Monthly Archive for June, 2010

The Friday Night Parties – Wolfgang Tillmans v Efdemin

I am going to split myself in halves today. One part of me will enjoy Wolfgang Tillmans’ order of things in his new show at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The Guardian’s art critic Adrian Searle found a wonderful way to describe Wolfgang’s bewildering orchestra of sujets, and later on we will dance the night away to have a bit of a midsummer party – this a picture that Wolfgang took in the morning last year. Could be Berlin, eh?

This is where my other half will go: In the early morning, the walls of the Berlin Panoramabar of Berghain will shout for joy to the sound of “Chicago“. It will be quite a night. Efdemin celebrates his record release party, and it is a breathtaking album. Sound art you want to dance to, basically, as Efdemin imports the detailed treatment of beats we know from the likes of Photek and transfers it to modulate the sound of techno. This is taking house to a new, abstract, complex, and ecstatic level. If you listen to Night Train, you can already see it all: the hands up in the air, the chary morning light, the people filled with joy in Panoramabar.

One day in a not so far away future, biotechnology will take us to another level. Then I will split myself in two halves like a double helix, and I will say to myself: Tonight, we are going to have fun.

Find his beautiful video of “Chicago” further down here, or get an idea of what I am talking about by looking at the unofficial version of Wonderland that someone uploaded on YouTube.

25/06/10
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Open data? Fine. But available isn’t accessible

Technology has become ubiquitous, a potential our society is rather ignoring at the moment. Think about it.

We spend most of our work day in front of a screen, some of our friends never stop to Twitter, most of them check their emails on their blackberry even when drunk, and now we grab the iPad on the weekend in our leisure time. But what does it really mean for our societies to be surrounded by this new digital technology? What chances lie there in being surrounded by computers? This is a question, we barely think about. Not good. At the moment, we can see some serious potential we are about to miss.

Conrad Wolfram pointed out some of them at the inspiring Computational Knowledge Summit in London as to know in the future will be a mix of knowledge and computation. “High power computation is now available for everyone”, he said. “We need to understand what that really means for life and knowledge and expertise. In the past high power computation had to be done by experts. What do we really need to learn, how has that changed?”

He was delivering the very important context to WolframAlpha, a knowledge engine that gives an idea about to where this thing with digitalisation could be taken. It is an approach to make available knowledge also accessible. Because what does open government data really mean today?

We all welcome that governments publish their data, but it is not enough to open a box. We have to take the data out. “Available doesn’t always equal democratised”, Conrad Wolfram said. A very true sentence.

In a world of information overload, available isn’t accessible anymore.

So how can we unlock the knowledge assets of digitalisation? One answer might be to re-think our publishing strategy. As Conrad Wolfram said, we should think about publish in applications, and not in publications. Here, designing a good interface is more important than ever to set a technical potential free. Think of the iPhone: The technology of the iPhone was there before Apple came to unlock it. It was curating and design, who brought smartphones to the masses and made the computer truly a mobile little thing.

Today, to develop and design an application is not anymore just a business. Shouldn’t we start to see it as a political contribution?

11/06/10
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Is truth beyond knowledge? Can’t we mount knowledge to become truth? Isn’t knowledge to become something beautiful, while truth is something beautiful that goes away to stay forever and be reached again? #beyond

11/06/10
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Here computes everybody! The computational knowledge engine WolframAlpha announces plans to reach out to the user

The presentation of search results in a list is utterly outdated. Barely has any format survived the disruptive dynamic of the internet that long, and when it comes to Stephen Wolfram of WolframAlpha, it will not survive that much longer.

Yesterday, and about a year after he launched WolframAlpha to change search engines from delivering links to real answers, he announced the next steps. To built up momentum, his project introduces a new strategy: Easy to use, just do it yourself.

To reach out to the user, WolframAlpha plans to introduce three innovations: Firstly, the user will soon be able to upload own data that the computational knowledge engine WolframAlpha will then analyze; furthermore WolframAlpha makes it possible for users to create their own answer-widgets on the fly to embed them on their own sites, and finally WolframResearch will take visualization further so that everyone can embed a 3D model player to get lost in 3D rendering. Yes, WolframAlpha takes the user-centered approach.

Build your own little Wolfram

Indeed, WolframAlpha fights a problem that is similar to the one Twitter has: While it is highly respected among geeks, the average user doesn’t get it. Giving the user the chance to built its own widget shall change that, that’s the first step of the plan.

At the Computational Knowledge Summit in London yesterday, Stephen Wolfram shows a demo of the next steps. “In less than a minute you can soon deploy a piece of computation”, he says and starts right away.

For creating a little widget on the fly, he uses a new command “create a new template”. He then quickly types in the query “distance between San Francisco and London”, and presses “test this query”. Automatically the next step “use this query to create a template” comes up. He decides to make it more random, and switches within the template both cities, San Francisco and London, to “any city”, and presents an html-code to embed. The Wolfram widget is ready.

“With WolframAlpha we are trying to deliver something that you can build sort of the fly. Now we take this mass customized piece of creativity further”, Stephen Wolfram said.

To download from or upload your own computational data to WolframAlpha, for example. Answers to queries like the statistics of the search for “BP vs Exxon” or country statistics delivered from “how many sheep in the UK” – will soon become downloadable for the user in formats which are easy to compute further. Also, the user can soon upload his own data and run it through a WolframAlpha analysis.

