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The Cage

The Cage ran at middays on Monday on 4ZZZ for a year. It’s premise was that we lock you in until you answer the question. Every interview began with the statement ‘The Crimes Act of Queensland 1908 dictates that we cannot lock you in for more than eight hours and only four of those hours may be spent under interrogation. Do you understand?” We also randomly fired three questions from our library of placement questions which placed the interview subject in the moral landscape for the listener.

The questions were things like, Do you think abortion should be legalised, do you think climate chaos is caused by human burning of fossil fuels … . The show had an active website, facebook page and twitter feed. The show incorporated the Generator news at the top of the hour, and regular segments from The Cross.

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Seeking Throughlines Through Storylines

The Storylines interface is an exploration as well as a presentation tool. It was developed to reveal and discover throughlines as much as to present them. The reason for this is that I had never sat down and made a list of my projects, let alone examined them for throughlines or thought about identifying established creative that may have explored those same throughlines.

To this end, I started by recording the media, the topics and various other metadata about the projects I have created during my highly varied career, in an attempt to determine a pattern and any meaningful throughlines that might emerge.

The Prime Minister affects boredom as Ebbs wows the crowd

As I did this a number of throughlines did emerge, I have done a lot of advocacy in environmental politics, in print, on radio and through the political party The Greens. A large number of established creatives have similar foci, I have selected Ted Nace and Al Gore as they are remarkable for their transition from writing about technology to climate activism in Ted Nace case, and from politics to activism in Al Gore’s case. On reflection, I should have also considered broadcaster and writer Philip Adams who I admired as a teenager, interviewed as a luddite for PC Week and have maintained correspondence with over the intervening decades. His friend Barry Jones, was president of the ALP for many years, Australia’s first Minister for Science and author of many books on the importance of science in politics.

While I may have reached this conclusion using tools other than the still fledgling Storylines interface, it was building and testing this tool that revealed the links to those influences on my work.

I have also spent a good deal of my life coding systems designed to categorise data using n-dimensional cubes and metadata tagging. This started with my first coding projects, designing a program to generate crossword puzzles, or jigsaw puzzles with more than one solution. This focus sharpened through the development of my software tools to extract census data (which is stored in an n-dimensional cube with each census question as an independent dimension) as three or four dimensional data sets for analysis by statisticians at the Institute of Multicultural Affairs. I then explored metadata tagging as an alternative to database retrieval, inspired by the Australian data management system called The Corporate Retriever. The outcome of that work was a decision by Sean Howard to invest in the then emerging technology of text searching and the launch of the software package ISYS. All that work culminated in the development of the Metadex, a system for indexing metadata, designed to complement the early web search engines and create a distributed framework for sharing metadata and discovering meaning on the web in a more contextual manner than text searching allows.

The Storylines interface itself has a deep relationship to that work, being primarily driven by the categorisation system of WordPress. I see the Storylines interface as being an alternative way to retrieve data from the billions of WordPress websites around the world. This is part of a long term project. I developed a content management system (CMS) known as Proton in the mid nineties to demonstrate Metadex, because there were no CMS available at the time. My first attempt, UConstruct, was built before Microsoft had a database to web scripting language and was written to my specs, by a friend in C++. I built Proton from the ground up in Cold Fusion, and then ported it to Microsoft ASP. I saw Metadex as providing a FAT table for the internet and forming the basis on which a series of net based apps could be built. The developer of Cold Fusion, Jeremy Allaire visited us in Ultimo and took some of those ideas to Adobe as the basis of the CS framework for connecting Adobe applications across the cloud. Adobe purchased Allaire shortly afterwards.

I am still searching for other technologists and computer scientists who have worked in that space, though, in hindsight, if I had done that research twenty years ago the trajectory of my career may have been remarkably different.

I have been introduced to the work of Christopher Alexander by David Harris, Creative Media Theories, Griffith University, which I have found totally inspirational and suspect may provide an overarching framework to give a meaningful and moral anchor to this work. That ties together two philosophical frameworks I have been pondering over the last three decades.

