Auteursarchief: Maarten

The Origin of Computers

first computer

Dr. Chris Evans
Science Fact, 1977

‘Man is about to create a new companion for himself an this planet, a companion who will rival vie with him not for natural resources, but for intellectual supremacy. Man, undisputed master of the earth, may before to long have to step gracefully aside and yield reins of power to a being of his own creation. Contrary to most current scenarios, the 20th century will not be remembered as the era when space was conquered, or the power of the atom harnessed, but that in which there appeared the first machines with minds’.

The Disembodied Librarian

Charles Martell
The Disembodied Librarian in the Digital Age, Part II , 2000

With responses to the article from Barbara Moran and Laverna Saunders
In the January issue of College & Research Libraries, the author began a discussion of four profound historical discontinuities – time and space, mind and body, real and virtual, and humans and technology – that are reaching critical thresholds as we enter the twenty-first century. Existing within multiple environments – technological, social, and cultural, these discontinuities are seldom acknowledged, but their influence on the future of our institutions is incalculable. An awareness of these discontinuities will assist librarians in (1) creating a new virtual space for libraries as physical space becomes less important, (2) adapting to states of disembodiment caused by roles deeply embedded in virtual environments, and (3) developing the new value-added services necessary for survival in the next millennium. In part II of this discussion, these discontinuities are related to new ways of being and thinking about the future of librarians and libraries. This article is followed by responses from Barbara Moran and Laverna Saunders.
Lees verder →

I, Librarian

waste of time
Josh Lesnick, 2006

Hilda Kruger
I, Librarian, 2005

‘The fast and continuous technological change that is characteristic of the information society we find ourselves in has demonstrable impact on the way librarians go about their business. This paper offers a scenario of technological changes already in the pipeline and yet to come, and how those changes will impact the role of librarians in the future. One of the main concerns of this paper is the continued relevance of information professionals as infomediaries in our future society.

Will brick-and-mortar libraries still be relevant fifty years from now?
Lees verder →

Stonehenge the Sequel

Jim Reinders
Carhenge, 1987

carhenge

carhenge tourist

“Carhenge, which replicates Stonehenge, consists of the circle of cars, 3 standing trilithons within the circle, the heel stone, slaughter stone, and 2 station stones, and the Aubrey circle….

The artist of this unique car sculpture, Jim Reinders, experimented with unusual and interesting artistic creations throughout his life. While living in England, he had the opportunity to study the design and purpose of Stonehenge. His desire to copy Stonehenge in physical size and placement came to fruition in the summer of 1987 with the help of many family members.

Thirty-eight automobiles were placed to assume the same proportions as Stonehenge with the circle measuring approximately 96 feet in diameter. Some autos are held upright in pits five feet deep, trunk end down, while those cars which are placed to form the arches have been welded in place. All are covered with gray spray paint. The honor of depicting the heel stone goes to a 1962 Caddy.”

Adam Horowitz
Stonefridge, 1997

stonefridge

Atop the flat landscape on the edge of Santa Fe, among tumbleweeds and trash and the beauty of northern New Mexico’s skyline, “Stonefridge” catches your eye and confuses your mind like a mirage.

Refrigerators of all colors and shapes stand 18-feet high, lined up in a 100-foot diameter circle, facing inward toward a cluster of taller fridge towers. It’s as if the outer ring of fridges is worshipping these inner towers, or perhaps protecting them from the outside dangers.

Like Stonehenge, which is aligned to solar and lunar astronomical events, “Stonefridge” is geographically aligned to its own kind of power source: Los Alamos National Laboratories. Adam Horowitz, a critic of the atomic bomb, purposefully built the monument in a place where visitors can see the labs in the distance. He calls it an “atomic alignment.”

Concrete Question?

