Ratchet Up

[Last Snow Gone In Minnesota]

 

Snow

angels, winter sprites, wing their way into the ether.  

[Digitally Mediated Urban Spaces]

Anthony Townsend teaches urban planning and interactive design at New York University and is the Executive Director of NYCwireless, a non-profit organization that aids the development of open public wireless networks.

For Praxis he has written a nicely illustrated overview of four of the world's most digitally-mediated urban spaces: Times Square, Shibuya Crossing in Japan, Union Square in NYC, and the proposed Digital Media City [DMC] in Soule. He suggests that:

To begin thinking about potential reconfigurations of urban space, it is useful to consider the relevant applications in which digital technology has advanced significantly in the last decade. Broadly, we can group these technologies into four groups based on their functional application in urban environments: display and expression, communications, positioning, and documentation. [My emphasis.]

This article offered my first chance to see plans for Seoul's Digital Media City [above], where, like Times Square, businesses are required to front their buildings with massive LED signs. But in the plans for Soule they'll all be mastered by a single system, so that on special occasions—festivals, artists' projects, or even emeregencies—they can work as a single mega-sign.

Imagine having all of Times Square as your palette.

Townsend is also involved in designing Digital Media City, along with a team from MIT. More on that here. [Via Smart Mobs]

As for Times Square, Yahoo just turned one of the area's biggest signs into a videogame that you can play from your cell phone on the street. "The game is kind of like those old Hot Wheels games where you set up the track and just control the speed of the car, with no steering."

[Inverse Surveillance: See Yourself]

he last decade witnessed a flood of justified concern about surveillance. As Foucault's '70's conception of the Panopticon went warp-speed thanks to the emerging digital technologies of the last 20 years, we've had much urgent writing on the topic. The journal Surveillance & Society is one interesting example.

But there's an opposite trend emerging—labled by one group "Inverse Surveillance"—that's producing new technologies and applications that enable individuals to reclaim the glaze by visioning their own lives in interesting new ways.

For example, check out this announcement for a small conference on "Inverse Surveillance" taking place in April. [When they say small they mean it: there's only room for 25, and the "Program Committee" already has half that many members!] Their list of proposed topics is a telling indication of how they conceptualize the topic:

• Camera phones and pocket organizers with sensors;
• Weblogs ('blogs), Moblogs, Cyborglogs ('glogs);
• Wearable camera phones and personal imaging systems;
• Electric eyeglasses and other computational seeing and memory aids;
• Recording experiences in which you are a participant;
• Portable personal imaging and multimedia;
• Wearable technologies and systems;
• Ethical, legal, and policy issues;
• Privacy and related technosocial issues;
• Democracy and emergent democracy (protesters organizing with SMS camphones);
• Safety and security;
• Technologies of lifelong video capture;
• Personal safety devices and wearable "black box" recorders;
• Research issues in "people looking at people";
• Person-to-person sharing of personal experiences;
• End of gender-specific space (e.g. blind man guided by wife: which restroom?);
• Subjectright: ownership of photograph by subject rather than photographer;
• Reverse copyright: protect information recipient, not just the transmitient;
• Interoperability and open standards;
• Algebraic Projective Geometry from a first-person perspective;
• Object Detection and Recognition from a first-person perspective;
• Computer Vision, egomotion and way-finding technologies;
• Lifelong Image Capture: data organization; new cinematographic genres;
• New Devices and Technologies for ultra miniature portable cameras;
• Social Issues: fashion, design, acceptability and human factors;
• Electronic News-gathering and Journalism;
• Psychogeography, location-based wearable computing;
• Augmented/Mediated/Diminished Reality

Many new applications are aimed at technologizing self-recording. We're entering an era of dramatic redefinitions of the family album. [Even while we're still being surveilled.]

I'm interested in pulling together these new techniques of personal visioning. Things like My Life Bits and LifeBlog. If you know of similar projects you particularly like, please send them along by e-mail. Or better, send a post to the Ratchet.

