Sticky Postings
By fabric | ch
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As we continue to lack a decent search engine on this blog and as we don't use a "tag cloud" ... This post could help navigate through the updated content on | rblg (as of 09.2023), via all its tags!
FIND BELOW ALL THE TAGS THAT CAN BE USED TO NAVIGATE IN THE CONTENTS OF | RBLG BLOG:
(to be seen just below if you're navigating on the blog's html pages or here for rss readers)
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Note that we had to hit the "pause" button on our reblogging activities a while ago (mainly because we ran out of time, but also because we received complaints from a major image stock company about some images that were displayed on | rblg, an activity that we felt was still "fair use" - we've never made any money or advertised on this site).
Nevertheless, we continue to publish from time to time information on the activities of fabric | ch, or content directly related to its work (documentation).
Thursday, October 26. 2017
Note: following my previous post about Google further entering the public and "common" space sphere with its company Sidewalks, with the goal to merchandize it necessarily, comes this interesting MIT book about the changing nature of public space: Public Space? Lost & Found.
I like to believe that we tried on our side to address this question of public space - mediated and somehow "franchised" by technology - through many of our past works at fabric | ch. We even tried with our limited means to articulate or bring scaled answers to these questions...
I'm thinking here about works like Paranoid Shelter, I-Weather as Deep Space Public Lighting, Public Platform of Future Past, Heterochrony, Arctic Opening, and some others. Even with tools like Datadroppers or spaces/environments delivred in the form of data, like Deterritorialized Living.
But the book further develop the question and the field of view, with several essays and proposals by artists and architects.
Via Abitare
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Does public space still exist?
Gediminas Urbonas, Ann Lui and Lucas Freeman are the editors of a book that presents a wide range of intellectual reflections and artistic experimentations centred around the concept of public space. The title of the volume, Public Space? Lost and Found, immediately places the reader in a doubtful state: nothing should be taken for granted or as certain, given that we are asking ourselves if, in fact, public space still exists.
This question was originally the basis for a symposium and an exhibition hosted by MIT in 2014, as part of the work of ACT, the acronym for the Art, Culture and Technology programme. Contained within the incredibly well-oiled scientific and technological machine that is MIT, ACT is a strange creature, a hybrid where sometimes extremely different practices cross paths, producing exciting results: exhibitions; critical analyses, which often examine the foundations and the tendencies of the university itself, underpinned by an interest in the political role of research; actual inventions, developed in collaboration with other labs and university courses, that attract students who have a desire to exchange ideas with people from different paths and want the chance to take part in initiatives that operate free from educational preconceptions.
The book is one of the many avenues of communication pursued by ACT, currently directed by Gediminas Urbonas (a Lithuanian visual artist who has taught there since 2009) who succeeded the curator Ute Meta Bauer. The collection explores how the idea of public space is at the heart of what interests artists and designers and how, consequently, the conception, the creation and the use of collective spaces are a response to current-day transformations. These include the spread of digital technologies, climate change, the enforcement of austerity policies due to the reduction in available resources, and the emergence of political arguments that favour separation between people. The concluding conversation Reflexivity and Resistance in Communicative Capitalism between Urbonas and Jodi Dean, an American political scientist, summarises many of the book’s ideas: public space becomes the tool for resisting the growing privatisation of our lives.
The book, which features stupendous graphics by Node (a design studio based in Berlin and Oslo), is divided into four sections: paradoxes, ecologies, jurisdictions and signals.
The contents alternate essays (like Angela Vettese’s analysis of the role of national pavilions at the Biennale di Venezia or Beatriz Colomina’s reflections about the impact of social media on issues of privacy) with the presentation of architectural projects and artistic interventions designed by architects like Andrés Jaque, Teddy Cruz and Marjetica Potr or by historic MIT professors like the multimedia artist Antoni Muntadas. The republication of Art and Ecological Consciousness, a 1972 book by György Kepes, the multi-disciplinary genius who was the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, proves that the institution has long been interested in these topics.
This collection of contributions supported by captivating iconography signals a basic optimism: the documented actions and projects and the consciousness that motivates the thinking of many creators proves there is a collective mobilisation, often starting from the bottom, that seeks out and creates the conditions for communal life. Even if it is never explicitly written, the answer to the question in the title is a resounding yes.
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Public Space? Lost and Found
Gediminas Urbonas, Ann Lui and Lucas Freeman
SA + P Press, MIT School of Architecture and Planning
Cambridge MA, 2017
300 pages, $40
mit.edu
Overview
“Public space” is a potent and contentious topic among artists, architects, and cultural producers. Public Space? Lost and Found considers the role of aesthetic practices within the construction, identification, and critique of shared territories, and how artists or architects—the “antennae of the race”—can heighten our awareness of rapidly changing formulations of public space in the age of digital media, vast ecological crises, and civic uprisings.
