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Tag Archives: Vinyl

Fridge magnets, Porpoise & the power of language in Innovation.

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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#mayarse, Anarchy, Blackadder, Corporate Speak, Creativity, Digital, Easter Island, Genome, Guttenberg Press, Identity, Idiom, kaizen, Language, Porpoise, punctuation, purpose, Roald Dahl, rote, Slang, social networks, Socialising the Genome, Sound, Tabloids, technology, The BFG, vernacular, Vinyl, Wax Cylinders, Yoda

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Words are funny things.

Haphazard, abstract, profound, silly, shape shifting, infinitely playful, confounding, eternally powerful and utterly malleable. Language is a remarkable technology.

Glyphs, scratches and symbolic signing of sounds eventually dragged kicking and screaming into some vaguely coherent order that ticks a few syntactical boxes and language rules and shazzam! the fun begins.

Suddenly these scatters and blocks of marks, letters and symbolic sounds forge themselves into desires expressed, thoughts formed, theories expounded, opinions offered, information fixed, stories told and dreams captured. Sounds cut into the wax cylinder of our minds and played out through sharp stone point, stylus, quill and nib onto cloth, wood, parchment, stone and flax.

And our eyes scan across them and our tongues run along them like a needle in a vinyl groove, transforming them into the sound of speaking.

As time has marched the expression of our expression has been altered by the nature of how we generate the text. We have hopped skipped and jumped from painful rendering every letter by hand over vast tracts of time, illuminated by curlicues, cartoons, motifs and scenes – and the silent furious industry of re-rendering the same again and again for the benefit of a rare few – to carved crafted blocks to be set in lines, paragraphs and pages – inked rolled and pressed into sheets to be shared and distributed amongst the many.

Technology elevates technology as the presses become mechanised and the inks become jets. Vast universal printed broadsheets supplemented by the intimate particular of typing machines that throw metal letters through ink ribbons onto pages layered with carbons for multiple copies. Until the binary marks of programmes on a different ribbon digitised everything at the speed of light.

So we now find ourselves with the ability to use these marks and symbols at the speed of swipe and type in real time to fire them across the world via networks and platforms.

Yes the books still fill shelves and the magazines still scatter coffee tables. But they have become the paper monoliths of what was. The  printed word and how we consume it versus how we consume its digital cousin have become fundamentally different.

For your words to be ‘in print’ still carries a deeper value. Words on a physical printed page feel more meaningful, eternal, immortal. They are the Easter Island Statues of the written word. Their digital counterparts the writing in the sand on the beach.

The way new technologies have gamified they way we think and more importantly the way we express those thoughts through writing enables a very particular kind of playfulness rooted in eclectic multidirectional multi channel distribution. The Ephemeral Passing nature of the txt blog tweet and the written content of the live in-flow constant beta site allows everyone to ‘play’ – text as balls to be lobbed tossed kicked, rolled and scattered in every direction, only to return transformed, tweaked, built upon liked loved berated and bludgeoned.

The creativity inherent in the technology of language and subsequently in the technology we use to generate language in flow seems to have two forms when it comes to words and how we express ourselves with them.

Creativity is still as much about liberating expression as it is about liberating distribution. Language as a technology has been tinkered and played with by everyone from the lowest order to the highest mind since the technology was invented. Derivation. Disruption. Disorder. All of these traits have been alive in the spoken and written language since its inception.

New technology does not advance innovation. It accelerates our ability to unpack and play with the given wisdoms and expressions to seek something new and different. This is the fuel of innovation – new technology merely the accelerator.  And the role of language in innovation and technology’s ability to accelerate it is remarkable.

Word play – a lightness of spirit and a subversive nature in regards to language – has always enjoyed turning the given rules upside down and back to front – messing with words and language because we can – as a mark of our individual nature and curiosity.

Thats why vernaculars and slang and idiom are so important to individuals – and why corporate language is so disliked avoided and derided by ordinary people. Corporate language and ‘speak’ smacks of an Order of the Few inflicted on the Spirit of the Many.

