Twitter as Hangman

I'm for a transparent bureaucracy but this isn't what I had in mind. Social media as medieval spectacle. More death tweets at Infocult.

internet/data 'Cloud" fueled by coal

You have to appreciate the symbolism here despite the bad news.

SAN FRANCISCO - The 'cloud' of data that is becoming the heart of the Internet is creating an all-too-real cloud of pollution as Facebook, Apple and others build data centers powered by coal, Greenpeace said in a new report to be released on Tuesday. Facebook facility being built in Oregon will rely on a u utility whose main fuel is coal, while Apple Inc is building a data warehouse in a North Carolina region that relies mostly on coal, the environmental organization said in the study."The last thing we need is for more cloud infrastructure to be built in places where it increases demand for dirty coal-fired power," said Greenpeace, which argues that Web companies should be more careful about where they build and should lobby more in Washington for clean energy.The growing mass of business data, home movies and pictures has ballooned beyond the capabilities of many corporate data centers and personal computers, spurring the creation of massive server farms that make up a "cloud," an emerging phenomenon known as cloud computing.

via:commondreams.org

Bruce Sterling on Atemporality

Another great discussion regarding Atemporality and Network Culture. Strangely absent from the visual art discourse.

If progress is to go beyond the banal indulgences that give rise to a never-ending array of car shell designs then we need to analyse our present time with regard to its aesthetics and its media.

Watch Bruce Sterling's keynote on Atemporality at Berlin's Transmediale.

via: Core 77

on cloud-based calamity

Haven't read the current issue and full print article by Jaron Lanier but this quote seems right for our moment.

From Jaron Lanier, The Serfdom of Crowds, in the Jan/Feb issue of Harper’s Magazine:

The wave of financial calamities that took place in 2008 was cloud-based. No one in the pre–digital-cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to himself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion. In finance, the rise of computer-assisted hedge funds and similar operations has turned capitalism into a search engine. You tend the engine in the computing cloud, and it searches for money. In the past, an investor had to be able to understand at least something about what an investment would actually accomplish. No longer. There are now so many layers of abstraction between the elite investor and actual events that he no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of his investments…

The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order. In each case, human creativity and understanding, especially one’s own creativity and understanding, are treated as worthless. Instead, one trusts in the crowd, in the algorithms that remove the risks of creativity in ways too sophisticated for any mere person to understand. A hedge-fund manager might make money by using the computational power of the cloud to create fantastical financial instruments that make bets on derivatives in such a way as to invent the phony virtual collateral for stupendous risks. This is a subtle form of counterfeiting, and it is precisely the same maneuver a socially competitive teenager makes in accumulating fantastical numbers of “friends” through a service like Facebook. But let’s suppose you disagree that the idea of friendship is being reduced. Even then one must remember that the customers of social networks are not the members of those networks. The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear in any significant way. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the cloud lords to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who could someday show up.

via John Cole/Anne Laurie

Shockwave Riders: Collective Intelligence & TransDisciplinary Pedagogy

The following is being hosted by Parsons this weekend. An incredible list of participants. I'm going!

Shockwave Riders: Collective Intelligence & TransDisciplinary Pedagogy

A symposium on technology and education organized by the
School of Design Strategies (SoDS) Parsons The New School for Design

NOVEMBER 14, 2009, 12 Noon – 7 PM; Open to the public

“…cultural delta can be loosely described as the rate of change imposed
upon culture/society by the speed and depth of new technology.”
-from an online exegesis of Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando

Contemporary models of systems and cities rely increasingly on ‘multi-agent based’ modeling tools and theories, using digital techniques to analyze real world situations and propose design solutions. At the same time, radical and unanticipated forms of public space, communication, and subjectivity are emerging in the technologically mediated spaces of today’s cities.

It can be argued that an information and economic revolution is taking place due to these theoretical and practical changes, through the emergence of crowd-sourced collective intelligence, global swarm urbanisms, new disruptive economics ['wikinomics'] and ultimately the formation of a global political ‘multitude’- with commensurate revolutions catalyzed by these changes cascading across all cultural and political domains.

This symposium marks a continuation of the School of Design Strategies’ work to map out the ways in which emerging forms of social media, global information exchange and new models of pedagogy meet, and it brings together thought leaders from architecture and urban design, the business world, new media entrepreneurs, and media / culture theorists, to discuss and dispute the consequences of technological change in the next decade and outline strategies for developing a design and design-education models that can meet the challenges ahead.

