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| Adriana Young is a community cartographer, under-utilized space modifier, and urban lifestyle researcher. She teaches a course about the suburbanization of NYC at the Parsons School of Design and is the Research Director for CAPITAL B. Her projects explore extreme modes of domesticity and the relationship between shopping, the war on terror and freedom. She will be running public investigations workshops as part of Eyebeam's Digital Day Camp in July. |  |
As the United States takes its first steps toward mandating that power companies generate more electricity from renewable sources, China already has a similar requirement and is investing billions to remake itself into a green energy superpower. Through a combination of carrots and sticks, Beijing is starting to change how this country generates energy. NYT
SparkFun has started to release some of their kits as open-source hardware. Projects such as ClockIt, a simple alarm clock, have their schematics, board designs, and source code released under the CC-by-sa license. Although most of their widgets and projects already had example code and schematics available, they are now using an open-source license. They are joining adafruit and EMSL and others in pushing OSH, but it is interesting to see an established company turn to this. Normally, startups do this to encourage early adoption.
[via adafruit]
Earlier this year, digital artist Jer Thorp used the New York Times Article Search API to create visual displays exploring the areas of focus and interconnection found in articles. The Flickr sets posted by Thorp map changes in coverage over the course of time for narrow topics or keywords, or depict a broader range of themes over a shorter period of time, such as the relationships between key terms during a single year.
The most striking displays juxtapose two themes, diagramming their mutual waxing and waning through the years. The image above–showing relative references to hope and crisis since 1981, the pairing of regulation and innovation or socialism and capitalism provide visual histories of changes in public perception and civil society.
Thorp hopes to refine the system by developing visualizations of linkages keyed to specific events, including the span of presidencies or more discrete events such as September 11th.
Artists and educators Jesse Shapins and Brian House discuss new directions in urban media arts. Their conversation connects maps, dictionaries and the tools of design education.
A couple of projects displayed at RCA Design Interactions's show are heading towards some new and extremely interesting directions this year.
View of the exhibition space
Toys, by Tommaso Lanza, was initially inspired by the fall of American energy company Enron. The scandal that shocked America so deeply it was turned into a musical and a documentary film.
By December 31, 2000, Enron's stock was priced at $83.13 and its market capitalization exceeded $60 billion, 70 times earnings and six times book value, an indication of the stock market's high expectations about its future prospects. The company was also rated the most innovative large company in America in Fortune's Most Admired Companies survey. Almost a year later, plagued by its questionable business model, clumsy accounting, financing maneuvers, and failure to hide any further its critical state of affairs, Enron's stock price fell to $0.61. The day Enron filed for bankruptcy, employees were told to pack up their belongings and were given 30 minutes to vacate the building
Lanza's project brings us to 2005. A fictitious company he calls ENT International has filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. It progressively closes or sells all of its international operations.
Square Mile Auctions' original catalogue from 2005
The quick collapse of the company led to a fire-sale of most of ENT's assets. In the months following the Chapter 11 filing, the liquidation team split the enormous sale across a number of auction dealers. Lanza created a photographic essay of some of the items surfaced by the bankruptcy auction, some of them perfectly mundane (executive chairs, workstations, gold balls and clubs, luxury cars, a range of sat nav, etc.), others fictitious. They are listed in the catalogue of an auction that dealt with low to mid-valued items and leftovers from previous auctions; despite the low-key of the sale, the dealers got their hands on a few items which were sold at much higher prices than originally expected thanks to their unique nature.
Narcotic vaporisers featuring biometric identification via an integrated IriScan system. The double nozzle system is automatically sanitized after each use (digitally rendered model)
Viewfinder probably owned by a small number of executives and used for monitoring stocks and other financial products too sensitive to be displayed on-screen or retrieved on the company's computers (digitally rendered model)
Item 987V: six rapid deployment emergency shredders featuring MicroCut technology and dual feed which makes mass shredding much faster and efficient (digitally rendered model)
The unabridged reprint of the SMA auction catalogue brings page after page a series of clues about the arcane and at times scandalous inner workings of a large corporation. It brings the keen observer one step closer to unravelling the secrets behind one the biggest bankruptcies in recent times.
