Being anonymous seems simple; you want to hide your real identity. How about anonymity for an entire group, to be used as a statement?
To collectively deny another party your identity can be empowering when all participants choose to have the same identity, or lack thereof, rather than just hide their true self.
For Anonymous, their disguise of choice is the mask from the movie V for Vendetta; a stylized representation of Guy Fawkes. In this film the mask is used to give the people of London the opportunity to rise up against an oppressive regime and collectively ignore the yellow-coded curfew alert.

This monday, The Independent wrote about the government of The Kingdom of Bahrain that banned the import of said Guy Fawkes masks, penalized with arrest. This is a bit of a petty move on part of the government of Bahrain but as The Independent states:

“Sadly, though, it is but a mask.  And the thing about a masks is, you can print them, paint them or draw them yourself.” 

However, in order to do so it is necessary that these masks are still identical to each other, otherwise the power of this collective anonymity is lost.
There are a few papercraft projects online but they are always a printed version of the plastic mask and I was interested in a more digital looking form, making it clear the eventually worn mask came from a downloaded file. I decided to alter an existing ‘thing’ on the social platform for DIY objects into the likeness of V for Vendetta’s protagonist.
Such an alteration could jumpstart a new collective identity for the entire movement, born out of solidarity.

I’m working on a traceable fold-out that can be cut or milled from plastic so you can easily multiply a number of masks with plain paper and a pen.
Will post that here and on Thingiverse when done.

+ Article on The Independent
+ Linked there by The New Aesthetic
+ The mask I uploaded to Thingiverse

Yesterday PBS Nova aired a show “Rise of the Drones” that featured the ARGUS-IS system. Named after the all-seeing mytological giant Argus Panoptes it really lives up to is name.
It is a drone hovering over and registering all activities in a 40 square kilometer area, 24 hours a day. What makes this system different is the epic resolution at which it captures these images. There can be zoomed in, on both the live feed as the recorded stream, to street level. The images clearly show people and vehicles moving about but even a pigeon can be seen. It does this by joining 368 cellphone camera’s to a large sensor capturing 1.8 billion pixels (1.800.000.000).
The sensor records this hyper high resolution footage internally but also streams a million terabytes to the ground each day.
Tomorrow’s UAV’s will only have to come down for maintenance so in theory a grid of these machines could register all life on earth at all times.
Traffic camera’s would not have to exist and with placing mirrors strategically it could even capture footage from a street perspective.

> Article at Engadget
> Clip of the PBS Nova episode

The other half of the name of the mythological giant Argus Panoptes is used to define the prison system known as panopticum, in which a central watchtower makes it possible for guards to look into all the prison cells.

I’ve seen the first two images below a few times on my Tumblr dashboard in the last couple of weeks. Never were the images accompanied by and explanation other than a title or a name: “The Highrise of Homes - James Wines, ink and charcoal on paper”.
Not knowing if the depicted building was fictional or real I searched around and quickly found an article on the website of the Museum of Modern Art. I learnt the project was either to be built from the ground up or use an existing but outdated structure as a host.
I liked this because it was the reason I was interested in the images in the first place; it would make a whole lot of depressing high rise areas a lot more livable! Since there is so much empty commercial spaces and not nearly enough housing where I live, I envisioned myself claiming a floor, knocking out walls and building my own Vrijstaat (autonomous state) with some friends, while another group of people could do the same thing a floor below in the meantime. The idea that high rise could also mean freedom in stead of just reflective glass landmarks is deeply inspiring and could form some sort of modern day Tower of Babel.

The principle of a stacking elements of the environment that are normally located next to each other is not something I had never seen but then it was in a rather experimental and hypothetical form. I visited the Dutch pavilion by MRVDV at the 2000 World Expo in Hannover and the idea of an indoor forest spoke to me then but I could not envision it in a comprehensible scale; it either had to become a mega city like the one in the bay of Tokyo or had a very strick purpose like MRVDV’s Pig City.
Both of which can never arise from a grassroots collective need for better housing and living.

Delving into the work of MVRDV I came across an article that investigated if the Dutch pavilion was plagiarized from a newspaper cartoon in 1909.
While that assumption seemed a bit far-fetched it showed a picture of the drawing which looks nothing like the pavilion but is nearly identical to the Highrise of the Homes sketches.
Eventually Highrise of the Homes was supposed to arise near Battery Park Manhattan but was canceled because it would become to costly.
I’m off, trying to find an abandoned parking garage.

So in my post The New Robotics I posted some images of robots that Boston Dynamic and DARPA are working on. I am at the same time both attracted and dismayed by the possibilities these robots purport.
Last week The New Aesthetic posted a link to a Twitter message sent out by the company that develops these robots for the US military, DARPA.
The post was that of one of their LS3 robots, meaning Legged Squad Support System; a vehicle shaped like a dog or a mule that follows troops in rugged terrain like the animal it was inspired on would, only a lot stronger and less stubborn.

Apparently these LS3’s were demonstrated to a selected public recently which DARPA photographed and shared on their own website.
It underlined my position of ambivalence toward the entire project; here are military robots (with still unknown future goals) on one hand, and on the other the images reminded me of something else; the pictures I take of my cats. The makers had formed a relation of some sorts with these LS3’s, reminiscent of a living dog with it’s owner.

