culturge

Culturge is moving!

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:42:00 +0000

Thank you to all of culturge's loyal readers and followers. It's been a fun few years, but it's time to close up culturge's shop. For all of you out there still interested in following a filtered forum for art, culture and design, the conversation will continue at my new website: http://www.ianaldenrussell.com/writing/blog

I hope to see you there, and thanks again for all the comments, critiques and comraderie over the last few years.

All the best,

Ian Russell

Revisioning Heritage: The Prague Astronomical Clock by The Macula

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:38:00 +0000

We've been enjoying the spectacle of video-mapping for the last few years, with companies such as Nuformer have wowing us with stunning projections giving new life to old facades. On 9 October 2010, the past took a big step into the future (or perhaps just the present). Prague-based, The Macula performed an epic video-mapping spectacular as part of the 600th anniversary of Prague's Astronomical Clock, the Orloj (see below). Effecting a 10 minute tour through 600 years of Prague's history, the performance is a dramatic demonstration of the possibility for new forms of media to enliven and activate the sometimes dormant narratives embedded in the architectures around us.

History timecode for the video:
05:04 The Symbol of Bohemia and the Czech lands – The two tailed Lion bearing the crown of Charles IV as the Czech King and Holy Roman Emperor, uplifting Prague to be the jewel that it is today.

06:40 After much turmoil, the old town was the place where 27 Czech protestant leaders were executed in 1621 by the Catholic Ferdinand II.

07:23 The 12 apostles that come out every hour, 24/7 in all seasons.

08:15 Serious damage in 1945 from Prague Uprising by Germans.

Equipment: Two Christie 18K HD projectors - 5000×1200 resolution

Half man, half machine, all soldier: The future of combat exoskeletons

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:38:00 +0000

It is almost cliche to talk about how the future is actually happening today. The accessibility of information from sources like TED and Pop Tech! about the cutting edge of technological innovation and the real world impact these shifts are going to have has given us the chance to not merely imagine the future but to see how our industrial complexes are preformating and predetermining it for us. Though occasionally a news story appears that shocks and awes such as this worrisome promotional news video for the Raytheon Sarcos XOS 2 robotic suit for US combat troops.

The cultural impact of the deployment of such suits in conflict scenarios where the US army is primarily engaged with non-robotics enabled combatants is indeed profound. While one can understand the importance of ensuring the safety of combat personnel, the widening of the human-technology gap in complex socio-cultural conflict scenarios is something that P.W. Singer has warned us of many times over. See:
Robots and the future of war: P.W. Singer

And an interesting article here about cyber warfare:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/8008520/Defence-Review-The-Services-have-a-fight-on-their-hands-but-who-is-the-biggest-enemy.html

Russia's YouTube Whistle-blower

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:47:00 +0000

We've had virtual choirs, countless bad cover versions of popular songs and opening credit sequences from nearly every 1980s children's programme that was ever produced... Though the fascination with the ability to syndicate one's individual AV perspective and persona has produced an amazing tool documenting and sharing the complexity and diversity of human creativity and achievement, somewhere amidst the social noise, the possibility of something more than a community of interest - a political engaged citizenry - has been drowned out.

Over the last year, though, a cry from across the Caucasus, the Urals and the Baltic has shown the ability for social media to empower a simple citizen in a corrupt system to raise their voice to the world and call for accountability. This is the story of a beat cop from the Black Sea who decided to take on Putin, and though landing himself in jail for a year on trumped up fraud charges, he inspired a whole society to bring their disparate voices of dissatisfaction and desire for change together. Watch the NYTimes' excellent documentary below. The montage of voices from across Russia in the middle, I find simply inspiring...

The world is your stop-motion animator

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:54:00 +0000

This is without doubt one of the most amazing graffiti videos I've ever seen. The Italian graffiti artist Blu's innovative approach to the medium of wall art challenges traditional understanding of the possibilities in the realm public art whether sanctioned or not. In this new work Big Bang Big Boom, not only does Blu challenge the limits of the wall by morphing his visuals into enlivened physical objects, he also has mobilised the medium for creative reflection on science and education, playfully exploring a version of evolution.

