Tuesday, May 24. 2016Building AI is hard — So Facebook is building AI that builds AI | #automation #ai
Note: even people developing automation will be automated, so to say...
Do you want to change this existing (and predictable) future? This would be the right time to come with counter-proposals then... But I'm quite surprized by the absence of nuanced analysis in the Wired article btw (am I? further than "make the workd a better place" I mean): indeed, this is a scientific achievement, but then what? no stakes? no social issues? It seems to be the way things should go then... (and some people know pretty well how "The Way Things Go", always wrong ;)), to the point that " No, Asimo isn’t quite as advanced—or as frightening—as Skynet." Good to know!
Via Wired ----- By Cade Metz
Deep neural networks are remaking the Internet. Able to learn very human tasks by analyzing vast amounts of digital data, these artificially intelligent systems are injecting online services with a power that just wasn’t viable in years past. They’re identifying faces in photos and recognizing commands spoken into smartphones and translating conversations from one language to another. They’re even helping Google choose its search results. All this we know. But what’s less discussed is how the giants of the Internet go about building these rather remarkable engines of AI. Part of it is that companies like Google and Facebook pay top dollar for some really smart people. Only a few hundred souls on Earth have the talent and the training needed to really push the state-of-the-art forward, and paying for these top minds is a lot like paying for an NFL quarterback. That’s a bottleneck in the continued progress of artificial intelligence. And it’s not the only one. Even the top researchers can’t build these services without trial and error on an enormous scale. To build a deep neural network that cracks the next big AI problem, researchers must first try countless options that don’t work, running each one across dozens and potentially hundreds of machines. “It’s almost like being the coach rather than the player,” says Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, the Google outfit behind the history-making AI that beat the world’s best Go player. “You’re coaxing these things, rather than directly telling them what to do.” That’s why many of these companies are now trying to automate this trial and error—or at least part of it. If you automate some of the heavily lifting, the thinking goes, you can more rapidly push the latest machine learning into the hands of rank-and-file engineers—and you can give the top minds more time to focus on bigger ideas and tougher problems. This, in turn, will accelerate the progress of AI inside the Internet apps and services that you and I use every day.
In other words, for computers to get smarter faster, computers themselves must handle even more of the grunt work. The giants of the Internet are building computing systems that can test countless machine learning algorithms on behalf of their engineers, that can cycle through so many possibilities on their own. Better yet, these companies are building AI algorithms that can help build AI algorithms. No joke. Inside Facebook, engineers have designed what they like to call an “automated machine learning engineer,” an artificially intelligent system that helps create artificially intelligent systems. It’s a long way from perfection. But the goal is to create new AI models using as little human grunt work as possible.
Feeling the Flow After Facebook’s $104 billion IPO in 2012, Hussein Mehanna and other engineers on the Facebook ads team felt an added pressure to improve the company’s ad targeting, to more precisely match ads to the hundreds of millions of people using its social network. This meant building deep neural networks and other machine learning algorithms that could make better use of the vast amounts of data Facebook collects on the characteristics and behavior of those hundreds of millions of people. According to Mehanna, Facebook engineers had no problem generating ideas for new AI, but testing these ideas was another matter. So he and his team built a tool called Flow. “We wanted to build a machine-learning assembly line that all engineers at Facebook could use,” Mehanna says. Flow is designed to help engineers build, test, and execute machine learning algorithms on a massive scale, and this includes practically any form of machine learning—a broad technology that covers all services capable of learning tasks largely on their own. Basically, engineers could readily test an endless stream of ideas across the company’s sprawling network of computer data centers. They could run all sorts of algorithmic possibilities—involving not just deep learning but other forms of AI, including logistic regression to boosted decision trees—and the results could feed still more ideas. “The more ideas you try, the better,” Mehanna says. “The more data you try, the better.” It also meant that engineers could readily reuse algorithms that others had built, tweaking these algorithms and applying them to other tasks. Soon, Mehanna and his team expanded Flow for use across the entire company. Inside other teams, it could help generate algorithms that could choose the links for your Faceboook News Feed, recognize faces in photos posted to the social network, or generate audio captions for photos so that the