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NewsTo be...continued. UPDATE: I'm afraid the above may have been too subtle a cue for some. As of November 2006, I put v-2 in mothballs. I'm still writing at Speedbird, though, and, with Kevin Slavin, teaching a course called Urban Computing for NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. I'd be honored if you'd have a glance at either. Cheers! To think about later: UUSSIAt the service discovery layer: define a Universal Ubiquitous Service Self-Identification profile, or UUSSI. (Pronounced, naturally, "you see.") Morning in America (?)Oh, good god, how sweet it is to wake up this morning and see what the day has brought us, after six long years of waste and misrule. To invoke Winston Churchill, the felicitous result last night may not be the beginning of the end, but it sure looks like the end of the beginning. I can't imagine that any one thing is going to get very much better any time soon. The Republicans still control the Senate, they still own the judiciary, and they've maintained an astonishing ability to frame the national political debate, even into their weakest hours. The war is, sadly, a given, for the foreseeable future. We failed to get rid of that thrice-becursèd blot on human decency called Joe Lieberman, and he'll wrap himself in a smugness still more lethal for appearing to have his constituents' approval. But maybe we'll see the tide begin to change, with the worst of the judicial candidates sent down to defeat, and the White House curtailed in its ability to make mischief. And would I be too naive to expect one or two investigations with teeth, that some of these felons should end their days in orange? So give each other a hug. This is a great day, for no better reason than that nobody will ever have to utter the words "Senator Santorum" again. I'm off to Oslo tonight, for Atelier Nord and a few surprise appearances. This sure is a wonderful going-away present. Thanks, America. Announcing Urban ComputingI am very, very happy to be able to relate this following piece of news to you: starting the week of 16 January 2007, Kevin Slavin and I will be teaching a class called Urban Computing at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. We see the class as an experiment, and you should too. What we're doing, really, is groping after a sense that we've both had - Kevin in his work with area/code, me during the research I did for Everyware - that some of the most interesting ideas current in interaction design were being worked out at the scale of the city. And if we increasingly understand the urban architectonic as a platform for computation in itself, wouldn't it be natural to explore these ideas at ITP, hopefully extending, informing and enriching its traditional focus on physical computing? We're going to try developing a vocabulary (and maybe even a grammar) of interaction patterns appropriate to this scale of events, and then see how our students permutate them in their projects. All I can say now is that we'll all learn something about these places called cities we live in, and with any luck, we'll have a hell of a lot of fun while doing so. Needless to say, I can't even begin to express my gratitude to Red Burns, Clay Shirky, and everyone else at ITP who did so much to make this happen. I can only hope that Kevin and I manage to reward your faith in us. So we'll see you in class, starting the second week in January, right? ; . ) (If you should happen to be American, BTW, please please please remember to get out and vote today!) Life at the limitSo here I am in grey Toronto, having done nothing more place-specific than repair to a sandwich shop with free wireless around the corner from my hotel. It's a flat and close-in kind of afternoon, I'm not feeling all that social, and there are worse things aplenty than getting some reading and writing done over a few bottles of Stella Artois. I brought two books along with me: Peter Macey's The Lives of Michel Foucault and Canetti's Crowds and Power. (I've been on something of a Foucault kick lately, and the Canetti is something Mr. Slavin and I have both been working our way through in preparation for our course next spring. It makes me want to weep it's so beautiful. You should go buy it right now, and thank me later.) Foucault is notorious for having constructed his experiments with LSD, SM and anonymous bathhouse sex as the conscious pursuit of "limit-experiences," by which he meant (if I understand him correctly) the sacrifice of an ordinarily well-defended sense of self on the altar of extreme sensation. And it's in this context that Carey relates the story of Foucault's near-death one evening in the rue de Vaugirard, at the hands of an speeding driver. Foucault was struck forcefully as he stepped into the street, thrown up onto the hood of the onrushing car with enough violence that his head shattered the windshield. Despite the extensive damage he suffered, his recovery would eventually be all but complete; while he apparently continued to suffer headaches and muscular pain for the remaining years of his life, he evidently regarded the crash as a net positive. According to his biographer, he thought of the intense physical violence he experienced in the moment of impact as a kind of ecstasy, a mode of pleasure, a limit-experience hard to equal. On reading this, I'll admit that I was preparing myself to object pretty strenuously, if only silently and to myself. It sounded just a little too much like caricature, like the would-be provocation of a peculiarly Continental type of eminence so lost in cynicism that all perspective is lost - Stockhausen's celebration