MachineMachine /stream - search for landscape https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[RPS Contemporary Group | Dr Grant Scott: United Nations of Photography]]> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_-07wlkYKA

Recorded Monday June 20th, 2022

After fifteen years art directing photography books and magazines such as Elle and Tatler, Dr Grant Scott began to work solely as a photographer for commercial and editorial clients in 2000. His images combine his experience working with some of the greatest photographers of the last century with his graphic and journalistic talents to create engaging photographic narratives from every commission.

Grant is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Coordinator for Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015) and New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019).

In the talk Grant addresses the constantly shifting sands of engagement with the photographic medium. Noting that we read books and acquire a respect for how difficult it is to write and are taught how to read the written word and appreciate its transformative power Grant will makes the case for the importance of visual literacy. He will explain how digital photography has democratised the medium, with ensuing debates between those with analogue experience and the digital natives and focus on the importance of ‘the personal’ in defining subject matter. The talk and following questions and answers are an exploration on what makes a successful visual narrative.

]]>
Mon, 27 Jun 2022 02:33:41 -0700 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_-07wlkYKA
<![CDATA[No music on Mars: Sound is different on the red planet - Big Think]]> https://bigthink.com/hard-science/mars-sounds-music/

Your mind’s eye can already paint a picture of what Mars looks like. You will probably conjure up the image of a barren landscape of scattered boulders and pebbles under a reddish-brown sky. It is familiar by now. But what about our other senses?

]]>
Fri, 03 Jun 2022 05:52:04 -0700 https://bigthink.com/hard-science/mars-sounds-music/
<![CDATA[No music on Mars: Sound is different on the red planet - Big Think]]> https://bigthink.com/hard-science/mars-sounds-music/

Your mind’s eye can already paint a picture of what Mars looks like. You will probably conjure up the image of a barren landscape of scattered boulders and pebbles under a reddish-brown sky. It is familiar by now. But what about our other senses?

]]>
Fri, 03 Jun 2022 01:52:04 -0700 https://bigthink.com/hard-science/mars-sounds-music/
<![CDATA[Break Bread]]> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41B5YonixBs

------Curiosity Stream Sign Up Link----- https://curiositystream.com/fdsignifier

After a few months of “success” on the platform, I sat to contemplate my journey from unknown content creator scraping for views to hot new video essayist and legit “left tuber”. This contemplation led to numerous questions and ponderings, and as I dived into those questions I started to get frustrated the answers that I arrived at. I got tired of people asking me “where have you been this whole time” when I knew I had been just quietly treading water, wondering why my videos weren’t being seen, and wondering why I barely saw any creators in the mold of what I wanted to do.

To explore these emotions, I talked to a variety of creators and experts on the nature of YouTube as a media platform the algorithmic systems that govern it, and the greater culture around it. I delved into my own concerns and observations about the landscape of YouTube, especially “left tube”.

This video is my thesis on what challenges I and other black creators face.

00:00 Intro 02:12 How Did I Get Here? 08:22 The Untold History of Breadtube/Lefttube 33:17 No Favors From the Algorithm 1:09:10 Problems in the Community

Creators Featured Voice Memos for the Void - https://www.youtube.com/c/voicememosforthevoid Jordan Harrod- https://www.youtube.com/c/JordanHarrod/videos The Storyteller- https://www.youtube.com/c/TheStorytellerAJ CJ the X- https://www.youtube.com/c/CJTheX Noah Samsen- https://www.youtube.com/c/NoahSamsen khadija Mbowe- https://www.youtube.com/c/KhadijaMbowe T1J- https://www.youtube.com/c/the1janitor Legal Eagle- https://www.youtube.com/c/LegalEagle Hank Green- https://www.youtube.com/c/SciShow

Channels Mentioned Yara Zayd- https://www.youtube.com/c/Yharazayd Kolpeshtheyardstick- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Vj51Kp7qPC102MsA98Fww Victory- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8JTStI16odEK-N3JJcMmpw

DJ Trackmatic- https://www.instagram.com/trackmatic_idris/?hl=en https://youtube.com/channel/UCqeWnr-XOv2x8jr2fW72mnA

Resources-

Pewdie Pipeline by Noncompete https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmRYRRDbuw&t=1029s

The Alt Right Playbook series by Innuendo Studios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xGawJIseNY&list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ

Not So Awesome (channel awesome fall out documentary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvedKSaHCBQ

Implicit Bias Primer- https://www.simplypsychology.org/implicit-bias.html

Implicit Bias Association Harvard Study- https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

]]>
Mon, 06 Dec 2021 10:00:09 -0800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41B5YonixBs
<![CDATA[Media Fields Journal - Lithium Landscapes]]> http://mediafieldsjournal.org/lithium-landscapes/

Figure 1. Satellite image of the Salar de Atacama. (Source and copyright: USGS) From space, the lithium fields of the Salar de Atacama in Chile appear like a multi-colored mosaic or plots of agricultural lands arranged in grids.

]]>
Thu, 08 Jul 2021 23:55:23 -0700 http://mediafieldsjournal.org/lithium-landscapes/
<![CDATA[Here's what we know sex with Neanderthals was like - BBC Future]]> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210112-heres-what-sex-with-neanderthals-was-like

Their eyes met across the rugged mountain landscape of prehistoric Romania. He was a Neanderthal, and stark naked apart from a fur cape. He had good posture and pale skin, perhaps reddened slightly with sunburn. Around one of his thick, muscular biceps he wore bracelet of eagle-talons.

