The Blind, Taiheiyo Evergreen Forests, 2008. Institute of Critical Zoologists.
Behold the Institute of Critical Zoologists! The ICZ aims to develop a critical approach to the zoological gaze, or how humans view animals.
They say:
“Urban societies live in relative isolation from animals; however, our demand and gaze upon them have grown significantly over the last century. It is undeniable that looking at animals is considered both desirable and pleasurable in societies. Animals convey meaning and values that are culture-specific, and in viewing the animal, we cannot escape the cultural context, political climate and social values in which that observation takes place. We seek to develop a Critical Zoological Gaze that pursues creative, interdisciplinary research that includes perspectives typically ignored by animal studies, such as aesthetics; and to advance unconventional, even radical, means of understanding human and animal relations.”
Simulation of mountain top, The Real World development laboratory, Mr Toyo, 2008.
The white whale swimming in the ocean depths off the coast of Omishima, circa 1985.
The London Psychogeophysics Summit proposes an intense week-long, city-wide series of walks, fieldtrips, river drifts, open workshops and discussions exploring the novel interdisciplinary frame of psychogeophysics, colliding psychogeographics with earth science measurements and study (fictions of forensics and geophysical archaeology).
Open events include practical workshops in building simple geophysical measurement devices from scrap materials, fieldtrips for study and long-term use of such devices in the city, measurement and mapping of physical and geophysical data during city-wide walks, deployment of strategic underground networks, fusion of fiction, derive and signal excursion, studies of river signal ecologies alongside short lectures and discussions of broad, interdisciplinary psychogeophysical themes.
Description: In Frank Herbert’s famous1965 novel Dune, he describes a planet that has undergone nearly complete desertification. Dune has been called the “first planetary ecology novel” and forecasts a dystopian world without water. The few remaining inhabitants have secluded themselves from their harsh environment in what could be called subterranean oasises. Far from idyllic, these havens, known as sietch, are essentially underground water storage banks. Water is wealth in this alternate reality. It is preciously conserved, rationed with strict authority, and secretly hidden and protected.
Although this science fiction novel sounded alien in 1965, the concept of a water-poor world is quickly becoming a reality, especially in the American Southwest. Lured by cheap land and the promise of endless water via the powerful Colorado River, millions have made this area their home. However, the Colorado River has been desiccated by both heavy agricultural use and global warming to the point that it now ends in an intermittent trickle in Baja California. Towns that once relied on the river for water have increasingly begun to create underground water banks for use in emergency drought conditions. However, as droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, these water banks will become more than simply emergency precautions.
Sietch Nevada projects waterbanking as the fundamental factor in future urban infrastructure in the American Southwest. Sietch Nevada is an urban prototype that makes the storage, use, and collection of water essential to the form and performance of urban life. Inverting the stereotypical Southwest urban patterns of dispersed programs open to the sky, the Sietch is a dense, underground community. A network of storage canals is covered with undulating residential and commercial structures. These canals connect the city with vast aquifers deep underground and provide transportation as well as agricultural irrigation. The caverns brim with dense, urban life: an underground Venice. Cellular in form, these structures constitute a new neighborhood typology that mediates between the subterranean urban network and the surface level activities of water harvesting, energy generation, and urban agriculture and aquaculture. However, the Sietch is also a bunker-like fortress preparing for the inevitable wars over water in the region.
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.
Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver’s electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.
Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999. Text by SETI@home.
A wise man once said “We are all at the mercy of our wild monkey minds. Incessantly swinging from branch to branch.” With multiple windows and applications all vying for our attention, we have sadly adapted our working habits to that of the computer and not the other way around.
Ommwriter is a humble attempt to recapture what technology has snatched away from us today: our capacity to concentrate.
Ommwriter is a simple text processor that firmly believes in making writing a pleasure once again, vindicating the close relationship between writer and paper. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration.
If you are a scriptwriter, blogger, journalist, copywriter, poet or just someone who enjoys writing, welcome back to concentrating.
