OTOCRON

Media landscape is a visual metaphor to describe the media’s array.  Media ecology is a systems metaphor. A media landscape is to be looked at - and this viewing act locates the spectator in relation to the landscape, that exists elsewhere, at the other end of the gaze.

A media ecology cannot be looked at without being part of it. It’s beholder is by definition included in the system - experiencing a media system implies connecting to a mediation, thereby becoming part of the systems’ internal state.

The MEVoS, short for Mediated Events per Volume Second, is an experimental media measuring unit that I’m developing. In this blogpost I am exploring some of its properties.

It was mentioned it in my last post, but then I called it REVOS, for Reported Events per Volume Second: “Through the ever increasing density of the media ecology and through the increasing amounts of user-generated content and through the distribution of all the new organisms in the media ecology and their machine-generated content the REVOS rate of the world will continue to increase rapidly. At some places more so than at others, obviously.”

The MEVoS should allow to express in one unambiguous number the mediation density of a certain spacetime volume. To make this unit compatible with the wider system of physical measurement units, the volume part of the MEVoS is m3 (one cubic meter, equivalent to 10000 liters), and the time unit is the second.

How to define a Mediated Event? My current proposal is: any event that results into an electronic or mechanical system transporting a report of that event to another mechanical, electronic or cognitive system at a different location (however minute the distance), thereby potentially causing further events.

Event size…
But what is the size of an event? Would a fist fight count as an event? Or would you have to split it up in a series of blows, that are all seperate events? This question then means: what is the resolution of the report? (analogous to the resolution of digital picture: the amount of pixels per inch) In other words: the resolution of the report determines the size of the event. If one particular blow with a fist is reported seperately, it is obviously a seperate Mediated Event. If a fist fight is only mentioned as a whole, then that is the Mediated Event.

Fistfight

Hm. What if there is only one picture made of a whole fist fight? The picture only shows one blow… - not even that actually, because it shows only a time fragment of a blow, the size of which depends on the shutter time of the camera… But if there is only one picture, there is only one Mediated Event? With quite a rough resolution, indeed.

Ah -the the trouble is that in the expression Mediated Event a separation is being made between the event and its mediation. But the point of coming up with this MEVoS is not to measure the proportion of mediations in relation to events - it is to be able to describe the density of mediations, (and maybe in a later stage to see how mediation density plays a role in the construction of events and event narratives). So we’re talking about Mediation Events, not Mediated Events. The Mediation is the Event I’m talking about (it echoes of McLuhan)

Fridge
Let’s explore a not too political example. In the event that the internal temperature of my refrigerator raises above 5 degrees Celsius, the thermostat of the refrigerator will report that event (with the flip of one switch) to the pump, that will release pressured gas in the pipes, that will absorb the excess warmth in the fridge. When the internal temperature is 5 degrees again, the thermostat will again report that event to the pump, with the reverse flip of the switch. If the fridge door opens, the little light switches on, by an even more simple relais, but that is also a Mediation Event.

In this simple temperature sensor with a digital display, the bridge circuit removes the unwanted signal at 0°, which allows the ADC reading to equal the temperature

On a day when I’m home and I’m cooking, I estimate I open the fridge about 20 times. And the pump switches on and off about 3 or 4 times. The total internal volume of my fridge I estimate at 0.65 m3.A waking day has 16 hours, that equals 57600 seconds.So the MEVoS rate of my fridge is 28 reported events per 0.65m3 per 57600 seconds = 0.748 MicroMEVoS on an average day when I’m home. If I measured the MEVoS rate per hour, it would probably be about 0.03 MicroMEVoS for 15 out of those 16 hours (the pump switches on and off once per 0.65m3 per 54000 seconds) when I’m not cooking, and 1 CentiMEVoS (24 : 0.65 m3 : 3600 sec.) for the one hour I’m cooking.
A fridge that maintains different temperatures at different sections requires a finer system of sensors and switches, and has a correspondingly higher MEVoS rate for its total volume.

Statistic number
Ok. That’s not too hard. It’s a statistic number. To achieve at something meaningful, you need to choose both the space volume and the time volume properly.

Nairobi spacetime volume
Another example: the riots in Kenya, that followed the late 2007 elections, this would be a much more complex situation to put into MEVoS measurements. What volume would you want to measure? Let’s say the city of Nairobi, from the ground till three meters up, or so. What time volume? The first two weeks after the elections. What would be the Mediation Events? Pictures, written reports (sms’s, blogs, news articles, maybe even books) video’s, films, phone calls, sound recordings, etc. So, what’s the MEVoS rate of that particular spacetime volume? I wouldn’t know really. But through the application of the MEVoS concept, a lot of well rendered critical thoughts come up.

