Experiment and Experience: A Polyphonic Seminar on the Dao of Indeterminacy and Play Feb 8 - June 13, 2024

Professor Sha Xin Wei is co-convening with Cécile Malaspina the seminar series at Collège international de philosophie Paris and King's College London:  "Experiment and Experience: A Polyphonic Seminar on the Dao of Indeterminacy and Play”

All sessions will be online at 17:00-19:00 pm (GMT / UK time

Professor in the School of Arts, Media + Engineering; and Director Synthesis at Arizona State University

Reader in Critical Theory and founding Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths College, London

Affiliate, Synthesis Center @ ASU; Co-Founder, Fyrthyr Institute for Unsettling Technologies; Organizer, Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines

Founder and artistic director of SCILICET, a London-based studio exploring human & non-human collaboration.

Research Director Emeritus at Centre national de la recherche scientifique at the Cavaillès interdisciplinary center of École Normale Supérieure in Paris

Abstract
In An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies Steve Coutinho writes: “Interconnections build and shift as one develops familiarity with the verses, but the meaning never crystallises into a final form.” This seminar responds to the need to enlarge the concerns, vocabulary, and even the modes of articulation of philosophy, so as to address the transformative dynamics of the contemporary world. Because it imbricates local and planetary complexities, this work calls for greater openness towards philosophical legacies muted by the dominance of the Western tradition of philosophy, including alternative attitudes towards indeterminacy, as well as traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). We invite participants to bring plural, distinct personal and cultural genealogies of thought to bear on the theme of indeterminacy and play, as much to create a polyphonic family of generate interpretations of the theme as to showcase the richly disparate modes and concerns that animate these genealogies.

Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide // Session Impression & Primer // Session Two: The Double Fracture…

A.G.A.P.E.

Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide

AREA Studies Seminar & Studio

(Art, Research, Education, Activism)
 

Session Two:

“The Double Fracture…”

 

Date:

3 December 2023

Start Times:

10:30 LA / 13:30 NYC / 15:30 São Paulo / 18:30 London / 19:30 Berlin / 21:30 Dar es Salaam / 00:00 Dehli

End Times:

12:30 LA / 15:30 NYC / 17:30 São Paulo / 20:30 London / 21:30 Berlin / 23:30 Dar es Salaam / 02:00 Delhi

Where:

Virtural-Only

 

Many thanks to the thirty-six folks, spanning three oceans, who attended the first session of the Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide Seminar & Studio. I deeply appreciated seeing so many names and faces from so many different walks of my life, old and new. 

I also want to say thanks to those who could not attend but whose present-absence shaped the conversation. I know that I found myself being ventriloquized by a number of inspiring folks who had expressed regrets at being unable to attend; and I am sure others did as well.

What follows is an impression of Sunday’s session that summarizes and reflects upon a few threads of conversation that I would like to weave into future sessions with the group. 

Folks who want to participate in the next session of the seminar & studio can register at the Zoom link below or, alternatively, they can participate asynchronously via this padlet. I encourage those who attended to comment on the impression and primer below in the padlet, noting anything you think was overlooked or that you disagree with or that you wish I had mentioned.
 

Background Readings: 

 

Pre-Session Primer: 

After taking a bit of time to warm up to one another and get our bearings, our session kicked off in earnest after I presented a framework for what we might hope to accomplish in community with one another during the Seminar & Studio.

Borrowing terms from the conduct of due process in pursuit of justice, I proposed that we might come together to learn (i) to bear witness to the disturbing realities of colonization and its wake/fallout, (ii) to testify to the disturbing realities, and (iii) to contribute to the repair of that which has been disturbed by colonization and its wake/fallout. 

As we unpacked these terms — witness, testify, and repair — we realized that these terms, in their conventional senses, proved untenable and that we either had to make new sense of these terms or discover better ones. 

With respect to the last of these terms, “repair”, I proposed an alternative sense which borrowed from the art of kintsugi and the architectural theories of Christopher Alexander. However, although the question of how the descendants of the colonized and the colonizer are called on to contribute differently to repair was put on the table, our conversation focused less on the term “repair” and more on the terms “witness” and “testify”. 

