Dichterische Fragmente

2012-01-23T19:33:00.002+01:00

Sourcefabric, those open source types that I work with and for, are looking for some amazing audio to ship with Airtime Pro. Upload your track to the contest, get friends to check it out, and your song could be one of ten tracks that comes with Airtime Pro and features in the web demo. Done and done.

2012-01-19T22:55:00.002+01:00

Apple has finally confirmed the worst kept secret of 2012; its foray into the schorlarly publishing industry. Smart move of course, amazing to think Blackboard has lasted this long, but success seems to depend on widespread educative adoption of the iPad. Or does the iPad's success depend on the widespread adoption of the iBook Author (as its clumsily called)?

Either way, its a software/hardware excursion that could be really interesting and help define the book's future. Interactive, tablet driven publishing has real potential. That said, it's certainly not the end of the book's evolution, nor is the ebook market sewn up. Why do I say that? Well, you'll just have to wait and see… (come back February 3rd).

Books of course are where myths live and, as my posts this week are exploring (using Jack Lule as inspiration), news too is the habitat of the greater myth. Within the modern story of news and with The Victim identified (the print paper) and The Scapegoat named (the internet), we move onto the next myth, society's most pervasive. The Hero.

The hero, according to Lule, is an exemplary model for society. The trajectory is a familiar one. Humble beginnings, noble quest, fierce battle, triumphant return. Lule argues that mass media has hollowed out this traditional hero though, in favour of one with their own agenda - the celebrity.

But The Hero of the modern story of news, a story in which an industry transforms, is different. He is a true hero. He is not necessarily a he. He is the journalist who can cope with technological change. Who has evolved into a marketing strategist. Who was blogging in '99. Who can tweet a sensation and jump to the scene of any story through a Facebook contact. A journalist who has mastered Google+ to save his reputation and that of his newspaper. Someone as happy to code as to coffee drink.

From humble beginnings as an apprentice on the newsfloor, a noble quest for truth, a bloody battle against the revolution in media publishing and eventually, the triumphant return. These are the men and women recognised in new media awards, approached by Google, who command online legions to amplify their truth.

Heroes have a thousand faces, says Lule, and for these new heroes, it couldn't be truer.

2012-01-18T22:35:00.003+01:00

And so in a day where internet protests reached a new level with SOPA/PIPA blackouts (where to start with commentary on this? Here, here, here?) we arrive at the second myth, that of The Scapegoat.

In taking Lule's text Daily News, Eternal Stories, I've barely touched upon what his justification for using myths is. So, why is it important that we should link news and myth? And, therefore, why is it important that I should spend time detecting the myths within news' current predicament?

News and myth, Lule argues, both tell real stories. Myth is not fiction or fable, it is a true history that verses, and is versed, in reality. There is no symbolism in myth and there is no symbolism in news.

The Scapegoat is the second of Lule's myths to be found between the broadsheets, yellow papers and red-tops. The function of The Scapegoat is a societal one. The Scapegoat is used to show us what happens when we deviate from societal norms. It is the vilified criminal, the shamed teacher, the corrupt politician and the radical cleric.

In the story of news however, it is important to ask the question - whose society do the norms belong to?

Of course, there's the internet as candidate. There's always the internet. Is it The Scapegoat? The papers are full of stories about demonic chatrooms, phished pensioners and VC-funded excesses. Is the old establishment hitting back at the revenue-stealing web and denoting it as The Scapegoat?

The Scapegoat warns us not to challenge or ignore social beliefs, so it would seem only right that if journalists and print are the victims, then it must be web enterprises who are to blame for the news downturn. The internet is The Scapegoat in the eyes of the industry.

Because, of course, the news industry is the media industry. Challenge us, the industry says, and you will end up like this, this, this thing… bloated and uncontrolled and open to criminality and it's-not-as-free-as-it-looks. A den of inequity, full of quick bucks, stolen content and shifting sands. SOPA and PIPA are Scapegoat potions, potions that seem - thankfully - not to be working.

The crucial point they're missing, is that when you view those that push boundaries as good for society, not bad, The Scapegoat can be a positive thing. The internet instills new ways of working and thinking and earning and creating. For media, for newspapers, for all of us.

That sounds more like the web we know and love doesn't it? The meaning of scapegoat has shifted over the years from one vilified as a warning to society, to one unfairly accused, a fall guy for the wrongdoing of others. Sounds about right.

And (thankfully, for I am running out of places to hide) it leaves convenient space for the next myth in the story of news - The Hero.

2012-01-17T10:17:00.000+01:00

"The victim lies at the heart of many texts. Myth reconciles people to the tragic and seeming randomness of human existence. Plans, careers, dreams and lives can be shattered in an instance by a lightening strike."

Jack Lule's Daily News, Eternal Stories seeks out seven master myths and shows them to be present in our everyday news media. The task I have set myself (both to begin writing again, and to give some form to scattered thoughts) is to identify those myths, not within news stories but within the story of news itself.

It is often said that every great story contains one of these myths. For me, for a story to be truly great, it must contain them all. Is the story of news truly great?

The first of Lule's master myth is The Victim. Innocence and death are central to this theme, the paragon of virtue snatched from us before their influence was truly felt. So who plays this role?

Well, from this 2012 perspective, it's the humble print paper. The worthy, noble, talented, ethical, investigative citywide paper that somehow stitches together a community ravaged by post-industrial decay, community diaspora and crime with stories about, well, post-industrial decay, community diaspora and crime. Dwindling sales, competition from online news (often from the paper's own own online edition), a workflow structure resistant to change, as well as steadfast and obdurate owners who see value in different terms from those who work for that value.

"News, as myth, turns death into sacrifice. A story is gathered and told. A passing is marked and mourned."

We all recognise it from The Baltimore Sun in The Wire, stereotype that it is. You are doing excellent work, but we need less with more. Hell, even when it comes to selling papers, its proving difficult (as the New York Times has found with its attempts to offload The Boston Globe).

But of course, it's the journalists who are the real victims in this story. Educated, trained and experienced, they end up competing with themselves, having to reducate themselves, find themselves becoming developers and designers and social media gurus. They have to learn CSS and HTML and read books on community building through marketing on the late train home. When was the last time you paid for news?

There's hope of course. These are talented people and surely there's a myth that salvages them, right? Perhaps. But not quite yet. Firstly, another myth emerges - that of the The Scapegoat.

Seven myths of journalism

2012-01-16T20:37:00.000+01:00

"They are primordial stories that have guided human storytelling for ages. And they guide the news stories of today."

There are seven myths, so we are told, seven myths and seven stories. They are at the heart of all narratives. Jack Lule's book Daily news, eternal stories seeks out those seven myths in modern news stories. In every newspaper, every day, these myths appear.

But what of newspapers and their future? As news media faces an epic challenge, the likes of which as not been seen since television, can its own history and narrative arc be traced like one of these myths? Criminal activity, ownership tectonics, technological progress, shifting markets, closing doors, fading ink and the disintegration of ethics and language… and yet. And yet.

The story of news has someway to run. So, what are these seven myths and can any of them be found in the current situation news media finds itself in? Jack Lule posits the the victim, the scapegoat, the hero, the good mother, the trickster, the other world and the flood as the seven myths. I'll take those thanks Jack, he says, needing a writing challenge, and build a myth of my own. Seven days, seven myths, starting tomorrow.

2011-12-08T08:54:00.001+01:00

More great work from the Guardian's data and interactive teams.

Riot rumours: how misinformation spread on Twitter during a time of crisis
A period of unrest can provoke many untruths, an analysis of 2.6 million tweets suggests. But Twitter is adept at correcting misinformation - particularly if the claim is that a tiger is on the loose in Primrose Hill

The study of sentiment, rumour and counterargument in social media, especially Twitter, is an important one. Understanding amplification is probably, to an extent, being driven by commercial and marketing interest, but the rise of Twitter has consistently been matched by the rise of interesting technologies to try and gather 'Big Data' and apply it.

What might be interesting is when we see frameworks develop, into which multiple social networks can be 'plugged'. For instance, the UN are building Hunchworks, "the world's first social network for hypothesis formation, evidence collection, and collective decision-making." It's sentiment analysis by any other name, but are they trying to build a social network to replace Twitter or work under/over it?

In other words, will Big Data analysis tools develop to have a similar relationship with social media as frameworks like Zend, symfony, CakePHP have with PHP itself? The core 'code' is in the social network, but frameworks will be developed to lie over the top and allow the rapid building and prototyping of other networks, datasets and live analysis? Is this already happening?

2011-12-07T09:46:00.001+01:00

Some record labels and online stores seem to really understand how to work with digital material. Used well, digital streams and digital downloads can benefit artists and drive sales.

How do I know this? I've run a record label, I sell my own music on CD, tape, vinyl and a range of digital formats and - yes - I'm perhaps that rare breed of person happy to pay for digital music.Take Boomkat for instance. Great playlists, wishlists, range of file formats, excellent shop and the files arrive nicely bundled and often with extra pdfs or at least artwork.

I recently bought the amazing Pinch and Shackleton album direct from the label Honest Jons. In short, the user experience of the shop wasn't the best, the previews wouldn't load in my browser and the mp3s themselves had no data at all apart from titles in the form of 1cracksinthepleasuredome.So I sent them this response.

Dear Honest Jons,

First time buyer, just thought I'd give you a little feedback.

After hearing great things about Pinch And Shackleton's album, thought I'd buy direct from the label.

Some issues:

- had to go to youtube to actually preview the track

- had to individually add each mp3 to my cart

- had to select individual mp3s for download from email

- no artwork included

- incorrect metadata - no artist, album data, release date, etc.

That's like selling me a vinyl without the sleeve. I guess selling digital not a priority, but I've bought vinyl from you previously and always been impressed. This time not so.Found the album on filesharing sites, could have downloaded it for free. Thought I'd support the label and artist, pretty sure the illegally shared stuff would have had artwork and correct metadata.

Really disappointed.Best, Adam

And received this amazing (anonymous) reply.

Morning, Adam...You can preview on our site, top quality mp3s.Your points two and three are the same. The mp3s are only 60 bloody pence. The bundle would be £4.80...Yes, no artwork for this price and format. In the case of Pinch & Shackleton, we want people to buy vinyl. The sleeve is there on the site.The metadata isn't incorrect, it's partial. Put the release date yourself in if you like!'Found the album on filesharing sites, could have downloaded it for free... pretty sure the illegally shared stuff would have had artwork and correct metadata.'Checked your links, you're quite a wanker.

Sure, it's not the biggest purchase in the world, not the most pressing issue, but this an exceptional example of how not to deal with a) digital material and b) customer feedback.Buy Pinch and Shackleton's music, avoid Honest Jons if you can.

UPDATE

I wrote back (their quoted mail in italics).

You can preview on our site, top quality mp3s.

Doesn't work Mac OSX 10.6.7, Firefox or Chrome.

Your points two and three are the same. The mp3s are only 60 bloodypence. The bundle would be £4.80...

Sure. How much does it cost you to host them? It's not a big deal, just feedback on the user experience.

Yes, no artwork for this price and format. In the case of Pinch &Shackleton, we want people to buy vinyl. The sleeve is there on the site.

I often buy both. I tend to wait till I'm back in the UK though, hence the digital only purchase this time.

The metadata isn't incorrect, it's partial. Put the release dateyourself in if you like!

I'm pretty sure 1cracksinthepleasuredome isn't the correct track name.
Checked your links, you're quite a wanker.

Great customer service. More than happy to help. Best, Adam
And they replied (them in italics again).
Doesn't work Mac OSX 10.6.7, Firefox or Chrome.
Yes, it does, all three.
How much does it cost you to host them?
No money goes to hosting. One third each to Pinch, Shackleton and HJ.
I'm pretty sure 1cracksinthepleasuredome isn't the correct track name.
I don't think we can influence this. It's not our metadata.
So, ignoring the fact that they don't know the difference between an OS and a browser, or that they misunderstood my hosting question, it's now, apparently, not their fault.

As Honest Jons gets a third of the money, I can tell you with some certainty that the going rate to be called a wanker is about one pound eighty.

2011-10-27T18:58:00.000+02:00

Facebook, I quit. Why?

Privacy

Shifting privacy boundaries, opt-out new features and blatant lies about tracking have all but eroded my trust in the service. Here's a recent patent application in which "a method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain." No thanks Facebook, not when you said about 30 days earlier that you had no interest in this.

Irrelevance

Having only committed esoteric or impartial amounts of data to Facebook, its social graphing of me is somewhat skewed. Advertisements have always been irrelevant and ignored, but now my news feed is way off. I don't see the updates I want to from the friends I'm closest to. For me, the algorithm is not working.

UX issues

Timeline, ticker, messages, feed all changed for the considerably worse. Feedback loops, required ctrl refresh moments, UI confusion - all happens too often.

User habits

Pointless event invites, mass-mails, photo-tagging as attention attracting. Yep, some of the users - my friends - ruined it for everyone else. I'm also aware that I might be ruining it for others too - the ability to filter/block/unfriend is not transparent enough, not easy enough. I want my networking to be guilt free.

Groups, filters and lists

Introduced too late - my social, professional and family networks cannot be simplified in a way that would make the service easier for me to use. Retroactive grouping way too time-consuming.

Data

Like all internet services, Facebook is often a balance between giving up data in return for something in return that is aggregated, accurate and insightful. The pay-off between surrendering data and getting something useful in return is too small in this case. This is the new law of diminishing data returns. The more I give you, the less safe I become, the less useful your service is to me.

In the meantime you can find me over at LinkedIn and my two twitter accounts, one for journalism and media updates, and one for more personal or music orientated thoughts. Or write me a postcard.

2011-10-24T09:00:00.000+02:00

A final walk up the hill, perhaps. To the hotel, perhaps. To another night's sleep and to another morning's awakening, perhaps. Things are moving and refusing to return. Ending my second week in unfamiliar beds, frustrated that I've not been able to write more here. I stand facing crossroads and - to my great fortune - all of them seem like exciting junctions, seem like exciting junctures.

New York was a blast. Gave a nice workshop on Booki, a phenomenal open source social production platform for the writing of books. Spoke with nice people from the Parson's School of Design. Got to understand a little more about the structures behind Wikimedia. Visited the US's longest-standing freeform radio station WFMU. Hung out with the very creative folks at Hacks and Hackers NYC. Engaged with UNICEF, laid plans for Sierra Leone radio networks. Talked tech with WNYC radio people and toured their digital newsroom. Hung out with former DocumentCloud programme director. Forged links with Creative Commons and those lovely folks at Mozilla. Drafted plans for a peer-to-peer university school that will materialise in the next month. More, much more to come. Considered moving to NYC, decided to move to NYC, will wait and see. Now is not the right time, new structures need to be set first.