Kristin Posehn
Replicant, 2005/2006

replicant

description: A remake of a graffiti-covered supporting column from the M25 motorway/freeway, using photography and plywood. The exceptionally detailed tromp l’oeil photograph are mounted on a plywood structure, which shows through at top and bottom. A play on reality and illusion, process and reproduction, simulacra and materiality. A synthesis of sculpture, photography and installation. This work was a commission for the Keith Talent Gallery and Year_06. It was installed in the lovely Dicken’s Library of the Mary Ward House, Bloomsbury, London.

‘The physical construction of the work is the narrative; the movement required to view the work is the story and its unfolding. The structure of the work is a response to the journey that was its construction; it absorbs and reacts to all prior stages, such that the whole encompasses a larger time than any one moment. The passage through the work is interesting not in terms of a destination, but as a form for experience.’

more: Kristin Posehn
– blog
– research

Kinetic Skeletons

Theo Jansen
Animaris Percipiere, 2004

theo jansen

Theo Jansen is an artist and kinetic sculptor living and working in Holland. He builds large works which resemble skeletons of animals which are able to walk using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands. His animated works are a fusion of art and engineering. In a BMW television commercial, Jansen says “The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.”

theo jansen

Jansen is dedicated to creating artificial life through the use of genetic algorithms. These programs simulate evolution inside their code. Genetic algorithms can be modified to solve a variety of problems including circuit design, and in the case of Theo Jansen’s creations, complex systems. Some measure of “fitness” is introduced into the algorithm; in Theo’s case it is to survive on the beach while moving around within two enclosing lines on the wet sand near the ocean, and the dry sand at the edge of the beach. Those designs best at the assigned task within the modeled beach environment are bred together and graded again. Over time complex designs emerge which sprout wings and flap in the breeze pressurizing what look like plastic 2 liter soda bottles. Articulated legs sprout and scuttle across the sand like those of a crab. Theo uses plastic electrical conduit to make some of the computer’s most promising designs. He then lets them roam free on the beach, measures their success, and updates his model.

Watch them move on video

Interview with Theo Jansen

Smart by nature

A Beukers & E v Hinte, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam.
Lightness; the inevitable renaissance of minimum energy structures.

froginator
Froginator
Cyber Frog By Terrence for the Cybergenics 7 contest.

There is a duality between engineering and nature which is based on minimum use of energy. This is because animals and plants, in order to survive in competition with each other, have evolved ways of living and reproducing using the least amount of resource. This involves efficiency both in metabolism and optimal apportionment of energy between the various functions of life. A similar situation obtains with engineering, where cost is usually the most significant parameter. It seems likely, then, that ideas from nature, suitably interpreted and implemented, could improve the energy efficiency of our engineering at many levels. This transfer of technology, variously called bionics, biomimetics or biognosis, should not be seen so much as a panacea for engineering problems as a portfolio of paradigms. Lees verder →

Biomimetics

Design inspired by nature. Biomimetics is the application of methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology. The transfer of technology between lifeforms and synthetic constructs is desirable because evolutionary pressure typically forces natural systems to become highly optimized and efficient. A classical example is the development of dirt- and water-repellent paint (coating) from the observation that the surface of the lotus flower plant is practically unsticky for anything (the lotus effect). Examples of bionics in engineering include the hulls of boats imitating the thick skin of dolphins; sonar, radar, and medical ultrasound imaging imitating the echolocation of bats; and the arch imitating the spinal column. In the field of computer science, the study of bionics has produced artificial neurons, artificial neural networks, and swarm intelligence.

robotic scorpion

For decades, scientists have looked to scorpions and other eight- and six-legged creatures for inspiration. Imagine a creature that can withstand extreme termperatures-from below freezing to a brutal 120 degrees F- and survive in almost any environment on earth. Scorpions are among the best-adapted animals in the world. Now imagine a creature that can mow your lawn, vacuum your living room, guard a museum, build a car and explore the surface of Mars all without oxygen or food. Combine the best features of these animals and the technology of science and you can understand how scientists have been using robots designed after scorpions for years.

