Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
It was Tom Morris who first pointed me towards this kickstarter project for a visual history of UK club culture.
The shots look so good and its a great thing to have captured, I wish there was one for the early UK rave culture too but I’ve pledged as I’d love to have this in my book collection.
Its kind of crazy that Thinking Digital is 10 years old now. I still remember meeting Herb Kim for the first time at a BBC Innovation labs event. He convinced Adrian to take 5mins and talk about coming back from TED global and wanting to create a conference with similar outlook in Newcastle. Yes! yes, I laughed at him but later did say if he gets it off the ground I will support him in anyway I can. That was over 10 years ago and the first Thinking Digital happened in 2007 and was amazing (such a shame I didn’t write about it).
10 Years later, its still an amazing conference, attracting more and more new people all the way to Gateshead/Newcastle. Every year people ask what am I looking forward to? and every year I pretty much say I haven’t even looked at the schedule, as I just know Herb has created a exciting and diverse line-up. My trust in the conference and Herb is super high and he never lets me down.
As per the last 8 years, heres my personal highlights of the conference, but honestly every speaker was great including Tom Scott, Dan Biddle, Darren Jobling and Adrian Westaway.
Simon Singh
I was aware of Simon previously but I found his geeky interest in mathematics pretty exciting and intriguing. I’m much more likely to keep an eye out for those cryptic mathematical equations now more than ever.
Richard Wiseman
Richard is another one of those figures I’ve heard of but never really checked out. He was also a great follow after Adrian Westaway’s magic + design (which only missed out from my favorites because I heard Clara talk in Manchester and spent some time getting to know the amazing Special Projects, still love to work with them on Perceptive Media). Richard broke down magic tricks and focused on our (lack) attention.
Really nicely done and ever so funny too! Certainly someone to watch out for in the future.
Mike Mullen
Fintech is something i’m less interested in but since using Monzo, started to get more interested in. Mike is the CEO of Atombank and his talk was actually really engaging. The story of how he moved from CEO of First Direct wasn’t fully explained but how he got started again and facing new challenges was fascinating. He described banking as a Rules based industry and talked about how the pace of change is based on who’s got the money; which currently is older people but thats changing which changes the dynamic of banking. Also found his idea of killing customers to see how much they are willing to put up with (think RyanAir) interesting. Such a good talk to kick start the conference too!
John Kershaw
What can I say about John, which I haven’t already said?
He finally revealed the full story of what happened with Dragons Den as he did in this blog post. He also revealed quite a bit about TV production generally. To be fair most of it was, “yeah and…?” to me but for most people the shine of TV production is a bubble they haven’t ever seen inside of. As Debra said, John is a highly invest-able guy with plenty of good ideas and I’m expecting some great things in the near future.
Dr Justin Sanchez
Justin works for DARPA and is focused on Human brain interfaces. Something which gets talked about quite a bit especially since the debate around machine learning has matured quite a bit. Justin talked a lot about Direct brain interfaces and the benefits to restore memories and provide benefits beyond imagination.
Hoping DARPA are thinking about the ethics of this stuff at #tdc17
— Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) May 17, 2017
All I kept thinking was about the ethicals of all this stuff, surely DARPA are somewhere along the line interested in using this as a weapon or defense? Justin did well to positioned DARPA as doing impactful things like kick starting the ARPnet which the internet was built on.
Although I wasn’t totally convinced, its hard to think about tapping into the CNS and PNS without thinking about films like the Matrix, Existenz and the Black Mirror S3ep2 Playtest. While Justin talked people on twitter mentioned Inception, especially when he talked about architecting spaces. Funny because the pasivdevice in inception is military (think Department of Defense? not DARPA?).
That’s why the military developed dream sharing-a training program where soldiers could strangle, stab and shoot each other, then wake up.
Plenty to think about!
Dr Anita Sengupta
There little I can say about this talk except wow!
