Test Lab this evening at V2 in Rotterdam, with demonstrations of 4 projects from artists who’ve been working there over the summer. I’m interested to see how the mix between demonstration/exhibition/talk format works. The Lab will be streamed live on V2 website, if it’s a good stream I definitely recommend watching as I suspect the projects will be both progressive and antagonistic. Review to follow!
The film above by Chris Marker, could be taken as an interesting design research proposition, and way of visualising scenarios. ‘Future Artifacts’ (to which this film could possibly tenuously be said to belong) are a useful way of trying to ‘evidence’ the impact of design decisions, particularly across larger and more complex projects that involve networks, services and interactions.
Marker himself is a very interesting filmmaker and visualiser, a leading exponent of the ‘compilation’ or ‘essay’ film. ‘Notes from the era of imperfect memory‘ is a blog dedicated to him and his work.
Thanks to Gordon Hush for the link.
iPhones can now play Flash content via Frash app that works within Safari browser. Currently only works on phones that have been Jailbroken. Now legal in USA but still resisted by Apple who say it voids your warranty. Maybe this will weaken their resolve to work with Adobe on Flash support.
Sure you have all seen homestarrunner by the Chapman brothers that the demo uses to display flash based content.
This playful installation by Troika, based on the Alan Fletcher original, (and which creates a mechanical palindrome of sorts), provides the perfect excuse to reveal my two favourite palindromes, which I imagine readers will be desperate to know. They are;
Satan oscillate my metallic sonatas
and
ABBA.
John Underkoffler speaks effortlessly on UI (User Interface) for computation. He believes advances in UI have been neglected in the quest for bigger memory and faster processing. Watch out Wii.
Project produced by Rotterdam company V2, where Herman Asselbergh dismantles a brand new MacBook Pro piece by piece. Although the online video is only a clip right now, the still image makes me very exited to see the finished autopsy. Asselberghs comments on the contradiction between how often we see laptops in artworks and the ubiquity of them in our lives.
If you’re interested in network cultures, web design (history thereof), or eyeballs and attention, this post might be useful. It has lots of good links, uselessly hidden in a rambling text.
Two money related links – the first to an enlightening excerpt from an RSA lecture by radical geographer David Harvey, with helpful accompanying animation.
And secondly, a conference (with some interesting speakers) that asks the following questions: “Data visualisation – a genre within visual culture that depicts data streams in provocative, poetic or insightful ways – has been booming, thanks to the growing availability of large amounts of data and the desire to grasp ever more complex realities by visual means. But is it always a good idea to assign such an important role to numerical information? How can we best interpret various data in relation to the values we consider important? And which new forms of storytelling does data visualisation have to offer us? Will the data film be the new documentary form?”
(and point 2.1, if you’re mad for data, the following set of videos from the gov 2.0 conference in the US)
This archive contains some interesting talks, such as the one above featuring 5 middle-class white men talking about atemporality, which sort of links to lizzies previous post about power-browsing (i think): from the Video Archive | transmediale.
Design Interactions Show 2010, online. RCA Show 2 on till next weekend.
More on Death by Design.
(Photograph by Leander Johnson)
A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention recently fell into alignment (by chance) with this other D.O. post from John Thackara;
“Emitting messages, however clever and evocative they may be, is not the same as being with real people, in real places, who are changing their lived material reality. That’s why I have a radical proposal: Consider speaking your words in a place rather than pressing “send.” … ( and one for Simon here) … Ivan Illich believed that our culture started to go off the rails in 1120, when monks stopped reading texts aloud to each other and became solitary scholars…”
This (as well as being directly mirrored by the way I’m collating all these sources and redistributing them) links (with varying degrees of tangential-ness) to a previous post about ways of thinking and processing information, the rise of the schizoid reader (unable or unwilling to process texts in a linear and ‘complete’ fashion) and the ahead-of-their-time work of the amazing Muriel Cooper and the MIT Media Lab. (from 1994 — see below)
Visually *sparky* design (for the European Design Festival in Rotterdam) from StudioDumbar(1), makes me want to move to the Netherlands, where people generally seem (to me) more relaxed about this sort of thing.
(1) Their Performance of ‘Sniff & Kiss’, a portrait of Studio Dumbar, at Typo Berlin 2010 Saturday 22nd of May, sounds interesting.
Whilst cautious of sounding like a right sad-bastard, this augmented reality iPhone application seems like an interesting way of giving archives and collections a geographical context, and taking them out of the museum, via: Creative Review – StreetMuseum iPhone app.
The principle of hacking could be applied to any situation where you find yourself thinking that something isn’t what it could be, from a piece of furniture, to an educational institution, to a piece of software, to a government. As a facet of ‘open-source’, the idea of hacking and reverse-engineering is at the heart of the principle of re-purposing and re-using knowledge, tools and technology, and Science Hack Day (London, June 19th–20th) applies this to the field of science and technology. Sign up if you fancy creating artificial life in your fridge, beyond that over-ripe stilton sitting at the back.
Video: Guardian Website Hackday.
OFF THE WALL by the Yale Graphic Design 2010 MFA cohort, is energetic but employs a visually difficult navigation (in execution, not necessarily in concept), which fails to show the work at a meaningful scale (i think).
The same but different. Play these videos at the same time.
Use Me, Abuse Me explores several questions, including: Where will image-making take us? Will all existing photography be endlessly recycled? Will we soon see more photographers taking fewer photographs? How far can we stretch the medium of photography?
via The New York Photo Festival | The Future of Contemporary Photography.
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