Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

Compressed 02

Compressed 02 from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo.

Franciszka and Stefan Themerson - Oko I Ucho / The Eye and The Ear (1944/45)

Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world

The Mass Ornament

"Everyone does his or her task on the conveyor belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality"

"The Mass Ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality to which the prevailing economic system aspires"

- Siegfried Kracauer

Not I

samuel beckett

Seen: Countdown to Zero

Seen: Inside Job

The Mind's Eye

Destruct

Jimmy Loizeau talk @ RCA

Everyone = Boom from DWFE on Vimeo.

http://www.auger-loizeau.com/

Busby Berkeley

we are the virus

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/feb/14/environment.highereducation

"James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis conceives of the planet as an active control system. It posits the existence of feedbacks at the global level which, so far, have served to keep the earth's surface habitable within a tolerable range, despite significant external changes, including changes in the radiation from the sun. However, with severe human-induced activity, that is now beginning to change."

Social Computing

"I'm not a robot. I'm a unicorn"

First 'chatbot' conversation ends in argument - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14843549

We Are All Human Microphones Now -

http://www.thenation.com/blog/163767/we-are-all-human-microphones-now

Food Facility - http://www.mediamatic.net/page/298/en

‎"I am not a dystopian, I truly believe that everything is possible as long as…. It starts with chaos."

http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2011/11/design-fiction-a-report-from-the-field-by-nelly-ben-hayoun/

Visited: Thrilling Wonder Stories @ AA

http://www.thrillingwonderstories.co.uk/

Organised by Liam Young and Geoff Manaugh

Thrilling Wonder Stories 3

Date: 28.10.2011
Time: 12:00:00
Venue: London and New York

Created by Liam Young (AA Unknown Fields Division and Tomorrows Thoughts Today) and Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG), in association with Studio-X NYC and Popular Science

OCT 28 1200 – 2200 at the Architectural Association London
OCT 28 1300 – 1600 at Studio X New York
OCT 29 1400 – 2200 at Studio X New York

Live in London and New York
Created by Liam Young [Tomorrows Thoughts Today] And Geoff Manaugh [BLDGBLOG]
In Association with Architectural Association Studio-X NYC Popular Science
We have always regaled ourselves with speculative stories of a day yet to come. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of tomorrow with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. Slipping suggestively between the real and the imagined these narratives offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios.
Thrilling Wonder Stories chronicles such tales in a sci fi storytelling jam with musical interludes, live demonstrations and illustrious speakers from the fields of science, art and technology presenting their visions of the near future. Join our ensemble of mad scientists, literary astronauts, design mystics, graphic cowboys, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries for an evening of wondrous possibilities and dark cautionary tales.
For the first time, Thrilling Wonder Stories will be simultaneously hosted in London and New York and Popular Science will join the Architectural Association and Studio X NYC in coordinating the event this year. Join us for the third event in the series as we chart a course from science fiction to science fact with talks, a hands on taxidermy workshop, animatronic guests, swarm robotics demonstrations, datascapes walking tour and live movie soundscapes.
OCT 28 1200 – 2200 at the Architectural Association London OCT 28 at Studio-X NYC OCT 29 at Studio-X NYC

See www.thrillingwonderstories.co.uk
twitter: @wonderstories #tws3
tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com
live streamed via www.aaschool.ac.uk

LONDON
Hosted by
LIAM YOUNG (‘Tomorrows Thoughts Today’ and the AA’s ‘Unknown Fields Division’)
MATT JONES (‘BERG London’, Design technologists)

VINCENZO NATALI
Director of Splice and Cube and the upcoming films based on the JG Ballards ‘Highrise’ and William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’.

BRUCE STERLING
Science Fiction Author and futurist.

ANDY LOCKLEY
Academy award winning visual effects supervisor for ‘Inception’ , compositing/2D supervisor for ‘Batman Begins’ and ‘Children of Men’.

PHILIP BEESLEY
Digital media artist and experimental architect

CHRISTIAN LORENZ SCHEURER
Concept artist and Illustrator for video games and films including films as ‘The Matrix’, ‘Dark City’, ‘Fifth Element’ and ‘Superman Returns’.

