bibliostructures

Genetically modified “glofish“

A few days ago I wrote about the announcement of a colour flexible display (electronic paper) from LG Philips and Electronic Ink and how this is, for me, the holy grail of electronic publishing. Sony has announced its version of the technology, a 0.3mm TFT (thin film transistor) that uses an organic electroluminescent display, which a story in MIT’s Technology Review describes as being not as widespread for gadgets as “as the two main display technologies now on the market — liquid crystal displays and plasma display panels.” I discovered that this technology orginated with Pioneer:

OEL—Organic Electroluminescent—displays were introduced to the world by Pioneer in 1999, and headunits have never looked the same since. OEL displays, featured in select Premier and Pioneer models, have some intensely great advantages over normal displays, namely:

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  • You can read the display from wide angles and even in bright sunlight (what a concept!).
  • Since it’s easier to read, it’s also easier to control, and you can keep your eyes on the road longer.
  • It’s a self-emitting device, so there’s no need for backlighting and it’s really efficient to operate, power-wise.

I’ve been writing some stories on food production in Australia for The Ethicurean, and one that’s about to be published is on genetically modified food and animals. There’s an application been made to the Office of Gene Technology Regulator in Australia for the commercial release of the zebrafish that glows in several fluorescent colours, and that’s an organic electroluminescent display as a living creature. Altering animals to entertain us makes me shudder: Why stop at colours, how about having the text of Moby Dick display itself on a fish as it swims in a tank, “turning” a page to show the next block of text as it turns around for a new lap of the tank?

Sony is undecided on how it will apply this technology.

”In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person’s wrist, even worn as clothing,” said Sony spokesman Chisato Kitsukawa. ”Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper.”

Sony mentions how its display differs from other electronic paper concepts:

Other companies, including LG. Philips LCD Co. and Seiko Epson Corp. are also working on a different kind of ”electronic paper” technology, but Sony said its technology using the organic electroluminescent display delivers better color images and is more suited for video.

Sony President Ryoji Chubachi has said a film-like display is a major technology his company is working on to boost its status as a technological powerhouse. In a meeting with reporters more than a year ago, he boasted Sony was working on a technology for displays so thin it could be rolled up like paper, and that the world would stand up and take notice.

If anyone from Sony is reading this, and would like some ideas, I have ideas for two prototypes for this technology, based around projects by the artists, Zatorski + Zatorski.

THE KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE IN TEXT MESSAGE LANGUAGE.

Zatorski + Zatorski spent several years translating the King James Version of the Bible into text message language and plan to release this as a book. I propose to bind together many pages (20 or 40 say) of this electronic paper, and have this function as both a mobile phone display and a book.

ELECTRONIC ART BOOK WITH VIDEO PAINTINGS

Zatorski + Zatorski’s works are deeply symbolic, often drawn from the time and world of the King James Bible and with visual references to the paintings of the time. They capture life itself, slowly, meditatively, often respectfully with animals simply because animals happen to be around them, living their own lives in their own way (birds in the Durham Cathedral when they had a residency, for instance). They put music to the moving images.

Yet these aren’t movies, they demand and create stillness and reflection and careful consideration. So I propose an art book, with this paper, that allows these video images to be considered as a glorious plate in an art book, AND simultaneously as a video.

‘Cordero’ . Still from the ‘video painting’ by Zatorski + Zatorski.

The world’s first A4-sized colour electronic-paper – a paper-thin and bendable viewing panel, produced LCD.

Photo: LG Philips 

Seoul, Korea (May 13, 2007) – LG.Philips LCD [NYSE: LPL, KRX: 034220], a leading innovator of thin-film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) technology, announced today that it developed the world’s first 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper display, equivalent in size to an A4 sheet of paper. This is a second breakthrough in E-paper for LG.Philips LCD, which introduced the world’s first 14.1-inch black and white flexible E-paper display in May 2006.

