metabolo.org - history

The Robot Hall of Fame : Home

gva — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 13:48:41 -0500

"Recognizes excellence in robotics technology worldwide and honors the fictional and real robots that have inspired and made breakthrough accomplishments"

Invitation to contribute to Agenda Art 2010

gva — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 11:12:10 -0600

I received an invitation from Peter Noever, director of Vienna-based contemporary art museum the MAK, to contribute a piece of writing to their annual report. Peter wrote:

The MAK has always seen itself as a place of social awareness beyond its assigned function as a site of art and a laboratory of art production. Under the heading of “AGENDA ART 2010,” we are now trying to draw up scenarios on the future of art: Which production conditions, which values in society, which extent of interaction with politics and the economy would be desirable for art? And how can these scenarios be made real? An avant-garde paper of this style can only be developed with the help of visionary minds from the fields of art, architecture, design, and the humanities.

Further thoughts from the MAK's director are available online.

A Science of What Can’t Be Done

gva — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 21:01:41 -0500

My friend David Coole recently took his masters in architecture and has been advising me about the graduate degree experience. After building an impressive career in film and video production, including supervising post production for Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine, he decided to enroll in architecture school.

In a recent discussion he proposed a necessary new science: a science of what can't be done. After decades -- centuries really -- of the science of what might be possible, its time, he thinks, for a science of the not possible.

Alchemists for centuries attempted to turn lead into gold. Others attempted to create a perpetual motion machine. For years the belief exceeded the practice. Only after a scientific theory proved it wasn't possible did the resignation sink in.

What do we currently believe might be possible some day, and what damage and waste are flowing from this?

David believes that if we maintain an unflagging belief, for example, that we are just a short distance from undiscovered methods for remediating our destruction of the environment, it gives us licence to continue business as usual. Where has all the discussion of superconductors and other fantasy technologies taken us?

Let's say we could go back 1000 years and ask: is it possible to have a clear, room temperature solid? It's easy to think could not have imagined glass. No cameras, no eyeglasses, no airplanes, no windows, no , etc.

I'm intrigued by this for another reason. We can't truly discuss one -- what is possible -- without knowing about the other -- what isn't. We are beginning to understand more about our own cognitive and physiological limits as we build a fuller picture of what our forebears inherited and gave to us -- that is, to what point has evolution delivered us thus far?

We need to understand that we are not at the end point of an evolutionary process. We are embedded in a co-evolutionary process. We're not done, and we're not alone. Those facts are the starting point of a new science of the what can't be done and why.

McLuhan reverses our intuition about sound + vision

gva — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 22:03:47 -0500

We tend to think of visual information as instantaneous or simultaneous, and audio as time-based, linear, successive. I do, at any rate.

To underscore this assumption, let's say I'm reviewing a designer's portfolio. I can "read" a visual image almost in a moment -- I make a snap judgement much like that analyzed in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.

I see a cassette, video tape, quicktime file, or what have you, however, and its a different story -- I know I need to make a time investment. I immediately have expectations for what I want to get out of it. Call it experience economy "ROI". Actually, Bruce Sterling, who incidentally will be speaking at OCAD on October 2 (yes, you heard right), puts it best in Shaping Things: he says in an age of 'Gizmos', our relationship with objects is governed by the "opportunity costs" and "cognitive load" of the user.

Anyway, back to McLuhan. In the Playboy interview (see link below) and everywhere else in his writing, he puts it this way:

"The man of the tribal world led a complex kaleidoscopic life precisely because the ear, unlike the eye, connot be focused and is synaesthetic rather than analytical and linear. Speech is an utterance, or more precisely, an outering, of all our senses at once; the auditory field is simultaneous, the visual successive." (Mcluhan's 1969 interview in Playboy)

This seems striking. I understand and agree with McLuhan, yet my portfolio judging example above tells me the opposite. In some way, both readings must be true.