One hundred posts to Cluster. No champagne to celebrate, but a glass of decent Australian white. Time for a bit of reflection. Strangely, the most popular posting is one in which I mentioned, in passing, the iDetect wifi sniffer. In fact, most people cruising past Cluster seem to be more interested in iPaqs, wifi and streaming mp3s than in any of the other things I’ve been talking about. Oh well. We’ve covered quite a lot of more interesting stuff. The topics that seem most important to me in retrospect are:

Spaces Are not (Necessarily) Places. This thread came out of discussions with Katherine about MOO worlds at the start of the year, and has kept coming back in various guises [1] [2] [3] [4]

Nude Media. Thoughts on the experiential qualities of purely digital media (especially music). [1] [2]

The Radio-Of-Me Concept: a thought experiment on the phenomenology of radio, and how such considerations, with some collaborative filtering technology, might finally find an unobtrusive application for Digital Rights Management while still giving consumers a simple listening experience and access to new music. [1] [2]

The Smart Spaces/Discreet Computing Whitepaper. I’ve been involved for years in the design of working environment technology. The whitepaper is something of a manifesto regarding where I think creative businesses are getting technology adoption right and wrong. It’s based on some rough notes that appeared here first. [1] [2] [3] [4]

There’s more, but those cover what’s been most on my mind for the past six months. I’m not sure what comes next, but I’m going to at least be working more on the Smart Spaces ideas (and hopefully selling some Smart Space projects to my clients). I’m also going to be implementing a proof-of-concept radio-of-me to see what it actually feels like. Having had Cluster as external memory for the past few months, I’ve become very aware that phenomenology and experiential concerns form the basis of most of my thinking, so expect more of that. Anyway. Thanks for being here.

There’s a big Tillmans retrospective on at the moment at Tate Britain; we’re going to make a day of it tomorrow and, if the weather’s nice, catch the new Tate river bus up to Tate Modern afterwards.

I’m listening to Dub Tractor’s More or Less Mono. Sparkly music for an otherwise glum day.

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogs and wikis. HTML seems so ill-suited to dense intertwinglings of thoughts. Ok for simple document layout, but the chunking/scoping seems at the wrong level for anything very fine-grained. I want to be able to pick this site up by a concept, shake it and see how everything else falls into place around it. Some approximation of that would be possible with heavy metadata and hyperbolic trees, but I feel like the map and the document should be the same thing. At the very least I want those visible interconnections within documents that Ted Nelson mocked up for Xanadu all those years ago…

Marcell Iványi’s lovely short film, Wind. Good articles in p.o.v magazine from a few years ago. Can’t find a copy anywhere (I saw it at a festival), although there were at one point rumours online that its included on a Hungarian VHS of Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Strange world.

(Quoted in the July 2003 World of Interiors (p.119)):

Don’t look at it — just glance! Sometimes in a mere glance one can see more than in the close scrutiny of a thousand details.

Intense sun today. Dwelling on the rhythms in Bridget Riley’s Composition with Circles 1 (1998) which I was fortunate enough to have been able to buy with some options, back when having options meant anything…

We were in Brittany a few weeks ago, and visited the salt fields of Guérande. There were no paludiers in evidence, only acres of neatly tended salt ponds. Guérande salt comes in two kinds — one grey and very moist, and the other the brittle, pinkish fleur de sel (‘the caviar of salt’), which is ludicrously expensive if you don’t buy it at source. Or you can make it yourself: the following directions, quoted in Salt. A World History, are from Cato’s De Agricultura:

Fill a broken-necked amphora with clean water, place in the sun. Suspend in it a strainer of ordinary salt. Agitate and refill repeatedly; do this several times a day until salt remains two days undissolved. A test: drop in a dried anchovy or an egg. If it floats, the brine is suitable for steeping meat, cheese or fish for salting. Put out this brine in pans or baking dishes in the sun , and leave in the sun until crystalised. This give you the ‘flower of salt’. When the sun is cloudly, and at night, put indoors; put in the sun daily when the sun shines.

I’m not wholely convinced that Cato’s recipe would deliver anything as delicious as Guérande salt, which tastes of stars…

Attended the launch of the BFI’s Digital Test Bed at the NFT this morning — currently Europe’s only test laboratory for digital cinema. They are justifiably proud that they can now play everything from nitrate to pure digital feed (demonstrating the former with a lovely technicolor excerpt from The Harvey Girls (1946), and the latter with a live connection to ‘The Hall of Edoras’ set for The Return of the King in Wellington, New Zealand, with Jim Rygiel, Weta’s digital effects supervisor).

I had to leave before the tour, but from their press pack, it looks as if they have at least one reference projector (a JVC QX1) capable of 2048×1536 resolution, but seemed to be projecting in HD today.

Is it as good as celluloid? The clips they showed today head-to-head today (from The Insider) were certainly impressive, with the scanned film satisfyingly grainy and filmish, and I couldn’t really see that the quality was any lower than uniqueliveevents managed a couple of months ago with a QX1 at native resolution. Seems that one of their problems is selling the idea of HD resolution to cinemas (because cinema owners realise that people will potentially have the same resolution available at home, soon, and don’t see much of a business in offering nothing better in their multiplexes), while simultaneously trying to sell the idea that HD is ‘as good as celluloid’ to customers and studios (so why should you leave home for a stinky multiplex?). A bit of a marketing problem there, even without the many standards issues.

Peters argues that SETI was to the 20th century what the spritualist movement was to the 19th, with serious researchers in both fields resolutely pursuing the inner strangeness of their chosen quests, and yet missing the point that all communication is inherently strange:

SETI research reminds one of Thoreau’s quip about those who tried to measure the depths of Walden Pond: “They are paying out the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvellousness.” (p. 257)

Curiously, he doesn’t directly reference Carl Sagan’s Murmurs of Earth, effectively the ’sleeve notes’ for the gold-plated records launched into interstellar space on the Voyager probe. It’s an artifact of a time — the 1970s — now itself distant and alien, difficult to make contact with (both the Cold War and the unfinished sexual revolution cast shadows over the media which finally made it onto the disks). Unfortunately I don’t have the anniversary edition with the contents on CD. At the time of my rather tatty first edition, they didn’t have music clearance. Shame. I’d love to hear Laurie Spiegel’s

…giddy whirl of tones reflecting the motions of the Sun’s planets in their orbits — a musical readout of Johannes Kepler’s Harmonia Mundi, the sixteenth-century mathematical tract whose echoes may still be found in the formulas that make Voyager possible (p. 254)

Regardless of such pleasures, there’s a sense of deep yearning and disquiet about the project:

So deep is the conviction that there must be life out there beyond the dark, one thinks that if they are more advanced than ourselves they may come across space at any moment, perhaps in our generation. Later, contemplating the infinity of time, one wonders if perchance their messages came long ago, hurtling into the swamp muck of the steaming coal forests, the bright projectile clambered over by hissing reptiles, and the delicate instruments running mindlessly down with no report. (Loren Eiseley, p. 46)

Peters would have something to say on that.

Watching Hiraki Sawa’s lovely Dwelling of which I only have a QuickTime cutdown (and thanks to EAST 2002 for the cutdown — anyone with the DVD who wants to sell, please let me know — I missed out through indecision).

Looking for a new flat. I want one with aeroplanes…