Wednesday, December 10. 2008
http://www.works-thoughts.com/
"As a warm-up for the fall quarter, I participated in UCLA’s Digital workshop. Georgina Huljich, partner of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, was the program director. Rhinoceros was used to create 3D interpretations of the sketches of Ernst Haeckel, a prominent German biologist, naturalist, and philosopher. The articulation of micro-surfaces related to the biological function of the organism was of particular importance in my work..."
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Via Beyond the Beyond (Bruce Sterling)
Personal comment:
Voir sur le site de UCLA. Quelques projets de 3d analogique et générative qui ont l'air intéressants.
D'une certaine façon, on pourrait considérer que "Les algues", de Ronan et Erwann Bouroullec sont alors aussi une 3d analogique générative...
*I'm trying to imagine myself old, and feeble, and weak, and sick, and white-haired, and totally surrounded by mid-21C "Plectic Architecture."
Obviously I've got it coming, I deserve that fate, but... maybe I'd be really *pleased and serene*. "Yes, this part is nanotechnological... and this is an old-skool Janine Benyus biomimicry riff here... and this useless Koolhaas junkspace where I keep my dialysis unit, that's where they goofed off doing Rhinoscript 'taffypulling.'"
And then I take visitors over to the BDLGBLOG room where I've got a crumbling archive of the only stuff every physically printed out from BLDGBLOG. It's like Tut's tomb in there. It's like Otzi's autopsy table, and a cloud of plectic dry-ice pours out whenever I open it.
http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/otherhostedsites/avatar/intro.html
PLECTIC ARCHITECTURE -TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE POST-DIGITAL IN ARCHITECTURE (((no no, don't run away yet -- it's pretty good stuff, and I put some paragraphs in it so it's almost parseable)))
Definitions:
Firstly it is important to stress that "Post-Digital Architecture" is not an architecture without any digital component. Indeed it an architecture that very much is a synthesis between the virtual, the actual, the biological, the cyborgian, the augmented and the mixed.
It is impossible, anymore, to talk of Digital Architecture as a binary opposition to normal real world architecture. Cyberspace has insidiously insinuated itself into our existence, at every scale and at every turn. (((Yep.)))
Murray Gell-Mann defines "Plectics" as the "...the study of simplicity and complexity. It includes the various attempts to define complexity; the study of roles of simplicity and complexity and of classical and quantum information in the history of the universe, the physics of information; the study of non-linear dynamics, including chaos theory, strange attractors, and self-similarity in complex non-adaptive systems in physical science; and the study of complex adaptive systems, including prebiotic chemical evolution, biological evolution, the behaviour of individual organisms, the functioning of ecosystems, the operation of mammalian immune systems, learning and thinking, the evolution of human languages, the rise and fall of human cultures, the behaviour of markets, and the operation of computers that are designed or programmed to evolve strategies - say, for playing chess, or solving problems." (1)
If we start to think of the architecture in this book (((there's a book? Hey wait, wow, I need that book))) as the first stirrings of a Plectic post-digital Architecture, then Murray Gell-Mann's, mid nineteen eighties definition, of "Plectics" seems a suitably broad umbrella within which to situate it.
Such terrain can include a variety of complex sub cultures of architecture that are all composed of differing degrees of the digital, the virtual, the biological and the nanotechnological, interaction and reflexivity without banishing the more off piste and often less fashionable investigations, propositions and researches.
Above all these architectures seek to simplify, amplify or facilitate and make visible the complex entanglement of contemporary space. (((And that's a full day's work right there, folks.)))
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Via Beyond the beyond (Bruce Sterling)
Personal comment:
Bruce Sterling relate l'évolution du M-Arch "AVATAR --pour Advanced Virtual And Technological Architecture Research--" de la Bartlett School of Architecture de Londres (un très bon cursus): le master passe au "post-digital", non pas parce qu'il n'y a plus de digital, bien au contraire, mais parce "qu'il n'y a plus de distinction binaire possible entre digital et physique, virtuel et actuel, etc."
"Les éléments sont dorénavants entremélés" et le master vise à "une architecture qui cherche la synthèse entre le virtuel, l'actuel, le biologique, le cybernétique, l'augmenté et le mixte."
C'est ce que l'on disait déjà en 1999 avec le projet La_Fabrique, mais que l'on a commencé à réaliser "seulement" en 2001 avec Electroscape 001... Aujourd'hui nous parlons pour notre part plutôt d'"interférences spatiales", d"ex-dimensionnalité" et de "temporalités ou réalités post-globales", voir de "réel hallucinant (psychédélique)", ... plutôt que de "plectisme"! ;)
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Un nouveau journal, expérimental et développant des thématiques contemporaines pour le moins pointues aux titres évocateurs: "Le destin du psychonaute occidental", "Comment les Cyborgs ont appris à ne plus s'en faire et aimer la surveillance", "Molécules de combat", "Le vaudou planétaire", "La planète-laboratoire ou la phase terminale du nihilisme", etc.
En versions imprimées anglaise et française au prix de 2.-€, ou plus simplement téléchargeables en pdf sur le site.
P_
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Via fabric | ch
Personal comment:
Mentionné en vue du prix Transmediale 2009 (thématique: Deep North). Ewenn Chardronnet fait partie du comité de rédaction, il organise le prochain festival Futur(s) en Seine à Paris (fabric | ch y sera invité à produire une pièce) et c'est lui qui avait écrit un article il y a quelques années sur le projet i-Weather, travail conjoint entre fabric | ch et Philippe Rahm.
