They’re still making stylus-free laser turntables in Japan. I’ve never heard one, but look at its immodestly chunky styling: it must sound fantastic (and evidently it does). And just over $10,000 for the basic model. Still, it seems the only way to experience that retro vinyl patina without degrading the media at the same time. But isn’t that cheating? Part of the vinyl experience is the harrowing of the grooves with each playback, surely.

It’s the summer of Anticon in my house. Song of the week has to be this remix of Sole’s Plutonium. Look out for the white girl suicide bomber. Indeed.

Thinking more about glanceful interfaces, and the communication of complex multivariate datasets. For reasons I haven’t gotten around to writing about here yet, I’m veering towards sound cues for a lot of things, particularly binaurally-located vocal cues. I’m looking for a pipelining spatialiser using some simple head-related transfer function (HRTF) that I can feed audio into at approximately realtime. For ‘earcons’, simple samples are easy. For vocal cues, I’m thinking of using FESTIVAL. But I need the spatialiser, and I can’t find one that runs on Linux and accepts a stream input. Maybe I’ll have to hack something in Max. I’d rather not.

Brian’s lucid moments are as entertaining as his (um) other moments. He’s recently written a column about product development in our post-everything world:

The fact is, even in the present economic conditions, it?s never been easier to bring an idea to market.

Rem Koolhaas recently said that formal architectural training was a waste of time. If you can imagine a building, Ove Arup can build it. If you have a better idea for a laptop or flat panel television, OEM manufacturers can spec and build it for you. Need distribution? Allow me to introduce you to the web, and an account with DHL (who?ll even do your warehousing).

You don?t even need to be Pepsi to take on Coke any more. My brother in law, for God?s sake, is taking on Coca Cola with a new no-caffeine energy drink. It?s been formulated by a company in Germany to his specifications. It?s packaged and distributed by third parties. He runs the whole operation out of his spare room.

The point he is making is that the actual product design isn’t an issue. The hard part is the concept. His column is titled Ad agencies: Why aren’t you rich?, and he has a point. If agencies are so good at coming up with brands, and branding is the tough bit, why don’t they stop slaving for marketing drones in Slough and just create brands themselves (and, of course, get rich in the process)?

Turned out Banksy’s ‘event’ was just around the corner from here in Dalston. A few pictures before my camera died. It was a good weekend for art: also Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet at the White Cube, and the exhibition of Henry Wellcome’s extraordinary collection of things at the British Museum. And a mango lassi at the Rasa festival in Hannover Square.

More un-London, monsoon-like rain.

I am an enemy of symbols. Symbol is too narrow a concept for me in the sense that symbols exist in order to be deciphered. An artistic image on the other hand is not to be deciphered, it is an equivalent of the world around us. Rain in Solaris is not a symbol, it is only rain which at certain moment has particular significance to the hero. But it does not symbolise anything. It only expresses. This rain is an artistic image. Symbol for me is something too complicated.

Andrei Tarkovski, Interview Ein Feind der Symbolik with Irena Brezna in “tip” 1984 (3), pp. 197?205 [Pol. trans. Adam Sewen], quoted at Nostalghia.com

Brakhage DVDs arrived. Rage Net on Arcam FMJ DV27 to 42 inch plasma screen. Watch from a distance of about 10 inches. That and The Dante Quartet, which dissolves the screen. Fragments form and reform.

Ange Leccia’s La Mer. I’m not sure where I found this excerpt. The whole thing runs for an hour, and is mesmerisimg projected large. Saw this unexpected in a stairwell at the Palais de Tokyo a few years ago.

A question for glanceware practitioners: how to convey multivariate, multistate data at a glance. You have to choose media which we are very good at parsing at a glance. Chernoff faces were an early attempt at this. I guess music would be another good medium to explore. We want users to know things without necessarily knowing how they know, or when they were informed. At one level, glanceware should make knowledge transfer subliminal. Which itself raises the question of when and why we need to convey quantitative or qualitative information.

Imagine a glanceware system to monitor a stock portfolio. Do you need to know what price a given stock is at, or just to pick up, say, a feeling of unease about a particular sector, without necessarily knowing why, with the qualitative data being available to possibly a longer glance, or more conventional drilldown?

Heidegger makes the distinction between tools with are ‘ready-to-hand’ (zuhanden) and those which are ‘present-at-hand’ (vorhanden). We are, he says, only conscious of tools as tools when they are present-at-hand. When we are actively engaged in performing a task through use of the tool, we lose consciouness of the tool itself, which ‘withdraws’ into the task.

The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all… The peculiarity of what is proximally ready-to-hand is that, in its readiness-to-hand, it must, as it were, withdraw in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically. That with which our everyday dealings proximally dwell is not the tools themselves. On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves is primarily the work.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, quoted in Paul Dourish, Where The Action Is

But this assumes exclusive modalities: we are either performing a task or not. It seems to say little about a world in which we seek constant ambient awareness. We want the tool to withdraw into the task, certainly, but what is the task? The easy answer is that it is being-in-a-context: being-at-work, relaxing-at-home, escaping-on-holiday. Each of those roles would call for activation of a different set of tools, which then withdraw themselves into the actions appropriate to that role. But I don’t think thats how it is. Extended awareness is analagous to metatools such as language; the task is that of being-in-the-world. There isn’t an off button.

As Ben points out, it is strange that ubiquitous computing is mostly treated as an engineering problem. It is not impossible that, 8000 years ago, writing was conceived as the mostly technological issue of flint-sharpening.

[More on this later]