Architec Tradure

Category: Uncategorized

  • 10MayInspiring book : the Prosthetic Impulse

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    The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, by Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006.

    The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human.”
    —Bernard Steigler,Technics and Time

    With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning. . . . Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God.When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but these organs have not grown on to him, and they still give him trouble at times. . . . Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginable great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man’s likeness to God still more. But in the interests of our investigations, we will not forget that present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character.
    —Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

    The first chapter can be downloaded here

  • 11MayAlmost Safe



    Deconstruction, 2007; Low Tide, 2007 by Anthony Goicolea

    In his new show “Almost Safe,” photographer Anthony Goicolea presents digitally-composed, black-and-white images of a shattered earth. The artist portrays a world that bears the wounds of globalization, war, and a crippled environment. Only these wastelands are left in their wake. Goicolea has composited images taken at several disaster sites, adding elements (like power lines across an ocean rock formation) that seem out-of-place or just barely plausible. In Deconstruction, ominous dark clouds form over an office building that’s been halved in two and thrown across a beach. In Black Ice, a car is shown leaving a post-apocalyptic cityscape that’s maybe part-New York City and part-Oz. This world is only half-real, but the more you look at Goicolea’s constructions, the less impossible they seem. – Christopher Bartley

    “Almost Safe” opens April 28 and runs through June 2, 2007 at Postmasters Gallery, NYC.

    More info

    Via V magazine


  • 11MayHello Kitty, a social identity?


    Hello Kitty vintage phone

    I remember this funny phenomena.
    Back in Paris, I had a few Hello Kitty toys from the 80’s floating around, toys of my childhood. A few friends would come over and would be like: “wow Hello Kitty!!! you like Hello Kitty!!”, I would be “well not really, it is from my childhood and I have only a very few of them”. Then at my following birthday, friends would come with Hello Kitty new toys, being like :”we know you love Hello Kitty!!!”. I would keep them, touched by their gesture and the fact that they remember these 4-5 toys I had from my childhood. This phenomena mutiplied and started to be annoying, always receiving Hello Kitty toys, and trying to explain that it is not that I don’t like their gift but it just that I only like the vintage Hello Kitty from the 70’s.
    Later on, I shared with a friend a passion for vintage toys including Sanrio based characters, it was however impossible for my friends to distinguish vintage toys from new toys and would keep insisting that I liked Barbie, Hello Kitty and so forth. I started to have a collection of them that i got rid off flying to Boston (and broke the heart of a few of my friends by doing so).

    Funnily enough, I keep receiving comments like “Cati loves pink! Cati you love Hello Kitty” or genuinely keep receiving these new commercial Hello Kitty toys that I completely dislike. I don’t find them charged with personal meaning or design value either.


  • 11MayWhat’s next with social networks?

    I recently thought of creating a social network for dead people. Everyone could provide their digital representations, biometry information, simulation of personal touch that would only be revealed when dead. However, Mission Eternity is a similar concept that Regine Debatty noticed at ISEA.

    The M∞ ARCANUM CAPSULES contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem: as infinite data particles they forever circulate the global info sphere – hosted in the shared memory of thousands of networked computers and mobile devices of M∞ ANGELS, people who contribute a part of their digital storage capacity to the mission.

    Video




    Arcanum Capsules contain digital fragments of the life, knowledge and soul of the users and enable them to design an active presence post mortem.


  • 13MayMusic performance: water walk

    In 1960 John Cage appears in a popular TV show and performs the music piece water walk. He uses sounds of everyday objects to compose. His carefulness and very precise actions show that he must have rehearsed hundred of times to perform his piece. Via multimedialab.

    Video

    Recently, Nicholas Knouf created an interactive version of John Cage’s graphical score Variations 2, called Variations 10b. I tried it during an exhibition at the Lewis Music Library at MIT and found the interface very convincing. The interface allows a performer to change the score and get immediate feedback as to the result. Nicholas hopes that both listeners and performers will develop a more nuanced understanding of the score through the use of the interface.

    Paper on variations 10b.



    Three dots activated in a performance


  • 16MayMachine Therapy

    I mentioned the work of Kelly Dobson about a year ago. Today, I attended her VERY inspiring thesis defense at the Media Lab, researching on Machine Therapy. I love her personal relationship to machines. I cannot wait to read her thesis!

