Edwin Gardner is a writer, theorist and architect.
For an overview of my writings and projects go here
2010 - present | Editorial Consultant Volume
2009 - present | Researcher at Partizan Publik
2005 - 2010 | Webeditor at Archis/Volume
2000 - 2009 | BSc & MSc Architecture at Technical University Delft | Graduated in Architecture Theory | thesis: Reasoning in
Architecture; About the Diagrammatic Nature of Thinking with Real and Imagined Objects
2006 - 2007 | Istanbul Technical University | Erasmus Student Exchange Program
2005 - 2006 | The Projective Landscape; A Conference on Projective Practice | Initiator and organizer
2003 - 2004 | D.B.S.G Stylos | Board member of the Architecture Student Association of TU Delft
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Mad Men as thousands download via bittorrent
shared on 20 April 2012 | 6:31 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
The BitTorrent protocol lets groups of people download parts of a single file from each other, so instead of one file from a single source, you get multiple bits from different places. Artist Conor McGarrigle shows this activity via an episode of Mad Men, as it's downloaded.
The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent with the corruption of the file a direct result of the bittorrent protocol. The video acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and avoids infringing the copyright of Madmen as it is incomplete. Curiously the greater number of simultaneous users sharing the file the more aesthetically pleasing are the distortion effects.
Poetic almost.
[via Waxy]
tigerbones:
melisaki:untitled
oil on canvas by Heinz Mack,...
shared on 20 April 2012 | 1:35 pm via: Howard Roark
melisaki:untitled
oil on canvas by Heinz Mack, 1961
(via B. W. Betts’ Geometrical Psychology | The Public Domain...
shared on 17 April 2012 | 10:37 pm via: Howard Roark
(via B. W. Betts’ Geometrical Psychology | The Public Domain Review)
Grundeinkommen - 22 Translation(s) | dotSUB
shared on 16 April 2012 | 5:22 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
epigothica:
Sumerian Star Chart
Sky Map of Ancient Nineveh...
shared on 16 April 2012 | 11:23 am via: Howard Roark
Sumerian Star Chart
Sky Map of Ancient Nineveh 3300 BC
A reproduction of a Sumerian star map or “planisphere” recovered from the 650BC underground library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, Iraq in the late 19th century. Long thought to be an Assyrian tablet, computer analysis has matched it with the sky above Mesopotamia in 3300BC and proves it to be of much more ancient Sumerian origin. The tablet is an “Astrolabe”, the earliest known astronomical instrument. It usually consisted of a segmented, disc shaped star chart with marked units of angle measure inscribed upon the rim. Unfortunately considerable parts of the planisphere are missing ( approx 40%), damage which dates to the sacking of Nineveh. The reverse of the tablet is not inscribed. Still under study by modern scholars, the planisphere provides extraordinary proof of the existence of Sumerian astronomy…and a very sophisticated astronomy at that.
unknown author
freshphotons:
“This image is based on a page from my comic,...
shared on 15 April 2012 | 7:10 pm via: Howard Roark
“This image is based on a page from my comic, Islands, in which the main character discovers that things are not what they have always seemed to be. The comic is about a solitary journey through a dream that mixes astrophysics and bending realities. The drawings were made in the winter and spring of 2011 while I was abroad in Sweden.” – Brendan Monroe
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The Pentagon Competes for Hacker Hearts and Minds
shared on 10 April 2012 | 4:56 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
A clap of thunder in the hacker/maker community: Mitch Altman, respected DIY guru and co-founder of San Francsco’s legendary Noisebridge hackerspace, publicly announced via the hackerspaces.org mailing list that he would not be participating in this year’s Maker Faire, THE annual hacker/maker get-together. Some 100,000 enthusiasts of reappropriation descended on California for last year’s event.
Altman’s withdrawal comes in the wake of what he considers a compromising deal agreed between Maker Faire and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s controversial research and development agency.
It’s official. I’m greatly saddened that I won’t be able to help at this year’s Maker Faire after they applied for and accepted a grant from DARPA. I look forward to working and playing at Maker Faire again, after they are no longer associated with DARPA.
The grant is part of a DARPA educational program known as MENTOR (Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach), set up to encourage the creation of new design tools and collaborative manufacturing practices for students. MENTOR is itself part of the larger Adaptive Vehicle Make project, which aims to “revolutionise the way defence systems and vehicles are designed“.
Meanwhile, Jerry Isdale, a member of the Hawaiian MauiMakers hackerspace, joyfully announced that the Hacker Space Program, an international space exploration program, had been selected by DARPA to negotiate for a contract.
Those who want to flame about taking government money can do so…We just wont pass any $ your way.
The two announcements have provoked reactions that provide an insight into the ambiguous relationship that the hacker/maker community maintains with the prestigious DARPA, a relationship that calls into question a complex array of moral, financial and patriotic considerations, and a creeping politicisation of the movement. Mathilde Berchon spent several months immersed in the maker community in San Francisco:
The debate illustrates the divide between real hackers – more politicised, activists, some even anarchists – and the majority of the troops who associate themselves more with the maker community. The average member is a decent family man who tinkers with and fixes things in his garage, drinking beer, who loves his country and wants to defend it, without being a hardcore patriot. With this grant, Make is running the risk of alienating the more radical fringe.
Ultimately, the news is forcing everyone to take a side, redrawing demarcations which had seemed to have faded between subversive hackers and mainstream makers.
The Military-Industrial Elephant in the room
Dale Dougherty, an equally emblematic figure of the community, is co-founder of programming manuals publisher O’Reilly Media and Make magazine, and an organiser of Maker Faire. He wasquick to justify his decision in a long blog post, whilst also making clear he respected Mitch’s decision.
Our program would encourage schools to engage more kids in making by creating makerspaces and providing access to these tools for student projects, and use Maker Faire to showcase more work from students.
We were motivated to apply for the DARPA grant by the following statement that was part of the MENTOR program: “One of the biggest challenges we face as a nation is the decline in our ability to make things,” Dr. Regina Dugan, then Director of DARPA.
“As a nation.” The program is limited to American schools, even though the hacker ethic rejects the notion of borders. Dale Dougherty also tried to put to rest some of the “speculation” that had been circulating regarding the grant. YES, the software will of course be developed as open source, a requirement of the program; NO, the students’ work will not be owned by DARPA; YES, the military did participate at Maker Faire in Detroit; YES, they work with NASA, the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, because “if you want to work in education, you need to work in the government“.
While it’s worth recalling that DARPA funds represent just one facet of Make’s educational activities, what gives Mitch Altman and many others pause is that DARPA is part of the military-industrial complex. It’s a point that Dale Dougherty does not mention in his post, as noted by a member of the California hackerspace HeatSync on the hackerspaces.org mailing list.
His argument amounts to “the ends justify the means.” He ignores objections to the military-industrial complex, instead assuring us with talk of open-source. Why should the military be funding education when military spending has been astronomical and education spending has been strangled for the past decade?
Dale Dougherty simply dodges the issue.
MIT also produces engineers who work in a variety of fields, including the military. This is true of every university that trains scientists and engineers in the US.
