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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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Reblog > Into the Cloud (with zombies)

By Wednesday, September 17, 2014 Design, Resources Tags: 0030, Data, Datacenter, Designers, Energy Permalink 0

Note: Published almost two years ago, this interesting post by Kazys Varnelis

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Via varnelis.net

Today’s New York Times carries a front-page piece by James Glanz on the massive energy waste and pollution produced by data centers. The lovely cloud that we’ve all been seeing icons for lately, turns out is not made of data, but rather of smog.

The basics here aren’t very new. Already six years ago, we heard the apocryphal story of a Second Life avatar consuming as much energy as the average Brazilian. That data centers consume huge amounts of energy and contribute to pollution is well known.

On the other hand, Glanz does make a few critical observations. First, much of this energy use and pollution comes from our need to have data instantly accessible. Underscoring this, the article ends with the following quote:

“That’s what’s driving that massive growth — the end-user expectation of anything, anytime, anywhere,” said David Cappuccio, a managing vice president and chief of research at Gartner, the technology research firm. “We’re what’s causing the problem.”

Second, much of this data is rarely, if ever used, residing on unused, “zombie” servers. Back to our Second Life avatars, like many of my readers, I created a few avatars a half decade ago and haven’t been back since. Do these avatars continue consuming energy, making Second Life an Internet version of the Zombie Apocalypse?

 

 

So the ideology of automobliity—that freedom consists of the ability to go anywhere at anytime—is now reborn, in zombie form, on the Net. Of course it also exists in terms of global travel. I’ve previously mentioned the incongruity between individuals proudly declaring that they live in the city so they don’t drive yet bragging about how much they fly.

For the 5% or so that comprise world’s jet-setting, cloud-dwelling élite, gratification is as much the rule as it ever was for the much-condemned postwar suburbanites, only now it has to be instantaneous and has to demonstrate their ever-more total power. To mix my pop culture references, perhaps that is the lesson we can take away from Mad Men. As Don Draper moves from the suburb to the city, his life loses its trappings of familial responsibility, damaged and conflicted though they may have been, in favor of a designed lifestyle, unbridled sexuality, and his position at a creative workplace. Ever upwards with gratification, ever downwards with responsibility, ever upwards with existential risk.

Survival depends on us ditching this model once and for all.

I&IC – Preliminary and then edited Bibliography, Webography

By Friday, September 5, 2014 Resources, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0010, ABCD, Architects, Books, Curators, Designers, Designers (interaction), Methodology, Scientists, Thinkers Permalink 0

Note: this is the bibliography that helped us set up the research project, taken out from the I&IC -Preliminary Intentions document. We’ll certainly complete it along the way so as possibly document in more details some of the most important resources later (i.e. Clog, 2012). This means that this list might change along the way for our own cross posts references.

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Bibliography, Webography

Augé, M. (1992). Non-lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Le Seuil.

Bar, F. Pisani, F., & Weber, M. (2007). Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism. Prepared for discussion at Seminario sobre Desarrollo Económico, Desarrollo Social y Comunicaciones Móviles en América Latina. Convened by Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, April 20–21, 2007.

Banham, R. (1984). The architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, The University of Chicago Press.

Bathia, N. & al. (2013). Bracket [goes soft], Actar.

Blum, A. (2012). Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet.

Bourriaud, N. (2009). Radicant, pour une esthétique de la globalisation, Denoël.

Branzi, A (2006). No-Stop City: Archizoom Associati, HYX.

Bratton, H.B. (2016). The Stack, On Software and Sovereignty, MIT Press.

CLOG, (2012). Data Space, Clog online.

Divers (2002). Living in Motion, Design und Architektur für flexibles Wohnen, Vitra Design Museum.

Donaghy, R. (2011). Co-opting the Cloud: An Architectural Hack of Data Infrastructure. Graduate thesis work.

Glissant, E. (1990). Poétique de la relation. (Poétique III), Paris: Gallimard.

Himmelsbach, S. & Mareis, C. (2015). Poetics and Politics of Data. The Ambivalence of Life in a Data-Driven Society. Christoph Merian Verlag.

