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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

The death of J.G. Ballard cannot pass without note. As a young man his books were incredibly influential on me, with their intensely symbolic Max Ernst-like landscapes, pathologically driven anti-heroes, and their willful coupling of rabid sexuality and technological fetishism.

But the enigmatic presence of the terrace city, with its crumbling galleries and internal courts encrusted by the giant thistles and wire moss, seemed a huge man-made artefact which militated against the super-real naturalism of the delta. However, the terrace city, like the delta, was moving backwards in time, the baroque tracery of the serpent deities along the friezes dissolving and being replaced by the intertwined tendrils of the moss-plants, the pseudo-organic forms made by man in the image of nature reverting to their original.

For example, I particularly remember reading Concrete Island and being dumbfounded by both the simplicity of the idea and the way Ballard was able to develop something so chilling, so plausible, from the mundanity of the initial premise. Even now I still occasionally think of Maitland as I negotiate motorway intersections:

Far from wanting this girl to help him escape from the island, he was using her for motives he had never before accepted, his need to be freed of the past, from his childhood, his wife and friends, with all their affections and demands, and to rove forever within the empty city of his mind.

The Drowned World, The Drought, Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, High Rise, Concrete Island, Super Cannes—to name but a few of my own personal favourites—all powerful novels that spoke in an utterly unique and unflinching contemporary voice:

Helen knelt across me, elbows pressed into the seat on either side of my head. I lay back, feeling the hot, scented vinyl. My hands pushed her skirt around her waist so that I could see the curve of her hips. I moved her slowly against me, pressing the shaft of my penis against her clitoris. Elements of her body, her square kneecaps below my elbows, her right breast jacked out of its brassiere cup, the small ulcer that marked the lower arc of her nipple, were framed against the cabin of the car. As I pressed the head of my penis against the neck of her uterus, in which I could feel a dead machine, her cap, I looked at the cabin around me. This small space was crowded with angular control surfaces and rounded sections of human bodies interacting in unfamiliar junctions, like the first act of homosexual intercourse inside an Apollo capsule.

Leaving the last words to Mr. Ballard himself:

We wait here, at the threshold of time and space, celebrating the identity and kinship of the particles within our bodies with those of the sun and stars, of our brief private times with the vast periods of the galaxies, with the total unifying time of the cosmos…

[Thanks to the G-Man for this one.]

A short film I made last year:

MP3 Player
I’ve updated the MP3 player again this month, so if you’re a returning visitor you may wish to refresh your browser now. For me the highlight of this month’s selection is The Beach Boys little-known car classic Cherry Cherry Coupe. Not because there’s anything particularly brilliant about the music—it’s just a typical early-Beach Boys mix of Chuck Berry filtered through Phil Spector and topped off with a stunning vocal arrangement, that’s all—but the lyrics are just great. They were written by Roger Christian, who wrote a whole set of mostly car-oriented songs for the group, the apogee of which is Little Deuce Coupe. Anyway, check this out for a couplet:

Door handles are off but you know I’ll never miss ‘em
They open when I want with a solenoid system.

Pure genius! Love the album cover too:

Yes, I know The Beach Boys are about as hip as Englebert Humperdink, but frankly my dear I don’t give a damn….

Jammy
I recently made some damson jam. This is my label for the jars, just quickly adapted from an earlier honey one:

News Wall
Whilst at the D&AD Xchange 07 conference Ulrich Proesel showed a slide of a wall from a village in India, where every week someone paints up a summary of the world’s news. My colleague John Hill was at the show with me and he had the idea of using this as the basis for a little project for the freshers. This was my contribution, based on a news photograph and executed with one 3/4″ inch brush, one propelling pencil (with eraser), one black board marker, and three small pots of emulsion:

Come on you monks!

MP3 Player
I updated the MP3 player last night with a new (eclectic, exotic, extravagant) playlist. Regular or returning visitors may need to refresh this page. Watch out, Ionisation starts very quietly.

