b l a s t u l a reblog++

Radiant Copenhagen is a future version of Copenhagen. Using Google maps and Wiki technologies, the group has created a Copenhagen dressed in dystopian scenery and amusing attire. You will find stories and images about peoples and places, atypical architecture, fictional art projects, suspended gravity, environmental peculiarities and the wonders of future transport, literary permutations and poetic vignettes. Radiant Copenhagen takes the internet project as its base, but spreads into the real city, with enactments of staged reality appearing without warning.

The artists Anders Bojen, Kristoffer Ørum, Kaspar Bonnén and PhD (Comp.Lit.) Rune Graulund have worked with a team of architects, artists, designers, engineers and musicians to create an alternate vision of Copenhagen. All contributors share an interest in alternative realities and how these, through the internet and other media, play an increasing important role in our common understanding of the world.

The internet project as well as the physical interactions with the city are intended as devices to challenge conventional thinking, an assault on the collective imagination of Copenhagen by which new possibilities for change are established. Be there for the opening March 27, check out radiantcopenhagen.net and remember to keep an eye out for a new Copenhagen.

Contributors to Radiant Copenhagen includes Kristoffer Ørum, Anders Bojen, Rune Graulund, Maja Zander, Kaspar Bonnén, Stig W. Jørgensen, Palle R Jensen, Ida Marie Hede Bertelsen, Peter Rasmussen, Kasper Hesselbjerg, Ulrik Nørgaard, Daphne Bidstrup, Andreas Pallisgaard and Kristian Haarløv.

Radiant Copenhagen is supported by projektpuljen – City of Copenhagen. Book a seat for the bus tour on March 28 at 12 noon or 3:00 pm by emailing booking [at] radiantcopenhagen.net. Departure is in front of Christiansborg - duration 1 hour. Opening is at 5:30 pm at Gallery Overgaden - Institute of Contemporary Art. Overgaden Neden Vandet 17, DK-1414 Copenhagen K.

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo


reBlogged

on Mar 26, 2009, 7:51PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on March 26, 2009, 8:51pm

Posted under reblog art, reblog innovation, reblog wikinomics

Originally by Regine from we make money not art

Posted under reblog art

The Infrastructural City - Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, edited by Kazys Varnelis (Amazon UK and USA.)

Publisher Actar says: Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures avoid being superfluous by joining this system as temporary containers for people, objects, and capital. This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture.

I was waiting eagerly for The Infrastructural City - Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. 3 reasons for that.

Number one, is Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies, Varnelis’ previous book which he co-authored with Robert Sumrell. Anyone who had that one in their hands will get my point.

Lane Barden, Fifty-Two Miles Downstream: An Aerial Survey of the Los Angeles River and Channel

Reason number 2 is Los Angeles, the one city on this planet i should be averse to. The first time i was there i saw creatures that freaked me out: Chupa-Chup ladies -heavy and round on top, super slim on the rest of the body- and all sort of people walking around with some rather stunning attributes that had been recently implanted. I could not accept that no one ever ‘walks around the city center’ to do some shopping, have a drink and sit down in a park. And where was the city center anyway? I realized i would never survive in L.A. without a driving license. The skyscrapers were tiny Lego structures thrown in a heap by the highway. And the river. Even that poor repudiated and alien river looked fake! I should never have liked LA. I tend to measure every city to a European one. I manage that tour de force almost everywhere but in LA the attempt is more preposterous than ever. That’s what charmed me so much. That and many other things. Los Angeles is the only city in the USA where i would be tempted to live.

From the series Los Angeles parking booths by Mac Kane

Let’s get to reason number 3. The Infrastructural City will drive you way beyond Los Angeles. The idiosyncrasies, stories and lessons described are thought-provoking enough to make you look at your own city with a more inquisitive eye. In this book, Los Angeles is little more than a (fascinating) case study, a pretext to explore the effects that today’s complex and distorted infrastructures, whether planned by public entities or developed by private and competing corporations, have on contemporary urbanism.

As Varnelis writes: Our goal was not modest: we set out to replace Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) as the key text for understanding the city urbanistically. Instead of four ecologies, The Infrastructural City offers essays commissioned to researchers who bring the discourse on urbanism outside of its usual and sometimes way too formal boundaries. These essays cover the three scales of networks: landscape, urban fabric and the object.

In one of the essays of the book, David Fletcher invites us to ‘embrace freakology rather than bucology’. The advice could apply to many aspects of the Los Angeles. Its river, for example. Instead of following blindly the assumption that it is an eye-sore and a disgrace whose dignity would only be recovered when the concrete is removed and its native vegetation and wildlife reimposed, one should be aware of the fact that coming back to the ‘natural’ state could only be done at the cost of anihilating a complex ecosystem made of exotic and native species that has slowly found its equilibrium over decades.

Image from the project Not A Cornfield

This hotchpotch of imported and original flora can be observed all over L.A. making it one of the most bio-diverse areas in the world. Most of us however, tend to reduce Los Angeles to its ubiquitous and iconic palm tree, a tree that is actually not a native species either. Most of them were planted to beautify the city for the 1932 Olympics, at a time when a city built around cars felt that it might have to re-invent its landscape. The average lifespan of the palm tree is 70 to 100. Its days under the California sun are numbered. And it doesn’t seem that the city is going to waste much tears on them as no palm tree has been invited to the Million Trees party.