The 14.1-inch flexible color E-paper uses electronic ink from E-Ink Corp. to produce a maximum of 4,096 colors. It can be viewed from a full 180 degrees, so that images always appear crisp, even when the display is bent.

Like the black and white flexible display, the color version uses a substrate that arranges Thin-Film Transistors (TFT) on metal foil rather than glass, allowing it to recover its original shape after being bent. This model includes a color filter coated onto the plastic substrate, allowing it to display color images.

LG.Philips LCD’s use of metal foil and plastic substrate rather than glass substrate makes the flexible color E-paper display bendable and durable while maintaining excellent display qualities. 

The negative aspect of writing my stories for my own site rather than a newspaper is one of perspective: I fear I’m developing what I’m terming a “pre-Galileo” world view, that the world of paper revolves around me and my interests, that I don’t perceive that I’m an unmeasurably small unit in deep (probably non-geosynchronous) outer orbit around the universe of paper. But Philips LG and e ink’s announcement, two days ago, of the development of colour electronic paper brings into alignment, and makes actually — rather than hopefully — possible many of the projects I’ve been dreaming about doing, that I’ve been thinking about a lot, again, as I’ve unpacked boxes of books and prototypes I sent from L.A. so that I can repack them more sturdily and move them to Sydney in a few weeks.

At my main website, Yamazaki’s Notebook, I use a service I think of as a digital tea-leaf reader. It tells me the location of the IP address numbers in my stats, and, if there’s a domain name, who’s actually reading my stories. I have a lot of universities and technical colleges in North America, Europe, Asia, Scandinavia and Russia calling up my stories. A venture capitalist in Hong Kong. Branches of the Australian government and its state libraries. And I have more readers in Seoul in Korea and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Delhi in India than in any other cities on earth. If any of my Korean friends are reading this and have favourably placed friends at LG who can make an electronic book-binder’s dreams come true, please pass the link for this post along to them.

E-ink’s electronic modules charging about on flexible “paper” are the foundation for everything I can think of that’s remarkable in electronic publishing. The Plastic Logic prototype newspapers and novels I swoon over, frequently, on the Bibliostructures site are developed with E ink. Sony’s electronic book reader for the Western market, and it’s predecessor the Libri-e, which had a ghostly icy pale beauty, and was only available on the Japanese market are made in conjunction with E ink. And on the E-ink website there’s a sleek Seiko watch with an inbuilt E-ink display that makes it seem as if the New York Newsday news ticker that runs around the top of its building in Times Square is encircling one’s wrist. I can’t remember exactly when I found about E-ink. Maybe it was 1999 when these applications were only a static uncharged microcapsule in developer’s eyes. But e-ink has held onto the concept of the glory of the device itself, the binding that will hold the pages their ink is printed on, and not been seduced by marketing synergies and bringing to the market expedient half-baked devices and software that don’t recognise the potential of the technology in an intelligent way. Maybe it’s been impossible to do that, and they wanted to do that, but I’m glorifying this slow ascent as patience.

The addition of colour to electronic pages isn’t just another feature upgrade, it represents a significant shift in the possibilities of the artform. It’s equivalent to sound being added to motion pictures. It isn’t a killer ap that explodes and dazzles and hits like a brick falling on one’s head: it brings a complexity, subtlety and rich stillness and silence to digital works, it amplifies beauty.

Among the books I was re-packing was Ken Goldberg’s The Robot In the Garden. Ken has been a friend for about ten years, and I’ve written many magazine and newspaper articles about his telerobotic art projects.  His projects do double-duty. The science demonstrates and makes clear a specific principle that relates to his research as a professor in the department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at UC Berkeley: the reliability of a robot arm that’s remotely operated to allow users to plant seeds in a garden plot, and weed, and water the plants. An algorithm that finds within a database new jokes for a reader based on a ranking of how the reader has rated previous jokes for their ‘funniness’. His newest project is CONE a collaborative observational natural environment that’s birdwatching and the identifying of breed presented as a multi-user video game. And then there’s the mystery, the poetry and beauty that spins around his projects, the contemplation of which often leads to something which sometimes remains inexpressible.

