One of my favourite artworks in the world is Michelangelo Pistoletto’s ‘Cubic Meter of Infinity‘, which I first saw in Tate’s Arte Povera exhibition about ten years ago. It consists of a box made of inward-facing mirrors, and it bends the mind. If there is light in the box, it must be infinite, but if there is no light, what is reflected?

I thought of Pistoletto when reading Andrew Blum’s Tubes, on the physical infrastructure of the internet. Of the millions of miles of light transmitted through fibres beneath the sea and street, sheathed in black plastic, invisible to the eye, visible only at the point of transformation or repetition, a light that illuminates at a distance.

I was reminded of Pistoletto, again, last week, at “Pacific Standard Time”, an exhibition of Southern Californian art, 1950-1980, at the Martin-Gropus-Bau in Berlin. Larry Bell’s ‘Untitled, 1969′ is another metre cube: this time made of smoked, semi-reflective glass, only just transparent, so that one sees oneself reflected in it, other patrons through it, and shards of other works, like Hockney’s ‘Bigger Splash’, hung on a nearby world. It is a ghost cube, hovering somewhere between Pistoletto and Anish Kapoor, who has made pieces that both fully reflect (the Cloud Gate, ‘Turning the world inside out‘), and absorb (the black pigment pieces). Gerhard Richter too, currently on show at the Neues Nationalgalerie and formerly at Tate, whose glasses break down the outline of the viewer, turn them into one of Richter’s own paintings.

James Turrel’s ‘Stuck Red’ and ‘Stuck Blue’, also in “Pacific Standard Time”, fill voids in the wall with intense fluorescent light, so that they appear to be flat panels of light on the surface of the wall, instead of inside it. He has everted notional space.

Anthony McCall’s light hazes at the Hamburger Bahnhof, at P3, at ACMI. Locator beams, like the superstructure of GPS, a vast mesh tent enclosing the earth, 20,000 km above the terrestrial net. Radio waves are just invisible light.

At the Berlinische Galerie, an exhibition of Boris Mikhailov’s photographs from Ukraine, before and after the fall of Communism. These were originally presented as slideshows, as light, and many are coloured: coloured in, or washed in blue or sepia tones:

“… the brown sepia tone. This colour lends the work a historical and even nostalgic quality. The aesthetic evokes memories of early photography and engrains a sense of history into these pictures.” (Wall panel, Berlinische Galerie, emphasis mine)

Photography is made of light, capturing and projecting it. Classical photography contains a double projection: the world onto the film, the film onto the print. Digital images are captured more directly, onto the CCD, and printed with pigment, rather than light; but then they’re hardly printed any more: instead, they are continually projected from the screen, back at us. They are light all along.

Analogue photography rendered the light physical. In contrast, digital photography preserves the illumination. Re-projected, illuminating at a distance.

(Berlin is the original home of Bring Your Own Beamer, a series of exhibitions hosting artists and their projectors. The most striking image of Occupy Wall Street was the projection on November 17th of slogans onto the Verizon building, as thousands marched across the Brooklyn Bridge. London’s Olympic Games Act of 2006 grants Police specific powers to enter private properties and seize material and equipment that might be used for projection. Reclaim the light.)

(Another work from that Arte Povera show: Giovanni Anselmo’s ‘Invisible’, an out-of-focus projector, which, when the viewer inserts themselves into its field, reveals the word “Visible” displayed on their chest. I recalled the message, incorrectly, as ‘Hello’; the effect is the same. Waving at the machines.)

In Alan Moore’s “Century” series of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, he crosses the streams. Jerry Cornelius appears, inverted, in black and white: “I’m feeling very negative at the moment.” And Iain Sinclair appears (ad parēre) as Norton, the prisoner of London, doomed to exist in all Londons, through time and the city, to see every connection and emission, but unable to leave or intervene. I think Sinclair might have been practicing Network Realism for some time—his network the city, of course, strung together with light, the beaded ropes of Albert Bridge, the brash glow of Piccadilly Circus, the Maian eyes of the City and Canary Wharf.

