Miner, Bronc Rider, Friend

I went to the thrift store the other day to pick up a baking pan. While I was there I decided to get an inexpensive refill on Louis L’Amour paperbacks. At 65 cents a piece, these little books are meant to be consumed by the stack, but I am really enjoying these low budget Westerns.

After reading Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and a review of Pynchon’s new book in the New Yorker (and another review in The Stranger) I get the feeling that noir is back to being a stylish repository for real intellect. (Whoo!)

Seriously, from the review it sounded like Pynchon (Pynchon!) has written a novel that’s like The Long Goodbye, The Big Lebowski, and a little Easton Ellis (the west coast Ellis) all rolled into one. I’m pretty excited to read it.

Maybe the Western has already been played, but somehow I see it making a similar stand. There are characters, tropes, and story lines which could play nicely when modernized. (I wish the guy who made Brick would make a Western…) And I wonder, if I decided to make a building that was in the style of one of these Louis L’Amour books, what it might look like.

Filed under: architecture, books

The Other Side

I’ve been working on more of these Gilgamesh things. I thought before I would print them, I could publish them online somewheres. But it would be nice to have something more artsy (ahem) than a photo gallery.

Luckily, I found this great little AS3 library for making “books” with flex.

Here’s one book I made with my thesis (5mb…wait for it) warts and all!

It’s pretty depressing to see how many mistakes I’ve made… archived forever in MIT’s stacks. Double ugz.

Filed under: art, books, personal, projects, thesis

Auto Raves

Wikipedia: Cover of Gibson's Neuromancer

In a recent conversation, Johnny Lee mentioned (and I think he was referring to Desnee Tan’s work) that sensors could be all over the place and still not give us all the information we need. For example, we could have a camera in our car but it might be hard to recognize with computer vision an “accident” ahead. But if we placed sensors on someone’s body we might be able to record their heartrate or adrenaline as they “sensed” the accident ahead. We could sense of lot of information through the body.

The first thing I thought of in the back of my mind was Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Billed “Artificial Artifical Intelligence”, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk basically provides an interface and market for people to divide computationally complex tasks into small Human Intelligence Tasks. For example, if you come up with a question that fits a given statement, you’ll get $0.03.  Spammers have used this service to bypass the “test” to see you’re a real person on blogs and forums.

But one big problem with Turk is that the HIT’s generally require conscious effort, which is slow and time-consuming for both Workers and Requestors…  I think you see where I’m going here.

People hooked up to sensors could “automatically” be turked, selling data gathered subconsciously (thanks for the link T). For example, I want to do a quick test of a new ad campaign. I flash the ad up to some Workers. They just look at it for a second. I gather bio-feedback. And we’re done! They get some pennies in their accounts. I get results instantaneously.

The whole thing feels sorta Neuromancer-like, which means it’s probably going to happen.

Filed under: books, culture, programming, technology

Caps Off to David Foster Wallace

I have been thinking about this part of Wallace’s Infinite Jest so gosh darn often these days, that I thought I’d literally rewrite part of it here– just give myself a fresher memory to pull from. Here’s the beginning. Copied verbatim. (DFW, you are sadly missed. There’s one less genius in the world.)

