Back on Monday the 19th of September Will & I attended the opening night of ENO’s production of The Passenger, Mieczysław Weinberg’s first opera. It was amazing. Harrowing, but amazing. It’s based on a novel (sadly not available in English) by Zofia Posmysz which in turn is based on her own 1959 Polish radio play Passenger from Cabin Number 45.

Normally when you read opera critics they either talk about the music, the staging, the acting, the costumes, etc. This opera appears to be Marmite to critics – the reviews are varied indeed – and one perplexing theme is a debate as to whether writing and staging an opera set in wartime Auschwitz is valid, or wise at all? I don’t get this. Throughout our history we, as a species, have used storytelling and song to pass knowledge from one generation to another, so that important events that shape our understanding of the world and of ourselves are not forgotten. Surely then the Holocaust is exactly the kind of event we should write stories and music about? In my own experience it is often the story-telling from unexpected genres that brings the impact home. For example the children’s story The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne helped introduce my children to this subject and the graphic novel (i.e. comic book) Maus by Art Spiegelman is a shocking but insightful biography of his father, a Holocaust survivor. There are other more obvious reasons why both Posmysz and Weinberg should be allowed to write about Auschwitz: she was there and he lost his family to the Nazis. But even without that harsh heritage, surely anyone should be at liberty to explore what happened through story-telling and music?

I think so, and I’m excited to be returning this evening (with my wife Kate this time) to see the closing night. To find an opera that is so moving (and harrowing) tackling such necessary subjects in a thoughtful way is rare. And that’s without mentioning the music. I’d never heard of Weinberg but he is great – especially his writing for strings. If you are a Spotify user I’ve put together a playlist, roughly in opus number order, of all I could find there: http://open.spotify.com/user/dumbledad/playlist/5569eNo77PBA4EKsUOP3A6 His music is a weaving together of much that was important in twentieth century composition, and that seems a very modern (and accomplished) approach.

Roll on tonight!

I’ve been battling away with JavaScript, jQuery, Ajax, and WCF in a project for several days now failing to see why my Ajax call repeatedly threw an “Internal Server Error” without any of the WCF server code running. It turns out that I’d forgotten to put quotes in the JSON data field around the string I was passing in, I had them around the argument names, but not the string values.

"On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog", a cartoon by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993

Yesterday Kate and I went to see Nico Muhly‘s new (and first) opera Two Boys at English National Opera. Kate’s not much of an opera fan but we’d both seen and loved another Muhly premiere, Impossible Things with the Britten Sinfonia, and so it wasn’t hard to persuade her along.

What a great evening it was. We attended the pre-concert talk, part of the ENO’s Join the Conversation: Live series, and it was far fuller than your usual pre-concert talk with three speakers (including Muhly and the video producer Mark Grimmer from 59 Productions) and a brief recital with Muhly accompanying Valerie Reid on the piano as she sung the character Anne Strawson’s opening aria. I learnt tons about the opera and the talk turned my excitement and expectation up to 11!

And we were not disappointed. Two Boys is a fabulous and gripping opera. Beautiful and thought provoking.

The video promised to be beautiful too. I had already seen 59 Productions work with the ENO in Death in Venice, Riders to the Sea, Doctor Atomic, Messiah, Satyagraha, and The Pearl Fishers so I knew how good they could be – neither background nor foreground but subtly integrated into the staging and performance. I was even more excited to find (in the pre-concert talk) that Grimmer had eschewed the usual graphics used to sum up the internet. Initially I was disappointed. When Grimmer said they’d avoided the obvious I assumed he meant they would not use abstract data visualizations of networks. But that is exactly the aesthetic reference they started with! I was left pondering which more conventional imagery they had discarded. But I was not disappointed for long, because the projections were so well done in terms of integration into the action and in terms of balance with the acting and other staging and just so beautiful that I soon forgot my disappointment and just enjoyed them.