Sarah asked us, “Who has access to the choice to bear witness? Who testifies? In which language do we testify (Glissant and Babel!)? Who is the audience? Who listens, and why do they listen? … Who is on trial? Does it matter?”

Pushing us even further, Deann questioned the order and temporality of the conduct of due process. 

  • According to what epistemology, ontology, and cosmology does  witnessing precede testimony and testimony precede repair?
  • Are we assuming the epistemology, ontology, cosmology, and historiography of the colonizer when we regard these as being steps in a linear sequence? 

In asking these questions, Deann pointed us toward something that we will encounter in Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race and Unpayable Debt. Silva makes the case that the black arts and decolonial sciences must reckon with “distinctions without separability” and that we must be wary of tropes that ask us to counter colonization and racialization in incremental steps following one after another in linear time.

Going even further, there were critical questions regarding how it is that one bears witness and testifies, especially as we consider the stream of images and commentaries on the current ethnic cleansing of Palestine. On the one hand, as Raya, Jessica, Alexandria, and others eloquently observed, we will need to develop communal and embodied practices to care for ourselves while bearing witness to so much horror, listening to horrifying testimony, and being called to testify to all of it. On the other hand, as Misi observed, we need to refuse the temptation to pursue the fame that comes with being singled out as the star witness and having one’s testimony go viral.

Media artists amongst us, Ryan and Linn in particular, urged us not to equate gazing at streams of images on our devices with witnessing. As we gaze at the stream, we are often watching other’s testimony rather than witnessing, and the testimony that we are being given often has a curated aesthetic that betrays faults in our acts of witnessing. Analyzing the aesthetics of a photojournalist’s image of an armed Libyan coast guardsman standing on a boat after the interception of 147 migrants, Linn and Ryan reminded us of something Rizvana Bradley speaks of in her book, Anteaesthetics, “The modern aesthetic regime is an essential dimension of what makes genocide possible, not least through its concealment of the aesthetic forms genocide assumes. [...] [E]xtraction and containment masquerade as celebratory recognition, and genocide is fashioned as self-defense.” 

What goes for the consumption of images also goes for the consumption of statistics, infographics, news reports, documentaries, films, etc. In light of this, one thing that I wondered was whether something like the Bechdel-Wallace test, which measures the representation of women in film and other fiction, could be constructed to measure representations of colonization and its wake.

Consider any piece of media, fictional or factual, that deals with wicked social, ecological, economic, and erotic problems and events that have taken place since 1452.

  1. Did the piece thoughtfully mention or depict the disturbing realities of colonization and its wake/fallout? How? To what degree and extent?
  2. Were colonized people involved in its making behind the scenes? How? In what capacity?
  3. Were colonized people depicted or mentioned in any of the scenes? How many of them and in how many of the scenes? In what sorts of positions and postures relative to colonizers and their proxies?
  4. Were colonized people presented interacting with one another unobserved by colonizers?
  5. Did colonized people inform the mentions or depictions of colonization and its wake/fallout?
  6. Did colonized people only get to inform mentions and depictions of the horrors of colonization, or did they also get to inform mentions and depictions of transformative resistance and the persistence of peoples and places in spite of colonization?

Recognizing that consuming media does not amount to witnessing, and given that colonization and its wake are inescapable, we asked questions regarding how one goes about witnessing with our bodies in contact with the world around us and without necessarily knowing in advance what we are doing and to what end.

Sticking close to home, I considered witnessing how the demographics of a wealthy white neighborhood in an American city change during the day: parents go to work, school-age children go to class, and the neighborhood becomes, for a few hours, home to a majority Latin American migrant population of cleaners, gardeners, repairmen, construction workers, nannies etc.

Brian suggested making trips to places where people don’t normally go to bear witness and doing just that. He discussed his trips along the Mississipi Riverwhere he witnessed natural surroundings suffused with the aftermath of colonial trauma and racial exploitation.

Brian’s remarks on his trips along the Mississipi resonated with Nat’s remarks on the “vanishing isles of Sierra Leone”, and this brought us to some matters that I would like to concentrate on during our next session.

