Now for something different…

by Eszter Hargittai on July 2, 2007

Wow.

Try it here.

I should probably add this:
Time sink!

(This isn’t breaking news so we may have covered it earlier, but I don’t recall seeing it here.)

{ 12 comments }

1

vivian 07.03.07 at 1:30 am

Ooh, will try it on the cool new computer upstairs. Thanks for not making us wait until Friday!

2

Guest 07.03.07 at 2:28 am

wow. just wow. holy cow.

3

Daniel Zaccariello 07.03.07 at 5:12 am

I’m completely stunned. I have worked in and with technology in a deep way for going on 12 years now. Rarely am I stunned. I see a lot of cool things (multi-touch displays was the last one), but even that didn’t strike me as positively revolutionary:–multi-touch is a mechanism for interfacing…what was in what you’ve linked to, on the other hand changes the way we think about how we can organize data…and further, perceptions of the world. I’m already dreaming about how I can extend the metaphor to my area of study:– other social and political phenomena.

4

Kieran Healy 07.03.07 at 5:22 am

Culture as collective representations emerging from multiple positions. Cool. What he says at the end of the talk is great.

5

novakant 07.03.07 at 10:11 am

love it,

also the part were he says “you know, I never thought I’d work for Microsoft, so it’s very gratifying, this kind of reception here”

lol

6

Katherine 07.03.07 at 10:48 am

Sorry, am I missing something? I didn’t have the sound on, so all it looked like to me was a zoom tool. I must be missing something.

7

Eszter 07.03.07 at 12:02 pm

Katherine, you’re definitely missing something, but I don’t think it’s possible for us to summarize it here in a few words. That’s why I didn’t add much commentary to my post. Try to watch it with the sound on.

Vivian, yeah, I almost apologized for not waiting until Friday, but did put the logo there as warning.:)

Novakant, yup, made me smile. Good to know that people don’t hold such a grudge against a company that they don’t recognize and acknowledge amazing contributions.

8

Joshua W. Burton 07.03.07 at 2:23 pm

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now—

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now—
Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

Neuromancer (Ace, 1984). Welcome to the consensual hallucination.

9

Jacob Christensen 07.03.07 at 4:40 pm

In order to bring some variations to the comments, I’ll introduce the equivalent expression in Danish, which for people of my age is – Hold da kæft for nogle blærede effekter…! (Danish teens and twentysomethings would simply say f&%@)

And yes, you should watch the video with the sound on.

10

Jacob Christensen 07.03.07 at 4:43 pm

(Just a practical note to Eszter: There is a “time sink” category on this blog. You might want to add this entry to that as well ;-) )

11

Eszter 07.04.07 at 12:57 pm

Jacob, thanks for expanding our vocab. And thanks for reminding me of that relevant category I had created back when.:)

12

brian.a 07.04.07 at 5:15 pm

In our post-naive-realist mindset, we’re used to thinking of a photographic image as existentially unique, even alongside other images of the same object. But the morphological uniqueness of the object itself allows these programmers to exploit, in amazing ways, the purely iterable aspect of an image. It looks like we’re about to enter a period of “going back” to thinking of the photo as “merely” information.

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