]]>
Mon, 18 Jan 2021 06:55:14 -0800 https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210112-heres-what-sex-with-neanderthals-was-like
<![CDATA[Cyberfeminism Index]]> https://cyberfeminismindex.com/

Cyberfeminism Index is INCOMPLETE and ALWAYS IN PROGRESS. Commissioned by Rhizome, it premiered with New Museum’s First Look. The printed publication Cyberfeminism Catalog will be published by Inventory Press in 2022. Please feel welcome to contribute using the “submit” button at the bottom of all pages.

cyberfeminism?

Cyberfeminism cannot be reduced to women and technology. Nor is it about the diffusion of feminism through technology. Combining cyber and feminism was meant as an oxymoron or provocation, a critique of the cyberbabes and fembots that stocked the sci-fi landscapes of the 1980s. The term is self-reflexive: technology is not only the subject of cyberfeminism, but its means of transmission. It’s all about feedback.

]]>
Thu, 22 Oct 2020 11:59:18 -0700 https://cyberfeminismindex.com/
<![CDATA[MeFi: A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind]]> http://www.metafilter.com/181213/A-Monstrous-Psychedelic-Bubble-Exploding-In-Your-Mind

Need some psychedelic music getaway, a blend of old and new, long mixes with separate themes? Back in 2008, Amorphous Androgynous / Future Sound of London decided to make the ultimate mixtape. A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind Volume 1: Cosmic Space Music is a 2h40m journey across a varied sonic landscape engineered for your enjoyment.

]]>
Fri, 31 May 2019 22:35:42 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/181213/A-Monstrous-Psychedelic-Bubble-Exploding-In-Your-Mind
<![CDATA[Hito Steyerl - This is the Future - Biennale Arte 2019]]> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYQB4_riCCg

Steyerl uses AI technology to create a garden of the future that emulates the Venetian landscape of elevated walkways. Viewers walk among digital flowers that cycle through their lifespan without ever actually existing. Through Steyerl’s self-created technology, she asks whether AI can successfully predict the future, the answer being an explicit ‘no’.

]]>
Wed, 29 May 2019 07:40:52 -0700 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYQB4_riCCg
<![CDATA[Episode 431: Takeshi Murata and Robert Beatty | Bad at Sports]]> https://huffduffer.com/therourke/433031

http://traffic.libsyn.com/badatsports/Bad_at_Sports_Episode_431-Murata_and_Beatty.mp3download

This week: San Francisco checks in with a great interview. Bad at Sports contributors Brian Andrews and Patricia Maloney sat down with artist Takeshi Murata and sound designer Robert Beatty on November 9, 2013, at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, to discuss Murata’s most recent digitally animated video, OM Rider(2013). OM Rider follows two animated creatures: a wizened old man that Andrews describes as “half the Curious George Man in the Yellow Suit, half like the butler from Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and a hipster wolf, which rides a moped through a barren landscape and performs other aimless tasks. The video begins with the creature playing a synthesizer that gives the video its title. Om Rider contains Murata’s characteristic absurd humor and aesthetic, which mixes highly attuned lighting and composition with more retro modeling and minimalist, almost antiseptic spaces.

Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago. In 1997, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied film, video, and animation. He currently lives and works in Saugerties, New York. Murata has exhibited at the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Sikemma Jenkins & Co., New York; Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Salon 94, New York. Murata’s work is featured in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; and The Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

FYI, AP will post an excerpted text version of this interview on Dec. 3, and the link for that conversation should be:

http://www.artpractical.com/column/interview-with-takeshi-murata/

And here is a related review Brian wrote for his previous show: http://www.artpractical.com/review/get_your_ass_to_mars_andrews/

About Latest Posts ChristopherOperations Manager at Bad at SportsChristopher Hudgens is the Operations Manager for BaS and works in various other capacities for other organizations in the Chicago Art & Culture scene. Most recently as Business Operations Manager for the Bridge Art Fair and currently an advocate for all things art & technology.

Latest posts by Christopher (see all)

Episode 577: Kerry James Marshall WLPN B@SC Radio Edit - February 28, 2017

Kevin Jennings (1979-2016) - June 28, 2016

Episode 549: James Wines SITE Architect - May 24, 2016

http://badatsports.com/2013/episode-431-takeshi-murata-and-robert-beatty/

]]>
Thu, 28 Sep 2017 10:13:24 -0700 https://huffduffer.com/therourke/433031
<![CDATA[Transmediale 2017 (events)]]> http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/transmediale-2017/

I just came back from two jam packed weeks at Transmediale festival, 2017. Morehshin Allahyari and I were involved in a wealth of events, mostly in relation to our #Additivism project. Including: On the Far Side of the Marchlands: an exhibition at Schering Stiftung gallery, featuring work by Catherine Disney, Keeley Haftner, Brittany Ransom, Morehshin and myself.

Photos from the event are gathered here.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook european launch: held at Transmediale on Saturday 4th Feb.

Audio of the event is available here.

