An Ignite Talk at The National Geographic Society #WhereCampDC 2011 by yours truly.

Related posts:

1. Ignite Submit
2. Virtual Brain

I see the shadow of a similar change happening within the current world of Geography related to the contentious neologism “Neogeography” and all the agnostic advances and changes taking place under this monicker of ill repute. In the above mentioned episode there is a story about Joachim De Bellay and his poetry gang’s manifesto on renovating the shabby provincial French language into something capable of expressing grand poetic vision. In this manifesto (Défense et illustration de la langue française) a relatively new term “patrie” (fatherland) is heavily used and advocated but the entrenched defenders of the status quo retaliated with the sentiment, “Those of us with a country (pays) have no need for your fatherland (patrie).” Perhaps the recent deletion of Wikipedia’s page on Neogeography should be taken as a similar expression of defensive self preservation by a status quo uninterested in the elevation and expansion of location based practice? “Those of us with Geography have no need for your Neogeography.”

Part of the idea behind this French linguistic renovation was that a dualistic relationship to the language needed to be in place for it to be more fully understood, analyzed, and exploitable. The language had to be spoken and dissected, internalized and externalized. This could only be achieved if the language was made foreign again, self alienated, reread. I suspect the new organic world of the Neogeographic vernacular will likewise play a role in the rebirth of spatial expression into a form more capable of elegantly handling the increasing complexity of interaction between people, places, things, ideas, and time.

Viva la Neogeography! Shoutouts to @schuyler for getting that page back up, @ajturner and @dianneisnor for their prolific and glamorous use of the term and all the others involved in thinking outside the bounding box!

Related posts:

1. Frienemy vs Enemigo
2. The Constraints of Counting, and Other Segmentation Constructs

One variant that would be cool to include in a piece like this would be showing the in-game initiation of one of these games inside of a game. This addition could construct a much richer labyrinth of interaction and agency, something much more complex than the obvious russian doll metaphor. The ability to zoom in and out between characters as part of the game play.

Although it’s fairly stimulating to watch someone else’s musing on this potential structure in linear passive form, it might be best explored as a game itself.

Related posts:

1. Shantytown Labyrinths of Abandoned Online Identity Shadows
2. London Arms Trade Map

Whose Rubble?
Many people cried foul, describing this act as theft (some claiming the intentionally public artwork has been stolen from the public domain, other that the physical wall, although nearly rubble itself, is still private property, deserving of respect). But as Jeremy Korzeniewski points out on autoblog.com, “As much as the city of Detroit would like to do something about the the 3,500,000-square-foot [abandoned] facility, nobody seems quite sure who owns the dilapidated building.” The massive chunk of real estate seems to be in some pretty complicated ownership limbo, providing a convenient narrative mirror for the dilemma brought to the surface during this ordeal over the ownership rights of street art.

The Property Problem
Part of what makes this topic difficult and interesting to articulate is the fact that much street art is done, in part, as protest against the perceived tyranny of private property. In some cases being thought of as a form of civil disobedience, breaking the rules to change the rules, introducing the world to a vision of what could exist. In the case of street art, the vision is a world decorated and annotated with the hopes and dreams, criticisms, humor, celebrations, mysteries, and challenges of the people who walk, work, and live in those streets. A world where creativity and expression are celebrated. A world that acts as a mirror into the collective hearts and minds of the society itself. Art that acts to negate the aesthetic rights of property owners in favor of the aesthetic rights of those most exposed.

Therefore, where private property is respected and protected, street art can only be seen as having a negative value, as being a criminal activity, and as being inherently corrosive to the social fabric of our cities. But, from a perspective where private property is seen as part of an infrastructure of exploitation and control, a grass roots reinvention of one’s own surroundings is seen as an empowering expression of hope.

Many graffiti kids are not necessarily steeped in the revolutionary political interpretations of their intuitive acts of rebellious art. In fact their personal tendencies might very well lean heavily in the opposite direction once the carrot of financial reward begins to grow in the fertile soil of urban mythology. How much does it cost to convert an act of protest into an act of support? How much does it cost to transform a critic of private property into a zealous defender of it? How much can your art crime be worth?

The complexity of such questions creates a rich platform of diverse opinions upon which to build powerfully controversial social experiments. It is therefore not uncommon for some to consider the [array of situations around the] Banksy brand, and others, as a kind of media theater delivering high potency doses of conceptual and civic irony to an unsuspecting audience throughout the socio-economic tapestry of our cities.

Susan Farrell of Art Crimes states it clearly when she says, “I have no idea how Banksy feels about this wall and its fate, but it’s important to consider that Banksy might actually be a performance artist doing street-media theater and not a stencil artist doing walls.”

Recursive Violations as Creative Context
While the actions of the 555 gallery is being defended as benevolent, some art thefts are simply done as selfish acts and the irony is unintended, as in this NYPOST article about actor Adam Shulman stealing a piece in broad daylight.
.

This one is a detailed account of someone trying (but failing) to steal a different Banksy wall. Apparently they got this far, then had to leave, but when they returned to finish the heist, someone else had scored the booty. The blog post is a plea for the second thieves to compensate the first thieves who did most of the hard physical labor.

But other times the irony is front and center, as with Property Games T-Shirts that feature collages made from photographs that claim copyright of images of other people’s graffiti on other people’s property. A theft of a theft of an art crime.

