Creative uses of technology

Meet one of those periodic revolutions

Mon, 6 Sep 2010 08:35:42 +0100

I have finally got around to giving The Elements a half decent road test. Well, rail test actually. I spent the best part of a 3.5 hour train journey yesterday from Ledbury - which is so far off the map the periodic table would have difficulty reaching it - glued to it and was frustrated when the train finally arrived at Paddington. It's an iPad/Phone app with a difference. It passes not the Turing Test but the Keegan Test. Once you have savoured it you can find no reason why you should want to read it in book form - even though the book version is a delight in its own right. That is a big, if not revolutionary, step forward in book publishing.
I have read lots of books in e-book and iPod/iPad form including a 600 page novel on a phone. I was amazed how soon one got used to reading text on a small screen - the eye, after all, can only take in so much at a time and, oh, the convenience of it all: you can carry on reading in bed, at the bus stop or on a train. But it never reaches the sheer unadulterated pleasure of reading print on a page.
But The Elements does. It is a beautifully choreographed multi-media journey through all the elements of the periodic table - from gold to hydrogen - that make up the world with very impressive graphics. It is aimed at everyone from primary school children to established scientists but of particular interest to people like me trying to make up late in life for a crappy science education. There's not much point in trying to describe it in words - there's another compliment to the app - because this video by the author http://bit.ly/9UlxKu says it all so much better.
The rotational graphics of all the elements look stunning enough to me but there is an option to buy 3D glasses if you want an even more immersive experience. It is also integrated with the Wolfram Alpha computational search engine which gets to information Google can't reach by linking into to databases giving time-lines of facts in addition to live feeds such as the current price of platinum.
Once you have dipped into The Elements you have to wonder why anyone would publish a book of this kind - where illustration is as important as text - ever again in purely book form. It could even make economics readable and could provide a new format for newspapers in which the soul of the paper is maintained in a recognisable form but which leads off into a multitude of different directions depending on where your interests lie. The main reason you wouldn't do it now is that not many people have iPads or iPhones. But that will change dramatically during the next few years when the dozens of cheaper iPad imitators hit the streets enabling anyone from a school child to a pensioner to access any book or newspaper they want from wherever they are.
I am not sure how the digital revolution will affect the traditional novel. A lot more will, of course, be read in electronic form but probably mainly as pure text so as not to break the magic of conjuring up your own images of who the characters are and the landscape around them. But there will be a new generation of multimedia narrative books that won't depend on uninterrupted reading of text. This will be especially true of the market for multimedia children's books which I expect the go ballistic. But that's another story . . .

Victor Keegan's City Poems, iPhone app links poems to London streets that inspired them using using satellite navigation. Geo Poems geo-tags all his poetry books..

Shakespeare’s London: app for all seasons

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 10:56:21 +0100

Of late I have been buried in Shakespeare, researching content for our new app for the iPhone and hopefully other platforms called Shakespeare's London (City Walks series). This follows on from the modest success of City Poems, an app which relates poems to the streets of London that inspired them using geo-positioning from satellites.
It’s strange. If you go to Stratford, where he lived, you can't move for Shakespeare memorabilia, which is great. But in London where he worked and wrote nearly all of his plays, there is hardly anything on display except the marvellously reconstructed Globe, bequeathed to us by a far-sighted American, Sam Wanamaker. This may help to explain why so many tourists think it is the actual Globe or reconstructed on the original site which it is not.
It occurred to me that the navigation capabilities of mobile phones would be a great way of using new technology to breath new life into the past. Example: hundreds of thousands of people drive or walk up London Wall - I used to be one of them - without having a clue that the only place in London where we have documented evidence that Shakespeare lived is at the top of London Wall close by the Museum of London (who don’t seem to know either as one of their windows overlooks it). No reason why you should as there is no plaque or anything to help. But with our iPhone app you will be told you are, say, 30 yards from the spot and by clicking you can call up a photo of the likely spot together with a clip of from an Elizabethan map showing what it looked like then plus a potted history .It will also tell you you are a couple of hundred yards away from the church Shakespeare attended (which still stands) and where his “base born” nephew is buried not to mention the poet John Milton as well.
When I started looking into Shakespeare’s London years ago I had no idea that there were at least three other theatres apart from the Globe on Bankside - including the 3,000 seater Swan on the south side of what is now Blackfriars Bridge let alone that several books had been written about another one, the Blue Boar playhouse in Whitechapel, nor that the first purpose built theatre was in Mile End. It is good to know there are still places Google can’t - yet - reach.
We - my developer partner Keith Moon and I - hope to have the app finished soon. We are currently experimenting to see how much you can pack onto a mobile screen - audio, video? - without making it unuseable when you need it - walking the streets. We are also experimenting with augmented reality whereby you can use the smartphone as a kind of radar screen to pick out places of interest around you. Suggestions welcomed.

