Archive for 2012

Prada

2012-12-14_img_4645

Part of a larger project

Department of Unusual Certainties

The Department of Unusual Certainties is a relatively new collective, who have begun a debate series entitled “New Discourses for a Tired Century”. The first (on the future being hopeless) passed me by, but I took the opportunity to attend the second in the series, asking whether our democracy was in crisis.

Held on the second floor of the Gladstone, five people sat around a table, two for a side with a moderator. They didn’t say anything surprising or interesting, which I hope to argue here, is no one’s fault. What I heard was a presentation of usual certainties, which could be summarized thus: people aren’t engaged, people may have shitty jobs which distract them from politics, yet we have a society of outlets, most obviously the internet, which allow us to express ourselves and make our thoughts known.

How I arrived at the summary is not something I could describe, except to say that my snapshotted memories seem to cohere into that narrative. I found the debate to not be a debate, but rather a series of 3 minute statements, of which no real conclusion was reached, and had we been given cards to vote for the winner of the debate (such is done at the Munk series) I do not know how I would have voted. The exercise, it seemed to me, was a way for a generation younger than myself to discuss and present their research reports on the state of our democracy, arriving at conclusions already reached by older people such as myself, and thus presenting “usual certainties”, such as everyone talking about the internet.

I was left feeling that I will live to see the collapse of civilization, only because things have become so fragmented. Democracy for example, is clearly in crisis, and while I appreciated the remarks by its defenders, it seems to me that our current political cohort are so uncultured and contemptuous of the citizenry they have besmirched what had been a valid institution.

In proroguing the Ontario legislature, for example, Dalton McGuinty gave us a Trudeau salute and a cause to question the validity of the House – if it can be shut down for such an extended period of time without any ill effect, what good is it? Further, I wonder if people like Stephen Harper aren’t envious of heavy-handed authoritarian states like China, in that their governing structure’s simplicity allows them to operate a ship of state as such, rather than the herded chickens metaphor Western democracies are subject to.

I envision a century from now, Parliament could effectively be replaced with an app, to use the terminology of our time. Our governing structures are pre-telephone, let alone “INTERNET INTERNET”, and one imagines the practical minded, pre-ironic men of the past would have conferenced called their concerns had the technology been available to them. We instead are beholden to a tradition of physical presence in rooms which increasingly seems absurd.

If I am to be an informed citizen served by journalism, why reduce the fruits of my information to a penciled X every four-to-five years next to a name of someone who I’ve probably never met outside of the campaign, asking this stranger to “represent” me? I am currently lucky in that my representatives at the municipal, provincial, and federal level do tend to voice things that I agree with. However, we all don’t always vote for the winner, and it should be stated everyday that the governing Conservative party formed their majority on less than the majority of the vote. This is a stupid and insulting situation, which is further infuriating given we have the infrastructure to replace this model … if 114,000 people can ‘like’ a Kim Kardashian photo on Instagram, for god’s sake why can’t we all be using this technology to direct our representatives on how to vote, or better yet, directly vote on proposed legislation ourselves?

Stefan Wehrmeyer, a German software developer and activist who wants the government to do a better job of opening up its data, has downloaded the German federal government’s complete laws and regulations and posted them to GitHub. That’s the popular website that lets users track changes to documents — typically software — and make their own modifications.

The point, Wehrmeyer says, is to make it easy for German voters to track changes to the laws — and to also give lawmakers a vision of the future. (Wired, 9 Aug 2012)

I was left feeling that I would see the collapse of civilization because instead of actively working to use social networking infrastructure for collective decision making, I see another generation going over media talking points, given voice by virtue of their degrees. We the audience, passively watch as usual certainties are given “unusual” presentation because we’ve all been enculturated into this model of sit-down-shut-up-and-listen. I want to say that model is currently only valid for theatre: tv, movies, plays … yes, please shut up and watch. But not ideas.

I used to go to lectures regularly, and perhaps it was an historical moment: between 2000-2010, lectures seemed theatrical, and were even made into a TV show – TVO’s Big Ideas. Last week, TVO announced Big Ideas had been canceled, thus marking the end of the historicity. I’m painting with a broad brush here and ignoring for the moment the long history of the “presentation” as a form of theatre (like the Mark Twain & Dickens tours) in order to suggest that a moment had its time and passed. I think the model of being “educated” from a stage needs to be done away with, and replaced with community conversations.

I end this with a congratulations to the Department of Unusual Certainties in providing a forum, and a reason for people like me to give voice to these thoughts. I found the evening valuable and worthwhile, a reminder that tedious things are not necessarily bad things … in other words, not everything needs to be amazing to be of value. I would like to see them move into the type of participatory conversation that has been achieved by theater folk in this city, to not render the audience of interested minds a passive witness to thesis defense by PHD students.

Democracy is in crisis because we are beholden to traditions that ignore our new realities. Debate formats such as what I witnessed are an example of such a tradition.

New Mexico Drivers Licence 1998

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Sam Beckett’s New Mexico Driver’s Licence, issued in 1995, as imagined in the 1993 series finale of Quantum Leap.

