"Cryptoforests are feral forests—planted tree zones, for instance along motorways, that have been allowed to become wild to the point that their wildness is outgrowing their manmadeness. They are in limbo forests—tree-covered plots that feel like forests but technically probably aren’t; states of vegetation for which lay-language has no name. They are incognito forests—forests that have gone cryptic and are almost invisible; forests in camouflage, forests with a talent for being ignored. They are precognitive forests—lands that are on the brink of becoming forested, a future forest fata morgana. And they are unappreciated forests—forests regarded as zones of waste and weed, forests shaming planners, developers, and the neighbourhood. NIMBY forestry.

Cryptoforestry is a psychogeographic art; the above is therefore not a definitive list and only serves as a pointer for serendipitous search and identification…"

"What is FreedomBox?

Email and telecommunications that protects privacy and resists eavesdropping

A publishing platform that resists oppression and censorship.

An organizing tool for democratic activists in hostile regimes.

An emergency communication network in times of crisis.

FreedomBox will put in people's own hands and under their own control encrypted voice and text communication, anonymous publishing, social networking, media sharing, and (micro)blogging.

Much of the software already exists: onion routing, encryption, virtual private networks, etc. There are tiny, low-watt computers known as "plug servers" to run this software. The hard parts is integrating that technology, distributing it, and making it easy to use without expertise. The harder part is to decentralize it so users have no need to rely on and trust centralized infrastructure."

"Who We Are

We are an organization committed to the tenets of free information, free culture, and free society.
We hold that advances in information technology provide humanity with the ability to effectively face global challenges.
We contend that our very ability to mobilize, organize, and bring about change depends on our ability to communicate.
We see that our ability to communicate is purchased from a handful of powerful entities.
We know that we cannot depend on these entities to support movement away from a status quo from which they are the beneficiaries.
We believe that access to a free network is a human right, and a necessary tool for environmental and social justice.

What We’re Doing

We envision communications infrastructure that is owned and operated cooperatively, by the whole of humanity, rather than by corporations and states.
We are using the power of peer-to-peer technologies to create a global network which is resistant to censorship and breakdown.
We promote free

"Finally launched and available in the iOS App Store! [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/drift/id524083174 ]

Drift helps you get lost in familiar places by guiding you on a walk using randomly assembled instructions. Each instruction will ask you to move in a specific direction and, using the compass, look for something normally hidden or unnoticed in our everyday experiences.

As you find these hidden or unnoticed things, you will be asked to document them with the camera, creating a photographic record of you walk. Drift also keeps track of where and when you took the photos and makes your documentation optionally available for others to view through the Drift website.

Drift was made possible with the generous support from the Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant for Emerging Artists.

Drift was developed by Justin Langlois in collaboration with Broken City Lab.

This project was generously supported by the Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant for Emerging Artists."

"Aisha Mustafa, a 19-year-old Egyptian physics student, patented a new type of propulsion system for spacecraft that uses cutting edge quantum physics instead of thrusters…

Mustafa invented a way of tapping this quantum effect via what's known as the dynamic Casimir effect. This uses a "moving mirror" cavity, where two very reflective very flat plates are held close together, and then moved slightly to interact with the quantum particle sea. It's horribly technical, but the end result is that Mustafa's use of shaped silicon plates similar to those used in solar power cells results in a net force being delivered. A force, of course, means a push or a pull and in space this equates to a drive or engine.

In terms of space propulsion, this is amazing…

if you want proof that the tiniest of pushes can propel a spacecraft, check this out: Two Pioneer space probes, launched in the 1970s, are the farthest manmade objects from Earth...but they're not as far away as they should be…"

"I am so lucky, because almost from the beginning, people would record the shows," Spektor says. "I am just so thankful to them, first of all, for taking the time and putting it up online and sharing it with other listeners, but also mainly [for] myself, because there are so many songs I would not know how to play. It gives me so much relief to know that they're somewhere."

"I grew up poor, and there are a lot of people that grew up a lot poorer than I am. Though, to me, I think that if somebody doesn't have an easy life, they should at least have access to free books and film and music. I think that I feel very lucky to live in this time where people can go online and get everything I've ever made, whether they have a lot of money or not."

"I feel like a project is successful if we have had substantive encounters with people, if we have created spaces where a kind of exchange—whether it’s family history, or talking about why something should or shouldn’t be in an art museum, or sometimes it’s just swapping recipes—some form of animated or engaged dialogue comes out, or some sort of story emerges. It means we learn something, a story can be brought forward from that, that’s when things are successful. Another high-five moment comes when there is something compelling to look at. A lot of times when you see a social practice show, it’s either a room full of crap to read, or it looks like a place where they had a party and you didn’t get to go. I’ve been to a lot of those, and they’re not satisfying! You either wish they had just printed a book you could take home and read in your own chair—because it’s not very comfortable to sit in a museum—or you wish that you’d been at the party."

"The goal of my research is to understand the social meaning of linguistic variation. In order to do this, I pursue my sociolinguistic work in the context of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on the relation between variation, linguistic style, social identity and social practice.

Gender has been the big misunderstood in studies of sociolinguistic variation - in spite of the fact that some of the most exciting intellectual developments over the past decades have been in theories of gender and sexuality ... so I have been spending a good deal of time working on language and gender as well.

Since adolescents and preadolescents are the movers and shakers in linguistic change, I concentrate on this age group, and much of my research takes place in schools. The institutional research site has made me think a good deal about learning and education, but particularly about the construction of adolescence in American society."

