Life & Research Notes

Tomorrow the PLW will begin full-blown, fast-paced coverage of the 2006 SIGGRAPH conference. Takashi has put together an excellent new site, PLWire, to showcase the footage, images and contacts we make there. John’s urging us to avoid text and just go with images, video and links. Luis seems all set to get some awesome footage, though as of yesterday he was working through some MPEG-2 codec issues with the group’s new camera. PLWire will go live tomorrow.

It so happens that my parents are also coming in tomorrow, so it’s going to be a busy week for me balancing the conference and the family time. Then later next week Jenn and I are heading down to meet them and the rest of my mom’s side of the family in Ocean City, New Jersey for a little beach vacation. Armed with her board and stoked from a decent session last weekend with Danny, Jenn is hoping Jersey will actually have some waves. I guess like the rest of the east coast surfing population we’re going to have to hope for a storm swell.

In reading Hiroshi Kashiwagi’s forward in master designer Mitsuo Katsui’s book Visionary Scape, I found myself happily struck by his analysis of imagery in communication.

The modern era has been an age in which visual images have been in overflowing abundance but viewed to be inferior as a form of language. Today, however, the time has come for us to cast doubt on the special status accorded to communication whose purpose is rational agreement. We do not communicate only for the purpose of agreement. Rather than agree, we accept each other’s words. There is no need to set uniformity of awareness as our objective. It should be ample simply to understand what we are communicating. Communication gives rise to further communication in chain reaction. It should be enough merely to have the perception that one is participating. Though visual images may be thoroughly arbitrary as language, they are not inferior in terms of communicative function.

For most visual artists and designers this point is indisputable, yet in reading this I found myself confronted with my own biases . I don’t know how it happened, but I’ve come to favor verbal and written language over visual imagery. I like language’s range of expressiveness, from the poetic to the logical, and its potential for melding different styles within this spectrum. I like the intentionality in writing and speech, how its structure is crafted. But thinking about it now I’m reminded that visual langauge can also meld the precise with the poetic, the mathematical with the irrational, and much of its effectiveness is how it does so within the subconscious.

It isn’t much to see at this point, but last week Promiserver went live on my PLW site.

The challenge now is to move beyond descriptive natural language to a more procedural, structured form. I still feel like Ruby is the way here, with some sort of Ruby DSL that is interpretted within a sandbox on the server. I’ve actually been tempted to go back to Scheme just to prototype something, since it lends itself so well to this style of programming.

As a small diversion I’m also becoming interested in wiki-style collaborative contract and license authoring, including sophisticated diff and windowed timeline views. This falls out of an idea Takashi mentioned a while back about community defined licenses. He’s currently putting together a madlibs style license that I’m looking forward to seeing. And as my first effort in this arena today I added a humble timeline slider to the openstudio tag cloud. It’s a little slow with the amount of Ruby processing happening on each Ajax request, but serves as a decent first step. I’d next like to augment the simple slider with additional information. It would be nice to get a macroview of community activity, something along the lines of Martin Wattenberg’s history flow, but less overwhelming in its detail. For now at least I am just satisfied to be able to look back on the past days when flower was a more popular tag than abstract.