Author: Ben Barker

Ben Barker

21st February 2013

Recently we’ve talked a lot about how memory and place relate, in part following on from our thoughts on Memory, identity and the network. The discussion also formed a starting point for our Playable City submission. We have been exploring ways to let people create a new history of the city, to record and share the stories they have lived and are living.

One inspiration was Austerlitz, Seabald’s excellent novel where the titular protagonist unravels his forgotten past through travel, searching for his identity by crossing the globe as if it was his brain, examining the cities of crumbling synapse. It paints an idea of our environment, the city, as a Wiki about how we got to be the way we are, where we can walk the streets and be reminded of the ingredients.

James Bridle draws the network as the 5th dimension, that of memory:

“The network is not a shared consciousness, but it is a shared memory (and a shared experience if it makes sense to say that our experiences are just memories)… It is a recording device. It is a recording angel, but a curiously passive one. “

This passivity is important, more than ever there is an imperative to be agent in how we remember. What do we give and what do we get back? The network defies time too, at last years Serpentine Memory Marathon Douglas Copeland talked about how eras have been flattened in our networked age, platforms like spotify don’t care about when.

“Our lives have lost their narrative threads. The internet has bent us to it’s will quicker than any other technology….all eras co-exist at once.” 

The collective memory has become as available as our own, the function of memory on identity is being separated and tested. We rely on the network to tell us what we are like. This Is My Jam Odyssey refers to a years personal listening as an epic journey of exploration, and it is. The network knows we want, perhaps need, to be reminded of what we’re like. Bookcases aren’t about storage, but a granular record of what we’re made of, and this is a continuation.

I’ve referenced Tom Armitage’s Ghostcar before and it goes someway to answering the question of how we geolocate and revist memories in a meaningful way. It’s built on FourSquare, the most notable locational service and a very digital tool in a physical, messy reality. The beauty of ghostcar is it closes the loop, asks you to actually be there. Tom Loois’  Blank Ways is an app that shows the places you haven’t been, what Matt Ward describes as the spaces of mental calm, the unused storage, it’s a poetic highlighting of how memory and location are interwoven.

The memory structures of a city are a journey of surprise, we don’t always know the recalled experiences that will jump from a bus stop or broken sign. At it’s simplest, the network requires us to know what we want to remember. Facebook reminds us of holidays and parties, twitter of our sharable thoughts (it’s well worth keeping a tweets I didn’t send.doc as a personal record). We don’t visit physical spaces to journey backwards so often, but if we did, could we equally describe a return to childhood haunts as an ‘epic journey of exploration’? On a recent trip to my Grandparents soon to be sold house, I was surprised by the number of memories awaiting me, one in a steep stair case, another in a half dug pond. The image of it all being bulldozed and lost forever suddenly seemed a much more personal violation, a loss of data. Our experiences are intricately linked with place, but we haven’t reconciled locations temporality with our new networked realities.

So it’s from that space, between the networked collation of experience, and the stronger sensory reactions evoked using location that we approached Hello Lamp Post. Documenting and sharing these spacial memories as they change, before they change. Tracing them onto the network. The infrastructure of the smart city provides the skeleton of a low tech network that we hope will allow us to explore that.

Ben Barker

21st January 2013

We are excited to announce that our project Hello Lamp Post! has been selected for the Playable City Award. It’s a real surprise, we still can’t quite believe it. When we saw the quality of the shortlist, with work from so many names that we respect, we never imagined being chosen. We’re thrilled and can’t wait to get working. Big thanks to Tom and Gyorgyi for their work too.

We’re also really grateful to the judges for their comments, some of which are below.

Imogen Heap said: ‘I love this for its whispers on the street, guardians in dark corners, humanising our cities’ appendages whose eyes and ears now have a voice. Vessels for an ever evolving conversation, connecting us together. They were there all along!’

Tom Uglow said: ‘Hello Lamp Post! stood out with a potential for both art and play using existing urban furniture. It points to a future made up of the physical objects already around us, the ‘internet of things’, and the underlying complexity is made simple and easy for people by just using SMS for this project. Poetry and technology combine to create subtle and playful reflections of the world we live in. It filled me with a childish delight.”

Claire Doherty says: “We were enchanted by this proposal and particularly loved the way it challenged the prevalence of mass-entertainment and spectacle, revealing an invisible ‘soft city’ – the exchanges and incidents that create a city’s social fabric. It’s rare to find a proposal which combines those intimate exchanges with the humour and playfulness of Hello Lamp Post!”

