1. Some notes on experimenting with the economics

    November 09, 2008

    A few weeks ago, we launched the &AMP, Ampersand Make Production, a project in which people are supporting the production of cultural products.


    This is an experiment in the economics of production. Our first issue is a poster and a text: AMP001. The content is clearly influenced by the practice we developped to maintain and develop R-Echos (http://r-echos.net) and we called the issue “R-Echos issue 1”.

    * Recently Charlotte from Manystuff asked us to give more details about the ideas around &AMP - below I’m translating in english our answer to her request:

    Financing and the notion of Crowd Sourcing
    Instead of using a single source of finance, grant or sponsoring -we are seeking to establish a principle of distributed funding, like a p2p network. This principle is applied as well to the distribution since each share-holder/participant own a certain percentage of the real thing produced, and each of them is able to decide individually or collectivelly of the future of his or her share of the production.
    A series of economic experiments
    This project is for us a laboratory. The poster and the text of AMP001 (the first issue) are a first test tube. We are just starting to be able to draw early conclusions, it is for us a little bit like a reduced scale LHC: we are launching something and looking at the results depending on the parameters of the launch.
    An extension of R-echos (http://r-echos.net)
    R-Echos is a website, a selection of whatever we find, see, read and collect online, it is our daily best picks; it is a reblog that we have been maintaining for some years now. The poster of this first issue shows tangible objects that belongs to our every day life ans surround us: things on our desks, books in the shelves, visuals references that inspired us for some reasons - we consider those objects as being the sources of the project we develop and realise (like in programmation); we really consider R-Echos like being one of the source-code of Electronest.

    french version:
    le financement et la notion de crowd sourcing
    au lieu de s’en remettre à une seule source de financement, ou à un principe de sponsoring - nous cherchons à mettre en place un financement distribuée comme un réseau p2p. Ce principe s’applique également à la distribution, puisque chaque Share Holder possede un certain pourcentage de notre production et est en mesure de decider individuellement (ou cellectiveemnt) du futur de sa part de la production.
    une serie d’expériences économiques
    ce projet est un laboratoire pour nous. Le poster et le texte de AMP001, c’est une première éprouvette. On commence tout juste à pouvoir tirer des conclusions. c’est un peu comme un micro-LHC pour nous: on lance un truc, et on regarde ce que ça produit en fonction des paramètres de lancement
    une extension de R-Echos — http://r-echos.net
    R-Echos est un site internet, une sélection de ce que l’on lis/trouve online, nos “best picks” quotidien; c’est un reblog que l’on fait depuis quelques années déjà. Ce poster contient les objets qui nos entourent et nous inspirent — c’est un peu comme un code-source des choses que l’on fait, on considère le site de R-Echos comme étant un des codes-source de Electronest.

    * Here is also a short text I put on the facebook group a little while ago, it links the ideas of &AMP and the ones of etoy.SHARE:

    obviously, there’s some sort of inspiration taken from etoy.SHARE.
    In the & Make Production project, shares are project based and they determine if the project is interesting enough to make it to the production step. if not shareholders will be able to decide how they want the money to be used: refund, re-investment in the next publication or in the structure itself, etc.
    Shareholders are sharing the destiny of the project which we don’t control anymore.



  2. An experiment in the economics of production

    July 24, 2008

    An experiment in the economics of production: how can we shift focus from consumption of a finished product to investment in the processes of design, print & production?

    R-Echos issue 1 - AMP001

    This is a poster and a text: an analog R-Echos
    Would you be interested in investing in the tangible production of this work?

    1. You can download the digital archive
    and decide wether or not you’re interested in particpating in this project.
    2. Each participant donate a minimum of £8
    3. The publication is produced
    4. We share the publications
    which means each participant own a fair amount of publications and participants decide (collectively or individually) what to do with it.


    minimum £8



  3. Autopilot - frequencies

    July 02, 2008

    autopilot-Picture 1.png

    Book is out of print, PDF is available from http://www.carstennicolai.com/



  4. Ghost object

    June 22, 2008


    Amandine’s Sun Glasses, originally uploaded by jrgd.



