Ratchet Up

["I Want My MTV PDA"]

Problem: "More Me-, Me-dia Mommy"

Solution: Soft PDA with teething ring

Outcome: Happy Baby, Ready for Computer Camp

Bits from Tamar Lewin's article in the "New York Times":

"In the last five years, there has been an explosion in electronic media for babies and toddlers: "Teletubbies," the first television show for preverbal children; computer "lapware" for babies to play with while sitting in a parent's lap; and hundreds of videotapes and DVD's for even the tiniest infants. Many babies are now immersed in electronic media for hours every day. In fact, more than a quarter of children under 2 have a television in their room...10 percent of the babies and toddlers from 6 months to 2 years have a television remote control designed for children...Morgan, now 2, has already developed distinct video preferences. "No, Mommy," he said as his mother put on "Baby Bach" in their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. "No `Baby Bach.' I want Mose-art. Mose-art, Mommy! Mose-art."

...more than a third live in homes where the television is on almost all the time, even if no one is watching...But it is among the babies and toddlers that the most startling picture emerges. "We've got a mom in the office whose 2-year-old daughter has a special computer table, and she's got her games and her activities and her bookmarked Web sites"...

Capitalizing on parental anxieties, many of the new tapes and DVD's are marketed as educational aids, with titles like "Brainy Baby Right Brain," "Bee Smart Baby Multilingual Vocabulary Builder" and "Baby Genius Mozart and Friends."

With 100 Movies at Baby Mozart's Fingertips

Disney's new Moviebeam promises your little genius 100 films always at the ready, wirelessly downloading 10 new films every week: Moviebeam.

[Pacifier sold separately.]

[Marketing clincher: Moviebeam for Brainy Baby, Jim Beam for mommy and daddy.]

Two Sheets to Jim Beam's Wind: Where's Baby? Never Fear!

...just check your real PDA for up to the minute info thanks to your new Wherify kid-tracker.

Discovery: Your toddler has been at the keyhole the whole time! Little Genius knows that life is often better than art.

[Wireless watches track kids]

[Returning the Surveillant Gaze]

Since being 10, anything skywriting gets my attention. Add to that key privacy issues, which I follow as best I can through the bewildering range of new legislation and technologies, and you've really got my attention. Which is just what the Foundation for Taxpayer & Consumer Rights was counting on. They recently wrote the first five numbers of Citigroup's CEO Charles Prince's social security number in the sky over Wall Street [second picture here] because the "federal bill backed by Citgroup-- a version of which already passed the House -- will nullify California's recently-enacted landmark financial privacy law and pre-empt all future state legislation allowing consumers to say no to the sharing or selling of their private information among Citigroup's 2400 affiliate companies. Citigroup spent $4.6 million so far this year lobbying on Capitol Hill to take Americans' privacy rights and $11.7 million since 2000." As usual, legions offering champagne and lobster lunches are winning out over the handful of nobel souls defending the public interest with coffee and donuts...and enough money to pay for a sky-writer.

Cryptome.org, on the other hand, has been taking to the air with a similar table-turning political action by publishing a satellite surveillance photograph of the home of the first Total Information Awareness czar, John Poindexter. It's part of their "eyeballing" series of similar outings. [I find these images pretty creepy, but of course that's the objective.]

Of course, there is lots of similar "watching the watchers" activity these days, but here's one additional pointer to an article in "Discover" magazine by Stephen Johnson, a writer I like. "Government Information Awareness" returns the gaze of "Total Information Awareness" through a website that collects information about the government from individuals, then runs it through a ranking and credibility system, makes it easily searchable, and even sends e-mails to users so they can easily track specific political issues. In other words, "Government Information Awareness" is using the full spectrum of "smart mob," and P2P practices to assemble a master dossier on the government itself.

Johnson: "It takes publicly available information pulled from a variety of official sources, government Web sites, telephone directories, C-SPAN and integrates it into a single database...McKinley's site makes exploring the tangle of relationships that constitute our government as easy as flipping through the Yellow Pages and much more productive...McKinley is developing special tools for tracking information as it's added to the database not unlike the stock-tracking services offered by some financial sites. Eventually, you'll be able to tag anyone or anything Tom DeLay, the Congressional Budget Office, the Air Force's secret shuttle program and you'll get an e-mail alert if any new information becomes attached to the item...The self-policing of the site makes for an arresting sociological experiment. Most of the time, the trust ratings of eBay manage to block an individual's financial incentive to misrepresent information online. Will a similar approach work when the incentive is ideological instead of financial?"