“Limit(e) Beckett is a collaborative project and an online resource, aimed at promoting the study and appreciation of Beckett across existing borders. We want to foster dialogue between the francophone and anglophone worlds, between established and emerging scholars, between academic and non-academic readers, and between different disciplines and across different media.
Our website, at http://limitebeckett.paris-sorbonne.fr/ is the heart of this project. It provides several approaches to our central aim: as journal, as creative showcase, and as online resource. Limit(e) Beckett is a new and innovative peer reviewed bilingual journal, which publishes scholarly articles on Beckett and the limit(e). Our first issue features articles in French and English, on Beckett and philosophy, Beckett and the arts, and Beckett across languages. The website will also be a showcase of Beckett’s wide influence beyond academia, featuring creative engagements with Beckett’s work in the visual arts, film, contemporary writing and beyond. Finally, Limit(e) Beckett also offers a valuable online resource for Beckett enthusiasts, making out-of-print works of criticism available online, and collecting information about upcoming events and useful resources.
In order to ground this online resource in a real community, we organize occasional events around this broader project. We launched this project in 2009 with a highly successful conference in Paris that brought speakers from the UK, the US, France and beyond, and featured both academic papers and an exhibition of artworks inspired by Beckett. We hope to hold further events in the future.” LIMIT{e} BECKETT
…extra:
Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies, 2010SEMINAR PODCAST
Suzanne Lee creates clothing out of yeast, a pinch of bacteria, and several cups of sweetened green tea. She is a senior research fellow at the School of Fashion & Textiles at Central Saint Martins in London, and the brains behind BioCouture, an experiment in growing garments from the same microbes that ferment the tasty caffeinated beverage.
The website says:
Imagine if we could grow clothing…
BioCouture aims to address ecological and sustainability issues around fashion.
The BioCouture research project is harnessing nature to propose a radical future fashion vision.
We are investigating the use of bacterial-cellulose, grown in a laboratory, to produce clothing.
Our ultimate goal is to literally grow a dress in a vat of liquid… http://www.biocouture.co.uk/ http://biocouture.posterous.com/
Explore the world from inside a bush. The Terrestrial Shrub rover celebrates NASA’s efforts to revisit the moon with a rover that explores the terrestrial and social environments back on Earth. For more projects, visit: www.justinshull.us
MAICgregator is a Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial complex (MAIC). It searches government funding databases, private news sources, private press releases, and public information about trustees to try and produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites. This is a necessary activity in light of the contemporary financial “crisis”.
The video above shows the initial test runs of the vehicle, including retraction of its unique stabilization wheels.
The Zerotracer is a tandem seat, fully-enclosed, all-electric motorcycle that sports a Kevlar body and is capable of driving 450km (280 mi) on a single charge; has a top speed of 250 km/h (155 mph), and zero-to-100km (60mi) acceleration in 4.5 seconds. Petroleum-free.
Zerotracer is the product of DesignWerk in Winterthur, Switzerland. www.zerotracer.com
Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.
On May 3rd 2008, artists Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburghs Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…
Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform.
LifeNaut, has a free service called “Mind File” that lets you digitally backup the organic brain:
“A Mindfile is a web-based storage space for organizing and preserving critical information (digital reflections) about one’s unique and essential characteristics for the future, and to share with friends and relatives in the present.”
GLASSPHEMY! is Macro-Sea’s visceral and psychological recycling center. We have built a 20-foot high, 30-foot long steel tower specifically designed to allow you to hurl glass bottles at your friends, enemies, and loved ones while they are safely tucked away behind bulletproof glass.
We will be collecting bottles from some local Brooklyn bars and then recycling the glass on site. We will be making cool lights, pulverizing the glass for use as environmental fill or topsoil, and through a contest sponsored by Readymade magazine opening up the project to people with other interesting recycling ideas.
This whole recycling and green thing has gotten so damn boring in recent years that we felt we had to do something. GLASSPHEMY! celebrates the illicit thrill of breaking bottles while working through deeply rooted emotional issues (and sort of saving the planet a little). Text from Macro-Sea.
