On The Rebound
George and AIBO. Photograph by Fromform at Flickr.
I began my custom book-binding business in the candy-coloured bioluminescent glow of the i-Mac era. Apple had made an internet-enabled computing device something as ordinary as a toaster or a coffee percolator, a part of everyday life. E-ink was printing electrically-charged pixels onto an opaque paper-like screen that could be read in daylight. Microsoft hinted at something similar, taking out ads in newspapers with a reproduction of the first page of Moby Dick, looking, on the screen, indistinguishable from a printed page in a book. I read Moby Dick for the first time towards the end of 1999, while I had a head cold and fever, imagining, in my delirium, Queequaig counting the many, connected, paper-thin flexible screens of an electronic book (on sale at Barnes and Noble for $25.99).
Computers hadn’t and wouldn’t replace paper. Paper use had actually increased as offices made back-up ‘hard copies’ of data. But paper had ceased to be something manufactured for humans to write on with pens and pencils or to feed through typewriters. Paper now was now being manufactured with a smooth and dull and even surface that wouldn’t upset the delicate constitutions of photocopiers, plain paper fax machines and computer printers. A couple of years ago at an Office Works stationery superstore in Melbourne I compared paper from about eleven different countries: Malaysia, Australia, Thailand, Belgium, and France among them. It was all as uniform and bland as a McDonald’s French Fries. The rise of the superstore had also brought a flattening out in the character of notebooks and journals, they were now made in bulk and sold in bulk and diversity disappeared.
In Margaret Mittelbach and David Crewdson’s quest to find the Tasmanian tiger, they quote a sign posted by Forestry Tasmania near a glorious, handsome four hundred year old Eucalpytus Regnans in the Styx Valley in Tasmania. It macabrely lists all of the uses a single 70 metre (230 foot) tree can be put to, generating timber for decorative veneers for a four storey hotel, solid wood for a full set of household furniture, the framing and roof trusses for an average family house, and, as an afterthought, enough pulp wood to “photocopy the entire works of Shakespeare more than 3,000 times over.”
“It was good to know that the wonders of the world could be of use instead of just sitting there and looking pretty,” they wrote. “We imagined a sign posted next to Michelangelo’s David on the industrial applications of marble: ‘The by-products derived from taking a sledgehammer to just one of Michelangelo’s great works can produce enough tiling to panel the bathroom in every suite at the Ritz-Carlton. And after all that, enough scrap marble will be left over o make 800 six-inch-high souvenir reproductions of David for sale at the gift shop. Don’t forget to stop and shop.’ “
I was motivated by unreal dreams of a Walkman of Words (as Sony called it’s first, ugly electronic book reader in 1991) and something like the organic food movement’s yearning for pre-industrial food, seasonal, in tune with nature. Living in New York in the late 1980’s I’d bought pleasingly-furred business Bond paper by the ream, pads of onion-skin Airmail writing paper and modest student’s lined and graph notebooks with minimal decorative elements on the cover. In all likelihood the manufacture of these papers would have been environmentally unfriendly, too, and I realised that I’d need to find alternatives to industrially-produced tree-pulp paper: an African grass called Kenaf? Bamboo? Hemp? In 1996 there weren’t so many obvious alternatives as there are now.
My books existed in a twilight zone, not completely organic, not fully electronic but I couldn’t find a happy medium. My business stalled because I’d been a knucklehead about the digital aspect. As a journalist I’d gravitated towards writing about robotics and electronic engineering research projects for hyper-specific foreign technical journals. I’d written an essay on Ken Goldberg’s telerobotic art projects for a publisher in Barcelona. In Spanish, which I barely comprehend, what I’d written seemed as magically romantic as a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel.
Paris Review: You describe seemingly fantastic events in such minute detail that it gives them their own reality.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: That’s a journalistic trick you can also apply to literature. For example, if you say there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.
Ken’s late twentieth century telerobotic art projects were based on mechanisms that were visible to the users when they logged onto the internet: robot arms, head-mounted navigational devices, a modified air blower, even the mysterious “shadow server” was a machine that we saw, an electronic counterpart of Marcel Duchamp’s “Ball of Twine With Hidden Noise”. They operated flawlessly and reliably, and had intuitively simple interfaces. These projects also had an operational clarity and sensual philosophical beauty that reminds me of a Leonard Cohen song: the gritty disappointments of everyday life in contrast with the soaring, transcendence of ancient religious imagery and references. William Gibson’s novels were another example of supernatural devices spoken of so naturally that it was impossible not to believe they existed. He didn’t invent fantasy worlds wholesale, he chronicled the way that technologies move into people’s lives, what the devices are like when they’re adapted, scuffed up, broken. Swept away by Ken’s projects and Gibson’s novels it didn’t seem to me that a series of paper-like screens, bound together, wirelessly downloading data into an electronic reader as unexceptional as a paperback novel would be nearly impossible to create. I kept thinking that in just a few months I could find the components to build them on the electronic components shelves of the hardware store in Los Feliz where I bought my bookbinding supplies.
