Back in June of last year, I made the following draft post entitled “Yearnotes 2011”:

At 6.30 on the evening of Monday the 30th of May, on the beach at Whitstable, I ate an oyster.

We cycled there from London. It was a good day. Many of them were.

I’m a little late for the usual yearnotes, which would be far too verbose in any case, but let it be said that 2011 was brilliant, and 2012 is going to be awesome, because bigger numbers are always better, right?

For a quick survey of 2012, see my portfolio and speaking schedule (2011 was the year of talking a lot, 2012 looks to be not dissimilar, but with more things.)

A few highlights from 2011: Publishing Experiences at TOC in New York, Seven Posts about the Future, social reading, Robot Flâneur, Where the F**k Was I?, Rorschmap, The New Value of Text, Everything is the same only different at the Internet Archive, the whole New Aesthetic thing, particularly Waving At The Machines in Sydney, Hard Times (For Our Times)… and so much else.

Onwards: I’m currently working with Storythings, Readmill, Artangel and a couple of others on upcoming and ongoing projects, which you’ll hopefully hear about soon. I’m also looking to do more teaching this year, following workshops at the RCA in London and AHO in Norway.

As ever, I’m interested in talking to anyone about work, teaching positions, speaking and collaborations: please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

… and the first big project of the year to go live is of course Bus-Tops:

I’ve written about Bus-Tops before, but that was back in October 2010, and it’s hard to believe we’re actually (almost) there. A Cultural Olympiad project for 2012, we’re installing large screens on the top of bus stops around London, to be seen from the top of double-deckers.

20 screens are now live across London, with another 10 being installed as I write. Also being tuned up is the final website, which will allow the public to submit their own work—still images and animations—to appear on the screens. At the moment, they’re showing Mark Titchner‘s “31 Day Programme”, with an excellent list of artists’ commissions planned for the next nine months. It’s all very exciting.

A belated Happy New Year, and here’s to 2012.

The work is based on Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times, originally subtitled For These Times. It consists of 50 identical-looking paperback books, where every text is different. The transformations are stylistic, algorithmic, and literary.

Some copies appear with distorted and pixelated text, or with pages missing or transposed. Some copies have been robo-translated into other languages: I cannot speak to their accuracy. One copy has been translated into another language and back into English, to produce word salad (Yes, there is a lolcat version). In some the words have been changed: a building enlarged here, a dress changes colour, a character lives or dies. Sometimes, whole chapters have been rewritten to alter the outcome, or move the action to another town, another country. Sometimes a word, sometimes more. Each one different.

If that sounds familiar, it is of course the logical conclusion of The Author of Everything.

I wrote that story having visited India, and thinking about the new house of wisdom. And then Andrea Francke of the Piracy Project showed me her copies of books from Peru, where local copies appear on the market before the “official” international editions, and pirates rewrite popular novels to their own tastes. Of course, it is happening already.

True “publishing” is now within the reach of everyone, from international conglomerates to independents, from pirates to private individuals. The book is no longer a sacrosanct object: it is subject to the whims of any reader who wishes to change it for themselves. Engagement with culture has fully switched from active author and passive reader to a shared creation of the text, where every interaction is a recreation and reimagining. (In fact, this has always been the case; as ever, technology mostly reveals what has been hidden in human affairs, rather than prompting entirely new behaviours.)

Hard Times is a satire on the Utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, who held that a totally rationalised society would result in the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Dickens, who based Coketown, the fictional locale of Hard Times, on the mills of Manchester and Preston, believed that this rationalisation, the rationalisation of Thomas Gradgrind, who believed in Facts over Fancy, would result in greater misery, more work and less imagination. Hard Times is always For These Times.

After The Bit Rush is concerned with Post-Digital Design, the notion that “whether something is analogue or digital does not matter anymore. Everything we do is influenced by digital technology. Just as air and water, the property of being digital is only noticed when it is not there, not when it is there.”

For Our Times is the least apparently digital work in the exhibition; it bears no marks that set it aside from traditionally produced books, nothing to show that it is not what it presumes to be. Only by comparing each edition, sometimes at a word-by-word level, are the differences apparent. I’m sure many visitors are not even aware that the bare shelf of books is even part of the exhibition. My favourite thing: several copies have already been stolen from the gallery. They will inevitably re-enter the food chain at some point, becoming someone’s Hard Times.

And that’s OK: one of the things I learned in attempting to produce 50 interesting variants on the text is that it is very, very hard. Whatever is done to the text, it is virtually impossible to extinguish Dickens’ intention without extinguishing the whole work (as in the case of the copies which read simply “Fancy fancy fancy fancy…” or “Facts facts facts…” for 300-odd pages). The text stands; it is greater than paper.

I’m very grateful to Angelique Spaninks at Mu, and to Claire and Dries, for letting me try this one out.

More photos at Flickr.

I’d always intended to talk about The New Aesthetic, but up until about the day before I didn’t really know how. The original title of the talk was “The Robot-Readable World”, but this didn’t really sit right with me; it’s one aspect of NA, for sure, but there was something else I wanted to emphasise: the human aspects and emotions of NA, and the becoming-human of the machines.

