The body contains 10 times more bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms than human cells. Most of these species are harmless—although they can still cause illness if they wind up in the wrong place. In addition, researchers are beginning to learn exactly how some microbial species in the body help digestion and contribute to regulation of appetite and the immune system.
Learn about the bacteria, fungi and other micro-organisms that maintain human health HERE
‘The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others.’ – Inuit shaman Najagneq, recorded by Knud Rasmussen1
‘If you want to build a modular, my advice is not to do it if you want to have any friends, it takes too much time.’ – Jessica Rylan2
Over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes, or “hands dirty” art in the words of practitioner John Richards3. With this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s. Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka, Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools became commercially available or freely downloadable4– often through a long, rigorous process of self-education in electronics.
Text and Image via Vague Terrain
The Automatypewriter is a typewriter that can type on its own, as well as detect what you type on it. By reading what it types to you and responding, it can be used interactively to play a game or participate in a story (in this case, Zork).
Text via Up, not North
“Wifi Camera,” Sjölén, Haque, Somolai-Fischer, 2006.
Antonio De Rosa’s Instagram Socialmatic Project concept.
In the age of cell phones and other mobile devices with network and photographic capabilities, the art of taking photographs has become as daily a process as brushing one’s teeth or walking to work or school. In a sense, the art of photography has been lost in the phrase “everything that can be made, can be made social.” The ubiquity of the camera, assuming the form and shape of objects that we carry with us daily, has turned the act of taking a photo into an everyday duty rather than an artistic rendering. In addition, the advent of 80% of a global population carrying around a video and still image recording device with them daily has led to an overabundance of information and media gathering.
Responding to the challenge of transforming the traditional act of photography into something new that utilizes the strengths of the internet, artists are creating projects that not only question what it means to take a picture, but also to share and collaborate on the meaning of photography as it’s evolving in the world of Web 2.0. Within the context of crowdsourcing, two projects take advantage of the multitudes of human thought and expression circulating through the internet.
Text and Images via The Creators Projects
Electronic Instant Camera,” 2011.
In this talk, Dries Buytaert (original creator and project lead of Drupal) shares his experiences on how he grew the Drupal community from just one person to over 800,000 members over the past 10 years. Today, the Drupal community is one of the largest and most active Open Source projects in the world, powering 1 out of 50 websites in the world. The concept of major projects growing out of a volunteer, community-based model is not new to the world. Volunteer networks and communities exist in many shapes and sizes. Throughout history there are examples of pure volunteer organizations that were instrumental in the founding and formation of many projects. For example, the first trade routes were ancient trackways which citizens later developed on their own into roads suited for wheeled vehicles in order to improve commerce. Transportation was improved for all citizens, driven by the commercial interest of some. Today, we certainly appreciate that our governments maintain the roads. However, we still see road signs stating that a particular section of a highway is kept clean and trim by volunteers — at least in some countries. When new ground needs to be broken, it’s often volunteer communities that do it. But a full-time, paid infrastructure can be necessary for the preservation and protection of what communities begin. In this presentation, Dries wants to brainstorm about how large communities evolve and how to sustain them over time.
Some questions to think about ahead of the presentation:
Do you know examples of large organizations that have grown out of volunteer communities?
Why do some communities keep growing while other communities come to a halt?
Is the commercialization of a volunteer-driven community part of a community’s natural life-cycle?
Is it inevitable that over time the operation and/or leadership of volunteer communities are transferred to paid personnel?
Tuesday, May 29, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person via the form below
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.
Via Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Imagine charging your phone as you walk, thanks to a paper-thin generator embedded in the sole of your shoe. This futuristic scenario is now a little closer to reality. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity.
The scientists tested their approach by creating a generator that produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.
Their generator is the first to produce electricity by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of a biological material. Piezoelectricity is the accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to mechanical stress.
The milestone could lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs.
It also points to a simpler way to make microelectronic devices. That’s because the viruses arrange themselves into an orderly film that enables the generator to work. Self-assembly is a much sought after goal in the finicky world of nanotechnology.
Excerpt of a press release written by Dan Krotz, Berkeley Lab. Continue HERE
On May 14, Jeannette Ginslov gave a Medea Talk about the developmental stages of the AffeXity project, the interdependence of the collaborators, the relational and dynamic formation of technical and human intervention, the encounters of the carnal and the digital, the dialogic and temporal scaffolding of encounters of techne and the hands that attempt to capture affect.
JEANNETTE GINSLOV is Medea’s artist-in-residence this spring. Her roots are as performer, choreographer and artistic director in South Africa, but for the last five years she has focused more on interdisciplinary platforms investigating the crossover between the media/dance/cinema/video and the internet.