Participants
• Ed Keller, Parsons SoDS, organizer and moderator
• Ben Bratton, UCSD & the Culture Industry
• Jamer Hunt, Parsons SoDS, Chair of Urban and TransDisciplinary Design
• Katherine Von Jan, KvJ & Co
• Mark Leiter, Nielsen, President of Professional Services
• Geoff Manaugh- BLDGBLOG and Contributing Editor WIRED UK
• Warren Neidich, TU Delft
• Daniel Perlin, Artist, Writer and Sound Designer
• Roland Snooks, Columbia GSAPP, UPenn and Kokkugia
• Cameron Tonkinwise, Parsons SoDS, Chair of Business Design and Sustainability
• Kazys Varnelis, Columbia GSAPP Network Architecture Lab and AUDC

Time & Location:
12 Noon – 7 PM
School of Fashion, Parsons The New School for Design
560 Seventh Avenue, NY NY 10018

Society of the Query

This is new to me as I just learned about (via Geert Lovink) the upcoming conference in Amsterdam on the Society of Inquiry. The event is organized by the Institute for Network Cultures. This is incredibly timely for anyone concerned with data, knowledge, access and creativity.

Here's a little about the purpose of the conference (Nov. 13-14, 2009):

With the Society of the Query conference -stop searching, start questioning-, the Institute of Network Cultures aims to critically reflect on the information society and the dominant role of the search engine in our culture. What does the dependency on the engine to manage the complex system of knowledge on the Internet mean? What alternatives exist? How can the increasingly centralized web be regulated? What is the future of interface design? By bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, the conference will examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design.

This two-day Query conference aims to examine the key issues that are emerging around web search, and to contextualize developments within the fields of knowledge organization and information design. The Institute of Network Cultures aims to do so specifically by bringing together researchers, theorists and artists, creating room for speculation and open questions, as well as concrete projects and research. The questions this conference raises are:

• How does the idea of machine understanding influence the fields of knowledge organization and information retrieval?
• How is the legal framework surrounding search engines changing shape?
• Is Google’s increased ubiquity affecting the production and dissemination of art and cultural practice?
• What influence does the existing hegemony of a few large search engines exert on the traditional flow of knowledge and the diversity and accessibility of web content, and in what way might regulation be possible?
• Considering developments in the fields of art and information architecture, how can we get to more sophisticated ways of interface design and the presentation of search results?
• What alternative ways of search are visible on the software level, the network level and the user level that challenge the engine as the major search paradigm?

Conference themes

• Society of the Query
• Digital Civil Rights and Media Literacy
• Alternative Search (1 and 2)
• Googlization of Everything
• Art and the Engine

For more information and registration for the event, please go to http://www.networkcultures.org/query

heirarchy of digital distractions

full view - information is beautiful

box of clouds

This is very cool.

Digital artist Kim Laughton made this cloud viewer out of an old keychain photo viewer. The backlight of the LCD screen was removed so you have to hold the box up to the light to see the clouds drifting by inside.

Go here for more cloud cycles.



via: Make

birth of the CUIL

So the new search engine CUIL just launched - crashed- and reloaded.

From the NY Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — In her two years at Google, Anna Patterson helped design and build some of the pillars of the company’s search engine, including its large index of Web pages and some of the formulas it uses for ranking search results.

Ms. Patterson left Google in 2006 to found Cuil. The new company has other prominent ex-Google employees, including Russell Power, who worked with Ms. Patterson on the large Google index, and Louis Monier, a former chief technology officer at AltaVista, a pioneering search engine. Cuil, which has about 30 employees and is in Menlo Park, Calif., has raised $33 million from venture investors.

I checked it out (searched myself of course) and there seem to be the obvious bugs and such but I do like the design. This could be promising and that is good news to all of us embedded into Google.

essay on network culture: Kazys Varnelis

Fredric Jameson's classic description of Postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism is now well over twenty years old. Jameson's analysis is crucial for understanding late twentieth century thinking. But where are we now? Kazys Varnelis has recently posted his text for the Networked Publics book. It is well worth the read and I'll perhaps go into detail with a follow up post. For now I'm kinda lovin' this "handy" chart at left (click for full size).

Funny, I don't see apocalypse anywhere :) but Hegel shows up...