Public Space? Lost and Found combines significant recent projects in art and architecture with writings by historians and theorists. Contributors investigate strategies for responding to underrepresented communities and areas of conflict through the work of Marjetica Potrč in Johannesburg and Teddy Cruz on the Mexico-U.S. border, among others. They explore our collective stakes in ecological catastrophe through artistic research such as atelier d’architecture autogérée’s hubs for community action and recycling in Colombes, France, and Brian Holmes’s theoretical investigation of new forms of aesthetic perception in the age of the Anthropocene. Inspired by artist and MIT professor Antoni Muntadas’ early coining of the term “media landscape,” contributors also look ahead, casting a critical eye on the fraught impact of digital media and the internet on public space.
This book is the first in a new series of volumes produced by the MIT School of Architecture and Planning’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology.
Contributors
atelier d'architecture autogérée, Dennis Adams, Bik Van Der Pol, Adrian Blackwell, Ina Blom, Christoph Brunner with Gerald Raunig, Néstor García Canclini, Colby Chamberlain, Beatriz Colomina, Teddy Cruz with Fonna Forman, Jodi Dean, Juan Herreros, Brian Holmes, Andrés Jaque, Caroline Jones, Coryn Kempster with Julia Jamrozik, György Kepes, Rikke Luther, Matthew Mazzotta, Metahaven, Timothy Morton, Antoni Muntadas, Otto Piene, Marjetica Potrč, Nader Tehrani, Troy Therrien, Gedminas and Nomeda Urbonas, Angela Vettese, Mariel Villeré, Mark Wigley, Krzysztof Wodiczko
With section openings from
Ana María León, T. J. Demos, Doris Sommer, and Catherine D'Ignazio
Tuesday, July 05. 2016
Note: in the continuity of my previous post/documentation concerning the project Platform of Future-Past (fabric | ch's recent winning competition proposal), I publish additional images (several) and explanations about the second phase of the Platform project, for which we were mandated by Canton de Vaud (SiPAL).
The first part of this article gives complementary explanations about the project, but I also take the opportunity to post related works and researches we've done in parallel about particular implications of the platform proposal. This will hopefully bring a neater understanding to the way we try to combine experimentations-exhibitions, the creation of "tools" and the design of larger proposals in our open and process of work.
Notably, these related works concerned the approach to data, the breaking of the environment into computable elements and the inevitable questions raised by their uses as part of a public architecture project.
The information pavilion was potentially a slow, analog and digital "shape/experience shifter", as it was planned to be built in several succeeding steps over the years and possibly "reconfigure" to sense and look at its transforming surroundings.
The pavilion conserved therefore an unfinished flavour as part of its DNA, inspired by these old kind of meshed constructions (bamboo scaffoldings), almost sketched. This principle of construction was used to help "shift" if/when necessary.
In a general sense, the pavilion answered the conventional public program of an observation deck about a construction site. It also served the purpose of documenting the ongoing building process that often comes along. By doing so, we turned the "monitoring dimension" (production of data) of such a program into a base element of our proposal. That's where a former experimental installation helped us: Heterochrony.
As it can be noticed, the word "Public" was added to the title of the project between the two phases, to become Public Platform of Future-Past (PPoFP) ... which we believe was important to add. This because it was envisioned that the PPoFP would monitor and use environmental data concerning the direct surroundings of the information pavilion (but NO DATA about uses/users). Data that we stated in this case Public, while the treatment of the monitored data would also become part of the project, "architectural" (more below about it).
For these monitored data to stay public, so as for the space of the pavilion itself that would be part of the public domain and physically extends it, we had to ensure that these data wouldn't be used by a third party private service. We were in need to keep an eye on the algorithms that would treat the spatial data. Or best, write them according to our design goals (more about it below).
That's were architecture meets code and data (again) obviously...
By fabric | ch
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The Public Platform of Future-Past is a structure (an information and sightseeing pavilion), a Platform that overlooks an existing Public site while basically taking it as it is, in a similar way to an archeological platform over an excavation site.
The asphalt ground floor remains virtually untouched, with traces of former uses kept as they are, some quite old (a train platform linked to an early XXth century locomotives hall), some less (painted parking spaces). The surrounding environment will move and change consideralby over the years while new constructions will go on. The pavilion will monitor and document these changes. Therefore the last part of its name: "Future-Past".
By nonetheless touching the site in a few points, the pavilion slightly reorganizes the area and triggers spaces for a small new outdoor cafe and a bikes parking area. This enhanced ground floor program can work by itself, seperated from the upper floors.
