Category: design-and-ideas

Put on your own Moon Festival event?

Moon 50 Festival

I’m still very excited to be a digital adviser on the Moon Festival for all reasons I mentioned in my previous blog and so much more.

One of the things I suggested for the Festival was the ability to run it in different locations. It made sense to me, as it is the moon and such a momentous date in history can’t be limited to London alone. Of course London is a great place to have such a event with the Greenwich observatory and the GMT timeline in the night sky.

So with my experience running BarCamps, TedXs and other decentralised/distributed events. I was able to talk the amazing Livia into trying to distribute the event into other cities and countries.

So many of you got in touch to ask how you can be part of Moon Festival and too often we had to say no because of time and money which we hated to do because let’s face it, you had some really brilliant ideas. And so we decided to open up our programme to the world.

Livia has the full very friendly guideline for the proposals on the same page.

It makes a lot of sense for the likes of artistic events like Future Everything,  Abandon Normal Devices festival and the Manchester International Festival (to be honest I’m really surprised there isn’t a event in this years line up) to say the lest. Of course thats just around Manchester events! I’m wondering about all those centres like FACT, Home, MOSI, etc. Of course it could be anywhere, any city, any town, any community, any country!

Not got plans for the 50th Anniversary of the moon but can’t make it to London? Don’t fancy Bluedot? What you waiting for? Try running your own… Don’t hold back let your creative juices flow!

I personally was thinking about a storytelling event like the Moth around the Moon and our relationship with the moon. If anyone is interested in the proposal in Manchester let me know.

The Moon 50 Festival

Black Mirror choices can be snooped on?

Magic box

I have so much to say about Bandersnatch, most has been written here. But its clear that Netflix haven’t given up on the medium and even doubling down on it.

Something popped into my feed about some researchers paper saying you can snoop on the choices of people using Netflix’s interactive system. I’m hardly surprised as its typical network analysis and GDPR requests. But it reminds me how important the work we have done with perceptive media is.

I best explain it as delivering (broadcasting) the experience as a contained bundle which unfolds within the safe space (maybe living room) of the audience. Nothing is sent back to the cloud/base. This is closer to the concept of broadcast and means the audience/user(s) and their data isn’t surveil by the provider. This is exactly how podcasts use to work before podcast providers started focusing on metrics and providing apps which spy on their listeners. I would suggest the recent buy out of gimlet media by spotify might point this way too?

Of course the broadcast/delivery model this doesn’t work too well for surveillance capitalism but that frankly not my problem; and all audience interaction should be (especially under HDI) explicitly agreed before data is shared or exported.

I might be idealistic about this all but frankly I know I’m on the right side of history and maybe the coming backlash.

Best of the recent TEDxManchester’s

TedX Manchester 2019

Last year I never got a chance to write about TEDxManchester 2018, partly because I tend to take pictures with my camera and its the new venue (Bridgewater hall) policy not to allow cameras in.

Regardless I went to TedXManchester 2019 (without my DSLR), and thought its about time I got back into blogging some of the best talks, especially as they are put on youtube now. Because they are on youtube so quickly, I created a playlist with the best TedXManchester videos. There are a number missing and its worth saying the list is highly opinioned. Theres some key ones from previous years gone by including my own and Carrie’s super popular one.

But I wanted to give credit to the best ones this year and last year.

2018

Last year the outstanding talk was form Vikas Shah’s How to save your own life.

A year later Vikas tweet is a perfect description.

I felt the talk was extremely brave, powerful and honest. The mental health message was powerful.

2019

This years outstanding talks were difficult to pick one. I was torn but decided although everyone loved Ged Kings talk I wasn’t super keen. I found Andrew Szydlo and Jon Carmichael’s fantastic but its not online yet so decided Katherine Ormerod spoke to me like Emma Harvey’s “Whoops, I changed the world” at TedxBradford.