Then we have a community blog for people to post stories and examples of artwork being stolen, copied, misappropriated, etc. It’s wonderfully called You thought we wouldn’t notice. They have a section dedicated to intellectual property theft of graffiti.

Authenticity
After the city of Melbourne apologized for painting over yet another Banksy stencil, a slew of “copies” started cropping up but were discredited as fakes. How was the authenticity of the original one established? Authenticity also has to be considered when you realize people are selling some of this original (stolen, found, gifted) artwork for non-trivial sums of money (at the time of this posting, the Jamaican Banksy wall was back on the market for $50,000).

At least this rat is blunt enough to give us the cold hard truth on the question of authenticity!


(img by cidsoe)

Ephemeral Isn’t Synonymous with Unwanted
Another element of the active critique on banal architecture that graffiti manifests is one of stasis vs ephemerality. The built environment is created by artists who move from one project to the next, availing themselves of new challenges while not quite realizing the long term periods of inflexibility their buildings impose on those who are not fortunate enough to partake in a continually changing landscape of possibilities. There may be something deeply seeded in humanity that expects, craves, even needs, a certain level of change within our physical environment from time to time.

Graffiti artists quickly adjust to the fact that their work is not permanent, that it may be buffed or covered with another piece at any time. Some might presume that acceptance of the ephemeral nature of their work should automatically be interpreted as a general lack of interest in its fate. This presumption underestimates the subtle intuitive intelligence that any true artist has for the arcane contextual nuances within their particular practice. Basically, these guys are making this work every day, of course they think about the temporary nature of their art, and of course those realizations and thoughts seeps into the work itself on some level. If they are building examples of a new kind of world, it’s one that fluctuates and glistens from moment to moment with the changing interests and thoughts of the collective social entity that inhabits it. Moving this kind of work as an intended act of benevolence results in a preserved specimen captured from the wild and provides little more that a shallow spectacle, reinforcing the encroaching dominion of a culture which seeks to understand others through the analysis of decontextualized relics.

This work is more that just the visual image. We value the visual portion of the work because we live in a culture that has commoditized visual iconography, but we fail to value the context and site-specificity because we are not yet able to commoditize location and context. If the 555 gallery had some way to remove and preserve the entire area in which the discussed mural was originally situated, I’m sure they would have. As we stand today, context is simply something we are willing to forfeit. But context is so much more that just the physical surroundings of a piece of street art, it also includes the contemporary prevailing social and economic climate, the legal and political landscape, the fickle vernacular interpretation of short and long term historical destiny, the time line of ancestral artwork on that particular wall, the life and circumstances of the artist at the time of, and since the creation of the artwork, as well as so many other interconnected layers of information. There aren’t current methods available for preserving or even recognizing all the pertinent contextual forces that come into play for the formation of this type of artwork which uses context as a core part of its concept.

Attention Economy
While some interpretations may attribute ideological ardor as the primary drive to produce ephemeral street art, others point to the more fundamental human desire for attention and appreciation. Putting artwork on the streets, with all it’s dangers and pitfalls, may simply provide the quickest and most efficient route to artistic recognition. After all, the streets thrive without curators, committees, or resumes. The streets offer direct access to a huge variety of eyeballs.

All this talk about assumed motivation is here simply to demonstrate how a variety of responses could emerge to the guerrilla collection of guerrilla art, and how the experience of having your own artwork stolen could be a gigantic ego boost in the quest for validation and relevance. If your art is already on display for free, and people still feel the need to snatch it up, to hoard it, there is surely some trickle of pride coming along as well.

Evolving Values
Vandalog takes a rational and balanced view of these topics, bringing into perspective a very important idea: in the future, people will think of these issues very differently.

Will new economic forms evolve around these questions?

Edge cases sometimes become normative.

[update]
It occurred to me a day after posting this that I may not have clearly articulated something critical about all of this debate. So many of the arguments around street art, rights, property, preservation, context see to take it for granted that there is actually such a thing as a “right answer” or a “right position”. While listening to a fascinating lecture by historian Frank Gavin I was struck by the pragmatic way in which so many very difficult decisions need to be made. The notion of what’s “the right choice” is incredibly flexible depending on the myriad of pressures and obstacles that relate to the outcome and impacts of the decisions. One choice impacts many other choices. The road to a functioning and satisfying future doesn’t depend so much on what’s best for the current players in the direct present, but on the complex web of interactions that those choices are apart of, now and in the future.

Maybe it’s not about “what’s right” but about “what’s best”.

Related posts:

1. Street Art Sculpture Bildstrecke: Street Art Skulpturen – Postgraffiti-Generation – Kunst – art-magazin.de
2. When Cities Apologize for Buffing Graffiti

Places drift, jump, and fade, physically. Some places have a much higher propensity towards noticeable drift than others, but location, in general, is not stable. The geo-web of the past few years has mostly ignored this as a low impact edge case. The era of the Google Maps API dramatically boosted developer productivity and interest within the geo space because it simplified and lowered the barriers to entry, while simultaneously reinforcing a few paradigms that find easy adoption within rapidly moving startups and business, ideas like “the perfect is the enemy of the good” and “solve for the 80% use case”. Startups are constantly faced with a to-do list that can never be 100% complete, but these catchy ideas formalize and automate the painful process of deeming some desires unworthy of your attention. Since 80% of the places that most people are searching for, or reviewing, or visiting feel relatively immune to change (at least in the “several years” lifespan much of today’s software is being designed for), we have very quickly built up a stiff and rigid framework around these places to facilitate the steep adoption of these now ubiquitous geo-services. The rigidity is manifest in the ways that place drift isn’t handled, places are assumed to be permanent.

