[via VSL]

Khoi IM'd me very matter-of-factly the other day, "Hey have you seen the Google-Radiohead thing?" Being the totally uncool person that I am, I hadn't, and of course, I clicked his embedded link and what I saw resulted in the last 48 hours of deep pause. What I experienced in Radiohead's new "House of Cards" video simply blindsided me on so many levels.

I would call myself a marginal Radiohead fan at best, but this song and this video made me think about them in a whole new light. There has been much buzz around Google's involvement, the impressive technology behind the effects, the unusual pairing of GOOG and Radiohead (but it makes sense though since Radiohead so gets the Internet, thus becoming the Internet's darling rebels), the strength of Radiohead's recent album in general. Initially, I watched the video a few times, gawking; decided I needed more and downloaded the hi-res version, read every word about it (both on Google Code and Radiohead's site) watched the "making of" companion piece, messed around with the interactive Google Code version, bought the .mp4 version of the song on iTunes, even downloaded the fullscreen screensaver. I did everything that was asked of me, following the PR script to a T. I was a good-geek.

Eventually, what it led to, which I am assuming was by design (even if it weren't it doesn't matter), was total immersion into the video itself. By my most conservative estimation, I've watched the video probably 70 or so times this weekend, sometimes actively, sometimes having the video run in the background, listening to the track while I did other stuff on my computer and off. But why on earth would I compulsively loop the video if I weren't actually watching it? Good question. I guess I just wanted to always know it was playing, to know that it was "alive" and always near me. I even took it to bed with me, looping fullscreen on my iPhone (being able to "hold" a video experience in your hand, liberated, decontextualized..is just cool beyond words).

Upon reflection, I realize that my appreciation for it gradually went deeper than the initial coolness of it. I started thinking about it in the way I think about any work of art, and not simply as another notable example of diversionary entertainment. Asking myself questions about the translation of intention to execution, taking a critical look at the meaning behind the words, separating the music from the visuals and experiencing either on it own (try it, watch the video with sound turned off), pondering the nature of the technology used to create all the amazing effects. Then I realized something: I began thinking of this "House of Cards" video as a legitimate work of art. Why is this significant? Can't you call just about any music and music video works of art? Well, no. I have always loved music videos, and even worked for a few years with a video production company producing lots of short-format entertainment experiences (mostly house and hip-hop). It was a blast.

No, this Radiohead video is a perfect storm in a way that I've never seen one in a music video - a trifecta of perfection. One, the music arrangement itself, so soulfully earnest, halting and haunting, elegantly restrained, a departure from typical Radiohead fare. Two, the bold appropriation of one medium (lidar laser scanning, data visualization) and perverse application of it to another. Three, the rich subtext of the lyrics - a literal interpretation of the lyrics is about the experience of unrequited love, the pining for someone trapped in a meaningless relationship, references to Ang Lee's "Ice Storm" and its plodding expose into the experimentation with social mores in laissez faire suburban America. But what about the subtext...?

I went on a few lyrics sites (needed to, I find Thom Yorke's Orbison-esque voice hard to parse) and discovered a wealth of opinions from Radiohead fans around the world about what the lyrics meant. I am admittedly one of those people who likes to read movie reviews after I see something, especially when I can't rightly articulate myself why I liked or disliked something. I would say categorically established fan opinion agreed the song was about love, but a few voices made compelling arguments that the song was about....capitalism. Pretty cool because this is an important theme for me of late. Whether or not you are in a visual or textual medium, metaphor can be powerful especially if used deftly. I honestly think all the song's references are indeed metaphors for the illusory structures that we experience in capitalist society, and the song concerns itself with our own state of being in an environment that is tenuously anchored in symbols and a relativistic moral framework...a framework as solid as a "house of cards". 

The song's refrain, "Denial, denial, denial" repeatedly echoing Radiohead's pretty explicit statement that we as a society just don't have a clue that all that is solid in modernity, really just continually melts into air. And this metaphor is rendered in a not so metaphorical way in the video's many scene cuts to a mundane ranch house suburb, houses quite literally disintegrating into digital dust, blown away by virtual wind.

