GENOMICON

This is your planet.

You live here alone and sit all day under a giant mushroom talking to a persian cat who wears brass spectacles and reads Proust aloud and smokes a cheroot etc. You have a car with butterfly wings and there are peacocks and seahorses and daffodils that reach up to the sky. This is what it’s like in winter:

You have friends who live on other similar planets…

and occasionally baby planets peel off and go on their way…

Anyway. This is your planet. Look after it. You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Do your belief-systems serve you or do you serve them?

That quote comes from someone, somewhere, (lost in the mists of time) talking about The Landmark Forum, a spinnoff of EST… what is generically known as a Western Therapy Cult.

It works, it’s a mind-virus that propagates by a specific series of techniques… every-inch an exercise in brainwashing. I did it once, and it did me an enormous amount of good, but it’s still brainwashing. As a participant, you’re not in control. Absolutely an exercise in memetics, and very controlled and controlling.

Still… that aside, when I re-read the thing I wrote the other day and saw the bit where are four different font-styles, I thought “oh oh”… because I recognised something that I hadn’t quite figured out yet. Multiple font-styles are a dead giveaway for memetic addiction.

People usually so affected always seem to center-align everything, quite often write on black backgrounds and really really really like RANDOMLY capitalising THINGS… then use bigger and bigger font-sizes, changing colours etc as emphasis is piled upon emphasis as each new thought (which is more important than the last) shouts in competition with the others.

Oh, and they’re incredibly talkative.

More often than not they’re to do with “mind powers“, or conspiracy theories – if you google “UFO CONSPIRACIES” you’ll come across some absolute classics. There often seems to be tie-ins with self-published books or videos (which are for sales) and if you search for documentaries on google, about 1/2 of them will be from meme-addicts.

Anyway, this was set off by this… which is another utter classic.

(edit : the link above has been down for most of the day… and now seems to have morphed into a rather (more) sober looking Unix group)

Well I was going to go on about neopaleofuturism, inspired by these “inventions” from Apple Labs (I think) of electric cars. iCars. iMo. eMo.

What is it with electric car designers that they always want to make them look like teapots? I don’t want to drive around in a teapot, I want to drive around in shark. I want an Angel Interceptor. I want vectors. Velocity. Velociraptors. With laserbeams and massive teeth that go “ARRRGHH” and eat fucking iMos for breakfast. That’s what I want.

So anyway, I was watching this video, and then thought “fuck me, what’s that”?

Top tune, so I googled the lyrics (you know, the ones the copyright cartels wanted to ban) and found the track… looked it up on youtube and found this:

Which I think is fucking excellent. Every so often something comes up and I think “everything has changed” and I have to sit back and assimilate the groundswell of transformed paradigms that come flooding in. The first time I felt this was when REM first turned up with So Central Rain. The Acid in the Park festival at Finsbury Park. The Orb. Kramer’s lot in New York. Teenager from Aus. Dunno. It doesn’t happen that often, and it’s highly subjective. It’s possibly a generational thing… something like: “the criteria by which everything prior to this was judged, no longer apply. We don’t even have to make sense. All we have to do is exist”

So MGMT – I think this lot are excellent – and the one in the video that looks a bit like a hobbit is even better looking than the chick from Hanson. They’re like gay hobbits on acid who don’t realise that The Mighty Boosh was supposed to be a comedy (and TBF, I can hardly blame them for that). Brilliant.

This is a completely gratuitous picture of Bat from Bat for Lashes (who I love) and who I went on about over here when I was someone else, although my old personality seems to be leaking into my new one which is a bit of a worry

Whatever. I think MGMT “get it”. Kindof. As far as I can gather they’ve made some sort of application where their fans can mix their own videos and put them up on youtube. Because people were going to anyway… in fact in the “making of this video” video, that’s also on youtube, there’s a bit where they ask a couple of people who made a fan-vid of the last video to help with the next one. They recognise that one of their most valuable resources is the people who love them so much that they are willing to copy and re-interpret their work.

So there are hundreds of variations of this one track on youtube. As well as this, there are dozens of remixes and quite a few fan-vids made without using their application. They get it I think… they get that (in the words of Seth Godin), marketing isn’t about selling to people who don’t know you, it’s about giving the people who already like you the tools they need to sell you to their friends…. and this is what they’ve done. They’ve created a little memosphere for echo-chambering their stuff. It works.

MGMT would be fucking insane to try to stop people uploading variations of their tracks. This is how people show that they like you. This IS the highest form of flattery, and it in the internet age, it IS the main conduit for creating brand-awareness.

Sure you can’t make money out of something that’s infinitely copyable by anyone at zero cost… so a magic series of ones and zeros isn’t (and can’t be) (and shouldn’t be) a licence to sit back and make money forever… but that level of fame has got to be worth something. Fuck it – go back to selling vinyl to people who want to be cool. There must be something.

Mind you… they may get it, but their lawyers/record company, are still persisting in the dismally retarded practice of blocking embeddable videos (what happened to providing your uber-fans with the tools they need to sell you?)… so as a massive fuck-you to them, here are 3 versions of the same video uploaded to other sites.

