Designers Accord - Sustainability in 7 - Nathan Shedroff (by Core77)
In what he deems “probably the fastest introduction ever” to systems thinking, Nathan Shedroff introduces systems as a context and a perspective.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Wayne Marshall, Vijay Iyer and M.I.A., “Galangs,” 2010.
I get crabby about mashups. You laid a rap vocal over Beach House? OK. That’s what djs do. Maybe it’s good. Maybe it’s great. But if there’s something different about this whole combining deal that someone called “the mashup,” it’s the reckoning with the song itself and all the very tricky bits that have to interlock. “Stroke of Genius” is two songs making one, keys and changes and words and moods all lining up. It’s musical and it’s hard and people don’t do it right much. The blends thing is a billion years old and fun but tends to spit out the same kind of material because it’s so easy now with the computerz. Straining and struggling tends to make you work it out and think it out.
Wayne killed it with this one. I am happy to say the word “musical.” I also love “no musics.” But this is the musics.
BLADE RUNNER - Roy Batty’s Last Words (via sochmaKer)
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Bruce Sterling thinks we’re at risk of a “Digital Dark Age,” where all this data we so painstakingly curate and conserve might vanish because of the inherently unstable nature of the internet and out storage technology:
“…Will we become internet civilization? No, the internet is unstable. Guidebooks become old fashioned immediately. The internet has gothic high tech aspects that can’t be disguised. Whereas the museum’s purpose is to hold on in perpetuity. There is no storage method for digital data that can predictably last for fifty years. Favela chics are jargon imperialists. They say if you’re not on search engines you don’t exist.
What is the response? The Unesco Cultural Heritage, academic conferences, live events. This conference is about picking over the ruins of favela chic and pulling it into gothic high tech. The digital is going to vanish like the dot coms, unless efforts are made to snatch it back. But that’s the problem. Nothing is left to conserve. Advanced but rapidly decaying hardware is everywhere. Maybe we’ll have an internet of things?
…In 2020 children of digital natives will be interested in their analogue grandparents, in our parents. Those living from ‘45 to ‘89 will be romantic to young people denied that way of life. The digital revolution will have outlived its luster. It won’t be shiny, or new, but fashionable to count cost and valorize painstaking, beautiful analogue things that belonged to long dead atomic ladies and gentlemen. They’ll prize analogue museum pieces for weird, wrong reasons. What does a chic favela gothic institution look like? How does it strategize? It wouldn’t want a gothic ruin, but an unprecedented, elegant combination. Everybody lives in museums, in resolving contradictions. In new forms of the old continuity.
In the digital dark ages we may lose tons of stuff. I’m worried about the death of analogue published documents, magazines, and newspapers. We may lobotomize ourselves. We may become haunted by totalitarian states that ceaselessly reinterpret the past. Actual people’s experience that are set in record then incessantly reworked. The internet lends itself to that. Things we see stored there are not really restored. We don’t have storage methods. We can have a black out that lasts years. The internet is vulnerable to all kinds of passing upsets…”
— Bruce Sterling
…His fears mirror those of people like Jaron Lainer, who preach the evils of “remix culture” and the potential harm it’s doing to our culture, writ large. I’ve tended to dismiss folks like Lainer, but I have a harder time casting Chairman Bruce aside (if only because I respect him more). It is important to note, though, that Sterling isn’t exactly making the same point as the breathless critics of internet culture: his is a pragmatic concern, one which I share…that we lose something essential when we allow our lives to be too highly mediated by “high” technology. We are at risk, as a culture, of being “that guy” at the concert, who spends his time staring at the LCD screen on his camera rather than experiencing the event. And, once we’ve gone and ignored the territory for the map, we might just see the fruits of our labor vanish into the digital aether, or be “repurposed.” And oh yeah, there’s no money in any of it.
He’s right when he says, “We may become haunted by totalitarian states that ceaselessly reinterpret the past. Actual people’s experience that are set in record then incessantly reworked.” The absence of over-arching narratives in our time and the ease with which we can rework images/video/etc. leaves us prone to having our lives “remixed” out from under us. But, “totalitarian states” have always had the power to dictate (of only for a time) the “story” of the day. That it might be carried out in Photoshop and not at the business end of a gun is actually somewhat of a comfort.
It’s the emphasized paragraph, though, that really caught my attention. We have to build “resilience” into our lives to ensure that everything we have isn’t digital. This means creating communities, in one form or another, and bolstering them with every tactic we have available. It means utilizing traditional (though, no less disappearance-prone) media, be it ‘zines or books or whatever. It means giving primacy to experiences, rather than trusting in the ability of archiving and time shifting to allow you the experience later. It means finding and making things that actively resist archiving, for whatever reason and recognizing the joy of “fugitive texts.”
…Else, we risk the fate of Roy Batty; all our memories (which are not entirely ours, but which we have access to through technology) lost, like tears in rain, as the structures we helped to build and trusted crumble around us.
(via ekstasis)
This is an interesting article I linked to Brian’s facial recognition presentation. It is interesting that so many mainstream companies, like Coke and Swedish-company The Astonishing Tribe, are encouraging this type of technology. While Coca-Cola’s facial recognition page seems more entertaining than anything, the new iPhone app seems a little sketchy. This app is in development and has not been approved yet, however, it would enable pictures to be taken and link these to social websites like Facebook, Twitter and other sites. I have a feeling there will be plenty of backlash if this app gets approved because of privacy implications.
Beardbox on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
Response to Class Presentations
3-D Technology
The last time I saw a 3-D film, it was back when 3-D was all about having things flying out at the audience, which I hated. But now that I know more about the technology and how it’s being used, I really regret not seeing Avatar in 3-D (btw, it’s at the Byrd this weekend!!!). I’m curious to see how far this is going to go, whether it’s just a fad or truly the way of the future. I also have images of Back to the Future II and that shark flashing in my head, which is slightly worrisome… But back to the presentation, I loved how in developing the 3-D camera, they based it on human eyes. It’s curious how much technology is attempting to replicate/supplement natural human features—as we saw with the other droid and prosthetic arm presentations.
PS Someone I follow on Twitter posted a 3-D picture the same day as the presentation - love the glasses, thanks!
Facial Recognition Software
It’s really interesting to hear about this technology that we see all the time on so many crime shows, but when seeing it in action, as on the Coca-Cola website, it also makes me a bit trepidatious, I suppose. On all the shows, if they get someone’s face on camera, then they are able to automatically match it to someone in their database(s). But if you consider the face matching program, you can see that many people can have extremely similar faces, so how many matches would a crime-fighting place actually get for a single face caught on camera? Or is their technology a lot better/more accurate than Coke’s?
