Entries from Monday, February 16. 2009
Monday, February 16. 2009
RFID key mixed with and old key assemblage
An intriguing mix of the bleeding-edge of recent times (seen at my hotel in Paris yesterday):
- this rfid key that you swipe on your door to enter your room
- the stability of the past: this old and commong keyring which is so heavy that you would not keep the rfid key in your pocket during a whole day: you must put it back at the hotel desk when you get out (delegation in design).
The flat, sober and white plastic key and the old copper keyring.
Posted by Patrick Keller in Culture & society, Interaction design at 11:17
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, interaction design, interferences, monitoring, tagging
Modernism 2.0. | Meaning is back in fashion, courtesy of M/M (Paris)
Published on Friday, 6 February, 2009 | 2:04 pm
If you've ever been troubled by what they call a 'postmodern moment' – disorientated, disconnected and detached – worry no more, write Monika Parrinder + Colin Davies. Postmodernism is over, according to Nicholas Bourriaud the French writer and curator behind the current Tate Triennial 2009.
Instead, the altermodern is emerging. This rejection of postmodernism (after modernism) is a rejection of 'history as an arrow', as Bourriaud put it in a recent Tate interview. Alter proposes 'multiplicity, otherness.' It's the 're-loading' of modernism for today's context; global, nomadic, creolised but – crucially – connected. 'Today we are living in a maze and we have to get meaning out of this maze and these are the big stakes around the altermodern,' he claims. Meaning is back in fashion!
Altermodern runs until April 2009 at Tate Britain, based on four themes – 'alter', 'exile', 'travelling' and 'borders' –, which provide cluster points for Bourriaud's Altermodern manifesto.
Bourriaud's interest is in how artists can meaningfully connect across moments. A significance for designers is that this matrix of relationships – between people, contexts and medias – is one in which design was already embedded, long before the Bourriaud sound-bite machine came along. What then, can design gain by 'reloading' the latest art criticism?
A link here is M/M (Paris), the designers Bourriaud insisted be used for the show. M/M (Paris) have worked with him since he was director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where he developed the curatorial practices that informed his first book 'Relational Aesthetics' (1998). This explored art which creates 'scenarios' and generates relationships between people. It was followed by'Postproduction' (2002) which relocated – reconnected – the relational into the Internet age.
In 'Part of the Process' (Eye no. 59 vol. 15) we used this work to discuss what's already going on in design, with reference to work by Ji Lee, Kenya Hara, Daniel Eatock and A2.
Paul Elliman, who works in both art and design, once noted (in correspondence with us) that if art adds or emphasises the relational 'design, which is always already relational by definition, is a kind of super-relational [. . .] in terms of its production, not just its use or reception.'
M/M (Paris) provide a good example: their design often functions as co-ordinates, points at which the art, design and fashion communities meet. For them, the moment of intersection – of people, contexts, medias – is like a conversation which becomes the 'engine' to produce images.
The 'solo' show by M/M (Paris) in London (Haunch of Venison, 2006) was an installation-collage of preceding work. Uprooted from its original context, some of their visually baroque, story-building work lost its original meaning. In a parallel talk at Tate Modern they explained that to re-edit old images to 'create a new history' was a deliberate process. This is the sense of creole that connects them to altermodern – which is time, not site-specific. Modernism 2.0?
Graphic designers often view 'theory' as suspect. By the time art-cultural ideas such as Bourriaud's begin to resonate in design, their moments have passed in the art world. And yet, Bourriaud's starting question –how do we make sense of cultural chaos? – remains valid. If the art world looks to the way artists answer his questions, then the design world should ask the same of designers, too.
This year's Tate Triennial will show how the design by M/M (Paris) – re-embedded in the 'real' networks of the show's production – helps Bourriaud bring meaning to this chaos.
By Monika Parrinder + Colin Davies, Limited Language.
Tate Triennial 2009 / www.altermodern.com.
There's a curator's talk by Lizzie Carey-Thomas on 20 Feb 2009.
Limited Language blog on M/M (Paris) as Bourriaud's 'semionauts'.
Above and below: Front and back covers and spreads from Altermodern (Tate Publishing, 2009, £19.99). Design: M/M Paris.
Tate triennal "Altermodern"
Nicolas Bourriaud on Wikipedia
Nicolas Bourriaud's "Esthétique relationnelle"
En partie d'accord avec Nicolas Bourriaud "Alter proposes 'multiplicity, otherness.' It's the 're-loading' of modernism for today's context; global, nomadic, creolised but – crucially – connected. 'Today we are living in a maze and we have to get meaning out of this maze and these are the big stakes around the altermodern".
Par contre, au niveau de la communication visuelle choisie pour la triennale, je trouve qu'il y a difficilement plus postmoderne que M/M...
Posted by Patrick Keller in Art, Culture & society at 10:33
Do We Need a New Internet?
