Monthly Archives: June 2005

Hive-Minded Swarm On Exhibit

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Via Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog comes this interesting bit on a collaborative art effort called “The Minded Swarm“. From the press release:

The artists have met for some years in a science fiction reading group, absorbing SF’s mode of fantastic speculation into their own practice. Assuming the model of a Gestalt Organism (Theodore Sturgeon, More than Human, Vintage, 1998.) where individual capacities merge to create a single distributed intelligence, the artists have enacted a state-change, adopting a communal consciousness (Olaf Stapledon, Starmaker, Wesleyan University Press, 2004 (1937), p. 271.) as a means of artistic production.

If you’re in the LA area, the exhibition runs through Sunday, 4 September 2005.

This reminds me a little of the early efforts of a European collective called Workspace-Unlimited. A few years back when they popped up on the radar they were attempting to use the Quake 3 game engine to create a virtual artistic community (it appears they’ve morphed into something else now perhaps). They got off to a really nice start with the game engine, and the possibilities to do something like a virtual “hive mind” project seemed within reach. But as some of us pointed out, they probably ran into licensing issues and the like. It does look like they have something else “virtual” going on though. Something to check out when I have a minute…

Personalized Marketing aka CRM

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Adage (free registration) has a revealing article online that’s tied to virtual spaces (even though it may not seem like it is). It’s called “In Search of Marketing’s Future“. You can guess some of what that future is if I’m talking about it. From the article:

The event {Outlook 2005}, which came one year after McDonald’s CMO Larry Light declared the death of mass marketing, made clear that there is life after that death — namely in the form of hyper-targeted one-to-one marketing strategies that use a variety of technologies.

That sounds sufficiently innocent; almost friendly even. As do a couple other quotables. But here’s the a piece of the article that caught my attention:

“We built this huge umbrella. We looked strongly and deeply at the internet,” Mr. Weedfald said. “The internet has very little value unless you understand the back end of something called CRM. It’s about tracking, converting and retaining customers 24 hours a day, utilizing the power of wireless and the internet.”

Is now a good time to talk about the “tracking” and spying tools that are already employed in virtual worlds? These comments sure make it sound like Big Brother has siblings. Should that be “restraining”?

WorldChanging 3000

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In the event you’re visiting this site and not regularly stopping over on the WorldChanging.com site (a highly recommended visit), the good folks at WC asked me to contribute an entry. I did and you can read it here. Obviously, as soon as I set up the dropbox, I’ll be taking donations to send me to writing class. Hopefully the message gets out in spite of my limitations.

[Edit from the future: As the WorldChanging site is now long gone and I have no idea what I wrote for them, here’s a link to something I suspect is related: “Making the Virtual Real”]

Dreaming With The Big Boys

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Design News has posted an article discussing the future of simulation systems as integrated product design and test tools (among other things); a subject that’s near and dear to me. It’s a nice article and well worth the read. From the entry:

Bevilaqua gained insight into some of Lockheed’s stickiest design issues. He learned about the advantages of shortening the turn radius of the F-35 and found ways to use software to cut the qualification times for air-to-air refueling of the F-18. He also applied his game expertise to the study of so-called “viffing” (vectoring in forward flight) on the AV-8B Harrier, thus improving the aircraft’s maneuverability.

“Sometimes, you can know the equations, but not really know the physics,” Bevilaqua notes. “That’s what the games did for us: They taught us the real physics behind the equations.”

All that from playing videogames. That’s a pretty powerful statement.

You’ll also see three letters pop-up in the article: PLM. They’ve been getting some play here over the past month or so, but I now consider “product lifecycle management” a limited way of defining the potential for this kind of software integration (I’ve already written a first draft for an entry to be posted on the SLSalon blog that deals with this – should be up within the week). I suspect a new definition for what this stuff is morphing into will eventually emerge – I don’t think of people as products.