Wednesday, December 11. 2013Thomas Dreher’s History of Computer Art | #history #art
----- *I’ve blogged this ongoing effort before, but it’s just full of stuff one would never hear about otherwise. http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/GCA_Indexe.html *The latest chapter, “Reactive Installations and Virtual Reality,” (in English, no less): http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/GCA-V.1e.html
*It amuses me to see people complain that his history is “too German.” That’s exactly what’s great about it. I’m staggered by the meticulous attention to detail in Dreher’s compendium. I’m quite the fan of media history, but really, ten of me couldn’t write a book like this.
Monday, December 02. 2013Frank Lloyd Wright, Reveals ... | #architecture
Note: Dubai pre-booted by Mr Wright?
Via Stuff -----
Frank Lloyd Wright, Reveals the Design for his Mile-High Skyscraper, Chicago, Illinois, 1956
Personal comment: Even the image is big! Wednesday, November 06. 2013Between New York and Tokyo: Fluxus and Graphic Scores | #scores #algorithms
Via e-flux -----
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: 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.
Related Links:The Making of an Avant Garde | #architecture #theory
Via The Architectural League NY -----
The Making of an Avant Garde: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies 1967-1984 A documentary written, produced, and directed by Diana Agrest
1.5 AIA and New York State CEUs This film screening is organized by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union and co-sponsored by The Architectural League. A screening of The Making of an Avant Garde: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies 1967-1984. The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, founded in 1967 with close ties to The Museum of Modern Art, made New York the global center for architectural debate and redefined architectural discourse in the United States. A place of immense energy and effervescence, its founders and participants were young and hardly known at the time but would ultimately shape architectural practice and theory for decades. Diana Agrest’s film documents and explores the Institute’s fertile beginnings and enduring significance as a locus for the avant-garde. The film features Mark Wigley, Peter Eisenman, Diana Agrest, Charles Gwathmey, Mario Gandelsonas, Richard Meier, Kenneth Frampton, Barbara Jakobson, Frank Gehry, Anthony Vidler, Deborah Berke, Rem Koolhaas, Stan Allen, Suzanne Stephens, Bernard Tschumi, Joan Ockman, among others. Time & Place
Wednesday, November 13, 2013 Tickets
This event is free and open to all. Reservations neither needed nor accepted.
Personal comment: Undoubtedly a documentary I'll look to get a copy! Tuesday, August 27. 2013Douglas Engelbart’s Unfinished Revolution
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Computing pioneer Doug Engelbart’s inventions transformed computing, but he intended them to transform humans.
Peripheral vision: Engelbart rehearses for the “mother of all demos.”
Doug Engelbart knew that his obituaries would laud him as “Inventor of the Mouse.” I can see him smiling wistfully, ironically, at the thought. The mouse was such a small part of what Engelbart invented. We now live in a world where people edit text on screens, command computers by pointing and clicking, communicate via audio-video and screen-sharing, and use hyperlinks to navigate through knowledge—all ideas that Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) invented in the 1960s. But Engelbart never got support for the larger part of what he wanted to build, even decades later when he finally got recognition for his achievements. When Stanford honored Engelbart with a two-day symposium in 2008, they called it “The Unfinished Revolution.” To Engelbart, computers, interfaces, and networks were means to a more important end—amplifying human intelligence to help us survive in the world we’ve created. He listed the end results of boosting what he called “collective IQ” in a 1962 paper, Augmenting Human Intellect. They included “more-rapid comprehension … better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble.” If you want to understand where today’s information technologies came from, and where they might go, the paper still makes good reading. Engelbart’s vision for more capable humans, enabled by electronic computers, came to him in 1945, after reading inventor and wartime research director Vannevar Bush’s Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think.” Bush wrote: “The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.” That inspired Engelbart, a young electrical engineer, to come up with the idea of people using screens and computers to collaboratively solve problems. He worked on his ideas for the rest of his life, despite being warned over and over by people in academia and the computer industry that his ideas of using computers for anything other than scientific computations or business data processing was “crazy” and “science fiction.” Englebart knew right from the start that screens, input devices, hardware, and software could allow the necessary collaborative problem-solving only as part of a system