Last: September 2003
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October 30, 2003
w00t: Etcon 2004
So life appears to be very up and down at the moment.
Today: saw the final film in the Cremaster cycle - Cremaster 3 - and it totally filled my brain with experiences. A refreshing three hour jolt to the system. Dinner of burnt ends and baby-back ribs at Bodeans, one of the best (only?) BBQ houses in London (I'm trying to get my team at work to go along for their Festival of Pork). Late night stroll through Trafalgar Square; quite special at night, a few people, no pigeons, fountains lit and in full flow. Threads on BBC4.
And one of my talks for Etcon has been accepted, after initial rejection - "35 ways to find your location" - I give a quizzical look at Rael, and be thankful I didn't lay off my dancing girls and indoor fireworks. I'm the last talk in the conference, so I need all the gimmicks I can get! I guarantee that if you use places or location in your apps, for real geography or context, you'll find the talk useful, and maybe even enlightening. If you don't use location for anything, come along and see what you're missing!
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October 26, 2003
art 2
Not much to say or think at the moment; a few personal issues to work out. I'm papering over the cracks in my existence (and therefore this weblog) with a few more art exhibitions.
The Cremaster Cycle first - Matthew Barney's 5 films are being shown at the Other cinema in London. I saw 1 & 2 (the Busby Berkley one and the rodeo one) yesterday, and will see 4 & 5 (the Isle of Man one and the opera one) tonight, and 3 on Wednesday. They're visually stunning, incredibly weird (I couldn't possibly begin to say what it all means), and whilst slow, keep your attention. Reminds me slightly of Koyaanisquatsi....... if filmed entirely on location in the 7th level of Hell, directed by Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch, with unlimited Vaseline, satyrs, and Manolo Blahnik shoes. In 5 parallel universes, this is daytime television, their soap operas. A good swap, on their worlds they pile into arthouse cinemas to watch Richard and Judy.
Next to Bill Viola at the National Gallery. I'm a kind of fan of Viola's work, after stumbling on a huge exhibition in Frankfurt years ago. One of the pieces is reprised here: The Crossing. Most of the other pieces here are much smaller, and much slower. There were far too many people in the exhibition to be able to do any of the art justice (including a logjam in the Crossing room) - this seems to be a growing trend. Several exhibitions at Tate Britain have been spoilt this way, and the National in particular seem to have no clue how to properly corral people. I'm going to go back some time and try to give the (slightly monotonous) art another go. Personally I think the installation at Tate Modern is better.
Finally the two new exhibitions at Tate Modern: Sigmar Polke and Common Wealth.
Sigmar Polke: History of Everything is a jaunty run through his recent work, and it's quite unexpected (earlier works exhibited elsewhere in Tate Modern were uninspiring). There's a nice mix of materials, and some real depth that transcends the pop nature of the photocopied newsprint that resonates throughout the exhibition.
Common Wealth comes with key words: exchange, communication, interactivity, games and play. It's a group show with 5 artists from Europe and South America - and yes, there are resonances of Utopia Station from the Venice Biennale. Is it high art? Who knows, it's a lot of fun, slightly loud (as loud as British galleries get), interactive in the good sense of things to do rather than crappy inexplicable computer displays (the map you get as a guide has symbols for "You may participate" and "You may not participate")... Whereas the Weather Project suffered from sheer weight of people today, this exhibition needs many bodies and a few hyperactive 5 year olds to really spark.
It's a pity I missed the two study days: Land Mark (basically political psychogeography) and Diffusion (on collaborative practice in contemporary art). There is, however, a slightly related talk at the RCA tomorrow (Mon 27th), entitled "Interpreting Anthropogeomorphology". I have no idea what this means, but it sounds fantastic. There's also an unrelated photography day at Tate Modern soon called "The Joy of Things".
Also, went round Saved! at the Hayward again on Friday with my mum - it's still fantastic, there's so much good stuff to see, and well worth a trip (especially if the strategically placed guards aren't there).
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October 18, 2003
art
The start of a few interesting openings around London.
Tate Modern's Turbine Hall has reopened featuring Eliasson's Weather Project.
It is good, but doesn't quite excite the apocolyptic gushing offered by the Guardian (and also on the Late Review last night). The piece works well as you enter, until the bridge. As you get closer, it seems more mundane. The clouds are a very thin smog - more interesting when observed than when inside. The ceiling is interesting; the Turbine Hall feels happier at double height. The edges of the mirrored panels shatter the illusion, though, of both the height and the sun.