Singularities: a panel and discussion conceived and introduced by Morehshin and myself. Featuring Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, and Dorothy R. Santos.

Audio of the entire panel is available here. The introduction to the panel – written by Morehshin and myself – can be found below. Photos from the panel are here.

Alien Matter exhibition: curated by Inke Arns as part of Transmediale 2017. Featuring The 3D Additivist Cookbook and works by Joey Holder, Dov Ganchrow, and Kuang-Yi Ku.

Photos from the exhibition can be found here.

 

Singularities Panel delivered at Transmediale, Sunday 5th February 2017 Introduction by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke   Morehshin: In 1979, the Iranian Islamic revolution resulted in the overthrowing of the Pahlavi deen-as-ty and led to the establishment of an Islamic republic. Many different organizations, parties and guerrilla groups were involved in the Iranian Revolution. Some groups were created after the fall of Pahlavi and still survive in Iran; others helped overthrow the Shah but no longer exist. Much of Iranian society was hopeful about the coming revolution. Secular and leftist politicians participated in the movement to gain power in the aftermath, believing that Khomeini would support their voice and allow multiple positions and parties to be active and involved in the shaping of the post-revolution Iran. Like my mother – a Marxist at the time – would always say: The Iranian revolution brought sudden change, death, violence in unforeseen ways. It was a point, a very fast point of collapse and rise. The revolution spun out of control and the country was taken over by Islamists so fast that people weren’t able to react to it; to slow it; or even to understand it. The future was now in the hands of a single party with a single vision that would change the lives of generations of Iranians, including myself, in the years that followed. We were forced and expected to live in one singular reality. A mono authoritarian singularity. In physics, a singularity is a point in space and time of such incredible density that the very nature of reality is brought into question. Associated with elusive black holes and the alien particles that bubble out of the quantum foam at their event horizon, the term ‘singularity’ has also been co-opted by cultural theorists and techno-utopianists to describe moments of profound social, political, ontological or material transformation. The coming-into-being of new worlds that redefine their own origins. For mathematicians and physicists, singularities are often considered as ‘bad behaviour’ in the numbers and calculations. Infinite points may signal weird behaviours existing ‘in’ the physical world: things outside or beyond our ability to comprehend. Or perhaps, more interestingly, a singularity may expose the need for an entirely new physics. Some anomalies can only be made sense of by drafting a radically new model of the physical world to include them. For this panel we consider ‘bad behaviours’ in social, technological and ontological singularities. Moments of profound change triggered by a combination of technological shifts, cultural mutations, or unforeseen political dramas and events. Like the physicists who comprehend singularities in the physical world, we do not know whether the singularities our panelists highlight today tell us something profound about the world itself, or force us to question the model we have of the world or worlds. Daniel: As well as technological or socio-political singularities, this panel will question the ever narcissistic singularities of ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’ – confounding the principles of human universality upon which these suppositions are based. We propose ‘singularities’ as eccentric and elusive figures in need of collective attention. It is no coincidence that ‘Singularity’ is often used as a term to indicate human finitude. Self-same subjects existing at particular points in time, embedded within particular contexts, told through a singular history or single potential future. The metaphor of the transformative Singularity signals not one reality ‘to come’, nor even two realities – one moved from and one towards – but of many, all dependant on who the subject of the singularity is and how much autonomy they are ascribed. The ‘Technological’ Singularity is a myth of the ‘transhumanists’, a group of mainly Western, commonly white, male enthusiasts, who ascribe to the collective belief that technology will help them to become ‘more than human’… ‘possessed of drastically augmented intellects, memories, and physical powers.’ As technological change accelerates, according to prominent Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, so it pulls us upwards in its wake. Kurzweil argues that as the curve of change reaches an infinite gradient reality itself will be brought into question: like a Black Hole in space-time subjects travelling toward this spike will find it impossible to turn around, to escape its pull. A transformed post-human reality awaits us on the other side of the Technological Singularity. A reality Kurzweil and his ilk believe ‘we’ will inevitably pass into in the coming decades. In a 2007 paper entitled ‘Droppin’ Science Fiction’, Darryl A. Smith explores the metaphor of the singularity through Afro-American and Afrofuturist science fiction. He notes that the metaphor of runaway change positions those subject to it in the place of Sisyphus, the figure of Greek myth condemned to push a stone up a hill forever. For Sisyphus to progress he has to fight gravity as it conspires with the stone to pull him back to the bottom of the slope. The singularity in much science fiction from black and afro-american authors focusses on this potential fall, rather than the ascent:

“Here, in the geometrics of spacetime, the Spike lies not at the highest point on an infinite curve but at the lowest… Far from being the shift into a posthumanity, the Negative Spike is understood… as an infinite collapsing and, thus, negation of reality. Escape from such a region thus requires an opposing infinite movement.”