Several areas are linked to monitoring activities (input devices) and/or displays (in red, top -- that concern interests points and views from the platform or elsewhere --). These areas consist in localized devices on the platform itself (5 locations), satellite ones directly implented in the three construction sites or even in distant cities of the larger political area --these are rather output devices-- concerned by the new constructions (three museums, two new large public squares, a new railway station and a new metro). Inspired by the prior similar installation in a public park during a festival -- Heterochrony (bottom image) --, these raw data can be of different nature: visual, audio, integers from sensors (%, °C, ppm, db, lm, mb, etc.), ...
Input and output devices remain low-cost and simple in their expression: several input devices / sensors are placed outside of the pavilion in the structural elements and point toward areas of interest (construction sites or more specific parts of them). Directly in relation with these sensors and the sightseeing spots but on the inside are placed output devices with their recognizable blue screens. These are mainly voice interfaces: voice outputs driven by one bot according to architectural "scores" or algorithmic rules (middle image). Once the rules designed, the "architectural system" runs on its own. That's why we've also named the system based on automated bots "Ar.I." It could stand for "Architectural Intelligence", as it is entirely part of the architectural project.
The coding of the "Ar.I." and use of data has the potential to easily become something more experimental, transformative and performative along the life of PPoFT.
Observers (users) and their natural "curiosity" play a central role: preliminary observations and monitorings are indeed the ones produced in an analog way by them (eyes and ears), in each of the 5 interesting points and through their wanderings. Extending this natural interest is a simple cord in front of each "output device" that they can pull on, which will then trigger a set of new measures by all the related sensors on the outside. This set new data enter the database and become readable by the "Ar.I."
The whole part of the project regarding interaction and data treatments has been subject to a dedicated short study (a document about this study can be accessed here --in French only--). The main design implications of it are that the "Ar.I." takes part in the process of "filtering" which happens between the "outside" and the "inside", by taking part to the creation of a variable but specific "inside atmosphere" ("artificial artificial", as the outside is artificial as well since the anthropocene, isn't it ?) By doing so, the "Ar.I." bot fully takes its own part to the architecture main program: triggering the perception of an inside, proposing patterns of occupations.
"Ar.I." computes spatial elements and mixes times. It can organize configurations for the pavilion (data, displays, recorded sounds, lightings, clocks). It can set it to a past, a present, but also a future estimated disposition. "Ar.I." is mainly a set of open rules and a vocal interface, at the exception of the common access and conference space equipped with visual displays as well. "Ar.I." simply spells data at some times while at other, more intriguingly, it starts give "spatial advices" about the environment data configuration.
In parallel to Public Platform of Future Past and in the frame of various research or experimental projects, scientists and designers at fabric | ch have been working to set up their own platform for declaring and retrieving data (more about this project, Datadroppers, here). A platform, simple but that is adequate to our needs, on which we can develop as desired and where we know what is happening to the data. To further guarantee the nature of the project, a "data commune" was created out of it and we plan to further release the code on Github.
In tis context, we are turning as well our own office into a test tube for various monitoring systems, so that we can assess the reliability and handling of different systems. It is then the occasion to further "hack" some basic domestic equipments and turn them into sensors, try new functions as well, with the help of our 3d printer in tis case (middle image). Again, this experimental activity is turned into a side project, Studio Station (ongoing, with Pierre-Xavier Puissant), while keeping the general background goal of "concept-proofing" the different elements of the main project.
A common room (conference room) in the pavilion hosts and displays the various data. 5 small screen devices, 5 voice interfaces controlled for the 5 areas of interests and a semi-transparent data screen. Inspired again by what was experimented and realized back in 2012 during Heterochrony (top image).
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PPoFP, several images. Day, night configurations & few comments
Public Platform of Future-Past, axonometric views day/night.
An elevated walkway that overlook the almost archeological site (past-present-future). The circulations and views define and articulate the architecture and the five main "points of interests". These mains points concentrates spatial events, infrastructures and monitoring technologies. Layer by layer, the suroundings are getting filtrated by various means and become enclosed spaces.
Walks, views over transforming sites, ...
Data treatment, bots, voice and minimal visual outputs.
Night views, circulations, points of view.
Night views, ground.
Random yet controllable lights at night. Underlined areas of interests, points of "spatial densities".
Project: fabric | ch
Team: Patrick Keller, Christophe Guignard, Christian Babski, Sinan Mansuroglu, Yves Staub, Nicolas Besson.
