time and mixed with a unsatisfied anticipation.  I clicked and felt really lonely.  I added some people to my wave.  I said some mundane things like 'what is this for'?  I forgot about it.  I read a report about it.  I came back to it.  There were more people so it felt less crazy to say something less mundane.

I've now figured out that Google Wave is a sort of mix of email,wiki, google docs, and IM.  It's a mix of synchronous and asynchronous.   It may be a replacement for email but the average wave message seems to have more commitment than the average email.  There seems to be more purpose to the wave and more community.  There also seems to be more longevity to the conversations.   So maybe the workflow is that you 'move' email conversations to the wave when they become too complex for email and you need more collaborative authoring.  

The best part is that it's a protocol so it can be reskinned.

A song for this post.

Breathe with the egg (day 96)

I've started to animate spheres stretched into egg shapes (as stand-ins for lungs).   They breathe.  I'm trying to simulate regular breath, calm breath, excited breath, anxious breath, and so on.  So far I've got calm breath down I think.  I'll post a video soon.  It's an interesting process.  I tweak the animation curves and breathe with the egg.  I keep breathing with the egg and notice how I'm feeling.  Sometimes I end up out of breath and feeling like I need to breathe more often or more deeply.  Sometimes I feel I have to get up and do something.  Sometimes I feel light-headed.  Sometimes I even feel good.  It's an interesting process.

Just looking at the eggs breathe makes me think that we might want to consider a more stylized model for the lungs.  Not necessarily cartoony but maybe something with more personality.  I'm not sure which would be more effective.  Certainly the anatomical look of the current lungs gives a kind of visceral feeling.  Something would be lost with a more drawn look.   May be worth a try though. 

A song for this post.

No matter what, I want cleaner air (day 95)

I came across an article in the BBC talking about the new role of science in the democratic process.  It's a well written article with lots of insightful comments about the possibility of science becoming corrupted when faced with a high stake issue like climate change.   We've had separation of church and state for good reasons and it's worked out well.   But we don't have separation of business and science.  Maybe we should.  Perhaps all science should be publicly funded.  The issue is further compounded because predictions coming out of climatology are easily attacked on the basis of potential biases from the choice of data sets and methodologies.  It's too easy for factions to form on the basis of beliefs in a particular set of ingredients to the complex system.   Add to this observers which have a stake in shopping for the right climate change answer and you have an explosive mix which leads one's belief (or not) in climate change to be treated as a religion.  It's a sad state of affairs and it points to the general fear around what we we might have to change about our lifestyle to be kinder to the environment, to breathe easier.  Seems to me no matter why or if the climate is changing, we stand to gain a lot from decreasing pollution.  Unfortunately lots of money has been made on the fast pace enabled by oil.  Many have been successful with the current system and understandably want no change.  But we go faster than anything else, to our detriment.  We forgot the rhythm of the earth.

A song for this post.

Random learning, things that stick (day 94)

Some random things I learned today:

• you can become addicted to your own stress hormones
  
• stay away from chiggers (they'll make you sick and dissolve your flesh so they can eat it).
• Corelam is a very good sound absorbing material (amongst other things) and it was invented by one of Emily Carr's Industrial Design faculty, Christian Blyt.
• CMHC allowed an exhibit of small houses ('Homes for Less') designed to help homelessness but drew the line when one of them became inhabited.
• The repetitive nature of the commute (or the running track) can be exploited for narrative design.

A song for this post.

New is beautiful (day 92)

I get a special little thrill when I think about learning something new.  It's a similar thrill to opening up a novel already in progress.  The moment of anticipation of something unexpected and engaging.  It's different but similar to the thrill of creating something which feels exciting and risky all at once.  Learning something new feels hopeful and young.

I know a lot of people don't have this experience but I liked school so much when I was a kid that I would miss it in the summer.  I would ask for extra homework.  I would read books from the grades above me.  I particularly loved looking at algebra books and later calculus books so I could figure them out.   I loved things that had answers and were self-consistent.  Playing with coloured shapes and grouping them together was fun too.  Anything that was well framed and logical.

Looking back now, it doesn't seem crazy that I ended up in computing science.  Though at the time it wasn't such an easy decision.  The hard sciences like Chemistry, Biology, and Physics were much more respected.   And computing science (I'm not even using capital letters), in my mind, was for play...not serious business.  I was so serious.

I still love cracking open a computing science book though I would never immerse myself back in the field as I was.  I love the frame of a system that is logical and responsive.  It's a refuge from the open-ended and much more arbitrary art world (I don't say this pejoratively...I mean arbitrary in the same way that the law is arbitrary...complex systems built over time and highly contingent).

This weekend I'll learn something new about GLSL.  I look forward to it.

A song for this post.

Self-surveillance (day 91)

I just started taking a snapshot of my computer screen every 15 minutes.  It's all automated on all three screens I typically use (mac laptop, PC laptop, PC desktop).   It's actually fascinating to see the shots at the end of the day.  How long I spent on something.  The tidbits I read during the day.  The videos I watched.  The emails I wrote.  Sometimes I don't remember having looked at a particular thing.  It all goes by pretty quickly and somewhat compulsively.  It would be neat to get a snapshot of my face as well...and to record my breathing pattern.  For now, it's just screenshots.  It's for the Breath I/O project.  I'll collect hundreds of screenshots and make a quicktime to map into the environment and onto the lungs.

For those that are interested, it's pretty easy to set this up.  It's easiest on a Mac because cron runs natively.   All you have to do is issue the command "crontab -e" and edit the file that opens.   I run the following script in mine:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/sbin/screencapture -x $(printf "/Users/mlantin/Pictures/screenshots/macscreen-%04d.png" $((`ls ~/Pictures/screenshots| grep -c ''`+1)))

On a PC it's not as easy.  I downloaded and installed the MiniCap application.  Then I made a script in cygwin, again using bash.   Then I made a batch file to run the bash script.  Then I made a shortcut to the batch file so I could set it to run minimized (so it wouldn't pop up the svchost.exe window). Then I used Scheduled Tasks to make the script run every 15 minutes.  Here is the bash script:

#!/bin/bash

/cygdrive/d/Program\ Files/MiniCap/MiniCap.exe -capturedesktop -exit -save "$(cygpath -w $(printf "/home/mlantin/screenshots/desktopscreen-%04d.tiff" $((`ls /home/mlantin/screenshots | grep -c ""` + 1))))"

Here is the batch file (called takeashotdos.bat):

D:\cygwin\bin\bash.exe -l /home/mlantin/takeashot

exit

Here is the command in the Scheduled Task:

D:\cygwin\home\mlantin\takeashotdosshort.lnk

A song for this post.

Efficient language (day 90)

My friend Nathalie said something interesting tonight at dinner.  She said that religious language is very efficient.  It bypasses the frontal lobe and goes directly to the limbic system.  It creates affect without trying very hard.  It's efficient language.   I wonder then what the relationship between art and religion is.  Perhaps other people have wondered this and there is a whole discourse for which I have a blind spot.  But tonight marked the first time I'd ever really parked my awareness on the question.   It seems that art is related to religion in their desire for short-cutting preconceptions to create emotional insight or affect.   Art can be very efficient communication.  I suppose when people talk about the sublime and sublimation are referring to that efficiency of state change.

A song for this post.

Tribal misbehaviour (day 89)

Today on my twitter feed there was a news article about being tweckled.  A nice word that belies the extent of damage it can bring.  It's basically bullying on a mass scale in a conference backchannel.  If someone is daring to bore you at a conference you can blow off steam by insulting the speaker with your closest backchannel friends, loudly, in the public twittersphere.  The backchannel group referred to in the article, retrospectively feels justified based on the grounds that the speaker was obviously disrespecting them so they had the right to disrespect them right back.   In the moment, I doubt the thinking even went that far if anywhere at all. Another oft-stated argument was that this is the new world and you better come prepared to face the backchannel.   It rewards richly and punishes harshly.  It's the new world.  Hardly.  It's the gauntlet, revisited.  I've seen this behaviour in snowboarding terrain parks too.  It's not so new.  It's, in fact, as old as the hills.

As evidence of their good nature, they pointed out that they had collectively bought a new laptop for someone in their group who had lost theirs. Seems to be the same tribal behaviour flipped over.  I wonder which felt better.  It's a real question.

There is so much to say about why their tribal misbehaviour and lesser forms of it is harmful.  Part of me refuses to even spend the time thinking about it.  My high horses are so ready to ride but the real argument is based on a humble principle of generosity.

'the world owes me nothing, we owe each other the world'.  -- Ani Di Franco

A song for this post.

Theatre in a box (day 87)

I mentioned Sid Fels project, the "pCubee" in my last post.  It's a five-sided lcd display that simulates the appearance of something inside the cube.  It tracks the head of the person looking and gives them a realistic rendering of what is inside.
I'm not a fan of the name but I am a fan of the thing.  It's like having a cell phone in your hand except it's a cube.  I know that sounds a bit simple but I make the comparison because I remember the first time I watched a video on my iPhone, how personal it felt.  I'm imagining the same thing could apply to the pCubee with different types of content.
My suggestion to Sid was to investigate live action video in the cubee.   Right now it's just CG scenes.  I'm not sure how many cameras would be needed (16-20?) but you could probably capture 3D live theatre and show it in the cubee.  People would download an e-play for the pCubee in the same way people are now starting to download e-books on their readers. 
I like the idea of theatre in a box.  There could be something so intriguing about watching little people perform for you in a little box.   I'm not sure if it would be like a parlour game or something serious like watching an art film.  Probably more parlour game.  Either way I'd love to experience it.  It reminds me of music boxes.  But then there is an edge to it with live content...like looking at a bird in a cage.  Not so pleasant.  Holograms in Star Trek are not boxed in so they don't suffer from the cage metaphor.
He does have a bigger version of the pCubee which would significantly alter the experience.  Perhaps lends it more to games or puppetry than theatre.

A song for this post.

Infopong (day 79)

Informavore is a term that Frank Schirrmacher uses to describe our current propensity to ingest information.  It's obviously a term that relates to information overload but without a negative connotation.   I like the term and I'm certainly a fan of food and eating metaphors but I wonder if it's the correct metaphor.   Obviously I'm biased here because of the Breath I/O project but it seems to me that a breathing metaphor may be a little more apt.  I say this because the act of digesting is inherently a one way transformation  (not to get too graphic) whereas the act of breathing is one of exchange and shared environment.  This is an excerpt of a response from Daniel Kahneman to the Frank Schirrmacher interview on Edge.org

The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath. The link with Bargh is also interesting, because John pushes the idea that we are driven from the outside and controlled by a multitude of cues of which we are only vaguely aware — we are bathing in primes.

I think too that the metaphor of ingesting information implies the right of first refusal -- that we are not being force-fed.  In reality, it's a combination.  We can choose what information we take in by choosing our context (who/what we follow, who we friend,  what we surf) but the information bits that are presented to us are not of our own choosing.  For certain, this can be a great thing, rather like christmas morning when you get a particularly relevant tidbit you weren't expecting.   But there are also many instances where our context may be chosen with a particular purpose in mind (shopping for food, for instance) but is usurped for another purpose (selling celebrity lifestyles or diet fads).  So we are forced to hold our breath or just breathe and deal with the cough later.

For sure neither metaphors go far enough in describing the affect of having a multitude of information feeds that we somehow process, pass on, and contribute to.   There is something too crude with food, and too insubstantial with air.  And both suffer from a certain amount of passivity.  A better metaphor might be a game of pong with thousands of balls in play.  But then we're back with the no-body problem.

It seems too that any metaphor should have a dual, a metaphor to describe the negative space of what's happening -- what is not felt.   In the case of processing information, I feel this may have to do with space itself.  A sense of the bigger context that comes with a moment of reflection.

A song for this post.

How tweetly they fall (day 78)

I've been on Twitter for a few days now so I feel qualified to give my first impressions as someone who resisted the very idea of Twitter for so long.   I got an account and got into a strange loop when adding contacts such that all the contacts that it gathered from my gmail were included in my follow list.  No big deal I figured, I'll just prune later.  Well it turns out that most of them got an email from Twitter saying I was following them.   I surmised that this was the case when I started getting emails saying they were following me back.  This was somewhat disconcerting.  I wanted more control right off the bat.   Then I downloaded TweetDeck for the iPhone and logged on.  I immediately got overwhelmed by the number of letters on the screen and proceeded to ignore Twitter for a few days.  Then I installed TweetDeck on my macbook and things seemed more manageable and I noticed someone had written me a message, which helped.   I started tweeting a bit and doing some searches.  Kinda fun but with a certain amount of discomfort coming from a general lack of understanding of the Twitter language -- the format that things need to be in to properly direct, credit, and link tweets.  Compound that with the use of SMS type of abbreviated words and it becomes a lot to absorb all at once.  Half the time I think I'm doing it wrong and that I'm pissing off lots of old timers.   I screwed up a couple times but there is a delete tweet button so I could redo.

Twitter has a different feel than Facebook, must more about conversation and little observations, less about media collection or persona building.  It's more about linking people together around topics, than around pre-existing cliques.  I am following people that I don't know based on recommendations and searches.  So far I feel that Twitter is more about expanding your network than keeping your existing network up to date.  There is less commitment there than 'friending' someone so it's not such a big decision to link to someone.   Of course one of the biggest differences there is that you can follow without the other person's permission (though there are safeguards).

Sometimes it feels a bit like a cross between messaging or  texting.

I'm still learning the etiquette around twittering.   It feels like it's worth a learn and that's somewhat surprising to me.  But Facebook has taken a back seat.  It already was getting squeezed out but now even more so.  I don't like people that crosspost from Twitter to Facebook.  Seems like an intrusion.  I don't want to be that person.   We'll see if even that barrier falls.

A song for this post.