To Fix the Image in Memory

Vija Celmins
To Fix the Image in Memory (1977-82)

Vija Celmins

To Fix the Image in Memory places eleven small stones and their duplicates, made of painted cast bronze, onto a surface, challenging the viewer to decipher the real from the manmade and to question the relevance of the distinctions between real object and copy, nature and art. Culled from the area around the Rio Grande near Taos, New Mexico, where Celmins went to recover from the breakup of a romance in 1977, the stones have a magical, talismanic quality. They are all different shapes, colors and textures, ranging from the craggy to the phallic to the fecal, with interesting markings and lines on each.

vija1

vija2

“I got the idea for this piece while walking in northern New Mexico picking up rocks, as people do. I’d bring them home and I kept the good ones. I noticed that I kept a lot that had galaxies on them. I carried them around in the trunk of my car. I put them on window sills. I lined them up. And, finally, they formed a set, a kind of constellation. I developed this desire to try and put them into an art context. Sort of mocking art in a way, but also to affirm the act of making: the act of looking and making as a primal act of art.” By having each original rock installed with its duplicate, Celmins invites the viewer to examine them closely: “Part of the experience of exhibiting them together with the real stones,” she has said, “was to create a challenge for your eyes. I wanted your eyes to open wider.”

CompSpeak 2050

William Crossman is a philosopher, futurist, and professor involved with issues of education, media and technology, language and culture, and human rights. He is Founder/Director of the CompSpeak 2050 Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures

‘The prospect of escalating conflicts and tensions around the world, together with the ongoing search for global peace, demand that we create technologies which allow everyone to communicate with everyone else. Voice-in/voice-out (VIVO) talking computers, using online voice-recognition technology, will allow all people to access the world’s storehouse of information merely by speaking, listening, and viewing graphics. We live in a world in which 80% of the population is nonliterate or functionally so, thousands of different native languages block or deter easy communication amongst people, and millions suffer from disabilities that prevent them from reading and/or writing. However, using a VIVO, a person won’t need to know how to read or write text in order to store and retrieve information. VIVO’s instantaneous language translation function will enable that person, while speaking only in their own native language, to converse with all of humanity. And if they had a disability that barred them from accessing text, they could speak, listen, or sign via their VIVO. By lowering these historic barriers to global communication, VIVOs hold the potential for democratizing information flow worldwide–one key step in creating democratic nations that support human and civil rights, freedom, justice, and equality as the necessary bases for world peace. Without our being able to hear–literally–the voices of the world’s disenfranchised, world peace will remain an illusory goal. Over the next decades, as VIVOs enable more and more of those voices to be heard, and as written language/text shrinks as our technology of choice for accessing information, the electronically-developed countries will evolve into oral cultures. By mid-21st Century, written language/text–which is essentially an ancient technology for storing and retrieving information–will be a thing of the past, and by mid-22nd Century, all nations and communities, including those we build in space, will be informationally united in a worldwide, yet diverse, oral culture.’

Mission Statement

The Institute’s mission is to study, learn, speak, consult, promote dialogue, and write about:

1. The social, cultural, and philosophical implications of talking computers and voice recognition technology–that is, the ways that talking computers will affect every area of human activity.

2. The replacement of writing, reading, and written language itself by talking computers and other speech-based and non-text visual technologies–a process that began in the 19th Century and will reach completion in the 21st Century.

3. The parallels that exist/will exist between today’s oral cultures around the world and the oral cultures that the United States and the other electronically-developed countries are becoming.

4. The ongoing school literacy crisis, its causes and its solution. The impact that talking computers will have on education in the 2lst Century.

5. The nature, history, uses, and effects of written language as a technology specifically developed to store and retrieve information under the specific conditions of the agricultural revolution 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.

6.The role that human evolution plays/will play in the development of information technology (including talking computers), and vice versa.

