Author: admin

I have had several long and detailed conversations with friends in the last few days about Stranger Things 2, after we discovered that we had all binged it. It would not have been obvious to me, a priori, that so many people would immediately binge-watch a nine hour miniseries the moment it is released. But then again, Stranger Things is no ordinary miniseries.

All of the people I’ve had these conversations with have at least some memory of the 1980s. So one of the things that we talked about is how true the show is not just to the look of that decade, but to its spirit.

It’s not so easy to convey the essence of an era to people who weren’t there. I imagine that to millennials, the youthful spirit of mass revolt against established norms that characterized much the 1960’s would seem very exotic. The very premise of the cultural conversation is radically different.

Similarly, it would be hard for young people today to connect with the raw sense of upheaval and youthful rebellion associated with the emergence of Rock & Roll in the 1950s. After all, that kind of Rock & Roll was the music of their grandparents.

When artists in later times try to reproduce such eras, the results are often weirdly off. I found this to be true of, for example, the 1999 TV movie The ’60s, and the film The Wedding Singer.

When I watch such attempts at cultural time travel, I feel a bit as though I am looking at aliens trying to pass as human, after they’ve studied up on the subject by watching humans on TV (shades of Galaxy Quest). They get lots of little details right, but the essential spirit is somehow off.

Which is what makes the Stranger Things series so miraculous. It feels true to the actual spirit of the 1980s, with a precision that I haven’t seen in a very long time.

This semester, the Tuesday evening graduate course I teach falls on Halloween. So in our previous class, I told the students that they should feel free to come to class dressed up in a Halloween costume.

Alas, only one soul was brave enough to take me up on it. She arrived dressed up as Judy Hopps from Zootopia (complete with ears), and her costume was awesome.

Not knowing how many students would arrived dressed in costume, I decided that in all fairness, I needed to come to class in a costume. So I got dressed up as a professor.

Yes, I know that sounds confusing. After all, I am a professor. But I’m the kind of professor who usually dresses like a student.

So this evening I did the whole three-piece old fashioned twill suit thing, with a tie and everything. Probably not all that different from what C.S. Lewis would have worn to teach his classes at Oxford ninety years ago.

The students were very appreciative. I think they always like it when their professor puts a little extra effort into preparing for class. 🙂

Our society is a complicated thing, which can make it difficult to parse it in such absolute terms as “good” and “evil”. But every so often you can clearly see that something is, indeed, evil.

The disgusting and pointless ban on transgender military service by our Idiot in chief was such an example of pure evil. And it was particularly evil because it was done purely for political gain.

To spell it out: The creepy orange one clearly doesn’t care about this issue one way or another. Yet he knows that some of the more vocal elements of his fanatical base do.

At various times in U.S. history some within our society have focused on excluding blacks, Jews, Catholics, Italians, the Irish, and a long list of other groups who could be conveniently labeled as “other”. And sometimes, sadly, U.S. presidents have supported such exclusionary tendencies.

But this is probably the first time a president has done so not out of any actual sense of conviction, but merely because it makes him look cool to his fanatical base. It is that complete lack of underlying conviction — a decision to something utterly hateful and cruel merely to win political points — that makes such an act particularly evil.

Fortunately Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has called out the Idiot. It is good to see that even in the face of utter monstrosity, there are still some people left in this country who retain a basic sense of decency.

When you talk with your artist friends about ideas and creative struggles, and you have wonderful conversations, and they show you what they are working on, you can momentarily forget that anybody else is listening.

But art is always engaged in a larger conversation. And part of that conversation involves the world publicly recognizing the work of artists.

A case in point is my old friend, the brilliant Toni Dove. In addition to being a really delightful person, Toni is a groundbreaking and pioneering artist in the ever evolving world of interactive multi-media art installations.

Just recently Toni invited me to her loft. We spent some time talking about our various projects and ideas, and had a wide ranging conversation about what might come next in interactive computer-mediated art. I also got the chance to experience her fantastic and complex latest work, The Dress that Eats Souls.

So today I was thrilled to see a review of this very same work in The New York Times. It is being shown as part of a larger retrospective of Toni’s work at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota.

Fortunately the NY Times reviewer seemed to really understand and appreciate the piece, which — like everything Toni creates — challenges its viewer to be open to the many ways that sculpture, AI, genre narrative, robotics, political commentary and philosophical inquiry can come together in a single work. It’s good to be reminded, in such a pleasant way, that art is a conversation with the world.

I sometimes go to the Wikipedia page for whatever date of the year it happens to be. Starting from the top, I learn about all the historical events that happened on that day of the year, followed by notable births, followed by notable deaths.