Email Apnea (day 77)

An unexpected find today had be smiling all the way to the bus stop.  I was listening to the Spark podcast of November 3rd (which is a great one btw, two longer interviews both on fascinating topics).  Nora interviewed Linda Stone who coined the term 'email apnea' to refer to the lack or shallow breath that happens when we are anticipating the next email, tweet, or txt.  This is wonderfully in line with the investigation in the Breath I/O project.    This is an excerpt from our grant application:

We have chosen to work with lungs as a visceral representation of personal interior space that is in a direct relationship of exchange with the environment. Even more directly than the heart, the lungs are a link to life and health. They offer the first clue to the quality of the surrounding environment, and breathing patterns are in a reciprocal relationship with emotional states. With these traits in mind, sounds and image streams are added to the environment of the lungs to mimic our modern situation of being surrounded and sometimes overwhelmed with images and sounds. Our relationship with media sources competing for our attention is often one of unconscious ingesting in a constant search for meaning, connection, diversion. This can be compared to shallow breathing where the body is forgotten and left to react to a starving mental state. Conversely, images and sounds may bring attention to the body by matching its rhythm or otherwise bringing the mind out of its usual patterns, triggering curiosity or calm attention. This can be compared to deep mindful breathing. Breath I/O intends to investigate the individual and collective act of apprehending media spaces as it relates to personal history and the physical body.

I was so happy to hear/read Linda Stone talk about her breathing practice and how she noticed that when she sat down in front of the computer her breath became shallow and sometimes stopped.  She has since studied the phenomenon and how it relates to the sympathetic nervous system.  She has written an article about this in the Huffington Post and this is an excerpt from her interview with Nora Young (starts at about 28 minutes into the podcast).

...email apnea means...temporary cessation of breath or shallow breathing in front of any screen it could be a computer screen it could be a television set it could be a mobile device.  ...with anticipation most mammals humans most certainly do a sharp intake of breath like that and so between the inhale not exhaling because of our posture we were breath holding and many people think of breathing really as an inhale take a deep breath and they go but the really most important part of breathing is the exhale...There are a number of things that begin to happen when you cumulatively over time shallow breathe or breath hold the first is that it kicks sometimes low level sometimes not so low level flight or fight stress response.  The part of the autonomic nervous system that is all about flight or fight is the sympathetic nervous system so this breath holding up regulates or really activates the sympathetic nervous system sending us into flight or fight.  A few things happen when we're in fight or flight.  The part of our brain that creates habit is activated, it blooms so to speak. and we become more compulsive in all our bevaviours and I'm sure that we've experienced and those listening can recognize gee I just can't stop texting or I just can't stop checking my email.  It activates actually the part of our brain that compulsively behaves.

The interview is really interesting and I highly recommend hearing it in its entirety.  I completely relates to what she is saying and I would love to integrate some of the thinking into the Breath I/O project, particularly integrating some of the sounds of our devices that call us to immediate attention: the small chirp of TweetDeck, the trill of the iPhone when a new txt comes in, the ding dong of a new email.  The moment where there is nothing happening and we wait for it like a kid anticipating the movement of a monster in the closet.  Or we stop waiting for it and turn on the light and look everywhere.   For me the sounds are much more evocative of what she is talking about than the actual content of the information that is constantly pouring in.  It would be great to bring the affect of that anticipation into the chorus of lungs.

A song for this post.

Shut out the shuteye (day 76)

I'm so tired my short term memory is going.  I'm so tired because I punch through the tired to the second, third, and fourth wind.  Eventually I run out of wind and I have to collapse into bed.   I can almost hear the bed berate me incredulously.   I want to be one of those people that can do 4 hours of sleep a night.   My brother and I used to fantasize about what it would be like not to sleep.  Think of all the things you could do.  We didn't think about the fact that it would be more but that everyone could do more too.  It's all in the contrast.  So really we just needed even just a one hour advantage.   People that only need even 6 hours of sleep have a serious advantage over the rest of us.  Evolution, where are you?  I need to need to sleep less!

A song for this post.

Lark envy (day 75)

Days when I don't have to go to work trigger a slide toward my true nature of night owl.   I am not a lark, have never been a lark.  I do enjoy the smell of early morning and the sun's first shine of the day but I rarely get to see either.   Unfortunately (and unfairly), the world is made for early risers.   And oh I envy them.   People who gladly wake up at 5am and saunter in to work a leisurely 4 hours later.   I wake up at 7 usually groggy after an indulgent late night and struggle to work out, eat, shower and get to work by 10.   On vacation I settle in to a rhythm of going to bed at 2am and waking out at 10.   Part of me can see understand the rationale of an early start.  Part of me feels out of step and unnatural.  But I honestly prefer the evening to the morning.

I once went to Tuktoyaktuk way up north.  The most northern town before hitting the research outposts.  It was June and the sun went around and around the horizon.  I totally loved feeling of not aging resulting from the lack of reference points.  The best part though was the lack of schedules.  People slept when they were tired, got up when they were rested.  Shops opened when they opened.  Babies were walked at all hours.   In Tuk, I was not a night owl or a lark.  I was just someone that could enjoy any hour like any other.

A song for this post.
Update: This is the song I really wanted to post.

I'll bump that +1 thread and rt (day 74)

Recently I asked Steve 'what is the difference between ice cream and gelato?'  He answered the question and added that he knew because I had told him.   Somehow I had transferred the knowledge to him and deleted my cache.  I was behaving as an information conduit with limited storage capacity.   Looking around I see that this is not an isolated phenomenon.  The proliferation of social media tools means that we are spreading information around more than we are storing it.  We've all become information amplifiers and dampeners.   The benefit to this is that we don't all have to read or experience everything.   We can read and experience our part and amplify what we think is interesting and then let the rest of the crowd filter down what they think is important toward us.  The detriment is that we may be less able to synthesize new knowledge.  If we are not holding deep knowledge in one or more areas, it's hard to understand how information from another field may be applicable to what we already know.   We are in danger of becoming dilettantes.   And this is the conundrum: there is more information than ever before but because it is not housed in our brains, it's not deeply held knowledge in a way that it can be productive.  It's as if we went from being experts at making things to being experts at networking.  I'm not making a case for more or less networking.  There just needs to be a balance between knowledge acquired and information sharing.  If we are all busy sharing information but not enough new knowledge is being acquired, it quickly devolves into a solipsistic exercise...a kind of cabin fever.

I've made a distinction here between knowledge and information.   I think of knowledge as something that an individual has.  Something borne out of experience, trial and error, experiment.  In contrast, information resides outside of the human body and can be stored, on a hard drive, for example.   Knowledge then becomes information as it gets shared in writing or speech.  It can become knowledge again as it gets absorbed and integrated by someone else.  Facts are a type of information which for the most part have never been knowledge.

We'll continue doing, recording, and sharing as always.  And as always, we'll wonder what and why.  What's changed are the proportions and the media.

A song for this post.

As the river flows (day 73)

Spending time with Alex has made me realize how crucial information management is.  She showed and spoke to me about how she organizes her emails and her notes and her blog posts.  She talked about the tools she uses, the filters, the habits, the idea cache.   She spends a lot of time with social media so in some ways she has more need for these techniques and tools than I do but still there were some really useful tidbits of information.  I've started using Evernote more since she showed me how she uses it.  I've downloaded an application called Skitch for taking snapshots.  I'm seriously thinking of filtering my mail more seriously than I have been.

At the conference there was a talk about the digital divide in which the speaker mentioned that after the distribution of technology is relatively achieved, the divide is more about the skills it takes to cope with the onslaught of available information channels.   After speaking with Alex I can see that it's a continuum with some people surfing the information flow with glee and skill.  Others (like me),  swim and splash around but definitely not with glee.   Having just joined Twitter, not only do I have to learn a new language but I have manage yet another stream joining in to the raging river.  I still haven't faced up to it.

I must say there is something exciting about meeting Alex.  Like downloading another application or buying a new tool.  I can't wait to see how it changes my life.

A song for this post.

Rant + Celestial Beauty (day 72)

I bought myself an Apple Airport Express.  I connected it, went through a short setup process and was able to play songs from iTunes on my speakers in the living room, remotely.   I was happy.  But the next step was not so easy.  In fact, it seems to be impossible.   All my music is hosted on a NAS which permits all my computers to store it once and share it with all the machines on my network.  So far so good.   iTunes on my machines can connect to the shared library on the NAS.  But if I try to use the Remote app on the iphone to see the shared library, I can't do it.  I can't pair with the library on the NAS because there is no way for me to enter the pairing code on the server (there seem to be some hacks out there that might work, but it certainly is not easy or sanctioned).  Even if I connect with the itunes client running on one of my machines, it doesn't see the shared library.  It looks like my library is empty.   So I'm stuck.  Apple does not provide a proper iTunes client on the iPhone, and does not allow the browsing of share libraries on the Remote App, and does not allow pairing with servers without a GUI.   This is a sad state of affairs.  The only other solution I've found is to buy an expensive media player that would be paired with PlugPlayer which can see my NAS (but not the Airport Express).  There is an application called Air UPnP which will make the Airport Express look like a proper device to applications like PlugPlayer but it needs to run on a PC which defeats one of the purpose of having the NAS in the first place -- not to have any other machines on besides the NAS.  My real beef is with Apple for not providing support for externally hosted libraries with the Apple Remote app.   It would make the Airport Express so much more useful.

I may still find a hack around this mess, but for now the frustration of being so close is driving me mad.

I will redeem this post with a picture of a beautiful animation I saw the IDMAa09 conference exhibition : Celestial Clock by Anson Call.  I can't find any information online about it unfortunately.  No video, no pictures.  What I'm posting here is a snapshot from my iPhone.

A song for this post.

IDMAa eh? (day 70)

I'm astonished to say that I have no recollection of not blogging on Wednesday night.  I was up until 2 working on Paula's The Wall project again and I guess I just tuned out at some point.  Last night though I was exhausted from a travel odyssey to Muncie Indiana to the IDMAa conference (which Emily Carr is hosting next year).   It was a conscious decision that sleep was better than blog.

The conference started early with a keynote from Tom Kelley of IDEO.   He was...umm...perky.   We came in late so I'm not sure what the red queen is was going on about was, but it seemed to apply to a lot of things.  To be honest I didn't get much out of his talk but that may be because I have a block when it comes to that kind of presentation.  It's a sort of inspirational tone that just says "nothing deep here, move along".   But let me be clear.   I have nothing but respect for IDEO and what they do.   Many people seemed to enjoy his talk a lot.

The next talk I totally missed because of jetlag.  I slept through most of it.   The little bits that I remember were fascinating.  That talk was from John Fillwalk from the Digital Intermedia Arts Institute which is part of Ball State University.   Turns out the Institute was part of the campus tour later so I got to see some of what he talked about in his talk which was great.   The best part was a Second Life instrument that rang the real life bells in a bell tower on campus.  It was amazing to walk down the street and hear the seemingly random bell sounds, like a postmodern concert.

The next panel I attended was about the Future of Interactivity.  I was impressed with the work of Richard Elaver (Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne) who is using generative patterns based on nature to create 3D printed forms.  Some beautiful modular jewelry and other objects.  I can't find a website unfortunately.

The last talk I attended was at the Museum of Art where they also had the conference exhibit.  I toured about half of the exhibit before having to break to go to the panel.  It's an awesome show.  There were two highlights to the panel session.  One was Lindsay Grace (Miami University) talking about Critical Games.  He did one game a week for six weeks, all critiquing particular aspects of game play that are pathologically repeated and not often questioned.  He demoed one game called "Wait'  where the details of the game (and points) only come if you remain in one place in the game space.   As soon as you walk, the environment goes white.  Another is game was 'Black/White' where all characters are visually the same except for colour and behaviour.  There is no way to tell if the characters are enemy or not.  The other talk that caught my eye was from Tammy Brackett (Alfred University) who uses cellular automata to remix video feedback.  She has some great images that were generated from a seed of a musical score derived from chromosome six.  She had work installed in the exhibit but I didn't get to see it because when it was closed after the talks.  I was very disappointed about this.  Particularly because it's doesn't open again until 1:30pm tomorrow at which time I'll be on my way home. 

My biggest regret of the day is not having toured all of the exhibit.  My second biggest regret of the day is not being able to attend all of the afternoon panels.  My possibly third regret of the day is joining twitter.

A song for this post.

Feather magic (day 67)

When I was a child, I was fascinated by the story of Dumbo the elephant.   The feather that helped him fly fascinated me.  The triumphant moment of letting go of the feather was not so important.  The fact that the feather helped was the bit that gave me joy.  I knew nothing of placebos at the time but I loved the magic of it.  I still use the analogy of Dumbo but most people don't know the reference and just look at me thinking I just called them dumb.   Still feathers are reminiscent of power for me.  I collect them during forest walks if one catches my eye.  I've used one as a stand-in for a weapon in a warrior figurine.   I've offered them as gifts of courage.  I've used the bird as gift bearer in one of my 3D class projects (pictured below).   It's a romantic superstition but a very soft gentle one.

A song for this post.

Hello first day (day 66)

Anticipation is key. A first day is fun. She popped her head in and I barely recognized her in my fog of email, phone calls, and worry. Still I'm happy and mostly curious. Yet another one in the mix. Like a good recipe, you hope it's the spice that was missing. I am anticipating.

Here's to you Alex.

Geek out complete (day 65)

The NAS is set up.  It works fabulously.  It is acting as a Time Machine, file server, iTunes server, audio station, and photo station.   I can upload and download files remotely which is great when I'm at work and need project files.  It's really neat to be able to stream my audio library from anywhere using my iPhone.  It's too bad iTunes does not do that on the iPhone.   For home, I'll have to buy an Airport Express to get my iTunes library to output onto the speakers in the living room, with iTunes remote on the iPhone to control the playback. 

I feel more responsible already.  I'm ashamed to admit I was at the mercy of the disk gods until today.  So far, I've had good luck with hard disks but luck always runs out. 

This weekend of geeking out has left me feeling distant from work, like it's a world far far away.  I wish I'd set aside a bit more time to enjoy the sun.  Especially today.

A song for this post.

NAS love (day 64)

I got a new toy today.  A brand new NAS - the Synology DS209j.  1TB of storage in RAID1, all networked with an iTunes and web server.  Inside are two Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB drives.  I'm still configuring but I'm expecting that my life will be all joy and ribbons once it's online.  Next I buy an Airport Express.  And music will ring throughout.



