NN: What I like in WMMNA is the very sober nature of your posts, the way you get straight to the point when describing the projects. Is there a reason behind this “no stance” attitude?
RD: Several reasons: the main one is that i don’t want to influence people, I want readers to form their own opinion. i give mine in a subtle way: when i don’t like something i just don’t write about it. it’s also quite difficult to always have a view on interaction art/design. you have to experience the installation yourself to really know what it is like. then of course sometimes i don’t give my view for a very simple reason: i have no opinion, i just “feel” that a story is interesting enough and hope others will make sense of it.
[...]
NN: In what sense do you think your blog is of interest to researchers, R&D people and foresight managers?
RD: I should ask them. I guess the projects described in the blog might be interesting because many of them give a snapshot -albeit sometimes whimsical- of people’s desires or of what tomorrow could bring ... We all need these communication technologies but sometimes we might feel overwhelmed, right? surely there should be a way to get some control over them. The industry has had little incentive to address the problem and give us more control. I hope that they are already getting their designers and engineers to work on that (especially when it comes to the technology that seems to frighten everyone: RFID). in the meantime artists are exploring methods of self-defense. hopefully they will inspire someone out there ... I think if one is willing to look beyond the quirkiness and delirious aspect of some installations or applications, there’s a lot to learn and get inspired from.
[...]
NN: To me, humor plays an important role in what you’re posting in WMMNA. How do you think this dimension can bring critical elements about technology usages?
RD: I think humour is very important. it helps getting the attention of the audience. humour puts the piece into a non-threatening, non-intimidating light. which helps a lot to get the message out.
[...]
NN: Since I am doing research about location-based applications, I would be happy to know what you think about locative media. It seems that the scene failed (see for instance what Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis says about it), do you have any thought about that? You were curator at Sonar about locative media project, have you seen new project that would foster a revival of this trend?
RD: [An] example is the Feral Robots by urban tapestry. I like this idea of using locative media to give the man on the street the tools to understand what’s going on in his own neighbourhood, to do that in a playful, non-academic, non-threatening way.
"She should embrace the fact that she *already does* influence people and could make a great contribution as a critic. If 'critic' is too strong a word, think of it as being a 'teacher.' Teach me what's interesting about a project. Teach me how it builds on what came before, or merely duplicates other ideas. Teach me how it extends the dialog about people and technology, or is just a whimsical experiment...But more interesting is the work of the many artist-engineers that blurs the line between the two fields. Exploring the cultural, ethical, and artistic qualities of *that* work is an area just waiting for someone like Regine to take it on!"
Technosocial Screens: Mobilities, Communities, Citizenships
screen, v. to show, or hide from view; to sift or separate; to shelter or protect
New interactive technologies promise to reconfigure relations between producers and consumers, public and private, physical and digital, local and global - and in these shifting scenarios the screen takes on a multitude of roles. Not only are screens changing size and resolution, some are becoming softer and more flexible, and others are disappearing entirely. Some screens offer a bird's-eye view of the world that we can hold in our hands, and others tell us where we are - or could be - at any given moment. Whatever the type of screen, we can be sure of one thing: people, places, objects and ideas are being screened at the same time.
Together we will explore some of the critical ways in which new media technologies shape, and are shaped by, our changing experiences and understandings of community and citizenship. What kind of shelter and hope can we expect from a world of everywhere and anywhere media? From what, and whom, are we protecting ourselves? How are these technological practices sorting our everyday social, cultural and creative relationships? What, and whom, gets hidden - or cannot hide? How can new media technologies explore different ways of belonging and being together? How can they encourage diverse and lively participation and representation around shared matters of concern?
SCHOLARSHIP UPDATE: Apply by July 27
"Interactive Screen allows you the time and space you need to share in understanding the creative, social, and business potential of new media. Discussions, roundtables, working sessions with peers, and case studies converge with live performances.
Apply today for one of 11 full Interactive Screen scholarships. Canadian new media producers, content creators and artists are eligible. Scholarships include tuition, travel and accommodation.