I knew landing on Mars and exploring it was extremely difficult but Anita explained the whole life-cycle of the work and basically there wasn’t single persons mind which wasn’t blown at the end.
Simply incredible and great to hear the facts behind the headlines…
Sophie Bostock
Very fitting talk as it was recently mental health awareness week. Sophie talked about mental health through the lens of sleeping and pretty much the quantified self, although she never actually said those words. She talked about sleeping apps and CBT – Cognitive behavioral therapy as a service you can access anywhere from your phone via a app. Which brought up the credibility question.
Don’t worry she said, these apps are about to be rated/checked in the same way medicine is. So hopefully removing the crap from the good. She did mention other metrics such as cost and accessibility but never the data ethics worry I have with all these things.
Good talk which raises plenty more questions… Unfortunately I never quite got time to grab Sophie or get her details.
Chris Turner
Chris a goofy white guy who raps about anything and everything was amazing. He came out rapping after Imogen and instantly got the audience going. After rapping and talking about the key rules for rapping, he then asked the audience to pull things out their bag and rap about them in one continuous stream. The rules Chris talked about were the same for improvisation really.
Stay in the moment, don’t over think things and don’t worry about it.
It also reminded me of my new years resolution to take a improvisation class. Forge about rapping in the shower, which Chris recommended; I need to make this happen for sure!
Imogen Heap
Up till the conference I had no idea who Imogen Heap was. I gather she was involved in the music business but her interests in digital technology were pretty deep.
Imogen has a big interest in changing the business of music by taking advantage of decentralised systems like blockchain and the concept of smart contracts. She talked bout how everybody talks about this being a golden age for music listening, but is the true of music creation?
I instantly started thinking there are so many connections with the work I’m doing around decentralisation (blockchain for music use/rent/buying), object based media (huge amounts of metadata which isn’t included in music) and dj hackday (music metadata affecting the world around you/quantifed club style). This was further confirmed when I bought a ticket to her cellia event after the conference.
Although there was lots of technical problems, the points were made and the 42 city tour of the world next year sounds very interesting. Plus her performance was actually musically good. While Adam Stark & Imogen talked about the glove technology, I looked it up hoping it would be a open source project. Although it isn’t, its funded by UWE, Innovate UK and others; putting it in the field of academia. I wouldn’t be surprised if theres a push to open source a part of it alongside selling the actual gloves in the future?
Once again if it wasn’t for Thinking Digital, I likely would never known about Imogen and some of the cross over in thoughts and ideas.
Sarah Raad – The Gratitude Habit workshop
Sometimes you meet someone and the connection around ideas and view on life are perfectly matched. This was Sarah.
Sarah who is an amazing woman runs a marketing company called Tent has a side hustle called Simple happy life
Running a workshop about gratitude @ThinkingDigital today as my side hustle @_simplehappy 🙂 pic.twitter.com/DK0CzmixPT
— Sarah Raad (@tentspitch) May 16, 2017
The idea is simple (pun-intended). Learn to have a gratitude habit by being grateful for the things you have right now. Ideally you would write these down or share them in some way.
Of course it sounds too simple (pun again) but Sarah pulled up many scientific research leading to the same conclusion that a gratitude habit can really be the building block for a more fore-filling life.
The first exercise was to get to know each other by saying who you were, why you were there and say why you were grateful for the picked topic out of gratitude jar. I picked by random friendship which I had plenty to say. Interestingly as I heard other people talk, it was fascinating to hear how open or closed they were with their thoughts.
Of course I’m quite open with most of my thoughts. Without really thinking about it, I was practicing some of the gratitude habit already. I also remember a thinking digital workshop I went to the year after leaving hospital from Bobby at the now gone Happiest. Of course one of the happiest items for a happy life was Gratitude.