blind can understand what’s in them. It could even help the company determine what parts of the world still need access to the Internet. With Flow, Mehanna says, Facebook trains and tests about 300,000 machine learning models each month. Whereas it once rolled a new AI model onto its social network every 60 days or so, it can now release several new models each week. The Next Frontier The idea is far bigger than Facebook. It’s common practice across the world of deep learning. Last year, Twitter acquired a startup, WhetLab, that specializes in this kind of thing, and recently, Microsoft described how its researchers use a system to test a sea of possible AI models. Microsoft researcher Jian Sun calls it “human-assisted search.” Mehanna and Facebook want to accelerate this. The company plans to eventually open source Flow, sharing it with the world at large, and according to Mehanna, outfits like LinkedIn, Uber, and Twitter are already interested in using it. Mehanna and team have also built a tool called AutoML that can remove even more of the burden from human engineers. Running atop Flow, AutoML can automatically “clean” the data needed to train neural networks and other machine learning algorithms—prepare it for testing without any human intervention—and Mehanna envisions a version that could even gather the data on its own. But more intriguingly, AutoML uses artificial intelligence to help build artificial intelligence. As Mehana says, Facebook trains and tests about 300,000 machine learning models each month. AutoML can then use the results of these tests to train another machine learning model that can optimize the training of machine learning models. Yes, that can be a hard thing to wrap your head around. Mehanna compares it to Inception. But it works. The system can automatically chooses algorithms and parameters that are likely to work. “It can almost predict the result before the training,” Mehanna says. Inside the Facebook ads team, engineers even built that automated machine learning engineer, and this too has spread to the rest of the company. It’s called Asimo, and according to Facebook, there are cases where it can automatically generate enhanced and improved incarnations of existing models—models that human engineers can then instantly deploy to the net. “It cannot yet invent a new AI algorithm,” Mehanna says. “But who knows, down the road…” It’s an intriguing idea—indeed, one that has captivated science fiction writers for decades: an intelligent machine that builds itself. No, Asimo isn’t quite as advanced—or as frightening—as Skynet. But it’s a step toward a world where so many others, not just the field’s sharpest minds, will build new AI. Some of those others won’t even be human.
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
11:16
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, automation, code, culture & society, research, science & technology
Thursday, January 28. 2016I&IC at Unfrozen – Swiss Design Network 2016 Conference, SDN (Zürich, 2016)) | #datacenter #infrastructures #research
Note: I'll move this afternoon to Grandhotel Giessbach (sounds like a Wes Anderson movie) to present later tonight the temporary results of the research I'm jointly leading with Nicolas Nova for ECAL & HEAD - Genève, in partnership with EPFL-ECAL Lab & EPFL: Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s). Looking forward to meet the Swiss design research community (mainly) at the hotel...
Via iiclouds.org ----- Christophe Guignard and myself will have the pleasure to present the temporary results of the design research Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s) next Thursday (28.01.2016) at the Swiss Design Network conference. The conference will happen at Grandhotel Giessbach over the lake Brienz, where we'll focus on the research process fully articulated around the practice of design (with the participation of students in the case of I&IC) and the process of project. This will apparently happen between "dinner" and "bar", as we'll present a "Fireside Talk" at 9pm. Can't wait to do and see that...
The full program and proceedings (pdf) of the conference can be accessed HERE.
As for previous events, we'll try to make a short "follow up" on this documentary blog after the event.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Interaction design, Territory
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10:46
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, conferences, data, fabric | ch, harvesting, interaction design, interface, interferences, networks, opensource, publications, publications-fbrc, research, speculation, talks-fbrc, territory, ubiquitous
Wednesday, December 30. 2015Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957 | #exhibition #radicalpedagogies #book
Note: could a perfect ending for this year be this post about (yet another) new exhibition (in Boston)? It is about the fantastic, the radical and the utopian Black Mountain College in North Carolina that became an important school for a large part of the post-war avant-garde in the United States/East coast. It was an "adventure in progressive education" which points again how schools, when they remain "wild" enough, can become important structures to crystalize creative energies and momentum (and that is therefore also logically listed in Beatriz Colomina's research project about historical "Radical Pedagogies" in architecture).
