Bengler

[bengleroslo]

Random sketch: Glass Houses (DoITT 3-D Building Massing Model / New York City, OTOY OctaneRender)

[bengleroslo]

[bengleroslo]

You can train neural networks to generate images. This is done by combining two networks – one learns to recognize images, while the other learns to generate images that can fool it. The networks are adversaries and the technique is called Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks (DCGAN).

This is part of the project Principal Components where we are investigating the use of machine learning technologies with the Norwegian National Museum in collaboration with Audun Mathias Øygard. The project is supported by the Norwegian Arts Council.

Given that national romantic landscapes figure prominently in the collection of the National Museum it was tempting to train a network generate new samples.

[bengleroslo]

World Architecture Community News - OMA and Bengler critique sharing economy with PANDA project installed at Oslo Architecture Triennale

[bengleroslo]

Desde 1998 referente de la cultura arquitectónica: METALOCUS es una publicación independiente dedicada a la arquitectura y más, mucho más ...

[bengleroslo]

OMA and Bengler's Panda app disrupts the sharing economy

OMA has teamed up with creative studio Bengler to propose an app that allows workers being exploited by digital sharing platforms like Uber and Airbnb to fight back against their employers. On show as part of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016,...

[bengleroslo]

PANDA: een wapen tegen

Architectenweb sprak met OMA en Bengler over het conceptuele deelplatform, dat is gepresenteerd op de Architectuurtri

[bengleroslo]

Strelka talked with Oslo Architecture Triennale curators Ignacio González Galán and Marina Otero Verzier.

[bengleroslo]

Context as content: mapping the contemporary at the 2016 Oslo Triennale with OMA, Andrés Jaque and more | Features | Archinect

Maybe the closest thing to new construction in After Belonging, the sixth Oslo Architecture Triennale, is an apple press assembled with two 2x2’s, some nails, a saw, a gallon bucket, a heavy pole, a colander, a hammer, a plastic bag, a funnel and a car jack. Eriksen Skajaa Arkitekter...

OMA and Bengler’s collaboration, PANDA, appropriates an activist aesthetic in a wry installation that both critiques the sharing economy and assumes its language, “at once an act of resistance and a business opportunity”

[bengleroslo]

AGAINST ALGOCRATS

[bengleroslo]

OMA and Bengler propose digital platform to disrupt the sharing economy

OMA has teamed up with creative studio Bengler to propose a "disruption-as-a-service toolkit" for workers of digital sharing platforms like Uber and Airbnb

[bengleroslo]

OMA & Bengler Present PANDA, An Investigation of the Share Economy at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale

PANDA, an exhibition by OMA & Bengler, opens today at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale – After Belonging. From the architect. PANDA...

[bengleroslo]

Bengler Wins Jacob’s Prize 2016

Bengler is proud to have been awarded Jacob’s prize, the highest recognition from The Foundation for Design and Architecture in Norway. Its history runs back to 1957 and was initially tied to artistic crafts and the Scandinavian design movement. It has since been awarded within a range of design disciplines; interior, landscape, graphic, product as well as architecture.

Bengler is the first recipient to specialise in design for digital media and we are especially pleased to receive this award as we believe craft and material considerations are essential qualities when designing digital services, products and experiences. The lineage of the prize is fitting and we are honoured to be included in this list of esteemed peers.

[bengleroslo]

Simen made an opera about transhumanism*

By “made” we mean Simen provided the concept and foundation that composer Rolf Wallin and british playwright Mark Ravenhill transformed into the opera Elysium expertly realized by musical director Baldur Brönniman, director David Poutney, set designer Leslie Travers and the awesome soloists, chorus and production team at The Norwegian National Opera.

It just finished its initial run in Oslo and was branded “a triumph” by Shirley Apthorp of the Financial Times, and “built on a strong concept” and “a living, well considered work” by Hild Borchgrevink of Dagsavisen.

Rolf Wallin and Simen Svale Skogsrud at the Opera. Photo: Jimmy Linus/D2

In the opera, the bulk of humanity has evolved themselves into immortal trans-human beings with a super-human empathy and communication abilities. A small group of holdouts are preserved on an island sanctuary as a memento of the transhuman origins. The opera explores the drama of profound change and poses the question: Is it more important to preserve or evolve humanity?

Elysium will become available for streaming via The Opera Platform – date unknown.

Stage photos: Erik Berg / DNO&B

[bengleroslo]

Deep Learning at the Museum

We're starting a new project with the Norwegian National Museum looking at how machine learning and deep neural networks can be applied to their collections. Both to easily add metadata, but also just to explore the context free gaze of machine classification. A cognitive counterpart to scary robots, machine vision in its current state sits uncomfortably in the uncanny valley of human facsimile

Misclassifications 1: Edward Munch - Self-Portrait with Burning Cigarette and Hippo Snout

Misclassifications 2: Adolph Tidemand & Hans Gude - Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord amongst Alligator Snapping Turtles

At the moment we’re doing some initial tests. A model has been retrained to classify periods in art history on Wikimedia arts. The retrained model has in turn been used on the collection of the museum to lay out maps of paintings based on their perceived similarity. Preliminary data is promising and could already be used to build novel user interfaces to aid in comprehension and exploration of collections.

A scattering of t-distributed stochastic neighborhood embedded national romantic landscapes

On this project we are working alongside Audun Mathias Øygard. Audun gained a degree from the Oslo Academy of arts before studying mathematics at UiO. He recently finished his graduate work on image classification using convolutional neural networks.

This project follows up on a project with the musem from two years ago, Repcol, an exploratory data visualization investigating representativity in the collections.

Principal Components is funded by the National Arts Council and the Norwegian National Museum.

[bengleroslo]

Status / Arrivals

So this Fall. Where to begin. We built a omnivorously sensing website for the OMA while refining the metadata on all their projects as well as updating our in-house content curation framework Sanity.

Front page OMA.EU at launch

Right after summer, Loop and their pelvic floor exerciser disrupted their our way out of our bleeding edge co-working decelerator after being acquired by the mammoth Canadian sex toy manufacturer Standard Innovation.

PK was away on possibly blissful paternal leave. We built a topical statistics portal on integration and immigration as an experiment in working for the government.

Simen redid the control software for next iteration of the Alta for closed loop control while Even was on a weeklong visit to The ACT at MIT – an historic early collider of art and technology.

ACT sitting comfortably inside the Wiesner Building

Simen’s Blackboard

We’re involved in 3 different research projects funded by the National Research and Arts Councils with HIOA, SINTEF and The Norwegian National Museum. This in addition to a steady stream of work for long term clients.

With design specification work on Vega in full swing and its year long production run beginning January 2016 next year is already looking pretty interesting. So we have been informally talking to people and luckily, Human Resources has been in touch with updates.

In January we will proudly be welcoming Jakob and Espen.

Espen Hovlandsdal is a passionate builder of web softwares, as attested by his many open source projects. He comes to us from Norway's largest newspaper VG.

Espen Hovlandsdal

Jakob Bak has spent the last four years at (CIID)’s research unit developing projects within the field of interaction design and education. He is a member of the Copenhagen based art and technology collective Science Friction and an avid DIY synthesizer enthusiast.

Jakob Bak

Can’t wait to have you both here!

[bengleroslo]

✓ Brewery / Bioreactor