Tuesday, February 26. 2013Bracket - [goes soft]
By fabric | ch via Bracket ----- A few events linked to the book launch of Bracket - [goes soft] that we missed to annouce on | rblg. After New-York at the Columbia's Studio-X NYC and Houston last February, the book will be launched in Toronto on the 1st of March. Among several interesting projects curated by Benjamin Bratton, Julia Czerniak, Jeffrey Inaba, Geoff Manaugh, Philippe Rahm, Charles Renfro sits Arctic Opening, a project by fabric | ch that we realized back in 2010 on the Frioul Archipelago (Marseilles), in France. The co-editors are Lola Sheppard and Neeraj Bhatia. The book is published by Actar and designed by Thumb.
Enjoy the reading!
Posted by Patrick Keller
in fabric | ch, Architecture, Interaction design, Territory
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08:13
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Monday, January 14. 2013The Single Theory That Could Explain Emergence, Organisation And The Origin of Life
----- Biochemists have long imagined that autocatalytic sets can explain the origin of life. Now a new mathematical approach to these sets has even broader implications.
One of the most puzzling questions about the origin of life is how the rich chemical landscape that makes life possible came into existence. This landscape would have consisted among other things of amino acids, proteins and complex RNA molecules. What’s more, these molecules must have been part of a rich network of interrelated chemical reactions which generated them in a reliable way. Clearly, all that must have happened before life itself emerged. But how? One idea is that groups of molecules can form autocatalytic sets. These are self-sustaining chemical factories, in which the product of one reaction is the feedstock or catalyst for another. The result is a virtuous, self-contained cycle of chemical creation. Today, Stuart Kauffman at the University of Vermont in Burlington and a couple of pals take a look at the broader mathematical properties of autocatalytic sets. In examining this bigger picture, they come to an astonishing conclusion that could have remarkable consequences for our understanding of complexity, evolution and the phenomenon of emergence. They begin by deriving some general mathematical properties of autocatalytic sets, showing that such a set can be made up of many autocatalytic subsets of different types, some of which can overlap. In other words, autocatalytic sets can have a rich complex structure of their own. They go on to show how evolution can work on a single autocatalytic set, producing new subsets within it that are mutually dependent on each other. This process sets up an environment in which newer subsets can evolve. “In other words, self-sustaining, functionally closed structures can arise at a higher level (an autocatalytic set of autocatalytic sets), i.e., true emergence,” they say. That’s an interesting view of emergence and certainly seems a sensible approach to the problem of the origin of life. It’s not hard to imagine groups of molecules operating together like this. And indeed, biochemists have recently discovered simple autocatalytic sets that behave in exactly this way. But what makes the approach so powerful is that the mathematics does not depend on the nature of chemistry–it is substrate independent. So the building blocks in an autocatalytic set need not be molecules at all but any units that can manipulate other units in the required way. These units can be complex entities in themselves. “Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to think, for example, of the collection of bacterial species in your gut (several hundreds of them) as one big autocatalytic set,” say Kauffman and co. And they go even further. They point out that the economy is essentially the process of transforming raw materials into products such as hammers and spades that themselves facilitate further transformation of raw materials and so on. “Perhaps we can also view the economy as an (emergent) autocatalytic set, exhibiting some sort of functional closure,” they speculate. Could it be that the same idea–the general theory of autocatalytic sets–can help explain the origin of life, the nature of emergence and provide a mathematical foundation for organisation in economics? As Kauffman and friends say with just a little understatement: “We believe that these ideas are worth pursuing and developing further.” We’ll look forward to following the work as it progresses. Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1205.0584: The Structure of Autocatalytic Sets: Evolvability, Enablement, and Emergence
Monday, December 10. 2012The Relevance of Algorithms
Via Culture Digitally (via Christian Babski) By Tarleton Gillespie -----
I’m really excited to share my new essay, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” with those of you who are interested in such things. It’s been a treat to get to think through the issues surrounding algorithms and their place in public culture and knowledge, with some of the participants in Culture Digitally (here’s the full litany: Braun, Gillespie, Striphas, Thomas, the third CD podcast, and Anderson‘s post just last week), as well as with panelists and attendees at the recent 4S and AoIR conferences, with colleagues at Microsoft Research, and with all of you who are gravitating towards these issues in their scholarship right now. The motivation of the essay was two-fold: first, in my research on online platforms and their efforts to manage what they deem to be “bad content,” I’m finding an emerging array of algorithmic techniques being deployed: for either locating and removing sex, violence, and other offenses, or (more troublingly) for quietly choreographing some users away from questionable materials while keeping it available for others. Second, I’ve been helping to shepherd along this anthology, and wanted my contribution to be in the spirit of the its aims: to take one step back from my research to articulate an emerging issue of concern or theoretical insight that (I hope) will be of value to my colleagues in communication, sociology, science & technology studies, and information science. The anthology will ideally be out in Fall 2013. And we’re still finalizing the subtitle. So here’s the best citation I have.
