Saturday, August 21. 2010
Via Domus, via Beatrice Galilee
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By Christophe Guignard
Arctic opening is an new installation for the Festival MIMI which is part of an outdoor exhibition presenting several works of art / experimental architecture. The aim of Arctic Opening is to let appear a "second day" made of a large artificial lighting, between Marseille's sunsets and sunrises, when the islands becomes dark and quiet. The light emitted by the installation will reproduce the luminous variations of a distant environment, where the sun shines 24 hours long during summer: the Arctic. This light, transported from North, will shine on a Mediterranean landscape, facing the Frioul port. Set up in a rocky zone swept by wind, close to an industrial ruin, Arctic Opening could also evoke a strange scientific expedition. Its sensing devices and climatic interfaces would analyze by anticipation a fictional and catastrophic future of an Arctic Ocean free of ice. BG
"Each day, when night falls on our urbanized landscapes in our cities, our streets or our ports, another day dawns, electric. It is literally a "second day" which begins: one of neon signs, street lights, sodium, mercury or fluorescent lighting, one of illuminated apartments and shops windows, one of night activities that we did not know two centuries ago.
Although today we no longer think much about it, this "second day" is now part of everyday life for city dwellers. Artificial light has been a conquest: by fire first, then by the gas, and more recently by electricity. This "fabricated" light permitted first to extend artificially the day at night to illuminate the darkness, but also to transform our relationship to time, to landscape and to space. It especially allowed to exceed the given natural immemorial cycle of day and night induced by the rotation of the Earth itself, and thus to redefine architectural and urban spaces.
One also began to design new architectures that did not require natural lighting anymore. In a few decades, artificial lighting profoundly altered the lifestyle of city dwellers, but not only: birds began to sing at night near the lampposts, insects to swarm under the spotlights and stars to disappear of the urban night sky, opening the door to a strange world, that combines natural and artificial cycles. Losses and gains then.
This environment, sometimes magical, sometimes disturbing, develops undoubtedly for us a poetry of shifts. Now, the challenge is to deploy these shifts, which combine presents and futures, into a comprehensive reflection on our contemporary space and our consumption of energy.
Designed for the Innovative Music Festival (MIMI 2010) in Marseille, on the Frioul islands, Arctic Opening does not aim to deny this "second day", but to amplify its positive and sensitive issues. Thus, Arctic Opening seeks to develop the potential of imagination(s) of artificial illumination, while integrating new technologies and intelligent lighting cycles of low energy consumption.
In a global environment, endlessly interconnected, which develops new forms of mobility, temporalities, and social behaviours at the crossings of time zones, this artificial day provides an opportunity for another kind of "days", simultaneous and distant: an imaginary or mediated "connection" with countries where precisely and literally, at the same time, the sun is shining. Through satellite imagery and sensor data, it is now possible to imagine opening a "window" onto a sensitive and remote light whose intensity varies continuously, the sky is sunny, then cloudy, then possibly sunny again. A window "teleporting" abstractly a remote atmosphere without physical mobility, without means of transport other than transportation data from there to here.
With Arctic Opening, fabric | ch proposes to create such an "opening" at a large scale, to another day: an artificial and sensitive light, revealing some geographical patterns, luminous and meteorological, across the globe (to the summer of one hemisphere corresponds the winter of the other, to the daylight the darkness, to the perpetual light of a pole the night of the other, etc.). When night falls over Marseille this "second day" gets up with its source somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, on the edge of the habitable zones, where once the ice melted new navigation routes open and will open more and more in the future.
Fed by light coming from regions, where in this season, the horizontal light of the sun never sets, where sunrise and sunset mix, Arctic Opening reproduces the continuous modulation of the northern summer. Composed of hundreds of light emitting diodes (LEDs), this bright band long of eighteen meters illuminates a rocky landscape, swept by winds. At sunrise, it goes slowly to reveal a temporary installation of pipes, placed there to conduct this experiment in distant light. Erected near the vicinity of a military and industrial relic of the twentieth century, a tent hosting the instruments of control suggests a possible scientific expedition in an "hostile" zone.