Around the world in 80 seconds. Directed by Romain Pergeaux & Alex Profit. A project done in only 3 weeks. This route is a tribute to the famous Jules Verne’s book “Le tour du monde en 80 jours”. The making of the video, pictures of the trip and an interview of Alex Profit can be seen at http://www.tourdumonde80.fr
Our tour included stops in London – Cairo – Mumbay – Hong Kong – Tokyo – San Francisco – New York – London.
Music by Lucas Goret : http://www.myspace.com/lukstete
According to Hugh Pocock:
“I am weighing all of my food and drink and all of my urine and shit. The difference between the two weights is approximately what has been transformed into Energy. This energy is what moves my body,mind and many interactions. During this period of time I am finding that I am able to more closely observe the passage of energy as it moves from the food that I eat, through my body and then, out into the world.”
“The CodeOrgan analyses the “body” content of any web page and translates that content into music. The CodeOrgan uses a complex algorithm to define the key, synth style and drum pattern most appropriate to the page content.
Firstly, the CodeOrgan scans the page content and removes all characters not found in the musical scale (A to G), and then analyses the remaining characters to find the most commonly used “note”. If this is an even number the page is translated into the major pentatonic scale of that particular note, it becomes minor if there is an uneven number.
Secondly, the CodeOrgan defines which synthesizer to use. This is based upon the total number characters used on the webpage – there are currently 10 synthesizer effects and the one chosen is picked based upon the percentage of content.
Lastly, the CodeOrgan selects a drum loop based upon the ratio of characters on the page versus the number of characters that are actually musical notes – there are currently 10 different drum loops to pick from.” Text by Code Organ
The Limpopo Fold Belt, South Africa Delta upon Delta
Pathological Geomorphology is a blog dedicated to images of “extreme, bizarre, incredible, shocking, or otherwise intriguing landscapes and landforms of the Earth”. Kyle House, its creator, collects geo-vignettes from online services that offer images of interesting land assemblages (like Google Earth) He is a geologist specializing in Fluvial Geomorphology, Paleohydrology, and Quaternary Stratigraphy.
“These portraits are made with a Polaroid aura camera developed in the 1970s by an American scientist in an attempt to record what a psychic might see. This project explores the idea that a portrait photograph can reveal an otherwise unseen and accurate insight into the subject’s character.
The subject is connected directly to the camera by hand-plates that measure biofeedback, which the camera depicts as an aura of color in the Polaroid and translates into a printed diagram and description explaining the camera’s interpretation of the subject. It also explains separately, what the the subject is expressing and how they are seen by others, such as the photographer, suggesting the camera bypasses the control of the photographer and subject in making the portrait. This printout, which includes information about the subjects emotions, potential, aspirations, future, etc. is presented to the viewer along with each photograph in a similar manner to a caption.
The aura camera has undertones of pseudo-scientific authority and attributes associated with a less mediated type of photography. It’s a modified land camera that uses instant film and has only one button, allowing the photographer little control over the mechanisms mediating the portrait making process.
Aura photography is a relatively recent offshoot of spirit photography. Unlike attempts to record images of ghosts, aura photography evolved from a type of spirit photography – popular around the time diagnostic imaging devices like the x-ray emerged — which sought to objectively measure and document unseen aspects of the human body.”
(PhysOrg.com) — An experiment led by a University of Alberta researcher, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, could dramatically change our concepts of basic physics, revolutionize our understanding of the Universe and could eventually lead to technologies in future generations that right now only exist in science fiction.
U of A physics professor James Pinfold is leading an international team of physicists who will use ultra high energy proton collisions. The protons will move at very near the speed of light, in search for a hypothetical particle, called the magnetic monopole.The magnetic monopole is a theoretical particle of matter. “Several important theories of physics are built on the belief that monopoles exist and it would be a great scientific coup to prove that,” said Pinfold.If successful, Pinfold says, physics textbooks from university level right down to high school will have to be revised.
