Ratchet Up

> Technology Primer

I'm back from a bout of working on Camera / Iraq, which has attracted a surprising amount of attention. Public Journalism Network wrote that "Camera / Iraq is a site every journalist, academic, and citizen interested in photojournalism should be watching."

This is a great find.

When I was a kid, my phone number was "675." You'd pick up the handset and an actual person would answer "Operator." [A female voice, but occasionally a male supervisor, and that male voice would paralyze you for a second.] Then you'd say your number, and the Operator would patch you through.

We had two phones in our house, and when I was longing to stay over night at my grandmothers on the other side of our little midwestern town, I'd sneak up to the phone in my parents bedroom and call her in a whisper: "Grandma, would you call mom and ask her if I could stay over night tonight?" She'd always say yes. By the time the call came through to my mother, I would already have my pajamas and tooth brush in a brown bag rolled at the top so it would wrap around my bike handle. Twelve blocks in a small town to my grandmothers.

When there, I'd get showered with cookies and milk, a crisp sheet over the sofa to sleep on, and if it was a Friday night, a chance to sit with my grandpa, who for a while was the county sheriff, and his pal, a retired local judge, as they smoked cigars and watched the "Friday Night Fights" on early '50's TV. Those nights were like passing the peanuts at a smoke-filled "sit down" with the Midwestern Moffia.

What I like so much about the illustration above is that the person studying this moment of techno-etiquette actually underlined the good parts. We've always been ernest about interactivity.

• Photography and the Iraq War: A Ratchet Up Special Blog

Ratchet Up has spawned a new Special Project blog, Camera / Iraq, and for the next two or three weeks this site will be snoozing while energies flow thataway. My initial motivation for Camera/Iraq was to create a place for students in my Representing Reality class to research uses of the photographic image in events surrounding the war in Irar. But with luck the site can grow beyond the immediate purposes of a class.

Camera / Iraq

:: They Rule: Josh On

osh On's "They Rule" has become a classic of net.art. It's the best cartography of social and political influence I have ever seen, so even if you have already discovered this site it may be time for another visit. "They Rule" has the feel of diagnostic social software in the way it maps links between individuals and institutions. It also has the feel of an information visualization tool where the goal is to reveal the dynamics of corporate and economic power. And its strategies are very much in line with those of artists like Hans Haacke.

"'They Rule' aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors. Some individuals sit on 5, 6 or 7 of the top 500 companies. It allows users to browse through these interlocking directories and run searches on the boards and companies. A user can save a map of connections complete with their annotations and email links to these maps to others. 'They Rule' is a starting point for research about these powerful individuals and corporations."

[Josh On has written more about his project for Ars Electronica.]

[See also: Doug McCune's "Political Friendster."]

[Star Trek: Borg Invasion 4D]

Threshold Digital Research Labs has been described as a "next generation Pixar." They're hooking up with IBM to create CG films that can be produced at the same speed as a traditional film and at roughly half the cost of past CG features. Or at least that's their claim, and IBM is buying it. Literally.

Their new film "Food Fight" is about what happens in a grocery store after hours. It features 138 main characters and 6,254 secondary characters—which looks like everybody that's on the shelves. "Millimeter" calls it "one of the most complex digitally animated feature films ever produced." Besides the investment, partnering and prestiege aspects of the union, IBM is going to use Threshold to promote its "on-demand computing" idea where you pay for additional computational power like a utility rather than buying new hardware and software for your desktop. Something like shopping at a grocery store.

As the "NY Times" reports, Threshold has just:

...created a 3-D movie that not only gives the illusion of a world in front of you, but all around...in the same way that Dolby Digital 5.1-channel audio gives listeners a sense that they are enveloped by voices and effects: it's surround sound for the eyes. The technique is being used in a seven-and-a-half-minute film that is part of "Star Trek: Borg Invasion 4D,'' a 22-minute attraction at [the Las Vegas Hilton].

The film's conceit is that the humanlike Borgs are trying to capture the space station that the attraction's audience is ostensibly visiting. As the station's crew fights back, viewers find themselves in the middle of the action. The floor of the theater moves, seat cushions inflate and deflate to simulate acceleration and impact, and at one point a mist of water is sprayed in viewers' faces. The film combines 10 actors with 130 computer-generated figures. To shoot the live action, Threshold used two high-definition video cameras mounted next to each other. To change the sense of depth, the cameras' distances were varied. [...]