It is an intellectual door policy – if you ain’t got a ticket you can’t come in – the bouncer on the door of the exclusive club.

Ordinary people like to own and share the language they use to express their most individual selves, in their own way on their own terms. They reserve the right to speak as they wish, express in the manner they feel most comfortable with.

It is unsurprising that fads and trends especially in the highly socialised accelerated age see @everything and #anything already running out of steam. This is not due to the academics deriding them. It is mainly due to ‘rules’ being applied. A new higher order or High Priest of Digital Expression has risen out of the chaos – defining rules of use and relevance. Thankfully it spikes the oldest of human responses. Dissent.

Rules? #myarse.

The intellectualisation of language will always occur while the human nature of assertion and pursuit of social exclusivity remains. We simply can’t help ourselves.

Language gets used to include and exclude. It always has and it always will in some shape or form. It is a tool in our tendency to assert and control. You’re not in our club. How you order sentences. How you punctuate. How you correct and edit yourself. How you use common signifiers of expression. Words and language are the cutlery of expression. How you use your knife speaks volumes about you. And there will always be those that use it against you.

BUT.

If thats the case, I say fill your boots. Subvert at every opportunity. Break a language rule everyday. Smash the shackle.

Start with fridge magnets and madness. before you take one step towards the workplace, make some shit up out of a load of words on the fridge. Set your mind free. Gobbledegook is good for the soul. Have a BFG day. Using phantasmapoppingful words. Go Yoda and reorder a sentence – like someone’s put a Germanic grammar filter on your English. Pop some nonsense in a sensical world. Embrace puns at every opportunity.

And if you’re in business – especially one that involves speaking to ordinary people – use pub speak in board meetings. Ask a 70 and a 7 year old to edit the CEOs keynote. And see the tyrannical use of language for what it is. An ugly veneer behind which mediocrity and insecurity can often lurk.

If you are working with multiple nationalities there has to be some common ground. But at least allow every one to bring a little of their own cultural idiom into the room before you set out on some highly controlled over strung and soul-less corporate conversation. Allow their free mind out as a matter of course. Build a ‘Sling Some Slang’ into every meeting. Allow each nationality to ‘play’ in their own language and share it. You will be far more likely to find yourself with human beings in the room. Much more helpful to collaboration and co creation.

Innovation starts with language and how it is used and embraced. Rote cultures create Rote people. And innovation and creativity withers on the vine. The confidence to ‘mess’ with language shows an ability to break from the norm, to turn something upside down and the wrong way around to take a different view. Mistakes are the fuel of invention. Failure is a central tenet of Kaizen. We should embrace failings in language. Before dispensing with them, check to see if there is anything good hidden in there.

So can everything be chaos and subversion? No. Like anarchy, it only exists meaningfully if there is a counterpoint to it to keep it relevant and focused. If everyone is an anarchist. Their is no anarchy. Just conformity.

A perfect example of deconstructive/destructive language play was to be found in a conversation I had with a friend of mine. Both utterly child-like far to often, we found ourselves discussing Purpose and Purposeful businesses and the manner in which this word has been taken and chiseled into a corporate straight jacket. It has lost its original profundity; replaced with a pompous self-righteousness. We found ourselves having to use ‘cod’ Noo Yawker accents to continue the conversation with any feeling.

So Purpose became Poiypuss. What! Who knoo! Badda bing badda boom. I gotta poiypuss ‘n’ I’m gonna use it.

Cue more cod accenting until eventually Blackadder and the Prince and The Porpoise sketch prevailed. And so Purpose became Porpoise.

Happiness.

PORPOISE. The prefect name for an agency that believes deeply in Purpose but with a profound dislike for the way in which it has been hijacked; made humourless, confined, dislocated; rendered inhuman and spiritless.

Porpoise. Creating Purpose with a difference: purpose with a human touch. Nice logo. Disney meets Vector with a scattering of fun.

Ridiculous. perhaps. But I do have evidence that this childlike view of the world can sometimes create breakthroughs in communication and engagement.

