creativity/machine

I’ve been waiting for this for a while: Nokia’s Lifeblog software beta has been released (for Windows). Background from the BBC:

The Lifeblog software automatically arranges all the messages, images, videos and sound clips people capture with their phones.

The PC software organises information on a timeline and lets people add to the collection with images from other digital still and video cameras.

Eventually the software will let people publish some or all of the information they collect to the web to let them create their own biographical blog.

An interesting reconfiguration of the blog - a “lifeblog” is evidently a kind of chronological scrapbook that hybridizes diarising daily experiences, consumption habits and visual documentation of events and relationships. I am very interested to see what Nokia users do with it - something that Nokia most sensibly knows that they do not yet know.

I’ve had a nice day doing a bit more exploring around Oxford, including the Natural History and Pitt Rivers museums, followed by a quest for good icecream and some shopping. But being (very) far from home the notion of place comes up again and again, both in conversation and in my head.

As I sit here now in my room at Wadham college, the soundscape includes music from my laptop (meme - thanks to fellow OII participant David Berry), Beethoven symphonies from downstairs, the outdoor theatre troupe on the lawn below my window performing a French play (Cyano de Bergerac) in English, and the chants and shouts of the animal rights protest marching past on the street. This morning I looked at cultural artefacts from all reaches of the globe, many of which are of course the spoils of Empire, before eating Turkish delight icecream and buying an african thumb piano (mbira) and a set of peruvian pan pipes…

This evening: croquet, apparently!

Seminar notes are coming, but for now here are the powerpoint slides from my own presentation, “Digital Storytelling as an Example of Vernacular Creativity and New Media”.

experimental electronica label with very cool alternative remuneration schemes for artists: burning emptiness

Harvard Law Digital Media Project

fellow panel members snapping at my heels for an abstract, a journal issue to put to bed, and two days of notes to blog…bear with me people, I’ll get there in the end. Or maybe I should try Anne’s trick - seems to work for her. Hey look, I’ve just done it anyway.

Things kicked into high gear on the second day of the OII doctoral programme. Those of us in the “internet and everyday life” subgroup had an enjoyable session mapping out our research projects and identifying common threads - there appear to be two very strong shared interests: firstly social (i.e. human) networks, and secondly non- or un-professional practices involving digital technologies (genealogy, blogs, digital storytelling, mobile phone use. David Berry has set up a wiki which should be a useful resource beyond the course once populated with content. David (as WARD) is playing a gig at Birmingham next weekend - my feeling is that we should form an OII posse and go along.

Here’s a cut and pasted (or, as Ted Nelson would say, a hidden and plugged) version of my notes from the formal seminars. Everything is more or less paraphrased, with comments marked by square brackets.

Robin Mansell: Enabling Internet Participation: A Global Challenge

Background: UK Office of Science and Technology Foresight Project www.foresight.gov.uk ?implications of ICTs in areas such as identity, system dependability, security and information assurance and the basis for effective interactions between people and machines.?

Alternatives to the ?digital divide? model of critical approaches to participation important because ?digital divide? is dualistic. Participation: beyond infrastructure, access, skill levels [?computer literacy?]

Areas in which action or interventions could enable/disable internet participation eg. Technology->values->identity->regulation
Relationships between trust/risk and access/participation
[trust–>social capital]
[authority–>>cultural capital]

Trust builds more slowly than access–> ?trust? as a possible link to cultural value as well - the medium as transparent/opaque; substantial/ephemeral???

Is a broader base of participation in digital culture hampered by perceptions, not necessarily of criminal risk, but of the proliferation of spam, porn, and other ?low quality? content?

e.g. see Knowledge Technologies and the Semantic Web ? more ?reliable? search engine results, for example, might enable people to ascribe cultural authority to particular sources: Leaving us to ask: who should pay?

Ed Steinmueller
Open Source Software: A New Paradigm for the Division of Labour

Key concepts: collaboration, contribution

Can public participation in the creation and improvement of information goods create substantial [economic?] value (i.e. broader value for society, not just for themselves)

Information goods as expansible [proliferation, not protection (i.e. copyright) as a goal], because reproduction does not exhaust the original] and non-rivalrous (one person?s use of an information good does not diminish the value to others)

Protection to prevent hijacking and the erosion of the value represented by expansibility and non-rivalry
Distinction between free/libre and open source movements. Open source communities are project focused, self-organizing. BUT: tension between ?self-organizing? paradigm and the very principles of ?openness?

Social structure of open source communities: examining the constitution of authority; analysing advantages and limitations in the method of voluntary collaboration

Two paradigms for collaborative ?information assemblage?
Cumulative dependency (vertical)
Complementary dependency (horizontal)

Last but not least: Ted Nelson’s “What Every Intelligent Person should Know about the Internet” - i.e. TCP/IP, the history of the world and everything in it, and the evils of the Windows clipboard and one-way hyperlinks. Which was a wonderful way to end the day. Ted has promised to teach me how to use zigzag as well.
Off down to London for a friend’s birthday - catch you on the B-side

Finally got online for the first time in three days today - a strangely unnerving and oddly liberating feeling being disconnected for that long. So after answering all the most urgent work-related emails, I steeled myself to overcome my fuzzy-headed jet lag long enough to write something about the first day of the OII summer doctoral programme…I was going to wax rhapsodical about the dreaming spires, the bridge of sighs, the centuries of tradition (and privelege) that you breathe as you walk down the street here. Not to mention the labyrinthine procedures involved in getting a Bodleian library card, the bright people (self excluding statement of course) who’ve been gathered together for the program, and the vigorous discussions that have already begun. But super-organised Kylie Veale has already done all that for me. Then I was going to post bad camphone pics of the view from my room…that’s been done too. Better luck tomorrow i guess.

an interview with DJ Spooky about cinema, collective memory, and sampling.

Finally, I’m happy to have stumbled across these two excellent music blogs recently: The rest is noise (thanks things magazine), and aworks (on American contemporary classical music).