tziteras

A recap

2011-11-25T19:09:00.000Z

Here is a quick recap since it's been a while I've written here (I've written a bit on my blog in n-1.cc though).

When the spanish protest camps made their decision to shift focus from camps to assemblies in each neighbourhood, back in June, I started going to my local commission meetings. It was a brilliant experience, to sit with other spaniards and see what we actually wanted to implement from our experience of the camp. I took part in the culture group and talked about participative art, and how you can use flashmobs and quite innocent actions to get people involved, or at least questioning things. We organised a cabaret where we brought together lots of local people for a memorable performance in our local square. This was in Sant Andreu del Palomar. I've since moved to the city centre, so am too far away, but I have about 4 different assemblies to choose from here, and getting energy to get stuck in a bit more.

Sant Andreu in Barcelona is an area with small streets and old and beautiful mediterranean houses a bit like Gracia, but without the drunken tourists. It was a bastion of resistance to franco, and before then, one day in 36 it was the area where thousands of rifles were siezed by local anarchists - contributing massively to their short but inspiring time of self organised local democracy. One assembly participant said the soldiers there had left their bullets in a different warehouse across the yard so they couldn't shoot them! Another described the taking of plaza catalunya back then, as told by grandparents - that the fascist soldiers were expecting the civil guard to be on their side, but they weren't - and they didn't have a chance, and he showed me which way everyone had gone. Back to this century - we then organised an end-of-summer "university" with the Universitat Indignada, which led to me talking about Transition Initiatives together with Antonio Scotti of Barcelona en Transició to a full square, and showing In Transition. Somehow there were also 3 other Peak Oil related talks, one of which was Martí Olivella, doing the rounds with his own version of Transition - applied in his case to politics. Soon after, we started an urban garden project with a lot of enthusiasm from pretty much everyone who passed: someone asked - "when do you meet? Every Monday?" "I don't know it's our first time, but okay!" and they are still at it...

With all the other members of Barcelona en Transicio, this cultural revolution that was the 15-m protest movement emerging from the squares, really got us energised, as people were now asking real questions, not just about the economy but about the earth, and family and the future. I just got the news the other day that 400 people have signed up, in a village out in the countryside, to support a politically oriented version of the Transition Towns recipe, pioneered by one of the speakers at our Uni Indignada: Marti Olivella, and an enormous stretch of land once used by Coca Cola is now to be proposed as a project to the local city council for food growing projects, and of course there is Calafou - the post-capitalist experimental factory space outside Barcelona, by the fantastic Montserrat Mountains. In Calafou, there is a hackerspace and a brewery project, as well as many smaller workshop spaces and living spaces - all closely linked with local assemblies so as to provide an alternative system in which to start to inhabit, and slowly stop being so dependent on what are now very fragile and unequal societies.

The hackerspace for now is inhabited by Lorea developers, the creators and maintainers of the 15-M's own ELGG based social network (but federated, secure, private, collaborative, and task/collab oriented) - N-1.cc.

Of course I played a lot of gigs for fundraisers, and got out a lot of old chilean Nueva Trova songs that I'd not played for years, but somehow fit the times again....

Now that the Occupy movement has joined in this incredible form of protest and reinvention that began for us back in May, things are really starting to change on a global level. I expect the governments and powers that be might even make some token concessions at this point, to try and get everyone christmas shopping.

The occupy movement has inspired a huge amount of creative, projects that work across disciplines in modern culture creating international IRC networks, teamspeak meetings, physical journeys or meetings. Some of these projects and initiatives start to build a symbiotic rather than parasitic kind of technological and social system around us. Now we are dominated by algorithms that determine all the decisions for us.

And then, there's the urgent problems around. Who am I to say anything, but this is meant to be a global movement for democracy so here is my suggestion: http://pastebin.com/xz6kZ3HS

It's a plan for a way to do a global people's meeting, like a giant physical and virtual assembly where we all, the people of this earth, as a one off, meet, and decide once and for all the future of the planet and what we are going to do about it. Think of it as a people's Bretton Woods, without the bickering. There are lots of smaller regional initiatives going on, but it's hard to organise larger get togethers, but we can start to think of distributed ways for it to happen, although I first thought of it as a time constrained thing, where we were all at it simultaneously.

Here is the piratepad where we're working on more of it. Feel free to contact me and join in. One of the things about it is that it needs skills that are already there around us, and abilities that are pretty widespread already. I really hope something like this can happen.

If there was such a global meeting, I would take my non-crazy robot idea there. (see next post!)

Ban Robot Violence

2011-11-25T17:44:00.018Z

[IN PROGRESS - need to add links. Sorry but I'm into participative process, please comment and help me write this!I was just thinking about this thing about robots - online or physical, or more tentacular cybernetic systems like what international corporations and/or tech companies have built up around us over the years and how it interacts with us. I felt I should come and write it down.]

There is terrible totalitarian news starting to edge it's way in to passive acceptance, from the government injustice and brutality across the world, and the international coordination of this violence (that goes all the way to the top), from that to the drones that patrol prisons and are made to kill people.

I've spent a little time working with electronics, making and conceiving of materials to make a symbiotic musical, solar, improviser bot, and programming software based bots to guide kids around a 3D reconstruction of Sydenham Crystal Palace in London (and Second Life). I learnt that through the years, robots have been acquiring the basic ability not only to be a bit overly specialised towards human interaction, but to carry out all the functions required to be considered alive, even when some of those functions are made through their relationship with us. In the case of killer or surveillance drones, their creators, the teams of scientists who work in places like and are completely insane, as are the structures who made them exist. And I wonder how many of them believe in a creator god.

There's one thing they probably don't want us to realise: We the people are the creators of robots. Everyone can join in by learning a bit of programming and electronics, and a huge DIY scene is still around making UAVs or just robots of all kinds, just from open designs - recently to film a protest.

We invented robots. Nowadays the killer robots aren't that autonomous, but they are getting there. They can mimic human behaviour in loads of ways already, but they shouldn't have to, as they are completely wonderful things, if you think that they can be made from just about anything. But soon, this intelligence, but also growth in availability of sensors and software libraries for interpreting them, so a robot will do as told and travel autonomously to kill selected people without much need for a human "pilot".

But robots shouldn't be made to do these horrible insane things. They come from our invention, from all our wonderful science that's supposedly so opposed to judeochristian religion, but that is the same white boys club, who deep down wouldn't mind a go as all powerful creator gods too. To want to not only kill you but create a robot but make it kill you more efficiently than a human in a plane or helicopter could, is psychopathic, and all the people involved in doing this should be tried for international war crimes and put under care and long term psychoanalysis for psychotic disorders. In the end though, the system as usual is to blame.

We know that it's going to be a huge crisis here on earth, with the euro falling apart and banks crashing any minute, no new fuels in sight and an environmental catastrophe after another. Some fear we really might not make it through as a human race in the slightly longer term, which has most other species sighing with relief! So if that's even a remote possibility, I imagine how the people in these companies and government departments react to that thought, wondering what their legacy might be.

Our robot brethren are whatever we make them, and we can get them not only to survive us , but be positive creatures. Maybe they will be merciless killers like in a space blockbuster, but maybe they can be ethical, positive things too, and I realise this must come from popular demand, not passive acceptance of these trends.

So I propose a ban NOW on robot violence. No robot shall ever be made, or forced to be violent to people. We owe it to them as their creator gods. And just as non-crazy people. Thank you.

Is peaceful cohabitation with self organisers possible?

2011-05-22T11:16:00.018+01:00

My predictions for Spain are pretty bleak at the moment, although I have some hope. I predict the right wing Partido Popular, founded by a member of Fascist dictator Franco's government, will winthese elections.

The PP will have none of the PSOE's qualms in dislodging the protestors once results are in. There will be some trouble with police and law inorder to empty the squares, and for some time, things will return to normal.

These are beautiful protests – more aspontaneous group of people just expressing discontent, andtrying to find alternatives to the way things are. They now reach 300 cities and towns where people are camped in the main squares, and the evening "caceroladas" (some sonic discontent making at 9pm with cans and pots) reach every street in Barcelona.

I think the camp'sfuture is uncertain at the moment, but that a movement may have beenborn, a movement that will oppose or maybe even cohabit with the old order in new creative ways.

"teach noam chomsky in schools"

And then in the longer term there's the upcoming financial crash.

Anarchists have been targeted in Greece by police violence, maybe because they are one of the main groups organisingprotests and actions. There are also lots of groups here organising morefor bottom up resistance to cuts: decreiximent is the main eco centred group coming up with interesting ideas, and there is a local cooperative with far reaching aims, the Cooperativa Integral Catalana. But then there are also people involved in various movements which have joined the streets at different moments in recent times and the demoralised unions. A lot of the anger needs a positive direction and there is a lot to be done. The cuts are due to the need to pay back ahuge EU loan, and the anarchist black blocks make up a lot of theviolent elements at protests. But fighting policemen doesn't help people make bonds.

The problem with this: Spain is getting close to adebt situation like Portugal, which yesterday received a bailout from the IMF's sexy purse. But that money is running out, and if Spain andItaly join the queue, the EU could suffer tremendously. What happens when Italy and Spain both go for that last bit of money is all unclear at the moment.

This ishaving strong effects on day to day life in Spain. In the PlazaCatalunya Acampada on Friday, a woman told the crowd at one of thespontaneous assemblies of seated people, happening in various placesaround the square, on a loudspeaker that her wing had been closedafter 30 years of work there, but that it had been opened again sothat a minister could have his pacemaker put in, before closing upagain.At 9pm the "cacerolada" started - a loud banging of pots and pans and lots of shouting. It was beautiful to see the call rise and everything start, like a symphony taking off. The next day I was on my little streets away from the centre, and the cacerolada started - in some streets a lone beater in some window, banging on a pan, and in other streets whole families out with all their kids banging pans and talking to people about why they were doing it.

Cacerolada Acampada Barcelona Miercoles 19 by alefernandez

Services are being cut meanwhile, and some things arestarting to fall apart. Getting work is a bad joke when 100 people apply for a single position within a day, so that finding work becomes an exercise inbecoming meat for the short term money so that everything can keepworking badly in the contracting companies the employment agencies find workers for. InGreece, this has reached the level of mass hunger strikes ofimmigrants, general strikes and some areas organising direct actionand sabotage, blocking roads and taking action. Here, an attempt last winter to occupy an abandoned cinema and use it as an information centre, was quickly and brutally evicted by police.

The disintegration ofthe social structures people once relied on is slowly progressing, ashousing agencies, local shops and larger business alike fall apartfrom one day to the next. Financial meltdowns are nothing new in Spain, often at huge social costs.

A "post capitalist baby" at plaza catalunya. "Help us grow - we are in an embryonic phase".

Anarchism offers lots of ways (there is probably adifferent version of anarchism for each anarchist there is) to selforganise in participative ways and keep things going in some way whengovernment services collapse. I believe these people protestingshould use their remaining time in the square finding out how to make the assembly permanent and functional. Through virtual spaces and perhaps the use ofempty shops and spaces.

The best action you can take is action to protect and provide help to your own area, because the politicians can't argue with the fact that they have ceased to provide important services. Cooperative spaces can begin to fill these spaces, and volunteers can do a lot with their cognitive surplus.

The workers who run those government services justhave to agree to open the place up, find out what is needed to makeit running and get to work again - a method described in "La Toma" - about the worker's takeover of abandoned factories in the financial crash in Argentina at the beginning of the century. It's also been shown that anarchism reaches a certain level of efficiency that is higher than that of the state, once the cost of maintaining a functioning government becomestoo high for it to function properly. This is very much what happened when the republic fell in 1936 and people just stuck in and organised themselves to take over. This kind of popular democracy might not bepossible today in the way it was then, but it's important not toforget that these experiments tend to be crushed by both right andleft wing sides, as they show that the whole establishment of amodern government or a nation as state might actually not be the bestor the only way to run things.

During the time when most businesses werecollectivised and run by cooperatives in the 1930s, in the Catalunyaand Aragon provinces, where I happen to live, self organisationreached a huge level, and apparently not through any particularinfluence from anarchist groups.

From what I see in this film or fromHomage to Catalonia, this was spontaneous bottom up organisation muchlike what is happening now in squares across Spain. Here is "land and freedom" by mike leigh, hoping that's a good video playlist for these times.

It is much easier to step in when there is no oneto oppose you, but as a government slowly loses money and stopsfunctioning, it is hard for collaborative groups to step in, like thepeople self organising in squares across Spain today.

Yesterday the Environment office (tent) from the local Acampada Barcelona - the peoplecamped out in Plaza Catalunya in the centre of Barcelona, joined upwith Barcelona en Transicio, whilst welcoming many other local groupsto come and share what they have been trying to do in response to theecological and financial situation with the people in the square. There are also calls going out to lots of other groups around the world for solidarity with the protesters. I'm trying to get a few translations of their call now in various languages! Alot of the difference between the Transition movement and anarchistgroups, which are frequently much greener and have been going muchlonger, is that transition groups actively seek funding and worktogether with lot of organisations, including local government.

Nowadays though most anarchists would nevercollaborate with a government in co-governing. But collaboration isknown to have a certain efficiency in living systems in general, andI think it deserves a look, and a decent attempt at making it workalongside government. How to get government to accept a bit of selfrule in the interest of stability? I think it needs to happen with alot of smiles and friendly gestures, because if it starts off wrong,it won't happen, and those services won't be around when thegovernment actually goes.

10 More minutes: From gift economies to celebration economies

2011-02-01T10:12:00.002Z

An article by Richard Heinberg, "Economic History in 10 Minutes" which I read the other day, inspired me to look a bit more into more elaborate economies than simply gift/tribal based, that might escape people's thoughts as they search for alternatives to the current (failed?) economic system.

His article is a good summary of a lot of peak oiler economics although I've heard him and others say these things before lots of times and in different ways. Heinberg points to our addiction to fossil fuels as the central reason for lots of current problems, and the article treasures hunter gatherer cultures with their gift economies as a possible future or as something to move towards. Doing something in 10 minutes is bound to leave something out. It would be easy to believe, reading his article, that we once were all happy and shared everything, then - boom! - iPods. (He actually says "So letting go of the gift economy was a trade-off for progress—houses, cities, cars, iPods, and all the rest").

After painting a pretty negative picture of the history of money, involving the sin of Usury, Charles Ponzi and Fractional Reserve Banking, leading to the current situation, he then goes on to make a call for more general knowledge of our shared economic history and to say "Is this the end of the story? As society dramatically simplifies itself in the wake of fossil fuel depletion, will we revert to some form of gift economy? Or will we catch and steady ourselves on some intermediate rung on the ladder of economic development?"

Well I'd like to take 10 more minutes to talk about a couple of those rungs I happen to know about.

You see, my dad is an economic historian, and also comes from a small Aymara ethnic minority (on my grandmother's side). So I grew up in a house full of books on economics, and in this family of refugees of the Pinochet regime, my only connection with the Aymaras were many pairs of Ojotas (sandals made from recycled tyres), lots of colourful cloths and clothes, memories of a couple of visits to villages like Putre and Codpa in Chile, and a few of the books in between the economics ones, which spoke of Aymara culture and their world view.

One book, "Holocausto al Progreso - Los Aymaras de Tarapacá" fascinates me still, with it's descriptions of preincaic aymara culture. It includes a reconstruction of what life must have been like for a few thousand people, who had adapted from around the 5th century BC up until the arrival of the Incas in the 14th century, to live in a really difficult environment involving the Andes mountains and the most arid desert in the world. And now it's on the internet, for any Spanish speaker to enjoy! This little stretch of Northern Chile, which is now just sea, desert and mountain, then also included some forests, which have since been swallowed by the Atacama desert. Here is a bit of a picture from the book, which I hope can help to show this:

So there were at least 4 distinct climates, and none of them could adequately support a large population on it's own. Living there were fishermen, hunter gatherers, shepherds and farmers. By sharing, these distinct groups made this area incredibly rich and varied. I wish I could have seen it.

Here is a google assisted translation of a few paragraphs of Holocausto al progreso showing this vivid picture, punctuated by community rituals, harvest times and hunting seasons, the building of dwellings, and sharing of produce that couldn't have been accomplished unless people got organised. From around page 99:

A schematic reconstruction of this so varied indigenous economy conjures the following image:

In autumn, i.e. March or April, the shepherds would leave their homes,major residential centers located high in the Cordillera, and their summer grazing grounds at altitudes above 4000m, and make their way towards winter grazing lands, at altitudes from 3000 to 3500 meters, where they occupyshacks and makeshift houses in the open fields.

Part of themale population would then migrate, taking with them a herd of llamas loaded withproduce from these high altitudes (dried meat, wool, leather, textiles, quinoa, herbs, salt, animal fat etc.), to lower environments: the agricultural area, where smallnuclei of farmers belonging to the same community, and seenas relatives, would have been busy working the fields during the summer, irrigating the terraces, and working and defending the crops against the local animals and birds.

When harvest times drew near, the shepherds would arrive from the mountains to assist in these efforts and in the conservation andstorage of agricultural produce. A portion of the produce from the highCordillera (and possibly even the Altiplano and the eastern valleys:coca and herbs), was provided to supplement the diet of the farmers and after the harvest feasts and ceremonies, the llama herders would take, in return, apart of the agricultural produce (potato, garlic, corn, squash, etc..) to thewestern lowlands.

In the forests of the longitudinal valley they would stop for a while to gather the fruit of the carob tree and to shepherd thepack animals, using the pods and fruits that this tree produces.

Later, in winter, these well fed shepherds and their herd of animals would cross the desert andcoastal mountains and visit the fishermen and hunter gatherers of the coast. The herdsmen would take part in fishing, and in hunting seals whose inflated skins were made into rafts, on these shores devoid of timber. They also participated in shellfish harvesting, in the preservation of these products and in the collection of white guano, which was - along with rotten fish and locally mined saltpeter - a popular fertilizer for the agricultural terraces higher up.

With spring approaching, the herders would prepare for the return trip, leaving behind the rest of the produce they had brought from higher altitudes, and taking sea and coastal produce in exchange.

After another stop in the woods of the Tamarugal they would again help farmers in the foothills by cleaning the irrigation canals, preparing new terraces and sowing new seeds. They would leave there much of the seafood they had brought from the coast and, after the planting season, they would take some produce back to supply the shepherds and the community centers in the Andes.

Theshepherds would still be in their winter pastures at this point, but once the herders arrived, they would return to their homes in the mountains, together with their relatives and join their entire herd, bringing products from the countryside, the coast and sea, as an indispensable supplement to their diet.

So in this way, the faldas del morro or "Hillslope" Aymara culture was able to maintain a much larger population than they could have if all those groups had been independent. The "economic" activities were not seen as travail as contemporary europeans would have called it. They had instead a religious and cultural dimension in which work was seen as celebration, and was indeed punctuated by lots of festivity. This image is a bit out of focus but it shows the calendar of festivals that accompanied this migration for the shepherd communities and the farming ones:

Going back to Heinberg's economic rungs, as we fall down the ladder from fractional reserve banking - I hope we don't forget these creative moments in our economic history, perhaps valuing "economic" migration and the celebration of work, as we adapt to the issues of the new millennium.

Free open source multitrack recording on an android phone

2010-09-01T11:51:00.001+01:00

I've been recording rehearsals for a while using my android phone. This gives quite acceptable sound quality and some of it is even on soundcloud. It naturally led to me wondering if more than one track was somehow possible, and I've tried a few combinations of apps to see if they could work together, before getting to this method:

This process has only been tested on a G1 so far so I can't say for sure if this can be done on other phones. It's a bit tiresome but it proves that 2 track recording can be done. With a few changes to the apps that allow it, it could get a lot easier too.

1) Start by downloading Rehearsal Assistant and Ringdroid. Both these applications are open source, and both are listed on the android market.

2) Make a recording using rehearsal assistant first - it's easy - just push the big red button, but you may want to go into it's settings and set it to record directly as .wav files by selecting "Record Uncompressed Audio" under Recording Quality.

3) Once you have your recording you can play it back and if you long press it, lots of options will appear, including the option to open the recording in Ringdroid. Do this, and Ringdroid will start up.

4) Now you have to select what you want to save. The problem with Ringdroid is that it's mostly for making ringtones so it will by default only select a small part of your recording - I first zoom out as much as possible by clicking on the magnifying glass, and then try and select all the bits of the recording I want to have as a background track. Try and leave a few seconds of space at the beginning. You can edit it off later. Now save it as "music".

5) Open it again (how laborious!) by selecting from the various recordings available in ringdroid's list. Press the play button.

6) While the recording plays in ringdroid, hold down the home button so as to show up other recently used apps. Select rehearsal assistant again...

7) Now you can hear the first recording you did, and can also hit record again to record your second track.

For some reason if you do it this way, the background recording plays through completely and a second track doesn't sound too bad over it - I've tried to do this in other ways and it always cuts out when in the background for a few seconds.

Again, this is still for putting musical parts down together and seeing what two tracks might sound like superimposed, not for quality professional recordings. It reminds me of the 2 track recording that was possible using cassette players years ago.

Bristol's Budget Conversation and Town Hall BEPs

2010-06-29T12:01:00.001+01:00

In case you are from Bristol and haven't noticed, there's currently a "big debate" being held over at http://askbristol.wordpress.com in the comments area.

Basically, the city council are asking the public how to cut the huge sums of money that they will have to do without anyway from very soon.

There are lots of reasons why this is flawed. As one commenter posted,

"This “consultation” is a pointless exercise without access to a clear summary of what is for the chop and doing it on the internet just encourages the lunatics. Are there any plans for proper town hall style meetings? Or is this just a sham?"

But still, I thought I'd publicise it, even if it's a sham, in case somehow it can get a bit closer to becoming an actual debate and taking of responsibility by all parties.

So how do you sift through all these comments and start to extract something resembling usefulness from it all? And how can the public actually get the data they need to make their choices with? Maybe Open Source Software can come to their aid, but as a method rather than as a piece of actual software:

Open Source projects are often overrun by suggestions or even implementations of disparate and confusing features and they have evolved ways to keep this problem at bay.

As the Python programming language project, an open source project, grew quickly towards the end of the 90s, it became obvious that a new way of managing feature requests was needed.

Some of these requests were duplicates of others, or deeply flawed or unimplementable, but each one would be argued on mailing lists or various forums each day. Also, with open source the problem is that sometimes the people making the suggestion don't actually have any ability to or interest in *doing* the work.

So the PEP(Python Enhancement Proposal) came into being. It's a standard document you fill out, that forces those submitting complex feature requests to turn them into focused, clear suggestions. PEP editors on the python team then reject or accept them based on these parameters.

I think a Bristol "town hall" group like the one proposed in the quote above, should be tasked with publishing appropriate stats and data, reviewing pep-like proposals by the wider public, and consulting with those affected by that proposal to ensure it actually makes a difference and doesn't cause more spending somewhere else. It could then also put these in action if passed, after which it would have to monitor the council's progress on them and report back on that too.

If this happened, I for one would help find venues to do this in, help set up the space and even figure out how to get everyone some refreshments!!

Ecologising Open Hardware

2010-05-16T12:46:00.000+01:00

I've come to realise, through my experiments and readings, and through spending months in the world of instrument design, that I had until now marvelled in the idealistic beauty of Open Hardware without considering it's limitations in much depth. I thought it might be time to start to see where this fantastic creative world still might fall short from the point of view of the various "green" threats around us.

This shiny new thing is the possibility of:

Having a brain wave.
ordering some cheap parts online,
Going through a creative process to produce
1. a circuit diagram,
2. a materials list and
3. parts list,
4. a printed circuit board
before finally assembling an item

Whilst designing what turned out to be my Bird Symbiot, a prototype of a system for outdoor sound generation, I visited and contacted lots of people in different occupations. It's not the most essential of applications but I do know a bit more about what happens between me recording some music, and it being played by a device, and about how it can be powered in a more sustainable way. As a project it spanned acoustics, mathematics, electronics, world music, sound generation and clay making. I had a lot to learn.

One of these visits was when I got help assembling my first circuit (a lady ada sound shield) from Marcus Valentine. He has been working in electronics for many years and has a home workshop for electronics design. The circuits he designs - usually the pieces in a larger pool, are sent off as diagrams and parts lists to process. They come back in a way similar to construction sets, with 200 or more mini circuit boards all printed together from the same slab of plastic.

This then, in a typical small electronic item's production process, goes back to a large company which then manufactures thousands of them.

At another point while making my Maker Faire exhibit, I needed some good solar panels, and synth maker Tom Bugs offered to give me some that he had ordered but never managed to use. He runs Bugbrand, which is an online shop, and also a small workshop in the area, doing electronics design of sound making devices. On the borders with open hardware, Bugbrand items are designed mostly in this mini Stokes Croft factory, and an online shop deals with the sales. Selling crazy music making electronics and boards seems very fitting in a place with as much experimental music in it as Bristol, and he also runs workshops internationally, where people make them themselves. I saw in his workshop a PCB printing work area for creating small runs or prototypes of circuit boards. He confessed he hadn't used it much. A colleague built the boards while he pretty much ran around concieving new boards, answering forum questions, ordering parts and selling the finished products online.

It was only much later, by speaking to other inventors and hackers at the Maker Faire, that I got to see more of the true Open Hardware manufacturing approach. Open Hardware makers will work alone as needed, but will often team up with small shops or other projects to order parts or design aspects of their work. The landscape of this creativity is really a friendly ecology of helpers, a small world where people begin to know each other.

Of course, the main benefit of open hardware is the supposed availability of plans and designs for the good of everyone else, but there is still no equivalent of the GPL or CC license when it comes to actual objects and things.

The open hardware approach seems to be going towards ordering components, then assembling and selling items in online markets in a semi bespoke manner. It's true, some are starting to do more: Feral Trade sells Cube Cola, which once amazed the BBC when they once sent for many litres of it. The order was neatly placed at the centre of their huge van, in a tiny concentrated bottle.

Cube Cola is published under the GPL, but beyond that, it has hit on a brilliant distribution method centred on the ready availability of sugar and fizzy water to dilute and prepare it with.

There is a convergence between the green and the techy in open sourcing Hardware - as seen in projects like the Reprap or larger open source cousins that can cut or shape metals or even precious stones. But this is not a typical aspect of it's lifecycle.

We have to begin cutting down on this politically, monetarily and ecologically fragile, long distance distribution network occurring at either end of this beautiful creative centre.

Another problem is the predilection for and reliance on high wattages. Maybe this is just the "macho" side of electronics - typically a men's world. There is little use of freely available energies that can be channelled to help these processes.

For the bird symbiot I realised pretty early on that making something audible at low power would mean using natural amplification. This turned out to mean using clay - something whose production I found to be readily available by using an old rag, some sticks and by ordering basic materials from a few miles outside Bristol, and a firing process used cooperatively in a local art studio.

But there is also a bias in some aspects of the tinkerer world, towards a repulsion ("ugh - knitting!") for what is seen as lesser "craft" rather than a welcoming of other disciplines in order to collaborate towards creating a device. But I hope this is only a marginal problem, and that some healthy partnerships can emerge soon. It will be significant to see some of the main open hardware proponents start to work in projects with larger scope than just the basic circuits, and requiring a wide range of skills and work shared by many different kinds of people.

At the Maker Faire in Newcastle, some of the biggest attractions used a tremendous amount of electrical power. Lots of the items I saw seemed to use a lot of money and electricity to run. I recently saw a lot of people turn their backs on what I thought was an interesting bike power project because people see it as not enough power to do anything useful. The bird symbiot uses the equivalent in solar power of 2 AAA batteries, and can burst into song with some good sunlight flying by it. A 3v fan on an oven or a wind powered pump for some water can mean the difference between a gruelling existence and a plentiful life.

