Wednesday, October 27. 2010Where do Websites go to Die?Via dpr-barcelona -----
In 1998 google was created. In the year 3ϕϕ there will be the Dead Website Archive at the Munižaba cave [Croatia]. Following the same mission of the International Internet Preservation Consortium [IIPC], that is to acquire, preserve and make accessible knowledge and information from the Internet for future generations everywhere, and based in the same kind of philosophy as the project The Ruins of Twitter on the idea that the current times are the age of the data-loss paranoia… what if to have an archive of dead websites? From David Garcia Studio‘s MAP 003: Archive, we can read:
According to Iliesiu, our behavior is based on an obsessive back-up system, where we save, we update and upgrade, in a race with crashing computers and obsolete hardware. With this obsesive behaviour and related with an article by E. Alan that we found a few years ago, it is understandable to have the same kind of concerns that Alan had when he wondered what happens to these “dead websites” after their death? And then he added: “Is there an archive where you can trace them? Does anyone keep statistics how many websites are dying daily or monthly? Which country or which category has actually the biggest cementry of websites?” Well, now it seems that we will be able to answer to this questions and say that dead websites will go to the Dead Website Archive in Munižaba.
The Dead Website Archive proposed by David Garcia Studio, will convert what was once virtual and plural while in use, to a physical and single reality when it has been removed from the Web. The archive will be located over Europe’s largest cave in Croatia and it’s task is to select the relevant shut-down-websites, and proceed to laser cut the contents of the full site into thin polycarbonate A4 sheets. This is a response to the call for attention to the urgent need to collect and preserve the world’s cultural and historical record, that is increasingly being produced digitally and in no other form, as the Library of Congress recently published:
According to Jim Barksdale and Francine Berman, an estimated 44 percent of Web sites that existed in 1998 vanished without a trace within just one year. The average life span of a Web site is only 44 to 75 days. In this context, with websites dying what we can call “a strange death”, we can’t stop asking where did they go?… and start understanding the need to have a dead website archive.
If we agree with the Library of Congress on their definition for “Web Archiving” as the process of collecting documents from the Internet and bringing them under local control for the purpose of preserving the documents in an archive, we should also agree that the archiving process occupies a large amount of space. That’s why choosing the right place for this archive is also an important issue. According to the Data Centre Knowledge, the ideal location for a Data Centre is one that can accommodate growth and change and is also protected from hazards with an easy access. This kind of locations can be as diverse as urban apartments or underground bunkers and silos; so, the idea to “colonize” the Munižaba cave and build there a bridge that acts as a building, where researchers can stay, work and descend to the cave when acces to the archive is required is quite creative. As David Garcia Studio explains:
The cave allows the user to select and photocopy an archived “web site” from the cave floor, or project it on large screens for group sudy.
The Munižaba Cave is located in Crnopac [Croatia]. With an horizontal length of 6947 m and a depth of -437 m it is the perfect place to house the dead website archive, as David Garcia Studio is proposing. The counterpoint between arduous work that is required to move about in such an impressive natural space, and the conrast to the easy access and plural digital reality that defined the website when it was “alive”, is a way to remind us about the ephemeral life of some of our actions when we create and share contents.
Some people think that archives have reached such epidemic proportions that, the digital revolution has not been able to solve the problem, but in fact it has aggravated it. Can we say that the Dead Website Archive will help us to solve this problem? We’re not sure about the answer… whe can only speculate on the emotion of a future researcher while his eyes are discovering “ancient messages” in foreign languages, hidden in the caves and blurring into subterranean fountainheads: “Estoy aquí entre archivos y kilos de bits… aquí debajo, ¿no me ves? Aquí…” -@pacogonzalez* —– Related reading:
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
12:24
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, data, digital, history, speculation, territory
The new NorthVia Mammoth ----- by rholmes
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a fascinating excerpt from geoscientist Laurence Smith’s new book, The World in 2050, which looks at how four global “megatrends” — “human population growth and migration; growing demand for control over such natural resource ’services’ as photosynthesis and bee pollination; globalization; and climate change” — are fueling both international involvement and urban growth in the Arctic:
Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal.