that included cognitive, social, and institutional changes. But he found introducing new ways for people to work together more effectively, the lynchpin of his overall vision, more difficult than transforming the way humans and computers interact. Engelbart labored for most of his life and career to get anyone to think seriously about his ideas, of which the mouse was an essential but low-level component. Only for one golden decade did he get significant backing. In 1963, the U.S. Defense Department provided the wherewithal for Engelbart to assemble a team, create the future, and blow the mind of every computer designer in the world by way of what has come to be known as “the mother of all demos.” I first met Engelbart in 1983 in his Cupertino office in a small building that was completely surrounded by the Apple campus. A company that no longer exists, Tymshare, had purchased what was left of Engelbart’s lab and hired him after the Stanford Research Institute stopped supporting the Augmentation Research Center due to the Department of Defense withdrawing funding. Engelbart noted with dismay that although the personal computer was evolving quickly, the other elements of his plan weren’t. At the time, personal computers weren’t networked to one another—as terminals of large computers could be at the time—and they lacked a mouse or point-and-click interface. Engelbart told me in our first conversation, as I’m sure he must have told many others, that the computer and mouse were just the “artifacts” in a system that centered on “humans, using language, artifacts, methodology, and training.” In the late 1980s, Engelbart set up his self-funded “Bootstrap Institute” to try and get his ideas about working more effectively the acceptance his artifacts had. He developed ways of analyzing how people acted inside an organization and specific techniques that he claimed would boost “collective IQ.” A set of detailed presentations on those methodologies started with what he called CODIAK. “Collective IQ is a measure of how effectively a collection of people can concurrently develop, integrate, and apply its knowledge toward its mission,” (emphasis Engelbart’s). Mouse manufacturer Logitech provided office space, but the Bootstrap Institute – staffed by Engelbart and his daughter Christina—never sold bootstrapping, collective IQ, or CODIAK to any funder, major company, or government department. Engelbart’s failure to spread the less tangible parts of his vision stems from several circumstances. He was an engineer at heart, and engineers’ utopian solutions don’t always account for the complexities of human social institutions. He only added a social scientist to his lab just before it was shut down. What’s more, Engelbart’s pitches of linked leaps in technology and organizational behaviors probably sounded as crazy to 1980s corporate managers as augmenting human intellect with machines did in the early 1960s. In the end, the way Silicon Valley companies work changed radically in recent decades not through established companies going through the kind of internal transformations Engelbart imagined, but by their being displaced by radical new startups. When I talked with him again in the mid-2000s, Engelbart marveled that people carry around in their pockets millions of times more computer power than his entire lab had in the 1960s, but the less tangible parts of his system had still not evolved so spectacularly. Like Tim Berners-Lee, Engelbart never sought to own what he contributed to the world’s ability to know. But he was frustrated to the end by the way so many people had adopted, developed, and profited from the digital media he had helped create, while failing to pursue the important tasks he had created them to do. Howard Rheingold, a visiting lecturer at Stanford University, has written since the early 1980s about how innovations in computers and networking change peoples’ thinking. He profiled Doug Engelbart’s work in his 1985 book, Tools for Thought and is most recently author of Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Interaction design, Science & technology
at
08:24
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, devices, digital, history, interaction design, interface, research, science & technology, thinkers
Monday, July 15. 2013Did Al Gore Invent the Internet? No, Nikola Tesla Did
Via The Huffington Post (via Nikola Jankovic) -----
What do you do when you have annoyed J.P. Morgan, the most powerful man on Wall Street? This question was very much on the mind of Nikola Tesla in January 1902. An electrical inventor, Tesla had been born in 1856 to a Serbian family living in what is today Croatia. In 1884 Tesla had emigrated to America to work for Thomas Edison, but he soon quit in order to pursue his dream of an alternating current motor. After selling this invention to George Westinghouse, Tesla had gone on in the 1890s to be one of the first to study radio waves, prompting him to perform demonstrations where he took shocks of 250,000 volts as well as to create 100-foot lightning bolts while working in Colorado Springs in 1899. While in Colorado, Tesla convinced himself that it would be possible to send power around the world without using wires.
