The recent post on ifbyphone discussed the technique of making interactive text available as interactive audio. How does this media-shifting affect the experience?

There is a long-standing connection between the IF community and blind/visually impared gaming or audiogaming. While not all IF is accessible, the vast majority can be used by a visually impared gamer simply by reading the text-only content using normal screen-reading software. Special IF-text-to-speech interfaces are also in development which streamline the text-to-speech process (say, to prevent rereading of the status bar when it has not changed). In this context, it makes sense to ask to what extent experiences interactive audio experiences are accessible. Are they similar to the screen experience of the work? What changes? “Photopia” and “Fail-Safe” provide good case studies:
<!-- technorati tags start -->Tags: audio, games, IF<!-- technorati tags end -->

The color of sound

ifbyphone features a nicely chosen selection of games for the new player. “Adventure” and “Zork I” are traditional, while “Dreamhold,” “Theatre,” and “Ediface” are well written and provide a wide range of genre and tone. “Photopia” is an acclaimed work, and a particularly interesting choice in that, like some editions novels such as of Michael Ende’s novel “The Neverending Story” or Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves,” it uses color printing to influence the mood and indicate story progression. This color effects are primarily ornamental, as “Photopia” is fully playable without color. However it is interesting to see how quickly media translation issues appear even when dealing with collections of apparently minimalist work. To adapt the color edition of “Photopia,” should a different text-to-speech (TTS) voice read each color? Should it be the same voice, but pitch-shifted?

Even without color, auditory adaptation of interactive fiction immediately raises some interesting aesthetic questions - many of which are common to the production of TTS audio books, but some of which are unique to IF. This becomes most apparent in considering the choice of Jon Ingold’s “Fail-Safe” to be experienced as TTS audio.

The sound of sound

Jon Ingold’s “Fail-Safe” is perhaps a perfect choice for “by phone” transmission, as the game already claims to be occuring entirely via radio transmission. Just as you the player cannot see anything beyond text, the operator whose role you play in “Fail-Safe” relies entirely on audio from the other end of the line to find out what is going on from the very introduction:

Bzzt. Crackle. *Static*

“…hello? Hello? Can… me? .. Anyone! Hel…. Need.. hello?”

Bleep - PLEASE WAIT - Locating/Tuning signal…

..

“.. help. Repeat, can anybody hear me? Can you hear me? Hello..”

>> hello

“Hello? Hello! The .. pretty bad. Are you receiving this? Over.”

>> _

Considering this text, we can see immediately that a lot of audio information has been textually encoded. “Bzzt. Crackle. *Static*” is not supposed to sound like those onomotopeaic words, pronounced outloud - it indicates that we should imagine actual line noise, with the bold emphasis and the asterisks indicating high volume, and the ellipses indicating not just lapses of time between sounds, but shifts in relative volume when the static drowns out the signal, or the signal volume fades.

“Fail-Safe” is most appropriate for ifbyphone because it is most particular to an auditory experience - but ironically the visual encoding of auditory information is also what makes much of the content totally inappropriate for being processed by text-to-speech (TTS). Similarly, what makes “Fail-Safe” so perfect for its interaction loop is that its parser error messages refer to not hearing what was said - which in my experience was frequently the actual problem. Given that we can expect to be yelling “OPEN DOOR!” into the phone in a low-reception area while the computer replyies “That isn’t something you can throw”, wouldn’t it be interesting to process error messages based on the real audio input? Pattern matching failures might generate error messages like “you’re speaking too quickly” “you’re breaking up” “there’s too much static” “could you please speak a little louder?” based on the actual quality of the audio received, rather than at random (as “Fail-Safe currently does). Importantly, the difficulty in speaking over the crackly channel is part of the suspense of the story - it is an obstacle of the medium (the limits of cell-phone networks and TTS technology) that is already subsumed into the dramatic situation.