Below is the introduction, to give you a taste. Algorithms play an increasingly important role in selecting what information is considered most relevant to us, a crucial feature of our participation in public life. Search engines help us navigate massive databases of information, or the entire web. Recommendation algorithms map our preferences against others, suggesting new or forgotten bits of culture for us to encounter. Algorithms manage our interactions on social networking sites, highlighting the news of one friend while excluding another’s. Algorithms designed to calculate what is “hot” or “trending” or “most discussed” skim the cream from the seemingly boundless chatter that’s on offer. Together, these algorithms not only help us find information, they provide a means to know what there is to know and how to know it, to participate in social and political discourse, and to familiarize ourselves with the publics in which we participate. They are now a key logic governing the flows of information on which we depend, with the “power to enable and assign meaningfulness, managing how information is perceived by users, the ‘distribution of the sensible.’” (Langlois 2012) Algorithms need not be software: in the broadest sense, they are encoded procedures for transforming input data into a desired output, based on specified calculations. The procedures name both a problem and the steps by which it should be solved. Instructions for navigation may be considered an algorithm, or the mathematical formulas required to predict the movement of a celestial body across the sky. “Algorithms do things, and their syntax embodies a command structure to enable this to happen” (Goffey 2008, 17). We might think of computers, then, fundamentally as algorithm machines — designed to store and read data, apply mathematical procedures to it in a controlled fashion, and offer new information as the output. But as we have embraced computational tools as our primary media of expression, and have made not just mathematics but all information digital, we are subjecting human discourse and knowledge to these procedural logics that undergird all computation. And there are specific implications when we use algorithms to select what is most relevant from a corpus of data composed of traces of our activities, preferences, and expressions. These algorithms, which I’ll call public relevance algorithms, are — by the very same mathematical procedures — producing and certifying knowledge. The algorithmic assessment of information, then, represents a particular knowledge logic, one built on specific presumptions about what knowledge is and how one should identify its most relevant components. That we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God.
What we need is an interrogation of algorithms as a key feature of our information ecosystem (Anderson 2011), and of the cultural forms emerging in their shadows (Striphas 2010), with a close attention to where and in what ways the introduction of algorithms into human knowledge practices may have political ramifications. This essay is a conceptual map to do just that. I will highlight six dimensions of public relevance algorithms that have political valence:
Considering how fast these technologies and the uses to which they are put are changing, this list must be taken as provisional, not exhaustive. But as I see it, these are the most important lines of inquiry into understanding algorithms as emerging tools of public knowledge and discourse. It would also be seductively easy to get this wrong. In attempting to say something of substance about the way algorithms are shifting our public discourse, we must firmly resist putting the technology in the explanatory driver’s seat. While recent sociological study of the Internet has labored to undo the simplistic technological determinism that plagued earlier work, that determinism remains an alluring analytical stance. A sociological analysis must not conceive of algorithms as abstract, technical achievements, but must unpack the warm human and institutional choices that lie behind these cold mechanisms. I suspect that a more fruitful approach will turn as much to the sociology of knowledge as to the sociology of technology — to see how these tools are called into being by, enlisted as part of, and negotiated around collective efforts to know and be known. This might help reveal that the seemingly solid algorithm is in fact a fragile accomplishment.
~ ~ ~ Here is the full article [PDF]. Please feel free to share it, or point people to this post.
Posted by Patrick Keller
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17:40
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Monday, December 03. 2012Ban ‘Killer Robots’ Before It’s Too Late
Via Human Rights Watch via Computed | Blg ----- (Washington, DC) – Governments should pre-emptively ban fully autonomous weapons because of the danger they pose to civilians in armed conflict, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. These future weapons, sometimes called “killer robots,” would be able to choose and fire on targets without human intervention.
The United Kingdom’s Taranis combat aircraft, whose prototype was unveiled in 2010, is designed strike distant targets, “even in another continent.” While the Ministry of Defence has stated that humans will remain in the loop, the Taranis exemplifies the move toward increased autonomy. © 2010 AP Photo
The South Korean SGR-1 sentry robot, a precursor to a fully autonomous weapon, can detect people in the Demilitarized Zone and, if a human grants the command, fire its weapons. The robot is shown here during a test with a surrendering enemy soldier. © 2007 Getty Images
“Losing Humanity” is the first major publication about fully autonomous weapons by a nongovernmental organization and is based on extensive research into the law, technology, and ethics of these proposed weapons. It is jointly published by Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic.