Monday, March 17. 2014
Via Le Monde, via Philippe Rahm Architectes
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Par Philippe Rahm
A quelques semaines des élections municipales, il n'a jamais fait aussi beau à Paris. Le soleil brille, il fait chaud et pourtant on nous déconseille de sortir dehors à cause de la pollution de l'air qui atteint des sommets. Mauvaise nouvelle pourdéjeuner en terrasse. C'est assez paradoxal, ce beau temps qui ne l'est en réalité pas. Cela ne va pas de soi et il nous faudra réviser à l'avenir nos critère du beau et du laid, ne plus se fier au perceptible, au soleil, à la température et au ciel bleu, mais plutôt à l'invisible et se dire le matin qu'il fait beau seulement quand le bulletin météo annoncera pour la journée un taux bas de particules fines dans l'air.
Le nuage de pollution à Paris, jeudi 13 mars. | AP/Christophe Ena
Mais si le bulletin météo classique nous informait de l'état du ciel selon des forces naturelles qui nous dépassaient et contre lequel on ne pouvait choisir que de prendre ou pas son parapluie, le problème de la pollution des villes est une conséquence des activités humaines. Et parce qu'il nous concerne tous, parce qu'il définit la réalité chimique de nos rues et de nos places, parce qu'il menace notre santé, il est éminemment politique. J'affirmerai même qu'il est la raison d'être fondamentale du politique: celle de nous assurer à tous une bonne santé. Le politique est né de la gestion sanitaire de la ville et de la définition de ses valeurs publics que l'on retrouve inscrit aujourd'hui dans les règlements et les plans d'urbanisme: avoir de la lumière naturelle dans toutes les chambres, boire de l'eau potable, évacuer et traiter les déchets et les excréments. En-dessous de son interprétation culturelle, l'Histoire de l'urbanisme et du politique est finalement celle d'une conquête physiologique, pour les villes, pour les hommes, du bien-être, du confort, de la bonne santé.
Et respirer un air sain en ville ? Ne pourrait-on pas penser que c'est finalement cela que l'on demande aujourd'hui au politique ? La demande n'est pas neuve. Au début du XIXe siècle, Rambuteau, préfet de Paris, avait tracé la rue du même nom au coeur du Marais pour faire circuler l'air pour éviter le confinement des germes. Dans sa suite, le préfet Haussmann traçait les boulevards dans un même soucis d'hygiène, y plantait des arbres pour les tempérer, créaient des parcs (les Buttes-Chaumont, le bois de Boulogne, etc.) comme Olmsted avec Central Park à New-York, conçues à la manière de poumons verts pour rafraîchir la ville en été, absorber les poussières et la pollution, améliorer la qualité de l'air, parce qu'à l'époque, on mourrait réellement de tuberculoses et des autres maladies bactériennes dans les villes.
Mais toutes ces mesures sanitaires ont perdu leur légitimité avec la découverte de la pénicilline et la diffusion des antibiotique à partir les années 1950. À quoi cela servait-il encore de raser les petites rues sans air et obscures du Moyen-Âge, de déplacer les habitations dans de vastes parcs de verdure si l'on pouvait chasser la maladie simplement avec un antibiotique à avaler deux fois par jour durant une semaine. Etait-ce vraiment raisonnable d'élargir les petites fenêtres des vieilles maisons en pierre, d'enlever les toits en pentes pour en faire des toits terrasses, si en réalité, on pouvait éviter la maladie avec un peu de pénicilline ?
Si l'on a arrêté de démolir les vieux quartiers des villes européennes à partir des années 1970, si on a commencé à trouver du charme aux ruelles tortueuses et aux vieilles maisons étroites du Moyen-Âge, aux intérieurs sombres et humides des centres villes, si les prix des arrondissements historiques que tout le monde désertait jusqu'aux années 1970 ont commencé à grimper, si des mesures de protections du patrimoine ont été votées, si ces vielles pierres sont devenues des témoins de notre civilisation et un atout touristique et économique, si l'on est revenu habiter les vieux centres historiques, on le doit peut-être autant aux théories post-modernes de Bernard Huet, l'architecte des la place Stalingrad et des Champs-Elysées dans les années 1980, qu'à la découverte médicale des antibiotiques.
Mais les antibiotiques ne peuvent rien contre la pollution aux particules fines d'aujourd'hui. Cela veut-il dire que nous allons assister au même phénomène que durant la première partie du XXe siècle, celle d'une désertion des centre-villes, d'une perte de valeur immobilière des quartiers centraux de Paris, au profit des banlieues et des campagnes où l'air n'est pas polluée ? La ville que l'on a réappris à aimer et à habiter à la fin du XXe siècle va t-elle retombée dans la désolation ? On peut tenter de croire, dans un monde globalisé, que la mission de la politique locale est aujourd'hui de réduire le chômage ou de diminuer les impôts. Mais plus profondément, le politique se doit aujourd'hui de reprendre en main sa mission fondamentale, celle d'assurer la qualité de nos biens publics, celle de nous offrir en ville, après l'eau et la lumière, un air de qualité, seule garantie pour la prospérité sociale et économique future.
