Nevolution

Fragments of the Everyday

Continuing on with the Australia Day weekend charm offensive, these all came from the lovely book Fragments of the Everyday. Considering I'm on holidays at the moment, it seems right that this be a travel themed selection. And what a fantastic selection they are. Everything about this makes me feel nice and proud that there was such a lovely Australian style before it got washed out. They have just a hint of an awareness of global trends, without bucking too much in that direction. Shame you don't get that anymore. 

 

Symbols of Australia

Considering it's Australia Day weekend, it seems somewhat necessary that I regail you with some nice and crunchy vernacular design. These are all from the book Symbols of Australia by Mimmo Cozzolino which used to reign supreme in my book case when I was deeply into this stuff. Back when I was constantly searching for the Australian typographic ideal. Of course, such a silly thing doesn't nor can it exist. But there's a doctorate in their somewhere for someone who would want to map the different typologies of our design history. 

This isn't the time and the place though. Instead I'll just slam you with quite a few logos from our past. I should note, that even though some of these might come across as racist, these could have been much much worse. My god we have a quaint racist past. Heck, even editing out the truly horrible stuff, what I've left in speaks volumes for what was on our collective mind in days of yore.

 

 

Mixbook 2011

There’s never enough time to read anything properly these days, especially something on the internet. Even with Instapaper I need another step to filter and save what I’ve already filtered and saved. So, after a year of keeping the important stuff it only seems fair to do something with it. Printing out the internet seemed like a good approach to this problem. And yes, using a service such as Blurb fits perfectly with this project, living only on the internet. I didn’t want to spend too much time typesetting this or giving page numbers, just enough to make it a useful object. One of the problems I find with reading on screens is there’s no possibility for patina. Nothing can be dog eared, it can’t be taken into the bathroom (without pangs of guilt and shame) and yet the text is discarded too quickly.

After trawling through hundreds of saved posts and articles, a mild theme began to emerge. One that wasn’t just somewhat of a retrospective of the past year, but the way in which we’ve been thinking in 2011. Or, how I’ve been thinking this year at least. The overall shape of the 21st century is finally beginning to emerge and some of these pieces should point in that vague direction. While there’s somewhat of an underlying thread here, the most important thing was that this would be an interesting read. Something for the holidays. This meant loosening up the structure: taking out pieces that were too dry or specific. Editing is always the hardest part. I don’t want to ramble too much, so I’ll let you get on with it. Consider this my mixbook for 2011.

I should stress that I lovingly stole this idea from Christopher Butler (who lovingly stole it from Emmet Connolly). Chris is up to his third book so far (volume one, two, three) and I hope to continue the trend. He has much smarter things to say about this whole process, so read his and then come back here to read me waffle on for a bit. I've been planning on doing this for a year or so, when an email came in from Blurb that they were having one of their many sales, I quickly stopped everything for two days and got it done. Making it used parts of my brain that needed stretching, but also made me realise how much more time should have gone into it.

I wanted to include something by Dan Hill, which seems to be the running gag that any of these sorts of things should have one of his incredibly long blog posts. There's always next year. I couldn't help inserting my own private joke in here: having Bruce Sterling close the whole thing. Considering he's always called upon to close just about every conference it seemed fitting to let him do the same thing here. 

I didn't have time for any illustrations, page numbers or links in the text (two days is clearly not long enough), so next year should be much more of a finessed object. The other tip I've learnt is to actually hand them out between xmas and new years. It's holiday reading but not everyone has them despite everyone going back to work. In needing a front cover I couldn't resist a photo of my first 3D printed object: because, well, it's a print out. The icing on the laser sintered cake is that it's a generative piece which I made during the Generative Design intensive this semester (I DID mention I was doing my Masters this year didn't I?). Lots of algorithmic logic in some of these articles, I couldn't resist. Looking forward to seeing the amount of batshit that goes on in 2012 just so it can be squeezed into the next book.

 

Is 2011 a year that will change the world - John Harris

For Mason, all this is also pretty clearly manifested in this year’s most iconic archetype: the tent community which springs up in the midst of the city, usually home to the flickering blue light of laptops and the incessant hubbub of intense conversation. “One thing that there has been in common between the Arab spring and the European and American events is this drive – which is almost pathological – to secure space, and live in it,” he says. “In one sense, it’s a meme … and I think it does satisfy a desire. Once you’ve lived and experienced this sort of spontaneous, communal, utopian sort of existence online, which is what you do if you’re a net-savvy young kid … well, put it this way: if you were to ask yourself, what is the real-world equivalent of being in a 200-strong World Of Warcraft horde? It’s probably sitting in a square, in a tent.” 

 

Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of fiction - James Bridle

So, if Gibson was originally writing “on top of Firefox”, he’s now writing on top of Twitter. The stream contains references, mixed up, to Prada shoes and Idoru dancers. All links. All references, premade scenes waiting to be pulled into the flow of fiction. When the Festo drones appear in the text, they appear in the same location, same architecture as in those product videos. The network’s readymades. 

Gibson’s been talking a lot lately about atemporality, this idea that we live in a sort of endless digital now. In “Zero History” we have an echo of “No Future”: everything compressed into the present. This idea is what Zero History is really about. (This is the Order Flow: the future is defined by the present; who pinpoints the present controls the future.) ... it’s undeniable that something is happening, a network effect produced by the sudden visibility of just how unevenly distributed those futures are.

 

Thinking in Tumblr - Alexandra Lange

Which is why I recently found myself discussing with a designer why I thought his industrial design client should not publish a commemorative book, but should start a commemorative Tumblr. (I couldn’t believe it when those words came out of my mouth.) Considering this history project, my mind reassembled its pieces as a blog, asynchronic, motley, sketchy. Rough rather than smooth. An archive of affinities rather than a resolved history. There’s a reason so many archives are using it. On a Tumblr, every kind of memory could be collected and streamed, linked, as so many of the “f*** yeah” genre are, by a single word.

 

The Elusive Big Idea - Neal Gabler

And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us. 

 

Innovation Starvation  - Neal Stephenson

SF has changed over the span of time I am talking about — from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers — trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others. Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.

 

Inside the Mind of an Octopus - Sy Montgomery 

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms. 

But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin. 

 

How Algorithms Shape our World - Kevin Slavin

And that’s the thing, is that we’re writing things, we’re writing these things that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible. And we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. And we’re starting to make our way. There’s a company in Boston called Nanex, and they use math and magic and I don’t know what, and they reach in to all the market data and they find, actually sometimes, some of these algorithms. And when they find them they pull them out and they pin them to the wall like butterflies. And they do what we’ve always done when confronted with huge amounts of data that we don’t understand -- which is that they give them a name and a story. So this is one that they found, they called the Knife, the Carnival, the Boston Shuffler, Twilight. 

 

A Critique on the Critical - Patrick Keating

Critical design cannot predict the future.  Our ideas of the future are often less radical than the reality. Design however, can invent worlds giving us freedoms to explore various branches of reality. Speculative design is a dreamlike exercise – manufacturing alternate worlds, ones which feel every bit as real as the “real world” we inhabit day-to-day (whatever that is!).  It cannot predict the future, but it can shape the present. 

 

The Movie Set that Ate Itself - Michael Idov

One of the twins admiringly touches my head. Before coming to wardrobe, I’d stopped in hair and makeup. My nape and temples are now shaved clean in an approximation of an old hairstyle called a half-box. All to help me blend in on the set. Only, from here on, I can no longer call it that. According to a glossary of forbidden terms posted right in front of me on the wall, the set is to be referred to as the Institute. Likewise, inside the Institute, there are no scenes, just experiments. No shooting, only documentation. And there is certainly no director. Instead, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, the man responsible for this madness, is to be referred to as the Head of the Institute or simply the Boss. 

 

Twenty Years Fore and Aft - Bruce Sterling

Twenty years from now is 2031. That year is not Utopia or Oblivion, it’s not made of sci-fi hologrammed tinsel; it’s just another year among many, and most of its working parts are already scattered around. Like any other year, it offers novelties, but also huge absences. 1991 had many thriving elements denied to 2031. Film cameras. Newspapers. Bookshops. Print magazines that were simply, entirely and utterly print. National analogue broadcast television networks. Young people.

