or: “I made some public art”.

It’s been lovely to see Bus Tops finally emerge into the world. If you’re not aware: it’s a series of LED-matrix screens on the top of bus stops around London, displaying a curated programme of art that anyone can submit works to. It’s been beautiful to see it come to life so well: feels like a thing, has its own aesthetic, the public nature of it feels exciting and odd and transgressive.

I decided I ought to start making some things for it. I’m particularly interested in the screens as an animated medium. So far, I’ve submitted two works; one, an original, and the other, very much not, although it’s the kind of thing that needs to be on giant red LED matrixes.

Anyhow.

Ripples has been selected for display, which is quite exciting! It’s a short animation that makes it look a little like it’s raining on top of the bus stop, even when it’s not. It was a nice exercise for me: making something attractive, graphical, in code (which is not my sweet spot of programming).

An hour or so with Processing later and I was getting somewhere, and it didn’t take much longer with the rather lovely gifAnimation library to spit out an animated gif to import into the Bus Tops editor.

The original animation that Ripples is based on can be viewed here. The source code for it is also on that site.

This feels like a good beginning, and I have a few more ideas for abstract moving works that would look good in red, black, and nighttime, from the top of a double-decker.

(And, as reference primarily for myself: the way you fixed “sad about not making things” is by just starting things, ideally small things, and before you know they’re done.)

Update: and here’s what it looks like on top of a bus stop. Static:

and in motion:

(thanks to the Bus Tops site for the images)

Adam Gopnik’s “How The Internet Gets Inside Us“, in last year’s New Yorker, is a remarkable read. This leapt out:

…at any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence, and whatever media kids favor will be identified as the cause of our stupidity. When there were automatic looms, the mind was like an automatic loom; and, since young people in the loom period liked novels, it was the cheap novel that was degrading our minds. When there were telephone exchanges, the mind was like a telephone exchange, and, in the same period, since the nickelodeon reigned, moving pictures were making us dumb. When mainframe computers arrived and television was what kids liked, the mind was like a mainframe and television was the engine of our idiocy. Some machine is always showing us Mind; some entertainment derived from the machine is always showing us Non-Mind.

…but really, the whole thing is half an hour well spent.

John Gruber on the new Twitter iPhone app:

What also worries me is that these changes suggest not only a difference in opinion regarding how a Twitter client should work, but also regarding just what the point is of Twitter as a service. The Twitter service I signed up for is one where people tweet 140-character posts, you follow those people whose tweets you tend to enjoy, and that’s it. The Twitter service this new UI presents is about a whole lot more — mass-market spoonfed “trending topics” and sponsored content. It’s trying to make Twitter work for people who don’t see the appeal of what Twitter was supposed to be.

Yes, that. It increasingly turns out that the Twitter I signed up for – the Twitter in my head, as it were – is the MVP of something else. And now, the MVP is fading away and the something else is taking over. Which is fine for acquiring new users – after all, by and large, it’s a given that most people don’t use your product. But my mental model is stuck around five years ago, when I signed up.

I signed up for this product because it made mass-texting people when I was in town easy, and led to lots of serendipitous drinking and hanging out when I was in the city. On the radio last year, I heard someone explain Twitter as “a tool for following famous people and seeing what they’re up to“. It’s interesting how the product described in the new app feels like the product described by that radio pundit: a consumption tool.

For me, it was always about the permanent backchannel with my friends. I guess I’m looking for a new mobile client now.

I wish more people were making tools for a specific creative purpose rather than for general consumer adoption. I wish more people were making tools that very intentionally do not scale—tools with users by the dozen. Tools you experience not through a web signup form, but through pathbreaking creative work.

Robin Sloan writes about being frustrated by the startup generation’s love of toolsmithery. Or rather: their recurring commitment to selling services.

Now, I know that I’m a toolsmith – but I only really make tools for myself. Some of them are on github; some are not even there, either because they’re just so bespoke or so useless. Some I use daily; some I barely use at all. Regardless, I wouldn’t sell them to anybody.

But I thought about the article, and ruminated, and my best comeback is: blessed are the toymakers.

If you can make a tool, you can make a toy. The common output of workshop apprenticeships were both tools to be put to use, but also toys or knick-knacks to demonstrate and practice skills.