I think of a line by my friend Jennifer, who has worked on the New York Times app and hand-made artists’ books, and says the only difference between the two is “the velocity of the material”. I think that the physical and the digital are inseparable in culture in the same way that waves and particles are inseparable in light. I think the network permeates all things, is an extension of the eye, which is an extension of mind. It is all made of light.

Some links for context:

• Network Realism
• Code/Space, Kitchin/Dodge
• Kevin Slavin on Algorithms
• The Lives of Bots, by Stuart Geiger
• Waving at the Machines, New Aesthetic arts, October 2011
• A Ship Adrift
• Polari at Wikipedia

From the start, the process of engaging with the New Aesthetic has been one of “OK, not that, then how about this”. As more people have become involved, it’s interesting to watch how each one folds the concept into their own practice and interests. Bruce deftly extrudes the “issues” with the NA as it is presented and considered now, which are pretty much the things I’ve been chewing on for the last few months. If all you’ve seen of the NA is a Tumblr or the Waving talk, you may be forgiven for thinking it’s all about the pretty pictures, but it’s not, and how we engage with the non-pretty aspects is what we do next.

I’m still working through this myself, but this post by Adam Rothstein in particular caught my eye, calling for a politics of the New Aesthetic. On the one hand I’m disappointed that the politics of NA, which have been there from the very beginning, and are for me a key component of the phenomenon, have not been so evident that those interested should think they have to start that “module” from scratch. On the other hand, I’m genuinely excited to see what results.

The other thing that needs to be joined up is how the New Aesthetic relates to Network Realism. The formulation of NR is a clear precursor to the wider scope of the NA, but more tightly focussed on literature. (The process, in case you haven’t noticed, involves thinking about how digital/networks effect one cultural product, and then expanding this to EVERYTHING.) NR remains a thing you can definitively point at and go: that’s the New Aesthetic as it occurs in literature (as opposed to in writing, which Russell covers here). But is it more than that / is it an analysis that can be applied to other things?

Hmmm.

I’m now writing a fortnightly column for the Observer Books section, entitled ‘The New Reading’ and shared with Anna Baddeley of The Omnivore. Long-time readers of this blog are unlikely to be surprised by the content, but it’s good to see that most old-school of literary organs, the broadsheet review section, taking the subject of electronic books to its readers, alongside more traditional content. The first two columns are up now, on Visual Editions’ iPad app and electronic bookmarking, and the third will follow this week-end, on Robin Sloan’s Fish.

I wrote a piece for the Ideas Bank section of WIRED UK’s most recent edition (May 2012). It’s about publishing, leaning heavily on The New Value of Text. You know, this kind of thing…

[...] Books are amenable to interaction analysis, but those interactions are so complex, so embedded in our minds and in our culture, that it seems impossible to separate them from the thing itself. Books are encoded experiences, they are repositories of the experiences we have with them, and they are ultimately souvenirs of themselves, extraordinarily powerful totems of the imagination. They bear the marks of their use in a way few other cultural products do, something which initially set them apart from words trapped behind screens.

The publishing industry has long profited from this unique assemblage of product and meaning. As a result, it has been slow to respond, philosophically and organisationally, to the challenge of new media. [...]

[UPDATE: The complete article is now online]

I also wrote about cameraphones for ICON magazine’s mobile phone special issue. I even got a George Clooney quote in.

In August 2006, when the photo-sharing website Flickr launched “geotagging”—allowing its members to place photos on a map of the world to show where they were taken, it was hosting 230 million photos from 4.5 million registered users. By the end of 2011, this had increased to more than 6 billion photos, and over 300 million of them have been placed on the map.

Eric Fischer, a San Francisco-based artist and technologist, has used Flickr’s photographs to create “The Geotagger’s World Atlas”—maps of world cities entirely made out of the locations where photos have been taken—and “Locals and Tourists”—the same maps with the dots coloured based on the origin of the photographer. In both cases, the density of the mappings is such that the contours of the underlying cities are sharply revealed, right down to the edges of parks, squares and intersections. A 1:1 map of the world; the representation as territory.

In 2009, the iPhone overtook everything from cheap point and shoots to high-end DSLRs to become the most popular camera on Flickr, a service biased towards people who take photography a little more seriously than most. And while Flickr took seven and a half years to reach that 6 billion figure, Facebook got to 60 billion in the same time frame, and reckons that it handles over 100 million photo uploads every single day. And almost all of that is because of cameraphones.