Hopefully this will mean that the new breed of palm tree that double as cell antenna is going to loose some popularity as well:

Cell phone antenna camouflaged into fake tree

If trees of all sorts and a river are to be expected in a section dedicated to the landscape of L.A., lowly gravel is not. Neither is oil. Well, not in the way Frank Ruchala (don’t miss another of his essays, Recovering oiLA, you can access it on Lulu) pictures it: an actor which used to supply as much of the US’ oil demand as Saudi Arabia, an asset whose value nowadays has to compete (most often than not unsuccessfully) with real estate. Los Angeles contains one of the most intense concentration of pipelines in the world yet, the presence of the precious resource is often camouflaged behind mundane facades. As we all know now, the Industry with a big I in Los Angeles is no longer the one that earned it the nickname of ‘Oildorado.’

Postcard view (ca. 1900) of oil rigs in a booming giant oil field in the Los Angeles area. © Peter A. Scholle, 1999

The rest of the book explores what is below that patch of pavement, inside the backyard garden of an unassuming house or what goes though monster warehouses. Each chapter is written by a different expert but the many photographies, graphics and a certain spirit enable the book to find its own voice.

Photograph by Ric Francis/Associated Press (via)

As i mentioned above most of the infrastructures analyzed in the book provide food for thought wherever you happen to live.

Cables overhead. Image Xeni Jardin, One Wilshire flickr set

One Wilshire, the unassuming container of the U.S. telephone and data connections reaching across the Pacific evokes the very tangible spin-offs of information society. The analysis of Los Angeles & Long Beach’s ports, both major dispatchers of an unprecedented rise in the volume of goods from the Far East to the city and to the rest of the country, speaks to our seemingly unstoppable gluttony. I found some of the most illuminating comments in Roger Sherman’s essay about change-based thinking, a position that invites architects and urbanists to envision their work under a different lens, one that would ’sett a trap’ to capture potential change that inevitably occur in the lifespan of a city.

Image on the homepage from Lane Barden’s series Fifty-Two Miles Downstream: An Aerial Survey of the Los Angeles River and Channel.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

Originally by Regine from we make money not art

Posted under reblog innovation

Long overdue…. A follow-up on media_city Seoul, a media art biennale hosted until November 5, 2008 at the Seoul Museum of Art.

The events aims to reflect on the place that media art has taken into contemporary art. Each in their own way, the works selected for the exhibitions bring a fragment of answer to fundamental questions such as: What is media art? What is different from the conventional art? What changes have been made by that in the field of art? and what influences could come from now?

In order to ensure a broader and more informed coverage of these issues, Park Il-ho, exhibition director, professor at Ewha Womans University and main curator of media_city Seoul surrounded himself with four international curators: Maarten Bertheux from the Stedelijk Museum, independent art curator and critic Raul Zamudio, curator of Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art Tohru Matsumoto and art historian and curator Andreas Broeckmann.

I had the opportunity to attend a talk in which Broeckmann shared with the audience his point of view on some of the questions raised by the media art biennale: What can be defined as media art today?

Most of you probably know Andreas Broeckmann as the artistic director of the transmediale festival (2000-2007) and the co-director of the media arts lab TESLA in Berlin (2005-2007). The curator and art historian recently co-chaired the re:place 2007 interdisciplinary science and art history conference and is currently working on the next edition of ISEA which will take place in the Ruhr area (Dortmund, Essen, Duisburg, a. o.) in August 2010.

Below are my (fairly rough) notes from the talk.

Questions such as What does it mean to speak of media art today? or What is the territory of media art today? have given rise to many ongoing discussions and are even the core subject of a couple of exhibitions (such as media_city Seoul). One of these exhibitions closed yesterday at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Deep Screen - Art in Digital Culture. Proposal for Municipal Art Acquisitions 2008 was organized with the objective of getting a sample of contemporary media artists living in The Netherlands. The Stedelijk plans to select a few artworks from the sample and buy them for its permanent collection. The questions they museum asked right from the start was ‘How can we bring this recent art, with its own aesthetics and thematics into the collection?’

Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács‘ Hinterland #2 series (exhibited at the Stedelijk)

Broeckmann’s conviction is that in fact not much of it is really new for the Stedelijk. After all, they have been buying such artworks for 40 years now: Fluxus works, videos by Abramovic, Bill Viola, etc. Media art shouldn’t be reduced to technology, some media art pieces are just good examples of conceptual art and have other strong connections with modern and post-modern art.

We are now living a historical time when digital technology is used everywhere everyday. We don’t have to think about it anymore. It just became so natural. Only a tiny minority of people had a mobile phone 10 years ago. Today we all have one. Being connected is easy and that’s the way we expect it to be. Yet people keep seeing media art as something different, a genre which puts a heavy emphasis on technology and when we speak about art, it mostly refers to art creation that uses analog media.

In the past, when technologies were news, artists were engaging with it in a free and often very explorative way. Now that they have mastered the technology the focus is mostly on making good art. Of course some artists are still developing complicated art pieces but we are seeing much more work using easy, hand-on technology.

