[Malcom McLean / Apparatus for shipping freight / 1958]

Yesterday my September column was published on Current Intelligence. The article is an examination of shipping containers in light of ubiquitous computing that jumps in scale from electronics components to port configuration. While RFID technology allows for low-resolution tracking of goods, there are a new breed of sensor-laden devices that clip on to containers and offer increased security and real-time data. What is really interesting here is not so much the technology (these tracking devices contain the same sensors as premium smartphones) but the complexity of developing and implementing international standards. Given that logistics is not my usual stomping ground, this article was produced in collaboration with my partner Jordan Hale (her research interests include maritime geography and security studies).

Reception to this and the previous articles has been positive and I'm quite flattered that Bruce Sterling has been supportive of the endeavour. Beyond my plugging the article, I have to say that I'm really happy about contributing to the magazine as editor Michael A. Innes seems to be working quite tirelessly to build the profile of the publication and is assembling a roster of columnists and bloggers with broad expertise in current affairs, culture and politics. Consider subscribing to the RSS feeds, newsletter or print publication to tune into the stream of great content.

Recently noted:

• Imon Deshmukh at Cooper design ruminates on diegetic interfaces in gaming. This piece touches on Dead Space (pictured above), Mirror's Edge and Far Cry 2 – amongst others. See also: Game UI Discoveries: What Players want on Gamasutra.
• Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens offer Ten Theses on Wikileaks.
• Greg Allen discovers and unpacks Daniel Libeskind's 1980s 'machines'.
• On the topic of automation: Stuart Elliott at The New York Times ponders the significance of CAI, a generative advertising application. CAI project lead Stephane Xiberras on the response from within the industry: "After this first reaction, they get a little scared, when they see that a software program can create the same (mediocre) results in just ten seconds as several hours of strategic meetings and production.'' Inspiring.
• Eric at talk2myShirt discusses a little black dress that is also an oversized (yet form-fitting) mobile phone.

I post .txt dispatches bi-weekly to highlight noteworthy content from across the web. Feel free to subscribe to my Google Reader shared items or add me to your delicious network if you want to tune in to the material that I'm bookmarking.

"We're not cynical, we just watch the news" was the response offered by Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh when a journalist inquired about their glib attitude during a 1981 interview. I have had a soft spot in my heart for DEVO for 15 years now and last fall I wrote the below article on my favourite "pioneers who got scalped" for Rhizome.

[Duty Now for the Future – album artwork, 1979]

But the whole discourse of noise-as-threat is bankrupt, positively inimical to the remnants of power that still cling to noise. Forget subversion. The point is self-subversion, overthrowing the power structure in your own head. The enemy is the mind's tendency to systematize, sew up experience, place a distance between itself and immediacy… The goal is OBLIVION.¹ – Simon Reynolds, "Noise"

Replace the word OBLIVION with DE-EVOLUTION and you have encapsulated the essence of the strangest art-music project that ever emerged from Akron, Ohio. While a quintet of jerky ectomorphs in hazmat suits (seemingly) singing about sadomasochism breaching the Billboard Top 20 in 1980 seemed unlikely, the legacy of DEVO is fraught with such contradiction. Formed in 1973, DEVO began as a polemical performance project, became a major buzz band and then crumbled under the weight of the attention they had cultivated. Outside of influencing a generation of musicians and artists, a surface reading would suggest the band only registered a few blips on the broader pop culture radar—"Whip It", their pioneering music video work and a legendary Saturday Night Live performance—but tracing the dramatic arc of DEVO reveals a fascinating back story. While the group might be most easily read in relation to their 1970s Ohio peers Pere Ubu, The Dead Boys or Chi-Pig, more enduring points of reference may be found in the deadpan, dour and decidedly humourless synthpop of Telex, Gary Numan and Kraftwerk. Comparisons notwithstanding, DEVO defied categorization and their creative exploration of emerging technology, hermetic logic and contentious relationship with the mass market make them quite relevant to new media artists—they're just the band you want!

