Colin Ellard - You Are Here

I'm not letting go of my book

I'm really trying not to obsess too much on the imminent release of my first book, but it's an odd feeling to understand that a set of thoughts and ideas you've spent so long with is about to be frozen in time, stamped onto paper and sent out into the world.  I know there's nothing new and noteworthy about these feelings - it's all been said before.

But here's something fresher.  With the help of some tech-savvy friends and a fantastic electronic marketing guru at HarperCollins named Cory Beatty, I think I may have come up with a way to never have to completely let go of my book.  Details are still coming together (but doing so very nicely I think), but the most important part of it is that if you buy my book, or even pick it up in the store to have a look, you'll discover that it contains a somewhat cryptic link to me.  If you happen to have a cellphone with a camera, you'll be able to point it at my book, the physical thing, the dead lump of paper and ink, and make instantaneous contact with me.  It's honestly not that complicated an idea, but it still seems like magic to me and I'm still working through all of the implications.

If you read this blog, you know that there's open commenting and that if you decide to chime in and say something to me then you can do so.  It doesn't happen very often, but the opportunity is always there.  But you also know that there's a funny sense in which this blog doesn't really exist anywhere.  You can call it up to your screen as a bunch of electrons whenever you like, and then you can make it vanish just as quickly. 

A book is a different kind of object.  When this thing goes out, there will be lots of identical copies of my words that will (I hope!) land in all sorts of wondrous places.  Some will sit on nightside tables.  Some will travel on buses and trains.  Some will be used to prop up unsteady legs of rickety tables.  The big difference is that there will be no way to click on a button and make these books disappear in a flash (though a few may end up tossed into fires -- maybe during wet camping trips in Algonquin park when the kindling runs low).  I don't know why this fascinates me more than the fact that I never really know who is reading my online words at any point in time (though I do have a few tools to track this).  Somehow, though, the physical book makes a more intimate connection to me, perhaps only because it is more difficult to bring into and to remove from existence.  So given that feeling of intimate connection between me and these physical copies of my thoughts, I'm tickled to death to think that each copy contains (on its back), a special little Shazam code that can be used to call the mothership.  If you use the code, you and I will be connected.  You can talk to me if you want to.  Or just listen.  Or maybe even win some kind of a prize.

Annotating space with augmented reality

Following my discovery of QR tags, I'm continuing to wander down the road of bleeding edge technological developments that will influence not only the way that we find our way through space but also how we connect with locations and the things that they contain.  With the advent of cheap and accurate GPS and accelerometry and the continued development of sophisticated mobile computing for the everyday user, the possibilities are quite staggering.  As if I wasn't excited enough yesterday by the development of an entire store full of QR tagged merchandise related to my forthcoming book, I now discover the remarkable Enkin:

Enkin from Enkin on Vimeo.

Imagine it. You're out on the street in a new city, hopelessly lost. Pull out your camera phone and point it at the closest building. The fun here would be that not only could the device tell you where you are (which a simple GPS device could already handle easily), but it could be used to provide annotation. A simple application would be something like a cyber-walking tour, but much more fun could be had by embedding something like this within an extended augmented reality game. Location-based games are already nicely underway in some quarters, but this seems like a way to jack up the graphics content of such games to make a more compelling hybrid of the real and the virtual.

Cyber-geotagging

Plans for some fun activities connected with the launch of my book are now beginning to ramp up, so I've been spending a fair bit of my time this week poking my nose into some new (to me) tech areas.  I've been looking for excuses to spend time with the avalanche of new interest and applications relating to geo-tagging and GPS for some time now, and my chance, happily has come.  I've even managed to astonish some of my tech-savvy children with my new found expertise-- something that doesn't happen every day.

