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“Leap represents an entirely new way to interact with your computers. It’s more accurate than a mouse, as reliable as a keyboard and more sensitive than a touchscreen. For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements.”
(via @j__c___)
“How far ahead did we set our science fiction at various points in history” based on a random sampling of over 250 works of science fiction (books, movies, TV, and some comics) created between 1880 and 2010.
Research by Ben Vrignon and Gordon Jackson.
Why is it so? My guess is: multi-factorial explanations, with lots of socio/anthro issues and feedback loops based on our relationship with tech.
(via edwingardner)
“Atkins uses absolute minimal means for quite impressive results. He does little more than spell out dirty words and uses them in the most clichéd sentences like citreous where are you? But of course it’s all about the way he does it. But what exactly is that way? Could we not say that by saying it all out load explicitly he produces in this stand up act, exactly the effect of illusion of innuendo. He takes the dirty word makes then sound proper by presenting them as peoples names, and then in a third step allows us to recognize the illusion to dirt. So he creates the thing he is circumventing through the very act of circumvention. And in view of this we could perhaps propose the following hierarchy of comedy. In a bad comedy you just say “arse.” In a better comedy you find an ingenious interesting way of alluding to it. In the best comedy you say “arse” as a way of alluding to it. The empty space you circumscribe in that way hit helps produce a something, a certain space with a density is precisely the enjoyment room of its own. Or perhaps not so much a room of its own, as its scene. We could say the comedy is the scene of enjoyment in this sense. Instead of allocating comedy a private room of its own, it constructs, creates a scene for it in the theatrical sense of the word.“
Alenka Zupančič
Last Thursday we organized a breakout session during the What Design Can Do conference in Amsterdam. The session on contact ironically began in mutual isolation. Upon arrival at the meeting point in the centre of Leidseplein, each guest was handed a pair of red ‘silent disco’ headphones (capable of receiving a radio signal) blocking out the voices of our friends and hosts. Our MC Lilet Breddels of Archis/Volume instructs us over the airwaves to head into the new Apple store across the street and “act like customers.”
What if materials could defy gravity, so that we could leave them suspended anywhere in mid-air? ZeroN is about liberating materials from the constraints of space and time by blending the physical and digital world.
ZeroN is a new physical/digital interaction element that can be levitated and moved freely by computer in a three dimensional space. Both the computer and people can move the ZeroN simultaneously. In doing so, people and computers can physically interact with one another in 3D space. Users are invited to place or move the ZeroN just as they can place any other objects on surfaces. Once levitated, ZeroN’s behavior can be digitally programmed. For example, users can place the sun above physical objects to cast digital shadows, or place a planet that will start revolving based on simulated physical conditions.
ZeroN can remember how it has been moved. Physical motions of people can be collected in this medium to preserve and play them back indefinitely. When the users move and release the ZeroN, it continues to float and starts to move along the same path. This allows a unique, tangible record of a user’s physical presence and motion which will continue to exist even after the death of the person.
“It’s time to get over a lot of our preconceptions,” states Bridle. ”One of my problems is the complete failure of metaphors for these things - cyberspace is not a space, that doesn’t work anymore, it doesn’t make sense anymore but it’s still the way we conceive of it, therefore we see it as separate, in the distance and having boundaries which clearly isn’t true anymore so all that kind of stuff needs rethinking, It will take a much larger thinking of what these things entail if we are going to move forward in any major way”.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/robert-urquhart/an-an-interview-with-jame_b_1498958.html
(via Beyond the Beyond)
I’m looking froward to watching this:
this is why all babies should be kept behind glass at all times.
Lion Tries To Eat Baby Through the Glass at the Oregon Zoo in Portland
Bloomingdale’s Virtual Shop Window
“Summer’s on its way and for some of us that means hitting the shops to buy a new summer wardrobe. For those in New York this experience as been made a whole lot more simple with Bloomingdale’s new interactive window displays.”
http://prote.in/feed/2012/04/bloomingdales-virtual-shop-window
via @patternrblog
A really great review by Levi R. Bryant of Paul M. Livingston’s new book The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism.
The book sounds absolutely wonderful (despite the high price), and by exploring the formal dimension to the social and political, particularly timely, given that “to think the social and political is to think relations between parts and whole, forms of organization, and the relations organizing these assemblages. When, in our pessimistic moments, we say that political transformation and resistance are impossible we are, in fact, making a formal claim.” as Bryant describes.
Bryant goes on to describe that if totalities are complete entities, then “any resistance will merely reproduce the ideology of the whole and any resistance will merely reproduce the distribution of power organizing the totality. Escape is impossible”.
