Think, Eric, Think!

Recently I saw Snakes on a Plane with Felix Petersen. After the movie, Felix soon exclaimed: “We should have had a backchannel!”. That got me thinking.

Backchannels everywhere these days. But what is a backchannel? It’s a kind of parallel discussion, a collectively shaped comment on some ongoing conversation. An alternative channel, often with a different conversational modus.

We see a world that is becoming increasingly hypermediated. The idea of immediacy often attributed to the conversation seems to be fading. The notion of sequentiality is being replaced by a sort of multi-modal parallelity. In other words, the backchannel is going mainstream. Soon it will be everywhere, in all conversational contexts imaginable.

Why? Because there’s a demand. In fact, isn’t there for every conversation a hidden, mirroring, and even antagonistic conversation? For every shared experience a colorful array of potential comments on that experience? For every explicated thought, aren’t there dozens of potential thoughts flocking around it, some countering it, some intensifying it?

Such is the nature of the conversation, but it is only lately that parallel, tacit reflections have become incarnated in mediums where they can evolve and flourish. And so we see chats, feeds, collaboratively edited documents, and even entire parallel worlds turning into shadow conversations appearing and vanishing in tight interplay with a multitude of ongoing discourses.

Sometimes the backchannel even takes center stage–reducing the speaker, or the movie, or the experience in question to a mere object of intense discussion. I myself saw Robert Scoble turn into a de-throned moderator for a stormy backchannel during his talk at Reboot last year.
Similarly, instant messaging is often just a conversational backdrop for what we do in front of our computers–ever heard of continuous partial attention? What used to be intense one-on-one conversations are now ongoing background mumblings in our hypermediated daily lifes.

The backchannel is here to stay. With time it will become ubiquitous. It will enter our most private and intimate spaces. And we will wonder how we ever could live without it.

Ulla, Adam, and me.

With Ulla, Jyri, and Adam. Wow, it’s the future — I can already imagine a fly-by-wire, autopilot, gps-tracked deluxe Segway. People will look at us 50 years from now and laugh at how ridiculous these vehicles were in their infancy…

Last weekend reminded me that breaking up with girlfriends sucks. Big time. Anyway, I’m slowly recovering, and things got a bit better after trying out Backpack, the new wiki/todo-list/PIM web app from the signals. Really can’t decide if this is useful social software or not. Still missing realtime collaborative editing though — heard some rumors about them working on that. I’m in bad need of a SubEthaEdit for the web, and I guess lots of other people are too. They just don’t know that yet.

Just looking at how I could integrate my last.fm recently played tracks feed on my site, and it turns out I’ll have to parse rss (with some rdf thrown in), transform it to html, cache it on my server and then include that snipped on my page. I fully understand why few bloggers do this — it’s simply too complicated!

The easiest way to include stuff on a page is probably by using javascript, but few sites provide feeds and even if they do, it’s a far from optimal technique as your site will build up gradually when content is loading (and it won’t be very accessible either…). And now the rumors has it that IE7 will prohibit all kinds of cross-domain scripting, which effectively will kill much of the really interesting content syndication taking place on the web now…

So what we need, as my friend Adam argues, is a simple standard for seamlessly including stuff on a web page. I propose XML Inclusions, with standard http headers for smart content caching (e.g. “304 Not Modified”). Some smart, transparent proxy system would still be needed for high traffic sites — that, of course, is still the harder problem.

With this, I could include whichever feed I wanted to with one line of code. Just think of how many millions of people who would start aggregating stuff…

Phew, finally got my act together and put a new blog up. Had a redesign resting on my Powerbook for year or so, but I was too much of a perfectionist to let it go online — and I never had the time to fix the bugs. So anyway, following the Three Commandments, I decided to release it anyway, bugs included.

If I know myself well enough, this site will probably stay in “perpetual beta”. At least I’m in good company.

I’m in the middle of some kind of tour. As I’m writing this, I’m on a plane to Osaka, Japan. Siberia is on my right.
Recently I visited Switzerland, played at the Montreux Jazz Festival on the World Wide night with DJ Ghe. People in the business say this is one of the most professionally arranged festivals in the world. At least I haven’t experienced anything better. We had a beautiful view from our hotel balcony. Our set was filmed, streamed and shown live on big screens all over the festival. We got served Champagne right after. I hanged out backstage with Jamiroquai and Roy Ayers. Stunning women everywhere. Even the girls who interviewed me were pretty damn good looking.

It all made you feel like a star for a day.

Forss in underwear, Alex from Jazzanova in
Montreux.

Then I paid a visit to friends in Zürich who run west95, a newly opened atelier/showroom.

“I have to work on my attention span…”

They made a cozy party there, where I had the opportunity to play. The beat from Journeyman just kicked in when the PA broke down. I managed to snap a photo of the surprised crowd, while a replacement amplifier was arranged for.