Don’t you get it? When people embed a video on their site/blog, they’re doing you a favour. In the old days you paid (and probably still pay) radio stations to play your tracks. Illegally. Now when each of your fans has become a little radio station in their own right, you try to use the law (or get new ones written) to stop them.

The memosphere will route around you. For fuck’s sake, stop trying to fight the best thing that’s ever going to happen to you.

(from : Flickr : fdecomite)

I’ve noticed that when a new idea turns up, often it’s immediate use is as a toy… which I think is a useful creative path – “play” gives people a consequence-free medium in which to experiment with things. I went on about Bristlebots a while back, apropos of nothing… just thought they were a neat idea and that it was cool how the bristlebot meme propagated.

Now it appears they may have a useful application – in a theoretical sense at least… as a means for launching spaceships. I kid you not. There has long been talk about the use of a space-elevator for escaping earth’s gravity – basically a long cable that is held in place by the centrifugal force of the earth spinning. There was always a problem however with how to propel the car/ship.

It turns out that a guy from the EU Space Agency has demonstrated a possible method – using bristlebots… but instead of vibrating the bristlebot, you vibrate the thing it’s standing on – in this case the cable.

So there you go.

In the future (and by that I mean 10-20 years) I think a lot of product design will be free and open sourced, and physical instantiations of these designs will be for sale… but basically anyone will be able to make their own if they want by taking them to their local print shop (which will have aquired 3d fab-lab units) and get the cut/made locally.

Rather than this being the creativity killer that copyright cartels claim it will be, it will lead to an explosion of creativity… a far greater number of people will be able to supplement their income by bridging various mechanical-aptidude gaps than are currently employed in the rarified ivory towers of corporate product design studios.

With that in mind, here’s a designer who makes open-source designs, and sells the products.

The payoff is of course that he gets talked about. I’m talking about him now. People who are involved in the creation of an object are far more likely to become evangelists for the product’s designer.

I’m not sure why I get so diverted by this knitted stuff… but I think it’s possibly to do with it being

a) quite subversive
b) not as bloke-oriented as most geek stuff is, which gives a fresh angle to the imagination
c) playful – which generally means ideas can be a lot more left-field than normal geekery

And if there’s one thing I like more than anything else, it’s left-fieldness.

So anyway, knitted cameras:

I’m also experimenting with a format for including the entire (known) history of a meme – it’s memeology (as opposed to geneology). It’s a recursive bit of HTML that looks something like:

<div class="memeology" title="Stuffed Digital Camera">
	<div class="via" rel="date:2008-02-22,author:Jenny Ryan">
		<a href="http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2008/02/stuffed_digital_camera.html">
			<span class="source">Craft magazine</span>
			<span class="title">Stuffed Digital Camera</span>
		</a>
		<!-- from -->
		<div class="via" rel="date:2008-02-21,author:Neta Amir">
			<a href="http://bobilina.blogspot.com/2008/02/story-of-socks-camera.html#links">
				<span class="source">Doll's Stories</span>
				<span class="title">Story of a socks camera</span>
				<!-- any more froms go here -->
			</a>
		</div>
	</div>
</div>

and so winds up looking (with a bit of styling) something like:

It has the links to each person/site that found it… if there’s a merging of memes, then it can have more than one parent. There’s embedded metadata about the author / date etc.

I’ll need to contact some of my microformat people to see if I’m on the right track etc. Still, there it is.

Ok… a little bit more blokey – a lego knitting machine

It’s got quite a long memeology that one. I think I’ll need to make a generator for these things so they can all go on one line. Having a massive bunch of HTML in the middle of your copy makes it hard to find things / edit etc.

Ok – back to art, back to reality: Kitbashers

Hmm… maybe these memeology things are a bit obtrusive… it might be better to make a show/hide thing with jQuery.

Anyway, if there’s anyone out there who suffers from a sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation, this could be the solution – knitted electromagnetic sheilds for the kitchen.

And finally, something that is off-the-dial cool…

… a lampshade the knits itself. When you switch it on, it knits a new row every 20 minutes… so gets longer and longer. It’s by Nadine Sterk, and is called the Sleeping Beauty Lamp. Genius etc.

I found this arty thing today that I thought was utter genius… and was going to post it here, link to it, spread the word etc…

…but then I read deviantart’s copyright policy which is as nasty a piece of anti memetic poison as I’ve ever read. It reminds me of the legal letters that the Pirate bay get… the arrogance of ‘ownership’ eh?

Well fuckem. I’m not interested anymore… maybe it’s what their members want and expect etc, maybe they’d respond by saying they have a thriving community, but this memetic emasculation is… well, just that. It would be far more interesting if there was some sort of chain of descent kept in the metadata of an object… a bit like what Aviary do with their Visual Laboratory app as mentioned in the last post.

The mean-fisted, heavy handed, walled-garden, threats-of-lawfare approach that the copyright cartels, and deviantart take is a calicified relic from the previous century.

