Everyone’s an actor now, creating a great number of what Jyri Engeström calls Social Objects on the way. Maybe even TV shows like Big Brother were an early sign of that, in the way that they turned the private (although it is a scripted private) into a form of entertainment. Consequentially, according to psychiatrists in Montréal, there’s now what they call the Truman Show Disorder, which has people believe they actually are actors in a script.

Agreed, just enter your del.icio.us username, and (given that you’ve dutifully tagged your bookmarks) Wordle creates an accurate map of your head.

Linda and I will be talking about Export to World at this year’s reboot in Copenhagen. Wooo, looking forward to meet everyone! Probably happening on Thursday, best watch the schedule of day 1.

Update: it’s at 19h in the small hall, that’s the first evening-session after dinner.

(Best thing are the comments, like “Isn’t asking art students about money a little like asking eunuchs about sex?“)

This BMW is more interesting than any vehicle design I’ve seen in a million years. Imagine being able to change the physical appearance of something expressive on the fly. Long part of the discourse in architecture and wearables, this really convincing and finished thing seems to be coming from a somewhat unexpected direction. Best in video. (via Wired)

News from an optimistic future, curiously plausible with sunny Sunday afternoon, Jonathan Richman and Yo La Tengo playing. (Via BB)

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)

iTunes, as an example, basically mirrors a physical record collection which is naturally limited by factors like storage space and money. The notion of the collection however, also implies something else, which is really important with music as a personality vehicle. A collection reflects its owner’s taste and thus serves to distinguish him or her from others, something that usually comes into full effect in puberty and, at least for me, although less strongly, has functioned like that ever since. So, with iTunes, that paradigm is still intact, it even gets extended by people browsing each others iPods on the go and, probably most importantly, constantly exchanging digital files of songs they love.

If you look at the notion of a server-based everything always available-paradigm now, there’s a problem, because, at least in the case of Spotify which even though it works wonderfully, is still lacking any true collection building-features and/or social exchange. These are things that are probably relatively trivial to implement, but they need to be considered. Last.fm, who have recently announced a future business model that is also largely cloud-based, originally came from a completely different corner, because they started with the social aspects. Only now they are including actual playback possibilities, at least for complete songs. As a result of that, the networking aspects of their site are extensive and recognize the social function of music well beyond anything else, with personal data that often reaches back tens of thousands of songs, event attendance and not always successful taste-matching. Presently, they seem to be in a much better position, because if they give their uses access to everything, the framework for showing off, liking, hating, and having a crush on someone’s musical taste will already be in place.

And, I can’t forget to mention Soundcloud here, the lovely people who introduced me to Spotify in the first place on some afternoon in Berlin. Their approach is much more low-level and allows you to get in touch with the music and the musicians on a post-and-comment basis, almost like Flickr for music. They take the social aspect even further, towards interaction, and I’m really curious how that will shine.

In our technological culture, there’s currently a strong movement towards an amateur or do-it-yourself approach. With people hacking all kinds of devices and processes, biology and medicine–eventually life itself–is no exception.

In recent developments, we have seen cancer-patients effectively conducting self-experiments using a drug called DCA after Canadian researchers and especially a New Scientist-article had generated a huge amount of interest. One step further, projects like OpenWetWare provide frameworks for open research, enabling people outside of institutions to participate in research and application of science, especially genetics and synthetic biology. Notions which might eventually lead to a future as scientists like Freeman Dyson suggest–where “domesticated biotechnology [that] once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures”.

What would a near-future scenario in which people have the means and skills to engage with their own illnesses on an experimental level look like? Or–more provocative perhaps–one where a collapsing public health system is encouraging patients to do so, even providing the frameworks and the tools.

It currently appears that there’s two steps to it: firstly, there’s the home molecular genetics side, where patients might follow recipes they find on the web to reproduce and use zero-day research as it happens. They would isolate parts from a certain organism’s DNA and insert it into something else to produce the desired result, which has to be something that can be ingested or injected. I believe this would be more or less possible today since 2006 I participated in a workshop with Beatriz da Costa, Christopher Kim and scientist Tau-Mu Yi in which we genetically modified yeast (pictured above) using techniques that could be followed be practically anyone.

The second step is a bit further fetched, but quite interesting in terms of a scenario. It would have patients actually engaging in research, becoming active producers and contributors of information while they try to isolate information from organisms. Things like Craig Venter’s voyage on which they sampled millions of new genes come to mind. There might be a new kind of tourism in which patients go ventering, or bioprospecting, after they’ve heard that there’s animals or plants in a remote part of the world that have a certain ability which might help them cure their illness. Whole colonies of amateur scientists in areas with great biodiversity might be imaginable, half lab, half hospital.