Tag Archives

Reblog > The cloud

By Monday, October 26, 2015 Resources, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0115, Clouds, Datacenter, Energy, History, Infrastructure, Sustainability, Thinkers Permalink 0

Note: after a Summer “pause” mostly dedicated to a mid-term exhibition and publication of our joint design-research, we are preparing to dive again into the I&IC project for 18 months. This will first happen next November through a couple of new workshops with guest designers/partners (Dev Joshi from Random International at ECAL and Sascha Pohflepp at HEAD). We will take the occasion to further test different approaches and ideas about “The cloud”. We will then move into following steps of our work, focused around the development of a few “counter-propositional” artifacts.

But before diving again, I take the occasion to reblog an article by James Bridle published earlier this year and that could act as an excellent reminder of our initial questions, so as a good way to relaunch our research. Interestingly, Brindle focuses on the infrastructural aspects of the cloud (mostly pointing out the “hard” parts of it), which may in fact become the main focus of our research as well in this second phase. Scaled down certainly…

 

Via Icon (thanks Lucien for the reference)

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cloud_copy

 

There’s something comforting about the wispy metaphor for the network that underpins most aspects of our daily lives. It’s easy to forget the reality of its vast physical infrastructure

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“Pictures of Clouds”, 1995

By Wednesday, October 21, 2015 Resources, Sciences & Technology, X-Posts Tags: 0114, Clouds, Computing, History, Infrastructure, Networks Permalink 0

I found this quite funny yet revealing diagram related to the paper “A brief history of cloud computing” (already mentioned earlier on this blog), by Maximiliano Destefani Neto. It describes the time, back in 1995 according to Mr. Neto, when “Pictures of Clouds” started to appear in technical drawings about networks and the then emerging network computing (grid computing started to be a buzz word around the same time).

The purposes of these schematic “clouds” were to synthesize “too complicated for non technical people to understand” parts of the infrastructure into one image/logotype. It was the icon of the cloud! And it revealed to be a clever choice, because it probably helped to keep the whole infrastructure “blurry”, “hidden”, “invisible” or “un-understandable”… “It happens in the cloud“, this fuzzy technological arrangement and therefore you don’t really need to explain it.

 

clouds_of_1995

 

Now in 2015, we’re almost fully immersed into these “clouds”. Literally living in them, through them, … but they still remain blurry!

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Datadroppers, a communal tool to drop off and/or pick up data (and then develop projects)

By Thursday, October 8, 2015 Projects, Resources, Sciences & Technology, X-Posts Tags: 0111, Clouds, D, Data, Open source, Service, Sharing, Tools, Web Permalink 0

Note: fabric | ch, one of our partner on this project, has developed an open source data sharing tool that tries to simplify the procedures of declaring/logging and sharing data (from “connected sensor things”, mainly). This is Datadroppers. The service is somehow similar, yet slightly more versatile than the now vanished Pachube, or the contemporary, but proprietary, Dweet.io (that we’ve already mentioned in the resources section of this blog).

One of the interesting points in this case is that the new web service has been created by designers/coders that are themselves in need of such data service for their own work, promising in some ways that it won’t be commodified.

The other interesting point is the fact that they are formally involved in this design research project as well (through Christian Babski, developer), which should help us match the functions of Datadroppers with OwnCloud: through the use of the documented OwnCloud Core Processing Library and the one of Datadroppers, new paradigms and artifacts in file/data sharing and cloud operations could be envisioned, implemented and tested.

But moreover and mainly, projects made by the design community could be developed that will take advantages of the open resources of Processing (later on, Javascipt as well), OwnCloud and these libraries. Designing tools remains one of the goals of this design research project. Designing artifacts that will use these (improved) tools will be the work of the coming year in our design research…

 

Via fabric | rblg, via datadroppers.org

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Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s), a design research teaser about misunderstandings and paradoxes …

By Monday, October 5, 2015 Architecture, Design, Ethnography, Interaction Design, Publications, Sciences & Technology, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0110, ABCD, Clouds, Data, Datacenter, Research Permalink 0

iic_paradoxes

At the occasion of the first peer reviewed conference we’ll take part with the I&IC project (Renewable Futures in Riga) and following the exhibition at H3K last Summer 2015 (Poetics and Politics of Data), Lucien Langton edited and produced a short teaser about our design research that dive into misunderstandings and paradoxes that concern the “Cloud(s)”!

 

Inhabiting & Interfacing the Cloud(s), can “weather affect cloud computing”? from iiclouds.org design research on Vimeo.

 

 

Poetics and Politics of Data, the publication

By Monday, September 28, 2015 Publications, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0108, ABCD, Books, Clouds, Code, Conferences, Data, Thinkers Permalink 1
pbl_32a_2015 pbl_32b_2015 pbl_32d_2015 pbl_32e_2015 pbl_32f_2015 pbl_32g_2015 pbl_32i_2015 pbl_32j_2015 pbl_32k_2015 pbl_32l_2015 pbl_32m_2015 pbl_32n_2015 pbl_32o_2015 pbl_32p_2015 pbl_32q_2015 pbl_32r_2015 pbl_32s_2015 pbl_32t_2015 pbl_32u_2015

Note: we’re pleased to see that the publication related to the exhibition and symposium Poetics & Politics of Data, curated by Sabine Himmelsbach at the H3K in Basel, has been released later this summer. The publication, with the same title as the exhibition, was first distributed in the context of the conference Data Traces. Big Data in the Context of Culture and Society that also took place at H3K on the 3rd andf 4th of July. 

The book contains texts by Nicolas Nova (Me, My cloud and I) and myself (Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s). An ongoing Design Research), but also and mainly contributions by speakers of the conference (which include the american theorician Lev Manovitch, curator Sabine Himmelsbach and Prof. researcher from HGK Basel Claudia Mareis) and exhibiting artists (Moniker, Aram Bartholl, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jennifer Lyn Morone, etc.)

 

pbl_32a_2015

The book serves both as the catalogue of the exhibition and the conference proceedings. Due to its close relation to our subject of research (the book speaks about data, we’re interested in the infrastructure –both physical and digital– that host them), we’re integrating the book to our list of relevant books. The article A short history of Clouds, by Orit Halpern is obviously of direct signifiance to our work.

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