Bookproject update 002: 28,989 words

I guess there must be some writers so enthralled to the Muse that for them word counts simply don’t feature - just as there must be some able to blithely disregard their sales figures. Let me tell you, in neither case am I one of them.

Nah. I’ve got a positive thing about numbers, about external indices of accomplishment. In most contexts it’s undoubtedly a personality flaw, although it’s probably forgivable here:

As of 10.00 EST this date I’m on the verge of 30,000 words in, which strikes me as getting into the realm of seriousness. (Everyware, admittedly a slim volume, is only 70,000-odd words.) It’s true that Harlan Ellison once wrote a 40,000-word note complaining that he got paper bags at the local Ralph’s when he clearly asked for plastic, and there’s apparently a Thomas Pynchon “lost cat” flyer in circulation that runs to seventy-two-five, but I think we’re otherwise clearly talking book when we edge into this kind of numbers.

So today’s sitrep is just that: your book is taking on some of the first signs of real shape. Having some experience of book-writing now, I can tell you that some of that shape will be pruned back pretty mercilessly, as I decide whether one or another lengthy chunk actually pushes the book’s central argument any further down the rail, but the core is there.

I’d like to say that I’ll be posting at least one or two passages of useful length in the very near future, but if my experience with Everyware is any guide, longer arguments of any coherence don’t seem to emerge until relatively late in the game. And while I’m committed to open and public development, I’m not quite sure what would be served by posting 800-word fragments - fragments which, frankly, at the moment mostly serve as more or less resonant placeholders and reminders to myself. What I can say is this: when I feel like there’s something roughly chapter-length that I could use your help with, I’ll throw it up here. Deal?

That’s all for now.

Ensuring that I’ll be missing even more of my favorite people…

Gen Kanai writes to tell me he’ll be speaking at LIFT in just about ten days now, as will Jasmina Tesanovic. That sound you hear? Is me pounding my head against the desk.

Carry on.

Korean technologies of the body, right here at home

You’ll have heard me rave before about jjimjilbang, Korea’s answer to the sauna, the schvitz and the day-spa. It’s a treat for the senses; a true jjimjilbang experience starts with a cleansing shower and proceeds through hot tubs, whirlpool baths, tea- or eucalpytus-scented steam rooms, and radiant-stone dry saunas, before ideally concluding with a vigorous massage.

One of the aspects I really love about the experience is that it’s a social, multigenerational thing: the whole family comes, and spends the whole day (or night). The larger jjimjilbang are richly provisioned with different functional areas or zones, so there’s always some way to relax close at hand whether your preferences run to shiatsu, robot massage chairs, “color therapy” (with your choice of seven LED color washes), or beer and TV. I sincerely believe that the the full-service jjimjilbang has got to be numbered among the highest accomplishments of the human species, and in any sane world there’d be a good one down the end of every other block.

Up until last night, though, I always had trouble imagining this kind of thing working particularly well in New York. It just seemed far too culturally specific, nontransferably bound up with the profoundest sort of unstated beliefs about custody of the body and comportment in public - I’d try to envision a big ol’ spa on, say, 34th and Lex, and I’d invariably fail.

And then we went to Inspa World.

There’s something about being operated under the protective aegis of the Korean immigrant community - an existing audience, and a grounding familiarity with the form and its rituals - that seems to function as guarantor. Inspa World works brilliantly, right here in polyglot Queens.

Upon checking in, you’re issued a two-piece cotton uniform, just exactly as you would be in Seoul. The uniforms - “orange for women and blue-gray for men, sort of like an ultra-low-security prison,” in the Grey Lady’s felicitous phrasing - are utterly sexless, which strikes me as being an important part of what makes the whole thing hang together, socially. (For an American, it can be a little odd to contemplate that hedonism and sensuality can be pursued, and quite ardently, without a single note of sexuality in the mix. If it’s the latter you’re interested in, Korean society of course offers the usual array of options, at least if you happen to be male, but that’s just not what the jjimjilbang is all about.)

Before you even get that far, though, you’re issued an RFID bracelet, and this will be your constant companion over the next several hours. I’m, inevitably, fascinated with how rapidly and how unremarkably RFID technology has been folded into the proposition. In a place like Inspa World, your bracelet is quite literally key to the experience: you use it for your (separate) shoe and clothing lockers, but more importantly you use it to purchase all of the additional products and services the place has on offer.

