Showing posts with label Shinola. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shinola. Show all posts

Saturday, November 16, 2013

16/11/2013: WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics

This is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics. Enjoy!


In recent WLASze (http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/11/2112013-wlasze-weekend-links-on-arts.html), I wrote about the IBM's Watson super computer pushing out the limits of AI by getting into the areas of 'computational creativity' - not quite human creativity, but still… Here's an MIT Technology Review take on the same http://www.technologyreview.com/view/521596/the-secret-ingredient-in-computational-creativity/

Ages ago I used to do some work trying to figure out what exactly Waston's capabilities can be used for (http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2011/02/13022011-what-jeopardy-champ-can-do-in.html). As I found out, the bounds to computation are that computation is bounded - in other words, computational systems are still based on continued iterations of pre-set space of data. Computers lack the power of creation no matter how much power of combination is granted to them.

Thus, culinary exploits of a computer are fun and good, bye more important question, however, remains the same as before: what is creativity in the first place… The real breakthrough for the AI will arrive when computers start asking that, rather than answer reducible problems of matching traits to combinations of various substances.


Now, let me see… here's an example. "Legacy Machine N°1 was conceived when Maximilian Büsser started fantasising: "What would have happened if I had been born in 1867 instead of 1967? In the early 1900s the first wristwatches appear and I would want to create three-dimensional machines for the wrist, but there are no Grendizers, Star Wars or fighter jets for my inspiration. But I do have pocket watches, the Eiffel Tower and Jules Verne, so what might my 1911 machine look like? It has to be round and it has to be three-dimensional: Legacy Machine N°1 was my answer."" Take a look
http://www.mbandf.com/machines/legacy-machines/lm1/#/about

Of course, you might say that there is reductionism going on here: the author took specific time periods hallmarks and reduced them to physical design semiotics, to graphic and industrial markers. The issue, however, is that both the inputs and outputs were qualitative, not quantifiable, in their very nature. And as a result, translation from inputs to outputs required much more than an algorithmic search-and-match, but an aesthetic narrative, leap of faith, belief, discontinuity.


Non-reducibility of art follows across both the creative dimension and descriptive compositions. Example: John Pawson's minimal St Moritz Church photographed during a choir rehearsal:
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/11/15/st-moritz-church-john-pawson-photography-hufton-crow/



The point of this is that with true art, one does not really know where the creation ends or begins. One can have reference points or interpretative meanings assigned to work, but one cannot have re-traceable deterministic path from a work of art back to the points of data origination that inform that work. In the case of AI - one can and indeed the record of the pathway exists.


In mathematics, this goes to the heart of the nature of countability, infinity and infinite sets. Mathematics distinguishes different degrees of infinity - something unique to the subject. Artists inhabit the world that allows for them. Computers, however, are able to function only in the world with countably infinite systems in them. Here's a quick and dirty article on the difference in sizes of various infinite sets: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-infinity-comes-in-different-sizes and more entertaining version: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128231.400-ultimate-logic-to-infinity-and-beyond.html#.UoeJ3JRHBF8

Let me add that if you extend the above argument to include power sets, then the set of possible infinities becomes infinite itself and the size of possible infinities becomes infinite.


Amazing beauty of juxtaposition: content vs context in Max Sher's photographs. See series Amerika:


Russian Palimpsest:

Your spring will never end:


I Will Drink To Your Decline:


See more at http://maxsher.com/work


How fast does the Earth rotate? Geeky answer to a child-like innocence of the question: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970401c.html but someone, please tell NASA that designing a website can be… oh… so exciting… (as opposed to simply plugging text into a tabulated space presented like some sort of a proto-socialist elections leaflet asking you to support your only candidate choice from your only political party…


And just to keep track of the past propaganda the WLASze unleashed on you, here's a WSJ article on the Detroit revivalist design shop Shinola:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303618904579169660144850526
I love these guys and has covered them in WLASze: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/11/10122013-wlasze-weekend-links-on-arts.html What an awesome merger of design, tradition, and sentimental wealth of Detroit…


And another self-referential note. Readers of the WLASze know I have been critical of Banksy's foray into NYC with 'artist in residence' concept. I love, this, however: http://www.foodrepublic.com/2013/10/11/banksys-latest-nyc-art-installation-takes-aim-slau?utm_source=outbrain.com&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=CPC What an awesomely invasive push through the urban mindscape.