 

Kim Jong Il Communication

The second I found out that Kim Jong Il had died I quickly followed the protocol in a situation such as this and immediately scanned my twitter feed for confirmation. After failing to come up with anything worthy of 140 characters I moved on and waited for others to do what I couldn't be bothered doing.

I've kept North Korea in my partial attention zone for a few years, after @cowbellistan gave me a copy of Dictators Homes for my birthday, followed by Tyrants the following year. Hungover, I would spend the day after reading about horrible people and their horrible ways. Don't know why but North Korea always seemed to stick out. Fascinating, train wreck of a place. Complete and utter nightmare. I could keep on going with the cliched half sentences but I'll leave it at that. Point is, a bad man died. And now we're all supposed to react in some collective way. But how do we react to something this culturally foreign and closed off? Why do we feel the need to react in a certain way?

  

We do it for the Lulz. 

While that video was uploaded in mid September, months before his death, it conveys the point. Especially when the subtitle is Ain't no party like a Pyongyang party, cause a Pyongyang party is ABSOLUTELY MANDATORY. It's a response to a situation that we don't understand, by the only means through which we're capable of understanding. It's not humour, but not tasteless either. It's a response to everything being available, at all times, for everyone. It all just becomes fodder. I'm surprised that no one has taken apart the chilling video of North Koreans trying to cry their hearts out and replace the sounds with cats meowing. When I first saw it (and I've seen it countless times in the past few days) I remarked on twitter that it felt like one big cultural photoshop. We can clearly see through the whole affair, and I'm sure that they can too, but meh. Whaddya gonna do? Viscerally feel what it would be like to live with such a twisted mindset?

And that was when I realised the depth that the lulz was willing to go. How it acted as our coping mechanism. The contrast between the lulz and the leader couldn't be starker. A man who commanded a country with the most perverse of grips; he went far beyond the jackboot stamping on the face of humanity. North Korea is testament to the failure of centralised command hierarchies.

The lulz, on the other hand, revels in its distributed and decentralised nature. Anyone can do it for the lulz, as long as you're steeped in network culture. The lulz takes your Juche ideology of self reliance and determinism and pisses all over it. The Lulz sees your hermit kingdom, scrapes all the intent out of it and squirts it out onto the web. For all the unknowable horror that he causes, we take it and turn it into a small joke of him looking at things.

It would be remiss of me to not mention Team America and the hilarious song I'm So Ronery by a puppet Kim Jong Il. I'm beginning to see this as the Ur script of all humourous takes on North Korea. It enabled us to see him as a short and angry little man, something able to be mocked. Perhaps we needed that particular angle to view him as in order to make fun of him. But that was before he died, while he still maintained godlike power over a nation of slaves. When all he could do, post-stroke, is look at things and approvingly smile.

Not that we should be surprised at any of this. Lulz has somewhat become the easiest way to cope our world. It's soon on the way to replace irony and sarcasm as our humour coping mechanism. Or, as sarcasm was to the nineties, the lulz is to the early twenty teens. Yet, the lulz seems only possible in our networked world. It doesn't seem to make much sense away from keyboard and mouse. Unless you're Anonymous, then go right ahead and do whatever it is that you please.

I feel as if there needs to be some mediated screen between us and the lulz. The lulz needs to come out of the internet, as a product of it. Either as a cheezeburgeresque macro or as a single serving fuckyeah tumblr. I've been keeping a few tabs on the fuckyeah genre of tumblr; it works really well when there's enthusiasm for the topic. A sadistic yet comical tyrant, not so much. So how, now that he's dead, do we deal with it? Simple, another single serving tumblr, this one with more deft and vulgarity than the previous. Kim Jong Il Dropping the Base.

I'm impressed at how quickly it was put together, let alone coming up with the idea. It's also amazing how many photoshops could be made in one day, all of fairly decent quality. All scraped and spidered off the internet, ready to be spread as fast as possible. Prepackaged and destined for a quick like on the facebook. To re-enter the stream in as many ways as possible just to become more content for our thirsty eyeballs and reward centres.

Much as the trend for vintage posters of soviet memorabillia seemed odd and somewhat offensive to survivors of communism, Kim Jong Il dropping the base would be downright weird if any North Koreans ever get a hold of it. Not because it's offensive to their beloved leader, or because of all the atrocities that they've gone through. No, it's because they simply wouldn't get it. Their pre-networked culture isn't close to the nuance and deft that the lulz can bring. Expecting them to get the joke, pushed through the sieve of the new aesthetic is light years ahead of their aesthetic sensibilities. That's probably the saddest part of all of this. Apart from the torture and starvation and fear of course. That when the Norks do open the border through some way or another and the stream of stunted masses pour through the border that they'll be too far gone to ever catch up to the cynicism of the lulz.

 

The Altermodern Nomad

Apologies for the academic language but I don't have the energy, headspace or the smarts to work through and rewrite it. This essay was written last year, during what I'm calling my Bourriaud phase when I was knee deep in art theory. Thankfully that's over, but he has plenty of worthy ideas as a result of the Tate Triennial Altermodern as well as The Radicant (a companion book he wrote at the same time as curating the show). Which is why I'm posting this essay after all this time. Consider this a conceptual precursor to my other blog – Heterochronia – as it works through some of the ideas I was stumbling my way through in a previous post. Thinking in Tumblr, while fun, is hard to make a comprehensive point. It's more about falling through links as I come across them. It's all too easy to forget about any sense of direction. Reading through this essay I forgot about one of the key distinctions about the way in which we percieve time and progress. Less teleological direction, more about moving through multiple temporalities, evolving through a network of differing periods and possibilities. Moving through time as if it were space. It's interesting to go through this essay nowand remembering grasping these ideas and spending a few solid weeks with them. That is, instead of throwing up a quick link here and there. That's the beauty of studying: the forced concentration, the singular depth of thought. As I write these words I realise I'm going to have to quote myself and turn this depth into easy bite size links for Heterochronia.

The images aren't connected in anyway to the essay, but should be seen as a visual counterpoint. I came across this project (Nomadic Plants by Gilberto Esparza) on we make money not art at the same time I was writing the essay and I always imagined pairing the two. Regine Debatty

Vegetation and microorganisms live in symbiosis inside the body of the Nomadic Plants robot. Whenever its bacteria require nourishment, the self-sufficient robot will move towards a contaminated river and 'drink' water from it. Through a process of microbial fuell cell, the elements contained in the water are decomposed and turned into energy that can feed the brain circuits of the robot. The surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to complete their own life cycle. 

They don't really connect with Bourriaud's notion of the vine or creeper as the botanical metaphor for our time, but it's a plant that lives in a robot and moves about a polluted landscape. What more do you need? I'll stop faffing about and let you get on with the essay.

 

The theme of travel is the most dominant of all concepts articulated in the Altermodern Manifesto. Travel is a part of our daily lives, and the effect it has on our way of being affects the way in which we inhabit and view our globalised world. 

Travel, cultural exchanges and examination of history are not merely fashionable themes, but markers of a profound evolution in our vision of the world and our way of inhabiting it.1 

Considering this emphasis on travel, then we need to explore what forms of travel are implied, and what are their reasons and effects. We can see the beginnings of an answer in the Altermodern catalogue: 

The artist turns cultural nomad... Thus the exhibition brings together three sorts of nomadism: in space, in time, and among the ‘signs’.2 

By constructing the identity of this nomad and how it is suited to Altermodernity, we can look for comparisons to differing identites found in Modernity and Post Modernity. Through this construction we will then articulate how this nomad exists in the parameters set forth by Bourriaud and what journey forms are made and how. 

This essay will not look at the art or artists of the Altermodern exhibition (Tate Triennial 2009), but instead extend the central thesis put forth by the show’s curator and lead theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud. Using his ideas as a base in which to begin the journey, the discussion will wander through other ideas and theorists who share similiarities and correlations in describing the world in which we now inhabit.