CHARLIE TUESDAY GATES
Taxidermy artist and sculptor. Charlie will be leading a live taxidermy workshop.

DR RODERICH GROSS AND THE ‘NATURAL ROBOTICS LAB’
Head of the ‘Natural Robotics Lab’ at the University of Sheffield. Dr Gross will be running a live swarm robotics demonstration

GAVIN ROTHERY
Concept artist on ‘Moon’ directed by Duncan Jones

GUSTAV HOEGEN
Animatronics Engineer on Ridley Scott’s upcoming film ‘Prometheus’, ‘Hell Boy’ and ‘Clash of the Titans’


RADIO SCIENCE ORCHESTRA
Theremin-led, electro-acoustic ensemble

SPOV
Motion graphics artists for Discovery channel’s ‘Future Weapons’ and ‘Project Earth’

ZELIG SOUND
Music, composition and sound design for film and television

http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=1611

Visited: Value Based Social Change Talk @ RSA

Value Based Social Change - Exploring new frontiers from The RSA on Vimeo.

Carl Poll, a Trustee of Manavodaya Institute of Participatory Development, explains how shared values are achieved through self-awareness, dialogue and reflection, and systems are adapted according to local needs and culture, empowering communities to effect their own change.

Workshop: Human Factors in Extreme Environments

Run by Charlotte Jarvis and Regina Peldszus

"Last month, I was invited to run a one-day workshop on human factors in extreme environments with 20 Design Interaction masters students at the Royal College of Art, together with Charlotte Jarvis. The workshop participants responded to a fictional but feasible future mission scenario involving a remote duty station in deep space, where a crew member has been experiencing – and initially hiding – a painful medical condition. After a morning of hands-on familiarisation with group dynamics in unusual or extreme settings, the participants plotted different chains of events in the mission scenario, and developed one particular situation with its ethical, emotional or logistical dimension in more detail. The associated issues and implications touched upon in the participants' final responses – in the form of speculative products, systems or services – ticked a number of boxes of exploration-related R&D taxonomies from preventative and onboard medical care, in situ restraint of individual crew members and onboard ambient intelligence to legal issues, risk perception, loss of crew and more." - Regina Peldszus

The Future is Not a Noun, it's a Verb from Charlotte Jarvis on Vimeo.

by Charlotte Jarvis

Seen: Lost Book Found by Jem Cohen

by Jem Cohen

Murmuration

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Cymatics - Bringing Matter To Life With Sound

The Itch

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=1

Itching. Perception. Deceiving the brain. Phantom limb syndrome.

"The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory.

Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals."

Semiconductor

'20hz' - Data from a geo-magnetic storm in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, captured by the CARISMA radio array, generating sound and moving images

Brilliant Noise from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

‘Brilliant Noise’ - (2006), grainy black and white images of the sun, using raw satellite data captured by the Soho satellite

Semiconductor is artist duo Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt. Through moving image works they explore the material nature of our world and how we experience it, questioning our place in the physical universe. Their unique approach has won them many awards and prestigious fellowships such as the Gulbenkian Galapagos, Smithsonian Artists Research and the NASA Space Sciences. Their work is part of several international public collections and has been exhibited globally including Venice Bienniale, The Royal Academy, Hirshhorn Museum, BBC, ICA and the Exploratorium.

http://www.semiconductorfilms.com/

Project: Philanthropy

1st project of MA Design Interactions @ RCA

http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/philanthropy/

Brief here - http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/philanthropy/?page_id=2

Also, included talks / presentations from -

Public Works

We Made That

Lucy Kimbell

Utopia London Film

Visited: Locked Room Scenario @ Londonewcastle Depot

Frustrating / funny.

Text - "This place is everything... This place's everything... Rose"

Here.

Review.

Another.

Ryan Gander: Locked Room Scenario from Artangel on Vimeo.

Passing Cloud

Predominant winds would determine the routes and speed of the hovering cloud, which would move from place to place without any fixed destinations.

Passing Cloud by
Tiago Barros

michael-smith-tour-olympic-park

"London's a roll call of yesterdays utopias over lapping in space and time, yesterdays hopes and dreams poking through history into the present"

http://www.floatingcinema.info/films/michael-smith-tour-olympic-park-23-july

by Floating Cinema.

