30 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. That shiny new tower with its curtain wall of low-e windows might be supremely energy efficient, but building such a structure requires tons and tons of carbon-intensive steel and concrete.

      Focus on consumer-end solutions rather than systemic changes to adapt to a less carbon intensive economy

    2. Meanwhile, with oil now scarce, a number of Nordic and Western European countries, including Germany, Austria, France, Switzerland, and Sweden, adopted aggressive measures to facilitate a transition to geothermal electricity and geothermal heating and cooling.

      Interesting how the Embargo influenced directly the research and economic behavior of the entire NATO bloc. Artificial scarcity was a blessing, as this period laid out the seeds for contemporary research on energy efficiency and low emmisions.

    1. He argues players are thus encouraged to “witness” history, and this experience “follow[s] the logic of a theme park ride” (Reisner, 2013, p. 254). Baron, is deeply critical of such lack of player agency in the use of archival material, arguing that it functions to “promote a sense that history is teleological and can happen -- could have happened -- only one way”

      En este sentido la especulación sobre el movimiento social lleva al videojuego en otra dimensión, rompe con la teleología de los videojuegos basados en misiones, proponiendo un trasegar entre lo agencial y lo contemplativo que cuestiona nuestras opiniones formadas acerca de dicho movimiento.

  2. Jul 2023
    1. videogames can and should be considered as a new and significant form of public history. Public history occurs outside formal learning contexts, involves the general public, is participatory and straddles history and heritage.

      Public history might not necessarily mean "good" or "necessary" history. The participatory process might make it look as legitimate and democratically built, but it might take the biases, xenophobia and collective hatred towards particular social or ethnic groups, enshrining a narrative that can be both innacurate and far from what is needed in order to heal societal wounds.

  3. Feb 2022
    1. Autocene more clearly than the automobile

      The exemplification of industralization through the fordian production line has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as is used as example of automation, it continues to perpetuate and multiply as cosmotechnical device

  4. Jun 2021
    1. And the same with the extremely cold ecosystems. And the same with the redwood forests. Trees can’t up and move quickly enough to keep up with climate change.

      Unless we help them do so

    1. projected for a 4°C world have not been evaluated, but they could be expected to vastly exceed the consequences experienced to date (heat-related deaths, forest fires, harvest losses) and potentially exceed the adaptive capacities of many societies and natural systems.

      Also exceed infrastructural capabilities to adapt. I guess the resilience index in SSPs scenarios would account for that

  5. Apr 2021
    1. If we accept the idea that the entire surface of the earth is migratory, then why not landscapes in particular? A landscape — as a scene, landschap, ecosystem, and socio-political territory — is a material assembly of moving entities, a dynamic medium which changes in quality and structure through the aggregate movements or actions of the things that constitute it.
  6. Mar 2021
    1. and any known lifeform has always and probably will always be transient, a passage in time

    2. Practicing reason would tame the passions and thereby “free” humans to recognize the advantages of the political or “artificial” over the natural state.

      F*** you Hobbes

    3. His answer was that nature had endowed humans with reason (“logos”) and that, hence, the function of humans is to think and, more specifically, to participate — by way of thinking — in the divine thought that organizes the cosmos.

      F*** you aristotle.

    1. For all, Culinary Modernism had provided what was wanted: food that was processed, preservable, industrial, novel, and fast, the food of the elite at a price everyone could afford. Where modern food became available, populations grew taller, stronger, had fewer diseases, and lived longer. Men had choices other than hard agricultural labor, women other than kneeling at the metate five hours a day

      Yet, this is now the issue anymore. Overabundance of saturated fats and low quality calories are the norm.

    2. and in much of the world people avoided fresh vegetables, all on medical advice.

      The fact we can now eat fresh vegetables is due to the intense terraforming and regulatory process, industrialization and sanitation introduced to their production process. To advocate for the past is also misleading, as they just died younger, always, so this turn to fresh and "natural" food is not entirely unfounded. But it has been facilitated by modernization.

  7. Feb 2021
    1. This is obvious when you consider that, once, the word ‘computer’, like the word ‘typewriter’, could originally be applied both to the human being ‘using’ – that is to say, involved with – the machine as well as to the machine itself. And it is no accident that most of these typewriters and computers were in the first instance women.

      Both objectified in relationship to the function they serve

  8. Dec 2020
    1. s.

      Curiously, all of these movements or mentalities are generally atributed to western liberalism. Postcolonialism, post-gender movements are all the fruition of the enlightenment promise of personal and individual freedom, that was proven to be hindered for the large part of the population that was not the hegemonical white male during a long period of history. Yet, most of these promises for freedom of thought and agency are not universally present in non-western mentalities. Although amerindian ontological structure is itself not separate from nature, thus having uninterrupted connections between what we divided as "social" and "natural", it is precisely this cosmological framework that assigns certain social and behavioral roles meant to harmonize with the universal design. Such absolute freedom and individualism are products of a western line of thought, and however good and beneficial they are in and of themselves, should not be conflated, nor equated with the roles and rules that apply to the "individual" (if such can be diferentiated) in non-western ontologies.

  9. May 2020
    1. Smaller and smaller moments of human life are being transformed into capital, whether it’s the ability to automatically scan thousands of cars for outstanding court fees, or a moment of recklessness captured from a photograph uploaded to the Internet

      The sensing layer is expanding, not only to incorporate physical subjects, but also time embeddings and relationship between them.

  10. Apr 2020
    1. “More information” does not produce “more truth”, it endangers it

      As generally more information lacks more nuance.

