Ratchet Up

[Latest E-Book From HP]

"The developers were keen to retain the features of traditional books that people liked while trying to dust off their out of date image." That's my favorite sentence from this notice about the latest in e-book technology from Hewlett-Packard. Trash those books if you don't want to be out of date! Scary. At this point, however, out of date paper books are doing pretty well: in 2002, we bought 1.5 million printed books compared with just 500,000 electronic books. The market for e-books is tumbled after early optimism. Barnes & Noble closed their e-book store last week, and many publishers have throttled back, if not given up entirely.

Have you noticed that the rhetoric of technological development almost always insists that one technology will wipe out another, turning innovation into a bloody Darwinian struggle of winners and losers? The new always has to trump the old. No wonder so many librarians are paranoid about e-books: they're afraid of finding themselves sucked into volatile memory some day.

The truth is, of course, that new and old forms of media often coexist comfortably. [Although the only people comfortable in the picture on the right are the trendy laptop-brarians: the 60+ veteran in the background has to lug 100 pounds of books! Can't somebody get the old dear a cart?] The movies may have killed the radio star, but they didn't kill radio, which is returning reincaranated as a digital, satellite-delivered medium. It's often more a matter of synergy, transformation, and cross-influence than new here today, old gone tomorrow. We don't have to trade yummy "old book" lovers for a single e-book-toting Goth-girl librarian. Traditional and electronic books will flourish alongside one another, and we'll be richer for both.

Contemporary media theories of "remediation" suggest that new media forms incorporate, re-create and transform the old. In HP's new e-book we get a comforting visual animation of pages turning, accomplished with the push of a button. HP wants to reassure us that we don't have to give up page turners just because we buy a page turner.

Now that it's so easy to download sounds [my son sent a couple of round-the-clock days downloading ring-tones for his new cellphone until he found himself in an ironic '70's disco riff], I'm hoping for the ability to select a page-turning sound that fits the situation. New media is all about personalization, isn't it? I just love the soft scraping sound of a page dragging slowly across a cotton sheet, the last sound of my day heard through fading consciousness.

I'm a big reader in bed and can count on three pages every night. The first is the last page from the previous evening, dimly remembered. Next my new page, a triumph of the will. Then...well, I just don't remember much about it beyond the scraping sound. A bedside book has to be pretty good to keep my attention for a year. Maybe if I turn up the volume on my e-book up I'll be able to reach the distant shore of page four.

[BBC on HP's E-Books]

[A Mouse Mightier Than The Pen]

Haptics is happening. There's of interesting work going on around the notion of interface by touch. Here's just one: a new system that allows the computer to detect motion, velocity, speed, and other parameters that will make the signature you make with your mouse as credible as the one you make with your pen. Others are looking at the pace and velocity with which you hit a touch pad, using them as a form of personal ID when using an ATM machine or telephone, for example. [BBC]

Check out this great gathering of laptics lab goings-on.

["The Game Museum" at the Helsingin Sanomat]

This grade-A, hot-and-juicy link comes from Nora Paul at the Institute for New Media Studies.

[Be sure to scroll down and click "The Game Museum" on the lower left of the page.]

Crash around the Sanomat a bit and enjoy the droll Finnish wit.

[Carleton College Digital Arts Festival]

If you're a Ratchet Up reader within striking distance of Northfield, Minnesota, please join us for this fall's Digital Arts Festival. Or just check out the calendar, explore the links, and wish you were still in college.

Bookmark: Carleton Digital Arts Festival

[Noted...and Bloated]

There are emerging technologies that seem to be going somewhere, and then there submerging technologies that seem to be going nowhere. Like this strange contraption from the water-logged brain of an English inventor apparently fed up with noisy environments that make a quiet mobile phone conversation impossible.

Noise has clearly driven James Auger to distraction. As a way of regaining his aqua-poise he's invented a flotation system--the Isophone--that allows you to lower yourself into water where you'll finally--thank God Almighty!--actually get to talk in peace and quiet on your cell phone!

Now we'll have to figure into our rising monthly tech bills new pool rental charges, plus a trailer to haul the flotation bladders.

"Whilst it's not necessarily very efficient, in many ways it's very pragmatic, in that the user will be totally focused on who they're talking to," says its sensibly British inventor.

Anything for that moment of phone satori.

He would have been a lot smarter, a lot dryer, and perhaps a bit richer had he simply checked out the 1932 cover of Popular Mechanix with art by Norman Saunders.

This is probably how E.T. got his withered fingers...calling home.

