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Completely mesmerized by this project. It seems like something one might encounter in a video game as a puzzle to solve.

“Keepalive, a digital installation in the countryside near Neuenkirchen, Germany, could easily be mistaken for a strangely charred but otherwise ordinary boulder. But in an unusual mashup of neolithic and digital technologies, lighting a fire up against the stone reveals a hidden cache of digital information.Inside the rock is a thermoelectric generator that turns heat into power for a Wi-Fi router and USB drive. Visitors who activate and connect to the router gain access to dozens of digital survival guides on a variety of topics. Dating and intimacy, programming and hacking, parenting, shopping, dealing with bad bosses — everything one needs to know to weather the wilderness of contemporary culture.”

#keepalive #iot

Together they form a cloud of machine sensation, each listening or looking or feeling or smelling something about the world or about the Users in the world, or both a once. A sensor may even be a user if it also initiates columns p and down The Stack from its little perch....Human users are both the subject and the object of this system, sometimes piloting it and sometimes piloted by it. We leave little traces of ourselves as we march through the sensor cloud, traces of our presence, our attention, our interests...This stigmergy of data, like ants communicating by leaving tracks of pheromones, is another way that humans interact with one another, indirectly, anonymously, and perhaps unconsciously as the impact of one User's presence, her habits, is part of the information that another User may observe or be observed by when passing along the same route that is accumulating input and output.

Benjamin Bratton, The Stack

Where will those regimes get their raw material for this artificial coherency? As Users go about their days and lives, dragging their phone-shaped homing beacons hither and yon, they may pass by millions of sensors, each peering out into the world like a tick waiting for mammal heat.

Benjamin Bratton, The Stack

Compilation of Quotes on the Creepy Line of Technology and Dependence

“ What’s the cultural line of “creepy” in the context of new technology? How can technology be used for “This double-edged quality is a hallmark of so many technological innovations today. The same facial recognition software that auto-tags your photos can auto-flag dissidents at the border. The machine-translation engine that lets you flirt in passable French can help spy on multiple continents from a single cubicle. The fitness data you use to adjust your workout might soon forcibly adjust your health-insurance premium. And the stakes have risen considerably as the Valley’s ambitions, during the past few years, have clambered into physical space; in a phenomenon that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has famously called “software eating the world,” a new generation of tech companies has encroached on industries like hospitality (Airbnb), transportation (Uber and Lyft), office space (WeWork) and more, bringing a set of tech-inflected values with them.” - Welcome to the Age of Digital Imperialism

-http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/welcome-to-the-age-of-digital-imperialism.html

“Like so many palliatives, however, technology can turn on us. It may not be as safely in control as we’d hoped. The potential for unease grows as our technologies become more powerful, more complex, and more self-determined. On some level we’re aware that the relentless logic they’re following is their own. We know they’re not truly alive, but they seem to be. We wonder whose agenda is being followed. Creepiness ensues.” - Doug Hill

http://thequestionconcerningtechnology.blogspot.com/2012/08/creepy-technology.html

“But we cannot rely on the makers of new technology to think about the moral and privacy implications, she said. “There is not a lot of internal searching among engineers,” she said. “They are not encouraged to say, ‘What does that mean for society?’ That job is left for others. And the law and social norms trail in dealing with the pace of technical changes right now.” - Addicted to Apps

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/sunday-review/addicted-to-apps.html

GOOGLE and other tech companies are intimately familiar with this arc of seduction — from distrust to dependence — and take advantage of it to ease us into the future they want to build, said Evgeny Morozov, who writes about the political and social implications of technology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/25/sunday-review/addicted-to-apps.html

“ The study of code and software in general tries to go ‘beyond the blip’ to understand the implicit politics of computer code, ‘to make visible the dynamics, structures, regimes, and drives’ of the wide variety of programmed scripts that are littered across the internet (Fuller, 2003: 32). With this view we can see computer code not as a literal, rhetorical text from which we derive meaning but a complex set of relationships that tie together the coded systems of definition and organization that constitute our experience online. Codes are cultural objects embedded and integrated within a social system whose logic, rules, and explicit functioning work to determine the new conditions of possibilities of users’ lives. How a variable like X comes to be defined, then, is not the result of objective fact but is rather a technologically-mediated and culturally-situated consequence of statistics and computer science.”

http://docslide.us/documents/a-new-algorithmic-identity-soft-biopolitcs.html

“This article will examine the consequence of some of those practices

aimed at understanding exactly what kind of user is visiting web sites, purchasing

products, or consuming media. Online a category like gender is

not determined by one’s genitalia or even physical appearance. Nor is it

entirely self-selected. Rather, categories of identity are being inferred upon

individuals based on their web use. Code and algorithm are the engines

behind such inference and are the axis from which I will think through

this new construction of identity and category online. We are entering an

online world where our identifications are largely made for us. A‘new algorithmic

identity’ is situated at a distance from traditional liberal politics,

removed from civil discourse via the proprietary nature of many algorithms

while simultaneously enjoying an unprecedented ubiquity in its reach to

surveil and record data about users.” http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/28/6/164.full.pdf

What I learned at the University of Trento was still relevant: The goal is not what you design (as I now repeat to my Ph.D. students), but rather the knowledge you produce from the process. How could just designing something qualify as research? You need at least an evaluation explaining whether the design worked as expected or not (and possibly why) and some sort of intellectual framework to guide the production of new knowledge. Indeed, it was only through testing our design prototype that we gained further knowledge. But knowledge about what, exactly? Through our evaluation we could question whether our design assumptions (grounded on our interpretation of the ethnographic data) were adequate. We asked participants to use our prototype for a few weeks and to keep diaries. We then conducted follow-up interviews and further probed them about their self-care practices.

http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2015/a-personal-perspective-on-research-through-design

tacticalneuralimplant

Squad will patrol no-fly-zones and order unlawful operators to land their drones.

“There’s something hilarious, dystopian and wonderful all at the same time, about living in a future where you’ll be able to look out of your window and see high-tech pilotless gizmos flying around the city trying to catch each other in nets for the sake of law-enforcement and terrorist prevention.“

brucesterling

*I’ll believe it when I see it. On Youtube. I guess

nevver

The future had no future

From cat maps to selfie analyses, a new exhibit in London showcases how the boom in easily available data has transformed our lives.

Personal predictive analytics as imagine by Auger-Loizeau

The aesthetic immediately reminds me of Dr. Who. The spinning of the circle has a connotation of constantly calculating.

Tim Hawkinson - Signature Chair (1993)

A Performance of sponsored by your digital self.

Cut Out Briefcase Prototype - The proportions aren’t right here. Definitely needs to be wider. Considering buying a briefcase and modifying it next.

In The Mirror Suitcase Man, photographer Rui Calcada Bastos creates surrealist visions with a single, elusive prop: a suitcase made of paneled mirrors.

The Rug - Jonathan Hodgson

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