Social Technolgies Summit - Day 2
Oh no. I’ve turned into one of those people who are on their laptops all the time in conferences. I’m gonna look like such a twat! And the worst thing is…I might succumb to being a twitter nerd, feeling peer pressured to start following people’s tweets!
I started the day trying to decipher the rather complicated programme. After staring at it for about 5 minutes, I realised why – the programme is really badly designed! There are parallel sessions happening throughout the day including workshops but I was unable to decipher is due to the design of the timetable layout. Can you guess why?
I’ve decided to attend presentations in the first half of the day and then to commit myself to a workshop in the afternoon. I have summarised the day in a sentence or two for each event that I attended to give you a flavour of the day. I have written a fuller description of Stowe Boyd’s talk because it was one of the more interesting talks and was well delivered (plus I had the most notes on it).
Keynote Presentation:
Stowe Boyd: Social Tools - The Shape of Future Culture (full review below)
He predicts the rise of the Edglings – a movement away from the centre to the edge of current social location and of mass organisation to one of a rich network of connections. He says, ‘I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections’.
James Marriot: Museum of the Corporation
This talk was a call to arms to depower, de-legitimise and de-centralised corporations who should take responsibility and acknowledge their contribution to our current environmental crisis. We need to de-legitimise the power and position of corporations in our imagination. Corporations should only be allowed to exist in museums, where they can do no harm.
Usman Haque: Real-time Data Environment
His current work on real-time data environment is founded on 3 principles of environment (not the physical but space generated by our existence), platform and relations (relating my environment to your environment). He introduces a sensor network platform Pachube which is ‘a service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual’. I should also mention an ongoing project that is on display at the Cube gallery - called Natural Fuse.
Tapio Makela: Ecolocatedness
He introduces the concept of ecolocatedness which is how to act quickly in multiple, affective and effective ways through localised actions yet still take time to consider and gather evidence through a considered knowledge-based process. An illustration of this concept is the MARIN (Media Art Research Interdisciplinary Network) project which is a mobile residency program located on a sailing boat sailing to different research sites. It is a networked residency and research initiative, integrating artistic and scientific research on marin ecology and sustainability of mobility.
Dave Griffths: FoAM Lab and Groworld
Guerilla gardening meets open source gaming software. He is part of the FoAM collective of artist, programmers and designers with the motto of ‘grow you own world.’ Groworld is FoAM’s interstice between ecology, culture and technology. It brings together three ‘forces’ capable of transforming the world on human and ecological scale: design, permaculture and technology.
Aaron Koblin: Data visualisation - interpreting complexity
Data tells stories of our lives but he also paints a very pretty picture with it. Some examples of work includes visualising flight patterns, visualising number of SMS messages sent during new year’s eve and visualising location of emails sent to geographically. His latest works looks at other ways to translate the data into more intuitive manner and one of his experiments includes representing the access patterns of internet channels into audio rhythmic feedback.
Christian Nold: Bijlmer Euro
Christian is an artist who works with local communities to develop the idea of a ‘transition town’. A transition town is an organisation that tries to encourage local food production, local economy and through what he calls local currency. Local currency is the local equivalent of versions of the legal currency and in some cases be the only currencies accepted by local stores. The idea is to spend your money locally and be mindful at where you spend it. It can also become a political choice if only local stores accept it and not larger chain shops like Macdonald for example. It’s ultimately about trust. Trust can be based on local identity. Local trust can exist parasitically on top of big institutional structures like the Bijlmer Euro currency developed for the town of Bijlmer in Amsterdam. Basically is sticking an RFID tag onto an existing currency. The tag will contain information of its monetary value and will provide extra benefits when used in local shops.
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Which talks did I enjoy the most?
Stowed Boyd for his insights into the affects, and ultimately beneficial nature of social tools.
Usman Haque because his projects are really cool!
Aaron Koblin because he is doing visual and audio wonders with data.
Christian Nold for introducing me to the idea of a parasitic money network.
Detail Review
Stowe Boyd Social Tools: The Shape of Future Culture
The morning keynote started with a presentation by Stowe Boyd talking about social tools. This was the guy who coined the term ‘Social tools’ in 1999 and describes himself to be a ‘presentist’ rather than a futurist. He is generally concerned about the ‘impact of social tools on us as individuals’ based on the hypothesis that the cultural impact of these tools is difficult to examined.
