Foggy notions #16

Best friends

Scanner bed

Make yourself comfortable.

from here

Lo res girl

Summer reading

Scene from the 40s serial Red Men:Conquerors of Earth

Atrium pt2

The concept is simple: The middle of the Guggenheim is empty, how to fill it? Guggenheim curators Nancy Spector and David van der Leer picked ~200 artists and architects and urged them to be fantastical. They were. Their cleverness turned what could have been institutional self-infatuation into an unusually clear look at what creative leaders are thinking about right now. The list includes climate change, energy and environmental challenges, torture, terrorism and how we respond to it, and institutional critique. Finally, some of the proposals are just plain funny. Each day this week I'll look at how artists projected one of these interests into the GuggenVoid.

Taken from here

Blueprint

Handing over our homework assignment.

Here we are with a copy of the first draft for Mathew (right) - author of The Red Men. We're expecting him to have us 'ruffed up' any time now.

My God, I'm so heavy

IEEE Spectrum

The MeBots. Awful title for a film.

"In the future, all business meetings will be conducted by telepresence robots--on-site avatar machines that will take care of the boring business of earning a living while we sit back at home sipping lattes and generally enjoying our 300-year lifespans.
(Credit: Sigurdur Orn)
Even if you don't believe telepresence robots are going to eliminate the need to get out of bed in the morning, it's hard to dismiss them as a powerful new communication tool, especially if one is waving at you while perched on someone's shoulder.
MIT doctoral student Sigurdur Orn's MeBot is a mobile telepresence bot with richly expressive gestural abilities. It's part of what he terms "socially embodied communication," which is more immediate than an e-mail or phone call."

more at cnet news

Painful moan

via ๏̯͡๏

No more dirty nappies

"A team of researchers in Osaka, looking to learn more about the mechanisms involved with infant development, publicly presented a robot on March 3rd that is designed after human babies. The robot named the M3-neony has learned to crawl on all fours, among other child-like capabilities."

via examiner.com

Relax

RedMan

image by Third Plane

Getting ready to go out

thanks Griff!

Of course he'll come back.

Two years of screenwriting summed up in one lo-res jpeg

Low res action

Freshen up

Face.

Scan apps.

Graphic overlays

We have everything we need

Dzama!

Plastic parts.

Sayaka Ganz

What could be more apt...

..than a soundtrack composed by a machine.

David Cope

What does the future look like?

The last 10 minutes are a pretty scary vision of the future.

Hi-Five!

Peratech is using its "quantum tunnelling composite" (QTC) material to create touch-sensitive skin for intelligent machines at MIT. QTC is a low-cost, flexible, and electrically conductive material that would give robots a new means of interacting with people.

via cnet news

Jump in.

The Economists' new clothes

"When the neoliberal project first began in 1979 with Mrs Thatcher the idea was that politicians would give away power to the markets and the state would shrink. Over the past 15 years the idea of the "market" has been extended to practically every area of society - education, health, even the arts. But to make this happen those running the neoliberal project had to enforce it by creating vast and intricate performance indicators and feedback systems (which in many cases led to wide scale absurdities). And to do this they used the mighty power of the state.

The crucial thing is that these systems had practically nothing to do with the original idea of the "market". They are actually a strange pseudo-scientific piece of planning engineered by politicians and groups of technocrats that borrowed far more from cold-war ideas of feedback engineering and cybernetics than from the risky roller coaster of the market. And to create the systems they had to greatly enlarge the state and the extent of its power, which is the very opposite of the vision of a free-market utopia.

And when you examine the roots of the neoliberal idea of the market it gets odder still. The ideas that rose up in the post-war years that captured the imagination of people like Mrs Thatcher are actually a very strange mutation of capitalism. If you listen to interviews with Friedrich Hayek he talks far more like a cold war systems engineer discussing information signals and feedback than Adam Smith with his theories of Moral Sentiment.

While the roots of the technical systems that the banks created to manage risk also lie back in the cybernetic dreams of the 1950s and 60s. Dreams not of progress through the dynamism of markets - but of using computers to create a balanced, almost frozen world. - just like in the Cold War."

by Adam Curtis

Print, bind, envelope, post, sweat

Should I picture you naked?

Vintage magazine ad

Mysteries of the Gods

from William Shatner's Mysteries of the Gods (1976)

via cinematrices