Usable Witchery

Yaniv Steiner has been running a class at the Visual and Multimedia Design graduate programme from the University of Architecture in Venice a few weeks ago. Its approach was slightly different from classical physical computing classes, starting with the name of the class: Usable Witchery. Students learned magic tricks with coins and cards, and then built up some Animatronics elements trying to humanize machine and robots to look and feel more like humans.

I’m just going to give a summary of the course as i feel its spirit might be relevant to the interests of many readers. But i’ll keep it short as i’ve decided a while ago not to cover anything i haven’t had the opportunity to see nor experience myself. Rules are supposed to have exceptions, right?

Usable Witchery investigated how products could be less a result of technical thinking, and become more “humanized”, natural and intuitive. As Yaniv told me recently: “I will trade many functional elements to magical and slightly more poetical element in any of my devices. I hope the student will apply it one day as they go and work for IDEO and Nintendo J.”

Image by Yaniv Steiner

He explains with further details this association between magic and interaction design in a list of reasons why advanced technology can be compared to magic. According to him, interfaces are actually doing the same to some extent. His text illustrates the point by giving examples of interaction procedures, viewed from this frame of reference: calculators displaying, without revealing how, the correct series of digits, mountains of information “leaping” invisibly in the air, “hold” switches, etc.

But still… Harry Pottering design students?

“Regarding the animatronics part, I feel it is dealing with humanization of machines in relation to Physical-Computing,” he goes on. “We all saw the blinking LED - Blink; and how motors can move robotic limbs with the grace of “Marvin the paranoid android”. We conducted experiments with ways to humanize these artifacts, making them closer to the way we, humans, interact and communicate with the world around us. And thus giving a small humanized illusion.”

Image by Synodic Month

Tons of images from Usable Witchery.

Related entries: Yaniv Steiner’s talk on rapid prototyping process and Opensourcery (where Zach Lieberman learns a few tricks from Mago Julián.)

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael

Tanks but no tanks

They say rooting out insurgents is like finding a needle in a haystack.

If that’s true, this tank is in trouble.

(By German artist Hans Hemmert.)

via like cool

…

Originally from core77.com's design blog
reBlogged by michael on Feb 29, 2008, 9:56AM

Botanicalls Twitter

Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What’s up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world. When your plant needs water, it will post to let you know, and send its thanks when you show it love. Twitter is social software that asks a simple question: What are you doing?

Botanicalls is a system that was developed to allow plants to place phone calls for human help. When a plant on the Botanicalls network needs water, it can call a person and ask for exactly what it needs. When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics. Call 212.202.8348 to hear more about each of the plants. What you need >>.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2008, 12:58PM

Live Stage: voiceoverhead [Amsterdam]

voiceoverhead - A project by Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal featuring Casper Cordes, Harun Farocki, William Furlong, Sharon Hayes :: until March 1, 2008 :: February 29, 2008: An evening of live-performances - Casper Cordes & Ellen Ugelvik; Discoteca Flaming Star; Will Holder; Guy-Marc Hinant - subrosa; Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal :: SMART Project Space, Arie Biemondstraat 105-113, Amsterdam.

In their collaborative practice Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal deal with audio-acoustics and storage media used for acoustic material. Their core interests are audio-recordings, particularly of language, spoken word and speech, original footage taken from radio-broadcastings or other archives. Their work found its multiple form in the project voiceoverhead which is rooted in a record collection of approximately 350 records, including footage documenting political speeches and language orientated radio-programs. The records aurally cover historical events and were originally designed to function as “documentations of the real”. This notion of the ‘documentary’ has been questioned throughout the history of the medium itself and developed as one of the inherent debates around the emerging modes of reproduction in the late 19th century - the phonograph, film and photography. Starting with the early Lumière-movie ‘Workers Leaving the Factory,’ this discussion emerges. Harun Farocki has shown, in his 1995 video-essay on the Lumière-sequence, the complexity of a playful representational conspiracy between the audience / viewer, the document / documentarian and the documented beginning at the birth of the genre itself. This act of conspiracy takes place when any document from the archive is brought back to the public sphere as a kind of reenactment of a communicative and rhetorical figure.