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WHY- THOUGH IN THE EARLY DAYS OF INTERLACE’S INTERNETTED TELEPUTERS THAT OPERATED OFF LARGELY THE SAME FIBER-DIGITAL GRID AS THE PHONE COMPANIES, THE ADVENT OF VIDEO-TELEPHONING (A.K.A. ‘VIDEOPHONY’) ENJOYED AN INTERVAL OF HUGE CONSUMER POPULARITY- CALLERS THRILLED AT THE IDEA OF PHONE-INTERFACING BOTH AURALLY AND FACIALLY (THE LITTLE FIRST-GENERATION PHONE-VIDEO CAMERAS BEING TOO CRUDE AND NARROW-APERTURED FOR ANYTHING MUCH MORE THAT FACIAL CLOSE-UPS) ON FIRST-GENERATION TELEPUTERS THAT AT THAT TIME WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HIGH-TECH TV SETS, THOUGH OF COURSE THAT HAD THAT LITTLE ‘INTELLIGENT-AGENT’ HOMUNCULAR ICON THAT WOULD APPEAR AT THE LOWER-RIGHT OF A BROADCAST/CABLE PROGRAM AND TELL YOU THE TIME AND TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE OR REMIND YOU TO TAKE YOUR BLOOD-PRESSURE MEDICATION OR ALERT YOU TO A PARTICULARLY COMPELLING ENTERTAINMENT-OPTION NOW COMING UP ON CHANNEL LIKE 491 OR SOMETHING, OR OF COURSE NOW ALERTING YOU TO AN INCOMING VIDEO-PHONE CALL AND THEN TAP-DANCING WITH A LITTLE INCONIC STRAW BOATER AND CANE JUST UNDER A MENU OF POSSIBLE OPTIONS FOR RESPONSE, AND CALLERS DID LOVE THEIR LITTLE HOMUNCULAR ICONS- BUT WHY, WITHIN LIKE 16 MONTHS OR 5 SALES QUARTERS, THE TUMESCENT DEMAND CURVE FOR ‘VIDEOPHONY’ SUDDENLY COLLAPSED LIKE A KICKED TENT, SO THAT BY THE YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADILT UNDERGARMENT, FEWER THAN 10% OF ALL PRIVATE TELEPHONE COMMUNICATIONS UTILIZED ANY VIDEO-IMAGE-FIBER DATA-TRANSFERS OR COINCIDENT PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, THE AVERAGE U.S. PHONE-USER DECIDING THAT S/HE ACTUALLY PREFERRED THE RETROGRADE OLD LOW-TECH BELL-ERA VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONIC INTERFACE AFTER ALL, A PREFERENTIAL ABOUT-FACE THAT COST A GOOD MANY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-TELEPHONY-RELATED ENTREPRENEURS THEIR SHIRTS, PLUS DESTABILIZING TWO HIGHLY RESPECTED MUTUAL FUNDS THAT HAD GROUND-FLOORED HEAVILY IN VIDEO-PHONE TECHNOLOGY, AND VERY NEARLY WIPING OUT THE MARYLAND STATE EMPLOYEES’ RETIREMENT SYSTEM’S FREDDIE-MAC FUND, A FUND WHOSE ADMINISTRATOR’S MISTRESS’S BROTHER HAD BEEN AN ALMOST MANIACALLY PRECIPITANT VIDEO-PHONE-TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEUR…AND BUT SO WHY THE ABRUPT CONSUMER RETREAT BACK TO GOOD OLD VOICE-ONLY TELEPHONY?

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the micro-economics of consumer high-tech.

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You’ll have to grab the book (or borrow it from a friend, as I did) to read the rest.

It’s worth it!

Filed under: books, technology

Count Your Loaves

Got back from Cambridge earlier this week. It was a bit of a whirlwind; I wish I could have stayed longer there were people I wished I could see and people who I saw who I did not spend enough time with.

Anyway, I’m up late and sleepless. I enjoyed making those posters so much before that I thought I would give myself a little exercise. 2 hours + quotes (taken from the Epic of Gilgamesh).

Great words, I just gave them a font. (Close ups are here.)

Filed under: art, books, projects

Pears, Ploughman

In a fit of binge reading, I finished Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin in a delirious 24 hour period. It was good, much better than Rainbows End.

Anyone who enjoyed Ender’s Game would probably enjoy book too. I’m reading the sequel now (Axis) and, like Speaker for the Dead, it’s pretty enjoyable but not of the same caliber.

Spin starts with an event. One night the stars and moon “go out”. In the morning the sun rises, but it’s not the sun. It’s a flat disc that radiates the same heat and moves at the same speed, but it isn’t the sun. Earth finds itself trapped in a strange membrane that mimics the usual conditions, like a giant terrarium, with one critical difference. Inside the membrane time passes normally. Outside the membrane time is passing at an alarming fast rate, years per second. Our solar system will end in 50 years: the real sun will nova and engulf the Earth. Who did this and why? (Some of these questions will be answered by Martian Pharmaceuticals.)

This is isn’t Steinbeck, but if you like science fiction it’s a really fun read.

Filed under: books

Wearables and Usability I.V

Aside: How did Romans do decimal points? (bars and commas? Maybe that’s why the empire fell…)

I just finished reading this graphic novel called Tekkon Kinkreet last night and I want to post that instead of usability. So here’s my beef with “usability”.

