Living in a robot

Victor Vetterlein's Reboot is a self-sufficient and eco-friendly house. The building is constructed with a space frame, and the outer skin increases structural strength through double curvature. The skin system consists of a vapor barrier, dense foam insulation, and metal sheathing where the exterior face is glazed in solar cell paint. The surface of the building serves as a solar energy collector.



Supplemental electricity is provided by on-site wind turbines and energy is stored in batteries on Deck 1. Wind power is also used to pressurize a large canister to operate the hydraulic elevator and the water treatment system. The smooth outer skin of the building acts as a foil against adverse weather conditions, and the rooftop serves as a water collection surface where rainwater runs into a drain located above the resin laminated glass windows. The water is stored in holding tanks positioned below the Main Deck and managed by an in-house water treatment system on Deck 2. Natural ventilation is provided by operable vents located at the top and the bottom of the structure. Lastly, the building’s mechanical systems are stacked on two floors above the Ground level eliminating the need for massive ground penetrations and a large site footprint.

See also his robotic furniture design!

Posted by Cati Vaucelle @ Architectradure

Object Artistically Modified

Stéphane Vigny, Mécanique Populaire. For this installation, an electric drill becomes a skipping rope.

I discovered the work of Stéphane Vigny at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Mixing minimalism to mainstream objects, he produces subversive pieces. I love his work that I find humorous as much as alarming.

Selling ad space via computer etching

Leah paid for her new MacBook Pro by selling ad space on her laptop to sponsors.

Soon you will receive a parking ticket for leaving your computer too long on a campus table. Soon you will etch ads on your body to have unlimited plastic surgery, soon you will become an ad to survive!

But I wonder, are stickers over yet? Spreading throughout the internet, the hip idea for a few years now is to etch the cover of your laptop.

I saw beautiful work out there, but never dared attacking the cover of my mac book. I prefered not following any trends, and stuck to my stickers! Among all this craft work, I chose this one from 2006 (see picture above) that is particularly interesting by Buzz Andersen.

Abstract by Joëlle Bitton

Abstract is the upcoming interaction installation by Joëlle Bitton at Gallery EF in Tokyo.

On the theme of waiting and the perception of the time passing-by: inviting visitors in a space where the body and its movement play the role of interfaces. From a point of view on the Japanese garden and its vision on the surrounding, aesthetic and philosophical world, this project is inspired by the tension between elements intentionally thought here in a contradictory dialog: abstraction and texture, concealment and disclosure, empty space and framed space. This installation places the visitor on the razor's edge: always on the border, between two worlds, passing from one to the other. This is the experience of difference and of a fragile balance, of what is called in the Japanese culture, the impermanence of things. The latter is then staged in a relationship to the cycle of time, to the emotions that the expectation of something to happen can generate.

Joëlle's portfolio

Music videos: after the e-baby ...

E-baby Produced by Pleix / Chased by Cowboys. Music: Bleip. 2003.


Beauty kit Produced by Pleix. Music: Bleip. 2001.

Music videos that mainly deal with the question of the influence of technology on our lives such as biotechnology, media and plastic surgery, etc ... Pleix is a virtual community of digital artists -3d, musicians, graphic designers- based in Paris. I like their progression from the beauty kit, the e-baby: how to order a baby online, to birds as flying dogs: the imagery is stunning, to the complete human assimilation of freaky gigantic robotic-plastic rabbit.


Birds Produced by Pleix / Blink. Music: Vitalic. PIAS. 2006.

All their videos.
Check also Régine Debatty's report on Pleix's talk.

E-baby video

Never too pink

Pink Prank Project found on itfashion

What the heck is Electronic Mail?

"Electronic Mail is a term that's been bandied about data processing circles for years. Simply put, it means high-speed information transportation. One of the most advanced methods is terminals talking to one another. Your mailbox is the terminal on your desk. Punch a key and today's correspondence and messages are displayed instantly (...) Electronic Mail is document distribution that's more timely, accurate and flexible than traditional methods. There's no mountain of paperwork (...) Tomorrow's automated office will clearly include Electronic Mail. - Honeywell Office Automation Systems"
Ad found on Abdul Taiyeb's blog

Paperless or techno flat?