of the aesthetics of the collapsing World Trade Center towers comes to mind. But then I remembered two incidents from my own life, and I realized that it was something else entirely. On two occasions in my thirty-eight years on the planet, I have been entirely, viscerally convinced that my death was both imminent and inescapable. (The first was at the age of sixteen, when I lost control of the Mustang I was driving and did a 720 straight into a ditch; the second is related here.) And what I can tell you is that, on both occasions, I felt an intense and unmediated sense of peace and rightness, something oceanic and pure and heartbreakingly simple. Here, at what I had every reason to believe was the very limit of a life I generally consciously experienced as a disappointment, I had somehow broken free into something so far beyond beauty that language doesn't have the tools to convey it. (I'd love to hear, in comments, whether you've had any similar experiences, and if so what their emotional tenor was.) And you know what? I can totally buy the idea that this is what Foucault felt at the moment he was swept off his feet by the force of impact. And I'm sympathetic, surely, to the attempt - once you've known that breakthrough into satori - to recapture or rediscover it by whatever means come to hand, and whether those means involve jumping out of planes or running ultramarathons or hanging in slings in fistfuck clubs ripped to the gills on your own endorphins is irrelevant. What I don't buy is the coupling - and here I can't tell whether it's Macey's or Foucault's own - of the sought-for ego-dissolution to the sensation of bodily violence. The latter, I'd argue, is immaterial, a distraction, the worst sort of red herring. What's crucial is letting go of control. But now we're back in the realm of words, and the poorer for it. What I really wanted to tell you was this: reading about Foucault's rather Ballardian limit-experience was enough to trigger my own recollection, bodily and present, and for a few gorgeous moments every little thing was all right. That's not so bad for a biography...and certainly nothing to be ashamed of for an afternoon in October's gutter. Toronto is goWheels up early early tomorrow for DesignThinkers 2006 in Toronto, where I'll be giving an Everyware talk and doing a discussion thang with Dan Saffer. To be honest, I'm just a little worried about turnout - I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but I'm really puzzled as to why my kind hosts edited the description of the talk the way they did (i.e., in such a way as to remove any reference to its actual topic, ubiquitous computing). I don't know about you, but from where I sit a generic discussion of the "implications of new technology for society, for business, [and] for the way we design" just doesn't sound that compelling. Still...we soldier on, whether there are four or fourteen hundred in the audience. I'm not sure I'll have time for my planned pilgrimage to Jane Jacobs' house, or any of the other local immersion exercises I had in mind, but we'll see. Usual rules apply: come say hi, if you can forgive me in advance for my jetlaggedness and such. On the failure (or impossibility) of mappingLast night I had an appointment to meet some old friends at Freemans for drinks and - as is both my habit in general, and an occupational hazard when getting around town on a conveyance that moves faster than just about anything else in the mired cityscape - I showed up quite a bit early. Having locked up my bike, I found myself with a good fifteen minutes on my hands, an absurdly generous stretch of time in which to stroll up and down the not-particularly-extensive length of Freeman's Alley. I didn't have a book, I didn't happen to have my Moleskine on me, I had nothing close at hand with which to divert my attention, and so I wound up subjecting the space of the alley to the kind of close and sustained inspection I so rarely get to lavish on anything. I saw windows bricked up, apparently against the encroachment of a neighbor building that was no longer in evidence. I saw fronds of razorwire tangled in rusted lengths of now-obsolescent barb, the both moored to a stanchion that had somehow worked or been torn free from anything more solid than the wire itself and which remained hanging stupidly in the void. Above all I saw a thousand ad hoc interventions, each the trace of some occasion on which an electrician or a plumber or a contractor made an off-plan, field-expedient modification in the name of getting things done - the outstanding example of which was a congeries of coiled, small-gauge utility lines staplegunned to the alley's westerly wall, their distal ends disappearing through holes into the buildings beyond. Some of these were still tagged legibly (feed 193 chrystie roof), but most had long gone mute as to their function or purpose. I took all of this in, over the course of a quarter-hour. And then I knew, immediately and in my bones, that any project devoted to the Borgesian attempt to map the built environment at even reasonably high resolution is forever doomed to failure, no matter how many self-reporting locational gizmos we tack onto the world. Time and layered improvisation had rendered this one alley-end baroque almost beyond description, calling into question the practicality of any attempt to represent it schematically. And from there, inevitably, the regress beckoned, as it always does for me, and I suddenly understood the world as nothing more than an enormous aggregation of moments like these. Infrastructure foliates, ramifies. That's what it is, what it does. It has a thousand parents, all of whom work on