OMG. If this is half as cool as it looks I am going to lose my mind.

Ponoko is billing themselves as “the world’s largest marketplace for product plans. Creators and consumers use these plans to share, buy, sell and make individualized goods.”

A social web production place for making ANYTHING? and sharing the plans too? AND selling?

FINALLY!!!!!!!!!

Ponoko

I am very interested in the neural necklace. But its not for sale? HUH?

Hey Kelvin! Remember this?

I think I said something funny. We were hanging out at my old apartment up in NoPo back two summers ago…

update: Kelvin wrote me an email! yay! That means that Kelvin reads this. He said I could re-post his response:

“I don’t remember what was said. I don’t know why I’m laughing like that, but I’m sure it has something to do with Lucky loving me a little too hard, as per her usual.

I realize I have yet to write to Anselm, the question about the very large organic computer, and I’m planning on writing it still. The query became a little more complicated after I gave it some thought, and I didn’t want to send him something so muddy. I’ve been struggling to keep up with research for the graphic novel, which may never be made, but I’ll be damned if it’s not going to be written. If, and I do mean If, I ever get to start it.

There’s too much to goddamn learn, you know? Just too much, and even the terrible parts….even those poison-dart strength soul-punches aren’t bereft of some kind of lesson. I say this having emerged, mostly intact, from the final vestiges of The Year Of The Boar, 2007 – which was, for me overall, just as a witness in most cases, a really terrible year. I apologize for that run-on sentence, but not for what it expresses.

How are you? Where the hell are you? I only see you on the internet.

Why are your Twitter updates protected? Just curious?

Remember that I love you, and have the utmost faith in your creative abilities. I’m too hungry to write anything of substance to you today other than that.

Keepin’ it shakin’ Kelvin

p.s. – JDilla’s Donuts. Get a copy. Seriously. It’ll change your life, if your ears are ready. p.p.s. – Unless, of course, you have a copy, and know just how sweet it is. KP”

I do Kelvin. Its an awesome album.

I am putting together a paper detailing the interconnectivity between visual studies and interaction design. This relationship is something that I deal with all the time as a visual artist and an interaction designer. But I am realizing that it is not very well covered. In class this past Wednesday I was asked to explain the connection to my fellow students and I choked. For me it was like talking about the relationship between chewing, and eating food and the mouth. I was totally stumped as to how and where to begin.

Thank god I am in school with some brilliant people. Yesterday in critical theory class with Anne Marie Oliver, we were discussing Visual Studies summed up nicely by Wikipedia:

Visual culture is a field of study that generally includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, by focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images. Among theorists working within contemporary culture, this often overlaps with film studies, psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, queer theory, and the study of television; it can also include video game studies, comics, traditional artistic media, advertising, the Internet, and any other medium that has a crucial visual component. Because of the changing technological aspects of visual culture as well as a scientific method-derived desire to create taxonomies or articulate what the “visual” is, many aspects of Visual Culture overlap with the study of science and technology, including hybrid electronic media, cognitive science, neurology, and image and brain theory. It also may overlap with another emerging field, that of “Performance Studies.” “Visual Culture” goes by a variety of names at different institutions, including Visual and Critical Studies, Visual and Cultural Studies, and Visual Studies.

What stuck me as very obvious was difficult for other people to see. And of course, it was way harder to explain in a simple way then I realized. This is really interesting! And so it falls on me to figure out a way to connect these together.

Back in September I started cataloging all of the work I was doing for the whole year in school- this document has become my bible, it explains what I am doing and why. In about two weeks I need to present this work and a statement on the connection between interaction design and visual studies to the chair of my department, the dean of the school and my mentor. WOW.

I have posted versions of it here on the blog a couple of times- I am going to tie this document in with my essay- somehow I hope. There was another essay I wrote on QR codes and physical hyperlinks- that was not so hot, but really helped me understand the bigger picture of what it is I am fascinated by-

• The rate of adoption of new technologies through play and social interaction
• The beginning of the era of physical computing through mobile phones
• The way mobile devices are changing- New Tech New Ties FTW
• The evolution of physical hyperlinks becoming a normalized, ordinary everyday experience

This looks like it will be the meat of the essay- extracting the concept of physical hyperlinks, the critical analysis of visual studies, the formulation of the design of the interaction.

Visual studies PLUS physical hyperlinks PLUS interaction design

Seems pretty cyclical to me. Please email me with any and all suggestions for research.

“All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.”

Rudolph Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: The New Version, p.5.

Justin Gorman. Results Under Action

This is a large scale interactive sculpture project that has been ongoing for a while. The website is a fantastic document of his process and level of involvement for each piece.

