via L O L I T A
don’t forget, a great impression of simplicity can only be achieved by great agony of body and spirit.
- boris lermontov
* i love those instant and objects which are just making you feel simply good. I try to collect some of those material instant here.
August 01, 2009
Categories: I Like, Things
Tags: jar, light, photography, rainbow
What do you think of this?
May 28, 2009
Categories: I Like, Things, thinking loud
What do you think of this?
As Yet; still Untitled -> Unofficial new-akiba.com -> Day off.
Original image found on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seier/1244185274/in/set-72157600283667645/
Photgrapher: SEIER+SEIER http://www.flickr.com/photos/seier/
Text, taken from the flickr page (Seier+Seier):
le corbusier famously claimed that all architecture could communicate was ideas. and the original ideas of christiania are well put by the best buildings out there: an open community of equals; a deep distrust, no, dismissal of authorities – including architects; a deep trust in the creative potential of ordinary people when left to govern their own lives. modesty. individualism. sustainability.
today, there is a strong political will to tear the houses down. they are illegal, follow no building code, have no permits. the old copenhagen defense line on which they are situated must be cleared to protect the city’s cultural heritage.
but these buildings are cultural heritage too. and while the 20th century has left us all with a distrust of utopian and idealist thinking, tearing them down will be acting in a dangerous denial of history.
… this story reminded me a lot of the Manor House allotments being stollen for the good of the Olympics developers under the flag of the community development.
March 24, 2009
Categories: I Like, project
Tags: glass, house, shed
What do you think of this?
This morning, I have been looking at Roger Excoffon [more] typographic work. I have been starring at the Mistral typeface; I also came across the Antique Olive which seems to have weird letter forms when compared to the Helvetica – but from the Antique Olive, there’s a je-ne-sais-quoi of something more human that makes me happy about it. i really would like to use it sometimes soon.
* Mistral
* Antique Olive (light)
I also quite like the idea of making a custom font dedicated to an identity, a little bit like a finger print, something that would really say: ‘Look, it’s us, writing’ – something man-made. But then i’m wondering if the fact of digitalising such a typeface wouldn’t say quite the opposite, like if loosing its purpose and authenticity in an attempt at overemphasizeing something that should be subtle.
I come to the point where I think I should stick to something really man-made and not trying to reproduce the man-made (the Truth of the medium). In this sense, maybe, the identity shouldn’t be conveyed exclusively by the typeface but rather by a set of parameters (physicality: weight, texture, color), applied to the context of the communication.
January 23, 2009
Categories: designing, thinking loud, typography
Comments (2) - what do you think of this?
Today we tried to bid and get an A0 plan chest to store and protect Amandine’s Book Setting posters (soon on Supermarketo) and the incoming first & A M P edition and the future projects we got around.
Unfortunately someone else got it at the very end (classical eBay-ian story…)
* I really liked the idea behind the blog ‘Reference Library’ run by Andy – in which he has a category called Objects I Didn’t Win.
To disperse my (evident) frustration, I’m posting the picture here – be prepared for a couple of those pictures…
** If anyone got a proposal for such a piece of furniture (A0/A1) in UK (London or not: we can arrange pick up & delivery) please use the comments to let me know.
January 16, 2009
Categories: I Like, Things, thinking loud
What do you think of this?
In the wake of the attack yesterday in Mumbai, a couple of thoughts picked across the twitterverse pointed me to a note referring to the use of Twitter in emergency conditions (via @timoreilly); people in India are active users of Twitter, Flickr and YouTube – the short note states the use of immediate/real time/near real time application and services during/just after the Mumbai attacks: learn from use of Web 2.0 in Mumbai. It delivers a realtime information of what’s happening. It is not only a ping that let the beloved know that one is fine (electronic presence) but it is also a raw information source for rescue team. Unfortunatelly, it could lead also bad intentionned people to monitor the same pubic channels.
How about a special kind of 999 where you could send any crucial information to authorities? Many information visualisation have been developped so far that could help authorities stay on top the instant huge flux such use could create.