I love making toys. Little mechanical things, to be fiddled with, to be explored, created with purpose and intent and intended to express an idea. Most of my borderline-nonsense Twitter bots are just that: toys I wanted to play with. One of them lived for an hour before I decided it was so rubbish I wasn’t letting it out in public for a while. Some of them have lasted a very long while and have a great many followers.

The best toys have hidden depths. The best toys are all super-simple on the surface; super-obvious. They let you know exactly what you ought to try doing with them. But as you explore them, you discover they have hidden depths. And: hidden affordances. Spaces for imagination to rush in. Toys allow you to play games, inventing rules that make the toy more fun, not less. Toys allow you to tell the stories you imagine, not that are baked into them.

As Matt Jones said in his his Interesting 2007 talk – “stories are the contrails that toys leave as they roar through our world and our imaginations“. It’s one of my favourite Jones-isms. I’ve been returning to that notion a lot, recently.

Toys demand fiddling with: they invite interrogation through hands and messing around. And they can be disposable: if they’re no good, make another.

The toys my Dad made for me were wooden. The toys I make – for myself, for friends, to make a joke real – are digital. But they’re there, and they all come down to an odd idea I wanted to explore, or a joke I wanted to make real. They are not vague ideas, tweeted and then forgotten about, tossed to the wind in a meeting, or imagined up but never created. They work, they’re real. No smoke and mirrors here – but no Great Purpose either, no business model. Just something fun, something interesting, to scratch an itch, to see if it’s fun in your hand.

I make toys to find out what’s interesting, to explore what’s next.

Reading Robin’s post, I came to agree with him. After all, I’m a staunch believer in the whole “Liberal Arts 2.0” idea; I’m one of those humanities graduates who learned to code.

Why not put technological skills to use making art (as I argued at Culture Hack Day)? Go one step further: rather than putting technology to use serving existing media – the books and films that Robin talks about – why not just invent new forms of media, as Jack Schulze and Timo Arnall describe? The new liberal arts are not on the edge of something big; they are on many edges, all at once. We get to decide where they tip over into; what’s at the bottom of those cliff-faces. Maybe those media will have the tiny audiences Sloan describes; maybe they’ll become huge. But we get to decide, and right now, there is space to play, and a need for those of us with weird skillsets – technological hands and flighty, artistic brains, or vice versa, ‘consecutive or concurrent’ – to go explore.

Inventing media is a big job. We could start by making toys.

I’m really bored of the term “3D printer”.

It’s begun to make me squirm when I hear it. For many such devices, it’s a reasonable explanation of the process – layers of extruded material “printed”, a layer at time, building an object up from nothing.

My problem is with the “3D” part of it. Or rather: the idea that a “3D printer” prints… 3Ds? I read an article explaining the technology in a mainstream newspaper; it explained that at the end of the process, you’d remove your “3D artefact” from the machine.

Or, you know, object. Thing. Or even call it by the name of what you’ve printed: “when the printer finished, I removed my ashtray/cog/bottle opener/toy.”

I’ve just finished Charlie Stross’ Rule 34, which was fun. One of my favourite pieces of futurethinking in it was his exploration of the domestication of “fabbers”. They’re not things owned only by geeks and early adopters; Stross’ fabbers are bought in John Lewis, made by mainstream companies. Of course, like Nespresso machines or inkjet printers, they’re artificially hobbled to only use ‘official’ feedstock, and perhaps even to not make certain plans (ie, forcing you into a “thing store” to download official plans). So the opportunity for hackers are to take the off-the-shelf machines and rewire them to use illicit feedstock, to make dangerous things. But the fabber is very much just like a coffee machine in this universe, and I liked some of his explorations of what it was like to have an off-the-shelf object printer in the house.

A name like “object printer” or “thing printer” feels so much more honest and less clumsy. And: eventually we’re going to get over the magic of the “3D” part of the printing, and instead just focus on the variety of things we can get out, the varieties of materials we can print in, the affordability of such devices. The 3Dness will be taken as given.

(If you pushed me, and I had to coin a neologism, though, I’d choose artefactory.)