The last week was spent in Prague with the united nations of Sourcefabric. I never fail to be amazed by the breadth and scope of the talent attracted to this organisation. Sourcecamp is the annual yearly meetup - this year we number 42 (we've quadrupled in size in 16 months), with more joining us every day.

Witnessed presentations of stunning newsroom projects, new software lines, graphical representations of team growth, inspirational mission statements, lightening tours of communications activity, business plans, marketing initiatives. These things can be seen all over, but to see them partnered with an open source ethos, a team that cares like no other I've experienced, and an unbelievable work ethic... the sky is the limit.

I'm proud to be heading up our communications gang. Our team is expanding and a new structure emerged in the last week, not one I can easily draw, one that works less like root-and-branch forms, but more like overlapping circles - areas of influence and expertise that complement and support. From coders to community managers - these people I work with are some of the finest around.

Then to Mediafabric and Mediathon, where the impact of our work worldwide began to hit home with amazing conference stories of independent journalism. Not just tools (and I like tools), but ethics and principles and philosophies of the right way to work. Of mainstream media's responsibilities. Of the challenges of digital. Of data's power. Of the strength of crowds. Of democracy's accountability. Of transparency. Of plurality of voice. Of access to information. Of distributed support. Of social progress through connection. Of infrastructures built through words. Of narratives that speak beyond work and to a calling. Beyond work, a calling.

2011-10-23T11:35:00.000+02:00

We're nearing the end of Sourcecamp, Mediafabric and Mediathon - a packed week of investigative hacking at the core journalistic values, technologies and workflows that underpin independent media. Full report soon, but here's a Storify summary of the discussion at Saturday's conference.

2011-10-09T14:55:00.003+02:00

Wisdom and Knowledge shall be the stability of thy times. Yesterday, a day downtown. Started at City Hall with Brooklyn Bridge stretching away over the expanse, an inevitable breathlessness at the skyline. At each moment a new eyecatcher, a new block and a new view. The sheer enormity and variety - how many ways to state intent?

The World Trade Centre site congested, felt like a hollow collecting a nation's grief, still, ten years on. New structures growing like scar tissue, stronger and irregular, absence still the dominating feature. Then towards Wall Street to interview protestors in their established camp, smaller in numbers than I expect, but with clear social organisation - public relations, press and media teams. Weather is amazing, their voice is definitely carrying further in this late summer.

Out to Greenwich village and Union Square, to markets and stalls, and then up to Grand Central Terminal, nothing short of an architectural astonishment. Sneaked into the Chrysler building, structures of power dominant in everything from typefaces to turnstiles.

5th Avenue, crowds building, remarkable flagship stores, soft spot for the Rockefeller Centre - 22 acres of objectivistic response to a Depression; the largest private building project ever undertaken. "Wisdom and Knowledge shall be the stability of thy times" sloganises the entrance.

Then through to Times Square, entering the void - everything expected and more. Found some calorific sustenance, enough to take us out of the neon heaven, a few blocks away, and up 86 floors to the Empire State observation deck, where an entirely different city revealed itself. The stability of times?

2011-10-08T15:02:00.002+02:00

No Sleep till Brooklyn. A month of travelling starting with my first visit to New York City. Little to report beyond the long plane ride, the skewed sleep patterns and a surprisingly quiet Brooklyn neighbourhood. Last night was short, arrived at nine, went up to the Target and Chase at Flatbush, then a slow fight against circadian rhythms, nursed a late beer, an attic room, dreamlands.

2011-10-02T13:30:00.000+02:00

The cultural differences and references of the @ sign or 'commercial at', most of which relate to animals. From wikipedia, so it must be true.

The @ symbol is known by various names in English, including "at sign", "at the rate", "at symbol", "at mark", "commercial at" or "ampersat". This is not to be confused with the ampersand. In keeping with its obvious etymology, it is usually pronounced at.

In Italian, the symbol is informally called the "snail" (chiocciola); its French name is "arobase" or sometimes "arrobe" or "arobe" (from the arroba, an old Spanish and Portuguese unit of weight); in Dutch it is called the "(little) monkey-tail" (apenstaartje); in Hebrew, it is informally called Strudel ("שטרודל"); in Japanese it is the "at mark", and similarly, in German it is called the "at symbol" or "spider monkey" (Klammeraffe); and in Chinese, it is known as the "little mouse".

In Spanish and Portuguese it is the symbol for arroba, an archaic unit of weight, and in some Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries it is still pronounced this way, even when related to an email address.In Russian, the symbol is informally called the "dog" (sobaka (собака)) or "doggie" (sobachka (собачка)).

The Finnish sometimes call the symbol "miukumauku" (meow meow) owing to the symbol's resemblance to a cat and its tail. In Bulgarian it is called "maimunka (маймунка)," "little monkey" and in Polish, it is called "małpa," meaning "monkey," for its resemblance to a monkey with its arm extended over its head.In Swedish and Danish the sign is known as the "snabel-a" (literally trunk a), owning to the resemblance between the sign and the trunk of an elephant.

In Norwegian the term most commonly used is "krøllalfa" (literally: curled alpha). In Greek the sign is known as "papaki" (παπάκι) meaning small duck. In Slovenian, the most common word for it is "afna", colloquially meaning "monkey", much like in Polish. In Hungarian, it is called "kukac" meaning "worm". In Czech and Slovak, it is called "zavináč" meaning "rollmop".

2011-09-08T11:58:00.000+02:00

The country of Georgia, since its declaration of independence in 1991, has oscillated between independent media booms and independent media repression. One of the most difficult things in trying to understand exactly what the country's media landscape actually looks like, is that - of course - much of the reportage on the media, comes from the media. In many countries that's a bias we accept, draw into our judgements and look past. In Georgia the situation is not quite so simple. Why? Because of the amount of influence the government holds over newspapers, radio and television.

After the Rose Revolution, a protest movement that turned into a national coup in November 2003, Georgia enjoyed four years of relative stability. After November 2007 however, following the abrupt closure of the government-critical station TV Imedi, relations between the media and the Georgian government suffered dramatically. Conflict with Russia in August 2008 further complicated matters and in 2009 media freedom became one of the key political issues between the government and the opposition, with control of the Georgian Public Broadcaster one of the prominent sites of disagreement.

So, how do we get the inside story on what's happening in the country? One perspective comes from a new wave of young, politically active reporters in Georgia. Eka Chitanava is a journalist working with Liberali one of the country's few independent news beacons, and here's the first of two exclusive podcasts covering accusations of espionage upon the president's photographer, May's clashes between police and journalists, media training in the country and what's next for the evolution of Georgian reporting.

2011-09-06T09:20:00.003+02:00

Due to Godwin's Law and a severe free-time shortage, I rarely engage in forms of internet discussion or commenting (hence the scarcity of chatter here). However, the poorly-researched, complacent and fundamentally flawed Artleaks project was one poorly-researched, complacent and fundamentally flawed art project too many and I took the bait.

Artleak's aim is to expose the "abuse of [artists, curators, art historians and intellectuals]' professional integrity and the open infraction of their labor rights." How? "With online tools... we welcome cultural workers to publish reports on the situation inside of the institution in any form. Both anonymous and signed reports are welcome."

The tools they provide? A Wordpress site and a collective gmail account. This exchange took place on their Facebook site.

Adam Thomas: Genuine question: how secure is the 'anonymous' contributions webform on your site? "We understand that some cases require anonymity – and pledge not to disclose your identity if you so request it of us" doesn't really fill potential leakers full of confidence I would imagine. How much IP information is recorded? How secure are the email addresses that you reply from?

ArtLeaks: Dear Adam - thanks for your interest - just a short remark - first of all we stay for open political confrontation for which better to use a real names ; but if some cases would demand anonymity then for sure only idiots would use any net platforms - there are many other ways to deliver information

AT: Thanks for the reply, but with all due respect it's hard to take you seriously with a response like that. Firstly, what other ways would you suggest? Your wordpress site only offers a webform and a 'collective' gmail address. Secondly, the right uses of SSL, https, gnupg, etc. can make a secure web platform delivery possible (and therefore help you achieve your goals). I'm all for your ideals when your mission statement refers to wanting to fight against the "abuse of... professional integrity", but I think the unprofessionalism with which you are approaching your task abuses the integrity of people who either work to educate about web privacy, build secure information systems, or indeed risk careers (and more) by providing information. And if "only idiots" would use a net platform whilst requiring anonymity, why does your website suggest they should use your web form? "In the initial stage, please complete the form below, describing your case in one or two paragraphs. We understand that some cases require anonymity – and pledge not to disclose your identity if you so request it of us."

ArtLeaks: OK - I got your point and you right we are not into all this issues because if you read all cases that we publish you will see that they are open public cases and looks like that you are not familiar with art matters and system which are much more low scale and where all actors very easy to trace if they give a certain information. I would imagine that things might happen that people do not want to reveal the names but then I can hardly imagine that any art institution could get into business of tracking Gmail addresses and hack it - looks like that we speak from completely another worlds.. and in any case of course we respect any professional communities but looks like that any protection could be broken when someone have interest in the case... and also materials could be delivered in any way outside internet - from oral witnessing up to data storages... dmitry

AT: Thanks for the reply Dmitry. I'm very familiar with art matters - I'm a well-established artist and curator - and very surprised you're so complacent when it comes to this. I think it shows a real lack of respect to the profession you're choosing to try and speak on behalf of. I think you have a duty of care to people who might want to leak - you're claiming you can keep this process anonymous when it's not and a fundamental tenet of your mission rests on this. The Openleaks project has a succinct take on this: "Trust in someone whom you supply with confidential material has two major aspects: 1) trust in the integrity of those receiving the material and handling it, 2) trust in those supplying and operating the technical infrastructure." Unfortunately you fail on both accounts, and so, by proxy, does your project. (Fortunately, there's a way out. Change the language on the site or do a little research into the things you claim to be protecting in your mission).

ArtLeaks: Dear Adam, we appreciate your criticism and your insight into the matter of privacy. I am the one who implemented the website - so please direct your concerns in my direction - and please use our collective email to voice them - I hope we can have a productive conversation. Dmitry and the rest of our group worked very hard to see this project come to fruition - and we also put ourselves out there as a sign of solidarity, engagement and integrity - and we hope to improve the project as we go along - let me assure you that we do not take our responsibilities to the community lightly - I think this conversation has been drawn out long enough, so i encourage you to email us with further suggestions - Corina

AT: Thanks for the conversation - I hope you see that if people can trust your systems, they'll also be able to trust what you report. To end of a positive and constructive note, there's some great toolkits which might be of use (http://www.tacticaltech.org/protect/project/survival-digital-age for instance). There's an amazing directory of whistleblowing resources (software, frameworks, platforms, legal information at http://leakdirectory.org/index.php/Leak_Site_Directory and you might also look towards OpenLeaks and GlobaLeaks for inspiration, ideas and support. Thanks!

Remain critical. Privacy of information, secure tools and transparency of process remain absolutely vital to artists as much as they do to anyone else. By taking whistleblowing (and subsequent fact-checking and redaction) away from the journalistic domain and turning it into protest or art or controversial discourse for the sake of it, real damage can be done.

The risks for advocates and independent journalists are becoming more complex. Confusion in these matters often either leads to a false sense of security (and danger is introduced into the information hierarchy, sometimes indirectly to people not involved) or leads to inaction.

Projects like the above simply serve to underline that fact, and undermine the work of people who put careers and lives on the line whilst trying to maintain freedom and openness in the media and online. If Artleaks wants to take itself seriously, and wants people to trust its reports, then it needs to start taking whistleblowing, online security and real journalistic process seriously.

2011-08-31T08:58:00.000+02:00

Two reports worth highlighting from recent months. The first is a summary and evaluation of technology for transparency and accountability by the T/A Initiative. How is it being used to promote transparency in government? Is it effective? How can it be used better?

A key element of successful technology use in transparency and accountability efforts is their speed – both in execution and in stimulating change. Well-designed efforts produced relevant and usable information that can be used to demand accountability quickly. Technology for transparency and accountability tools need not be sophisticated, but it does need intelligent design that is relevant to the local context. Projects also have a better chance of effectively producing change when they take a collaborative approach, sometimes involving government.

The second is more focused in scope, but no less in-depth. The UNEP Ogoniland Oil Assessment has revealed the extent of environmental contamination and threats to human health in Nigeria's Niger Delta region.

The environmental restoration of Ogoniland could prove to be the world's most wide-ranging and long term oil clean-up exercise ever undertaken if contaminated drinking water, land, creeks and important ecosystems such as mangroves are to be brought back to full, productive health.

Nigeria's petroleum industry is the largest in the country (itself the largest populous on the continent) and has seen serious criticism over its failure to reform an industry clearly damaging communities and their environment.

2011-08-25T09:07:00.017+02:00

A recent episode of On The Media, NPR's great radio focus on media, transparency and politics has prompted me towards a tangent on borders and identity today.

Sudan Votes is a project that seeks to promote independent, balanced and accurate coverage of Sudanese and South Sudanese affairs, all the more scrutinised (or should be) since South Sudan's independence in July. A recent article looked into the predicament of the Ngok Dinka, a largely agro-pastoral ethnic group from the Nile basin.

Now that South Sudan is independent, the Ngok Dinka are in legal limbo. While their stated loyalty has always been with the south, the geographical region they inhabit along with migratory groups officially belongs to the north.

Naturally these kind of disputes are racked with complication fueled by geography, lifestyle, community bonds, legality and - of course - colonial legacy.

A newer player in this ever-changing field of modern cartography and the shifting identities within is the web mapping service, the best known being Google Maps of course (open source alternatives for both services and tools available - my preferred are OpenStreetMap and Open Layers respectively).

But how are these services changing the world? The datasets used by organisations like Wikipedia and OSM sometimes clash with information available via Google's mapping service leading to serious disputes and differences of opinion - both in the state and public realms. Here's Ogle Earth's take on it in an amazing article on the redrawing of the Sudan/South Sudan borders:

Google’s map data carries no authority in any legal sense, not any more than Microsoft’s, Yahoo’s or National Geographic’s, but that is not surprising. What sets it apart from the others, however, is that over the past half decade, the ubiquitous use of Google Earth as a universal digital atlas has bequeathed it a popular authority, and a sense that Google’s choice regarding a border (or place name) constitutes a weighty endorsement in the court of global opinion. This has led to remarkable situations where states themselves have petitioned Google about perceived bias or errors in its maps.

There's a lot of valuable and necessary work being done by people like the writer of Ogle Earth, Stefan Geens, in documenting the evolution of online maps, and awakening a realisation that, just as it was with ancient cartographers, mapping deeply affects culture and society.

