Note: during the long shutdown of the museums in Switzerland last Spring, fabric | ch has nevertheless the chance to see Public Platform of Future Past (pdf), one of its latest architectural investigations, integrated into the permanent collection of the Haus der elektronischen Künste (HeK), in Basel.
We are pleased that our work is recognized by innovative and risk taking curators (Sabine Himmelsbach, Boris Magrini), and become part of the museum's collection, along several others works (by Jodi, !Mediengruppe Bitnik, Olia Lialina, Christina Kubisch, Zimoun, etc.)
It is also the first of our work whose certificate of authenticity has been issued by a blockchain! (datadroppers)
A second work - currently in production - will enter the collection in the spring of 2021, which will be documented at that time.
Note: the discussion about "Data Materialization" between Nathalie Kane (V&A Museum, London) and Patrick Keller (fabric | ch, ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne (HES-SO)), on the occasion of the ECAL Research Day, has been published on the dedicated website, along with other interesting talks.
Note: 2017 was very busy (the reason why I wasn't able to post much on | rblg...), and the start of 2018 happens to be the same. Fortunately and unfortunatly!
I hope things will calm down a bit next Spring, but in the meantime, we're setting up an exhibition with fabric | ch. A selection of works retracing 20 years of activities, which purpose will be also to serve in the perspective of a photo shooting for a forthcoming book.
The event will take place in a disuse factory (yet a historical monument from the 2nd industrial era), near Lausanne.
If you are around, do not hesitate to knock at the door!
During a few days, in the context of the preparation of a book, a selection of works retracing 20 years of activities of fabric | ch will be on display in a disused factory close to Lausanne.
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Information: http://www.fabric.ch/xx/
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Opening on February 9, 5.00-11.00pm
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Visiting hours:
Saturday - Sunday 10-11.02, 4.00-8.00pm
Wednesday 14.02, 5.00-8.00pm
Friday-Saturday 16-17.02, 5.00-8.00pm.
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Or by appointment: 021.3511021
Guided tours at 6.00pm
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Pendant quelques jours et dans le contexte de la création d'un livre monographique, accrochage d'une sélection de travaux retraçant 20 ans d'activités de fabric | ch.
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Informations: http://www.fabric.ch/xx
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Vernissage le 9 février, 17h-23h
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Heures de visite:
Samedi - dimanche 10-11.02, 16h-20h
Mercredi 14.02, 17h-20h
Vendredi-samedi 16-17.02, 17h-20h00
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Ou sur rendez-vous: 021.3511021
Visites commentées à 18h.
I like to believe that we tried on our side to address this question of public space - mediated and somehow "franchised" by technology - through many of our past works at fabric | ch. We even tried with our limited means to articulate or bring scaled answers to these questions...
A collection of essays by prominent creators collected by MIT explores the uncertain nature of common space in the contemporary world. And the answer to the question in the title is yes!
Gediminas Urbonas, Ann Lui and Lucas Freeman are the editors of a book that presents a wide range of intellectual reflections and artistic experimentations centred around the concept of public space. The title of the volume, Public Space? Lost and Found, immediately places the reader in a doubtful state: nothing should be taken for granted or as certain, given that we are asking ourselves if, in fact, public space still exists.
This question was originally the basis for a symposium and an exhibition hosted by MIT in 2014, as part of the work of ACT, the acronym for the Art, Culture and Technology programme. Contained within the incredibly well-oiled scientific and technological machine that is MIT, ACT is a strange creature, a hybrid where sometimes extremely different practices cross paths, producing exciting results: exhibitions; critical analyses, which often examine the foundations and the tendencies of the university itself, underpinned by an interest in the political role of research; actual inventions, developed in collaboration with other labs and university courses, that attract students who have a desire to exchange ideas with people from different paths and want the chance to take part in initiatives that operate free from educational preconceptions.