“It is essential to stop the development of killer robots before they show up in national arsenals,” Goose said. “As countries become more invested in this technology, it will become harder to persuade them to give it up.”
Personal comment: It has obviously some deep link (contradiction) with the "Three Laws of Robotics" ... Tuesday, October 16. 2012Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world
Via TED via Creative Applications -----
Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control. Kevin Slavin navigates in the algoworld, the expanding space in our lives that’s determined and run by algorithms. Full bio » It takes you 500,000 microseconds just to click a mouse. But if you’re a Wall Street algorithm and you’re five microseconds behind, you’re a loser.” (Kevin Slavin)
Posted by Patrick Keller
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09:45
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, code, computing, culture & society, interferences, science & technology, theory, thinkers
Tuesday, September 11. 2012Essay: 21st Century Gestures Clip Art CollectionVia City of Sound ----- By Dan Hill
A month or so ago, Nicolas Nova asked me to write an essay for a project he was doing. He said they'd been working on a catalogue of novel "gestures, postures and digital rituals" and could I write about that, please, as a kind of foreword.
It so happens that, for some years now, I'd been collating a catalogue of novel gestures and interactions myself and had never got round to doing anything with it. So Nicolas's kind request gave me the chance to get it off my computer and onto the internet. Thanks Nicolas! One outcome of their project is a rather nice short film; another is their book, here. My "preface" is reproduced below. Please note: as you'll see, this is not intended to be thorough, complete or even coherent—but you'll get the gist. I would guess many of us have such a list. It's probably more about noticing as a kind of practice rather than the particular gestures themselves, even though I spent a little too much time trying to get the hands right.
21st Century Gestures Clip Art Collection
1. A text file For some years I’ve been collating a list in a text file, which has the banal filename “21st_century_gestures.txt”. These are a set of gestures, spatial patterns and physical, often bodily, interactions that seemed to me to be entirely novel. They all concern our interactions with The Network, and reflect how a particular Networked development, and its affordances, actually results in intriguing physical interactions. The intriguing aspect is that most of the gestures and movements here are undesigned, inadvertent, unintended, the accidental offcuts of design processes and technological development that are either forced upon the body, or adopted by bodies. For a while, I have been “a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”, simply compiling the list. As a list, it’s entirely subjective, incomplete, and essentially pointless. But I kept coming back to it. Some gestures, interactions or behaviours eventually disappeared from the text file; others were reinforced. It turned out that Nicolas Nova and collaborators were pursuing a similar idea and asked, by chance, if I might write something about their project. Rewriting the brief somewhat, I have instead used this essay to put my list to bed. Walking around “eating the world with your eyes”, as the fictional design tutor in Chip Kidd’s novel The Cheese Monkeys puts it, you can’t help but observe the influence of The Network on our world. Yet The Network is often still spoken about as if it were somehow something separate to Us, as if it were an ethereal plane hovering above us, or perhaps something we might be increasingly immersed in but still separate to our bodies, to our selves. This doesn’t feel accurate now. There is no separate world, and this list indicates how we are even changing what our bodies do in entirely emergent, or at least unplanned, everyday fashion, in response to The Network’s demands. Yet this isn’t a list of weak signals or extreme and extremely unnecessary positions—such as embedding an RFID chip in your arm, Kevin Warwick—but entirely vernacular conditions, performed by everyday people and created by everyday people. Working on various projects for the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, I had begun to informally assess how wifi users were inhabiting the space, not simply in terms of the locations they would flock to, or their patterns of social grouping, but how they draped themselves over furniture in new ways, found small pockets of space to hole up in, while cradling or propping up a laptop, or the newer netbooks that had emerged at that point. There were no iPads back then, but there was clearly a new physical relationship around computing that suddenly left the Library looking askance at its “computer labs” and “drop-in-centres” of “PC towers” secreted under rows of desks. I drew sketches of the library users co-opting the spaces and objects, ascribing a name to each type as if they were yoga positions. Two laptop users sitting with their backs to each other was “Reverse Battleships”; two sitting facing each other was “Battleships”; one, watching a DVD whilst lying flat on her stomach, was “Front Crawl”; another, astride a bench, perpendicular to the designed stance, was “The Horse”, while swinging one’s legs over one side of the bench but twisting the torso to remain perpendicular would be “Side Saddle”, and so on. I also plotted where people were sitting in relation to wifi signals and building architecture, and discovered clear correlations between people, space, devices and Network. I made a rough 3D model of the wifi itself, as if it were a physical phenomenon that we could more easily understand structurally, rather than simply connect to. (AHO’s “Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi” later articulated a similar idea in a far more sophisticated fashion.) These were all attempts to understand how The Network could be perceived in civic space. Yet in the yoga position sketches, I was also interested in how people’s movements changed. The few examples collated here are a development of those sketches, and range from small gestures, to those involving the whole body, to those concerning bodies moving through spaces. Each example has a name and a sketch (below). The list in my text file has more examples than are listed here, but these should be enough to convey the idea. It’s interesting to compare with the much larger list independently collected by Nova and his colleagues. We are looking at the same thing, yet at different things also. What follows is not really a complete list or clip art collection at all—more a sketch of what one might be, in order to provoke more interesting questions.