Another ubiquitous name (much to the credit of its team - as a non-profit's communications manager, I'm in awe of their exposure) in any discussion of online mapping tools is Ushahidi. Taking place in Nairobi today is their .ke evaluation launch ahead of further open dev and hackathon sessions. Join them in person or, of course, online. Talks are afoot for my own excursion to Nairobi for a journalist training project sometime next year. I've never been, but I guess I'll need a map of some kind.

2011-08-24T11:24:00.001+02:00

Taking two weeks out, but have allowed myself a one-day hiatus in my news and internet lockdown. Turns out it's a pretty significant one for Libyans.

Al-Jazeera has a liveblog with videos, as does the Guardian (compare and contrast with Russia Today's coverage). The New York Times has an interesting piece on Qaddafi's use of the media and disinformation. The Washington Post features analysis on what happens next and how the Transitional National Council will seek to guide the country through the vital next weeks. As always, follow Global Voices special coverage to keep abreast of social media and blog reaction from within Libya and neighbouring countries.

2011-08-09T15:29:00.000+02:00

Interesting outsider take on the London Riots on the Guardian live blog:

Nour Ali, a pseudonym for a journalist based in Damascus, reports:
Syrian media is largely focused on the domestic crisis, where a heavy crackdown against five months of protests is ongoing amid rising international pressure, but most outlets have covered the riots in London.

Most newspapers have run fairly straight news stories, often using material from the wires. Some reports describe the unrest as 'protests', others as 'riots'. Al-Watan, an independent daily newspaper close to the Syria regime, ran a front page story on Tuesday entitled '215 people detained and government threatens the "naughty" protesters'.
Official state media agency Sana reported the story under the headline 'Riots extend to a third British city'.

Syrian TV is putting greater emphasis on the idea that the military may be called in to restore order, Syrian analysts say, spinning what may happen in the UK to match events in Syria where the army have been heavily deployed around the country.

Presenters have reported that the mayor's office in London is asking for the military to intervene and that the police are asking families to prevent their sons from protesting."

Several things of interest beyond this, especially in the language used in government/police press releases, conferences and interviews.

Cat-and-mouse rhetoric of violence from the police. "We may use baton rounds."
Politicians shifting responsibility shifting from communities to parents to individuals and back again, as and when they deem appropriate.
Home Office constantly topping official statements with references to the police's good work - morale presumably low.
'Reclaiming' of technologies with firstly #riotcleanup and then 'looter' tumblogs (Lootr?). (Be wary of this - what's the providence, does the photo show criminal activity?)
This leaflet not sign of mass organisation - clearly adopted from a fairly standard demo leaflet seen at any protest. Have only seen one photograph of one leaflet, but thousands of tweets about it.

Watched three concurrent streams of international coverage last night - could have been three cities, such was the difference in presentation.

2011-08-03T17:31:00.000+02:00

Dispatches from Guatemala and Khombole as linked, topped and tailed by me. Podcast also features me introducing a piece my me. Allow myself to introduce myself.

Besides these meta-shenanigans, there are noteworthy audio moments within; a short round-up of recent headlines in Guatemala, a new initiative in West Africa promoting safe motherhood and a quick chat with Sheriff Bojang Junior about the Knight-Batten Award we're still quite excited about winning.

Inside Source #2: Dispatches from Guatemala and Khombole by Sourcefabric

2011-08-02T09:17:00.000+02:00

Coincidences are worth twice the context in which they arrive. So it is with the Aymara language, which has frequently appeared in my field of vision recently. With perhaps two million speakers, Aymara is one of a select few Native American languages still in widespread use and it's spoken primarily in Bolivia and Peru.

One of the unique characteristics of the language is the way in which it posits the speakers position in time relative to events past, present and future. English visualises and conceptualises the future as ahead of the speaker (what lies before us) and the past at our backs (all that is behind us). Our ego moves forward into the future.

The Aymara visualise time in quite the opposite way, viewing the past as laid out in front of us and the future trailing away behind us. The future is known as 'back days' and often indicated with gestures positioning the future behind the speaker.

Behind Aymaran people and speakers in the future is, one hopes, a greater connection to voices from all over the world. One of the newest Global Voices Lingua sites is in Aymara and an initiative of the Jaqi Aru project of El Alto, Bolivia. It's goal is to increase the amount of information available on the internet in order to promote and preserve this indigenous langauge.

Translating current affairs from around the globe into Aymara is no easy task however – many words, especially relating to technology, simply don't exist. Tools like the libre project Runasimipi Quespisqa Software help in this regard by allowing communities to build a consensus around new words and their translation.

How they will relate to these world events would be another area of interest, if claims by linguistic experts Eve Sweetser and Rafael Nunez are true.

A "simple" unqualified statement like "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" is not possible in Aymara – the sentence would necessarily also have to specify whether the speaker had personally witnessed this or was reporting hearsay In a culture that privileges a distinction between seen/unseen – and known/unknown – to such an extent as to weave "evidential" requirements inextricably into its language, it makes sense to metaphorically place the known past in front of you, in your field of view, and the unknown and unknowable future behind your back.

With so many speakers, Aymara is not under threat, but their particular view of time, as it becomes infused with the dominant Spanish of its spoken regions, is. Global Voices' project hopefully shows that globalisation does not have to mean homogenisation, but rather that greater interconnectivity can indeed sustain cultural identity.

2011-07-30T10:19:00.000+02:00

Having seen yet more remarkable scenes from Yemen's "Friday of Patience and Perseverance" yesterday, it was apt that I came across this great presentation from Nadia Al-Sakkaf, the editor of the Yemen Times. Her appraisal of gender balance in the newsroom (and actions to redress it) are really something worth taking note of, especially in light of the Guardian's hopelessly male-biased MediaGuardian Top 100.

2011-07-28T11:01:00.006+02:00

At moments, things collide. Was preparing a new podcast when I saw these phenomenal photographs from Guatemala by Jorge Dan López

Guatemala is about to come to terms with some of its past with the trial of soldiers for the Dos Erres massacre. The Central American country was engaged in civil war for thirty six years until 1996 and has been in the international media spotlight recently after Argentinian protest singer Facundo Cabral was murdered in Guatemala City.

In October last year an unethical experiment was revealed in which, from 1946 to 1948, American public doctors infected nearly 700 Guatemalans, including prisoners, soldiers and mental patients, with STDs in order to 'test' the effectiveness of penicillin. The United states have since apologised.

ElPeriódico de Guatemala is one of the best newspapers in the region and I'll be talking to a leading tech journalist about their work, about open source media and about the news climate in the country later on this week.

2011-07-27T21:35:00.002+02:00

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to visit (and survive) Dakar, Senegal, one of the most amazing cities in the world. I was there for this reason:

West Africa Democracy Radio is a Dakar-based network of radio stations serving 13 countries in West Africa who designed a publishing system that works for those without resources. Partnering with the Czech journalism nonprofit Sourcefabric, WADR integrated several open-source tools, including the Newscoop CMS, Airtime radio software and the SoundCloud audio-distribution platform to publish reports in French and English online, on air and on social media sites.

It was one of my first forays into technical software specification and newsroom architecture. Trying to splice working news practices, open source platforms and social media networks, we jerryrigged, and then refined, a set of SoundCloud plugins that would connect stories to journalists to sounds to radio to websites to the social web and back again. The resultant platform just won a Special Distinction Award in the prestigious Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. Huge congratulations to everyone involved.

2011-07-18T13:14:00.002+02:00

Just released my first foray into audio reporting with the first of a series of podcasts entitled Inside Source. The idea is to present views from some of the more unreported/unreportable corners of the globe.

Inside Source #1: Belarus' silent revolution by Sourcefabric

Marina Klinova from Minsk gave me a remarkable report on Belarus' silent revolution and the brutal governmental response to peaceful protest.

Organised through the "Russian Facebook" Vkontakte, the collective Revolution Through Social Networks schedule silent, peaceful flashmob demonstrations in public places. Marina told us of the serious consequences for those demonstrating, and even for the journalists reporting on the protests. Accusations of arrests being carried out in "Europe's last dictatorship" by plain clothes operatives using unmarked, unlicensed vehicles, plus the blocking of social network sites, have been reported.

The podcast also features a conversation with Claudia Méndez Arriaza, a journalist at
El Periodico Guatemala. She told us of the fear young journalists have of doing something fundamental to the practice of journalism; signing one's name to a story.

Finally, Sheriff Bojang Junior of West Africa Democracy Radio kindly volunteered a recent report of his on the empowerment of women in West Africa through microfinancing and grassroots banking.

2011-05-03T15:35:00.003+02:00

For a couple of weeks in March and April 2011, the world's eyes were turned towards West Africa. Laurent Gbagbo, the President of Côte d'Ivoire, was arrested after months of unrest, Nigeria's parliamentary polls were postponed amidst logistical woes, Senegal celebrated its Independence Day and, for the first time, a woman became the Prime Minister of Mali.

One media outlet delivered exceptional coverage throughout, keeping West Africa and its diaspora informed, whilst at the same time making some news of its own by launching an new, innovative news platform.

That organisation was West Africa Democracy Radio and I helped to design and build their new way of working. Read the full article over at sourcefabric.org.

2011-04-07T15:08:00.002+02:00

Enforced hiatus after an emergency drive through soaring heat to a hospital. An injection that made me see stars and then taken to a bed where I spent the next sixty hours with an intravenous drip in my arm.

Amoebiasis is caused by Entamoeba histolytica. Heading first for the digestive system, if it gets out of hand, it spreads to the blood - as it did in my case - and then goes for the lungs and liver. Intense antibiotic treatment stopped my companion in the blood however and I left my little hospital room last night in a heavy dusk, leaving the white walls and view of dusty palms for a cool hotel room and recuperation. My stay in Dakar is extended by some three days. Time to feel good about the city again.

2011-03-31T10:12:00.000+02:00

Pressure mounting in Dakar as deadlines grow ever closer, but the whole team are getting very excited about their transition to a new publishing platform. It's not without its difficulties, but the process of migration is very satisfying, helped ably by the talents of the team here. Many are stringers or correspondents for international publications such as the Guardian, others have reputation within Senegal or their home country (it's a very diverse group) of being the leading news journalist. Very often, reports you'll hear from West Africa – like the Ivory Coast escalation currently – will start here at West Africa Democracy Radio.

They have amazing contacts and an equally amazing manner that, through respect and knowledge, manage to get them access to presidents and religious leaders (often equally if not more influential) on a regular basis. As I speak, the UN Security Council are passing motions on embargoes, finally recognising the severe situation in the country. WADR ran an interview today which preempted most of the international coverage and without a doubt offered a more complex and informed view of the situation.

Our evening was spent trying to unwind, a local bar, essentially someone's backyard with a glowing beer advert on the outside. Super friendly, amazing beer, fantastic food – and my first mosquito bite. Night falls here almost instantly, plunging the city into darkness and once more it comes to life.

2011-03-30T00:05:00.000+02:00

An early morning run to try and stir exhausted limbs, routing past the new carriageway and people waking in houses, past the rows of plants in the roadside shops and past the rockhard football pitch, later to be filled by dedicated groups of players training in the intense midday heat. Plenty of buildings springing up near the airport, double propeller iron beasts roaring low overhead, workers gradually turning concrete shells into offices, hotels and housing complexes.

The first production meeting of the day at the radio station office raised some controversy over our role, some journalists understandably uncomfortable about our filming. Rational discussion resolved the debate and talk turned to matters more important – reports coming in from Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea and Nigeria.

Training sessions were laden with more questions than answers as an unfinished system inevitable intrigued more than it satisfied, but the journalists all took to the new way of managing content and workflows with positivity and understanding – the understanding of the potential for a story to spread far and wide far outweighed any reluctance to take on extra work with metadata addition and content augmentation in the form of pictures, sounds and videos.

At lunch we spoke to two journalists, one Gambian, one French, and spoke about the unique nature of making news in Senegal, West Africa's supposed model of democracy. Quantity not quality seems to be a prevailing motif of the Senegalese press, with questionable journalists' motivations an interesting byproduct of a press that can be described – in the main – as free, especially in relation to the country's neighbours. The lack of public information and data makes it hard to establish provenance – it was suggested this is sometimes an excuse for spurious stories.

The rest of the day was spent triaging, planning and fixing with a grand overarching plan set out for getting the new website online and getting the final documentation captured. Night fell in seconds and sleep before midnight, following more amazing food, was very welcome.

2011-03-29T00:11:00.000+02:00

Tracing the route through the city now, but seemingly growing never more accustomed to that journey through lazy morning heat. Red dust and white-pick up trucks stream towards downtown, the roadsides lined with people waiting for cars rapide, brightly graffitied minubuses that pick up and set down travellers wherever they wish.

At the radio station, the Monday shift started at six in the morning, preparing and collating the subregion's news for the first of four live news hours, split into French and English. Then a production meeting, introductions and workflow discussion with the staff. Rice, vegetables and salad for lunch, slow-walking down the street past building sites and high-walled homes. The afternoon was all about defining workflows and wireframes, mapping the new site onto reality. Darkness fell suddenly as always – a meal, dusty ride home and broken sleep finished the day.

2011-03-27T23:22:00.001+02:00

Continental breakfast in a West African hotel before a short ride through the city, our first real excursion in Dakar. Riding through dry landscapes and empty buildings, slow meandering lanes of traffic and the stirrings of the day's dusty warmth. In the distance, great monuments upon a hill and enormous birds in silhouette. At every crossing and corner, stalls and collections of people, some laid out in the morning sun.

At WADR we met the team of correspondents, editors and technicians and began to plan the week ahead before unpacking the boxes and sketching documentary interviews. Short film shoots, more introductions, photograph directions and a meal with the station directors, outlining a vision for the future of the station, speaking in soundbites - several precise valuable testaments to free journalism and innovation, all off the record.

The final third of the day lay out the training sessions. As night plummeted, sounds of goatherds riding in filtered into the office. The call to prayer, over-modulated and hazy in the evening heat, drifted. Back at the hotel, planes roared overhead, headed up in straight lines before banking sharply over the ocean and disappearing.

2011-03-27T00:33:00.000+01:00

The day of departure and transit lounges, Prague to Lisbon to Dakar, a thousand air conditioned holding bays, slow drinks and shifting time zones. Flying through the night, jumping hours with the international date change. Arrived to small hour tropical warmth and sweet sea air, landing into a quiet airport with many police officers interested in visas and packed equipment. By this time all hope of routine was lost and sleep was late and short.

2011-03-26T12:42:00.002+01:00

Imagine a website and audio archive that must deal with multi-linguality, remote correspondents and editors, radio news delivered through audio, video, text and images, plus the ubiquitous, instantaneous need for dynamic, granular sharing amongst ever-changing social media networks. Imagine how this site must look to its audience with content they can search and filter, with programme calendars and sections for different types of news, and the different countries the news affects. Imagine the backend of the software, how the editorial staff must be able to move seamlessly between drafting newsreaders scripts to creating audio playlists, from live news reports to broadcast schedules, from archived programmes to Facebook discussions.