During the workshop, it was clear to me that some of the exercises although very/quite private needed that wider interaction to make them really sink in (in my honest opinion); but its very hard to do this unless its a safe & comfortable environment. Very hard to do during a workshop in a office. This is something me and Sarah discussed after the workshop in a cafe afterwards and during the TDC dinner later. I remember also trying to recite bobby’s quote about negative thoughts.
We have roughly 60,000 thoughts a day and 95% of them are the same as yesterday and 80% of those are negative in nature.
We talked a lot and it was refreshing to have quite deep and I guess some would say intimate conversation about life, politics, happiness and the world. Lots was shared and I feel extremely gratitude to have met Sarah.
Thinking Digital once again is such an incredible conference and I’m very grateful to be there and gained so much out of a conference which I originally scoffed at… Here’s the next 10 years!? Herb?
My friend Oli asked me nicely if I could do a mix for his new car, after the last mix which I did for his Mazda MX5
Of course, any reason to do a good mix while taking planes and trains over the last month. I did this one while sat in Helsinki Airport but made a bit of a mistake with the crossfader which meant doing it again.
@coldclimate expect one hell of a mix from all this time I'm hanging around Helisinki and Munich airports
— Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) April 28, 2017
The mix is a weird of mix trance and dub steppy type tunes. I kind thought of Oli tearing up the road on a summers day. So theres moments of uplifting trance alongside some of dirty dub step. I’ve been playing it while riding around on the scooter and it great.
Hope you enjoy Oli… play it loud!
It was Mike who sent me a link to this classic piece of culture jamming seen in Bristol. Of course it’s not by Spotify, but they (whoever is responsible for this work of genius) went as far as to use their logo and typeface.
… only in Bristol, eh @cubicgarden https://t.co/MHs1scsXJ1
— Mike Armstrong (@MikeA_MCR) January 1, 2017
It was only less than 24 hours previously at my new years eve party, when a couple of people wanted to control the music playing. I know wanting to control the music isn’t anything new; but I’m finding people are assuming the music is from Spotify.
Before the holidays, I was at a party where the music was chosen by people typing names into a laptop connected to the sound system. As you can imagine, people would select a few tunes and queue them up. Then someone else would come over and select more. Some would then shift around the playlist to move their tunes to the top, etc. It was a bit of mess with different people deleting other people’s selected tunes and others hogging the playlist. The inner DJ in me, choose to turn my back on everything and ignore the chaos.
The mindset has changed and although I love what Pacemaker are doing. I do slighly wonder about the future of mixed music. Theres a sense of instant gratification in playing track after track in a playlist and bumping things up and off the list, rather than trusting a mix to take you on a great journey. Maybe this is why I never use spotify and use mixcloud more? Delayed gratification is something which seemed to go right out the door with the increase in blood alcohol levels
Of course this is absolutely nothing compared to whats happening with the artists of course. Which leads right back around to the culture jamming in Bristol. Like Uber, the big behemoths across the sharing economy (if thats what we are to call it) are most likely to feel pressure in the long run from more humane practices such as Juno. Or at least I certainly see becoming true…
There is a blog draft which I’ve had saved about the state of business now and into the future. Its big and likely needs slicing into smaller blogs but cooperatives are certainly a big part of it.
Ben pulled me up on this recently surround Evernote…
Ian, are you against these companies making money/turning a profit? I’m curious how you otherwise see them paying for both the innovation and the on-going costs of running the service?
I replied without the links (but now I can finally put them in)…
No I’m not against that Ben Metcalfe, I’m in favour of up front telling people up front what they are getting into. You have to be honest and say EULAs are a joke no one reads except myself and a few others.
I’m also not a fan of massive endless
profitsgrowth which ends up ruining the companies…like Twitter, Pebble, Evernote, etc, etc. I see it over and over again and I think the likes of the media are also part of the problem – huge valuations attracting/temping more startups to get involved.Its a mess and killing the long term sustainability of a exciting future.