Scholarship winners will be mentored by Jan-Christoph Zoels, one of Europe’s leading interface and application designers, the founder and director of User Experience Design at Experientia (Italy), and senior associate professor at Interaction-Ivrea. One-on-one mentorship will include access to production facilities, project pitching, critique sessions, and the opportunity to work with Jan-Christoph and the Interactive Screen team to develop your project, services, and processes."
"We can obviously no longer duck and cover. These times require designers and content-creators to become involved in the economic context of our work. Of course economics turns out to implicate culture and politics as well. Poisonous ideas can be found lurking in the mightiest global institution of all - consumerism.
Here's what I want to say. Consumerism demeans us. Nobody wants to be a consumer. The power relationship implied by the term should be unacceptable to everyone, if they were able to understand it. I picture a 'consumer' as something like a giant slug, a simple tube through which stuff passes from retail to landfill.
[...]
But back to business. Obviously, an all-out revolution against consumerism would be, shall we say, resisted. But a serious head-change is definitely in order. I propose that each of us actively redefine the success criteria for business to include the cultural and material costs and benefits of the product, as well as what we currently think of as 'the bottom line.' I'm suggesting that we find ways to help both kids and adults have access to this material and the means to understand it. I want every person in this country to know the unauthorized biography of every single thing they buy.
[...]
Design gives voice to values. Design suggests what is useful or beautiful or pleasurable or good or true. The affordances of a design suggest desirable actions. A design that has not engaged the designer's values may speak, but with a hollow voice. We know the rules of good design. But it often comes as a delightful revelation to young designers that brilliant design not only permits but requires the designer's personal voice.
And so we arrive at the happy confluence of responsibility and power. We are only the victims and servants of business as usual if we choose to be. This work of transformation - which I have come to think of as 'culture work' - must be approached mindfully and with great conviction and effort. The strategy of culture work is not straight-ahead revolution; rather it is to inject new genetic material into the culture without activating its immune system. By intervening in the present, we are designing the future.
I wish us all a great deal of courage, self-discipline, and clear-eyed hope."
American Women: Partners in Research (1960)
"It begins like this: basic research develops new materials to cope with the space age we're living in...Now the problem is this: Now that we have the material, what products can be made better than ever by using it? And more important still, how can industry be sure that what it makes are the things that people really want?
It starts with men: designers, engineers, production men. First they determine what things can be made better [and it] seems there is no doubt there is a need for good percolators. But it's also an established fact that 3 out of 4 new household products just don't sell. Or to put it another way, the women of America will not buy 3 out of 4 new products offered to them for their homes because they aren't what women want. That's the basic problem and that's the reason for this new partnership in research with women.
So first, the design department works out some preliminary shapes. And good as these designers are, they know that women have minds of their own. They've learned to seek the help of the American housewife. Now let's go on to the next step in design, and see how American women show one company what they want before it's offered for sale..."
A Plow For Mexican Peasant Farmers: A Challenge for Designers
"There is a tendency on the part of professionals to overlook value issues in their work...Professionals are predisposed to appraise issues from the standpoint of their own fund of technical knowledge. This is for the most part entirely proper, and it is what they have been trained to do. There is a weakness in this approach, however, namely that it tends to obscure the fact that some issues are not most appropriately dealt with from the perspective of their professional knowledge... [S]ome decisions are primarily matters of values. This affects not only the criteria appropriate for a decision, but also the decision as to who should make it..."
"Technology makes such a profound impact on a culture that there is always a question whether a particular technological artifact should be created at all. Some technological innovations have clearly been more destructive than constructive...The question about the ultimate value of a technological innovation is often difficult to answer, but it is one which an ethically sophisticated designer should consider..."
"First, a designer cannot answer all of the questions we have posed here. In order to do so, she would not only have to do an enormous amount of research, but she would have to know the particular social group for which the plow is being designed. Many of these questions would be answered in different ways for different social groups. Since the plow is presumably being designed for a large number of cultural groups, the designer cannot design the plow so as to accommodate only one such group. Perhaps, though, the engineer could design the plow so that it would be as adaptable as possible to the demands of different groups.
