If the standing-room only attendance at Tuesday’s Create World session on Google Wave is anything to go by, there are people out there by the truckload champing at the bit to get their hands on Google Wave. Still in beta form, and still available by invitation only (you can ask to be [...]]]> Listen to the interview

If the standing-room only attendance at Tuesday’s Create World session on Google Wave is anything to go by, there are people out there by the truckload champing at the bit to get their hands on Google Wave. Still in beta form, and still available by invitation only (you can ask to be invited, but it might take a while to get a response), the hype about Wave is that it represents the next quantum leap forward in respect of online collaboration and information management. See for example the developer preview from Google:

But does it live up to the hype? And how difficult is it to use? And will it be sufficiently sexy and robust to drag our technophobic colleagues away from their insistence that collaboration is best handled by email, with all its detritus of archive boxes, and attachment folders full of multiple versions of misnamed, unordered files?

These are questions that Andrew Dekker, Stephen Viller and Aaron Tan (University of Queensland) have been investigating. In that process they have developed a particular Mac implementation of the system which they call CocoaWave, and which you can download and play with yourself (if you’re game!) …. Andrew & Stephen talk about it in this interview with Ian Green.

About Google Wave |  Read the Wave guide document

Find out all about CocoaWave

It was billed as a Visual-Art- interfaces-with-Scientific-Research event, but I’m not quite sure that we had time to get to the pointy end, you know where we [...]]]> The first day of Create World presented to us a panel of image-making superstars, including renowned nature photographer Steve Parish,  and Eureka prize winning science photographer Phred Petersen (RMIT).

It was billed as a Visual-Art- interfaces-with-Scientific-Research event, but I’m not quite sure that we had time to get to the pointy end, you know where we answer that question as to what the Arts-Science interface really entails. Mostly, we just oohed and aahed at lots of awesome graphics straight out of the science lab – water rippling in slow motion, frantic technicolour human cell imaging, patterns of shockwaves ….

Phred Petersen put it all modestly and matter-of-factly, constantly insisting that he was not an artist, and that structures in the natural world revealed themselves to be ‘far more beautiful’ than anything than his own imagination might produce under its own steam. He is into scientific photography, he says, because it allows him to see things that he wouldn’t otherwise be able to see. And much of the time, what he sees, often by virtue of incredibly expensive, high speed cameras, is simply ‘cool’. No further critical comment needed, it’s just ‘cool’.

I guess it raises some interesting questions about how we define artistic endeavour. Just because you don’t create something entirely from the ground up doesn’t mean that  you’re not an artist. After all, don’t we consider found art a legitimate field of artistic expression? Admittedly, found art practitioners will often modify, frame, contextualise the pieces they pick up. But doesn’t one suspect that those scientific imagers are doing the same thing – framing, situating in space, colorizing, and so on – in ways that are irrelevant to the scientific data being communicated, and that just make for better visual appeal? So maybe they are artists after all. But what does it matter – the photos are cool.

Image: Phred Petersen’s prize-winning ‘Blast Wave’, taken from: http://mams.rmit.edu.au/jcw64n3jaclz.jpg

Ian Green

iFidelity: view the presentation (best viewed in iTunes)

The whole world, just about, is in love with the iPod. That much we know, at least in general. But how do people, as individuals, relate to their iPods? How do they feel and think about them, what kind of loyalties and affections do [...]]]> iFidelity: listen to the interview

iFidelity: view the presentation (best viewed in iTunes)

The whole world, just about, is in love with the iPod. That much we know, at least in general. But how do people, as individuals, relate to their iPods? How do they feel and think about them, what kind of loyalties and affections do they show to them, and how fickle are their fascinations for them? And why are these worthwhile and interesting questions to pursue? Is there something about the iPod itself that sets it apart from the ordinary array of objects that we use in our day-to-day lives?

Andrew Scott

Andrew Scott, from the School of Design at the Queensland University of Technology, has been investigating these issues. Over the past two years Andrew has been tracing how his chosen subjects, some 20 people, use and feel about their iPods. And this is no fanzine study. It’s the core research work for his PhD, is based on solid qualitative methodology, and sits within the broader field of ‘object biography’ – the study of the way in which social interactions between people and objects create particular meanings, and how those meanings are renegotiated over time. (Hey, there’s a new term maybe – iPography – the study of iPods in their social context.)

In this interview Andrew talks to Ian Green about the emerging results of his study. People love their iPods, it seems, seeing them almost as part of themselves, and with some very interesting rituals of fidelity, loss and separation. (Kind of like the rituals you have for human relationships, though I haven’t yet heard of anyone cheating on their iPod.) Listen to this interview to find out more. And you can also view the slides and audio of the Create World presentation, which Andrew has very kindly made available.

Ian Green