i’ve been missing my gaming fix lately. this time last year, i was rock band-ing daily a la berkman center, and even exercising my gamer theory with monthly mit-harvard game design meetings hosted by the ever brilliant gene koo.

anyway, between a brother who is no longer all that interested in video games (or staying up late for that matter) and an antiquated game system (wait, you mean they aren’t still developing titles for my beloved game cube?) i’ve decided its time for a change. something new. a next step.

i was tempted initally to buy an xbox 360. i love playing fifa 09 with my boys, and project natal will surely make that system all the better. PLUS, the xbox 360 has netflix interaction, and will soon have even more media possibilities- what’s not too love? the games basically. tho i love me some first person shooters, there’s really no reason to invest in a system that only does that with its time. ok, there’s also rock band and sports games, but they are really only fun with other people. ONE OF MY BIGGEST PROBLEMS IS LACKING A STEADY GAMING CREW (again, tears for the rock band core of yore).

as for the other considerations, the playstation 3, for all its awesomeness (like Little Big Planet) is too expensive. and the wii is too gimmicky. its like an arcade for your home, and i don’t want to buy an arcade. moreover, between my roomates next year, their should be one of each console in our apartment. SO WHY COMPLICATE THINGS.

plus, i love puzzle games. i loved myst back in the day, i loved games like journeyman project legacy of time, and adventure games. these genres have been forced into the ds market having been rudely rejected by adrenaline-addled Xboxers and PSers. no worries, i’m more than happy to find things like Professor Layton and the Curious Village or the much hyped scribblenauts in a single man machine. my prayers seem answered.

i struggled for a while about whether or not i should actually buy a ds. i researched into them extensively. i played a few, i read the reviews. at every turn i found myself more sold. the new dsi features suave (albeit slow) internet browsing, an online store with downloadable games (the next generation in video game delivery) and cameras promising both inventive game play and possible skyping/webcamage. one game called ghostwire will actually employ augmented-reality gaming, which uses the cameras to superimpose the game reality into your “physical reality.” i cannot wait to play/theorize on that.

finally, i am going to ars electronica this fall, and i’m worried about bringing along a full computer. i was thinking initially of getting a netbook for the trip, but i really only want one for the trip, not the long term. with the dsi, i may (note “may”) have a solution, as the dsi might be just the lightweight multipurpose ticket to bring to the festival. now lets just hope nintendo has a blogging platform working by then (plz wordpress?)

an animated summary of my arguements

i’ve been playing with a fun web 2.0 presentation tool called prezi this week. take a look at the slick little animation of my arguments that i composed on the beast in about a half hour. this thing is a very slick tool for showing your audience that slideshows are for cartesian minds, while prezi is for deleuzians. sort of.

http://prezi.com/128668/

in the next 24 hours, the berkman center will celebrate one web day in part by unveiling a radical new interface through which blog posts, tweets, youtube videos, flickr images, and raw urls will coexist as a dynamic bodies of information situated within a totalizing system. using tags as display criterion, users will be able to construct, deconstruct, assemble and reassemble heterogeneous media which share common tags or content types. much of this interface responds to david weinberger‘s idea of the folksonomy, outlined in everything is miscellaneous.

the individuals responsible for this interface (i balk at calling at art piece because it has such utilitarian value as not exist merely as aesthetic) are a barcelona-based technology group called bestiario. bestiario have been leading a reassessment of information aesthetics (or the aesthetics of informatics as i like to call it) and are interested in finding new ways of visualizing information so as to give users more control/insight into the interrealatedness of data.

to be perfectly frank, david weinberger is the reason that the berkman center (and i) became involved in collaborating with bestiario, and reimagining the ways in which a whole bunch of media could be creatively re-visualized. i became involved with the project, because seth young, communications guru, asked me to reconsider the berkman website and the horde of content we had from this spring’s berkman@10 conference. how should this be packaged? how should this be organized? how should this be made complete? seth asked me.

i didn’t necessarily know. but i did know that the existing system was not working. within a week at the center, i compiled a list of all the materials we had from berkman@10. there were photostreams, twitter categories, youtube videos, blog posts, official videos, wikis, delicious items, and more. the only way i had to effective corral them, was to make a masterlist of hyperlinked items, and a separate delicious feed. it feel ineffective and one-dimensional, no way to related the material meaningfully or to demonstrate the ways in which this closely related set of data actually fit together.

david weinberger found me in the kitchen one afternoon and asked what i was up to. i responded by telling him about my problem of multiplicious media, an idea i did not yet know was a bit of his specialty. he mentioned the bestiario group, and showed me the work they’d done with the TED talks. i expressed my deep enjoyment of the work, but wondered: how could bestiario manage tagged content across various media types.

to skip towards the conclusion, bestiario under the guidance of santiago ortiz, had a way of relating multiple media types. they called their 6pli system, and it worked by creating a dynamic interface of an individual’s delicious feed. other groups have played with graphic re-rendering delicious as interface, but few groups if any, have worked as hard as bestiario to make that interface totalizing. i mean totalizing in the sense that it stops being a list of links taking you out of the space, and more like a browser opening content within the space.

where the hyperlink as been the building block of web1.0, related data has become the essential part of web2.0. as a result of this progression, the need has emerged for a space where one can judged the interconnectedness of data, and simultaneously engage the individual data elements. it is a new way of seeing information, one that situates the view of the data/media within context before providing it individually. this effectively reverses the current traditions of the internet, which hide such contextualization, even on a micro scale in favor of one to one hyperlink relations.