A song for this post.

I'm not in love (day 63)

I used to fall in love with technology easily and deeply.  New gadgets, new tools, new languages, they all  triggered enough interest and hope that I would just fall in, willingly believing that they would change everything.  There are books that end in that phrase.  How x changes everything.   I still fall in love.  Now though I don't feel the love back in the way I used to and I lose interest a bit faster.  Sometimes I resist falling in love.  I don't love Twitter and Twitter doesn't love me.  It's a shallow conviction.  I will eventually get a Twitter account, if only to steep in a new crowd language for a time.  I appreciate that the online culture has fallen in love with social media.  I picture it in my head and I see the fascination in our eyes, the infatuation.  It's sweet and naive and joyful all at the same time.   What I don't love is everything becoming a nail to be hammered by social media.  This too shall pass.  I'm looking for the next stage.  If we've been solipsistic, perhaps we need to have a call and response situation.  I heard the term 'sentient city' today.   The holy grail of being heard is when the city responds automatically.  The grand telematics experiment.  It might evolve into a kind of SimVanCity where popular beliefs and desires are mocked up and tried out before being moved into the physical world.  It might be a mixture of virtual and real.  The idea of a more direct response to our social participation is attractive.  I'm not in love yet, but I could be.

A song for this post.

Degenerative diagnostic (day 62)

My neck is fine.  No pain now.   A month or so of pain after the accident but now no pain.  So the diagnostic of degenerative arthritis from an x-ray of my shoulders and neck was unexpected and a disorienting.  Did I know that, he asked?  No of course I didn't know that.   The discussion was deferred to the physiotherapist.  I left confused about the word degenerative.  I know what arthritis is.  It's what old people get in their joints that causes a lot of pain and deformities.  I told myself that nothing had changed but on my way home from the medical centre I shopped compulsively and got home with no other desire than to order pizza.  I was deflated.  Usually I'm delighted if I get home with enough time to prepare a salad and another side dish.   Pizza it was.  Fire-roasted vegetable pizza with a thin crust.  All organic.  At least there's that.  On a scale of junk to healthy I wasn't hitting the bottom.  I went to bed early, reading a story of a woman with early onset dementia.  I woke up still deflated but early enough to get in about an hour and half of exercise.   That helped a lot.  No pain in my neck.  I started to see the ridiculous nature of the worry.  A label.  Someone put a label on you.   Degenerative doesn't mean it's inevitably going to get worse, it means it got to this point from wear (computer typing posture probably doesn't help).   I stopped feeling old and decrepit and made a pancake, enjoying every bite.   The only thing I can do is be healthy and stop going for X-rays.

A song for this post.

Step on a crack (day 61)

Superstition.  It makes up a large part of our belief systems.  Complexity breeds superstition by the sheer number of contributing factors to a particular outcome and the unpredictability of said outcome.   We don't want to believe that bad things happen to good people so we choose to believe in a higher power that somehow knows what they are doing.  In that belief, we convince ourselves that power has a fickle personality that we must assuage.  I don't happen to have that particular superstition but I do have others.  I take the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator because I think that if I don't I will increase my chances of becoming paralyzed in the future.   I don't use locker 13.  People that suffer from migraines are also prone to rituals or avoidances  sometimes based on evidence but often with some degree of superstition involved.   At the root of superstition there may be some rational behaviour.   By superstitiously participating in particular behaviours we 'fix' some parameters while allowing others to vary.   So if we get sick for example, we can say things like "I wash my hands after shaking hands with anyone, so that can't be it".   It just allows us to rule out or include causes that are either ritually absent or present.   So it affords some control.  The point at which rational action becomes superstitious ritual is the point at which we forgot why we do it, or we have become unable to vary it without some kind of emotional stress ("the sky will surely fall if I floss _before_ I brush").  On the surface, it seems likely that scientists would be less prone to superstition but in practice that hasn't been my observation.  It seems that beside the stuff that can be scientifically studied, there remains plenty that is chaotic and beyond measure.  Like why your lover left suddenly leaving not even a note.

There seems to be two types of superstition: one to stave off the bad and one to invite the good.  It is likely that people have an implicit preference toward one or the other.  I tend to fall in the superstition for the summoning of good category.   I believe that people that are superstitious to stave off bad or in a kind of prison where more and more superstitions are likely to be added since bad things happen anyway.  At least it seems more a slippery slope.  Superstition for generating good is self-perpetuating but not in an ever-growing way.   Believing in a parking goddess for example just means you praise your goddess every time you get a parking spot, and remember those times all the more.

A song for this post.

Contextual belief (day 60)

I just listened to Peter Schiff speak in a somewhat desperate tone about the US dollar being devalued and on route to becoming worthless.  Hyperinflation.  He sounded scared or maybe a mixture of incredulous and desperate for people to wake up.  He sounded convincing perhaps in large measure because he's Peter Schiff, predictor of collapses.   I tried to imagine it was someone else saying these things and how much I believed it.  I do this kind of context test sometimes when I'm in a new city and feel like it's very different than where I came from.  I imagine that I'm actually in my home city, just somewhere I've never walked or driven before.  Where is it in the city?  Close to which neighbourhood?  I get curious about how much cognitive effort it takes to map the new city to my home city and how I feel about the new city afterward.   I do this as an exercise to see how clouded my perception might be by the assumption that where I am is totally different because it's thousands of kilometres away and the people dress differently.  I admit this may strike some people as odd (I know it).  But try it sometime.  It's actually a neat exercise to challenge contextual bias.   Once you start doing it in one situation, it's sort of addictive.  So back to Peter Schiff and his ilk - the people that speak with conviction and write books.  There was something in Peter's voice that was haunting, like a 'please wake up' quality.  I found myself thinking about context but this time in a different way.   Could the things that we are told about other incompetent or 'evil' governments apply to the United States?  And I'm not talking about the direct aggression.  I'm talking about the deliberate devaluing of currency combined with misinforming the public.  You know the type of behaviour that gets people clanging pots out of windows and into the streets, en masse.   I couldn't quite make the leap of context but I came close.  The changes are happening in slow motion so it's hard to understand the trajectory and harder to believe that it couldn't be stopped.  So far, Peter Schiff has convinced me that shifting money away from US currency is probably a safe and good idea.  But not convinced enough to call every one of my friends and tell them to do so.  Trust is so hard to come by.  One thing's for sure, extreme points of view are good at changing the context suddenly if not permanently.

A song for this post.

Feel the lungs (day 59)

Today I had lunch with Joy James and we talked about the Breath I/O project.  She asked me some interesting questions about the type of affect we would like the piece to have.  Why do what we are doing?  How will people feel the experience of the lungs and the video and the sound and the interface?  As she was talking and asking questions I could feel my mind going from the how to the why.  I am so often preoccupied with the technical details of doing something.   It felt nice to speak of the audience, to picture them in the room,  to imagine the sounds they might hear.  At first I pictured only one person entering a large dark room (the mocap studio actually) where the sound was louder than the picture.  The sounds were enveloping, breath like, rhythmic and calm.  There are several places to sit down near the ground and in front of each seat there is an object, each one different.  The lungs are in a chorus formation breathing in sync, the video interchanges between them.  The person picks up an object and holds it.  One of the lungs gradually takes on more importance visually and the video is more consistent and clear.  The sound of the video is heard over the breath.  The singled out lungs have more personality and are not so in sync with the rest of the chorus which has faded to the background.  The lungs are reacting to the video that is playing within them, sometimes sighing, sometimes coughing, sometimes fast breathing, sometimes deep breathing.   The object vibrates in a association with the lungs.   When more objects are picked up more lungs approach and start to interact with each other and the objects. 

The feeling of the environment to be calm and conducive to a reflection on the bittersweet nature of life,  the life cycles, the exchanges we have with people, the constant give and take of life.  The preciousness and sadness of being human.  The joy of movement and breath, of health.

Thanks for the talk Joy.

A song for this post.

Wild things (day 58)

"Mommy that was a sad movie".  That's what a little boy said at at the closing credits of Where The Wild Things Are.  He repeated it, looking for confirmation.  I didn't hear what his mom said but I imagine she didn't say "that's just real life, Sam".   But, just as Max realized in the movie, that's exactly what it might have been.  It wasn't sad in a tragic way, it was just sad in a regular disillusioned way.   What did surprise me is the slightly psychotic character of Carol.  He was a mixture of paranoid schizophrenic and bipolar.  The line "he doesn't mean to be that way, he's just scared" is a little too close to an excuse you give for someone's abusive behaviour.  The character of KW was good but it was never clear why she wanted out except to get away from psychotic Carol.  She was the most grounded of them all even though she had her own escapes (shooting owls out of the sky?!?).   I guess in the end I have to agree with the little boy.  The movie was sad.   It was sad because everyone was looking elsewhere for happiness.  To the king, the owls, the boat, the utopic city, the dirt clump war.  No one gets happy in the end but they are one failure closer to getting there maybe.

I never read the book.  I wasn't even aware of the book as I was growing up.  Perhaps because I grew up in Quebec?  Perhaps it wasn't translated?  I wonder how close the movie is to the book or the spirit of it anyway.  It's got me curious. 

A song for this post.

Hello lungs (day 57)

I took some time today to render the lung model to see if I could get the transparency to work correctly and maybe play around with the video mapping.  I got as far as getting the transparency to work and then ran into a resolution problem.  To my chagrin, Touch Designer will only render to a maximum horizontal resolution of 1280...unless I pay $599 for a commercial license (per machine).  I've asked if they have educational pricing and we'll see.  It's strange that I hadn't notice this before when I rendered to the screen in the lab.  But looking back, it does explain the slightly squished look of the lungs.   Even at the slightly lower resolution, the lungs look pretty good.  I'm really starting to get fond of the shape of the lungs.  They're almost friendly and sweet.  Here is a pic (which is down-res'd):

The grey scale give it a medical X-ray look.  I wanted to keep it neutral until the video is added to see if it has a fluoroscopy look.  We'll see.  Trent is currently working on the texture coordinates.

I also spent some time learning Field which I can run now that I have my Macbook Pro.  It feels like learning a new language even if the component elements (Java, Python, OpenGL) are familiar.  It feels to me like a tool I could seriously love after spending some hours with it.   It reminds me of the old Unix days with lots of command line and immediate feedback.  It also makes me a bit worried that I would write something in Field and a few months later remember nothing of the mental model that led me to a particular design (i.e. more than one way to shoot yourself in the foot).   But this minor worry is not going to stop me.   I'll just trust that I knew what I was doing at the time I wrote the program which, believe it or not, is hard to do.  The belief that I am smarter in the present, so smart in fact that I know better than the previous self who was immersed in the code, is always lurking.

A song for this post.

Is this real life? (day 56)

Reality.  That word gets more fuzzy every day.  It's one of those words where you think you know what it is but as soon as you start explaining it you end up neck deep in caveats.  It's a fuzzy concept precisely because it's defined as 'you know it when you're in it'.   The first crack is the realization that you're never out of it.   Maybe we should specify 'shared reality'.  That's a little closer to something precise and takes care of dream and drug spaces.  The real problem is that beyond straight up stimulus to our sense organs, there is a layered conceptual reality which is emergent and involved in a feedback loop on itself.  The term shared reality is a little better because it recognizes that the forces on the conceptual layers are largely shared by immediate neighbours (in a physical and/or cultural sense).   I recently saw a documentary on Jonestown where they explained that loudspeakers were constantly broadcasting Jones' voice.  At no time or place could the residents be free of his voice and his opinions.  He offered a view of the outside world that was both paranoid and delusional and they had no way of verifying what he was saying.  They were still in the same sensual reality that all people inhabit but their shared conceptual reality was both disconnected and discontinuous from the other shared realities.  What is astonishing is that at the moment between life and death only a few people trusted their basic sensual reality and decided to run.  Some after seeing their children die.  And these were not weak or deficient people.  They worked hard and had ideals that are hard to argue with.  The situation again brings up my paranoia about not knowing what I don't know.   It's important to diversify media sources.  And even then, you still have to suss out the most likely facts.  When the Yes Men pulled their last prank about the US Chamber of Commerce reversing its stance on climate change, it reminded me again how arbitrary the truth is.

A song for this post.

Act now and... (day 55)

Have you ever been so busy that new opportunities seemed more like problems?   Especially ones that come with some kind of expiry date?  Like act now or forever lose out to another that will take advantage of this opportunity because they're not so busy?   I feel this way about a lot of things these days but I figure one of the better skills in life is learning how to properly finish things.   Anyone can start things.  So I must finish some of the projects I've started before taking on new ones.  I know this.  But there is a lagging feeling that perhaps I should 'reserve my seat' at the table of the other opportunities.  Just start it and then sort of sit on it for a while.   It may be disingenuous.  In any case, it's a good problem.

Meanwhile, the projects go on.  The Interactive Futures conference is less than a month away and the lineup of events looks great, if a little full.  I'm very grateful for the help we've had.  Such amazing students helping out.   The lung project is crawling along but definitely still moving.  The lungs look good and I've been able to import them into Touch Designer with some tweaking of the model.   Next up is the bump map texture, and texture coordinates.  After that I'll try to make a chorus and see how many we can get in there before the frame rate drops too much.  Then I'll mess around with the video and see if some good effects can be created in and out of the lungs (then alternate this step with the last one).  This will take us the Interactive Futures easily...and perhaps I'm being overly optimistic about that.  Time moves on.

A song for this post.
(as an additional musical note...I heard Cris Derksen perform tonight at the Western Front and I thought she was fabulous.  Here is one piece that she performed).