So the talk became “Waving at the machines”, a 50-minute, 120-slide vector through the idea, an idea that still seems massive and nebulous, but which it is possible to fire a laser through and illuminate some motes. I’m not sure I managed to phrase the camouflage stuff quite right, and the need for an ending always feels like a cop-out, but nevertheless, I cover many of the bases. (Web Directions have also transcribed the entire talk, should you be so crazy as to attempt to read it.)

For those of you who haven’t come across the New Aesthetic before, it began here, it continues here, I’ve been interviewed about it here, and here are a few responses.

The adventure continues; Kevin Slavin, Aaron Straup Cope, Ben Terrett, Joanne McNeil, and myself will be interrogating the concept at SXSW next year, and no doubt it will be covered elsewhere before then.

Huge thanks to everyone at Web Directions, particularly to Maxine Sherrin for all her help and patience, to Hunting With Pixels for the video, and to everyone who attended.

Now & Next is a glanceable for BBC Radio. It tells you what’s on the main BBC (Analogue and Digital) Radio Channels now and next, in the style of the old Ceefax page: frankly one of the best pieces of information design ever.

It fits really well on the iPad and on the Kindle, as all good quiet glanceables should do.

Sitting quietly on my kitchen table, it has already changed my radio behaviour: instead of sticking one channel on and leaving it for hours, I surf—but intelligently, discovering things I actually want to hear. Adding pictures to the radio: but just a single, little, useful one.

(I was inspired to actually write this post and release N&N by Dan W writing up Arrivals, which is lovely and you should check out too. His quote, “the hardest part of designing a glanceable is restraint” is key here.)

In the talk, I built on the last post here, on the new value of text. In particular, I focussed on the three values I identified: Velocity, Breadth and Depth.

I introduced the talk by defining my area of interest: the long form text. This is not to say that other things are not interesting, but this is what I talk about when I talk about books: long and some shorter-form texts, novels, some non-fiction.

And so when I talk about “books”, I don’t mean ‘ebooks’ or ‘bound books’ or any division thereof: I’m talking about something written down and transmitted. When we talk about how we feel about and interact with music now we don’t have to specify whether it’s MP3 or vinyl in most contexts. That’s not really what the discussion is about.

The reason this needs to be clear is because when we ask what is different about digital books, what we are asking is what existing qualities of the book digital enhances.

And this is why I am suspicious of many of the more obvious “enhancements” to books, of fiddling with their form or content, of adding extraneous media, images and movies and sound, because we’ve been able to do that for quite a while, and it hasn’t done much for the book. It quite clearly hasn’t captured the imagination like the traditional text has. Whether it’s multimedia CD-ROMs or interactive hypertext fictions—and while there are plenty of good examples of those—the authored text is still our central, best evolved and most respected cultural object. What are needed are not enhancements, but augmentations.

I defined velocity in terms of time-to-market (Penguin Specials and Brain Shots’ Summer of Unrest) and responsiveness (Amazon’s introduction of Kindle Singles and the increased use of analytics within the book).

Breadth consists of the ongoing value of editorial standards in the digital world. Books have always existed in context: to one another, to their shelfmates in the library or the bookstore, in the world at large. Indexes, footnotes, introductions and editorial curation have been used to make these links clear. Yet it is these we are losing in the switch to digital, as publishers race to the bottom to produce ever cheaper editions, and with that a range of formatting and proofing problems arise, further damaging the reputation of the book. These can be resolved instead of increased through digital, through better workflows, linked content and more openness to feedback.

Finally, depth is what is brought to the experience of books by sharing not the books themselves, but our experience of them. This is social reading. As part of BiB I also gave a brief introduction to Open Bookmarks and participated in a NISO meeting on producing a standard for annotations: a necessary step. You can read a summary of my take on social reading at Open Bookmarks. (I was quite surprised at the reaction of some to the idea of social reading—the old canard about cacophany. This post might be of interest too.)

The thrust of this argument is that there is nothing we need to change about books themselves. Books work. My major realisation from the talk and the conference was that books have always been networked; it is us who are becoming networked now.

What I mean by this is that books have always been social and connected, existing in a larger context than it was previously possible for an individual to understand. (I have no doubt this applies to other products, cultural or otherwise, too.) But the network gives us farsight, and new uses, connections and possibilities are revealed.

We need to ask not what is different about digital books, but what digital can do with and for books, which are eternal. Augmentation, not enhancement.

* * *

I also used the talk to introduce a new book work, currently featured in After The Bit Rush at Mu Gallery, Eindhoven. I’ll be writing more about this in a future post.

* * *

Finally, it is perhaps notable in the context of this talk, of current events, of my current feelings about the inviolability of the text, that Booktwo turned five years old last month (I still think the introductory essay is worth revisiting). Thanks for reading.