The Crises of Capitalism: An RSAnimate

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:37:00 +0000

In this RSA Animate, radical sociologist David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?

This is based on a lecture at the RSA (www.theRSA.org).

Prosthetics & self-prostheticisation: The march of homo evolutis

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 17:48:00 +0000

Just over a year ago, we discussed the Juan Enriquez's argument for the identification of a new species of human - homo evolutis. Continuing our coverage and concern over the prostheticising of humanity, especially since Roger Clark's recent re-articulation of 'Cyborg Rights', here are two notable new stories of the avant-garde of technological progress in human-machine interfaces:

Robot arm controlled by the mind
BBC - 12 May 2010

Prosthetic foot up for MacRobert Engineering Prize
BBC - 10 May 2010

The attack of 8-bit nostalgia

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Thu, 27 May 2010 08:23:00 +0000

As we're well into the first year of the second decade of the 21st century, we're putting some serious temporal distance between us and the nascent days of graphic user interface (GUI) culture. It's not surprising then to witness the recursive loop of nostalgic reworking and temporal mashup of bits (all 8 of them) of the aural and visual culture of our shared computing heritage.

Most striking (and the inspiration for this post) is the short film Pixels by Patrick Jean from April 2010 which depicts an onslaught of 8-bit graphics on New York. I particularly love the opening scene which provides a possible motive for their attack - the thoughtless discarding of their their mediated home, the analog, cathode-ray tube television.

Pixels has aptly spawned a whole array of remixes with some quality 8-bit music masters. A particular favourite of mine is the 8-bit dubstep mashup 'Humanoid Kill' by Bazooka.

In the genre of 8-bit music reawakening, Anamanaguchi takes the cake as the band that 'makes loud, fast music with a hacked NES from 1985'. There live shows also crank out some rather satisfying NEStalgic visuals (seen below)...

For graphic novel fans, there's always the classic 8-bit Theatre from Nuklear Power.

And any one not satisfied yet can watch the excellent review of pixel art by Simon Cottee just released this month. (thanks to Rudhraigh McGrath for pointing this one out)

Enjoy your media-nostalgic hit for the day.

------

JUST IN
Another gift tip-off from our friend Rudhraigh McGrath - the amazingly satisfying 'My Desk is 8-Bit' by Alex Varanese. Enjoy!

Eyjafjallajökull and the subliminal sublime

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Mon, 24 May 2010 12:30:00 +0000

Just a few weeks ago, an intrepid photographer embarked on a valiant mission - to counter the overwhelming number of 'mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland that no one can pronounce the name of'. For a media that seems obsessed with stories of immense cataclysm and catastrophe, it does seem surprising that most of the images produced are not meant as more than factual documentation.

Sean Stiegemeier's endeavour to capture (or perhaps create) a compelling image of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull valcano in Iceland illustrates just how powerful the aesthetics of the sublime can be in generating affective images of our world and our place within it. (It also is an amazing demonstration of the Dynamic Perception Timelapse Dolly.)

The sublime, simply put, is the aesthetic of things which compel us and have the power to destroy us. It is an assertion of the place of humanity within the broader forces of the world. In European Romantic painting, the sublime is often represented by paintings of immense landscapes with tiny depictions of people dwarfed by the land and the sky's scale. In these paintings, it is the landscapes (and skyscapes) which are the central subjects, and humanity is left to be merely one component of the wider ecology of forces at play in the world.

The philosopher Edmund Burke in 1757 wrote on the fundamental difference between beauty and the sublime - noting that beauty is what is well-formed or pleasing to the eye whereas the sublime is that which compels us with its ability to destroy us. For Burke, the sublime was intimately tied up with terror, astonishment and admiration. Anyone who has had the experience of watching, first hand, an immense storm come in from the sea to the coast or view a tornado touch down will have a sense of the aesthetic and affective impact that Burke was exploring. Romantic painters of the 18th and 19th centuries were very skilled in evoking these affective responses through their work, and at times I wonder whether there is a similar skill at play today in the curation and design of news media - though admittedly perhaps without the intention of creating a visual trace of this design.

