Reblog > The cloud

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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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

I&IC at Renewable Futures Conference in Riga

The design research Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s) will be presented during the peer reviewed Renewable Futures Conference next week in Riga (Estonia), which will be the first edition of a serie that promiss to scout for radical approaches.

Christophe Guignard will introduce the participants to the stakes and the progresses of our ongoing work. There will be profiled and inspiring speakers such as Lev Manovitch, John Thackara, Andreas Brockmann, etc.

 

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I&IC Workshop #4 with ALICE at EPFL-ECAL Lab, Work in progress

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Above: an illustration of the third scaled model presented further.

 

As the week unrolls the workshop is starting to produce scenarios. Wednesday (yesterday) we had a quick presentation of the work in progress, which is documented briefly in the current post. Students Delphine Passaquay, Tanguy Dyer, Francesco Battaini & Anne-Charlotte Astrup working on Inhabiting the Cloud(s) as a team developed a global perspective on the subject. Their approach is focusing on four distinct territorial scales in order to question the centralized data center model. While the proposal doesn’t have a name yet, it however clearly speculates about a distributed isotrope network. The student architects focused on the preexisting urban infrastructure in order to establish their proposal.