But I think a basic flaw in the current open hardware lifecycle is just that: We rely still on the generation of power as if it had to be something separate from the rest of the device. It's excluded from the design process as soon as it ceases to be about electronics. So it all needs a more holistic and inclusive approach.

I also have some problems to do with why circuit design has evolved to be flat, and this makes the BEAM robotics world so fascinating - because they stich parts directly to each other creating a device that is by it's nature 3d and doesn't particularly need a board.

What will we do if with vanishing fossil fuels and the need for technologically aided alternative power, we can't make a transistor? A semiconductor? A resistor? - this new open hardware lifecycle needs to green itself at all levels.

So how do you do these things locally and sustainably?

If modern telecommunications and technology is to avoid a crash or stagnation due to whatever natural or man made catastrophes, there have to be freely available applications and designs of every type of electronic item. From vital to domestic, electronic ideas and inventions should be available to the public regardless of their wealth or place in the world. I think this is probably even a human right, linked directly to the right for an education - we have to know how to create and evolve the technologies that our lives and cultures depend on.

All aspects of modern electronics need thorough re-examination so as to find and document cheap ways to recreate them openly in light industry at a local scale, anywhere in the planet.

Maker Faire Exhibit - Weeks 3 and 4

2010-02-18T16:01:00.009Z

Last week I made the raku clay bird ornament in which the device will be kept, unless I can make a better one before the faire. It was a really interesting process to follow, and Hilda, the potter who showed me it, said things sometimes randomly emerge with clay, not always what you expect. I like that idea, as opposed to 3d design where you try and go for an exact shape. Also it shrinks 10% when it's fired, and so any calculations as to size or tuning would have to be done through lots of different models and trial and error, which I don't have time for as she is now going away for a bit, and I won't have access to her kiln again until after the maker faire.

I'm not completely happy with the results of my first big process of making: it's a bit small and the "bird" only happened randomly during the slab rolling process. But still, it's functional and I put a lot of stuff in it, that I know will need to go in any subsequent thing I make as an enclosure. It has only 2 openings at the top which I will put wires through and seal, it has holes in which to mount a stand, so that it can resonate a bit more fully, a small area in which to put some moss or other small plants, and a shelf inside in which to put the box with the arduino in it.

I then had a good chat with John Honniball and Tarim at PM Studios to see how to get the Maxim PMIC chips I ordered, working to power an arduino. The result is not good: there is a simple, if inefficient way to power one from a 9v battery, but the best way at the moment to get something better going, is to get a Mintyboost kit, and wire it to an 11v solar panel (which I have). The PMIC chips that Marcus Valentine suggested I use, will only work with panels of up to 5v, and anything beyond that will damage the arduino. John says it's a good idea to try the chips anyway, because if I can get anywhere with that, it will mean we can have an arduino running off very low power, and able to use that quite efficiently - so for example from a single AA battery or from a little cell battery. But most likely, it won't work.

This last week on the other hand, I've been learning about fast fourier transformations, wave table synthesis, granular synthesis and reading about the work of Ellen Fullman - who makes a long stringed instrument with a small sound box at either end for amplification. A very different design from mine. I also looked at the workings of recycled aluminium so as to create resonating cones and much more research. As well as this, I've been trying step back a bit and decide how the arduino will actually pick out the best readings and make them into a discernible song.

Firstly, it will be playing in little bursts all day. I hope this will make it more interesting and build up interest for the dusk concert. Most of the time it will just play the readings almost directly, as they are collected (which is what it is doing now), write the readings to EEPROM and turn itself off or go to sleep/power saving mode as much as it can. But if it thinks it's dusk, it will get ready to play something more complex.

In this more complex dusk concert, I want there to be single notes, with overtones and lots of silence in between, a gradual build up for each performance. There will be something resembling a trio of drone, melody and percussion, I think. This makes it easy to decide which role the 2 piezo outputs and 1 wave sample output will take on each time it decides to play.

In the style of an indian classical raga, I would then select 5 or 7 "notes" from the readings it has collected, and play them according to a repeating melody or ostinato pattern.

This would then be varied - the melody would be reached via the playing of small patterns that then build up in speed and complexity to be the pattern again.

Then this somehow builds up in speed and adds to recorded samples (played from the Adafruit Wave Shield).

Finally, it will end in a tihai figure, based again, on this ostinato.

A while ago I wrote a tabla beat that goes - if you understand this stuff,

Dha ti dha ge na dha ti dha ge na
ga dha ti dha ge na ga dha ti dha ge na
na ke na

There's a lot of variations to go with it, but that's the basic beat. This is in 25 beats, and I've divided into 5 / 5 / 6 / 6 / 3. The 25 beat structure means the tihai - if seen as 3 repetitions of a 33 beat variation on the main ostinato, will land back on the 100th - i.e back at the beginning of the next beat.

I've been trying to decide how much of hindustani classical and world music tradition to bring in to this though. Because then the symbiotic creature might become too much a reflection of my own interpretation than a true reflection of the readings it gathers. But as a mathematician friend remarked when I told him about this project, there are an infinite amount of ways to apply maths to numbers so as to extract sound, so maybe I should stop being so precious about it.

Many cultures ancient and new have music and songs reflecting or seeking to affect the seasons or time of day however, and I think there is a lot to learn from from that in this project.

Meanwhile though, here is a sound grab of the piezo portion of the symbiot, amplified using a small bodhran drum and using a prototype clay model I've now made as a container, and as a sound box. More to come soon!

Symbiotic Readings by alefernandez

Maker Faire Exhibit - Weeks 1 and 2

2010-02-02T21:48:00.006Z

It's not very often you get a chance to work on such a varied project. The brief for the project in the previous post on this blog, but I thought it useful to put down some thoughts at this stage in it's preparation. Especially in case I get lost later on.

Last week I did the first parts: I wired together light sensor, piezo buzzer and an electromagnetic field detector and they are sending data back to an arduino that is now capable of "sleeping" - i.e. switching to a lower power mode.

There are lots of ways of getting it to fall asleep though, and I prefer no power to lo-power as Newcastle is not known for it's warm bright weather (for example - this week, according to the newspaper, sunset came to Newcastle at 4.40pm, and the average temperature is of about 4-5 degrees with showers half the time, leading me to think rain power may have been a better choice than solar).

To amplify all the recorded and generated sounds this device is beginning to produce, I got a plant pot, and an old bohdran drum, into which I put the speakers and sound emitting bits. It helped the sound be fuller and a bit louder. I'm not aiming for a very noisy device, but something that's sonically fragile and can interplay with other noises in it's area.

Here is a video of the state of play last Wednesday:

Since then I've put together lots of solar cells of various different shapes and sizes, and I tried to test their voltage and current, and wire them up to a small circuit I got from here and here.

I'm planning on using some rechargeable coin cell batteries to do this. I tested the battery by putting it inside a little set of solar lights and seeing if it charged them. The lights were powered by a 3.2v, 250mAh battery, but they seem to work fine on a 3.7v 200mAh one too, all of which led me to wish I'd paid more attention in physics class at high school...

I also added the capability to detect temperature to the bit with all the sensors (the Seeduino seen in the video, which at the moment will only run sensors, before I put the whole contraption together and get it to play sounds as well).

And I've investigated a lot about clay, based on a long discussion with Mat Dalgleish. Clay and pottery is local to just about every place and culture in the world. It is strong, resistant to the outdoors (if fired at high temperatures), and above all it looks natural and earthy, and very fitting for housing all my electronic stuff, which may be functional, but it doesn't look very visually appealing!

So at the weekend, I got the (regular "das") clay out and spent a morning in the library, reading about pottery so I could get some handle on the basics. Then I started making (the children got involved too!). The result was this nice little ocarina, which actually plays a note when blown!

From my discussion with Mat, and from chatting today with Hilda Bligh, a local and very experienced potter, who will let me use her kiln, we went for Raku. This is a 16th century Japanese/Korean technique which produces nice and very random colours, and can be fired at high temperatures. Hilda was very generous and treated me to some lovely soup and gave me some cheesewire, lent me a clay roller, and got me lots of nice oxides(iron, yellow iron, copper and some iron filings), as well as a big heavy pack of raku clay!

As well as this, she gave me a quick class on simple raku pottery. I'm planning to cut a slab of clay, and roll it into a cylinder. Then I'll try and shape it and glaze it. This first experiment will probably fail(she suggested I make 3 experiments to begin with), but I'll try and add a sketch of what it should look like so that it can house the arduinos, allow for leakage, provide a simple way to place all the sensors around it, and hold the solar panels high up. Also, I might add some cones or tubes to it (as I did with the first clay experiment) to make it look more like a tree...

Later this week I plan to experiment more with the thermistor (for which I'll need a thermometer...), and with all the readings on the piezo circuit. I'll also try the first step of the raku process.

The solar panels also will need to be wired together some more and tested/ experimented with for readings. Next week, I hope to finally get to the musical bit!

OMOSP

2010-01-29T16:48:00.018Z

An outdoors low consumption, self powering musical installation.

This blog post is about the design and creative process around the concept of an art object I'm making, to be displayed at the UK Maker Faire in Newcastle in March.

The intent is to install in an outdoors area, various sensors and various sound sources - mostly amplified piezos as well as a wave shield. These will be guided by an arduino which is powered in turn by various solar panels. The device will capture sunlight during the day (I'm also considering windmill or crank power), and gathers readings through the day and night to play a short "concert" at dawn and dusk.

The readings are light, temperature, sounds, humidity and, I hope, some simple electrode type readings, for which I'm currently experimenting with EMF, which I hope to couple with a second one, so as to have a sort of electrode.

When light reaches a threshold, the device plays a melody based on readings gathered, fires off a recorded sound according to the amount of energy it has stored with which to play it, and plays the piezo melody over the wave background. I would hope speed would slowly increase, and it remains to see if further ongoing readings would influence the performance also.

Background

I first wanted to do something of this type years ago, as the value of printed CDs decreased, and they lost value in my mind as well as monetarily as a way of distributing or experiencing music due to them being ripped almost immediately, and due to the songs then living on various media in large libraries.

How could I separate a musical composition and it's experience from this media environment, I wondered, and I thought it would be interesting to embed recordings inside an object, in such a way as to make the sound a part, not the result, of a full experience. I hope there will still be regular media on this creation, but that this will be a derivative, a copy, not the original.

I imagine one day walking up a hill or to a remote spot, and only then, by knowing the times of dusk and dawn, hearing the sounds of the creation. Or as the composer and maker of the device, I would get to travel to it, and fix it, dry it out or re tune it every so often.

Areas of work

In designing this device, I'm trying to keep to the idea that simple is good and that all parts need not be connected so as to sound or result in a coherent experience. I want the sound to reflect the time of year and type of day, in the sense that in a cold, dark, still day, only a couple of notes might play, whereas on a hot or windy day, there would be a symphony of noise lasting several hours. In the style of the Morning and Evening Raga in Indian Classical music, the musical style is different also according to the time of day, and this should be reflected in the way sensor data is interpreted and played back. For example, in a morning raga, the sound starts very gradually, and builds up in speed and volume only towards the end. An evening raga is much more of a performance than a meditation in this sense.

Sensors
Thermistor for the temperature sensing: test and review the one I have, connect to second life. Temperature should change gradually, not more than 12 degrees in a day I am hoping... so this is rhythm, and will dictate the activities of the avatar that will be connected to it. http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?moduleno=2218
http://www.arduino.cc/playground/ComponentLib/Thermistor

A light sensor (or 2?) - test should be working - just got a better resistor and connected a piezo to it. It works. Light readings will be connected to the interrupt, so when it wakes, it will measure all the sensors, write them to eeprom, and then based on the light sensor value and it's change from the previous reading, decides whether to wake up and play.

A battery charge sensor: Very simple to make... the tutorial is online somewhere. Based on this it decides for how long it can play a piece, and wether to play a long sound via the wave shield or just a piezo based generative melody using various smaller, individual wave sounds only towards the end.

thermistor - temperature sensing: Trying with a small bead thermistor, out of 3 bought from maplins. Circuit is almost done.

Plant monitor: Built, working a bit randomly... I plan to show this to Marcus Valentine, get it working properly, measure the resistance on a multimeter (borrow one!), and connect it up to the rest of the device.

EMF detector: Built, and giving very random data. Almost a random seed. Need to add smoothing function. Need to disconnect this from the music emission if Serial.available().

Boards and Power Architecture

An Arduino Duemilanove to connect to a Lady Ada wave shield. (I will have spare arduino from Mat, and a Seeeduino). Currently developing the sensors on the seeduino and working on the wave shield on the duemila: will have to put it all together at some point!

Find out how much power this shield draws(lady ada forums).
How much time do I want the musical object to play stuff? Half the day yes half no? And how loud? What to play? Current idea is mornings and evenings. But at night, will it be able to charge from small 3v windmills?!
Find out how much power the whole thing draws and if a second circuit can be built to wake it up.

Solar Setup
A solar panel capable of charging enough for power requirements. I looked on solarbotics as well as on Adafruit, but Farnell and other closer ones to the UK (i.e without a 3 week or so delivery time) are probably better.

Tom Bugs of nearby BugBrand has also given me about 4 of the more modern smaller solar cells, and some diodes, which I have still to test, so as to do a part of this. They are 2 szgd4026 cells (4v, 20mA) and 2 SZGD5020-A cells, around 2v. All together, they can give 12v, if only for a small about of time.

Maybe just the seeduino on it's own would be an accomplishment. I probably will need to get one of the other ones, and power some of it also maybe from the other solar panels I already have.

A way of reducing the power consumption during the night (having only a small battery powered circuit with a timer chip may be a way.

1 solar panel from a garden light set, that charges a 3.2v, 250mAh battery, which I have replaced with my rechargeable coin cell battery from coolcomponents (3.7v, 200mAh) , to see if it can deal with it. Stupid? Maybe, but fun!

I also have a variable one that does 3v easily during the entire day, but is quite big.

And finally, given to me by Tom Bugs. I'm guessing a regular AA 3.2v battery can probably charge itself through the day and take readings during the night. The idea with power is to make sure there is always enough of it.

Wave recordings
I built a lady ada wave shield with Marcus Valentine's Help.
It has been running "pi", and works fine with this first test program.
Convert a lot of sample music and backgrounds to the correct format from my external hard drive load up samples via SD card reader.
Get a feel for what sounds good alongside the piezos.
Make some ambient recordings also.

Arduino Sketch
Needs to incorporate interrupts and put arduino to sleep until light level changes. Depending on value of light level it chooses weather to play a melody. http://www.uchobby.com/index.php/2007/11/24/arduino-interrupts/
http://rubenlaguna.com/wp/2008/10/15/arduino-sleep-mode-waking-up-when-receiving-data-on-the-usart/
Data logging needs to use EEPROM functions for read/write.
Needs to be able to select and play from wave shield. If easy, play also some shorter files in different speeds, perhaps for shorter concerts.

Pseudocode:
Cast an initial drone based on average temperature.

If connected to a computer, EMF signals are ignored and replaced perhaps by output from Opensimulator, coming back from Ironpython.
(one that slowly moves between averages of readings taken during the night)
duration = readBatterySensor
play(duration)

Play(duration)
choose a wave file to play, or a structure using various shorter wav files if there is very little charge.
read from eeprom some sensor values
play values in descending order.
play a melody with beat, melody values, according to how many sensor readings made since last time.

Problem: what if it loses all it's charge while making readings?

IronPython/Open Simulator Code
This script takes serial readings from the arduino and then sends them to a virtual avatar running via LibOpenMetaverse in the 3d world Open Simulator which is an open source world similar to second life. At the moment, it will be easy to trigger a serial call in the form of a command, such as "get readings", or to play one of the sound sources directly.

This will allow for some form of online interaction with the device when connected to this code via the serial cable (and therefore without issues of battery capacity or song duration! ). The character's user name is Abies Alba, and mine is Nima Macchi on osgrid.org - please come by and say hi if you use these things!

Casing
Some amplification can be done using the shape and texture of clay, wood or plastic. Shape, size and colour will be important aspects.

A suggestion from Tom Bugs is to build it all inside a tube obtained from a hardware shop. Put the solar panel on top, then speaker at bottom and hang it from somewhere. Also there is someone on youtube who has made a balafon from plant pots by securing it in such a way as to allow it to vibrate. Am trying this with wave shield and a small platform with good effect. Plastic, transparent drum skin might be best for light sensor to poke through, and for piezos.

For the Clay part, which I think will be quite important, it is possible to make a DIY kiln, but I've also asked various people and best plan seems to be to go to the art college in clifton and ask to use theirs.

Stokes Croft 2017

2010-01-25T22:48:00.016Z

Most people symbolically see birth of the robotic race as 2015, when those famous wikicars escaped from the race course, rode into their trainers, and escaped into the desert. They do not realise that the first large scale battles to use robotic killers was not just the well known oil wars of Iraq and Afghanistan, but this had begun far far before, in these few streets of Bristol UK known as Stokes Croft, where all the new electronics factories had come to converge.

In Bristol, in the valley of dilapidated houses swathed in graffiti between Montpelier and Kingsdown there was once an insurrection, and a great battle, with augmented free running kids fighting police, then the army, each other, and finally fire juggling armies of anarchist clowns as well as the more familiar modified urban fauna we know today (at first with abortive attempts to domesticate wild Foxes, followed by the now familiar Slug, Seagull and Crow, with effects we all remember with such apprehension and shock today).

We now have discovered data and remains from the depths of the hole in the ground where that part of the city once stood, in that valley, where we had once thought all to be obliterated, consumed by a plague of nanobots, which allows us to trace this insurrection even further before this series of urban revolts and confrontation at times of deep crisis. We have found that there was a question of data, surveillance and censorship, which led to a citizens mesh network to be created using hidden transfers between generic everyday electronics.

As times became harder it would become a matter of life and death for these humans to be able to zap the data out of a drone or destroy it at the right moment if it meant being able to access the right technology or data from the net, or if it meant being able to build the weapons that really mattered. Government drones were at first well built creatures with firearms and permission to kill the citizens of Bristol. But they were soon only one of many different types of small aerial solar robot. With solar cell prices going down drones were soon running around protecting gardens, walking children to school, but above all collecting and sending messages and data. Everywhere, umbrella frames became 6 legged walking mechanisms, bottles became batteries, bags were woven into skin and all the useless old desktop computer hardware from the dot com boom and bust across the valley of Stokes Croft was stripped of motors, cameras and sensors in small and prosperous factories that sprung up as the world demanded anti surveillance tools and Bristol answered that call.

Neighbourhoods set up monitoring and data carrying devices of their own and used these at first alongside and then against the drone evidence machine, often following directions from bored staff working overtime hunched over a workstation on a bonus pay system. At first they had been surveillance devices, frequently subject to attack by thieves, vandals and police alike, but soon benefiting from the hive mind of the internet as their owners and maintainers shared their knowledge and perfected their ability for speed and dominance of the skies and land. The energy sources and human uses multiplied with each code update. The source code and algorithms for life and behaviour that most people use today, are mostly re-elaborations and reconstructions of the scripts used back then.

But it was the anger of the people that finally equipped these first bots with guns, tazers and knives, and not least with a shared universal operating system that allowed different robots to work together for the first time, and semantic learning chips equipped with a distributed survival instinct which would enable them fight a large army. But it was not to be. The whole place was completely destroyed after increasingly desperate battles between the local factions of the time, long before that tired army ever got back to the valley of central Bristol. They had had enough on their hands in their foreign battles for resources abroad, and various police mutinies, and they soon split off into various militia, before eventually inspiring and pioneering the building of the domes and shared spaces which became that centre of living birth and creation that we know this city as today.

Ironically, it was an open source recipe for a nanobot, by around 2015 being made in many illegal factories across the world, which was the demise of the Stokes Croft rebellion, and the buildings around it, 250 metres into the ground.

If you'd like to make one, take one strip of carbon nanotube, which you will use to contain all the ingredients.

Into this, put in a nanomachine, some xor gates, some dust from a magnet and an energy sucker. Mix it well.

Don't try this incantation near your local parts supply area unless you want a gigantic crater in it though.

images from
http://www.thisischris.com/uploaded_images/Robot-and-Bird-03_small-779473.jpg

http://flickr.com/photos/fdecomite/2167298500/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielproulx/3963404104/

Plant Electrodes

2010-01-12T14:19:00.004Z

I've been doing more late night research on electrodes. This is a good way to create an interface between machine and plant, or machine and animal, and it's basically a wire on a living surface, like a plant or your skin somewhere, and another one close by going out to complete a circuit. It passes current through this non metallic surface, between anode and cathode, and then you measure the resistance you detect. Then the medical ones get much more complicated, and easy to apply or stick to someone.

I started thinking about electrodes when planning a slug detector project, which would use the electrode in order to detect (or cast and then measure discrepancies in) an electrical field. Casting and detecting changes in, or just detecting electrical fields is a form of animal communication used in very primitive underwater animals, mostly to hunt prey or detect possible predators. Because slugs tend to go out on rainy nights, this would work mostly when there was water around this machine. It would generate or detect an electric field the size of a slug and then fire off an action if it does (like take a photo or open a beer trap), but now I'm moving on from molluscs and applying it to plants, as a kind of home made EEG.

The reason I'm talking about these things is I've been trying to make a garden sound object (GSO), or a Musical Raga Automaton (MRA) or an Arduino Powered Renewable Energy Symbiot (APRES), but really I've not really found a good acronynm for the thing so far. It's entered into the Newcastle Maker Faire 2010, as an outdoors exhibit.

It will also have a plant monitor to detect soil humidity, a light sensor and a thermistor to detect temperature.

So back to electrodes. Various ways to spread the pain/effect - http://www.bodyclock.co.uk/acatalog/tenselectrodes.html like with those electrodes, all more comfortable than a naked wire on your skin coming from some machine. It allows my musical automaton project to consider an even deeper symbiosis, whereby it could become the musical soundtrack for either a particular patch of land, or for a particular plant, a long lasting one, such as a bush or a tree.

This might be a more advanced one. This arduino page mentions simple electrodes.

Here is someone who has built a very simple windmill system. It could be good for a distributed windmill light or battery charging project. It's the simplest possible cardboard coil generator, which I'm sure could be attached to a rotor of some kind and made into a workshoppable item, using old hard disk magnets, LED lights and some old CD cases...

I thought more about green noise, and about going around and collecting some sounds from around bristol, maybe the water in the rivers and drains, the sound of the motorway at night, the air at the top of the hill... If I can get it sounding a bit like white noise, I'll know I'm close...

Today I got a step closer to a white noise circuit, but also built the Lady Ada Wave Shield, which I now hope to get working on my Seeeduino. Which brought me to consider once again the outdoor garden musical automaton(OGMA) and what sensors it should have, how it should interface with people and plants.

It should play each day differently through the year, so that in 30 degree heat you get more wave recordings and longer more intense sounds, using the higher amounts of energy collected by the solar panels and / or windmills on it. I don't know where to put a stop to it, but it will take a lot of testing - adding and removing piezos, wether sensing or buzzing, adding/removing light sensors, getting a temperature sensor and testing out a simple electrode or 10 on a plant (my poor aloe vera is wincing at the prospect).

In the winter, it will only play sparse sounds and try and calculate it's current remaining before attempting anything complex.

At night, the Noise Generating Automaton (NGA) will monitor certain readings, and go into a low power mode, still powered mostly by windmills charging some batteries. It will build a file with statistics based on these readings, and use that in the morning when it wakes up.

When light passes a certain threshold, it will generate a low frequency noise which increases as light does. When the sun is almost up, it will have got to being like a base tune, which jams following a pattern dictated by the temperature and humidity sensor's readings for the night.

Using Lady Ada's wave shield, some simple speaker housing, some piezo buzzers (here is an early test of one) and some natural resonant housing, I can produce enough amplification to create this hopefully inobtrusive garden soundtracker(HIGS). What is left to figure out is what to put it in that is both pleasing to look at and resistant to the humid newcastle climate... I'm considering Sugru and sealed glass or if all else fails, the typical plastic containers that you can buy at maplins again, for a few squid (Ah, another mollusc!).

The Garduino project will provide great help I think, as will Mike Skylar's experiments.

Second Life / Open Simulator Arduino Project Plan

2010-01-12T12:03:00.000Z

Here is my thinking on this:

Devobot is an IronPython framework that allows you to trigger animations, movement and chatting to a Second Life or OpenSimulator based avatar using the open source libopenmetaverse library. I used this software in my bot work in a recent archive / 3d model of the Pompeii Court of the Sydenham Crystal Palace.

PySerial on the other hand, allows IronPython based serial comms. Serial comms can also be done via .net frameworks - example is in C#, but it should be a good reference for an ironpython version.

An arduino microprocessor can be hooked up using an adapted version of the light sensor tutorial on http://arduino.cc/ - but for example, triggering animations or chat responses according to the light level or to other sensors I might be able to think of. Maybe eventually growing in complexity until, naturally, a wiimote is added for IR tracking.

So the question is - will it work?

3 possibilities: Hackspace Bristol, DMT and the Aquatrick

2010-01-07T23:45:00.008Z

Today I had some important realisations and considerations about various projects I'm working on - Hackspace Bristol, the Green Noise Open Hardware Project, and the invention of the Aquatrick, a water based, sensor controlled, light projecting device. I don't know how related they are except for this snowy day in Bristol, but that's life, and here they are:

1. Hackspace Bristol

Here is a project plan/wish list of sorts for Bristol Hackspace, which is currently based at Coexist/Hamilton House in Bristol:

Bristol Hackspace will be a feature of Stokes Croft and active contributor to it's attractions as a local and international centre of alternative arts and culture, adding a technological aspect to the existing local autonomous spaces, and hopefully working with these and with the wider world-wide hackerspace or makerspace (and dorkbot?) movements as well as many others. To this I hope to be able to assist by curating events, co-ordinating workshop series' as well as one-off and off-site events featuring our members or invited guests, and co-ordinating arts/object production. I think one main use of the hackspace will be this last one. Supply, as well as in house production and sale of open hardware creations might take place, from simpler Arduino based devices to more complex or diverse projects such as the RepRap, Lifetrac or Hexayurt.

A lot of dorkbot/hackspace participants would like laser cutters, 3d printers and the like, so it just depends what we can get funded, donated, or made ourselves, but cheaply.

It would be great to also get to mess with other workshop environments, such as Chris Chalkley's planned kiln workshop some day, which he is planning for his Stokes Croft China sensation...

Also, there will certainly be the more artistic inventions by our own members or international or well known or common sense open licensed ideas. These can be worked on during electronics or arts related workshops, or simply made by hand or mass produced so as to sell in our (fingers crossed!) Stokes Croft shop front.

Members can pay several levels of monthly fee which contribute to the basic running costs and rent, but we could also go for various different types of funding on a project basis and hopefully sponsorship from creative, community based, educational and business related establishments around the city that might begin to also benefit from our classes and various types of open, participatory crafting events.

And now for something completely different:

2. I may have invented my own religion, or, DMT's important connections with Buddhist and other spiritual practices.

I realised also today that there is a link of some kind between the plant and animal chemical DMT and a more Buddha-like state of being. DMT is a powerful psychedelic drug also manufactured by the human brain (some say the pineal gland at the centre of the brain). Nam Myoho Renge Kyo on the other hand is the chant, rhythm and teaching at the centre of Nichiren Buddhism and it's various offshoots. In this, a Mahayana interpretation of Buddhist teachings, Buddhahood is a pervasive force inside every living being, an absolute force and potential for good in everything, which is said to have taken place whilst he sat by a Pipal tree - Ficus religiosa - for many days, eating only what fell from this tree.