An image of hope

Harry Mulisch, Discovery of Heaven (1992/eng.trans 1997):

In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what – apart from the eternal innocence of animals – offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer, or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pieta: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap. No, the image of hope is someone passing with a musical instrument case. It is not contributing to oppression, or to liberation either, but to something that continues below the surface … (p.56)

Pints in 1844

Tumblr tells me this is the earliest known photograph of men drinking beer. (Edinburgh Ale, 1844, by Hill & Adamson).

Chrome History

In order to poke my brain to remember a site I figured out how to hack my Chrome History, and learned that Webkit doesn’t use Unixtime. Rather, it uses a timestamp of microseconds since 1 Jan 1601.

Thus to convert from Webkit Format to a generic Unixtime, divide by a million to get seconds, then subtract the number of seconds between 1 Jan 1970 and 1 Jan 1601 (11644473600).

In order to retrieve your Chrome history for analysis within a spreadsheet, (and if you’re using OS X) do the following:

1) Copy `History` file located at

USER/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/History

to working location, then:

2) open using SQLLite Browser,
3) export table in question to CSV (in my case, `urls`)
4) open in Excel or Numbers
5) create column next to datetime you want to work with
(`last_visit_time`)
6) apply this formula referencing the column in question
=(CELL/1000000-11644473600)/60/60/24+”1 jan 1970″
7) …and set the column to ‘Custom’ = yyyy-mm-dd h:mm

Useful links:
Decoding Google Chrome Timestamps
Converting Unix Timestamps
Webkit Time

Update June 29 2013: Reader Darlyn Perez wrote me to offer his Python script to convert a Webkit timestamp into a regular timestamp. As he says, “It basically does the same thing as the spreadsheet formula in your post.”


#!usr/bin/python

#Converts a Webkit timestamp (microseconds since Jan 1 1601) from keyboard input into a human-readable timestamp.
#Script by Darlyn Perez on 2013-06-29

import datetime
def date_from_webkit(webkit_timestamp):
    epoch_start = datetime.datetime(1601,1,1)
    delta = datetime.timedelta(microseconds=int(webkit_timestamp))
    print epoch_start + delta

inTime = int(raw_input('Enter a Webkit timestamp to convert:'))
date_from_webkit(inTime)

Pussy Riot FTW

I haven’t been that interested in the Pussy Riot trial, except to say going to jail has made their protest far more successful than it would have been if they’d been ignored. We’ve gotten used to ‘radicals’ doing something offensive and disappearing, but these girls performed a song, pissed off people enough to get arrested, forced Western journalists to compare their story to Soviet show trials, and ignited sympathetic protests around the world. When they get out of jail in two years they’ll be free-speech darlings and will probably have a widely successful global tour. If the point of their action was to highlight that Russia is intolerant of protest, then this whole story exemplifies that wonderfully.

However, Russia doesn’t care that Western people under the age of 40 who Tweet think this is outrageous. Reuters reports:

Valentina Ivanova, 60, a retired doctor, said outside the courtroom: “What they did showed disrespect towards everything, and towards believers first of all.”

A poll of Russians released by the independent Levada research group showed only 6 percent sympathized with the women and 51 percent found nothing good about them or felt irritation or hostility. The rest could not say or were indifferent.

Our Generation has no Chomsky?

I tend to think that our generation does in fact have such thinkers, only they’ve been hampered by structures designed to celebrate such already “brand name” established figures. Also, this generation’s thinkers are less likely to go through an academic publishing route, given the opportunities for self-publishing today.

The Mechanism

Hints of “the Mechanism” in Alaistair Reynold’s Blue Remembered Earth appear until it actually becomes a plot element, where we learn precisely what it is. Essentially, by 2162, people have been enhanced, and interact with the data cloud via retinal implants and augmented reality. There is a major political system called the United Aquatic Nations, where people live in under-ocean cities, swim a lot, and where some have even undergone surgeries to make them into living mermaids. These people still use buttons and screens, as we do, but it seems this is mostly a necessity of their lifestyle choice.

Because of the constant, internalized connection, people generate a massive amount of data which needs to be indexed (via posterity engines), while it is also being monitored. The Mechanism is the set of algorithms which constantly monitor the data stream, and intervene if signals indicate a certain action is underway, or about to be. When Geoffrey, a main character, gets so angry we wants to hit someone, the Mechanism recognizes this and strikes him with an instant debilitating headache. (p.283) The incident is logged, and he is then scheduled for a visit by a risk-assessment team to determine the seriousness of the matter.

It is known as The Surveilled World.

•
I recall being a child, going through a Catholic education, and realizing that according to the teaching, God could hear my thoughts. I felt exposed, my privacy violated, and embarrassed. Was there no respite from scrutiny?

Twenty-five years later, I visited the Cloisters, the reconstructed (and frankensteined) medieval complex in New York. Throughout we see little heads gazing down from sculpted elements – these essentially are the medieval version of our black domed cameras, a reminder to the monks of eight-hundred years ago that they were constantly being watched, by a security apparatus of angels.

It seems then, that we have some social need to construct surrogate parental oversight. That a society without watchers – a secularized society that doesn’t believe in spiritual spies and one without CCTV cameras (essentially the Western world for about a hundred and fifty years) cannot exist without engendering existential angst (as seemingly happened).