This starts to summarize some of the main points of the longer blog post…
I mentioned in my trance set from July, that I had recorded two trance sets; and was deciding which one I preferred. The full’on classic trance set won out but I wanted to share the alternative one too. It pretty raw and short but I quite like it, especially since I love out of the blue by system F so much that it was played twice!
Enjoy and remember sharing is caring!
Photo credit comes from lneprz.
In my last mega blog post about Futurefest, I talked about millennials thinking.
Millennials charactistics include
- Multiple things going on
- More likely to do things they are passionate about
- Blur work and play and enjoy it
This very much applies to something I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a long time (5 years!).
DJ Hackday, is a hackday for not only for DJs but for remix culture.
Remix culture, sometimes read-write culture, is a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new product. A remix culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holder
My personal thoughts are, DJ culture was new exciting and things were moving and changing all the time. We had vinyl, record players and mixers. But people were innovating and doing new things on top of that. Then the technology changed from spinning discs (Vinyl, CDs heck even Minidisc if you must) to Solid State/Digital. There was a lot of push back and there still is… But you can’t stop the future.
However we adopted the digital methods to do exactly the same thing. You can see this in the vast amount of digital dj tools, 2 decks and a mixer. Skeuomorphism hell! And it needs to die! Because a good 20 years after the first Mp3 dj software (virtual turntables by Carrot innovations). The interface, method and general approch is exactly the same.
That’s more than half my life time! That has to be some kind of a joke!
Ok under the hood things have changed but not far enough and wheres the distruptive changes? The DJ world still seems to be stressing out about auto BPM? Its happened get over it. For a whole culture built on innovation and creativity, it seems highly ironic?
5 years ago at Mozilla Festival I convince the lovely Michelle Thorne of this and I was able to run a prototype of DJ hackday during the festival. Out of it came a DJ first multitrack stem/format called 8trk.
But this was just scratching the surface of a much larger problem with DJ/Remix culture. I put together some slides which horrible to read back through as they are 5 years old, but its been super useful when talking to people and companies about what DJ hackday could be about. It was due an update and thankfully I can finally tick this off my list.
While talking to many people and companies over the years, some of got it and some have asked why isn’t it part of Music Hackday?
I have spoken to the Music hackday people about DJ hackday and made a very clear distinction between what they are doing and what I’m trying to to.
My estimations is the internet 1% rule applies here.
The 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1-9-90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio), which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content.
In the case of DJ hackday; out of 100 people…
Music hackday cators for the 1% and of course moving remixers and consumers into makers. DJ hackday is moving consumers and makers into remixers. Its a very viable area with plenty of people doing interesting great things already. Everyone we have spoke over the last 5 years have gotten the concept and really want to see it become a real things now.
Myself and Simon have started a Lanyrd page to start building support and getting more people interest. Its also one of Mozilla Festival’s Fridge events, which is fantastic as it shows the progession from its small prototype to a full blown event and Mozilla are always a supporter of remix cultures.
Capitalising on the recent interest in the Get Down on Netflix, which sums up a bit of why DJ/Remix culture is important. I created some simple teaser posters. Expect a proper poster in near future but right now, its about getting the word out. And we’re really targetting those who never thought of themselves as DJs or participating in remix culture. People like you!
#DJhack posters popping up around #Manchester's NQ. Look out for themhttps://t.co/r7HqZQTkbE pic.twitter.com/qYvtjO94La
— Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) October 3, 2016
As the year counts down towards Winter, I’ll be looking for people to help and other companies to join the DJ Hack. We already have some great names (tbc) and starting to sort out venues for the night events. Of course we already have the MMU Shed for the main hack which is a great space for a hackday. The actual hack dates are Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th January, with a social event on the Friday 13th January and post hackday party on Sunday evening somewhere we can try out some of the hacks.
If you are interested in helping out on the day, know a great venue, like to support in some way, set a challenge or want to come help organise it. Get in touch…
Feel free to ping myself a tweet or drop a message via email, my contact form, comment, etc… I’m quite easy to get hold of.
