VVORK

VVORK 17/04/2012 23:24

“Chairs”, 2001 by Robert Morris. Wood, lead, audio.

VVORK

VVORK 17/04/2012 23:17

»Boy«, 1999 by Michelle Lopez.

Rogue Archivists Fight the Digital Dark Age

The Long Now Foundation 16/04/2012 20:59

Vigilantes? Internet Archaeologists? Digital doomsday sayers?

The Archive Team has been called many things. Here at Long Now weve been following their work, which was recently featured by NPRs On The Media. In a brief interview for the program, founder Jason Scott talked about some of the work theyre doing, and why it’s important.

Scott describes his group as a kind of emergency response team that comes into action whenever a social media site shuts down. We share our personal lives on these sites by uploading pictures, music, and other materials through their free services. But, Scott warns, such platforms are inherently fragile and short-lived and what happens to our stuff when theyre taken down?

People put their lives online, and then one day wake up and realize, its not there anymore. They are keeping their memories on spinning magnetic pieces of metal.

Thats where the Archive team comes in. Weve been compared to firemen, Scott says: they enter doomed sites and try to grab what [they] can, hoping to salvage the photos, writings, and other memories people had stored there.

An ambitious goal but it does prompt a question: is everything we upload to the net really worth saving? Isnt most of it a sea of insignificant snapshots and mundane memories? Scott counters that even the most trivial piece of information may harbor a nugget of historical gold:

the example that I give is a civil war letter to a wife from her husband who is on the front lines. It might be the most trivial thing to say, hope the cows are OK, hope youre fine, but theres so much other information coded in there. There could be a watermark showing that a company that said it never worked for that side, did in fact sell paper to that side. It could be a certain kind of ink, it could be that that one front guy became a general, and this is one of the few cases of him signing his own name. I know its a stretch, but there are people right now, taking some of the things we download, and doing cultural analysis. This is what happened when life went online. This is what happened when people reached a larger audience than their genetic line had ever reached. What did they do, given that power? And so, even though we might objectively say, this is trivial, I wouldnt want these read out to me, one by one, forever, everything historical that we see is because a whole line of people said, lets not throw out that box, lets not delete that tape, lets not get rid of those pictures. And, I dont want to be the guy who decided, ok, this is good, this is bad, and then 100 years later be hated.

In other words, even the tiniest tweet could give future generations some crucial insight into the workings of 21^st century culture. The Archive Team is here to save it all from being swallowed by the digital dark age, one site at a time.

Rogue Archivists Fight the Digital Dark Age

The Long Now Foundation 16/04/2012 20:59

Vigilantes? Internet Archaeologists? Digital doomsday sayers?

People put their lives online, and then one day wake up and realize, its not there anymore. They are keeping their memories on spinning magnetic pieces of metal.

the example that I give is a civil war letter to a wife from her husband who is on the front lines. It might be the most trivial thing to say, hope the cows are OK, hope youre fine, but theres so much other information coded in there. There could be a watermark showing that a company that said it never worked for that side, did in fact sell paper to that side. It could be a certain kind of ink, it could be that that one front guy became a general, and this is one of the few cases of him signing his own name. I know its a stretch, but there are people right now, taking some of the things we download, and doing cultural analysis. This is what happened when life went online. This is what happened when people reached a larger audience than their genetic line had ever reached. What did they do, given that power? And so, even though we might objectively say, this is trivial, I wouldnt want these read out to me, one by one, forever, everything historical that we see is because a whole line of people said, lets not throw out that box, lets not delete that tape, lets not get rid of those pictures. And, I dont want to be the guy who decided, ok, this is good, this is bad, and then 100 years later be hated.

Glass Hills of Mars

BLDGBLOG 15/04/2012 18:56

More than 10 million square kilometers of landscape on the surface of Mars, a region nearly the size of Europe, is made of glassspecifically volcanic glass, "a shiny substance similar to obsidian that forms when magma cools too fast for its minerals to crystallize."