What are social tools? It’s a new category of software intended to augment social systems, software intended to shape culture. These tools are primary designed to support social connectedness amongst people. He illustrates how our social interactions are changing by comparing email, chat and microblogging( like twitter). He talks about these shifts from 3 aspects of tempo, access and contacts.
Tempo
(Email) Asynchronous–> (Chat) Synchronous–>(Microblogging) Synchronous
Access
(Email) Secret–> (Chat) Private–>(Microblogging) Public
Context
(Email) Inbox–> (Chat) Room–>(Microblogging) Stream
He observers a dramatic shift in microblogging and for future generation, the use of email as a social tool will be in decline the same way as postal communication has now been restricted to communication with corporations.
His talk also discusses the rise of the ‘Edgelings’, a movement away from the edge, mass organisation and results in creating a rich network of connections. It is characterise by these characteristics: bottom up, egalitarian, subjective, partial, networks, glocalism, participative, restoring, sustainable, decentralised and enigmatic. The core issue is a move towards a re-humanism of ourselves, a movement from idealogy that divides us. He ends with a quote by Claude Levi-Strauss:
‘A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of other before self.’
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A quick postscript, I did attend the Nokia Forum Workshop in the afternoon. It was supposed to last a few hours but I ended up leaving earlier. I didn’t really know to expect as the programme description was quite vague. It turns out that it was a workshop to learn how to code in Python language to develop mobile applications for Nokia. Unfortunately, this platform is only currently available on Nokia and only on certain models (so it won’t work on Android or on the Iphone). So, while it was interesting to try it out (we got to code and run the script on the phones), it was just not well set up as a workshop. Most of the participants did not know what to expect and should have been asked to bring a laptop, as coding more than a few lines on the phone is really time consuming. Python is a really powerful programming language, but in the context of a mobile phone apps, its very limited if its only available on Nokia platforms.
Social Technologies Summit 2009 - Day 1
I’m attending the Social Technologies Summit conference which is part of the FutureSonic Festival happening in Manchester starting today till the 16th of May. This is the first time that I’m attending, so I have no preconceived notion on what to expect. The timetable and the range of speakers should make it a very interesting and hopefully stimulating experience for me.
The opening gala event was tonight and we were treated to 2 very different presentations. Firstly, though I would like to comment on the venue. The festival events are being held all over Manchester, but the summit is located at the Contact Theater. Its such a weird looking building and I have no clue as to the history behind the design of it. Anyway, I digress. The first presentation was by Mike Pilkington and Tim O’Brien. Its an audio and visual collaboration between Mike who is a digital artist and Tim who is an astro physicist. They reinterpret the sounds of the cosmos to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings. From what I understood of their explanation of their work, Mike wrote algorithms to translate signals received from a telescope into audio feedback which he manipulated for his piece. It was musically interesting (similar to many electro minimal pieces I have heard), though I thought they could have done a bit more with the visual, rather than just let Tim move some data windows around the screen.
The second presentation was by environmental futurist, Jamais Cascio who
For me personally, his presentation was too focused on presenting the doomsday scenario. I felt that he was preaching to the converted (though there was at least one very drunk person in the audience who beg to differ), and should have instead focused more on discussing issues and challenges arising from the use of
Its going to be a pack couple of days as the summit gets into full swing tomorrow. I’ll probably have to do a ’top’ picks as I probably won’t have time to reflect on each of them in detail.
Rothko Exhibition
I finally made it to the Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern last week. Its in its final week and closes on the 1st of Feb. Being a huge Rothko fan, I couldn’t give up this opportunity to see more of his work in the flesh. The exhibition at the Tate is focused on his later works, which stemmed from his Seagram Murals series. This series was initially commissioned to be hung in a dining room at the iconic modernist building, Seagrams Building, built by Mies Van der Rohe in New York. Rothko famously withdrew from the commission after working on the paintings citing the unsuitability of the site for his paintings, allowing a much wider audience to discover his works.
The exhibition consisted of 9 rooms, with the largest room housing the Seagram Murals, bringing together Tate’s own collection, with Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The other significant collection was the Black collection and his later works Brown and Gray works on paper.