It’s a natural part of the design process to question assumptions and even break rules. Far too often I see usability clamping down on a design long before it’s anything interesting to make usable. Many years ago, my former boss, Steve Gano, surprised me in a discussion we were having about how to visualize some scientific data in a flash interactive. I called up some of Tufte’s rules and he responded by handing me a stack of books with diagrams, graphs, maps, and visualizations that didn’t fit Tufte’s model, but were beautiful and legible all the same.

“Usability” is often treated as if it’s an absolute concept, a certain UI is inherently more usable than another. But in fact usability is based on a number of subjective and relative factors. People constantly come up with new ways to use things and new things to use.

Anyhoo, I finished Tekkon Kinkreet last night and I enjoyed it a lot.

The book is a loose coming-of age story of two street kids named “Black” and “White”. Black is slowly becoming an angst-y teenager prone to outbursts, moroseness and violence. And White is a prototypical giddy Japanese kid, whimsical, hopeful, and also prone to violence. They live in a carnival city populated with garbage, bums, yakuza, and corporate sleezebags. And it’s all drawn in a very beautiful artoonist style.

The story itself is fairly simple, but it manages to avoid being juvenile, a problem that most graphic novels never solve. (Another solution might be to relish puerility. Lost Girls, which I also read over the weekend, does this with aplomb. It was so bad it belonged in MOBA, a distinction which might mean that the book has gone full circle to come round to genius. Anyway, if you ever wanted to see an “erotic” graphic novel that looked like it was drawn by a 12 year old girl with color pencils, you should check it out.)

Back to Tekkon Kinkreet. The storyline is simple, while the characters and drawing style are pretty unusual. The clothes in the novel are odd animal suits or strange leotards. And, although much of the story takes place perched up on roofs or telephone wires, the buildings have an odd circus quality to them, leading one to believe that the setting is sometime in a fantastical, perhaps mildly dystopian, future.

Once I finished the book, I checked to see when it was published: 1994!

Honestly, this is more evidence that comics are one of the last remaining forms of worthwhile pulp and, as such, are strong indicators of trends in visual production (art, movies, etc) in the future. At my last visit to the comic store, I realize that there were lots of books here that if I didn’t buy, I would never see again. With a few exceptions, they aren’t in libraries or online. It’s a pity, really.

Filed under: books, technology

Octodog

I’ve had a glut of sci-fi recently. K and I have been listening to Gibson’s Spook Country on audio book over dinner. So far the most notable thing is how deep the narrators voice is…

Last weekend, I went to Elliot Bay books and basically hung out in the chess, design, and sci-fi sections respectively.

I bought a chess book. Not a famous one. A book for beginners, really.

I couldn’t afford the design book, New Retail, a Phaidon book on new retail spaces. Although, I wanted it and I might have been able to have the company pay for it. It has some pretty futuristic interiors, but with drawings, so I can see how they space plan. This is for work…

Also, I did buy two sci-fi novels. Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table, recommended by T– Since I enjoyed Gun with Occasional Music (a hardboiled noir set in a biogenetic menagerie of a future) so much. I haven’t started this one yet.

And Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End. I had just finished a collection of Nebula winning short stories, poetry, and criticism from 2006. Vinge had this great short story: the poorly titled The Cookie Monsters which told the tale of a few “enslaved” AI’s becoming self aware, but realizing they had no cultural memory except for a single, very limited “cookie”. I really enjoyed it; it had shades of Philip K. Dick’s short fiction. Unfortunately, the book, which I am about a fifth of the way through, hasn’t got it’s hooks into me. Since it’s set in the near future, much like my job, you’d think there’d be something there.

Something about the book is irking me. I hestitate to complain– One, because I’m not sure I could write a better novel. (However, writing a sci-fi story is something I’d really like to try.) And two, because complaint and criticism are blog cliches.

Anyway, I started this posted wanting to complain about two things both can be expressed as single words, and both deserve to be put in quotes since I don’t take them seriously:

“Wearables” and “Usability”

But now, it’s late and I’m falling asleep…

Filed under: books, technology

Hyperbolized Ambiguity

This is my first post from Seattle! I’m in company housing in Kirkland. It’s pretty posh, in a corporate way, but I’m comfortable and adjusting well.

