Russell Davies

paying secondary attention

I've been going on about secondary attention and sound for a while. But it's been hard to get over what I mean, or to find anyone who thinks I might not be mad. I've even been trying to build some examples of my own, but it's been slow going. I've now settled down to hoping I'll be able, one day, to build something on the BERGcloud.

In the meantime - choir.io is a lot of what I mean. A bit like Peep but made for now. Here's how they explain it:

"Choir provides a programmable interface to translate events into a rich set of context-aware sounds. Our users mark events with emotions and intrusivensses and we take care of the rest.

...Choir has three killer applications.

First, ambient sound monitoring. By associating user or server activities with different sounds, you can stay aware of the current statuses without having to look at the graphs. If something unusual happens, you would hear the changes almost subconsciously. Failed login requests, rejected credit card transactions, 500 errors are a few good examples here.

Second, notify without interruptions. Today your notifications are mostly delivered via email or chat room messages. You have to bear the cost of context switches to checkout these messages. Choir can provide you with a more fine grained control over different type of notifications. For example, you might choose to play a pleasant, low-intrusive sound when a user gives a kudos to a support ticket, but you would probably want to select a negative and intrusive sound, maybe a sea monster roar, if a user just unsubscribed from your service. If you hear too many of the scary sea monster noises, you will know something is wrong.

Third, celebrate with others. Some companies would hit a giant gone when they close a new deal. It is a great morale booster to bring the whole team together and share the excitement of successes. Now you could configure Choir to play a cheerful sound when a new paid user sign up for your service."

I suspect they're also  foreshadowing is the solution to the Google Glass stare. Google shouldn't be using your eyes for this, they should be using your ears. Stick all the same information in your background attention, via your ears, and you solve a lot of problems. Anything where you need the actual information can be done via text to speech. You've seen how it works - it's Jarvis.

arrays

I don't know why but I'm starting to get slightly obsessed with broadcast / sensor arrays.

summer

stalking bill drummond badly - three

August 2007 - Tate Liverpool

We were on the Wirral visiting Anne's parents and I popped over to hear Mr Drummond talk at Tate Liverpool. In my head it was at Christmas but the facts seem to suggest it was August. He handed out copies of a poster he'd made for the City of Culture but which never got posted. I was very excited about it, but it's gotten lost somewhere. I'm not sure where. This depresses me.

He also gave us all mugs from his project twinning Kensington in Liverpool with Kensington in London. This cheers me.

A to B

It's weird to remember it now but for loads of my advertising career I worked on car accounts. Endless focus groups with company car drivers - constantly lying about why they drove the car they did. And they could only ever remember one ad. This one:

(Which, by the way, is just another example of the fact that advertising is not about story-telling, it's about moments)

Then - car planning gold - a series of documentaries called From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring. Years, campaigns worth of car insights. This one is about reps, it's absolutely briliant. What a world. What people. Mostly vanished now. The other programmes are all good, have a hunt around YouTube for them. Martin Parr shot the book that accompanied the series - that'll give you an idea of the thing.  

Nicholas Barker / Martin Parr also made a series about taste and homes called Signs of the Times. Also brilliant.

I really want to make some films like these about the internet and how people use it.

stalking bill drummond badly - two

March 2007 - South Bank Centre

I saw Bill Drummond talking at the Royal Festival Hall as part of a tribute to Robert Anton Wilson. A lot of the evening's focus was on Alan Moore - he was being very shamany. But it was Mr Drummond who was most striking. I've just finished reading KLF and realised, maybe, why - this was the first time he'd actually read the Illuminatus! trilogy.

"In his 2008 book 17, Drummond writes about being asked to appear at an event at the South Bank Centre in London to commemorate the death of Robert Anton Wilson the previous year. Drummond agreed after hearing that Alan Moore would also be appearing, but he was unsure what he should do at the event. For inspiration, he decided to read Illuminatus! He claims that he had never read the whole thing before. When Campbell gave him a copy to help him design sets, he read little more than the first volume because that was where most of the play was taken from. He was not particularly impressed by what he read.

He was more impressed in 1986 when he picked it up again and it inspired him to form The JAMs with Jimmy Cauty, but even then he only read as far as page 138 in a trilogy of over 800 pages. Cauty, although he had seen the play, never read the book at all.

Reading the whole thing, in 2007, was something of a shock. Because it was in there, all of it - rabbit spirits, Lucifer, submarines, the angels in the lake, even, to his horror, money burning. It seemed like his life had been mapped out in this one book. It went far beyond the obvious stuff he stole from the first volume. At the time he was involved in a choir called The17, for example, not realising that the number 17 kept appearing in the book at the same places as the number 23.

This was a similar situation to how he learnt about the Situationists, for he only really learnt what they were about, and why his actions kept being described as Situationist, in 1995. Seeing his own history sketched out in the book was deeply unsettling."

 

 

watch jack

Do yourself a favour and watch Jack for 90 minutes. He is so smart and so differently smart. Even the way he uses language, the words he uses will ping on the inside of your head. 

we sensed new weather

Timehop reminded me that, a year ago, I tried to make some little examples of what non-flabby robot-based media would be like and I made these. They were all topical at the time. Why the hell has no one exmployed me to make these yet?

reading as destiny

I suspect part of the appeal of things like Timehop is they let you figure out / invent narratives for your life in the way a biographer would do. They give you a thread through the years which you might not ordinarily step back and see.

I noticed today, for instance, that I read these two books on holiday four years ago:

The Nature of Technology (which I loved) led directly to my dconstruct talk. Lots of thoughs came out of all that, most of which I haven't done anything about. But I'm hoping I'll get the chance one day.

Shop Class As Soulcraft (which I found very irritating and problematic) led, sorta, to Laptops And Looms and a lot of other ideas I haven't done anything about, but which was one of the highlights of 2011, for me.

Challenging the made-up-self-mythology though I do have to point out that I also read American Nerd, which I don't remember anything about.

stalking bill drummond badly - one

November 2006 - The Internet

My friend Ben interviewed Mr Drummond on ResonanceFM for No Music day and I stuck it up as an MP3. Now, that MP3 has found its way onto a thousand odd MP3 sites. I still listen to it every now and then. Good listening.