Much more to come on this in the days ahead, but my most interesting find of the day has been the QR code.  Somewhere in the back closets of my muddled brain, I knew about these things, but I had no idea that they were a. so easy to generate, b. so easy to read, and c. so potentially powerful as a means of connecting real places to the cyberlandscape.  So here's a quick primer:

1.  If you have a camera phone with a web browser, start by going here

www.i-nigma.mobi

to download a nifty piece of software that will allow you to read QR codes.  Test by reading this:

Just run the software, point your camera at this image, and amaze your friends.  If you'd like to generate your own QR codes, it's just as easy.  Go here:

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/

Can you see how much fun could be had with this?  For some reason this simple technology for joining the mobile web to real world objects seems uncommon here, yet is more widely used in other parts of the world.

Many thanks to my friend Richard, who is leading me, not so much kicking and screaming, into cool new hardware and software territory these days. 

 

Following the breath, virtually

I'm still waiting for my neural activator thingie from OCZ (I could really use it today --the coffee isn't working) and still thinking about novel ways of interacting with space via technology.  Here's one that I'd really like to try.  A breathing interface.  One floats through a beautiful virtual environment on movements guided by the breath.   It reminds me of a hard year I spent training in some Vipassana techniques I was trying to learn with a local Buddhist group.  There, the idea was more to use the breath as an instrument of calming though rather than as a navigational device.  However, the primal instruction was always to "follow the breath."  I wonder what kinds of interesting mental spaces we'll find as these new technologies make brain and machine connect in new ways.

The future of reading

The chatter is increasing about the influence of new technologies on the basics of how we read and otherwise parse information.  This article, justifiably, is receiving a lot of attention.  The premise is that our exposure to Internet technologies, and the alternative methods they give us for gathering information, may actually be changing the structure of human cognition, giving us what Cory Doctorow called an "outboard brain."  Now, the New York Times is chiming in with an in-depth series on the future of reading beginning with an article written by Motoko Rich (free registration with NY Times required to read this) and published this past weekend.

There are many important issues to be worked out here, and the articles linked above serve as a pretty good primer for some of them.  As an educator and a scholar, I find much to like in the recent exponential rise in the availability of good quality information in digital form.  In some ways, my job has become much easier.   In the past few years, the direction of my research has undergone a radical shift -- I've had to try to imbibe entirely new areas of knowledge in a dizzyingly short period of time.  I know there are gaping holes in my knowledge base, but I also know how to fill them quickly and efficiently from my desktop (which can be anywhere ranging from my office at the university to my backyard Muskoka chair to (much to the disgust of my little son and boon companion in "bear country") a twinkling smart phone beside a campfire.  As the Times article points out, with the loss of the careful editorial control of content that happens in the chaotic Internet, we've learned to rely on the rules of swarm intelligence to assess the patency of what we read.  Wikipedia, for all of its warts and wrinkles, seems to me to be right more often than it is wrong.  When 10 different websites say much the same thing, one can be ever so slightly more confident that one is at least circling the neighbourhood of a "fact".

One of the main criticisms of the Internet Information Age has to do with its potential to erode our span of attention and this, to me, seems like a more serious concern.  I had a short e-chat with a textbook editor friend of mine last week about this, and she felt that it had become more difficult for her to immerse herself deeply in text.  I feel the same tug of resistance to this kind of immersion myself.  When I read a novel, I often do so with a notebook computer close at hand so that I can both write notes to myself and check facts or follow up on random ideas, as I read.  I can't remember the last time I became so immersed in a book that I lost track of space and time, yet I know this used to happen to me on a regular basis.

On the weekend, Karen and I visited the Stratford Festival to take in a production of Taming of the Shrew.  When we heard that the running time was just shy of three hours, we both blanched a bit, yet this is not the least bit unusual for a Shakespeare production.  Looking around the half-filled auditorium, it was hard not to notice that the demographic spectrum of the audience tilted toward the aged, in spite of the aggressive marketing of the festival designed to bring under-18s into the auditorium.  Is full scale live theatre also a victim of the electronic age?  As I sat through what turned out to be a pretty solid production of an interesting play, I found myself struggling to maintain attention at times.  This never used to happen to me.