"The Hayward Gallery’s Wide Open School is an unusual experiment in learning. Its programme of classes is devised and delivered by over 100 artists from approximately 40 different countries. It is not an art school however. Instead it is a wide-ranging forum where artists lead and facilitate workshops, collaborative projects, collective discussions, lectures and performances about any and all subjects in which they are passionately interested.

That is a territory as expansive as the imaginations of artists."

"Most schools are in the business of transferring knowledge from teachers to students. Wide Open School, on the other hand, is more like a labyrinth of learning in which various possibilities can be explored and developed."

"Wide Open School will take place in classrooms built in the Hayward’s gallery spaces. But is not meant to be an exhibition in any sense, and it demands a very different type of engagement."

"ONLY THE BEST COMMERCIAL-USE FREE FONTS
Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format. Here are some of our favorites:"

"Hey Kickstarter! We're organizing XOXO, an arts and technology festival in Portland, Oregon this September 13-16th.

XOXO is a celebration of disruptive creativity. We want to take all the independent artists using the Internet to make a living doing what they love — the makers, craftspeople, musicians, filmmakers, comic book artists, game designers, hardware hackers — and bring them together with the technologists building the platforms that make it possible. If you have an audience and a good idea, nothing’s standing in your way.

XOXO is in three parts:

Conference (Saturday – Sunday). Talks from artists and creative technologists around the country that are breaking new ground.
Market (Saturday – Sunday). A large marketplace with a tightly-curated list of the best of Portland's arts and tech scenes, sharing and selling their work, with food supplied by the best of our thriving food cart scene…"

"Pd (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. It is the third major branch of the family of patcher programming languages known as Max (Max/FTS, ISPW Max, Max/MSP, jMax, etc.) originally developed by Miller Puckette and company at IRCAM. The core of Pd is written and maintained by Miller Puckette and includes the work of many developers, making the whole package very much a community effort.

Pd is free software and can be downloaded either as an OS-specific package, source package, or directly from CVS. Pd was written to be multi-platform and therefore is quite portable; versions exist for Win32, IRIX, GNU/Linux, BSD, and MacOS X running on anything from a PocketPC to an old Mac to a brand new PC. Pd can run on smarphones thanks to projects like libpd and RjDj. It is possible to write externals and patches that work with Max/MSP and Pd using flext and cyclone."

"telescopictext.org is an extension of telescopictext.com, and is primarily a set of tools for creating expanding texts in a similar way. The tools can be found by clicking Write in the navigation at the top. Texts will house an ongoing collection of selected texts. Resources provides help for using this website, and also any news, updates, guides, support and a Q&A.; If you need further information or help, contact info@telescopictext.com. You can Register in order to save and publish texts, or Sign in if you already have an account. If you like what you find here and you want to help support it you can Donate."

"NetLogo is a multi-agent programmable modeling environment. It is used by tens of thousands of students, teachers and researchers worldwide. It also powers HubNet participatory simulations. It is authored by Uri Wilensky and developed at the CCL. You can download it free of charge.

What can you do with NetLogo? Read more here. Click here for intro video."

"YALE UNION (YU) is a center for contemporary art in Southeast Portland, Oregon. It is led by a desire to support emerging and under-acknowledged contemporary artists, propose new modes of production, and stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art."

"A center for contemporary art in South East Portland. It is led by a desire to support emerging and under-acknowledged contemporary artists, propose new modes of production, and stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art.

We are a small organization in a large building. At this point in our development stage, it would be disingenuous to say that our building, a handsome brick block, isn’t as much an albatross as it is an instrument. While still in renovation (see PLAN section) Yale Union will demonstrate that a contemporary art center does not need to be architecturally complete to foster culture."

"…Once they have identified what we should be looking at & talking about, my eye is inevitably drawn to the ‘not art’ side of the room, which often seems more alive to me, more fun. Is it possible to make things, do things, before they are categorized? Is it possible to build a life’s work as a free-range human, freely meandering and trespassing without regard for the borders?…

Children naturally operate this way, but it’s the opposite of how most formal education works. We are introduced to borders, decide which ones we want to surround ourselves with, learn what happened within them before we got there, and are then expected to perform within their narrow perimeters until we die… If I am interested in gardening, I don’t want to make work about gardens, I become a gardener…

Maybe identifying myself as one limits my freedom by implying that everything I do aspires to be art. I’m not aiming for art, I’m aiming for life, and if art gets in the way, that’s fine."

[via: http://randallszott.org/2012/05/21/border-control-fritz-haeg/ ]

Another passage from earlier on:

"In her 1979 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ Rosalind Krauss analyzes the slippery, evolving nature of what was being referred to at the time as sculpture by artists including Carl Andre, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson. Krauss talks about sculpture, and its relationship to ‘not architecture’ and ‘not landscape’. Recently the term ‘expanded field’ has been revived to help make sense of the work of a new generation of artists (including myself), whose legacy can ironically be traced directly back to artists from the 1970s whom Krauss does not mention in her essay. These include: Ant Farm, Buckminster Fuller, Anna Halprin, Joan Jonas, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Yayoi Kusama, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper and Yvonne Rainer, to name just a few personal favourites. They were working at the borders of what was known as sculpture, and some were outside what was even considered art. With our generation growing out of theirs, I would argue that the field has not expanded at all, but rather the ossified borders that previously separated it and other fields from each other are becoming more porous."