@irk (day 54)

I'm @annoyed at all @the @$*%*( @tagging that's going @on.   Seriously I can't read people's posts without being cognitively interrupted all the time.  Is it me?  Am I just programmed to pause at an @?  Is my inner voice too loud?  What, if, I put, commas, everywhere, would, that be the, same?  Yup, seems to be.   But the @ has the additional annoyance of being visually prominent.    I have to learn to relax with the @.  Love it, view it as decoration to be skipped or acknowledged after the fact.   Part of a well written text is the fact that it disappears.  I love the lilt of a good turn of phrase.   I love the flow of a nicely timed sentence.  So far the @ destroys that for me.  This annoyance was partially triggered by the cross-posting from twitter to facebook.  In the twitter world the @ has a function that is definitely not the same in Facebook.  I think of a post on FB as being addressed to everyone, but what sometimes happens with cross-posted tweets is that certain people are named or it's obviously a response to something and it feels like it ended up on my FB feed by accident.   Like receiving an invite to a party that's not addressed to you.   It's visual and cognitive noise.

ta@

A song for this rant.

Today was (day 53)

Today I've made history.  Again.  Too bad it wasn't recorded.   Today I looked at the gorgeous gin bottle and thought wouldn't it be nice if it worked.  Today the idea of cucumber in gin made me grin.  Today I made okra and it was delicious.  Today lots of little quirky things happened.  Lots of little unplanned laughs with unlikely people.   Some leaps of logic that escaped me and then surprised me.  Some beyond the call of duty stuff that deserve a giant spotlight.   Some emails that were easy to answer.  Today I still ended up dead tired but perhaps a tinge more grateful for my life.  So may this post be a celebration of the little things that make a day productive and fun at the same time.

A song for this post.

Guestbook nostalgia (day 52)

I took some time today and fixed the broken link to the Digital Guest Book that I made for the IDS opening.  For reasons related to mySQL versions, I had stored it on a server other than my own and eventually that server was no more.  I've now migrated everything over but in so doing I've lost the timestamps for the signatures which is a little sad.  I'll see if I can recover them from the signature files themselves, stored on my tablet.

Looking at it now after almost 3 years it feels nice to see some of the comments.  I recognize some of my friends and even some I didn't even had come or signed.  If I have a bit more time (maybe Christmas break?), I'd like to change the animation to be a bit smoother.

Anyway, take a look and sign if you'd like (during the opening, it was displayed on a tablet so it was easier to sign).  The signature won't be stored but you'll see it animated while the app runs.

A song for this post.

Swine repellent (day 51)

I am aware of H1N1 -- who isn't.  I have so far stayed away from any flu vaccines based on the fact that I don't tend to get sick.  I reason that I should not fix what is not broken.   I have a superstition that if I artificially boost my immune system, I will wreck the naturally strong immune system I've been blessed with.  I have no evidence that this would happen but because nothing bad has happened stemming from this belief, it doesn't matter whether it's true or not.  With the re-appearance of the swine flu, it seems like it's starting to matter.   The word on the street is that it likes young women.  I may be on or past the cusp of not being a young woman but still it gives me pause.  The fact that perfectly healthy young people can be struck down by this virus is perplexing.   The mantra of only the very young, very old, or immunocompromised people needing to worry is suddenly a little too simplistic.

Apparently the H1N1 vaccine will be available within a month and undoubtedly I will offered the vaccine at the school.  The question will be called.  And it seems that it is both an individual  and communal decision.   Anecdotally I hear that mothers are particularly irked and more likely to chastise other mothers bringing their sick toddlers to playgrounds and pay groups.  Would I be the target of a mild communal reprimand if I refused the vaccine?  Is not getting the vaccine an irresponsible act?  I wonder.  I will continue to think on this.  I don't like the idea of something foreign being injected in my body.  But I don't like the idea of worrying about every little sore throat that comes my way. 

A song for this post.
(the song was composed from the dna sequence of the swine flu)

New is old news (day 50)

Have we always been obsessed with the new?  Before there were stores, what was new?  Before there were peer reviewed journals, what was new?  Before there were internet rankings, what was new?  Before patents?  It seems that new is relative but we use the word as if it's absolute.  For me, new has been a sore spot for many years because it often drives a wedge between creativity and responsibility.  I see it in my students too.  If what you are passionate about is not new in the absolute sense, where do you go from there?  To graduate you need something original but yet you need to go through some well trodden steps before coming close to new.  I often tell the story of being stuck during my doctoral research and my supervisor telling me that if everything seems grey, go toward the thing that is a a little less grey.   If you lose the thread of interest, you have to take little steps out.   It's important that personal interest remains a priority and is honoured as unique in the individual.    In fact, the relationship between unique and new is perhaps worth a second look.   In reality, journals and patents are rewarding something in between unique and new.   Same with degrees.   In digital media the new has been especially problematic because technology changes so quickly.   If an artist is using old technology, are they behind or somehow not worthy of being called a digital media artist?  Clearly not, but often there is an impulse to use the latest even as the old has not been explored to its fullest.  I think it's better to view the available tech as mere ingredients.  My winning recipe will not be the same as my neighbour's even if our ingredients are the same.  The unique fusion of ingredients is what should be celebrated.  In computing science, we also talk about the difference between the model and the view.   The model is the underlying structure of the data and processes.  The view is how we choose to represent the model to the senses.   Two data artists with the same dataset (model) will not produce the same visualization (view).   Is it new to re-represent a data set?  I would argue that it is.

Our relationship to new is based on immediate needs and interest.  Something may linger for decades before being dug up as new, interesting, and useful.  Traditionally we've trusted our gatekeepers to tell us what is new but I'm seeing a trend where the crowd is perfectly able to suss that out for itself.   And what's neat about that is that the definition of new is implicit and much more fluid.  My students still need to defend their thesis but the real feedback on the work happens in the frenzy of the crowd.

A song for this post.

Ungrounded wall (day 49)

Some days are just a little ungrounded.  Like today.  I woke up way too late and so did Steve.  We were both thrown into the day with no time to say hello.  The whole day reeled from this.  Everything I did seemed like it was late or instead of something else I should be doing.  Not that I wasted time, not at all.  It just felt all out of step like the beat and I never met.  Even now as I write this I have a craving for an unknown balm.  This is what drives people to eat, that feeling of needing something.  I'm pretty sure it's not food I'm craving, but movement.  No time to exercise and computer work all day makes for a pretty underutilized body.  Everyone should dance every day.  I usually do but today no dance and no joy.

I spent many hours today tweaking a 3D model of the Israeli/Palestinian wall superimposed on a 3D topo map of San Francisco.  It's not quite there yet but hopefully a bit more work and it'll be ready to be 3D printed for an upcoming exhibition.  The work is the brainchild of Paula Levine.  What stunned me most as I was working on the models is how long the wall is - and how tall.  It's amazing that most people either don't know this wall is being built or don't know the scale of the project.  This is a wall whose boundaries are chosen based on fear and greed.  It separates people from each other and from their livelihood.  I wonder how many more walls before we realize it just doesn't work.

A song for this post.

Go project go (day 48)

I am not a project manager.  I have many projects and they are all plodding along but most likely not as efficiently as they could.   My colleague Kara has pointed me to Action Method, a startup that claims to help with project management with a proven way of working.   And now of course we're back to the old magic-incantation-that-will-make-everything-perfect dream.  But I'm attracted to it.  Perhaps  attracted enough that I'll try it.  I've tried Basecamp before with some limited success.  The difference with ActionMethod is that a) it looks nice and b) it has an iPhone app.  Good design is crucial in a project management application.  You don't want to be overwhelmed by an interface when the task at hand is already overwhelming.  Good colours,  not too cluttered, intuitive placement, good level of notification, consistent language, these are all characteristics to aim for.   So far I'm impressed with AM.   I've got about six projects on the go which could use some management help.  It's a lot and most of them are collaborations with people.  Which brings me to the next hurdle with project management software.  You have to convince others to use it.  Everyone has their way of dealing with project tasks and information.  Some make Google sites, Google docs, Google tasks, Google calendar, blogs and wikis.  Some just have an ingenious use of folders, emails, and post-its.   It's hard to convince people to switch.   The best you can hope for is some sort of integration where systems can blend so that people can slowly be lured into a self-contained application.  And really not wanting to switch is completely rational.  It's an investment in time to transcribe a project's assets and tasks.  It's an investment in time to learn a new way of doing things. Why would this work if everything else has been a disappointment is a rational question.   In the end it may come down to discipline and a consistent process.  But I have to say it doesn't hurt if the software looks good.

The panacea of project management is a lure.  The promise of software solutions is a lure.  I spend so much time online that managing my projects there makes a lot of sense. I already do that in my own little ad-hoc way.   But another important aspect for me is to actually step away from the computer and get a better overall perspective.  That may be a chart on the wall or a white board drawing.  The point is to be able to actually stand with the big view.  Stop looking at a tiny window and think bigger.  Because windows actually do change the way we think.  We unconsciously think smaller when we look at a 15" screen.  And this is another reason why AM seems to be worthwhile.  They sell physical products to go with their software.  I'm not advocating spending money on this but I like the fact that they are thinking outside of the digital realm.  Perhaps they should also weigh in about space design for project management.

A song for this post.

There's more here (day 47)

Geotagging is hot.  I like the idea of say Twitter being geotagged a lot except it brings up a bit of anxiety about being too public.  This is different than the stage fright I felt when I opened my first blog nine years ago.  At that time I was afraid of the judgment, not so much people knowing too much.  That fear came later when it became obvious that the internet does not easily forget.   Geotagged twitter or any immediately broadcast note service is like painting graffiti out in the open.  It better be good and/or sanctioned.    It brings up so many issues of what one may do with a simple lat long.  If that lat long happens to index government land,  are there restrictions on what you can say?  What about a mall or a store?   Owners of that spot will want to control what gets posted.

Geotagging is an extension of the 'i like it, i don't like it' principle to place which in some ways makes it much more personal.   Still I can see so many good things that could happen.  Favourite places can be highlighted with instructions about where to look, history sliders could highlight the changes in that place, stories of that place, replays of the last year's tweets to/on that place, songs tagged to that place.   It really could be little treasures to be found on an ordinary stop somewhere.  Ordinary magic really.   People could leave compliments about each other's houses or garden (I know I'm heading fast into Utopia).   The landscape could respond with subtle clues that geotagged content would complement the experience if we let it.  

The upshot is that we leave traces of ourselves as a matter of daily life and it's being extended into the digital and then back into the physical.   Geo-tagged visualizations will be interesting: as always aesthetically pleasing aggregators will be great gifts.   I think sound will also play an important role in how we become aware that a certain place is rich with content.   Still the issue of forgetting remains.  In real life traces fade and biodegrade.  Not so in the geotagged world.  Maybe forgetting is just something we selectively apply to data as a matter of habit and ethic.

A song for this post.

Shiny and old (day 46)

A small package of new just entered my life.  A shiny aluminum package.  The click of the keyboard is louder and the click pad is stiff.  I've rebooted twice and each time I marvel at how quick it is.  Each time something new comes in a little bit of disappointment also sets in shortly after.  Chogyam Trungpa wrote that disappointment is a source of great learning.   He also called enlightenment the ultimate disappointment.  He might have been on to something.  Disappointment is that feeling you get when you come face to face with your projections onto the future, the object, the person.   Feeling disappointment can be the pointer to the places where you still long for the magic formula.  So I suppose the ultimate disappointment would be the deep realization that this is it and there is no magic incantation, no super perfect way to be, no state of grace where you are judged good and worthy of a life without suffering of any kind.  There is simply the capacity for delight in paying attention to what is.

I am grateful for the shiny in my life.  I'm also grateful for the aging in my life.  And this is the curious thing.  When I think about having something new, the feeling is so completely different from taking care of something (or someone) aging.   They are both full of projections, but one is a promise of ease, and the other is a promise of struggle.  But the reality is that in the taking care of the old I appreciate the life lived.  In those moments when I let the joy of the process seep in, the old is a gift.

One of my favourite songs for this post.

Pancakes and art (day 45)

I've mentioned before that I have pancakes every morning.   Since tonight is a late one (btw, if you're a night person are you more likely to have a hard time dying?) I will share my pancake mix recipe and call it a night.  Oh and maybe share some art pieces that I think are ok...

Here is the recipe:
2 cups of unbleached white flour
1 cup of whole wheat pastry flour
1 cup of buckwheat flour
1/2 cup buttermilk powder
1/4 cup vanilla sugar (plain sugar will do but really the vanilla is a nice touch)
1/4 cup freeze-dried cocoa powder (mycryo) (optional but makes it moist)
4 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

To make a good size pancake you mix about 1/3+ cup with a little more water than that.  I just wing it every morning to get batter that is a little more runny than cake batter.
These days I add coronation grapes but the season is almost over.  Blueberries of course work well.

And here are two art links that I think are all right:
"Best Buy" by Borna Sammak
"Tiny Sketch" competition

A song for this post.

What you don't know (day 44)

Apparently when we go to sleep we forget most of what happened during our day.  Only the unusual gets stored in a way that can be recalled in more details.  The rest gets absorbed and reinforces certain patterns or inhibits them.  The point is that we think we know what happened yesterday but we're missing big chunks.  This gets worse as time goes on.  We have very little recall of what happened last week and even less last month and last year.    There was a book written recently that talks about why life speeds up as we age.  One of the points mentioned was the repetition of pattern with less new or unusual stimulation.  The older you get, the more you've done and seen, and the harder it is to stimulate the brain to create a new memory.   Memories are intimately linked with time perception.  They also mention the fact that a year when you're 60 is not the same as a year when you're 4.  One is 1/60th of a life lived, the other is a quarter.   I'm not sure I buy that argument for life speeding up but it's a worth a reflection.   I know that the older I get the more paranoid I am about what I'm not perceiving either deliberately or through forgetfulness or just plain physiology.  I think about a certain mood I was in a few weeks back and it seems so foreign, like another person.   Yet I know it will happen again.  I'm puzzled by the contrast between immediate control and long term uncertainty.

If you know french, Jacques Languirand spoke about the book mentioned above on his show Par Quatres Chemins.

A song for this post.

The one that got away (day 43)

I'm writing this post at my PC, not the laptop.  I mention this because I think it might make a difference.  You see, I bought this beautiful 24" lcd a little while ago and it doesn't fit in the computer desk which means it needs to sit higher than it should.  So I'm always slightly looking up at the screen -- like a reverent expecting look.  My seat is a little too low so my shoulders are always twitching to scrunch up to my ears.  I'm looking at the wall behind my screen.  Usually I'm looking at the living room through the kitchen.  Context is everything and now I'd like to talk about real estate.

