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In Lev Manovich’s Interaction as an Aesthetic Event – a text describing mobile phone evolution up to 2005 – he outlines a notion of technological interaction as theatre.*

One thing which this brings to my mind, is a memorable early scene in The Matrix (Neo’s first encounter with the elusive Morpheus) where a Nokia phone is taken out of a parcel box and, without stimulation, the mouthpiece of the device springs forth, giving a physical expression to the already heightened sense of ‘drama’ in this particular moment.

Whilst searching for a YouTube clip of the scene, I stumbled across a comment left on another video (specifically related to that Nokia phone) which gives further clues to the nature of this seductive and overwhelming effect:

lndac02 (3 months ago)
I still have mine, its a design classic. I used to feel like neo ever time I clicked the slider down to take a call. it is a cool phone and always will be.

Below, a fan remix video highlights this juxtaposition of cellphone interaction and drama in The Matrix; mobile ringtones precede heroic violence against an oppressive infrastructure; telephones are presented as both gateways and exits for drama and escape. (Watch it all – it’s great!)

Another YouTube video (below) makes audible, the ominous electro-magnetic interference which often preceded the shrill personalised ringtones of the late nineties – further emphasising another way in which these mobile devices engender dramatic tension.*  (Inadvertently?) the video also has some kind of intense rhythmic machine-like banging in the background.

So! – Don’t be annoyed next time someone picks up a call at an inappropriate time – REMEMBER! – In our, highly-networked, global society, ALL PHONES are the BAT-PHONE: Each and every one of us must, at all times, be ready and willing to be called upon and to act in the role of protagonist, centre ov the stage.***

* refers to: Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (1991)
**iPhone users still experience this nostalgia-tinged interference phenomena if they go anywhere near an old telly.
***It does appear to be the case that we are all subconsciously sleepwalking towards the belief that we are NOT IN FACT MERELY RECEIVING A PHONECALL but instead, that we are at a pivotal point of the most important drama ever to manifest and potentially we are making THE crucial connection which might ultimately FREE (not only our individual self, but also) the whole of humankind from our collective technological enslavement.

Huddersfield St.Patrick’s Day Parade

town centre – public space – collective memory – heritage – temporality – shared experience – crowds – the Parade! – What a day!

Parade Head Steward, Ginger McCullogh and Huddersfield Town Crier, Victor Watson during Huddersfield’s tenth St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Sunday 14th March 2010.

Stare into the abyss and the abyss stares into you* **

Colleagues in Digital Media introduced me to something called chatroulette the other day: Basically, chatroulettte, if you haven’t heard, is a website where two webcams are visible onscreen – yours – and that of a randomly selected ’stranger’.  You are presented with a different random stranger for chat each time you hit the NEXT button (and the stranger can do this also).

• What is the nature of the ‘interaction’ going on within this web phenomena?

I (like several thousand others around the world) have been taking a look and trying and figure out ‘HEY! WHAT’s UP MAN?’

Once your webcam is enabled (an amazingly fast two-click no-login procedure) ’strangers’ appear, right there, in your browser.  And a typical experience is illustrated below:

What seems to continually happen is that someone – the ’stranger’ – appears on screen, vacantly staring, and then clicks away.

There was a seemingly never-ending stream of glassy expressions (and quite a lot of male genitals – so be warned!)

A rough estimate of the spread of users when I was on the site (9pm – 12am 11-03-2010) would be:

With all of these strangers staring for a brief moment and then clicking NEXT, it was quite a strange (primal and hostile) experience – I decided I had to try and disrupt this, so I did a simple drawing of a human male character…

By moving the drawing in front of the screen, I found it was possible to engage the stranger – often eliciting a smile:

I took this simple interaction a stage further, by introducing a second drawing with a ‘thumbs-up’ once the stranger was engaged:

Many individuals returned the ‘thumbs-up’ salute – international archetype for ‘hey!’ – and then I returned to the original drawing.

I found, at this stage that the stranger was often willing to chat – they typed into the chat panel and then I removed the drawings and showed my ‘real’ self.  The guy above is a good example – he told me that he lives in Indiana, in the U.S. and was on chatroulette looking for naked girls but, every time, they clicked away :-(

He was happy to chat with me though – as were other people: a teenager in Brazil; an older guy in Chile; a guy my age in Texas; a Jordanian girl in Dallas; some teenage guys in France.  Many people talked about the same things: ‘boredom’ and wanting an ‘encounter.’

I made a short screengrab movie of these interactions below and the illustrations are also available to download as PDF and for printing and trying out yourself. (Let me know how it goes!)

Unfortunately the original video was taken down by YouTube because it contained nudity – but there is another edit below which has been censored.

