sky, Author at Sky's Blog

On “The Power of the Personal – Voice?”

10 March, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

Rob Paterson writes (today on the FASTForward blog) about The Power of the Personal – Voice? He visualizes this with an Alexa Internet chart/data showing how quickly the recent web sites that allow individuals to broadcast their personal voice have risen.

Most particularly, the data show that Wikipedia rose from zero to “Daily Traffic Rank” of about “10” in about four years, and YouTube rose to “10” in about a year and a half. (Making them among the top sites on the web.)

You’d have to attribute this to the fact that these sites are created by, or at least “formed” in some way by, their users. That belies the suspicion that people are couch potatoes and won’t lift a finger to create their own media entertainment, other than to channel-surf. Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of channel-surfing going on at YouTube, but there’s also lots of participation, even if 90% of it is deadheaded talking-head responses. And Wikipedia is certainly a creation of its readers (even though there’s a core group that does a huge percentage of the heavy lifting).

So, I want to know if this phenomenon only gives “voice” to those with broad Internet connections, or whether it can be used by those with only occasional access to the net. Can conversation take place offline and then be put online in the form of blog postings, or wikipedia entries or online video? [Read more…]

Co-Creating Art (Making Peace) for The Missing Peace

24 February, 2008 by sky 2 Comments

Late last year, as The Missing Peace (TMPP) was being prepared for exhibition in San Francisco, I began working on an adaptation of my Pervasive Interactive Technologies so that I could run a location-based mobile phone “game” in conjunction with TMPP and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. My idea was to have mobile phone users begin this new game at home and complete the game at YBCA, where they would visit the exhibition. Please join us at Making Peace after you read this article!

I had met Joel Barraquiel Tan, the Director of Community Engagement for YBCA, about two years ago, so he already knew about my technologies and games – one of which is played at Yerba Buena Gardens, right outside his front door. In one quick conversation, however, we took a huge jump forward…

[Read more…]

Interactive Art-in-public-places

5 February, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

In my “commercial” world, one of the things I do is related to art-in-public-places. More specifically, I create “games” that play out thru mobile phones and the Internet, and they are (currently) all linked to art that’s in public places.

So when Cory Doctorow blogged this event (which took place in October-November 2007) it immediately captured my attention. It’s an interactive light painting on the face of a cathedral where the color and patterns of light projected on the face of the building react to sound input from the spectators. “Usman Haque has created responsive environments, interactive installations, digital interface devices and mass-participation performances.” I hope you get as much of a kick from viewing the video as I did.

More and more ICT education

2 February, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

ICT Education Session I’m impressed that over the years there has been more and more ICT education taking place in the wake of the DITG founding (that we participated in, in 2005). Recently this took the form of a four-day Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) session for Tibetans in exile in Dharamsala.

You can see what I’ve written about in this blog related to the DITG.

Videoblogging in real time

25 January, 2008 by sky Leave a Comment

I don’t know how I ran across this thing that Robert Scoble is now doing – but here he is interviewing people at Davos using a cellphone camera (actually two at the same time) – and questions coming in in real-time. I’ll just point you at his interview of danah boyd on QIK.COM (more about her later because she’s important to what I do in real life). Check danah at her blog “Apophenia :: making connections where none existed before.”