So, in celebration of homebrew science fiction, multimedia r&d and a profound cynicism regarding human nature, the following series of vignettes have been drafted to chart the circuitous mythology of DEVO. A critical listener might dismiss the band as a kitschy counterpoint to Reaganism, or worse yet, a 1980s footnote. However, careful consideration of DEVO's legacy reveals a morbid obsession with the decay of technology and an uncanny aptitude for the graphic dissection of pop culture. In the DEVO universe, there is no distinction between the prison colony and the shopping mall, suburbia is a blighted landscape of genetic defects and "space junk" rains down from the heavens. There is an order to this metamorphosis in the Midwest, attentive listening will reveal the pulse of a prescient rhythm section and a melodic snarl that is simply too odd to neatly file away in the standard punk, post-punk or new wave historical dustbins.

[DEVO perform "Smart Patrol/Mr. DNA" at Max's Kansas City, July 8th 1977]

Mythology as DIY enterprise: In November 1977, David Bowie walked onstage at Max's Kansas City in Manhattan and introduced DEVO as "the band of the future." This was a somewhat ironic description considering that DEVO had dedicated the better part of the last decade to assembling a narrative for the band based off not only cultural but evolutionary regression. The fruit of the band's labor was De-Evolution, an assemblage of crank sci-fi that combined elements from a 1924 puritan anti-evolution tract, a 1944 issue of Wonder Woman (that prominently featured an evolution machine), Oscar Kiss Maerth's 1971 pseudoscience treatise The Beginning Was the End and a 1933 film adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau. A sequence in the latter reference would inspire the infamous "Are we not men?—we are DEVO" call and response sequence from "Jocko Homo". The lyrics of the groups' first album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (1978) chronicled America as a mutant nation of crass commercialism fueled by hypocrisy, mundane ritual and sexual frustration. Perhaps founding member Bob Lewis stated the early goals of the band most lucidly in "Readers vs. Breeders," a manifesto he wrote for the LA Staff in 1972:

So it is that the Devo-tees believe that only in a reaffirmation of the organic impulse, and the subsequent realization of the basic physiological facts which are the functioning components of man's destiny-cluster can the horror of cybernetic man be avoided.²

So we might summarize the modus operandi of DEVO in this era as a celebration of the spasm, an outlet through which to snap "those who should know but don't, and those who don't know but should"³ into awareness. However, manifesto writing and junk science were not what got this collective on the path towards quasi-stardom. The genesis of DEVO can be traced to two key events, the politically and artistically charged milieu of Kent State between 1966-1974 and their first film project, The Truth about De-Evolution.

[Sextet DEVO at the Kent State Creative Arts Festival, 1973]

The majority of writing on DEVO positions the civil unrest surrounding the 1970 Kent state shootings as a "ground zero" for their political and artistic awakening. Make no mistake, this event irrevocably affected the outlook of the original members. Bassist Jerry Casale witnessed the shooting of Allison Krause by the Ohio National Guard during the Kent State shootings. What is less documented than this political turmoil is the cultural renaissance that was taking place at Kent State before and after the shootings. At the time, a steady stream of baby boomers were moving to Ohio resulting in the university increasing in population by 250% within a few years—this growth was accompanied by an influx of young professors⁴. Amongst these scholars was poetry critic Robert Bertholf, who encouraged students Bob Lewis and Jerry Casale to play at the Kent State Creative Arts festival in 1973. Lewis and Casale were joined by Fred Weber, Rod Reisman, Bob Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh (manning the minimoog, wearing the chimp mask in the above video). Lab coats, surreal agitprop theatrics and a confrontational attitude towards the audience—the seeds were planted in this first concert.

It took a while before DEVO came close to resembling a band but the group chipped away at songwriting and honed their live performance skills at the second edition of the Creative Arts Festival in 1974. The following year, the group scored choice gigs at the Kent premier of John Waters' Pink Flamingos and a Cleveland Halloween event featuring Sun Ra (DEVO opened and cleared the room).

