Yesterday I was transfixed by images of Coventry Cathedral on BBC 1 and not just the extraordinary modern geometric post-Brutalist architecture of Basil Spence’s new St Michael’s but some of the art and design contained within it.

It is a building in and of an age, just as we are now “in and of age”. The environment and recent history of that age bleeds through into it, just as ours does now. It is a pure response to the effects of war, and much of what it contains is a response too, albeit indirectly.

There are some principal art, architecture and design movements and references at force. The choir stalls by Basil Spence invoke echoes of design elements of the atomic age as made popular through the graphic work of Charles and Ray Eames. The age of commissioning of the cathedral has bled through. The atomic motif was a benign motif in the 1950/60s. It signified science and hope in a pre Three Mile Island era. It is the softer of the two principle aesthetic references and is in sharp and almost jarring visual contrast to the artworks such as the Christ figure on the pulpit by Elisabeth Frink.

The stained glass in the cathedral was the work of John Piper a former war artist and the painter of “Interior of Coventry Cathedral”. Painted just after the destruction of the prior cathedral during a bombing raid, “Interior of Coventry Cathedral” is thought of as Britain’s Guernica. Just as the horrors of the Spanish Civil War are manifest in Guernica, the experiences of Piper and other war artists have been woven into the art in the Cathedral. The light cast by the windows is hopeful, yet they clearly their form relates to the violent fracturing of the original cathedral’s windows by aerial bombing.

The altar piece is another case in point. A masterpiece by Graham Sutherland. 

Sutherland was also a war artist whose style changed radically after the Second World War, as did a generation of young British artists whose work bridged the softer shapes of Moore and Hepworth and the abstract shapes of Caro, Annesley and King.

This was most noticeable in an exhibition that Sutherland participated in for the British Pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale, a group show - “New Aspects of British Sculpture”. Also represented were Robert Adams, Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Geoffrey Clarke, Bernard Meadows, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull.

The works were radical and are still uncomfortable and painful to view. In a now famous part of his introduction for the catalogue Herbert Read wrote of them: 

‘These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance… Here are the images of flight, or ragged claws “scuttling across the floors of silent seas”, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.’

The phrase “geometry of fear” is now often used to describe the art of the early ’50s from this group of British sculptors. Their experiences of the war directly led to the aesthetic of their art. In their case there was a dramatic and sudden reforming of the world through war.

Herbert Read writes about the relationship between artist and experience in “Art Now”, quoting from Ernst Cassirer’s Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture:

‘Art is for the first time clearly conceived, not as the mere reproduction of a ready made, given reality, but as the discovery of reality which discovery is communicated in a symbolic form.’

(aside: that looks familiar)

(a Guardian image from an article about drones, rendered using a pxl effect by Dan Catt)

and further on Read says:

‘Art is indeed the discovery and establishment of a new world of forms, and form is rational; but art is a continual transformation of form by forces that are vital and irrational.’

Dan Catt wrote an excellent essay on the New Aesthetic a few days ago which has had me thinking continuously about it in relationship to Read and the Geometry of Fear, a thinking only catalysed and crystallised by the images of Coventry Cathedral on television. 

There have been several responses to a Bruce Sterling essay which make me feel that the art world is confused in responding to the New Aesthetic and is either aiming to co-opt it by the suggestion of making work in response to it or to downgrade it as merely a set of  observations. Here the parallels between the Geometry of Fear and the New Aesthetic just become stronger for me and relate to truth to materials. The New Aesthetic is not merely an observation, it is a series of works, a transformation of the observed forms in an appropriate medium.

Just as that generation of British Sculptors wrought their art (their response to the experiences and the environment of a post-War age) most successfully through hacking and gnawing at clay and casting it in Bronze - making their responses both physical and visceral, the most appropriate part of the New Aesthetic is the making of the responses and investigation to it through the medium most directly related. To experience machine vision through simulations of the eyes of the machine. To see the world that we now co-inhabit as the machines see it, and to look evermore for the hitherto ignored traces of this sharing of worlds and the spaces where it bleeds through into our age and society. Just as war bled through for Sutherland, Piper, Spence and the artists of the Geometry of Fear.