Stare into the abyss and the abyss stares into you* **

*(with his dick in his hand)

**(for 2 seconds)

The (symbolic) importance of physically petitioning 10 Downing Street should not be underestimated.

If a citizen takes their petition to 10 Downing Street they are literally and symbolically banging on the ‘front door’ of government and demanding that their issue be given due care and consideration by the highest elected authority in the land.

Our friends, MySociety, facilitate their own online brand of this complaint process; the No 10 Petitions Website – How does this online experience compare?

If you have encountered No 10 Petitions Website it might well have been through receiving an invitation to sign a petition via email (something like) -

Protest the Pope, 10 Downing Street Petition

Petition the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown

Please sign:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ProtestthePope/

And, the Number 10 Petitions Website fosters this kind of signature-gathering-via-email approach, which appears to be a very efficient way to:

• gauge support for current issues
• raise the public profile of an issue
• bring an issue to the attention of central government

When I visited to the site today I noticed that there was a new petition there, campaigning for legislation regarding ‘Mosquito youth deterrent devices.’

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/MosquitoUse/

The petition was created by Howard Stapleton and reads:

‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Legislate
the use of the Mosquito device.’

I ’signed’ the petition, (since I strongly disagree with the use of these devices*) and it was pleasingly simple to do so.

Perhaps too simple?  Whilst the online petition is certainly an efficient delivery method, the process feels much more like making a mundane consumer complaint (rather than taking part in an engaged political action).  And that is not the only problem.

The No 10 Petitions Website operates, on one level, on a similar model to the previously mentioned FixMyStreet:

• “report-the-problem-to-the-relevant-authority Model”
  

Can reporting a pothole in need of repair (or reporting a broken traffic light in the DIY Democracy example) to a council department REALLY be equated with reporting bigger, less well defined, more complex issues to the Prime Minister?

*These totally unregulated ‘mosquito devices’ send out a high frequency pulsing sound which can only be heard by younger people, indiscriminately targeting them; making their lives unpleasant. The legal use of these devices has not yet been tested in the British Court, but it is widely believed that they are a violation of International Human Rights Law.

Downing Street image file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Brazil license.
Original image here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lula_and_Brown_1_April_2009.jpg

Sorta like this:

…quick post in relation to MMME class questions:

Q. What are the sounds of Newcastle city of which you’re most aware?

A. …there was a nice moment one Saturday when Newcastle United scored – the roar from St. James Park…

Q. Do certain sounds trigger your memories for you? What are they? These could be musical sounds as well…

A. …sound last week of particular sony-eriksson mobile phone ring put me into the past… …particular pop songs (Eagle Eye Cherry ‘Save the Night’, Sugar Babes ‘Push the Button’) put me in past workplaces…

I received a link via email today (thanks Tom):

DIY DEMOCRACY – these guys have developed an iPhone App for… well… engaging in Democracy…

The ‘DIY DEMOCRACY’ App allows citizens to report back to government agencies when they encounter an ‘issue’ and it also gives immediate access to the written law – it even has a button to ‘challenge the law!

The logic of the App seems to be that, given the correct information, our elected government bodies will ‘fix’ society’s problems e.g. broken traffic lights

Here is some more from the App’s website (it’s currently only available for use in the US):

“FIX YOUR STATE”
“FIX YOUR CITY”
“DOCUMENT YOUR EVIDENCE”
“TAKE ACTION”
“SHARE YOUR ISSUES”
“CONTACT YOUR LEADERS”

The above are all really good ideas BTW – but really… with an App? – I’m a little skeptical…

In recent years, in-keeping with the web 2.0 ‘participation,’ ‘interactivity’ trends there have emerged a great number of websites and applications which seem to offer to act as ‘broker’ between disenfranchised citizens and political process.

In the UK, quite a few sites operate under the banner of the charity ‘MySociety.’

An example project is ‘FixMyStreet,’ a website which deals very sensibly with a constant problem – potholes – by putting pro-active citizens in the position of informal ‘monitors.’

If you spot a pothole then you can simply enter the location (postcode) into the site (or a geotagged photo if you like) and all of the necessary information is AUTOMAJICALLY reported to the SPECIFIC RELEVANT LOCAL AUTHORITY so that they can schedule a repair.

In crowdsourcing pothole reporting, FixMyStreet has a very modest and clear remit and I think the website works primarily because it takes a lot of the hassle out of the ‘civic duty’ of COMPLAINING.

The DIY DEMOCRACY App takes this notion of reporting ‘problems’ to a totally different extreme:

THE POWER OF CHANGE IS IN YOUR HAND

Its rhetoric is very seductive, and raises some questions:

Are all of societies inequalities and failings mere logistical ‘bugs’?