Typically, give people a sun and they sunbathe.
I think the piece would be more interesting if continually open, a 24 hour sun, a perpetual dusk: more resonance if the sun wasn't shining so brightly itself in London. I walked past late last night, and the brief glimpse you can get when shuttered showed the sun still shining...
Yesterday I got the opportunity to have a preview of the new Hayward Gallery, and the Saved! exhibition (open to the public from the 23rd).
It's fantastic. I have always thought the Hayward to be probably the greatest gallery in London - the kind of art I like works well with the architecture (exhibitions of small paintings or prints don't, with too many people an inch away from the work), and curatorship for the past 5 years has been of exceptional standard.
Disclaimer: I love the South Bank architecture. The lit-up National Theatre at night, and the walkways of the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Hayward Gallery are stunning examples of late 20th century buildings (one of my beefs, the river entrance to the Festival Hall, is being addressed; my other, the closure of the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, which could be a balmy room garden, isn't).
The Hayward has been slightly softened by the new pavillion and entrance. The workmanlike double-height box is, well, forgettable, and I feel the upstairs space is a bit lost. The Dan Graham pavillion, on the other hand, is wonderful. I wasn't expecting much, but the potential mirrored vista is stunning. You get reflections from far up and down the river, a great opened-up view down to the Tate Modern, passersby and buses from Waterloo Bridge, and you can look up, and still see the building you're part of. It in some ways celebrate the old building, rather than trying to hide it.
A few caveats - the doors to get outside the pavillion were locked, which was a real shame, and I'd like to see a bit more seating, inside and out, as it is definitely a place to sit and contemplate. The cafe has been moved to the ground floor, which means that you can't get a coffee part way through the exhibition, and you can't sit and sip watching London go by. Worst of all, it's become a Starbucks (supposedly a bespoke one, as it sells wine).
So, to the exhibition. Firstly, I'm really happy. The galleries haven't been altered at all. People always complain about its quirks, like the ramp, or the outdoor courts, but I've seen several shows use them to their full potential. The walls in this exhibition are painted gold, silver and bronze, and I have to say the works really sing (and the curators seemed to be really happy with it too). I've never seen paintings look so expressive. The design has been created by Piers Gough of CZWG Architects.
It's an odd mixture of works that the Art Fund has helped various museums and galleries buy. It takes a loose definition of art, with a lot of paintings, prints and photographs, but with pieces of ethnography, design, and historical interest. I'm not a particular fan of large swathes of old paintings, and it helps breaking them up with other interesting pieces, often related to the time or setting of nearby works.
The organisation is, errr, bold. Items are grouped in galleries by the period in which they were bought with the help of the Art Fund over the last 100 years (all the tags show how much the works were bought for too). What is interesting is that this has allowed the curators to bring together works based on similar themes, and put them next to each other. Pieces have come from 74 different collections - you are unlikely ever to see something from the Tate hanging next to something from National Gallery hanging next to something from the V&A.
As for the pieces themselves? It's a greatest hits of a wide variety of styles. Even the most hardened art hater should find something to pique their interest. I have an unfortunate feeling this is going to be very busy, but it is wholehartedly worth a trip.
A quick (now not) last chance to see - Video Acts at the ICA is a great exhibition of 'single-channel video works', mainly from the 60s and 70s. A great historical grounder to, say, the Viola and Neuman rooms at Tate Modern (and to link to the Hayward - the Dan Graham videos are really interesting). Exhibition has been extended to the 9th November.
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October 16, 2003
how maps work
Before lambasting TfL's maps any more, I thought I should try and get a grounding in cartography (so I can at least use long words when smacking them down). I've picked the book How Maps Work by Alan M. MacEachren.
Now, I'm only ten or so pages in, so I can't give any great commentary yet, but I'm really liking the cut of its jib. Cartography seems to have some parallels with HCI, and its modern twist, interaction design. Both disciplines are interested in how information is disseminated, passed, parsed and used, and this book takes a cognitive approach to understanding. It doesn't stop at when the information is understood, but is interested in how that information will be used, for what purpose, and under what conditions (and then taking that learning and changing the design accordingly). I think I'm going to learn a lot from the book that I can use straight away in my work. Also impressive, on a quick flick though, is that the diagrams remind me of Designing Visual Interfaces, taking from first principles how people see and what people can understand.
