Energy Babble: networked radio broadcasting internet content

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez – who leads a workshop at ECAL this week for the IIClouds project – pointed me to this intriguing project he was part of, with fellow colleagues at Goldsmith (Tobie Kerridge, Liliana Ovale, and Alex Wilkie). It's called "Energy Babble" (see the paper published at the Nordic Design Research Conference 2013). It's a networked radio appliance drawing content from online sources:

"Synthesised speech files are published from a server for immediate playback by the devices. These sound files are derived from texts from a range of sources, including twitter accounts and policy and activist news publishers. Speech files are also algorithmically generated by the system drawing on historic utterances, also triggered by energy events, and taken from user contributions via the devices’ microphones."

Why do I blog this? Matthew's currently leading a workshop about "botcaves", the hardware required to run bots. He mentioned this project that I find interesting as a way to materialize the aggregation of digital content.

The Internet of Things at the flea market

I think it's William Gibson who said that part of his speculation process was based on thinking how a piece of technology might end up on the dusty shelves of a pawn shop. That thought came up this morning while running across these two boxes of the Nabaztag. It's intriguing to see "the second first wireless rabbit" (that is, the 2.0 version of the Internet of Things posterchild) in a crappy box along with an air blower, a set of glasses, a polaroid and a deck of playing cards.

Coincidentally, I've heard that the Nabaztag, after almost ten years of bons et loyaux services, is going to be discontinued. So long and thanks for all the fish!