The first is that the network we are building is an organism in which humans are simply nodes. In the same way that our biochemistry is rich with the historical components of other lifeforms including colonies of organisms that have become organs in our body, so will the systems that we build now become components of a larger organism. To me it seems foolish to argue about whether automated supermarket checkouts threaten human job security when the system is not being built to serve the interests of individual humans. The systems of the spy agencies that monitor our phone calls and text messages, and the big data centres that monitor every purchase and trip we make are simply the beginnings of the nervous system of that larger entity. What exercises my mind about this fact is that we approach the singularity with almost no thought about the role of ethics and morality in its development. In determining where to study my masters I wrote to QUT requesting the facility to study that topic specifically as a PhD subject. On hearing Alexander’s 2009 address to computer scientists I wept with joy that there are other people considering these same topics.

The second is that I long ago tired of the simplistic arguments of the antitheists that religion is illogical and unscientific and therefor the enemy of rational debate. While I fully acknowledge that religion has evolved from a search for meaning into a tool of the state that is more effective at managing populations than oppression by brute force, that does not diminish its role as a rich and dense storehouse of cultural meaning and a reference point for morality. My project The Cross was commenced in 2015 to deal specifically with this topic, though it has languished for want of attention due to a lack of time. I hope that Christopher Alexander’s 2016 work, Making the Garden, explores similar themes and will offer me a way into dealing with this topic more richly and powerfully than I have been able to so far.

Finally, I would like to comment on my most recent work, CHIME, which is currently a sound piece, manifesto and short mime performance on the theme Text is dead, long live Chime. This has grown out of a study of the IBM Selectric typewriter and will lead to more experimental work using bells as a media for social interaction and play. The theoretical underpinning of this work is the thought experiment, what if we took away Text as the universal interface between computer applications and started somewhere else. At the moment it is simply a fanciful idea to spawn further work and thinking and has proved remarkably fruitful. I do not have any polemical issue with text as the basis of computer interfaces but as will all assumptions I think it worth challenging and examining. As well as exploring the creative performance possibilities this approach offers I would like to examine the role of text in the light of Christopher Alexander’s challenge for computer scientists to think through the morals and meaning of the code we build.

In the interim, I will continue to build on the Storylines interface as presented here, as a means of finding connections and meaning in my projects as well as content generally.

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Christopher Alexander

Architect, writer and philosopher, Christopher Alexander has taken a bottom up approach to design, identifying what makes individual components of a design good, and building from that a series of patterns that lead to good architectural design. His best known work A Pattern Language was written in 1977 and compiled thousands of these patterns as the basis for future work.

His work has influenced Computer Science, especially object oriented programming, the design patterns movement and the extreme programming movement.  His work was influential in the development of the Wiki, SimCity and its immensely popular spin-of The Sims. His works Notes on the Synthesis of Form, and the Nature of Order underpin significant developments in computer science but Alexander himself has applied them more broadly to investigate religious and philosphical questions from a new basis.

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The Cross

The Cross is a project, centred on social media, that attempts to put religion in context. On one hand it has evolved from our relationship with nature and the search for meaning that developed from a thoughtful examination of that relationship. On the other, it is a tool of power used by the state to manage the populace more effectively than through the force of arms. Religious and military authority have jostled for position at the head of society for time immemorial, across cultures. The Cross is a project that accepts this fundamental reality and discussed contemporary issues around religion in that context.

It was specifically created to isolate the anti-theists and distinguish its arguments from their simplistic stance. Their position can be characterised as “religion is foolish because it is illogical” or “religion is bad because it is hypocritical”. The Cross assumes that both of these statements are self-evident and significant but have no bearing on the relevance or role of religion in society.

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Giovanni Ebono

Founder of the Ebono Institute, Giovanni Ebono, is the nom-de-plum of Geoff Ebbs.

He was formed as a comic, working the club circuit in Byron Bay and the NSW Northern Rivers. In the tradition of Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Mark Twain or Lewis Carroll, the character became more famous than the originator, and took on a life of his own.

Giovanni had his own radio show, comedy circuit and theatre following before I decided to legitimise him through a legal name change and run him for politics. He ran for the Federal seat of Richmond in 2007 and 2010, did much better than Geoff Ebbs in 2013 and 2014 and has his own Wikipedia page.

Among other mainstream positions he was the general manager of sewage and water engineering firm, Simmonds & Bristow. I am still asked to present as the character or comment on historical events that he was involved in. Most recently he was asked to contribute a chapter to a book on the history of the NSW Greens and the role of the socialist workers clique that took over the NSW Greens party in the mid nineties and have dominated it since.