Hi, hypernarrative is a blog by Wilbert Baan about Art, Media and Technology with a focus on interactive storytelling. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed with Google or Netvibes. I'll post a few messages a week. Thanks for visiting!

Eclectro Directo: RGBoy live concert from Jan Dybala JD Video on Vimeo.

Once a month we organize a webcast at Eclectro. We use the website Ustream to broadcast a DJ-set or concert live from the DJ his living-room. All the DJ needs is a computer, webcam and internet connection.

Last friday the RGBoy-chiptune-heroes performed in front of the webcam. They performed a live gameboy concert including visuals. The entire performance was broadcasted live from Myslowice, Poland.

A chiptune, or chip music, is music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in realtime by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis. (Wikipedia)

The video above is a compilation from fridays performance. The tracks RGBoy plays are; my new PT82, super muter, secret level, 1980.

During these performances we invite viewers to use the Ustream chat-box. This increases the ‘live experience’ and enables contact between viewers and performers. The talks are often about technical problems, quality, track titles, personal matters or just to tell how great the artist is.

Utrecht meets Chicago
The next Eclectro Directo live performance will be friday the 30th of May. This time we will use the Mogulus website. Since this will be a live performance broadcasted simultaneous from two locations. Maurice Dohmen [moos] based in Utrecht, Netherlands takes care of the sound and visual artist Jorrit Poelen based in Chicago, USA takes care of the visuals.

Eclectro Directo Live: May 30th, 20:00 (Amsterdam time) / 1 PM Chicago Time

Eclectro Directo promo from Wilbert Baan on Vimeo.

Are you an electronic artist / producer / DJ and would like to perform live for the Eclectro webcam, let us know.

Photo from this blog post by Michael Shanks

We have always collected things. Somehow making collections is valuable to us. Most of the media we are collecting is moving or has moved to a virtual representation. Music is moving to the web, video and games will. And I’m sure books will move to the web as well. Encyclopedia and dictionaries already did.

In the end it will probably be a mix of economics and access that make things move to the cloud of information. Why buy a more expensive cd in the store if you can listen to the song right now?

For now we create virtual representations of our physical collections. For example the books you own on LibraryThing or Amazon or your music on Last.fm.

My ‘real-life’ public profile
We use the collections to express who we are. My books and my collected music tell me something about myself. Your collection of books is like a public profile that your real-life friends see when they visit your house.

I don’t know why we collect. For some people it is an obsession, see the movie in the end of this post.

When collections move virtual we get a new type of collectors. The librarians already unite at wikipedia to collect all the information that is valuable. We see creative artists playing with public sets of information through API’s and feeds. Making interactive installations or retrieve emotions and relations from large sets of data.

For journalists the information age is like a golden age. There is so much data public available that if you know how to make valuable collections you can generate news. A good collection of information can act like a news machine. Database journalism enables people to see patterns that answer or create questions.

Video
I’m researching some things about collections for the EN.nl website. Here are some videos I found that are really interesting.

The interactive installation “I Want You To Want Me”, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for their “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition.

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating. It chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, using real data collected from Internet dating sites every few hours.

The piece is presented on a 56″ high-resolution touch-screen, hanging vertically on the wall, and was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day.

My Map from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Email became an integral part of my life in 1998. Like many people, I have archived all of my email with the hope of someday revisiting my past. I am interested in revealing the innumerable relationships between me, my schoolmates, work-mates, friends and family. This could not readily be accomplished by reading each of my 60,000 emails one-by-one.

Instead, I created My Map, a relational map and alternative self portrait. My Map is a piece of custom designed software capable of rendering the relationships between myself and individuals in my address book by examining the TO:, FROM:, and CC: fields of every email in my email archive. The intensity of the relationship is determined by the intensity of the line.

My Map allows me to explore different relational groupings and periods of time, revealing the temporal ebbs and flows in various relationships. In this way, My Map is a veritable self-portrait, a reflection of my associations and a way to locate myself.

More info: christopherbaker.net/projects/mymap/

POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

‘POSSESSED’ enters the complicated worlds of four hoarders; people whose lives are dominated by their relationship to possessions. The film questions whether hoarding is a symptom of mental illness or a revolt against the material recklessness of consumerism. When does collecting become hoarding and why do possessions exert such an influence on our lives?

At the Next Web conference there was an overall urge for relevancy. You noticed it in presentations and startups. Unfortunately there weren’t many speakers that had exiting answers. In his presentation Robert Scoble made clear that for most new web applications ‘The first experience sucks‘.

Why?
This is inherent to how these new web applications work. The webservices that are doing something new are often ‘connected‘ applications. Websites and widgets connect information and people resulting in a new collections and new relevancy. This relevancy will only show itself when using the service for a while. Which is - of course - difficult to explain to a user when he or she signs up.

This is a user experience problem, but not one we will not find a solution for. The friendfinder button in most new web services enables you to import your Gmail contacts or another social network. Most applications are doing something similar to a service that already exists, with the open web (API’s and feeds) technology should be able to suggest a personal social profile before you start.

When information gets fragmented
What’s more interesting about this is what this search for relevancy really means. The web was always used similar to previous media. We made pages and domains on the web. Information was reserved for one place and relevancy was made by the website editor. This can be a news website or a blog.

Now the web is evolving in something that goes beyond what we are used to. Everything gets fragmented, distributed and aggregated. Information (text, photos and video) transfer from one online place to another. Information gets distributed and duplicated. The collection made by the creator is getting less relevant.