The combination of light produced by this window and the Frioul islands' landscape produces a composite territory: Arctic Mediterranea, remote nocturnal day. This hybrid area in mixed light is purposely created as a prospective environment, which evokes the contemporary patterns of mobility and crossing time zones, the fluxes and the networks, the artificiality and the mediatization, or to indicate the strange topographic similarities between the arid Frioul islands and the Arctic regions where no tree grows.
As if this temporary place in front of Marseille, illuminated by a light transported from the Arctic could become the distant, catastrophic and fictitious future of these northern territories: warmed by climatic changes, visited by boats navigating on new routes opened by melting ice, the shores of the Far North could begin to resemble those of the Mediterranean Sea. This environment would then hybridize himself as well, as people become increasingly mobile over time: mix of here and elsewhere, future and present, material and immaterial.
Thursday, August 19. 2010
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Security legend Paul Kocher talks about the attitudes shaping Congress's latest tech misstep.
If the Internet ever does something unfriendly to the national security interests of the United States, what if the president of said Union could pick up a cold war-era style phone - or maybe whip out an iPhone pre-loaded with a custom "kill the internet" app - and order that it be shut down?
That's what activists are saying is one potential outcome of the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. The so-called "Internet Kill Switch" is not actually an outcome of that bill, by the way - some commentators have compared this meme to the "death panels" myth that almost derailed the healthcare bill.
But the fact remains that the president has broad power under the 1934 Telecommunications Act to restrict "wire communications" during a time of war - and that includes the Internet. So even under existing laws, an off switch for the United States' most important information conduit is, in theory at least, only one over-eager lawmaker in chief away from reality.
Paul Kocher, current CEO of Cryptography Research, is a legend in the field of security - one of the engineers behind SSL 3.0 and an innovator in a host of other areas. Recently I interviewed him on the subject; here's what he had to say about the so-called "Internet Kill Switch."
"It's a Rorschach blot."
"On one level it's, absurd, and on others it's impractical and frightening. It's a Rorschach blot.
When you build something that will shut down a massively critical piece of infrastructure that people have tried to make reliable, that's a more frightening prospect than anything that could have inspired such a defense."
"It's a very blunt weapon."
"Networks like internet are critical for a lot of tasks - if you ever flipped a switch on that, you'd cause tremendous amounts of harm. It's unclear you'd get any particular benefit from doing that."
"Maybe I'm being cynical, but my read on the rationale [for the Internet Kill Switch] is that it's a fear of technology."
"The idea that people can kill the technology if they wish to makes people feel reassured that the technology won't go rogue in some way. If you had an army of robots walking around you'd like to have switch to turn them off - people still have that concept of the Internet."
"I can guarantee every teenage hacker will try to figure out how to trigger it."
[Ed. It goes without saying that Paul was once one of those teenage hackers, and knows whereof he speaks.]
"If I want my name in the paper, or to have an effect that's bad on the world, it's hard to think of something more perfectly designed for that kind of use."
Attemps to degrade the quality of civilian GPS signals shows that disabling communications networks hurts the good guys more than it hurts the bad guys.
"The whole GPS infrastructure is built with a mechanism where they can degrade the quality of location measurements. It's designed so they could have the military have more accurate GPS units than civilians.
But it turned out the military ended up using civilain GPS receivers because they're cheaper. They ended up disabling the degradation capability because the harm caused to the U.S. military exceeds the benefit to the folks they're fighting."
"Stopping a Denial of Service attack by shutting down the Internet is like trying to stop a small explosion by triggering a much larger one."
"You could conceivably come up with ways to bring down the entire Internet, by playing games with BGP protocol or bringing down the entire DNS archicecture. But you can't stop a pinpointed attack with this.... If you had a kill switch you'd either shut down entire internet or achieve nothing.
"The question this comes down to is, 'Is there some scenario where one would really want to bring the entire internet down?'"
"Everybody working from home: gone. Everybody's [VoIP] phone connection: gone. Everybody's website: gone. That's the only binary choice you can really achieve with this."