We are witnessing a profound assault on book publishing and literature, on the text itself—not from ebooks, which publishers are slowly, painfully coming around to after a long resistance, or the internet, which is after all entirely made of text—but from applications, “enhanced” books and reductive notions of literary experience. As I’ve written about before, in the context of advertising, publishers’ reactions to new technologies betray a profound lack of confidence in the text itself. We are being distracted by shiny things.

Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on technology: it is what we make technology out of. Code is text, it is the fundamental nature of technology. We’ve been trying for decades, since the advent of hypertext fiction, of media-rich CD-ROMs, to enhance the experience of literature with multimedia. And it has failed, every time.

Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. That they’re shallower, lazier, more dazzled. If they are, then the text is not speaking clearly enough. We are not speaking clearly enough. Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further.

Literature is an active process: the communication between writer—who wishes to tell the reader something, and imagines that reader in their mind in order to best adapt their writing for their understanding—and reader, who reconstructs and reanimates the text in their own mind. Any other input, audio or video, however pleasurable in certain contexts, diminishes the reader’s capacity for imagination and understanding. All else is distraction. Other—particularly visual—media reduce the bandwidth of the imagination.

“Storytelling” is what we do for children. It is the infantilisation of literature. And while there is much of interest in children’s literature and children’s publishing, to emulate it is to debase literature, and ourselves. (It’s dangerous in science, technology and other non-fiction too: no application or television programme is equal to a well-written, long form text.)

And these reductive notions of literature infect the rest of the body. Contrary to popular thought, everyone is not a publisher. When you hear a publisher say it, it’s even sadder. Publishing is a complex and well established collection of knowledge, competencies and processes, refined over time, practiced under forever difficult circumstances in a frankly indifferent market. Which is not to say that it’s exclusive: the bar to entry has dropped massively, obviously, in the last ten years. But it’s still hard, and hard to do well, and the rewards are still small. Writing something and putting it on the internet is not publishing. Producing an application and getting it into the app store is not publishing. If you think everyone is a publisher, go home now, and come back when you’ve thought about what you do.

In my writing on advertising, I suggested looking to Amazon and Apple as to how to market reading: it’s in the text itself. Amazon in particular are making a killing with the Kindle, they’re eating the publishing business, and they’re doing it by focussing on text. Kindle Singles and related ventures like Byliner and Random House’s Brain Shots take advantage of digital text’s primary advantage: speed. (See the opposing directions of The Guardian’s liveblogs and News International’s The Daily for fundamental understandings and misunderstandings of digital text.)

Added to the velocity of the new text is its sociability, its connectivity. Social reading, whether of the Kindle highlights, Kobo Dashboard, Instapaper, Findings or Readmill flavour, adds depth to the text without diminishing it. When I write about the reading experience, I’m talking about a deep engagement with text, an active, intelligent, two-way conversation between reader and writer.* I am not talking about pretty pictures, sound effects, film clips, or point-and-click “interaction”. 1001 words trump a picture, and books have always been interactive. (There is so much of value in comics, films and games but it is not what book publishers do.)

Finally, the text still requires context. As publishers spin up their digital and print-on-demand backlists, more and more is published with less and less context. These efforts amount to land-grabs and rights-squatting, without adding value. Works without TOCs, indexes, author bios, footnotes. Placing work in context is one of publishers’ primary tasks, stretching out to commissioning introductions, assembling background material, supporting biographies and critical studies. Design belongs here too: good book design, appropriate book design, as important now as it has ever been.

Velocity, depth, breadth. These are the dimensions we can add to books, that are the gifts of a digital age, not gimmicks, glossy presentation and media-catching stunts.

The text works. It stands and speaks for itself. It is not what we need to change.

* Apparently this requires clarification. See below.

I spoke on the opening panel—Where Are Digital Books Headed?—and while I was primarily there to learn, here’s the rough sketch of my contribution. It focussed on what’s happening in the UK and the US, now and in some possible futures, and observations about India follow.

• The growth of ebooks in the UK and US
• 5 years ago, nobody believed this was possible.
• Now, it’s accepted, growing fast, and part of every reasonably-sized publisher’s strategy.
• Ebooks are driven by ecommerce: first one, then the other.
• This fundamentally changes the structure of organisations and the industry.
• Changes in bookselling
• Amazon, as distributor, bookseller and sole controller of the Kindle ecosystem, holds a huge amount of power in the UK. In the US, this is somewhat mediated by the presence of Barnes & Noble and the Nook.
• This is a concern, and requires a response. The fact B&N has a toehold at all is in large part down to the actions of publishers.
• Analytics are key to understanding the new market: whoever controls ebooks holds the advantage.
• Analytics are also key to understanding reading. This understanding can produce new insights and products, cf Kindle Singles.
• Changes in reading
• Concerns about ebooks are often misunderstood or misrepresented (this is the “temporal not physical” shtick).
• Social reading is a way of returning the affordances of the physical book to ebooks, and analytics to publishers.
• So-called “enhanced” e-books have applications in Education and Childrens’ books, but they also introduce a dangerous platform-dependence, and betray a lack of confidence in text.
• A fundamental change in our relationship with the book—as authority, as discrete object, as form of attention—is underway.
• The next battle concerns libraries and subscription/streaming services. (I have another post brewing on this subject.)