Via MIT Press ----- "Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957," an exhibition currently showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, focuses on how Black Mountain College (BMC) became a seminal meeting place for many of the artists, musicians, poets, and thinkers who would become the principal practitioners in their fields of the postwar period. "Leap Before You Look," the first exhibition in the US to examine BMC as a hotbed for the American avant garde, opened on October 10, 2015 and will show through January 24, 2016. Senior Production Coordinator Christine Savage recently checked it out and shares the following insights: The story of Black Mountain College (BMC) serves as an excellent reminder of how brilliant, prolific, and innovative people can be. The school was an idyll, an embodiment of a progressive, collaborative, utopian future. The college was also an absolute anomaly, and serves possibly as an even better reminder of how rarely we come together to achieve such promise. If only it hadn’t gone broke and closed after only 24 years.
“Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957” is a remarkable exhibit that does a wonderful job of illustrating BMC’s proud stature among the great artistic moments in the last century. The collection features music and dance performances, as well as over 200 pieces of artwork created at the college. A history of the school and the art created there can be found in the MIT Press book, Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art edited by Vincent Katz, which documents the brief—but influential—existence of the school, and offers a fascinating glimpse of campus life. BMC was a tiny school with a disproportionate influence on art and culture in the 20th century. (A partial—yet still absurdly impressive—list of artists who taught and studied there includes Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Ruth Asawa, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Cy Twombly, Kenneth Noland, Vera B. Williams, Franz Kline, Buckminster Fuller, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Dorothea Rockburne, and Walter Gropius.) Founded in 1933 at a former summer camp with 22 students in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, BMC was an adventure in progressive education. Less an art school than a perpetually broke experimental liberal arts college, the program’s philosophy centered around the belief that artistic experience was instrumental to all aspects of learning and grew students into better—and more curious—democratic citizens. Fortunately for art lovers the world around, BMC’s college life and curriculum revolved around the artistic process at a critical moment when American Progressivism combined with European Modernism. Photographs at the start of the exhibit show the communal, egalitarian style of living and working at the school. The faculty owned and operated the college, and governed it together with students. In the early 1930s, sweat equity was more useful than tuition—they grew their own food, cooked their own meals, and built their own classrooms. The founders of BMC kicked off their utopian educational experiment by hiring Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers, who brought with them a healthy dose of enthusiasm for communal idealism and experimentation. These values remain evident in the profoundly interdisciplinary art created at the college during its brief existence, spanning painting, sculpture, ceramics, textiles, poetry, dance, music, and theater. The exhibit begins with the colorful geometric paintings and prints of Josef, and the striking, modernist weavings and jewelry of Anni. In nearby rooms, photographs and models showing Buckminster Fuller’s experimental architecture—and the oftentimes unsuccessful attempts at constructing it—sit in conversation with the geometric and organic drawings and sculptures of Ruth Asawa, as well as the vibrant, expressionistic paintings of Elaine and Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Later in the exhibit, the artistic creations of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg showcase the collaborative, bodily nature of the work at BMC. Displays and performances using their choreography, music, and set decorations—schedules of which are available on the ICA website—allow museum visitors to share in an experience that, well, grew from shared experience. As one might expect from the school’s summer camp beginnings, it was a perfect storm of intense closeness, idealism, freedom, and collaboration. Throughout the ICA’s galleries, the works of art from BMC seem to speak to each other, and to be in their presence is to get a glimpse of how their creators exemplified the school’s motto of “learning through doing.” It’s an education in the importance of experimentation and exposure to difference, and a chance for (oft-maligned) utopian idealism—however short-lived—to get a little vindication.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Art, Design
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13:41
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, books, design, exhibitions, experience, experimentation, history, research, teaching
Monday, December 21. 2015Gramazio Kohler celebrates 10 years of research in digital fabrication at ETHZ in a video | #digitalfabrication #researchbydesign
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One decade of Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich – The Architecture of Digital Fabrication from Gramazio Kohler Research on Vimeo.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Design, Science & technology
at
09:43
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, code, design, digital, digital fabrication, generative, research, science & technology
Monday, September 28. 2015Poetics and Politics of Data (ed. S. Himmelsbach), HEK (Basel, 2015) | #data #clouds #society
Note: a book as a follow up of the exhibition for which fabric | ch designed the scenography last May at the Haus der elektronische Künste in Basel (project White Oblique, downloadable pdf on our website). I was implicated in a double way in the exhibition due to the fact that the content of the design research I'm jointly leading with Nicolas Nova for ECAL and HEAD, Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s), was also exhibited. I have the pleasure to publish a text in the book about the state and objectives of the ongoing research as well.
