free visible network

Spanish researchers Clara Boj and Diego Diaz are working on the Free Network Visible Network (04), an augmented reality project which aims to make visible the exchanged information between computers of a wireless network. First marks in the facades of the buildings will indicate the presence of a node, thus the possibility of connecting to the net, and at the same time to see the 3D representation of the information that we are interchanging with this node in real time. via wemake$

metropolis now

“The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. The task was too great. So they hired hands for wages. But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man’s hymns of praise became other men’s curses.” From Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” 1927. (via A.O. Scott, nytimes)

network society

"....the network society is developing a culture which we could define as “hyper-realistic” due to its attempt to achieve a profound comprehension of a reality that is at the same time recognised as digital (the “hyperlink”). Both processes are understood as transformation tools in which the hybrid public spaces of the network society configure a new commons which is the stage for social and individual creation." Juan Freire

nude toys

"In a world where the value of life decreases daily, where boundaries between real and artificial are increasingly blurred, bye the toy that will truly confuse kids and rob them of any remaking sense of the natural. Epidermits are fully functioning organisms, resulting from advanced tissue engineering and the lasted fuel cell and electronics technology. They don't feel pain - or think - but follow a complex set of algorithms. They require minimal maintenance, can be stored in state aof forced hibernation in a standard refrigerators, and are customizable with different body, skin and hair selections and through tanning, tattooing and piercing." -Epidermis Interactive Pet by Stuart Karten Design

delicate boundaries

"As digital technologies become more embedded in everyday life, the line between the virtual and real is increasingly blurred. Delicate Boundaries imagines a space in which the worlds inside our digital devices can move into the physical world. Small bugs made of light, crawl out of the computer screen onto the human bodies that make contact with them. The system explores the subtle boundaries that exist between foreign systems and what it might mean to cross them." csugrue.com

light criticism

"Between October 2006 and December 2006, the City of New York has removed or obscured 59 illegal banners on sidewalk sheds. In that same period, Citibank Chase was forced to remove all illegal sidewalk projections at branches around Manhattan. And now, years into NYC’s crackdown on graffiti writers and protesters, after we’ve watched our friends be detained, arrested, beat, fined, tried, and given real jail sentences, not a single corporate toy from any ad firm has had to do any time." graffiti research lab

building on cinematic vision

"Sonny Astani walked into a Westwood movie theater in 1985 and saw the film that changed his life: "Blade Runner," the science-fiction tale that imagined a dystopian Los Angeles where jet-powered cars zoom past skyscrapers covered with enormous, cinematic advertisements. Decades later, the Iranian-born businessman is determined to bring some of those futuristic images to life. His plan? Attach an animated sign 14-stories tall on the 33-story condominium project he is building in downtown L.A." David Zahniser, Los Angeles Times

color like one other

"Mad-hatter artist Graziano Cecchini has struck again. The public-art prankster who filled the Trevi Fountain in Rome with blood-red dye last October released 500,000 brightly colored plastic balls Wednesday from the top of the Spanish Steps in Rome." By sonia zjawinski,blog.wired.com

MediaSCAPES studio final review

The MediaSCAPES design studio final review took place on December 13, 2007. We were joined by a diverse range of critics attending from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco-

Jason Anderson, Juan Azulay, Benjamin Bratton, Christian Bruun, Jean Michel Crettaz, Rene Daalder, Blair Ellis, Jeffrey Inaba, Carla Leitao, Marcos Novak, and Scott Perry.
















Projects were presented by
_Kenneth Cameron
_Nina Marie Barbuto & Bjork Christensen
_Jordan Kanter, Arthur Switalski & Bao Quoc N. Doan
_Christopher Norman
_Guillermina Chiu & Sepehram Khamjani
_Jihyeun Byeon
_Saman Hosseini-Pou & Salman Masmouei
_George Labeth
_Hao-yun Ambrose Chuang
_Valentina Vasi

Student Projects can be viewed individually
at this link: MediaSCAPES WIKI

The studio brief proposed an investigation of the 'Post Empire' world in relation to political agency in contemporary society:

POST-EMPIRE SCAPES: MediaSCAPES
Professor: Ed KELLER
Assistant critic: Greg THORPE

'Parallel Realities, Trans-national Archipelagos, New Urban Ambiences

"Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication...
But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world..."