Of course, these kinds of interactive audio designs go far beyond the ifbyphone concept, which appears to be a comparatively simple, efficient and reliable text-to-speech / speech-to-text loop. Still, this shouldn’t prevent us from asking how the experience might be improved. How could we make a better ”Fail-Safe“ audiogame? One approach might be to pre-record each of the text outputs from the game, creating a kind of IF audio-book in which the parser strings together mp3s for playing rather than printing text strings - these audio clips could be performed, with appropriate background noise. A more complex way of doing it would be to introduce an audio mixing layer, where TTS strings from the parser could be combined with radio-play-esque sound effects strings as well as background sound - in this case, a volume controllable wall of static. A parser that produced its audio rather than presenting it would maintain many of the advantages of the text-based system - for example, the possibility of inline translation, of substituting voices with different accents, or of fine-tuning the audio effects.

If we did create such an audiogame, however, it would be asymmetrically text/audio based even when interacting with it by keyboard - much like Subservient Chicken was an asymmetrical text/video chatbot. This suggests that our model for looking at text-based systems in general could use some refining - what separates IF and chatbots from many related works is not that they are text-based, but that they are text/text as opposed to say text/image or image/text.

Is an experience that is both heard and voice-controlled really ”text art,“ even if the background processing occurs entirely within a text engine? Recently, WRT has covered a lot of image-based ”text art,“ involving words embedded in cartoon images, words formed in water, words made of light, or words that otherwise depart from the traditional understanding of digital characters computationally encoded symbols (ASCII, Unicode, etc.) rather letterforms whose creation was enabled by some digitally-assisted process (digitally controlled spigots, digitally controlled LED-boards, etc., etc., etc.)

The example of ifbyphone represents yet another limit on the concept of ”digital text.“ ifbyphone and IF/TTS rely on symbolic manipulation of encoded symbols (rather than say audio transformations) in determining their output. Yet, in order to argue that they are digital text art, we must concede that neither the reception (heard audio) nor the interaction (spoken audio) need be textual.

This concession would seems to throw any definition of ”digital character art“ wide open, and leave us with only ”character manipulation processes“ - which sounds like a Turing Machine to me….

—

Related: ”You’re Kidding Me“ simulated phone conversation, based on an earlier work by the same designer

Why do I reBlog this? Jan Chipchase has one of the more enviable jobs, at least in my mind. Nokia Research Center is also one of the more prescient R&D operations in the mobile communications business ecology. Rather than exclusively "instrumentalized" research (how do we get the phone smaller? how do we cram more features into that smaller phone?) they seek a richer, culture-specific explication of usage, users, social "factors", implications of locale-specific practices, etc. Jan captures some of this in his wonderfully illustrated dispatches from the field. His "Future Perfect" blog is part travelogue, part ethnography, part database of insights. Future Perfect. --JB

If you’re new to the Carnival, the idea is to collect the best writing about mobile in one place at a different website every week. This week, it’s Smart Mobs’ turn and I’m doing the editing – so I’m the guy to complain about if you don’t like what I’ve written!

You can find out more information about the Carnival here. If you’re a blogger, you might want to enter in the future – or even offer to host it one week soon.

So let’s get on with it.

First up, we have an amusing little ditty to get us in the Thanksgiving mood, from the “Queen of the Blogs”, Emily from Textually and who’ll be familiar to Smart Mobs’ readers too from her moonlighting here too. Emily recounts a great story about how to really annoy an actor and how his ire won him a standing ovation from the rest of the audience.

I dubbed Troy Norcross as "the man who really hates spam" in the first Carnival and the sobriquet seems to have stuck. Troy's blog covers Mobile Marketing and Spam, which is also its name, in case you're easily confused. This week Troy's been looking billions of "Welcome to our Network" messages the networks send every year to the 210 million of us who roam annually - set to rise to 850 million within 5 years. Could these messages be made more useful for the recipients and be a valuable marketing opportunity to boot? Troy has some interesting ideas - check them out here.

If you've ever found a mobile application difficult to use or been bewildered by a menu system, that's because it's missing the mUXP ingredient. No, it's not a piece of code or arcane techie protocol, but design following the principles of Mobile User Experience. In other words, seeing how mobile owners actually use their phones and designing your applications and experiences accordingly. This sounds bleeding obvious, but it's a principle frequently overlooked by the best of us. Head over to Rudy De Waele's M-Trends to read all about this vital and much neglected area.

