fabric | rblg

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).

Note: Turing Machines are now undoubtedly part of pop culture, aren't they?

Via Open Culture (via Boing Boing)

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It took Richard Ridel six months of tinkering in his workshop to create this contraption--a mechanical Turing machine made out of wood. The silent video above shows how the machine works. But if you're left hanging, wanting to know more, I'd recommend reading Ridel's fifteen page paper where he carefully documents why he built the wooden Turing machine, and what pieces and steps went into the construction.

If this video prompts you to ask, what exactly is a Turing Machine?, also consider adding this short primer by philosopher Mark Jago to your media diet. 

Related Content:

Free Online Computer Science Courses

The Books on Young Alan Turing’s Reading List: From Lewis Carroll to Modern Chromatics

The LEGO Turing Machine Gives a Quick Primer on How Your Computer Works

The Enigma Machine: How Alan Turing Helped Break the Unbreakable Nazi Code

Hear the Christmas Carols Made by Alan Turing’s Computer: Cutting-Edge Versions of “Jingle Bells” and “Good King Wenceslas” (1951)

More about Quantum Information by Vlatko Vedral and his book Decoding Reality.

Via Legalise Freedom

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Listen to the discussion online HERE (Youtube, 1h02).

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Vlatko Vedral on Decoding Reality -- The Universe as Quantum Information. What is the nature of reality? Why is there something rather than nothing? These are the deepest questions that human beings have asked, that thinkers East and West have pondered over millennia. For a physicist, all the world is information. The Universe and its workings are the ebb and flow of information. We are all transient patterns of information, passing on the blueprints for our basic forms to future generations using a digital code called DNA.

Decoding Reality asks some of the deepest questions about the Universe and considers the implications of interpreting it in terms of information. It explains the nature of information, the idea of entropy, and the roots of this thinking in thermodynamics. It describes the bizarre effects of quantum behaviour such as 'entanglement', which Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance' and explores cutting edge work on harnessing quantum effects in hyperfast quantum computers, and how recent evidence suggests that the weirdness of the quantum world, once thought limited to the tiniest scales, may reach up into our reality.

The book concludes by considering the answer to the ultimate question: where did all of the information in the Universe come from? The answers considered are exhilarating and challenge our concept of the nature of matter, of time, of free will, and of reality itself.

Note: I'll have the great pleasure to be in discussion tomorrow with Fabio Gramazio, Prof. & Head for Digital fabrication at ETHZ and partner at Gramazio Kohler, during the much-awaited symposium "Research in Art and Design", at ECAL.

If you can attend, please do so! As we're expecting great presentations from the likes of Xavier Veilhan, Roel Wouters, Skylar Tibbits, Catherine Ince and several others... including Fabio Gramazio of course, who will speak about their rescent researches at the Swiss Institute of Technology / Department of Architecture in Zürich.

Via ECAL

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10+10 Research in Art & Design at ECAL
A symposium celebrating 10 years of Research in Art and Design

Tuesday 10 October 2017, 8.00–18.30
IKEA Auditorium, ECAL, Renens
www.researchday.ch

On the occasion of the 10 years since the moving of ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne to its current premises in Renens and marking the 10th anniversary of the foundation of EPFL+ECAL Lab, ECAL is hosting a symposium on Research in Art and Design, featuring artists, designers and scholars in these fields from all over the world, in conversation with ECAL faculty members.

Admission is free upon registration through the online RSVP form at www.researchday.ch
Due to the limited number of seats in the auditorium, the maximum number of participants is 350.

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Programme

8.00–8.30 Registration
8.30–9.00 Welcome
Alexis Georgacopoulos director, ECAL

Introductory notes on Research in Art and Design in Switzerland
Davide Fornari professor, ECAL

Moderation
Vera Sacchetti design critic, Basel

Design Research: from Academia to the Real World

9.00–9.45 Alba Cappellieri professor, Politecnico di Milano, Milan
in conversation with Nicolas Henchoz director, EPFL+ECAL Lab

9.45–10.30 Sophie Pène vice president, Conseil National du Numérique, Paris
in conversation with Davide Fornari professor, ECAL

10.30–11.00 Coffee break

Research Through Art and Design: Materials and Forms
11.00–11.45 Xavier Veilhan artist, Paris
in conversation with Stéphanie Moisdon professor, ECAL

11.45–12.30 Fabio Gramazio co-founder, Gramazio + Kohler Architects, Zurich
in conversation with Patrick Keller professor, ECAL

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12.30–13.30 Lunch

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Research Practices in Curating Art and Design
13.30–14.15 Catherine Ince senior curator, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
in conversation with Anniina Koivu professor, ECAL

