Liz: August 2004 Archives

BYOB

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byob.jpg

Katherine reminds me to post about BYOB, which will be a demo at Ubicomp2004 this year.

BYOB is a modular set of interactive textile squares that can be combined to build a bag (see above) that can function in multiple ways: as an alert, a network visualizer, etc.

When modules are snapped together to form an object, they become part of a network and begin to communicate with people, other objects, and their environment.

While admittedly I think Katherine is right - do we really need more applications where the ambient pretty lights go blinky-blink? - the project does nicely evoke the long history of modular design and individual adaptation in the textile arts.

Transportation futuristics

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The UC Berkeley Library has what looks to be a rocking exhibit on Transportation Futuristics - efforts to address transportation needs in ways that didn’t quite get off the ground literally or figuratively.

The online catalogue is exhaustive, and contains such gems as:

keep your eyes on the phone

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I (along with others) had believed that the first appearance of a mobile phone in the movies was Gordon Gekko's megabrick in Wall Street.

Not so! Via a continuing thread on the ITP list serv, I've learned that mobile (at least, automobile) phones were first spotted in Sabrina, of all movies, in 1954...as well as slightly less (or is it more?) unbelievably in Cleopatra Jones in 1973.

I could ramble on forever about the America we see changing through the films of 1954, then 1973, then 1987. But instead I'm going to ramble on about the continuing use of communications as a sign of social power - and the disappearance of the automobile. The post-war banker sits in the back seat; the 1970s international agent sits behind the wheel. And the 1980's stockbroker (note the change from patrician Linus Larrabee to parvenu Gordon Gekko, btw)...? He's not on the road at all. He's at the beach.

Clearly, the novelty of a cool ride disappeared after David Hasselhoff cornered the market. Instead, power appears as access to communications networks. Gordon Gekko is always buying and selling, always on the phone. The telephone is the medium by which information - or people - is bought and sold.

It's interesting to watch power travel turn into power talking. We know that Sabrina's Linus Larrabee is important because he is driven from Manhattan to Long Island by his chauffeur. The telephone is merely an accessory, like the chauffeur (and is it any coincidence that Linus finally marries the chauffeur's daughter?). Cleopatra Jones, international super agent, doesn't have a chauffeur. Instead, she has a tricked-out Corvette that doesn't muss her afro and packs some serious weaponry (and a phone). But the funny thing is, she's always driving around to meet people in person.

In Wall Street, the telephone isn't an accessory to power. Instead, through the transactions Gekko manipulates, it's a means. The fun of nourishing our inner Gekkos is that we're never more than three feet away from a handset and a potential tirade. Of course, the people on the other side are the flipside of that fun. We never have to see their faces while we're talking to them, after all. We can always just look at the beach.

(Oh, and on an entirely different note, this amazing archive has more information than you ever wanted or needed on the history of America's highway systems, including a fascinating account of the lead-up and resulting fall-out from the 1956 Interstate Highway Act)

Reading suggestions: August

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Cities of the Dead

The author's thesis defies reduction. However we might say that it involves the performance of memory and forgetting, culture, and performance events from carnivals to stage plays to everyday ritual. He investigates history, memory, and performance as it is acted out in London and New Orleans by the matrix of African, Caribbean, European, and American cultures. A sampling of chapter titles will set the tone for this fascinating and complex volume: Canonical memory and theatrical nationhood, The Mohawk Macbeth, The demon actors in Milton's Paradise Lost, and Mystic chords of memory – or, Stevie Wonder Square.Book News, Inc.

Corpus Delecti

A collection of historical and critical studies of contemporary Latin performance. Drawing on live art from the 1960s to the present day, these essays explore the impact of Latin American politics, popular culture and syncretic religions on Latin performance. Including contributions by artists as well as scholars, Coco Fusco's collection bridges the theory/practice divide and discusses a wide variety of genres. Among them are: body art, "carpa", vaudeville, staged political protest, tropicalist musical comedies, contemporary Venezuelan performance art, the Chicano Art movement and queer Latino performance.

The Guide to Ecstacity

Monograph, manifesto, travelog, history, autobiography, novel--A Guide to Ecstacity is a bit of all of these things. The brainchild of British architectural visionary Nigel Coates, it asks us to reimagine the city as a dynamic hybrid of inventive design and cross-cultural political empowerment. Produced in the spirit of Rem Koolhaas's S,M,L,XL, it is a palimpsest of the real and the hypothetical, with fragments of seven cities from around the world--Cairo, London, Mumbai, New York, Rio, Rome, and Tokyo--woven together into one multifaceted urban fabric.