(more later )

This is basically the content of a talk I did for the Club of Amsterdam session on Ambient Intelligence, at February 22, 2007. I was asked to speculatively reflect on the future of ambient intelligence and the media. This is what I came up with, slightly fleshed out and clarified.

What impact will the development of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) have on the media ecology? In the AmI vision of the near future, many more things will start behaving like media - ‘everything will talk to everything’… What does that mean? And how will that affect the media ecology? I’ll break it down to a series of related questions and remarks on where we might find answers.

The wave of user generated content that’s currently happening, points to an increased democratisation of the media production process. (By the way: some people obviously still make better stuff than others - there is no equally impressive democratisation of talent going on.) The media ecology is also becoming increasingly interactive, increasingly 2-directional. Next to the internet we have on-demand content over TV cable networks, IPTV, digital radio, interactive television with settop boxes, the TIVO.

The powernodes in the media network have not ceased to exist, and are in fact strong as ever: BBC, TimeWarner, Reuters, Universal, CNN, etc. New powernodes have emerged: Nokia , YouTube, MySpace - yet others are emerging: ngo’s that become content providers, car navigation systems are becoming an important media channel. Next to this we have an immense and fastly growing amount of smaller media nodes - that mainly use internet. I’ll look at the relevance of this in the context of AmI later.

But when we talk about AmI, we talk not of The Media as we currently know them, but of new organisms in the media ecology. We talk of the way computronium , to quote Charles Stross among others, gets embedded in our physical surroundings. Many of those new things that become media are not media for humans in the first place - they are primarily media for other things - they are machine oriented media. They distill and traffic information: differences that make differences: sensor tresholds are surpassed, resulting in bitflips or datastreams, that trigger events in other locations and actuators. AmI means that many more things become media - and also that many more things will get mediated. I propose a new metric to describe this development consisely: the REVOS. (short for Reported Events per VOlume Second).

Through the ever increasing density of the media ecology and through the increasing amounts of user-generated content and through the distribution of all the new organisms in the media ecology and their machine-generated content the REVOS rate of the world will continue to increase rapidly. At some places more so than at others, obviously.

It is important to note that in the current proposals on AmI-like implementations, most of the distributed sensors. i/o boards and other smart matter only talks with some dedicated other smart stuff and that they don’t talk with the rest. So, some things will talk to some other things, rather then everything to everything… but maybe we can still do something about that. If we go along with the ideals of AmI: “environments that react intelligently to users needs” , the question arises how this array of different applications and functions will integrate to an environment that we can relate to. I’m thinking here of an urban environment, not of the space of one household. I’m thinking of an environment everyone can use. An environment that also leaves us also with an important sense of agency (otherwise, how can we trust it?)

Smart Matter & Ambient Intelligence
How to turn this smart matter into coherent:
- locative media?
- context sensitive media?
- taste sensitive media?
- fashion sensitive media?

One way to start unpacking that question could be to ask: how to integrate human generated content & non-human generated content on a general level? (We already have quite a bit of non-human generated content - streams from automated cctv systems with movement sensors, traffic sensors, RFID enabled logging systems, aircraft logging systems, weather data from measuring stations etc.)
Possible answers, that are also in line with the current changes in the media ecology could be the following: The first thing is that all these new media organisms should become part of the internet. They should have IP adresses and they should talk via the http protocol. This means that no major new infrastructures have to be developed. Furthermore, they should not be part of closed services, or applications. Like it has become normal procedure in the Web2.0 context, builders of new applications should continue to publish their API’s, allowing other parties to talk with their applications on the programming level.
But if we really go idealistic… These new media organisms will generate bits, numbers, characterstrings (text?), photo’s, sounds and video, but they should also generate nifty metadata, that allows aggregation of their data in various other human-desired contexts, the same metadata they use to organize their inputs from other sources. Standardisation of their metadata in various categories (relating to time, place, to the kind of mediaobject they are, or to the kind of aggregation they could belong to) would easily allow various devices and services to talk to each other (without too complex programming), and would easily allow new parties to develop new services using existing networks and data.
We would also need standard protocols for developing future kinds of metadata.

