paulhazel.com

Check out this superb little film. As Peter Kirn says in his original post:

Sound design and recording quality are important, but in this film, directed by Henrik Hansen, each gesture of the sound mix is likewise deliberate and meticulously paced. There’s a reason some of the best editors are both film and sound editors.

Note there’s also an HD version on YouTube for full effect.

[Via Create Digital Music]

[Via Pixelsumo]

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Every from Coventry University. During the course of the meeting we were both in there was a good deal of discussion about engaging students in their University courses and retaining them on the course for the duration of the degree programme. A short while after the meeting, Peter sent me the link to a video that he’d made, documenting an experiment in teaching and learning that he and his colleagues had carried out at the beginning of this academic year. Here it is:

A few comments:

• A well-made little film, and a very good promotional tool for the Creative Computing team.
• Nice new building going up. I’m jealous…
• An interesting project taking students through the whole production cycle.
• A lot of emphasis on the social and  collaborative aspects of learning, and on individual and group identity. Equally, a relatively light touch on the technology.
• The video really highlights how unsuitable their current facilities are for the type of open, flexible, and student-centred learning that they are experimenting with. From my own experience these types of facilities are, unfortunately,  typical of most HE institutions (including where I work). This is a big issue in education, in my opinion: the learning environments to a large extent dictate the types of activities that go on in them, and they are conceptually way out of date.

So. All very thought-provoking. Thanks Peter.

Peter Every Links

Website:    http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~pevery/
Courses:    http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~pevery/cc/
Blog:         http://ccatcu.blogspot.com
Music:      http://www.neophyterecordings.com/

Absolutely exquisite:

[Via Grant Senior. Nice.]

About three weeks ago now—yeah, I know, but I’ve been busy—Chris Crawford delivered a ‘Masterclass On Interactivity’ at Swansea Metropolitan University.

Chris began with a light-hearted look back at the history of computing and, simultaneously, back over his career. Whilst offering a gentle introduction to the presentation and a chance to get to know him, the opening section did make on major point: that interactivity is what defines modern computing and, by extension, new media in general. The computer is an interaction machine.

Chris Crawford's home-made first "laptop."

Eastern Front 1941

Having set out his stall Chris went on to discuss the concept of interactivity. Firstly he said that the best example of interactivity—to which all machine interactions strive—was a human conversation: real-time, using all our senses, pure improvisation. From this observation he derives what I think is the best definition of interactivity I’ve come across: interactivity occurs when computer and user alternately listen, think, and speak.

The quality of the interaction is defined by the weakest element in that chain. For example, modern computer games are very good at ’speaking to us’—they look fabulous and they sound fabulous—but they’re not so good at thinking: very often the characters or the basic game AI is actually pretty dumb. Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 is a perfect example.

Computers are also not very good at ‘listening’ to us. Interaction with a computer is usually limited to a surprisingly small range of gestures and actions: pointing, clicking, dragging, etc.. Whilst multi-touch and gestural interfaces are widening that vocabulary, it remains very limited compared to what is possible with natural language. Chris suggested a Linguistic User Interface as being the future, in turn paving the way for the social aspects of interaction (and, by extension, the social aspects of gaming, evolving into what he calls “interactive storytelling”).

Only Four Mental Modules?

Although computers are good at ‘thinking’, Chris argued that the main limitation of computing was that it currently only used a small number of the “mental modules” we possess, the main ones being spatial reasoning, hand/eye coordination, resource management, and problem-solving. Crucially, our all-important social reasoning module was not challenged at all.

Star Wars considered as a social network.

Pacman considered as a social network

Summing up the first half of the presentation, Chris suggested that our current generation of computer games have developed as far as they can go, and that a separate industry will emerge exploiting the social aspect of the technologies.

***

After lunch Chris began by talking about the human predilection for talking about experience in terms of things rather than as a system of processes (nouns rather than verbs, data rather than algorithms). Interactivity is communication through process. He went on to talk about interactive storytelling environments where each use generated a new narrative instance, as opposed to our current paradigm where stories are fixed within a medium (novels, comics, films, TV programmes). Chris argued that these interactive stories—hypernarratives—would never achieve the polish of the story fixed within its medium, but that they would have much greater emotional impact because of their personal, individually generated, meaning.

For the final section of the afternoon, Chris talked about what the requirements were for the designer of these new interactive storytelling environments. This was Chris at his most overtly evangelical, throwing wide the doors of learning and revealing an endless landscape for exploration and discovery. Using Erasmus as an example, he very cleverly and humorously showed how little information there was on the Internet compared to that encoded in books. He showed how you could use equations that describe natural processes to model human interaction (for example, human attraction and repulsion convincingly modeled using spring compression equations). He tried to get as to look at the processes underlying the world we live in, not its surface features.

