As the alarm bells have made it urgently clear—humanity has breached planetary boundaries—causing anthropogenic climate change and environmental disaster across the world.

It’s hard to keep track of all the overlapping technological, environmental, and political crises to worry about in 2023.

It’s hard to keep track of all the overlapping technological, environmental, and political crises to worry about in 2023.

Knowing that an author who wrote unsparingly about humanity’s capacity for violence and oppression dwelled amid such picturesque Pacific Northwest ordinariness is comforting. This quiet, unremarkable place would suit a diligent recluse, which Butler reportedly was. Her stories, whether set on alien planets or fictionalized Earths, rarely depicted such nurturing environments.

Art takes a unique combination of skill, creativity the very human element of aesthetic taste. But what if the visual arts also fall to AI. In this episode we discuss Dall-E 2, a powerful text to image generator that's set to shake things up.

A.I. Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0iVR8sl9TiXmZUgZSZOpGFouuFNieqgP

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--- About ColdFusion --- ColdFusion is an Australian based online media company independently run by Dagogo Altraide since 2009. Topics cover anything in science, technology, history and business in a calm and relaxed environment.

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--- "New Thinking" written by Dagogo Altraide --- This book was rated the 9th best technology history book by book authority. In the book you’ll learn the stories of those who invented the things we use everyday and how it all fits together to form our modern world. Get the book on Amazon: http://bit.ly/NewThinkingbook Get the book on Google Play: http://bit.ly/NewThinkingGooglePlay https://newthinkingbook.squarespace.com/about/

Sources:

https://cdn.openai.com/papers/dall-e-2.pdf

https://fortune.com/2022/04/06/openai-dall-e-2-photorealistic-images-from-text-descriptions/

https://www.engadget.com/open-a-is-dall-e-2-produces-fantastical-images-of-most-anything-you-can-imagine-170056814.html

https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-open-ai-dall-e-2-images-111840375.html

https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-images-from-prompts-using-clip-and-stylegan-1f9ed495ddda

My Music Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGkpFfEMF0eMJlh9xXj2lMw

//Soundtrack//

Burn Water - Nostalgia Dreams

no spirit - leaves covered by snow

Burn Water - Does it Get Easier (clean)

Nils Frahm - You (Teen Daze Rework)

Jon Hopkins - The Wider Sun

Ben Böhmer - Flug & Fall

Kidnap Kid - Moments (feat. Leo Stannard)

Hammock - Wasted We Stared at the Ceiling

Burn Water - Fate

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Producer: Dagogo Altraide

Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage. The Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force.

The poor South is being exploited so that the rich North can transition to environmental sustainability. Entire swaths of land are being destroyed to secure the resources needed to produce wind turbines and solar cells. Are there alternatives? There’s a dirty secret hidden in every wind turbine.

This seminar course is an introduction to the concepts, questions, and components that encompass interactive media as it relates to creative expression and critical engagement. Students will learn to analyze interactive media’s constituent parts, engage in readings that critically examine both the impact that interactive media and technology have on culture and societies as well as the ways in which social contexts shape the development and application of these technologies, and apply these concepts in a series of creative exercises. The contexts become apparent by examining interactive media and interactivity through the lenses of relevant critical perspectives including politics, economics, ethics, race, gender, psychology, and the environment. Throughout the semester students will learn and apply critical texts to analyze interactive media and build a vocabulary for making sense of our increasingly mediated world. The course thus serves to introduce a conceptual foundation for students to inform and direct their own creative practice by establishing a lexicon of basic operating definitions and reinforcing a culture of makers capable of critical reflection and awareness. Readings, discussions, research, creative exercises and writing constitute the body of this course.

Yes, that Charles Murray, who in 1994 co-authored “The Bell Curve,” with Richard J. Herrnstein, arguing in two notorious chapters that I.Q. differences between the races were mostly innate and mostly intractable. (They allowed that environmental factors play a part in I.Q.

While technology critics drag technological solutionism in five thousand words or 280 characters, artist and environmental engineer Tega Brain wields solutions against themselves, in the form of objects and installations.

Much of what archaeologists do is study how humans adapt to the environment. After Gordon Willey’s (1953) groundbreaking investigation into the entire history of occupation of a small valley in Peru, understanding how humans lived in and modified their environment became commonplace.

