tziteras

Electronic Ideas and Experiments

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:52:19 PST

LED lights.

This is a simple idea which has already led some local artists to make shiny balloons to light up a pier, and has inspired a teenager to start a business and win various entrepreneurial and inventing awards with something that leaves most open hardware or electronics enthusiasts cold and blank.

Basically the most simple thing you can build using electronics is an LED attached to a resistor, and both ends of those two, attached to a battery. Another simple variation on this is the throwie, which is LED + Battery + magnet (so it sticks to what you throw it onto).

To many this is old stuff, far too simple to be interesting any more, but to me the simplicity of the design is beautiful:

But it's actually a lot more fluid than that picture, made of bendable wires that could go anywhere, and could be arbitrary lengths really.

LED light can be very directional and will project really nicely on to things, so an LED tree made of wire or pipes that you can position seems a good idea. LED technology is also getting better fast. Switches to turn on or off can be made using just metal bits or pins so there's loads of space for considering not the electronic aspects, but the design of the object and what it would feel like or what it would be for. So doing some kind of LED lighting unit where each one is switchable and autonomous would be brilliant. But how to do it...

I would like to create an LED light system for a tiny stop motion home theatre using my Arduino. I have to find out how to power at least 3 different coloured LEDs. I think I have 5V so maybe I need to figure out how to do the lights at different times. But then what to encase them in so that they are easy to position, and how to turn them on and off. Here is a simple lighting test I did:

Solar power

Once I'd build my first arduino based prototype, my main worry was those huge panels of 4 AA batteries at a time that are needed for this kind of thing. It is far too much consumption and the first thing to do would be to switch to rechargeable batteries.

Once you have rechargeable batteries though, the next step is to figure out how to wire in a small solar panel and let it be self sufficient. The thing I want to be self sufficient will be able to generate sounds from a buzzer in some kind of container that can naturally amplify it(a pumpkin has been suggested for this), as well as play electronic beeps to it, from a piezo. So it follows that if this is playing all day it will be annoying, whereas if it uses only a little energy and has to save up energy before it can play for a while, it will only give a couple of concerts a day, which may be more interesting than a constantly sounding device.

http://little-scale.blogspot.com/2008/03/connecting-solar-panel-to-arduino.html
http://www.instructables.com/id/Self-Sufficient-Arduino-Board/

http://residentialsolarelectricity.diycreation.com/sun-tracking-solar-panel-w-arduino/ <- fun stuff

White Noise Generator
I want to do a psychological experiment using sensory deprivation to induce a hallucinatory state. This will use a white noise generator and ping pong balls remove auditory and visual inputs from the wearer, excepting the LED lights which will follow the overall luminicence of the device and light up at some moments to trigger a colour perception. It will need a simple and small hat with the required attachments: a white noise generator, and some LEDs that light up randomly at the side of the eyes when the room darkens and a light diode to detect light (although this can be done with an LED as well).

Initial links to useful chips and bits that might help:
http://www.edaboard.com/ftopic302943.html
http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/an_pk/3469
http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm/qv_pk/1521
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1169001613
http://processing.org/discourse/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1234706777

Marcus Valentine suggests using a linear feedback shift register to do this with. I have no idea where to start and only vaguely understand what a digital circuit is in the first place but here it all is:
http://web-ee.com/schematics/noise_generation/scalable-noise-generator/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_feedback_shift_register

Using simpler chips and boards than Arduinos

The natural progression from using an arduino to prototype something is to want miniaturisation and to try and make the thing cheaper to keep as a permanent object. I don't want to have to take my arduino out and build it all back up again each time, so circuits will get soldered, and ideally, the arduino will be then used in turn to program a smaller, less expensive chip with what is needed to just do it's job (minus all the USB connection and other arduino stuff that make them simple). The end result is you have a small device you can make more of, running on a simple chip. This can work well for stuff like musical instruments or other semi bespoke work.

http://shop.tuxgraphics.org/
http://shop.tuxgraphics.org/electronic/detail_avrusb500.html
http://www.futurlec.com/
http://fundamental.antville.org/
http://code.google.com/p/mega-isp/
http://drug123.org.ua/mega-isp-shield/

Beyond the netbook: Making the simplest open source arduino based microcomputer

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 04:14:06 PDT

Today's arduino based microprocessors are no match for the computing power of an ARM chip. Most of these chips can easily run Linux, or proprietary systems like WinCE, and they power most of our phones as a result of much earlier electronic experimentation, as show by last week's Micromen BBC program, about the Acorn vs Sinclair battles of the 80s.

A fully capable ARM chip able to control a complex thing like a mobile with it's full color displays and wifi, 3g bluetooth etc will cost a minimum of 150 pounds(and that's just for the chip), and so for hardware hacking isn't really worth the investment, as no-one will buy it for £150 when you can buy a proper ARM based phone at Tescos for 15 pounds.

But an arduino can still be the basis for some kind of cheap system, perhaps one that costs only around 50 pounds to prototype.

What I'd like to see though isn't a project to make something that mimics phones, but is to make a functional leap and create the simplest possible thing that can serve as a household computer, taking the most basic functions: communication, data transfer, storage and interface, and concentrating on being low power, cheap to make and open in design.

Things to use:

Voice: OCR to Voice, voice to text etc, getting rid of keyboards. (Although the processing power needed for this might not make it a good idea. Maybe it would only record messages, send them around and play them back.
"Touchscreen" or head tracking as with http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ and other ideas.
Casing: Recycled materials. Tire, sensors from old electronic items, mass produced plastic packaging etc, natural materials such as bamboo and balsa.
It could use sd cards for storage, send data over audio channels, and we could copy data in and out using the miniusb.
Could a photo sensor and piezo combine to create an interface perhaps? The photosensor would do distances, and piezo would check for sound. Sound + distance can easily reproduce the rubbish but simple keypad used in mobiles.
Display: The tellymate! http://www.solarbotics.com/products/50652/ but if it can plug into an old flatscreen monitor, all the better.

There has to be a cheap way of generating images or sending data. Using ethernet and a fast local network, it can control a huge array of devices, and there are new technologies coming out all the time such as 3g modems and IP over electricity.

With the basis of an arduino, or of it's cheaper clones, an open hardware device could be created able to plug into a monitor or a television and use a modern but inexpensive interface such as IR gestures or touchscreen, powered by AA batteries or crank power!

So here are some links I've collected to do with ARM chips and netbooks:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10198879-16.html Ubuntu triumphs in the modern netbook market.

http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/software-arm-linux.php A linux ARM distro for a specific chip, price TBC...

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/arm-sbc.php $110...

If a workshop was set up to make something that sold for £40 pounds or less, people would buy it. But the sets could take the price down to half of that if it was just simple parts and lots of inventiveness...

A weekend building an arduino based robot

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:18:38 PDT

[The bot itself, looking sombre]

Last month, I went away to Stourbridge, a great centre of technology and robotics in the UK's scenic midlands. Here are some notes, pictures and film from that journey.

(I lied about Stourbridge).

The little train that brought me over from the main rail routes felt like a mix between the Totoro cat train and the slowly chugging train of death that inevitably carries away dead steampunks.

I later learned it had been built with very little money, so the health and safety was very minimal, and it was always breaking down.

But my friend Mat lives on the side of this sleepy town. He said that to one side of his house there was wasteland and empty industrial buildings. The other side, he warned was a land of chavs with blue neon underlit cars, there were also pubs and strip clubs, and lots of nurseries.

For a long time, Mat had been collecting arduinos and sensors of all kinds, hoping for a weekend of calm in which to play with it all. He invited me over to build a sonic robot.

So I had gone over for a weekend of playing with cool tech, which turned out to include generative sound with PD and Max MSP, arduinos, robots, cameras, c++ libraries, and lots of gaming. It's for a show he wants to do next year.

We also talked about the idea of a combined virtual and real tree: perhaps feeding into each other. My tree would live in Second Life or Opensim, and would be made of a robotic avatar, which would talk to it's attachments and generate detachable fruits if it was paid Lindens or fed nice textures. Mat's would live in real life, made of arduinos, servos and LEDs, and might for example produce virtual fruits with a GPS location that you'd need an AR platform to go and find them with.

So Thursday was a quick introduction to the arduino. We did the first hello world tutorial and got out Mat's extensive collection of arduinos, roboduinos, arduino diecimila, cornettos, arduino super maxis, calippos and mars bar ice creams. So after getting one LED's worth of blinking satisfaction, we created two little things out of plastic:

To make these, we sawed a CD box cover in half, attached three ultrasonic oscillators on either side (which were bought for a tenner each at coolcomponents.co.uk). And inside the box covers was a little arduino, controlling it. Our idea was to then wire this up so that music could be played based on it's tactile nature, and based on some 80s experiments with infra-red range finders.

But then we got out PD, and started playing around with that, as well as getting out loads of computer games like Left 4 Dead and Fight Night round 4 - great inspiration for messing with electronics and sound generation.

So next morning came a fun Puredata workshop, downloading it, setting it up on linux, and generating random sounds in our stoic Stourbridge surroundings, a local JD Wetherspoons, to the annoyance and tutting of the locals. I learnt that you can wire up Playstation 3 controllers to PD via USB and they will control anything on the PC. It looks a lot harder to figure out than Max MSP but in it's help files' introduction page it mentions Xenakis and Stockhausen.

And then, after some stir fry, we put together a robot kit, the kind you buy at bookshops or museum shops. This one was from Robot Shop (although I can't find a link to it direct. Mat says it's called the Rover though). We ripped out the frame and the wheel motors and attached them to an arduino. After we'd put 20 tiny bits of metal inside 20 tiny little holes on each track, it was quite easy to get the arduino controlling a single tracked wheel, but there was not enough power to run them both, much less to carry loads of shit around like a robotic pack horse mini me. It would have needed a transistor and a 9v battery, which means a trip to Maplins.

So we sidestepped that whole issue and added the contents of a £50 Edimax webcam and wifi pack to the robot.

[To indoctrinate robots into the human world, it is traditional to filially imprint them with some late night Jonathan Ross]

We removed the webcam from the white side of it's plastic container, displaying it's internal LED(s) as well. This we then taped on to the robot box. and on top of the whole thing went the WIFI router, which was also in the pack from edimax. I soon downloaded an android IP cam app, and had connected to the camera over the wifi router, although being plugged in doesn't make our little robot any better at being autonomous...

But we could add batteries at some point. It needs either a 6v, 9v and 12v battery, or just a rack of AA batteries like a radio controlled car.

[Slightly menacing blue lights, again showing a strange resemblance between television and sound bot]

We also thought of using one of the range finders for it, so that it would have an easy way of avoiding obstacles, but then Mat's games with video to audio pretty much got rid of that need.

And we took loads of photos of the photos it was taking. But to get the camera working on linux, I needed a bit longer, as I had to download all the info and a big 150 meg library to my g1 (As a sign of the times, there was no working internet in the flat, but we both had it via 3g on our phones, which we'd use to transfer files via USB cable).

Meanwhile, I wrote my first C++ library for arduino, stealing shamelessly from a Twitter library, found online, which was able to deal with basic authentication.

So easy to make robots nowadays! I bet in future our robot dolls will be home made too.

I'm back now, a few hours later. We've taken a slight detour with a Max/MSP patch that interprets Mat's Mac's camera and turns it into ostinato piano notes based on how bright each pixel is. After that, Mat enlarged it by 250 times, by taking each pixel in a row and doing this based on the average. It's about as good as the range finders were to begin with. We had loads of fun and made a couple of videos of Mat playing his computer like a piano sampling theremin.

It's also, to my mind, a lot more accessible than a range finder, ultrasonic or IR, because everyone has a camera in the UK and everyone is being videoed or is watching video constantly through the day.

Imagine an installation where you took over all that CCTV in a space, and used it to generate sound based on the people passing through it.

I kept working on my C++ library, and it is now able to log in, request a page, and get an error code of 200 from the camera. Also, you can now install it in the arduino development environment and it will run out of the box, even giving an example. It's not much really, but it was late... And with the pdf of the cgi calls, it will soon be able to deliver lots of info to the arduino based on the images it sees.

Next step will be to get the little camera for the robot sending data back to the Arduino, so that it can pick up visual info and use it to tell where it's going. I had a geeky time messing around with the arduino and it's Ethernet shield, getting it to be a web server and client(ooh, arduino p2p, I count the days until your birth), but unfortunately still not managing to get it to connect to anything useful.

Mat's final vision for the robot is that it is eventually able to find it's way around using the camera, and able to find the most musical place, so that in it's symbiotic relationship with humans, it can deliver pleasurable noises. We also still kept the first basic idea of using our original rangefinder interface, maybe mounted on the robot, or in an area close to it, so as to allow people to play duets with the robot, and find even better noises based on what it finds.

[Our little robot relaxes after a long and arduous hacking session]

How to do memory:
Instead of storing sound samples on an SD card (which could also be good, for obtaining on-board recordings), it could store much more data based on the images it sees, before it turns them into noise. On a 9 hour day, 15 frames a second, so for a minute it would need 900 samples. So for an hour, 54000 samples. it would have 486000 individual samples to take care of. BUT each row of elements has 256 individual integers. So that gives 124 416 000 bits stored in a day, i.e around 15MB.