Sir Phillip King described post-war sculpture as being:

“somehow terribly like scratching your own wounds - an international style with everyone showing the same neuroses…”

A statement which has a resonance for our times too with the inexorable linkage of machine vision, filter bubbles and surveillance.

I’m not trying to suggest for a moment that the New Aesthetic is literally only about geometry or fear. It is in fact, in my view, neither. However for me there are similarities between the two “movements” in that the New Aesthetic is becoming a set of manifested and moreover material responses to the experiences of a radically new era which is dramatically breaking through. This materiality and truth to materials is however often invisible to those who are not inhabiting the space.

I had the pleasure of visiting Henrik and David at Readmill at their lovely offices in Berlin a couple of weeks ago. I’ve written about Readmill before and I stand by all of my comments of it being a lovely meaning full social product. I have a great deal of respect for them as a pair of founders and as a team focussing relentlessly on making a beautiful and well designed product.

As with many startups they have an API and they have hackdays the latest of which was over the weekend just gone and when in Berlin I offered to join in remotely from home and office in Oxford as I had a few ideas about what to do with their API. 

The idea I ended up making for their hackday was a playful experience for starting with an API. I often find myself frustrated by a few things with new services and their APIs. They start from the wrong angle: one of “we have an API, you want to play with it, here is the unwieldy documentation”.

Often it’s a joyless experience, registering for a key, wading through pages of documentation, occassionally seeing a glimpse of a sample return as if on a wildlife safari. Often it involves diving into the command line (which I like) and using curl (which I also like) but often finding that I need to remember the arcane collection of flags and options to simulate accept headers (which I hate) and then getting back ugly unreadable JSON which has been stripped of whitespace (which annoys me and puts me off playing). 

It feels like there could be a more funner way of doing it, of smoothing the on-ramp, of being accepting that there are an enormous number of APIs out there competing for people’s play time (after all there are precious few APIs that are “must learn”). It would be lovely if someone took you on a journey through the API, telling you a story of how it fits together. But one unlike those horrible tutorial videos, one in which you could cut and paste and try stuff out and experience the real thing. Learning by doing. Like a choose your own adventure, because after all, that’s what an API is.

So that’s what I attempted. It’s called Play and you can find it here. At the moment it only deals with the Book methods of the Readmill API. It has terrible copy and if you veer from the path there’s no way back. It’s quite broken really, but it’s the product of two evenings tinkering. More bits of the API need linkifying. It’s a hackday project, not a product. But to me there’s something interesting in there to be explored further.

There’s one more useful space for this sort of thing to exist in. One set of things that have emerged of late which are very interesting are coding tutorials. This could be a good accompaniment to them. Once you’ve learnt bits of coding then the next thing to do is to make something, anything, but often that gets squashed by working out where to get content or materials for your thing from. APIs do that. They’re full of content and malleable stuff you don’t have to type in or make a CMS for and populate. When we teach people how to code we should teach them how to play in APIs as then they’ll develop skills and add APIs into the things that they make and the loosely joined world will get more blocks of lego to play with. 

It’s not worth for a moment going into why we’re all talking about sexism within the technology industry or why there are less women in tech than men, other people have written about it eloquently.

Earlier I suggested we used that most “now” tech industry word to pivot the conversation to asking “Why there were so many misogynists in tech?”. I was surprised at some of the denial I saw in replies that there was a problem.

Some of the people I admire most in tech are women. I admire them deeply for two reasons:

1. They’re talented and I admire them for their skill and clarity of thought.

2. They’ve gone through utter rubbish that I haven’t had to just to do the things they do because of their gender. It’s a waste of energy, time and emotion and the fact that they still do the things they do is wonderful and a testament to their talent.

I wonder if the fratboy style comments are just emotional immaturity or a symptom of a part of our society we sweep under the carpet or are in part fear that people who have, through gender stereotypes throughout the ages, been denied rights in the workplace are better than them. Either way these attitudes have no place in an industry that is all about being progressive. 

