Bits and pieces from the CrystalPunk Manifesto

I am actually in Utrecht, in the former utility area of a vacant 13 floor office (for the "Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture"). Rooted in self-education, DIY and drawning "connections between disconnected fields of knowledge" is the motto. Reading their description, I ran across this part that I find fundamental:

Now that we have found data, what are we going to do with it?!

Technologists have for decades been playing with the idea of the supposedly smart home: the entire house adaptive and responsive and proactive, providing conveniences like that resurfacing dystopian killer-app: the refrigerator that makes sure the milk never runs out. No matter how device-centric and profit-inspired these efforts are, and as such divided by a royal mile from the super-serendipity of Crystalpunk roomology, this workshop is moving in the same problem-space of obvious possibilities and unresolved puzzles of making sense from the surplus of automated data production. Everybody can generate a source of water by opening the tap, few are given to come up with conceptually stimulating ways to process the output.