transitlab

27 Jul, 2008

phineous gage is a fatality of the industrial age

Posted by: brian In: art|conference

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadski /Vladimir Ivanovi...Image via Wikipedia

Steven Pinker and SWAMP are really interested in Phineous Gage, who suffered from a railway spike passing through his brain, he didnt die, but his personality changed for the worse. This runs counter to the idea of the noble savage.

Matt and Doug from SWAMP talked about  Vladimir Vernadsky and the noosphere. The theory that humans have been extended by technology.

However, now we have technology based diseases.

Metahuman is the now, the reach of the internet, satellite networks. Technology that uses people without much concideration of the humans. In the conflict between Metahuman vs Human,the Metahuman corporation often wins.

Walmartathon, 24hrs in a walmart consuming. The idea of the corporate organism and by doing this action they are interrogating the metaorganism.

spore1.1, 2004
SWAMP seeks to kill a rubbertree plant from home depot (with its garanteed money back offer), it is fed by the homedepot stock value, if it goes up, then it gets watered. During a bull market the plant died because of too much water, after enron the plant died because of too little. From this they worked out that this simple system was too likely to go to extremes as it was based on a single variable. In real life, multiple factors keep organism

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About

Brian Degger is a technologist/artist, he writes, thinks and makes around themes of interactivity, biomimicracy, and collaboration

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Asides

PDF import and editing in openoffice
One function I have found useful in openoffice is the ability to import pdfs. This is possible by downloading and installing the pdfimport plugin. This means that you can import a pdf, edit it then output it at a lower resolution for screen. (2)

miniFM

miniFM
In the foreground is a Tetsuo Kogawa version (built during RadioCraftLab, during AVFest08) and in the back the remix by sonodrome (built last week at Sonodrome Central). Both assembled by me.
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Bioplastic
Jay Cousins and friends had a hackday around bioplastics and laser cutting. Making the bioplastic from starch and glycerin (see this link for more details) and then laser cutting them. Cool stuff, they were even making different color ones. This is important as people move from using commercially sourced plastic in their makerbots to something else. Plastic is expensive to buy for these machines, but it is all around. SO be it bio-plastic or post waste plastic, ways of reusing these provide a compelling reason to throw away less waste. It is amazing that these materials are coming out of the factories, to be used in domestic situations. Together with polymorph and sugru, there are a variety of materials to play around for wearables, for prototypes and one offs. Bring on the future, with peer production.

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augmented foraging - cool use of layar -

augmented foraging Originally uploaded by _foam A mobile phone guide to edible urban wild-food sources.
Amsterdam urban_ edibles is developing Augmented_Foraging, a  mobile phone guide to wild-food sources using Layar. Much better use of this program than finding property in Amsterdam (unless you live there of course)!
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