Earlier today I considered resigning my place on the Mayor’s Digital Advisory Board which I have been proud to have served on since its inception. I considered resigning over the change to the Mayor of London Twitter account to Boris Johnson. What appears to be a simple change of name is not just that in my opinion. The followers and engagement, built up throughout tenure in public service, with the assistance of public servants, is more a public rather than a personal account. The accounts have now been switched back it seems after a clarification tweet was sent leading to the rather confusing collection of screen names you see in the screenshot below (this may be an artefact of different levels of caching in a rather complicated browser based Javascript app in which the browser URLS are sometimes not what they might appear to be).

I thought that it was admirable how things like the Number10Gov account was seamlessly handed over as the coalition government took charge. The return this evening of the Mayor of London account is also admirable. 

Part of the problem is that everything is moving so fast enough in public engagement that things are being made up on the go. Doing this always leads to mistakes, but that’s just a part of learning. We are working through an environment where the rules of engagement are continuously in beta where previously they have been static and stable for decades. Many years of gatekept broadcast are being substituted by more seemingly personal communications from official bodies. It’s fine to make mistakes. It’s finer to remedy them in real time.

I’ve spent nearly a year thinking about this fantastic campaign by The Guardian that Ben Terrett worked on (he talks about them here). Like all good things it works on an exceptional number of levels, some of which are only just revealing themselves to me after a lot of thinking. It struck me as brilliant straight away, only now do I think I fully realise why.

For starters the adverts were simple and beautifully designed. And they stood out. Stay with the story was a combination of strapline, call to action to product and exhortation to the viewer. This is important stuff - stick with it, find out more.

At the time they were there everyone else was using the screens either as places to display videos or flickery things which caught the eye. To me these are the actions of people not understanding the medium or being lazy.

The Guardian ads were doing something very different. They were ambient indicators for news. Big glanceables if you like that term. They bought the news stories into places where the network didn’t reach, deep underground. The important word though is stories. They told the story as it unfolded. I was travelling by tube a lot the day that the story was breaking and I felt that it circled around me as I travelled. You wanted to see the next thrilling instalment they almost made you want to go down into the stations as they became a place of information.

It built upon Matt McAlister’s wonderful “Weaving The Guardian into the Fabric of the Internet” and turned it into “Weaving The Guardian into the Fabric of the Built Environment”. 

I started working with 101 London part-time this week and as part of my first week there I gave a talk, the first of three. I wanted the first one to be a set of provocations to think about; principles about making digital things. A lot of it was about product thinking and it included the slide below, coupled with the picture above. 

From where I sit, the campaigns that often appear in the digital space are still about broadcast. You could say these digital billboards were broadcasting news, but they did more. They were advertising as product and more importantly product as advertising. They brought the product temporarily to you and showed you what it did, how it felt. Show don’t tell.

We can’t always make experiential things but when we can it feels like we need a “truth to materials” approach both on the medium in which we’re delivering and the thing it is we’re talking about. All of this became a bit more apparent with the launch of another piece of “product as campaign” - the launch of the Storythings project for John Lanchester’s Capital. I feel honoured to have been a part of the making of this with Matt Locke, James Bridle, Dean Vipod, Phil Gyford and Kim Plowright. The key to the experience is John Lanchester’s writing and providing you with a vehicle for reading it and engaging with it. It’s promotion for a book and so it is a product about reading and experiencing John’s writing. Matt has written beautifully about it, I can’t really say any more or better. 

I missed the billboards when they were gone. They were clever. They were omnipresent public service broadcasting pretending to be adverts. I hope some day they’ll come again. 

This misplaced advert annoyed me more than I can say. It appeared next to the picture of my best friend’s daughter who turned 16 today. It was posted by my best friend’s wife. Facebook know’s they’re married. They’ve already given over that data. The only other person who commented on it was a mutual friend from school. He’s also married and Facebook knows that too. It also know’s I’m married. It knows we all have children and sees pictures of us smiling happily at our spouses and offsprings. It sees all that data.

Now either it knows before all of us do that we’re at that age where clearly need to have an advert about the mid life crisis none of us seem to have decided to have yet or it’s algorithms are lazy. I know what my money is on. 

