metabolo.org - technology

Kitchen Budapest

gva — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 20:22:48 -0400

"New media lab for young researchers who are interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and urban space and are passionate about creating experimental projects in cross-disciplinary teams."

The Robot Hall of Fame : Home

gva — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:48:41 -0400

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

Report from Massive Change Global Visionaries Symposium

gva — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:19:23 -0500

Just returned from the Massive Change Global Visionaries Symposium in Chicago. As a co-creator of the Massive Change exhibition I wanted to see it in the first US showing. Another aim was to study the public event and possibly seek out some of the speakers for a symposium I'm co-organizing with colleagues at the Beal Institute. The event was eye opening and highly enjoyable.

Overall my favorite speakers were Stewart Brand, futurist and author of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Clock of the Long Now, and How Buildings Learn; Gunter Pauli, founder and director of Zero Emissions Research Initiative of the United Nations University in Tokyo (Zeri.org), founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales, and Mary Czerwinski, cognitive psychologist and principal researcher at Microsoft. Brand and Pauli were certainly the most dynamic.

Other speakers were Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic and author of The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse; Dayna Baumeister, cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild; Hazel Henderson, futurist, evolutionary economist, and syndicated columnist; John Todd, biologist and ecological designer, and Reginald Modlin, Director of Environmental Affairs for Daimler Chrysler.

Stewart Brand presented first and he was superb. Soft-spoken and persuasive, he is a master inter-disciplinarian and unromantic humanist. His presentation was the only one with visuals, very polished with dense information demographics, many photos, sound clips, transitions, etc. Not as typographically sophisticated as Al Gore's show but equally dense. Brand focused on the city, its pivotal place in the pantheon of human creativity, its long history and the dynamic economic and demographic forces transforming it worldwide, in every continent and across all income strata. Overall he gave a picture of optimism about the creativity and resourcefulness of human communities to solve problems.

Gunter Pauli, based in Tokyo, described some of his initiatives in designing radically green urban / industrial communities at very large scales. Much of his work is in the developing world, e.g. Gaviotas in Colombia. These communities can leapfrog past current toxic practices and install new infrastructure that uses closed-loop, "waste=food" principles to achieve high employment, zero emissions, ample food production, etc.

Here's a helpful third party commentary [http://www.planeta.com/planeta/02/0209gaviotas.html]:

Pauli, in some ways a younger version of [Paolo] Lugari, has some spot-on things to say. He is most definitely on The Right Track. Kind of a permaculturist-social-justice-guy with a penchant to use fairy tales to illustrate his points....
...ZERI's focus is on taking things that are considered "waste" and finding new uses for them.
...The trick to "zero emissions" is to use the "waste" of one of the five kingdoms as food for another.

In person Pauli is outspoken and imaginative, frequently alluding to his work with children and seeming to celebrate these same qualities in them -- they don't filter their ideas of what's possible. Not an easy personality, but much better than that. Pauli was on stage with Reginald Modlin, Director of Environmental Affairs for Daimler Chrysler, who was cagey, dry, and sycophantic. No surprises and few big ideas from the global manufacturing giant.

Next were Dayna Baumeister and John Todd. One very interesting moment of that talk arose through a question afterward by Stewart Brand regarding GMO's -- actually he scooped me as I was going to ask the same question. Brand pointed out that certain bacteria swap genetic material all the time, and that many scientists who understand biology thoroughly, including stellar minds like E.O. Wilson, are less disturbed by GMO than others who are not trained in biology. Todd gave a thoughtful answer that GMOs are a distraction in that he's more interested in the symphony of ecological relationships, rather than the admittedly interesting soloists or featured organisms.

Jimmy Wales and Mary Czerwinski offered slightly differing views on emerging digital media. Most telling comment in that session came from Wales who imagined that the open, volunteer-driven model of wikipedia would be a temporary architecture that would soon have to be replaced by a more restricted and conventional model. To his surprise, the need to install controls on the model never materialized. In fact he continually has to explain to the media that the organization's controls are less restrictive than they imagine. Simple rules, like requiring individuals to be members for four days before they can edit, have effectively dampened most of the troll-like behaviour in the system.