this is the domain of the scroll, the need to move vertically up and down through information as list. but following the nomenclature of the world wide web, bestiario reimagines information as webbed rather than listed, and as a result, i believe that there “view” of data actually provides a robust new viewing scheme, that adds an intelligence previously expected of the user alone. that is, the expectation that connections are made across the arrays of informatic regimes currently used by people from google to wordpress, up/down informational organization.

the domain of the scroll is the rearticulation of print, within dynamic digitalia, a possibly unnatural carryover from print to code culture like the decorative columns are a carryover from greco-roman building into an architecture that does not need them structurally, only symbolically. in this way, we must wonder how else our digital paradigms are still contigent upon print traditions, and whether the continuation of those traditions is really necessary.

in march of last year, i was in new york for a meeting when i decided to hit the museum of modern art. the museum was hosting an exhibit called “design and the elastic mind” and i was so impressed with its content and convictions, that i began to reassess the ways in which human design influences human cognition. one of the most virulent threads woven through that exhibition was what i later called the aesthetics of information in a paper i wrote some weeks later. projects like re-wiring the spy, flight patterns, or we feel fine attempted to reassess the presence of information with new aesthetic treatments. treatments that allowed new patterns to form within the information, and patterns that revealed hidden meanings in the data.

i feel that the bestiario project, to which i have served ironically as a mediator, is a project within which the aesthetics of informatics are carried towards overthrowing the scroll/print regime in digital culture. where tags and folksonomies led to a reassessment of how information could be organized, it seems that bestiario’s interface for the berkman@10 conference might provoke a reevalution of the ways that information, data, and media are displayed in digital systems. this is not to say that it is a perfect product or that it is the future of digital structuration of information, but rather that it does something powerfully new which may yet lead to an overturning of a leaf, or the discovery of a leaf hidden in the cacophony of meaning just in front of us.

it has been an enchanting summer working at the berkman center for internet & society. everyday, i get to hang out with some of the most brilliant people on the planet. we talk, we write (emails), we blog, we laugh, we play rock band. and when things need to get done, we stay late hyped on free coffee and leftover food.

it is a distinct honor to be considered a peer among such excellent people. and i am not just talking about the fellows, staff, and faculty, though they are all outstanding. no, i mean my peers as in my fellow interns, who are almost definitely the ripening next generation of changemakers.

one of them is adam holland, a 1996 olympic rower and certified international rowing master. as an athlete, holland long ago proved his worth, but despite his olympian stature, he is kind, compassionate, and supremely brilliant. in addition to always having a clever wit about the center, adam is also a mythology and science fiction expert, and recommended that i read the player of games, my great read of the summer.

today, adam invited anyone interested from the berkman center to come down and learn to row at harvard’s 100 year old men’s boathouse. naturally, i took him up on the offer, partially because on i’ve always wanted to learn how to row, and partially because this is harvard, rowing on the charles is the very image of the made cambridge, massachusetts man.

harvard’s boathouse alone was worth the trip. built in 1900 (ish), the structure has a classic, late victorian feel. the sides of the building are lined with slate, and various porches protrude out from the building’s second floor to take in vistas of the charles or of harvard’s athletic fields on the other side of storrow drive. inside, wide bays hold dozens of rowing shells, while upstairs locker rooms and training facilities look as though they were still haunted by the ghosts of yesteryear. not to get into cliches, because the harvard boathouse is more of a icon realized that cliche manifest.

one of the other attendees, john randall, was amazed by the amount of wood used in the construction of the building. “everything is made out of wood,” he remarked.

“keep in mind it was built a hundred years ago,” adam responded.

as we walked down from the locker room, adam pointed out his singles scull. i had already seen it, and had a feeling it was his, as its name was a little… unique. the “sisyphus heureux” as i believe the boat was named, clearly nodded at the greek king who insulted the gods and was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for the rest of his life in the underworld. heureux, means happy or content. so it seems that adam enjoys arduous, repetitive tasks… like rowing.

we took a brief tour of the building, eventually taking our first lessons on the mechanics of rowing in on the building’s ancient indoor rowing tanks. this tank, apparently added over 80 years ago, was so compellingly old school that i became absolutely in love with it, and forced a group photo in the tank to remember the afternoon.

rowing was hard, but intuitive. the sport seems to be more about developing proper mechanics and sharpening instincts that powering through the water using whatever means necessary. getting out on the water was quite relaxing, and each stroke felt remarkably powerful, i can see how one who be interested in rowing up and down the charles river, as it gives on the opportunity to reflect on everything else going on around them.

like sailing.

i had long thought then when i would first learn to row, i would be immediately disappointed that i was not sailing. because sailing would seem so much more effective. that did not happen, as rowing is SO efficient.

after rowing at the end of a string that adam held for about ten minutes, i came off the water and let some of the other guys take the practice shell out for a jaunt. it was wonderful.

on my way home, i enjoyed a glorious bike along the banks of the charles. it would have better rowing.

i’ve told this story before. often in fact. but this is certainly the most succinct telling i ever managed.

after starting at the berkman center for internet society where i’ve been working this summer, i was approached to tell this tale for the record as a part of the digital natives project. i was more than happy to do so.

big thanks go out to the digital natives team (john randall, nikki leon, etc.) who put this together. they are such a talented group of people and it seems a terrible waste of their time to play with a silly video of me.

another big shout out for the riaa whose actions against me only brought direction to my life and made me wake up to the world happening around me. as obi wan kenobi once said “if you strike me down, i will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

keep an eye out for part 3!