This is all very America/Eurocentric, and as I said, and said then, I wanted to learn about India. So here are a couple of things that I found particularly interesting.

I’ve been tracking the growth of ecommerce in India for a while because, as I note above, it’s a necessary precursor to ebooks. Ebooks are online, therefore you need to have a sizable market of people willing to buy online before anything is going to happen. In India, there have been several reasons and/or arguments why this hasn’t been happening. The main two were that local, mostly independent, booksellers commanded great loyalty through handselling, personal relationships, and personal discounting; and the Indian web wasn’t secure or developed enough for ecommerce: in short, people wouldn’t (and probably shouldn’t) hand over their credit card details.

Two years ago, I was told of all these objections, but also heard about a start-up called Flipkart which was trying online bookselling anyway. Despite an innovative business model that included cash-on-delivery to circumvent the main problem with online payments, the one person who’d heard of them didn’t give them a chance. Last year, most people in publishing had heard of them, but still didn’t give them a chance. This year, when I asked the audience to raise their hands if they used Flipkart, everyone did. Without exception.

One figure quoted was that in in 2010, Flipkart sold as many books as Crossword, the largest bricks-and-mortar book chain in India, and is growing faster. There are many caveats to this: Crossword is still not very big on a national scale, dwarfed by the number of independents; we’re talking trade publishing, not the vast academic/educational market; and dotcom figures are routinely over-inflated (thanks to Vinutha Mallya for that).

Nevertheless: underlying these changes in the business is the fundamental change in attitude that is occurring. Once ecommerce is possible, books are slowly abstracted from physical bookshops, laying the groundwork for ebooks. We’ve seen it happen—and not just to books, but to groceries and a vast range of other goods—in the West. Loyalty and handselling, it would appear, are easily and overwhelmingly trumped by choice and convenience. In a developing country, this inflection point is a huge deal.

But ebooks in India also present a very different opportunity to ebooks in the West. As K. Satyanarayan of New Horizon Media explained to me, books in India now are still only published at the same per capita rate as they were in US in the 1950s, but they are growing fast. “An explosion” is about to occur, thanks to ebooks, but it will be in addition to, not at the expense of, printed books.

Satyanarayan was one of the founders of CricInfo, the world’s largest cricket website (no small deal in cricket-insane India), which was sold to Wisden, and then to ESPN. After the sale, India’s CricInfo partners were looking around for a new business, and saw the lack of quality content—particularly non-fiction and business books—in Indian languages. So in 2004, they founded New Horizons and started publishing in Tamil, which has 65 million native speakers in South India, Sri Lanka, and worldwide. They expanded quickly, not least through an innovative distribution strategy that included selling through every kind of local retail space from saree shops to roadside stalls (“books hanging alongside the shampoo sachets”, as one attendee put it), with fast-moving sales and stock teams moving through every town and village at least twice a month.

But with a digital background, New Horizons had its eye on ebooks from the start, and all of its content is already in digital formats, and ready to go. The biggest barrier to digital books in India is access to digital devices, and over the next five years, the government of Tamil Nadu, India’s seventh largest state and 90% Tamil-speaking, will distribute 7 million laptops to schoolchildren aged 15-16, and college students in Government schools. This market, which will be replicated all over the subcontinent, will be additional to, not in competition with, the still-growing print market.

The over-whelming takeaway from this trip was that fact, together with/enhanced by the growth of ecommerce and the acceptance of ebooks in Indian publishing. As ever: exciting times are ahead.

It’s always worth bearing in mind that India is a country of 1.2 billion people, almost 20% of the world’s population, speaking 22 official languages, several hundred “mother tongues” and thousands of dialects. It is often better comprehended as a couple of Europes (but, you know, different) than as a single country. Many of these Indias are also stunning beautiful, culturally fascinating, and hospitable, and it is a privilege to be a guest there. But while looking to the future of literature always requires an understanding of local customs and culture, the broad strokes hold everywhere.

*

… And here are some more Indian-born digital things you should check out; all, not coincidentally, in the childrens’ market:

• Tulika Books‘ apps for children – The beautifully illustrated Who Will Rule?, the bilingual English/Hindi Ekki Dokki and The Runaway Peppercorn.
• StoryTruck – childrens’ ebooks and audiobooks in a range of Indian languages, aimed both at Indians at home, and in the diaspora.
• Memetales – publishing platform with a “super compelling gamified e-book reader for kids”.

When Steve Jobs stepped on stage to thunderous applause at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on June 6th, he announced a new product which everyone in the room had been expecting: the iCloud, a seamless syncing service for users’ data, documents, music and photographs between devices. But he also did something unexpected, something rarely done in the world of network technologies: he pulled back the curtain to reveal what “the cloud” really is.