Size S In terms of small gestures, one which already seems to be dying out is the Google Map Smear.
Fig. 1 The Google Map Smear
This you see when people are suffering from “roaming data” allowances condition on their smartphone’s payment plan, and so are anxious about expensive data transfer. When in a foreign place, the user will temporarily turn data roaming on and load up the cache in their phone’s memory by scooping up the immediately adjacent map tiles, downloading enough map to show them the way, and then quickly turn off the data. This scooping is performed in a series of “smearing” circular movements, as if scrubbing the map tiles into life, rubbing a magic lamp to conjure up some locally useful geography. It’s unlikely this tiny interaction will persist, as maps cease to be produced via tiling, and roaming data becomes less expensive.
Fig. 2 The Wake-Up Waggle
The Wake-Up Waggle, in which a user approaches a sleeping computer and attempts to rattle it into life by hammering the keyboard or aggressively waggling the mouse is at first so small as to be insignificant, but what kind of previous object would we interact with in this way? Perhaps kicking a lawnmower into life, or nudging a sleeping dog with your foot, but it feels disturbingly tied to the way we feel about computers; the mild frustration with which we often approach the device, as if it should by now be guessing when we’re about to use it. There’s a muted irritation here I find perversely appealing. Note, I haven’t included the wipes, pinches, taps and double-taps common to gestures for touch screens. I’m not quite sure why. They are novel and inventive, clearly, but perhaps also deliberately familiar—they don’t feel odd at all, and instead mimic our previous interactions with sliders, paper or fabrics. They are also clearly designed.
Size M In terms of bolder gestures and actions which require most of the body, we have the iPad Photographer, the Security Pass Hip Bump and the iPhone Compass Calibrator.
Fig. 3 The iPad Photographer
The iPad Photographer is really a variant on existing ways of taking pictures, but feels awkward and transitional. While there needn’t be anything particularly odd about taking a picture with a largeish rectangular-shaped device, it does look and feel very peculiar indeed. The form factor of cameras has hovered around the hand for centuries, even when embedded in cellphones, yet this is a new body shape, requiring both hands holding the device at arm’s length while one thumb or finger gropes awkwardly for the in-software shutter button. The Security Pass Hip Bump, which I first noticed a former client doing repeatedly in the library building she worked in, is particularly enjoyable. It occurs when someone carries their RFID-enabled security pass in their bag, and approaching a sensor, lifts the hip to angle the bag towards the sensor, creating a hands-free connection and activating the lock (the hands are often full of paper files, ironically enough.) It’s clearly an odd thing to do, when considered like this—to insouciantly cock your hips towards a small black rectangle on the wall as a form of greeting and personal identification—but it can be carried off with a certain panache. Try it.
Fig. 4 Security Pass Hip-Bump
When the same security passes are on extensible key fobs, they are articulated as if they were keys; when they are worn on lanyards, it’s as if they were simply identity cards from an earlier age, merely “shown” to a sensor rather than a security guard. Similarly, even something like retinal scans are a long-lost descendent of a family of gestures that might include the act of accessing a medieval walled city—put your face up to the grate for inspection—just as a spoken passphrase also has an ancient history. The Hip-Bump is different. It relies on a loose, instinctive, trial-and-errored understanding of the range of the radio waves involved, and the materials involved, and again feels like a form of interaction entirely unforeseen by the designers of security systems. (Note that Nova and team’s “Bag Swiping” is a close relation.) Most famously, perhaps, is the iPhone Compass Calibrator, which perhaps shouldn’t be included as it clearly is designed. Yet the performance, often public, that it entails is appealing enough to warrant inclusion. To suddenly stand stock-still in the street and rotate the little rectangle through an arm’s length figure-8 feels almost like a physical incantation, the kind of activity that might lead you direct to the ducking stool were it 17th century Massachussets. One never stops to consider how it might calibrate the phone’s compass; we are simply following orders. What else would we do if Apple told us to? People have a frozen, absent, pretty vacant look on their face as their arm movements mechanically ape the figure-8 described on their iPhone—although some seem to realise the peculiarity of the gesture and offer up a wry smile. (You’ll sometimes also see iPhone users revolving in a circle as their compass finds its bearings, doing a little waggle-dance with the electronics.)