An important question to raise is: What happens to art when it has reached the phase beyond digital technology novelty? We used to be fascinated by technology and now it is so much part of our life that we don’t have to think about it anymore.

Many people have the feeling that we still describe something when we say ‘media art’. Which role does media art has in contemporary art? Are there particular themes, ideas or fields that media art references?

One of the works shown at media_city Seoul illustrates a possible answers. At first look, Julien Maire’s Exploding Camera is a heap of electronics on a table. The bits and pieces belong to a video camera which, although it was disassembled, is still perfectly functioning. The lens has been taken out. Instead, external light coupled with LEDs and laser produce video images by direct illumination of the camera’s CCD (light sensor). A transparent disc containing photographic positives is placed between the lights and the CCD. The pictures are projected onto the CCD when a light is turned on. Because of the different position of the lights, movement in the same picture can be created. Large lights and the laser create explosions (they trigger a sound that overlays the backing soundtrack).

Exploding Camera Screenshots

The installation was inspired by the murder, two days before the 9/11, of the most credible opponent to the Taliban: Commander Massoud.

Two al-Qaida suicide bombers posing as journalists killed him with an exploding camera at his camp in Afghanistan’s remote Panjshir Valley.

Although the murder is connected with 9/11, it has been almost completely forgotten because of the magnitude of the events a few days later.

The artist wrote: For me, it is as if the destroyed camera used in the attack against Massoud had continued to work and has been filming a war film for the last 6 years.
All of this, as well as the death of the almost mythic figure of Massoud, has lead me to develop the piece ‘the exploding camera’: a kind of destroyed medium able to produce live an experimental historical film reinterpreting the events of the war.

Just like Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács‘ Hinterland #2 series (exhibited at the Stedelijk but not in Seoul), the work deconstructs the technology of audiovisual media in order to better reflect on the way that it works. This theme is often explored in media art and could therefore constitute an element that contribute to its definition.

Marko Peljhan, Speckr, Linz

An other relevant figure to consider is Marko Peljhan, an artist interested in social and political context of technology. He develops works in the Russian constructivist tradition of the 1920. His art projects deal with with technology and offer the public the opportunity to engage with them and talk about technology, scientific research, military developments, etc. The aesthetics of his work is directly inspired by the aesthetics of science and technology while exposing its dark side, the esoteric and sometimes irrational aspects of modern science.

Hello World by Yunchul Kim

Hello, World!, offers an interesting dialog with mediality by showing the process of the translation from the digital to the analog through copper pipes. The installation, developed by Yunchul Kim, uses acoustic signals to store data. A codified auditory signal (feedback) circulates in a closed system consisting of a computer, a loudspeaker, 246 meters of copper tubing and a microphone. Due to the acoustic delay in the tubing system, it’s possible to save data, whereby the rule is: the longer the copper tubing, the longer the time delay and the greater the memory capacity.

Where is the medium in this work? Is it the computer with the hardware which carries the data file? Or is it the software? The electrical signal?

Driessens & Verstappen, Breed

Erwin Driessens & Maria Verstappen’s Breed (also included in the Stedelijk exhibition) is a fascinating take on the theme of the transition from digital to analog. A computer program uses artificial evolution to grow very detailed bronze sculptures that represent virtual mathematical models. The purpose of each growth is to generate by cell division from a single cell a detailed form that can be materialised. On the basis of selection and mutation a code is gradually developed that best fulfills this “fitness” criterion and thus yields a workable form. The virtual designs become tangible artefacts through 3D printing techniques.

Driessens & Verstappen, Breed

The whole creation process is left in the ‘hands’ of the computer, there is no direct artistic decision. The final result is presented in a very traditional way: the print-out structures are cast in bronze and presented in a glass case.

Breed reflects on the relationship between virtuality and materiality but also the relationship human and machine creativity. Belonging both to the software art genre and the sculpture genre, Breed pushes the boundaries of mediality.

Pierre Bastien

The work of Pierre Bastien which engages mostly with mechanical age looks at the degree zero of media. He uses very basic (wind, voice, fans, etc.) media for human expression in a ‘post-machinic age’ scenario. It doesn’t make much sense to talk about new media art in this context but his work is an artistic expression that uses the most ancient media possible. On the other hand, it can be regarded as media art because of the way it reflects on the mediality of its own materiality (and vice-versa?.)

Electroboutique

Ironic wink from Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev with their latest artistico-commercial adventure: Electroboutique, a conceptual project that playfully but intelligently reflects on the status of media art as another product of consumer culture. The Russian artists are exhibiting at media_city Seoul Super-i, a pair of goggles that allow visitors to reverse the virtual/real duality by transforming the “real” world around us into a pixelated one in real time.

Today, many electrical and digital technologies are available to artists, they are free to choose which one best fits their work. That didn’t use to be the case. There was a time when these technologies were expensive and not available to the hoi polloi. Nowadays, these technologies have been ‘liberated’. In the past, computers would limit what an artist could do, they were ‘imprisoned’. Today, an artist can decide freely whether it is software or wood that best correspond to their project. This also constitutes a liberation from the idea that the essence of media art is technology.