Actually, you’re imagining something that is simultaneously incredibly complex and completely, utterly normal.

Extract from my article about West Afrcia Democracy Radio on sourcefabric.org.

2011-03-26T00:37:00.000+01:00

Warm Praha, scuttling from the suburbs to the airport - exurbs if you will - back into the ambassadorial residential area and then into the office, an old printworks with intense sun shining through the curved glass of the roof. Much luggage and packing of equipment, some time to eat and witness demonstrations before working again. An evening punctuated with traditional Czech food and microbrewed beer, full of hops. An early night, ahead of the day imagined.

2011-03-24T20:00:00.000+01:00

Departed from bright Berlin on a red train set for Wien. The journey typical enough, a quiet compartment, a moment to work. Passengers with enormous suitcases and borderlands accents, clear as a lake. Out the window, wind turbines, we veer from the mainline, cutting through a gulley scooped out of a small hill and then emerge from shadow into yet more plains. Black rock and blue water valleys accompanied me into Praha, where I disembarked and set out into the streets.

2011-03-23T12:51:00.000+01:00

Consumers of internet news in Belarus are becoming younger and more active. Publishers and chief editors within the Belarusian print media grow daily more conscious of the necessity to produce rich, multimedia content to attract these users. It’s all part of the migration to what Marina Klinova and Natalia Afanasjeva see as the East European ‘convergent newsroom’.

Excerpt from Newsroom convergence in Belarus and beyond, an article by Marina Klinova and Natalia Afanasjeva that I edited for Sourcefabric.

2011-03-22T12:45:00.000+01:00

Radio’s future lies in its tactics, in its modes and methods of deployment. By matching cheap technology with instantaneous networks and open standards, radio and its innovators open up a future that has the potential to mirror the frenzied experimentation of the 1900s. By combining the broadcasting vision of one hundred years ago with the experimental technology of today, radio’s tactical future will benefit local urban stations in Berlin as much as early-warning systems in East Asia or networked community broadcasters in Rwanda’s Great Lakes.

Excerpt from my article Frequency Response on radio and tactical media.

2011-01-04T23:20:00.003+01:00

2010 was not really a year of reading (nor writing for that matter), but one book made up for a lack of others. This was the year of Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace's magnus opus turned my world upside down, having a singular effect on me that few books in my adult life have. The impact of Pynchon was similar but different, cerebral rather than emotional. Hell, I think I spent the year mourning.

Of course I was then compelled to read the brilliant A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, the enlightening Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, Stephen Burn's Infinite Jest Reader's Guide and even Hamlet (again).

Of the rest, few are books from 2010. Alexander von Humboldt's Jaguars and Electric Eels is one of the most evocative and agreeable travelogues I've ever encountered. A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit kept me thinking for weeks.

The Dead Yard by Ian Thomson opened up a new understanding for me about history, politics and culture in Jamaica, Suketu Mehta's Maximum City in Bombay. East Coast Europe edited by Markus Miessen was a fine book on identity. A remarkable volume, The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee shed new light on radical politics in France and beyond. The Portraits Polychromes book on Pierre Schaeffer was great and reminded me to read more books on music.

McLuhan's Understanding Media was reread and redigested within the context of radio while George Friedman's The Next 100 Years stimulated many interesting debates and has made me pay attention to this year's geopolitical situations in Poland, Turkey and The Caucasus with a critical eye.

Also read were the lyrical, ambitious The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee by Matthew Stadler, Nicholson Baker's obsessionist, synapse-stalling Mezzanine, Cormac McCarthy's divertingly apocalyptic The Road and T.C. Boyle's eminently readable Drop City. There were more, I'm sure.

The year ended with me tearing through Tom McCarthy's C, an opinion onwhich has not yet had time to settle (are the narrative arcs just all a little too reverse-engineered?), but it is commendable for the subject matter and depth of research alone.

Sitting on the shelf waiting for 2011 to age are Édouard Levé's Suicide, Gabriel Josipovici's Only Joking and Thomas Bernhard's My Prizes. Oh, and Georg Buechner's Dantons Tod, in German, which may be beyond the scope of my reading in 2051, let alone this year.

2010-12-15T10:00:00.002+01:00

There are many more albums in 2010 than the ones I mentioned previously of course, many I have missed. Unordered, honourable mentions have to go to music and records by Cheap Machines, Catherine Christer Hennix, Élément Kuuda, Family Battle Snake, Glue Pour, The Great Park, Infinite Body, Laish, Lord Cry Cry, Marcel Turkowsky & Elise Florenty, Trembling Bells, Shigeto, OCDC, Omar Souleyman and the Refused reissue. I've forgotten many.

Finally I'm going to talk about one of my own records in spite of the risks therein. I speak of Echolalia momentarily just to say it was a total pleasure to work with ten amazing musicians on such a project. I never thought an album would take 18 months from inception to completion, but thanks to the hard work of all involved, all that supported, and especially Lee at No-Fi, it somehow happened. A testament to collaboration if nothing else and a great way to end the year.

2010-12-14T10:00:00.001+01:00

Leif Elggren's body of work fills me with awe and excitement, from the photography to the manifestos, the fiction to the records. 2010's The King's Curve is a sublime tape, a desperately and hilariously black soliloquy, ring-modulated and phased so the spoken words take on a hypnotic effect. Buy everything. Similarly sparse and odd, but equally as impressive were Starving Weirdos with their piano-sample based B/P/M Series 1.

Grouped by both etymology and impact are two cygnicic acts which hit me for six in 2010. Swans' My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky was a belated introduction to the work of Michael Gira. I crawled out from my particular rock to find subdued threats, huge percussion and lines of melody in my head every morning. Needless to say, I'm working my way through the back catalogue; heavy guitar songs have been born again.

Yellow Swans are a different proposition - guitars, distortion, vocals but set from a different mould. Good noise music should be as good quiet as it is loud. The finest acts deal in texture and structure from the inside out, meaning pure volume is no infallibile yardstick of quality. Yellow Swans are easily more melodic than most, but the posthumous Going Places is the finest work from their vast back catalogue and one of the finest of the year undoubtably.

Still yet more to follow...

2010-12-13T10:04:00.003+01:00

The eastern plains of Germany speed past my window as I write this, bound as I am on a journey to Prague. Soon we'll pass fields of whiteout and reach Dresden and then head into a black valley with a wide widing river and tree covered peaks.

That's the backdrop for a summary of my favourite listening of 2010. As any analyst will tell you, trends are more important than numbers, so I forego any enumerated value judgements in favour of a loose collection of sonics that hopefully represent another amazing year for modern music.

Keith Fullerton Whitman had an unbelievable year, releasing early and often with great quality. 2010 was his year and rightly so. Generator, which I wasn't fortunate enough to snap up on cassette, was my favourite, but Disingenuity/Disingeniousness was also standout. Craft, vision and an aural understanding that shamed 99% of post-hypnagogic's synth-posturing fallout.

Unfairly dragged into that particular chillwave morass was Sun Araw, whose proto-future soundscapes drew in afrobeat and tropicalia in all the right ways and provided songs for every summer situation (On Patrol especially). Oneohtrix Point Never's reputation too remained intact despite being dragged through the mainstream gutter. Returnal is a thing of beauty, nothing less. His Games project was on continual rotation too and saw the best collusion between youtube videos and experimental music yet. I'm surprised at how few experimental artists make interesting, quality videos and I remain eager for recommendations.

Visuals and music have always been entwined within raster-noton's ouevre. Senking's darkstep masterpiece Pong is so evocative of a certain Berlin for me – I love the way this city has adapted dubstep and made it its own. The albums' production is stunning; one play and I'm back in that abandoned no-man's-land factory, feeling the air moved by sheer frequency. Talking of which, Eleh's Location Momentum was a game-changer for 2010, plain and simple.

More to follow...

2010-12-05T12:00:00.004+01:00

Interesting, balanced article in the Guardian today on Afghanistan, propaganda and women's rights. Important to recognise progress as much as impasse.

There are indeed several achievements that cannot be easily disregarded. Under the Taliban girls were not allowed to go to school after the age of eight. Now there are more girls attending school in Afghanistan than at any time in its history. Under the Taliban, women's voices were banned from radio (TV was completely forbidden) and now they take up a leading role in the broadcast media. Before, sports were off-limits to women, now there are female athletes competing in international events. Adultery was punishable by being stoned to death, and women were beaten on the street for anything short of total enshrouding. Now, while the informal dress code remains restrictive, 25% of parliamentary seats are allocated to women.

Clearly there is a very long way to go, and in many different social strata, but in a week (month, year?) of relentlessly negative press, a few positives don't hurt. The reversal of these achievements in the name of a political or military strategy that subjugates women cannot be permitted.

That said, Arianna Huffington's summarial perspectives on Wikileaks shine light on Afghanistan from another another angle. Her chaos approach views the leaks as confirmations rather than informations, but insists they could be the tipping point for public and political opinion with regards to an exit strategy that unable to locate the door, let alone the route to it.

But here is what makes the leaked cables so important: they provide another opportunity to turn the spotlight on the war in Afghanistan, which, despite the fact that it's costing us $2.8 billion a week keeps getting pushed into the shadows -- even in this deficit-obsessed time. The cables are a powerful reminder of what this unwinnable war is costing us in terms of lives, in terms of money, and in terms of our long-term national security.

2010-12-01T12:16:00.005+01:00

There remains scarcely any doubt that youth will be the first to savagely confront power. These last few years, from the riots of Spring 2001 in Algeria to those of December 2008 in Greece, are nothing but a series of warning signs in this regard. Those who 30 or 40 years ago revolted against their parents will not hesitate to reduce this to a conflict between generations, if not to a predictable symptom of adolescence.

Reading on the train to Eindhoven, powerless in more ways than one, I turned to a book I had bought sometime before, a slim blue volume. The Coming Insurrection occupies a controversial position in both French law and anarchist discourse. The book was a central piece of evidence in the case against the Tarnac Nine. The implication of the French Minster of the Interior at the time was that reading or authoring the book was a terrorist act.

The third day of student protest and action in the UK yesterday, brought me back to the opening passage in the book. Many questions, as friends occupy university buildings and continue to march on institutions, remain as to the longevity and impact to the UK demonstrations of 2010. How do demonstrations sustain themselves? When do peaceful marches turn to rioting? When do the streets become occupied and parliament becomes a target? What would it take to reach that point? Should it ever?

The conflagration of November 2005 [Clichy-sous-Bois riots] was not a result of extreme dispossession, as it is often portrayed. It was, on the contrary, a complete possesion of a territory. People can burn cars because they are pissed off, but to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in check - to do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly and share a common language and a common enemy. Mile after mile and week after week, the fire spread. New blazes responded to the original ones, appearing where they were least expected.

Lenin's Tomb, K-Punk and Infinite Thought are this emigrant's current barometers of unrest.

2010-11-30T23:20:00.002+01:00

A slew of my own writings have been backlogged and deemed irrelevant by the delay of release. Thus, clumsily, we arrive at the release featured most prominently in the news, if not for its actual content then at least for its process, Wikileaks.

Such international collaboration on a major story is unprecedented in the history of journalism and points to the new role that elite news organizations play in the Internet age — in this case, as conduits of material originally obtained not by their own investigative journalists but by others, such as WikiLeaks.

The big papers wouldn’t have the material without WikiLeaks. And WikiLeaks wouldn’t get the international exposure — and, perhaps more important, the credibility — that comes from having its material published in the world’s most important newspapers.

POLITICO, 29th November

Most interesting to me is perhaps the collaboration and integration between traditional print media, online platforms and this quarter's most tradeworthy argot, data-journalism.

In addition to this, I'm suprised by the confusion between a news agency and (investigative) journalism; the difference between source material and an article. As Lovink/Riemens suggest in their Ten Theses on Wikileaks;

Traditional investigative journalism consisted of three phases: unearthing facts, cross-checking these and backgrounding them into an understandable discourse. Wikileaks does the first, claims to do the second, but leaves the issue of the third completely blank.

We're not seeing a new form of journalism - yet - but a new form of sourcework, a sourcework exponentiated by the decade's onset into the ubiquitous digital networking and storing of data. Journalism, quality journalism, still requires vast networks of contacts, the ability to cross-check quickly and accurately and detailed field knowledge of specific geopolitical spheres. Crowdsourcing has not yet answered that call and cannot, should not, replace it. Remain critical.

2010-09-19T14:30:00.000+02:00

The day was fresh, up reasonably early for breakfast, then a bus to Eindhoven and a slow train down to Maastricht, bright sun warming the journey. In Maastricht, experts there by now, we took a short bus ride and walked along the canal to Landbouwbelang, an enormous former grain factory, now squatted and home to inventors, activists, musicians, builders, lift engineers, sauna constructionists and more. The place was huge with great expanses of concrete and knots of unrecognisable machinery, giant silos between floors and chutes that dropped uncareful feet four storeys in an eyeblink.

The inhabitants had fashioned kitchens and bathrooms and even build giant wooden houses for themselves in the eaves of the larger floors. Some levels were full of protest banners and artworks, others full of partitioned ateliers. We climbed the tower up endless stairs (the lift still to be worked on), past dove nests, unclaimed spaces, forgotten rooms and up to the top space, the height of four Berlin houses. Up partially through a roof-hatch I clung to the ladder, vertigo getting laughed at from below, but I could see well enough into three countries and that was high enough and fine enough for me.

Great food later before the show, home-prepared vegetables and delicacies. Soundcheck was good, the final show nerves kicking in a bit, especially when we saw the size of the cellar, a cramped bar that was sure to be full. And full it was, I played second after Stephen once more kindly silenced the majority of people with his songs. My show was less good, never quite managed to find the trail I was following, directionless and slightly battered around by the rising levels of conversation as the bar filled to beyond capacity. Still, playing is playing, and some kind words were had – last shows of the tour are always a disappointment, a climaz and anti-climax both.

Out we went into the night, to visit some boats for late night coffee, came back and sat at the rivers' edge playing word association games and trying to speak Dutch. Himalaya played next, subdued and melancholic post rock that went down well, and then we took to the beers and couches, reflected on our days of wake and sleep, the successes and mistakes, the rises and falls. All in all, memories were strong and positive – I went to sleep before everyone else and was found, for the first time to my knowledge, sleepwalking about the place, muttering about going for a walk, unsettled by something or other. Who knows where I walked, but I woke up in bed and eight trains later found myself home again, returned exhausted to Berlin's fresh autumn.