The image of a collective ‘push’ of the stone of progress up the slope necessarily posits a universal human subject, resisting the pull of gravity back down the slope. A universal human subject who passes victorious to the other side of the event horizon. But as history has shown us, technological, social and political singularities – arriving with little warning – often split the world into those inside and those outside their event horizons. Singularities like the 1979 Iranian revolution left many more on the outside of the Negative Spike, than the inside. Singularities such as the Industrial Revolution, which is retrospectively told in the West as a tale of imperial and technological triumph, rather than as a story of those who were violently abducted from their homelands, and made to toil and die in fields of cotton and sugarcane. The acceleration toward and away from that singularity brought about a Negative Spike so dense, that many millions of people alive today still find their identities subject to its social and ontological mass. In their recent definition of The Anthropocene, the International Commission on Stratigraphy named the Golden Spike after World War II as the official signal of the human-centric geological epoch. A series of converging events marked in the geological record around the same time: the detonation of the first nuclear warhead; the proliferation of synthetic plastic from crude oil constituents; and the introduction of large scale, industrialised farming practices, noted by the appearance of trillions of discarded chicken bones in the geological record. Will the early 21st century be remembered for the 9/11 terrorist event? The introduction of the iPhone, and Twitter? Or for the presidency of Donald J Trump? Or will each of these extraordinary events be considered as part of a single, larger shift in global power and techno-mediated autonomy? If ‘we’ are to rebuild ourselves through stronger unities, and collective actions in the wake of recent political upheavals, will ‘we’ also forego the need to recognise the different subjectivities and distinct realities that bubble out of each singularity’s wake? As the iPhone event sent shockwaves through the socio-technical cultures of the West, so the rare earth minerals required to power those iPhones were pushed skywards in value, forcing more bodies into pits in the ground to mine them. As we gather at Transmediale to consider ai, infrastructural, data, robotic, or cyborgian revolutions, what truly remains ‘elusive’ is a definition of ‘the human’ that does justice to the complex array of subjectivities destined to be impacted – and even crafted anew – by each of these advances. In his recent text on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster Jean-Luc Nancy proposes instilling “the condition of an ever-renewed present” into the urgent design and creation of new, mobile futures. In this proposition Nancy recognises that each singularity is equal to all others in its finitude; an equivalence he defines as “the essence of community.” To contend with the idea of singularities – plural – of ruptures as such, we must share together that which will forever remain unimaginable alone. Morehshin: This appeal to a plurality of singularities is easily mistaken for the kinds of large scale collective action we have seen in recent years around the world. From the Arab Springs, and Occupy Movement through to the recent Women’s March, which took place not 24 hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump. These events in particular spoke of a universal drive, a collective of people’s united against a single cause. Much has been written about the ‘human microphone’ technique utilized by Occupy protesters to amplify the voice of a speaker when megaphones and loud speakers were banned or unavailable. We wonder whether rather than speak as a single voice we should seek to emphasise the different singularities enabled by different voices, different minds; distinct votes and protestations. We wonder whether black and brown protestors gathered in similar numbers, with similar appeals to their collective unity and identity would have been portrayed very differently by the media. Whether the radical white women and population that united for the march would also show up to the next black lives matter or Muslim ban protests. These are not just some academic questions but an actual personal concern… what is collectivism and for who does the collective function? When we talk about futures and worlds and singularities, whose realities are we talking about? Who is going to go to Mars with Elon Musk? And who will be left? As we put this panel together, in the last weeks, our Manifesto’s apocalyptic vision of a world accelerated to breaking point by technological progress began to seem strangely comforting compared to the delirious political landscape we saw emerging before us. Whether you believe political mele-ee-ze, media delirium, or the inevitable implosion of the neo-liberal project is to blame for the rise of figures like Farage, Trump or – in the Philippines – the outspoken President Rodrigo Duterte, the promises these figures make of an absolute shift in the conditions of power, appear grand precisely because they choose to demonize the discrete differences of minority groups, or attempt to overturn truths that might fragment and disturb their all-encompassing narratives. Daniel: The appeal to inclusivity – in virtue of a shared political identity – often instates those of ‘normal’ body, race, sex, or genome as exclusive harbingers of the-change-which-should – or so we are told, will – come. A process that theorist Rosi Braidotti refers to as a ‘dialectics of otherness’ which subtly disguises difference, in celebration of a collective voice of will or governance. Morehshin: Last week on January 27, as part of a plan to keep out “Islamic terrorists” outside of the United States Trump signed an order, that suspended entry for citizens of seven countries for 90 days. This includes Iran, the country I am a citizen of. I have lived in the U.S. for 9 years and hold a green-card which was included in Trump’s ban and now is being reviewed case by case for each person who enters the U.S.. When the news came out, I was already in Berlin for Transmediale and wasn’t sure whether I had a home to go back to. Although the chaos of Trump’s announcement has now settled, and my own status as a resident of America appears a bit more clear for now, the ripples of emotion and uncertainty from last week have coloured my experience at this festival. As I have sat through panels and talks in the last 3 days, and as I stand here introducing this panel about elusive events, potential futures and the in betweenness of all profound technological singularities… the realities that feel most significant to me are yet to take place in the lives of so many Middle-Easterners and Muslims affected by Trump’s ban. How does one imagine/re-imagine/figure/re-figure the future when there are still so many ‘presents’ existing in conflict? I grew up in Iran for 23 years, where science fiction didn’t really exist as a genre in popular culture. I always think we were discouraged to imagine the future other than how it was ‘imagined’ for us. Science-fiction as a genre flourishes in the West… But I still struggle with the kinds of futures we seem most comfortable imagining. THANKS   We now want to hand over to our fantastic panelists, to highlight their voices, and build harmonies and dissonances with our own. We are extremely honoured to introduce them: Dorothy Santos is a Filipina-American writer, editor, curator, and educator. She has written and spoken on a wide variety of subjects, including art, activism, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. She is managing editor of Hyphen Magazine, and a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellow, where she is researching the concept of citizenship. Her talk today is entitled Machines and Materiality: Speculations of Future Biology and the Human Body. Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira are Brazilian design researchers, who very recently wrapped up their PhDs at the University of the Arts Berlin. Under the ‘A Parede’ alias, the duo researches new design methodologies, processes, and pedagogies for an onto-epistemological decolonization of the field. In their joint talk and performance, Luiza and Pedro will explore the tensions around hyperdense gravitational pulls and acts of resistance. With particular focus on the so-called “non-lethal” bombs – teargas and stun grenades – manufactured in Brazil, and exported and deployed all around the world. Rasheedah Phillips is creative director of Afrofuturist Affair: a community formed to celebrate, strengthen, and promote Afrofuturistic and Sci-Fi concepts and culture. In her work with ‘Black Quantum Futurism’, Rasheedah derives facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics, futurist traditions, and Black/African cultural traditions to celebrate the ability of African-descended people to see “into,” choose, or create the impending future. In her talk today, Rasheedah will explore the history of linear time constructs, notions of the future, and alternative theories of temporal-spatial consciousness.      