Everyone knows if you’re not paying in dollars you’re paying with attention but I’d hope we could do better with the sort of processing power and algorithmic doodahs we have nowadays. If you blanket bomb irrelevant adverts then people will stop noticing them. Worse still if you put in offensively irrelevant ones like this people will leave. Run of site adverts have had their day, if you can’t sell inventory leave the space blank. 

As Kevin Marks said a few years ago now about virality “If you behave like a disease, people develop an immune system”. If people become immune to your adverts and that’s how you monetize I guess all you can hope to do in a few years is to follow one of your predecessors who’s currently suing you and sadly become a patent troll. 

Since F8 I’ve been thinking a lot about frictionless sharing and what it means and in particular how I feel about it. I think it’s best summed up for me by bastardising a Douglas Adams quote - ”I love frictionlessly shared things. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Frictionlessly shared things feel devoid of meaning to me. They were shared automagically without human intervention and, as such, all they have is an algorithmic relationship with that person. Normally the only human intervention connected with them is to switch them off.

That’s why I tweeted this this morning:

I’ve been fascinated in declarative vs implicit sharing for a while now, but somehow seeing the very ignorable stream of people’s actions flow by has sharpened the focus. I’ve not glanced and seen one interesting thing within it. It’s like your peripheral vision as you drive fast along a road. It feels like mere fodder for the robots; for other algorithms to try at best to curate something for you out of your friends actions, or quite possibly to try and make better adverts.

It’s aspergic social software. I always think that good social software is where you can picture yourself having that conversation with someone - where they have edited their subconscious in some way before the stream of data emerges.

There are three services around at the moment which are the converse and feel very meaningful to me. Interestingly the sharing within them is declarative and frictionfull. You have to work to do something before sharing it and in doing so, far more of you, the thing your friends and people who follow you care about, emerges.

The first of these is Readmill. At some point I should write more about why I like it in general. It’s beautiful. In this context though, the simple action of highlighting things that you’re interested in has an implied friction. You have to have read the thing first to be able to highlight an element that has meaning for you. There’s no shortcut. The act of opening a page is not enough as it is with the frictionless sharing in some of the newspaper Facebook apps.

The second one is Instagram. For me it seems like a way to curate the world around you. To note down the moments in life where you spot something. It makes you see. It reminds me a lot of Tom Taylor and Tom Armitage’s lovely Noticings and in some of the things we tried to do with our game And I Saw… You’re not live streaming the world around you, you’re plucking visual ephemera and things which touch you and sharing it. As such it has a massive emotional resonance and feels like one of the most visceral ways of being present with distant friends.

The third is a new one and is the perfect antidote to the Facebook Spotify integration which takes more out of the party than it brings for me. This is my Jam allows you to share the one piece of music that is currently full of meaning for you.

“What’s your favorite song right now?

Not any old track, but THAT song; the one that’s on repeat, the one you can’t get out of your head today, the one worth shouting about.”

This comes back to my thoughts about the conversation you’d have with someone and on how you really have to role play social software to imagine how it feels for someone on the other end of it. Personally, I’d tell my friends what music I was obsessing about and I’d hope they’d do the same for me. This morning’s chat with Chris Wild shows me how true that is. The Spotify autoshare functionality is like my friends telling me in person the name of every track they’re playing, even the ones which play when they go off to make the tea. It’s the zenith of anti-social social software - no eye contact is ever made as the stream of non-conversation occurs. All it feels like to me is analytics for a person’s life.

Good things are always hard won and it strikes me that frictionless sharing is merely the easy way out. It’s the outcome of having enough compute units and a deep enough desire to amass data in the hope of understanding a person as a monetizable unit. Let’s make things harder and do better with those compute units and the pieces of life people choose to share. Make it more about curation and make the more complicated services that encourage people think about sharing and through doing that give them a meaningful and emotional connection to their friends.

Something I’m very proud of and honoured to be involved in launched yesterday. It’s a project called DACS Open. Its name harks back to events such as the Whitechapel Open which was an annual event which was renowned for supporting the local community of artists, many of who moved to East London because of the low rents for both housing and studio space. 