Miquel Mora Mor | Paper Alarm Clock | Printed electronics on paper

What ever happened to the paperless future?
What if we could enhance paper instead of getting rid of it?
The Flat Futures project deals with this future. A future where, through printed electronics we could print technology (displays, batteries, speakers...) in flat and flexible surfaces. Objects will wear technology instead of carrying them inside. It will become their skin.
How will this affect our lives? How will our relationship with these enhanced objects change? If any surface can display anything, where will its value be? In the physical object? Or in the information itself?

Social Sensors

Social Sensors by Chris Hand

community anticipation enlarger bluetooth boredom bouncer open source ambivalence revolutioniser wireless road rage communicator dog-mounted love alarm gardeners neighbourliness matcher in-library fear disposer gps-based group hug finder childrens happiness counter automatic group hug announcer community togetherness generator peer-to-peer frustration reducer personal paranoia filter hand-held fear investigator domestic happiness announcer childrens boredom communicator pensioners obsession matcher hand-held powerlessness alarm community homesickness reflector industrial uncertainty alarm neighbourhood jealousy subverter kitchen environment-friendliness messager predictive anger investigator dashboard-mounted depression reducer public transport relaxation finder in-library loneliness broadcaster family empathy communicator -- Extract from 139,590 Devices

Microscopic spies

Even your printer is spying on you! Hard to believe.
Intrigued by the new project of the Computing Culture's research group directed by Chris Csikszentmihalyi, I discoverd Seeing Yellow. So if you think that you need to hide your IP address and remove spywares, well maybe spies are around you in your tangible environment for a while now!

When you print on a color laser printer, it's likely that you are also printing a pattern of invisible yellow dots. These marks exist to allow the printer companies and governments to track and identify you -- presumably as a way to combat money counterfeiting.

Now Seeing Yellow has a tangible-antispyware available for you and this by calling your printer maker (and more)


Glass invaders designed by Sebastien Messerschmidt

An inventory of effects

Re-reading and re-discovering an old edition from 1967 of the Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan, I spent quite a long time on this quote, trying to position the context in which this has been said, in which it is re-contextualized through the book, and how it applies today and what I can learn from it.

The discovery of the alphabet will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves...You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.--Socrates, "Phaedrus"

When design meets science fiction

Mariko MORI, Oneness, 2003, Technogel(Registered Trademark), cast aluminium, electric system, 135 x 75,6 x 37,4 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Deitch Projects. Photo: Jens Ziehe

An exhibition at the Mudam Luxembourg the 25 May to 24 September 2007. More on E-flux

TOMORROW NOW - when design meets science fiction is the first exhibition devoted to the relationship between design and science fiction. Homage to Luxembourg-born Hugo Gernsback, the inventor of the term "science fiction", it explores the links created between the two disciplines from the beginning of the 20th century until today.

Curated by Alexandra Midal and Björn Dahlström, the exhibition presents the territory covered by both disciplines and the richness of their combination through works created by designers, architects, artists, science fiction authors and film directors on the subject of science fiction. More than 800 pieces by more than 100 artists have been brought together and are the subject of a thematic circuit that develops through the different galleries of the museum. The show design, by Mathieu Lehanneur, is in keeping with the exhibition in that it modifies our perceptions with monumental mobile cubes at the entrance to rooms that decide whether to allow the visitor to enter or not, a mountain of unidentified material which seems to pour towards the visitor and inflatable flying objects in a geostationary state...

Display

Sanggil Kim, display, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art #3, 2007.

