Tuesday, March 01. 2011"fabric | ch", Art Contemporain et Nouveaux Médias (éd. D. Moulon), Scala (Paris, 2011)
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Art, Interaction design, Science & technology
at
13:37
Defined tags for this entry: art, artists, books, computing, digital, fabric | ch, interaction design, media, mediated, networks, publications, publications-fbrc, science & technology
Monday, February 21. 2011The Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant WorkersVia ArchDaily ----- by Andrew Rosenberg
© R.Kuper
Architects: Yoav Meiri Architects
© Y.Meiri The Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant Workers was founded in 2010 as a social-artistic urban community project. The project sees the right to a book as a fundamental human right and a possibility of both escape and shelter from daily misfortunes. The library is located in the Levinski Park, by the Tel Aviv central bus station. The park is the place migrant workers congregate on weekends. It was important for us that the library come to the people, that those who maintain illegal immigrant status will come without fear, that the library would not have a closed door or a guard at the entrance who would check and ask questions. diagram 01 The library has no walls or door. It is comprised of two bookcases, which are supported by the walls of a public shelter located in the heart of the park. The taller structure contains books for the adult readers. It is transparent and illuminated from within so that, at night, the books glow in the park. Across from it is a shorter – children’s height – cabinet. The doors to the small cabinet swing down to form a parquet floor for the children to sit on and review the books. © T.Rogovski The door of the tall cabinet, open to form a canopy that stretches above the two structures, and provides shelter from the sun and rain, protects the books and the visitors, and establishes a space for browsing, reading and social meetings. The library contains approximately 3,500 books in Mandarin Chinese, Amharic, Thai, Tagalog, Arabic, French, Spanish, Nepalese, Bengali, Hindi, Turkish, Romanian, and English. The children’s cabinet also holds books in Hebrew. © Y.Meiri The books are not catalogued according to conventions of genre or author name, but according to the feeling they arouse. Every detail in the sorting and categorization system reflects the spirit of the library: The library is a small and parallel world: the books wander between the shelves as their readers have wandered/are wandering the world. They carry with them their emotional history. The placement of the book is not decided by popular vote, but by the last reader. Even if ten readers thought a book was amusing and the eleventh thought it was dull, the book will move to the Boring shelf – at least until the next reader weighs in.
Related Links:Personal comment: Beside the fact that we can enjoy to see a constructive project regarding migration and migrant people (so to say: not some stupid propaganda and populism), I also find interesting on a more trivial or spatial aspect the mashup between two public programs: the parc and the library.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society
at
10:15
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, books, culture & society, design (environments), mashup, mobility, public
Tuesday, January 25. 2011Une ère conditionnéeVia Libération ----- By Sylvestre Huet Récit - Le glaciologue Claude Lorius démontre que l’homme est devenu un «géo-ingénieur» climatique aussi puissant que les forces géologiques, et annonce l’anthropocène, l’ère de l’homme.
Iceberg dans les eaux antarctiques. (REUTERS) - More about this book, Claude Lorius and the Anthropocene directly on Libération.
Related Links:Personal comment:
Anthropocene is a word we hear more and more about. It probably just gives a name to what we all observe everyday: that our environment is getting more an more artificial, conditioned at a global scale with ecological costs.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology, Territory
at
12:33
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, books, climate, conditioning, culture & society, geography, science & technology, sustainability, territory, theory
Tuesday, January 18. 2011What is at stake in animate design?Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises ELSIE Usman Haque has, on several occasions, made the observation that there is an important difference between interactivity and responsiveness (see for example -pdf). A responsive system is a fundamentally linear set of relations, a kind of reaction where the same thing happens every time a given action is performed. A normal light switch is responsive in this sense. A typical light switch doesn’t consider any other variables, or have any other behavioural options. Pressing the switch will either turn it off or on, in what is a linear causal relationship. A properly interactive system is very different in its logical structure, and is characterised instead by a relational and circular (or more complex network) causality. In a properly interactive system, a given action will produce different results, because it depends upon the context at that moment, the history of previous interactions, and the relational creativity of the system. To take the banal example of a light switch again: in an interactive system an input might turn on a light, but it could equally result in other behaviour. A properly interactive light might set itself at different levels according to other sensor inputs, or the light might not come on at all, and instead curtains or windows might be opened to allow in more light. It might even ask you if you are afraid of the dark, or if you need help. It might try to sell you a torch, or it might just remind you that you are wearing shades. The post-war maverick ecologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson used a different example to illustrate the same point. If