Lengerer & Gal developed the idea voiceoverhead in order to locate the record collection and their artistic practice within a broader context and to include the work of other artists, filmmakers and musicians working with archived language materials in multiple ways and diverging modes. So too do divisions exist in the cultural field: such as electronic music that is entrenched in elements of language and radio-sounds and there is a sub-genre of visual artists, filmmakers and documentarians who also focus their work in this area. Both fields are conceptually and practically applying different approaches to the given speech material: differences in working and presentation methods, as well as differences in distribution and public reception. voiceoverhead presents, confronts and merges the approaches applied in these diverse cultural productions in the exhibition and in an evening of sound performances, taking place on Friday 29 February.

voiceoverhead is a co-production with the Jan van Eyck Academy.

http://www.smartprojectspace.net/

Originally from Networked Music Review by jo
reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2008, 1:20PM

Live Stage: Cao Fei’s “RMB City” [NYC]

Cao Fei: RMB City :: February 29 - April 5, 2008 :: Opening: February 29; 6-8 pm :: Lombard-Freid Projects, 531 West 26th Street, 2nd floor, New York NY

“Is this your city?” asked the young man. “It’s yours.” The angel answered.

RMB City has been created by Cao Fei’s avatar China Tracy as an experimental utopian world for the 3D online virtual community of Second Life. Institutions and investors have been invited to buy buildings in RMB City and program events and activities within them where other Second Life users can participate. Thousands of young people in Asia and around the world are embracing Second Life as a “parallel universe” on the Internet.

RMB City will be the condensed incarnation of contemporary Chinese cities with most of their characteristics; a series of new Chinese fantasy realms that are highly self-contradictory, inter-permeative, laden with irony and suspicion, and extremely entertaining and pan-political. China’s current obsession with land development in all its intensity will be extended to Second Life. A rough hybrid of communism, socialism and capitalism, RMB City will be realized in a globalized digital sphere combining overabundant symbols of Chinese reality with cursory imaginings of the country’s future.

Lombard-Freid is providing China Tracy, as Chief Developer, with retail space for a New York RMB City leasing office and showroom. The public is invited to view an RMB City model, promotional videos, detailed RMB City photographs and go online via laptops providing real time links to RMB City under construction in Second Life.

The pure white RMB City Model proposes an ideal futuristic city in three dimensions for viewers outside of Second Life. China Tracy’s RMB City video projected onto a reflection pool showcases the myriad details of the metropolis – exposing layers of urban activity and the dense beauty of its architecture.

Also on view i.Mirror, Cao Fei’s quasi-documentary of China Tracy’s adventures in Second Life over a 6 month period premiered at the last Venice Biennale. i-Mirror the 3-part machinima of her Second Life experience inspired Cao Fei aka China Tracy to build RMB City.

Cao Fei’s recent exhibitions include: Brave New Worlds at the Walker Art Center, and Laughing In A Foreign Language at The Hayward Gallery, London. The 10th International Istanbul Biennial, the 52nd International Venice Biennale, the Lyon Biennial, China Power Station: Part 1, at the Serpentine Gallery, and China Power Station: Part II, at Astrup Fearley Museum of Modern Art. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo retrospective at Le Plateau, Paris.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Feb 27, 2008, 3:08PM

Situation Room

Situation Room, a project / prototype conceptualized and proposed / produced by hackitectura.net, is on view until March 17 at LABoral, an new exhibition, training and production centre for art, science, technology and advanced visual industries located in Gijon, Spain.

Situation rooms are places used in times of crisis to assess and monitor data for decision taking. These rooms are equipped with monitors and data boards to control everything from the Strait of Gibraltar to the nuclear fission processes in a nuclear power station or the life sustaining mechanisms on board the International Space Station. If i tell you that they are also called “control room” then all kinds of images from war, space and spies movies might come to your mind.