[The Truth About De-Evolution (still), 1974]

Within the same time frame that these early performances were taking place, the members of DEVO were busy collaborating with fledgling filmmaker Chuck Statler (a peer from Kent State) to shoot their first film. The Truth About De-Evolution showcased their anthem "Jocko Homo" and a de-evolved version of "Secret Agent Man" within a surreal abstraction of the Midwest. Shot on location in a Goodyear factory, the Governance chambers in the Kent State student center, JB's (a nightspot), the "president's room" in a local McDonald's and crowned with an opening shot of a gaudy patriotic mural (reading "Shine on America"), the dystopian imagery is inspired and chilling. The "Jocko Homo" segment is a ghastly meditation on the body in which what seems to be a scientific congress erupts into a riot—complete with thrashing cocooned larvae and sickly cinematography—the sequence could make a young David Cronenberg squirm. The $2,000 film, with dead-simple static shots and a cast of friends and family won the "best short film" award at the 1976 Ann Arbor Film Festival and immediately became a fixture at DEVO shows. Years later, Mark Mothersbaugh reminisced: "There was no such thing as MTV in the mid-70s… so we would just string a sheet up and show the film in front of us. Then we'd pull it down and play a set" with the net effect being that the video "perfectly programmed" the audience for "celebrating the downward spiral".⁵ The Truth About De-Evolution began showing across the international festival circuit and quickly developed a cult following. Three decades later director Chuck Statler would speculate that the mythology and buzz around the film sparked a record label bidding war over DEVO that preceded the release of their first full-length in 1978.⁶

["Time Out For Fun" (still), 1982]

Rock Band - r&d edition: Things moved very quickly for DEVO from 1978 onwards. Having undergone personnel changes the group was settling into their "classic" line-up that would remain in place through 1985. The band had evolved into a well-oiled gigging machine and was enjoying a new found celebrity geek chic status. DEVO released five albums between 1978 and 1982 and video was integral to their artistic development. To put things in perspective regarding how far ahead of the curve DEVO was with their investment in the music video as a medium, MTV launched in the summer of 1981 with a pool of about 100 videos⁷ and DEVO would shoot their tenth video that year. The success of "Whip It" ensured the band was a fixture in the early days of the cable network and DEVO was in such heavy rotation that they filmed MTV station IDs.

["Beautiful World" (still), 1981]

Obviously none of DEVO's commercial videos were as outright weird as The Truth About De-Evolution, but given the size of the audience, much of their material was surprisingly subversive. The video for "Whip It" was a super-saturated critique of "cowboy culture" at the dawn of the Reagan years and "Beautiful World" featured Booji Boy at the helm of a archaic video mixer with which he cycles through an inventory of 20th century archival footage. Much like the lyrics, the song seems upbeat and poppy at first but the tone gradually shifts. The clips transition from blooming flowers, dancing women and scenes of idyllic leisure to a final sequence that stitches together trench warfare, Klansmen, vapid counterculture, race riots, a starving child and the explosion of a nuclear device. The video may not have been the "anti-capitalist science-fiction movie" that Jerry Casale had always dreamed of making⁸ but it epitomized the glossier (increasingly synthesizer-based) pop with unsettling undercurrents that DEVO had begun gravitating towards by their third album. This new sound was seamlessly translated into a sharp, uniform graphic language in the videos for three singles from Oh, No! It's Devo (1982) – "Time Out For Fun", "Peek-A-Boo!" and "That's Good" – that collectively considered the possibilities afforded by Chroma key and early 3D graphics.

In addition to video, DEVO was involved with the following media projects:

• 3-DEVO, a rear-projection-based system for synchronized AV performance whereby the band played in front of, and interacted with the video content from Oh, No! It's Devo. The first performance was plagued by latency issues and resulted in decidedly un-synced audio and video with the band left confused and floundering in front of a full house and pay-per-view audience. Simon Reynolds described the irony of this debacle as DEVO, themselves a "parody of regimentation" had now became the real thing"⁹
• Along with engineer David Smith, Jim Mothersbaugh (the "electronic percussionist" of the original DEVO lineup) worked at Roland throughout the 1980s developing MIDI technology.
• 1987 saw the release of the E-Z Listening Disc - a brilliant compilation of Muzak versions of various titles from DEVO's back catalog. Lounge versions of classics like "Swelling, Itching Brain" and "Come Back Jonee" are simultaneously jaunty, bland and repugnant.
• A 1995 foray into game development saw Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol, a Myst era point-and-click adventure title released to harsh criticism. One critic lamented "reaching the end is mercilessly impossible" and another described the game as "so hermetic… smugly wrapped up in its little world." Playability and interface griping aside, DEVO had developed a game several years before other bands would even begin licensing songs for use within the game industry.

