Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 708

Five days in Mondovi dedicated to multimedia art

*It's like a French village art festival for with-it multimedia. Man, only in Europe.

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ENGLISH VERSION

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Newsletter 03.12.2009
Piemonte Share - SMIR - Spazi...

Augmented Reality: Google Goggles

*Uh-oh. Massive AR stirrings in Mountain View. Not just locative pop-ups, but real-world image search and recognition in real time.

*And it's on Android.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/07/google-goggles/

The death of the boring blog post

*Okay, maybe they're still boring blog posts, but they've been jazzed up with

awesome "blogazine" techniques borrowed from the dying print industry.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-death-of-the-blog-post/

*I don't see what's wrong with using *television design* in a blog. Like,

BEYOND THE BEYOND here would rock if it had a black and white test-pattern

and guest starred Howdy Doody.

Augmented Reality: Bars Near Me

*I hope users can still poke their iPhones when they're really looped.

"How about "Alcoholics Anonymous" Chapters Near Me?

The Humanities with Heavy Iron

*I see more and more of this lately: humanities scholars who somehow think they need more raw computational power than physicists. If you take the trouble to check out the scholars who won this grant, you might agree with them.

*Personally, I'm waiting for the first novelist who needs massive number-crunching for his basic research. It would mean a literary feat that would "manage a deluge of data and turn bits of information" into a real crackin' page-turner.

*I suppose it could be...

New French centipede

*Weird political sex-smear story here. I dunno what this signifies, but I'd expect several hundred more shoes to drop before it's over.

*On the face of it, the very idea of Sarkozy using sex scandals to torpedo leftists is absurd on its face — what, this stuff from the glittering court of Sarkozy, where the Justice Minister had a child by an unknown man, the Premiere Dame was a girlfriend of Eric Clapton, etc etc? But, given that incriminating pictures of the rich and famous are so...

Balthasar Holz

*Until ten minutes ago, I had never heard of the architect Balthasar Holz. Now I'm all intrigued by his aphorisms about time, futurity and decay.

http://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/probable-form/

*Some delphic sayings by the late Mr Holz:

"Time condemns us to change. We would rather not change, but we have no choice.

Change does not happen in a sequentially linear way, but simultaneously, in many directions at once.

Each thing is growing and decaying at the same time, only at...

Tweckling, crackchannels, smackchannels, trackchannels, hackchannels, cochannels, snackchannels, lackoftactchannels and FAQchannels.

*Turning off any toxic peanut-gallery lynch-mob commentary for this post, for reasons that will soon be obvious if you click that link:

http://gumption.typepad.com/blog/2009/12/the-dark-side-of-digital-backchannels-in-shared-physical-spaces.html

"The Dark Side of Digital Backchannels in Shared Physical Spaces

"Recently, I've been disturbed to read about some significant frontchannel disturbances arising through the use of Twitter backchannels to heckle speakers at conferences…."

You Don't Know M...

The Manifesto of IndianAuteur.Com

*Bollywood highbrows. This oughta be pretty good.

http://www.indianauteur.com/

"Manifesto

* Our cinema screen has become an ill-constructed, and conventional portal to a world we aspire of, rather than a mirror, which reflects us.

* Our emotions are guided by leitmotifs placed deftly, and religious beliefs exploited.

* Our spirit of inquiry has become dead and we have been reduced to mere receivers in the process.

* Cinema and television has replaced interaction with imposition of thought. Its...

Gentlemen of Bacogno

*Those "sapeur" gentlemen in question are really packing the chic into Favela Chic.

http://www.coolhunting.com/archives/2009/12/gentlemen_of_ba.php