This curve based market selection exists everywhere. Architectural guidelines and building codes are designed for average sized humans, websites are designed for the most commonly sized screens, even health care is designed, to put it another way, to ignore a certain subset of problems. I’m not making the case that we should solve every problem, every time. If we tried to solve every problem, we’d likely solve none. What I’m trying to articulate is that we are at a point, in the geo-web industry and as end users, where we can choose to keep building a concrete framework for the places that generally don’t move, and just write off the anomalies as being in the jurisdiction of specialists, or we can start building a new flexible framework that understands and incorporates place drift. If we accept that all places drift, we don’t have to divide the world into places that are easily indexed and those that aren’t, we can more closely match the human experience of flexible place allocation.

The illusion of stasis ignores the fundamental reality that every place eventually drifts, jumps, moves, or vanishes. It’s not the responsibility of any one startup to design, use and evangelize a structure intended to last for decades instead of years, but it might be an opportunity. Or it might fall into the realm of proposals that have to swim against such a strong incumbent current that it is thought best to form some sort of committee, or standards organization.

One tectonic shift that is going to press up against the old concrete framework currently in place is the explosion of real-time geo-data. This shift is forcing designers and developers to shoehorn the 4th dimension into their schemas by attaching the tweets, road reports, and sensor data with flexible glue. This is like building earthquake proof penthouses on top of old unreinforced brick buildings resulting in a Winchester Mystery House. I guess i’m advocating for both new building standards as well as seismic retrofitting of the 4th dimension into the legacy geo-data that is still being used from previous eras.

Ideally the new standards would not just implement a few more date fields (although perhaps this is all that can be expected of retrofitting), but should address issues similar to what KML’s “Level of Detail” concept can address (when you have a lot of data in a region, some is better suited for visibility from afar, while other is better seen up close). It should also be able to deal with transposition (where the temporal continuity connects various locations of a place). Finally, such a new standard should be able to address the flexible and permeable, and pixelated nature of borders and boundaries. The defined location of a neighborhood breathes, it’s alive, it’s a collection of diverse perspectives, each of these perspectives having their own native shelf lives of validity and relevancy.

I’m not just talking about when a dry cleaner moves to a new address, but also addressing the NYC’s WTC past and future, the shifting of Chilean cities from earthquake, the addition of a new wing to a museum, or when an entire mansion is stolen and relocated across state lines.

This all brings me back to the previously described idea of a scatterplot approach, where the notion of canonical location data is traded for an ongoing changing flowing morphing stream of scatterplot location data, a “location field” if you will. This field is a living entity, a wave, that adjusts instantly, and represents the pulse of data available for, from, and about a place. Places are patterns that coalesce, they emerge from, and superimpose over, other places of various size and scope.

Places are like people, we change over time, the atoms in our body are completely regenerated every N years, we learn and forget tons of things, our relationships grow and break, we migrate to whole new sets of peers, yet we somehow maintain some sense of continuity. This hybrid form of change and stasis can and should be integrated more into the digitization of our environments.

Maybe places are more about time than location.

Related posts:

1. Embracing the Social Scatterplot
2. DRIFT – call for submissions

I think the only harm done in this situation would be to continue to assume that a Place has a singular, static, defined relationship to a cartographic framework. If we aspire to understand what Places people are talking about, as they connect to these places with a growing variety of devices and standards, we might do well to move from a vector based polygonal model to something more pointillist.

If we can establish an array of coordinates as the historical collection of points that have been used to define, or to reference, a Place, no matter how askew they may be from our sense of the real boundaries, then we can actually start talking about the same Place, regardless of each tiny, singular, gadget or app specific definition. This methodology is conceptually related to the common notion of subjectivity, in which we learn to understand from early childhood that a toy, or a person, or a Place, looks different from different perspectives, or as seen through different media. We eventually learn that we are talking about the same kitten, even if your photograph looks different from my drawing. The concept of the kitten is just a collection of all the successful references to the physical object. Even in the act of trying to capture, or document, that actual objective nature of the kitten, we are simply creating more subjective references to it. The need, and ability, to objectively define and describe a physical object only becomes increasingly ridiculous and futile the more one tries. The same can be said of Places. The harder we strive to objectively define exactly where a Place is, or what happens at a Place, or what category a Place falls into, the more we realize our measurements and descriptions add to the collage of data they are hoping to clean up.

It’s time to put down the minimalist fallacy of Place Objectivity, and embrace the polymorphic cloud of the Social Scatterplot for Subjective Place Definition.

photo from gps insight

Related posts:

1. Start Archiving Your Platial Maps Today
2. Avatar Machine

Could vernacularly empowering and agency imbuing terms be a viable loyalty boosting tactic?