To reduce eyestrain, the company shot each scene so that both the foreground and the background were in focus. The filmmakers could then create parallel planes of action, allowing viewers to scan the frame to discover unconnected activities going on throughout the ship. Because everything is always in focus, the production company had to imbue each element with rich detail, whether it was part of a ship or one of the many computer-generated characters talking to colleagues on catwalks or riding elevators seemingly hundreds of yards away. [...]

To create the overhead action, Mr. Johnsen and his colleagues wrote an algorithm that would put the computer-generated animation in proper perspective. While the ceiling screen is at a 90-degree angle to the vertical wall, a spaceship passing overhead would need to appear to spread out as it passed above and then receded in the distance. [...]

[New York Times]

[Goodbye Corvette, Hello Mobile Phone]

Among mobile phone users' Seven Deadly Sins, the Sin of Preening Phone Pride is surely near the top. Here are some of the best bits from a short but provocative article in a recent edition of the Economist:

"Parks beautifully," boasts an advertising hoarding for the XDA II, above a glimpse of its sleek silver lines. “Responsive to every turn”, declares another poster. Yet these ads, seen recently in London, are selling not a car, but an advanced kind of mobile phone. Maybe that should not be a surprise. Using automotive imagery to sell a handset makes a lot of sense for, in many respects, mobile phones are replacing cars.
Phones are now the dominant technology with which young people, and urban youth in particular, now define themselves. What sort of phone you carry and how you customise it says a great deal about you, just as the choice of car did for a previous generation. In today's congested cities, you can no longer make a statement by pulling up outside a bar in a particular kind of car. Instead, you make a similar statement by displaying your mobile phone, with its carefully chosen ringtone, screen logo and slip cover. Mobile phones, like cars, are fashion items: in both cases, people buy new ones far more often than is actually necessary. Both are social technologies that bring people together; for teenagers, both act as symbols of independence. And cars and phones alike promote freedom and mobility, with unexpected social consequences.

The design of both cars and phones started off being defined by something that was no longer there. Cars were originally horseless carriages, and early models looked suitably carriage-like; only later did car designers realise that cars could be almost any shape they wanted to make them. Similarly, mobile phones used to look much like the push-button type of fixed-line phones, only without the wire. But now they come in a bewildering range of strange shapes and sizes.

Less visibly, as the structure of the mobile-phone industry changes, it increasingly resembles that of the car industry. Handset-makers, like carmakers, build some models themselves and outsource the design and manufacturing of others. Specialist firms supply particular sub-assemblies in both industries. Outwardly different products are built on a handful of common underlying “platforms” in both industries, to reduce costs. In each case, branding and design are becoming more important as the underlying technology becomes increasingly interchangeable.

[Economist]

More phone facts. German band Super Smart is releasing their new album in ring tone format only. The only way you'll be able to hear their music is to load it onto your phone as the ring signal. Power to the Panda.

[Adidas One Shoes]

[Old Tech: Pebble in the Heel] [New Tech: Motor in the Heel]

Adidas' new $250 running shoe has a sensor in the heel that can take early 20,000 readings and a microprocessor that can make 10,000 calculations—all so that it can adjust its performance in real time.

Fine print on the Caution Label:

1. These shoes may be confiscated by airport security. [Please do not leave unattended.]
2. These shoes may be confiscated at knife-point by envious teens. [Urban runners may prefer model #2200 with duct tape outers.]
3. These shoes brake for whales, and may be user-programmed for up to four other species. [Latin names may not exceed 24 characters.]
4. These shoes beep when used in reverse. [Personalized ringtones available for additional fee.]
5. Should use include repeated lateral walking on a mountainside or similar incline, please refer to instructions for adjustment. [Adjustments differ for northern and southern hemispheres. For users near the equator, check toilet swirl if in doubt.]
6. Repeated exposure to wet conditions may cause malfunction; performance may vary in high humidity. [Some mild tingling in the foot during and after wet runs is normal. Should it persist, check with your doctor.]
7. Please turn off shoes during public performances. [In a few cases, interference effects with outsized commercial hand-dryers have been reported.]
8. Like everything else in 21st century life, don't expect these to work longer than 40 minutes without a change of batteries.

[The ESP Game]

Ever wondered about how images on the Net or elsewhere get catalogued and tagged so that we can effectively retrieve them? They require "metadata tags" which are basically list of words—yes, we filter the logic of images through the sieve of language—reflecting the mental categories by which we define them.

The ESP Game invites you to join in.