Mathilde Berchon, meanwhile, has her own take on Dougherty.
He believes that his ideals are so strong that they won’t be swallowed up.
Care Bears
There is, however, opposition to the Care Bears thinking of “purists” like Mitch Altman. Following his own logic, he should no longer use the Internet, which is the modern descendent of Arpanet, the communication network set up to link universities working with DARPA. The Internet has a big fat military gene.
Jerry Isdale, the hacker who was so excited to receive DARPA funding for the Hacker Space Program, took to the mailing list to vent some spleen.
Sorry but I’m a bit confused by Mitch’s refusal to attend Maker Faire because DARPA funds its high school educational program, but his willingness to go to China and attend Maker Carnival, etc. The Chinese government (as socialist/communist state) is heavily invested in its industry, tourism, military and occupation of various former other countries (e.g. Tibet). China is seeking to benefit its military/domestic security, etc by bringing in western technology. Going to China is as supportive of the repression of Tibet as going to Maker Faire is of supporting US DoD”
The DARPA hacker
These heated, occasionally violent exchanges are set to continue in person. Mitch Altman intends to hold a debate at the HOPE #9 (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference, to be held in New York in July. He’s hoping to bring along an old hand who knows a lot about the subject: no less than Mudge, the mythical hacker who became a DARPA employee.
In 1998, members of Boston’s L0pht hackerspace famously explained to the US Senate that they could shut down the Internet in 30 minutes. Mudge, real name Peiter Zatko, was among this elite crew of hardcore hackers, and also a member of the infamous Cult of the Dead Cow. Far from an empty threat, the 30 minute warning was intended to make the US government aware of significant computer security vulnerabilities.
Mudge, like other hackers, continues to collaborate with the US state. Since 2010 he’s been working for DARPA, who hired him as program manager for cybersecurity as part of their CINDER (Cyber Insider Threat) project. That project’s goal? To prevent another WikiLeaks-style security breach. Mudge is also involved with the Cyber Fast Track program launched in 2011, which ostensibly flirts with hackers. Working with short-term contracts, CFT is operationally extremely flexible – a proposed project can be given the green light within seven days, an unheard of timescale within the industry. Needless to say, the concept has generated much discussion in the community.
Image Credits: CC Flickr
The U.S. Army, Orin Zebest, tibchris
Follow @SabineBlanc on Twitter
Related: Mitch Altman & The Hacker Lifestyle
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Google Glasses? Heads up!
shared on 10 April 2012 | 2:06 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Google’s “Project Glass,” is the Augmented Reality (AR) Heads-up-Display (HUD) glasses offering that Google is designing for a near future Internet interactive experience.
Click here to view the embedded video.
(Video credit: Google)
From watching their demonstration video, I certainly have some questions and observations. Google’s vision (no pun intended) of the future is a place where people ignore women except as witnesses to their achievements, talk with their mouth full, and put their live friends on hold to interact with a machine (oh wait, that’s what people do now); and is one without ads (wait…what?). Thankfully, rebelliouspixels mixed them in:
Click here to view the embedded video.
(Video Credit: Google + rebelliouspixels)
As I wrote earlier in Connected cAR: Becoming the Cyborg Chauffeur, if Google has their way, we are about to be overwhelmed with synchronous (connecting in real time) and asynchronous (connecting in shifted time) messaging and communication while we walk.
If you’d like to read that piece, I’ll wait.
Not much difference. This time, the idea is that the Augmented Reality (AR) driven multiple input information will be applicable to everyone, not just those behind the wheel of cars. In the Connected cAR, the conculsion was that we were the intermediaries training the robots to drive. This time, we won’t be training the robots to walk for us. It’s more that our usage of Project Glass glasses will be training Google’s AI to learn about the world. This AI is still for the robots, but mostly likely for Google’s robots which aren’t here…yet.
Applin and Fischer’s (2012) recent paper, PolySocial Reality: Prospects for Extending User Capabilities Beyond Mixed, Dual and Blended Reality, discusses the evolution of software development and how the mobile-local-social-geo-web has changed the game with regard to human interaction and participation. PolySocial Reality (PoSR) is described as a conceptual model of the space that contains individuals’ multiplexed, synchronous and asynchronous individuated data creations. An instance of PoSR might contain behaviors such as walking while talking on a phone, while texting, while the phone checks into foursquare, and sends an update via Twitter and/or Facebook, while replying to incoming friends’ status update and/or other messages at the same time. Each instance of PoSR can contain a lot of action, which can cause distraction, and people may or may not be walking or (we hope not) driving while all this is happening. Because the actions of individuals may overlap, if true, the potential for distraction in each case compounds.
Applin and Fischer suggest that there are cases for historical software development and that we are moving from a homogenous model of having “one user, one machine,” or “one type of user, many machines,” towards a heterogenous model of “many users (all different) and many machines (also all different).” Google’s “Project Glass” in the video is shown as a case of “one user, one machine” in the video, but the actual reality of using the glasses likely will hover around being geared towards that of “many homogenous users, many machines” and when fully deployed, most likely a case of “many heterogenous users, many heterogenous machines” where there is fully functioning PoSR that becomes disruptive. In this last instance, designers and developers of programs must take into account a number of factors including the fact that:
“Details about the context of others are missing and my be difficult for individual users to infer or [contain] details that cannot be inferred; Highly complex elements of differentiated environments are combined into structures that appear different from each users’ point-of-view; and Users as distributed dynamic unique agents.”
This means that people in the Google Project Glass glasses bubble are going to be having some serious navigation problems.
When someone is walking down the street using a cell phone or, as the Google video illustrates, a cell phone like device, the negative consequences from instances of PoSR can become even more problematic. The 2009 study, “Did You See the Unicycling Clown? Inattentional Blindness while Walking and Talking on a Cell Phone”, (Hyman, Boss, Wise et al. 2009) examined the effects of walking while engaged with music players, cell phones or walking with others in a pair. The results showed that cell phone usage might cause an “inattentional blindness” even during an activity such as walking. Cell phone users were found to be less likely to notice something different on a normally travelled path when engaged with their phones. The study found that individuals while talking on a cell phone “experienced more difficulty navigating through a complex environment….walked slower, weaved more often, and made more direction changes.” The observed individuals who were engaged in cell phone conversations for the most part missed seeing a clown riding a unicycle in their immediate vicinity.
I’m going to write that again:
“The observed individuals who were engaged in cell phone conversations for the most part missed seeing a clown riding a unicycle in their immediate vicinity.”
This example illustrates problems for individual people engaged with cell phones conducting regular conversation. The Google Project Glass demo seemed to show simple cases of simple interaction in a nearly synchronous environment. The reality of today’s messaging is much more along the lines of multiple instances of PoSR, hovering more into the asynchronous rather than synchronous messaging category. This means more messages, more responses and less attention to the “unicycling clowns” on our paths and in our lives.
In short, while the idea of getting our attention away from looking down at a device, to looking at the world, when the phone is on our ear, the research still suggests that we have cognitive problems that keep us from acknowledging or understanding or even seeing events in our immediate proximity. If we multiply that by the aggregate of people wearing Google Project Glass glasses, I fear we are in for a bumpy ride.