Consider the strangeness of that word for a moment. Consider the strangeness of “I’m just going to take a photo of that with my phone”. The mobile electronic eye. “Pics or GTFO”.

The first cameraphones appeared in the mid-to-late 1990s as miniaturisation advanced, but it was the parallel development of sharing technologies that made the technology explode. On June 11, 1997, Philippe Kahn, developer of the first true cameraphone, wirelessly transmitted pictures of his daughter Sophie’s birth from the maternity ward to more than 2,000 people around the world. By 2003, more cameraphones were being sold than stand-alone digital cameras. In 2008, Nokia overtook Kodak to became the world’s largest camera manufacturer.

Now, it is almost inconceivable that an event in the Metropolitan West might go unwitnessed and unrecorded: whether it’s an amusing graffito or an aeroplane bellyflopping into the Hudson river, the cameraphone manages to simultaneously make the everyday spectacular and the spectacular pedestrian. George Clooney, a man who hires his own satellites to scan the earth for evidence of war crimes, recently noted: “Now that every single human being on earth has a camera phone, where are all those UFO pictures? Remember you used to see those pictures. Some guy just happened to have a Polaroid when the UFOs appeared? Either it was all bullshit, or my theory is that the martians have decided, ‘Don’t go down there, man. All those fuckers have cameras now.’”

Much praise needs to go to Andy Gilmore for the incredible illustrations accompanying the ICON article. Lot’s more good stuff in there from Lee Rourke, Matt Jones and the (un)like.

A few more coming soon; I shall try to remember to post. I like writing.

And I was talking about things I’d done in the past, and the interesting things technology does to literature, that they do to each other, and various examples of things that I felt were new and good and worked, that were connected to literature somehow—not always obviously—things that I liked, that I had made, or that I was just interested in.

And all the way through, probably because I was talking to an audience of professionals in this sort of thing, all the way through the talk I was trying to say: this bit is about writing, and this bit is about reading.

And it didn’t make sense, at least to me, it didn’t make sense, because reading and writing, for me, are not separate activities. It’s all way-finding, orienteering through literature, and sometimes someone else has beaten down the path and sometimes you have to make it for yourself.

Nathan Jones of Mercy said this thing in his talk about “language at the point of infestation”: there’s just so much of it, is it our responsibility to produce more of it, or to carve our way through it?

I started trying to write a book last year, for various reasons, and I kept getting derailed by the sheer pointlessness of the format for what I was trying to do. The only point I could identify in writing it as-a-book was to make a saleable thing, which is fine but the whole point of this not-book was/is to talk about what is not that.

Network Realism is about yoinking as much of the network as you need into the text. Something something the whole network i.e. reading and writing, flow, process.

I do keep coming back to David Shields’ Reality Hunger for the brilliant way it argues for a new mapping between fiction and non-fiction, and makes its argument with hundreds of extracts from other works, taking quotation to the level of collage. And an absence of quotation marks makes it difficult for the reader to always be sure when it is Shields speaking, and when it is one of his influences. This is what read/writing feels like.

The Ship Adrift is stuck somewhere in a depression over the Aral Sea right now, it’s gone a bit quiet. I guess this is where my talk about “collaboration” comes in, but I’m almost scared to touch it; I have made a thing that produces language (from the fragments of other languages) but it is a thing, it has a voice, it does not deserve to be bracketed in quotation marks either. It is read/writing.

More Nathan: “the seo-isation of language” / “textual abundance” / “a literature that is not inevitable” / “the internet is a eulogy for all languages”.

That, for now.

At SXSW this year, I asked four people to comment on the New Aesthetic, which if you don’t know is an investigation / project / tumblr looking at technologically-enabled novelty in the world.

(Previously: the original blog post, the main tumblr, my talk at Web Directions South.)