The criticism that proved harder to shake was of the subject itself. Back in the early days of the internet there was a real fear that when you were talking with someone on the internet you had no real idea who they were. This fear was summed up perfectly in 1993 (yes 18 years ago) by Peter Steiner in the New Yorker cartoon above. Academics also explored this idea, most notably Sherry Turkle in her 1995 book Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Perhaps the internet would prove a place of continual identity play where we could be whoever we wanted to pretend to be. But no, that is not what happened, and most of these analyses have been revised, even the cartoon.

Response from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Now we realise that the opposite problem may be more real. Like all teenagers I did things I’d rather forget. And indeed I have forgotten most of them. My children play their lives out in an archived medium and so for them forgetting and reinvention is harder, not easier. Jaron Lanier talks about this (amongst other things) in his book You Are Not a Gadget. But even these new fears are not crippling. I grew up surrounded by cars and find crossing the road relatively easy (though I was taught how to do it). My children grew up surrounded by the interweb and by social media. Though I’ve done my bit to teach them how to use it safely I’m sure it is their generation not mine that will be fluent and safe.

Not that the old fear was without founding, the news event on which Muhly and Lucas based Two Boys was real, as was the Lori Drew / Megan Meier case referred to by Muhly in the programme. But these events are uncommon. Nico Muhly is fluent in interweb, so why choose a hackneyed 1990s fear as the driving plot device? Why not look more subtly at  the problems presented to young and old by the internet? danah boyd’s writings are a great resource for this. Or why not recognise that communication on the internet is less about problems and more about adding depth (and texture) to existing real friendships, as is pointed out in Richard Harper’s recent book.

[N.B. In the interests of full disclosure I ought to point out that Lanier, boyd, and Harper are all colleagues of mine at Microsoft Research.]

My criticism is quite abstract. The concrete detail of the opera was wonderful. The plot was gripping. Kate and I spent the interval sipping pink drinks and trying to guess who the guilty party was, and I’m happy to fess up that I guessed wrong. The production, the set, the video projection, etc. were beautiful and really drew us in. The singing was fabulous, especially the boy soprano Joseph Beesley and the main characters: mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley, tenor Nicky Spence, and soprano Mary Bevan. Above all of that goodness the most memorable part of the evening was the orchestration. I’m sorely tempted to buy tickets for Friday and go and listen again. There were some lovely touching parts and I especially enjoyed the way the tuned percussion was woven together from either side of the orchestra pit, with the glockenspiel and two xylophones (marimbas?) on the far right and the celesta on the left. Fantastic.

Each week recently, for sight reading and ensemble playing practise, my violin teacher and I play a duet from Béla Bartók’s 44 Duos for two violins. The harmonies are exquisite and odd. This one’s No. 11 and made us both laugh – what key is that!

One year before the workshop one of the organisers, Miriam Yagud, booked the twelve available rooms at Woodbrooke with some trepidation; she was not sure that her proposal would attract twelve attendees. In the event around eighty people applied to come and (using overflow accommodation) roughly forty were able to attend, including my Mum and me.

We started on the Friday evening with a ‘get to know yourself’ session. Miriam used a game to get us thinking about ourselves and our Quakerism. We broke into groups of six and each group member delved into a bag to retrieve two objects, without peeking, the first would represent you and the second your Quaker faith. I was left pondering how a battery might represent me and an old hiking sock my Quakerism! We used a mixture of silent reflection and discussion that served well to start the weekend getting to know ourselves and our fellow attendees better.

The first evening ended with an epilogue, a Woodbrooke tradition consisting of a short meeting for worship including a longer piece of prepared ministry from one of the groups studying there that weekend. The Churches Together group lead the session and read the Britain Yearly Meeting epistle on same sex marriage from 2009. Looking back I can see how important this was for my understanding of the weekend. The reference to George Fox’s words “Marriage is God’s work and we are but witnesses” got me thinking about how nontheists understand the role of God and of God-language within Quakerism. The epistle also underlined the importance of diversity to modern Quakerism.