Another familiar name to Smart Mobs' readers is The Pondering Primate, himself - Vanilla Gorilla. We both share a passion and fascination for the mobile in its role as connecting the digital and real worlds. I sometimes refer to the mobile in this context as a virtual mouse. The PP this week considers two such possibilities - sampling trailers for a hot, new film release via Bluetooth and a price comparison service by phone. One service is found wanting - any guesses which?

Judy Breck, (yet another Smart Mobian) has a passion to put mobile at the centre of our education system - kids love mobiles and and find them fun and intuitive to use. This means that suddenly our kids of the future won't be able to wait to get stuck into their homework! Judy looks at a recent Nokia announcement that suddenly means that the vision is becoming reality much quicker than you might think.

Two big themes in the past few months have been VoIP and pay-per-call advertising, rumoured to be the next big thing in online advertising. Goobile has been looking at one of the key players who have just landed a big round of funding. What do you think - is this the new, new thing, or another noble but doomed initiative?

Many of us think that radio is a much better marriage with mobile than its sexier cousins, Video or TV. Typically, you're doing other things when you're mobile and radio is a great accompaniment to this. But try watching TV when you're walking down a busy street or crossing the road. Motorola have understood this opportunity with the launch of iRadio - or have they? In which case, why would they be talking about iVideo, which is the current rumour discussed at iRadio Waves.

The old days of "Wap is crap" are long dead (oh ye of little faith) with the UK alone enjoying 1.82 billion page impressions a month. It's still early days for surfing the web on your phone, but it's already better than that say, using a computer to surf back in 1996 and look what's happened since then. A site dedicated to finding the best Wap sites is Wap Review. This week, they've been looking at a top Sports Wap site, rating it highly for both content and usability. So if you're a sports fan or want to see what the future might look like, head on over and find out more.

Oliver Starr of The Mobile Technology Weblog was called to greatness this week and invited to write for the venerable Financial Times, no less. In a wide-ranging article, Oliver asks are we entering the Golden Age of Wireless and looks at the evidence to support the case. Head on over there are have a read.

My Post of the Week this week goes to Stuart Mudie of Blethers, mainly because unlike may of us bloggers who just write about it, Stuart actually did something with his mobile:

Those of us who "get" the mobile future realise that the mobile will replace the computer as the single most important device we'll be using to access the web. Shame no one's told Microsoft yet! To get us into the spirit of this, Stuart Mudie has hacked together an online - well, go find out for yourself here. Suffice to say, this kind of tool is the shape of things to come.

Finally, it's a long tradition for the Carnival of the Mobilists (well, 7 weeks old anyway) that the host/editor choses something from their own site that they'd like to draw readers' attention to. This week is unusual in that I'm editor here, but blog at MobHappy usually. So I get to choose two.

First, Smart Mobs. Tons of good stuff as usual, so I let personal bias get in the way here, as I know both the journo, Mike Butcher, and the interviewee, Steve Flaherty, in the original story in the FT. Plus it's a damn fine idea. Check out Judy's post on StarSight - a truly breathtaking idea in its potential to change the world. And like all great ideas, so obvious in hindsight!

For my own post this week, I've selected one I wrote about the much misunderstood area of Mobile Search, trying to probe the potential and explode a few myths. Judging by the comments and referring links around the place, it must be saying something interesting.

Next week, the Carnival is at Wap Review. Don't forget to surf on over and check it out - why not try it on your phone? Thanks to Howard and the Smart Mobs crew for hosting.

If you have any feedback about any of the posts, the idea behind the Carnival, or its format or style, please leave a comment as we'd love to hear from you.

And Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone.

Following up on Jamais' June 2004 post about the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica, or EPICA, new results published this week verify that "the relationship between climate and CO₂ that had been deduced from the Vostok core appears remarkably robust," according to RealClimate.