I opened the panel by talking about the origins of NA, in a frustration at retro-ness (the belief that authenticity can only be located in the past)—best encapsulated by Russell’s post here:

Every hep shop seems to be full of tweeds and leather and carefully authentic bits of restrained artisinal fashion. I think most of Shoreditch would be wondering around in a leather apron if it could. With pipe and beard and rickets. Every new coffee shop and organic foodery seems to be the same. Wood, brushed metal, bits of knackered toys on shelves. And blackboards. Everywhere there’s blackboards.

—as well as a real sense that there were new and extraordinary things and experiences in the world, like the ability to see through satellites, which we should wonder at and explore, but instead reduce to the mundane, like GPS driving directions…

One of the core themes of the New Aesthetic has been our collaboration with technology, whether that’s bots, digital cameras or satellites (and whether that collaboration is conscious or unconscious), and a useful visual shorthand for that collaboration has been glitchy and pixelated imagery, a way of seeing that seems to reveal a blurring between “the real” and “the digital”, the physical and the virtual, the human and the machine. It should also be clear that this ‘look’ is a metaphor for understanding and communicating the experience of a world in which the New Aesthetic is increasingly pervasive.

What has been brilliant about the New Aesthetic for me, personally, is that it has produced work, it has made me see and think about the world in a strange way, out of which thinking strange things have fallen, like Rorschmap and Robot Flaneur and Balloon Drones and Shadows, of which more anon.

But what has also been brilliant is that other people have pitched in. I first realised that NA was “a thing” not in that first blog post (I would have given it a better name) but when people started responding and writing about it. They started coming to me, bringing things, and saying “is this New Aesthetic?” or even “I think this is New Aesthetic” and I’d go yes, possibly, or better, why do you think that?

Names have power (I showed a slide of Aleister Crowley at this point; hell, I’ll show it again—).

—giving something a name gives you power over it, but it also gives other people power too. Other people can pick up your tool and use it. (Sidenote, which we’ll return to: I’ve always loved this aspect of language. It’s at the core of the invisible book club, and the best example of it I’ve experienced lately is China Miéville’s “The City & The City” which yes I am still banging on about because it gives you new words—breeching, cross-hatching—for things you know but can’t describe and which you can use as keys to open the world in all its Sapir-Whorfian glory).

Anyway, the point about the brilliance of NA as a shareable concept is that other people respond, and I wanted to show that at SXSW by inviting four people—friends old and new—to respond as they saw fit, which might be any way at all. And they did, and you should read what they had to say (follow the links to their sites):

• Joanne McNeil, editor of Rhizome, spoke about the history of new aesthetics, on new perspectives, technologies and art.
• Ben Terrett, designer, on the New Aesthetic in commercial visual culture.
• Aaron Straup Cope, artist and developer, on drones, data and human geography.
• Russell Davies, reckoner of this parish, on the New Aesthetic and writing.

They are all smart and good and you should go and read them now. (You are missing the title cards and the jingles, but I guess you had to be there for that. Also the drone. Later, we took it swimming.)

I came back on at the end to tell a few stories from the New Aesthetic. It was somewhat incoherent, in the way that talks are allowed to be but essays less so, but I shall try to lay it out.

I went to CERN, and one of the many great things about it is that people are doing things there in order to understand what they are doing, and it’s this vast iterative process with no definite outcome, but we do it because, perhaps, this is what we do when we encounter new things; we cannot do otherwise. We must stare at them ever longer and harder to understand what they mean.

Like this building and this photograph. The first is Telehouse’s new datacenter in East London which I have spoken about many times : why is it pixelated? Is it an attempt to render the network, the digital, visible? What form does the architecture of the network take, and what is the significance of the network’s irruption into physical space? (See also.)

What is the extraordinary interweaving of events that must occur for this image to exist? (It is the Free Bradley Manning section of San Francisco Pride). How many networks have been traversed by ideas and images and people for this thing to happen and be seen? And what Julian Assange said [PDF]: “We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not.” If we have not found what we are looking for yet, what we are looking for must be found in the new.

And what of the render ghosts, those friends who live in our unbuilt spaces, the first harbingers of our collective future? How do we understand and befriend them, so that we may shape the future not as passive actors but as collaborators? (I don’t have much truck with the “don’t complain, build” / “make stuff or shut up” school, but I do believe in informed consent.)