I, for one, felt as if our last session focused a great deal on Global Apartheid and left much to be said about Planetary Ecocide, and perhaps this was symptomatic of the difficulties of thinking through what Malcolm Ferdinand calls the double fracture at the heart of the modern tempest. It seems as if, on the one hand, there is a Global Apartheid defined by the colonial fracture instilled by Western colonization and imperialism that resulted in racial slavery and the domination of indigenous peoples and women in particular and, on the other, there is a Planetary Ecocide defined by an environmental fracture driven by a technocratic and capitalist civilization that led to the ongoing devastation of the Earth’s ecosystems and its human and non-human communities. In reality, however, these are two sides of the same cutting edge that has wounded our planet

During the next session I would like to pick up the conversation where we left off but to focus on the other side of the coin. In so doing, I am also hoping that, following, Q’s provocation, we may think about “remembering, recognizing, resisting, and repairing” as improvements upon the terms “witnessing, testifying, repairing”. Furthermore, following Deann’s provocations, I want to continue thinking about these terms as marking differences without separability. How might we accomplish acts of remembering, recognizing, resisting, and repairing (or, alternatively, witnessing, testifying, repairing) at one at the same time, in a single fluid gesture?
 

A.G.A.P.E. || Session One: “In the wake…” || This Sunday, 19 November 2023


A.G.A.P.E.

Against Global Apartheid & Planetary Ecocide

AREA Studies Seminar & Studio

(Art, Research, Education, Activism)
 

Session One:

“In the wake…”

 

Date:

19 November 2023

Start Times:

10:30 LA / 13:30 NYC / 15:30 São Paulo / 18:30 London / 19:30 Berlin / 21:30 Dar es Salaam / 23:59 Dehli

End Times:

12:30 LA / 15:30 NYC / 17:30 São Paulo / 20:30 London / 21:30 Berlin / 23:30 Dar es Salaam / 02:00 Delhi

Where:

HYBRID

Register for Zoom Link

Bishop & Wilde @ Tin House 

2601 NW Thurman St, Portland, Oregon
 

Come as you are.

Drop in whenever you can find the time and for however long you can find the time, regardless of whether you have read the texts in advance.

Those who can only drop by for 15 minutes in the middle of a session without having done the readings will be just as welcome as those who read the texts twice over in advance and stay for full sessions. Don’t be embarrassed or shy either way. Open your mind to the possibility that you arrive at the perfect time to either share an unexpected gift of knowledge with the group or receive an unexpected gift.

You are welcome to forward this invitation to other friends and fellow travelers with whom you would like to be in community.

 

Padlet

This is a place where folks can participate in discussions asychronously in addition to or in lieu of participating synchronously. Post comments and questions (in audio, video, or text format), reflect on the background readings, and/or add supplementary texts and other media to the site. 

Posts to the padlet will inform conversations during the synchronous sessions. Notes taken and markings made during the synchronous sessions will also be posted on the padlet.

Pre-Session Primer

I’d like to begin by marking a distinction that I think will be very helpful for us throughout this seminar and study group: the distinction between (i) an ideology, (ii) a process, (iii) the product of a process, and (iv) the wake of a process.

 Read More 

Intellectual Generosity

The magnanimous intellectual doesn’t out-read others but, rather, reads-ahead for others and then backtracks in order to read-in others.

 Read More 
 

Giuseppe Longo, Conférence spéciale, 25 septembre, 10h-12h, Locale 422, 2910 Édouard Montpetit, « Espaces d'imagination dans la relation triangulaire : machine/homme/écosystème"

Friends, Please circulate this to all interested faculty and students:

Centre Cavaillès, CNRS - ENS, Paris, 
will be giving a special seminar:

Espaces d'imagination dans la relation triangulaire : machine/homme/écosystème
( Spaces of imagination in the triangular relation: machine / human / écosystem )

Université de Montréal 
Monday Sep 25, 10:00 - 12:00 noon
2910 boul. Édouard Montpetit, room 422

The seminar will be in French, with Q&A in English and French.