["Devo Corporate Anthem" from Duty Now for the Future, 1979]

I find their 'philosophy', i.e. what lies underneath the surface devolution material, to be vacuous, populist and cynical to a repulsive and unnecessary degree.¹⁰ – David Thomas (Pere Ubu)

If you are going to fail, fail big: DEVO's luck with major labels (Warner Brothers represented them domestically) almost seemed doomed from the start. When the group produced a minor hit with "Whip It" the pressure was on—the label declared that "they must repeat" and DEVO simply couldn't. While the band was able to gain some traction due to the new wave phenomenon, they were by no means a perfect fit for the expectations of a mass audience. Too weird to pass off as synthpop and too stiff to please the post-punk crowd the band seemed to have manufactured themselves with built in obsolescence. Perhaps DEVO, in accordance with the Brian Wilson and Tony Asher song, simply weren't made for their time. Really, what band of the era would have better benefited from consumers receptive to independent labels or self-distribution?

DEVO's prospects for commercial success completely fizzled with the release of the unremarkable Shout in 1984. The album did not receive a warm critical reception and was a financial dud. Warner Brothers promptly dropped the band and percussionist Alan Myers (aka the human metronome) moved on to other projects. The group recorded albums in 1988 and 1990 but have been largely inactive for the last 25 years, only recently reactivating, touring and returning to the studio. Regardless of commercial success or longevity, DEVO made a sizeable impression on the music industry and echoes of their irreverence can be recognized across the entire aural spectrum. DEVO would eventually be cited as a key influence by alt-icons like Trent Reznor and the late Kurt Cobain, their aesthetic and sound design is foundational to retro-outfits like Ladytron but most interestingly, traces of their post-industrial weirdness occasionally bubble up in unlikely (equally obtuse) places like the "operating theatre" of Dr. Octagon or the eugenics-obsessed electro of Dopplereffekt.

In 2001, Terre Thaemlitz described the lead New Traditionalists (1981) single "Through Being Cool" as an operating manual for "becoming a prick in the ears of all suburban robots that monitor reality."¹¹This is where DEVO thrived: in their purest moments they acted as kind of an incongruity contagion, quite literally "out of sync" with consensus reality—or, by their own description, "a musical laxative for a constipated society." DEVO carefully crafted each and every nuance of their identity and exemplified how even a pop band can function as tactical media practitioners—simultaneously submitting to and resisting the machinations of the music industry. Given this media savvy, it isn't at all surprising that DEVO largely mutated into various advertising, film scoring and video production ventures. So, as DEVO gears up for a "career victory lap" to celebrate the rerelease of their first two albums, you can't really fault them for the inevitable clichéd reunion tour—three decades ago they hollered that they must repeat.

Notes:

1. Reynolds, Simon. "Noise" in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. Cox, Christoph. Daniel Warner (eds). New York: Continuum, 2004. Pg. 57
2. Lewis, Bob. "Readers vs. Breeders: Didactical Works re De-Evolution" published in LA Staff in 1972.
3. ibid
4. Lewis, Bob "Some thoughts on Devo: the first Postmodern Band". Pg. 2.
5. Mark Mothersbaugh quoted in Dellinger, Jade. David Giffels. Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! London: SAF Publishing, 2003. Pg. 114.
6 See Wollinsky, David. "Interview: Chuck Statler" in A.V. Chicago. 2007.
7. Dellinger, Jade. David Giffels. Are We Not Men? We Are Devo? London: SAF Publishing, 2003. Pg. 189.
8. Reynolds, Simon. "Uncontrollable Urge" in Rip It Up and Start Again. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Pg. 41.
9. ibid Pg. 49.
10. Quoted in Dellinger, Jade. David Giffels. Are We Not Men? We Are Devo? London: SAF Publishing, 2003. Pg. 105.
11. Thaemlitz released an album of piano interpretations of DEVO tracks on Mille Plateaux in 2001. The project was accompanied by extensive, at times quasi-autobiographical liner notes that feature a range of aesthetic and cultural commentary.

