How do artists, designers and activists use performance, biohacking, robotics, synthetic biology, photography or gaming to probe and challenge the capitalistic abuses of plants, soils and the communities that take care of them?
The artist is continuing his exploration into a future that will probably depend more on DIY and basic survival skills than on the thrills of green, sleek smart cities
The course will explore how artists, designers and activists use biohacking, gaming, robotics, synthetic biology, photography and collaborative experiments to investigate existential threats, devise creative strategies for survival and explore humanity’s strange fascination for apocalyptic scenarios
Next month, I’ll be giving online classes titled “Art & Politics for Plants. On plant geopolitics, phytoengineering and uncanny crops” with the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe
I talked to the founder of a school where students learn new skills, manipulate new tools but also get to examine the political and human dimensions of technology
As its name suggest, the show aimed to demonstrate that design can play an important role when it comes to engaging with today’s social, social and political concerns. Through various visual and experiential strategies, designers can make more visible and even tangible problems that are under-discussed or too abstract to be easily understood
Syuko Kato and Vincent Huyghe from the Interactive Architecture Lab have designed a robotic system that turns dance into architectural forms
A week or so ago, i was in Eindhoven for the Age of Wonderland festival and realized the city was in full Dutch Design Week swing. There was far far too much to see for someone like me who has only a mild interest in design. So i went for the blockbusters. One of them was the Graduation Show of the students from Design Academy Eindhoven.
Sonic booms and nuclear power are explored as replacements to petroleum offering up new dreams of energy efficiency and innovation through technology
CRAF turns into paper planes messages of protests that people exchange on social media. Comments and reactions sent to @aerocraf are printed on paper, folded into little projectiles and thrown over passersby by a 6 meter high paper plane-folding machine
“Furl” combines Electroencephalography (EEG) with advances in soft silicone casting of “air muscles”. The introduction of soft robotics replaces the mechanical principles in interactive architecture through a biological paradigm. EEG allows sensing of human brain functioning so that our environments begin moving and responding to our very thoughts
William Bondin’s proposal involves a colony of self autonomous creature-like structures, called Morphs, which very slowly navigate public parks. Their moves are not just dictated by a set of pre-programmed rules, they also rely on their physical and social environment
The participating artists not only play with distortions of the “real”, but also pioneer new ways to interact with their work. The formal exploration of new interfaces is as much part of their preoccupation, as is the content of their work, and the kind of commentary on the current state of reality we live in
Hertz makes robots controlled by cockroaches, video game systems that you can literally drive around, he gives talks about Zombie Media and has just crafted a magazine about critical technical practice and critically-engaged maker culture that puts us all (us being media people) to shame
For people working at the Yuri Gagarin Training Centre, a military complex where all cosmonauts have been trained since the 1960s, Gagarin remains a hero while space is the only reality they know, almost blending with the surreal machines they work with, they seem to be trapped in a window of time. In the shadow of faded dreams, thus sheds the light on a close-knit community of space-lovers, still clinging to the decaying legacy of the 1960s Space dream
A speech recognition algorithm searches radio waves for conversations about money. As an ongoing investigation of the Viterbi algorithm, this project seeks to understand the agency of a mathematical entity that operates as structural thread within the fabric of contemporary society.
The project is miles away from what you’d expect from an architecture work. No model, no plan. In fact, it looks more like an essay made of photos, short videos and texts. Together, they reflect on immoral architecture, unsympathetic machines, reality filtered by technology and more generally, our symbiotic relationship to technology. In fact, Madhav Kidao likens his project to “an exaggerated caricature of our present and near future relationships to technology as is stands.”
What would happen if the regulation of air rights was given free rein, if air became a commodity that could be bought and sold? How would the trade physically manifest itself? Can we imagine that one day an Air Bank will open in the heart of Manhattan?
If you peruse the Wide Open School class catalogue, you will encounter a remarkable diversity of topics and approaches to learning. It includes material that is under the radar of mainstream culture – things that are overlooked or neglected for one reason or another. It also features classes that involve looking at familiar subjects in a new light
rep.licants.org is a web service allowing users to install an artificial intelligence (bot) on their Facebook and/or Twitter account. From keywords, content analysis and activity analysis, the bot attempts to simulate the activity of the user, to improve it by feeding his account and to create new contacts with other users. Quick Q&A with the artist
One week before the MFA Exhibition, here are a couple more works i discovered when i met the students of Department of Design | Media Arts at UCLA in Los Angeles
While i was in Los Angeles ealier this month, i had the great opportunity to visit the UCLA Department of Design | Media Arts and chat with some of the students. The department educates designers and artists for the information age by teaching the fundamentals of Design, Media, and the Arts, and encouraging experimentation and innovation
The Course Director of MAID on collage, ecological issues, gene mutation cutlery, clay animation and that famous hamster paper shredder
When magic tricks and physical computing classes collide at the University of Architecture in Venice …
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