Philippe Rahm construit en ce moment un parc de 70 hectares pour la ville de Taichung à Taiwan, livré en décembre 2015 qui propose d'atténuer la chaleur, l'humidité et la pollution de l'air par l'emploi du végétal et de technologies vertes.
Philippe Rahm (Architecte et enseignant aux Universités de Princeton et Harvard (Etats-Unis))
Saturday, September 21. 2013
By fabric | ch
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Deterritorialized Living is a new project by fabric | ch that we've just published online last week, in relation with the Call and the Talks we are presenting during Close, Closer, the 3rd Lisbon Architecture Triennale curated by Beatrice Galilee (first talk is today, September, 21 at 5pm, LX Factory, Rua Rodrigues Faria, Lisbon, while the second one will be on December, 14).
This project is the result of a residency we did in Beijing last spring, at the Tsinghua University (TASML) and has certainly some unconscious relation with the experience of climate we had in the city!
http://www.deterritorialized.org, the server of Deterritorialized Living, the artificial and livable troposphere.
Deterritorialized Living is an artificial troposphere that reverses our causal relationship to the natural rhythms of day and night, air, seasons, time. It is a “man made” environment where the atmosphere is the effect, continuously shaped from the global activities on the networks produced by humans and robots. The aim of this artificial, almost fictional atmosphere is to give permanent presence (at this stage only in the form of data flows) to what has paradoxically become an ambient, "atmospheric" and contextual experience of deterritorialisation / detemporalisation induced by the massive use of networks, transportation devices, flows of data or communication technologies. Therefore, to literally become able to "breathe" the environment we are generating through our common actions. To some extent, Deterritorialized Living could then also be considered as an information design, delivered in the form of an atmosphere.
As the result of its initial and designed rules, this milieu develops strange behaviors: daylight is always “on” (as there are always activities on the networks) but at variable strengths, nighttime never occurs, air composition regularly reaches “physiological enhancement” levels of high altitude, it is composed of a unique single day that goes back and forth and that ideally last forever, continuous. There are no months, no years.
Deterritorialized Living is delivered in the form of open data feeds which define this “geo-engineered” yet livable environment, computed by the deterritorialized.org server. We expect to develop and use the troposphere in the future in the form of installations, responsive devices and architecture projects.
But the artificial troposphere is also freely available to architects, artists, designers, scientists and makers of all kinds in the form of different “services”: Deterritorialized Air (N2, O2, CO2, Ar), Deterritorialized Daylight (visible light Intensity, IR, UV) and Deterritorialized Time (HH:MM:SS). Additional feeds and refined rules will be added along the time to mature this generated atmosphere.
The live parameters, data and charts that show the evolution of values for Deterritorialized Air (N2, O2, AR, CO2).
Values for Deterritorialized Daylight, including Intensity (lm, visible light), Infrared (w) and ultraviolet (w) as well as Deterritorialized Time (HH:MM:SS), with their related charts. It is interesting to note that the generated time changes along time... but not in a linear manner, it varies between 06:32 and 19:36.
Man page explaining how to access the different data feeds for the ones who would like to develop their own project out of Deterritorialized Living.
These algorithmically designed data feeds can therefore be used independently or combined to drive experimental devices, interfaces, software and speculative livable environments of all kinds (under the responsibility of their authors...).
Let us know if you'll be using it!
Wednesday, July 24. 2013
Via Forbes
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By Anna Secino
Smart cities have been creating a lot of buzz lately—thanks, in no small part, to the recent controversy over NSA surveillance, which cast a rather sinister light over visions of cities made more efficient through data collection of public resources. “It starts with monitoring water usage,” the naysayers cry, “But where does it end?”
This past week, two cities—Montpellier, France, and Dallas, Texas—released statements concerning their own attempts towards smartening up their infrastructure, which got us thinking about “Informed and Interconnected: A Manifesto for Smarter Cities,” a 2009 paper by Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter and IBM IBM +0.03% International Foundation President Stanley S. Litow. Its thoughts on and solutions for smart cities continue to be relevant four years later, as the cases in Montpellier and Dallas attest to.