Her work centers around affect, haptic and digital materiality on several platforms: stage, screens, online and new media applications. Ginslov is currently working with Prof Susan Kozel at Medea on the project AffeXity that draws together screendance, visual imagery and mobile networked devices.
Text Via MEDEA
In the future, ultra-high-density non-volatile storage — such as hard drives — could be grown using magnetic bacteria.
This breakthrough, shepherded by researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK and the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, relies on certain strains of bacteria that ingest iron, which is then converted into magnetite (iron II, III oxide), the most magnetic naturally occurring mineral on Earth. These microbes, by following the Earth’s magnetic field, use this built-in magnet to navigate.
To turn this behavior into something that can actually act as magnetic storage, the researchers identified and extracted the protein responsible for converting iron into magnetite — Mms6. A gold substrate is then covered in a checkerboard fashion with chemicals that bind to Mms6, and the substrate is dunked in the protein. The whole caboodle is then washed with an iron solution, turning each of the Mms6 sites into a magnetic bit (pictured above)
Excerpt of an article written by Sebastian Anthony, Extreme Tech. Continue HERE
Motherboard‘s documentary on Occupy Wall Street, hacktivism, and the hackers trying to build a distributed network for the Occupy movement and beyond.
HAVING helped spread the internet’s tentacles across the globe, boffins are now thinking of extending them further. Assorted space agencies believe it would be rather nifty if the world wide web encompassed more of the world than just one planet. Those at the European Space Agency (ESA) are therefore designing an interplanetary network, which might help space stations, planetary rovers, astronauts and ground stations communicate more effectively.
In October they are planning to test just such a network by getting an astronaut in the International Space Station (ISS) to control a rover on Earth. This will be a test of the technology for use on future Mars missions. They are also exploring the possibility of creating a universal information-exchange system, allowing many of the different space agencies to share data quickly.
Nestor Peccia, who heads ground-software development at the ESA, says that the main challenges are more political than technological. An interplanetary web’s assets, like Earth ground stations, relay satellites, rovers, moon stations, etc, will probably belong to national space agencies. Government agencies may be reluctant to share them with others and it may be a while before enough space entrepreneurs like Elon Musk stump up the amounts of money need in to mimic Earth-bound internet’s decentralised charm in orbit.
These would be considerable. It tends to cost around $50m just to launch a single satellite, not counting design and construction, though Mr Musk’s company, SpaceX, may yet bring that down. And a fully fledged interplanetary web would need a sizeable flotilla.
For now, orbital internet is limited to the ISS. Since January 2010 its astronauts have had access to so-called Crew Support LAN, which uses satellites to provide a brisk, reliable internet connection. Before, going online in orbit was a hassle. E-mails, tweets and other online exchanges had to be relayed through a colleague on Earth, hardly ideal, especially for intimate communications. The current system has undoubtedly improved the quality of life in the ISS, helping to ease the sense of isolation. It is a far cry from interplanetary social networking. But it is a start.
Text and Image via The Economist
Molleindustria aims to reappropriate video games as a popular form of mass communication. Our objective is to investigate the persuasive potentials of the medium by subverting mainstream video gaming clichè (and possibly have fun in the process).
According to founder Paolo Pedercini:
We can no longer consider videogaming as a marginal element of our everyday lives. In recent years, the turnover of the videogame industry has exceeded that of cinema, and there are a growing number of adult and female players. There are more frequent overlaps with other media: there are videogames for advertisements (advergames), for educational purposes and for electoral propaganda. space invadersHow did videogames become such a central element of the mediascape? During the second half of the nineties, major entertainment corporations extended their activities in this sector and extinguished or absorbed small producers.
Now videogames are an integral part of the global cultural industry, and they are in a strategic position in the ongoing processes of media convergence. These developments inhibit the political and artistic emancipation of this medium: every code line is written for the profit of a big corporation.
All text via Molleindustria
The Occupation Directory is a public listing of all known Occupation sites built by and for the #Occupy movement. The directory aims to be a service layer upon which anyone can build other apps. All our data is FREE and PUBLIC in a variety of formats.
The directory data was instantiated from a manual merge of the data from a number of public sources from our partners and collaborators at occupytogether, wealloccupy, The Guardian, and many others.
Surveying the landscape, we saw there were many overlapping, spreadsheet-based, directory projects. We identified a need to standardize the data collected, liberate it from Google, and assist data submission and editing with form validation, editorial workflows, and community participation.
