Suchergebnisse

An essay for Bracket journal drawing on the work of political economist Albert O. Hirschmann to speculate on the possibility of 'exit spaces' enabled by networked technology to exist outside of state or corporate oversight and control. The essay explores the history of these spaces from the Koreshan commune, to Occupy, Seasteading, and the opportunity for them to exist digitally in forms such as mesh networks.

As part of the Photographers' Gallery's Unthinking Photography series of online writings and essays I was commissioned to edit and bring together work exploring the influence and role of computer generated imagery technology in our conception of reality. Four initial essays were commissioned: An introductory text to the series, Rendering The Desert of the Real by myself exploring a brief history of doctoring of images and their political role. The Enstasis of Elon Musk by Tamar Shafrir giving an overview of the rendering and ideation technologies of architecture that have come to define the imagination of the city. Embodying Others by Simone Niquille which presents a video essay of how the current slate of CGI technologies are used to construct the environment for forensic purposes and Into the Universe of Rendered Architectural Images by Joel McKim discusses the relationship between the technical and the imaginable.

An essay for NEXT 2018's publication 'Digital Fix' The essay addresses the struggle of critical practice in building compelling narratives of engagement with technological and social issues. The essay calls questions the inevitability of social democratic notions of 'progress' that are wrapped up in technological criticism and critical practice and calls for alternative aspirations to be drawn out for technology as a tool for world-building and imaginative potential. Nascent in technology is the opportunity to build worlds without cars, worlds driven by principles of spiritual fulfillment rather than efficiency and productivity.

Paper delivered at Between Paper and Pixels, Transmedial traffic in architecture drawing at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre, TU Delft. The paper looks at how the aesthetics of rendering software are influencing popular conceptions of the future and offers there categories of radical practice that are challenging this hegemony; Un-Rendering, Low-Rendering and Hyper-Rendering.

An essay for Amateur Cities on the potentially radical politics of rendering software. The tools are difficult but they are multiplying, Google Sketchup is becoming more sophisticated as a free alternative to other engines. Beyond traditional rendering platforms, Minecraft has already proven its worth as an educational and imaginative platform, allowing players to stretch the bounds of the rules of the universe. It is not clear what a radical utopian rendering culture would look like, nor exactly how these things would act outside of the existing culture of architectural renderings, developing things not to appeal to developers or critics. Sascha Pohflepp's recent work with physics engines, provokes thoughts of a Dr Morel-style world where rendering technology frees us from the bounds of the physical universe rather than constructing more visions of monoliths and shopping centres. Imaging these worlds in the context of cheapening immersive and virtual realities opens up massive possibilities for radically reforming reality and constructing radically different spaces.

The Monopoly of Legitimate Use takes the very physical notion of inhabiting a space or territory into the technological world, where networks can form political territories and places where people can gather and align themselves to particular ideological beliefs. The three films, Bumper, Blackspot and Stateless explore three individuals – migrants and refugees – in a near future, moving between the layers of this vertical geography to try and find refuge or exploit the geography to their benefit. The films raise questions about the tools and methods we use to identify ourselves politically as well as the rebalance of control caused by network technology that is simultaneously globalising and localising.

Essay for Noon magazine's inaugural issue Spring/Summer 2014. The article expands on themes around Designed Conflict Territories and technology as a territorial basis for a commons. Technology can be a territory. If we take territory to be an abstract political projection of boundaries and laws over a hardened and implacable geography then, in a sense, anything could be a territory. But if we take geography, not as continents and landmasses but as the network - the jealously embedded system of cabling and legal frameworks often carelessly brushed off as 'The Internet' or more recently 'the cloud' - then we arrive at a point where the territories constructed on the network possess a cruel politics that is crushing the imaginable alternatives the technology promised.

By 2050, half the world's population will live in cities — Ancient Proverb You have, surely, seen or heard the above statement before—in newspaper articles, possibly, or government documents; perhaps as wall-text at an art exhibition; perhaps whispered into your ear by an anonymous commuter. Words summon action. Describing a near-future in which half of the global populace will inevitably—definitely!—live in cities is not a value-neutral offering but an invocation to act. This proverb drives policy development for the United Nations, forms the opening gambit of a great many foresight reports and acts as the backbone of the property development industry. It is a compelling pitch for businesses and govern- ments looking to shore up certainty in an age of instability and volatility, framing half the world's population as a captive audience for policy, surveillance and sales. Positioning the city as the nexus of mass human experience for the foreseeable future sets up a land-grab for who gets to define what these cities will look like. And what is being imagined often seems to be terribly similar, both in terms of what these cities look like, how they are controlled and what forms of technological systems will thread through them. It is these apparently inescapable future-metropolitan visions that critical approaches to design, architecture and urbanism seek to challenge.

CHARISMATIC MEGAPIGMENT is a collaborative project produced with Charley Peters and Wesley Goatley. In this installation, a green painting by Charley Peters is analysed in detail by a robotic camera and screen roaming across its surface. This camera feeds a machine learning system, built by Wesley Goatley, which is trained on a custom-made database of 100,000 images classified as 'green' by Google. As the camera slowly moves across the painting it draws and displays a nearest-neighbor match to the part of the painting it is 'seeing' to the bank of green images from Google. In doing so it creates the impression of investigating or interrogating the painting, looking for meaning in the abstract forms and colours. However, the painting and the images are contextually unconnected and any meaning or inference drawn from the computer's analysis of the painting is purely an inference of the viewer. The project critiques an aesthetic meaning-making tendency in both machine-learning and greenwashing. Machines' ability at performing pattern-recognition is often held up as s sign of some sort of intelligence or meaning-making quality. Equally, contextless images of fields, forests and smiling children are often intepreted as ecological-consciousness. The juxtaposition of these two ways of deploying visual culture to aid a technological and political idea is exposed as critically unsound through the project. The project also seeks to technically explore the limitations of pattern recognition and meaning-making in machine learning. The generative nature of the outcomes and the sendipitous matches of Google images and painting invite the audience to consider the hand of the artist, developer or engineer in making editorial and critical decisions about what consitutes a 'match.'

This essay, 'Internet of Bombs' acts as response to and contextualising tool for the MA projects. In it, we take the long view, considering the use of the autonomous weapons of war animals in Ancient Greece; and considering how, as in WWII 'area bombing' the efficacy of a weapon (re)defines a target. We trace precision tracking, sensing, and control from Cold War era computerisation of military strategy, into modern day offerings and operations around the Internet of Things, the 'smart city', and the networked world. A long-form essay which takes the long view around autonomised weaponry, considering the use of the autonomous weapons of war animals in Ancient Greece; and considering how, as in WWII 'area bombing' the efficacy of a weapon (re)defines a target. We trace precision tracking, sensing, and control from Cold War era computerisation of military strategy, into modern day offerings and operations around the Internet of Things, the 'smart city', and the networked world.

Are digital interfaces controlling more than we realise? Can designers take responsibility, and should they? From domestic appliances like Siri and Amazon Echo, to large scale Facebook manipulation and Google search prediction, digital interfaces are ubiquitous in everyday life and their influences affect how people live, feel and behave. As they grow in complexity and increase integration into our lives we need to address the social, ethical, political and aesthetic responsibilities of those designing and creating the computer systems all around us. Through discussion with cutting-edge designers and thinkers and with international examples, the authors explain how we need an expanded aesthetic, critical and ethical awareness on the part of designers willing to act with sensitivity and understanding towards the people they design for and with. This critical take on the process and implications of interface design looks beyond the mechanics of making, and into the techno-political realm of deliberate and unintended consequences.