Secondly, these results will allow paleoclimatologists to really look in detail at the differences between the different interglacials in the past. The previous 3 before our current era look quite similar to each other and were quite short (around 10,000 years). The one 400,000 years ago (Marine Isotope Stage 11, for those who count that way) was hypotheisied to look more like the Holocene and appears to be significantly longer (around 30,000 years). Many of the details though weren't completely clear in the Vostok data, but should now be much better resolved. This may help address some of the ideas put forward by Ruddiman (2003, 2005), and also help assess how long our current warm period is likely to last.

The study shows that carbon dioxide levels have increased significantly over the last two centuries, from 280 to 380 parts per million. According to Edward Brooks, a geosciences specialist at Oregon State University, quoted in an Associated Press article, "There's no natural condition that we know about in a really long time where the greenhouse gas levels were anywhere near what they are now. And these studies tell us that there's a strong relationship between temperature and greenhouse gases. Which logically leads you to the conclusion that maybe we should worry about temperature change in the future."

An article in the UK Guardian, linked from a comment on the RealClimate post, refers to analysis of cores drilled along the eastern seaboard, suggesting that "oceans will rise nearly half a metre by the end of the century, forcing coastlines back by hundreds of metres." Professor Kenneth Miller is quoted as saying there's little we can do at this point to stop the sea level from rising, prompting a clarification from Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate: "Miller's point is that sea level will continue to rise under any conceivable scenario (as seen in the 'committed climate change' papers by Meehl et al and Wigley earlier this year....while cuts in emissions will not prevent sea level rise, they may prevent the worst case scenarios in the medium to long term."

MSNBC also published an article, "Tiny bubbles, rising seas point to warming."

Mitigation/Adaptation: Jamais' post, What's the Best Path to CO₂ Reduction, has good information on potential mitigation strategies, as well as the WikiPedia entry on Mitigation of global warming. The leading global effort at mitigation, of course, is the Kyoto Protocol. As Jamais posted when the Kyoto Treaty became active, "Kyoto is a reframing exercise, a memetic engineering project. It forces us to respond and, by being transparent in its failings, forces us in turn to come up with something better."

(Posted by Jon Lebkowsky in To Know It for the First Time – Place, Environment and Ecology at 03:55 PM)

Why do I reBlog this? As long as I'm in an existential tailspin.. -JB

WHO WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT USERS by KRIS R. COHEN (pp.16-36)
Abstract. I begin with some questions: how have the theories and methods which subtend design research been changed by their migration from academy to industry? How have they adapted to their new commercial culture? What languages and customs have they had to acquire to fit in? To address these questions, I consider a facet of design research which I think most problematically bears the marks of this passage: how we choose who we will study. I go on to think about both the causes and implications of exclusions so often resident in this choice. The ideal that drives my analysis forward is that design researchers are in the business of designing not products for "users," but landscapes of possibility for public life. A final suggestion, inspired by my recent work on Internet-based personal photography and here briefly sketched, is that design researchers take the publicness of our work more seriously-that we design for it.

ETHNOGRAPHY, OPERATIONS, AND OBJECTUAL PRACTICE by TIM PLOWMAN (pp. 38-51)
Abstract. This paper raises issues around commercial ethnographic praxis and its relationship to social and cultural theory. Michel de Certeau’s theories around everyday life practices and Karin Knorr Cetina’s concept of postsocial objectual practice are juxtaposed in order to explore how commercial ethnographic practice might seriously engage with theory and transcend some of the assumptions that currently constrain its application within industry.

TO THE END OF THEORY-PRACTICE ‘APARTHEID’: ENCOUNTERING THE WORLD by MARIETTA BABA (pp. 175-186)
Abstract. A historical and comparative examination of ethnographic practice in sixteen nations around the globe reveals that theory-practice relations in anthropology and ethnography (A/E) have been shaped and re-shaped over time and space by complex contextual influences. This paper explores the evolution of theory-practice relationships in A/E over various regions of the world, tracing the beginning of a theory-practice ‘split’ from its origin under British colonialism, to its reappearance and institutionalization in post-World War II America, and explaining its absence in the ‘Second and Third Worlds’. Global practice in ethnography now appears to be converging toward a re-integration of theory and application across multiple disciplines and professions (a ‘hybrid’ approach), as ethnographers work to address urgent and poorly understood problems that are not
well theorized.