British Destroyer On-Board Glass Polar Plotting Board (via)

With the arrival of the Internet, a more open access to data collection and display technologies has enabled several experiences of Situation Rooms in civil society, with temporary media-labs mainly influenced by cybernetic ideas and free software.

Taking Asturias as a case study, Situation Room invites the public to participate in an open experiment-simulation of a situation room. The second goal of the project is to facilitate the production of common knowledge among artists, geographers, architects, biologists, economists, computer specialists, critics and the public, about the issues put forward.

I found the project so interesting that i asked the coordinator of the project, Pablo de Soto, if he had a few moments to answer my questions. In the meantime i realized that Pablo is a member of hackitectura.net, an activist group of architects, hackers and programmers, whose work i had been admiring for a couple of years. At the core of hackitectura.net are Sergio Moreno and José Pérez de Lama and Pablo. Their collaborative network undertakes practical and theoretical research into the emerging territories of information and communication technologies, new social networks and the traditional physical space.

Answers by both José Pérez de Lama aka Osfa and Pablo from hackitectura:

Situation Room. Image LABoral/Cárdenas

I actually discovered your work a few years ago at the festival Mal au Pixel in Paris where you gave a talk about Hackitectura. How does Situation Room builds upon the experience and projects Hackitectura.net have been developing since its creation? How does the project complete (or differs from) your previous works?

The project Situation Room is the distillation of the experiences made by hackitectura.net since 2003 in the design and implementation of several temporary media-labs: “Pure Data Beta Rave” in the abandoned AVE station in Seville, “Okupa Futura: Ciudad Disidente” in the Centro Cívico Federica Montseny in Corvera de Asturias and “La Multitud conectada”, a media-lab with satellite connection in La Rábida Huelva (2003), Fadaiat: freedom of movement / freedom of communication in both borders of the Strait of Gibraltar (2004 and 2005).

The Multitud Conectada (”Connected Multitude”) was a prototype for a networked public space, produced for a network of activists, artists and technicians. Using technologies such as the bi-directional satellite connection, the wifi (in its infancy at the time) or the streaming with free software, -with real time connections to México, Bogotá or France-, we created a space which was both local and global, digital and analog.

Dave Tarifa Psand pointing grid antenna to Tangier. No GPS device was used. Picture: osfa

In Fadaiat, which we developed in the framework of the Indymedia Estrecho network (an independent production platform and a bi-political production to which hackitectura actively participated), we developed the same concept but focused on the production of a cyborg geography (conception of spaces, social networks and electronic flux), which was located in a geopolitical node as peculiar and antagonistic as the frontier that separates Europe and Africa in the Gibraltar Strait. In Fadaiat, which held editions in 2004 and 2005, we had a distributed medialab, part of it was located in the Castillo de Tarifa (Spain) and the other in the Marshan, in Tánger (Morocco), linked between each other by wifi connection. Besides, this connection, set up by a network of technicians and activists from both parts of the Strait, was the first wifi connection ever made between the two continents, at least the first one managed by hackers and activists. We like to highlight how the link crossed a densely controlled and militarized space, a space with which we were trying to communicate in some way or another.

Planning of the wifi link, as sent to ITU Morocco for permission. Image:osfa

The SIVE (Sistema Integrado de Vigilancia Exterior / Integrated System of External Surveillance), which had started to take ground in the area since 2002, constitutes the first attempt to fortify the frontier with electronic tools, and Fadaiat was conceived as a kind of critical mirror to it.

Media-lab Tangier. Daytime, fixing the link with Tarifa. Picture: hd_(((i))) bcn

More specifically Situation Room is the continuation of the temporary laboratory that hackitectura.net designed and implemented in Geografías Emergentes (”Emerging Geographies”, 2007), which took place near the nuclear power plant of Valdecaballeros, located in a Spanish region called Siberia Extremeña. Because of the social opposition, the power plant was put to a stop 25 years ago, before it even started functioning and since then it is abandoned, dominating a severe landscape made of steppes, like a post-nuclear ruin.