Seen: Utopia London @ RCA

At college they had a screening of this film and Q&A with it's director, Tom Cordell, as part of the project we are currently working on.

Utopia London documentary trailer from utopialondon on Vimeo.

It featured Alexandra Road Estate, NW8. (Also above)

I also enjoyed the drawings by George Finch which featured in the film.

http://www.utopialondon.com/

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2010/12/utopia-london.php

http://www.iconeye.com/news/review-utopia-london

Christoph Büchel’s “Piccadilly Community Centre”

This was back in July but I only just found out about it. I saw his 'Simply Botiful' exhibition on Brick Lane a few years ago and that was amazing.

"Something uncanny this way comes at Hauser and Wirth London: for Christoph Büchel’s latest feat in politically-charged trompe l’oeil, the Swiss artist dropped a well-used community center straight onto Piccadilly. Though it only opened a couple weeks ago, the gallery’s usual parquet is covered by worn linoleum, and each successive room is perfectly decorated and organized for dance lessons, art therapy, and other various classes in full swing—the space even smells authentic. Though upon looking further, a curious eye will detect a few uncanny moments pointing to the artist’s critical engagement in creating such a space: a reproduced Rothko hangs in the prayer room, seemingly announcing and deflecting its transcendental nature; and upstairs the Geranium Shop for the Blind is situated next to a outpost for the Conservative Party Archive—a potent juxtaposition beckoning a consideration of Big Society politics."

Read full review here - http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/christoph-buchel’s-“piccadilly-community-centre”/

Droog Open House Project

WELCOME TO A FUTURE SUBURBIA

Washing machines sit idle most of the time. Homes offer views that mostly go unnoticed. At the same time, housing foreclosures are on the rise and ready-made jobs are not easy to find. Inspired by the service-oriented mentality of New York, Open house by Droog in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro is a movement in which suburban homeowners supplement their income and develop a new vocation by offering home-made services and facilities to the public.

Open house encourages self-inventiveness, offers ideas, and proposes new models for suburban housing, striking a new balance between the private and public realm. Starting with an economic argument for the struggling middle class, the proposal also addresses the challenges posed by urban sprawl and single–owner consumption. The new residential marketplace not only brings more capital and density to the neighborhood, it also increases social cohesion through service exchange.

http://openhouse2011.com/

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/suburbia-what-a-concept/

Quayola

http://www.thecreatorsproject.com/en-uk/creators/quayola#ooid=loaHRjMjr91mD7eFnLTY3YE5igXGgaTX

Seen: I Am Here

http://www.iamhere.org.uk/

background

i am here is a public art work generated from within an increasingly transformed residential area in Hackney, East London. It is a direct response to the experience of living in an estate in the process of being regenerated. The Haggerston estate, andSamuel House, is located alongside Regents Canal in-between Kingsland Road and Victoria Park in Hackney, London.

Boarded-up and half-empty housing estates have become familiar landmarks in the contemporary urban landscape. Their façades have come to function as projection screens for collective fears and fantasies of troubled and dangerous environments that may lurk behind. This perception is all the more emphasized when rapid redevelopment encircles such estates with new luxury loft apartments and live-work spaces.

Whilst this rapid transformation has been going on in the area, nothing much has changed on Haggerston & Kingsland Estate since the early 1980's. That is, except from an ongoing steady decline due to lack of maintenance and a gradual emptying of the estate. Since at least 2004 no new residents have been accepted, and instead, vacated flats have been boarded up.

intervention

Without any prior warning in April 2007, 5 months before the stock transfer vote, bright orange boards were promptly fitted over the windows of all the vacated and empty flats on Haggerston & Kingsland estate. This rather bold visual statement even further underlined the dilapidation of the estate. The blocks now dotted with orange boards rapidly turned into an object of curiosity, especially for the passers-by using the increasingly popular towpath along Regents Canal for daily commuting to and from work, or for weekend strolls to Victoria Park and Broadway Market.i am here was initiated by artists who are themselves long-term residents of Samuel House. Through their open windows, facing on to the canal, they often overheard passersby speculating on reasons for the buildings demise and its current state. The installation aims to disturb this one-way interrogation by replacing the 67 bright orange boards with large-scale photographs of residents on the estate: onlookers no longer stand unchallenged, as their gaze is met and returned by a multitude of faces consisting of current and former residents on the estate. Thus the project literally humanises a piece of architecture on its final journey.

