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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]

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…

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.

Craig Mod has just published a thoughtful, insightful, and beautifully-presented essay on the future of books in the digital era, using the emergence of devices like the Kindle and the iPad as his focus:

This essay could usefully be cross-referenced with Part 2 of Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics from 2000. In other words, some of what’s on offer here is not that new. However, the distinction between Formless and Definite Content is new (to me, at least) and provides a convincing armature around which the essay revolves. And if you need convincing about the inevitability of the move away from printed matter, here it is.

An excellent piece of work, highly recommended. The page must die!

Here’s a video of a presentation made by Bruce Sterling on 6th February 2010 at the Transmediale Futurity Now! festival in Berlin. The theme is “atemporality,” the sense that new media has moved us beyond modernism, beyond postmodernism, beyond all the “grand narratives” of traditional historical discourse. Sterling asks how we survive in this new environment and offers a range of never-less-than interesting and stimulating strategies for designers, artists, and academics. Here are a couple of taster quotes:

1) The Frankenstein Mashup (aka sampling, collage, bricolage):

So how do we just — like — sound out our new scene? What can we do to liven things up, especially as creative artists? Well, the immediate impulse is going to be the Frankenstein Mashup. Because that’s the native expression of network culture. The Frankenstein Mashup is to just take elements of past, present, and future and just collide ‘em together, in sort of a collage. More or less semi-randomly, like a Surrealist “exquisite corpse.” You can do useful and interesting things in that way, but I don’t really think that offers us a great deal. Even when it’s done very deftly, it tends to lead to the kind of levelling blandness of “World Music.” That kind of world music that’s middle-of-the-road disco music which includes pygmy nose-flutes or sitars. This kind of thing is tragically easy to do, but not really very effective. It’s cheap to do. It’s very punk rock. It’s very safety pins and plastic bags. But it’s missing a philosophical high-end…

2) Generative Art:

Then there are other elements which are native to our period that didn’t really work before, such as generative art. I take generative art quite seriously. I’d like to see it move into areas like generative law, or maybe generative philosophy. The thing I like about generative art is that it drains human intentionality out of the art project. Say, in generative manufacturing, you are writing code for a computer fabricator, and you yourself don’t know the outcome of this code. You do not know how it will physically manifest itself. Therefore you end up with creative objects that are bleached of human intent. Now there is tremendous artistic intent — within the software. But the software is not visible in the finished generative product. To me, it’s of great interest that these objects and designs and animations and so forth now exist among us. Because they are, in a strange way, divorced from any kind of historical ideology. They are just not human.

3) Gothic High-Tech vs Favela Chic:

We are in a period which I think is dominated by two great cultural signifiers. An analog system that belonged to our parents, which has been shot full of holes. It is the symbol of the ruined castle. Gothic High-Tech. The ruins of the unsustainable. And the other symbol is the favela slum, Favela Chic, the informalized, illegalized, heavily networked structure of the emergent new order. The things that the twenty first century is doing that are genuinely novel, that have not been domesticated or brought into sociality. The Gothic High-Tech and the Favela Chic. These are very obvious to me, as a novelist and creative artist. Perhaps you won’t see things this way — but I think the life-span of this will be about ten years. A new generation will arise who does not need things explained to them in this way. They will not wonder at a slogan like “Futurity Now!” because they will have never known anything different.

Fascinating stuff. Go for it:

[Via BoingBoing. Transcript of the speech here].

Whilst in London last week I walked back from the South Bank to Victoria on two consecutive evenings. As I walked down Victoria Street the first night I was looking into the reception areas and foyers of the all-but-deserted office buildings, the shops, the restaurants, and it struck me how odd these places were at night.

Consequently, the next night I decided to do something about it and zig-zagged my way up the street, quickly shooting into the interiors. I say quickly, because the security guards did not look all that amused about being photographed, and there has been at least one incident in London of the Police demanding that images be deleted from cameras in the interests of “security.” I’m not just being paranoid: that night the whole place was crawling with Police because of political demos in Trafalgar Square.

Anyway, here are a few of these strange interiors:

Foyer 1

Foyer 2

Foyer 3

Unlimited Shopping

Restaurant

Foyer 4

Objects Of Desire

Nighthawk

All very shiny, all very bright, all very modern. Completely soulless. What on earth do these spaces say about us (apart from the fact we love wasting energy…)?

How good is this?

[Thanks to Matt Ottewill for the link.]