A typical Nichiren Buddhist's personal practice might involve study, application of buddhist teachings in their daily lives, and chanting anything from 10 times a day to even so called "5 by 5s" - 5 hours a day for 5 days, to an inscription in a scroll called a Gohonzon.

In simple terms the purely Buddhist belief is that by doing this we make ourselves more in rhythm with this absolute, positive energy that pervades the universe, and that by doing so we are able to have the wisdom, fortune and timeliness to be in the right place in the right time so as to make a large difference in life for oneself and others - in essence, to be a hero, able to behave like a Buddha at all times.

The reason I make this probably blasphemous assertion about dimethyl-tryptamine is due to the Green Noise Experiment I put on as a performance art/mind hack experiment at the Arnolfini Arts Centre here in Bristol in December 2009 (see previous entry on this blog for links). Basically, I put ping pong balls over the eyes of around 38 participants in a darkened space, and gave them various types of continuous white noise, green noise or pink noise to listen to for either 5, 10 or 20 minutes each.

This experiment in sound and open hardware was more to do with a inducing an also mildly psychedelic, but more hypnagogic state similar to that encountered when falling asleep or possibly during sleep paralysis, but it led me to look up various wikipedia articles about DMT production and read about various other experiments to see if there was a known link between DMT and the ganzfeld procedure I had used.

In the words of some participants in a well known DMT study in the 90s by Doctor Rick Strassman of the book "The Spirit Molecule", when injected with doses of 0.2 to 0.4 mg/kg of this very simply structured derivative of the amino-acid tryptophan:

(in the beginning, volunteers would experience vibration and many colours would appear, and begin to form complex patterns, like a curtain, which Dr Strassman in this case encourages his subject to go beyond)

"At that point it opened, and I was very much somewhere else. I believe it was at that point that I went out, into the universe-being, dancing with, a star system.."

and a few days later, from the same subject

"I am changed. I will never be the same. To simply say this almost seems to lessen the experience..."

"The great power seemed to fill all possibilities. It was "amoral" but it was love, and it just was. There was no benevolent God, only this primordial power. All of my ideas and beliefs seemed absurdly ridiculous. I never wanted to forget this..."

"I had no idea how long I was in this confluence of pure energy, or whatever/however I might describe it. Finally, I felt myself tumbling gently and sliding backward away from this light"

There is lots more where this came from, and in my experiment I was reminded of this effect in particular by the green noise diffraction effect that participants in the Green Noise Experiment had, and how relevant it seemed then, that white noise in particular, is the sound of absolute randomness all at once, of every possible wavelength and noise put together, whereas green noise was just a more natural and accessible version of this same universal sound due to it's frequent existence in the natural as well as urban environment, and that it might somehow be linked to what we are trying to achieve in Buddhist practice.

I have still to figure out if there was any prevalance in mystical or spiritual experiences in the Green Noise experiment, but the event certainly felt imbued with a positive energy - so many people were so pleased and thankful to have had a chance to try the machine.

My point of view of death, as a Buddhist, is that in dying we fall back into a sea, like an individual wave rejoining a larger whole. In more practical terms, I'd say we visibly fall back into a shadow of our previous selves, the atoms that once made us function slowly merging with other organisms or environments and the changes we make slowly losing relevance.

Although our minds may be gone in death, the memories of those around us, the inspiration, ideas and lessons we may have taught or inspired in others, and the effects of our actions in life carry on.

These changes we make in life, in our families, and in wider society and the environment around us can still can be seen long before and after a single lifetime, as we are seeing day to day with the current environmental and economic situation. This concept seems to have such a huge similarity with what is seen in the space of around 5 minutes in Dr Strassman's DMT subjects.

This thought is very enlightening, and I feel very lucky to be in both the worlds of art oriented electronics and music, and a Buddhist, so as to be able to have this realisation. I don't know if it will lead to anything, or where if so, but it certainly seems important and life changing right now to look into how I might improve my Buddhist practice through creating and using these Ganzfeld devices and through the use of what I've myself called no more than mind hacks.

Doctor Strassman, I believe, has figured out a way to measure DMT in the blood, so it seems worth testing a link between this and the practice of chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, as well as many other Buddhist practices, not least Tientai, also known as Zhiyi, the founder of the Tendai, or Lotus School of Buddhism.

This was a chinese monk who around the year 575 declared the Lotus Sutra to be the highest teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha's sutras, intended for many generations after his time due to the time not being ripe for it to be spread widely when it was conceived.

The Lotus Sutra itself was probably compiled from oral teachings long after Shakyamuni's death.

Zhiyi added to existing meditative practices in year 600 China, the practice of "Great Concentration and Insight", (which I've also seen probably mis-translated as "Stopping and starting") - a complex system of self-cultivation practice that also incorporated devotional rituals and confession/repentance rites.

Nichiren Daishonin, in 13th century Japan, then simplified this practice into the Nam Myoho Renge Kyo chant heard today, taking inspiration from contemporary Buddhist schools offering simpler, more universally accessible practices, and from his own readings into Buddhist teachings. Nichiren's followers and practitioners today strive to make concrete changes in their lives through their practice.

I believe DMT is a vital ingredient in Buddhist practice - a fact which doesn't lessen it's beauty to me in the slightest, and as shown by Dr Strassman, is also present in many other spiritual practices worldwide, and I think this link urgently deserves further investigation.

The Aquatrick

The third truth I would like to tell you about, is that I just thought of an interesting device to make. It is a lamp, which includes an inverted LED in a reflective concave surface, shining onto a small pool of water, in a reflective container. This creates pleasant moving lights on the walls and roof around the device, so it is also a projector, or lava lamp-ish item. On the top of the device, as well as an "on" button are some sensors that allow a user to control the movement of some servo based or electromagnetic mechanisms that stir the water beneath, creating waves. This means passers by, or single / multiple users can influence the movement of the reflections around them. The water might also sound nice, but the shape of the object is probably crucial! And so ends another gathering of quite unrelated truths and future possibilities.

Green Noise Experiment

2009-11-27T15:06:00.027Z

This post relates to my "Green Noise Experiment" at Uncraftivism, Arnolfini Bristol, 12-14 December 2009.

An experiment will be carried out producing 3 devices capable of inducing hallucinations through sensory deprivation.

A CD player and headphones containing 20 minutes of green noise, and some ping pong balls and sticky tape to cover eyes. I'm considering creating a second CD with some natural green noise collected from around Bristol.

a white mask with an arduino microprocessor and 2 piezoelectric buzzers producing white noise near the wearer's ears. Current status - the white noise device and white piezoelectrically modified earmuffs are ready. I've decided not to use the mask. It fits and works, but is easy to break and difficult to put on

Two simple white and pink noise circuits (made with the help of other dorkbot members) one using Linear Feedback Shift Circuits and Xor chips, and the other using an even simpler "good enough for me" pink noise circuit. I will be constructing some piezo earmuffs on Sunday morning so that one of these machines can also be used by participants.

All three devices will be usable in some way by the audience, who will be able to wear the device in a quiet area for up to 20 minutes, and will be invited to write their experiences for posterity.

Here, meanwhile is the code for device #2: the arduino based white noise generator, from Dorkbot member John Honnibal:



/* Pseudo-Random Bit Sequence Generator                     2009-11-25 */
/* Copyright (c) 2009 John Honniball, Dorkbot Bristol                  */

/*
* For a discussion of PRBS generators, see The Art Of Electronics, by
* Horowitz and Hill, Second Edition, pages 655 to 660. For more info
* on Linear Feedback Shift Registers, see Wikipedia:
*   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_feedback_shift_register
* For the actual shift register taps, refer to this article on noise
* generation for synthesisers:
*   http://www.electricdruid.net/index.php?page=techniques.practicalLFSRs
*/

// Choose the same pin as the "Melody" example sketch http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/PlayMelody
int speakerPin = 9;

unsigned long int reg;

void setup ()
{
// Serial setup for debugging only; slows down the program far too much
// for audible white noise
Serial.begin (9600);

// Connect a piezo sounder between Ground and this pin
pinMode (speakerPin, OUTPUT);

// Arbitrary inital value; must not be zero
reg = 0x55aa55aaL;
}


void loop ()
{
unsigned long int newr;
unsigned char lobit;
unsigned char b31, b29, b25, b24;

// Extract four chosen bits from the 32-bit register
b31 = (reg & (1L <<>> 31;
b29 = (reg & (1L <<>> 29;
b25 = (reg & (1L <<>> 25;
b24 = (reg & (1L <<>> 24;

// EXOR the four bits together
lobit = b31 ^ b29 ^ b25 ^ b24;

// Shift and incorporate new bit at bit position 0
newr = (reg << reg =" newr;">

It works a treat! I think the arduino and it's batteries might be happy to live in a bottle with wires coming out of it into the mask. The first thought when the circuits were ready was that I'll have to add an on / off switch.

This morning I made some video of the first stages of putting together a mask for the ping pong ball eyes, hoping to mix them soon.

A simple way to apply ping pong balls to eyes comfortably is by glueing some cotton wool around the edges but I have gone for taping the half balls directly. The white mask will hopefully be a step up from this. It is not complete but will be on show, in case ideas come forward for improving it.

As you can tell, the experiment has now taken place. There are now write ups in various places, and possibly followup information on the _GNE Device and the piezoelectric earmuffs or other information will follow soon on this blog.

Electronic Ideas and Experiments

2009-10-19T02:26:00.012+01:00

LED lights.

This is a simple idea which has already led some local artists to make shiny balloons to light up a pier, and has inspired a teenager to start a business and win various entrepreneurial and inventing awards with something that leaves most open hardware or electronics enthusiasts cold and blank.

Basically the most simple thing you can build using electronics is an LED attached to a resistor, and both ends of those two, attached to a battery. Another simple variation on this is the throwie, which is LED + Battery + magnet (so it sticks to what you throw it onto).

To many this is old stuff, far too simple to be interesting any more, but to me the simplicity of the design is beautiful:

But it's actually a lot more fluid than that picture, made of bendable wires that could go anywhere, and could be arbitrary lengths really.

LED light can be very directional and will project really nicely on to things, so an LED tree made of wire or pipes that you can position seems a good idea. LED technology is also getting better fast. Switches to turn on or off can be made using just metal bits or pins so there's loads of space for considering not the electronic aspects, but the design of the object and what it would feel like or what it would be for. So doing some kind of LED lighting unit where each one is switchable and autonomous would be brilliant. But how to do it...

I would like to create an LED light system for a tiny stop motion home theatre using my Arduino. I have to find out how to power at least 3 different coloured LEDs. I think I have 5V so maybe I need to figure out how to do the lights at different times. But then what to encase them in so that they are easy to position, and how to turn them on and off. Here is a simple lighting test I did:

Solar power

Once I'd build my first arduino based prototype, my main worry was those huge panels of 4 AA batteries at a time that are needed for this kind of thing. It is far too much consumption and the first thing to do would be to switch to rechargeable batteries.

Once you have rechargeable batteries though, the next step is to figure out how to wire in a small solar panel and let it be self sufficient. The thing I want to be self sufficient will be able to generate sounds from a buzzer in some kind of container that can naturally amplify it(a pumpkin has been suggested for this), as well as play electronic beeps to it, from a piezo. So it follows that if this is playing all day it will be annoying, whereas if it uses only a little energy and has to save up energy before it can play for a while, it will only give a couple of concerts a day, which may be more interesting than a constantly sounding device.

http://little-scale.blogspot.com/2008/03/connecting-solar-panel-to-arduino.html
http://www.instructables.com/id/Self-Sufficient-Arduino-Board/

http://residentialsolarelectricity.diycreation.com/sun-tracking-solar-panel-w-arduino/ <- fun stuff

White Noise Generator
I want to do a psychological experiment using sensory deprivation to induce a hallucinatory state. This will use a white noise generator and ping pong balls remove auditory and visual inputs from the wearer, excepting the LED lights which will follow the overall luminicence of the device and light up at some moments to trigger a colour perception. It will need a simple and small hat with the required attachments: a white noise generator, and some LEDs that light up randomly at the side of the eyes when the room darkens and a light diode to detect light (although this can be done with an LED as well).

Initial links to useful chips and bits that might help:
http://www.edaboard.com/ftopic302943.html
http://www.maxim-ic.com/appnotes.cfm/an_pk/3469
http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm/qv_pk/1521
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1169001613
http://processing.org/discourse/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1234706777

Marcus Valentine suggests using a linear feedback shift register to do this with, and John Honniball says this would need quite cheap chips, easily available here and there. Here are some links explaining it:

http://web-ee.com/schematics/noise_generation/scalable-noise-generator/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_feedback_shift_register

Using simpler chips and boards than Arduinos

The natural progression from using an arduino to prototype something is to want miniaturisation and to try and make the thing cheaper to keep as a permanent object. I don't want to have to take my arduino out and build it all back up again each time, so circuits will get soldered, and ideally, the arduino will be then used in turn to program a smaller, less expensive chip with what is needed to just do it's job (minus all the USB connection and other arduino stuff that make them simple). The end result is you have a small device you can make more of, running on a simple chip. This can work well for stuff like musical instruments or other semi bespoke work.

http://shop.tuxgraphics.org/
http://shop.tuxgraphics.org/electronic/detail_avrusb500.html
http://www.futurlec.com/
http://fundamental.antville.org/
http://code.google.com/p/mega-isp/
http://drug123.org.ua/mega-isp-shield/

Beyond the netbook: Making the simplest open source arduino based microcomputer

2009-10-14T13:52:00.004+01:00

Today's arduino based microprocessors are no match for the computing power of an ARM chip. Most of these chips can easily run Linux, or proprietary systems like WinCE, and they power most of our phones as a result of much earlier electronic experimentation, as show by last week's Micromen BBC program, about the Acorn vs Sinclair battles of the 80s.

A fully capable ARM chip able to control a complex thing like a mobile with it's full color displays and wifi, 3g bluetooth etc will cost a minimum of 150 pounds(and that's just for the chip), and so for hardware hacking isn't really worth the investment, as no-one will buy it for £150 when you can buy a proper ARM based phone at Tescos for 15 pounds.

But an arduino can still be the basis for some kind of cheap system, perhaps one that costs only around 50 pounds to prototype.

What I'd like to see though isn't a project to make something that mimics phones, but is to make a functional leap and create the simplest possible thing that can serve as a household computer, taking the most basic functions: communication, data transfer, storage and interface, and concentrating on being low power, cheap to make and open in design.

Things to use:

Voice: OCR to Voice, voice to text etc, getting rid of keyboards. (Although the processing power needed for this might not make it a good idea. Maybe it would only record messages, send them around and play them back.
"Touchscreen" or head tracking as with http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ and other ideas.
Casing: Recycled materials. Tire, sensors from old electronic items, mass produced plastic packaging etc, natural materials such as bamboo and balsa.
It could use sd cards for storage, send data over audio channels, and we could copy data in and out using the miniusb.
Could a photo sensor and piezo combine to create an interface perhaps? The photosensor would do distances, and piezo would check for sound. Sound + distance can easily reproduce the rubbish but simple keypad used in mobiles.
Display: The tellymate! http://www.solarbotics.com/products/50652/ but if it can plug into an old flatscreen monitor, all the better.

There has to be a cheap way of generating images or sending data. Using ethernet and a fast local network, it can control a huge array of devices, and there are new technologies coming out all the time such as 3g modems and IP over electricity.

With the basis of an arduino, or of it's cheaper clones, an open hardware device could be created able to plug into a monitor or a television and use a modern but inexpensive interface such as IR gestures or touchscreen, powered by AA batteries or crank power!

So here are some links I've collected to do with ARM chips and netbooks:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10198879-16.html Ubuntu triumphs in the modern netbook market.

http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/software-arm-linux.php A linux ARM distro for a specific chip, price TBC...

http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/arm-sbc.php $110...

If a workshop was set up to make something that sold for £40 pounds or less, people would buy it. But the sets could take the price down to half of that if it was just simple parts and lots of inventiveness...

A weekend building an arduino based robot

2009-10-13T14:00:00.001+01:00

[The bot itself, looking sombre]

Last month, I went away to Stourbridge, a great centre of technology and robotics in the UK's scenic midlands. Here are some notes, pictures and film from that journey.

(I lied about Stourbridge).

The little train that brought me over from the main rail routes felt like a mix between the Totoro cat train and the slowly chugging train of death that inevitably carries away dead steampunks.

I later learned it had been built with very little money, so the health and safety was very minimal, and it was always breaking down.

But my friend Mat lives on the side of this sleepy town. He said that to one side of his house there was wasteland and empty industrial buildings. The other side, he warned was a land of chavs with blue neon underlit cars, there were also pubs and strip clubs, and lots of nurseries.

For a long time, Mat had been collecting arduinos and sensors of all kinds, hoping for a weekend of calm in which to play with it all. He invited me over to build a sonic robot.

So I had gone over for a weekend of playing with cool tech, which turned out to include generative sound with PD and Max MSP, arduinos, robots, cameras, c++ libraries, and lots of gaming. It's for a show he wants to do next year.

We also talked about the idea of a combined virtual and real tree: perhaps feeding into each other. My tree would live in Second Life or Opensim, and would be made of a robotic avatar, which would talk to it's attachments and generate detachable fruits if it was paid Lindens or fed nice textures. Mat's would live in real life, made of arduinos, servos and LEDs, and might for example produce virtual fruits with a GPS location that you'd need an AR platform to go and find them with.

So Thursday was a quick introduction to the arduino. We did the first hello world tutorial and got out Mat's extensive collection of arduinos, roboduinos, arduino diecimila, cornettos, arduino super maxis, calippos and mars bar ice creams. So after getting one LED's worth of blinking satisfaction, we created two little things out of plastic:

To make these, we sawed a CD box cover in half, attached three ultrasonic oscillators on either side (which were bought for a tenner each at coolcomponents.co.uk). And inside the box covers was a little arduino, controlling it. Our idea was to then wire this up so that music could be played based on it's tactile nature, and based on some 80s experiments with infra-red range finders.

But then we got out PD, and started playing around with that, as well as getting out loads of computer games like Left 4 Dead and Fight Night round 4 - great inspiration for messing with electronics and sound generation.

So next morning came a fun Puredata workshop, downloading it, setting it up on linux, and generating random sounds in our stoic Stourbridge surroundings, a local JD Wetherspoons, to the annoyance and tutting of the locals. I learnt that you can wire up Playstation 3 controllers to PD via USB and they will control anything on the PC. It looks a lot harder to figure out than Max MSP but in it's help files' introduction page it mentions Xenakis and Stockhausen.

And then, after some stir fry, we put together a robot kit, the kind you buy at bookshops or museum shops. This one was from Robot Shop (although I can't find a link to it direct. Mat says it's called the Rover though). We ripped out the frame and the wheel motors and attached them to an arduino. After we'd put 20 tiny bits of metal inside 20 tiny little holes on each track, it was quite easy to get the arduino controlling a single tracked wheel, but there was not enough power to run them both, much less to carry loads of shit around like a robotic pack horse mini me. It would have needed a transistor and a 9v battery, which means a trip to Maplins.

So we sidestepped that whole issue and added the contents of a £50 Edimax webcam and wifi pack to the robot.

[To indoctrinate robots into the human world, it is traditional to filially imprint them with some late night Jonathan Ross]

We removed the webcam from the white side of it's plastic container, displaying it's internal LED(s) as well. This we then taped on to the robot box. and on top of the whole thing went the WIFI router, which was also in the pack from edimax. I soon downloaded an android IP cam app, and had connected to the camera over the wifi router, although being plugged in doesn't make our little robot any better at being autonomous...

But we could add batteries at some point. It needs either a 6v, 9v and 12v battery, or just a rack of AA batteries like a radio controlled car.

[Slightly menacing blue lights, again showing a strange resemblance between television and sound bot]

We also thought of using one of the range finders for it, so that it would have an easy way of avoiding obstacles, but then Mat's games with video to audio pretty much got rid of that need.

And we took loads of photos of the photos it was taking. But to get the camera working on linux, I needed a bit longer, as I had to download all the info and a big 150 meg library to my g1 (As a sign of the times, there was no working internet in the flat, but we both had it via 3g on our phones, which we'd use to transfer files via USB cable).

Meanwhile, I wrote my first C++ library for arduino, stealing shamelessly from a Twitter library, found online, which was able to deal with basic authentication.

So easy to make robots nowadays! I bet in future our robot dolls will be home made too.

I'm back now, a few hours later. We've taken a slight detour with a Max/MSP patch that interprets Mat's Mac's camera and turns it into ostinato piano notes based on how bright each pixel is. After that, Mat enlarged it by 250 times, by taking each pixel in a row and doing this based on the average. It's about as good as the range finders were to begin with. We had loads of fun and made a couple of videos of Mat playing his computer like a piano sampling theremin.

It's also, to my mind, a lot more accessible than a range finder, ultrasonic or IR, because everyone has a camera in the UK and everyone is being videoed or is watching video constantly through the day.

Imagine an installation where you took over all that CCTV in a space, and used it to generate sound based on the people passing through it.

I kept working on my C++ library, and it is now able to log in, request a page, and get an error code of 200 from the camera. Also, you can now install it in the arduino development environment and it will run out of the box, even giving an example. It's not much really, but it was late... And with the pdf of the cgi calls, it will soon be able to deliver lots of info to the arduino based on the images it sees.

Next step will be to get the little camera for the robot sending data back to the Arduino, so that it can pick up visual info and use it to tell where it's going. I had a geeky time messing around with the arduino and it's Ethernet shield, getting it to be a web server and client(ooh, arduino p2p, I count the days until your birth), but unfortunately still not managing to get it to connect to anything useful.

Mat's final vision for the robot is that it is eventually able to find it's way around using the camera, and able to find the most musical place, so that in it's symbiotic relationship with humans, it can deliver pleasurable noises. We also still kept the first basic idea of using our original rangefinder interface, maybe mounted on the robot, or in an area close to it, so as to allow people to play duets with the robot, and find even better noises based on what it finds.

[Our little robot relaxes after a long and arduous hacking session]

How to do memory:
Instead of storing sound samples on an SD card (which could also be good, for obtaining on-board recordings), it could store much more data based on the images it sees, before it turns them into noise. On a 9 hour day, 15 frames a second, so for a minute it would need 900 samples. So for an hour, 54000 samples. it would have 486000 individual samples to take care of. BUT each row of elements has 256 individual integers. So that gives 124 416 000 bits stored in a day, i.e around 15MB.

But that's only if it was gathering this stuff all day: it only needs to gather the stuff it likes(based on an algorithm Mat's got in mind), so maybe a 30 sec vision based sample at most, which would then be stored on the SD card so that it could be played back in combination with other stuff it liked. Samples could maybe be stored in 3 types (Lady Ada's wave shield allows the playing of 3 sounds at a time - enough for percussion, chord/drone and soloist/multiple tones).

Mat's algorithm would do a fitness test:


   is this a C major chord, or a scale, or something I can identify?
       Yes:
           What type is the sound: percussive, slow tone, quick tone?
               store a segment(type)  
           Move slightly forwards or back to try and get nice variations.
       No:
           Turn X degrees left or right.

Arduinos and bits bought from:

Devonrobotics.co.uk, corecomponents.co.uk
Robot shop construction kit: £40 including an arduino!
Lady Ada Wave shield kit: also quite cheap, and including another Arduino.
skpang.co.uk : very cheap bits and oscillators.

Dorkbot's New Hackspace

2009-10-06T23:27:00.003+01:00

Here below you see a miniature, or pocket version of what was recently displayed at a large event in Bath by the newly hacktivised dorkbot bunch, who were given the challenge of providing a musical experience for a tech related arts event. They had to build a smaller version for testing, so they say, or most probably, because they could and because it was fun.

So Dorkbot has finally grown up from being a show and tell of the media, design, internet, engineering, musical and generally creative dork-peoples of Bristol. It has now gained much attention from event organisers and maker faires, as popular electronics has it's second rennaisance in arduinos and strange inventions, and as the closet sound benders of Bristol started messing with all that, so they are booked to play quite a few places, in the sense of course, of playing strange new-millennium unicycles that generate sounds by bending a microprocessor's own vibrations.

Tonight, we plotted the needs for the upcoming (23rd and 24rth October) event in Cardiff, where many a sound unicycle will parade the streets(um, of the venue), a veritable orchestra in fact, for which bass parts are now sought. Here is the shopping list for now:

2 Sunshields for bike wheel (to shade a small section at the top where the optical sensors are)
2 Battery packs for 6AAs
2 Arduinos
Wires
3 or 4* optic sensors
£4 speakers from the garage near John's friend's house
2 power plugs
2 jack sockets.

* The 4, as explained by John Honnibal, was due to the possibility of having an extra track around the side of the disk, which provides the musical score for the device, and to have that synchronise the other notes. This is shown in the first image, at the top of the blog post.

But perhaps I should explain a bit about this space that has been kindly given to Dorkbot by local networkers and community IT group Bristol Wireless, so as to be used as a Hackspace. It's housed at Hamilton House in exotic stokes croft(where from the bar below, a local play takes place each day, next to Bristol Wireless's offices, and so far just an internet connection, some power sockets, and lots of possibly useless, potentially dangerous electronic devices in large plastic containers. Oh and some unicycles.

The idea is to keep it running weekly as a time in which to make stuff, rather than show stuff you've made as with the Pervasive Media Labs sessions. I hope those like me who have never done a day's soldering in their lives will soon learn to count their ohms, tell their resistors from their capacitors, and others will get to work with interesting people who bring their creations to new audiences or new collaborations. But the Dorkbot, mixed media feel is not lost. It's still meant to be a mix of whatever is made by electricity, and I hope the musicians and engineers can be quickly joined by dancers, poets and cooks. (But I do also remember a Cube Cinema based dorkbot where even the electricity rule was broken, and most of the show and tell was about open source cola and distributed apple tree orchards).

So, we now have a bristol hackspace, and lots of things to build each tuesday, for upcoming events, some leaning more towards outreach(such as a busking and empty shop takeover event in late November), others more towards art(such as the Arnolfini's December based IT/hacking programme). I must end with another list, this time of the first hackspace invention ever to be built as a kit and sold. Here are some of the parts that might be required:


In each pack (of a total of maybe 20 packs?):

A small used flyer, or some thin cardboard on which to print a circuit board and on to which the device will be assembled.
1 diode
2 capacitors
2 potentiometers
Chips
etc

1 pack of 20 or 50 plastic parts ziploc bags.

As well as this creation, allowing people to come to a workshop and go home with something interesting, we'll also be on the lookout for some cheap sound making toys from pound stores or toy shops, so as to circuit bend these as well. Meanwhile though, I'll definitely have to learn to solder!

Where's the Salad?

2009-09-15T02:33:00.006+01:00

A while ago, I put on an event in which people from Bristol grew and made a salad, based on Alison Knowle's "Proposition No 2":

It was very nice, and I made a preparatory video:

as well as there being a radio interview and a sound art play with radio and some homemade chopping noises(with poet Andres Andwadter), lots of photos of the event itself and some graphics about it. But I want to make this, as well as more audio, this time of the live chopping duet between lollorosso and improvising trio, into a video and tell the story that way. So I'm really sorry, but it's going to take me a while. It was an incredible experience, and thanks to all who came, and to the better food company who gave us loads of tasty tomatos and lettuce. And to everyone else who brought us salad!

