tim wright: digital writer & multiplatform wonk

4 Talent Interview

In the run-up to B.Tween I was interviewed by Channel 4 for its 4Talent site. Here's the resulting article: http://www.channel4.com/4talent/feature.jsp?id=4127

b.tween in bradford

I'm at the b.tween conference in rainy rainy Bradford. Terrific to find Alex Mayhew here and see that he is still creating sophisticated, avant-garde, beautiful work. I was looking forward to listening to Peter Cowley of Endemol today (I used to work with him when he was at Freeserve) but rain has stopped him getting here. Pretty sure we will get a glimpse of what David Bausola is up to at Imagination, which I suspect will be very interesting. Check out Where Are The Joneses?

My contribution here has been more stoopid Golf on the Moon stuff. Have still not found a way to explain this project in a way that might garner something more than blank indifference and/or polite chuckling. I think I might have to admit that this is a story that isn't really working.

On the other hand, we *did* play a bi of golf in the main conference space so  now have our third moon golf hole. Huzzah!

Global warming on Mars

Can’t quite believe that there are climate change nay-sayers out there who seriously believe that evidence of warming on Mars proves that warming on Earth is not man-made. Happily, the blogosphere has been responding with obvious but necessary rebuttals such as this.  Perhaps this is the way media consumption works now: newspapers and Tv grab  our attention and manipulate our emotions, but we have to go online to individual trusted voices in order to get at the facts .

Twitter

I've just started playing with Twitter. Could be extremely useful for initiating/tracking the astronaut training programme. Can't help feeling I'll also use it for badminton-related celeb spotting. We'll see...

Here's my badge anyway:

follow moongolfer at http://twitter.com

succumbing to myspace

OK, so I've finally setup a basic myspace page at http://www.myspace.com/golfonthemoon, chiefly so I can keep tabs on a few bands I'm interested in. All suggestions welcome as to what the hell someone like me might actually use myspace for are welcome.

Insync Xmas party

On the back of the fab PlayTime event, I was very honoured to be asked to be part of the Insync Xmas party, developing some of the ideas for my MoonGolf project as a set of simple and discreet exercises that people could engage with whilst also doing all that stuff that people do at xmas parties (i.e. drinking).

Here's a Download golfonthemoon_summary2.pdf with info about the different exercises I'm developing for all budding moongolfers.

Here's the flickr set from the evening (you'll note that I have a number of 'action man' re-enactments to think about)

Here are some YouTube videos that demonstrate that Bowie simulation can be fun and telling. I'm particularly pleased with my own 'Fantastic Voyage' recital:

AN IPOD SHUFFLE GOES TO THE CREATOR OF THE BEST MOON/GOLF/BOWIE IMAGE SUBMITTED BY XMAS

To celebrate the success of the PlayTime event and continue Tim Wright’s mission to play golf on the moon (with David Bowie), XPT is offering a iPod Shuffle to the person who comes up with the best photographic simulation of a particular aspect of the the 30-year plan.

As Rob Bevan has already commented: ‘Simulation=Solution”.

Rob Bevan's PlayTime post

"Photo manipulation has always had a bit of a bad name, and even today we’re still worried that adding, removing or modifying parts of a photographic image detract from photography’s perceived ability to show us the truth. But you could argue that these techniques - and especially montage/manipulation (cf. the history of collage, Eisenstein etc, blah blah) - allow us to see other, new truths (all that nonsense about MegaWords was a joke about quantifying this). And the things you need, stock imagery, skills, tools etc. are becoming more available and affordable all the time: see all the examples of the web services* I mentioned. So we’re going to see a lot more of it, especially with the YouTube generation, and it’s also something that we (XPT and everyone else) are going to continue to have a lot of fun with…

*Most of the links to these are embedded in the PDF, but for convenience here are the best of them: Worth1000, Photoshop Tennis, iStockPhoto, Snipshot, Tourist Remover, Riya Visual Search, Lazy Mask, Zonetag, scanR, retrievr, Mappr, Ning Photos and Google Moon.

http://robbevan.com/blog/2006/11/22/playtime-playing-with-pictures/

Gavin Stewart's PlayTime links

A poem from Poorly Pets called Fish
A games/poem project called Mystery Museum
Also Gavin's digital art: - choice/cuts -
And the flash poem Slippage

All of Gavin's photos of the day can be found in the golfonthemoon group.

Tom Hume's links from PlayTime

Here are my URLs:

http://www.asterisk.org/

http://www.yac.com/

http://www.gnokii.org/

http://www.clicktell.com/

http://www.mxtelecom.com/

http://www.scoopt.co.uk/

http://www.shozu.com/

http://english.ohmynews.com/

http://www.futureplatforms.com/

http://tomhume.org/

www.golfonthemoon.com

I am now the proud possessor of the URL golfonthemoon.com, which from now on should be the central hub for all noodlings about this project.