A major concern with regards to smart cities is figuring out who, exactly, is in charge of all this data collection? The government? The tech companies? As a city strives towards streamlined convergence, how does it avoid creating an especially unscrupulous monopoly? “It is important to note that new technologies have additional potential to make communities smarter by combining sets of data and making them available not only to immediate decision makers but to a much wider network of officials and agencies so that they can make more informed decisions,” Kanter and Litow write.
Michel Aslanian, Montpellier’s Vice President of Innovation, believes that he has found the answer through making the $5.4 million research and development project a joint effort among stockholders, universities, startups, public utility operators, and Montpellier everymen. “The citizen is being made the author and actor in the development of the region,” he said regarding the “Ecocité” initiative, which hopes to collect data on public transportation, water usage, and other factors of city life that could lead to a greener, more efficient future.
Other cities have not been quite so eager to jump on the bandwagon. In Dallas, where most corporate and municipal buildings operate on old, inefficient equipment, the switch to newer, more energy-efficient models has been ponderous. Europe requires that buildings be energy efficient, but U.S. politicians have been reluctant to pitch their support behind a similar initiative. And with the majority of office buildings dating back sixty to seventy years, updating existing structures can be costly. For all the money that cities and businesses waste every year through electricity, water, and other resources, many refuse to fund a never-ending progression of equipment repair.
Supporters of both Dallas’s tortoise and Montpellier’s hare may want to acquaint themselves with Kanter and Litow’s vision for a city where high-tech advances help build efficient, egalitarian communities. Via a streamlined, interconnected approach, they argue, there would be less exclusion of racial or ethnic groups, as communities gather strength through individual differences, united in their efforts towards a better quality of life. In this scenario, technology serves merely as a tool for enhancing the very human pursuits of social- and self-betterment, with the monetary cost far outweighed by the environmental and communal benefits.
To learn more about Kanter’s and Litow’s ideas for the snowballing smart city movement—including their list of the top eight problems commonly faced by smart cities, and how these can be avoided—read their full manifesto here, on the HBS Working Knowledge website.
About the author: Writer Anna Secino is a student at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Friday, March 23. 2012
Via Treehugger
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By Lloyd Alter
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
The Free Universal Construction Kit is a wonderful idea, "a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten popular children’s construction toys." It is not a set of physical objects, but instructions for a 3D printer. My first thought upon seeing it on every website from Kottke to Geekologie is that the patent lawyers will be on the case in seconds; In Canada, we have watched the endless battle between LEGO and Montreal's Mega Blok that went all the way to the Supreme Court. (LEGO lost).
It turns out that the designers of the Free Universal Construction Kit (I cannot use the acronym on this family website) were preoccupied with the issue as well. In fact, it seems to be one of the prime motivations of the design, " to provide a public service unmet—or unmeetable—by corporate interests."
In producing the Free Universal Construction Kit, we hope to demonstrate a model of reverse engineering as a civic activity: a creative process in which anyone can develop the necessary pieces to bridge the limitations presented by mass-produced commercial artifacts.
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
The designers describe the Free Universal Construction Kit is a sort VLC open source video player for hardware; a tool that disrupts the system, that lets anyone play with their toys any way they want instead of the way the toy manufacturers plan it.
Today’s manufacturers have little or no intrinsic motivation to make their products compatible with anyone else’s. Indeed—despite obvious benefits to users everywhere—the implementation of cross-brand interoperability can be nearly impossible, given the tangled restrictions of patents, design rights, and trademarks involved in doing so. So we stepped up. The Free Universal Construction Kit is the VLC of children’s playsets.
The Free Universal Construction Kit from Adapterz on Vimeo.
The most important aspect of the Free Universal Construction Kit is what it portends for the future.
The Free Universal Construction Kit is simply one “toy” illustration of a coming grassroots revolution, in which everyday people can—with desktop tools—overcome arbitrary restrictions in mass-manufactured physical culture. The burgeoning possibility of freely shared downloadable adapters has significant implications for industries where the attempt to create “technological lock-in” is a common business practice.
No wonder that the first people they thank in their credits, after their families, are their lawyers. More at Free Art and Technology.
Free Art and Technology/Public Domain
Personal comment:
A very interesting approach for opensource projects: to bridge the gap and position themselves between branded (and/or proprietary) products.
Thursday, February 23. 2012
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While the subject of online piracy is certainly nothing new, the recent protests against SOPA and the federal raid on Megaupload have thrust the issue into mainstream media. More than ever, people are discussing the controversial topic while content creators scramble to find a way to try to either shut down or punish sites and individuals that take part in the practice. Despite these efforts, online piracy continues to be a thorn in Big Media’s side. With the digital media arena all but conquered by piracy, the infamous site The Pirate Bay (TPB) has begun looking to the next frontier to be explored and exploited. According to a post on its blog, TPB has declared that physical objects named “physibles” are the next area to be traded and shared across global digital smuggling routes.
TPB defines a physible as “data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical.” Namely, items that can be created using 3D scanning and printing technologies, both of which have become much cheaper for you to actually own in your home. At CES this year, MakerBot Industries introduced its latest model which is capable of printing objects in two colors and costs under $2,000. With the price of such devices continuing to drop, 3D printing is going to be part of everyday life in the near future. Where piracy is going to come in is the exchange of the files (3D models) necessary to create these objects.
A 3D printer is essentially a “CAD-CAM” process. You use a computer-aided design (CAD) program to design a physical object that you want made, and then feed it into a computer-aided machining (CAM) device for creation. The biggest difference is that traditional CAM setups, the process is about milling an existing piece of metal, drilling holes and using water jets to carve the piece into the desired configuration. In 3D printing you use extrusion to actually create what is illustrated in the CAD file. Those CAD files are the physibles that TPB is talking about, since they are digital they are going to be as easily transferred as an MP3 or movie is right now.
It isn’t too far outside the realm of possibility that once 3D printing becomes a part of everyday life, companies will begin to sell the CAD files and the rights to be able to print proprietary items. If the technology continues to advance at the same rate, in 10 or 20 years you might be printing a new pair of Nikes for your child’s basketball game right in your home (kind of like the 3D printed sneakers pictured above). Instead of going to the mall and paying $120 for a physical pair of shoes in a retail outlet, you will pay Nike directly on the internet and receive the file necessary to direct your printer to create the sneakers. Of course, companies will do their level best to create DRM on these objects so that you can’t freely just print pair after pair of shoes, but like all digital media it will be broken be enterprising individuals.
TPB has already created a physibles category on its site, allowing you to download plans to be able to print out such things as the famous Pirate Bay Ship and a 1970 Chevy hot rod. For now it’s going to be filled with user-created content, but in the future you can count on it being stocked with plans for DRM-protected objects.
Monday, January 30. 2012
Via Mammoth
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by rholmes
["Interior components of the cooling system" at a Facebook data center in Palo Alto; image via Alexis Madrigal's report for Domus on Facebook's Open Computer Project, which "describes in detail how to construct an energy-efficient data centre".]
“Secret Servers”, an article by James Bridle originally published in issue 099 of Icon magazine, looks at the relationship between architecture and the physical infrastructure of the internet. I found Bridle’s last few paragraphs particularly provocative:
“What is at stake is the way in which architects help to define and shape the image of the network to the general public. Datacenters are the outward embodiment of a huge range of public and private services, from banking to electronic voting, government bureaucracy to social networks. As such, they stand as a new form of civic architecture, at odds with their historical desire for anonymity.
Facebook’s largest facility is its new datacenter in Prineville, Oregon, tapping into the same cheap electricity which powers Google’s project in The Dalles. The social network of more than 600 million users is instantiated as a 307,000 square foot site currently employing over 1,000 construction workers—which will dwindle to just 35 jobs when operational. But in addition to the $110,000 a year Facebook has promised to local civic funds, and a franchise fee for power sold by the city, comes a new definition for datacenters and their workers, articulated by site manager Ken Patchett: “We’re the blue collar guys of the tech industry, and we’re really proud of that. This is a factory. It’s just a different kind of factory then you might be used to. It’s not a sawmill or a plywood mill, but it’s a factory nonetheless.”
This sentiment is echoed in McDonald’s description of “a new age industrial architecture”, of cities re-industrialised rather than trying to become “cultural cities”, a modern Milan emphasising the value of engineering and the craft and “making” inherent in information technology and digital real estate.
The role of the architect in the new digital real estate is to work at different levels, in Macdonald’s words “from planning and building design right down to cultural integration with other activities.” The cloud, the network, the “new heavy industry”, is reshaping the physical landscape, from the reconfiguration of Lower Manhattan to provide low-latency access to the New York Stock Exchange, to the tangles of transatlantic fiber cables coming ashore at Widemouth Bay, an old smuggler’s haunt on the Cornish coast. A formerly stealth sector is coming out into the open, revealing a tension between historical discretion and corporate projection, and bringing with it the opportunity to define a new architectural vocabulary for the digitised world.”
Though Bridle does not make this link explicit in the article, the idea of a potential “new architectural vocabulary” is clearly related to the “New Aesthetic” that Bridle began talking about this past May. (I’ve always liked Matt Berg’s description of it as a “sensor vernacular”, and Robin Sloan’s “digital backwash aesthetic”. I’m not sure either of those capture exactly what Bridle’s been talking about — more like pieces of it — but they all dance around the same set of things, or at least similar sets.) Here’s Bridle’s original description, pinched together:
For so long we’ve stared up at space in wonder, but with cheap satellite imagery and cameras on kites and RC helicopters, we’re looking at the ground with new eyes, to see structures and infrastructures.