The Livingston poses (as articulated by Bryant) the fundamental question “are totalities such as this possible? Drawing on the formal resources of Cantor, Russell, and above all Gödel, Livingston shows that in fact totalities of this sort are not formally or structurally possible. Cantor’s paradox demonstrated that a genuine whole that would be complete, fully enumerating and accounting for its parts, is not possible because the subsets of a set are always greater in number and possible arrangement than the set from which they are drawn. As a consequence, every social totality — which is itself a set — will necessarily have an uncontrollable excess rumbling beneath it. Russell’s paradox showed that it is not possible to form a set of all sets that are not members of themselves, thereby demonstrating that totalities are riven by paradox. Finally, Gödel demonstrated that every formal system is either necessarily incomplete or inconsistent. It is these formal discoveries that provide the means of comprehending both the possibility of critique and resistance.”
As Bryant concludes, given the importance of this book, let’s hope Routledge reduce the price.
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/30207-the-politics-of-logic-badiou-wittgenstein-and-the-consequences-of-formalism/
Instagram Deal: Facebook’s New Friend Is Worth More Than The New York Times
“Facebook could have bought The New York Times for less.
That’s right, the $1 billion in cash and stock that Facebook paid for Instagram Monday values the two-year old mobile photo-sharing app more than The New York Times.
Instagram, a social network built around cellphone photos that has yet to make any money and has employed fewer than seven people for much of its existence, is now worth more in the eyes of its acquirer than a host of other name-brand public companies, including a major office supplies retailer with more than 1,100 stores, an 80-year old cosmetics company and the third-largest pizza chain in the United States.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/09/instagram-facebook-deal_n_1413256.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003
William Gibson’s foray into television included an X-Files episode that aired in 1998, called “Kill Switch,” and it’s one of my favorites. In it, Mulder and Scully must pursue a killer computer that lives in an RV and drives around killing people through the Internet. I know how it sounds. But compared with aliens and monsters, and alongside cartoonish cyberspace euphorias like Hackers and The Net, “Kill Switch,” with its arrogant computer geniuses, dispirited hackers, A.I. and brain-uploading, still feels right at home in 2012.
This was only a tiny sliver of Gibson’s work, but it said a lot about his influence: the science-fiction-writer-for-people-who-do-not-read-science-fiction has left his mark in a dozen books, a handful of films (including a forthcoming, long-time-coming rendition of Neuromancer), and across the cultural map. That’s because he imagined what an increasingly giant part of that map looks like; “cyberspace,” the term he coined in 1983, is now considered by the Pentagon to be the fifth domain of warfare, and the imagery in his books added a kind of faded screen glow to an era’s paranoia about the digital future. Other things he may have given us, according to his Wikipedia page, include virtual sex, “the explosive growth of virtual environments in video games,” digital cities, fake Internet personalities, reality television, and the term “matrix.” All this at a time in the ‘90s when Gibson, eager for a distraction-less writing environment at home in Vancouver, didn’t own a computer.
See also, What Science Fiction Has to Say About Google’s Fancy Glasses
Not that the Wikipedia page is to be believed, and that’s kind of the point. Gibson’s newer writing edges right up against a present where everything feels manufactured and piped into us at speeds faster than it can be processed. His recent work might be seen as an index of his own attention span, from the near-future speculations of Pattern Recognition to his steady stream of Tweets (his handle is @GreatDismal) to a new book of essays about contemporary culture, copied and pasted from the past two decades. When we sat down with the mild-mannered Gibson at his publisher’s office, in a conference room that might have been ripped from Zero History, we ranged across other non-fiction topics tangential to his fiction: activism, giant Internet companies, cities, the influence of psychedelic drugs. (Also via the Internet: in 1968, Gibson was the manager of Toronto’s first head shop.)
For the demonstrators and cyberpunks of the Occupy movement, Gibson offers a counterfactual scenario. “If it had been a book I’d been writing, I’d probably would have had everyone go away all at once,” rather than waiting until a police raid. ‘Thanks for all the fish.’ To leave the narrative open ended in the public space, rather than to leave the narrative in a way for the corporate world to present it as a defeat or a failure.”
He sees hope for activists, even in an age of “universal information transparency,” when everything and everyone is under surveillance. Technology cuts both ways, and Gibson is confident it will keep giving individuals the ability to question and fight the status quo.
The essays in the new book are laconically and self-effacingly annotated, lined with typical modesty about his writing (like “being paid to solo on some instrument vaguely related to one I actually knew how to play”) and his role in interpreting the onset of the future. In one postscript, about an essay he wrote for Rolling Stone in 1989 on the topic of the Internet, Gibson admits to “pretending to know what ‘the Net’ might be…. Was it something to do with this ‘email’ a few people seemed to know how to send between distant computers?” He’s no prophet; he’s still learning a lot about the odd future the present became. And with some help from fanciful, weird imaginations like his, so are we.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/4/4/motherboard-tv-william-gibson-in-real-life
Incredible.