“If you don’t think we’re serious about this”, said Jobs, referring to the iCloud product offering, “This is our third datacenter. It’s in Maiden, North Carolina. This is what it looks like.” The slide behind him showed a vast, windowless and ground-hugging white building, set in a deep forest, the size of several football fields and abutted by squat round cooling towers. “It’s a pretty large place,” he went on to say, “full of stuff. Very expensive stuff.” [1]

The idea of “the cloud” is almost as old as the internet; indeed, it is one conception of the internet, as a ubiquitous, pervasive network of access points and data services, of computation as a public utility. But the reality of the cloud, of the internet itself, is that it is a physical infrastructure of cables which run beneath streets and oceans, connecting exchanges and switches to servers in offices, homes—and datacenters.

The fragility of this network has been emphasised by recent events. In January, the late Egyptian regime effectively cut its country off from the internet with a few phone calls to the small number of licensed Internet Service Providers, which control virtually all the connections in and out of the country. In February 2008, a ship attempting to drop anchor at sea during bad weather in the Mediterranean accidentally sliced through the Flag Europe-Asia and Sea-Me-We 4 fibre optic cables which between them carry 75% of all traffic to the Middle East and South Asia, a region with over 75 million internet users. [2] In April of this year, a 75-year-old Georgian woman scavenging for copper to sell as scrap accidentally severed the main fibre link to neighbouring Armenia. Georgia supplies 90% of Armenia’s connectivity, and the so-called”spade-hacker” plunged 3.2 million Armenians, and a significant number of Georgians and Azerbaijanis, into data darkness for over five hours. [3]

Andrew Blum, a writer for Wired who is currently writing a book about the physical infrastructure of the internet, calls these physical points in the network “choke points”, geographical locations where the networks of networks connect to one another “through something as simple and tangible as a yellow-jacketed fiber-optic cable”. [4] Many of these networks meet one another in nominally neutral carrier hotels, and in more overtly privately owned datacenters like the one which Jobs so dramatically revealed.

One such carrier hotel is Terremarks’s ‘NAP of the Americas’ in Miami, Florida. Terremark is a multinational datacenter and network infrastructure provider, and the NAP, or network access point, provides meeting points for 160 networks, switches the majority of South America, Central America and the Caribbean’s digital traffic with the rest of the world, and hosts one of thirteen instances of the internet’s root domain name system (DNS), the critical technology translating human readable URLs into IP, the language of the internet itself. The NAP is also a highly secure 750,000 square foot fortress, with 7 inch thick steel reinforced concrete exterior panels designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane and a 100-year storm. Situated in a downtown location, some seven storeys high and topped by golf-ball radomes, the NAP is not easy to hide, but like many of its kind, it is unmarked by corporate logos, and photography is strongly discouraged. [5]

Google, which recently bought another similar and nominally independent facility, 111 8th Avenue in New York, has spent the last decade building the single largest network of datacenters on Earth, nicknamed the Googleplex, estimated in 2008 to consist of 12 significant installations in the United States, with another three under construction, and at least five in Europe. [6] But Google is notoriously secretive about these locations, to the extent of obscuring its facilities on its own mapping and satellite viewing applications. In a Harper’s Magazine article on Google’s datacenter in The Dalles, Oregon, Ginger Strand wrote that the blueprints for such buildings, “are proof that the Web is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.” [7]

Datacenters have evolved dramatically from their origins as the boxy rooms housing large single mainframes at the dawn of the computing era. The modern datacenter incorporates back-up power generators, state-of-the-art inert gas fire suppression systems, multiple telecommunications network connections, rack upon rack of quietly humming servers, switches and modems, and the electrical and water supplies required to keep them running under optimal conditions with minimal human presence or interaction.

But the visible architecture of the datacenter, the envelope, has changed little: typical examples are nondescript office buildings with mirrored or shuttered windows, deliberately dull to the point of deflecting unsought attention; or vast, distripark-style groundscrapers of the kind unveiled by Jobs: the size of football fields, but marked with few clues as to their actual functions, the epitome of the big box.

Counterexamples are rare. In 2008, Swedish ISP Bahnhof opened ‘Pionen’, a data center located a hundred feet underground in a former nuclear bunker in the centre of Stockholm. Bahnhof deliberately styled the facility after James Bond films and 70s science fiction, with greenhouses, waterfalls and German submarine engines and klaxons, in order to stand out in a discreet industry: “The unique design makes it a ‘talk about’ facility,” said Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung. “If you have been inside Pionen you will for sure tell somebody else about it.” [8]

Citigroup’s LEED-certified data center in Frankfurt by Arup announces its presence with a vast “green wall”, irrigated with recycled cooling water [9], while HSBC’s South Yorkshire National Data Centre just off Junction 36 of the M1, built by Midland Bank in the mid-1970s, was modelled after a supertanker, complete with a command-and-control bridge joining the two main computer rooms, and tall green cooling funnels erupting from well-tended lawns. [10, 11] Its rounded corners and white facades place it somewhere between the Bauhaus and Hubbard, Ford and Partners’ GRP-clad Mondial House on the Thames, from the same period: once Europe’s largest international telecommunications complex, its bold design expressing its technological function. [12]

But Pionen is accessed via a set of thick steel doors recessed into a cliff face, and the SYNDC is screened from the road by tall trees and fences, with inquisitive passers-by warned off by security—posters on local Sheffield messageboards refer to it as a conspiracy-laden Tellytubbyland. [13] Even these structures do their best to efface themselves.