Via iiclouds.org ----- Note: we’re pleased to see that the publication related to the exhibition and symposium Poetics & Politics of Data, curated by Sabine Himmelsbach at the H3K in Basel, has been released later this summer. The publication, with the same title as the exhibition, was first distributed in the context of the conference Data Traces. Big Data in the Context of Culture and Society that also took place at H3K on the 3rd andf 4th of July. The book contains texts by Nicolas Nova (Me, My cloud and I) and myself (Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s). An ongoing Design Research), but also and mainly contributions by speakers of the conference (which include the american theorician Lev Manovitch, curator Sabine Himmelsbach and Prof. researcher from HGK Basel Claudia Mareis) and exhibiting artists (Moniker, Aram Bartholl, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jennifer Lyn Morone, etc.)
The publication serves both as the catalogue of the exhibition and the conference proceedings. Due to its close relation to our subject of research (the book speaks about data, we’re interested in the infrastructure –both physical and digital– that host them), we’re integrating the book to our list of relevant book. The article A short history of Clouds, by Orit Halpern is obviously of direct signifiance to our work.
It can be ordered directly from H3K website: Poetics and Politics of Data, 265 pp, ed. Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel, 2015 (29.- chf)
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Art, Culture & society, Design, Science & technology
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15:49
Defined tags for this entry: art, books, catalogue, culture & society, data, design, ecal, exhibitions-fbrc, fabric | ch, infrastructure, interferences, magazines, networks, publications, publications-fbrc, research, science & technology, teaching, tools, topology
Monday, July 27. 2015E.A.T. at The Museum der Moderne Salzburg | #art #technology
Note: nice to discover that a museum has decided to mount a retrospective ("first-ever") about the activities of Expriments in Art and Technologies (E.A.T.), a group composed of avant-garde artists and scientists (R. Rauschenberg, R. Whitman, D. Tudor, B. Klüver, F. Waldhauer) that were behind milestones events such as "Event scores, 9 evening" in New York (mainly scored by R. Roschenberg, but with fellow artists and "scorists" like J. Cage, D. Tudor, R. Whitman, L. Childs, etc.) or later the Pepsi Pavilion in Osaka, with Fujiko Nakaya (fog sculptures). This association helped anchor the association of visionary people and scientific labs (Bell Labs in this case, where people like Frank Malina was also working at the time, or A. Michael Noll too... to name a few). Later influential labs (Menlo Park, Xerox, Media Lab) and of course many recent Swiss initiatives (i.e. Artists in labs or Collide@CERN) are inheritors of this early collaboration. BTW, we should suggest to Pro Helvetia that they could also run an "architects in labs" so as a "designers in lab", that would be a great initiative! The exhibition opened last Saturday and will last until November 1, 2015.
Via Domus (thank you David Colombini for the link!) -----
E.A.T. The Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents a comprehensive survey of the projects of the evolving association of artists and technologists E.A.T. – Experiments in Art and Technology.
The Museum der Moderne Salzburg mounts the first-ever comprehensive retrospective of the activities of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a unique association of engineers and artists who wrote history in the 1960s and 1970s. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) and Robert Whitman (b.1935) teamed up with Billy Kluver (1927–2004), a visionary technologist at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and his colleague Fred Waldhauer (1927–1993) to launch a groundbreaking initiative that would realize works of art in an unprecedented collaborative effort.