“Our conventional understanding of magnets tells us they have a north pole and a south pole,” said Pinfold. “A magnetic monopole has only one pole and that will change our understanding and the potential of electromagnetism,” the force that binds particles of matter together. “Electromagnet force is the reason that, when I sit down on a chair, I don’t fall through it.”Pinfold says the discovery of electronic monopoles will open up a whole new future for materials and technology if scientists can produce large numbers of them. “Monopoles could make materials strong enough to withstand a nuclear explosion and could also enable magnetic levitation.”
Russell Higgs is one of my heroes. As I watch this video, every face stores in some part of my body organs. Most of his faces bounce from my frontal lobe to my visual cortex. My favorites are retained until I see the flashing next ones and so on.
Thank you Russell. Can I make you a song for your video?….or actually you can opt to watch the video with a old song I made. Ironically, this song is called “regulando el aspecto” (meaning: regulating the aspect.)
Mute youtube video, play the song, and press video play. Perhaps, let the video buffer a bit and then proceed. “regulando el aspecto” Find this song here.
You’ve read the news—everyone wants to be green now. But do you really know how your personal choices are adding up? What about the choices of your fellow citizens? How well are people around the globe adopting behaviors that can make the world a more environmentally sustainable place? How have they changed over the past year? National Geographic and the international polling firm GlobeScan have just conducted their second annual study measuring and monitoring consumer progress toward environmentally sustainable consumption in 17 countries around the world.
Why? We wanted to give people a better idea of how consumers in different countries are doing in taking action to preserve our planet by tracking, reporting, and promoting environmentally sustainable consumption and citizen behavior.
This quantitative consumer study of 17,000 consumers in a total of 17 countries (14 in 2008) asked about such behavior as energy use and conservation, transportation choices, food sources, the relative use of green products versus traditional products, attitudes towards the environment and sustainability, and knowledge of environmental issues. A group of international experts helped us determine the behaviors that were most critical to investigate. (text by Greendex)
At 18.00 on Tuesday 26th May, Weather Projection will commence transmission of the rest of the world.
Light from the Americas will be piped into Sydney’s dome and then retransmitted live by the webcam. An online roll-call clarifies the schedule, highlighting the chronographic star of the moment, shifting start time minutely with each new day.
As Smart Light Sydney begins, the sun first hits landmass in remote north-eastern Canada and the eastern shores of Brazil, slowly sweeping across the Americas until its sole terrestrial glint is seen at the western tips of Alaska and a few sparse Pacific islands. This sparsity is infilled by a review of the evening – a final rapid uber-time-lapse playing back the whole evening’s activity, crescendoing at midnight.
Upon returning to class after the Golden Week holidays, students at a Tokyo elementary school were delighted to find their teacher had been replaced by a robot. The talking humanoid, named “Saya,” was originally developed as a receptionist robot in 2004 by professor Hiroshi Kobayashi of the Tokyo University of Science, but has recently begun taking on work as a substitute teacher.
The robot, which can speak multiple languages, uses facial expressions to facilitate communication. With an array of motors in her head that stretch the soft synthetic skin into various positions, Saya can display emotions ranging from happiness and surprise to sadness and anger.
However, Saya needs to work on improving her classroom management skills. At present, she can’t do much more than call out names and shout orders like “Be quiet.” But that does not make her any less popular with the kids.
“Robots that look human tend to be a big hit with young children and the elderly,” said Hiroshi Kobayashito to The Associated Press. “Children even start crying when they are scolded.” Well…I would also cry.
The Blind, Taiheiyo Evergreen Forests, 2008. Institute of Critical Zoologists.
Simulation of mountain top, The Real World development laboratory, Mr Toyo, 2008.
The white whale swimming in the ocean depths off the coast of Omishima, circa 1985.
Mexico City (Zócalo, MUCA/UNAM Campus)
Netherlands 6 (Dream Amsterdam Foundation) 2007
Ireland 4 (Dublin) 2008
Riboflavin
Iron
Sugar
Water
Corn Syrup
Animal Shortening
Whole Egg
Soy Protein Isolate
Soy Flour
Di Glyceride
Red 40
……
The Limpopo Fold Belt, South Africa
Delta upon Delta
The delta of Las Vegas Wash, Nevada: 2004-2008
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