"REGARDING THE ’90S UTOPIANISM: I never though that cyborgs and virtual worlds were particularly utopian, so I’ve never been disappointed. The world is always more interesting than some futurist’s vision. If you think it’s not, you’re not really looking."

"WHO WE ARE: Who we are is largely who we meet. Cities are machines that randomize contact. The Internet is a meta-city, meta-randomizing contact. I now “know” more people than I would ever have imagined possible, because of that. It changes who I am and what I can do."

"The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR:

You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.

* There are no page-fees.

* You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).

* The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. Merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.

* You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.

* Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission."

"A place to create the impossible, the new, the ridiculous, the exiting and most importantly, the never seen before. It is the largest do-it-yourself industrial art space in the Bay Area with over 40 different art groups and craftsmen in the shop.

NIMBY not only offers space to create, but supports its artists with resources, assistance in sourcing re-purposed material, as well as logistical and technical guidance. This supportive culture shared by all members of the NIMBY community is at the root of the amazing art that emerges from its doors. NIMBY is the hub for creativity that boggles the mind and fosters community values that encourage collaboration and
innovation.

Over the years, the concept of our community has brought together talented and diverse local artists who have created an impressive body of work. NIMBY has been the largest workspace/gallery of its kind in the City of Oakland and continues to provide a workspace, storage and display area - a one-stop shop for big…"

"Navigating the city through Art, Research, Education, Activism.

Founded in 2005, AREA Chicago supports the work of people and organizations building a socially just city. AREA actively gathers, produces, and shares knowledge about local culture and politics. Its newspaper, website, and events create relationships and sustain community through art, research, education, and activism."

"The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country. If you declaim it and blow it up with noble intentions then you are no better than the politicians whom you despise. You are just someone waving a flag and making the cheapest kind of appeal to a kind of emotional patriotism. Think of the words as science, not as art. They are a report. You are speaking before a meeting of the Explorers' Club of the National Geographic Society. These people know all the risks of mountain climbing. They honour you by taking this for granted. If you rub their faces in it that is an insult to their hospitality. Tell them about the height of the mountain, the equipment you used, be specific about the surfaces and the time it took to scale it…

Avoid the flourish. Do not be afraid to be weak. Do not be ashamed to be tired. You look good when you're tired. You look like you could go on forever. Now come into my arms. You are the image of my beauty."

"threewalls is a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to increasing Chicago’s cultural capital by cultivating contemporary art practice and discourse. Through a range of exhibition and public programs, including symposiums, lectures, performances and publications, threewalls creates a locus of exchange between local, national and international contemporary art communities."

"PHONEBOOK 3 is a directory of independent art spaces, programming, and projects throughout the United States and a collection of critical essays and practical information written by the people who run them. PHONEBOOK 3 includes artist-run spaces, public programming, unconventional residencies, alternative schools, and community resources; all of the projects that form and support art ecologies across the nation, as well as historical documents marking their past. Featuring essays and documents from Group Material, Renny Pritikin, Susan Sakash, FEAST Brooklyn, Ox-bow, Faheem Majed, Chances Dances, Paul Durica, Dara Greenwald, Amy Franceschini, Pilot TV, Jon Brumit and Sarah Wagner, PLAND, Andy Sturdevant, Robby Herbst and more."

"Draftastic is a new kind of collaborative editor. We make it simple for any number of people to edit the same document at once without getting in each other’s way.

Co-authoring a paper? Copyediting the next big novel? Brainstorming that business plan? Sick of mailing Word files back and forth? Draftastic can help.

Draftastic lets everyone type in the same document at once, but will never let anyone type over you. Simple as that. You can learn more in our Q & A, but the best way to learn about it is to try it with a friend."

"My art is driven by a life-long interest in biology. While I was terrible in high-school science and math my education about the life sciences emerged from a wide engagement with materials and practices. Through my work as a chef I began to understand biochemistry and laboratory methods; as a hospice caregiver I worked with life support technologies and environmental controls; and through my interest in wild mushrooms I learned about taxonomies, forest ecology and husbandry.

The creative projects I work on take a variety of forms, though all are based on research, experimentation and long term planning. Recent work has included some videos about live cultures, experiments with growing fungal building materials, and founding and directing CRITTER- a salon for the natural sciences. These diverse projects stem from my fascination with the interrelationships between human beings, technology and the greater living environment."

"The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow.[1][2] Its thesis was that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into the titular two cultures — namely the sciences and the humanities — and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems."

"I know some of the people involved in Museum of the Phantom City, and they’re good people. But, in order to see the things that they want to point out, I have to go that place — well, okay. But then, once I’m there, the best way to display that information is the juxtaposition of it in front of what I’ve just traveled there to see? I don’t think so. Bottom line, maybe, is that visualizing the invisible is difficult, and might not be best expressed through the metaphor of the camera."

"What's important to me about the kinds of things we were doing with Area/Code — and all the designers around us — is that we were building systems in the middle of the data, some systems that gave us a way to read, and reasons to read it. The stories we were telling with locative games were fiction, but as always, good fiction describes the real world rather precisely."

"Crowsflight is a GPS compass that simply points. No instructions, no maps to orient, no lines to follow, just an arrow that points at the destination."

[via: http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/an-interview-with-kevin-slavin/30608/ ]

"Describing the reign of the mechanistic, Talorized new state order and its transmogrification of nature in his dystopian scare novel We, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote how, under the sovereign gaze of the “One-State”, all livings things were remade, cast anew by the Machine: “All was new, made of steel: a steel sun, steel trees, steel people.” The dreary (and admittedly, awesome) reality has found a home in Singapore, amid steel “Gardens by the Bay”, foregrounding Moshe Safdie’s gargantuan Marina Bay Sands.

