Weekending 19062012

7248926388_64201b8d4d_b © 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

Nicolas: A quite academic week with two days as an expert in a design school in Switzerland (Neuchatel) and polishing a research project submitted to a funding body. Being external jury judging student’s work is always intriguing, especially when projects … Continue reading

Monster sticky note on cell-phone screen

© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

Last month, when involved in a teaching seminar in France, I ran across this utterly curious scene. It’s basically a cell-phone with a piece of paper that shows a drawing, stuck on the device’s display. The drawing features a sort of animal quickly scribbled. This is exactly the sort of artifact that I like to [...] Continue reading

Weekending 12062012

Monday May 07, 13:52:22 © 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

Nicolas: last week was quiet because of May 1st but I spent few days on different things. First, I worked on preparing a wall of game controllers with Laurent Bolli for a summer exhibit at mudac in Lausanne. Since the … Continue reading

Virilio on “statistical image” and perception #newaesthetic

paul virilio © 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

Read in Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine: “But by way of conclusion, let us return to the crisis in perceptive faith, to the automation of perception that is threatening our understand- ing. Apart from video optics, the vision machine will also use digital imaging to facilitate recognition of shapes. Note, though, that the synthetic image, [...] Continue reading

Z/Z/Z/ describing the dimension of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language

© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

Via Daniel Rehn: Z/Z/Z/ is a project hatched by Daniel Rehn and Sarah Caluag dedicated to “describing the dimension of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language”. This endeavour deploys a custom visualization workflow to break down footage from film, animation and games and reconstitute this source material into stills and animated [...] Continue reading

Robot Mori: a curious assemblage from the Uncanny Valley

6995325090_aa2e218736_b © 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

Perhaps the weirdest piece of technology I’ve seen recently is this curious assemblage exhibited at Lift in Seoul: it’s called “Robot Mori” and, as described by Advanced Technology Korea: “Meet Mori, the alter ego of a lonely boy who wants to go out and make friends but is too shy. Mori, on the other hand, [...] Continue reading

Fosta’s Ye Olde Aesthetic

old-aesthetic © 2012 Julian. All rights reserved.

(Nick wrote this over on his blog. It deserves more blogginess, so I’m re-blogging it here as well. – Julian) The New Aesthetic. People are all over this one. It’s Bridle’s baby and a worthwhile endeavour it is too. The … Continue reading

“Recombinant food”

kitkatvic © 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

Reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, I ran across this notion of “recombinant food” (pp. 219-220): “Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midwestern/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie [...] Continue reading

Weekending 03222012

JCB_20042012_112807_1509 © 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

Nicolas: the week was packed with different meetings and discussions about a trip this summer to Los Angeles… two months to be spent on a *secret for now* laboratory project in a design school in the area. I also made … Continue reading

Robot-produced languages as part of #newaesthetic?

© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

As a follow up to my blogpost the other day about New Aesthetic as not-only-visual-but-also-something-else, I kept wondering about other possibilities. Overall, what I find interesting in NA is that algorithms produce new cultural forms… and that it’s not just about visual representations. One of the cultural form that can produced by robots/algorithms for that [...] Continue reading

Representing the city as it’s lived: livelihoods

© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.

It’s been few days that I’m following the the livehoods.org/ and it’s quite interesting. The project is defined as follows: “Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people’s checkin patterns at places across the city, we [...] Continue reading