Day Two started with a talk by Miriam’s fellow organiser, David Boulton, covering various definitions. David is known to many Quakers as the author of Who on Earth was Jesus?, the editor of Godless for God’s Sake, and a member of the Quaker Universalist Group, the British Humanist Association, and was editor of the Sea of Faith Network’s magazine. He talked about the various words used to describe nontheism: atheism, agnosticism, heresy, humanism, etc. and looked both at their etymology and at what they might mean for us now. Nontheism, though clumsy, appears to have become the preferred term lacking as it does some of the more aggressive critical connotations of the word atheism.

Breaking again into groups we next explored how the diversity of Quaker faith is supported in our local meeting. I was amazed at the diversity of experiences. There were nontheists present who felt isolated and silenced by their local meeting and others who felt core to their local meeting’s faith. Practises like discussion groups and ‘after words’ were reported as valuable ways to explore and nurture the diversity of beliefs among existing Quakers.

This was followed with a look at Quaker history, highlighting the role of dissenting voices. Starting with early Quakers and Ranters we heard quotes like this from Gerrard Winstanley (1609-c.1660):

“He that looks for God outside himself, and worships God at a distance, worships he knows not what, but is … deceived by the imagination of his own heart.”

Many of the nontheists on the workshop had been asked the question asked of Susan B Anthony (1820-1906): do you pray? Her answer was inspiring:

“I pray every single hour of my life; not on my knees but with my works.”

Though this historic journey was inspiring, and did show that Quaker notions of faith and of God have been diverse from our inception, I did wonder, especially reading back through my notes, just how realistic it is to claim some of these historic Friends as relevant for nontheism.

On the Saturday afternoon each of the groups at Woodbrooke had free time and so we decided to get together for silence and discussion. It wasn’t easy. Several of the Churches Together attendees felt that the conceptions of God put forward by the nontheists were too constraining of their own ideas and that our approach was too evangelical. The last point made was that we should listen to each other’s beliefs and experiences, not with the intention of changing minds but purely to understand the personal meaning of what was said and felt.

The last formal session on Saturday looked at meeting for worship and explored what we, as nontheists, do in meeting. For me this was the most troubling and the most confusing session. I had hoped to find other nontheists sharing common experiences of meeting for worship but the six people in my group all approached what happens in meeting very differently, and in ways that sometimes felt foreign to me.

After dinner we relaxed with an evening of music and poetry sharing. Most of this was uplifting but the gems turned out to be the jokes and shared humour, like this limerick recited by one of the women attending the workshop:

There was a young lady called Alice
Who peed in the Vatican Palace.
It wasn’t her need
That prompted the deed
But pure Presbyterian malice.

Saturday closed with another Woodbrooke epilogue, this time lead by David Boulton from our group. He chose to weave readings and analysis of Blake’s poem The Divine Image through the ministry:

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.

On Sunday we shared meeting for worship with the other groups after a closing session looking forward to our next steps as a group. We worked on a minute summarizing the weekend which I’ll include at the end of this report. I came to the workshop hoping to deepen my understanding of my own beliefs, and my understanding of my Quakerism. But I feared that less subtle, more aggressive atheist arguments might dominate. In fact neither proved true. What I found instead was a fascinating community of committed nontheist Friends, many of home needed this workshop to convince them that Quakerism could still provide their home. The minute we worded reads as follows:

“There are nontheist Friends… Friends who might be called agnostics, atheists, sceptics, but would nevertheless describe themselves as reverent seekers.” So began the report of the first formal workshop for nontheist Friends, held in New York State in 1976. A generation later, nontheist Friends are a widely accepted strand in the multi-coloured fabric of theologically diverse liberal Quakerism in both the United States and Britain.

Forty Friends from all over Britain, identifying as nontheists or wishing to explore nontheist perspectives with an open mind, met in Woodbrooke this weekend. Some for whom Woodbrooke rooms were not available were accommodated in the adjacent Fircroft College but another forty would-be participants were unable to attend because of lack of available beds.

