'You Can't Be Alone in a Liquidity Pool': Introduction to the Sphere's Cyber-infrastructure


Erik Bordeleau
thesphere.as
Apr 22 at 8:30 AM EDT – Apr 23 at 1 PM EDT


As a collaborative and emergent web3-based infrastructure, The Sphere is a call to challenge and experiment with the traditional frameworks of cultural production. In the spirit of the open source movement, The Sphere wants to enable every agent in the performing art ecosystem - artists, cultural professionals, audience, cultural organisations as well as a wide range of sympathisers and other potential stakeholders, to participate directly in the shaping of new organizational, aesthetic and economic forms.

This open office session will be an occasion to present the current development of the Sphere’s cyber-infrastructure, as well as opening up a space for collective imagineering around the potential for web3-based derivative art communities. In sympoetic partnership with Curve Labs, The Sphere is catalysing a “quadratic” alliance with 4 key partners - Gnosis, Furtherfield/CultureStake, Black Swan and Spectre - in order to model and implement a radically innovative commons 3.0 for circus and the performing arts.

brief, focussed project: a concept video on portals and telematic embodied architecture ?

Some of you know that one of our projects puttering along for awhile has been trying to create some alternatives for portals,

Re portal video:  I’d like to create something that is as polished as these but propose alternatives  (old somewhat tongue in cheeky work Table of Contents ).  Can anyone feel like working with Andrew Robinson on a next version of some “portal” work?   See "Suturing Space: Tabletop Portals for Collaboration” 

https://ca.room.com

At least it takes the design proposition of starting from physical and inter-corporeal engagement rather than dis-embodying VR ;)
so at least it’s not, as Terry Winograd put it, trying to reach the moon by find the right species of tree to climb.

Don’t know whether to laugh or to cry…

Niklas Damiris: The Limits of Sustainability

The Limits of Sustainability

Talk by Dr. Niklas Damiris. 20 November 2010, Montreal.
Co-sponsored by Topological Media Lab, Design and Computation Arts Department, and the David O'Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise, Concordia University.   

This wide-ranging lecture outlines a set of core and critical issues:
Sustainability as symptom rather than goal. Desire.  Symbolic mediation + being part of the world.  Nature-society divide.  Materiality.  Quantum entanglement.  Foucault parrhesia and Socrates contra psychology (identity, personality, self).  Limits of sustainability construed under an "economic” frame.  Money as symbolic mediation. Productivity. Excess and generosity. Service, entanglement. Governmentality.  Using materials in a dematerialized way.

For more extensive inquiry, contact: Niklaswild1000@gmail.com, or xinwei.sha@asu.edu

Superflux speculative design

https://superflux.in

Superflux create worlds, stories, and tools that provoke and inspire us to engage with the precarity of our rapidly changing world.

Founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern in 2009, the Anglo-Indian studio’s early work brought speculative design approaches to new audiences, working for some of the world’s biggest like Microsoft Research, Sony, Samsung and Nokia, and exhibiting work at MoMA New York, the National Museum of China, and the V&A in London.  

Over the years, the studio has gained critical acclaim for producing work that navigates the entangled wilderness of our technology, politics, culture, and environment to imagine new ways of seeing, being, and acting. The studio’s partners and clients continue to grow, and include Government of UAE, Innovate UK, Cabinet Office UK, UNDP, Future Cities Catapult, and Forum for the Future.

Natasha Jen: Design Thinking Is Bullsh*t

Natasha Jen: Design Thinking Is Bullsh*t

https://99u.adobe.com/videos/55967/natasha-jen-design-thinking-is-bullshit

If Google Image search is your sole barometer, “design thinking uses just one tool: 3M Post-Its,” says Pentagram partner Natasha Jen. “Why did we end up with a single medium? Charles and Ray Eames worked in a complete lack of Post-It stickies. They learned by doing.” In her provocative talk, Jen lobbies for the “Crit” over the “Post-It” when it comes to moving design forward.

Natasha Jen, Partner, Pentagram

Natasha Jen is an award-winning designer and educator. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, she was invited to join Pentagram’s New York office as partner in 2012. In 2014 she was acclaimed by Wired magazine as one of nine ‘Designers Who Matter’.

Jen’s work is recognized for its innovative use of graphic, digital, and spatial interventions that challenge conventional notions of media and cultural contexts. Her work is immediately recognizable, encompassing brand identity systems, printed matters, exhibition design, digital interfaces, signage and way-finding systems, and architecture.

She was one of the winners of Art Directors Club Young Guns, for which she also served as a judge in 2007 and 2011. She has been a guest critic at Yale University School of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Maryland Institute College of Art; and currently serves on the Board of Directors for Storefront for Art & Architecture and AIGA’s New York Chapter.

Barthes neutrality … Laozi 無爲 Wúwèi

To record an exchange from PSF

Muindi: In light of our talk about institutions that play the role of neutral facilitator in geopolitics and individuals who play the role of neutral facilitators in games and play scenarios, I wanted to share with you all some quotations from Roland Barthes' lectures on The Neutral, a book which I am very, very fond of and that I think would make great reading for the PSF group, alongside his lectures on How to Live Together. I send this because I think that Roland Barthes has a lovely way of talking about neutral party as a passionate figure rather than a dispassionate one. What's more, Barthes phrase "outplay the paradigm" (rather than "playing into the paradigm") could be a very useful phase to empower a facilitator within the context of types of games and play scenarios that we were discussing. (edited) 
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In a related timbre, Stefano Franchi, Niklas Damiris, and Helga Wild wrote a deep book on Passivity, which exists only as an unpublished ms.  A source for these diverse Western turns away from modernity: Bathes,  passivity, Heidegger’s standing in reserve, and Merleau-Ponty’s notion of constitution is Laozi’s Daodejing.  Here’s an introduction by Steve Coutinho to the daoist concept of wúwèi:

Sander Van Der Leeuw: "Are Cities Resilient?" / "Les villes sont‐elles résilientes ?"

Dear Synthesis / Prototyping Social Forms folks + friends,

As background for the UNDP Navigating Uncertainty 
Attached is a complex systems and long-term evolutionary approach to the life of cities, with profound implications…

Are cities resilient?
Sander E. van der Leeuw < vanderle@asu.edu>
ASU-SFI Center for Biosocial Complex Systems, Arizona State University and Santa Fe Institute


ABSTRACT. … [T]he driving force behind the aggregation of human settlement, throughout the centuries, has been the ever-increasing need for collective problem solving. Villages and cities have emerged in ‘dissipative flow structures’ in which organization (information processing capacity) spread out from cities into their hinterland, enabing energy and other resources to increasingly flow into cities to meet the needs of the population. Information processing is thus the driver of urbanization, and energy is the constraint. With the Industrial Revolution, the growth of such dissipative flow structures accelerated very rapidly due to the fact that fossil energy became available and lifted the constraint. Hence the urban explosion of the last couple of centuries.

…[S]ome of the potential consequences of this explosion are discussed. First, whether the ever accelerating increase of global urbanization will continue or not, and then what might be the consequences of that acceleration for urban planning and architecture, emphasizing that cities need to become pro-active rather than re-active. They need to start designing for change rather than responding to it. In a final section we discuss some of the risks to urbanization that are posed by the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Revolution, and conclude with a suggestion how, in developed countries, information technology might reverse the trend to increasing concentration of the population in cities, whereas for the moment, this is not likely to be the case in developing countries.



Xin Wei