Roissy Express

Anyone who has ever attempted to create something positive from nothing or write something about nothingness will understand and appreciate the amount of time and effort that went into this tedious undertaking. In 1989, two Parisians decided to take the Roissy Express, a commuter train, to the Paris suburbs and explore life along each stop. This is their narrative-a documentary written in diary format. They write of towns without pasts, places without futures, relics without people, ghost towns, a concentration camp way station, people, farms, desolation, poverty, hopelessness. This is not a travel guide for Americans or other foreign tourists but a sociological history and commentary of and for Parisians and French suburbanites. Not recommended for popular collections in this country. Library Journal

...Thanks to all who advised me. Does anyone have anything else to add?

representations of digital identity

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If computer-supported cooperative work is your thing - or especially if it really isn't - please consider submitting a position paper to the workshop I'm running at CSCW 2004 with danah boyd and Michele Chang:

This workshop will address the many ways by which online presentations of self have been - and could be - constructed. In the absence of the body as a source of accountability and social legibility, individuals project a sense of self through multiple layers of mediation, including email addresses, graphic avatars, "friend lists," and results from search engines. How can we use the body in a mediated world? Or alternately, how can we promote rich modes of interaction that do not rely on the illusion of physical presence?

The deadline for submissions is September 20. There's more info at the website.

C'mon along. It'll be big fun.

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Yes, these eye shadows do look a lot like iPod minis, which look a lot like Kyocera cameras, don't they? And I think I saw that yellow car on the way down to Palo Alto yesterday.

It's become a kind of a truism to point out that Pantone owns product aesthetics. But in the spirit of reconfirming the obvious, I point you towards this inadvertently hilarious forecast from 2003 to get a sense of how managed "good taste" is these days, and how peculiar the interplay between politics, consumption, and design can become.

Walch urges graphic designers to "remember yellow, always a color of movement and youthful energies, and symbolic of a bright future, ideal for contemporary graphics." And Melanie Wood captures an emerging national mood when she asserts that "we want to get the war behind us, start anew and have fun again. Colors that refresh and rejuvenate will lead the way with innocent tones of pink and peach giving us a sense of freshness and a promise of tomorrow."

I hope you considered the cultural implications before you bought that pink iPod. And that eyeshadow. Not to mention the car.

It is free and so are we

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Was at DIS – “designing interactive systems” – a conference in Boston. More about this later. Sadly, was too annoyed and overwhelmed by the comment spam situation on confectious to do much posting. Yes, it will be fixed soon. Stayed briefly in NYC with a friend who is a theater critic. Stolen from her bookshelf: an essay by John Cage, which now appears oddly apropos to translating and re-representing lived experience as electrons passing through a screen. Cage was a musician; this text was written for — and about — performance before an audience. But he was also a product of his time, and a commentator on the larger cultural shifts around him. I don’t think he’d mind my borrowing these words for myself:

Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss. We need not destroy the past; it is gone. At any moment it might reappear and seem to be and be the present. Would it be a repetition? Only if we thought we owned it, but since we don’t, it is free and so are we. Most anybody knows about the future and how un-certain is. What I am calling poetry is often called content. I myself have called it form. It is the continuity of a piece of music. Continuity, today, when it is necessary, is a demonstration of dis-interestedness; that is, it is a proof that our delight lies not in possessing anything. Each moment presents what happens.
...

Mobile means: if that element is tossed, it acts, but disappears.

(John Cage: A Year From Monday, Juilliard lecture, 1953)

What Cage described in 1953 seems perilously close to the incorporation (or dis-incorporation) of lived experience through digital “personal” media. Playlists, blogs, search results, photo sharing: translated into bits, printed on paper, burned into magnetic tape – sensory memories are...nothing, in a way, and cannot be owned (cf: DRM, open source). As the recording of memories in digital form (or the mediating of human life through digital documentation) becomes more prevalent, the accumulation of all these traces of lived experience effectively approaches a continuous stream, what Cage would call presentation of what happens. Cage's point, of course, is that no matter how identical the bits remain over time, you can't cross the same digital stream twice.

What I find so beautiful here, and so helpful, is Cage’s belief in dis-interestedness – or lack of ownership — as a means towards delight. Walter Benjamin believed in artifacts and doubted the survival of uniquely experienced objects in “an age of mechanical reproduction.” Cage, the diva of the unreproduceable, gives us (or me, at least), an escape hatch from Benjamin’s pessimism about objects into the freedom of of performance. It doesn't matter how endlessly reproduceable – how free the bits are. What matters is that we will never experience them with the same eyes.

About this Archive

This page is a archive of recent entries written by Liz in August 2004.

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