The Cage, by Tania Ruiz Gutiérrez, tries to re-create the experience of being incarcerated. The projection shows an image of a tiger kept prisoner in a zoo. The image is always the same, yet the tiger moves around his cage. The artist explains that the movement is in fact determined by the relative sizes of tiger and cage, such that his movements are optimized to the only possible path given the tight space available. Given that both the duration and the distance are repeated, one can imagine that in the tiger’s brain there exists a double incarceration, both spatial and temporal. Moreover, the tiger’s path traces over and over the sign of infinity. I would like to make visible the passing of a suspended time and give this installation both a reflexive and hypnotic character.

Pneuma Monoxyd, by Thomas Köner, is a visual metaphor of how time and memory intersect into our mind. The video installation merges in a dark blur surveillance images of a German shopping street and a Balkan marketplace.

These last works show how media art offer us new possibilities to look at the world in a different way.

Mark Hansen’s 2 channel video Other People’s Feelings Are Also My Own No.3 shows the artist in a similar outfit and facial expression as those of the man, woman or child in the picture next to his. The work explores notions of ego, subjectivity and identity but it also looks into the mediality of the human face and how much it can be used as a screen.

Herwig Weiser’s sound sculpture Death Before Disko is a self-absorbed machine, it is a medium that could be qualified as ‘autistic’. It appears to be busy with itself and communicates as little as possible to the outside. ‘Death Before Disko’ uses an online data stream from space observation and translates it into sound and light events. With the proliferation of digital technologies, users have become more and more distant from the physical hardware of their laptop or hi-fi units. ‘Death Before Disko’ aims to return to the foundations of the hardware, and shows how our relationship towards technology is more often emotional than rational.

Broeckmann’s view is that it is getting less and less important to have specific media biennales and festivals. If a ‘media art’ piece is a good art piece it will survive as contemporary art.

Further reading: Deep Screen - Art in Digital Culture. An Introduction by Andreas Broeckmann.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

Originally by Regine from we make money not art

Posted under reblog art

By Scott Smith

The sustainable future will be a networked future: technology will be the glue that binds the green city together. One voice among those pushing this idea comes from communication equipment giant Cisco, which is staking the claim that sustainable cities are not just about grass roofs and vertical farming, but about using the IT skeleton of the urban environment — its web of communication systems, connected transport systems and networked living and working environments — to tie the whole city together in an integrated, controllable, monitored community.

As a step on this road to fully networked city environments, last month Cisco and the City of Amsterdam held the second Connected Urban Development (CUD) conference to highlight the Dutch city’s inclusion as one of three initial cities, alongside San Francisco and Seoul, in its CUD initiative. CUD’s creation in 2006 was driven by Cisco CEO John Chambers’ involvement in the Clinton Global Initiative, and held its first summit in San Francisco last year. This year’s event also marked the inclusion of four additional cities as CUD testing ground: Madrid, Hamburg, Lisbon and Birmingham, England.

Kicking off the conference, Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen pointed out that his city has several obvious reasons for being interested in looking more deeply into using IT to do its part to help slow climate change: not only because it is a low-lying city that would be strongly impacted by rising sea levels, but also because it has a tech-centric economy, with 12 percent of employment linked to IT and new media. With major traffic problems (and increasingly tech-based solutions) in his city as well as around the Netherlands in general, Cohen said Amsterdam felt not only pressure but an obligation to cut carbon emissions, and has set C02 reduction targets for 2029 at 40 percent lower than 1990, which will require aggressive action. Population density is a core issue the Dutch have had to face in recent years, as the country ranks 23rd in inhabitants per square kilometer worldwide, even higher if only land mass is taken into consideration.

Despite very high usage of alternative transport, Amsterdam still faces carbon problems driven by population density.

Cisco Europe’s Chris Dedicote also pointed to IT as a potentially powerful tool in helping cities lower emissions and achieve greater levels of sustainability by linking transportation, energy, built environments and other urban infrastructure, but only if use of technology itself is better understood for its own potential for negative impact on the environment. Dedicote said an estimated 2 percent of global carbon emissions can be traced back to unmanaged use of IT, and that his company was itself trying to better understand its own internal carbon consumption in order to establish carbon budgets alongside financial budgets. “You have no idea how much energy a department or an office uses,” Dedicote said in his keynote. “In the same way we know how much money [a department] spends, if we also know how much energy they use, it has an incredible impact on the way they work.” Dedicote pointed to refining monitoring and sensing technologies as the next key step in getting to this level of transparency across companies, buildings and entire cities.

Larger IT and communication companies have placed a main focus on the topic of energy-efficiency strategies as a competitive advantage. Cisco and one of its largest competitors, Nortel, have both been focusing on the energy consumption levels of their own networking equipment and benefits of green IT. Nortel’s latest ad campaign targets Cisco directly, claiming its own gear’s lower energy consumption amounts to an “energy tax” on those who use Cisco equipment. Cisco itself appointed a director of green engineering earlier this year to drive the company’s efforts in the area.