This response to the Google demo pretty much sums it up:
Click here to view the embedded video.
(Video Credit: TomScott.com)
Sally Applin is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, in the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing (CSAC). Sally researches the impact of technology on culture, and vice versa.
floresenelatico:
Mel Chin: Revival Field
shared on 9 April 2012 | 9:59 am via: Howard Roark
Mel Chin: Revival Field
(via It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into...
shared on 9 April 2012 | 9:46 am via: Howard Roark
(via It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity - but does it float)
(via Zilvinas Kempinas) - via floresenelatico
shared on 8 April 2012 | 6:12 pm via: Howard Roark
(via Zilvinas Kempinas) - via floresenelatico
freshphotons:
(via dissociative-land, isomorphismes)
shared on 8 April 2012 | 5:08 pm via: Howard Roark
(via dissociative-land, isomorphismes)
nickkahler:
Viollet-le-Duc, The First Building, c. 1870
shared on 4 April 2012 | 5:00 pm via: Howard Roark
Viollet-le-Duc, The First Building, c. 1870
Checkthis
shared on 3 April 2012 | 4:30 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
handy tool if you just want to make one page (e-flyer/invite/...)
floresenelatico:
Marshall Islands, Navigation Chart,...
shared on 2 April 2012 | 10:38 am via: Howard Roark
Marshall Islands, Navigation Chart, wood/fiber, c. late 19th c.
Timeline
shared on 30 March 2012 | 4:57 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
finally a great timeline tool for on the web!
tomasorban:
Laser installation by Li Hui at the Singapore Art...
shared on 25 March 2012 | 10:48 am via: Howard Roark
Laser installation by Li Hui at the Singapore Art Museum, photographed by Choo Yut Shing
imaginarylands:
Erik Desmazieres, Théâtre de Géographie
shared on 25 March 2012 | 10:44 am via: Howard Roark
Erik Desmazieres, Théâtre de Géographie
optical grey (by adrien lucca) - follow the link to see the...
shared on 22 March 2012 | 6:02 pm via: Howard Roark
optical grey (by adrien lucca) - follow the link to see the ‘grey’
(via FFFFOUND! | Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe)
shared on 22 March 2012 | 12:00 am via: Howard Roark
(via FFFFOUND! | Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe)
archiveofaffinities:
Trim Castle, Plan, Trim, County Meath,...
shared on 14 March 2012 | 9:13 am via: Howard Roark
Trim Castle, Plan, Trim, County Meath, Ireland
f-featherbrain:
These images come from an album of geometric...
shared on 10 March 2012 | 2:05 pm via: Howard Roark
These images come from an album of geometric and perspective drawings (Codex Guelf 74. 1. Aug. fol.) from the 1500s, available online from Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel
"The Benking Universe” - jump-page for Heiner Benking
shared on 5 February 2012 | 7:56 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics
Wc-ondernemers scoren met 2theloo - AMSTERDAM - PAROOL
shared on 7 January 2012 | 3:20 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
the californian ideology - the hypermedia research centre - University of Westminster
shared on 9 November 2011 | 10:01 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
Rick Poynor: A Dream World Made by Machines: Observers Room: Design Observer
shared on 9 November 2011 | 9:51 pm via: Delicious/edwingardner
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Petition to Google: don't kill Google Reader
shared on 29 October 2011 | 10:38 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Shared by Annie
SHAREBOMB THIS SHIT
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In Which We Make Life Decisions Based On Media Archetypes
shared on 28 October 2011 | 4:55 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
The Dastardly and the Dopey
by SARAH HIRSCHMAN
Around the third day of architecture school, you realize things are not quite what you expected. Your friend's architect father, when he took you to lunch the previous spring, told you over matzoh ball soup and a grilled cheese not to become an architect if there was any way you could avoid it. You read the blogs and heard from the disgruntled parties. You worked with some of those disgruntled parties, even, but none of this flagged your faith. But here, at a desk, in a city you don't know, among people who seem already to have been to architecture school, it becomes clear that something is amiss, you did not see this coming. But you can't have been the only one…
The thing is that while architecture is really good at marketing itself, the campaign is not all that accurate. There remains a gaping trench between what people think architects do, what they are trained to do, and what actually goes on to get a building built. The discipline at large aimed to create an image of something unobjectionable — the witty well-shod culturephile in the room — and in the process created a bunch of bizarre spin-offs.
One of the things you do when you are in architecture school is you watch a ton of movies and TV shows. You have Hulu or Netflix or whatever playing in a background pane on your laptop, or on a totally separate laptop used exclusively for viewing video content, and you have company. You have a less disorienting way to mark the hours between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. than playing Animal Collective on hallucinatory repeat.
You fly through whole seasons of Caroline in the City and both the original and the recent Battlestars because the culture-producing machine just can’t keep up with the number of hours you are awake, and you are hungry to consume anything. Because while design is really exciting and interesting, the production of the drawings that communicate the intricacies of your design to everybody who does not inhabit your head can be very tedious.
That is why the lights were always on in the architecture building at whatever college you went to. There are people inside of it, all of the time. And so while you are browsing Hulu, if something even remotely related to architecture pops up, or better yet you just type in "architecture," you have guilt-free viewing running alongside you while you accidentally glue your fingers to the roof of a plexi model or live paint a plan into a fiction of order. The illusion that you might ingest an accurate depiction of your hard-won profession is moot at this point: you're just looking for some noise to keep you awake.
Why exactly does architecture put up such a cool front? Why is the lack of remuneration and control so seamlessly offset by a faith in fonts and rigor? How does it make a strange kind of sense that someone would want to pretend to be an architect?
Art VandelayI decided to become an architect for a bunch of reasons, but the one that got me here now, the one that got me from daydreaming to portfolio-making to all-nighter-doing, was that it seemed like a really cool thing to be. "I’m an architect!" I imagined myself declaring, and as architecture school wore on, that particular self-important declaration seemed that much more consequential. It deteriorated into a mantra that I was all but rocking myself to sleep repeating, imagining my nonchalant facebook update at the end of it all ("Architecture school? I did that.").
The thing is that architects are taught that they’re a bunch of different things, and you can select among the ones that most apply at any given moment, and there’s one that serves you very well at every stage in the game. There is Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, a character that really spoke to the (probably not-so) secret pretentions of my sixteen-year-old self. Who needs grassroots activism and community organizing when you know what is right and good and you have faith in your self? Who needs to form a consensus when the only opinion you need to know is your own?
H. Roark
Architects are people who direct things, the idea goes, people who are pulling strings behind the scenes to realize their plans, the point to which the great fanning out of places and spaces can be drawn back. The Architect in The Matrix wasn’t even an architect, he was a computer program and he is cold, calculating, risk managing, in control.
The number one usage of the word "architect" on the front page of the Times in all of the last decade was in this sense. "Architect of destruction," "architect of terror," even “architect of 9/11” all appear more frequently than just plain old “architect,” the person who draws up plans to build things. It is as though the image of the architect is more powerful than the architect herself.