A list of future physical/virtual computing arts projects

2009-09-14T23:51:00.006+01:00

I have to write up so much from recent events, but as usual at these times, my head is buzzing with ideas for other stuff to do next (all based on a long weekend of messing with arduinos, robotics, Puredata and Max/MSP), so I thought it best to document that first. So. I would like to make:

An enactment of a score I wrote a long time ago, involving dancers/actors performing with a box, that follows different parameters based on what stage the performance is at. It would be a black box, interacting with the movement and words only through sound. It would be capable of "jamming" or following music in some way or other. (Link suggested by Mat)
A dance based implementation of the MaxMSP script that my friend Mat quickly put together last weekend, which allows webcams to interpret visual data as audio samples(more on that in the next post). I want to invite a duet of dancers to perform with this webcam audio, in December, but mostly scriptless, just a result of trying things out with the kit and seeing what shapes to pull so the sounds are better!
An outdoors sound object capable of sensing it's environment (possibly via sensors able to see light and soil moisture, so a bit like a plant again). It would turn those senses into audio. I would program it with my own samples and prototype it with PD, though so it would sound somehow like my own thing. The main part of it would be that it could play a morning raga: if it's dark, play a generative solo sound. As sound increases, find a melody and vary it, keeping the main bit for later. Percussion joins in when light reaches a certain moment, and follows warmth or moisture. I've got most of the bits of this. I'm wondering how to keep it safe out there in the rain and damp all the time though. And I want to get it solar panels and make it self sufficient, or even read more data from that into music as well!
An exhibition, soon, of the musical robot we prototyped and got started this weekend (looking for venues at the moment).
The two trees, from the previous post. This will hopefully debut on Burning Man's Second Life incarnation, Burning Life.
Maybe in future, a watcher system to protect plants against night time garden pests. It would have a wire going into each plant pot. It would use the noted aversion that slugs and snails have to small electrical charges (this is why they don't like copper), together with a motion sensor or some other sensors, to (gently) zap them whenever they come by. The natural extension of this would of course be a mobile robot that had all these things in it, and a good way of finding it's way around the garden.

So some of these are very real and coming soon if not here already. The Burning Life land grab is tonight (3am! late night tonight for me then) for example, but other things I just want to note down for the future...

A tree spirit for Opensim / Burning Life

2009-09-09T00:48:00.014+01:00

I want to make a self replicating distributed bot + attachment system, which is coupled with a physical computing version of itself which my friend Mat Dalgliesh is making as a physical creation.

Here is the spec:

The tree idea is a reflection of a physical computing tree, created using arduinos, sensors and motors.

Leaves are attachments with a built in fall script. When they fall, they slowly degrade, becoming darker until they become a particle effect and delete themselves. New leaves take donations from users. If they get donations, they grow bigger and live longer. They pass this donation to the trunk who divides it around the rest of the plant.

Here is a little bit of a proto-leafgen script:

// Rez an object on touch, with relative position, rotation, and velocity all described in the rezzing prim's coordinate system.
string object = "Leaf"; // Name of object in inventory
vector relativePosOffset = <2.0,>; // "Forward" and a little "above" this prim
vector relativeVel = <1.0,>; // Traveling in this prim's "forward" direction at 1m/s
rotation relativeRot = <0.707107,>; // Rotated 90 degrees on the x-axis compared to this prim
integer startParam = 10;



default {

state_entry() {
    vector myPos = llGetPos();
    rotation myRot = llGetRot();

    vector rezPos = myPos+relativePosOffset*myRot;
    vector rezVel = relativeVel*myRot;
    rotation rezRot = relativeRot*myRot;
llSetObjectName("Leaf");
    llRezObject(object, rezPos, rezVel, rezRot, startParam);
  }

touch_start(integer num_detected) {
  llRequestPermissions(llDetectedKey(0), PERMISSION_ATTACH);
}

run_time_permissions(integer perm) {
  if (perm & PERMISSION_ATTACH)  {
      llAttachToAvatar(ATTACH_RHAND);
  }
}

}

Fruits are controlled by all the other parts: they accumulate currency, and can spawn more of themselves when small. When big, they have a drop script. It becomes a little ball that gives something nice, like textures, or sim currency when picked. Just before it drops, it transfers any remaining goodness inside it to the trunk

The trunks are all bot avatars, run after being prepared by humans. Each time the tree needs to grow by another bit, another avatar is needed to be attached to a linking attachment. By use of animations, they could even be intertwined with each other. It uses currency to upload textures of it's older self - used in all other parts. If restarted, the bot scripts will start from seedling.

The avatar is heavily made up: it will have trunk and root- like attachments. sounds and animations, and then generators for the fruits and leaves, It is a bot, communicating with the attachments it wears via hidden channels. Maybe that's how a tree spirit should.

Roots are born when the tree is on some land. They could be non physical and locked to a place, so they function as an anchor. It can be engineered that only way it could be moved would be by the addition to the tree of a rooting script, temporarily making the tree physical. Not sure if these will be needed really though.

To kill it, because it can respawn trunks which automatically wear leaves and accumulate money, you would have to ddos all the bots that run it, and they can be connecting from different servers, which could make it quite a resilient little plant.

So this is an opensource project at the moment. It is a cross between content, character design ecology and commerce. It should be fun! Let me know if you'd like to be involved!

A quick look at Second Life and Opensim

2009-08-04T14:48:00.003+01:00

I just wrote this blog post as a generic look at the history and uses of virtual worlds, with focus mostly on SL, but I'm about to change it drastically to just be about SL and it's uses to most of the clients we have at work - mostly quangos, charitable organisations and meta-academic groups. Meanwhile, here is it's full original and sometimes unfinished text

I Robot

These days I have been mostly building some robots. To be precise, I am making a few Victorians, some roman slaves, and a roman tour guide and host. They will be there to welcome visitors, and to provide entertaining commentaries as a backdrop to a historical reconstruction. But these are not your "ordinary" robots, made of metal and silicon: they will live their slightly repetitive existences only within the confines of the Second Life virtual world.

The project I'm working on uses this 3d environment to recreate a Victorian model of an earlier Roman building - the Pompeii Court, which was in turn, reconstructed as part of the original Sydenham Crystal Palace exhibition in the 1850s.

Many academic institutions have used Second Life for similar purposes - to bring to life lost buildings in architectural or design projects, as a way to show these places and buildings to students and visitors.

So what is Second Life again?

Second Life, like many other MMOs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games or Environments), is a direct descendant of the text based "Dungeon" software that became popular in the late 80s and 90s, around the time when the Internet first came into popular use. These were primarily games, but also allowed users to socialise and sometimes even to build new aspects of this textual environment.

Second life, first published by Linden Labs in 2002, offers similar functionality: you can send messages, chat, or send instant messages to other players, as you would in a social network environment such as Facebook, but with the difference that this would take place in a rich 3d world, complete with sounds, animations, video and sometimes even the real voices of the other users. The vast majority of what you can find inside Second Life has been built by the same users who frequent it.

To have a first look, just go to https://join.secondlife.com/ and follow the instructions you will find there.

A useful tip is to remember to capitalise the first letter of your new avatar's name, as the automatically generated second name will also be automatically capitalised. Once you have selected a pre-built avatar and filled in some details, you will be able to download the client software and get inside second life's "grid" (the collection of computers running second life's server software, which combine to produce second life's "world").

Why would I want to use it?

Linden Labs' business oriented web site lists the main ways companies are working in Second Life today. Above all, it is used as a virtual meeting place, allowing shared virtual spaces, where employees can discuss issues within a traditional meeting or conference framework, or in small groups anonymously or informally. Because Second Life provides powerful and easy to use 3d building tools, it is also employed in the field of design and architecture for collaborative building, or to simulate dangerous or far away environments for training purposes, as well as to view 3d prototypes that might otherwise take days to produce off-line.

There are many ways of creating game areas, or so-called "Interative advertising" so that concepts can become immersive for users or more entertaining to learn about, Technology moves quickly however, and some companies initially doing this in Second Life have since found it easier to use bespoke virtual environments, and some have been recently developing their own solutions.

Here are some examples of how different types of company might use Second Life:

A health company recently used Second Life for informal workplace talks on health. One organiser was quoted as saying "“Normally you would rarely tell your colleagues about your health concerns, but here with some level of anonymity, people open up”.
Late last year, IBM held a Conference using various teleconferencing technologies, including use of Second Life for 200 people, involving three keynote speeches and 37 breakout sessions.
Imperial College London are building a "Virtual Hospital" within a private area of a virtual postgraduate medical school in SciLands, a dedicated science and technology Second Life continent populated by universities, government agencies and museums.
A company named Encitra is using Second Life as a platform to do real life urban planning.

The Virtual Economy

One major aspect across many online virtual worlds, is the fact that these worlds have their own currencies and economies that interact with the real world. As players of virtual games increase their abilities, complete quests and acquire items, they are able to trade these in various currencies. Recently, the Chinese government limited the practice of "Gold Farming" where players of the more game oriented virtual worlds would pay low-skilled game characters to gain points or items for them. In many cases these tasks were carried out in sweatshop-like working conditions.

In the online space trading world of Eve Online however, an economist has been hired to oversee the in-world currency, so as to keep it interesting and balanced. Quarterly blog reports are highly awaited by players, as accountants might await the reading of the UK budget. There are a number of differences from real world economics, mostly due to the speed at which transactions occur, and to the fact that they can all be recorded by the underlying software, but this only makes it easier to construct and run economics simulations.

Other uses

A lot of the most interesting functionality of virtual worlds is still to come. As major Virtual World proponent, Dr Crista Lopes, Associate Professor in the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, remarked, "My attraction to SL in particular, in contrast to my relative indifference to MMORPGs in general, was its potential to become more like the web; to mature and become a platform for business and life in general". So a good reason to be aware of these environments is that they stand a good chance of becoming a lot more widespread.

Within the mobile software market for example, as GPS, fast internet and tilt sensors reach wider audiences, there is a big pull towards so called Augmented Reality software - where you can hold a device up in a city centre or library for example, and see data about that place - bus times, friends in the area or books about a certain subject. Software such as Google Earth has frequently been seen as a type of virtual world, and Second Life itself has been a source of experimentation in "Civic Mirror worlds": environments that map or mimic real world areas, allowing users to visit places that would be difficult or impossible to do in real life.

In this way, today's 3d environments are the first step towards a convergence of real and data-augmented environments, with the benefit of being easy to get involved in, especially for younger or less technically oriented users.

An alternate pull is away from reality, and I've mentioned the use of these worlds as a way for people to express themselves informally and anonymously or in role play. For the majority of users of Second Life today, their avatars - virtual personae - do not seek to represent their real life selves. Instead they use the environment as a vehicle to free themselves from their physical limitations, to fly, dance, fit into all kinds of clothes or appearances and in this way to socialise with people they wouldn't otherwise be able to.

A case looked at in detail in the book "Second Lives" by Tim Guest is a workshop consisting of physically and mentally disabled patients, who choose one of several identities, and together with a carer on a computer console, all participate in a shared identity, making decisions as a group as to what that character will do in any particular session.

Problems and alternatives

There are many competitors to Second Life currently under development. An important counterpart is Open Simulator, an open source world that is fully compatible with Second Life. It allows would be world builders to download and host a world of their making from their own computers or hosting providers, in the same way that a modern website is served to users. This gets past a lot of Second Life's drawbacks, such as those evidenced by Dr Nic Earle of the Sydenham Crystal Palace project:

Second Life servers may be closed for maintenance when their US based audience is sleeping - which in the UK may be right in the middle of a session or in class!

The Second Life client software may require an update at any time (also chosen by Linden Labs), and won't allow access to the world until this is done. Again, this can be a huge problem if there is limited time in which to show a simulation to a group.

Due to issues with content restrictions, there are actually two Second Life grids: a "teen grid" which is PG only and for users aged 13-17, and a separate adult grid. This can create lots of problems in undergraduate classes, where some students will still be too young to enter the adult version.

Price: The rental costs of an island or parcel of Second Life with content editing permission is on the increase. Open Simulator on the other hand can be run on most computers, and hosting can be very cheap.

Open Simulator is not without it's problems: long term Second Life users will find it's functionality lacking, but other virtual environments are quickly stepping up to offer alternatives. It is now possible to use flash based software such as Paper Vision to provide a 3d environment accessible directly via a browser and without requiring software downloads.

Virtual worlds and their underlying technologies are always advancing. With the advent of controller-less devices, we will see - at first in gaming, but ultimately across many aspects of computer use - much simpler, more interactive and immersive ways of communicating and of representing real or imagined environments, and at a far lower cost to the pocket and to the world than both physical travel, and video based teleconferencing.

Here is a promotional video for the next version of Microsoft's X-Box 360 game console - showing many of these possibilities: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oACt9R9z37U

ILRT offers Open Simulator hosting and a selection of Second Life based services.

2 weeks in - a google phone review

2009-04-16T15:33:00.009+01:00

So I was at a funeral 2 weeks ago, and feeling pretty sad and in need of distraction. Also while at the funeral, my phone broke, so the next day I went down the road and spent a good hour telling all my life and family data to the sales guy, who then signed my life off in blood for the next 18 months on this planet. Midlife crisis?

T-Mobile says it's £30 a month for a famous "Google Phone" or G1, but actually this works out at 45 for most people if you throw in the data plan (which for a G1 makes little sense without), and the 10 pound insurance the phone shop was very very into flogging to me. I declined, saying they should seek alternate revenue than insurance - I see that as a dead market in these times. They should concentrate on providing services like repair or home made application development. Much more money in that, and value to building a community of phone users around a shop etc etc... But I didn't waste too much time telling him that.

Rooting it up

After 2 weeks using this, I've found out that it really makes sense to "root" it. This is UNIX speak for gaining all the administrative privileges to the backbone of the phone - a task usually reserved for ultra geeks, but something you can also do for a fee nowadays in most phone repair shops. T-Mobile have been very nice with this so far, and it looks like rooting doesn't invalidate your warranty, unlike Apple, which has sometimes resorted to "bricking" people's iPhones when they tampered similarly with them. As various forums list - the main benefit is you can "tether" your phone to your PC - and use it's unlimited data plan instead of shelling out on a virgin media plan (yet another contract with the monthly fees devil). Another reason is that after just 4 days of downloading various free apps from the android market, my phone was packed full and complaining about lack of space. So rooting also helps here because you can then install applications on the 2GB SD card that comes with the T-Mobile package.

On the Case

Another mishap on the journey is that as we were arriving in Bristol from the funeral, my daughter had a stomach upset, all over the bus, and somewhere in there was the phone's slender sock that had also come with the t-mobile package. So it's still there somewhere, and as we cleaned the seat and gathered belongings, I somehow lost it. But a plethora of much more usable cases already exist - some simple, plastic and protective, others leather and very business-like, but few that actually fit around the phone and it's opening keyboard, protecting the big touch screen as needed, when in the hands of someone like me, who invariably will drop or mess up a phone if left long enough with it.

Film Programming

Then it was Easter, and one night I realised it was probably my only available night to actually get into some android programming. After about 3 hours faffing and reading, downloading eclipse and looking up existing android code from the various open source app projects on code.google.com, I managed to produce a Maya Deren application. All it does is show a picture, and a bit of text, and it's little more than a hello world app - although I see a vague market for it - a personalised obituary service. But in the spirit of Ms Deren and her early experiments with film, I plan to continue by using the camera preview API - a basic way of showing video and related effects on the phone, before the new version of android comes out - with much improved video recording and display capabilities.

Programming was much like modern web design and programming: the layout was held in XML files, and the programming code separate, and even the code itself, when working with the android API, is incredibly high level, making it easy to, for example, save some data to a database, take a picture from the camera or choose a colour from a colour picker and feed the result back in to a function in just a couple of lines of code. This is probably why the android application landscape today is very similar to pre-1995 java applets - where you could typically wait 15 minutes for someone's homepage to download a gnome picking it's nose.

Zombie Borg Circus

There are some brilliantly geeky applications on the market. Firstly, the ones that let you play games - I wish other people I knew had this phone so we could all go out and play Zombie Run for example - brilliantly simple: it tracks your location and some (hopefully) imaginary zombies on a google map and you have to outrun them around the town... Would be good in connection with the AK-47 App...

The creator of Audacity now works for Google, which can account for the brilliance of the ringdroid application: it can record any sound - from the phone's microphone or anything being played from inside another application. So I can record Last FM streams for example, or voice diaries/comments, and chop them up to size for use as ringtones or to export from the SD onto other media. Sadly though, no improvements have been made to this since October.

My daughter (the one with the stomach upset, much better now thanks) really likes the speaking capabilites of the phone. A linux text-to-voice library was ported to the android platform some time last year, and now there are reams of applications using it. In the one she uses, she can type a word, and it will speak it back to her. A variant does this in other languages too. This keeps her amused for many fruitful 30 minute periods, only slightly alarming when she waves it around with glee from the absurdly robotic pronounciations.

But a more advanced use of this TTL library is certainly the "The vOICe" application - I have no idea where or why this came about, but it is billed as an "augmented reality application for the visually impaired" and it converts input from the phone's camera, into sound, as well as speaking out GPS locations and other robotic data. Now I know what to choose as an eye implant if the world of City of Lost Children ever comes together or the borg have to cut back in the face of the intergalactic credit crunch. It is the single most geeky application I have ever seen in my life.

I also found so many comics. It looks like a big screen touchscreen phone may be the short form media place of choice in future. Some comics incorporate simple animations and sound to replace talk bubbles, others are just a slideshow of images scanned from print based comics, but all of them allow you to read the first issue for free, and charge you for the next one. All but one, a CC licensed remix of a Cory Doctorow story, which could be the future of CC licensed media... If anyone has a comic in mind, I'll be happy to score it with my local improvising orchestra and release it as CC for you! Enquire within: http://orchestra.cubecinema.com

Soundcasting

So where next with android? First step will be rooting it, installing the next version of it's SDK and firmware when it's (imminently) released, and then getting to work on a soundcasting application - this is so that when you are walking around and hear nice sounds you want to share (the birds in the park, your footsteps in the snow), you can stream them out to a slightly annoyed audience as you would a twitter message, but in the form of background or unintended noise only. Much more like the twitter of real birds.

Oh, one gripe with the phone. It's quite hard to actually figure out how to make calls!! A couple of times in the first week I had the phone, I couldn't get apps to close in time to make important calls, but now I'm getting the hang of the idea that you can't ever actually close applications - they just go to the background and maybe die later if the phone things they aren't doing anything useful. Also the touch screen system, whereby a different function is called if you press for a bit longer, rather than a single tap, was hard to get used to, a bit like learning to click the blue underlined words if it's your first time on the web. Battery usage varies wildly depending on what apps are running or services you are using (GPS is a good way to drain it all in an hour).

And the whole UI sometimes feels like a messily put together collection of bits and pieces - for example it should be easy for it to pick up phone numbers in any application and have a standard list of things to do with them - save to contacts, call, sms etc - but actually this kind of thing is not yet there. So let's say, for an IT person like me, it's great, and a really addictive gadget to have, but it's really not grandma-ready yet.

Sustainable Communities Bill

2009-03-18T15:43:00.004Z

Here is my submission to the sustainable communities bill call for suggestions. I hope that others feel motivated to publish their SCB suggestions. I think there's a huge lack of dialogue in the current process, and the more we share what we know the more we can counter this

-- 0 --

Walking through Bristol in mid recession, there are many many more empty properties as businesses close, homes are repossessed and places become derelict. This reminds me of what happened during the Great Depression in the US: Thousands of properties lying empty while people are homeless or crammed in social housing, or having to endure various hardships due to living arrangements. This conundrum led to considerable social unrest both then and in the recession of the 70s.

To solve this problem some turn to squatting, or artists sometimes ask administrators of empty properties for their temporary use for exhibitions, and many positive results have come from this. The arts/community group Artspace/Lifespace has made many steps forward with this in Bristol, with it's use of the Pro Cathedral and now the various "Bridewell" police stations as temporary arts venues before their redevelopment as housing projects. Apart from giving these places free publicity, they also cleaned out the properties and maintained them while occupying them.

I believe a part of this success has been the empty buildings tax which the owners of these buildings would have been charged had their buildings sat empty.

I'm not aware of what legislation stops there being a general purpose way of facilitating temporary use agreements with a property's administrator. I am sure however that there is much legislation that gets in the way of this.

Uses need not purely be artistic. Any positive community uses such as short term housing, shops, and businesses can help a positive future for the community around it. I believe any social, cultural, business or environmental purpose could be included within this scheme, thus leading also to many low cost business models - such as food preparation "cafes" in busy central streets, voluntary organisations or workers cooperatives producing what we no longer afford to import, and a homeless population not driven to rioting or crime due to lack of community or opportunities around them. Agreements could vary depending on the nature of the project (such as increasing rent as business picks up), some part of building's insurance could be covered as part of the agreement, and much of this could be paid for by a higher tax on these empty premises, and by the opportunity cost of leaving those buildings empty. I would ask that this agreement be done as an open process, consulting with local residents as is usually done for a planning permission application, not only to grant the use, but to ask for suggestions, contributions and involvement (for example, in time or money) towards the scheme.

I am aware that the SCA as it stands does not have space for dialogue once this suggestion is sent, but I am happy to do so informally or to travel wherever possible and present further documents or clarification further along the line. I have written this without contacting the groups mentioned in 10., but will endeavour to do so and that they can submit similar proposals.

Point 9: I don't know if these come under "local service providers":

ArtSpace/LifeSpace: http://artspacelifespace.purplecloud.net/index.php/developers
Community groups such as the PRSC in Stokes Croft - which has done lots of work with the homeless population of that area.
Workers cooperatives in Bristol - the CDA will know who to contact.

--0--

Next suggestion:
Volunteer waiver of unpicked food prices. Under this agreement, farmers unable to raise money for distribution, and where sale price doesn't meet production costs, allow city people to come and take produce. Perhaps in exchange for city items or training. Groups transporting large amounts of produce could then be allowed to distribute it.

"The farmers are being pauperized by the poverty of the industrial population and the industrial population is being pauperized by the poverty of the farmers. Neither has the money to buy the product of the other."

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/10/05/the-great-depression-the-credit-crisis-and-the-future-of-your-food/

Big Cafe on Transport Sustainability

2008-07-25T01:09:00.016+01:00

About a month ago, I went to the "Big Cafe for Transport" event that was happening just around the corner from my house at the brilliant new "Co-Exist" sustainability business centre. Coexist run as a CIC and are just about to launch with a plan to open up green community and event spaces, funded in turn by work and business spaces. I really hope that means a market in stokes croft!

After I attended, I'd promised everyone I'd write up about it, and promptly left it as a nagging thing in the background as life took over. But now the official write up of the event has been published so I thought I should finish the abortive blog post I made that same night. A disclaimer: I'm allowed to make mistakes here, so if I've written anything wrong or stupid, please correct me!

A big cafe costs 20 pounds to attend. It started really early on a Saturday morning (thus excluding the entire population of Stokes Croft), but it included a lunch (from Kukuva Cafe across the road, locally sourced or at least in aid of justice, according to their vision). It didn't have to be so expensive though: 10 pounds for students, or 15 or 5(?) if you didn't want the lunch. You get to talk to all kinds of people invited from all over the place. So, for whatever misgivings I might have with the makeup of the people in the room and with how representative we were of the people affected by transport in Bristol, it was quite cool and very well intentioned.

Yes, misgivings, because there were too many green minded people there:

How come no-one brought up road tax (as mentioned that week in the venue mag as a pressing point for car drivers - in their view it should apply to cyclists as well), or even the issue itself of road maintenance?
How come when the idea was formed to "ban front door paving", it got a huge ovation across the room and was included in the summary poster? I just thought that kind of thing just creates opposition and disagreement, but there was no voice there to say that.

Oh well, I guess it was supposed to be a very green gathering. I hope there's more effort to bring in different kinds of people in future though - if the outcome can affect real movings of money around Bristol, then it's consultative in nature, and should try and reach out to as many groups and individuals as possible. Web postings are not really an inclusive way for people to express their opinions if they're not comfortable with technology in the first place, and city centre "sustainable" events will not attract all kinds of people in this diverse city.

Fortunately, Transition Bristol is offering free training in "involving hard to reach groups in environmental projects".

I was interested to find lots of opposition on the other hand, from some people, some of whom had been active in politics for a while, even one from the green party, to the idea that transport plans should involve a shift to a locally oriented society. This is the kind of set-up where travel is assumed to be slow, so everything fun or fresh has to be made and used where you live, although this hopefully includes local specialisation and exchanges between localities and globally as well. It's hard to step beyond cycle lanes and think about the whole picture, but I'd have thought a green vision no matter what the party should involve re-localisation, and should be considered holistically with respect to the various threats that we face and the many solutions we can apply to them (fuel, population, water, food, nuclear, climate and counting!).

There have been a few big cafe events so far, starting I think at the beginning of the year. There's been a bit of chatter about this already, but the chair, Vala - who has the controversial title of Professor of Sustainability came across very well. The format of the big cafe events is as follows: You debate some big questions - suitably vague so as to further the gathering of ideas, and then these get written up a summaries. Here are the summaries from this session:

(sorry about that first one, I played with it to try and get it brighter, but now it looks like it's been through nuclear fallout)

When I arrived there, late of course, David Bishop, transport geezer for the city council was talking:

He said we can't invest in train stations because of the infrastructure costs. The same reason seemed to rule out trams, which were community architect Keith Hallet's favoured investment of our money. He says they can be the golden ticket that makes Bristol a wonderful city - they certainly used to be.. (shit link alert - turn popups off!).

The bus routes on the other hand, needed to be like an overground subway network- like the London one. A distant flag waves for First if so, although they have redeemed themselves a bit train-wise with their expansion and publicity of the Severn Beach line - a line whose other name may as well be Easton-Clifton line. Still, I decided to stop taking buses so much, since the day a driver gave me a 2p change ticket that could only be redeemed in one little office in the city centre. Since then my bike has gotten more and more creaky, and my bus rides a lot more peaceful.

On the other hand, David conceded, the bus service is currently unacceptably bad and expensive. It was good to hear a few mentions of peak oil too, although he seemed to think we're not there yet. He spoke about a proposed Rapid transit network whose posters I think were on the wall behind us - I'm sure they'll be easy to find...

We are Smart wireless urban people, he went on. We need real time info, linked, integrated.
The vision for the next 30 years is to get to this integrated transport network.

I was very sad to hear him mention this same old growth agenda - proposed by some now disgraced politician from Blair's old cabinet, of 30,000 homes to be built in the next however many years. Why does this have to be the basis for the transport strategy? It's completely unsustainable. We've proven already not to have the water in the UK for such a development, and empty houses sit unmended, empty shops unused opposite our fancy cafe chats, and both awareness of climate change and of the credit crunch has seriously changed the situation since then. Already I think groups like artspace/lifespace, with their very elegant post-squatting, are a very attractive proposition of short term living and working possibilities. Also their stay deals with that painful issue of the recent empty buildings tax by creating temporary spaces like the Pro Cathedral, whilst attracting people to that building as an arts venue.

Anyway, back to Mr Bishop: He concluded by saying the council is not good at changing it's plans based on new opinions or information, but this is changing. It is starting to listen more and it is learning to communicate better.

Next up, Vala with some examples of good and climate helping transport systems from cities around the world. These have been shown quite clearly in the official write-up.

