Supermodernity

A blog about Time, Space and Cyborg Anthropology. 



August 26, 2008

An Architectural Definition of Interface

Comments and Excerpts from Urban Structure, 1968. Paul Elek. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.

The Interfaces (Page 76-77).

"An interface may be described as a common boundary between two systems. The interface between transportation systems is the most neglected element that the passenger is force to tolerate. The attitude of transportation system operators seems to be, 'leave the driving to us but how you get aboard and where you go when you get off is your problem'. Improvement in the attraction and holding of riders is needed more than anything else except frequent service."

"The one ability that ninety-nine out of a hundred of the human race has that makes mass transit possible is that ability to walk. Why do we attempt to eliminate it as if it were unnatural? We seen to accept the walking required to use vertical transportation in buildings. We walk from our car or bus into the building, walk to the escalator, something even walk on it as it moves up, walk to the elevator, walk in, walk out, and walk to our desk. Why do we accept this? Because we are always moving towards our destination. The only wait is for the elevator and this is very short, and the interfaces are convenient, comfortable and pleasant, as much so as the building itself. Similar qualities of environment can be had in horizontal transportation."

"The point is that our daily existence is normally filled with short walks and passing through interfaces. It is not the number that we remember but rather the poor quality of them and the time spent in moving through them."

-Several things must be done. Transit service must be improved to eliminate waiting times for all practical purposes at all hours.

-Interference interchanges must be fast, convenient, comfortable, without undue effort in a controlled environment.

"The interface between two systems is a meter of performance to the passenger. And its performance depends on the expertness of the plan and its execution as well as the performance of the two systems which share it."

Think about this next time you design a User Interface.

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August 26, 2008

The Psychology of Space

"Architecture is not only about domesticating space', writes Karsten Harries, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, 'It is also a deep defence against the terror of time. The language of beauty is essentially the language of timeless reality.' [11]

Architecture's task to provide us with our domicile in space is recognized by most architects, but its second task in mediating our relation with the frighteningly ephemeral dimension of time is usually disregarded."

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August 26, 2008

A Discussion of Haptic, Sensuous Architecture.

Juhani Pallasmanaa states the following in the May 2000 edition of Architectural Review:


"The retinal-biased architecture of our time is clearly giving rise to a quest for a haptic architecture". (Translation - We see most things now (computer monitors, ect) - we don't feel them - Haptic is "to touch").

"Ashley Montagu sees a wider change taking place in Western consciousness:

We in the Western world are beginning to discover our neglected senses. This growing awareness represents something of an overdue insurgency against the painful deprivation of sensory experience we have suffered in our technologized world'. [9] Our culture of control and speed has favoured the architecture of the eye, with its instantaneous imagery and distant impact, whereas haptic architecture promotes slowness and intimacy, appreciated and comprehended gradually as images of the body and the skin."

"The architecture of the eye detaches and controls, whereas haptic architecture engages and unites. Tactile sensibility replaces distancing visual imagery by enhanced materiality, nearness and intimacy."

"Flatness of surfaces and materials, uniformity of illumination, as well as the elimination of micro-climatic differences, further reinforce the tiresome and soporific uniformity of experience."

"All in all, the tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental conditions and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow."

Source: HAPTICITY AND TIME. (discussion of haptic, sensuous architecture.) The Architectural Review | Date: 5/1/2000 | Author: Pallasmaa, Juhani.

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August 26, 2008

Using Morphology to Assess the Organic State of Web Development

As Emelie Durkheim states, the nature of sociaty is to go from mechanic to organic. In the case of the net, Google is amassing so much gravity that it is pulling in all of the Internet data around it, binding sites to its successful law of social gravity. Galaxies start out as shifting clouds of dust and gasses.

This chaos, once aged, begins to compress in on itself and, through gravity, becomes orderly. In the case of the Web, the center gravitational point of this galaxy is Google. The spiral arms are Flickr, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, Digg, Technorati, Blogger, ect...