The night after our theatre expedition, I sat in our large family room and looked around at all of us--together in the same room yet each in their own space.  Only my four year old son lay on the floor immersed in a book (well, an Archie comic still counts....).  The rest of us stared at screens.  I tried an experiment.  I pulled a copy of Oliver Twist from the shelf (significantly, purchased at least five years ago and yet unopened until Saturday) and began to read aloud.  Soon, I had a litter of children at my feet (Karen too), lying on the carpet each with one ear facing me.  After a couple of chapters, I stopped, fearing that everyone was asleep.  One little head popped up, and then another.  My teenaged daughter, Jessica, asked "Can we read more tomorrow, Dad?"  It might not happen--we might not get through the whole book any time soon--but it was great to think that it might be possible.

Vacation

It's been a very exciting week for me.  Not only did I catch the first glimpse of what will probably be the cover of my forthcoming book, but I had a chance to try my hand at making a video trailer for the book.  This was something entirely new for me.  I've been a reluctant feature in home movies, but I've never had to try to to project any kind of message using video images.  Like any beginner doing this, I learned all kinds of hard lessons about myself.  I talked too fast.  I dropped my volume at the end of sentences sometimes.  I don't swing my arms very much when I walk, which looks weird (my wife, at breakfast this morning, almost spewed her coffee in amusement at the idea that I hadn't really known this before this week).  What was most interesting, though, was having a chance to see myself from the outside.

Just after I earned my PhD, a dear friend of mine gave me a book:  The Personality Surgeon, by Colin Wilson.  I have no idea how she chose this particular book for me and didn't have a chance to ask her, but I've probably wondered more about this gift over the years than almost any other that I've ever received.  From my current perspective, it seems like a remarkable act of prescience.  The premise of the book is that a psychiatrist stumbles upon the idea that if we could only see ourselves as others see us, many personality problems would be solved.  This basic idea is spun off in classic Wilson style by the introduction of the idea that if we see ourselves as we're not, perhaps our personalities can be changed.

I'm not sure whether seeing my hulking presence on a screen will turn me into a new man (I suspect not), but Wilson's idea, and my own thoughts about embodiment, have a kind of resonance.  How much of what we are depends on having that third person point of view concealed from us?  And when we look on, as we do when we see video images of ourselves or avatars representing ourselves in virtual reality, how does that change who we are? 

Much of our understanding of ourselves must come from feedback from the outside world.  I know I've hurt your feelings when I see you cry.  I know I've pressed the elevator button when I see it light up.  Turning a mirror on ourselves using any number of different space-shifting technologies changes those feedback loops in all kinds of interesting ways.

I'm going on vacation for a few days -- going to take in some nature scenery at a campground.  I have an idea which book I'll take with me.

Wayfinding games

I had an email today from a clever young student asking me if I knew about the impending release of this parkour inspired game.  My answer, happily, was "yes" because I follow the Space and Culture blog (where I must once again applaud the noticeable uptick in great content on this site -- thoroughly recommended for those with an interest in, well space, culture, planning and design).  But it made me reflect again on how the times are full of playful interest in space both physical and virtual.  Not only will Mirror's Edge be a hit but so is Portal, a game in which it's possible to warp one's way through walls and floors by throwing down self-made openings between spaces, defying both Euclid and Newton.

The other side of the spatial divide, where we use technological aids like GPS to help us use real space in a playful way is also full of promise.  I like this idea, for example.  I suspect there is no end of clever ways to use this kind of gear both to help us reflect playfully and creatively on what space means to us, but perhaps also to get us off our bums and into the thick of the real stuff.  Time to buy a new computer.  And a new pair of running shoes.