Valdecaballeros nuclear power plant (image)

Taking the challenge of the regional government which called for a development based on knowledge (we are talking about the first region in the world who chose to work with free software at an institutional level) and sustainability, we decided to simulate a takeover of the nuclear plant as a participatory lab in order to initiate a reflexion and come up with proposals regarding the re-use of the power plant in another economical and production context and from other subjects. The laboratory was located in the middle of the field, surrounded by sheep, but it was connected to the internet by a satellite antenna and equipped with computers and screening systems. A geodesic dome acted both as a shelter and as a screen for projections. Made of white textile, it worked from the inside as an immersive interface and from the exterior like a magic lantern in the middle of the night.

Geografías Emergentes, Geolab

The various events that took place in the lab (presentations, debates, workshops, performances) were broadcast live on the net and we also had remote participants via streaming.

An important element of Geografías Emergentes was the participation of young people from the area (a competition selected 10 projects to be implemented in the lab) but also of children and adults from Valdecaballeros who participated to workshop and festive events.

Situation Room, an attempt to combine the ideas of a media lab and media room, with practices of data-visualization, cartography and free streaming, aims to present previous experiences in a more artistic and institutional context.

Situation Room. Image Marcos Morilla. Courtesy of LABoral

Which kind of data are you going to monitor during these two months spent in Asturias?

We understand the Situation Room at LABoral, more as a simulation than an actual device to scientifically mine and process data. The main information that we have been showing and discussing at least in the first part of the project, has been the presentation of the concept itself, its origins and proliferating use by command and control powers, and the potentials to hack situation rooms in order to make them perform with other goals.

Situation rooms are on the one hand, devices connected to complex contexts, where processes are non-linear. In order to take decisions and act in these situations, the different agencies (military staff, governments, business, police…) need to continuously monitor reality and establish a permanent feedback loop between it and their actions.

The processing of sets of data extracted from complex systems needs new ways of processing and evaluation, which have to do with cartography and data visualization. On the other hand, situation rooms are only meaningful if we understand them as embedded in networks, which comprise at least two main areas, a sensors area (that captures data) and an actuators area, which allows for strategies and decisions to be performed.

Our ideas where to use Situation Room as a space and time to discuss these issues, and particularly the possibility of turning them into a “multitudinar” device, that is the possibility to use them to empower the action of social networks, rather than central powers. How could situation rooms enhance distributed control. How could they be used to generate socially useful knowledge and to increase coordination between social movements.

“Financial core,” Bureau d’études, World Monitoring Atlas (via)

One of the questions that we made ourselves is, then, what kind of data would such a situation room be interested in. In order to advance in this direction, we held a workshop with Bureau d’Etudes, the French team famous for their cartographies of capitalism, power and production. It seems somehow that before or beyond quantifying data, a situation room of this sort should produce different images of the system, that would enable other desires and goals. In this workshop we started studying different critical mapping projects, and after that participants - focusing on Asturias, the region where the workshop was happening -, made a list of possible mapping subjects (worked out of the ideas of nodal points, threats and opportunities). This allowed us to produce a preliminary map of the region, somehow a strategic map, that should guide future data mining - and could as well work as a communication and coordination tool.

Installation Cibersyn operations room (image)

The second workshop dealt with a project which we feel very closely connected to ours, which is Cybersyn. Cybersyn was a network developed in Chile between 1970 and 1973 under the socialist government of Salvador Allende (Cybersyn was presented in Transmediale, right after Situation Room). A very young team of Chilean techs collaborated with British cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer to develop a Chile-wide system to coordinate nationalized industries. The aim of the project, however, wasn’t to control factories and workers, but to regulate the network as a living organism, where autonomy of the different cells was compatible with the overall functioning of the organism. Of course, the right wing coup d’etat didn’t allow the project to be completed, but its promises are still of great appeal. One of the interests of this workshop was to realize the social potential of the concept - which astonishingly was designed almost simultaneously to Arpanet itself (1969). Rather than being afraid of control and technologies in general, we think that research and creativity should be applied to the social appropriation of them; we even think that the source of technological creativity, as Cybersyn shows, lies rather on social cooperation, and that is only later captured by the military or capitalism.