And, can we REALLY solve all of our POLITICAL issues by remote control?

There are a growing number of transparent democracy websites and below is a link to a comprehensive blogpost by Tom Steinberg (of MySociety) outlining various emerging trends and strands:

Nine is the number: The different flavours of transparency website in 2009

My Digital Media Research Masters Final Project will require a theoretical understanding of the alliances and interactions between law and digital technologies and it is my hope that this learning can be aided through discussion with both the designers, programmers and theorists resident in Culture Lab and also legal academics across at the Law School.

Tomorrow, at 2pm, I’ll be making a presentation to a PHD Research group at Newcastle Law School to introduce my research and thinking regarding areas where technology, art and law appear to intersect:

Title: Interfacing with Law

John O’Shea is working on an AHRC Research Project at Newcastle University’s Culture Lab proposing and prototyping new kinds of technological ‘interface’ between citizen and law.
The convergence of digital-media collaboration tools (such as wikis), G.P.S. enabled mobile devices, and ubiquitous social networking technologies present not only new challenges for legislation but also new possibilities for governments, corporations, communities and citizens to interact with legal frameworks.
John will present examples from his current avenues of research and open up a discussion regarding the implications of current technologies for citizens and the legal profession.

As well as discussing current examples of “Web 2.0″ technologically enabled initiatives between citizens, government and legislation I would also like to direct some focus onto instances where the two streams – technology and law  – seem to merge and hybridise instigating problematic scenarios brought about neither by citizen nor government BUT instead simply through the advancement and free proliferation of new technologies.

Real practical examples of these unanticipated pairings are often evidenced in the tabloid media:

Top: Recorded data in G.P.S. systems (potential evidence of wrong-doing) causing headaches for businesses and lawyers.
Below: Low unit cost of fingerprint scanners is enabling new, non governmental, identification schemes.
Bottom: To counter thieves, designers technologically ensure that mobile phone owners keep their device on their person at all times (again using G.P.S.)

In each of the three story examples, technological innovation is portrayed in an unswervingly positive light and, although each of these developments could have very obvious implications for the privacy of individuals involved, these concerns are not voiced.

In his ISEA2009 keynote, Clive Van Heerden of the Phillips Technology ‘Design Probes’ division discussed these kind of throwaway news articles and used the phrase ‘weak signals’ to liken them to a kind of cultural indicator.

This idea has parity with one of Marshall Mcluhan’s 1969 conceptions of the role of art and artists in relation to technology:

I think of art, at its most significant as a DEW line, a DISTANT EARLY WARNING system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

More info regarding DISTANT EARLY WARNING at this excellent site HERE!

We are required, for our DOING assignment, to draw an interesting shape using Processing and export it as a PDF. file so that we can cut it out using the lazer-cutter…

My thoughts have returned to the unusual Prenzlauer Berg gravestone and I have decided to make a model.  The black outline will be cut from leftover acrylic plastic in the workshop and the design element (in red above) will be engraved (is engraved the right word – sounds quite grand -  anyway, it will be cut also but not all of the way through.)

Having already made an approximation of the spirograph design I have worked with Processing’s bezier() function to make an outline shape similar to that of the original stone.  It took some time to understand how to programme the curves but once the bezier principle is understood it is actually very simple.  Basically, the curve is constructed through combining both sets of co-ordinates for the construction lines (in red below).

Click for sketch and code.

PDF. here also. (any questions please add comment.)

(this instance of DIY gravestone manufacturing may or may not have been inspired by this Home Office video designed to help young people with everyday problems…)

# Do you know what year the house you live in was built? How would you find out? Are you interested? Why/why not?

The house here in Newcastle? I rent it – I really couldn’t care less about it. The house in Huddersfield? – that is my parent’s house, where I grew up – I don’t know exactly what year it was built, probably the end of the 1960’s. It’s the end house in a row and it faces a small wood. Apparently they were built as show-houses for the Highland’s council estate (which is behind). There aren’t any people living in the street now, who were there at the beginning, so if I needed to find out more then I think I would have to start at the library, although, thinking about it, if I actually cared – rather than performing some superficial research – I’d be more interested in speaking to people who were there at that time. I’d probably call into a couple of the local shops and pubs/clubs and just find out who might know something – start from there.

# Do you know your own family history? How would you find out? Are you interested? Why/why not?

I know some ‘history’ about my family. I also know that my Grandmother (on my Mother’s side) and my Grandfather (on my Father’s side) both know an incredible amount – going back many generations. If I wanted to find out specific information, then I would ask them but I don’t have a desire to record their knowledge. I’m interested in the stories and details that they have chosen to share with me.

# Do you use any technologies which investigate history? Which ones and how do you use them?

No – I don’t think that I do.