Wednesday, July 15. 2009
Personal comment:
Je dirais "Architecture, art & code" pour fabric | ch! Communauté (et cycle de conférences) à suivre peut-être pour soumettre des approches plus orientées sur le code (Rhizoreality, etc.)?
Friday, June 05. 2009
"We have come to an era where society breaths technology. Screens are familiar
to us, however we do not know the consequences that tie with their domination".
So begins the LIFT conference blurb. My own take, which I'll talk about, is that
new technology connects us to each other more, but leaves us *less* connected to
the biosphere of which we are a co-dependent part. We need to use digital infra
in ways that reverse this ecocidal divide. Keynote speakers include Euan Semple,
Gunther Pauli, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (the French Digital Economy Minister),
Usman Haque, Bruce Sterling. The event takes place in the Palais du Pharo, a
gift to Napoleon perched on the cliff tops at the entrance of the Vieux Port.
Marseille, 18-20 June 2009
http://liftconference.com/lift-france-09
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Via The doors of Perception (John Thackara)
Personal comment:
Je trouve le statement intéressant: le "biological devide" créé aujourd'hui par les technologies d'information. Pas faut, mais cela pourrait changer radicalement quand on connait les nombreuses technologies environnementales en cours d'élaboration. Et il serait alors intéressant de se poser la question: quels services pour créer cette connection "digitale" entre biotopes, biosphère, infosphère et humanité.
Monday, May 18. 2009
World-Information City Paris 2009 is an international, two day conference focusing on four major themes within the wide field of new urban geographies: mobility, global flows and local dynamics, the remaking of urban spaces through new strategies of conflict and security, and new approaches to map distributed action in space. Mobility – of people, goods, and information – across distances large and small has become an ever more salient aspect of a wide range of social practices.
For the first time in world history a majority lives in cities but the cities’ form itself is challenged. Virtual and physical space increasingly fragments into fully globalized zones along intensely localized spaces in a single geographic domain. High-level presentations, discussions and workshops offer insights on future urban transformations in a digitally networked world. With: Bruno Latour, Saskia Sassen, Stephen Graham, Christophe Aguiton, Carlo Ratti, John Urry, Eyal Weizman, Solomon Benjamin, Brian Holmes a.o.
address: Maison des metallos, 94 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud - 75011 Paris (GoogleMaps).
More info>>
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Via The Mobile city
Personal comment:
Pour info, un cycle de conférences (approche théorique, sociologique, géopolitique, technologique... mais pas architecturale!) concernant la ville^, la mobilité et la globalisation. Prochaine étape à Paris à la fin du mois.
Monday, April 06. 2009
Starting just a few hours from now down at SCI-Arc, on a cloudless 73º day, "seven distinguished architects and theorists" whose designs straddle "the intersection of physical and virtual worlds" will be presenting their work at the Mediascapes Symposium, led by Ed Keller.
The bulk of the afternoon's discussion will encompass "the practice of immersive and virtual architecture, which spans animation and 3D technologies, digital environments, and questions of materiality... asking how these classifications will define our understanding of the relationships between tangible and intangible worlds."
One of today's speakers, Benjamin Bratton, who will also be presenting next week at Postopolis! LA, describes his talk: "Pervasive computing will make inanimate objects see, hear, and comment on our interactions with them. This experience will, in many cases, be indistinguishable from a psychotic break, or from the rituals of classical Animism." That, or it will feel like The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
If you're in LA, be sure to stop by.
Via BLDBLOG
Personal comment:
Some names... actifs dans la région de LA autour de thématiques qui ne nous sont pas étrangères! Des "usual suspects" (comme Marcos Novak ou Eric Owenn Moss) et des nouveaux suspects (Ed Keller, Benjamin Bratton, etc.)
Via City of Sound
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By Dan Hill
Patrick Keller’s talk was so up my strasse it’s ridiculous. Keller is from the Swiss architecture practice Fabric, originally from Geneva and now in Lausanne (I’m not sure why he was in LA.) He’s interested in the collaboration between information designers and architect, and works in the space between these disciplines, interested in creating responsive architectures (As am I.) He notes wryly that most of his projects are as yet un-built, “like most architecture”. (As are mine.)
He runs through a few projects in quick succession, each a progression of the other. There’s a lot more to his projects than we were able to get through in 30 minutes. All concern the interplay between the environmental characteristics of spaces, in terms of the idea of conditioned environments (somewhat apposite, given Banham’s ideas of Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (see my own spin on that) and as LA must be home to as much air conditioning as anywhere.)
