Monster sticky note on cell-phone screen

Last month, when involved in a teaching seminar in France, I ran across this utterly curious scene. It’s basically a cell-phone with a piece of paper that shows a drawing, stuck on the device’s display. The drawing features a sort of animal quickly scribbled.

This is exactly the sort of artifact that I like to find in my peripheral vision. Quick drawings, paper, duct tape and a technological devices: those are the ingredients that generally leads the observer to spot a bottom-up innovation of sort. De Certeau at its best probably. Seeing this, I thought that the user of this device had a specific use for this: perhaps aesthetical (a kid’s present), most likely functional.

Fortunately, the “user” of this phone was close and I had the opportunity to ask her what it meant. She told me it was a reminder. Interestingly, in French, a reminder is called “pense-bête”: literally “a reminder for stupid people” but “bête” not only means “stupid”, it’s also a term employed for “beast”. This user thus created a drawing of a small beast on a piece of paper as way to signify it’s a reminder.

The thought process is clear here: the stick note is put in a convenient place (the phone display) and for both aesthetic/functional reasons, it takes the form of a piece of paper with a quick drawing. It’s also stunning to see how the phone screen is used as surface to put additional information (and subsequently cover up the screen itself!).

Why do I blog this? This is a fascinating example of bottom-up creativity that corresponds to how users create their own personal (and meaningful) personal solutions in everyday life. What is important is that the phone itself supports that very same functionality (reminder/virtual stick note). However, the user preferred the use different material (paper, pen, duct-tape) to do it. This can be seen as a good example of the difference between a feature and its instantiation from the user’s POV. It’s not because the phone has a reminder system that it’s going to be used… simply because the whole system is different and does offer the same level of personalization.

http://betaknowledge.tumblr.com/ as a compilation of weak signals about the future

Btw, I started a tumblr few days ago to accumulate insights, data points and “weak signals” in a very basic/raw way… I use to put that material into delicious but I’m not satisfied with the service anymore.

It’s called beta knowledge and it can be seen as material that can be turned into long posts here on Pasta and Vinegar, in articles/books/reports, or, even better, into design objects.

I’m trying to integrate that into the feedburner RSS feed.

Virilio on “statistical image” and perception #newaesthetic

Read in Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine:

“But by way of conclusion, let us return to the crisis in perceptive faith, to the automation of perception that is threatening our understand- ing. Apart from video optics, the vision machine will also use digital imaging to facilitate recognition of shapes. Note, though, that the synthetic image, as the name implies, is in reality merely a ‘statistical image’ that can only emerge thanks to rapid calculation of the pixels a computer graphics system can display on a screen. In order to decode each individual pixel, the pixels immediately surrounding it must be analysed. [...] As a mode of representation of statistical thought today dominant thanks to data banks, synthetic imagery should soon contribute to the development of this one last mode of reasoning.“

Why do I blog this? As usual, there’s always a French philosopher to refer to something we’re discussing nowadays. Although I’m not necessarily a big fan of Virilio, I’m often fascinated by some insights one can find in his essays. The above quote struck me as interesting with regard to the New Aesthetic meme.

Z/Z/Z/ describing the dimension of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language

Via Daniel Rehn:

Z/Z/Z/ is a project hatched by Daniel Rehn and Sarah Caluag dedicated to “describing the dimension of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language”. This endeavour deploys a custom visualization workflow to break down footage from film, animation and games and reconstitute this source material into stills and animated GIFs using a range of image analysis techniques.
(…)
While the underpinnings of Z/Z/Z/ predate our creative partnership, its dual-mission of research and aesthetic-production mirror the goals of our overall practice. The ability to analytically, quantifiably describe these visualizations while also revelling in their beauty is ideal for us

Why do I blog this? Intriguing approach/objective/purpose. Relevant for an upcoming course.