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1. Dangerous Information
2. On How to Speak Anonymously in Public: A Hacker’s Guide

Observation changes things. This we find even in the fundamentals of our physical world through research like the double-slit experiment. We also know this anecdotally in many areas, one example being that surveillance cameras are supposed to deter crime, that we act differently if we know we are being watched.

Interaction also changes things, anyone who shares a home or office with another human realizes that objects don’t always stay in the exact spot you last saw them. Other people interact with the world in your absence, a lot, sometimes eroding and depreciating, but sometimes adding, contributing and improving. Most systems in the physical world don’t reset themselves just for you. Video games, and then the web, on the other hand discovered that these customized, personal experienced could easily be created just for you. Countless people could read the same book or document at the same time without making it unavailable to anyone else, or could start a fresh game of pac man without worrying about other instantiations of the ghost infested mazes. The notion of scarcity-free on-demand experience found a way into our cultural bloodstream.

But sometimes we still want the social experience. We still have certain reasons to watch a movie in a dark room full of strangers, we still flock to music festivals, sporting events, and shopping malls to rub elbows and bump egos.

My proposal is that the Augmented Reality movement take into account the ways in which shared social interaction with digital assets might be used to enhance understanding, access, and hedonic quality within the augmented views of the world. If you interact with something, there are cases where I should experience the changes you made. These notions are already central to many online social gaming experiences like Second Life, where my actions do have effects on the other inhabitants, or on the environment. What can the AR community learn from these scenarios?

Sometimes it’s nice to listen to music together, and to know that those around you, or at least to know who among those around you, are hearing the same music as you. A dance party with everyone listening to their own layers of unsynchronized sounds is not likely to be a transcendent experience.

Related posts:

1. Augmented Reality Revolution
2. Mice in Virtual Reality

You might have heard the news that the Melbourne city council issued a pubic apology for accidentally painting over a piece of graff by the world famous artist banksy. This blew my mind, in a good, but confusing, way. Of course I find it encouraging that a city council can recognize the cultural and creative heritage of street art, but it brings up so many questions.

Before the questions, I want to start with a few facts I dug up about the situation in Melbourne.

Melbourne seems to have a strong history of street art going back to the 1970s, but has just recently started officially sanctioning specific pieces, walls, alleys, and tunnels throughout the city. The city has issued 26 permits so far, 16 of them being retroactive, meaning they were already bombed out spots that were later recognized and officially approved. Just look at this official city government url: http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/ForResidents/StreetCleaningandGraffiti/GraffitiStreetArt/Pages/Registeredstreetartapplications.aspx.

The official website for Melbourne tourism promotes walking tours of these areas dripping with graff. The tours ironically conclude with an hour of “fabulous wine and cheese”.

One quote from the recent news reports caught my eye.
“We will now be acting to implement retrospective legal street art permits to ensure other famous or significant street artworks within the city are protected.” said Melbourne city council chief Kathy Alexander.

Protected from …. the city? What about protected from modification or destruction by other artists? or when property changes ownership? or when a property owner decides he’d like to sell the wall itself to an art collector, at auction, or on ebay? What about later modification by the same artist? If it’s protected, who owns it? What happens when that famous artist paints outside a sanctioned zone (this is apparently what happened with the parachuting rat)?

Apparently, recreations of the buffed banksy work are now popping up, and while they are not generally attributed to him, could this live in a grey area of legal clearance?

Being curious about the actual letter of the law regarding street art in Melbourne, I wrote to the city council as follows:

Lots of news around the banksy paint over, i’m wondering if i could ask some historical questions around street art in Melbourne?

I found the list of street art applications, many being retroactive. Is there much prosecution in Melbourne for graffiti?

Do painters still create this work in secret?

Is there any official distinction between ‘tagging’ and ‘art’?

If prosecution does still happen, how would the new banksy copies be handled, specifically as stencils are almost digital in the way they can be reproduced. Is there anything happening in terms of graffiti piracy?

Are copyrights recognized for street art in Australia?

I read in one report that your city council is considering issuance of graffiti licenses for famous artists, how will the identity of there artists be established, especially international ones who need to remain anonymous?

In the case of the ‘banksy woz ere’ instance, does that council consider that an act of vandalism? Would those perpetrators be liable for a higher property destruction fine? what if they claim to be banksy himself? what if they were a licensed street artist?

i know this is a lot of questions, if you have time to answer just a few, it would still be much appreciated.

cheers,

If I hear back, I’ll be sure to update this post.

Here are some images of Hosier Lane where the accidental buff took place.

The conversation about permission or sanctioned street art isn’t limited to Melbourne, here is a conversation on fatlace.com asking artists what legality might mean for the art form itself, historically based in a confrontational stance against prevailing laws.

Here is another relevant quote from an essay by Caleb Neelon (aka Sonik):

… the notions of “legality” and “permission” are pretty fuzzy. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve personally been arrested for painting a legal wall, and have been painting a wall illegally only to have the property owner walk up, tell me how nice I was for painting his wall, and buy me lunch. There are plenty of abandoned and public property spaces that are painted regularly by graffiti writers where the property owner could never be found in order to ask permission. In any case, the process of obtaining permission to paint, for free, what is by any objective account an act of community service deserving of respect and gratitude, is often completely degrading to an artist and guarantees bland art in the spirit of compromise. It is to the artistπs credit that they get fed up and create multiple works without permission in the time that it would take for the paperwork to clear (or not) for one.

