Russell Davies

we love technology - part two

When I was growing up a big point in the week would always be the arrival of The Observer newspaper on a Sunday. The two bits I devoured immediately were Clive James' TV reviews and Tim Hunkin's Rudiments Of Wisdom. The Clive James stuff appealed to the pop culturist wannabe writer in me and I loved The Rudiments of Wisdom because I wanted to be an engineer, like my Dad. The education system and my own laziness forced me to choose between the two and I plumped for the non-mechanical arts, but I still loved Tim Hunkin.

After the rudiments were phased out of The Observer (probably in favour of some specious holistic doctor) Mr Hunkin popped up next on BBC2 with a brilliant homebrew-looking series called The Secret Life Of Machines.  But that was in the days where you watched a TV programme and then it just disappeared, you never saw it again. And he did some stuff with the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, I remember seeing some of his machines in Covent Garden (I think). And then I got more and more swallowed up with the digital and I stopped thinking about building Hunkin machines.

But then, earlier this year, I bumped into Hukin-ness again at KInetica and read about his amusement arcade at Southwold Pier. And I got all excited again. And then I saw he was talking at We Love Technology and started to think of it as a pilgrimage.

He didn't disappoint. What a lovely man.

He pointed out that amusement arcades are in terrible decline at the moment. Video gaming at home is as good as you can get in most arcades and the relaxation in gambling laws means that more and more arcade territory is being given over to gaming machines. There's not a lot of investment in gaming fun. So, he thought, what could be a better time to reinvent the arcade? And he happened to live close to Southwold Pier and was given the chance to run the arcade there, so he did.

He's clearly always been a builder and a tinkerer but I think the thing that makes him different is this very clear thought - 'the best machine to make is a machine that makes you laugh'. That might be why his machines are so much more successful than other things you might think of as 'media art'. In the same way that comedy is clearly a higher and more difficult art than straight drama then making a machine that makes you laugh is a more interesting discipline than some media project that's designed to 'provoke' or 'make you think' or 'challenge contemporary notions or interpersonal modality'.

And, of course, the joy of his  laugh-making machine success is that he doesn't have to apply for grants or talk in the language of funding applications. He justs goes and empties the cash out of his machines every week and makes a living at it. There's a purity of purpose to that which I imagine is very satisfying.

He's got a few machines which act like funny simulators - they simulate walking the dog, or compress a package holiday into three minutes. He said that he never bothers trying to match the movement on the screen with the wobbling of the seat - he reckons that if you wobble the seat a bit and there's some movement on the screen that's all you need to create enough illusion for you to get immersed. I like that. I bet there's lots of parallels with other things in there somewhere. Don't work to hard on making something believable, make it entertaining and  the brain will fill it all in for you.

He also talked about the value of re-using stuff, not starting from scratch. In a very pratical way. A lot of his machines are built on the bones and frames of pre-existing machines - Atari things or treadmills or whathaveyou, and they've already invested millions of dollars in making sure those things comply with health and saftey regs etc. Which means that Mr Hunkin doesn't have to worry so much about that stuff.

The other big moment for me was his passion for working with his hands, he's recently taught himself to use CAD but he says he can't do it for long, he just yearns to get out in the shed 'thinking with my hands'. Apparently he's tried to get permission to go into schools and teach kids to use powertools (which are very rewarding when your hands are too small to do a lot) but most schools are frightened of the idea. Powertools for kids! I could get behind that as a campaign. (Along with Medium Amounts Of Things!)

But the key thing I got from Mr Hunkin - enthusiasm = good. Anyone fancy a day-trip to Southwold Pier sometime?

This was good stuff too. Plasticity is a an 'urban planning toy' -they've modeled Bradford city centre on the Unreal Engine (so it looks like a video game, it, sort of, is a video game) and you (or your character) can wonder around looking at and playing with the architecture. Though I like the way Mr Manthorp put it "if accurately models an urban centre and then allows you to monkey with it". I think that expresses the way they'd taken a very serious  project and rendered it playful, and therefore more useful.

The introduction of nice British colloquialisms into techtalk is a good thing. Reminds me of the folksy hunt for a British version of 'beta'.

And then, that was it for the day because James arrived, tried to sneak in, got spotted and ejected so we went and had a cup of tea in Huddersfield Open Market, which is a fantastic place.

