#herald x lara

[my-chemical-mermaid]

A Flystep Playlist

Love Again - Dua Lipa

I Feel it Coming - The Weekend

Prisoner - Miley Cyrus

Do I Wanna Know - Arctic Monkeys

Starving - Hailee Steinfield

Infra-Red - Three Days Grace

Sunlight - Hozier

Heaven in Hiding - Halsey

Wicked Games - RAIGN

Blinding Lights - The Weekend

Bound to You - Christina Aguilera

Crazy in Love - Beyoncé

Good Enough - Evanescence

Midnight Rain - Taylor Swift

Break In - Halestorm

Levitating - Dua Lipa

[embodiedinfrastructures]

Research Date: 17-06-2019

Publish Date: -mm-yyyy

Owner: Chris Stokel-Walker

Summary:

Important Quotes:

“The launch of the Iphone in 2007- and the raft of rival smartphones- heralded another dawn for technology: computers that were mobile and in ever closer proximity to us, devices that we could interact with through touch or gesture-enabled displays.”

“Some of the technologies that look set to define this era are fast becoming commonplace—such as augmented reality (AR), voice technology and wearables. Others are less familiar—like extended reality, diminished reality, or object and pose detection. But what unites them all is clear: they will bring computers ever closer to our bodies, smoothing the interaction between people and devices.“

“From the home computer to the smartphone, technological developments have tended to follow the same growth cycle: the so-called S-curve, a smooth line charting the pace of development and adoption of a particular technology.”

“Most users [of computers] were specialists and dedicated long periods of time learning how to bring the abstruse and obtuse technology to heel and use it to facilitate processes and labour-intensive tasks.“

“The way we engage with computing power is becoming altogether more interactive. “

“Today, to be able to access Instagram data, you have to have an account and a smartphone. But tomorrow, that information may not be just on your phone screen but embedded into your environment—and that really changes your relationship with your physical reality,’ says Yasaman Sheri, a Creative Director and Designer who has worked with the likes of Microsoft Hololens, Google (X), the Rhode Island School of Design and NASA’s Ames Research Center. ‘If we begin to augment our sense of perception like this, we change the nature of how we trust what’s in front of us.”

‘Tech companies could own our new physicality and digitality—and each platform comes with its own politics,’ - Yasaman Sheri

“Appealing aesthetics and cultural acceptance will be as crucial to the success of emerging technology as smoothing out the technical lumps. “

“Computers already see better, hear better, and are better at many other things” - Mo Gawdat

“As cameras become an intrinsic part of our everyday lives, their use is becoming more commonplace, with AI trained to analyse moving images and entirely new products and opportunities emerging from them. “

“Although preferential intelligence isn’t an official term, it makes sense when you consider how your Amazon, Gaana or Tencent Video account works: all three are examples of software that can recognise and analyse your individual likes and dislikes, account for your taste, and recommend new content or products.“

Affective computing - Teaching AI how to monitor facial expressions, voices and writing, interpret feelings and reply sympathetically.

“Danish startup Corti analyses the voices of people calling emergency services as well as the words they use.“

“Ugly devices are out; well designed and seemingly handcrafted gadgets are in.“

“-- technology no longer serves a single purpose—a way of making a phone call, say, or of telling the time. Rather, it has social value.” 

“‘I see the future of digital as how digital can be in service to the physical experience,’ “ - Lara Marrero

“Google kept some of its best-known products, like Gmail, in public beta for years while allowing the public to use it as a fully-fledged utility.“

“The destination is a more layered, digitally literate world, in which human intelligence is augmented by machine logic and representation.“

“The widespread adoption of 5G will help us stream data at such high rates that the need for local computational power suddenly drops—with profound consequences for machine-learning services and the local hardware that runs it. “

“Just as we take for granted that we have the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips, thanks to the world wide web, we will soon begin to evolve with the technologies we create—losing grasp of some seemingly obvious skills (like remembering phone numbers by heart) while gaining new ones that serve us in this digitally-tinted world.“

People:

Yasaman Sheri- Creative Director

Amy Webb - Quantitative Futurist

Kai-Fu Lee - AI Expert

Michael Abrash - chief scientist at Oculus VR

Mo Gawdat - Former head of Google X

Oggi Rudovic - Researcher at MIT

Marc Newson - Industrial Designer

Lara Marrero - Strategy Director and retail practice leader

Related Links:

https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/jpt/vol20/iss2/1/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGgd9Ld-Wc

https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/helping-computers-perceive-human-emotions/

[caveartfair]

Christchurch Shooting Gives New Sense of Urgency to Simon Denny Show

Simon Denny, Game of Life: Collective vs Individual Board Game Display Prototype (detail), 2017. Courtesy of Christchurch Art Gallery.

