Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 728

What DIY Culture is telling us about tomorrow

*Hey, I'd go:

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Please join us for the next CITRIS Research Exchange at the Banatao Institute at Berkeley this semester:

"Making the Future: What DIY Culture is Telling Us About Tomorrow"

David Pescovitz [Co-editor of BoingBoing.net and Research Director at Institute for the Future:]

12:00 p.m., Wednesday, October 21

Banatao Auditorium, 3rd floor, Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley

http://www.citris-uc.org/events/RE-Oc...

The complete schedule for the semester is online at...

Yum. Urban Micro-Agriculture Fish Tacos.

*I hope these awesome Silverlake architecture hipsters are slaughtering and

gutting those live, flopping fish right on the spot.

Don't miss delicious fish tacos made from vegetables and fish raised in the exhibition "Back to the Basics" a collaborative project of MatterApp, a hands-on design & build workshop hosted by M&A over the spring and summer of 2009.

The exhibition will close with a big fish taco party on the opening night of this year's Silver Lake Art Crawl. "Back to Basics" was an...

Dogfooding the Cloud, or, adventures in mixed metaphor

*Cloud trouble.

*Okay, we've got the metaphor of the "Cloud," and we're kind of stuck with that word.

"Backbone, Highway, Web, Cloud." From a bony skeleton to an oozing, omnipresent,

wireless fog. History of the Internet in four words.

*But, one of the larval clouds, the Microsoft T-Mobile Danger Sidekick cloud,
just failed. We now need a verb to go with that noun. The Cloud "crashed"?
How can a cloud "crash?" The cloud "failed"? Did you ever see a cloud fail?
A cloud "service disruption"? ...

The latest from Jonathan Keats

*Yes, we are fans…

For Immediate Release

Contact: jonathon_keats@yahoo.com

CALIFORNIA ARTIST REBUILDS WORLD ECONOMY WITH ANTIMATTER

October 15, 2009 - In the wake of global economic collapse, a conceptual artist has introduced a hedge against future catastrophe by creating a mirror economy designed to skyrocket as world markets plummet. The first holistic response to the great recession, this far-reaching financial innovation was formulated by Jonathon Keats, whose previous artistic enterprises ...

Shape-shifting blob from iRobot

*Okay, that's pretty wack, but check out the sophistication of that demo

vernacular video. It's totally geek and street-level without ever looking

cheap or lazy.

*The Lovecraft thrill of watching that alpha-rollout 'bot take its first so-called "steps"

is about a thousand times more viscerally effective than any neatly-bound

DARPA white-paper.

Augmented Reality: sketching mechanical systems

*Augmented Legos, TinkerToys and Meccano sets, here we come.

Augmented Reality: Metaio's cereal box

*Now THAT is Augmented Reality. It's also 105% pure American processed

cheez.

*Remember when cereal ads used to support kid cartoon shows? Now the

cartoon's in the cereal. Presumably busty chicks inside six-packs of beer

can't be far behind.

Augmented Reality: Hand from Above

*Okay, that stunt's not very "augmented." Got no true 3-D registration, just a real-time video overlay and some video effects.

*Funny as heck, though. Liking the scaling issues.

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

Albert Robida: media prophet

*This guy was just the king of futurism. His sarcastic insight beggars belief.

*From "The End of Books," written and illustrated in 1895.

*Should be the new io9 logo:

Boris Dolgov, Weird Tales Illustrator

*The passage of time has made these considerably more weird.

They're not just about the fantastic and the supernatural: they're dead media.

*I wonder if it's physically possible any more to create illustrations

with this granular pulp-magazine quality. Culturally they're gone, but

could you get there from here physically, if you really really wanted?

http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/2009/10/boris-dolgov-virtually-nothing-is-known.html