The visual images that surround his projects have the kind of eye-pleasing richness one finds in a coffee table book. From the very first moment I heard about E-ink and tried to imagine what books bound with paper printed with its electronic ink would be like (there HAS  to be multiple pages/screens) I thought of subtle textures: the shimmer on Lynn Davis’s photograph of an Egyptian tomb in the book that accompanies her exhbition at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in New York, for instance. Ken’s works are often installed in art galleries, and deserve this handsome gallery catalogues to accompany them.

His most deeply philosophical art projects question the nature of reality using humour and play to disarm our preconceptions. In 1998, out of individual silicon atoms and using an electron microscope, he built a 1:1,000,000 scale model of Fallingwater, the house that Frank Lloyd Wright built into a waterfall. One of the treasures I repacked yesterday was a tiny photograph, the microscope’s version of a screen-grab of the model, printed as an old-fashioned high quality black-and-white photograph and kept in a glassine envelope.

Dislocation of Intimacy (1997) is Plato’s parable of prisoners watching shadows on a wall. This is an analogy to there being a higher reality we can only perceive part of, translated to the internet with a device quoted from Duchamp’s 1916 sculpture Ball of Twine With Hidden Noise. His ’shadowserver’ was a lightbox filled with never-identified objects, some of which moved of their own accord). Over the internet one could manipulate combinations of lights trained on the shadowserver, and be given a digital snapshot of the shadow cast. All one could doin response was accept the mystery and be moved by the weird beauty of the shadows.

The seriousness of the science and the loftiness of the poetry obscure the fact that Ken’s projects spring from an ordinary sense of wonder about the world and a delight in asking ‘why?’ and ‘what if?’ The central, recurring theme of his work has always been encouraging the use of the internet to broaden one’s own curiosity, but warily. “Well, you know the expression ’suspension of disbelief’, right?’ he says. “You see a movie or start reading a novel and you suspend disbelief. People also get into a mode of accepting things they find on the internet at face value. I’m trying to facilitate the resumption of disbelief.”

I’m hoping that some day (tomorrow or the next day would be convenient) someone reading my posts will send me an e-mail and introduce themselves as being from one of the companies developing electronic books that will be printed with e-ink, and ask me to help create a book that demonstrates the capabilities of the paper and the binding. I have a Ken Goldberg coffee table book ready to go. For me it isn’t just about writing. In fact it’s hardly about writing at all: I’d imagine writing a small essay. But there would be two new categories of tasks that don’t exist with books bound from regular paper.

1. Design Algorithm Groomer.

The references and artworks and projects themselves are always exquisitely designed on Ken’s website. As poetry does, their influence shifts and grows and takes off on new tangents, and Ken’s projects are covered by magazines and newspapers that write illuminating articles. Any new material loaded in would negotiate with the design algorithm to appear in a form that’s harmonious to the overall design of the coffee table book yet not compromise the design integrity (if this is important to the material being loaded in) of the source publication.

2. Footnote Forager and Seeder.

Making a suggestion for books, articles, music, movies, pieces of writing that build upon the context for Ken’s works, so that the search algorithm can seek out not only obviously useful works that directly relate to and illuminate the projects, but find magnificent non-sequiturs that make one reflect upon the project through contrasts, or strange sideways connections.

Photograph by Jamie Rector for The New York Times

“The machine made a turtle, top, and Gumby, from a plastic powder.”

Print your own book. Not just the pages, but the whole thing. When I was reading this story this morning in The New York Times about 3-D printers edging closer to becoming household items, my mind started whirring about the possibility for the components for my snap-together books being printed out right at home. There’d be nothing to ship. I’m curious about the powdered plastic that forms the 3-D objects.

“In the future, everyone will have a printer like this at home,” said Hod Lipson, a professor at Cornell University, who has led a project that published a design for a 3-D printer that can be made with about $2,000 in parts. “You can imagine printing a toothbrush, a fork, a shoe. Who knows where it will go from here?”