Because a line has been crossed, technology/software/code is in and of the world and there’s no getting out of it. Some architects can look at a building and tell you which version of autodesk was used to create it. The world is defined by our visualisations of it. (Someone who makes such things told me: what they put in, even as place-holders, always ends up getting built. Lorem Ipsum architecture.)

People are writing stories about having sex with robots on the internet—turning all of literature and technology into creativity and amusement while simultaneously undermining all previous notions of authorial authority and intellectual property. (I was talking about slashfic and possibly starpunk too.)

People are “acting” in ways we may or may not understand, which may or may not have an effect in the real world, whether it’s signing petitions, organising riots (on BBM), clicking, ‘liking’ KONY, whatever, the correct (maybe) response is not to have an opinion (default internet response, still) or a moral position, but to live inside the thing as it unfolds.

I think at this point I might have quoted Kafka and then gone on a rant about how brilliant Tumblr is:

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

I said that we need to invent new words for everything, preferably/not really Long German ones, because we are experiencing genuinely new things, and we should not shy away from that fact. Yes, everything has always been new and different and everything has always been the same, but we can perform an end-run around this endless back-and-forth between contemporary boosterism and conservative ever-wasness by getting excited about the fact that new ways of seeing (/thinking) produce if not a new world then new sensations which are the medium by which we appreciate a new world (and for that tug at your heart, that drop in your stomach, when you see a distant place through the internet and a number of devices (including your friends drinking in a distant city in real-time on Twitter) and wish you were there I coin the term Strasseblickfernweh, or Street View wanderlust.)

I wrote this rant a while back on Flickr, about, essentially, the uneven distribution of exciting futures (there was something in the air last summer / there is always something in the air if you’re facing the right way)…

And Tom (who is, I guess, my Nils, or should be) said:

It’s 2011, and I have no idea what anything is or does anymore.

At CERN, there was a video where a particle physicist was asked “What if you don’t find the Higgs Boson? What if you’re wrong about this?” and he thought that would be brilliant, because then they’d know a whole area they could block out and go OK, not this, but how about this?

Also, what Rilke said:

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Which must be true because Rilke said it (what would you bring down from the mountain?).

My point is, all our metaphors are broken. The network is not a space (notional, cyber or otherwise) and it’s not time (while it is embedded in it at an odd angle) it is some other kind of dimension entirely.

BUT meaning is emergent in the network, it is the apophatic silence at the heart of everything, that-which-can-be-pointed-to. And that is what the New Aesthetic, in part, is an attempt to do, maybe, possibly, contingently, to point at these things and go but what does it mean?

There’s a round-up of tweets from the session here (thanks to Paul), as well as a bunch from Bruce Sterling’s SXSW closing keynote (thanks to Chris), when he declared the NA to be at least one kind of future. He also wrote it up for Wired.

Thanks very much to Joanne, Ben, Aaron and Russell for agreeing to and indeed taking part in this ongoing discussion (do read their blog posts), also to Chris and George for moral support, and to everyone who came. All will continue, no doubt, here and at the NA.

The first thing you need to know about CERN is that it’s a misnomer. The N stands for Nuclear which sounded cool in 1954 but they’ve actually worked on sub-nuclear stuff ever since then.

And the second thing that is connected to the first thing is that all the numbers are really, really big or really, really small. Really, really, really. CERN is one of those things I thought I understood but hadn’t actually thought about too hard and when I did think about it I got high on Science. The principle of the whole thing is actually quite simple but achieving it is the most massive extraordinary physics and engineering and computing project we as a species have ever attempted. It is the best thing.

CERN—and specifically the Large Hadron Collider—is an attempt to simultaneously create the hottest place in the Universe and the near-coldest place in the Universe, on Earth, just outside Geneva, and millimetres away from each other. (The former, the conditions of the Big Bang; the latter, the 1.5° Kelvin of deep vacuum space and superconducting magnets cooled with liquid helium. The core beam tubes of the LHC are colder and emptier than most of space.)

You know, maybe aliens know all this, and we’re come-latelies to the whole comprehending-everything thing, but there isn’t really any more you can do in our current Universe than this. It’s the top thing. It is everything. This makes us amazing.

