I spent the past week in Warsaw with some friends and the M1. I arrived on Wet Monday, an Easter tradition where Polish "boys awake girls by pouring a bucket of water on their head and striking them about the legs with long thin twigs". Apparently the tradition continues out into the streets where boys splash girls they have crushes on, but I didn't see anything of the sort. Probably because it was way too cold, but also because Warsaw has a tendency to take itself way too serious. (I was told plenty of flirtatious water fights would be happening in the smaller, more "traditional" towns outside the city.) Fortunately I was able to recoup the fantasy that evening when I did some (visual) splashing of my own with the Milkymist alongside Movie Star Junkies, an impressive blues/punk band from Torino, Italy.

Full disclosure: I've never vj'd previous to this show. But this goes to show how simple the M1 is to use: I just plugged it in, aimed the live-feed video camera at the band, toggled between its preset psychedelic patches, and Boom! an epic visual performance. Everything went so well that I got invited to perform again the next night at a different venue. Despite the change in setting and sound--from underground (literally in a basement) punk show to jazz/funk fusion jam band in a swanky loungey bar--it was just as easy to adapt and compliment the music due to the M1's smorgasbord of visual options. Check out the videos, see for yourself: http://vimeo.com/fabricatorz/videos

If I were to write an allegory of the computer manufacturing industry in "Greater China", I might be tempted to call it Pingguo and Shanzhai.

Pingguo（蘋果）is the nickname by which Apple Computer is known in China. Its partner Foxconn (a Taiwanese company by the way) is the largest electronic component manufacturer in the world and the largest private employer in the PRC. Foxconn is the pinnacle of industrial scale electronics manufacturing in the Pearl River Delta (and, indeed, the world); and Apple would not be the Apple of today without Foxconn, and China.

Shanzhai（山寨）are the noble bandits of our little allegory: small-scale black market manufacturers who skirt regulations and quality control to produce affordable, relatively low yield, but surprisingly diverse electronics. (I should point out that these innovations were enabled by another Taiwanese company, Mediatek, which sells development kits that many Shanzhai products, such as mobile phones, are built on top of.)

Pinguo and Shanzhai are the well-known protagonists in the technological and social drama of the computer manufacturing industry that straddles the Taiwan Strait. But neither Pinguo nor Shanzhai tell the story of the kind of technology that I want in my life, or that I want to base my business on.

For me the real inspirational story is that of Qi Hardware. Qi Hardware is innovation built not at the cost of billions of dollars and legions of anonymous workers (Pingguo), nor at the cost of questionable legal and safety practices (Shanzhai). Rather, Qi Hardware is a collective dedicated to sharing knowledge, experience and technology, and represents the kind of wise future[1] I am looking to achieve.

In discussing Qi Hardware I am constantly looking for a language to describe this new style of innovation. I am reluctant to call it 'open' hardware for reasons I have already explained; and calling it 'copyleft' hardware (in contrast to 'copyright') puts too much emphasis on the legal underpinning.

I finally settled on the term 'shared' hardware to describe what I feel captures the spirit of the movement. By sharing, Qi Hardware aim to lower barriers to innovation, as well as to profit and pump out genuinely cool technology!

Let's keep telling this story.

Notes

[1] wise futures - I came by this term by listening to public talks by Rob van Kranenburg and Adam Greenfield in Taipei in February of this year. You can read Part I here.

The first photo in this post is of the Milkymist One, which I shot in my studio a couple of weeks ago. The second photo is of Adam Wang, when I visited him in Taipei, where he tests and assembles the Milkymist.

There isn't much video out there that does the Milkymist justice, an unfortunate circumstance because it really is an impressive little machine. In an attempt to remedy this Barry and I recently shot some video with the hopes of mirroring the representation of the Milkymist with it's actual ability. We (actually, I, since I'm the one responsible for the editing) fell well short of this mark. But despite the poor editing (I haven't edited video since the VHS days!) and poor image quality (who knew high-quality video required so many damn GB's?), you'll get to see how non-intimidating the set-up is and how fast this little guy can get a party started.