Via my domain name provider: the .tel new TLD is a new extension for domain name. You can’t use it to link to a website – it means http://mywebsite.tel is not a web address, it is not WWW based. Instead, the DNS (Domain Name Server) is used to store you contact information and the whois is updated in real time. It means it is a container to host your information and one can imagine storing his/her own geolocation information as well as a new contact telephone, or a new snail mail address, or anything else using custom. The interest is the real time aspect of the thing. It gives you (or your device) a URL – somewhere on the internet where someone can ping you and see your status: online, offline, busy, … alive. (see also: Ambient post on Capacity)
It is clearly some of the first manifestion of the coming internet of things as previously described and explored by many peoples – see more reference on the wikipedia page: Internet of Things.
* ping: it is a reference to a UNIX command, a basic network command, that checks your machine can reach another network node from your local host. If your machine is connected to a network, any machine on the network can ping it in order to make sure your machine is part of the network.
** TLD Top Level Domain: this is the usually three leters that ends the URL of a website; most common are .com, .net and .org. Telnic is in charge of the administration of .tel domain name; they have a .tel FAQ
*** Twitter an instant messaging service. It is based on the notion of microblogging – blogging using text-only messages limited to 140 characters. It allows the very fast diffusion and replication of memes across networks of people.
November 27, 2008
Categories: electronic presence, network, technology, thinking loud
Tags: electronic presence, emergency, individual, internet of things, mumbai, ping, twitter
Comments (2) - what do you think of this?
November 15, 2008
Categories: thinking loud
Tags: tweets
What do you think of this?
Powered by Twitter Tools.
EDIT: thank you Twitter Tools – it has been a fine mess with over 20 posts created overnight for a single tweets. let’s see how this will perform from now on.
November 13, 2008
Categories: thinking loud
Tags: tweets
What do you think of this?
A few weeks ago, we launched the &, Ampersand Make Production, a project in which people are supporting the production of cultural products.
This is an experiment in the economics of production. Our first issue is a poster and a text: AMP001. The content is clearly influenced by the practice we developped to maintain and develop R-Echos (http://r-echos.net) and we called the issue “R-Echos issue 1”.
* Recently Charlotte from Manystuff asked us to give more details about the ideas around & – below I’m translating in english our answer to her request:
Financing and the notion of Crowd Sourcing
Instead of using a single source of finance, grant or sponsoring -we are seeking to establish a principle of distributed funding, like a p2p network. This principle is applied as well to the distribution since each share-holder/participant own a certain percentage of the real thing produced, and each of them is able to decide individually or collectivelly of the future of his or her share of the production.
A series of economic experiments
This project is for us a laboratory. The poster and the text of AMP001 (the first issue) are a first test tube. We are just starting to be able to draw early conclusions, it is for us a little bit like a reduced scale LHC: we are launching something and looking at the results depending on the parameters of the launch.
An extension of R-echos (http://r-echos.net)
R-Echos is a website, a selection of whatever we find, see, read and collect online, it is our daily best picks; it is a reblog that we have been maintaining for some years now. The poster of this first issue shows tangible objects that belongs to our every day life ans surround us: things on our desks, books in the shelves, visuals references that inspired us for some reasons – we consider those objects as being the sources of the project we develop and realise (like in programmation); we really consider R-Echos like being one of the source-code of Electronest.
french version:
le financement et la notion de crowd sourcing
au lieu de s’en remettre à une seule source de financement, ou à un principe de sponsoring – nous cherchons à mettre en place un financement distribuée comme un réseau p2p. Ce principe s’applique également à la distribution, puisque chaque Share Holder possede un certain pourcentage de notre production et est en mesure de decider individuellement (ou cellectiveemnt) du futur de sa part de la production.
une serie d’expériences économiques
ce projet est un laboratoire pour nous. Le poster et le texte de AMP001, c’est une première éprouvette. On commence tout juste à pouvoir tirer des conclusions. c’est un peu comme un micro-LHC pour nous: on lance un truc, et on regarde ce que ça produit en fonction des paramètres de lancement
une extension de R-Echos — http://r-echos.net
R-Echos est un site internet, une sélection de ce que l’on lis/trouve online, nos “best picks” quotidien; c’est un reblog que l’on fait depuis quelques années déjà. Ce poster contient les objets qui nos entourent et nous inspirent — c’est un peu comme un code-source des choses que l’on fait, on considère le site de R-Echos comme étant un des codes-source de Electronest.