Exhibition FLASH CUBE, July 5 - September 30, 2007, at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, 747-18, Hanam-dong, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea 140-893. Via E-flux

The exhibition Flash Cube will chart a series of such spatial research strategies implicating a diversity of artistic points of departure such as fluid inner space, open urban space and installative space. The various photographic strategies will be mutually confronted in a transformative way in the exhibition's methodology of mounting (floorplan) - underscored by Rem Koolhaas’ unique non-perspectivist display system of Leeum's exhibition space - so that both spatial reflection and spatial experience can occur in dynamic and invigorating ways.

Cable carpet

Britta Böhne's Cable Carpet.

Why hide cable clutter when you can embrace it and make it an integral part of your environment? The cable's path is cut into the carpet, but there's also an insert that the cable snaps into to hold it in place. More after the jump. Britta has a placeholder website here.

Thank you Touching the city for the link! Also more info on Moco Loco

Stock puppets

8 foot tall fiberglass mannequins act as puppets, each puppet movement is connected to a face animation of the appropriate finance minister on the VGA monitor head. Via Pasta and vinegar.

The G-7 Stock Puppets are an Internet-driven kinetic installation that tracks the movements of global stock markets with seven larger-than-life marionette puppets. Using a real-time data stream, a network of PC laptops, and a complex electro-mechanical control system, the installation reanimates the abstract machinations of global financial markets as an absurdist carnival puppet show.

Web site

Bruce Sterling on design

On Technology Review, a video of Bruce Sterling on design. Science fiction author and design critic, he explains why so many technology designs seem hostile.

Video of the discussion with Bruce Sterling.

Videogame controllers as ustensils

Burger time place setting

Chris Dimino redesigns the classic place setting: fork, knife, spoon, cup, and plate using unconventional materials solution: the burgertime place setting, using videogame controllers as ustensils and a TV screen plate that plays the classic nintendo game "burgertime"

Touch: a meaning system socially and culturally located

Today, I met with Anne Cranny-Francis based in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. Her web site is a great ressource of references, hyperlinks to papers related to the meaning of touch.

I presented and discussed my research on touch simulation for persons with neurological and pathological disorders. She works on the touch project to understand touch as a meaning system that is socially and culturally located. "The project is concerned with the diversity and specificity of touch as it is experienced by people in their everyday lives. Touch is one of our fundamental ways of negotiating the world and each other. It is specific to different genders, classes, cultures, ages – for all of whom the same physical touch may mean very different things."

She wrote a paper The Midas Touch to re-think the representation of touch. "Its essential argument is that touch defines our being in the world, so that touch is always already a cultural and political practice."

A must-read paper for me as soon as it is published: somatic technologies

My argument is conducted via a series of encounters: a reading of the figure of Christ’s body in late Middle Ages devotional texts, in which the hybridity of Christ is both celebrated and fetishised; the recent appearance of hybrid and cyborg figures in the Stephen Sommers’ film, Van Helsing (2004) and the excess of religious (mostly Christian) references throughout the film; and a mapping of the homologies between the figures of Christ crucified and Sommers’ representation of Dracula, which suggests their interrelationship. This paper is based in a belief in the inextricable relationship between embodiment and the technologies (material, cultural and political) that generate it, the semiotic density of those technologies, and their iterative deployment to generate new ideas – about technology and about embodiment.

Social subjectivity?

Should we design for everybody within a consensus or should we find a new line of products outside of the consensus? Should we go for the consensus and define what this consensus is or should we rethink the interaction with products itself? When researching on interaction design and defining visionnary work, I found the following quote to be inspiring:

Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk with your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly.
Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still ... we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it. It's a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out. (150-151) - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 1980.

Cool online social stuff

Bumplist

During Chi, I had a few gatherings with my old school friends from Media Lab Europe. This reminded me how fun it was to be beta tester for each other's project. Back in Dublin, I tried out Jonah and Mike's Bumplist.

BumpList only allows for a minimum amount of subscribers so that when a new person subscribes, the first person to subscribe is "bumped", or unsubscribed from the list.

Via Jonah again, I tested the super fun myfrienenemies social community. Basically, on this site, anyone can post anonymously about their enemies and connect to others through their enemies.