So, readers, please forgive my naive indulgence into a critical analysis of a pop-culture artifact (as I am hardly an art or music critic), and forgive me for looking deeper into something beyond the myriad "cool-factors" by which it is being peddled to the public. I just want to write this: Radiohead's "House of Cards" video is as close to perfect (the trifecta of form, meaning, and technique pushing conventional boundaries, bonded together into something coherent, incomplete if separated), as anything can get. 

It's just so beautiful on so many levels. 

[Updated: infosthetics likens it to Colder's "To the Music" video - good tune, cool effects, but not the same animal at all, not even close.]

I am no child development expert by any stretch of the imagination, but because I am a parent of a 21-month old I must pay attention to how she is developing against lots and lots of established research and professional opinions. I discovered an interactive timeline from Talaris Institute whose mission it is "to improve the social, emotional, and cognitive development of children from prenatal to age 5." Of course, being a designer, I appreciated the way the timeline was constructed, and I quickly learned that Willow is on target in all areas of her development with the exception of language. Though she is babbling and communicating willfully, her vocabulary is not where this chart says it should be; she has about 10 recognizable pre-words, this timeline says she should have a working comprehension and use of 200. There are probably a number of factors leading to this, like the fact that she spent her first year exposed only to Mandarin, and the fact that I tend to speak super-fast and truncate my words in an annoying (to Bonnie) "Gong-speak" that probably doesn't help Willow's comprehension of English.  We'll keep a close eye on this, though. Hmm. We really hope her recent seizure isn't a factor....gulp.

Anyway, reading through the numerous milestones featured in this handy timeline, I tried to remember my own childhood development, but of course, couldn't really recall much of anything (I do remember liking to crawl around chasing cockroaches, but that wasn't mentioned here, not sure why). It did get me thinking about how it is that I developed into a designer (and not something else), and this timeline offers many clues as to the things we all evolve in the early years, but things specific to designers are notable in that what forms in most all people obviously develops more acutely for designers (yes, you can extrapolate to other creative disciplines, of course - in this case I am mostly interested in design as a visually and compositionally intensive vocation).

Here's a summary of things I culled from this timeline that are, in my non-scientific and at times tongue-in-cheek opinion, most relevant (but not necessarily unique) to the development of this strange kinesthetically-advanced class of people I belong to called "designer-humans". It is interesting to me that many of these things are still developing in me, even at age 41...

SOCIAL

• Readily shows disgust (birth - 3 months)
  
• Becomes interested in mirror images (4 - 7 months)
• Shows evidence of empathy (18 - 24 months)
• Starts to display feelings of envy (18 - 24 months)
• Objects to big changes in routine (24 - 35 months)
• Begins to negotiate solutions to conflicts (36 - 48 months)
• More likely to agree to rules (48 - 59 months)

COGNITIVE

• Can relate what they feel with what they see (birth - 3 months)
• Recognizes that objects remain the same size and shape even if they are distant (birth - 5 months)
• Struggles to get objects that are out of reach (3 - 6 months)
• Can perform simple addition and subtraction exercises (5 - 10 months)
• Can distinguish between two vs. three objects (9 - 12 months)
• Begins to sort shapes and colors (17 - 24 months)
• Capable of completing puzzles with three or four pieces (26 - 36 months)
• Can make mechanical kinds of toys "work" (28 - 36 months)
• Increasingly inventive fantasy play (36 - 48 months)
• Capable of approaching problems from a single perspective (38 - 48 months)
• Can correctly name some colors (40 - 48 months)
• Realizes other people can have inaccurate perceptions of the world (48 - 57 months)
• Realizes that people may have different visual views of the same object (48 - 58 months)

LANGUAGE

• Can correctly identify a picture with its spoken name (14 - 24 months)
• Understands the concept of “same” and “different” (39 - 48 months)
• Capable of telling stories (43 - 48 months)
• Speaks in complex sentences (51 - 59 months)
• Tells longer stories (52 - 59 months)