Then she introduced world cafe format, which I spoke about above, and she introduced the big 4 questions that were to form the rest of our day:

if you had a bottomless pit of money to spend on Bristol's transport system, how would we travel around the city in 10 years time?

What examples of better transport systems can we draw from the rest of the world or history?

What would you enable you personally to make greener choices in bristol for transport.

How do we encourage better use of and attitudes towards sustainable transport?

I'll stop now as this is getting long, but one last thing always gets me: I had the fortune that day to sit next to councilors, council staff and other people involved in local politics, and for all their hard work and merits, what gets me is always the institutionalised, bitchy, childish infighting between political parties. I call it infighting although it crosses parties, because together they, as a group, suggest, plan and carry out changes that affect us. We pay them to do this, so I really hate seeing time and time again how we pay for them to do tit for tat politics, complaining when someone else embraces their ideas if they are from another party or destroying good initiatives for the same reasons, insulting each other, and the whole competitive side of politics. A bit of competition is good, but fairly balanced with co-operation.

If the sustainable communities bill means we're going to see what the balance books are and be shown how they work, my first question will be how much of that money is spent in this kind of faffing, and how can we change it so local government can have a neutral forum to express their views and work together too.

Maybe they need a weekend cafe as well...

Local Economy Management System

2008-07-14T02:01:00.018+01:00

Today I did lots of healthy, useful things*, while the news around us is that we are in a recession, a very quick and serious one, and not just as a country but as a globalised western world. What this has led to is exemplified really nicely by the great Big Issue headline that came out a while back "The answer to the food crisis - Grow your own!" - and in general people are rushing to get more and more into planting and cycling and generally into more sustainable lives as they see this is probably the best time to do it - even if this is just a mini bust due to speculation.

And when I read an article in the weekend paper about a poor freelance journalist wishing he had studied engineering as a backup trade - and now impoverished by the credit crunch, I was inspired to expand freecycle and other stuff like that into an online community task/project/exchange coordination system, that could fall back into wireless if there was no main internet.

That's what I've been thinking about since: how to create an open source management system for localised urban economies to exchange, buy, give resources and skills, and organise those exchanges into tasks. But of course it's only about 30% a web application - the rest of it is hard work and face to face trading, discussion and agreements between the people involved, and ways to ensure people without computers don't get excluded and in fact are encouraged to use it.

But this didn't just come out of nowhere: I've recently become one of the webmasters for Transition Bristol. I was chatting about this last week with a friend who is stuck in his house with ME and lots of family heirlooms and clutter, which really get him down. One bit of this clutter is a very nice collection of ecologically oriented books. So we thought - let's start a distributed library for Transition Easton - so just in that part of town, for local people to be able to share say, a lawnmower or a book. So I suggested it to Zoe who is one of the people running Transition Easton - and in doing that I researched all the other exchange systems that have come and gone in Bristol already:

Existing local and UK DIY stuff:

freeconomy - marc boyle of BBC walk-to-india fame implementing his free economy idea - a completely gift based system.
feral trade, an even fairer than fair international trade system where transport happens via DIY trade routes, organisation by SMS and emails, and selling home made Cube Cola, coffee, and now even grappa and antidepressants.
Diss Free eXchange. Part of the Norfolk based Diss community system. Gary Alexander, the author of this plone based system, is currently working on a new version, so it's something I'm going to propose to my colleagues at work, since they all work on plone as well.
Bigger things: ebay, freecycle, gumtree. (I know that freecycle is getting a second version written quite soon - to have a web interface replacing the yahoo groups).
Older/less IT based things: BEETS, LETS and the farmer's market!

Larger versions: many existing open source systems have very similar requirements to what I feel a local economy manager would need: The typical version control software used for programming with open source, issue trackers for reporting software bugs, project planning software and team/groupware have basically all the functionality needed. Also they're written in convenient languages allowing a new project to have a peek or even lift functions to get the same things done - some (like the version control software Bazaar) are distributed systems. This is good because they'll not need a central server, but will be made up of all the individual little computers running it. Moodle also has similar capabilities.

Most importantly - It would aspire to the lofty goal of being a "Moodle for communities". A free, open source, world wide project which could then be used by lots of different groups on a local basis. From speaking to Gary Alexander (who wrote the Norfolk based Diss exchange system) , I know there's a systems philosophy called VSM that can be used to inform the development of this, as well as of course the participative and self organising aspects of Web 2.0, permaculture as a design science rather than strictly for gardens, and finally Participatory Economics(or Parecon) - an underused field that I don't believe has an implementation but which I find a good basis. The wikipedia article on population mentions this as possibly the only system that could allow economies to continue functioning at the scale we are at now, without involving a huge die-off (or a war) first.

The first simple thing that Parecon gives is that for example on a web page about a particular transaction, anyone would be able to have their say on it - like "you can't buy those eggs, we need them here at the cafe" or "Oh and can I have the egg shells? I use the powder for my bone disease" etc - which would be a very web 2.0 way to buy and sell, and would make the experience of trade into more of an ecosystem.

The first great thing about VSM on the other hand, is that I was actually born into it! It was only ever implemented on a national scale in Chile during Allende's rule. So there's something wonderful about all this!

Here are some of my notes on this(written on the laptop while gardening, out of range of any internet):

Database-wise it would need tables for people, items, projects/interest groups and actions, a plug-in system for extensions and integrations (like with feral trade for international commerce), a strong wifi-mesh enabled back end allowing stronger traffic with wifi networks running same software. And lots of ways of exchanging resources as a community.

All the systems need no more than a way to profile an item - this could be an idea or an instruction, a bit like an issue in a request tracking system or in a project management system.

The system needed is a stripped down, simple to use and expandible(plugin based) way to

buy/sell

Exchange: offer/"take"/advertise/ask for

Exchange indirectly using internal system (timebank extension plugin fits here, as do many others).

So allowing for exchanges - it becomes like a marketplace of skills and resources, products and deliveries.

A funded programme might pay for bikes, lessons and legal system for teenage kids to be able to deliver items in return for meals, food, items, services, training etc, but also money. 2 quid for a delivery is not much to ask, and economy of scale means lots of little things can be delivered (eg flyers).

Also it should allow for the complex elements involved in organising a more extended project requiring stages of production - it would also have inputs and outputs, and tasks allowing for their organisation in a decentralised way - a tasks wiki.

It shouldn't tell you what to do with it, but allow lots of generic options. So this system is like a programmer's CVS of the 90s. It's a first stage towards a programmed economic/exchange system for a community.

So for example a chicken coop: You

post an idea,
people subscribe to it,
you get meetings together and depending on what's agreed, for
example:
you organise flyering,
you put out ads for coop materials or existing coops,
for incubators (or raise cash for this and other care items /tools).
You ask for space for grazing.
Eggs, compost, weed and parasite pecking given in return.
Needs transport system as well.
Needs at least 2 hosting people with working enclosures to get started.

Could this run via a wireless protocol? querying wifi networks findable via the computer, as well as geolocated network via p2p to connect and offer a node of info each, each page looking like a facebook of tasks and ideas, and such that if the main internet is lost, it can still function via wifi/bluetooth/sms

* Healthy things I did that sunday (from above): I planted lots of recycled potatoes in the garden, hoping they'll come up in a clump (but I think I should have put some mushroom and fungus poison on them first), and I bought an SWC. It will have basil, cucumber, tomato and an assortment of other things like green beans for nitrogen. I learnt a bit about companion plants and germinating seeds rather than planting direct. I might look in ebay for other seeds of nice herbs... Also I cycled off to see a friend, did some exercises, figured out a compost-food recycling system for my house which now needs black magic marker penned instructions as to what goes where. I invented, on a proverbial napkin, the concepts of

a water or smoke powered musical box, set into a victorian fireplace wall and using the rising smoke to turn it, or with little paddles, linked to a flow of water.
a bike powered seed planter with pneumatic seed laying spokes and solar panels to play music as you pedal.

And I called an electricity company for a quote to do my house up with solar panels. Nice lazy sunday.

The State of Fluxus day 2

2008-05-29T19:18:00.010+01:00

No time just now! Lots of commentary on fluxus today, flux sports, how to put on a fluxus event, and random natter, but later. For now, just the pics - as they are so in demand!

A really nice score, performed on the Monday, when I wasn't around I think... Or was it for the piano recital?

All the budding fluxus stars, awaiting our first concert, day 1

Tools of the trade

Group photo, before the salad

The string quartet performs while the audience throw a big ball up in the air, and chopping sounds begin...

Bowls and rakes, still life

And finally, our name in lights, in the corner of the big poster... Lots more of these on faecebook, slowly appearing here and there...

The state of Fluxus, Day 1

2008-05-27T20:55:00.011+01:00

This weekend I went back to what I did a few months back, and went down to the Tate Modern all the way from Bristol, to play (very little) crazy music and perform in front of loads of people in London.

Last time we were on Millennium Bridge, which (to explain for the non-londoner) is a very narrow bridge which gets swamped around 4pm on a Friday afternoon, by commuters going both ways. We were there lined up with loads of loud and eccentric instruments, in t-shirts and responding to a conductor, and to an orchestra by the Tate, and a boat with lots of improvising musicians (Evan Parker included, who is now coming to the Cube Cinema in June) playing samples of maritime, Thames noises - boats, seagulls, and some of the most complicated classical as well as improvised and participatory music that was a beautiful tribute to that space.

This time for us performers it was a 4 day experience - 2 days rehearsal, and 2 of performance, with some of the surviving masters of the Fluxus time, still around performing and writing material, as of course more famous people like Yoko Ono do. We performed from Alison Knowles' fantastic repertoire - including the really colourful and beautifully simple "Make a Salad" piece, and the really funny and proto-improv Newspaper Music. There was also loads of other work by other Flux performers, including a first realisation of the FluxOlympiad - an incredibly accessible way to get kids into experimental arts - "A gateway drug to Rembrandt" as baptised by our great deliverer of the most wonderful lecture in Fluxus, Simon (whose surname I forget, but he's a university professor specialising in this movement's history in the US).

Through this lecture and then through many memories and explanations given by Simon, Sara Seagull and Alison Knowles through this intensely arty weekend, I got to see a lot more of the history of Fluxus than is possible through a quick read of Wikipedia the night before the first rehearsal. Firstly the controversy of Fluxus's life-span, which for some starts with John Cage's Experimental Composition class, and ends with George Maciunas' death in 78, but for all the fluxus people present, was still very much alive and well, as we saw with the performances. What you can say though is that the network of artists who performed Fluxus was described in the past tense, in the exhibition that accompanied our performances at the Tate. Some of the later newspapers had a very Creative Commons-like copyright - anyone is authorised to perform any fluxus Event Score whenever they want, provided they use the names they stated, and if it's most of the event, it has to have the name they provide - in this case the FluxOlympiad, or a FluxFest or many other FluxEverythings from audience participation pieces, to distorted musical performances, or even video, hospitals and toilets in Fluxus style. This is a beautiful spirit, and the participatory element combined with the multimedia element, synaesthesia and the beginnings of improvised or loosely structured experimental artistic practices, as well as the DIY element, which have filtered through from the Fluxus hayday that mesmerised a young John Lennon, but seem to have gotten to today having forgotten their lovely playful origins.

It was very interesting to see the rejection our Fluxus initiators had for the internet - it's always easier for our younger generation to think technology has to be involved in artistic practice but as one performer said, shunning technology becomes a choice, now that it's so ubiquitous. No digital divide to straddle, more imagination needed to get to the same destination. And that aspect was refreshing, although a Fluxus facebook group is now hopefully to be created, and maybe it will only be through this technology that we will now assist in a re-birth of practice in the UK - at least if I can have my way and do a performance at the Cube Cinema...

The pieces were so accessible because they were tiny, some carried out in seconds, like the famous squeaky-toy-into-cymbals piece "C/T Trace", while others needed more time, like the Yoko Ono piece "Sky piece for Jesus", but were incredibly fun to perform and somehow symbolic and spiritual to carry out -we had to wrap up a string quartet in gauze and lead them away with care, like critically injured patients. In another piece we had to scratch our fingers down a small black board, or in another, bang our heads against the wall. So the beginnings of the "pain" aspect so famously put forward by people like Franco B - which Sara summed up wonderfully - "if there's so much pain in the world, what's the value as a privileged western artist in hurting yourself?" - are also to be found in Fluxus. That's terribly misquoted though, a flash of a memory in the middle of a very excited evening lounging in the Tate Modern's staff cafe after the first performance and talking about what went wrong and right. Also the pieces are accessible because they are available to all to perform, although I'd agree they wouldn't make much sense if you didn't get it, or get to share some of the original spirit.

The salad was a wonderful part of it all. It really used our senses, without resorting to video or high art concepts - Alison (and a team of cooks) just cut vegetables and made a lovely (if a bit gritty) salad for all the audience to consume. She made it on top of the turbine hall, in a long 10 minutes with all of them hidden up there cutting them up, but with the knives miked up so we could hear interminable chopping. And then our sight was first to see the spectacle of food, now so scarce in the world - flying greens, reds, purples, liquids and solids, some falling light as feathers, others heavy and squirting bits all over us poor performers - who in this piece had to hold the tarpaulin and toss the salad, and for this had our name written on the wall of the Tate. And then finally it was stirred with rakes and spades, and served on paper plates, and it tasted great! Also because I was a bit skint, it was even better to be fused with art in a culinary way...

Eduserv Symposium 2008

2008-05-12T17:42:00.006+01:00

I came to attend this symposium out of the blue, having seen an email late one Wednesday afternoon, saying our assistant director was too ill to go, and after a quick look at the programme, I realised it was a follow-up to an event I'd seen on video a while back where an entire conference on Second Life had been trashed by a talk which had argued it was all pretty much useless hype. So if this year's presentations were going to be in that vein, it sounded like like a fun time.

This being a web 2 conference, lots of it was used, including a live chat backchannel ( http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2008/livechat powered by cover it live streaming software:http://www.coveritlive.com/ ), a ning based conference centred social networking site (which as expected didn't achieve critical mass but was a nice feature all the same), and of course lots lots more.

Eduserv's Andy Powell started the day talking about these "Disruptive technologies" we know so well. Looking across the room, it seemed a-bleep with mobile phones, laptops and all kinds of hybrid gadgets twittering and SL-ing and all kinds of SN/Web 2.0-ing as he spoke.

"Please turn your phones off as it interferes with the equipment in the room, unless you're twittering or blogging from it"

This was the digerati of UK HE in the room (from which a colleague had minutes before noted the conspicuous absence of any HEA top brass), and it was a bit negative to hear all these references to the "disruption" caused by the uptake of web 2.0 in HE and all this focus on how to "control" it. But later on it surfaced that I wasn't the only one who thought a more positive terminology (like "Emerging Technologies") would be more conducive to positive adoption on campus or even just to an understanding of the real strengths and limitations of these tools. Another good reason to have a chat back channel - all these slightly controversial thoughts tend to get put forward there easily, while I guess people are a bit more shy of doing it live in Q&A.

Larry Johnson:

Larry presented using Second Life as an embellished Power Point, with his avatar walking through a virtual exhibition of photos of his grandparents and of various turn-of-century discoveries, followed by lists of all the technological revolutions that that generation had to deal with. He compared that with the current IT situation, from the beginning of the personal computer and Internet, to now, and noted that in comparative terms we haven't even got from the Gutenberg press to Martin Luther - any real revolution to come from this has still to come. Another difference between that generation and this one is that the focus has shifted from using technology to free up time - we have no such illusions today. My lack of a pen at that point limits my recollection now, but there were some areas that the Horizon report had identified as the main areas of growth and change for the education community:

the arrival of grassroots video as a teaching tool and increased pressure in HE institutions to deliver video storage/distribution/collaboration.
Collaboration Webs - using tools like google docs or other simple online tools requiring just a modern computer and web browser.
Mash-ups - old news but now getting more mainstream with the increasing availability of data.
Social OS - the next step in social networking is a focus on the individual rather than on content in all aspects of software.

In my opinion these blue sky previsions don't tend to take into account the more global state of the world today, the economic downturn and it's effects on the world for example, so Dr Johnson's talk seemed a bit limited in that respect, and when cornered (by me) later over coffee, he seemed dismissive of the effects of global warming and possible legislation changes on data centre energy usage as well as changes due to price increases and how the digital divide would affect the future he envisaged. The horizon report can be found at http://www.nmc.org/horizon

Bobbie Johnson: The guardian and Web 2.0
http://www.slideshare.net/tag/efsym2008

This was the most useless talk of the symposium. I think the inclusion of two large media agencies was a mistake, and we could have done with half that presence replaced by someone from another business sector, from a student or from some other piece of the picture. Here are my notes anyway:

The Guardian was founded as the Manchester Guardian in 1821. The paper's format and structure didn't change until the early 50s with the addition of photography. At all times the core values of social justice, freedom of thought and religion and social reform have been at the forefront of the decisions they have made as an organisation. Johnson spoke at length on the history of this newspaper on that basis, and the various owners and trusts that formed through the years.

The website appeared in 1996. Very embarrassing. By 2007 the director told his staff at the All Hands meeting - "We are now a digital operation which makes printed stuff on the side". So radical change is very recent.

He then showed us a front page scan from a couple of years ago. Very few things came from web 2.0 specifically (although you could say that all the user generated content was in some way reflective of the new notion of the web as a 2 way consumption/production medium).

Then he showed a very nice blog aggregate page (in his words a "Superblog"): http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html - probably one to emulate when doing a university-wide blogging service, although I suspect it's very well edited, so there's an extra bit of effort than just getting people to write good blogs.

The Guardian site has gone from Closed/Subscription based to free access, and as a company they have gone from content provider to content platform.

I closed my notes with a poem:

Did photography create surrealism in art?

The digerati thumb their phones

a blue glare reflects on their faces

Information hiding ignorance

Geoffrey Bilder: Sausages, coffee, chickens and the web: Establishing new trust metrics for scholarly communication

A very interesting and clued-up talk on trust issues and the web. Personally I would have defined these as filtering issues, but it still makes sense either way: the web is awash with information and it's not rated, so you can waste huge amounts of time surfing it, and never can be sure of the quality of what you read, whereas traditional media has inbuilt filtering - due to the physical and commercial limits of just publishing everything like the web does.

Bilder's talk examined amongst other things the reason why the tilde (~) is non-trustworthy - (Spoiler alert!) - because it denotes a URL for a home directory - i.e. not official information but contained in a personal home page. But to a regular non-techy this isn't obvious, and the same is true for the various web 2 enabled sites. It's hard to assess trust. The path followed by any new technology depends on all these issues, and trust is crucial to it's adoption. It usually goes like this:

A techno-information power base invents a new technology (eg, the blogging community circa 1996)
Publicity/Hype follows
The masses take up this technology
Breakdown: the hype doesn't live up to it. (eg: people discover most blogs are abandoned in a few weeks).
Filtering systems are created. (eg: technorati)

In this way Bilder made a clear connection between the trust exuded by traditional publishing media via it's implicit filtering system ("wow - they're going to publish my book" = "it passed the filter").

He then talked about the first filtering systems put together on early web logs: the slashdot.org karma points system put together to reduce the incredibly high volume of comments they were dealing with daily, and which was reducing the overall value of the site - high points (awarded via good behaviour on the site) made you a temporary comment moderator, and in turn your moderations would be moderated by other high karma scorers, thus drastically improving the quality of post comments if you opted to raise your filter level.

Other early systems of peer-based filtering were Ebay's focus on user trust and ratings and Google's siterank system. These trust metrics were key to the success of these sites.

Chatting later to Debra, she agreed that self filtering systems are probably the way forward. The slightly depressing outcome of Bilder's talk was the idea that in the same way that traditional media has been supplanted in a way by the web, and as medieval scribes were made redundant Gutenberg press, so quality controlled on-line resource collections like Intute are endangered by this, because they apply a "centralised" filtering/trust system, which an automated web 2 enabled peer review system might do just as well.

The questions and on-line comments were very interesting, and it was a shame there was no time to answer or discuss at length. One insight from here was the way people's perception of their personal profile (as used on SN sites) as increasingly personal - something that should be owned and held by the individual and released/sold only to trusted parties of interest to the individual. Bilder agreed that this is probably the way things will be in future.

And then we went for lunch. Many a picture was flickrd of the curiously purple tray of summer desserts.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmje/2475205817/ (more photos at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/efsym2008/ - and the efsym2008 tag worked quite well as a way to tag across slideshare, flickr, delicious etc)

Also during lunch I bumped into Torsten Reimer of the now semi-defunct AHRC Methods Network. He sadly told me of the serious lack of funds that this kind of initiative suffers from. They have a little money for small projects, but not enough for anything bigger as a result of these, or for any radical strategic changes, so the MN is not viable at the moment.

BBC:
This was similar to the guardian talk in it's irrelevance for me, but of the two I'd have kept this one, more witty and a lot more insight into the future: the speaker showed us the evolution of BBC content up to it's inclusion today on other websites: on the Sun, the Guardian's sites, and the communities formed around programs that the BBC had produced, but that were taking place outside of the BBC's websites.

So does it matter to the Beeb that their competitors are taking the content that 25% of their income is spent on (the online side) and making community out of them? This is the "globalisation" problem of web 2.0, and a hard decision for the Beeb, but they currently allow it. Possibly because their core principle is that they are a brand: Their charted doesn't specify they have to make programmes on TV: they just have to entertain, educate, inform.

Chris Adie:

First of all, the document circulated prior to the Symposium ( http://www.vp.is.ed.ac.uk/content/1/c4/12/45/GuidelinesForUsingExternalWeb2.0Services-20070823.pdf
) is a great first step towards regulations/guidelines/policies that help an academic institution deal with the issues that come up with the increasing adoption of Web 2 technologies.

In ID's case, the problem (for me) is the possibility of us hosting a university wide blogging service. A service like this would need us to first revise guidelines in many ways, even if the decision is to allow people to just use external services (we are still liable and there are still risks even if this is the case).

Another problem with external services is the credit crunch: what happens when your service goes bust, closes, shifts in focus, loses critical mass, starts charging or switches to paid registration?

From the chat: here are the BBC's guidelines on SN/Web 2 use: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/advice/personalweb/index.shtml

Also in the chat, the point was made that some of the social networking sites might be more resilient than public services - for example the ill fated AHDS - what will upcoming UK elections mean for any online services we may be using now?

Some of what he said I found to be a bit unbalanced along the lines of that chat comment: he said for example that information might be more at risk of unauthorised use, unscheduled maintenance etc - but these are also risks within an institution if their internal policies or technical systems aren't up to scratch - and if the government can lose huge amounts of public data, I am sure Higher Ed can catch up.

Also I'm a bit concerned with the paper's implicit position on Intellectual Property rights. It is true that not all info should be given away immediately, and that a lot of grant money depends on ideas being kept safely under wraps, even in academia, but a university legal dept should be up to speed on the GPL and CC licenses, and be able to advise what is personal and what is owned by the institution depending on who you are, the nature of the work/data and in what capacity you work for it. Any other sharing should be facilitated by universities by their embracing of web 2.0 related speedy transfer of knowledge (such as twitter/facebook).

Apart from these doubts though - this is the first clear and broad paper trying to put together the first academic guidelines on risks and implications of using SN and Web 2 technologies, and he is aware it's just a draft and needs input from others.

Afterwards I asked Chris how we can feed back to him about his paper. He said he's in the process of making it into a wiki, but that at present comments are open, and we can feed back that way.

David Harrison: A Modern Work Environment at Cardiff U: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/futures/mwe/index.html

http://diharrison.wordpress.com/2008/05/10/reflections-upon-efsym2008/

Dr Harrison startled us all with a very advanced web manager's view on how to run all the IT services within Cardiff University whilst still leaving space for SN/Web 2 technologies to be adopted strongly and used by their staff.

The presentation had lots of diagrams which I can't really explain well in written form, but here goes: The core (read "boring") services like calendars, request trackers, sick forms, finance software are at the centre of the picture, around which sit the managed research and learning environments, and around these, are the VLE/VRE. Anything else around this circle includes twitter and friends. Somehow this made much more sense with his slides though so I should stop there..

My main notes were that he had Cardiff's VC supporting all the way through, attending all the meetings and pushing things forward. We can't count on the same support at Bristol Uni, with Eric Thomas being much less available and not known to be particularly tech-friendly.

He also said that innovation, real discovery isn't particularly widespread in universities. The kind of innovation they see more and need is where existing innovation is brought into the university or across faculties and departments. This is a brilliant potential benefit of Web 2.0 - facilitating communication between people who wouldn't normally talk to each other, and giving them ways to disseminate that and value it.

More discussion of this at
http://blog.newport.ac.uk/blogs/michael/archive/2008/05/09/32921.aspx - another staff member involved in their MWE blog that mentions this presentation (I'm afraid I only scanned through this first time I looked... It's mostly on the media presentations).

Grainne's Presentation was the only one that really went into how web 2.0 actually affects pedagogy within academia. It was also interesting because I joined ILRT after she had left, and this was my first chance to see her after hearing so much about her. Fortunately she's already put it online: http://e4innovation.com/?p=198 - so I can skip talking about it since this post has gone on far too long now!

A letter to the times.

2008-04-22T00:58:00.003+01:00

Sir,

Melanie Reid's article "I don't want to live in a scratchy world of hemp
lingerie" made me reach straight for a pen to reply (this email is a
transcription of that, you see), with many references to women's
impending return to a boring dark age devoid of skiing, exotic food and
sleek accessory porn, forced by "eco-purists" to go back to sewing
buttons, wearing rags and to the absolute unhappiness of the world that
preceded household appliances.

I'm sorry for Melanie, but these are in themselves dark times, in which
our senses and ability to experience emotion are dulled by the intensity
of the world around us, where any exotic meal, place or piece of
information is seemingly at our fingertips, or as Daisaku Ikeda, the
Japanese Buddhist philosopher puts it, "This imbalance takes the form of
a dulling of our natural responsiveness to life and the realities of
daily living". And I believe this dulling has in many ways been brought
about by the rationalist, and very masculine nature of the past
century.

All the things Ms Reid lists as disappearing in a world run by her "eco
purists" will remain in some form. Her list of joys under threat of
extinction seem to be precisely the things enjoyed by an upper middle
class in a prosperous society like the UKs, as many of them are not
available to anyone below the poverty line. She will not tell me that
the coming age will eradicate poverty for example, lovely though that
thought might be, there will still be extreme divisions between the rich
and poor. Perhaps in a booming economy like China's those things will be
around more, so maybe she should practice her mandarin? But they are not
the preserve of the un-ecologically minded.

I believe as a Buddhist myself, that it's not "things" in themselves
that make one happy - anything in life can be a burden or a joy. It's
your relationship to these things that can excite and enliven. And this
is the same with Reid's relationship to the world and it's current
situation - should her opinion of eco-nazi's change for the better, her
excitement should follow.

Ms Reid is not without fault though, in criticising eco-do-gooders who
pride themselves in alienating others. Like monks who wear masks so as
not to kill microbes and then act violently towards those of other
faiths, these people are living in some kind of imaginary world where
they are devoid of their share of negative states of mind, or in this
case, of the capacity to push away others, who they should instead be
trying to engage in dialogue with. This is the spirit in which I write
this letter. The future will not be as exciting without Melanie Reid's
input!

But what I'd like to repeat, as many times as necessary, is that whether
you believe society will collapse due to climate change and fuel
depletion, or that this is just a passing fad, this is what we should be
doing anyway: connecting with nature, acting as a builder - not just a
consumer of the valuable things around us, not being greedy, talking to
other people more. Because the world is changing, like it or not, and it
doesn't have to be boring and lifeless.

