Thursday, October 22. 2009Data.gov.uk Newspaper: Opening Up Local Information as a Newspaper
The current project acts as a prototype / working demonstration of the creative and original possibilities that are possible when governments would open some of the valuable datasets they have currently in their position. It also hopes to encourage some more data to get opened up to the public. Also on Nodalities. Via @blprnt. ----- Harrabin's Notes: Green towerBBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin reports on the tower block under construction in China which could lead the way in green building technology.
THE GREEN TOWER OF GUANGZHOU CITY Among a host of features designed either to make or save energy, the one that caught my eye was the shape of the Pearl River Tower itself. It is built in a curve, facing the prevailing winds. And it has been deliberately sculpted to increase the speed of that wind and force it through slots in the building where wind turbines will be located. Now, on many buildings, wind turbines are a waste of space because there's so much turbulence in cities. I heard an apocryphal story about a Japanese firm that installed a turbine which needed electric power to keep it turning to save the face of its would-be-green owners.
HOW THE TOWER SAVES ENERGY
But the American architects of this tower - SOM - insist that their experiments in a wind tunnel show this building will generate economically viable wind power. The vertical axis turbines will be located in the mechanical floors mandated by the Chinese government as emergency muster floors, so no usable office space will be lost. SOM claims that by thinking carefully about the use of space combined with energy-saving and energy-generating technology, they have been able to make unprecedented gains, so this building will potentially create as much energy as it uses. They are by no means the only architects to espouse the principle of integrated design, of course. But some observers believe that too many buildings are still being put up with a few bolt-on green features, without proper thought as to what could be achieved through a more considered approach. Take the cooling system in the tower. Most of the time, air conditioning is done by fat air ducts which gobble both energy and space between floors and ceilings. Here the cooling is done by a cool water system. The water flows in ducts through concrete beams, and cool air descends upon the toiling masses from cold water radiators in the ceilings. This doesn't just save energy. SOM say it saves so much space that it's allowed the building's owners to put in an extra five storeys of usable office floor at little extra cost. Indeed, they predict that the extra investments in the building will start making the money in five years. There are other green features too. There's a wide-spaced double-glazed wall, which channels hot air upwards to a mechanical floor where it's harnessed for dehumidification. There's also substantial use of solar photovoltaic technology on the frontages of the building, which curve upwards toward the sun, although the current cost of photovoltaic arrays militated against cladding the building completely in energy-generating glass. Inside there are numerous automatic control systems to make sure power isn't being wasted. SOM say they could have coaxed the building to produce more energy but it would have been futile because there's no facility in Guangzhou to feed self-generated power back into the grid. To many, this will be a familiar tale. 'Radical' design I can't verify whether all its claims are true, but the building is undoubtedly an exciting project. Ame Englehart, director of SOM's East Asia office said: "This building is so radical it could only have been commissioned in China. The owners are very self-confident and have been prepared to push the design as far as it will go." SOM insists that the design is site-specific and can't just be replicated elsewhere. But the sad observation from my viewpoint standing on the girders of the 24th floor is that this tower is very much the exception rather than the rule. The Chinese government has increased building standards recently but they still don't lead to anything like the performance of the Pearl River Tower. A report in the China Daily during my trip suggested that 40% of bribery cases in China involve property development. And a Western businesswoman I bumped into told me her firm couldn't persuade Chinese clients to invest in more energy-efficient vehicles even if she could prove that they would start paying back their owners in energy costs is just 10 months. Later in the week I'll be looking at the building frenzy in the Chinese countryside. Tomorrow, though, I'll be looking at electric scooters in Guilin. ----- Via BBC News Related Links:Personal comment: Effet d'annonce ou réalité? Le point frappant est que l'on recommence à dessiner des architectures dont la forme et l'organisation est (en très légère partie ici) déterminée par un design "climatique", à la façon des architectures vernaculaires. A suivre... Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and CyberneticsBy Geeta Dayal on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 1:00 pm.