The game selects a random image on the web and then teams you up with another anonymous player from anywhere on the globe. The only qualification is that you both speak English. The two of you suggest defining categories for the image to one another until you're in agreement. All while the clock is ticking, which makes it a game. Presumably, working together helps insure that you don't simply project your own idiosyncrasies onto the image. Unless, of course, the two of you share—consciously or unconsciously—similar viewpoints or interpretive strategies.

Even if you don't want to take the time to give it a try, you can check out their page of six example images. Go for it.

Looking at the labels chosen for each, you see immediately how we project our own interests and ideologies onto pictures. Indeed, an image isn't legible [as opposed to visible] until we interpret it, and categorization is central to interpretation.

To read an image is to impose your own mental grid on it, one that reflects the multiple social categories that define you, from large [mantra-categories like race, class, gender, nation] to small [your own kinky idiosyncrasies].

Next, imagine trying to come to agreement about meta-tags with someone who has a dramatically different world-view from your own—with an anonymous English-speaking co-interpreter in Botswana, for example. Now you start to get the picture and see how deeply interesting this game can be.

In the top picture from their examples [above], I recognize immediately actress/celebrity Reese Witherspoon. Guy-like, I'm drawn first to her beaming face. But the co-interpreters of this image have agreed that the primary meta-tag should be "man," the character on the left who to me seems obscured by a visor and at this scale just barely discernible as male. Then, next on their list comes "hat." Poor Reese: all those hundreds of thousands of dollars on publicity and she's out meta-tagged by a "hat"!

Question is: how did these co-interpreters arrive at this categorization, and what does it tell us about them?

This isn't a media class and I'm trying not to drag out all of our clanking terminology, but you get the picture here. [I'm going to assign a class to play this game and write about what it tells us. They'll have to drag out the terminology.]

This game is really fascinating. Oh for a partner who gives good category.

[Snooze Button]

Repetitive, deadpan documentary projects like Ed Ruscha's Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations or Lee Friedlander's Self-Portraits became popular with conceptual art in the '60's. But thanks to the new display options of the net and flash this impulse is being reinvigorated.

"For almost three years, Dean Baldwin has marked the waking moment of his day with a self-portrait taken by a digital camera hooked up to his alarm clock.

Baldwin's intention is to point out the subtle differences in the sameness of our daily routines; the tired eyes may look similar, but the bear is scruffier and his sheets have been changed. His Alarm Clock Self-portraits (SnoozeButton) is part of a broader practice in which he obsessively documents life's habitually recurring and more mundane moments."

To find it start here, then >Table of Contents > Snooze Button

[The sheet choices alone boggle the mind.]

[Sky Ear Pricks Up May 4]

Sky Ear will be a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky.

The cloud will be made of one thousand large helium balloons each responding to the electromagnetic environment (created by distant storms, mobile phones, police and ambulance radios, television broadcasts, etc.) with coloured blue, red and yellow lights. The balloons will be enclosed in a carbon fibre and net structure 25m in diameter tethered to the ground by 6 cables and held aloft at a height of 60m where it will remain for several hours.

Using mobile phones people will be able to listen to the actual sounds up high, the electromagnetic sounds of the sky as well as streams of "whistlers" and "spherics" (atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena that are the audible equivalent of the Northern Lights).Of course, the action of calling the cloud changes the electromagnetic environment inside and causes the balloons to vary in brightness, colour and intensity." [Source: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich]

This non-rigid "cloud," made up of several hundred glowing helium balloons, will be embedded with mobile phones. The balloons will contain miniature sensor circuits (simple gaussmeters) that detect levels of electromagnetic radiation at a variety of frequencies. When activated, the sensor circuits will cause ultra-bright coloured LEDs to illuminate. The cloud will glow and flicker brightly as it passes through varying radio and microwave spaces.

As visitors to the event call into the cloud to listen to the distant electromagnetic sounds of the sky (including whistlers and spherics), their mobile phone calls will change the local hertzian topography; these disturbances in the electromagnetic fields inside the cloud will alter the glow intensity of that part of the balloon cloud. Feedback within the sensor network will create ripples of light reminiscent of rumbling thunder and flashes of lightning. People may find that they are in the process collaborating with others to create patterns of light activity across the surface of the cloud. [Source: Project Creator's Site]

More details in this PDF brochure.

You can watch the whole thing as a live webcast at 7 pm Brit time, or about noon—not exactly sure—here in the midwest. They'll go live several hours earlier.