Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 645

People Are Walking Architecture, or, Making Nearlynets with Ubicomp

*Well, I'm not nailing Arduino boards to the doorway just yet, but this Matt Jones lecture is the cat's Muji pyjamas.

http://berglondon.com/blog/2010/05/18/people-are-walking-architecture-or-making-nearlynets-with-mujicomp/

Augmented Reality: Sudoku Solver

*Aw man, that is diabolical.

via @AugmentedPlanet

Augmented Reality: Superbien

*Gotta love that 3d projection-mapping, even if it is all artsy, and kinda the red-headed stepchild of the AR scene. But at least, in projection-mapping, they can get the registration to work — because everything sits still.

ENVISION : Step into the sensory box from SUPERBIEN on Vimeo.

ENVISION : Step into the sensory box. Sous ce nom se cache l'expérience immersive offerte par ALCATEL-LUCENT à ses clients lors du dernier Mobile World Congress. Une expérience à base de vidéo mapping conçue...

Getting cozy with the demoscene

http://rhizome.org/editorial/3516

"1. Introduction

"The demoscene is an international collective of programmers, graphics artists and musicians who create real-time audio-visual presentations with home computers. These people call themselves demosceners or just sceners. The real-time presentations are in turn called demos. Geographically the demoscene is a European phenomenon, with relatively little activity on other continents."

(((One of the real oddities of European cyberculture. And why is ...

India in a Globalized World

*Sounds like the Indian diplomatic corps has got a real job of work on its hands.

Dear Bruce Sterling:

In the maiden edition of a new monthly magazine, Geopolitics, Sreeram Chaulia argues that Indian foreign policy planners need to do serious work on grand strategy and broadening the scope of interests to far-flung parts of the world.

Ram Narayanan

US-India Friendship

http://www.usindiafriendship.net/  

GEOPOLITICS, MAY 2010

INDIA IN A GLOBALISED WORLD

The MEA's policy planners will have to...

Anarchy here, Anarchy there

*Anarchists bubble along for centuries, and every once in a while people pay attention to them.

*Got a couple of humdingers here. What strange political times these are.

http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpres...

An Open Letter to Glenn Beck

By kate

May 14, 2010

Dear readers: We here at AK Press were both shocked and (we'll admit it)
thrilled when right-wing media mogul Glenn Beck held up our new book on
the Greek Insurrection of December 2008 on his FOX News program ...

Arduino Nerf Sentry Gun

*I don't wanna get all fussy and bring-down about home tinkering, but this is an unmanned, dirt-cheap, open-source, robot sniper rifle. I'm a little perturbed about the implications here. This is like building an IED that blasts nice soft marshmallows.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/05/arduino_nerf_sentry_gun_build_prima.html

Retro-futurist techno hyperstasis

*This Simon Reynolds essay is great. I feel I must annotate the whole thing. Oh wait wait wait — I have to appropriate it in toto — that's it.

http://blissout.blogspot.com/2010/03/i-noticed-curious-equivocation-in-press.html

*Reynolds speaks:

I noticed a curious equivocation in the press release for Contact, Love, Want, Have

"While on the face of it the album seems to traverse a number of retro-futurist styles, including dubstep, UK funky and garage, 80s synth pop and computer game...

Room-temperature bricks made of bacteria and sand

*Holy cow, those things are off-the-wall.

http://www.dexigner.com/design_news/bricks-without-clay-or-carbon-next-generation-competition-winner.html

"The ordinary brick - you would think that there is nothing more basic than baking a block of clay in an oven," said Horace Havemeyer, Publisher of Metropolis. "Ginger Dosier's idea is the perfect example of how making a change in an almost unexamined part of our daily lives can have an enormous impact on the environment."

"There are over 1.3...

The Night Market

*Nice to see that New York still has its ability to cook up some surreal mischief.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/05/lost-horizon-night-market/#more-36710

(…)

Part 21st-century street carnival, part Burning Man-style artgasm, (((oh come on who can't like that))) the Night Market is an empirical example of the participatory culture movement. To potential proprietors, the scale of a project in a 10-foot by 14-foot or 24-foot space is liberating in its constraints. It's small enough to...