Couple of things from yesterday. Laurie Spiegel posted a comment to an earlier posting, to let us know that her Harmonices Mundi is now avalaible on limited edition transparent vinyl. You can get it at (amongst other places) Forced Exposure. While elsewhere in the musical past, Jerry Nilson has posted tantilising excerpts of some live early performances by Eyeless in Gaza. Play loud.

And from the INSA list: “[...] the first experiment in learning the face-to-face communication patterns of a large group by equipping the people within the community with wearable sensing devices. The main contribution of this thesis is to have demonstrated the feasibility of learning social interactions from raw sensory data. In this thesis we have presented a framework for automatic modeling of face-to-face interactions, starting from the data collection methods and working up to computational methods for learning the structure and dynamics of social networks.” I haven’t read this yet. Looks interesting.

From a posting on the Freecooperation listserv today:

>Do you believe in the haptic potential of new technologies?
You touch your keyboard don’t you? Some linguistics:
‘hap’ in Dutch means to ‘have a bit’ or ‘to bite’.
hap hap they say to their children who do not want
to eat their overcooked broccoli.

We were in Amsterdam over the weekend. Go see Candida Höfer and Bert Nienhuis’s photo studies of libraries and their keepers at the Huis Marseille at Keizersgracht 401.

I’ve been obsessing, quietly, about what retro tech says to me. In my current mood, what I think it tells me, is something to which I’ve alluded previously — that once you (we) heft a particular tool and make it a part of your (our) extended being, a world of possibilities closes down around the other potentialities. It’s interesting looking back to the tech that failed, to see some other possibilities, many of which have never been explored subsequently. Or at least an excuse for geek nostalgia.

Any such exploration is half taxonomy (or tech tree, as its known in the god-gaming world), half virtual history (as its known to social theorists and historians with too much time on their hands) [1]. Endless avenues, although the one most directly relevant to Cluster is the virtual present where we ended up with Xanadu rather than the Web. I’m increasingly frustrated with HTML and its inheritors: great chunks of text which require serious time, effort and back-end coding to annotate, thread or version. Sigh. Yes, these are early days, but so was 1970-whenever when Ted Nelson was drawing his beautiful sketches of living documents. And those a damn sight better than this. Waiting for the Great Loop Forward…

Last night we went to the private view of A Changed World, an exhibition of work by second year students in an experimental printmaking course, at the Bankside Gallery. Some nice things, including this pig in a poke, and a video by Sara Yaghubi, which features some good hair. Lots of people taking pictures, with all manner of devices, of the art and each other in equal measure… wonder if the moblogging thing is really happening, or if not, where all those images end up … (photo by Anne-Fay).

We were at the ‘World Sneak Preview’ of Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed at the ICA tonight. Complimentary sake and sushi, a lovingly-prepared but very silly flipchart presentation from the producer about the politics of the world in which it is set, then the film. The technique is impressive — the city of Olympus is beautifully rendered, the battle set-pieces are fluidly choreographed and edited, the whole nicely balancing genre conventions and virtuoso hyper-realism. Although the first few minutes owe too much to The Matrix-meets-Avalon, and in parts (to my eye) the human characters suffer somewhat from traditional anime styling, Appleseed is something genuinely new in feature-length animation: detail everywhere, lovingly rendered, with sinuous tracking and editing.

Less successfully, the film contains way too much exposition (even without the flipchart!), in the style of some Russian epic from the 60s — I’ll be surprised if it makes it to American multiplexes without some trimming down. The music supervision also jarred: it was nice to see Basement Jaxx turning up for the premiere, but their music — and that of Oakenfold and the rest — on the soundtrack made no sense thematically or emotionally, and seemed to be just a hook for an international audience.

But if you can ignore the turgid moralising — which just slows down the action — the 3D animation and design (the mecha are great, while the Mobile Fortresses out-scale any city-stomping weapons platform I can remember) is stunning. All the big fast things were perfect. Go see it at a big cinema with decent Dolby when it’s on release next month, or get it on DVD (evidently scheduled for July) and turn up the sub-woofer.

My DVD of Decasia arrived today. I’m watching it tonight with the sound off (I haven’t bothered repatching since the Bryston went back). Very nice, although the print has quite a few transfer artifacts, which is a little ironic. I had forgotten that I still had my active subwoofer connected, which adds a certain something a few minutes after the nuns…