Personal comment:
Of course, this makes me think of the project we've done last summer, Arctic Opening. The arctic region will certainly be the area where the fate of all "sustainable" approaches will finally be decided... And for my part, I'm not very optimistic about it unfortunately.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Sustainability, Territory
at
10:32
Defined tags for this entry: ecology, energy, globalization, interferences, sustainability, territory
Friday, October 22. 2010Ludlow 38 presents Maryanne Amacher's City-LinksVia Art-Agenda ----- Ludlow 38 is pleased to present the exhibition Maryanne Amacher: City-Links. Between 1967 and 1981 the pioneering sound artist produced 22 City-Links projects in total, connecting distant microphones to installations and performances using dedicated FM-quality analog phone lines. Areas of downtown Buffalo, MIT, Boston Harbor, the Mississippi River, the New York harbor, studios in various locations, and other sites in the USA and abroad were transported, sometimes integrating performers near the microphones (such as John Cage and George Lewis for City-Links #18 performed at The Kitchen in 1979). The exhibition at Ludlow 38 brings together a number of documents, images and sound samples selected and reproduced from the nascent Amacher Archive as a first look at this important series of early telematic art works about which little has been published. --- Maryanne Amacher ---
Related Links:Personal comment: Sound telepresence. Sounds "usual" today, but it must be underlined that Amacher's works, City-Links (this could be the title of one of our work today!), date back from the 70ies. And where one more time, we see the Name of John Cage pop up...
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Art, Territory
at
08:26
Defined tags for this entry: art, artificial reality, artists, exhibitions, history, interferences, mashup, mediated, sound, tele-, territory
Tuesday, October 19. 2010Vertical Farming: New Book OutVia WorldChanging ----- Dr. Dickson Despommier, a former professor at Columbia University and champion of vertical farming, has released a new book on The Vertical Farm Project. The book puts forth his argument about the future of urban agriculture through vertical farms. Worldchanging has covered the debate over vertical farms quite a bit (see the list at the end of this post for links), and the idea is certainly a controversial one. I've not yet read the book, but it would be interesting to know if Despommier addresses some of the challenges to the concept pointed out by others, such as the need for a proven business model for wide-scale application, and how vertical farms can grow food without herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers and operate in a low-carbon way despite high energy needs.
LA Half-Way House Starts Vertical Farm | Sarah Kuck, 25 Aug 08 Since moving into the Los Angles half-way house two years ago, residents of the Rainbow Apartments have been devising a plan to start their own urban garden. After a few trials and errors, the novice gardeners have now succeeded in creating a 34-foot-long plot bursting with strawberries, tomatoes, basil and other herbs and vegetables, which grow vertically against their cinder block building. ¶ In addition to providing them with fresh, nutritious food, the residents have found that the garden has given them a way to connect with each other and build a supportive community... Cities are for People: The Limits of Localism | Adam Stein, 8 Aug 08 Columbia Professor Dickson Despommier has generated a fair amount of attention with his concept for "vertical farms," stacked, self-contained urban biosystems that would -- theoretically -- supply fresh produce for city residents year round. The New York Times showcased outlandish artists' conceptions of what such farms might look like. Colbert did his shtick. Twelve pilot projects are supposedly under consideration, in locations as far-flung as China and Dubai. ¶ The concept has captured the imagination of at least the sliver of the public (including the editors at Worldchanging), who laments the enormous resource demands of our food production system and yearns for something easier on the land, easier on our aquifers, and less demanding of fossil fuels. Vertical farms seem to promise all that. ¶ Promising, of course, is different than delivering. Construction requires a lot of energy. Keeping vegetables warm in winter requires a lot of energy. Recycling water requires a lot of energy. Generating artificial sunlight requires a lot of energy. In other words, the secret ingredient that makes vertical farms work (assuming they work at all) is boatloads of energy. No one seems to have actually done the math on the monetary and environmental costs of such a scheme, but they would no doubt be considerable. ¶ Perhaps those costs pencil out (although they almost certainly do not), but the plausibility of the idea itself is in some ways beside the point. Whatever the merits of vertical farms, the enthusiasm with which this idea has been received suggests that we're becoming mightily reductive in the way that we think about sustainability... Rewilding Canada | Karl