howLAB

here is where howLAB (how life art to be) members post what they are researching, developing or doing.

[howlab]

cofounder: Walter

[climateadaptation-deactivated20]

The Crystal Serenity cruise launched on a luxury tour of the Arctic that promises to carry passengers through the storied Northwest Passage and across the roof of the world. The controversial cruise was scheduled to set sail Tuesday from Seward, Alaska, and dock 32 days later in New York City.

Scientists have long predicted this moment, although as recently as last year, a scientific study found the Northwest Passage would remain too unpredictable for regular shipping for some time to come. But that hasn’t stopped some commercial shipping vessels from already making the journey. Nor did it stop the planning for the Arctic’s inaugural cruise — a journey that will mark the first case of mega-scale tourism in one of last virtually untouched landscapes left in the world.

As many as 1,700 passengers and crew were expected to be on board the Crystal Serenity, which will transit the Bering Strait and visit Greenland. Tickets for the historic journey started at about $22,000 and went into the six figures. That price doesn’t include extras that guests can book, such as a helicopter ride or side excursion to a Greenland glacier.

Despite the cost, the trip sold out quickly, and the company behind it said a second journey is already in the planning.

The location might be the Arctic, but the Crystal Serenity’s 1,100 guests aren’t exactly roughing it. The $350 million ship is 820 feet long and has 13 decks and 535 state rooms. It has a driving range and putting green, a casino, a movie theater, half a dozen restaurants, multiple pools and a library with thousands of books, games and DVDs. There’s also a spa, fitness center, hair salon and 24-hour complimentary room service.

More than anything, the cruise is a symbol, a harbinger of the tourism and commercial traffic that is likely to fill the once-isolated, ice-choked waters of the Arctic. Many scientists have projected that the ocean could become virtually free of ice during summers at some point, perhaps as soon as the next few decades.

Via WaPo

[howlab]

http://sculpture-center.org/exhibitionsExhibition.htm?id=113236

[99percentinvisible]

Tsunami Stones: Ancient Japanese Markers Warn Builders of High Water - 99% Invisible

Residents of Aneyoshi, Japan, heeded the warnings of their ancestors. They obeyed directions and wisdom found on a local stone monument: “Do not build any homes below this point,” it reads. “High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis.” When the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami

[infiniteinterior]

Visit Original Link

got myself a soundcard and now i can do multitrack recordings of the sounds inside my mouth

[brucesterling]

“Anticonventional Objects,” perennial design-fiction theory fave

[howlab]

English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6055/the-art-of-fiction-no-208-louise-erdrich

[howlab]

Dad had us cover our eyes when the commercials came on. He didn’t want us to nurse any unnecessary desires and succumb to capitalism.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6055/the-art-of-fiction-no-208-louise-erdrich

[howlab]

As the eldest child, I often felt that I belonged more to my parents’ generation than to my own.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6055/the-art-of-fiction-no-208-louise-erdrich

[howling-science]

[iheartmyart]

Moebius tribute by Dave Taylor, 2012

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See more artwork by Dave Taylor on iheartmyart. Discover more illustration on iheartmyart.

[howlab]

Lovely to see recycling process at it's most refined

[howlab]

I like this blog, howlab. My post about organizing social affairs.qq

I've always had to twist and turn and stretch my idea of social organization. Perhaps that's my fate. Because of my fate I made the choice to always be thinking about my audience. It is just a few close friends, my parents, maybe ppl who enjoyed me or my ideas in college or highschool and perhaps some randoms who found this by accident or tags or somehow... I know there are few Mainers, Conservatives, hightech professionals, conservationists and common ppl who read this. I'm sure many more nameable groups. And going even further, I doubt anyone but Wendall and I have really read and thought seriously about every post, maybe not even one post. I think the research I've done in this infinite moment may be useful to others, but I've never tried selling it, shipping it or promoting it. It's a automatic giant that may wander outside the walls, eating tiny humans whenever it can, but wanders in such a remote region that it never encounters any meals. It certainly has never approached human territory. Back to the subject of social organization. Long story short this blog has sometimes been my place to write big ideas. The response has never justified this. But it *feels* like the right audience/venue. Lately art mail (wrldmail) [www.patreon.com/wrldmail] has been my place to transmit ideas to specific people. This takes care of almost all my ideas. I know exactly to whom I write. But other times I prefer to cast my perceptions to the whole world. Which, ofc, is the same as casting it into the void. Only the famous person is truly heard, because their name lends credence to their words. *this part is stressing me out, but it's coming fast*. I listened to the Traveling Wilburys on the way here (brother's house)...nevermind! Im outi. - illy