]]>
Thu, 09 Feb 2017 08:50:26 -0800 http://machinemachine.net/text/ideas/transmediale-2017/
<![CDATA[Masters of the Anthropocene Boundary | Generation Anthropocene]]> https://huffduffer.com/therourke/364507

It’s our 50th episode!  To celebrate we sit down with four members of the Anthropocene Working Group: the scientists and experts who are deciding whether or not we formally adopt the Anthropocene into the geologic time table.  We discuss what makes the Anthropocene boundary different from all of the other boundaries in geologic history, how they deal with the increased public attention to this particular boundary, and some cultural ripple effects of the Anthropocene dealing with the Law of the Sea.  As we wrap up, the Generation Anthropocene producers take a minute to reflect on all of the rapid changes we’ve witnessed over the past 50 episodes.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Episode (Right-click and select Save Link As…)

If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like:

  1. Conservation in the Anthropocene

  2. Welcome to the… Technosphere?

  3. The rock hard truth of mass extinctions

Contributors

Jan Zalasiewicz

Jan Zalasiewicz is a Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester, and before that worked at the British Geological Survey.  He is a field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, and researches fossil ecosystems and environments across 500-million years of Earth history.  Jan is also the convenor for the Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ and has published many scholarly works on the topic.  Along with Mark Williams, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

 

Davor Vidas

Davor Vidas is the director of the Law of the Sea and Marine Affairs Programme at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI).  As an expert dealing with the Law of the Sea, Davor is currently investigating how international laws, all of which were written during our previous and stable geologic epoch, need to adapt to better fit the unstable environment of the Anthropocene.

 

Mike Ellis

Mike Ellis is the head of climate change science at the British Geological Survey.  Mike has worked all across the world researching the intersection of plate tectonics and landscape evolution, the environmental impacts of climate change, and the Anthropocene.

 

Mark Williams

Mark Williams is a reader in paleobiology at the University of Leicester.  His work deals primarily with the interactions between the biosphere and other Earth systems.  Mark also studies climate proxies and the application of numerical climate models.  Along with Jan Zalasiewicz, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

 

Interviewer

Miles Traer

For biographical information on Miles Traer, please click here.

http://web.stanford.edu/group/anthropocene/cgi-bin/wordpress/anthropocene-working-group-roundtable/

]]>
Thu, 06 Oct 2016 09:17:48 -0700 https://huffduffer.com/therourke/364507
<![CDATA[15 Driver Behaviours In A World of Autonomous Mobility — Hidden in Plain Sight — Medium]]> https://medium.com/hidden-in-plain-sight/15-more-concepts-in-autonomous-mobility-8fd1c794e466

These are the behaviours and practices that will mainstream in our self-driving urban landscape. Inspired by a session with an automotive client, and a follow up of the popular 12 Concept in Autonomous Mobility.

]]>
Sun, 17 Jul 2016 04:33:06 -0700 https://medium.com/hidden-in-plain-sight/15-more-concepts-in-autonomous-mobility-8fd1c794e466
<![CDATA[Landscapes of Data Infection – BLDGBLOG]]> http://www.bldgblog.com/2016/02/landscapes-of-data-infection/

There’s a fascinating Q&A in a recent issue of New Scientist with doctor and genetic researcher Karin Ljubic Fister. Fister studies “plant-based data storage,” which relies on a combination of artificially modified genes, bacteria, and “infected” tobacco plants.

]]>
Tue, 16 Feb 2016 08:17:49 -0800 http://www.bldgblog.com/2016/02/landscapes-of-data-infection/
<![CDATA[‘Auto-rewilding’ landscapes and the Anthropocene – Interview with Anna Tsing | Allegra]]> http://allegralaboratory.net/auto-rewilding-landscapes-and-the-anthropocene-interview-with-anna-tsing/

Anna Tsing is professor of anthropology at the University of Santa Cruz, California and the Nils Bohr professor at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she heads the Living in the Anthropocene research project.