An on-the-fly search didn't turn up this article on the "Discover" site, so here's a link to it in Google's cache.

[DigitEyes: Electronic Music - Old School / New School]

[F.C. Judd at the Dartington Summer School of Music, England, 1952.]

[Miguel Depedro [aka Kid606] in Berlin, 2001.]

[This masterful pairing put on the Ratchet turntable by Jesse Kriss.]

[A Note From Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky In Mannheim]

Paul Miller: I'm sitting here in Mannheim, Germany days after playing at Carleton, and the thing that stays in my mind is how similar people are throughout the industrialized world. People are wearing the same clothes, drinking the same drinks, using the same software and I'm sitting in a different country halfway around the world, and this is just the beginning. If the 21st century has inherited anything from the 20th, it's that we are looking at huge scales of production that can change and reconfigure, but still maintain a consumer-oriented consistency. The writer Walter Benjamin critiqued this kind of standardization in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" but I think that Norbert Weiner said it even better in his "Cybernetics: The Human Use of Human Beings" in 1950: "it is as completely natural for a human society to be based on learning as for an ant society to be based on an inherited pattern..."

This is something that has haunted me for the last couple of years, and what I try to convey in my lectures is a sense of how to create your own story out of the media bombardment that creates this kind of standardization of the creative act. I guess I was hoping that people could come out of the lecture thinking about public culture and private expression - how to foster a new sense of creativity out of the passivity that contemporary digital culture seems to create in the people that should be the most active in its transformation. Its a bit of a paradox, but then again, hey, that's what makes the world flow in these strange, digital days... I always try to have some different versions of material on hand to show the permutations that are possible, but again, as an artist - I can only say, I think of what I'm doing as a template - the material is meant to go out into the world so that other people can use it as they please... it's a thoughtware as shareware kind of mentality.

I guess, and that's why I encourage people to visit my website and download things. Form follows function in this scenario... and that is basically what my lecture was about. Form and function, fact and fiction, the scenario is all about thinking outside the box on this kind of stuff, and as an artist I act as a kind of metaphor for this kind of thing. The rest is up to the viewer to walk away with the thought that a different world is possible. The question is how to make it real...

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J.S.: Paul's site is crammed with interesting stuff, including his writing and interviews.

But I particularly encourage you to check out his new 21C Magazine. It has an outstanding roster of writers and an editorial viewpoint that reflectd Paul's restless curiosity about art, music, new media, politics and cultural theory. You can't find better. It's an actual comes-in-the-mailbox magazine you can subscribe to [subscription form on the previous link], but with a generous online presence.

[Tower of Babble, Searchable Edition]

Be sure to check out Amazon's new "Search Inside the Book" feature that "allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as running an Amazon.com search."

An excellent article just appeared in Wired magazine on this feature. It's the first time "Wired" has published an article online before it appeared in print--no doubt because Amazon's "Search Inside" was going to go public and they didn't want a good article to get scooped. I encourage you to read it, since it includes a good overview of other omnibus visions of putting all literature on line.

I tried it: First, I keyed into Amazon's search box the word "rhizome"--digital culture's magic word. Naturally, it took me to gardening books. So next I keyed in "rhizome digital culture," which took me to the "Visual Culture Reader," and in turn to the a complete scan of the one page in that book on which the word "rhizome" appears. A limited experiment, but still amazing.

Teasers from the article:

"With its 120,000 titles, the archive has about as many books as a big brick-and-mortar store. Still, this is plenty to create a familiar sensation of vertigo as an expansive new territory suddenly opens up....With persistence, serendipity and plenty of time in a library, I may have found these titles myself. The Amazon archive is dizzying not because it unearths books that would necessarily have languished in obscurity, but because it renders their contents instantly visible in response to a search. It allows quick query revisions, backtracking, and exploration. It provides a new form of map...

How was it possible to create a publicly accessible database from material whose ownership is so tangled? Amazon's solution is audacious: The company simply denies it has built an electronic library at all. "This is not an ebook project!" Manber says. And in a sense he is right. The archive is intentionally crippled. A search brings back not text, but pictures -- pictures of pages. You can find the page that responds to your query, read it on your screen, and browse a few pages backward and forward. But you cannot download, copy, or read the book from beginning to end. There is no way to link directly to any page of a book. If you want to read an extensive excerpt, you must turn to the physical volume -- which, of course, you can conveniently purchase from Amazon...