2010-09-18T14:28:00.000+02:00

Headed for Gemert, somewhere outside of Eindhoven, and arrived with familiarity at the main station and got a lift through the flatlands of the countryside, past breweries and duckponds, haybales and bicycles. Arrived at the venue, a quaint living room, sorted amplifiers and set-ups, bought cigarettes, complained a bit of self-inflicted tiredness and then we wandered around the village, everywhere stages, us having stumbled into being a yearly music festival where seemingly every entertainment spot was converted into a stage.

Our show was nice and quiet, interested people arrived en masse to fill the small house with gifts and conversation. I overcame my demons and went first, playing something spectral and orchestral, not too much obfuscation or aggression, just letting the sounds speak for themselves. The Great Park followed my lead, some moments of overlap before I dissipated and disappeared into the audience. The second half was a reversal, Stephen holding court with love and loss before I took up the mantle, building on the themes he'd laid out ending with some magnetic coda of something half remembered.

Got a really kind reaction, very open-minded folks with lots to say, the duality seemed to have been a hit. So it was then that we went out into the night, to meet friends and head out into bars where seemingly everyone knew everyone. Drinks flowed, bands covered Hendrix, bicycles tore off into the night and at some point forgotten, the will to party deserted us and we walked home to more sleep under a sloped roof

2010-09-17T14:27:00.000+02:00

A gradual start to the day with eggs and coffee and fresh bread, recollection of things, the eternal reorganisation of luggage and equipment, selling CDs but gaining tapes, the exchange of formats gradually rendering my collection obsolete.

Something happened with the trains, something that meant we were left sitting for hours, bemoaning our own good timing, but it was shortly forgotten as the express took us over the border to Belgium, through an lost city between the kingdoms, long empty platforms with low slung lights and seemingly no way to get into the city. On we continued into Liège, the houses built differently already, tall and toppling, roads at 45 degree angles, no grids, only streets meandering up breathless hills.

Sebastian picked us up at the station, there for hours, held by our delay under the enormous glass span of the controversially expensive train station. We took a short car ride to the venue, Le Cercle, a reclaimed working club, very Gallic-looking, bar billiards tables and strip-lighting, tall ceilings, long bar with stools and clouds of smoke. Out back, a kitchen and tall stairs, the smell of amazing food, stuffed mushrooms, parsley and couscous – we ate and soundchecked and smoked as the lights went out one by one and slowly people arrived.

Stephen did the honourable thing and opened again, no mean feat when you expect the audience is not yours. Of course, he killed again, hitting each song perfect to a rapturous set of applause, the words floating through the silent room. I took the stage after a pause, wary of the slightly battered PA, knelt down and played a long set of shifting oscillations, grainy wildlife recordings and some submerged melodies. The room responded really nicely, a really enthusiastic and genuine audience. They asked us to play more, so Stephen and I paired up for a couple of encores, songs about woods and canals, before retiring to the bar for some nine percent Belgian dark beer.

More conversations, table football (they know how to play), an attic room to sleep in, inebriated wanderings through the halflight to get there, storeys of red brick and tall hills, green clouds seen from a summit laying low over the entire city – with evocation and interest, we'll be back.

2010-09-16T11:57:00.002+02:00

The longest journey of the tour, shouldn't have felt long (being only two and a half hours), but what with the sleep deprivation, the droning whine of the carriages, missed connections and the damp feet, it felt long. Arrived in Maastricht sometime after five and waited with the pigeons in the station, climbed about a bus and headed to the outskirts, the English recollections of an early autumn brought on by the sweet smell of fallen apples and cut grass.

Abandoned by the bus, we looked lost for a moment but soon found our way, a large former car garage with a guerilla mobile garden in its forecourt and the telltale signs of artists occupancy – handmade signs, salvage-art and paint. Inside a great open space, two stories high and covered in corrugated steel, huge beams and constructed wooden platforms, mirrorballs and string lights. In every corner a door, another corridor, and further rooms full of circuit-bending ateliers and wood workshops, electronic goods tradestore, cultural offices and sculptures.

So we set ourselves, soundchecked, arranged candles and chairs and awaited a slow Wednesday evening crowd, not huge by any means, but seemingly intent on listening and generous with conversation. The Great Park was on form, quiet between songs, but intense of voice and sure of hand, the songs drawing us in from the reality of the room into something altogether closer and darker. I worked with the room as best as I could, great sound from monitors and speakers, some interesting mid-frequency reverb that escalated the noise at surprising moments, but the majority of the time I just about managed to keep on top of the six cassette players, playing slower than usual, trying to tease out the patterns and clearings of sound.

Sleep, the closing paragraph to a long day, was undisturbed and surely the heaviest of the tour, preparing us for the day following, a day of writing, cityscapes and border crossings.

2010-09-15T11:53:00.000+02:00

Playing catch-up with ourselves, we had plenty of time to make it to Zwolle, past forests, swollen rivers and incessant streams of water running from the rooves, saturating my shoes and loosening the glue. The Netherlands knows about rain, that much we've learnt.

We were headed to a huge second-hand store, located a drizzly walk from the station over the train tracks. Inside we got warm coffee and walked open-eyed round the shop, racks of clothes, boxed of vintage toys, stacks of paintings, shelves of books and endless lines of chairs and dining tables. Stephen set up near a playhouse with stuffed animals and grasses on the roof, while I took a table in earshot and began to lay out my cassettes. Half an hour later, we were both finished and had committed small excerpt sets to tape amongst the tablelamps and stuffed animals, live at Kringloop.

Back into the rain after a small browsing excursion and broodje, onto the train and Amsterdam once more, 120 kilometres southwest, enjoying that now familiar ride in past the odd shaped quayside buildings and spidery scaffold structures. To a different part of town we went though, a fantastic tram ride along crowded squares, past merchant houses and restaurants, easing our way somehow past the rivers of bicyclists and the water's edge. Something of an evening off for me, despite a tramp out in a monsoon to fetch an acoustic amp, the evening was set for guitars and dancing and I took myself thankfully off into a night of slow inebriation, waiting for tomorrow's light.

2010-09-14T11:51:00.000+02:00

Another train, this time to Utrecht, where we arrived early enough to walk in the sun and sit by the canal and drink tall beers whilst watching the boats and ducks. My second time there this year, I'm still slightly enchanted by the tiny riverside houses, arched caverns and riverways, all dominated by the huge Dom Tower, bombed away in the middle, separated from its cathedral body, the skeleton marked only in coloured brick.

The evening's venue was a tiny folk pub, Cafe Derat, wooden boards and dim light, rows of gleaming glasses and pockets of conversation, a piano and a staircase. Not my usual crowd nor location, some time spent wrangling with a PA that kept swapping channels and cutting away to roars of static only to find it was my connection that was wrong all along.

Stephen played well, voice and strings just peaking above the natural acoustic of the room, particularly fine version of Portugal (tour favourite of mine, along with Royal Canal and Song for a Coalman). Then to me, always second at the moment, suits the dynamic better it seems. Afraid of unsettling the quiet bar and tables of solemn drinkers I ushered out some wavering, tentative tapeloops and environment recordings, augmenting with the odd sine drone or delayed piano stretch.

Received a curious reception, intrigue and interest more than enthusiasm, but that's no bad thing. One kind man bought four CDs, requesting only prime numbers from the limited edition, before stacking them on the table and beginning to advise upon the chess game running next to him, turning to scraps of paper, setting out complicated rows of probability in biro. We left under something of a cloud and stole away to winding conversation, fried Dutch delicacies and an attic beset with blankets. I dreamt of nothing under the rain.

2010-09-13T11:47:00.000+02:00

Mid-afternoon train in the sun to Den Haag, anvils and mare's tails in the sky. Took a packed red tram through the streets, past the stations and modern skyscrapers, through the administrative district and then old town, past squares and alleys, people crammed into chairs outside cafés, taking in the Sunday.

Arrived into the concert venue's district, dead-end canals, enormous mansions and a heavy police presence. Walked down a leafy road past more large detached houses and before we knew it we had arrived; a co-operative villa, abandoned for twenty years previously, victim of some misguided extension work and in need of repair. Ten people now living there, a collection of artists and painters and more and we ate fresh potato salads and grilled vegetables with them outside as the temperature dropped.

The venue was in the basement, a psychedelic damp cellar room (one of about fifty in the entire house). Stephen opened standing with Annabel, sat for the remainder, progressively drawing the crowd in, winding words through melodies. I played an entirely unplanned set, around thirty-five minutes, moving through high tones to low, building walls of static and gradually dismantling them, not always with success but there was some progression and the set reached its conclusion with enough coincidence and movement to feel complete.

Afterwards is more of a blur, a few beers later, three sets live on the radio, cacophonous noise, some chatter, room sounds, feedback and drones – the usual fare. Then to outside, a starlit night, quiet conversation and a slow, late retirement to rooms full of vintage amplifiers and upright pianos for sleep and an early morning rise to bright autumn sunlight.

2010-09-12T10:12:00.002+02:00

There's a way to be greeted when you arrive somewhere, and that way is in a vintage stretch Citroen with felt interior and hydraulic suspension, kindly chauffeured by the festival director Jan who led us through the psychgeography of the city, the absence of Phillips, the city's industrial heartbeat, former providers of employment and jobs and schools.

He took us directly to Strijp-S, the former manufacturing plant and laboratories of the company, now designated a zone for cultural regeneration and home to Flux/S, a four-day festival setting out to redraft the future, questioning ideas of successful failure through a series of stunning installations. Fearsome multi-monitor generative pieces, plant propulsion machines, speculative architectures, brick carpets, snare-drum klang installations, fantasy space narratives, even a rare vegetable expo, a monument to biodiversity with its rows of colour subsequent root vegetables.

We spent the afternoon enjoying the festival's amazing hospitality, producing the longest soundcheck of my career and Stephen and I battled the buildings eleven second reverb, before conceding defeat and deciding that it is what it is and it will be what it be. Often an issue at reclaimed industrial spaces turned round for art, the issue was whether to subvert, fight or acquiesce to the enormous structure.

Some more hospitality, several hundred stairs, a spectacular sunset, the arrival of a good friend, beautiful food, and it was eventually time to play. Stephen and I had developed a special set together, indeed the festival performance being the excuse to play the tour at all – we layered over and over guitar-lines and ranges of tape-static, Stephen delivering narratives of loss and learning while I drew echoes and traces with the sounds in an hour-long set that felt measured and right, not everything we expected, but genuine and responsive to the occasion, room and people. Many kind conversations afterwards, nice stories and dissections, hanging out with the crew and a tired taxi home to our insane hotel bar replete with nine-piece soul covers band, seemingly playing through the night for a collection of drunk, happy-faced solicitors and merchants. We forewent the frivolities, instead choosing comfortable silent beds, happily receiving the faded messages of sleep.

2010-09-11T10:10:00.002+02:00

Six hour train ride to Amsterdam from Berlin to meet Stephen of The Great Park for the start of our short lowlands tour. The rails took me through the industries and houses of Hannover and several automobile empire outposts, Wolfsburg et al, me shut up in a solitary silent compartment, reading and making notes, building a Dutch story of my own. (All of this accompanied by lucid histories of pre-mediaeval tribes, about Friesians and the mounds and structures they drew from the swamps, raising the land and building churches and trademarkets, livestock-pens and fisheries.)

Arrived at Amsterdam Zuid, brief struggles with signage and metrolines, but eventually found the hightrain out to Lelylaan and met Stephen. Wandered through suburban wildernesses, past mechanics and community centres and mosques, midrise reminiscences of south London, building facias, flat roofs and antennae. Then off to a precise flat, a balcony overlooking the city's people, spires and canals somewhere different. Stephen fetched Jessica, fresh in from Barcelona and introduced her with four songs of welcome, with tales of arrivals and leavings. My show was brief and fractured, surrounded by a small circle of people widening and contracting with the inconsistency of my sound, it felt like I was dredging again, like Friesiens pulling up clods of reeds and mud and slapping them down on top of one another. Not pretty but something was built, I suppose.

Then to the concrete angles and railings of the block's stairwells for far too much conversation and beer and more, watching the satellite dishes and blinking skylines and slow gulls, black against a sky set aglowing by some distant light. Laughing till split sides, plates and plates of white bread, impromptu disco manoeuvres before the inevitable. We three slept four short hours on irregular furnitures, waking at dawn to set out into a quiet Amsterdam morning already warm with sun.

2010-08-21T11:43:00.002+02:00

From somewhere buried deep within the magnetic mire, spectral announcers pre-empt grand movements of distorted symphony. Discordant static and pulses rise and fall cued, apparently, by chance. Unrehearsed, several people began to simultaneously play different recordings of the same instrument. Drop-outs and cuts provide unplanned rhythmic accompaniment to haunting disembodied voices and environmental sounds. Accidental sonics fall into perfectly harmonious repetitive phrases. All the time in the background wow and flutter, slowly degrading magnetic tape and the revolutions of the players' mechanisms provide an accompaniment to the circular processes of memory and forgetting present within the everyday.

2010-08-20T10:01:00.002+02:00

A new archive of endless loops was born, the original recordings of others somehow both destroyed and preserved. The cassettes now were a collection of odd aural coincidences, repetitive vocalisations and endless musical refrains growing narrower in frequency and somehow more beautiful with each revolution as each artefact settled into its new circularity.

2010-08-19T09:42:00.002+02:00

In the process, we began also to decipher the apocryphal scrawls on label and box - unverified alphabets of authorship both - before listening to hours of anonymous singers, abandoned narratives, obscured sounds and unmistakable analogue hiss. Beyond this we observed the occasional glitches, recording imperfections, erasures and ghosting tracks inherent to the medium, open even to the possibility of ciphers and hidden messages from long absent sources.

2010-08-18T11:42:00.005+02:00

The dominating physical form of a cassette tape, once you take it apart and examine its capstan holes, guide and pinch rollers, screws, supply hubs and take-up reels, is a circle. Reviving the arcane art of tape loops, the group began to apply the circular form to the spools of magnetic tape too, breaking its A to B linearity. Hundreds of cassette shells were prised apart and unscrewed, spools removed and then cut into short sections, following precise measurements from some forgotten handbook, before being individually spliced into loops, turned into helices and replaced into the cassette's body.

2010-07-27T15:35:00.000+02:00

What urban circumstance leads to this moment, when deep in the heart of a city, all traces of human civilisation are missing? To write in this way, to present an image, whether developed from negative or memory, is to suggest a beginning. That which exists within the photograph however, has no history.

All traces of evolution and progression are lost, like a river that has seemingly evaporated. By hunting within dusty cardboard boxes at a fleamarket and finding two such photographs, without so much as an inked date on the reverse, we can recreate this erasure of all that has gone before.

When one occurrence resides within a determined route of occurrences, each one an effect to a cause, then a beginning is needed. Where no more causes can be found, at that precise juncture where an event refuses to be both progenitor and descendant, at that moment where the photographs are taken into gloved hands bound against the cold, we enter into a cosmogony - a narrative with which to understand the creation of order.