you kick a stone, he said, then the trajectory of the stone is a simple mechanical affair, that can easily be calculated using Newton’s equations. If you kick a dog, then you do not know what is going to happen. It might bite you, or bark at you, or run away. A dog interacts with us. It has its own agency, and that is the important issue here. One point to be made here then, is that many of the installations, systems and apps that we might broadly classify as interactive, are actually just responsive or reactive. There is nothing per se wrong with reactivity, and of course such responsive and reactive systems can in any case be ‘looped’ and networked to form components of more complex and properly interactive feedback systems. The important point rather, is that properly interactive systems are interesting, as they are able to stage a series of philosophical questions regarding the nature of agency and creativity – important questions that perhaps cannot be posed in any other way. The way that circular causal systems which feature feedback and recursion act as minds was the broad research focus of the post war project of cybernetics, and has been the subject of a recently published book by Andrew Pickering, called The Cybernetic Brain – Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2010). In this work, Pickering takes the reader through this fascinating period of experimental work at the boundary of art and science, which he describes as “some of the most striking and visionary work that I have come across in the history of science and engineering”. Pickering focuses upon the most radical traditions within cybernetic research, which largely arose out of the work of a series of distinctly eccentric British researchers, who he describes – borrowing a phrase from philosophers Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – as performing a nomadic science. He notes that “unlike more familiar sciences such as physics, which remain tied to specific academic departments and scholarly modes of transmission, cybernetics is better seen as a form of life, a way of going on in the world…” Pickering considers many experiments that have come to take on a legendary status within the history of cybernetics, ranging from Ross Ashby’s Homeostat (a network of four machines composed of movable magnets with electric connections through water, which would exhibit a range of emergent self-organised behaviours), Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises ELSIE and ELMER (which would respond to each other’s lights, or themselves in a mirror), to Stafford Beer’s remarkable Cybersyn project for Salvadore Allende’s government in Chile (an early form of the internet, which created the basis of a de-centralised socialist planned economy. For an information rich – though political analysis very poor – documentary, see here). Of particular interest to Pickering is the work of Gordon Pask, whose experimental installations and assemblages of various kinds captured in a uniquely distinct way, what Pickering describes as the “hylozoic wonder” of radical cybernetics – that is to say, under what conditions can we think of all matter as (at least capable of) being alive and thinking. Gordon Pask was heavily influenced by the ideas of Gregory Bateson – in particular Bateson’s anthropological work with various Balinese tribes, and later with family therapy and schizophrenia. In this research Bateson showed how our very experience of being a ‘self’ is produced out, or emerges out of, our participation in a network or ecology of conversations with other actors in our environment: people, objects, rituals and so on. Bateson suggested that “the total self-corrective unit which processes information, or as I say, ‘thinks’, ‘acts’ and ‘decides’, is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the ‘self’ or ‘consciousness’.” For Pask famously, the conversation became the paradigm for thinking about interactivity – much of which focused on the question of how do systems learn and teach, or as Bateson described it, what is deuterolearning: learning how to learn? Pask’s writings in this area can often be rather obscure, especially to the newcomers to the field, and Pickering provides an excellent introduction to these projects – including Musicolour, SAKI, Eucrates, CASTE, and the yet more experimental chemical computing projects – many of which were developed in association with architecture schools and in art settings. In all of these projects, Pickering reminds us, Pask is ultimately staging questions about who we are, and what we and our world might be; questions which the ‘ecology of mind’ of radical cybernetics can still help us with today. In this regard, I can’t put it any better than Usman Haque, who has stated that: “It is not about designing aesthetic representations of environmental data, or improving online efficiency or making urban structures more spectacular. Nor is it about making another piece of high-tech lobby art that responds to flows of people moving through the space, which is just as representational, metaphor-encumbered and unchallenging as a polite watercolour landscape. It is about designing tools that people themselves may use to construct – in the widest sense of the word – their environments and as a result build their own sense of agency. It is about developing ways in which people themselves can become more engaged with, and ultimately responsible for, the spaces they inhabit.” – About the Author: Jon Goodbun is researcher interested in networks of architecture, process philosophy, radical cybernetics, urban political ecology, and the natural and cognitive sciences. He sometimes refer to himself as an metropolitan tektologist, for want of a better description. His work focuses on near and medium term future scenarios. He is currently printing his PhD, working on a book ‘Critical and Maverick Systems Thinkers’, and planning some kind of exhibition on ‘Ecological Aesthetics, Empathy and Extended Mind’.