Not all permission walls are safe. Sometimes cops buff them, sometimes bizarro anti graff vigilantes buff them, but then get arrested themselves because buffing graffiti without permission just makes you a really boring street artist yourself!

Related posts:

1. Profiting From Stolen Street Art
2. WikiMarathon 2

Plausibly originating in the arts, the word frienemy attempts to perform a balancing act between the boolean concepts of friend and enemy, most commonly indicating that the term ‘enemy’ is the root concept, thinly veiled by the suffixation of the nearly complete “frien”. A frienemy is someone who appears to be, or starts out being, your friend, but reveals himself to be your enemy, although possibly without disrupting the friendship. Regardless of the etymology, our common English understanding of friend and enemy posits them as polar opposites, concepts that have no relationship to each other besides their opposition. Friends and enemies don’t come from the same places, don’t share a common root, don’t have the ability to change sides, cannot transform or migrate. They are purely distinct and repel each other. This is where the power of the term frienemy comes from, it’s the dangerous and tenuous balance between these naturally opposed forces.

Many years ago, I found it amusing and quaint that in Spanish, the words for friend and enemy were closely related, amigo and enemigo. Amusing because the linguistic pattern matching part of my brian is ticklish, and quaint because it was clear to me at the time that a less distinct cut between the expression of these concepts represented less experience in, or a lack of honest evaluation of, the harsh realities of the world (i was in high school ok?). If spanish speakers see their enemies as simply ‘un-friends’ does this mean there could be potential migration back and forth between these two states? Are these relationship states simply different sides of the same coin, endpoints on a slider, or are they more akin to oil and water, fundamentally different? Could these specific questions be related to the nature of all conceptual opposites?

Several years later, as part of an art based propaganda war between rival meme gangs (CitAC and N.I.N.E.), one widely distributed sticker dared it’s readers to “stop pretending you have no enemies”. It could have also read, “stop pretending opposites don’t exist.”

Frienemy is still a rarely printed word, but it recently showed up in a headline of an article about the future relationship between the governments and economies of China and the United States. I wanted to know if more languages follow the English model or the Spanish model, and if anything could be learned from this about our cultural connections to the ideas of opposition.

A very quick survey of some languages available through google’s translation tool (limited to roman based characters) reveals the following pairings.

friend as the root:
ami ou ennemi (french)
amigo o enemigo (spanish)
mik apo armik (albanian)
amic o enemic (catalan)
prijatelj ili neprijatelj (croatian)
přítel nebo nepřítel (czech)
priateľ alebo nepriateľ (slovak)
vinur eða óvinur (icelandic)
amico o nemico (italian)

enemy as the root:

related but not using modification through appendage:
vriend of vyand (afrikaans)
vriend of vijand (dutch)
Freund oder Feind (german)
zanmi oswa lènmi (haitian creole)

seemingly not related:
cara nó namhaid (irish)
teman atau musuh (malay)
rafiki au adui (swahili)
arkadaş ya da düşman (turkish)
ffrind neu gelyn (welsh)
ħabib jew ghadu (maltese)
friend or enemy (english)

Has a mashed up term like frienemy also evolved in Irish, Malay, Swahili, Turkish, Welsh and Maltese? Is the concept of a backstabbing friend, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as culturally powerful in these places as it is in our own?

The larger group, that does use friend as the common root, would presumably have a tough time inventing words that sit between their already intimate terms. Is there no need for further disambiguation between ami and ennemi? Are these cultures more tolerant of differences in general? less prone to violence? more cooperative? How do their political structures relate to their languages? Do these languages have more examples of appending suffixes to denote opposites? Is there a difference in how a language sorts verbal polarity internally? Does it matter if we are talking about polarity in nature or culture? between objects or people?

English makes at least one notable use of the suffixed polarity model with male and female. If we had completely unrelated representations of these concepts, would we understand each other more or less fluently? Would we feel more or less antagonism? Would we have more of less equality in the work place?

Can the structural relationships of our words predispose our cultural emotions and priorities?

Related posts:

1. The role of linguistics in the rise of individualism
2. Thinking Outside the Bounding Box

I didn’t know where @caseorganic was sitting, I just scrawled this note and handed it off to the person on my right, nudging them to do the same. Watching down the aisle I noticed the passing included more verbal interaction than I had suspected (it would be nice if it caused a little less disruption (friction)). The horizontal passage was an artifact of the physical setup, much easier to pass to the person beside you, unless there was a significant gap (in which case i’d suspect people would hand it to someone behind them).

Five minutes later, voila, the note found her.

I actually was a little shocked, turns out she was sitting in the front right, while i was in the far left. The act of passing a note forward seems pretty disruptive, and i’m surprised that enough people reached forward, tapped a stranger’s shoulder, and handed them a note, that this little experiment actually worked.

A few questions linger:
How many people peeked inside the note as it passed by?
Why didn’t anyone augment the note? Add their own postmark?
Was the first test a success because it was headed to someone with 6,000 followers? (two subsequent tests fail whaled).
What percentage of handlers used knowledge of the recipient’s position to inform their actions?
What kinds of incentives might lead to a higher success rate? or structural changes? or test mechanisms?
Is there any connection to self organizing principles here?
Is this a subtle form of emergence?

