Thursday, February 28, 2008
quiet things
made with bookmaking materials
magnetic curtain by Florian Kräutli
A curtain which you can shape to any form. Through the incorporated structure and magnets, it stays in the shape you push and pull it to.
laptop sleeve with snaps. by working class heroes.
mmmmm... industrial felt.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
explosions & art
http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=f14f365dd2ae53dc79b7b6d6f55a16e29001e6a2
Saturday, February 23, 2008
rhizome: definitions
"The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversilble, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight." p. 21 (Thousand Plateaus)
"Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be." p. 7 TP
"A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines... Every rhiozme contain lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified attributed., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees." p. 9 TP
"A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, "and... and.. and..." p. 25 TP
"A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles" p. 7 TP
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Casual Infovis - definition
reflections from a georgia tech student, John Stasko
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~john.stasko/papers/infovis07-casual.pdf
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"In our view the Ambient Infovis, Social Infovis,
and Artistic Infovis systems, as well as other new domains and uses
of visualization point to a complement to traditional infovis that we
call Casual Information Visualization (Casual Infovis). All of these
sub-domains share the same relationship to more traditional infovis
research, that of center and margin. Though each sub-domain has its
own character, we propose Casual Infovis as an umbrella term that reframes
ambient, social, and artistic infovis, as well other edge cases as
a part of, but different from, more traditional infovis systems and techniques.
We note four differences between traditional infovis systems
and Casual Infovis.
* User Population: The user population is enlarged to include a
wide spectrum of users from experts to novices. Users are not
necessarily expert in analytic thinking, nor are they required to
be experts at reading visualizations.
* Usage Pattern: Usage expands past work, to focus on other parts
of life. Systems are intended for usage that is momentary and
repeatable (over weeks and months), or contemplative (a long
moment at an art gallery).
* Data type: The data is typically personally important and relevant,
as opposed to work-motivated. This means that a user’s
relationship to the data is often a more tightly coupled one.
* Insight: We propose that the kinds of insight that Casual Infovis
may support are different from more traditional systems. We
suggest that developers are interested in providing insight about
data that is not analytical, but instead of a different sort.
Thus, we define: Casual Infovis is the use of computer mediated
tools to depict personally meaningful information in visual ways that
support everyday users in both everyday work and non-work situations."
"Casual Infovis shifts the goals of the systems that are built; system designers
focus on creating insights that are different from the design
goals of traditional infovis systems. If infovis is intended, according
to Card, Mackinlay, and Shneiderman, to amplify cognition and
to provide insight, what does this insight consist of? What may help
to define Casual Infovis systems is to explore the shift in these edge
case’s sense of providing insight."
///
key impact: infovis leads to the paradigm shift of information --> insight
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
complexity as a thermodynamic system
"[An organism] receives, stores, exchanges, and gives off both energy and information-- in all forms, from the light of the sun to the flow of matter which passes through it (food, oxygen, heat, signals). This system is not in equilibrium, since thermodynamic stability spells death for it, purely and simply. It is in a temporary state of imbalance, and it tends as much as possible to maintain this imbalance. It is hence subject to the irreversible time of the second law [of thermodynamics], since it is dying." (134-135)
qtd. in Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity (2001)
Noise and complexity, according to Henri Atlan
"randomness is a kind of order, if it can be made meaningful; [secondly,] the task of making meaning out of randomness is what self-organization is all about." (136)
"Complexity is composed of a great number of parts interconnected in multiple ways. [...] Complexity is an emergent phenomenon whose occurrence cannot be accurately predicted. [...] Evolution is apparently oriented toward more complexity. [...] Atlan identifies the state between rigid structure (the crystal) and vanishing structure (smoke) as the domain of living organisms. The interstitial condition marks the moment of complexity." (137)
qtd. in Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity (2001)
complexity in terms of "algorithmic compression"
"the complexity is directly proportional to the length of the shortest possible description of that object. As a corollary we can give a rather clear-cut condition for something to be random (i.e. maximally complex): a string of letters is random is there is no rules for generating it whose statement is appreciably shorter-- that is, requires fewer letters to write down-- than the string itself. So an object or pattern is random if its shortest possible description is the object itself. Another way of expressing this is to say that something is random if it is incompressible." When understood in this way, complexity and compressibility are indirectly proportional: the less compressible, the more complex, and vice versa." -John Casti (139)
qtd. in Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity (2001)
complex vs. complicated
"Complex systems are not just complicated systems. A snowflake is complicated but the rules for generating it are simple. The structure of a snowflake, moreover, persists unchanged and crystalline, from the first moment of its existence until it melts, while complex systems change over time. It is true that a turbulent river rushing through the narrow channel of rapids changes over time too, but it changes chaotically. The kind of change characteristic of complex systems lies somewhere between the pure order of crystalline snowflakes and the disorder of chaotic or turbulent flow. So identified, complex systems are systems that have a large number of components that can interact simultaneously in a sufficiently rich number of parallel ways so that the system shows spontaneous self-organization and produces global emergent structures." (142)
qtd. in Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity (2001)
characteristics of complex systems
compiled by Taylor:
1. Complex systems are comprised of many different parts, which are connected in multiple ways.
2. diverse components can interact both serially and in parallel to generate sequential as well as simultaneous effects and events.
3. Complex systems display spontaneous self-organization, which complicates interiority and exteriority in such a way that the line that is supposed to separate them becomes undecidable.
4. The structures resulting from spontaneous self-organization emerge from but are not necessarily reducible to the interactivity of the components or elements in the system.
5. Though generated by local interactions, emergent properties tend to be global.
6. Inasmuch as self-organizing structures emerge spontaneously, complex systems are neither fixed nor static but develop or evolve. Such evolution presupposes that complex systems are both open and adaptive.
7. Emergence occurs in a narrow possibility space lying between conditions that are too ordered and too disordered. This boundary or margin is "the edge of chaos" which is always far from equilibrium.