How technology is bringing art back to its roots

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:13:40 +0100

In primeval times man started painting with his or her fingers .It was only later that tools started to be adopted that led to the use of the paint brush which has held sway for hundreds of years. Now, thanks to new technology the space between your finger and the surface that you are painting on has, to use a frightful banking expression, been dis-inter-mediated. The arrival of the iPhone, the iPad and other new touch screen devices such as Android has reinstated the finger as the medium of expression to the extent that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to tell a photograph of a painting executed with an iPhone app such as Brushes from an original work done with oils, watercolour or acrylics, thereby passing a Turing test of sorts.
When I first started painting with Brushes on my iPod Touch I found it very difficult to get the lines right but after a while you get used to where your finger should be if you are going to, say, continue drawing a line - just as, when you first tried a paintbrush it took time to adjust to its length. Having "got used" to the iPod Touch I was looking forward to painting with the iPad because the screen is so much bigger to start with - even before using the facility to enlarge it eight or more times to paint details in. In practice I haven't found it all that much easier and I am still pondering why.
This week I was due to do something for the Deadline Painting Group on Flickr where anyone can paint to a deadline on a specific subject on the 29th of each month (yes, today!). This time I decided to "import" an unfinished oil painting I did a couple of years ago and finish it on my iPad using Brushes. This is strictly speaking against the rules of the DPG as you are supposed to do it all in the same month - but I am sure they will be understanding in the cause of creative experimentation. One of the interesting things about importing a painting is that when you press your finger (the flesh not the nail) on the imported picture it immediately picks up the colour from the screen enabling you to carry on as before (only without wetting your fingers) Equally you could "dilute" the colour by changing the transparency. The result can be seen above.
It is not only in painting where new uses of technology are bringing art back to its roots. I have recently done two iPhone apps One called CityPoems links poems in central London to the streets that inspired them and the other Geo Poems contains my complete works (three poetry books) with each poem geo-tagged on the phone's map to the place in England or the rest of the world that triggered it. When I was interviewed about this on BBC 3 by the poet Ian McMillan he pointed out that this was poetry returning to its roots where poems were read out linked to particular places. It would be interesting to hear any other examples of technology returning art to its roots.

O2 be in England . . .

Sat, 22 May 2010 11:04:08 +0100

I know . . I should have known better. For years in my columns on the Guardian I have been warning everyone else about the scandal of the horrendous charges you can incur abroad unknowingly if you access the internet from your mobile phone. I am not talking about downloading music tracks - which can cost hundreds of pounds per track - but simply accessing the web for your emails etc. For years I took the easy way out and didn't use my phone at all for a data while on holidays.
But this year was to be different. Why? Partly, because we are away for a month and I need to do some work - yes, hopefully including creative uses of technology on my phone. But mainly because we have now entered the mobile internet age and things have just got to change. At the domestic level there has been a vast improvement mainly thanks to Apple's insistence that the operators it does deals with must offer more-or-less unlimited data tariffs.
But abroad? Oh dear. Before I left I checked out what I was letting myself in for http://bit.ly/cYjzpy with my operator, O2 so there wouldn't be any nasty surprises. It turned out I could buy a "bolt-on" to my normal tariff which would give me 50MB of data for £50. I regarded that as usurious as it would cost around £80 to upload the equivalent of a three minute video to YouTube, but let that pass. I wasn't planning uploads, I just wanted to read my emails and Twitter feeds etc. And I haven't got any alternative as there was no wi-fi in our apartment and other operators such as Vodafone were offering even worse deals. In any case, I can look after myself. I write about these things. I know.
If only. One of the precautions I had taken was to regularly text an O2 number that replies with how much of your data allocation you have used. It is a good service but would be even better if it was automatic as most people are unlikely to initiate it themselves regularly. On May 19 they told me I had 8.3MB left so I started to use it more carefully. A couple of days ago it had gone down to 4.6MB so I started to be really careful. Then last night when sent my text, the news came back that I had incurred recent charges of £85 before adding on VAT which would bring in up to £100.
I phoned them this morning and got straight through to a human being (O2's customer service always impresses me, and I mean that) and asked what had happened. They said I had incurred a charge of £77.46 (presumably before VAT) on May 13. I asked what it was but was told it would take five days for an investigation to find out. Funny how they can add charges in a fraction of a second but queries take five days. Nor could they explain how, if the charge of £77.46 (way in excess of my £50 allowance) was incurred on May 13 why it had not appeared in the texts which continued to show me in surplus until yesterday (May 20).
I could go on and on (eg I am still being required to pay my - unusable - UK monthly charges which can't be set against the excess clocked up abroad) but you get the point. They won't let you through to a supervisor to complain nor will they give you an email address to make your point. You have to write a letter - remember them? - to some address in the country while they are extorting charges from you by the minute.
This is an outrageous scandal. The question is what can be done about it. There are interminable moves going on in Ofcom and the European Commission but, like the interminable legal case Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Bleak House they don't seem to be heading towards a result.
What can we do? If we threaten to boycott all operators they will call our bluff as they are all at it and they know there is nowhere else to go. We have to break the unofficial monopoly that is in operation by going for one operator. If we succeed it would not only be good for consumers and the future of the mobile web but also good for that operator because if one operator is forced to allow uniform tariffs abroad as well as at home they would gain an awful lot of new customers. So, for what it's worth I am going to leave 02 - despite it being one of the better operators and having good customer service - because they ought to know better. It is no good having good customer service if the people behind the counter know they are defending the indefensible.
So for what it is worth I will be leaving O2 in three months time (September 1) unless they have changed this shameful practice. Any one else is welcome to join me. If you have a better idea leave your comment below.

