"When you call upon dormant memories, you change them in the process. You remember the most recent version of your memory + whatever present lens you’re using at the time of recall. In other words, how I changed since I left shaped how I remembered what I once experienced."

Some months ago, I watched…Nostalgia for the Light. It’s about the astronomy done in the Atacama desert …The film juxtaposes the work of scientists in the desert who look to the sky for answers, with old women just miles away who look to the ground for answers, searching for the bones of relatives assassinated by the Pinochet regime and buried in the desert. The film is about the connection between the past and the future, ground and sky. It’s also about memory.

In the film, director and narrator Patricio Guzman says, “Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who have none, don’t live anywhere.”"

[via: http://bobulate.com/post/21563251336/ ]

“And the future, to be honest, is already the past. Futurism is a very old fashioned concept. That whole idea of futurism is 19th century. So I really like to give it that twist, to say “OK, it’s not really important where it is on the timeline, it’s important if it makes sense in its elements”

—Uwe Schmidt - The Ecstasy of Simulation (Wire 793)

“Popular science, media representations, pundits, and futurologists all portray our own moment in history as one of maximal turbulence, on the cusp of an epochal change, on a verge between the security of a past now fading and the insecurity of a future we can only dimly discern. In the face of this view of our present as a moment when all is in flux, it seems to me that we need to emphasize continuities as much as change, and to attempt a more modest cartography of our present.

Such a cartography would not so much seek to destabilize the present by pointing to its contingency, but to destabilize the future by recognizing its openness. That is to say, in demonstrating that no single future is written in our present, it might fortify our abilities … to intervene in that present, and so to shape something of the future that we might inhabit.”

Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself.

"Original and world-changing design was long considered the product of solitary geniuses, masters and heroes, but recent research has argued that cultural innovation is often the result of everyday actions by ordinary people. This course critically and creatively examines the dynamic and collaborative networks that characterise professional and amateur design today, and prepares students to face the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead."

[Course aims, course content, course assignments (4 of them) follow, all worth reading]

To get started, students are required to complete the following task (adapted from The Exercise Book) for the first tutorial:

1) Go for a walk with a notebook and pay close attention to what’s going on around you.

2) Compose one written page with three sections. Start the first section with “I see…”, the second section with “I remember…” and the third section with “I imagine…”."

"How are governments responding to the entitlement, engagement and sharing brought about by the Internet? How can policy "mistakes" be fixed in "high funcrctioning democracies"?<br />
Harvard law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig describes how policy errors in the United States are having unintended negative consequences and he implores "outsiders" to help US to correct its mistakes with balanced, sensible policy alternatives."

"…I crossed an international border to install an app on my cellphone. That wasn't the nominal purpose of the trip, but if we step back from our understanding of internationalization & international copyright law, that interaction btwn border crossing & the performance of an effectively physical act is almost surreal. More surreal is possibility…that I could have simply traded my Icelandic SIM card for my US one &…effectively, virtually, performed that border crossing…

Like everyone else, my life is bound up mostly w/ those of some few hundred other people, & lived in a specificity of place mostly across some few square km. Unlike many other people, the future is rather more heavily salted into it, & that space is split over various countries. It is unclear if transnational culture or border performance will win, or how long a compromise of ever-increasing osmotic pressure can last. I dearly hope…immediate awareness of our ultimate interconnectedness will triumph regardless."

"Los Angeles has been compared to a laboratory — an urban ground for experiments both prescribed and accidental. Laboratory is a perfect word. Enveloping, chaotic and mutable, LA is a nocturnal workshop where the constant experiments leave no time to tidy up and reset the data in order to start fresh in the morning. In LA, you are both the experiment and the scientist. One is forced to be the object of fascination and fray, while simultaneously judging and monitoring the urban experiment…<br />
<br />
what is the new identity for a city whose entire life has been marked by its ability and desire to endlessly expand? Perhaps the lack of perceptible hierarchies — or, likely, the reality that traditional thresholds and boundaries in this city are hidden and constantly transgressed — makes LA a difficult case study in the urban milieu…<br />
<br />
As an evolving being, its dynamics make description difficult. Perhaps it is not a city — perhaps it can only be described as Los Angeles."

"I was biasing the results by using full-text search to explore my email…The pattern-seeking engine in my brain would fire on all cylinders & make a story of the searches, creating an unintentional email-chrestomathy, a greatest-hits collection of ideas I’d had around a single word or phrase…I thought I was doing history in a mirror, but because the emails were pure matches for key terms, devoid of all but a little context, I fell for the historical fallacy, which is when, as John Dewey described it, somewhat impenetrably: <br />
<br />
"A set of considerations which hold good only because of a completed process, is read into the content of the process which conditions this completed result. A state of things characterizing an outcome is regarded as a true description of the events which led up to this outcome; when, as a matter of fact, if this outcome had already been in existence, there would have been no necessity for the process." <br />
<br />
That is, I had lost sight of time…"

"How can technologies demonstrate an outward posture? I mean, how might they extend their forms and also their functions, beyond a single user? Couldn’t they both resolve & reveal, pose more questions than answers?…"<br />
<br />
"A built environment, a city that accommodates—& indeed demonstrates—physical or cognitive interdependence doesn’t only call for limbs & ramps. We need wholly-spectacular impracticalities, & artistic research & collaboration, & public interactive art, & we need the most durable accessibility equipment we can design."<br />
<br />
"Moreover, we might take the long view in order to get the short view more clearly in focus. This has long been said of science fiction in literature—that our ideas about the future are really an index of our attitudes in the present. I’m interested in futurism in prosthetics as an inquiry & spectacle, & I also want to make projects that help us harness our technologies for a more inclusive world."