The first project is from a few years back as evidenced by the title. ‘Real Rooms’ (2005) takes its name from Real Player, then one of the de rigeur streaming media players. The idea being that instead of streaming media you could stream actual environments into spaces. This project, for Swiss giant Néstle, was situated in the world HQ of Néstle, a late-modern building with large areas of transparent glass on the outside but an almost hermetically sealed series of interior spaces (corridors, offices, cubicles, boxes etc.) which had precisely controlled environments in terms of internal artificial climates, artificial lighting etc.
So given the building had lost a relationship with climate, at least on the interior, Fabric proposed a series of container-like interior ‘boxes’ which could be altered in terms of temperature and lighting to ‘stream’ artificial climates into those spaces, representative of climates and time zones from across the world (playing up Néstle’s global reach, perhaps) - that you could “invite a climate into the box” in Keller’s words. So you could make one environment always 8am, staying on the same latitude. Some could be “always dark, some always daytime - some very cold and some very hot”.
The building looked particularly beautiful at night, when only some part of it is lit, forming the shape of daylight across the globe. This shape would then change slightly varying with season.
The second project Keller showed also concerns internal atmospheres, but instead of controlling, this is about “letting climate go by itself”. A competition entry for a tower in San Jose, containing a huge volume of air. This building would also communicates climate around the globe, but using the natural processes of convection, albedo effect and so on within the volume of air. As opposed to the former project, this would just enable a climate within the structure, articulated by the volume of air, and then communicate the performance of that air volume via boxes with sensors on the exterior, linking it to climates worldwide.
The tower enables a kind of “porosity in vertical axis” so the air can ascend or descend, but with no porosity on the sides, it is trapped, in order to manifest the daily patterns within that volume.
Keller says it’s a sort of test tube environment for climatic variation: “In the morning you’d have cold air at bottom and warmer air at the top remaining from the day before … During the day, it gets warmer, and goes to the top, then cooler air is present at the bottom. Humidity collects at the top, condensates on the facade and runs down. Pollution particles are more dense at the bottom than at the top (as they’re heavier)”. And so on …
So the form triggers a natural atmospheric variation into building, which is then captured by the sensors. These sensors then feed information displays on part of building (essentially on each floor), enabling a comparison at each moment of the performance of the building itself, and then “related atmospheres” to other places on the globe. (A fascinating idea, and really close to my own ideas of building as urban dashboard.)
The third and final project was ‘Environ(ne)ment’ for the CCA, working with Philippe Rahm. This was both a form of “test environment and representation“ concerning an ‘artificial sun’ (as per Eliasson's Weather Project?) triggering differences in heat, light etc. within the gallery space. These phenomena then sampled by sensors, and feed projections about what’s going on in the space. Moving the ideas forward, Keller described how this exhibit then offered suggestions about how you could inhabit these spaces with differing climates - “propositions generated through software”, such as cooking on floor, sleeping on carpet, wearing clothes or not, furniture, activity and relationships all changing function in response to the different environmental characteristics. (This is an intriguing step forward for the ideas, moving into behavioural relationships as a result of changing environments quite directly, rather than the previous two projects with their more subtle but potentially ignorable approach of prompting.)
So Keller sums up by noting how the first project concerned a “conditioned environment” which is then questioned and reopened. The second was a “let go” environment, which is “more natural and costs nothing to trigger variation”. The third concerns “some new way of inhabiting those climates”. He believes this third is interesting as neither totally conditioned nor totally free, but somewhere in between …
Geoff asks a question concerning moving beyond the building into urban and landscape design through temperature gradients. “Could you engineer microclimates through LA? Could you bring different climates to the city?”
Keller responds that it could theoretically “go large scale, though it is hard to trigger it at this scale. At urban scale you have to deal with natural conditions as well”. Having said that, in a sense the cities have already changed our climate at this planetary scale of course - and we could do so again, he suggests, say by “painting the cities all white and replace polar caps” accordingly.
(There are many more fascinating projects at Fabric’s website, as well as details of the projects noted above, and it’ll be worth watching the work of this practice. This kind of work is at the most interesting junction with architecture and urbanism, to my mind, and perhaps the most potentially fruitful.)
Fabric.ch
Personal comment:
This was a really great and challenging event with sharp interventions. I hope we'll be able to organize one in Europe sooner or later (but rather sooner).
Thursday, April 02. 2009
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Photo by StoreFront Gallery, via Flickr
Well, this has been one of the most intense weeks I´ve had in quite so time. Postopolis! LA has turned to be an amazing event: An incredible venue at the rooftop of The Standard Hotel in downtown, a very interesting group of speakers, very proactive attendants, networking and drinks. And of course, the presence of our friends from BLDGBLOG (Geoff), City of Sound (Dan), Subtopia (Bryan), Mudd Up! (Jayce, a.k.a. dj/Rupture), We Make Money Not Art (Regina), The Storefront Gallery (Joseph, Cesar) and ForYouArt (Bettina, Devin).