In the last session Hazel Henderson held court and Gregg Easterbrook held his own. Henderson captivated the audience with ideas such as unmeasured value creation within the "love economy," and the need for broader alternatives to the money-based economic indices, like triple bottom line and the Calvert Henderson index. Both speakers dealt with notions of wealth and politics, and the overall picture was one in which material prosperity has shown steady increases in recent decades. The passing of Milton Freidman was noted and some audience members noted that we've never really tried pure market economics because of massive subsidies for entire industries, including oil and gas.

Lineup for IDMI’s Hyperpolis 3.0 conference

gva — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 12:35:22 -0400

Below are the themes and speakers of a conference, hosted by the Integrated Digital Media Institute and Othmer Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, where I'll be giving a presentation based on the ideas in my paper with Robert K. Logan, "Designing for Emergence and Innovation." More background may be found at http://idmi.poly.edu/

The Production of Politics Thursday October 19th 11am to 2pm

Richard Rogers, Director, govcom.org, University of Amsterdam

Tom Keenan, Director, the Human Rights Project, Bard College

Karen J. Hall, Humanities postdoctoral fellow, Syracuse University

Atopia (Jane Harrison and David Turnbull), Urban research and design office, New York

The Art of Work in the Age of Post-production Thursday October 19th 3pm to 6pm

Rev. Luke Murphy, Artist, VP of Technology, MTV Networks

Greg Van Alstyne, Senior Research Associate, Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity, Ontario College of Art & Design

Ruth Ron, Architect and new media artist, Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Florida

Blogging: around the table Friday October 20th 11am to 2pm

Jodi Dean, Teaches political theory at Hobart-William Smith colleges and maintains jdeanicite.typepad.com

Geert Lovink, Media theorist and activist, University of Amsterdam

McKenzie Wark, Author of the Hacker Manifesto and teaches media studies at Lang College, the New School

Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University

The Politics of Production Friday October 20th 3pm to 6pm

Michael Liegl, Ethnographer, University of Munich

Eric Redlinger, Musician, network administrator, member of Share collective, New York-Montreal-San Diego-Wiesbaden

Michael J. Schumacher, Composer, performer, director of Diapason sound gallery, New York

Katherine Carl, Co-director, the School of Missing Studies, New York-Sarajevo

Sterling, Greenfield, and the Patchy Internet of Things

gva — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 20:27:44 -0400

I've heard Bruce Sterling taking issue with Adam Greenfield over the title of his book, Everyware (in this great IT Conversations podcast). I was a bit surprised, then, when in our OCAD lecture Sterling gave a big boost to Greenfield's book and said that they talk all the time and are now good buddies. Hey, things change. In any case that's not why I'm writing.

At some point I plan to take up Sterling's original argument, and maintain that the arrival of dataspace (as we call it at the Beal Institute) AKA the Internet of Things will not involve "everything" and "everyone" and "everywhere" -- it will be patchy and spotty. And I agree with Sterling that it may take 30 years to arrive. But I'm not writing about that either.

Actually I'm writing to point out a hard to find and thin but interesting discussion board about the emergence of ubicomp in Greenfield's site. Some nice examples of weak signals or whatever in there -- so, like, check it out.

McLuhan reverses our intuition about sound + vision

gva — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:03:47 -0400

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.

Metabolo Metaphors

gva — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:30:14 -0400

I thought about creating a place where I can list examples of metabolo in contemporary culture, as I encounter or think of them, and expand on them later. This post is that place.

Examples:

Flock - the browser I'm using right now
Media ecology - a young discipline pioneered by Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, and others
Rabid media attention described as a "feeding frenzy." On this note, one relative of the slain child Jon Bennet Ramsey said the media attention was "like having a wild animal attached to your face."
Macintosh's pulsating status light -- like a sleeping animal's breathing
Linkrot - apt... if not pretty

Bruce Sterling’s Speech at ETech 2006

gva — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 20:59:04 -0400

This item links to the transcript -- or the script... not sure which -- of Bruce Sterling's speech at Emerging Technology 2006, San Diego, CA, March 2006. In the author's words, "Delivered at alpha-geek central, it may include indecipherable techie in-jokes. Well over 6,000 words. Includes illustrations." The audio, which is quintissentially Sterling and thus more fun to consume, is available at http://www.itconversations.com (keyword search for Sterling). [del.icio.us/gva]

About Metabolo: From Mechanics to Mimesis

gva — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 00:56:21 -0400

Far from becoming tamer, the far-reaching effects of electric technology that were presaged by Marshall McLuhan seem to be waxing wilder, penetrating ever more deeply into our personal and social lives. Is it alarm we’re sensing, or the thrill of recognition – a quickening? Are we attempting to maintain control, or building a portrait of our environment and ourselves that is beginning to rival the responsiveness and creativity of the natural world?

