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"This is what the next generation of the mega-selling phone will look like. They'll be rough facsimiles of the high-end smartphones forged for well-heeled buyers, stripped of fat and excess—an embodiment of compromise. They'll be 90% of the phone for 20% of the price, with FM radios instead of digital music stores, and flashlights instead of LED flashes. This is how the other half will smartphone, if you want to be so generous as to call the developing world's users a half. We're not even close." Yes.
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"Sahel Sounds rounded up music salvaged from the discarded mobile phone memory chips in West Africa." Wow; the after-life of dead electronic media made real.
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"Board games are different. Sure, while you might love a board game for the sense of immersion it provides, or the way the game lifts off the table and fills the room, you also might love it for how beautiful the mechanics are. It’s like looking inside a clockwork watch. That fascination, as you see how all the pieces fit together, how everything is timed to perfection, how balanced it all is. With a beautiful board game design, you can love it for that craftsmanship you can feel with every turn." Yup. But, of course: this is, increasingly, why I like any game. It's just much more visible in boardgames – where you have to wrangle the rules yourself. And everything else – the immersion, the involvement – will come too; it just comes from that clockwork heart.
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"…in honor of Canabalt's first birthday (back on September 1st), why not write a guided tour of how everything works instead?" Lots of good tidbits on here; the stuff on hitboxes is particularly well observed and explained.
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This is all great.
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I walked 4.5km down the A10, stopping every 200m or so to ask 10 unsuspecting passers by … "Excuse me, what area is this?" This is what I was told.
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"We’ve just launched a project in collaboration with biochemist/photographer, Linden Gledhill for Canon’s PIXMA colour printer range. The project features surreal ‘sound sculptures’ made of dancing droplets of paint captured in extreme detail as they react to sound waves." Just beautiful.
Speeds not naturally found very often this side of celestial interaction
30 September 2010
I don’t think we’ll ever notice the age of cyborgs, because we do these things one at a time. We roll them out in small ways, and increment them across society. We quietly piece together a know-everything machine, make its connections invisible, then put it in a small box we built as a talk-to-anyone-machine, and carry it around with us. (The first and ultimate prosthetic of the species being community, and so our most powerful magics will always be incantations to one another.) We hand out drugs to everyone that make them more ready for capitalism as a warm, tasty beverage. While we talk about powersuits and armies of robots, we get into metal boxes next to explosion chambers and extend our proprioception to their edges. We do this so that we can then hurtle down ribbons of death we’ve built all around the landscape at speeds not naturally found very often this side of celestial interaction. We call this commuting and consider it one of the most boring things humans do.
Matt is right. Quinn’s contribution to 50cyborgs is wonderful; thoughtful and provocative and brimful of good stuff. You should go read it right away.
Media-cyborgs
16 September 2010
I’ve already linked to it on delicious, but this Snarkmarket post demanded a decent quotation:
…you start to see cyborgs all around you. It’s not just people with, you know, gun-legs; it’s anybody who uses a cell phone or wears contact lenses. It’s anybody who brings a tool really close in order to augment some capability.
Aren’t there people who have brought media that close? Aren’t there people who manipulate it, in all its forms, as naturally as another person might make a phone call, or speak, or breathe?
When you think of someone like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you can’t think only of their brains and bodies. Lady Gaga in a simple dress on a tiny stage in a no-name club in Des Moines is—simply put—not Lady Gaga. Kanye West in jeans at a Starbucks is not Kanye West.
…which is about as much as I can quote without reproducing the whole article. But there’s so much good stuff here. Media as force-multiplier and prosthesis. Media as true-geography. Media as identity. It’s really, really good, overlapping with so many of my own interests, making a convincing point.
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"We’re all Jamie Madrox now." (This is so good).
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"I know which side I'm on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static."
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"But we have got the resources to save ourselves. General perception of games is jammed as masturbatory power-fantasy, sure, but the talent is hardly lacking. So let’s plea to them: we need a Joyce, or a Waste Land, or something you have to play with an abridged notes guide over your knee as you rip through it, something hardcore in its modernism that wants to make you work, make you sweat for its charms. We need cultural elitism to save ourselves." I am really, really enjoying Five Players at the moment.
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"The story description is "Giving objects in a story world symbolic weight has often been done by hand, but rarely procedurally. Here's one method for doing so."." This is stunning.
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"The book assumes no prior knowledge of programming, but also doesn't treat I7 like a regular programming language: loops, for instance, are barely mentioned. In fact, Thinking in Inform 7 might have been a good title." This sounds great.
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Brilliant.
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Nice, if somewhat DVD-extra-y, video on the RDR soundtrack. The most interesting footage is of the recording sessions and the musicians. It's a shame we're still at layering everything at same tempo/key, when it comes to interactive scores; I miss iMuse. But otherwise: great stuff.
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Great list, and lovely to be able to actually listen to it all, rather than just have to hunt it down later.
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Joe Moran on Daniel Miller's "The Comfort Of Things", which has gone straight onto my wishlist.
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"For instance, when a film critic with a Twitter account says that video games are not art, the natural followup becomes, "Well then… what is art?" And suddenly we're in some goddamn flourescent-lit student lounge, sitting on a nine-dollar couch across from a dude whose shirt is self-consciously spattered with daubs of encaustic, hip-to-hip with the girl who stamped each page of a copy of The Feminine Mystique with an ink print of her own labia, hearing the guy over our shoulder mention Duchamp for the sixth time this week, and it all just needs to stop right now." Well said, Steve.