Related posts:

1. Cars as mesh network
2. Embracing the Social Scatterplot

Portland’s Memorial Coliseum is the ideal facility for the nation’s (world’s) premiere incubator for, and center of, critical non profit activity. Think of it as Sand Hill Road for the 501c3 set. Offices, workshops, symposiums, conferences, events, rallies, classes, and more will take place in this global center for change. Interaction with the general public on a daily basis, as well as with business and movement frontiers-people will stimulate the city of Portland like nothing else.

Incubators will get a lot of attention in the coming decade as we all search and strive and hope for new ideas and new solutions for the future. New models for business focused incubators are already in the works in places like SF. Let’s take the next big step and innovate in social entrepreneurship, and not for profit work.

Related posts:

1. Exponentially Exponential – A Thrilling Video About The Future
2. Car Free Portland

They both tell a different story about our fascination with, and relationship to, simulated humanity, machine intelligence, creator and creation. As a proposed next step, I’d personally like to see another robot manning the remote controls of this robot, perhaps creating some kind of command based feedback loop, susceptible to minute changes, enabling a kind of machine evolution of culture.

Enjoy

Related posts:

1. When Virtual and Actual Worlds Collide
2. Sometimes Robots Aren’t Cool

While building out the final export tools for the retiring online guest map service Frappr.com, it quickly became clear that there is something fundamentally broken about online identity. Normally we include author attribution for the various bits of information submitted by the members. These attributions are valuable inside the service as well as beyond its walls. When Google indexes our data, it’s important that the original author not only gets visible textual credit by name, but also that their profile page is linked so that viewers may discover other content this author has created or even may be able to get in touch with the author. This works pretty well if the web service remains alive. As soon as a domain vanishes, those attributions lose a lot of their value.

Most online identity is trapped within the walls of the single domain. The only identity data we have on the frappr members is their display name, a frappr.com based member profile page url and an external email address. Attributing content to these is either completely unstructured, obsolete or a breach of privacy. The only thing we could go with was the unlinked and unstructured display name, if it existed.

This dissociation shatters the community into millions of shards with little recourse for reconnection. I’ll suggest that we aren’t well equipped, metaphorically or psychologically, for this kind of disintegrating experience, as humans. If a factory town loses the factory it does disintegrate in many ways, but the low level identities of the members of that community do actually persist. While many communication and interaction channels are gone, the citizens can still gather together and work on the problem as a team. Even if many move on to other locations, they still have a tangible forwarding address that they can optionally leave behind, there are at least some options.

There have though been historical events that do effectively shatter communities into irreconcilable bits, and these do have a devastating and lasting impact. Diasporas leave the remnants without options.

The dissolution of a web based community is a kind of digital diaspora. But we can mitigate the effects of shattered communities if digital identity is organized differently, anchored outside the borders of these rapidly shifting social software domains. The communities, after all, were created by and owned by the members, not by the service. The ownership of these communities, these affiliations, these connections, should not be left to ruin just because a website can’t pay their bandwidth bills.

How can we organize digital identity differently? There are several interesting initiatives and activists currently working on this very issue from many perspectives, and in fact I’m not really qualified to try and list them here (drop some names in the comments if you think what they are doing is relevant, i’d love to follow up on related work). What seem to be the common threads amongst projects I have seen are universal login, portable social networks and personal preferences for content selection. But what this whole experience has got me interested in is more along the lines of, “where is the canonical reference point of an individual?”. Based on this question I’m going to pour some half baked ideas of my own out into the light of scrutiny to see if anything might have a chance to congeal. These ideas are presented only from a design perspective and not from a technical perspective.

Nearly everyone already has a globally unique phone number, and with mobile web access rapidly becoming the global standard, a mobile network identity may make sense for the future. Mobile network identity would require portability, just like the mobile number portability that came to the US a few years ago (moving your number from one carrier to another). A mobile network foundation also starts to make more sense if it ever develops some kind of DNS system, where your identity isn’t a number anymore, but structured text with an ordained set of namespaces. Actually the existence of a mobile DNS removes the requirement of number portability, since the DNS records could just be updated. 3G enabled netbooks are bringing mobile networks into computers, and building an identity link between your phone and your laptop could be as simple a a process as pairing a bluetooth phone to a headset.

Email addresses are also already unique and ubiquitous. They would actually be a pretty great way to standardize and decentralize, as long as there were better ways to filter/block message sending rights to email addresses. The Twitter model is compelling for it’s limitations on incoming messages (only people you follow can dm you), but it’s still a single service that may dissolve or change someday. I think the email model is interesting, but I think the email infrastructure couldn’t handle the task.

Another idea for perpetual online identity management would be something like the imdb or archive.org or wikipedia but just for people. In terms of my original problem with content authorship attribution, this model would work quite well if the archiving organization were highly stable. I doubt anyone has noticed, but in the KML exports for Frappr i do link to the most recent archive.org cached version of the website instead of the website itself.

This almost just comes down to a simple question, “When you mention a person’s name online, what do you link to?”. I would have thought that as the web evolved, it would become more and more decentralized, with most people operating their own domains. While some people do maintain their own domains, many links wrapped around someone’s name leads to a profile page of one webservice or another. Facebook’s recent support of profile page shortcuts underscores how many people use twitter, as a kind of accidental identity server. Many of you reading this will know that @fekaylius means http://twitter.com/fekaylius. The domain almost becomes invisible, or synonymous with “my public online identity”.

