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Digital Creativity
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An internet of old things

Chris Speed
a a

The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art Available online: 06 Apr 2011

To cite this article: Chris Speed (2010): An internet of old things, Digital Creativity, 21:4, 239-246 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2010.555915

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Digital Creativity 2010, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 239 246

An internet of old things

Chris Speed
The Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art
c.speed@eca.ac.uk

Abstract
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This paper reects upon the temporal characteristics of the emerging phenomenon known as the Internet of Things. As objects become individually tagged with unique identities through the addition of small electronic chips or bar codes, their history is recorded and made available to others across a network. The advent of this ever-growing catalogue of histories means that every object will be in touch with its current and previous owner at all times and suggests that while we as owners might like to forget about an object, we will never truly be detached from them. However the author suggests that there exists a social and cultural inertia that is tied to a teleological perception of time and that the weight of this is hampering opportunities for the Internet of Things to embrace old things. The paper uses a series of cultural coordinates to explore our relationship with personal and social histories including the use of cosmetic surgery to correct hereditary characteristics and lms from the last ve years that demonstrate a more creative approach to understanding the past. Ultimately the author uses a research project that he is involved in to explore the potential for digital technology to network the past and develop an Internet of Old Things. Keywords: time, space, locative media, digital mapping

1 Things and linearity

The term, Internet of Things, refers to the technical and cultural shift that is anticipated as society moves to a ubiquitous form of computing in which every device is on, and every object is connected in some way to the Internet. The specic reference to things refers to the concept that every new object will also be able to be part of this extended Internet, because they will have been tagged and indexed by the manufacturer during production. The technology has enabled supermarkets to track the temperature of consignments of prawns from the shing boat that caught them, to the in-store freezers, to following the life cycle of a product from cradle to grave, shelf to landll. Tracked and monitored as they move around the world, objects are becoming networked and always-on (Greeneld 2006), a condition that means it will become harder to disassociate an object from its memories. However industry is not geared up to handling the histories of objects, it is focussed upon the production of new objects. The innovative use of linear models of time underpinned the development of manufacturing and distribution systems throughout the twentieth century. Since the industrial revolution, time and space has been treated as discrete units in order to develop more and more innovative means of accelerating production processes. From Fords development of the production line to the Toyota Production System, time and space have been compressed to develop increasingly exible forms of accumulation (Harvey 1990, p. 298). In each case the model of time has travelled in one direction: from a cradle

ISSN 1462-6268 # 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14626268.2010.555915 http://www.informaworld.com

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to a grave, choosing to pay little attention to looking backwards. A fall out of this forward looking production of things is a modern tendency that is epitomised in the technological determinist slogans from recent history: Were getting there (British Rail, 1980s), Where do you want to go today? (Microsoft, 1990s) or The futures bright the futures Orange (Orange phones, 2000s). A characteristic to this condition is the assumption that we are able to relinquish ourselves from any past prole and that the things that are new are best.

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2 Valuing the future and forgetting the past

In the summer of 2009 the UK artist Jasper Joffe staged the sale of everything that he owned at the Idea Generation Gallery in London. Everything from his paintings, drawings, teddy bears, and rare books was grouped into 33 different lots, each on sale for 3333. Part of the publicity for the show involved a short interview on BBC Radio. During this interview he described how the installation/performance offered him an opportunity to re-think everything and to overcome a tendency of getting stuck with old habits. My emotions exist I guess in my brain, not in the stuff that I own, the things that I feel . . . the things I do, dont relate to the photos Ive got in a box or an object that I keep at home, or you know, an antique teddy bear. (Jasper Joffe 2009) Joffes ease in detaching himself from an object and the memories that are associated with it, are a Cartesian trait in which the breaking down of systems into discrete units, in particular the subject and object, and time and space, support a position of control. The linear model of time that production models have inherited, tends toward an industrial interpretation for the Internet of Things that, like Joffe, disassociates itself with the past and is interested in only producing the new. Tags on new current consumer artefacts tend to fall into three categories along a linear time line: (1) Past; Ability to identify where something was or what condition it was in, in the past
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(often used in surveillance or evidence to justify the integrity of something that is fresh or new, or alternatively conrm that it is outdated); (2) Present; Ability to check on the status of something, its condition now; and (3) Offer new opportunities to connect to related products or services, for future consumption (offers printed on to products or found on posters). These three temporal perspectives offer the primary benets for tagged products as they emerge into mass circulation, with different parties able to access different databases in order to promote the consumption of new things. While the consumer landscape is kept fresh with information about the new, the network properties of the Internet of Things offers other opportunities that do not adhere to a linear model of time, and instead offer value to objects through the recovery and retention of information from the past. However the question that this paper proposes is whether the Internet of Things can escape the inertia of society that uses a teleological basis for many of its approaches to production and manufacture?

