You lookin' at me? (day 237)

Morgan Rauscher defended his thesis yesterday.  I was one of the faculty members on his committee.  He did very well and was an interesting person to talk to as always.  The best part of his thesis is the project which has two parts: Zeugen and Mind Machine.  Zeugen is a large suspended board with 32 half faces (eyes and nose) whose eyes follow the people currently looking at them.  The faces are backlit and turn on and off according to an algorithm that I'm not quite clear about.  There is a half-mirror in front of the faces which becomes more of a mirror when the faces are not lit.  There are servo motor sounds from the eyes tracking the viewers' faces.  The back of the board is open and shows the mechanics and electronics of the work, as well as the netbook that controls it.  Morgan calls this open source.  I've seen this work a few times in different instantiation but this was the first time I saw it with the half mirror.

After being with it for a while it started to make me think of social media.  The board is a kind of screen and the faces are looking at me and I'm looking at them and at the same I'm looking at myself.  And it's all quite ordered.  The whole thing is self-conscious in a mechanical and somewhat unnerving way. 

The piece will be on display during the Graduate Exhibition May 2-16th at the Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University.  I recommend.

A song for this post.

Booked on the weekend (day 233)

I finished the book "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".  It was a quick and entertaining read.  I'm curious about how well it works as a movie.  It's the first of a trilogy but I'm not sure when I'll be able to convince myself to take a full day to read again.

The other book that I finished a while ago and forgot to mention is "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster.  Jaron Lanier recommended it during his talk at SXSW.  The book was written in 1909 so is in the public domain.  It's set in a futuristic world where humans are living underground, each in separate apartments fully managed by the Machine, which has become something like a God to them.  Birth and Death are managed and travel is not desirable.  "Ideas" are the most valuable currency (if you read the book you'll understand why I put ideas in quotes). The short story is about the gradual decline of the machine as the inhabitants gradually become ignorant and complacent about its maintenance.  An amazing tale even if it was written today.  The fact that it was written in 1909 is almost unbelievable.

I was a panelist at the Diane Farris Gallery on Saturday.  Hank Bull was a fellow panelist and Lili Vieira de Carvalho was moderating.  The topic was social media and art.  It was interesting to hear Hank talk about the beginning of network art in the 1970s when artists were using the telephone, the photocopier, and the precursors to the fax machine and video phone.  He said something that stuck with me: when it became clear that artists would be able to link to each other in a great network around the world, the belief and hope was that there would be large collaborative works, no longer individual works.   I'm very much paraphrasing from memory and I wish I remembered his exact words.  He also said it's worth noting that it's called social media, not socialist media.  This is after some discussion about the role of corporate interests in web 2.0.   It was interesting to me that the optimism of the early 70's has been partially realized in the sense that the technology is more available than ever but there has also been the disappointment of losing control of the medium.  Overall, a pretty good panel.   It probably would have been more balanced if Kris Krug had been able to be the third panelist.  We needed a convert I think. 

A song for this 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.

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.