The “supertrees”, as they are called, are part of the soon-to-be completed OCBC Skyway that weaves an aerial walkway through a grove of 18 arboreal structures, which range in height from 25-50 meters (82-164 feet). The steel trunks will collect and store rainwater for reuse and will also sport built-in solar panels to generate electricity, which will be used, among other purposes, to release hot air into the  ground conservatories…"

"ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones… Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones…

…neither entrepreneurs nor the rich have a monopoly on brains, sweat or risk. There are scientists — and artists and scholars — who are just as smart as any entrepreneur, only they are interested in different rewards.

…“Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And so, “they mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Our most destructive lie, he added, “is that it is very easy for any American to make money.” The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us."

"The Listening Machine is an automated system that generates a continuous piece of music based on the activity of 500 Twitter users around the United Kingdom. Their conversations, thoughts and feelings are translated into musical patterns in real time, which you can tune in to at any point through any web-connected device.

It is running from May until October 2012 on The Space, the new on-demand digital arts channel from the BBC and Arts Council England. The piece will continue to develop and grow over time, adjusting its responses to social patterns and generating subtly new musical output.

The Listening Machine was created by Daniel Jones, Peter Gregson and Britten Sinfonia."

[via http://snarkmarket.com/2012/7782 ]

"The epic life of a world-class artist, jammed into six minutes.
Narrated by Tom Waits.
Commissioned by LACMA for their first annual "Art + Film Gala" honoring John Baldessari and Clint Eastwood.

directed by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman (http://gosupermarche.com/)
edited by Max Joseph (http://www.maxjoseph.com/)
written by Gabriel Nussbaum (http://www.bankstreetfilms.com)
cinematography by Magdalena Gorka (http://magdalenagorka.com/)
& Henry Joost
produced by Mandy Yaeger & Erin Wright

Thank you to John Baldessari and his studio. (http://www.baldessari.org/)"

"When I was a kid, sometimes I’d run home to Mommy with a bloody nose and say, “Mom, my friends beat me up,” and my Mom would say “well then they’re not worth having as friends, are they?” At the time, I figured she was just trying to put a postive spin on having birthed an unpopular pussy. But this is, after all, the same lady that bought me my first typewriter. Then later, a Commodore 64. And later, a 300 baud modem for it. Through which I met new friends that did like me much, much more.

I’m 39, now. The friends my Mom warned me about are bigger now, and older, bloodying my nose with old world numbers, and old world tactics, like, oh, I don’t know, sending out press releases to TV Guide at 7pm on a Friday.

But my Commodore 64 is mobile now, like yours, and the modems are invisible, and the internet is the air all around us.  And the good friends, the real friends, are finding each other, and connecting with each other, and my Mom is turning out to be more right than ever."

"If I hated these pieces, I would say they were full of bathos, self-seriousness, and chaos. And I would be right. And I would be missing the point that these qualities are what make two quite different essays both brilliant to me, because even when I resist their points, they push me along axes that I did not know to look for. This would not happen if they told me what I already knew of.

What they say matters to me because they have become vulnerable by putting things in their own terms and risking overreach…

I participate in certain subcultures where a lot of weight is put on being smart and getting smarter. But it seems to me that for an awful lot of people trying to do good things, IQ is not a limiting factor. If you are smart but ignorant or smart but lack empathy, you are only better at coming up with justifications for the ways in which you are wrong."

"Backup all your emails on disk.
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Even being the world best ever email service, Gmail and especially its IMAP service is not without bugs. Gmvault handles all these issues to provide the smoothest experience to the user. Gmvault deals with the most common issues and always let the user with an uncorrupted email database."

"Åh [o:h] is a platform for creative collaboration between Johanna Lundberg and Elin Svensson. From 2008 to spring 2012, it served as a studio practice for the two designers, producing award winning work from art direction to illustration, publications, branding, stationery and websites.

Their clients include The Architecture Foundation, Financial Times, The Finnish Institute in London, Grafik Magazine, The Guardian, Helsinki Arts Initiative, kulör, Newly Drawn, OK Do, Time Out Magazine and YCN.

As well as continuing together in a collaborative capacity, Johanna and Elin are now pursuing projects individually in the fields of design and illustration. To discuss potential projects, please contact either one"

"…we should be open to assignments and changing our mind. I think that's what I had, a change of mind. I'm a huge believer in science and scientific method…every time that we get an answer in science it also provokes two new questions…in a certain curious way science is expanding our ignorance - our ignorance is expanding faster than what we know…what we know is just a small, small fraction of what is going on in the world…

…the most active theologians today are science fiction authors…asking the important questions of "What if?"… [Examples of questions]…Those are the kinds of questions that not theologians are asking in any religion that I am aware of, but science fiction authors constantly are exploring that. And they're the ones who are going to have the answers for us that the theologians will have to look to. But at the same time these are fundamentally religious questions that are not being asked in that vocabulary."

"Flickr is still very valuable. It has a massive database of geotagged, Creative Commons- and Getty-licensed, subject-tagged photos. But sadly, Yahoo's steady march of incompetence doesn't bode well for making use of these valuable properties. If the Internet really were a series of tubes, Yahoo would be the leaking sewage pipe, covering everything it comes in contact with in watered-down shit.