For technical as well as political reasons, no bill with anything resembling an "Internet Kill Switch" will ever be signed into law.
"If Congress decrees electrons have positive charge and gravity goes in the other direction, it doesn't mean it's possible to achieve those things.... But the reality is that if something like that came close to passing there would be a tremendous outcry.
"The government has had some misleading experience with this area, with telephone switches where there are requirements that there be backdoors so law enforcement can do wiretaps and eavesdrop on calls. But there's a lot more homogeneity in telephone infrastructure than within the packet-switched internet infrastructure.
Follow Mims on Twitter or contact him via email.
Wednesday, August 18. 2010
Via TreeHugger
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Images from Oikos Project Some are calling it "junkitechture", a new way of building and designing using only recycled and reclaimed materials. The Jellyfish Theatre, which is under construction right now, is a prime example of this new architecture. It will be the first UK theatre made completely of old materials from all sources: junked theatre sets, building sites, 800 market pallets, old kitchen units that the public bring along. There will e...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Via TreeHugger
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photo: Rob Lee via flickr
Lots of environmentally bad stuff is happening as the world's permafrost melts, mostly in the realm of releasing stored greenhouse gases. But, as Conservation points out, a new report in the journal Science of the Total Environment finds that as a permafrost melts in northern Sweden, stored mercury has begun leaking from a peat bog into a nearby lake--something which could expand as temperatures continue to rise.
In addition to storing large amounts of greenhouse gases, peatlands also store mercury--some from natural sources, most coming from the emissions of burning fossil fuels. As you hopefully know, mercury and water is a highly toxic mix for life.
The study finds, "there is a very real potential that a substantial amount of mercury, and other organically bound and stored contaminants, might be released into arctic and sub-arctic surface waters from thawing permafrost."
Sediment Mercury Levels Rising at Rate Not Seen in Centuries
To come to that conclusion a team of researchers used core samples from a peat bog and lake-bottom sediments from northern Sweden to determine shifting mercury concentrations and compare them to past climate data. They found that "sediment mercury levels are now rising at 8.3 micrograms per square meter per year, a rate not seen in several centuries."
Read the original: Climate driven release of carbon and mercury from permafrost mires increase mercury loading to sub-arctic lakes
Personal comment:
The choice of the Arctic as a reference for our latest work was not by chance! What will happen or not there (about climate, about energy, about territory/energy conflicts, about transportation --goods, people, tourists, oil, ...) will affect the rest of the globe.
Via Mammoth
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[Housing in Hong Kong, from photographer Michael Wolf's series "Architecture of Density"]
In the latest Foreign Policy, Parag Khanna argues that the city is increasingly becoming a more important geopolitical entity than the nation-state:
The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not — and will not be — one global village, so much as a network of different ones…
Time, technology, and population growth have massively accelerated the advent of this new urbanized era. Already, more than half the world lives in cities, and the percentage is growing rapidly. But just 100 cities account for 30 percent of the world’s economy, and almost all its innovation.
Neither 19th-century balance-of-power politics nor 20th-century power blocs are useful in understanding this new world. Instead, we have to look back nearly a thousand years, to the medieval age in which cities such as Cairo and Hangzhou were the centers of global gravity, expanding their influence confidently outward in a borderless world. When Marco Polo set forth from Venice along the emergent Silk Road, he extolled the virtues not of empires, but of the cities that made them great. He admired the vineyards of Kashgar and the material abundance of Xi’an, and even foretold — correctly — that no one would believe his account of Chengdu’s merchant wealth. It’s worth remembering that only in Europe were the Middle Ages dark — they were the apogee of Arab, Muslim, and Chinese glory.
While the article is too brief and too wide-ranging to treat its thesis (really, theses, as Khanna makes a host of relatively provocative claims through pure assertion) as thoroughly as it deserves, it is an interesting read. Perhaps his forthcoming book will explore the ideas outlined in the article in more depth? (I have to admit that I am, predictably, partial to his earlier assertion that “independence without infrastructure is futile”.)
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