Here in Bristol for example, fashion designer Viva Cazeaux
(http://www.retrio.co.uk/) creates beautiful, (possibly exciting?)
upmarket clothing made using recycled materials of all kinds. In
Birmingham, the recent renewal of the canal side area has helped bring
back the beauty of inner city travel by boat, for leisure or work. Hemp
itself can be woven in many ways and doesn't have to resemble potato
sacks. From a place like The Urban Shop (http://www.theurbanshop.co.uk)
you can buy a stylish, organic hemp men's t-shirt - hemp is expensive
and heavy because it's not freely grown in this country, but that was
not the case years ago and many styles of clothing can be made from it.

I can't really speak for women, and I'm sure they can speak for
themselves, but returning to the words of Ikeda, in his 2003 peace
proposal presented to the United Nations -

"We need to restore our sensitivity to life itself, our palpable
awareness of the realities of daily living; and here, I believe, women
have an especially important role to play. I have for some time
expressed my view that the twenty-first century must be a century of
women."

http://www.sgi.org/about/president/works/proposals/2003sum.html

I certainly would not be as confident as I am now in the exciting beauty
of our future had it not been for the many many modern, sophisticated
women who introduced me to these issues, and who through these past few
years since I became aware of them, have worked harder than I ever could
in so many ways for local, down to earth and intelligent ways to make
that reality happen.

Alejandro Fernandez, Bristol

3 books for Bristol

2008-04-06T12:52:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I went to the shops, in a desperate last push to get some new curtains, the inner liner white £1-a-metre ones that people put in a drawer when they move in somewhere, and then put back when they move out. And mine were all mouldy... Bleah! Anyway, I stopped in Waterstones for ages and bought 3 books: Clay Shirky's "Here comes everybody", Noam Chomsky's "What we say goes"(hope I don't get in trouble for linking to a torrent, but they're interviews, and that link will give you the full original audio for them) and Rob Hopkins' Transition Handbook.

All these purchases were devoted to my quest for finding a way for the re-use and investment in technology to become a strong part of the Transitionista's vision. I think we've got loads of equipment these days that we can recycle and make use of for a long time, and if we all have generators or solar panels, some of that charge can be spent on the laptop... So no matter how stupidly apocalyptic the future is going to be, there has to be a place for robot overlords or it just won't be fitting.

I also think - due to Clay Shirky's many videos from recent boing boing entries, and from his book, there is a big problem with adoption of technology and engineering skills required to maintain it, and the transition movement: there's a cultural gap between the people who use this technology more readily - instant messengers, Skype, social networking sites etc - and other people who can't or don't want to for various reasons be as acquainted. But on the other hand, these are tools which allow a huge change in the way things are working, and this is evident even locally, where the Railway Path's celebration last week brought together 1500 people via mostly online word of mouth (lots of last minute problems with flyers) and where the council meeting had the most people attending that the mayor had ever seen in all his time there. He thought maybe we'd come to wish him goodbye, as it was his last meeting. The meeting was also different because it was webcast, it resulted in a video statement on the planned transport route by Mark Bradshaw, and because there was a lot of correspondence, mostly in public view, since the meeting, between residents condemning the labour backroom anti-green pro-consumerism deal - this after many labour councillors had marched with railway path lovers just a day earlier. I doubt there is any other organising power than that which technology provides, that's able to ensure communication and organisation between disparate communities, dealing increasingly with all manner of public and private, local, national and international entities around them, who have historically been more organised than the individual.

The transition handbook and it's corresponding movement of transition towns - local initiatives to guide a small geographic population - a village, town, city or suburb to resilience against peak oil and climate change. In Bristol this is gaining popularity - I've heard Transition Bristol described as "intelligent and sexy" and they have lots of funding (due to run out soon though) for glossy posters and showings of various inconvenient films, as well as a very popular subsidised distributed tree planting - but village meetings seem without scope as many local initiatives have still to get off the ground. The transition thing in general is still looked at a bit cautiously by other groups, as it does seem to have a lot of spiritualist, permaculturists' "positive thinking" and simplistic, step driven information on how to deal with this fossil fuel-bad millenium. Maybe they will turn out to be a cult of happy shiny people, but if it really works out, this isn't really an organisation, but a framework, and a framework for it's own future development.

And finally, Noam Chomsky, because I think I can back up quite well that the guy is an anarchist and peaceful, and intelligent, and I think he only says things that are really well researched or he won't talk about it, and in this little red book he says all kinds of things that we were asking ourselves about politics - all from his point of view as an outspoken US political historian, but that can apply in many ways to the behaviour of councillors at a council meeting and our anthropological understanding of it.

p.s.

2008-01-12T02:47:00.001Z

Julian Oliver is a brilliant artist!

He's also done a workshop like the one I'm doing now -

Loads to look at!!

Dream Machines part 1

2008-01-12T01:32:00.000Z

We live at such a key time, when on one hand we're waking up tragically to the effects of our use of fossil fuel and our extraordinary growth in the past few hundred years to this blip where revolutions can happen at any point, and go unnoticed, because it's given us an incredible luxury as well. As food prices increase and the skies punish us, we are more in touch with all our friends, family and community than ever before through the benefits of telecommunication.

I mean the Digital Revolution, or whatever is at the base the geekiness of ham radios, and at the top the equally geeky virtual worlds which start to take a strange grip on the real world - Second Life, Facebook, Myspace, Email, Instant Messaging, Texting and all the other ways we have added to the written and oral communication we had before. In a sense, all the virtual worlds are just an elite's pinnacle at the top of the incredible communications we're capable of as a global population, aided at this time by the relatively low cost of a ticket to get you in person to the other side of the world.

Slowly these machines have been able grow in complexity to the point where they are able to visualise our dreams, and that has become a strange addiction in an imperfect world. But how much of this can be useful in a realistic consideration of what is needed this millennium?

The truth is that we have overspent, defaulted and got late with our payment back to the planet. The punishment for this will be to have to slow down. It's not to scare or despair that I say this, but my approach to technology has to be from a long term ethical standpoint. Were it to become very expensive to travel, would we still have mobile phones? Would we be able to repair old computers if there were no new parts coming from asia, no new raw materials coming from the terrible mines in Africa? Those things have no reason to exist - they are a terrible self inflicted wound in our planet. Second Life alone uses a huge amount of processing power (This amount - as of 2006 - can be found in the book Second Lives - about modern society's relationship to virtual worlds). How much for facebook then, with it's millions of pages and applications?

But with all these problems I feel it's my crucial mission to make sure that in future we aren't stuck with the present day 'meeting' as the default way of getting things done when communicating using technology, not after so many thousands of years before that, where we had such a diversity that we've now replaced with corporate aims. I don't want this hidden digital revolution that has happened under our noses to end up like the religious world of the Caliphates in 13th century Baghdad - whose spiritual thought was so evolved, only to be destroyed tragically by the armies of Genghis Khan, and be lost. I don't want our closed mindedness to steer us into a corner.

But how can we make technology sustainable?

At this time, I feel the best way is to bring different kinds of people together. This is something I love doing and that I'd be doing even if I didn't believe there was a crisis - figuring out ways for people to express themselves and experiment with new things. So this 2 day workshop, Dream Machines, which will be the focus of this month's Dorkbot Bristol, is a second step towards that(Last Year's Locating Grid Technologies work shops were the first - we looked at videoconferencing and mixed media artistic uses. This series resulted in funding for a p2p enabled semantic web interface for the watershed's library of screen media):

In this workshop however, we'll explore how 3d engines can and are being used in all kinds of experimental ways, but this will be kind of a sideline to the practical skill in getting acquainted with and messing around with the technology directly. We have to learn it's limitations and then sidestep them through the wisdom you can only give when coming to something fresh for the first time. So we'll have dancers with world of warcraft gamers, The Movies directors with TV directors, Interaction artists with Noise artists(and many more such people, in any order) and a lot of mucking around with cheap hardware and free or easily available software that we can use to quickly work in realtime and across media, adapting this extremely advanced, but ubiquitous 3d technology to whatever people want to play with.

Then again, there's not that much you can do in 2 days. I'd like to get people in, experts in their own game, to learn to make a finished game or put together a show or installation. Or run a programme of game/art authoring courses for teenage kids taking inspiration from what is done in Brazil with Estudio Livre, or do more workshops focusing more on the Max/MSP/Pd side of things - the interaction that's easily accessible nowadays - the freedom to hook someone's nose up to a scanner that shoots bubbles into a projection behind them if that's what takes their fancy. And I could work more in the area of the real physical hardware - perhaps taking home made moving parts or robots and linking them to games or online applications so that they can use game AI, so that a remote person can control a prop, perhaps be their own little temporary physical avatar, and you can see your robot get taken over by your friend each time they change their facebook profile. This sounds like random experimentation while Rome burns, but we have to open ourselves up, break things up and put them together again in this time while it's still possible. I am sure real, essential, cheap and long term uses will come of this in a speedy way, even if it's just in that the different people might be able to come together and can maybe learn to understand each other better.

In the book Second Lives the author sits in a korean internet cafe playing an obscure multiplayer role playing game in a room full of strangers who are there still at 2 in the morning, playing and interacting not with each other, but with hundreds of people playing the game around the world. He compares Seoul to Birmingham, ugly, empty and torn by consumerism, even with pleasant ads reminding of the move of the capital to a new city, sealing it's doom of a place of extreme transience. I don't know how much this reflects the author's viewpoint and state of mind at the time, and how much it's an accurate portrayal of that city, but it feels to me like a reflection of the modern world, where we sit at computer screens dreaming of our virtual but virtue-less lives and where anyone who doesn't have internet access is left out from all the news and unable to share their valuable, very different, and majority opinions. At some point the dream will end and we will have to wake up, and then I hope we see technology for real.

Art Fossett on SL

2007-12-13T11:34:00.001Z

Yesterday I attended a very fun and immersive Second Life talk by Art Fossett, the in-game avatar, accompanied by his on-earth alter ego, Andy Powell of Eduserv. It was fun mostly because he'd organised it to take place on Eduserv island, in the conference room, and invited friends and colleagues to attend online. They kept chuckling like a misbehaving class, turning into dinosaurs, cartwheeling around, and calling him Chubster behind his back (on the projection screen, but he could spy them from his laptop so he caught them out). All very innocent fun though and it complemented his talk quite well.

The presentation was organised as a series of t-shirts, which took a while to res the next topic name on the avatar's chest. Interesting for the links it turned up, although they kept mentioning something called slideshare, (which I guess I should google!) where the slides will probably turn up soon enough.

There are a lot of mailing lists following Second Life activity in higher education, SLED being the main US one, from far fetched to down to earth discussion, and very US centric. More UK wise though was the
Facebook UK educators group, among a large amount of facebook groups popping up on this topic all the time.

Most importantly for me was the getting started stuff, although I've been a member for more than a year, I've only had about 3 memorable experiences there - going to the anarchist area and chatting with someone there about their online black block actions - invading virtual reuters etc. All a bit useless to me. Or the first time I went in, when I befriended someone who showed me how to build, resulting in lots of squares and circles left lying around like I hadn't housetrained my pet mini-me. And the other time was in a starting place like Orientation Island where I met an imperial stormtrooper, who tried to get me to join his multiplayer sub game thing with the bribe of a free jetpack suit and stormtrooper armour. Oh and once I found a sweet, closed up cottage on a hilltop playing irish music if you got really close to the windows...

Andy/Art explained that the best way to start is actually by arranging to meet a real life known person online and have them take you around. I will try this... He also said to try out the Berkman Sandbox Area or the Glidden Sandbox area for some impressive in world artwork.

He mentioned a growing trend of producing Machinima with SL, and the
Theatron project - I think a reproduction of ancient roman or greek theatres with costumes avatars and staged re-enactments of old plays. There's also the globe theatre somewhere I think. And to top it all a colleague lent me the book Second Lives, which is really brilliant - about people with disabilities and their use of it, or what's happening with gangs and real street violence in Korea...

So armed with all this new knowledge & inspired by the book, I went home to try it all out, and was dismally disappointed when my linux client managed to get in far enough to tell me I needed a new version of the client, then crashed so bad even X wouldn't start, and my windows client, after a few seconds, did the same thing and although the task manager worked, it was unable to remove the client's instance, or get anything else to work, and after a while I actually had to very drastically pull the plug out of the machine. So in conclusion, virtually pleased, in other ways, not.

Planning for dream machines

2007-12-11T00:00:00.001Z

Workshop is in 2 months, have found http://www.ventrilo.com/ and http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24 and above all discovered Garry's Mod, a modification of half life 2 that allows you to position characters from the game, and the many sci fi characters that forum users have created and posted online, can be used to create situations, poses and scripted movements or multiplayer acting environments. The link I gave above was for a forum where people post the videos they're making, or making calls for actors to be in their movies.

But I have to remember that we aren't making movies. Maybe we're making archives, personal archives or documentation about things by encoding it in a three dimensional space. Or maybe parody star wars re-enactments?

Garry's mod costs 10 dollars, so I'm tempted to use it to create characters in the workshop on the second day, although that would mean windows machines again, and some of this is so limiting because it's all for the one platform and the software just isn't hasn't been ported yet, or has to be really open source etc...

With crystal space I've found the community to be very inspiring, involved with the Brazilian movement of estudio livre, doing work with puredata and 3d, or kitchen appliance instruments as the case may be.

It would be cool to play with the video projection by scripting a dialogue between live and video characters, but maybe if narration had to take place live or you could have live acting there, or how could we make it seem like it could be real or a game maybe, or ask people in the forums to join in with the workshop supplying skills in directing to help figure out a script that will be feasible in the time we have. We can choreograph a run through a map as well, and this might help create cinematics. The bluescreen might be valuable and we can offer to film sonething scripted by a machinima author. But I don't want to get too Machinima-centric. We're just looking at the whole idea of being in a 3d world and of using media from it, so the software etc isn't really the issue, except that a multiplayer creative environment like gmod, is not run by linden, it's a free play area...

I like the idea of geolocation as well. Maybe it would help to do a mapping from google earth to a geolocated group of maps in kml or with links to ongoing games in multiplayer engines that had representations of them and other users wandering them too, and could some be used to buy and sell, in person and using some kind of standard software? Or how about a geolocation for free sound, so that we have so many media in the same form? (Software is available for Sony Ericsson's Java enabled mobiles that can feed back their cell-id - an approximation of their location).

I've just found a new form of forum game: http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=365269&page=3
- a user posts some images and offers choices which are then added a few days later, following reader's votes. The thread goes well for a month or so then goes through various problems and finally fizzles out more than a year later. I wonder if interactive comics will one day be all the rage? http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showthread.php?t=445148 Maybe not.

The play between the game based social aspect - maybe putting an audience of 14 people in front of another audience of, say, 15 first person shooter players. We could storm a multiplayer server - a modern boy's game room to a chorus of UR MOM SUX etc, playing strange instruments in a chorus of voice speakers as they scream their disapproval, and as we thrash them in the game at the same time.

Dumped, Channel 4

2007-09-03T17:06:00.001+01:00

Yesterday's Dumped (new eco-reality programme on British TV where people are left at a rubbish dump for 3 weeks) was wonderful! Great mix: surreal post-cataclysmic landscape, lazy people having tea, and lots of more extreme eco-talk than I've ever heard on TV - like to what extent do we really need to adapt, where do we stop in our efforts, how far will we have to go etc.

The sad possibility I saw was that not only will we one day walk the mounds of rubbish in the dumps, but we'll also fight over them, as some have called them the treasure troves of the new millenium. When there is no other way to get that kind of stuff here from other countries, those will be the only places to get them...

So I was spellbound until I realised I'd sat through 1 hour of TV when I usually just catch the news for a second, in that time pondering how to word my letter to TV Licensing about how TV sucks and why I don't want to pay for it anymore.

My Interpretation so far of the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings

2007-08-26T23:22:00.000+01:00

This Sutra, handed down by Ananda, the Buddha's companion, then found and translated to Chinese by Kumarijiva, is part 1 of a trilogy consisting of the Lotus Sutra, The Innumerable Meanings Sutra and the Meditation Sutra. It is studied and known among others, by Nichiren Schools of Buddhism, and it's his interpretation that I probably share most with: http://nichiren.info/OngiKuden/text/Muryogi.htm

First of all, it is meant to be read by Bodhisattvas. Boddhisatvas are people who use what they learn to teach others about how to be Buddhas. When I think of Boddhisatvas, I think of people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King etc, people who fought beyond their own lives for the greater good or peace, perhaps even without knowing what the right way or right practice is.

The Innumerable Meanings Sutra says these people will attain the supreme enlightenment that the Buddha attained, eventually, although the short term effect will be that everyone is a lot better off. Laws, people and societies alike, can manifest the Buddha nature, and it will emerge as a huge success of their individual characters. So even if you are hopelessly out of touch, you can still be a Buddha too.

Most of the deep stuff starts for me in the second chapter, "Preaching":

A Boddhisatva, (...) should learn observe that all laws (...) are (...) in themselves void in shape and form; they are neither great nor small, neither appearing nor disappearing; neither fixed nor movable, and neither advancing nor retreating, and they are nondualistic, just emptiness.

This is where it starts being about all things described as Forms or Laws(the translator's note says "or all existences"), and their nature. For me this is about physical laws governing our universe, laws present day to day around us such as economics and gravity and deep wisdoms learnt only after strife. Or even today's green philosophies and their counterparts. But I realise this is out of context and it's just my interpretation. Laws are all around us even in the moments of the day and they rise and fall and have lifespans like living things. There is only one law that is beyond this: Nonform. I don't know what that is - but it's not "wonderful" because he translates another word as wonderful later, and here he just says nonform - having no form and being formless. I think it could be Myo as in Wonderful as in Sutra of the Lotus of the Wonderful Law - that trust we have to place in the unknown beyond any law.

This is where he first mentions his "expedient means" which means that basically, he's been lying for about 40 years of Buddhist practice and as a teacher to a vast amount of people in what is now Nepal and India in around 400-500 BC, by vastly adapting what he had to teach so it would fit with laws and existences of the time. That truth would be, he implies, contained in the Lotus Sutra which was to follow. All three Sutras in this trilogy go on and on about the benefits of preaching and reciting the lotus sutra, but never say what it is - and that's where Nichiren Daishonin comes in...

Still, that's not very nice to hear for any Theravada Buddhists, or any followers of earlier teachings, like basically all non-Nichiren or Tendai sects... oops... I bet that doesn't sit too well with them if you also know of the common belief that the Threefold Lotus Sutra is believed to be a forgery put together by Mahayana monks, or hidden by priests for hundreds of years because it was believed to be a secret text meant for the future? Could make a cool graphic novel...

Then in the third and last chapter (and that's what I like about it - it's quite short!), it explains how we can avoid war, disease and famine on a national level: by all believing in the Lotus Sutra. Although this might seem a dogmatic conclusion, you'd have to understand that belief in the Lotus Sutra is dedication to the positive forces in the universe(i.e. the universe's Buddha nature). I can see how even on a basic level that might guarantee something: if it even just meant that everyone, no matter how flawed they may be in character, or whatever weird set of laws they believed in, or whatever society they came from, were equal, because they all and you all have a Buddha nature. In a country where this pluralism/mutual respect took place, I can see the positive use of the Lotus Sutra's philosophy, and that of this Innumerable Laws Sutra as it's preface. But then you'd all of course become SLAVES to us Buddhists, and we'd get the mad whips out and our shaved heads would reign invincible!!!

So that's my own flawed, learning vision of that - if you have any comments please let me know - I'm open to debate on this one... Here's another explanation (I don't think I really understand this one).

Anyway so far it seems to carry an important lesson even without reference to the LS: a lesson in detachment from any one belief, be that environmentalism or racism, because we attach ourselves to these beliefs without knowing what is actually good. It says that a Bodhisattva should have "mercy" (old translation) to lead us from the path of suffering and should have compassion to see beyond the evils of those transient laws of the world and the effects those things have on the people who can't see beyond them, as well as a strong belief and support for it's Buddha nature. It says that a Bodhisattva should be a hero in their personal world and not knowing the supreme truth which was then revealed in the Lotus Sutra about the attainment of Buddhism, should still use expedient means on all around them to teach them the Sutra of innumerable meanings.

There's then the 10 merits of practising this Sutra, and two of these are quite interesting in that one is the merit of attending Buddhas - this is Ananda's Bodhisattva practice: He was the Buddha's attendant in his later years, and in particular while he was expounding these Sutras in the state of Magadha. And then right after is Rahula's boddhisatva practice - of being the son of the buddha. In the Lotus Sutra they receive predictions of the enlightenment they would achieve throughout the ages to follow - the supreme kind, the same way: one after the other, and as a mirror of the way they were now. Their nature wasn't changed.

There's probably a lot of depth to all this to which I can only see the beginning - that for example it tells you that you don't have to practice the 4 noble truths or various other older Theravada teachings. It's enough to practice the IMS to get the 10 merits. But it's incomplete: Each of the 10 merits contains an exception - those who practice won't know the supreme truth and won't be able to do anything for themselves. Only for others.

The true aspect of all phenomena is mentioned here and is defined as "formless", but also there is the mention of the path of teaching - to answer the question of why he taught them the 4 noble truths and all that if it was just an expedient means.

Expedient means I think, could be just anything: using the power of your own charisma to convince people, using rational thought turned into blog posts or emails, spiritual leadership, whatever, it's all kind of "tactful" lies really, but the point is they lead people to go through relationships with laws, through these beliefs then, to encounter problems and to conquer them.

The innumerable laws which always change are to be used by Bodhisattvas in this way because people are different, and have different understandings, which is why the Buddha used expedient means to teach the people around him until then. I wonder if "Non form" is a basic central law that all the other laws progressively revolve around?

I haven't been able to find the Innumerable Meanings Sutra posted online. If anyone has a link please let me know! Hope you've liked and not been too bored by this post!

Section 4

2007-07-02T19:42:00.000+01:00

Here are all the areas of the Section 4 open exhibition, with comments on how they were received and where they could develop:

Symbolic Jumble Sale: This was a strong piece - as it constituted the full first week of the Pierian Centre exhibition on it's own and a lot of people saw it. It is basically all the items I picked up when my friends Cristina and family were deported, on display on a table. At first I thought it hadn't gone well because a lot of people looked very upset looking at it, but it's an upsetting thing to see. A visitor reminded me of this, and said it probably really affected people. I thought success would have been if some wealthy visitor had offered to buy for example, the extension lead or the phone charger for £2000 as a work of art, so I could send it back to Bolivia, but although I think this is viable as an installation, I need to do just that, and none of the other things, or it loses focus. Just each item, with a huge price tag. The fact that they are mundane electronic items makes it quite strong I think - you end up using it, and you end up remembering the deportation hopefully.
Another idea coming from the jumble sale idea was to do an installation of a kitchen and living room that re-enacts a deportation, using audio recorded during real deportations. This would be incredibly powerful I think. A progression on this idea, although very complicated, would be to do an asylum seeker's live snakes and ladders game, from arrival via human trafficking or some eco or political disaster, to the court process and deportation.
The actual jumble sale, collected via the Drop-in centre and Pierian Centre, didn't go very well - partly because some people thought it was also deportee items, and partly because I just couldn't always be there. I haven't counted the money but I doubt it's a tenner even. Originally this was intended to be managed by someone who did only that, so as to ensure it was run well and gave good returns, but I'm glad I did it and with a volunteer to man the desk it could work well in future. Probably this exhibition needs a large space, and maybe 2 volunteers there at any one time so as to ensure this kind of thing works.
The 4 information boards. Great success. Divided into Stories, The State, Hope and What I Heard. Went down very well, both exhibition spaces asked to keep them a little longer. Ali Zalme and quite a few others suggested this is where we can get funding and input from refugee visual artists to make them more visually striking and easier to understand, although my friend Govinda said it makes it easier to add comments when there is not already a predefined aesthetic to it.
Listening posts. Another time I need to frame the players somehow, so they can't be stolen, or even better, transmit from a computer as loops via fm to lots of old walkman style radios that people can hold up to their ears. Also, the audio material will be very good for internet dissemination. I need a better way of presenting the transcripts of the interviews.
The Video Booth. This didn't work because the whole exhibition needed more of a participative edge: I think my failure was that I planned out in detail all the ways people could participate, so it didn't leave space for other spontaneous ways of expressing things - so it felt a lot like I was trying too hard to make people participate. Also with video, as we discovered at the Live Archives workshops , where this exhibition was partly concieved, there is a strong stigma to video recordings - people find it uncomfortable! Another time maybe it should be a microphone area, or an actual closed, provate booth!
The Internet Cafe. This was one site: http://www.livearchives.org/section4/ which Paul Stapleton and Mike Fallows of UCL generously allowed me to use. Computers at the Pierian Centre were lent equally generously by Bristol Wireless. I didn't push this aspect too much as it didn't really work at the exhibition (see point above).
The DVD. Amazing material, hopefully this material can be added to and edited further. Anna's interview is particularly striking, and I hope some of this content can be broadcast via radio, internet or tv! Lots of people sat through this. It could easily, perhaps together with a better organised video booth, form an exhibition of it's own.
The printed information table. This went down very well, and lots of people spent a long time leafing through all the info. It's still at Kebele for another while. I hope to go there and take notes of the contributions so as to feed back to local councillors and our local MP.
Snacks/Food. I arranged for Arts trail asylum seeker visitors to get free meals, and asked around lots of places, but in the end it wasn't possible to have snacks in the place itself and I cancelled that aspect. Problem with co-ordinating this on my own, but if I had help, it would be great to stage the exhibition as a community gathering, with food, drink, talks, discussion etc. As it was, a lot of spontaneous little groups formed and people started discussing the issues together.

I got a strong feeling a lot of the time that I was preaching to the converted, although the converts didn't know quite how bad it actually was. In future, doing it in different kinds of places will probably work much better in terms of gathering more wide ranging opinions.

I learnt a lot about how space works in an exhibition space, and how personal space impacts (at least in the UK) on where people will go. At the pierian centre someone said "it looks like your front room!" and "I wasn't sure I could go in there" because the room was so small, and there was a sofa and a TV there too!

Section 4

2007-06-14T03:12:00.001+01:00

mp3 excerpt: Father Richard MacKay talks about deportation as practiced in the UK.

Here are my preparations for an exhibition on section 4, failed asylum. Feel free to join in :)

STILL TO PRINT:

Father McKay http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bristol/somerset/3961289.stm

Labels for recordings

World Map (and pins)

Failed Asylum Snakes and Ladders

Letter for Co-op on the triangle.

Copyright document: The material in this collection is licensed under a Creative Commons By-Nc-Sa license. This entitles re-use of all material donated for further work, as long as it is attributed to "Section 4" and used for non-commercial purposes. Any other uses will require contact with the original author, via the exhibition organiser, Alejandro Fernandez, 12 Bruce Avenue, Bristol. By submitting material for this exhibition, you are agreeing to put your contributions under this license.

I agree [ ]

I wish to remain anonymous [ ]

Signature

Call montpelier health centre, ask for 192.com - Local Search for Health Centre in Bristol: "0117 942 6811" DONE, left message

Call NHS centre: CAMS. Phone interview with CAMS central sector knowle clinic 0117 9190330

Democratic writings will be small paragraphs on a topic (like soft lists, destitution, deportation, vouchers, work, health, signing on, community work, organisation, a graphic showing what the path is if you are a failed asylum seeker(listen to father mackay's interview to extract this info better).