]]>
Thu, 19 Nov 2015 02:13:35 -0800 http://allegralaboratory.net/auto-rewilding-landscapes-and-the-anthropocene-interview-with-anna-tsing/
<![CDATA[Litter, Landscape and The Road | Alluvium]]> http://www.alluvium-journal.org/2015/02/27/litter-landscape-and-the-road-2/

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) presents a dystopian vision of a near-future world in which most organic vegetation has died and human life is becoming increasingly rare.

]]>
Tue, 26 May 2015 05:08:18 -0700 http://www.alluvium-journal.org/2015/02/27/litter-landscape-and-the-road-2/
<![CDATA[Pacer]]> http://vimeo.com/123553635

Pacer looked at the world in a way no film had before it. The geometry of the city and its construction, the artistry of Montreal's landscape seen the hyper-prism of a camera racing through time on different dimension. Compressed imagery and physical motion combine in a never-been-seen-before kind of way. Pacer can lay claim to being the first hyperlapse film, or at the very least, to being the precursor to it's development. It was shot on a Bolex 16mm camera in Montreal, Quebec in 1995. Shooting single frames, all the 'effects' are done in camera. The film's original negative was destroyed in it's one and only printing in 1995. That print was screened once and telecined for posterity, and the print was never projected again. The film would've fallen into obscurity, except for the low rez video version that was included in a VHS video magazine called Channel Zero in 1996. Other visual artists like TopherZ of the Dandelion Collective who saw that Channel Zero and began to pick up the technique, and with Guy Roland's subsequent film, Spacer, in 2004 (later known as Kino Citius), the technique of hyperlapse took shape. The only print of the film was carefully transferred to 2K digital in 2014 and painstakingly remastered in early 2015, resulting in the version you see here.

]]>
Thu, 02 Apr 2015 16:32:39 -0700 http://vimeo.com/123553635
<![CDATA[#Additivism Interview at Creators Project: 3D Printing's Call to Action]]> http://additivism.org/post/114419825956

Benoit Palop interviewed us for The Creators Project

It took over a year of intense reflection and exploration for San Francisco-based new-media artist and art activist Morehshin Allahyariand London-based writer and artist Daniel Rourke to create The 3D Additivist Manifesto, a research project that combines art, engineering, science fiction and digital media aesthetics into a call to arms to soar beyond the current limits of 3D printing. 

Here, the creative, “intelligent,” and evolutionary technology—for which the possibilities are still being explored—is probed in a 10-minute video essay that takes viewers deep into an uncanny journey of 3D-rendered landscapes and surreal objects, set to a soundtrack by Andrea Young.

It’s a dynamic call to artists, researchers, and other interested parties to reflect on the current state of additive manufacturing. The end goal is the “Additivist Cookbook,” a methodological collection that will bring together submitted ideas, thoughts, and designs for the future of 3D printing.

To learn more about “Additivism,” The Creators Project spoke with Allahyari and Rourke:
]]>
Mon, 23 Mar 2015 10:51:58 -0700 http://additivism.org/post/114419825956
<![CDATA[Whale tale: a Dutch seascape and its lost Leviathan | University of Cambridge]]> http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/whale-tale-a-dutch-seascape-and-its-lost-leviathan

In 1873 the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was given a number of Dutch landscape paintings by a benefactor called Richard Kerrich. Among these works of art was a beach scene painted by the artist Hendrick van Anthonissen early in the 17th century.

]]>
Thu, 05 Jun 2014 01:53:50 -0700 http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/whale-tale-a-dutch-seascape-and-its-lost-leviathan
<![CDATA[Artist Profile: Morehshin Allahyari]]> https://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/jan/31/artist-profile-morehshin-allahyari/#new_tab

Daniel Rourke: Your ongoing project, Dark Matter, was something of a revelation for me: a collection of objects forbidden or “unwelcome” in Iran, brought together through digital modelling, meshing, and 3D printing. The results are playful and surrealistic, with the same capacity to waken the subconscious as any Dali Lobster-Telephone or Hair-Lamp. For me Dark Matter resonates as subversive not just because the dog-dildo is an affront to conservative sexual values, or because the Barbie-VHS blurs cultural boundaries (a feature of a lot of your work). Rather I was taken by how the objects spoke to the here and now; that perhaps there is something about the collapse of all commodities, forms, and ideas into the digital that promotes blurred perspectives and subversive practices. I wondered whether you saw your work as particular to the digital tools and materials you choose, or are you “just” making use of things that happen to be available to you? Morehshin Allahyari: I was particularly interested in choosing the most relevant tools and materials for creating a new body of work about forbidden/unwelcome objects. I found the idea of “3D printing/re-creating the forbidden” a very compelling prospect, which raised paradoxical issues of limitations and boundaries—social, cultural, and political. I was also very interested in the technology of 3D printing as this “poetic technology” for resistance, for reclaiming all the things that were taken from me during my life in Iran or are currently being taken away from my sister, and mother, and my friends. There is something very special about things that you can’t have access to when they are forced by law out of your life. When there are many of those objects/things, and they are the most ordinary things (dog, sex toys, neck-tie, Barbie, satellite-dish, Bart Simpson, ham/pig, alcohol, etc.), then there is something meaningful and symbolic about using a technology like 3D printing to re-create them. The combination of the objects, I think, adds a sense of humor to the work that is very similar to the ridiculousness of having these objects banned when you look at the whole picture.

