creativity/machine

This is a tagcloud that I generated from the text of my entire PhD thesis at tagcrowd. I don’t know what it tells anyone about the thesis itself, unless you put a lot of faith in word frequency. But there’s something immensely pleasurable about it for me. I was strangely excited waiting for the fraction of a second it took to generate the cloud.

6 days to go…

Some everyday cosmopolitanism at a project called normal room.

Normal Room shows you interior design and home furniture from all around the globe. Search our image database and explore the differences and similarities in architecture and home decoration between people in different countries.

via boing boing.

This is not the parody I was looking for, but at least this very obviously calculated-to-provoke-youtube-responses fan ‘ad’ features women. I’m proudly reading very much against the grain here, but as much as I love cheap and nasty, the PS3 is way, way, sexier. Go Karaoke:

Yeah, like the young people say, we don’t need feminism anymore, right? And beyond gender, is this what ‘play’ has been reduced to? Jesus.

YouTubeFanBoyFanVideo prediction: PC and PS3 fall in love.

In the mail yesterday, I got a buddha machine, brought to us by FM3. I love it, and I made a minimalist lo-fi film to celebrate (see below).

Incidentally, it was not only shot but also edited in about 10 minutes using the VideoDJ application (which is a perfectly functional video editing tool) in my Sony Ericsson K800i. Very cool.

alternate link

Excellent review of the buddha machine at PopMatters.

Museumr is a new 3rd party flickr toy that lets you stick your own photo in a frame at your choice of museum. More museumr photos.

It’s weird that I came across this via my Flickr contacts this morning, while writing a proposal for a paper I hope to give at MIT5 on Flickr, social aesthetics, and the reconfiguration of the relations between everyday life, ‘professional’ photography and artworlds.

Please observe my protruding right cheek here, but…

To play with Henry Jenkins’classic terminology for fandom, this latest Flickr fad is textual poaching in reverse because instead of pilfering the materials for creativity from the landlord, it’s all about sneaking your own creations into the master’s house. But it’s still a form of fandom in my view.

And I love the fact that a large number of the images in the biggest frames are utterly paradigmatic of vernacular photography: photos of babies, garden gnomes, cats and dogs. The effect is so much wittier than in the ones where people have used their best ‘arty’ photos. My dog wants to know when he’s going to be featured on a wall at MOMA.

Ham Radio’s Technical Culture, by Kristen Haring, is a new book out on MIT Press, found via Anne’s del.icio.us links.
From the blurb/summary:

Ham radio required solitary tinkering with sophisticated electronics equipment, often isolated from domestic activities in a “radio shack,” yet the hobby thrived on fraternal interaction. Conversations on the air grew into friendships, and hams gathered in clubs or met informally for “eyeball contacts.” Within this community, hobbyists developed distinct values and practices with regard to radio, creating a particular “technical culture.”

Sounds familiar in the light of hacker culture, open source, social software, and so on ad infinitum, no?

Without wanting to just impose patterns derived from contemporary culture onto history, I’ve been very interested lately in the way that emergent amateur cultures of (cultural) production have been articulated with technological change in a whole heap of contexts. I’m also increasingly interested in the articulation of the hacker ethic (or, the ‘tinkering’ discussed by Haring in the book) with masculinity. Looking through the gender+tech lens, it’s interesting to compare the history of ham radio and the personal computer with the domestication of, say, the gramophone or my old favourite, the camera. So this is one for next year - oops, I mean post-phd this year. It’s started already and slowly grinding into gear.

Happy New Year, by the way!