This contemporary aesthetic of the sublime in the media is perhaps somewhat sinister, in that it is not immediately visible. It is somewhat obfuscated, and perhaps intentionally. The overwhelming number of stories designed to compel readers and impress upon them the range of things at play in the world prepared to destroy them seem in a strange way Romantic and sublime. There are a lot of discussions of the use of the concept of 'terror' by governments and news media to manipulate and influence people, and given the evident dangerous impact of this discourse upon civil liberties and social cohesion, the possibility of a non-visual, subliminal sublime aesthetic at work becomes all the more compelling and sinister.

Though we may want to assert the radical difference between human-made terror through industrial or inter-personal or inter-group means and terror from the natural world, disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill point to a blurring of the boundaries between an assumed duality of natural and human-made worlds. The firm grounds upon which many have identified the bounds of human agency and the boundaries between humanity and the rest of the world are becoming increasingly slippery. Paralleling the rise in stories of terror are ethics of ecology and human engagement in the world. These ethical imperatives, irrespective of moral placement reveal the dominant subliminal sublime aesthetic at play in our media across all sections of the newspaper.

With this in mind, it is lucky that we have creators such as Stiegemeier who through their artistic skill can evoke these same affective and aesthetic relationships. These creators can compel us both to ponder our place in the world but also to consider what may be an absence in the media of such reflexive visualisations of aesthetic strategies - of the subliminal sublime.

The 'racist' webcam: Anthropometry, design and the myth of objective science

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:47:00 +0000

A You Tube video posted by wzamen01 on 10 December 2009 demonstrates how the new face tracking software of HP's new webcams is unable to track a black man's face. Admirably, the video post is made in good humour and is a positive example of effective consumer criticism, but what I am most concerned with are the comments and responses to the videos that have been made.

In response to the posting, HP released this statement:

'We are working with our partners to learn more. The technology we use is built on standard algorithms that measure the difference in intensity of contrast between the eyes and the upper cheek and nose. We believe that the camera might have difficulty "seeing" contrast in conditions where there is insufficient foreground lighting.'

Although this might be a technically appropriate explanation of the issue being experienced, it is revealing that the product was released by HP without this having been considered or at least brought to user/public attention.

Just this morning on the You Tube, user BaldEspresso posted a comment to the video stating that:

'Physics cannot see race. Only colour. I'll assume this video was made as a joke.'

This comment is technically correct in that physics (or other sciences) works with objective/quantifiable concepts such as colour, weight, etc. and that subjective concepts such as race can not be directly measured. However, the personification of physics as 'seeing' anything in the sentence is ironic. If we're being technical, physics does not see anything. It's not alive. Or is it...

Science is more than numbers and data. It is a set of relations, observations and agreements between people in the world. Using a fundamentalist definition of science that is above human agency ignores not only the critical issues of design and application of systems (which is as much a part of science as the numbers) as well as the long history of scientific racism of the last two centuries.

Head-measurer tools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were only intended to measure heads. Humans made the intuitive leaps to develop thought-systems and hierarchies of anthropometrics (human measurement) to justify racism and genocide. So it's not at issue whether HP's technology is itself racist. Rather, it is whether the applications of the technology and the assumptions about users made at the beginning of the design process that may reveal oversights or ignorance.

Many companies use anthropometric data in designing their products today (such as clothes manufactures, car companies and NASA). This is to optimise the experience or use of a product for the largest number of users. Every country in the world tends to develop their own sets of anthropometric data that is revised regularly to account for fluctuations in height, weight, size, etc. due to changes in lifestyles, diets, etc.

The question to be asked today of HP is what sort of anthropometric data did they utilise to account for skin tone colour variation amongst the world's population and who compiled this data? Or whether they considered any such data set and merely made assumptions about user face colour tone and contrast which would suggest possible indirect racism on behalf of the designers and programmers.