    Abstract

    In this thesis I describe a new body of work called Machine Therapy, a methodology for revealing the vital relevance of subconscious elements of human-machine interactions that works within art, design, psychodynamics, and engineering. This practice highlights what machines actually do and mean, in contrast to what their designers consciously intended. Machine Therapy is a cyclical process that alternates between discussion of and sessions for empathic relationships with domestic appliances, personal extension and connection via wearable and prosthetic apparatuses, and the design of evocative visceral robots that interact with people’s understandings of themselves and each other. Combining research and practice in digital signal processing and machine learning, mechanical engineering, and textile sensor design, I have been able to create new objects and relationships that are unique in some aspects while maintaining quotidian familiarity in other aspects. This is illustrated through the documented construction of several projects including re-appropriated domestic devices, wearable apparatuses, and machines that act in relation with users’ autonomic signals. These Machine Therapy devices are evaluated in studies of participants’ interactive engagements with the machines as well as participants’ affective responses to the machines. The Machine Therapy projects facilitate unusual explorations of the parapraxis of machine design and use: these usually unconscious elements of our interactions with machines critically affect our sense of self, agency in the social and political world, and shared emotional, cultural, and perceptual development.

    Dissertation Committee

    Christopher Csikszentmihályi

    Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences

    Muriel Cooper Professor of Media Arts and Sciences

    Program in Media Arts and Sciences

    MIT Media Laboratory

    Rosalind W. Picard

    Professor of Media Arts and Sciences

    Program in Media Arts and Sciences

    MIT Media Laboratory

    Edith Ackermann, PhD

    Honorary Professor of Developmental Psychology

    University of Aix-Marseille I, France

    Visiting Scientist, MIT School of Architecture

    Kelly’s Web site

    Computing Culture research group


  • 28MaySuper Hero and the Wii

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    Now, one can almost fully be a Super Hero Marvel with the Wii. Thank you Olivier! More pictures.


  • 28MaySuper Hero and the Wii

    If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to receive the latest Architectradure’s articles in your reader or via email. Thanks for visiting!



    Now, one can almost fully be a Super Hero Marvel with the Wii. Thank you Olivier! More pictures.


  • 29MayRenewable energy

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    Aurelius introduced me to Cool Earth, a renewable energy startup. It has patented a way to make solar energy more efficient than coal. Impressive …

    Three years ago our top scientists and Nobel Prize winners met in Washington in search of a solution to energy-related Global Warming. Four points came from the meeting:- there is no solution available

    – yet we must implement one by 2050

    – the only power source that presents a viable solution is solar

    – but solar energy is currently far too expensive.

    Cool Earth was formed to solve this problem. Now. With currently available technology. We are working to reduce the cost of solar electricity by a factor of 25, making it cheaper to produce than energy from coal or other non-renewable sources. By developing a solution from minimal, low-cost materials, we aim to make solar generation as profitable as today’s best investment options.

    This extreme goal has led us to exactly one real and viable solution: a solar farming approach, based on concentrated photovoltaic collectors, constructed from inexpensive, widely-available plastic films.

    Here’s how the system works:

    Inflatable concentrators gather light and focus it onto photovoltaic cells, increasing the energy impacting the cells many times over. Our design costs 400 times less per collected area than conventional mirrors, can withstand 100 mph winds, and can protect the mirror surface and receiver from rain, insects, and dirt.

    Series of concentrators are suspended on support and control cables stretched between poles. By suspending the concentrators, vast areas of land can be easily converted for solar energy production with limited environmental impact. The ground beneath the concentrators remains free for other uses, such as farming or ranching.

    The timing is perfect. Our technology is in place. And we have a plan to reach “grid parity” in three years, not thirty.


  • 29MayRenewable energy

    If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to receive the latest Architectradure’s articles in your reader or via email. Thanks for visiting!

    Aurelius introduced me to Cool Earth, a renewable energy startup. It has patented a way to make solar energy more efficient than coal. Impressive …

    Three years ago our top scientists and Nobel Prize winners met in Washington in search of a solution to energy-related Global Warming. Four points came from the meeting:- there is no solution available

    – yet we must implement one by 2050

    – the only power source that presents a viable solution is solar

    – but solar energy is currently far too expensive.

    Cool Earth was formed to solve this problem. Now. With currently available technology. We are working to reduce the cost of solar electricity by a factor of 25, making it cheaper to produce than energy from coal or other non-renewable sources. By developing a solution from minimal, low-cost materials, we aim to make solar generation as profitable as today’s best investment options.

    This extreme goal has led us to exactly one real and viable solution: a solar farming approach, based on concentrated photovoltaic collectors, constructed from inexpensive, widely-available plastic films.

    Here’s how the system works:

    Inflatable concentrators gather light and focus it onto photovoltaic cells, increasing the energy impacting the cells many times over. Our design costs 400 times less per collected area than conventional mirrors, can withstand 100 mph winds, and can protect the mirror surface and receiver from rain, insects, and dirt.

    Series of concentrators are suspended on support and control cables stretched between poles. By suspending the concentrators, vast areas of land can be easily converted for solar energy production with limited environmental impact. The ground beneath the concentrators remains free for other uses, such as farming or ranching.

    The timing is perfect. Our technology is in place. And we have a plan to reach “grid parity” in three years, not thirty.