You are right that ThoughtMesh connects essays hosted at its own server or elsewhere. However, authors who choose to host their essays on a remote Web site (such as their own) must still use the ThoughtMesh interface to format their articles in a form that can be linked to other essays across the Web.

I would also like to credit my co-developer Craig Dietrich and our collaborator John P. Bell, who’ve played critical roles in the project.

Thanks for your interest!

Thanks for posting about the Digital Artists’ Handbook. We thought you might be interested in two new updates to the handbook, announced this week:

video editing with open source tools: http://www.digitalartistshandbook.org/node/35

Blender: Working with 3d: http://www.digitalartistshandbook.org/node/36

Read the full announcement here: http://www.folly.co.uk/node/1413

Thanks,
Jennifer Stoddart
Projects Manager, folly

In fact there is a bigger point here about the value of *coherence* in distributed, generative forms. I think Web2.0 as a design phenomena can be critiqued in a most interesting way from the perspective of ‘generative coherence’ or ‘dynamic coherence’ – rather than from the tedious ‘capital v. community’, ‘public v. corporate’, ‘open/closed’, ‘read only/read write’ stuff that I read near everyday now.

I am really using Kriss’s visualisation unfairly as a means of revisiting the problems I have previously written (and continue to write) about regarding the way the linear/planar/spatial metaphor upon which the web’s technical and governmental infrastructure was based folded via the very incipiency’s of interaction it provided into something more…well ‘dynamic’ doesn’t do it justice…’transient’ is more appropriate – tools were developed to account for this transience or ‘throwness’ that was occurring at the generative horizon of the web and the old ‘under construction’ signs we once saw everywhere were replaced with ‘always becomings’ – the web moved to the ‘edges’ and the stable center that was so carefully structured by administrators became a musty archive of the webs past. Metaphors have a mind of our own.

Because there is such a linear correspondence in the ‘History of Sampling’ (between sampled and copied – which are starkly opposed) we are drawn to read the graph as saying sample culture was a phenomena that ‘peaked’ in this stage (on the sampler axis) and which was mostly concerned with a nostalgic ‘return’ to ‘this’ peak period on the sampled axis. But of course a generation of artists and potential artists came to know Sly, JB, etc through Public Enemy; probably the ‘real’ reason for the corresponding peaks. But this level of recursion can’t be represented here. The development of Hip Hop as it opened this window on the past was influenced by the development of european electronica and its technology as well as a growing awareness and performative reclamation of the interconnectedness of a political/social/street/musical heritage. Remix/Sample culture is the a mnemo-technical re-synthesis of culture futures.

In order to show recursive folding-out of cultural histories the visualization would have to ‘grow another leg’ so to speak (or at least another axes) so that the network could be represented in a way that better illustrated this mnemo-technical virtualisation of culture futures that is performed in the act of sampling- sampling is less concerned with histories as it is concerned with the immediate opening onto a potential future.

Basically this is a history of samples and not a history of sampling…

not sure how I feel about this reply…anyway..something to think about.

(I’ve realized that my frequent return to append previous posts probably go unnoticed by those subscribing via rss – and will use the ‘comment’ field for this purpose from now on.)

I’ve looked further at the publications for the Q-life research centre and found that as an example of the methodology and theoretical bases being deployed here the paper ‘Presence as a dimension of Communication: Context of Use and The Person’ is of particular interest. The paper cites Damasio’s theory regarding the central position of affect in the provision of a momentum to thought and the possibilties this presents for immersive media.

The projects completed section of the Q-life web site includes links to some interesting projects that I am guessing date to the period in which Q-life was integrated with the Interactive Institutes studio program – of particular interest are the projects engaged in collaboration with the Tools for Creativity Studio that ended in 2005. key projects to look at include the EMMA project, the ‘Gone to Wild’ project and its related vectors, ‘The Reality Helmet’ , and ‘The Illusion of Being’ (2002) project. All of which position Virtual Reality as a means of evoking an emotional engagement – the early projects – the ‘Gone to the Wild’ is concerned with what its exponents call Perceptually Seductive Technology (PST) this is really just the idea of an immersive installation being deployed as a means of ‘self-presencing’ via an emotional/affective engagement. This is obviously a very different design approach to the representative approaches taken by many other VR inspired projects. Projects like ‘The Exploratorium’ employ the theories of Lakoff et al. on the ‘embodied’ bases of metaphor to represent emotional vectors as architectural spaces and in doing so provide a means of testing the efficacy of a kind of ‘reverse’ deployment of these metaphors as navigable spaces capable of inducing emotional transformation. The ‘Exploratorium’ also deploys the ‘Body Joystick’ as a means of navigation. Inspired by the SCUBA interfaces of Char Davies the ‘Body Joystick’ uses breath and other movement to control the bodies navigation of the virtual space. They note that to move up requires greater intake of air, more oxygen, and the potential of experiencing the higher plains of the virtual architecture while on an ‘oxygen high’. The ‘Reality Helmet’ far from being simply another cumbersome virtual reality display is in fact deployed with microphones and cameras that allow it to create synesthetic modulations of real-time perception in order to endow the sensory experience with a higher dimensional rendering of the real. The ‘Gone to the Wild’ project sees the idea of emotional engagement as critical to creative development’ deployed to the service of rehabilitation for Brain Damaged patients and Intellectually disabled students.

There is a refreshing experimentalism in all of these projects that translates directly to marketable and socially engaged innovation in new media development.

The cure for this is to inject a degree of randomness into the interface. Last.fm achieves this well I think..The randomness is not a mediation but is an answer to the problem of the ‘frame’ or ‘scale’ in network visuality….It means that the ‘big’ is not always at the ‘front’ obfuscating my view of the ‘small’….the small might be given a presence – small nonetheless – but without a presence it is ‘no body at all’ (Massumi)…

Let me know if I make no sense and I will clarify.
All this is important for seeing beyond the dumb critique of collective intelligence v/ collective stupidity – all of which forgets the affective drive behind intelligence…..