Ubiquitous Content + Pileus: The Internet Umbrella

“[...] “Ubiquitous Content” is an idea of a new design objective of our lives in the post-PC era. In 20th century, a notion of media contents has been meant contents like movies, music, animations, video games etc. Figuratively speaking, such contents were entities supplied in containers designed as “boxes”. But now, a spread of networks and a realization of ubiquitous computing technologies are going to change those styles of media. The container is not like a “box” any more: It will change its forms freely to give us advanced computer augmentations in a specific context and it will be sometimes invisible embedded into our environments. It is more appropriately called Ubiquitous Media and it will be a new style of media. When we design such Ubiquitous Media, we need to think about the container as our environments in which many things are cooperating rather than a single hardware, a single software or a single standard. Users will not need to be conscious of those medias, therefore such containers emerge for users as “their lives” themselves. “Ubiquitous Contents” are contents for such media. Those must be “experiences” in “their lives”.

As Ubiquitous Content project focuses on our lives and experiences, all things in our everyday lives are targets of the design. The 10 Laboratories of KMD are working on this wide subject from different perspectives…. Continue reading

Interview/Article

“As the Internet permeates our lives, our future may include networked devices in the home and workplace that provide global connectivity. Closely examining this concept is German architect and designer, Tobi Schneidler. Schneidler’s work explores the seemingly limitless potential of networked furniture, living spaces, and clothing on our daily lives and experiences. From his “Remote Home” project that provided an Internet link between the furniture and lighting fixtures in two apartments in Berlin and London, to his “Ticker Chair” which dynamically displays stock market and news information on an illuminated chair. Schneidler’s work uncovers striking associations between interior design and external data streams. Gizmodo recently caught up with Schneidler to discuss his past and current projects, and to discover exactly why dynamic information displays need to exist in physical, not only screen-based spaces.” Continue reading Networked Furniture and More with Tobi Schneidler; Interview/Article by Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Gizmodo. Continue reading

Digital Scavenging

The FAMULUS project consists of an intelligent modified vacuum cleaner and the FAMULUS server. it is a replacement of the ubiquitous desktop metaphor feature of the trash bin. Instead of moving unwanted trash into the bin, it is sent over to the FAMULUS, that consumes the digital debris for the satisfaction of the user. The FAMULUS features an empirically modelled realistic sounding vacuum cleaning noise that expresses the complexity of the object sucked in. Plug-ins are used in order to hand over as many data types as possible. Currently, FAMULUS can successfully imbibe e-mail messages and RSS feed items. the latter even opens up the chance to automatise the process of digital scavenging. This is the prototype website. You can already send mail directly to FAMULUS and even include urls of RSS feeds in the mail. FAMULUS will download the RSS feed once and trash all information as well as the original mail. The web-interface is yet to come… Also see TRATTI and sevenmileboots. Continue reading

Mapping First Life Experiences with Virtual World Counterparts

Blum, M. Pentland, A. Troster, G. (2006), InSense: Interest-Based Life Logging, IEEE Multimedia, 13 (4), pp. 40- 48.

The paper describes a wearable data collection device called InSense based on Vannevar Bush’s Memex principles. allows users to continually collect their interactions as store them as a multimedia diary. It basically take into account the sensor readings from a camera, microphone, and accelerometers. The point is to “classify the users activities and “automatically collect multimedia clips when the user is in an “interesting” situation“.

What is interesting is the types of categories they picked-up to develop their context-aware framework: they chose location, speech, posture, and activities—to represent many diverse aspects of a user’s context. They also have subcategories (for instance for location: office, home, outdoors, indoors, restaurant, car, street, shop). Continue reading

Networked Photography

I’m Sascha Pohflepp, currently based in Berlin, where I spent the last couple of years at the University of the Arts’ (UDK) visual communication department (some of the work from that time can be found at http://www.pohflepp.com). I also frequently contribute to the blog We - Make - Money - Not - Art.com and occasionally work with the Mediamatic foundation in Amsterdam.

My most recent work is a two-fold thesis project, titled “Between Blinks & Buttons“. It is a try to look at photography as an increasingly connected process and the implications which arise from that – both for the individual but also for the process of remembering and the camera as an object in itself. Quoting from the introduction:

“Photography has become a networked process. It no longer ends with pasting putting prints into an album. Instead, making them public through services like Flickr is rapidly becoming one of the main ways how we treat our visual memories. The photographic process extends from preserving a moment to an act of telecommunication, with numerous implications on how we perceive reality, how we make our memories and how we create a narrative from it. Continue reading

What happens when 1st & 2nd Life mash up?

