Attention Futures
From ‘A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention‘, by Michael Erard:
“I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.”
THE PHYSIOCRATS: organic biscuits & the ruins of suburbia
Pitched somewhere between Archigram, the Matrix, The Tripods, and a bacteriophage, this entry to the Reburbia suburban design competition is … all kinds of wonderful.
Whoever Michael Huges & Damien Wake actually are, I’ll hold on to the vague hope that they live in a hollowed-out volcano, and have an army of overall-clad mooks to do their bidding.
Thoughts on Desktop Manufacturing
Following on from my ramble about Cory Doctorow’s upcoming novel, Makers, and having caught a rather excellent BBC abridged reading of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition - a book that’s had a totally disproportionate impact on my way of viewing the world … well, I’ve been thinking …
Dangerous territory, I know!
From mid-September, I’m down to study this, here, for the sheer love of it. And, reading this, I’m increasingly excited…
Further out? I know I want to write slightly outré sci-fi / spec fic (in whatever medium), and live in a house made from shipping containers. Problem: I don’t think I’ve got quite enough life experience to write convincingly (particularly with characters & dialogue) for the longer form, and my self-discipline is terrible.
Now, I’ve tried my hand at something approaching journalism, and quite enjoyed it. Problem:
“[G]ood journalism is dependent on a total stranger’s cooperation and participation.”
I’m quite good at networking, but not (currently) that great at getting information out of people. And although there are plenty of inspiring journalists doing exciting things (exhibits A, B, and C), the current state of the industry is a strong deterrent for those contemplating a conventional journalistic career.
A PhD is pretty enticing in the near-to-medium term, though (as you may have gathered) my brain doesn’t really do focusing on one thing for long periods of time. And this is where the RepRap video and dangerous thinking come in …
Today, last night, this afternoon … I’ve been thinking on the feasibility of pitching a doctoral thesis on something to do with “Maker” culture – as seen in Maker Faire, Make magazine, Doctorow’s Makers (once published), and recent developments in desktop manufacturing.
Some recent work with Hide&Seek on Playmakers (among other things) bought the concept of “ungeeking” to my attention. There’s definitely some stuff here about Etsy, Spoonflower, Shapeways, print-on-demand – as evidence of the increasingly tactile, physical nature of new media (cf. Russell M Davies)? Materiality versus virtuality? The intersection of intellectual property, political economy and productive capital … as mediated by new technologies & new media.
And this tackled from a hybrid anthropology/political economy standpoint. Fieldwork & participant observation as an excuse to develop practical, “transferable” skills & make useful contacts while remaining in the institutional safety net of the pre-implosion academy. Subcultural rules, norms, ethonomics, and visions of the future. Some peculiar mish-mash of gift economies, peer production, adhocracies, and pirate utopias.
Equally dependent on the participation & cooperation of total strangers, yes, but – as such – solid preparation for the kind of work in which interpersonal skills are likely to be most useful. As a plan, it’s all a bit tentative, ad-hoc … but might be something worth returning to. Suppose I should have a bit of a look over the existing literature; make sure nobody’s got here before me. Of coure, I might abandon the whole thing next week for the vague promises of a life in urban regeneration. Or something. Who knows?
Neo-Schumpeterian Fiction: Perez vs. Doctorow
The above is a slide lifted from Growth After the Financial Crisis, a fantastic lecture from Venezuelan techno-economist Carlota Perez at the Institute for Public Policy Research. Audio available here. Surprisingly accessible, with moments of pure clarity, it comes highly recommended …
“there is *always* over-investment in infrastructure, and that’s one of the reasons for the bubbles …”
Shaking the unpleasant memories of bone dry theories of international political economy ingested then regurgitated as part of my undergrad degree (mostly about tulips), Perez’s is an approach which excites me.
Although I haven’t (yet) read her book, the core thesis of her work seems to rest on the relationships and interlinking of technology, institutional structures, innovation and speculative finance in a way that – gasp! – actually seems to explain things.
Architecture & Urbanism Cartography & Infographics Film & Multimedia Memory
by Justin
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My Winnipeg (2007)
My Winnipeg is a challenging film, in the best possible sense of the word. Despite falling asleep halfway through my first attempt (or perhaps because of it?), I really got on with this noir Canadian autogeography.
It’s a film which – to my mind – shares a lot with, and stands as a companion piece to, something like This is my City. Both take as their subject specific places as filtered through the eyes of specific people. With the latter, it’s this kind of viewer tension between (a) those insiders curating their city’s sights (sites?) & hotspots, and (b) our self-designated heroes, who stumble into existing dramas and unfamiliar landscapes. In My Winnipeg, it’s the eyes of our narrator and filmmaker, Guy Maddin, with the film’s visuals filtered through his melancholic half-memories of urban legends and familial traumas.
So while the team behind my City aims for authenticity by keeping their curation & mediation to a minimum, presenting things (more or less) as they happen, Maddin’s gone to every effort to simulate and recreate a city which – in reality – may never have existed. A re-enactment of the past which echos, then exorcises. Memory versus documentary … not quite opposites, but – I don’t know – different ways of approaching the same goal, maybe? Of representing a subjective experience of the real? Of the city and its built environment, supposedly external to the body; objective, immune to memory’s holes and biases.