( French abstract below … )

From: Jonathan Simon <jonathan.simon@umontreal.ca>
Subject: Fw: Giuseppe Longo, Conférence spéciale, 25 septembre, 10h-12h, Locale 422, 2910 Éd. Mont., « Espaces d'imagination dans la relation triangulaire : machine/homme/écosystème"
Date: September 18, 2023 at 4:37:51 PM EDT
To: Xin Wei Sha <sxwasu@gmail.com>, giuseppe.longo <giuseppe.longo@ens.fr>

Chers collègues,

J'ai le plaisir de vous annoncer une conférence spéciale qui sera donnée lundi prochain, 25 septembre, de 10 h à 12 h, par Giuseppe Longo, en visite à Montréal du Centre Cavaillès, CNRS - ENS, Paris. 

Veuillez transmettre cette invitation à vos collègues ou étudiants susceptibles d'être intéressés.

Où:

2910 boul. Édouard Montpetit, 
locale 422

Quand:

10h - 12h, 25 septembre
Qui:

Giuseppe Longo 
Centre Cavaillès, CNRS - ENS, Paris ww.di.ens.fr/users/longo

Quoi:

Espaces d'imagination dans la relation triangulaire : machine/homme/écosystème.


Abstrait: 
En 1936, Alan Turing imaginait un «calculateur humain... agissant sur un cahier d'enfant», saLogical Computing Machine : lire/écrire 0/1, se déplacer à gauche/à droite. Conjointement au Lambda-calcul de Church (1932), ces «systèmes de réécriture de termes» constituent encore aujourd'hui le fondement logique de l'informatique et, depuis trop longtemps, un paradigme pour la cognition humaine et l'IA. Turing les présentait comme une «imitation» possible d'un cerveau humain. Le «tournant connexionniste» s'appuie au contraire sur un «modèle» du cerveau, depuis Hebb et Rosenblatt (dans les années 1950) et a ouvert la voie au Deep Learning contemporain. Dans les deux cas, une machine à entrées-sorties est censée simuler un cerveau animal, sans espace tridimensionnel (ou avec juste une imitation de celui-ci par une cascade de couches bidimensionnelles), ni la matérialité biologique du cerveau dans son contexte (un crâne animal, dans un corps, dans un écosystème). Certains résultats limitatifs (mathématiques) du Deep Learning seront évoqués ainsi que les différences entre imprévisibilité, dynamique et créativité, comme instance de «production d'anti-entropie», notion proposée en 2009. Dans les processus mentaux, la production d'anti-entropie peut être comprise comme «l'invention de configurations de sens».

References : 

G. Longo, Le cauchemar de Prométhée. Les sciences et leurs limites. Préface de Jean Lassègue, postface d’Alain Supiot. PUF, Paris, 2023. - Couverture-Table-introLeCauchemarPromethee.pdf - E. Klein : Présentation sur France Culture - 4 minutes 

G. Longo, Information at the Threshold of Interpretation, Science as Human Construction of Sense. In Bertolaso, M., Sterpetti, F. (Eds.) A Critical Reflection on Automated Science – Will Science Remain Human? pp. 67-100, Springer, Dordrecht, 2019. 

C. Calude, G. Longo. The Deluge of Spurious Correlations in Big Data, in Foundations of Science, 1-18, March, 2016. 

(téléchargeable à l'adresse suivante: https://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/download.html )


Brief Biography:

Giuseppe Longo is DRE CNRS, at the Cavaillès, République des Savoirs, interdisciplinary center of Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris and a former Professor of Mathematical Logic and of Computer Science, University of Pisa. He spent three years in the USA (Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon) as researcher and Visiting Professor. GL is co-author of about 140 papers. Founder and director (1990-2015) of Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, a Cambridge U.P. journal, he co-authored the book with A. Asperti, on Categories, Types and Structures (M.I.T. Press, 1991). He then extended his research interests to Theoretical Biology and Epistemology, see the books with F. Bailly, Mathematics and the natural sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life (Hermann, Paris, 2006; Imperial College Press, London, 2011) and with M. Montévil, Perspectives on Organisms: Biological Time, Symmetries and Singularities (Springer, Berlin, 2014). GL edited with A. Soto and D. Noble (and co-authored six papers of) From the century of the genome to the century of the organism: new theoretical approaches, a special issue of Prog Biophys Mol Biol, 122, 1, 2016. GL is currently focusing on historical correlations and on alternatives to the new alliance between computational formalisms and the governance of man and nature by algorithms and by supposedly objective "optimality" methods. He recently published ‘‘Matematica e senso. Per non divenir macchine’’ (Mimesis, 2021); a largely revised and extended version in French of this book is ‘‘Le cauchemar de Prométhée’’ (PUF, April 2023).