Speaking of the social upheavals of the mid 21st Century, the character Eunice describes its development:

The warming was global, but Africa was one of the first places to really feel the impact of the changing weather patterns. The depopulation programmes, the forced migrations … we were in the absolute vanguard of all that. In some respects, it was the moment the Surveilled World drew its first hesitant breath. We saw the best and worst of what we were capable of Geoffrey. The devils in us, and our better angels. The devils, mostly. Out of that time of crisis grew the global surveillance network, this invisible, omniscient god that never tires of watching over us, never tires of keeping us from doing harm to one another. Oh, it had been there in pieces before that, but this was the first time we devolved absolute authority to the Mechanism. And you know what? It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to us. We’re all living in a totalitarian state, but for the most part it’s a benign, kindly dictatorship. It allows us to do most things except suffer accidents and commit crimes. (p.150)

The quote continues:

“And now the surveilled world doesn’t even end at the edge of space. It’s a notion, a mode of existence, spreading out into the solar system at the same rate as the human expansion front. But these are still the early days. A century, what’s that? Do you think the effects of the 5.9 kilo year event only took a hundred years to be felt? These things play out over much longer timescales than that. Nearly 6000 years of one type of complex, highly organized society. Now a modal shift to something other. Complexity squared, or cubed. Where will we be in a thousand years, or six thousand?”

This is worth quoting in full since it hints at Alastair Reynold’s larger project: Blue Remembered Earth is merely the first novel of a planned trilogy, reported to span into the far future. I imagine the next book will take place centuries ahead, and be part of the answer to this speculation.

The referred to 5.9 kilo year event was a period of intense desertification occurring circa 3900 BCE which triggered worldwide migration to river valleys, from which emerged the first complex city-states. The character is suggesting that present climate-change is a similar event, which will drive us into new ways of living. In the book, one of these new ways is that of globalized surveillance, complete with a thought-control mechanism.

However, there is an area on the Moon that exists outside the Surveilled World, and Geoffry visits his sister Sunday there early on. They strolled through a market while Sunday explained social theories regarding crime as a necessity for innovation and social health. The chapter ends with Geoffrey reaching into his pocket for his hat, and finding it missing …

The hat, it began to dawn on him, had been stolen. The feeling of being a victim of crime was as novel and thrilling as being stopped in the street and kissed by a beautiful stranger. Things like that just didn’t happen back home. (p65)

The Mech then, is an interesting possibility about where we might be headed. The consequences of it are that, by 2162, there are no police forces and no jails. In the novel a news item is mentioned in passing about the demolition of the planet’s last jail, a facility in Mexico.

Bike Baskets

The author Elah Feder interviewed me about this at the Parkdale Tim Hortons two weeks ago.

“It’s people being lazy. They’re making their problem of having to throw something away, into my problem,” said Timothy Comeau, who’s gotten pretty frustrated with the coffee cups and other scraps of garbage he keeps finding in his rear-mounted milk crate. “I just find it really insulting.”

Book Trailers

Last week, the Cloud Atlas trailer was released and it has reportedly driven up sales of the book on Amazon.

It’s an interesting effect, given that books have begun to have trailers produced by their publishing houses.

Neil Stephenson’s 2009 Anathem had a trailer…

…as did my latest favorite book (of which I’ve been writing about lately), Alastair Reynolds’ Blue Remembered Earth:

While B.R.E.’s‘ helped me understand what the book entailed, I was convinced by the Amazon Kindle’s sample chapter.

(For that matter, I bought Cloud Atlas at the end of December when I saw the concept art on io9.com, and got hooked by the sample chapter as well).

I have no information with regard to the trailers produced by the publishing houses having any impact. However, if they wanted to produce 6 minute masterpieces like the Cloud Atlas trailer (a distillation of imagery from a reported near 3-hour movie) then the form would come into its own.

This unintended effect generated by the Cloud Atlas trailer may convince them to do just that.

I love the idea of the mini-film being constructed out of choice scenes, of the quality that suggests an excerpt from a larger cinematic work.

Kind of like Franceso Vezzoli’s 2005 art-video, Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula


(Gotta love the Gladiator soundtrack. Also, how has this been on YouTube for two years?)

Engines • This is Already Happening 2

I tweeted this last week, but I should note it here:

Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Google are Search Engines.

Wikipeadia is a Find Engine

I wrote something on Posterity Engines.

Today, all the talk is about “Search” and databases are being built up on ‘search behavior’. Google has a zeitgeist listing that tells us what people have been lookig for, and one result of this database is its prediction algorithm, which guesses what you might be searching for, or tells you what other keywords match a search phrase.

If the conversation shifted to ‘finding’, what then? We have Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia, and all the other websites in the world. Google’s dominance began with the quality of their ‘finds’ – the websites they suggested best matched your search.

If we shifted to analyzing ‘find behavior’, we would begin to build up a database of what sites we’re being accessed most often … and yes, this is already happening, and essentially drives Google’s algorithms. The site at the top is most likely to be the one you’ll want because others have chosen it as well.