This is an interesting development in the relation between people and robots.
When AIBO was released in 1999 it was clearly a toy and although it was sleeker styled it had a clumsy and slow way of moving about, the owner never really felt a connection as you would with a real pet because it was always seen in the context of your living room floor and it wouldn’t really follow you about as a pet would.
These images of the LS3’s in a park setting are very different to the earlier released ones in the lab and remote training grounds; DARPA and Boston Dynamics were still testing and tweaking and it did not seem like they had formed a bond yet, I view these recently released photo’s as the equivalent of a birth announcement.

I asked myself the question how a future with these robotic animals would look and by coincidence (I was looking to find a resemblance to photo’s of dogs) I came across a self initiated calendar with pictures of her dogs some lady made and distributed on Lulu.com.
I made the calendar she, or enthousiasts like here, would possibly make in a near future about her LS3’s. The calendar was initially for myself but I now made it public.

Enter the code; “Darpa_2013” when you purchase the calendar and get 10% off.
> Darpa calendar on Lulu for €13,50

+ Link to New Aesthetic article
+ Link to Darpa tweet
+ This post is now featured on Wired

The New Aesthetic posted a link to the website www.styleblaster.net and it promises to be a truly unbiased fashion and style blog that captures anybody in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that walks by.
This results in a stream of images that are part fashion blog, part surveillance image, part chatroulette but once you start clicking through the captured images it starts to work as the democratic version of The Sartorialist, commenting those types of blog and social media exhibitionism at the same time.

Some images come out wrong by showing a glitch in the technology that is being used, generating some nice distorted images.

+ The New Aesthetic
+ Styleblaster

The website The Spectacle of the Tragedy was created by graphic designer and researcher Noortje van Eekelen as part of her graduation at the Sandberg Institute.
The project revolves in part around her editing news images, facts and texts about various aspects of the financial crisis. This results in image sequences of the Dutch prime minister laughing, the handbags of Carla Bruni, the full RGB spectrum of Angela Merkel’s blazer collection and the mistresses Silvio Berlusconi allegedly had.
The image collections are beautiful but the sequences on their own are not new and resemble, to some extend, popular blogs like Kim Jong Il looking at things.
The addition of simple facts like “Christine Lagarde leads the IMF but does not pay any taxes” or the list of bankers that personally gained over a billion pound (£1.000.000.000) as their banks were bailed out gives it a lot more depth and the fact that you have to click the friendly faces to get to this disturbing information makes you feel betrayed even more.

All of the images, movie clips, texts and facts combined give a real gloomy look on the state Europe is in. The current world leaders are in more ways than you would like on par with the Roman emperors and The Spectacle of the Tragedy reveals their true intentions and greed in a very intelligent way.

Linked by: Vandejong

After watching clips that Dutch parliamentarians chose as being inspirational their choises were pretty obvious ones and in no way really inspirational. It did however inspire me to think about a clip that inspired me and the documentary Surplus: Terrorized into Being Consumers came to mind.
When I saw the film by Erik Gandini and Johan Söderberg nine years ago it sparked a sudden interest in documentaries as an alternative to news and mainstream television.
It is kind of a poppy way of critisizing consumersism and it is pretty crude but you can feel the joy the makers had in making it, which was truely inspirational to me.
It is on YouTube and is about 50 minutes.

+ Watch Surplus on YouTube

 
 

A few months ago I saw a clip of a Boston Dynamics project in a documentary about the future of military operations and the role robotics will play in it and today I came across a post on DesignBoom where researchers made a fluid soft robot for DARPA.
What Boston Dynamics does it make robots that mimic animals or sample some of the techniques they use in nature to get from A to B.
The result is wonderful in every sense of the word but because these robots are so heavily inspired by the worlds fauna they become much more lifelike then even the best humanoid robot around.

They swarm, wobble, creep and jump through nature and urban area alike and it is not too difficult to imagine a world where these creatures get small tasks and thus a place in society. Where the archetype of a robot could at best do human tasks very well, the new robotics could become an industrial revolution of the government apparatus and replace humans for droids and drones.
In our modern society where we are so used to fast changing ethics on social, technological and privacy issues there is almost no incentive to stop this from happening since the advantages a so big.
Events like the European financial crisis could be the accelerator for an era in which robots could live among us since the cost of government is one of the big problems.
And I am very curious to see where it leads and in the meantime enjoy the way researchers like Boston Dynamics and Harvard/DARPA come up with new creatures.

EDIT: Interesting article “Lawful vantage point” on The Register (linked by The New Aesthetic) about domestic drone use for surveillance purposes.

+ Self-camouflaging soft robot
+ Boston Dynamics YouTube cannel
+ The Register article “Lawful vantage point”

I like this Wall City by architects/designers Planda from France.
It reminds me of Zelda and SimCity but more about the feeling I got when I left Cuba after a holiday and saw The Netherlands in all it’s glory; infrastructure, roads and nature all drawn in some piece of CAD software and no room for experimentation or coincidence.
People would benefit fro a bit more room to color outside the lines while preserving a basic state of organization.

Early tests for an application that controls a lighting sculpture by Studio Drift.
The application is designed with a sequencer or synthesizer in mind, giving the user a feeling of control without killing the element of surprise that embodies the installation.
Currently on show in Dubai.

+ Studio Drift