More books are written than you can read. Until you are, say 40, you read fully expecting you’ll get a chance to re-read. But will you? So many books to read and time will run out, eventually. One cannot read everything and so you begin to make decisions, conscious decision as to what not to read. Some of these decision are hardly decisions — I do not read thrillers, I do not read Indonesian or Bulgarian novels. More interesting are decisions against certain writers that do pop up in your ‘cultural’ environment. Books & authors that you tried reading, but that, repeatedly, did not strike a chord in you… Nabokov. Dostojevski. Pamuk. I tried reading their novels and I never finished one. Came halfway De Gebroeders Karamazov but was so put off by the christian/religious theme in the book that I could not stomach reading the rest. And now also, Nathan Safran Foer. Last monday (at last) started reading his much-discussed Incredible Loud and Extremely Close (sh*t, do I remember the title correctly?), and after 50 pages lost interest, read a few bits from middle and end, looked at all the ‘nice’ experimental pages (well, not so experimental at all) and decided that the book was too sentimental for my taste. Sorry.

Question: I can stand Richard Powers’ bordering on sentimentality. Why not Foer’s?

Goed, je fiets wordt er vreselijk smerig van, maar misschien vind ik dit wel ideaal fietsweer: droog en een laagstaand zonnetje na regen, de bomen geel en bruin en bijna rood, graad of twaalf, weinig wind. Twee miezerbuitjes van niet langer dan een minuut. Prachtig novemberweer. Net voor Vise werd ik bijgehaald door een man of acht uit Fleron – de blauwgelen van Electrabel (?). Ik haakte aan bij wat hun zaterdagse wintertraining bleek te zijn (zij hadden er al aardig wat kilometer opzitten), en wonder boven wonder reden zij tot voorbij Evegnee exact de route die ik wilde doen. Maakte een praatje, tot ik doorging richting Bolland en zij naar huis. Knoopte in het vervolg nog hier en daar een extra lusje vanwege het fijne weer en kwam helemaal ontspannen thuis: dit is een echte zaterdag, een fijne zaterdag.

Kanne – kanaal – Hermalle ss Argenteau – Richelle – St. Remy – Housse – Saive – Tignee – Evegnee – Melen – Bolland – Charneux – Rossenfosse – Val Dieu – Mauhin – Mortroux – Dalhem – Bombaye – Mons – Vise – kanaal – Kanne

Vrijdag, ‘s ochtends weg voor een mooi rondje, 50 kilometer? Prachtig weer met een gouden zon – gewoon een nazomerzon – deed me besluiten om nog over Hombourg en dan via het Drielandenpunt te rijden. De bossen geel & bruin en soms bijna rood in de laagstaande zon. 13 graden, stevige zuidwestenwind. Zachte novemberdagen: perfect fietsweer. (Afgezien van de bladeren op straat die soms een bocht verraderlijk glad maken: in de afdaling naar Camerig moest ik remmen voor een langzaam rijdende tegemoetkomende motor die te ver links zat, gelukkig reed ik al langzaam, want ik slipte behoorlijk).

Kanne – kanaal – Vise – Dalhem – St. Andre – Julemont – Charneux – La Minerie – Thimister – Clermont – Birven – Hombourg – Plombieres – Gemmenich – Drielandenpunt – Vaals – Camerig – Kuttingen – Beusdal – Opsinnich – Remersdael – Veurs – St. Martenvoeren – Gravensvoeren – Moelingen – Lixhe – Lanaye – Kanne

I’ve put a pdf of my presentation at the RFID-workshop online, for download. In my talk I dealt with the development of blogging-software as an example of the co-development of software and uses/users, using both Latour and Andrew Liu’s ‘Discourse Network 2000’ as an inspiration. Showing how a genre is constituted both by needs of users/writers and by software that is developed in response to those needs. Well, this goes through stages — for instance at one point it is blogging software that actually defines the genre. Next stage — where we are now — is when blogposts can & are used and re-used in different contexts, aggregation/syndication, when one is blogging without ever looking at the back-end of the blogsoftware, or even ‘blogging’ automatically. (Et cetera — hope you catch my drift). I’m trying to formulate what this means for the concept of ‘publishing’.

This is also what I will be discussing next week in my lecture in Groningen (15.00, Radesingel 6, Frank Mohr Institute).

Anyway, the pdf is for download here: http://www.ariealt.net/mediamatic_rfid/.
The first half is the actual presentation I did, what follows is a recap, and it ends with a collection of reserve ‘sheets’ that cover issues that I expected Julian Bleecker to talk about (but that I wanted to have handy, in case someone would ask me about it).

Last minute: Julian Bleecker will do a public lecture in the Mediamatic exhibiton space (now the “Night Garden”: http://www.mediamatic.net/artefact-12874-en.html), friday 17th november 18.00.

Julian Bleecker is visiting Mediamatic for the RFID-workshop (see below). “He is a Research Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication and an Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media Division, part of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television. His work focuses on emerging technology design, research and development, implementation, concept innovation, particularly in the areas of pervasive media, mobile media, social networks and entertainment, and he is one of the main theoreticists on The Internet of Things.”

And then at the RFID workshop: short runthrough of different technologies and available stuff to work with, amongst which Mediamatic’s own Symbolic Table: http://www.mediamatic.net/article-11344-en.html.

Btw: yesterday an awesome concert of Olaf Rupp, playing solo acoustic (classical) guitar at the DNK series (OT301, see http://www.dnk-amsterdam.com/?dept=AGENDA&article=8): playing very precisely with all the ‘noises’ that playing a nylonstring guitar involves (nails on strings, ‘bijgeluiden’ et cetera), almost as if overlaying different types of sound in a way that can be compared to what goes on in electronic / laptop music… Also Gjerstad & Olsen played, but Rupp, well ‘blew my mind’…

Works at http://www.chrisoshea.org/ & blog at http://www.pixelsumo.com/. Where Rob was looking at all the political & privacy issues, he looks at RFID for artistic & playful use. References Peter Anders (2001) idea of ‘cybrids’. And then shows a lot of his work, with interactive works for musea and sound, works that incorporate RFID & games that uses RFID-playing cards…

Is starting with RFID in China… where they are working on their own frequencies and softwares. His background in literary theory (Rob used to be big into Walter Benjamin for instance), pops up too: a nice quote of McLuhan :-)

Again: stressing that RFID is a very simple technology… 2 Years ago he handed over his RFID report to all Dutch political parties & the only party that voiced interest and asked questions in parliament was the SGP (etremely conservative, orthodox protestant party).

“No more public. No more memory loss. No more people, just data clouds.” We have become fragmented in dataspace. There is no (political) general public with whom to discuss problems around RFID. With total tagging & tracing there will be no memory loss. Ambient intelligence & smart things instead of a laptop plus mouse.

Explains the set-up of an Internet of Things:
RFID – reader – EPC network – PML (physical mark-up-language) – ONS (object name server — built on top of DNS). Hmm: to google a bottle of beer in the Mediamatic fridge from a room in Tokyo.

Problem: convergence to just one company (Verisign) who’s in charge..

But: users have the possibilities to use the system for their own use, if you have a reader…

New word (for me): “glue code”. Code to tie everything together.

More Rieback: “RFID software is pretty complex and will turn in to bloatware as everything else”. “Security is designed inside the system. It is not something like a band-aid that you strap on later.”