In a recent project – Socialising the Genome – I worked with Dr Anna Middleton to try and unpack the arcane language of Genomic science and the impenetrable academic and clinical terminology it uses when speaking to ordinary people. The objective? To be able to engage with a greater number of ordinary people around the benefits of GENOMIC science and data gathering to improve individual and collective health care.

We found that in almost every qualitative research group people had a tendency to drop the first E in GENOME, and quickly deconstruct it into something far more friendly and more palatable and less scary. GNOME.

So the massed intellect, discovery and genius at work in the world of GENOMIC science and discovery – and the gateway to understanding our most precious personal selves and the data that defines it – was enshrined in a picture of a small bearded man with a fishing rod. Cue Double Helix fish and chats about fishing in our DNA for answers – and the idea that sometimes that fishing just comes up with an old shopping trolley and river bed junk. And sometimes with something more remarkable and enlightening.

So language – a beautiful technology accelerated by newer ones. But it is not sacrosanct. It demands that we flex with it, play with it, mess it up, test its edges. Because in doing so we test our selves and the ideas we have – and through it we find new iterations and expressions.

Which is a good thing, No?

 

LANGUAGE NOTE: My use of No? at the end of the final sentence is in homage to the idioms of the French “…, nest pas?”, the Spanish “…, No?”, the Scandinavian “…, Nej? and the Glaswegian “know whit ah mean, big man, no?” and ending one’s sentence with an upward inflection “No?”.

And because it really, really irritates purists – as does the doubling up of adverbs like ‘really’.

 

uber tech, the human condition & the curse of being Super

27 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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ABBA, Born To Run, Bruce Springstein, Cage Fighting, Carbyne, Evolution, Green Lantern, Jack & Diane, Kinesis, Mutants, Nanotechnology, Pilsbury Dough Boy, Ronal McDonald, Superman, Supertrouper, Survival, technology, telephone boxes, The Human Condition, Vinyl, Wonder Woman, Wurlitzers

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The juke-box was one of the old fashioned ones – none of this fancy new micro aural-fabric wall covering surround sound system stuff.

It was Old School. Renovated Wurlitzer. Vinyl. Beautiful. Real. Music you could touch and smell. Tucked in a corner. Take your 165bpm world and stick it on 78rpm.

A love-struck Romeo plays the streets a serenade…

laying everybody low…

with a love song that he made

A ripple of delight rolled up the cloaked blue back. Lois loved this song.

The PA system rudely interrupts the juke-box, and a few bright chords chime out over the heaving hall.

ABBA!!! Jesus.

He winces: just a little. Like The Man With No Name. Love those movies. To one side of the bar, on the wall, a carousel of ‘original’ movie posters flickered up. Le Bon. Le Brute. Le Truand. Everywhere you looked a screen played your thoughts back to you.

Clark sends the last pistachio shell skittering across the bar top. It scuttles and flips on the escarpment of some old bar top graffiti and spins off into space.

His wrist band buzzed. His heart rate must have increased. Substantially. Its glow took on a purple hue. Pituitary aberrations. Weird.

As if by magic, the barman comes and removes the almost empty bottle of sour mash in front of him.

“Sorry ‘Man. You know how it rolls. Can drink yourself to death for all I care. But not here. They’ll shut us down and sue our ass to next Jesus day if you die on the premises”

The irony of this statement, given that not 10 metres away combatants regularly tried to rip each others heads off and squeeze plasma out of each others eyes, was not lost on Clark. But it seemed to have passed the barman by.

Clark fingered and stretched the polymer blue-black tube around his wrist. One day he’d figure out how to turn this thing off. Ugly little spy. But needs must.  No band; no cover; no health and no welfare.

It relentlessly measured his vital signs and a number of secondary organ, enzyme and blood readings, distributing the data at super light fibre speed to everyone from his insurance company to the local hospital to the social welfare office to the barman in front of him via geo-location and face recognition. Latency certainly wasn’t an issue. The information was transmitted so damn fast it may as well have gone back in time.