While developing the project, I really fell in love with thinking about 3D printing as a “documentation tool”… you know, like when you go to historical museums, and they have this whole collection of objects or things that used to be this and that, or had whatever functionality 500 years ago. I thought, what if this could be the archive, the documentation of the life after the 1979 revolution in Iran, the life I lived, and how will it feel to look back at this collection in 20 or 30 years? Also, through combining and re-creating these objects and putting them inside a virtual word, I can re-contextualize and invite the audience to enter the historical dimension of the work… So yeah… I am directly addressing the medium of 3D printing here. Plus, there is a broad conversation of censorship built into the technology of 3D printing as a whole, which actually expands the project to other countries including the United States (I am thinking about the 3D printed, potentially functional gun as one of the first examples).

Morehshin Allahyari, virtual landscape for #dog #dildo #satellite-dish from the series “Dark Matter.” Work in progress. DR: You have just collaborated on a text that shifts between registers, performing the splits, breaks and tears it indicates in the life and work of “self-exiled” people. I was struck by an image you use of “Time, memory, space, and bodies collapsing, losing composition.” [1] These ideas feature heavily in your work, where one’s heritage or identity can coalesce and mutate as readily as a 3D print. MA: I am struck by the idea of representation in digital art. I think about the reconstruction of memory in virtual worlds, the rebuilding of non-existent objects from the virtual world into real life… how we understand our world through representation, the dystopian, the utopian, and everything in-between. Since I have moved to the U.S. (2007), I have become more and more fascinated by the in-depth thoughts on exile and diaspora within Edward Said’s text “Reflections on Exile,” Mahmoud Darwish’s poems, and Lorna Dee Cervantes’ Palastine poem, among others. But in my own work, I wanted to simultaneously be aware of the dangers of the romanticization of exile and self-exile – as well as the whole nostalgic remembrance of the “homeland” that is inaccessible; I wanted to look for different ways that I can use digital technology to talk about my own understanding of self-exile. So I worked on a 3D animation video, a plexiglas installation, a 16mm film, a series of Facebook post-cards installation, and a creative research/writing project in the course of one year. It’s interesting to step-back and think about each of these works now (after two years); to think about geographical determinism and the collective history of the young self-exiled Iranians; but also to realize that, through time, my relationship has changed with “home” and that it will continue to change. Doing this interview and thinking about my body of work “The Romantic Self-Exiles”, I remembered that I haven’t thought about my house in Tehran, Yousefabad and Valiasr streets, and other common places that I used to go, for a very long time. I used to do this thing almost every night, that I would close my eyes and try to imagine and remember every details of my room in Tehran… or the exact directions/streets that I would have to take to get to whatever place. I couldn’t help but think that’s the only way to survive the diasporic life… could this be one dimension of the mutation of identity? Is this where I forever will feel distanced, unrelated, and disconnected from home? Or have I just entered a new stage of life in diaspora? Gray areas might be the only places worth existing…delving into identity as a transparent rather than defined; homeland as belonging to nowhere and everywhere; virtual space as both real and imagined; aesthetics as perfection vs imperfection.

Morehshin Allahyari. Excerpt from The Romantic Self-Exiles I (2012). DR: The mutations you speak of also come through in the way you approached the writing of that text, stretching the critical territory you cover by fusing the essay with a voice more readily associated with fiction. I also note elements of fabulation in your gallery and video works. Both The Romantic Self-Exiles-I and Over There Is Over Here toy with reality and imagination in a broken essayistic language. Do you understand your practice as writerly? MA: My discovery of the art world has been through creative writing (since the age of 12 when I started to take part in a private creative writing class in Iran that would meet weekly, which continued until I was 18)… so writing is very dear to my heart and it’s a very important part of my work. I’m interested in bridging digital technology, writing, and visual arts in an essayistic and poetic language. I think about Milan Kundera and Chris Marker as the best examples of this style of writing. As I have worked more and more with a software like Maya, I have learned that there is something very beautiful about building and creating landscapes and environments. Especially in the Romantic Self Exiles animation, it felt like creating an imagined home… a space and environment where I could perhaps belong… but another aspect of it was talking about this experience and process of modeling, animating, texturing, etc through a self-reflexive narration. In Over There Is Over Here, there is also a landscape, but the narration is more complex with ambiguity… going back and forth between a third-person narrator and myself as the narrator and an outsider… In both of these works, though, my writing process was connected to the process of designing these virtual landscapes. DR: In another text produced with collaborator Jennifer Way you discuss the representation of female identity in Iran. Could you tell us some more about how this relates to art and romanticization in particular? MA: I was really interested in doing research on women, technology, and art in Iran, because there is almost no academic research and discourse about this topic (although the art and technology scene is growing very rapidly in Iran). So I have kept an eye on the art and technology festivals, exhibitions, workshops, and lectures that have been happening in Iran in the last 4-5 years and been amazed by the lack of women and the dominance of the hyper-masculine culture. In collaboration with Jennifer Way, we interviewed Iranian artists (mostly women) who in one way or another are and have been involved in the new media art scene in Iran and asked for their comments, observations, and concerns regarding new media art or art and technology considering the recent rise of such art practices in Iran. This is especially and personally very important to me because Iranian women have been the dominant university demographic in Iran for the last decade or so. On the other hand, in my own work, I have constantly thought about and re-defined both my Middle-Eastern female identity, as well as my identity as a woman in the field of art and technology. On the one hand, I have gradually become aware of and resisted the female identity defined by—for instance—the work of artists like Shirin Neshat. This is something that comes up in my daily discussions with other female colleagues from the Middle-East: how we feel distanced from the presentation and re-presentation of women in the work of older generation artists (in this case from Iran)… That in fact, we are eager to re-define these clichés and—in most cases—one-dimensional interpretations and exoticized or stereotypical images of women of the Middle-East; thinking about ourselves more as “Glocal.”

