Immersion Blog

This is a scenario that’s straight out of Four Lions and Chris Morris’s head. Khuram Sher, arrested on terrorism charges in Canada a few days ago, had previously appeared on Canadian Idol;

Sher, 28, appeared in an audition on the reality show “Canadian Idol” in 2008 in which he sings a comical version of Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” complete with dance moves that include a moonwalk. He told the judges he’s from Pakistan and likes hockey, music and acting. The judges weren’t impressed by either his singing or his dancing.

“Have you ever thought of being a comedian?” one asks in a video posted on YouTube.

Police allege the men had plans and schematics to make improvised explosive devices. Police seized 50 electronic circuit boards which they say could be used as remote-control triggers for bombs. They said one of the men was trained overseas to make explosive booby traps, but did not specify which one.

Police say they moved in on the men to prevent them from sending money to terror groups in Afghanistan.

Logorama from Marc Altshuler – Human Music on Vimeo.

Love this. I found it as research for something I’m working on. It’s unbelievable how hard it is to come up with an idea which is utterly original- and it’s stopped surprising me that, no matter how outlandish the idea seems when I have it, there’s always someone out there who’s thinking in the same general direction…

More 3D inspiration, this time from Claire Morgan, an artist based in London. I love the idea of using “natural” objects to create geometry and movement- amazing…

I’ve started learning about game design, and what a wonderful field it is! Many of my favorite areas of interest are relevant in this eclectic discipline- aesthetics, psychology, identity, neuroscience, technology etc. I’ve started looking at this because I’m interested in the user experience of what I posted about a few weeks ago in “Contact Through Images”. It seems likely that the combined effect of the internet, new reading devices, explorable 3D and so on, will create new ways of creating and interacting with media. That’s obviously a bit of an understatement. We know it and can see it now, but what’s unclear is how much this will blur boundaries between the different media. In his book “A Theory of Fun” , Raph Koster claims that;

Mere entertainment becomes art when the communicative element in the work is either novel or exceptionally well done. It really is that simple. It has the power to alter how people perceive the world around them. And it’s hard to imagine a medium more powerful in that regard than video games, where you are presented with interactivity and a virtual world that reacts to your choices.

“Well done” and “novel” mean, basically, craft. You can have well-crafted entertainment that fails to reach the level of art. The upper reaches of art are usually subtler achievements, They are pieces of work that you can return to again and again and keep learning something new. The analogy for a game would be one you can replay over and over again and keep discovering new things.

I remember seeing Van Gogh for the first time. I had seen the images many times beforehand, and then walked into the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam and was really rearranged by them. It was an extraordinary experience, one that is no doubt repeated on a daily basis as thousands pass through the doors of that museum. The depth and movement in the paint creates a psychological sensation and emotionality, that most people wouldn’t have experienced before, through the medium of paint. But I don’t think  I’ll ever get anything markedly different from that, other than whatever is created by own internal state when I’m looking at them. The almost psychedelic sensation is his achievement and there isn’t much more to learn from it. All the rest of it had been done before. That isn’t a bad thing, I just think that we tend to overstate the importance of individual achievements when they mark an influential departure point.

Collectively those achievements add up to alot. But it creates a resistance to perceived value in spheres where those achievements are seemingly eroded by technical sophistication. Especially in a climate where the value of art is so heavily influenced by it serving the purpose of being interior decor for the rich. But, you know, who cares? Shakespeare wrote plays for entertainment. Dickens wrote episodic narratives that were read out from street corners, to people who couldn’t read. The art market is, in so many ways, unbelievably conservative. In a way pursuing that kind of value can be limiting. It always strikes me that video game makers are at once beset by the idiot demands of their market, and by their own sense of what purposes are served by their medium. The latter is way more corrosive than the former. I think things are going to get much more interesting as elements of game design become relevant to the production of online media that isn’t purely aimed at being entertainment.