At the moment it is simply a muddle and a mess, and most of the interesting assets are elsewhere in a blog, or in sites like Flickr, YouTube, Ning etc.

I guess it’s part of the point of this project to explore how user generated content from all these different Web 2.0 sites and services might be choreographed into a meaningful and entertaining shared narrative or performance.

I’m feeling a bit nervous that I’m just going to noodle rather pointlessly in public for a while and that will be it. But then again, this is pretty much how In Search of Oldton started, so there’s hope for me yet.

rocket scientists

How intense and energized people looked at PlayTime when asked to get serious about playing with Lego.

Stuart Nolan is just so good at getting people to use this classic toy as a means to explore metaphor and build concrete models of people’s emotions, memories, relationships and concepts.

In this case people were asked to build something that represented an idea or memory associated with travel, and then they had to talk about their construction in terms of what it represented.

Notice how keen people are to protect their creation with their hands as they talk, and look at the object with a great deal of warmth and intensity.

Take the soundtrack and context out and I realized that what I was looking at could just as easily be a bunch of scientists or engineers demonstrating their latest designs – for a rocket, maybe?

Or component parts of a rocket?

So here I have my first team of rocket designers – and since Lego is made up of very basic components, I can in most cases, straight from the photo or video, construct my own pretty close versions of whatever my scientists design.

Perhaps I can fit them together in some way to create the full scale *big* rocket that will take me to the moon.

BTW have you tried Lego Digital Designer yet?

Becoming an action man

One of the images to come out of the PlayTime event that I liked the best was one where Rob and I are lying on the floor holding hands.

We look quite camp and a bit floaty and doll-like, don’t we?

Why are we doing this? Well, the idea was to leave my two Action Men (the old one that looks like me is now being referred to as Minor Tim – geddit?) lying around for anyone to play with throughout the day. I’d then take a picture of them in any pose or situation they happen to have been left in – and then Rob and I would then re-enact that pose or situation and have our photo taken. Basically we would be snapped ‘being Action Men’.

Subsequent to this I have used this photo to show Rob & I “floating in a tin can/far above the Earth”.

Gradually the simulation is becoming more ‘real’ .

Now take a look at this amalgamation of images to show me and Rob and the Action Men *and* Bowie *and* a golf ball all floating inside a spaceship. This part of the mission is really starting to take shape, no?

What I need now is more opportunities to allow people to play with my Action Men to create a library of poses and situations. Can you help?

the first hole

As you can see from the previous blog entry, I did make some attempt at PlayTime to get some golf played.

Many many thanks to both Rob Bevan and Paul Dornan (pictured left) for being game enough to not only get out on the street, but also to dress up a bit in silly gear and even attempt a very basic Bowie simulation both in terms of make-up and singing (more on this in the weeks to come…)

It strikes me that it should be possible for us to design and simulate many and various moongolf course holes here on earth – in much the same way as the Apollo astronauts had to spend time plodding around old Icelandic lava fields to get some idea of what the moon surface might be like.

All we need to do is define the location of the tee and the location of the hole and decide how many shots one should normally take to get from tee to hole. Budding hole designers could take mobipics of their designated tee, a view to the hole and hole itself, plus perhaps snaps of the location of the ball after each shot.

Ambitious hole designers might even make a video walkthrough. I've already taken snaps of the first hole in Soho that we played at PlayTime - and I even have a video of it on YouTube:

In this way we could put together a whole collection of moongolf holes scattered across the country for anyone to play at any time. Perhaps we could use GoogleMaps to log them all.

One minor quibble I’ve had from friend Phil Dolman to this idea is that the earth’s terrain is nothing like the moon’s. This we can change.

Once a hole has been designed and mapped, there is absolutely no reason why moongolfers couldn’t bring their own terrain with them. Perhaps one by one we could take small piles of moondust to the designated site and leave it in the appropriate place (a bit like the prisoners in The Great Escape shaking out tunnel dirt out of the bottom of their trousers in the exercise yard…).

This leads to the exciting idea that a call could go out to all registered moongolfers to come and deposit moondust in a particular area with a view to a full simulation taking place at some point in the future.

For example then, I’d like people to start dumping small deposits of moondust at the end of Peter Street, Soho, roughly here please (or better at the end of the alley near the two white paving stones), with a view to us having another go at simulating a moon golf hole on 13th December 2006 at 7pm.