Flickr's last best hope is that Yahoo realizes its value and decides to spin it off for a few bucks before both drop down into a final death spiral. But even if that happens, Flickr has a long road ahead of it to relevance. People don't tend to come back to homes they've already abandoned."

"In a market where books and games are close rivals for the most popular category on app stores, what happens when today's new gamers are hungry for something more than word puzzles?"

"Gamers are hungry for deeper characterization and worlds to which they can truly attach, and text can be a way to illuminate inner worlds, thought processes or other elements that aren't easily demonstrated by imagery."

[The delightful copy from May 15, 2012.]

"Hello, I'm Max Fenton.

Knowingly or not, I've enlisted friends, peers, and strangers to unpack a puzzle that involves reading and writing on networks and screens.

You can follow along or participate by reading, clipping, grokking, assembling, questioning, and sharing—while making a path. You'll need electrons, a wish to explore, and an eye for how these pieces might fit together in novel shapes and forms.

My trails are charted through twitter, tumblr, pinboard, readmill, reading, and 2nd hand [flavors.me]."

[As shared on Twitter:

"Made my site a little more accurate [http://maxfenton.com] then read @pieratt's "Transparency" http://pieratt.tumblr.com/post/23108094947/transparency-in-the-evolution-of-technology — Yes."

http://twitter.com/maxfenton/status/202477843534454784 ]

[See also: http://twitter.com/rogre/status/202481485633159168 ]

"As a society, we’ve had 10,000 years to choose to be open and honest with each other, and we have generally chosen not to. But now we’re at a point where new technology plays a critical role in our lives, and technology has no use for our half-truths and doublespeak. They are disruptions in the flow of information. As we are all becoming parts of the machine, our relationships with each other are being ground down to purer, more efficient forms so that they can be put to better use.

We are becoming more honest because it increases the speed at which information can travel. We are becoming less private because to withhold valuable knowledge from the rest of the network is to act selfishly. We are becoming more transparent because that is what the evolution of technology asks of us."

"To treat the city as a living art installation, or compare it to the neutral space of a research laboratory, is both to de-historicize & to depoliticize its experience. The informal economy of poverty celebrated by the Harvard team is the result of a specific set of policies pursued by Nigeria’s military dictatorships over the last decades under IMF & World Bank guidance, which decimated the metropolitan economy."

"Lagos provides ample evidence for Mike Davis’s contention that rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation & state retrenchment has been a ‘recipe for the mass production of slums’."

"The scale of the city, its extreme poverty & ethnic polarization now present real obstacles to rebuilding its social & physical fabric. Though informal networks & settlements may meet immediate needs for some, & determined forms of community organizing may produce measurable improvements, grassroots responses alone cannot coordinate the structural…"

SERIOUS HYPERTEXT: Eastgate publishes superb, original hypertext fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, and we create innovative tools for hypertext writers.

These outstanding hypertexts are collected in libraries and studied in universities and schools throughout the world, and have been widely discussed in the research literature."

[Catalog: http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/Fiction.html ]

"Q&A is a project-based alliance between four Helsinki practices. Operating in the fields of design, strategy, architecture and art, they come together for multifaceted commissions and initiatives, to ask and propose."

"A collection of notes is a curious archive of attempts. Attempts to understand the language we use, the logic we trace, and the images we generate to understand life today. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13), would say that these notebooks are “worlding” exercises, weaving and stringing together different potentials.’"

"we are really interested in exploring artistic research. Artists, like scientists, are pioneers when it comes to creating new forms of connectivity between worlds that seem to have nothing in common with each other. They embark on the endless study of everything that contributes to different formulations of what we call reality. Taking artistic research seriously means accepting disorganisation within the relationship between disciplines that deal with contemporary art. The rise of cultural studies, critical theory, and the many variations of post-Marxist understanding of the relationship between art and economics is the fruit of…"

"(Post)Material is a three-day event that proposes questions and answers for contemporary design practice operating across the wildly varying dynamics of atoms, bits and ideas. Curated by Q&A;, a joint effort between four Helsinki-based design and research studios, and facilitated by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York, the event brings together an assemblage of practitioners and academics in a daily talk show at WantedDesign, The Tunnel (11th ave b/w 27th & 28th) on May 19–21, 2.30 pm–4.00 pm every day.

“We tend to talk of the ‘information age’ without realizing that the future is as much about energy and materials as it is about information,” postulated Manuel De Landa in 1994. From design’s perspective, could this historical point in time—a resource-hungry industrial epoch rapidly nearing its expiry date—be defined as the ‘(post)material’ age?"

"Note taking encompasses witnessing, drawing, writing, and diagrammatic thinking; it is speculative, manifests a preliminary moment, a passage, and acts as a memory aid.

With contributions by authors from a range of disciplines, such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, economic- and political theory, language- and literature studies, as well as poetry, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts constitutes a space of dOCUMENTA (13) to explore how thinking emerges and lies at the heart of re-imagining the world. In its cumulative nature, this publication project is a continuous articulation of the emphasis of dOCUMENTA (13) on the propositional, underlining the flexible mental moves to generate space for the possible. Thoughts, unlike statements, are always variations: this is the spirit in which these notebooks are proposed."