The Royal College of Art Show is open every day from 11amd to 8pm until July 5, 2009.
Infographics—and 'information design' in general—are about as hot as they can get right now. So intentionally or not, Flickr user and ersatz artist 1chord & a fib has created a wonderful meta commentary on this emerging medium by producing a series of nonesense infographics with no labels, or discernable meaning. Absent these indicators they are, like many examples of actual infographics (ahem, ahem), hard to decipher. But true to form, they sure are pretty. See them…
Wataru Itou created an immense and breathtaking paper castle, currently exhibited at Uminohotaru in Tokyo. It took Itou, an art student, four years to complete. The pictures are a must-see, do click through.
A Paper Craft Castle On the Ocean
(via Paper Forest)
Taking advantage of the increased resolution and new autofocus capabilities of the iPhone 3GS to shoot close-up stills has just gotten a little easier thanks to Derrick Story's DIY Copy Stand for the iPhone 3GS. Utilizing a commodity storage container from the local mercantile and repurposing the iPhone's packaging Derrick has created an easy to assemble positioning apparatus that doubles as a light diffuser.
If you've ever tried close-up work with the iPhone, you know you have two challenges. The first is holding the camera steady enough to avoid camera shake. The second is getting the plane of the camera parallel to the plane of the subject to avoid distortion. This little device helps with both, plus diffuses the light for a more flattering rendering.
[via thedigitalstory]
As another major American art museum joins the Twitter-verse this past month (@Guggenheim), it begs the question: how can institutions and the public they serve better benefit from participation in Web2.0? Currently, many museums utilize the major social networking sites in the same manner they use their websites—to promote current and upcoming exhibits, special events, display works, and post the rare job opportunity. And while we can all benefit from multiple reminders, it's beginning to feel as if these institutions are not truly adapting to the opportunities opened up by social networking. The goal is to use these sites as they were intended, as a tool for conversation and relationship building between individuals, and not as an avenue for a one-way transmission of information.
The fear, of course, is that once museums begin actively participating in Web2.0 environments, they will have to give up some control over both content and message. As museum professionals Nina Simon and Gail Durbin both point out, in a world where all knowledge is at one's fingertips, visitors expect to be able to respond to their experience, therefore museums should develop platforms that allow for a diversity of voices. One New York institution in particular, The Brooklyn Museum, has successfully adopted Web2.0 endeavors, with two blogs on the website documenting installation and artist processes, an iPhone application to view and search the museum's collection, and 1stfans, a $20 museum membership with exclusively social network-based content and features, such as the Twitter Art Feed (@1stfans), which allows followers to pick a different artist to create work for the feed each month. Another example of an organization which has expanded its 2.0 reach is the Victoria and Albert Museum, which uses its Flickr stream to display user-generated exhibits, such as artistic photography of tattoo and body art, and documentary materials of period weddings, which are currently being studied by the museum's genealogical research team. By creating platforms that allow for a constant feedback and participation between the institution and visitors, these museums have been better able to expose their content to an audience outside of the traditional brick and mortar model.
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We have released on Public Record the fourth and final collection of one-minute audio responses to the question: What is the sound of the war on the poor? This instalment in the series features recordings from the below contributors...
If more and more of the flowers we buy at florist are cloned and if food is less and less spottable as genetically manipulated, we are facing times when the intervention with the dna of different living organisms will be considered as pop culture. Common Flowers by Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel is a peculiar art project using genetic engineering
to short-circuit the sophisticated system of GM (Genetically Modified) crops. First it relies on an exemplary case: the blue "Moondust" GM carnation that has been developed by the Japanese company Suntory. Even if the company could have got the permission to grow the flowers from authorities, they decided not to do that, but to outsource the growing and harvesting in Columbia - from there they are globally sold and shipped as cut-flowers. Fukuhara and Tremmel then purchased these cut-flowers and started technically cloning new plants from them, using the so-called Plant Tissue Culture method. It consists of DIY biotech methods, involving kitchen utensils and other materials that can be easily purchased. The plants are rated as "non harmful", so the artists are bringing them back to life again, planting them into the environment, and then making them a Common. The controversial gesture, in the very spirit of the best "bio art" movement, addresses the abyss of bio manipulation and bioethical aspects. Both of them are just exposed and hacked, proving once more that (as Yukiko Shikata notes), natural codes have a lot in common with software, and so personally re-writing and releasing information becomes a powerful and challenging statement.