By JOHN MARKOFF
Two decades ago a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student brought the Internet to its knees with a simple software program that skipped from computer to computer at blinding speed, thoroughly clogging the then-tiny network in the space of a few hours.
The program was intended to be a digital "Kilroy Was Here." Just a bit of cybernetic fungus that would unobtrusively wander the net. However, a programming error turned it into a harbinger heralding the arrival of a darker cyberspace, more of a mirror for all of the chaos and conflict of the physical world than a utopian refuge from it.
Since then things have gotten much, much worse.
Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.
What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a "gated community" where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.
"Unless we're willing to rethink today's Internet," says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, "we're just waiting for a series of public catastrophes."
That was driven home late last year, when a malicious software program thought to have been unleashed by a criminal gang in Eastern Europe suddenly appeared after easily sidestepping the world's best cyberdefenses. Known as Conficker, it quickly infected more than 12 million computers, ravaging everything from the computer system at a surgical ward in England to the computer networks of the French military.
Conficker remains a ticking time bomb. It now has the power to lash together those infected computers into a vast supercomputer called a botnet that can be controlled clandestinely by its creators. What comes next remains a puzzle. Conficker could be used as the world's most powerful spam engine, perhaps to distribute software programs to trick computer users into purchasing fake antivirus protection. Or much worse. It might also be used to shut off entire sections of the Internet. But whatever happens, Conficker has demonstrated that the Internet remains highly vulnerable to a concerted attack.
"If you're looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon," Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm, said recently.
The Internet's original designers never foresaw that the academic and military research network they created would one day bear the burden of carrying all the world's communications and commerce. There was no one central control point and its designers wanted to make it possible for every network to exchange data with every other network. Little attention was given to security. Since then, there have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect.
"In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago," said Eugene Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University and a pioneering Internet security researcher, "because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure."
In fact, many computer security researchers view the nearly two decades of efforts to patch the existing network as a Maginot Line approach to defense, a reference to France's series of fortifications that proved ineffective during World War II. The shortcoming in focusing on such sturdy digital walls is that once they are evaded, the attacker has access to all the protected data behind them. "Hard on the outside, with a soft chewy center," is the way many veteran computer security researchers think of such strategies.
Despite a thriving global computer security industry that is projected to reach $79 billion in revenues next year, and the fact that in 2002 Microsoft itself began an intense corporatewide effort to improve the security of its software, Internet security has continued to deteriorate globally.
Even the most heavily garrisoned military networks have proved vulnerable. Last November, the United States military command in charge of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars discovered that its computer networks had been purposely infected with software that may have permitted a devastating espionage attack.
That is why the scientists armed with federal research dollars and working in collaboration with the industry are trying to figure out the best way to start over. At Stanford, where the software protocols for original Internet were designed, researchers are creating a system to make it possible to slide a more advanced network quietly underneath today's Internet. By the end of the summer it will be running on eight campus networks around the country.
The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users.
The Stanford Clean Slate project won't by itself solve all the main security issues of the Internet, but it will equip software and hardware designers with a toolkit to make security features a more integral part of the network and ultimately give law enforcement officials more effective ways of tracking criminals through cyberspace. That alone may provide a deterrent.
This is not the first time a replacement has been proposed for the current Internet. For example, modern Windows and Macintosh computers already come equipped to support a new Internet protocol known as IPv6 that would fix many of the shortcomings of the current IPv4 version. However, because of cost, performance and compatibility questions it has languished.
That has not discouraged the Stanford engineers who say they are on a mission to "reinvent the Internet." They argue that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world. Like the existing Internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organization will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today's network and are adopted as Internet standards.
For all those efforts, though, the real limits to computer security may lie in human nature.
The Internet's current design virtually guarantees anonymity to its users. (As a New Yorker cartoon noted some years ago, "On the Internet, nobody knows that you're a dog.") But that anonymity is now the most vexing challenge for law enforcement. An Internet attacker can route a connection through many countries to hide his location, which may be from an account in an Internet cafe purchased with a stolen credit card.
"As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire," said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego.
A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers' licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the Internet.
Proving identity is likely to remain remarkably difficult in a world where it is trivial to take over someone's computer from half a world away and operate it as your own. As long as that remains true, building a completely trustable system will remain virtually impossible.
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, science & technology, security
The City Is Here: Table of contents
Goaded by Mike Kuniavsky's publication last week of an outline to his forthcoming book, here's a table of contents for The City Is Here For You To Use. It's a little unusual, in that it takes the form of a skeletal argument, or maybe even an essay; I hope you enjoy it. Of course, you should also consider this an alpha version, subject to change. (If any of this whets your appetite, do consider pre-ordering the book here.)
Twentieth-century urbanism struggled mightily to establish the rudiments of an empirical, human-centered practice - one capable of identifying, understanding and supporting the processes that give rise to lively, vibrant cities.