Fig. 5 The iPhone Compass Calibrator
Size L Then there are the larger spatial conditions, in which a person interacts with others, and/or The Network, moving through a space.
Fig. 6 Cellphone Wake
Cellphone Wake is probably not that novel. Walking down a city street reading a book or newspaper would have had the same effect on a moving crowd a century earlier, but perhaps few would have done it. Now, it occurs frequently, and due to the deeper cognitive load involved in reading, typing and walking simultaneously, we might expect the ballet of the sidewalk to now rely on a heightened sense of “civic proprioception”, an awareness of one’s body in a bounded space of constantly moving objects, constantly yet subconsciously scanning for collision detection. The agent-based pedestrian simulations used to model subways and streets on urban planning projects are only just beginning to incorporate a sense of these interlocking wakes. While Cellphone Wake is irritating to observe, never mind get caught up in, when a Meeting Room Wake-Up Call occurs, it’s a delicious sight to behold. One of my perennial concerns is in designing systems that enable active citizens. Many technology-led “smart building” visions actually tend towards creating passive citizens, who outsource decision-making about their environment to software, with simple data derived from simple sensors. In this way, passive citizens also abdicate their conscious participation within an environmental system. Passivity of this type cannot create a “smart building” almost by definition, nor will it reverse the irresponsible decision-making culture that created unsustainable automated buildings and spaces in the first place.
Fig. 7 Meeting Room Wake-Up Call
So there’s a secret delight in seeing people interact with technology like this, in seeing the sheer physicality of their interactions—seeing a Serious Meeting of Businesspeople suddenly waving their hands in the arm like they just don’t care, in order to wake up a trigger-happy motion sensor. While it’s not particularly to do with The Network, this performance, when thought of more broadly, effortlessly reveals the absurdity in much of the “smart building” idea. (For more such absurdity, see the related toilet-based “Waving at Sensors” tactic in the Curious Rituals list.)
Fig. 8 Wi-Fi Dowser
I first consciously noticed W-ifi Dowsing during that post-occupancy evaluation of the public wifi at the State Library of Queensland. As one section of the library closed for the day, visitors would wander out with their laptops still open in front of them, staying connected and looking for the strongest wifi signal. Ultimately, users gathered near largely anonymous wireless access points; located through trial and error, and watching their devices, they manoeuvred themselves towards the best position in terms of The Network rather than the best physical space (or at least, some good compromise of both.) This seemed redolent of the ancient act of dowsing, or doodlebugging, for water, a form of divining trying to perceive and locate a hidden flow—although with rather better results than that entirely spurious practice. Neither public spaces or laptops are designed with this movement in mind.
2. Clip art sociology I’ve drawn these activities in a kind of 1950s newspaper illustration style, often seen in classified ads at the time, and now used as clip art (they’re actually adapted from scanned originals found on Flickr.) Those ads, and indeed clip art, often work as some kind of subconscious “training” for modern life. They prime what typical behaviours, are, or should be, given clip art’s often aspirational primary uses. Clip art such as this usually describes a form of physical interaction, in space, bereft of backstory. They are simply “man sitting at desk”, “woman, smiling, answer phone”, “people dancing”, “office party”, “shop interaction”. They describe context but not content, so that they might be freely used to underscore numerous different narratives. They are a frozen moment of interaction, with no before or after. So perhaps we might read clip art as an unwitting description and guide to the stereotypical environments and interactions of our world. This is why David Rees’s legendary comic strip “My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable” is quite so funny; in its crude clip-art bastardisations, it highlights the mismatch between an age lived on The Network (us) and the office culture of the near past (them). It freeze-frames people (mis)filing paper into filing cabinets and playfully and profanely deadpans them into an absurd alternate universe, which tells us as much about contemporary corporate-speke and the thrill of The Network as it does about the ‘80s or early ‘90s office environments its characters seem to be drawn from.
I transcribed some of the emerging behaviours of our modern world into this language of clip art to similarly freeze, distill, highlight and to provoke a discussion as to whether they are simply peculiar blips or transitional hints as to where we’re going next, taking an everyday performance and stripping it of its context, pinning the butterfly under the glass. The sports jackets can only help in this regard.
