“Cloud infrastructures and the public’s right to understand it.”

By Friday, October 3, 2014 Resources, X-Posts Tags: 0040, ABCD, City, Datacenter, Engineering, Infrastructure Permalink 1

The Creative Time Report has a piece on cloud infrastructures and the public’s right to understand it. The author interestingly describe her discoveries:

In trying to see where data lives, I hoped to better understand how we live with data and, by extension, with the myriad forms of surveillance that it enables. We live with data by pretending that we don’t. The opacity of internet infrastructure and policy—and the insistence that ideally users shouldn’t need to see or understand either—occludes data, the institutions that hold it and the power they exercise with it. Ultimately, in a geography of power, the cloud is not the territory.

Data Center Grand Tour

By Friday, October 3, 2014 Resources Tags: 0039, City, Clouds, Datacenter, Engineering, Hardware, Infrastructure Permalink 0

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“Data Center Grand Tour” by Silvio Lorusso is a project that aimed at showing the data center where the info flowing into your computer is coming from:

ʻData Centers Grand Tour (This Data Belongs Here)ʼ starts here and will be an ongoing project for which Silvio Lorusso will be purchasing domain names and hosting in each country across the globe. For each domain a single web page will be hosted showing a satellite view of the geographical site at which that particular domainʼs data is stored. The tour will start by clicking at a destination, one click will take you to the next domain in a different country where you will again be able to view where that domainʼs data is stored, and so on until all of the countries in the world are covered

Stockholm 1982: The Hot Line

By Friday, October 3, 2014 Society Tags: 0038, Behavior, City, Hack, History, Infrastructure, Links, Social Permalink 0

http://blay.se/2012/09/17/hot-line-riot-1982/

In September 1982, the youths of Stockholm had discovered a specific way to meet each other: they used a bug in the routing of the city’s phone cabins to communicate through group calls, for free. This story is relevant as an ethnographical example of the influence of communication technologies on the behaviour of social groups, specifically through their misuse.

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Via Magnus Eriksson

Reblog > Setting up a Raspberry Pi to run bots

By Thursday, October 2, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0036, Code, Electronics, Energy, Links, Makers, Sociology Permalink 0

http://www.jeffreythompson.org/blog/2014/08/31/setting-up-raspberry-pi-to-run-bots/

Artist Jeff Thompson has put this comprehensive tutorial on how to run bots on a Raspberry-Pi microcomputer – including the basics of setting up the Pi to run without a screen and programming it remotely by SSH-ing into it from another computer. This is an interesting way to tap into small ressources of the cloud without necessarily consuming vast quantities of energy.

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Via Algopop

 

Reblog > Deterritorialized Living, residency, storyboard for workshop and follow-up #1 (open call)

By Thursday, October 2, 2014 Architecture, Interaction Design, Projects Tags: 0035, Architecture, Designers, fabric | ch, Furnitures, Infrastructure, Interferences, Sketches Permalink 0

 

Note: I had the opportunity to lead a workshop last year for fabric | ch at the Tsinghua University in Beijing, for the student of the Tsinghua Art & Sciences Media Laboratory. The workshop took place during a residency at the university and we developed the idea of revisiting the computer cabinet, possibly inhabiting it and developing a symbiotic environment between human and computers. The workshop was short and ideas didn’t have the occasion to unfold very far unfortunately. It even became later an open call during the last Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Yet this workshop undoubtedly constituted the preliminary work before the redaction of this research project and it could continue to be a line of thinking during this project.

Below are the storyboard little sketches I made at that time to introduce this workshop.

 

Via fabric | rblg

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I came back from Beijing more than a month ago now and before Christian Babski will return next week to China for fabric | ch during another month to finish our residency at the Tsinghua University (until mid July), I’m taking a bit of time to write a follow-up about the short workshop/sketch session I headed there with the students of Prof. Zhang Ga, at the Tsinghua Art & Sciences Media Laboratory.

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