It has been a week since the conclusion of this year's Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, and images of its most imaginative structures...
Artworks of Burning Man: The Pop-Up City of Self-Governing Individualists.
As the incident with Microsoft's AI chat bot shows, if we want AI to be better, we need to be better ourselves.
Actually, I would be interested to see how Tay matures over time. You can’t just kill a naughty teenager; she is just as flawed as every human being. Partly I agree that “If we want to see technology change, we should just be nicer people.” AI is merely another tool human created. That said, it’s an unprecedented opportunity for tech designers to channel and maximize the kindness in human nature, making the world a better one.
Developed by the team at MIT Media Lab's Responsive Environments group, SensorTape is a sensor network in a form factor of a tape that allows users to create large sensor networks.
In honor of Friends Day, we've recalculated the classic 'Six degrees of separation' statistic for everyone who uses Facebook and determined that the number is actually 3.57. Each person in the world (at least among the 1.55 billion people active on Facebook) is connected to every other person by an average of three and a half steps.
Marina Abramović's art pushes the boundary between audience and artist in pursuit of heightened consciousness and personal change. In her groundbreaking 2010 work, "The Artist Is Present," she simply sat in a chair facing her audience, for eight hours a day ... with powerfully moving results. Her boldest work may still be yet to come -- it's taking the form of a sprawling art institute devoted to experimentation and simple acts done with mindful attention. "Nothing happens if you always do things the same way," she says. "My method is to do things I'm afraid of, the things I don't know, to go to territory that nobody's ever been."
This week’s inspiration is The Artist is Present; it’s about Confrontation, and social network design.
Confrontation is the signature of Marina’s participatory performances. She gave knife and pistol to you; she bent a bow in your hand whose archer points straight to her heart; the confrontations she created and personally embodied are bluntly forward, strikingly powerful and even physically violent.
As an interactive technology designer, I envy such provocative power. In our computer-mediated lives where attention increasingly fractured and information scattered, we found in Marina’s art pieces the brew of emotions, the moments of null but reflection, and the heightened consciousness.
Also interestingly, Abramović’s art is in the thin delicate layer in-between reality and performance. – So are everyone’s social beings (online or offline). I found such “heightened consciousness” or “the intensification of life” (Dewey,1934) best illustrated by Abramović and Ulay’s hopelessly romantic breakup, before which they made art symbiotically for twelve nomadic years.
As every relationship comes to an end, ours went too… We walked the Great Wall of China to say goodbye. I started at the Yellow Sea, and he started from the Gobi Desert. We walked, each of us, three months, two and a half thousand kilometers. It was the mountains; it was ruins; It was going through the 12 Chinese provinces, it was before China was open in ‘87; it was difficult. And we succeeded to meet in the middle to say goodbye. And then our relationship stopped.
Is it a breakup, a ceremony or a performance, an art? When they finally gathered in the mid point of the Great Wall, media crowded them, cameras piled, as if it is a New York city gallery opening; Still, she cried. He patted her on the shoulder. Just like how you and me experience break-ups. At that moment, I wonder: may be this is the best kind of social network space we can create, a stage and a spotlight holding the gems of our memories.
Since his early works in NYU ITP, Rozin made a series of object mirrors (this one is my personal favorite). These responsive and submissive installations can always easily put a smile on my face.
An exhibit of Jill Magid’s also displays a similar human-artificial-agent relation, yet through a much more critical lens. She sets up a bedroom-size space, with walls all displaying endless crowds slowly and mindlessly flocking to you. Visitors of that exhibit say: After a while in that room, I feel like god.
Now, think again. Why do we feel the penguins are funny?
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