Showers and thunderstorms mix by Cubicgarden on Mixcloud
Its been ages since I have published a Pacemaker Device Mix.
This one I have been listening to on and off for the last few weeks on my phone as I wonder around Manchester. Lots of new tunes and a less hectic pace of about 135bpm, but plenty of hands in the air moments and smooth mixing.
I also added chapter marks to give you can idea of what was influencing my tune selections.
Enjoy!
Anybody who loves dance music MUST watch this BBC Radio 1 special from the BBC Proms in the Albert Hall.
Who says electronic music and classical don’t mix? Well Dance music was elevated to one of the highest levels at the Proms.
Pete Tong takes charge of the BBC Radio 1 Prom and decides to employ the Heritage Orchestra to play a selection of Ibiza classics. The Royal Albert Hall has never seen anything like it!
Jules Buckley conducts the orchestra through dance masterpieces by Fatboy Slim, Eric Prydz, Shapeshifters, Robert Miles, ATB, Moby, Frankie Knuckles, Orbital, Inner City, Daft Punk, Faithless, Stardust and so many more, with the help of Ella Eyre and John Newman.
I had this playing out over BBC iPlayer with my Philips Hue lights dancing along side the music. My favourite part has to be Orbital’s Belfast which stokes up many memories for me, although I would have love it if they did Chime instead.
Amazing to watch and certainly another chapter in the continuing cultural domination of dance music.
The conference was in beta state as LJ Rich announced at the very start. It is a example of the way the BBC is changing. More people within are able to push the organisation the way it needs to go. More risks taken, more gained for the general public.
One of my crazy ideas is becoming true next week! Are you into Music & tech? DM if you want to attend! #BBConthebeat pic.twitter.com/XQPHfJzOcO
— Sara Gozalo (@sara_sgm) December 1, 2014
Beta or not, it was a good afternoon with speakers from across the music industry. Each panel was backed up with somebody from the BBC.
The sessions were centered around the audiences, discovery and metadata. The keynote was given by Mark Mulligan, whom I gather is well known for his blog and writing about the future of music.
It was interesting to hear how the music industry has parallels with the film industry.
Artists need to ‘find their popcorn’
In the audiences panel it was interested to meet and hear from DJ Charlie Sloth and Shazam. There was also a interesting reflection between the Charlie’s focus on the BBC Radio 1xtra audience who may not own a hifis and use their phones for music discovery. Against a talk by Jeff Smith from BBC Radio 2, with audiences who still buy CDs.
In the Metadata session which included Music Brainz, there was a debate about the lack of metadata in music and they only scratched the surface. When it came out that theres not really a well used standard for music classification.
To which I tweeted…
How can the record industry expect us to pay if they can't even be bothered to sort out metadata standards!? #BBCBeat
— Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) December 12, 2014
In who’s your music dealer? with Spotify, PingTune, BBC R1/1Xtra, the question of algorithms for discovery came into call. But even more interested was the power of the DJ to bring forward music unlike anything else. Something the music algorithms fail at.
.@bbcmusic #BBCBeat conference yesterday w @jimpurnell, @GeorgErgatoudis @LJRICH (nice work @sara_sgm @tw0tw3ntytw0!) pic.twitter.com/ZdghdHRwID
— David Jones 大卫 琼斯 (@djonessays) December 13, 2014
The event was top and tailed with musical demos from many companies and our own BBC R&D UX team showing off the scalable documentary. However there was also, LJ’s impromptu’s play on the piano.
That's nothing @iamjakebailey here's me properly showing off on a piano 🙂 http://t.co/6AgKj0b930 #bbcbeat people, thanks for having me!
— @LJRich Music & Tech (@LJRICH) December 12, 2014
…and live music which I thought was odd, however I really enjoyed the quite unique voice of Layla, one of the many artists who signed up with BBC Introducing.
