Mount Analogue

Home installation.

Gregory Povey — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 17:29:53 +0000

Have today experimented with using the iPad as a pseudo-gallery installation, showing Gummo and Trash Humpers as I worked. An interesting experience — and certainly a good way to go with Korine. The glanceable screen doesn’t have to be about conveying information.

via Instagram http://instagr.am/p/gQUNl/ January 11, 2012 at 05:24PM

Tagged: images, instagram, noticings, photos

Pretend chef: pork & scallop.

Gregory Povey — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:24:49 +0000

King scallop, belly pork, crackling, apple puree.

via Instagram http://instagr.am/p/cqwzm/ December 29, 2011 at 07:10PM

It may not look much for over a day’s effort (curing the pork/crackling yesterday), but this is the first time I’ve cooked any of it. Until this year, I’ve always sworn off seafood, so cooking scallop is a big deal for me.

I followed the instructions of how to prepare and roast the pork from David Chang and got an excellent caramelised top and close to pulled pork consistency of meat. The scallop, I pretty much went on my own after a trial cooking yesterday. Probably browned the butter a touch, but I can live with that. #mountanalogue

Tagged: images, instagram, noticings, photos

Things that I said to people at Culture Hack North.

Gregory Povey — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 14:49:40 +0000

I was invited to give a short provocation/inspiration talk at Culture Hack North. CHN is part of the wider Culture Hack programme bringing developers, arts organisations and creatives together to think about how to use technology differently, and develop prototypes for New Things. It seemed to be a very successful weekend and you can see some of the hacks that were made.

There were plenty of good people talking, including the always excellent Matt Edgar (his notes), Frankie Roberto (talking about embracing ambiguous data through the Open Plaques project) and the new-to-me but very interesting Natasha Carolan (her write-up).

I’m not a seasoned speaker, so thanks to Rachel for twisting my arm and making me go to Leeds. The images I used to represent my points and the words I tried to say are below.

This is the title of the talk, it’s probably misleading to what I’m about to say. Look at the wonderful illustration of a forest troll by Theodor Kittelsen.

Here, I introduce myself, how I work at Mudlark where we make interactive experiences — games, web apps, and try to tell stories in interesting ways.

My background is in theatre and metacriticism: the practice of reviewing reviews of reviews of events of pretend performances. This means I spend a lot of my time imagining how things are.

I see the value of stories as ways to explore the world and everything it contains. It’s a bit broad, but I don’t have much time to be specific here. I have a frustration with the ambition in the way stories are told currently, given the huge amount of different tools available, they’re not being used in a way that is engaging, meaningful or particularly natural.

That’s the provocation: to expose the stories around us without forcing unnatural means upon audiences/people.

This is an example of a story well-told. I’m a sucker for stationery at the best of times. When it comes with a story I am even happier. This is the recent Fire Spotter edition of the Field Notes brand of notepads. It’s a 48-page notepad with dotted graph paper. It’s pocket-sized and made for writing in, doodling, that kind of thing.

This is a better notepad because of its story: a tribute to the firespotters who sit 93-feet up a tower watching out over the forests of Wisconsin for fires. If they see one, it’s called in, they make a note of it and the forests remain.

The notepad is better because it contains context, history, value and meaning. When I write in it, I am more mindful of its origins. It also affords me some time to pretend. When I make a banal note in this notepad, I can pretend it’s the forest-saving banal note of a Fire Spotter.

This is an example of stories told badly. Museums and galleries are the largest, visitable public resources for stories available (I exclude libraries and the internet, of course). All the items in the collections, on display, have masses of stories in and behind them, but they’re told through rubbish signs.

A sign that says: title, year, artist, materials.

The sign doesn’t tell anyone the importance of the piece, why it’s there, why it’s worth experiencing and what you can get from it. That’s not enough.

So we end up with QR codes. QR codes are useful for certain things, as we scrabble for the ‘hyperlink of the real world’, but they’re nothing more than a redirection to a sign on a different medium. A sign on a screen, instead of a sign on a wall or plinth.

They simply serve to exacerbate the partial attention problem of trying tell stories or convey information through separate forms. They’re a compromise of attention, a compromise of observation.

I made a slide of lazy sloganeering, because that’s quite good for cutting to the core of a point.

