An Architectural Breathing Apparatus
In today's edition: content memories, speculative art air, the history and future of laundry, Minsky, inequality, and Trumps' tweeps.
"Certainly the discomfort we feel in the face of these unwelcome 'looks back' is partially to do with Facebook’s invasive qualities, and the revelation of how much of ourselves we have volunteered to it. But part of the palpable dissonance clearly comes from the fact that many of our posts were never intended to become 'memories' in the first place. An important question gets raised here: what’s the purpose of all this 'content' we serve to platforms, if it’s useless in constructing a remotely valuable history of ourselves? Are we creating anything that’s built to last, that’s worth reflecting on, or have social media platforms led us to prize only the thoughts of the moment?"
2. Packaged air.
"The best speculative art projects have a peculiar ability to come true, years later. In 1973, Haus-Rucker-Co, a “Viennese architectural collective,” in the words of Esther Choi, installed Grüne Lunge (Green Lung) at the Kunsthalle Hamburg. In essence,Green Lung was an architectural breathing apparatus; it pumped artificially conditioned indoor air through a series of inflatable ducts to a grape-like cluster of transparent plastic helmets suspended to a pole in the square outside. Visitors—that is, any public passer-by who wanted to pop his or her head into a helmet—could thus breathe the rarefied atmosphere of an art museum, inhaling airs that only minutes earlier had been gently rolling over the painted surfaces of Romantic landscape scenes and delicate statuary."
3. Comparative laundry studies.
"In stark contrast, many American homeowners associations have banned the use of outdoor clotheslines entirely. The sight of drying clothes is viewed as an eyesore or a marker of poverty that lowers property values. San Francisco had a ban on clotheslines until October, 2015. Thanks to a recent Right to Dry movement, California and some other states have repealed these bans. Laundromats in the Philippines are mostly home-based businesses, with one or two washing machines and family members helping out. Self-service, coin operated laundromats are virtually nonexistent, but there are some bigger modern facilities doing larger-scale laundering."
"Professor Minsky, in 1959, co-founded the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Project (later the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) with his colleague John McCarthy, who is credited with coining the term 'artificial intelligence.' Beyond its artificial intelligence charter, however, the lab would have a profound impact on the modern computing industry, helping to impassion a culture of computer and software design. It planted the seed for the idea that digital information should be shared freely, a notion that would shape the so-called open-source software movement, and it was a part of the original ARPAnet, the forerunner to the Internet."
"The growth of income inequality is such an important conversation to frame properly! We have to understand what’s wrong with the world as it is, because only then can we envision the world we want to create, and think about how to get there. There are many people who blame technology for increasing income inequality. Paul’s defense of technology (which he frames as 'startups') is that it creates wealth for all, even as (he claims) it creates inequality. I agree with him that technology can make us all richer, but I disagree that it necessarily creates greater inequality, even if some startup founders become very rich. It only does that if companies don’t create real value in return for that wealth."
On Fusion: We built a bot that retweets the bios of people Donald Trump retweets. It's fascinating.
1. theguardian.com | @megpalmateer 2. blogs.walkerart.org 3. @tashian 4. nytimes.com | @vaughanbell 5. medium.com
An Architectural Breathing Apparatus