One element of Amsterdam’s strategy is the development of networked co-working centers, the first of which opened last week in Almere. The fast-growing satellite city to Amsterdam’s east is typical of sprawl that has emerged as the Netherlands’ population has grown in the past few decades. Created in 1971 in part to ease crowding in Amsterdam and now home to 185,000, Almere is expected to double in population by 2030, according to the city’s mayor, Annemarie Jorritsma. The Smart Work Centre provides working space for area commuters, including meeting space and fiber-based videoconferencing facilities, taking advantage of the massive fiber network infrastructure that has been laid under the Netherlands in the past decade. The city of Amsterdam uses the co-working space, as does IBM, but it will take many such centers to make a significant impact on working and commuting patterns in the region, and even then proponents will have to break through a traditional work culture built around 9 to 5 presence under management’s eye.

Almere’s mayor Annemarie Jorritsma speaks with Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen and others via a fiber-based video link.

CUD’s next stop is next spring in Seoul, where it will take stock of the initiative’s progress. Based on the plans and case studies discussed at CUD, sights are set high among government leaders, technologists and urban planners. With major projects ranging from San Francisco’s Treasure Island redevelopment to Abu Dhabi’s futuristic technology project of Masdar City — both presented at the conference — those hatching new mega-developments globally are feeling increasingly pushed to put sustainability front and center in order to achieve the scale of their project plans. Where a diverse set of city departmental managers once sat in different facilities watching traffic or power grid performance disconnected from one another, concepts discussed at CUD point toward a future where integrated “dashboard” views of a city’s vital statistics — a la Sim City — will redefine the nature of city management.

Scott Smith is a futurist and founder of Changeist, a human foresight consultancy, and project director of Smartspace, a research initiative to map development of integrated intelligent communities worldwide.

Photos taken by the author.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 8:45 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment, reblog innovation, reblog wikinomics

This article was written by Joy Green in March 2008. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

What happens when disruptive ideas combine?

We’ve heard a lot about distributed energy generation and smart grids recently – cities could act as distributed power plants, channeling energy from hundreds of thousands, even millions of individual rooftops (think micro-wind and solar PV) into common use and minimizing transmission losses. In essence - your home or building generates clean power and sells the surplus to the grid at peak prices for you during the day– it buys any excess energy you need during the evening when prices are low. You could plug your hybrid car into this fabulous integrated system and depending on the time of day it would either sell surplus energy from its battery to the grid or charge itself up ready for use the next morning.

We’ve also heard a lot about product-service systems. At the moment, as I’m working on an urban mobility futures project at Forum For The Future , I’m particularly interested in the Velib scheme in Paris – the self-service, easy access bike hire scheme with banks of bikes outside metro stations and other key points that has got thousands of Parisians cycling again (Similar to Barcelona’s Bicing system - ed.). You pick up a bike anywhere you need it and drop it off, no-fuss, at your destination. Like the smart grid, this is also a form of distributed infrastructure – you could call it a lightweight public transport infrastructure that smooths the peaks of demand for the more traditional system of the metro and the bus.

And if you combine them?

MIT recently outlined a service model for personal urban mobility that does just that.

Imagine the Velib bike scheme in Paris supplemented with self-service electric, stackable two-seater mini-cars at transport interchanges and hundreds of other points all over the city. These mini-cars are designed for multiple short urban trips so they don’t need huge bulky batteries or high top speeds. They’re tiny (six stack in the same space you’d park a regular car), lightweight, ultra-maneuverable and super-convenient – you’d never have to worry about finding a parking space again. You just swipe your card, pick up a mini-car whenever you need one from a nearby stack, and drop it off at another stack when you are done.

This already sounds like a good service model, but what makes it much more interesting are the potential second and third order effects. When the cars stack together, they effectively become large, intelligent batteries plugged into the grid – and the perfect partners for smart grids and distributed power generation. Car stacks could mop up and store excess energy or provide an extra boost of local power as required, so would be a particularly good fit with buildings that generate power from intermittent renewables such as solar or wind (or even, by the coast, wave power). In essence, each mini-car doubles as a mobility service and an intelligent energy storage device. With a hundred or so mini-cars in a stack, and hundreds or thousands of these car stacks in a city, you’d have enormous battery capacity being added to the electrical grid – perfect for large-scale distributed energy generation from renewables on buildings. The batteries would provide the flexibility to cope well with fluctuations in demand and generation.

If you then add in ubiquitous mobile networking and ‘embedded intelligence,’ things get even more interesting. William J Mitchell at MIT speculates on these mini-cars

* knowing patterns of energy prices and mobility demand, and intelligently playing the energy futures market
* operating in an environment of fine-grained, highly dynamic road congestion pricing, and intelligently playing in the road space market
* knowing parking space availability and dynamically adjusted prices, and intelligently playing in the parking space market

In effect, these cars becoming “Google for the city, efficiently getting you to its resources, while taking account of time and cost constraints”

Even without this heady third stage though, the proposal is a potential distributed system that integrates energy, transport and the built environment. It’s an idea for personal urban mobility that takes on many of the perceived strengths of the car – convenience, independence, weather protection and safety. (One caveat here though - it would be difficult to predict how many car journeys this system would actually displace without running a pilot project. Velib has so far mostly displaced public transport journeys – which is also helpful for easing pressure on creaking infrastructure – but had little effect on car use.)

It’s also a little closer to how an ecosystem works – flexible, interlinked and resilient. And this is a lot closer to how we’re going to have to think and act if we’re going to solve problems like personal mobility in a world where there are 9 billion of us and 6 billion of us live in cities.