Maybe he should drink inside the Cage. The bands didn’t work inside it. It blocked the signal. So much for infallible systems.

Hologram Ren belched, scraped back his stool, and stood up, kind of. He was done. Clark nodded, not that Ren really noticed. Wasn’t the same since Stimps got burned. A one man show Ren wasn’t. The music increased in volume.

Su-per trou-per

lights are gonna find me 

shining like the sun…

smiling having fun…

feeling like the No1!

One Eyed Mike thought he was real funny.

The music is Clark’s cue to move towards the tired scruffy wired cage at the far end of the bar hall – to the Cage and its sweaty bloody canvas. Made from triple-strength carbyne wire, it measured 30 feet by 30 feet by 30 feet.

What a circus. Mind you given his Victorian strong-man red-pants-outside-blue-tights look, he wasn’t really in position to comment.

The blue and red had seen better days, and the fabric looked positively ancient.

Clark shook down his shoulders. Christ he ached. He stepped up off the stool, his hand going to the site of his deepest scar, just beneath his right pectoral muscle.

The Cage on Highway Number 9 was jumping. Packed to the rafters with some ‘madness in its soul’. It was now legendary apparently; though how a straight-build tumbledown Roadhouse with a liquor & wrestling license in the middle of nowhere became legendary the gods only know.

The even bigger question was how all the other faded Supers had found him here, turning wrestling tricks for a few bucks and a free meal.

Not that it was bad having them here: just kind of crazy. They all felt happy here. Amongst their own. OK, so the Mutant Super thing kicked off every now and then but most of the time, apart from Parker’s web mess sprayed everywhere, getting on people’s nerves, it was, well, ok.

Being Super didn’t mean shit anymore. Everyone was Super now. With their airborne InfoTech, data bytes the size of asteroids travelling just as fast, virtual experiential sensosuits cheaper than a pair of sweat pants, and headspace 360 real-time vision and cyber implants.

There was time when Super meant something. Before everyone got junked up on tech.

Green Lantern was stretching off in the corner of the Cage. Bless him. Like a huge slightly jaded leprechaun.

ABBA’s super euro pop tune drifts out of the PA across the long room around the tables of assorted friends, freaks, failures.

Note to self. Take said pop song and stick it up one-eyed Mike’s new one, freshly ripped.

One Round. That should do it, Pound the crap out of him and bring a House Of Pain down on his head and then the rest of the night would be sweet.

One final super rumble at midnight and then he was free for another week.

He wondered who today’s Cage Celebrity Smack-down pairing was going to be.

Watching Ronald McDonald and The Pilsbury Dough Boy rip pieces out of each other last week, howling and hawking, covered in their own viscera, tears streaking their stage makeup and dough-eyed faces had moved to a place beyond funny.

He flexed his left arm. Shoots and pin pricks again. The Band griped on his wrist.

Clark’s focus was pulling in and out again. Gone were the days of looking through rock and steel. Could barely see through the edge of the Cage.

His vision tightened. Time to get busy. Washed up he may be in the flying universal policeman stakes but he could still rumble with the best of them.

That’s what they could smell. That’s what drew them from all over the US.

This scruffy aggregate of pseudo-super human beings with their fancy tech sophistry were here to see one thing. Good old school violence. The parochial, outside the beer-hall, looking at my girl kind of violence. Blood. Spit. Ugliness. Pain. The possibility of watching a creature suffer.

For all the experiences they could virtually replicate, the one they hadn’t nailed was the sheer excitement, the delicious thrill of seeing another creature, weakened, terrified and humiliated; buckling and writhing with the metallic taste of its own blood gurgling in its throat. Motorway pile ups, public hangings and terrorist beheadings. They just couldn’t help themselves.

And no avatar can replicate that expression: the one that flickers across a creature’s eyes when the bleak finality of knowing that its time has come in the gene pool survival game.