The lesson from this situation are that science is not above human bias, ignorance or flaw. Science is not an omnipotent being distinct from humans above arguments over subjective values. Science is deeply embedded within humanity, and our application of scientific thought and data in developing technologies must always be reflexively aware of this. Furthermore, the process of design and the development of technology and the programming of software are also not simply separate, functional, objective pursuits, and perhaps this failure in HP's software and technology today reveals an unhealthy distance that has been growing between software designers and programmers and humanity - a same distance which unfortunately grows between the sciences and the arts and humanities.

CO2 Cubes: Copenhagen 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

One of the many exciting projects currently being put together for Copenhagen 2009... Struggling to give physical presence to the environmental carbon emissions, friends at Millenium Art have partnered up with countless supporters to invade the civic spaces of Copenhagen with their CO2 Cubes. Occupying the physical space that 1 tonne of carbon would occupy, artists will be presenting visualisations and representations of 'what 1 tonne of carbon looks like'.

It's an intriguing, playful and likely beautiful concept for public art. Though, I might question whether raw representation is a successful means of creating social behavioral change and whether the cubes may just simply be experienced as aesthetic window dressing for the Copenhagen summit.

Virtual voices: Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:16:00 +0000

Maybe it all started with 'Chocolate Rain', but there are now thousands of videos all over the net of people singing all manner of songs over their webcams. It was only a matter of time 'til video posting sites such as YouTube became bastions for self-produced, lofi music videos and mass-syndicated amateur singing, but amidst the torrent of tenors ad onslaught of altos, Eric Whitacre has decided to separate the wheat the from the chaff and create the world's first audition-based virtual choir.

It cannot be ignored that the project is to some extent a use of sensationalism and spectacle to advance Whitacre's career. The sound quality of the choristers' own recordings does not allow for sensitive control of choral blending or tuning, and there is also the question of the quality of Whitacre's arrangements in general. However you feel about the aesthetic or acoustic merits of the musical production, it is an exciting demonstration of the new types of independent musical collaborations that are enabled through the near ubiquity of webcams amongst computer users.

Aspiring singers can audition for the choir and represent their country in song. Best of luck to all the hopeful virtual choristers.

Resurfacing old facades: Nuformer's digital media magic

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:47:00 +0000

The custom made digital projections of NuFormer are progressively pushing the boundaries of creative layering images, identities and visuals onto the streetscapes of Europe. Previously the type of media work that would have been limited to stadium rockers and pop stars, the stunning knitting of futuristic CGI visuals into old architectural fabric both inspires and opens a wide realm of possibilities for communicating, entertaining and activating public spaces. I'd be very interested in seeing what they might do with archaeological sites or ancient architecture such as the Colosseum in Rome...

The First DJ Battle in the World: Timofei Levchuk's 'In the Ukrainian Steppe' (1952) Redubbed

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:37:00 +0000

The impact that You Tube has had on contemporary culture has been widely discussed (e.g. here). It's produced any number of average joe heroes and overnight celebrities. What also is produced are gems of remixed old media. Often giving new life to long forgotten music or film, the media archaeologists of You Tube dig up priceless bits of previous generations' culture which sometimes have hilariously resonant similarities to today. Below is one of my most recent favourites from this genre of internet creativity. A redubbing of the music track from a scene in Timofei Levchuk's 'In the Ukrainian Steppe' (1952) featuring:

1. Eazy-E - Only If You Want It

2. 2 Brothers On The 4th Floor - Mirror Of Love (Mastermindz Freaky R'N'B Club Mix)

3. 2 Unlimited - No Limit [moon project extended mix]
4. Captain Jack - Dream A Dream (Spacefrog Mix)

Beyond the priceless matching of the electro bass beat to the shoulder swagger and fist waving of the moustached protagonist, the scene itself in its original form illustrates how audio media conflict has a history spanning back well into the early 20th century.

Present absences: The Home Project

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:06:00 +0000

The street art stencils for The Home Project were completed this week on Clanbrassil Street in Dublin. Activating heritage, community, identity and public space, the powerwasher stencils will be in situ until the foot traffic of Clanbrassil Street erases them through the accumulation of new residues and traces. Why not have a walk down Clanbrassil Street and help build new relations as the work deteriorates.