But that's only if it was gathering this stuff all day: it only needs to gather the stuff it likes(based on an algorithm Mat's got in mind), so maybe a 30 sec vision based sample at most, which would then be stored on the SD card so that it could be played back in combination with other stuff it liked. Samples could maybe be stored in 3 types (Lady Ada's wave shield allows the playing of 3 sounds at a time - enough for percussion, chord/drone and soloist/multiple tones).

Mat's algorithm would do a fitness test:


   is this a C major chord, or a scale, or something I can identify?
       Yes:
           What type is the sound: percussive, slow tone, quick tone?
               store a segment(type)  
           Move slightly forwards or back to try and get nice variations.
       No:
           Turn X degrees left or right.

Arduinos and bits bought from:

Devonrobotics.co.uk, corecomponents.co.uk
Robot shop construction kit: £40 including an arduino!
Lady Ada Wave shield kit: also quite cheap, and including another Arduino.
skpang.co.uk : very cheap bits and oscillators.

Dorkbot's New Hackspace

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:19:15 PDT

Here below you see a miniature, or pocket version of what was recently displayed at a large event in Bath by the newly hacktivised dorkbot bunch, who were given the challenge of providing a musical experience for a tech related arts event. They had to build a smaller version for testing, so they say, or most probably, because they could and because it was fun.

So Dorkbot has finally grown up from being a show and tell of the media, design, internet, engineering, musical and generally creative dork-peoples of Bristol. It has now gained much attention from event organisers and maker faires, as popular electronics has it's second rennaisance in arduinos and strange inventions, and as the closet sound benders of Bristol started messing with all that, so they are booked to play quite a few places, in the sense of course, of playing strange new-millennium unicycles that generate sounds by bending a microprocessor's own vibrations.

Tonight, we plotted the needs for the upcoming (23rd and 24rth October) event in Cardiff, where many a sound unicycle will parade the streets(um, of the venue), a veritable orchestra in fact, for which bass parts are now sought. Here is the shopping list for now:

2 Sunshields for bike wheel (to shade a small section at the top where the optical sensors are)
2 Battery packs for 6AAs
2 Arduinos
Wires
3 or 4* optic sensors
£4 speakers from the garage near John's friend's house
2 power plugs
2 jack sockets.

* The 4, as explained by John Honnibal, was due to the possibility of having an extra track around the side of the disk, which provides the musical score for the device, and to have that synchronise the other notes. This is shown in the first image, at the top of the blog post.

But perhaps I should explain a bit about this space that has been kindly given to Dorkbot by local networkers and community IT group Bristol Wireless, so as to be used as a Hackspace. It's housed at Hamilton House in exotic stokes croft(where from the bar below, a local play takes place each day, next to Bristol Wireless's offices, and so far just an internet connection, some power sockets, and lots of possibly useless, potentially dangerous electronic devices in large plastic containers. Oh and some unicycles.

The idea is to keep it running weekly as a time in which to make stuff, rather than show stuff you've made as with the Pervasive Media Labs sessions. I hope those like me who have never done a day's soldering in their lives will soon learn to count their ohms, tell their resistors from their capacitors, and others will get to work with interesting people who bring their creations to new audiences or new collaborations. But the Dorkbot, mixed media feel is not lost. It's still meant to be a mix of whatever is made by electricity, and I hope the musicians and engineers can be quickly joined by dancers, poets and cooks. (But I do also remember a Cube Cinema based dorkbot where even the electricity rule was broken, and most of the show and tell was about open source cola and distributed apple tree orchards).

So, we now have a bristol hackspace, and lots of things to build each tuesday, for upcoming events, some leaning more towards outreach(such as a busking and empty shop takeover event in late November), others more towards art(such as the Arnolfini's December based IT/hacking programme). I must end with another list, this time of the first hackspace invention ever to be built as a kit and sold. Here are some of the parts that might be required:


In each pack (of a total of maybe 20 packs?):

A small used flyer, or some thin cardboard on which to print a circuit board and on to which the device will be assembled.
1 diode
2 capacitors
2 potentiometers
Chips
etc

1 pack of 20 or 50 plastic parts ziploc bags.

As well as this creation, allowing people to come to a workshop and go home with something interesting, we'll also be on the lookout for some cheap sound making toys from pound stores or toy shops, so as to circuit bend these as well. Meanwhile though, I'll definitely have to learn to solder!

Where's the Salad?

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:12:06 PDT

A while ago, I put on an event in which people from Bristol grew and made a salad, based on Alison Knowle's "Proposition No 2":

It was very nice, and I made a preparatory video:

as well as there being a radio interview, a sound art play with radio and some homemade chopping noises(with poet Andres Andwadter), lots of photos of the event itself and some graphics about it. But I want to make this, as well as more audio, this time of the live chopping duet between lollorosso and improvising trio, into a video and tell the story that way. So I'm really sorry, but it's going to take me a while. It was an incredible experience, and thanks to all who came. Especially to those who brought us salad!

A list of future physical/virtual computing arts projects

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:29:55 PDT

I have to write up so much from recent events, but as usual at these times, my head is buzzing with ideas for other stuff to do next (all based on a long weekend of messing with arduinos, robotics, Puredata and Max/MSP), so I thought it best to document that first. So. I would like to make:

An enactment of a score I wrote a long time ago, involving dancers/actors performing with a box, that follows different parameters based on what stage the performance is at. It would be a black box, interacting with the movement and words only through sound. It would be capable of "jamming" or following music in some way or other. (Link suggested by Mat)
A dance based implementation of the MaxMSP script that my friend Mat quickly put together last weekend, which allows webcams to interpret visual data as audio samples(more on that in the next post). I want to invite a duet of dancers to perform with this webcam audio, in December, but mostly scriptless, just a result of trying things out with the kit and seeing what shapes to pull so the sounds are better!
An outdoors sound object capable of sensing it's environment (possibly via sensors able to see light and soil moisture, so a bit like a plant again). It would turn those senses into audio. I would program it with my own samples and prototype it with PD, though so it would sound somehow like my own thing. The main part of it would be that it could play a morning raga: if it's dark, play a generative solo sound. As sound increases, find a melody and vary it, keeping the main bit for later. Percussion joins in when light reaches a certain moment, and follows warmth or moisture. I've got most of the bits of this. I'm wondering how to keep it safe out there in the rain and damp all the time though. And I want to get it solar panels and make it self sufficient, or even read more data from that into music as well!
An exhibition, soon, of the musical robot we prototyped and got started this weekend (looking for venues at the moment).
The two trees, from the previous post. This will hopefully debut on Burning Man's Second Life incarnation, Burning Life.
Maybe in future, a watcher system to protect plants against night time garden pests. It would have a wire going into each plant pot. It would use the noted aversion that slugs and snails have to small electrical charges (this is why they don't like copper), together with a motion sensor or some other sensors, to (gently) zap them whenever they come by. The natural extension of this would of course be a mobile robot that had all these things in it, and a good way of finding it's way around the garden.

So some of these are very real and coming soon if not here already. The Burning Life land grab is tonight (3am! late night tonight for me then) for example, but other things I just want to note down for the future...

A tree spirit for Opensim / Burning Life

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:04:13 PDT

I want to make a self replicating distributed bot + attachment system, which is coupled with a physical computing version of itself which my friend Mat Dalgliesh is making as a physical creation.

Here is the spec:

The tree idea is a reflection of a physical computing tree, created using arduinos, sensors and motors.

Leaves are attachments with a built in fall script. When they fall, they slowly degrade, becoming darker until they become a particle effect and delete themselves. New leaves take donations from users. If they get donations, they grow bigger and live longer. They pass this donation to the trunk who divides it around the rest of the plant.

Here is a little bit of a proto-leafgen script:

// Rez an object on touch, with relative position, rotation, and velocity all described in the rezzing prim's coordinate system.
string object = "Leaf"; // Name of object in inventory
vector relativePosOffset = <2.0,>; // "Forward" and a little "above" this prim
vector relativeVel = <1.0,>; // Traveling in this prim's "forward" direction at 1m/s
rotation relativeRot = <0.707107,>; // Rotated 90 degrees on the x-axis compared to this prim
integer startParam = 10;



default {

state_entry() {
    vector myPos = llGetPos();
    rotation myRot = llGetRot();

    vector rezPos = myPos+relativePosOffset*myRot;
    vector rezVel = relativeVel*myRot;
    rotation rezRot = relativeRot*myRot;
llSetObjectName("Leaf");
    llRezObject(object, rezPos, rezVel, rezRot, startParam);
  }

touch_start(integer num_detected) {
  llRequestPermissions(llDetectedKey(0), PERMISSION_ATTACH);
}

run_time_permissions(integer perm) {
  if (perm & PERMISSION_ATTACH)  {
      llAttachToAvatar(ATTACH_RHAND);
  }
}

}

Fruits are controlled by all the other parts: they accumulate currency, and can spawn more of themselves when small. When big, they have a drop script. It becomes a little ball that gives something nice, like textures, or sim currency when picked. Just before it drops, it transfers any remaining goodness inside it to the trunk

The trunks are all bot avatars, run after being prepared by humans. Each time the tree needs to grow by another bit, another avatar is needed to be attached to a linking attachment. By use of animations, they could even be intertwined with each other. It uses currency to upload textures of it's older self - used in all other parts. If restarted, the bot scripts will start from seedling.

The avatar is heavily made up: it will have trunk and root- like attachments. sounds and animations, and then generators for the fruits and leaves, It is a bot, communicating with the attachments it wears via hidden channels. Maybe that's how a tree spirit should.

Roots are born when the tree is on some land. They could be non physical and locked to a place, so they function as an anchor. It can be engineered that only way it could be moved would be by the addition to the tree of a rooting script, temporarily making the tree physical. Not sure if these will be needed really though.

To kill it, because it can respawn trunks which automatically wear leaves and accumulate money, you would have to ddos all the bots that run it, and they can be connecting from different servers, which could make it quite a resilient little plant.

So this is an opensource project at the moment. It is a cross between content, character design ecology and commerce. It should be fun! Let me know if you'd like to be involved!

A quick look at Second Life and Opensim

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:56:54 PDT

I just wrote this blog post as a generic look at the history and uses of virtual worlds, with focus mostly on SL, but I'm about to change it drastically to just be about SL and it's uses to most of the clients we have at work - mostly quangos, charitable organisations and meta-academic groups. Meanwhile, here is it's full original and sometimes unfinished text

I Robot

These days I have been mostly building some robots. To be precise, I am making a few Victorians, some roman slaves, and a roman tour guide and host. They will be there to welcome visitors, and to provide entertaining commentaries as a backdrop to a historical reconstruction. But these are not your "ordinary" robots, made of metal and silicon: they will live their slightly repetitive existences only within the confines of the Second Life virtual world.

The project I'm working on uses this 3d environment to recreate a Victorian model of an earlier Roman building - the Pompeii Court, which was in turn, reconstructed as part of the original Sydenham Crystal Palace exhibition in the 1850s.

Many academic institutions have used Second Life for similar purposes - to bring to life lost buildings in architectural or design projects, as a way to show these places and buildings to students and visitors.

So what is Second Life again?

Second Life, like many other MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games or Environments), is a direct descendant of the text based "Dungeon" software that became popular in the late 80s and 90s, around the time when the Internet first came into popular use. These were primarily games, but also allowed users to socialise and sometimes even to build new aspects of this textual environment.

Second life, first published by Linden Labs in 2002, offers similar functionality: you can send messages, chat, or send instant messages to other players, as you would in a social network environment such as Facebook, but with the difference that this would take place in a rich 3d world, complete with sounds, animations, video and sometimes even the real voices of the other users. The vast majority of what you can find inside Second Life has been built by the same users who frequent it.

To have a first look, just go to https://join.secondlife.com/ and follow the instructions you will find there.

A useful tip is to remember to capitalise the first letter of your new avatar's name, as the automatically generated second name will also be automatically capitalised. Once you have selected a pre-built avatar and filled in some details, you will be able to download the client software and get inside second life's "grid" (the collection of computers running second life's server software, which combine to produce second life's "world").

Why would I want to use it?

Linden Labs' business oriented web site lists the main ways companies are working in Second Life today. Above all, it is used as a virtual meeting place, allowing shared virtual spaces, where employees can discuss issues within a traditional meeting or conference framework, or in small groups anonymously or informally. Because Second Life provides powerful and easy to use 3d building tools, it is also employed in the field of design and architecture for collaborative building, or to simulate dangerous or far away environments for training purposes, as well as to view 3d prototypes that might otherwise take days to produce off-line.

There are many ways of creating game areas, or so-called "Interative advertising" so that concepts can become immersive for users or more entertaining to learn about, Technology moves quickly however, and some companies initially doing this in Second Life have since found it easier to use bespoke virtual environments, and some have been recently developing their own solutions.