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3 Cosmetic surgery: an analysis of denial of provenance

In searching for further evidence of the social inertia behind a teleological model for the world, the author offers the culture of cosmetic surgery as a form of practice that embodies the characteristics of a society that tends toward looking forward in time in denial of the past. Writing as someone who has no experience of cosmetic surgery, the psychology behind people who invest in it, or the cultural pressures that sustain what seems to be a thriving industry, the author offers it as a concept for playful analysis in the context of the Internet of Things and networked history. We can assume that the Internet of Things posits a circumstance in which every time we pick up an object we will be offered not only its individual heritage but also its connection to everything else that is in someway related to it. No longer detached and free to move from the table, a cup of tea on a table will be attached to a

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web of links that will add a historical weight to it as we pick it up. Perhaps only as challenging as picking up a tea cup that has bound by cobwebs, nevertheless the tea cup will no longer be an unconnected artefact but instead attached to lines of thread that have built up over time as different people have been involved in its manufacture, passed it on to its current owner and ultimately drunk from it. As individuals, our sense of social being is constituted through the relationships that we have with our friends and family, and our actions and communications toward them are affected by the histories that we have produced together. Of the relationships that we have with our friends the result of these connections manifests to some extent in how we dress and associate ourselves with each other through our public image and the products we wear and purchase for our homes. For families, the relationship is biological and manifests itself in the shape of our noses, size of our ears and quality of our skin. If we dwell on the concept of our bodies as members of a historical network we can identify parts of our bodies that we know are inherited from mothers, fathers and grandparents. So much so that if we have known our relatives just a little bit we understand ourselves not as fresh new human beings but a collection of components that have been mashed up from a range of genetic connections. We also anticipate that when we fall in love, and as one thing leads to another, that when our own children are born that they will be identiable as related to us because they too have some of our features. Of course this is not anything new, we were quite aware that when we met our lovers parents for the rst time that all along we would be kissing the lips of our future father in-law. So in this web of physical attributes that connect us to our parents and anticipates the look of our children depending upon who we make love to, what does it mean to decide to have cosmetic surgery and alter these features? To change a nose is to proclaim that a grandfathers nose is not something that is wanted on our face. To alter our ears is to deny a relationship with a mother, whose ears had perhaps been
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hidden behind long hair. While there are many good psychological reasons for denying a connection with the past there does seem to be a persistent hope that futures can be rewritten through a severance with the baggage that has formerly dened us. How does the future child associate herself with a parent that does not look like them? How are we to feel when nobody is able to comment on the likeness between our newborn and ourselves because we have had too much cosmetic surgery? Dare we postulate that the recent trend for Hollywood stars to adopt children is a carefully considered decision to avoid the genetic fruit machine that is involved in procreation and that any results of a new child might affect the image of the parent who themselves has been modied to retain a look that is kept as timeless as possible? Of course the author is using biological and physiological connections as a metaphor for revealing the legacy that modernity has left us with that encourages us to anticipate the new and furthermore seize opportunities to retain newness. In the Internet of Things we will not be able to distinguish the new anymore because everything will have a history, every teacup will have its cobwebs already attached as it is picked up from the shelf in the shop where it will begin another relationship with another owner. The benet of using cosmetic surgery as a metaphor for an Internet of Things is that it highlights a teleological inertia in the way that we consider the relationship between things: that the next in line will be new and have the opportunity to express itself as a new start, a fresh beginning that may go on to succeed where the previous generation failed.