Hu, T.-H. (2015). A Prehistory of The Cloud, MIT Press.

Léchot-Hirt, L. (2010). Recherche-création en design. Modèles pour une pratique expérimentale. Genève: Métis Presses.

Mejias, U. A. (2013), Off the Network, Disrupting the Digital World. University of Minnesota Press.

Open Compute Project/Facebook. (2012). Deploying OCP Hardware in a Collocated Facility.

Rifkin, J. (2012). La troisième révolution industrielle. Comment le pouvoir latéral va transformer l’énergie, l’économie et le monde, Les liens qui libèrent.

Serres, M. (2011). Habiter, Le Pommier.

Shepard, M. (2011), Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, MIT Press.

Ulrberger, A. (2013). Habiter les aéroports, Paradoxe d’une nouvelle urbanité. Métis Presses.

Varnelis, K. (2009). The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles. Actar.

Varnelis, K. (2007). ETHER : One Wilshire, In Sumrell, R. & Varnelis, K., Blue Monday: Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies, Actar, pp.48-89.

Weiser, M. (1991). The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American, vol. 265, no. 3, pp. 66–75.

ECAL / M&ID

By Monday, September 1, 2014 People, Schools, X-Posts Tags: 0008, Architects, Designers, Designers (interaction), ECAL, Teaching Permalink 0

 

ECAL / Media & Interaction Design

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Prof. Patrick Keller

Co-Head of the I&IC design research.

Patrick Keller is Professor at the University of Art & Design, Lausanne (ECAL) where he teaches design in the Media & Interaction Design unit. He was in charge of this unit between 2001 and 2004. In 2007, he led the design research Variable_Environment that united designers from ECAL and scientists from EPFL (design & sciences research).

Patrick is a founding member of fabric | ch, a studio for architecture, interaction and research. As part of his activity as creative director for the studio, he formulates new space proposals that combines digital, physical and environmental dimensions. Oscillating between devices, installations, experiments and productions, the work of the collective has been exhibited and published internationally, so has presented in numerous talks.

Patrick Keller studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) where he graduated in 1993 (M.Sc) and in Berlin. He then continued his education in the research labs of the EPFL with a postgraduate in Computer Graphics (Mas). Patrick worked at the EPFL as a research assistant where he contributed as a designer on several research projects between 1996 and 2000, before formally founding fabric | ch in 2001.

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Contact: patrick[dot]keller[at]ecal[dot]ch

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EPFL + ECAL Lab

By Monday, September 1, 2014 People, Schools, X-Posts Tags: 0005, Designers, Electronics, EPFL_ECAL_Lab Permalink 0

 

EPFL + ECAL Lab

 

Nicolas Henchoz

Based in Lausanne, the EPFL+ECAL Lab was founded by Nicolas Henchoz in 2003 to explore the potential of emerging technologies. Its mission is to foster innovation at the point where technology, design and architecture overlap.

Under Nicholas’s direction The Lab’s activities are focused on three main concerns. First, to develop practical, real-world applications for technologies developed in the scientific labs. Secondly, to drive innovation by widening the scope of designers’ work. Thirdly, to form new links and develop synergy between researchers and wider society seeking technological and other innovative solutions.

One key area of exploration is augmented reality which developed into an exhibition, Gimme More, in New York earlier this year. It is part of a project aiming to better understand how augmented reality can be developed into a medium in its own right.

Nicholas Henchoz’s teaching and research concerns include augmented reality, innovation management and material science. He has been named among Bilan’s “300 Most Influential People in Switzerland”. The EPFL+ECAL Lab is a unit of the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne – Europe’s leading research & development university –  in co-operation with the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne.