In plenary sessions and small groups, through discussion, worship and creative listening, we explored varieties of Quaker nontheism – atheist, humanist, agnostic, non-supernaturalist. We listened to the words of Friends through the ages, from the 17th to the 21st century, who declared for free thought and free expression within the Society of Friends, thereby laying the foundations on which an authentic nontheist understanding could be built within our beloved Quaker community.

In an informal session with Friends on other Woodbrooke conferences (“Becoming Friends” and “Churches Together”) many of us were able to share our different experiences of what it means to be Quakers today. We shared epilogues and joined together in meeting for worship.

In our business session we addressed the question in the title of our gathering: “What next for Quaker nontheism?” Acknowledging that the burden of organising and financing our work has tended to fall on isolated individuals, we explored ways in which we might share responsibilities in a more formally organised way. Recognising the concern among some Friends that open differences can lead to division, we looked to find a way forward that would celebrate and enhance the Society’s diversity of religious opinion. After careful thought and collective discernment we resolved to form a steering group to prepare proposals for a Nontheist Friends Group within Britain Yearly Meeting. Six names were brought forward and accepted. The steering group was asked to liaise with Woodbrooke on possible dates for a further gathering next year to continue our work and explorations.

Finally, we noted the recent statement on the Britain Yearly Meeting website, as follows:

“There is a great diversity within the Quakers on conceptions of God, and we use different kinds of language to describe religious experience. Some Quakers have a conception of God which is similar to that of orthodox Christians, and would use similar language. Others are happy to use God-centred language, but would conceive of God in very different terms to the traditional Christian trinity. Some describe themselves as agnostics or humanists or non-theists, and describe their experience in ways that avoid the use of the word God entirely.”

We expressed our appreciation of this public recognition of our diversity. We are all in the Quaker mainstream now.

(Minute and Epistle of the gathering of nontheist Friends at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, Britain, Feb 18-20 2011, taken from the Nontheist Friends website)

The cover story in this month’s issue of Ceramic Review is about Tamsin van Essen’s work in her project “medical heirlooms”. It’s a fabulous project at the cusp of art and science, reflecting in clay various human ailments. Her idea is in the ether at the moment as I’ve seen it picked up in other craft/art disciplines (for example Laura Splan’s lacework doilies depicting the SARS, HIV, Herpes, etc. viruses)

One of Laura Splan’s 2004 freestanding computerized machine embroidered lace doilies mounted on velvet, depicting the SARS virus.

Reading the Ceramics Review article I was taken back to 2007. At work we do a lot of research about the interplay of computing, social science, and design and so every year a few of the team (myself included) try to visit as many of the degree shows as we can, plus combined shows like New Designers. Central Saint Martins is always a high-spot, and I make sure I climb the stairs to visit the work of Kathryn Hearn’s Ceramic Design BA.

My snap of Tamsin’s medical heirlooms at her degree show in Central Saint Martins in 2007

Tamsin’s work was tucked in the corner in the 2007 show, and like so much of the work coming out of the CSM Ceramic Design BA it redefined what I thought was possible at BA level, it must have given the masters students a shock! This week Graham Pullin, Jon Rogers, Richard, and I are writing up our thoughts about two years projects from Dundee design undergraduates in Microsoft’s Design Expo, and were reflecting there on how sometimes undergraduate work, when placed alongside higher level work, can really pull its weight.