We wonder aloud whether we’ve traded too much privacy for convenience and access, meanwhile scarcely noticing that all these musings have migrated into that ever-widening and ever-converging data stream that suddenly seems more real and more -- accessible? -- than ever before. This veritable Mississippi of data offers more manipulability and meaning as the tools, their default settings, and their recombinant interactions increasingly evidence startling levels of transparency, empathy and relevance to daily life....

Our brains, our bodies, our social relationships, the webs of life that nourish and sustain our physical selves and natural environments, no longer are these being taken for granted, denigrated, made incidental -- at any rate, not in the same blind and wholesale way. On the contrary, these are being methodically rediscovered and appreciated as irreplaceable, unique, meaningful, and worthy of support, research, emulation, connection, amplification, celebration.

As a candidate for the Master of Science degree in Integrated Digital Media at Polytechnic University, I offer this space to the investigation of these developments and these questions.

In this discursive space I intend to share and solicit interdisciplinary research interrogating emergent effects at the intersection of three organizing discourses: technology and design; biology and social behavior; ecology and environment. The diagram that follows illustrates broad relationships and selected patterns characteristic of the intersections:

I will survey the literature pertinent to these intersections, including historical texts as well as emerging theoretical and practical developments from both academic and professional sources. The underlying theoretical and methodological framework and vocabulary will be informed by the closely related discourses of cybernetics, systems thinking, complexity, and network studies. My objective will be to document and explicate applicable laws and principles in order to forge a new level of synthetic understanding with an eye to guiding the design and implementation of beneficial systems.

To assist the analysis and communication of my findings I intend to use appropriate techniques in media production that may include data modelling, visualization, and/or motion graphics. The resulting thesis will seek to articulate and demonstrate design principles in response to the critical question: “Can we learn to design for emergence, in order to develop and distribute more human-friendly and ecologically responsive social and technical systems, by studying and mimicking deep patterns originating in the realms of biology and social behavior?”

Following is a preliminary and partial list of sources to be consulted:

Biomimetics; Sociomimetics; Social Software; Networks
Barabasi, A. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Perseus Books; 2002.
Benyus, J. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. William Morrow; 1997.
Hock, D. Birth of the Chaordic Age. Berrett-Koehler Publishers; 1999.
O’Reilly, T. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228
Reed, D. P. The Law of the Pack. Harvard Business Review; Feb. 2001
Surowiecki, J. The Wisdom of Crowds. Anchor Books; 2004.

Commons; Cooperation
Axelrod, R. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books; 1985.
Bricklin, D. The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor. http://www.bricklin.com/cornucopia.htm August 7, 2000.
Creative Commons. http://www.creativecommons.org
Hardin, G. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science 1968;162:1243-48.
Lessig, L. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books; 2000.
Rheingold, H. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Basic Books; 2002.
Rheingold, H. and Institute for the Future. http://www.cooperationcommons.com/
Wright, R. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Pantheon; 1999.

Cybernetics; Systems Thinking; Complexity
Capra, F. The Hidden Connections: A Science for Sustainable Living. Anchor Books; 2002.
Weiner, N. Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. M.I.T. Press; 1961.
Weiner, N. The Human Use of Human Beings. Houghton Mifflin; 1950.

Emergence
Fromm, J. Types and Forms of Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0506028
Fromm, J. Ten Questions About Emergence. http://arxiv.org/abs/nlin.AO/0509049
Helms, M. Design That Improves With Use. Ambidextrous. http://www.stanford.edu/~judywen/ambidextrous/page36-39.pdf
Johnson, S. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Scribner; 2002.
Van Alstyne, G. From Induction to Incitement: Inside the Massive Change Project. What People Want: Populism in Architecture and Design. Ed. Michael Shamiyeh. Birkhäuser; 2005:188–205.
Van Alstyne, G. and Logan, R.K. Designing for Emergence and Innovation: Redesigning Design. Publication pending; 2006.