TALK: Pathology of Identity [2020]

PODCAST: Lumina Podcast | Australian Film Television and Radio School

TELLING STORIES IN NEW WAYS

“For me, the projects are most successful when people say ‘Sorry you’re doing what? Why?” and I say that I think this will make more sense in a few years time.” – Tea Uglow

Since the first time someone told a story around a campfire a lot has changed about how we tell stories to one another. In this first episode of Lumina, Fenella Kernebone talks to two creatives rethinking the way we tell stories; Tea Uglow, Creative director at Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney and Mikaela Jade, CEO and founder of augmented reality company InDigital. Both think screens are just a stepping stone on the way to a world full of interactive stories we can barely conceive of yet.

Source: https://www.aftrs.edu.au/about/research-an...

IDEAS: Design Indaba [2017] - BLOCKCHAIN

Tea Uglow is a creative sage and director of Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney, Australia. She is involved with a number of unique projects at any given time, connecting different talented designers and engineers with one another to work on cutting-edge questions where technology and creative thinking intersect.

Uglow is interested in the human mind and how its limits can reveal deeper queries. She is a firm believer in the power of doubt, that uncertainty is fertile ground for controversy rather than closure.

“John Keats coined a phrase that I find spectacularly relevant still today. It’s this idea called ‘negative capability’. He’s talking about the human ability to speak, to write, to create – what we do is transcendent, it is sublime. This is terribly relevant today because we are surrounded by these machines that are doing so much. Our computers take an input and derive an output... It does so even when you give it inputs that are highly variable, like doubts.”

Uglow presents a number of thinkers throughout history who have explored the value of doubt similarly, philosophers who have interrogated their own doubts regarding reality in pursuit of empirical evidence and certainties. According to her, such questions ought to be asked by forward-thinking artists and examined by designers and engineers.

The creative director introduces Editions At Play – a project that disrupts our normal habit of looking to history for permission and insight to do things. It is a re-evaluation of how literature is presented, a rethink of the traditional book as a 2-dimensional way to convey knowledge. With the astonishing interactive tools available to us in the digital age, Editions At Play embraces new formats on screen that are not confined to the spine-and-cover layout of books (and E-books, for that matter).

Editions At Play encapsulates Uglow’s way of thinking – to step back and reconsider the way we do things, given the tools that are at our disposal. The project challenges the book as a linear way of reading, appealing instead to physical gesture and interactive play. There are many areas in life that could do with a similar rethink, according to Uglow, who applies the concept of dimensionality and the idea of moving outside of the world to better understand our position in it. She interrogates the notion of binaries, of black and white truths, how they fail in the face of a graded spectrum and vice versa.

“I really feel like the relationship we have with information at the moment is terribly linear,” says Uglow. “It’s much more interesting if you start to consider information as a dimension, like time and space. Information is something that we can move around in.”

TALKS: Zeitgeist Berlin [2012]

It was with some trepidation that I was asked to talk by Adam Scott of Free State at their inaugural Zeitgeist Project 2012 . The event was a fringe event / curtain-raiser for CMO's and CTO's from a range of global brands attending the IFA Consumer Electronics Fair in Berlin in September and I was asked, in the spirit of free thinking I guess (certainly not because I know what I'm talking about) to choose a piece of consumer technology that represented the zeitgeist. THere is a nice overview of the whole thing here.

Obviously for me the connection between the online world and the physical was the direction I immediately headed in: (these are the notes from my talk - the video is below)

I wanted to talk just as an enthusiast about an area of the digital world that's undergoing significant change mainly due to the democratization of funding mechanisms like kickstarter and more fluid production processes. 

Another important aspect is a psychological one. We live in a post digital world.

This is a term coined a while ago to describe the point in time when we stop being awed by the power of computing in our lives… and just like cameras or combustion engines this is true. we no longer marvel at all the astonishing technology that you will se, we simply demand more. 

We expect our phone to allow a three way international video-conferencing call with no latency and for it to be free.

It isn't normal. It's extraordinary.  

So I am more interested in places where the interface between the real world and this magical one. 

There's a term called biophillia which is a hypothesis that states we have an innate connection with nature. WIth trees. wood, organic materials.

And our lives have become ephemeral. Invisible. 

For example we listen to digital music, play online games, take digital photos on digital phones that are saved invisibly into the sky, we go to work and we do this and we don't actually make anything.  

I think others this evening have or will talking about our innate need for patina and physicality, to create deep and longer lasting memories and how this is best effected by sensory mash upß sonic/visual/taste&touch etc but predominantly organic - innate and

- cross-modal experiences 

So we love that  damage, distress, residue and patina caused by physicality and we want to see it in digital as well as traditional consumer products .

Scratches on a record.

creases on a book.

the crack on your android. the dent on your macbook

the trace of the hand.

this organic complexity is more authentic and in a world of ephemeral magic I find that authenticity is lacking. 

So my examples are grass-roots projects, I'm afraid several are prototypes, but increasingly they indicate the need to move digital into physical, instead of augmented reality, we want reality augmented.

little printer from berg is a physical box that creates a thermal printed newspaper from the internet for you each day personalized to your world. 

We have heard about 3d printing technology for a while. But with printrbot we are finally seeing them in homes and offices.  I have one on my desk, unfortunately it's still in 74 separate pieces, but it is there. and it was about $500 

tableau by Jon Kestner is a beautiful model of how you can bridge the divide between the digital and analogue generations using some affordable gadgetry, a drawer, and a touch of showmanship. 

Jon Kestner is a partner at super mechanical who also produce twine - a piece of consumer electronics that lets you program with your phone to tell you when things happen - i.e.  you want to get a tweet when your laundry's done, an email when the basement floods, or a text message when you left the garage door open. THis is the 21centuries equivalent of programming the VCR. You may not be able to do it - but your kids will. 

pebble is a watch that tries to harness the computing potential of your phone in a more convenient consumer device. They made 11m dollars on kickstarter when only asking for $10000

Consumers want these things. I want one. 

But apparently I have to pick one thing.

Well it's a close run thing between twine and my winner - because I really feel the remote controls of the future are going to allow us to program environmental triggers into our lives and we haven't even begun to really think about what that means. 

In the meantime my award goes to makeymakey. That they call an invention kit for anyone but could be equally described as a way to program physical objects to do digital things. It's really easiest to show rather than tell so here's a great video that they made for kickstarter that to me is the future of consumer electronics.