From this Guardian article, published around the release of The Craftsman (and because there were too many quotations to put in a Pinboard link):

…the ideal of fit-for-purpose can work against experiment in developing a tool or a skill; it should properly be seen as an achievement, a result. To arrive at that goal, the craftsman at work has instead to dwell in waste, following up dead ends. In technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does more than encounter problems; he or she creates them in order to know them. Improving one’s technique is never a routine, mechanical process.

To work is to develop one’s skill, if you like; “dwelling in waste” is part of the process of the craftsman.

Three abilities are the foundation of craftsmanship: to localise, to question and to open up. The first involves making a matter concrete; the second, reflecting on its qualities; the third, expanding its sense. The carpenter establishes the peculiar grain of a single piece of wood, looking for detail; turns the wood over and over, pondering how the pattern on the surface might reflect the structure hidden underneath; decides that the grain can be brought out if he or she uses a metal solvent rather than standard wood varnish.

Which all seemed very relevant, given Technology as a Material.

The following is an essay for the newspaper distributed to participants of Edgelands, a one-day ‘flash conference’ on technology and the arts, held in Edinburgh on 21st August 2011.

Hannah asked me to write something about technology for the arts sector, and I chose a slightly different take on the notion of ‘Technology as a Material’. I’ve written about material exploration of data before. This piece was intended as a broader, more high-level exploration of the topic for creators in the arts.

Much of the thinking in here – although shaped by my own experiences – began during my time at Berg, and I specifically wanted to thank my former colleagues for their many investigations into “Immaterials” and their undeniable influence on this train of thought.

Video: Immaterials: The Ghost In The Field by Timo Arnall, Jack Schulze and Einar Sneve Martinussen.

To make art with technology, one does not use it as a tool; one must understand it as a material. Technology is not always a tool, an engineering substrate; it can be something to mould, to shape, to sculpt with.

Materials have desires, affordances, and textures; they have grains. We can work with that grain, understanding what the material wishes to be, wishes to do – or we can deliberately choose to work against it. We must understand that grain and make a deliberate choice.

Software is a material. A language like Processing is better at some tasks than others, faster at some things than others, easier to manipulate in certain directions and harder in others. It has a grain, and desires, that we must understand to work with it – that we learn through working with it.

A service like Twitter has an inherent pace, a vernacular language, limitations on its functionality. A project built with it needs to work within these givens to be suited to the medium.

Data is a material. To work with streams of live information, or data sources from an API, it to understand the fidelity of that information, the frequency of update, the relations to other data it affords or not. To work with it requires exploring the dataset, honing your demands of it to those it can meet.

Hardware is a material. As Anthony Dunne writes in Hertzian Tales: “All electronic products are hybrids of radiation and matter“. To build with electronics is to understand both that radiation and that matter. How fragile is the hardware? How can it be housed? Is the output from sensors like cameras or microphones accurate enough? And in the case of radio-based hardware, be it GPS, 3G, Bluetooth or RFID – what affects the field of that radio? Is it useful to the fidelity you require? Is it an appropriate solution for the installation? How does it even work?

In “Immaterials: The Ghost in the Field”, Timo Arnall, Jack Schulze and Einar Sneve Martinussen explore the spatial qualities of RFID through long-exposure photography and an LED probe. The end result is an actual understanding of the field of an RFID reader, not read on a datasheet, but gleaned through experimentation and exploration – all to better understand RFID as a material in its own right.

We understand materials not by reading about them, or assuming what they can do, but by exploring them, playing with them, sketching with them. Ideally, that sketching happens in the final material, but perhaps, like a sculptor sketching on paper, it happens in abstractions such as paper-prototyping. What matters is that you find a way. Sketching is not just about building towards a final work; it’s about building familiarity with a medium itself, working it into one’s practice.

As creators, we must feel our materials – even if we are not the ones using them in the end.

The sculpture analogy is again useful. For centuries, sculptors have worked with the aid of others in their studios and workshops, to produce large works. But despite drawing on the expertise of others, they must be skilled in their chosen mediums themselves.

Last year, I went to see an exhibition of sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s notebooks. In amongst the sketches and prototypes, there was a piece of circular graph paper with a line traced on it. This was part of the process of Monument, Whiteread’s resin, mirrored cast of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar square. It was a print-out from a machine used to test the resin Whiteread was using to cast the sculpture. There, inside her notebook, she had kept a proof of the material’s capacities: a commitment to understanding the material she’d be working with. If technology is a material, artists should treat it no differently.