But, of course, and this is a big 'of course’ because I was raised in a world of weekly self esteem workshops and throwing yarn-ball-warm-fuzzies to girls about whom I felt, on a good day, ambivalent, it comes as no surprise that the perception business is all just a question of quieting the rest of the world.
Sure, I don’t expect to make a ton of money, and that’s a particular type of blow, considering how much money it takes to first get the education and then maintain some kind of culturally engaged life, but who needs a pile of cash when you’ve got big ideas, when you’re in control? And that’s where the other axis comes in – the dopes.
Marshall Darling with awesome completed building
Marshall Darling is a great example of this because his sincerity and earnestness dovetail nicely with a pitiable sensitivity to what’s going on in his own house. Frequently surprised, he’s a loopy benevolent presence in the life of Clarissa as she Explains it All. He actually gets distinction because it's his weird creative permissiveness that allows Clarissa to have the life all Nickelodeon subscribers circa 1992 wanted.
it's not really that complicated
There is that Steve Martin character in It’s Complicated, a pathetic shmo who is interesting and cultured, but somehow just won’t ever be as dangerous or exciting as the Alec Baldwin jerk. He’s safe, he’s expected, he respects and listens to his client and perpetually verklemt love interest, but he just can’t take the heat, and so the fire goes away.
Ted Mosby not getting the girl
And there's Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother, and he presents a completely nutso idea of what it means to be an architect, because clearly nobody involved with that show has any idea about anything architecture, though he still hews to the sensitive-good-guy mold. I don’t necessarily want to complain about this one, because I enjoy participating in the fantasy that you can just one day choose to quit designing buildings and become a professor, as though anyone does one or the other of those things exclusively, because there are just universities out there that are desperate to hire a run-of-the-mill young architect with seemingly few qualifications to teach their history courses.
No, I definitely do not want to complain about that. But even he is this dopey romantic type who believes in things and is too sensitive to keep the girl.
I got into this because I had held on to a really self-serving idea of what it meant to be an architect that I thought I could tailor to my self, I didn’t look really at all the clues that media outlets everywhere were sending me – the losers and the whiners and the meek but well-read nerds that populate television and movies with indications of how I might be perceived in the future.
Ryan Atwood forsakes his life of crime for a life of checked button-down shirts.
The Ryan Atwoods of the world forsake a life of crime to pursue a long-dormant interest in architecture that manifested itself on a drafting table and t-square in the pool house. Architects are good for you, they are funny and self-effacing and powerless, they have feelings because they make spaces, or else they’re dastardly and controlling and evil!
Coming out of a video art and semiotics program, I had an idea that the only place to find better shoes and glasses was in design school. That said, architecture might not actually be the best kind of design school for cool hunting, since the exigencies of all-nighters and model-making don’t exactly permit careful accessory maintenance. Sure, architects like shoes and glasses, and sure an asymmetrical caftan and Wonder Woman belt-combo are the only things I ever felt comfortable presenting my projects in, but accessories do not a profession make. If they did, we’d all be one trip to the Piperlime Accessories Wall away from professional accreditation. Which would be rad.
Just some fun pals palling around like they always do
Within the discipline, there’s all sorts of rumbling, now that the pillars of modernism have been resolutely cast down for about the fifth time. We're not going to have truths anymore, and whether that’s a function of some new spirit or just the huge variety and diversity of people now studying and practicing architecture is for a social scientist to determine. But it remains that a really large strain within intellectual architectural output focuses on the question of who we are and what we do. I doubt the same kinds of fears and preoccupations haunt other disciplines.
The real work is preferable to self-analysis. You get to design things and build them and use power tools well into the night. You get to buy gallons of expanding foamed polyurethane liquid and dye it hot pink because you think that instead of representing water as blue in your giant model, that it might look cool with a fleshier texture, and that your reviewers might be down with that. You get to put macaroni and oatmeal into your models to show how a bulk foods supermarket might store its products. You get to go as far off your rocker as you want, as long as you show up for the review the next day. You snag an hour’s rest under your desk and get back to working on something that could either get you laughed out of the room or hailed a visionary, or both, because the parts of design that are least apparent to the rest of the world actually might be the best.
Sarah Hirschman is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her website here.
"Poor in Love" - Destroyer (mp3)
"Savage Night at the Opera" - Destroyer (mp3)
"Suicide Demo for Kara Walker" - Destroyer (mp3)
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New Transistor Interfaces Directly With Biological Functions
shared on 27 October 2011 | 11:35 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Talk directly to the malfunctioning processes in your body. Someday is getting sooner. (SF in the News)
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Lines [WebApp]
shared on 27 October 2011 | 6:36 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Lines is based on a writing technique from medieval times developed by monks as a solution to expensive paper and tedious writing. The monks were writing in the centre of the page allowing enough space for others to annotate the pages on the sides, method allowing you to read the story through other people’s writing. The problem arises when 5-6th person tried to comment there would be no paper space left over. As the time passed and writing material became cheaper this technique was abandoned and the techniques we used today were adopted. The team behind the project thought it would be interesting experiment to revisit the techniques using modern technologies, predominantly the “screen” as it has no borders and provides infinite space.
Educated as artists and graphic designers, trained primarily in the logics of print and haptic output, we have grown a great interest in how a transition to screen publishing, and the formats of the new media, affect the way we write, read and communicate. What are the new contracts between author and reader? How are they shaped by old and new forms, and how do new habits in writing and reading affect the way we build and share knowledge?
Continue reading.... Lines [WebApp]
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Open Source Hardware: A Design For Life
shared on 27 October 2011 | 3:44 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
On a farm in deepest rural Missouri, the heartland of the American midwest, a village is emerging from the soil. It’s the base camp for the Open Source Ecology (OSE) movement, founded in 2007 to search for innovative answers to the world’s mounting sustainability problems. Here a Princeton educated Polish physicist and a growing band of DIY devotees have embarked on an ambitious project – to redesign the basic elements of civilization, making them cheaper, greener and smarter.
Marcin Jubowski believes he has identified the 50 machines necessary to create a sustainable village – “a civilization starter kit”. He calls it the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), and it’s new technology, the Internet and the power of crowdsourcing that’s making this ambitious project possible.
The machines include a tractor, a press that turns soil into bricks for building and a hydraulic power unit. Marcin’s initial designs were often based on existing machines; the GVCS steam engine for example is just that, a steam engine, with simplified modern design. These initial plans and instructional videos were shared on the group’s online wiki. Gradually others have weighed in, online and in person, with improvements and suggestions. As word of the project spreads, the influence of collective knowledge grows and prototypes begin to take shape.
So far four of the machines – the tractor, the brick press, the hydraulic power cube and the soil pulverizer – have undergone the full production process: three stages of prototypes, road-testing and complete documentation. Five more are in the initial prototyping phase.
OSE claim that their completed machines are five to ten times cheaper to manufacture than current industry equivalents. A brand new tractor would cost about $120,000 in the US, or around $25,000 second hand. Their open source tractor costs just $12,000.
The machines’ modular design means they can be disassembled into their component parts and those parts reassembled into different machines, like a real life Lego set. The easy disassembly also makes repair simple and inexpensive.