[via: http://frieze.com/issue/article/books2027/ AND http://halloween-in-january.tumblr.com/post/21407577412 AND http://www.jennasutela.com/frieze ]

"With all its formal acrobatics, I Read Where I Am nevertheless enables one to easily scan, leaf or browse—in a word, to watch it. This experience is akin to reading websites & online forums: we process content instead of getting immersed in it; we receive an impression instead of absorbing it. Whether this makes the volume a dubious design construct, or one par excellence, is another question. Either way, it is a sign of the times. For artist Koert van Mensvoort…reading like this – by comparing and linking ambient visual stimuli – creates something of new significance. Before the media existed, Van Mensvoort writes in his essay ‘Reading Surroundings’, ‘we read the landscape, the skies, the tracks in the sand of the prey we were hunting […] In other words, we read our surroundings, in which symbols coincide with events & things.’ According to him, this new kind of reading has a future on the Internet where context, again, is content."

[See: http://frieze.com/issue/article/books2027/ ]

"Schedule an email to be sent later. Easy email reminders.
Boomerang for Gmail is a Firefox / Chrome plugin that lets you take control of when you send and receive email messages."

"Umberto Eco (b. 1932) is a novelist, semiotician, philosopher, and literary critic most famous for his novel The Name of the Rose (1980). Along with artist Eugenio Carmi, Eco has published three picture books, the first of which is The Bomb and the General, published in Italy in 1966, and then revised and reissued in 1988, at which time it was translated into English by William Weaver.

For more information on Umberto Eco's children's books, visit my blog:

http://wetoowerechildren.blogspot.com/2012/02/umberto-eco-bomb-and-general.html "

"…a unique interactive platform that allows kids & parents to read & play together. We don't want to just add interactive elements to books. We want to build from the ground up a new type of book. Kids are going to experience books not just on the pages in front of them but all around them. They're gonna be able to interact with the characters & become a character in the story. The videos that they watch online, the messages that they're gonna get in their inbox, the games that they play are all going to relate to the story as it's happening and they are going to be a part of it. We are talking about a collaboration. It's going to be the author who wrote the story, the parent who controls and customizes the story and then the child who experiences the story. These books are gonna be immersive, not disruptive."

[Quote is caption to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2ZMhLh7aME ]

"Choice of Games is a small partnership dedicated to producing high-quality, text-based, multiple-choice games. We produce games in house, beginning with Choice of the Dragon and Choice of Broadsides. We have also developed a simple scripting language for writing text-based games, ChoiceScript, which we make available to others for use in their projects, and we host games produced by other designers using ChoiceScript on our website. All of our games are available for free on the web. We also produce mobile versions of our games that can be played on iPhones, Android phones, and other smartphones."

"This is getting silly. The world is not filled with heartless, cruel, cold individuals, and the world actually needs individuals who understand emotions and feelings. If they had read any recent studies about creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial talents or books related to multiple intelligences, they would understand the importance of emotional intelligence and the value of empathy."

"I have tackled this issue in my upcoming book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students, to be released by Corwin Press in mid August. My basic suggestion is that excellence comes from the individual--individual students, individual teachers, individual schools, and individual communities. A true high expectation comes from the students themselves when are allowed autonomy and rewarded for genuine contribution to the society using their talents, passion, time, and efforts."

"Using standardized tests to measure student performance in a few subjects distorts the whole picture of education, confuses test scores with real education that prepares competent and responsible citizens, and reduces education to test preparation. These simplistic accountability measures distract policy makers, educators, parents, and students from addressing what really matters in education, waste precious political and financial assets, and unfairly blames educators for societal problems. The lack of faith in public education could lead to the demise of the great American tradition--a decentralized public education system that strives to educate all children in their local context…

I think educators have to shoulder the responsibilities of public intellectuals--we need to advocate, educate, and act…"

[See aslo: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/05/yong_zhao_common_core.html ]

"Recess is a social platform to organize and discover participatory sports and fitness activities in your local community. Recess connects you with other people around the sports you love to play, and makes it easy to do so. Join your friends after work for a soccer game, discover weekend kickball games in the local park, or organize morning runs with your neighbors."

[via: http://interactiondesign.sva.edu/festival/2012/recess.html ]

"…a story…about a crow who, like me at this moment, like all the rest of us all the time, is at the end of something, and at the beginning of something.

Crow is Walking

Crow is walking
to see things at ground level,
the landscape as new under his feet
as the air is old under his wings.

He leaves the dead rabbit waiting—
it’s a given; it’ll always be there—
and walks on down the dirt road,

admires the pebbles, how they sparkle in the sun;

checks out his reflection
in a puddle full of sky
which reminds him
of where he’s supposed to be,

but he’s beginning to like
the way the muscles move in his legs
and the way his wings feel so comfortable
folded back and resting.

He thinks he might be beautiful,
the sun lighting his back
with purple and green.

Faint voices from somewhere far ahead
roll like dust down the road towards him.
He hurries a little.

His tongue moves in his mouth;
legends of language move in his mind.

His beak opens.
He tries a word."

""I think teaching is pushing them away from you…through different doors. Not embracing them. When you embrace someone, you’re holding them back. Picasso really captured that in his art work, Mother and Child: a chunky mother, balancing the baby perfectly. She doesn’t hold him…it’s balance…he can go, anytime he’s capable of going, but he’s perfectly balanced until he takes the step. Classroom teaching should be that. Find a security spot for them and then they’re ready to go."

…the “balance” to which Cullum refers has more to do with allowing children to discover their own uniqueness, their own abilities and their own “script”. He creates the structures and the strategies that allow this discovery to take place,  but the goal is never to have them cling to him as teacher. Instead, the goal is to have them embrace that uniqueness and potential and run with it…as far as they can in whatever direction they choose."