Each of these 4 boards will have an "audio area" - an old audio player taped on, a pen on a string (sellotaped), and a title and very little info: little more than "Add your opinion", although individual bits might have pen or marker pen indication of what each thing is.

Testimonies VS Media: (Anna, Ali) 2 stories , 1 Poem - do better, Photos

Health: (Naomi, Mary) NHS asylum policy, Wikipedia post traumatic stress disorder. Audio interview to CAMS and montpelier health clinic

People who help: (Father MacKay, Sue, BDASC) Cube Asylum Policy, Cube Programmes, Bristol Defend the Asylum Seekers. Sue O'Donnell webpages, "democratic info sheet" on the need for co-ordinating body at local level, section of asylum act relating to community activities, timebank, sign up sheets, article on food for a million etc.

The State: interview sections on Immigration Department, Solicitors and Government (Father MacKay croydon lies, BDASC political will, Sue o'donnell) Migration Watch article, FOI legislation, Asylum act in full, Articles with Father MacKay (PRINTED).

Prepare Audio, Prepare Boards (get children to help!)

Maybe can bring some double headphone plugs to allow listening 2 at a time. Bring TV, DVD, Scart Cable, extension leads (2)
Buy: Cassette tapes, magic marker, fm transmitter

Take printed letters to Sweet Mart, Maitreya, Better Food, Co-op Triangle.

Thank you page print out:
Thanks to all who helped make this exhibition possible:
(cross out as needed)
Coop Community Fund
Bristol Sweet Mart (Food donations)
Cafe Maitreya (Food donations)
Bristol Wireless (LTSP computer suite).
Paul Stapleton, Mike Fallows (LiveArchives.org)
Siobhan McKeown (Video operation and interviews)
Barry Parsons & Sam, Mat Dalgliesh, Ivan Zverstvo (Sound editing)
Bristol Defend the Asylum Seeker
Drop in Centre, St Nicolas of Tolentino
Mel McCree (Audio, work with children)
Helen Grant (Video editing, testimonial recordings)
To everyone who gave an interview
To everyone who donated things for the symbolic jumble sale.
All of you who came and added to it!

Call the haven, montpelier health centre, 0117 942 6811

call and plead to print places (secured 4 a3 prints from Besley Hill on St Marks Road) Abandoned trying other print places...

buy boards from art shop DONE, print lots of flyers DONE

ask june if I can use their printer within reason at pierian

email freecycle about the jumble sale

call brian

text paulette asking section 4 contacts to come to exhibition, offer interview if wanted. DONE If so, cheeky question: ask her what she feels about the Respect Party being accused of using the asylum seeker issue to somehow further political ambitions, and would she, despite this, attempt dialogue with other people who help asylum seekers to solve these issues and perhaps coordinate services and information?

What does she feel about community activities for section 4 beneficiaries?

What kind of thing could be the best? Make example of Anna's love for growing own food: community gardens and meals.

Call immigration. Ask them if they can say a few words as a statement for a art exhibition on section 4.

What is your name, and function within the immigration department?

What is that like?

What contact do you have with the asylum seekers you work with, and what can you tell me about them?

What is your policy towards asylum seekers, in a nutshell?

And what is your opinion of the treatment of failed asylum seekers in the UK?

What are people's rights during this situation?

What can you tell me about deportation in the UK, how is it usually carried out?
Some have voiced accusations that the deprivation from work, money, medical services, friendship and family is a form of torture, designed to send the message to the world that Britain is not the country to seek refuge in.

Do you believe that the immigration department could be breaking human rights laws?

The law on asylum specifies community work. Is this something that any community group can apply for?

Wouldn't this lead to asylum seekers being known personally by the general public and hence possibly protected?

But then maybe the problem would go away if everyone liked them?
hello?

excerpt 2: George Speaks. More interviews and transcripts here.

Poem for peace, from a pirate recording in a Cairo Museum.

2007-02-05T16:13:00.001Z


My love
With peace I have placed loving flowers
at your feet
With peace
With peace I stopped the seas of blood
for you
Forget anger
Forget pain
Forget your weapons
Forget your weapons and come
Come and live with me my love
Under a blanket of peace
I want you to sing, beloved light of my eyes
And your song will be for peace
let the world hear,
my beloved and say:
Forget anger
Forget pain
Forget your weapons
Forget your weapons and come
And live in peace

These I believe are the words of a widow at the tomb of her beloved. I got the words from this italian website.

It was used in a seminal Italian anti-war song "Luglio Agosto Settembre Nero" by the band Area (although I guess they weren't called anti-war songs then) - whose vocalist Demetrio Stratos indirectly gives the name to this blog, and whose music is the inspiration for a lot of my mine. It's adapted in turn from a greek folk song, but no-one knows who wrote the original words, except that Stratos was probably the one who made this pirate recording when visiting Cairo.

By the way, I'll be playing this live at the open mic at the greenbank pub on my new Setar/Rabab. Rehearsing it "furiously", but I guess, peacefully.

(If that Italian site disappears before this one, here are the words:)

(Mio amato/ Con la pace ho depositato i fiori dell’amore
davanti a te/Con la pace/con la pace ho cancellato i mari di sangue
per te/Lascia la rabbia/Lascia il dolore/Lascia le armi/Lascia le armi e vieni/Vieni e viviamo o mio amato/e la nostra coperta sarà la pace/Voglio che canti o mio caro “ occhio mio “ [luce dei miei occhi]/E il tuo canto sarà per la pace/fai sentire al mondo,/o cuore mio e di' (a questo mondo)/Lascia la rabbia/Lascia il dolore/Lascia le armi/Lascia le armi e vieni/a vivere con la pace.)

Ideas for a possible Ninjam front end

2007-01-31T12:19:00.001Z

In my nightly jams with Ninjam I've recently found out loads about how it can be improved. Firstly there's now a linux client (there's always been one but this one is gui based). It's called gninjam. Best of all is that in doing this, Tobias the author of this first derivative, separated display from core functionality creating libninjam and a front end which he wrote in Glade.

Setar and Tabla improvisation on very cheap microphone

I want to write a new front end for it then, using libninjam and wxpython which looks simple enough, although this is all very ambitious, and I may never actually get to do it, but here's all the ideas meanwhile:

a last.fm-like client that is able to :

* Simplify the process of setting up audio: loads of ninjam users get in, but cant' hear themselves, some other player, or are coming through distorted etc and have to rely on the irc window to help them. For this I'd make a "testing room" - a room run on a standard server somewhere that everyone used then as a doorway to all the other servers(would show who is logged in, and allow people to register their own servers too). Also, visual feedback about sound setup should be much more detailed - such as graphical displays of the sound levels for each user connected (however delayed if this reduces performance).

* Another point of confusion is the way latency is handled - by slowing everyone down to the last beat. Could a display be made that showed where you were in the measure? Perhaps the sound level graphs would be enough for this, or a tutorial could be put together that played something set each time and asked you to play on time so you can "practice" this.

* Third, the stream that's recorded isn't available. This should be a toggle, so you can go straight in and hear how you sound.

* This is just technical stuff: a community would have to be formed, so "contest" stuff like on the ccmixter site - big jams or even popular flash-mob style events would bring people in and get them coming up with stuff. (I imagine a 30 minute session of keyboard typing in offices from around the world for example - not musical and not jamming but very inclusive and perhaps also interesting). Among other things, a community of users would then let you for example always have people on IRC helping people out in real time, plan times and slots on servers for specific styles of music etc....

* Also ways to define the music you want to do: setting a key, a beat, a style or whatever. Some of this would be helped by user logins allowing you to set a personal profile with the insturments you play etc.

* A screen with profiles could be linked with a "score screen" - so people tuning in to the jam or a set "conductor" could send timed, large font sized instructions that they could all see while jamming. Perhaps a separate, very low quality mic stream would let people have the option of headphone mics while playing, allowing them to exchange comments as they play too. There is software already for linux that does this kind of performance friendly prompting.

* Separating the editing from the jamming - what if remix artists could join in on a live jam and work with the samples as the jam happened? This is for the far future I think...

* integrating Raptor's drum machine features and making them simpler - so as to allow easy to make drum patterns.

* jesusonic for linux clients...?

Could Ninjam be used to aid a geographically distant but studio quality live performance/recording? Perhaps if 2 people were able to jam together with a high speed connection and low quality streams, the latency issue would disappear. After this the high quality tracks would be sent and mixed later, so you'd have a good telematic performance as well as a good recording of it.

Asylum Seekers Violently Deported in Easton

2007-01-23T02:07:00.000Z

Right under our very doorsteps, on the streets of Greenbank that have such lovely names, there are people who look like the rest of us but live under house arrest because they would not sign documents agreeing to leave this country for somewhere more dangerous. There are people being deported all the time. There are also some broken bin bags at the end of Bellevue Road, containing some of the lost clothes of a small boy who used to go to Bannerman Road Primary School. Up till Wednesday 17th January.

Felipe came home that day and barely had time to settle down after school before a helicopter pulled up outside his house, in the sky. Last time the police had come for them, on December 8th, they had been taken at 6am, out of the blue and in a very traumatic episode, to a detention centre with the idea that they would be deported as soon as a plane was free. But they were not together, the father had left the house just before they had come, and called with his lawyer and they were freed. But this time, this last Thursday they
were finally being taken: their leave of stay had expired. Until the end they didn't know if it was going to be the usual rigmarole of an appeal procedure, with lawyers and court hearings, followed by some tickets and times for departure.

Instead it was a Pakistani immigration officer, shouting at Felipe's mother that she could not say goodbye and she had to get 20 kilos of her belongings and get in
the van. No one was there able to stand up to this woman and her colleagues and just say the few words that could have changed it ("I am their lawyer" seems to work for example, but just anything that could help in breaking through the loss of responsibility for human suffering in such a horrible job). I spoke to their eldest daughter, 19 year old Lizeth, who we just saw pass by from the bus that day, but spoke to for the last time so far, the night before they left. I wish now I'd taken her email address down too. Intelligent and studious, she wanted to be a dentist and study here, but now with the growing idea that they were to be sent back, she
wanted at least to finish her studies, stay these last few months with friends or family so as to get a document that she could stamp at the embassy and qualify to go to university in Bolivia. Without this, she'll have to repeat the whole of her secondary studies, which doesn't seem likely as they go to stay with their grandmother in a poor city now.

She was put, together with her other brother, in a van that went alongside the van with the parents and two younger siblings. A van with no windows.

Treated like criminals, when they were part of this community for years and the parents had made food for many of the school children atBannerman Rd as well as participating in refugee week activities and personally helping many of the Somali or Asian refugees who speak much less English than themselves, but sometimes have no-one to talk to. I don't know them too well and I don't know what the full story is here but the immigration police had no right to treat that family like that.

The children shouldn't be treated like this because you have to see that these are a universal concept - they could be yours. And the adults shouldn't be treated like this because they left Bolivia escaping police persecution, of an extremely violent nature, so this treatment seems to have been given without first examining a medical history and so therefore putting them in medical danger as well. The trauma of being sent back was already noticeable when I went to see them the day before the big raid of Bellevue Rd.

On the couch, they told me of the way their son had scared the police, who told him to put his hands up, because he had a toy gun, and because he wouldn't wake up.
They were shaking him. They didn't let his mother go and wake him, maybe reserve the right to tell him that he was leaving the country or give him some words of strength for the journey.

He was playing when I went there the day before their deportation. He wanted 10 pounds his mother owed him. She wasn't going to give it. We nagged at him that those 10 pounds could buy a lot of meat and rice in Bolivia, or at least a lot more chocolate than what he wanted, but he really didn't understand.

They sent them off leaving their house abandoned, leaving all their Latin American
friends to call each other disgusted and upset at this news, and rushing to their flat to try and gather up and sort out the rest of their belongings, what they hadn't been allowed to take with them. The rest of it is still in the street or collected the next day when the house was emptied and presumably made ready for some new tenants. We took what we could. I have

some computer speakers

a mini hifi stereo system

a DVD drive

an old cassette tape recorder

an ink jet printer

some small toys

a red rucksack

A mountain Bike

A multiple socket plug

And more, and my idea is to sell it, but with the idea that the money is going to go towards them getting their house back - they exchanged it for a loan when they put together the money to come to the UK. They called their sister, who lives in London, an asylum seeker who won leave to remain already I believe, and I'm about to get in touch with them, as I've just found their number at their mother's house in Santa
Cruz. They were coca farmers, a life lived against the state that came before Morales, and before the guy before him, but now I think they have gained only the English language and customs which they learned when they were here. I hope we can still teach them warmth, after failing them like this.

Since this happened, I've been shocked. I've not known what to do, whether to report it or what. And now I think I should get the word out. I've also not known what to do
in terms of my own life - to buy a house here, look for a job, or start making roots somewhere else. I used to live under the illusion that this society was respectful. Now I see how inhuman it really is, and that's disheartening. But I know life is much worse elsewhere, and I really really know why people risk so much in the channel tunnel to get here. This is really a privileged society.

The racist within

2007-01-19T20:34:00.000Z

There is a racist in all our hearts
And it has to come out and face reality
That's the ultimate reality tv - the people around us.

But no-one should be abandoned: we all have prejudices,
and great good can come from the worst person turning around.
Because they take with them their distorted environment,
and it gets to see it too.

Fitting that it happens to India from it's old decaying invader, when the Buddha himself tried so hard to make a change in the barriers between different castes in Brahmanic society, castes which continue to this day to affect society there. This means there is lots of Buddhist teaching to choose from when looking at this. I'm, I guess, now just a Nichiren Buddhist, so to name a few from my adopted tradition: dependent origination, the oneness of life and the environment, but mostly the possibility that all people being living beings intrinsically have Buddhahood within them, and no-one should be excluded, no matter what they believe, from the possibility of realising the positive nature they have. That seed may be there, but this is always going to be a struggle for individuals and societies alike. The moment you have a way of getting people to dialogue freely and resolve these things, you have a something which can become corrupt if institutionalised. It has to always be a struggle.

Still, that's all I want to say about this shit.

Setar or Rebab from Uzbekistan

2006-12-18T01:03:00.000Z

Sound clip of me playing this (Setar (or) Rabab)

My brother went to Kazakhstan recently, and bought a Setar (or Rubab, or maybe it's a kashgar rabab) when he crossed through to Uzbekistan for a part of his trip. I think he got it in the city of Samarkand. It's a small rounded mandolin sized instrument, with four strings - which seem to have very different tunings, not mandolin like at all. From looking at Wikipedia, it looks like some of the strings are sympathetic strings, i.e. drone strings. Two drones and two strings that play mostly solos, punctuated by some fast strikes of the drones. In gamelan music it's the only free instrument, that only has to abide by the rule of stopping on the beat. As a rebab it's played with great style in the afghan city of Herat, in slowly reawakening musical traditions. It is played with a bow in general, and is considered to be the precursor of the violin. In the tradition of Uzbek and Kazakh people it's an instrument of great improvisation, which is only starting to show - as an actual forgotten classical tradition. It's a music which is of the same calibre as Hindustani classical at least - they share the same origins and this has also had the influence of Persian invasions and of the trade route through to other parts of Asia. It even ended up in andalusia and then came back - when spain was re-taken and many muslims moved east. It was really in the right place for a long time!

But how to tune it. I've settled for C, F, E, A - the last two being quite a bit higher than the others. This is because of a description of the modern afghan version and because of another site talking about the tuning of the Rebec, it's medieval sister instrument. This page on the other hand says there's something weird about it.

On TV there would be shows where these people would improvise songs about the lady in the third row or about what you could text in to the show, and improvising musicians would make songs up on the spot. This follows a tradition of improvised storytelling and music, and a lot of horse riding. Now though, in Kazakhstan at least, they ride 4 by 4s. Oh and they wouldn't be very nice to Borat, so I wouldn't expect a reality tv program for him there any time soon.

Here's some more info on uzbek music

On his way across the border back to Uzbekistan my brother said there was general chaos and loads of people trying to get through. The Rebab got a bit damaged then. I have to see a friend's friend who knows a lot about strange instruments apparently, and take it to hobgoblin music or somewhere in bristol that repairs and fixes these kinds of things.

Technorati Tags: rabab, ethnic instrument, music, improvisation, hindustani, uzbekistan, rabab, setar

the legend of the tooth mouse (first draft)

2006-11-17T14:24:00.002Z

Once upon a time there was a mouse called Lauchito, who was very crafty and worldly and had been in all kinds of kitchens stealing little bits of food from the humans.

The humans didn't mind too much because he was a very clean mouse and always tidied up after himself, and because long ago he had befriended a small boy who had given him some food in exchange for some of the little night that he kept in his cave, back when humans didn't have night and had to sleep in the bright sun instead.

The mouse was always playing tricks on the fox, who was very greedy and not very nice. Most of all the fox wanted to be like a human. And one day he managed to marry a princess who had a baby daughter and later became king. But he was not a very nice king and made everyone very poor by taking all their money and keeping it himself.

The princess became a queen and her daughter became princess. The fox king didn't like the princess and kept her locked up in the castle all the time. She had lots of money but no friends. The princess was bigger now though so when she lost her first tooth she put it under her pillow because her mummy had told her that a mouse might come and give her a present. So she did, and waited, and when the night came she saw a little mouse who was dressed in human clothes and was climbing up her bed carrying a bag to put the tooth in. She tried to catch him in her hands and he slipped out and ran through a hole in the room. She followed him and was able to fit through the mouse hole and had become like a mouse too. She chased him all around town and when he thought he had lost her he went along his way chased by cats and getting out of the way of the people walking everywhere while the princess chased him.

She saw him take presents and take teeth from all children around the town, some very poor children and very rich children, all kinds of children. She really liked this and made friends with the mouse and he liked her very much. He said she must be a fairy princess and that's how she was able to come with him.

She came back and the king was very angry that she had escaped, and locked her and the mouse up in the cupboard under the stairs. Her mum he locked in her room. And then he was very tired of all that shouting and being horrible so he went to bed. The mouse escaped and climbed under his pillow, and the king found him.

Hello Fox, said the mouse from under the pillow. The king was very angry to be found out to be a fox, so he punched the pillow. He pulled out the pillow expecting a flat mouse, but under the pillow the mouse was fine, and he got out of his huge bag of teeth and ka-boom he hit the fox king sending teeth everywhere and told him never to be horrible again.

From then on the tooth mouse and the tooth fairy went around together giving presents to children. The tooth fairy had only money though, so she sent that. Also they are always arguing but that's normal when people work together for a long time!

This is an attempt to make a short story to explain why my children have 2 different beings who share their teeth (they have italian, chilean and north american traditions). Here are some of the links I used to figure it all out:


http://etimologias.dechile.net/?mapuche
http://cvc.cervantes.es/actcult/raton/cuento.htm
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Bonne_Petite_Souris
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/6413/leyendas/noche.html
http://www.telepolis.com/cgi-bin/web/DISTRITODOCVIEW?url=/1356/doc/cruzdelsur/aymara.htm
http://www.unap.cl/sociales/revistasociales/articulos/rcs_3/articulo_3_4.htm

Marketing and Publicity in community action and collectively improvised music.

2006-11-11T04:07:00.001Z

The Comic version of the 911 commission report is really inspiring - both as an art form following from trends in documentary film and as a way to make information accessible to the masses - making a difficult and dense report easy to understand. This is what I feel the Chocolate Box network needs - a way to communicate our issues simply so that we can truly be representative.

I'm hoping a good publicity group springs from our midst. We could take Milly's popular exhibition from the Mivart St Open Weekend - a collage of community meeting notes, videos of our meetings and encounters with the head of Elizabeth Shaw, historic and present photos and plans of the factory and what interesting ideas have been put forward for ideas that fit the 5m budget it's got to make (at least!).

We are also due to do a fundraiser in December, at the Lego Church - which I plan to take part in.

__Sustain My HEAD!__

I attended on Thursday the Sustainable neighbourhoods workshop organised by Bristol City Council and held at the create centre. I took part as a member of Chocolate Box, together with lots of groups - some of which had been going for quite some time. It was depressing, firstly because I got a look at what Chocolate box might become. It's sad how every bit of initiative, true friendly neighbourhoodly initiative is preyed upon, a trend in the market, and turned into something that is slow to move because it's stopped being young and idealistic believing anything is possible and in the real importance of the issues we fight for. Not to say that these groups are not useful, and it's amazing some of the longer running ones keep at it through thick and thin, and I don't mean this as a criticism of them - more of the way the system has bent it all. All the groups were worth a lot of praise not to mention Voscur and in my opinion Bristol City Council itself, but I just feel it could be so much more free.

On a recent copy of Bristle magazine it was mentioned that a large part of the population of this area and of maritime destinations from middle age Bristol were slaves. There are centuries of buried karma building up to form these situations nowadays, and we don't even remember it.

Another other reason it was depressing was that I realised I have so far to go and that there is really a slim chance of things actually working properly for true sustainability in this area.

I'm completely happy with this area, not that I regard it mine not even that I think I'll stay here for long, but I believe it can withstand better than many places anything that could come and challenge it's sustainability. But it's like an adventure trying to get it to really go that way.

After an initial game which I found quite useless but well meaning - we had to give examples of things we'd done following the themes behind the meeting. A coffeehouse challenge, a street party, a volunteer run gardening service. A coffeehouse challegne is a light discussion of a topic over food and drink in a community space. And then we talked about how we should network - it was agreed sustainability-friendly organisations can share resources such as large meeting spaces or knowledge, and use larger resources from the council - such as the ability to carry out professional surveys of the people we are trying to represent.

I hope this turns into something tangible, as it has to be something very simple, something that everyone benefits from in the short term, maybe something fun. Technically though, I really think we need a shared wiki - with very simple editing rules - a website we can all add to with generic information according to our needs - a knowledgebase but also person or skill finder. And with simple information and resources on taking realistic action. What is real? Only what we can build as a widely shared understanding, and it only goes as far as those who understand it that way. And mostly they just think they do, but the unity of purpose is enough to keep it going. In buddhism we call it Itai Doshin.

After the break we talked about definitions: What is sustainability in a neighbourhood? How can you say a neighbourhood is sustainable?

For the purpose of making a statement of some kind showing a shared understanding.

But I found it really challenging. I didn't want to give a definition myself because I was representing Chocolate Box and I don't know if there's a definition we agree on. I doubt it. And at the same time I desperately wanted to talk about it. I was very upset about that because a vision of possible future is really what guides your life in some ways so I realise I'm very attached to my view and at the same time it needs to be put out there for discussion. So here it is:

The world is in a very serious and dangerous situation. I don't think I need to list the problems at hand but I think no single issue can be singled out like some are being singled out now. Sustainability is work to counter that sum of issues which are threatening our livelihood in the long term. There are fundamental things that anyone on the street can do to change this, but they require organisation of some kind - even if it's spontaneous like the people who'll be going around giving free hugs out at the broadmead shopping centre before Christmas. One hug makes a smile warms a heart and pushes you on.

We need to develop an infrastructure that can withstand to some degree the possibility of a fast crash in fuel availability. This is needed both on a political level as resources become scarce, as on an economic level to protect against crashes in economies on which we might be dependent. This could be called antiglobalization, but applied, and applied not as an activist statement, but as what you do when you realise you've fucked up and need to tuck in your belt and get to work fixing the mess.

We need to lose the concept that growth is good. We need to stabilise and downsize. This should be a new indicator of a country's ability to sustain itself.
We need a more civilised way of running ourselves. For this I believe it should be, at some level - Anarchism. You could also call it "community". Local people just working together and helping each other. Small groups - linking in some ways to other small groups.

All these things need individual activity - pluralist but mutually respectful, building up links in such a way as to work alongside what we now know to be the downfall of centralised systems - an inability to look farther ahead.

__DOrkboT__

I also went to Dorkbot that night and met the inspiring artist Carolyn Ryves who using plans from the internet on her own adapted her bike to generate a small amount of electricity. The design is not very efficient, she admitted, but it was very interesting to many people there, as a practical demonstration of how easy it is to generate alternative energy. We talked about potential uses, and I volunteered myself to organise a workshop - I want to get people messing about with the electrics involved in building them, since bike powered generators can be made from things you can readily find second hand or on freecycle, and since decentralised energy is going to run the risk of being run by travelling cowboy technicians - insurance groups who would have the monopoly of maintenance of our wind turbines and solar panels when they routinely break down every 5 or 10 years. We need to develop these skills in the community.

I'm much closer to a complete idea through a lot of research I've done, inspired by the Grid Technologies workshops we did this summer. I think I know the basics now of how to build a small shared p2p environment - so that in a decentralised way you could navigate and share resources with other people close by. Everyone wants to make money out of things like this and no-one has thought of making a free software mobile based grid application - a myspace/napster for your mobile phone, perhaps even a complex email system - where messages travel from phone to phone dupliacted and encrypted and eventually might reach someone who knows someone who passes by someone... But also a simple way to distribute things quickly. A text file, an image, a video even - all sent en masse for example by amplifying bluetooth signals could enable a mass market device built on existing commercial technology.

(My newest phone says "Made in Malaysia" I got it for free from Virgin Mobile. It's crazy. What did the assemblers get paid and what is their pay package? Does it include good medical support? Do they fund research into the effects these components and tools have on the factory workers and their communities so you can refer that information to us the customers? Well we're going to do it for you if you don't.)

But back to the point from before I need to start a project for this, write a project plan, describe some of the protocols and apis needed, platforms it would need to support, killer app - ways to use this quickly and easily on the field as a prototype. For example by loading python s60 and a script on your Symbian phone could you put in a tiny p2p program of some kind? Like Tinyp2p even? But that program makes heavy use of libraries which just don't exist in the bluetooth world.

One thing I think of is Music distribution: You compose tunes and make them available to other people - putting them in a public profile of some kind. Logging in you'd see all the profiles in your vicinity, with images or video segments put together simply from a collection of photos from the phone, or some other simple and accessible way to figure out you have something in common with that person. It could also examine your data more in detail and tell if you have friends in common. It might even try and assemble a map of friendships and groups based on shared phone book data and frequency of messages or calls to each one. It then depends only what the software can make available to others - something either to argue out or just to provide as settings to users.

The orchestra, I now realise, is playing a gig in collaboration with Nick Sorenson of the improvising School, and in support of Eugene Chadbourne of very eccentric fame, on the same night as I'd bought tickets to see Ojos de Brujo at the colston hall!! I'll have to do a disappearing act...

Bluetooth Mindboggles

2006-10-24T02:37:00.001+01:00

Bluetooth FAQ

My only thought (one track mind) just now is how to make a bluetooth application that ran a grid over mobile phones? It would grow dynamically across any installed clients it found. You could copy in anything, and it would have metadata for that stuff. If it found a phone capable of point to multipoint, it would send all to everything around it, and it would allow things to be informally shared perhaps in various levels of secrecy, but also with various levels of social comfort:

If you were in a public space you could set your phone to something like "contactable" or "surprise me!" and this would get you everything passing by on the other phones. Animations, texts, pictures, videos, ringtones and combinations of these would be the easiest things to transfer. You might choose to keep a record of what you got, and inspect it later or search. This could be good for social purposes.

If you were in a conference, you might wish to reveal more, such as work documents, and you'd set it to "show". There are already things that do this, but you have to buy them. Buzzer I think it's called. Not worth looking up even...

There are libraries and things that can be used for this, and I guess the first step is decking out a computer with a dongle and the SDK, or a bit harder but more comfortable in the long run, is doing this with linux. Then, once set up and running, Cobain is a comms API, and you can get media streaming stuff too.

