REFLECT, a magazine

Photograph by Soffia Gisladóttir at Flickr

I’m always waiting for a character who’s going to come in and confuse the plot a bit more or make it more interesting, take it another way, try to kidnap it. I think it’s a bit like doing collages. Billy the Kid had a kind of collage structure. I’ve been thinking about collage a lot. I love it. There’s something about it that’s not just to do with having a different colour, a yellow bus ticket next to a packet of Gauloises or something like that. It’s also the texture of the paper, the juxtaposition of things. It’s having to make all those things one unit. So if something comes and doesn’t fit in, another thing drops out…. Even though I’m trying to write a novel from A to Z — or A to X, anyway — there is an element of these different voices. And we don’t think chronologically.

Michael Ondaatje interviewed by Johanna Schneller. The Globe and Mail. 13.4.07

I’ve only been publishing my writing online for a couple of months and I find it hard to imagine going back exclusively or even occasionally to writing for publications printed on paper, unless there’s some way I can easily take the books or magazines apart and re-use the bindings or put fresh material into them. The more time I spend browsing on Flickr and de.licio.us I keep longing for a way to view the photographs and read the articles in a way that brings excellent graphic design into the equation. In just two months my reading manner has completely changed. I no longer print out articles to take to a cafe to read while having coffee: I make coffee at home and read newspapers, magazines and blogs online. Borders is on my route home from the library but I no longer linger at the magazine stand there: I save photos into my favourites file on flickr and browse through them. The way I write and read has profoundly altered. I used to write from an extensive outline on paper: now I have a sketchy outline on paper and use my notes to keep track of thoughts, non-sequiturs and tangents that I might put in later, or stray thoughts that are racing ahead of where I am in the story. I used to believe that the screen was for information and the book, printed, bound, fixed, was for deep reflective reading. Now I’m able to reflect equally well reading from a screen.

It’s the EXPERIENCE of reading that’s important to capture. It seems to me – an armchair consumer electronics and product design expert — that all of the materials and communications systems and software exists to make this magazine, all I need to do is establish a compelling need for it to exist so that someone will want to manufacture it.

 THE HARDWARE: an accordion

Plastic Logic is already making flexible screens that resemble paper into glorious representations of books and newspapers.  They would be able to take a l-o-n-g piece of electronic paper (something as cashmere soft and faintly creamy, like the paper-substitute Yupo®) bend in tiny accordian folds that would create ’pages’ (the circuitry can be applied to the back of these folds) and snap a bamboo-mixture spine onto the folded accordion. The covers would be made of an organic (upcyclable) material that soaks in light for the solar-powered batteries and would be a ghostly overlay of the last fifty articles or images the magazine uploaded. It would have the effect of an artwork that William Gibson describes in Pattern Recognition,

On the wall to her left is a triptych by a Japanese artist whose name she forgets, three four-by-eight panels of plywood hung side by side. On these have been silk-screened, in layers, logos and big-eyed manga girls, but each successive layer of paint has been sanded to ghostly translucency, varnished, then overlaid with others, which have in turn been sanded, varnished….The result for Cayce being very soft, deep, almost soothing…

William Gibson. Pattern Recognition

THE EDITORIAL POLICY

The most radical thing about this magazine is the editing software. There’s no “editorial” content in Reflect. It’s just an empty electronic shell that people fill with their own content, it reflects the readers interests, not the editors, but there would be an “issue profile” on de.licio.us that show how various readers, including the editors of the magazine, are compiling the content of their own magazines, that anyone could upload to read.

The name of the magazine, Reflect, suggests a careful thoughtful reading of articles or images, but there would be design prompts coded into the images and articles downloaded that would ‘reflect’ the intentions of the writers and photographers and magazine designers. Although Flickr has an option that allows a photographer to show the photograph in several sizes and suggest an optimum size, Reflect could take things further, and make colour and texture adjustments (matte or glossy) and position the image on a page, much in the way that movies are letterboxed to show how they originally appeared on a larger screen.

And a feature I absolutely want and hope that someone reading this can tell me how to achieve is something I’ve seen for the first time in the online edition of Conde Nast’s new business magazine, Portfolio.

Red-haired and impish, the 32-year-old wore jeans, a wrinkled white dress shirt, and a pair of navy Converse sneakers. During lulls when documents were being printed, Kavanaugh played Blackhawk Striker, a computer game that he’d somehow figured out how to display on the room’s 13-foot screen.

The words that are underlined appear to be a link, and when the cursor hovers above the link a box appears (like a snap preview box, but it leads to a block of text, not another page) with these words in it: “But when negotiations hit an impasse, at least once an hour, Kavanaugh turned away from the imaginary helicopter cockpit and swung into action.”

This is the most minimal and elegant way I’ve seen to place quotes and blocks of text into an article, to bring in other voices, while still being able to write a composed, polished narrative in my own voice. I desperately want to be able to do this. This is the final piece in the puzzle for me, the only other thing I wanted this badly was the most radical and remarkable form of an index, the tag cloud, and I’ve achieved that by saving all of the articles (across my sites) into a de.licio.us profile and showing the tag cloud on the front page of my main site, Yamazaki’s Notebook.

THE PAYMENT AND ROYALTIES SYSTEM

I want someone to develop a PayPal like system that makes it possible to pay a monthly subscription fee (ten bucks say) to read or listen to or view anything on the internet. Pieces of music and movies and articles, anything that currently requires a subscription fee, would have a radio tag code embedded into it and a phone could be beamed at it and register a payment, or a universal code number loaded in or it could respond to a voice prompt. But the payment algorithm would register that this object had been seen, read or listened to and immediately send a royalty to the artist and publisher.

There’d be none of this 99c to own a music track, you could just listen to it any time you liked included in the fee. If you want to download a piece of music, or save or print an article a microtransaction fee would apply … charged to your phone bill (the monthly subscription fee would include a certain number of downloads & prints and you could pay extra to have more).

OTHER TITLES FROM THE SAME PUBLISHER

Another electronic publication I would want would be called RESPOND that would allow me to write onto electronic pages, or see the text appear there while I’m using an infra-red keyboard, and that would allow me to interact with Ken Goldberg’s telerobotic art projects. A new one goes online today:

 A new website will allow players to earn points by taking live photos and classifying wild birds. CONE Sutro Forest (CONE-SF) combines a remotely controllable robotic pan-tilt-zoom video camera with live streaming video, image database, and point system.

Conceived by Ken Goldberg, artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, and Dez Song, professor of computer science at Texas A&M, and funded by the National Science Foundation, CONE-SF automatically computes the optimal camera viewpoint that satisfies dozens or hundreds of simultaneous players, including both experts and amateurs. Managing large communities is the specialty of craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who will host the camera from his San Francisco residence overlooking the Sutro Forest.

CONE-SF is free and open to the public. To play, visit: http://cone.berkeley.edu.