Here are some examples of how different types of company might use Second Life:

A health company recently used Second Life for informal workplace talks on health. One organiser was quoted as saying "“Normally you would rarely tell your colleagues about your health concerns, but here with some level of anonymity, people open up”.
Late last year, IBM held a Conference using various teleconferencing technologies, including use of Second Life for 200 people, involving three keynote speeches and 37 breakout sessions.
Imperial College London are building a "Virtual Hospital" within a private area of a virtual postgraduate medical school in SciLands, a dedicated science and technology Second Life continent populated by universities, government agencies and museums.
A company named Encitra is using Second Life as a platform to do real life urban planning.

The Virtual Economy

One major aspect across many online virtual worlds, is the fact that these worlds have their own currencies and economies that interact with the real world. As players of virtual games increase their abilities, complete quests and acquire items, they are able to trade these in various currencies. Recently, the Chinese government limited the practice of "Gold Farming" where players of the more game oriented virtual worlds would pay low-skilled game characters to gain points or items for them. In many cases these tasks were carried out in sweatshop-like working conditions.

In the online space trading world of Eve Online however, an economist has been hired to oversee the in-world currency, so as to keep it interesting and balanced. Quarterly blog reports are highly awaited by players, as accountants might await the reading of the UK budget. There are a number of differences from real world economics, mostly due to the speed at which transactions occur, and to the fact that they can all be recorded by the underlying software, but this only makes it easier to construct and run economics simulations.

Other uses

A lot of the most interesting functionality of virtual worlds is still to come. As major Virtual World proponent, Dr Crista Lopes, Associate Professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, remarked, "My attraction to SL in particular, in contrast to my relative indifference to MMORPGs in general, was its potential to become more like the web; to mature and become a platform for business and life in general". So a good reason to be aware of these environments is that they stand a good chance of becoming a lot more widespread.

Within the mobile software market for example, as GPS, fast internet and tilt sensors reach wider audiences, there is a big pull towards so called Augmented Reality software - where you can hold a device up in a city centre or library for example, and see data about that place - bus times, friends in the area or books about a certain subject. Software such as Google Earth has frequently been seen as a type of virtual world, and Second Life itself has been a source of experimentation in "Civic Mirror worlds": environments that map or mimic real world areas, allowing users to visit places that would be difficult or impossible to do in real life.

In this way, today's 3d environments are the first step towards a convergence of real and data-augmented environments, with the benefit of being easy to get involved in, especially for younger or less technically oriented users.

An alternate pull is away from reality, and I've mentioned the use of these worlds as a way for people to express themselves informally and anonymously or in role play. For the majority of users of Second Life today, their avatars - virtual personae - do not seek to represent their real life selves. Instead they use the environment as a vehicle to free themselves from their physical limitations, to fly, dance, fit into all kinds of clothes or appearances and in this way to socialise with people they wouldn't otherwise be able to.

A case looked at in detail in the book "Second Lives" by Tim Guest is a workshop consisting of physically and mentally disabled patients, who choose one of several identities, and together with a carer on a computer console, all participate in a shared identity, making decisions as a group as to what that character will do in any particular session.

Problems and alternatives

There are many competitors to Second Life currently under development. An important counterpart is Open Simulator, an open source world that is fully compatible with Second Life. It allows would be world builders to download and host a world of their making from their own computers or hosting providers, in the same way that a modern website is served to users. This gets past a lot of Second Life's drawbacks, such as those evidenced by Dr Nic Earle of the Sydenham Crystal Palace project:

Second Life servers may be closed for maintenance when their US based audience is sleeping - which in the UK may be right in the middle of a session or in class!

The Second Life client software may require an update at any time (also chosen by Linden Labs), and won't allow access to the world until this is done. Again, this can be a huge problem if there is limited time in which to show a simulation to a group.

Due to issues with content restrictions, there are actually two Second Life grids: a "teen grid" which is PG only and for users aged 13-17, and a separate adult grid. This can create lots of problems in undergraduate classes, where some students will still be too young to enter the adult version.

Price: The rental costs of an island or parcel of Second Life with content editing permission is on the increase. Open Simulator on the other hand can be run on most computers, and hosting can be very cheap.

Open Simulator is not without it's problems: long term Second Life users will find it's functionality lacking, but other virtual environments are quickly stepping up to offer alternatives. It is now possible to use flash based software such as Paper Vision to provide a 3d environment accessible directly via a browser and without requiring software downloads.

Virtual worlds and their underlying technologies are always advancing. With the advent of controller-less devices, we will see - at first in gaming, but ultimately across many aspects of computer use - much simpler, more interactive and immersive ways of communicating and of representing real or imagined environments, and at a far lower cost to the pocket and to the world than both physical travel, and video based teleconferencing.

Here is a promotional video for the next version of Microsoft's X-Box 360 game console - showing many of these possibilities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oACt9R9z37U

ILRT offers Open Simulator hosting and a selection of Second Life based services.

2 weeks in - a google phone review

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:02:05 PDT

So I was at a funeral 2 weeks ago, and feeling pretty sad and in need of distraction. Also while at the funeral, my phone broke, so the next day I went down the road and spent a good hour telling all my life and family data to the sales guy, who then signed my life off in blood for the next 18 months on this planet. Midlife crisis?

T-Mobile says it's £30 a month for a famous "Google Phone" or G1, but actually this works out at 45 for most people if you throw in the data plan (which for a G1 makes little sense without), and the 10 pound insurance the phone shop was very very into flogging to me. I declined, saying they should seek alternate revenue than insurance - I see that as a dead market in these times. They should concentrate on providing services like repair or home made application development. Much more money in that, and value to building a community of phone users around a shop etc etc... But I didn't waste too much time telling him that.

Rooting it up

After 2 weeks using this, I've found out that it really makes sense to "root" it. This is UNIX speak for gaining all the administrative privileges to the backbone of the phone - a task usually reserved for ultra geeks, but something you can also do for a fee nowadays in most phone repair shops. T-Mobile have been very nice with this so far, and it looks like rooting doesn't invalidate your warranty, unlike Apple, which has sometimes resorted to "bricking" people's iPhones when they tampered similarly with them. As various forums list - the main benefit is you can "tether" your phone to your PC - and use it's unlimited data plan instead of shelling out on a virgin media plan (yet another contract with the monthly fees devil). Another reason is that after just 4 days of downloading various free apps from the android market, my phone was packed full and complaining about lack of space. So rooting also helps here because you can then install applications on the 2GB SD card that comes with the T-Mobile package.

On the Case

Another mishap on the journey is that as we were arriving in Bristol from the funeral, my daughter had a stomach upset, all over the bus, and somewhere in there was the phone's slender sock that had also come with the t-mobile package. So it's still there somewhere, and as we cleaned the seat and gathered belongings, I somehow lost it. But a plethora of much more usable cases already exist - some simple, plastic and protective, others leather and very business-like, but few that actually fit around the phone and it's opening keyboard, protecting the big touch screen as needed, when in the hands of someone like me, who invariably will drop or mess up a phone if left long enough with it.

Film Programming

Then it was Easter, and one night I realised it was probably my only available night to actually get into some android programming. After about 3 hours faffing and reading, downloading eclipse and looking up existing android code from the various open source app projects on code.google.com, I managed to produce a Maya Deren application. All it does is show a picture, and a bit of text, and it's little more than a hello world app - although I see a vague market for it - a personalised obituary service. But in the spirit of Ms Deren and her early experiments with film, I plan to continue by using the camera preview API - a basic way of showing video and related effects on the phone, before the new version of android comes out - with much improved video recording and display capabilities.

Programming was much like modern web design and programming: the layout was held in XML files, and the programming code separate, and even the code itself, when working with the android API, is incredibly high level, making it easy to, for example, save some data to a database, take a picture from the camera or choose a colour from a colour picker and feed the result back in to a function in just a couple of lines of code. This is probably why the android application landscape today is very similar to pre-1995 java applets - where you could typically wait 15 minutes for someone's homepage to download a gnome picking it's nose.

Zombie Borg Circus

There are some brilliantly geeky applications on the market. Firstly, the ones that let you play games - I wish other people I knew had this phone so we could all go out and play Zombie Run for example - brilliantly simple: it tracks your location and some (hopefully) imaginary zombies on a google map and you have to outrun them around the town... Would be good in connection with the AK-47 App...

The creator of Audacity now works for Google, which can account for the brilliance of the ringdroid application: it can record any sound - from the phone's microphone or anything being played from inside another application. So I can record Last FM streams for example, or voice diaries/comments, and chop them up to size for use as ringtones or to export from the SD onto other media. Sadly though, no improvements have been made to this since October.

My daughter (the one with the stomach upset, much better now thanks) really likes the speaking capabilites of the phone. A linux text-to-voice library was ported to the android platform some time last year, and now there are reams of applications using it. In the one she uses, she can type a word, and it will speak it back to her. A variant does this in other languages too. This keeps her amused for many fruitful 30 minute periods, only slightly alarming when she waves it around with glee from the absurdly robotic pronounciations.

But a more advanced use of this TTL library is certainly the "The vOICe" application - I have no idea where or why this came about, but it is billed as an "augmented reality application for the visually impaired" and it converts input from the phone's camera, into sound, as well as speaking out GPS locations and other robotic data. Now I know what to choose as an eye implant if the world of City of Lost Children ever comes together or the borg have to cut back in the face of the intergalactic credit crunch. It is the single most geeky application I have ever seen in my life.

I also found so many comics. It looks like a big screen touchscreen phone may be the short form media place of choice in future. Some comics incorporate simple animations and sound to replace talk bubbles, others are just a slideshow of images scanned from print based comics, but all of them allow you to read the first issue for free, and charge you for the next one. All but one, a CC licensed remix of a Cory Doctorow story, which could be the future of CC licensed media... If anyone has a comic in mind, I'll be happy to score it with my local improvising orchestra and release it as CC for you! Enquire within: http://orchestra.cubecinema.com

Soundcasting

So where next with android? First step will be rooting it, installing the next version of it's SDK and firmware when it's (imminently) released, and then getting to work on a soundcasting application - this is so that when you are walking around and hear nice sounds you want to share (the birds in the park, your footsteps in the snow), you can stream them out to a slightly annoyed audience as you would a twitter message, but in the form of background or unintended noise only. Much more like the twitter of real birds.

Oh, one gripe with the phone. It's quite hard to actually figure out how to make calls!! A couple of times in the first week I had the phone, I couldn't get apps to close in time to make important calls, but now I'm getting the hang of the idea that you can't ever actually close applications - they just go to the background and maybe die later if the phone things they aren't doing anything useful. Also the touch screen system, whereby a different function is called if you press for a bit longer, rather than a single tap, was hard to get used to, a bit like learning to click the blue underlined words if it's your first time on the web. Battery usage varies wildly depending on what apps are running or services you are using (GPS is a good way to drain it all in an hour).

And the whole UI sometimes feels like a messily put together collection of bits and pieces - for example it should be easy for it to pick up phone numbers in any application and have a standard list of things to do with them - save to contacts, call, sms etc - but actually this kind of thing is not yet there. So let's say, for an IT person like me, it's great, and a really addictive gadget to have, but it's really not grandma-ready yet.

Sustainable Communities Bill

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:06:08 PDT

Here is my submission to the sustainable communities bill call for suggestions. I hope that others feel motivated to publish their SCB suggestions. I think there's a huge lack of dialogue in the current process, and the more we share what we know the more we can counter this

-- 0 --

Walking through Bristol in mid recession, there are many many more empty properties as businesses close, homes are repossessed and places become derelict. This reminds me of what happened during the Great Depression in the US: Thousands of properties lying empty while people are homeless or crammed in social housing, or having to endure various hardships due to living arrangements. This conundrum led to considerable social unrest both then and in the recession of the 70s.

To solve this problem some turn to squatting, or artists sometimes ask administrators of empty properties for their temporary use for exhibitions, and many positive results have come from this. The arts/community group Artspace/Lifespace has made many steps forward with this in Bristol, with it's use of the Pro Cathedral and now the various "Bridewell" police stations as temporary arts venues before their redevelopment as housing projects. Apart from giving these places free publicity, they also cleaned out the properties and maintained them while occupying them.

I believe a part of this success has been the empty buildings tax which the owners of these buildings would have been charged had their buildings sat empty.

I'm not aware of what legislation stops there being a general purpose way of facilitating temporary use agreements with a property's administrator. I am sure however that there is much legislation that gets in the way of this.

Uses need not purely be artistic. Any positive community uses such as short term housing, shops, and businesses can help a positive future for the community around it. I believe any social, cultural, business or environmental purpose could be included within this scheme, thus leading also to many low cost business models - such as food preparation "cafes" in busy central streets, voluntary organisations or workers cooperatives producing what we no longer afford to import, and a homeless population not driven to rioting or crime due to lack of community or opportunities around them. Agreements could vary depending on the nature of the project (such as increasing rent as business picks up), some part of building's insurance could be covered as part of the agreement, and much of this could be paid for by a higher tax on these empty premises, and by the opportunity cost of leaving those buildings empty. I would ask that this agreement be done as an open process, consulting with local residents as is usually done for a planning permission application, not only to grant the use, but to ask for suggestions, contributions and involvement (for example, in time or money) towards the scheme.