Situation Room. Image Julio Calvo. Courtesy of LABoral

Situation Room is a complex project which includes a series of workshops, a laboratory and the installation itself. What is the aim of the project? What do you hope to explore and learn with it?

We think one of our aims was to advance in the design of situation room that could be actually used in the context of social movements, for special events or for daily research, strategic planning and organizing. Somehow we understand that it should be rather a multiplicity interconnected of situation rooms, embedded in networks of “biopolitical labs” such as social centers and independent media and research groups. As we wrote in the presentation for the project, somehow anyone equipped with tv, Internet, mobile phone and computer, has a personal situation room at home, but we would like to go on researching how the combination of hacktivists medialabs, artists media rooms, multimedia communication, participatory cartography and emergent free software data mining and visualization technologies, could empower social action.

Situation Room, graphic from the first proposal

The presentation of the projects says that the public will be able to participate. How exactly can they get involved in the project?

In the first part of the event, we organized the two already mentioned workshops that were open to the public, and students in particular.

There was a small but intense participation, composed by artists, architects, techies and activists. In the opening sessions we had remote participants, from Barcelona and Malaga, whose images occupied one of the walls of the room. The sessions were streamed through GISS (a global free software network) making them available to anyone connected.

One of the results of the workshops was an interactive cartography of Asturias, based on meipimatic (a wikimapping platform developed by some Madrid friends). In the next weeks, meetings will be held with different local collectives, that are knowledgeable on particular issues such as ecology, labor, urbanism, etc, that we expect to join the mapping team. This groups will be invited as well to set up their temporary offices in the lab and use its resources.

Open tactical cartography of Asturias

The general public is also invited to contribute to the map.

Another way of rather automated participation is through rss feed. Feeds form relevant media, especially independent, are processed and permanently projected in several of the large screens in the lab, presenting a panorama of current issues in Asturias.

Eventually, there will be several workshops with children. Activities will include access to data bases, introduction to data visualization technologies and creation of data bases and maps to be visualized in the Situation Room. Children’s contributions would be incorporated as well to the Asturias meipimatic.

Thanks Pablo and osfa!

Situation Room. Image Marcos Morilla. Courtesy of LABoral

Situation Room is the winner of the first convocation of the LABjoven Experimenta Contest at LABoral in Gijon, Spain.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael

Trevor Paglen’s talk at Transmediale

The talk i was looking forward to listen to during the Transmediale conference last week was Trevor Paglen’s who was part of Session 4: Techno-Historical Collusions: The Making Of A Trojan Horse.

(Previously, in the same session: Eva Horn’s talk at Transmediale)

Paglen works at the border of art and research and is currently completing a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. His artistic work deliberately blurs the lines between social science, contemporary art, and other more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret the world around us. He has published two books (Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights (Amazon USA and UK) which documents the use by the CIA of modified commercial aircraft for extraordinary rendition; and I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (Amazon USA and UK) about the secret world of military imagery and jargon revealed by patches from classified projects) and is currently preparing the third one (Blank Spots on a Map, 2008/09).

One day Paglen arrived at his office to find man standing in front of his door, looking with intensity at a picture hung outside of the office. At some point, the man tried to pick out the image out of its frame. Paglen intervenes and asks him what he think he’s doing. The guy then asks him “Do you know what that place is?” Starts a dialog where the man reveals that he used to be a pilot. He and his companions at the army were instructed that there were places in the desert where they would not be able to fire at all, where they could not land under any circumstance. One of these places was just called “The Box”. But one of the pilots ran out of gas and has no choice but land on “The Box.” A week later, the guy comes back. He wouldn’t say anything. “That place belongs to the Black World.” The black World, as military insiders call it, is the world of classified programs, projects, and places, whose outlines, even existence, are deeply-held secrets.

