Underground dreams

Three years ago, I wrote about how delighted I was to read about the discovery of a mysterious cinema, built by persons unknown in the catacombs of Paris.

In the same spirit, let me just pay a hat-tip to the visionaries who – completely illegally – constructed a vast complex of underground temples in the Italian Alps…

Surrounded by unseen presences

Last year I wrote a review of Margaret Chan’s book, Ritual is Theatre: Theatre is Ritual, about Chinese Spirit Mediums in Singapore. Here’s an interesting clip that I just found on YouTube:

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, probably provoked by reading William Gibson’s latest novel, and by some articles about gaming technology.

Gibson was one of the first to discuss how virtual presences might manifest themselves in the real world. In Count Zero, it was achieved through biochips physically implanted in the brain, allowing a virtual entity to possess a human (a process shown again, using a slightly different technology, in the Matrix sequels, where Agent Smith manages to leave the Matrix and take over a human body).

I ‘m not going quite that far here, but I’m wondering where we’re going with the convergence of:

• virtual communities
• customisable online avatars
• augmented reality (AR)
• ubiquitous wireless access
• unobtrusive personal/mobile computing
• omnipresence

AR and mobile computing are now pretty much ready to go. I find this French clip very interesting for several reasons:

• the computers and goggles that the people in the clip are using are pretty unobtrusive; if they walked past you in the street you wouldn’t necessarily notice anything unusual;
• the “locative art” is multi-user; they are all seeing and interacting with the same virtual objects;
• the virtual ‘life-forms’ don’t do much in this clip… but what could they do?
• the augmentation of reality isn’t confined to adding in objects and entities; it also redraws the location – for example, at the end of the clip, by redrawing the actual walls, adding in water, and so on.

The clip suggests to me that this kind of technology and experience will be mainstream soon. Probably the first steps will be to move gaming, and environments similar to Second Life out into the real world; keyboards and monitors will come to be seen as a temporary aberration.

The extension of Second Life et al into augmented reality is one element of what I find interesting here. In Second Life, I have an avatar – which could look realistic, or not. In augmented reality, I will be physically present in one place, but why should I not have one or more avatars roaming other ‘real’ places. As artists get closer to bridging the uncanny valley, my avatar could be completely realistic. It could potentially use game-style AI to model my real behaviour, even when I was not actively controlling or monitoring it. To someone else immersed in AR, it may not be possible to tell if this is the ‘real’ me without taking off the goggles.

I will also be interacting with avatars. Some will belong to people I know personally in real life. Some will be people I only know from online interaction. Some will be intelligent agents, and others will be AI-driven NPCs. This is where things get a little strange, because the motivations and abilities of all but the first group are essentially unknown. If you and I know each other only from online interactions, then we are each dealing with a construct we ourselves have developed, interpreting the information we have given each other as well as observed behaviour. I cannot know whether you are in fact a real individual. Thus, in Second Life one avatar, Wilde Cunningham, is actually controlled by a group of people; if I were to meet Wilde without knowing this, his behaviour might seem very erratic, and part of my sense-making would be to rationalize and explain variations in his speech and actions. Other, seemingly real, persons may not have any real-world person controlling them; they may be software controlled, but I still may not be able to tell without exiting AR.

This leads me to omnipresence. We’re already accustomed to this: through internet chat like MSN, Skype, Twitter, and so on, our friends are ‘always there’, to be contacted when we need them… IF we can get their attention! How is this going to work in AR? Will be call their name and see their avatar materialise before us? Will we constantly surrounded by their ghostly shapes, which only solidify as they interact with us?

Other issues involve dealing with avatars and agents who have better software, faster connections, wider knowledge, and superior connections… there are a lot of variables here.

Where this leads me is to wonder how behaviour will change once augmented behaviour becomes normal. Believers in voodoo – the metaphor used by Gibson – as well as the tang-ki mediums of the Singaporean Daoists, all believe that we are surrounded by unseen enitities who can be called upon. Some are friendly, some are not; some are predictable, some are not; some are powerful, some are not.

Do these traditional beliefs give us behavioral patterns, metaphors, and tools that we can draw upon as we design systems from e-commerce to e-learning, or social and gaming systems? Will we find that people tend to default to this kind of behaviour and sense-making?

My feeling is yes. Although the pieces for widespread AR are all present today, they haven’t been put together yet. When they are, people are going to find it very strange. After all, to someone from my grandparents’ generation (of that ‘rational’ but un-computerised world), explanations from a traditional spirit medium and from an AR-enabled person, of their respective experience of the world would seem equally incredible and incomprehensible – but sharing many similarities. I suspect that as people try to cope with the very different AR world, they will look backwards for tools and concepts that help their adaptation. I also suspect that unanticipated consequences will result!