I am aware that the SCA as it stands does not have space for dialogue once this suggestion is sent, but I am happy to do so informally or to travel wherever possible and present further documents or clarification further along the line. I have written this without contacting the groups mentioned in 10., but will endeavour to do so and that they can submit similar proposals.

Point 9: I don't know if these come under "local service providers":

ArtSpace/LifeSpace: http://artspacelifespace.purplecloud.net/index.php/developers
Community groups such as the PRSC in Stokes Croft - which has done lots of work with the homeless population of that area.
Workers cooperatives in Bristol - the CDA will know who to contact.

--0--

Next suggestion:
Volunteer waiver of unpicked food prices. Under this agreement, farmers unable to raise money for distribution, and where sale price doesn't meet production costs, allow city people to come and take produce. Perhaps in exchange for city items or training. Groups transporting large amounts of produce could then be allowed to distribute it.

"The farmers are being pauperized by the poverty of the industrial population and the industrial population is being pauperized by the poverty of the farmers. Neither has the money to buy the product of the other."

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/10/05/the-great-depression-the-credit-crisis-and-the-future-of-your-food/

Big Cafe on Transport Sustainability

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:24:37 PDT

About a month ago, I went to the "Big Cafe for Transport" event that was happening just around the corner from my house at the brilliant new "Co-Exist" sustainability business centre. Coexist run as a CIC and are just about to launch with a plan to open up green community and event spaces, funded in turn by work and business spaces. I really hope that means a market in stokes croft!

After I attended, I'd promised everyone I'd write up about it, and promptly left it as a nagging thing in the background as life took over. But now the official write up of the event has been published so I thought I should finish the abortive blog post I made that same night. A disclaimer: I'm allowed to make mistakes here, so if I've written anything wrong or stupid, please correct me!

A big cafe costs 20 pounds to attend. It started really early on a Saturday morning (thus excluding the entire population of Stokes Croft), but it included a lunch (from Kukuva Cafe across the road, locally sourced or at least in aid of justice, according to their vision). It didn't have to be so expensive though: 10 pounds for students, or 15 or 5(?) if you didn't want the lunch. You get to talk to all kinds of people invited from all over the place. So, for whatever misgivings I might have with the makeup of the people in the room and with how representative we were of the people affected by transport in Bristol, it was quite cool and very well intentioned.

Yes, misgivings, because there were too many green minded people there:

How come no-one brought up road tax (as mentioned that week in the venue mag as a pressing point for car drivers - in their view it should apply to cyclists as well), or even the issue itself of road maintenance?
How come when the idea was formed to "ban front door paving", it got a huge ovation across the room and was included in the summary poster? I just thought that kind of thing just creates opposition and disagreement, but there was no voice there to say that.

Oh well, I guess it was supposed to be a very green gathering. I hope there's more effort to bring in different kinds of people in future though - if the outcome can affect real movings of money around Bristol, then it's consultative in nature, and should try and reach out to as many groups and individuals as possible. Web postings are not really an inclusive way for people to express their opinions if they're not comfortable with technology in the first place, and city centre "sustainable" events will not attract all kinds of people in this diverse city.

Fortunately, Transition Bristol is offering free training in "involving hard to reach groups in environmental projects".

I was interested to find lots of opposition on the other hand, from some people, some of whom had been active in politics for a while, even one from the green party, to the idea that transport plans should involve a shift to a locally oriented society. This is the kind of set-up where travel is assumed to be slow, so everything fun or fresh has to be made and used where you live, although this hopefully includes local specialisation and exchanges between localities and globally as well. It's hard to step beyond cycle lanes and think about the whole picture, but I'd have thought a green vision no matter what the party should involve re-localisation, and should be considered holistically with respect to the various threats that we face and the many solutions we can apply to them (fuel, population, water, food, nuclear, climate and counting!).

There have been a few big cafe events so far, starting I think at the beginning of the year. There's been a bit of chatter about this already, but the chair, Vala - who has the controversial title of Professor of Sustainability came across very well. The format of the big cafe events is as follows: You debate some big questions - suitably vague so as to further the gathering of ideas, and then these get written up a summaries. Here are the summaries from this session:

(sorry about that first one, I played with it to try and get it brighter, but now it looks like it's been through nuclear fallout)

When I arrived there, late of course, David Bishop, transport geezer for the city council was talking:

He said we can't invest in train stations because of the infrastructure costs. The same reason seemed to rule out trams, which were community architect Keith Hallet's favoured investment of our money. He says they can be the golden ticket that makes Bristol a wonderful city - they certainly used to be.. (shit link alert - turn popups off!).

The bus routes on the other hand, needed to be like an overground subway network- like the London one. A distant flag waves for First if so, although they have redeemed themselves a bit train-wise with their expansion and publicity of the Severn Beach line - a line whose other name may as well be Easton-Clifton line. Still, I decided to stop taking buses so much, since the day a driver gave me a 2p change ticket that could only be redeemed in one little office in the city centre. Since then my bike has gotten more and more creaky, and my bus rides a lot more peaceful.

On the other hand, David conceded, the bus service is currently unacceptably bad and expensive. It was good to hear a few mentions of peak oil too, although he seemed to think we're not there yet. He spoke about a proposed Rapid transit network whose posters I think were on the wall behind us - I'm sure they'll be easy to find...

We are Smart wireless urban people, he went on. We need real time info, linked, integrated.
The vision for the next 30 years is to get to this integrated transport network.

I was very sad to hear him mention this same old growth agenda - proposed by some now disgraced politician from Blair's old cabinet, of 30,000 homes to be built in the next however many years. Why does this have to be the basis for the transport strategy? It's completely unsustainable. We've proven already not to have the water in the UK for such a development, and empty houses sit unmended, empty shops unused opposite our fancy cafe chats, and both awareness of climate change and of the credit crunch has seriously changed the situation since then. Already I think groups like artspace/lifespace, with their very elegant post-squatting, are a very attractive proposition of short term living and working possibilities. Also their stay deals with that painful issue of the recent empty buildings tax by creating temporary spaces like the Pro Cathedral, whilst attracting people to that building as an arts venue.

Anyway, back to Mr Bishop: He concluded by saying the council is not good at changing it's plans based on new opinions or information, but this is changing. It is starting to listen more and it is learning to communicate better.

Next up, Vala with some examples of good and climate helping transport systems from cities around the world. These have been shown quite clearly in the official write-up.

Then she introduced world cafe format, which I spoke about above, and she introduced the big 4 questions that were to form the rest of our day:

if you had a bottomless pit of money to spend on Bristol's transport system, how would we travel around the city in 10 years time?

What examples of better transport systems can we draw from the rest of the world or history?

What would you enable you personally to make greener choices in bristol for transport.

How do we encourage better use of and attitudes towards sustainable transport?

I'll stop now as this is getting long, but one last thing always gets me: I had the fortune that day to sit next to councilors, council staff and other people involved in local politics, and for all their hard work and merits, what gets me is always the institutionalised, bitchy, childish infighting between political parties. I call it infighting although it crosses parties, because together they, as a group, suggest, plan and carry out changes that affect us. We pay them to do this, so I really hate seeing time and time again how we pay for them to do tit for tat politics, complaining when someone else embraces their ideas if they are from another party or destroying good initiatives for the same reasons, insulting each other, and the whole competitive side of politics. A bit of competition is good, but fairly balanced with co-operation.

If the sustainable communities bill means we're going to see what the balance books are and be shown how they work, my first question will be how much of that money is spent in this kind of faffing, and how can we change it so local government can have a neutral forum to express their views and work together too.

Maybe they need a weekend cafe as well...

Local Economy Management System

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:35:42 PDT

Today I did lots of healthy, useful things*, while the news around us is that we are in a recession, a very quick and serious one, and not just as a country but as a globalised western world. What this has led to is exemplified really nicely by the great Big Issue headline that came out a while back "The answer to the food crisis - Grow your own!" - and in general people are rushing to get more and more into planting and cycling and generally into more sustainable lives as they see this is probably the best time to do it - even if this is just a mini bust due to speculation.

And when I read an article in the weekend paper about a poor freelance journalist wishing he had studied engineering as a backup trade - and now impoverished by the credit crunch, I was inspired to expand freecycle and other stuff like that into an online community task/project/exchange coordination system, that could fall back into wireless if there was no main internet.

That's what I've been thinking about since: how to create an open source management system for localised urban economies to exchange, buy, give resources and skills, and organise those exchanges into tasks. But of course it's only about 30% a web application - the rest of it is hard work and face to face trading, discussion and agreements between the people involved, and ways to ensure people without computers don't get excluded and in fact are encouraged to use it.

But this didn't just come out of nowhere: I've recently become one of the webmasters for Transition Bristol. I was chatting about this last week with a friend who is stuck in his house with ME and lots of family heirlooms and clutter, which really get him down. One bit of this clutter is a very nice collection of ecologically oriented books. So we thought - let's start a distributed library for Transition Easton - so just in that part of town, for local people to be able to share say, a lawnmower or a book. So I suggested it to Zoe who is one of the people running Transition Easton - and in doing that I researched all the other exchange systems that have come and gone in Bristol already:

Existing local and UK DIY stuff:

freeconomy - marc boyle of BBC walk-to-india fame implementing his free economy idea - a completely gift based system.
feral trade, an even fairer than fair international trade system where transport happens via DIY trade routes, organisation by SMS and emails, and selling home made Cube Cola, coffee, and now even grappa and antidepressants.
Diss Free eXchange. Part of the Norfolk based Diss community system. Gary Alexander, the author of this plone based system, is currently working on a new version, so it's something I'm going to propose to my colleagues at work, since they all work on plone as well.
Bigger things: ebay, freecycle, gumtree. (I know that freecycle is getting a second version written quite soon - to have a web interface replacing the yahoo groups).
Older/less IT based things: BEETS, LETS and the farmer's market!

Larger versions: many existing open source systems have very similar requirements to what I feel a local economy manager would need: The typical version control software used for programming with open source, issue trackers for reporting software bugs, project planning software and team/groupware have basically all the functionality needed. Also they're written in convenient languages allowing a new project to have a peek or even lift functions to get the same things done - some (like the version control software Bazaar) are distributed systems. This is good because they'll not need a central server, but will be made up of all the individual little computers running it. Moodle also has similar capabilities.

Most importantly - It would aspire to the lofty goal of being a "Moodle for communities". A free, open source, world wide project which could then be used by lots of different groups on a local basis. From speaking to Gary Alexander (who wrote the Norfolk based Diss exchange system) , I know there's a systems philosophy called VSM that can be used to inform the development of this, as well as of course the participative and self organising aspects of Web 2.0, permaculture as a design science rather than strictly for gardens, and finally Participatory Economics(or Parecon) - an underused field that I don't believe has an implementation but which I find a good basis. The wikipedia article on population mentions this as possibly the only system that could allow economies to continue functioning at the scale we are at now, without involving a huge die-off (or a war) first.

The first simple thing that Parecon gives is that for example on a web page about a particular transaction, anyone would be able to have their say on it - like "you can't buy those eggs, we need them here at the cafe" or "Oh and can I have the egg shells? I use the powder for my bone disease" etc - which would be a very web 2.0 way to buy and sell, and would make the experience of trade into more of an ecosystem.

The first great thing about VSM on the other hand, is that I was actually born into it! It was only ever implemented on a national scale in Chile during Allende's rule. So there's something wonderful about all this!

Here are some of my notes on this(written on the laptop while gardening, out of range of any internet):

Database-wise it would need tables for people, items, projects/interest groups and actions, a plug-in system for extensions and integrations (like with feral trade for international commerce), a strong wifi-mesh enabled back end allowing stronger traffic with wifi networks running same software. And lots of ways of exchanging resources as a community.

All the systems need no more than a way to profile an item - this could be an idea or an instruction, a bit like an issue in a request tracking system or in a project management system.

The system needed is a stripped down, simple to use and expandible(plugin based) way to

buy/sell

Exchange: offer/"take"/advertise/ask for

Exchange indirectly using internal system (timebank extension plugin fits here, as do many others).

So allowing for exchanges - it becomes like a marketplace of skills and resources, products and deliveries.

A funded programme might pay for bikes, lessons and legal system for teenage kids to be able to deliver items in return for meals, food, items, services, training etc, but also money. 2 quid for a delivery is not much to ask, and economy of scale means lots of little things can be delivered (eg flyers).

Also it should allow for the complex elements involved in organising a more extended project requiring stages of production - it would also have inputs and outputs, and tasks allowing for their organisation in a decentralised way - a tasks wiki.

It shouldn't tell you what to do with it, but allow lots of generic options. So this system is like a programmer's CVS of the 90s. It's a first stage towards a programmed economic/exchange system for a community.

So for example a chicken coop: You

post an idea,
people subscribe to it,
you get meetings together and depending on what's agreed, for
example:
you organise flyering,
you put out ads for coop materials or existing coops,
for incubators (or raise cash for this and other care items /tools).
You ask for space for grazing.
Eggs, compost, weed and parasite pecking given in return.
Needs transport system as well.
Needs at least 2 hosting people with working enclosures to get started.