How could a NFL game like this gathered so much national attention : a dysfunctional organization vs underachiever at the week lowest possible viewers’ broadcast - Thursday night football? Both are the losers’ teams of the rich-n-wealthy state of California? No, it was the league historical moment- first ever NFL game shot and live broadcast in 3rd dimensional, and it was aired in HD too. Now that the game was over and since it was broadcasted in selected theaters, and only a few fortunate invitees got to see it; let’s see what the viewers thought about the full digital 3D sport.
Yahoo Tech reported few technical glitches here and there; couple feeds were blacked out in the first half of the same, viewings pulling the goggle off due to few weird effect with sudden camera movement and refocusing. Overall; the audiences love the 3D visual effects despite a dull match-up.
What about the polarized glasses and did it work? The Boston media described the technology in detail “Once your eyes adjusted to the glasses, which didn’t take long, the visuals were stunning, the picture sharp, and when the graphics came up on the screen, you felt as if you could reach out and pluck them off with your fingers.”
The game has not decided the future of 3D sport, but it certainly sparked a few interested parties. The league, team owners and broadcasting committee will meet and discuss the possibility some time before March. Now, guess where the next 3D HD football live broadcast will be? BCS Championship to be held at Miami and live broadcast at CES show 2009! A few lucky us will be there.
Monday, December 08. 2008
On October 28th Rob van Kranenburg’s book The Internet of Things A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID will be launched (5:00 pm, Waag Society, Amsterdam) A pdf download is already available at the Institute for Network Cultures website.
The main point of Kranenburg’s essay is that:
Cities across the world are about to enter the next phase of their development. A near invisible network of radio frequency identification tags (RFID) is being deployed on almost every type of consumer item. These tiny, traceable chips, which can be scanned wirelessly, are being produced in their billions and are capable of being connected to the internet in an instant. This so-called ‘Ambient intelligence’ promises to create a global network of physical objects every bit as pervasive and ubiquitous as the worldwide web itself. Some are already calling this controversial network the ‘internet of things’, describing it as either the ultimate convenience in supply-chain management, or the ultimate tool in our future surveillance. This network has the power to reshape our cities and yet it is being built with little public knowledge of consent.
Kranenburg makes a range of interesting points with regard to the internet of things that he would like to see discussed. I’ll highlight two of those here:
- Dependency & Agency
Ubicomp makes citizens ever more dependent on large and complex software networks. Ubicomp or ambient intelligence technologies aim to disappear into the background. Yet that also means that its affordances might become invisible: what else can be done with the technologies, apart from running the scripts and algorithms that it was designed to do?
The result will be dumb interfaces that hide all keys to the technology that drives it. Consequently it will keep citizens from being able not only to fix it when it is broken but to build on it, to play with it, to remake, remodel, and reuse it for their own ends. I believe this being able to negotiate stuff, stuff that is axiomatic thinking embodied, is called creativity.
Kranenburg compares these emerging systems with modern cars. Up to a decade or two ago, it wasn’t too hard to fix one’s own car if something had broken down, or to tinker with and and tune it yourself. Nowadays you have bring it to a certified dealer who has the right licences and know-how to tinker with its software. This shift has a larger cultural consequence:
If as a citizen you can no longer fix your own car – which is a quite recent phenomenon - because it is software driven, you have lost more then your ability to fix your own car, you have lost the very belief in a situation in which there are no professional garages, no just in time logistics, no independent mechanics, no small initiatives.
So, what we need, according to Kranenburg is not closed and complex systems of proprietary software, but rather we should start off with ‘small-scale open content, software and hardware - made for and used by artisans’ that does not ‘have to remain physically local
but can travel through friends across the world.’ He refers to a project called Bricolabs as an example of this approach.
- Fear and Trust
Kranenburg points out that the emergence of ‘the internet of things’ is often part of a discourse about fear and control. On the one hand, new technologies are used by the state to monitor activities of things and humans. In this scenario, every action of everything and everyone can be tracked and stored in databases. He calls this scenario ‘the city of control’. This also means, he reminds us, that ‘there is no forgetting: no memory loss’:
Consequently you should not say: “I’m not doing anything wrong, so why should I worry about smart
cameras with 3D coordinates reading my face, or this RFID/M2M/NFC infrastructure? No, you should worry about whom will deem what wrong in three years from now, as from the moment of going live all movement will irrespective of man, machine or animal) be logged, stored and data mined.
Instead he argues for a City of Trust, in the introduction of the book described as:
on the surface [the City of Trust] looks very similar to the City of Control. But here the citizens have been given much more control: Here pervasive systems have been embedded, but offered as an option rather than as a default. You leave your laptop on the train, no problem: with the ‘internet of Things’ can locate it on a search engine, even arrange for it to be delivered back to your door.
In this scenario it is not the state (or project developer or other central institution) that uses the technologies for central control, but rather citizens themselves have taken up the technologies to organize their own lives. This means that citizens/users/consumers should also be given control about the technologies, not only should they be more transparent and easy to tinker with, they should also provide the option to shift between different modes of privacy:
[we should be] moving from privacy to privacies, which acknowledge that in a hybrid environment we leave different traces and might want to build temporary personalities around these traces, not exposing our entire personality all the time.
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Via The Mobile City
Personal comment:
Un autre livre, une autre ressources concernant l'"ubiquitous computing", l'"internet of things", etc. C'est un peu le nouveau "buzz word" ces temps dans l'univers des media arts/design. Une ressource à mettre toutefois en réserve en vue de Globale Surveillance.
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