Before going, I was all blasé and geeky, and all “the LHC is great but I really want to see Room 404 and the first web server.” By the end of the tour I had completely forgotten about this, and only checked at the last minute to find that NeXT box in a little cabinet half-hidden in a massive gallery of particle stuff. Because, you know the web is cool and all, but when you’re trying to understand the fundamental building blocks of the universe and constructing the single greatest scientific instrument of ours and perhaps any civilisation, the whole modern internet is a happy side effect, it is a nice to have.

Here’s a thing. They study all sorts of particles at CERN in ways I won’t go into, but one that bears mentioning is neutrinos. Well, they produce the neutrinos as a byproduct of various very small, very fast things at CERN but they study them at Gran Sasso in Italy, in a specially-constructed chamber 1400m below a mountain, because that is how you hide from cosmic rays. And Gran Sasso is 730 km from CERN, but because neutrinos are very, very small and will pass straight through anything, they don’t need to build a pipe or a tunnel they just fire them through the crust of the earth itself.

Here’s another thing. Magnets are a big deal at CERN, because you need them to steer the beams of very, very fast particles around in a big circle. And the French word for magnets is “aimants”, which means “loving”. The LHC is a massive loving machine, and I love the Académie française.

They’ve been building particle accelerators at CERN for 50 years and they’re still using all the existing ones, and what’s more they use them all together. So it starts with a tank of hydrogen and it goes into a little old linear accelerator and then it goes into a slightly larger, slightly newer cyclical accelerator and then a larger, newer one and so on until it is injected into the LHC as very fast clumps of protons and sped up even more until BOOM and you hope just maybe you might see a Higg’s Boson, which even if it exists you might only see a couple a day and even then you might not see it because there are a millions of possible boring interactions at the same time. And maybe it doesn’t exist and that means we’re all wrong and that is brilliant too because then we know we have to figure something else out.

When they designed the LHC they thought they’d have about 15 petabytes of data per year to analyse. In the second year of operation, they generated 50 petabytes. Experiments are good when they are bounded by things like the speed of light and the age of the observable universe.

You can’t go down into the tunnels since the LHC started operating, so we only went to a couple of test facilities and one of the control rooms but it didn’t matter at all. We had an amazing guide who was a physicist who used to work on software and stuff (formerly Fortran, now C++) and who wore a beret and had a brilliant Eastern European accent and must have spent so many depressing hours with gangs of bored schoolkids but when he realised we were genuinely interested just opened up and answered all of the questions, even the stupid ones. (It didn’t hurt that one of us was a guy who built a working fusion reactor in his basement in Brooklyn. Knowing the right questions helps.)

I am slightly ashamed that I didn’t get it before but I get it now and I am humbled and amazed and still sort of dazed.

Thanks to Lift and particularly to Nicholas Nova for organising trip. If you ever get the chance to go, go go go.

Photos at Flickr.

Code is permitted to express certain forms of power (to dictate certain outcomes) through the channels, structures, networks, and institutions of societies and permissiveness of those on whom it seeks to work, in the same way that an individual does not hold and wield power but is afforded it by other people, communal norms and social structures.”
(Kitchin & Dodge, code/space, 2011)

“Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.”
(Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852)

A Room for London is a joint project between Artangel and Living Architecture. Artangel has a twenty-year history of commissioning extraordinary public art from Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis’ era-encompassing Battle of Orgreave, to one of my favourite things in the whole world, Janet Cardiff’s The Missing Voice at the Whitechapel Library. Living Architecture gets contemporary architects to build spectacular things like this and this and this and then lets them out to the general public. And this is what they’ve done now:

It’s a ship, atop the Southbank Centre in the heart of London, looking out across the Thames (above photo by Charles Hosea). Designed by David Kohn Architects and Fiona Banner it takes its form and name from Joseph Conrad: the Roi des Belges, referencing Conrad’s own command in the Congo in 1890, and his best known work, Heart of Darkness. There is a series of artists, writers and musicians in residence, and you can stay there too—or you could have done, before all the tickets sold out in under two minutes. Sorry.

I love Conrad and London, obviously. Two previous works—A Wide Arm of Sea and Romance Has Lived Too Long Upon This River—directly reference the man and the river. They both permeate the waterlogged city.