* Here is also a short text I put on the facebook group a little while ago, it links the ideas of & and the ones of etoy.SHARE:
obviously, there’s some sort of inspiration taken from etoy.SHARE.
In the & Make Production project, shares are project based and they determine if the project is interesting enough to make it to the production step. if not shareholders will be able to decide how they want the money to be used: refund, re-investment in the next publication or in the structure itself, etc.
Shareholders are sharing the destiny of the project which we don’t control anymore.
November 09, 2008
Categories: electronest, experiments, ideas, internal, project, r-echos, republishing, tangible, thinking loud
What do you think of this?
- went to Photographers’ Gallery (Soho archives, and Dryden Goodwin who remided me a lot of facial recognition graphs) and the Saatchi Exhibition (Revolution Continues – a very figurative selection of chinese artists – the piece in the “cellar” was the most exciting). Later in the day: went to the opening of the Royal Academy exhibition; saw (mainly and amongst other things) agrifashionista.tv and Urbania’s installation: a red room reporting on their various experiments about communal life and projects.
- went to the Friday’s DotDotDot lecture at Somerset House; link: DDD17 / talk.
- thought about making a website which like Dog Eared Books would list the films i like, quoting them; a sort of personnal memory. It comes from the fact that this year we have been increasingly watching more and more films every week (Amandine being back at university, we have access to the LCC’s library and their DVDs – just great!)
- watched (amongst other DVDs) ‘A Pervert Guide to Cinema’ – an interresting documentary on perversion trough a couple of selected movies; more specially: this documentary is a very nice Republishing piece along with commentaries: trying to organise the Tlktlk discussion on the topic of republishing and to set a list of guests.
- discovered about Edgser Dijkstra self re publication and Piet Schreuders’ Furore via Pierre.
- went yesterday to the Social Pasta: Maki, Kajsa, Alex (the rich one), Bearen and Momoko were cooking while we watched 2 films: one 20 minutes documentary by les Blanks ‘Werner Herzog eats his shoes’ (YouTube 1, 2) and Errol Morris’ film: Gates of Heaven. Amazing combination and the food as usual was incredible!. And they all had really nice shoes…
* the documentary is a beautiful support and encouragement at self initiated projects.
- Werner Herzog: “I am more and more convinced that the only alternative to film making is cooking. Maybe there’s another alternative which is walking”.
He also said “I don’t believe you have the guts (to make your film), but if you do it, I come to brooklyn eat my shoes when you show the film”.
November 08, 2008
Categories: event, exhibition, notes, republishing, talk, thinking loud
What do you think of this?
east london
Maxime (my good old mate, master at typography as well as at tatooing, amongst other things) filmed our flat a while back when he visited for the tatoo convention 2008 in Bricklane; he posted the video on the website for his Sang Bleu Magazine – here
* it feels a bit strange to see your own flat on the website of someone else :)
October 21, 2008
Categories: Uncategorized, data beautification, internal, london, offline, thinking loud
Tags: film, flat, maxime, sangbleu
What do you think of this?
This post is made of a few short connection in between 3 things; all of them are linked to notions like future proof, open source and hackability.
(center picture: Nicolas Nova; left: Assembling, right: Miltos Manetas )
* This morning i’ve read a very nice post by Nicolas (Pasta & Vinegar); titled buildings as flows and process, it shows a couple of pipes in the streets of North America which are depicting the infrastructure of the building itself.
* Somehow it reminded me of that post i wrote on Assembling about ‘The beauty of designing the underlying structure’ which somehow linked a large biro drawing by Amandine, a carpet by Britta Boehne, a series of paintings by Milto Manetas and my reflections on my own practice.
* This morning i was also dwelving in R-Echos archives and came across this post (original post is here): Social Networks Evil Twin Attacks which depicts an attack made on an individual using the social networks in vogue with the web 2.0, Markus the other day was speaking about this kind of concerns and issues with services like Facebook.
October 07, 2008
Categories: designing, memory, notes, thinking loud
Tags: design, hackability, infrastructure, methodology, process, structure
What do you think of this?