In an interesting twist of fate we met some of our neighbours just a block away from where we live.  They were having a yard sale.  They live in the house that we tried to rent when we came back to Vancouver in 2006.  We ended up losing the bid to another couple probably because we were in Alberta and couldn't be there in person to properly represent ourselves.  The story is actually slightly longer than that but let's just say, since we moved to the area, we've been looking at the unit we didn't get with a somewhat nostalgic gaze. One of the tenants holding the yard sale is a screenwriter and musician from Newfoundland.  He  was delightful and played us a song on the guitar as we discussed the soul-sucking high rents in Vancouver and his choice of DVDs and soundtracks.  He is going back East.  The other tenants showed us their basement bachelor suite and we were stunned when they told us how much they're paying.  They seemed relatively happy to be going back to Florida.  Just as we were leaving the landlady came over and we were able to introduce ourselves. She was very gracious and arranged for us to see the suite that we didn't get.  It is gorgeous.  There is a chance that it may become available in the new year but it is a slim chance.  Having met the tenants, we wish them nothing but good fortune...which would mean they would stay in the suite.  Nevertheless, it was nice to close that loop, and re-open it all in one afternoon.

A song for this post.

Macbook on world trip (day 42)

This is the trajectory for my new macbook pro.  It started in China which was surprising in itself and then instead of heading south from Anchorage to its eventual destination, it crossed the country to New York and Ontario.  Is this a mistake, or a baffling side effect of centralization?

A song for this post.

Unitaskers unite (day 41)

[The new power supply worked. I am happy. My PC is running and maybe even quieter than before. Now I just have to find out where to recycle the old power supply.   It probably could be fixed but no one would bother.]

Today was a glorious day.  I stayed home and answered emails all day.  I didn't see anybody, I didn't talk to anybody and no one interrupted me.  I processed seventy-five emails.  It was a rare day where solitude came at exactly the right time.  As I sipped ginger lemon honey tea,  I felt myself becoming more civil and generous.  As I listened to the birds I felt hopeful instead of resentful.

I try to picture the days when I only had a one or two things to do.  How did multi-tasking become the norm.  I was more productive as a unitasker or at least I was more creative.  There is something about multi-tasking that robs me of the depth needed to make something new and meaningful.   I can do a lot in one day juggling devices, media, and meetings.  But I don't necessarily have anything tangible to show for it.  So many books have been written on this subject.  So many people claim they have the process that will change you from inefficient and overwhelmed to fulfilled and productive.  I believe processes evolve that will fit the context.  If something is not working, I can converge on solutions.   For example, adding Google tasks to my process changed things.  I get less email now because I can add to my task list without having to ask people to email me to remind me of something. 

This week on 'This American Life' they talked about a man who collected Lewis and Clark books until he was able to retire on the proceeds from their sale.   He retired and became a scholar.  He speaks of his new found freedom to explore in such glowing terms.  He's a true unitasker and he is happy.  Maybe this could be next year's resolution -- to become a unitasker and to write a unitasker manifesto.

A song for this post.

Look it up (day 40)

Search engines are the new clerics.  They interpret our requests and tell us where to look for answers.  When people speak of the hegemony of Google they are speaking of the new religion built upon the necessary faith we must have that the big G is benevolent and has our best interest embedded in its cloud.   Short of writing our own search engine (oh the heresy), we need to park our  search faith somewhere.  And Google might as well be it.  They have cute logos, a simple home page, some cool apps and a geek's equivalent of the Hippocratic oath.  Can anything go wrong?  They damaged their reputation a little when they voluntarily censored results in China.  But overall we are inclined to believe that Google is indeed the right agent to be digitizing the world's information.  There's never been a cuter more ambitious behemoth next store.

There is a good reason to be agnostic though.  We should search with multiple partners for the same reason the movie Memento threw me for an extended loop.  We simply don't know what we don't know.   Reflecting on this long enough is guaranteed to send me into a paranoid tizzy.  So diversification is key.  Friends or concerned parties may tell you what you don't know.

The truth is that I don't worry about G very much.  But I read a few blogs where there is much anxious typing about who owns what information and what may happen if the religion turns into an evil cult.   I think they have good points and I am happy that open source alternatives like OpenStreetMap exist to challenge some of the issues inherent in contributing to an infrastructure in which the public has no real stake.   It's correct to worry about the size of an entity that we ultimately cannot control.   On the other hand, at least G cares about what they do.  They seem to genuinely like the cloud and its possibilities.  I am curious about how long this can be sustained.  Part of me is always waiting for the other shoe to drop.  Will G ever have their equivalent of the Vista launch?  I wonder.   But for now, in G we trust.

A song for this post.

I've angered the gods (day 39)

I'm in PC hell yet again.  This time it seems to be my power supply.  The machine just randomly shuts down without warning.  Ugh.  I've just ordered a new power supply and hopefully all is well in a few days.  I'm suspecting my covet of an iMac has brought this fate down upon our household.    The macbook pro that is on its way from China probably also heaved some heavy karma toward my pc. 

I will fix the PC but only until the new iMac comes out and then I'll go through the agony of deciding whether I'm forever jumping ship.   That'll take a month at least.   So I need a good PSU that will last me roughly 3 months.  Not being one to skimp, I got a really quiet one.  There is nothing like a quiet machine.  And on that front Apple has everyone beat.  You could fall asleep to the purr of a Mac Pro.

I really really hope it's the power supply.  The last time I went through a random shutdown problem, it wasn't so easy to pinpoint.  I ended up swapping out the motherboard, the PSU, and tons of memory sticks.  In the end, it was the memory sticks though I could tell you a story about unlikely coincidences that would make the story seem fishy.  It was a long moment of hell.

There is nothing like a hardware problem to make me revert to obsessive geekiness - a state more endured than enjoyed.

A song for this post.

A love list (day 37)

I have a hate list.  Does everyone have a hate list?  Probably but I bet not everyone as a well developed formal hate list.  I'm somewhere in between now but in my early twenties I had this thing call the pit which had many levels.   Things and people (mostly people) would get thrown into the pit.  Some people would be given tools to dig themselves out.  Most times these were only small plastic spoons.   One person went so low into the pit that they became a mythical figure haunting the pit with the sound of their nails on the pit walls.  Some people were given bungee cords and although they were occasionally thrown into the pit, they had an automatic reprieve after a harrowing few moments.

My friend Zeenat asked me what is on my love list today.  I don't have a formal love list at all.  But I think, however sappy it may be, a love list might be a good thing to start.  First, what is the correct metaphor for a love list.   A bean stalk?  clouds?  Warm lofty winds?  Oh I know.  Food.  A layer cake.  It works because it's not just layers of cake but there's frosting and cherries and decorations and coulis.   Some people are good frosting, others are more robust cake layers.   Zeenat is definitely sparkles on the cake.  Steve is a mottled chocolate and white cake layer all his own.  My cat Tagi is little bits of almond that are sometimes welcomed and other times just incongruous.  My parents are the plate.  I know it sounds unglamourous but being a plate is the very base of the love cake.  Shannon is well-placed sour cherries.  Nathalie is refreshing slices of pear.  This cake deserves never to be eaten.

A song for this post.

Me and my machine (day 36)

At some point I started having an arms length relationship with the machine.  This does not feel so good.  I probably will go back to manipulating data directly but for now I'm in interface hell.  Yes, I'm in menus with options that I'm not sure about trying to achieve thing that clearly these menus weren't meant to facilitiate.  Often there is a nagging suspicion that perhaps it's not me or the menus, but something wrong in the implementation or an unintended interaction with another plugin or widget.   These mild irritants used to be motivations to go to the code and change things directly.  Now they are stumbling blocks that keep me from getting things done because either I don't have access to the files I need or I simply don't have the time to fiddle.  You see, I've become an administrator.  Administrators delegate.  My problem is that I still secretly long to fiddle.  Sometimes I give in and spend hours tweaking or programming something.  It's like being on a diet and suddenly binging on ice cream.  It feels good in the moment but then the cold hard reality of my inbox hits me in the morning.

I think that for my own sanity I'll have to carve out some time at least three times a week to assuage the programming urge.  I've just ordered a new Macbook Pro and I'm looking forward to working with Field.  I think it could be a nice mix between menus and low level wrangling.

A song for this post.

Stereo ahoy! (day 35)

This week Leila and Thea were here from Montreal to work on the Breath I/O project.  It was worth the stress of carving time from a busy schedule to work on the project in a more sustained way.  The main thing we are trying to work out is a workflow for the output of the Sony HDR-TG1 cameras we are using to shoot stereoscopic footage.   We had great hopes for the little Sony's and I think they will work out in the end but we've hit many walls along the way.  The TG1 is ideal for us because of its small size.  We can mount two TG1s beside each other on a Slik twin camera mount and shoot stereo at varying inter-ocular distances.   Miles built us a remote that controls both cameras so we can start/stop and zoom them in tandem.  Another ideal aspect of the TG1 is that they record surround sound.   With such a small microphone we wondered how good the sound would be.  It turns out to be quite good!   Overall we were pleased with the output of the camera but we started to hit some snags when it came time to edit the video.  The footage is in AVCHD format and the sound is Dolby Surround.   Here is what we know so far:

• The Picture Motion Browser software that comes with the camera will export the video to mpg2 or wmv with surround sound but not full resolution (it downgrades to 720x480)
• Final Cut Pro downgrades the audio to stereo
• Adobe Premiere can import the mts with surround sound and full res, but cannot output surround sound.  We did find a plug-in that may help but it's $295 and at this point we haven't given up on a cheaper solution.  CS4 says it comes with a trial version of said plug-in but we don't seem to have it.
• Stereoscopic Player does not play the surround sound (this is just a minor irritant since eventually we'll be playing the stereoscopic footage in a virtual environment)
• Interlacing is an issue.  The TG1 records at 1080 60i and needs to be deinterlaced to 1080 30p.  

So we currently don't have a workflow that preserves both resolution and surround sound.  The belief that this it must be possible keeps us searching.

Despite these setbacks we had some nice stereoscopic results with the footage that Leila shot of her nephews in track and field, and hockey.  The twin camera mount needs a level so some of the footage  had some vertical disparity but we were able to fix that in post-processing.  We tested the stereo footage on the old lung prototype and it looked interesting.  It kind of looked like the lungs were transparent.  Not exactly what we were looking for but perhaps with a little bit of a bumpy surface on the lungs, they won't look so mirror-like or transparent.

Another highlight was Trent's new model of the lungs.  They look great!  With any luck we'll be working with these on Monday (Leila's last day).

Miles was also around working with different sounds.  Making soundtracks on the fly for the silent videos we were playing.   We talked about different ways of teasing out the deeper resonance of someone voice in real-time.  He showed us an effect in super-collider which may be the start of what we're looking for.

A song for this post.

Mood dips in step with temperature (day 34)

I've noticed that the stock market gyrations need a story.  You can't just say "the stock market dipped by 300 points today".  You have to say "the stock market dipped dramatically following investor doubts about...".   I have read many of these headlines.   Over time an image has formed in my head, helped by the many trading room stock photos.  I picture chemicals (economic indicators) being piped in and landing on the crowds of traders in uneven but clustered patterns.  They there is general barking and howling that spreads to local neighbourhoods.  A frenzy of anxious trading takes place, and when the chemicals subside, exhausted stunned traders reckon with the result.   To put a story on this behaviour is interesting but most surely wrong because the traders are barking out of habit and neighbourly influence as much as reason.   The headlines are like a running commentary on a cock fight.   They create mini-dramas out of very immediate facts.  Some of these mini-dramas will actually fit the facts longer than others and you'll feel good about the narrative arc.  It's good to feel like you might know the next thing that happens, or to feel like a tragedy is in the making.  The anticipation is good.  Good like dessert.

The problem is that eventually drama exhaustion sets in.  There is only one cure for drama: deep engagement.  But how does one actually get beyond the fine grained noise to the deeper currents in financial systems?  It's not clear to me that anyone is even relatively sure of the deeper narrative taking place.  And maybe there is none.  It's quite possible that we've created a machine so mesmerizingly complex and with such high stakes that we're stuck in a fearful narcissistic moment.  This may be one reason to see the movie "cloudy with a chance of meatballs".

There is not real conclusion to this post.  The compulsion to stay at the surface of things because it's more immediately interesting is a trap that eventually robs us of insight.  It's related to discernment in the choice of information we take in.  It's also one of the topics we are researching with the Breath I/O project.  The frenzied consumption of the new eventually leads to shallow breathing and anxiety.  What kind of media consumption leads to a deeper breathing?

A song for this post.

Mirror mirror (day 33)

There is a mirror on the moon - 18 inches square.   If you shine a laser at it, it will reflect the photons back to you so you can calculate the distance to the moon.  The mirror was place there by Neil Armstrong.  The idea of shining of a laser so far away is crazy enough.  The idea that it would actually reflect anything back is crazier still.

Just a marvelling fact today.  That's it.  I need sleep.

A song for this post.

A life without me (day 32)

Let's talk more about bodies in Second Life.  I was watching a talk recorded in SL a few days ago and I eventually had to walk away from the image because the self-intersecting bodies performing strange and repeating 'casual' moves were too distracting.   In that case, and perhaps because it was recorded and not live, I found the whole idea of an avatar presentation in Second Life a little superfluous.  What exactly was gained over an audio broadcast except the visual awareness of audience for the presenter?  If I'd been at that conference in the...ummm...what's the SL equivalent of flesh?  Anyway, if I'd been there,  I couldn't have even walked away from the screen or done email at the same time for fear of my avatar suddenly going zombie like.   Like playing Barbies, you have to be there to strike the poses or it just doesn't work.