3. Could have been contenders We can argue about these particular examples all day. Some entrants on the list get removed upon consideration. A man stooping and pointing his phone to capture a QR code at the bottom of some advertising hoarding, as I saw in the street in Helsinki the other day, is really only a variation on a photo-taking pose, simply held a little longer due to machine vision’s poor acuity. Certainly, the act of taking photographs has changed shape due to digital technology. Where once the camera was generally brought up to the eye, now it is more often active at arm’s length, thanks to LCD screens on the back, and the “fire and forget” sensibility enabled by cheap storage, or increasingly a cloud-based upload meaning storage isn’t even an afterthought. (Those of a certain age will remember how precious each of your 24 or 36 shots on the roll of film used to be.) The freedom of movement these developments have delivered have been exploited by professional cinematographers and the average punter alike. But again, it is only a variation on a previous mode, and equally, many photographers will have shot at arm’s length for as long as cameras have been light enough to do so. There is nothing to do with The Network about this performance. (How might the physicality of taking a photograph change due to The Network is a good question, however.) People certainly move in a distinctive fashion when they’re talking on the phone. I observed our two year-old daughter talking into her plastic Hello Kitty pretend-phone and airily meandering around the apartment, brushing her fingers absent-mindedly over surfaces, just as her mother does, as she talked to her mythical mystery companion. You might argue the Bluetooth headset or the iPhone’s earbud-based mic has freed up one hand, but the essential stance of Being On The Phone hasn’t changed as a result of The Network. Even a intrinsically contemporary product like the Nike Fuelband is interacted with like a wristwatch, just as the laptop is essentially operated like a typewriter. Even what the body does in an achingly new game like “Tearaway” on the PS Vita, which features a riot of interaction design breakthroughs, would essentially be familiar to a 1950s child’s imagination—blowing on characters or tilting platforms to knock them over, or using fingers as puppets, for example. The novelty is in the fact that the characters are digital and Networked, rather than in the gestures themselves. It’s why these interactions work, and again, they’re entirely designed this way. All would be familiar, one way or another, to someone magically transported from 1965, say, even if the outcomes of those gestures would be largely beyond their comprehension.
4. Immaterial weightlifting But the interactions in the text file should seem odd to the time traveller, just as they seem slightly odd to us when highlighted in this way. These physical acts all make it evident that there is no separate “virtual world”; our very bodies are shaping our digital interactions. We are part of The Network, and not just intellectually, in terms of our projected persona and identity, but physically. The body is making The Network visible, legible. Tracing the articulation of the hips, hands and arms is sometimes tracing the seams of The Network. We have a long understanding of how the body creatively interacts with invisible forces. If you watch footage of Jimi Hendrix, you can see how he used his body to shape his guitar’s feedback; the sound is produced by the interplay of his guitar, especially its pickup, the speakers, the room, and his body within electric fields, in space, over time. Sensors and actuators, in contemporary language, at play within invisible fields, but shaped by the body, as well as objects and spaces. We need to think in terms of these fluid immersive interactions, material and immaterial—or “transmaterial as Mitchell Whitelaw would say—which we are part of physically as well as intellectually. This implies the conceptual separations of Hardware and Software, Them and Us no longer stand. Unlike the objects that are being interacted with—here deliberately represented as characterless rectangles—the bodies reveal the patterns of information exchange. Rather than passive users in meaningless space with screens bringing all the action from elsewhere, these interactions foreground the idea of “Screen as object in the world, rather than window to somewhere else“, as Mitchell Whitelaw puts it. “Window to somewhere else” has been around for a long time, yet as Whitelaw’s essay “After the screen” suggests, we are now working with “glowing rectangles” in a new way, and sometimes interacting with The Network via objects in the world that are without screens, rectangles without the glow. The kinetic energy expended in the extravagant contortions of the Security Pass Hip Bump, or even the subtle twitches of the Map Smear, suggest the transactions at play rather more the objects themselves do. You can almost viscerally feel the tiles being created during the Map Smear. As Bruce Sterling put it in “Shaping Things”, the objects are merely “material instantiations of an immaterial system”, and relatively faceless ones at that, whereas the immaterial system is the aspect which is “so overwhelmingly extensive and rich.” Perhaps it’s in the body that we sense that weight of information elsewhere? In 1985 Italo Calvino wrote “It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware.” Time has passed, and the heaviness of hardware has dissolved into lightness, as a counterpoint to the increased weight of associated information on The Network. But the body has also become a weighty vessel for software, a site for the Network to express its dynamics, well before we explore the next wave of wearable computing.