Schroeder, 01 Jul 2007 ...to focus on just one technology, let's look at the potential impact of vertical farming. ¶ There's a great site introducing the concept called, logically enough, the vertical farm project. This site will give you an extensive introduction to the idea of doing intensive hydroponics agriculture in urban hi-rises, and it includes a lot of architectural plans, systems analyses and hard numbers. Cost is somewhat skirted-around, but doesn't appear to be prohibitive when you factor in the fertilizer, pesticide, transportation and storage costs of our current mode of production. ¶ It seems crazy to talk about farming in a hi-rise; the vision it gives rise to is of a kind of student-residence crammed with pot-smoking hippies who've traded their carpets for wheat. In fact, the approach is pretty hard-nosed and industrial, with very high outputs as its aim. And here's where it gets interesting from the point of view of our ambition to rewild the country: in the study entitled "Feeding 50,000 People, Anisa Buck, Stacy Goldberg and others conclude that a single building covering one city block, and up to 48 stories high depending on the design, can grow enough food to sustain 50,000 people. This calculation doesn't require any magical technology; there's no fairy-dust being evoked here, we could build such a structure now. ¶ So, let's do the math... More Infrastructural Greening | Sarah Rich, 9 Apr 07 It's hard to tire of projects that involve wallpapering, paneling, and roofing urban structures with plant life. Though it's becoming a more common design approach for enhancing air quality, catching runoff, highlighting the "green" aspects of a building, and sometimes even providing food, it always has an unexpected effect, accustomed as we are to surfaces made with impermeable and dull materials...[the concept of vertical farming] had a recent update in New York Magazine.Since we discussed the concept, developed by Dickson Despommier, who teaches environmental science and microbiology at Columbia, a whole lot more people are on board with the climate change issue. So his proposal to put agriculture into skyscrapers and reallocate land to forests in the interested of sequestering carbon and slowing global warming now has the attention of more than just design junkies and eco-imagineers. It's become an attractive possibility to venture capitalists from all over the world. The idea factors in not only the climate aspect, but also impending population explosions, looking at taking food cultivation upwards instead of outwards as it grows to accommodate greater numbers of people . Vertical Farming | Alex Steffen, 26 Jun 05 On an urban planet, closing urban resource and energy loops -- creating zero-waste systems for meeting the needs of people who live in highly dense cities -- floats in front of us, grail-like, as a goal. ¶ No one quite knows how to get it done, yet. But more and more interesting pieces of the puzzle are piling up, like smart places, smart grids and product service systems...Here's another piece of the puzzle -- vertical farming:...it's a provocative idea, and might fit together with some of the innovations discussed above in novel and worldchanging ways.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Sustainability, Territory
at
13:27
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, books, density, ecology, farming, sustainability, territory
Monday, October 18. 2010Rome City Vision Architecture Competition winner / Weekend in a Morning ArchitectsVia ArchDaily ----- by Sebastian J Italian architects Massimiliano Marian and Andrea Cassi (Weekend in a Morning Architects), received first prize in the Rome City Vision Architecture Competition. Images and architect’s description after the break. Rome is the city of illusions, it is not a chance (“Roma” by Federico Fellini, 1972) A cloud of aerostatic balloons is hanging over the city, airships borrowed from a time when dreaming and running after the future were compulsory. Almost a Fellinian dream, a sonnet by a famous composer played on a loose chord. Each balloon has taken off from a dock corresponding to a specific suburb, defining an imaginary circle that takes up the diameter of the Raccordo Anulare, the ring road of Rome, and embraces the city. A trampoline to look out, count the fallen and dream. Until you get back to the ground with fragments of these thoughts in your pockets. Surrounded by the hills in a circular embrace; center of a land strip slid onto the sea, our sea. Rome is the embrace of an antique porch, open to the world. Enclosed by a ring of traffic, by mountains of houses that don’t follow the course of the river anymore; houses that all look the same, with doors and windows, piled on top of each other. Rome isn’t Rome everywhere. The circle of streets and buildings of its outskirts surround the city of souvenirs and memories: without any exchange, without any words. Like an old man and a boy, sitting on a bench with nothing to say. A vision is that place where memory and future look at each other without being afraid to speak. Sometimes a dream comes out of this. Waking up is always hard – headache and nausea. The vision that has