[howlab]

Boring Post About Business, American Democratic Anarchy and the form of society

Long story short, I have two businesses. Both are made up: I just noticed and decided ppl in my areas might want a computer knower to help them with computer-enabled reality. Then I noticed ppl like receiving mail that doesn't suck, and that they would pay me to send them cool mail. The foundation of this was built on a lot of dead versions of myself and what I wanted to do, however, so to speak, whatever, you know? During Albany occupy wall street, I made a sign that said, "Occupy Anus: Keep It Tight: LAN-based group rule from the ground up." That sign went ignored for the most part until our march passed a gay bar near the park. Hahha, then it got cheers and yells and pointing. Long story short, the idea was that each community would be connected based on geographical and population based import. Each unit of 150 people would come together to air grievances and would communicate with the people around them about civics and personal issues, and the country could be run with representatives of these groups. A fine idea, kind of anarchistic, a little like organizing the country along the lines of occupy wall street. They had a facilitator who would gather issues from everyone, address the ones that occured more often and let everyone speak. If there's some kind of ultimate point, it's this. I think that putting commerce at the level of people around and near you is cool. I like that it keeps your priorities realistic, and grounded in realistic geography. At the same time, the mail service keeps me connected to who I love and want to keep connected to abroad. And both become my direct focus for making it in the world. When you work for an international business, those around you and those you love become secondary, perhaps only hobbies or worse, ignored. I connect with people who need what I can provide to a seaside and rural community: computers. I connect with people who I've spent a lot of time on when I lived elsewhere: mail. It's supporting me, and it's comforting. I take care of my politics, my personal feelings and needs/desires, and my money. I can only see it maturing, never ballooning larger than I can manage it and never shrinking to shadows and thoughts alone. :) hm, how my life art to be Billy Ps. Please discuss, reblog, ask questions, modify my words for your own ends. Share alike. But if you're going to make money off my ideas, cut me in.

[howlab]

Persuasive Technologies Logically Nonsensical

Source of Confusion : Persuasive Technologies Should Be Boring by Conrad Wai and Pete Mortensen Source of Inspiration: Logical Modeling of Deceptive Negative Persuasion by Neil Rowe Source of Profession: HCI Handbook, Chapter 7- Motivating, Influencing and Persuading Users by BJ Fogg, G Cuellar, D Danielson

HCI is the design of computer interfaces (websites, devices, etc) but also the study of human interaction with any tool or technology. In HCI jargon, a Person is re-named a “user”. It is symbolic–“junkie” comes to mind. Proceeding from that symbolic choice of word, what we students were taught in design courses was how to persuade with design. Examples of questions HCI designers ask themselves: (1) How can we make people come back over and over again to shop on our website? (2) How can we persuade people with more money to buy products for a higher price? Some of you may know I earned an MS in Human-Computer Interaction, otherwise known as HCI.  You may also know I earned it by reversing rote HCI teaching.

Typical HCI drivel teaches you to make tools easy to use, so that the user doesn’t have to think. Classes equate buying online products to using doorknobs. The mental consciousness to do either should obviously be disparate, but they try to teach. I coined the phrase Inconvenient HCI to describe my reversal of this litany.

Inconvenient HCI is a reversal of typical HCI thinking. HCI designers’ education was my subject of study. I thought we could be taught to think about our tools’ effects on People and not only their effect on human organisms. I don’t believe that learning to persuade people based on their unconscious reflexes is okay. In order to learn, I taught myself the opposite of these principles to come up with an opponent theory of HCI. But as I discovered, my theory fell under the umbrella of HCI.

Inconvenient HCI or Poetic HCI is HCI that is inconvenient, or difficult, or poetic. It persuades the person to think about the tool/technology/design they’re using, that has been designed by people. A poem is typically not easy to understand. You can’t read it once and capture all of its meaning, and you are sure you have not. A poem is difficult to digest, even if it’s easy to eat. If we want to persuade ethically, we also have to educate or create barriers to protect people from agreeing to that which they do not understand.

Nonsensical Persuasive Technology would not interfere with sensical, effective HCI. The designer’s conceits should still be hidden, yes. But the entry point to persuasion should not be simple for someone to accidentally trigger. An 80 year old man who can’t print should not be convinced to use a wearable device. It’s simple mercy. The man doesn’t understand, he isn’t educated enough to understand what you have made or why. If someone wants to buy a wearable device, they should be able to do this. But if they want to use it, they should be interacting with a design that teaches them about itself. This is nonsensical, because it’s nonsense to imagine a watch as an entity able to communicate with us.