This section is about how Augmented Reality is very vogueish, but still very poorly thought out. There is a desire on many people’s behalf, including cultural institutions, to throw notes, data, infographics, additional images and location information on top of the things we’re supposed to be experiencing.

What this does is make it noisy. It makes it harder to experience the thing you’re supposed to be experiencing. It detracts from the experience as it redirects your attention. AR is not ‘better’, it’s just more.

This is what AR-enabled experiences are like. It’s smart, and it’s potentially valuable, but it’s obscuring the work. You know there are people behind the records, but you can’t see them. The thing in front of the people has come to be more important.

AR is the act of putting something in between you and the thing you’re supposed to be experiencing.

Which is:

(with apologies to Ian Stevenson)

Kevin Slavin said this earlier in the year, and it really sticks. It’s not just the eyes that need to be preserved, it is all the senses. It is important to not put things in between us and the experience. If we are to improve the experience, or add to it, it must be done in a way that is sympathetic to the thing that is to be experienced. Don’t let technology distort what you see.

The challenge is to find ways of improving the experience without disrupting it.

Getting back to what I said I was going to say, is this. This is from the Hello Little Fella Flickr group started by Matt Jones of Berg many moons ago. It’s about a cognitive function that ensures our brains recognise faces first, above all else. Some people are aware that they do it, others are not. As soon as you are aware of it, you start seeing – and looking for – faces in everything around you.

This tidbit of knowledge, leading to a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, has affected how people see the world in profound ways. It changes people’s behaviour, it affects the way they look at things, simply by using the tool of story in a simple, natural way. It is more important to change how people see things, not changing how things are seen by putting something in the way.

Rather than lay stories and experiences on top of people’s lives, we’re looking at ways to seamlessly slot into them. There are a couple of ways in which we’re trying to tell stories in ways which are already natural to people include Chromaroma and Derby 2061.

Chromaroma is ostensibly a ‘slow game’ played on the London Underground, but we like to imagine it’s a means of slow, pervasive publishing. It is something we can leak stories out into, through missions or collections, or straight up story publishing to users. It doesn’t disrupt a player’s life, it slots into it. It adds to it without demanding much of the user. You can pick up bits of stories about places you go every day, without changing what you do.

Derby 2061 is much more of a tangible story. Again, the aim is to do an ambient form of publishing; to dot 50 parts of the story at fictional venues around Derby City Centre.

The story is accessible on foursquare, as venues and tips. If you check into a nearby venue, you may be prompted with a ‘tip’ from Derby 2061, but they are parts of the story. The story slots into existing behaviours of foursquare. It’s not demanding, it’s just… there. You can engage or not.

The point of it is to provide a future-based story that would encourage general foursquare users to consider their environment, and what it will look like or be in 50 years time. It’s a gentle goad wrapped in a story.

It’s a way of looking again at the world around you, and considering it anew.

This is the end. That’s the Black Death. Thank you.

Me to play.

Gregory Povey — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 19:32:47 +0000

On occasion, it is good to recall this tale told by Nagg in Beckett’s Endgame:

An Englishman, needing a pair of striped trousers in a hurry for the New Year festivities, goes to his tailor who takes his measurements.

“That’s the lot, come back in four days, I’ll have it ready.”

Good. Four days later.

“So sorry, come back in a week, I’ve made a mess of the seat.”

Good, that’s all right, a neat seat can be very ticklish. A week later.

“Frightfully sorry, come back in ten days, I’ve made a hash of the crotch.”

Good, can’t be helped, a snug crotch is always a teaser. Ten days later.

“Dreadfully sorry, come back in a fortnight, I’ve made a balls of the fly.”

Good, at a pinch, a smart fly is a stiff proposition.

To make it short, the bluebells are blowing and he bollockses the buttonholes.

“God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it’s indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making me a pair of trousers in three months!”

“But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look—

—at the world—

and look—

—at my TROUSERS!”

Tagged: beckett, behaviour, culture, endgame, human, theatre, writing

Instagram and Other People’s Shopping Lists.

Gregory Povey — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:43:02 +0000

Since October last year, Instagram has ruled my photograph taking. It’s done what Flickr should have done and what twitpic, yfrog and the like thought they were doing — a simple, single-purpose photo sharing mobile app.