But galaxies don't stop at the spiral arm age. The become eliptical galaxies, and eventually compress into black holes... When will this happen? What will the Web look like then? How long will it take? Will it be utopic or fascist? We'll probably know in 20 years.

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August 26, 2008

Sherry Turkle | MIT Professor of Science, Technology, and Society

Sherry Turkle - Biography

Abby Rockefeller Mauze Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology
Director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self
Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Cambridge, MA 02139
sturkle@media.mit.edu


Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: JacquesLacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); TheSecond Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, November 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997).

Seminars at the Initiative on Technology and Self led to three edited collections, all to be published by the MIT Press, on the relationships between things and thinking. The first volume, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, was published in Fall 2007. The second volume, Falling For Science: Objects in Mind, will appear in Spring 2008. The third volume, The Inner History of Devices, will follow in Fall 2008. Professor Turkle is currently completing a book on robots and the human spirit based on the Initiative's 10-year research program on relational artifacts.

Professor Turkle has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis and culture and on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology, especially computers. She is engaged in active study of robots, digital pets, and simulated creatures, particularly those designed for children and the elderly as well as in a study of mobile cellular technologies. Profiles of Professor Turkle have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine. She is a featured media commentator on the effects of technology for CNN, NBC, ABC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline and 20/20.

This has been an Aubcultural Acon.

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August 26, 2008

Etymology of the suffix 'ati'

See Suffix. 

Link it to the uses of Linkerati, Technorati, ect. The mother of all/the father of all. In the case of Old Irish, the educator, or the mother/father role. Aptly used in the Webconomy, SEOmoz.org CEO Rand Fishkin uses it to mean 'elite', but in reality it is more connective than that. In a social/attention economy standard, it fits well.

Ati : mother// Gothic: athei (mother) // Oscan: aeda (father) // Hittite : attas (father)// Old Irish: aite (educator) // OldSlavic : otitshi (father) //Albanese at (father) // Indo-european : *atta(father).

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August 26, 2008

The Fractal Production of Value

I will be preforming a mathematical function to show the fractal shape of societal development. I will present some of these concepts to the class in some communication form.

Why I chose to do this:
I guess its something to do before I get out of college. I did independent studies of mathematics and biology in high school, and I would like to expand on it.

The mathematical function comes originally from topology . This concept is called a 'mapping function', in which a set of objects, numbers, ideas, ect. is mapped onto another set.

Consider two sets of numbers, one being the set of all positive odd numbers, and the set of all positive whole numbers. Mathematically, one can prove that the set of all positive whole numbers is equal to the set of all positive odd numbers by showing a one to one mapping operation. This is the concept of an infinite subset, and key to demonstrating fractal regression.

1 2 3 4 5 6....infinity
| | | | | |
v v v v v v
1 3 5 7 9 11...infinity

Because there are in infinite amount of odd numbers and an infinite amount of whole numbers, the group of positive odd numbers can be said to be an infinite subset of the positive whole numbers. This is an interesting result that shows a little bit about the nature of infinity. Something that should be 'twice' that of another can be completely absorbed by infinity.

But it is also interesting to note that there are higher magnitudes of infinity that may be discovered in the same way. I'll expand on that in the next post.

For now, this site http://www.naturalfractals.com/fractal_animation/animation.php
can show you a little bit about what a fractal looks like, and how it functions. Anything that is self-similar and repeatable can be considered a fractal. A tree is one, since it has a trunk and self similar branches that split off into smaller self similar branches.

I will be uniting a few concepts here (interdisciplinary).
Cell phones/computers/inorganic structures and
Cellular organelles, cells, muscles, neurons, RNA, DNA.

In the end, I should be able to glean a general equation through which to predict future technological development, innovation, ect.

As Zygmunt Bauman says, all the concern of managers is with:

"looser organizational forms which atre more able to "go with the flow" and where business organization is increasingly seen as never conclusive, ongoing attempt to "form an island of superior adaptability" in a world perceived a multiple, complex, and fast moving, and there fore as ambiguous, fuzzy, or plastic' and notable against structures with a "build-in life-expectation commensurable with the customary length of a workibg life" (Bauman, 117).