MOTOR

• Grasps and shakes hand toys (1 - 4 months)
• May begin to copy some capital letters (41 - 48 months)
• Use of thumb and forefinger to explore objects, turn knobs and dials, etc. (10 - 20 months)
• Capable of copying simple horizontal lines and vertical lines and building towers (14 - 24 months)
• Can scribble with a crayon (16 - 20 months)
• Can make on own vertical, horizontal and circular strokes with pen or crayon (25 - 36 months)
• Copies triangles, squares and other geometric patterns (49 - 59 months)

Updated: This morning, Bonnie was so kind as to share an interview with the Architecture Dean of IIT Donna Robertson, on the Miesian design education pedagogy, which I didn't know anything about:

In the classic Miesian format, you didn’t design a building until the fourth year of your undergraduate education. The first year was devoted to developing visual literacy and craft; the second year to constructing with brick and wood; the third year, steel and concrete. Then the fourth and fifth years were focused on building design. I am interested in teaching construction technology through studio––the central tenet of Mies’s principles—but I want to be sure that any time a student is asked to produce a building form, he or she can take design into consideration.

I. The essential nature of the Japanese poetic form hokku (or haiku), is brevity in expression, expansiveness in meaning, following a strict structure of "beats" (5-7-5) or, more accurately in Japanese, morae. It is a sparse form that I have always admired, dabbled in, and respect deeply for its restraint. A good haiku's diminutive presence on a page betrays the intimate immensity experienced by the reader. The number and ways an haiku can be interpreted because of its inherent sparseness is not knowable.

My long lost friend, otherworldly computer graphics genius, Paul Haeberli appeared in my inbox tonight. He shared the above video, which he made, and a vague reference that it could be the basis for research into tactile, fluid interfaces. After the fourth time I watched it, I concluded that Paul may be right enough, but I resist the "motivation" - his modest video simply suffices as an interface haiku, a different kind of "non-motivated" utility-less interface experience, not something less than a "real-world applied" interface, but something beyond it. Anything beyond the grasp of the gravitas of human concern is quite simply, mystery. Without mystery, there are no questions. Beautiful questions.

Today's the day of futuristic interfaces (see also Aurora, previous post) and I also came across piclens (via dep), a browser plug-in that allows you to browse hundreds, thousands of images full screen via various web feeds or hookups to Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and others.

Installation was a snap and it's kind of a blast to use. I introduced it to my 20 month old daughter Willow, who is always looking for a reason to play around with my Mac (she absolutely loves tinkering around with Expose and Spaces, and she knows the key command to launch Quicklook from the many icons on my desktop - I don't even know how to do that). That being said, she is captivated by all the dynamic scaling and movement on my big 30" monitor. With piclens, she squealed like she was on a rollercoaster. She liked watching youtube videostreams in this infinite videowall-informationscape, and I can't blame her. It's fun, immersive, fast, and arguably, useful. It runs just fine on my medium-performance Nvidia 7600GT, smooth as silk, stable (refreshingly so).

It got me thinking. Way back in 1990 thereabouts when I was an architecture student at UT Austin, I took a seminar with Michael Benedikt on "cyberspace". At that time, William Gibson's Neuromancer captivated just about everyone's imagination, and this seminar was my first immersion (no pun intended) into the possibilities of the kinds of architectures that could be born from visualization and interacting with information. He published a book based on the proceedings from the first conference on cyberspace called Cyberspace: First Steps, and I even have a project in it called "DigiSubNavSim", a hypothetical virtual information space used by Navy submarine drivers to visualize sonar signals as they plod blindly through the ocean's blackness. I was obsessed for a while with giving form to the inherently invisible.

Fast forward 18 years (eeks I'm old) and we have Web 2.0, Crysis, PS3, 8-core processors and Nvidia GPU computing for the mainstream (SGI is irrelevant in mainstream computing), broadband in every home, mature IP protocols, billions of web pages, trillions of indexed words and images, real-time collaboration, VoIP, etc etc. I asked Micheal a few years ago, "So, like, when will cyberspace happen?" He said, "10 more years, grasshopper." Aren't we kinda here, and doesn't piclens begin to point to something that just starts to resemble the many visions we talked about in that seminar? However, on reflection, "just starts" really means "is just barely scratching at". But there certainly is the right confluence of technologies and social-readiness....I am getting a little tickle in my belly.