Michael Hickox's Lego Arcade stop motion animations are fantastic. Check the video at Boing Boing Offworld. "Video: 8-bit arcade classics are back, in Lego form"
The Chinese government has banned all forms of exchange between game economies and cash economies, including the extremely popular Chinese online games that involve buying and selling virtual goods with cash, as well as the infamous practice of gold farming (creating in-game wealth that is sold on to rich foreign players), a practice that is said to employ 400,000 people in China.
The ruling is likely to affect many of the more than 300 million Internet users in China, as well as those in other countries involved in virtual currency trading. In the context of online role playing games like World of Warcraft, virtual currency trading is often called gold farming.
The most popular form of virtual currency in China is called "QQ coins," a form of virtual credit issued by Tencent.com.
The trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester.
AppLab will give millions of Africans access to health advice, farming tips and trading services using only a mobile handset
It has already conquered the web, becoming one of the most powerful companies in the world in the process. But now internet giant Google is taking on a new challenge, joining the launch of a system aimed at helping some of the world's poorest people – by pumping information to their mobile phones.
The project – known as AppLab – is launching today in Uganda, giving millions of phone users access to health advice, farming tips and trading services using only a mobile handset.
The system allows users to send a text message asking for information on a number of subjects, with the answers returned by SMS in a manner not dissimilar to a web search.
Users can use AppLab to request health advice – including information on HIV, Aids or other illnesses – or find nearby health clinics or medical services. Farmers, meanwhile, are offered a selection of useful data including weather forecasts and agricultural tips.
Another part of the system allows Ugandan users to list items for sale or find things to buy from local merchants, enabling them to trade more effectively in their communities.
"With the explosion in mobile phone ownership, we saw the tremendous potential in developing innovative approaches for providing information through mobile services that can benefit the poor," said Joseph Mucheru, the head of Google's operations in sub-Saharan Africa.
"Google's SMS technology is still evolving and we will continue to improve it over time, but what we are launching demonstrates the potential of this platform that can serve many more types of users in many countries."
The scheme has been orchestrated by the Grameen Foundation – a philanthropic spin-off of Grameen Bank, the pioneering developing world investment organisation founded by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus.
Google is providing SMS search technology, while the service is underpinned by MTN, the mobile phone operator headquartered in South Africa.
"Our core mission is to enable the poor to create a world without poverty … technology has always played a key role in achieving this mission for us," said Peter Bladin, executive director at the Grameen Foundation. "We believe that access to the information and services that many of us take for granted will help alleviate poverty and empower poor and underserved communities."
Although Uganda is one of the world's poorest nations – with half of the population living on less than the internationally recognised poverty line of $1.25 (75p) a day – almost 10 million people in the country own a mobile phone.
That constitutes about a third of the population, but the number of phone users is actually much higher because handsets are often shared between family members or owned by so-called village phone operators. These local merchants rent out mobile phones as a replacement for phone kiosks – allowing individuals without their own handset to use phone services and contact relatives for a small fee.
Although pilot programmes suggest that the system will be largely used by those who own handsets, experts suggested that these village entrepreneurs will be a significant factor in driving up use.
Mobile services are becoming a hot topic in the developing world, where many countries are leapfrogging the traditional telecommunications system to develop services that work over the air.
In addition to information, the mobile has also become a banking tool in many remote areas. Phone credits are often used as a replacement for cash, and the ability to send and receive credit by phone has become a flexible replacement for traditional banking in a country such as Uganda, where just one in 10 citizens has their own bank account.