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4 Playing with time

Despite the momentum of a teleological based society there seems to be evidence of ever increasingly creative approaches for presenting complex histories. Cinema in particular has offered tangible examples in which the linear time line is deconstructed and reconstructed to provide the audience with different insights into a story. From Pulp

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Fiction to Sliding Doors, and Memento to The Time Travellers Wife, directors have manipulated the traditional format of start, middle and end in many creative ways so as to offer a temporal complexity to a context that reveals a contingency present in the subject of the narrative. In the last two years three lms in particular have taken the deeply contingent subject of the Second World War and told stories in ways that challenge the audiences preconceptions of the issues involved. Stephen Daldrys interpretation of Bernhard Schlinks book The Reader, Quentin Tarantinos Inglourious Basterds, and Michael Hanekes The White Ribbon all use different temporal approaches to offer respite to a society that is old enough to reect upon the horrors of war, but still struggles to reconcile its many dreadful consequences. 4.1 Three time frames for the Second World War

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away from the events of war, offers a temporal model which is deeply contingent and makes clear a networked model to the history of postwar Germany.

4.1.2 Inglourious Basterds

4.1.1 The Reader

Bernhard Schlinks book and Stephen Daldrys lm The Reader situate the audience in an intergenerational love affair in which we watch our protagonist, a young law student, as he struggles to understand a previous teenage relationship with a woman who he now comes across in court, on trial accused of a war crime. The woman, who is accused of indirectly murdering a large group of prisoners by not releasing them from a church that catches re, is convicted of murder because she attempts to explain the importance at the time of following instructions, of reading. The narrative is particularly affective because it is careful to bridge a series of relationships that are often seen as stratas that do not interfere: the protagonists love affair with someone who is closer to his mothers age, his relationship with his father who must (by temporal association) have been part of the German war effort and ultimately a descendant of one of the victims who was trapped and killed in the church. The Readers use of the law student as someone who is able to traverse the generational strata that separates the different moral judgments made by each generation as we move further
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Tarantino has a very different approach to dealing with the series of events that we accept as the story of the Second World War. For Tarantino it is easy to simply re-write history by changing some of the facts to construct a series of new endings that offer recompense to some of the acts of war. Like many Tarantino lms a series of characters are interwoven in a way that the subtly of their interactions is too complex for the audience to anticipate any ending. Inglourious Basterds features four primary characters: a young French Jewish cinema owner who narrowly escaped being murdered alongside her family by a Colonel of the SS, the same Colonel who persuades Hitler to attend the premier of a new propaganda lm in the same cinema, the young director of the lm who is propelled to success after making the lm, and a crack American military squad whose single objective is to hunt down members of the Nazi party. Each driven by a mission of glory, the lm ends with the young Jewish cinema owner using the ammable nature of celluloid as ammunition to burn down her cinema with a great many key members of the Nazi party inside. The young Jew dies in the process but the glory of rewriting history is magnied as the stream of light from the projector projects her as one of extraordinary power upon the plumes of smoke that ll the auditorium. While a twist remains as the commandant bargains his way out of being murdered by the leader of the American team, the power of the graphic symbol wins out as a swastika is carved on to the SS Colonels head. Reminding us of the power of the image and representational media to ght wars, Inglourious Basterds rewrites history for a contemporary audience who know how the war ends, but perhaps wish for more a satisfying ending than Hitler committing suicide in a bunker in Berlin (Cox 2009).

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4.1.3 The White Ribbon

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Michael Hanekes The White Ribbon employs an even more challenging temporal strategy: to locate a story in a time before the Second World War has actually happened. Based in a ctitious German town between 1913 and 1914, just before the start of the First World War and a further 29 years before the Second World War, Haneke constructs a relatively small environment in which the politics of a series of grand narratives are played out. Life in the village of Eichwald is dominated by the different forms of power that exerted by the pastor, doctor, farmer and baron, all of whom abuse their positions to retain forms of control. However these politics are shattered as a series of disturbing events begin to occur: from a wire that is stretched between two trees causing the doctor to fall from his horse, to the farmers wife who dies at the sawmill when rotten oorboards give way. From the barons eldest son who goes missing on the day of the harvest festival and is found the following morning in the sawmill, bound and thrashed with a cane, to the pastors parakeet which is found cruelly impaled. These incidents are played out to an audience who are perfectly aware of what becomes of the generation of children who grow up in this context of complex power relations and wicked acts. The children will grow up in time to be complicit in the Second World War, no one will ever know who or how, but the lineage that Haneke draws between the disturbed qualities of the village to the horrors of war are tangible. When strictness becomes an end in itself, and when an idea turns into ideology, it becomes perilous for anyone who doesnt comply with this ideology. The lm uses the example of German fascism to talk about the mental preconditions for every type of terrorism, whether it comes from the right or the left, and whether its politically or religiously motivated. Wherever people are in a [sic] hopeless, unhappy and humiliating situations, they will grasp at any straw that is handed to them. (Haneke 2009) Of course the success of all of these lms to engage different audiences is because in the web
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of hereditary and social relations, 65 years since the war ended, it is very hard to nd someone without some association with the good guys and the bad guys. However, this temporal distance is enough to allow us to develop creative models of temporality that will provide insight in to the social complexity that is war.

