Weblog // Project
On writing your own VOIP application
For my final, big, worth-too-many-marks-to-mess-up, project; I’ve been making my own VOIP application. Like Skype, but for the sake of art. It’s been… tricky. Before I get into it too much though, here’s an MP3 sample of how it sounds.
If you listened to the clip, allow me to translate. I’m saying, “Hello, my name is Simon Grout and this is my project”; followed by some whistling. Obviously. There are two lots of reasons why the audio sounds like this; there are technical reasons and then there are critical / contextual reasons (which sound made up). (more…)
Project prototype
Prototype time! You dial a (secret, for now) phone number, and you get to have a somewhat trippy conversation with yourself, across time and space. In case you’re wondering, it sounds a bit like this.
This little doodle shows how the technologies fit together; the arrows represent audio signal. This is mostly for my benefit, so as to avoid those nasty feedback noises.
The point of this prototype is to demonstrate how the ‘gaps’ that technology can introduce form a part of our experiences. By exaggerating the gap — in this case by using GarageBand to introduce a delay to the audio signal — I’m looking to play around in this space in between interface and experience.
TomTom vs the London Underground
Says Speedy, Write a 100 word critique on tom tom as opposed to your love of the london map
. Well ok, (it’s a diagram not a map, by the way) here we go:
The London Underground system runs to a set schedule; in order to intersect with a train you have to be in the right space at the right time. The diagram will show you the space, but time has been separated out into a timetable. With TomTom, the view moves with you; tracking your movements live, from satellites in space and giving you a constantly updated ETA.
The TomTom gives you a view of the space you are in, but in some kind of myopic tunnel vision (with a slightly threatening Australian accent, at that). The diagram does gives you an overview of the whole system, you can plan to go from A to B and see both represented on the diagram at once.
Dissertations are tricky
I’ve spent the weekend with my brow furrowed (furrowed, I say!) rewriting the abstract of my dissertation. The new title, which I’m sure will change at least one more time, is:
The London Underground diagram is to London, as [blank] is to the World Wide Web.
As I tried to explain to the guys this morning, the dissertation is about interactions with ‘objects’ — digital or otherwise — and how our strategies for dealing with those objects affects our experience. Which is to say, it’s still about how awesome the London Underground diagram is.
Project triangle
The project triangle places my work in the area I think I’m working in, and positions it relative to other work that I’m going to steal appropriate bits from. Michel Gondry and Liam Lynch aren’t on there, but they sort of sit just outside of the bottom right corner.
Dissertation proposal
I’ve finally managed to put into words what it is I want to write about this year; before I could only manage it with much waving of arms and obscure references to Jacques Cousteau.
The world-wide-web remains largely unexplored because — much like the London Underground before the introduction of Harry Beck’s diagram — we can’t comprehend the entirety of the network as it is currently presented to us.
On another note, I used Avenir as the typeface for the PDF of my proposal. It’s nice, but the capital R isn’t anywhere near as filthy as the one from Helvetica.
Maps of the web
This year, I would like to go exploring the web (I’ve probably already mentioned that a couple of times). An explorer needs maps, and so I’ve been thinking about the way the web is currently mapped. Most of the maps out there are either based on network connections between machines (which isn’t that interesting to me) or on semantic connections between topics (which is better, but still not that interesting). More on the semantic web another day, though. And I’ll start talking about mappa mundi once I’ve been to the library again and know what I’m talking about.
So far, the best map of the web I’ve found is this map of online communities on xkcd.
London Underground map
It’s not really a map; it’s a diagram — it has, at best, a tenuous relationship with the actual geography of London — but to many people (including me) it’s the only map of London there is. As I’ve experienced it, London is a collection of islands, joined only by an elaborate network of tubes. The London Underground map is London.
So… the internet (and by internet, I mostly mean the web). Physically, the internet is just a lot of computers linked together; sending, receiving and routing packets of data (through, oddly enough, an elaborate network of tubes). That’s just machines though, that’s the way they see it.
What I’m trying to say is; the way I experience London through the Underground map is somehow related to the way I experience the internet through Safari and Google. And in the same way that most of London is left off that map, to be forever unexplored; much of the internet is floating around in unexplored obscurity, not linked into the Piccadilly Line of the web.
I want to go exploring.
Carnivore
Carnivore is a surveillance tool for data networks
. It is a piece of open source software (ok, free software; quiet down back there Richard Stallman) that allows you to map network traffic between machines.
That’s nice, but there’s more to the internet than machines passing data to each other — there are people out there. And there are treasures. And beasts. How do you map all of that? And much like the bottom of the sea, I suspect that much of it remains unexplored. Which leads me onto an idea I’m having for my project this year…