Beginnings are, however, never as they seem to be. The photographs, now purchased from the market, brought home and laid upon a wooden table under candlelight, are mere lapses within causality. They are no more beginnings than you or I can claim to be immaculately conceived. They are merely lapses in visible causality, artefacts of hidden human processes.

2010-07-22T12:47:00.003+02:00

Thinking, then, of tactility in the digital age. The internet brought us the ability to communicate, irrespective of geographies and without time restraints - it removed the journey from communication, allowing almost instantaneous missives.

But, of course, it was just words. Emails and IRC never broke beyond the written word (not even the spoken word). Voice over internet and even video-conferencing, brought its own problems to the party. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, predictively:

Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener's expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those caller who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking extra rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress. (p146)

The issue we're left with is the contradiction that while the internet has accelerated communication and allowed us to communicate more frequently with a greater number of people almost simultaneously and in various locations, it has taken a long time enabling a version of communication as multi-faceted as the one we experience in face-to-face meetings.

For a certain generation, writing an email is similar to turning up to someone's door at 10 o'clock at night when you haven't seen them for three years. The formality, the effort, the potential for misunderstanding is in no way relational to the message they're trying to communicate. Communication technology, and the way we use it, takes time to evolve into a level of sophistication that we're comfortable with.

SMS was nearly abandoned as useless by early mobile phone manufacturers, but eventually became the de facto way of communicating – issues of intrusion and detachment coerced the mode of communication into certain forms which became standard. The different situations which require a call or a text or even a missed call, became encoded into the unwritten communication charters that vary hugely amongst different social groups and generations.

Some evolutions take us into roads of abandonment. The technology, despite being more high-tech than its predecessors, simply takes us too far, it can't be adapted or evolved, it stagnates and dies. Foster Wallace calls this “a queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.” (p145)

Returning, then, to tactility in the digital age. Why is it that some social networks stagnate and die?

Precisely because of this notion of roads of abandonment, of self-obliterating logic. Myspace simply became too big, too cluttered, too unrestricted and too one-dimensional to allow effective or personal communication. Others have other stories of failure.

Here, we also find the reason why Facebook has the market share it does. It has allowed communication on the internet to evolve, to become multi-dimensional and more human. There's the ability to poke (a virtual tactility that no-one uses for precisely the same reason no-one apart from teenagers poke each other in civilised society). A direct message is a conversation (a email, but threaded and in a friendly, connected context for those of use who receive mails into clients). A wallpost is a comment across a crowded room, amongst friends. Tagging a friend in a picture is the equivalent of mentioning someone in their absence and this being reassuredly relayed back to the person at a later date (“so and so was talking about you last night...”). Then there are the invitations, the likes, the recommendations...

Facebook's success is not so much built on the networks we're able to adopt, harness and communicate with, but by the means of communication within those networks, by its conscious-or-not attempt to supplement and digitise the nods, winks, hellos, conversations and relationships that it appeared the internet had stymied. They're not attempts to replace those human signals, nor simulacra – this is too simplistic and does not allow for cultural difference – but rather an augmented and complimentary set of engagements.

With that contradiction – the idea that technology enables connectivity but diminishes its dimensionality – dissolving into a more sophisticated method of communication, it is clear that the next generation of networks will succeed on their ability to develop and better the rules of engagement set out by the most recently popular networks. Privacy options, open-source and integration are all crucial but the race will be won by those who find the most possibilities for affect in digital communication.

(Thanks to kottke.org for hastening my quote search.)

2010-07-16T11:48:00.001+02:00

Circumstantial evidence requires a deduction, a leading away from what is obvious, from what appears on the surface, towards a truth. It begins with evidence, continues with an act of imagination and insight and then traces its way back to origins known, retrospectively making sense of both the circumstances and the conclusion in one movement of return.

A person discovering a river immediately stands there and judges the flow, the water's shape and direction. This leads to the sea, he claims, although he cannot see the sea himself.

He gathers evidence, citing the foliage on the banks, the silver slip of fish upstream. He climbs hills looking for the source, all the time following the river as it reduces to a trickle. The hills, the shape, the flow, the willows and fish. This is a river and it leads to the sea, he infers. Braced now with enough evidence, he walks for many days and nights along the river's edge until arriving at the river's mouth, a vast estuary, and beyond that, the salty sea.

At that moment, the evidence of the river proves that the sea is in fact a sea, it is a large body of saline water into which one or more rivers flow.

Simultaneously, the sea proves the river – it is not a canal, or a long lake or any other body of water. It has a source and empties itself into a sea. At that moment, the sea is the sea, the river is a river, indeed the fish are fish, the edges of earth are banks and the glinting stones are part of that river's bed.

2010-06-30T17:33:00.006+02:00

Radio is not a platform. FM, DAB+, digital satellite, webcasting - these are lines drawn across a battle map that concerns itself with multiplex monopoly, license lockdowns and standards. This is not radio, just as music is not defined by the vinyl, tape or FLAC that carries it. It influences the way in which it is consumed, but content is something else entirely. Content is where the real battles are fought, where the real potential for freedom and innovation exists.

cc: by-nc-2.0 http://www.flickr.com/photos/gyst/

Many quote McLuhan, many chorus that the medium is the message. Many forget or never knew the context McLuhan himself placed that epithet within. On censorship:

'Although the medium is the message, the controls go beyond programming. The restraints are always directed to the “content,” which is always another medium.'

So what is at stake is not a platform, not arguments about encoding, relay stations and broadcast technology, but instead what we must call 'another medium'.

'Another' here must be read as something distinct or of difference; not more of the same. It also follows that if content is the site of interest, dissidence and interruption, then we can safely disregard playlist radio and the commercial sectors of the spectrum in our thinking for they are little more than mobilised archives. More of the same.

So what defines this medium? McLuhan offers several insights in Understanding Media (published in the year England's first pirate radio was launched – 1964) that amount to the subliminal and the private. Radio as something dating back to unspoken communication between separate social groups and now existing as something uttered into the dark, into society's echo chamber. Inherent and crucial is the need to D-I-Y, to fill in the blanks. Radio reduces the most enormous of communications to something with 'village dimensions' McLuhan claims.

And so what relevance today for (yet) another medium? The next stage of the evolution of the web - be it semantic, Web 3.5.1, or HTML 5 – surely returns us to the global village, the infinitely connected community? Hyperlocality is found in all new start-ups – social networking, revenue-streaming, geo-tracking – information's primary relevance is to the world around you. Community is everything.

Communities exist of trusted peers - they don't have to be geographically located, but often they are. At the recent ON Festival in Basel, many leading radio stations found that the majority of their listeners, even those tuning in online, came from their immediate FM broadcast area.

Trusted content – and the boundaries of trust change from one person to another – is the next visible sign of web evolution. Faith once more in experts, in opinion formers, in qualified content. Observe the rise of curation in fine art as a more noble, studied and well-paid job than that of the artists (the same goes for promoters whose brands hold more weight than those that perform under their banners).

So, then. Community and trusted content are the hallmarks of what we see changing around us on the web – these too are the foundations of radio content. The role of makers and editors, the interaction between content providers and those that ratify it. Radio's continuing vitality, essentialness and recent resurgence can be attributed to a popular need for reconnection with communities and trusted content. Add to this the need to hack and open source both our gadgets and our processes, and you have a trinity of needs that brings radio to the fore, not as a technology but as a form of content and a collaborative process.

Whether we tune in on battered transistors or chrome DAB+ eggs is another issue, another medium if you will. Whether our audio is bundled with photostreams, metadata or even video, radio as a site for exchange is unrivaled. Radio has survived and outlived the 'psychic action of technology' (more McLuhan, this time on ignoring the effects of technology on society), seeing off the threat of television and more, and comes into line now, ready to reap the benefits of digital natives eager to hear 'the resonating echoes of tribal horns and antique drums.'

2010-06-23T09:00:00.000+02:00

At the entrance to the cemetery was a small rundown brick building, not an outbuilding, but perhaps a building for religious meetings. From the road it appeared unused to Maria. Limp sheets of paper hung in the windows. The steps leading to the door, itself boarded across with unpainted bowing planks, were split and crumbling, rent disparate no doubt by successive seasons.

The trees rose high out above the graves, the walls and even the tall buildings nearby. In reaching towards the clouds, towards the inevitable grey pallor of a Krakowian day, they seemed not to expand but to enclose the cemetery, securing it against the city so that inside seems a very still and protected place.

2010-06-22T12:59:00.000+02:00

I visited the cemetery as a child and I just about remember the headstones slanting all around me as though they were jagged teeth set unevenly around a jaw that seemed set to close at any moment.

The grassy beds in between the tombs held no recreation for me as a youngster, I was always held in awe to the black paths, afraid of walking upon the body of some poor soul, more afraid perhaps that I would simply imagine the corpse beneath my step. Crows would hop from branches down onto the hardened earth and begin to tear at tree roots and the impacted layers of coloured, decomposing foliage and at that moment I would ask my father if we could leave.

2010-06-21T11:58:00.000+02:00

One can imagine it, even if one has not been there. Dense gravel paths slowly winding past stacks of graves, monuments to the dead rising out of the earth as though they are pushing through from beneath the ground. Moss creeping over the corners of stones.

Maria talked to Terlecki of graves old and new, of stone epitaphs that were weathered beyond comprehension, set next to slabs of polished black marble and of unnamed beds of concrete, cracked and sunken and covered with fallen leaves. Memories of this place or others like it come to me easily.

2010-05-12T10:04:00.001+02:00

Undergoing a period of reading which stutters, I am lost for words. Three books sit upon the desk. The first has a blue and purple cover and a photograph of a cloud, lurid luminescent text slanting across the top half. The second is typically institutional, the subject of the biography portrayed in a small rectangle, odd abstract colourations elsewhere mix with wildly incongruent fonts. The third cover is captivating; a train pulls into Victoria Terminus, Mumbai, the platform heavy with passengers, a blur of movement.

But none of them are being read, not properly. They stack upon each other, cumulatively, a doorstop of failure. Involuntary halts, barriers and blockades occur daily, reading unable to progress.

The problem is not for want of will, nor for want of the simple (revered) ability to read. Anxiety, however, moves into view, storm and stress begins a process of self stigmatization, the problem unfolds and squares itself through a system of positive feedback. The less I read, the less I read.

Some days are better, the system varies. Some days I want bold, expansive fiction and soon I am holding 1079 bible-thin pages in my hand. On others, the musical biography takes on new import and I get through a page or two. Indian politics appears in the news, I reach for the third. Then, just as quickly, the fluency dissipates, rainwater down a storm-drain.

The exact cause, I cannot determine. Perhaps genetic, perhaps neurophysiological, perhaps behavioral. I consider therapy, aversion treatment, help groups, religious confession, prescribed medication, regular exercise, exotic holidays, fundamental transmogrification. Nothing happens though, pages remain unturned. Next to me, a brown-haired girl tears through page after page, hungrily consuming her next plotline, her next character, her next fact and history. There is no cure for the disorder at present.

2010-05-12T00:29:00.003+02:00

Inside, Labour ministers pack their complimentary, unread manifestos into corrugated cardboard boxes. Outside, a scavenging fox picks through party political broadcast scripts and plastic Sekt flutes, as a civilised British mob shouts 'fuck Tories' (too exasperated at the day's flip-flopping to bother with the definite article) through the black wrought-iron gates of Downing Street, England. Nick Robinson screeches into a fluffy microphone. Expats high-five each other, having preempted their own emigration with a long holiday. Pleas for optimism drift through the night, unheard.

Liberal Democrat votes counted for something at this election, thinks the fox, the one true winner for Sekt is a nectar easily drawn during election week.

Fox continues, now orating aloud to a dumb constituency of cellar-rats. Tomorrow, he says, the Liberal Democrats will be an integral part of a British government, something unthinkable four years previously. Their presence – the traction and transience of which remains to be seen – heralds one important thing; the lack of a Conservative majority. My rural brothers and sisters may be safe yet.

More burrowing, more digging, reams of black plastic nuzzled aside. Fox is onto something. A-gnawing, a-gnashing, a-tearing, he bears down on his prey. The KFC bucket yields.

Suddenly, movement - bloody Nick Robinson again, round the back for a slash. Fox is up and out of there, trotting down the street wearing the red and white grease-sodden cardboard bucket like a hat. Fox spies more bins.

Yes, I know, Fox pleads to no-one, under his breath, sniffing and rooting at the refuse heaped on the street corner. The danger is that Liberal Democrats will achieve nothing, they'll be sold on a couple of cheap manifesto tricks. I mean, look how quickly they've dropped the immigration potato, even as it cools. Fox finds a real potato, stone cold, bites into it. Tastes rosemary and rock salt, imagines a bugle, jerks his head up. Nothing there.

But, let's be positive. If I could have voted – Fox is speaking out loud again - I would have voted Liberal Democrat. They're now involved in day-to-day politics. The potential for electoral reform is there too. The default politics of electoral reform is coalition – here's the big experiment, will proportional representation work? If it does, and if British politics survives the next four years (another bonus, thinks Fox - we've avoided a snap second election in which Conservatives surely would have got a majority) Liberal Democrats will be at the heart of coalition politics, both as paradigm shift and as practicality.

In that sense – Fox snaps a chicken bone he'd saved specially for the climax of his diatribe – we have reasons to be positive. Lets ignore the negatives about class and incapacity, about press engagements over politics – the Conservatives have picked up a poisoned chalice, they'll be unpopular for a generation once more. Cameron will show his colours soon enough. Labour too will need to regroup and focus; they are broken politics.

Fox looks up and down the street, the wind settles. This is it, he thinks. It's not what any of us wanted, but a little positivity might go some way. Let hope liberalism stays principled, lets hope public engagement continues, lets hope politics hears the message of reform.

Fox turns tail and trots back the way he came, moving back towards the media throng, towards the floodlights and moleskines, a hint of resignation in the way his tail moves, but also the sense that all is not quite lost.

2010-04-21T08:10:00.000+02:00

Organisational structures, those delicate balances between supposed meritocracy and feint hierarchy. Much of that work is completed in sentences, poetic circles around ambitions and directions. Invisible dotted lines across the sky, through streets and over city greenlands.

The day rises to gossamer threads, agents bound to one another not by knowing, but by action. Another city awakes some thousand miles away, the lines between the actors tense, tighten and draw taut. There, several time zones removed, one more city sleeps, thinking on ideas the other has not even encountered.

2010-04-13T08:37:00.005+02:00

Working early in Basel, set deep into the retreat of an old factory, forming ideas around community development and radio, the ideal of open broadcast. Inherent within the word community, within its etymology, are notions of togetherness (communitas) and publicly offered duties, gifts or tributes (munus).