Top and above: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), Pepsi Pavilion, exterior with fog installation by Fujiko Nakaya and Floats by Robert Breer © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20). Photo: Shunk-Kender
Around two hundred works of art and projects ranging from kinetic objects, installations, and performances to films, videos, and photographs as well as drawings and prints exemplify the most important stages of E.A.T.’s evolution. In light of the rapid technological developments of the period, the group aimed to put an art into practice that would employ cutting-edge technology. Starting in the early 1960s, Kluver collaborated with artists including Jean Tinguely, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Yvonne Rainer on an individual basis. Like some artists of the time, he was interested in the social implications of novel technologies and believed that the marriage of art and science had to take place on a practical and physical level. Members of E.A.T. hoped that the meeting between artists and engineers would allow for the production of works that would not have been possible without the special expertise of trained technologists. The engineers would conversely be inspired to think in new directions and help shape the future evolution of technology.
Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York, 1960. Kinetic sculpture (mixed media) and performance. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, US, Sculpture Garden, March 17, 1960 © Estate of David Gahr. Photo: David Gahr. Right: Jean Dupuy, Heart Beats Dust, 1968. Engineer: Ralph Martel Lithol rubine pigment, wood, glass, light, stethoscope, amplifier. Collection FRAC Bourgogne © ADAGP, Paris/Courtesy Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris. Photo: Terry Stevenson
----- July 25 – November 1, 2015
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Art, Science & technology
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13:06
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, artists, exhibitions, history, research, science & technology, search, thinkers
Friday, June 26. 2015I&IC within Poetics and Politics of Data, exhibition at H3K, scenography. Pictures | #data #research
By fabric | ch ----- Note: last end of May was the opening of the exhibition Poetics & Politics of Data at the Haus der elektronischen Künste in Basel. This was the occasion to present the temporary results of the design research I'm leading at ECAL/University of Art & Design Lausanne, in collaboration with Nicolas Nova from HEAD - Genève, EPFL and EPFL-ECAL Lab. But for that matter, fabric | ch realized the scenography of the whole exhibition, in particular the "hidden" part hosting the presentation of the design research itself. The whole spatial display we designed looks like some sort of "heterotopy": an archive and (computer) cabinet of curiosities within the white cube. A little bit like the "behind the scenes" of the exhibition, occupying its center, yet articulating it. It is basically made out of the modular elements that constitutes the "white cube" itself. Just that we maintained the hidden parts of these walls open and visible, widen and turn them in a pathway and an archive. Also present in the space and scenography are different works from fabric | ch: Deterritorialized Daylight is used to drive the lighting of the inner part of the cabinet, a new work Datadroppers --an online data commune, reminiscence of the now dead Pachube-- is used to collect and re-use random data from the exhibition, several Raspberry Pis in their dedicated 3d printed casing are collecting these data (which includes, in addition to the traditional ones more surpising ones like "curiosity", "transgression", etc.) and "dropping" them on the online service. They are then searchable and be used in third parties applications.
The exhibition will still be on view until the end of August in Basel, with works by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Moniker, Aram Bartholl, Jennifer Lyn Morone, Rybn and several others.
Pictures by David Colombini and Marco Frauchiger
- Intro text to the exhibition and credits: Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s) is an ongoing design research about Cloud Computing. It explores the creation of counter-proposals to the current expression of this technological arrangement, particularly in its forms intended for private individuals and end users (Personal Cloud). Through its fully documented cross-disciplinary approach that connects the works of interaction designers, architects and ethnographers, this research project aims at producing alternative yet concrete models resulting from a more decentralized and citizen-oriented approach.