Text via http://directory.occupy.net/
Over the last few years, a wide range of new publishing initiatives have developed within the arts and design fields. New book fairs are emerging in major cities, small publishing houses and independent presses are frequently initiated and the alternative bookshop seems to recurrently be reborn in new forms. Something that seems to tie these activities together, is that they are run by practitioners themselves — photographers, artists, authors and graphic designers — often with a visionary idea of how to redefine the world of publishing.
On May 25th 2012, a few of these interesting and inspiring practitioners have been invited to Stockholm to take part in the seminar ‘Publishing as (part-time) Practice’. Confirmed participating publishers are: Elin Maria Olaussen / Karen Christine Tandberg from Torpedo Books and Press (NO), Georg Rutishauser from Edition Fink (CH), Matthew Stadler from Publication Studio (US), Anna Gerber / Britt Iversen from Visual Editions (UK), Nille Svensson from Nilleditions (SE), Jacob Grønbech Jensen / Rikard Heberling / Emi-Simone Zawall from Drucksache (SE) and more to be announced. Andrew Blauvelt from Walker Art Center (US) will introduce the event as well as provide a concluding reflection at the end of the evening.
Text via Konst & Teknik
Many people constantly update about their lives on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter mainly because of the “kicks” that self-disclosure offers, according to a new Harvard study.
The study found that sharing personal information is as good as eating food or even having sex. The nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA), regions that are associated with reward, were active when people talked about themselves.
Continue article at Medical Daily
TOUCHY, by Eric Siu, is a phenomenological social interaction experiment that focuses on the relationship of giving and receiving by literally transforming a human into a camera. Touchy, (the person wearing the device) is blind most of the time until you touch his/her skin. Once vision is given to Touchy, he/she can take photos for you. This human camera, with its unique properties, aims at healing social anxiety by creating joyful interactions.
Social Concern
It is common for humans to be separated into social bubbles, to avoid sharing social space and to connect to strangers. However, technologies like Internet social networking or the mobile phone loosens social boundaries, hence dehumanizing physical communication. To a certain extent, it generates social anxiety such as the one experienced in the “Hikikomori” and “Otaku” cultures in Japan. Touchy criticizes this phenomenon and suggests a solution by transforming the human being into a social device: a camera. The Touchy project investigates how such a device improves social life, presupposing that a camera is a known tool for sharing memories, valuable moments, enjoyment, emotions, beauty and so forth.
Text and Images via TOUCHY
The contents of one of the most important and eclectic modern music collections in the world – John Peel’s personal record collection, is starting to be made public for the first time through an online archive.
John Peel’s family, The John Peel Centre for the Creative Arts, Eye Film and TV, and website company Klik, are working together to create an online archive of John Peel’s record collection, including specially created videos of key artists, John Peel’s home movies, John’s hand-typed note cards, and other content.
John Peel’s personal record collection consists of over 26,000 LPs, 40,000 singles and many thousands of CDs.
Text and Images via JOHN PEEL’S RECORD ARCHIVE
These images by ZEITGUISED were showcased at the “Graphic Art” Exhibition at the KisstheDesign Gallery in Lausanne, Switzerland.
On her/his website: Material sample interpretations as simulations of macroscopically photographed nano-sculptures. The base for these enlarged tiny grown crystal structures are textile pattern, with two different levels of translation. One is the layer of color, where a scan of the textile is taken directly to color individual parts of the structure. The second layer is a translation of fabric weavings into three dimensional stacks of interlocked platonic bodies. Both layers are in an uneasy, off-set relation with each other. On a meta level, the simulation of photographed space seduces to imagine this setup as an existing material reality.
The Descriptive Camera, created by Matt Richardson, works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.
As we amass an incredible amount of photos, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage our collections. Imagine if descriptive metadata about each photo could be appended to the image on the fly—information about who is in each photo, what they’re doing, and their environment could become incredibly useful in being able to search, filter, and cross-reference our photo collections. Of course, we don’t yet have the technology that makes this a practical proposition, but the Descriptive Camera explores these possibilities.
Text and Images via Matt Richardson
data.anatomy [civic] is a new audiovisual installation by the acclaimed Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, arising from a unique collaboration with Mitsuru Kariya, the development leader of the new Honda Civic.
Exhibited as a 3-screen video projection, data.anatomy [civic] immerses viewers in an intricate yet vast audiovisual composition derived from the entire data set of the car.
Via WE HEART
Photo/Nykto is an experimental game conceived by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley as part of the « Unterplay » project at the Master Media Design —HEAD, Genève. It is a game for nyktophobes and photophobes. It is played by switching on and off the lights in order to avoid reaching the edge of the screen. The score increases exponentially near the edges, and speeds up with each change from light to dark and back.