It’s important to mention money early on. Very few artists make work that command the enormous numbers often associated with the art world. Many artists struggle to be artists. Many have to teach and in the current cuts to education, teaching jobs are harder to find. Many work to public commission, but these are being reduced. Many make work thanks to the support of fellowships, however these are in decline. It’s not just the public sector in a recent essay at the start of their annual booklet Alan Christea talks about the challenging climate for commercial organisations too. The arts and artists are getting squeezed from every direction at the moment. It’s always the first thing to go, but definitely not the first thing to be missed.

DACS, the Design and Artists Copyright Society, has recently been studying artist’s wages. The results are shocking as the statement above shows. With the current financial climate and squeeze on funding for the Arts it’s hard to see it changing any time soon. The DACS Open project hopes to help this problem by working with artists on ways that they can engage audiences online and then hopefully find new funding models such as micro-philanthropy.

The whole process is a set of co-creation exercises where we explore with artists what is possible in terms of stitching together bits of technology and how they want to be in digital spaces. We’re looking with them for the places where they feel they they can be open without changing how they are as artists. We’re looking with them for tools which make their lives easier, places where everyday devices and software can be transformed into things that help them to concentrate on making work while at the same time helping them to take advantage of all of the opportunities that digital holds for engaging audiences. The co-creation is key. We’re two workshops in and I now know so much more about artists and in particular what it is to be one and the process of being one that the prototypes we’re making with them are very different to anything I’ve made before in direction. We’ll be sharing all that we do on the DACS Open blog and Twitter account, with videos on Vimeo and photos on Flickr. Please follow along, I’ve written my first diary entry about the first two weeks of workshops and making. 

For me personally there’s a strong reason to do this. It’s about giving back. The visual arts have been one of the greatest passions in my life. Visiting galleries and seeing art is one of my major pleasures in life but for a long while now I’ve wanted to find a way to say thank you for all the joy it brings. This is a small part of that thank you.

Mark Simpkins and I took a very different approach to the Honda Hackday to the ones that we both take both at hack days and in our working lives. We decided to make some art together. Mark’s talked a bit about it here. We jokingly called the movement the Algorithmicists. Both of us have wanted to explore how you make things to provoke thought and invite inquiry in the observer and have no utility or purpose apart from that. Mark has for a while talked about an organisation of unknown shape called This is Our Algorithm and this was a chance for us to try it on, to see how it felt and many thanks to Rewired State and Honda for allowing us to.

Mark talks very well about some of the thoughts and principles:

“All three pieces dealt with algorithms, code and control. They were as much about some strange desire we have to codify up our lives into possibly complex but ultimately meaningless algorithms, trying to reduce complexity to a point beyond understandable simplicity to end at a nihilistic pointlessness.

Reality is complex, understanding reality is hard.”

The first piece and physically the largest piece we made was called A Dream Within A Dream. It is an exploration both into influence and algorithmic scoring and also a piece to provoke that thought in the viewer. It’s partly inspired by this fabulous tweet from Chris Sacca.

I have some fairly strong views about Klout. I really don’t like it in so many ways. I can sympathise with people who feel there need to be some form indicator about the reputation of an account on Twitter (real person vs bot) but I feel really rather sad about things like Klout in many ways. They dehumanise networks in my opinion. One use case I often hear is about looking at how companies can avoid very public confrontations with people by understanding who the influencers are and then ensuring that they’re helped/offered special treatment/pacified. This feels like an own goal for a quasi-meritocratic society at best and a re-enactment of the rise of the 1% at worst. Giving free things to influencers feels like giving gift bags to people at Awards Ceremonies.

I also have strong views about black box ranking systems or ones where the walls are so opaque that an everyday user cannot begin to see what is going on in the system. I can imagine which tweet it was that made Klout for a long while think I was influential about Hugh Grant. However it’s really quite an outlier in my stream, although I sent another today. I’m not an expert statistician, but as a former research scientist I find it worrying that a large amount of faith is put into a metric which clearly in some cases amplifies aberrant signal over noise and pretends it’s a relevance. I’d love to know how they run controls in their system. How they test it against randomness. How the look for and guard against false positives. How they compare against standard texts and against nonsense tweets algorithmically created out of common word tables.