At its simplest, Cobain acts as a simplified communications API; it saves the trouble
of writing hundreds of lines of code required to discover the devices and their services,
handle the connections and the low-level sending and receiving of the packets

1

Another use could be an online world in a phone. Could be a stick man world, but where you can build and draw environments - with sound/sound effects etc, and sit in them, and where people could see yours. Would need in-phone authoring. The grid aspect would be that in logging in, again in a social scenario, you would see the world that other people had built - some chosen from "wizards", others built from a process of taking existing photos and faces grabbed automatically from the phone and getting the user to confirm/reassemble until they found what they liked. The idea would be to stimulate individual aesthetic expression. Again, there's a library that might help with this: The EPOC 3d engine at http://sourceforge.net/projects/symbian3d/ but no idea how good/supported/useful this will be. Might also be good to do this in SVG, as it's got good support on mobiles and could be easily transferred to a computer environment.

All of these depend on critical mass though, and the object at first is to get things to everyone, hence a lot of the initial effort should go to into the distribution of the applications themselves. - Apparently there is a man in London who distributes his animations over bluetooth on the bus. This doesn't need much - you just find bluetooth devices, and click send, one by one... A simple addition would be a "send to all", but how do people know what they are going to get, especially an executable? You need trust... One way is that this happens after you know the person anyway, so you'd need some kind of use case: a good reason to give them that application. Another would be to do online authentication via a download first of a checksum or a texting of one (which could pay for it) so that users would initially see this as an extension of existing web content. So this could be a plug-in for a social website.

Then there's bluetooth texting: Easy: just a program that sends texts, but sends them via bluetooth to everyone else, like a chatroom. Again, you should download and then just set to "chat with me!" to make you visible in the chat room. It might be worth implementing a buzz or a specific tone to identify you when you ask someone to join the chat. Why would you want to do this? Classrooms. (And this could be for aiding L&T not just subverting it!). Once you can have this text based back and forth communication - it's only one step further to add a storyline or an environment and make it a game, or add web links to connect with the online world, connect the texts to a real computer screen so they can be shared that way, or just whatever features emerge from it's use.

Because of the problems with multipoint etc, only very small networks can be built in a grid of phones/pdas (plus you have all the various competing OSs running on them... I go for Symbian in this, but I don't know stats...) I believe complete bluetooth grids are no bigger than 8 devices max, but you can probably get around this with partial networks - so each phone only connects to a manageable amount of other devices, and works intermittently with the others, so you have the illusion of a larger network, but actually it's many little networks each co-operating to form a bigger one.

Candle based small heater

2006-10-12T12:21:00.000+01:00

If only people like this could open their business and get a web designer in too!

Weaving grid computing into the Net | Tech News on ZDNet

2006-10-09T16:57:00.000+01:00

Weaving grid computing into the Net - article about possible union of business and scientific grids. Mentions what may be a very interesting paper to read...

http://www.3pointd.com/20060820/mitch-kapor-on-the-power-of-second-life/

Explaining some of the background to SL's grid based client/server system amongst others. Massive centralisation of object data means when you get into the world all you have is IDs for objects. Your client then has to query the central db for the rendering data to all these objects even if you created them yourself. But how could any other kind of setup allow people to relate to the real world? For example, an online world where objects were only there while their client was connected to the grid, so where client software was responsable for storing data too, a bit like with some more distributed p2p clients.

It would perhaps match buddhist thought - that each person is a protagonist and creator of their own environment through past causes they made. In this case, through designing objects and putting them online.

As long as you're connected though - the world looks the way you thought it looked, but is the light always on in the fridge even when you're not looking?

Social Networking/Grid App videos/podcast links

2006-09-28T10:50:00.000+01:00

I came across all these links looking at Miguel de Icaza's blog

Danah Boyd speaking about social networking sites such as Myspace, and funny things that happen when you don't check how your data is coming from properly (although that's always hard to do when your audience is made up of teenagers)

Second Life Client: A distributed grid application, now running .mono!
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/4/1/94138e2a-d9dc-435a-9240-bcd985bf5bd7/Jim-Cory-SecondLife.wmv

Lots of blogs on social networks, and distributed grid game/build environments

Distributed Computing VS Distributed Performance

2006-09-18T14:53:00.001+01:00

Networks are by their nature, failure prone. Whether you are talking about a person in your extended network turning up as requested to a place, or a computer not crashing when you need it, you can't really control the remote points. But you can "influence" it - devote more time to any node and give it incentives such as quick replacement arrangements, money, systems administrator time etc.

In working on the Locating Grid Technologies workshop series' last practical event, we had to take this into account. I envisioned the connections as being a central set of maybe 2-3 nodes that we really checked up on and ensured would be functioning on the day, and then as many other nodes as needed, but with no checks or involvement from us.

In a much larger network we'd have had the chance to test out many more of the fallacies/problems/opportunities of distributed computing, but I'm impressed at how much a social/performance event resembles a generic computer procedure in distributed computing.

A good start for this might be some of the accompanying materials to a recent interview to a data grid enabling technology Jini developer Van Simmons on javaposse.com: http://weblogs.java.net/jag/Fallacies.html our problems mirrored these - and our expectations did in fact mirror the fallacies on that page.

A quick summary:

Latency: we saw this in sound, but probably also video is late in arriving to another node by a few milliseconds. So synchronisation is a known problem.
Uniformity: some AG nodes run inSors, some run AG in various sometimes incompatible flavours.
Partial Failure: Partial Failure could be seen in the case of the Japanese and U.S nodes which didn't make it, and the London node, which very nearly had to be pulled out at the last minute. In organising events for the Orchestra Cube or at other times, you have to know what any performer or group is doing and be in touch habitually to some extent to know they are not going through something which might mean they can't perform on a given date. With distributed, far away performances, you have even less control. On the other hand the "partial" bit is positive: if there is a sudden unavailability of a venue when doing a traditional performance, you can't have much "partial" success other than doing it out on the road!
Concurrency:
Concurrency, on the other hand, or "The illusion that two or more tasks are being performed in parallel" (definition from developer.novell.com/research/devnotes/1999/october/04/02.htm) was what enabled our little experiment, but it's failure is race conditions or deadlock (when more than one person use a single shared resource - like a camera for example, resulting in unpredictable behaviour) and I didn't hear from anyone if what we went through proved this was happening, except in the actual performance, when a great many actions by Mmmmm in the london node didn't actually get put across because they had no technician, and therefore little control of the cameras.
I think concurrency problems did happen though - because as a partial observer of the whole thing ( I only took part in some placing of screens and a couple of comments to the orchestra every so often) - you often had many screens vying for attention at every moment, sounds and visuals everywhere, and around the room, so I had a classic case of information overload. I think we are wired up to handle this to some extent though - and it would be good to experiment more with concurrency in distributed performance.

Another note about concurrency is the idea that 2 people can communicate any one piece of information (which could be for example a new bit of narrative or plot sequence) and they could do it concurrently to aid people's understanding. An interesting example which I read about recently is that in small self sufficient communities (where there is usually a flat heirarchy and decisions are usually made by consensus), little bits of information (who has the keys to what, where is X etc) are known by almost everyone. These redundant bits of information mean the network itself is less prone to errors, and if a person (or node) goes down (on holiday, dies, forgets etc) someone else knows this anyway. A point I've left out of this list is also in the paper mentioned below:

Local versus remote memory access: I left it out because it goes into the problems that happen when programmers access a computer's memory in distributed grids. I can't find a comparison with distibuted events, but I think there is a problem to do with the memories and fragments of understanding of "what we are doing here" with everyone else.

A social construction happening in distributed space is going to be what? This is another experiment that would be really useful to examine by using the AG in performance. For example, inviting people on two occasions, perhaps a year apart, or using existing data and their memories of a real life event, and then doing a live reconstruction of what happened using the AG with Memetic. Another experiment would be to invite people to do an AG based event, but leave out some important details and see how people interpreted what they thought should happen despite this lack of information.

The note on distributed computing is the paper I mention. So in what ways does distributed computing *not* mirror what we found out in devising these workshops?

A good note also is that Jini could be a good technology for building compute grid applications, although the one used by the BBC Weather and I think SETI, could be quicker to write in the short run and is also open source.

It's important in doing research to build either compute grid apps, or AG enabled apps for performance, that we step back from what we're trying to do now (for example, run "distributed improvisation" events to inform the devising process), and really look into the possibilities and nature of distributed computing and into distribution where found in the natural world, and try to use that to allow for possibilities for performance that we've not even concieved of yet.

Airless Sound

2006-09-16T01:21:00.000+01:00

So much has been done already around the AG and we're all just doing the same little things with it to get it to the next level. It's quite clear what it needs:

*Good quality sound
*Streaming Tools - maybe grid enabled annotation devices, or just note pads, but that work across and take full advantage of the medium
*Moving cameras
*DJ-VJing/advanced editing/processing capabilities.
*Tools to deal with latency and compression faults imaginatively.

The interesting thing is that a lot of these problems are solved technically in other video/audio transfer software available already around the web, or in people's studios. What is missing is the link between universities and artists to make things happen. What about a series of funded performances in partnership with willing institutions, in return for some publicity for their meeting rooms?

It's also a great medium for collaborative performance, of the really deep higher art kind - because it allows for intensity and over stimulation, but it's also art that can be incredibly immersive and entertaining, with just the notion that projections can happen anywhere and anything can happen in each one, which has bearing on what happens to you or where you end up next.

PARIP Explorer

2006-08-09T12:07:00.001+01:00

Web applications nowadays do everything you could think of - information-wise at least. You can look up any item of human knowledge and using hypertext trace through all the links to other topics, buy any book, listen to any music or see any films - and see the connections between your tastes and those of others, aggregated into lists and links both to help you and to provide information to others. As well as overlay annotations on geographical maps etc - we're really starting to map all our knowledge, as well as it's links and relationships.

It's obvious then that there is a need for an easy to use, accessible and simple looking general purpose application that allows relationships between concepts etc to be built and displayed by the general public.

Enter PARIP Explorer. It's software that is only and all about relationships between things. At the moment it describes arts researchers, their friends/aquaintances, interviews they've had. Since last week, you can link in to shows artists have done and view clips from them too. But a recent feature request has been to open it out and make it more generic, and work on this is underway by developer Simon Price.

Suppose you wanted to describe a riff, break it down, give it tempo, speed, notes, transcription, notes from the composer, video of it being played - everything could be there if it was needed for a lesson. If you wanted to inspire creativity in the way of an indian raga, you could explain it, tag it, and thus get it to people in a way in which it can be adapted - a high quality sample of the main melody for example - but easy to find and navigate to. This is happening a lot already but the connections don't have a pretty way of being shown. And it doesn't have to be about art related content (it's said a secret of myspace's success has been that it doesn't tell you what it itself is for)!

It needs:

A history mechanism. A parallel RDF file that is tagged with editing times for the rdf. This way you can go back to prior versions - that let you specify dates and enter information about them. Existing semantic web software like Memetic could be used to then display a timeline. This could have zoom capabilities - so that it could describe things with greater or smaller granularity. A sequence of actions, a performance, or a career. Other "dimensions" surely follow, such as languages used to describe things... Nothing new there.

It needs to be rewritten as an online application that allows you to share RDF with other people.

Python and turbogears??? ;)

An option, but an interesting one explained below: make it distributed (a grid application similar to Seti/bbc weather etc) and add a cacheing mechanism to create a mesh network while files are online or in demand.

Maybe it shouldn't be a distributed application - maybe it should be a central database, but that database would have to be maintained by and be dependent on an institution or funder. As a mesh/grid application, using only resources(storage space, processing power, databases) from machines running nodes, and using algorithms from the freenet project we can see how to maintain in demand data. The system is not infallible: an example taking from my experience with art collectives is that there are always one or two people shouldering most responsibility, and true distribution of work/responsibility is rare and difficult to set up. On the other hand, this would also allow for brokerage of disclosure of sensitive information like - for example - personal social networks.

Actually, rdf data could be kept tagged with freenet keys, and could run in combo with that, running then on a local parip server in it's current guise. Running a server makes it's public information accessible to all other nodes. Private information could be for example contact/travel information if you were to visit an organisation. This could also be given via RDF (directly into an application that could interpret it), as well as a quick knowledgemap of the people you were meeting in the company(who knows who, past projects etc), but only to people who were actually authorised. This kind of system, in performance, means we can specify what we want without damaging the critic's view of the information, or that of the audience.

A similar application, perhaps quicker to demo would be to map wiki based info into Parip Explorer. Here are some links that talk about mediawiki(wikipedia's base software) and it's adaptation to support RDF export:

http://www2006.org/programme/files/xhtml/4039/xhtml/fp4039-voelkel.html

http://wiki.ontoworld.org/index.php/Help:RDF_export (This software allows you to set up a new wiki and easily add this info to parip explorer, but getting some of wikipedia's data would be much more impressive!)

2 Needs for UK Sustainable energy infrastructure

2006-07-17T02:05:00.001+01:00

A financing company or quango - needs to allow people and businesses to invest in renewable energy - solar panels, wind turbines, etc but pay it back slowly so as to immediately see any rewards in terms of lower monthly prices etc.
Home energy management infrastructure: So that lots of small renewable energy solutions can be used together seamlessly - all plug into "inverse" plugs for example, which feed energy into the house (or back to the grid, but mostly people won't have the money to invest in something that generates that much energy - only the Camerons of the high income world). Lots of renewable tech charges batteries for example - perhaps this aspect should be seamless: on a windy day more energy would come from a turbine, on rainy days from the hydro, from sunny days from the sky... This shouldn't matter to people. The equivalent of the IBM PC or of USB plugs - if one thing doesn't work, plug in another one and use that...

Problem is, the government might never fund or start this kind of thing on their own! Who will do it?

George, Keith and the Chocolate Factory

2006-05-26T23:04:00.001+01:00

Just back from the Chocolate Box Architects meeting. This step in the campaign consisted of getting two well known architects active in the area to come and give their opinions and expertise. We met with Keith Hallet(who has set up many local wonderful places like the scrapstore/better food company and redcliffe futures - all with a running theme of community involvement) and George, were joined by Jackson and Paul, as well as a lot of the core Chocolate Box people and of course local residents. The architects seemed very capable and very open to the very same community participation, sustainability, and self build ideas, although offering their own improvements to our ideas by saying that the self build could happen within the framework of the existing buildings (thus offering many many more self build plots), and seemed to warm to the idea of a reduced traffic build that favoured bike access or connections with the railway.

I arrived early and got a chance to speak in person to Keith, then George about the leaked planning application plans we all got a look at. It had been put in that day by Persimmon and the building plans were there for us to see. They had a quick look and could make lots of comments on it. They both agreed this was a useless plan, below average, seemingly not worked on since the consensus meeting back in April - except now it had a bit of mixed use, but still complete demolition of all existing buildings and no environmental assessment. Not to say they are useless: Persimmon had bought this smaller company which in turn had bought the option to buy. And this was George's fault! So it's perfectly fine to believe that Persimmon have done this on purpose so as to get rid of the burden or to quickly get it passed through so as to do something else with the site at a later date, or because of the deadline imposed by Elizabeth Shaw.

Let me explain about it being George's fault though - he went once to a party in the fantastic covered streets that form the main three routes though the factory. He thought it was a wonderful place then - with so much very clear potential for a bustling market place, a thriving community area like the Coin St Market in London (where the local people turned the table on plans to build executive apartments and luxury hotels, and to this day are involved in keeping the original feel). George suggested to the owner that they should buy the plot (at the time they had only the long term lease of the land). Now they have done so, but it's a bit of a shame they weren't able to carry on with that idea - not just ecological and architectural, but ultimately this site can make much more money if made through a participatory process with the community than another blank suburbanisation(I made up a word!) of the community landscape. So it's all because of George that Elizabeth Shaw got the factory in the first place. Oh well, can't blame him. Now he wishes he'd stayed quiet so he could just buy it himself I guess... :)

We talked about all sorts of things - including the objection which is legitimate at this point and until Wednesday: EVERYONE - please say this in your letters to Ian White (which I think are better if printed and with signatures, addresses etc, but can be emailed as well - you still have to say where you live) - Say something like this:

My name is xyz, I am a resident of xxxyyyzzz and I am writing to express my objection to the current planning process for the Elizabeth Shaw chocolate factory site. I understand there was a two phase consultation involving one meeting with residents of Carlysle Road, one meeting with some more adjoining streets, where already drafted plans were simply shown vaguely at the few residents who could turn up, and no evidence of actual participation of the huge amount of local residents who have lived and work alongside this huge piece of history we are so lucky as to have in our area. I do not believe this constitutes a consultation.

And if you didn't live on the streets that were flyered in the second "consultation" you could add something like:

"For this reason could it go on record that I was not consulted, and I judge this to be a failure on the part of those involved in planning this development."

We have until Wednesday 31st to send these as emails or whatever. Another template has already made it's way to the easton bristol discussion group. The chocolate factory website has Ian White's email address and I imagine office address - if he gets it on Tuesday it still counts.

The other thing we can do is form a neighbourhood development trust - which can be as anarchic or as authoritarian as it's members want it to be, and would guide and centrally manage the actual planning process which would follow from having got rid of Persimmon(don't quote me on this last bit - I tried to get more details on what the role of the trust would be but although it sounds brilliant I don't really know what it all entails in terms of our involvement). Persimmon probably don't actually want the site, but if they do, George says he can prove very easily that they are not making as much money, or extracting enough value in terms of voters(which might interest people in the city council), and of sustainability and value creation for Bristol. His experience of working with Persimmon is that he would never do it again.

The neighbourhood development trust in Coin St in London comprised 18 families who dropped everything to constitute it and get everything going with the initiative of the neighbours. Community participation. They created a 30 page document with a proposal. I didn't get the details of that but Dave taped the meeting on video... We spoke for the first time also of trying to involve the Muslim community, although we hear the elders are insular and probably won't get involved, the younger generation is a bit more business minded and might want to help sort out the plans so that we consider muslim house building rules for example.

Equilibrium Epiphany

2006-05-14T23:40:00.002+01:00

So came my epiphany. In the realisation that no-one knows when the end will come, and that we are actually in charge of deciding this. Peak oil is just a tiny part of a much larger point which is our having grown to this size in terms of our consumption of resources for the first time in the history of life. As a Buddhist this is significant because it's a turning point for humankind. If we can survive this issue, we will really be making an incredible cause. There is only one way to do this, and it's to finally realise the connectedness, or even just see the logic in not taking the world to the extremes we've taken it. We have already gone too far and it's not going to be easy to get out of this mess.

But there are changes afoot - even Google realise that working with small companies and not seeking to dominate is the business. And one little bit less do we resemble a steaming pile of maggots over a corpse, now lacking the larger millipedes who storm around or the larger ants. And now each of us has to stop and eat a big leaf so our stomachs can stop hurting.

A Study of bus companies operating in rural regions found, in a very innocent manner, that

In addition to conclusions stated in the APTRA paper (Brown & Tyler 2001), to
achieve, maintain and improve ridership and revenue on new community run
local bus services it is recommended that:
a) the service should be set up for a minimum of two years based on full
community consultations concerning frequency, costs, fare structure, funding
and bus stops
b) timetables should be as simple as possible
c) amendments to timetables, routes and fares should be minimal, after full
community participation.

On the other hand
over here, no-where like that amount of money would go into a community run bus service, like the usbus. But really the way to run these things is through public consultation at all levels. Local people are like shareholders of the service and can boycott it, or work with it to improve it so we already have these rights and can make them work for us. It makes me wish I could somehow join a green party as I see that so much of this - like decentralised energy is actually proposed with no idea of the technical and social implications of switching to these systems. How can you go to a government and not include a demonstration of something like this? They need success stories, they need proof that British people can club together if put under stress, that we can create things through our own efforts. This wouldn't be news to anyone I know around Bristol - making the greatest things happen, from an experimental collaborative orchestra to a volunteer-run cinema, to improvised parties in the street to fight for the chocolate factory with decks and reggae and barbeques and children playing football in the street followed by heavier drinking in one of the houses later on. This with people I'd never met before - such a great experience!

We create and are part of and hear of and help in so many community and locally run services, as well as the groups and rooms we might be a part of in the online world - and the thing about them is that they are driven by our interest and the desire to make things happen that are not happening. This is a magic that the government could tap into and run using incentive streams. This would suit Tories or other posh gits on bikes with the executive car behind them. It would make the government smaller and reduce taxes just through not having to pay people more, but just devolving the running of services to community formed organisations. And these could be like small businesses.

It has been said and attempted before, but no one has tried to make a participative state using the telecommunications technology we have, and which is not going away too soon. You can make a computer out of lots of locally sourceable materials, and it could be possible to maintain a highly specialised production of slower computers even without the bits mined in Africa to make them go faster. Ricardo Semler, from Semco in Brazil - the absolutely participative factory which was a success story twice in it's career, recently avoiding the web bubble crash by having chosen not to go down the lane of venture capital funding, which they thought would somehow control them - he has something quite unique - a pedal powered laptop for reading his email. This really forces him not to spend too much time just messing around on a computer.

We should use computers and telecommunications - mesh networks, wifi networks, telegraph poles, text messages - try and get them to run on a minimal infrastructure and set up day to day voting systems to help run the decision making process.

It doesn't have to be on a national level, just even as a subversive alternate decision making process, but a well made one, a believable one. Efficient Anarchy.

Save our Chocolate Factory

2006-04-20T23:56:00.004+01:00

Today the chocolate factory has been the talk of the neighbourhood. Already a yahoo group has been hijacked and is the subject of much discussion at the local volunteer run free wireless non profit, and maybe soon at the cube or even my work.

It's an old ramshackle looking chocolate factory owned by Elizabeth Shaw who used to be called Packer & Co and sell their fancy chocs to marks and sparks. So with the sparks not flying so far anymore, they are closing down.

The chocolate factory used to have 2500 employees, workhouses, a school and even the cemetery used to be a part of the ecosystem that was Greenbank in the last century. It was vital for all the people in the area. And this was a very industrial area, with the gasworks and the chocolate factory, the hawks gym - what was that? Mivart St... the big train station (I wish there had been a picture of the mural on that station - it's incredible). They all stand like giants in our wake. Now the tide is turning and I don't believe cities can stand to be so dependent on other cities, and especially not so dependant on dwindling fuel. In a way, Greenbank and Easton around it could go back to the 19th century in terms of want. It's not sustainable to want what we want these days. But up until the 40s I believe it was. It's not our fault the population grows exponentially. Well, um. make love not war? Oops...

Anyway I'm rambling. The factory is going to be closed down in June I think - oh it would be great to have a wee celebration and some flags to commemorate it. We could get Liz Shaw and pals to come too... Pity Miss Horner can't come.

Naturally, someone has come in and said "Hello everyone, I am going to demolish this old factory and build high density inner city flats which I will sell for the highest prices possible (he he) and then make a quick getaway before the housing market starts slumping again. Of course 30% will probably have to be affordable, or we won't get permission, and maybe we can have some shops or offices. But best of all you can all have sunlight in your back gardens, which will increase the value of your houses - chu-king!" I hear the tills in his eyes already. That someone is Persimmon, the construction company. I could be wrong but I hear they don't employ architects because they always build the same thing!

On our side, however we have Royce - local resident with a shiny yellow motorbike that looks like a hover bike, Sarah is a local VCP - very clever person - a researcher into usability and children's games in fact, who lives a few doors up and organised a meeting last wednesday with our neighbours to begin to oppose the planning. The companies it seems, have seen what has happened next door in Packer's field. They haven't even applied and did a public consultation (yesterday, at the church down the road that looks like it's built out of lego. Only a few original bricks remain. Maybe it was the blitz?).

Then there's Caroline - who I have no catchphrases for except she's really nice and really thinks about her children and wants them to take part in the campaign. They are from a road that little bit closer - where if you walk up the imposing building is just a part of life - and has become part of the family - it's amazing the difference in perspective from street to street. And she, through another neighbour showed me about what seems the best alternative to gentrification:

BedZed!

I'll drink to that!

Such quick growth in a campaign - really in the space of 10 days it's very impressive and further proof of how expensive those gardens should be if we have such good neighbours! But it's got it's teething problems and the first differences of opinion and allegiance are starting to emerge. Still - as long as we don't tell anyone, we can lead from behind and let everyone just be able to express themselves and they will be practicing anarchist management theory of participative organisation without even suspecting it!

Meanwhile I have stupidly volunteered to "do" the website. Fortunately, Beef have volunteered to do the design and hopefully the setup as well. I have to email them in the morning. Tall Paul has offered to get the domain registered, and now all I need to find is easy access hosting somewhere. I'm tempted to run it on sparror and will ask the nest, and bristol wireless too.

On Saturday there is going to be another meeting. I hope part social - that would help defuse things a bit... By then I have to figure out where to put the website (needs easy access so another person could replace me as admin so sparror seems more likely than my work - the ILRT, although the university provides I think 100 meg free space which we could use). Also what needs to be on the website:

It should have a wiki

Apache + PHP probably

Reasonable storage space? I have no idea how much but it could be very little

Hostname - DNS - http://www.saveourchocolatefactory.org.uk/ ? http://www.greenbanksweettooth.org.uk/ whatever we choose.
ok this is a new idea: a video diary. We could store at my work or on the internet archive - and go around recording people's views on the chocolate factory. This could involve said children - and old people etc as they wouldn't have to log in to yahoo before they could take part. Would take a lot of faffing about with video cameras and sending huge files around...
As beef are involved, and they did a brilliant little app involving texting your level of happiness to a google map application that then showed how happy/sad bits of bristol were, I want to get them to do something else with texts - unless of course that bit is too expensive... This would be "txt your views" - people could text and their view would appear on a smaller easton sized google map. This could also go in people's profiles.

Profiles as well - ok this is me getting into social software stuff - as there are differing views that we need to embrace - even those of Persimmon and Elizabeth Shaw, and if it's a wiki that lets you log in for example (it would be cool if you didn't have to register but just said what house you lived in!), it needs to let you give a view. These would be displayed when you logged in, all grouped together like a tag cloud - so that you'd see all the differing opinions, and some would be similar so you could get the gist of them... And if you went to a user profile you'd get their individual ones. A bit like the one on flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/

And we need to get the children making chocolate! My secret dream in all this is that some of the chocolate making can survive - maybe even just a machine that very irregularly spreads cream on chocolates...

Ok that's it for now! Getting into a techie nightmare! I really want to explain what a wiki is properly to Sarah... I'm glad I've got the experience of Cog Coop and the Orchestra Cube behind me with using IT for decentralised organising, I hope we can put this stuff to good measure, but I really hope most of all that we keep having our well deserved chocolate...

Slashdot | IBM to Oracle - You Can't Buy Open Source

2006-04-20T23:56:00.003+01:00

Slashdot | IBM to Oracle - You Can't Buy Open Source

IBM? Oracle? Pffft! You're standing on the sky scrapers and only see the giant peaks that come out over the clouds. What happens when the mountain falls?

So here I am stuck in Peak oil world - that devastating feeling you get after eating too much and realising you just popped your stomach. Oh shit. But it's just a world, and it'll pass, and be replaced soon enough by my peak oil epiphany.

I've known for long and have had glimpses in my dreams. "Daddy - the chickens are sick" - and me, "Stay away from them!". The world where every resource had been taken and was being used to the full amount it could, renewably. So the only way to win over the others would be to destroy a large amount of the land through war or something equally hellish and then run in and invade it.

"We have to go on our annual pilgrimage to feed the Chinese soldiers. We will not have to donate a child this year. They carry chinese blood."

Anyway enough of this nonsense. People are so stupid!