Tesla in his experimental station in Colorado Springs, December 1899. He is seated in his magnifying transmitter (known today as a giant Tesla coil), with an electrical discharge passing from the secondary coil to another coil. This picture was a double exposure on a single glass plate; Tesla was first photographed sitting in the chair and then the magnifying transmitter was turned on.
The challenge facing Tesla in 1902 was that, although Morgan had given him $150,000 to build a laboratory at Wardenclyffe, Long Island in order to send power and messages across the Atlantic, Guglielmo Marconi had beaten him to the punch. In December 1901, Marconi announced that the Morse code signal for the letter "S" had been transmitted from England and received in Newfoundland. Marconi, not Tesla, was the new wunderkind of radio. So what did Tesla tell his patron Morgan? Along with complaining how Marconi had stolen his circuit designs, Tesla proposed to Morgan in 1902 a plan for a "World Telegraphy System" in which a number of transmitting stations would collect news and broadcast to customers via individual receivers. As Tesla boasted to Morgan: The fundamental idea underlying this system is to employ a few power plants, preferably located near the large centers of civilization and each capable of transmitting a message to the remotest regions of the globe. These plants . . . as fast as they receive the news, they pour [it] into the ground, through which [it] spreads instantly. The whole earth is like a brain, as it were, and the capacity of this system is infinite, for the energy received on every few square feet of ground is sufficient to operate an instrument, and the number of devices which can be so actuated is. . . . infinite. You see, Mr. Morgan, the revolutionary character of this idea, its civilizing potency, its tremendous money-making power. Tesla confidentially told Morgan that they would make money by manufacturing receivers, and by far his most imaginative idea for a receiver was a handheld device connected to a short pole or even a lady's parasol so that it could pick up voice messages anywhere in the world. As Tesla promised in 1904, "An inexpensive receiver, not bigger than a watch, will enable him to listen anywhere, on land or sea, to a speech delivered, or music played in some other place, however, distant." Here in the opening years of the 20th century, Tesla conjured up a device much like a transistor radio or cell phone, with the promise of providing instantaneous access to information anytime, anywhere. So what became of Tesla's vision of a World Telegraphy System? Ever the hard-headed banker, Morgan was not persuaded by visions of information flowing through the earth and he refused to invest further in Tesla's Long Island lab. Tesla struggled for a few more years, only to discover that it was incredibly difficult to "get a grip of the earth" and pump oscillating currents into the earth's crust. Distressed that he could not square physical reality with what he could see so clearly in his mind, Tesla suffered a nervous breakdown in 1905. A broken man, Tesla died in 1943 in a New York City hotel room, penniless and forgotten. Over the last 20 years, Tesla has enjoyed a comeback in popular culture, celebrated as a Don Quixote-like hero who did battle with business titans like Edison and Morgan. Late last summer, Matt Inman used his online comic, The Oatmeal, to raise $1.4 million by crowd-sourcing so that a private group, the Tesla Science Center, could save Tesla's laboratory on Long Island.
"Tesla's Wireless Transmitting Tower, 185 feet high, at Wardenclyffe, N. Y., from which the city of New York will be fed with electricity, and by means of which the camperout [sic], the yachtsman and summer resort visitor will be able to communicate instantly with friends at home." From "Tesla's Tower," New York American, 22 May 1904 in The Tesla Collection, 23 vols., comp. Iwona Vujovic, (New York: Tesla Project, 1998), 17:11.
More than seeing Tesla as a flighty crank who never finished anything, we should appreciate his early insight about the coming of the Information Age. Although he was certainly not thinking about the computers, software, and packet-switching necessary to create the Web, his fundamental idea that all information should be collected and disseminated around the world is very much what the Internet and World Wide Web has come to be in our time. "I think we all misunderstood Tesla. We thought he was a dreamer and visionary," wrote fellow engineer John Stone Stone in 1915. "He did dream and his dreams came true, he did have visions but they were of a real future, not an imaginary one." Stone understood only too well that without such bold visions practical engineers cannot build the future.
