The other day, in a conference about video-games I co-organized in Lausanne, I instagramed this presentation by Brice Roy in which the game designer mentioned a game that can only be completed in 250 years. One of my contact (@carinaow) wondered about the very fact that "it's longer than a lifetim...
These new aestheticians were a bit too literal, weren't they?
Why do I blog this? Probably because this encounter with a weird table, whose shape has been generated by a computer program, seem to exemplify the excess or the mere simplicity of adopting this approach in design/art. We'll probably see more and more things like that. Perhaps this signal can also...
Lessons from teaching design approaches to engineering students
This year, I had the chance to teach a year-long course at EPFL about design and creative approaches with my colleague Daniel Sciboz. This class is part of the social science/art/design program which corresponds to a set of courses engineering students have to take as part of their general curricul...
Monster sticky note on cell-phone screen
Last month, when involved in a teaching seminar in France, I ran across this utterly curious scene. It's basically a cell-phone with a piece of paper that shows a drawing, stuck on the device's display. The drawing features a sort of animal quickly scribbled. This is exactly the sort of artifact t...
http://betaknowledge.tumblr.com/ as a compilation of weak signals about the future
Btw, I started a tumblr few days ago to accumulate insights, data points and "weak signals" in a very basic/raw way... I use to put that material into delicious but I'm not satisfied with the service anymore. It's called beta knowledge and it can be seen as material that can be turned into long pos...
Virilio on "statistical image" and perception #newaesthetic
Read in Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine: "But by way of conclusion, let us return to the crisis in perceptive faith, to the automation of perception that is threatening our understand- ing. Apart from video optics, the vision machine will also use digital imaging to facilitate recognition of shape...
Z/Z/Z/ describing the dimension of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language
Via Daniel Rehn: Z/Z/Z/ is a project hatched by Daniel Rehn and Sarah Caluag dedicated to “describing the dimension of cultural artifacts that are difficult to explain using natural language”. This endeavour deploys a custom visualization workflow to break down footage from film, animation and game...
Robot Mori: a curious assemblage from the Uncanny Valley
Perhaps the weirdest piece of technology I've seen recently is this curious assemblage exhibited at Lift in Seoul: it's called "Robot Mori" and, as described by Advanced Technology Korea: "Meet Mori, the alter ego of a lonely boy who wants to go out and make friends but is too shy. Mori, on the ot...
"Recombinant food"
Reading REAMDE by Neal Stephenson, I ran across this notion of "recombinant food" (pp. 219-220): "Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midweste...
"you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works"
Read in Wired 3.05, May 1995 (via): "Kevin Kelly: If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do? Brian Eno: I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, This is a good outpu...