A better understanding of materials leads to better usage of them. Poor execution cannot be written off with the excuse “oh, but it’s art“; the vernacular understanding of technology is now too sophisticated for that. To embrace an audience’s existing understanding of technology, we must meet their expectations: not being ugly, not being broken. Audiences expect polish, even in experimental work. And to understand that execution, we must become literate in our materials.

Alan Kay defined literacy as “the ability to both read and write in a medium“. I would agree – but I must also be honest: the barrier to becoming literate with technology is perhaps higher than for those materials you can feel in your bare hands.

It’s still lower than it ever has been, though. Compare the diversity and quality of tools aimed at the non-specialist, the designer, the creative to what was availably twenty, thirty years ago. It’s not just that technology has advanced: our abstractions have too. Thanks to prototyping and creative tools such as Max/MSP, OpenFrameworks, or Arduino, it is easier than ever to explore the creative applications of technology.

And, as throughout the arts, there is always value in collaboration. To make art with technology is to make art with technologists, and there are a great many people out there – if you look for them – sensitive to creative endeavours, skilled in technology, and eager to collaborate.

It’s imperative to work with technologists through the creative process: they are not just manufacturers, but collaborators. As a technologist, it’s important for me to observe the terrain I’m working in, to sit with others and see them at work, for them to see what my process looks like. It’s how we come to a shared understanding of one another, and of the work itself.

Technology is not something to be used cynically, to qualify for funding, or to add a veneer of supposed “innovation” to tired work. For art is a purpose, not an excuse. To make art with technology is to make art out of technology. Artists should consider it as a material like any other.

Cities are full of public space; between the buildings – most of which are private, some of which are public – is space, most of which is public, some of which is private.

Some of that public space isn’t, really. It looks like it is – and part of the conditions of its existence are that it serves as a limited thoroughfare – but it’s very much a private space that you’re lucky to be allowed on, and which can be policed privately.

Nowhere is that more obvious than More London – a complex directly west of Tower Bridge, where City Hall resides, as does a variety of office buildings. It contains the obvious walking route along the river front; it’s designed as a very public space. But it isn’t at all: it’s private property, with its own rules.

Lock a bike to a lamp-post and this happens:

That lamp-post wasn’t yours to lock it to. This sort of thing both frustrating and confusing: why does this space, which looks like any other space, behave differently? How was one to know it wasn’t, technically, public? If you don’t see the little signs, you wouldn’t know. People walking freely, people eating their lunch in the open spaces: these are much greater signifiers for the urban citizen, and these all seem to fit a representation of “publicness”.

More and more of the city looks like this.

What happened with Tower Bridge on Twitter a few weeks back was a reminder that this is also true online. Twitter isn’t a public space like the domain name system is; it’s a private one, and you’re at the whim of its Terms of Service. I infringed its Terms (just), things got moved around.

So far, so walled-garden. We’ve seen things like this before.

But there’s a slightly larger, and more complex question raised here, and that’s the one I’m much more concerned about.

The frustrations that you see in the real city are coming to the instrumented city, and this highlights an interesting set of problems if you’re designing that instrumented city.

(What follows is not about my bot in specific; it’s about the state of existing terms of service around the web, and what they mean for any form of instrumentation and augmentation).

The idea that an object representing a structure itself in the first person isn’t allowed to describe itself is problematic; the idea that someone with the rights to a trademark has more claim to represent a structure, an edifice, than a stream of information that the structure itself produces is… troubling. (I’m not sure I can find the right word there just yet).

There’s something important about authorship and identity here, and the idea to suggest that the streams of information about a structure come from anywhere other than that structure itself feels backward.

(I would, of course have no problem if the trademark owner wished to produce that stream of information themselves).

The Transamerica Pyramid doesn’t have an account on Flickr so that people can pretend to be it, or pretend to upload photographs in its name. It has an account so that it can be pointed at in other photographs; it has an account so that it can be referenced just like a person. How do you enable something to serve that purpose if it doesn’t have the actual name of the building in question? The account isn’t impersonating the building; it is the building. Those photographs aren’t lying about having the Pyramid in them. (As it stands: the account on Flickr is called “The Pointy Building”, which is both non-infringing, but also a more accurate representation of what most people call the building anyway).