Reaching for nothing

I had a great chance to experience some uniquely local high culture last night at the world premiere of Reaching For Nothing: Water's Thirst, a brilliant multimedia piece by composer Peter Hatch and architect Dereck Revington (who, incidentally, designed the much-discussed brilliant aural suicide-barrier at the Bloor Street Viaduct in Toronto).  I'm not a reviewer, per se, so I'll leave that angle to the professionals (at least in pre-review format).  This was an event that both because of the local talent and because of the venue -- Waterloo's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics -- worked as a marvelous piece of site-specific art.

My fantastic experience at this event perhaps attests to the truth that a performance works best when the observer becomes personally immersed in the presentation.  On a physical level, the set was explicitly designed to encourage such immersion.  Sound sources, both live and electronic, were dispersed throughout the small hall -- which seemed a perfect venue for this piece.  Through clever use of lighting, drapes, and a wee bit of dry ice, visual sources were similarly dispersed through the room at times, enhancing one's feeling of being inside the performance and sharing in it at a more intimate level than that of the viewer. I think I first noticed this when I discovered that the sounds of my own breathing were at first a distraction to me -- yes, it was just this quiet in the hall full of rapt attendees -- but then somehow joined on to the performance to serve as yet one more reminder that I was not on the outside peeking in at something, but rather was an integral part of it.

The performance itself was an extensive meditation on space and time so again a perfect fit for a physics institute and also close to my own intellectual leanings.  Lately, I've spent much time thinking about some of the connections between the two domains.  We use space and time interchangeably sometimes, in trying to understand our own place and impact on the planet.  My own favourite and slightly daffy example of this is the time that I once asked a street person for directions and his response was to wave his arm in the correct compass direction and to grunt "It's about two cigarettes from here."  More fundamentally than this, though, I've wondered how our generally weak grasp of the geometry of the connections between places might relate to our perceptions of time.  I have a colleague who has shown that brain-injured people who suffer from a syndrome referred to as "neglect" in which they act as though the space on one side of their body is missing also have inabilities to estimate time accurately.  Like many people, I have a disturbingly good grasp on time of day, but become fuzzy very quickly about more remote events (did something happen last week or the week before?  Deciding on an answer to a question like this can involve some tricky mental acrobatics).  I've also wondered about the connections between the patterns of space that we find soothing and restorative -- natural settings, forests, water and the patterns of time contained in natural sounds and in certain types of music.  And also the connections between the two.  A part of the epiphany of nature that I wrote about a few days ago was my sense that in nature the sights and sounds fit together with the kind of coherence that one just doesn't find on a city sidewalk. 

Sharing a beautiful multimodal space with a group of talented performers and designers last night gave me a perfectly comfortable little cerebral nest into which I could snuggle and contemplate this interesting set of ideas and to  explore their connections as if watching a dance of waves on an ocean beach.

E-heckling

This morning I had cause to run up the aisles of the big lecture hall where I was teaching (admittedly to a smallish crowd of bleary-eyed souls who had braved the -22C temperatures and the first day of daylight savings to listen to me).  It's something I don't do enough.  In part I say that because it always makes me think of Phil Donahue, which itself brings back fond memories of high school days spent playing hookie, lying on the couch, watching the tube.  But a bigger reason is because, following the lead of a great tip given to me by my dean, I like to watch the reactions of students sitting behind laptops.  When it comes to minimizing windows, they have pretty wicked trigger fingers, sleep deprived or not.  It's something that professors have had to learn to live with (except for one lecturer of legend who climbs on a chair to unplug the wifi portal in his classroom before the beginning of each class).  I don't think it bothers us all that much.

This context made reading some of the accounts of the shenanigans at the SXSW conference all the more interesting for me tonight.  Mark Zuckerberg, wunderkind CEO of Facebook was scheduled to deliver a keynote, but the uber-technophile audience staged a kind of e-revolt, beginning with a mad bout of Twittering but then ending up the old-fashioned way with hoots and shouts.  They weren't happy with the questions that were being asked, and eventually took control of proceedings.  It seems clear that what in a conventional format might have amounted to nothing more than a dull murmur of discontent and perhaps a bit of an exodus to the coffee urn in the lobby was turned into something much more positive and productive by the priming presence of an extra layer or five of electronic communication in the room.