[Free Culture Via BitTorrent]

Lawrence Lessig, who was only a few weeks ago at Carleton for a knock-out talk, just published his newest book, Free Culture. And in the spirit of the book's argument for the frictionless circulation of ideas, he has made the complete text available online. For free. So if you want to sit at the computer and read a book click here for the PDF. But wait, there's another way to have it digitally delivered to your doorstep. [I'm not looking to slight this important book, but we are taking a left turn here.]

If you have never heard of BitTorrent, here's a brief introduction to this new, free cultureish form of peer-to-peer distribution. It can deliver Free Culture to your desktop, along with much more.

As a post on Slashdot put it: Every so often a new tool comes along that causes a shift from Bronze to Iron, that divides history into "before" and "after." [...] Enter BitTorrent—a "swarming, scatter and gather" file transfer protocol developed by Bram Cohen that's taking the net by storm. Even without a friendly, unified interface, BT's ability to scale in the face of overwhelming demand while minimizing the free rider problem ("leeching") has attracted a flood of new users. But as with any tool, understanding how and why it works will always make using it easier and more fun.

Perhaps the best way to understand this is by starting with an illustration. As you see immediately, this is not a central server/multiple clients model, it's peer-to-peer.

BitTorrent is a protocol designed for transferring files. It is peer-to-peer in nature, as users connect to each other directly to send and receive portions of the file. However, there is a central server (called a tracker) which coordinates the action of all such peers. The tracker only manages connections, it does not have any knowledge of the contents of the files being distributed, and therefore a large number of users can be supported with relatively limited tracker bandwidth. The key philosophy of BitTorrent is that users should upload (transmit outbound) at the same time they are downloading (receiving inbound.) In this manner, network bandwidth is utilized as efficiently as possible. BitTorrent is designed to work better as the number of people interested in a certain file increases, in contrast to other file transfer protocols.

One analogy to describe this process might be to visualize a group of people sitting at a table. Each person at the table can both talk and listen to any other person at the table. These people are each trying to get a complete copy of a book. Person A announces that he has pages 1-10, 23, 42-50, and 75. Persons C, D, and E are each missing some of those pages that A has, and so they coordinate such that A gives them each copies of the pages he has that they are missing. Person B then announces that she has pages 11-22, 31-37, and 63-70. Persons A, D, and E tell B they would like some of her pages, so she gives them copies of the pages that she has. The process continues around the table until everyone has announced what they have (and hence what they are missing.) The people at the table coordinate to swap parts of this book until everyone has everything. There is also another person at the table, who we'll call 'S'. This person has a complete copy of the book, and so doesn't need anything sent to him. He responds with pages that no one else in the group has. At first, when everyone has just arrived, they all must talk to him to get their first set of pages. However, the people are smart enough to not all get the same pages from him. After a short while they all have most of the book amongst themselves, even if no one person has the whole thing. In this manner, this one person can share a book that he has with many other people, without having to give a full copy to everyone that's interested. He can instead give out different parts to different people, and they will be able to share it amongst themselves. This person who we've referred to as 'S' is called a seed in the terminology of BitTorrent. [This tipsy dinner table metaphor comes from Brian Dessent, with more helpings here.]

If you want to download BitTorrent [you need a little program], here's the place. Looking for things to download? You might start here. Or for contested music, try here.

Now that you understand BitTorrent, you'll probably notice its name popping up more and more often.

And if you already have BitTorrent, here's your Free Culture download.

[Tourism and Photography In Online Game Spaces: Beating Swords Into Digi-cams]

Visual Studies has had a particular interest in tourism and visuality recently, so it shouldn't be entirely surprising to find an article that considers online game environments as tourist experiences. It's virtual tourism in the lookin' rather than fightin' mode.

As afficionardos know, it can take 15 or 20 hours of avatar-walking to cross the virtual landscapes in the biggest online games. [Or so I have read; if you have specifics on this, let us know.] Most—but not all—of these landscapes are traversed as places of contest. But videogames offer multiple pleasures, one of which is the excitement of polishing off a "Boss" and then finding yourself in a new level with a novel visual world. If you take yourself into that new space with the subjectivity of a tourist [sans weapon, perhaps even with a camera], you might experience something akin to the sublimity of 19th century landscape esthetics.

