Aram Squalls

The metaverse inches closer to reality with Google's "liquid galaxy"

Google's new project, "liquid galaxy," is kind of like The Veldt. Once large-scale, flexible AMOLEDs become affordable, this can be more or less seamless.

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:

1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud
2: The Metaverse
3: Hackers and Gamers
4: OSS/FS/CC
5: dot-com Fantasies
6: Web 2.0
7: Remix/Configurable Culture
8: The Cloud
9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots
10: Adventures in MeatSpace

I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!

Reconfiguring the sonic landscape

In an ocularcentric culture like ours, it's no surprise that privacy advocates and security advocates alike are caught up in the battle over visual information -- who can record it, who can store it, and who can share it with whom. Foucault helped us make sense of this back before configurability even kicked in, with his critique of panopticism (a metaphor borrowed from Bentham).

But, aside from the soundtracks to video footage and commercial music, not many people have been concerned with our sonic landscape, with what I (and some others) would call the "panaudicon" (actually, the last Batman movie is a notable exception). For years now, I've been kicking around this idea of aggregating diverse audio streams from net-connected devices, public microphones, and the airwaves, and filtering them into a public space (virtual or actual), where they can be cataloged, remixed, redirected, etc. I proposed versions of this project to both the Lear Center and the Annenberg Center (R.I.P.) when I was in LA, but they never had any interest in backing it, and I guess I just didn't have the time or the interest to pursue it on my own.

Thankfully, someone has now done it, in a very cool site called SoundSweep.org (or is it "sounds weep"? ah ha!). I think this is a Sci-Arc based project. Anyway, here's the site's self-description:

Sound Sweep is a gray radio broadcast that records and reprograms sonic space in Los Angeles. Its intention is to generate new spaces, perforate established spaces and amplify forgotten spaces.

Definitely worth checking out, although there's not much audio there yet.

(Thanks for the link, Marissa!)

Thought-control interface for gaming

People who know me know that I love stuff like this: creepy sci-fi technologies seeping almost without comment into our quotidian world. A company called Emotiv has just announced it will be shipping thought-control (and emotion-reading) interfaces, mass marketed to video gamers, later this year. Of course, this stuff has been around for a while -- mostly, DARPA-funded projects whose ostensible purpose is to help paraplegics move a mouse cursor, but of course the real agenda is more like Firefox (not the browser -- the Clint Eastwood movie) -- thought-controlled weaponry to nudge our soldiers ever closer to maximal killing efficiency and an Ender's Game-like remove from the visceral experience of taking life. But, to my knowledge, this is the first time such technology will be available at BestBuy.

Of course, as I've been arguing for years, this tech is half of the necessary infrastructure for networked telepathy (the other half has also been built -- someone just has to put the two pieces together), or, if you want to get really sinister about it, networked thought control.

To put on my analyst's hat for a second: imagine the data mining possibilities this thing will have! McDonald's will actually be able to target action-oriented marketing (buy a Big Mac right now, for 99 cents!!!) based on the real time emotional state of media consumers. Whoa. I've got to bake that into my SEMPO projections.

Now, to put on my video game professor's hat: imagine the feedback effect the adoption of technologies like this would have on game design. Once designers can count on collecting and delivering data through such an interface, it could significantly change gameplay; levels could become faster or harder depending on the level of stress the user exhibits (certain biofeedback games already do this, in a way), or enterprising designers could use the device to break the 4th wall. Imagine Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid taunting you -- not with "his" psychic knowledge of the games you've got stored on your memory card, but based on "his" real-time assessment of your emotional state. [Shudder].

(Thanks, Masha!)

UPDATE: Dave [surname redacted] sez:

hmmm....i'll believe it when/if it works...
at this point, it is all very functional and doesn't work very well, at least what i've seen.  it is all based on mapping electrical signals AFAIK.  neuroscience/brain imaging scares the shit out of me b/c so many people want to believe its possible (and have a vested interest in making it appear possible) that the technology is being sold as being able to do more than it can.  you've seen the stories CNN has done where they're using fMRIs on people to show their "real" voting preferences?  it's batshit crazy to say that one is true (the scan) over the other (the person's articulated preference).  at best you can say that they're in conflict.  but once CNN (or Wired or anyone who can make money off overblowing claims) gets a hold of it, they start making fMRIs say more than they do.

i've been thinking a lot about Eugene Thacker's biomedia argument- what you get is not someone's thoughts, but a machinic interpretation of them, mediated by a computer program that is designed to interpret signals in a particular way.  it is IMO not any different from what was going on in the 19th C when they were measuring fatigue and inferring neurasthenia based on slow reaction time, declining tactual acuity, etc.