ParisTalk
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17-02-2005, Theo van Doesburg house, Paris, talk by socialfiction.org
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[edit] talk notes
[edit] computation and what we understand as computers are 2 distinct things
GAME OF LIFE, 1970; Conway executed the rules on a table with fiches, often the game would become too extensive for the table and continue on the floor, this was painstaking and errorprone but he found using a computer beside the point.
- f course the computer made the process much more efficient and turned the game into a hackers icon, a piece of culture, the elvis of software
Eric Raymond proposed the Glider as hacker-logo: http://www.catb.org/~esr/hacker-emblem/
the Game of Life can on principle be programmed into a fully functional computer, THUS also the game played by hand can be made to function as fully functional computer
double functionality, space and computation: cathedral of Pienza http://web.tiscali.it/casapoliziano/pienza.jpg
algorithmic walking: http://socialfiction.org/dotwalk
programming for cities: http://socialfiction.org/ProgCities.html
[edit] programming as social engineering
a complete algorithmic machine can express everything that can be formalised as a set of rules.
AI: does that include emotions? if we are in the end nothing but machines the answer is in theory yes
in practice AI has showed how little we understand of our selves,
ELIZA, software is convincing because it adds a story, a context to understand it, to make up for stupidness of the software
http://socialfiction.org/BOTWRITER.html
a good story is more important than technical skill
people will find meaning in randomness
you can do something in 10 lines of code or in 100, if it does the same only boring nerds care. code and realtime are in this sense unrelated
SHRUDLU is still the bomb http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/ http://www.semaphorecorp.com/misc/shrdlu.html
interfacing to software in natural language (PLANNER allowed geologists to talk to a sonde on the moon) is still near impossible, embedding a scripting language would be better, or least prove less frustrating in the long run.
In Shrudlu objects on screen, the way you adress them in natural language and their data representation inside the software are one and the same
the distinction between computers and architecture, the clear line between the real and the virtual are diminishing
wireless internet becomes a standard like running water, every device, even plants, can be connected to the internet http://swamp.nu/work/spore/spore.html
internet0: http://cba.mit.edu/projects/I0/
your wall could be bio-inspired computing tissue: http://www.teuscher-research.ch/download/christof/papers/teuscher01_ipcat01.pdf
software for buildings, you buy a house and get a domain-name with your adress with it, you can use this for as long as you are in the house. http://automatedbuildings.com/
http://x2.i-dat.org/~mp/pdf/Acadia.pdf
fysical space is represented as data on the web, infrastructure-technologies like XML allow you to make this raw data public available, RDF turns XML in to a textual graph, allowing for automatic pattern recognition/data mining of this data. earthquake feed: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/rss.html seismographic data can be correlated to geography or to time, the data doenst care,
semantic city, Jo Walsh will one day be recognised a pioneer: http://frot.org/bus/wiki.cgi?node=SemanticCity
you can walk through a website; each page can represent a room, changes in the room can change the page in real-time, users of the website located elsewhere can manipulate the room
Machine vision, sensing, etc http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/BOOKS/BANDB/toc.htm http://wwwradig.in.tum.de/people/wimmerm/se/
[edit] Smart spaces: the bore of the refrigerator who orders your milk
design for hackability, instead op willing to make the ultimate tool (internet explorer), allow easy extension by others (firefox) http://roachfiend.com/
trend: less large software doing a lot of things a little bit, more small programms doing one thing very well, the point becomes to make seperate applications communicate with each other. XML (and RDF on top of this) are most likely to become the standard.
These are no languages but agreements on sharing data/resources http://earthquake.usgs.gov/recenteqsww/catalogs/eqs7day-M5.xml FOAF, PML, Locative package, GeoUrl, BlogMapper, History markup languages etc etc.
RDF is not at all easy though: http://www.w3.org/RDF/ as a non-programmer I never the less fell in love with the beauty of the concept.
reasoning engines, can logic be popular culture? can taxonomies be popular culture? http://socialfiction.org/taxonomy_room.gif
http://www.patternlanguage.com/archives/alexander1.htm
knowledge management became less important than pattern recognition, seeing faces in clouds http://socialfiction.org/clouds.html
language is a powervector determining your professional scope, standards are important in a world needing to communicate across geographical and cultural borders. esperanto tried, now default is English, XML on the internet self-invented languages: Little language for a room, Landscape expression
formal languages can parse each other: html/xml are generated at the end of the computational process
[edit] My Punk Theory of Scripting:
a perhaps slighly optimistic perception of its history. but punk wiped clean the slate, put away the at that time prevailing culture of technical superiority, the distinction between specialists and audience. punk started with noise, but slowly music emerged from it when control over intruments grew, music that was personal. punk as self-education, slipping into various fields like living, art, theory.
code is like an intrument anybody can use, little skill can still produce great software. you do not need to be able to read scored music to be a fine punkrocker, you do not need to know math to program but it can help
psychogeography: self defined geographies cutup maps http://www.notbored.org/naked-city.gif collaborative perception, software in the act aiding our preception (face recognition of clouds)
Florian Cramer: software cannot be understand by code alone. it is a culture.