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5 Creative opportunities for the Internet of Things

It has been suggested that people surround themselves with between 1000 and 5000 objects. Of those thousands of objects many of them are probably not truly cared for and end up in rubbish bins or in storage, but for every owner, in almost every household there are a selection of objects that hold signicant resonance and will already connect them to an Internet of memory and meaning. An intrinsic human trait is the process of imbuing meaning onto objects so that they provide connections to people, events and environments. Artefacts across a mantelpiece become conduits between events that happened in the past, to people who will occupy the future. These objects become essential coordinates across families and communities to support the telling of a stories and passing-on knowledge. Developed in collaboration with the Oxfam charity shop in the student quarter of Manchester, a creative/technical intervention entitled RememberMe explored how memories that are attached to objects can affect consumer habits. Oxfam are a charity that has 700 shops in towns and cities across the UK. The shops receive donations of clothes and artefacts from people and sell them on to new owners as second-hand goods. A research associate worked for one week in the Oxfam shop in Manchester and asked people that dropped things off to tell a brief story about the object into a microphone, e.g. where they acquired it, what memories it brings back and any associated stories. These audio tracks were then uploaded to the Audioboo service (http://www.audioboo.com) and linked to newly created stories on the Tales of Things website (see Section 3). One week later, with the permission of people involved, this audio

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track was linked to two-dimensional barcodes and radio-frequency identication (RFID) tags that were attached to the objects in the shop with a custom RememberMe label. Two-dimensional barcodes, commonly known as QR codes (quick response) are a printed paper barcode that is able to contain an Internet address and like RFID tags can easily be associated with information or data les. Figure 1 illustrates a screenshot of a tag attached to an artefact in the Oxfam shop. People browsed the shop used bespoke RFID readers and the Tales of Things iPhone and Android phone-based applications to scan the labels. Once triggered, speakers located in the shop played back the audio stories associated with the label. Although the team anticipated an interest in the stories, we were surprised at how affective the very individual voices were upon visitors to the shop. The actual sound of somebodys voice associated with an object offered a supernatural extension to handling an artefact. People visiting

the shop, browsing the objects and scanning the tagged donated items spoke of the personal connections made as artefacts conjured an actual voice that gave the object additional meaning. The red silk toiletries bag that had no history or geography was transformed into an object loaded with place and personality as the story of its previous owner described a shopping trip in Bangkok that involved a near death experience in a tuk tuk (Figure 2). Well my item is the little red silk make-up toiletries bag its from a place called Narai in Bangkok and it was one of the very rst things that I bought when I went to visit my uncle and his wife Noi who lived just outside Bangkok themselves and I believe if this is the shopping trip that Im thinking of, I believe its also one of the very rst times that I got a tuk tuk and nearly fell out, on the middle of the motorway, on the way back which Im pretty certain it is actually so yeah thats my story and I risked life and limb to get that toiletries bag. (Red Toiletries bag, Anonymous donor)

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Figure 1. Tale view in Tales of Things. RememberMe at FutureEverything 2010 (Photo # WeAreTAPE).

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Figure 2. Scanning the red silk toiletries bag. RememberMe at FutureEverything 2010 (Photo # WeAreTAPE).

The projects emphasis upon personal stories and not quantitative data such as price, temperature or other logistical data, offered a rich immaterial dimension to each objects material instantiation. The result of this supplementary information meant that every object (approximately 50 in total) was sold, even the types that are notoriously hard for a second-hand shop to sell.