Some people say that virtual worlds like SL will be the new browser.   One of the big differences between a browser and SL is privacy.  For the most part, when I'm browsing I don't have crowds looking on.   In SL, if I'm looking at an object or reading a sign or watching a video and someone happens to walk by, they can see what I'm doing.   There are advantages to being seen, primarily meeting like-minded people, but it does break a certain paradigm of the lone surfer which has a lot of advantages too.  For that reason I would advocate for an invisibility mode in SL where you are not seen and you can't see others. Difficulties arise when you effect the world but these difficulties already exist in a web browser when you post on FB for example.   I'm also interested in the possibility of history sliders for portions of the world.  And the possibility of ambient live data rooms where real world data is being piped in and being audio-visualized in real-time.    The two together (a-vis+history slider) would add some insight.

Most fancifully, I'd love to have my avatar develop a separate life.  Why do I need to be there all the time?  Why couldn't she just make friends and develop a personality?  Then I do a 'being John Malkovich' on her and re-enter at will.  She would be like a walking talking recommendation engine.

A song for this post.

A life by any other name (day 31)

I wonder about Second Life.  I feel old when I think that many others wonder why I have to wonder.  There are so many trends to keep track of and one must show discernment.   I've been in Second Life a few times and each time I feel icky and awkward.  The social rules don't apply in the same way and I've been through a few chats that left me feeling a little affronted if not assaulted.   So I decided not to invest much time into it.  The SL headlines wizzed by at dizzying speeds for a while.  The hype couldn't have been more shrill.  Now it's down to a drizzle of headlines and most people have polarized into "i like it, i don't like it".   Maybe it's the disillusionment phase of a new technology where we suddenly see the hard work it'll take to solve the inherent problems.  And the phase where we see that we are still humans fundamentally still looking for the panacea.

In the disillusionment I see realism and I feel better there.  It's like I can have some room to think about what it might mean to carve out a space for myself in that technology.   In the best possible virtual world with the most enlightened avatars, what would happen?  Actually it's the avatar part that I'm not so sure of.  Or rather the humanoid forms that pass for avatars up to now.   Playing the game 'Flower' today made me think of what it might be to navigate information as a petal rather than a human.  I know it's fanciful but it seems a lot closer to the way I feel when I traverse information in a browser for example.   I'm not exactly sure why a body needs to be added.  Sure, the body language is potentially interesting but if it can be faked at the click of a button, what's the point?

I have to sleep.  More on SL tomorrow.

A song for this post.

Just right (day 30)

Two days of bliss and adventure in the Nicola Valley and I now have more apples and plums than I dare look at.  I picture them transforming into pies, crisps, sauces and snacks.  I'm hoping I can be quick enough so none get wasted.  I'm starting to realize that my fascination with fruits and vegetables is not as common as I thought.  Not everyone gets home and has a brief moment of panic at the piles of organic goods needing to be matched and transformed.  It's a good thing I also secretely love the challenge and the leftovers.

The weekend was sublime with many culinary moments worth remembering including cooking okra for the first time and Janek's makeshift souffle with all that was left in the fridge and more (like Doritos).  As we were about to start picking the last of the plums on our last few hours on the farm, a momma bear and her three cubs showed up right by the orchard.  There is an electric fence so they are trained to stay away but they were right by the fence climbing up a Ponderosa Pine.    Four beautiful really cute black, brown and blond bears.   The way they move, so slowly and considered was a great pleasure to watch.  It's hard to believe we can't be friends.   As it was, it was a uncomfortable standoff.  We had to pick fruit and they were too scared to come down from the tree.  The momma bear huffed angrily at us as we started to pick the fruit as far from them as we could.  Eventually we finished with the plums and everyone was much calmer.

Watching momma interact with her cubs, it occurred to me how silent their communication is.   Compared to human families with their constant chatter, guiding, praising, and chastising it seemed so quiet and languid.  Kind of like us this weekend.

A song for this post.

Did I just help you? (day 27)

I have a dilemma.  Do I bring my computer to the Okanagan this weekend so I can write on the blog and not miss a day even though I can't upload (no internet connection), or do I just declare a blog vacation due to a broadband accident?  My obsessive side says bring the computer, there may actually be some cool stuff that happens in the OK.   My adventurous side says no don't bring the computer, do something completely different.  Maybe I'll bring the computer for the option and then see what I feel like when I get there.

Today I went to a great talk at Emily Carr about collaboration.   Jer Thorpe and Simon Levin talked about their projects,  including 'Just Landed', 'Big Picture', 'Glocal', and 'CodeLab'.  An interesting question came up at the end of Jer's talk about the definition of collaboration and whether it is truly a collaborative action to create an art piece or a visualization from data that was contributed freely but with no specific intent toward the author of the visualization or otherwise.   For example. 'Just Landed' takes data from the twitter feed and scans for words that would indicate someone has just arrived in a new location.  The application then looks up where that twitter author comes from and deduces the start and end point of travel in order to visualize it as a dynamic path.   The vast majority of twitter authors whose data was used have no idea the visualization exists.  Is this ok?  For this visualization, I would say yes it's fine and it's wonderful that it was made possible and most people would be pleased to have contributed without having to do anything extra.   The data in 'Just Landed' was anonymized so issues of privacy didn't occur.   But there is a line to be drawn I believe.   That line might just be begged by visualizations because their specific purpose is to make visible derivative data --- trends and patterns.   So while we contribute all kinds of tidbits about ourselves we may not want anyone analyzing that data for things about us that we would rather remain private.  This exact case came up recently when MIT students announced that they could deduce someone's sexual orientation by their list of friends on Facebook.  Well maybe, but should you?  And should you announce that?  In any case, the question remains.  Should there be a pingback when your twitter data gets analyzed for patterns?  Sounds like a logistical nightmare.

The one thing to celebrate is perhaps the overall collaborative intent of sharing such volumes of information.   We obviously didn't have the worst in mind when we slipped into the experiment that is social networking.  That's human nature, and I like that part of it.

Until Tomorrow or Monday,

A song for this post.

delete delete delete (day 26)

Luis Suarez says email can all but be eliminated.  He's down to 30-40 emails a week.  I drool when I hear those numbers.  These days I can never empty my inbox and I feel trapped by the email treadmill.  There are so many conversations that answering an email feels good but there is also a twinge of dread for the response.   The emails that scroll off my screen have a very high probability of never getting answered.  How did it get to this? I used to love email.  I suppose the asynchronous nature of email made us think that time was stretching.  The reality is that it takes way longer to type or read something than it does to have a conversation.  The same action items will result but conversing will get there more quickly.  I realize the benefits of email -- the record keeping, the attachments, the time to think about a response.  But I would say the bulk of my emails don't fall in that category.

Luis just said no more and stopped responding to email.  I'm not sure if he's down to zero responses but it's pretty close according to the talk I heard.   He has instead diverted his email conversations to other media.    He uses social networking tools like Yammer and blogs so he still has the record keeping but shares the information a little wider.   I suppose there would be a small overhead in diverting conversations but over time there would be less traffic in your inbox.   And maybe over time there would be less repetition.  Still, it may be my lack of imagination or cynicism but I have a hard time imagining that more software tools in my life will be better.   I have a task list, several calendars, two inboxes,  four blogs,  an RSS feed reader, and a facebook page.  I haven't even joined Twitter for fear of one more thing to check.

I admit that something has to change in my inbox wrestling moves.  Luis says we need to work smarter not harder.  It's glib.  I suppose I could change my habits in his kind of direction and see what happens.  I wonder if he has a step by step guide.

A song for this post.

Domo Arigato (day 25)

The dream of robot slaves.   There's been lots of talk lately about robots that can walk, run, stay balanced, go up stairs, serve coffee, chop vegetables.    Alongside the talk about new robot abilities there's been nervous hand-wringing about the ethics of having robots among us.  It's funny to me because I actually got into computing science because of a sort of fascination with telling the computer what to do.  Write a program, press enter, and it does exactly what you specified.  At that time, the computer was a semi-conscious thing for me.   I had no real knowledge of the inner workings so it was a capricious being, fighting yet giving in with the right incantation.  I still feel that way but now I know the innards so it has lost a bit of its romance.   So I wonder if acquiring a robot to chop vegetables for me and do laundry might not be a version of my first encounter with the Commodore 64.  Mysterious yet pliable, my robot frenemy.   Here of course I'm talking of the benign affect of telling a robot what to do.   The difference between a robot and a computer is in the potential for harm.  Motility takes computers way beyond the harm of computer viruses and privacy invasion.  Sentience and free will adds a whole level of unpredictability which may swing it towards harmful behaviour.

Asimov's laws three laws (don't harm humans, obay humans, preserve thyself) as a starting point for ethics but they have been found lacking it seems mostly on the basis of the robot's sentience or free will getting in the way.  The conundrum is that we are creating something stronger than us and expect two things:  that it will not harm us and that it will harm the ones we don't like.   It's the fantasy of the gun as a defensive device, again.   We are afraid that we will create the robots a little too much like us and have to deal with mood swings on a scale beyond prozac.  So we need to ask ourselves who's creating the robots?  What are their intentions?  It's unlikely a dove can come out of a hawk's nest so we really need to choose the root genetics of this new line really carefully.  We should feel revulsion at drone attacks.  We should feel disturbed by a robot that looks like a girl and is pleased to repeat any recorded positions when you tap her on the head.  These are real affective behaviours and abilities.  Our relationship with robots informs and is informed by our relationship with other beings.   It would be infinitely better to amplify the best in human behaviour.

A song for this post.

Attention: Requiem (day 24)

This is a requiem for
long talks
videos longer than 10
emails longer than two paragraphs
the long form of thx
days with less than 5 contexts
one conversation at a time
inboxes with less than 100 emails
the joy of receiving an email
news with more than 140 characters
friend as a noun
This is a requiem for my attention span

This is a song for this requiem.

Our share of envy (day 23)

We took a walk along the sea today.  We started at kits beach and passed through Jericho, Locarno, and Spanish Banks.  A portion of the walk has to be on the road because there is protected land.  While strolling along Point Grey Rd. and 1st Ave. we couldn't help but notice and sometimes admire the massive houses overlooking the water.   It's a spectacle of sorts and we make a game out of pretending to buy and sell our favourites.    Ownership of a house on that stretch of road probably starts at three million and we feel rather certain that our group will never own any of them or even socialize in any of them.   Once in a while we spot someone who lives in the houses and they look normal.  There is no glow of money it seems.   We wonder what it is that they've done to be there.  What is it that we're not doing, or not doing right?  Looking at wealth distribution in Canada it's clear that some people know something others don't and that they are not sharing.   I'm puzzled by this crazy making situation.   Our tacit approval of the wealth distribution means that we accept the notion that the people that get millions in salary and bonuses deserve it, and that the rest don't.   The implication is that if you don't have the money to buy the Point Grey house, you're not smart enough.   There is currently so much discussion about bank executive salaries but at the root of the dialogue is this massive insecurity that inequality creates in those that don't fetch the millions in bonuses.  And this insecurity means that nothing will change.   As long as we buy the tale that they deserve it, we will continue to minimize the impact of the injustice, and resist regulation.

Of course I'm aware of the irony of this discussion.  I am rich by any relative measure that goes beyond downtown Vancouver and most definitely North America.  The imbalances are stunning.  But surely one of the ways to start to right the craziness is to skim the fat off the top and redistribute it properly.   Or better, keep the fat from rising.  If more of excess capital is widely distributed, it can only mean better, more equitable participation in world markets.

Back to lighter topics tomorrow...

A song for this post.

Earl Grey tea, hot. Nike shoe, blue. (day 22)

In 1999 I saw Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software Foundation) give a presentation at (now absorbed) TechBC University.   I could say much about this presentation but I will stick with the content which was fabulous.   He said something that has stuck with me ever since.  He explained that because digital information is essentially free (like free beer) to copy, its distribution and sale must be treated differently than a physical object which is not as easily copied (or as exactly for that matter).  This is now common rhetoric but you have to remember this is before the p2p frenzy and the RIAA's unreasonable response.  At the time, many of us were running GNU/Linux and enjoying the fruits of the FSF and Open Source movement.   It seemed like the free flow of information would just around the corner.   It was such a whirlwind...napster, limewire, sharaza, pirate bay.  But alas business models don't die gently.   Rather, they are replaced and fight until the bitter end.  Could it be any different?  Maybe it has been but it's the spectacular failures to play nice that make the news. 

Then someone figured out that people would pay (a little) for convenience and extras.   I can still get my music from p2p sites but it's a more pleasant experience to surf iTunes and get it for .99.  Double that for movies (although the selection on iTunes is culturally and historically deplorable).   Never underestimate people's willingness to part with a loonie for instant gratification.   I still think the price on a movie is too steep.  $4.99 just seems extreme for something that is so intangible with no "special features" and no possibility of rental extension beyond the allotted two days.   Would be nice to get an offer to have unlimited rental for the title for a bit extra.   Chances are that people would pay and seldom play it again.  And if they gave you a key, you could actually 'lend' the movie to someone else so they could stream it for a limited time.   The possibilities are endless.   More choice more better....for everyone.

Next up is the 3D printing industry.   Accessible manufacturing of small parts changes how we think about design and objects.   There is already an open source movement geared toward 3D prints.  Not just open source 3D printers (that can print themselves!) but also open source designs.   If you can afford to print this, you can have it.  The design is free and customizable.  The just-in-time market will be big not just for the open source community but for large manufacturers who can offer individual features (or add-ons) to their products for very little extra efforts.  Much like the book industry, you can have your object virtually or really.   Both have advantages.  If you have a virtual object you can use it on your avatar or in a virtual environment (game or not), or make it part of your latest animation.  If you have it really, you can wear it, use it, paint it, glue it, hang it, (eat it?).   I feel about 3D printing the way I felt about music in 1999: excited and optimistic.  This time, though, I know there will be blood before the promise land.  I just don't know who will strike the first blow.

A song for this post.