[Original report, BBC]

[News KiOSK]

In a class Tuesday, Steve Dietz mentioned that on a recent trip routed through the Amsterdam airport he bought a newspaper that was printed on the spot. It was a little larger than the New York Times Magazine, about 35 pages in length, and printed on both sides of the sheet. I explored the manufacturer's site a bit and thought I'd pass it on, but credit goes to him for the find, particularly since he popped for the $3 to buy it.

"Using state-of-the-art proprietary software and a Private Multicast Satellite Network, Satellite Newspapers has created a Digital Content Distribution Network that provides a distribution highway to Satellite Newspaper KiOSKS around the globe. Satellite Newspapers receives payments via worldwide-accepted credit cards and dedicated Satellite Newspaper KiOSK-cards. Through a secured virtual private network, these payments are sent to a central clearinghouse and processed on a daily basis.

Capable of transferring digital files throughout the world, Satellite Newspapers positions itself as the global distributor of content in any print or digital format. Satellite Newspapers brings to the world the convenience of digital speed coupled with the familiarity of print.

Satellite Newspapers has developed a self-contained, fully automated newspaper-vending unit: the Satellite Newspaper KiOSK. The Satellite Newspaper KiOSK is capable of receiving files, processing payments and on demand printing of newspapers...Within just two minutes, the Satellite Newspaper KiOSK prints and staples the latest editions of national and international newspapers, on customers demand, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week...Each Satellite Newspaper KiOSK is equipped with a user-friendly touch-screen. Customers are prompted through the menu in their native language to:

1. Select the continent
2. Select the country/state
3. Select your newspaper
4. Insert credit card or KiOSK-card"

[I digress here. If I were a potential investor in KiOSK I'd be thinking that the whole enterprise could go 404 when many American students traveling abroad for the summer hit the above list--particularly the "select the continent" part. Here's a quote from Our Dynamic Planet Workshop: "The purpose of the Plate Tectonics Lecture is to help the student become familiar with the theory of plate tectonics. It consists of 30 minutes of video animations created by Prof. Tanya Atwater of UCSB. The Profile Game helps students learn to visualize 3-dimensional geological structures using elevation profiles. The Geography Game helps students recognize important features on a world map. I have found that some students cant find the Atlantic Ocean and various continents."]

In any case, KiOSK is instant global news, plug-and-play, and the list of the 131 available papers is impressive.

It may offer a glimpse of the future of publishing, since the site reminds booksellers of the convenience the KiOSK offers in contrast to old school printing. And, of course, to shipping, which can take up to a dozen different carriers to schlepp newspaper atoms half way round the globe. For stocking, several days later, in a newsstand where only half are purchased. And the other half has to be picked up and shipped back to an incinerator where they're burned. Only to float back to their country of origin as acid rain. Thus completing the "Cycle of Life" that should be the next lecture following the unit on "Plate Tectonics."

The illustration of the Kiosk above gives you a good sense of what you'll look like to security cameras while using the machine. If you want to know what the KiOSK looks like when you're standing in line behind an attractive Italian model, check out this whopping big .jpg.

[Praying To The Cameras Of Gotham]

I had to return a kitchen faucet at Menard's recently, where I felt the chilly stare of their surveillance camera as I stood in line for a good ten minutes. It got me thinking.

The Surveillance Camera Players have grown over the last several years from a little ragtag group of refuse-niks into a big ragtag group of refuse-niks. Frustrated with the estimated 7,000 or so surveillance cameras in Manhattan, they began staging plays in front of individual cameras, presumably for bored guards at monitors--but also as street theater where, among other things, they invite passers-by to pray to the camera.

As you can see from their founding documents, their history stretches back to 1995, so their own special brew of paranoia, anguish and acting out has been fermenting for a good while. They have mapped cameras in many sections of the city, and offer walking tours that seem idea for an autumn Saturday in Manhattan. You can also check out some of the images from It's OK, Officer, one of their raucous poster-board performances. Three is also plenty of press coverage like this one from England's Surveillance-and-Society.

Along these same lines is the iSee Project from the Institute for Applied Autonomy. It offers a great map of surveillance in the city.

I have also seen a site that let's you type in your destination, then maps a route across Manhattan free of cameras...if that's possible any more. But I just can't find it. Let us know if you have the URL.

For those ready to fight back more tangibly, Michael Naimark's Camera Zapper, offered more as an artist's performance project than as an actual invitation to deploy it, uses a laser to temporarily neutralize a camera sensor.