Web page: http://www.di.ens.fr/users/longo/



Hope to see you there next Monday!
Xin Wei

beyond "wearables" -- Pedro Lopes and "intended consequences"

Pedro Lopes @ U Chicago CS has a provocative research program that invites critical attention.

"integrating interfaces with the human body—exploring the interface paradigm that supersedes wearables. These include: muscle stimulation wearables that allow users to manipulate tools they have never seen before or that accelerate reaction time, or a device that leverages the smell to create an illusion of temperature.”

(Pedro came from Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam, also worth tracking…)

I'm not at all advocating that we blindly adopt such techniques in our fashion+tech work.  Indeed, it may be timely to look ahead of the state of industrial craft (e.g Google+Levi's Jacquard ) and see where critical-creative attention ought to bite.

Cheers!
Xin Wei

Carlo Ratti Architects: Reimagining e-Mobility with the World’s Largest Board Game

From: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati <pr@carloratti.com>
Date: April 18, 2023 at 7:57:41 AM EDT
To: SHAXINWEI@gmail.com
Subject: Reimagining e-Mobility with the World’s Largest Board Game
Reply-To: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati <pr@carloratti.com>

 Reimagining e-Mobility with the World’s Largest Board Game


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newsletter
APRIL 2023

 

REIMAGINING E-MOBILITY WITH THE WORLD’S
LARGEST BOARD GAME



Italo Rota and CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati present “Walk the Talk”, an installation which dramatically transforms Milan’s Botanical Garden into a 3,500-square-meter interactive game. Over 400 energy-harvesting luminescent tiles form multiple pathways, engaging players in the discourse underlying the future of urban mobility. Developed for Eni, the project is on view during Milan Design Week through April 26, 2023.

More information and images available upon request through pr@carloratti.com.



Architect Italo Rota and international design and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati have unveiled a project for Milan Design Week 2023 that transforms the city’s Botanical Garden into the largest game board in the world. Designed as an accessible “choose your own path” adventure, “Walk the Talk” challenges players to discover and reflect on everyday choices for a sustainable mobility. The installation features energy-harvesting tiles that produce dynamic light and sound effects during day and night. The project is developed for global energy company Eni as part of the Design Week’s INTERNI Re-evolution exhibition, and will be open to the public until 26th April 2023.

The “Walk the Talk” path is structured as a metaphorical stroll around Milan, featuring the city’s major landmarks. It is made up of over 400 wooden tiles and 32 different types of icons spread across 3500 square meters. Each one represents either an obstacle or a solution to the game’s theme of urban mobility: from traffic to public transportation and electric car sharing. Players – either alone or in tandem with others – navigate their way through the city by finding sustainable solutions to challenges such as overcrowded neighborhoods or lack of pedestrian areas. Their route depends on the choices they make, as they encounter various crossroads and intersections along the way. 



The path’s colored tiles are produced with a combination of special luminescent varnishes and films which harvest and store energy during the day and release a prolonged glow after dusk. This glowing effect is enhanced by a low-intensity lighting system throughout the garden, adding an atmospheric quality to the space and allowing visitors to play the game after dark. The “Walk the Talk” path is designed along with game designer collective Blob Factory Gaming studio, and with graphic design concept by studio FM milano.



“Walk the Talk” uses the gaming framework to form a dialogue between the visitor and Milan’s much-loved  Botanical Garden. It provides a participatory way to engage with this historical location and with the city, as well as an experience that people can share.” says Italo Rota, founder of Italo Rota Building Office.

“The future of mobility presents substantial challenges which require collective understanding and participation,” says Carlo Ratti, founding partner at CRA and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab: “At a time when digital gamification is everywhere, we wanted to experiment with a physical game board - one of the largest ever made. “Walk the Talk” is an accessible experience to help jumpstart an important conversation about the future of mobility.” 