All the groups involved said they hoped to roll out the system in other countries across Africa, and other parts of the world, if it proves successful.
Not since industrial noisemakers like Einsturzende Neubauten first miked a shopping cart... This is a decidedly more 21st version. The makers, Hogan Birney, Sean Kinberger, and David Plakon explain the design:
Touch and pressure are used to control the live manipulation of sound and image. The cart is equipped with a video projector, computer and battery making it portable and self contained. Using a microprocessor (Arduino) and custom software (max/msp/jitter) to sense the users touch and translate the pressure of the users touch, a real-time response is created both visually and sonically. The cart is used by MPG performers and the audience is also encouraged to play the cart as well.
More about the Mobile Performance Group
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Diana Eng (best known from her season on Project Runway and her book Fashion Geek: Clothes Accessories Tech) is our current guest contributor, covering ham radio for Make: Online. In this Make: Project, Diana adds a little fashion frill to a standard piece of ham radio gear, the Morse code key. - Gareth Branwyn
I am just starting to learn Morse code and got a brand new key. Most keys need to be mounted to hold them in place while the operator is dah-dit-ing. Keys are mounted on a heavy platform, or fastened to a radio. And some keys are worn on a leg strap. As a lady operator, and fashion designer, I wanted something cuter to keep my key on my leg, so here it is -- how to turn a standard leg strap into a cute Morse code key leg strap.
Materials:
* 1 yd 2" wide satin ribbon
* 1 yd 3/8" wide patterned ribbon
* 1 yd 3" wide lace
* 2 spools of thread (to match patterned ribbon and lace)
* scissors
* a small amount of tulle (an 8" x 8" square will work just fine)
* a small amount of organza
* pins
* screw driver
* measuring tape
* key
* leg strap
1. Using the measuring tape, measure around your leg where you'd like to wear the strap. Subtract ½" from this measurement and cut the lace and patterned ribbon to this length.
2. Using a sewing machine, straight stitch the edge of the ribbon 1 1/8" in from the edge of the lace.
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Yishay sends us Persepolis 2.0, "a mini graphic novel telling the story of the last two weeks in Iran, in the style of Marjane Satrapi, by two Iranians living in Shanghai"
Eric Steuer is the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that works to make it easier for creators to share their work with the rest of the world. It also provides tools to make it easier for people to find creative work that's been made available to them—and the rest of the world—to use, share, reuse etc., freely and legally. What follows is the first in a series of interviews called 'We like…
Brian Kane, designer, Emergency Broadcast Network co-founder, and Vujak co-creator (the first video sampler), has a brain full of wacky ideas. The latest: a study for a sculpture in stone that immortalizes what Apple officially calls the “Spinning Wait Cursor,” and what we call the pinwheel, or “(*&$*(&*(&!” (Well, depending on how zenlike you get.)
Need to calm yourself in the face of your computer grinding to a halt in CS4? Sit and contemplate (Brian plans a bench at some point.) Consider the nature of time, and the wisdom that can come from not doing, but waiting.
And then waiting some more.
And yes, the pinwheel has its own, copious Wikipedia entry.
From Brian’s own blog, slashboing
Urban China Bootlegged by C-Lab for Volume, available off and online.
What they say: As the second installment in an ongoing editorial project between Urban China and Volume, we have produced this limited edition publication on the occasion of the exhibition Informal Cities at the New Museum. Inspired by the unofficial compilations sold by fans at music concerts, we offer a bootleg issue of Urban China. The bootleg is a DIY format for assembling and disseminating work within a circle of hardcore fans, typically consisting of live work recorded, sequenced and edited by the concertgoer. Unlike a pirated copy or fake which tries to assume the identity of an authorized product and is motivated by a desire for profit, a bootleg announces itself as an improvised, illegitimate work and is largely motivated by a wish to share. Given the urgency of the topic, C-Lab has borrowed the bootleg format to quickly distribute observations, initiated in dialogue with Urban China, on the crisis and its management.
Illustration from Rogue States of Mind, By C-Lab