14.15–15.00 Astrid Welter head of programs, Fondazione Prada, Milan/Venice
in conversation with Federico Nicolao professor, ECAL

15.00–15.15 Coffee break

The Future of Art and Design Research
15.15–16.00 Roel Wouters co-founder, Moniker, Amsterdam
in conversation with Vincent Jacquier professor, ECAL

16.00–16.45 Skylar Tibbits co-founder, MIT Self-Assembly Lab, Cambridge (MA)
in conversation with Christophe Guberan professor, ECAL

16.45 Closing remarks, panel discussion
Alexis Georgacopoulos
Vera Sacchetti
Davide Fornari

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17.30 Exhibition openings at Cinema Studio, Gallery l’elac and EPFL+ECAL Lab

• Caustics, curated by Mark Pauly, EPFL RAYFORM
• Projects for Victorinox, curated by Thilo Alex Brunner
• The Sausage of the Future, curated by Carolien Niebling (preview)
• Augmented Photography, curated by Milo Keller (preview)
• EPFL+ECAL Lab Research Land, curated by Nicolas Henchoz
• Rapid Liquid Printing, curated by Christophe Guberan, MIT Self-Assembly Lab, Steelcase

ECAL will launch the book Making Sense: 10 Years of Research in Art and Design at ECAL on the occasion of the symposium.

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18.30   Cocktail

10+10 Research in Art and Design at ECAL
In collaboration with EPFL+ECAL Lab
With the support of HES-SO
Media partner Disegno

Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne
5, Avenue du Temple, Renens  

Related Links:

Note: Timothy Morton introducing his concept of "hyperobjects" and "object-oriented philosophy".

Via e-flux via The Guardian (June 17)

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Image of Thimothy Morton.

The Guardian has a longread on the US-based British philosopher Timothy Morton, whose work combines object-oriented ontology and ecological concerns. The author of the piece, Alex Blasdel, discusses how Morton's ideas have spread far and wide—from the Serpentine Gallery to Newsweek magazine—and how his seemingly bleak outlook has a silver lining. Here's an excerpt:

Morton means not only that irreversible global warming is under way, but also something more wide-reaching. “We Mesopotamians” – as he calls the past 400 or so generations of humans living in agricultural and industrial societies – thought that we were simply manipulating other entities (by farming and engineering, and so on) in a vacuum, as if we were lab technicians and they were in some kind of giant petri dish called “nature” or “the environment”. In the Anthropocene, Morton says, we must wake up to the fact that we never stood apart from or controlled the non-human things on the planet, but have always been thoroughly bound up with them. We can’t even burn, throw or flush things away without them coming back to us in some form, such as harmful pollution. Our most cherished ideas about nature and the environment – that they are separate from us, and relatively stable – have been destroyed.

Morton likens this realisation to detective stories in which the hunter realises he is hunting himself (his favourite examples are Blade Runner and Oedipus Rex). “Not all of us are prepared to feel sufficiently creeped out” by this epiphany, he says. But there’s another twist: even though humans have caused the Anthropocene, we cannot control it. “Oh, my God!” Morton exclaimed to me in mock horror at one point. “My attempt to escape the web of fate was the web of fate.”

The chief reason that we are waking up to our entanglement with the world we have been destroying, Morton says, is our encounter with the reality of hyperobjects – the term he coined to describe things such as ecosystems and black holes, which are “massively distributed in time and space” compared to individual humans. Hyperobjects might not seem to be objects in the way that, say, billiard balls are, but they are equally real, and we are now bumping up against them consciously for the first time. Global warming might have first appeared to us as a bit of funny local weather, then as a series of independent manifestations (an unusually torrential flood here, a deadly heatwave there), but now we see it as a unified phenomenon, of which extreme weather events and the disruption of the old seasons are only elements.

It is through hyperobjects that we initially confront the Anthropocene, Morton argues. One of his most influential books, itself titled Hyperobjects, examines the experience of being caught up in – indeed, being an intimate part of – these entities, which are too big to wrap our heads around, and far too big to control. We can experience hyperobjects such as climate in their local manifestations, or through data produced by scientific measurements, but their scale and the fact that we are trapped inside them means that we can never fully know them. Because of such phenomena, we are living in a time of quite literally unthinkable change.

Related Links:

Note: I'll be pleased to be in Paris next Friday and Saturday (02-03.12) at the Centre Culturel Suisse and in the company of an excellent line up (!Mediengruppe Bitnik, Nicolas Nova, Yves Citton, Tobias Revell & Nathalie Kane, Rybn, Joël Vacheron and many others) for the conference and event "Bot Like Me" curated by Sophie Lamparter and Luc Meier.