All in all a brilliant day, I think I got the same things out of it that Iain did. Must go again next year.
 

we love technology - part one

As I said, I went with some chaps from Poke to a splendid conference called We Love Technology in Huddersfield on Thursday. (And, in passing, I might say that the fact that they go to things like this is one of the things that make Poke good.)

I didn't really know what to expect from it, didn't know anything of the people who were talking there, except that I'm a long-time worshipper of Tim Hunkin, (more of him later) but I knew it was going to be good when I saw they'd put a little food order pad in the attendees pack. The perfect thing for taking notes, cheap, the right size and lovely to write on. I wish we'd thought of that for Interesting. (My notes in full, with added notes are here, if you're interested.)

The thing I liked most about it all was that it was a tube popping up into a world I'd not really visited before. (Or a bridge.) It was the world of digital art, of stuff that's made by people who've received grants or 'funding' and who have different issues and approaches from those I'm used to. It was really refreshing to look at the world that way for a bit. (Again, Mr Hunkin was an exception, but, as I say, more of that later.) There was a rigour and dedication to it all which I loved. These were people who seemed to have built a life doing what they loved.

The whole thing was to be compered by Matt Locke but he'd been struck by lurgy and was replaced by Steve Manthorp who did an excellent job. But I presume Mr Locke had a hand in programming the thing, and if so, hats off to him.

Steve Manthorp started off with a list of ten things he loved about technology. It was a very good list. These are the things that stood out for me:

BEAMbots. I was sitting quite a long way back for this bit and couldn't really see the screen properly, and I didn't really hear either so I only caught a vague glimpse of it and couldn't quite tell what he said. Beadbots? Beanbots? (I love it when this happens. This is often how good ideas happen. You misunderstand something and are therefore forced to think through an incongruity - trying to make sense of something nonsensical - from this you tend to get good ideas, because you have to find something novel that closes a gap.)  So in trying to imagine what beadbots or beanbots might be I thought of something half-way between jewelery and  lego mindstorms, not in an etsy sort of way, but something both functional and playful, like a rudimentary technological familiar.

I was, of course, wrong.

BEAM it turns out, stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics and it's a school of robotics that uses simple technological stuff to do relatively simple things but with great ingenuity and bags of charm. A lot of the charm seeming to come from the fact that they're deliberately modeled on the behaviours and characteristics of natural organisms, and they're often solar-powered and light-seeking, which gives them a sweet sense of purpose. As you can see, I don't know much about these things, except they're good and I've ordered a kit from here.

I mentioned semi-living worry dolls yesterday. The phrase still bangs round my head. I suspect it's one of the things that will stop me signing on permanently with a large corporation again. Until the phrase, big-pension-go-home-early crowds it out.

You probably all know about wikileaks but I'd completely missed it. What a brilliant idea. Go have a look. This chimed again for me in the afternoon as I was chatting with James Boardwell, who knows far more than me about how things of the web are actually made. I'd never really thought about the fact that wikipedia isn't just built on a tremendous social insight about the power of co-operation but that it's also technologically very smart, and that it's ability to scale and disambiguate (dread word) could provide useful models for all sorts of things. (Though it's probable I've misunderstood something in there.)

And then there's the Hansen Writing Ball. I don't like sticking images on here that I didn't make myself or don't have permission to use. But this thing is so beautiful I couldn't resist. This picture is from the Virtual Typewriter Museum and there are a ton more there so go and see. The Hansen is a very early typing machine and it proof that, at least in terms of aesthetics, word-processing has been going backwards since 1867. Nietzsche was apparently a fan of the writing ball and called it a schreibkugel. Thinking of him banging his words out on here somehow makes you appreciate them more.

Usman Haque was up next. I ususally find the discussion of architecture impenetrably dense. And this wasn't. But it was quite dense. Dense enough that I don't think I got it all and I may have made up my own meaning, as discussed previously. His big point seemed to be that technology used to mean a science or description of how something worked and now it tends to mean the object itself. ie we talk about an ipod as a great bit of technology but we don't talk about a frog as a great bit of biology. I guess that's true. What seemed interesting about that was Mr Haque's suggestion that what was stimulating and useful to think about was the larger system that something was part of, not the object itself.

I understood this most when he said that when we claim to build technology that's inspired by biology we're fooling ourselves, because we tend to be inspired by biological objects not broader biological systems. (I guess, my summary would be that we design stuff that looks like a frog, we should design stuff that works like a pond.) Biology is the process, not the object. We should copy that.

