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.

]]> http://blog.robbiecooper.org/2010/03/10/in-almost-every-picture/feed/ 2 http://blog.robbiecooper.org/2010/03/09/algorithmic-culture/ http://blog.robbiecooper.org/2010/03/09/algorithmic-culture/#comments Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:15:51 +0000 Robbie http://blog.robbiecooper.org/?p=2826 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.

Chatroulette is a service that allows you to make random video links with others over the internet. I read a piece recently where a journalist did it for an hour and saw x number of couples have sex, x number of lone men wanking etc. This is a video that I Am Un Chien made on it (for their song Hologram) and posted on YouTube. I love it. Thanks to Julien for this.

I’m just remembering who Chris Jordan is. He’s the guy who did these images of garbage from a few years ago. He has also done projects Running the Numbers 1 & 2 that are on his site. Check em out and then breathe into a paper bag- number visualization has never been so unbearable.

There’s an amazing slide show on Seed Magazine’s site of Chris Jordan’s work in the Midway Islands, in the heart of what is known as The Great Pacific Garbage Patch- an enormous island of junk that’s formed by ocean currents between Japan and the US. These images are not staged- the birds simply mistook the brightly colored garbage for food and ate it.

Vice’s site has a hilarious post on a $27 million creationist theme park in Kentucky. I used to love theme parks when I was a photojournalist, and would have been all over this one. Anyway, it’s always funny when nutters try and fight evolution by saying stuff like “it’s God testing us”. You’d have to throw out most of the literal interpretation of the bible in the process, but it would seem like a better route to talk about theoretical physics, quantum mechanics, the holographic principle, things like that. Einstein believed in God, after all. Making up stories fit for babies is a pretty radical alternative. It’s betting on stupidity. Actually, maybe that isn’t such a dumb idea.

It seems like a natural evolution that the worlds of text, data and images will merge into a virtual world. In a way of course they already have on the internet, but I’m thinking more along the lines of the kind of virtual world that William Gibson envisioned. Second Life has it wrong because the attempts to make spaces that mirror real world businesses, brands etc are manifestly divorced from real information, geography and real events. RL/SL events that attempt to merge the two are comically clunky. The space that I’m thinking about would have to be primarily visual. But given the increasing networking of data and the linkability of gps, text, visual and other types of data, it could be a visual world that we all contribute to with our camera phones and other devices.

Imagine a world where all images are portals into a virtual world. So, for example, you read a story on the front page of the newspaper on your tablet device, which allows you to move around in the image that illustrates it. Or likewise, an image on a friend’s social network album. You can go forward in the image, around corners, you can click on the images of people and send messages to them via their social network. People already use images of themselves as their avatar, but what if every image of you was automatically your avatar? The context of the news story or the friend could be abandoned in favour of a new context and a new perspective. The reason why this idea makes the hairs on my neck stand up, is because it’s essentially an evolution of what has already been there for many years.

…Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard’t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

Even though this idea is gaining momentum due to “noise” that could turn out to have a mundane source, it’s exciting that results from the GEO600 could lead to further investigation into this, in the near future; “We are very eager to find out what we can learn about the possible holographic noise over the course of the coming year”, says Prof. Dr. Karsten Danzmann, director of the Hannover Albert-Einstein-Institute. “GEO600 is the only experiment in the world able to test this controversial theory at this time… You could say that this has placed us in the very centre of a tornado in fundamental research!” That was about a year ago, so I’m hoping there’ll be some update in the next few months.

Basically, the problem I’m having is that I’ve been having extreme loneliness…for many years. I don’t really know what to do because I’m not the type who likes to go out much, and I’m just shy and quiet. Even on the internet, I don’t feel comfortable posting much because it exposes myself. Sometimes people are so mean.

So I’m trying to figure out what to do. I just wish I had someone to give me attention and stuff. I wish I had someone who would be there to listen to me, and always be nice to me. It really hurts to have someone neglect me or be mean. Unfortunately, a weakness of mine is that I’m sensitive, but I think I became more sensitive after something bad happened some years ago.

I wish I had at least one nice person to talk to, maybe over e-mail or Messenger. Of course, if I could find someone to marry, then Insha’Allah I would have someone in real life to give me all the attention and affection I wanted. So far, the families we’ve met aren’t interested in me, though.