[image: mccmicb]

The power of such lists is apparent in the fact that the kings of Mesopotamia regarded leaving a list inscribed on a tablet, after death, as insurance for an everlasting legacy. The Sumerian king list, a chronology of dynasties of Mesopotamian kings, is just such a document. It indicated a smooth succession of rulers, a successive rolling out of seamless historical epochs, but leaves out the bumpy bits of history, when rival Mesopotamian cities vied for control. In this way, lists can be a way of sanitizing and simplifying knowledge. As Geoffrey Bowker and Sudsan Leigh Star attest, there is always a tension between attempts at universal standardization via lists and the local circumstances of their their use.

List-making is often seen as a fundamental activity of modern society. Indeed Michel Foucault and Patrick Tort claim that the production of lists (e.g., classification of geological specimens, languages, races, animals and so on) is a defining feature of modern science. Latour argues that the main job of the bureaucrat is to construct lists that can then be shuffled around and compared. The bureaucratization of science in the nineteenth century is an important move away from science as the province of the gentleman amateur to science as bureaucratic control in the service of the empire. We can then see the connection between the nineteenth-century scientific taxonomists, collecting and organizing and measuring and ordering the world, and the ancient cuneiform lists. Both tell us what the world is and how we are to behave, therefore they tell us how to order the world and how to organize work and labour.

– Alison Adam, "Lists" in Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008. Pg. 175.

[UBERMORGEN.COM / Chinese Gold / 2005-6]

I recently received a missive from the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMk) regarding Space Invaders, a group exhibition exploring the "increasingly blurred boundaries between video-game space and real space" that will be opening next week. The show pulls together a range of works addressing immersion, experience and perception in gaming by Riley Harmon, Aram Bartholl, Jeremy Bailey, Yuichiro Katsumoto and many others. I don't have too much to say about the show (other than I'd like to see it) but I thought that the link to the exhibition microsite was worth passing along – it is a handy switchboard for connecting to numerous exciting art practices. An excerpt from the curatorial statement by Heather Corcoran (of FACT, Liverpool) and NIMk:

From minimalistic adventure games based on text to the detailed cities of Grand Theft Auto, which are based on the actual street plan of New York, the world of the computer game is developing to ever more realistic levels. In addition, games are presently no longer defined by progress in a literal sense—beating a field—but increasingly concentrate on creating an environment in which the player has the freedom to set out on his or her own explorations: an environment that looks and feels like the real world. Moreover, the internet has created conditions for on-line gaming, which often has still less to do with winning and losing and more with the cultivation of social communities and human networks that extend into 'real' life, like Farmville. Equipped with wireless technologies and GPS, games have abandoned a stationary existence to make their way through physical space as mobile and other available applications

The show has been framed quite cleverly, in simply addressing 'space' the curators have been able to program diverse work including Julian Oliver's tangible puzzle box levelHead, Michael Johansson's Tetris-inspired sculptures and a project on parkour-platforming by the Ludic Society. It is also fantastic to see Will Crowther and Don Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure (1977) alongside Malfunction, a new piece by indie game-artist Mark Essen – the juxtaposition highlights how the DIY origins of game development have really come full circle.

Space and gaming is a popular subject in game studies and art practices, for those interested in a general survey of this field, I'd recommend SPACE TIME PLAY (2007), undoubtedly the most comprehensive text on the subject.

It seems like there has been a lot of news on the location-based service and geoweb front over the last few weeks, here are several projects and articles worth checking out.

Street Slide is an experimental interface currently being tested by Microsoft researchers Johannes Kopf, Billy Chen, Richard Szeliski and Michael F. Cohen to augment 360° panoramas familiar to users of Google Street View and Bing Maps. The designers of this prototype argue that while panoramas—'bubbles' in their terminology—are useful, they do not engender users reading the city at a block-by-block scale. Nathan at FlowingData describes the limitations of the bubble paradigm quite nicely:

The tough part with current street views is that the you don't get a seamless transition as you move from point A to point B. Instead, you get to one point and you can look around the panoramic view, and then move on, and then look around again. In the real world though we don't scan, go blurry, and then scan. We just scan.

