OFF BEAT REPEAT (2010) - Sally Thurer and Mylinh Nguyen
OFF BEAT REPEAT is a pattern making machine developed and designed by Sally Thurer and Mylinh Nguyen with the help of Dan Michaelson.
design
Required Reading:
Unboxing, Teardowns and Tear Aparts by Greg J. Smith
The above video is a milestone in consumer electronics history: it was the first recording to document the unwrapping of a new gadget that was titled as an unboxing. While individuals have been gleefully ripping open the packaging of their electronics for decades, unboxing is the relatively new practice of recording these moments and uploading them to video sharing services for public display. The 2006 video embedded above features veteran technology blogger Vincent Nguyen as he unpacks a new Nokia E61 smartphone and related accessories. Nguyen removes the device, displays it to the camera while commenting how thin it is, and then dryly lists off the remainder of the objects in the box. On completion he utters "Basically that's it… ummm, for now."
While Nguyen's removal of a smartphone from its original packaging was decidedly drab, unboxing has become a fixture in online consumer electronics coverage. Major players like Endgadget have entire streams of content populated with seasoned technology experts (almost always male) rifling through waybills, wielding box-cutters and carefully extracting shiny new netbooks, gaming consoles and cameras from their packaging. I've watched about three dozen of these videos over the past few days—scanning for signs of intelligent life—and they are remarkably ritualistic: styrofoam is carefully set aside, manuals are flipped through, battery packs are commented on. In doing this field research I've come up with two hypotheses of what unboxing represents:
1. A practice that has emerged as as extension of page view journalism whereby gadget blogs can get traffic without doing any actual 'reporting'.
2. Glib theatre where adults joylessly reenact moments from their childhood when they received and opened gifts.
While both of these readings of unboxing are equally applicable, I prefer the latter, where each of these tiny ceremonies is an act of worship at the altar of technology-induced ennui. However, I think the majority of coverage of this phenomenon simply writes it off as geek porn.
Now, an important question: Can unboxing be elevated to an art form?
-- EXCERPT FROM "UNBOXING, TEARDOWNS AND TEAR APARTS" BY GREG J. SMITH ON SERIAL CONSIGNVACATION (2010) - BFFA3AE
Based on the idea of summer VACATION, BFFA3AE will program the 179 Canal website to reflect the discovery and unraveling of this season. Summer is an aberration in our year, a time where heat takes over our lives and a productive diligence is thrown to the wayside. An absence assumes our lives (absence from work, school, life) and instead we live in the ideal and fantasy of what Summer becomes. We anticipate this time of year with a child like earnestness and we willfully throw ourselves into a haze, from which we slowly find our way back into reality.
An image will be presented as the front page of the website of 179 Canal. Every day a new image will be uploaded to the main page, a slight alteration done to the image of the day before. Slowly, the image becomes more and more abstract, until the end of summer VACATION when only a blur remains, ushering us on to the next season of Fall.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM 179 CANAL'S SITEJUST ANOTHER WORDPRESS SITE!!!! (2010) - Jacob Ciocci and Jeff Crouse
JULY 24 - SEPTEMBER 4, 2010
In this project Ciocci and Crouse have redesigned Light and Wire Gallery’s characteristic website so that every time you visit a new page, a different layout or WordPress Theme is loaded behind the gallery’s usual content. Crouse's code randomly loads 1 of 20 different Themes, while Ciocci has visually modified each one. Fundamentally, the WordPress theme system is a way to “skin” one’s website. Not only does this determine the look of the site but the WordPress themes can provide control over the presentation of the material on a website. As one clicks through each theme, this generic design platform that largely informs the aesthetics of the web is revealed for its amateur quality.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM LIGHT & WIRE'S SITERequired Reading:
Prof. Dr. Style Vernacular Web 3 by Olia Lialina
How did the World Wide Web look before this Internet boom, before it became a riot for star backgrounds, bouncing envelopes and under construction signs?
Well, in 1991, Tim Berners-Lee went live with the first web page TheProject.html located inside the hypertext/WWW/ folder on a computer called "nxoc01" at CERN. Neither him, nor any of his colleagues made an effort to preserve this first version. The only thing we know is the URL http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html and the way the first page ever looked in november 1992. That's early enough, still half a year before the Mosaic browser would be released and people outside of CERN would start to make their pages.
It is difficult to estimate how many pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millennium in their primordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin, like the Russian Space Science Internet -- redesigns clearly shaped by the then-new Netspace browser.
But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993. To present them to the new students I look for "Prof. Dr." in Google.
