Wednesday, April 16. 2014
Via The Programmable City
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On Thursday April 10, the space agency is set to reveal its enormous database of where to find software for more than 1,000 of its projects (probably including rocket guidance, robotic control and/or climate simulators).
More about it on MailOnline.
Wednesday, April 02. 2014
Meanwhile ...
Makes me think about this interview with Bill Gates about software substitution.
Via algopop (via Reuters)
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Computers dethrone humans in European stock trading - via reuters
European equity investors are placing more orders via computers than through human traders for the first time as new market rules drive more money managers to go high-tech and low cost. The widespread regulatory changes has made electronic trading spread across the industry.
Last year, European investors put 51 percent of their orders through computers directly connected to the stock exchange or by using algorithms, a study by consultants TABB showed. The TABB study revealed that of 58 fund managers controlling 14.6 trillion euros in assets, a majority intended to funnel much more of their business through electronic “low touch” channels, which can cut trade costs by two-thirds. Pioneer Investments, which trades 500 billion euros ($695 billion) worth of assets every year and has cut the number of brokers it uses from 300 to around 100. Thats a lot of money in the non-hands of algorithms.
Thursday, February 06. 2014
Via Beyond the Beyond
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"Launching the Wolfram Connected Devices Project"
January 6, 2014
“Connected devices are central to our long-term strategy of injecting sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything. With the Wolfram Language we now have a way to describe and compute about things in the world. Connected devices are what we need to measure and interface with those things.
“In the end, we want every type of connected device to be seamlessly integrated with the Wolfram Language. And this will have all sorts of important consequences. But as we work toward this, there’s an obvious first step: we have to know what types of connected devices there actually are.
“So to have a way to answer that question, today we’re launching the Wolfram Connected Devices Project—whose goal is to work with device manufacturers and the technical community to provide a definitive, curated, source of systematic knowledge about connected devices….”
(((Gosh there sure are lots of them.)))
http://devices.wolfram.com
Tuesday, February 04. 2014
Via #algopop
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By Plummer Fernandez
Love in the time of algorithms by Dan Slater. A book about the online dating industry. I think the title of this book alone makes this relevant to #algopop.
Also researchers at the University of Iowa are developing an algorithm that much like Netflix, will recommend partners for dating based on data-mining rather than user input. The concept is based on the assumptions that a user’s self-curated profile is not entirely truthful, and that he or she 'may not know themselves well enough to know their own tastes in the opposite sex', so algorithms could potentially get to know the real you, and your potential partner, through your dating-site browsing habits.
Via Creative Applications
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By Lauren McCarthy & Kyle McDonald
AIT (“Social Hacking”), taught for the first time this semester by Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald at NYU’s ITP, explored the structures and systems of social interactions, identity, and self representation as mediated by technology. The semester was spent developing projects that altered or disrupted social space in an attempt to reveal existing patterns or truths about our experiences and technologies, and possibilities for richer interactions.
The class began by exploring the idea of “social glitch”, drawing on ideas from glitch theory, social psychology, and sociology, including Harold Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, Stanley Milgram’s subway experiments, and Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of social interaction. If “glitch” describes when a system breaks down and reveals something about its structure or self in the process, what might this look like in the context of social space?
Bill Lindmeier wrote a Ruby script using the Twitter Stream API to listen for any Tweets containing “new profile pic.” When a Tweet was posted the script would download the user’s profile image, upload it to his own account and then reply to the user with a randomly selected Tweet, like “awesome pic!”. The reactions ranged from humored to furious.
Along similar lines, Ilwon Yoon implemented a script that searched for Tweets containing “I am all alone” and replied with cute images obtained from a Google image search and “you are not alone” text.
Mack Howell built on the in-class exercise of asking strangers to borrow their phone then doing something unexpected with it, asking to take pictures of strangers’ browsing history.
The class next turned it’s attention to social automation and APIs, and the potential for their creative misuse.
Gal Sasson used the Amazon Mechanical Turk API to create collaborative noise, creating a chain where each turker was prompted to replicate a drawing from the previous turker, seeding the first turker with a perfect square.
Mack Howell used the Google Street View Image API to map out the traceroutes from his location to the data centers of the his most frequently visited IPs.
In another assignment, students were prompted to create an “HPI” (human programming interface) that allowed others to control some aspect of their lives, and perform the experiment for one full week.
