February 23, 2006
11-12 March 2006 Utrecht:
Interaction is the Crystalpunk Drug
A Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture event Oudenoord 275, Utrecht, NL: Essentially it was William Butler Yeats who defined soft architecture as early as 1888 when he wrote: "Behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin.". Yeats was talking about magic, but we are thinking about technology (and pointing out their similarities is pointing out the obvious) that is promising to make this worldview into a reality: equipping mindless objects with in silico brains, turning rooms into artificially intelligent machines.
Gargoyle computational processes evolving the optimal design solution to a problem and printing it in 3D, in real size. Every time you wave your hand a pandemonium of software agents start to reason on what they could do for you. Objects can sense and act and acquire personalities of which the complexity rises as their ecosphere becomes richer and more connected. Architecture is at the forefront in applying these ideas, at the same time it will pose new challenges to the practise.
Between September and December 2005 the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture brought together a large international group of people to think about what all this means for spatial design and experience. Looking back at what we learned some underlying threads emerged. From the beginning we had only a peripheral interest in the technology itself; we proved it's donkey stuff of which the basics you can learn yourself for cheap and without teachers. But what had our real interest was what to do with it. A room that does things for you may sound like a good idea, at least to some, but what if locks you out of the control structure in your own room: the inability to switch off the lights, say. We are not interested in silly input-output control situations of the kind architects and product designers come up with, but in rich Yeatsian entities that have their own life independent of us.
For so long the marketing department can understand it we are not interested; we want technology to become BacterioPoetic.
In the weekend of 11 and 12 March the workshop will open for the last time to follow up on some leads left unexplored. Other niceties, activities and installations by Tao Sambolic and Thomas Laureyssens, we are like a tapas bar, will be presented on the side.
Saturday 11 March: 14.00- 18.00-- BOT / AIML workshop by Mario Campanella. From the early days of computer based interaction bots, interfaces through which you interact with software in normal language, have been one recurrent strategy. Recently a new wave of interest in them has taken place, this time to allow seamless communication with all sorts of devices. In this informal hands-on workshop, Mario Campanella, will first explain about the history of bots before getting into AIML. This "Artificial Intelligence Markup Language" provides a framework for Bot designers to capture knowledge. The aim of the workshop is to give you the knowledge on how to build the 'brain' of a Chatbot: using the general purpose AIML database, you will create new entries for an existing one, or create your own chatbot with a special purpose 'persona'.
It is advised to bring your own laptop and have one of the Alice programs installed: http://aitools.org/downloads. There are versions in most popular programming languages.
Here you can find some of the existing AIML sets: http://aitools.org/aiml-sets/
Presentations by:
Mirjam Struppek was trained as an urban planner. Right now she is organising the second URBAN SCREENS conference which is the crucial event in the ongoing formation of a new field of expertise: the (growing) infrastructure of large digital moving displays, that increasingly influence the visual sphere of our public spaces. The main question being whether these screens can become a tool to contribute to a lively urban society, involving its audience interactively?
Z-25 is Utrecht based group of artists who will present their recent "Indoor RFID" project. RFID chips allow object to be tagged and monitored. The expectations (fuelled by industrial rhetoric and citizens paranoia) is that these will become an explosively present part of society. Z-25 will show some of its power. Who needs Amsterdam when there is Z-25?
Adam Somlai-Fischer is part of Aether, one of the hottest design studios working in interactive architecture. His work is part research and part design, often beautiful always thought provoking. During a previous Crystalpunk workshop he has proven himself to be exceptionally skilled with the soldering-iron too.
Pablo Miranda Carranza runs Army Of Clerks, which explores generative and algorithmic approaches in architecture and design. Hoping to find utter bliss in the relentless accumulation of unintelligent calculations, mindless arithmetic performed by computational armies of clerks. Carranza's work on the electro-chemical devices by Gordon Pask unwittingly (and after a long process of confabulation) gave the crystalpunk movement its notion of crystals as entities encoding data in form from which it owes the name, for this alone he deserves his place in heaven.
Nocolas Nova is a key blogger in the world of locative media. Recently he has been taking up an interest in Blogjects: an example of the 'Internet of Things', i.e. a network of tangible, mobile, chatty things enabled by miniaturization. In its most basic form, a blogject is not dissimilar to people that blog - it is an artefact that can disseminate a record of its experiences to the web. He even organised a workshop on them.
Jelle Feringa of the Paris based design agency EZCT is crystalpunk's guru for Voronoi-crystals and genetic design. Always ready to discuss radical uses of new technology, instead of making them do old things different, EZCT is slowly claiming fame with their evolved chairs. Right now they are building a 3D printer.
All event are free. Check the website for further details, the same applies for technical details of the BOT workshop.
CPWfSA initiated by socialfiction.org, produced by IMPAKT
Posted by jo at February 23, 2006 04:18 PM