Another video. It’s hard to understand her so turn up your volume, there is too much background noise.

It just occurred to me that one way I could save things that I want to revisit would be to post them here. That way I know where to look to find things. Public hoarding, I guess.

In any case, my teacher sent this video to me. Damn. I wish Bruce Sterling could come to my school.

Bruce Sterling from Innovationsforum on Vimeo.

Important details:

Presentation at the conference »Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign« in Potsdam, Germany. The talk was held on 31. March 2007.

The Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign was organised by the Interface Design programme of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.

Conference web site: http://interface.fh-potsdam.de/innoforum

Interface Design programme: http://interface.fh-potsdam.de

Finally finished this one a little while back. I just took a while to proof-read it and get it out the door. The buggy software I used didn’t really help much at all. A full report on Blurb will be forthcoming. I want to actually GET my book in hand before I talk about that company.

in the meantime I thought since I had started to ramble on about mixtapes in my last post that I would add the little intro essay to the book I made since it dealt specifically with the digital and analog relationship of mixtapes.

FWIW. I am so tired of talking about QR Codes. This was an experiment, not a solution. Lets find a better way to do this shall we?

Visual search anyone?

Introduction Essay

This Book is a Collection of Songs Embedded in Images- A Visual Mix tape

As a teenager I would spend hours meticulously composing mix tapes and creating elaborate cases for the tapes that would then be exchanged or given away. These days, if I want to exchange my mix tapes with friends I can do it almost instantaneously and traditional mix tapes are rare to find and even harder to share.

The term ‘mix tape’ is still used, though now it is a metaphor to denote any collection of songs composed together, and the physicality of the object will soon be forgotten. This book is a digital mix tape, a collection of songs embedded in visual codes.

Digital mix tapes are common but lack the experiential nature of the original analog tapes in two ways: One, the time that it took to make a mix tape was real time, a person has to listen to the tape to make the tape and this was inherently understood in the exchange. Two, the physicality of the tape necessitated that the exchange happened in real time and so the packaging of the experience became a valuable extension of the tape itself. The original mix tape carried a temporal and physical weight that current digital mix tapes do not convey.

And somehow this makes even the music sound different. It has no material form and takes up no physical space—but why should that matter?

I still lug stacks of records, cassette tapes, and CD’s with me every time I move. When I moved again last month, I thought to myself, “I haven’t owned a cassette tape player for years. So why am I still carrying milk crates of old tapes around?”

I realized that I had come to rely on the music. I whole-heartedly felt that the music represented a part of my personal history, and in order to be me, I was obligated to keep these things. My memories were intertwined with the cassette tapes — both in music and object. The simple act of holding a particular tape triggers memories of people, places and who I used to be. I fear the loss of the emotional space these physical objects possess; I fear the loss of their power as well. These things that take up space and are heavy to carry —in some small bothersome way that I don’t like to think about— they are me.

As we transition from an analog culture to a digital one, our music and our memories are moving to hard-drives, device-drives, servers, and other seemingly obtuse, yet convenient forms of safe-keeping. What we lose in materiality we make up with ubiquity and a seamless permanence that only digital reproduction offers. My music is now accessible wherever and whenever I may be; it will not age or get misplaced.

Physical hyperlink is a neologism that refers to extending the Internet to objects and locations in the real world.

Currently the Internet does not extend beyond the electronic world. Physical hyperlinking aims to extend the Internet to the real world by attaching tags with URLs to tangible objects or locations. The tags are read by a wireless mobile device and information about the objects and their location are retrieved and displayed on the device. [Wikipedia]

Simply put, physical hyperlinks aim to link objects to information, activating a psycho-geographical experience for the viewer. I created this visual mix tape using one of many intermediary tools for this kind of interaction. The codes are physical hyperlinks to the songs.

For the maker of the mix tape, the potential is created for blending the memory of the music into the very space of its experience; for the listener of the mix tape, the potential is created to listen to and experience the music though unexpected ways.

Using the QR Code generator I built for this project, I have encoded a series of 14 songs into 14 stickers that I placed around different parts of Portland that I associate with those songs.

The visual mix tape is a form of outsourced memory, in book and in place. Locating these songs spatially at the exact place that the song synesthetically exists for me I complicate and extend the memory of the song.

By extending the memory of a song into physical space, I invite other people to participate in the experience. The potential is there for other people to attach meaning to the relationship between each song and location.

By creating a book of song-images and labeling it a visual mix tape I conflate analog and digital in an open-ended and subjective manner. This book is a digital mix tape in its capacity to represent permanent, ubiquitous access to music through the use of a code, but the book itself has a physicality and linear nature that is finite.