The Amazon project -- dubbed Search Inside the Book -- represents a bold step toward the dream of a universal library. Bezos refuses any such allusion. But outlines of the Alexandrian fantasy can clearly be made out in Amazon's innocent book-purchasing tool. The company's success at launching a massive archive of digital books will undoubtedly fuel enthusiasm for overturning the current publishing and copyright regime."

Stephen Johnson on this in "Slate"

[Cyber-Girls: 300 dpi Of Quivering Imperfection]

In July I posted a passing note on the ever-greater realism in the reproduction of virtual women, and on their virtually inevitable sexualization. If you want to stay abrest of this--and we all way to be ahead of the curve--then you may want to check out the new "Digital Beauties: 2D and 3D CG Digital Models from Taschen. It's published in association with a new show at The Watermans in London called "Perfectly Real: Women in Bits and Bytes."

Taschen seems to be careening off their own earlier 576 page book of "Digital Beauties", whose advertising copy suggests that: "In an age in which virtual characters are being copyrighted left and right, it's about time you got to know some of the "people" you'll be coming across in the future on TV and even in film; one such example is Steven Stahlberg's lovely Webbie Tookay, the first virtual model to sign with Elite Digital Models. Some of these digital creations have even been included in "sexiest women" lists-along with real humans, of course!" [The illustration on the left is Webbie Tookay.]

The "Perfectly Real" site doesn't have much in terms of critical commentary--I guess the story-lead comes in the form of pictures, and they deliver those in pixel buckets. You can download whopping 300dpi poster-scale images that will swamp your bezel and turn your monitor into a device for the scrolling micro-examination of female bodies. [I guess that's the "bits" part of the show title.] Think of these images as the 21st century version of the old Tool Company girlie calendars beloved by auto mechanics. Only now they find their way--along with some winking irony and a mild theoretical critique to make them more palatable--onto the walls of contemporary cyber-cubicles.

As digital beauty seems to be bustin' out all over, the show's curator reminds us that the key ingredient in the artist's secret recipe for perfection is imperfection. The BBC reports that: "Brazilian creation Kaya [here on the right] has what the artist describes as a large mouth and teeth, far-apart eyes and thick eyebrows, deliberately designed to represent 'realistic woman with slight imperfections'...Her makers intend to give her a strong character and let her live online, 'so people can control what she says and her movements through the web,' [show curator] Ms Gomez explains. She does look more 'realistic' than many of the airbrushed creations which grace the pages of both men and women's magazines every day. But perhaps some might ask why far-apart eyes, thick eyebrows, gaping pores should be seen as 'imperfections'. 'In this time of real perfection in terms of plastic surgery, when it comes to the digital, we only believe them if they are not 100% perfect and that is where the power lies.'"

If you make it to "Kill Bill," judge for yourself. Live or Memorex?

BBC: Cyber Women Test What's Real

[New Image Technology - Virtualizing The European Union?]

The Irish Examiner and Wired are running stories on a spectacular new form of public image display from Euro-based Tholos Systems.

The Examiner: "A window between cities that allows people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart to meet and talk could make its debut in Britain next year. Tholos, named after a type of circular ancient Greek temple, consists of a large round screen nearly 10ft high and 23ft wide. Its designers hope to see one of the first two in the world become a new tourist attraction in the centre of London. The London Tholos would be linked to an identical one in Vienna. Through them, people in both cities will be able to see and hear each other in real time.

"The cylindrical structure contains a unique technology that simultaneously transmits and receives high definition live moving images. People standing in front of London's Tholos would see a wrap-around picture of the scene in Vienna. At the same time, a similar London image is displayed in the Austrian capital. Citizens in both countries would be able to face each other and talk via an array of directional microphones and loudspeakers, which keep conversations private. Effectively, it is like meeting up in the town square except that you might be on different continents.

"...Each Tholos is expected to cost about 1.4 million to build and install. Public access would be free, and running costs paid for by advertising, which will take up 13% of airtime. Companies are expected to pay a premium to advertise on Tholos, which will allow them for the first time to broadcast messages to the public simultaneously in different countries...

"You can see where the other people live, you have eye contact, and you can talk to each other...It's like having a conversation with someone standing next to you."

Although the [developing] Tholos site itself is mostly vacuous marketing lingo, there is an interesting pro-EU rhetoric to be found there: "the cylinders will find its [sic] place at the heart of major cities - for example at the St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna or the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin - making them instant symbols of pan-European identity. THOLOS - the 'materializing' of the European Union vision."

