Tag: Internet

Website : ATLV/Education

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[Image: A screen grab from the homepage of ATLV/Education].

ATLV/Education is a learning platform where a lot of resources for tutorials that would be a major help for beginner and intermediate Grasshopper and Rhinoceros users. ATLV is actually an acronym for Architectural Technology Laboratory Venture, a computational design firm based in Los Angeles. The firm explores the frontier of computational design technology through design practice and research in contemporary architecture and spatial design.This computational design firm is founded in 2012 by Satoru Sugihara, with a mission ‘We make what we want to make with technology. This is our responsibility to society. ‘. He is currently a faculty member at Southern California Institute of Architecture teaching scripting for computational design. He has over 5 years of experience as a computational designer at Morphosis Architects as well as over 16 years of experience in computer programming. He holds Master’s degree in Architecture from University of California Los Angeles and another Master’s degree in Computer Science from Tokyo Institute of Technology.ATLV has been focussing in challenging area of design through new technologies and design process. Innovations in technology help in solving design problems in new perspectives and also broaden the design possibilities.

ATLV/Education is a very direct tutorial website and gives out clear step-by-step instructions for beginners . Diagrams and topics are displayed coherently, started from very fundamental and basic topics to a much complex processes , complete with file examples and pdf .

Screen Shot 2014-12-04 at 5.37.49 AM[Image: A screen grab from the website of ATLV/Education].

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[Image: A screen grab from the homepage of ATLV.org].

Read more at the ATLV/Education  and do check out the ATLV.org website for more information about the firm.

Source : ATLV.org

The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace

In relation to our Brief 3, I recently found this book written by Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace.
In the book, Vincent Mosco goes beyond the usual stories of technological break through and economic meltdown to explore the myths constructed around the new digital technology and why we feel compelled to believe in them. He tells us that what kept enthusiastic investors in the dotcom era bidding up stocks even after the crash had begun was not willful ignorance of the laws of economics but belief in the myth that cyberspace was opening up a new world.Myths are not just falsehoods that can be disproved, Mosco points out, but stories that lift us out of the banality of everyday life into the possibility of the sublime. He argues that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture — specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics — we will add to our knowledge about the digital world; we need to see it “with both eyes” — that is, to understand it both culturally and materially. After examining the myths of cyberspace and going back in history to look at the similar mythic pronouncements prompted by past technological advances — the telephone, the radio, and television, among others — Mosco takes us to Ground Zero. In the final chapter he considers the twin towers of the World Trade Center — our icons of communication, information, and trade — and their part in the politics, economics, and myths of cyberspace.

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You can find a short book review here: http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol2-2/sublime_review.pdf

Makerbot, RepRap and Wikinomics

About a week ago, the brooklyn-based company Makerbot Industries, led by its ubiquitous CEO, Bre Pettis, released a 3D printer called the Replicator 2 (image below) at around $2,200 per unit.

While the Rep2 was being developped, I bought the parts of my RepRap Prusa Mendel (image below) for £500 from a company called RepRapPro which was created by the inventor of the RepRap 3D printers, Adrian Bowyer. RepRap is an open-source project, meaning that all the components of the machine are disclosed online. This project is also based on the idea of a “self-replicating” machine. In fact, I could print some of the parts of another machine (the white parts below are printed).

Makerbot was founded by some of RepRap core developers, Zach Smith, Bre Pettis and Adam Mayer with some investment from Adrian Bowyer. In August, Makerbot received around $10M in funding from Angel Investors such as Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.

All the previous printers and CNC machines that Makerbot developped were open-source but the Rep2 will not be. Have a look at the post from Bre Pettis regarding this topic, and more specificaly, read the comments after it as well as the post by Josef Prusa, core developper of RepRap. The following reply of Adrian Bowyer to Bre Pettis’ post sums up what he thinks about the replicator: “Ask yourself: which will be the more numerous 3D printer (or laser cutter): one that can self-replicate, or one that has to be made in a conventional factory?”

This debate is not only fascinating but illustrates a possible conflict between the notion of Open-Source technology and sustainable business.

