Montreux and the ISWC Mothers of Invention

I have always liked Montreux. It is an idyllic lakeside town that would ooze class and opulence were oozing not just too tackily post-19th century. Its olde-worlde feel is overlayed with a general bearing of grace, politeness, and pleasure in service which is neither too obsequious nor too begrudging. When I lived in Switzerland in the 80’s and 90’s, I visited Montreux often en route to or from the neighbouring town of Vevy (home to the international headquarters of Nestlé and Philip Morris), and, as in the rest of the country, not a lot seems to have changed. Tipping is still considered vulgar; people still don’t walk on red at pedestrian crossings; the stores still close for lunch; and the trains still run on time.

Lounging below vine-covered hillsides at the eastern end of Lac Léman (that’s Lake Geneva to the non-Vaudoise), Montreux is the kind of resort town that Merchant Ivory would set movies in, had E. M. Forster ever written stories based there, and, of course, had Ismail Merchant not recently gone to join the choir invisible. As has Freddy Mercury, who loved the town and apparently lived out his last years there, his loyalty being rewarded by an appropriately larger-than-life statue of him jutting out his butt and punching the air in triumph as he glares across the lake at France.

Creative types have always been attracted to Montreux. Lord Byron was inspired by the nearby lakeside castle to write The Prisoner of Chillon whose opening line “Eternal spirit of the chainless mind!” could be the T-shirt slogan of the blognoscenti. Queen owns a recording studio in the Montreux. Deep Purple burned down the casino while recording there some 35 years ago (actually, it was a fire that broke out during a concert by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention), inspiring Smoke on the Water, the guitar riff from which is also commemorated in a lakeside sculpture. David Bowie has a home in Montreux, though nobody in the town would be so indiscrete as to tell you where. Every summer a horde of jazz musicians and fans descends on the town for the amazingly wonderful Montreux Jazz Festival. Where else, as I was lucky to do one year, can you see onstage in one evening Deedee Bridgewater, Van Morrison, Georgie Fame, Santana, and John McClaughlin each playing their own sets and then jamming till the early hours with many other musical legends who are in town to listen and play?


Freddy does Montreux

This year another black-clad crowd of unconventional but somewhat geekier Mothers of Invention descended on the town to enjoy the engineering equivalent of jazz. While the inventors of the air guitar T-shirt were missing from the Montreux symposium, a few hundred other engineering students, professors, policy makers, industrialists, and techno-hucksters from all over the globe converged for a few days of future-gazing, presenting the improvisations, concepts and experiments that must surely be at one of the bloodier edges of bleeding-edge thinking.

The International Symposium on Wearable Computing melded out-of-this-world engineering, ergonomics, and human-computer interfaces with some of the more intense needs for performance improvement that exist in the real world: The GPS-linked head-up-display on fire-fighters’ visors that guides them out of smoke-filled buildings; the doctor’s hospital note taking system that works on arm gestures so as not to take attention away from the patient (pity the unfortunate patient seeing a doctor repeatedly making a sign of the cross at his bedside); the scary guy who uses his skin as a conductor to send 2 Megabits per second of data across his body, eliminating the need for iPod headphone cables; the see-through eyeglass displays and motion-sensing wrist bands that train auto-workers to install headlamps. The theory sessions, covering topics like “Humans – A Tutorial,” were even more mind-bending than the practice sessions.

For someone like me who is engaged at the application and performance impact end of technology, it was fascinating and a little humbling to spend a couple of days in the company of the brilliant minds that actually have to conceive, design, and build the revolutionary tools in the first place.