Sad. It’s a waste of good memetic DNA.

To me Web 2.0 means Memospheres. I can’t think of a single successful Web 2.0 app that doesn’t create (and nurture) an environment where memes can buzz and breed. The first one of these I ever saw was put together by Heather Champ… I went on about it here a while back.

So… memospheres…

• A brain is a memosphere… from a certain perspective, the first.
• A society of brains that can communicate is an extended memosphere, with a massively widened capacity for memetic-cross-pollination and memory.
• A society with writing is a memosphere with radically enhanced memory.
• A society with printing presses or typewriters is a memosphere with enhanced memory, quickened synapses and a massively increased number of participating nodes.
• A society with computers (etc etc)….
• The internet is one wacking great memosphere of connected machines and minds
• The programming platforms within this new beasty are memospheres
• Web 2.0 applications are memospheres

and so on.

Everything gets smarter and faster, but to operate in these (raw) environments you need to be a bit of a rocket-scientist, so sub-systems are created so others can participate. Microsoft rode to power on the back of this… but now sub-systems are proliferating like crazy… and the ones with realy get-up-and-go produce memes at a programming level as well as at the level they were designed for. Take a look at the number of apps that have been built around the Twitter API for example.

Anyway, I (and everyone else I suspect) kindof takes these for granted now (even though a lot of them seem to be running on thin-air)… the ones that interest me are the ones that look a bit like physical systems. eg: http://fantasticcontraption.com/

On its own it’s really addictive, but what makes it interesting is that you can build on other people’s designs, and some of them are pretty incredible… eg:

Click on it to see it in action – but you probably need to play the game for a bit to get an idea of how incredible it is. Needless to say there are hundreds of examples posted to youtube, and it looks like someone’s had a crack at a Theo Jansen’s walking machines that I was on about here.

If you want to make a real killer game – one that takes over the whole world in a way that Tetris did, make a cross between the one above and Robot wars played in a massive multi-player environment. I have a feeling that’s what Spore tried to do, and maybe they have but they bungled it with their DRM (which is memetic eugenics) and if there’s one thing that the macro-memosphere hates, it’s anything that tries to interfere with its virality.

So the Youtube was suddenly awash with cock-monsters, and this contribution, which I think is fairly funny for some reason, though obviously in the very poorest of taste.

Still, never mind about that. Apparently Aviary came out of beta yesterday,

and as far as I can gather, their Visual Laboratory app is a take on open-source art… and looks pretty interesting.

Fairly cool I think… and the first thing that springs to mind when I see their interface, is that at some point there ought to be a convergience between that, and the Bug labs modular hardware thing, which is pretty cool, but you need to be a java programmer to write for it. Remember Buglab people, worse is better.

Someone has managed to make an amazing replica of the Hellboy Gun out of paper… presumably copied from a replica, a great many of which can be found on google… every successful sci-fantasy movie seems to create a cottage industry of DIY weapon-making. There are enough Lord of the Rings swords on Ebay to arm the whole of Middle Earth several times over.

The person that made it (showing a keen grasp of the nature of memetics) didn’t just show the product, but also provided all the plans… which are on a Japanese site, if you click the jpg links.

And someone’s taken them up on the challenge… and actually used those plans to make a real(er) one out of an aluminium block.

They’ve not only included pictures of the finished product, but the entire life cycle in picture form… I went on about this tendency earlier. A created “thing” can have its attention-value massively enhanced if its 4th(?) dimension is published as well… and people are doing it. A lot.

This thing is quite an impressive piece of work I think.

Further on…. Indy Mogul has an instructional video of how to make them here:

And loathe though I am to say that instructional videos are the new Rock and Roll, the spirit of “The Velvet Underground didn’t make a lot of money, but everyone who heard their records started a band” isn’t a million miles away. Worse is better. If it’s easy to copy, people will copy… making variations of their own, but out of this rag-tag bazaar of replication, real jewels can be found.

But I digress. Back to Hellboy Guns.

Here are the originals. My brother (who is an unbelievably clever bloke) made 8 of them for the movie. I was a bit unsure as to the copyright situation with regards publishing pictures of something, the IP of which is technically owned by someone else… but he seemed to think it was ok, and besides… the cat would appear to be well and truly out of the bag on this one.

So how much of this is legal? I haven’t a clue… but although it’s going to be a while before home raprep boxes get up to speed, I have a feeling that the massive heamoraging of “intellectual property” that we’ve seen in the last decade isn’t going to be limited to a purely digital realm forever.

…aaaaaandddd…. back to Rubik’s cubes again, for no other reason that I think this looks really cool… and whoever made it understood that to put up a completed work of art (because that’s kindof what I think it is) as a fait-accompli, is not enough. That’s not what it’s about… you also put up how you did it.

It’s like the object doesn’t just exist in two or three dimensions – as much of the 4th as possible needs to be there as well, and to really be alive from a memetic POV, it needs to come with instructions for replication.

from gfixler at flickr. Genius.