Lebbeus Woods: Visionary Architect
"Lebbeus Woods, Architect", February 16 - June 02, 2013, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
"Architect Lebbeus Woods (1940-2012) dedicated his career to probing architecture's potential to transform the individual and the collective. His visionary drawings depict places of free thought, sometimes in identifiable locations destroyed by war or natural disaster, but often in future cities. Woods, who sadly passed away last year as planning for this exhibition was under way, had an enormous influence on the field of architecture over the past three decades, and yet the built structures to his name are few. The extensive drawings and models on view present an original perspective on the built environment - one that holds high regard for humanity's ability to resist, respond, and create in adverse conditions. 'Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules,' he once said. SFMOMA has collected Woods's work since the mid-1990s, amassing the broadest collection of his work anywhere; the exhibition will feature these holdings, as well as a selection of loans from institutional and private collections."
(San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Let's not let new technology change our profession or our industry...
"This newscast from KRON in San Francisco in 1981 has been making the rounds recently. It's labeled 'primitive Internet report,' but what it presents is actually one example of the many pre-Internet efforts that the newspaper industry made to try to plan for an online future - and stake out its own turf in that forthcoming world. ...
In the video, you can hear [Dave] Cole say, of the 'Electronic Examiner' he was demonstrating, 'We're not in it to make money.' At the end, the announcer points out that an entire edition of the paper takes two hours to download, at a $5/hour cost - making this 'telepaper' little competition for the paper edition. 'For the moment at least,' the reporter declares, over the image of a sidewalk news vendor hawking the afternoon edition, 'this fellow isn't worried about being out of a job.'
Though the piece does say that 'Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer,' its underlying message is - Don't worry. This crazy computer stuff isn't going to change anything much for now. And indeed it took 10 years for any sort of online service to become even remotely popular. Almost 30 years later, newspapers are still in business; some are even still sold by guys on sidewalks. It has taken this long for the technology to transform the newspaper biz in a big way. ...
But even as the downloads sped up and the connect-time costs dropped, the industry held onto that approach, instead of coming to grips with the fundamentally different dynamics of a new communications medium. What had made sense in the early days over time became a crippling set of blinders. The spirit of experimentation that the Examiner set out with in 1981 dried up, replaced by an industry-wide allergy to fundamental change.
'Let's use the new technology,' editors and executives would say, 'but let's not let the technology change our profession or our industry.' They largely succeeded in resisting change. Now it's catching up with them."
(Scott Rosenberg, 29 January 2009)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Tablet Newspaper: A Vision for the Future in 1994
"The Knight Ridder Information Design Lab is developing a newspaper interface for the tablet device. The tablet newspaper draws on the strengths of print and on the strengths of electronic forms. It is both browsable and searchable, both broad-reaching and customizable. It offers pages with story abstracts linked to more detailed stories, background material, photos, sound, and video. People can ran read as deeply or as casually as they want. Stories are no longer limited to 'news hole,' the space allotted to editorial content after press configurations and advertising have been considered.
The tablet newspaper includes editorial content and advertising, both important components of a local information package. Like editorial content, advertising can have many layers, and can be searched and sorted, as well as browsed. Additionally, ads can have transaction hooks, so that readers can make reservations or purchases."
(Teresa Martin, 1995, CHI Conference Proceedings [http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/])
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Machines replace humans: heavy metal robot 3-piece
"I'm impressed with Compressorhead - the three-piece robot band (three and a half if you count the little robot who drives one of the cymbals). I went to their website to see if I could discern the origins of the project, DIY, corporate, academic, or whatever and couldn't really find anything on the makers. Then I tracked down the drummer. Stickboy was created by Robocross Machines and a whimsical roboticist named Frank Barnes. ... Reminds me of the Survival Research Labs robot machines, built for public performance and disturbance."
(Maxwell Schnurer, 5 January 2013, Life of refinement)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Connecting Cities: Artist's Call for Proposals
"The European Urban Media Network for Connecting Cities is a project initiated by Public Art Lab in co-operation with Ars Electronica GmbH Linz, BIS Body Process Arts Association Istanbul, FACT Liverpool, iMAL Brussels, m-cult Helsinki, Medialab Prado Madrid, Media Architecture Institute Wien, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Riga 2014, Videospread Marseille, in association with University of Aarhus, Marseille-Provence 2013 and MUTEK Montréal and funded by the European Union.
Our aim is to create a networked infrastructure of urban media facades to circulate artistic and socio-cultural content throughout the whole of Europe. Media facades and digital big screens provide new opportunities for communication in the public space. Through modern Information and communication technologies (ICT), they are membranes between the digital and the urban spaces. All over the world we can evidence an increase of urban screens, media facades and media technologies like mobile phones: 5,9 of 7 billion people have meanwhile access to the internet. What is the potential of urban media besides the commercial usage for advertisement? How can they catalyse communication and awareness of our environments and contribute to a lively society? How can we create an exchange between local scenes and neighbourhoods thus giving a voice to the public audience? Which impact will they have for our global communities?"
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