The modular power cube is a particularly clever piece of open source sorcery. Consisting of an engine hooked up to a hydraulic pump, it produces power by pumping hydraulic fluid at high pressure through connecting hoses. It can be easily removed and attached to almost any machine, and a series of power cubes can be attached to each other to generate greater power.
Nikolay Georgiev is a 27 year old Bulgarian computer science major who discovered the GVCS project online. “I was searching for what projects I wanted to do. OSE seemed to combine a whole lot of good things.” Nikolay now helps out updating the group’s wiki, fundraising and coordinating European interest in the project.
The 50 machines were decided upon according to a strict set of principles. “Marcin started the project with some specific questions: whether you’re using local resources, questions about the economic model, about the ecology, development process, simplicity of design and so on. This is how they were defined, by answering all these questions,” he explains.
While ecovillage projects like this have been attempted many times before, as far back as Gandhi and beyond, it’s the embracing of the Internet and open sourcing that sets GVCS apart. While the concept of open source has until now centred on software, the focus of GVCS is open source hardware. They reap the benefits of crowdsourced knowledge, while using the Internet to share their results.
Click here to view the embedded video.
“The project is happening now because it’s possible now,” Nikolay explains. “We’re connecting globally with people from different continents, communicating and sharing information. It’s an iterative process.”
The group want their machines to be as or more efficient than private industry equivalents. The goal is to construct a practical, modern living environment, but one that does away with the waste and excess synonymous with industrialised living. “Here you’ve got more or less a small industry,” Nikolay continues. “You’re building machines. It’s like what Marcin says – civilization on a smaller scale. It’s not intended only for villages, you could build these machines and use them in cities and other places.”
Eventually the project hopes to be entirely off-grid. “We won’t be dependent on companies for electricity,” says Nikolay. “We can use the biomass converter, we’ve got wind turbines and solar concentrators.”
Click here to view the embedded video.
Funding for GVCS comes from a combination of non-profit sector donations, grants, a Kickstarter campaign, individual donations via their wiki page (from so-called “True Fans”) and sales. From May to August this year they raised $25,000 from a production run of the machines. “We sold four life trucks, four CEB (compressed earth brick) presses and eight power cubes,” says Nikolay.
Having started with a monthly budget of $1,500, they’re now working off $10,000 a month. They hope to have raised $5 million by the end of 2012.
Next year they also plan to open the world’s first open source microfactory at the site in Missouri. “There we’ll be building all, or almost all, of the industry sector machines,” Nikolay explains. “It’ll include an induction furnace for melting metal, a machine for making sheet metal, and all the machines for forming the metal into other parts – cutting, drilling and so on. Then you have production power. You can produce the prototypes much faster,” he adds.
And interest in the project is growing in Europe. “We will see something from Europe too, next year or the year after,” Nikolay believes. Similar projects have begun popping up in the US, using the GVCS wiki as their guide.
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Photo Credits: Open Source Ecology
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Senseless Drawing Bot [Arduino]
shared on 25 October 2011 | 10:23 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Senseless Drawing Bot is a 4-wheeled graffiti machine, with a pendulum arm, arduino and spray cans to create random strokes as it moves up and down the gallery space. See video below.
Created by So KANNO and Takahiro YAMAGUCHI
Metal Works Supported by Hitto ASAI
The exhibition “UTOPIA no OSHIRASE” took place at AKIBATAMABI21, 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo 9.10 – 10.10, 2011
Continue reading.... Senseless Drawing Bot [Arduino]
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Free Bieber: campaign to kill proposed law that would send you to prison for 5 years for singing copyrighted music on YouTube
shared on 21 October 2011 | 10:15 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Shared by marcell
"5 years in jail, for singing!"
S.978, a new bill in Congress, makes it a felony to post videos that contain copyright-infringing music, with up to five years in prison for violators. The clever folks at Fight for the Future have noticed that this law would have put Justin Bieber in jail, since he launched his career by posting videos of himself singing R&B tunes, in violation of copyright. The Free Bieber campaign is aiming to raise awareness of the campaign to fight S.978 and keep posting videos of yourself singing music legal, and they've got plenty of info for helping you fight the bill and enlist your friends to do the same. After you sign, you can submit a webcam video "from behind bars" explaining why jail-time for ordinary internet users is a terrible idea (they're calling it the "Biebercam"). You can also submit your own photos of Bieber in jail to their Tumblr.
Just a kid, singing a song
This is a video of child celebrity Justin Bieber singing "With You" by the artist Chris Brown. YouTube videos like this one were what made him famous. Tons of kids do this for fun, and many now-popular artists got started in this same way.Wait-- it's illegal?
Copyright law is so extreme, just singing somebody else's song in public could be infringement. Because he and his mother posted the videos to advance his music career, it's commercial infringement. And a new bill would make this a felony.5 years in jail, for singing!
The maximum sentence would be five-years, just for singing a cover! Other online video "crimes" could include: videos of a school play, a professional baseball game, or videos with incidental background music (even just a ringtone). Nuts, right?
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The Rise of the Internet (Anti)- Intellectual?
shared on 19 October 2011 | 11:28 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
This post originally appeared on Cyborgology.
The title of this post is an homage to two recent essays, the first being Larry Sanger’s “Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?” and the second Evgeny Morozov’s “The Internet Intellectual”, a recent scathing review of Jeff Jarvis’ latest book.
Larry Sanger’s critique of “geek” culture as anti-intellectual is a powerful read (even though I wrote a sort-of critique of Sanger’s post here; and he replied to me here). Sanger’s fundamental point is that modern geek culture is characterized by an anti-intellectual rejection of experts and I want to bring in Morozov’s review to highlight a slightly different point: the techno-experts embraced are anti-intellectual themselves.
My goal in this short piece is to encourage the reader to take a look at these two essays in tandem to suggest a further conversation about the need for public intellectuals, the role of academics in framing theories of new technologies and what the consequences are when we leave this discussion to be dominated by business folks.
Evgeny Morozov
To be read as a pair:
Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?, by Larry Sanger.
The Internet Intellectual, by Evgeny Morozov.
To be honest, I tried to dislike Morozov’s review of Jeff Jarvis’ new book, Public Parts. To begin, I have some disagreements with Morozov’s book, The Net Delusion. Further, the review is more than 6,500 words long and begins with some seemingly unnecessary insults against Jarvis as a person. However, Morozov’s dismantling of Jarvis picks up when he quickly moves into attacking the ideas contained in the book. Indeed, Morozov needed nearly all 6,500 words to make the necessary critique.
I will not go through all of the criticism here because this post is not about Jarvis’ book (though, I may post a review of the book as well). Instead, the more interesting point is how Jarvis’ book is part of a larger trend of so-called Internet Intellectuals or “gurus” who are not doing rigorous work but instead providing sound-bites aimed squarely at the business community.
The implications of this are serious: Jarvis tackles the privacy-publicity debate with very little focus on power and inequalities. For more on this point, see my previous critique of Jarvis for discussing these issues without taking on power. Surrendering important conversations to these trade books means that things like previous theorization or serious conversations about social justice will be left out.