  5. Analog color selection, tangible interface and live performance

    February 03, 2008

    colors-collection.png

    Today I helped Amandine to take some pictures in London Field for her work - at some point I asked her to take a picture with my hand, in front of it, selecting an object’s colour: this was a proper analog color selection. (The setup was for one of her work which should be published on her sketchbook this week)

    stuff-rainbow_1.jpg

    I would like to use this pink, please.

    Delicious Library let’s you scan your books’ barcodes to generate your collection (it gets the isbn out of it, and from the isbn, the software grabs the title and cover from the internet), using simply the iSight of your Mac.

    A bit in the same fashion, we could select a color by simply showing it to the computer. Clic! ColorBooth would let you then finetune the hue, saturation and brightness…

    delicious-library.png

    Somehow this idea of tangible interface is related with this video from Bob Dylan filmed by Pennebaker in 1965 where the text is displayed by the main characters of the music video story; the storytelling is essentially textual and I like it a lot. (thanks Patrick for the link)
    [youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=PedxiosPF8U]

    minorityreport.png

    Even when we first saw the movie Minority Report, the idea of having tangible interface was nothing new. Nonetheless this idea excited my mind quite recently, especially since I saw the various hacks and experiments using a wii controler - one of those is by Johnny Lee, in the video below he explain you how to track your fingers in the same fashion as Minority Report.

    [youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=0awjPUkBXOU]

    Another one, in a TED talk, by Jeff Han who shows a high-resolution multi-touch computer screen and the various new interactions modalities ipod/iphone like.

    touchscreen.png

    A few weeks ago, I have been invited by Maki to a talk he and Kajsa were organising at RCA for their student of visual communication. The talk was by Aurélien Froment, he was presenting a live film project - so it was like a performance. A bit like a scenario mixed with a storyboard, projected live in front of the audience amongst which Aurélien was sitting.

    aurelien_froment-setup.jpg

    The setup was quite simple: from the ceiling a hung camera was filming Aurélien’s desk where the show was taking place.

    [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFd_bOjFgZg]

    Here is a picture of the desk after the performance with all the elements of the film’s project :

    aurelien_froment_desk.jpg

    He then showed a film he realised: a magician selecting images from a collection, playing around with them, in the same fashion as the Minority Report movie.
    Meeting Aurélien was quite exciting since his work and what he shown at RCA this afternoon was really close from questions and pieces I have been developping for sometimes now.



  6. Fashion Design, Rock the Casbah and Ecosonic Ensemble.

    January 04, 2008

    The picture of Barbara’s trousers has been taken on the way back from the concert ‘Ecosonic ensemble with Ouija Board’ where she invited us on Saturday - it was a the Union Chapel, in Islington, an amazing place:

    UNIONCHAPEL-stage-tryptch.jpg
    We were at the Union Chapel, a beautiful and old church - http://www.unionchapel.org.uk/ they are using the rent of concert space to refurbish the architecture.

    Ecosonic Ensemble with Ouija Board
    Baroque Flutes: Stephen Preston, Eva Caballero
    Ouija Board: Peter Coyte, Matt Cargill
    Cellos: Thomas Gardner, Laura Reid

    After the concert, walking to a pub to get some food for our thoughts, Amandine was saying to Barbara she really liked her trousers: short legs but huge top part which reminded us of some trousers one can see in Egypt - since it was a Tartan we spoke about the Clash’s cover of ‘Rock the Casba’ by the algerian rocker Rachid Taha:

    [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DbFYsi9iSg 350 300]

    I like also form him the ‘Voilà voilà que ça recommence’As a strange reminiscence, Barbara’s trousers made me think about what I felt during the concert, however neither the Tartan pattern or Rachid Taha has anything to do with the concert we just saw (at least not that I know) - it’s nice to have different kind of music suddenly related trough a bit of fashion design:

    It’s a kind of trousers one could define as being a closed long skirt. With a minimum use of means, the Tartan fabric is enclosing the leg just above the ankle. The fabric then moves in a somehow nice transfixing movement: and you suddenly find yourself thinking what is this that she wears: a skirt? a trousers?

    reduced-15122007(006).jpg
    The ‘Rock The Casba’ trousers has been bought at Comme des Garçons, and it has been designed by Rei Kawakubo.

