“Desire is a cluster/which seeks to cluster”

[reference: Charles Olson - ?]

Isn’t that what all this is about, small world desiring clusters-of-clusters?
Thanks today for kind words from Ben at Headmap, for whom & whose site I have massive respect. More soon.

Analogue media is marked by time: cassette tapes warp and stretch, the sleeves of my vinyl albums curl and fade; the albums themselves accrue their individual patina of noise from each unique history of replay and handling. Once ripped to digital, the noise floor is frozen as it was at that point, forever.

I don’t mourn the steady degredation of quality, but the absence of patina. Patina matters. Through the concept of yugen, patina is central to a whole thread of Japanese aesthetics.

To achieve the end of yugen, art had sometimes been stripped of its color and glitter lest these externals distract; a bowl of highly polished silver reflects more than it suggests, but one of oxidized silver has the mysterious beauty of stillness, as Seami realized when he used for stillness the simile of snow piling in a silver bowl.

[reference: see above link]

We were talking about this a couple of weeks ago, and Katherine pointed me at an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith which used the phrase nude media:

What I mean by this is that once, say, an MP3 file is downloaded from the context of a site such as UbuWeb, it’s free or naked, stripped bare of the normative external signifiers that tend to give as much meaning to an artwork as the contents of the artwork itself. Completely detached from shopping impulses, unadorned with neither branding nor scholarly liner notes, emanating from no authoritative source, the consumer of these objects is left with only the wine, not the bottles. Thrown into open peer-to-peer distribution systems, nude media files often lose even their historical significance and molt into free-floating sound works, travelling in circles that they would not normally reach if clad in their conventional clothing. This applies to all web-based media, be it sound, image or text.

He is making a point more about context and metacontext rather than time- and handling-borne patina, but he’s thinking in a similar space, and I like the expression nude media enough to co-opt it for media which doesn’t show the marks of age.

This has been in mind recently, as I’ve been changing the way I access my music. For years, I’ve been storing my CDs in CaseLogic cases: more space-efficient than keeping them in their jewel cases, easier for travelling, and I don’t really care about the packaging anyway — it’s the music which matters, and if I need track listings etc., I can always get them from freeDB. I’ve been happy having semi-decontextualised music for years, but the CD itself is still an object with a certain patina. Over the last few months, however, I’ve been working my way through my CDs and vinyl, ripping everything to MP3, so I can carry it all with me when I’m not at home. Suddenly my music feels very very nude indeed, removed from its last vestiage of physicality and context. I’ve actually been finding it very hard to listen to raw MP3s — instead I’ve been doing mixes and only listening to those, they have accumulated some patina I think from the process of putting them together, and from my having spent time on them — they feel warm and musical in a way that 20Gb+ of pure MP3 with instant random access simply fails to…

More serendipity: Tim knows someone doing work for nTags, which look interesting:

nTags are designed to work in harmony with normal social interactions. They provide a key piece of information at just the right time or suggest an introduction to just the right person. And they do all this without requiring any action from the people wearing them – no reaching into pockets, pushing buttons, or writing on screens. Instead of distracting people from connecting with each other, nTags encourage connections.

For example, when I walk up to you, our nTags automatically beam data to each other. Then they display messages based on that information. Perhaps I am trying to meet someone who is hiring marketing managers. Your tag may tell me that, although you are not hiring, you met someone who is ten minutes ago. Or the tags may tell us that we both love yoga and have an interest in genomics – just the information we need to start a meaningful conversation. The possibilities are limitless.

nTags also have radio transmitters and receivers, enabling them to communicate with a base station. Event organizers can send messages and updates and can even conduct audience-response polls. Participants can send messages and can upload data about the people they have met.

[reference: from the nTags site]

One problem with wireless adhocery is of course knowing what’s around you. Warchalking and netstumbling are I guess fun if you are that way inclined, but apart from anything else, generate a network snapshot rather than being a real-time service: what’s the average halflife of availability of a particular open WiFi access point? Maps decay.

Personal Area Networking is even more sensitive to aging of data. There’s no point my pocket device knowing who had bluetooth active within range a week ago. An alternative to maps is of course always-on search and notification. The problem with current pocket devices is that they don’t have battery life sufficient for us to be that profligate with power, or the ability to hibernate with networking alone active. Which is a shame: personal area p2p (intimate networking) shouldn’t have to wait for fuel-cell charged PDAs.

But Bluetoooth is low power, and the chips are cheap. How about a TINY bluetooth object, no display, no interface, which just lights up, chirps or vibrates when it detects an open bluetooth device proximate, alerting you that it might be worth powering on your more power-hungry kit?

Or failing that, given that the BT implementations in recent mobile phones (such as my Ericsson T68i) seem capable of being always-on while still allowing battery life of a couple of days, how about someone writing a smartphone app that’s the Bluetooth equivalent of Netstumbler — when it detects an interesting nearby service, it can pop up a messge on the handset similar to an SMS message notification?

New Year. Trying to entwingle many threads, some of which might end up here. It’s been a pleasure over the past couple of weeks talking MOO phenomenology and poetics with Katherine in Canada. No final conclusions or manifestos, but some nice thoughts, mostly about the activeness of being inMOO.

With a big nod to Bachelard, some questioning of what constitutes an inMOO reverie, or more accurately, a reverie of MOO. Seems to me that this would consist of a state of engaged, attentive inaction, both on the part of the player character and the player themselves, the state I think that Jason and the good people at ZenMOO (now seemingly offline) were aiming to create. The experience of inMOO involves (tritely) an act of the active imagining consciousness: at a tangent, I’m reminded of the early physics of Empedocles:

Early philosophers thought that light originated in the eyes, reaching out like the beam of a lighthouse, or like the stick of a blind person, to ‘feel’ the nature of the world at large. Empedocles, who lived in the fifth century BC … described how Aphrodite had fashioned the human eye out of the four elements, held together by love. She kindled the fire of the eye at the hearth fire of the Universe, so that it would act like a lantern, transmitting the fire of the eye out into the world and making sight possible.

A similar thread of course, runs through early Christian and later Gnostic theology [same reference].

With poetics of space thus in mind, I’ve also been thinking more about location-awareness, mobile presence and situated frameworks… I can’t help feeling that the poetics of the emerging pervasive computing space is actually a lot more interesting than that of the artificially limited space of classic VR (text-based or otherwise). MOO is most interesting to me at the moment as a limiting example of mediated environments: is MOO the smallest possible onierically charged, mediated ‘world’ that is experienced as a world? As opposed to say Jabber — yes the Jabber community has soul, but there’s no soul in Jabber itself…

Well that was weird. Trying to find a blog client which would work on my ipaq with b2 (pocketblog doesn’t seem to), stumbled thru google weirdness onto something i’m been actively hunting for and complaining-about-the-absence-of for the last 12 months — a streaming mp3 player for pocketpc compatible with my icecast server. And you can find it at badassgeek. Seems to be freeware, so if you want a copy, ask me (or tell me otherwise).