I BECAME DISENCHANTED WITH ELECTRONIC BOOKS
In his autobiography inventor James Dyson describes the almost unbridgeable gulf between imagining a device can exist and bringing it to life, manufacturing it, and having it accepted in the marketplace. He made over 5,000 prototypes before perfecting the bagless dual-cylclone Dyson vacuum cleaner and almost went bankrupt in the process. But the harder part was struggling first with, then against, the global corporations who didn’t want such a different, efficient and lasting device to compete with their own vacuum cleaners. It made me realise that my thoughts of getting the current manufacturers of electronic book readers to help me develop my device were beyond foolhardy.
I spoke with James Dyson when he visited Australia at the end of 2007 to launch the Dyson Airblade, a more efficient and hygenic hand-dryer than those currently on the market. For the last couple of months ther’s been one in the kitchen where I’ve been working and it’s a marvel. The windscreen-wiper action that scrapes water from the hands is fast and efficient. When I’m confronted elsewhere now with paper of cloth towels, and weak dryers or those that spray water droplets. I wish that everywhere had a Dyson Airblade. It’s been sobering, too, to consider how difficult it’s been for James Dyson to succeed with products that are household or commercial necessities. My book-reader is based around my own ideas about the experience of reading that are at odds with the bookreaders that have been introduced so far, that it’s important to be able to flip back and forth between many pages of (even temporarily) fixed text rather than refresh a single page. An entry on the Union Square Ventures blog described how difficult it is to create a specific electronic device.
There is no easy way to create a purpose built device and integrate it into a new or existing process. The current method requires that the entire device be designed from scratch, all of the components or subsystems sourced anew for each new design. Finally you have to write custom software from scratch to stitch all the components together. It can take months to get a prototype to boot and years to integrate everything into a working product – electrical, mechanical, industrial engineering, manufacturing process engineering, QA, and support. And this is just the device. You then have to integrate that device into a business process and software applications environment. Half the time, by the time you are done, the process has changed and the technology embedded in the device is obsolete.
Contrast that to the way web services are built today. Start with the open source LAMP stack, modify slightly for your unique requirements, cut and paste a little Java script to mash up two or three other services on the web and than spend a couple of weeks hacking in a light weight scripting language like Ruby or PHP and presto you have a service that can serve hundreds of thousands of users. With a little more work it can support millions. The foundation of open source software and standard interfaces makes it much easier to create an innovative service and get it into the market quickly and cheaply.
Union Square Ventures Blog
The Sony and Amazon bookreaders that have been released in the last few years are ugly, clunky and limited in their software and capabilities, while Apple’s phones, monitors and i-pods are becoming Zen-minimal and increasingly sleekly responsive to every communication and entertainment application. The ease-of-use and immediacy of internet services on my mobile phone has diminished my desire for a dedicated electronic book reader. I read the New York Times and Google News selections and a few blogs on the Nokia phone I loathe. (I looked for a 3G phone as soon as the service was offered by my provider, selected from what was available then, and still have $150 in payments to make on this phone before I can turn it in.) I imagine that some time, soon, Apple will offer a device as responsive as the notebook of Shinya Yamazaki, my favourite character from William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy of novels. It will be a book, a music player, a phone, have a keyboard input, will capture, transcribe and translate audio, and turn pen scratches into data.
The twenty first century telerobotic art projects Ken Goldberg’s created have been invisible to the naked eye, or cloaked mechanisms, or been based around algorithms. He’s now the Director for the Centre for New Media at Berkeley and includes philosophies and concepts as media.
A medium, from the Latin for ‘middle element’, acts as a lens between observer and object, or between subjects. New Media refers to media that are discovered, invented, or adopted during a particular point or period in history. The alphabet was a new medium in 1800 BCE; subsequent new media include the printing press, telescope, camera, X-ray, and the electric light. Contemporary new media range from Wifi to Wii to Wikipedia.
The Berkeley Center for New Media defines new media broadly to include ideas that facilitate perception and communication: Theories are media. For example psychoanalytic theory and the theory of relativity are intellectual frameworks for interpreting phenomena; they act as lenses for viewing texts, data and events.
Manifesto. The Berkeley Center for New Media
And William Gibson’s novels of the twenty first century are placed in the present, with the technology that’s available now, and the chief villain is a Belgian advertising shark. A decade ago Gibson felt the tide begin to go out …
Skinner’s story seemed to radiate out, through the thousand things, the unwashed smiles and the smoke of cooking, like concentric rings of sound from some secret bell, pitched too low for the foreign, wishful ear.
We are come not only past the century’s closing, [Yamazaki] thought, the millennium’s turning, but to the end of something else. Era? Paradigm? Everywhere, the signs of closure.
Shinya Yamazaki, from Virtual Light by William Gibson, published in 1993.
