"Dr. Mitra heads research and development at NIIT, a leading computer software and training company in New Delhi. Just outside his office is a wall that separates his air-conditioned 21st-century office from a slum. Mitra decided to place a high-speed computer in the wall, connect it to the Internet, and watch who, if anyone, might use it. To his delight, curious children were immediately attracted to the strange new machine. "When they said, 'Can we touch it?'" Mitra recalls, "I said, 'It's on your side of the wall.' The rules say whatever is on their side, they can touch, so they touched it."" via frontline/world Rory O'Connor
hole in wall
meta meta
"The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it? The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous." Jaron Lanier via edge.org
telepathic infrastructure
"Alongside this shift towards a more information-based, ephemeral physical city, the emergence of telepathic infrastructures is rapidly codifying, embodying and annotating what was once the most ephemeral aspect of urban living – social networks. And thus we’re seeing intense internal conflict as telepathic individuals augmented by these new technologies struggle to understand their identity within a world where every social action and relationship is recorded and visible." Anthony Townsend. via ubiwar.com
cognitive map
"The new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion." Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
cloudmakers
"....Cloudmakers was founded as a discussion group for the interative web game centered around the film A.I. We officially solved the game on July 24, 2001. Though the original game, The Beast, has ended, Cloudmakers now serves as a clearinghouse for online gaming...." cloudmakers.org
hole in space
"Suddenly head-to-toe, life-sized, television images of the people on the opposite coast appeared. They could now see, hear, and speak with each other as if encountering each other on the same sidewalk. No signs, sponsor logos, or credits were posted -- no explanation at all was offered." ecafe/1980
video environment
"V1B3 is an artist-led project that explores the impact of media in the built environment through curated site-specific interventions, presentations and published documentation." www.v1b3.com
Christian Moeller
"Christian Moeller is an artist working with contemporary media technologies to produce innovative and intense physical events, realized from handheld object to architectural scale installations. Over the past two decades, his body of work represents one of the original and most complex investigations of what is possible to be revealed by the intersections of cinema, computation, music and physical space" www.christian-moeller.com
experimental geography
"Experimental Geography explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide and possibly make a new field altogether. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice through a wide range of mediums including interactive computer units, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography created by 19 artists or artist teams from six countries as well as the United States." Rochester Art... image: Ilana Halperin
here here here
"Drawing with chalk and the aid of a GPS receiver, Pete Gomes outlines shadows, persons, trash bags, etc.; marks territories and defines borders for things both temporary and permanent. All while dutifully chalking latitude and longitude. In these often large scale and impermanent drawings, he points to the variable nature of position over time, unseen power structures and the arbitrary relationship between the physical world and the coordinate system." Bleecker, Knowlton