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Monday, June 7

Sensory Circus is embodied in an interactive installation comprising an active, responsive and auto-generative audiovisual and architectonic system. The audience is central, and is principally responsible for their substantial contribution to the nature and dynamics of the whole environment.

Through the different types of interaction with the components present inside Sensory Circus as well as their physical presence, every visitor mutates from a passive viewer to an active protagonist.

(Thanks Karmen!)

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Maps! You have taught me the fear of becoming lost

Jane England in ROAM - a Reader on the Aesthetics of Mobility

To roam is to be mobile - able to move freely from one place or position in the environment to another. The essential companion to mobility is orientation, the knowledge of distance and direction in relation to your surroundings, together with the ability to keep track of spatial relationships as they change while you move about. Maps provide the orientation that accompanies mobility so that you can reach where you want to go, or know exactly where it is that you have ended up: "You have taught me the fear of becoming lost... In strange cities I memorise streets and always know exactly where I am. Amid scenes of splendour, I review the route back to the hotel."

There it is again. That tension between security and insecurity...

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Literate lad culture

Chuck out those wrinkled copies of FHM. Apparently, women prefer men who read books.

Penguin UK's Beautiful Women Want Good Booking Men: if you get spotted reading the book-of-the-month by their Stunning Good Booking Girl (scroll down) you get the prize.

Into guys? No problem.

Um, wow.

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Saturday, June 5

Already very fast

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow Blue and Red, 1939-42

I suggested to Mondrian that perhaps it would be fun to make these rectangles oscillate and he, with a very serious countenance, said: 'No, it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast'.

- Alexander Calder

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Friday, June 4

So what are laboratories and research, anyway?

Of course I have been following the all-too-real story of Steve Kurtz - member of the awesome Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) and Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

On one hand, I am deeply saddened and concerned about the implications for artistic and academic freedom. On the other hand, I am completely fascinated by the challenge taken on by the American government: to define exactly what constitutes a laboratory and acceptable research.

The FBI is seeking charges [against Kurtz and others ] under Section 175 of the US Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which has been expanded by the USA PATRIOT Act. As expanded, this law prohibits the possession of "any biological agent, toxin, or delivery system" without the justification of "prophylactic, protective, bona fide research, or other peaceful purpose."

For their work in the CAE, the Kurtzes operated a home biotech lab with several strains of bacteria, chemicals and enzymes, a centrifuge and a PCR machine, the device scientists use to amplify genetic markers for visualization. Scientists in biotech labs every day operate centrifuges and PCR machines in their attempts to create new, genetically modified and transgenic organisms for the global food supply, and genetic therapies for treating devastating diseases.

The FBI agents asked Adele Henderson [chair of the art department at the University at Buffalo] why the Kurtzes were operating a lab in their home, and not at the university. "(The FBI agents) didn't seem to get it," said Henderson. "They're used to the science model, with scientists working in a lab with government funds. In an art department that's rarely the case."

So what's a lab then? Or research, for that matter? Is the only model a government-sponsored scientific one? And what kind of science is that anyway? Is there any way to critique that practice?

We know there are cultural expectations about how, where and by whom science is practiced - so what are the differences between Nexia Biotechnologies, extracting your own DNA at home and Steve Kurtz's research for the CAE? Is it really just a matter of location? Or is it intention? Who decides? And using what criteria?

**

Georges Braque: "Art upsets and science reassures."

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Tiananmen

I was 16 years old and just finishing my final year of high school when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. I wept. That was 15 years ago today.

"Our hearts still tremble and bleed."

State terrorism continues to kill people around the world every day, and we do precious little to stop it.

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Thursday, June 3

The kitchen (of the future)

The Honeywell Kitchen Computer (1969) "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." It cost $10 000, took two weeks to learn how to use, and would balance your chequebook as well as plan the meals. Sweet!

**

The Dutch Kitchen of the Future

MIT Media Lab's Kitchen of the Future

Microsoft's Kitchen of the Future

Salton's Kitchen of the Future

Philips Design Kitchen of the Future

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The Kitchen of the Future "The people of the kitchen began to believe that the kitchen was so good that the whole house should be one big kitchen" by Joe Thompson

**

The Practice of Everyday Life Volume 2: Living and Cooking by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol

Update

Designing technology for domestic spaces: A Kitchen Manifesto (pdf) by Genevieve Bell and Joseph Kaye

Glass Bottom Boat is one of those Hollywood movies: ditzy blonde disrupts the orderly life of rational scientist. Bruce Templeton, a NASA physicist played by Rod Taylor, has designed himself the perfect home, equipped with laborsaving devices. His kitchen is a showpiece of streamlined functionality. Cooking becomes just another task, one that can be controlled and contained. The kitchen—automated with appliances popping out of counter tops and selfcleaning dishes and floors—confounds Doris Day’s character and renders her "feminine" skills obsolete; she is compelled to declare that there is no place for her in this kitchen of the future. Her declaration that "this kitchen doesn’t need a woman" captures a central theme of this paper. In creating technology for the home, in particular for the kitchen, technologists have forgotten that these domestic spaces are inhabited and used by people. These spaces function not as sites for technologists’ or technological in(ter)vention, but as sites where meaning is produced, as well as meals. These spaces are the places where we dwell.