Second, the purpose of this discussion has not been to cause an engineer to be so obsessed with the cultural and ethical aspects of her work that she loses sight of more narrowly engineering considerations. Rather, the purpose has been to broaden the horizons of students, so that they will be more aware of the fact that design work does have social consequences. Engineers, like most of the rest of us, tend to forget the wider implications of what they do.
Third, this discussion also serves to raise the issue of 'problems of conscience' as they arise in engineering work. Engineers sometimes object to working on a project for moral reasons. Some engineers do not want to be associated with military projects. Others object to working on projects (such as dams or projects that involve draining wetlands) that they believe are destructive to the environment. Similarly, an engineer might believe that this plow should not be produced because it would have a negative impact on the culture of those who would use it."
"[Should] engineering societies...be more active in promoting the rights of engineers to object to work on the basis of a problem of conscience. Should engineering codes have a statement that at least encourages firms to provide alternative forms of work for an engineer who has a problem of conscience in working on a particular project?"
"Should social scientists accept defense funding? How [is] defense funding different from other kinds of government agency funding? How [is] it different from research funded by private businesses and industry?"
and more pointedly, citing Doerfel,
"Do we want to forego rich understanding of social relationships because such knowledge gets into the wrong hands? Do we want to be part of research – like that of the Army’s – so that we can have a chance to intellectually and ethically influence such endeavors?"
"Today, military funding organizations are interested in 'transitions' – in moving research up the 'supply chain' so that it can be incorporated into tools and decision aids and then 'fielded'.”
ESSAYS
:: Locative Media as Socialising and Spatialising Practice
by Anne Galloway and Matt Ward
:: Trace: Mapping The Emerging Urban Landscape
by Alison Sant
:: Swimming In The Grey Zones: Locating The Other Spaces In Mobile Art
by Leslie Sharpe
:: Locative Viscosity: Traces Of Social Histories In Public Space
by Lily Shirvanee
:: Locative Media: A Brief Bibliography And Taxonomy Of Gps-Enabled Locative Media
by Julian Bleecker and Jeff Knowlton
:: On Urban Markup: Frames Of Reference In Location Models For Participatory Urbanism
by Malcolm Mccullough
:: Asphalt Games: Enacting Place Through Locative Media
by Michele Chang and Elizabeth Goodman
:: The Design And Experience Of The Location-Based Performance Uncle Roy All Around You
by Steve Benford, Martin Flintham, Adam Drodz, Nick Tandavanitj, Matt Adams and Ju Row Farr
:: Performing Sonic City: Situated Creativity In Mobile Music Making
by Lalya Gaye and Lars Erik Holmquist
:: Locative Media & Instantiations Of Theatrical Boundaries
by Sally-Jane Norman
:: Homing Devices For Unhomely Times
by Misha Myers
BIBLIOGRAPHY
:: Locative media bibliography
GALLERY
:: Locative Media, on and off the beaten track
curated by Suhjung Hur, Annie On Ni Wan, Andrew Paterson
"We believe...that the goals of scholarship, teaching, and service are deeply intertwined, and that a reimagining of the scholarly press through the affordances of contemporary network technologies will enable us not simply to build a better publishing process but also to forge better relationships among colleagues, and between the academy and the public.
Such dialogue will foster new scholarship that operates in modes that are collaborative, interactive, multimediated, networked, nonlinear, and multi-accented. In the process, an open access scholarly network will also build bridges with diverse non-academic communities, allowing the academy to regain its credibility with these constituencies who have come to equate scholarly critical discourse with ivory tower elitism.
[...]
Such openness and interconnection will also allow us to make the process of scholarly work just as visible and valuable as its product; readers will be able to follow the development of an idea from its germination in a blog, though its drafting as an article, to its revisions, and authors will be able to work in dialogue with those readers, generating discussion and obtaining feedback on work-in-progress at many different stages. Because such discussions will take place in the open, and because the enormous time lags of the current modes of academic publishing will be greatly lessened, this ongoing discourse among authors and readers will no doubt result in the generation of many new ideas, leading to more exciting new work.
[...]