"Cole himself spent time talking to many people in cafes, on planes and at concerts in an effort to research his novel. He found that a surprising number of people wanted to tell him about their lives.

"People are able to detect that there's something unusual going on here; this is somebody who actually wants to hear the small and insignificant and boring details of my life," he says. "People open up — they trust that, and they open up."

Most of the people Julian talks to in the novel are immigrants, or at least somewhat culturally outside the mainstream — Julian himself is both German and Nigerian. Cole, as well, was raised in Nigeria but moved to the United States in 1992. He began to embrace his American-ness, he says, when he realized that it was OK to be what he calls an "eccentric American," looking to the president or Dominican-American author Junot Diaz for examples."

"Maps should not be understood only in extension, in relation to a space constituted by trajectories. There are also maps of intensity, or density, that are concerned with what fills space, what subtends the trajectory… It is always an affective constellation… Pollack and Sivadon have made a profound analysis of the cartographic activity of the unconscious, perhaps their sole ambiguity lies in seeing it as a continuation of the image of the body. On the contrary, it is the map of intensity that distributes the affects, and it is their links and valences that constitute the image of the body in each case—an image that can always be modified or transformed depending on the affective constellations that determine it. A list or constellation of affects, an intensive map, is a becoming." - Gilles Deleuze

"One of the loveliest blogs of the past few years was Teju Cole’s…has subsequently disappeared, leaving dozens of dead links…Blogs usually don’t work like this – they outlive the enthusiasm of their authors, lying neglected & silent. The Japanese call dead blogs “ishikoro” – pebbles. A missing blog is something else, a hole, like a dropped stitch in a row of knitting…

I’ve been exhuming the digital remains of Teju Cole…via the Wayback Machine…in the wake of reading his lovely & all too short “Every Day is for The Thief“…one of the best books I’ve read this year…one that I plan to press into the hands of friends travelling to West Africa for the first time…especially into the hands of African friends returning home.

I don’t know why Cole took down his brilliant blog, or why this beautiful book ends on a lovely but abrupt note. But if I respect a man’s right to speak, I’ve also got to respect his silence."

"Indeed, economies of scale work well in periods of energy "ascent", when the supply of energy increases, but work less well in periods of energy "descent". In these circumstances, economies of scope are needed. These types of economies are exactly what peer production (which encompasses open knowledge, free culture, free software, open and shared designs, open hardware and distributed manufacturing) is all about…

So what are the economies of scope of this new age? They come in two flavours: the mutualising of knowledge and the mutualising of tangible resources…

What will the new system look like if economies of scope become the norm, replacing economies of scale as the primary driver of the economy?

Global open design communities could be accompanied by a global network of micro-factories producing locally, such as the ones that open-source car companies like Local Motors and Wikispeed are proposing."

"What Africa needs more pressingly than Kony's indictment is more equitable civil society, more robust democracy, and a fairer system of justice…

If Americans want to care about Africa, maybe they should consider evaluating American foreign policy, which they already play a direct role in through elections, before they impose themselves on Africa itself…Nigeria is one of the top five oil suppliers to the U.S., and American policy is interested first and foremost in the flow of that oil. The American government did not see fit to support the Nigeria protests…

Let us begin our activism right here: with the money-driven villainy at the heart of American foreign policy. To do this would be to give up the illusion that the sentimental need to "make a difference" trumps all other considerations…

All of this takes us rather far afield from fresh-faced young Americans using the power of YouTube, Facebook, and pure enthusiasm to change the world. A singer may be innocent; never the song."

"In this week’s New Yorker, the Journeys Issue, Teju Cole writes about coming to America. Here Cole takes in the skyline from the roof of his apartment building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and reflects on his American citizenship and Nigerian upbringing."

[video also here: http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid897219300001 ]

"One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.

So much of science and technology has been about pursuing efficiency, scale and “exponential growth” at the expense of our environment and our resources. We have rewarded those who invent technologies that control our triumph over nature in some way. This is clearly not sustainable.

We must understand that we live in a complex system where everything is interrelated and interdependent and that everything we design impacts a larger system.

My dream is that 100 years from now, we will be learning from nature, integrating with nature and using science and technology to bring nature into our lives to make human beings and our artifacts not only zero impact but a positive impact to the natural system that we live in."

"The Seattle Public Library system's annual Summer Reading Program is called Century 22: Read the Future, and is tied in with the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World's Fair. Young people are encouraged to scour the city's landmarks for 1,000 books hidden throughout town, and then to re-hide them for other kids to find. Among the books in this summer's program is my own YA novel Little Brother, which is a source of utter delight for me."

"What are your favorite books/who are your favorite authors?

Poets inform my ear and my way of seeing the world. I read poetry much more than I read prose…"

"Do you have any writing rituals or habits? Where and when do you write?

I make notes all the time. There are little fragments of experience that somehow call out to me, and I make note of them: either something I’ve read in a book, or something I see on the subway, or a thought that occurs to me in the shower. And this archive of fragments after a while begins to show family resemblance, and could lead to a work, fictional or otherwise. Other than that, I have no particular rituals. I write longhand or on a computer, usually the latter, in the morning or late at night, usually the latter, in silence or with music, usually the latter."

"How does your photography inform you writing?

I try to see things from a different angle, in photography and in writing. Not novelty for its own sake but something that comes from an…"

"As we outsource more of our private lives, we find it increasingly possible to outsource emotional attachment…

Focusing attention on the destination, we detach ourselves from the small — potentially meaningful — aspects of experience. Confining our sense of achievement to results, to the moment of purchase, so to speak, we unwittingly lose the pleasure of accomplishment, the joy of connecting to others and possibly, in the process, our faith in ourselves.