We've learned that the dynamics which bring such communities into being and allow them to flourish are peculiarly sensitive; the configurations of favorable material circumstances, enlightened policies, and empowered citizens on which urban vitality depends are inherently contingent, and must remain (or be held) within surprisingly delicate tolerances. The introduction of any disruptive factor is likely to move a given ensemble across a variety of thresholds, with significant implications for the way that place is formed and the ways in which it can be experienced. The disruption we will be examining in this book is technological.
In recent years, a class of networked information-processing technologies has emerged which permits the built environment, and discrete objects in it, to sense, process, store, communicate, display and take immediate physical action upon information. The result is a highly dynamic overlay of current conditions, soundings and action potentials made explicit and superimposed on the city - something we might think of as network weather.
This weather is already exerting pressure on the delicate parameters that between them do so much to condition the life of our urbanized places. We can see both the urban milieu and the array of choices available to people moving through it beginning to evolve in response.
In many ways, the technologies involved remain distressingly opaque. Understanding how they work in concert with one another (or fail to do so) requires specialist knowledge that tends not to be bundled alongside their appearances in the world. In order to build effectively with these systems, therefore, and use them most sensitively once deployed, we need to unpack the specific details of their capabilities, affordances and governing logics.
When considering the impact of informatic technologies on urban form and experience, however, the relevant unit of analysis is not the technology itself, but rather the local technosocial assemblage into which it has been laminated. Such constellations of protocols, practices, activities and cultural assumptions operate in mesh to produce a given effect, and this makes any one component very hard to dissect out, consider in isolation or successfully transplant.
Nevertheless, some general trends are observable. A previously mute and disjointed streetscape is being replaced by one comprised of addressable, queryable and even scriptable objects;
An architectonic built up from static and relatively inert forms is being replaced by dynamic structures and surfaces;
A visual environment which asks little more of us than that we spectate is being replaced by interactive façades, screens, and displays;
Above all, those of us moving through the urban environment have ourselves been richly provisioned with sensors operating on a variety of channels and at the most intimate scale.
As a result, where previously human and other processes in the urban fold were lost to insight and to history, the contemporary city's rhythms and processes speak themselves.
The bottom line is a city that responds to the behavior of its users in something close to real time, and in turn begins to shape that behavior.
This has profound implications for a variety of practices that, between them, are arguably constitutive of metropolitan experience: the way the city is disposed in space, as well as the way we find our way around it;
…the way in which we move around and through it;
…the way we make use of it as a platform for conviviality, to socialize, experience solidarity and the simple pleasures of the company of others;
…and the way we bring goods and services to market.
We need to be clear that significant threats to liberty and autonomy inhere in any adoption of these technologies. They can all too easily be used to apply differential control over who gets to use space and under what circumstances, with little or no effective recourse in real time.
There are other inherently and significantly problematic aspects involved any time we re-engineer urban practices of long standing, that have matured to the point that they already work usefully well, around technical processes which are not, have not and do not. We need to take particular care to avoid the introduction into everyday life of failure modes which do not currently exist.
Only by reckoning with these constraints and limitations will we formulate a robust urbanist practice for the twenty-first century, a Newer Urbanism capable of fully embracing the potential of networked informatic technologies while turning them to our own various ends.
This will require a new way of conceiving of public objects as informational utilities…
…new agreements regarding the use of public space…
…and perhaps even a new conception of the practice of citizenship.
None of these strategies will be sufficient on its own, and the list is far from comprehensive. Ultimately, successfully managing the challenges of the networked city will mean understanding it not just as an ecosystem but as a single conjoined process unfolding in time. And further still, as a deeply seamful process, presenting all who encounter it with a million gleaming hinges: apertures allowing you to reach in and withdraw useful intelligence, to tweak its performance to your own present necessities, or to plug its outputs as inputs into yet other running processes. Now, as never before, the city is here for you to use.
Via Adam Greenfield's Speedbird
Adam Greenfield on Wikipedia
Everyware
Quelques notes à propos du prochain livre d'Adam Greenfield (The City Is Here For you To Use). L'auteur du livre Everyware y détaille les points qu'il souhaite aborder concernant une approche urbanistique qui tiendrait compte de l'"ubiquitous computing". Y sont présents de nombreux points qui nous tiennent à coeur par rapport à l'espace (urbain) contemporain, même si ici le focus est fait sur la question de l'"ubicomp".
A noter également la table des matières du livre de MIke Kuniavsky qui fait une large mention du concept d'"information shadows" (autrement les traces que nous laissons ou que les objets laisse dans les réseaux: "Nearly everything manufactured today exists simultaneously in the physical world and in the world of data").
Posted by Patrick Keller in Architecture, Culture & society, Interaction design, Territory at 09:43
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, culture & society, interaction design, territory, theory, thinkers, ubiquitous, urbanism
February '09