Does your product or service have users, members, consumers, customers, patrons, or players? Do you and your team refer to them in a consistent way? Do the people who interact with your app even know what they are to you and what you are to them? Is the relationship clearly defined? Does it matter?
Could vernacularly empowering and agency imbuing terms be a viable loyalty boosting tactic?
Just like most of the web, and many newer technologies, Augmented Reality is a self centered experience, focusing on the discrete interaction between the tech and one user. But, unlike the web, AR aspires to be a deeply integrated overlay on the real, shared, communal world, a view into the hidden, a new array of human senses. There is severe experiential turbulence where these two perspectives come together.
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.
While carrying a GPS device in each hand, Nikki Pugh walks and walks again, building up a collection of the glitches and anomalies in the data.
From the event listing:
As the journey is repeated and the resulting data overlaid, unique generative drawings are produced that reveal relationships between the fabric of the city and the behaviour of the technology.
I would actually like to see this data plotted in 3D (including altitude) creating a tunnel or cloud that could be navigated first hand. It also makes me wonder, if there is this much spatial drift in GPS, what about temporal drift?
This event took place as part of Tracing Mobility
One city’s plague is another city’s blessing.
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!
Welcome to another installment of the Outsider Linguistics series, where I propose new and unfounded causation models for societal paradigms via casually perceived linguistic quirks. This installment looks at relationships and word appendages between friends and enemies, and attempts to propose a model that connects the way we speak to the way we see the world.
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?
Can a hand written note find its own way to a specific person by crowd surfing through 400 geeks at the Emerging Communications conference?
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?
Cross post from the Platial Blog:
Now is your chance to beat the imminent rush and export your full archive quality KMZ maps from Platial. We are in the last stages of testing 2 new export tools and would appreciate your participation and feedback.
The 2 new tools are a full KMZ exporter with all uploaded images embedded (any images that were added to the map via the flickr tool or as a web based image link will continue to link out) as well as a newly formatted KML version with image hosting provided by GeoCommons.com.
To enable the 2 new export modes, simply append ?export=1 to the end of any map url. This should work for visitor maps (/mapv/) as well as normal ones (/map/).
http://www.platial.com/map/Cable-Access-Highlights/10095 becomes http://www.platial.com/map/Cable-Access-Highlights/10095?export=1
Note: this will enable a new KMZ and KML link in the map header area
These export tools are applicable to any map on platial.com, so if you appreciate someone else’s map, feel free to grab a copy (with the exception of a user places map (the map of all your places), in which case, it will only be available to that logged in user.
Feedback is welcome as commentary here on the blog, on the getsatisfaction page, or via the Platial feedback page.
Known Issues you can avoid commenting on:
Thanks,
Jason
Also, You can expect a few more announcements in the next few hours and/or days about Platial. Might want to start following @platialmaps for breaking news :)
Mad bike skills!
Leon Botha talks about identity, vibrations, and formlessness.
I came across this guy researching Die Antwoord
The sound of a water droplet, pure and quiet, resonating from your iPhone at random times throughout the day or night. Bzzt Drip creates an aura of contemplation and focus around you. Honor yourself with this gentle and humble Audio Perfume.
Bzzt Audio Perfumes are the latest must-have identity accessory. With an ever growing selection of free and premium offerings, Bzzt acts like an always on application as it sprinkles you with sound no matter what applications you’re running, even while your phone is in standby mode.
Adorn yourself in sound.
Bzzt.