It's "Sirens of the Lambs"… pitch-perfect…


The latest in pre-apocalyptic disaster-state living schematise is upon us, courtesy of a student's warped (vino? or "…two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can," as Hunter S. Thompson defined a perfect condition for tripping out of space) imagination and via Woldless Tech (the place where Big=Great and Invasive=Sensitive): http://wordlesstech.com/2013/11/07/amazing-eco-friendly-walking-metropolis/
"An amazing eco-friendly walking metropolis" that is actually non-amazing (beyond the scale) not eco-friendly non-metropolis:



But, to be fair to the WorldlessTech, they have some actual pearls: http://wordlesstech.com/2013/10/30/famous-logos-communist-regimes/. The humour is spot on most of the time…


This alone is worth coming back to the site…


And for the last bit… an absolutely stunning project via Bot & Dolly here: http://www.botndolly.com/box
A live performance exploring "the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping onto moving surfaces". WATCH IT! From the Box to Levitation to Intersection to Teleportation to Escape…

Enjoy!

Sunday, November 10, 2013

10/11/2013: WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

Having spent the entire weekend in the Marble City at Kilkenomics 2013, I hardly had any time to read through many articles on arts and sciences this week. Hence, this week's WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics will be short.


For a popular science magazine, this article doesn't quite get high accolades for being either well-written or insightful, but the topic of it is very fascinating and, with some stretch of imagination beyond our current technological capabilities, even important. Basically, some astronomy eggheads decided to carry out a relatively simple exercise. Assume that with conditions in other solar systems similar to those found in ours, the distance from the sun and the nature of orbit determine the temperature conditions to be found on planets. Thus, any planet with its orbit falling within the specific range of distance from the sun (star) will be potentially inhabitable. Now, take visible stars and start linking star intensity (energy it emits) to distance to orbiting plants. Count the ones that are close enough not to be ice cubes floating in space and yet far enough not to be like a roasting oven… Simple and rather boring. But also rather significant. It turns out that the closest candidate to Earth we can find is a planet mere 12 light years away from us. (That is just shy of 113,528,765,670,970 kilometers or, like, 272,120,723,085 round trips between Dublin and Cork without stop-overs in McDonalds, that's right over 272 trillion round trips)... some might, one day, call that commuting distance to Dublin...
http://www.popsci.com/article/science/one-five-sun-stars-have-earth-planets?src=SOC&dom=tw
Here is the same story in much cooler and excited language of science:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/10/31/1319909110.full.pdf

Fig. 4. The detected planets (dots) in a 2D domain similar to Figs. 1 and 2. Here, the 2D domain has orbital period replaced by stellar light intensity, incident flux, hitting the planet. The highlighted region shows the 10 Earth-size planets that receive an incident stellar flux comparable to the Earth: flux =0.25–4.0 times the flux received by the Earth from the Sun. Our uncertainties on stellar flux and planet radii are indicated at the top right.

To explain the above: green box contains Earth-like planets. Or in the terminology of the article: 10 small ðRP=1−2 R⊕Þ planets that receive stellar flux comparable to Earth: FP=0:25−4 F⊕.


Back on Earth, meanwhile, the largely uninhabited and uninhabitable planet Detroit got a fresh start on (some) life in the form of an absolutely fantastic new firm that specialises in reviving what used to be an industrial design powerhouse. Shinola is a superb group of designers and producers that do everything - from fantastic watches to unbelievably well-designed and executed bikes… Enjoy!
https://www.facebook.com/shinola
An awesome brand from an awesome city... The first set of non-Swiss watches I actually would love to own…


From life-restoring design success story of Detroit's wastelands to the story of human's life-destroying activities in the oceans:
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140164/alan-b-sielen/the-devolution-of-the-seas?cid=soc-facebook-in-snapshots-the_devolution_of_the_seas-110913
Foreign Affairs once again delivers a superb article on a hugely important topic.


And from digging ourselves into the environmental trouble, to digging out a troubled history… Brief history of world's largest hand-made hole:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/big-hole-and-open-mine-museum


Attached to it, is the story of the De Beers...

Enough for the day that's left...