Robot Mori: a curious assemblage from the Uncanny Valley

Perhaps the weirdest piece of technology I’ve seen recently is this curious assemblage exhibited at Lift in Seoul: it’s called “Robot Mori” and, as described by Advanced Technology Korea:

“Meet Mori, the alter ego of a lonely boy who wants to go out and make friends but is too shy. Mori, on the other hand, isn’t shy at all. He swivels his head, looking around for nearby faces. Once he detects your face, he takes a picture and uploads it to his Flickr page.“

Why do I blog this? The focus on face, and the visual aesthetic produced by the whole device is strikingly intriguing. Definitely, close to the Uncanny Valley… which made me realize that whatever sits in the valley often belong to the New Aesthetic trope. I personally find it fascinating that robots can have this kind of visual appearance and wonder whether some people might get use to that after a while… in the same sense that they got used to moving circle pads as vacuum cleaners.

“Recombinant food”

Reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, I ran across this notion of “recombinant food” (pp. 219-220):

“Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midwestern/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient.
(…)
The recombinant food thing was a declaration of mental bankruptcy in the complexity of modern material culture.“

Why do I blog this? Food made with already processed elements is something I already noticed recently, not just in the US but also in Europe. Last examples that come to mind have been encountered in France: tiramisu or speculoos ice-cream, desserts made of and banana mixed together, snickers-based recipes.

(Picture by the divine dish)

Even though I’m not much of a food expert, I find this intriguing as a way to show how material culture (yes I include food as part of material culture) is in a constant process of hybridization and recombination. It’s particularly interesting that Stephenson use this term coming from chemistry and genetics as it reveals the underlying principles: some basic components (units in Ian Bogost’s perspective on #ooo or “cultural waves” in Basile Zimmermann’s parlance) can be combined… to create something potentially new and original. Which is of course tight to the notion of creolization I already mentioned here.

This kind of phenomenon is spot on what I’m interested in lately as the process that led to this sort of type of food is the key to understand potential futures. I’m currently working on this for an upcoming talk at the Hirshhorn Museum in June.

“you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of “their” works”

Read in Wired 3.05, May 1995 (via):

“Kevin Kelly: If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do?

Brian Eno: I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, This is a good output, reinforce that, or replay it, or feed it back in. I would love to have this machine stand for me. I could program this box to be my particular taste and interest in things.

Kevin Kelly:Why do you want to do that? You have you.
Brian Eno: Yes, I have me. But I want to be able to sell systems for making my music as well as selling pieces of music. In the future, you won’t buy artists’ works; you’ll buy software that makes original pieces of “their” works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box. Or you could buy a Brian Eno box. So then I would need to put in this box a device that represents my taste for choosing pieces.“

Why do I blog this? Well, simply because that’s good quote that partly reflects the discussions about New Aesthetics (and the audio side of it as I mentioned the other day, but I guess it’s applicable to other creative fields… think about architecture and Frank Gehry’s work for instance).

Robot-produced languages as part of #newaesthetic?

As a follow up to my blogpost the other day about New Aesthetic as not-only-visual-but-also-something-else, I kept wondering about other possibilities. Overall, what I find interesting in NA is that algorithms produce new cultural forms… and that it’s not just about visual representations.

One of the cultural form that can produced by robots/algorithms for that matter is certainly language and communication. Researchers in Artificial Intelligence indeed work on that avenue for quite some time and it would be relevant to consider the “language” produced in this context by (ro)bots… and see whether it fits with the New Aesthetic meme.

A good starting point for this is Language Games for Autonomous Robots by Luc Steels:

“s. A language game is a sequence of verbal interactions between two agents situated in a specific environment. Language games both integrate the various activities required for dialogue and ground unknown words or phrases in a specific context, which helps constrain possible meanings. Over the past five years, I have been working with a team to develop and test language games on progressively more sophisticated systems, from relatively simple camera-based systems to humanoid robots. The results of our work show that language games are a useful way to both understand and design human–robot interaction.“

This is done through various experiments such as the “Talking Heads experiment” shown on the following picture. It’s hard to find a video of such work but this one might help to get a sense of what’s happening (it’s a guessing game though).