This summer, I read the book Wikinomics,  by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams (cover below). They praise the concept of Open-Source as a positive revolution for companies, giving the example of IBM which spends $100M a year on the development of LINUX, an open-source operating system. They say opening up patents and copyright law will allow for collaboration on an unprecented scale which will benefit everyone. They call the new consumers, the “prosumers” as they will no longer buy passively but will know the inner-workings of their products and will be able to improve/hack them.

This is already happening with Arduino, Processing, FabLab, Hackspace…etc…communities in which people hack the Microsoft Kinect (video below) or Samsung/Android phones or any other devices with an open API (application programming interface) to create a new collaborative technology or pieces of art.

 

This whole debate resonnates within the architectural world in which Architects are often replaced by enthusiastic self-builders. With information being increasingly available online, knowledge will not necessarily be in our mind anymore but mostly on the web. What will remain in our minds is intelligence and decision on how and where to apply it.

Many questions arrise from it: How do we help self-builders or prosummers and do we want to help them? How do we offer our talent, our own experience to people that can technically do what we are suppose to do just by googling it? Can a business still be sustainable if it discloses all its innovations?

 

Bridging the Digital Divide with Sparchitecture

More than 4 billion human brains are not connected to the global machine that is internet. The enormity of this divide is cause for concern. So how do we bridge this divide? India has the greatest disparity between total population and internet users out of all the countries in the world. The majority of users are located in urban areas, the rural parts are digitally disconnected.

By trying to include an exemplar rural community in West Bengal into the global digital network, we aimed to develop an architecture that considered India’s local resources and culture. By using Jute which is a vegetable fibre that is also the highest produced agricultural product in India, we intended to show-case the communities local materials and skills. India’s cultural symbol is represented by the spindle. We took the idea of the spindle to an architectural level by developing a spinning system that would create architecture and become the catalyst for the construction of a spillage (spun village).

The community’s internet inclusion would be manifested by the setup of a blog that would advertise the community and promote their growth by attracting tourists to come and visit the site. With the growth of the community the spaces would accommodate visitors and the site would become an ecotourism destination. Ultimately, this scheme was conceived to diffuse the ideologies beyond the borders of the community, spreading local ideas. This exemplar settlement would become a precursor for change in other communities across the developing world that have the right to the internet, unleashing a cornucopia of human thought!

By Maria Valente and Anam Hasan

The Virtual Revolution

It has been recently reported that Google has launched a new unified privacy policy which took effect March 1st. All data already collected about you, including search queries, sites visited, age, gender and location will be gathered and assigned to your online identity represented by your Gmail and YouTube accounts. Now that the policy has taken effect you are not allowed to opt out without abandoning Google altogether. Before the policy took effect, you had the option of deleting your Google Web History by modifying your settings so that Google is unable to associate data collected about you with your Gmail or YouTube accounts.

A break-down of how Google tracks us and alternative search engine: DuckDuckGo.com

There is a plugin that lets you keep your opt-out status for this browser even when you clear all cookies: Cookie Opt-out Plugin

Here is an article on ‘The Deep Web‘, which is currently ‘400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web’. It’s supposedly the deep web that is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet and the internet searches we make are searching only 0.03% of the total web pages available.

An important documentary series, The Virtual Revolution, first shown on the BBC June 2010, explores how the Internet is molding almost every aspect of our lives and what is really going on behind this reshaping.

Marshall McLuhan, author of Understanding Media: The extensions of Man, saw that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act. ‘As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as a society.’

Below is a 3D visualisation of the Experian Hitwise Network Map of internet usage in the UK September 2009. It illustrates how traffic flows between 30 of the top websites in the UK. The size of the bubble represents the website’s share of Internet visits (so Facebook and Google UK have the biggest bubbles), while the lines illustrate the amount of traffic moving between the sites (using their clickstream data).

More information and discussions/talks:

http://alekskrotoski.com/

http://untanglingtheweb.tumblr.com/

PressPausePlay

The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent of people in an unprecedented way, unleashing unlimited creative opportunites.

But does democratized culture mean better art, film, music and literature or is true talent instead flooded and drowned in the vast digital ocean of mass culture? Is it cultural democracy or mediocrity?

This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world’s most influential creators of the digital era.

Download full movie in 720P or 1080P, in normal or interactive version from the link below:

http://www.presspauseplay.com/

Enjoy!