It’s an ideal technology in this context, for a whole bunch of reasons. The bracelet is both waterproof and resistant to the entire range of temperatures you’ll encounter, from cold plunge to the hottest sauna. It lives comfortably - in fact, all but unnoticeably - at the surface of the otherwise un- or lightly-clothed body. And it’s there to meet whatever desire should arise in the course of your sojourn here, from frozen yoghurt to facial treatments to an inner tube for the rooftop pool, all of which are additional charges on top of the $30 entrance fee.

It rather reminded me of the network of ubiquitous scanners in Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, in which each citizen of the universal state wears, from earliest childhood, a metal bracelet bearing their unique identification “nameber,” and when you want to “buy” something from a store, you place first the item desired and then your bracelet against a scan-plate to authorize the transaction.

Inspa World is like that, but in Korean, and lacking (most of) the creepy dystopianisms - and in this, it’s a reasonably good preview of how u-City life is supposed to work. I have to say that I was both pleased and chagrined to see my argument in Everyware borne out: when the act of purchase is as thoughtless and painless as waving your wrist past a scanner in the presence of the thing you desire, let me tell you, shit adds up quickly.

Just so you’re not taken unawares, as well, it must be said that Inspa World’s idea of “relaxation” is as inflected by the contemporary Korean experience as everything else here - which means that the “relax zone” is a darkened bay of sixteen massage chairs, each of which is equipped with its own not particularly quiet television, looking out onto a wall swept by light in every color LEDs can be tuned to. Outside the sauna spaces proper, the air is filled with a cacophony of synthesized-voice and deedly-ping signalling: the massage chairs welcoming you to sit down, half a dozen phones going off all at once as the family tries to track down halmoni, etc.

Nevertheless, nevertheless. What a gift to the city this place is. For all that it’s a hassle to get to, way out there in a lobe of Queens with no public-transit options whatsoever, I’d rank it a Must - both to do nothing with a day but enjoy your body, and to get the tiniest taste of what loud, happy, particolored ubiquity Korean-style looks and feels like.

O LED, O LED…, or: The visual rhetoric of ubiquity

A little more technical and granular than we generally get here, but there are a couple of things coming together at the moment that constitute what I think of as the first consumer-level flowering of the visual rhetoric of ubiquity.

Consider this lovely Stephen Fry piece from the Grauniad, discussing the phenomenological and experiential consequences of Motorola’s decision to equip their otherwise “frankly unremarkable” U9 phone with an OLED, or “organic LED,” display. Here’s the money graf:

What is new is that there is no secondary screen; the whole exterior of the phone is pure glossy violet plastic, giving no hint of display capability. The image appears to be going on somehow inside the very surface of the plastic cover. What’s more, if I close the phone while playing a track, a music player now appears - a touch-sensitive music player at that. It is as if you are looking at a perfectly ordinary spectacles case that suddenly decides to show you a television programme and allows you to change channels by touching it. What witchcraft is this?

Witchcraft, sure, or equally so, magic. What Fry’s bumped up against is nothing less than a visual instantiation of the logic of seamlessness, the urge in the design of ubiquitous systems to deny or efface the messiness of everyday life, in favor of an experience “indistinguishable from magic“; I’d argue that what we see here is a novel technical capability rising to meet a pre-existing articulation of value.

Not that I’m necessarily saying that it’s an entirely bad thing, as suspicious of the logic of seamlessness as I am. The first OLED-bearing product in our household - that I’m aware of, anyway - is the rather unbelievably pretty wireless keyboard we picked up from Apple’s new Meatpacking store last weekend, where the OLED application is simply a power-indicator light that’s invisible until switched on. Taken as a whole composition, the keyboard is utterly convincing, and while the indicator is only a small element of the design, it plays a disproportionately strong role in pushing the experience over the threshold separating “pleasurable” from “delightful.”

I have two questions, though maybe they’re really one question posed two different ways. The first is whether “ubicompy” design cues like OLEDs and frameless displays - the closest commercial approximation to which is currently the iPhone - will be anything but a momentary fashion, whether they’ll come to be seen as connoting “late oughties design” every bit as much as a Memphisian explosion of form and color marks objects designed in the early 1980s.