Philip Glass - Sesame Street - Geometry of Circles

Visited: DesignersBlock @ Farmiloe Building, Clerkenwell

The work on show was what you'd expect but the location was amazing.

http://www.industri.uk.com/farmiloe-building/

Visited: Just Do It @ Prince Charles Cinema

Just Do It - a tale of modern-day outlaws

http://JustDoItFilm.com/

Visited: Power of Making @ V&A

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/power-of-making/power-of-making/

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2011/09/the-power-of-making.php

The unsung sense: How smell rules your life

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128301.800-the-unsung-sense-how-smell-rules-your-life.html?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg21128301.800

"What's more, it is becoming clear that the brain's olfactory centres are intimately linked to its limbic system, which is involved in emotion, fear and memory. That suggests a link between smell and the way we think.

The power of smell will be no news to estate agents, who often advocate the smell of baking bread or brewing coffee to promote the sale of a house. But there are more subtle and surprising effects too. For instance, when Hendrick Schifferstein from Delft University of Technology and colleagues pumped the smell of orange, seawater or peppermint into a nightclub, the revellers partied harder - they danced more, rated their night as more enjoyable, and even thought the music was better - than when there was no added scent (Chemosensory Perception, vol 4, p 55). Rob Holland and colleagues at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, meanwhile, have found that the hint of aroma wafting out of a hidden bucket of citrus-scented cleaner was enough to persuade students to clean up after themselves - even though the vast majority of them hadn't actually registered the smell (Psychological Science, vol 16, p 689)."

New York Calling

http://www.core77.com/gallery/talk-to-me-2011/24.asp

City: What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About NYC

Originally published in Wired magazine in 2010, Pitch Interactive's data visualizations illuminate complex sets of information in a way that is dynamic, accessible, and visually eloquent. NYC's 311 call center, which receives more than 50,000 calls each day, offers citizens information on school closings, recycling rules, etc. and fields complaints on anything from property taxes to rodents. In an undulating, colorful graphic, Pitch Interactive plotted the most common complaints by time of day, exposing what irks New Yorkers at all hours of the day and night. www.pitchinteractive.com

Design: Wesley Grubbs and Mladen Balog

Read / Write Genes

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14919539

PUSH / PULL (my luck is your misfortune)

Find more videos like this on artreview.com

By Pascual Sisto - http://pascualsisto.com/

Orange Object

Visited: 'The Price of Altruism' @ RSA

"Survival of the fittest or survival of the nicest?

Since the dawn of time man has contemplated the mystery of altruism, but it was Darwin who posed the question most starkly. From the selfless ant to the stinging bee to the man laying down his life for a stranger, evolution has yielded a goodness that in theory should never be.

Academic and author Oren Harman visits the RSA to tell the moving story of the eccentric American genius George Price, who strove to answer evolution's greatest riddle. Different and driven to succeed, Price was a gifted polymath with a Zelig-like ability to be part of much of the seminal science of the twentieth century. But it was tackling Darwin’s great mystery where he finally made his most dramatic discovery.

Ultimately a homeless recluse, he had caught a glimpse of a deep and scary truth about humanity. From the heights of the Manhattan Project to the inspired, soul-shaking equation that explains altruism, to the depths of homelessness and despair, Price's life embodies the paradoxes of Darwin’s enigma. His tragic suicide in a squatter’s flat, among the vagabonds to whom he gave all his possessions, provides the ultimate contemplation on the possibility of genuine benevolence."

Listen here - http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2011/?a=411761

George Price

I listened to this after going to a talk called 'The Price of Altruism' at the RSA by Oren Harman and Matthew Taylor.