(Thanks Simon!)

Another update

From the ever-awesome Prelinger Archives:

Design for Dreaming - Set at the 1956 General Motors Motorama, this is one of the key Populuxe films of the 1950s, showing futuristic dream cars and Frigidaire's "Kitchen of the Future."

(Thanks Peter!)

See also:

Practical Dreamer - A fantasy of kitchen planning and modernization, 1957.

Step-Saving Kitchen - Demonstrating a U-shaped kitchen developed by the housing staff of the Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, 1949.

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[ 3 comments ]

The Corporate Anthropologist (and ethics)

Christian Science Monitor - Anthropologists on the job

Katie Hafner - Coming Of Age In Palo Alto

CNN - Corporate anthropology: Dirt-free research

**

Anthropology as ‘Brand’: Reflections on corporate anthropology (pdf) by Lucy Suchman

Our work as anthropologists sits uncomfortably inside the close-knit interweaving of consumer experience understood as something prior, discovered through anthropological investigation and then addressed by design and marketing, and consumer experience understood as constituted through activities of design and marketing, in their contributions to the creation of desire and the crafting of cultural imaginaries. I don’t believe that we can resolve this tension.

[Daniel Miller] cautions against the danger that, in taking up the cultural analysis of consumable things, we find ourselves contributing to, rather than refiguring, dominant forms of commodity fetishism. As antidote he proposes that we attend to the "mundane sensual and material qualities" of the object, and through those qualities find the connections to lives and the cultural imaginaries that animate them.

Along with the increasing virtuality of consumer capitalism, in other words, are the persistent threads of materiality and desire that comprise our everyday lives, as consumers and as participants in a multiplicity of other life projects. Image and substance, marketing and design are inextricably interwoven in these places and in the things they offer us, which is part of what makes them both insidious, and powerfully seductive. Unless our stories of consumption can come to grips with these specific materialities we’ll have missed something substantial about the place of stuff and its power to enroll us, however unwittingly, in the increasingly asymmetrical and inequitable flows of labor, goods and capital around the globe. As anthropologists and as consumers, our problem is to find the spaces that allow us to refigure the projects of those who purchase our services and from whom we buy, rather than merely to be incorporated passively into them.

Now that's something to think about.

**

Society for Applied Anthropology - Ethical and Professional Responsibilities

American Anthropological Association Ethics

Association of Social Anthropologists - Ethical guidelines

American Sociological Association Code of Ethics

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Supercool knitting

I am still loving knitting, but I'm still not as good as this guy.

I think it's supercool to knit superhero costumes!

Nice combination of the (traditionally) masculine and feminine.

(via)

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More on the shape of things

It seems that drawing the continents - keep scrolling down - is not unlike drawing haircuts.

(first link via)

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Cities through the eyes and minds of scientists

NASA's Cities Collection - Outstanding Astronaut Photography of Cities Taken During Spaceflight (via)

The Optimal Shape of a City - if you're a theoretical physicist (via)

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Wednesday, June 2

Changing technologies

Fashion Victims by Davide Agnelli, Dario Buzzini and Tal Drori
- bags that permanently stain red when they're exposed to cell phone radiation

Mass Distraction by Davide Agnelli and Tal Drori
- a set of three jackets, each of which require the wearer to do a specific thing in order to carry on a mobile phone call

Hybridization by Tal Drori
- a hat that changes according to whether the person is listening to music or ready for conversation

(via)

Haptic Chameleon by Sony
- a video control knob that a user can switch to round, rectangular and semicircle shapes that have different functions and different force feedback effects

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Tuesday, June 1

Jump. We dare you!

On the way to the Tate Modern

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Dialogue

Tori Orr is, amongst other things, a Master's student interested in the "potential of social software for dead people." Cool. In March I posted on this student project because I was all excited about social software for the dead too.