Tagcloud
From the human perspective, a proven useful way to organise some kinds of metadata to mediate between non-human centered media and the way humans understand is the tagcloud. The tagcloud is as semantically rich as human language, and at the same time sufficiently unambiguous for computers. I propose using tagclouds partly consisting of standardised metadata, and partly consisting of personal tags and choices as a simple way to organize human centered mediation of human and non-human generated data. Flock is an example of a browser that has already embedded ways to deal with different metadata coming from various Web2.0 services, to allow really simple aggregation by its users. Yahoo Pipes is another example of a generic aggregation tool for various web outputs.
Similar ideas would start to apply to our physical surroundings in my public space AmI scenario.

One-and-a-halfLife
AmI (and its current predecessors like locative media projects, GPS readers and RFID systems) fuses the physical surrounding with the digitial. This means that media content will extend further towards physical experiences, which implies that here and now becomes important at the expense of the new media paradigm ‘anytime, anywhere’.RFID, motes hives networks, IPv6, GPS awareness - all these techno-practices are already quickly establishing themselves as part of the media ecology. Also there are new media surfaces emerging: clothes, public screens, electronic paper. What will happen is that we’ll start to navigate physical space more like we navigate online information. We’ll move from a FirstLife next to SecondLife towards a permanent One-and-a-HalfLife (at least in urban environments)
The media ecology that includes this kind of general AmI will be more layered, with different layers inscribing different levels of reality. Myriads of new media niches emerge: from extremely local, personal, time- and context sensitive mediaflows, to worldwide time indepependent unpersonal mediaflows, and every possible combination thereof.All this will be organised through a combination of open API’s, standardised metadata and personal tagclouds, that behave like experience filters, or like smart advising librarians or more like hormones: using your testosteron tagcloud really gives a very different feel to the city than using your lavender tagcloud - for instance.
Users shape their personal paths through all available mediaflows, but these paths will partly overlap: powernodes in the medianetwork will still exist on global and regional level: olympic games, harry potter, bbc, the evening news, a soap in your own language, highbandwidth squares, public benches that are access points to funny personal experiences. Because people need to acknowledge the shape of reality to each other, they need something to orient themselves with, that allows them to share aspects of perceived reality with others.

So, to structure and facilitate the collective flow of media between non-humans among each other, between humans and non-humans and between humans through non-humans, we’d need open API’s and standardised types of metadata. Some are in place: GPS metadata and timebased metadata. Metadata models that relate to output channels (tv, mobile, billboard, loudspeaker, car navigator etc.) are being developed simultaneously by different brooadcast organisations and press organisations . There is no open standard… to my knowledge. Here is work to do. On top of the arrangements with controlled vocabularies of metadata, there should be room and functionality that supports user generated metadata, relating to times, places, events, objects, people animals, experiences etcetera. Sophisticated tagclouds that can structure tastes, fashions, moods, subcultures, and that can be shared at will by those interested to do so.

The Long Tail in meat space
Will we, humans, manage in this hybrid physical/digital ocean of (meta)dataflows? If so, how? Let’s take a contemporary evolutionary approach. We don’t talk about survival of the fittest and death to the rest, but: what can exist will exist - I mean: think of Media and the Long Tail.The Long Tail is here understood as the pattern by which the bulk of traffic on a network consists of an enormous amount of small flows between minor nodes instead of the big flows between big nodes.
IF media nodes and flows are online uniquely identifiable products, services and items.
AND IF the network is sufficiently big, connected and distributed
AND IF users (AGENTS!) are free to browse, engage, choose and discard these products services and items
THEN the Long Tail starts to apply.

So in this emerging AmI media ecology, the long tail will start to apply to all kinds of phenomena that also exist in physical reality. Think of the Long Tail in tourism: instead of being stuck with the Anne Frank House, the Heineken Brewery and the Albert Cuyp Market for a one day visit to Amsterdam, you could follow your highly peculiar tagtrail (namedtestoreron, or spinoza, or mother of pearl or whatever) through Amsterdam - a tagtrail built from experiences and metadata added by a relatively small group of totally unrelated world citizens that you’ve subscribed to. I’m talking about the del.icio.us or LastFM idea, applied to physical space, usable as you’re walking through town.