Anytime an email or Twitter direct message was sent to Ben Kauffman with the hashtag #brainstamp and a mailing address, he would get an SMS with the information and promptly right down on a postcard whatever was in his head at that exact moment. He would then mail the thoughts, at turns surreal and mundane, to the awaiting recipient. An alternative to normal social media, Ben challenged us to find ways to be more present while documenting our lives.
Bill Lindmeier invited his friends to control his movements in realtime through a Google-street-view-esque video interface, and asked them to complete a simple mission: Buy some coffee in under 20 minutes. The tools at their disposal: $5, an umbrella and a carrot.
Mack Howell created a journal written by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, asking them to generate diary entries based on OpenPaths data sent automatically as he moved around.
In a project called My Friends Complete Me, Su Hyun Kim posted binary questions on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and let her friends collective opinion determine her life choices, including deciding whether to change her last name when she got married.
A couple weeks were spent having focused discussions about security, privacy, and surveillance, including topics like quantified self, government surveillance and historical regimes of naming, and readings from Bruce Schneier, Evgeny Morozov and Steve Mann. In parallel, students were asked to examine their own social lives and compulsively document, share, intercept, impersonate, anonymize and misinterpret.
Mike Allison explored our voyeuristic nature and cultural craving for surveillance, allowing users to watch someone watch someone who may be watching them. In order to watch, users must lend their own camera to the system.
Bill Lindmeier created an app called File Party, a repository of files that have been randomly selected and uploaded from peoples’ hard-drive. In order to view the files, you have to upload one yourself.
In a unit on computer vision and linguistic analysis, students were paired up and asked to create a chat application that provided a filter or adapter that improved their interaction.
Realizing how much is lost in translation and accents, Tarana Gupta and Hanbyul Jo developed a video chat tool which allows users to talk in their respective language and and displays in real-time text and images corresponding to what is being said.
In FlapChat, Su Hyun Kim and Gal Sasson rethought the way we interact with the web camera, allowing users to flap their arms to fly around a virtual environment while chatting.
Overall, the most successful moments in the class were the ones where students had an opportunity to examine an otherwise common technology or interaction from a new perspective. Short in-class exercises like “ask a stranger to use their phone, and do something unexpected” gave students a reference point for discussion. The “HPI” assignment gave students an unusual challenge of “performing” something for a week, lead to its own set of difficulties and realizations that are distinct from purely technical or aesthetic exercises. On the first day of class a contract was handed out requiring that students respect others’ positions in class, and take responsibility for any actions outside of class. This created a unfamiliar atmosphere and opened up the students to question their freedoms and responsibilities towards each other.
In the future, each two- or three-week section might be expanded to fit a whole semester. Of particular interest were the computer vision, security and surveillance, and mobile platforms sections. Leftover discussion from security and surveillance spilled into the next week, and assignments for mobile platforms could have been taken far beyond the proof-of-concept or design-only stages.
More information about the class, including the complete syllabus, reading lists, and some example code, is available on GitHub.
A condensed version of this class will be taught in January at GAFFTA in San Francisco, details will be announced soon with more information here.
About the Tutors:
Kyle McDonald is a media artist who works with code, with a background in philosophy and computer science. He creates intricate systems with playful realizations, sharing the source and challenging others to create and contribute. Kyle is a regular collaborator on arts-engineering initiatives such as openFrameworks, having developed a number of extensions which provide connectivity to powerful image processing and computer vision libraries. For the past few years, Kyle has applied these techniques to problems in 3D sensing, for interaction and visualization, starting with structured light techniques, and later the Kinect. Kyle’s work ranges from hyper-formal glitch experiments to tactical and interrogative installations and performance. He was recently Guest Researcher in residence at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan, and is currently adjunct professor at ITP.
http://kylemcdonald.net
Lauren McCarthy is an artist and programmer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is adjunct faculty at RISD and NYU ITP, and a current resident at Eyebeam. She holds an MFA from UCLA and a BS Computer Science and BS Art and Design from MIT. Her work explores the structures and systems of social interactions, identity, and self-representation, and the potential for technology to mediate, manipulate, and evolve these interactions. She is fascinated by the slightly uncomfortable moments when patterns are shifted, expectations are broken, and participants become aware of the system. Her artwork has been shown in a variety of contexts, including the Conflux Festival, SIGGRAPH, LACMA, the Japan Media Arts Festival, the File Festival, the WIRED Store, and probably to you without you knowing it at some point while interacting with her.
http://lauren-mccarthy.com
Monday, February 03. 2014
An interesting call for papers about "algorithmic living" at University of California, Davis.