Smart Grid, Meet the Product-Service Model is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:10 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

Heterotopia and the City Public Space in a Postcivil Society; Edited by Michiel Dehaene, Lieven De Cauter.

Heterotopia, literally meaning ‘other place’, is a rich concept in urban design that describes a space that is on the margins of ordered or civil society, and one that possesses multiple, fragmented or even incompatible meanings. The term has had an impact on architectural and urban theory since it was coined by Foucault in the late 1960s but it has remained a source of confusion and debate since. Heterotopia and the City seeks to clarify this concept and investigates the heterotopias which exist throughout our contemporary world: in museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, gated communities, wellness hotels and festival markets.

With theoretical contributions on the concept of heterotopia, including a new translation of Foucault’s influential 1967 text, Of Other Space and essays by well-known scholars, the book comprises a series of critical case studies, from Beaubourg to Bilbao, which probe a range of (post)urban transformations and which redirect the debate on the privatization of public space. Wastelands and terrains vagues are studied in detail in a section on urban activism and transgression and the reader gets a glimpse of the extremes of our dualized, postcivil condition through case studies on Jakarta, Dubai, and Kinshasa.

Heterotopia and the City provides a collective effort to reposition heterotopia as a crucial concept for contemporary urban theory. The book will be of interest to all those wishing to understand the city in the emerging postcivil society and post-historical era. Planners, architects, cultural theorists, urbanists and academics will find this a valuable contribution to current critical argument.

Table of Contents:

Part 1: Heterotopology: ‘A Science in the Making’
Part 2: Heterotopia Revisited
Part 3: The Mall as Agora: The Agora as Mall
Part 4: Dwelling in a Postcivil Society
Part 5: Terrains Vagues: Transgression and Urban Activism
Part 6: Heterotopia in the Splintering Metropolis
Part 7: Heterotopia after the Polis

Michiel Dehaene is Lecturer in Urbanism at the Eindhoven University of Technology and a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, KULeuven. His work focuses on the epistemology of urbanism, dispersed urbanization and the interrelation between formal and informal modes of development.

Lieven De Cauter studied Philosophy and History of Art. He teaches at the department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning, KULeuven, the media school RITS and the Berlage Institute, Rotterdam. He has published books on contemporary art, modernity, architecture, on the city and politics.

Originally
from Networked_Performance

by jo

reBlogged

on Sep 30, 2008, 8:56PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on September 30, 2008, 10:56pm

Posted under reblog art

Finally some time to put order in my brain and write a few lines about the 5th edition of Seoul International Media Art Biennale, aka media_city Seoul.

With some 70 artists showing their work, the biennial is a very satisfying but also very overwhelming experience, especially because the event features so many pieces that require time and reflection, and so many artists whose work i had never heard of. Thank god and the curators, there were very few of those installations that look more like entertaining gizmos than art. Most of the time they require the audience to wave their hands or move around so that whatever is projected on a screen will move. Or will perform some magical trick like spitting out smoke. Apparently some visitors have seen this kind of work too much: i saw a few people flapping their arms in a desperate attempt to ‘interact’ with a piece which was perfectly happy to function without human help, thank you.

Sorry Miss, this installation is good but it won’t interact: Hello World by Yunchul Kim

I saw some great pieces of media art in Seoul and they put the emphasis on ‘art’ rather than ‘media’. media_city Seoul is the only major biennial i’ve heard of that is entirely dedicated to media art. It doesn’t take place in a gallery or in one of those ueber-trendy disused industrial spaces outside the city. It is located in a very official, big, and bright art institutions: the Seoul Museum of Art.

Visitors trying on Electroboutique’s virtual reality goggles

The thing that puzzles me is the existence of a media art biennial. Not because i am per se unconvinced by the idea of applying the structure and vocabulary of ‘traditional’ contemporary art onto media art. Not because of all the discussions about the overflow of biennials all over the world and the obsolescence of their concept. I love biennials, any celebration of art is good for me. No, what perplexes me is that, once again, media art is treated like the odd kid who has to be separated from the others. If on the one hand it’s fantastic that a city has the guts to dedicate two month to media art and host the event in a museum, i wonder how long it will take until media art is regarded as ‘art’ and integrated into other contemporary art events without anyone finding it extraordinary, brave or strange. We’re getting there i know but, damn! it’s slow. Anyway, not sure this French expression translates well in english but i’m going to stop ’spitting in the soup’ and just rejoice in this opportunity i had to see so many great works.

Starting with 2 examples taken from Marie Sester’s Exposure series, an artwork which started as videos that explores how X-ray imagery was used for surveillance, before 9/11.

Exposure, Marie Sester

One photo shows an X-rayed truck containing what are very probably smuggled items. In another one, an X-rayed horse trailer is elegantly juxtaposed with a house, which eventually overtakes the entire screen. The horse trailer has a luxury car hidden inside. The house was scanned by laser as well. Today, Exposure is a work stronger than ever. Marie Sester has also noted that today, as an artist, she would never have access to images like the ones included in “Exposure” due to the levels of control that entities, which she approached in the past, have placed on their surveillance technologies.