Clare Reddington, Judging Panel Chair says, “We were really excited by the applications we received and by the comments and questions from audiences about the short-listed entries.  The judges had a difficult decision to make but have selected an unusual and innovative project, which responds perfectly to the theme and seems very apt for Bristol. We will certainly have some challenges to make sure the project reaches as many people as possible, but am sure people will respond with curiosity and warmth and I am very much looking forward to waking up some street furniture this summer.”

We’ll keep you updated as the project develops, and look forward to developing the ideas and building the project. Thanks for all the support during the shortlisting process.

Ben Barker

5th December 2012

This year our advent calendar is called The Santa Scores. It is the only advent-calendar tv-listings site that picks a film from that day, and then rates it for Christmasiness, against other films that are also on, but on different days. 

Last year our advent calendar reviewed pre-packaged high street sandwiches. This year we’re asking what gives films a festive feeling. We’ve been scanning the TV listings for you. Every day we’ll choose a film that looks like the most Christmassy one on and then we’ll review it for Christmasiness. You can exploit this information as you choose.

From an experiential perspective, we think the “Christmas feeling” is very interesting. It’s a weird compound emotion – a mix of apprehension, nostalgia and suspension of disbelief; synonymous with feelings towards family, reward, comfort and pop mythology. Though it must be unique for everyone, a lot of people understand it as a concept and have had personal experience of it. When it begins is very subjective, and the subtlest of details can trigger it – Christmas lights going up, decorating the tree, or other tropes and rituals – including, we suspect, certain films. We’re keen to find out which movies have the best chance of triggering a ‘festive cascade’.

Ben Barker

11th July 2012

The Podcast:

In this second podcast we talk with Isabel Christie, a neuroscientist, about memory creation and recollection. We ask:

Without memory, or the ability to recall it, is there any value in experience?
Can you be something other than the collection of memories that you have?
Are memory and sentience the same thing?

As we say, Pan exists to explore what value we as humans find in experience. We understand that the transformative quality of experiences define us as humans and constitute the major part of what makes a life. In exploring memory, we hope to better understand the role of memory recall in valuing experiences.

Oh, and the image above is of a synapse, the connection between two neurons in the brain. The strengthening and weakening of these synapses is called synaptic plasticity and it is understood that a vast network of these connections is what represents memory.

Here’s the direct link to the file: Memory Podcast

Ben Barker

2nd May 2012

I can’t really remember the film Moneyball. I saw it recently, and I’m sure it was fine. I think Brad Pitt looked a bit waxy, a man did something with numbers. I suppose it saved me reading the wikipedia page for either or both of them. If a friend hadn’t asked my opinion, I would have forgotten it forever. That doesn’t make it a bad film, but in my estimation doesn’t make it a good one either, it left no legacy.

Is that system fair, and does it translate more broadly to experience?

A measure for experience might be memorability. If you can’t remember a month, a year or a decade, then it probably lacked profound, revelatory or stimulating experiences. This is something we touched on in our podcast a few months back. Though it could also be applied to any single experience as much as a period of time. Think back to any moment, how sharply do you remember its smells, encounters or the way you felt. What does your recall of it tell you about its significance?

There is the danger of making memory creation the activity rather than one of the outcomes, here’s Simon Amstell on that:

“I was in Paris recently with a new group of people… So she suggests that, at about three in the morning, that we all run up the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. And I guess telling you about that now sounds a little bit exciting and fun, but at the time, I just thought, “but w-why would we do that? And then what’s the point? And then when we get there, then what will we do with our lives?” And I’m sort of analyzing what the point of it is, and we live that way [points the other way] and it seems a long way to go. And everyone else is just not analyzing, they’re just running and I’m running as well because of the peer pressure because I’m fun! And we’re all running and running and everyone else, I think, is just at one with the moment, at one with joy, at one with the universe, and I’m there, as I’m running, thinking, “well, this will probably make a good memory!” Which is living in the future discussing the past with someone who, if they asked you, “oh, what did it feel like?” “I don’t know! I was thinking about what to say to you!”

If he had of been “at one with the universe” like his peers, he could still have formed a lasting memory, however it wasn’t a transformative or meaningful experience for him, so he had to consciously encode it.

