Between Display and Environment
So, it's December 31. It's been a wild year. We made a TV show (which comes out next month!). And made the Real Future Fair happen in November. It's been a tremendous experience. But I have a single resolution for 2016: write more. That means more essays and stories (and perhaps starting a book late this year)—and it also means a more regular newsletter. Realistically, I don't think I can make it a daily labor of love, but I'm going to shoot for two times a week. That should be easier to produce and digest. Thanks for sticking with me through the irregularity of recent months.
1. Can't find out about the CIA's art collection? Just recreate it.
"Several years ago, when Barron saw a photo by Taryn Simon of two abstract paintings hung in a CIA hallway, she wanted to learn more about the agency’s art collection, but its website only had brief blurbs on a few artworks. Barron filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency, hoping they’d provide her with more details and images. But despite several more FOIA requests, the CIA repeatedly refused to give Barron any information about the Melzac Collection. This Kafkaesque saga inspired Barron’s ongoing project Acres of Walls, in which she attempts to recreate paintings in the Melzac Collection in three-quarter scale based on scraps of descriptions she’s collected from tireless research."
2. A tremendous primer on augmented reality from the University of Washington's Tech Policy Lab.
"The vision for AR dates back at least until the 1960s with the work of Ivan Sutherland. In a way, AR represents a natural evolution of information communication technology. Our phones, cars, and other devices are increasingly reactive to the world around us. But AR also represents a serious departure from the way people have perceived data for most of human history: a Neolithic cave painting or book operates like a laptop insofar as each presents information to the user in a way that is external to her and separate from her present reality. By contrast, AR begins to collapse millennia of distinction between display and environment."
3. Fascinating project shows you an image of where you might be.
"Tracing You presents a website's best attempt to see the world from its visitors' viewpoints. By cross referencing visitor IP addresses with available online data sources, the system traces each visitor back through the network to its possible origin. The end of that trace is the closest available image that potentially shows the visitor's physical environment. Sometimes what this image shows is eerily accurate; other times it is wildly dislocated. What can a computational system know of our environment based on the traces we leave behind? Why might it want to see where we are? How accurate are the system's data sources and when might they improve?"
4. The subversive coloring books of the 1960s.
"The first adult coloring book, published in late 1961, mocked the conformism that dominated the post-war corporate workplace. Created by three admen in Chicago, the Executive Coloring Book show pictures of a businessman going through each stage in his day, as though teaching a child what daddy does at work. But the captions, which give instructions on how to color the image, are uniformly desolate. 'This is my suit. Color it gray or I will lose my job,' reads a caption next to a picture of a man getting dressed for work. Another page shows men in bowler hats boarding their commuter train. 'This is my train,' it reads. 'It takes me to my office every day. You meet lots of interesting people on the train. Color them all gray.' The rare appearance of a non-gray color is even more disturbing: 'This is my pill. It is round. It is pink. It makes me not care.'"
5. The particular art of the VCR glitch.
"'Most people over the age of about 23 right now have some fond memories of VHS tapes, and there’s a shorthand between the viewer and the piece in that instance. The texture of the thing is familiar, if skewed,' Johnson told me. 'There’s an inherent creepiness to the beauty, and I think the creepiness is something to be explored. I know it certainly freaks me out a little, and I just want to share that creepiness a little.'"
On Fusion: Star Wars still thinks technology is useless.
1. hyperallergic.com | @lainnafader 2. techpolicylab.org | @rcalo 3. tracingyou.bengrosser.com 4. atlasobscura.com 5. killscreen.com
Between Display and Environment