THE COMING OF AGE OF HYBRIDS: NOTES ON ETHNOGRAPHIC PRAXIS by JEANETTE BLOMBERG
Abstract. It has been nearly 15 years since Donna Haraway wrote in Simians, Cyborgs and Women that, "In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse and in daily practice we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras." While Haraway’s referent was not the community of practitioners, scholars and change agents assembled for the EPIC conference, her attention to the arrangement of material goods, human labor and social relations in processes and histories that have consequences for people’s lives resonates with the themes addressed in the workshops and with concerns that bring many of us to this conference. In this talk I will explore how ethnographic praxis is constituted by a mixing of such pure categories as, virtual – real, local –global, material – social, spiritual – secular, research – design, mercantile – humanitarian, and academic – applied. I will close with a call to celebrate our hybridity – our lives on the margins and our pragmatism.

UPDATE: Nancy White's notes & Dina Mehta's notes

CRAFT, VALUE, AND THE FETISHISM OF METHOD by NINA WAKEFORD
Abstract. In order to set the scene for the panel on methods, I will be drawing on C Wright Mills' injunction to avoid the fetishism of method. Mills urges us to think about our methods in terms of a process of craft production. I want to explore what key elements of this craft might be, beyond the usual focus on actual techniques such as interviewing or ethnographically informed data collection. Foregrounding the papers in the session, I will examine ideas of value, temporality and transformation (and perhaps even transgression).

UPDATE: Nancy White's notes

Why do I reBlog this? This question as to how or by what method one makes assesments of one's research is currently driving me a bit batty. I know it's not enough to be a magpie when describing what one thinks about one's "results", but it still isn't clear to me how an research experiment becomes more than a short, inconsequential statement that gets read (maybe) at a professional conference and forgotten, ultimately..or maybe the holidays just put me into an existential tailspin. --JB

Samsung just announced their SPH-S4000 and SCH-S400 gesture controlled cellphones for Korea. Each of these clamshells is capable of recognizing your convulses for functions such as game play or for skipping or backpedaling MP3 tracks. The S4000 also features a compass, pedometer, thermometer, and health management functions for you out-of-doors active-types which can presumably alert your dietician when it senses the long slow pull of a Big Mac up to your anxious pie-hole.

[Thanks, Mike]

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

Why do I reBlog this? While I'm not 100% sold on the gesture notion — it seems like a tricky interface to get to work right — I do like the idea or figuring out how the orientation of a mobile device might be part of the interface design syntax. The compass integration seems promising — at least based on my experience navigating strange cities, it would be nice. As a general thing, who knows? Maybe it's just more gadgets. Jan Chipchase seems to think the most effective way of orienteering when you're lost and there are other people around is to simply ask for directions. --JB

IPXL appeal rejected

Amazon.com has successfully defended a claim that its famous 1-Click payment feature infringed another company's patent for an electronic fund transfer or transaction system. IPXL Holdings had been seeking around $50 million in damages.…

Why do I reBlog this? Intellectual Property as a business asset is quickly eating away at innovation. I mean, there are engineering jobs where you're essentially expected to read the latest conference papers, even papers in review meaning they're not published yet, and carve off some patent meat, get a conference call in with the lawyers, and file it before breakfast. Nasty stuff. --JB

We know Microsoft has a lot riding on the Xbox 360’s success, so it makes sense that in response to the first reports of Xbox crashes, they told Reuters there were “a few isolated reports of consoles not working as expected” for a “very, very small fraction” of Xboxes sold, and that their “number of calls was not unexpected.” Maybe so, maybe no; there are always a certain amount of defective units on any product launch — especially one as huge as this — and it’s not usually something anyone can call just based reports on forums alone. Molly O’Donnell, Microsoft spokesperson, called it “Par for the course.” Then again, we did have to call the Xbox support line about six times before we could even get on hold to talk to someone, and wound up on the horn over two and a half hours because one of our retail units (the one that crashed a couple times) wouldn’t (and still won’t) connect to Live. We’ll have to chalk that up to amazing odds, since only time will tell how pervasive and persistent the Xbox 360 crash problems really are, but in the mean time Microsoft says they’ll overnight repair or replace any defective 360s in your midst. So if you’re seeing screens like those above, holla at ‘em.