5. YouTube: “early flying machines” Speaking of lightness, when we look back at old movies of early flying machines, we see frail bodies trapped in awkward wooden frames, some of which hop unpredictably in and out of the air, as if a plastic bag blown along by the wind, while others plummet headlong from jetty to water with all the sense of purpose that gravity can muster. Those bruised and soggy aviators caught flapping articulated arms we can now discount as pursuing a developmental dead-end, though it was probably worth a try at the time. In others, we can see the blueprints of successful subsequent flights emerging before our eyes. These contemporary actions are similarly unpredictable. We don’t know if the Security Pass Hip Bump is actually a precursor of what happens when our clothes are made of smart fabric derived from nanocellulose fibres, and we use the combination of body and fabric to receive, transmit and display data. Is it a form of prototype, or is it simply an absurd contortion inflicted upon us by a building contractor placing an sensor slightly too high? They leave us to wonder whether we have designed “things which are in harmony with the human being and organically suited to the little man in the street”, as Alvar Aalto put it. Perhaps these all too human responses indicate we actually have designed in such harmony, totally inadvertently? Or that, just as the street finds its own use for things, our stereotypical physical movements simply adapt, if the promise of The Network is worth it.
6. Learning from wooden spoons You might argue over these choices; that’s the point. Such behaviours come and go every day. The point is only to observe, perhaps. These are all transitional, and at this point they tell us about here and now. In other words: at this point, they tell us about this point. But over time, when you watch enough, and log the iterations, they might hint at where we’re going, at our future physical interactions. Bruno Munari once wrote that the repeated use of a wooden spoon for stirring and testing soup not only wears the spoon down, but also “it eventually shows us what shape a spoon for stirring soup should be.” We can’t easily see that creative wear and tear taking its effect upon The Network and our interactions with it. Unless we discuss it, we can’t recognise the shifts in physical and social interaction occurring as a result of something that is often invisible, or leaves little trace either way, and whose objects are discarded with a frequency that would make Munari wince, and the simple wooden spoon feel quietly triumphant. What we’re witnessing here are tentative vernacular sketches as to how we might physically interact with The Network. Just as those early films of flying machines are equally absurd and prescient, these contortions and behaviours might contain the clues of our future interactions. Building an unfinished catalogue of them, as I have here, is also absurd, clearly; I leave it to you to do the prescient bit.
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Some references Alvar Aalto, speech in London, 1957. Italo Calvino, "Six Memos for the Next Millennium", 1985 Chip Kidd, "The Cheese Monkeys", 2002 Bruno Munari, "Design as Art", 1966 David Rees, "My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable" 2002 Bruce Sterling, "Shaping Things", 2005 Clip-art sketches inspired by the "Bart&Co. Historic Clip Art Collection"
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Interaction design
at
11:55
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, body, culture & society, interaction design, interface, interferences, theory
Friday, June 15. 2012VenueVia BLDGBLOG
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de noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh)
I'm excited to be launching a new project called Venue, a 16-month collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment, Columbia University GSAPP's Studio-X NYC, and Future Plural, the small publishing and curatorial group I'm a part of with Nicola Twilley. We kick things off this Friday, June 8, with a launch event at the Nevada Museum of Art in downtown Reno, from 6-8pm; if you're near Reno, consider stopping by! [Image: The tools and props of surveying; courtesy of the USGS]. In brief, Venue is equal parts surveying expedition and forward-operating landscape research base, a DIY interview booth and media rig that will pop up at sites across North America through September 2013. Nicola Twilley and I will be traveling on and off, in a series of discontinuous trips, over the next 16 months, visiting a variety of sites including infrastructural landmarks, science labs, factories, film sets, archaeological excavations, art installations, university departments, design firms, National Parks, urban farms, corporate offices, studios, town halls, and other locations across North America, where we'll both record and broadcast original interviews, tours, and site visits. From architects to scientists and novelists to mayors, from police officers to civil engineers and athletes to artists, Venue’s interview archive will form a cumulative, participatory, and media-rich core sample of the greater North American landscape. [Image: Understanding landscapes by way of strange devices; courtesy of the USGS]. While there will no doubt be regular updates here on BLDGBLOG, you can follow along, both online and off, by reading our latest dispatches, suggesting sites and people we should visit, and keeping an eye on our schedule (or signing up for our mailing list) to find out when we will be bringing Venue to a neighborhood near you. In addition, our best content will be syndicated on a dedicated channel online by The Atlantic, so keep your eye out for our first interviews or site visits—photos, short films, MP3s—as our travels get underway. [Image: The