During these days we had the chance to conduct live interviews with wHY Architectura (Yo Hakomori), Oyler Wu Collective (Dwayne Oyler, Jenny Wu), Sander Architects (Whitney Sander) and JohnstonMarkLee (Sharon Johnston, Mark Lee). These have turned to be very interesting, as you saw on the live streaming. Also, the audience has been participating making questions to the architects. And i have good news for this, as we got a new microphone and the audio recording is great! So expect the edited interviews to be posted soon.
Today we are going to interview Austin Kelly from XTEN Architecture, so if you´ve got any questions write a comment and i´ll try to get him to answer them. You can see the interview via Ustream at 5PM Pacific time.
As for the rest of the speakers, I´ve been impressed for the variety of architecture related topics discussed… urbanism, communes, sustainability… i really liked the presentations by Jeffrey Inaba (Inaba Projects), Patrick Keller (Fabric) and Stephanie Smith (Ecoshack, check her awesome project Wanna Start a Commune?). And there´s more to come, so be sure to check the full schedule. The quality of the Ustream feed is very good, so be sure to check it out.
Be sure to follow @Postopolis on Twitter (and also @archdaily) for live updates. There´s also a Flickr group, with very good photos.
We thank the StoreFront Gallery, ForYourArt and The Standard Hotel LA for making this event possible, one of the best by far.
And please remember that we have a closing party on Saturday!
Wednesday, March 25. 2009
Via BLDBLOG and Storefront for Art and Architecture
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Postopolis! LA has been gathering pace over the past few weeks, despite the silence, so it seemed like high time for an update. Although we're still finalizing both the schedule and the list of speakers, it's looking amazing so far.
[Image: Logo by Joe Alterio].
The whole thing kicks off in less than two weeks, running from Tuesday, March 31, to Saturday, April 4, and from 5pm-11pm everyday.
The venue has finally been announced, as well: we'll be up in the sky, watching the sun set every evening from the rooftop pool, deck, and bar of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The event is free and open to everyone, with a cash bar and free wifi, so come on down for some landscape and architecture, bring your favorite wireless device, and wear your Speedo or bikini if you want to use the pool (it's more like a wading pool, FYI). And, of course, we'll be keeping our fingers crossed for no rain.
The list of speakers, as it now stands, includes unbelievably interesting people. Here's a glimpse:
—Ari Kletzky (Founder, Islands of LA)
—Austin Kelly (Principal, XTEN Architecture)
—Ava Bromberg (Artist, In the Field)
—Ben Cerveny (Strategic and Conceptual Advisor, Stamen Design)
—Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues (Architects and Founding Partners, Ball-Nogues Studio)
—Benjamin Bratton (Architect and Theorist)
—Bryan Boyer (Organizer, Helsinki Design Lab 2010)
—Christina Ulke (Artist, Co-Founder, C-Level, and Editor, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest)
—Christopher Hawthorne (Architecture Critic, Los Angeles Times)
—David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young (Founders, fallen fruit)
—David Gissen (Theorist and Historian, CCA)
—Dwayne Oyler (Architect and Principal, Oyler Wu Collaborative)
—Eric Rodenbeck (Founder, Stamen Design)
—Freya Bardell and Brian Howe (Principals, Greenmeme)
—Fritz Haeg (Artist and Writer)
—Gary Dauphin (Writer and Critic)
—Jeffrey Inaba (Architect and Principal, Inaba Projects)
—Ken Ehrlich (Artist and Writer)
—Mary-Ann Ray (Architect, Writer, and Principal, Studio Works Architects)
—Matthew Coolidge (Director, Center for Land Use Interpretation)
—Michael Dear (Professor of Geography, USC)
—Michael Downing (Deputy Chief of Counter Terrorism, Los Angeles Police Department)
—Mike the Poet (Poet and Writer)
—Orhan Ayyüce (Architect, Blogger, and Senior Editor, Archinect)
—Patrick Keller (Architect and Principal, Fabric)
—Paul Petrunia (Founder, Archinect)
—Robert Miles Kemp (Designer and Principal, Variate Labs)
—Sam Grawe (Editor-in-Chief, Dwell)
—Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee (Architects and Principals, Johnston MarkLee)
—Stephanie Smith (Founder, Ecoshack)
—Steve Roden (Musician and Artist)
—Ted Kane (Architect and Author, Polar Inertia)
—Whitney Sander (Architect and Principal, Sander Architects)
—Yo-Ichiro Hakomori (Architect and Principal, wHY Architecture)
—Zach Frechette (Editor-in-Chief, GOOD)
That's nowhere near the final list, though, as we've also got a handful of media panels planned for Saturday, April 4; these will include Matt Chaban from the Architect's Newspaper, Dakota Smith from Curbed LA, Greg J. Smith of Serial Consign & Vague Terrain, journalist Alissa Walker, a variety of Archinect school bloggers, and many, many more.