7. How to make sure that the human right of all people, nonliterate or literate, with disabilities or without, to access the stored information of our world via talking computers is realized in the 21st Century.

‘By enabling us to access stored information orally-aurally, talking computers will finally make it possible for us to replace all written language with spoken language. We will be able to store and retrieve information simply by talking, listening, and looking at graphics, not at text. With this giant step forward into the past, we´re about to recreate oral culture on a more efficient and reliable technological foundation’ -William Crossman-

Romboutese

Guy Rombouts

rombouts

A = Angular
B = Barred
C = Curve
D = Deviation
E = Elbow
F = Fluctuation
G = Grooves
H = Hairpin
I = Inlet
J = Jimmy
K = Key pattern
L = Lancet
M = Meander
N = Node
O = Ogee
P = Peristaltic
Q = Quadrangula
R = Rhombic
S = Snake-like
T = Tortuous
U = Uneven
V = Vault
W = Wavy
X = X-axis
Y = Y-axis
Z = Zigzag
and White

Former printer-typographer and visual artist Guy Rombouts (1949) has strong feelings about the relationship between form and content in language. He believes the conventional symbols of the written word are purely arbitrary and inadequate for expressing certain ideas and feelings.

Rombouts’ fascination with this “inadequacy” has led him to develop his own “more expressive” system of written language. He has taken the 26 letters of the alphabet and created replacements with new shapes. For instance, an angular line stands for A, a curve for C. a zigzag for Z, etc. By combining these lines into word-polygons, Rombouts has created a writing system that makes language look like a continuous flow and, he claims, gives it “another, new reality.”

“Romboutese” is the artist’s own pictorial language, whose applications he claims to be boundless. He has extended the alphabet’s visual aspect by providing each of the 26 lines with its own color (aquamarine, Bordeaux red. etc.) and matching noise (aha, brrbrr, sshssh, kdoink, etc.) so that Romboutese can be appreciated aurally as well as orally.

A choice is always a limitation
Interview (dutch) with Guy Rombouts by Koen Brams & Dirk Pültau
published in De Witte Raaf, september 2006
Lees verder →

The Future of Writing

Vilém Flusser

… ‘Writing is an important gesture, because it both articulates and produces that state of mind which is called “historical consciousness.” History began with the invention of writing, not for the banal reason often advanced that written texts permit us to reconstruct the past, but for the more pertinent reason that the world is not perceived as a process, “historically,” unless one signifies it by successive symbols, by writing. The difference between prehistory an history is not that we have written documents that permit us to read the latter, but that during history there are literate men who experience, understand, and evaluate the world as “becomming,” whereas in prehistory no such existential attitude is possible. If the art of writing were to fall into oblivion, or if it were to become subservient to picture making (as in the “scriptwriting” in films), history in the strict sense of that term would be over.’

‘If one examines certain Mesopotamian tiles, one can see that the original purpose of writing was to facilitate the deciphering of images. Those tiles contain images impressed upon them with cylindrical seals and “cuneiform” symbols scratched into them with a stylus. The “cuneiform” symbols form lines, and they obviously mean the image they accompany. They “explain;” “recount;” “tell” it. They do so by unrolling the surface of the image into lines, by unwinding the tissue of the image into the threads of a text, by rendering “explicit” what was “implicit” within the image. It may be shown through text analysis that the original purpose of writing, namely, the transcoding of two-dimensional codes into a single dimension, is still there: every text, even a very abstract one, means, in the last analysis, an image.’ …

The History of Tomorrow

– a short story-

by Maarten Vanden Eynde, 2006/2007
in collaboration with Marjolijn Dijkman

Maarten Vanden Eynde The History of Tomorrow

A billion stars twinkled in the universe, irregularly like diamonds. I woke up in a sweat and tried to christalize where I was. The heavy window screens were open but I could only feel a pitch-black sky. I rolled over to the side and found my glasses. There, up there on the left, it should be there! Was I still sleeping? I blinked my eyes a couple of times, but was disappointed again. It was gone, it was really gone…

The loss of gravitation first came to general notice on the 15th of June 2008, during the Olympics in Beijing, China. On that day 27 world records were broken. Lees verder →

Nice Indians!