The main reason for this, says YRM’s Iain McDonald, is security, on three fronts: terrrorism, industrial espionage, and theft. The legitimacy of the latter is confirmed by news reports, such as the break-ins at Level3′s Braham Street facility in March 2006, where thieves absconded with a valuable router and brought down a major London network in the process, or a burglary at Easynet’s Brick Lane datacenter in the same year, where equipment was worth an estimated £6 million was loaded into the back of a van and spirited away. [14] However, it’s hard to connect discretion with real security, when building owners and locations are easily discoverable on the web and in council records.

YRM has recently completed Telehouse West, a flagship facility at Telehouse’s data campus in Docklands, East London. Nine storeys high, with 19,000 square metres of technical and customer space, the building stands out from other datacenters, including the existing Telehouse and Global Switch facilities on the same site, and not just for its technical provisioning. [15, 16]

Telehouse West’s distinctive, windowless envelope incorporates a “disruptive pattern”, breaking up the monocolour facades with a series of tones based on a monochrome, silver-grey palette, resembling nothing so much as the pixelation of low-resolution imagery: the aesthetic of the network itself. Together with high-quality cladding, expressed cross-bracing and angled louvres which create a “crown” of visual interest, Telehouse West attempts to balance what McDonald calls “a Lloyds-type building which expresses its services” with “an aesthetic quality”.

McDonald cites William Gibson’s ‘Pattern Recognition’, a novel concerned with the human tendency to see patterns in meaningless data and the tensions between art and corporatisation, as an influence, as well as the way in which films like Blade Runner reset the urban landscape from a Logan’s Run-inspired modernism to a “dirty hybridity”. McDonald sees this era coming to an end as corporations seek to use architecture as branding, as at Mercedes-Benz World at Brooklands, an Aukett Fitzroy Robinson-designed scheme offering automotive consumers a range of experiences from galleries to circuit driving to retail.

“You could design a datacenter and, depending what you clad it in, you might be hard pushed to see it as that different from an art gallery.” New constructions like David Chipperfield’s Turner Contemporary in Margate are morphing into digital content institutes, sharing the datacenter’s challenges of managing complex internal requirements—lighting, atmosphere and temperature control—while projecting the appropriate brand values.

What is at stake is the way in which architects help to define and shape the image of the network to the general public. Datacenters are the outward embodiment of a huge range of public and private services, from banking to electronic voting, government bureaucracy to social networks. As such, they stand as a new form of civic architecture, at odds with their historical desire for anonymity.

Facebook’s largest facility is its new datacenter in Prineville, Oregon, tapping into the same cheap electricity which powers Google’s project in The Dalles. The social network of more than 600 million users is instantiated as a 307,000 square foot site currently employing over 1,000 construction workers—which will dwindle to just 35 jobs when operational. But in addition to the $110,000 a year Facebook has promised to local civic funds, and a franchise fee for power sold by the city, comes a new definition for datacenters and their workers, articulated by site manager Ken Patchett: “We’re the blue collar guys of the tech industry, and we’re really proud of that. This is a factory. It’s just a different kind of factory then you might be used to. It’s not a sawmill or a plywood mill, but it’s a factory nonetheless.” [17]

This sentiment is echoed in McDonald’s description of “a new age industrial architecture”, of cities re-industrialised rather than trying to become “cultural cities”, a modern Milan emphasising the value of engineering and the craft and “making” inherent in information technology and digital real estate.

The role of the architect in the new digital real estate is to work at different levels, in Macdonald’s words “from planning and building design right down to cultural integration with other activities.” The cloud, the network, the “new heavy industry”, is reshaping the physical landscape, from the reconfiguration of Lower Manhattan to provide low-latency access to the New York Stock Exchange, to the tangles of transatlantic fiber cables coming ashore at Widemouth Bay, an old smuggler’s haunt on the Cornish coast. A formerly stealth sector is coming out into the open, revealing a tension between historical discretion and corporate projection, and bringing with it the opportunity to define a new architectural vocabulary for the digitised world.

