blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

Just finished the first bit of my dissertation. The topic has slightly shifted but gained a bit in focus I guess. I’d highly appreciate feedback and/or suggestions for research materials about future impacts, and especially people to meet on the West Coast in July and August (yes!).

When I started the research for this dissertation, I originally set out to look for ‘grand projects’– endeavors like Herman Kahn redesigning whole African nations, the architects Superstudio re-imagining Manhattan covered with giant structures or Nikola Tesla’s countless patents, many of which could be world changing if only realized. Yet curiously, when asking around for more examples of such projects, by far the most relevant reply came from a friend in California, suggesting a broad range of work, ranging from transhumanism, nanotechnology, computer science to projects like Steward Brand’s Long Now Foundation, a truly grand project which aims to give people a ten-thousand-year scope of history by creating both a clock that works in this cycle and a library. However fantastic this might seem, it is deeply rooted in the alternative culture of the 1960s and 1970s, just like Brand himself. I became increasingly interested in the implied connections and the reasons for which these projects at first glance seemed much more relevant for the present than, for instance, many of the radical architectural visions of the last 30 years such as Superstudio.

Eventually, I came across an essay by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, titled The Californian Ideology, which was initially published in 1995, at the onset of the initial boom of the internet and the so-called New Economy. While fairly ideological itself in demanding “Europeans to assert their own vision of the future”, a call to arms for the dormant Left against what they perceived as a “resurrection of [...] economic liberalism”, Barbrook and Cameron did manage to successfully point out the key paradox of a Californian ideology, should it exist. This paradox essentially consists of the unlikely combination of countercultural notions of fundamental transformation of society and the financial backing that these ideas came to have. This, at least at this scale, arguably unique constellation is what has rendered the rise of information technologies so successful in the last 40 years. Even more so, with the virtual community having long become a main-stream phenomenon in the developed countries and continuing to change how we socialize, work and play, the potential of the industry which evolved around this “hybrid faith”, as Barbrook and Cameron call it, is far from exhausted. In the light of global climate change, in large parts popularized by former New Economy-proponent Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, the ecologist notions which formed the foundation for a Californian ideology in the near future might attract attention and investments at an unprecedented scale.

Yet, what might have an even greater impact in the medium-term future, is the fact that the many of the paradigms and notions associated with information technology have been increasingly prevalent in biology, especially with the seemingly exponentially increasing possibilities of manipulation at the molecular level of living organisms. However, considering its historical origins, this development can only be regarded as consistent if not consequential. In this dissertation I will attempt–through sourcing various materials, as well as hopefully through interviews with some of the past and current protagonists–to historically trace the transformation from American fringe culture into a system of technologies, which in the last decades have experienced enormous “global resonance”. From there on, I will try to extrapolate the present developments into the future, especially in relation to notions and technologies which will be likely to have a far greater effect on our natural environment–and ultimately on ourselves.

(Image: ATS-3, the US communications satellite which took the first photo of Earth in whole–an image which later appeared on the Whole Earth Catalog)

Ute Meta Bauer of MIT’s Visual Arts Program gave a very inspiring lecture at Tesla Salon in Berlin yesterday night. It was interesting to see how her being part of a mostly technology-oriented institution like the MIT changed part of her view on how things work as someone primarily concerned with the arts. Some of her points were very lucid and she had a sense of realism (and interest for understanding the motivations of the so-called enemy, see below) about her which people who are exclusively involved in the art world often lack.

Art, science and economy all rely on fiction – Art pieces, scientific theories and also things like business models really are models about how the world works.

There is no outside anymore – Critical distance is good and important but just as much, it is arguably a thing of the past. Art is a highly evolved market and as such part of the economy and uses the products of science (like the computer you’re currently sitting in front of).

The sets of theoretical tools are virtually identical – Talking about one of her students, Oliver Lutz who used to work at Wall Street for a decade before returning to art, she said that the was amazed to find that corporate economists often refer to the same theorists as artists do for their interpretations of the world.

(Critical) art can only work in cooperation with the sciences anymore. Otherwise it cannot get hold of the complexity of even the current questions.

Interesting also the reaction of those who actually mainly are part of the art world. Lots of criticism for her acceptance of working along researchers who work for the military etc. Fairly militant yet pretty naïve rethorics: “Know where the enemy stands”, “Alliances”, “Working in the heart of darkness” and so on.

Amazing that suddenly all kinds of spatio-temporal re-contextualization applications of photos seem to pop up:

First Google suddenly launch their amazing Street View (note: it’s obviously crazy practical, but what I actually find magical about it are the fuzzy transistions between the shots which obviously were taken at slightly different times and thus turn the whole thing into an enormous narrative. People and cars appear and disappear, light changes etc.) and now Microsoft come up with with Photosynth which, according to Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ presentation at TED allows you to actually recreate space from a multitude of (amateur) photographic perspectives. Kind of reminds me of this sketch from back at EuroLAB as well.

