The Eye Writer

Tempt1

We live in interesting times, no question about that. Plague, famine, kids killing people in remote villages from their drone playstations in Las Vegas, sipping RedBull. It is quite difficult to know how we can provide an ounce of balance to a ton of misery, so that ounce must be something really special to rescue our impossibly damaged spirit.

The influx of very damaged very young humans, the broken byproduct of that biggest business which is war, ends up in the landfills of society, the eternal superfund from which some people pick up the pieces and try to put things back together, albeit in a very different way. A leg here, an arm there, an eye or two, perhaps a brain? Can we pull us back together?

I will call him Luis

While searching for an appropriate picture to help me cut through the fog I had trouble finding one of the millions of miserable children which survive doing such a thing, because Corbis Corporation, the photo "service" owns most of them. I wonder, do those children get a percentage directly deposited to their pig accounts?

I guess you get the point. What triggered all this diatribe was me thinking about what we do on a daily basis, our "job" in other words. Do we really do something useful, something that tips the balance and creates a positive change? I think one of the reasons that the Open Source movement is so important is that it is a sort of groundswell, difficult to perceive because it is so pervasive and widespread.

But this movement, so dangerous to the monopolists of the world will tumble the most arrogant of them. There is no corporation, not even the most technically sophisticated that can evolve as rapidly as thousands or millions of people working together for a common cause.

As a little sample, I offer this movie about such an endeavour, one that ends with a call to hackers all over the world to collaborate, in this and any other way that might become the glue that binds us together again, into our cyborgian future.

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Open Frameworks, F.A.T., Graffiti Research Lab, graffiti legend Tempt1 and of course EyeWriter got together to produce that ounce of energy for each and everyone of us...

Here is the how to and all the good monopoly-breaking stuff for those DIY's among us. Keep on DIYing...!

Becoming Cyborg

In the reading of Frank Biocca's The Cyborg's Dilemma I found myself thinking a lot about how embodied we have become in virtual worlds. The whole theses of the Cyborg's Dilemma is that as interfaces and means of engaging with computer or with people via computers becomes more "natural" the human interfaces become the more "unnatural" we become as we enter into another state of being (in essence). I think I would also add that in doing so we re-define what "natural" is. (An interesting article on this) How many of us have seen a couple in love holding hands but talking on their cell phones to someone else. Also, how common is it to see a group of students sitting at table but everyone is engaged with their cell phones communicating with someone else. This is not "natural" the more natural thing would be to pay attention to and talk with the person whose company we are keeping. I know that communicating via email and text or even through social networking sites is convenient and seems like from a physical point of view a fairly natural means of engaging with the electronic medium, but it has change the normal for what it means to interact and spend time with someone. It is a dilemma.