Is this simply transparent marketing hutzpah in search of pan-European sales? Is it tapping a European longing for a technologically superior EU standing proudly independent from the US? Is it simply a megalomaniacal inventor revealing himself through his own brochure-speak? In any case, it's another example of a technology announcing its political and marketing ambitions loudly in its own birth announcement.

More info and the best images [reproduced from Tholos PR] can be found in Wired.

A note of caution in all of this. First, because there is no mention of a "Tholos-o-rama" [my word] actually existing in Paris, it appears that the knock-out images in the illustrations are Photoshop simulations. The Tholos site has what appear to be actual photographs of the device, which looks less spectacular. [But in fairness it's often impossible to make spectacular pictures of spectacular pictures.] And on checking today, I discover that the Wired article is no longer on their front page, suggesting it has been pulled instead of descending, as it typically would, down the list of reports until it drops off the edge of the known world, the browser.

Perhaps we'll find a more accurate metaphor for the EU in this last paragraph.

[Discovering The Metacortex Alternate Reality Game]

This summer a couple of pals and I went to the New Media Centers Conference where we first met Brian Alexander. We instantly loved this guy--so smart, hugely articulate, and able to jump from 18th century literature to The Matrix in a single bound. [Although apparently these days he's less and less eager to jump back to the 18th century.] So we're delighted to have him send the Ratchet a post. [Brian is Co-Director of the Center for Educational Technology, and here's his blog.]

Brian: There is a new iteration in the world of collaborative fiction, especially the mysterious, interactive, multimedia type. Perhaps you recall "The Beast," an elaborate game-cum-marketing conspiracy for the movie A.I? One of those cases where the marketing clearly trumps the marketed, this game quietly published a rich, interlinked, and often sneaky series of texts, clues within other documents, Web sites, and even voicemail messages, then unlreased the inquisitive power of thousands of curious netizens around the world. The pieces were constellated, puzzles determined and solved, and the larger patterns developed into a narrative we can consider a new form of writing (some use the pithy and delightfully-abbreviated term "Alternate Reality Game"). For more background, there's a New York Times intro, Sci-fi Wire's sketch, Ain't It Cool's coverage, along with the Yahoo discussion forum for the biggest collaborative group around the game, Cloudmakers.

A new example has emerged on the Web during the past month. It obviously supports the new Matrix movie, but there's no need to hit the official site. And we might expect this game to outstrip the payoff from the third turn of Neo's wheel.

Two ways in:

First, you can dive in by exploring the mysterious pieces of the game which have surfaced in collaborative exploration. There's the Metacortex company home page (note the spelling of the URL), a firm specializing in a variety of cyberproducts. Metacortex employee-of-the-month Beth McConnell has her own personal/research site, where you can read about her interest in the paranormal. Metacortex publishes MetaOffice Suite, and is soon to roll out a new virtual reality tool, MetaVRX, while also developing a new personal productivity/knowledge management product, Metadex. One pw-protected Metadex site points you to two missing persons sites, he is missing and she is missing; each has built by MetaOffice Suite's Web authoring product ("content="MetaCortex MetaPage V1.0.3 for Windows""). Meta is partnered with an undersea hotel construction project, Aquapolis, and also with Underscore Web Hosting. Underscore, in turn, hosts several interesting sites, including the Cascade Vortex. PaintOver is a cryptic site, playing the unusual, fourth-wall-breaking role of also hosting a discussion forum devoted to cracking its secrets.

Or, second, you can see what players have discovered so far. The Metacortex Conspiracy offers solid information. Down the Rabbit Hole presents the players' progress so far. Matrix Information Collection is just that, db-driven, with updated data on the timeline, characters, etc. The Last Free City hosts a discussion. Metacortex: Unlock the Mysteries has a good narrative account of their exploration.

Narrative pieces are beginning to emerge. Metacortex has a new, sinister CEO. As with any good mystery, several people are missing: that previous Meta CEO, along with the so-far unnamed she and he. Investigating characters are nervous, threatened, conspiratorial.

What next? More disappearances, one hopes. And the paranormal thread will probably reveal our world as the Matrix. Look for the narrative thread to bunch up toward the film's release this winter.

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JS: Ratchet Up welcomes posts from other readers, too, so that it can be more like a conversation, or at least a series of intertwined monologues. So please don't be intimidated by the link-happy complexity of Brian's post. It's a high-wire act with a touch of "first post syndrome" that even he probably couldn't sustain. Ratchetees don't care whether you prepare an eight-course meal or just share a few dogs around the grill--we've come to the party for the commaradarie, not to judge everyone's cooking. Let's hear from you.