 

If we are to discuss the nature of Altermodernism as a third stage of Modernism, then we need a set of tools that others have used to explore the two previous modernities. Bourriaud looks to the world of botany in which to explain the new world.3 In ‘The Radicant’ a book considered as a companion to the Altermodern exhibition, he explores the notion of roots and extends the ideas set forth by Deleuze and Guattari in the opening chapter of ‘A Thousand Plateaus’.4 

Through the use of lexicography, Bourriaud equates the Modern individual with that of the tree root, a Radical.5 While Modernity is predicated on a rupture with the past and a desire for progress, it was also concerned with it’s historical roots. The duality of the sprouting tree encapsulates Modernism and the Radical individual: focused on the future but aware of it’s heritage. 

Not content to view their writing as a mode of binary oppositions, Deleuze and Guattari look to the image of the Rhizome: an underground root system consisting of only horizontal offshoots, such as ginger. This metaphor is one that indulges in it’s plurality: 

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order. 6 

The need to create this distinction was to delineate away from Cartesian dualisms, that of the vertical tree and root system, and instead to comprehend the notion of horizontal multiplicities. However, this multiplicity has neither subject nor object. It is only able to reference itself, forever deconstructing the environment amidst a desert of self referentialities. By continuing with the botanical metaphor Bourriaud utilizes the image of the Radicant: a vine or creeper plant that plants it roots constantly as it moves along. 

Unlike the rhizome, which is defined as a multiplicity that brackets out the question of a subject from the beginning, the radicant takes the form of a trajectory or path; the advance of a singular subject. 7 

This is a clear difference than the others. It accepts the need for multiplicities and the need to not be fixed upon one stable point. It articulates not only the need for movement, but the way in which it can be done. The conceptual link between the constant daily travel and the idea of the radicant are unmistakable.

Bourriaud continues by stating that “it [the radicant] exists exclusively in the dynamic form of wandering”.8 This denotes an identity that moves away from a static existence to one in which we are only able to understand our identity through a dynamic process. This notion of existence as only made visible by it’s trajectories echoes sentiments by Emirbayer in discussing the identity of an individual where "a dynamic, unfolding process, become the primary unit of analysis, rather than the constituent elements themselves". 9 

Emirbayer is elaborating on ideas put forth by Dewey and Bentley in the idea of the Trans-Action. In looking at systems of naming and linguistic taxonomies ‘elements’ or ‘entities’ are not in isolation, but are a part of their ‘relations’.10 The act of ‘relating’ overrides the reductionist tendency to look at the subject unto itself. 

Thus, in the context of Altermodernity, the wanderer is inseperable from the act of wandering. By existing only in this nomadic state of constant travel, the act of travel overrides any notion of singular identity. In accord with the nomadic method of wandering through the signs, we see that the process of organising connections between signs is what constitutes a radicant identity. Continuing on with relational and trans-actional linguistics, Brown looks at the difficulty in percieving this dynamic unfolding process in Western languages.11 The issue here is in the ability to hold both noun and verb at the same time. Being a radicant and the act of radicantity as one. 

This ability to nod at syntax and carry on is a result of the
re-introduction of pragmatics. When the intent and reception
of language is included while considering the fluid process of signifying, there emerges a coherent rambler. 12 

This ability to nod and carry on is central to our need to move past the impotency of Post Modernity and towards our abilities as nomads. 

Having revealed why the Radicant identity is predicated on movement, we now need look at how we’re moving through time, space and the signs. Leading on from the Enlightenment, Modernist notions of time were teleological. Post Modernism saw fault in this linear direction as hegemonic and saught to dismantle the notion of progress through deconstruction: “A levelling of chronological systems by criticizing the Western one.”13 Time was instead seen as a catalogue, something in which all cultures are situated on a horizontal plane of relativism. The result was that ideas and cultures could be mined for their stylistic attributes. 

Through the eyes of the nomad, time is somewhere that can be travelled to and inhabited. For when we travel, are we not also travelling to cultures with a different temporal sequence than our own? Appropriated from biology, heterochrony is the timing of the developmental variation of an organism in a species, leading to differing results. It is with this application of evolutionary understanding of history that the radicant travels through Altermodernity: a multitude of possible worlds, each with their own narrative of events.14 

This notion of history as geographical and “constituted of multiple temporalities”15 is similar to the idea of Atemporality put forth by Bruce Sterling.16 He defines the difference between previous notions of history and our current one as a result of the intrinsic capabilities of the dominant medium of our day. The contrast between moving through a history book understanding the narrative as a linear process as opposed to the result of attempting to search online for an aspect of a historical narrative is a important one. 

A book is a linear piece of text. It has a beginning, an end and an author with intent. To continue along this line into Post Modernity – a period of time punctuated as after the death of history – one could look at Barthes and the Death of the Author as a lack of regard to any historical narrative.17 But the internet has brought a levelling of authoritative knowledge: “A single historical narrative is a paper narrative”.18 We shouldn’t be expecting a new meta narrative while network culture is the dominant framework in which we view the world.19 It is only through network culture that are we able to understand heterochronic multiple narratives. 

It is this network culture that has become the dominant cultural logic of our day, though this is not to say that it defines all systems of logic. The machine as cultural metaphor did not extend into all forms of thought in Modernism, it only acted as a suitable metaphor.20 Instead of an autonomous individual – a result of the Western Enlightenment – we now see ourselves as nodes in a network, as an individual situated and contingent upon other nodes. As Varnelis argues: “affirming one’s identity today means affirming the identity of others”.21 

It is at this point that we need to refer to one of Bourriaud’s previous works, Post Production. In it he comes up with the term seminaut: one able to move through the signs, to create new paths through culture and semiotics. Relying on previous notions of authorship – both Modern and Post Modern – and originality as points of departure is no longer productive as “The seminaut imagines the links, likely relations between disparate sites”.22 For while artists like Duchamp and Burroughs bravely constituted works by blurring the notion of authorship, we have witnessed this logic be appropriated everywhere. The DJ and the idea of the remix has firmly entrenched itself in our society and is now taken as a given, it’s practices no longer informed by a degree of ironic self consciousness.23 The notion of context within a given network is what gives the artist or author an instinctive understanding of use: “exhibiting a work composed as a network of signs”.24 

If the seminaut imagines the links, then the radicant set these forms in motion.25 Perhaps instead of wandering through the ‘signs’ we should be wandering through links. As Bourriaud explains: 

The journey format... goes hand in hand with the generalisation of hypertext as a thought process: one sign directs us to a second, then a third, creating a chain of mutually interconnected forms, mimicking mouse clicks on a computer screen. 26

If this metaphor is to extrapolated, then this is a form of travel with no particular endpoint in mind. This applies to all forms: temporal, spatial or through the ‘signs’. This differs from the teleological direction of Modernism or the looping tendencies of Post Modernism.27 

 

In order to summarise the nomadic facet of Altermodernity, we need to look at one last image: travel. The Modern era was informed by the explosive power and superabundant energy of both the train and automobile.28 The direction and progress implied by these modes allow for the arrangement of events into causally linked sequences, correlating with the teleological notion of history that we have discussed. The 1973 oil crisis as a precursor to the Post Modern condition is an event that Bourriaud places great importance, making us aware of our limited energy reserves.29

The object that neatly sums up the current spirit of our directionless travel today is that of the mobile phone. While both the train and the automobile are objects that create travel, the mobile phone presumes an inherent mobility on the part of the user. It allows us to connect to our roots at any point amidst a state of wandering. Technological progress allows us to carry the network in our pocket, no longer attached to the home. This enables us to situate ourselves within a network of signs while in the act of movement in time and space. Considering worldwide demographic shifts to the city, the mobile phone seems perfectly suited to our new built environment, especially considering the speed at which both the developing and the developed world have made it a central part of this new Altermodernity. 

Whether or not the Altermodern exhibition was a success, the ideas put forth by it’s lead curator can not be discounted. Not just as a consideration on the changing face of art, but in the way in which it has made links and correlations in our contemporary world. Only as nomads are we able to inhabit this new world and must set about doing so.