Cartographers seem to have some similar problems to interaction designers, too. Cartography is the intersection of art, craft and science, like interaction design. There are factions that think it is one, or the other, but, to me, it is high-craftsmanship, using scientific learnings to create art.
HCI is the same. Can you always prove what is right? Should you always have to prove what is right? I know interaction designers are often dismissed as just having "another opinion" on how things should work, when in reality designers - at least good designers - spend every waking moment deconstructing experiences, working out why things work, trying things out, failing, learning, and applying this knowledge, and expertise, to the problems at hand. I shouldn't have to justify or test every design decision, but similarly I shouldn't dismiss any design criticism without proper thought and evaluation.
A few interesting links:
The Cartographic Congress, which probably spurred my interest in maps
The Design Group of the British Cartographic Society - "a gathering of slightly anarchistic cartographers, academics, software gurus and interested citizens who not only appreciate cartographic design, but also enjoy changing the misconceptions cartography has about itself."
A discussion about how to learn to be a cartographer, turning into an argument regarding who exactly should call themselves a cartographer
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October 13, 2003
Victorian smartmobs
One of the books I'm reading at the moment is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay. It's a riproaring rollercoaster through many strange human afflictions, including the South Sea bubble (analagous to the .com bubble), tulipomania, prophecies, magnetisers, the crusades, 'influence of politics and religion on the hair and beard', haunted houses, and slow poisoners.
My favourite chapter is 'popular follies of great cities'.
"The popular humours of a great city are a never-failing source of amusement to the man whose sympathies are hospitable enough to embrace all his kind, and who, refined though he may be himself, will not sneer at the humble wit or grotesque peculiarities of the boozing mechanic, the squalid beggar, the vicious urchin, and all the motley group of the idle, the reckless, and the imitative that swarm in the alleys and broadways of a metropolis."
The particular folly mentioned is that of popular slang; phrases that "spring up suddenly, no one knows exactly in what spot, and pervade the whole population in a few hours, no one knows how". I've never really thought of the origins of such phrases that catch. The first examined is the monosyllable Quoz, "but, like all other earthly things, Quoz had its season, and passed away as suddenly as it arose, never again to be the pet and the idol of the populace".
So memes have always been around, in physicality, cutting through class and kin. I posit that smartmobs are the Quoz of the Internet, after other popular catchmemes of hamsters dancing and moustahioed Russian gentlemen. Their time is past, the phrase used more in jest than in reality. The Internet is just another city, in another time.
To continue the purility, my favourites are "What a shocking bad hat!" and "Does your mother know you're out?". Feel free to use at every opportunity today.
Being written in 1841, Extraordinary Popular Delusions is available from Project Gutenberg in three volumes. However, for a measly three English pounds, you can get (most of) the three bound in finest paperback for your perusal from ye olde Internete Bookmerchant.
"Such are a few of the peculiarities of the London multitude, when no riot, no execution, no murder, no balloon, disturbs the even current of their thoughts. These are the whimseys of the mass - the harmless follies by which they unconsciously endeavour to lighten the load of care which presses upon their existence."
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October 06, 2003
Bus spider map with Tube lines et al
To continue the early autumnal attempt to improve the information design of London public transport, here I present a badly drawn version of a possible improvement.
Simply, to start people thinking about integrated public transport, and multi-modal journeys, you need to start behaving as if the different modes are actually integrated.
The first step is integrated transport maps. There have been a few "Continuing your journey" handouts, but the majority of maps available all concentrate on a single mode.
An example:
include tube, rail, and river lines on bus spider maps
I've quickly drawn the Circle and District lines on part of the spider map for Blackfriars. I'll admit I cheated slightly for speed; cutting off Thameslink and the north-east curve of the Circle line - I'm not being paid to do this ;)
Old:
New:
Click here for a larger version
The TfL website, all the comms, posters and maps are manifestations of a company that seems to have strong divisions between the departments. To get people thinking integrated, you have to act integrated too: the journey planner and maps sections are a glimmer of hope.
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October 03, 2003
spoiling it for everyone
As I sat down to write this, I found a post by Clay, probably expressing these themes far better than me. Like him, I've got a gut feel of despondency - and for me it's not just about email.
