The second thing this question makes me think of comes back to my own definition of the professional artist as a “middle-class…

“The second thing this question makes me think of comes back to my own definition of the professional artist as a “middle-class creative laborer.” Most working people just don’t have any say in the creative content of their own labor; that’s part of the definition of being a worker, you trade your labor to someone else and they get to tell you what to do. So, the idea that there is a category of person in society who both gets to do, to a certain extent, what they want and make money doing it takes on some kind of special aura because it is an exception: precisely because most people are alienated in their work, the dream of being an “artist” takes on some exaggerated societal importance as an image—even though the reality for most “working artists” is more complex, and most people who call themselves “artists” actually make money somewhere else.”

–How Small It Actually Is, Alex Zafiris interviews Ben Davis - Guernica / A Magazine of Art& Politics (viaphotographsonthebrain)

NATS - Guardians Of The Sky

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ourcorporatevision:

NATS - Guardians Of The Sky

From the gigantic white woman in heels roleplaying ‘Attack of The 50ft Woman’ on an airport to the assurances that she holds millions of lives in her hands, this Omnipotent Air Traffic Being clearly has our best interests at heart and yet she insists on remaining ‘unseesn and invisible.’ If infrastructure fiction did dream sequences, this would be it.

Our invisible flight controller waxes lyrical on ‘big data’ and robot planes. What exactly is the difference between ‘air traffic control’ and ‘dynamic air traffic management?’ No one knows. Doesn’t matter, it’s the future baby, which is essentially the same thing with the names changed.

The future is also ‘quieter and more efficient.’ Presumably this is because the overlord has reduced the other former populace of planet Earth to white silhouettes aimlessly milling about the code/space of airports. I guess if you’re just the blasted silhouette of a former human you don’t actually need to eat or consume or do anything at all really except pose for design fictions.

Of course, later we see the reason for the silhouettes as she boards the Hypersonic Jet Of The Future; no-one else is on it. Those silhouettes can’t recognise each-other, all familial relationships have broken down, they don’t know who they are or what to do and so they just wait, ghost-like in the airport wondering what happened to the cries of their children.

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At NATS we believe we’re a little different. We’re best known for providing air traffic control in the UK, particularly at London’s Gatwick and Heathrow airports, the busiest single and dual runway airports in the world. But that’s not all we do.

We support airport and airline customers in over 30 countries globally to aid in achieving their objectives. Growth. Efficiency. Safety enhancements. Using big data to transform how air traffic control affects economies, affects people.

We’ve created a short film that asks you to consider us differently and to wonder with us what the future might hold.

© AP Photo/NOAA, Corey Accardo In this aerial photo taken on Sept. 27, 2014, and provided by NOAA, some 35,000 walrus gather on…

arctic, climate change, walrus, habitat, alaska

© AP Photo/NOAA, Corey Accardo In this aerial photo taken on Sept. 27, 2014, and provided by NOAA, some 35,000 walrus gather on shore near Point Lay, Alaska. Pacific walrus looking for places to rest in the absence of sea ice are coming to shore in record numbers on Alaska’s northwest coast. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirms an estimated 35,000 walrus wer photographed Saturday about 700 miles northwest of Anchorage. The enormous gathering was spotted during NOAA’s annual arctic marine mammal aerial survey.

"After extensive training, we wanted to find out if the talent in trading might be rooted genetically and crossed the top…

Marcovici, rats, training, trading, futures, chance, randomness, breeding, pedigree

“After extensive training, we wanted to find out if the talent in trading might be rooted genetically and crossed the top traders with each other. After only 20 days, we had 28 new rats (15 males and 13 females) , and we soon started to train again (even reducing the training time). The results were astounding: the second generation of top traders had a much better performance than their parents, but undoubtably, further research will be necessary to confirm this finding of ours.”

Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper by Ken Shirriff

algopop:

Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper by Ken Shirriff

Bitcoins are mined using a cryptographic algorithm called SHA-256. This algorithm is just about simple enough to be done with pencil and paper as shown in a video (embedded below) by Ken Shirriff. It is obviously impractical but exposes the process of bitcoin mining. It consists of repeatedly performing a cryptographic operation called hashing until an extremely rare hash value is found - one that begins with around 17 zeros. Only one out of 1.4x1020 hashes will be successful. Using a pencil and paper approach you would only be able to mine about 0.7 hashes per day.

 

You Call This Thai Food? The Robotic Taster Will Be the Judge

thailand, food, robot, taste, automation, algoritmics, deliciousness, gastronomy, thai food

The government-financed Thai Delicious Committee, which oversaw the development of the machine, describes it as “an intelligent robot that measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology in order to measure taste like a food critic.” In a country of 67 million people, there are somewhere near the same number of strongly held opinions about Thai cooking. A heated debate here on the merits of a particular nam prik kapi, a spicy chili dip of fermented shrimp paste, lime juice and palm sugar, could easily go on for an hour without coming close to resolution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/world/asia/bad-thai-food-enter-a-robot-taster.html?smid=tw-share&_r=2

Masdar City

build it and they might come, Masdar, top down, urbanism, flat pack futures, city planning, UAE

