Duelling with Distance - PICNIC08, Stefan Agamanolis

Stefan Agamanolis of Distance Lab is ex-MIT.

These days his mission is “is to bring together engineering, design, and the arts to challenge the way people think about distance and to help overcome its disadvantages in learning, health, relationships, culture, and other domains.”

Stefan opens with one of the most engaging comparisons I’ve heard in a long time (despite it being ultimately presented just as simple PPT 1.0 - respect for bucking the trend).

With a backdrop of the #1 Google Image search result for “Fast Food” he runs down some of the things we associate with fast food (efficiency, genericism, unsatisfying, ubiquitous), and then contrasts those with the values of the “Slow Food” movement.

His theme is “what would slow communication be like?” After all, it’s a world where the phone call was once planned, private and focused - rather than public, random and disjointed. He then presents four projects that looked to explore slow communication by focusing on the values of privacy, intimacy, tradition and health.

Privacy is covered by the Iso-Phone

Intimacy is covered off by the Mutsugoto (or Pillow Book, cribbing from the Greenaway flick) project which is honestly sweet and touching if impractical - “Mutsugoto allows distant partners to communicate through the language of touch as expressed on the canvas of the human body. A specialized computer vision and projection system allows users to write or draw on their own bodies while laying in bed. Drawings made by one partner are transmitted to and revealed on the body of the remote partner. ”

The intimacy point is particularly well made - you talk to your lover on the same phone they talk to their lawyer or colleagues with, genericising the whole experience. So in this version, there you go - you reach out remotely and other arms reach out to you, other eyes smile tenderly etc, only it’s represented by light and shape. As I say, sweet and thought provoking, but deeply impractical and unlikely to help anyone (other than the most deeply, tragic arthouse)  actually get off.

The value of Tradition is represented by the Solar Vintage project, again, cute, but did nothing for me, and then finally Health gets an airing with the Remote Impact project. Again, less impressive…

So final verdict? Great stuff, but weaker progressively. Nevertheless, fantastic presentation and properly thought provoking. We’ve looked before at why mobile phones destroy intimacy and contribute to the pollution of public spaces, but this pushed it so much further…