"Matthew Taylor tells the story of the last eight years in the life of George Price - a scientist who studied the evolution of altruism and who suffered for his faith. With contributions from Price's biographer Oren Harman, writer Marek Kohn, Professor Steve Jones and Price's family and friends, Matthew follows a journey that began with a sensational breakthrough in evolutionary biology and ended in poverty and suicide."

Producer: Peter Everett.

'Humankind' on Radio 4 - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012wxyl

Louise Mensch MP calls for Twitter and Facebook blackout during riots

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8697850/Louise-Mensch-MP-calls-for-Twitter-and-Facebook-blackout-during-riots.html

Fear of the internet

Power of the internet

Internet Vs. Government

Eyeborg

From here - http://www.gizmag.com/eyeborg-camera-eye/19653/

Cally Festival / Postcard Project

For the Cally Festival we had postcards printed of Caledonian road for people to take home with them. The were kindly printed by Dodd's on King's Cross Road.

We also asked people to give their feedback on the festival on the back of the postcards which were then displayed for everyone to see in the window of the Cally Festival shop / HQ.

See also - http://aminanazari.blogspot.com/2011/08/news-cally-festival.html

The Cally Festival

I helped to organise this. A community festival. 3rd July 2011, Caledonian Road, London. Such an amazing day!

Entrance to the festival. Mario came with 100's of plants!

Street buskers and a juggling granny!

Music stage

Beginnings of the mural on the side of RSPCA shop

This disused shop became a pop-up gallery.

Miles and miles of bunting and flags outside the Cally Festival HQ shop.

www.thecallyfestival.com

Loads more, much better, photos HERE by Steph Wood.

(making something out of nothing)

Reading -

Started reading all these books. I'm not sure I'll ever finish any of them though.

Colour

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14421303

"In an experiment testing the relationship between emotions and colour we discovered that nearly every adult assigned yellow to happiness, blue to sadness and red to anger (surprise and fear, which are the other two universal emotions, had no obvious colour). While children showed the same trend, their choices were far more mixed and variable.

On the other hand nearly everyone (young and old) showed a similar relationship between colour and sound, where lower notes are thought to be best represented as dark blue and higher notes as bright yellow.

In other words people seem to have internal mental maps between colour and other perceptual qualities, such as sound and form. Amazing when these relationships do not exist in nature.

.........

"In another experiment we asked people to put 49 coloured blocks on a surface area of 49 spaces. They had no other instruction.

The number of possible images that could have been created was 10 raised to the power of 62 - a huge number.

What's remarkable is that people made patterns that were largely predictable, because everyone grouped colours together according to similarity. Why?

Because we have an inherent need for structure, and in particular structures that are familiar, in this case structures that are similar to the mathematics of the images of nature.

In yet another experiment that really looked at the fundamentals of colour vision, we asked whether there might be individual differences in simply detecting light.

What we discovered is that not only are women more sensitive than men, but also women who feel they have a stronger sense of control are significantly better than those women who feel powerless.

Remarkable really when one remembers that we're just talking about light detection.

We also examined whether colour can actually alter our sense of a minute.

Our initial observations suggested that a minute takes longer for men than for women… about 11 seconds longer on average.

But a minute took longer for men and women when surrounded by red light, as compared to blue light.

This effect is likely to be linked to arousal since it is well-known that red and blue create different states of arousal in men and women alike."

Getting old

"

As Leon Trotsky put it: "Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man." Behavioural thinkers believe that most people are incapable of imagining themselves getting old, one reason why people fail to invest sufficiently in a pension.

.....

Living longer is one thing, but the quality of the extra years is what counts, he believes. And no-one knows if these extra years will be spent working for longer and being mentally and physically active, or finding oneself frail and bed-ridden.

"We may not be able to expect people to work much longer than they already are," Read warns. "If the productive years remain about the same but the lifespan expands that becomes a major issue for society."

The novelist Martin Amis argued last year that the answer might be "euthanasia booths on every street corner". As he explained at a public Q&A session the swelling ranks of the elderly would not only be a drain on resources for younger generations, but lead to an undignified end to one's life.

......

"The progress has been astonishing," he notes. For the last 50 or so years life expectancy has been increasing at a rate of six hours a day."

"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14412025