We’ve seen our fair share of bizarre VR experiments over the years, but this one might just take the cake.

I was 10 when Super Mario Galaxy came out, and I’m 22 now on its rerelease. There was all sorts of confusion before it came out, about what really was the situation surrounding motion controls, which were described as both mandatory and optional by various outlets.

Keynote with Ryan Bishop (Winchester School of Art), Benjamin H. Bratton and Metahaven At Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin 31.1.2014

Conference stream An Afterglow of The Mediatic

Planetary computation and its geographies can be modeled as a coherent platform, a vertical software/hardware "stack". In his forthcoming book, "The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty", Benjamin Bratton explores this topography as a geopolitical framework, one defined by accidents and contradictions as much as by inventions and efficiencies. The design group Metahaven's forthcoming publication, "Black Transparency", focuses on the political and aesthetic regimes of contemporary transparency, and their coexistence with networks, institutions, and various (dis)organised groups. The latest in their series of ongoing collaborative discussions, Metahaven and Bratton will take turns using the stack's six layers—Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User—offering proposals on the future of each.

We are living in an interface culture: wherever we are, we find touch screens, microphones, sensors, cameras; and we are constantly reminded of interfaces through their sounds.

Human flight began with laundry. In 1777, Joseph-Michel Montgolfier was watching clothes drying over a fire when he noticed a shirt swept up in a billow of air; six years later, he and his brother demonstrated their hot-air balloon, the first manned flying machine.

illucia.com twitter.com/paperkettle illucia dtr is a patchbay controller for connecting computer programs. Life Sequencer is a game in the illucia suite - it uses falling blocks to build step sequencer patterns (it is also remixable by Conway's Game of Life). Also, it doesn't actually make any sound - it just makes data using OSC. You can then take that data and send it to any computer programs... like Ableton Live or Max. Behind the scenes (not shown in the video), Ableton and Max have some audio samplers running. As I play Life Sequencer, it builds step sequencer patterns. I then patch the data from the step sequencer into the music samplers (so that the sample playhead moves around based on the block patterns in the game). I use cables to select and layer samples, and then I speed up the playback and audio pitch with illucia's knobs. Eventually I patch in some sample rate reduction (and a special glitchy mode on Life Sequencer) right as I trigger the Conway's Game of Life pattern remixer. The Conway algorithm eats through most of the existing blocks, and then I start placing more blocks to build a new pattern. The illucia patchbay then becomes a physical controller for exploring these strange connections & reconsidering the inner lives of computer programs.Cast: paperkettleTags:

A few weeks into the making of Her, Spike Jonze’s new flick about romance in the age of artificial intelligence, the director had something of a breakthrough.

Virtual Reality (VR), especially in a technologically focused discourse, is defined by a class of hardware and software, among them head-mounted displays (HMDs), navigation and pointing devices; and stereoscopic imaging. This presentation examines the experiential aspect of VR.

Mediation and technologies of mediation, whether the sign (Vygotsky), the symbol (Piaget), or the mirror or signifier (Lacan), all play central roles in accounts of human development and activity. They are not simply metaphors enabling, say, a particular conception of memory, perception or language -- as is the case for Plato's wax tablet, Descartes' camera obscura or Chomsky's computational "language organ." Instead, media form the organizing principles for the psyche and its functions overall; they provide the pivotal moment for maturation and humanization -- the point where human development allegedly diverges decisively from the animal to the human. But in these contexts, media are not simply the basis, cause or source of psychological phenomena; they are inextricable from and in a sense even constitutive of them.

The new political ecology is thus emerging from a call for greater humility toward the world and all the life forms it may hold, both literally and figuratively. Rather than contrasting mankind to nature and the rest of the world, this perspective consistently perceives humans as relays in a dynamic mélange of relations that can be more or less open, inclusive, and stable over time, but without any preordained knowledge about how these relations may develop or change.