Tail Numbers/Gold Coast Terminal, Las Vegas, NV/Distance ~1 mile/5:27 pm

Paglen then showed us pages from the Department of Defense Budget Fiscal Year 2008. The document is publicly available but presents some puzzling numbers. For example, a whopping $ 12.3 million is allocated to toilets which, the document states, must provide soldiers with equipment 2 enhance their efficiency and efficacy.”

Paglen showed more images from a documents of classified strategic RDT&E programs. Some projects with mysterious names such as “Pilot Fish”, “Retract Juniper,” “Chalk Coral”, etc. receive huge budget but, unlike the toilets do not present any justification. Sometimes the sum allocated to a project does not appear at all, leaving blank spots in the budget. The National Security Agency has mostly blanks in its budget.

Code Names: Classified Military Programs Active Between 2001 and 2007

One of Paglen’s work inspired by the military budget is Code Names is a list of words, phrases, and terms that designate active military programs whose existence or purpose is classified.

So what happens with these “Selected Sites Associated with Classified Military Activity”? Money doesn’t disappear like that. Paglen calls them the “Black Dollars”. A number of places where these figures congeal are located in the South West of the country, more precisely in the desert. That area has a long history of being an unexplored region. In World War II, these places became useful to hide secret bases where airplanes were tested. Also the Manhattan Project in 1945.

Manhattan Project, “Jumbo” atomic device being positioned for “Trinity” test at Alamogordo, New Mexico (souce)

This Black World started to get more importance in the ’80s. The Black Budget became then a big part of the defense budget with President Reagan, a man fascinated by secret weapons.

Paglen showed more documents to prove his point.

The next issue he tackled was “How do we study something that doesn’t exist? Something that must stay hidden?”

Paglen turned to geography to make emerge a negative image of these black spots on maps. That’s where he compares his work to the one of an astronomer because he deals with dark matters, with phenomena which are detectable only through the influence they exercise on the visible world.

Open Hangar/Cactus Flats, NV/Distance ~18 miles/10:04 am

He uses similar instruments as astronomers’ to create his Limit Telephotography series.

Many of the military bases and installations hidden deep in deserts and buffered by dozens of miles of restricted land are so remote that a civilian might be able to see them with an unaided eye. In order to visually document these places, Paglen uses high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent. Because of the distance and the heat coming off the desert, these images have peculiar aesthetical qualities that sometimes evoke impressionists paintings rather than photography.

Limit-telephotography resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth.

Flight Tracking
CIA sets up civilian front companies to hide these “black” operations, making it look like a normal business. But even front companies must produce flight logs, registration papers, and other legal documents. And most of them publicly available. That’s the kind of data you check to know if a plane will land on time for example. Now how do you find front companies? Documents such as the Civil Aircraft Landing Permits lists the planes which are allowed to land on military landfills. These are companies you have never heard of. You can get a list of the planes these airlines own and from there track information about where they land and from where they fly.

Terminal Air

Terminal Air, a visualization system that Trevor Paglen developed together with the Institute for Applied Autonomy tracks the CIA aircrafts. You can register and get an email message when a CIA plane is coming to your city.

These companies leave other traces. They must have addresses. One of them lead Paglen to a law office which is weird for an aviation company. No one would answer his questions. Then there are signatures at the bottom of documents belonging to the companies. He deciphered the names and found individuals which, unlike the rest of us, leave no electronic trace: they have no credit history, no driver license, etc. They all have a single address which is a PO Box in Virginia. Paglen went there and discovered that the PO Box was used by hundreds and hundreds of names. It’s a long collection of ghosts, of fictional characters. Which makes sense as these people are in the business of making other people disappear.

Signature of a non-existing airline company member (image source)

Paglen also practices some Amateur Anthropology.

These people involved in secret activities have colleagues which are the only persons with whom they are allowed to talk about their jobs. They organize reunions and form bonds. They also give awards to each other but they can’t exactly say what this award is for. So someone would get an award for his or her “significant contribution in a remote location.”