This is a lightly-edited bit of recent email conversation we had:

Tori: I've done research all over the board trying to use social network analysis as a way of linking the living with the dead (our personal present with our communal past). I am interested in representing the type of subject matter (say, in literature, oral histories and other associated digital resources) that helps users find relevant links to the past, to tradition and the deep (buried!) interconnectedness of communities. I've used keywords like phylogeny, ontogeny, story-telling, personal histories, interpersonal awareness, memoirs, memory, (auto)biography, and interaction histories.

Anne: Sounds great. And don't forget kinship charts. I can't really recommend them as visuals, but their terminology is probably the most comprehensive ever created. Kinship terms reflect both biological and cultural relations.

Tori: I'm trying to find new ways of representing and expanding traditional family tree relationships.

Anne: Now there's a fun challenge! Alternate ways of representing family relations might connect people according to interests or characteristics, rather than biology. Even biologically-related families can be ordered differently.

Tori: Yes! Like families of dressmakers and families of writers, as well as families with similar surnames...

Anne: Or you could represent people according to the rights and responsibilities we have to each other. I quite like the idea of charting obligations. Not like they're oppressive (although they may very well be) but as a way of rendering tangible something that is increasingly difficult to locate: accountability. I imagine snazzy posters for the upcoming elections that outline the relationships between governments and citizens, and what is at stake.

Tori: Hmm. Rights and responsibilities. Sort of like a covenant? That almost makes it sound spiritual. And so back to the dead!

Anne: Right. I sort of went off on a tangent there, didn't I? Sorry.

Tori: That's okay, but I wonder if the dynamic nature of relationships ceases when a person dies? Not only does their body become stiff with rigor mortis, but their relationships settle and solidify as well...

Anne: Fascinating! My first thought is that our relationships never "settle and solidify". If you believe that 'who we are' means 'who we are with other people' then the dead continue to have relationships with the living and vice versa. The key - whether people are living or dead - is to find ways to represent the many and shifting kinds of relationships we have. To avoid being reductive or rigid (and that means no universal ontologies ;)).

What do you think?

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Monday, May 31

Words are looking good

airtext

One step closer to the promise of technogically augmented spaces:

By waving the Nokia 3220 camera phone from side to side, the LED lights of the Nokia Xpress-on FunShell light up to "write" a message that appears to float in mid-air.

In March 2003, the WSJ reported from CeBIT about a phone called Kurv, made by Kyocera Wireless Corp which featured airtexting: "The company believes airtexting will be one of it's most popular features, especialy in night clubs. To airtext, you type in a text like 'call me' then wave it back and forth in the air. As the phone moves, a row of blinking red lights along the top of the phone leaves the phrase trailing behind it."

[Another] article described a form of mobile graffiti, using a cell phone as a paint spraycan, "by waving it into the air to form a word, the text would appear onto the screen of a person passing by".

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[ 3 comments ]

Wireless: local and global

This morning, I see that Howard Rheingold is asking if location blogging will take off. Oh probably, in some form or another. But until GPRS rates come down significantly, the opportunity for public authoring will only be available to a select few (which, of course, is not very public). And ever-skeptical, I do wonder if never missing a friend (or always knowing if you have a friend nearby) is better than not.

Shifting from local to global scale, check out Message in a Bottle: From Ramsgate to the Chatham Islands.

On 25th May 2004, fifty bottles were released into the sea off the south east coast of England near Ramsgate Maritime Museum, Kent. The intended destination of the bottles is The Chatham Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The islands, which are 800km east of mainland New Zealand, are the nearest inhabited land to the precise location on the opposite side of the world to Ramsgate Maritime Museum ... Several of the bottles are being tracked automatically using GPS technology and are programmed to send their longitude and latitude coordinates back to Ramsgate every hour. The data they send has been used to create a live drawing which is automatically updated in real time. (Scroll down this page for another map.)

But oh no! It seems that on Friday the automatic reports stopped and they now have only a "few days to recover them, diagnose then fix the problem, then put them back into the sea." So if you find one of the GPS bottles, let them know!

(via)

This reminds me - in researching ubiquitous/pervasive computing the past few years, I have rarely seen or heard public discussions about how these technologies often don't work, and if they do, they often don't work well. (Just one example: GPS doesn't work well in dense urban areas where buildings block the signal.) A couple of months ago, Gene Becker wrote: "Ubicomp is hard, understanding people, context, and the world is hard, getting computers to handle everyday situations is hard, and expectations are set way too high. I used to say ubicomp was a ten-year problem; now I'm starting to think that it's really a hundred-year problem." Indeed!

Update - The Feature: These Streets Were Made for Talking. An article on, you guessed it, the Talking Street project.

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