Goodbye, you had to say to every room
When as a child you went out.
Those rooms might not be there when you returned.
Even now, when you’ve been out,
You like to creep back and stare through your windows
As if to catch the rooms by surprise,
To see what they look like in your absence
Or to snatch a glimpse of yourself.
The house a mirror which might make that self seem true.
From Home by Mark Roper.
Published in Whereabouts, transcribed from The Enchanted Way (28/5/05).
Brian Eno on creating the Windows 95 start-up sound:
The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.” The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.” I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags provides a decent overview of the failings of a traditional system of content categorisation when applied to online content, the alternatives provided by user-developed classification, and it’s roots in hyperlinking on the web.
The Library of Congress has something similar in its second-order categorization — “This book is mainly about the Balkans, but it’s also about art, or it’s mainly about art, but it’s also about the Balkans.” Most hierarchical attempts to subdivide the world use some system like this.
Then, in the early 90s, one of the things that Berners-Lee showed us is that you could have a lot of links. You don’t have to have just a few links, you could have a whole lot of links.
…
If you’ve got enough links, you don’t need the hierarchy anymore. There is no shelf. There is no file system. The links alone are enough.
If we produce a work of art that is based on data aqcuired from a locative device such as GPS, Bluetooth or WiFi the fact that it tells a story of some sort, is a given. It’s inherent. To produce the data, the device would have to physically move from point A to B to C etc… the fact that it describes a story is unavoidable.
If I’m made aware of the fact that this is a GPS tracklog, I know that there must be some form of narrative regardless of whether or not I’m actually able to read any of it. This is one of the most important aspects of locative media as an art medium. Regardless of how we choose to present it, it’s always a record of a sequence of events. A story.
On narrative, abstract and location [PDF], P?ll Thayer
A congervence of a number of recent interests has led me to become increasingly keen the idea of a combination of spatial annotation and folksonomic social networks. I really think there are going to be huge developments in this area in the next year, and especially once GPS-enabled cameraphones become available.
There’s already a debate developing in relation to how “geo-annotation/geotagging” will manifest itself, and how users will respond to it. The Institute For The Future predicts that it will be a social act, done for the benfit of others:
Every one of these personal geo-annotations boils down to “I was here” or “You are here”. People will take the time to compose a message and tag that message to a place because they want you to know that they were there, or because they have information that will be relevant to you later when you’re in the same location, or some combination of both.
Peter Merholz disagrees:
Why would you want to annotate space for yourself? For whatever reasons you would use del.icio.us. While del.icio.us thrives as a “social bookmark” site, it depends on the me-ness of the activity — by and large, I’m saving items to del.icio.us that interest me, that I might want to return to later, and the posting-for-others aspect is largely secondary. It’s an added benefit, but not the raison d’etre.
I would say that individuals’ motivation for using a given system could be either of the above. However, the success of previous examples (Flickr, del.icio.us, Audioscrobbler) has been based on both the mining of community data, and the system’s ability to capture individual’s data unobtrusively — satisfying both types of users.