Eric Paulos is a man riding the experimental edge between humans and machines. His research in this area, both in his graduate studies in computer science and robotics at the University of California at Berkeley, and with renegade robot troops such as Survival Research Laboratories, is far more adventurous than most researchers in similar space dare to be. “Lethal, anonymous tele-obliteration,” the “I-Bomb,” and several types of tele-embodiment are just a few of his past projects. Danger is definitely not outside the scope of his work. Continue reading “Eric Paulos: ExperiMental InterAction”
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell has put together what is easily one of the most readable books about social phenomena out right now. Borrowing by analogy from epidemiology, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little Brown & Company) is a clear, concise analysis of social epidemics and why they “tip” (“The Tipping Point” is the name given to the moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass). Gladwell says, “If you talk to the people who study epidemics – epidemiologists – you realize that they have a strikingly different way of looking at the world. They don’t share the assumptions the rest of us have about how and why change happens.” Continue reading “The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell”
Bruce Sterling: Future Tense
Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now. It was originally on Paul’s site, djspooky.com.
“For if the Jazz Age is year for year the Essences and Symptoms of the times, then Jes Grew is the germ making it rise yeast-like across the American plain. . . . The letters after their names are their tommy guns and those universities where they pour over syllables their Big House.” — Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
“The city no longer exists, except as a cultural ghost for tourists.”
— Marshall McLuhan, “The Alchemy of Social Change” from Verbi-Voco-Visual Explanations, 1967
First things first: It took me a zillion years (summer to winter 1999) to write this ’cause I didn’t know where to start. I think about Bruce Sterling’s writing and see a precedent that runs throughout a lot of American science fiction. It’s a tradition of writing where the future is far more of a barometer to measure the present than the past, and it’s the fracture points in the lines of thought holding it all together that his work explores. Continue reading “Bruce Sterling: Future Tense”
Survival Research Laboratories: Post-Apocalypse Now
Remember the evil toys from the movie Toy Story, the ones with all the mis-matched parts from other toys, all rearranged into new strategies of purpose? Imagine those same toys built to life-like scale: in car-lengths instead of Lego-lengths, built with military surplus parts and armed with military surplus weapons. Now picture no-holds-barred warfare between these bastardized giants of the scrap heap. A skirmish between screaming, fire-breathing, chewing, burning monsters bent on hate for one another and devoid of concern for their human overseers. Continue reading “Survival Research Laboratories: Post-Apocalypse Now”
Douglas Rushkoff: The Thing That I Call “Doug”
John Brockman let me publish the following lengthy talk he had with Doug Rushkoff in my book, Follow for Now. As much fertile ground is covered and many prescient ideas are discussed, I’m reposting it here.
Until recently, media and technology guru Douglas Rushkoff believed that we should let technology develop at its own pace and in its own way. “I thought that this rapid acceleration of culture would allow us to achieve the kind of turbulence necessary to initiate a dynamical system,” he says. “And I saw everyone who called for us to put on the brakes, or to put new governors on the development of culture, as the enemy to our evolution forward. Their vigilance would prevent us from reaching the next level of complexity.” Continue reading “Douglas Rushkoff: The Thing That I Call “Doug””
Graffiti: Discontents Under Pressure
One of the major things that differentiates the human species from all other species on Earth is our ability to externalize subjective memory. To write things down. To store and exchange ideas outside of our brains. This all started with cave paintings and etchings. Graffiti, if you will, was the beginning of written history.
Graffiti proper, in the modern sense of the term, started in the late 1960s in New York City when a kid from the Washington Heights section of Manhattan known as Taki 183 (“Taki” being his tag name and “183” being the street he lived on) emblazoned his tag all over NYC. He worked as a messenger and traveled all five boroughs via the subways. As such, he was the first “All-City” tagger. Impressed by his ubiquity and subsequent notoriety, many kids followed suit and graffiti eventually became a widespread renegade art form. Graff writers embellished their names with colors, arrows, 3-D effects and mad lettering styles.
By the mid-to-late 1970s, New York — especially its subway system — was literally covered with brightly colored murals with not only tag names, but holiday messages, anti-establishment slogans and full-on art works known as “pieces” (short for “masterpieces”). The world of graff preceded the rest of Hip-Hop culture, but became an integral part during hip hop’s early-1980s boom, joining Breakdancing, emceeing and DJing as Hip-Hop’s four elements.
Replacing the drab city walls and boring metal subway trains with greetings and flashy colors, most graffiti artists honestly saw themselves as doing a service to the city. City officials and stuffy citizens hardly agreed. Massive anti-graffiti campaigns grew right along with the artform itself and are still in effect today in most major metropolitan areas. These specialized anti-graffiti forces only added to the artform’s already outlawed status. The ability to pull off a hype piece under such increasing pressure only made great writers more revered for their skills.
Graffiti still thrives in the jungles of our inner cities. It has survived as what Jello Biafra recently mentioned as “the last bastion of free speech”, and Abbie Hoffman called wall painting “one of the best forms of free communication.” Anyone can grab a can of spray paint or a fat marker and make their thoughts known to the passing population. You can buff graffiti, you can paint over it and you can arrest its practitioners, but as long as someone feels that their voice isn’t being heard, you can’t make it go away.
[Disinformation, October 18, 1999]
[photo by Drew Donnolly]
[art by SIRONE]
John Eikenberry: Free Agent
After graduating from the University of Georgia with a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, John Eikenberry turned to the web to continue his career. His thesis focused on “using semantic networks for keyword analysis and document classification,” which was achieved mainly by developing independent agents. His current work is centered around a bot/agent development environment. Continue reading “John Eikenberry: Free Agent”
Rudy Rucker [Part One]: Keeping It Transreal
My friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
Rudy Rucker has a lot of things on his mind. Although his day job has him teaching computer science and mathematics at San Jose State University, Rucker is a writer. He has written twenty nonfiction and science-fiction books covering such topics as higher dimensions, artificial life, and biotechnology. Called the original cyberpunk author by many, his self-described “transreal” writing style is akin to Kerouac’s On the Road (Viking, 1959) and an issue of Scientific American after a run through the mince cycle on a blender. I recently had the chance to catch up with Rucker and discuss two of his most recent books, Seek! (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999) and Saucer Wisdom (Forge Books, 1999). Continue reading “Rudy Rucker [Part One]: Keeping It Transreal”
Sean Gullette: Faith in Chaos
My friend and colleague Tom Georgoulias let me run this interview in my book, Follow for Now.
Sean Gullette is a very busy man. With seemingly contradictory roles as both a webmaster for KGB Media and a computer skeptic, he splits his time between graphic design work and acting. Gullette has been in ten independent films, including the leading role as Maximillian Cohen in Pi, the winner of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival Award for Best Directing. Pi is a film about a brilliant, paranoid mathematician who teeters on the brink of insanity as he searches for the numeric order behind the stock market. Continue reading “Sean Gullette: Faith in Chaos”
Kevin Warwick: The Man in the Mind of the Machine
Described a short time ago as Britain’s leading prophet of the robot age, Professor Kevin Warwick is head of the Cybernetic Department at The University of Reading. He has designed countless machines that learn amazingly complex behaviors on their own. He is currently involved in a computer/human interface experiment that finds him with an active microchip implanted in his arm. The chip sets off sensors, causing them to activate various processes as he walks by. Continue reading “Kevin Warwick: The Man in the Mind of the Machine”