Exposure, Marie Sester

When walking in the museum lobby, you might be startled by the sound of an aircraft flying overhead. Up there above you, the gigantic shadow of an aircraft is passing quietly and menacingly over the ceiling. The only on-going attack I-Chen Kuo’s work Invade the SeMA (SeMA being of course the Seoul Museum of Art) refers to is the one that sees artists invading art institutions, with or without their consent.

Invade the SeMA by Kuo I-Chen

One of the best art pieces i saw at the biennial is Life Writer by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. An old type writer rescued from the era of analogue text processing and normal piece of paper become the vivarium for a swarm of artificial life creatures. The letters that you type appear as projected characters on the paper. When you push the carriage return, the letters turn into small black creatures that creep or fly over the paper. The creatures are based on genetic algorithms where text is used as the genetic code that determines the shape, behaviour and movements of the creatures.

Life Writer Machine, Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau

The creatures need to eat text to stay alive and when they will try to snap up the new characters you type. Once they have eaten enough text they can also reproduce and have off-spring.

By connecting the act of typing to the act of creation of life, Life Writer deals with the idea of creating an open-ended artwork where user-creature and creature-creature interaction become essential to the creation of digital life and where an emergent systems of life-like art emerges on the boundaries between analog and digital worlds.

The interesting part was to hear and see how the young people behave in front of the typewriter. They never had to use it so they tend to type using very soft and light gestures as if the keyboard of machine was as sensible as a the one of a cell phone.

For his project Adam Smith: a million of good reasons to become millionaire, Damián Ontiveros Ramírez asked students of economy and accounting to help him draw the figure of Adam Smith, an 18th century Scottish philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, an essay regarded as the first modern work of economics.

A view from Damián Ontiveros Ramírez’ installation

The artist’s objective is to total 1,000,000 drawings that show Adam Smith performing different actions. Each of them suggests a way to make money, as the Scottish economist had claimed that the source of wealth is labor. For media_city Seoul, the artist is showing digital animations of some of the drawings.

Damián Ontiveros Ramírez, Adam Smith: A Million of Good Reasons to Become Millionaire

Herwig Turk is showing two works which question the standards of perception. The first part of the installation, Uncertainty, takes its cue from Austrian physicist Dr. Manfred Drosg who stated that ” A model can never be a perfect portrayal of reality, and there can never be a part of reality perfectly mirrored by a model”.

Herwig Turk, uncertainty

In this two-channel video installation, which Turk developed in collaboration with Paulo Pereira, a camera registers the movement of a fluorescent solution set on top of a shaker. The camera is supported by a similar shaker, set to move at the same speed, in an attempt to reproduce the solution’s exact motion. In a precisely controlled experiment the solution would not move. This, however, is impossible since the movement of both shakers can never be perfectly synchronized. This impossibility is represented on one of the screens, whereas on the second screen the movement has been artificially synchronized through post-production, so that the solution no longer moves. However, on this screen the whole stage begins to move. The artificial immobilization of the fluorescent solution results in an apparent shaking of the white background, making the stillness of the vibrating solution distressing. A small black border occasionally appears on the screen’s periphery, dissolving yet another reference: the frame of the screen.

Herwig Turk, DNA film

The second part of the installation, DNA film, consists of an animation of DNA separated in an agarose gel. The pulsating black and white structures are an artistic translation of DNA-sequences, which are interpreted as the twilight zone between being and nothingness. By measuring the average luminance within the single frames, a structure was found to generate the sound that is directly referring to the picture. The artwork refers to the constant need for translation within science and art and just like uncertainty, it focuses on the manipulation of scientific image.

To be continued…

media_city Seoul runs until November 5, 2008 at the Seoul Museum of Art.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

Originally by Regine from we make money not art

Posted under reblog art

Aaron Koblin is a data visualization geek. He believes that “data systems tell stories about our lives”, and he’s in the business of building beautiful, poetic images that tell those stories.

Some of his earliest works looked at mapping georgraphy in terms of the use of infrastructures. The image above is a map of North America drawn by tracing the paths of planes in flight. As this map moves through time, you can see the East Coast wake up and get on the road, followed by the midwest and into the West. “You’re able to intuit the system without knowledge of any geography.” He’s built similar maps of traffic accidents, of email flow, and a visualization of data coming into and out of New York City called the New York Talk Exchange.

Recently, Koblin is fascinated by Mechanical Turk - both the historical wooden figure that allegedly played chess (it didn’t - a man sat inside the machine and made the moves) - and the contemporary data outsourcing service offered by Amazon. Most of the tasks people are asked to do with Mechanical Turk are extremely boring and repetitive - Koblin offered a much more human task: Draw a sheep, facing left. If you did this, using his online tools, he’d pay you $0.02. Over forty days, more than 7000 people drew 10,000 sheep. They took 105 seconds, on average, to complete the task, which makes this not an especially good way to make money, but a lovely way to make art.

Why sheep? They were, perhaps, the first industrialized animal, an animal we used to produce industrial materials.Sheep symbolize following. They were the first animal humans learned to clone. And it’s a reference to Le Petit Prince, where the character asks the narrator “draw me a sheep”.