I was initially asked to provide contextual data to the project, something that could be archived, logged, illustrate the time. We went with a weather station and a camera to start, and the former has become a favourite, another little ship, perched next to its bigger brother on the rooftop, sending wind speed and direction, temperature, pressure, rainfall and more out into the world via the internet. You can see the little lines charting it on the Room for London homepage, and, as with Romance…, the tide.

I wanted to do more with this information, and followed several strands to their less-than-obvious conclusion. To unpick some of my issues with the ship

First of all, as wonderful as the boat is, it doesn’t go anywhere. This is a necessary but regrettable quality. And secondly, as wonderful as Heart of Darkness is (and, indeed, as wonderful as it is not, in all the ways… oh hang on, I might have to come back to that)—as wonderful as it is, it’s not my favourite Conrad, not by a long shot. It’s not The Secret Agent and it’s not Victory and it’s not a number of other things, but anyway. That too I shall come back to. (What I love most about Conrad is often the men screaming in the darkness.)

Add to this my increasing interest in bots and algorithms and language of a certain kind, and you have two things close to my heart: geography and story-telling. To go sideways for a moment:

I came across this comment on a blog some time ago, and it spoke to me:

Sorry. I?m telling you, things are getting out of hand. Or maybe I?m discovering that things were never in my hands. Help me! I find sites on the topic: Replica firearms for sale. I found only this – replica rolex for sale. Replica, rome is the court to many being areas. Replica, twelve wrote environment years along the college change principal exploration. Waiting for a reply :-(, Jerusha from Senegal.

Oh, sadface Jerusha. You sound so yearning and hopeful, so desperate to speak to us. And I want to speak to you Jerusha.

We live in a world that is increasingly coded, that is, it exists as a composite of physical space and language and software, a strange hybridity that I have been trying to articulate in the New Aesthetic that others have been pointing at too, in Kevin Slavin’s algotremors, in BERG’s robot-readable world, in Timo‘s beautifully compelling compilation of machine visions:

I’ve been talking about the fact that the best arrangements for our most complex spaces rely on a highly specialised cooperation between humans and intelligent agents, and the fact that the best chess is not played by computers against humans—they outstripped us long ago—but by teams of computers and humans.

Twenty-two of the top thirty Wikipedia editors are bots. Knowledge and literature are coded spaces too. Stuart Geiger puts this succinctly: “a non-vitalistic ethnography: an account of a culture devoid of life. Like with Latour and agency, once we show that life is not a necessary criterion for this thing called culture, then the fun really begins.”

This is why I am increasingly pro-Artificial Life. It’s why I follow bots like my good friend Tim Robinson on Twitter, and why I am distressed when Twitter’s algorithms auto-wipe a slew of them from history; if we keep erasing them, how will they ever achieve sentience? It’s why @horse_ebooks is such a delight.

But anyway.

I wanted to make the ship move, and I wanted to make it speak, and I wanted to speak back to it, with it, together. To make something.

A Ship Adrift takes the data from that weather station and applies it to an imaginary airship piloted by a lost, mad AI autopilot. The ship is drifting because the pilot is mad or the pilot is mad because the ship is drifting; it doesn’t really matter.

If the wind whips eastwards across the roof of the Southbank centre at 5mph, then the Ship Adrift floats five miles to the East. See the sharp tack the Ship made on the night of the 27th / 28th January? That’s the weather turning; the next day, we froze in London; a few days later, snow. (I like the fact that, after slipping its moorings, the ship made hard for Poland, Conrad’s homeland. Once there, it could go anywhere.)

As the Ship drifts, it looks around itself. It doesn’t know where it is, but it is listening. It’s listening out for tweets and foursquare check-ins and posts on dating sites and geotagged Wikipedia articles and it is remembering them and it is trying to make something out of them. It is trying to understand.

The ship is lost, and I don’t know where it’s going. I don’t know what it’s going to learn, but I want to work with it to tell some stories. I want to build a system for cooperating with software and chance. There is no what or why or where or when. We’ve got all year. At least.

You can follow along at shipadrift.com, via Twitter or RSS, if you like.

… in belarus in belarus …

… I am lost …

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.