As shown by Steels in this paper:

“During a three-month period, the agents played close to half a million language games and created a stable core vocabulary of 300 words (they generated thousands of words overall). Our experiment showed not only that the language game approach is useful for implementing grounded dialogues between one human and a robot, but also that the game might be useful as an explanatory model for how language originates“

And this is exactly where you can find what can be part of New Aesthetic: the “language” that emerged from these robot interactions. One of my project as a graduate students in Cognitive Sciences was about that and I remember being fascinated by the work of researchers such as Frederic Kaplan or Bart de Boer. More specifically, the latter investigated emergent phonology, i.e. how iterations of imitation games in a population of agents can led to the emergence of sound systems emerge that look remarkably like human vowel systems. It’s not necessarily the fact that is used to model language evolution that interest me here. Instead, what is strikingly stunning is to see the results of such emergence and what it can produce.

Here’s the process:

“The agents that are used in the computer simulation use vowels to “communicate” with each other. For this purpose, each agent has its own list of vowels. The lists of vowels for each agent are initially empty, and will be filled as the agents engages in interactions with other agents.
(…)
The experiments presented in this work are concerned with the emergence of a coherent and useful phonology in a population of initially empty agents. In order to investigate how this can happen, the agents engage in exchanges of sounds, so-called imitation games, the goal of which is to learn each other’s speech sounds. If necessary, speech sounds are invented, in order to get the communication started, and also in order to introduce more possible sounds in the population.“

The result part of the paper is quite dense and describes the phonemes and vowels produced by the robots.

Why do I blog this? Of course, in this case, the goal is to model natural languages but it would be curious to play with the constraints to see how various sorts of language systems can emerge depending on the model parameters. And this is exactly where the result can be part of a cultural form that can belong to New Aesthetic.

On a different note, the problem, from the collection angle (that is quite important in the NA theme), is that it’s hard to find audio or video pieces that can help us to listen to these languages games. I’ll try to dig into that.

Representing the city as it’s lived: livelihoods

It’s been few days that I’m following the the livehoods.org/ and it’s quite interesting.

The project is defined as follows:

“Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people’s checkin patterns at places across the city, we create a mapping of the different dynamic areas that comprise it. Each Livehood tells a different story of the people and places that shape it.
(…)
The hypothesis underlying our work is that the character of an urban area is defined not just by the the types of places found there, but also by the people who make the area part of their daily routine. To explore this hypothesis, given data from over 18 million foursquarecheck-ins, we introduce a model that groups nearby venues into areas based on patterns in the set of people who check-in to them. By examining patterns in these check-ins, we can learn about the different areas that comprise the city, allowing us to study the social dynamics, structure, and character of cities on a large scale.“

Why do I blog this? Working on a similar topic, I quite enjoy this kind of research work. The idea that social media data can be employed to understand areas as lived by people is fascinating and highly intriguing to test. It’s somehow what one can call a “social map” and we now have more and more data to see how it would look like.

“The Unknown Glitch”

Read in SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums by Steward brand (1972):

Alan Kay: “They had a thing on the PDP-l called ‘The Unknown Glitch’ ["Glitch" - a kink, a less-than-fatal but irritating fuck-up]. They used to program the thing either in direct machine code, direct octal, or in DDT, In the early days it was a paper-tape machine. It was painful to assemble stuff, so they never listed out the programs. The programs and stuff just lived in there, just raw seething octal code. And one of the guys wrote a program called ‘The Unknown Glitch,’ which at random intervals would wake up, print out I AM THE UNKNOWN GLITCH. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, and then it would relocate itself somewhere else in core memory, set a clock interrupt, and go back to sleep. There was no way to find it.“

Why do I blog this? Working on the chapter of a book about game controllers, I am collecting material about Spacewar! and it’s interesting to see how this work parallels other current interests (such as New Aesthetics). I wish I could have seen this sort of glitch.