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Contact: nicolas[dot]henchoz[at]epfl[dot]ch

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Partners

By Monday, September 1, 2014 People, X-Posts Tags: 0004, Architects, Code, Curators, Designers, Developers, Participants, Scientists, Sociology, Thinkers Permalink 0

 

Guest Researchers, Practitioners & Thinkers (in order of appearance)

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James Auger (Auger-Loizeau), London – workshop #2 at HEAD

James Auger has a BA in Product Design from Glasgow School of Art and an MA in Design Products from the Royal College of Art. Between 2002 and 2005 he was employed as a research associate at Media Lab Europe, where the main focus of his research was a design-based investigation into technology-mediated human interaction. He then worked at the Issey Miyake Design Studio in Tokyo as guest designer. Since 2005 he has been teaching and continuing his research in the Design Interactions programme at the RCA.
James is also a partner in the Speculative Design practice Auger-Loizeau, whose projects have been published and exhibited internationally, including MoMA, New York; 21_21, Tokyo; The Science Museum, London and the Ars Electronica festival, Linz, and are part of the permanent collection at MoMA. In 2003 James was awarded the Köln Klopfer International Designer of the Year by the students of KISD in Germany. James Auger is an external examiner at Edinburgh College of Design, visiting professor at HEAD – Geneva, and on the judging panel of IF Design awards.

 

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez (#Algopop), London – workshop #3 at ECAL

British/ Colombian Artist and Designer Matthew Plummer-Fernandez makes work that critically and playfully examines sociocultural entanglements with technologies. His current interests span algorithms, bots, automation, copyright, 3D files and file-sharing. He was awarded a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction for the project Disarming Corruptor; an app for disguising 3D Print files as glitched artefacts. He is also known for his computational approach to aesthetics translated into physical sculpture.

For research purposes he runs Algopop, a popular tumblr that documents the emergence of algorithms in everyday life as well as the artists that respond to this context in their work. This has become the starting point to a practice-based PhD funded by the AHRC at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is also a research associate at the Interaction Research Studio and a visiting tutor. He holds a BEng in Computer Aided Mechanical Engineering from Kings College London and an MA in Design Products from the Royal College of Art.

 

Dr. Christian Babski (fabric | ch), Lausanne – developer

Christian Babski is lead programmer and co-founder at fabric |ch, a studio for architecture, interaction and research based in Lausanne, Switzerland.
As scientist, Christian Babski takes part in the technical and software development of research projects within the group. Through experimental projects, he developed specific skills in interfacing heterogeneous systems/mechanism/hardware by achieving specific software libraries in numerous distinct programming languages. Therefore, he is used to manage computer hardware, sensors, mobile devices as well as network and online technologies or services.
Christian Babski holds a Phd in Computer Graphics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Lausanne), where he was involved into several European research projects. He previously graduated in Computer Science (Ma) in Dijon (France), prior to finalizing a Master of Science (M.Sc) in Lyon (France)/Geneva (Switzerland).

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Contact: christian[dot]babski[at]fabric[dot]ch

 

Dev Joshi (Random International), London – workshop #5 at ECAL

Dev Joshi is Head of Technology at contemporary art studio Random International. Having trained in product design engineering he has spent the last five years at Random finding ways to bend technologies and systems for use outside their usual arenas. In addition to his work in the arts, Dev has recently launched Headless Ghost, a Kickstarter funded display emulator and is CTO at Product Laboratories Limited – developers of Rain Cloud, a connected weather device. Focusing on hardware and humans, Dev enjoys exploring the interface between people, objects and the behaviors of both as well as how technology can be used to convey information across the fields of art and science for both practical and emotional expression.

 

Sascha Pohflepp, Cologne – workshop #6 at HEAD

Sascha Pohflepp is a German-born artist, researcher and writer whose work has been known to probe the role of technology in our efforts to understand and influence our environment. His interest extends across both historical aspects and visions of the future and his practice often involves collaboration with other artists and researchers, creating work on subjects ranging from synthetic biology to geo-engineering and space exploration. Notable exhibitions include Talk To Me at MoMA New York, Hyperlinks at the Art Institute of Chicago, Micro Impact at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam, Pre-History of the Image at STUK Kunstencentrum Leuven, Science Fiction: New Death at FACT Liverpool and an online project for opti-ME* at Auto Italia South East in London. Sascha’s work has earned two Honorary Mentions from the VIDA Art and Artificial Life Awards and in June 2015 was shortlisted for the Berlin Art Prize.

 

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