By creating a physical manifestation of my digital memory I reinterpret what initially appeared to be a loss of objecthood and therefore a loss of me. I am used to locating myself, and my memories, in the singular and the finite.

By storing my memories as encoded physical hyperlinks in the city around me I am outsourcing my very being into the space.

Wikipedia contributors, “Object hyperlinking,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_hyperlinking (accessed April 06, 2008)

The site objective is simple. Click on one of the colored bars. It’s a mixtape. Listen to it. THATS IT.

This image shows a list of my favorites, all I get information-wise is the name of the mixtape (in the colored bar) and the song and artist titles on the tape. I LOVE IT. Muxtape gives me what I need and nothing more. The experience is far more valuable, that the options on the website. I like that more and more I am seeing sites that are not this broad spectrum of too many things and too much stuff to look at. I want more sites as tools. And muxtape is it.

yes, I could complain about some things, it’s true. I won’t LIE. I would love to make a muxtape, but its a bit too complicated in my opinion. But I am sure that will get simpler. In the meantime though, I have what I want and need- mixtapes are BACK.

The Interaction design association has a nice thread on this conversation too: ixda muxtape interface

There is an interesting point at the bottom of the (amazingly short) thread that someone makes in response to a remark criticizing the muxtape interface, that ‘talking about problems is a great way to learn.’ This is an interesting thing to note. While I agree with that I think that this can lead to expecting too much from everything.

I am not convinced that every project need meet every possible desire. It is possible to spend too much time thinking about the way things should be and not enough time exploring what can be done with what IS.

This is true for life too. Not to say that being critical isn’t valuable. It really is.

Muxtapes constraints are similar to the original mixtape. Slow and time consuming interactions are what made mixtapes wonderful and dreadful at the same time. The experiential value of making a mixtape was in knowing that the person that listened to the tape knew you had to take time to make it. It’s allegorical.

Oh heck. I will just post my little essay on this. btw: it works on iphones! (so you can run and listen to your muxtapes)

Not too sure if anyone that reads this knows or not but I have a little side project called the Makerlab- Makerlab.com for the little biz, and Makerlab.org for the development area, that is coming along nicely. For the last 8 months or so it has been pretty quiet and Anselm and I have been sticking project ideas up there as they come along after each drunk rant occurs. Some of them are funny, some are fascinating and some are informative.

All of the projects so far have been open to other people getting involved. Recently we decided we needed to get SERIOUS about it. Then about a week or two after that a wonderful gift arrived. A friend of Anselm’s offered to help up put a better face on the site and I was blown away by what he offered. I have never met this person before so I was so amazed that he created a logo with a rainbow:

Anyone that knows me personally knows I have a rainbow tattoo on my left arm! I got the comps last week and we are starting to build the new site right now. HUGE thanks to Michael Rylander I will try hard to keep up with the site development. I know Anselm has been working overtime trying to get his thoughts together around this. I will probably re-post something by him here soon.

Realized it might be interesting to post what I read in my blog rather than linking people to it via email.

From The British Library: More from the British Library on this report

“Pioneering research shows ‘Google Generation’ is a myth 16 January 2008”

• All age groups revealed to share so-called ‘Google Generation’ traits
• New study argues that libraries will have to adapt to the digital mindset
• Young people seemingly lacking in information skills; strong message to the government and society at large

“A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.

The report Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future (PDF format; 1.67MB) also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.

Commissioned by the British Library and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), the study calls for libraries to respond urgently to the changing needs of researchers and other users. Going virtual is critical and learning what researchers want and need crucial if libraries are not to become obsolete, it warns. “Libraries in general are not keeping up with the demands of students and researchers for services that are integrated and consistent with their wider internet experience”, says Dr Ian Rowlands, the lead author of the report.”

The cover image of the report is pretty garish. I am not sure how necessary it was to add this but I guess they felt that the report needed some “punch”

This is just a snippet from the press release and part of an enormous conversation. For the full press release and a lot of good links and information around the topic- More from the British Library on this report.

This is what its like going to school full time, working full time and trying to have a life:

This shot was taken at a friends studio near where I live in downtown PDX. Apparently someone was doing a mind-map? of time travel. I do not know who did this drawing but I like it. Write me if you did the time travel equations on this blackboard and I will source the image properly.

The last month blew me away frankly.

I moved into a new place! A gallery in the Everett Street Lofts featuring a gallery in the front and a little lofty apartment in the back, paper-thin walls (sigh) and a gorgeous courtyard.

Went to NYC for a week with the classmates and saw a tremendous amount of work.