 

 

1. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Tate Britain, ‘The Altermodern Manifesto’, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm, accessed 19/02/2010

2. Bourriaud, Nicolas et al, The Tate Triennial: Altermodern, (London, Tate Publishing, 2009) 13

3. Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant, (New York, Sternberg Press, 2009) 21

4. Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateus, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 

5. Bourriaud, op. cit., p22

6. Deleuze & Guattari,  op. cit., p6

7. Bourriaud, op. cit., p55

8. ibid

9. Emirbayer, Mustafa. ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’ The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 103, No. 2. (Sep., 1997), 287 

10. Bentley, Arthur & Dewey, John. Knowing and the Known. (Boston, Beacon Press, 1949) 108

11. Brown, Colleen. ‘The Relational Meme’ Fillip Vol 1 (Summer 1996) http://fillip.ca/content/the-relational-meme, accessed 13/03/2010

12. ibid

13. Morton, Tom & Bourriaud, Nicolas. ‘Looking Forward: Tate Triennial 2009’ Frieze Issue 120 (Jan-Feb 2009) http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/tate_triennial_2009/, accessed 23/03/2010

14. Bourriaud, op. cit., p13

15. ibid

16. Sterling, Bruce. Beyond the Beyond ‘Atemporality for the Creative Artist’ http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/02/atemporality-for-the-creative-artist/, accessed 26/02/2010

17. Barthes, Roland. ‘The death of the Author’ Aspen No. 5-6 (Fall-Winter 1967) Roaring Fork Press NYC

18. Sterling, op. cit. 

19. ibid

20. Varnelis, Kazys. ‘The Immediated Now: Network Culture and the Poetics of Reality’ Networked: A (networked_book) about (networked_art). http://varnelis.networkedbook.org/the-immediated-now-network-culture-and-the-poetics-of-reality/, accessed 27/03/2010

21. Varnelis, Kazys. ‘On Atemporality’, http://varnelis.net/blog/on_atemporality, accessed 18/03/2010

22. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Post Production: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (New York, Sternberg Press, 2002) 18

23. Kazys, op. cit.,

24. Bourriaud, loc. cit.

25. Bourriaud, op. cit., 23

26. Bourriaud, op. cit., 20

27. Bourriaud, op. cit., 18

28. Bourriaud, op. cit., 16

29. ibid., 15

 

Futuro

I present to you the one and only Futuro house. Possibly the single greatest example of a hope for a brighter future ever conceived by man. Despite all of it's blemishes it still makes me giddy just standing near it. Only 90 were ever made and I get the privilege of having stood near one. Students at Canberra University are attempting to restore it as part of the conservation and design programs. It was previously situated at the planetarium which burnt down not long after the Futuro house was moved (thank christ). They've a long way to go before it's back to it's rightful glory, but still, just look at it. Thing of beauty, even with all of the blemishes.

Even the delightfully embarrasing interior and hideous front door add to the appeal. It all helps to reinforce where this object sits in time. But I'm not here to talk about decay, or time, I'm here to talk about the Futuro. So I'll just leave you with a few more hero shots of the thing. Because that's what it deserves. 

Heterochronia

For the past few months I've been toying around with a side project, and it's somewhat about time that I attempt to make it somewhat public. I've had it on the sidebar for some time as well as slyly using it as a category on this blog, but I feel it's time to announce it. Heterochronia. It's a somewhat lazy attempt to collect examples of something that I can't exactly put my finger on, I'm not exactly sure I understand it, but it's there. I'm hoping that if I make this post long enough I'll be able to get a handle on it. I'll ramble on for a bit before hopefully either making sense to my self or getting around to making a point. The term, heterochronia, is a biological one, that refers to a different timing in the development of organisms. For a more useful and relevant definition, we should turn to the source from where I got it from, the semi recent Tate Triennial Altermodern.

Hetero – different or other, chronos – time. Within the framework of Altermodern, it describes artists’ work which cannot be easily anchored to a specific time; which asks us to question what is contemporary. Without nostalgia, artists trace lines and connections through time as well as space. It is not the modernist idea of time advancing in a linear fashion, nor the postmodern time advancing in loops, but a chaining or clustering together of signs from contemporary and historical periods which allows an exploration of what is now.’It is significant that a number of today’s artists operate in a space-time characterised by this “delay”, playing with the anachronistic, with multi-temporality or time-lag.

This doesn't exactly get across what I'm toying with, but Bourriaud does go someway towards explaining it. I spent some time toying around with what to name the blog, in the end going with Heterochronia. Yet the roots of this idea isn't with everyones favourite french super curator. Instead, I'm shamelessly exploring a few of the thoughts that Bruce Sterling and William Gibson have been toying with for the past two years or so: atemporality. To paraphrase Sterling, I'm playing with their ideas but "shaving off the serial numbers". I wanted, badly, to call it Atemporality or Zero History. Not only would it have been too obvious and easy but the SEO would have been nigh impossible.

Perhaps another explanation would be through a semi incoherent rambling email I sent trying to explain the darn thing:

It's a symptom of the network culture that we live in, that the idea of time, and progress, that we used to have has changed. We're not looking down the barrel of a single point perspective of progress, nor are we pissing on it because it's a product of - what's that word? The annoying one? Deals with power struggles. Annoying and PoMo - anyway, [I think I meant hegemony] it's not those two approaches to time, but this really fragmented version of progress. Where it makes total sense to use instagram or hipstamatic on an iphone. Or that camera that you have is a model of an older camera, that borrows the styles of yesteryear of the Olympus Pen line, but then doesn't keep on replicating the styles as it continues, but branches out from it. And how we're all toying around with the idea of utopia and progress ad futurity, but it feels different than any other time. It's not a grand statement or vision of the future, but a smaller, more pragmatic approach. We're not going to solve the problem that will be the twenty teens with large monolithic solutions, but we'll branch out, and try a million different possibilities and see what sticks. And also how we've got guys with jets coming outof their back, which is kinda the future, but we're not responding to it the way we should. Or, we can't, because there's too many things going on and we have to go look at cats or look at gizmodo instead. 

As I mentioned, these aren't my ideas. I'm merely using the medium of a blog to explore them. I'm not such a fan of tumblrs, sucking and scraping thing's off the internet with no real attempt to create something new. It does suit the project (as exploration) and the topic (contemporary understanding of time and our time period) rather well. I don't provide any commentary on any of the links I've put up; it's more of a public archive for my own sake. I kept on noticing these vaguely coalescing ideas and felt the need to do something about it. Shamefully, the front end needs quite a bit of work. I've stabbed at it here and there, but I just can't wrap my head around the CSS and HTML that Tumblr use to construct templates. No matter, it's a rough approximation of the heroic modernist aesthetic that seems appropriate for what I'm collecting. 

At this point I need to mention the starting point for this project. Sterling's talk Atemporality for the Creative Artist is a near perfect explanation for some of the ideas that I'm playing around with in my assortment of links. The whole talk is mesmerising in only the way Bruce can be:

So what makes an atemporal situation different from a post-modern situation, or a modernist situation, or a classicist situation, what’s really different about it?

Well, let me take a guy who I am very fond of, a very immediate, hard-headed scientific thinker - Richard Feynman, American physicist. Richard Feynman once wrote about intellectual labor, and he said the following: ‘Step one - write down the problem. Step two - think really hard. Step three - write down the solution’.

And I really admire this statement of Feynman’s. It’s no-nonsense, it’s no fakery, it’s about hard work for the intellectual laborer… Of course it’s a joke. But it’s not merely a joke. He is trying to make it as simple as possible. I mean: really just confront the intellectual problem!

But there is an unexamined assumption in Feynman’s method, and it’s in step one - write down the problem.

Now let me tell you how the atemporal Richard Feynman approaches this. The atemporal Richard Feynman is not very paper-friendly, because he lives in a network culture. So it occurs to the atemporal Feynman that he may, or may not, have a problem.

‘Step one - write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already. Step two - write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys. Step three - write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted. Step four - open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further. Step five - start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem. Step six - make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem. Step seven - create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it. Step eight - exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine - find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’

In one way it's the triumph of the new over the old. On the other hand it doesn't really care about the distinction between the new and the old, in a manner that's dissimilar to the postmodern notion of the pastiche. In this regard we return to Bourriaud's idea that our understanding of time, and thus the future (and the past), are about how we cluster various signs together. By branching out in different directions instead of moving from step one to two to three. Having quickly flipped over to check my mail and messages it occurs to me that a tidy example is the use of threaded and branching messages on facebook, gmail, twitter etc. 