Our plan is to develop and employ a process of 'peer-to-peer review,' in which texts are discussed and, in some sense, 'ranked' by a committed community of readers. This new process will shift the purpose of such review from a gatekeeping function, determining whether or not a manuscript should be published, to one that instead determines how a text should be received. Peer-to-peer review will also focus on the development of authors and the deepening of ideas, rather than simply an up-or-down vote on any particular text."
Seeding a mongrel practice: anthropological reflections on art + design + everyday life
"Art and design have long understood the importance of context, and since anthropology shares this concern I thought it would make a fertile place to begin our courtship. After all, each of us approaches our own practice in terms of the meaning and value we attribute to particular connections between people, places, objects and ideas--even if those meanings and values may differ--and I believe we can learn a great deal from each other. After exploring some of the ways in which symbolic and material culture, history, and power play out in the everyday practices of art, design and anthropology, we'll discuss some of the related ethical challenges we face as students, teachers and practitioners in an increasingly interconnected world. And ultimately, we'll begin to imagine what might constitute a socially and culturally critical practice--a mongrel and voluptuous practice--based on our shared concerns."
(image from Uncomfortable Proximity by Harwood@Mongrel)
The Surveillance Project
"The Surveillance Project researches the ways in which personal data are processed. We explore why information about people has become so important in the 21st century and what are the social, political and economic consequences of this trend. Questions of 'privacy' and of 'social sorting' are central to our concerns.
Surveillance is 'any systematic attention to a person's life aimed at exerting influence over it' (James Rule). So The Surveillance Project studies everything from supermarket loyalty cards to police networks searching for suspects. We have a special interest in the surveillance aspects of post 9/11 quest for tightened security. While high-tech methods have become very significant, we also examine surveillance as face-to-face supervision or as mediated watching using video cameras.
Surveillance is not simply about large organizations using sophisticated computer equipment. It is also about how ordinary people - citizens, workers, travelers, and consumers - interact with surveillance. Some comply, others negotiate, and yet others resist. The Surveillance Project explores how expanding flows of personal data affect and are affected by everyday life."
OpenNet Initiative
The ONI mission is to investigate and challenge state filtration and surveillance practices. Our approach applies methodological rigor to the study of filtration and surveillance blending empirical case studies with sophisticated means for technical verification. Our aim is to generate a credible picture of these practices at a national, regional and corporate level, and to excavate their impact on state sovereignty, security, human rights, international law, and global governance.
InfoWar Monitor
The Information Warfare Monitor is an advanced research project examining how states and non-state actors seek to exploit information and information systems to pursue political objectives through non-political means. The project seeks to examine this emerging dimension of global security on two levels: Operational Case Studies & Consequences for Global Security.
Hactivista
Hacktivista is the story of three University of Toronto students (Nart, Michelle, and Graeme) who travel with their professor to Guatemala and Chiapas to work with human rights organizations and activists on Internet security and connectivity - and produce a documentary series in the process.
In his own words: "In the conceptual restaurant 'Sprout' vegetables are grown and consumed in a greenhouse. The vegetable parts that are not suitable for consumption which are normally thrown away in the kitchen, are used now as resource for products like plates and bowls. This is achieved by shredding, drying and moulding the vegetable fibres with a hand press. In order to make the products hygienic and moisture resistant a transparant sheet of biodegradable plastic (PLA) is laminated in the inside. The outside is left uncovered, in order to reveal the material by smell, touch and sight. 
Since the menu is based on seasonally grown crops, the material of the products changes accordingly, and are therefore intended to be used only once. After use, the dirty plates and bowls are fed together with foodleftovers to a biodigester to create biogas for cooking. The residue from this process is a nutrient rich fertilizer to grow new crops from in the greenhouse."
The Empty Life, 1963
In a lovely twist on Sartre's notion that hell is other people, Paul Davies' Prayer Antenna project allows wearers to receive signals from god - "yes, your God.""[I] have found with friends when you actually start talking [a problem] out you are really fixing and solidifying the conflicts: marking them. But if you were to go away for a couple of weeks or couple of months, other things may have started in your life, and you are not quite the same person anymore. And maybe you could just put aside your quarrel without ever having resolved it, because you are now both somewhat different people...[Y]ou establish a discontinuity, in which something new gets born."