    In a way, like for the trousers, the stage design used a minimum of means (if not, none at all) - something a bit like a DorkBot in a disaffected London east end warehouse.
    On stage there was 4 chairs and an orange structure with 4 vertical legs partially covered with a white piece of fabric, with 3 metal boxes on the side, one with a computer on top of it; there was also the microphone of the performers, and a few instruments: 2 violoncellos and 2 flutes, a bright light was on top of the stage, a couple of cables were lying on the floor, 6 performers catched our attention and hears for the next hours or so.
    So far, it looks quite familliar to me: ‘you plug, you hack, it works’ is my moto since a few years now.

    There was 4 improvised acts; the first one saw all the 4 instruments playing together and 2 guys in the back moving their hands over the white piece of fabrics, triggering noisy loops from the computer. the remaining acts were based on couple of instruments. Those couple were articulating in the manner of a discussion like in a lot of improvisation performance. Those instrumental discussions allowed the public to be maybe a bit more aware of how the classical instruments were interacting with the ‘table’ and the mesmerising flow of hands on top of it: the instruments were recorded live on the stage and the records were then used as sample or loops, played by the hands like on an invisible keyboard. The performance was all made of recorded loops, a re-temporisation of the music just performed on stage.

    On the stage design side: instrumentalists are facing the audience, they play in front of. In the background, the table with one or two performers focusing on the table top. When an instrumentalists finished to play its bit she or he looked at the table - in a manner of saying: ‘it’s your turn now’ - and maybe this was a bit too demonstrative of the process: to show how the ‘things’ were actually working was clearly didactic.

    hand-shadow-C010-5.jpg
    image via: Project Gutenberg’s Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall, by Henry Bursill

    The electro acoustique performance was relying heavily on the Reacting Table Top - the ‘Ouija Board’. The light on top of the stage was projecting shadow of the hands on the top of the table: a piece of white fabric hang by a structure of 4 feet. Underneath: a camera, filming the shadows. The shadows are then transcripted into music trough the use of the computer which is recording the music. The computer use MaxMSP to translate the hand position into a ‘push a button action’

    enfants-du-paradis.jpg

    The movement of the hands over the table top reminded me of this film I recently watched Les Enfants du Paradis written by Jacques Prévert and filmed by Marcel Carmé - which narrates the love affairs of Baptiste a pantomime (a theater mime) in Paris back in the 1820s or 1830s.
    Those handled performance were implicating both performative and demonstrative aspects. Performative in its relationship with the dancer, Demonstrative in its relationship with actor (transmitting a meaning like a pantomime)

    This ‘Ouija Board’ made me think of an instrument made of a hollowed instrument - here but not here, made of its own absence.
    My e65 camera phone is really bad at taking any kind fo picture; nonetheless the over exposed zone (the aura on the picture) is actually the place where the hollowed and somehow magical instrument was situated

    electroconcert_15122007(004).jpg

    After discussing with the composer at the end of the performance i had the confirmation that nothing on stage was in anyway designed - which it happens I quite like - much more than if it would have been.

    I like this design principle: designing something without designing it actually, letting things happen and reacting upon discussions and new discoveries - it is a little bit the same process Åbäke and us used to work on the Kitsuné website or on the Digitalism’s ‘Idealistic’ cover - but I keep the Dome story for a bit later…



  7. I wish this ceiling would be connected to parameters.

    November 27, 2007

    light_13-09-07_0958.jpg
    I wish this ceiling would be connected to parameters.