their own, in effective silence, and none of whose efforts or intentions are fully knowable to anyone else. Infrastructure, as I once insisted to a friend, is a bitch. All the cables, conduits, trunks and buses our planetary girdle of awareness is built from - they may not literally have the power of self-reproduction, but they may as well have, given how far beyond any one agency's knowledge or control they are and continue to grow. You turn around for a moment and it's all changed. How could we possibly hope to map it all? I can't help but think that this is one of those apparent insights which occasionally strike me with the force of epiphany, and yet are completely banal to others. I don't know why a few minutes at the back of one particular New York alley should impress this feeling on me - maybe it's the effect of recent attention to questions of situatedness and underspecification - but I do know that moving forward, I'll be a lot less likely to take seriously any schema of the world which relies on the accurate description or representation of live infrastructure for its force. Keynoted brieflyI am very happy and proud to be able to announce two keynotes I'll be giving in rapid succession next May. First I'll be opening Pervasive 2007, the Fifth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, in Toronto on 14 May, and then hopping on a plane to Paris to kick off XTech the very next day. I hope to see you at one or the other of these events. Come up and say hi - I'll be the guy who looks travel-wrecked. UPDATE: And while we're on the topic of appearances in Europe in the first part of 2007, check out the new LIFT site! Making good on a debtI spent much of my weekend at the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium here in town, and more anent that later. For the moment, though, I want to tell you about the most important thing that came out of the symposium for me personally, which was the chance to catch up with Anne Galloway. For one reason and another, we haven't spoken with in almost a year, and something unexpected and rather upsetting came out of our reconnection: I learned that she had no idea I kick off each and every talk and appearance I make with an open acknowledgment of how much my work owes to the conversations we've had over the years. So let me say it again now, so you can see it, Anne: I owe the very fact of my original interest in ubiquitous computing entirely to you. If you hadn't recommended that I attend Ubicomp '02 in Goteborg, it's very likely indeed that Everyware would not exist, and so very much of what makes the book what it is owes its shape and texture to our discussions and occasional arguments. It's not just that I'm grateful; I receive a great deal of pleasure, too, by being able to so publicly express my gratitude. I've always been very clear about this, and anyone encountering the book (or attending one of my talks) should be, too. When New York matteredSo, at last, at long last, it's really over. Having spent a previous lifetime as a rock critic, I've spent more than my fair share of time at CBGB - not a little of it, actually, in panel vans parked illegally out in front, huddled with musicians sweating through that downtime between load-in and the top of the set list. (Admittedly not the same thing as having been there with Lenin on the sealed train to Petrograd, but not so bad for a twenty-year-old, either.) To be sure, I missed the phase of its existence when it really mattered - the post-Fun City era when Saturday Night Live introduced itself as coming to you "from New York, the most dangerous city in America," and the President famously invited the whole scabrous, rat-infested burg to drop dead. I never saw the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, Talking Heads or Blondie there - except, maybe, as individuals half legend and half never-was, skulking around the joint like they both owned the place and had the decency to feel guilty about it. But nobody could say I haven't had my share of moments. I've dived heedlessly into the arms of a crowd that buoyed me practically back to the bar, screamed myself hoarse, taken more than one Doc Marten to the jaw, made my way by drunken and fumbling touch down to its notoriously lightless and reeking urinals, and once or twice finished up the night by clambering up onto the canted stage with everyone else left in the house to send that one last whoah-oh-oh chorus crashing through the ceiling-mounted speakers. All memories now, of course, and bound to remain such. Because finally, after throes endlessly and needlessly prolonged, it's all over. To be resurrected - maybe, and if so perfectly - as an Attraction on the Vegas Strip. It's just as well, to tell the truth. As any New Yorker will tell you, it's been a decade and a half at least since CB's had any organic connection to a vital and growing subculture of any kind. And its closing merely underlines what we all already know to be true: that the economic and demographic conditions now extant make it very hard to imagine any global-scale wave of cultural innovation ever again coming into being on and spreading outward from this island Manhattan. This is a twentieth-century city, and will be, as far as I can tell, for the foreseeable future. CBGB? A nice long ride - maybe a bit too long, in point of fact, but so good while it lasted. Thanks, Hilly, and thanks to everyone who made it what it was. Even you, Legs. IA or not IA: the overflow threadI don't think we're done discussing this, and Haloscan seems to be choking on comment length or something, so I think I'm gonna start a new thread just so none of what gets said gets lost... |