Another idea is an identity DNS system that could track, aggregate and reroute requests to all the various services that may come and go. Think of this like one part traditional DNS and one part call forwarding. Imagine for a moment if you could enter @fekaylius into a browser address bar and it would route you to my personal blog. Then I could update my routing preferences and it would reroute to my CV. Perhaps you might even be able to send an email, SMS, or any type of IM to that identity alias, and depending on the protocol (and our relationship?) it would find it’s way to my work inbox, my desktop IM client or even as a push notification on my mobile. Google Voice seems like it may be going in this direction. The @ namespace isn’t right for this, but it’s an example using something people already understand. I also wonder if people outside of twitter have adopted this tag format? Will it be able to migrate beyond one service, it was, as you know, not a construct of the twitter service, but a construct that emerged out of the community, a grass roots vernacular. It could very well spring up again and again.

Back to the mobile phone network for a moment. There is also a possible paradigm where we carry our identity servers around with us everywhere we go, in our phones. Maybe there is no need to go this far, but the notion of really having control over your digital identity, over the routing and filtering and watching the requests with the flick of a finger is pretty compelling to me. Tying in uniquely mobile services to this idea makes it a killer app, ubiquitous location and calendar awareness, one snap mugshot updating, foaf services based on your local address book, nearby offers and people.

The last idea might be one huge database of every person in the world, past present and future. It would hold just enough data about the person to disambiguate. When mentioning someone anywhere online their id could be embedded in an identity tag. All these references would be aggregated and you could see what people were saying about this particular person. Imagine a kind of facebook, but where it’s not at all up to you what gets shared. Letting the bots take over.

In closing, perhaps the shanty town labyrinths of abandoned online identity shadows we have today will survive for another decade, but I doubt it. Things are changing, hopefully we will all be able to have a say in how our digital identities are organized in the future.

Related posts:

1. Free Domains for Artists
2. Nested Play as Identity Centrifuge

I’m still on the heels of a full family interstate move from Portland to Palo Alto. We spent weekend after weekend selling and giving away the accumulated sludge of life, from toys and games to computer hardware, tools, clothing, books, and movies. It’s amazing how almost every item fully transformed from trash into treasure. It was like a really slow abstracted game of synchronicity tetris.

During the subsequent digital cleanup I discovered a treasure trove of old music, from some Ciccone Youth songs I thought I’d lost, to 3 dupes of the same 3 Leg Torso album. This process was saturated with déjà vu. Some of the dusty zeros and ones are keepers others just need to go away. But where can they actually go?

The feeling of finding good homes for things that I once cared for was an important psychological process for coping with leaving a city. It engages other people, it creates an interwoven object history that confirms your presence in the community. If I just drag these folders into the trash, I get none of that. The feeling is more akin to loss, or waste guilt.

One detail that helps unload unwanted physical detritus is packaging. People would stop and gaze at the immense free piles, but until we handed them a bag or a box to put stuff in, most of them were blocked by the element of logistical surprise (we targeted people coming to the neighborhood farmers market, they either had full bags already or didn’t want to go shopping lugging an armload of loose books). With digital media I think packaging has to be taken into consideration. I’ve never seen an online free pile of stuff someone is trying to get rid of, a pile that actually deletes the file once it have been taken.

My proposal is for such a tool to arise: instead of dragging your old music to the trash, you’d be able to drag it to the free pile, which would be a publicly exposed directory (with a feed) that automatically incinerated each file as it was downloaded. You might want granular access controls so that anyone in the world could take your Van Halen records, but only friends of friends could take the Misfits.

Here is a snap of what looks like a municipal free box in Telluride, CO.

I guess another option would be to just fill up all the schwaggy thumb drives you can find with your unwanted media and go dump them into a physical free box somewhere.

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1. last.fm + free music
2. Free Domains for Artists

There are several points that resonate with me, but I’ll limit this post to the quoting of a couple choice passages.

People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the “best” or most informative content, but that which triggers a reaction. This isn’t inherently a good thing. Consider the food equivalent. Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they’re rare in nature. Thus, when they come around, we should grab them. In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.

When we think about centralized sources of information distribution, it’s easy to understand that power is at stake. But networked structures of consumption are also configured by power and we cannot forget that or assume that access alone is power. Power is about being able to command attention, influence others’ attention, and otherwise traffic in information. We give power to people when we give them our attention and people gain power when they bridge between different worlds and determine what information can and will flow across the network.

via @chrismessina

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Clifford Nass gave a stimulating and uncommon talk today through Stanford’s Media X program.

Generally a research team will focus on a very narrow question, something they can own, maintain secrecy over, then release the results of extensive research in that vein, effectively positioning themselves as the topical experts of that domain. But Nass and his team seem to be taking a more open, bottom up approach to their research into the psychological underpinnings of “media multitasking”. Nass says that research isn’t generally presented publicly this early on. While they have found some profoundly surprising results in early studies, they are facing a field that is too vast for one team to lay claim to, so, he’s bringing it forward partially in response to public demand (“we need to know if multitasking is bad for our kids”), but partially to invite more and more external specialists into the sphere.