Essentially, I find the use of the word ‘engine’ to name these processes of indexing databases curious, and found it especially interesting when coupled with the word ‘posterity’. It began to make me think about the data we are creating, and how it might be archived, accessed, and named. We are currently living under a ‘search’ paradigm but the future will inevitably complicate this, until ‘search’ will no longer be an adequate word.

Posterity Engines • This is Already Happening 1

One of the more interesting reconceptualizations I’ve come across lately is that of a “posterity engine” which is in Alastair Reynolds’ latest novel, Blue Remembered Earth. I have the Kindle edition which allows me some quick and easy textual analysis; the term appears four times thus:

1. “Across a life’s worth of captured responses, data gathered by posterity engines, there would be ample instances of conversational situations similar to this one…”

2. “…[it was out there somewhere in her] documented life – either in the public record or captured in some private recording snared by the family’s posterity engines.”

3.”It doesn’t know anything that isn’t in our archives, anything that wasn’t caught by the posterity engines…”

4. “He was old enough not to have a past fixed in place by the Mech, or posterity engines…”

The context of these sentences imply something not much more complicated than a contemporary search engine. The novel is set in 2162, that is 150 years from the present & publication date (2012).

The phrasing, “captured”, “snared”, “caught” speaks of today’s search engine crawl – crawling across a site, building up a database of links, content and keywords. At some point in our future, our terrabytes will be warehoused and crawled by personal search engines that will be indexed for our future uses – that is for posterity.

This is already happening. We just don’t label these processes with ‘posterity’. Our Apple computers are already running Spotlight crawls that index our local storage, and Time Machine is snapshotting our hardrives. Windows has an equivalent Start Menu search bar.

Imagine than the contemporary as laughably quaint, and imagine five future generations worth of personal petabytes stored somewhere (a central core server per home?) that requires contemporary Google-grade search to make useful.

I’m reminded of the fact that when Google began in 1998, its storage capacity was 350 GB. An off-the shelf MacBook Pro could have run Google in the late 1990s.

The Dark Knight Rises

I saw the The Dark Knight as a Monday matinee during our August long weekend in 2008. By that time, it had been out for two weeks and had already generated a lot of buzz. It seemed everyone was talking about and praising its greatness. I did not go as a fanboy of Christopher Nolan nor of Batman, but to merely catch up, and see the sequel to Batman Begins, which I learned about late during its 2005 theatrical run and almost missed.

I liked Nolan’s Inception, and seeing that movie cemented into my mind the idea that I like his films – tone, atmosphere, cinematography. However, was that atmosphere in The Dark Knight Rises? I know in the future I’ll have this film on my system and I’ll put it on as working wallpaper … or will I? Did it have that slow-burn quality against a rich backdrop and wonderful Hans Zimmer soundtrack? Yes, the Zimmer soundtrack delivered, and yes Bane was menacing, but I feel (at this point) that the only part of the film that lived up the hype was the prologue, which had been shown in December, and which made my jaw drop the first time I saw it as a blurry pirated internet clip.

Even though a lot was familar from the trailers etc, I went in with questions about the uprising, which were straightforward: a gang of thugs, the release of prisoners, the cops held hostage.

The whole “city under seige for five months” plot at the end didn’t work, as it was unbeliveable. I think in post-9/11 it would have been a lot more panicked, and the coercion of getting the military to guard the one bridge off the island would never have worked.

I did find Catwoman’s motivations interesting: she wants software that can erase her from all the world’s databases. “Collated, analysed, what we do sticks”. This concern of her seems slightly ahead of the time but only by a week or two. That’s a plot line that will make more sense as time goes on when this movie is just another file in a database we can download with our cloud accounts.

All & all, it seems too soon to judge TDKR. As a stand-alone, it’s weak. However, in the future when we can play the series back-to-back on our own time, when a teenager can spend three nights watching the movies on their tablet before bed, then its failings and successes will be clarified. Perhaps its tone has nuances that we can’t pick up yet, but that will become obvious later.

New Design

Beginning in November of last year (2011) I began to experiment with responsive design on a new blog site – the ultimate goal of which was to move my blog from timothycomeau.com/blog (where it had been for years) to it’s own dedicated url: timothycomeau.info.

Over the course of the winter (and while I was studying Web Design at Sheridan) I hacked away at it using it as a playground to try new ideas and further my understanding of WordPress, and especially Responsive Design.

Unfortunately, by the time I came to graduate, I was caught with a mangled site which was only half-developed for what I’d then intended: not only have it as a blog, but also an archive of my previous web content. The archive part wasn’t done, and unresolved.

At about the same time, I began to look into the sites on Themeforest.net, and in order to learn more about how they were built and functioned, bought one, which I put on the site in May. I was asking myself questions: how does this theme work and, does my content stand up to its design?

However, I soon grew frustrated with the implementation. That theme was designed for portfolios mostly, and I wanted the site to function as a blog primarily. It was evident that it should be scrapped.

About a month ago, I hacked together a very simple theme for my localhost WordPress Journal. As a Journal, the end that needed to be served was reading and so design wise it needed to emphasize and encourage that.