[The Truth About Cyborgs]

In 1927, while shooting Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," the first great cinematic visualization of robot-cyborgs, Brigette Helm, playing "The Robot" aka "Futura," takes a smoke break while being cooled by a prototype hairdryer.

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Christmas-in-October book recommendation from Carol Donelan:

I have two recommendations for the Ratchet Holiday Gift List: What is Cinema? by Andre Bazin (California, 1967) and Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory by Philip Rosen (Minnesota, 2001).

One of Bazin's theses in his essay "The Myth of Total Cinema" is that "cinema has not yet been invented." Cinema existed in the minds of human beings as a Platonic ideal long before the technology of film was invented, like the wings of Icarus before the airplane made human flight possible. In its ideal form, in what Bazin calls "the myth of total cinema," cinema not only duplicates reality recreates the world in its own image" via an "integral realism"but offers an added advantage over reality: control over time. Every scientific invention takes us closer to the ideal of total cinema from the addition of sound and color to film, to the creation of three-dimensional interactive virtual realities. But the ideal has not yet been achieved: cinema has not yet been invented.

Film scholar Philip Rosen's description of the "digital utopia" in chapter 8 of "Change Mummified" recalls Bazin's description of "total cinema." Indeed, Rosen might have subtitled his chapter "The Myth of Total Digitality." In it, he discusses three ideals invoked repeatedly in the discourse about the digital, including 1) the practically infinite manipulability of the digital image, 2) convergence, and 3) interactivity. (It would be interesting to explore this site to see if and in what context these ideals are invoked). In any case, it is upon these ideals that claims are made for the radical novelty of the digital in relation to "old" media like photography and cinema. By interrogating the ideals upon which the digital utopia is based, Rosen reveals the extent to which the digital "new" is still very much rooted in the photochemical "old."

The moral of the story: it is through cinema that we can best comprehend our digital present and future.

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"Cyberspace is particularly geared toward the erasure of all non-Western histories. Once a culture has been 'stored' and 'preserved' in digital forms, opened up to anybody who wants to explore it from the comfort of their armchair, then it becomes more real than the real thing. Who needs the arcane and esoteric real thing anyway? In the postmodern world where things have systematically become monuments, nature has been transformed into 'reserve', and knowledge is giving way to information and data, it is only a matter of time before Other people and their cultures become 'models', so many zeros and ones in cyberspace, exotic examples for scholars, voyeurs and other interested parties to load on their machines and look at. Cyberspace is a giant step forward towards museumization of the world: for anything remotely different from Western culture will exist only in digital form." [Z. Sardar, 1996 ] Yes, 1996.

[Thinking Christmas In October]

Finding myself recommending a book yesterday got me thinking.

When you live in the midwest Christmas comes way early. The 18-wheelers pull into the Mall of America with deocrations for both Thanksgiving and Christmas in September, and in many stores Christmas and Thanksgiving go up at the same time. That way when the blunderbusses, corn staves and Pilgrim's hats come down Santa stands at the ready.

You've no doubt noticed that I don't have a "blogroll" in this pixel-rag's left column. Picking and choosing is just so existential I haven't faced up to it. But here's a Christmas-in-October idea that might productively fill up the white space.

I'd like to invite Ratchet readers to suggest a book that they've enjoyed, something that vaguely fits the theme of our venture here--so please no Back Pain for Dummies. I'll post your recommendation with your name. [If you're lucky, someone might actually think you wrote the book yourself.]

Just off the top of my head--and because they sort of fit into a category that yesterday's mention of Jimmy Corrigan got me grooving on--I'll add a couple of things from Princeton Architectural Press--You Are Here and Reinventing the Wheel. [Princeton has lots of good stuff, like this, this, and this.]

Oh, one last thing. If you send a book recommendation [and please do!], include a link to something other than Amazon.com. It could be the publisher's site, an interesting review, etc. I've got nothing against Amazon--other than the fact that their much-celebrated search system often doesn't work very well. My beef is with the wonderful people at TypePad, the makers of the smooth-as-silk software that "powers" this site. [God knows nothing really powers this site.] Their format for listing "Books" necessarily links to Amazon, automatically placing an image of the book on your blog and linking readers to the Amazon cash register.

In some ways, of course, it's handy. But I'm here to tell you that Vannevar ["rhymes with beaver"] Bush never had in mind an associational logic hardwired to someone's tin cup. Linking to Amazon is fine. Having no choice but to link to Amazon is like having to link to HELL.