He's right – when navigating the city we do just scan. Street Slide allows users to expand their field of view from the bubble into a continuous photo-collage that lends itself to efficient panning. Since the city is being abstracted and 'flattened' to a 2-dimensional surface anyways, the designers pull business signage, street numbers and road signs out of the city and blow them up as annotations to make finding what you're looking for that much easier. This brilliant workflow is best illustrated through viewing the project demo video.

Weeplaces is a new tool that allows users of geosocial networking service FourSquare to cue up their entire history with the service and view it as a dynamic visualization. This project allows individuals to get a sense of their personal relationship with the city, but in running the provided examples I can't help but be reminded of the limitations of FourSquare, which are:

1. It reduces the city to an array of bars, restaurants and commercial establishments.
2. I can't help but notice that many of the Manhattan/NYC example users don't truck up towards Harlem very often. Somebody needs to make a FourSquare visualization that aggregates public check-ins and reveals 'quiet areas' within the city, neighbourhoods where users are not going – zones of exclusion.

From the tedium of the check-in to the design of hard edges, ReadWriteWeb published a great overview of geofencing last week. In this post, Tasso Roumeliotis of Location Labs outlines a basic typology of geofences (virtual perimeters), these are:

• Place geofences – "use a stream of continuously pushed location to identify when a user enters or exits a place or static zone."
• Dynamic geofences – event spaces that are demarcated by time-sensitive events like concerts, celebrity sitings or traffic accidents.
• Peer-to-Peer geofences – location-based collision detection! i.e. a rule that causes some kind of notification or API call when linked users (mobile devices) come into contact or part ways.

Roumeliotis' post is succinct and exciting – be sure to check out the related video. I think this passive, automated functionality is what we'll need before services like FourSquare can really take off (as in offer a meaningful experience), but considering that the launch of Facebook's Places is imminent, all bets for the near future of location-based services are off.

I should also mention that the New York Times ran a piece on security concerns regarding the geotagging of photographs, but who wants to read about the erosion of privacy? Boring.

[Protocol Architecture / The Wilbert Contracts]

Recently noted:

• Geoff Manaugh presents an overview of a fantastic, 'document-based' approach to architectural design hatched by a trio of GSAPP students. The project, entitled Protocol Architecture "investigates potentials for future design through the creation and analysis of hyper-fictional documents."
• Speaking of hyper-fiction, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell weigh in with a brilliant analysis that considers the narrative structure of Inception in light of Christopher Nolan's earlier work. Bordwell: "The Prestige treats its time zones somewhat as if they were embedded stories. I think that this is partly because we have two protagonists and a split point-of-view pattern. The biggest cue, however, is the way that the Nolans absorb the discovered-manuscript convention into the film. In a classic embedded structure, a character recalls or recounts a string of events with its own integrity, and sometimes the frame story involves a character reading a letter or memoir. In the film, this situation is provided by journals kept by the rival magicians."
• Alex Burns conducts a survey of emerging trends in 'ambient journalism' that touches on Peter Morville's research, programs run by Thomson Reuters and the work of Brian Eno.
• Media scholar Lauren Fenton revisits the kinetic, tactile and aural qualities of the puzzle-spaces that populate Sierra's 1995 game Shivers.

I post .txt dispatches bi-weekly to highlight noteworthy content from across the web. Feel free to subscribe to my Google Reader shared items or add me to your delicious network if you want to tune in to the material that I'm bookmarking.

"And yes, they are very boring, unless you like this kind of thing, of course. In which case, they are very interesting." – Drew Cullen, 2006.

The above video is a milestone in consumer electronics history: it was the first recording to document the unwrapping of a new gadget that was titled as an unboxing. While individuals have been gleefully ripping open the packaging of their electronics for decades, unboxing is the relatively new practice of recording these moments and uploading them to video sharing services for public display. The 2006 video embedded above features veteran technology blogger Vincent Nguyen as he unpacks a new Nokia E61 smartphone and related accessories. Nguyen removes the device, displays it to the camera while commenting how thin it is, and then dryly lists off the remainder of the objects in the box. On completion he utters "Basically that's it… ummm, for now."

