The Present as Utopia:

This will be an experiment in, instead of extrapolating the present into the future, looking at the past and imagining slightly twisted presents that resulted from them. Initially looking at tiny changes, small narratives will find systems, objects, and behaviors that are different but live in a today. They might reflect on the way that things are right now, maybe showing working alternatives and point at the political implications of technology, that things go the way they go because someone decides so.

Starting points: Think about the scale that is to be looked at (read Mike Davis’ City of Quartz since Los Angeles is such a good example), maybe make timelines, look at developments to tweak, create narratives and prototypes and bring them alive.

The Ordinary Future:

Forget about flying cars and five-assed monkeys. The future will feel as normal as the present does. There will be a dash of excitement here and there, but genetic modification and many associated things will not even be noticed anymore. Re-interpreting Arthur C. Clarke on the use of biotechnology: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic nature.’ If the engineering-style approach of synthetic biology becomes a reality, it might be a re-run of the last 40 years of computing. Abstraction layers will allow ever greater interaction and importance for what today is the domain of specialists.

Starting points: What applications might arise from the technology and how would they shape things? How do synthetic systems relate to evolutionarily developed ones? What does that say about time and scale of engineered biology (Julian Bleecker’s worry about the different speeds of technology and evolution)? Create sketches and visualize them before the backdrop of ordinary life.

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It’s two subjects to look at, but they share the technique of using the present, one looking back and one looking forward. Is that a good thing? There’s currently some overlapping parts, but I’m confident that they are different enough that the outcomes will be far apart by June. Ideas?

(Both images by Superstudio, who have a criminally short Wikipedia entry.)

More about our (Linda Kostowski’s aka realfakewatches and my) workshop/project at Ars Electronica 2007 – Export to World is a contribution to the Second City event in which lots of empty shops on Linz’s Marienstrasse will be transformed by numerous projects that focus on Second Life and its likes.

The biggest buzz about SL, and aruguably also what attracts many users and especially big corporations to it, is its economy and the fact that you can basically sell everything. Yet, it feels a bit strange that in this “metaverse” the paradigm of physical objects as commodities is being reproduced, or simulated in a way that is almost identical to how the first life works. When the Copybot made its brief appearance in SL, the outcry was enormous since many of the vendors felt that their business was endangered. But, was the copybot not only revealing that the things in SL are actually made of data and thus are susceptible to the same effects that music has been facing ever since songs could be digitalized?

The other funny thing is the actual kind of objects you can buy in SL. There are many people who try out their impressive scripted creations in the sandboxes, but there seem to be many more who just want to go to shops and equip their digital homes with food, couches and toilets. SL in many parts either feels like an infinite shopping mall or a residential area and the question why you would want just that in your second life when you could have anything imaginable hasn’t been really answered if this claims to be the new frontier of our world.

We want to comment on some of those aspects by exporting some items from Linden Labs’ digital environment into the physical world in the form of papercraft-models and see what happens. We bought a range of things for a couple L$ and we will hopefully also be able to help people to export their own items during the festival. However, the process as a whole turned out to be pretty work-intensive, especially with complex objects.

Here’s how it works – initially, you have to grab the actual data from SL. This is done through Michael Frumin’s awesome piece of software called OGLE which in turn plugs into GLIntercept. The combination of those two allows to capture the 3D-data and output it into a format readable by most modelling applications. – The imported scene looks very awkward and is encapsulated into some strange geometry which has to be cut away first. (There’s a vaguely eerie quality about those scenes, like being a ghost in Second Life. I remember that turning off clipping in Quake and leaving the map actually used to give me a similar feeling.) – After cutting free the wanted object, you have to re-texture the object with the images that OGLE also saves along and export it as a whole or its parts, depending on how complex it is. – To actually make papercraft-models, we are using a Japanese software called Pepakura Designer that can unfold three-dimensional models onto sheets of paper. Preparing the unfold can be a bit tricky and needs some massaging which we still are collecting experience in. – The result is a 2D object which is ready to be printed out and glued together to become a 3D object again, this time outside of the computer.

Our first exported object was a free donut and we actually only realized in the process that this is probably one of the most difficult shapes to unfold and glue, but anyway, it’s done. You can see some visual documentation of the process in this set on Flickr or behind the various links above.

Remmelt boxing on the Wii

Two days ago, I tried out the Wii for the very first time. I think it’s really wonderful and I’m happy for Nintendo that their approach seems to have such a great impact. The design of the hardware is just fantastic and the positioning and such works very well as praised on countless blogs already. In terms of games, tennis, bowling and especially boxing are just wonderful and utterly physical experiences. It’s immersive to an extent that it really feels good, not only aesthetically but bodily and this is something new, at least for a mainstream application. It’s astonishing how much the involvement of the body boosts the whole experience, I’ve only had that once before with a Japanese arcade machine where you could dodge when the yakuza were firing at you.

