© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Nicolas: A quite academic week with two days as an expert in a design school in Switzerland (Neuchatel) and polishing a research project submitted to a funding body. Being external jury judging student’s work is always intriguing, especially when projects … Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Last month, when involved in a teaching seminar in France, I ran across this utterly curious scene. It’s basically a cell-phone with a piece of paper that shows a drawing, stuck on the device’s display. The drawing features a sort of animal quickly scribbled. This is exactly the sort of artifact that I like to [...] Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Btw, I started a tumblr few days ago to accumulate insights, data points and “weak signals” in a very basic/raw way… I use to put that material into delicious but I’m not satisfied with the service anymore. It’s called beta knowledge and it can be seen as material that can be turned into long posts [...] Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Nicolas: last week was quiet because of May 1st but I spent few days on different things. First, I worked on preparing a wall of game controllers with Laurent Bolli for a summer exhibit at mudac in Lausanne. Since the … Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Read in Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine: “But by way of conclusion, let us return to the crisis in perceptive faith, to the automation of perception that is threatening our understand- ing. Apart from video optics, the vision machine will also use digital imaging to facilitate recognition of shapes. Note, though, that the synthetic image, [...] Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Via Daniel Rehn: Z/Z/Z/ is a project hatched by Daniel Rehn and Sarah Caluag dedicated to “describing the dimension of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language”. This endeavour deploys a custom visualization workflow to break down footage from film, animation and games and reconstitute this source material into stills and animated [...] Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Perhaps the weirdest piece of technology I’ve seen recently is this curious assemblage exhibited at Lift in Seoul: it’s called “Robot Mori” and, as described by Advanced Technology Korea: “Meet Mori, the alter ego of a lonely boy who wants to go out and make friends but is too shy. Mori, on the other hand, [...] Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, I ran across this notion of “recombinant food” (pp. 219-220): “Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midwestern/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie [...] Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Read in Wired 3.05, May 1995 (via): “Kevin Kelly: If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do? Brian Eno: I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, [...] Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
Nicolas: the week was packed with different meetings and discussions about a trip this summer to Los Angeles… two months to be spent on a *secret for now* laboratory project in a design school in the area. I also made … Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
As a follow up to my blogpost the other day about New Aesthetic as not-only-visual-but-also-something-else, I kept wondering about other possibilities. Overall, what I find interesting in NA is that algorithms produce new cultural forms… and that it’s not just about visual representations. One of the cultural form that can produced by robots/algorithms for that [...] Continue reading
© 2012 Nicolas. All rights reserved.
It’s been few days that I’m following the the livehoods.org/ and it’s quite interesting. The project is defined as follows: “Livehoods offer a new way to conceptualize the dynamics, structure, and character of a city by analyzing the social media its residents generate. By looking at people’s checkin patterns at places across the city, we [...] Continue reading