newly released

dog eared books
October 26, 2008

A little while ago, Pierre sent me an image of a project he thought about for quite sometimes. The idea complements the republishing process of R-Echos and is based on sharing quotes from the books we read.

http://dogeared-books.electronest.com/
the rule is quite simple:

for each quote we like, we make a corner in the book; after a few pages, at the end of the capter, when we finish the book, or stop reading it - we scan the pages and retype the quote (ideally we would use OCR)

After a while we will end up with a very nice collections of cornered pages, and also a database of our favourites bits and pieces from the books we read and which have no search functionality - it is a kind of personal Google Books as well.

* You will notice there are Amazon ads - for a reason: ideally, i would like this experiment to be self sustainable, and the sharing of books could pay for buying the next ones. So if you enjoy the project and find a few books you would like to buy - please use our links, we asked Amazon to pay us in books :)

Categories: book, bookmark, newly released, website
Tags: archive, books, ocr, republishing, scan
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I messed up
September 11, 2008

Categories: newly released, website
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London TLK TLK
August 29, 2008

We launched a new website: Tlk Tlk - this is a project in which we would like to share the events we are attending, to promote nice things we come across in real life where friends are organising, or just giving a hand, or sometimes events organised by complete stranger but we like what they do…

The idea is a continuous curration of things we are interrested in, a littl ebit like R-Echos but for cultural events.

Categories: event, exhibition, experiments, memory, newly released, notes, offline, project, talk
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An experiment in the economics of production
July 24, 2008
An experiment in the economics of production: how can we shift focus from consumption of a finished product to investment in the processes of design, print & production?

This is a poster and a text: an analog R-Echos
Would you be interested in investing in the tangible production of this work?

1. You can download the digital archive
and decide wether or not you’re interested in particpating in this project.
2. Each participant donate a minimum of £8
3. The publication is produced
4. We share the publications
which means each participant own a fair amount of publications and participants decide (collectively or individually) what to do with it.

minimum £8

Categories: collection, designing, electronest, experiments, medias, newly released, project, r-echos, tangible, typography
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3V Dome animation (update on home hub)
July 02, 2008

see it in context or go straight to the linked resource

Categories: bookmark, designing, info hub, newly released
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Defragmentation: quick visualisation and visual trends
January 26, 2008
Defragmentation’s process aims at reducing the fragmentation of data by concatenating parts stored in separate locations: a (partially) new visualisation interface made its apparition on R-Echos; its url is: http://r-echos.net/defragmentation/

It’s quite simple, and it shows the last 500 posts, each post represented by a clickable color coded square (a color is equivalent to a post’s category). The most recent articles are on the top left, while the older are at the bottom right. When hovering on a square, title and first image of the post are displayed. It allows for a quick visual browse, a single click brings up the article. It is a rework based on the former interface of R-Echos which was using lines of colors.
This visualisation was inspired by a re-post a little while ago in Pierre’s reblog (about blogs); the original post coming from Social Fictions, whose ideas was much more about the software way of processing with a limited amount of memory, mimicking palimpsest: a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

This blog/blogject is a Janus head, 2 faced web0.0 monster sharing a memory-system styled on a palimpsest. When the limited memory it has is filled to maximum capacity it needs to reorganise it to make space otherwise it can’t store any more new blog entries. In doing this it has to try not to forget the old ones, but this is not always done with much success as memories confabulated over time become increasingly unrecognisable. This making space is done by the blogject and its functioning is modelled on how our brains interleave our memories: by dreaming. The resulting dreams are what the blogject publishes online.

The relationship between blog (and someone using it) and the blog-ejects rendered from/within this input is symbiotic. The blogject only starts functioning when memory reached a tipping point (being full), the blog can continue to accept new entries for as long as the blogject succeeds in freeing space, to which again there is an upper limit.

As an experiment in writing by a selfless-self (adjacent to automatic writing and the cut-up) there are two angles to this system: the blogject’s output and the stuff stored in the blog as its increasingly looses its integrity, are both written by a non-self. The purpose or meaning of this writing is not in the writing itself but in the interpretation of it by the ones submitting writing to its memory. This property too it shares with dreams.