The Home Project explores the concept of 'home' against the changing landscape of the past, present and future of the Clanbrassil Street area. The words for this project are taken from a series of creative writing workshops run by Ursula Rani Sarma with 10-12 year old students living in the Clanbrassil Street area.

In 2009, curator Ian Russell worked with Ursula to create a public art installation using extracts of the students writings about 'home'. A postcard was designed in collaboration with Zero-G (which can be seen here) and was distributed throughout Dublin, and in July 2009, a selection of statements about 'home' were chosen and stenciled onto both footpaths of Clanbrassil Street using a powerwasher and a lot of friendly help and support. See the final product here.

If you would like to learn more about the development of the project, there is an artist's statement available here: 'The Origins of The Home Project' by Ursula Rani Sarma.

Ursula's artist residency in the Clanbrassil Street area was part of the Placing Voices - Voicing Places Project which was funded by a Heritage Council of Ireland INSTAR 2008 Grant, administered by University College Dublin, Create and Dublin City Council.

Turn any politician green: Guerrilla Gardening to recycle election posters

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 12:40:00 +0000

It's the time of year again when our streets are plastered with faces of the ambitious will-to-power types vying for a spot in national and European politics. Of course, it's important that people know how their representatives are and are able to recognise them, but there is an uncomfortable ecological feeling seeing all the paper and card and board being lashed to poles around our cities only to be later binned - all for the sake of head shots and party titles.

Putting aside the politics, a team of eco-warriors have proposed a new use for the throngs of political posters that adorn almost every corner of Dublin. Inspired by Guerrilla Gardening, the team from Unitedminds.ie have been converting political posters into ready-made window boxes for gardens. Putting the residue of excessive politics to good use, Mick Veale, one of the agent provocateurs behind the campaign, has put together a tutorial for how you can go out and turn any politician you want green...

Tiananmen Square 20 years on: The Brolly Blockout

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:08:00 +0000

It's not quite 'Singing in the Rain', but the use of umbrellas in Tiananmen Square by under cover Chinese police to block out international media does have a feeling of choreography about it.

Below is a short video of BBC correspondent James Reynolds in a dance with plainclothes police just opposite the square.

The egalitarian web: Internet pop culture

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Mon, 25 May 2009 23:35:00 +0000

The internet has been around since the late 1960s when scientific researchers at UCLA and SRI in Menlo Park, California created a computer network (ARPANET) to enable real-time information sharing from their experiments. Since then, the chaotic relations of various comptuer networks grew, developed and eventually coalesced into what we know now as the internet. Initially guided by the National Science Foundation's backbone infrastructural investment of the early 1980s, the internet later was opened to commercial development and exploitation in 1988.

Today, we interact with the internet as a form of digital commons or hyper-agora. Where once priority was given to the information sharing needs of government bodies and universities, now a myriad of pop culture icons have emerged from the bundles of wires, lines of code and chaos of mouse-clicks. Though we might question whether the internet is indeed 'free' or a 'commons' (see Timothy Luke's papers on 'cyberculture'), the growing list of cybercult icons such as Numa Numa, the Dramatic Chipmunk, Fail Blog or I Can Has Cheezburger testifies to the ability of human agency to coalesce into viral and dynamic communities of interest.

Increasingly the internet-based media communities such as YouTube is shaping the media at large. With many of the topics in Greg Rutter's Definitive List of 99 Things You Should Already Have Experienced on the Internet having appeared within the content of newsbroadcasts, late night talk shows and in print media. It may seem somewhat antithetical to propose a difinitive list for internet experiences, but as you read through Greg's list, it becomes clear that that cyber pop-culture though egalitarian in formulation does lend itself to hierarchies of importance/significance.