Layla at #BBCbeat pic.twitter.com/rMMi4syJTU
— Beth Anderson (@betandr) December 12, 2014
All excellent stuff and ultimately reminded me that DJ Hackday needs to happen… Love to team up with BBC Music to consider the future of participation, remixing and music discovery from a slighly different standpoint.
Dark brush stokes by Cubicgarden on Mixcloud
Its another mix from my new pacemaker. This one is a combination of the mixes I was doing to test the firmware downgrades and upgrades of my new and old pacemaker. Its a nice selection of tunes and I have been throwing this around on my phone for about a month. Slight issues with file encoding caused me delays in uploading it. Have a listen and don’t forget to share… because sharing is caring…
Thanks to Simon for pointing this out to me. I am very interested as I mentioned to BBC on the beat team.
@cubicgarden @TomPoole007 @si_lumb btw, let me know if you want to attend!! 🙂
— Sara Gozalo (@sara_sgm) December 1, 2014
I’ve been pushing for the future of Djing for years and I thank Mozilla Fest for letting me run something a while ago. One of the outcomes was stem based djing, we called it 8 track. I always felt like we were just scratching the surface and there were many other scenarios which needed to be explored. I especially like the quantified club. I wonder about the line up, it seems very singles music driven rather than looking at mixing/djing. I do wish Mixcloud, Pacemaker and Mixxx were all coming along too!
See you in London?
Enjoy! And blog post about Mozfest is coming soon.
Media relies on the ability to engineer peoples emotions. This can sound pretty bad but all media from romantic comedies made for cinema to the old classics from Shakespeare. The effect of media and ultimately storytelling has always fascinated me and I’m sure its the same for most people. Its hardwired in to us as Jason Silva puts it.
The ability to engineer someone’s emotions is interesting from a story point of view. However if you add broadcast, you can do this to a nation or the whole world. But like the 10% of any audience, which are highly suggestible, how do you reach the others?
A 600,000 person study Facebook and Cornell University did a while back but recently came to light might have a clue about how. However there has been a major push-back on the study for ethical reasons.
Facebook’s controversial study that manipulated users’ newsfeeds was not pre-approved by Cornell University’s ethics board, and Facebook may not have had “implied” user permission to conduct the study as researchers previously claimed.
Starting from a different place is Moment.us.(little disclaimer to say I may be working with this Manchester based startup in the near future, but only because their technology is mind blowing)
Moment.us, tracks and follows the users media habits. It watches as you choose songs (bit like scobbling apps like last.fm) when you pick them and records the context of when. Like certain types of song when your going for a ride to work on a sunny day.
Our proprietary algorithm, contextual database, analytics, understanding of and expertise in media, technology and user behaviour. Highly relevant, hyper-personal, socially integrated, context driven mobile experiences for consumers and unrivalled contextual consumer data for commercial organisations.
A while ago we pitched a project loosely called In Tune at the BBC Radio One Connected Studio which we felt was very credible but unfortunately the judges disagreed. Maybe it was the way we pitched it but there was a lot of doubt we had the data to do what we planning to do.
I have seen first hand the data points and been amazed at what patterns of activity our music listening can reveal about ourselves. Imagine what you could do if you were have access to that data and could engineer the music and therefore the experience?
Interestingly Google is getting in on the idea as they recently bought Songza.
The firey drive mix by Cubicgarden on Mixcloud
Escaping the interstellar fall mix by Cubicgarden on Mixcloud
Been a while since I have uploaded a decent mix, but don’t worry I have been messing with the pacemaker quite a bit on long journeys. I felt this one was good enough for public consumption, hence the upload to mixcloud. Most of the tunes are brand new and theres a slightly feel of break dance to this with the addition of Knife Party which I can’t get enough of. Also absolutely love Mogusa’s Laserbeams! Of course, Max Graham’s Evil ID and the excellent remix of Southern Sun are great stuff. Its a long one but well worth playing loud, where ever your listening.