I found a love for newsgroups and mailing lists pretty much as soon as I got "proper" Internet access, at University: October 1995. Seemingly my affair with Usenet tailed off in Feburary 2002, with a few sporadic sojourns to old haunts since. I'd witnessed many good, friendly, useful groups go the way of all others, swamped by spam, binaries and every kind of freak. I even became a voted-in moderator for a group - however the group became mainly meta, talking about fairness, voting methods and moderation. The new faces dried up or were scared away, attrition became faster, and the group (for me anyway) died.
It's a real shame - many newsgroups were really useful for people, an obvious door to enter, and meet people that have gone through the same things as you. I owe an awful lot to newsgroups, maybe even my life, so I do have an affinity. Stopping reading and participating in Usenet was a real wrench for me.
Is the same happening with email? Well, you can't trust official messages as more - too many subject lines such as "account problems" or "shipping notification". Spammers are getting smarter, and subjects and authors are getting so close to something that may be real, and really interest me, even with my natural slippery untrusting coating, that I've been tricked into clicking on a few recently. Of course, I make sure my email program doesn't do anything stupid, like retrieving images or running any kind of script. But I still feel gutted. I can't tell real email from spam anymore.
Personal email is no better. "hello", "hi", "an idea", "proposal", "thanks!" get junked, Bayesian filters set to kill. I'm not sure if it's just me, that has a large amount of mailing lists and real, asked-for commercial messages, but spam filters of any sort just don't seem effective anymore. For several years, I've wondered why spammers were so stupid: now they're not, and all kinds of real email get washed out with the detritus of my mailbox.
Furthermore, when sending email, I have no idea if it will ever be read, whether it will even get to the ISP of my recipient, let alone their account, and a mailbox they actually read. Legislation doesn't work. Filtering doesn't work. Firefighting doesn't work. When ISPs give up, I'm left wondering where this is leading. I've always been a great email advocate, but my work email sporadically doesn't work, my various personal addresses may work at best. The psychological benefit of reliability has been lost.
Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. One of the successors of newsgroups and mailing lists, the web board or group, is under attack too. Not neccessarily spammers, but it's very easy for a single person, or small group, to cause havoc. Small boards may just shut up shop, large commercial platforms decide it's not worth the effort anymore.
What next? Weblog comments. Several sites are considering shutting down their comment functionality. The floodgates are open. Some people think that it should all be turned to trackbacks - people posting comments on their own weblog, and referencing the original. They are not the answer - would I have to create another weblog to post comments? (I have a main weblog, and a link list, and comments would look strange in either). What is unsightly for me is impossible for others: creating a weblog is a high hurdle for just commenting on a post. Understanding trackbacks is even higher.
This in turn causes skewed results for aggregation services - daypop and blogdex have both suffered from commercial spam via magnitude of links.
More realities - Google is compromised. As I have mentioned before, people creating spider's webs of terms and links can blast a topic from the top 50. Search for any kind of product, from hotels to DVD players, and rather than reviews, you get hundreds of links to affiliate pages. Small pieces loosely joined; distributed promise of profit cause infrastructure meltdown.
We're not quite done. P2P systems have mislabelled, bad quality songs and files, part on purpose (from RIAA et al) to braindead helpful types, ripping music so it fits on floppy disks. For something so distributed, social engineering means that poison files spread quickly.
Where does that leave us? I hope it's not in hinternets, or gated communities. The open Internet, the easily searchable Internet, the non-commercial Internet, is an amazing thing, something to benefit everyone. Hiding away, locking down, is as bad as non-existance. It used to be you, your computer, and a direct dial up connection to the Internet. Now, any access requires the building of firewalls, the constant maintenance of every OS, every user to be a sysadmin. Firefighting is too little too late; fires are occurring in most PCs without the current knowledge of their users.
It could even kill the next big thing, pervasive, always-on, mobile access. SMS spam is growing, but whilst there is a cost associated, it's going to be curtailed. Many of the apps and services I'm working on need peer-to-peer communication, sharing, talking to each other, trusting each other. Nefarious types are already potentially finding holes.
So, what are the rays of hope? What can make me see an open future? I'd be grateful for any comments, anything that makes you think the future of the Internet isn't quite as bleak a picture as I've just painted.