Australian artist Sam Jinks sculpts his figures in clay and then casts them in silicon. He says he’s most inspired by renaissance artists, because of the mystery and reverence created by their religious purpose. It’s interesting that he’s managed to capture that atmosphere so well in his sculptures. The hyperreal physicality, the off-kilter surrealism, and the flawed humanity in his subjects all add to that power. His favorite picture is by Bosch, which also seems to make complete sense. I’m researching 3D at the moment, so the hyperreal modern sculptors are fantastic for inspiration…

My show at the National Media Museum opened on the 12th of last month. I grabbed these shots of it just beforehand, seems like that was last week- things have been a bit hectic recently. Wallpaper did a nice piece on it and it’s going to be on the front cover of The Sunday Times Magazine, coming out soon.

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Independent web videos.

Wallpaper has a great selection from Erik Kessels’ series of books, “In Almost Every Picture”. Kessels scours flea markets and the internet for vernacular images that, in series, contain narratives that are sometimes comic, sometimes poignant and occasionally quite creepy.

David Gelernter has written an interesting and hopeful manifesto on Edge “Time To Start Taking The Internet Seriously”. In his introduction to it, John Brockman writes;

Take a look at the photos from the recent Edge annual dinner and you will find the people who are re-writing global culture, and also changing your business, and, your head. What do Evan Williams (Twitter), Larry Page (Google), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web Consortium), Sergey Brin (Google), Bill Joy (Sun), Salar Kamangar (Google), Keith Coleman (Google Gmail), Marissa Mayer (Google), Lori Park (Google), W. Daniel Hillis (Applied Minds), Nathan Myhrvold (Intellectual Ventures), Dave Morin (formerly Facebook), Michael Tchao (Apple iPad), Tony Fadell (Apple/iPod), Jeff Skoll (formerly eBay), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have in common? All are software engineers or scientists.

So what’s the point? It’s a culture. Call it the algorithmic culture. To get it, you need to be part of it, you need to come out of it. Otherwise, you spend the rest of your life dancing to the tune of other people’s code.

Alot of the points that Gelertner makes remind me of my current obsession, but then I guess they would;

5. Consider Web search, for example. Modern search engines combine the functions of libraries and business directories on a global scale, in a flash: a lightning bolt of brilliant engineering. These search engines are indispensable — just like word processors. But they solve an easy problem. It has always been harder to find the right person than the right fact. Human experience and expertise are the most valuable resources on the Internet — if we could find them. Using a search engine to find (or be found by) the right person is a harder, more subtle problem than ordinary Internet search. Small pieces of the problem have been attacked; in the future we will solve this hard problem in general, instead of being satisfied with windfalls and the lowest-hanging fruit on the technology tree.

6. We know that the Internet creates “information overload,” a problem with two parts: increasing number of information sources and increasing information flow per source. The first part is harder: it’s more difficult to understand five people speaking simultaneously than one person talking fast — especially if you can tell the one person to stop temporarily, or go back and repeat.  Integrating multiple information sources is crucial to solving information overload. Blogs and other anthology-sites integrate information from many sources. But we won’t be able to solve the overload problem until each Internet user can choose for himself what sources to integrate, and can add to this mix the most important source of all: his own personal information — his email and other messages, reminders and documents of all sorts. To accomplish this, we merely need to turn the whole Cybersphere on its side, so that time instead of space is the main axis.

And also;

13. The traditional web site is static, but the Internet specializes in flowing, changing information. The “velocity of information” is important — not just the facts but their rate and direction of flow. Today’s typical website is like a stained glass window, many small panels leaded together. There is no good way to change stained glass, and no one expects it to change. So it’s not surprising that the Internet is now being overtaken by a different kind of cyberstructure.

14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.

15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams — some called blogs, “feeds,” “activity streams,” “event streams,” Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time.

16. Your own information — all your communications, documents, photos, videos — including “cross network” information — phone calls, voice messages, text messages — will be stored in a lifestream in the Cloud.

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.