Live from from the top of a power shift, see now the leader of the old nation meeting the leader of new nation on video. Could someone please start a discourse analysis here, apart from the fact that it looks a lot like ChatRoulette?
- TV camera angle vs. webcam
- “really excited about it” vs. 6 x “you guys”
- sending to vs. gratefully receiving
- make-up vs. “what the hell do I care how I look like”-authenticity
What else?
It is important to dance on top of the world from time to time, and we planned on going that night. Now in London this is not so easy. Like for example Fabric might be a club with an amazing soundsystem, but lacks the creative roughness of a Berlin club. Yes, I know I am spoiled from living there fore too long. But Fabric is a professional entertainment stage there to produce your clinical entertainment event, and events don’t like to be staged, the less in a clinical environment. Events like to catch you off guard to take action, connect with a crowd, and deny to follow a plan. Here goes the Saturday night, good bye top of the world, was what I was thinking.
Moderat – Rusty Nails (Shackleton Remix) by Nialler9
Suddenly the sound became thick, dense, and dark making its way across the whole range of the soundsystem. Soon its complexity, the one that made us dance, curated the crowd, sorted it out until only those who know moved across the dancefloor to the straight dubstep, here and there broken by a soundwall that gave way to new fragments of the musical structure, cut by a sharp twisted snare or accompanied by poetry.
This music tried to break the conventional structure of electronic music, the loop. A bit like the tracks of James Blake, it seemed to be composed in a new style, its fragments diffunding, playing with each other, interacting, behaving more like a tag cloud. The elements of the live set were not shifting in the foreground and background like usually in electronic music. It was engineered in a different way. New. We were standing in the music, dancing, making way, moving through an annoying, complex, beautiful, aggressive and pure sound. The soundtrack of the 21st century.
Sometimes In Autumn (Shackleton Remix) by ishmo kayor
When Shackleton finished playing his two hour live set, the crowd applauded very long, then left immidiatly. On our way home through the morning light, I finally understood what had happened, when A. said the words to describe what was going on: “I am shocked.”, she said. We were, and still exchanging comments full of joy on the next day. Oh, music.
It has been a day. In fact, yesterday’s Guardian Activate Summit was inspiring, and not only because Alan Rusbridger engaged the grey haired, nice, shrewd koala lookalike Schmidt in a scintillating discussion. After asking Schmidt a question, I felt exited like a small girl on her first day of school. Finally allowed to talk to real adults. Yay!
This sounds a bit embarrassing, but there is a good reason for this: Today, business corporations like Google and not academic institutions manage our knowledge. As knowledge is power, this will affect the structure of our society. We already know that the internet disrupts business. Up next? Politics. Exiting, eh?
When I was hanging around at the canal with the lovely witty programmers of the Guardian having Pimm’s and eating strawberries instead of dinner, we resumed what was said, but it was much later till I understood that the way technology is shaping knowledge at the moment is far more fundamental.
Alan Rusbridger is testing Google Goggles on Eric Schmidt
So let us quickly get through what Eric Schmidt actually said to concentrate on what he said by saying it.
For him mobile, cloud and network are shaping our future; Steve Jobs is a “friend”, “this might shock you”, but he is explicitly opposed to Apple’s closed version of the net; Google is sorry for the wifi-scandal, takes privacy serious, and there is a need for regulation; obviously there are plans for a Facebook-like “Google Me”, because Schmidt said (please follow me into the twisted logic of journalism) he wouldn’t announce a “possible future product” here or on Twitter, so with not denying its existence: “it sounds like yes,” as Alan Rusbridger concluded.
When we were talking about what’s next at the end of a highly inspiring day, there was suddenly this glimpse of a more fundamental shift. The internet will not be the “disruption” that everybody agrees upon by now. You wish! It will be a fundamental eruption of society. I am sure that Heidegger, if still alive, would immediately despise the word “disruption” argueing that it blocks our view.
Let me collect the bits and pieces of that day: The journey started with data.gov.uk, and Nigel Shadboldt presenting his fascinating project. He and the dad of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, are currently making the UK data accessible to the public. By now, people have developed apps for it, so you can find the next dentist or pharmacy, compare care homes, or get a panic attack over the density of minor incidents with the iPhone asborometer, as it helps you to learn about the anti social behaviour orders (asbo) in your neighborhood. Data.gov.uk and the US version presented by Beth Noveck, however, deal with an interesting challenge: Opening data to the public makes it accessible, but not available.
Let’s take this with us to the next chapter of my day. During lunch I had an interesting conversation with my former boss of MediaGuardian, Steve Busfield, about databases, statistics and journalism. Personally, I believe that there is a new journalism to evolve, journalism that is data driven, and will be published as apps and not as texts.
The Guardian is already doing that on the fantastic Datablog with good help of the lovely data visualisations of Information is beautiful. Steve and me brainstormed what that might mean for journalism, and I predicted that apps vs. text might be the next war after print vs. online. Funnily enough our little chat was simultaneously echoed by a tweet of the Guardians’ info architect Martin Belam. Sometimes things are all coming together for you to get it. Thank you things.
When I came home the things were still excited, not only because I had to prepare a radio feature on Eric Schmidt’s talk for the next morning. I went through my notes and the twitter feed, and when I came across a tweet of my colleague Tim Bradshaw of the Financial Times, it hit me. As some of you might know, Google allows their employees to work on a project of their own one day a week, and Tim tweeted Schmidt’s answer on what he is doing in his 20% time:
Let me repeat that for you: “Tech is about to upend the way governments work.” Well. We already know that the internet is an effective tool for governments. With the Obama campaign we have seen that the internet can efficiently help politicians to organise people, connect them, and keep them up to date. It might be time to think about: designing crowds. ?
But upend how governments work? I admit, there is something going on, a database revolution happening at our fingertips. There is not only a debate on how power point interferes with politics and influences military strategies. As more and more data is open, gets uploaded and connected, designing statistics and building apps became in a certain way a political act. Surely the interface between the people and the politicians is about to change. But technology is political in itself. It will change, but not upend governments.
How democratic is crowd sourcing really? What were we asking for, and what is it we better don’t want to know? Can it ever be just “the algorithm”? And when do we get enough response, when are we only hearing the loud voices?
Winston Churchill said once “the only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself”, and now the statistics get democratised. However, today you don’t even need to falsify anything, you simply make some data visible, while you let other figures sink deep down to the bottom of the information overload.
These are just some thoughts, fairly rough. But why this is so important to me: I think we need to start a debate on how technology is disrupting politics. Organising statistics and publishing knowledge is a political act. Knowledge is more power than ever. And journalism needs to find a new role in here.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
“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
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.
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
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