Rate of Technological Change…ill-equipped to deal with such blindingly fast change.<br />
<br />
Energy. Depending on fossil fuels is bad for the economy, the environment, & politics.<br />
<br />
Environment. Between global warming, melting ice caps, forest depletion, species extinctions and numerous other issues, the environment is changing faster (& more negatively) than at any other point in human history…<br />
<br />
Water. The scarcity of fresh water for consumption & agriculture is going to be a major source of conflict btwn & w/in nations.<br />
<br />
Education. Taking a USA-centric perspective, our increasingly fragile education system will challenge many generations to come, as this will have a direct correlation to the economic, political, & social health of the US.<br />
<br />
Creativity / Innovation…<br />
<br />
Overpopulation. Too many people in the world, not enough resources.<br />
<br />
Wealth Distribution. The graphic below is from 1992. No doubt, it's even more of a gap now."

"Shabbat is a very old idea -- 5000 years old. Just take a break one day a week. I desperately needed a "technology shabbat." Recently addicted to tweeting, I became that person I hated who pulled out her iPhone while actually talking to someone -- sneaking email fixes in bathroom stalls. It was getting ugly. <br />
<br />
Sophocles once said, "nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse," and this couldn't be more true of technology. <br />
<br />
My husband (artist & robotics professor Ken Goldberg) and I were thinking about the "curse" part. We both love technology and have devoted our careers to experimenting with it, but could we unplug for one day a week? So Ken and I decided to try to truly power down one day a week. Inspired by this concept, we reworked Ginsberg's "Howl," into "Yelp." Then I made a little film about it and Peter Coyote lent his great voice."

"By providing us with new ways to share what we’re doing right now, the real-time web also captures something we might not have created otherwise: a permanent record of the event. We’ve all been so distracted by The Now that we’ve hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake. We’ve all become accidental archivists; our burgeoning digital archives open out of the future."<br />
<br />
"The current philosophy underlying most of the real-time web is that if it’s not recent, it’s not important. This is what we need to change."<br />
<br />
"I believe we, as makers of online services, have an incredible opportunity to ground the things we create in both the present and the past, making them — and thus ourselves — richer, more beautiful, and more human.<br />
<br />
But first we need to catch archive fever."

"key thing to remember about me is that I’m still a student…still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I’d keep that in mind. Don’t take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done & whoever you were & throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes & dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, & what decisions & actions we make reflect those values. That is why it’s hard doing interviews & being visible: As you are growing & changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy & I’m getting out of here.” & they go & hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently."

"Bold predictions are made every day. We'll reduce our carbon emissions by 50% in 20 years, boast business leaders. No, make that 80% in 15 years. We'll cut the deficit in half by 2015, pandering politicians claim. That leaves us with dozens of conflicting estimates and ballpark figures that are soon forgotten. It's hard to hold experts to their predictions, but that could all change soon thanks to an experimental search engine from Yahoo.

Developed by the company's Barcelona research lab, Time Explorer is a search engine for the past, present, & future. Results are displayed on a timeline that stretches years back *& forward. Move your mouse over the future part of the timeline, & you get predictions for what was supposed to happen in that year from as much as 20 years ago. For example, the timeline for "North Korea" lets us know that the rogue state should have developed some 200 nuclear warheads--according to an inaccurate op-ed in the NY Times by Nicholas Kristof in 2004."

"As part of a 2007 graduate seminar on "History in the Public Realm: Collective Memory?" I thought it might be useful to collect the definitions of various types of memory that scholars have come up with. Given the wide range of meanings "collective memory" can have (for example an object or a process), there are also a number of cognate terms. I first offer in this box a bulleted listing of the terms, then below, in chronological order, quotations with exact citations."

"While Bruce Sterling & Cory Doctorow & Vernor Vinge fantasize about Singularity or augmented reality or 3D printers that can reproduce themselves (which, incidentally, all appeal heavily to juvenile power fantasies), Sloan is writing a fiction that speaks to a world in which we find ourselves not exactly emancipated by technology but simply hyper-connected by it, our identities as people redefined by the media we share, media which we embrace & deeply care about even when it leaves us bewildered, co-opted, & reduced in a thousand ways to algorithms. It isn't "hard" Science Fiction, not by a long shot, but most "hard" SF long ago stopped being able to figure out how to be relevant to most readers (as can be seen by their sales figures), with its greatest practitioners, William Gibson & Neal Stephenson, turning instead to the present day, on the one hand, & history & alternate history, on the other. Sloan, however, has found an entirely different & exciting avenue of attack."

"I’m still convinced that hereish-and-soonish/thereish-and-thenish are the grain we need to be exploring rather than just connecting a network of the pulsing ‘blue-dot’."

"We are people of the screen now. Last year, digital-display manufacturers cranked out four billion new screens, and they expect to produce billions more in the coming years. That’s one new screen each year for every human on earth. With the advent of electronic ink, we will start putting watchable screens on any flat surface. The tools for screen fluency will be built directly into these ubiquitous screens.

"people preoccupied w/ success ask wrong question...“what is secret of success”...should be asking, “what prevents me from learning here & now?” To be overly preoccupied w/ future is to be inattentive toward present where learning & growth take pl

"Suppose...you had the kind of society you wanted. How would you live...in that society? Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles, people, or things that won’t let you live that way, then begin

"The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present."

"We do not live in the age of technological revolution. We live in the age of technological stasis, but do not realise it. We watch the future and have stopped watching the present."