I’m not sure how I’ve managed to miss out on this all of these years, but the b-sides to Amnesiac are blowing my mind. Jonny Greenwood is the cat’s pajamas! That’s right. The cat’s pajamas.
SO-IL’s Kukje Gallery in Seoul. (via Sam Jacob’s article in Domus)
Anthony McCall - “Five Minutes of Pure Sculpture”
I was fortunate enough to experience an exhibition of his ‘sculptures’ at the Serpentine Gallery a few years ago. They are very tactile - as he says in the video - despite their lack of obvious materiality. They beg for interaction.
See the images.
Judith Benzer - Summer House in Southern Burgenland, Austria
via DesignBoom
Beautiful b&w time-lapse video of Jupiter & Saturn created using NASA photographs.
(Source: lleigha)
“Emptiness and silence are hard to design. There are three ways to do it: do nothing, protect them, and make them visible.”
Situated Technologies Pamphlet No. 9
Modulated Cities: Networked Spaces, Reconstituted Subjects
Helen Nissenbaum and Kazys Varnelis
“Instead of sustaining the freedoms of physical space online, the conditions of … cyberspace seem increasingly to be replicated in (or mapped onto) physical space—social networks, an Internet of Things, pervasive computing, RFID, GPS-enabled devices, location tracking systems and technologies, and identification through crowd-sourcing (a so-called “human flesh” search engine). As venture capitalist Harry Weller put it in a recent interview, “now instead of us surfing the Internet, the Internet is surfing us.”
“For example, American Express lowered the credit limits of individuals who shopped frequently at Walmart because as a group, Walmart shoppers statistically have a poor history of repayment. On the other hand, if you buy premium birdseed,
it turns out that corporations can tell you are a good credit risk. Corporations know that about you. So we’re already being followed around the shopping mall and, of course we’re also being followed around the Internet: data mining of purchases is nothing new.”
This is so addictive. Try it.
Bruce Sterling’s critique of ‘The New Aesthetic’ (you’re probably all familiar with its artifacts, but just in case you’re unfamiliar with its vague catch-all moniker browse this tumblr and maybe watch some of this).
Sterling:
“Our human, aesthetic reaction to the imagery generated by our machines is our own human problem. We are the responsible parties there. We can program robots and digital devices to generate images and spew images at our eyeballs. We can’t legitimately ask them to tell us how to react to that… .
“When computers first shoved their way into analog reality, they came surrounded by a host of poetic metaphors. Cybernetic devices were clearly much more than mere motors and engines, so they were anthropomorphized and described as having “thought,” “memory,” and nowadays “sight” and “hearing.” Those metaphors are deceptive. These are the mental chains of the old aesthetic, these are the iron bars of oppression we cannot see… .
Computers don’t and can’t make sound aesthetic judgements. Robots lack cognition. They lack perception. They lack intelligence. They lack taste. They lack ethics. They just don’t have any. Tossing in more software and interactivity, so that they’re even jumpier and more apparently lively, that doesn’t help.
It’s not their fault. They are not moral actors and they are incapable of faults. It’s our fault for pretending otherwise, for fooling ourselves, for projecting our own qualities onto phenomena that we built, that are very interesting to us, but not at all like us. We can’t give them those qualities of ours, no matter how hard we try.
Pretending otherwise is like making Super Mario the best man at your wedding.”
Via Sterling’s blog on Wired.com (some additional commentary via Metalab at Harvard)