Could this run via a wireless protocol? querying wifi networks findable via the computer, as well as geolocated network via p2p to connect and offer a node of info each, each page looking like a facebook of tasks and ideas, and such that if the main internet is lost, it can still function via wifi/bluetooth/sms

* Healthy things I did that sunday (from above): I planted lots of recycled potatoes in the garden, hoping they'll come up in a clump (but I think I should have put some mushroom and fungus poison on them first), and I bought an SWC. It will have basil, cucumber, tomato and an assortment of other things like green beans for nitrogen. I learnt a bit about companion plants and germinating seeds rather than planting direct. I might look in ebay for other seeds of nice herbs... Also I cycled off to see a friend, did some exercises, figured out a compost-food recycling system for my house which now needs black magic marker penned instructions as to what goes where. I invented, on a proverbial napkin, the concepts of

a water or smoke powered musical box, set into a victorian fireplace wall and using the rising smoke to turn it, or with little paddles, linked to a flow of water.
a bike powered seed planter with pneumatic seed laying spokes and solar panels to play music as you pedal.

And I called an electricity company for a quote to do my house up with solar panels. Nice lazy sunday.

The State of Fluxus day 2

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:52:50 PDT

No time just now! Lots of commentary on fluxus today, flux sports, how to put on a fluxus event, and random natter, but later. For now, just the pics - as they are so in demand!

A really nice score, performed on the Monday, when I wasn't around I think... Or was it for the piano recital?

All the budding fluxus stars, awaiting our first concert, day 1

Tools of the trade

Group photo, before the salad

The string quartet performs while the audience throw a big ball up in the air, and chopping sounds begin...

Bowls and rakes, still life

And finally, our name in lights, in the corner of the big poster... Lots more of these on faecebook, slowly appearing here and there...

The state of Fluxus, Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:48:15 PDT

This weekend I went back to what I did a few months back, and went down to the Tate Modern all the way from Bristol, to play (very little) crazy music and perform in front of loads of people in London.

Last time we were on Millennium Bridge, which (to explain for the non-londoner) is a very narrow bridge which gets swamped around 4pm on a Friday afternoon, by commuters going both ways. We were there lined up with loads of loud and eccentric instruments, in t-shirts and responding to a conductor, and to an orchestra by the Tate, and a boat with lots of improvising musicians (Evan Parker included, who is now coming to the Cube Cinema in June) playing samples of maritime, Thames noises - boats, seagulls, and some of the most complicated classical as well as improvised and participatory music that was a beautiful tribute to that space.

This time for us performers it was a 4 day experience - 2 days rehearsal, and 2 of performance, with some of the surviving masters of the Fluxus time, still around performing and writing material, as of course more famous people like Yoko Ono do. We performed from Alison Knowles' fantastic repertoire - including the really colourful and beautifully simple "Make a Salad" piece, and the really funny and proto-improv Newspaper Music. There was also loads of other work by other Flux performers, including a first realisation of the FluxOlympiad - an incredibly accessible way to get kids into experimental arts - "A gateway drug to Rembrandt" as baptised by our great deliverer of the most wonderful lecture in Fluxus, Simon (whose surname I forget, but he's a university professor specialising in this movement's history in the US).

Through this lecture and then through many memories and explanations given by Simon, Sara Seagull and Alison Knowles through this intensely arty weekend, I got to see a lot more of the history of Fluxus than is possible through a quick read of Wikipedia the night before the first rehearsal. Firstly the controversy of Fluxus's life-span, which for some starts with John Cage's Experimental Composition class, and ends with George Maciunas' death in 78, but for all the fluxus people present, was still very much alive and well, as we saw with the performances. What you can say though is that the network of artists who performed Fluxus was described in the past tense, in the exhibition that accompanied our performances at the Tate. Some of the later newspapers had a very Creative Commons-like copyright - anyone is authorised to perform any fluxus Event Score whenever they want, provided they use the names they stated, and if it's most of the event, it has to have the name they provide - in this case the FluxOlympiad, or a FluxFest or many other FluxEverythings from audience participation pieces, to distorted musical performances, or even video, hospitals and toilets in Fluxus style. This is a beautiful spirit, and the participatory element combined with the multimedia element, synaesthesia and the beginnings of improvised or loosely structured experimental artistic practices, as well as the DIY element, which have filtered through from the Fluxus hayday that mesmerised a young John Lennon, but seem to have gotten to today having forgotten their lovely playful origins.

It was very interesting to see the rejection our Fluxus initiators had for the internet - it's always easier for our younger generation to think technology has to be involved in artistic practice but as one performer said, shunning technology becomes a choice, now that it's so ubiquitous. No digital divide to straddle, more imagination needed to get to the same destination. And that aspect was refreshing, although a Fluxus facebook group is now hopefully to be created, and maybe it will only be through this technology that we will now assist in a re-birth of practice in the UK - at least if I can have my way and do a performance at the Cube Cinema...

The pieces were so accessible because they were tiny, some carried out in seconds, like the famous squeaky-toy-into-cymbals piece "C/T Trace", while others needed more time, like the Yoko Ono piece "Sky piece for Jesus", but were incredibly fun to perform and somehow symbolic and spiritual to carry out -we had to wrap up a string quartet in gauze and lead them away with care, like critically injured patients. In another piece we had to scratch our fingers down a small black board, or in another, bang our heads against the wall. So the beginnings of the "pain" aspect so famously put forward by people like Franco B - which Sara summed up wonderfully - "if there's so much pain in the world, what's the value as a privileged western artist in hurting yourself?" - are also to be found in Fluxus. That's terribly misquoted though, a flash of a memory in the middle of a very excited evening lounging in the Tate Modern's staff cafe after the first performance and talking about what went wrong and right. Also the pieces are accessible because they are available to all to perform, although I'd agree they wouldn't make much sense if you didn't get it, or get to share some of the original spirit.

The salad was a wonderful part of it all. It really used our senses, without resorting to video or high art concepts - Alison (and a team of cooks) just cut vegetables and made a lovely (if a bit gritty) salad for all the audience to consume. She made it on top of the turbine hall, in a long 10 minutes with all of them hidden up there cutting them up, but with the knives miked up so we could hear interminable chopping. And then our sight was first to see the spectacle of food, now so scarce in the world - flying greens, reds, purples, liquids and solids, some falling light as feathers, others heavy and squirting bits all over us poor performers - who in this piece had to hold the tarpaulin and toss the salad, and for this had our name written on the wall of the Tate. And then finally it was stirred with rakes and spades, and served on paper plates, and it tasted great! Also because I was a bit skint, it was even better to be fused with art in a culinary way...

Eduserv Symposium 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:51:03 PDT

I came to attend this symposium out of the blue, having seen an email late one Wednesday afternoon, saying our assistant director was too ill to go, and after a quick look at the programme, I realised it was a follow-up to an event I'd seen on video a while back where an entire conference on Second Life had been trashed by a talk which had argued it was all pretty much useless hype. So if this year's presentations were going to be in that vein, it sounded like like a fun time.

This being a web 2 conference, lots of it was used, including a live chat backchannel ( http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2008/livechat powered by cover it live streaming software:http://www.coveritlive.com/ ), a ning based conference centred social networking site (which as expected didn't achieve critical mass but was a nice feature all the same), and of course lots lots more.

Eduserv's Andy Powell started the day talking about these "Disruptive technologies" we know so well. Looking across the room, it seemed a-bleep with mobile phones, laptops and all kinds of hybrid gadgets twittering and SL-ing and all kinds of SN/Web 2.0-ing as he spoke.

"Please turn your phones off as it interferes with the equipment in the room, unless you're twittering or blogging from it"

This was the digerati of UK HE in the room (from which a colleague had minutes before noted the conspicuous absence of any HEA top brass), and it was a bit negative to hear all these references to the "disruption" caused by the uptake of web 2.0 in HE and all this focus on how to "control" it. But later on it surfaced that I wasn't the only one who thought a more positive terminology (like "Emerging Technologies") would be more conducive to positive adoption on campus or even just to an understanding of the real strengths and limitations of these tools. Another good reason to have a chat back channel - all these slightly controversial thoughts tend to get put forward there easily, while I guess people are a bit more shy of doing it live in Q&A.

Larry Johnson:

Larry presented using Second Life as an embellished Power Point, with his avatar walking through a virtual exhibition of photos of his grandparents and of various turn-of-century discoveries, followed by lists of all the technological revolutions that that generation had to deal with. He compared that with the current IT situation, from the beginning of the personal computer and Internet, to now, and noted that in comparative terms we haven't even got from the Gutenberg press to Martin Luther - any real revolution to come from this has still to come. Another difference between that generation and this one is that the focus has shifted from using technology to free up time - we have no such illusions today. My lack of a pen at that point limits my recollection now, but there were some areas that the Horizon report had identified as the main areas of growth and change for the education community:

the arrival of grassroots video as a teaching tool and increased pressure in HE institutions to deliver video storage/distribution/collaboration.
Collaboration Webs - using tools like google docs or other simple online tools requiring just a modern computer and web browser.
Mash-ups - old news but now getting more mainstream with the increasing availability of data.
Social OS - the next step in social networking is a focus on the individual rather than on content in all aspects of software.

In my opinion these blue sky previsions don't tend to take into account the more global state of the world today, the economic downturn and it's effects on the world for example, so Dr Johnson's talk seemed a bit limited in that respect, and when cornered (by me) later over coffee, he seemed dismissive of the effects of global warming and possible legislation changes on data centre energy usage as well as changes due to price increases and how the digital divide would affect the future he envisaged. The horizon report can be found at http://www.nmc.org/horizon

Bobbie Johnson: The guardian and Web 2.0
http://www.slideshare.net/tag/efsym2008

This was the most useless talk of the symposium. I think the inclusion of two large media agencies was a mistake, and we could have done with half that presence replaced by someone from another business sector, from a student or from some other piece of the picture. Here are my notes anyway:

The Guardian was founded as the Manchester Guardian in 1821. The paper's format and structure didn't change until the early 50s with the addition of photography. At all times the core values of social justice, freedom of thought and religion and social reform have been at the forefront of the decisions they have made as an organisation. Johnson spoke at length on the history of this newspaper on that basis, and the various owners and trusts that formed through the years.

The website appeared in 1996. Very embarrassing. By 2007 the director told his staff at the All Hands meeting - "We are now a digital operation which makes printed stuff on the side". So radical change is very recent.

He then showed us a front page scan from a couple of years ago. Very few things came from web 2.0 specifically (although you could say that all the user generated content was in some way reflective of the new notion of the web as a 2 way consumption/production medium).

Then he showed a very nice blog aggregate page (in his words a "Superblog"): http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html - probably one to emulate when doing a university-wide blogging service, although I suspect it's very well edited, so there's an extra bit of effort than just getting people to write good blogs.

The Guardian site has gone from Closed/Subscription based to free access, and as a company they have gone from content provider to content platform.

I closed my notes with a poem:

Did photography create surrealism in art?

The digerati thumb their phones

a blue glare reflects on their faces

Information hiding ignorance

Geoffrey Bilder: Sausages, coffee, chickens and the web: Establishing new trust metrics for scholarly communication

A very interesting and clued-up talk on trust issues and the web. Personally I would have defined these as filtering issues, but it still makes sense either way: the web is awash with information and it's not rated, so you can waste huge amounts of time surfing it, and never can be sure of the quality of what you read, whereas traditional media has inbuilt filtering - due to the physical and commercial limits of just publishing everything like the web does.

Bilder's talk examined amongst other things the reason why the tilde (~) is non-trustworthy - (Spoiler alert!) - because it denotes a URL for a home directory - i.e. not official information but contained in a personal home page. But to a regular non-techy this isn't obvious, and the same is true for the various web 2 enabled sites. It's hard to assess trust. The path followed by any new technology depends on all these issues, and trust is crucial to it's adoption. It usually goes like this:

A techno-information power base invents a new technology (eg, the blogging community circa 1996)
Publicity/Hype follows
The masses take up this technology
Breakdown: the hype doesn't live up to it. (eg: people discover most blogs are abandoned in a few weeks).
Filtering systems are created. (eg: technorati)

In this way Bilder made a clear connection between the trust exuded by traditional publishing media via it's implicit filtering system ("wow - they're going to publish my book" = "it passed the filter").

He then talked about the first filtering systems put together on early web logs: the slashdot.org karma points system put together to reduce the incredibly high volume of comments they were dealing with daily, and which was reducing the overall value of the site - high points (awarded via good behaviour on the site) made you a temporary comment moderator, and in turn your moderations would be moderated by other high karma scorers, thus drastically improving the quality of post comments if you opted to raise your filter level.

Other early systems of peer-based filtering were Ebay's focus on user trust and ratings and Google's siterank system. These trust metrics were key to the success of these sites.

Chatting later to Debra, she agreed that self filtering systems are probably the way forward. The slightly depressing outcome of Bilder's talk was the idea that in the same way that traditional media has been supplanted in a way by the web, and as medieval scribes were made redundant Gutenberg press, so quality controlled on-line resource collections like Intute are endangered by this, because they apply a "centralised" filtering/trust system, which an automated web 2 enabled peer review system might do just as well.