◸ One approach to community: togetherness is instilled by a common intent towards making these transactions happen. Or, to reverse it, these transactions happen with an intent towards togetherness.

◸ Another approach. Togetherness is created through a belief in these munerations, perhaps their benefit. Or, conversely, togetherness creates the belief, creates the benefit.

◸ One more. Togetherness needs gifts. The other way – gifts are useless without togetherness (the seed of market value and economy).

◸ Finally. Togetherness reduces the risk of the publicly offered gift. From a different angle, perhaps gifts reduce the risk of togetherness.

Demonstrating passive or active roles for togetherness is a crude exercise in opposition, but from it involves important distinctions. Firstly, community, is not just about a collection of people, but also about an exchange, a transaction, a public service. Secondly, it is important not to assume that toegtherness is a byproduct of the gift – it is useful to think of the reverse, to think that gift-giving is hollow without a collection of people to instil worth, context & value. Thirdly, the key notion is that it is of course in flux, it is a constant movement between the two poles, two poles which are not in fact opposites but rather a circle, the serpent eating its own tail, Jörmungandr or Οὐροβόρος. Cycles, alchemy and energy, then - these are positioned, as the radio blares and the coffee spills over, at the heart of community.

2010-04-08T09:41:00.000+02:00

I think that everything is political. I think that amplifying one's voice is political. Taking up space is political, because space is contested and loudness is related to power and access. Technology has everything to do with [politics], by its origin and in terms of access to it... exterior to what is actually being amplified.
Marina Rosenfeld

Amplification and space, then. Spreading the word, enacting community upon passive voices, drawing crowds into choral sources, shouting from the rooftops, passing on the message, speaking universally of enablement and inclusion, marketing the medium.

Not just speaking, then. Not just amplifying. Rather, the origins of technology, the control of access to it. Not so much the voice behind the microphone, but the foil, the diaphram, the capacitor, the RC circuit, the phantom power, the shielded wire, the fuses, the bipolar junction transistors, the loudspeaker, the power switch. Not just signal, then, not just signal. Instead, the opened mechanisms of power.

2010-03-20T12:11:00.000+01:00

Memory List #7

Boarding card, McCarthy novel, U7 to Rudow, Gatwick-bound, family, slow illness recovery, just a minute, fava beans, river ice plains, naming ceremonies, prezi planning, early flight to London, David Foster Wallace, emirates chanting, Vibracathedral Orchestra, splitting bricks, lowlight of futurity, open broadcast platforms, a gentle snowfall, fond farewell, a morning of Ariel Pink, tagging emails, coding fiction library, toast, five below, by the throat, digital pioneers image disc, jaunt into the media markets, a need for substitutes, email praise, slow filing, Bangladeshi bay shortwaves intercepted and looped, one hour of sleep.

2010-03-19T10:09:00.000+01:00

Memory list #6

Sunday subway, waking dreams, suspended mannequins, immersive gaming, rebooked flights, pixel adjustments, filmic loops, Neil Young, ovenfresh bread, sparkies, an ironic space station, transit circulars, philanthropy, episodic memory, nutshells, seabears, international banking codes, digital media yurts, poached eggs, national insurance, J.D. Salinger (another dead hero), carillon preparations, endless envelopes, projector calibration, wireless interceptions, TFT, war inquiry, national insurance, waterproof radio, muesli and cacti, icing-sugar pavements, frozen doors, plunging stock markets, compacted ice, warm printed bank statements, u-bahn blackouts, a dictionary of addiction.

2010-03-18T09:08:00.000+01:00

Memory List #5

Tragic wireless news, endless infrastructure, 1000 seconds of longplayer, airform archives on the walkman, banks of snow falling from Tesla's roof, blood visions, white flakes of morning, Italian coffee, Harrapian Night Recordings, nɑrˈsɪsəs, Incandenzent samizdats, stuttering grammar, belong, remove the inside, crating electrolysis equipment, machine in the ghost, dreams of speaking shadows, hotel bars, dimensual, leaden sky, buildings as pencil lines on tracing paper, yellow underground rail, covert inspectors, secret dice games, the comeback, deluge city, hemmed in by drifts, white vistas, politburo, curtailed sleep, salt convoys, oneohtrix point never, fine blizzards, citric acid, watermelon soap, grids within grids, bleak house, breakfast ballet, clear ordinances.

2010-03-17T11:10:00.000+01:00

Memory list #4

Double agents, brown sauce, the rushes, house porter cracking ice with an axe, broken clouds, compacted powder, critical path schedules, broccoli soup, a little research, schneider boutique, wireframe visions. gathering reports on radicalisation of Yemen & Somalia, colourless sky, snowy expedition to Alt-Templehof, reminders of The Innocent, O.N.A.N, a certain Dzeko, drifting on folkways, browsing fonnes & lummig, bowing floorboards, balconies full of snow, new year explosives, pietolan Delays, noodles and green peppers, a break in the snow.

2010-03-16T10:09:00.000+01:00

Memory List #3

Screeching horns and traffic crawls outside, trees muffled, dictionaries, triple espresso, nourishment stockpiling, file migration, insect monitoring, diamond pavements, digital ascent, ambitions of correspondence, incense and rubber, prurient plagiarism, libraries of chandler loops, passport checks, layered novels, endless toiletries, three-d specs, system collapse, bleak passages, silver thread, transit lounges, OJ from concentrate, hex triplets, storage issues.

2010-03-15T10:00:00.000+01:00

Memory List #2

NCL - AMS – TXL, lucent Northumbrian sky, merriweathers, surprisingly simple HMRC appointment, slow food, indexing mails, battling infection, hand luggage, safely back in Newcastle, streets of unheimlichkeit, fear of erythromycin, a family voyage, rest needed, making tapeloops in the snow, slipping mercury, grazing cattle, embers of burning bread, balancing budgets, box-fresh t-shirt, post-mix, the north circular, apocalyptic views out over Hackney marshes, late night text edits, museum cartography, subterranean sleep, ringing ears, arrival in London, low rising fog, traces of snow, minus one, USB printer fail, gathering magnetic fields, last minute preparation.

2010-03-14T15:47:00.001+01:00

Memory List #1

Occam's razor, Wilko's scissors, black and white photocopies, skies and apples, a lurching Vauxhall, aerosol inhalation, airport runs, Lenovo pacts, green vinyl flooring, regiments of traffic, low winter sun, reorientation strategies, viral situationism, thunderbirds, teething troubles, telephony solutions, Bashō, familiar terraces, cold tea, yellow light, poppy seeds, spritzenjammer, hidden acoustics, now upon Tyne, police helicopters and searchlights overhead, new distributions, night flight along the coast, exhaustion creeping over.

2010-03-11T09:57:00.002+01:00

A flock of birds, startled above the rising noise of traffic. Doors rattling from the onrushing and offrushing of goods vehicles. Shouting across the courtyard, the low rumble of fluorescent bins being dragged to the street. And, of course, the need to sit at the notepad, at the keyboard, at the window, before the day has begun and commit something, commit to something. The process of composition, akin to writing before waking. Would it be done if possible, writing before waking?

Some sort of information silo, emptied in the precious seconds before retinas flood with light and the brain snaps awake. A sharp intake of air, hand reaching for the book, the phone, the glass of water, the last object touched before unconsciousness. To find it is not there. To sit up now, urging resisting limbs, a slow intake of air this time. Still not there - what was it anyway?

Up now and to the door, across cold floorboards, hard with winter, leaving behind the magnetometer, a millimeter-wide silicon cylinder, filled with a gas of about 100 billion rubidium atoms, sealed by glass at both ends. To the terminal, pressing I/O, a small array of green light emitting diodes flares, flickers, settles to a dim glow. Enter password, birthday soon, to the server, waiting for a distant start-up.

Instantaneously, for the newly awake at least, the right hand portion of the screen is alive with text, a collage of broken sentences, isolated words, unfinished clauses, all perfectly spelt. Draw the cursor to the button, GUI much improved, and summon it once. A millisecond click, now text begins to appear in the left half of the screen, correlating directly to the disappearance of text in the right, a virtual osmosis across a permeable membrane, the thin shaded border that divides the two windows.

Now on the left, something readable. The process begins with words patterned in much the same way as they appeared in the right, but in the left words begin to move as other words are added. A secondary process is taking place, a calculation of function more than form, ordering words according to their role within the sentences, pulling out the -ings and conjugating them according to pronoun, punctuating with occasionally awkward commas, attempting to eradicate non sequiturs, layering sentences into a clumsily threaded narrative. Certainly not perfect, but formative, enough to begin the day on.

The text itself: something about doorways, figures lurking, acts of subterfuge. The sense of being followed, a dull sadness. Noises from next door, the tragically addicted, the afflicted wealthy, those caught between languages, sirens rising and falling, a flock of birds, startled above the rising noise of traffic, the onrush of sleep.

2010-03-10T10:09:00.000+01:00

Every now and again a sign of life. There, a boat low on its keel, haunting sideways across mountain misted lakes. Now, seven deer, plump and dark brown with sharp eyes. A roadside bar, hostile glances offered through the windows, banners exclaiming anniversaries and offers, the rising clouds of debate and drunkeness. Six motor cars parading slowly in a row, indicators flashing, limp ribbons attached, tired children slumped in the rear seats, drivers hunched with urgent stares over steering wheels, will staving off tiredness. What is this place?

2010-03-09T19:53:00.001+01:00

Over yonder one was taken by a group of men, possibly solicitors. He's now earning. Beyond the crease in the map - trace your finger with mine! - we come to the people's country. Here the monsters are borders and within them are complexes of social organisation, houses and stores and markets and and grain importers and quarrymen and lumbermills and steamhouses and foundries and parliaments and munitions dumps and pharmacists and motorways and internet providers and design start-ups and local casinos and endless immaculate sandwich emporiums.

But right now we are back to the forest, to the lake and snowstorms, seven degrees below. Off we go into the fog that plunges down into the canyons and rises, smothering our retreat to the hills. Take a vantage point, exchange some currency for food, perhaps buy a room for the night, an apartment for a year, take stock and plan the next move carefully. Mark nothing, leave no trace. What can be read, can be thought.

2010-03-08T15:51:00.001+01:00

How many times have I written platitudes, bare on the page, stark as morning?

Talking without waiting for an answer, not even rhetorical, barely recognising that air carries sound, not even uttering it into the world. Writing a mute dispatch to a frontier unimaginable. The rider will never arrive, instead will only trapse through endless vales and woodlands. Pitching across rivers, setting camp on exposed hillsides, traversing cuts and inclines, stumbling over scree and fieldmarsh, bound in clothes and ambition.

There be monsters here too, silences of judgement, horrible faltering depths that mark the distance between mathematics and narrative, between what can be measured and what appears. Riders are lost to infinite snowstorms, driven insane by spiralling mountain paths, accepting exhaustion without progress. Another one lost to the bog, remains slowly settling beneath the reeds.

2010-02-16T13:21:00.000+01:00

---unjustified hiatus---

2010-01-30T10:30:00.001+01:00

I'm the Assistant Guest Curator for transmediale.10, Berlin's festival for art and digital culture, 2 - 7 February 2010. Programme announcements, dates and ticket details can be found on the new-look transmediale website or check out the newsroom.

2010-01-19T13:54:00.002+01:00

The room was reached by climbing a set of dog-leg stairs which lay immediately inside the exterior door. Filthy and monochromed by years of uncare, the stairs were long-neglected and used infrequently. A single strip light illuminated the steps, its weak yellow output barely uncovering the recesses or corners of the passageway. The ends of the fluorescent tube flickered dimly and uncomfortably and as a result the edges of things appeared blurry and undefined and the small square landing that joined the two perpendicular sets of steps seemed almost to be hovering in place.

The figure at the top of the stairs traced a figure in the dust.

Ж

Moving carefully, the man (for it was he) returned to ground level, just as he had ascended, diligently placing his footsteps into the marks left only seconds before. An unobservation, one made without seeing the initial act, would be that the man had simply disappeared the moment his fingers left the dust.

2010-01-02T13:32:00.001+01:00

Moments of futurity, moments of awakening. Those slow elucidations, which rise in you like an inevitable dawn, brought only – after an inevitable pause – by the inevitable sinking of some sun below some distant inevitable horizon. It is in these times, in these inevitabilities, that futures occur.

Our metronomic lives owe much to the thankful passing of our own futures. Watch as an unnamed future hunches at the door, great clouds of breath obscuring its face, finger tracing over the frosted names at the entrance, before moving off down the street. Watch him as he goes.

2009-12-25T13:39:00.001+01:00

2009; a year which began in silence, graded into prolonged musical and literary activity and, true to form, faded slowly into deep wintry occupation. Live highlights included Machinefabriek and Greg Haines at Jesus Club, Philip Jeck playing solo and as part of the International Turntable Orchestra, Leif Elggren, Martin Howse and friends as part of Breakthrough Berlin, Cawa Sorix in Paris, Alva Noto's unitxt at CTM, Sons of Noel and Adrian in a Friedrichshain apartment. Away from music, Otto Roessler and Jacob Kierkegaard gave inspiring lectures on the LHC and singing sands respectively.

Lucky enough to play over twenty shows this year, I had real highlights in the now evicted Brunnenstrasse, at Maria am Ostbahnhof, out the back of Staalplaat (three times), in Paris for the launch of Beautiful Was The Time and at Echolalia in Newcastle with an all-star cast of dictaphone and tape impresarios. To be able to finish the year with a UK tour was amazing; Poldr and I met so many amazing and enthusiastic people and we're really excited about the subsequent documentation and release.

In music, my year was soundtracked in part by Arthur Russell's pop diamonds, Machinefabriek's wintry collages, Fennesz' black seas of static, the expansive hopelands of Emeralds, Natural Snow Buildings's folk and noise narratives, the reincarnation blues of Grails and unfolding repetitions of The Fun Years (still), monolithic dimensions of Sunn O)))', tonal meditations from ocdc, William Basinski's shifting etherialisms in 92982, DOOM's critical flows, and inevitably, the intricacies and resonances of the new noise expressionism of Poldr. The tragic passing of Jack Rose will not be forgotten.

The year's reading was dominated by Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but I also found significant departures via Danilo Kiš' Hourglass, Jack London's The Star Rover, Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, A Dirty War by Anna Politkovskaya, Europeana by Patrik Ouredník and J.M.Coetzee's A Diary of a Bad Year. Lev Manovich and Pipilotti Rist were visually introduced to me with significance – The Wire stole hours.

Thanks to all who helped, inspired and provoked. Best wishes for 2010.

2009-12-08T10:42:00.005+01:00

Sleeping.

