In the first century of the Christian era, in the reign of Tiberius, the historian Plutach tells us that a ship’s company, sailing past a small island close to Corfu, heard, in the depths of the forest, a strange lament: ‘Great Pan is dead!’ The light of a great age of European history seemed extinguished [...]

The human mind, unlike the song of the birds, does not rise with the sun; it is alerted by the awareness that time is finite, and that every day has its close. Whatever we start, starts with an end. In this way the distant horizon is closer to us than our immediate existence; and we come back to the present only in order to make our own kind of start: a beginning towards the particular objectives in view.

The way of looking, which Bridget Riley articulates, is rooted in the pattern of our existence. The eye, as she employs it, is not the simple soul of the ‘formalist impasse’. It includes the intellectual perspective within which all our conceptual responses operate: the immediate identification of the object of attention; the transgresssion of its presence through interpretation; and on top gf it all – in the far distance, so to speak – the assertion of principles, to which the interpreting activity itself succumbs. No wonder, that the mind of the beholder is deeply disquieted by the arrival of the Great Pan…

Bridget Riley: Works 1959-78 [London, The British Council ISBN 0-950-6326-0-0] Robert Kudielka, 1978

Even when they are trying to see centers, they often fail to see them all, and are not able to grasp how many centers there are in the design, how densely packed with centers it is.

Small world networks? No, this is from Christopher Alexander’s A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets. [NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-520866-8], which I admit I haven’t read, and at the price, am unlikely to purchase. However, read a review to pick up some of the ideas. Stephen points out that his four-volume The Nature of Order is now in print.

According to a fascinating post on the PSYCHE-D list, recent MRI studies hint that mental images are generated or at least processed by the same brain structures which process real-world image data from the retina:

[There is] some evidence to suggest that our memories are amodal abstractions whose modality can only be returned by reprocessing through the perceptual apparatus. Colour is in the eye of the beholder; by which I mean that the greenness of a green field can only be perceived by a conscious onlooker; the qualia of greenness isn’t a property of the grass. Colour is only perceived as such when it flows though the visual colour area [...]. The same is true of our memories: only by pumping our memories through V4 do [we] experience the colour content implicitly coded in our memories. Reality is achromatic; memories are achromatic. The occipital lobe isn’t a sensory cortex; it is perceptual. It can accept inputs either from the retina or from the temporal lobes. From these inputs it produces the conscious sensation of vision.

If true, this suggests that the whole visual perception system can in effect operate backwards, from consciousness out. [c.f Empedocles, elliptically]

The original Matisse interface: a plain telnet text pane. Media links opened elsewhere on the desktop, using helper applications such as jpegview or realplayer [sorry I have no archival screengrabs of this version]. It was important to me that content ‘in’ the text world should extrude outside the text pane: outside the frame of at least one level of interface metaphor. The idea of extrusion is important to me: one appeal of pervasive social media is the desire to push content outside the frame of its containing context — weightless media, extruded into the real world through location-aware pervasive networks, opens outside the closure of its technology. The context framing the augmented perceptual world is the intimate immensity of the actively imagining consciousness.

Weightlessness is a transitional state we must pass through on the path to pervasive presence, only because extant technology for access to social media is so experientially heavy. Afterwards: ‘there is only the music/while the music lasts.’ [Eliot]: lightness prevails

With planning and the right tools, it’s possible to travel light and yet maintain (relatively) seamless access to both communication channels (email, instant messaging, etc), and digital stuff. The idea that I need my workstation to access my data is already anachronistic. Access is everywhere: identity is portable.

But so far, digital stuff is stored in a particular somewhere, even if it is accessible roamingly. For me to play my copy of a film, I need guaranteed quality of service between my device & my hosting service. But, assuming the nudeness & pervasive replication of mass media, it is more efficient — yet experientially identical (nude media has no patina, remember) — for me to search for & watch a more topologically nearby copy rather than my more distant (==expensive) instance. Pervasive, weightless media space is best supported by content addressability, rather than location-based addressing.

Over GPRS, I can play decent quality streaming audio on my iPAQ over bluetooth via my phone. For the past few months I’ve had free access to a GPRS network, which means I can indulge such conceits without bankrupting myself in the process. As things stand in the UK, GPRS is ridiculously expensive. If I had to pay for the benefits I get from it, I doubt I’d bother.