The first generation of colonization began with empty space, and ended when the space was filled. Then, the space turned inward, as seen in industrial London. Space, having turned in on itself, began to resemble a fractal. Once urban space began to fill, another space was turned on into itself; this is the space of the mind. The mental space which is the target of free markets.

AS the axes of x and y have been colonized (agricultural territory), and z, (spatial height territory (the office building, the airplane, ect.)), w has been colonizeD. If time is embedded with space, then when one compresses space, one also compresses time.

Thus, one controls another dimension if they control access to time.

"The new irrelevance of space, masquerading as the annihilation of time" (Bauman, 117).

The near is now the far, and the far near.

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August 26, 2008

Supermodern Experimentia

"How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it." - Virginia Woolf

Experiment I: Firefox program called "Stumble". Settings to postmodernism, architecture, graphic design, Art.

Results: Popular Sites, blogs.

Refine Results: Refine blog listings. Find platonic design forms. Find those which trickle down the design instpration chains.

Secondary Results: Blogs that connect to blogs.

Refine Results: Follow blog listings to better blogs. Find more exclusive shows, more dialectic.

Results: Postmodernism in transition.

Refine Results: Find sites/blogs that deal with this new transition. What is after postmodernism?

Question: Modernism is constructure, postmodernism deconstructive. Will it be in the middle next? Will be start to reconstruct from the pieces that have scattered every which way?

Answer: Research new art trends, new pop culture.

Results: See the development of the reappropriation of design whose premise is based upon the vintage, the authentic, the fragmented.

Refine Results: Seek out sites that document this artistic movement and who look down at the reapproritation of symbolic values and signs from above.

Results: Exhibits like Mauro Ceolin's SolidLandscapes. Exhibits which take the simracrulum and make it lie. Sites that make the architecture of the videogame into reality. Rebasing the idea of the videogame, taking it out of compressed fake space and putting it into real space. It feel werid and creepy.

Supermodernity: The essence of a totally syncretic universe, where everyhtng bledns together. All religions, arts, cultures, sceintific techniques, all buisness commerce and trade. The ultimate metling pot of thought, image, and existence. This is the natrual outcome of living in a society that is beocming more commodified, with less friction dividing it. Now all one does is pick up the pieces and put them together in new ways. Everyhting has new value now. Everything may be used to make something.

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August 26, 2008

Supermodernity V | Book Review

History & Theory: Goodbye Supermodernism

Varnelis, Kazys
Architecture
Architecture v. 95 no. 7 (July 2006) p. 55-6 2006
Illustration
English

Supermodernism is obsolete in the digital era. Fourteen years ago, in his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Marc Auge argued that as contemporary life is a relentless procession through spaces of transit, place is giving way to nonplace--an empty, meaningless environment through which we pass alone. Inspired by this book, Hans Ibelings, almost a decade ago, published Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization, in which he argued that supermodernism is expressionless and neutral. Today we live in a networked environment that neither portends a return to the place of old, nor is it a space of solitude; therefore, nonplace is only a brief transitional entity, and supermodernity only a waystation on the path of a network culture.

Space (Architecture)/Social aspects; Architecture and society; Architecture/Philosophy; Place (Philosophy) ; Auge, Marc, 1935- ; Ibelings, Hans

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August 26, 2008

Supermodernity IV | Book Review

Marc Auge (translated by John Howe)

Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity Verso, London & New York, 1995.

First published (1992) as Non-Lieux, Introduction k une anthroplogie de la supermodernite

ISBN 185884 956 3 (hbk) 29.95
ISBN 185984 0515 (pbk) 9.95

An ever-increasing proportion of our lives is spent in supermarkets, airports and hotels, on motorways or in fronts of TVs, computers and cash machines. This invasion of the world by what Marc Auge calls "non-space" results in a profound alteration of awareness: something we perceive, but only in a partial and incoherent manner.'

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