So how is memory formed? This is all reduced from Richard C. Mohs, PhD description at: http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/life/human-biology/human-memory.htm

It begins with encoding of perception. Perception is a stimulation of any or all of the senses. The Hippocampus then integrates all those inputs into a single experience and decides if they are worth remembering. This is based on your state of mind, repetition and need. We are surprisingly in control of what we remember. He says “how you pay attention to information may be the most important factor in how much of it you actually remember.”
As one brain cell sends signals to another, the synapse between the two gets stronger. The more signals sent between them, the stronger the connection grows. Thus, with each new experience, your brain slightly rewires its physical structure. What is interesting is that we can either choose to try and remember something, or an experience can be sufficiently transformative that it demands to be remembered. First kiss, first airplane flight. First is a word that comes up again and again.

In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust made the distinction between habitual memory and what he called ‘memoire invoulontaire’. He took the view that ‘habit was anaesthetic to memory’ and that it ‘weakens all impressions.’ He even went as far as saying that it was ‘a second nature that prevented us from knowing our real selves’. The important distinction here is made between strong memorable moments, and the anaesthetic of memories encoded through habit. As A. E. Pilkington explains, Proust sees “voluntary and involuntary memory as recollection of identifiable events”, however Bergson makes the point in Matter et Memoire that ‘the two memories [may] run side by side and lend to each other a mutual support.’ So the challenge is not just forming memory, but memory of identifiable events and moments.

Can we use memorability as a measure of experience?

A reasonable criticism may be the fallibility of memory. We adapt our experiences to represent what we want, without subjectivity so memory is not a definte measure, however it is an indicator of richness of experience. We can ask ourselves what stands out, and in that sense the detail is less important, our remembrance, however skewed, is the measure of value.

After-Life is a beautiful film by Hirokazu Koreeda where newly dead people find themselves in a waystation en route to heaven. They are asked to reflect on what their favourite memory is. All the characters are drawn from interviews with real people, put into the hypothetical situation. It’s interesting for the memories they choose, but also for forcing people to weigh their lives. If you were one of the newly deceased, what would you choose?

What other measures of experience might exist? Personality, appearance, values. All of these are surely products of memory, be it habit (the experientially bad kind), voluntary (actively remembered) or involuntary (excited by chance). The quality of memory that an experience generates is its only legacy. Taking the metaphorical deathbed* as being the bottom-line of life, will you congratulate yourself the endless hours of forgettable contentment or be glad of the memorable experiences and transitions?

*The moment when your memories are both the most valuable and the most worthless. This is a big question to address, for now ponder on this quote from Blade Runner:

Tears In Rain (Blade Runner – 1982):
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. [pause] Time to die.”

Ben Barker

17th April 2012

Turning theory into practice is one of the hardest aspects of running a critical design studio. Having theoretical stand points and acting on them are two different things, easier to say what not to do than exemplify your beliefs through doing. We are working towards it thanks to the Critical Audit that Matt gave us a while back.

In that time I have always held in high regard The School of Life, in part due to it’s connection with Alain de Botton. Though in greater part, because it had a series of beliefs that it finds actual outlets for. Sermons, lessons, tours, feasts. All of the output is considered and consistent with their wider beliefs, which is not easy.

I went to one of the Utopian Feasts last Wednesday, where the menu expended a lot more time on the conversation we would be having, than on the food. A curated journey of discussion. The food was consciously all white, the idea being that conversation was the evenings colour. In my work with Innovation Unit we often facilitate discussion, and have very structured ways of taking them to conclusions. We typically use “tools” that are designed specifically for particular workshops, for example creating personnas to walk though the contact points of a remodelled council structure, or asking people to draw a specific role to express it in a different way. The challenges include making people confident that their ideas are valuable, keeping the conversations on track and turning discussion into outcomes.

The Utopian Feast was fun because we were a bunch of similarly minded people in a room, (in that sense it can’t fail) however I would have been excited to see how far our explorations into the Utopic society could have gone with a more structured facilitation. We were so worried about where we lived, what we believed and who had met AdB that we hardly had time to draw up new worlds. To be critical of the event, perhaps the ambition outreached the reality of middle class strangers in a room.

Regarding the School of Life as a whole though, the answer, or at least the next question, is in the name. How much is the school analogy a useful metaphor and how much is it actually a school? I think this is one of the bigger decisions in any design process, how much do you need to borrow the language of the existing, in justifying the new. The (up until recently) brilliant instagram wouldn’t have been anything if it didn’t build on the language of film photography and the history of analog image capture, and yet futures that restrict themselves with nowness are often berated. The School of Life’s skill comes from borrowing the language when needed, rather than burdening themselves with it. They live in a shop, they offer Sunday sermons and staff are faculty. It makes me want to clap.