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The Owner-Free Filing system has often been described as the first brightnet; A distributed system where no one breaks the law, so no one need hide in the dark.
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Cybercartography is “the organization, presentation, analysis and communication of spatially referenced information on a wide variety of topics of interest and use to society in an interactive and multidisciplinary format”
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bluestates is an art project which uses bluetooth – wireless networking found in many mobile phones and personal computers – to sense social relationships and, from that, to build an emergent model of an individual’s social network.
Author: MK
Overheard, from conversations, scraped from PowerPoint presentations… these are some of my favourite lines from ISEA 2006/ZeroOne Festival in San Jose.
“I don’t know if I need a burrito or a massage” – Gabe Sawhney
“Hermetically sealed systems are magic” – Amy Franceschini
“The digital strata are buried and opaque” – Matt Jones
“Did the Canadians throw all the parties?” – Galen Scorer
“This stuff could really sell, you know?” – Garnet Hertz, on the work of Jim Campbell in the Edge Conditions show
I’ll add more as I remember them.
General ISEA update coming up soon.
Instead of writing an ISEA report, I’ll just link here to what I find to be the best reportage on it on the web.
- Brett Stalbaum has collected some of the best YouTube videos of ISEA/ZeroOne
- Randall Packer was commissioned by Rhizome to write a report
- Responses to the Interactive City stream on the iDC list, blogged by networked_performance in three parts: one, two, and three.
- Canadian artist Ken Gregory posted a few times: once, twice, three times or so.
So many fascinating case studies, general questions, and thoughts were had throughout the day, and the lunch brainstorm sessions were wonderful. It’s difficult to summarize but I’ll do my best.
We had to respond to a question along the lines of: “You’re here as part of a planning committee for urban development, and so what activities/things/objects would you encourage the development of in your city, and which would you discourage?”
First I will try to summarize what “Group One” presented to the rest of us. This group summed up their “urban solutions” into three bullet points: education, access to infrastructure, and open source infrastructure.
They suggested that education could be the engine to drive our vision of an interactive city. Education (in the broadest sense) could be used as a tool to empower people to make change in their cities. The main thrust of their second point, about access to infrastructure, was a suggestion that the Internet should be a public utility and should be free, and access to technology should be taken on as a civic issue. Their last point was perhaps the most intruiging: if infrastructure is open source, people can solve the problem rather than feeling helpless or dependent on government. For example, download the software that runs your electricity meter to figure out why it is overcharging you. (Of course, you could also reset your meter to zero… but that’s me being the devil’s advocate).
Two other points from their presentation: a suggestion was made to improve urban space by implementing “Faraday Speak Easys” – quiet spaces, free of urban electronic noise for gathering and socializing. Finally, a phrase they used that stuck with me was “indigenous intelligence” – recognizing and truly utilizing local solutions that have been developed.
I was part of Group Two and in a way we were the yin to Group One’s yang – Group One seemed to talk a lot about infrastructure (the physical city) while we were more concerned with behaviours (the social city).
We talked a lot about how we can interact socially and improve social relations/behaviours. I brought up one of my favourite examples of “social engineering” to the group: Antanas Mockus, former Mayor of Bogotá, who used what I might call “performative governance”. He famously hired a troupe of mimes to humiliate drivers as they committed traffic violations. He also distributed cards with “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” symbols on them, so people could express approval or disapproval of actions taking place in public space. Mockus said: “Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change.” If change is what we want, and we are looking for how to positively influence behaviours, I think Mockus’s leadership is a powerful example.
Of course, Mockus’s solutions are very low tech (which I think is really part of their beauty) but we are here to discuss technological solutions in an urban context, so we brainstormed ideas for “normcasting” – expressing mass approval or disapproval or expressing simple social reinforcements. We talked about Bluetooth messaging, or using using wave messaging as less confrontational ways to communicate with each other. (and the devil’s advocates among us noted that independent moderators are probably still required for “normcasting”).
I am at Day Two* of the Interactive City Summit in San Francisco, sitting right beside a fellow who also happens to be entering notes into the oh-so-familiar WordPress interface.
The day started with a talk by Matt Jones, that in his typical rapid-fire and intelligent way, bantered back and forth between focused questions and proposed examples as solutions. He spoke about “solidified socialisation” – the idea that our social relationships are being better articulated and firmed up through web 2.0 applications (I found myself nodding during this slide, since I know I’ve used these tools to reinforce a weak tie or capitalize on a chance meeting). Matt also spoke of “playing with reality” (using fantasy football as an example) and methods of tagging, recording, and sharing information in public which he cheekily referred to as “search and deploy” tactics.
Matt asked the simple question at one point – Toys or stories? We used our mobile phones to vote on which thing – toys or stories – we preferred to use/make/think about. It is an interesting binary to propose, especially when thinking about some of the examples of creativity in urban environments that are being showcased at ISEA this year.
One of the concepts from Matt’s talk that I found particularly “sticky” was the idea that we are creating (or should be creating?) a “Robot-readable planet”, meaning that instead of working hard to develop machine vision and have robots see the world they way we do, we can just make it easier for them to read our world. This led to the vivid and horrifying example of perhaps some of the bots that surround us and try to read us and our world becoming a bit of an Army of Microsoft Clippys.
One of the final examplese that Matt showed was a news story about a British village named Crackpot, where people drive off cliffs because they rely too heavily on their satellite navigation systems, and not on their eyes. This example in particular made me smile, since I have seen a similar phenomena with my own eyes. When I did the Geostash project in Toronto, where artists searched for caches of materials to create temporary public art, often the participants fixed on the GPS device and the number displayed, fiddling with the technology instead of trusting their eyes and doing a good look around when the numbers were close enough.
Next up, some reporting on the lunchtime brainstorms…
* – sadly, I missed Day One.