Look at me (day 21)

Advertising is annoying.  Advertising is changing.  Will it still be annoying?  I remember when I first browsed on Mosaic in 1994.  It was quiet.  Academics were the only ones there.   It was made for us, by us.  It was good.  Then slowly buying and selling became the thing you did on the internet.   Then the individual home page, then social networking.  Now companies not only have web sites they have their tentacles in all areas of our travel on the web.   You do a search, an ad pops up.  You read an email, an ad pops up.   I am a potential buyer, practically everywhere.   I tell myself that I can ignore the ads and I think I do.  But I wonder how much actually sticks anyway.  Once in a while I can't help but glance and get curious.  On Firefox, I use Add-Art which replaces the image ads with art images.   When I first installed it, I would forget that the ads were being replaced and I would get really annoyed at the image that didn't fit.  What is that, what is that, what is that, what is that???? Then I'd clue in.  Oh it's art.  I'm not supposed to figure out if I need it or not.   Phew.

So here we are with a loose model of "free only because your gaze is valuable".   Yes my gaze is valuable to you.  But it's also valuable to me.  Where it lands affects me.  So discernment should be possible in the face of such a wide variation in quality.  The one saving grace to google ads is that they are pretty much all the same format so easy to ignore.  There's no flashing or dancing bears or shoot the monkey.  Other sites are not so kind.  Discernment becomes really difficult when the guy doing push-ups is constantly begging you to help him so you can win a prize.  I stopped watching TV because it started to feel like a mind control device.  I can't say the web is at that point but I am looking to my smart phone more and more.    Eventually advertising will follow me there too.  It hasn't yet....much.  But it's coming.  I only hope that it's less annoying, more entertaining, more optional.  What if it was an opt-in program?  If you say you will put up with ten ads a week, you get two dollars off your data plan.   Deal or no deal.   Of course that probably couldn't work because there are so many publishers and most of the time we'd prefer to surf anonymously however elusive that might be.   Unless the model was such that all ads used the same mechanism to pop ads on your phone and some could be allowed through depending on the deal that you signed with the telco.   A kind of ad firewall.  The thing I like about the opt-in model is that there would be some incentive to make the ads somewhat entertaining to get a following.  The question of how mobility might affect the sound/look/feel of advertising is for another day.

A song for this post.

Curious noise (day 20)

Today Miles and I talked about what an environment of mixed soundtracks might sound like.    In Breath I/O the videos and their associated soundtracks will 'swirl' around in the environment surrounding the lungs, mixing with each other.  When there is no video playing on the lungs it makes sense for the sound to be noisy with a slight foreground of interest, a hint of some of the soundtracks.   As more videos are playing, the noise retreats more and more to the background but is still present.  There is a seamless blend between when the soundtrack is fully audible and when it goes back as part of the noise.   All of this is in five channel surround sound.   One of the things we talked about is that the noise would be algorithmically composed of the granules from each soundtrack.  Much like the video pixels are being used to shade the atmosphere surrounding the lungs.  I like that parallel a lot.  Miles had some great examples of composers who work with noise and subtle foregrounds of interest.

One of the aspects of the atmosphere that we still need to develop is whether it will be influenced by some kind of action.   We've even talked about the possibility of the virtual affecting the real by being able to generate air currents in the installation space.   Personally I think it would be ok if the environment was like weather, unpredictable and interesting.  Something the lungs would be subject to.

A composition for this post (courtesy of Miles). 
More of Rosy Parlane can be found on myspace.

Let them eat cake (day 19)

Apparently Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake" (actually "qu'ils mangent de la brioche").  Having heard this expression repeated throughout my life, and having no context to attribute to it, I made up several meanings and contexts over the years.   The one that stuck the most is the one where Marie Antoinette being a selfish narcissist decides that she will give everyone cake so that they will shut up, so busy will they be in their newly found comforts.    Of course I know now the actual context of the phrase and in that story she is still a selfish narcissist but was giving no one cake.

I wonder about massive protests in the past and in the present but in other places.  Why don't we massively protest in Canada and the US?   What would it take?  How uncomfortable would we need to be? We are eating cake so the idea of protesting and possibly losing the cake is not so appealing I suppose.  We could also just be asleep from too much cake.  So when something bad happens like, oh I don't know, the failing of a flawed financial system, we just sit there dumbfounded unable to grasp that things won't just go back to normal soon, and that taxpayer money is being used to bailout a system that made billions for some and nothing for most.  It's really unbelievable and, when you're full of cake, it's even harder to get up and do something about it.  I remember the moment when the bailout was rejected ('blamed' on a speech by Nancy Pelosi).  That was amazing.  A grandstand moment if I ever saw one.   But short-lived and at my most cynical, orchestrated to appease and scare at the same time.  That was the last of the influence of 'main street'.   Long live main street.   

The other-worldliness of large broken and oppressive systems is daunting.  I wonder what it might have felt like for Puerto Ricans to rise up for self-determination.  I wonder about the feminist movement and their struggle for the vote.  I wonder about African Americans rising up for equal rights and freedom.  I can watch countless YouTube videos and movies but I still don't know what it might feel like.  I've never been in it.   My peer group likes cake for now.

A song and performance for this post.

Emotional breather (day 18)

I described the Breath I/O project earlier in which lungs will be used as vessels for video and sound. 

I've been wondering if it would be possible to annotate video with emotional content so when they are mapped onto the lungs the breathing style could vary to match or enhance the emotion.   Since at this point we are not planning on using dynamic video, it may be feasible and desirable to manually annotate the video with some state parameter corresponding to the type of breathing that would be appropriate.  From there the lungs could alter their breathing and seamlessly blend between states. 

A quick search later, I just found the specs for MPEG 7 video standard.  It allows for just the kind of annotation that we would need.  I'm not sure what the status is on mpeg7 and whether any of the applications we are currently using (Virtools, Touch Designer, Field) will even play it.  It's been around for a bit so perhaps it's more integrated than I think.  Regardless, we could use some of the concepts in the specifications and roll our own little annotated video player.

The more I think about it, the more I can see interesting uses to the new annotation standard.  Obviously many people have been thinking about this for a while on the standards side, but its interesting to me that it hasn't hit the mainstream yet in terms of all the possible uses and proper tools to support those.  The Wikipedia entry contains some examples of what people have done with the standard so far.  The IBM video annotator VideoAnnEx seems like it might be interesting for us.  There is also a Java library to extract annotation that we could use in Field.

There may be more appropriate standards or ways to do this, I'm not sure.  It made me happy to see mpeg7.  It seems like a good starting point to start making enquiries about the field.

A song for this post.

Experiment of a benign addict (day 17)

It's official, I am now off caffeine. I quit primarily because I was tired of not having the choice of skipping the coffee unless I was ready to deal with the headache that inevitably would surface roughly six hours later. The move was prompted by my usual supplier of coffee beans not having my favourite beans to sell for days in a row. After a while I started feeling like an addict showing up and sheepishly asking for the beans. And some mornings I would wake up late and be resentful that I couldn't just skip the coffee to gain some time. I know this is a ritual for most adults in this culture and certainly I love the joe but there was this moment where I started feeling ridiculous for being so directed by it. I listened to the moment and thought ok let's just say I don't do this anymore.

A couple days of headaches later, and I'm free. It feels really good and I save time and money. The only thing is, I now have these small urges to reach for my absent cup of coffee. Usually when a moment is uncomfortable or confusing, or if a task hits a wall and I just need some time away from it. It's something between an avoidance mechanism, a sensory reset, and a security blanket. It's been interesting noting when it happens. Now I need to figure out whether I replace it with herbal tea of some kind or just find a new thing to insert into those moments. I think maybe I'll see if every time it happens, I can just become conscious of my breath and relax into a sigh or something. Could be interesting. No doubt this would take care of itself over time but while the contrast is still high, I'll experiment.

A song for this post.

The last breath (day 16)

There will be a last breath.  Just like there was a first.   Sometimes I visualize the last breath and what it might be like to not breathe in again.  Would it be better to know and be absolutely conscious of the last breath?  In that case, would the last breath be somewhat willed?  How is it that whatever it is that makes us breathe in again just doesn't activate after the last breath?  Is that when the fear sets in?  Is it like drowning or floating?   Or maybe the last few breaths are more and more willed until you realize that you are just delaying the inevitable.  The last breath is then the final renunciation.  In some ways I prefer that scenario because it allows for a certain control about when the last breath will be.  The first scenario is much more of an imposition.

I have a friend who was declared dead for a few moments before being revived.  She says that first breath back was violent and highly unwelcome.  She had been going somewhere better.  Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor also died for a moment when she had a stroke and she speaks of not knowing how she would ever get back into her body, her consciousness having become so spacious.   It's almost as if the breath is the thing that keeps us attached to our bodies.  Our consciousness passes through it like a funnel and becomes contained by it, by its rhythm and boundaries.

It's maddening that so many humans have had a last breath and yet each one of us has to wonder what it's like still.  And when I go through it, if I'm conscious, I wonder if I'll have the unsatisfiable urge to tell everyone.

A song for this post.

Between nesting and jumping (day 15)

Salman Rushdie said in an interview on CBC that everyone has a wish for home and a wish for adventure.   Steve and I both laughed at the description he gave (if you've never heard SR speak, search for it, it's a treat...one of my favourite is this one).    Part of the reason we laughed is because we are currently in a rental apartment that needs work and we're not sure the owners will do the work...so..we hover between staying and leaving in a maddening dance of pros and cons. 

Several times in my life I've had the urge to throw it all away and just do something completely different.  I've done some pretty crazy turns but never truly just stopped and jumped without a net.   I'm either a sucker for continuity or just plain scared that things will turn out badly and I'll end up on the street.   It's probably enlightening to ask someone what their alternate reality is.  What jump would they make if risk or time/money was not an issue?

I think I would open up a little breakfast shop/restaurant in a little place like Nelson, BC.  I love breakfast.  Truly love it.  I have a blueberry (these days it's concord grapes instead, yum!) pancake every morning with maple syrup and homemade fruit sauces.   I think breakfast should be celebrated and lingered over.   If you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, get into a routine of an amazing home-cooked breakfast.  It's something to look forward to, and I swear you will feel better for the rest of the day.

So here is the paradox.  My crazy jump into something completely different would lead me to the mother of all nests: the home-cooked breakfast shop.  I picture it small, warm and full of great smells and great people that I know and love.   So I guess like many people I have a secret longing for the simple life, the one where you're so happy and comfortable you don't want to jump anywhere.   I'm pretty sure that things would turn out differently if I actually did it.  It may just be a case of wherever you go, there you are.   I'd probably get there and miss the world of technology and digital media terribly.   I'd probably start to hate breakfast.  And then I'd look around for the next jump out of there.

Tell me a story (day 14)

I read remarkably little fiction.  Most of my time is spent reading someone's treatise on media theory, or technology history,  gaming, narrative, etc.  I read other people's opinions.  Rarely but notably I hit upon a well written book in that genre that inspires me and genuinely changes my way of thinking about something.  The previously mentioned "Orality and Literacy" by Walter Ong is an example,  "Deep Time of the Media" by Siegfried Zielinski is another.  There is something about the way these authors write that has at least some resemblance to narrative.  In "Deep Time of the Media", the approach is a sort of trip through time and space where we are told of technologies that maybe didn't make it but were important to the development of other technologies, and certainly important to the culture of the time.  There is a also an attention to the characters (and they mostly were characters) that invented and peddled technology -- the geeks of their time.  I love the fact that the author makes no apologies for taking a romantic stroll through history.   He says that he chose the anecdotes and technologies in the book by looking for the 'shiny things', the bits that were just too curious to pass up.  He calls this a kind of archeology, taking issue with the idea that the evolution of technology (like any evolution) is linear and always yielding the best solution.  Indeed, the word 'best' implies defined criteria that could lead to optimal solutions to...well..I don't know exactly.   The point is that luck plays a giant role in any new technology gaining popularity and that there are some sad failures that were very exciting at the time.

This may be sacrilegious but I no longer make time for books like Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception" or Deleuze and Guattari's "Thousand Plateaus".  I own these books but I don't love them.  Maybe it's an underlying pining for more fiction, but I genuinely wonder why the topics of these books couldn't have been written with a little more of the pleasure of discovery built in.   I know some people love "Thousand Plateaus" and I may be tragically missing out but everyone draws boundaries on their time and I've drawn mine at their door.  Brian Massumi is an author that comes closer to making that kind of material more human, and certainly his book "Parables for the Virtual" is an interesting read where he allows himself a more fanciful jaunt through the material.

A lot of the books I read were recommended by Amazon.  In some ways they have my tastes figured out.  But it would be nice if the recommendation engine could notice that I don't read fiction, and suggest fiction based on the kinds of non-fiction that I read.  Surely there are some books that would bridge the two worlds.  I feel like I might be missing a whole treasure trove of material...

Confidently unrehearsed (day 13)

Always look on the bright side of life.  That's what they say.  Except that over-confidence will get you in the end.  Feedback is essential.  This article on Psy-Fi outlines the reasons why processes that have inherently long feedback loops are very hard to optimize and deserve a systematic approach to decision documentation and evaluation.   I love the article because it really strikes at the heart of human nature.  We are short-term beings, and for the most part cowards as well.   Most of us don't even like to hear or see ourselves on record.   There is something very frightening about seeing ourselves unrehearsed, and most of life is like that: unrehearsed and distracted.   This is why I like the premise of the article: even if it seems that emotional intuitive decisions are quicker, have the courage and take the time to analyze and document how a decision is made.  In the end, even if the decision ends up being the same, you'll have something to use as a basis for change if the decision didn't work out as expected.   The discipline and commitment that it takes to do something like that though is unusual.   The problem does not suggest its own antidote at all.

There is one thing in the article I don't quite agree with.   I don't agree that if we did see the world as the mess it truly is that we would be depressed (and make better decisions).   I think there is a nice middle ground between irrational exhuberance and irrational pessimism.  The world is a mess, absolutely.  But that's a reason to be realistic, look at the suffering directly, and try to help where possible.  Seen from that angle, exhuberance and pessimism are both forms of laziness.

The systematic way of making stock picks for effective feedback could be applied to life in general if we were clear on what we were optimizing.  With stock pics, we're optimizing a return on investment.  What about life?  I suspect there are lots of answers here.   My personal favourite is that the motivation should be related to reducing suffering and increasing joy.

