From a blistering K-punk on Live8 (which includes a reference to “Teleo-Marxism”- awesome!), comes a line that I plan to pull out of it’s current K-punkian context and transplant to the field of tangible/embodied interaction design to drop as much as possible:
“In addition to anything else, to ignore the crucial functioning of the meat in the machine is poor cybernetics.”
I want to be invited to a college design crit as soon as possible just to be able to say that.
July 4th is important of course in some parts of the world, but the front page of the wikipedia tells us that on July 5th in
A good day.
Liz’s notes on the recent O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference, even though she says they are sketchy, give a lot of food for thought (and they are funny, but it probably helps if you can imagine Liz recounting them, arms-a-waving) – I’m looking forward to her promised post-4th-of-July reflections.
Overall, it sounds like it was a fascinating carpet-mindbombing of the state-of-the-art of geographical technology and it’s effects on business and society. Wish I’d seen Nathan Eagle, and Kevin Slavin in particular.
One line in her notes will be thought about (and probably written about) much more by me:
“as always, they [O’Reilly] think that the difference between the desires of early and late adopters is one of size, not kind”
Crossing the Chasm was first published 14 years ago. Pre-web, pre-mobile. And yet the tech industry is still set in it’s belief that the mainstream will inevitably, steadily, globally – follow the alpha-geek early adopter. Surely it’s about time the Valley’s “Whig” telling of technological progress is tempered with the wiggly nature of human desire.
So far, according to media reports, the business-end of Deep Impact that has been launched to hit comet Tempel-1 is the size of
I will keep this list updated with more popular-media-sizing-analogs for space probes (half-a dolphin!).
—-
* In keeping with other white-goods in North America, are US washing-machines bigger than their UK equivalents?
Via greg.org, Nicolai Ourousoff on the compromised, redesigned “Freedom Tower” in the New York Times (reg. reqd.)
“…if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer’s architectural nightmares were fascinating: as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear.”
The original design, with it’s open-air structural crown dissolving into the sky was a fairly poetic commemoration of what happened in NYC on the 11th of September. As poetic and hopeful as commercial architecture tends to get, anyway.
It reminded me (and others) of Jean Nouvel’s unbuilt “Tour sans fin” – itself a product of a different, hubristic hopeful time.
Jonathan Glancey on Nouvel’s Tower in pre-war-on-nouns May 2001:
“we could learn much from Nouvel’s unbuilt project: how to build heavenwards without being lumpen or incurring the wrath of God. “
Nouvel himself, happily, seems to still be preserving the spirit of those times. Dina Mehta writes of his self-curated show of work: “The Louisiana Manifesto” at Worldchanging – from which this quote:
“Instead of the archaic architectural goal of domination, of making a permanent mark, today we should prefer to seek the pleasure of living somewhere.
Let us remember that architecture can also be an instrument of oppression, a tool for conditioning behaviour.
Let us never permit anyone to censure this pursuit of pleasure, especially in the domain of the familiar and intimate that is so necessary to our wellbeing.
Let us identify ourselves.”
This new “Freedom Tower” as Ourousoff points out, does not seem to identify the vibrant resilience of New Yorkers and NYC itself, as much as the psychopathologies of its political classes.
P.s.: See also Deyan Sudjic’s “The Edifice Complex”
Found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/nightmares, and cut/pasted here for my future reference more than anything else:
John Carpenter – The theme from The Prince of Darkness – the 1987 movie. Plus the repetitive piano bit from Halloween in the haunted house.
Brian Eno – From Another Green World – Big Ship – and In Dark Trees
Charles Ives – Symphony number two – 5th movement. Putnam’s Camp from Three Places in New England. Plus a bit from Central Park in the Dark
Ennio Morricone – Theme from the 1970 film Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion And a Morricone piece from the 1980 Pontecorvo film Ogro
Shostakovich – Lyric waltz from the Ballet Suite No 1 and a bit from The Young Lady and the Hooligan
John Barry – The Ipcress File
Soundtrack to The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea – Paul Sawtell and Jerry Goldsmith
Colours by Donovan
Baby It’s Cold Outside – the 1949 version by Johnny Mercer and Margaret Whiting
The best noises come from Skinned – which is a whole lot of samples from the archives of the band Skinny Puppy
Also, all three episodes in streaming realplayer format can be found here – found via Arthur magazine, which also links from its blog, Magpie, a Village Voice piece by the author of the films, Adam Curtis.
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }
Stupid 20th Century Crap (the militaryindustrialcomplex, fast food, the petroleum economy, Cliff Richard) will haunt us for hundreds of years. But we can stop some of it now if we work hard at it.
I just did my bit by posting this in the feedback form of a very 20th Century brokenated website of a very 20th Century organisation promoting a very 20th century notion of design.
“Why create a link saying ‘book tickets’ only to link to a PDF? 1995 called, they want their internet back.
Then again, your notions of design authorship and superstardom are so thoroughly 20th Century perhaps this is to be expected. Icons? Puhleaze.”
Frank Nuovo is the head of design at Nokia of course – but vast teams of people contribute to the design of technology.
The D&AD is just propegating a myth of solo superstar design authorship to an audience that wants to believe. I have a big head of ranty steam built up about this, and the Hillary Cottam nonsense that I need to vent really, really soon.
…get his Phd from Media Lab, by filling in his survey about bloggers and social networks.
It’s surprisingly painless.
Tom and Clayton collaborated on a set of beautiful images this year, and now Clayton has published a short interview with Tom on his site.
Tom discusses with Clayton his reaction to the finished work and the process they shared to create it; but also his route to generative art, it’s history and his influences:
“Before mass access to computers, people used other hardware, tools, toys and rule-sets to make algorithmic and process-driven art – pendulums, spirographs, Indian rangolis, Celtic knots, mandalas and so on – and a lot of the methods people use in computer generated art were investigated by mathematicians by hand before computers were available, such as Fibonacci series and the Golden Ratio. Casey Reas has looked into Kinetic Sculpture in some depth, and that’s something I keep intending to read up on. I’m sure that before computers were around the same things that people like about generative art were satisfied by fireworks, fountains, may poles, crop circles, wax lamps and oscilloscopes. Grid-based games such as Go and Othello are very reminiscent of the patterns created by certain types of Cellular Automata, too. The main advantage with using a computer is speed, such that there is now scope for using any of these systems over long periods of time and with minute variations.”
Beautiful stuff – congratulations to both artists.
In a page that reads like a shooting-script from a BBC4 Quatermass revival crossed with Warren Ellis’s Planetary Gun Club, we learn of the developing fate of the world’s first solar-sail spacecraft, launched from Russian Nuke Sub, by a club of private investors:
21:50 UTC
Cosmos 1the first solar sail was launched as scheduled at 19:46 UTC today from the nuclear submarine Borisoglebsk. The three stage separations occurred normally, and 15 minutes after launch a doppler signal was received at the temporary ground station at Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. The signal lasted for around three minutes, and was then cut off for unknown reasons.No signal has been received from the spacecraft since that time. The portable telemetry station at Majuro in the Marshall Islands did not receive a signal during the time it could have been in contact with the spacecraft. The next possible contact will be with the ground station at Panska Ves in the Czech Republic.
The fact that the spacecraft has remained silent does not necessarilly mean anything is wrong, according to Project Director Louis Friedman. Contact with the two portable stations at Petropavlovsk and Majuro was always considered marginal. We are now waiting for the contact periods with the permanent stations in Paska Ves, Tarusa, and Bear Lakes.
Petafloptimism 