You might have noticed I'm not really blogging anymore. For a long time now I've not really believed in the one person authored blog. So I've stopped. And not the irony of the blog post discussing the death of blogging is not lost on me.
I'm going to be spending less time on here and more time out there. Namely project work and less chin stroking. I have a tumblr here - but very different content to this blog. I might continue this again at a later date, we'll see.
As other sites / projects launch, they'll be news on here so feel free to continue pushing this through RSS readers... if you like.
Today was my day posting on the 3six5 posterous. It is what it sounds like. A different person (pre selected) posts something about their day each day. Insights, drama, mystery, bordom. Whatever it may be. Today was my day. I hope it doesn't suck.
Here's my post.
And yes the irony of the fact that I haven't blogged in a month and the first post is somewhere else isn't lost on me. Soon.
Sorry, things are slow here. Re-starting your life in another country is more work than anticipated. I'm mainly focusing on somewhere to live as moving from sublet to sublet is a bit draining. I'm nearly there though, so normal service will resume at that point.
My Soup is still active though. The soup never slows....
I'm going to live in America, New York specifically in a couple of days. I'm going to work for Fjord who I've worked for in the past, so it shouldn't be too painful an initiation. I've been in London for 15 or so years, so that's certainly a while and I'm ready to try something else.
New places, new cultures, a new stimulus. I know I need it. There's people I'll miss and I'll be sending kidnappers over with green cards periodically.
Monday will be the start of new things.
I listen to a fair number of mixes online, you can't help it, they're everywhere. It's easily one of the best ways of discovering music. The problem has always been that you don't know what track you're listening to. Even if the track listing is supplied I find myself scrolling back and forth trying to establish which one of the bands I'm listening to. Sometimes I even try Shazaam or increasingly Soundtracking.
On a recent Fact Mix, by Animal Collective they list the exact point where each track starts. Amazing. Thanks. This is how it should always be.
ATP Animal Collective Mix by All Tomorrows Parties
Moore's Law is interesting. Working in a field affected by technology you see its effects almost weekly. Media is bordering on being free (in one sense or another) and I've become interested in what happens to people's experiences with media (and its consumption) when the hardware gets so cheap is virtually free as well. How does the (almost) free hardware affect the delivery of the (almost) free media?
I've been buying up old iPod Shuffles. Partially because they're great and also partially because they're so cheap on eBay. I've really grown into the idea of only carrying certain artists around again, like we did with minidiscs / tapes. I like the idea that you make a (musical) choice and stick with it. Choice does pollute so.
It echos the idea of the distributed phone, where a modular style phone is split into fucntionally specific parts. Sometimes you don't need all the functionality a smart phone provides, while running, for example. Just as with a music player you don't need to carry a 60Gb hard drive for a 20 min stroll to the post office.
As kids we used to give out tapes to friends to play on their tape players. When the player is almost free like the media, you can give someone a 'mix' and a player in one. Isn't that pretty great. I suspect a lot of people saw this idea recently, which is exactly what I'm taking about.
Now I'm probably the only human alive that doesn't like badges much, but the premise is fabulous.
Where does this go from here? DVD boxes that have screens on them, that are players too. Or perhaps simply projectors. Player and media combined as a single usage item. Experiments like this have been around for ages but are mainly novelty items. I think we need more of this silliness, relating to what I said recently about dreaming and being experimental. We need seemingly crazy ideas like stickers that are screens. That's how we create the new stuff, from the random throw-away ideas.
Temporary hardware, controlled, conditioned or formatted by a parent device, like a smart phone or tablet, which increasingly, many of us have.
When stuff like this gets cheap we can really start playing with it. When all these little tiny things connect together easily through blue-tooth, NFC or WIFI then we'll see a wealth of new experiences and delivery mechanisms.
Media experience ecosystems that span titanium to paper, I like that idea. Transmedia hardware. Let's go.
I'm DJing at Heavy Pencil again (this Thursday). The last one was pretty fun. This time it's at Somerset House for the launch of Pick Me Up, which should be, by all accounts pretty descent.
Update:
I'm now NOT DJing on the 17th but AM DJing on the 24th. Confusing eh. Not that I'm the main draw...anyway. Main draw... hey that was quite good..
I've been hearing and reading lots about the near future and atemporality recently - what the web is perpetuating and how writers and designers aren't really thinking so big anymore, not thinking so out there. I think it's half true. And I do think it's a problem. The whole, we have magic screens and semi-inteligent computation is only the physical bit not the emotional bit. The dream bit.
In the early 1900s the Italian and French art communities went a bit potty for Futurism. It was all speed, industrial power, progress, launching our species forward at all costs at breakneck speed. While I clearly wasn't there, looking at collected material it looked like it was exciting. Those artists playing off the industrial revolution and the change that was happening around them. Do we still have this the future, lets strive for it mentality? I'm not sure.
I saw a documentary recently (which I can't find now) where Aaron Rose suggested that all we've been doing for the last 10 years is remixing the cultures from the previous decades. Not creating anything really interesting.
While remixing is still interesting, we're not breaking new ground, we're turning over already broken soil. And this seems to be consistantly speeding up. Of course there are inspirational fringe activities happening in culture but I'm mainly refferring to the stuff that breaks the surface.
It's like building something and only reaching for the bricks that are near you. Not even considering designing a new brick. And I'm not just talking about physical things I'm talking ideas - system ideas - different approaches. And yes there are lots of blogs surfacing bits and pieces, prototypes and the like but it's not hitting the mainstream much.
Throughout the 20th century we marvelled at our brilliance, communication, vaccines, travel, the moon, computers, and so on. We dreamed of video calling, robots and jet packs. Those future vision books everyone grew up with were for everyone. They were exciting. The future was exciting. We were always looking forward. James Bridle wrote a while back:
“The problem is not that we don’t have jetpacks, but that no one is writing about jetpacks.”
And I think this is partially true. I think we've almost confused ourselves over what future is. Right now people are growing buildings in seawater. We have very impressive dexterous robot hands and exoskeletons that can make us super human. Lots of our constructs for what future is seem to have arrived. The problem was that we got hung up on the old ideas and didn't invent new ones.
The present seems to be enabling our old notion of future at an incredible rate. The immediate now is currently very accessible and dominant. Real time digital social media such as Facebook and Twitter distract us terribly. We desperately try to keep up with the now and don't sit back and dream enough. And because of this I feel we are blinkering ourselves to possibilities.
where are the dream machines?
I think some people are thinking about the future but I think they're not given the media space they once had because our technology is now moving faster than our ideas. Our now is so incredible that the future seems less important, somehow. Several people have suggested this and I think they're right.
The opinion seems to be that, our future used be sexy because the present wasn't. Now that the present is sexy the future is not. I think that's wrong.
Content production has become so easy, we're overdosing on it. And it's 99% awful. I fear that the pressure to view all this unnecessary content is preventing us sitting back and dreaming of tomorrow. Instead, we are merely catching up with now. These tools of mass distraction such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube maybe changing business and behaviour but they're really not interesting compared with the other things that are being made / dreamt up.
I think it's time to dream for the sake of dreaming again. To make dreaming sexy again.
My friend Sandy has a nice new project under way. It's about Things & People. I'm in it, as you can see. It's a charming little thing uncovering the relationship with the aethetics that shape us.