The distributed future of this blog post
For example this blog post is distributed through RSS and it will be picked up by a dozen of spam blog that will all duplicate the entire text and distribute it again. All these blogs are indexed over and over by aggregators like Google or any other. This blog post is written in the context of my blog, but most people will probably read it in another context. Specialized companies trace discussions about brands on the web and redistribute relevant articles. Social networks are crawling the web to show articles that are personal relevant to your profile (LinkedIn).

Data is made to be duplicated
The incredible amount of fragmented information is what makes the web interesting. New social recommendation tools, networks, online friends, aggregators, feeds and widgets are breaking the web apart. This is what makes the web really exiting and work like a network.

This is difficult to understand and use by publishers, copyright lawyers and designers but more relevant for the user. The reader doesn’t care what blog or website presents a good article or where they read it, as long as they can read it. The most important value is the relevancy of the presenter, this can be a system or your friend.

Diggnation live recording with fake mustaches Photo by Anne Helmond (on Flickr)

Today I visited the Next Web conference in Amsterdam. This conference is a two day event about the near future of the web.

Unfortunately I won’t be there tomorrow, but with these conferences this isn’t really a problem. There is a very good live coverage of the event. The organization took care of a live video stream, a backchannel, a great event blog and a bloggers corner (cable internet and wifi, power supplies) resulting in serious online coverage.

My highlights today (quotes aren’t the exact words used, this is how I interpreted them and wrote them down)
In the introduction there was a really interesting sentence by I think Erick Schonfeld that triggered me.

How to make money if the web explodes?

When I make something I don’t think much about business models, I like to think about a concept and how something can be valuable for a user. I don’t really see the web as a business. Although it is serious business.

For most people making a serious business defines the success of a concept. A web that is breaking apart (widgets, feeds) creates a serious problem for people who think this way.

The guy Bryan Thatcher from Empressr said about the future of the web:

“The cloud: information (content) becomes more important websites don’t”

Store your information online and access and transfer your information online. The computer or website becomes a terminal that allows you to access and alter your information. Open systems will eventually allow you to take (or distribute) your information to other services.

Kevin Rose talked about the future of Digg.com and how to make it more relevant.

Expose the right content to the right people

This quote is not just about Digg.com, it can be used for the web in general. We will see better and more personal filters. All these social applications and social profiles enable a better and more personal selection. We are getting used to this and expecting more relevant results on other websites as well.

Nova Spivack talked about his love for the semantic web

The web is the database

This is a concept that regards the semantic web as a database. Store all your information in ‘the cloud’ in the form of metadata. Every set of information will have a complete set of metadata in it, theoretically you wouldn’t need a database because everything is in the front-end.

A smart and great concept, but somehow I’m worried about who will make the meta information? User don’t like to enter a lot of meta information, they just want to upload and share photos.

Tomorrow another day, don’t miss it in Amsterdam or online.

Edge, the world question center asked scientists the question ‘what have you changed your mind about? why?‘ It’s an interesting collection of people telling something very personal. Changing your mind is good, although it often takes some courage because it feels like admitting a mistake.

What I changed my mind about
I believe in a future for hypernarrative in storytelling, navigating through a non-linear structure of pieces of information that gives you a personalized story. I thought in 2007 interactive storytelling would have it’s online breakthrough like YouTube had the year before. I thought companies would start to experiment with serious interactive stories since bandwidth, computers and technology are no longer limiting factors.

I was wrong, storytelling did take an enormous leap in 2007, not because of professional producers, but by people starting to embrace notification media. Websites like Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Hyves and Flickr. Online storytelling grew not because of bandwidth and fancy interactive video but because of text.

With notification media we tell short fragments that are by itself almost worthless. But once you follow someone and read (parts of the) the stream of fragments a story is created.

It had nothing to do with bandwidth or technology. It had probably more to do with a state of mind and a younger or open generation of web users who are not being afraid to expose a lot of personal information online. Information about yourself. Where you are, what you are doing and if you like it or not. Todays teenagers choose between privacy and identity and for them identity beats privacy.

The popularity of notification services brings a new challenge for search engines. Indexing a blog post or article is easy compared to indexing a fragmented story. Notifications aren’t tagged, often they don’t follow up on each other and I’m not sure if you can even solve this by introducing a complete semantic web.

By adding the live notifications the web brought more meaning to some people and less to the computers indexing it. Let’s see who is the first to make useful information of this rapid growing amount of fragmented notification data, Google?

Read about what Kevin Kelly and Xeni Jardin changed their minds.
Kevin Kelly (Wired) about Wikipedia
Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing) about the online community

The record Two of Us by the Kompakt duo Supermayer is voted as the best dance record for 2007. The last month of 2007 almost 20.000 people made a total of 113.000 votes.

[audio:http://eclectro.freshheads.com/audio/twoofus.mp3]

The voting machine we used is a widget like object. Websites can embed it. And with this the websites that embeds the voting widget decides the audience that does the voting. This has some effect on the results, because the election is a choice out of two random records the effect is limited.

For example when the popular music website Resident Advisor wrote about and embedded the election you could immediately see its influence on the results. Artist Nathan Fake ended third and this has a lot to do with taste of the Resident Advisor readers.

Overall I think we did another great election with great records and a really interesting and representative list of the top hundred dance records of 2007. I hope you have enjoyed the election and thanks for voting.

This is what we did in 2006 and this is what we did in 2005.

The voting widget. You can still listen, but your votes won’t count anymore.

If you have ideas how we could enhance the election mechanism or find another subject for the machine your ideas are very welcome.

I was thinking I could fill the election machine with points of view from US election candidates. You could find out what people think is most important and see which candidate supports it.