CRA has explored the theme of sustainable urban mobility in a variety of projects, both as a design studio and by drawing on research conducted by Carlo Ratti’s MIT Senseable City Lab. Projects include the New Deal Paris, an exhibition project envisioning how Paris’ highway might look like in 2050 with the widespread adoption of autonomous mobility; and Anas Smart Road, a collaboration with Italy’s leading road agency ANAS to implement a digitally-integrated  highway to  improve  safety conditions and traffic management. In the city of Milan, CRA has designed the master plan for MIND-Milano Innovation District (former site of 2015’s World Expo), featuring offices, research centers, the future Science Campus of the University of Milan, and a neighborhood planned for shared, self-driving shuttles.

DOWNLOAD HI-RES IMAGES + READ THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE

CREDITS
Walk the Talk
A project by Italo Rota and CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati
Client: ENI
Location: Orto Botanico, Brera, Milan, Italy (opening times: 10:00-22:00)
Part of INTERNI Design Re-Evolution exhibition within the Milan Design Week 2023
Opening dates: 18-26 April 2023
 
CRA Team: Carlo Ratti (founder), Andrea Cassi (Partner in Charge), Chiara Morandini (Project Manager), Gabriele Sacchi, Gary di Silvio, Gianluca Zimbardi
Italo Rota Team: Italo Rota, Francesca Grassi
Developed with Blob Factory Gaming Studio; Graphic concept by studio FM milano 
Photo credits: Marco Beck Peccoz
Video credits: Davide Bernardis (creative direction), Andrea Zendali (videographer)

More information is available upon request: pr@carloratti.com
VISIT US AT MILAN FURNITURE FAIR

Not to be missed: CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati is at Milan’s Furniture Fair this year with Wood You Believe?, a project developed for Gruppo Saviola, the international leader in the manufacturing of fully recycled timber panels. The experimental pavilion, designed by CRA with Italo Rota, features a striking facade made from four tons of discarded wooden objects, granting waste materials a second life – a key tenet of the Circular Economy. Check out the preview photographs here - more to come soon! Open until April 23, 2023.

IN PROGRESS: EXPO 2030 ROMA

Three cities are left in the race to host the World Expo 2030: Rome, Riyadh, and Busan. This week, the secretary of the Bureau International des Expositions lands in the Italian capital for an official inspection visit - one of the most crucial steps of the selection process. As CRA led the team which developed the master plan for Rome’s bid to the international exhibition, you can read more about the project vision in Carlo Ratti’s op-ed for Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s most respected dailies.
ASPEN INSTITUTE ROUNDTABLE
MILAN, IT
21 APRIL

Carlo Ratti will host a panel discussion by the Aspen Institute, dissecting design of the new generation through the lenses of technology and sustainability.
ANNUAL INVESTMENT MEETING
ABU DHABI, AE
8-10 MAY

In this annual global congress, Carlo will moderate a conversation exploring how cities can navigate transformational technologies of the future.

 
CNN
/ 30 MARCH 2023

If autonomous vehicles are to become the cornerstones of future urban mobility, the roads on which they move are just as important in making transportation smoother and greener. CRA talked with CNN about how flexible design schemes – such as modular pavements to assign usage of the same road to different groups at different hours – could help drivers and pedestrians alike.
 
/ 6 APRIL 2023

A preview of Walk the Talk – Moving Energy, the installation created by Italo Rota and CRA for Eni, was spotlighted by Dezeen as one of the 12 “unmissable exhibitions” during Milan Design Week. Visitor enter a life-size “game board” with light and sound effects spread across the garden, and find their way through by engaging with ideas on sustainable mobility. See it in person at the Brera Botanical Garden!
/ 1 APRIL 2023

Monocle’s April issue features an interview with Carlo Ratti on integrating nature into urban spaces. Digital technologies could be a useful device to accelerate it, but more importantly, we need to identify the right approach to use them: trials and errors are inevitable, and feedback loops are key to perfecting designs to make cities greener and more livable.
 
