Portals / Table of Content, and boundary objects

Hi Yanjun, Shomit, Ri, 

Yanjun’s already seen this table portal project.
Here’s the video of a Portals  project called Table of Content
collaboration between TML and Synthesis  2014-15

The key is that we focus on mating furniture and objects on the table and stay away from video-conferencing.   It’s hard, but how about we try to avoid representing people telematically, at least not use video.    Suren, Seth and I are pursuing a stream on alternatives to ocularcentric thought and technology.  A profound reason is that the heavier the tech we throw into representing people telematically, the more people tend to be glassed-off from one another, resorting to cliche expressions.   Less can be more.

So, let's focus on objects that "exist in two places at once" serving as boundary objects* between not only locations but cultures.

Garrett was a principal member of the team on the Synthesis side, with Evan Montpellier in TML / Montreal.  ( Byron was one of the heroic fellow travellers :)

In this light, Yanjun’ss work with the cafe and our sociological study with Christy take on extra significance.    With Ri and Shomit, let’s strongly pursue the enchantment and theater of objects, with the added dimension of telematic mates, remote doppelgänger glasses, plates, foods and flavors and aromas.

There were many directions and questions left unexplored.   It’d be nice to build "on the shoulders of giants” and get a bit further with present techniques.

Xin We

*   Susan Leigh Star famously introduced this as a more subtle and supple concept in
"The Structure of Ill-Structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogeneous Distributed Problem Solving", in M. Hubs and L. Gasser (eds), Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence 3 (Morgan Kaufmann, 1989).





Xin Wei

_________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei • Professor and Director • School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
Founding Director, Topological Media Lab
_______________________________________________________

NYTimes: Restoring Forests Could Help Put a Brake on Global Warming

NYTimes: Restoring Forests Could Help Put a Brake on Global Warming

[A study led by researchers at ETH Zurich, suggests that] … the planet could support nearly 2.5 billion additional acres of forest without shrinking our cities and farms, and that those additional trees, when they mature, could store a whole lot of the extra carbon — 200 gigatons of carbon, to be precise — generated by industrial activity over the last 150 years.

A handful of countries could make a very big difference. The researchers found that Russia could restore 373 million acres, or 151 million hectares, of forest. That was followed by the United States, with 255 million acres and Canada with 193 million acres.Other large countries like Australia, Brazil and China also have large areas suitable for forest restoration.

iStage

More detailed overview  of iStage attached and in Dropbox.


The School of AME’s Motion Analysis Lab / Intelligent Stage is a research lab and performance space + theater-grade hardware + custom software dedicated to responsive immersive environments and studies of whole experience.  This blackbox space has multiple infra-red and visible light tracking cameras; microphone array; standard, short throw and floor-scale projectors; 8.2 Meyer speaker system, hardware matrix for video and sound (Dante).  We optionally use integrated Optitrack motion-capture system and custom wearable sensors. The blackbox is equipped with a 32’x 48’ AeroDeck Harlequin sprung floor.  The grid, 14’ above the floor, allows for easy access to the equipment for quick changes for a collaborative environment.

The computing platform consists of 4 Macintosh workstations and a suite of Mac laptops and minis for standalone installations, plus the SC software framework (based on Max/MSP/Jitter/GL+Javascript and OSC) that allows researchers to build a wide variety of experiments that can map to a variable configuration of hardware.


Also in
Dropbox\ \(ASU\)/Synthesis/Synthesis-Operations/equipment/iStage.pages

aerial work

Thanks Luke, It’s now in Synthesis/equipment/Space 3.0

+ 
(a daughter of my tgarden, tg2001, and grandaunt to sc :)

trapeze-artist-aides strapped visitors of all ages and shapes into harnesses.
they were slung into the air…some laughing like crazy

while we beamed the data from accelerometers sewn into their translucent tails 
to max+nato/jitter+supercollider 



+ 
circa 1990 I saw Project Bandaloop do wonderful aerial work back near Capp Street Theater int he Mission in SF 
during the Street Performance festivals

+ 
there were lots of aerial dance works since there were so many climbers in SF who were also dancers when they weren’t up in the Sierras .
but one of my friends was part of the support team at the tragedy with Sankai Juku  in Seattle a few years before…

+  Einsteins Dream overhead cam looking down 23 feet onto the sand
with  visitors wading as if underwater through the projected ripples to the umbrella:

Damiris' outline for workshop on alter-economies, June 4, 10:00 - 16:00, Milieux EV 11-705, Concordia, Montreal

Alter-Economies | Alter-Ecologies Workshop 

4 June  2018, 10:00 - 16:00
Morning session led by Erin and Brian, Afternoon led by Niklas

Milieux Resource Center EV 11.705, Concordia University

Niklas Wild-Damiris’ Outline:

In this workshop I plan to discuss and build on Brian Massumi’s forthcoming: “99 Theses; for a revaluation of value”

First, I will reflect on his problematization of value from a Marx-inspired ‘critique of value’ perspective. Next, I will address the theses on derivatives: while agreeing with him and other recent scholarship that the digital incarnation of these financial instruments, could make their repurposing easier and thus free them from their main preoccupation with ‘money-capital accumulation’, there are issues that need to be resolved first, if such ‘creative duplicity’ can be effective. Two important and related ones are: the ontology of algorithms and the problem of formalization rather than of ‘quantification’.

I will make a few remarks on the character of self-reference and reflexivity as they pertain to formalism, and how money itself qua formal structure can be also approached thus.

I will also briefly comment on Blockchain, whose dubious impact will have more to do with changing the rule of law, rather than the dominant economic order.