The kind of ‘formal’ language interogations that makes a lot of sense to me or at least it draws my attention a lot lately – like how do you spell/capitalise/prefix the word internet:
the internet
internet
Internet
the Internet
now i will wonder about two more parameters: in or on.
* Via
“i work in ubiquitous computing”
Often bemused by the “on the internet” versus “in the internet” debate, it’s intriguing that the only person we can find who refers to “i work in ubiquitous computing” was late Mark Weiser (see on his website).
** Christophe Guignard from Fabric.ch during a talk by Eric Sadin (Times of the Signs) once noted the different spelling of connection (physically attached) and connexion (close but not touching eachother) in french and english.
October 05, 2008
Categories: language, thinking loud
Tags: curiosity, language, meaning, translation, words
What do you think of this?
● I quite like the final take on this matter; it emphasize a side of the often criticised web2.0 not that often underlined: the recommandation principle where you trust your friend.
Do we get the blogs we deserve? We vote by click, after all. Perhaps we shouldnt look at all those top 10 lists and Britney Spears photos. Successful blogs, such as Zen Habits, tend to balance the more fast-food type posts with longer, more complex ideas that will presumably keep readers coming back—although there are plenty of people who make a living posting dubious crap. Perhaps the escape route out of a hit-driven blogosphere is all of our newfound “friends.” The Internet has always been very good at counting page views but not so great at assigning value to whats actually in those pages. Facebook, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, and the sharing feature of Google Reader have their annoying, nudgy aspects, but they allow us to rely on one another to sort out what is interesting and worthy. Put it on a T-shirt: Friends Dont Let Friends Read Bad Content.
How do bloggers make money? – By Michael Agger – Slate Magazine
(Via Design Notes)
October 04, 2008
Categories: I Like, ideas, thinking loud
Tags: blog, business, filter, infohub, money, ocntent, quality, quote, recommendation, web2.0
What do you think of this?
this morning i received the newsletter of Twitter:
Hacking The Debate
Tonight we expect the most activity Twitter has ever seen as
vice presidential hopefuls Sarah Palin and Joe Biden debate live
from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. The folks at
Current TV are making history by broadcasting Twitter updates on
live television during this debate. Will you see your updates on
television? Be sure to tune in or watch the streaming version of
Current TV’s “Hack The Debate II” at http://current.com/debate
* it is really nice to see a web service based on short and unobstrusive discussions enabling the realtime comments on a Tv show (streamed) – it would be nice to see this happening on a larger TV show – could it be the rebirth of TV? You could select if you want to see BBC with or without comments… I wonder what it would be like.
** i also found (via a pingbacktracking) a link to a nice archive of McLuhan broadcasted speech and interview on CBC (via Art Writing / Gemma Parse)
*** that’s another kind of Electronic Presence
October 03, 2008
Categories: electronic presence, thinking loud
What do you think of this?
- People consciously refusing to express ideas/views on the internet and who eventually prefer a couple of pinte at the pub and a few friends for audience.
- french silly expression that usually goes on my nerves but after all life wouldn’t be the same without them; like “tu vois ce que je veux dire?”, “oui mais non”, “ça ne casse pas quatre pattes à un canard”
- VW minibus (but also Martino’s Volvo and the old Saab that Laetitia had in Switzerland)
- Sweet cider, and red wine – but also a pint of Flowers
- Woody perfumes
- Walking by a school playground during kids’ school break around 10 in the morning – (a little bit of) sun and a cold and dry air.
and you what are your favourites things this morning?
* this list of 6 favourites things for this morning comes from this discussion
October 03, 2008
Categories: I Like, Things
What do you think of this?
* Yesterday, with Patrick we went to the George to work on the Butcher’s Project identity and website – Alex joined and we had fun discussing the incredibly serious design world; that was nice and a couple of interesting thoughts came out of the discussion. I’m trying to keep track of them below.
- the Wrong Gallery in New York. (an entry door space of 1sq meter used as a gallery).
[apparently they lost the space and they then relocated in London at the Tate Modern]
- Andreas Slumski made an exhibition there; he requested the door to be sent to his studio in Hamburg, organised a diner party there using the door as a table, sent back the door/table to New York.
