chrisblunt.com

Bit of a shake up to the grand design of my dissertation after yesterday’s meeting. The more I think about the ideas I’ve been having, the more they become dangerously close to a simple exploration of digital identity/social software.

Trying to break away from the technology-bias and introduce a critical/cultural understanding of a subject is the hardest part of defining my dissertation.

However, thanks to a lot of reading and some interesting websites, I’m beginning to find contrasting points of view for the case of social- and spatial-technology.

The lecture (below) got me thinking that maybe my spaceman should transfer to a spaceplace; maybe the explosion of coffee-houses such as Starbucks. Often used as a business example (certainly by business students I know…!) for perfectly managing to sell the experience; today’s coffee-culture demonstrates with powerful effect the implosion of habitus and representative space to form a new context of space.

How does this affect the travels of my spaceman? Via the unseen world, he can travel to these spaces to meet friends, chat with them maybe even show them what he sees (picture, video messages, etc.) His existence through the virtual connection in a sense enables him to visually exist - to be perceived by others in that space as ‘there’ - in the space. Video-telephony (3G mobile) has seen to that.

So while he does, in the traditional sence, not inhabit the physical space, his existence is felt by those who may be, and thus he is exerting some effect on the existence of that space. His effect on the space may not be perceived by the naked eye, but in the eye of the mind (those whom he has connected with), he has forever altered the representation of space.

Today I had my first project meeting with Chris Speed. The discussion went well and Chris has given me some good direction to build a well-formed critical argument.

As well as direction, the meeting also gave me the opportunity to throw some initial project product ideas at Chris. While the ideas are currently fairly dry implementations of the techno-cultural change I would like to develop, suggestions that emerged during the meeting are helping me to form some new ideas for the project.

I’ll now spend some time mapping the various elements of my project’s critical theory and present a final map online within the next couple of weeks.

As a crash course into electroacoustic composition, I’m rapidly trying to get to grips with Max/MSP and it’s open source off-spring, PureData. For the first assignment (to build a soundscape around a short movie clip), I’ll be using Max/MSP and Jitter to compose a generative soundtrack.

To get to grips with the Max environment, I’m playing with basic functions such as luminosity histograms and (bad) synth sounds. From this I hope to emerge a more refined generative soundtrack to the movie clip.

In an interesting post, Tom Coates identifies an apparent shift between two emergent paradigms that have occured in online tagging.

Some people, says Coates, use tagging as a form of folder-style grouping, allowing data entities to be grouped as they would group files in a folder. Tags, used in this way, remove the need for a literal file-folder hierarchy:

It was just that now an object could exist comfortably in a number of folders so you didn’t have to enforce an arbitrary heirarchy on your filing…

The second paradigm is that of Flickr, whereby everyone is encouraged to tag everyone’s data. As well as this social, collaborative tagging, Flickr seems to highlight a growing tendency towards descriptive tagging (singular, such as ‘blog’ or adjective such as ‘cool’) rather than classificational tagging (plural, such as ‘blogs’ or ‘ideas’).

Coates evidences this with statistic from his weblog, which shows a trend towards descriptive tagging by users of his site.

Quite a cool and informative post. People have also published some interesting comments and identified some other work that’s going on in this area.