One of Paglen’s slides showing the cryptic information of someone involved in one of the secret programs he’s investigating

Paglen is also into Amateur geo-spacial intelligence. He and his collaborators make maps of the world based on those flights.

He then reminded us of the case of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen who was abducted, flown to Afghanistan, interrogated and tortured by the CIA for several months in one of those Black Sites and then released without charge. The extrajudicial detention was apparently due to a mis-spelling of El-Masri’s name. When the CIA realized El-Masri was the wrong guy, they threw him on another plane and freed him in Albania.

Aerial view of Salt Pit (image)

It is believed that the jail were he was detained was a secret CIA detention center outside Kabul called the Salt Pit. For five months, El-Masri says, he was locked in a solitary cell in the Salt Pit and interrogated by Arabic-speaking inquisitors who asked him repeatedly if he was involved with the Sept. 11 hijackers, if he’d journeyed to Jalalabad on a false passport, if he hung out with Islamic extremists living in Germany (via).

Symbology.

NOYFB. Fabric patch, Edition of 50, 2006

Military have all sorts of patches, icons and insignia. They reveal anything that they do or are. These markers of identity and program heraldry begin to create a peculiar symbolic regime when they depict one’s affiliation with what defense-industry insiders call the “black world”.

The symbols and insignia shown in Paglen’s Symbology series provide a glimpse into how contemporary military units answer questions that have historically been the purview of mystery cults, secret societies, religions, and mystics: How does one represent that which, by definition, must not be represented?

Both the icons and words used on the patches are weird. “Alone and on the Prowl”, sometimes with inside jokes “Gustatus Similis Pullus” (Tastes Like Chicken); “Doing God’s works with other people’s money,” NOYFB (None of Your Fucking Business), etc.

You can see some of these patches until February at the Transmediale exhibition which runs until February 24 at the House of World Cultures in Berlin.

Related: Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy; Tracking the Torture Taxis; The Captives.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael

The Telepresence Frame

Just back from London where i visited the Work in Progress show at the Royal College of Art (you’ve got until Thursday 7 February to visit it). I’ll come back with more details later but here’s an appetizer from the department of Design Interactions.

Revital Cohen got interested in Life support machines and the way the technologies involved in keeping patients alive in intensive care enter and merge with the body. By doing so they redefine its material and functional properties. As the human anatomy gains technological capabilities, where does the body end and the machine begin?

The Telepresence Frame is a domestic object which utilizes the fact that one’s bodily functions are digitalized in order to create a new form of telepresence. Your family would have the frame at home as a presence that keeps them constantly aware of your physical state while you’re being kept alive at the hospital.

The Human Black Box records and stores this information, keeping a record of your very last moments. Once you die, the frame plays your life data back. In loop.

Originally from we make money not art by Regine
reBlogged by michael

Live Stage: Exhibiting On The Internet [Vienna]

Power Of Display 44: Exhibiting On The Internet - Dialogue with Franz Thalmair / Carlos Katastrofsky, Sakrowski moderated by: Nora Sternfeld (in German) :: February 7, 2008; 7 pm, Brick 5 :: Fonfhausgasse 5, A-1150 Vienna.

Initiated by Schnittpunkt exhibition theory & practice, the lecture series “power of display” seeks to stimulate reflection on current exhibition practices and to test experimental exhibition forms. The upcoming issue of the event in co-production with basis wien - Kunst, Information und Archiv deals with curatorial methods on the Internet. A virtual tour through exemplary projects is the starting point for a discussion about question of display and modes of exhibiting New Media and Internet-based Art.

schnittpunkt. exhibition theory & practice aims at producing a critically reflective exhibition and museum viewers/public. Beginning with theoretically well-founded exhibition and museum analyses, schnittpunkt wishes to stimulate reflection on current exhibition practice and to test experimental exhibition forms. We intend to bring about a general awareness of how interpretation and operation patterns of institutions are determined by cultural and social conditions.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo
reBlogged by michael on Feb 4, 2008, 9:46AM