• [1] http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/11piubpwiqubf06/event/ ↑
• [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/feb/01/internationalpersonalfinancebusiness.internet ↑
• [3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-cuts-web-access ↑
• [4] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/tunisia-egypt-miami-the-importance-of-internet-choke-points/70415/ ↑
• [5] http://www.terremark.com/technology-platform/nap-of-the-americas.aspx ↑
• [6] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/14/technology/14search.html ↑
• [7] http://harpers.org/media/slideshow/annot/2008-03/index.html ↑
• [8] http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-designed-data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/ ↑
• [9] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/04/24/citi-frankfurt-center-is-leed-platinum/ ↑
• [10] http://www.flickr.com/photos/benterrett/5544469736/ ↑
• [11] http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&cp=sxfbzfgw835v&lvl=18.068539402367243&dir=174.52816108477853&sty=b&eo=0&form=LMLTCC ↑
• [12] http://www.nothingtoseehere.net/2006/08/mondial_house_london.html ↑
• [13] http://www.sheffieldforum.co.uk/archive/index.php/t-37739.html ↑
• [14] http://russ.garrett.co.uk/2009/03/12/datacenter-security-a-cautionary-tale/ ↑
• [15] http://www.telehouse.net/telehouse-west/ ↑
• [16] http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=36624593@N00&q=telehouse ↑
• [17] http://www.ktvz.com/news/26827169/detail.html ↑

Photograph by Nick Rochowski / Telehouse. Used with permission.

For example, here are the Geospatial artworks of Nikolas Schiller:

And the “WorldWide Carpets” of David Hanauer:

There are a lot more out there: the Rorschmap is not a globally novel conception, although it was entirely new to me. It emerged organically from my investigations at the New Aesthetic and followed a huge range of experiments with maps and map data/APIs, many of them documented on Flickr:

This post is not about justifying my version of the Rorschmap, or claiming ownership of it in anyway: I have no interest in doing that. That said, certain claims have given me a greater sympathy for people, like Daniel Horowitz, accused of plagiarism. Shapeways’ recent blog post on simultaneous invention is worth a read. Things are speeding up, the internet is flattening time, we see further, everything is simultaneous.

What I am interested in is how my Rorschmap differs from those other instantiations. What I am interested in is how digitisation changes not just the format of a thing, but its fundamental essence.

These other images, while made possible by digital maps, could have been created with physical, paper, maps in much the same way. The Rorschmap is wholly digital, web-based, interactive. Its interactivity seems to be key: the first response of almost every visitor is to look up their home or another familiar place. Art customisation. I’m not sure how it could be shown in a gallery, for example, without simply installing a web terminal.

This echoes a debate currently raging in the web art world. At this year’s Armory Fair in New York, Rhizome director Lauren Cornell offered digital artworks for sale, promising that “you can sell digital work in different ways but in Sara’s case we’re going to take it offline for the collector so they can just have it locally.” Artinfo.com has the full story, but the reactions have been varied and frequently vociferous. “If a digital file is not live on the Internet, is it still a work of Internet art?” is one response; the hacker promise that “We will get that art back online by any means necessary” is another. I have no strong feelings about this, because the way I see it, if a digital file can be taken off the internet, it is not Internet art.

An answer, perhaps, is that the difference is systems. While the fixed maps are products of the system, the Rorschmap can only exist as part of the system, the network; indivisible from of it, composed of it. Holographically embedded in it. In the great undesigned, unintended coral reef of the web, artworks are not products, but systems. The social book is not a product, but a system, in which author, publisher, reader and increasingly a host of services, collaborate in an experience. This, less the services, has always been the case, but the culture is increasingly wired into the network, irrevocably entangled.

Digitisation makes something ephemeral, reproducible, robot-readable—and networkable. In fact, its capacity to be connected to other things like and unlike itself is its most insistent quality. It longs for it. The digital object is immanent in the network. It is where it is most truly itself, which is everything.

A couple of weeks ago, a group of friends and acquaintances converged on Arkwright’s Mill in the Derwent Valley for an event called Laptops & Looms. We were there ostensibly to talk about the new Making, small-scale manufacture, reindustrialisation, and how we take the webby, start-up, DIY approach to physical things. Matt Edgar has a good write-up, and there are various follow-ups floating around. I wanted to throw something in.

A huge number of attendees mentioned what their parents or antecedents did, and most of them were engineers or in associated trades. Russell’s Dad worked at Boeing in Derby. Matt Cottam’s grandparents moved to Rhode Island to work in textile mills, where he later attended the Rhode Island School of Design, and now found himself in the first textile mill talking about industry again. And there are our own formative influences too: Tom and I joke regularly about just how many of our circle did the lighting for the school plays.

My Grandads were an engineer and a fireman. Both my parents had, ultimately, highly independent careers. My Mum trained people in communication, travelled a lot, worked flexibly. She could pick and choose when and how she worked. My Dad worked in the Whisky trade for years but when he left and founded his own company 15-odd years ago he named his first business Lochinvar, not just for the Scottish connection, but for Walter Scott’s fourth line: “He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.” I think I absorbed the desire to work independently fairly early on.

So if a generation of engineers and flexible corporate jobs produced a generation of creative technologists and freelancers, what will the first makers, the early adopters, result in? In short, What Will Arthur Do?

Dan Hill talked about interfacing with the “dark matter” of large organisations to Get Things Done. With respect to governments and corporations, I admit I’m lukewarm about trying to turn oil tankers around: I’ve done enough of that in publishing and haven’t seen many successful examples. More things are supplanted than changed (but more people are living than dead, etc.). And I have no desire to talk to David Cameron. But I am intrigued by what our generation might produce in the next. What will you do if your parent was a UX designer? Or an SEO guru?