The pictures taken by Tamsin of her work and used in the Ceramics Review article are amazing. She’s just finished an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection and it will be worth keeping an eye on her site to watch for forthcoming exhibitions: http://www.vanessendesign.com/

I while back I wrote a blog post in response to the amazing production of Britten’s “Turn of the Screw” put on by the Cambridge University Opera Society. One of the things that made that production so magical was the lad playing Peter Quint, one Matt Sandy. I’ve just picked up the Cambridge University Musical Society brochure for the 2010-2011 season from our post room and notice that Matt (now listed as Matthew – this must be posher) is singing in the CUMS Chorus performance of Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus. It will be at 20:00 on Saturday the 13th in Kings College Chapel. If you don’t know Judas Maccabaeus (I don’t) Spotify has at least two versions: the Sir Charles Mackerras (with the English Chamber Orchestra, Felicity Palmer, Dame Janet Baker, John Shirley-Quirk, …) and the Nicholas McGegan with the Philarmonia Baroque; plus there’s an informative Wikipedia page.

========== EDIT ==========

Darn it – I cannot go. It clashes with a concert by the Cambridge Concert Orchestra at Comberton Village College which I’m playing in.

Crispin, the web master at the orchestra I play in (the Cambridge Concert Orchestra) is leaving us (and the UK) and so I’m taking over as web master. Crispin managed the website versioning in Subversion and so handed over the SVN dump file. I’m more of a Team Foundation Server  person, so it’s been a bit of a journey to get Subversion working on my Win7 box, though now I come to write some notes just-in-case I need to do it again the steps look easy. Big thanks to Dinan and a cast of thousands on the interweb for their help!

STEP ONE

I started off trying Subversion via Linux, using either VMware + Ubuntu or Slax to get Linux up and running on my Win7 box. However that seemed overkill, so I looked around for Windows versions of Subversion (there’s a list on the Subversion site here: http://subversion.apache.org/packages.html#windows) and settled on SlikSVN

STEP TWO

Once SlikSVN was installed I made a suitable directory, put Crispin’s SVN dump file in it, and from the command typed

>svnadmin create repository
>svnadmin load repository < svn_dump

That gets me the SVN repository unpacked. Next I need a working copy and so this was the command:

>svn checkout file:///C:/Users/timregan/CCO/repository website

That’s it for the command line.

STEP THREE

To edit the files it was easier for me to use Visual Studio 2010 as it’s powerful and I’m familiar with it. I used a Subversion plugin for Visual Studio called AnkhSVN which I installed.

Under the view menu AnkhSVN includes a repository explorer and a working copy explorer. I’m yet to figure out how to get it so that double clicking an shtml file in the working copy explorer opens the file in that instance of visual studio, and marks it as changed if it’s edited, but I’ll note those tips down to when I’m done.

The SVN book online is also fantastically useful: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.5/svn-book.html

I Ain’t Lying by Dead Air on flickr

Gilbert Cockton, Annamaria Carusi, and John Mullarkey  organised a one day workshop on the Design Philosophy Dialogue at Northumbria University’s School of Design, and each participant was invited to write a brief position paper. This is mine. It is more a reflection of my current concerns, questions, and confusions about the intersection of design and philosophy than a position.

Before starting the word ‘design’ needs clarifying. I had trouble categorising the type of design I wanted to talk about until Nathan Crilly suggested the term ‘art school design’, i.e. the various design disciplines taught as design in art schools (graphic design, product design, interaction design, etc).

The Lure of Other’s Disciplines

The bridge by quasarsglow on flickr

Bridges create possibilities. The rickety old bridge across a forest river pictured represents a temptation, a temptation to cross to an unknown world. But it also suggests danger in the crossing.

My own discipline, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), started life as an amalgam of two disciplines, computer science and psychology, and ever since has periodically renewed itself by alighting on new fields. Philosophy has been repeatedly visited for inspiration and for guidance, from before Winnograd & Flores’s 1986 book “Understanding Computers and Cognition” (which, amongst many other things, applies Heidegger, Gadamer, and Dreyfus’ ideas to the design of computer based office management systems) through to recent work including, for example, my colleague Alex Taylor’s project on everyday understandings of (machine) intelligence.