The map fragments, visible at different resolutions, accepting of differing hierarchies of objects.
Views of the landscape are superimposed on one another. Time itself dilates.
Representations of people and of technology begin to break down, to come apart not at the seams, but at the pixels.
The rough, pixelated, low-resolution edges of the screen are becoming in the world.
And when that — a new aesthetic vocabulary — gets linked to a “re-industrialization”, pulling together aesthetics, culture, economics, and politics, you’ve got a pretty significant project. I’d like to talk about this at more length later, but for now I will just quote from Dan Hill’s fantastic 14 Cities project. (Independent of the concerns in this post, the whole project is worth a read.) This is the fourth of the fourteen fictional future cities Hill describes, “Re-industrial City”:
“The advances in various light manufacturing technologies throughout the early part of the 21st century — rapid prototyping, 3D printing and various local clean energy sources — enabled a return of industry to the city. Noise, pollution and other externalities were so low as to be insignificant, and allied to the nascent interest in digitally-enabled craft at the turn of the century, by the early 2020s suburbs had become light industrial zones once again.
Waterloo, Alexandria and the Inner West of Sydney through to Pyrmont once again became a thriving manufacturing centre, albeit on a domestic scale, as people were able to ‘micro-manufacture’ products from their backyard, or send designs to mass-manufacture hubs supported by logistics networks of electric delivery vans and trains. Melbourne had led the way through its nurturing of production in the creative industries and its existing built fabric.
In an ironic twist, former warehouses and factories are being partially converted from apartments back into warehouses and factories. Yet the domestic scale of the technologies means they can coexist with living spaces, actually suggesting a return to the craftsman’s studio model of the Middle Ages. The ‘faber’ movement — faber, to make — spread through most Australian cities, with the ‘re-industrial city’ as the result, a genuinely mixed-use productive place — with an identity.”
[For more on the New Aesthetic, read Rob Walker's recent interview with James Bridle at Design Observer. It's also well-worth checking out the essay in Domus by Alexis Madrigal that the image at top is taken from.]
Monday, December 26. 2011
Via ArchDaily
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de Karissa Rosenfield
Tunisian Revolution via cjb22 on flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/cjb22222222/5373435731/
It began on December 17th, 2010, when 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi drenched himself in paint thinner and lit a match in front of the provincial-capital building in Tunisia. Mannoubia Bouazizi stated, “My son set himself on fire for dignity.” Her 16-year-old daughter added, “In Tunisia, dignity is more important than bread.”
All over the world, the protestors of 2011 have stood-up for fairness and freedom. “Do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and a real live protest went massively viral.” Authoritarian acts of violence and forceful evictions from “public” squares further exposed what the protestors were fighting for. In effort to honor the individuals who have made the greatest impact on our world during these past twelve months, TIME has named the 2011 person of the year as “The Protester”.
Day 36 Occupy Wall Street © David Shankbone
“Public” space has played an important role in this fight for social justice. Occupy Wall Street’s (OWS) eviction from the privately owned public space (POPS) Zuccotti Park, raised awareness on the privatization of the city and the illusion of being public. Architects became actively involved, assisting the development of temporary cities to support the movement, while questioning the “cult of homeownership” and the architect’s role in evolving the idea of housing.
Day 60 Occupy Wall Street © David Shankbone
“Among the ruins left behind by the eviction of bodies and the demolition of tents in lower Manhattan are the ruins of what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the “space of public appearance.” Ever since the ancient Greeks, who served as Arendt’s model, the right to participate in this space has been conditional on the possession of personal wealth. One of the many contradictory functions of the modern state, addressed politically by unionized workers and by civil rights activists alike, has been to redistribute wealth — that is, to mediate the distribution of resources, services, and value. Any structural alternative must ultimately come to terms with this mediating function.” – Design Observer: Occupy: The Day After
Tanks in front of the Qasba in Tunisia © Gladys Martínez López
Citizens across the world continue to fight for social justice, occupying the streets and inhabiting public space in efforts to achieve significant change. Coverage of the indignados taking back Puerta del Sol in Madrid exclaimed, “The sun has risen. The people cried. The square is ours.”
Indignados taking back the square in Madrid © Jesus Solana
Follow this link to the must-read TIME Cover Story: The Protestor.
Personal comment:
"The protester" will be our last post on rblg for 2011, before we leave to the Alps and the snow for a couple of days!
Best whishes to all.
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