2009-11-23T10:14:00.002+01:00

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

W.G. Sebald

2009-11-22T13:04:00.001+01:00

“One sometimes hears strange questions asked, like: ‘What are the tendencies of today’s literature?’ or: ‘Where is literature going?’ Surprising questions, but the most surprising thing is that if there is an answer, it is easy: literature is going toward itself, toward its essence, which is disappearance.”

Maurice Blanchot (via Named Tomorrow)

2009-10-27T19:14:00.000+01:00

That is the length, the hope, the number. We have forgotten Moebius, we have given up on the Standard. Chandler speaks to us through three hundred and seventy two divisions, and we reply, all of us in monotonous tones, one after another, each voice getting quieter and quieter, the consonants unclear, all of us lost in pronuntiatio. We are the star speakers slowly murmuring out, slowly out to fade and to nothing.

2009-10-13T09:22:00.000+02:00

Man number one, bald, six foot three, drifts from the shadow of the shop threshold and looks up four storeys to the tenement opposite. Lady number one approaches the edge of the balcony as though it is not there. Tired, she bends down, disappearing for a moment from the view of those on the street, but not from the view of the seven pigeons crowded onto the top of the curved street lamp that arches out like a rib. Then, momentarily she reappears, a diver returning to the surface with a pearl in her hand, but it is not a pearl, it's a small laundry bag.

The woman opens her mouth slightly revealing yellowing, tridirectional teeth and flings the bag into the air some six feet from her third floor vantage. Behind it a trail of green garden twine traces the vector, slackening as gravity quickens the fall of the laundry bag certain to hold something inside.

The man strikes out in a straight line across the traffic-less cobbles, above him the twine tightens, the twine stiffens, alert to its occupation the twine redeems the flight of the bag which lands softy and immaculately into the barely outstretched arms of man number one, who gathers the windfall without breaking stride. Lady number one is no longer on the balcony as man number one removes the key from said laundry bag, switches his glance from left to right and back again before entering the block opposite letting the enormous green glass-paned door swing loudly shut behind him.

2009-10-12T09:19:00.000+02:00

What signs can be summoned from the rain? This week has seen the return of autumn, retrieved from its locked cupboard, stored somewhere in the recesses of last year. A tiptoeing recollection brings pleasant thoughts too: hot coffees and soft pastries in the open fronted bakeries somewhere in the north of the city; long rides home through slick piles of mulch and dense drifts of clammy, sweet leaves; the setting of the fire each morning, slow heat warning off the frosts with white briquettes and tapers of glowing paper.

So, then, what signs? Alphas and omegas tumbling through the insistent drizzle, a fluid language, no longer two dimensions, no longer a simple planed form, but in fact now of three dimensions - line, volume, chronology. Letters suddenly appear with depth, written serifs and majuscules faint into the distance and loom forward once more, taking time to expose themselves. Entire stories are written into single characters that stretch on forever.

A winter ahead. The fear sets in, even during the dry times. Occasional throes of low sun dispense with the blues for an hour or two, but then that spectacular grey Berlin cloak sets in, scattering people out from the centres into the forests, the deep secret forests that belt and bank the scowling metropolis and its thick mantel. Those not native, flee. The time has come to board trains, to queue at airports, to huddle into recesses and renew passports. An exodus presents itself to the quietening city.

2009-10-07T11:10:00.000+02:00

Everywhere there are hidden receptacles, promissory notes of furtive belonging and dictionaries full of blank pages. Quadrants of men, issuing orders with complicated hand signals and intense glares, eyebrows arched, mouths pursed. Yellow suited orderlies ride yellow bikes, mechanical lemons, to each street corner and switch their glances quickly from left to right, then a hand darts into a pocket, comes out with a desperate key, desperate to enter, desperate to open the bent and burnt steel streetlocker.

Inside, more yellow - a plastic satchel bursting at the seams, rows of crushed envelopes, vacuum-packed advertorial inserts stuffed into the stiff corners of the heaving delivery bag. The bag is hoisted out, a great effort for the operative at this ninety degree angle, she has neglected to dismount, but hoist she does, pulling at the frayed strap and gathering the physics of the thing just right before swinging it expertly through a quarter of a circle and up onto the hollow-tubed yellow basket in front.

Then a click, she rocks the bicycle off the stand, flicks at her dirty perm ends and eases down the street picking up momentum on the tiny pavement stones, mosaicked into sand-flecked waves of uneven surface that judders and jolts her bicycle frame and her rigid elbow joints into a numb submission.

2009-09-18T10:57:00.001+02:00

A gallery, late Saturday afternoon. Some dusty courtyard, great corridors of triangular sunlight filtering between the buildings, oddly geometric light, must be the buildings. Low slung outbuildings, sheds almost, hidden behind a lurching great brick wall. A circle of wood, rain-beaten tables, something like an asphodel, something like that anyway, springing up from beneath the parting concrete, spring up into a triangle of sun making its way through the corridor of buildings, one old and one new. The new one is ring-fenced with cheap steel, hollow staircases visible through the gaping side of the building which is yet to be complete.

Inside the gallery, the second day of a series of theoretical talks on the relationship between sound and other media, relationships between non-figurative art and experimental music; why the former has captured the hearts and monies of a worldwide audience and why the latter has not. Also, a framework of the Berlin scene is posited, Berlin as a crucible, a melting pot of specific cultural and political circumstances that has produced a diversity that echoes out beyond its borders, current and past, built and fallen.

Geoff Stahl, via Montreal and New Zealand, came to relate the Berlin scene, not through the problematic methods of comparison and example but through broad sociological definitions of 'scene', through distancing it from subculture, through employing a discourse of spatial, temporal, social and semiotic investigations. Interesting were the notions raised of an excess of meaning, black-market sociality, elemental rituals and the blurred boundaries that exist between occupation and pleasure. Missing perhaps was some depth, something beyond an opening approach or a gentle delineation of things already apparent. Later, however, in a panel discussion Gudrun Gut and Ronald Lippok, scensters both, would come to relate anecdotes of East and West and mauerfall in such a way that filled the spaces proved in the opening piece.

Then Brandon LaBelle with his confessional fictions of his own youth, extracted to a third person, narrated slowly over static film shots of a satellite Los Angeles neighbourhood coastal town. Unfolding descriptions of garages, band practice, Iron Maiden covers, sanctuaries, fatherhood, suburban upbringing, police raids and finally an aspatial locking out of the universe, the drumkit as a space-defining tool, the catalyst for years of fascination with sound and structure.

Finally Boris Debackere with a lightening rod tour of the history of cinema in an oddly written presentation which only really became interesting when referring to the properties of digital cinema in relation to its predecessors. Supposedly generative rather than representational, digital means according to Debackere has opened a new way for cinema. The argument was less than convincing however and a DVD showing of Rotor did little to convince unfortunately. Cinema's hold comes through its representation, despite its retreat into commercialism and formulaic structures. Find me something generative like Manovich's Soft Cinema and we begin to get somewhere.

The light draws away early these days, heading into autumn certainly. Bicycle rides home are accompanied by a chill and dim dynamo-driven lamps that falter and squeak their way towards a sleep. So it was: to home, to sleep.

2009-09-10T16:42:00.004+02:00

The new apartment: rent paid, deposit paid, bills paid, maintenance paid. Many things have been earned and the apartment has been paid for - might we earn things here daily. The low morning sun stretching down the tree-lined street. The cold concrete of the balcony, the plastic rectangles full of shivering pansies, the dust gently moving between the twice-paned doors - all this might have been earned.

In the kitchen, sunlight might play out against the claimed wood (another story there, with entire blocks being evicted in deep Kreuzberg, the gentrifiers winding their inevitable way to the fringes of the city's inner housing areas). Sunlight might dip its shadowy intent beneath the roofs, or just above them, scoring an invisible arc into the graded sky. Move it does, only perceptible though when set against a straight line, a row of tiles or a horizon. Might it too throw Venn diagrams of shade onto the freshly painted wall, or flatten a metal lampshade into a grey oval which rises against the tiles, marking the lengthening hours as it creeps? So the day progresses, leaf over leaf, rusted bicycle frame over rusted bicycle frame, the courtyard once more an ever-changing chorus of shrieks, two-stroke engines, workmen, trodden stairs and absolute silence.

There, then - a proposal, nothing more. All this might have been earned. There are collections of chance, each like packs of cards splayed out into the sunlight, ready for the choosing. Each of these collections is a possibility, each an earned moment that deserves its light.

2009-09-10T16:42:00.003+02:00

Ghosts rising out of dust and late crimson sunlight populates those former houses. How many still stand? Two in the rough port town upon the listing seas of the south coast. These two are barely remembered: a cobbled street, square-cut stone step, tiny steep staircase, sliver of garden (in the second), a backroom window covered in frost. The stories that were told hold enough in themselves to inhabit estates - the journeys on a moped whilst still high in the womb, the day the television was stolen, the gently ascending job opportunities of my mother, the icy hills and motorbike accident, the day the neighbour - high on drugs - sent himself through the bedroom window, fields of buttercups, tiring walks across to the Solent, infant feet knocking pebbles against one another.

When we moved from the quiet, brutalist concrete shopping centres and squabbling bars, from the docks and permit parking to the Midlands countryside, were words said? Was the word home invoked? These were the early houses and the eighties, climbing a gentle ladder from terrace to semi to rural detachment - an odd new-build on an outcrop of entirely flat, arable land. Visions proceed of gulls squabbling behind combine harvesters, fires raging through the stubble during early autumn and great yellow swathes of rapeseed. My father returning home in his car, out all day trying to sell car batteries, bringing good news with the hot sunset. Behind such imagery, the bold colours are as tied into my childish retreat as the gently evolving structure of my family. A child, a sister, another, a girl again, then a brother. Later, twins, but they - in a way - are of another time. Entirely connected and loved but knowing only of one county and nothing of the return, knowing only of one parent.

2009-09-08T16:41:00.000+02:00

As time demands, time receives. Is it the sea, does it take everything without question, delivering some to shore and some to ocean-shelf with apparent neglect of consequence? Is time the sea? Is it a question worth saying, worth saying out loud? One worth writing in notebooks? Is time the sea? Do these words reward the effort? Is it time, sea, is it time?

2009-09-05T16:40:00.000+02:00

Let us for a moment together calculate the number of places my presence has accused of being home. Ha, to think of the structures bound into the word home! To self-serve, to line up false histories and knock them down with disregard for the memories of others - that place called home! Such a word! What else indicates a spectrum diverse, moving from directions in which sleep lay or loose collections of family, through fading career ambition and embarrassing geographic fatalism to a later, and perhaps inevitable, benevolent, self-serving programme of friend adoption. What else allows such brazen lies to unfurl as the word home?

2009-08-31T19:20:00.005+02:00

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.

Pynchonian disclaimers from Gravity's Rainbow, which I read only when being shuttled at great speed through twisted subterranean rail-shafts. Now is the time of moving, moving away and to a new home, staying at home and moving in. Having found a new apartment, we slowly fill all our belongings into cardboard boxes, Cara and I, and then disclose them into the bare four walls of the new place. Much is afoot, many plans are being laid out, many last moments either being compiled in advance, or, in retrospect, being forgotten.

2009-08-24T09:08:00.000+02:00

Lev Manovich, how am I supposed to regard him? Came across his work for the first time yesterday, his film work, Soft Cinema. Hidden from me previously, he came into light. How was it that he managed to stay beyond my sight for so long? At times, it is clear a conscious effort to obscure me from new art is at work. McLuhan's successor! I went through four years of red brick, white paper, grey day university and never encountered any media theorists, let alone McLuhan and his successor..

Soft Cinema, then, crept into my dreams. Late into the night I watched 'Mission to Earth', a science-fiction fable about a technologically inferior planet and its population who arrive on earth as immigrants. The format of the thing is something of beauty. Multiple windows of various sizes mirroring constant laptop use; episodic, short chapters; a looping, repetitive narrative; coloured backgrounds fading in and out - all are bound by database logic and algorithmic predilection. It is the cinema of software and it provoked dreams uncharacteristically vivid.

Vivid but, of course, nonsense. Vivid nonsense. Great sprawling fields full of grazing goats and low slung breeze-block walls, a town in the distance just beyond the hills. In the town, a modern office block, a psychic seance, some low-key data forensics, wireless network mapping, an enormous formal dinner with lego cutlery, a fleet of ex-girlfriends with permanent amnesia, a desire to sleep, tasks to fulfil.

So it is that software enters cinema, cinema enters dreams, and dreams enter into the everyday through writing. Software into the everyday, into the writing of the everyday. Software into writing, once more into software, to be published, to be published and exposed as vivid nonsense, to be scorned. Writing into everyday scorn, into nonsense and scorn.

2009-08-22T10:57:00.001+02:00

Another friend departs, leaving traces of movement all around, a luminous dotted line across a xeroxed map, oceans shaded in tight strikes of biro, coloured points locating somebody somewhere. Clusters of amber and barium pins, tips gently rusted tips from the damp wall, spell out words across the map, journeys undertaken and returned from, journeys alive and dead, journeys there and back.

An undersized maelstrom of social activity accompanies each visit of these flighting luminosities now transposed to paper. Last night we burrowed our way beneath the hanging mists following the electrical storms and crossed over into the former East, our feet striking the line of cobbles set into the city to denote the pre-existence of the wall, not once, but twice. There, not far from the black canal, where the white stillness of swans drifted into morning, we burrowed our way into some back courtyard, a skeletal steel frame of an outbuilding shadowing our stairly ascent.

These old buildings, post-industrial now of course, just girders and wood waiting for reuse, a reuse located last night in a collection of people out in search of detuned, electrified string instruments. Nadja, Ovo (and others we missed through a neglected watch) proceeded to set up layers of rhythm, chorus and overlapping distortion, mixing ritual with retrograde industrial feedback, the ambience of factories, slowing, cults of entertainment and reinterpretation at the expense of histories forgotten.

Other days in the week have also come and gone of course, days forgotten and remembered once more through writing, a wilful process of rewriting. Much time spent in the sunshine, absorbing as much as possible before the inevitable steep decline into a brief autumn. We spent time under the pavilions of the riverside, sheltering from the daytime heat or the evening insects, or walking through streets of rising dust, the hawkers slumped in off-white polyvinyl chairs buckling in the heat.

At some point, we stood out on a top-floor terrace, perched next to a lift-shaft drinking cool beers and looking out across the sleeping citiy. Gradually the lights blinked themselves out, save for the intermittent red-eyes of the distant transmission towers, and we watched the lighting storms roll in from the west. Wetterleuchten, they call it in German, glowing weather. Perhaps it is only sheet-lightning in English, or even summer-lightning, but glowing weather! That is a poetry unmatched. So it was then, as we stood on the balcony, a hundred feet above the courtyard below, and watched the weather glow towards us.