It gets a lot of flak from people moaning about the use of filters, but that misses the point of what it really is. Like criticising twitter for people’s spellings. As a social space, it’s probably my favourite at the moment. It reminds me of the early days of twitter – the days when you followed a fairly small, but diverse, group of people. When you shared ideas – occasionally what was for lunch – and didn’t have to worry about blocking all the SEO spammers or niche retail outlets from Kentucky, or people shouting for attention.

Instagram is a more curated space. It’s a space dominated by real people and what they see. You may follow annoying, dull people on twitter who will occasionally post something interesting or relevant, but there is no value in following them on Instagram. Similarly, Made By Many’s Hollergram bugged me a bit, because it made Instagram spammy and a marketing platform, rather than a photo-sharing space. It’s the same with brands; it’s relatively hard for them to find a way in to people’s feeds, and that helps keep it clean. Of course, there are exceptions and the success of feeds like Playboy, NPR and Threadless show that it is possible to be a brand in this space, without being spammy and crass. Offering quality content is still the best way to market.

Threadless, sharing some pouches on Instagram.

Unlike other social networks where there is some level of peer pressure to be friends with X, or follow Y, Instagram is liberating in that I only follow people who have an eye for an interesting image. It is about following people because you want to see what they see, how they see it.* Whilst I was writing this post, Ben Terrett posted this and asked for comments. You could probably stop reading now.

It’s that, I think, that I meant to write about. One of the best things – again this goes back to ‘early twitter’ – is the small memes. None of the awful #replacelovewithbanal word games, but ‘memes without a tag’. Behaviour that goes unannounced, but catches on, influences others, develops beyond the original insight or in-joke. The best bits of Herd mentality. It’s enjoyable watching the images that people collect, or make an effort to photograph: Marcus greets a statue of Otto von Bismarck every morning on his way to Booming, Emily hunts for lost gloves, Toby led a brief glitched photo meme, AceJet records the planes above, and everyone – everyone – shares Brutalist buildings, excellent coffees, typography and their feet.

My personal ambient collection is of Other People’s Shopping Lists. I’ve been aware of doing this since January or so, and I’ve collected twenty-eight since (with some help). It’s a casual thing, to keep an eye out for things people have left behind after shopping. I’m interested in them for several reasons: straight-up nosiness, as data trails, documents of human behaviour & intentions, and the stories you can tell from them – or at least imagine.

Other People's Shopping Lists.

Each shopping list is different; from its items, to the handwriting (one typed), the choice of material (Post It notes, back of birthday cards) and the way items are listed (aisle-by-aisle, recipes, days etc). They’re a fascinating snapshot of a person you don’t know, but probably feel you could. Every time I find one, I speculate on the person writing it. How old are they, what is their background, what are they doing? What kind of person uses a birthday card for a shopping list? Is the person that writes ‘pork’ different to the person that writes ‘meat’?

They give me a way to indulge natural tendencies: creating back-stories for things, applying the meaning layer to nothingnesses.

That’s what Instagram is for.

—

* Again, this is why filters are acceptable. The complaints that they obscure the subject of the photograph or add in a patina that doesn’t exist are valid, but facile. Every decision made about the image is made by the person taking it. If their choice is to present it in a washed-out greyscale, or a high-contrast lomo filter, then that is part of the composition. It is them presenting their version of an image; isn’t that what photography is about?

Tagged: ambient, behaviour, culture, digital, instagram, iphone, iphoneography, marketing, memes, social media, tumblr, twitter

A visit to Preston Bus Station.

Gregory Povey — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 21:03:10 +0000

After visiting Northcote, I convinced the other half to go to Preston. Last time we took a detour home via a North West town, we ended up in the Magical Moomin Valley, so I have form in delivering quality experiences.

The reason I wanted to go was to see, first hand, the marvel that is Preston Bus Station and car park. Preston Bus Station is a Brutalist masterpiece, a structure built to last, to provide a public service through pure form and design.

Unlike Park Hill flats, it had an application to become a Listed Building rejected some time ago. Unlike Park Hill flats, it is impossible to gentrify something that runs a working class service. Unlike Park Hill flats, it is the town’s favourite building. Unlike Park Hill flats, the council want to demolish it.

Demolish it.

The arguments for this is that it doesn’t get great numbers, that more people get buses from streets in the city, rather than the terminus. That demolishing it would provide a large area of land for Preston City Council to redevelop, put a mall or an array of chain shops, a John Lewis, M&S and Cineworld. Perhaps they could put some aspirational flats to leave rotting until the recession picks up. The replacement would cost more than refurbishment, and might not even happen at all.