There has been much celebrated work and experimentation in the 3D visualization space, virtual reality, (do you remember Microsoft's V-Chat?) etc, and we have really gobsmackingly sophisticated 3D gaming entertainment, but none of these manifestations is quite what I would deem "cyberspace" worthy of Gibson's vision which was immersive, useful, data-driven. And the most important attribute of all -- consensual. Even the celebrated (if not hyped) work from the MIT Media Lab in the early-90's was rarified demo software at best, running on only the most powerful computers of the day, the only users being the designer-programmers themselves and no one else, by virtue of the fact they were all visionary maquettes, ambitious implications. Consensual in this sense means everyone uses it, knows how to use it...it is ubiquitous, fully adopted, utterly un-self-conscious, perhaps mundane (like the web is now). piclens is a free plugin for Firefox. Was "cyberspace" ever going to be a "desktop" environment? We all thought so at the time. Maybe cyberspace really, truly, is simply a meta-layer on top of everything, a parasitic overlay sucking the good from the host that is the cumulative work of thousands, maybe millions of people. Maybe this is how anything at all comes to be, always building on top of something else, ad infinitum.

Some quick observations about piclens:

• Is it fully immersive? No. There isn't full 360 degrees of freedom. They've constrained it for a reason.
  
• What's the significance of cooliris (piclens' birthing company) being a Kleiner Perkins portfolio company? Probably hugely significant. And I think it's cool that the #1 VC in Silicon Valley is geeking out on this.
• Can you actually do anything other than browse this mega-video wall? No. But maybe that's enough for now. Willow's happy with it.
  
• Is it social? No. But it just takes imagination to make it so, I think. It's not a technology limitation.
• What's the significance of Mozilla having a role in both Aurora and piclens? Huge. I think commercial entities are too risk-averse to try shit like this.
  

Here are some good quotes from Benedikt and Gibson, in case you haven't read either of them:

From William Gibson's Neuromancer: Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...

From Michael Benedikt's Cyberspace: First Steps: Cyberspace: A new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world's computers and communication lines. A world in which the global traffic of knowledge, secrets, measurements, indicators, entertainments, and alter-human agency takes on form: sights, sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic night. [...]

Cyberspace: Its corridors form wherever electricity runs with intelligence. Its chambers bloom wherever data gathers and is stored. Its depths increase with every image or word or number, with every addition, every contribution, of fact or thought. Its horizons recede in every direction; it breathes larger, it complexifies, it embraces and involves. Billowing, glittering, humming, coursing, a Borgesian library, a city; intimate, immense, firm, liquid, recognizable and unrecognizable at once.

I'm pretty psyched to see this new stuff both real and hypothetical (Aurora, piclens) echoing visions that got me so excited about new experiential frontiers, but I had all but abandoned a long, long time ago. Are we closer? In the end, can life imitate art?

Adaptive Path and Mozilla Labs just announced Aurora, their, um, (see title above). I think it's awesome and contrary to some comments on their site, "everything and the kitchen sink" is not an inappropriate motivator to design a next-generation (ie Star Trek: TNG) networked-computing interface experience. Kudos to all involved - I love these explorations and was getting seriously bored lately at the total absence of it. Even if it never comes to fruition, I am happy dreaming about the possibilities. Go check out Jesse James Garrett's Jacques Cousteau-style narration video teaser.

- Eddie Cochran

I see that my last posting was well over a month ago, and that is a drag. Life has been arduous: a big house move, Willow hospitalized (see sidebar), general life transition-sickness, work at its lowest point since I started, a motorcycle crash with a month of aches and pains and a bruise on my hip the size of Alaska, observations around me that an economic recession is taking hold. What's been good? Well, plenty, of course. During this evening's put-to-sleep regimen, Willow asked me for two things: "Dok!" and "Nook!". She wanted Waylon, our 9-year old pointer-lab mix to join us in her room, and she wanted some cold milk before drifting off to sleep. I remember that it was only 5 months ago that she wouldn't even make eye contact with me, and now I am the one she goes to sleep most relaxed and confident with. And to see her treat our Waylon like a brother makes all of life's travails seem trivial. I offer here not knowing when I'll have a moment to write again, some of the past few weeks' notables:

