Our show is currently up at the RCA! Come around or find some more documentation on pohflepp.com and hi-res images on Flickr.
Model of a Lightning Harvester
Stuart Packer as Douglas Arnd
Plus: Growth Assembly, a project in collaboration with Daisy Ginsberg
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.
Launched yesterday: Social Collider, in collaboration with Karsten Schmidt aka Toxi/PostSpectacular as part of Google’s Chrome Experiments.
The term ’social collider’ mapped just after launch…
The Social Collider reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.
With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.
…and the same search term 16 hours later
This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.
The Social Collider acts as a metaphorical instrument which can be used to make visible how memes get created and how they propagate. Ideally, it might catch the Zeitgeist at work.
Give it a go at http://socialcollider.net and follow @socialcollider on Twitter for updates. There’s also a Flickr-pool for your screenshots. Happy colliding!
The Golden Institute
The Golden Institute for Energies is a think tank from an alternative reality where Jimmy Carter had defeated Ronald Reagan in the US election of 1981. The Institute, located in Golden, Colorado and headed by the prolific Douglas Arnd had been formed to pursue Carter’s energy policies and focussed heavily on devising alternative sources of power for the United States. Equipped with virtually unlimited funding, it quickly grew to be the earthbound equivalent of NASA. Its research and developments ranged in scale from manipulating the planet and its climate to the national economy and consumer products. Often called eccentric or megalomaniac by his contemporaries, Arnd’s grand visions and Golden’s projects have in fact extensively shaped the world of today.
Originating in research about the relationship of technology and idealism, this project takes the technique of future scenarios and attempts to turn it towards the past. In a realm which usually focusses on the future, this offers the opportunity of imagining what the present and its challenges would be like if different decisions had been made in the past and asks how a Western society could be transformed. The vast scale of some proposals echo the Cold War, but are in fact surprisingly similar to what some thinkers are demanding today in order to combat global warming. Lastly, the project reflects on the method of scenario-making itself, in fact invented by think tank RAND Corporation and Herman Kahn, and the way that designers are increasingly employing it today to forecast technological futures.
More about this project and some images.
Dream Cars
While The Golden Institute is mainly focussing on massive-scale projects, this project will look at the effects their visions had on the level of a consumerist society which has been transformed into being almost obsessed with energy. There is different approaches as which parts of life to focus on, but the most promising appears to be looking at the freeway system and the car. This is because as an object/system, it embodies many issues connected to the question of energy and modifications to it might have the potential to be turned into powerful statements. Apart from that, it is also a profoundly American artifact and scales very well from small parts to nation- sized systems. It’s important to point out that this does not mean designing electric or more efficient cars, but turning the whole system into something which fuses the idealism of saving the planet with the idea of Los Angeles. Think about drive through energy-generation, profitable (but dangerous?) detours and enthusiasts’ modifications of their vehicles to make energy. Goals:
A successful outcome will be a design of objects or a system which convincingly portrays a somewhat disturbing yet positively charged side to a familiar object which (especially in the context of European environmentalism) is the epitome of technology that is killing the planet. Furthermore it might somewhat provocatively ask whether successful action might require embracing competitiveness and capitalism as driving forces in our world. Ideally the work will be easily accessible and make the viewer somewhat insecure whether this has actually existed at some point.
Some basic visual research.
Soft things (with Daisy Ginsberg)
“Biology is a technology for manufacturing,” says Drew Endy. “Engineered genes could remake mass-production and materials.”
The economic and energy crises trigger an explosion in fuel and shipping costs, commodity production will be partially replaced by biofabrication: rapid prototyping where the material is produced by engineered bacteria. Manufacturing companies no longer produce goods, instead engineer life-forms, their cheap licensed products are grown where sold. Shops become factory farms. Large objects take time to grow and are more expensive, small ones more affordable. The rich continue to import ‘traditionally’ manufactured goods from China for status. Hackers have long broken the genetic copy protection on simple products. A thriving community of amateur designer-scientists has since evolved which experiment with the new properties of objects.
The prospect of using harnessing biology to create the world of consumer products might reverse the idea of industrial standards and introduce diversity and softness into a realm today largely dominated by heavy manufacturing. We are experimenting with the consequences and aesthetics of these living machines and materials. Objects for the poor and wealthy. Photographic processes with which to copy traditional objects, or fix broken ones. Stencils made with the remaining metal bits are exposed to media which grow into three-dimensional shapes.