Mobile Phones and Spirituality, on BBC Radio 4 in 2005
Getting to God: Technology, Religion and the New Enlightenment, Alex Pang's notes on a talk at the IFTF in 2004
Does Jesus do SMS?: Religion, Technology and Ubiquitous Computing, Melissa Ho's notes on a lecture at SIMS in 2004
Science and the Theft of Humanity
Geoffrey Harpham
"The demarcation of fields makes it possible not only to achieve precise sectoral knowledge, but also to mark the progress of knowledge as limited sets of problems are solved, one after another. Compartmentalization also, however, creates a host of unintended consequences, and some of these have proved to be just as productive as the intended ones. By limiting the kinds of questions that can be posed, departmental thought intentionally screens out certain features of reality, and while this partial blindness can be counted as a necessary condition of modern knowledge, it creates the conditions for an interdisciplinary reaction that blends two or more approaches to achieve results unobtainable by either: hence biochemistry, sociobiology, genetic engineering, architectural ethics and countless other innovations that are virtually invited by the limitations of disciplinarity.
But the most exciting and unpredictable unintended consequence of disciplinarity is the opportunity it creates for poaching, which happens when one discipline opts out of the gentleman's agreement allotting certain questions to certain disciplines and starts answering questions it is not even supposed to ask. This is happening today. Certain disciplines of science—having endured the skeptical and even debunking attention of philosophy, history, gender studies, cultural studies and literary studies, not to mention 'science studies'—have for some time been engaging in a quiet counteroffensive by making a series of little raids, each one limited in its scope and aspirations but potentially immense in the aggregate, on the one question above all that has been ruled off limits for them—the question of the human.
[...]
Autonomy, singularity, creativity—each of these terms names both a long-standing concern of the humanities and a set of contemporary projects being undertaken in the sciences...These projects may well force us to modify our understanding of traditional moral and philosophical questions, including the definition of and value attached to such presumptively nonhuman concepts as 'the animal' and 'the machine.'
We must understand that while scientists are indeed poaching [humanist] concepts, poaching in general is one of the ways in which disciplines are reinvigorated, and this particular act of thievery is nothing less than the primary driver of the transformation of knowledge today. For their part, those investigating the human condition from a nonhumanistic perspective must accept the contributions of humanists, who have a deep and abiding stake in all knowledge related to the question of the human.
We stand today at a critical juncture not just in the history of disciplines but of human self-understanding, one that presents remarkable and unprecedented opportunities for thinkers of all descriptions. A rich, deep and extended conversation between humanists and scientists on the question of the human could have implications well beyond the academy. It could result in the rejuvenation of many disciplines, and even in a reconfiguration of disciplines themselves—in short, a new golden age."
See also:
Chaos and Feminism — A Complex Dynamic: Parallels Between Feminist Philosophy of Science and Chaos Theory by Mary Ann McClure
(via wood s lot)
a normal spider web
spider on caffeine
spider on hash
spider on mescaline
spider on lsd
"[W]e've been running a 5 day workshop with a class of 30 nine year olds in Year 4 at the Jenny Hammond Primary School with our friend and collaborator Loren Chasse. The workshop focused on 'everyday archaeology' - a term we're using to describe investigations of the local environment using a combination of Feral Robots, Urban Tapestries, Sound Scavenging, an Endless Landscape, StoryCubes and eBooks.
Over the course of the week we have been using everyday archaeology to teach the students about relationships between the environment and pollution. The students have been acting as scientists and archaeologists to gather evidence about the world around them to uncover causes of pollution. This has been a trigger for them to imagine what they could do to help the environment and think about the kind of world they want to grow up in. The students gathered audio recordings, photographic evidence and used the Feral Robots to detect air quality in a local park, wrote stories based on the Endless Landscape, designed their own robots and created structures and environments using the StoryCubes. The workshop covered a range of key skills and concepts from map reading, making media, storytelling, drawing and literacy to more abstract concepts, science and maths - an intense and broad immersion for the students, teachers and for us."