Issues and OpportunitiesTo allow people to find relevant behaviours in relation to these technologies, to make this a space for innovation, to allow this blended physical digital culture to bloom, there are a couple of issues to adress.
1 Open API’s and metadata standards (a policy issue, a design issue as well as philosophical issue) In my AmI scenario we’ll need classes of reliably translatable metadata in open libraries, open RFID systems, open ONS providers.This does have important philosophical implications: these classes of metadata will be powerful categories that henceforth organise our relation with the mediating/mediated environment (see also: transparancy) Interestign would be to see how people that prefer to use different classes realte to each other.
2 Trust. How can people trust such an environment? An environment that knows everything about them? Trust is manufactured through 1 transparancy and a feeling of 2 agency / negotiability on the part of users.
2.1 Transparancy (a policy issue and a design issue) Reported events are events of which the record should be publicly available, not only for some other things, but also for interested humans. In this scenario we’re outsourcing more and more parts of decision making processes to configurations of little tools and other people. We will want the ability to know and see how they work, we want to be able to see where what is happening. (even if we don’t often use this ability) Media transparancy is of course the counterpart of media literacy Basic network knowledge and protocols should be part of the curriculum of primary schools.
2.2 Agency( a policy issue and a design issue) Agency, the ability to cause and shape events, becomes more and more distributed over networks of humans and non-humans in an AmI scenario. The Long Tail pattern and the tagcloud are models that are potentially beneficial for a very large part of users. They imply important agency on the level of human users. The privacy issue I see as one embodiment of the agency issue. Privacy ceases to be an issue when it is negotiable. That implies agency.
3 And then there are the business oppportunities: Physical space browsers need to be developed for on mobile phones. There is demand for content aggregators of various nature: mashup providers, retailers of neatly packaged metadata aggregators and user-generated tagclouds (you land at Schiphol, your phone picks up the network, you get an offer for a kinky amsterdam tagtrail collected by a group of young japanese tourists, - for only euro 2,99 and then you get the Golden Age trail for free!) And of course there is room for a whole load of consultants.

As a closing remark: the above is partly fictional but not intended as exotic. And it is more value fiction than science fiction. We won’t need to be inventing new languages, but only new sentences and stories. Http will still work. We are already moving to a new IP regime (ipv6) that supports approximately 5 x 10 to-the-28th addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people alive today, Object Name Services are just an add-on to a Domain Name Servers, and Physical Mark-up Language is just a kind of XML.

It is slowly dawning on me that the term location is subtly aquiring an added new meaning in the context of digital media. Location in the context of the geotagged web is not primarily the physical place (that can be indicated by latitude and longitude coordinates) but it is primarily an informational context, an informational dimension. On the web, location is re-invented as a handy way to organise digital information with the aid of a universal worldwide number system. Of course this number system intends to point to places on the globe, but it exists as an independent informational dimension as well. Actually, through GPS we can take the latitude and longitude system as our primary base of reference and experience, and use it as a way to look at actual physical places. See The Degree Confluence Project. I think GPS started the other way around with the numbers only being meaningful because they pointed to a specific place on earth. Now places become meaningful becasue they point to specific numbers.

Near Nihonhesokoen station - the WGS84 E135 N35 degree confluence.Photo published on Flickr by sleepytako. This location at least also has some degree of placeness to it.

20°N 74°W, 26.7 km (16.6 miles) ESE of Cape Punta Negra, Guantánamo, Cuba. Posted by Captain Peter at www.confluence.org . This location, however, only derives its ‘meaning’ from the fact that it is a degree confluence.

Despite the fact that the history of new media as they are adopted throughout technically and economically developed societies is fairly recent, this history has managed to create at least three distinguishable bodies of future visions that had sufficient mass appeal to make it into concretely percieved present.

Of course, specifically in the societal context of media en technology, envisioned futures follow each other up with an ever increasing speed. The funny thing is that the decay rate isn’t speeding up to the same extent. Once finance has found its way, and agenda’s, jobs and personal fates are committed, another time regime than that of the imagination takes over, and we get stuck with a severly mediated body of future visions for at least a couple of seasons.

So, that’s how we are currently living in at least three futures at the same time: Web2.0 is the warped but realised future vision of the early 80′ies hypertext believers, of the pre-dotcom and pre-www internet idealists for whom the net was to be the great democratising force - the means to spread all knowledge and power evenly.
Second Life is a beta version of an embodied future (rooted in the later 80′ies and early 90′ies) of the extropians, of the Californian Virtual Reality adepts that strove to leave the body behind and to upload consciousness into digital and (therefore) boundless realities.
And a third future - timebased in the second half of the 90′ies- that is being rolled out as we speak is that of RFID and GPS linked public data systems. It is the concretisation of the ubicomp dreams and the design ideology of ambient intelligence.