Our way of probing all of this was to create a fake dreaminess index. To show the futility of algorithmic scoring and how you can create an index about anything against anything. To show through parody that value only exists in creating a truly realistic index if that is what you feel you must do. To show this we set out to make the most pointless one we could.

The first point in our plan was in calling it a dreaminess index as shown in the parody image above from our presentation. What are we referring to as dreaminess? The second point is to think about what a dream is. Like influence, the word dream, has so many meanings and nuances - from the dreams you have at night to short term and long term aspirations, both personal and for the wider world.

The mechanism by which we went about creating the index was a further probe. Indexes need to be compared to things. The only way to measure things algorithmically is against some form of ideal, be it a standard or a derived standard. We decided to create an index of dreaminess based on pure lexicographical similarity to Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Dream Within A Dream”. I could argue, as pointlessly and as vigorously as I liked if I wanted to, about why I think that poem is the very ideal of a piece of writing about a dream. Without statistics, and all of the things we as scientists take for granted such as reproducibility and controls it and any index or scoring table is pointless. We’d like to thank Dom Hodgson who suggested our +D index should be called Doubt. Inspired.

The way we created the index is deliberately meaningless too. The scoring table is based purely on word frequency analysis of the poem. Things you’d normally stopword out are deliberately left in. The poem is our ideal of dreaminess and we’re futilely comparing how similar all the words including “a” and “I” in your tweets are to the poem. It’s deliberately wrong and pointless. The number of times the indefinite article are present in the tweet are doubly amplified, it’s both a high scoring and common word. It has all the wrong forms of bias.

We invited people to send in their dreams to us, we set up an account called GiveUsYourDream. The wording was deliberate - we would become the possessors of your dreams. You gave them freely, we have them now. When not enough people opted in we simply did what all other similar indexes would do, we just hoovered in tweets from a Twitter search for “dream” without asking people to opt in. This again is a deliberate response and provocation, and in addition it ensures that every dream gets at least a score of 5 for having the word “dream” in it. 

What we did next is to start making the physical side of the project, the visible part of the art work that people would see and engage with. We started writing down the dreams on blank pieces of paper chain. We wrote the tweet on the inside, so that it would be hidden partially from view. On the outside was the name of the person who had the dream and our +D score of their dream and, by inference, them. The reality, the sentiment, was barely visible when the chain was assembled; it was partially or largely obscured by the nature of the paper chain. The score and the name were dominant, just as it is on Klout. You’re boiled down to a score, the thing which you said is now a second class citizen. 

Part way through writing down the scraped tweets I came across this one and it stopped me cold. It made me think that actually anyone who does anything algorithmic should have to, as part of what they do, physically write down some of the data. You get a new emotional connection to it. It becomes real. And personal. It’s clear that someone typed it, just as clearly as you are having to laborioiusly write it. I wanted in a way to share a picture of what we’d done with this person, but then I felt I may spook them out. Instead I’ll look at this from time to time as almost a cautionary tale to anyone who may think about sentiment or influence mining. People write things with hopes, fears, feelings - read and use those things with respect for that.

We then set out to assemble. We’d originally considered going the whole height of the Guardian’s floors at Kings Place but the physicality of writing and making the chain meant that we could only manage the height of one floor in the time allotted, even though it was an inspiring and moving sight. A chain of semi obscured dreams. Independent dreams now interlinked. Dreams inextricably held within other dreams. Dreams within dreams. The whole piece was designed to be utterly self referential, the text selected as the source of the scoring table related to the physicality of how the tweets were displayed and gave the piece its name. It was moving to see it installed, hung on transparent nylon thread, running through the void of the stairwell and gently touching the floor. Rain Ashford took this picture of it, the best I’ve seen, as it disappears up into the illuminated stairwell. 

I miss it. It was something Mark and I talked about and schemed and thought about all weekend and it was there for a few hours and then it was gone (possibly to appear again we hope somewhere in Honda’s office in the UK). I do however have a feeling we’ll do more of these things. We spoke to many people afterwards who were really encouraging and said it had made them think about Klout and algorithmic scoring. We hope it makes you think about that to. 

Footnote/Full disclosure: After my post bemoaning things on a weekend, yes, the Honda hackday over the weekend. I was paid to be there.