As I’ve written before, I’m quite distressed at the historical myopia of town planners and councils. The desire to demolish the recent past and build inferior buildings, at a great cost — both economically and culturally — to the public.

Here are some photographs (passed through Instagram) from our wander around PBS:

Bus Station interior. Hard concrete, waiting bays.

Car park interior. Low ceilings, concrete pillars, curved walls.

Car park level. View along length, curved walls to protect car fronts.

External curves.

External, full curves.

External curve, looking up.

Preston Bus Station feels stuck in time, generally. The corporate signage is all in the Helvetica of its time, and there are a lot of informal, more hand-type style signs. Most of them have been there since its opening in 1969, and nothing much has been updated.

Far from being a relic or stamping its own demolition papers, it acts as a record of its inception, a moment of hope, pride and of making a public statement.

Internal signage.

External signage, bay number.

Internal. There are about six of these throughout PBS, all are stuck on this time.

I’ll be upset if it is torn down, but not surprised. You can do your part by signing this petition, then go and visit it on bus and spend a shitload of money on eggs, bacon, chips and beans in the café.

Tagged: achitecture, brutalism, listed buildings, modernism, park hill, preston, preston bus station

Paul, René, Glynn and Lisa; or, fussy to foodie.

Gregory Povey — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 19:22:55 +0000

I grew up eating cucumber sandwiches, macaroni cheese and toast. That was all I liked. Occasionally, green pepper; then I hated them and preferred red. That passed when I preferred yellow best of all. I liked croquettes until my grandad called them potato croquettes and I remembered how I hated potato. My parents suffered endlessly, but kept trying. Many times I ended up with aborted meals on my head; notably, spaghetti hoops and pizza.

My uncle Paul, at pains to change me and broaden my plates’ futures, once paid me £5 to eat a small cube of a seared beef steak. My mother paid a further £1 for photographic proof of the moment. A quality racket to run. The meat was fine, but I still preferred the white sauce and pasta.

“One day, you will eat everything. You’ll look back and laugh,” Paul said more than once.

I entered student years armed with the finest 29p noodle soups and pasta sauces, but somewhere down the line something changed. I don’t know what it was, or even when, but I am an adventurer now. Not so much at home, apart from with vegetables and spices, but when at a restaurant, all my guards are dropped. Paul is responsible for this, by and large, for constant nudging and encouragement. For making me feel daft, letting me try interesting food in his restaurant, making me understand the theatre and joy around dining.

When my girlfriend and I decided to visit Copenhagen in 2009, we tried to get into noma and were lucky, so very very lucky. This experience blew my mind, and forced me into eating things that I swore would never pass my lips (cod roe, raw razor clam in its own juices). The relaxed atmosphere, and knowing that a complete genius was at work, made me lose any inhibitions that I had. Everything was an incredible piece of art designed with absolute understanding of its place in culture behind it. Most of all, it was designed for eating, laughing, enjoying.

From then, we’ve tried to recreate our own bits of noma at home, and stretch ourselves when dining out. Last year, we went to Purnell’s, which was stunning in its exploration of West Midlands flavours, Asian spices and British produce. The duck with licorice ash and the amuse bouche of cucumber sorbet, ras el hanout and black rice particularly incredible.

This weekend, we took a trip to the North West to Nigel Haworth’s Northcote Manor. Lisa Allen was running the kitchen, and the confidence, calmness and beauty of the food in front again pushed me to go beyond my own limitations. Scallop carpaccio, oyster and my first tastes of lobster are still making me laugh.

Click to view slideshow.

Brilliant.

nb. The vegetarian experience is over here.

Tagged: cuisine, fine dining, glynn purnell, lisa allen, london carriage works, michelin, nigel haworth, noma, northcote, paul askew, purnell's, rene redzepi

Back Red Pop.

Gregory Povey — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 13:27:03 +0000

I’m not a massive Kickstarter user, I don’t trawl it looking for interesting things to put money into; the only thing I’ve backed before was for one of my favourite bands to record with my favourite producer.

Sometimes, though, an idea is just so stupidly good it needs to be made. This is where Brendan Dawes (of magneticNorth) and his newly-founded physical objects imprint, Beep Industries come in. Despite being a web/interaction design agency, mN have made a couple of nice physical things over the years — the Mixa USB c90 and MoviePeg — so to move those things over into a new company is logical.