If each moongolfer contributed just a handful of sand or dust or whatever, we could end up with quite a pile in a few weeks time and therefore achieve a much more accurate simulation of golf on the moon. Now all we have to consider is the low-gravity/weightlessness issue…

First moongolf simulation

Inspired by Rob Bevan's excellent talk on image manipulation at PlayTime, I've attempted my first moongolf 'simulation', and have added it to the golfonthemoon Ning group. Here is the original photo. Rob is offering a new iPod shuffle to the best contributions to the group (although as an XPT employee I'm not allowed to win, apparently).

The orange spacesuit

The orange suit has proved to be very popular and it photographs well.

I’ve even been asked to drop round to a neighbour’s house in full astronaut regalia to show it off to their young son. I’m not sure if I have the chutzpah yet to walk around my own neighbourhood in this way. Certainly my daughter will die of embarrassment.

What I really need is a similar suit for my Action Man doll. At the moment he’s making do with Captain Scarlet’s hand-me-downs. Anybody got any spare outfits?

Astronaut training

As part of the preparation for PlayTime, I wanted to see how I might entice people into a basic text interaction with the GolfontheMoon project.

When I say people, I mean mainly people who had already agreed to speak or participate in the event itself, so we’re talking about a group of fairly playful friends with a high tendency to interact. 

First off, I sent them this text message:

Task 1: attempt a sense of weightlessness today. Report back with your results. Did you achieve it? How? And how did it feel?

Here are some of the responses. Those who replied to this first message then got a second task:  

Task 2: be short sharp and concise in all communication. Send me an example of the quickest way to say something important

Here are the responses to this second SMS. Quite what I now do with this material I’m not sure, but I think it’s probably my task to somehow work these texts into the golfmission. Are they the meat of imagined conversations with Bowie on the way to the moon? Are they instructions from mission control that need to be carried out by me, the astronaut as part of my training?

Thanks to Jamie Cason BTW for observing that he was expecting me to devise training for him, rather than him having to formulate something for me. As he put it: “I was expecting some hidden agenda to be provided to me, I guess I'll have to devise one of my own now.” 

It is a salutory reminder that in expecting people to devise their own creative stuff and then hand it over to me in a timely fashion in the right format, I am almost certainly asking far too much. Most people don’t have time or the inclination to respond or interact to even the most compelling content with little more than a few button presses.

the obvious question about my Playtime presentations

Tom Hume asks in a mail today:

"why golf with bowie on the moon? I'm guessing  it's the result of a late night/early morning bet...???"

I surprised myself by answering him quite fully (and note the admission at the end that I don't really know what I'm doing...):

"Yup - the golf on the moon with bowie did start as a bet (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldton_tim/sets/72157594311920771/)

But I was also drawn to it because it combines and supports a lot of issues I'm interested in right now: mid-life crisis and being white, male and middle class (becoming a golfer...), space tourism becoming viable in my lifetime (if technology allows me to live long enough), playing like a pro but working like an amateur, dressing up & miming and re-enactment, author as performer and as plaything of the audience, using virtual web activity to make things happen in the real world (a kind of triggering but of people not always objects...) and the achievement of a seemingly impossible goal (just as the original manned flight/rocket scientists did - going from madcap machinery in the back garden to a man on the moon in less than 50 years - although having a world war and then a cold war did rather help free up budget and resources).

I wasn't very good on the day in explaining the motives behind the project because I guess I was using the day to try and find out what the hell I might be up to. I'm planning to publish something within the next couple of weeks that should make up for that and make use of all the texts, images and videos that came out of the day.

Post-Playtime

What a great time we had at Playtime last Weds. All the speakers and participants were excellent (see Download playtime_schedule.pdf ). And I got a great deal of inspiration - plus texts images, vids and audience participation - for my golf on the moon project. Thanks to everyone who took part.

For relevant links check out http://del.icio.us/timwright1964/playtime.

For pics check out http://www.flickr.com/groups/golfonthemoon/.

Some moongolf related vids are on http://www.youtube.com/group/golfonthemoon.

I know too that both Frank Boyd and Tom Hume have blogged the event. Do let me know if others have.

I'm working on full online documentation for the day and an all-new golfonthemoon site, to be completed within the next couple of weeks.

bowie on youtube

My word there’s a lot of great material here: pirated clips from every Bowie era, in every language, documentaries, adverts, karaoke performances, tributes, pastiches, cover versions and on and on and on...  My personal favourites? This:

and this:

It’s heartening to discover how keen people (well, some people) are to sing, dress up, perform and play given the right creative stimulus.

moongolf on youtube

I bought a webcam that came with some very basic ‘muvee’ creation software. It took me less than an hour to bash out these two moongolf trailers and publish them on YouTube (yeah, yeah, and it shows..).

It goes to show how easy it is becoming to fill up the Web with this kind of low-grade sketchbook material. It also demonstrates to me how quickly a writer such as myself can get lured away from the basic business of writing – with words.

Playtime! on October 4th 2006