Very nifty installation from the ICA running over the next three days [8-10 Oct]: Memory Cloud combines the 5,000 year old medium of smoke, with the 20th century medium of text messaging. Visitors can text any message they like to the artists’ creation, and that message will be grafted onto plumes of smoke and lit up for display in Trafalgar Square.
The method of textual inscription works with light as virtual ink that perceptually writes and erases through a cinematic interplay with the external environment. Memory Cloud aims to motivate social interaction through the construction of an environment that is given form through a collective act of writing space.
Alongside the predictable marriage proposals, pop philosophy and jokey messages, you might expect that brands would try and hijack this: hence advertising and political messages are off limits.
Either way, I love it when old meets new. Very cool.
You might remember the novel in its earlier form; it had a cover, and many pages, forethought of plot, editors and agents weighing in, and, oh yes, it generally had sentences and punctuation. And, finally, some poor suckers had to take the time out of their busy days to actually read it…
…Who has time for all those niceties? They’re so first half of 2008.
In my case, I’ve for the last two months been using Twitter to write a real-time thriller. Hence: Twiller.
However, while the technology might be new, as I’ve previously observed, the microblogged novel follows in that grand tradition of serialised fiction which was the height of fashion in the Victorian era. The fact that the greatest novelists of the time (such as Dickens, Eliot & Thackeray) chose to publish their newest works of fiction in installment - which was more affordable than purchasing bound hardcover books - democratised the consumption of fiction, sparking growth in the number of people desiring to read, and also in literacy rates.
Yet other forms of Twitlit are striking out in an entirely new model - self contained content in microformats. Copyblogger’s Twitter writing contest and Smithereen’s Can you put the wit in Twitter? respectively challenged participants to tell a short story and come up with witty wordplay in 140 characters.
Will this catch on?
Well, let’s check out the winners:
Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill.
Nowadays who we are - or at least how others perceive us - is increasingly defined by our online identity.
Our own personal histories are recorded on our blogs, twitter feeds, flickr streams, youtube channels, facebook pages and the like. We can create and shape our personal record, to build up a picture of the life we lead and ultimately who we are.
Of course, this isn’t a new behaviour, since people have been recording diaries, family histories and photo albums for years - it’s just the technology that’s new, making it easier than ever to record our personal histories for posterity.
But it’s also allowed us to record the history of others who went before us - who weren’t able to leave their own personal records.
In the case of me and my family, I’m thinking of Yad Vashem, the foundation which documents the history the history of the Holocaust period and seeks to preserve the memory and story of its six million victims. They’ve set up a central database to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, which features the following quotation on its front page:
“…I should like someone to remember that there once lived a person named David Berger”
David Berger in his last letter, Vilna 1941
It’s an attempt to reconstruct the names and stories of those who died in the Holocaust, featuring an estimated three million names. As such, building the database is a work in progress, which they’ve opened up to contributions from the public to help them build it further. Families and friends are encouraged to submit unrecorded names, and to add any further details to existing records so that their histories may be recorded.
Most of the Lindemann family was lucky enough to have been able to flee Nazi Germany, and it’s thanks to their escape that I’m here. My great great uncle Nathan was not so lucky, and was taken to a camp in Riga for the crime of being a Jew.
But thanks to the database at Yad Vashem, we’ve been able to add to Nathan Lindemann’s listing - submitting information about who he was in life, and uploading a photo to give a face to his record.
“When the Nazis rounded us up, they took away our names and gave us numbers. What we are doing here is taking away the numbers and giving them back their names.”
Arthur Kurzweil
It’s immensely pleasing that technology has allowed us to record his history so that his identity should be recorded for posterity, and that his memory may live on.
Our online identities aren’t who we are - they’re just one window into our personalities, and who we are in life may be very different from who we are online. But for those who aren’t able to record their own histories, an online identity is pretty bloody powerful.
And now the Power of Information Task Force has launched Show Us a Better Way on behalf of the government, to encourage the development of new products that could improve the way public information is communicated.