Via The Programmable City
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Call for papers
Thursday and Friday – May 15-16, 2014 at the University of California, Davis
Submission Deadline: March 1, 2014 algorithmiclife (at) gmail.com
As algorithms permeate our lived experience, the boundaries and borderlands of what can and cannot be adapted, translated, or incorporated into algorithmic thinking become a space of contention. The principle of the algorithm, or the specification of the potential space of action, creates the notion of a universal mode of specification of all life, leading to discourses on empowerment, efficiency, openness, and inclusivity. But algorithms are ultimately only able to make intelligible and valuable that which can be discretized, quantified, operationalized, proceduralized, and gamified, and this limited domain makes algorithms necessarily exclusive.
Algorithms increasingly shape our world, our thought, our economy, our political life, and our bodies. The algorithmic response of NSA networks to threatening network activity increasingly brings privacy and political surveillance under algorithmic control. At least 30% of stock trading is now algorithmic and automatic, having already lead to several otherwise inexplicable collapses and booms. Devices such as the Fitbit and the NikeFuel suggest that the body is incomplete without a technological supplement, treating ‘health’ as a quantifiable output dependent on quantifiable inputs. The logic of gamification, which finds increasing traction in educational and pedagogical contexts, asserts that the world is not only renderable as winnable or losable, but is in fact better–i.e. more effective–this way. The increased proliferation of how-to guides, from HGTV and DIY television to the LifeHack website, demonstrate a growing demand for approaching tasks with discrete algorithmic instructions.
This conference seeks to explore both the specific uses of algorithms and algorithmic culture more broadly, including topics such as: gamification, the computational self, data mining and visualization, the politics of algorithms, surveillance, mobile and locative technology, and games for health. While virtually any discipline could have something productive to say about the matter, we are especially seeking contributions from software studies, critical code studies, performance studies, cultural and media studies, anthropology, the humanities, and social sciences, as well as visual art, music, sound studies and performance. Proposals for experimental/hybrid performance-papers and multimedia artworks are especially welcome.
Areas open for exploration include but are not limited to: daily life in algorithmic culture; gamification of education, health, politics, arts, and other social arenas; the life and death of big data and data visualization; identity politics and the quantification of selves, bodies, and populations; algorithm and affect; visual culture of algorithms; algorithmic materiality; governance, regulation, and ethics of algorithms, procedures, and protocols; algorithmic imaginaries in fiction, film, video games, and other media; algorithmic culture and (dis)ability; habit and addiction as biological algorithms; the unrule-able/unruly in the (post)digital age; limits and possibilities of emergence; algorithmic and proto-algorithmic compositional methods (e.g., serialism, Baroque fugue); algorithms and (il)legibility; and the unalgorithmic.
Please send proposals to algorithmiclife (at) gmail.com by March 1, 2014.
Decisions will be made by March 8, 2014.
Thursday, December 12. 2013
Note: some sorts of generated "interfered" spaces, "spatial moirés".
Via #algopop
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Geo-Fragments by Daniel Schwarz
Automated Google Street View compositions of the artist’s daily movements, auto-posted to a tumblr. The location data is tracked with openpath.
Wednesday, December 04. 2013
Via Processing Matter
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Google no longer understands how its “deep learning” decision-making computer systems have made themselves so good at recognizing things in photos
(…)
The claims were made at the Machine Learning Conference in San Francisco on Friday by Google software engineer Quoc V. Le in a talk in which he outlined some of the ways the content-slurper is putting “deep learning” systems to work.
(…)
This means that for some things, Google researchers can no longer explain exactly how the system has learned to spot certain objects, because the programming appears to think independently from its creators, and its complex cognitive processes are inscrutable. This “thinking” is within an extremely narrow remit, but it is demonstrably effective and independently verifiable.
Thursday, November 07. 2013
Via beatricegalilee.com
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By Beatrice Galilee
Seven Minutes
by Alex Schweder, curated by Beatrice Galilee
Thursday 7th November, 7pm
In 2007, The New York Times published an article entitled ‘For The Brain Remembering Is Like Reliving’. Dutch Neuroscientists had evidence to prove that the act of recollection is not significantly different, in terms of the crests and falls of brainwaves and shooting of electro neurons, to the act of doing.
We know from our daily lives that there is a mental capacity to relive spaces, experiences and conversations without the dissonance of representation. In psychology, psychoanalysis and neurology, the memories of spaces and activities in our past dictate our actions in the present. The field of psychogeography is founded on the spatial effects of places and movements through space and psychoanalysis is based on the premise that the suppression of feelings from the past can emerge unconsciously in the reconstruction of the past, through writing or discussion.