- the connections in between the work of Richard Wentworth, Jason Evans (the Daily Nice, the New Scent) and Daniel Eatock [from which emerged the wish to make lists of nice or bad things; see next post: 6 things i like]
- the difference in between visual communication and graphic design.
- the interrests we share in design processes, and the fact that process (and process analysis) is the essence of design – and what it takes for design to be design.
** Yesterday, at the same time, it was Gina’s award from the Royal Society of Photography for her work in hospitals – Amandine, being her assistant, accompanied her, and came back with sparkling eyes; that was apparently quite nice as well :)
October 03, 2008
Categories: designing, thinking loud
What do you think of this?
● Yesterday, Pierre prototyped a new project which deals with database and the use of natural language to perform some maintenance task on it, it also auto-self-documents itself. Pierre refered to it as a thin layer of manipulation (software) on top of data.
⌥ Strangely today, I was considering the object of NONE (the name of this blog where I’m posting this couple of thoughts) and found some similarities (thin layer). I’m using this directory to record things, quote, anecdotes, images, projects, things i found, things i produce. The software i’m using is a blog; it uses the (forced by blog) time based narrative to organise those things.
A collection of collections – including R-echos issue 1
∴ In a way it is a bit frustrating not to be able to deeply record the (multiple) relationships – almost automatically – of the various elements i’m posting here. Meta data are becoming crucial to organise things in a records-all environement; and i wish i could organise the objects i collected by size, or by time i saved them on my desktop, or by time i uploaded them online.
∵ In this case, by recording things online using a blog engine I’m loosing some data sets that where embed in the file itself (Mac Os X saves data like created and modified dates) – also comes the consideration that recording all the meta data about the object itself in a manual (non automated) way would require a lot of time but would certainly proove to be more effective and accurate.
↩ R-Echos for example is an attempt at collecting research and reading, interesting projects or articles we come across on the internet. Originally th system i developped was recording a lot of data, including the provenance (source, via) as a separate entry in the database. When i switched the system to a wordpress based website, this provenance information was partially lost: i kept this meta information in the content of the post (as a link at the end, starting with via) but i lost the single entry from the database.
The single entry in the database was useful in the sense that it was compute-able; i could produce meaning out of it: listing entries based on their provenanace is now a very resource intensive task if i were to develop a new Defragmentation based on the sources.
Defragmentation is a series of considerations on data sets within R-Echos
** I’m using some UTF8 characters to begin paragraphs on this post in an attempt to describe the linear relation in between paragraph. I rememeber having read about press services (like AFP, reuters) using those symbol (sometimes abstract) to convey extra meaning to news they deliver (short bits of texts, excessively factual).
*** i used the website http://www.copypastecharacter.com/ to get them quickly in my clipboard (very nice interface! from Konst & Teknik and Martin Ström).
September 20, 2008
Categories: thinking loud
Tags: autologging, blog, code, data, database, logging, metadata, recording, software
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Right from the start, Cybernetics has accepted what all theory of technology must refuse: a classification of technological objects conducted by means of established criteria and following genera and species.
September 11, 2008
Categories: thinking loud
What do you think of this?
A very interresting set of radio show on BBC about the creation of CERN; CERN happens to be also the place where World Wide Web has been invented, incidentally when one of the laboratory needed to access informations dispatched on many different computers – from then Gopher quickly got replaced. History will ever remember Sir Tim Berners Lee. It quickly has been legally declared Public Domain – CERN could then not claim ownership but nobody else either.
There’s a very nice part of it which summarize quite perfectly the generosity behind the open source, and its root one can still find in the Science community.
I quite love this quote: Francis Farley
This [the Internet] usefull thing was a totally unexpected byproduct; you cannot plan the usefull part of science. What you can only do is to support the right guys let them do what they think is important – and out of that will come usefull applications
* thanks to Dodeckahedron for pointing out to me that today (10th september 2008) was the frist beam at CERN.
** picture: The Globe of Innovation in the morning. The wooden globe is a structure originally built for Switzerland’s national exhibition, Expo’02, and is 40 meters wide, 27 meters tall. (Maximilien Brice; Claudia Marcelloni, © CERN) via BostonGlobe.
September 10, 2008
Categories: info hub, network, open source, politic
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