But it leads me to thinking:

The weightless web [peer-to-peer meets hosted services] is content-based, not location-based: assuming that increasingly we will access content as a service rather than as a locally-cached copy [streaming mp3 vs iPod], and assuming that wireless network providers will continue to charge by-the-byte for the foreseeable future, there’s a new opportunity for content owners to push fee-based media services. Given that the weightless web is about content, rather than the location of a particular instance of that content, they can incentivise by subsidising the bandwidth costs for the replay of an instance of their DRM-protected media rather than of bootlegged copies. Market forces do the rest. So far, the motivation for owning both media and channel seems about internal efficiencies in getting content in front of the audience: anyone thinking about actually subsidising consumers, per media file, based on where they’re getting their content?

Of course, this assumes that network access is still charged per byte. Adhoc peering, via 802.11 mesh, or any other ‘free’ architecture, removes the financial leverage. But as long as the majority of punters are buying mobile phones, it’s a possibility…

Audio patina as an alpha channel: start with a canonical nude digital master of a recording, and save the difference between that and your much-played analog version. Assemble a library of various people’s difference files (which are presumably quite compact). Download any of them to reassemble and listen to their copy of that recording… [this thought from a long, drunken conversation with Dave many years ago].

Pervasive, ad-hoc networking needs robust, effective peer-to-peer platforms. And to prevent the ’silo effect’ — everyone having to develop their systems from the ground up, reinventing solutions to the same problems — we need standards which are general, scalable, and flexible. Unfortunately, there’s a rather alarming blindspot in many otherwise excellent contenders for p2p standardisation: the need to move digital stuff - data of substantial size – between peers robustly, verifiably and securely.

Back in the day, one insight behind the idea of Being Digital was that bits are easier and cheaper to ship than atoms. e-prefix your business processes, rip and scan your media, and welcome to the frictionless economy, where weight, distance and transaction costs no longer ate into margin.

And the beauty of making stuff digital is that whatever the bits represent (a movie, songfile, a novel), they can be transferred simply over the same kinds of protocols — once it’s possible to transfer one kind of thing from point to point, all the rest simply follow: HTTP, for example, quite happily transfers anything that can be digitised. The Web was inherently multimedia-capable from day one.

But ‘things’ made from bits have their own analogs of weight and cost. In particular, for large files or high-resolution data streaming, network bandwidth and quality of service (QoS) massively constrain the what, when and how of data transfer.

Recently I’ve been reviewing fairly critically a number of open, generalised peer-to-peer platforms. It seems that the need for robust transfer of ’stuff’ isn’t really being attended to by many of the key players: while many systems are elegant, they’re mostly avoiding the key issue of heavy lifting: how to actually move serious amounts of digital stuff peer-to-peer, efficiently and verifiably intact: the common conceit is that inband traffic must consist solely of lightweight XML exchanges, with heavy lifting is displaced elsewhere: out-of-band. Want to chat p2p about your ripped copy of Stalker? JXTA or Jabber will work fine. Want to actually send it p2p over a lossy network? The official line is that there are already other ways to transfer heavy data: FTP, HTTP etc: protocols each with their own problems in the real world of unreliable, firewalled, ad-hoc environments — exactly the kinds of environments in which the p2p messaging protocols themselves are designed to function. Or you can use very inefficient inband encoding, and start building up your own silo of code to ensure veracity and robustness.

Neither alternative is good enough. For p2p to get beyond yet more implementations of instant messaging, for it to become generally useful for moving stuff as well as chatting about stuff, someone needs seriously acknowledge the need for heavy data lifting, and to build it into the otherwise elegent p2p platforms.

When Tim and I were doing our futurist thing at HHCL, one of our predictions was of flash trends. We imagined that global connectedness would lead, especially in music, to emergent conjunctions of global microinfluences — some weird arabic/japanese/techhop track at the top of dance charts? Blame it on the Net.

But it (so far) hasn’t really happened, which still suprises me — in the global music community, surely more people should be doing their listening and mixing from more eclectic sources?

We had asumed that music communities worldwide would follow a ’small world’ topology, but it seems not. Obviously, there are a number of limiting factors at work, including the global stranglehold of the music majors, and the insularity of specific music communities. Possibly there is simply an insufficient number of eclectic ‘connectors’ bridging local clusters of interest, preventing any particular admixture of ideas to reach a wildfire threshold and crossover into the global networked consciousness.

Which leads me to thinking: weblogs and community sites work well to augment tight-knit communities of interest, to surface and develop new ideas, and to build and acknowledge reputation within the community. But for small-world dynamics to kick in, these clusters need long-haul interconnections. Possibly, emerging standards for digital syndication and aggregation can augment the function of the human connectors who do the joining-up in social networks. I’m interested to see what happens when syndication technology percolates out into online music communities — what will happen when there are more channels for local knowledge and enthusiasm to be spread automagically into other communities worldwide?