Eno was first exposed to concepts in cybernetics as a teenager in the mid-1960s, during his days as a student at Ipswich Art College. Several art schools in the UK in the '60s were incorporating ideas from cybernetics into their pedagogical approaches, mainly via Roy Ascott's infamous “Groundcourse” curriculum. Ipswich Art College, where Eno studied in the mid-'60s, was run by Ascott, an imposing presence who incorporated cutting-edge cybernetics principles into his offbeat teaching style. Before Ipswich, Ascott had been head tutor at Ealing, a nearby art school where a young Pete Townshend was studying. "The first term at Ipswich was devoted entirely to getting rid of those silly ideas about the nobility of the artist by a process of complete and relentless disorientation," Eno recalled some ten years later, in a guest lecture he gave at Trent Polytechnic. Ascott's teaching philosophy involved countless mandatory group collaboration exercises -- an echo of cybernetics' emphasis on “systems learning” -- and mental games. Very little of the teaching at Ipswich had anything to do with what the teenage Eno had ostensibly set out to do -- study the fine arts. Instead of daubing canvases with oil paints, Eno and his fellow students were instructed to create "mindmaps'' of each other. Eno became very interested in cybernetics, and possible ways to apply those ideas to music. As an art school student, he had gotten into observing life on a “meta” level, and looked at his own creative process with a bird's eye view. Cybernetics concepts challenged Eno to think in different ways about the process of making music, and these ideas infiltrated Eno's thinking on many of his 1970s albums in key ways. Groups of musicians working in the studio could be conceptualized, in some general sense, as cybernetic systems. A piece of music composed using feedback, or tape loops, could be construed using cybernetics principles, too. One of Eno's favorite quotes, from the managerial-cybernetics theorist Stafford Beer, would become a fundamental guiding principle for his work: ''Instead of trying to specify it in full detail," Beer wrote in his book The Brain of the Firm, "you specify it only somewhat. You then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go." Eno also derived inspiration from Stafford Beer's related definition of a “heuristic.” “To use Beer's example: If you wish to tell someone how to reach the top of a mountain that is shrouded in mist, the heuristic ‘keep going up’ will get him there,” Eno wrote. Eno connected Beer's concept of a “heuristic” to music.
Schmidt served as the music adviser to curator Jasia Reichardt for the landmark exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" at London's ICA in 1968, and his selection of computer music for the ICA show proved extraordinarily prescient. Schmidt had long been intrigued by electronic music, systems, and their connections to the visual arts. "Cybernetic Serendipity" showcased pathbreaking work by hundreds of artists, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Jean Tinguely, and was a huge success for Reichardt and the ICA, drawing somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 viewers and foreshadowing multiple major trends on the interfaces between art and technology. “Cybernetic Serendipity” also galvanized the interest in systems-based art. "The very notion of having a system in relation to making paintings is often anathema to those who value the mysterious and the intuitive, the free and the expressionistic, in art,” wrote Reichardt in 1968. “Systems, nevertheless, dispense neither with intuition nor mystery. Intuition is instrumental in the design of the system and mystery always remains in the final result."
(Courtesy of Lisson Gallery)
Eno and Schmidt released the Oblique Strategies cards together in 1975, when they realized that they had both been independently developing sets of ideas to help themselves come up with creative solutions to trying situations. “The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation – particularly in studios -- tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working, and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach,” explained Eno in an interview with Charles Amirkhanian in 1980.
The work of Eno and Schmidt, and of many other artists who took inspiration from ideas in cybernetics and other ideas from the sciences, was never a literal interpretation of scientific principles. That was part of what made it interesting. "One night at dinner, John Cage handed me a copy of Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener, and said "this is for you"," remembered John Brockman in his book By the Late John Brockman, published in 1969. "Robert Rauschenberg encouraged me to read about physics, recommending The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, and One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Gamow." Rauschenbergian physics and Cagean cybernetics were not, perhaps, the genuine article. These garbled transmissions from the sciences, mixed in ad-hoc ways into the arts, allowed for strange mutations to take root in culture, taking a life all their own. Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World (Continuum, 2009), a new book on Brian Eno. She has written over 150 articles and reviews for major publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, Wired, The Wire, Print, I.D., and many more. She has taught several courses as a lecturer in new media and journalism at the University of California - Berkeley, Fordham University, and the State University of New York. She studied cognitive neuroscience and film at M.I.T. and journalism at Columbia. You can find more of her work on her blog, The Original Soundtrack. ----- Via Rhizome.org Related Links:
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