March 28, 2008 by jerome
Yesterday we all went to the launch of Disclosures, a series of event organised by Gasworks. Disclosures purpose is to scrutinise the notion of openness across fields of cultural production at large..
Electronest is part of the event as commissioned artist/designer for the Pipeline website and we also designed the printed communication.
This morning, like almost every morning, I was looking at the statistics of our various websites; I started to consider the leaflet in which we had the chance to have an extended colophon as an extension of our Electronic Presence - yesterday, on Assembling we released a short report about the re-launch of Electronest’s “home page” and I remembered an idea Pierre explored a little while ago: Generic Business Card.
This morning, the idea of considering those bits of paper which I always neglected (or more exactly which I always tried to neglect) as an extension of our Electronic Presence started to be quite attractive.
Attractive enough for me, to have my own go at it.
Reading WikiPedia, Business Cards evolved from a fusion of traditional trade cards and visiting cards; they are bearing business information about a company or individual. They are shared during formal introductions as a convenience and a memory aid.
It is funny to then read and figure out the similitude with the definition of what a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is: In computing, a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), is a compact string of characters used to identify or name a resource. The main purpose of this identification is to enable interaction with representations of the resource over a network, typically the World Wide Web, using specific protocols.
∗ Business Cards on WikiPedia
∗ URI on WikiPedia
∗ by the way, the program which has a few mistakes and bugs, should be corrected in a future PDF, a sort RC2
∗ Pipeline |* is not yet launched but it should get some content and go live soon
Tags: ambient, beacon, electronic presence, print, tangible, typography, uri | Comments (0)
March 18, 2008 by pierre
http://rooreynolds.com/2008/03/12/ambient-skype/
made me think of our discussion about the different uses of the (sometime broken) computers, and the meaning of “electronic presence”.
A previous email from Jérôme:
- when there was those bombing in London in July 05, the Cellphone Network Carriers were quickly crushed: too many people were inquiring about the safety of their relatives. A simple alternative i read about at that time (i forgot where and from whom) was to have mobile phone with an IP system that would then reply to a simple ping
- Yesterday, Pierre’s computer crashed - all the data are safe, he does backup everything vital all the time. Despite this fact, I was worried by the loss of its hardware: he couldn’t make sure Martine who stayed in France was alright and couldn’t let her know he was since he was not connected to the AIM network; not that he needed to talk to her - there always is the phone - but he couldn’t see her in the corner of his screen.
That’s typically an exemple of what I’m referring to when I am speaking about Electronic Presence, a networked extension of the self.
- Then we started our rants and 2 pences about a personnal IP which would allow others to _ping_ someone - which means they can know you’re safe/alive. one could setup an auto reply status to the ping, like: “Hospital”, “I’m fine”, “sleeping”, “meeting”. Auto status could enabled in advance using calendar applications
- It really does sounds like FaceBook status; there is some Twitter too, under the hood.
- OpenID could be a nice receptacle for this kind of development.
To wich I replied:
Makes me think as well of an interesting interface that there is in the operating system plan 9 (a new more “perfect” unix that never really took off by some of the makers of unix), it is a sort of “distributed” os and there is a part of the UI that shows who’s connected to a machine with small icons like this (on the top left corner):
it is very similar to ichat buddies icons, but I like how it is built deep in to the system and UI, and linked to the idea that our personal machines could be seen as mere entry points in a more global distributed space, where our friends and loved ones are allowed to enter a common space.
and Jérôme quoted:
“Plan 9 is based on UNIX but was developed to demonstrate the concept of making communication the central function of the computing system.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
Tags: avatar, beacon, distributed, electronic presence, filesystem, openid, os, ping, tangible, twitter | Comments (4)
