Although Design Interactions is at heart a product design course, I have even moved a bit further towards the art side of things, creating three sculptural objects, a film and a painting-like collage. That is something I’m happy about, but it does not make it easier to position oneself as I’m neither necessarily aiming at the art-market, nor want to be a proper designer at this point in time.

So where could I go from here? My current plans for the Institute are to turn it into a platform for further research into some of the questions that the work is posing already. Mostly ones about the nature of technological visions, how they capture the public imagination and how that might relate to our own future. I’d be highly interested in having conversations with people who were instrumental in projects related to space flight, ecology, alternative energies and so on, or people who are trying to make similar things happen today, or reflect on them academically.

One question could be what the Institute’s world a few years later down the line might have been like, a United States with several mega-scale engineering projects which have significantly altered the notion of ecology and the abundance of electricity that came from it.

And there is definitely more to it, because there is a spirit in the air that is not so much unlike the one in the 1970s. However, this time it is more out of urgency and we are aware of the fact that many of the ideas that were being tested 40 years ago clearly did not work as many were hoping and yet they partly brought us things like the web, as Fred Turner has shown in his analysis of the American counterculture. In the light of the numbers that people like Saul Griffith have put forward, it is not the time for the small-scale interventions (although they obviously don’t hurt and are also ethically right) that are so fashionable again in media art. I believe it’s much more necessary to bring back that spirit of projects like the Apollo missions to address global issues with enthusiasm and also turn them into an economic opportunity rather then to portray them as the end of western civilization–something that the Golden Institute is hopefully talking about in an ironic and counterfactual, yet serious way.

Where to do that? That appears to be the best question at this moment and all I can do is follow my intuition there. My intuition says: California. I’ve had a very positive and productive time there last year, and a great deal of people who I would like to have a continued conversation with appear to be based there. It may be coincidence, but it may also be some sort of “Utopian current that is jet-packing across California” as my friend Aline recently said, and being the New World, I’d almost add the US as a whole. It might have something to do with a space that has been opened, more or less recently, and which still resonates. I would argue that there’s some of that spirit in Berlin too, which might be one of the reasons why it appears to be strangely compatible with California.

So part of September will be spent figuring out how to do that, both in terms of finding out the legal details but also what future possibilities there might be in working with people, fellowships, residencies etc. I’d be very happy about any suggestions in that area, who do you think could benefit from the thinking as sketched out above and might be up to meet?

Then in October I am going to be back in the UK, mostly because of a show at Dublin’s Science Gallery, plus to possibly do some work with a small group of exciting guys. And hopefully I will be bit smarter about where I want to take all this in the future.

I’ve just had the great pleasure of being a juror for the art exhibition BioLogic: A Natural History of Digital Life at this year’s SIGGRAPH in New Orleans.

Applying scientific methodology like peer-reviewing to something as subjective as art was definitely an interesting experience, with all the good and bad things that come with democracy. I’m sure that we’ve managed to put together a great show that will be much unlike the previous ones and intriguing for a wide range of people. Many thanks to Elona Van Gent, who’s the chair of the show for the invitation and to the other jurors for making this so pleasant.

You get to be a band with your friends, and it really feels like performing. Some things are well designed these days. So now I got a real blister on my finger from a simulated experience (see below).

So I moved to London to attend the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions program with Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby, Brendan Walker, James Auger, Nina Pope and a host of very different, motivated and bright students. The feel of the school is pretty different to UDK, probably because (even though it is in central London) it operates more of a campus which includes most facilities you would need throughout the day, including a fun bar. This way, people are being exposed to each other all the time, bonding them together much more strongly than I am used to and facilitating constant exchange between them. I actually prefer it this way, I believe.

Bruce Sterling came over for a talk on Monday and this also launched our first project, the brief of which is titled 54p7. It is about re-imagining robots and it is very open to interpretation. What really struck me in Bruce’s talk was his emphasis on how the idea of the holistic robot has proven to be a failure, with machines still struggling to understand basic language, let alone understand their surroundings. What arises from this is the image as the robot/computer as a somewhat disabled entity, maybe rather autistic because they tend to have what is often called splinter skills, such as extreme precision, speed or obviously computation.

To me this makes clear that machines, at least in the nearer future, will be highly dependent on human reasoning for most things outside their area of expertise. Humans (if you exclude actually autistic individuals) however, tend to be the opposite. Very good at subjective decisions (“I like”), but rather bad at moving around car bodies with precision or crunching PI. Consequentially, an interesting thing to propose might be a symbiosis between the human and the computer which, if you want, would result in a kind of much more powerful robot. Of course you could argue that this already exists in the form of different machines which extend one’s power, etc. but I am actually more thinking of an exchange between two separate entities.

I’ve been thinking hard about how this exchange might exactly work, and also tried to re-evaluate the general relationship man/machine for a second. The classic 20th century idea of a roboted life would mostly include a paradise with the machines doing all the work and humans having a good time in the park. From today’s perspective and our experiences with increasingly globalized work-processes, this prospect seems less promising as machines put people with replaceable jobs out of work due to their greater economical efficiency. Today’s ideal (in the western world) is the all-brain society which just thinks up great concepts and sends them to either the machines or South-East Asia for completion. Yet, there will hardly ever be enough clients or such jobs in general to cater to the 700+ million of, for instance, Europe. At some point, we might actually need machines to generate work for people in order to keep them alive or at least busy. So what I am thinking of right now, would be the perversion of the original idea of the robot towards a machine which rather produces work, especially tasks that it cannot perform itself, such as value assessments, moral judgements, aesthetic decisions, etc. I am currently figuring out the mechanics of that relationship, but a scenario could look like this:

An individual gets fired by his or her company because his or her (probably manual) job has been cut or moved to somewhere cheaper. He or she goes to the local employment center and after assessing skills and finding out that there’s nothing currently available in that sector, gets offered to participate in a companion program. This program consists of a little computer which easily could be fit onto (into?) one’s body and is so energy efficient that it can actually be powered by body heat and/or movement. The person wears that machine and every time it would get stuck and needs human input, he or she logs on to a service very much like Amazon Mechanical Turk and completes a few tasks as outlined above for which he or she will be payed in return. As said, I’m still trying to figure out the exact nature of this symbiotic relationship, but the prospect of commenting on social issues by inverting the paradigm of the robot itself seems kinda promising.

If you happen to know nice people who could use a flatmate at this moment, please get us in touch. Any hints appreciated and no restrictions made so far. Cheers!

Back from Tokyo. Was really wonderful. I need to go back as soon as possible, it’s just so much fun there that I just want to turn Wapanese. Took some photos too.

The Dislocate-symposium was very inspiring, you might want to take a look at the coverage on WMMNA. Buttons was exhibited in a tiny space and unfortunately the Agfa-button cracked on the second day. Wasn’t that bad since the camera still works, but I suppose that I have to make a button myself for the next exhibition – the 30-year-old plastic seems to be too brittle. I made two new cases and have documented the making to some extent, for anyone who might be interested.

Up next, after a week of vacation, will be a workshop at Ars Electronica in Linz, titled Export to World. Linda and I have been invited by Aram Bartholl to be part of the Second City-event, so we will be helping people make 3D-papercraft-models of objects that we will have selected and extracted from Second Life. More on that as it progresses.

So I went and made the most obvious thing: I threw all my feeds together to create a custom Sascha-superfeed.

Just think of it as a narcissistic Frankenstein’s monster of information: all the Blogs, Homepage, Flickr personalities, del.icio.us and posts from WMMNA in one place.