Which has elicited some fantastic ideas - such as WhatWentWhere, an interactive map showing what public money was spent on what services where, or Access to Health, providing public transport links to services on NHS Choices.
But the Guardian thinks it’s about bloody time. Their Free our Data campaign has been lobbying for our public data to be made available since 2006. Give us back our crown jewels first highlighted the fact that government-funded and approved agencies such as the Ordnance Survey and UK Hydrographic Office and Highways Agency are government-owned agencies who collect data on our behalf. They’re part-funded by taxpayers, yet have historically charged for this data, with onerous copyright restrictions that restrict the number and variety of organisations that can offer services based on that most useful data.
In comparison, the US has made the data it collects available and free to all:
It is no accident that it is also the country that has seen the rise of multiple mapping services (such as Google Maps, Microsoft’s MapPoint and Yahoo Maps) and other services - “mashups” - that mesh government-generated data with information created by the companies. The US takes the attitude that data collected using taxpayers’ money should be provided to taxpayers free. And a detailed study shows that the UK’s closed attitude to its data means we lose out on commercial opportunities, and even hold back scientific research in fields such as climate change.
As well as stifling innovation, it led to farcical situations as a local authority having to pay Royal Mail £3,000 for every website that includes the facility for people to look up their postcodes, despite it being that very same local authority that collected much of this data in the first place.
So the Guardian have welcomed the launch of Show Us a Better Way as a fantastic first step of providing the public with the data that is rightfully theirs, to allow the wisdom of crowds to truly innovate and provide us with tools and products to utilise our data to its fullest.
Only there’s a snag - the data’s only available for the purpose of the competition.
However, as the authors point out, “history shows that once a piece of information enters the public domain, it is hard to persuade people that it should be taken out again.
Just discovered a lovely twitter bot, called Recom.me
You send a message using @recomme or direct message recomme with a single artist name and it’ll use The Echo Nest’s Recommend API to trawl through last.fm and various other sources for other artists it thinks you might like.
I tweeted “Hot Chip”, it thought I might like New Young Pony Club, Junior Boys, The Rapture, Datarock, Cut Copy, LCD Soundsystem, Fujiya & Miyagi, Gabby Glaser, Ghosts, Klint, Simian, Acetate Zero & Doleful Lions.
It currently offers links through to find their music at Amazon, eMusic, Google or Echotron, but I imagine the next step will be to link users directly through to the music files itself (perhaps linking with one of these services).
This is a post that’s been brewing a while, so by now I’m sure you’re all too aware that Muxtape is no more, and it would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for that meddling RIAA.
David Porter, founder of 8tracks (more below) reckons it was only a matter of time before the RIAA brought it down:
“I (too) love the user experience of Muxtape - however, there really was no ‘gray area’ regarding the legality of the service. It’s an on-demand offering, and that requires direct licenses….which cost around $.01/stream and require fairly substantial upfronts.”
However, EFF lawyer Fred von Lohmann says this is basically bollocks:
“Porter is wrong about the legality of Muxtape. As I understand it, all the content on Muxtape is uploaded by users, which means it qualifies for the same protections that YouTube and every other UGC site enjoys under the DMCA safe harbors (but they have to have “notice and takedown” and a policy for terminating users who repeatedly infringe — I have no idea whether Muxtape followed these requirements). This issue would have been the key question in the Warner v iMeem lawsuit, but that one settled before we got any answers. It’s also the centerpiece of the Viacom v YouTube case.”
What’ll fill the Muxtape-shaped hole (and be the next service the RIAA come after?) Well here are a few for starters:
Lets you upload 8 tracks (with no more than two by the same artists), which are then streamed sequentially, so as to qualify for SoundExchange’s royalty rates for small webcasters - and which you can then embed elsewhere online
Rather than uploading your own tunes, Mixwit lets users create embeddable mixes from the catalogue provided by SeeqPod and Skeemr - Mixwit claim it’s all above board because they pledge to take down any copyrighted materials on request from the copyright holder. Also lets you customise your digital mixtape with your own pictures, artwork, photos etc. All fine and dandy except that the ‘catalogue’ simply scrapes mp3 blogs, music directories etc, so the mix you create is largely dependent on what’s available.