All This Goes In Here

Thing vs Process

Inevitably I have only offered a very brief overview of the contents of Chris’s Masterclass On Interactivity. The presentation was funny, inspirational, thought-provoking, and very, very, smart. Despite speaking for about 5 hours there was barely a moment that was less than engaging, and the whole audience was gripped throughout. As much as anything else, it was a masterclass on giving a presentation.

Thanks Chris. A privilege.

Chris Crawford Links

Storytron

Erasmatazz

Eastern Front: A Narrative History

Following his marvellous essay that I blogged here as The Future of Books? Craig Mod’s new essay considers the practicalities of e-reader design. Comparing iBooks and Kindle.app he simply asks “which one of these would you rather read with?” Here’s an image of the two with minimal chrome:

iBooks (left) and Kindle.app (right)

Typography, functionality, and the possible benefits offered by networking—aggregating data from reader’s behaviours—are also discussed.

Another excellent essay from Mod: go and read it. Even the comments are worth a look…

Jim who? Jim Reekes is the gentleman who designed many of the Mac system sounds including that start-up sound. This a recent interview with him (posted February 11th of this year) from a Dutch TV program called One More Thing:

A fascinating and amusing insight into the machinations of corporate culture. Interesting also to associate a personality to the sounds our machines make and which we inevitably take for granted.

[Via Create Digital Music]

On Tuesday 9th March I attended the Computational Turn conference at Swansea University. Very good it was too, with the wide range of speakers packed into a single day all having a diverse set of approaches to the main theme. Some of the papers were very challenging, and—whilst not all were of particular interest to me—many shone light into areas I had barely perceived previously, let alone considered in any deliberate way. The highlights of the day were the day’s two keynote speakers: N. Katherine Hayles opening the conference and Lev Manovich closing it.

N. Katherine Hayles

Hayles outlined the rationale for the “computational turn.” She began by asking how many books could we read in a lifetime. If we read one a day between the ages of 15 and 85, that turns out to be 25,550. Not many compared to the total number of books available. The question becomes, what if we could analyze a whole corpus of books—all the books ever written on WWII, say, or all the books written about Aristotle—using computers? What would this type of mass analysis reveal?

Of course the next question would have to be, an analysis on what basis? Computers can’t “read” in the same way humans can. They may be able to detect patterns in the data—frequency, repetition, structure—but that is a far cry from the type of hermeneutic interpretation that humans are so good at. Quoting Tim Lenoir, she suggests that we “forget meaning and follow the data streams.” Starting with meaning always embodies too many assumptions: if we start with the analytics we can work out what it all means later. She then went on to illustrate her thesis by showing the initial results of her computational analysis of Danielewski’s Only Revolutions.

The Q&A session ranged across a wide range of topics, all of which Hayles dealt with expertly:

• Nigel Thrift’s “technological unconscious” was discussed, the observation that assumptions and limitations are embedded within the technologies we use which are largely unnoticed and unseen. (An idea that seems very close to McLuhan’s theories about media.)
• There was talk of the “adaptive unconscious,” which posits a mind that is effectively a type of internal distributed network where the unconscious is not a Freudian dark place but an active participant in cognition and decision-making.
• There was talk of the “Baldwin Effect,” an elaboration on evolutionary theory which suggests that specific inherited traits are emphasized by cultural behaviour.
• Finally, Hayles talked of culture moving from a deep-attention mode (related to print) into a hyper-attention mode (related to electronic media).

All heady stuff. How some of these issues relates to the computational turn I’m not quite sure, but the whole session was never less than stimulating.

Lev Manovich

Lev Manovich’s talk was mainly concerned with his projects, all of which are related to visualizations of large bodies of visual data: one million Manga pages, all 3480 Time magazine covers, Vertov movies, the way saturation changes over time in modern painting. He also showed off the Cultural Analytics software his Software Studies initiative has been developing. Here’s one of his Manga visualizations (stolen from his CultureVis photostream):

Visualization of 50,000 Manga pages

The accompanying text reads:

X axis: Grey scale standard deviation (measured per page)
Y axis: Entropy (measured per page)

This visualization shows how cultural analytics approach allows us to map continuous style space of a cultural data set. In the current visualization, the pages which have more contrast appear on the right; the pages which have no grey tones but only black and white are on the bottom right; and the pages which have a full range of grey tone (and thus more “realism” ) on the top. Every page in the dataset is situated in the space defined by these extremes.

Here’s another example (from here) showing a subset of the Time magazine covers mapped out in the Cultural Analytics software:

Time Magazine analytics

The accompanying text reads:

Exploring a set of 450 Time covers (sampled from the complete set of 4553 covers 1923-2009 by taking every 10th image). Mousing over points reveals larger images and metadata.

I’ve only really presented here the bookends of the Computational Turn conference. There was much else of value, some of which I intend to follow up in my own work. A special thanks must go to Dr. David Berry for organizing the conference, for attracting such marvellous speakers to Swansea, and for the invitation. Thanks also to Sian Rees for coordinating the event and for providing such a warm welcome.