axis of praxis, originally uploaded by russelldavies.

I’m not entirely sure, but I think the colour-infill of the letters is crazy nu-rave reflecto stuff. I might change that… Unless people really like it!

A week or so ago, Ryan of Adaptive Path conducted a long, looping interview with me over IM where we covered the above and beyond.

Of course, this was meant to be something punchy, level-headed and action-packed as a promotion for their upcoming MX event, where people want to hear about the business-like practicalities and opportunities of ‘design thinking’ etc.

Instead they got something that Peter accurately described as ‘DVD-extras’, and I’m pretty comfortable with that.

For me, at least, and YMMV of course – crispy, crunchy blue-shirt and chinos bullet-points don’t do it. Design, invention and making comes out of play, punning and rambling on – generative, diverging and looping and splicing.

I’m very glad that Ryan decided to do the interview in IM, rather than emailing me questions that I could respond to as if in an exam. It’s a fun mess, that I’m glad to say Peter returned to and found a seed of something to advance further himself: the influence that our new ability of visualising shared behaviours has on our old ability as a social species to flock.

I’m hoping that my talk at MX will have a little more discipline to it, but still have enough DVD extras there for people to pick out and run with. If you register for MX, then use the discount code AP have given me: “MXMJ”, you’ll get 15% off the
registration price…

Tim O’Reilly wrote that his company is now creating aggregated speaker pages for everyone who’s every spoken at one of their conferences. I’m lucky enough to have spoken at a few, and even lucky to end up with two speaker pages – even after ‘The Unification’.

I’m

• Matt Jones

and

• Matt D. Jones

I’ll be losing the D in a couple of days, so maybe along with updating my bio, I’ll have my multiple-personality disorder seen to…

“’The lists in this book,’ I ventured to a Kylie momentarily caught precisely midway between a cynical world and a romantic one, ‘locate us somewhere, I hope beautifully, midway between the slight and the complete, between the incomplete and the deep.’

Kylie fainted. I think my audacity had penetrated the barrier of fame that separated her from everyday speculation, and had caused a couple of vital wires to snap. She had a way of fainting in slow motion that was both alarming and alluring. I had to explain that, yes, the list often just a nice way of passing the time, of showing of the hipness of your choices, a sketchy part of a self-portrait, a way of wallowing in a bubbly nostalgia that returns you to a simpler, sweeter time, of trying to contain sheer chaos in little patches of consoling order, of making plans for a future that seems so blank and featureless you have to impose shape on it by transferring things in easily wrapped packages. Lists help you believe that there will be a future – by reminding you that the things you are listing have happened, in a time that was once a future, and that therefore there will be a future where things will happen that can then be listed and taken forward to remind us of a past where stuff was generated that made us believe there is a present and so, ultimately a future.”

Words and Music, Paul Morley

Which is the best preamble I can think of to my obligatory last.fm rolling yearly top 20 (sort-of) chart of albums:

And top ten tracks

By comparing both of them, it’s clear that my last.fm usage is a reflection of where my music is - i.e. I listen to last.fm a lot at work, where I have very little music stored on my hard-drive(s).

There’s a smattering of iTms purchases which tend to be earworms I need to purchase and listen to immediately, DRM-be-damned. In this category I would place Justice Vs Simian’s ‘We are your friends’, ‘Monster’ by The Automatic and ‘Key of C’ by Jim Noir.

Sidenote: it is extremely gratifying for the reader of Paul Morley’s ‘Words and Music’ to find while referencing the wikipedia definition of ‘earworm’ that it’s first example of an earworm in popular culture is ‘I can’t get you out of my head’ by Kylie Minogue.

There are also things revealing of deeper needs, flaws and habits here – but again related to place. I often have a overwhelming need to play Television’s ‘Marquee Moon’ loudly on my speakers when everyone else have left my little bit of the office – which is well represented here.

It’s also clear that aside from these ‘hits’ that I placed on heavy-rotation I spent most of my listening year in my own long-tail, as it were. Heh – I think I might be disappearing up my own buzzword there. Ahem.

Revealing, in review, in terms of Last.fm’s character: it’s radio-station metaphor seems to have a powerful hold on me. I walk away from it, I leave it running, I come back to it.

There’s an implicit ‘passivity’ pitch: ‘just enjoy the music, it’ll be exactly what you want’ which belies the activity you have to invest in it: rating, banning, skipping.