Update

This clip gives an excellent introduction; the book it’s introducing is already being advertised on the sides of buses here in Singapore:

History repeating itself

I know that the whole metaphor of “the decline of the American empire” is getting a bit overdone, but still… I’ve just been reading John Robb’s article on how the US is now recruiting tribally-based security contractors in Iraq, and it rang a bell with my memories of classical history. Doesn’t it sound rather like the late Roman practice of relying on tribal foederati?

Hair: not a frivolous issue

Next week I’ll be attending a lecture at the National University of Singapore. The speaker will be Jaron Lanier. (Singaporean writer and NSFW artist MissIzzy will be interviewing him for a local magazine, which should make interesting reading).

Consider for a moment Mr. Lanier’s record. He’s a groundbreaker in the field of virtual reality. He’s an entrepreneur. An excellent musician. An innovative social theorist. Not bad, wouldn’t you say?

Now look at his picture:

I’m aware that at many institutes of tertiary education here, it is a disciplinary offence for students to wear a baseball cap. Likewise, male students can be disciplined for having long hair. These rules are prominently displayed and, I understand, enforced. Oh: so is the ban on wearing flip-flops. This is in the interest of maintaining a “professional image”.

How likely is it that these institution will produce a Singaporean Jaron Lanier? It’s not impossible, of course; Singaporean youths are as naturally gifted, or not, as anybody else. But nature alone is rarely enough; nurture, education, and socialisation are critical. Are rules like this training students for the globalized, value-driven media-rich age? For the office cubicle? For the factory?

PS:

See also my earlier post regarding Creativity vs. Discipline.

A proper holiday…

…at last. I’m off to Thailand for a week in mid-Feb; just bought the ticket.

The soundtrack to my life

Since I don’t have anything much to write here at the moment, I’ll steal a meme from Mr Brown, and experiment with the soundtrack to the movie to my life. It’s easy to do: look at the different themes, put your iPod or iTunes on shuffle, and note down the tunes as they come up! I wanted to do this a while ago, but had to wait until I’d rescued all my old music from my ailing Powerbook. And remember – BE HONEST! No editing allowed!

• Opening Credits:
  Abie Baby/Fourscore, Hair-Original Soundtrack
  “All men are created equal”
• Waking Up:
  Agarijo, Tsuwa / Omiya . arranged by Taylor and Gordon, Ryukyu Underground
  Hmm, ok, might be a chilled-out start to the day
• First Day At School:
  Thien Mi Ti Ai, Sally, Buddha Bar Presents Flying Carpet
• Falling In Love:
  Cordero De Dios – Bulerías, Paco Peña, Misa Flamenca
• Fight song:
  Spark The Sound, Blood Is Shining, (not sure where this is from)
  Hehe, seems quite appropriate>
• Breaking Up:
  Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Thievery Corporation Feat. Gunjan, The Cosmic Game
• Prom:
  Comptine D’un Autre Été: L’après Midi, Yann Tiersen, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain
  Oooh, a bit cheesy, but OK…
• Life’s OK:
  Tande M Tande – Listen To Me, Boukman Eksperyans, Kalfou Danjere – Dangerous Crossroads
  Hmm, going off track a bit here…
• Mental breakdown:
  Tinker Of Rye (Part 2), Paul Giovanni, The Wicker Man
  … but recovering somehat here…
• Driving:
  Yizhihua, Chen Jun, Erhu Classics:
  … oops, driving to erhu music? I don’t think so!
• Flashback:
  I’r Llwyn Banadl, Aled Lloyd Davies, Gwin Hen a Newydd
  Oooh, but spookily appropriate here.
• Getting Back Together:
  Suite In Rast, Sufis, The Music Of Islam, Volume 9 – Mawlawiyah Music Of The Whirling Dervishes
  Eeerm… no.
• Wedding:
  Hello Dolly, Louis Armstrong, 100 Years Of Cinema – Soundtrack Collection (Disc 2)
• Birth of Child:
  (Lookin For) The Heart Of Saturday Night, Tom Waits, Asylum Years
  Hahahaha!
• Final Battle:
  In The Bath, Lemon Jelly, The Chillout Session (Disc 1)
  Oh noooooo! NOOOOOOOO! How less appropriate could you get????
• Death Scene:
  Das Main Ki Pyar Wichon – Lal Chand Yamla Jatt, Various Artists, 50 Glorious Yrs. Of Punjabi Music VOL 1
• Funeral Song:
  Suhe WE Cheere Waliye, Surinder Kaur & Parkash Kaur, 50 Glorious Yrs. Of Punjabi Music Vol 2
• End Credits:
  Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man, Trudy Richards, The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert
  I don’t remember ever buying this album… where did this come from????

Oh so, so true

What a wonderful sentence

I think I may have just found my favourite sentence of the month, in a Guardian Online article about keeping a journal and blogging. The article is here, and the sentence is by Jennifer Lee:

Then I began blogging when I moved to Paris in October to start clown school.

Fantastic. I love Paris, and who secretly wouldn’t like to go to clown school if they could? But to go to clown school in Paris… How wonderful!