6 Tales of Things
The RememberMe project relies upon a technical framework: Tales of Things. Tales of Things consists of a web application that provides a backend services that is able to connect different media to a unique two-dimensional barcode. People that register for a free account at Tales of Things can add new objects to a user-generated object database via a web browser interface. During this process they provide some (optional) information (e.g. name, keywords, location) and a story (tale) about the object (thing). Tales can be told using text and any additional media that can be referenced via a URL (Unied Resource Locator). The system is capable of analysing provided URLs and rendering media from services such as
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YouTube, Flickr and Audioboo in an integrated media player interface. When a new object is created the service creates a unique two-dimensional barcode (QR Code) for the object that can be printed out and attached to the object. People are also able to link the objects using RFID tags. The web interface provides additional functions such as a commenting system, a view of the location of things and tales on a map, search, user proles, email and Twitter notications. An interface for group spaces and a public Application Programming Interface (API) are currently under development. We offer downloadable bespoke mobile clients that can read Tales of Things QR codes and that provide additional functions such as adding of new tales when a barcode has been scanned for the iPhone and Android platform. Further custom Bluetooth RFID Readers have been developed that read Tales of Things registered RFID tags and that can communicate to other devices via Bluetooth.

7 Conclusion
This paper has emphasised the teleological tendencies of contemporary society and its propensity to concentrate upon the new and detach itself from

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the past. Through brief analysis of the artist Jasper Joffe and his motives for the work Sale of a lifetime the author established a basis upon which to explore how easy it might be for people to ignore their past because of the motive toward the future. The paper used cosmetic surgery as an extreme metaphor to explore a denial of provenance and looked to cinema to demonstrate creative uses of timelines to describe the contingent nature of history. The RememberMe project was used to evoke an alternative temporal economy, one in which the arrow of time reects back to use memories and history as a means of adding value to artefacts as the pass through the society, and, as objects become tagged and catalogued within networks, the Tales of Things project offers a bottom-up approach allowing the public to tag objects and ensure that the Internet of Things is not just focusing upon new items, but identies the value of old things. This temporal turn offers a signicant shift in the linear cradle to grave production and consumption path that has underpinned the twentieth century, one that in contrast offers a memory economy in which value is not predicated on the idea of the new and the assumption we can detach ourselves from things in order to move into the future without ties to the past is overcome.

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inglourious-basterds-tarantino-change-history [Accessed 3 February 2011]. Greeneld, A., 2006. Everyware, the dawning age of ubiquitous computing. Berkley, CA: New Riders. Haneke, M., 2009. Every lm rapes the viewer. Spiegel Interview with Director Michael Haneke. Spiegel Online International. 21 October 2009. Availabel from: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/ 0,1518,656419,00.html [Accessed 3 February 2011]. Harvey, D., 1990. The condition of postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. Joffe, J., 2009. Interview on BBC Radio FiveLive, Breakfast Show. 30 June 2009.

Acknowledgements
The Tales of Things project is supported by a Digital Economy, Research Councils UK grant, and made real by our team: R. Barthel, B. Blundell, M. Burke, M. De Jode, A. HudsonSmith, K. Leder, K. Karpovich, M. Manohar, C. Lee, J. Macdonald, S. OCallaghan, S. Quigley, J. Rogers, D. Shingleton and C. Speed.

References
Cox, B., 2009. Inglourious Basterds is cinemas revenge on life. Guardian Film Blog. Available from: http:// www.guardian.co.uk/lm/lmblog/2009/aug/20/

Chris Speed is Reader in Digital Spaces at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture where he teaches undergraduate, masters and supervises PhD students. Chris has sustained a critical enquiry into how digital technology can engage with the eld of architecture and human geography through a variety of established international digital art contexts including: International Symposium on Electronic Art, Biennial of Electronic Arts Perth, Ars Electronica, Consciousness Reframed, Sonic Acts, LoveBytes, We Love Technology, Sonic Arts Festival, MELT, Less Remote, FutureSonic, and the Arts Catalyst / Leonardo symposium held alongside The International Astronautical Congress. At the time of writing (2011) Chris is working with collaborative GPS technologies and the streaming of social and environmental data. He is the lead academic on a GPS tool for historical maps iPhone application: Walking Through Time, is the leader of a large UK academic team investigating social memory within the Internet of Things funded by the UK Research Councils and is the co-developer for the locative media application Comob Net available for download in the Apple iPhone App Store developed in conjunction with Jen Southern (independent artist) and colleagues from the Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Edinburgh.

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