Design and philosophy are far older disciplines than HCI; what might be the appeal in each for each? For designers, philosophical theories and ideas may serve as inspirations, either in general methodological terms, or specifically project brief by project brief. And philosophy also serves to provide designers with the tools they need to discuss their foundational work. Both of these are problematic, as I’ll argue, which will bring us to what design may offer philosophers.

Building Bridges

First Tanks Across Bridge from historian505th on flickr

When people from different disciplines collaborate, each has a different specialist language. In their paper “Languages of Innovation” Alan Blackwell and David Good talk about this coming together of differing languages and show how successful long term collaborations move through misunderstanding, through pidgin use of each other’s language, to a full Creole – a new language forged by the two disciplines involved.

Design is not a textual discipline. The language of design is the designed objects and their precedents, their form and their embodiment in the world, and though we use the term “the language of design” I am not sure it is a language.

Philosophy is textual, fundamentally so. When design turns to philosophy for inspiration, the depth and texture of the philosophical arguments plundered appear lacking from the design renderings. There’s little fidelity in the transfer. When philosophy is used to explain the underpinnings of design other problems ensue.

What Counts as Knowledge? What Counts as Inspiration?

Gateshead Millenium Bridge, Newcastle-upon-Tyne by Xavier de Jauréguiberry on flickr

Last year a scarecrow was awarded a Nobel Prize. Why? Because he was out standing in his field.

Joking aside, each discipline has its own ways of establishing excellence, of deciding which work is considered seminal, which work is worthy of study, etc. For design these things are measured from a craft or a commercial perspective, or other perspectives that include the context of use, the engagement with the consumer of the design. But academic research in design has to stop and think deep thought to justify the term “research”, and thus turns to philosophy. And it is here where I fret that the obtuse nature of some continental schools veils a simpler and more direct practise based research.

Negative Capability

Golden Gate Bridge x9 by Area Bridges on flickr

This is the second workshop on philosophy I’ve attended recently. The first was at the OII about Internet Ethics. In it, one philosopher, troubled by my stance on knowledge, said “we don’t want to talk shit”. I feel I almost do.

Designers, especially in the early phases of a design, seem perfectly happy to maintain contradictory standpoints, to adopt profligate beliefs in order to produce a wealth of overlapping and contradictory design ideas, to fill out the design space with as many creative possibilities as they can. Keats’ “negative capability” stands against “irritable reaching after fact & reason”. It is overly simplistic to characterise design and philosophy as either side of Keats’ analysis, but can a philosopher’s notion of rigour work alongside a designer’s view of possibility?

Perhaps we could approach this from the other perspective. If philosophy adopted the experimental approach based in objects in the world, what would the implications be? Am I wrong in perceiving philosophy as descriptive?

Conclusions

The "old" bridge by The_lucas on flickr

I work in a fundamentally multi-disciplinary team, but unlike many multi-disciplinary teams embedded in technology companies ours is run by social scientists. As one of the few technologists in the group my role is shifted from being the intellectual focus to being a service skill: the intellectual critical mass of our work is not technological. This exposure to new ways of thinking is exciting, and so I understand the lure of new disciplinary perspectives. What troubles me, and what I hope I’ve laid out in this position paper, is that what I enjoy about design, and what I enjoy about philosophy, may be mutually exclusive.

John Heskett’s “Design: A Very Short Introduction” was published by the OUP eight years ago in 2002. Here’s a quote from Chapter 7 on Identities:

A new visual identity can also be a signal of a major change of intent in corporate strategy. In the year 2000, British Petroleum (BP) unveiled a new identity programme that featured a dramatic image of a stylized sun-symbol in the long-standing corporate colour scheme of yellow and green, again by Landor. Accompanying advertising signalled a move to a wider pattern of activities, under the slogan Beyond Petroleum. This brought down on BP the wrath of environmentalists, who pointed out that the corporation’s business remained overwhelmingly petroleum based. Whether the new image will be sustainable depends in great measure on the behaviour of BP in the future and the extent to which it can be judged against its claims for itself.