[Thanks, gamestopzak]

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# The nose must be heavy to ensure stable flight. A paper clip on the nose should allow the plane to fly further

# If the plane tends to nose-dive because of the heavy nose, bend the back edge of the wings upwards slightly

# The centre of gravity should be towards the front to prevent the plane from stalling

# The wings should be angled upwards to give the plane a slight “Y” shape when viewed from the front

# Winglets added to the edge of the wings will reduce drag

# Check for symmetry by looking down the nose of the plane and refold it if necessary. It will not fly smoothly if it is not entirely symmetrical

# Be patient and make small adjustments rather than radical changes to the basic design

Update: Philip sez, "Though the judges lauded the Avenger's design, it actually bombed at the competition. The winner was Spruce Moose

Paul has updated his list of mobile phone games using GPS or cell towers signals.

Here's one of the latest additions:

With RealReplay, you can choose the track you want to race on, select your opponent and start playing with everyone, without being dependent on their time.

Whether you're in a car, on a bike, or a sailing boat, all you have to do is tell your mobile phone to start recording. The phone will capture your every movement using GPS. Set checkpoints to define the key parts of your track. Your future opponents will have to pass them and get information on their intermediate time.

Others will find your track and race against you – even without you being present! If you'd like to pit your strength against your friends, inform them about the area where your race starts. They can then accept your challenge whenever they want.

On the display of your mobile phone you will always see your current position and route, as well as the one your opponent took when he recorded his race, which is played back as a replay.

Developed by Mopius.

Why do I reBlog this? Wonderful addition to the library of location-based mobile games! I love the way it uses time-shifting to create a multiplayer experience that doesn't require all the players to play at once. Well done! --JB

From -> Felicia Rice
The Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at University of California, Santa Cruz serves as a center for innovation and exploration of digital technologies in the arts. Faculty and students are drawn from a variety of established disciplines including the arts, computer engineering, and social sciences. The goal is to enlarge our collective imagination ... [more]

Why do I reBlog this? Yo, what? No video game classes? What kind of an MFA do you think you are, anyway? Santa Cruz rabble rousers.. --JB

Looks like our man Russ over at BBHub called it — after a brief delay, the BlackBerry 8700c is headed to stores this Friday. Yes, you heard that right — Black Friday. Eh, whatev, it’s their cellphone, they can launch it how they please. So 8700 fans, your countdown until friday begins… now!

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Why do I reBlog this? Not because I'm a Blackberry fan (I am, in principle, although I haven't had one for a couple of years.) It's because of something a BlackBerry booth guy said to me at CTIA a couple of months ago when I asked him when they're going to put a camera in there. The answer I got was, "..pretty much never." And it makes sense. The BlackBerry business crowd likes it for its synchronized and promptly delivered email capabilities and for its _lack_ of a built-in camera. Presumably, such a thing would make the BlackBerry ideal for capturing business secrets on film, like Maxwell Smart's (RIP) mini spy camera. In Japan, cameras have to make a shutter sound so as to mitigate against unwanted candids. Sure, this makes sense, although one's sense has to be seasoned with a liberal dose of paranoia, but what can you expect in a world where companies like Wal-Mart invest more in surveillance cameras to monitor anti-union agitators _inside_ their stores than they invest in surveillance cameras to keep an eye out for car-jacking bandits in their parking lots. --JB

Owen Gibson at The Guardian has tested The Eye Contact, a pair of spectacles developed by ID magasin. They have a camera inserted into the bridge, along with the battery pack, LCD screen and hard disk recorder strapped to the waist and they captures on film everything that you see during a typical day. Gibson wore the goggles for four hours, recording a bus and tube journey to Oxford Circus and a shopping trip up Bond Street, in London.

The results of the experiment showed that 99% of adverts make little or no impact.