I researched the idea that persuasive technology and tools could be used to teach, and that the best, most effective methods involve the complete conscious understanding and will of the person using them. Causing a person to think improves the ease-of-use as well as the reduction of manipulation and generates buyers that are more aware of how their choices affect them.

Many practicioners of HCI, at least in my experience, use the science/tech/art to sell products that persuade people to connect, share and provide information. Obviously facebook and microsoft are the worst of these hucksters. BJ Fogg says it’s not HCI to manipulate or force users to do something. Wai/Mortensen say that the design of products ought to be less disruptive and more convenient to aid in a more effective, widely used design. Neither acknowledge that the training of HCI practitioners is kept as secret and convenient for product sales as the prescription to do so as a practice.* [’The medium is the message,’ McLuhan would say.]

Is manipulation its own inconvenient HCI? Is secretive design? What’s an example in your life where your understanding was improved by a difficult tool or subject? Do you like making informed decisions for yourself or would you prefer to learn by unconscious pressure points based on human nature exploits?

*(I can’t get into it here, this is about nonsense design. I personally think this creates a majority class of HCI designers now being hired by many top firms who are trained to look at the world through a lens of persuasion & concealment.) by wrld@howLAB

[iheartmyart]

Yoko Ono, The Riverbed exhibition at Galerie Lelong, New York, December 11, 2015 – January 30, 2016; Photography by Blair Prentice

In December and January, Yoko Ono presented a two-part participatory exhibition titled, The Riverbed at Galerie Lelong and Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York City. Stones, string, glue and shattered ceramic pieces were strew around the space for visitors to use to as they pleased. On the last day of the exhibition at Galerie Lelong, the typically pristine white gallery walls were filled with images, notes and holes; and visitors were forced to crouch below an extensive web of string that supported various creations that dangled from its strings. On a series of white shelves, sat countless numbers of unique sculptures that visitors to the gallery had pieced together from the fragments of broken tea cups. 

Bonded by the communal experience of the exhibition, visitors warmly conversed amongst each other and lingered at the gallery for extended periods of time. Given the disparate backgrounds and experiences of the New Yorkers’ and tourists that visited the gallery, it was refreshing to see that with the right tools and opportunity, they would willingly participate in creative communal work to forge a single voice, which was the exhibition itself. 

THE RIVERBED is over the river in-between life and death.

Stone Piece: Choose a Stone and hold it until all your anger and sadness have been let go.

Line Piece: Take me to the farthest place in our planet by extending the line.

Mend Piece: Mend with wisdom mend with love. It will mend the earth at the same time.

- Yoko Ono

Photography by Blair Prentice of iheartmyart.com

______

Yoko Ono: Website Galerie Lelong: Website Blair Prentice: Website | Facebook

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More artwork from the Yoko Ono on iheartmyart. See more photography by Blair Prentice on iheartmyart. Discover more photographs of exhibitions on iheartmyart.

[howlab]

#NewFrontiers

[howlab]

Creativity

“My school used a smart board, but everyone started chewing it up until there was nothing left but detritus. Honestly, our favorite part about school wasn’t the technology, which was an expensive distraction (except for learning to code), but our teacher, Mr Sand Worm who made class fun all on his own. I still think about what he told me when I was a young man. He said, “Mmmmmm. Gsw, we can eat anything we set our minds to. Everything in moderation, and burrow deep.” That really made an impression on me. Ever since then, I’ve eaten every kind of technology out there. They all taste the same. One day though, they’ll have some flavor taste variety.”

- Giant Sand Worm

[Photo by ©Twain@howLAB. The Lakes District landscape in northwest England is an example of  sustainable development. All the houses are usually built nearby each other, no real sprawl. There’s a lot of grass, trees, land and free-ranging domesticated animals owned by the state roaming around. Even Leeds was mainly traversed by bus or bike.]

Mood: Intuitive, Detached and Matter-of-Fact Listening to: Piano Sonata #11 in A major -Alta Turca- allegretto by Amadeus, Bourgeois Blues by Leadbelly, Tub Thumping by Chumbawumba Quote: “Everybody’s rapping like it’s a commercial! Acting like life is a big commercial!” - Mike Diamond, Adam Yauch, Adam Nathaniel, Adam Horowitz

Disclaimer: If you feel like I’m scolding, it’s because I’m scolding myself for not thinking of this when I was 10.