Maarten Vanden Eynde
Nice Indians, 2007

Maarten Vanden Eynde nice-indians

Most of the ‘Native Americans’ are situated in the state of California, 627.562 to be precise. More than twice as much as in number two, Arizona. It’s the last refuge corner of the United States, the bottleneck towards South America. While driving through the Grand Canyon you are confronted with many native Indian shops next to the road. In the most desolate environment they sell original Indian jewelry and other souvenirs to passing tourists. They usually make themselves noticed by putting hand painted signs NICE INDIANS AHEAD fifty meters before the little store, followed by NICE INDIANS when you pass the store and about another fifty meters further they remind you or call you back by saying NICE INDIANS BEHIND! TURN AROUND…
In a way, this sums up the whole history of the United States, starting from Columbus to the present day. From the day the Europeans went to America (NICE INDIANS AHEAD), followed by the period in which ground was traded for pearl necklaces and new cities were build (NICE INDIANS), up to the present day where the tourist industry is profiting from the ancient wild west image and mass producing genuine Indian props (NICE INDIANS BEHIND). I want to copy/paste this time line into the contemporary topography of LA by replacing the signs into the city of Los Angeles.

Maarten Vanden Eynde nice-indians ahead

Location:

Interstate 5 (abbreviated I-5) is the westernmost interstate highway in the continental United States. Its odd number indicates that it is a north-south highway. Its southern terminus is at the international border between the United States and Mexico in the San Diego community of San Ysidro, California. Its northern terminus is at the international border between the United States and Canada at the Peace Arch in Blaine, Washington. An extensive section of this highway (over 600 miles or 965 km), from approximately Stockton, California to Vancouver, Washington, follows very closely the track of the Siskiyou Trail. The Siskiyou Trail was based on an ancient network of Native American footpaths connecting the Pacific Northwest with California’s Central Valley. By the 1820s, trappers from the Hudson’s Bay Company were the first non-Native Americans to use the route of today’s I-5 to move between today’s Washington State and California. During the second half of the 19th Century, mule trains, stagecoaches, and the Central Pacific railroad also followed the route of the Siskiyou Trail. It runs straight through Los Angeles which makes it the perfect road to place the time line.
The signs have to bridge the highway, so by driving on the Interstate 5 in the city you will pass through time and be confronted with the unspoken and forgotten reality of colonial history. NICE INDIANS AHEAD – NICE INDIANS – NICE INDIANS BEHIND.

Cetology

Brian Jungen
Cetology, 2002

cetology

Brian Jungen (b. British Columbia, Canada, 1970) is part of a generation of Vancouver-based artists currently bursting onto the international stage. Born to a Swiss-Canadian father and First Nations mother and raised in the Dane-zaa nation, his drawings, sculptures and installations explore elements of his own hybrid cultural identity. Yet, his approach transcends questions of ethnicity to explore the complex exchanges of goods and ideas in our globalized world.

Jungen’s reputation was secured by his magnificent whale ‘skeletons’, large suspended sculptures made from cheap plastic deckchairs. His rendering of rare and endangered whale species in non-biodegradable mass-produced objects also refers to current debates about whaling practices in Canada. Representing the postmodern, postcolonial world with a wry sense of humor, Jungen collapses stereotypes and embraces change, flux and instability. Offering new ways of thinking about multiculturalism at a time when the famous model of Dutch ‘tolerance’ is under close scrutiny, his practice approaches cultural difference as an unstable, reciprocal notion, using it as a starting point for creativity and critical reflection.

Study for the Evening Redness in the West (detail), 2006

scul