    2. Violent jihadism and other forms of right-wing extremism share two characteristics identified by the sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab: “monism” and “simplism”. Monism is described as “the tendency to treat cleavage and ambivalence as illegitimate [...] the repression of difference and dissent, the closing down of the market place of ideas”, while simplism is the “unambiguous ascription of single causes and remedies for multifactored phenomena”.

      Is a completely different way of understanding monism than Daoism. Daoism is monist in metaphysical and ontological terms, but it does nothing more than accept and embrace ambivalence, not only as desirable but inescapable condition of reality

  11. Jan 2020
    1. budgets account for only a fraction of the numbers that curators have on the brain. Thoughts swarm about the details of an art work, its dimensions and accession number; technical specifications for a projector; image resolution; security requirements and insurance values; conservation concerns, including light levels and humidity; the accessibility of facilities, such as the width of doorways or the maximum weight of a stair lift; visitor numbers – the list is endless.

      Valuable! Quote for what type of numbers curators have in mind when organizing exhibitions.

  12. Dec 2019
    1. The score may be viewed as an algorithm, expressive both in structure and in the writing hand of the composer.

      The original score is kept in the vatican museum cause the materiality of the score is irrelevant to the piece. Is the content of the score, its notation, sequentiality and the performativity it enables which is relevant. It boils down to the value system of visual arts vs other arts: It derives its value from scarcity, it is a luxury commodity.

    1. Clearly early civilizations developed procedures for counting and measuring. They also created procedures for weaving, grinding, making fire and cooking. Any of these procedures, when well defined, could be viewed as an algorithm. Indeed  weaving technology played an important role in the history of computers.  If we can spell out the procedure for any given task then, given all the necessary materials and skills, we should be able to carry out the task

      Agency coming from works of art might be defined, as a reaction in the system of perception carried out by accessory or complementary structure algorithms

    2. Today we are inclined to view any well defined procedure as an algorithm. A recipe for baking bread is an algorithm. Follow the recipe faithfully and you will duplicate the kind of bread made by the person who wrote the recipe.

      What kind of results are brought by errors in each type of algorithm? which are expected, even welcomed, and which others are just the reason to bring a system (or a program) down?

    1. Andre was not so lucky. His instructions were simply: ‘Timber Piece, 28 units c. 1′ x 1′ x 3″ and a little drawing. I pictured ‘timber’ as raw logs, where he meant finished lumber. It looked great, but he always insisted that it was my piece, not his.

      Shows the difference between computational algorithms and human or artmaking algorithms. Mistakes and misunderstandings could brin new generative options, while coding mistakes might bring just a crash error or just won't run (sometimes, some others mistakes might be accepted, i assume). This should be referred as one and the main limitation of my appraoch.

    2. Thus, if everything could be art and everything was worthy of being the subject of art, then it seemed – in 1969 – that curating itself might soon become obsolete. The fact that it has not signals an ultimate failure. Despite its huge influence within the art world up to the present, conceptual curating remains what Luis Camnitzer has called ‘full-belly art

      On the contrary, If everything is worthy of being the subject of art, curating indeed becomes all the more important. Same as the information society we currently live, selection, merging, simplification, analysis and meaning is what has been eroding after the super-abundance of available material, and curators as specialists in their fields should provide that edge of comprehensive knowledge and on site experience solution to the audience to really bring an experience to fruition. As Ronny Chieng intelligently put it: "Who would have thought that all of the information of the world would make everybody so dumb"

    3. The show was so large that the public would be overwhelmed and have to depend on its own perceptions. The index card form was carried over to the subsequent numbered exhibitions:

      Art pieces and art works as indexing. Strong connection with library practice

    4. I had just returned from a radicalising trip to Argentina (with French critic Jean Clay) during the military dictatorship. There we had met members of the Rosario group in the midst of their Tucamán Arde campaign (which in the last decade or so has finally been recognised as the groundbreaking work that it was). This was the first time I had heard artists say that they were not going to make art until the world was changed for the better. It made a profound impression on me.

      It might be that, the same as happened with Minujin and other DiTella institute artists, their recognition within art history on a local, latin american and global level, goes hand in hand with the fact they interacted with these first level curators or art institution staff.

    1. The manifesto removes itself from the vernacular application of the term “recombinant” (one tied to genetically modified organisms). Instead, the recombinants’s materials are described to be the result a form of data-splicing that removes any disparity between the data anatomy of digital datasets and organic DNA, which are explained to be constantly rewritten, or “recombined” in a cycle of constant rebirth and in the form of an eternal return. The manifesto claims many things the Recombinants are not; there are direct rejections of being merely cyborgs, replicants, mutations, humans, or computers, and the Recombinants reject any adherence to the past or future. From an outside perspective, the manifesto is mysteriously ambiguous, as the Recombinants claim to exist as nothing and everything at the same time.

      Does this concept connect, or rather is a theory support, of DCNN generated imagery?

  13. Dec 2018
    1. by their visual similarity,

      One big problem can reside in the understanding of "curating" as creating networks of "similarity" or "closeness" which is what most of this algorithms do, in order to keep you into the system. Those algorithms fail to foresee, the saturation you usually get from those recursive patterns. Curation is not collecting similarities, but balanced opposites within the same realm.

    2. which provides a curated list of annotated links to relevant stories about contemporary art that provide greater context for the work we host and produce

      News belonging from the hierarchical, closed off and institutional contemporary art system.

    3. How can museums make sense and meaning of such inordinate amounts of hyperconnected data, organised flatly and without a clear hierarchy for establishing value?

      Well, coming myself from a place in which museums have to fight off to assert themselves as hierarchical sense makers against basically any other media or influencer, this is not a very off situation. Museum is just like any other channel, with some responsibilities, backgrounds and limitations, but i would refrain to state the core task of it to "establish value"