If this really works that well, it’s bound to make possible whole other uses of crowdsourcing and photography, because people would ultimately contribute to re-creating the world in digital when sharing their photos. And, there as well, the part where you see the person climbling the wall is basically creating a filmic, spatial narrative from isolated portions of time. Really struck me.

In other news, the coiner of momentography has been identified.

Just a few notes about the very inspiring Mediamatic Hybrid World workshop a couple days ago. We’ve talked a lot about (and tried out) various location-based and presence services like Twitter and Jaiku and I’m beginning to see what the real benefits of those might be. I’ve actually started to use Jaiku (plugimi.jaiku.com), especially because I was very impressed by the aggregating-features that the service offers. By fetching one’s different traces (ie. RSS-feeds) from blogs, Flickr, etc. and contextualizing it with time and location-information from Plazes, it really succeeds in creating a kind of presence of that friend. The only downside is the fact that you still need a special Nokia phone and a data-flatrate to really use it the way it’s supposed to work. But, that’s probably a question of time and it’s easy to imagine how well it would work on Apples upcoming phone.

What needs to be stressed is the fact that the usual argument against Twitter and its likes (“And then I get messages from random people writing that they sit on the toilet, right?”) has very little validity since it’s actually your friends streams which you subscribe to. And, having an idea what they are presently doing might vastly change interpersonal relationships because the stream of information/awareness (ideally) is near-permanent (or, as permanent as the participants want it to be). Challenging to tell what the further implications of wide-spread use of such technologies will be. Jaiku’s Jyri Engeström argues that it would ultimately lead to greater honesty of such a Hyper-connected generation, bold statement.

What it certainly does is bring people closer together. In roughly two weeks of using it, it made me aware of two friends being around. Maybe we would have bumped into each other anyway, but the awareness that Jaiku created certainly made it more likely to happen. Connected to that are some thoughts from the workshop about how to deal with technology and serendipity. While thinking with Katharina about her project, it occurred to us that one of the things that especially location-based technologies do is to facilitate serendipity by creating awareness of friendly people spatially somewhat near. Question is of course, if we really want that.

One idea that came up was to use a phone (such as the Nokia N95) which would usually display the information on a map with you as the focal point as a kind of compass to visualize it in a more ambient and fuzzy way. When someone friendly appears in one’s vicinity, the phone would start to vibrate and turn until it is pointing in the friend’s direction, much like a compasses’ needle would point north.

This way, it would take some cognitive load off the user (currently, Jaiku-users are pretty focussed on their phone’s screen) but still facilitate serendipity to some extent. Unfortunately I missed the end of the workshop, but, awesomely, Katharina actually managed to build and present a prototype (see video!)

I really liked the Innovationsforum Interaktionsdesign conference a lot, mostly because the selection of speakers and their order (as excellently planned by Boris Müller), revealed various interesting things about the state of technology-related design.

What probably struck me the most, was the fact that one could roughly divide the lectures into two categories by how they dealt with complexity and simplicity. One group (usually the more business-oriented one) regard their products’ users as consumers with one primary need and a somewhat limited individuality. Someone who wants to buy a flight and likes some extra information or someone who is young, female and into fashion and celebrities.

Catering for those simple needs however, is being presented as an incredibly complex and almost impossible task to do, only to be accomplished by an army of professionals which are able to spin a cross-media web around the yearning customer. A notion which peaked in Mike Richter’s pathetic Don’t try this at home-statement. To emphasize on this, many presentations also featured some kind of diagram which would be presented with this we can’t really go into this right now but this is highly sophisticated, you know (and we’re worth your money, client)-attitude.

The other group also had points about this, but in their view as it seemed, the roles of designs and their users were just the other way around. Here, the individual is being presented as a highly complex and often even troubled human being with a life who has a need for simple designs to take some cognitive load off his or her shoulders. Anthony Dunne made some very good points about complicated needs, Bill Moggridge as well and Dennis & Patrick too. Maybe Bruce Sterling in his lecture-performance put it the most clearly with his hilarious juxtaposition of the iBrush (“Now on the wall, it’s Jobs himself!”) and the smart things which know that they haven’t been used in a year and can be asked to sell themselves on eBay to make their owner’s life a bit less complex and put a little more cash on his bank-account.

Of course this also resonates with John Maeda’s ideas about Simplicity in technology, but apart from the question of how to design, I was astonished by how different the weltbild of those designers was – particularly in their regard for users/consumers.

Also see our coverage on WMMNA.