Voy

Hoot hoot! – a new Ugle film

Einar Sneve Martinussen — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:17:26 +0000

Ugle is a wooden owl that can be controlled over the internet with an iPhone application. It let’s you send colour-messages from your phone to your home. When you change the position of the colors on the owl on the screen, the physical owl turns it’s head to the chosen color. It is a decorative personal message system where the household has to decide what the colours mean. We have just made a film that shows the owl in use.Ugle is a part of an ongoing project where we explore new forms for networked products in homes. Investigating materials, production quality, colours and pace as a way of bringing technology into domestic contexts. Ugle illustrates this approach by being a simple connection between an ornament and a phone application. It might be slightly nonsensical to use a wooden owl to send messages like this, but it is quite charming.

London and network friction

Einar Sneve Martinussen — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 13:25:29 +0000

I’ve just spent a week in London. Sitting at borrowed desks in nice studios (thanks!), lecturing at Goldsmiths’ Department of Design, and actually seeing the London sun for the first time in 10 years. Brilliant, but my phone doesn’t like it. Busses are so big that they disturb its compass’ sense of magnetic orientation. ‘Move away from any interference’ the phone says while I’m stuck inside several tons of double-decker-shaped metal that might very well be heading in the wrong direction.Underground stations and trains without network coverage is another oddity it can’t quite phantom, and having it’s data-roaming turned off makes it really annoyed (using 3G data abroad is still incomprehensibly expensive). It will passive-aggressively remind me that ‘Cellular Data is Turned Off’ whenever it get’s a chance and obscure any interface with crudely overlaid error-messages.

So how did a London visit accompanied by a needy piece of consumer electronics shape how I experienced the city? First, in a very small way it changed the way I moved about. Most notably through repeatedly choosing to walk down Great Eastern Street instead of Curtain Road to get within reach of my hotel’s WiFi. And then pausing for a few minutes on the pavement to download mails and tweets and adjusting the day’s plans according to these.Secondly, visiting London brought forward some of the peculiar frictions and seams of this particular networked city. This reminded me of Bell and Dourish paper ‘Getting Out of the City‘ (2004) where they argue for a cultural understanding of networked cities:

‘The spaces into which new technologies are deployed are not stable, not uniform, and not given. Technology can destabilise and transform these interactions, but will only ever be one part of the mix’

Importantly then, the mix is always different. The way GPS signals bounce of the architecture or get obstructed by railway-archers. Naming-tropes of domestic WiFi networks and the password-policies and condiments of cafes. Street-culture, pick-pockets, public transport, weather, subscription-models and data-plans are just as crucial for how a networked city is experienced and understood as the overarching infrastructures of the ‘smart city’.A few weeks ago I got to be on a panel about imaginary cities with the writer China Miéville at a scifi/fantasy-convention in Oslo. Here Miéville mentioned a wonderful phrase from Algernon Blackwood about ‘being bewildered in the way a man is when he’s looking for a post box in a foreign city’. The technical opaqueness of networked cities are akin to the invisibility of quotidian urban life. The cultural grain of everyday life also includes the minuta of the networked city, and can be just as mildly confusing and/or exotic for a visitor.

[YOUrban cross-post]

Norcon and imaginary cities

Einar Sneve Martinussen — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:51:55 +0000

This weekend I’ll be participating in Norcon at Chateau Neuf in Oslo (10-12 Feb). Norcon is a fantasy and sci-fi convention, and this year the program includes the mandatory zombies, dragons, steampunk and space-travel, as well as urban zoology, biomechanics, particle physics, dear old Lovecraft and a bit of mythical Norse human sacrifice. Cities is one of the thematic threads that runs through this year’s Norcon. And on Sunday I’ll be joining Ragnar Tørnquist from Funcom and the brilliant city-breeder and novelist China Miéville on a panel about imaginary cities. I’m really looking forward to this! Voy-Fhtang!

Sherlock and WiFi

Einar Sneve Martinussen — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:49:45 +0000

I watched the latest episode of BBC’s excellent Sherlock last night. I really like how the modern day Sherlock makes clever use of mundane networked city life. At its best the series weaves bits of everyday technologies into scenes as hints to what Sherlock is up to. For example iPhone message-sounds going of and the blue glow on Sherlock’s pale face when he dramatically writes and reads his SMSs (that Watson crucially often don’t get to see, but that we do).What I found specifically intriguing in this episode (‘The Reichenbach Fall’) was a brief scene where Sherlock uses nearby WiFi-networks to figure out what is going on in Baker street.Using names of nearby networks from his MacBook’s WiFi scanner, Sherlock locates the group of transeuropean assassins that have moved into his neighborhood (A Russian, an Italian, an Albanian, a Czech and an Estonian). Clever Sherlock then concludes: “There is a surveillance web closing in on us right now“.I think this interestingly plays on the common experience of WiFi networks as something that pops up on your computer, but understood as something that tells you what is going on beyond your walls. Or a way of reading ‘the electromagnetic terrain of the networked city’ as William Mitchell might have described it. I also find it amusing that someone have had to set up and name five WiFi networks as props for this scene (and have had to figure out what ‘world of the internet‘ is in Albanian). When we worked on our WiFi visualisations in Oslo we also came across patters of multilingual network names. This could be indicators of diversity in inner-city neighborhoods, but most of the time we just found lots of institutions andÂ default router names.Sherlock’s WiFi-scene could be seen as just another element in modernising the character and the context. And maybe it is, but it could also be read as an example of a popular-cultural understanding of wireless networks. If this is the case, then it represents a grounded and sensible approach to technology. Here, technology isn’t imagined as the typical futuristic science so common in current entertainment (e.g CSI), but is about ordinary consumer electronics in daily life. And crucially, Sherlock shows how spectacular this networked world already is.