Essentially, I ported that design over into this one. I wanted something as simple & clean as words on a page. With the basic structure in place, I think I’ve reached a final version.

A human heart (2006-2091)

Any Human Heart: the story of a 20th century man, published in 2002, written in the late 1990s, and with the fictional lifespan of 1906-1991.

A Human Heart: the story of a 21st Century man, published in 2102, written in the late 2090s, and with a fictional lifespan of 2006-2091. What story then awaits today’s 6 year old?

Prometheus

Since I saw the first trailer at Christmas I’ve been looking forward to this day: then, the December early evening darkness, the loss of leaves, the cold weather. The trailer came to us as a Christmas gift, along with a trailer for Batman: The Dark Knight Rises (July 20) and The Hobbit (December). Then at the end of February, the first viral video, the TED talk, followed by the Weyland website(s) and more viral videos, of David and of Elizabeth Shaw. Now, finally, the movie is in North American theaters, having opened a week ago in the UK.

I saw it today in IMAX 3D and I was thankful that I had, being rewarded with glorious landscape shots for the first part of the film, and then the glorious space shots as we see the ship shrunken against the backdrop of both interstellar space and alien cloud. It lands in a clearing, facing a series of mounds, which contain the sculpted head we’ve seen throughout. The science team investigates, runs into problems, everyone dies, but in the end Shaw and the head of David the Robot survive, and take off in one of the other alien ships (associated with the other mounds) heading to the stars and presumably the Engineer’s home world.

Some s-f movies (and tv shows) can be dignifying: you leave their world feeling infused by the narrative of a mythology, a feeling undoubtedly behind the ancient myths. Sometimes, stories can animate the imagination in such a way as to give a sense of meaning and purpose. I recognize this as real, but also a trick – an illusion (or, a mental illusion, a delusion) that has something to do with how our brains are wired. Just as certain patterns can trick our visual sense, certain narrative patterns can trick our ‘meaning sense’. All of religious history is probably a side effect of such games. Now, we play these tricks for entertainment, using them for movies and television shows.

So it isn’t so much pretense as actuality when the films makers talk of creating a new ‘myth’. Prometheus the 2012 film is a new myth, taking for its name an old myth, and taking for its back story a successful monster film (set within a 20th Century space-age context) directed by Riddley Scott 33 years ago. Who were the ‘space jockies’ of that film? We now know they were Engineers, who seeded Earth through sacrifice millennia ago (or at least it is implied, as that scene is not dated). The Engineers play with genetic technology: our sacrificer drinks a concoction that causes him to disintegrate, in the process converting his cellular structure into a virus, or merely genetic fragments: he falls into the primordial waters and thus the human DNA matrix has been introduced, to emerge out of mammalian primates later on.

The story of the ancient astronaut is compelling, I’ll admit. Four years ago I attended a Charles Darwin exhibition at the ROM, and was struck at the end by the display of skulls. Even though I’d studied physical anthropology in university, and even though I was familiar with the scientific narrative, to see all the skulls together made an impression that something is missing in the genenomic treeline. One can see how Homo Erectus is a form of Homo Neanderthalensis, all have a similar shape, similar brow-ridge, all are evidently part of a evolutionary story. But the outlier is the gracile Homo Sapiens Sapiens, all smooth boned, high forwarded, small chined. Perhaps something did intervene to make the brow ridges disappear, to make us more graceful.

Prometheus leaves the story open for a sequel: presumably in the next movie Shaw finds the Engineer’s home world and some more story elements are revealed, and the third movie will probably be an alien invasion flick set on Earth, post post … perhaps the Engineers are the reason Earth is destroyed by the end of Alien3

I didn’t feel dignified leaving the theater, but rather diminished. My humanity cheapened, the delusion only playing the depressing trick of making our Creators seem malevolent. Perhaps the overall implication is that we’re some kind of livestock to incubate the biological weapon of the xenomorphs.

(In reality, the story will probably turn out that sapient life evolved out of the dinosaurs and colonized parts of the solar system either before 65 million years ago, or during a time between (human beings comparatively have a 2 million year timeline, so there’s room in history for this), and the so called Greys are of the oceans of Europa, and for some reason had fiddled with our genome in the past -has has been suggested by The X-Files tv show of the 1990s, whose last episode told that the aliens were coming back on Dec 21 2012. In fact, Prometheus seems to owe much to The X-Files, in as much as both use a life-force of “Black Oil”).

Prometheus is also a generational parable: Vickers wants her father (Weyland) to die so that she can take over (Vickers being his daughter was pointless otherwise), but this model is also that of the whole: the children of the gods (humanity) want their parents (The Engineers) to die so that we … can take over the universe? And here an echo of the Promethean 1.0 myth: the God P give man technology and his fellow Gods are angry and inflict their famous punishment, because they know that with that technology man will one day challenge them for supremacy.

This tale echoes in a summer of student protest in Montreal.

Websites of the 2080s

On June 8th, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus will premiere in North America before going on to exist as a download or digital file encoded on a disc. Since February there has existed an online marketing campaign consisting of videos and websites, which have prompted me to consider this daily technology as it is now, and how it could be by the time the movie is set, some eighty years from now (reportedly 2093).