There is much public conversation about the balance of power between the branches of government, but we badly need to confront the larger and looming imbalance between the market and everything else.

A society in which comfort, care, companionship, “perfect” birthday parties and so much else is available to those who can pay for it?"

[via: http://randallszott.org/2012/05/06/why-relying-on-professional-artists-is-a-bad-idea-outsourcing-creativity/ ]

"Also in this episode, we take a broader look at financial literacy – or, really, financial illiteracy. In general, Americans aren’t very good at the basics of saving, investing, and retirement planning. So we want to know: How do we improve our grade?  We’ll hear from one scholar who wants to put financial literacy in schools and another who thinks that would be a waste of time. Guests also include two members of President Obama’s economic team and National Book Award-winner Sherwin Nuland.

And if education isn’t the route to financial literacy, maybe we can learn something from how one Los Angeles hospital solved the problem of its doctors failing to wash their hands."

"I’m fascinated by paths of discovery. Not just the link you share, but the steps you took to get there. How did you end up at this point?

I experienced one such path tonight that turned into a loop and gave me a mini “eureka!” moment, so I wanted to share:

I met a fellow journalist/geek, Keith Collins, at BarCamp News Innovation Philly on April 28. We were chatting about science and that, of course, led to RadioLab. He mentioned a segment he enjoyed about a pendulum. I did a quick search on my phone and sent myself the link to read later. When I returned to the post, it didn’t seem like I found the right item — this was a post on the Krulwich Wonders blog about a Pendulum Dance. Nonetheless, it fascinated me.

I tweeted it with a hat tip to Keith and he replied with the actual segment he had referenced on the Limits of Science. It did not disappoint. I responded to say that I’d enjoyed it and Keith replied with a link to one of the things mentioned in the segment…"

"…you’ve spoken about dispensing with the old accessories such as plot & characters. But are those old accessories so useless as that; are there no truths to be reached with them?

NATHALIE SARRAUTE: One reaches certain truths, but truths that are already known. At a level that’s already known. One can describe the Soviet reality in Tolstoy’s manner, but one will never manage to penetrate it further than Tolstoy did with the aristocratic society that he described. It will remain at the same level of the psyche as Anna Karenina or Prince Bolkonsky if you use the form that Tolstoy used. If you employ the form of Dostoyevsky, you will arrive at another level, which will always be Dostoyevsky’s level, whatever the society you describe. That’s my idea. If you want to penetrate further, you must abandon both of them and go look for something else. Form and content are the same thing. If you take a certain form, you attain a certain content with that form, not any other."

"It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not imagination. No, it kills it. When their poets over here try to celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally."

"Coming from the Welsh border, a village in the Black Mountains, Raymond Williams found that the images of rural life taught at Cambridge did not match what he had seen. As an academic at Cambridge, he studied and examined the contradiction, along with the contrasting idea of the city, which in the U.K. has never been separate from the countryside. Rural life without cities had existed in other parts of the world, but not for a very long time in Britain."

Looking, Walking, Being

“The World is not something to
look at, it is something to be in.”
- Mark Rudman

I look and look.
Looking’s a way of being: one becomes,
sometimes, a pair of eyes walking.
Walking wherever looking takes one.

The eyes
dig and burrow into the world.
They touch
fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor.
World and the past of it,
not only
visible present, solid and shadow
that looks at one looking.

And language? Rhythms
of echo and interruption?
That’s
a way of breathing.

breathing to sustain
looking,
walking and looking,
through the world,
in it.

~ Denise Levertov

"The Asbury Community School in Albuquerque, New Mexico existed from 1978-1985; during which time I attended as a young girl. It was a non-traditional school with an open campus, a diverse student body and curriculum that included yoga & self-directed learning. Asbury closed its doors in 1985, after which the school disappeared and its existence faded. I gathered the memories and traces of the students, teachers and parents of Asbury in order to reinstate the history of the school into its former buildings and the Sawmill neighborhood of Albuquerque. By engaging the ethereal nature of memories, the fuzzy and fractures fragrnents become a testimonial to a lost school and begin to fill a gap in the history of the buildings. The memories are placed back into the rooms and spaces in which they first occurred and a palimpsestual history emerges."

"Abra Ancliffe is an artist working primarily in printmaking & drawing, and is based in Portland, Oregon. She is interested in how language and architecture intersect, the beauty in gaps & voids and translations of translations. She received her MFA in printmaking from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and her BFA in printmaking from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Abra teaches in the BFA and Continuing Education programs at PNCA."

"The Personal Libraries Library is a specially-curated lending library located in Portland, Oregon. The Library is dedicated to recreating the personal libraries of artists, philosophers, scientists, writers and other thinkers & makers. The collection has commenced with the personal libraries of Maria Mitchell, the 19th-century astronomer, librarian, educator and suffragist and Robert Smithson (1938-1973), the influential artist, writer and thinker. Recent additions to the Library are the personal libraries of Italo Calvino & Jorge Luis Borges. Subsequent personal libraries of interest to collect belong to: Buckminster Fuller, Hannah Arendt, Lady Bird Johnson and Yoko Ono.

Members can check out books for an initial three-week period, with additional renewals possible. The Library resides in NE Portland, and has Reading Room Hours monthly. Please see Membership and Reading Room information below."