To quote Paul Morley again, the list is a way: ‘of showing of the hipness of your choices’ but a last.fm list is a mix of my choices, a machines choices and a multiplication of the two via the choices of others.

When I look at this list I see things that have a high rating that I would never actively ‘select’ e.g. Gary Jules (Gary Bloody Jules?! That’s putting a major dent in the ‘hipness of my choices’) but have probably played to no listener and multiplied their way up the list each time they have sung to no-one but the database.

So presenting a last.fm list of your year can feel an oddly-outsourced form of self-portraiture. A partly ghost-written musical memoire.

Yet – there are some gratifying things there – things which I discovered through last.fm and social-music-discovery-technology (clumsy!) – like Broken Social Scene, Tunng, Sufjan Stevens (late to the party on all three, another hole in the hipness of my choices…)

Richard Hawley ranks highly too – one of the albums which I think I always played as an album – a rare thing in this shuffle-culture, and also one that on a road-trip to West Wales I found that myself, my wife and my father all enjoyed. Again – rare!

So the list ends, 2006 ends – but last.fm keeps on cataloguing, “reminding you that the things you are listing have happened, in a time that was once a future, and that therefore there will be a future..”

Happy new year!

Black Iron Prison Hoody, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

The natural companion to the “VALIS is coming – look busy!” shirt… Be warm and snug inside your eternal perfect system of repressive social control!

When it comes to the people saving the Earth, or just the UK, or even just Cardiff from peril – don’t you want them to have a little more technical savvy, than, say a bored teenager?

Take a look at what alien crimefighters and Gallifreyan-crossword-anagram-answer, Torchwood are using:

Despite being a shadowy paragovernmental agency entrusted with securing alien technology – they are most comfortable something that resembles a bad Web2.0 site, or a dodgy trillian skin at best. They’re your Hotmail friends! They’re the people who send you that Ok-Go treadmill YouTube clip four months after you saw it!

They’re Eloi! We’re doomed

Reassuringly, good old Five are staffed with much more CLI-kinds of guys…

The Spooks, unlike their colleagues at CTU (who seem to favour the 45 degree angled corners of professional flash design circa 2002) are strictly on the command-line tip with the odd snazzy-but-useful bit of hardcore datavis.

MORLOCKS, THANKFULLY!

Apologies in advance for my attempt at creating one of those blog-meme things.

I asked this question at dinner the other night with some friends, and it sparked a lot of fun debate… So it might have some legs, and you might find it interesting:

The silicon-virus combined with climate-change-server-meltdown means that the internet is going to be switched off tomorrow. What 5 things are you going to print out?

My five things:

How to make a fire
http://www.m4040.com/Survival/Skills/Fire/Fire.htm

How to purify water
http://www.m4040.com/Survival/Skills/Water/Water.htm

Elementary shelter construction
http://www.geocities.com/aaawildernesssurvival/shelter.html

(My first three choices assume that the global poop has or will hit the fan and I’d like to know this stuff…)

Wikipedia article on The Beach Boys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_Boys
because it’s got the lot – also has a nice extensive discography to remind me of obscure songs to sing like ‘vegetables’

A mosaic of my flickr favourites using FD’s flickr toys
http://flagrantdisregard.com/flickr/

So there. It was quite instructional looking up the things I thought I’d need. For instance, at a cursory glance, wikipedia doesn’t have that much ‘how-to’ stuff. Moreover, Instructables.com tends to have things that might be a lot of use at ‘burning-man’ but not under a burning atmosphere…

Of course, there were a couple of things brought up at dinner the other night.

With my GMF fear, I’m assuming that the poop is hitting the fan here (and also as someone sagely pointed out, even then I could always go scavenging in Borders…). What’s the situation like if everything else is normal, but the internet gets switched off? What would I salvage then?

I’m passing this on to Tom, Webb, Dan, Rod, Tom A and Foe…

Clive Thompson on why “Soccer” (sic) annoys merkins:

“...game design reflects the national soul. Americans are predisposed to enjoy games where the rules encourage lots of scoring. Soccer wasn’t architected that way, so Americans don’t like it. Baseball, basketball, and football, in contrast, were designed to allow for lots of scoring—and they are thus huge hits in America, a country obsessed with toting up manichean victories.