Are we departing from an the myth of an egalitarian information sharing commons? Perhaps such 'definitive lists' of popular internet culture are a symptom of the underlying structures which define access and order of internet content. Does the assigning of significance to internet media content raise the more pertinent issue of the linguistic relationship between signs and signifiers and the structure of knowledge and communication? Should we question not just the structures of our engagement with the internet but also the method of coding that strucutre? Might we call for a 'linguistic turn' in our understanding of internet code and information architecture in general? Or is it merely a utilitarian space for infotainment?

Mapping the Buzz of NY and LA

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:06:00 +0000

In the recent report 'The Geography of Buzz', Elizabeth Currid of USC, LA and Sarah Williams of Columbia University have presented a new way of exploring the concentration and impact of the socialisation patterns of the arts communities of NY and LA. The project asserts the importance of the creative class to civic development, social cohesion and economic development. Mapping the location of thousands of photographs from the Getty archives from parties and events over one year (from March 2006-Feburary 2007) associated with key cultural sectors in the two cities, Currid and Williams developed a series of density maps based on arts medium, providing a striking illustration of the epicentres of elusive scenes.

Read the full report of 'The Geography of Buzz' here.

Here is a good article from the NY Times on the project.

Eco-animation: The Seed by Johnny Kelly

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:35:00 +0000

Here's a wonderful example of corporation demonstrations producing great art and educational tools. Johnny Kelly's 'The Seed' was underwritten by Adobe (and made by Nexus) as a project to illustrate the uses of Adobe CS4. With music by Jape, the video illustrates the ecological relationship between seeds, trees, fruit, humans and animals in the continual becoming of the world.

Check out more of Johnny Kelly's paper craft here.

Making of 'The Seed' from Johnny Kelly on Vimeo.

Grow your own fresh Air: Kemal Meattle at TED

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:55:00 +0000

With over 60% of the world's population living in buildings and over 40% of the world's energy taken up by those buildings, the importance of finding sustainable ways of engaging with prebuilt architectures is paramount. Kemal Meattle is just such a visionary.

He has discovered the correct configuration and ratio of three different plants that can grow all the fresh air one person will ever need and clean a large proportion of toxins out of the air as well. Meattle suggest that if you lived in a sealed bottle with just these plants, you would never need fresh air. So perhaps these three plants are our future astro-plants. If you plan on becoming a deep-space cosmonaut, I reckon you'd better get used to the sight of this greenery.

For one person you need:

Areca Palm (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens) x 4 shoulder high plants

Mother-in-law's Tongue (Sanservieria trifasciata) x 6-8 waist high plants per person

Money Plant (Epiremnum aureum) x 1 plant

Wolfram Alpha: The world's first computational knowledge engine

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Sun, 17 May 2009 02:30:00 +0000

Last night witnessed the launch of the world's first ever knowledge computation engine. Wolfram Alpha is now officially available to the public to solve all your knowledge computation needs. The brainchild of Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram Alpha's ambition is to be the one stop shop for formal knowledge on the web. Built on the architecture of Mathematica, the algorithmic computational acrobatics of the engine pulls source material from a broad array of authoritative sources (census reports, the Oxford English Dictionary, and countless other online databases) to present a simple and elegant interface with the world's knowledge.

The idea behind the engine is that popular search engine's such as Google or Yahoo are utilised to discover informal knowledge and broad-based web content based on the tags and page ranks of web content. Wolfram Alpha, however, searches formal knowledge structures to provide formal information to users' questions.

Designed to answer questions, Wolfram Alpha utilises a free-form natural language user interface, and it makes assumptions about search intent - referencing other possible intentions in the knowledge results. A search for 'truth' is initially assumed to be a search for a definition, but one can redirect to explore the 'general concept', or a search for 'existence' initially returns David Cronenberg's film 'eXistenZ' which can be redirected to the concept's definition.

My initial concern in using the knowledge engine was that it was an overly clean and simplistic interface that obfuscated (disguised/obscured) the complex strucutres of knowledge creation. Asserting itself as a distilled source of authoritative information, the engine was elevating itself to the level of authority. The balance this criticism, on every query-response page there is a link to 'view the source information'. Here one can see all the varied resources utilised to create the knowledge document - a bibliography of sorts. It does not however footnote any single figure of piece of information, so there is a fair degree of trust involved in using the engine that the Wolfram Computation Engine does indeed call upon reputible sources in its knowledge computations.