Project leaders: Patrick Keller (ECAL), Nicolas Nova (HEAD) Students (ECAL): Anne-Sophie Bazard, Benjamin Botros, Caroline Buttet, Guillaume Cerdeira, Romain Cazier, Maxime Castelli, Mylène Dreyer, Bastien Girshig, Martin Hertig, Jonas Lacôte, Alexia Léchot, Nicolas Nahornyj, Pierre-Xavier Puissant Scenography: fabric | ch ECAL director: Alexis Georgacopoulos
ECAL/University of Art & Design Lausanne, HEAD – Genève, EPFL-ECAL Lab, HES-SO
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Art, Interaction design, Science & technology, Territory
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08:51
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, data, exhibitions, exhibitions-fbrc, fabric | ch, infrastructure, interaction design, research, science & technology, speculation, territory
Wednesday, May 27. 2015Poetics and Politics of Data | #exhibition #data #research
Note: as explained below in the message I posted on the documentary blog about the design research project I'm currently working on at ECAL, we've been pretty busy recently... and not only with the exhibition project mentioned even so we've been working on the scenography for it. So to say, this explains why we are having a hard time to be more active on | rblg! But hopefully, things will calm down a little bit after that and I'll find time again to write about the many projects we've been working on over the past two years, in parallel to continue archiving interesting works and resources on this blog!
Via iiclouds.org -----
Note: after some time of relative silence on the blog, we’re happy to say that the design-research project Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s) will be part of the next exhibition at the Haus für elektronische Künste in Basel (CH), in the form of a counterpoint or “behind the scenes” to the media art exhibition per se. This explains partly that, then… We had to work hard for the exhibition, especially because I was also in charge of the scenography (a work by fabric | ch in this case though), while Lucien Langton produced almost all the video documentation content. At the invitation of H3K curator, Sabine Himmelsbach, we’ll therefore present the work that has been realized so far, half-way through our research process. This will consist for large parts in video documentation and few artifacts, including some new ones (“Tools” oriented). We will use this material later on the I&IC website to fully document the current state of our work. The opening of the exhibition Poetics & Politics of Data will be tomorrow at 7pm, at H3K (Dreispitz neighborhood in Basel), the show will then last until end of August.
Christopher Baker, Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise, 2008
Poetics and Politics of Data duration: 29.05.2015 – 30.08.2015 opening: 28.05.2015, 7pm H3K, Freilager-Platz 9, 4142 Münchenstein / Basel, CH
The exhibition „Poetics and Politics of Data“ addresses the paradigm of a data-driven society and reflects life in an increasingly datified world. In visionary future scenarios, scientists enthuse over a world in which algorithms take over managing processes, envisioning a highly sensory and datafied space for us to live in, a world in which our desires and activities are anticipated, long before we carry them out. „Big Data“ is the keyword to this new era in which the power of data induces a radical transformation of a society whose actions and production of knowledge rely increasingly on the accumulation and evaluation of data. “Poetics and Politics of Data” shows artistic works that approach the phenomena of Big Data and data mining, visualizing the continuous bitstream in various ways while referring to the political and social implications that come with a world that is controlled by data – from the processes of self-optimization to economical aspects and questions concerning the use and evaluation of this data. Who has access to our data? In what ways is it possible to extract useful information and find “valuable” and applicable correlations from the immense pool of data? The exhibition introduces critically subversive approaches and interventions in networked spaces that make use of the potential of a virtual community and reflect personal performance in social networks. It focuses on aspects of surveillance strategies, data mining, privacy, post-privacy and digital autobiography acted out in social networks. Amid the constantly growing, infinite ocean of data, artists question the meaning and position of the individual in a technologically networked society and – thanks to their resistance and sense of independence – offer various alternatives to a normative world of data. From computer-mediated installations to data visualizations, they address these questions through different media in order to not only generate a new approach to complex data structure, but to create a poetic immersive space of data. “Poetics and Politics of Data” is an interdisciplinary project between HeK (House of Electronic Arts Basel), the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW, the Centre for Technology Assessment TA-SWISS and Opendata.ch, the Swiss chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation, presenting an exhibition about artistic approaches to big amounts of data. Artistic strategies and concepts of data usage, -interpretation and -criticism will be on display, discussing the potential and dangers of Big Data and data mining. - Group exhibition with works by:
Scenography:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Art, Interaction design
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23:35
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, art, data, exhibitions, exhibitions-fbrc, fabric | ch, interaction design, research, scenography
Tuesday, April 28. 2015Signal-Blocking Architecture and the Faraday Home | #faraday
Via BLDGBLOG ----- Image: "RAM House" by Space Caviar].