The thing that makes it perfect is their latest product prototype, Red Pop. Red Pop is a physical camera trigger for the iPhone. More than anything, it’s a BIG RED BUTTON for the iPhone. It is this kind of stripped down and fun thinking that Brendan brings to everything (even if he does indulge in being grumpy from time to time).

Watch:

Now go and back it. With 40% pledged in just over a day, I am looking forward to this being available in all the best places.

Tagged: design, digital, iphone, iphoneography, objects, technology

One more time, with feeling.

Gregory Povey — Sun, 01 May 2011 12:24:34 +0000

I downloaded the iPhone app Weddar yesterday.

It’s a cute application that seeks to crowdsource the weather in the area that you’re in. It’s not about meteorological fact (22°C, 6mph Westerly wind, 78% humidity etc), but about how the weather is perceived.

Weddar: how does it feel?

I’m struck by the simplicity of its question, and the basic idea behind it: reporting on how it ‘feels’ is quietly brilliant.

For me, this is what the web does best: interpretation. Facts, it’s not so good at. Yes, you can get information from anywhere, on anything — and we’ve all used Wikipedia as a source — but unless it’s experienced or printed on paper, it doesn’t feel quite real. This is possibly because of the endlessly shifting sands of the internet, a fact changes regularly online; in print, it’s every few years or so, e.g. “the most recent study (2003) suggested that…”.

The web is empirical. It is full of alternative versions, experiences, perceptions and theories about the same events. That’s how it has naturally developed, and clearly how people want it to be. Whilst there has been a recent fetishisation of data visualisation and infographics, this is again down to interpretation of information. They may be displaying facts, but they’re doing so in a representational manner.

"Most Ambitious Cooking Experiment" (Feltron report 2008)

"Six Editions" (Stefanie Posavec)

The web is increasingly being designed around glanceable information and dashboards, about receiving and understanding information quickly. Most of this is around statistical truth and data veracity, but that’s not the most important thing. In his TED talk about Behavioural Economics (ack), Rory Sutherland talks about online banking interfaces. To paraphrase, nobody wants the truth about their bank balance, they want a representation of it. e.g. if you’ve got £x left for the month, which is more than normal (or linked to a personal target), then a simple visual indication of that is more important than the pounds and pence.

Very little is designing for impressions or perception. BERG’s Schooloscope is a fairly recent piece of information design that offers an honest representation of data collected around school reports:

Holy Cross Catholic Primary (BERG, Schooloscope)

It also offers a summary ‘feeling’ of the institution:

We Feel Uncertain... (BERG, Schooloscope)

That’s good and fine, but most parents would dig deeper into their children’s future school choice than a glanceable website. It does point towards things we should be developing around and designing for. ’Feeling’ should be a central design conceit: designing for the elicitation and engagement around it. To provoke interpretations, alternative versions and develop a rounded perception.

Perception is all about storytelling. By piecing different perspectives, interpretations, experiences together — you can create a ‘multilayered empiricism’:

Advertising seems to get this more than most. Market research is leading in sentiment analysis of how brands are perceived, experiential marketing is attempting to craft relationships between consumers and product, and there is a rise in corporate transmedia seeking to tell engaging/convincing stories. Perception, relationships, and experiences.

All of these add up to measuring and owning how consumers ‘feel’ about a product, service or brand. If you can build things for people to have distributed feelings around, and engage with feelings around those things, then you’re onto a winner.

Tagged: advertising, behaviour, design, human, marketing, social media, strategy, web

Bangkok & The Inevitable City (redirection point)

Gregory Povey — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:33:21 +0000

Last month, I went to Bangkok with Toby.

It was my first full week at Mudlark, and a pretty strange experience — Bangkok is a full-on city where the volume for all the senses seems to be stuck on eleven.

Emo etc.

We spent the time walking around, setting up remote offices in the TCDC or hotel bar, looking at everything, and even squeezed in a screening of Sucker Punch. (I need to see it again because it was either brilliant or the worst film of the year. I’m siding with brilliant for the moment.)

Here is an impressionistic post I wrote for the Mudlark blog detailing our minds being stretched a bit. In comic book style, words: me; pictures: Toby.

Enjoy.

Tagged: Bangkok, cities, exploration, the city, travel, walkshop