Sterling continues:

History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you do is go to the operating system, without even thinking of it as a conscious choice.

Now, a new master narrative could arise on paper. That would be easy. On paper, if it were just a matter of paper, we could do it. But to do that via the Internet is about as likely as the Internet becoming a single state-controlled television channel. Because a single historical narrative is a paper narrative.

To reiterate: our understanding of temporal sequence is affected by the dominant medium of the day. The sequential nature of the book forced upon us the idea of the lone subject reading a singular argument from beginning to end. After the Renaissance and single point perspective, the Industrial revolution gave us steam travel, and with it the ability to move continuously through space in a single line. There's also the Judeo-Christian notion of time either moving towards or away from an ideal. Let's not forget my favourite time period, the Enlightenment and the sumptuous idea of progress. But the dominant form of our time is not a sequential argument, it's a series of links that (hopefully) add up to something cohesive. Or there's no argument to be had at all, merely the experience of moving through different points. The network image has been seared into our collective consciousness. I'll be damned if Deleuze gets credit for any of this; rhizome is such an ugly word. We'll all just agree to use the term network structure and leave it at that.

Back to the idea of the paper narrative. I'm intrigued at this idea, and despite the obvious and inherent problems with it, I'm attempting to turn the blog into a paper narrative. It's a bit of a silly and self indulgent project; I've been toying around with the idea of making a small run risograph book, mostly to flex my print layout muscles. But as Mr Geddes pointed out to me the other day, the risograph is a technology that doesn't make sense. It's a printing method that doesn't belong in this time frame, nor any other time frame at that. And with that in mind, I'm attempting to create this book and send it out. I'm hoping that after a year I'll be tempted to make another one. It's partially to unashamedly play around with aesthetics. The other reason is to kickstart me into paying more attention to the blog; to fine tune my antenna.

My main fear is that the end result will be a silly attempt at shoehorning some ideas into a medium that doesn't play well with the content. So, how to organise a non linnear narrative according to a medium so intent on remaining linear? Perhaps, and this is a side thought, the next edition could be a newspaper. To just play around with dead media. It is at this point that I realise that I am toying around with the designer equivalent with the hipster fascination with dead mediums, the tape cassette being the immediate substantion of that. I've recently been wondering when fashion will catch up, properly, to rave culture. To the heady days of pre Y2K, (ok, fine, when I got into rave culture) and the cd as the equivalent of the cassette tape and vinyl before that. I'm intrigued at how that particular object will play into the vernacular in the same way. As an object, it's useless. Far too thick to be used as a phone case. Beige computer boxes will have to make a comeback at this point. Mark my words, expect to see old pentium computers being hollowed out to be used as speaker boxes. I must find that scene in Idoru, or is it All Tomorrow's Parties, where a bar (I think) uses the boxes as an interior decorative element. Pardon that tangent. I must learn to focus, or edit.

One method I've been toying with is by going through the blog and tagging everything. I find tagging slows me down when all I want to do is copy a link or text and throw it up before I get distracted. But there's an argument to be made that the act of naming something helps to clarify oneself. Even if I don't get around to tagging the blog (or using these tags specifically), breaking down the posts into these components helps me work through a few disparate thoughts.

Modern Ruin looks at the built ruins of modernism, the architectural decay of the dreams of the twentieth century. Taking the name from an exhibition at GOMA, it's ruin porn, plain and simple. Yet I'm not looking back at this past with scorn, or through rose tinted glasses, although there are tinges of admiration. It's more about looking at a foreign past. A past whose ideologies seem foreign to us now. A past in which the idea of utopia and progress don't match with how we view our uncertain future. And looking at the result that entropy has had on those ideologies and their material substantiations. It's a deep and respectful nostalgia for the absolute, without the warfare.

As a flip to this are the unbuilt attempts and ideas of what the future was to be like. I'm trying not to toy around with this too much, as there are plenty of paleofuture blogs out there that have this niche cornered extremely well. Besides, it would be too easy to spend all my time on youtube looking up Jetsons snippets and world fair videos. But this sort of stuff is good ol' fashioned light hearted fun. Especially when they get it so wrong.    

It seems that while the idea of futurity has mostly fallen in the west, it seems to be alive and well in other parts of the world. In the heroic sense at least. I need to put up more examples of this. The recent world fair in China is a perfect example of how the idea of progress is alive and well in other parts of the world. The unbelievably bland American exhibit was in stark contrast to the rest on show. There is still a sense of the heroic, but it's not coming out of the west, not as strongly as it used to, anyway. That's what I'm attempting to do with Rise of the Rest: document the excitement coming from other areas of the globe, without looking at it through the (somewhat whiney) lens of Post Colonialism. 

Objects out of time plot some of the points of the consumer landscape that don't seem to exist in the right time frame, aesthetically at least. I mostly blame the hipster for this one, and their love of nostalgia. I'm still trying to determine if there is an element of pastiche with some of the products, but I'm more impressed when they bring something out of retirement and then move it into new directions. Directions that couldn't have existed then, and can only exist now, as extensions of their former selves, either through technological or branding means. Exploring the new map with old objects, pushing the form or the function or the market niche for todays situation. 

Design Fictions are quite useful as they help to push through ideas of futures that we may inhabit, to act as probes (pardon the use of that term, I'm feeling lazy and it always feels apt). I find them to rather hard to spot without resorting to the usual suspects. The really good ones always look plausible, and I always have to question if they're fun playthings or genuinely attempt to map out and explore future scenarios or to extrapolate on situations that we're already inhabiting. 

Leading on from that are genuine attempts at future making. I'm getting lots of this stuff from kickstarter, the best place for pushing out ideas of the distributed and clustering future that we're headed for. Except most of the real juicy bits from kickstarter are all centered around a very specific future. Minor tangent: I'd love to see a compendium of interesting ideas on kickstarter that didn't make enough money for the project to start. Surely there'd be a few super interesting ideas that didn't get enough attention.

And then there's been a recent spate of juicy spacefaring goodness, and the death of the shuttle program. Nothing speaks to the raw vein of wanting to live in the future than spaceflight. The prohibitive costs of it meant that it just wasn't sustainable until we move a few parsecs above the level of technology we have now. Shame. 

I haven't poked around with Network Culture stuff too much; the ways in which our newly networked mediated culture affect us and our comprehension of time. A halfhearted attempt to map the false histories and possible futures that a network culture enables. In other ways it looks at how the network culture is surpassing the twentieth century. A superficial example of this are the delightful photos of the smoke trails of space shuttles taken out the window of an airplane, using a cameraphone, with all of the poor image quality that this brings. To see the trails of these hulking machines lift through the cloud, the dreams of a faded future. And then watching these images zip through the internet, one retweeted twitpic at a time. 

Another gaping hole that I should really get around to tending to sooner rather than later is the new form of heroic modernism as it relates to generative structures, objects and systems. This is a useful avenue to go down as it provides an even starker vision of modernism than the original. I'll need to tip toe down this route; too much of it or the wrong examples and the point will be lost. Sitting next to Design Fiction should be something about Alternative Universes but the concept hasn't had enough time to crystallize for me to say anything worthwhile about it. 

So far these are just some of the threads that I've been able to name. There's much more stuff in there that I haven't been able to get a handle on. Perhaps what's needed are more examples of similar links, enough for it to make sense to me at least.

Returning back to Bourriaud, it's the way in which our time is not linear as it used to be, nor is it endlessly cycling back on itself. Instead, it's how our attempts at progress are spreading out in different directions, and clustering on those different futures that seem plausible, or even hopeful, for different groups of people. In another way - and I can't really back this up with any sort of a cohesive argument - it is an attempt to pretend that Post Modernity never happened. Instead, we're faced with a void of time between the end of heroic modernism and now. Just a small thought. 