The Wind Speaker

Einar Sneve Martinussen — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:23:07 +0000

We have made a (kind of) music video for the musician Espen Sommer Eide / Phonophani. In this film Espen plays his new instrument the ‘Wind Speaker’. We helped Espen construct this peculiar instrument, and contributed with designing and woodworking. The Wind Speaker is a digital electro-acousticÂ harmonica made of birch that turns blowing into computerised singing. The sound emerges from the speakers at the front of the instrument when Espen blows into the holes in the wooden mouthpiece at the back. Through the pneumatic pressure from his own lungs Espen makes the computer-chip sing with the wonderful howl of a wooden machine.We have also had the opportunity of working with Espen in the past. He provided the brilliant soundtrack to the film ‘Immaterials: Light painting WiFi’, and in 2008 we made some very tricky outdoors electronics for his installation Karusell at Henie Onstad Art Centre. And by the way, Espen’s band Alog have a new quadruple LP out on the Rune Grammofon label these days. It is all kinds of wonderful.

The Playlist Club / Svartsyn

Jørn Knutsen — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:05:26 +0000

Einar has made a playlist for our friends at Playlist Club. It’s called Svartsyn (black-sight) and is a collection that explores an peculiar undercurrent of darkness running through Norwegian musical history from gloomy folk music from the dark middle ages, to contemporary black metal. Best enjoyed with the company of some cold dark weather.

Godt nyttår!

Einar Sneve Martinussen — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:23:14 +0000

We have just returned from the cold dark north. Happy new year and voy-a-hoy to all!

Ugle

Einar Sneve Martinussen — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 11:14:05 +0000

As a tongue-in-cheek interpolation between traditional Scandinavian woodworking, 1970s Marimekko and Mark Weiser’s 1995 visions of ‘calm technology‘, we have created Ugle. Ugle is a wooden owl that can be controlled over the internet with an iPhone application. When you change the position of the colors on the owl on the screen, the physical owl turns it’s head to the chosen color. The Ugle is a decorative object that displays digital information form the web in physical form, and is designed specifically for domestic settings like window stills or side tables.The Ugle allows you to send messages to your home in the form of colors, and invites the household to create their own langue around what the colors could mean. Yellow could for instance mean “I’ll be home soon”, while grey might be “Work is boring today” and blue “I’ll make dinner”. Used like this Ugle could be described as a form of slow messaging with a physical, place-specific and glanceable output. The colors could also be connected to other forms of data, like ambient-interface classics such as weather-forcasts, twitter-tags, incoming email etc.The owl is made of lathed birch and is connected to the internet through its own micro-controller and network unit, which means that it doesn’t need to be connected to a computer and could be placed anywhere with power and WiFi.

The Ugle is a work-in-progress from the Hybrid project at AHO Interaction design and this is an early demonstrator. It is a conceptual product for investigating how mobile computing and data from the web can be present in everyday domestic contexts in ways that draw on the esthetics, habits and pace of the home.

The Robot Voyager

Einar Sneve Martinussen — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:08:53 +0000

Earlier this year we made a website for re-watching NRK’s 5 day TV-marathon of Hurtigruta’s voyage from Bergen to Kirkenes:

Robot Voyager is an automated coastal-shuffler. It replays random bits of Hurtigruta’s voyage to the north, creating an endless stream of fjords, mountains, midnight sun, regional telly, freezing tourists and the occasional arctic storm.

Robot Voyager is is a coastal hat tip to James Bridle’s wonderful Robot Flâneur and inspired by Chris Heatcote’s thoughts on Ambient Tourism. It is meant to be a nice thing to put on an unused screen, and is an experiment in secondary attention and automated slow television. But most of all it is about longing for the sea. Ahoi!

Voy-a-hoy!

Einar Sneve Martinussen — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 12:27:59 +0000

Hoy! We are Jørn and Einar. We have started a design-studio named Voy! We work with interaction design, products and research, and are especially fond of woodworking, electronics and decorative ornithology. We have worked together since 2006 and produced interactive products, exhibitions and films, alongside talks and research publications.We are based in Oslo, but Einar (with glasses) comes from Kirkenes in the high north, and Jørn (with log) hails from the deep woods of Mjøndalen. We have previously worked on projects such as ‘Immaterials: WiFi light painting’, ‘Immaterials: Ghost in the Field’ and ‘Skål’ as a part of the research-project Touch. Our latest project is the exhibition Geospire that is currently on at the Geology museum in Oslo.We are based at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and we teach interaction design and work on our PhD projects. Our plan is to use Voy to collect and document our ongoing design and research work, and hopefully get the opportunity to do a few commercial projects as well.