I made it a point on not reading any reviews or researching about Rothko before going to the exhibition. I wanted to experience it ’pure’ as it were. And it did not disappoint! It was visceral, absolutely absorbing and undeniably primal. What was really paradoxical, was that his large paintings were very, very intimate rather than distant. The subtlety of his strokes, mastery of colour and layers is amazing. Sitting and staring intently at his creations reveals so many different imagery. I was also happy to discover his Black series, which as the name suggest, was painted using the black pallet. Of course its not as dull as pure black, its a Rothko, meaning that even using a single hue, he can create depth and visual interest in them. They are extremely powerful as a series and probably my second favourite Rothko series after the Seagrams Murals.
As a whole, the exhibition was extraordinary. I only wished there were less people, the crowds did make it difficult to truly enjoy his works. That’s why i love sitting in the Rothko room at the Tate, usually its empty and fill with regulars rather than passing visitors. You’re generally find me there, having a quiet sit.
New Interface!
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
Speechless!
International Journal of Design Vol.2 No.3
Volume 2, Issue 3 of the International Journal of Design has been published and is freely available online. Its a
Happy New Year - A new look for 2009
This is one of my favorite pictures of 2008 taken in Krakow.
2009 haven’t even began and I’m already on target with my new year resolutions! The promised new look of the website has arrived. Its completely driven by Wordpress now, rather than just the blog section. Hopefully this will make updating the site a whole lot easier and quicker. The site is divided into sections (research, design, type, photography). The right column contains sub-pages of each section as well as links that are relevant to the section.
I’ve added new content which are mostly in the Design and Photography sections, and taken some Teaching materials away. I will update this section after the new year. I’ve also decided not to move any post older than a couple of years old, I feel like a fresh start. Although, being sentimental, I’ve decided to keep posts that marked turning points of my life in the last couple of years. My 2nd new year resolution is to make sure that the post gets updated and content renewed every few months or so.
Thank you for your visit. Enjoy.
Favourite TED Videos
Recently, I’ve been using TED’s videos as a resource for my Contemporary Issues class that I teach to the MA students. The selection is eclectic, but usually linked to areas of Social, Economic, Technological, Environmental and Political issues. Instead of putting them all here, I’ve listed the ones which are my favourite in terms of most inspirational, informational and convincing.
1. Hans Rosling: Making Stats Sexy
2. Isabel Allende: Tales of passion
3. Cameron Sinclair Open-source architecture
4. Edward Burtnsky – manufactured landscape
5. Jonathan Harris: The art of collecting stories
Revamp Resolution
I’ve decided that the site needs a revamp…and also to make it easier for me to update the content - not just the blog. So an early new year’s resolution…I will try to get a new site up and running early next year. Hopefully by making this public, I will actually get down to doing this. Can you believe my WordPress version 1.2?
Creative Cities Talk by Scott Burnham
Went to a talk organised by DE07 event. Its entitled Creative Cities by Scott Burnham. I found him to be an enthusiastic speaker and in stark contrast to a talk I attended by Ben Drury (but I wont talk about that). Scott brought up issues relating to how a post-industrial city define itself. If they chose to define themselves as a ‘creative city’ - how then do we enable the public to be part of that creative dialogue? How do you get the public to reclaim public spaces and use them as creative outputs? His talk did not offer any practical answers to these question, merely some suggestions to how other artist have sought to address them through independent and fringe efforts. Some of the links that I found particularly exciting are:
Graffiti Research Lab
“Throwies LED”
(Check out their other projects as well)
Abstractor / Ji LEE
How to make abstract art…
Roadsworth
Playing havoc with road markings.
more commentary
You are Beautiful
Playful communication
(click on 1st row, the 5th down, with the fence cups)
Graphic Design Research Symposium
I’ll be giving a presentation at the Graphic Design Research Symposium to be held at Nottingham Trent University. Its a free half day event designed to demystify the process of embarking on a research degree, and to encourage Doctoral research in graphic design and its related areas. It will be on the 12th of September, from 1.30pm to 5pm. Teal Triggs will be the keynote speaker while Joe Eastwood, Rob Hillier and myself will be presenting case studies of our PhD experiences. More information can be found in the event’s leaflet. If you would like to attend, email Rob Harland before the 5th of September.