The other has to do with whether this sort of visual vocabulary will support the market differentiation perceived as necessary by the institutions that build these things over the longer term. Clearly, at the moment, Apple and Motorola intend unseamly designs like these to communicate something about their respective brands, and the value propositions that attend them. But it’s not at all clear to me if this is a sustainable strategy, or whether those who got here first will be forced to (cough) “innovate” past an optimized visual design in pursuit of mere distinction.

Obviously, time and the market will tell. In the meantime, I find myself surprisingly open to the language of smoothness, if and when it’s deployed anywhere near as delicately as it is on Apple’s keyboard.

“And Its Discontents” and its discontents

Do you think Freud’s translator had any idea what he was starting?

The lecture is conducted from the mic into the speaker

Beginning today at ITP: Urban Computing, Round II, for this the Spring semester of 2008:

Think about cities in terms of their physical components: walls, windows, markets, streets and neighborhoods, for example. At every scale, these are transformed when the air itself carries fantasies, suggestions, directions and lies, information and misinformation. Now the streets can summon up the world, and to a certain degree, the world can conjure the streets. This is not what urban planners were planning for.

This is an experimental class, focused on the consideration of contemporary practices, theory, and student work. The goal is to find a framework for the ways that our work affects and transforms our urban experience - and vice versa - and to consider the urban architectonic as a platform for computation in itself. Ubiquitous computing, Big Games, and mobile social networking are some of the practices that fit comfortably in the room. This seminar requires weekly readings, field reports, and active participation in the class and with New York City. Three assignments are given to apply these principles, appropriate to individual interests and pursuits.

Kevin and I have another overflow crowd on our hands, apparently, and we’ll once again face the challenge of somehow compressing all of the complexity, vitality and diversity inherent to the subject into a mere thirteen sessions. It should be a lot of fun. You can follow along by using urbancomputing tags on Flickr and del.icio.us; I’ll post the course reading list in comments just as soon as I’ve put the final touches on it.

Students interested in getting a jump on coursework can find the very first assigned reading here. Drill through that and you’ll have a sound overview of many of the themes and concerns we’ll be raising.

Friday, 08 Feb 2008: “Nextcity” at the New Museum

It’s my great pleasure to invite you all to “Nextcity: The Art of the Possible,” an evening I’ve been asked to curate at the New Museum on Friday evening the eighth of February, as part of Rhizome’s New Silent Series.

I’ve taken the opportunity to invite Stamen Design, J. Meejin Yoon, and Christian Nold to come and present some of their work here in New York - work that I feel illuminates some of the most important challenges we face in imagining the cities in which we’ll spend the balance of our lives.

As I put it for the obligatory blurb: “Emergent digital technologies are rapidly changing both the face of our cities and our daily experience of them, whether invoked in the production of architectural form, the representation of urban space, or our interface to the locative and other services newly available there…Dynamic maps update in real time; garments and spaces deform in response to environmental, biological and even psychological conditions. We find our very emotions made visible, public, and persistently retrievable. And somewhere along the way, we find our notions of public space, participation, and what it means to be urban undergoing the most profound sort of change.”

It will be wonderful to get these emerging talents all up on one stage, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes of their engagement with one another. So please do come and join us: this is something you really will not want to miss.

Relifted

I can’t believe it’s LIFT time again already.

LIFT was not one but two of my highlights of last year, counting our evening in Seoul last September, and if you’re anywhere near Geneva, I insist that you make it a priority to attend. The program is crammed to the gills with AG-approved speakers: Bruce Sterling, Genevieve Bell, Younghee Jung, Paul Dourish, and Heewon Kim are all presenting. That’s Thursday alone, and we haven’t even gotten to the fondue yet.

And hang your head if you miss this, good god.

I will cry bitter tears of longing into my coffee for not being there, but that’s the breaks, I suppose. And anyway, they’re saving me up for LIFT Korea later on in the year. : . )

Bookproject update 001: Two tracks, Scrivener, print bids

Here’s the first iteration of that which we promised you: detailed updates on The City’s progress.

From the start, we’ve thought of this as a two-track process, one track being the effort of actually writing the book and the other concerning its physical design, production and delivery. We think of these things as happening in parallel, and very much informing each other.