This voiceover from Jean Luc Godard's film Alphaville, spoken as the camera pans across nondescript post-war middle class high rise residential towers, identifies two kinds of global systems. The first is the wildly proliferating Hollywood mythmachine, which is able to colonize most of the world as America's most visible export, and which Godard satirizes directly in his film, by creating Lemmy Caution [E. Constantine] as a doppelganger of Bogart; and second, the global space which began to coalesce as the world recovered from World War Two, when urban centers were rebuilt and global networks of capital and materials intensified. The first problems of infrastructure, information science, highways, social housing on a mass scale, and systemic architectures in general emerged in macro-urban assemblies as the embodiment of such systems.

The core principles of the concept of 'MediaSCAPE' are defined through this set of catalyst conditions: the migration of vast numbers of people, caused by a range of geopolitical factors; and the emergence of a new set of infrastructures that ultimately merged the control of physical systems with the control of energetic and information systems: Media and Migration.'

surveillance

"Surveillance cameras by necessity record interzones, the hot spots where crime might breed or deviance might spontaneously generate, in locations beyond the reach of our unenhanced optic nerves, or where everything and everyone has simply shut up shop. Business parks at night, city squares cast in gloomy shadow, empty swimming pools, the hooded entrances of hospitals, the city-like scale of airport perimeters, motorway feeder roads where human interaction is factored out of the landscape and the only transaction occurs between speed and machinery. Ballard’s work precisely records such territory, a rich topography inset with mysterious ley lines, weaving a grid to support shadowy lifestyles enacted far away from mainstream thought." Simon Sellars , ballardian.com SurveillanceSaver

surveillance

"Researchers and security companies are developing cameras that not only watch the world but also interpret what they see. Soon, some cameras may be able to find unattended bags at airports, guess your height or analyze the way you walk to see if you are hiding something..... "If you think of the camera as your eye, we are using computer programs as your brain", said Patty Gillespie, Army Research Laboratory in Adelphi, Md. Today, the military funds much of the smart-surveillance research." Associated Press, msnbc

big shadow

"Shadows of the participants movements are projected upon a massive wall of a building, 7-stories high. When participants perform particular actions such as raising their arms over their heads, a giant dragon shadow appears out of the participants' shadows." bigshadow.jp/judge

interception

"A surveillance camera being used to monitor public space was hijacked and reinstalled in a subway station. The camera was used intentionally to broaden consciousness concerning the problem of increasing lack of privacy. People entering and exiting the station were tracked by the camera,and their “capture” was projected on a station wall. The action was illegal." Roch Forowicz, via rhizome

palestine urban infrastructure

"Palestine’s crumbling infrastructure presents a major challenge for a new Palestinian state. Yet it also provides an opportunity to plan for sustainable development and to avoid the environmental cost and economic inefficiencies of haphazard, unregulated urban development that might otherwise result from the need to accommodate a rapidly growing population. The Arc, RAND’s concept for developing the physical infrastructure of a Palestinian state, provides such a plan."

[In partnership with Suisman Urban Design]

 http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9119/index1.html

sensual body

"The sensual body finds itself living amidst an expansive set of technologies. In this ever-evolving computational world we encounter texts of varying forms and functionalities -- visual, sonic, and code-related. Text may also take physical and/or environmental form. The continuum that bridges distributed bodies with the recombinant communicative and associative functionality of technology is charged with the potential of extending humankind's ability to experience, generate, operate on, store, edit, and disseminate meaningful patterns of experience."
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/languagevehicle