May 2012
105 posts
Concept | no-place.org →
Open House is an installation by Jack Stenner and Patrick LeMieux that allows visitors to telematically squat in a Florida home undergoing foreclosure after the U.S. housing collapse. Virtual markets transformed this otherwise livable property into a ghost house. Prior to the collapse, the movements of global capital seemed like a distant reality to most homeowners, but in the end it was imaginary...
“Technology seems to be finally overcoming the restrictions that have kept...”
– The Cooper Journal: Creating immersive experiences with diegetic interfaces
The stones speak - Infocult: Uncanny Informatics →
Haunted graveyards, ubiquitous computing style. A company now sells RFID-implanted grave markers.
A horror story naturally follows:
a Nervous Nelly is making his or her way through a graveyard at night. Cue: full moon, owl, ground fog. A branch cracks. Nelly increases speed, heartbeat races, panting increases. A root clutches at Nelly’s shoe and he goes over, skidding to a stop in...
Tweet Radio - The New York Moon →
Beginning this project, I was right there with the chorus of Twitter detractors. Assuming Twitter trafficked only in frivolous, tedious, and above all, meaningless little squirts of text, I had hoped that a minor tweak of delivery system would be both funny and damning.
Changing the medium from one of large fonts bounded by bubbly corners to a melancholy computerized voice was supposed to...
Ghost via Google Streetview - Infocult: Uncanny... →
[T]he picture included our neighbor Bill, who passed away last winter. The automated face-blurring feature didn’t kick in for some reason, leaving this great picture of him eyeing what was presumably a slow-driving Google Street View car warily. The pic is a little like seeing a ghost, but it nicely captures him keeping watch over our neighborhood as he always did.
“When we examine the iPhone users’ arguments defending the iPhone, it...”
– iPhone users are delusional, consultants say | Technically Incorrect - CNET News
“It has often been said that tourism is the modern realization of a human urge to...”
– Stories in Reserve
Unleashed Devices « TINT →
Unleashed Devices is an exhibition of DIY, hacking and open source projects by artists who explore technologies critically and creatively. By reconstructing, remixing and reinventing everyday electronic devices, these take on a new life as they shift our vision of the use of data and purpose of technology. Playing with frontiers, such projects not only challenge our conception of technology but...
“The online memorial already has become the new grave,” says Jennifer...”
– BBC News - Virtual life after death
Play Loved - a confrontational online flash game →
“Participatory Video is a tool for positive social change; it empowers the...”
– Insights into Participatory Video: A Handbook for the Field | InsightShare
Ubi turns any wall into a touchscreen using... →
“We can turn any surface into a 3D touchscreen,” explained Anup Chathoth, one third of Munich-based startup Ubi Interactive. Such claims typically conjure up images of floating Minority Report-style touchscreens made from curved glass, but that’s exactly what this three-person team has developed. Ubi’s system uses a Microsoft Kinect sensor to turn a regular projector...
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Hybrid scientific disciplines are emerging from these fertile environments of...”
– The NBIC Convergence: When Machines and Matter ‘Have Sex’ « NextNature.net
“Is the world ultimately unknowable – if considered as a place where genuine...”
– NeMe: Cybernetics Revisited
Mark Selby » Camera Explora →
Inspired by the route maps that many of us keep after a journey, Camera Explora scales this practice from one that plots the places we visited, to one that plots the experiences we record. Photography becomes a tool for exploration. Each camera comes with a map of a city to which it is configured, and allows one photo for each grid square on the map. When that photograph has been taken the...
“We want to argue that data has come alive in the form of our extended network of...”
– CTheory.net
“Robotic sensing is like Plato’s allegory of “the cave”: there...”
– How robots think: an introduction | Ars Technica
“Losing a friend or family member is painful enough, but imagine the extra,...”
– Death and social media: what happens to your life online? | Ars Technica
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“Eli Yudin, 21, created the account earlier this week and enlisted his Twitter...”
– Tilda Swinton Twitter: Is @NotTildaSwinton the best celebrity parody account ever?
Kosmograd: Olympics Brand Exclusion Zone →
In essence, London has abdicated all rights and responsibilities to the International Olympic Committee, and implemented legislation which creates radical new spatial demarcations not only within the Olympic Park, but because of the distributed nature of the Olympic venues, across the whole of central London. London has surrendered the traditional rights to the city to the demands of the...
“Punkademics explores these varied intersections by giving voice to some of the...”
– Punkademics | Minor Compositions
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“Researchers at Ohio State University examined what happened to people who, while...”
– ‘Losing yourself’ in a fictional character can affect your real life
Watch(via R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX » Blog Archive » Vyrgynalia)
“In spatial détournement, a rambler reuses elements of a known territory to...”
– Nigel Ayers: On Spatial Detournement
Another tiny computer: VIA's $49 APC offers... →
Taiwanese hardware manufacturer VIA has announced a new product called the Android PC System (APC), a seven-inch ARM board that ships with a custom version of the Android mobile operating system. The device will be available in July for $49.
10 PRINT “GO TO STATEMENT CONSIDERED HARMFUL”: GOTO 10
My next program is a bit of an insider’s joke. It’s a reference to a famous 1968 diatribe by Edsger Dijkstra called “Go To Statement Considered Harmful.” Dijkstra argues against using the goto command, which leads to what critics call spaghetti code. I’m not interested in that specific debate, so much as I like how this famous injunction implies an evaluative audience, a set of norms, and even an aesthetic priority. Programming is a set of practices, with its own history and tensions. Any serious consideration of code—any serious consideration of computers—in the humanities must reckon with these social elements of code.
“It appears to be dawning on clients who control the U.S.’s major ad...”
– FACEBOOK’S WORST NIGHTMARE: With GM Pulling Its Ads, Here’s How The Other Dominoes May Fall - Business Insider
“Richard Gruesome is not your average bot set to retweet or remix existing tweets...”
– Academia as Monstrous Puppet | Center for 21st Century Studies
“I am these legs and arms and back and bum and spleen, and I remain determined...”
– On not feeling bad about my body, for DailyLife.com.au. (via jeanhannah)
“The Avatar-A project’s aim, Itskov says, is to create an autonomous system of...”
– Immortal Avatar: Russian project seeks to create robot with human brain — RT
“Psychologist Lev Vygotsky claimed that “words die as they bring forth thoughts”...”
– On writing the self | Design Culture Lab