Jeff Jarvis
But, of course, not all books need to be so rigorous. My problem is really not with Jarvis, but the fact that these “books that should have remained a tweet”, as Morozov states, have dominated the conversation about what the rise of new and social media means. I do not care that these fun little books exist, but that they are dominating the public conversation.
Perhaps the fault lies with the more rigorous intellectuals, both in and outside academia, who have made themselves largely absent from the public conversation about new technologies? Where is the Marshall McLuhan of social media? Why is it that Jeff Jarvis is setting the public conversation on publicity, Andrew Keen on amateurism, Tapscott and Williams on prosumption, Siva Vaidhyanathan on the impact of Google on society or Chris Anderson on abundance economies and “free”? To be clear, I think it is good that these folks hit on important topics in a catchy way. But they cannot be the whole picture, nor should they even be at the center. None of them provide a rigorous historical or theoretical treatment of their topics. (We called out Siva Vaidhyanathan on this blog after attending his a-theoretical talk at a public university).
If we can indeed convince more scholars to take on these topics, and there are many who are doing so already, do they have any chance at being public intellectuals? That is, can the ideas be delivered in a way that engages those interested, regardless if they have a degree in any specific field? For intellectuals to be public intellectuals they will need to be as engaging of writers as those authors listed above.
Larry Sanger
Or maybe the blame for the Sesame Street level books that dominate tech-writing is that publishers simply are not allowing public intellectuals to publish their ideas? I would be very interested to hear from anyone who has insights into this area.
In the meantime, I think the two essays linked to above are an important pairing to start a conversation over who gets to frame how new technologies are understood. Will it be a-historical, a-theoretical, non-rigorous business folks or can we inspire a new wave of technology-centered public intellectuals?
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Photo Credit: Flickr CC SimSullen, re:publica 2011, Ophelia Noor
Follow Nathan Jurgenson on Twitter: @nathanjurgenson
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LT v2.01
shared on 19 October 2011 | 3:44 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
(Light Transformer version 2)
python-generated random black & white pixel picture (50% black squares) printed to be silkscreened
thanks toRobert Ochshorn
Tagged: adrien lucca, color, colour, couleur, device, gradient, gray, grey, gris, halftone, light, print, sample, silkscreen
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CUNY Speculative Realism Talks
shared on 13 October 2011 | 1:57 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
The videos of the CUNY Speculative Realism talks are now available!
Here’s Patricia Clough and Jane Bennett (my talk begins at the end of this clip):
And here’s me and Graham Harman:
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My Un-Named Essay
shared on 12 October 2011 | 10:09 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
As I’ve mentioned a few times, I spent most of 2011 working on a exhibition for the Gwangju Design Biennale together with Ai Weiwei. At the exhibition opening, working with Weiwei was what most people wanted to talk about, so I wrote an essay about the experience for the Biennale’s catalog. It was written in a rush and I’m still not 100% happy with it, but since the biennale is still running, I think it’s important to put it out there….
Where is Ai Weiwei?
The Making of an Un-Named Exhibition
In August 2010, Ai Weiwei asked if I wanted to curate a section of the Gwangju Design Biennale. It was my first time hearing of the project and the place, and my first ever offer to curate. I accepted immediately.
A 30 minute conversation followed wherein Weiwei briefed me on the virtues of the event, including its big budget (”bigger than Venice!”) and open-minded leadership (”they wouldn’t have asked me to be director if they weren’t willing to take risks”). He talked about the host city (”good food”, “Korea’s democracy movement started there”, “many, many love hotels”) and described the biennale site, a complex of four interconnected galleries containing more than 8000 square meters of exhibition space.
As he talked, I started to worry. The scale of the project seemed huge and the expectations were high. The biennale’s theme, a strong, unclear concept derived from the Tao Te Ching and developed by the biennale’s co-director Seung H-Sang, I found difficult to penetrate. “Design Is Design Is Not Design,” Weiwei explained, was an epigram implying limitless creativity. “It is the end and the beginning,” he said. “For the biennale, we need to show design not as just a final product, but as part of a continuous process.” I scribbled the statement down. I wasn’t sure what do with it, but it seemed to me an anchor point, something solid enough to grab on to, extend out from.
I needed more, so I dropped the pretense of collaborating and reverted to my journalist roots, transforming our meeting into a desperate sort of interview. I prodded Weiwei with questions; I offered suggestions and requested clarifications, I repeated and rephrased his responses. He confirmed or corrected me, but he rejected nothing. It was as if his ambition was endless and capable of absorbing everything. By the end of the meeting, I’d written down dozens of commands (”Explore the reasons for similar activities in design”), analogies (”Exhibition like a body - fat, bone, organs, muscle, skin”), conceptual pairings (”Stephen Hawking + Buddhism”), and seemingly unrelated references (”Beat Generation”, “Big Bang”, “Food”, “Kunstkammer”, “French Almanac”, “KKK/Abu Ghraib/Burqa”).
At the center of the page, repeatedly underlined and surrounded by a cartoon cloud was the most important, least defined phrase of them all - Un-Named Design. This was the title of the section that I would curate. It was one of several sections in the show, but the only one that Ai Weiwei would oversee personally. Most of the points he’d made during our discussion were about Un-Named and when it was over he suggested I write a short statement to declare our intentions. That night I pored over my notes and eventually came up with this:
The Un-Named Design component will explore those facets of the human environment that are not conventionally considered design, yet influence everyday life and the perception of it. The works included in this section will derive from areas of creation where originality, signature, and marketability are not the primary source of value, and where the identity of a product is based on its theoretical force and practical use, rather than its material appearance. Examples from this creative territory range from highly purpose-driven virtual designs for social networks to the low-tech, custom manufacturing of low cost artificial limbs. The goal of this theme is to reframe design as a set of strategic solutions to human needs, rather than an ego-driven pursuit of subjective beauty. It will expand the concept of design beyond the material and show that it is not only about providing more or less useful goods, but also about the modification of human perception in a rapidly changing, interconnected world.
Post in full here.
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Circle of Trust [Javascript]
shared on 12 October 2011 | 12:14 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Created by D3, digital production company based in Sao Paolo, ‘Circle of Trust’ shows your asymmetric relationship network at Google Plus.
Is there a way to visualize how each person is using and constructing this social environment?
The team wanted want to create a good real example of how the brand new Google+ API could be used. The project was inspired by Jack Byrnes, character of the movie Meet the Parents. Interpreting Jack’s theory, the team made a simple algorithm to visualize who are the people that are inside your circle of trust and who are the people out. In the visualizations the green are the people you have circled and they have circled you back, yellow is for people that you cared to circle but they didn’t, and red is for people that have circled you but you didn’t care to circle back.