Morehshin Allahyari,#barbie #vhs from the series “Dark Matter.” Work in progress. The other side of this is my relationship with technology and the fact that I am interested in a poetic and feminine voice in technological aesthetics and in ways to challenge and push whatever medium that I’m using. In the last couple of years, I have been inspired by the works of other female artists and activists such as Claudia Hart, Brenna Murphy, Jenny Vogel, Tania Bruguera, and Guerrilla Girls. I feel like I have the amazing opportunity of combining and experimenting with all these ideas… to bring together new media, politics, art, social science, and creative writing… and examine a multi-layered understanding of female identity while dealing with the complexity of being in between. DR: To bring it back to my first question then, do you think that there is something specific in the ways and means of digital technology that enables the representation of interstitial spaces, politics and identities? MA: In both the writing/narrative and the aesthetics of my work, I am interested in the idea of imperfection and the allowance of error… which makes me think about the fact that bleeding/leading edge technology has built-in flaws and imperfections in them… which also works perfectly with the broader discourse of corruption of politics, collapse of identities, the loss of space through time, etc. In the case of 3D printing technology, I like to think there is something very special about it that doesn’t exist in other software/tools/material. Maybe this is a very “Eastern/Dervish” kind of way of thinking about digital technology: to think about means and ways and reasons and effects as points of departure and entrance. You know, like trying to stay away from the fetishism and consumerism that falls into the use of digital technology… so, yes! DR: Finally, what are you working on at the moment? MA: Well, as of right now, I am creating a series of virtual spaces for my 3D printed objects, and also combining more unwelcome/forbidden objects to print in the next coming months. After this, I want to broaden the conversation to other countries in an upcoming project, creating a 3D forbidden orgy (lol) installation, looking for new ways to blur these cultural boundaries and relationships. In general, in these new series of work I am taking a break from heavy, serious work which is mostly what I’ve been working on and creating for the last 6 years. I feel like I am exhausted from that, and I want to actually take a step back and be able to make fun of all these very serious topics. If you think about Dark Matter and these forbidden objects that we grew up with in Iran, they are actually simultaneously fucked up and ridiculous. I think as I’m growing as an artist, I am getting more and more interested about exploring humor in serious circumstances. I don’t want to feel bad for myself and the life I lived in Iran. I don’t want other people’s sympathy. That’s why I want to be able to sometimes make fun of it more than anything else. Age: 28 Location: Dallas, TX. How/when did you begin working creatively with technology? Since the very first months that I moved from Iran to Denver to study for my MA in Digital Media Studies. I remember I only knew a little bit of photoshop, and one of the first classes that I had to take was coding and CSS. It was a big jump. But after two years, I started to work constantly with different software and digital tools… At the same time, my partner (andrew blanton) has played an important role in my approach to technology, both conceptually and how I can teach myself new software and skill-sets as an artist. Where did you go to school? What did you study? During my undergrad I was in Iran and I studied Social Science and Media Studies at Tehran University. I studied Digital Media Studies for my MA at the University of Denver, where I was invited by Lynn Schofield Clark to do research with her at the Estlow Center on projects that concerned art, culture, and media (this was my initial reason to move from Iran to the United States). Then I was invited by David Stout of Noisefold to go to University of North Texas and work with him in Developing the Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts (iARTA) research cluster while studying in New Media Art for my M.F.A. What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Currently I am a visiting assistant professor at University of Texas in Dallas at the Art and Technology department. Before this I worked mostly doing adjunct positions. I lived in Chicago before Texas, and Denver before moving from Iran in 2007. When I lived in Tehran, I taught English and freelanced for different art and culture magazines and newspapers. What does your desktop or workspace look like? I don’t have a studio space outside of our house right now. But I do have a room as my studio to work at, which I kind of like better than studios that I’ve had in the last 4 years. I mostly work on my Hackintosh for my animation projects. I make a lot of notes, both in Farsi and English depending on my headspace when I’m writing and thinking… I’m obsessed with lighting of the space that I work at. Some days both my workspace and desktop look more organized than the others, which might be a good measurement of how productive I’m being. : )

  References [1] Allahyari, Morehshin, and Jennifer Way. “Romantic Self-Exiles.” Anglistica no. Issue 17 1 (2013). https://www.anglistica.unior.it/content/romantic-self-exiles.

]]>
Fri, 31 Jan 2014 09:00:00 -0800 https://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/jan/31/artist-profile-morehshin-allahyari/#new_tab