[Image: An otherwise randomly grabbed image of Mars from the fantastic HiRISE site].

In a paper called "Widespread weathered glass on the surface of Mars," authors Briony Horgan and James F. Bell III, from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, go on to suggest that "the ubiquitous dusty mantle covering much of the northern plains [of Mars] may obscure more extensive glass deposits" yet to be mapped.

Although it's worth emphasizing that this glass is present mostly in the form of "Eolian" grainsthat is, small pieces of windblown sand accumulating in dune fieldsit is, nonetheless, a sublime scene to consider, with endless glass ridges and hills rolling off beneath stars and red dust storms, slippery to the touch, as hard as bedrock, cold, perhaps glistening and prismatic inside with distorted reflections of constellations, like blisters of light on a television screen coextensive with the surface of the planet. You could slide from one hill to the next, for hoursfor daysalone on a frozen ocean of self-reflecting landforms, dizzy with the images locked within.

(What would a glass farm look like, agriculture carved into crystalline ridges, cultivating strange geologies? Meanwhile, ages ago, in a different lifetime on BLDGBLOG: Mount St. Helens of Glass).

Hydro-Electro-Musical Machinery

BLDGBLOG 13/04/2012 14:48

[Image: Flow].

A floating tidemill on the UK's River Tyne has been filled with "electro-acoustic musical machinery," powered by the river itself. The building, a collaboration between Owl Project and Ed Carter, called Flow, is "a floating building on the River Tyne that generates its own power using a tidal water wheel."

The acoustic machines inside, powered by CNC-milled wooden gears and timber pistons, "respond directly to the ever-changing state of the river. The sounds created by each instrument can also be manipulated by visitors to the millhouse."

[Images: Flow].

Specifically, the floating auditorium includes "three inter-connected sonic instruments which mix traditional craft and digital innovation. They draw water from the River Tyne, passing it through a series filters, lasers and sensors, which bubble, beep, hiss, creak and groan." For at least one instrument, the resulting sounds are determined by the salt-content of the water: "A wooden mechanism then dips a series of electrodes into the jars and creates a series of sounds. The pitch of the sounds will be modified depending on the salinity levels of the water."

The installation is thus also a kind of lo-fi river research station, supplying data about the water it floats within (in the designers' words, it uses "a range of traditional and new technologies to monitor key environmental details, including water temperature, speed, salinity, and pollution").

[Images: Flow].

Finally, "Owl Project has designed a series of Log interfaces to alter the sounds the instruments make," literal pieces of wood with knobs and levers that produce acoustic special effects.

[Images: Flow].

It seems obvious to describe this as a kind of mobile version of the Sea Organ in Zadar, Croatiaor the San Francisco Wave Organwith the addition of fine woodworking skills and some quasi-scientific instrumentation. Putting this into the context of a project like "Amphibious Architecture," featured here a few years ago, it's easy to imagine an acoustic early-warning system for pollution, floods, and even the appearance of rare marine wildlife. A city's waterfronta whole bayornamented by singing buoys.

You can follow the project on Twitter, and there is theoretically a live-stream of sounds here. If any readers out there happen to hear it in person, let me know!

(Spotted via The Wire).

VVORK

VVORK 13/04/2012 07:59

“Colorless, odorless and tasteless”, 2011 by Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG. Customised arcade game, engine.

Building in a Bottle

BLDGBLOG 12/04/2012 19:55

[Image: Piece of Nature Preserved (1973) by Haus-Rucker-Co; photo by Hagen Stier, courtesy of the Deutsches Architekturmuseum].

A forthcoming exhibition at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt explores the world of the architectural model, from Frei Otto and Rem Koolhaas to Peter Eisenman.

The above piece, by Haus-Rucker-Co, called Piece of Nature Preserved (1973) seems worthy of highlighting. "The small hut is a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the longing for a simple, back-to-the-roots way of life," the museum suggests. "Nature unharmed by destructive environmental forces can only be created in a glass capsule, as a model in the shape of a preserving jar."

The exhibition opens the evening of May 24.