The Masdar City model seems difficult to reproduce: too isolated, too expensive, too empty. The embryo town appears rather as a symptom of the obsession of a state with regard to its future. What will become of this territory, once the hydrocarbon reserves underneath its soil are depleted? In response, the frenzied builders attempt to inscribe life in a permanent fashion on a land that seems hostile to human existence. It is about facing the fear of death by building quickly (an “instant city”), to help transition to an Emirates that is a techno-ecological leader. Masdar City is meant to be the laboratory. Opening soon

http://www.fastcoexist.com/3035446/eerie-video-shows-masdar-city-the-sustainable-city-of-the-future-has-no-one-in-it

Agency

fiction, Quinn Norton, AI, agents, soft AI, pattern recognition, algorithmics, automation

Since we’re agent engineers, my husband and I tend to think agents are great. Also, we’re lazy and stupid by our own happy admission — and agents make us a lot smarter and more productive than we would be if we weren’t “borrowing” our brains from the rest of the internet. Like most people, whatever ambivalence we feel about our agents is buried under how much better they make our lives. Agents aren’t true AI, though heavy users sometimes think they are. They are sets of structured queries, a few API modules for services the agent’s owner uses, sets of learning algorithms you can enable by “turning up” their intelligence, and procedures for interfacing with people and things. As you use them they collect more and more of a person’s interests and history — we used to say people “rub off” on their agents over time.

https://medium.com/message/agency–3d37adfc69a3

Also joining the brain trust was Douglas Atkin, a branding Svengali who worked on the launch of JetBlue in his previous life as…

“Also joining the brain trust was Douglas Atkin, a branding Svengali who worked on the launch of JetBlue in his previous life as an advertising executive. “I’m the devil, actually,” Atkin told the audience this spring at a conference called “Share,” put on by one of the “grassroots” advocacy groups he founded as a new guru of the sharing economy. Atkin, who was hired as Airbnb’s head of community last year, is the author of a book called The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers Into True Believers, which describes how companies can generate cultlike devotion using techniques gleaned from actual cults—or, as he calls them, “radical belonging organizations.” Atkin’s hand is evident in ­Airbnb’s newly conceived tagline—“Belong anywhere”—and he’s been adept at whipping up the party faithful at host meet-ups he organizes. (“Successful cults which are turning into the next world religions, like the Mormons, know that personal interaction is the fastest route to cult growth,” is one Atkin­ism.) In videos from the meet-ups, people say things like, “In my life before Airbnb, I always felt really beholden to the company I worked for. And now I just feel really free.””

–“The Dumbest Person in Your Building Is Passing Out Keys to Your Front Door!” (viaiamdanw)

Vassilis Paleokostas

Vassilis Paleokostas, crime, Greece, banks, poverty, redistribution, wealth, Robin Hood, Ned Kelly

In a crime spree spanning three decades, [Vassilis Paleokostas] the man known to many as the Greek Robin Hood has taken millions from state-owned banks and kidnapped industrialists, while liberally distributing cash to the needy. Though he differs from some other famous bandits - Ned Kelly, say, or Billy the Kid - by claiming to have hurt no-one during his exploits, he remains one of Europe’s most wanted men.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/2014/newsspec_8700/index.html

Mission Accomplished: Mangalyaan Enters Mars Orbit

Mangalyaan, space, india, Mars, ISRO

India created history on Wednesday, becoming the first country to successfully get a spacecraft into the Martian orbit on its maiden attempt. Indian Space Research Organisation’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft started orbiting the red planet at 7.47am, but it was only 12 minutes later – because of a time delay in radio signals travelling the 680 million km – that scientists at Isro Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network in Bangalore, could erupt in joy as Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood a happy witness.

http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/mission-accomplished-mangalyaan-enters-mars-orbit–175632.html

I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin whatsoever (let us say a coin worth twenty centavos)…

“I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin whatsoever (let us say a coin worth twenty centavos) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures. Money is abstract, I repeated; money is the future tense. It can be an evening in the suburbs, or music by Brahms; it can be maps, or chess, or coffee; it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold; it is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the isle of Pharos. It is unforeseeable time, Bergsonian time, not the rigid time of Islam or the Porch.”

–Jorge Luis Borges.The Zahir

Lifepatch - citizen initiative in art, science and technology

lifepatch, labs, art, science, technology, indonesia, indonesian, DIY, artlabs

Selamat datang di situs online lifepatch.org. Situs ini merupakan situs resmi lifepatch yang menyajikan informasi mengenai aktifitas kami. Dalam situs ini kami mencoba menyajikan semua informasi dalam format bahasa Indonesia sederhana. Situs ini menggunakan format wiki sebagai database jaringan dari aktivitas yang kami lakukan. Kami selalu berusaha melengkapi informasi yang tersedia dari dokumentasi kami. Konten yang ada dalam situs ini akan terus berkembang seiring dengan waktu. Untuk menggunakan situs ini, silahkan gunakan menu navigasi utama yang telah kami sediakan di halaman ini, mengikuti kategori dari konten aktivitas atau mengetik kata kunci di kotak pencarian yang tersedia di kanan atas tampilan situs ini.

http://lifepatch.org/

Circular Confabulation ("A collection of diverse artifacts gathered in the forest, each one is representing a person who…

Vimeo, qnq, aujik, bilderberg, virgina, cyber, terrorism

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Circular Confabulation (“A collection of diverse artifacts gathered in the forest, each one is representing a person who participated in the 2008 Bilderberg meeting at the Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia, United States. The topic at that specific meeting was cyber terrorism. It was recorded by an anonymous security guard and then encrypted.”)