As the UN sits down for its annual climate conference this week, many experts believe we have passed the point of no return by On Sunday morning hundreds of politicians, government officials and scientists will gather in the grandeur of the International Congress Centre in Katowice, Poland.

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The communications industry could use 20% of all the world’s electricity by 2025, hampering attempts to meet climate change targets and straining grids as demand by power-hungry server farms storing digital data from billions of smartphones, tablets and internet-connected devices grows expone

Below is a shortened version of Annie Culver’s essay that won Honorable Mention in the 2017 Greene Prize for Environmental Writing. Annie is a PhD student in English at Rice University.

Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet. The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study.

Utopian Topographies

Posted

on May 18, 2018 in Talks | 0 comments

I was recently invited to deliver a guest lecture at the City Literary Institute in London as part of their evening lecture programme, titled "Mapping Imaginary Topographies and Times: Literary Utopias from the Renaissance to the Present." Since I'm currently writing a chapter on “Utopia and Science Fiction" for the Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literature (ed. Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Fátima Vieira and Peter Marks, forthcoming 2018) I thought I'd take the opportunity to introduce students to the literary utopia and sketch out key moments in its development, including: the genre's origins in Renaissance island-utopias, the subterranean worlds of late nineteenth-century hollow-earth utopias, euchronias (utopias set in the future) of evolutionary progress and scientific management, Martian utopias, critical utopias of the 1970s, and contemporary post-apocalyptic and disaster fictions (particularly flood fictions) that privilege the utopian impulse despite their narratives of catastrophe.

As part of my broader current research into science fiction and utopian narratives of what I'm calling "extreme environments" (such as Mars, Antarctica, the deep sea, the hollow earth), I focussed the lecture around the question of how particular locations and settings have inspired literary utopias; as well as the common political features of these ideal societies and how they critique the socio-political conditions of their own times.

Click here to listen to a recording of the talk:

http://www.drcarolineedwards.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/CityLit-Talk.m4a 

Below are the PowerPoint slides which accompanied the plenary, or click here to download:

Download (PPTX, 15.4MB)

http://www.drcarolineedwards.com/2018/05/18/utopian-topographies/

Description: We present a design exploration on how water based droplets in our everyday environment can become interactive elements. For this exploration, we use electrowetting-on-dielectric (EWOD) technology as the underlying mechanism to precisely program the motion of droplets. EWOD technology provides a means to precisely transport, merge, mix and split water based droplets. We integrate EWOD devices into a range of everyday objects and scenarios to show how programmable water droplets can be used as information displays, interaction medium for painting and personal communication. Credits: Udayan Umapathi (vimeo.com/udayanu), Patrick Shin, Ken Nakagaki, Daniel Leithinger and Hiroshi Ishii. Winner of the Golden Mouse Award in the CHI 2018 video showcase.Cast: Tangible Media Group

I contributed a short text to the second issue of NXS: Synthetic Selves. The issue centres on how the self is understood, whether we have a complete agency in constructing ourselves and what kind of images of ourselves we are broadcasting. Buy a copy Online environments are playgrounds for our identities and places for becoming the other. At face value, online platforms seem to promise us the opportunity to become anyone we want. Yet what happens online has consequences in the physical world. And what happens online is supported by the physical systems in which we grow up and live. Technology not only mediates the narratives of our daily lives, it shapes them. With contributions from

Armen Avanessian Hannah Barton Karolien Buurman Gilles De Brock Ivan Cheng Kim de Groot Benjamin Grosser Andrea Karch Kristýna Kulíková Geoffrey Lillemon Geert Lovink Aaron McLaughlin Dr. Alberto Micali Shintaro Miyazaki Nina Power Daniel Rourke Sophia Seawell Marloes de Valk Keith J. Varadi

Release Events NXS will be touring in 3 cities to present the second publication with an exclusive neon cover and screen The One Minutes series curated for the occasion.

Paris: Offprint November 9 – 12 Amsterdam: Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum November 16 Berlin: Trust Ltd November 23

You can Also find NXS at the Exhibition #13 Cybernetic Choreographies at Spectrum Berlin on November 24–26

Among the many stories that can be told about the origins of the environmental movement in the West, perhaps the most common is that it began with the emergence of Romanticism in the late 18th century. In this version, environmentalism was born as the good twin to evil industrialization.