Computer scientists at Kobe University in Japan have built a computer that draws inspiration from the swarming behavior of soldier crabs.
The computer is based on theories from the early 1980s that studies how it could be possible to build a computer out of billiard balls. Proposed by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli, the mechanical computer was based on Newtonian dynamics and relied on the motion of billiard balls in an idealized, friction-free environment instead of electronic signals like a conventional computer.
The model was developed to investigate the relation between computation and reversible processes in physics. A channel in this computational system would carry information encoded in the form of the presence or absence of billiard balls. The information is processed through a series of gates which the balls either bump into and emerge in a predictable direction based on the ballistics of the collision or which they don’t bump into and emerge with the same velocity.
Excerpt of an article written by WIRED UK. Continue HERE
CHALLENGE:
The “nav-u” U35 is a personal navigation device you can put on a bicycle.
We wanted to demonstrate the device by using the attractions of Tokyo, a city whose roads developed in irregular and complex ways.
IDEA:
Using the running log function of the bicycle navigation system, we started the project by drawing gigantic animal geoglyphs over Tokyo. People tweet what animals they want us to draw. From their requests, our staffers draw animals over the map.
The bike group rides all over Tokyo, logs the routes and uploads the drawing to the website immediately. Progress status with drawing and running footage are posted on Twitter in real time every day.
Fifteen animals are completed in 40 days.
RESULT:
The project was featured in TV news shows, newspapers, magazine articles, and over 80 online news articles. In addition, it was mentioned innumerable times on blogs and tweets. Moreover, it was also reported in other countries, and we received lots of positive feedback, support and messages of encouragement.
Before the campaign, Sony held third place in the market for navigation systems, but it rose to the first just two weeks after the start of the campaign.
A promotion for a bicycle navigation system also became a promotion for the city of Tokyo.
The Tokyo Zoo Project
Via Popupcity
Bilingual or multilingual friends can be quite annoying. Especially if you’re stuck at a social gathering with the ones who repeatedly mention their language skills and utter phrases such as ”Well, if only you could read this novel in the original, you would have a much more profound understanding of what the author wanted to express…..”. Or the ones who like to cite French, German and Arabic language newspaper articles and then remind you with a thinly veiled pomposity that you may have a very narrow view of the world if you only rely on English-language news.
However, this latter group is becoming more rare, possibly because a formidable foe is taking the wind out of their sails: Google Translate. The excellent book “Is That a Fish In Your Ear” by David Bellos has a chapter entitled “The Adventure of Automated Language-Translation Machines”, which is especially thought-provoking, because it explains some key concepts about Google Translate and the future of automated translation.
Continue this article by Jalees Rehman HERE
‘INTIMACY′ is a fashion project exploring the relation between intimacy and technology. Its high-tech garments entitled ‘Intimacy White’ and ‘Intimacy Black’ are made out of opaque smart e-foils that become increasingly transparent based on close and personal encounters with people.
Social interactions determine the garmentsʼ level of transparency, creating a sensual play of disclosure.
INTIMACY 2.0 features Studio Roosegaardeʼs new, wearable dresses composed of leather and smart e-foils which are daringly perfect to wear on the red carpet. In response to the heartbeat of each person, INTIMACY 2.0 becomes more or less transparent.
Currently Studio Roosegaarde is selecting haute couture designers to develop the next INTIMACY 3.0 fashion line for men and women.
Specifications: 2010-2011. ʻBlackʼ and ʻWhiteʼ dresses, length 100cm, width 40 cm. Smart foils, wireless technologies, electronics, LEDs, copper and other media.
Reliable Internet access on the Moon, near Mars or for astronauts on a space station? How about controlling a planetary rover from a spacecraft in deep space? These are just some of the pioneering technologies that ESA is working on for future exploration missions.
What do observation or navigation satellites orbiting Earth have in common with astronauts sending images in real time from the International Space Station? They all need to send data back home. And the complexity of sharing information across space is set to grow.
In the future, rovers on Mars or inhabited bases on the Moon will be supported by orbiting satellite fleets providing data relay and navigation services. Astronauts will fly to asteroids, hundreds of millions of kilometres from Earth, and they’ll need to link up with other astronauts, control centres and sophisticated systems on their vessels.
All of these activities will need to be interconnected, networked and managed.
Continue at Science Daily
Discovery Channel documentary show about curious questions in science, technology, society etc. In each episode different question is being answered or is tried to be answered, featuring different celebrity host.
Season 01, Episode 11 : Can You Live Forever?
Host : Adam Savage
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