Monday, April 27. 2009Coming soon to YouTube: Besson's and Bertrand's environmental film projectToday we're pleased to share an exciting new project that taps into the power of YouTube and Google Maps to spread the word about the state of our planet. Luc Besson's and Yann-Arthus Betrand's 90 minute full-length film "Home" will exclusively be available online on YouTube for English, French, Spanish and German–speaking countries beginning June 5 — just in time for the 37th World Environment Day. ----- Via The Official Google Blog Personal comment: Exclusivité Youtube - Google (maps) pour la "world première" d'un film (sur le climat). Pas question de télévision, de festival de cinéma ou autre ici ... Uniquement une distribution massive, mondiale et gratuite (sponsorisée - "googlisée" -) par le web. Review: “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities” by Mimi Ito et al.Mimi Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Ken Anderson have an interesting chapter in the edited volume by Rich Ling & Scott Campbell (2009) “The reconstruction of space and time: mobile communication practices” which recently came out. The chapter is called “Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places”. The authors explore how people use portable objects to ‘interface’ with urban space and locations. Up to now, the authors say, the dominant focus has been on conceptualizing the mobile phone as a personal communications technology. The emphasis in such studies has been on how interpersonal communication has been made possible “anytime, anyplace, anywhere”. To a much lesser extend the mobile phone has been conceptualized as a device that is tied to local situations. In this approach the mobile phone is seen as an interface to urban space. Mobile communication infrastructure intersects with the physical infrastructure of the city [1]. Ito et al do not look at the mobile phone on its own. Instead, they take the phone as but one of the portable objects that are ‘interfaces’ to the city. These include media players, books, keys, credit and transit cards, identity and member cards. Together these comprise “the information-based ‘mobile kits’ of contemporary urbanites” (p. 67). So the mobile phone, instead of being studied in isolation, is part of a larger assembly of objects that people use to navigate the city, as well as to sustain social relations with other people [2]. Next they discuss three kinds of urban interfacing, which they have labelled cocooning, camping, and footprinting. Cocooning is the practise of people shielding themselves off in public settings. For instance by using portable media players, books, doing stuff on their mobile phones, etc. They create an invisible bubble of mobile private space around them. Camping is the practise of finding a nice spot in town - often in coffeehouses - and doing information related work there with laptops, mobile phones, etc. This can be both for work and private affairs (and often intermingle). Camping can co-exist with cocooning when people shield themselves off from physical social interactions through portable media objects. Footprinting describes the various customer transaction and loyalty schemes through which people leave traces in a particular location. It is “the process of integrating an individual’s trajectory into the transactional history of a particular establishment, and customer cards are the mediating devices” (p. 79). The authors have done fieldwork research in three big cities: Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London. Interestingly, they conclude that behaviors vary only slightly between these cities. I find this approach very interesting for a number of reasons. First, the conceptualization as ‘urban interfaces’ focusses on the locative qualities of mobile media. The paper gives a nice categorization of the various ways in which mobile media act as interfaces between ‘the digital’ and ‘the physical’. Second, the mobile phone is not studied in isolation but as part of a larger array of informational objects that people carry along with them to manage and deal with urban life. Consequently, the image of the mobile phone shifts from an intrusive addition to an imagined once upon a time of ‘real’ public space, face to face interactions, spontaneous encounters and serendipitous discovery, etc., to a more pragmatic view on the mobile as an everyday necessity of urbanites. Third, Ito et al connect changes in the urban experience to changes in displaying identity in public spaces. This point receives scant attention in the chapter but is very important indeed. I also have some points of critique on this conceptualization and approach. First, Ito et al predominantly focus on the interaction of people with the physical localities and infrastructure of the city (p 71-72). They take infrastructure as a collection of ‘dead’ objects (roads, public transport entry ports, toll roads, etc.) making urban life possible. Location in their view refers solely to a point in Euclidian space, a coordinate on the map so to say. The authors leave out the human aspect of location and infrastructure. In their own words “it becomes even more crucial that mobile communications research look at these more infrastructural and