Flicking through newspapers and magazines on the tube, the eyes flitted away from the adverts. Gibson couldn't recall what any of them were for. And while hundreds of adverts were recorded en route, none registered without prompting.

Analysis showed that during a 45-minute journey, the journalist had been exposed to more than 130 different advertising "elements" showcasing more than 80 brands. He was "looking" at adverts for 29 minutes but couldn't recall a single brand without prompting. When prompted, it emerged that just over half of the adverts had made an impression, those for products he was interested in and to which he was exposed for more than 10 seconds.

Over a later 90-minute period, he was exposed to 250 different advertising messages, featuring more than 100 different brands in 70 different formats. The number recalled without prompting was 1.

Via MIT advertising Lab < The Guardian.

eglasses: Smart glasses detect eye contact, Eyeglass-like display lets patient monitor dental treatment, Anytime head mounted display, Media-Sensitive Glasses, Parkinson's hope over VR glasses, Electronic eye help blind people cross roads, etc.

Why do I reBlog this? When storage costs are inconsequential, when it costs more in cognitive load to delete than to just tag and save, we might expect more of this sort of full-ambience coverage in both art-tech projects and, you know..normal human usage scenarios. It's both cool and baffling. On the one hand, I think of the couple few or four or five times I've been screwed over by someone renegging on an agreement, or someone denying they said something when, omfg, you _so_ said that. On the other, more interesting hand, historiography should be richer, more nuanced and much more argued over than would happen if our daily lives were historicized by panoptic video rigs and 15.3 surround sound. My stories are mine because I tell them through the cheese cloth of my own constant, on-going, 'working through" of what I am becoming. Frankly, I enjoy the challenge of re-telling a past event, perhaps with a few or a dozen Flickr links. 94 hours of vacation b-roll just doesn't seem the same. It all makes sense, eventually, one might imagine, even if I think I had three beers when in fact I had five and a bratwurst. Just a thought.. --JB

Rhizome.org, a non-profit organization focused on new media art, is currently seeking a Director of Technology.

One of Rhizome's goals is to connect the worlds of contemporary art and online discourse. The Director of Technology plays a major role in meeting this goal, by taking part in the organization's strategic decision-making and implementing the technology behind new initiatives. The position also involves helping manage partnerships with other arts and technical organizations, and may include curatorial, critical, and artistic opportunities.

New from lacan dot com (thanks B!)

Slavoj Zizek
Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters

1. Violence, Irrational and Rational
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance.htm

Two parallels are often evoked apropos the recent violent outbursts in France: the New Orleans looting after Katrina hurricane and May 68. In spite of significant differences, lessons can be drawn from both parallels. With regard to New Orleans, the Paris fires had a sobering effect on those European intellectuals who used New Orleans to emphasize the advantage of the European welfare state model over the US wild capitalism - now we know it can happen here also. Those who attributed the New Orleans violence to the lack of European-style solidarity are no less wrong than the US free-market liberals who now gleefully returned the blow and pointed out how the very rigidity of state interventions which limit market competition and its dynamics prevented the economic rise of the marginalized immigrants in France (in contrast to the US where many immigrant groups are among the most successful). On the other hand, what strikes the eye with regard to May 68 is the total absence of any positive utopian prospect among the protesters: if May 68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the recent revolt was just an outburst with no pretense to any kind of positive vision - if the commonplace that "we live in a post-ideological era" has any sense, it is here. Is this sad fact that the opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a meaningful utopian project, but only as a meaningless outburst, not the strongest indictment of our predicament? Where is here the celebrated freedom of choice, when the only choice is the one between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence, a violence which is almost exclusively directed against one's own - the cars burned and the schools torched were not from rich neighborhoods, but were part of the hard-won acquisitions of the very strata from which protesters originate.
[read on...]

2. The Terrorist Resentment
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance1.htm

3. Escape from New Orleans
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance2.htm

4. The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape Revisited
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance3.htm

5. C'est mon choix... to Burn Cars
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance4.htm

6. Class Struggles in France, Again
http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance5.htm