A lot of Brian Massumi’s arguments are based on an inspired reading and intuitions culled mostly from Deleuze & Guattari and Whitehead. In my presentation I will suggest how they could be further enhanced and operationalized by drawing from Quantum Field Theory. 

I will not get too technical on this point, for I want to move to what I consider the main topic for our discussion: I will dub it the ‘Eco-Eco Nexus’

Briefly, I would like to claim that the core issue climate change is driving home hard, and faster than anticipated, is how we ‘do/practice economy’ under the ‘warming condition’.

I will argue for a generalized sense of economy (which has some affinity with Bataille’s ‘general’ economy’ and also gets inspiration from Klossowski’s ‘Living Currency’ and Henry’s From Communism to Capitalism Theory of a Catastrophe)

However, my largest inspiration and aspiration is to theorize something after the spirit of Schroedinger’s What Is Life?  I want to I ask: What is Economy?   The question cannot be posed, I claim, without factoring the ecological context not as an afterthought, but as the constitutive precondition of human economic activity. Since I want to avoid what I take to be a conceptual mistake to ‘hybridize’ ‘capital’ and ‘nature’, I introduce a methodological innovation based on rethinking the status of theory in quantum physics and how it deploys formalism. This ties back to the concern raised earlier concerning the differences between formalization and quantification.

I conclude the outline of my position by returning to Brian’s powerful call for a ‘revaluation of value’. I will propose emending his analysis with a morphogenetic approach to ‘monetary value’ based on the self-referential status of prices and the ubiquitous and unavoidable presence of uncertainty as leveraged in quantum physics.

My Eco-Eco (Econo-ecological) Nexus is not merely a slogan to displace ‘The Cash-Nexus’, but a re-write of Spinoza’s ‘God sive Natura’: God or nature (a.k.a. ecology) is immanent to economy, which defines human existence. This implies, without getting overly religious or theological, that ‘God or Nature’ is always the other that is never far away. Agency at its most potent and arrogant is only a trigger whose consequences are beyond its control. And yet humans must act! Especially Today!

If so, financial Speculation, like the divination practices of old, could underwrite a common planetary ethos for ‘coping with what is spoiled’.

Given the weighty the topics I try to weave together, I will conclude with few ‘light’ remarks comparing the currently popular Latourian research programme with the Hayekian inspired neoliberalism.


On May 31, 2018, at 12:01 AM, Sha Xin Wei <shaxinwei@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

We’re looking forward to a hands-on working session on alter-economies and alter-ecologies
10:00 - 16:00 this Monday at Concordia University EV11-705, in Montreal.

The schedule is deliberately loose.
I’ve taken the liberty of naming Erin, Brian and Niklas as lead discussants.
But I trust everyone attending this intimate workshop should have a chance to jump in.

For those interested but unable to attend, please PM me for follow-ups in Montreal this week,
and at Synthesis this Fall.

Warm thanks to Milieux and our Concordia hosts,
Xin Wei

June 4, 10:00 - 16:00: Workshop on alter-economies (crypto currency, blockchain, …), Milieux EV 11-705, Concordia, Montreal

Hi everyone,

We’re looking forward to a hands-on working session on alter-economies and alter-ecologies
10:00 - 16:00 this Monday at Concordia University EV11-705, in Montreal.

The schedule is deliberately loose.
I’ve taken the liberty of naming Erin, Brian and Niklas as lead discussants.
But I trust everyone attending this intimate workshop should have a chance to jump in.

For those interested but unable to attend, please PM me for follow-ups in Montreal this week,
and at Synthesis this Fall.

Warm thanks to Milieux and our Concordia hosts,
Xin Wei

_________________________________________________
Sha Xin Wei • Professor and Director • School of Arts, Media and Engineering + Synthesis
Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts + Fulton Schools of Engineering • ASU
Fellow: ASU-Santa Fe Center for Biosocial Complex Systems
Affiliate Professor: Future of Innovation in Society; Computer Science; English
Associate Editor: AI & Society Journal
skype: shaxinwei • mobile: +1-650-815-9962
Founding Director, Topological Media Lab
_______________________________________________________
 

gold mine of ideas in Adrian Freed's Stanford talk summarizing of UC Berkeley's CNMAT (1989-2016)

summarizing CNMAT, UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies: 1989-2016.

It’s a gold mine of ideas and research methods which I think are fertile and strategic not only for music and technology but for a lot of our work in the study of :

creativity,
dense media and dense sensing,
augmented human activity,
gestural media,
movement-based research,
wearables,
signal processing,
computer engineering, edge computing,
sensorimotor science,
realtime media,
ecology of things,
how to do research and mentor students informed by or in service of experimental performance practice.

Re: SERRA Take Down

Megan, Pete, Connor, Todd, Ben,

My apologies for missing the ops discussion today.  

( Today was crazy since I had to negotiate new faculty hires, potentially half a new building for AME, and funding for the space renovation for Stauffer and MC this summer.  The good news is that we may be getting 2/3 of the funds needed to summer renovation now apparently underway.)

Please post the proposed timetable for Serra so we’re all on the same page.

Thanks,
Xin Wei

On May 10, 2018, at 9:25 AM, Megan Patzem <mpatzem@asu.edu> wrote:

Hi all,

We should meet today for a short ops meeting and finalized the SERRA take down so I can send out an email to the parties included asap.

Thanks

Best wishes,

Megan Patzem
Multimedia Artist & Communications
School of Arts Media & Engineering + Digital Culture
Arizona State University
Mail Code: 5802
p: 480-652-5333  f: 480-965-0961  
email: mpatzem@asu.edu
web: http://meganpatzem.webflow.io/