impersonal forms of social and cultural practise” (p. 72 - my emphasis). Yet locations and infrastructures are only abstracted ‘ideal’ or ‘categorical’ concepts of their phenomenological equivalents in lived space. They are the abstract counterparts of places and routes (or trajectories). I would say we should look at the human side of infrastructures as crossroads of experiences, in the vein of what geographer Doreen Massey has called the “throwntogetherness” of place as an event [3]. Of course many locative media projects exactly tried to visualize this human aspect of infrastructures and locations (e.g. Christian Nold’s biomapping). A second critique on this approach is that it considers only one side of the hybrid relation between physical space and digitally mediated space. This conceptual framework gives prevalence to physical space over digital space. The main focus is on how the digital ’seeps’ into the physical and alters pre-existing situations there. But how does the physical seep into the digital realm? It is one-way, departing from the assumption of what Lev Manovich has called “augmented space” as an overlay of physical space [4]. This suggests that digital space is an extra layer to reality. As De Souza e Silva has argued, this idea of augmented space gives prevalence to behavior in the physical realm, rather than the interactions that take place in both types of spaces at the same time [5]. Instead, she argues, we must look at digitally mediated social behavior as taking place in ‘hybrid space’ [5]. Thirdly, important other location-based uses of portable information objects are being left out, such as navigation and wayfinding in (unknown) cities. The focus seems restricted to urban practises by people who actually inhabit or at least regularly frequent the city. In addition, footprinting is depicted as taking place solely in the commercial realm through customer loyalty cards. There is an abundance of locative media project that use geotagging as a way of leaving digital footprints or graffiti in the city (e.g. Dutch project Bliin). And the mobile device itself increasingly becomes the interface to footprinting. Many new high-end devices have automatic geotagging built in their photo camera, and come with various uploading services. Some devices already have NFC technology for micro-payments. It seems logical that more and more portable informational objects will converge into the mobile device. Will it ever come to the point that The Mobile City becomes “the city in our mobile”? [1] It should be noted that in most writings on ‘locative’ aspects of mobile media there is an almost exclusive focus on the city as the locus of action. This is understandable since in the city many of the networks that make up present-day ‘hybrid space’ are present in much greater density, and arguably with much greater consequences. In what ways rural space is changing under the influence of mobile media is understudied, I guess, and probably just as important. Especially if we consider that according to Claude Fisher (1992) who studied early fixed line telephony certainly in the beginning the telephone has been more important for rural living than for urban living. [2] A similar point about the research bias towards studying single technologies is made by Julsrud & Bakke in chapter 7 of this same volume (p. 160). [3] Massey, D. B. (2005). For space. London; Thousand Oaks: SAGE. p. 140. [4] Manovich, L. (2005). The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada. 1-15. Retrieved from http://www.manovich.net/TEXTS_07.HTM [5] De Souza e Silva, A. (2006). From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces. Space and culture, 9(3), 261-278. Retrieved from http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/resolver/1840.2/80 ----- Via The Mobile City Personal comment: Un livre à la thématique pas vraiment surprenante, mais qui va dans le sens des concepts que nous utilisons tels que "relations spatiales médiatisées", "spatialités médiatisées", etc. Telecom, transport, and (unequal) time-space compressionOne of the oldest terms to think about the influence of both transport and communication technologies on the experience of time and space is “time-space compression”. This notion expresses the sense that the experience of time passing by is accelerated while the importance of distance diminished. Geographer David Harvey made the term famous, although it has been in use much longer. Sociologist John Urry quotes an anonymous English commentator who in 1839 says that the new railway system were “having the effect of ‘compressing’ time and space” and that “distances were thus annihilated” (Urry 2007: 96). This latter expression is made famous by Karl Marx who talked about “the annihilation of space by time”. At the same time commenters (e.g. Nigel Thrift) have noted that the immensive speed-up of transport and communication technologies not only lead to shrinkage but also to enlargement and widening of space and time, since people could now get a sense of other worlds beyond their previously known local one and simultaneous presence with people elsewhere. Recently I stumbled across two examples that explore its very edges. The first is a fascinating map of the remotest place on earth.