What I probably found the most surprising is that many movements, while actually being just a swivel of the hand and certainly looking pretty moronic, felt right. I used to play tennis a few years ago and the sensation of playing tennis on the Wii actually came relatively close to the real thing. I tried to watch my movements and the result in the games a bit more closely, and most of the time I just seemed to trigger my avatar to hit the ball, so it’s mostly about timing as in most games before as well. Still, the higher involvement of the body lead to a much greater sense of causality, so apparently our Körpergefühl seems to quite effectively fill in the blanks that had existed ever since the simulation of movement on the screen. It’s also probably the first time that I had sore muscles from gaming (if you don’t count the joystick-craziness of the Epyx-games), which also felt kind of healthy.

Soccer in SL

On the other hand, there’s the increasing simulation of physical space in virtual landscapes such as Second Life. Yesterday I was playing soccer and skiing with my friends in SL and that also felt good. I’m really still unsure what to make of this whole thing and/or hype, but the very fact that people build a skiing resort and we meet up there to buy equipment and ski down snowy slopes is rather remarkable. Next up was an actual political demonstration in SL where opponents of French nationalists Front National gathered in front of their SL headquarters to express their unwillingness to accept FN’s presence there. This was even more astonishing since the nationalists in SL all looked a lot like gay Nazis (tight uniforms, broad shoulders, short hair, leather bracelets and dark sunglasses). The demonstration however, was very much unlike a usual gathering would be: while some of the very diverse crowd were en discutant inside the slick office, some were outside generating various objects to increase the load on the server which eventually slowed down and crashed. Will such strategies one day also have an effect on real demonstrations?

Demonstration in SL, me still skiing

So presently, there’s at least two currents: Virtual engages the physical through sensing of movement or location and virtual simulates the physical by creating huge realms in which people are able to create almost anything they imagine (ironically, often without the constraints of the actual physical world). Are these developments part of the same process or are they oppositional? Anyone got thoughts on that? What they do share, though, seems to be the fact that the activities are inherently social.

The Wii opens the box to participation, both spatially as it requires much more space in front of the screen and in terms of skills, thus making it more easily accessible and fun to join in. SL (and WoW to a great extent) are also social games, that rely almost completely on interaction between players. Or as Kevin Slavin pointed out recently: “Since the introduction of the computer, we had been playing alone for 30 years.”. Exciting times – and please, artists, don’t call something interactive unless you’ve tried one of these.

Buttons will be featured at NEXT2006 in Copenhagen, December 1-3. Hope to see you there!

There’s a four-page and a one-page version, the latter being the one that the reviewers accepted for presentation at the conference. Have fun reading and tell me what you think.

The other thing in Boston was Unravel, the SIGGRAPH fashion-show which happened two days earlier. Amanda, who curated it and who was hosting me, asked me whether I could do her a favor. So I did, it was hilarious and I even ended up in the Globe. Thank you for both!

(Photo by Evan Scheele)

Tried almost all of the push-switches at Conrad. I might stick with this one since it’s got a very nice haptic feedback. It’s clearly tangible when it activates/deactivates, so the moment one chooses will be distinct. I also further thought about the physical appearance of the object. There should be a mechanism that activates it, maybe some kind of slider which also protects the button from being pushed unintentionally. It could come as a very small (wooden?) box: the sliding lid exposes the switch and a green LED. Once the switch has been pushed, the LED goes off to signalize that the moment has been ’spent’. There’s a beautiful archive of old cameras at the Eastman House. I might try to refer to aspects of that in construction of the lid or materiality of the object, we’ll see.

Why am I posting this? Don’t worry, I won’t blog every resistor here, but haptics are really crucial with something like that. It has to feel and sound right, I believe. Here’s a little excerpt from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, unfortunately in German:

“So ist auch das einzige, was ich ertragen kann, was ich liebe, was mir vertraut ist, wenn ich photographiert werde, seltsamerweise das Geräusch des Apparats. Für mich ist das eigentliche Organ des Photographen nicht das Auge (es erschreckt mich), sondern der Finger: das, was unmittelbar mit dem Klicken des Auslösers zu tun hat, mit dem metallischen Gleiten der Platten (wenn der Apparat noch damit ausgestattet ist).” (…) “Für mich hat der Klang der Zeit nichts Trauriges: ich liebe die Glocken, die großen wie die kleinen Uhren – und mir fällt ein, daß ursprünglich das photographische Material den Techniken der Kunstschreinerei und der Feinmechanik zugehörig war: die Apparate waren im Grunde Uhren zum Ansehen, und vielleicht vernimmt etwas in mir, das sehr alt ist, im photographischen Apparat noch immer den lebendigen Klang des Holzes.”

Just found this wonderful photo by Josef Koudelka on the very first page of Edward Tufte’s splendid Visual Explanations. It was taken on some certain late August 1968 afternoon during the Prague Spring when Russian tanks brought things to an end. Koudelka wanted to capture/prove that the streets were emptied of protesters at that very moment and helped himself by simply taking a picture of his own wristwatch with the street as visual context (or the other way around, as you like), thus creating a powerful image that uses photography with stunning awareness.