Solitude and you (day 12)

I was listening to Spark this afternoon.  William Deresiewicz was talking about solitude and wondering whether we've lost the ability to be by ourselves.  He recalled asking some students about spending time alone and one student wondering what the point was of spending time alone ('what can you do alone that you can't do with someone else?').   At first the student's response seemed ludicrous to me.  Of course being alone is different than being with someone.    But perhaps I was too hasty to judge.  It may all be in the contrast.  Alone time can be being with fewer people than usual.   I could also be that in an increasingly oral world, alone time is just less valuable.  If you're not talking, you're not being.  This would be in contrast to a more text-based world where writing (an introverted activity) is more common.

I just finished reading the book "Orality and Literacy" by Walter Ong in which he describes the qualities of an oral-based culture and how the rise of writing and literacy changed the culture.   Near the end of the book he talks about a secondary orality arising.   I can see this happening more and more.  And looking at it this way, some of the characteristics of the primary oral culture are re-emerging.   One of the qualities of an oral world is this propensity toward the concrete and the constant sharing of information.  In a primary oral world, the information could not be written down so sharing was the only way for an idea to survive and also the only way to perfect an idea or technique over time.   When writing came along, introspection came with it.

So here we are, in a world of constant conversation.   The difference is that we are not as concrete as the primary oral cultures.   We may be talking a lot but we may not be doing enough to really acquire deep knowledge.   And then we're back to my earlier blog entry where I wonder about the disconnect between doing and networking.   I love being alone so it's hard for me to picture how you could ever learn anything significant without spending lots of time alone.

It may be that alone time comes later in life stages now.  It may be that alone time is just not as necessary anymore.  It may be that there are so many people in the conversation that it only seems that no one is taking a breath.

Container Art (day 11)

I'm still feeling weak so I'll keep this brief again. 

The container art show at the PNE was a brainchild of Peter Male who designs the grounds of the PNE including the sand castle competition, the home exhibition (sponsored by Home Depot), the car painting area (old cars that anyone can take a brush to), and many other little experiences that are interspersed with the usual rides and games.   What was interesting to me about the container art show (besides the fact that he put the whole thing together in 4 weeks from call to installation) was the fact that it blended so nicely with the other architecture at the PNE.   There is something a little grungy about the fair grounds...something you would expect when you pay your entrance fee: the smell of greasy food, the call to play the games, the dings and clangs and bells, the crowds, the screams.   To fit contemporary art in the midst of all that is no mean feat.   To me, the containers were the bridge (and they were literally positioned that way) between the grunge and the art.  And as Kyla observed, the people did read the space created by the containers as a gallery space worthy of a slower pace and greater attention to detail. 

There is so much to say about the atmosphere of the place.  There is music in the background, but individual containers can also have their own soundscape (one did, to great effect).    Some containers are blocked off so you can only look in.  Others are fully immersive experiences, a kind of low-tech cave.   There were only eight containers so not an overwhelming amount.  People can wander in and out on their way between places.   At night the space transforms into a more live space with lights and louder music.  Some of the containers specifically played to that time of day with well placed subtle lighting. 

Container art is a growing movement apparently.  I learned a lot just from hearing Peter talk about its origins in Italy.   The appeal is its ability to come in, contain art, and get out.   Very little footprint and no permanent marks.    I'm not sure how Emily Carr will be involved in future container art exhibits but it seems like an exciting design and art challenge that we'd be crazy to pass up.

Cars are heavy (day 10)

I just got hit by a car on my way back from the PNE.  I was on my bike and I'm relatively ok but my bike is not ridable.   Needless to say I'm feeling a little weird and shaky so I'm going to lie down and sleep off the headache.

The PNE was awesome and I will write about that later.  I went with Kyla Mallett who was a great partner on the tour and the rides.   We were there to see the Container Art show which was surprising and fresh.  Really worth seeing but today is the last day the show is up.

Sensual water breathing (day 7)

Steve came back from swimming and said the water felt good. It surrounded his body, gently, sensually. I immediately could relate to what he was saying. I know that sensation of floating, gliding, blowing air bubbles, being surrounded.

This feeling of being surrounded by water is the metaphor I would like to invoke in relation to the lungs being in an environment filled with image and sound. The problem is that generally people associate the combination of lungs and water with anxiety and death. My intuition is that there is a way to depict the lungs in water without triggering this association. Char Davies' work Osmose associates breathing with movement in a way that could make you forget that you may have been moving in environments inhospitable to human breath. I think if the lungs weren't breathing, the water surroundings could seem peaceful, like in so many images we see of babies in utero and like the feeling that Steve described. The problem is really about the lungs breathing. So perhaps it may work to automatically create space around the lungs when they breathe out. A kind of air bubble that slowly dissipates. This way perhaps the feeling of suffocation or breathing water would not arise. There is still the issue of breathing in, but I wonder if we could deal with that by creating many small air bubbles as the lungs breathe in. The lungs would be creating their own air as they chose the media to breathe in. Could be an interesting effect.

The contrast between having the lungs in or out of the water could be quite evocative. The water environment is much slower, enclosed, sheltered, quiet, mysterious. The air environment is much more direct, insistent, dangerous, spacious, loud, social. Playing with these contrasts may work to invoke some of the feelings associated with different media environments and our reactions to them. What does it look like to be assaulted by media? What does it look like to be lured and seduced? What does it look like to like what we see or hear, hate, dislike? add on? forward? share? There are so many ways in which we are affected by media and participate in its affect on others.

In the next month we'll be working on getting a prototype of the lungs ready and creating visual effects reminiscent of water, fog, air movement, etc. It would be great at the beginning of next month to have the lungs animated and surrounded by media, not necessarily breathing the media yet, but just be able to see which environments we'd like to work with for the next iteration.

Spend to live another day (day 6)

A few months ago I finished listening to the audio version of the book "The denial of death" by Ernest Becker (I don't really recommend the audiobook, it's a bit relentless. But I do recommend the documentary "Flight from Death" derived from the book). The book postulates that our refusal to look at death directly makes us blindly spend our energy to "immortality projects", thing that will transcend death or make us feel part of a greater whole that will live on. It can also increase our intolerance of those who don't support our grand project. One example is the nationalistic feeling that compels us to support the troops, or whatever else is meant to make the 'us' bigger than 'them'. If asked I bet most people would assume that if our life was longer, trending to immortality say, our fear of death would diminish. The point made in the book which has stayed with me is that accidental death would not disappear and that if the possibility of living forever existed, our preservation extinct would increase in proportion. The example they give is that it is much more tragic to die at 7 if you could live forever. This is probably why vampires are always given super healing powers with very specific ways to die. If dying was too easy, the immortality would be meaningless. If there was no way to die, the immortality would be a life sentence. The other problem with immortality (one that was beautifully illustrated in the last Godric episode of True Blood) is that laziness would be rampant. Why do today what you could do tomorrow? Death is a powerful motivator. And not just big death, all the little deaths too. We do a lot to keep things from deteriorating. It is an interesting exercise to think of what motivation might exist outside it, or in spite of it.

We want to live forever. It's true, the fear of death permeates our being and influences the amount of the risk we are willing to take. This is why most of us take fewer risks as we get older. I would even say that it's why most of us gain weight as we get older. It's a protection instinct. We think if we expend less of our life energy we'll have more later -- a savings account approach to life which turns out to have disastrous consequences. The less you move, the sicker you get. That's just the way it goes. I think it's probably best to embrace the impermanence and just spend spend spend that life energy.

Generosity (day 5)

Today I was part of a great meeting with some folks at lat49. Suzi Webster and I were there to talk about a potential collaboration. There was generosity all around as people contributed many creative ideas freely. I am so grateful when those moments happen. I think this bodes very well for our project and of course this generosity of spirit is no doubt a sign of a well run company.

Generosity has been on my mind a lot lately as the start of term piles on more duties than I dare to even think about as I write this (lest I compulsively go send another email). Many times in meetings, I sense in myself and those around me a reluctance to commit to the task at hand. The fear may be that if we commit then we might add to our task list. For me, generosity seems to be the antidote. If I can muster the courage to look at what's needed and give freely then things get more manageable even as my task list grows. It just feels better to not hold back.

Time, space and apple pie (day 4)

I just put an apple pie in the oven. It takes time to make an apple pie. It's full of suspense too. It involves no digital resources....oh...except for the recipe from America's Test Kitchen...and...the digital readout on the oven. There is something to do with your body and mind for about 2 full hours. Not bad. And then there's the moment where you get to sit down with the laptop to wait out the baking in a kitchen full of that nice cinnamon apple smell. Precious time.

Today someone asked me some questions about mobility and the hyperlocal trends. It happens that I'd like to create a mobile hyperlocal narrative application with Vancouver in mind. The question had to do with spacetime and implied that somehow the web has done something to our sense of time and space. It has taken away time by asynchronous communication, and taken away space by allowing us to connect from far away. I think I know what she was getting at. The feeling of other world when you're in it, and the feeling of the world happening without you when you're not reading, watching, keeping up. There is definitely another space with its own speed and insistence. It changes the expectation of what we know about each other when we do meet in the same physical space.

But I think the spacetime perception change may have more to do with the speed at which we need to switch contexts when we plug in. Check email, open a document, keep it open in the bg, quick check of RSS feeds, who's posting on fb, back to email, oh ya the document, scan the document, phone rings, another email comes in, and so on. It's a stream and somehow lots of little things get done. But no big things. I know what it feels like to focus and when I'm actively online, that is not what's happening. And while I'm in it, I'm not taking care of my physical environment in the same way. Maybe my plants don't get watered, maybe my computer gets unpacked months before my books do.

Part of the promise of hyperlocal is another dimension to sort the info. Maybe if I only get relevant information to where I am, it'll be meaningful and manageable. Again the issue of scale pops up though, there are millions of people in Vancouver. Why would the space not be cluttered. Just as cluttered as Robson street on a sunny Saturday afternoon. After all, the online is the mother of pack rats.

Making an apple pie is risky business. You have to go offline for 2 hours. And during that time much could happen without you being aware of it. More than before? Before we knew? Don't know. Don't think so. Not making an apple pie is risky business. You may forget the feel of a good pie crust and the smell of a baking pie. I'm not kidding. These things need to be maintained.

I prefer the burn to the itch (day 3)

I was stung by a wasp on Friday. It stung the arch of my left foot. Before I even knew what had happened, I had thrown my sandal and yelled, leaving me hobbling on one foot and embarrassed. Some dude under a tree was looking at me. I didn't bother explaining.

Who knew a wasp could do so much damage. Before long my foot was swollen and sore to the bone. The next day, the swelling was worse and there was the additional annoyance of the itch. The internet wisdom said "don't scratch, it will make it worse". Make what worse I wondered. The itch, or the overall experience, or? The itch was getting worse by the second. scratch it. scratch it. scratch it. comon scratch it. I gave in. It was an intensely pleasurable experience. I loved it. I couldn't stop. Such relief. wow. I rubbed, I scratched, I massaged....and then.....I stopped. Immediately the burn started. Like road rash or a sunburn, only deep in the whole foot. Woah. Ok so that's what they meant. True, the pain was worse. But I no longer had the little repetitive mind bug and that, my friends, was worth it. Yup, I would trade the itch for the burn any time. Plus you get the little orgasmic experience of the scratch. It's a good trade.

Take a deep breath and... (day 2)

first breath
breathe easy
take my breath away
breathless
hold your breath
don't hold your breath
the breath of life
hard breathing
bad breath
shallow breath
just breathe
breathe deeply
foul breath
last breath

I'm working on a research project called Breath I/O along with Leila Sujir, Joy James, and Ron Burnett. We feel very lucky to have this project funded by SSHRC for three years through their research/creation program (on hold for the moment). It is luxury...working with a team of researchers and students (Miles Thorogood, and Thea Jones are research assistants) for an extended period of time like this.

The form of the project is a virtual stereoscopic video sculpture with lungs as its subject. The lungs (single, multiple - a chorus of lungs) are in a constant exchange with the environment which is filled with sound, image and video.

The choice of not breathing cannot be sustained. We breathe and know something about where we are. We breathe and others know something about how we are. This idea of being subject to and indebted to the environment is what is compelling to me. In relation to the environment of sound, image and video (perhaps text?) I would like to know what it is to breathe image and sound. I read recently that the CEO of netflix thinks that web 3.0 will be a full video web. Like watching TV all over again but this time...with feeling? I don't know. I'm assuming he means that it will be democratic this time. That it will be the whole world cooking up a media storm for a public banquet of (biblical?) proportions. Or maybe more of a potluck...more like YouTube feels like now but less clicking. Who knows. My lungs will know if they are breathing the foul air of fast food.

The investigation has just started. We have a prototype but it's not quite right. We'll keep working at it, creating lungs that breathe naturally, convincingly. We'll come up with ways of seeing video mingling in the environment and finding its way into the lungs which take and give back. We'll find ways for people to converse with the virtual chorus with their hands and voices.

A bo challenge (day 1)

My friend bo asked me if I write. Only under duress I said. In my mind I pictured grant deadlines and reports on said grants. You should write she replied. Other people have asked me to write over the years.....oh no I don't write is the standardized response.

Meanwhile the 365 trend which surfaced a couple years ago (flickr self-portraits for example) is getting popularized by the new Julia Child movie (for a great commentary on what she meant to a generation of home cooks, read this beautiful writing by Michael Pollan.) 365 is a daily practice of something, doesn't matter what. Do anything once a day and you will be amazed by the patterns that emerge. Of course I already know this...at least I have an inkling. When I do manage to meditate daily for more than days at a time, I see the commitment that is required to stick out the bad days. And that's it, 365 is a practice, not of the thing you are doing but of the patience and generosity it takes to not give up.

Also meanwhile, a new year's resolution of becoming more public will be getting satisfied.

So here's to you Bo. I will write something each day. No need to stay tuned. This is the age of speaking out into the void...unspeakable generosity. But if you are tuned in, randomly, then feel free to randomly give me a random topic.