I’ve also switched MP3 encoder for this set of tracks. I was using iTunes, but I’ve found a little freeware programme called Switch that has an excellent range of conversion options and a very straightforward user interface. It’s made by an Australian company called NCH Swift Sound Software who make an interesting and unusual range of reasonably-priced audio programs for Mac, PC, and PDAs. Check ‘em out…

Anyway, I’ve started encoding now in stereo at 160kbps, assuming most people are on broadband. If anyone experiences problems please let me know. Which leads me on nicely to:

Audio Quality
Back in June—here in fact—I commented on the widening gap in audio quality experienced by music producers and music consumers. This week The Guardian ran an article by Jack Schofield that discussed this very issue, although mostly in terms of the small market for SACD and DVD-A. However, he does offer this pertinent summary that reinforces my own observations:

We have become the audio version of a fast food nation, consuming low-quality music on the run never sitting down to savour a higher-quality experience.

Quite. Thanks for coming, and please feel free to leave a comment.

I did an unusual job last week for the South Wales Evening Post. They were running a story on a woman named Vanda Lewis who had been accused and convicted of benefits fraud. Most of the evidence had been gained from the CCTV system installed at the Neath Civic Centre, and the SWEP wanted to include excerpts from the footage as a video podcast.

I received a couple of CDs that included the CCTV footage. This isn’t actually video: the system is simply taking stills once a second. These are then played back within a proprietary software package that shows two camera feeds simultaneously:

The software appears to have been created by a company called Neurodynamics, but according to their website they’ve been bought out by a company called Virage (who in turn are owned by Autonomy). As you can see from the screenshot above, it’s just a basic utilitarian PC package. Aesthetics just don’t come into it. Beneath the generic transport buttons you can see the list of images: this list scrolls as the ‘footage’ plays.

The question was: how do we turn this stuff into video? There was no obvious way to do it from within the software: the images were all contained within a proprietary file, and the export button didn’t seem to do anything useful. I opted to simply to use some screen capture software, and in the end used Camtasia Studio 4. I’d never used it before, but with the help of their online tutorials was quickly able to get some usable output. Although I didn’t need it for this project, I also noted that it allowed you to output video in a custom Flash player—which is neat—and also allowed you to export SCORM-compatible e-learning materials! A well-thought out and very useful piece of software.

Quite an unusual little project, and one that gave me some insight into the rather clandestine world of these corporate surveillance companies. Of course issues of privacy and the state-sponsored monitoring of our activities are highly topical now, but I’m not sure I’ve got anything original or informative to add to the debate. However:

Because of the potential for being watched we begin to internalize the constraints of the system into our own behaviour patterns and our consciences: we in effect adopt the goals of the system.

Needless to say I found it all a bit spooky…

Back in January I had a good look at the iPhone and Jefferson Han’s work on multi-touch interfaces (here and here). And for those of you looking to gain some kind of contextualization on this fascinating and highly topical area of interface design I’ve recently come across Bill Buxton’s historical overview.

I casually mention these only by way of introduction to Microsoft’s (ahem) “new paradigm in computing”, the Surface computer. Here’s one of Microsoft’s own promotional videos:

For something a little more illuminating, and that briefly includes schematics showing the innards of the Surface:

And for the inner geek, here’s a full 18-minute test-drive of the thing:

Yes, it’s pretty impressive (although the thought of that bog-standard PC running Windows Vista hiding inside is a bit off-putting). Some thoughts:

1. It’s not clear how the security issues will work. I mean, have you ever transferred data from one device to another without generating security prompts? As these will be public devices it seems inconceivable that security will not be a huge issue, and yet not once do we see anyone even inputting a PIN number in any of the videos. As if!
2. Will all manufactured objects become ‘tagged’ in the near future to allow interfacing with surface computers?
3. If so, will there develop a universal tagging language that will be understood by all “surface-compatible” products?
4. Can we predict a new job description: Surface Designer?
5. I do think there is a certain inevitability about this type of product.
6. The ability of the Surface to act as a ‘docking station’ for mobile devices calls to mind one of McLuhan’s Laws of Media: if you push a technology to an extreme it flips over into it’s opposite. In other words, as mobile devices have gotten smaller and yet more powerful, the tendency for miniaturization flips over into single large device that many of them can simultaneously attach to like a Mother Ship.
7. Doesn’t the Microsoft Surface remind you of those black glass-topped gaming tables you used to find in pubs? Space Invaders, anyone?