For all their peacocking about their virtual nirvana; and even in the face of the genocidal scale of their virtual battling and gaming, this super-human race had lost the ability to feel anything – pain; pleasure; and fear; especially real fear. This counted as a really big evolutionary Uh Oh in Clark’s book: the reverse Darwinian nature of a smart animal using its smartest inventions to make it the dumbest animal on the predatory block.

Divine obsolescence didn’t strike Clarke as a sensible plan for a species.

He scuffed around the bar, frozen for just for a moment in the light of an Ad wipe (highly annoying kinetically activated advertising curtains that mapped you and ‘robed you’ in some kitsch new designer apparel, took a pic and then immediately sent the pic to all the contacts in your band contact list across every social network in the world – With a ‘Hey doesn’t Clarke look sharp – tell him you like it’ button.)

Changing outfits was something Clarke was kind of done with. Half the telephone boxes disappeared and the ones that were left came with a drug dealer and a splash of voluptuous and rather inappropriately dressed ladies’ calling cards.

The crowd are cheering him in; but he has become deaf to it.

His gaze swings to the right of the path between the tables.

At one of the ring-side tables sits the crazy woman with her young boy. The boy was about 4 years old Clark reckoned; dressed in a forlorn super-suit from some gas station. The boy was fingering his game bar frantically.

Baby Superman. With bits of old hotdog and ketchup stain down the front. The truth always hurt.

As he walked past the boy he saw over his shoulder that the boy’s avatar was in flight mode hovering above the screen.

Christ.

Anyone can fly now. Not like the old school. At least they tried. At least planes actually understood what it was to move through the fluid air under their own power. At least a sky dive flight suit put you up there and out there for a moment, like some deranged flying squirrel. At least it was… …real.

Now everyone knew what it felt like to fly. Right. ‘Felt like’. The actual sensation. Even a so so mid range sensosuit could replicate the exact physical sensation of flying by firing millions of tiny charges across your skin, with different pressure sensors expanding and contracting the grasp of the suit on you to mimic dynamic movement in flight and G pressure. And the MeSq power implants in your head activated the relevant endorphins and adrenalin surges just to make sure you ‘felt it’.

Everyone could do everything. Everyone could see around the world in a second. Through steel and concrete. Everyone could see the future. Everyone could destroy anything with the flick of a finger. Everyone could be in 5 places at once. Superpowers was just so …everyday.

No-one needed the strength of 1000 men to topple a tall building. They could call up the strength of millions and topple a country.

The boy fingered the game bar furiously.

Could do without Diana seeing him that’s for sure

She’d looked a little shook up last time Clarke saw her. He always knew: when she played with her bracelets something was up. Like a change in the weather. When her heart was heavy, the scars on her wrists ached under her Indestructible bracelets.

She hadn’t mentioned the kids thing for awhile. He thought that maybe the pain had faded a little.

All she wanted was a kid. A normal, un-tampered with, straight DNA strand, in body baked baby. But for all the technology in the world it just wasn’t to be.

Anyway. They were cool. Clarke and Dian. Hanging out. It kind of worked.In fact the mundanity of it was a blessing; sweet liberation.

Life was simpler when you were less Super. Less wonderful. Something the new super humans with all their gadgets and advances needed to figure out for themselves.

He was in front of the Cage now. Green Lantern was looking wired. The tell tale pulsing temple and grinding jaw told Clark that he’d junked up on nano-oxgenators – small pieces of in blood technology that multiplied the effect of oxygen and adrenalin into your blood stream to boost resilience, strength and stamina.

Jesus even the Supers were at it now.

This wasn’t going to be quite as simple as Clark had previously though.

Screw it. He just needed to man up. Anyway. She’d be here soon. And everything would be alright.

The Princess and Clark: living the ditty; the Jack & Diane of the 21st Century, growin’ old in the heartland.

Clark steps up into the Cage. As he does so the sheer blue fabric of his suit catches the edge of the jagged wires. Rip.

Su-per-trou-per

Lights are going to find you

Shining like the sun

Smiling having fun

Feeling like the number 1.

Funny.

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