Three-dimensional printers, often called rapid prototypers, assemble objects out of an array of specks of material, just as traditional printers create images out of dots of ink or toner. They build models in a stack of very thin layers, each created by a liquid or powdered plastic that can be hardened in small spots by precisely applied heat, light or chemicals. …

In a brainstorming session, Kevin Hickerson, an IdeaLab engineer, proposed the method the company would ultimately choose. First the machine spreads a powdered plastic over a roller, which is heated to just below the plastic’s melting point. Then a sharply focused beam of light melts dots of plastic on the roller. After the unmelted powder is brushed off, the roller deposits the hot plastic onto a platform. This process is repeated until the object is assembled from the bottom up.

Still from Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner

There’s a story in The New York Times today, by Charles McGrath, about Philip K. Dick’s books, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that Blade Runner was based on, being re-issued as elegant hardbacks.

ALL his life the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick yearned for what he called the mainstream. He wanted to be a serious literary writer, not a sci-fi hack whose audience consisted, he once said, of “trolls and wackos.”… So it’s hard to know what Mr. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, would have made of the fact that this month he has arrived at the pinnacle of literary respectability. Four of his novels from the 1960s — “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Ubik” — are being reissued by the Library of America in that now-classic Hall of Fame format: full cloth binding, tasseled bookmark, acid-free, Bible-thin paper.

His novels were initially published as cheap, pulpy paperbacks:

His early novels, written in two weeks or less, were published in double-decker Ace paperbacks that included two books in one, with a lurid cover for each. “If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double,” an editor once remarked, “it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as ‘Master of Chaos’ and the New Testament as ‘The Thing With Three Souls.’ ”

Charles McGrath wonders if this is a serious re-examining of Philip K. Dick’s writing, or an attempt to re-brand and re-package books that have captured the public imagination, often through the movies they’ve been based on. And he points out the way that many of Philip K. Dick’s themes resonate with our times, particularly questions of authenticity and identity.

The books aren’t just trippy, though. The best of them are visionary or surreal in a way that American literature, so rooted in reality and observation, seldom is. Critics have often compared Mr. Dick to Borges, Kafka, Calvino. To come up with an American analogue you have to think of someone like Emerson, but nobody would ever dream of looking to him for movie ideas. Emerson was all brain, no pulp.

“The sketch book pages have textural lines- made with a technique of water marks.
The texture gives the pages the look and touch of old and new at the same time.
For personal inspiration and a flow of ideas.”

roni_baram02 on Flickr. Photograph by kickass design projects

(Link to the photo page on Flickr)

tamar_fleisher01, photograph by kick-ass Design Projects.

“contains survivors’ account, keeper of the internal, scars in and out. The opening of the book is possible only by a surgical operation.” 

Weighing up alternatives to paper can be dizzying. One of the reasons to move some publications (directories, newspapers, etc.) that update frequently and have a short life to an electronic format is that it saves trees. Recently, after reading a report about the amount of power that Google uses, and in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma that it takes more energy to produce corn than it provides in calories of energy, I began to think that a set of paper foraging tools would need to include a snappy algorithm that calculates and compares the paper to electronic ratios for power and water and biodegradability and upcyclability, and then, more subtly, how design decisions affect the use of power and water.

Treehugger reports that if Google’s home page was displayed on a black background rather than white, it would represent a significant saving of power.

From the lights out department – did you know that a cathode ray tube (CRT) monitor uses about 74 watts to display an all white web page, but only uses 59 watts to display an all black page? Yes, there all still plenty of these still in use, particularly in China and Latin America. Worldwide, about 25 percent of the monitors currently in use are cathode ray tubes, which means that they waste energy displaying white backgrounds. This can add up for sites with a global audience.

The story links to a post on a design blog, ecoIron , that has a table showing a panel of the most energy efficient display colours.