new-aesthetic:
Does cloud computing have weather? - rodcorp
“There is weather, too, beyond the physical infrastructure. Our “likes” and “favourites” are small prayers to the social network gods to keep safe the photos, spreadsheets and status updates we entrust to their cloudy crypts. (Not all precipitation makes it back to the ground: virga is rain that evaporates (or hail that sublimes) before reaching the ground - the observable spinning bar that never results in a file being displayed on our screens. Our status updates may not suffice as offerings: if we didn’t pay for the cloud service, we’re making a wish.) Service uptime websites are the weather charts. A database fails, creating a ripple of low data pressure.”
Another argument for #technonatures:
![new-aesthetic:
We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps – Quartz
“Less than 12 hours ago, we had never heard of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Now we know that he did not like haircuts but did like Game of Thrones. We know he was a wrestler and that he won a $2,500 scholarship while at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. We know he liked fast cars, ate lots of waffles, and probably used an iPhone from AT&T (but it broke in December).” […]
“Where it was once only reporters and the police who dug up information about people of interest, a whole nation is at it today. And for all the myriad concerns about privacy settings, cookies, data protection, automated surveillance, and Facebook, we reveal immense amounts of information about ourselves publicly, unthinkingly, and sometimes involuntarily.”](http://24.media.tumblr.com/0015a33a4d5314aa69b52a1acf92e232/tumblr_mlohzm6HiE1qjjis9o1_500.png "new-aesthetic:
We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps – Quartz
“Less than 12 hours ago, we had never heard of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Now we know that he did not like haircuts but did like Game of Thrones. We know he was a wrestler and that he won a $2,500 scholarship while at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. We know he liked fast cars, ate lots of waffles, and probably used an iPhone from AT&T (but it broke in December).” […]
“Where it was once only reporters and the police who dug up information about people of interest, a whole nation is at it today. And for all the myriad concerns about privacy settings, cookies, data protection, automated surveillance, and Facebook, we reveal immense amounts of information about ourselves publicly, unthinkingly, and sometimes involuntarily.”")
new-aesthetic:
We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps – Quartz
“Less than 12 hours ago, we had never heard of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Now we know that he did not like haircuts but did like Game of Thrones. We know he was a wrestler and that he won a $2,500 scholarship while at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. We know he liked fast cars, ate lots of waffles, and probably used an iPhone from AT&T (but it broke in December).” […]
“Where it was once only reporters and the police who dug up information about people of interest, a whole nation is at it today. And for all the myriad concerns about privacy settings, cookies, data protection, automated surveillance, and Facebook, we reveal immense amounts of information about ourselves publicly, unthinkingly, and sometimes involuntarily.”
Why this emphasis on curation - on gathering, filtering, selecting, framing, juxtaposing? Because curation is the native art of the network, and the network - digital, neural, bacterial, financial - now dominates our lives. It has become our latest implacable paradigm. Indeed, even the increasingly intelligent behaviour of the applications and processes we encounter on the internet - Google searches, shopping recommendations, ads that follow us across multiple websites - reflect a kind of personalised curation carried out by algorithms acting on the copious crumbs of data our online doppelgängers leave behind them.
— Erik Davis, The Thing is Alive, essay contribution to The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things by Mark Leckey. (via algopop)
A striking CGI visualisation by UK-based visual effects and animation company South 422, rendering visible a mesmerising, manmade technological organsim spanning around the globe. It’s a 7 day portrait of world shipping movements based on the output of individual vessels’ GPS tracking beacons.
Watch the video here
February 28, 2013 at 11:41am
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Digital technologies and on-line platforms are essential to the way we work and live. Interestingly, they are defined by algorithms which are not neutral. Kevin discusses how they define new social norms and how our culture is affected by the possibilities embedded in the softwares we use.
February 26, 2013 at 5:12pm
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Caught in the matrix.
Design is mainly understood as the activity of producing more or less useful artefacts, but not necessarily as a political activity. The design of an artefact, however, is always also a political decision about how people should live, communicate or behave. Furthermore, design can be used as a political instrument in the form of activism, or as a medium to discuss and dream about possible or better futures.
— http://www.designaspolitics.com/
Reversed gothic hightech: Project Genesis is a short movie which imagines an alternate world populated by old Macintosh computers, directed by Alessio Fava. In this world the computers get excited about new releases of ‘Humans’.
February 10, 2013 at 2:36pm
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In the past few decades, there has been a move from the party machine, to the media machine and then to the machine that now runs itself.
— Tony Fry
Strange bioforms take over New York by Squaredesign.
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