[Image: "RAM House" by Space Caviar].
In other words, why just rely on aftermarket home alterations such as WiFi-blocking paint, when you can actually factor the transmission of signals through architectural space into the design of your home in the first place?
[Image: "RAM House" by Space Caviar].
Space Caviar call this "a new definition of privacy in the age of sentient appliances and signal-based communication," in the process turning the home into "a space of selective electromagnetic autonomy." As the space of the home becomes saturated by “smart” devices capable of monitoring their surroundings, the role of the domestic envelope as a shield from an external gaze becomes less relevant: it is the home itself that is observing us. The RAM House responds to this near-future scenario by proposing a space of selective electromagnetic autonomy. Within the space’s core, Wi-Fi, cellphone and other radio signals are filtered by various movable shields of radar-absorbent material (RAM) and faraday meshing, preventing signals from entering and—more importantly—escaping. Just as a curtain can be drawn to visually expose the domestic interior of a traditional home, panels can be slid open to allow radio waves to enter and exit, when so desired. The result is the so-called "RAM House," named for those "movable shields of radar-absorbent material," and it will be on display at the Atelier Clerici in Milan from April 14-19.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Interaction design
at
07:35
Defined tags for this entry: architects, architecture, atmosphere, communication, interaction design, research, speculation, wireless
Thursday, April 09. 2015Corporate Dystopia: Liam Young Imagines a World in which Tech Companies Own Our Cities | #smart? #commodification
Via Archdaily ----- What if the manufacturers of the phones and social networks we cling to became the rulers of tomorrow’s cities? Imagine a world in which every building in your neighborhood is owned by Samsung, entire regions are occupied by the ghosts of our digital selves, and cities spring up in international waters to house outsourced laborers. These are the worlds imagined by self-described speculative architect, Liam Young in his latest series of animations entitled ”New City.” Read on after the break to see all three animations and learn more about what’s next in the series.
Viewers watching “The City in the Sea” at full size. Image Courtesy of Liam Young.
Liam Young’s London-based think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today explores the “consequences of fantastic, speculative and imaginary urbanisms” through techniques of fiction and film, with extremely high definition animations accompanied by short stories written by Jeff Noon, Pat Cadigan and Tim Maughan. The imagery produced seeks to “help us explore the implications and consequences of emerging trends, technologies, and ecological conditions,” exploring emerging trends across media, technology, and popular culture in order to exaggerate them and better understand our own world alongside our future. The think-tank is being developed as a model for an architectural practice informed by research and speculation as products in and of themselves rather than buildings as final products. Animation is often employed by the think tank, as Liam Young tells ArchDaily: “The skyline animations have been developed to be shown as super large scale projections, larger than the body so the audience has to move across the panorama, inhabiting it as they would do a city or building. Each animation is loaded with detail so as each time it is watched you might discover something different. The scale of the projections mean you are able to fully immerse yourself in the imaginary city and consumed by the soundscape you can sit and read the short story set in the city.”
From “Keeping up Appearances”. Image Courtesy of Liam Young
This latest series epitomizes many of the goals of the think-tank by looking at cites on a macro-scale and exaggerating trends across various stages of industry. The animations produced in the series thus far focus mainly on the technology sector and take existing cities as precedents for an exploration of themes and subsequent social commentary. For example, in the animation entitled “Keeping Up Appearances” (see top video) a future city is imagined in which almost every visible sign in the urban skyline is an advertisement for Samsung and the glowing logo represents the ownership of that particular piece of real estate. Based on a phenomenon occurring in many South Korean cities in which Samsung has begun to move into property development, in this exaggerated scenario the idea of corporate entities as driving forces behind real-estate development and growth becomes disturbingly plausible, while highlighting the real-world fact that many corporations have revenues which surpass the GDP of some countries. Young comments: “The branded skyline is just the most visible consequence of our gadget allegiances. What I am suggesting is that our relationships to technology are in fact generating entirely new forms of city, and new notions of place or site itself. Where we are in the world matters far less now than how we are connected and who we are connected to. We now see new forms of city generated around operating system choices, who we like on facebook, our twitter network and so on. I am much closer to my virtual community than I am to my physical neighbors. The network has allowed ‘non state’ actors to permeate every aspect of our lives.”