In another event, Meebo users expressed their boredom forcefully, electronically, and with all the maturity and wit of a gang of high school students.  The back channel chatter becomes the event, with multiple threads connecting the content of the presentation to the moods, expressions, and goofiness of the conference goers until the whole shebang becomes something like an act of swarm behaviour.  Not that this is a bad thing.  Swarm intelligence can generate some great stuff.  Look at termite mounds.  Look at great migrating flocks of Canada geese.

The potential for turning public speaking events like conference presentations, keynotes, and even humble little university lectures into something entirely different is something that interests me a lot.  It's as if we turn a physical location into the convergence zone of some kind of dynamic collaborative adventure.  I'm not even sure I understand the role of the speaker in such a setting.   The audience is the facilitator.  The "speaker" is just a kind of catalyst in an enzymatic reaction brought about by the occasion -- a space, a time, and a context mocked up by whomever happens to be in the audience and what they're thinking about on that particular day.

It would be really interesting to see more of this kind of interchange in a classroom setting.  At present, we can use things called "clickers" which can allow us to elicit simple push-button responses from an audience.  Imagine if they could give us much more than yes's and no's, abc's and 123's.  At times, the whole thing would dissolve into chaos.  But sometimes I bet things entirely new and unexpected could emerge.

One of the most interesting parts of all of this for me is that in a way it seems as though a new kind of cognition, a kind of freely floating unfocused attention would be needed to follow and understand proceedings like these. I wonder if we have it in us.

Bill Gates, technology, society and the enigma of content

I'm excited that Bill Gates is visiting Waterloo again on what promises to be his farewell tour in his Microsoft persona.  Details are sparse, but the topic of his presentation is said to be "technology and society."  I haven't always been a fan of everything that Microsoft has done (those who know me well might guffaw at my gift for understatement) but I'm pleased to see Gates turn more of his attention to broader issues in technology.  Though I think the odds are slim that I'll find a way into the small hall for a talk geared to students (and wisely so -- these are the bright kids who hold the future in their hands), the possibilities, given the topic, excite me.

I've been a part of many discussions recently which have all come to the more or less the same conclusion.  We've become a society that is expert at designing and deploying technology--gigantic screens, virtual reality, dirt cheap information processing, light speed communication of huge amounts of image and sound data.  We know how to do it in a big way, but we're still trying to figure out what to do with it.  We have the toys.  Now we need the content.

Plenty of money has been made by those with the know-how to use computer technology, but I see a future where our main concern will not be to find a way to grow economies and make lots of bucks.  We'll be busy trying to find a way to turn what our super-intelligence has wrought into a viable future for the species and the planet.  This will entail some hard thinking about exactly what we are as a species, what forms our minds take, and how we can tap into our biologies with new technologies to make the world a place again.

I've written here before about how technology might be used to help our minds connect fragmented spaces, to help us see how we're connected to the wider effects of our actions, and I'm hoping that what Gates will have to say will light some similar sparks in a room full of very smart 20-something students.

What we need out of technology is a new set of tools for rethinking ourselves as an integral part of a planet we need to protect, rather than as some kind of boxed-off Wunderkind outlier set apart from the rest of the cosmos.  I think the kind of information technology that Gates has helped to build can do exactly that.  The way is now being led by creative new media artists like David Rokeby and Scott Snibbe, but what could lie ahead is an environment populated by permanent interactive architecture that responds to our actions, thoughts, and moods by reminding us of where we fit in the bigger picture.

I may not be able to get my body into the room for Gates' talk, but thanks again to technology, I'll be sure to get my head into his space.