Digital games are important not only because of their cultural ubiquity or their sales figures but for what they can offer as a space for creative practice. Games are significant for what they embody; human computer interface, notions of agency, sociality, visualisation, cybernetics, representation, embodiment, activism, narrative and play. These and a whole host of other issues are significant not only to the game designer but also present in the work of the artist that thinks and rethinks games. Re-appropriated for activism, activation, commentary and critique within games and culture, artists have responded vigorously.

Being that this conference is about public interfaces, it would be evidently meaningful to talk about interfaces, machines and humans. But instead of examining the present multifaceted overwhelming and immense quantity of interfaces that daily calls for our attention, I will try to examine the relationship between the machine and the interface in a media archaeological perspective, that will, hopefully, point towards the physicality of the machine, in contrast to the symbolic ordering that is prevailing in the current understanding of interface.

In the introduction to this conference it is being stated that “in the case of computers, interfaces mediate between humans and machines, between machines and between humans” (Andersen, Cox and Lund), so the interface should be understood as something that is in-between the user and the machine. 

by Niklas Luhmann

The source of a distinction's guaranteeing reality lies in its own operative unity. It is, however, precisely as this unity that the distinction cannot be observed--except by means of another distinction which then assumes the function of a guarantor of reality. Another way of expressing this is to say the operation emerges simultaneously with the world which as a result remains cognitively unapproachable to the operation. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the connection with the reality of the external world is established by the blind spot of the cognitive operation. Reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it.

There’s never been anything like the Internet for helping us find what we want. But when it comes to finding what we didn’t know we wanted, print is magic.

Back in the ’90s, I used to read a handmade magazine called 8-Track Mind. In every issue it ran something called “The Eight Noble Truths of the 8-Track Mind.” Truth No. 1 was, “State of the art is in the eye of the beholder.” No. 5 was, “ ‘New’ and ‘improved’ don’t necessarily mean the same thing.” And No. 8 was, “Innovation alone will not replace beauty.”

As I’ve wondered lately about the future of ink and paper, I often wanted to reread those truths. I don’t know why it surprised me to find them online, but I’m glad I did. It could have taken me hours to find my old copies of the magazine in the boxes in the basement.

This video examines the benefits and limitations inherent in current mouse-based and window-oriented interfaces, the problems facing other potential solutions, and visualizes my proposal for a completely new way of interacting with desktop computers.

There's more information at 10gui.com. Cast: C. Miller

This is the Only Level is a 2D platformer in which you have to guide a boldly unanimated elephant over a series of pits, some of which are filled with spikes, past a switch that will raise a door, and deliver him safely to the exit. And that’s it. The twist is that, once you have initially completed the task, you’ll find you have to do it again, guiding the elephant over the same pits and the same spikes, and past the same switch that raises the same door, the difference being that this time the game’s mechanics have changed fairly dramatically. Then you’ll do it again, and again, each run-through offering a twist on the controls, or an unexpected tinkering with the environment.

It’s an approach that swiftly turns the standard tenets game design upside-down: instead of giving you a single set of tools and then varying the backdrop, the level becomes a controlled lab in which you play the role of the rat.

This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world.

The problem is that abundant resources, like computing power, are too often treated as scarce. Consider another example: Wired's IT department used to send out occasional emails telling employees it was time to "delete unneeded files from the shared folders"—their way of saying they had run out of storage room on the servers. Because we're good corporate citizens, we all dutifully scanned through our files, deleting those we could live without. Perhaps you've done the same.

One day, after years of this ritual, I began to wonder just how much storage capacity we actually had. Turns out, not so much: 500 gigabytes. At the time, a terabyte of memory (1,000 gigabytes) cost about $130. I had recently purchased a standard Dell desktop PC for my family, which the kids used for playing vide

The open source movement is driven by the idea of collective, process-based, sustainable production and improvement. In software development this strategy has already proven to be valid; however can this model be applied to other products such as artworks or even exhibitions? In how far does the open source model differ from other forms of artistic collaboration? Is there a new role model for both the artist and the curator in the future? Which (economic) value and impact has expertise in open source production? How could institutions and organisations respond to this trend? How could institutions and organisations respond to this trend and create public domains?