It’s the first and hopefully not the last time I take down a sound system.

In the meantime, I don’t get things done — and it’s frustrating. Neither the new site nor the philosophy essays are done. Can’t focus, especially not when there’s wifi around — which there will soon be on planes too.

Instead I consume articles and papers, read blogs, check out sites and applications. It seems I’m not alone with this problem.

Surprised crowd at west95 after sound system
failure.

It is clear I have to work on my attention span, but it’s also clear that computers need to get better at aiding the user to stay focused. I want to be able to tell my computer on a global level that I’m working on this project, that needs to be done at this date, involving these people etc. The computer could help me stay on focus by simply filtering out mails, IMs and documents based on these criterias.

Unfortunately, this involves changing quite radically a lot of the current application frameworks and interface paradigms.

I will write more about these issues in future articles, but for now I’d better just learn meditation instead.

Finally back in Stockholm after two years, writing an essay on future GUIs at the Faculty of Philosophy, Södertörn University College.
The album is done. Promo copies are going out.
Have been working like a dog the last month–and I’ve lived like a dog too for that matter. A nomadic dog.

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to meet Mark, who convinced me to mix every track on the album from scratch in his studio.
It has been a lot of work–but it has really saved the sound of the album, so I’m nothing but happy about it.

Doglife.

Mark has a wonderful combination of digital and analog equipment. We have beefed up numerous beats by running them through his API with wild eq settings. You just can’t do that with digital. If you try, very quickly things starts sounding like representations of the real thing.
“Oh, that sounds like a tape delay”, people who listen to music will say, because they often know how a tape delay works. They know that there is a vintage, slightly unreliable mechanism involved in the production of the delayed sound. They can tell the difference between a real tape and a mimicked one–just like most people can tell the difference between fake marble and real.
That’s the whole dilemma of digital–it tries to, and it has to, mimic analog counterparts that has a long tradition with them.

Say you want to achieve distortion–in the analog world you can do it in many ways, basically it means sending an over-driven signal into something, so that when it comes out, it will be distorted. The distortion will get a different color and body depending on what you send the signal through.
With analog, there are no bandwidth or dithering problems. You can use really extreme settings and it will sound extreme–but still “good” in the sense that you won’t end up with a “reduced” or “flattened” sound that “sounds processed”.

With digital you never know exactly what you get–professionals talk about a “Black Box”-effect.
They refer to the fact that there are undocumented algorithms in most plugins that might alter the fundamental character of your sounds in a very dull, predictable way.
An example: the highly regarded Waves Renaissance plugins; because they all are all based on the same internal architecture, they all narrow and distort the stereo image of your sound in a very characteristic way as soon as they are applied–even when they aren’t doing anything!

“The whole dilemma of digital–it tries to mimic analog counterparts that has a long tradition with them”

Another example: Logic (before version 5) deducted 1 bit in the global mix-engine for every extra bus that you added to your mixer, which would gradually reduce sound clarity. It wasn’t documented, so people got gradually more disappointed with their mixes–without knowing why!

My music already lacks context. It suffers from a kind of post-modern sickness, with sounds coming from many disparate sources. Some people can’t listen to it because they start to focus too much on the individual sounds–they desperately try to identify and classify them. I’m not saying this is a bad thing–I think that is an interesting part of the music. That’s what got me hooked on sampling in the first place.
But I’m not sure I would have coped with contextlessness of my old mixes. So thanks again for the hard work, Mark!

Anyway, I’m looking forward to spring in Stockholm–and live gigs in summer. Will do a serious update of the Forss Official Site when the album is released in June.

The 21 jun, 03 my blog participated in the “Blog Ta Musicque” event organized by these guys!
More than 60 bloggers will participate. Some examples will be interesting : Kill Me Again will create a song for this day and will post it on his blog, Philippe Allard will cover the Music Day in Brussels by moblogging, and on a Wiki page Christophe Ducamp will create a collaborative page about Joe Strummer.

On the bus. I slept all the way from Berlin to
Stockholm, only waking up once to take a photo.

I am addicted to screens.
And every time I work for a long time with my computer I “forget” part of my social ability. My eyes loose tracking, I forget to smile, to do the necessary small talk. I feel dull, stupid and …repelling.

It always takes a couple of hours to “come back”.

In front of my screen I feel comfortable again. I give my computer a command — it gives me feedback. And so it goes.

An electrically amplified infinity loop, fuelling ego and will.

Every now and then I get ideas about design, music, philosophy, technology…and other things. Sometimes I write them down.

On the Forssfeed I intend to publish some of those writings, so that people like you can get a chance to read and comment on them.

The Forssfeed will hopefully be a low quantity-high quality thing.

So, no need to peek in too often — a better idea might be to subscribe to my feed using your favourite news reader.

Ok, so who am I and what am I doing? Have a look at the Forssfolio!