I'll present with Nicolas Nova the almost final state of our joint research project Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s).

Via Centre Culturel Suisse

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Du vendredi 2 au samedi 3 décembre 2016

 

Bot Like Me
interventions en anglais

 

A l’occasion de l’exposition de !MedienGruppe Bitnik, et avec la complicité du duo d’artistes zurichois, Sophie Lamparter (directrice associée de swissnex San Francisco) et Luc Meier (directeur des contenus de l’EPFL ArtLab, Lausanne) ont concocté pour le CCS un événement de deux jours composé de conférences, tables rondes et concerts, réunissant scientifiques, artistes, écrivains, journalistes et musiciens pour examiner les dynamiques tourmentées des liens homme-machine. Conçues comme une plateforme d’échange à configuration souple, ces soirées interrogeront nos rapports complexes, à la fois familiers et malaisés, avec les bots qui se multiplient dans nos environnements ultra-connectés.

 

 

Vendredi 2 décembre / dès 19h30

 

conférence, 19h30-21h : Bot Like Me kick-off

avec Rolf Pfeifer (AI Lab de l’Université de Zurich / Osaka University), Carmen Weisskopf et Domagoj Smoljo ( !Mediengruppe Bitnik). Modération : Luc Meier et Sophie Lamparter

 

performance musicale live, 21h30 : Not Waving

 

 

Samedi 3 décembre / dès 14h30

 

tables rondes

 

-14h30-16h : Data Manifestos

avec Hannes Grassegger (auteur de Das Kapital bin ich), Hannes Gassert (Open Knowledge Network) et le collectif RYBN. Modération : Sophie Lamparter et Luc Meier

 

-16h30-18h : Cloud Labor, Petty Bot Jobs

avec Nicolas Nova (HEAD-Genève, Near Future Laboratory), Yves Citton (Université de Grenoble) et Patrick Keller (ECAL, fabric | ch). Modération : Marie Lechner

 

-18h30-20h : Botocene & Algoghosts

avec Tobias Revell et Natalie Kane (Haunted Machines), Gwenola Wagon et Jeff Guess (artistes). Modération : Joël Vacheron et Nicolas Nova

 

concert 21h : performance live de Low Jack et carte blanche au label Antinote

Note: we are --like many others I guess-- very interested in the work of Carribean writer Édouard Glissant here at the studio (fabric | ch). Concepts like "archipelagic thinking", "rhizomic identity", "Tout-Monde" (could be imperfectly translated as "Whole-World") and of course "creolization" are powerful yet poetic and positive tools to understand our interleaved world and possibly envision ways of action.

I recently followed a link posted by Nicolas Nova which drived me to a channel on Youtube (managed by Laure Braeckman) that gather different sources/talks by E. Glissant and where he speaks about the different concets that structure his thinking.

Below is the link to this resource that might be useful when you'll like to discover or come back to these ideas.

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By Laure Braeckman

"Imaginaire du monde" / "Tout-Monde" /  "Imaginaire poétique" / "Pensée de l'opacité" / "Pensée archipélique" / Marronage" / "Trois étapes de la Relation" / "Identité rhizome" / "Négritude" / "Métissage" / "Europe en archipel" / ... and many more ...

by Édouard Glissant.

Related Links:

Via iiclouds.org

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The design research Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s) will be presented during the peer reviewed Renewable Futures Conference next week in Riga (Estonia), which will be the first edition of a serie that promiss to scout for radical approaches.

Christophe Guignard will introduce the participants to the stakes and the progresses of our ongoing experimental work. There will be profiled and inspiring speakers such as Lev Manovitch, John Thackara, Andreas Brockmann, etc.

Christophe Guignard will make a short “follow up” about the conference on this blog once he’ll be back from Riga.

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!)

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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.

Note: an interesting handmade book initiative by Garnet hertz around the makers movement, from their critical point of view. Not critical thinking or design therefore, but critical make. I would even prefer to say "make thinking"!

Via Critical Making

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"Critical Making is a handmade book project by Garnet Hertz that explores how hands-on productive work ‐ making ‐ can supplement and extend critical reflection on technology and society. It works to blend and extend the fields of design, contemporary art, DIY/craft and technological development. It also can be thought of as an appeal to the electronic DIY maker movement to be critically engaged with culture, history and society: after learning to use a 3D printer, making an LED blink or using an Arduino, then what?"

...

The entire collection can be downloaded on the website.

Related Links: