© 2009 Julian. All rights reserved.
Found on this blog by David Sivers. A sketch in 2D of real life as David Sivers reflects on remarks and a drawing done at a talk by Kurt Vonnegut where he is explaining his perspective on why people like … Continue reading
© 2009 Julian. All rights reserved.
“Icky Futures” — a brilliantly distorting collection of corporate visions of the future, packaged in an original BTTF VHS (FTW!) tape. The redoubling ironies here are precious. This arrived in the mail over a week ago and I just now … Continue reading
© 2009 Julian. All rights reserved.
I don’t regularly read Wired, but I will occasionally flip to the “Found” back page which, according to words on the networks, is moving to the inevitable user-supplied content/contest model. In the meantime, our avuncular net BFF bruces found a … Continue reading
© 2009 Julian. All rights reserved.
Running the blog-the-dog-eared-pages algorithm on Bruce Sterling‘s fantastic “Distraction“, I’ve selected these gems. They’re all intriguing speculations about a near future world to be, complete with some insights and implications that trace the now to the then if you think … Continue reading
© 2009 Julian. All rights reserved.
15 Minute browsing limits for the tacky beauty, fashion and narrowcast hobby/sport magazines. 5 minutes for muscles, guns, motorcycles and dirtbikes! Yeah! 3 minutes for the DVD-pinchers prone to the back of the store’s rough-shod top-shelf collection. Urban Scout Nicolas … Continue reading
© 2006 Julian. All rights reserved.
Francois is just freshly back from a trip to India to kick it with that sub-continents introduction of the Aspen Institute — I guess they’re franchising or something.
He recounted (and performed, as evidenced in the photo above!) a parenthetical story that just won’t stop knocking around in my head. In areas where owning a cell phone is not routine — for economic reasons, predominantly — it is not uncommon for a stranger to ask another stranger to borrow their handset to make a call. This happened to Francois on a trip somewhere and he, being a nice guy, agreed and handed over his phone. Only he thought this stranger was going to just go ahead and make a call. Instead the stranger dismantled Francois’ phone — removed the back, spilled the battery out and popped out the SIM card and then popped his own SIM card in there, reassembled the phone and made a bunch of calls in rapid succession, hanging up on each one after the first ring or two.
Two things are going on here.
Local chum and Protohaus boss Eduardo Sciammarella has a piece in Always On called Cell Death 2010: Good-bye, mobile phones; hello, mobile web! captures the general aspirational tenor as well as the “sigh..groan..” ruefulness of many of we who see a great future for mobile and pervasive media but are genuinely puzzled at the oafish way the current mobile media ecology operates. A great quote captures this:
Think about it: Doesn’t your iPod nano look a bit like a phone already? That’s because it’s transitional technology: The memory chips inside don’t need to get bigger; they just need to be Wi-Fi connected to UB. When they are, a mobile music player will become a phone, bypassing the cellphone/MP3 player completely. Don’t ask why your ROKR can’t download songs into iTunes over the ponderous cellular connection; ask why you can’t make a (free) call yet with a nano
Why do I blog this? It points to the future of mobile and pervasive media, content — experiences, really, in a prescient way. Couple this forward thinking with The Internet of Things and you have a map of what the really adventurous Web 2.0 looks like.
I am particularly drawn to the way mobility, motility and proximity-based scenarios might look like, diagrammatically and the new kinds of representational schemas that will arise to support context-smart experience design.
I am also interested in the usage scenarios themselves, of course. The netmagnet project I developed while doing an R&D residency at Eyebeam is a project currently being revived to investigate one operational model for The Internet of Things.
[wikilike_img src=http://static.flickr.com/30/56445433_963bd35026_d.jpg|width=450|align=thumb tcenter|caption=Proximity and Motility Usage Scenarios|url=http://research.techkwondo.com/wiki/WiFi_ArtCache]
[wikilike_img src=http://static.flickr.com/34/69126717_df4bb009c3_d.jpg|width=450|align=thumb tcenter|caption=Motility Network|url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/julianbleecker/69126717/in/photostream/]
[wikilike_img src=http://static.flickr.com/35/69126609_c9830f1cc8_d.jpg|width=313|align=thumb tcenter|caption=Motility Network|url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/julianbleecker/69126609/in/photostream//]
[wikilike_img src=http://static.flickr.com/9/69126658_6702f0e368.jpg|width=450|align=thumb tcenter|caption=Motility Network|url=http://www.flickr.com/photos/julianbleecker/69126658/in/photostream]
Technorati Tags: motility, networked publics, pervasive media, proximity
© 2005 Julian. All rights reserved.