I am again going to quote at some length from Donald Richie’s A Hundred Years Of Japanese Film, with the subject this time being Yamanaka Sadao’s exquisite 1937 film Humanity and Paper Balloons:

In the second sequence of the film—a lane outside the tenement—we find that the camera is placed level with the human eye and that all shots are economically edited along a single axis. In this, Yamanaka was certainly influenced by Ozu. Though there are asides during the length of this sequence (one of them is to introduce Unno, the masterless-samurai hero of the film), in the main the camera placement of each scene during the progress along the alley varies not at all—the angle coincides with the axis.

This way of working is not often seen in American or European films of the period because these scenes could be said to “not match,” also because their sequence violates one of the assumptions of international cinema style, namely, that a film progresses by opposing shots. Shots which are compositionally similar are thought to confuse, though this Yamanaka sequence is proof that this is not necessarily so. The theory about opposing shots seems to be based on a Western assumption that narrative can proceed only through conflict and confrontation, compositionally as well as otherwise. The idea of a narrative proceeding through harmony and similarity, not often encountered in Western cinema, is seen again and again in Japanese movies.

[...]

In showing us the tenement alley, the director moves along its length, shot after shot. A precise rendering of the street is given, a believable accounting of its space, a logical introduction of the characters, and the setting up of half of the spatial metaphor. This is the closed and crowded alley itself, which, though invaded by officials from time to time, is really the safer part of the world.

When the outside world (the town outside the tenement district) is delineated, we are given no such spatial grounding. We do not know the location of the pawnbroker’s house in relation to our alley, nor the location of the bridge where one of the main characters will be killed. The temple gate, the fairground, all these “outside” locations are separate, distinct, cut off from each other. They lack the continuity of the tenement, which we were shown whole and complete. Consequently, it is the tenement which feels safe, like home, and it is the outside which is dangerous, or alien. “Spatially, Yamanaka—having set up this opposition of spaces, having fully reticulated one and left the other carefully and threateningly unreticulated—has created for himself a bipolar structure.”

Comment
Well, with all due respect to the eminent Mr. Richie, there are some aspects of this section that I’m a little unhappy with.

Firstly, the terminology in the first paragraph is wrong. The sentence “the camera placement of each scene during the progress along the alley” should surely read “the camera placement in each shot during the progress along the alley.” This mistake is repeated in the first sentence of the next paragraph as well, but thereafter corrects itself. A strange lapse (and something his editor should have picked up).

Secondly, I don’t actually agree with the conclusions Mr. Richie draws from his observations. Yes, Yamanaka does construct these opening scenes from a series of overlapping shots that, in terms of strict Hollywood continuity-style editing, would be considered ‘wrong’ because they break the 30º rule (which is presumably what Richie means when he says the shots don’t “match”). And, yes, the vast majority of narratives constructed using continuity-style editing are heavily reliant on shot/reverse shot structuring.

From these initial observations he then goes on to say that Yamanaka is doing all this to create a “spatial metaphor” where this seamless and “compositionally similar” directing represents the unified and integrated community within the alley, in opposition to the world outside which is represented by Yamanaka as a series of locations that are “separate, distinct, cut off from each other.”

However, the shooting and editing styles do not change throughout the film. When Yamanaka has to shoot a similar type of scene in the “outside” world—and where the action is confined to a long narrow space such as an alley—he employs exactly the same type of shot structure and editing style as he does in the tenement. In other words, Yamanaka is not composing these scenes this way in order to express a “spatial metaphor,” it is simply a function of the types of spaces he is shooting in. For example, here is a sequence of stills from the opening tenement sequence that Richie describes:

Compare this now to a scene later in the film that is in Richie’s “outside world” but shot in a very similar type of space:

As you can see, a very similar overall style. There doesn’t seem to be any particular “spatial metaphor” at work here that would allow us to identify the two sequences as existing in different symbolic or psychological realms: we’re just shooting in alleys!

Isn’t there also a contradiction in Richie’s piece? First he says that the “idea of a narrative proceeding through harmony and similarity … is seen again and again in Japanese movies” but then later asserts that the creation of these two spaces—the safe tenement vs. the alien outside—creates “a bipolar structure.” Surely all narrative proceeds through conflict of some kind.

Oddly enough, I do agree with the basic opposition that Richie has observed, namely that Yamanaka plays off this cosy and communal tenement against the disjointed and harsh outside world, but I don’t believe this is expressed in the shooting and editing styles. For me, it is the emptiness and formality of the outside world that distinguishes it from the noisy and vibrant tenement.

But that, as they say, is another story.

Reference
Richie, D. (2005) A Hundred Years Of Japanese Film. Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha International (p.76)