Do Computer Technologists think applications of mechelectronic technology are creative?

The technology stopped being created once it was shipped out to you. Then it began to fill its function prescribed by the designers. Do we need computer technology to be creative? At what point did we decide that it fostered creativity? It fosters efficiency, sure, it can be the means to solve creative problems. Simply using it to solve problems isn’t a creative act.

Think about where c-tech people want us to go. They are thinking about making everything a sensor, uploading every object on earth with a digital signature and pickup, visual, a hookup into our senses. Augmenting our senses to record all "information" around us. I put information in quotes, because it will always be biased based on what we think is important to record, not actually a representation of all information available to the human mind.

In our innovation it appears to be a choice to use all one scientific, technological method as a means of solving problems. Rather than a choice embodying a type of resourcefulness that elects the best method, it’s a shortcut which leaves out the bigger picture. Big picture is a useful way of thinking while we’re concerned about the environment and its “health”. Don’t get me wrong, I love my computer and my wacom tablet, I love thumb drives and printers. Whoever made these things were creative people for sure. And I love them because they enable new dimensions of creative choice. Why praise me for merely using what resources I have? You could just as easily criticize me for polluting the world by purchasing computer technology. Blackened lakes and rivers in China can attest to that. [[Listen fate people, this isn’t a good time to discuss fate, okay? Not now.]]

Obviously our future will be built with computer technology. Everyone with money is using it as a solution to everything, because it’s accessible and an advantage in terms of speed. There must be some way of merging that speed with well-considered world-wide choices. We already have commlink technology that connects all the leaders of the world from the famous to the meek across many previous social blockades, we’ve had that since the eighties. We have individuals who have grown up experiencing nothing else, and knowing it used to be different. [[Doesn’t every generation?]]

When we humans are aliens living in space compared to our current society, aren’t we going to ask ourselves, “Why did we think computers should be used for everything? Why didn’t we focus on the fact that this type of problem solving needs to be balanced with the world resources? Why did they have to make computers and drive cars that would break down when they were using a fabrication process that pollutes and acidifies all the water?” Don’t forget that computer technology has enabled the modern environmentalism movements. Why we are using computer technology? When should we use it? When and why would it be better to use a different form of creativity or innovation that doesn’t result in further pollution? Are there solutions we can implement to fit our specific communities? Why do you think so? Can you think of some way of influencing your communities to pivot on the skills or resources and they already have and put them to use thinking of some way to be sustainable? [[i.e. Is choosing to structure your business or profession around driving or shipping a resourceful choice? In what ways could you conduct business without using a car? Without electricity?]]

Spill your guts! I love looking at guts!

Candidate for World Hegemon - Twain@howLAB

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Reply by Wendall@howLAB

RE: You didn’t exactly pull the trigger on these ideas, but this post had some strong suggestions for me. There were the ideas connected to taste sensations, guts and metaphorical guts, or bodies or tastes. I relate the guts metaphor to having businesses operate locally or sparingly, keeping things close to reverse resources. There were also ideas about communication worldwide, localized labor or entrepreneurship. And that metaphor is distance, shipping, aliens. I relate the alien metaphor to using computers to find creative solutions to address climate change. These problems with our emissions causing ocean acidification and myriad other issues is similar to the human race being visited by aliens that we must unite against in order to triumph over AKA damage-controlling our influence on Earth’s ecosystem.

We were speaking earlier about using evolution as a metaphor for life, and using that metaphor literally to discuss the idea of our species survival, regardless of social class and “fitness”. That each social class, even the very poor have evolutionary fitness because they survive to reproduce. And that none of us will be “the fittest” if we destroy our genetic diversity by not curtailing global carbon emissions. That the very real threat to everyone’s survival comes in the form of this "alien invasion" we call climate change, and all the factors in our global society that contribute to climate change. Almost suggesting that there be a wide dispersal of power in each community to work on ways of changing our lifestyles to meet the alien in equal combat. The idea that our ancestors and parents and grandparents are the ones who awakened the alien presence which we all must now unite to address is particularly striking.

A question to think about: How would you communicate with your alien cousins in space without electricity?

-Wendall Carefare@howLAB

[howlab]

Art to be

A person’s art, if received and enjoyed by another person it’s the same for that artist as revealing their wet genitals and it’s so appropriate that it’s beautiful to the person flashed. It’s sensual, deep tissue flashing.