W. Bernard Carlson is Professor and Chair of the Engineering and Society Department at the University of Virginia. A historian of technology and business, he has published widely on invention and entrepreneurship, and his newest book is Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, published by Princeton University Press.
Related Links:Personal comment: Was Nikola Tesla a visionary scientist, a magician or an artist (creating "technologically sublime" artifacts --artificial daylight, artificial lightnings--)? Or all of them at once?
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
08:58
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, communication, culture & society, history, research, science & technology
Friday, May 24. 2013Mountain View
Via BLDGBLOG ----- de noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division].
After posting several of these images in our recent Venue interview with outdoor equipment strategist Scott McGuire—easily one of my favorite interviews of late, touching on everything from civilianized military gear used in everyday hiking to REI-augmented wilderness camp sites as the true heirs of Archigram—I was so taken by their weirdly haunting views of humans wandering through extreme landscapes, dressed in 19th-century suits and top hats, carrying canes, that I thought I'd post a larger selection.
Middle class gentlemen and ladies in hooped skirts walk into ice caves and step gingerly across the cracked, abyssal surfaces of old mountain glaciers, pointing up at things they don't understand.
At times, these feel almost like photos from some as-yet-unwritten Gothic horror story, perhaps a 19th-century Swiss prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing, in which some purely accidental sequences of photos—
—imply a narrative of genial discovery, focused exploration, and eventual solo flight down the mountainside in terror.
But then, at other times, these photos are almost like exaggerated set pieces by artists Kahn & Selesnick, whose work proposes fictional expeditions to otherworldly landscapes, missions to the moon, ancient salt cities, and more, all told through an almost unbelievably elaborate series of props, fake postcards, paintings, photographs, and more.
After a point, these scenes are Chaplinesque and ridiculous, like turn-of-the-century bankers who got lost on a glacier in a Modernist play.
In any case, these all come courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, where substantially higher-res versions of each photo are available; but don't miss the additional photos in the interview with Scott McGuire over at Venue.
Thursday, May 16. 2013The Whole Earth (exhibition)
Via manystuff -----
The image of the “blue planet”, a new perspective of the earth as seen from the outside, is one of the most popular images in history. This image, more than any other, has shaped the popular notion of the age of the “whole world” and globalization, from a worldwide society linked by the Internet to the current debate on the climate. Using artworks and materials from cultural history, the exhibition will critically explore the application of ecological-systemic concepts to society, politics, and aesthetics. The exhibition The Whole Earth – until July 1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin – is one of the first to explore the history of the photograph of the “blue planet”, and reflects in a comprehensive way the power of the Whole Earth Catalog…
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society
at
08:45
Defined tags for this entry: activism, culture & society, exhibitions, history, media, photography, speculation, thinking
Tuesday, May 14. 2013Sky Crane
Via BLDGBLOG ----- de noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
Wednesday, April 24. 2013Archaeology of the DigitalThe Lewis Residence by Frank Gehry (1985–1995), Peter Eisenman’s unrealized Biocentrum (1987), Chuck Hoberman’s Expanding Sphere (1992) and Shoei Yoh’s roof structures for Odawara (1991) and Galaxy Toyama (1992) Gymnasiums: four seminal projects that established bold new directions for architectural research by experimenting with novel digital tools. Curated by architect Greg Lynn, Archaeology of the Digital is conceived as an investigation into the foundations of digital architecture at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Watch an introduction to Archaeology of the Digital by curator Greg Lynn here. The vernissage for Archaeology of the Digital is 7 May 2013. On 8 May, from 2 pm to 6 pm, Greg Lynn discusses the foundations of digital architecture with Peter Eisenman, Chuck Hoberman and Shoei Yoh.
Personal comment:
Though we are not really in this line of thinking regarding what digital technologies means/will mean for architecture, an interesting "archeological" exhibition next May at the CCA about the rise of computation and algorithmic tools in architecture back in the late 1980ies and early 1990ies.
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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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