/ 22 MARCH 2023

Flatburn is the latest addition to the City Scanner series by MIT Senseable City Lab directed by Carlo. The open-sourced platform empowers individuals to build their own low-cost, solar-powered sensing devices to monitor the air quality of their areas, before engaging with the community to analyze the data. Find out more in Fast Company’s coverage.
/ 20 MARCH 2023

Carlo’s op-ed addresses the debate around 15-minute cities: conspiracy theories claim that they confine within their neighborhoods. In fact, 15-minute cities give their residents the freedom to access everyday necessities within a short distance. Thus saving longer commutes for leisure and socialization.
 
/ 16 MARCH 2023

Emanuele Rossetti, CEO of CRA Group, explains in this interview how AI and robotics are adopted across the company. From a robot bartender startup to decarbonization oriented infrastructure that manage thermal heat storage, they make cities “come alive” and become more responsive to our needs.

CRA is hiring! We are looking for new talents to join our offices in Turin and New York. To discover all the vacancies and send in your application, visit our JOBS page. We look forward to working with you!
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NEW YORK
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ILLUSION OF CONTROL, May 15-17 hybrid conference, Royal Swedish Academy, Para Limes Foundation Netherlands, ASU, Princeton, Stockholm Resilience Center, Beijer Institute for Environmental Economics



Dear Colleagues,
 
It is my great pleasure to invite you both to a unique conference on a topic that is currently emerging in debates in a wide range of disciplines confronted with the question why, while there is an acknowledged urgency to deal with climate change, environmental change and socio-political change, so little is actually happening. It brings together a very interesting group of high-level speakers, both academics and practitioners on environmental change. It is to be held May 15-17, in the auditorium of the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm. It is organized by the Para Limes Foundation in the Netherlands and sponsored by ASU, Princeton, the Stockholm Resilience Center and the Beijer Institute for Environmental Economics. The meeting will be webcast and is thus accessible to ASU faculty and students!


…
HERE you find a poster for the conference and the conference page for the website. You can REGISTER from both.

 

Many, many thanks for any help you can give me in publicizing this.

 
Yours truly,

 
Sander van der Leeuw
School of Complex Adaptive Systems
Global Futures Lab, ASU

OSC vs Web-RTC reflector in AWS cloud

A couple of things about OSC and Web-RTC.   This may seem like a technical consideration, but the lived experiences of  — communities of  —  creator or researcher or performer weighs in here…

(1)  For realtime responsive media in live event, we work under the assumption that our processes process live gesture & activity with adequately dense streams of data,    We like lowest possible latency, want our stream rates as high as emitted, don’t care about dropped frames, don’t care about irregular timing.  And we let downstream processes, including the human performer deal.  This works well when there’s adequately high density — frames of data / unit time, and live human-in-the-loop action. (… thanks to Joel Ryan using wireless sensor platforms for live performance between Vienna and Brussels.)    (Yes re. Vangelis we can lean on John Maccallum’s experience :)   

Benefit of UDP is the fact that some packets can be dropped/skipped/undelivered, as it is not "mandatory" data, like picture frames or piece of sound, that only results on reduced quality, which is "expected" behaviour in streaming world. WebSockets will ensure that data is delivered, and "price" for it is mechanics that at the end slows down the queue of packets, to ensure ordered and guaranteed delivery of data.

General principle, for live responsive media:  let human deal with variation of streaming media flow as part of the materiality of the medium (in this case network transport dynamics) rather than hide that materiality  under homogeneous behavior at the cost of slowing processing, introducing global latencies, or syntactic complexity.

(2) Syntactic complexity
For backward compatibility with a lot of code and coding practice, it’d be very important not to require application programmers to insert OSC - web socket glue code in legacy frameworks.  Technicalities or extra idioms whose adoption may seem trivial to an expert programmer can be an insurmountable barrier to creative coding in communities of researchers and artists who just want to get on with shaping the event.

(3)
As much as possible, I’d like to  talk to my cloud services independent from the web (httpd).
Our apps should talk via internet without going through any browser.   
OSC was invented for streaming sensor data between apps, and to be transport agnostic.  
And all the work we’ve been doing with responsive media for live event is aimed at 
avoiding the chunky clunky document paradigms introduced by HTML / httpd
(from the era of file-based OS familiar to CERN engineers :).   

One rejoinder may be that contemporary network transport quality renders (1) and (3) moot, but this assumption is false when we work in parts of the world that are farther from tightly managed network infrastructures.

And (2) is vital.