The questions and on-line comments were very interesting, and it was a shame there was no time to answer or discuss at length. One insight from here was the way people's perception of their personal profile (as used on SN sites) as increasingly personal - something that should be owned and held by the individual and released/sold only to trusted parties of interest to the individual. Bilder agreed that this is probably the way things will be in future.

And then we went for lunch. Many a picture was flickrd of the curiously purple tray of summer desserts.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmje/2475205817/ (more photos at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/efsym2008/ - and the efsym2008 tag worked quite well as a way to tag across slideshare, flickr, delicious etc)

Also during lunch I bumped into Torsten Reimer of the now semi-defunct AHRC Methods Network. He sadly told me of the serious lack of funds that this kind of initiative suffers from. They have a little money for small projects, but not enough for anything bigger as a result of these, or for any radical strategic changes, so the MN is not viable at the moment.

BBC:
This was similar to the guardian talk in it's irrelevance for me, but of the two I'd have kept this one, more witty and a lot more insight into the future: the speaker showed us the evolution of BBC content up to it's inclusion today on other websites: on the Sun, the Guardian's sites, and the communities formed around programs that the BBC had produced, but that were taking place outside of the BBC's websites.

So does it matter to the Beeb that their competitors are taking the content that 25% of their income is spent on (the online side) and making community out of them? This is the "globalisation" problem of web 2.0, and a hard decision for the Beeb, but they currently allow it. Possibly because their core principle is that they are a brand: Their charted doesn't specify they have to make programmes on TV: they just have to entertain, educate, inform.

Chris Adie:

First of all, the document circulated prior to the Symposium ( http://www.vp.is.ed.ac.uk/content/1/c4/12/45/GuidelinesForUsingExternalWeb2.0Services-20070823.pdf
) is a great first step towards regulations/guidelines/policies that help an academic institution deal with the issues that come up with the increasing adoption of Web 2 technologies.

In ID's case, the problem (for me) is the possibility of us hosting a university wide blogging service. A service like this would need us to first revise guidelines in many ways, even if the decision is to allow people to just use external services (we are still liable and there are still risks even if this is the case).

Another problem with external services is the credit crunch: what happens when your service goes bust, closes, shifts in focus, loses critical mass, starts charging or switches to paid registration?

From the chat: here are the BBC's guidelines on SN/Web 2 use: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/advice/personalweb/index.shtml

Also in the chat, the point was made that some of the social networking sites might be more resilient than public services - for example the ill fated AHDS - what will upcoming UK elections mean for any online services we may be using now?

Some of what he said I found to be a bit unbalanced along the lines of that chat comment: he said for example that information might be more at risk of unauthorised use, unscheduled maintenance etc - but these are also risks within an institution if their internal policies or technical systems aren't up to scratch - and if the government can lose huge amounts of public data, I am sure Higher Ed can catch up.

Also I'm a bit concerned with the paper's implicit position on Intellectual Property rights. It is true that not all info should be given away immediately, and that a lot of grant money depends on ideas being kept safely under wraps, even in academia, but a university legal dept should be up to speed on the GPL and CC licenses, and be able to advise what is personal and what is owned by the institution depending on who you are, the nature of the work/data and in what capacity you work for it. Any other sharing should be facilitated by universities by their embracing of web 2.0 related speedy transfer of knowledge (such as twitter/facebook).

Apart from these doubts though - this is the first clear and broad paper trying to put together the first academic guidelines on risks and implications of using SN and Web 2 technologies, and he is aware it's just a draft and needs input from others.

Afterwards I asked Chris how we can feed back to him about his paper. He said he's in the process of making it into a wiki, but that at present comments are open, and we can feed back that way.

David Harrison: A Modern Work Environment at Cardiff U: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/futures/mwe/index.html

http://diharrison.wordpress.com/2008/05/10/reflections-upon-efsym2008/

Dr Harrison startled us all with a very advanced web manager's view on how to run all the IT services within Cardiff University whilst still leaving space for SN/Web 2 technologies to be adopted strongly and used by their staff.

The presentation had lots of diagrams which I can't really explain well in written form, but here goes: The core (read "boring") services like calendars, request trackers, sick forms, finance software are at the centre of the picture, around which sit the managed research and learning environments, and around these, are the VLE/VRE. Anything else around this circle includes twitter and friends. Somehow this made much more sense with his slides though so I should stop there..

My main notes were that he had Cardiff's VC supporting all the way through, attending all the meetings and pushing things forward. We can't count on the same support at Bristol Uni, with Eric Thomas being much less available and not known to be particularly tech-friendly.

He also said that innovation, real discovery isn't particularly widespread in universities. The kind of innovation they see more and need is where existing innovation is brought into the university or across faculties and departments. This is a brilliant potential benefit of Web 2.0 - facilitating communication between people who wouldn't normally talk to each other, and giving them ways to disseminate that and value it.

More discussion of this at
http://blog.newport.ac.uk/blogs/michael/archive/2008/05/09/32921.aspx - another staff member involved in their MWE blog that mentions this presentation (I'm afraid I only scanned through this first time I looked... It's mostly on the media presentations).

Grainne's Presentation was the only one that really went into how web 2.0 actually affects pedagogy within academia. It was also interesting because I joined ILRT after she had left, and this was my first chance to see her after hearing so much about her. Fortunately she's already put it online: http://e4innovation.com/?p=198 - so I can skip talking about it since this post has gone on far too long now!

A letter to the times.

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:05:04 PDT

Sir,

Melanie Reid's article "I don't want to live in a scratchy world of hemp
lingerie" made me reach straight for a pen to reply (this email is a
transcription of that, you see), with many references to women's
impending return to a boring dark age devoid of skiing, exotic food and
sleek accessory porn, forced by "eco-purists" to go back to sewing
buttons, wearing rags and to the absolute unhappiness of the world that
preceded household appliances.

I'm sorry for Melanie, but these are in themselves dark times, in which
our senses and ability to experience emotion are dulled by the intensity
of the world around us, where any exotic meal, place or piece of
information is seemingly at our fingertips, or as Daisaku Ikeda, the
Japanese Buddhist philosopher puts it, "This imbalance takes the form of
a dulling of our natural responsiveness to life and the realities of
daily living". And I believe this dulling has in many ways been brought
about by the rationalist, and very masculine nature of the past
century.

All the things Ms Reid lists as disappearing in a world run by her "eco
purists" will remain in some form. Her list of joys under threat of
extinction seem to be precisely the things enjoyed by an upper middle
class in a prosperous society like the UKs, as many of them are not
available to anyone below the poverty line. She will not tell me that
the coming age will eradicate poverty for example, lovely though that
thought might be, there will still be extreme divisions between the rich
and poor. Perhaps in a booming economy like China's those things will be
around more, so maybe she should practice her mandarin? But they are not
the preserve of the un-ecologically minded.

I believe as a Buddhist myself, that it's not "things" in themselves
that make one happy - anything in life can be a burden or a joy. It's
your relationship to these things that can excite and enliven. And this
is the same with Reid's relationship to the world and it's current
situation - should her opinion of eco-nazi's change for the better, her
excitement should follow.

Ms Reid is not without fault though, in criticising eco-do-gooders who
pride themselves in alienating others. Like monks who wear masks so as
not to kill microbes and then act violently towards those of other
faiths, these people are living in some kind of imaginary world where
they are devoid of their share of negative states of mind, or in this
case, of the capacity to push away others, who they should instead be
trying to engage in dialogue with. This is the spirit in which I write
this letter. The future will not be as exciting without Melanie Reid's
input!

But what I'd like to repeat, as many times as necessary, is that whether
you believe society will collapse due to climate change and fuel
depletion, or that this is just a passing fad, this is what we should be
doing anyway: connecting with nature, acting as a builder - not just a
consumer of the valuable things around us, not being greedy, talking to
other people more. Because the world is changing, like it or not, and it
doesn't have to be boring and lifeless.

Here in Bristol for example, fashion designer Viva Cazeaux
(http://www.retrio.co.uk/) creates beautiful, (possibly exciting?)
upmarket clothing made using recycled materials of all kinds. In
Birmingham, the recent renewal of the canal side area has helped bring
back the beauty of inner city travel by boat, for leisure or work. Hemp
itself can be woven in many ways and doesn't have to resemble potato
sacks. From a place like The Urban Shop (http://www.theurbanshop.co.uk)
you can buy a stylish, organic hemp men's t-shirt - hemp is expensive
and heavy because it's not freely grown in this country, but that was
not the case years ago and many styles of clothing can be made from it.

I can't really speak for women, and I'm sure they can speak for
themselves, but returning to the words of Ikeda, in his 2003 peace
proposal presented to the United Nations -

"We need to restore our sensitivity to life itself, our palpable
awareness of the realities of daily living; and here, I believe, women
have an especially important role to play. I have for some time
expressed my view that the twenty-first century must be a century of
women."

http://www.sgi.org/about/president/works/proposals/2003sum.html

I certainly would not be as confident as I am now in the exciting beauty
of our future had it not been for the many many modern, sophisticated
women who introduced me to these issues, and who through these past few
years since I became aware of them, have worked harder than I ever could
in so many ways for local, down to earth and intelligent ways to make
that reality happen.

Alejandro Fernandez, Bristol

3 books for Bristol

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:55:44 PDT

Yesterday I went to the shops, in a desperate last push to get some new curtains, the inner liner white £1-a-metre ones that people put in a drawer when they move in somewhere, and then put back when they move out. And mine were all mouldy... Bleah! Anyway, I stopped in Waterstones for ages and bought 3 books: Clay Shirky's "Here comes everybody", Noam Chomsky's "What we say goes"(hope I don't get in trouble for linking to a torrent, but they're interviews, and that link will give you the full original audio for them) and Rob Hopkins' Transition Handbook.

All these purchases were devoted to my quest for finding a way for the re-use and investment in technology to become a strong part of the Transitionista's vision. I think we've got loads of equipment these days that we can recycle and make use of for a long time, and if we all have generators or solar panels, some of that charge can be spent on the laptop... So no matter how stupidly apocalyptic the future is going to be, there has to be a place for robot overlords or it just won't be fitting.

I also think - due to Clay Shirky's many videos from recent boing boing entries, and from his book, there is a big problem with adoption of technology and engineering skills required to maintain it, and the transition movement: there's a cultural gap between the people who use this technology more readily - instant messengers, Skype, social networking sites etc - and other people who can't or don't want to for various reasons be as acquainted. But on the other hand, these are tools which allow a huge change in the way things are working, and this is evident even locally, where the Railway Path's celebration last week brought together 1500 people via mostly online word of mouth (lots of last minute problems with flyers) and where the council meeting had the most people attending that the mayor had ever seen in all his time there. He thought maybe we'd come to wish him goodbye, as it was his last meeting. The meeting was also different because it was webcast, it resulted in a video statement on the planned transport route by Mark Bradshaw, and because there was a lot of correspondence, mostly in public view, since the meeting, between residents condemning the labour backroom anti-green pro-consumerism deal - this after many labour councillors had marched with railway path lovers just a day earlier. I doubt there is any other organising power than that which technology provides, that's able to ensure communication and organisation between disparate communities, dealing increasingly with all manner of public and private, local, national and international entities around them, who have historically been more organised than the individual.

The transition handbook and it's corresponding movement of transition towns - local initiatives to guide a small geographic population - a village, town, city or suburb to resilience against peak oil and climate change. In Bristol this is gaining popularity - I've heard Transition Bristol described as "intelligent and sexy" and they have lots of funding (due to run out soon though) for glossy posters and showings of various inconvenient films, as well as a very popular subsidised distributed tree planting - but village meetings seem without scope as many local initiatives have still to get off the ground. The transition thing in general is still looked at a bit cautiously by other groups, as it does seem to have a lot of spiritualist, permaculturists' "positive thinking" and simplistic, step driven information on how to deal with this fossil fuel-bad millenium. Maybe they will turn out to be a cult of happy shiny people, but if it really works out, this isn't really an organisation, but a framework, and a framework for it's own future development.

And finally, Noam Chomsky, because I think I can back up quite well that the guy is an anarchist and peaceful, and intelligent, and I think he only says things that are really well researched or he won't talk about it, and in this little red book he says all kinds of things that we were asking ourselves about politics - all from his point of view as an outspoken US political historian, but that can apply in many ways to the behaviour of councillors at a council meeting and our anthropological understanding of it.

p.s.

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:39:16 PDT

Julian Oliver is a brilliant artist!

He's also done a workshop like the one I'm doing now -

Loads to look at!!

Dream Machines part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:45:10 PST

We live at such a key time, when on one hand we're waking up tragically to the effects of our use of fossil fuel and our extraordinary growth in the past few hundred years to this blip where revolutions can happen at any point, and go unnoticed, because it's given us an incredible luxury as well. As food prices increase and the skies punish us, we are more in touch with all our friends, family and community than ever before through the benefits of telecommunication.