There are obvious issues that the Instrumented City, ultimately, will find ways around. Twitter – a short, written-language service – really isn’t the best format for instrumenting the city in the long run; it’s just what some of us are using for now. So I’m not worried about service-specific issues or any particular terms of service. I’m sure that the city of data will find more detailed, specified delivery formats for its information that building-owners will buy into, although I’d hope there’d still be an emphasis on the human-readability of such information.

For now, though, this is what we have, and these are the issues we have to work around, and they bear thinking about.

Kevin‘s talk from Momo Amsterdam a few weeks back. I know it’s been linked elsewhere, but really, it’s marvellous, and if you’ve ever used “AR” in a meeting or room – or even been in a meeting or room where it’s been mentioned – you need to sit down and watch this. It is a good 26 minutes of your time.

I, personally, am very bored of screens as magic windows, especially when they have to be held between the eye and the world; the Wii U video with the controller held up between eye and TV made me very sad.

Using screens liks this turns them into a kind of “reality gobo“. So much optical AR suggests it’s overlaying information on reality, and thus augmenting it – but really it sits between our senses and reality, getting in the way.

Optical AR, viewed through screens, derived from markers, or marker-less technologies, or through QR or barcodes or god knows what else, I think – I hope – will feel like a distraction, a false turn, in the years to come. And yet right now, it’s cropping up in more and more places in increasingly irrelevant implementations. And if I don’t care, why will a consumer? There are many wonderful ways to augment reality, many wonderful learnings to gain from new sensory input (be it seeing through satellites or feeling, at a distance, when a bridge opens). But this whole cameras, screens, and gobos thing? Tiring. Not to mention: computationally expensive for under-rewarding output.

And so: that talk felt like a solid distillation of a bunch of truths, backed with excellent examples and a lovely thread. Also, I always enjoy watching Kevin talk; he’s a coherent and thoughtful speaker.

As a footnote: I also liked Greg Smith’s astute take on the talk:

…the initial buzz was slightly misleading as it suggested that the presentation was an outright dismissal of AR. I don’t really think this was the case… My reading of the talk is that Slavin is extremely curious about augmenting reality—as praxis—and suggesting we (startups, developers and consumers) need to be considerably more thoughtful in our application/exploration of the emerging medium and consider how it might activate other senses – AR should not distill down to “an overlay for all seasons”.

I think the key takeaway point is in Slavin’s suggestion that “reality is augmented when it feels different, not looks different” – which basically echoes Marcel Duchamp’s (almost) century-old contempt for the ‘retinal bias’ of the art market. If AR development (thus far) is lacking imagination, perhaps the problem is that we’re very much tethering the medium to our antiquated VR pipe dreams and the web browser metaphor.

I got an email today, a bit sad that the bot I made to comment on Tower Bridge’s state had disappeared.

I wasn’t aware it had disappeared.

So I checked Twitter, and sure enough: @towerbridge is now owned by an “official” account. They joined Twitter on the 18th May this year. I’m not going to comment on the quality or usefulness of the account to date.

What I am going to comment on: the bot has disappeared. All those tweets are gone, basically. So there’s no history any more of bridge lists. There’s no instrumentation of a part of the city. A little bit of the heartbeat of London – for me, and the nearly 4000 other people who followed the bot – has disappeared.

Now, I use an old email address that I check rarely for that account – but I’ve not been contacted once about this issue. The account has just been gazumped, and a little, talking part of the city has been killed.

I’m about to get in contact with Twitter the second I’ve posted this. I’m more than a little furious; after all, all the URLs that link to it are now incorrect, all the lifts, all the (puppet-mastered) banter is gone. Cool URLs don’t change, and these have just gone. And in their place: marketing.

I’ve never pretended to be an official account; I’ve never dissimulated; no-one from the exhibition has ever got in touch with me about the bot.

So, for the time being: this is why the bot has disappeared. I’m very, very cross, and perhaps a little upset; the robots are our friends, after all.