For a journalistic backgrounder on surveillance, try Gotham's own Village Voice on Spycam City.

Finally, I received only one entry in the Gala Ratchet Up "Program The Black Box" Fest, and that was a note-to-self that read: "monitor better for stupid Gala Events--but don't abandon them in principle." True to the core tenants of "We Journalism," the audience has spoken in a single voice dead silent. So I'm awarding myself a ratchet--plus a shiny new electronic ratchet recalibration unit, so's we can get this damnd thing in better tune. Nonetheless, I'm still thinking virtual piñata party...

[Data-based Art]

Dateline: Schipol airport
En route from the Data-based Art seminar, sponsored by CRUMB, the "curatorial resource for upstart media bliss," and BALTIC , a new contemporary art center in Gateshead just across the river from Newcastle. Part of BALTIC's "remit" is to support new media practices, including its first new media residency with Lev Manovich, who created version 2.0 of his Soft Cinema project. Lev is the author of The Language of New Media, which everyone should own. It's also worth checking out his recent screed--and important questions--about trends in digital art at the Ars Electronica Festival, which was posted on Rhizome and can be accessed freely on nettime. Soft Cinema is itself an important project in the emerging genre of algorithmic video, although part of the point of v 2.0 is precisely its move toward authored narrative and away from pure algorithmic editing.

The other highlight of the conference was activist artist Graham Harwood's presentation. He sang the praises of perl as poetry and presented his concept for a new project that would use perl scripts to collect data from existing databases and calculate the "missing" lung capacity of all the children "killed, enslaved, fucked and abused" since the 18th century. He would then create a sonic blast over London, which would displace a similar volume of air. His is a truly Blakean vision, and I'm betting it will happen. In the meantime, check out Nine, a remarkable community project using the Internet, coded and initiated by Harwood.
--Steve Dietz

[Ratchet Up Appears In Margaret Atwood's New Novel]

With all the inevitability of Kabalistic numerology, Ratchet Up appears in Margaret Atwood's new novel about our bio-future, Oryx & Crake!!

Stay on the qui vive: "the truth is there for those who will but see it."

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Miltos Manetas has done a series of paintings about computers and videogames that you might find interesting. I particularly like the ones inspired by "Claudia"--saddish, flat, scratchy works, the first of which I used as my desktop image for a while. Salon did an aritcle on him last year, if you're interested. [Manetas.com]

Claudia and Playstation

Girl with Playstation

Claudia With Gun II

[Three Notes On Participatory Journalsim]

Dale Peskin, the Executive Director of New Directions in News, just published a series of excellent think-pieces entitled We Media by Hypergene's Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis, with input from Dan Gillmor and editing by J.D. Lascia. It's nicely illustrated in PDF and important.

As the subtitle suggests, it's an overview of how audiences are shaping the future of news and information. Participatory journalism is "the act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.

Participatory journalism is the bottom-up, emergent phenomenon in which there is little or no editorial oversight or formal journalistic work-flow dictating the decisions of a staff. Instead, it is the result of many simultaneous, distributed conversations that either blossom or quickly atrophy in the Web's social network. While the explosion of weblogs is a recent phenomenon, the idea of tapping into your audiences for new perspectives or turning readers into reporters or commentators is not."

It looks something like this.

Another good thing to explore on the NDN site is 13 Forces Shaping and Shaking the Future of News, Information, and Media. It's a tight, graphics-intensive little piece that seems just right for forwarding to a boss who needs more time and bigger ideas.

One slight irony: the format of this article is PDF-perfect print journalism, here augmented powerfully by the web as publisher and distributor, rather than a format that's more intrinsically web-based. Making it an oldie but goodie direction in news. Still, it's here on my doorstep this moring, and that's what counts.

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The BBC is taking something like We Media to the street, with a bit of help from the very smart Ideo design group. At their new BBC Interactive offices passers-by can stand on the street and watch live interviews as though they were gawking at a window display at Harrods. But here's the twist: sidewalk gawkers can use their mobile phones to send questions to the live participants that appear on a large graphic display at the back of the studio. It's a bit of a gimmick, obviously, but still it makes a point: the walls are porous and the streets are demanding dialogue.

And there's another big plus. Thinking, having a question, participating...they're a lot better than just standing there calling home on the mobile when the camera has caught you outside the window behind the anchor of one of those morning used-to-be-news shows. [Photo BBC]

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Finally, I suspect you have heard of OhMyNews before, but just in case be sure to check it out.