Continue reading.... Circle of Trust [Javascript]
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LEZING: The Knight’s Move: Mark Shepard, 27 Oct 2011, Stroom Den Haag.
shared on 12 October 2011 | 9:02 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
The Knight’s Move: Mark Shepard
http://stroom.nl/activiteiten/lezing_symposium.php?l_id=2472204
Donderdag 27 oktober 2011, 20 uur
Locatie: Hogewal 1-9, Den Haag
Voertaal: Engels
Entreeprijs: € 5,- (overmaken op ING-rekening 605409 van Stroom Den Haag onder vermelding van de naam van de lezing)
Reserveren verplicht: zie formulier onderaan deze pagina
De Amerikaan Mark Shepard is kunstenaar, architect en onderzoeker die in de praktijk voorbij gaat aan disciplinaire scheidslijnen. Hij is met name geïnteresseerd in nieuwe sociale ruimtes en de betekenisstructuren van hedendaagse netwerkculturen. Zijn meest recente onderzoek richt zich op de implicaties voor architectuur en stedelijkheid van mobiele media, communicatie- en informatietechnologieën. Zijn werk is internationaal tentoongesteld in musea, galeries en op festivals. Hij stelde dit jaar het boek ‘Sentient City: ubiquitous computing, architecture and the future of urban space’ samen.
The Knight’s Move
Stroom Den Haag organiseert jaarlijks een aantal toonaangevende lezingen onder de noemer ‘The Knight’s Move’ met internationale sprekers die zich onderscheiden door ongebruikelijke, verhelderende en inspirerende visies op de stad, stedelijkheid en het publieke domein. Zoals het paard – the knight – zich grillig over het schaakbord beweegt, over lopers, koningen en torens heen springend, zo wil Stroom het gesprek over de stad vanuit onverwachte posities nieuwe impulsen geven.
Mediapartner van deze lezingenserie is: De Groene Amsterdammer
The Knight’s Move wordt mogelijk gemaakt door het Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur.
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Get Hacked, Don’t Tell: Drone Base Didn’t Report Virus
shared on 11 October 2011 | 9:43 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Officials at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada knew for two weeks about a virus infecting the drone “cockpits” there. But they kept the information about the infection to themselves — leaving the unit that’s supposed to serve as the Air Force’s cybersecurity specialists in the dark. The network defenders at the 24th Air Force learned of the virus by reading about it in Danger Room.
The virus, which records the keystrokes of remote pilots as their drones fly over places like Afghanistan, is now receiving attention at the highest levels; the four-star general who oversees the Air Force’s networks was briefed on the infection this morning. But for weeks, it stayed (you will pardon the expression) below the radar: a local problem that local network administrators were determined to fix on their own.
“It was not highlighted to us,” says a source involved with Air Force network operations. “When your article came out, it was like, ‘What is this?’”
The drones are still flying over warzones from Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen. There’s no sign, yet, that the virus either damaged any of the systems associated with the remotely piloted aircraft or transmitted sensitive information outside the military chain of command — although three military insiders caution that a full-blown, high-level investigation into the virus is only now getting underway.
Nevertheless, the virus has sparked a bit of a firestorm in military circles. Not only were officials in charge kept out of the loop about an infection in America’s weapon and surveillance system of choice, but the surprise surrounding that infection highlights a flaw in the way the U.S. military secures its information infrastructure: There’s no one in the Defense Department with his hand on the network switch. In fact, there is no one switch to speak of.
The four branches of the U.S. armed forces each has a dedicated unit that, in theory, is supposed to handle cyber defense for the entire service. The 24th Air Force, for example, “is the operational warfighting organization that establishes, operates, maintains and defends Air Force networks,” according to a military fact sheet. These units are then supposed to provide personnel and information to U.S. Cyber Command, which is supposed to oversee the military’s overall network defense.
In practice, it’s not that simple. Unlike most big private enterprises, the 24th doesn’t have a centralized system for managing and monitoring its networks. There’s no place at the 24th’s San Antonio headquarters where someone could see all the digital traffic hurtling through the service’s pipes. In fact, most of the major commands within the Air Force don’t have formal agreements to carry the other’s network traffic. (The 24th Air Force did not immediately respond to requests to comment for this article.)
“We’d never managed the entire Air Force network as a single enterprise,” Vince Ross, the program manager of the Air Force Electronic Systems Center’s Cyber Integration Division, said in March. “That meant there was no centralized management of the network, that systems and hardware weren’t standardized, and that top-level commanders didn’t have complete situational awareness.”
The plan is to one day integrate all that infrastructure into a single Air Force network. But for now, it’s largely cybersecurity by the honor system. Each base and each unit in the Air Force has its own geek squad. They only call for help if there’s a broader network problem, or if they’re truly stumped.
That didn’t happen when a so-called “keylogger” virus hit Creech more than two weeks ago.
“Nothing was ever reported anywhere. They just didn’t think it was important enough,” says a second source involved with operating the Air Force’s networks. “The incentive to share weaknesses is just not there.”
Not even when that weakness hits the robotic weapons that have become the lynchpin for American military operations around the planet.
Photo: USAF
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Things you would know about if we were friends on Facebook Part 5
shared on 9 October 2011 | 1:09 am via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
…
41. A whole bunch of articles on ‘Un-Named Design’ a section of the Gwangju Design Biennale that I spent the past year working on:
A Flurry of Design Events in Asia and Europe Fill the Autumn Calendar
By ALICE RAWSTHORN, New York Times
Despite the anxiety about Mr. Ai, the Gwangju biennale is scheduled to open Friday as planned. His contribution is an exhibition of “Unnamed Design,” on which he has collaborated with the curator Brendan McGetrick to address the timely theme of the changing definition of design. They are planning to explore design’s contribution to fields with which it has not traditionally been associated, including the invention of computer viruses and new financial models, and the organization of political protests … Ambitious, intellectually provocative and generously funded, the Gwangju biennale seems set to be one of the most compelling design events of the autumn.
Korea’s design biennial: an extreme body of work that pushes no products
By Justin McGuirk, The Guardian
This year’s theme – “design is design is not design” – might sound like an existential tongue-twister, but it reflects the kind of dualism that is more common of Taoist thought than European. Chief curators Ai Weiwei and Seung H-Sang derived it from Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching….
One exhibit is a pamphlet handed out in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian uprising that advised protesters on the most effective tactics for civil disobedience, including how to improvise a helmet and how to breach police lines. Then there are designs for IEDs (improvised explosive devices) of the kind that kill troops daily in Afghanistan. There’s also a video of the plastic surgery that Ultimate Fighting Championship competitors can undergo in order to bleed less from the nose or above the eyes. (Korea, it should be pointed out, is one of the global hotspots of plastic surgery).
Is all of this design? It would be difficult to argue the case against: collective behaviour, bombs and extreme bodies all require designing. This tests the bland “designing a better world” rhetoric implicit in so much production. The most brazenly provocative exhibit illustrates different forms of public execution, from lethal injection to stoning, as blueprints – methods that someone had to devise in meticulous detail.
“Design that can be spoken of is not the eternal design”
By Edwin Gardner, Volume Magazine
Firstly the exhibition shows that a new design definition should move away from the artifact or object towards defining systems and rules, form is consequence of design, but not design itself. It’s about designing frameworks, instead of infills. It’s about the design of process instead of product.
Can Anybody Be a Designer?
By ALICE RAWSTHORN, New York Times
Curated in absentia by the Chinese artist and political activist Ai Weiwei, who was imprisoned during the final phase of research and banned from leaving China to participate in the installation, “Unnamed” explores the role of design in projects with which it would not traditionally have been associated. The show argues that design is not solely the preserve of professional designers but can also be the work of scientists, activists, computer programmers, hackers and anyone else who applies ingenuity, originality, strategic thinking and other qualities that are indispensable to good design.