By that time we will have resolved a lot of technical issues. Formats will be even more standardized, maybe resembling something like magazines and how templated they are.

Also, I imagine that some other technology will have subsumed the html/css/javascript trinity that is currently behind all sophisticated websites.

HTML is merely a collection of bracketed tags inserted into text files. Barring the development of quantum computers, or quantum/classical hybrids (which Kim Stanley Robinson calls ‘qubes’ in his latest novel, 2312), text files will remain what they are today. HTML as a collection of tags need not necessarily go away … when I began implementing my Journal as a localhost WordPress database, I did so with the understanding that my Journal as a collection of Word .docs was likely to be unreadable in 20 years, whereas HTML was probably future proof.

CSS is another form of text file, but it is already giving was to LESS/SASS as an interface to writing it.

Javascript has exploded as a programing language – I remember when people used to write “… incase people have JavaScript turned off” … and why would they have it turned off? Early on there were security issues. This all seems to be ancient history and Javascript has become a necessity, making websites seem like something belonging to a computer. (That is, an interactive publication rather than a digitized magazine). Javascript has advanced so much in the past five years that Flash is definitely on its way out as a web-interface medium.

The idea of something replacing HTML/CSS/Javascript in ten years (2022) is unrealistic. However, by 2022, we may (as we are now seeing with LESS or SASS) have the hints of something else, with working groups considering the re-invention of the technical language of the Cloud.

By 2042 then, we may have something else. Browsers will still be able to read a webpage from our era by piping the text files through a deprecated renderer, or some form of built in emulator (something like what OS X began using with the introduction of Roseta).

In the past month, I’ve dived into exploring WordPress themes and understanding the possibilities offered by WordPress as a CMS. I’ve used it as a blogging platform for five years, but only in the past six months have I begun to understand its use and potential to drive contemporary websites. The technical sophistication offered by off-the-shelf themes I found frankly stunning, and it is this model I foresee going forward. However, it is this very complicated collection (the WordPress backend remains a mess) that I imagine will be stripped down and simplified, so that by the 2080s, the database to text-file interface will be streamlined that there will be nothing complicated about it.

All of this inter-relation could be integrated into one backend coding interface, and we’ll have something like this eventually.

What is this new form of spam?

Both today and I week ago I got these strange emails from women with M & J initials which seem to come from ambitious young writers. Je ne comprends pas.

I suspect it’s some new kind of bot, & perhaps these emails are an intelligence test? AKA let’s see how many people we can fool into responding.

(I admit that I responded a week ago).

Hypercard April 1997

I recently completed the Web Design Program at Sheridan College, and on the night of our grad show remembered the Hypercard project I did as part of “Introduction to Computers” at NSCAD back in the spring of 1997. Given that Hypercard was in many way a precursor to the web, I wanted to revisit this project as a document of my proto-web work.

I recall doing this very last minute, and at the time I was listening to a lot of Beethoven, so the project was a quick walk through complete with a sound sample of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony taken from the cassette I removed from my Walkman.

The teacher gave me an A.

I recovered this project on 15 May 2012 using a USB diskette reader and the BasiliskII Mac emulator.The cards are presented in a looping sequence:

1) Ludwig van
2) The Skull
3) The Hand
4) The Ear
5) Deafness
6) [back to Ludwig Van and Play his 5th]

Grayscale

  • 000000
  • 010101
  • 020202
  • 030303
  • 040404
  • 050505
  • 060606
  • 070707
  • 080808
  • 090909
  • 101010
  • 111111
  • 121212
  • 131313
  • 141414
  • 151515
  • 161616
  • 171717
  • 181818
  • 191919
  • 202020
  • 212121
  • #2e3137

On Black

<div style="width: 200px; height: 200px; position: relative; z-index: 1; background: black; clear: both;"></div>

<div style="width: 100px; height: 100px; position: absolute; z-index: 2; background-color: #00fff0; margin-top:50px; margin-left:50px;"></div>

Medium Specificity

Lucian Freud was reported to have called Leonardo da Vinci a terrible painter, which on the face of it seems old man’s contrarian fun. But it’s not inexplicable.

In Da Vinci’s time, paintings were moving away from Mediaeval stylization toward what we’d consider ‘hand made photographs’. Artists of the time wanted to depict retinal reality, and Da Vinci was the master at this.

Vasari wrote that one could almost perceive the pulse in Mona Lisa‘s neck, an effect which really isn’t unbelievable. In the Leonardo Live broadcast I saw this past week, La Belle Ferroniere appeared to breath, which I attribute to Leonardo’s sufmato, where the softness of the edges echo the effects I once observed in a Rothko – because the edges have no definable boundary, an optical illusion of movement is created, so the Rothko seemed to pulse, and the Da Vinci portrait seems to breath.

Lucian Freud on the other hand, was a master of medium specificity, the modernist mantra promoted by Clement Greenberg in the mid 20th Century. His critique of Da Vinci was precisely from this point of view: Leonardo sucks at painting because his paintings don’t look like paintings. For Leonardo and his contemporaries, this was a success. For the standards of the late 20th Century, it is a failure.