As I've mentioned, it's a way for me to get a handle on a few things. As such, there isn't much cohesive thought put into it, and I'll get distracted by a few things that aren't necessarily what I'm looking for, or appropriate. But that's fine. In some way, I wanted to do this blog to get away from the fear of having to write for a blog. Twitter has taken away all of the short form posts I used to do, and thus after redesigning this place I was left without a place to just put stuff up online without it disappearing in a twitter stream.

Having gotten this far, I haven't really completed step 3 - solve the problem. I haven't really thought hard enough about some of these topics, missing large areas that require deeper thought than what I've been able to attend to. On the other hand I find it much easier to take Feymans atemporal approach. Which, if you've paid attention so far, is mostly the point.

 

 

#Sworcery

I’m usually not one to brag, or claim my old school badge over any one else, but I knew about the brilliant and fascinating and luscious game Sword & Sworcery before you did. How? A rather lengthy post called This is  a Public Health Issue I did on the marvelous call to arms video Design Reboot by SuperBrothers some time back. Not that the video mentioned that a game was on the way, but I had an inkling that something more would come of it. After waiting two excruciating years, with the trickle of cryptic email updates only making the wait that much harder, the final result was a far more beautiful, intelligent and witty experiment than I could have hoped for. 

I suppose the inevitable spoiler alert should be announced at this point. I’ll presume you’ve either played it, or don’t intend on doing so. On the other hand, hopefully you’ll read this then feel compelled to go out and play it. In which case we’re in a bit of a bind. But as Catch 22’s go, this is not a serious paradox we’re dealing with here. So go download it, activate the megatome, wait for the bright and dark moons and bring happiness to the woodfolk. So know that I’ve written this on the presumption that you have played it, or aren't going to.

I’ve never been a fan of the point and click puzzle game. I don’t really have the patience for a game that requires smarts, and while this means I’ve missed out on a large amount of games, I’m fine with that. I don’t see the point in moving through a story and being rewarded for figuring out arcane inventory juggling tricks. Sworcery, while it employ’s this trope, doesn’t have particularly hard puzzles although I’ll embarrassingly admit I had to look up a walkthrough a few times just to get the ball rolling. There’s only a few different puzzles to figure out, and once the basic pattern has been established, it’s not too hard to work them out. While I’ve read the odd critique of the simple and repetitive nature of the game, it was a big bons for lazy old me. I didn’t come to this game expecting to think hard, instead, Sworcery must be looked at as an experience. As an argument for a mode of gaming that plays itself out, slowly, through time. I’ll get to that argument in a bit, but first I must kneel down on the altar of worship as many before me have done: 

 

This game is totally awesomesauce.

 

The aesthetic is awesome. The animation is awesome. The sound design is awesome. The soundtrack is awesome. Hell, despite a few complaints, the puzzles are awesome. The mythic storyline, might not be awesome, but that’s kinda the point. It taps into many other gaming storyline tropes and bundles it up into a story that we’re all familiar with, makes you realise it’s not that important, and only then does it reveal it’s awesomeness to you. Even the writing is awesome. I spent half the game with a dry smile on my face, nodding with approval and feeling included in almsot all the jokes. Did I mention it looks awesome? Every pixel is where it should be, with those that feel out of place are out of place for a reason. There’s something to be said for Craig’s 21st century rustic minimalism illustrative look. It’s just such a joy to be immersed in it, as oppoosed to his illustrations or even his animations. Even the marketing of the game was a stroke of awesome.  The whole thing ties together into the sauciest little package you’ll come across on your phone for some time.

All of the details in this saucebottle work with each other; nothing is there without a reason. Where details you once overlooked become important, you begin to wander how all of the other visual elements would be part of another puzzle. By the standards of any other game, the landscape isn’t very large, but they pack a lot into each scene. And while there’s lots of walking, you’re walking past some gosh darn beautiful scenery. Everything becomes revealed over time, and the whole landscape eventually sings with the songs of the sylvan sprites.  The soundtrack, apart from being an absolute joy to hear, works rather intuitively with the narrative as it unfolds. On another note, this is how it should be done. This is how you create things that matter. That count. That people are willing to put in more money than they should. How you get people to tell their friends. How you sell music. Not that every album should play an integral role in an indie game, but that care was taken to have an affordable album, with proceeds going directly to the musician. With a record that treats the printed object with the aura print deserves.

But I digress. If you want a far more eloquent review of this game, Killscreen has you covered. Not only is their use of words far better than mine, but they're much more aware of how this game is so brilliant compared to all other games that have come before it. I'm not a game historian, or theorist. It's not my thing. I like games, lots, but games have to have a fairly high bar for me to want to play them. For want of better words, I need my games to have a theory behind it for me to want to play it. I need intellect in my games. I need them to teach me something about the world to take something away from it. 

 

I'm here to talk about how Sword and Sworcery stacks up against that metric. How it stacks up to it's own metric. For all his words about Less Talk, More Rock, Craig has a put plenty of talk behind this game. Which brings us back to the start of this post. Two years ago he made a nice little video illustrating some of Jonathon Blow's call to arms about the state of video games.

You can start to see the ways in which this thinking greatly influenced many of the more intriguing mechanics of Sworcery. Blow looks at the the way in which the rules games dictate their philosophical and political outlook. He's mostly looking at World of Warcraft as a symbol of all that is wrong in gaming:

It doesn't really matter if you're smart or adept at trying to get ahead in a system because what really matters is how much time you sink in... It also says that you don't really need to do anything exceptional because to feel good, to be rewarded, all you need to do is run the treadmill like everyone else

When I looked at the Design Reboot video, I used it as a way to lead into some thoughts on conspicuous consumption and evolutionary psychology, mostly as a result of runaway signalling. I'd previously gone to see a talk by Geoffrey Miller, author of the book Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism, and tried to show the connection between these ideas and gaming. On conspicuous consumption, I wrote that

Conspicuous consumption arises from human instincts for showing off our intelligence, personality traits, and moral virtues to family, friends, and mates. Consumerism is not a matter of 'materialism', but of runaway signalling, status display, and socially validated narcissism.

Most of the symptoms of conspicuous consumption can be neatly explained through this particular subset of evolutionary psychology. It's in this area that some games attempt to prove their worthiness to the player as well. It also neatly sums up everything that's wrong with poorly considered elements of Gamification. As an aside, I'm working on a post that compares gamification and quantification, but that's to come later. I continued

This abuse of runaway signalling is exactly Blow's argument. Without these scheduled rewards, is there any worthwhile gameplay left? Without a power up, gold coins, a bigger gun or more narrative, does the game fall below a threshold of playability, of interest? It's these empty rewards that keep most players hooked, the mistaken impression of a fitness indicator.

This game doesn't rely on forcing you to interact with it so you gain a bigger sword. It makes you want to interact with it to experience the world. You never get any power ups, you're sword doesn't get bigger, you gain no extra artifacts at the expense of fiddling around with inventory. The only objects that you gain allow you to interact with the world on different levels. The use of a magic mushrooms is a master stroke. Something we've all joked about, but here it makes sense. Not just as a game mechanic, but how it's appropriate to the woodland setting. Sure, you can restore your health, but I'd argue that this is a necessary element in all games where it's appropriate to do so. Sure, life is precious, but not so precious as to be detrimental to gameplay. More on that in a bit. So if "the rules of a game, the kind of interactions that a game puts you into is the meaning of life for that game" then what is the meaning of life for this game? 

Well, what are the rules of this game? Sure, it plays around with archetypes of classic games from our childhood, but it mixes them together to make a statement about itself, through the mechanics and the gameplay. You only have the chance to walk around and point to explore. There are puzzles for you to figure out, puzzles that make you pay attention to the environment. You get a chance to look beyond the normal scope of the environment. But there's also lots and lots of walking. You get lots of time to look at the environment. Everything reacts. Sure, these are only minor interactions; the water splashes, the trees rustle. But it's enough to make you aware that this environment is real. You get to go to sleep and enter a different world. A world in which the rules of the game remain mostly the same, but it has a different vibe to it. And there's a boor that dances and sings like Brent from The Office. It's also a place in which you get the final components needed to push the game into the final act. And there's this book that you need to open every now and again to find out about backstory, but also because it's interesting, but also to prod you into the vague general direction you need to go. It's a nice use of text as backstory. A method that doesn't detract from the gameplay, it's a separate component. Oh, and you need to kinda prey to the environment, to tinker around with the sworcery component. The flip side to this is the sword fighting. Sure, it plays around with Punch Out, but it also forces you to wait for the right moment, to be patient for the right time to strike, so you have to pay keen attention to the enemy, and remember how this battle works out. And there's some seriously bad ass synth when your facing off against unknowable geometry  (a nice little touch of Platonic realms thrown in for good measure).

But the way they use the phone's capabilities is also interesting as well. Sure, there's a bit of ticking off all the boxes that this thing is capable of, but it very rarely feels tacked on. It feels like an exploration of what this thing is capable of. You could almost hand this to someone and they would know everything that is possible about the machine, save for the gps sensor. Those there's lots of exploration here. Tapping, swiping, sliding, rotating. Even using it as a communication device. Patience also figures heavily in this game. Patience to walk around from place to place. Patience to look around. And patience to wait for the moon cycles. Sure, you obviously went to the moon grotto, or tinkered around with the dates on your settings. This also adds another layer of awareness into the game. Making you aware of the lunar cycles is a pretty broad stroke; the idea that a game could introduce such a slow pace is critical to how the game operates. It's a game that engrosses you into the world but but makes you aware of your own as well. And it does this another way by tinkering around with twitter.

So this backstory, the archetypes, the mythic narrative, the generic gameplay mechanics that tie back into the days of videogame yore; they all tie into wanting to make something that wasn't reliant on these mechanics, just about making something that's interesting. In a way, we've all played this game before. We all know how to play this game, as it's been part of our childhood, and we know the story already. 

If I knew more about Jungian theory I could delve into it a bit more, so I'll just quote Craig from a Gamercamp keynote he gave when previewing the game. 

Carl Jung wrote this crazy book... [with] illustrations by Carl Jung of a dude slaying a dragon and magical trees in the forest.... And Jung's a psychologist who talks a lot about archetypes and how we all have the same drives and the same imaginings no matter where we are in the world. There's something about that and the genre of sword and sorcery that fits. No matter where we are, no matter how sophisticated we are how, we still just love the idea of a magical sword and going into a dark cave to fight a dragon. So that's the concept right there: Carl Jung and Conan the Barbarian. 

You don't need to look into this too much to realise that Jung's big red book is the megatome, which is a nice little nod. But this triple play of archetypes and mythic narratives all that jazz is a really nice way for moving beyond all that stuff and just focusing on polishing all the details and letting the experience speak for itself. 

All of the little tricks of using the possibilities of iOS help reinforce the way in which this exploration occurs. It's not just about tinkering with this world, but about exploring what these machines are capable of. And I get the sense that the team making this were exploring it as well. This all adds up to these many layers of exploration, and experience for experience sake. 

The scene in which we get to sit by the fire with Jim Guthrie, as he plays his music, made me stop fidgeting, forget about the game, and just watch the scenery. Lord knows how it was done, but it was the most enjoyable little bit of videogame scenery I've had the pleasure of enjoying. The first time I've just sat in a game, and watched, despite there being nothing else going on. It helps that the song And We Got Older, is a hauntingly beautiful piece of music. That scene just really gets to the heart of the game as something to be experienced, despite the trimmings of mechanics and gameplay and interaction.

This game provides lots of nutritious food. It's food that you want to eat. That you want to savour. Not because there's a whole host of extrinsic rewards waiting for you if you do and forcing you to keep on going. The whole game is filled with these times when you force yourself to slow down, settle in and let the whole thing wash over you. And its a really refreshing feeling to play with something because I genuinely wanted to. It rewards exploration, not through all of these little points, or stars or a bigger sword. Unless you've got some pretty badass algorithms underlying your game, how do you manage to quantify exploration? You don't, you let it speak for itself as something worthwhile doing unto itself. 

As an antidote to leveling up, the way that I lost my health over time, that I became weaker with each battle, made me rely more on my skill than on any silly piece of armour or potion. It was when I realised this, that I understod the magic of the game. Many other games have created an environment where life is precious, Passage being one of them. And while Passage makes you feel sad, really sad about the loss of life, it's the sole purpose of the game. A fantastic and beautiful and smart game, but it operates at a smaller scale than Sworcery and focuses solely on this (touching) message.

When fighting comes into the mix, you don't get to rely on more armour or a stronger sword to beat the boss, but have to make considered moves, and be patient with each one. I'm guessing that great care went into this logic, and it adds to the meaning of the game via the rules imbued in it. That the levelling up must come from within the player, skill is not a matter of more loot, but of patience and smarts. As a side note, and due to my diligent research, it turns out that the original name of the game was to be Poopsock, and was to riff on the Design Reboot video, to be a pisstake on leveling up and RPGs and all that is wrong with games. It would have been a nice little exercise, a really smart and clever look at it, but the decision to turn it into something more serious makes it all the better for it. I managed to scrounge these images from another presentation he gave which show off the prototypes of this game. It's clever and funny and amusing and all that, but it wouldn't have had the heart of the final result. But I would like to play it. Nothing wrong with a meta game now and again.

Blow talks about, and Superbrothers make light of the typical WoW player, trapped in their own dark dungeon, alone and eating snacks. Sworcery brings you back into the social realm through the rather amusing use of connecting to twitter. Yes, it was annoying when my feed was littered with adventures by others who had the iPad version, but once I started playing, I couldn't help it. I wanted to be part of that same conversation. The twitter parlour trick doesn't feel foreign to the game. If all of the touching and swiping controls are to be explored, it seems natural that they use it as a communication device as well.

As a minor point to my argument, the use of twitter became a minor variation on the theme of conspicuous consumption. The way I wanted to show everybody that I was playing the game. That I was using it. At worst, it flooded my twitter feed. At best, I knew that there were others around me who were playing and enjoying this game, and you get to feel nice and warm knowing you're part of it. It wasn't an extrinsic force making me want to show off, I wasn't competing with others to show that I was playing it, but it was definitely conspicuous. This really comes to the heart of the runaway signaling I mentioned before. It toys with our desire to socialise, to feel connected, to be part of something bigger. But it also toys with our desire to want to show off. It's a trade off, but a nice one at that. This isn't a complaint, just an observation. What's most thrilling about the twitter aspect of the game, is how they managed to fit in every single textual narrative element into a tweetable text. Fitting some witty observation about my day into 140 characters is hard enough. Fitting in a story into a series of bites less than 140 just shows how much effort went into this experiment, and how much they cared about making it as enjoyable and polished as possible.

The ending, got me. It got me hard. I hadn't really felt much of a connection to the protagonist, mostly curiousity. The urgency of the dog barking near the end, the way I only had one life bar left, I realised that this was the end, of both the game and her life. As I ran away from the Gogolitic Mass, stopping only to vomit, I new the end was near, and it made me sad. Not tear jerkingly sad, but the grim awareness that the game, and her life, was about to end. It's hard to feel anything for a protagonist in a game, to feel anything resembling genuine emotion. Excitement, frustration and white knuckle fear come easily to games. The medium is well suited to this. But a sense of bitter sweet loss usually remains too nuanced for games. By making me feel compassion for my character is something I didn't expect until the game moved towards it's final act. Despite the more cerebral arguments put forward by the game, this becomes the final lesson. 

And they laid upon us hard labour

Normally an impossible task, I managed to bypass Pesach this year. Instead, I present a sequel to another Passover themed post from a few years back. The last one, The Shilo Hagaddah looked at a rather charmed Hagaddah that has been part of my family for some time. It's full of lovely expressive typography, whimsical illustration and a charmed use of a nice Didone. I've since come across a later edition with a complete redrawing and repositioning of the story of Moses, with a rather dark and depressing bent. The friendly illustrative style and depiction f smiling well behaved children is gone, replaced with nightmarish images of the oppression of the Jewish people throughout time. The Didone has been replaced with a hard and overprinted slab serif, commonly referred to as an Egyptian Serif. This supreme irony is not lost here, and surely the designers of this book surely felt a touch of amusement as they set these pages in a face called Cairo. Perhaps the use of an Egyptian serif was chosen as a typographic easter egg, an added layer of meaning for those of us who are typographically inclined.