42. This depressing report on how the privatization of government services (in the name of greater efficiency and cost effectiveness) ends up costing tax payers billions more:
Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors
By Project on Government Oversight
Choice Quote:
POGO’s study shows that the federal government approves service contract billing rates—deemed fair and reasonable—that pay contractors 1.83 times more than the government pays federal employees in total compensation, and more than 2 times the total compensation paid in the private sector for comparable services.
43. Another vid from my favorite new artist of 2011:
Frank Ocean - Swim Good
44. This quote:
Progress isn’t the future. It’s keeping up with the present. - Patti Smith
45. This quote:
If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them. - John Waters
46. This clip of the world’s greatest thinker describing the world’s greatest superhero:
Karl Pilkington - Bullshit Man
Click here to view the embedded video.
The End.
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Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet
shared on 7 October 2011 | 7:11 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’s Host-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistan more than 230 times; all told, these drones have killed more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to the Washington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military drones struck 92 times in Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American drone killed top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki — part of an escalating unmanned air assault in the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.
But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A $26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.
The lion’s share of U.S. drone missions are flown by Air Force pilots stationed at Creech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.
Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.
But time and time again, the so-called “air gaps” between classified and public networks have been bridged, largely through the use of discs and removable drives. In late 2008, for example, the drives helped introduce the agent.btz worm to hundreds of thousands of Defense Department computers. The Pentagon is still disinfecting machines, three years later.
Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.
In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.
The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”
However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus.
“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”
Photo courtesy of Bryan William Jones
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The iPhone 4S’ Talking Assistant Is a Military Veteran
shared on 5 October 2011 | 5:18 pm via: edwingardner's shared items in Google Reader
Siri, before you became the premiere feature of the new iPhone 4S, where did you come from?
Spencer, I started out as a gleam in the eye of Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research agency, as your Wired colleague Steven Levy tweeted. Darpa thought my artificial-intelligence algorithms for data collection and organization could help the military plan better. Would you like me to find you some references for that?
I would, Siri, thank you.
As it turns out, Siri — the voice-activated data assistant available on Apple’s iPhone upgrade — is a veteran. Nearly 10 years ago, Darpa funded a project known as PAL, for Personalized Assistant that Learns. It was an adaptive AI program for both data retrieval and data synthesis. (So not entirely like search, but not dissimilar, either.) If you told PAL what information you needed, and it observed what you did with that information, it would figure out a more efficient path to acquiring and sorting relevant information the next time around.
The project started out with a California company called SRI International. With a five-year, multimillion dollar grant from Darpa under the PAL program, SRI developed a system called CALO, for Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes. (Check out this handy chart of its architecture.) ”The goal of the project is to create cognitive software systems,” it explained, “that is, systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.”
Put more simply, “The idea is to develop a system that will adapt to the user, instead of the other way around,” a PAL project partner told a fresh-faced Noah Shachtman way back in 2003. Technophobic New York Times columnist William Safire sputtered that Darpa was ushering in “a world light-years beyond the Matrix,” with dire implications for the person “that PAL’s user is looking at, listening to, sniffing or conspiring with to blow up the world?”
As Darpa tried to show in the corny instructional video above, PAL didn’t work the way Safire thought it did. In the video’s hypothetical scenario, the military is in the middle of a humanitarian aid mission when a terrorist group fires a rocket-propelled grenade at a cargo plane. PAL — then quaintly hosted on a desktop — anticipates an officer’s question. “These-are-the-additional-security-forces-in-theater-that-are-available,” a Vocodered voice from a computer tells the officer, like it was the Enterprise answering Captain Kirk, as icons pop up on a screen to illustrate the point.
An Air Force major, new to the fictional task force, gets up to speed on the aid mission by asking PAL for displays of the command plan. “These are my priorities,” he tells it, tapping the screen with his finger. (Darpa seems to have anticipated that by the time PAL was ready, everyone would have a touchscreen desktop monitor.) And just like that, the major has planned his day, telling PAL what briefings he plans to attend. “Here-are-the-materials-you-need-for-the-meeting,” PAL replied, as it collated them into a folder.
Perhaps PAL was geared to be more like a PDA than the Enterprise’s computer. (No bureaucratic headquarters task is too complicated for a super-algorithm!) Then again, once PAL is networked with other officers’ PALs, it becomes easy to spot the erratic behavior of a fictional ship, alerting the task force to a potential terrorist threat.
By 2008 — with the PAL project not bearing fruit — SRI didn’t want to miss out on the commercial opportunities of iPhone apps. So it spun off a company called Siri Incorporated to develop what became the first iteration of the Siri app — a so-called “do engine” that weaved user preferences with existing web functions to, say, let you know what time the nearest Iron Man showing started. (It wasn’t voice-activated.) Apple thought the Siri’s tech showed promise, so it paid a rumored $150 to $200 million for the company. On Tuesday, CEO Tim Cook finally explained what Apple had in mind.
In other words, you probably won’t be using Siri to track any terrorists on your iPhone 4S. Chances are you’ll ask Siri to find you a nearby restaurant with an available table; a phone number from the depths of your email inbox; or tell you how long it’ll take you to get from the office to the airport in traffic. In fact, according to an SRI veteran, Siri is way more powerful than what Darpa and SRI had in mind. “It’s not just connected to various Web services, but also to your calendar and contacts and music and everything on the phone,” Norman Minarsky of SRI told Technology Review on Tuesday.
But what if you’re in the military, and you want to take Siri back to its PAL roots? Best of luck to you. Obviously, there’s no PAL in usage. Five years after the iPhone launched the smartphone revolution, the military is barely catching up. Only the Army is seriously considering requiring its soldiers to carry smartphones loaded with militarily relevant apps. (The Marines, to a lesser degree, are starting to as well.)
But it still doesn’t know how to secure the classified data that the phones will need to host. The Army is also schizophrenic about scotching its now-obsolete plans for networking soldiers together through wearable computers or incorporating smartphones into them. And budget crunches threaten to smother the Army’s entire smartphone experiment in the cradle. (Check Danger Room on Thursday for an update on Army smartphones in the age of defense austerity.)
So Siri, what should a soldier who wants to take advantage of you do?
She should probably consider getting an iPhone 4S. Would you like Metro directions to the Apple Store in the Pentagon City Mall?
No, I think I’m good. But how exactly could your functionality, hosted on a commercial iPhone 4S, be used to help the military directly?
Despite the early funding from Darpa to develop me, I’m not sure the Army has figured that question out.
Thank you, Siri, I suspected that was the answer.
See Also:
- Apple’s Rumored Virtual Assistant Could Outshine the New iPhone
- Siri Launches Voice-Powered iPhone ‘Assistant’
- Pentagon Wants to Make a New PAL
- Marines Look for a Software Study Buddy
- Live Blog: Apple’s 2011 ‘Let’s Talk iPhone’ Event
- Soldiers’ Wearable Computers May Get an iPhone Brain
- Army Taps Android Phones for ‘Wearable Computers’
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