Today’s treat is a little video from Erika Janunger a student at the Konstfack College of Art and Design in Sweden. It’s a little cheesy, nothing you haven’t seen before in music videos etc. But the video is elegantly done and starts to radiate a few ideas.

Before I left and on the plane over here I finished up a few more sci fi books. Blade #1 The Bronze Axe was pretty fun. That and Black Legion of Callisto, both from the 70’s had the same odd (over compensating) take on masculinity… although the idea of the Omnicompetent Man has been in sci fi for quite a while.

I also read a collection of short stories from Frank Herbert. All written in the late fifties and sixties, presumably while he was writing Dune. They all show an obsession with bureaucracy, politics and economics that when done right is like reading an issue of The Economist from the future; and when done wrong is painfully bad. The first story, which is good, is called “The Master Saboteur” and features a multi-bodied, multi-gendered race. It was written in the late sixties… about the same time that Ursula K. le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness was winning the H&N awards.

What’s so exciting to me in these examples is seeing gender-hyperbole being played out in pulp, while gender ambiguity happens in the “mainstream”. (I use quote because this is sci-fi, still.) I realize that this might be news to me only because of my straight male ignorance, but I think it might be evidence of other cultural polarities which can play out in a single genre.

Filed under: architecture, books, technology

Comestibles

First, an addendum: The Van Cliburn YouTube competition is for 35 and older only. Double poo! My praise has been redacted.

As reward that I had been planning for a very long time, K and I had dinner last night at TW Food. It was restaurant week in Boston, but their special menu was so abbreviated, that it seemed a travesty not to hit the seven course Winter Grand Tasting. We tapped that. It was the best meal I’ve had in a looong time. Three hours of delicious food and great wines. Awesome.

In other news, Chessgames.com has updated their viewer. Now, while watching a game (like a movie), you can pause and play out different lines of the game yourself, in the position of Byrne or (sigh) Bobby Fischer. I wish more media experiences incorporated the idea of the “choose your own adventure”.

A long time ago, when I worked at AMNH, we recorded a fly-thru in the known universe with cue-points that allowed a user to get off the “spaceship” and look around. (Not the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made, but an interesting experiment.) While this type of thing may be considered a “non-linear” narrative, the novelty of the experience is actually how the user would construct a very linear pathway through the interactive. In fact, the user wants linearity as much as possible in order to organize and understand what they are seeing.

These days we’re brainstorming a project whose main conceptual twist is an audio and video with two seperate narratives. The video is an idealized world; the audio, the purgatory of a mundane life. The problem with fashioning such a “non-linear” (or duo-linear) narrative is that a viewer automatically tries to rectify the two stories into a single understandable story. For example, showing a radio alarm clock, but playing a ringing bell, makes the viewer think that there’s another alarm clock off-screen; not that the audio might tell another story.

Even as it’s foiling my plans, there’s something fascinating about this desire for single, linear, understandable narratives. According to K, Ricoeur has a crapload to say about Time and Narrative. I guess I have some reading to do. In the meantime, here’s a lovely quote that aptly describes what low brow books I am actually reading.

Then, too, narration includes prophecy in its province to the extent that prophecy is narrative in its fashion.
Paul Ricoeur

Continuing my quest to have some sort of aesthetic position on “the future”, I’ve been reading a fair amount of science fiction. Of course, the reading list includes the Hugo-Nebula award winners, but also some pulpy losers from the 60s and 70s. The fonts, graphics, and yep, even the writing are nuts.

A Hugo award winner, for instance Dune (one of my favorite books– and Lynch films– of all time), has one of the traits of a timeless work of art, namely that it is timeless. Reading it today, it is as fresh and unusual as when I read it 15 years ago.

Sci-fi pulp, on the other hand, is of its time, and has many recognizable idiosyncrasies of the culture, time, and place in which it was written. Perhaps this just creates some sort of hot tranny mess, but maybe, when we’re looking to sample styles, the obviousness of these expressions is an asset. (Prada’s gorgeous new look isn’t about the subtle 70’s.)

Filed under: art, books, fashion, programming