Joseph DeLappe at Eyebeam an amazing piece that is starting complicated conversations.

Started a brand new project at Planet Argon!

http://www.alphaclone.com

A fascinating complicated project that is also quite controversial as I am learning.

And just about finished the qrcode project.

So ready to put this one to bed. So close. so close.

So here I am in New York. Currently sitting in a Starbucks. Apparently the only place in all of New York with wifi, which is freaking outrageous. I have taken gads of photos but forgot (of course) to bring my cord to upload any of them. GREAT. So here is a link to the “official” blog for the whole grad school trip. FIELD TRIP

I will add some photos from the trip. I promise.

When I was in London, oh about two plus weeks ago now I went to the British Museum. There was a wonderful (and tiny FWIW) display on Kanga Cloth from Senegal. Called “The Cloth That Speaks” Kanga Cloth is richly colorful, visually varied, prophetic and often funny. It is also wearable art. Embedded images with information, idioms, parables, quotes and quirky suggestions.

I took photos of the mini-movie on Kanga Cloth that we watched at the Museum

Khanga, meaning “guinea hen” in Kiswahili, for its brilliant colors is a colorful garment similar to Kitenge, worn by women and occasionally by men throughout Eastern Africa. It is a piece of printed cotton fabric, about 1,5m by 1m, often with a border along all four sides (called Pindo in Kiswahili, the East African lingua franca), and a central part (Mji) which differs in design from the borders. Kangas are usually very colorful. Wikipedia

I tried to find a book on Kanga Cloth since I am entertaining prospects for writing a paper on embedded information in images to tie into my recent project on QR Codes. I found this one which is apparently out of print? Not so sure. If someone finds a copy please let me know?

“Kanga – The Cloth That Speaks” by Sharifa Zawawi. Azaniya Hills Press in association with AfricaRUs MultiMedia. 2005 ISBN: 0976694107

“A book that tells you the history of kanga and its context in the Swahili culture as well as the global world. From the cradle to the grave: history, culture, language and fashion are inextricably woven in the two rectangular pieces of cloth worn together that form the kanga. Communities around the northern and western peripheries of the Indian Ocean now share its heritage. The kanga cuts across class, religion, gender and generation. All can wear it. More importantly, all can read its message. Kanga messages open an ever widening window on relations, customs and human values among those who wear and those who read.” From Watatu Textil

Kanga Cloth is a fascinating and multi-use and multi-purpose cloth/covering/tool/ cultural icon. Watatu Textil Has a short overview on some of the more interesting purposes of Kanga Cloth.

Everyone should take some time to do further exploration of Kanga Cloth: Swahili Language and Culture site has a great list of images of Kanga and their sayings.

I spent the majority of yesterday packing for the move to the new space and working on my essay on QR codes, mobile computing and annotated space. I tried timing myself to see if that would help my concentration and it did. I would set a timer on my phone for one hour sprints and then take a break and walk around the room or go look at art. Over the last week the essay had gone from 4 pages to 12. Which makes sense to me considering the enormity of the subject matter. But does not work AT ALL for a paper that is supposed to be only 4 pages long. (Absurd. Who can write that little?)

So I ripped out the first four pages and created a new document. Which was the one I worked on all day yesterday. By the end of the day it was up to 6 pages. Christ. This is just not going to work.

(Idyllic Futuristic Technology is Always Best Sold With Demure Pretty Women BTW)

Image from Ministry of Tech

The more I write, the more I ramble and the more I ramble the more questions I have about what I am working on. My current curiosity has brought me full circle back to My Favorite Book of 2007: Ambient Findability by Peter Morville

In an effort to not make this blog post go on and on like my writing style in general appears to do I have decided not to paraphrase Morvilles’ work, NOT that I could possibly be more succinct and straightforwardly readable than this book could ever be. Instead I present an excerpt of his writing here:

“Hypermedia technologies permeate our environment, shaping a bizarre hyper-reality that delivers information and commands attention. And even as we complain of information anxiety, we’re about the elevate intertwingularity to a whole new level with the advent of “ubiquitous computing.” The late Mark Weiser, formerly chief technology officer at Xerox PARC, coined the term in 1988 to define a future on which PC’s are replaced with tiny, invisible computers embedded in everyday objects. So whether we call it ubiquitous, pervasive, mobile, embedded, invisible, ambient, or calm computing, the vision is nothing new. Whats new is the rapid transformation of the vision into reality. It’s really happening, right now. Where Moore’s Law meets Metcalfs Law, we’ve reached a tipping point, and there’s no going back…..”

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability, Sept 2005. page 65 (reprinted without permission—Sorry! Don’t beat me up I think you are AMAZING)