Tim points this one out. This is exactly what I mean by glanceware. That it is entirely non-linguistic is even better. Know that you know something, without necessarily being aware how you know it. Their Stock Orb is exactly what I was proposing here.

There’s a lot of hype surrounding the current crop of Social Networking applications (LinkedIn, Friendster, Huminity etc.) But I’m wondering about a couple of issues. The first, is that there are too many of these systems, with no common architecture. How many times do I want to have to code my social network? Possibly once, probably not at all — let the software work it out for itself. Which is why I think Friend-Of-A-Friend architectures, which allow various spiders to work out the links for themselves, are ultimately better than an archipelago of unlinked proprietary systems.

The other concern is maybe slightly more fanciful, but I’m not so sure. It goes like this: social network applications will only succeed if they successfully proxy real-world behaviours, and efficiently surface patterns and structures within social networks. So, imagine the opportunities for marketeers. With a nice social network map to hand, it shouldn’t be too difficult to identify the all-important Bridgers/Connectors, and target them with a little brand seduction in an attempt to leverage their influence over their peers to tip over whole social subnets in favour of particular brands or memes. Of course, this is already part and parcel of any kind of real celebrity, but it isn’t something that most people have had to deal with. Imagine the day when you suddenly discover that your brand-new-best-friend is a spambod in the employ of a marketing communications company, being paid by the hour to change your brand loyalty, in the hope that you will then tip your network of friends and contacts over with you…

It is not certain what physical, chemical or neural mechanism causes or generates the changes in air pressure in or near the ear in response to various thoughts. It is hypothesized that various thoughts have varying intensities which cause involuntary muscle contractions or movements on a microscopic level in or near the ear, which generate pressure changes in or near the ear due to the compression of the air local to the ear. Nevertheless, regardless of the exact physical, chemical or neural mechanism, empirical testing has confirmed that thoughts generate small pressure changes in or near the ear of the person having the thoughts and that the air pressure changes have substantially their own signature and are thus substantially unique for each type of thought. Consequently, the air pressure changes can be monitored near the ear and used to detect the presence and type of thoughts of a user.

…according to US Patent 6,024,700, anyway.

John Gage recounts the story told by the painter William Williams in 1787 about an entomological illustrator who, “living in a remote country, unacquainted with artists, or any rational system of colours, with a patience that would have surmounted any difficulties, had collected a multiplicity of shells of colour, of every various tint that could be discerned in the wing of that beautiful insect [the butterfly]; for he had no idea that out of two he could make a third, by this method he had collected two large hampers full of shells, which he placed on each side of him, and sometimes the individual tint he wanted, was half a day’s labour to find out. What excellence must he have arrived at, had he known how to mix his tints.”

This and much more on the history of the attempt to systematise colour, at colorsystem.com, which isn’t simply history, but also

… a reminder of the choices we have in understanding the world — either empirically or theoretically, symbolically or scientifically. Although the principles described are universal, a desire to fragment and inflict change is also evident: we can take the light of the sun, direct it through a prism and then, like Newton, bend the resultant spectrum into a circle; a distortion that conforms with our own physiology, and creates a closed environment to facilitate the imposition of our own meaning on the world. On the other hand, we can simply observe the straight line of the visible spectrum as it runs from heat and infrared, and continues onwards to ultraviolet and radio energy; in other words, we can try to accept the world as it really is, and the secrets it contains..

Yet to have a proper look around there, but there’s some excellent stuff. Thanks to Stephen for this one.

Yesterday, Tsai Ming-liang’s short The Skywalk is Gone and feature Goodbye Dragon Inn at the London Film Festival. I’ve seen his The Hole before, and wasn’t impressed, but these, yesterday, were something special.

There are plenty of reviews of them around, pointing out the influences of Tati, Antonioni and the rest. But to me, the spirit of both films was more in the vein of Chris Morris: the long, weird scene with the smoking man at the row of urinals, the sinuous, nut-crunching girl, and much else in the feature, and the dénouement (if you could call it that) of the short could easily have been lifted straight from (a rather more formalist) Jam. Although seeing this bleak, sylised humour in an Asian film, I’m left wondering how much Morris himself has been influenced by the dark Japanese ‘comedies’ of the early Eighties, with their complex setups of social disconnection which lead nowhere, their pratfalls of nothingness tripping clumsily over itself…

Agricola, the seventeenth-century metallurgist [...] spoke of a juice (succus) that was a stone-forming spirit (lapidificus spiritus). Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, called it a “petrescent liquor,” from the Latin word petra, rock; and he thought there might be special juices for metals and other minerals [...] There were moments in the sevententh century when no one could admit that fossils might be the records of animals that lived before Biblical creation [...] It was supposed that “stone marrow” (merga) “dissolved and percolated” through the earth, sometimes forming bone shapes and other fossils. Alternatively, people thought that fossil shells had been real shells that were invaded by the stony liquor, a stone-forming spawn that seeped quietly up from the depths of the earth and overtook the slow and the dead.

James Elkins — What Painting Is, pp. 26-27

[The illustration of ammonites is from Boyle’s colleague Robert Hooke’s Lectures and Discourses of Earthquakes and Subterraneous Eruptions (1668?1700)]

I’ve been reading James Elkins’ (yes him again) What Painting Is. The book is about painting as the act of doing things with paint: the work towards the Work, as it were. Not about Art or Representation, or even stories about painters: the book tackles the viscous, tactile, impossible task of making something sublime through actions with oil, water, stone, pigment. There aren’t, he argues, art-critical ways of talking about painting at this level, and the book draws broadly from the language and practice of alchemy to navigate its way around these unspeakable things.

Elkins’ face-to-the-canvas discussion of the physical techniques behind, say, Monet’s gestural marks, has me thinking again about what it is I find so tedious about the Novel, as a form. It’s something similar — for me writing is work with words: and there are too few novels, where through the surface of the landscape of narrative, the jackstone knuckles of the words themselves are still visible, pressing upwards against the light: Pynchon, Faulkner, a few others…

Of course, this is a personal thing. I suspect it connects to my affinity for naked media. For me, the encounter with the thing in its thingness is worth effort.

And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

Victor Shklovsky — Art As Technique

Shklovsky’s defamiliarisation refers to something within the work, but applies also to the conditions within which we encounter it. I like having music happen to me, unexpected, unanticipated, hence my idea for the Radio-Of-Me. If I could construct the listening experience to present music even more directly as it is, as sound rather than music, then better yet (but it is difficult). The more directly we contact the work in its elements, then the better (to me) to feel it anew in its true selfness, or to feel what the elements (words, gestures, timbres over time…) do, being in themselves what they are. Or maybe I’m just not good at gestalts.