THWONK

THWONK is an exciting and new approach to creating online communities that allows participants to alter the rule sets of these systems. THWONK allows the public to design the rules of social networks such as email lists, a.k.a. User Generated Social Structures (UGSS).

Digital communication tools are a critical component of everyday life for many people. The appropriate and inappropriate design of communication tools influence and shape how we connect, interact and collaborate in local and distributed groups. Many of the digital communication tools we use arose organically; with no explicit understanding of the complex and multi-faceted effects they have on human behaviour. For example mailing lists emerged more than 30+ years ago, yet the social experience of mailing lists has remained nearly unchanged, e.g. mailing lists do not exist that are designed to explicitly support business processes.
http://www.thwonk.com

welcome to the desert of the real_molleindustria

Wildlife

At night projections from moving cars are shone on the buildings downtown. Each car projects a video of a wild animal. The animal’s movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: as the car moves, the animal runs along it speeding up and slowing down with the car, as the car stops, the animal stops also. The framerate of the movie corresponds to the speed of the wheel rotation, picked up by a sensor. If the presence of a moving object (such as another car or pedestrian) is detected with proximity sensors, its animal “avatar” appears in the projection.
For the ZeroOne ISEA2006 I will be using one vehicle with a projection of a tiger (additional animals will appear in the projection as reflections of passing vehicles and pedestrians).
Projection disappears and flickers as it is supported by the architecture. The city itself is an active partner in creating this alter ego.
We are elevated from the everyday reality through this element of fantasy into a world with more dimensions, possibilities and perhaps beauty.

created by Karolina Sobecka

Cybermind

Cybermind is an Internet mailing list, originally founded in 1994 to discuss the issues and problems of living online. It proved exceptionally fertile and is still going strong thirteen years later.

This book is an ethnographic investigation which follows Cybermind members in their daily lives on the List, and explores the ways they look at the world, argue, relate online life to offline life, use gender, and build community. Perhaps the most comprehensive history of an Internet group ever published, it includes detailed analyses using List members’ own words and commentary, and develops a unique theory of the relationship between culture, the problems of communication, and the ongoing processes of categorisation. Living on Cybermind illustrates how behaviour is affected by the organisation of communication, and how people deal with the paradoxes involved in resolving ambiguity and truth in a situation in which presence is always on the verge of slipping away.

artists as inventors

Using both historical and contemporary examples, this publication traces the complex relationships among art, technology and science, focusing on technological and artistic media from the nineteenth century to the present day.

World Power Systems

World Power Systems is an entity that produces artifacts and written ideas to create a sort of portal between this early Cold War era and today; to illuminate the beauty and horror, at once alien and familiar, and thereby reflect today’s beauty and horror back into visibility.

The artifacts, visible elsewhere, are obsolete forgeries. My work is not entirely visual; it needs to be felt and manipulated to hear it’s story.

The form tells a story of aesthetic design evolution; the functions define the true history of money and politics.

There will be blood

There Will Be Blood is a 2007 American drama film directed, written and co-produced by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film is loosely based on the Upton Sinclair novel Oil! (1927). It tells the story of a silver-miner-turned-oil-man on a ruthless quest for wealth during Southern California’s oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It stars Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano.

The film received significant critical praise and numerous award nominations and victories. It appeared on many critics’ “top ten” lists for the year, notably the American Film Institute^[1], the National Society of Film Critics, the National Board of Review, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Day-Lewis won Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors’ Guild, NYFCC, and IFTA Best Actor awards for his performance. The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning Best Actor for Day-Lewis, and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit.

the big plot

It’s your worst neurosis of your life.
It’s the most meaningless conspiracy in history.
It’s a spy fiction about your intimate secrets and personal data over internet.

A story dispersed in more than seven cities, across several media platforms and among a cluster of actors who lead a tour in some of the most poignant sentiments of the human condition. The worst obsessions of your era and your hearts are transposed onto many stages, where degenerate souls with insatiable fixations are trying to give sense to their life.

Jeff Noon’s new project

217 Babel Street is a web of interconnected stories set in a seaside apartment block. There are twenty apartments in the building. Each of the four writers works independently of the others, starting off stories from different rooms. New pages are produced by creating a link from a word or a phrase on a page that already exists. Writers can interrupt and take over each other’s stories, taking them in different directions. Month by month the narrative changes, expanding into new rooms, characters and situations, creating new pathways for readers to explore.

Daft