I seriously doubt Cannon and Lessner are even aware of the existence of ludology—the philosophy and design of play. But they have nonetheless illustrated precisely why ludology is such a powerful way to understand national cultures, and the differences between Americans and Europeans. It also helps you understand why the writers are so damn snarky, and their critics so correspondingly nasty: It’s because ludology is one of the most gut-level, passionate areas of philosophy, and play is so central to our identities. People can be tepid about whether or not they like a book or a movie. But nobody is is wishy-washy about play. A game either totally rocks or totally sucks, and there is no phase transition between the two.”

I lost my ipod, so I am starting to lead a life outside of the Jobsian iHegemon for now – transfering MP3s to the memory card in my N70.

I wiped it and didn’t have time to put new ones on (although the ‘random fill’ feature in the new music manager app is proving quite good) so, for better or for worse, I have been listening over and over to Strictly Kev and Paul Morley’s “Raiding the 20th Century – Words and Music edition”.

As a result I am sitting in a room, and William Burroughs is reverberating around in my head:

“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out”

Pass the chainsaw, would you?

Went to the dentist last friday.

I fully comply with the rest-of-the-world’s view of the British relationship with the dental arts, and am completely terrified of going to the little room with the cup of pink rinse.

I asked for recommendations from friends for a dentist who specialised in making people who hadn’t been to the dentist in… a long time… feel more relaxed and happy about the experience.

Mr. Webb told me about his dentist, Dr.Bashar Al-Naher who uses a combination of mild anaesthetic and NLP to induce relaxation and a feeling of security in his patients.

I’ve been lucky enough never to have to have surgery or be in another situation where anaesthesia was employed, so this was a novel experience for me.

Once I’d reached the state of both local and mild general anaesthesia, I had a curious feeling of distance from my body.

I felt as if my conscious mind (in which I seemed together enough to start dissecting the experience) was ‘up on a balcony’ somewhere in my head. I had a distinct feeling that I had retreated to an observation gallery, compartmentalised from my body itself, and even the lower part of my head/face where the action was.

Whilst feeling removed from ‘where the action was’, I started reflecting on ‘Where the action is’, and my previous work with Chris on embodied interaction. I even started thinking about writing this post.

Sometime during this, a small daemon system running somewhere sidled into the balcony where “I” was, and started fretting about all the dissection of the experience I was doing – perhaps fearing the degree of conscious thought going on would let the body (and the pain) in through the back door.

I went back to (un)concentrating on my breathing, and the visualisation that Dr. Al-Naher was leading me through. Happy again, I let the drilling and filling continue…

After the work had been done and I was coming out of the state of anaesthesia I was talking with the dentist, probably quite slowly and deliberately – but definitely ‘back in the room’.

There was a moment where I was aware that my foot was in an uncomfortable or precarious position. Most of the time we wouldn’t give this a microsecond’s conscious thought, and we would just effortlessly readjust the position of our foot.

I felt I had to send a discrete set of instructions down my body to my foot, almost like Flesh-Logo in order to move it.

Of course there are all sorts of flaws with this interpretation, but the temporary compartmentalising of ‘body’ and ‘mind’ that I felt just reinforced the fact that most of the time there is no separation at all.

The experience (apart from making my teeth better) has left me with real conviction the train of thought in Paul Dourish’s book – about the power of embodied interaction to improve our interfaces with technology.

And also, of course, how good my new dentist is – but he probably mindhacked me to say that…

Fun at ITP: Robotic wireless camera platform Vs Nokia N70

Digits, cities, originally uploaded by Ti.mo.

Personal highlight was being heckled by Bruce Sterling, after forgetting Olafur Eliasson’s name.

Timo took a picture a slide that I put in at the last minute, which looking back on it, basically sums up and communicates everything I’m interested in, or ever been interested in or think is important at the moment – my own personal aleph.



So I guess I’m done!

On bus. 137.

Chikka/Chikka/Chikka/Chikka

Depersonalised stereo dominates the space with its tiny, tinny drums.

Chikka/Chikka/Chikka/Chikka

As much of a challenge as an occupation – the player not really listening, not really enjoying, just waiting to be asked, just wanting to spit defiance.

Chikka/Chikka/Chikka/Chikka

Turn around to see two girls holding a neon-yellow beetle, rubbing its legs together.

Chikka/Chikka/Chikka/Chikka