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Poetics and Politics of Data, exhibition at H3K

By Wednesday, May 27, 2015 Publications, X-Posts Tags: 0106, ABCD, Architects, Art, Data, Designers (interaction), Ethnographers, Exhibitions, Media, Students Permalink 0

Note: after some time of relative silence on the blog, we’re happy to say that the design-research project Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s) will be part of the next exhibition at the Haus für elektronische Künste in Basel (CH), in the form of a counterpoint or “behind the scenes” to the media art exhibition per se. This explains partly that, then…

We had to work hard for the exhibition, especially because I was also in charge of the scenography (a work by fabric | ch in this case though), while Lucien Langton produced almost all the video documentation content.

At the invitation of H3K curator, Sabine Himmelsbach, we’ll therefore present the work that has been realized so far, half-way through our research process.

This will consist for large parts in video documentation and few artifacts, including some new ones (“Tools” oriented). We will use this material later on the I&IC website to fully document the current state of our work. We’ve prepared some “automated documentation” based on our blog. Here’s a sneak peak about the first one about the overall project:

 

An automated introduction to "Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s), a design research" from iiclouds.org design research on Vimeo.

 

The opening of the exhibition Poetics & Politics of Data will  be tomorrow at 7pm, at H3K (Dreispitz neighborhood in Basel), the show will then last until end of August.

 

christopher-baker

Christopher Baker, Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise, 2008

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Decentralization tools – links

By Thursday, April 2, 2015 Resources, Society, X-Posts Tags: 0103, ABCD, Links, Tools Permalink 0

A brief post on additional open-source services, software, hardware, community and art projects we stumbled upon during our ongoing research:

 

Commodify.us (service) enables users to retrieve their Facebook data, anonymize it and sell it back for market value. We’re not sure it’s legit (there’s a security warning while loading the site). It however seems to be the same people behind another service of the sort: GiveMeMyData.com

Freifunk.net (community) is a community-powered free wireless network originating from Germany.

Guifi.net (community) is an open, free and neutral telecommunication network built piece by piece (by literally deploying cables and antennas) by the community. The project originates from Spain.

Superglue.it (service, community) is a free tool to build and host your website at home. The project seems ambitious as it combines self-hosting hardware standards with a custom-made WYSIWYG webpage builder and a template repository fed by users (all webpages built become open-source templates).

FluidNexus.net (software) is a mobile messaging app for Windows and Android. It uses Bluetooth and the movement of crowds to spread data and suppresses the need for operators, a bit like the Firechat app. It however seems that the project has been abandoned in 2009.

Uncloud (software) is an application that enables anyone with a laptop to create an open wireless network and share information. Users can connect wirelessly while remaining disconnected from the internet.

GoTenna (hardware) is a product enabling users to text and share their location even when there is no telecom tower or satellite coverage.

AirChat (software, hardware) is a free, secure and open-source telecommunication network built by LulzLabs working a laptop and a hacked radio.

Alternet.cc (speculative design) is a free and secure communications network hypothetically built and maintained by the community.

Project Maelstrom Last but not least, Project Maelstrom is BitTorrent latest proposition to decentralize web hosting through the BitTorrent protocol – We cannot help to ask ourselves: Is it still decentralization if it’s owned by a company?

Project Fi While we’re in the corporate sphere: Google is apparently aiming to take over the front-end costumor away from telecom companies. Perhaps decentralization is becoming just another marketing argument for companies who actually want centralize (read: capitalize on) your data.

We will continue to add links as our research goes forward. In the meanwhile, you can find all the links mentioned in the research project on Delicious under the tag “i&ic_designresearch” (note: also mentioned in this previous post, “Public Survey on Delicious“, within the Resources category on this blog).

 

For additional and updated resources, a Github is maintained that lists tools:

https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet

http://redecentralize.org/

Clog (2012). Data Space

By Friday, January 23, 2015 Architecture, Interaction Design, Resources, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0091, ABCD, Books, Data, Datacenter, Infrastructure, Territory, Thinkers Permalink 0

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Note: we mentioned this “bookazine”, Clog, in our bibliography (Clog, (2012). Data Space, Clog online), at the very early stages of our design-research project. It is undoubtedly one of the key references for this project, mostly related to thinking, territory, space and therefore rather oriented toward the architecture field. It will certainly serve in the context of our workshop with the architects (in collaboration with ALICE) next week, but not only, as it states some important stakes related to data in general. This very good and inspiring magazine is driven by a pool of editors that are Kyle May (editor in chief, we invited him as a jury member when we –fabric | ch with Tsinghua University– organized a call during 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, curtated by Beatrice Galilee), Julia van den Hout, Jacob Reidel, Archie Lee Coates, Jeff Franklin.

The edition is unfortunately sold out. Reason why I assembled several images from the bookazine (for the research sake) in a pdf that can be downloaded here (60mb).

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Mejias, U. A. (2013). Off the Network, The University of Minnesota Press.

By Friday, January 23, 2015 Resources, Sciences & Technology, Society, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0088, ABCD, Books, Data, Internet, Networks, Research, Thinkers Permalink 0

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Note: Off the Network, a book by Ulises Ali Mejias that is interesting to read when it comes to objectify and question the network paradigm. Beyond the praise about participation and inclusiveness that was widely used by network advocates and now also by marketing companies, Off the Network brings a critical voice and addresses the centralization, or in some other cases the “nodocentrism” that is at work through many global online services, so as the commodification of many aspects of our lives that comes with them.

While we are looking for alternative “architectures” for cloud infrastructure, nodes and services, this is a “dissonant” point of view to take into account and a book that we are integrating into the I&IC bibliography.

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“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.