Venue tripods, universal mounts for interchangeable devices; designed by Chris Woebken]. There's a lot more information available about the project at the Venue website—including some early images depicting the incredible array of devices designed for us by Chris Woebken, a gorgeous hand-made interview box custom-fabricated for Venue by Semigood, and the "Descriptive Camera" that we'll have on the first leg of our trip—so by all means stop by and see the ideas behind the project, from conceptual inspiration taken from historical survey expeditions to Ant Farm's Media Van. [Image: The Venue box takes shape, custom-designed by Semigood]. And hopefully somewhere down the line, we can meet many of you in person. Personal comment: An interesting publishing project/initiative to follow and/or participate by Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Culture & society, Territory
at
15:34
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, culture & society, devices, magazines, monitoring, territory, theory, thinkers
Wednesday, June 13. 2012Non-Urbanism by Brett MilliganVia Archinect
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de MAGAZINEONURBANISM
“If you go into the hardcore urban or the hardcore rural, it is quite simple to define it, but that is not so relevant. It is more significant to talk about the condition in between. And this condition is extremely difficult to define.” – Urban planner Kees Christiaanse in conversation with Bernd Upmeyer and Beatriz Ramo on behalf of MONU Magazine
MONU’s call for submissions for its latest issue (#16, Non Urbanism) asked its participants to “investigate how non-urbanism may be defined and identified today, and how non-urban areas interact with and relate to urban areas.“ Fortunately for readers, the printed compendium seems to succeed in largely refuting the very existence of its themed subject matter. Or, if it doesn’t go so far as to refute the ‘non urban’, the content demonstrates how difficult it is to call out any place as not being deeply under the influence of it. MONU #16’s agenda fits within mounting reactions to the geographic myopia found in some of the contemporary ‘urban age’ rhetoric. ‘Non Urbanism’ explores what happens when the inventory of urban moves beyond widget counts of human bodies for its reductive definition. It asks: what is non-urbanism when we approach the ‘built environment’ in a fully relational way? What happens when we see cities in the wider geographic field of their effects, borrowin... Related Links:Monday, June 04. 2012Great speculations /// The Repertoire of Metabolism by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich ObristVia The Funambulist
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de Léopold Lambert
Photograph of the book Project Japan by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist. (editors Kayoko Ota with James Westcott) Koln: Taschen, 2011.
In a move that he clearly enjoy, Rem Koolhaas along with Hans Ulrich Obrist re-introduce the Metabolists in an era that consecrates SANAA and their followers as the new Japanese paradigm for global architecture. It is indeed difficult to find two visions of architecture that different and the fact that they were produced in the same country makes this opposition even more visible. The 700-page book Project Japan can therefore be considered, not as a retroactive manifesto (that was the self-definition of Koolhaas’ Delirious New York), but rather as a rehabilitative archive. It is a document that illustrates the coherency of a historical movement created as both individual and collective work in a way that cannot be observed in any way nowadays. Through interviews with almost all the actors of this movement -Kurokawa and Kitutake died since then-, R.Koolhaas and H.U.Obrist explore as much the origins of this ambition (they find them in Kenzo Tange’s experience of the war in China and its large territories) as the globalization of the movement which saw the Metabolists proposed many projects in the Middle East. The photographs of Charlie Koolhaas of several buildings built in the 60′s in their current state also bring an interesting comparison with the original documents and the endurance (or not) of those building to time.
Beyond the subjective reading of the two Europeans, this book is mostly a very valuable archive of documents created by the Metabolists, many of them which are probably not findable in already published books. In this regard, the Repertoire of Metabolism is particularly rich through its succinctness. In thirty four pages, we access to a visual inventory of the various architectural inventions or appropriations that the Metabolists have been developing through their work. The key typological words are the following:
Friday, May 04. 2012CreolizationVia Pasta & Vinegar -----
— Robin Cohen, Creolization and Cultural Globalization: The Soft Sounds of Fugitive Power, Globalizations Vol. 4 (2) 2007 Why do I blog this? Some people wonder about the fact that we live in a perpetual present without the jetpacks, moonbases and virtual realities we were promised. This was actually the topic of the Lift 09 conference I co-organized. I’m more and more interested to uncover the the “alternative futures” to this, places where créolisation will play an important role. This is a new pet project for 2012 and I will file all the weak signals I collect about this under the category “creolization”.
Personal comment: As we are very interested in that topic of creolization (see on our home page), so as Nicolas Nova with with we had a discussion on that topic last week, I take the opportunity to mention that he (Nicolas) will file projects under this subject on his blog.
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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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