Web 2.0 and ubicomp’s currently embodied future seem to match rather well. RFID can in many relevant ways indeed be used as a social platform to exchange digital data related to places, objects and located people.
Second Life is a bit of an outsider in the currently realised futures - it seems to me the overarching idea of SL as a no-holds-barred place of the wildest imagination, only limited by a simple physics engine, and the amount of LindenDollars on your account, gets in the way of more interesting, more hybrid uses. But I’m not sure whether in the near future LindenLabs has some serious decision making to do, and possibly re-branding, or that it will be the users themselves who take SL in new directions (after all, SL is mainly what it’s user do with it).
Will SL grow into a tool for creative representation of First Life phenomena? A virtual office where everyone can talk to a pretty and helpful face instead of having to wait for an idiot phone robot to explain what number to dial to get offered the next set of possible problems into which your particular issue might fall? A YouTube cinema? - where you can meet friends and watch someones peculiar YouTube selection in a cosy virtual cinema, and chat about it, so you don’t have to watch alone.
A place where activists come together and wield political power by sheer number again? Blocking the entrances of virtual offices with their avatars to put pressure behind their demand for a pay rise?

So not all local projects are locative. A microtransmitter broadcasting some iPods’ playlist is not a locative media project. Unless that playlist would consist of field recordings done at other places, and broadcasted here with the intention to create some heightened or particular experience of the place we are. (- just making things up here, but probably such a project exists somewhere)

More problematic: the canonical
Familiar Stranger project would then not be a locative media project. Because the whole thing is not about location - it is about proximity! Yes, the projects informs your experience of places you share with strangers that are less strange then you knew or that become less strange over time - but the project is not centered around location at all. It is centered around the user of the application - wherever that user happens to be. I would say location is only a secondary informative context of the Familiar Stranger project. Familiar Stranger is a Proximity Media project, as are a lot of Bluetooth projects that run on phones.

The more physical space becomes an important informative layer or context in digital information, the less clear it becomes what the term locative media refers to.
In the least, it indicates a very broad set of projects, technical applications and practices. Too broad, for my taste. With the LocativeClub (a group of Amsterdam based practioners and theoretics of locative media) we have been trying to dissect the term locative media - to come up with useful ways to pinpoint it. We are still in the process, so it may turn out to be necessary to stick to an inclusive use, while being aware and clear about all the differentiations of the term.

If we knew better how excacty we can mean ‘locative’ - we would also be able to formulate more interesting critiques on so-called ‘locative’ projects. And we may come up with good ideas for next projects.

Criteria
The first and most obvious criteria we proposed for an appropriate use of the term locative media was: the primary informative context of a locative media project should be (a specific) location. We actually thought this should mean that a locative project can only really be accessed at the location itself.
A second criteria we came up with is that the content material of a locative project should be related to the location (allthough we agreed that this relation can be of very heterogeneous nature).
Implicitly, I think, we discussed the term from a user or participants perspective - so quite subjectively and pragmatically. So, we tried to describe what the script of a locative media project should include from the perspective of a user / participant.

(more later)

(Looking for the best way to get a tag cloud displayed at the top of the central column - also checking various three column layouts)

Hello world indeed. I’ll leave the css’ing for later, and will allow myself some trial and error when I’m at it. The first thing to do know would be to show you some footage of Oorbeek together with Bodies Anonymous, that was shot only yesterday at the BIMHuis in Amsterdam.

The occasion was the monthly Dance and Music Impro Lab. We (six members of the band Oorbeek and four dancers of Bodies Anonymous) played Oorbeeks game Oordeel - that probably best translates as Judgement. In this game you either play or you conduct. Conductors conduct the players, and can make them stop playing as well. They can also tell the other conducters to start playing. If a conducter tells you to stop playing, you automatically turn into a conductor. Conductors use a set of gestures to make their interventions understood. Obeying the rules is, of course, sacred. But they leave an interesting form of freedom within their structure.
A complete explanation and visual display of Oordeel’s gestures can be found at Oorbeek’s website . Do play Oordeel as much as you like, or play it by your own rules (it’s an open source game!) but please mention Oorbeek if you play it. And let us know if you have good ideas about new gestures (oorbeek [at] oorbeek [dot] net )
As it turned out, Oordeel was as effectively playable by dancers as by musicians.
What was very exciting about the show and its non-categorising approach to body movement and sonic behaviour (speaking from the perspective of a musician on stage) was how the spatial aspects of making music developed over the performance. During the show Oorbeek was somehow unpacked. Musicians started to intentionally move over the stage - location, coming together, spreading out, lining up, orientation, kneeling, etc. becoming almost architectural aspects of playing music. Using the space and choosing places, postures and directions became meaningful but it didn’t get narrative (OK, here and there it did) and that (I think) kept it very open for the audience to experience at their own leisure.