I mean the Digital Revolution, or whatever is at the base the geekiness of ham radios, and at the top the equally geeky virtual worlds which start to take a strange grip on the real world - Second Life, Facebook, Myspace, Email, Instant Messaging, Texting and all the other ways we have added to the written and oral communication we had before. In a sense, all the virtual worlds are just an elite's pinnacle at the top of the incredible communications we're capable of as a global population, aided at this time by the relatively low cost of a ticket to get you in person to the other side of the world.

Slowly these machines have been able grow in complexity to the point where they are able to visualise our dreams, and that has become a strange addiction in an imperfect world. But how much of this can be useful in a realistic consideration of what is needed this millennium?

The truth is that we have overspent, defaulted and got late with our payment back to the planet. The punishment for this will be to have to slow down. It's not to scare or despair that I say this, but my approach to technology has to be from a long term ethical standpoint. Were it to become very expensive to travel, would we still have mobile phones? Would we be able to repair old computers if there were no new parts coming from asia, no new raw materials coming from the terrible mines in Africa? Those things have no reason to exist - they are a terrible self inflicted wound in our planet. Second Life alone uses a huge amount of processing power (This amount - as of 2006 - can be found in the book Second Lives - about modern society's relationship to virtual worlds). How much for facebook then, with it's millions of pages and applications?

But with all these problems I feel it's my crucial mission to make sure that in future we aren't stuck with the present day 'meeting' as the default way of getting things done when communicating using technology, not after so many thousands of years before that, where we had such a diversity that we've now replaced with corporate aims. I don't want this hidden digital revolution that has happened under our noses to end up like the religious world of the Caliphates in 13th century Baghdad - whose spiritual thought was so evolved, only to be destroyed tragically by the armies of Genghis Khan, and be lost. I don't want our closed mindedness to steer us into a corner.

But how can we make technology sustainable?

At this time, I feel the best way is to bring different kinds of people together. This is something I love doing and that I'd be doing even if I didn't believe there was a crisis - figuring out ways for people to express themselves and experiment with new things. So this 2 day workshop, Dream Machines, which will be the focus of this month's Dorkbot Bristol, is a second step towards that(Last Year's Locating Grid Technologies work shops were the first - we looked at videoconferencing and mixed media artistic uses. This series resulted in funding for a p2p enabled semantic web interface for the watershed's library of screen media):

In this workshop however, we'll explore how 3d engines can and are being used in all kinds of experimental ways, but this will be kind of a sideline to the practical skill in getting acquainted with and messing around with the technology directly. We have to learn it's limitations and then sidestep them through the wisdom you can only give when coming to something fresh for the first time. So we'll have dancers with world of warcraft gamers, The Movies directors with TV directors, Interaction artists with Noise artists(and many more such people, in any order) and a lot of mucking around with cheap hardware and free or easily available software that we can use to quickly work in realtime and across media, adapting this extremely advanced, but ubiquitous 3d technology to whatever people want to play with.

Then again, there's not that much you can do in 2 days. I'd like to get people in, experts in their own game, to learn to make a finished game or put together a show or installation. Or run a programme of game/art authoring courses for teenage kids taking inspiration from what is done in Brazil with Estudio Livre, or do more workshops focusing more on the Max/MSP/Pd side of things - the interaction that's easily accessible nowadays - the freedom to hook someone's nose up to a scanner that shoots bubbles into a projection behind them if that's what takes their fancy. And I could work more in the area of the real physical hardware - perhaps taking home made moving parts or robots and linking them to games or online applications so that they can use game AI, so that a remote person can control a prop, perhaps be their own little temporary physical avatar, and you can see your robot get taken over by your friend each time they change their facebook profile. This sounds like random experimentation while Rome burns, but we have to open ourselves up, break things up and put them together again in this time while it's still possible. I am sure real, essential, cheap and long term uses will come of this in a speedy way, even if it's just in that the different people might be able to come together and can maybe learn to understand each other better.

In the book Second Lives the author sits in a korean internet cafe playing an obscure multiplayer role playing game in a room full of strangers who are there still at 2 in the morning, playing and interacting not with each other, but with hundreds of people playing the game around the world. He compares Seoul to Birmingham, ugly, empty and torn by consumerism, even with pleasant ads reminding of the move of the capital to a new city, sealing it's doom of a place of extreme transience. I don't know how much this reflects the author's viewpoint and state of mind at the time, and how much it's an accurate portrayal of that city, but it feels to me like a reflection of the modern world, where we sit at computer screens dreaming of our virtual but virtue-less lives and where anyone who doesn't have internet access is left out from all the news and unable to share their valuable, very different, and majority opinions. At some point the dream will end and we will have to wake up, and then I hope we see technology for real.

Art Fossett on SL

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:31:58 PDT

Yesterday I attended a very fun and immersive Second Life talk by Art Fossett, the in-game avatar, accompanied by his on-earth alter ego, Andy Powell of Eduserv. It was fun mostly because he'd organised it to take place on Eduserv island, in the conference room, and invited friends and colleagues to attend online. They kept chuckling like a misbehaving class, turning into dinosaurs, cartwheeling around, and calling him Chubster behind his back (on the projection screen, but he could spy them from his laptop so he caught them out). All very innocent fun though and it complemented his talk quite well.

The presentation was organised as a series of t-shirts, which took a while to res the next topic name on the avatar's chest. Interesting for the links it turned up, although they kept mentioning something called slideshare, (which I guess I should google!) where the slides will probably turn up soon enough.

There are a lot of mailing lists following Second Life activity in higher education, SLED being the main US one, from far fetched to down to earth discussion, and very US centric. More UK wise though was the
Facebook UK educators group, among a large amount of facebook groups popping up on this topic all the time.

Most importantly for me was the getting started stuff, although I've been a member for more than a year, I've only had about 3 memorable experiences there - going to the anarchist area and chatting with someone there about their online black block actions - invading virtual reuters etc. All a bit useless to me. Or the first time I went in, when I befriended someone who showed me how to build, resulting in lots of squares and circles left lying around like I hadn't housetrained my pet mini-me. And the other time was in a starting place like Orientation Island where I met an imperial stormtrooper, who tried to get me to join his multiplayer sub game thing with the bribe of a free jetpack suit and stormtrooper armour. Oh and once I found a sweet, closed up cottage on a hilltop playing irish music if you got really close to the windows...

Andy/Art explained that the best way to start is actually by arranging to meet a real life known person online and have them take you around. I will try this... He also said to try out the Berkman Sandbox Area or the Glidden Sandbox area for some impressive in world artwork.

He mentioned a growing trend of producing Machinima with SL, and the
Theatron project - I think a reproduction of ancient roman or greek theatres with costumes avatars and staged re-enactments of old plays. There's also the globe theatre somewhere I think. And to top it all a colleague lent me the book Second Lives, which is really brilliant - about people with disabilities and their use of it, or what's happening with gangs and real street violence in Korea...

So armed with all this new knowledge & inspired by the book, I went home to try it all out, and was dismally disappointed when my linux client managed to get in far enough to tell me I needed a new version of the client, then crashed so bad even X wouldn't start, and my windows client, after a few seconds, did the same thing and although the task manager worked, it was unable to remove the client's instance, or get anything else to work, and after a while I actually had to very drastically pull the plug out of the machine. So in conclusion, virtually pleased, in other ways, not.

Planning for dream machines

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:34:35 PDT

Workshop is in 2 months, have found http://www.ventrilo.com/ and http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24 and above all discovered Garry's Mod, a modification of half life 2 that allows you to position characters from the game, and the many sci fi characters that forum users have created and posted online, can be used to create situations, poses and scripted movements or multiplayer acting environments. The link I gave above was for a forum where people post the videos they're making, or making calls for actors to be in their movies.

But I have to remember that we aren't making movies. Maybe we're making archives, personal archives or documentation about things by encoding it in a three dimensional space. Or maybe parody star wars re-enactments?

Garry's mod costs 10 dollars, so I'm tempted to use it to create characters in the workshop on the second day, although that would mean windows machines again, and some of this is so limiting because it's all for the one platform and the software just isn't hasn't been ported yet, or has to be really open source etc...

With crystal space I've found the community to be very inspiring, involved with the Brazilian movement of estudio livre, doing work with puredata and 3d, or kitchen appliance instruments as the case may be.

It would be cool to play with the video projection by scripting a dialogue between live and video characters, but maybe if narration had to take place live or you could have live acting there, or how could we make it seem like it could be real or a game maybe, or ask people in the forums to join in with the workshop supplying skills in directing to help figure out a script that will be feasible in the time we have. We can choreograph a run through a map as well, and this might help create cinematics. The bluescreen might be valuable and we can offer to film sonething scripted by a machinima author. But I don't want to get too Machinima-centric. We're just looking at the whole idea of being in a 3d world and of using media from it, so the software etc isn't really the issue, except that a multiplayer creative environment like gmod, is not run by linden, it's a free play area...

I like the idea of geolocation as well. Maybe it would help to do a mapping from google earth to a geolocated group of maps in kml or with links to ongoing games in multiplayer engines that had representations of them and other users wandering them too, and could some be used to buy and sell, in person and using some kind of standard software? Or how about a geolocation for free sound, so that we have so many media in the same form? (Software is available for Sony Ericsson's Java enabled mobiles that can feed back their cell-id - an approximation of their location).

I've just found a new form of forum game: http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=365269&page=3
- a user posts some images and offers choices which are then added a few days later, following reader's votes. The thread goes well for a month or so then goes through various problems and finally fizzles out more than a year later. I wonder if interactive comics will one day be all the rage? http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=445148 Maybe not.

The play between the game based social aspect - maybe putting an audience of 14 people in front of another audience of, say, 15 first person shooter players. We could storm a multiplayer server - a modern boy's game room to a chorus of UR MOM SUX etc, playing strange instruments in a chorus of voice speakers as they scream their disapproval, and as we thrash them in the game at the same time.

Dumped, Channel 4

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:35:52 PDT

Yesterday's Dumped (new eco-reality programme on British TV where people are left at a rubbish dump for 3 weeks) was wonderful! Great mix: surreal post-cataclysmic landscape, lazy people having tea, and lots of more extreme eco-talk than I've ever heard on TV - like to what extent do we really need to adapt, where do we stop in our efforts, how far will we have to go etc.

The sad possibility I saw was that not only will we one day walk the mounds of rubbish in the dumps, but we'll also fight over them, as some have called them the treasure troves of the new millenium. When there is no other way to get that kind of stuff here from other countries, those will be the only places to get them...

So I was spellbound until I realised I'd sat through 1 hour of TV when I usually just catch the news for a second, in that time pondering how to word my letter to TV Licensing about how TV sucks and why I don't want to pay for it anymore.

My Interpretation so far of the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 05:14:46 PDT

This Sutra, handed down by Ananda, the Buddha's companion, then found and translated to Chinese by Kumarijiva, is part 1 of a trilogy consisting of the Lotus Sutra, The Innumerable Meanings Sutra and the Meditation Sutra. It is studied and known among others, by Nichiren Schools of Buddhism, and it's his interpretation that I probably share most with: http://nichiren.info/OngiKuden/text/Muryogi.htm

First of all, it is meant to be read by Bodhisattvas. Boddhisatvas are people who use what they learn to teach others about how to be Buddhas. When I think of Boddhisatvas, I think of people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King etc, people who fought beyond their own lives for the greater good or peace, perhaps even without knowing what the right way or right practice is.

The Innumerable Meanings Sutra says these people will attain the supreme enlightenment that the Buddha attained, eventually, although the short term effect will be that everyone is a lot better off. Laws, people and societies alike, can manifest the Buddha nature, and it will emerge as a huge success of their individual characters. So even if you are hopelessly out of touch, you can still be a Buddha too.

Most of the deep stuff starts for me in the second chapter, "Preaching":

A Boddhisatva, (...) should learn observe that all laws (...) are (...) in themselves void in shape and form; they are neither great nor small, neither appearing nor disappearing; neither fixed nor movable, and neither advancing nor retreating, and they are nondualistic, just emptiness.

This is where it starts being about all things described as Forms or Laws(the translator's note says "or all existences"), and their nature. For me this is about physical laws governing our universe, laws present day to day around us such as economics and gravity and deep wisdoms learnt only after strife. Or even today's green philosophies and their counterparts. But I realise this is out of context and it's just my interpretation. Laws are all around us even in the moments of the day and they rise and fall and have lifespans like living things. There is only one law that is beyond this: Nonform. I don't know what that is - but it's not "wonderful" because he translates another word as wonderful later, and here he just says nonform - having no form and being formless. I think it could be Myo as in Wonderful as in Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law - that trust we have to place in the unknown beyond any law.

This is where he first mentions his "expedient means" which means that basically, he's been lying for about 40 years of Buddhist practice and as a teacher to a vast amount of people in what is now Nepal and India in around 400-500 BC, by vastly adapting what he had to teach so it would fit with laws and existences of the time. That truth would be, he implies, contained in the Lotus Sutra which was to follow. All three Sutras in this trilogy go on and on about the benefits of preaching and reciting the lotus sutra, but never say what it is - and that's where Nichiren Daishonin comes in...