Here are slides from my keynote at the Cross Media Week “Internet of Things” session. The talk itself was more extemporaneously authored from an outline and notes than written, but the slides capture the major conceptual beats.

Keynote Outline: From a Social Web to a Internet of Things: What happens when 1st Life & 2nd Life mash up?

Main Points: a. the digital communications network known as the Internet is an instrument of social engagement & exchange, and its instrumentalities (devices, databases, routers, web servers) are part of that social engagement & exchange. When other kinds of objects are “hooked-into” that network, they are caught up in the messy imbroglio of the social life of the internet.

If this is the case, then we should consider these objects as not inert objects, but social actors that shape and inform the kind of discourse that happens on these networks. So, i will refer to the various and diverse social actors amongst these networks (internet, intranet, whatever) variously as “participants”, social actors, social objects, and so forth. The reason is to emphasize that anything and anyone within the network has a role to play in the creation of social life of various kinds. More >> [blogged by Julian Bleecker] Continue reading

The camera that takes others’ photos

Well, well, i have to thank Julian for the scoop! Sascha Pohflepp is a new media artist based in Berlin. He also writes on this blog and rumours had it that his graduation project at the University of the Art in Berlin was kind of awesome.

His Blind Camera captures a moment at the press of a button. However, the device doesn’t have any optical part. The camera memorizes only the time of the picture and immediately searches the net for other photos that have been taken in the same moment. Essentially, it is a camera that only takes photos that were created by someone who pressed a button somewhere else at that very time as its own button was pressed.

After a few minutes or hours, depending on how soon someone else shares their photo on the web, an image will appear on the screen. In a way, it belongs half to the person who had pressed the button and still remembers that moment. Because of that connection, the photos are never dismissed as random, no matter how enigmatic they may be. Video. Continue reading

The “electricity” of future participation

A few months ago, when we started to work on the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium it took me a while to get into the language (ubiquitous findable objects- UFO, geo-locative systems, context-aware/ ambient/ ubiquitous/ invisible/ continuous/ pervasive computing, locative media) and the unfamiliar context of architecture. I was more into all things networked and did not immediately see the connection. But soon I realized that The Internet of Things offers a captivating angle on the “electricity” of future participation in online sociality; may that be through the hardwired or the wireless Internet.

Over the past months on the iDC list we started to talk about networked objects and “The Internet of Things.” Things? Things are not a species of their own making. So, why talk of “things” instead of objects? There must be more than semiotic cuteness at play; the term Internet of *Things* can’t just be about anthropomorphizing artifacts, machines, products, and gizmos. Continue reading

The thing about the internet of things

While I am not very familiar with the whole ‘internet of things’ discourse, I recognize plenty of recurring themes to be troubled about. We encounter, once again (but with new buzz words), the argument that new technologies can rehabilitate our relationship to the real and to the social. This time, however, instead of investing our sense of self entirely in the virtual (soooo 1990’s), we can invest it in ‘things’ (human-object assemblages) which populate reality, but which are still interconnected and organized in the virtual. The return of the object or ‘thing’ would seem to suggest that we are moving away from the idea of the virtual as an alternate realm of reality and towards a more complex understanding of reality as encompassing both the virtual and the actual (thank you, Monsieur Deleuze). However, I fear that our technophilia is obscuring the politics of these virtual-actual assemblages, obstructing the need to critically assess how agency is distributed amongst things connected through the internet. Continue reading

Anne Galloway

Thanks Mark for your thoughtful introduction to the September discussions. I’ve been following with great interest since I introduced myself in July, and now I’d like to share and begin to explore some things that have particularly resonated with me.

You mention the “current status of the material object [and] forms of embodied interaction” and I’ve often thought about this ‘return’ to the body and the physical after the (failed?) promises of cyberspace disembodiment. In other words, I see a kind of re-embodiment ethos at work right now in research, art and design practice, and a re-newed commitment to the material. In some ways, then, it seems that the pendulum of technological desire has merely swung to the other side.

Since my first two degrees are in anthropology and archaeology I also have a special interest in material culture. Coupled with my doctoral work in social studies of science and technology, I find this question of materiality to be rather persistent in my research. If you’ll forgive my self-referencing, Matt Ward and I wrote a paper recently about some intersections we saw between archaeology and locative media design: Continue reading