    I am sure you know already about the Nabaztag.

    This device reacts to information, it acts as a tangible filters to information flows on your network and transform them into a audio or visual signal, diffused into your real world - allowing you to go away from the computer to focus on your ‘analog’ things and come back only when this very email you were waiting for has arrived: you are alerted by the bunny on your desk.

    To be honnest: this little rabbit that talks to me or glow in the dark… it just makes me feel stupid. To me it’s not really something I would like to have to interact with. It really feels like being in Disneyland - except it’s at my home, on my desk… sounds like a nightmare!

    But, despite my reluctance I have to recognise I am completely amazed by the gigantic potentials of the brand new applications which arise with intelligent objects.

    On the other hand we could imagine subtle yet meaningful modification of our direct environment, (light coloring or dimming, for example) depending on alteration of our electronic presence. Design and culture to the rescue if I could say so: in fact, I just saw a few pictures from the exhibition of lamp by Ingo Maurer on lightscapes on http://maxspace.funporium.com/ which inspired me to share these reflections.

    One of the first thing which came to my mind is the LightHives project by Alex Haw (another Bunkerer), even if Light Hive goes more about surveillance and community, while those application I’m referring to are more attached to the personal sphere and are a private representation - both share the basic principle of an abstract representation of a live activity

    I wrote a bit about electronic presence and digital objects a little while ago on my personnal hub - but not as much as I talk about those topic everyday when working at Electronest; we should definitely write more about the ideas, concepts and projects that emerged since we started those discussions with Pierre.

    Refering to electronic presence and digital objects is all about expanding conceptual boundaries and design process:

    using terms like ‘electronic presence’ or ‘digital objects’ which are going beyond the simple scope of the web page design. The term ‘electronic presence’ does not only refer to an url with fancy images and well designed logotypes. ‘Electronic presence’ is closer to a global attitude towards digital mediums and cultures embrassing from the simple home page to the electronic installation (tangible computing) through customized content managment systems, home made software, generative application, etc.
    An essential curiosity glues all the separates aspects of a digital communication together and supports the communication expertise background. A website can be an extension or a representation of an activity in real life.

    Lights or simple lamps could then be connected to the local network, and represent events that otherwise coul go unnoticed. It could be a violent reminder, or simple and discreet light dimming. By using light reflection on color, we could use the ceiling as a silent echo of what is happening on the other side of the screen.


    LED Benches
    Ingo Maurer, 2002
    Glass, LEDs.



    LED Wallpaper
    Ingo Maurer, 2007
    Plastic film with conductive circuits, LEDs.

    note: People behind the Nabaztag seems to be more clever than the aesthetic and culture their rabbit promotes; they have a Nabaztag API. Maybe I just should remove the plastic shell of that hideous thing and play with it a little bit…

    edit: roof is the outdoor bit, ceiling the interior one - well well…



  8. ninten-do - (memory)

    May 27, 2006

    a simple stool connected to a nintendo nes to play with tetris.



  9. rd - rc - cr (memory)

    May 27, 2006

    radio remote controlled car. a remote controlled tiny car is controlled by the Voice of America, a propaganda radio streamed over the net, by the american governement.

    the process use a voice recognition software (embedded in all macintosh) to generate the parameters to drive the tiny rc car.



  10. mass media unit (memory)

    March 28, 2006
    MMD contains a screen, loudspeaker, stroboscope, 2 gaz bottles (one filled with N2O, the other with oxygen) The differents parts of the MMD are activated by the presence and the frequency of words Each word is displayed on the screen during a very short time (eye memory, flicking effect), a sound marks each second creating the base rythm, another sound is played for each displayed word. the stroboscope is activated depending on certain words. the gaz will be diffused more or less fast inside the helmet The MMD has also a camera which will display on an external monitor the head of the user, and 4 tiltswitch giving the user the ability to go faster or slower. After a certain period of time, the MMD will stop itself.



  11. alice in switzerland

    March 28, 2006
    IMG_6264.JPG