Of course there are those who quite rightly question Microsoft’s presumptuous and overblown claims for their product: British multi-touch interface designer Andrew Fentem has a reasonable and well-argued critique of both Microsoft and Jefferson Han here. Fentem’s own Spaceman Technologies website is well worth checking out by multi-touch aficionados.

Finally, irresistibly, if only to puncture the corporate pomposity of Microsoft:

A few days ago I was asked by the South Wales Evening Post to record an interview with Lord Sebastian Coe. I met up with Post reporter Shaun Greaney at the Liberty Stadium and was ushered into a rather soulless reception room where the interviews were to take place. After giving speech elsewhere in the building he emerged (with small entourage) for interviews, and fortunately we were first up. I just set the equipment up and lounged on the sofa, from which vantage point I took a couple of photos with my N70:

From left to right we have Coe’s PA (I think), Lord Coe himself, Shaun Greaney with his back to the camera, and Neath Port Talbot council leader Derek Vaughan. On the table you can see the Audio Technica 4050 used for the recording, with a nice yellow mic lead snaking down to the Marantz PMD 660 sitting on the chair. The recording quality was fine, only slightly spoilt by the hum from the air-conditioning. Here’s the recording as it appeared on the podcast:

The podcast has disappeared from the Evening Post site now, but you can read Shaun Greaney’s reports here and here. Subjects talked about include business opportunities offered by the forthcoming 2012 Olympics for businesses in Wales, participation in sport, his feelings about his involvement in the 2012 Olympic bid, his ties with Swansea, and of course the already infamous £400,000 logo:

What nuggets of wisdom can I pass on from this little experience? Well:

• Always check and double-check your equipment before you go.
• Be nice to people. Know your place in the scheme of things.
• You never know what you’ll be up against, so be prepared to be flexible and adaptable.
• Get there on time.
• Keep record levels on the conservative side. You’ll lose a bit of quality, but you need to ensure you don’t get any overloading (which in this context is just plain fatal).
• When submitting your work, provide as many formats as possible.

Yes, I really enjoyed it. The beauty of this kind of work is that it’s live: there’s no room for mistakes and no going back. You need to be alert and thinking on your feet…

Thanks for coming. See ya!

MP3 Player
I’ve just updated all the tracks on the MP3 player. Return visitors may care to refresh their pages now…

Comments
Until now it has only been possible for registered Blogger users to post comments here: now anyone should be able to. Please use this facility wisely and constructively!

YouTube
I note with interest that YouTube have launched a series of regional sites, including a UK service. Apparently there are nine regional sites now, with more to follow. According to YouTube co-founder Steve Chen the aim of local sites was to offer tailored services for each country (full story here).

We want to create features unique to certain countries, so if mobile phones are particularly popular we would introduce more mobile features.

OK. Certainly having own-language sites makes sense. However, my guess is that:

1. This is going to make copyright negotiations a lot easier for them. Most copyright agreements are territory-specific, and of course the Internet has completely undermined that principle. Re-territorializing content is going to make content management a lot more straightforward: this is clearly becoming a big issue for them as lawyered-up media production companies sniff around Google’s vast cash mountain…
2. Presumably this also represents some kind of network reconfiguration designed to take the strain off the main site. Anyone who’s tried to upload a video recently will have noticed how slow this has become: it used to take 10 minutes or so for a video to become live, but recently that time has shot up to around 12 hours. The thumbnail from my POGO video took about three days to appear!

The Wild Wild West of the electric frontier just got some more fences.