Still, that's not very nice to hear for any Theravada Buddhists, or any followers of earlier teachings, like basically all non-Nichiren or Tendai sects... oops... I bet that doesn't sit too well with them if you also know of the common belief that the Threefold Lotus Sutra is believed to be a forgery put together by Mahayana monks, or hidden by priests for hundreds of years because it was believed to be a secret text meant for the future? Could make a cool graphic novel...

Then in the third and last chapter (and that's what I like about it - it's quite short!), it explains how we can avoid war, disease and famine on a national level: by all believing in the Lotus Sutra. Although this might seem a dogmatic conclusion, you'd have to understand that belief in the Lotus Sutra is dedication to the positive forces in the universe(i.e. the universe's Buddha nature). I can see how even on a basic level that might guarantee something: if it even just meant that everyone, no matter how flawed they may be in character, or whatever weird set of laws they believed in, or whatever society they came from, were equal, because they all and you all have a Buddha nature. In a country where this pluralism/mutual respect took place, I can see the positive use of the Lotus Sutra's philosophy, and that of this Innumerable Laws Sutra as it's preface. But then you'd all of course become SLAVES to us Buddhists, and we'd get the mad whips out and our shaved heads would reign invincible!!!

So that's my own flawed, learning vision of that - if you have any comments please let me know - I'm open to debate on this one... Here's another explanation (I don't think I really understand this one).

Anyway so far it seems to carry an important lesson even without reference to the LS: a lesson in detachment from any one belief, be that environmentalism or racism, because we attach ourselves to these beliefs without knowing what is actually good. It says that a Bodhisattva should have "mercy" (old translation) to lead us from the path of suffering and should have compassion to see beyond the evils of those transient laws of the world and the effects those things have on the people who can't see beyond them, as well as a strong belief and support for it's Buddha nature. It says that a Bodhisattva should be a hero in their personal world and not knowing the supreme truth which was then revealed in the Lotus Sutra about the attainment of Buddhism, should still use expedient means on all around them to teach them the Sutra of innumerable meanings.

There's then the 10 merits of practising this Sutra, and two of these are quite interesting in that one is the merit of attending Buddhas - this is Ananda's Bodhisattva practice: He was the Buddha's attendant in his later years, and in particular while he was expounding these Sutras in the state of Magadha. And then right after is Rahula's boddhisatva practice - of being the son of the buddha. In the Lotus Sutra they receive predictions of the enlightenment they would achieve throughout the ages to follow - the supreme kind, the same way: one after the other, and as a mirror of the way they were now. Their nature wasn't changed.

There's probably a lot of depth to all this to which I can only see the beginning - that for example it tells you that you don't have to practice the 4 noble truths or various other older Theravada teachings. It's enough to practice the IMS to get the 10 merits. But it's incomplete: Each of the 10 merits contains an exception - those who practice won't know the supreme truth and won't be able to do anything for themselves. Only for others.

The true aspect of all phenomena is mentioned here and is defined as "formless", but also there is the mention of the path of teaching - to answer the question of why he taught them the 4 noble truths and all that if it was just an expedient means.

Expedient means I think, could be just anything: using the power of your own charisma to convince people, using rational thought turned into blog posts or emails, spiritual leadership, whatever, it's all kind of "tactful" lies really, but the point is they lead people to go through relationships with laws, through these beliefs then, to encounter problems and to conquer them.

The innumerable laws which always change are to be used by Bodhisattvas in this way because people are different, and have different understandings, which is why the Buddha used expedient means to teach the people around him until then. I wonder if "Non form" is a basic central law that all the other laws progressively revolve around?

I haven't been able to find the Innumerable Meanings Sutra posted online. If anyone has a link please let me know! Hope you've liked and not been too bored by this post!

Section 4

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:29:12 PDT

Here are all the areas of the Section 4 open exhibition, with comments on how they were received and where they could develop:

Symbolic Jumble Sale: This was a strong piece - as it constituted the full first week of the Pierian Centre exhibition on it's own and a lot of people saw it. It is basically all the items I picked up when my friends Cristina and family were deported, on display on a table. At first I thought it hadn't gone well because a lot of people looked very upset looking at it, but it's an upsetting thing to see. A visitor reminded me of this, and said it probably really affected people. I thought success would have been if some wealthy visitor had offered to buy for example, the extension lead or the phone charger for £2000 as a work of art, so I could send it back to Bolivia, but although I think this is viable as an installation, I need to do just that, and none of the other things, or it loses focus. Just each item, with a huge price tag. The fact that they are mundane electronic items makes it quite strong I think - you end up using it, and you end up remembering the deportation hopefully.
Another idea coming from the jumble sale idea was to do an installation of a kitchen and living room that re-enacts a deportation, using audio recorded during real deportations. This would be incredibly powerful I think. A progression on this idea, although very complicated, would be to do an asylum seeker's live snakes and ladders game, from arrival via human trafficking or some eco or political disaster, to the court process and deportation.
The actual jumble sale, collected via the Drop-in centre and Pierian Centre, didn't go very well - partly because some people thought it was also deportee items, and partly because I just couldn't always be there. I haven't counted the money but I doubt it's a tenner even. Originally this was intended to be managed by someone who did only that, so as to ensure it was run well and gave good returns, but I'm glad I did it and with a volunteer to man the desk it could work well in future. Probably this exhibition needs a large space, and maybe 2 volunteers there at any one time so as to ensure this kind of thing works.
The 4 information boards. Great success. Divided into Stories, The State, Hope and What I Heard. Went down very well, both exhibition spaces asked to keep them a little longer. Ali Zalme and quite a few others suggested this is where we can get funding and input from refugee visual artists to make them more visually striking and easier to understand, although my friend Govinda said it makes it easier to add comments when there is not already a predefined aesthetic to it.
Listening posts. Another time I need to frame the players somehow, so they can't be stolen, or even better, transmit from a computer as loops via fm to lots of old walkman style radios that people can hold up to their ears. Also, the audio material will be very good for internet dissemination. I need a better way of presenting the transcripts of the interviews.
The Video Booth. This didn't work because the whole exhibition needed more of a participative edge: I think my failure was that I planned out in detail all the ways people could participate, so it didn't leave space for other spontaneous ways of expressing things - so it felt a lot like I was trying too hard to make people participate. Also with video, as we discovered at the Live Archives workshops , where this exhibition was partly concieved, there is a strong stigma to video recordings - people find it uncomfortable! Another time maybe it should be a microphone area, or an actual closed, provate booth!
The Internet Cafe. This was one site: http://www.livearchives.org/section4/ which Paul Stapleton and Mike Fallows of UCL generously allowed me to use. Computers at the Pierian Centre were lent equally generously by Bristol Wireless. I didn't push this aspect too much as it didn't really work at the exhibition (see point above).
The DVD. Amazing material, hopefully this material can be added to and edited further. Anna's interview is particularly striking, and I hope some of this content can be broadcast via radio, internet or tv! Lots of people sat through this. It could easily, perhaps together with a better organised video booth, form an exhibition of it's own.
The printed information table. This went down very well, and lots of people spent a long time leafing through all the info. It's still at Kebele for another while. I hope to go there and take notes of the contributions so as to feed back to local councillors and our local MP.
Snacks/Food. I arranged for Arts trail asylum seeker visitors to get free meals, and asked around lots of places, but in the end it wasn't possible to have snacks in the place itself and I cancelled that aspect. Problem with co-ordinating this on my own, but if I had help, it would be great to stage the exhibition as a community gathering, with food, drink, talks, discussion etc. As it was, a lot of spontaneous little groups formed and people started discussing the issues together.

I got a strong feeling a lot of the time that I was preaching to the converted, although the converts didn't know quite how bad it actually was. In future, doing it in different kinds of places will probably work much better in terms of gathering more wide ranging opinions.

I learnt a lot about how space works in an exhibition space, and how personal space impacts (at least in the UK) on where people will go. At the pierian centre someone said "it looks like your front room!" and "I wasn't sure I could go in there" because the room was so small, and there was a sofa and a TV there too!

Section 4

noreply@blogger.com (Ale Fernandez) — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:39:38 PDT

mp3 excerpt: Father Richard MacKay talks about deportation as practiced in the UK.

Here are my preparations for an exhibition on section 4, failed asylum. Feel free to join in :)

STILL TO PRINT:

Father McKay http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bristol/somerset/3961289.stm

Labels for recordings

World Map (and pins)

Failed Asylum Snakes and Ladders

Letter for Co-op on the triangle.

Copyright document: The material in this collection is licensed under a Creative Commons By-Nc-Sa license. This entitles re-use of all material donated for further work, as long as it is attributed to "Section 4" and used for non-commercial purposes. Any other uses will require contact with the original author, via the exhibition organiser, Alejandro Fernandez, 12 Bruce Avenue, Bristol. By submitting material for this exhibition, you are agreeing to put your contributions under this license.

I agree [ ]

I wish to remain anonymous [ ]

Signature

Call montpelier health centre, ask for 192.com - Local Search for Health Centre in Bristol: "0117 942 6811" DONE, left message

Call NHS centre: CAMS. Phone interview with CAMS central sector knowle clinic 0117 9190330

Democratic writings will be small paragraphs on a topic (like soft lists, destitution, deportation, vouchers, work, health, signing on, community work, organisation, a graphic showing what the path is if you are a failed asylum seeker(listen to father mackay's interview to extract this info better).

Each of these 4 boards will have an "audio area" - an old audio player taped on, a pen on a string (sellotaped), and a title and very little info: little more than "Add your opinion", although individual bits might have pen or marker pen indication of what each thing is.

Testimonies VS Media: (Anna, Ali) 2 stories , 1 Poem - do better, Photos

Health: (Naomi, Mary) NHS asylum policy, Wikipedia post traumatic stress disorder. Audio interview to CAMS and montpelier health clinic

People who help: (Father MacKay, Sue, BDASC) Cube Asylum Policy, Cube Programmes, Bristol Defend the Asylum Seekers. Sue O'Donnell webpages, "democratic info sheet" on the need for co-ordinating body at local level, section of asylum act relating to community activities, timebank, sign up sheets, article on food for a million etc.

The State: interview sections on Immigration Department, Solicitors and Government (Father MacKay croydon lies, BDASC political will, Sue o'donnell) Migration Watch article, FOI legislation, Asylum act in full, Articles with Father MacKay (PRINTED).

Prepare Audio, Prepare Boards (get children to help!)

Maybe can bring some double headphone plugs to allow listening 2 at a time. Bring TV, DVD, Scart Cable, extension leads (2)
Buy: Cassette tapes, magic marker, fm transmitter

Take printed letters to Sweet Mart, Maitreya, Better Food, Co-op Triangle.

Thank you page print out:
Thanks to all who helped make this exhibition possible:
(cross out as needed)
Coop Community Fund
Bristol Sweet Mart (Food donations)
Cafe Maitreya (Food donations)
Bristol Wireless (LTSP computer suite).
Paul Stapleton, Mike Fallows (LiveArchives.org)
Siobhan McKeown (Video operation and interviews)
Barry Parsons & Sam, Mat Dalgliesh, Ivan Zverstvo (Sound editing)
Bristol Defend the Asylum Seeker
Drop in Centre, St Nicolas of Tolentino
Mel McCree (Audio, work with children)
Helen Grant (Video editing, testimonial recordings)
To everyone who gave an interview
To everyone who donated things for the symbolic jumble sale.
All of you who came and added to it!

Call the haven, montpelier health centre, 0117 942 6811

call and plead to print places (secured 4 a3 prints from Besley Hill on St Marks Road) Abandoned trying other print places...

buy boards from art shop DONE, print lots of flyers DONE

ask june if I can use their printer within reason at pierian

email freecycle about the jumble sale

call brian

text paulette asking section 4 contacts to come to exhibition, offer interview if wanted. DONE If so, cheeky question: ask her what she feels about the Respect Party being accused of using the asylum seeker issue to somehow further political ambitions, and would she, despite this, attempt dialogue with other people who help asylum seekers to solve these issues and perhaps coordinate services and information?

What does she feel about community activities for section 4 beneficiaries?

What kind of thing could be the best? Make example of Anna's love for growing own food: community gardens and meals.

Call immigration. Ask them if they can say a few words as a statement for a art exhibition on section 4.

What is your name, and function within the immigration department?

What is that like?

What contact do you have with the asylum seekers you work with, and what can you tell me about them?

What is your policy towards asylum seekers, in a nutshell?

And what is your opinion of the treatment of failed asylum seekers in the UK?

What are people's rights during this situation?

What can you tell me about deportation in the UK, how is it usually carried out?
Some have voiced accusations that the deprivation from work, money, medical services, friendship and family is a form of torture, designed to send the message to the world that Britain is not the country to seek refuge in.

Do you believe that the immigration department could be breaking human rights laws?

The law on asylum specifies community work. Is this something that any community group can apply for?

Wouldn't this lead to asylum seekers being known personally by the general public and hence possibly protected?

But then maybe the problem would go away if everyone liked them?
hello?

excerpt 2: George Speaks. More interviews and transcripts here.