And so, I think it’s important that we encourage this. Matt Sheret’s been writing about how we need to speak to those outside our disciplines to spread these ideas. I agree, but I’ve also believed for some time that we need to change the way we talk to kids about them. A world in which you can get your ICT GCSE by becoming proficient in Microsoft Office suite is not one which will produce the next generation of radical makers. Young Hackspace just might.

Or perhaps there’s something else, perhaps making-things and making-bits don’t just cycle back from one to another, perhaps there’s a third place to go to. Only our children will find it, and we probably won’t understand what they do. We don’t need to reindustrialise, but we don’t need to fill the mills with digital services either.

It’s the maker’s manifesto, really. Make the things that we make hackable too. Encourage secondary markets. Educate, educate, educate. We built on the values of our parents; the only thing we can really do is pass these down. Perhaps they hate Facebook for good reason, because they understand more intuitively than we do how limiting and infantilising it is; perhaps they see past the sheen of current-instantiation ebooks and other content technologies to the terrible limitations they are trying to impose on our cultural experiences. Perhaps not, but perhaps we can fix things anyway. Perhaps I do want to change the world, after all.

*

While we’re at it, you also really need to read two pieces connected to the recent Edgelands event in Edinburgh: Rachel’s “On Edgelands” and Tom’s “Technology as a Material”. “Art is a purpose, not an excuse.” Ooh, goosebumps.

Earlier this year they released a simple, beautiful iPad app for electronic reading, one of best reading experiences you can have on the platform, which connects to the Readmill service to track and store your reading. Directly connected to several free ebook stores, you can also load any of your own epub files. And yesterday, they launched highlighting.

Highlights allow you to share and save bookmarks and notes in the books you read. As well as keeping its own record, it creates a permanent link on the web for sharing and commenting:

Highlights are central to Readmill’s and Open Bookmarks’ ideal of social reading: connected, portable and permanent. And in the true spirit of social reading, Readmill’s API allows any other reading app, not just on iPad, to connect their users to a powerful bookmarking and sharing service, with the vision to making these as open as possible in the future.

Still in private beta, I’ll be writing more about forthcoming features soon, but for the moment, Booktwo has 100 invites for curious readers and developers who’d like to test out the system: http://readmill.com/invite/booktwo. Get them while they’re hot.

UPDATE: Added another 100 as the demand’s been so great.

tl;dr: I have made a thing with maps. It is called Rorschmap and you can play with it at rorschmap.com. Also: this page contains weird maps that will likely not play well in RSS or in old browsers.

For a while now, I have been thinking about digital maps. In part, this is the New Aesthetic at play; one aspect of it, the way we see and represent Earth with our new tools. I’ve also been working on another, longer-form map project I can’t talk about yet, but it comes down to something Matthew Knutzen, Geospatial Librarian at the New York Public Library, said to me, something like: “When maps become digital, they become something different, something new”.

That’s it; that’s all, spoken calmly among the stacks of the NYPL’s extraordinary centuries-old, thousands-strong paper map collection. But it’s something we rarely say, about anything digital. We’re so busy looking for ways to make digital books and maps usable in ways that we understand that we fail to do things with them that we don’t understand, or that are beyond our understanding.

Jack Schulze, of BERG, describes this difference in what the map is as animation: a digital map is an animation on pause, redrawn quickly in the browser and slowly in the air, by Landranger aircraft and satellites. Wikistyle maps like Open Street Map redraw the map in time; the plane extends in four dimensions.

It is 65 years since Buckminster Fuller patented the Dymaxion Map, designed to show, and only show, the whole earth. Fuller’s map forced less distortion than contemporary projections; it also, having no ‘right way up’, embodied his idea that the only directions in the universe were ‘in’ and ‘out’.

The plane of Google Maps has an up and a down; it also has an in and an out: the zoom between tile layers, the moment of transference, of refocussing and resolution. What if we could fold digital maps like the dymaxion, go truly into them?

Rorschmap is cartographic navel-gazing, a reframing of the map. It will not help you find anything. We are bored with your squares and your margins. We want new shapes and new dimensions, the unicode snowmen of visual representation. †‡†, as the man said.

The word “kaleidoscope” is derived from the Ancient Greek καλ(ός) (beauty, beautiful), είδο(ς) (form, shape) and -σκόπιο (tool for examination)—hence “observer of beautiful forms”. It was invented by Sir David Brewster in 1815-17. Brewster was also active in the development of the lighthouse; both things were byproducts of his researches into optics. The light, refracted, serves both beauty and safety, both aesthetics and cartography.

Rorschmap should work on most modern browsers. Safari and Chrome are better than Firefox. I don’t know about Windows machines. It is optimised for iPad, and looks rather good there. Enjoy.

Hat tip to the excellent Rob Myers, who put the foursquare dream image into my head, and thanks as ever to Tom Taylor for code advice.