The drum clips are meant to demonstrate the Milkymist's integration with electronic instruments and external sound, both of which stimulate the visuals when plugged directly into the Milkymist or intercepted via the onboard microphone. And the club shots, well, those are testament to the Milkymist's party credibility. We actually smuggled the Milkymist into that particular party at a warehouse-like venue in San Francisco's Mission District, then set it up guerrilla-style and proceeded to project on the walls and dance floor despite the fact that there was already a house VJ. I was actually surprised how well our slapdash performance compared. During the short 15 minutes we were there the crowd turned away from the DJ and VJ projection on the far wall and towards each other in the middle of the room where we were projecting. The dancing and interaction intensified, and at one point one of the VJ's assistants came over all starry-eyed and intrigued.

I have to say, I was a bit skeptical about the Milkymist until I saw it in action. It has some incredible psychedelic and dynamic capabilities that will only continue to expand. Keep your eyes peeled, kids.

Footage here: http://downloads.qi-hardware.com/people/bonewolf/ and more to come.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to Academia Sinica in Taipei to address an audience of the Culturemondo forum on Smart Cultures, held alongside TELDAP and convened by Ilya Li. Ilya had asked me to prepare some remarks about open hardware culture, particularly as it relates to recent developments in Taiwan and China.

The Fabricatorz are often asked about "free and open" hardware. Jon shared his views on open hardware manufacturing during a talk he gave in Miami last December. It is not an idle topic for us, as we believe that investing in our own hardware platforms is just as important to the future of our business as is the software we create.

Can Hardware be Free?

The term 'open' hardware is used by way of analogy to free and open source software. The freedoms of 'free' software comprise the right to use, study, duplicate and improve that software. These freedoms as they relate to hardware apply not to the physical device itself, but rather to its design; for it is only the hardware design that can be truly studied, duplicated, and, most important, improved.

However, a process which begins with a free hardware design and ends with a finished product requires a non-trivial provision of capital, resources, skill, and time. This plain fact leads the founder of the free software movment, Richard Stallman, to conclude that "freedom to copy hardware is not as important, because copying hardware is hard to do."

I think the logic of that assessment is backward. The difficulty that hardware presents to our freedoms makes the issue more important, not less. It is the reason that we at Fabricatorz are investing time, money and talent to find solutions to the hardware dilemma. Recall the famous words of Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

Is Richard Stallman serious about software? I know we are.

Credits (images remixed by me on an M1):
Richard_Matthew_Stallman_working_on_his_Lemote_Machine
Alan_Kay_and_the_prototype_of_the_Dynabook

I recently spoke at TTI Vanguard's NEXTGEN conference in Miami. Totally great experience to talk to some very high level folks about the work we are doing as Fabricatorz on the Qi Hardware and Milkymist Video Synthesizer project. Here are my slides. The first set I did on my laptop, and the second set I *performed* using the Milkymist! In 2012, I will try to use the Milkymist for any performances (no more presentations!).

I should note that the presentation title reflects popular interest in some of my topics, and not the specific words I would choose to represent what we are working on. In particular, we are staying away from using the words FREE, OPEN, COPYLEFT now in favor of Sharing, hence Sharism. Also, the word Hardware is a bit problematic because of what it conjures up for computer nerds as this an already manufactured piece of hardware, like the 400K iphones foxconn is churning out a day. We take it to mean more like the glass or metal that is part of a final product. To consider the Milkymist or our projects FROM CHINA is not completely accurate. While I spend a lot of time in China, the Milkymist in particular is manufactured mostly in Taiwan.

Oh well, words are words are words! Check out the slides below and please share. They are ✳ (shared by) me, aka: ✳ Fabricatorz.

(Click here for the SVG presentation or the SVG with outlines)

(Click here for the SVG presentation or the SVG with outlines)

Ask me about the event the next time you see me; I have some great stories to tell since this event was supposed to be mostly private during the conference.

In a more public showing, Yi from Qi Hardware is presenting about the Milkymist tonite (中文 at Xinchejian, the Shanghai-based hackerspace we held the first Sharism Presents Shanghai.

Don't forget to Buy a Milkymist One for yourself or your friendz :)