OpenTape picks off where Muxtape left off. It’s borrowed the (publicly available) UI code from Muxtape, and created a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own Muxtape-style mixtapes. Muxtape’s achilles heel was that they hosted the content on their servers, so the RIAA had one target to go for. OpenTape still have the same issue of copyright infringement, except that the individual users host the content themselves, meaning that the RIAA have the same issue as they do with Limewire, i.e. the tool itself isn’t the problem, it’s whether its users choose to infringe copyright or not. And if the users do, that’s an awful lot of people to go after.
Imeem claims to be the “number one in social music”, and became the first social network to strike revenue-sharing deals with the big four labels (Universal, Sony BMG, Warner & EMI), along with a deal with Viacom to show videos from Comedy Central, MTV and VH1 - and lets you create embeddable playlists. Most certainly a different beast to the young upstarts listed above, it’s predicated upon the model of revenue generation (in partnership with the labels) rather than the simple provision of tools or applications to enable users to share their music.
Who’ll win out? Is the future in co-operation with the labels, the model employed by Imeem, the forthcoming Myspace Music and We7. Or will the challengers - the Opentapes, the Blip.fms the Limewires win out?
My other half, surprisingly for a record producer is wholly on the side of the underdogs, because, as he’s said “I come from the direction of someone whose living is from money from people buying music, but I can still see they’re getting it so badly wrong, I’m against how the labels and the RIAA are behaving as much as the next person”.
As Chris Anderson outlines in his Taxonomy of Free, the tide of free and open sharing of music is too great for the labels and RIAA to turn back:
A taxonomy of free: Zero marginal cost
What’s free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.
This describes nothing so well as online music. Between digital reproduction and peer-to-peer distribution, the real cost of distributing music has truly hit bottom. This is a case where the product has become free because of sheer economic gravity, with or without a business model. That force is so powerful that laws, guilt trips, DRM, and every other barrier to piracy the labels can think of have failed. Some artists give away their music online as a way of marketing concerts, merchandise, licensing, and other paid fare.
The cost of distribution is close to zero, but artists can’t and won’t make music for nothing - but blocking the sharing of music isn’t going to turn back the tide.
Whether it’s giving your music for free to encourage paid sales (like Radiohead), giving it away to make money from touring and merchandise (like NiN), selling it outright to a media partner for exclusive distribution rights (like Prince) or whatever the next experiment in tweaking the model will be, simply blocking the sharing of music isn’t going to hold back the tide.
But what’s the bet that the RIAA keep on trying anyway?
And this isn’t even a ‘proper’ ad, yet it’s possibly my favourite ad on TV at the moment. It’s a filler from DEFRA, so unlike a standard government TV ad - which runs in commercially-purchased airtime like any other advertiser - it’s a public information film which will only end up running when the broadcasters have an unexpected gap in their schedule or in place of their programme trails.
Which also means it’s not made by a creative agency - it’s made in-house by COI. Which I’m sure the majority of the creative community will say is clearly evidenced by the quality of the ad. (A bit like the response to the latest TNCC ad, which runs a close second IMO, but what do I know?)
But come on. It’s got singing cheese. And dancing prawns. And let’s not forget that they follow in the footsteps of greatness. If it was good enough for Jim Henson, it’s good enough for me.
[ Oh and sadly I’ve not actually been on holiday since my last post, although a month-long break would have been great…..Instead I had a wonderful trip, and came back head first into a pitch, thus blogging fell down the agenda below eating and sleeping when not slogging away in pitch world. Though it paid off - we won, yippee!]
Off on holiday for a much needed break - hoping to come back well-rested, having got through a pile of books, a bit less pasty, and a lot more bendy (it’s a yoga holiday!)
Hi. I'm Katy Lindemann and kitschbitch is a home for things that interest me, which I hope may also interest you - bits 'n' pieces from on and off the interweb and my own thoughts about planning, communications, media, music, art, geeky stuff and so on ...more
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