This is one of a series of interviews I’m doing on the theme of Agile Learning. See also interviews on agile learning and agile technology, hands-on alternatives to factory learning, learner-generated contexts, home schooling, peer-to-peer learning in the enterprise and creating the School of Everything. With hindsight, it was surprising that the first part of […]
Long Now
Counterculture, Cyberculture and Innovation: the strange case of Stewart Brand
A couple of years ago, at the end of this post on the crossover between Web 2.0 and anarchism, I wrote that I’d started reading Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and suggested I might be blogging about some of the ideas in […]
Reflections on Longplayer Live
I wasn’t going to blog about today’s first live performance of Longplayer, since I go on about Longplayer fairly regularly already. But Christian Payne recorded an Audioboo interview with me, and the combination of vanity with minimal effort created a path of very low resistance, so here we are. I refer a couple of times […]
Support Longplayer Live
To the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse today for the annual visit to the Longplayer 1,000 year composition by Jem Finer/Artangel. In 02006’s post I commented that some of the things we had hoped might happen that year had not come to pass. In this year’s photo, evidence that patience was rewarded on at least one […]
Animating the future of population and cities
One of those happy synchronicities has alerted me to two different ways of presenting information information about population growth. And, to compound the coincidence, the same topic was raised in a discussion with David Puttnam that I attended in the same week as I discovered them. First is this video, which was featured in the […]
Be patient, it’s a longplayer
Another year is over, and today I made what is becoming my annual visit to the Longplayer ‘listening post’ at Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse. It seemed busier than New Year’s Eve last year. The picture on the left was taken at lunchtime in the listening post at the top of the lighthouse — it shows […]
Steven Johnson and Brian Eno at the ICA
Yesterday evening the ICA put on an event that was part book launch for Steven Johnson’s new book, The Ghost Map (subtitle: A Street, an Epidemic and the Two Men Who Battled to Save Victorian London — these long ‘pitch’ subtitles are getting out of hand), and part first UK event for the Long Now […]
Blogging, learning, and going off at tangents
I start off questioning the value of blogging an event that you know in advance will be blogged to death from every side. Does it really help anyone to have multiple perspectives on one thing, when the inevitable inconsistencies between them may be confusing? And if there are six accounts already, what added value is […]
6 down, 994 to go
Here are a couple of pictures taken this afternoon at the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse. It was six years ago today that Jem Finer’s Longplayer composition started playing continuously, and it’s planned to keep playing until 31 December 02999, when it will start to repeat from the beginning. I wrote more about Longplayer after my […]
Why birds, and neanderthals, sing
The ‘music instinct’ is far more ancient than previously suspected, and neanderthals and birds may have been jamming before they were talking. But why do humans and birds converge on the same acoustic and aesthetic choices and why do babies respond to musical sound? … quoted from the blurb for the Play on: a journey […]