There's an echo of this in Matt's thought from Interesting about scales, and the quote he shared from Eliel Saarinen - "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." It also seems connected to Cradle To Cradle thinking, which I guess is also about thinking about the next largest context, but in time, not space. And I'm sure there's all sorts of clever experience design stuff that thinks about all this, but I don't know what it is. (He also pointed us at howstuffismade.org which is an interesting picture of the future for manufacturers of anything and again illustrates the simple power of a wiki.) There's probably a connection to this too.

The best bit about this talk was that it inspired me to look at Mr Haque's work and it's fascinating. Strange, imaginative, low-tech and normal. And only slightly drenched in jargon. I'd like to see more of it in the world. There's also a video interview with Mr Haque at the redoubtable PingMag which is worth looking at. (And I've just noticed that there's a write-up of this talk at We Make Money Not Art, and Regine was clearly taking better notes than me.)

Mirjam Struppek was up next and she immediately made me feel very old by telling us about the project that had made her fall in love with technology, many years ago, in 2001.  Good grief. That project was blinkenlights. I'm sure we all remember this and most of us probably think of it as a cool, hacky thing that you read about in Wired, Ms Struppek pointed out though the socially transformative effect it had on the square where they did it, which hadn't really occurred to me before.

She's also made me look at urban screens more carefully. As she points out so many are co-opted for commerce but have the potential to do other things, potentially more interesting things for the city they're in. Again, I didn't follow a lot of what she said, but it's made me want to think about it more.

Last before lunch was Julius Popp, and he was excellent too. He makes robotic/technological things as art, they have a simple, graceful, elegant quality. (Though being shallow fools it's both Iain are I were immediately taken with his exotic continental spelling. It does sort of matter though, technologie is somehow different to technology and mashines somehow more exotic than machines. It's like magick and magic. Spelling matters.)

I liked micro.adam and micro.eva a lot. Robots designed to adapt to a single factor - gravity - but the big thing he talked about was his bit.fall project. It's a hard thing to explain, perhaps the simplest thing is to imagine it as a huge printer that uses falling drops of water as pixels in a temporary display. But then that's the genius of YouTube, I don't have to explain it, you can just watch it:

Lovely isn't it? The text is generated through an algorithm that searches the web for buzzwords, I think the whole thing is supposed to be about the temporariness of ourselves and our culture, the changability of the flow of information and a nice thought about the haziness of our 'personhood'. (A theme in Popp's work which I think he stems from a childhood incident which meant he lost consciousness and became acutely aware of the fragility of person-ness. Or something like that.)

I liked Popp's modesty and ruefulness in the face of public reaction to his work. He's trying to make serious and thought-provoking stuff but the form he's chosen - words written in falling drops of water - can't help but make people smile. I liked his shrug in the face of that. You also have to admire his quiet persistance in pursuit of his vision. The finished product looks incredibly simple but it's obviously taken him years of work to do; unexciting, determined work. You've also got to respect his wish to keep it un-commercial since I bet every marketing person who looks at is immediately imagines it as an advertising medium.

I got home from the conference, was looking at his site, and admiring his singular persistance in making this thing work when I read about this. I do hope he's not going to be rolled over by MIT.

I think not though. He's already working on bit.flow which uses water in tubes to create robots which can make 3D images with water and examine their own behaivour. Good man. Excellent stuff.

This is turning into a long post. Maybe I'll do the afternoon later. Must do some work now.

Then we had lunch.

church times

One of the things I like about living and working in London is that whenever you're early for something (and I like to be early) there's almost always a fantastic church nearby where you can go and soak in calming architecture for 5 minutes. Went to the Farm Street Church this morning and it's lovely, acted as a nice counter-balance to the low level of contemplation and reflection in most of my appointments. I'm extremely not religious but church architecture still has the power to slow you down for a minute.

sunday twittering

I've enjoyed the tweets I've been getting today. They've added up to a perfect portrait of a British Summer Sunday.

"I napped and read comics instead of working" - "Falling in love with strangers on the tube" - "Watching the shadows lengthen in the garden and listening to the jingle of an ice cream van" - "Royalty, retired tennis players and Bryan Ferry" - "Making refried beans out of value baked beans" - "On way home after wet but lovely welsh camping weekend" - "Cuppa then a short summer stroll (in the wind and the rain)" - "Sausages etc"

Rory's written smartly about twitter and facebook here and I'm sure there's all sorts of compelling herdy reasons why they work, but there's also just something beguiling in the way that people can use a few words to evoke their lives. It's lovely.

new piccadilly memories

So it looks from the discussion here like the New Piccadilly is finally going to close its doors around the 22nd or 23rd of September. A sad day. I'm sure many people will be visiting to pay some final respects to the place, and many more will have great pictures sitting in a shoebox or on a hard drive somewhere. I thought it'd be nice to commemorate the place in pictures so I created a public flickr group called New Piccadilly Memories where anyone can stick this stuff, pictures or stories or thoughts. I think it'd be a good way to celebrate the home of many good meals.

this is tomorrow

I've just come back from the first outing of a fantastic film called This Is Tomorrow, made more fantastic because it was at the place it was about (if that makes sense) - The Royal Festival Hall. And the music was performed live by Saint Etienne and a youth choir and orchestra. The evening had all the ingredients guaranteed to bring a lump to the throat; school orchestra children waving at their parents, lots of bunting and a glorious vision of a socialist utopia. Really good stuff. It had a lot of the spirit of one of those post-war films made by the GPO film unit; it is, after all, celebrating a governmental/commercial enterprise, it should theoretically be weighed down by the dread hands of bureaucracy and commerce, but instead it had the same lightness of touch and awareness of the beauty of the ordinary of those GPO films.

I wonder also if some of the affection I have for bunting comes from soaking in Festival Of Britain things over the years, I think we caught something of the spirit of the festival at Interesting, and maybe it was to do with the bunting.

writing about advertising

When I left Nike one of the things I wanted to try my hand at was writing for money. It'd always been a little dream to be writer, but I've always been too lazy/nervous/crap to do it. Blogging made it possible, it led to the Campaign thing and today they're letting me try a new experiment; 'live-blogging' for Campaign from a seminar in Cannes. It's going to be interesting. I've managed to avoid Cannes for my whole career but now someone's paying me to go I'm quite interested to see what it'll be like, because I'm going to feel like an outsider. And with any luck I might get to meet Rob for the first time. Of course the grim reality of it is that I had to be up at 4.30 this morning and I'm typing this at 6am in Terminal One at Heathrow. Still, I'm managing to convince myself it's a bit more glamorous than usual because I'm being 'a writer', not just going to present some nonsense or other to someone, but obviously that's a delusion.

(I'm quite liking the meta-ness of this; blogging about blogging. Maybe I should do a Campaign column about it and blog about that.)

multumesc

Got back from Bucharest yesteday, had a great few days there with Iain and Faris, who've both written about it better than I could. I'd just like to say that if you ever get the chance to go there, you should, it's not got the glamour of Budapest or Prague but it's a fascinating city and the people are talented and creative and funny. It's always a good trip.

And it's also worth saying, if you're ever stuck in an airport, you should have Faris with you...

faris juggling at the airport from russelldavies on Vimeo

oh lay your hands

One of the depressing things about getting old is all the bounce leaks out of you. I look at Arthur, he's packed with bounce, he falls over and springs back up like he's got neoprene skin. I fall over and I have to lie there for a week counting my fractures and trying to remember whether we've made a will.

So, after I'd done my bit at the wildfire conference I managed to fall down a couple of steps and twist, strain or bruise my ankle so that today it's stolen and painful, despite my concerted programme of RICEing (Rest. Ice. Compression. Elevation - Dr Internet told me what to do.) I wouldn't normally bother you with this except that in a week's time I'm supposed to be doing the Coast To Coast walk and I'm really looking forward to it and I don't want to miss out because of a stupid slip down a step.

So I'm going to resort to Wayne Rooney / Sun newspaper style tactics and ask you all to lay your hands on the screen and send the healing power of the blogosphere through the internet tubes to my ankle. I will install some sort of vibes reader to manage the inveitable spikes in good will and will update you on healing feelings via twitter. I thank you.

crazy

It's a privilege and an honour to have been able to make my second contribution to Anne's magnificent 'Nothing To See Here' project. So hie yourself there to have a look, or more enjoyably, cancel that fancy holiday you were planning and get yourself to Mablethorpe in the summer to play on the crazy golf.