-- FROM "PROF. DR. STYLE VERNACULAR WEB 3" BY OLIA LIALINANote: This essay is the third in the series "Vernacular Web" - be sure to read "Vernacular Web 2" and "A Vernacular Web."
Exploding Space: Conceptions of Space and Network in Interactive/Dynamic Architectures
One of the interesting challenges in discussing or writing about interactive architecture is the term itself. As its usage has increased so have the potential meanings of what an architecture that is truly interactive might mean. That the building might truly interact, become temporal, transform a viewer or inhabitant into a user and a physical space into an application, is such a tantalizing proposition, one can empathize with the artists, designers, engineers, and architects alike all springing to define and participate in the shaping of the term. Its aims may end up being similar to earlier conceptions of the role of architecture, shaping urban space, defining urban life, but its means will be, not new, but novel. A constellation of concepts, what Farshid Moussavi calls The Novel, that join architectural thinking with computational practices and interaction design strategies, a marriage of strategies for shaping space and engaging users. The notion of an interactive architecture first emerged in the 1960s as cyberneticists and architects Gordon Pask, Cedric Price, and Archigram in the UK, and Warren Brodey, Nicholas Negroponte in the US, all developed similar ideas of interactive environments and spaces that would sense, converse, and participate with their users. Since then interaction design, artificial intelligence, computer vision, environment sensing, mechanical engineering, interior design, have all been drawn into dialogue in different forms, creating solutions, informing practices, generating new ways of creating conversations between users and spaces. Terms have proliferated as well, ‘liquid’, ‘dynamic’, ‘reactive’, or ‘adaptive’ architectures, ‘interactive installation’, ‘cybernetic spaces’; all with a generalized conception of the notion of a space that communicates, that is computationally enabled and that provides a mode of input and some level of appropriate feedback. With the complexity of discourses involved and the range of intents and strategies employed, it’s difficult to discuss a coherent history or diagram spheres of influence but one can see general tendencies: goals, intentions, critical junctures, and points of convergence across a range of practices.
Why now? Why this rapid explosion of interest in interactive architecture? The crisis of urban space, ecological pressures, technological capacity, the exhaustion with and reaction to the iconic architecture of the last forty years all weigh heavily on present architectural practice. An interactive architecture offers an explicit engagement for the user, a de-emphasizing of the architect; allowing anyone who enters the space to become at minimum a collaborator and in some cases a co-creator. The moment of the aesthetic of the collaborative, the utilitarian, the designed and empowering solution has arrived. In the histories of kinetic sculpture, video, installation, performance, littoral practices, there exist historical antecedents for interactive art practices. To the architectural, participating in the computational data rich experience and the interactive, presents a new escape, a new collaborative attitude, and an antidote to the static, extemporal, and spectacular that has dominated architectural thinking over the last 50 years.
The medium of architecture itself is changing, becoming a combination of spaces, networks, and agents both mechanical and organic. We already experience architecture as a shifting array of mediums. Architecture bloggers Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes winkingly named the iPhone as one of the most important architectural works of the first decade of the new millennium, arguing: “urban systems are defined most fundamentally not by structure and infrastructure, but by practice, action, and thought-process; what act has more significantly altered the practices and thought-processes of urbanites in the past ten years than the mass distribution of smart phones?” The Rhinoscript-ing of Parametric Architecture is most certainly, if nothing else, a demonstration that compelling notions of space can be generated by algorithmic processes. Architecture historian Beatriz Colomina argues in Architecture Between Spectacle and Use that the fame of Mies van der Rohe is largely based on photographs of his work. The medium of architecture is already diffuse and complex. The interactive architectural environment simply extends that diffusion, integrating a dynamic system, an interconnected series of structures, situations, and objects that participate in the myriad ways that we consider and shape urban and living space.
Content-Aware Military Vehicles (2010) - Tabor Robak
[Content-Aware Jet]
[Content-Aware Helicopter]
[Content-Aware Tank]
..so different, so appealing? (2010) - Jonathan Monk
In his current exhibition Jonathan Monk is showing fourteen different electronic devices from the area of home entertainment. Powered speakers, a flat-screen monitor, an iPod, a radio alarm clock or an interactive video game console – the new and functional brand name devices selected by Monk form a cross-section of the range of products to be found in an electronics retail store. However, the artist undermines their usability by presenting the individual devices in custom-fitted plexiglass showcases, therefore conserving them as objects.
-- DESCRIPTION FROM THE PRESS RELEASE FOR "..so different, so appealing" AT MEYER RIEGGER