I don’t do this all that often, but when I do, I read the page all the way through, and I always learn something. Today, for example, I learned that October 28 was the publication date of Gulliver’s Travels. Also that today is Bill Gates’ birthday, in case you want to send him a congratulatory email.

So many fascinating historical events happen to fall on any given day of the year. It occurs to me it might be really fun to build a course around that fact.

Imagine a University course structured entirely around the exigencies of chronological happenstance. On any given day, students would learn about the most notable events that happened on that particular day of the year throughout history.

The purpose of the course would not be to do a deep dive into any particular topic, but rather to provide a structure for providing a broad base of knowledge on many topics.

I could imagine, given just the events listed today, learning about music, politics, religion, mathematics, sports, literature, medicine, technology and many other topics. It might be interesting for individual students to track one or two themes, and see how those particular themes evolve and tie together as the year progresses, day after day.

I couldn’t really tell you what kind of structure would emerge by imposing such a willful layer of apparent randomness. But I can assure you it would be interesting!

I often have the experience of dreaming about some cool new idea, only to wake up and realize that the idea was actually silly or pointless. Many times I have felt myself awaken in a burst of excitement over some great new dream-time discovery, only to see the sad reality revealed within the few seconds it took for me to come fully awake.

But this morning I had a different experience. I was in a dream, describing an idea to my research collaborator. After hearing my idea, the dream version of my collaborator said “Hey, that’s a really good idea!”

Then a little later, within another dream, I found myself watching the idea play out, and saw to my excitement that it was really working. Then I woke up.

And the idea was still pretty cool! Hey, I might even try it. But first I’ll probably check to see what the non-dream version of my collaborator thinks of it. 🙂

I arrived today at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport several hours before my flight, because I caught a car ride today from Quebec City thanks to a very kind friend and colleague. Which means that I have been enjoying several hours of quiet time, just me and my trusty MacBook, with no interruptions.

Fortunately this is one of those civilized airports where they don’t loudly blast TV shows into every corner. As they wait for their flights, people are speaking in hushed tones, or just working quietly away on their computers or on good old fashioned paper.

It may be odd to think of an airport waiting lounge as a welcome refuge, but right now that is exactly it is. Particularly after a whirlwind several days of non-stop conference activity.

And sometimes a simple refuge is just what you need.

This year the UIST conference was on the small side, because fewer people end up going to Quebec City than to, say, Tokyo (which was the site of last year’s conference). But that very smallness was wonderful.

A small number of attendees may not be good for the financial health of the organization, but it’s great for the people who do attend. There is a certain intimacy, a complicity, that starts to fall off when the numbers get too large.

After seeing all the great work presented over the last few days, I am left with lots of thoughts about where to go next in our own lab’s research. That’s what always happens after this conference — my mind is on fire up with exciting possibilities.

Several of the grad students in our lab came to the conference this week, and gave brilliant demos. Perhaps, after seeing our students’ great work, other attendees are finding their minds on fire with exciting possibilities.

I was having a conversation at the UIST conference this week with Bill Buxton, one of my heroes in the field of HCI (Human/Computer interfaces). We realized that we both disapproved of the idea of computer interfaces that tell you where you are supposed to focus your attention.

Essentially, if an interface needs to tell you where to look, then it is doing something wrong. If the interface is properly designed, you should already be looking in the right place.

Consider earlier media, such as cinema. A great film director, such as Bigelow or Scorcese, knows how to steer your eye around the screen, without you even realizing they are doing it. They don’t need to tell you to look at a certain place — you are already looking there.

To invoke an even earlier media technology, think of novels that you have read and loved. You can clearly remember the most vivid passages, the ones that had a deep impact on you.

Theoretically a novelist could tell the publisher that certain passages need to be underlined in red. “These are the places,” the hopeful author might explain, “where the reader really needs to pay attention. Let’s highlight those passages just to make that clear.

If I were a publisher, I would seriously question this strategy. And so should you, if you are an HCI designer.

That moment, when the tricky and ambitious new computer program you’ve been working on, the one you weren’t sure would ever work, the one that was way too ambitious in the first place, the one that was producing such crazy results that you were beginning to doubt your very sanity, the one that had made you start to think you had seriously overreached, the one that had somehow turned into a full-blown existential crisis, the one that had recently been giving you nightmare visions of Sisyphus forever pushing that giant rock up a mountain, the one that was making you put aside such distractions as doing laundry and remembering to feed yourself, that moment…

Yes, that moment. The moment when it finally starts to work.

That moment has now arrived. I think I will go for a nice meal.

🙂