The site of the exhibition, the traditional site of display and representation is the field of operation for artist and architect Alex Schweder. Schweder’s work deals precisely with possibility that spaces are scripted and informed by bodies and occupation. That the boundaries between them are permeable and behavioural patterns can be manipulated with careful intervention.
In this one-off unique work held in the Opus gallery for four days, the artist will be working with the architecture of the space – using the architecture of walls, doors, memories, history and conversation to script the space and through strategic means, transform the reading and semiotics of space for the visitor.
In seven minutes the intention of the artist will become clear.
The exhibition will be open Saturdays 9th, 16th and 23rd Nov, 12-5pm
Wednesday, November 06. 2013
Via e-flux
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Shiomi Mieko, "Fluxus balance: version 1955, for 68 contributors," 1995. One from a portfolio of 68 prints, each 9 1/16 x 12 5/8 inches, edition of 10. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2013 Shiomi Mieko.
New on post:
Shiomi Mieko, Poema Colectivo, Polish Radio Experimental Studio
The editors of post are delighted to announce Between New York and Tokyo: Fluxus and Graphic Scores, a selection of archival materials, artistic projects, and essays commissioned and edited by Miki Kaneda and Doryun Chong.
post.at.moma.org
In 1964, Shiomi Mieko sent a card to more than 200 artists spanning multiple continents inviting them to "write a word and place it somewhere." Shiomi's simple instruction exemplifies the spirit of openness, simplicity, and versatility that characterized the transnational artistic networks related to Fluxus in the 1960s. Between New York and Tokyo raises questions about artistic networks and their transformative potential still relevant today.
Materials include:
–Newly commissioned essays by artist Shiomi Mieko and art historian Midori Yoshimoto
–Rarely seen collections of Spatial Poems by Shiomi Mieko drawn from MoMA's holdings
–A video of pianist Fujii Aki performing Shiomi's Endless Box
–David Horvitz's Artist Breakfast, a contemporary, networked take on Shiomi's Spatial Poems, broadcast live on post
Appearing on post this fall:
Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES)
A selection of audio recordings, films, and musical notations produced by artists and composers linked to the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, a unique hub for experiments in sound and art established in Warsaw in 1957.
Poema Colectivo: Revolución and the International Mail Art Network
In 1981, the Mexican group Colectivo 3 initiated an international collective poem with the aim of investigating the theme "revolution." post presents images of the 310 works, newly commissioned essays, and primary documents translated for the first time.
Also on post:
Interviews
Bratescu: "The Studio Is Myself" / Dias's "Incomplete Biography" / Yamaguchi: Jikken Kobo / Yasunao: The "John Cage Shock" in Japan
Essays
Uesaki on Yokoo Tadanori / Hendricks on Fluxus / Ehrenberg on the archive as artwork / Ross on Iimura Takahiko
Places
Istanbul report by Superpool / The sounds of Japan's antinuclear movement by Novak / MoMA curators in Brazil, Central and Eastern Europe, and Japan
Practices
APN portfolios from the 1950s / Poetry performance by Augusto de Campos / Portfolio of Iimura Takahiko's film performances / Krakowiak's response to the Sogetsu Art Center
Features
Kaneda on experimental music in Japan / Hirasawa on 1960s Japanese film festivals
Workshops
Denegri on Gorgona—in English and Croatian / Montgomery on historicizing the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America / Crowley on sound experiments in the former Soviet Bloc / Bal's remarks on C-MAP / Longoni's reflections on decentering
post is an online platform developed by The Museum of Modern Art, and managed with an international network of partners and contributors. post launched in February 2013 with the aim of publishing research resources and artistic projects that engage with narratives falling outside art history's familiar accounts. Committed to investigating artistic practices that have historically been overlooked in MoMA's collection and exhibitions, post explores experimental practices in East Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
Adapting the attributes of an online journal, archive, exhibition space, and forum for research exchanges, post uses the characteristics of the Web to spark in-depth explorations of the ways in which modernism is being redefined, and link those topics to artists and institutions working today.
post grows out of Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), a cross-departmental research program begun in 2009 at MoMA to facilitate a museum-wide study that reflects the multiplicity of modernities and histories of contemporary and modern art. Read more about C-MAP here.
To join the conversations and follow topics of interest to you, create a user profile that will keep you updated with activities on post.
post.at.MoMA.org
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