Poems go mobile . . back to their roots

Tue, 11 May 2010 10:39:07 +0100

Poems, unlike novels, are not usually continuous narratives that need to be read in a book. Each is distinct, its own story. We read them in books mainly because it is hugely pleasurable to do so though also because there is no obvious alternative. But creative uses of new technology - as in my new iPhone application Geo Poems - now offer fresh avenues thanks to "geo-tagging" whereby text can be linked to a map on a mobile phone making use of latitude and longitude coordinates.   Thus, instead of setting out poems sequentially in a book, you can read them from a map on a smart-phone by clicking on the place which inspired them or where the poem was written or some other association. The iPhone app City Poems which I did with developer Keith Moon enables you to see how many yards you are from a place or thing that inspired a poem in central London. I spent quite a lot of time researching the poems and was amazed what I learned about life in London centuries ago (see earlier blog). City Poems was restricted to classic poems out of copyright in one city. Geo Poems is, I believe, the first book of current verse to be published in this new way  As a result of the interest generated by City Poems I was invited to join a discussion on the Radio 3 programme The Verb about the connection between poetry and place. Ian Mcmillan, the poet/presenter made the interesting point that linking poems to places actually looks back to earlier aural poetic traditions when they were read out aloud often in the place that was being written about.  It was while doing City Poems that I thought why don't I publish my upcoming book of poems "Remember to Forget" (Lulu.com) as a geo-tagged experiment for the iPhone which could quite possibly be the first time an original book of poems has been published in this way. But the poems - which can be read on the iPhone app Geo Poems - looked a bit lonely spread around the map of the world so I decided to include my previous two books as well, both of which had previously been published utilising new technologies. It may seem barmy to sell three books for only £1.79 - but this only reflects the economic reality that it costs nothing to produce extra copies.  My first book, Crossing the Why, was issued ten years ago in association with a web site I had devised with the help of my Guardian colleague Noll Scott (who died tragically in South America a few years later): it tried to reproduce two lines of a poem ("Can art by accident be bred/ And if it were, would Art be dead") on a computer running day and night. It pretty quickly managed to get about 13 characters correct at the same time but for the past seven years hasn't made any further progress. It is still running 24/7 and can be seen at www.shakespearesmonkey.co.uk (though it doesn't seem to work properly on all browsers and I have long forgotten how to get back into it).  My second book, Big Bang, was published before a live audience in the virtual world, Second Life http://bit.ly/dvPVbh where it generated an animated discussion among artistic people around the world - appearing only as their avatars. So it feels right to continue this tradition by using the amazing technology of mobile phones to publish Remember to Forget.  It may not look like it but Geo Poems contains over 250 poems written over ten years. This is partly because poems concentrated in one place get hidden behind what looks like a single icon. For instance, if you click on Le Touquet in France there are seven poems buried beneath. This is because while I was on holiday a few years ago having a coffee before buying the croissants seven poems on the subject "Truth" suddenly came to me. Yes, poems can sometimes be like buses. One of these poems "Truth" has since been recorded by the Glasgow indie group A Band Called Quinn and a pre-release video version can be viewed here on YouTube http://bit.ly/aoapte.  Relating hundreds of poems to particular places is usually obvious but sometimes difficult. It was easy to park most of the love poems on the statue of Eros, the god of love, in London's Piccadilly Circus and a few about freedom with the Statue of Liberty but what about those about Big Bang, the start of the universe? It suddenly came to me - the Large Hadron Collider which seeks to emulate the conditions of Big Bang. That's why there are poems linked to Geneva even though I have never been there.    Publishing poems on a mobile also has practical advantages. In this case you don't have to carry three books around with you (no, not even I would think that worthwhile) because they are always on your mobile to be read during spare moments on the train or in a queue as well as in a place that inspired them. I hope these will give purchasers some pleasure and look forward to hearing other novel ways of publishing poems. Remember to Forget (and Big Bang) can be bought in book form at Lulu.com or as an iPhone app Geo Poems. We hope to use other platforms (Android. Symbian/Nokia) at some stage in the future).