Brain Farts

'Brain Farts' is a page for ideas that seem to have promise but have no immediate place to go. Until one of them makes me rich and/or famous, they'll have to sit here and gather dust.

Adult 'touch and feel' books

Reading 'touch and feel' books to my one year old, I was struck by the thought that no-one (to my knowledge) has developed these for adult consumption. For anyone who hasn't come across them, these thick-paged books contain samples of fabric to give texture to the illustrations. For example, a rabbit might be given a hairy chest with the use of fake fur, or a dinosaur given a 'scratchy' tongue. It's fun - kids love it; so why not adults!

  The most obvious, if cheesy, application would be to produce an 'adult' version which employs seaside-postcard humour and lots of Lycra, satin, lace and fur. It can be as mischievous as you like - the children's versions often have holes in them to be poked! And much can be achieved with fake fur and skin-coloured PVC!

  There's always a market for crass novelties like this. But maybe it's also worth more serious thought. How much consideration is given to the physical texture of what we read...or consume more generally. As our work and life more generally becomes less tactile, more virtual, is there a need to become more 'touchy, feely'?

ILR meets CB meets GPS
This Brain Fart thinks about commuters as a community and wonders whether there isn't a way to develop this using locative (GPS-based) media. It's based on the following observations:
1/ Getting to and from work is 'downtime' in which you are disconnected, isolated, unable to achieve very much. The places you are travelling to and from (home and work) have their own demands. Commuting represents another distinct space which could be utilised, made more productive or more enjoyable.
2/ The most common GPS devices are those used in cars to get you from A to B.
What local radio primarily does is to cater to this audience of commuters, providing them with information, entertainment and community news in the downtime of their daily commute (listening figures traditionally peak during rush hours). But what if those GPS devices (already installed in cars) could be tweaked to provide a similar but highly localised service -creating communities of commuters along shared routes into work?
This would become a centre of exhange: with commuters either posting/attaching audio to spots along the route, or simply listening to other audio postings along the route. These could include:
-traffic warnings, community notices, items for sale etc ('this pub has a band playing tonight' etc)
-music sequences pasted along the route, favourite driving tunes, new bands
-competitions: in-car recordings of songs (who doesn't sing in their car?!)
-points of interest along the route: information about local wildlife, history, planning rows, other news
You saw it here first!

Smellative
A lot has been written about temporal and spatial forms of narrative but what about olfactory narrative? Is it possible to tell a story using smells? It is, after all, one of the most evocative senses -yet has never been developed as a medium. Pizza Hut pumps garlic smells into the street to draw in customers, supermarkets have in-store bakeries for the same reasons, and perfume manufacturers attach stories to their products to promote them. But when has smell taken centre stage and become a performer in its own right?
  I think this notion is worth experimenting with...I imagine a row of jam-jars, each with a new and evocative smell. Could it be a travelogue: 'Journey through India', for example? But maybe this is too linear: what we need is a branching-interactive-olfactory-narrative. Users would simply follow their noses!

'The Real Virtual Reality' - a documentary

This is an idea for a documentary that came out of one of Jon's lectures. The 'virtual' world is becoming (or always was) material and embodied. Gaming points have real monetary value -Edward Castronova. Gamersloot.net employ Romanian gamers to collect points and then sell them. There are 'virtual' sweatshops in China where workers collect gaming weapons to be sold. Korea has a 'Cyber Terror Unit'. All these elements have huge potential for a documentary that investigates these practises but also explores more deeply the 'virtual' promise and harsh reality. But need to find the right strand for it. One-offs are almost impossible to sell.