"In The Arte of English Poesie (1589) George Puttenham defines a posy as 'a short epigram . . . printed upon . . . banketting dishes of suger plate' and taken home at the end of the feast by each guest as a kind of party favor.' 'Nowadays,' he continues, posies are more commonly painted 'upon the backsides of our fruit trenchers of wood' or used 'as devises in rings and armes and about such courtly purposes.' For Puttenham the posy is the exemplary form of poetry at the court of Elizabeth. Pinned to trees and curtains, set upon conduits, and wrapped around gifts; or plaited into bracelets, embroidered onto clothes and copied into books, the posy plays a crucial role in the material exchange of favors that articulates life at court. As material forms, posies were classified according to a once fluid and now invisible taxonomy of location.
[...]
It is worth insisting that the posy - a piece of writing with physical extension - cannot exist as text in the abstract. To make a distinction that would have been incomprehensible to his readers, Tusser's 'Husbandly Posies' are patterns for posies rather than the things themselves: it is the householder who, copying them onto her walls, or cutting the book in order to paste them there, makes a posy from a text ... [T]he Elizabethans understood reading and writing as procedures for the gathering, storage, and redeployment of well-framed wisdom. Within such a regimen writing is that which frames truth to catch the eye or memory: like the stylistic devices of brevity or ornament, writing can, in and of itself, add weight to a sentence.
In The Art of Memory (1621) John Willis lists the procedures of condensation and displacement that produce memorable representations. Such representations or 'ideas' can be either 'direct' (where the image of a boat stands for a boat) or 'oblique . . . whereby the thing to be remembered is obliquely or indirectly signified.' Willis distinguishes three types of oblique idea: the 'relative' (that is, the metonymic), the 'subdititial' (the metaphoric), and the 'scriptile' (the written): 'a Scriptile idea is, whereby the thing to be remembered, is supposed to be written on a plaine white table hanged up in the midst of the opposite wall'. Within the imagined space of his memory system, Willis advises that ideas be stored in the places they would occupy in real life.
[...]
According to the sermon given at her funeral Anne Clifford decorated the walls, hangings, and furniture of her bed-chamber with 'sentences or sayings of remark':
'She would frequently bring out of the rich Store-house of her memory, things new and old, Sentences, or Sayings of remark, which she had read or learned out of Authors and with these her Wals, her Bed, her Hangings, and Furniture must be adorned; causing her Servants to write them in Paper, and her Maids to pin them up, that she, or they, in time of their dressing, or as occasion served, might remember, and make their descants upon them. So that, though she had not many Books in her Chamber, yet it was dressed up with the flowers of a library.'
[...]
The practice of early modern wall writing may then have materially informed not only memory systems based on imagined interior 'places,' but also the mental topography of the intellectual system that manifested itself in the keeping of commonplace books.
[...]
The writing that survives from the Elizabethan period was produced by people who had the technological and financial resources for the laborious procedures of securing paper, pen, and ink. The poor, the hurried, and those (it may have been practically everybody) unconcerned with the extensive circulation and long survival of their bons mots wrote with charcoal, chalk, stone, and pencil. That the bulk of early modern writing was written on walls, and was consequently both erasable and in our own scheme of things out of place, is a proposition with consequences beyond current assumptions about the constitution and statistics of literacy in the early modern period. For it prompts us to imagine, in an age to which is ascribed the inauguration of 'proper' writing, a widespread, and in contemporary terms multiply 'undisciplined' writing practice: one within which writing and drawing are not fully distinguishable; defacement operates as a principle of textual production; the page is no longer an important boundary; and the written product cannot be taught, reproduced, or sold as a commodity. Elizabethan wall-writing is, in short, graffiti by another name.
[...]
Today the uncanny effect of wall-writing depends in part on the dizzying collapse of language into its material forms with which graffiti seems to present us: words flee, writing remains - and remains to speak in the voice of the undead. But it is a marked fact that in the age of Elizabeth, in spite of reformation concern over idolatry, written language does not seem to be aspiring to full transparency, and is still tending to accord sentience to its own material supports ... By the second half of the sixteenth century plaster was made according to a process that produced intense heat and columns of steam from cold limestone, and required the admixture of animal hair: it thus offered a rich metaphorical field for those who wrote about, on, and in it. Blood, charcoal, marking stones of all colours, smoke, lead, and diamonds on glass had further properties of their own; and each drew on the overdetermined terms 'shade' or 'shadow,' to mark or draw."