Here's a link to Betsy Book's Traveling Through Cyberspace: Tourism and Photography in Virtual Worlds. [If you're unfamiliar with multi-player online games, you can check out this site.] She writes:

...virtual worlds are presented and experienced as exotic travel destinations for “online tourists” and how they make extensive uses of travel and tourism metaphors. It will show how virtual world owners use travel industry imagery and messaging to attract visitors and how virtual “photography” serves to reinforce each world’s conceptualization as a tourist destination. Along the way, readers will be taken on a sort of virtual tour of these worlds themselves. Each section of the paper contains several illustrative “photographs” of virtual worlds that can be viewed by clicking on the blue underlined text of each image title. [...]

John Urry observes that tourism is constructed by and mediated by a “tourist gaze." While all senses may be engaged during an offline tourist experience, it is primarily the act of gazing at (and photographing) various objects, landmarks, and views that defines the tourist’s experience. Some virtual worlds include sound effects and voice chat but a virtual tour is above all a visual experience because of the nature of the medium. The visual consumption of artificially constructed sights is even more central to a virtual tourist’s experience than it is to an offline tourist’s experience only because virtual worlds do not yet fully engage the other senses.

Urry also notes that many offline tourist sights have become increasingly “hyper-real” with the “construction of ‘themed’ environments waiting to be viewed by the omnivorous visual consumer.” Virtual worlds are the epitome of “themed environments.” In fact, many of them have multiple themes in one world, making them the online equivalent of theme parks. They take the concept of hyper-reality to the next level by leaving corporeal reality behind altogether. And yet most virtual worlds feel like familiar places. They use the same visual semiotic systems that are used in the offline world, and in the case of tourist metaphor, replicate them as closely as possible.

In virtual worlds, “recreation” equals “re-creation,” not just of a visitor’s work-weary psyche, but of reality itself. [...]

A photograph in a virtual world takes the form of a screen capture: a digital image of the computer’s screen captured at a specific moment in time. Virtual tourists take photographs for the same reasons offline tourists take photographs. They want to commemorate their travels, obtain a visual record of enjoyable experiences, and show evidence of their experiences to friends and family. The most enthusiastic virtual photographers create elaborate online photo albums and corresponding travel journals to record and share their virtual world adventures. There has some engaging samples of this activity, including a Photo Club, a Screen Shot club, and several photographic travel journals.

[I'm thinking it could be fun to assemble a gaggle of media anthropologists for nightly treks of virtual tourism. For a Minnesota boy, it would like guiding a group of academics around the Mall of America.]

[Puppet Tool]

A friend visited my office recently with his son of about 7 or 8 years. We wanted to have a cup of coffee to catch up, so I tried to think of something the lad could noodle with on the computer while we were talking. But I don't have the best nose these days for the sensibilities of an 8 year old.

Then I remembered Puppet Tool, and with a bit of Googling brought it up. It worked.

Puppet Tool is you-control-the-parameters animation. There are many similar projects on the web, but this is one of the most evolved. And because the constituent elements are photographic, it has a particular fascination. Have fun.

Puppet Tool

LeCielEstBleu

[Audiogames: May Your Ears Be With You]

As videogames are to the eye, audiogames are to the ear. Audiogames are designed solely as sound environments, and originally they were developed for the blind. But as they're getting more and more sophisticated sighted players are giving them a try. And as you'll see below, some have gone wireless.

Turns out that there's a helpful overview of audiogames in the Wikipedia, from which:

"Audio games originally started out as 'blind accessible'-games and were developed mostly by amateurs and blind programmers. But more and more people are showing interest in audio games, ranging from sound artists, game accessibility researchers, mobile game developers and mainstream videogamers. Most audio games run on a computer platform, although there are a few audiogames for handhelds and video game consoles. Audio games feature the same variety of genres as videogames, such as adventure games, racing games, etc. [...] The main audience is still mostly visually impaired users. But commercial interest is growing steadly. In 1999 a Japanese company called Warp developed a game called "Real Sound: Kaze no Regret." It was released on the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast and it featured no visuals at all, just sound."

Here's a quick listen, a short mp3 promo for "Flight Commander".

There is even a site for blind gamers, Audyssey Magazine, and a clearing house and archive, Audio Games.

I particularly liked roaming through the Demor location-based 3D audiogame site. It has some great images, this mp3 recording of a game in progress, plus an excellent Quicktime demo that shows just how strange you'll look to the outside world.

Maribeth Back, from Xerox PARC, has written a very smart article entitled "Micro-narratives in Sound Design: Context, Character, and Caricature in Waveform Manipulation."

[Thanks to Ben Shapiro]

[Eye Am A Camera]

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair..."

[Christopher Isherwood: "Goodbye to Berlin", 1939]

[From Reuters] "Philips Electronics says it has invented a tiny digital camera lens to fit inside a mobile phone that could focus on objects and create sharp pictures in ways that are similar to the human eye.

Unlike high-end digital cameras, the new lens does not require mechanical moving parts because it works by manipulating two fluids in a tiny transparent tube. Philips said on Thursday it will build a production line for the three millimetre lenses that are aimed at low-cost imaging products, such as digital cameras that fit inside a mobile phone or a home security system.

By charging the sides of the tube with an small electric current, one of the two fluids is drawn to the edges while the other fluid fills up the remaining space in the tube. The place where the two fluids meet, functions like a lens.

By changing the current, this lens can be shaped hollow, curve or anything in between, so that it can focus on objects far away or as close as five centimetres."

[Philips press release with more info, diagrams and hi res images from this tiny, watery lens]

[A Mother's Love: "I just want you to be happy, even if I don't understand what you're doing at the computer."]

                   

And here's Beige Records' Bruce Beuckland's rendering in beads of the digitized logic of a Bruce Lee videogame:

And since no gift from mom comes without a little advice:

"Keyboards, computer mice and telephone dials are more infested with microbes than toilet seats, according to a new study...they can on average contain 400 times as many germs as a toilet seat...The average office contains 20,961 germs per square inch. 'Desks are really bacteria cafeterias...They are breakfast bars, lunch tables and everything else, as we spend more hours at the office.'" [Australian IT]

[Romance In The Information Age]

Christine Rosen: Romance in the Information Age, from which:

The pursuit of love in its modern, technological guise has its roots in the decline of courtship and is indelibly marked by that loss. Courtship as it once existed—a practice that assumed adherence to certain social conventions, and recognition of the differences, physical and emotional, between men and women—has had its share of pleased obituarists. The most vigorous have been feminists, the more radical of whom appear to take special delight in quelling notions of romantic love. Recall Andrea Dworkin’s infamous equation of marriage and rape, or Germaine Greer’s terrifying rant in The Female Eunuch: “Love, love, love—all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.”Much of this work is merely an unpersuasive attempt to swaddle basic human bitterness in the language of female empowerment. But such sentiments have had their effect on our culture’s understanding of courtship. [...]

Although not the root cause of our romantic malaise, our communication technologies are at least partly culpable, for they encourage the erosion of the boundaries that are necessary for the growth of successful relationships. Our technologies enable and often promote two detrimental forces in modern relationships: the demand for total transparency and a bias toward the over-sharing of personal information. [...]

Internet dating offers an interesting case study of these technological risks, for it encourages both transparency and oversharing, as well as another danger: it insists that we reduce and market ourselves as the disembodied sum of our parts. The woman or man you might have met on the subway platform or in a coffee shop—within a richer context that includes immediate impressions based on the other person’s physical gestures, attire, tone of voice, and overall demeanor—is instead electronically embalmed for your efficient perusal online. [...]

This impulse is part of a much broader phenomenon—the encroachment of science and technology into areas once thought the province of the uniquely intuitive and even the ineffable. Today we program computers to trounce human chess champions, produce poetry, or analyze works of art, watching eagerly as they break things down to a tedious catalog of techniques: the bishop advances, the meter scans, the paintbrush strokes across the canvas. But by enlisting machines to do what once was the creative province of human beings alone, we deliberately narrow our conceptions of genius, creativity, and art. The New York Times recently featured the work of Franco Moretti, a comparative literature professor at Stanford, who promotes “a more rational literary history”that jettisons the old-fashioned reading of texts in favor of statistical models of literary output. His dream, he told reporter Emily Eakin, “is of a literary class that would look more like a lab than a Platonic academy.”