The book is one of the many avenues of communication pursued by ACT, currently directed by Gediminas Urbonas (a Lithuanian visual artist who has taught there since 2009) who succeeded the curator Ute Meta Bauer. The collection explores how the idea of public space is at the heart of what interests artists and designers and how, consequently, the conception, the creation and the use of collective spaces are a response to current-day transformations. These include the spread of digital technologies, climate change, the enforcement of austerity policies due to the reduction in available resources, and the emergence of political arguments that favour separation between people. The concluding conversation Reflexivity and Resistance in Communicative Capitalism between Urbonas and Jodi Dean, an American political scientist, summarises many of the book’s ideas: public space becomes the tool for resisting the growing privatisation of our lives.
The book, which features stupendous graphics by Node (a design studio based in Berlin and Oslo), is divided into four sections: paradoxes, ecologies, jurisdictions and signals.
The contents alternate essays (like Angela Vettese’s analysis of the role of national pavilions at the Biennale di Venezia or Beatriz Colomina’s reflections about the impact of social media on issues of privacy) with the presentation of architectural projects and artistic interventions designed by architects like Andrés Jaque, Teddy Cruz and Marjetica Potr or by historic MIT professors like the multimedia artist Antoni Muntadas. The republication of Art and Ecological Consciousness, a 1972 book by György Kepes, the multi-disciplinary genius who was the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, proves that the institution has long been interested in these topics.
This collection of contributions supported by captivating iconography signals a basic optimism: the documented actions and projects and the consciousness that motivates the thinking of many creators proves there is a collective mobilisation, often starting from the bottom, that seeks out and creates the conditions for communal life. Even if it is never explicitly written, the answer to the question in the title is a resounding yes.
Public Space? Lost and Found Gediminas Urbonas, Ann Lui and Lucas Freeman
SA + P Press, MIT School of Architecture and Planning
Cambridge MA, 2017
300 pages, $40 mit.edu
Overview
“Public space” is a potent and contentious topic among artists, architects, and cultural producers. Public Space? Lost and Found considers the role of aesthetic practices within the construction, identification, and critique of shared territories, and how artists or architects—the “antennae of the race”—can heighten our awareness of rapidly changing formulations of public space in the age of digital media, vast ecological crises, and civic uprisings.
Public Space? Lost and Found combines significant recent projects in art and architecture with writings by historians and theorists. Contributors investigate strategies for responding to underrepresented communities and areas of conflict through the work of Marjetica Potrč in Johannesburg and Teddy Cruz on the Mexico-U.S. border, among others. They explore our collective stakes in ecological catastrophe through artisticresearch such as atelier d’architecture autogérée’s hubs for community action and recycling in Colombes, France, and Brian Holmes’s theoretical investigation of new forms of aesthetic perception in the age of the Anthropocene. Inspired by artist and MIT professor Antoni Muntadas’ early coining of the term “media landscape,” contributors also look ahead, casting a critical eye on the fraught impact of digital media and the internet on public space.
This book is the first in a new series of volumes produced by the MIT School of Architecture and Planning’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology.
Contributors atelier d'architecture autogérée, Dennis Adams, Bik Van Der Pol, Adrian Blackwell, Ina Blom, Christoph Brunner with Gerald Raunig, Néstor García Canclini, Colby Chamberlain, Beatriz Colomina, Teddy Cruz with Fonna Forman, Jodi Dean, Juan Herreros, Brian Holmes, Andrés Jaque, Caroline Jones, Coryn Kempster with Julia Jamrozik, György Kepes, Rikke Luther, Matthew Mazzotta, Metahaven, Timothy Morton, Antoni Muntadas, Otto Piene, Marjetica Potrč, Nader Tehrani, Troy Therrien, Gedminas and Nomeda Urbonas, Angela Vettese, Mariel Villeré, Mark Wigley, Krzysztof Wodiczko
With section openings from Ana María León, T. J. Demos, Doris Sommer, and Catherine D'Ignazio
Note: More than a year ago, I posted about this move by Alphabet-Google toward becoming city designers... I tried to point out the problems related to a company which business is to collect data becoming the main investor in public space and common goods (the city is still part of the commons, isn't it?) But of course, this is, again, about big business ("to make the world a better place" ... indeed) and slick ideas.
But it is highly problematic that a company start investing in public space "for free". We all know what this mean now, don't we? It is not needed and not desired.
So where are the "starchitects" now? What do they say? Not much... Where are all the "regular" architects as well? Almost invisible, tricked in the wrong stakes, with -- I'm sorry...-- very few of them being only able to identify the problem.
This is not about building a great building for a big brand or taking a conceptual position, not even about "die Gestalt" anymore. It is about everyday life for 66% of Earth population by 2050 (UN study). It is, in this precise case, about information technologies and mainly information stategies and businesses that materialize into structures of life.
fabric | rblg legend: this hand drawn image contains all the marketing clichés (green, blue, clean air, bikes, local market, public transportation, autonomous car in a happy village atmosphere... Can't be further from what it will be).
An 800-acre strip of Toronto's waterfront may show us how cities of the future could be built. Alphabet’s urban innovation team, Sidewalk Labs, has announced a plan to inject urban design and new technologies into the city's quayside to boost "sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity."
Huh?
Picture streets filled with robo-taxis, autonomous trash collection, modular buildings, and clean power generation. The only snag may be the humans: as we’ve said in the past, people can do dumb things with smart cities. Perhaps Toronto will be different.
As we continue to lack a decent search engine on this blog and as we don't use a "tag cloud" ... This post could help navigate through the updated content on | rblg (as of 07.2017), via all its tags!
HERE ARE ALL THE CURRENT TAGS TO NAVIGATE ON | RBLG BLOG:
(to be seen just below if you're navigating on the blog's html pages or here for rss readers)
Note: following the two previous posts about algorythms and bots ("how do they ... ?), here comes a third one.
Slighty different and not really dedicated to bots per se, but which could be considered as related to "machinic intelligence" nonetheless. This time it concerns techniques and algoritms developed to understand the brain (BRAIN initiative, or in Europe the competing Blue Brain Project).
In a funny reversal, scientists applied techniques and algorythms developed to track human intelligence patterns based on data sets to the computer itself. How do a simple chip "compute information"? And the results are surprising: the computer doesn't understand how the computer "thinks" (or rather works in this case)!
This to confirm that the brain is certainly not a computer (made out of flesh)...
When you apply tools used to analyze the human brain to a computer chip that plays Donkey Kong, can they reveal how the hardware works?
Many research schemes, such as the U.S. government’s BRAIN initiative, are seeking to build huge and detailed data sets that describe how cells and neural circuits are assembled. The hope is that using algorithms to analyze the data will help scientists understand how the brain works.
But those kind of data sets don’t yet exist. So Eric Jonas of the University of California, Berkeley, and Konrad Kording from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University wondered if they could use their analytical software to work out how a simpler system worked.
They settled on the iconic MOS 6502 microchip, which was found inside the Apple I, the Commodore 64, and the Atari Video Game System. Unlike the brain, this slab of silicon is built by humans and fully understood, down to the last transistor.
The researchers wanted to see how accurately their software could describe its activity. Their idea: have the chip run different games—including Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Pitfall, which have already been mastered by some AIs—and capture the behavior of every single transistor as it did so (creating about 1.5 GB per second of data in the process). Then they would turn their analytical tools loose on the data to see if they could explain how the microchip actually works.
For instance, they used algorithms that could probe the structure of the chip—essentially the electronic equivalent of a connectome of the brain—to establish the function of each area. While the analysis could determine that different transistors played different roles, the researchers write in PLOS Computational Biology, the results “still cannot get anywhere near an understanding of the way the processor really works.”
Elsewhere, Jonas and Kording removed a transistor from the microchip to find out what happened to the game it was running—analogous to so-called lesion studies where behavior is compared before and after the removal of part of the brain. While the removal of some transistors stopped the game from running, the analysis was unable to explain why that was the case.
In these and other analyses, the approaches provided interesting results—but not enough detail to confidently describe how the microchip worked. “While some of the results give interesting hints as to what might be going on,” explains Jonas, “the gulf between what constitutes ‘real understanding’ of the processor and what we can discover with these techniques was surprising.”
It’s worth noting that chips and brains are rather different: synapses work differently from logic gates, for instance, and the brain doesn’t distinguish between software and hardware like a computer. Still, the results do, according to the researchers, highlight some considerations for establishing brain understanding from huge, detailed data sets.
First, simply amassing a handful of high-quality data sets of the brains may not be enough for us to make sense of neural processes. Second, without many detailed data sets to analyze just yet, neuroscientists ought to remain aware that their tools may provide results that don’t fully describe the brain’s function.
As for the question of whether neuroscience can explain how an Atari works? At the moment, not really.
Note: let's "start" this new (delusional?) year with this short video about the ways "they" see things, and us. They? The "machines" of course, the bots, the algorithms...
An interesting reassembled trailer that was posted by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez on his Tumblr #algopop that documents the "appearance of algorithms in popular culture". Matthew was with us back in 2014, to collaborate on a research project at ECAL that will soon end btw and worked around this idea of bots in design.
Will this technological future become "delusional" as well, if we don't care enough? As essayist Eric Sadin points it in his recent book, "La silicolonisation du monde" (in French only at this time)?
Possibly... It is with no doubt up to each of us (to act), so as regarding our everyday life in common with our fellow human beings!
Everything but the detected objects are removed from the trailer of The Wolf of Wall Street. The software is powered by Yolo object-detection, which has been used for similar experiments.
Note: I'll be pleased to be in Paris next Friday and Saturday (02-03.12) at the Centre Culturel Suisse and in the company of an excellent line up (!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Nicolas Nova, Yves Citton, Tobias Revell & Nathalie Kane, Rybn, Joël Vacheron and many others) for the conference and event "Bot Like Me" curated by Sophie Lamparter and Luc Meier.
A l’occasion de l’exposition de !MedienGruppe Bitnik, et avec la complicité du duo d’artistes zurichois, Sophie Lamparter (directrice associée de swissnex San Francisco) et Luc Meier (directeur des contenus de l’EPFL ArtLab, Lausanne) ont concocté pour le CCS un événement de deux jours composé de conférences, tables rondes et concerts, réunissant scientifiques, artistes, écrivains, journalistes et musiciens pour examiner les dynamiques tourmentées des liens homme-machine. Conçues comme une plateforme d’échange à configuration souple, ces soirées interrogeront nos rapports complexes, à la fois familiers et malaisés, avec les bots qui se multiplient dans nos environnements ultra-connectés.
Vendredi 2 décembre / dès 19h30
conférence, 19h30-21h : Bot Like Me kick-off
avec Rolf Pfeifer (AI Lab de l’Université de Zurich / Osaka University), Carmen Weisskopf et Domagoj Smoljo ( !Mediengruppe Bitnik). Modération : Luc Meier et Sophie Lamparter
performance musicale live, 21h30 : Not Waving
Samedi 3 décembre / dès 14h30
tables rondes
-14h30-16h : Data Manifestos
avec Hannes Grassegger (auteur de Das Kapital bin ich), Hannes Gassert (Open Knowledge Network) et le collectif RYBN. Modération : Sophie Lamparter et Luc Meier
-16h30-18h : Cloud Labor, Petty Bot Jobs
avec Nicolas Nova (HEAD-Genève, Near Future Laboratory), Yves Citton (Université de Grenoble) et Patrick Keller (ECAL, fabric | ch). Modération : Marie Lechner
-18h30-20h : Botocene & Algoghosts
avec Tobias Revell et Natalie Kane (Haunted Machines), Gwenola Wagon et Jeff Guess (artistes). Modération : Joël Vacheron et Nicolas Nova
concert 21h : performance live de Low Jack et carte blanche au label Antinote
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