- Juliet Fleming, 1997, "Wounded walls: Graffiti, grammatology, and the age of Shakespeare", Criticism 39(1): 1-30.
"Women’s increasing engagement with computers as users has not been accompanied by a parallel increase in the proportion of women studying for and working in computing jobs. Hopes that the Internet and mobile phones—both, in general, now used by women in equal numbers to men—would level the playing field have not proved grounded. Women seem inclined to regard these technologies as enabling tools for communication and the execution of other goals, rather than interesting objects of study in themselves. So, while the ever changing nature of technology itself is, no doubt, introducing new challenges, and therefore demanding new strategies, it would appear that the discomfort and indifference that many women feel with technology persists.
[...]
So in proposing change, participants in the forum made a distinction between initiatives that seek to change women and those that change the environment; elegantly caught in the phrase: ‘change the water, not the fish’. The participants raised the question that comes up in all debates about equal opportunities: do we focus on attempts to change women—such as giving them different skills and making them tough enough to cope in masculine cultures—or do we want to change the culture so that women are more comfortable in it in the first place?" (via)
"The projects we are doing here are based in ideas of interaction with environments that somehow incorporate their own metabolisms of self-sensing and self-reacting."
WEAVER
The emergence of intelligent textiles as a means of embedding technology into woven surfaces has received a huge amount of international interest during the last decade. Electronically informed materials that change colour, form or texture reacting to sensor based input such as light, sound or heat are beginning to define a research field between Human Computer Interaction, textile design and fashion. Intelligent clothes, active textiles and wearables are research areas that explore how we can engage with technology through its, and our, embodied presence.
Weaver seeks to explore the potential intersections between an intelligent surface and its inhabitation. As a collaboration between architecture and textile design, the aim is to explore the spatial potential of a continually changing surface as well as its material properties. Working between the scaled and the actual, Weaver seeks to explore ideas of a fluid morphology, taking shape through its performance."
"I think the wider interest in the idea of decentralisation or distribution and self-organisation is really connected to an idea of urbanism. The idea of a sensor as that which picks up on a particular dimension of a space (e.g. shifts in the magnetic field, dark areas in the camera picture etc) is a monocular world view. However if the city is a performed condition taking place through the multiple agents or actors drawing their own territories, temporal and spatial, it is perhaps through this monocular awareness that difference and contradiction can take place while still sustaining an idea of a shared territory."
"This symposium, organized around the notion of an 'encounter,' will attempt to articulate new research vectors, sites of practice, and working methods for the confluence of architecture and situated technologies. What opportunities and dilemmas does a world of networked objects and spaces pose for architecture, art, and computing? How might this evolving relation between people and 'things' alter the way we occupy, navigate, and inhabit the built environment? What post-optimal design strategies and tactics might we propose for an age of responsive environments, smart materials, embodied interaction, and participatory networks? What is the status of the material object in a world privileging networked relations between 'things'? How do distinctions between space and place change within these networked media ecologies? Given the explosive market proliferation of mobile communications and wireless networks, what distinguishes the emerging urban sociality they enable? How do the social uses of these technologies, including (non-) affective giving, destabilize rationalized 'use-case scenarios' designed around the generic consumer? These are just a few of the questions we want to address.
Through a combination of workshops, presentations, and panel discussions, the symposium will attempt to stage a set of encounters between invited participants, an audience encouraged to participate, and the City of New York. This event will be podcast and a publication will follow."
July: Trebor Scholz
Topics: Networked Public Sphere, Autonomous Uses of Situated Sociable Media
August: Omar Khan
Topics: Performance Paradigms, Responsive Architecture and Artificial Ecologies
September: Mark Shepard
Topics: Locative Media, Tactical Urbanism, Situated Aesthetics
