I talk about social connections a lot in my work but last night I literally made a live electric one. It turned out to be remarkably simple but it felt momentous. Next I shall try two switches.
I started mucking around with how it might operate in the engine. If only turning the sun on and off was this easy.
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Kat and I chatted this evening with Evan Raskob, Designer in Residence and Senior Lecturer at Ravensbourne and part of Technology Will Save Us, the “haberdashery for technology and alternative education” based in London.
Evan is a hive of inspiration - a designer, machine-maker, artist and tinkerer, he sent us in some exciting new directions as we contemplated working together on fabricating the Serendipity Engine. It was a timely conversation, as Kat and I are heading into the Royal Institution’s workshop tomorrow to start making.
We talked about Fluxus and Experiments in Art and Technology - groups that embody the LuvviesBoffins sentiments that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently voiced at the Edinburgh TV Festival, and fit with the aesthetic and function of the Serendipity Engine. I particularly like Jean Tinguely’s self-destroying machine, Homage to New York (1960) (he was “an artist, an inventor or a philosopher,” according to this newsreel):
We also talked about Jonathan Harris’ & Sep Kamvar’s We Feel Fine, the 2005 adventure in emotional sentiment mapping across the blogosphere, or “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale”. This may inspire a solution to a conundrum: Kat and I have been thinking about what content we might incorporate into the machine after speaking with Will Pearson, Ravensbourne’s Director of Technology (who kindly connected us with Evan), who reminded us that Arduinos can do inputs from all kinds of sources. Maybe crawling the web for the word “serendipity” might make use of the the technology’s cybernetic networked brain in an interesting way…
Evan’s offered to show us the guts of one of his wired up creatures on Thursday and to proffer his talents in our direction. After thinking about the connections between different objects and people, and how we might gain inspiration from synesthesia (yep, we did go there), we were overwhelmed with possibilities: Sound! Colour! Wired up tamagotchis in a suitcase!
Before then, I have a shopping list: home-made amplifiers and DIY speakers (via Technology Will Save Us - the “music” problem solved), bits of bicycles, wires, LED lights and scavenged pieces of my now-dismantled flat.
And Kat’s just learned how to make a circuit:
This is totally going to work.
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We’re ISO a person with amateur electronics skills to collaborate on wiring up The Serendipity Engine ahead of the lecture at the Royal Institution on 8 Nov. Tweet @aleksk if you’d like to help: we need to speak with you ASAP!
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A interesting methodology. Rich pickings for serendipitous experience.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science, despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psychogeography with abundant data.
More on the dérive from Wikipedia.
Speaking of walking, here’s the Walking Artist’s Network - a collective of people “who define themselves as walking artists - or who are interested in walking as a mode of art practice”. It’s based in London. I’ve already informed @vickeegan and @moongolfer, my two favourite walking partners.
HT @i_serenA
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I’m honoured to be contributing to the Digital Media and Learning project, an initiative supported by the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation. I’ll be blogging there about the implications of the web for learning and society, joining an exceptional cast of scholars like danah boyd, Ethan Zuckerman, Cathy Davidson, Howard Rheingold and many others.
I am obsessed with serendipity. It’s become an almost pathological fascination since 2009, when I was inspired by a happy confluence of what I was doing then, and something that bumped up against it. I’m curious about what serendipity is, how it can be predicted and the things that help facilitate it and hinder it. And, being a student of the social psychology of the web, I’m interested in how the digital space affects it.
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Henry Hoke’s Random Excuse Generator, built by the Institute of Backyard Studies from the, er, original design. (by easterbilby)
This is a beautiful machine.
Will the platitude accumulator work? How fine should the credibility gaps be set? Will the blame shifter be powerful enough?
And here are a few images from the Lost Tools of Henry Hoke exhibition on Flickr, and some more on ABC.net.
More on Henry Hoke at Maker Faire by Mark Thompson from IBYS.
And just to make a point about the relative value of analogue machines compared with the opaqueness of their digital counterparts, have a look at this. No comparison.
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Wallace & Gromit’s collection of Cracking Contraptions, from Wikipedia
How very nice.
Kat and I are working on the physical structure that will be the Serendipity Engine today. We’re meandering between producing a modelling system, like the MONIAC (perhaps the endgame?), a series of mechanical scenarios used as a collection of modular objects that represent “serendipitous storytelling” (perhaps the inspiration for/results of our Serendipity Salons?), and a device that could come out of the workshop of Wallace & Gromit.
The thing we’re struggling with is how to reduce something that we are arguing is too reductionist already - we don’t want to fall into the same trap as that which we are critiquing. Unfortunately, that seems to be part of the curation process, and we must simply be reflexive when devising the thing that we are going to create. Instead, we want to EXPLODE abstractions, and make them visible.
We’re trying to come to terms with how best to represent this. There are many different parameters to this brief: the context in which it will be presented; the materials that we have to hand; the time we have to create it; the specific line-up of abstract concepts we wish to make physical; and also our creative and theoretical approaches to the same problem.
Be assured, it won’t have an outcome: the point of this project is that you cannot predict serendipity. If people are coming to the Royal Institution expecting the answer, I’m afraid they will be disappointed.
To come up with our structure, we have been playing with pieces of paper. I must say, making things physical certainly inspires.
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At the ISEA conference in Istanbul, Turkey in September, I sat on a panel with the team behind serenA, a cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional research group currently working on an EPSRC-funded sandbox project to build a technology to produce serendipity.
I am skeptical of computer solutions that portend to generate serendipitous outcomes, as I widely discuss here. The good news is that they are too.
Here’s the talk I gave at the panel, on alekskrotoski.com
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At the ISEA conference in Istanbul, Turkey in September, I sat on a panel with the team behind serenA, a cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional research group currently working on an EPSRC-funded sandbox project to build a technology to produce serendipity.
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