For me, the best example of the medium specificity ethos can be found in Charles Dicken’s 1854 novel, Hard Times:

‘Would you paper a room with representations of horses?’ [asks the government bureaucrat addressing Mr Gradgrind’s school]. “I’ll explain to you why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality – in fact? Of course no.

Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t have in fact. What is called Taste, is only another name for Fact.

This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery.

You are to be in all things regulated and governed by fact. We hope to have, before too long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of Fact, and nothing but fact. You must disregard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object or use of ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk up flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to wall upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented on walls. You must use, for these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are suspceptile of proof and demonstration. This is a new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.”

This mid-19th Century anti-imagery disposition is in fact an echo of the ancient prohibition against images that is found in The Bible. That prohibition reasserted itself during the Iconoclastic years during the Catholic and Protestant split, and is also found within the tenants of Islam, from which this official’s prescription may be a parody: in banning representation, Islamic arts developed geometric pattern to a degree we find astonishing.

A century after Dickens’ words were written, it had become the dominant aesthetic ethos. Art historians tend to bring photography into the explanation, since photography was superior and easier to accomplish than a Da Vincian masterpiece. Painting was left to explore its possibilities as a coloured viscous media.

By our early 21st Century, we’ve left aside concerns that painting need to do anything except be a painting. Young people continue to take up brushes because painting is an interesting and fun thing to do, and occasionally wonderful things result.

1854

As noted, Dickens’ novel was published in the mid-1850s. This was a time when photography was just beginning, and the dominant aesthetic movements were Academic Classicism and Romanticism. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were active, who formed themselves around the idea that art before Raphael (aka Da Vinci) was superior to the work that came after him (the imitation of Michelangelo known as Mannerism).

Realism, as an art movement, was also happening during this time, and 1854 was the year Courbet painted his famous Bonjour Mons. Courbet. Realism, as described by Wikipedia:

attempt[ed] to depict subjects as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation and “in accordance with secular, empirical rules.” As such, the approach inherently implies a belief that such reality is ontologically independent of man’s conceptual schemes, linguistic practices and beliefs, and thus can be known (or knowable) to the artist, who can in turn represent this ‘reality’ faithfully. As Ian Watt states, modern realism “begins from the position that truth can be discovered by the individual through the senses” and as such “it has its origins in Descartes and Locke, and received its first full formulation by Thomas Reid in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 had put on display a variety of consumerist products made by machines. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and the writings of Ruskin who championed them, the Arts & Crafts Movement began in the 1860s, led by William Morris. From The Arts and Crafts Wikipedia page:

The Arts and Crafts style was partly a reaction against the style of many of the items shown in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which were ornate, artificial and ignored the qualities of the materials used. The art historian Nikolaus Pevsner has said that exhibits in the Great Exhibition showed “ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface” and “vulgarity in detail”.[25] Design reform began with the organizers of the Exhibition itself, Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877) and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888). Jones, for example, declared that “Ornament … must be secondary to the thing decorated”, that there must be “fitness in the ornament to the thing ornamented”, and that wallpapers and carpets must not have any patterns “suggestive of anything but a level or plain”. These ideas were adopted by William Morris. Where a fabric or wallpaper in the Great Exhibition might be decorated with a natural motif made to look as real as possible, a Morris & Co. wallpaper, like the Artichoke design illustrated (right), would use a flat and simplified natural motif. In order to express the beauty of craft, some products were deliberately left slightly unfinished, resulting in a certain rustic and robust effect.

In 1908, Adolf Loos published his (in)famous essay ‘Ornament and Crime‘ (trans to Eng: 1913), which argued that ornament was a waste of energy, in addition to applying racist and moralistic interpretations (equating the tattoos of the South Pacific natives with primitive barbarism). As Wikipedia notes, this essay is an historical marker as a reaction to ornamental style of Art Nouveau:

In this essay, he explored the idea that the progress of culture is associated with the deletion of ornament from everyday objects, and that it was therefore a crime to force craftsmen or builders to waste their time on ornamentation that served to hasten the time when an object would become obsolete. Perhaps surprisingly, Loos’s own architectural work is often elaborately decorated. The visual distinction is not between complicated and simple, but between “organic” and superfluous decoration. He prefigures the Brutalist movement that spreads from the 1950s to the mid 1970s.
(Wikipedia: Adolf Loos)

This post was edited on 3 Nov 2013 for clarity

Impressive

I can’t believe somebody did this.

From a Tumblr. Work credited to Aubrey Longley-Cook.

Applying timeless page design principles to the web

This morning I found Alex Charchar’s page on ‘the secret canon & page harmony’ as presented in the past by Jan Tschichold.

Using the Van de Graaf Canon, one divides the a page spread thus:

This is based on a 2:3 ratio page size. However, the spread makes the overall ratio 4:3.

Not coincidently, our monitor resolutions are based on a 4:3 ratio:

1024 = 4(256) = 1024
768 = 3(256) = 768

1280 = 4(320)= 1280
960 = 3(320) = 960

We can apply the Van de Graaf Canon to a 1024 x 768 webpage like this:

As Tschichold showed, the circle is indicative that height of the resulting textblock is equal to the width of the page, or in our case, ½ of the page (1024/2 = 512).