Face(lift)book
As some of you know, I've had a Facebook account for over a year but only started to actively use it only a month ago. I like Facebook a lot, and I like the redesign a lot, but have to admit I was looking forward to some kind of big momentous step forward. It is, as is the new MySpace (by Adaptive Path), a mere cleaning of the proverbial closet, a smart reordering of things accumulated and accreted by all manner of personal curiosities and shared trivialities.

Aggregation Nation: Flock
I have been almost exclusively using the new Flock browser for all my surfing and social networking needs. It works great. And is the great flag planted on the big mountain of a pile of social networking sites that are out there today. Once again, like the great portalization of everything in the early 2000's, we consolidate and aggregate. I use all the standard fare, but notably absent are MySpace (too much advertising noise and the redesign only makes the advertising to personal content ratio that much clearer, OY) and Twitter (i am just not that interesting and my own Twitter-block proves this). Other aggregators of note: pageonce.com, alltop.com. Found pageonce through one of the new free iPhone webapps. Handy (but risky).

iPhone 3G Love
I lost my 1st gen iPhone during the move, so I finally got a replacement one, a 16GB WHITE one. Happy to be different. 2.0 of the software fixed most of the things that bugged me before. I do like some of the new (free) web apps, and I disagree with Khoi Vinh, who is the last remaining design purist on this planet, that the web apps diminish the core purpose of the iPhone. So what if they are half-baked? That's like saying the web should only have, like, 10 websites. The battery life is, indeed, abysmal.

The Ultimate Media Jukebox: AppleTV
Love it. What else can I say? I love this thing. It has changed my (daddyness) life. I can access so much media for Willow (Wiggles, Teletubbies, Sesame Street, TMBG, and many more) at the touch of a button, it really makes those 30 minutes a few times a day, when Bonnie and I really need to get critical things done, a real joy. My podcasts, my music library, HD versions of films that I will never tire of watching when I need a post-midnight fix of something classicly great - all from that little remote, streaming from my MacPro over my Apple Extreme Network. It all just works. I cannot remember the last time I actually used the Comcast cable box.

Best New Search Technology that I really want to like: Viewzi
It all makes sense, and for the most part, all the different visual search paradigms are usable, but you know what Viewzi will fail. I want to be able to articulate why, but I can't. I think it has to do with how hardwired we are with scanning text for searches, and although we all certainly learned to understand the visual before the textual, there is something about "Internet Information" that a picture "telling a thousand (more) words" about something is actually a step backwards. All the infoviz fanboys out there are gonna slap me for that for sure.

New Search Technology that I spent all of 2 seconds test driving and then wrote off: Cuil
It's way, way, way better than Google in all the ways that don't matter.

Ethical quandaries: Architects building in politically troublesome spots
Talk about a paradox. The world's best architecture is all being built in Dubai and Beijing (among other places). Do architects deserve the crap they get for "turning the other cheek"? I say they aren't, but I'd sure would like to hear a different party line other than "Architecture is ABOVE politics." Nothing is above politics. Politics determines everything.

Art posing as something else: Tesselion
Look at the pictures. Marvel at the chutzpah and engineering mastery. Then read the words and rationalization. Then i defy you to tell me that you don't find some disconnected BS here.

McCain vs. a rash
Siva Vaidhyanathan writes about the growing (mis)use of Google Trends in law and politics.

So..what does the collapse of the United States really look like?
Dmitri Orlov compares the collapse of the Soviet Union to the the mounting evidence of a US collapse.

Good little blog postlet from John Thackara - makes me wonder why no one has really taken this dashboard idea into the social networking space - like really really pushed it?

Design Thinking is Anthropology Appropriated
Which completely blows, says Dori Tunstall. Long comment from yours truly.

Some fries with these nuggets
Am liking Alltop.com, a lot. Not sure if it's a game changer, but the streaming information 'nugget' thing makes a lot of sense to me.