The problem with saying “something will turn up - it usually does” is that you’re not working from a complete sample: the only cases we know about are the ones where something did turn up. We don’t hear about all the times something failed to turn up. There might be just as many of them.

From one of our meeting rooms you can see some trees standing in the flagstones outside the old IMAX building. The trees are young, with a slim trunk and a clear head of leaves on top, like a child’s drawing: the leaves are large and well defined, and if the sun shines brightly enough the trees cast clear shadows. I was struck, recently, by the indissoluble link between the tree and the shadow, and thought how satisfying it would be to be hold the shadow in place as the sun moved slowly round, breaking that link. As the shadows of the other trees crept across the flagstones, the discrepancy between them and the one shackled in place would become more visible: the angle between them would tell you how long it had been held in place.

Not literally possible, of course, and probably for the best. But I thought perhaps there might be a way to mimic this, to fix the shadow on the ground somehow so that it would be clear that wherever the shadow might be at present, at some point in history it had been elsewhere. You can get hold of photosensitive paper fairly easily, I think, but I wanted something that would act faster than paper. At the moment, I’m thinking about evaporation. I want to find some kind of mixture that would stain the ground at about the same rate that it evaporates, so that all you have to do to fix a shadow would be to spill this fluid over it and wait. If the sun was particularly strong that day, the shadow would be sharp and defined: if it was cloudy, or windy perhaps, it would be blurry and indistinct. The shadow would tell you not just that time had passed but also something about the weather: from a shape on the ground you could read the history of the sky.

The thing I like most about this idea is that you could make pictures by fixing overlapping shadows, if you had an object with the right shape in the way of the sun. I’d love to hand out vials of this shadow fixing elixir with a picture and GPS co-ordinates: from the angle of the shadows in the picture you’d have to work out when to pour the liquid on the ground in order to reproduce it. Or perhaps you’d just have a set of times and a location, and when you stepped back from the shadows you’d fixed over the course of the morning, a message would reveal itself. Lots of games. But in all of them, you’d have to think about the relationship between time and the world, and when you see it and when you don’t, and that would be, I think, a good thing.

The Comfort of Strangers game is playing at the Come Out and Play festival in NYC in a couple of weeks: I’m hoping they’ll bring it along to Hide and Seek in London at the end of June. There was something kind of magical about weaving a team together from nothing more than proximity, and playing a game outside gives you new eyes for a familiar landscape: in the end, though, I think I just like running around and hiding.

There is no “before we begin”. We have already begun.

We offer a manifesto for a revolution, an uprising to sweep intellectual torpor from those gatherings that hold influence, a revolt to bring to power those with blood in their veins and fire in their synapses:

1. Nobody in attendance over 30, or lacking possession of the hunger that comes before seniority and respect have taken hold.
2. On entering, all in attendance to state honestly that they have read what they were expected to read: those that cannot to wear a token indicating so, in order that their fellows might judge what they say accordingly.
3. No more venues that speak of success and privilege, that flatter those that attend they exist in an echelon apart from the common mass. Places that energise and dare the senses should be our only residence: the edges of clifftops; the roofs of speeding trains; the engine room of a crippled submarine; a palace of ice that will melt within an hour.
4. Every one attending to look within themselves when they find nothing ready to say: if nothing appears, or if they think more about the other participants than the task at hand, or if they discover themselves saving insight for more amenable company, they should bow quietly and leave.

Talking this way will be glorious! Talking this way will be fast, correct and free of ego! Talking like this will be electrodynamic!

I’ve got longer notes from the day that I need to digest before I put up here: broad themes that seem to stand out right now are a faith in the power of making the invisible visible (so a lot of talk about data visualisation and open data), the importance of community in effecting social change and a refreshing lack of faith in technological fixes that are unsupported by changes in behaviour. Two things that seemed to arise from a lot of people’s talks that I need to think more about: all the failures that people described (in regulating emissions, or in delivering aid or technology) seemed to be more about management and process than technology or access to data, despite this last point being a central article of faith for the conference, and I wonder if that might be a more productive (though more boring, perhaps) thing to think about. And the second was this idea of “community” - it seems to come loaded with a set of ideas about the sort of people in the community, that they’re nice people like us, whereas of course plenty of revolting people form communities as well. Minor point, really.

Anyway. My bit didn’t make anyone leave, which is my usual measure of success, but I think there were a few points that I might have offered people in a more structured and articulate way. It was a good experience to speak to a different audience, though, having spent the last couple of years talking mainly to education conferences and policy types, and I’ve got a few points to consider for the next time I talk in front of people. Learning, learning, always learning. For what it’s worth, I’ve put my slides up here if you’re interested. And I was really pleased to discover, during a vanity google, a twitter survey on a question that Ben posed afterwards, from Jemimah Knight: really interesting responses, will have to give them a bit of a mull.

So. Notes to come on speakers and ideas but short version: it’s brilliant, go to the next one.