Although I don’t let social media run my life, and use it a certain way which bother some. I find the continuously running theme of living life with these digital tools interesting. There was a talk just before with Chris Bailey (this is from TedxLiverpool) which was good but felt too preachy for my palliate. As I write this blog post in a coffee shop, I’m watching a woman taking a selfie with her tiny dog to a social network. She took about 12 photos before finally settling on one to post. I find the whole thing strange as posted about before, and I wonder how many are in control, following fashion, doing so out of peer/social pressure, etc…

Re-decentralising the internet recording at Futurefest

Futurefest 2018 panel

I had the pleasure of being on the panel of re-decentralising internet at Futurefest, last summer. (when England was still in the world cup and the weather was super warm) Feels like so long ago. I’m quite glad its audio only because I was sat in the sunshine sweating a lot!

The internet isn’t where we want it to be. With power increasingly centralised in the hands of very few players, citizens have little say in where we want the internet to go next. But challenging existing dynamics won’t be easy: we find ourselves caught in the crossfire between the dominant American models (driven by Big Tech) and the increasingly powerful Chinese model (where government reigns supreme). Is there scope to create a third, European model, where citizens and communities are in charge?

In this session, we discuss alternative trust models for the internet. This session is part of the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative. We will hear from Manon den Dunnen, strategic specialist at the Dutch National Police, Ian Forrester, Chief Firestarter at BBC R&D and Marta Arniani, innovation strategist and founder of Futuribile / Curating Futures. Chairing will be Katja Bego, senior researcher at Nesta and coordinator of the Next Generation Internet Engineroom project.

Thanks Katja!

Imagine if the Curve card supported all those transport and store cards?

The Curve CardI have been using Curve for a while now. I first came across it when Tom Cheesewright talked about it at a second degree dinner I hosted. I was still amazed by Monzo but it lost its shine once it became a current account for me. So I finally got a Curve card thanks to Tony Churnside for the referral.

Its been very good to me, and the trade off in sharing my transactions in return for not carrying around all my cards is good for me. I do generally carry around one more just in-case, but its been fine except a couple times, where I needed to tap again.

If I had a company credit card, a curve card would be essential, especially since the receipt feature works almost as I need it for my expenses.

Having used it for a few months, I started thinking it would be great if curve supported NFC travel cards like Oyster. Its something I’ve thought about previously. Of course the London Oyster system supports NFC payments directly, so maybe I should return my Oyster cards anyway.

But imagine if it supported other NFC cards? Yes you can use your phone to do this but I don’t want to use my expensive phone compared to a cheap piece of plastic which I can freeze in a instant? Store cards is more tricky as most are still swipe not NFC but could be very cool?

Update…

https://twitter.com/imaginecurve/status/1102500000020525056

27-28th Feb is Manchester’s first Storytellers United Hackjam

storytellers united hackjamOn the Wednesday 27th – Thursday 28th February in Manchester’s first Storytellers United Hackjam.

The hackjam is run with support from BBC R&D and BBC Academy, MMU’s School of Digital Arts (SODA), Storytellers United, Popathon, University of York’s Digital Creativity labs and Creative England.

Its a 36 hours hackathon around responsive/perceptive/adaptive media experiences. Participants work as a team to brainstorm ideas, create prototypes of their own storytelling experiences. They will compete against the clock, not against each other sharing knowledge and expertise as they go. They won’t be alone, as they will have some excellent mentored by industry experts sharing their knowledge and experiences. Its all part of BBC Academy’s Manchester Digital Cities week.

The hackjam is only part the story. On the late afternoon of Thursday 28th Feb there will be a mini-conference titled Storytelling in the Internet Age. Where promising prototypes will be demoed to the audience.

Collaborating together

Ideal participants are from the creative sectors such as,

  • Freelancers, Sole-traders and SMEs working in new media fields combining data with media,, may have tried twine, eko, inkle, etc
  • Producers and Directors interested in adaptive and non-linear narratives, may have tried twine, eko, inkle, etc
  • Developers and Designers with an interest in audio & video combined with data and used javascript libs like the VideoContext.js, Seriously.js, etc
  • Students and Academics with a deep interest in object based media, adaptive narratives, interactive digital narrative
  • Artists exploring mixed media and non-linear narratives

Tickets are free but an expression of interest, with no guarantee entry.

See you there!

Perceptive theme park rides?