While Nguyen's removal of a smartphone from its original packaging was decidedly drab, unboxing has become a fixture in online consumer electronics coverage. Major players like Endgadget have entire streams of content populated with seasoned technology experts (almost always male) rifling through waybills, wielding box-cutters and carefully extracting shiny new netbooks, gaming consoles and cameras from their packaging. I've watched about three dozen of these videos over the past few days—scanning for signs of intelligent life—and they are remarkably ritualistic: styrofoam is carefully set aside, manuals are flipped through, battery packs are commented on. In doing this field research I've come up with two hypotheses of what unboxing represents:

1. A practice that has emerged as as extension of page view journalism whereby gadget blogs can get traffic without doing any actual 'reporting'.
2. Glib theatre where adults joylessly reenact moments from their childhood when they received and opened gifts.

While both of these readings of unboxing are equally applicable, I prefer the latter, where each of these tiny ceremonies is an act of worship at the altar of technology-induced ennui. However, I think the majority of coverage of this phenomenon simply writes it off as geek porn.

Now, an important question: Can unboxing be elevated to an art form?

Graphic designer Brian Stark received his iPad on April 3rd and he filmed the event in stop motion. The most curious quality of this video is the lack of a person in the frame – the cutting blade floats in space, the box seemingly opens itself and the protective film on the screen just peels away while accompanied by a precious guitar-driven Mateo Messina track. At the end of the video the packaging glides offscreen, the device is powered up and the web browsing begins.

Although the video is essentially an unsolicited advertisement, it is quite effective as a case study of how the packaging of Apple products are a vital part of the user experience. Stark's chipper short perfectly captures the (supposedly) seamless interface and ease-of-use that Apple has built their brand around.

On the more extreme end of the consumer electronic fetish spectrum we have the product teardown, where devices are not only unboxed, but completely taken apart. A high profile example of a teardown would be Gizmodo's dissection of misplaced iPhone 4 prototype last April in which journalist Jason Chen attempted to confirm that the phone in his possession was indeed an Apple product. This story ruffled a lot of feathers in technology journalism circles but it is only relevant to this discussion insofar as it created a spectacle out of the disassembly of a device that had not even been released.

The distinction between unboxing and the teardown completely collapses in Belgian artist Herman Asselberghs' Dear Steve (trailer embedded above). This 45 minute film features actor Stan Wannet methodically unpacking and dismantling a brand new MacBook Pro. Critic Dieter Roelstraete encapsulates the work as follows:

What we are witnessing in this work is the ruthless, smooth dismantling of a brand-new MacBook Pro, and the act of literally turning inside-out the digital work station cannot help but reveal the irreducible materiality of the one ''tool'' that plays such a pivotal role in the triumphalist rhetoric of so-called immaterial labor.

Although clinical in demeanour, the piece seems to present an alternate perspective on the pageantry and performance of our engagement with technology. The Gizmodo iPhone 4 teardown was about gleaning insight into electronic components, design and assembly while Dear Steve is executed with cool indifference, a missive from a hypothetical 'user' to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

In the Arcades Project Walter Benjamin repeatedly quips that "fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver." I wonder if we can extend this logic to encompass the design, assembly and packaging of electronic devices. What is it about our relationship with these objects that motivates us to treat them with such care and reverence – are we profoundly bored or genuinely fascinated?

If this post does not contain enough box-opening action for you, please note this sharp unboxing parody video developed to promote the Samsung i900 'Omnia' smartphone in 2008.

As a follow-up to my recent article and interview regarding self-configuring modular robotics, I thought I'd provide a short bibliography on this topic. Some of this material is under the lock and key of closed journals but all of these articles/chapters are worth tracking down if you're curious about this fascinating subject.

• Fox, Michael. Robert Miles Kemp. "Autonomous Robotics" in Interactive Architecture 229-236. New York City: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.
• Whitesides, George M., Bartosz Grzybowski. "Self-Assembly at All Scales," Science Vol. 393, No. 5564 (2002): 2418-2421.
• Yim, Mark, Wei-Min Shen, Behnam Salemi, Daniela Rus, Mark Moll, Hod Lipson, Eric Klavins, Gregory S. Chirikjian. "Modular Self-Reconfigurable Robot Systems," [PDF link] IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2007): 43-52.
• Zykov, Victor. Andrew Chan, Hod Lipson. "Molecubes: An Open-Source Modular Robotics Kit" [PDF link] Paper presented at IROS-2007 Self-Reconfigurable Robotics Workshop, San Diego, USA, Nov. 2nd, 2007.

