Prism is part, I would suggest, of the realm of design thinking. This is a problem-solving methodology born out of similarly strange bedfellows as The Californian Ideology. In this case it’s art school creativity hijacked by management theory. Design thinking suggests the synthetic way in which designers are (supposed to be) thinking can be applied to almost any subject. […] By seeing the world through the lens of this conceptual design ecosystem, design thinking abstracts the world into a series of interactions with outputs and it remains poised to provide a solution for anything. Never mind the fact that there are many who would argue with the idea of design as a solution-focused activity, that this conception of design is pure ideological cant.
Of course, like digital culture and like late capitalism, design thinking prefers to appear a non-ideological matter of common sense. Apparently de-politicised and post-ideological, design thinking appears free of its own innate desires and tendencies in order to open-mindedly and radically reinvent the world.
— A text by Sam Jacobs about “PRISM as the dark side of design thinking”
“Whenever discussion starts about how to hide from the tracking code that follows users around the Web to serve them targeted ads, recommendations soon pile up for a browser add-on called Ghostery. It blocks tracking code, noticeably speeds up how quickly pages load as a result, and has roughly 19 million users. Yet few of those who advocate Ghostery as a way to escape the clutches of the online ad industry realize that the company behind it, Evidon, is in fact part of that selfsame industry.
Evidon helps companies that want to improve their use of tracking code by selling them data collected from the eight million Ghostery users that have enabled a data-sharing feature in the tool.”
— A Popular Ad Blocker Also Helps the Ad Industry
A social network analysis of Rousseau’s Confessions by Yannick Rochat & Frédéric Kaplan:
Working on an index, we build a literary social network of Les Confessions based on co-occurrences, by using a process that deals with edition and page constraints. We are currently investigating new ways to visualize and analyze literary social networks over time. Here, we propose the use of a temporal window, which captures the evolving structure of the network during a given interval of time.
“I got a call, ‘Jay, there’s a cloud in the data center’,” Parikh says.
“‘What do you mean, outside?’.
‘No, inside’.” There was panic. “It was raining in the datacenter,” he explains.
The problem occurred because of the ambitious chiller-less air conditioning system the data center used.
We’re writing things that we can’t read, (…) We’ve produced systems of such complexity that they’ve all been written by humans but they are totally illegible to any human on earth, and yet their effects are quite tangible.
— Kevin Slavin, a professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab, says.
As a fairly new area of study, the viewpoints of animal-computer interaction and its possible uses, as well as the driving forces behind the research – even the seriousness of the approach – can be seen to vary greatly. Still, majority of the research is done in the name of promoting the well-being of all different kinds of animals in our lives. The studies show that due to the animals’ inability to voice their opinions or consent it is difficult to evaluate the true ethicality of proposed implementations. This also applies for usability and other technical issues surrounding the development of computerised systems for animals communicating in such different ways from human users. Based on the research studied also the true benefit of animal-computer interaction to the animals themselves remains debatable.
Tatsuo Horiuchi, the 73-year old Excel spreadsheet artist:
“I never used Excel at work but I saw other people making pretty graphs and thought, ‘I could probably draw with that,’”
June 11, 2013 at 3:51pm
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As a fan of monster stories and movies, I’ve always liked to think about what the monster would be like when it is not performing its duty to the plot of the film. What is the monster like at rest or engaged in the daily routines of life that don’t involve being monstrous? Like those monsters, drones (U.A.V.s) seem to always be in an active state. We only really hear about drones flying or spying or striking. What is a drone like when being passive or outside the monstrous, drone narrative? In response to these thoughts, I thought about a drone character. I wanted to capture scenes of the drone character not being active. I feel as though this scene puts the drone character in a passive, and even vulnerable, position. It might come across as a strange or absurd scene, but I want to portray something more from the story of the monster.
— Colin Morse
June 10, 2013 at 3:13pm
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The countryside, mapped, marked by the wear and tear that each thing imposes on, and in turn receivesfrom,thethings around it and its environment, is studded and cluttered with memories, a collection of remains, monuments, memory. Every place can be dated by this mutual hollowing, and by these ruins.
— Michel Serres, 2008
Ethnographic research involves multiple embodied and material practices. What I mean is that words have only ever been one of our tools, and “an ethnography” (or ethnographic monograph) only one of our research outputs. Images, objects and performances are also fundamental parts of the ethnographic toolkit–both in terms of doing our work and how we present it to others–and in that sense we have always been multimedia practitioners.
— by Anne Galloway
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