So stay tuned for more updates.
And, don't forget, Postopolis! LA will be hosted by BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, mudd up!, Plataforma Arquitectura/Arch Daily, Subtopia, and we make money not art, under the organization of the Storefront for Art and Architecture and the sponsorship of ForYourArt.
Hope to see you there!
Personal comment:
Names (including fabric | ch) at Postopolis!LA.
Friday, November 28. 2008
CCTV camera turned into birds’ nest. Seen at the Design Biennale in Saint Etienne, France.
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Via Pasta & Vinegar
Tuesday, November 04. 2008
I made the trek to a steamy hot NYC this weekend to attend one day of the three day Last HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania. There was too much going to adequately cover it here (or even take it all in), but a few things stood out.
Steve Rambam’s eye opening talk on the death of privacy for example. For a solid three hours in front of a standing room only crowd he weaved back and forth between the Orwellian theme of how our privacy is being ripped from us by everyone from Google to Choicepoint and the theme that seemed even creepier to him, self contribution. Over and over he expressed disbelief at how willingly we post our personal details everywhere from Twitter to Facebook while thanking us all the while for making his job as a private investigator that much easier. What the marketers and government don’t actively take, we actively give. Naturally I twittered the whole thing.
Cell phone tracking; artificial-intelligence-assisted reality mining; 3000 cameras per square mile in Manhattan; facial, activity, and even gait identification software; government outsourced investigative databases shielded from FOIA requests; UAV-based license plate scanners; beating anonymity by correlating multiple datasets; unanticipated database repurposing; and on and on… Finally I could twitter no more and left the venue hurriedly fashioning a tinfoil hat from a burger wrapper while consigning myself to doubling the dosage on my meds.
I will say this though, there was something deliciously ironic about standing in a room chock full of hackers all listening at rapt attention to a three hour chillingly dystopic harangue on privacy loss while nearly every single one of them was wearing an RFID tag around their necks. Even better, the tag was tracking their every move around the venue and was linked to a comprehensive self-contributed profile.
Moving beyond the privacy nightmare stuff, there was hardware hacking to be found everywhere at Last HOPE. Tables were covered with broken open electronic toys and electronic components and were surrounded by hackers with smoking soldering irons.
Of the completed projects on display, one of my favorites was a something of a hybrid that projected a 3D image onto carefully placed strings.
Called Wiremap, the project was built by Albert Hwang who carefully moved it from his living room to the Hotel Pennsylvania where it took him a full day to set up and re-calibrate. It is a fascinating piece that creates a convincing (if low res) three dimensional image by carefully processing a volumetric image into slices (using Processing) and then projecting those slices onto reflective white strings stretched into a precise angular array.
The resolution of the system is limited by the fact that the strings have a physical width and that the projector is quite imperfect for the task. Relatively poor angular precision, rectilinear lens distortion, the lack of flat field optics, and the fact that the lens has a fairly narrow focal depth all conspire to limit the display resolution to 256 slices. However, despite the limitations you could move around the display and really get a sense for the object and it’s motion. The video I’m embedding below isn’t great but it should get the idea across.
Finally, I just wanted to mention a couple of things about the “Crippling Crypto - The Debian OpenSSL Debacle” talk given by Appelbaum, Zovi and Nohl. Plenty has been written about the issue itself, so there is no point in regurgitating it here, but if you haven’t seen the diff of the before and after code change it’s worth taking a look. It is amazing that such a benign looking edit (at first, and probably second, glance it looks like someone just added a comment) could turn out to be the “worst bug in the history of Debian,” and probably SSH as well since it also relies on OpenSSL.
As the presenters set out to recreate 524,288 weak keys for use in tracking them down and blacklisting them, they calculated it would take them five days on a single machine. So, instead, using Amazon’s S3, SQS, and 20 32 bit and 20 64 bit EC2 instances, they ran the entire job in four hours for a total cost of $24. Interestingly, they didn’t even have to supply their own image of Ubuntu with the un-patched code as it was still available from Amazon for use with EC2.
I expect video for some of the talks will pop up here and there. In the meantime, if you are interested, these guys videotaped every session and made DVD’s. If you don’t already suffer from paranoiac delusions I would highly recommend Steve Rambam’s session (or, you can find an earlier version of the talk here).
(from r-echos via : O’Reilly Radar)
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