Tischold’s summarized Van De Graaf’s geometric method as the simplest way to create the outlines that were also used by medieval scribes, which all result in a text-block that fits within a 9 x 9 grid.

(animatd gif from Alex Charchar’s article)

Essentially, we can determine the size and position of a content block by taking any page size and dividing it up into a 9×9 grid.

A book spread which divides both pages into 9 columns results in a grid of 18 columns and 9 rows: however, our 18 rows can be condensed into a 9 x 9 without loss of effect. (Eighteen columns merely subdivides the otherwise 9 into halves).

The content block sits 1 column in, two columns above the bottom, and 1 column from the top.

Responsive Web Design

All of this would create a wonderful guideline for laying out the basics of a webpage were this still 2005 and 1024×768 had become the ne-plu-ultra after years of 800×600 CRT monitor resolution settings. Today (early 2012), a webpage needs to resolve on a variety of screens, from iPhones to giant monitors.

In order to have responsive content, it helps to code elements as percentages rather than specific pixels.

Our 1024 x 768 example creates a content block with an 87px top margin, a 166px bottom margin, and side margins of 112. The content box itself measures 800x 512 (the height is equal to half: 1024/2 = 512).

Coding anything in pixels though is unreliable since browser windows are never consistently sized across machines, and padding creates effects which makes pixel precision difficult.

What is needed is to achieve this 9×9 grid with percentages, so that this proportion can be rendered across resolutions.

In order to determine this, I coded a 9 row and 9 column table with a div overalyed using z-index. I fiddled with the css’ size and margin until I got something that matched the constraints.

The result is:

#container {
margin-left: 11%;
margin-right:11%;
height:67%;
width:78%;
margin-top:11%;
}

The page looks like this:

Demo

Hello Mammal Lovers!

This Friday (February 10) at the Drake Lab (1140 Queen St. West), in coordination with our current residency, “Open Cheese Office Grilled Songwriting Sandwich,” we’ll be cooking, hosting and celebrating the FOURTH annual Timothy Comeau Award, and you are invited! Swing by at 7pm or after to eat, be merry and find out who the winner is this year! Bring yourself, your friends, your drinks, your musical instruments, and the rest (an abundance of decadent cheese-variation sandwiches) will be provided.

The Timothy Comeau Award was created to recognize individuals who have shown exceptional support, interest and love for Mammalian. Recipients of the Timothy Comeau Award have been participants in many of our activities and have also offered insights, analysis and criticism. These are people without whom our events and existence would feel incomplete.

The 2010 winner of the Timothy Comeau Award was Sanjay Ratnan. Sanjay has been hanging out with MDR and participating in Mammalian events since he was a fetus. He continues to contribute his talents, ideas and super-star personality to Mammalian as a member of The Torontonians.

The 2009 winner of the Timothy Comeau Award was Kathleen Smith. Kathleen is not only a super Mammalian supporter, but thanks to her three nominations, MDR won the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Arts for Youth Award in 2009, a $15,000 cash prize!

The 2008 winner of the inaugural Timothy Comeau Award was Timothy Comeau. Timothy is a writer and cultural worker who has a couple of blogs including (curation.ca). He has been a constant supporter of the company, writing about our work, showing up to our events, goofing around and generating the kind of vibe that is essential to us. A Mammalian event without Timothy is a Mammalian event that’s happening on another continent.

Who will it be this year?!!

Hope to see you Friday!

MAMMALIAN DIVING REFLEX
Centre for Social Innovation

Emblems by Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci’s emblems are 16th Century logos. The Royal Collection in London has two pages of drawings, one consisting of the sketch, and the other consisting of the three sketches compiled onto one page, in a finished state. They date from between 1506-1510, during Leonardo’s second Milanese period.

The sketch page is of interest due to the large profile to the right of the sketches. It occurred to me in looking at this that perhaps the profile was there as a source of inspiration. We see the curl of the boy’s hair reflected in the curl of the ribbon, for example, and my thought is that Da Vinci was trying to create an emblem/logo using forms inspired by the face.

His logos then can be broken down into the abstraction of the face: a circle or an ovoid encloses shapes arranged symmetrically which signify an identity. Da Vinci’s face is in profile, while his emblems ‘face’ us directly … so perhaps my idea would seem more cogent if his boy was looking directly at us.

The images are screencaptures from the Royal Library collection online.

The Sketches

The Finished Drawings.

Emblem 1

Emblem 2

Emblem 3

The Profile

No need to flaunt it

The truly superior human doesn’t need to flaunt it, tell people about it, or write about it seeking validation.

That’s a line from a short story* I read a couple of years ago, and I think of it whenever I see some tat’d up hipster flaunting how “unique” and “creative” they are. Paradoxically, I find “boring” way more interesting these days.

* Marc Carlson’s The Immortality Blues

Hmmmm

Interesting that in 2011, a “lost” Leonardo da Vinci painting is “found” and that in 2012, a “lost” work of Johannes Brahms shows up.

Star Trek nerds will get this.