But the real purpose of Mechanical Turk is making money. So he launched a project called Ten Thousand Cents. It invited Turkers to draw a very small part - a ten-thousandth - of a hundred dollar bill. Everyone who participated got a cent… and producing a hundred dollar bill cost one hundred dollars… and the sales of prints supported One Laptop per Child, the former Hundred Dollar Laptop project. It’s interesting to see how many people rebelled, drawing something other than the section they were assigned. When you put ten thousand small images together, that rebellion basically disappears and becomes invisible.

More recent works have included a music video for Radiohead and a visualization of Amsterdam in terms of SMS messages sent. Whether it’s visualizing Thom Yorke or the human structure of a city, Koblin brings an artist’s eye to a data-rich world.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent personal blog, My Heart’s In Accra.

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(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 10:18 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by Ethan Zuckerman


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Ethan Zuckerman from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog art

Talk one of four at PICNIC was a small seminar for the European Journalism Center. Their part of the PICNIC experience was hosted in a geodesic dome tent within the “club” - the noisy public space where attendees are eating, drinking and having fun. So it felt a bit like giving a seminar in the anteroom of a dance club… not the easiest experience.

The talk after mine came from the founder of Zemanta, Jure Cuhalev, an interesting plugin for bloggers. You install Zemanta on your browser, it watches what you’re writing as you author a blogpost, and it sends your text to a server, which does natural language processing analysis, and suggests videos, photos, hyperlinks and tags for your content. The media suggestions appear in a window, and you can drag and drop them into your post - they’ll appear with appropriate attribution, ensuring that you follow the “rules of the road” of the internet. Related articles can optionally show up in a section at the end of a post, and the page will be tagged for optimum findability from search engines.

I love the idea - and especially some of the features, like entity extraction. When I type a name - Jure Cuhalev - I’m usually going to look up that name on the web and link to that person’s webpage or blog - Zemanta promises to this automatically. Looking forward to trying it out on my blog soon. And here’s a good video from G4’s attack of the show which introduces the tool.

Chatting with a journalist after my talk, I ended up showing up late for Adam Greenfield’s talk, coming in for one of his more gruesome examples. Adam’s specialty is ubiquitous computing, and he’s done great work thinking about what happens when computation makes it into every aspect of our lived environment. This ubiquitization happens a little bit at a time. In European cities, it’s become common to fence off spaces with retractable bollards - metal posts that rise out of the ground to block spaces to unauthorized traffic. When an RFID-enabled vehicle with the right permissions passes by, the bollard retracts and gives one access to a street.

When a system like this crashes, things go badly wrong. Adam shows an example of a car - properly authorized - which was assaulted by a misfiring bollard, killing a passenger. “Who do you call for tech support when a system like this fails?”

As we transform our urban spaces, we’re starting to see spaces that are “stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery“. Here Adam is borrowing terminology from Steven Flusty at USC. Stealthy spaces can’t be found; slippery ones can’t be reached. Prickly spaces can’t be occupied comfortably; crusty ones are armored and can’t be entered. Jittery may be the most interesting to Adam - they can’t be used without being under surveillance.

map from cabspotting.org

He adds “foggy” to this list of spaces - spaces that can’t be mapped - they don’t exist on your GPS, you can’t plot routes to them. This may become increasingly important as we start visualizing urban spaces in terms of data, offering a network overlay to help us understand our places better. These overlays might look like the map of San Francisco drawn by GPS in taxi cabs. Or a map using Zillo’s information of real estate value. Increasingly, we’ve got information about a place in that place, made local and actionable. We might choose how we move through a city based on the air quality of the areas we plan through, or the traffic we might encounter. “Networked overlay closes the loop, changing how we interact with urban space.”

As spaces become addressable, scriptable and queryable, we can start doing very weird things. What happens when billboards in Times Square start warning individual pedestrians that they need to catch a cab right now if they want to make their flight to Jamaica. Or letting you know that the NYPD knows that that guy is carrying a gun, and that they’re watching him. “I don’t expect these spaces to be pleasant,” he tells us, but they’re coming.

The more hopeful version is a world in which we move from browse urbanism to search urbanism, where we find ways to reach out to the different experiences waiting out there in the city.

I’m not really doing Adam’s work justice here - I’d recommend reading his blog for lots more of this stuff.

My friend Bruno Giussani leads a session introducing nominees to win the Picnic Green Challenge. This is a big prize, funded by the NL Postcode Lottery, and awards 500,000€ to the winning project. Out of 235 nominees, we see four finalists:

routeRANK - a website that looks for the best travel route, both in terms of time and environmental impact.

Greensulate - an insulation that works like extruded foam, but is grown on locally available byproducts, like rice and cottonseed hulls. The result is like styrofoam but produced with a far lower carbon footprint.

Smart Screen - a window glass that reflects solar energy away from warm spaces and opens to absorb solar energy in warm spaces.

Veranda Solar - Easy to install solar panels that sit on your windowsill and plug into existing electric outlets.

We’ll know in a few hours who wins the big prize - I’m pulling for Veranda, because I want to buy some of those as soon as they’re available.

This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent blog, My Heart’s In Accra.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Media at 2:02 PM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by Ethan Zuckerman


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Ethan Zuckerman from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation