What does Wikipedia without text and only links look like? Why don’t we recycle the content of our trashcan? Are you dreaming of a startup sound karaoke?

Last night the graphical design students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Amsterdam presented us a number of projects that deal with the Graphical User Interface.

The projects arose out of the following questions:

• what are the conventions of GUI (Graphic User Interface) design
• what is fascinating or attractive
• what is good or bad design
• what is user friendly
• what kind of metaphors are used
• what are alternative ways of operating
• what is it’s history
• how deal others with the GUI conventions
• what is the relation to our human interfaces? (Wikipedia)

The quality of the projects was wide ranging but overall the projects were interesting and topped with humor. Here are a few of my favorite projects:

De-Construct

This handy application will desummarize all your files and will show you everything that makes up your single file. The application works with every single file on your computer. Do you have an mp3? It will let you hear all the different instruments. Do you have a JPG? Deconstruct it by color or lines or anything!

Super Mario Brothers Speed Competition

A videoclip of people competing in finishing Super Mario Brothers first. The most relaxed looking people finished first. The video reminds me of the work of Mr. Toledano who photographed people while playing games to reveal “a hidden part of their character.” Another interesting photographer is Robbie Cooper who photographed gamer’s alter egos.

Traces of Your Inbox

This movie shows the different traces people leave when checking their e-mail. Every user will create it’s own path and image because users will use different e-mail applications, different e-mail services, different operating systems and different e-mail checking habits. Your digital traces are translated into material traces.

GUI Labyrinth

In the age of the information overflow we are constantly distracted by e-mail, instant messaging and other applications that want our attention. It is now a task to actually get things done. This “game” turns your GUI into a labyrinth where you have to get to the exit without accidentally bumping with your mouse into one of the icons of the running applications which will launch once hit.

Emoticon Photoseries

Hey, this looks familiar! A few months ago Esther and I did a photoshoot in Brussels where we imitated the Skype emoticon set. Our set (bottom left) also includes the new Skype emoticon (los) which stands for loughing out silently. We visit a lot of conferences where we often communicate using Skype.
The (los) emoticon was born during a conference speech where someone had to lough out loud but was forced to laugh out silently. Our absolute favorite Skype emoticons are (poolparty) and (heidi) because you can use them in almost every single situation.

A lot of projects dealt with the idea of “window washing” or, in other words, stripping the GUI or application down to the minimum or the basics. Award for the best project in this category goes to: A contentless Wikipedia. Wikipedia is stripped from its text but the links are kept. I thought it was really interesting to see Wikipedia with only links. It shows the context instead of the content. Lovely!

Other great projects: Trashare, CPU Forecast, Startup Tune Karaoke, A visualization of .DS_Store and the rotating mouse pointer.

All the pictures from the GUI Play Presentations can be found on Flickr.

Sorry if I got any of the project names wrong, they flashed by in seconds. If anyone knows where I can find the project website (except for the one on Wikipedia) please share it in the comments.

(The following post is in Dutch because it concerns a Dutch publication about New Media in the Netherlands)

Het Instituut voor Netwerkcultuur en het Sandberg Instituut hebben een krant uitgegeven over Nieuwe Media Cultuur in Nederland. De krant werd vandaag officieel gelanceerd tijdens de “Nieuwe Culturele Netwerken” conferentie in Amsterdam.

Een beperkte oplage van de krant komt met twee kaarten en een stickervel met woorden waarmee zelf mooie media-gerelateerde uitspraken gemaakt kunnen worden. Mijn laptop is vanaf heden dan ook bestickerd met “vormgeving is niet zo ingewikkeld moeilijk” & “i love nieuwe media/internet” & <theorie “kunst” leuk>.

De uitspraak “vormgeving is niet zo ingewikkeld moeilijk” is niet zozeer een uitspraak waar ik het mee eens ben, maar is bedoeld als provocatie bij de onderliggende sticker “mycreativity.” Ook de binnenkant van mijn laptop doet mee met de stickerpret met “draadloos” naast mijn wifi lampje.

De titel van de publicatie “54.780 Woorden Over Nieuwe Media Cultuur in Nederland” verwijst naar het sobere karakter van de krant. De 19 artikelen zijn gedrukt op tabloid formaat, zonder plaatjes en geheel in Times New Roman.

Al zal dit sobere karakter misschien niet geheel in de smaak vallen bij een deel van de doelgroep (verscheidene Nieuwe Media opleidingen hebben de krant besteld) het is een zeer functioneel ontwerp dat tot in de puntjes uitgewerkt is en daarmee tevens als tijdbeeld dient. Ik vind het ontwerp van Florian Conradi prachtig! Meer over de inhoud van de krant wanneer ik deze uitgelezen heb.

De krant, stickers en kaarten zijn te downloaden op de site van het Instituut voor Netwerkcultuur, zie rechterkolom.

Alle foto’s van de lancering van de krant staan op Flickr.

I must admit I practice a dualistic attitude towards the environment. On the one hand I use energy saving light bulbs, ride a bike and separate my garbage but on the other hand I leave my computer on 24/7. Fortunately there are now several solutions to ease my conscience. An easy solution would be to host my blog at at a carbon neutral/climate neutral host. A lot of hosting companies now offer environment friendly hosting solutions and I would like to take the opportunity to shamelessly promote the Dutch hosting company Greenhost.nl.

Disclaimer: I know the people behind Greenhost but this promotion is for a good cause. My blog is currently hosted elsewhere so it’s not carbon neutral free yet but I am considering the transition.

I first came into contact with Justice when I saw their video for D.A.N.C.E. on MTV. The video clip with the dynamic t-shirts is cheerful and beautifully crafted and proves to me that Internet has not killed the videostar quite yet. Then I saw that friends were playing the record on their last.fm account and thought it was time to check out the whole album. The album title † and the dark cover make it look like a death metal band but looks are deceiving. Cross is the debut album from Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay who are managed by the folks of Daft Punk.

This is one of the few electronic albums in my collection that I like from start till finish. It is dark, distorted, loud, upbeat, cute (D.A.N.C.E. is the most cheerful song on the album, making it the perfect summer single), mythical, grande, getyourfeetonthedancefloor, great running/dish washing/treadmill food.

I cannot properly describe it, I am not a music journalist, I just want to tell everyone this is the best album I’ve heard for a while so “GET IT!”

Yesterday I installed Safari Beta for Windows and gave it a try. I’ve been using Firefox for a while now and I’m very satisfied. I often use Safari on other people’s Mac and I like it because of its minimalistic interface and its fast startup and page loading. Unfortunately the Windows version is a very buggy beta release. It crashes on a lot of sites I use and it renders text between -strong- and -em- tags invisible. That is one huge bug! It makes my blog look like this:

While it displays correctly on my friend’s Mac:

Also a lot of fonts look blurred in Safari Beta for Windows. Maybe Safari uses some kind of anti-aliasing that doesn’t display well on my screen?

What I do like about Safari is that it comes with the Lucida Grande font. It is a great looking anti-alias font for web display. It also opens up a whole “made with Apple” world for me. I installed Lucida Grande as a system font and now all pages made with Macs that have Lucida Grande as their default font (in the stylesheet for example) display differently. Previously these pages would be displayed in Verdana which is usually the default font setting for Windows users. So all pages with a stylesheet that contains -font: “Lucida Grande”, “Verdana”, sans-serif; -will now display in Lucida Grande instead of Verdana. Lucida Grande was designed for Apple and Verdana was designed for Microsoft and now Lucida Grande is available for Windows users as well.

My WordPress interface is now also displayed in Lucida Grande which makes me assume it was written by Mac users, but I am going to fact check that one.

University Of Chicago Press, USA 2005
288 pp. Paperback, $16.50 USD
ISBN 0226321487
Buy at Amazon

My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts is Hayles’ final book of her trilogy on the binary opposition between embodiment and information through an engagement with the materiality of literary texts. She continues where she has left of with Writing Machines and How We Became Posthuman to deepen these ideas into computation and textuality. Hayles sees materiality as “the constructions of matter that matter for human being” (3) which connects to the view of the Computational Universe, “that is, the claim that the universe is generated through computational processes running on a vast computational mechanism underlying all of physical reality.” (3)

The title My Mother Was a Computer indicates an anthropomorphic projection that is often used in (mis) understanding the computer’s functioning. We can also see this in blogging when people apologize to their blog they implicitly create “a cultural Imaginary in which digital subjects are understood as autonomous creatures imbued with human-like motives, goals, and strategies.” (5)

Hayles defines making (language and code), storing (printing and electronic text) and transmitting (analog and digital) as the three modalities related to information that help to constitute the bodies of subjects and texts. She calls the entanglement between the bodies of texts and digital subjects “intermediation”. (7)

Speech, writing and code are considered to be the three major systems for creating signification whereby Hayles states that the three are in a progression. I would like to argue however that code came into existence at the same time as writing. “Coding structures make use of what might be called the syntagmatic and paradigmatic, but in inverse relation to how they operate in speech systems.” She uses Manovich view on the database to explain coding structures and how databases and narrative interfaces work together. There is a flexibility of narrative ambiguity at a high level and rigidity and precision at a low level. This could relate to Mark Poster’s impoverished self because of the restricting abilities of the database. There is a paradox visible in the fact that the high-level literariness is achieved through the low-level (database, ones and zeros) rigidity. This got me thinking about blogging and the use of plugins (as a paradigmatic tool to extract different paradigmatic objects in the database to create a syntagmatic expression) and I will work out that thought soon. Another thing that interested me in relation to my thesis was the “tower of languages” essential to code. How is this tower of languages built in blogging through PHP, HTML and CSS? “…[on ASCII code and teletypes - ed]… To some extent, then, the technology functions like a rock strata, with the lower layers bearing the fossilized marks of technologies now extinct.” We can see the same rock strata (although not the strict sense that the technologies they are built on are extinct) in blogging: WordPress still uses PHP 4 instead of PHP 5 and the restrictions of the use of colors (256 VGA) and fonts (system bound) by the browser (more elaborate thoughts on this later).

An electronic text is a process instead of an object because of its distributed nature that causes dispersion. Blogs are also highly dispersed and the blog text exists in different formats and locations (RSS/e-mail). “[...] with the advent of the Web, communication pathways are established through which texts cycle in dynamic intermediation with one another, which leads to what might be called Work as Assemblage (WaA)” (105) which underwrites my view on blogs as assemblages.

[...] the WaA derives its energy from its ability to mutate and transform as it grows and shrinks, converges and disperses according to the desires of the loosely formed collectives that create it. Moving fluidly among and across media, its components take forms distinctive to the media in which they flourish, so the specificities of media are essential to understanding its morphing configurations. (107)

This description of the WaA as a vital object that derives its enery from transforming, converging and dispersing resonates my recent discussion with Twan on blogs as an autonomous unity that derives its energy from dispersion, aggregation and pinging. There are human and nonhuman actors in the network the blog/Work as Assemblage resides in. Is the text on the blog the original and is the blog post in the RSS reader a copy? Can we continue to make this distinction in the distributed digital network? ” [...] the complex dynamics of making, storing and transmitting are changing contemporary ideas about language, textuality and cognition.” (218)

This is not a general summary of the whole book but rather some general points that interested me regarding my thesis on blogging. As Hayles is a Professor of Literature she analyzes quite a few literary texts to strengthen her argument. For me, those text analysis were the least interesting and quite fluffy so I quickly skimmed through them. Especially her analysis of Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl where hypertext is seen as a feminine act of weaving. *SIGH*