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| Adriaan Beukers Ole Bouman Steward Butterfield Ben Cerveny Elisabeth Diller Michael Douglas Maya Draisin Brian Eno Marti Guixe Ivo Janssen Nathalie Jeremijenko Winy Maas Malcolm McCullough Irene McWilliam Sugata Mitra Andre Oorebeek Chris Pacione Garry van Patter Fiona Raby Hani Rashid Kristi van Riet Rick Robinson Alexander Rose Tiffany Shlain Bruce Sterling Lisa Strausfeld Jane Szita John Thackara Tjebbe van Tijen Michael Waisvisz |
(Comes on stage barefoot and looking dishevelled) It’s tough first thing in the morning! So the great thing about Amsterdam (smoking) . . . I'm sorry I forgot what I was going to say. . . (audience laughter) There’s something funny about jokes. I don’t know why jokes are funny, but one funny thing about them is that they rely on the listener, the laugher, sharing a lot of knowledge with the person telling the joke. You can see this when it comes to explaining the joke, it’s always a matter of relating a few facts or assumptions that the listener may not have had in mind. Like, 'Pat Kennedy is a racist', or 'blondes are stupid'. Your success when telling a joke depends on your listener knowing things and you being able to count on them knowing those things. All communication is like this. All interpretation requires a huge base of shared knowledge. And really when you come down to it, we have some small differences. But just like differences between one person’s genes and another's, we have a lot more in common than we have differences. It might be trivial things, like the axioms of arithmetic, or obvious stuff, like 'mean people suck'. But there’s a lot of shared knowledge, and what shared knowledge enables is richness and lightness in communication. If you’re talking to a close friend, you can say a lot less and communicate a lot more. But it’s not just about the economy of saying less, the economy of motion that you might experience, but about evoking a lot of things that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to say, explicitly. And exploiting the available shared info is what makes that possible. So, when someone on the stage says 'Modernism', they can count on that to evoke a bunch of images and stories in the minds of the listeners. It might be Frank Lloyd Wright or something like that. But when you’re talking to a close friend and you say 'Modernism' as you roll your eyes, you can usually evoke a lot more. Or, if you’re more like me, you can say Postmodernism and roll your eyes. So to summarise, these are some of the thing you would have to know for that joke to be funny: one, smoking marijuana is tolerated in Holland; two, smoking marijuana affects your short-term memory. And if you didn’t know those things, then the joke wouldn’t have been funny at all. When you’ve achieved a level of intellectual intimacy with someone, your words can go a lot further. And, although we always say that computers aren’t like humans at all, one way that they are like humans is that the more knowledge that you can count on them containing in the interpreting system, the more you can exploit it and therefore the less you can get away with. So this is perhaps one slogan that comes out of the 5K Awards, and it’s probably my favourite example that didn’t actually win anything in the contest. It's by a Dutch guy (Milo Vermeulen), who’s 22 and lives in Rotterdam, studying Interaction Design there. If anyone here owns a web design studio in The Netherlands, I’d say snap this guy up, he’s really quite incredible. This is called Hungry Little Frog (frog appears onscreen). To see Milo Vermeulen's Hungry Little Frog, click here. And see some of the techniques he uses in order to get in under the 5K limit, things like telling the browser to draw the background green, rather than actually specifying green pixel, green pixel, green pixel, green pixel. And this background image of the bog is actually a much smaller image and he’s telling the browser through the HTML to blow it up, to reuse these pixels again. And you can see these little flies that you can drag around. And each of the flies is exactly the same, but just slightly offset algorithmically, to give it a kind of natural feel. You can see that the little frog (frog's eyes move around), he tracks the movement of the mouse, it’s very clever: you get to draw one small circle and then describe another circle mathematically and use the same one-pixel image to track around. It’s a very nice effect using very, very little. This is Stewart Butterfield's second presentation given at Doors in a series of three.Link to Stewarts presentation #1 |
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