“We also plan a big version of what we’ve been doing for larger organisations and companies, where we take a WolframAlpha customer version that operates internal data”, he said. “The intention is that these things will be widely available.”

Can data visualization become iPhone easy?

Finally, he talks about a third novelty WolframResearch is planning, a Mathematica player that could be embedded on webpages to take the visualization of data further. The computational software program Mathematica that Stephen Wolfram also lies at the heart of WolframAlpha and is used for a lot of computing.

Soon, a browser plugin can turn a 3D model to an interactive experience, and every user can play around with a random variable, able to see the results immediately. “It’s still up in the air”, Stephen Wolfram says, “but it will be free to download and free to use for non-commercial publishers, with the intention to make it widely available.”

Will Wolfram’s vision become reality? With Mathematica he showed that he is capable of building something big in the world of science and finance and everywhere else where number crunching is important, but to take WoframAlpha to the masses depends on a whole range of factors.

For sure, computational knowledge like WolframAlpha is an option to watch, the more if it becomes iPhone easy to use.

10/06/10
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Gliding along the surface of things


Efdemin’s subtle approach of electronic music always raised deep carefully to a new level, as does his new album Chicago. For “There will be singing” he collaborated with the Berlin based multimedia and design agency Jutojo to produce a truly beautiful video. In a rather quiet way the camera is gliding, now exploring the texture of old pictures, now moving along the Chicago skyline, zooming into a window, and moving back to the texture. Made my morning.

8/06/10
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What does knowledge do to search engines?

7/06/10
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“Under digitalization more generally, there is a widespread tendency for all objects, processes and qualities to become transduced by data-gathering, patterning and identification. Take a virus, this little darling is known by virtue of an electron microscope to be so cute and cuddly and roundishly polygonal with just enough weird fuzzy bits and clotted fraying edges to make it amenable to love.

It looks like another planet. One you could escape to, off earth, find death.”

Poetic theory zombie moment byMatthew Fuller, Digitality and objects

6/06/10
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Let’s have a fashion problem

My glasses are a problem. They are incredibly last season. Remember, last season glasses had to have a big frame, a bit ovally. When I bought my Reiz glasses in Berlin, I had a lucky moment. Albeit in Germany everyone thought where does this owl come from, here in London I got several compliments. Anyhow, basically in Germany no one except my best friend regards glasses as a real part of fashion, and Mr Joswig always likes to look.

So this is what happened. Surfing iPad like through the internet without an iPad, I came across this shooting in the wonderful NYTimes magazine.

The glasses immediately caught my eye, and from that moment on the shape frequently stood out, perfect for the are-we-behaving-like-lemmings-and-me-too-studies I like so much. They were out on the street, all over the “No soul for sale” exhibition at Tate Modern, in the bus on my way to work, and in my favorite pub, Prince George. Actually, the best friend was already wearing them last April at a Soundcloud picnic, now suddenly you saw them everywhere. They were fashion. Mine were not.


The best friend, Picture by Yuna Yagi by Misscreativeclass

My glasses are incredibly last season, I said to Mr. Plugimi, with whom I usually discover culture here in London, albeit globalisation will beam him soon away to Pasadena. Yes, but they are nice, he said. Nice? Very well. At least he didn’t say sweet.

I must admit that from that moment on I was wearing my contact lenses more often, until a small blood vessel exploded in one of my eyes, and made me look like a Zombie which I don’t mind. Last season glasses it was then again, all over. And since yesterday, I am okay with that.

I learned to solve the fashion problem, and this is the trick: Sit back, move along as an undercover owl for a while, and wait till the trend becomes big, then say you don’t want to be part of the masses. A bit cheap, but works.

Really. When I enjoyed the warm summer evening in front of the Hotel opening yesterday, I spotted them everywhere. Five, six, seven people were wearing the round glasses. Now, we all know that there is a fine line between hip and trying to be hip, and nowhere is this line thinner than in East London. If you try to be hip here, sorry, you’re out.

My friend Ned Beauman, who’s debut novel Boxer, Beetle we are still waiting for, while the Germans among you can already buy and enjoy “Flieg, Hitler flieg!” (nice FAZ critique!), explained recently to me how hard it is sometimes for these East London Hipsters as several items are only hip for about a week before every other hipster has them.

To solve a fashion problem, simply use that dilemma, and surf it. As here in London everything except the underground on the weekend likes to move pretty fast, – poof! – your last season stuff is always definitely more fashion than the this season things that everybody is wearing. Thanks to the hipsters, at least now my fashion problem, the last season glasses, is gone. I am proud to be a classic owl now, and with a bit of a blood vessel in the eye no one can beat you anyhow.

5/06/10
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Yay, it’s terrible!


Laughing out loud. Edgar Wright, the British film maker who already impressed with the nice, bloody, smart Shaun of the Dead (or is it just because I like Zombies so much?) has his next movie coming up, and I already like how this archetypical story copy-cut-pastes itself somewhere else, makes use of a world full of technology, and clings on to absurd twists, links and hints. Let’s see if the trailer can keep its promise when the movie comes out in August. Oh, and let me tell you one thing: Except the haircuts, it is not getting better when you’re older. #lookslikewearedoomedtobeteensforever

4/06/10
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