The Holocaust features throughout the pages, the Illustrator using it as a way of imposing relevance by comparing atrocities. I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about visually exploring this particular story of slavery, but the note from the illustrator in the opening pages at least point to why this edition is so viscerally dark and depressing:

Jewish fate, which sways between suffering and redemption, has grown to mighty proportions. With increase in suffering, the longing for redemption and the certainty of its coming have gathered strength. 

This is an old Jewish book, one that speaks of such sorrow and hope. It now appears in contemporary dress, illustrated by one who himself has suffered the flames and escaped them. He was urged by the desire to vivify jewish experience, as it finds expression in the words and pictures of the Haggada.

One can't really fault someone who has gone through such suffering as wanting and needing an outlet for their memories. That aside, this book is a strange and depressing artifact full of rich illustrations of pain and suffering. 

The Face of Watson

 

I'd been putting off watching the Jeopardy Watson video as I assumed it would be nothing more than your typical orb of visualised intelligence speaking in a friendly voice and putting humans to shame. Turns out I was partially correct. It was orb like, and it won, but the method of visualising a super computer was much more interesting than I thought. One of the issues in making what is nothing more than a series of servers, hard drives and some very clever algorithms is in making this approachable to humans. One can imagine the remake of 2001 using something similiar to Watsons impression of sentience as a stand in for the revamped HAL. It's the super friendly voice that does it. Makes it approachable, believable, yet without attempting to cross the vocal uncanny valley. 

I've never really cared for Josh Davis. I didn't see the point of Praystation when I came across it in undergrad; his more recent generative works seem to be just a series of patterns, albeit created generatively. But I'm damn impressed with the approach that he took with making Watson an approachable and non threatening entity. I'm going to presume that this was created in Processing, mostly because it's all I can see at the moment, but I don't know of any other way that this could be made. What with the swarm dynamics and all. 

 

I'm really interested in the many different personality traits they've given to it, as well as all the branching decisions that entail all of the different traits. I'm also rather pleased that they decided to go with the the IBM Smarter Planet logo as the face of Watson. Based on the video, it seems fairly evident that this decision came form on high, the stern IBM guy would have made his point in one of the meetings, and I'm happy that they got to pull rank. Note, I'm making this up completely based on the part in the video at 2:07.  The use of a logo, or a screen based representation as opposed to something more robot like helps in conveying this as an intelligence far different than what we've come to expect. 

It's one or two steps removed from the relational logos I described in my thesis, but close enough that it remains closely linked to their overall branding guidelines. I'm not sure something this detailed could work as a logo, and why would you bother? The Smarter City logo is clever enough (I had to work real hard not to dovetail a smart pun in there) and this is a rather charming extension of it. In my thesis I looked at three different categories: Contingent, Networked and Generative. This is firmly placed in the generative pile, but it goes one or two steps further than what I've seen before, and not just because we're dealing with a near sentient AI. Due to the 26 personality traits that they've given it, the level of complexity far outreaches any other possible generative logos. 

One of the familiar tropes here is the use of the pulsing orb as a means of signifying the speaking entity. Not the most creative of decisions, but a useful one at that. At least we know that this will continue to be used in movies. I can't recall any at the moment that use this, but they have to be out there. Maybe HAL? This works as a nice and comfortable shorthand illustrating voice waves, so we're probably going to stick with it for some time. What is rather neat about this is how the colour of the voice relates to the emotion that Watson feels as he speaks, or as he responds to incoming stimuli such as the presenter.

What I'm most fascinated by is the use of swarm and particle dynamics as a means of illustrating sentience, thought and emotion. And not because I just learnt how to make it recently, although that does help. Davis mentions that he created a swarm, with one leader and the rest follow that swarms decisions. I'm not sure why he went with this approach, but it seems to work. It creates a sense of urgency in the movement, as well as keeping the whole thing in one cohesive group, while allowing for a controlled amount of variance. It's an interesting choice, using a swarm to indicate sentience, and one that relates somewhat to how the brain works. The human brain is not a monolithic individual, but composed of a multitude of different decisions, all working somewhat together to give the appearance of the singular. The same thing is clearly at work in the way Watson searches for the correct answer. It shows what I'm presuming to be a multitude of differing and competing algorithms all trying to evaluate their own decision and then seeing if they're confident about their own choice. This swarm is seen as unintelligent bots racing through the various possibilities contained within the hard drives or the internet. It's a clever choice, as it seems an entirely appropriate decision. 

Despite this not exactly falling into the realm of logo design, I'd go so far as to place this in an entirely new category. It's partially generative, but only in so much that there are generative rules that dictate the animated form of the object. But this goes further than form as it begins to move into the realm of behaviour. There's a whole host of questions that arise once this starts to become, if not the norm, then at least unsurprising. Will we start to see this used on a more casual basis? As fractionally sentient branding marks begin standing in for a whole company, how will they create personalities that are able to represent the core brand values of said company? Will this then become part of the repertoire of branding? How will we, as users, consumers and citizens react to this new form of branding? What will be the role of the designer, will this open up a whole new host of design skills that weren't possible before? What will this new field be called? Personality Designers? Brand Sentience Managers? In writing about emoticomp, Ben Bashford has outlined some of the skillsets that might be needed for this new field:

What’s clear, and it’s been said before, is that there’s an opening for a new type of designer. Someone that understands interaction design, product design and can add character to things through behaviour. A light touch. Very subtle in order to make them believable - without them being too ridiculous.

He's talking about products and devices - tangible physical things - but there's a similar thread at work here. What if they start to piss us off, in ways that didn't happen before? That we decide, now that the brand has taken on a new facet, that we don't really like him. Will it be a female or a male? What if there ends up being more male brand AIs than female? That we really like the products they make, but can't stand the representation. I'm not referring to mascots, but that comes into it somewhat, but more abstract representations. We can't always go with the softly spoken somewhat british pleasant voice; there'll be children voices, elderly voices, accented voices. This scenario will only be possible for specific types of companies, but they won't need to be large multinationals, as the cost and scale of fractional AI will begin to be affordable for medium range companies.

What's fractional AI? Ask Matt Webb, he coined it, and it's a bloody useful term to describe the what I'm talking about when describing partially sentient brand ambassadors. It's not AI in the monolithic sense that Watson or HAL employ, but how small bits and pieces of AI can be used as minor interaction points. It's an hack, a cheap trick in creating believable sentience for a very small set of design and user needs. His How fractional AI can be used to make nicer things talk is a rather fascinating introduction to the topic but Botworld: Designing for the new world of domestic AI talk is a very considered and thoughtful take on how it might play out. 

Back to the prognostication. What if the logo crashes? There's a bug and it starts to behave in a manner far removed from it's designated personality traits? When do we get the first scandal of a logo being improper? The history of Sci Fi is littered with robots and AI gone wrong, but these brand marks are limited to a very small subset of personalities. Yet it's entirely plausible that one of them will be unintentionally mean to me. Having your feelings hurt by a domesticated robot gizmo is fine (to an extent), it's limited to a particular and individual object. But being told I'm stupid, or fat by a brand, even by no fault except the algorithm will be a severe problem. Made even worse by these non human intelligences trying to remedy it. 

The domesticated robot should be subservient to the human, both in it's job and in it's intelligence, but the artificial brand ambassador of the future should be a few clicks above that in terms of representation and perceived intelligence. Matt Jones refers to this as BASAP (Be As Smart As A Puppy), but this falls apart when you move away from small robotic companions and helpers toward representations of brand values that don't mesh with this need for emotional simplicity. When brands require sophistication, and use screen based representations we'll need a new model on which to base it. 

The design behaviours employed with Watson rely on colour, position and speed of both the swarm and the orb. These all work rather well, especially in making him become approachable and non threatening, but there'll be a time when we need to move away from simple particle systems. Something tells me that neonatal representations of the human face won't seem appropriate. There's time yet before this becomes a reality, hell, there's time yet before this becomes remotely plausible. But we'll need to start thinking about ways in which generative forms can move up the levels of complexity while still operating in the realm of design.