SoftwareForAHouse
From UoWiki
A page to assemble ideas concerning a big question: in what ways can software contribute to the way people use and experience their house/room.
Currently I have my hand in 2 projects:
1- The ~Crystalpunk ~Workshop for ~Soft ~Architecture (http://socialfiction.org/crystalpunk ) which will evolve an empty room into 'unknown states of technological enhancement'. The lenght of this workshop (3/5 months) will hopefully ensure that answers will pop up as lots of cool and talented people will be invited to plug their minds into it.
2- Het Blauwe Huis (http://www.blauwehuis.org ), which is a blue house in the middle of a redeveloped area in Amsterdam that for a period of 4 years will be a art-house artist-and-their-worksplace antists-and-open-studio sort of thing. This project is set up by Jeanne van heeswijck who in Holland has build up quite a name for herself with these massive projects. The house will have habitants handpicked by Jeanne and I happen to be one of them. My 'task' is the website, which is still very dull at the moment, but I want to built applicatiosn for it in such a way that it does more than your ordinary blogging/agenda/accouncement kind a thing.
On the sideline of these practical concerns there is the further ranging wish to think about software beyond the utilitarian. One look at a code repository as freshmeat is enough to show that most coers bore themselves with endless projects that need to some work, work with capital W, xml parsers and all that. For the Blauwe Huis (the codename of the software by the way is Lapis Azuli) what people wish for are blogs and so forth, which is understandable, as that is what people know, but I want to go further. But of course am not sure whereto
A current interest in for generators: simple toys that generate names for Chinese restaurants or Hobbits and hiphopify text you feed it by replacing 'you' by 'u', for instance. They are funny in that generators make use of what every 4th rate scripter like myself can use scripting for: generating endless amounts of useles data using inbuilt replace-functions. It comes so naturally that it must be its unacknowledged best point. Just as the humans ability to guess the next digit in series like: '111...', '111222....', '1112222....' comes so naturally that it took very long to understand how important and complex this faculty really is.
For the sake of argument I like to think of rooms as sentient, and that the stress or the focus on software for buildings should be on the room and not on its users. In this text on roomology (http://socialfiction.org/psychogeography/roomology.html ) I argue that rooms are part of our intelligence. taking the argument one step further and borrowing from 100 year old psychology like the wanderings of Francis Galton, you could say that rooms are the antechamber of conciousnes, a delightful spatial metaphor. Related to this concept is the so called stream of conciousness, the always on generator. Software should tap into it.
Recently I was playing with the Marsrobot software developed by the JPR, which is also the real software the NASA use right their on your desktop. You can download the latest data harvested by the actual rover on Mars and then instruct a routine for the robot to navigate in it. Because of the interface being really crappy the sense how much technology (from Copernicus to Newton to Space program to universe wide communications) behind it all is easy to forget. I am not eve sure what you are exploring: mars? a dataset? the limits of your belief of what you see? Would it not be cool to develop software (and a data format) which would allow navigating in virtual the antechambers of conciousness? Instead of reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf you would drive though them in your SUV of the mind.
In my own rethoric and elsewhere too, the internet is often though of as a layer. This is an understandable but essentially misleading image that I need to kill within myself. wi-fi perhaps is alayer, but the actual content is always otherworldly: always on-screen. slowly perhaps internet will conenct to robots and walls and doors etc. But I suspect this to make internet invisible just as electricty is. A webpage, an application is always on a device and so always localised and not a layer. This is an distinction that needs to be made.
I want to built my own stuff diferent: take a parser. They are cool for some reasons, but they annoy me in that they build a tree out of a flat string. But one token can be ambigious about where it belongs in the tree. There are 2 ways to describe teh world: as a tree and as the ocean. The latter of course refers to teh ancient greek notion that you never set your foot twice in the same ocean. The novel too went through a transformation: from victorian novel with structure like a gothic church to the streams of woolf (one of here novels is called "The Waves" for a reason. The ocean of cours eis teh bigegst natural generator.
Transformational grammers: another word that seem to spell out material from which to make stuff. All this is language based. I don't know if other coders feel like this but for me code is about the language first and about the application second. That is to say that it is an end in itself. But contradicting myself it is also a medium which can do more than editing read/write options and copying data from here to there or some such stuff. I expect my language to have solved this for me. The idea of transfomational grammers is thought provoking because it turn things into something else, but possibly losing the ability to turn it back without flaws.
Perhaps websites can be otherworlds, but never cold you bring them along with you so easily. Social software thrives on the fact that with wi-fi social interaction does never has to stop. People work and IRC at the same time. But more importantly: software mediated social interaction is very real and people talk about themselves with people unknown they would never otherwise do. Software allows to connect with object and persons not here in way that is programmable as radio and television either never had or in any case hasn't.
Software for a room, could connect rooms which aren't there. So when there is a blue house in amsterdam while Jeanne has het studio in rotetrdam, she can walk from the one inside the other when they would exist as antechambers online.