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Interaction design, Science & technology
at
11:33
Defined tags for this entry: books, history, interaction design, research, science & technology, theory, thinkers
Tuesday, December 07. 2010Decontextualized Formalism: Form+CodeVia Vague Terrain -----
In creating a foundational piece of software infrastructure Ben Fry and Casey Reas have done myself and countless peers a great service and helped launch thousands of arty new-media applets. In Form+Code (F+C) Reas teams up with Chandler McWilliams and LUST design studio to produce a slim introductory text on procedural and code-influenced art and design. While the book makes only the briefest mention of Processing, a good percentage of the work documented in it can be traced directly or indirectly to the platform that emerged from the MIT Aesthetics and Computation work group. F+C also includes historical precedents, from loving documentation of green Cathode Ray Tube Spacewar!, to one of Sol LeWitt's wall drawing instruction cards (presented here as code only — LeWitt's typed out gallery proposal). There are a few other nods to post-minimalism and other pre-P5 projects. Additionally, F+C also breaks out of the screen-based ghetto, including images from proposed and built architectural investigations, art installations, design prototypes and sculptures. The book itself is broken down into conceptual chapters that explore techniques that are code-like or only practically achievable with code-based tools: repetition, geometric transformation, parametrization, visualization, simulation. Each chapter includes spare descriptive pages which introduce overall themes and very briefly discuss the documented projects. F+C is a fairly no-nonesense machine -- it moves briskly through its functional structure of chapters, never pausing to dwell on any one project or image. Yoshi Sodeoka's 2004 video work based on presidential State of the Union addresses is presented in much the same way that Marius Watz's beautiful software generated abstractions are. Both sit alongside a Rafael Lozano-Hemmer installation, an elegant Cory Arcangle data-vis deconstruction, images of a Morphosis tower project for Paris, news-stream visualizations, and Mark Lombardi inspired diagramming. To some extent all these projects (and many others) are being stripped mined for the illustration of a technique or concept. This undifferentiated treatment of a really diverse set of work and ideas is, for me, the primary weakness of the book. Even with some notable omissions in the projects covered, there's likely to be a items here most of us haven't seen yet – I discovered many. If you are looking for an overview and introduction, or a catalog of interesting work, Form+Code will be a useful resource. Ultimately, though, it leaves me hungry for a more focused and critical approach to this incredibly interesting subject. It's clear that Reas, McWilliams and LUST would be particularly well qualified to produce exactly that sort of text. Personal comment: The more and more code based / behavioral design, documented and commented here in this new book by Casey Reas et al.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design, Interaction design
at
10:23
Defined tags for this entry: books, code, design, design (environments), design (graphic), design (interactions), design (products), designers, interaction design, theory
Friday, November 19. 201069 année conceptuelleVia manystuff ----- En présentant cette sélection de livres d’artistes réalisés pour la plupart entre 1968 et 1971 dans la mouvance de l’art dit conceptuel, il s’agit de tracer en filigrane, le portrait de Seth Siegelaub qui a joué un rôle déterminant dans l’évolution du livre d’artiste, qui à la fin des années 60 est en pleine émergence. L’originalité de Seth Siegelaub, c’est d’avoir édité, dès 1968 plusieurs catalogues qui se revendiquent comme l’exposition et non comme un supplément ou une illustration de celle-ci. Le livre est le lieu même où vont se déployer des œuvres originales, conçues à l’occasion de cette publication. Siegelaub ne s’intéresse pas particulièrement à ce médium pour des raisons de bibliophile mais plutôt parce que celui-ci apporte des réponses aux différentes interrogations que lui pose alors son rôle de diffuseur d’art. Cette exposition donne également un aperçu plus vaste sur la production de livres d’artistes à une époque charnière. Bien que l’accent soit mis sur les artistes “conceptuels” ou “minimalistes” (ceux “défendus” par Siegelaub, comme Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner , Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry…), de nombreux autres artistes américains et européens sont aussi présentés. Télécharger le texte de Jérôme Dupeyrat : “exposer, publier…”
24 novembre 2010 – 12 février 2011
Thursday, October 28. 2010Code/Space: Software and Everyday Lifevia Cyber Badger Research Blog -- We [ Martin Dodge & Rob Kitchin ] are just checking the page proofs for our book Code/Space that is nearing publication after a somewhat slow production process through much of this year. Code/Space is structured in four sections and has eleven chapters:
More details on our ongoing research on code/space and various published papers are listed on this webpage. Related Links: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
Friday, October 01. 2010Vitesses limites (ed. A. Fleischer), Le genre humain – Seuil (Paris, 2010)
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Art, Science & technology
at
13:24
Defined tags for this entry: art, books, dimensions, fabric | ch, interferences, publications, publications-fbrc, science & technology
Tuesday, July 20. 2010Kindle Books Outsell Hardcovers on AmazonVia GOOD
-----
by Patrick James
Part of the sales growth can be attributed to the Kindle's price drop—from $259 to $189—which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos credits as a tipping point for the device. Do you think we're closing in on a time when the majority books will be published exclusively as e-books? Photo via Tech Crunch
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Interaction design
at
09:08
Defined tags for this entry: books, culture & society, design (graphic), digital, interaction design
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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.
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