Continue reading »Cornell, Joseph (1903-72). American sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage.
He had no formal training in art and his most characteristic works are his highly distinctive `boxes’. These are simple boxes, usually glass-fronted, in which he arranged surprising collections of photographs or Victorian bric-à-brac in a way that has been said to combine the formal austerity of Constructivism with the lively fantasy of Surrealism. Like Kurt Schwitters he could create poetry from the commonplace. Unlike Schwitters, however, he was fascinated not by refuse, garbage, and the discarded, but by fragments of once beautiful and precious objects, relying on the Surrealist technique of irrational juxtaposition and on the evocation of nostalgia for his appeal (he befriended several members of the Surrealist movement who settled in the USA during the Second World War). Cornell also painted and made Surrealist films.
Modern Device Company is the work of Paul Badger, an artist working in new media and public art, who teaches courses in physical computing and robotics at Rhode Island School of Design. He also does much of the reference documentation on the Arduino website.
The Bare Bones Board is an Arduino-compatible board (Freeduino) that implements the vast majority of the functionality of the Arduino Diecimila with the exception that the USB chip has been removed to a cable. More on this below.
Arduino is an open-source microcontroller hardware, and software, environment, closely related to the Wiring and Processing open-source initiatives. The microcontroller uses an Atmel Atmega168 chip programmed with a bootloader, so no programming hardware is required.
Renga - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Renga (連歌, Renga?) is a form of Japanese collaborative poetry. Ren=connected or linked. Ga=elegance. A renga consists of at least two ku (句, ku?) or stanzas, often many more. The opening stanza of the renga chain, called the hokku (発句, hokku?), later became the basis for the modern haiku style of poetry. As the renga was a popular poetry form for many centuries, there are many sayings that find their roots in renga traditions. The Japanese phrase ageku no hate (挙句の果て, ageku no hate?) means “at last”, as the ageku is the last stanza of a renga.
The Box That Makes the World Go Round
A system of self-propelling factors powers the growth: Globalization drives containerized cargo, and containers fuel globalization. Steel boxes have become the building blocks of the new global economy. Without this ingeniously simple, stackable and standardized receptacle, we would still be waiting for China’s economic miracle, and the American urge to spend, spend, spend would have been stifled in its infancy
…
The ships usually spend four to eight weeks at sea. A global network of shipping lanes now spans the globe, directing traffic. The Artemis, for instance, plies the so-called “A Loop”: from Hamburg to Amsterdam and on to, say, Tokyo, Singapore and Southampton before returning to Germany. Vessels from the “Super-Post-Panamax Class” — which measure 40 meters wide and can’t squeeze through the Panama Canal - take 56 days to complete a single lap.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,386799,00.html
Shipping containers in Architecture: Quik House : Adam Kalkin
http://www.quik-build.com/quikHouse/QH_main.htm
Continue reading »“You can look at them both as junk or as something special,” Kalkin notes. “To me they are like a treasured antique: they may not be inherently valuable, but the history and the storytelling add value.” Kalkin’s inventive architectural vision grows directly out of his belief in interconnectedness. He argues, “We come from a culture of sampling. I’m just out there in the world picking out things and reusing things—sampling—from my experience and from what other people have already invested a lot of time and energy in. I think there’s a tremendous amount of richness out there.”
His ability to mix unlikely sources and materials with the fairly straightforward domain of domestic architecture sets him apart from other architects, he thinks: “I’m a little bit outside of architecture, in the sense of my lack of allegiance to a specific kind of behavior or orthodoxy. I don’t value architecture culture over other cultures: I draw from writers, music, and the visual arts. Who wants to narrow the world down?” Instead Kalkin hopes he’s “seeing real connections between things and reaching toward a humanitarian core,” revealing that the “distinctions we’ve built up are false ones.” Just as insects make the most of a fallen tree in a forest, utilizing the tree for both shelter and food, Kalkin sees the sense in “repurposing” objects for architectural ends. Or, as he says, “Any kind of junk can be turned into stuff.”
RE: Minimalism
As a sculptural object, the shipping container has obvious associations with minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre or Sol LeWitt. The inherent inherent physical qualities of the ‘ready-made’ container are key interests for me, which are enhanced by the etching of time and space onto their internal and external fabric.
The Shipping Container as Object Oriented Code
From the perspective of my daily work, as a web developer, the parallels between shipping containers and object oriented programming are obvious; a standardised design for the shipping of goods across different modes transportation (which interestingly took hold because not only was it standardised, but also it was open - given freely to the ISO standards organisation), which is turned into many many instances of the design (or class), and which is extended in many different ways (inheritance).
<?php
// object oriented presentation of the shipping container:
class shippingcontainer {
public $height;
public $width;
public $length;
private $contents;
function __construct( $height, $width, $length )
{
$this->height = $height;
$this->width = $width;
$this->length = $length;
}
function storeGoods( $goods )
{
$volume = $this->height * $this->width * $this->length;
if ($goods->volume > $volume || isset($contents))
{
return false;
}
else
{
$this->contents = $goods->contents;
return true;
}
}
function unloadGoods()
{
if (!isset($this->contents))
{
return false;
}
else
{
$goods = $this->contents;
unset($this->contents);
return $goods;
}
}
}
class politicalmeaning extends shippingcontainer
{
public $meaning;
function __construct( $height, $width, $length )
{
$parent::__construct( $height, $width, $length );
$meaning = array();
}
function addMeaning( $new_meaning )
{
$meaning[] = $new_meaning;
}
}
?>
About Steam Shift (My Company)
The name Steam Shift comes from an industrial process which combines coal and steam in the presence of a catalyst to produce CO2 and Hydrogen. This process is known as the Steam Shift Reaction.
This process is an ideal metaphor for the creative process - taking two disparate elements and combining them in the presence of a catalyst (ideas, concepts, technologies) to produce something new.
Steam Shift Ltd itself is a product of this process - it is the synergy of of creativity in art, design, music with technology (Web, CD-Rom, Kiosk, Email).
About Artisans
Peculiarly (as I found myself unable to agree with almost every expression voiced in ‘The Digital Artisans Manifesto‘), the notion of the artisan has a particular resonance to me …
a worker in a skilled trade, esp. one that involves making things by hand.
New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition
For me, it is the latter part of this definition that holds the key, and perhaps forms part of my dislike of the Digital Artisan’s Manifesto; I will need to explore this in more detail.
William Gibson: Idoru: Waverider
Much of the joy of the novel resides in the details, the meditations on the nature of a postindustrial, postmodern, mediated and simulated social milieu. For example, one of the novel’s main protagonists is Laney, a researcher and data collector for the SlitScan media organisation (a kind of hyperreal metatabloid, somewhere between The Sun, Celebrity Nudes and schlock TV). Laney’s a channel surfer, a waverider, a station zapper, with a short attention span, who is an ‘intuitive fisher of patterns of information…a dowser, a cybernetic waterwitch’. Intuitively, magically, he can browse the info-gestalts in data banks and, by finding the node point, a strange attractor, uncover the scandals in celebrities lives. He’s kind of like Case from Neuromancer, a console cowboy of sorts who thieves the horrors and disasters from people’s lives; the hacker as tabloid journalist, you might say. It’s in these thoughts on data and information, its relations with the subjects lived experience and actual life that Idoru is at its most interesting. In a sense Gibson’s offering an update of a Foucauldian panoptican: the lives of the individual citizen and subject are constantly open to surveillance and intervention through the traces they leave in cyberspace. In Gibson’s near future, the life of an individual is entirely open, ever present (albeit virtually); s/he can have no secrets, every action and gesture can be known by the data it leaves behind.