(…)

A blogject, not to be confused with a slog (a sensor log), is the bot rephrased in the language of the blogosphere. Unlike bots, software-based attempts at making computers speak with us in our own language, that only have to respond on user input, blogjects in theory are pro-active and possess their own threshold function to decide when to produce something. Obviously, systems possessing artificial consciousness are non-existent, and bots and blogjects cannot but interpret/generate input of which is the meaning is always relative to templates in its database not relative to the outside world as you would suspect a true AI would.

Each cube represents a segment of a colour-coded memory. Each black dot represents a free segment. While the palimpsest has free segments entries are added from left to right and from top to bottom. When filled, dreaming commences (and the blogject will eject-text) to make space. This results in chains sharing a segment and releasing one in the process. The neat crystalline order inside the memory that exists in the beginning will slowly become chaotic.

The ideas behind the BlogJect are really interesting; it would be interesting to see such behaviour enacted on the R-Echos project, like evasive or digressive memory - it would never give the correct answer, but an almost correct one, though creating a sort of dérive inside the archive of the magazine.
It is also quite exciting to consider web software and web design aiming at the apparition and growth of a certain kind of new intelligent entities limited in some ways - a form of software reification, somehow.

Categories: memory, newly released, r-echos, thinking loud
Tags: AI, color, software, visualisation
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Aggregation, re-syndication & electronic presence
October 27, 2007
I have just finished a nice addition to my personnal hub:

It is actually republishing automatically content from twitter, flickr and myspace; it’s the continuation of ongoing experimentations around the notion of aggregation (read for example about what an aggregator is, on wikipedia).

Categories: newly released
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Kitsuné - new electronic presence
June 11, 2007
Benjamin and I just turned live the new version of the kitsuné’s website, the second version since we started working together.

Categories: electronest, newly released, web design
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Altitude - Gestalten verlag
March 09, 2007
I know it somehow old news, but I finally got my hands on the copies of Altitude in which i’m featured for two of my projects on a double spread:

One is the limited edition of Sun Tzu «The Art of War» - 13 generative readings of the original text written by the chinese tactician.

- Limited edition of a set of 13 books; each of them is a re-interpretation of «The Art of War» written by Sun Tzu around 3,000 BC Designed using home-made software specifically developed to take in account the structure of the text (text analysis + statistics).

The second featured work is the Corporate Annual Report for an edition company .TXT - made in collaboration with Pierre Terrier (who recently founded Koilinen, with Franz Hoffman)

- Patterns, text & display. Designed using home-made software specifically developed for the branding of a publishing company

I quite like the description of the content (it somehow really makes you feel proud of your work):

Altitude
Contemporary Swiss Graphic Design

A new wave of intellectually rigorous and iconoclastic Swiss designers are carving their niche in a new graphic language. By combining traditional high quality “Swiss Style” with advanced media, they are giving rise to a progressive style of visual expression. Seven years after publishing “Swiss Graphic Design”, we present “Altitude” - a new generation of flourishing contemporary designers, giving insight into the impact, essence and diversity of the work and evaluating the significant evolution of illustration and typography in recent years.

An increasing number of designers are working internationally with interdisciplinary design practices in typography, vector graphics, photography, interiors and web design. They bring about an experimental, playful and humorous element while maintaining the minimalist approach and precision that gives Swiss Design its universally recognized trademark.

Altitude is an expansive volume that showcases and examines current trends as well as providing an analysis of contemporary Swiss Design through visuals, texts, interviews and commentary from the designers and editors themselves.

and BTW, I really like the way the book is bind, and the continuity of the red shadow on the spine:

Altitude, Gestalten Verlag, Berlin

Categories: book, designing, generative, internal, memory, newly released
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la transhumance…
February 07, 2007
anti-chambre.net once again is under mutation; the hosted bits and pieces of experimentations will be transfered to new locations from now on.

here’s a list of the already transfered projects:
Categories: internal, memory, newly released
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