I always imagined that being a crane operator would be different to any other job on a building site: entering the site with the rest, checking your safety hat, perhaps eating a thin bacon sandwich spotted with burnt fat from the van, but always leaving them early to grip the first rung and start the long climb away, to the glass box where the ground looks unreal and mistakes are so consequential. Up there the radio link to your colleagues below would be slow and clumsy compared to the signals and nods that pass between you and the other crane operators across the rooftops. On sunny days the shadows cast by the latticed jib on the cab would turn your brothers into strange amputated shadows - a booted foot, a firm hand and the rest uncertain behind the cab glass, turned to sky and clouds on the vertical edge of the city. In pubs you would recognise each other by the tanned wrinkles beside your eyes, and the way your colleagues treated you with respect but no affection, not trusting your love of the high places.

Last night I met a man who called himself a stevedore. He wasn’t sure whether we knew the term: I described him as an expert on lifting anything and he said “close enough”. He preferred the word to “docker”, which he thought made people think of tattoos and bad behaviour, and I agree that it’s a fine thing to have an excuse to use a word like “stevedore” and mean it. Most of his work is in ports around the Severn, although he modestly suggested that his expertise sometimes calls him to London, and he spends his time in gantry and tower cranes, lifting crates of things that come from far over the horizon. I was thrilled, though I hope I kept my cool. Finally, to meet someone who could share with me something of the brotherhood. I tried to remember that he would be surprised by my insight. Could he see other crane operators? He could? And did they nod to one another, closer to their brothers than the earthbound below? He said, no, not really, they tended to use the radio to talk to their crew.

On the way home I heard fireworks nearby. Looking for the light, I saw they were coming from the bridge I had to walk across in a couple of minutes. Should I walk on and cross further down? But that would be cowardice and as good as saying I don’t live here: I carried on to the bridge. Halfway across I saw them: a middle-aged man, hands in pockets, looking embarassed, and a woman near him, leatherette blouson and gold hoop earrings, with a carrier bag of fireworks and a grin on her face a mile wide, firing them one by one across the New Cut.

Internet language, by which I mean hip internet language, the sort used by twenty-four-year-olds who have been twenty-four for long enough now to understand tax returns and how to make money from selling t-shirts that carefully mean nothing, the sort of approach to communication that thinks “i have an extra controller do you want to play as luigi i know that’s not much but this is my house” is a good sort of a thing to say on a masthead, the kind of speech that reckons that, if ordinary metaphor is two kinds of meaning and intertextual metaphor is three and that’s better, then metaphor which is likely shorn of any referent for your audience is NONE times THRIFTEEN better which is win, this kind of language is, I intend to propose once I’ve thought this through a bit better and the flashing lights have gone from my peripheral vision, this kind of language is a perfectly good response to the problem of having a thousand and two billion people at risk of reading your words.

By which I mean, analysing memey language (the language of lol and of fail and having all of things belong us, not specifically memetic language that copies and replicates extant modes of communication) according to computing history, or the affordances of the technology present when a certain kind of speech was established, or the prevalent youth codes active in the populations that propagate these ways of talking online might not be as elegant a way of approaching this indefinable (really) but instantly recognisable (honestly) internet trait as coming to see it as a way of preserving self through obscurity, a tacitly recognised capitulation to the need to remain unknown to most people (this is normal and healthy) while still being available to all. If I use a metaphor that makes no sense (”scratch and sniff” for “have a look at the archives”) then maybe what I’m really doing is looking for the least (not most) relevant yet meaningful connection I can make, in a signal that, if you understand, even inarticulately, my reasons for doing that, then you will understand.

My god it’s hideous, this thought, so different from the pure and snowy notion that drifted in just two paragraphs earlier. The class have been cruel in their passion, stubby and unco-ordinated fingers blurring essential features, warping what were harmonious qualities into the kind of ghastly shape I hope never has a pulse. Obviously, understanding the need for obscurity through language has been a hallmark of youth talk since things were copacetic, and the imperative to say things to be got rather than have them contain things to get is what makes cool things cool (if you have to ask, then…). But it seems to me that in this lies a possible defence against the relentless flaying of our social skins by the sharp demand for transparency issued by the web, that in defying Wittgenstein and making languages private we might find a way to wriggle out of the riddle posed by socially-targeted ads and Amazon recommendations, by googling new employees and only posting our good shots on flickr, and that maybe the development of the notion of ‘cool’ in the twentieth century is what will help us hang on to the concept of ’self’ in the twenty-first.

That, and rooting bare-fingered through the slime and detritus of flooded cities for anything we can burn for fuel, or course. This might be a worry only for a very short time. But still: it’s an idea I’d like to record, to leave in its various stunted forms on the shelves of my inner art store, to wander about and reconstruct in its Platonic glory from the absences present in these muddled sentences. It says “notebook” up there for a reason, after all.

SIMULATED USERS ON FLICKR: CAUTION!!!

Dear friends

I’m be menaced and importunaded per “users” - newly arrived on FLICKR - because a picture by me uploaded in 27JAN2008. See the photo, one of menaces and my reply in farm3.static.flickr.com/2280/2223613619_4ac516968d_o.jpg
They used the Flickr-Mail principaly to irritate me…
What I do in this case?
Sincerily,

MATEUS27_24&25