Augmented City 3D from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

[…] “Take, for instance, Keiichi Matsuda’s Augmented City. Matsuda (whose previous video, Domestic Robocop, we noted at beginning of the year) produced the short for his Masters Thesis at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Continue reading

Posted by Rob Holmes on Mammoth:

[Not a cyborg plant, but certainly technobotanical; image by NL Architects via Inhabitat]

1. This post is for 50 Posts About Cyborgs.

2. This is a cyborg arboretum. That is, a collection of various plants not naturally found in geographic proximity, brought together for educational purposes, whose constituent plants happen to be cyborgs. Not augmented humans, but flora augmented by “non-hereditary adaptations”.

Now, in some real and valid sense, just as we’ve been augmenting our own biological capabilities with technological adaptations for millenia, we’ve also been engaged in a massive and only semi-conscious re-shaping of the forms and functions of plants. Continue reading

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) — Festival of New Cinema & Digital Culture :; October 1-7, 2010 ::

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is a new festival, taking place across the Northwest until 2012 and beyond. A catalyst for production and experimentation, AND invites us to consider what are our normal devices and how might we abandon them?

From October 1-7, 2010 AND ventures into Manchester for a hybrid undertaking of cinema, performance and media art. We invite anarchists of the imagination to challenge the behaviours and systems that define who we are, through politically deconstructed networks, archives and reconfigured stereotypes. Our identities will be contested by an array of thinkers, cultural provocateurs, designers, filmmakers and artists. Continue reading

[Image: Jean Cocteau, “The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète),” 1930. 35 mm black-and-white film, with sound, 50 min. Film still by Sacha Masour.*] Chaos and Classicism: Performance, Digital Workshop, and Film Screening :: October 9 and 10, 2010 :: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street), New York City.

In conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936, the Guggenheim Museum is pleased to present the following suite of related programs.

Premiere Performance: Coup de Foudre, Based on The Blood of a Poet by Jean Cocteau — Paul Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky, Ballet Noir, and Melvin van Peebles :: October 9; 8:00 pm + October 10; 6:00 pm: Continue reading

Helene von Oldenburg: Slovník sítí/A Dictionary of Nets — Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Nets, Webs and Networks (But Were Afraid to Ask) :: September 29, 2010; 6:00 – 7:00 pm :: CIANT Lab, Kubelikova 27, Prague, Czech Republic.

Nets are everywhere. They are organized differently. Have a look at various systems like informatics, biology, archaeology, sociology, etc. Putting all these types of nets together may mimic science as well as art. Or is it both? Helene is an artist | scientist, member of a newly acknowledged “species” that inhabits our contemporary culture while acting as an agent of innovation. Her new book “A Dictionary of Nets” features a new hierarchic system of nets, incl. spider webs, fishing nets, social networks, internet, etc. Continue reading

[Image: A glimpse of Honda’s brain-interface technology] Posted by Geoff Manaugh on BLDGBLOG: “I thought I’d jump into the ongoing conversation swirling around Tim Maly’s Cyborg Month — of which you can read more here — with some loose thoughts about what an architectural cyborg might be.

There have already been some significant stabs made in this direction over the past few weeks, including a brief look at “architecture machines” — that is, “evolving systems that worked in ‘symbiosis’ with designer and resident,” promising to “turn the design process into a dialogue that would alter the traditional human-machine dynamic” and thus opening up the possibility of cyborg architecture. Continue reading

Posted on The Teeming Void by Mitchell Whitelaw: Measuring Cup is a little dataform project I’ve been working on this year. It’s currently showing in Inside Out, an exhibition of rapid-prototyped miniatures at Object gallery, Sydney.

This form presents 150 years of Sydney temperature data in a little cup-shaped object about 6cm high. The data comes from the UK Met Office’s HadCRUT subset, released earlier this year; for Sydney it contains monthly average temperatures back to 1859.

The structure of the form is pretty straightforward. Each horizontal layer of the form is a single year of data; these layers are stacked chronologically bottom to top – so 1859 is at the base, 2009 at the lip. Continue reading

Live Shorts @ Filament Festival (EMPAC): You Don’t Know What You’re Talking About — a MTAA lecture/performance controlled by the audience and the Internet :: October 2, 2010; 2:45 pm + October 3, 2010; 3:45 pm :: Streamed live. We NEED your tweets! (Please tweet away with the hash tag #mtaa and you’re tweets will be included in the performance.)

We, like you, have often wished while listening to a lecture, speech or newscast to stand up and tell the speaker, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” MTAA sit behind a desk with two laptops and two microphones before them. Behind them a projection screen displays the text “#mtaa” and a timer. Continue reading

MTAA (Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden) will be conducting a barn-raising on October 1, 2010 from 10:00 am – 6:00 pm (EST) on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as part of the Filament Festival. It will be streamed live.

A commercially-available barn-building kit acts as the starting point, but MTAA and our group of volunteers — perhaps including yourself — will use the results of web-based polling, input from the general public, constructional improvisation, sweat and maybe even some tears, to raise a barn, or a barn-ish sculptural object, or a… well… something.

— VOTE —— VOTE —— VOTE —— VOTE —
— http://artbarn.mtaa.net —
— VOTE —— VOTE —— VOTE —— VOTE — Continue reading

The Anthropology of Hackers by Gabriella Coleman, The Atlantic:

“A “hacker” is a technologist with a love for computing and a “hack” is a clever technical solution arrived through a non-obvious means. It doesn’t mean to compromise the Pentagon, change your grades, or take down the global financial system, although it can, but that is a very narrow reality of the term. Hackers tend to value a set of liberal principles: freedom, privacy, and access; they tend to adore computers; some gain unauthorized access to technologies, though the degree of illegality greatly varies (and much, even most of hacking, by the definition I set above, is actually legal). Continue reading