The next video in the series, entitled “The City in the Sea,” looks at the very real issue of outsourced labor and industrialized cities in the developing world. Taken to its extreme in this animation, the imagined city is completely detached from any kind of nationalistic identity and only exists to provide a corporate haven for manufacturers that is devoid of regulations and taxes. According to Young: “The City in the Sea is a multicultural city collaged from photos taken on expeditions through the outsourcing territories of India and China. The floating corporate city is built on the Pacific Ocean garbage patch and drifts in international waters, outside of national labor laws to become a free trade zone supporting the mega companies based on land. It is a city that connects to a long tradition of free states, from the traditions of pirate utopias, islands that existed with their own laws and governance to the speculations of offshore data havens on the abandoned naval fort Sealand or Google’s mysterious barges. We also see the same desires to escape jurisdiction playing out on land with the formation of special economic zones and free trade regions. These forms of territory are forcing us to reimagine what a border might mean in the age of the network.”
The third video in the series takes on a much more ephemeral quality and symbolically represents an element that is vital to our everyday lives, yet invisible to most. The idea of our online identity has become increasingly tangible to anyone that uses Facebook or surfs the web. Each of us possesses vast amounts of important information that is stored in “the cloud” but this notion has very little physical connection to our lives. Most are probably not aware of where their data is stored, but it is usually held in large data banks in places such as the city of Prineville, Oregon. These unassuming cities hold some of the world’s most sought after goods: personal identity stored digitally. Young also foresees data centers such as this as a new architectural frontier and describes its significance: “This part of New City is built for machines, it is the physical landscape of the cloud, our generation’s cultural landscape. I am really interested in what these physical sites of the internet actually mean, they are a completely new cultural typology and architects need to take the data center on as a project. Is the internet a place to visit, are they sites of pilgrimage, spaces of congregation to be inhabited like a church on Sundays? Would we ever want to go and meet our digital selves, to gaze across server racks, and watch us winking back, in a million LEDs of Facebook blue? Every age has its iconic architectural typology. The dream commission was once the church, Modernism had the factory, then the house, in the recent decade we had the ‘starchitect’ museum and gallery. Now we have the data centre, the next forum for architectural culture.”
“The City in the Sea” on display at full size. Image Courtesy of Liam Young.
It is clear that the technology sector has already played a transformative role in our global economy, and Liam Young’s work gives us a glimpse at how technology may finally influence our built world. By illustrating these potential future scenarios and exaggerating them, Young opens a platform for discussion on how to take control of our own built world. But what is next in the series? What other pressing cultural issues require attention if we are to understand our built environment? Young tells ArchDaily: “I am interested in continuing to look at the new types of ‘city’ that are emerging out of the network. Cities are increasingly being designed not for the people that occupy them but for the technologies and algorithms that are being built to understand them and manage them. Cities developed based around the logic of machine vision, satellite sight lines, Wi-Fi weather systems and so on are all of interest. These technologies are fundamentally changing what cities mean and these types of speculative projects are critical to play out possible scenarios for discussion.”
Viewers watching “Keeping Up Appearances” at full size. Image Courtesy of Liam Young
Readers can view all three animations accompanied with short stories by Jeff Noon, Pat Cadigan and Tim Maughan, at Liam Young’s Vimeo profile.
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Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Science & technology
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Defined tags for this entry: architecture, brand, city, commodification, culture & society, research, science & technology, speculation, urbanism
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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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