Also, some key projects to check out:

• M-TRAN3 (2005)
• Molecubes (2005)
• SuperBot (2006)
• Miche (2006)

My most recent column for Current Intelligence is on self-configuring modular robotics. In preparing that piece I conducted a brief email interview with multidisciplinary designer Robert Miles Kemp, co-author of the excellent Interactive Architecture, published last year by the Princeton Architectural Press. I was first introduced to Kemp's work through a talk he gave at Postopolis! LA in spring 2009 [see Dan Hill's notes/commentary on the talk here].

[Robert Miles Kemp / Image of robotic modular units in an assembly configuration]

Greg J. Smith: How have recent advances in digital fabrication changed research in modular robotics?

Robert Miles Kemp: As more and more digital fabrication machines have been created their overall cost has gone down dramatically. This has lead to two phenomena this is affecting our ability as designers to build more robots. These are:

1. Cheaper machines means that it is possible of designers and even students to purchase their own 3d printing machines for under $2000. At least three of my friends have purchased a MakerBot or a similar machine in the past year. This means more fabrication can take place at home.
2. More competition means cheaper prices overall. The cost of the hardware, sensing and intelligence has gone down dramatically. This makes it possible for even more experimenting.

What are some potential applications of modular, reconfigurable robotic systems that we may see become widespread over the next two decades?

Widespread? I think it is likely that modular reconfigurable robots can solve problems pragmatically in office and home environments. I would say that it is most likely that modular robotics would see widespread deployment in two key areas: pragmatic environmental issues and (hopefully) pragmatic experience settings. At least right now, commercially, it is hard to sell these types of robots as fun experience projects. Consumers still don't see the value in non-functional high-cost experience projects. Because of this I think it will be a while before lots of money is available to build reconfigurable play spaces or entertainment spaces or even entire houses. In the meantime, I think smart objects will become more and more prevalent. Some of the projects that I see on the horizon include smart glazing systems that can adapt to conserve or optimize environments, smart networked furniture that can reconfigure for different entertaining or work arrangements, smart materials that act as membranes and can be applied to other objects, objects that are applied to architecture.

Think smart versions of furniture. I can't track down the link but there is also a very interesting collision detection/video/robot project that has 4 tables that can move around each other and reform into different arrangements.

In Interactive Architecture you talk about "redesigning the brick" and an architectural endgame where modular robotics are deployed to create reflexive spaces. Can you describe one or two scenarios where robotics could help us make a more efficient use of domestic space?

The future of modular robotics is about enabling us to live better lives. For me that means making it easier and more fun to interact with other people. Modular robotics offers the potential of a new type of "smart stage" to create dynamic experiences with others.

[Robert Miles Kemp / Meta-morphic Architecture / 2006]

Scenario 1: The way my house operates is different when it is just me and my wife versus when we entertain. I would like to reprogram my space to be optimized for both types of living environments. When we have more people over we need more, seating, better acoustics, more light and more open space. All of which would go largely unused when it is just the two of us.

Scenario 2: On a smaller scale, I wish that my entire kitchen working areas was modular and reconfigurable. The way I work on each meal varies so much depending on what I am working with. I wish that my sink could change size and my counters could move up and down to optimize to the tasks I am performing. It should optimize for cleaning and use.

I think one of the biggest issues that no one talks about is that modular robotics can't solve all of these problems alone. The potential of doing things in interfaces through visual information is much higher than doing things physically. That is why right now most of the advancements in reconfigurable spaces is actually taking place in digital/physical interface projects in the home. Using information in a different way is much easier than literally moving objects around in a space. For example, if I am working on a large touchscreen wall in my house it would be much easier to move the information to another part of my house (onto another screen) then it would be to move walls around. Experience is easier to manipulate in digital environments. This is one crude example of the type of work my company is working on right now, modular information projects and interactive strategies.