(Why in parallel? Well, if you’ll excuse the expression, we’d like significant aspects of the book’s format and design to be innovative - but not simply for the sake of innovation, only insofar as any experimentation is directly driven by the content and its structure.)

I’m happy to be able to report that all is proceeding smoothly on the writing side. I’ve settled on Literature & Latte’s Scrivener as my primary composing environment - I find it a really good fit with both the way that I tend to collect scraps of research and the way I eventually turn those scraps into arguments - and you’ll find me, most afternoons of the week, comfortably ensconced in the Rose Reading Room, tapping away. No complaints there.

On the production side of the house, the very first item on our agenda was sourcing printers that might be interested in working with us. After some initial digging, we identified three we thought would be able to do short-run jobs at the level of quality we have in mind, each presenting distinct strengths and drawbacks: Asia Pacific Offset, Butler & Tanner, and Park Slope’s Rolling Press.

I submitted requests to discuss this project via email on the fifth of January, and only Rolling Press got back to us with a bid, which we’ll be discussing in a moment. I had a very pleasant discussion with one of Butler & Tanner’s salespeople, and she took down enough detailed information to come back with some kind of a ballpark bid, but we’re still waiting on it; we’ve heard nothing at all from Asia Pacific.

Here’s the salient data point in that: two weeks have now gone by, and we’re really no further along on the production side. Anybody contemplating doing something like this might want to consider that the print world apparently moves at a different speed than one folks used to the Web might consider normal. I’ve just sent out reminder mails to the printers I haven’t heard from, and if that doesn’t seem to raise any interest we may at some point be able to leverage the good relationship Asia Pacific Offset has with our friends at the Architectural League. (I’m particularly interested in receiving a bid from them because of their experience with printing Durabooks.)

Now, as to the bid we actually have in hand.

Rolling Press made our short list for four primary reasons: they’re local, they’re family-run, they’re committed to environmentally-friendly methods (”printing with vegetable inks with low VOCs, using a chemical-free computer-to-plate production process, and running on…certified 100% renewable wind power,” with “100% recycled and FSC certified papers always available”), and Nurri has had good experiences working with them in the course of her day job at AIGA.

When comparing this bid to others, it’s good to remember that there’s a certain amount of apples-to-oranges in all of this, as available print stocks and methods are going to differ between houses, and in the specific case of Rolling Press a lot of what we’d be paying for is the satisfaction of doing it indie, environmentally and above all locally.

Still, it does come down to numbers, and these are the basic parameters of the bid we received from them:

Self-published book
Quantity: 2,000
Pages: 248 Pages + Cover
Finish size: 6 x 9
Flat size: 9 x 12
Cover stock: 12pt C1S Cover
Text stock: 60# EnviroPrint 100 Text (100% postconsumer, processed chlorine free, FSC certified, made with BioGas energy)
Cover prints: CMYK + Satin varnish/Black (5/1) (vegetable inks with Low VOCs, chemical-free CTP production process, printed with wind power)
Text prints: 2 PMS (2/2) (same-same)
Finish: perfect binding
Quote: $15,375

That works out to a raw per-unit cost of around $7.70 - which is high, but not ridiculously so given what we’d be able to warrant to purchasers. (Interleaving multiple paper stocks would raise the number a bit.) At the very least, it’s a good place to start from. We’ll obviously be letting you know how it stacks up against the other bids we receive.

So what are our next steps, beyond waiting to hear from Butler & Tanner and Asia Pacific? I’ll continue to work on the text daily, of course, but we’ll also be:

- Incorporating our studio;
- Engaging an editor;
- Soliciting illustrations from various interested parties, as relevant subjects crop up;
- Choosing appropriate body-copy and display typefaces;
- Exploring the relationship between work in Scrivener, an intermediary full-fledged word processor, and InDesign.

Things are going to get really interesting and complicated now, especially with some stuff going on which has so far remained in the background of our lives that might be about to foreground itself in a very big way. We’ll let you know about that, of course, as soon as we hear anything. Stay tuned.

With apologies to Walter Benjamin

Already today, as the contemporary mode of knowledge-production demonstrates, the book is an obsolete mediation between two different hypertext systems. For everything essential is found on the del.icio.us page of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his or her own blog.