I arrived a couple of hours late for a day-long series of presentations on what the ICT is doing these days.
Flatworld is an environment for training and simulation that uses stage “flats” as projection and display surfaces.
[wikilike_img width=180 | caption=Sgt Blackwell from Flatworld|align=thumb tright|src=http://static.flickr.com/28/59752839_efb709c07f_m.jpg|
url=http://research.techkwondo.com/node/67/play]
I met Sgt. Blackwell, a character that’s being used in these Flatworld environments. Here’s a video of him introducing himself (“..whu-uh”) and one of him explaining the relationship between himself, the military and the entertainment enterprise.
Why do I blog this? It seems that the military industrial light and magic complex theme is riding high in my life as of late. This is another of those meme swells. I have to say that the work isn’t all that fascinating creatively, but that’s to be expected I suppose. It is more of an attempt to integrate the entertainment world’s genetic code into military simulation projects. Actually, that sounds way too one-way. It’s a shared knowledge tangle. A “collective” of knowledge sharing, formally (e.g. money, talent, consultantancy back-and-forth) and informally (e.g. off-handed associations with a game someone’s kid plays). It’s one of [w:Bruno Latour]‘s “Things”, for certain, and a collective as a complex knot of messy entanglements and hybrid associations. (cf From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik — How To Make Things Public
Technorati Tags: augmented reality, military, military industrial light and magic complex, mixed reality, simulation
© 2005 Julian. All rights reserved.
Service Ecologies and The Geospatial Web
Mike Liebhold is here today to talk on the topic of the Geospatial web.
Technorati Tags: geospatial web, locative media, Service Ecology
© 2005 Julian. All rights reserved.
Marc got me thinking about possibly inserting a project into the ISEA2006 Interactive City event. This came up during responses to the talk I gave at the Art Center Nabi Workshop on Urban Play and Locative Media, which I blogged about herein.
Possible projects I thought about are mostly revivals of previous work that didn’t get played out as fully as I would’ve liked. For instance:
WiFiKu which I did for the psy.geo.conflux even in New York City in May of 2004. Perhaps do that and really make a printable beautiful gorgeous map.
The WiFiKu project was a bit of a “war walk” gathering the names of WiFi nodes and turning those into Americanized Haiku. The idea was that neighborhoods would be represented by the WiFiKu formed by the names of their local nodes. Whacky idea, but it was fun for the kinesthetic and “workshop” aspect — I took tours of people around and talked about WiFi usage, about Psychogeographic mapping and so on. It was less about really making a fool-proof map showing where nodes were and whether they were open or not. Instead, I intended to transform the invisible semantic layer hovering in the ether into a representation of the ‘hood.
Ephemera Cache, which is an application for the WiFiBedouin which I also did then, but which I think could be more effective if it were distributed on a large scale during a large event in which there will undoubtedly be lots of WiFi-laptop-toting alpha geeks.
Why do I blog this? I’m trying to think of a way to add to some of the projects I felt I started but maybe thought I had finished while back in New York City. And Marc reminding me about Ephemera Cache, which I often forget about, got me going through the catalog to see what could be remastered, perhaps in a context that would be thick with participants, as I suspect ISEA2006 will be.
Technorati Tags: ISEA2006, locative media, mapping, pervasive media
© 2005 Julian. All rights reserved.
Aram Armstrong mentioned a project he worked on in a Service Design course at Ivrea that involved using a pedometer that would sustain or enliven or otherwise affect an electronic avatar that you could then jack into your computer back at home and it would author a blog entry about how good it was feeling based on movement.
It’s called Piedimonsters.
Piedimonsters are the fun, fitness monsters that help motivate kids be more active. The Piedimonsters service includes a physical device carried on the person (a virtual pet pedometer), a website which takes the data from the device and provides both a qualitative and quantitative activity report, as well as neighborhood hubs for organizing local group activities.
Why do I blog this? I like the idea of a pervasive avatar especially one that’s tangibly and kinesthetically linked to your activity seems like a promising design. And the idea of auto-blogging is kind of brilliant, in a way. I mean, it’s a step toward the auto food/exercise diary.
Technorati Tags: authoring, electronic games, fitness, kinesthetic media, pervasive electronic games, play, blogjects, urban play, urban space