It is a bold step towards enriching users' experience of the web, and for now, it's free. Although being built on theories of organic computational evolution, it is a far cry from Terminator's Skynet and sentient computing - though it is a step on that road...

Robots and the future of war: P.W. Singer

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:42:00 +0000

In an absolutely arresting talk at TED in February 2009, P. W. Singer has broadened our awareness of the frightening speed at which we are removing human arms from armed conflict. Exploring drone planes, robotic sentries and enhanced human battle technology, Singer fears the ethical and moral implications of warfare that is no longer counter balanced by lived human experience of conflict. The military-industrial complex has brought us towards tipping point where it is not longer humans who fight, but robots who fight for us.

Recalling the call for ethics in robotics from Isaac Asimov, these current trends in military robotics are already creating disillusionment. From US military personnel in New Mexico flying drones and dropping bombs remotely who experience higher PTSD levels than foot soldiers in Iraq to other countries anger that the US army will not fight them as men, the technological acceleration of the removal of humans from war does present us with serious ethical issues which perhaps we need to take time to consider. Unfortunately, the current pace of production supported by the Pentagon may mean that there simply isn't time...

Robots who need your help!: Tweenbots by Kacie Kinzer

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:23:00 +0000

Sometimes people are just so human-centered. Rushing here and rushing there. Never thinking about all the little robots out there that are struggling to make their way through the world.

Interventionist and robot-activist Kacie Kinzer is studying and hopefully rectifying this through her Tweenbots. Taking to the streets of New York, Kinzer's Tweenbots (human-assisted robots) struggle to overcome obstacles and avoid danger and need our help to make it through their journey.

Both deeply cute and intellectually insightful, Kinzer's Tweenbot project explores the social energy that can be activated through simple interventions and directed towards a single goal. As Kinzer rightly points out, it perhaps is supported by her robots being anthropomorphic (human-like), and it would be interesting to see if there was a different response to robots who looked less cute and approachable. That the robots are human-like and 'cute' did produce some perhaps unique anecdotes about human-robot interactions. Kinzer reported that at one point a man corrected the robot, saving it from a threatening path, saying to it - 'You can't go that way. It's towards the road'.

The first of Kinzer's adventurers recently completed a journey through Washing Square Park (see the video below). It took 42 minutes and 29 people intervening for the robot to complete the journey.

See future outings of Kinzer's robots here.

Public anonymity: Post Secret and anonymous publicity

noreply@blogger.com (Ian Russell) — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:58:00 +0000

In an age when privacies are being eroded continually through data-collection, taste-mapping and customer profiling (never mind actual government intelligence agency efforts), it might have seemed unlikely that hundreds of thousands of people would flock to broadcast their deepest personal secrets to the public. In 2004 though, that is precisely what began to happen.

Post Secret began as a local project by Frank Warren in Washington, D.C. Distributing post cards in local bars and cafes in D.C., Warren solicited people to post him their secrets. It quickly became a global phenomenon as people began to scribble down the deep and dark secrets, humorous stories and intensely personal and emotional stories onto all manner of paper products (and eventually on anything that could be posted).

For the last five years, Warren has been stewarding the Post Secret Community online, posting images of the post secrets he receives, prompting a global network of shared personal experience. Victims of abuse, long estranged family members and similarly tempered spirits have connected through the constellated web of relationships of Post Secret.

The fierce simplicity of Post Secret probably points to its success. Publicly broadcast secrecy provides an empowering way of meeting a society head on - which is at one time trying to breakdown privacy while simultaneously increasing social fragmentation through direct marketing based on private data. The resulting social cohesion through anonymously shared secrets is powerful and indeed life changing. It is moving to read the posts by people who have had lives saved by reading Post Secrets of others who have experienced similar traumas in life.

For a more in depth story of Post Secret, watch Frank Warren's recent talk at PopTech! 2008.