always labeled Rome is made of the past, buildings that impose their history. Excavations for piping that take ages due to the steeplechase between buried treasures. Young american girls with sandals and international cameras as if they were in a theme park. Waking up from a dream like this one means getting out of the historic city and moving on to what we, and not our fathers, are building. Rome isn’t Rome everywhere. There are places where there’s no architectural or plastic element distinguishing a precise region, a particular landscape. These places reveal without any filters the inhuman nature of a maximized and globalized society, where there’s only one kind of landscape: the product of ideologies that act through simplifications or mere speculations. In these places the only thing leading back to a precise place of the territory is the skyline of the center, in a mist. The only element unifying two parallel yet divided realities is heaven. It’s the outskirts and heaven that we’re focusing on. The concept consists in creating a sort of fluctuating ring road. A new level that is added to the existing layers of the city. An immaterial level, defined only by the straight and circular trajectories of the balloons that move from one dock to the next, connecting the various Roman outskirts with each other. A system that is placed on the margins of the city that allows to seize the urban environment through new means. Knowledge, combined with the volatileness of a dreamt world, like a circus tent, like the famous travelers’ note books, these are the foundations of our views. “Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole.” (Earnest Hemingway, “Death in the afternoon”, 1932) The outskirts turn into the center of a special infrastructural network and almost ends in themselves: the docking towers become new architectural symbols that reflect the existing physical necessity of the urban borders. At the same time they are the frame of a transport system that provides a solution for two issues: tourism and environment. Through offering the chance to fly/float over Rome, the new system is aimed at decentralizing a part of tourism, today concentrated in the old town, thus creating now opportunities for the suburbs. At the same time this new infrastructural level can be regarded as alternative to individual transport by car. A new quick and non polluting way of creating new links in urban texture. The antique taste of this airship shall remind us of evolution that has led to the creation of ever more effective and technically advanced means. We think that it’s fundamental that the poetic and fantastic aspect of this proposal is supported by a special emphasis on environmental and technical innovation issues that need to be the foundation of any urban project. A city in fact is a place where interaction takes place, where many different levels of connection exist: a real ecosystem made of continuous exchange between the substance of what’s being built and the living organisms. Infrastructures, plants and streets are the support of numerous activities, movements and both evolution and involution processes. Today it seems essential to try to understand their complexity, and that’s where new technologies can be of avail. Let’s imagine we can read parts of town with a system now present on every smartphone, that has a photographic lens: the lens of augmented reality (AR). Pictures taken from the airships are broadcast live on a screen at the bottom of each docking tower: environmental and other useful data complete the images, thus providing a genuine scan of the metropolitan situation. A new scientific medium, continuous and complete. The outskirts become the place where city is read. The grid has been completed – both physical and virtual exchange are taking place. In our vision the continuous exchange of informations between balloons and stations and stations themselves (between outskirts and outskirts, a “suburban” dialogue) guarantees transversal monitoring of the city, allowing the citizens to have better consciousness of their own role within the urban ecosystem. Hence knowledge, not only in terms of creating postcards from above or taking fascinating photographs from bird’s eye view, but rather as starting point for a necessary participation in change. The aerostatic balloons float over the rooftops of Rome. Related Links:Personal comment:
As a side note, I think it's quite "funny" to see how much "flying things" are now present in architectural renderings (birds, baloons, kites, etc.), and by extension, things based on wind (energy harvesting). In this case, the project is fully based on flying balloons, but in many other cases, I believe that it is a way to illustrate the idea of sustainabiliy (without the project being necessary sustainable...).
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Territory
at
10:42
Defined tags for this entry: air, architecture, history, mobility, speculation, sustainability, territory, urbanism
(Page 1 of 2, totaling 7 entries)
» next page
|
fabric | rblgThis 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.
QuicksearchCategoriesCalendarSyndicate This BlogArchivesBlog Administration |