The findings they did present are quite interesting.
Basically there was this assumption that some people are more prone to, or adept at, multitasking. They went out and found a way to quantify this, and gathered a collection of these people. They also found a set of people who were not normally multitasking with media

In short, there was a prevalent idea that multi-tasking was an expression of some hidden cognitive skill (better filtering, sorting, or switching), but it turns out that people who are consuming multiple media channels at once are significantly worse at all three of these types of activities. There was no secret power, there was only an inability to filter, sort, and switch. One conclusion is that media multi-taskers are simply explorers, always on the lookout for something new, while another conclusion might be that multi-taskers are simply running away from boredom, they get bored easily and need to find respite from this. A future fMRI study will try to determine if the impulse to consume unrelated media simultaneously is an aversive (running away from boredom) or an attractive (running towards something you want) impulse, but I’m a little skeptical of this dualistic reduction. Marshall McLuhan saw media as a new extension of the human nervous system. From his perspective, I find it challenging to delineate between aversive and attractive impulses within a unified system. Perhaps with all these remote eyes and ears around the globe connected to our own minds we are transforming previously disparate channels into a new type of unified stream of awareness.

Maybe what seem like unrelated content is simply a value judgement (or a historical prejudice). Perhaps, as experimental art forms try to combine disparate sensory experiences into one cohesive piece, the multi-taskers of today are sucking in content that all relates somehow to our singular world instead of sucking in various disparate unrelated media sources. Perhaps what seem like multiple threads to us now are actually woven into a heretofore unknown type of mesmerizingly unified tapestry of the near future.

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The article is worth reading for all sorts of reasons, and for all sorts of people, but I’m just going to comment on the bits that caught my immediate attention.

The opening section declares:
AR is going to make it possible for us to see through walls. It will remove some of the blindness that has crept up around our industrial landscape.
I wonder how this might be applied to open government, and transparency in the corporate world, will we be able to see through the walls of our local police department? Is this another potential tool for radical reality?

Will geo-based mashups finally be able to reach us out in the world?

Anselm talks about needing ways to filter the floods of future data, but I propose we should focus on getting enough well rounded data in first, otherwise we’ll be filtering against a small, platform specific, subset. One way to encourage increased data input to the AR universe (whether it’s distributed or unified) will be to recognize AR as a natural evolution of the geoweb movement, for it to benefit from the existing momentum, to explicitly be backwards compatible with the current generation of geodata. I do however expect metadata around AR items to blossom, meaning old geodata may need to do some freshening up to stay relevant.

Regarding the discussion about a universal AR platform, I imagine there may be an open data store, with viable APIs that support a multitude of creative experiences, but I also envision a closed, all in one, walled garden player that will probably be a little later to the game, but will come out swinging with an effortless interface.

I’m left with an exciting expectation of an Augmented Reality Universe, with many evolving access methods and platform standards, a possible replacement for the web as we know it.

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The Pirahã language has no numbers or concept of counting (only terms for “relatively small” and “relatively large”); no kinship terms beyond immediate children and parents; no “left” and “right” (only “upriver” and “downriver”); no named distinction of past and future (only near time and far time); no creation stories or myths; and—most important for linguists—no recursion.

Numbers, Universal Segmentation, and Individuality
The lack of numbers and counting, while being at first utterly unimaginable, does strike some familiar conceptual chords once accepted as a potential reality. Numbers, and counting of objects, essentially rely on a conceptual framework where boundaries exist. This fish is separate from that fish. A culture, a worldview, liberated from the numeric grid, can simply see EVERYTHING as a substance, a continuous, flowing, merged, unified mass of stuff. Fish are like water, there is no need to count water, you just take what you need, and you know how much is enough. Perhaps abundance, or at least non-scarcity are prerequisites for this?

Does a lack of numbers indicate a world view with a low level of universal segmentation? If an individual fish is seen as part of a massive entity, of a substance, of a part of nature which doesn’t have naturally differentiated units, then humans might also fit right into that framework as well.

A World Without Before
Creation myths are irrelevant within a purely stable world. Asking what the world was like before the current state of things only makes sense in a world of change. Western modernism, and urbanization in general, seem to be building or offering stability (at least saturating itself with materials and references that connote this) but it might be this same (encroaching) stability that puts an end to a way of life, a culture, and a language born of the real thing.

Systemic Attribution (or Empirical Gradients) and the 4th Dimension
Apparently their verb formations include a built in way to trace back the source of the information being relayed. For example, if you said, “He went fishing”, this utterance would contain embedded information as to how you know this, if you heard it from someone else, if you saw it yourself, if you inferred it from evidence, etc.

Does this integrated (attribution oriented, and seemingly gradient) empiricism also represent a more sophisticated notion of interconnection? Is this a social reputation system?

Is there a way to consider this invisible chain of perpetual attribution as an alternative to our own 4th dimension (time)?

Delineation vs Happiness
Combine low universal segmentation with highly integrated empiricism and consider if these realities are causal contributors to their standing as one of the planet’s happiest people. In other words, do time and numbers prevent us from being happy?

This tribe is truly rejecting binary dualism!

So many more nuggets of ideas tightly woven into this talk, it’ll have to be revisited again.
Listen to the MP3.

(Via longnow.org.)

Related posts:

1. The role of linguistics in the rise of individualism
2. Retrofitting Geo for the 4th Dimension

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