Rhizomatic, space-filling poetry from Bataille:

[...]the earth first opens to life the primary space of the waters and the surface of the ground. But life quickly takes possession of the air. To start with, it was important to enlarge the surface of the green substance of plants, which absorbs the radiant energy of light. The superposition of leaves in the air extends the volume of this substance considerably: In particular the structure of trees develops this possibility well beyond the level of the grasses. For their part the winged insects and the birds, in the wake of the pollens, invade the air.

Is that what we’re waiting for, liberation from our planar representations? That which follows in the wake of the pollens, and invades the air?

Ben emailed me to ask me something about the provenance of some of my Discreet Computing stuff, which led me to thinking (although I don’t think I’ve answered his question yet):

“There’s probably a riff to be done on how current tech burns away attention because of some link with the conspicuously consumptive assumptions of the business world — damn it I have 10,000 people in back offices staring at screens, and my machines are sucking the attention of that many minds, therefore I must be successful…”

In fact that might be the way in — computers (used the way we generally do, their incarnation as Big Beige Boxes) are the way we throw away attention which would otherwise have to be constructively expended.

I insist on the fact that there is generally no growth but only a luxurious squandering of energy in every form! The history of life on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exuberance; the dominant event is the development of luxury, the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life.

George Bataille, The Accursed Share Vol. 1

…so maybe the attentional suction we build into our tech is just our way of throwing our lives away, when we would be otherwise encountering some newly liberated way of being… well anyway, it’s a thought, and maybe at the root of why there is an economics of attention.”

Possibly this also touches on Tim’s question about why groupware is so depressing. Maybe it has to be, to properly consume attention.

OLEDs and epaper with the contrast and resolution of the real thing, foldable and flypost-able like the real thing. Wait til you see what I have in my pocket. And cinema is worrried about HDTV! Let pixel-perfect flowers of the new new media bloom. From Headmap:

The next generation of devices is going to give us new animals, less easilly defined with preconceived ideas

An out-of-content excerpt which fills me with a dreadful excitement.

Which reminds me. Banksy does live animals later this month.

Thanks to Tim for the neologism. Once you start looking, there are lots of possibilities for systems which make information amenable to a passing glance: everywhere can be mediated, if you have the right tools. Most work on ubiquitous and intimite comptuing has focussed on new technology to deliver pervasive networking and sensor-rich environments. I’m more interested in what we can do here and now, with a bit of thought, using cheapish, commoditised componemts and the occasional bit of hacking. Of which, Tim’s Homeland Security Alert Status glanceware desktop is a fine example. What could be more important than being able to determine the current likelihood of having a dirty nuke parked just around the corner, without having to waste precious seconds mousing though to a government website for confirmation. Glanceware gives you more time to run.

On a more practical level, I’ve been using the fine web-scraping service at myRSS to build glanceware for market intelligence. RSS is fine, but the majority of corporate news sites (at least here in the UK) haven’t woken up to it yet, and are unlikely to for some time. To solve the problem without having to write my own web-scraping system, I’m using myRSS, which enables anyone create, for free, publically available RSS feeds from ‘any website’. Well, from any which uses HTML in a predictable manner, anyway. For a fee, you can increase the frequency of update from daily to hourly, or get a hand-customised filter built for any of your sites. Fee-paying users also get credited as ’sponsors’ of the channels they create. Assuming myRSS catches on, early adopters will do well out of the visibility of their sponsorship. Ku24 is sponsoring hourly RSS feeds from the most important UK media news sites (currently including mad.co.uk, Brand Republic and BroadcastNews). I’m recouping the money by offering newsfeeds plus a newsticker (powered by wticker) as a Ku24 product. The feeds I’m sponsoring are available to anyone, but I can afford to cover the cost from the value-added ticker product, which feels like a reasonable way to make money from open-sourced information and technology.

Tim points out that there’s a new Criterion DVD of Stan Brakhage available. Good year for experimental film (so far). The ones I really really want to find are a couple of short things I saw at the London Film Makers’ Co-operative screenings in Camden about 10 years ago. I can’t remember the titles, but I think they were by John Tappendam, about whom I know nothing. One was black and white, high contrast, the other colour. Both were formalist things probably made by filming the shadows cast by hanging mobiles or similar. Very fine.

The bfi has released its Norman McLaren 2 DVD ‘Collector’s Edition’ set. Mine turned up today. Beautiful. Fantastic transfer, and good selection of films. Lines Horizontal (1961), Mosaic (1965) and Synchromy (1971) are extraordinary visual toccatas. Expensive, but worth it. Buy a video projector, tape down the curtains, and turn up the volume.

According to the BBC,

Japanese bookstores are set to launch a national campaign to stop so-called “digital shoplifting” by customers using the lastest camera-equipped mobile phones. The Japanese Magazine Publishers Association says the practice is “information theft” and it wants it stopped.

It is the kind of thing that most Japanese young women wouldn’t think twice about doing. The Japanese use their phones for much more than just calling. They might spot a new hairstyle or a new dress in a glossy fashion magazine and they want to know what their friends think — so they take a quick snap with their mobile phone camera and send everybody a picture.

which suggests that the Japanese are applying their cultural skill at appropriation at the micro- as well as macro-scale, busily setting nude media free from its embedded context…