The map is created by researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank. It is part of a research that measures urbanisation from the new perspective of travel time to 8500 major cities. Key findings are:
The map beautifully shows just how incredibly connected the world has become - not only via telecommunications but also by physical mobility - and how even the remotest regions are now closely tied to the urban sphere. The fact that 10% of the world is more than 48 hours from a large city raises questions about the definition of ‘urban’, as states the news release. More nice maps here. A second example is the Reuters news that a Nepali telecom firm is planning to expand its mobile phone service to the top of the Mount Everest. The Mount Everest is one of the busiest high mountains. Each year hundreds of climbers attempt to reach the summit. Until now they were dependent on expensive satellite telephones to call family and friends from the top. Now even the highest peak on earth will become connected to the worldwide communication networks. The question of course remains whether this potential for mobility and connection to ‘the global’ actually contributes to a worldwide “imagined community”. What this map does not indicate is that mobility and connections are unequally divided. Doreen Massey has called this “the power-geometry of time-space compression” (see article). While for global and digital ‘neo-nomads’ the world may indeed seem one homogeneous ’smooth space’, for others it remains firmly divided by barriers and obstacles. ----- Via The Mobile City Humanity close to passing the Hofstadter-Turing Test?A version of the Turing Test now running in Second Life could one day prove that humanity is truly intelligent
Monday, April 27, 2009
Various versions of the Turing test have been put forward over the years but only one is so tough that even humans haven't yet passed it. That will change if Florentin Neumann at the University of Paderborn in Germany and a couple of pals have their way. This alternate exam is called the Hofstadter-Turing Test, after Douglas Hofstadter who put forward a version of the idea in an essay called Coffee House Conversation in 1982. Here's how it works (pay attention because it contains a certain circularity to the argument): Spot the tricky circularity to this test? Players can only pass if they create a virtual intelligence which must then pass the test itself. And since that hasn't been achieved by any human in history, nobody has yet passed. What's interesting about the paper though, is that Neumann and co claim that humanity is moving closer to achieving a pass. First of all, we're half way there because we've already built various virtual worlds. And now Neumann and co claim to have implemented a version of the Hofstadter-Turing Test in the Second Life virtual world.
They go on to say:
They're absolutely right that taking this on board requires a remarkable amount of generosity: the Ghosts in a Pacman game are unlikely to ever put in a decent challenge in any other type of Turing Test. But suppose we give them the generosity they desire. The process raises some interesting ways of analysing the various levels of reality that could occur when machines become intelligent. And what of the possibility that our efforts may be validating the intelligence of a programmer exactly one level higher than us? Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0904.3612: Variations of the Turing Test in the Age of Internet and Virtual Reality ----- Related Links:Personal comment: Où l'on reparle du Test de Turing et 2nd Life... Raisonnement un peu étriqué, mais qui n'est pas sans rappeler par certains aspects le côté absurde d'Electroscape 004 (AI vs AI in self space). Facebook To Open Your Status Updates to DevelopersIn another targeted shot at Twitter, Facebook is expected to announce on Monday that developers can take the streams of Facebook status updates on user profiles and mix them into new applications. Just like the massive Twitter ecosystem, this could lead to a blossoming of innovation around Facebook streams. What’s being made available? Updates, photos, videos, notes and comments, says the Wall Street Journal, but only if you allow access. We’ll be interested to see if such access is provided as a single privacy setting on Facebook (”anyone can mash up my updates”), or done on a case-by-case basis like Facebook Apps and Facebook Connect - the latter is far more likely, and the WSJ appears to confirm it:
And this, I think, is the reason Facebook’s open ecosystem, despite its 200 million-plus users, may not kill off Twitter’s traction with developers: Facebook’s culture is one of privacy and shared updates with friends. Twitter is all about public updates, and hence users love for you to mash up their Tweets into public-facing applications like TweetingTooHard.
Twitter is Still More Open
We’ll likely see a bunch of new applications to post media to Facebook (think: browser plugins and desktop applications) and explore content from friends, but building an open ecosystem will not change the closed culture of Facebook and our willingness to share with only a small circle of personal friends there. Twitter, then, remains the most open…culturally, at least.
----- Via Mashable Reviews:
Personal comment: On peut donc s'attendre à voir fleurir de nouvelles applications/interfaces dédiées à l'affichage les statuts... Et éventuellement encore d'autres choses (installations? --je repense évidemment ici à Listening Post--, displays divers, etc.)
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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