Tony tweeted me about this thrill machine which uses body data to influence how the ride operates. The link comes from Mashable and I was able to trace it back to the original

“…while building this attraction I also wanted to change the usual one-sided relation – a situation where the body is overwhelmed by physical impressions but the machine itself remains indifferent, inattentive for what the body goes through. Neurotransmitter 3000 should therefore be more intimate, more reciprocal. That’s why I’ve developed a system to control the machine with biometric data. Using sensors, attached to the body of the passenger – measuring his heart rate, muscle tension, body temperature and orientation and gravity – the data is translated into variations in motion. And so, man and machine intensify their bond. They re-meet in a shared interspace, where human responsiveness becomes the input for a bionic conversation.”

https://danieldebruin.com/neurotransmitter-3000

Its a good idea but unfortunately couldn’t work on a rollercoasters, which is my thing. Or could it? For example everyones hand up in the air means what? The ride goes faster? How on earth does work? How meaningful would this be if you could actually do this?

Its one of the research questions we attempted to explore in the living room of the future. How can you combine different peoples personal data to construct a experience which is meaningful and not simply a medium of it all.

These global changes don’t seem meaningful or so useful? Maybe its about the micro changes like mentioned previous.

Of course others have been working around this type of things too.

Over 15 years of Flickr data

All those files to download

Its been a long haul but finally Flickr is beyond use for me. I briefly tried Flickr pro for a while but theres so many other options now. Its a shame but Flickr went through a lot of trouble at the end but was saved from Yahoo craziness by snugmug. But even looking at the pro account prices, I decided that after…

It was time to leave Flickr and just let it start deleting my photos, which I mainly had backed up in multiple places anyway.

I was quite impressed with Flickr’s data portability option, for example the uploaded files are exactly the same. But it would have been great if they embedded the tags into the original EXIF data. However it seems they kept the tags in account data. So with some work, it would be possible to pull the whole lot together again? I’m actually surprised no ones already done this?

The dream has become their reality

Inception Mombasa

Imran posted a link to me from Wired magazine around Lucid Dreaming.

I had a good old read and found it very interesting and similar to how I’ve understood the current state of lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming has been slowly gaining prominence in recent years. The release of Christopher Nolan’s 2010 science-fiction blockbuster Inception— in which corporate spies sneak into their marks’ dreams to steal their secrets and implant bad ideas — was a landmark moment. (The spies use a top as a tool for reality tests; if it spins indefinitely, then they know they are in the dream state; if it falls, they are awake.) Nolan said that the film was inspired by his own experience of lucid dreaming and that its ambiguous ending—the camera lingers on a spinning top, leaving viewers to wonder whether or not it will fall—should be taken to mean that “perhaps all levels of reality are valid.” Google searches for “lucid dreaming” spiked around the movie’s release and have never returned to pre-2010 levels. And the internet, of course, has helped. A constantly updated Lucid Dreaming forum on Reddit has accumulated more than 190,000 subscribers.

Later in the piece there is some rough and ready double blind experiments with Galantamine in the equivalent Inception’s Mombasa dream den.

The workshops have also provided him with a way to move his own research ahead. They have given him access to a group of people who are willing to participate in his studies, even if they aren’t certified by a lab.

Eames: They come here every day to sleep?

Elderly Bald Man: [towards Cobb] No. They come to be woken up. The dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise?

Extending REM has been a dream (pun intended) for many and Galantamine might be a step towards this. Its been mentioned on a few blogs and forums I’ve seen but never really looked into it. Any notion of a drug to extend this is worrying for me personally but like microdosing each to their own I guess.

Galantamine is not a magic bullet, though; it can trigger nasty side effects like headaches, nausea, and insomnia. And it can work too well—cautionary tales of galantamine-induced nightmares can be found alongside success stories. “It felt like my brain was being drawn and quartered,” one lucid dreamer wrote. “I kept falling back asleep into these bizarre dreams that I can only describe as my head being scraped against the bottom of a submerged iceberg.” “It felt like I was falling through my bed and all these loud screeching sounds and vibrations started happening,” testified another. “It was so scary and I felt paralyzed.”

The wired piece centres around Galantamine and the study of it on Lucid dreaming. The study to date is questionable, but like the quantified self community, its good to see someone trying something. Although I personally would have declared something under competing interests, as Stephen LaBerge did setup the Lucidity Institute.

Regardless its all very interesting and thanks to Imran for the post…