Prior to March 15th, New Zealand seemed remote from much of the world’s troubles. The South Island, in particular, became a backup destination for Silicon Valley elites, a Helm’s Deep to retreat into as the rest of the world descended into chaos.

Following the mass murder of 50 praying Muslims at two Christchurch mosques, New Zealand no longer seems so remote, and the strategy of retreating from global problems—to your basement, a South Pacific nation, Mars—seems less tenable. Douglas Coupland put it in Cold War–era terms in his 1991 novel Generation X, but his point remains relevant: “New Zealand Gets Nuked, Too.”

There’s a tension between the radical individualism of those readying to abandon ship and the communitarianism of the phrase “they are us,” which circulated after the massacre. And Simon Denny tackles that tension in his exhibition “The Founder’s Paradox,” now showing at Christchurch Art Gallery.

Simon Denny, Ascent Box Cover Projection, 2017. Courtesy of Christchurch Art Gallery.

Paypal co-founder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel stopped by an earlier exhibition of “The Founder’s Paradox” at Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland in December 2017. There, he saw himself depicted as Lord Tybalt, a green-faced, bow-wielding warrior in the board game-inspired work Ascent: Above the Nation State.

“It’s actually a work of phenomenal detail,” he told another gallery visitor, according to the New Zealand Herald. While Thiel loves fantasy—he named his companies Valar Ventures and Mithril Capital after Lord of the Rings lore—it’s a strangely zen response to a show that casts him, on the exhibition’s walls, as a “Contrarian Hero” fighting to undermine “Maladaptive Monsters” such as democracy, fair elections, and independent journalism.

The exhibition uses games to contrast winner-take-all and more communitarian ideologies. Head curator Lara Strongman said that this political dilemma has “particular resonance in the South Island of New Zealand, with many Silicon Valley founders buying up property here as boltholes, should society collapse over the other side of the world due to various technological depredations into the fabric of society.”

Simon Denny, Above the Nation State Board Game Display Prototype (detail), 2017. Courtesy of Christchurch Art Gallery.

Thiel has built his own bug-out bunker, complete with a panic room, in Wanaka, a picturesque South Island town of fewer than 10,000. After making donations and investments, and meeting with four senior members of the New Zealand government, including the prime minister, he acquired New Zealand citizenship. Thiel prevailed despite declaring that he had never lived in New Zealand, had no intention to, and had spent just 12 days in the country—facts that caused a scandal when they were exposed by New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Nippert in 2017. It typically takes 1,350 days in residence before a foreign national can acquire New Zealand citizenship.

Another work from Denny’s show elucidates the role New Zealand plays in tech-billionaires�� efforts to transcend single-country citizenship. An adaptation of the popular board game Settlers of Catan, “Founders” tasks players with hoovering up sufficient resources to escape decaying parts of the planet, move to relatively unspoiled New Zealand with the help of a Global Impact Visa, engage in Pacific Seasteading, and eventually establish a colony on either the Moon or Mars (the endgame for billionaire founders from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos).

New Zealand’s independent justice system and low level of corruption are part of what make it so appealing to would-be “sovereign individuals.” They’ve allowed Kim Dotcom—founder of file sharing site Megauploads, once one of the most popular websites in the world—to repeatedly appeal New Zealand court decisions that would see him extradited to the United States to face criminal copyright charges. Dotcom now lives in Queenstown, an hour’s drive from Wanaka. (Denny made a show about Dotcom, too, “The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom,” which first showed at Mumok, Vienna, in 2013.)

Simon Denny, Founders Board Game Display Prototype / Founders Rules (detail), 2017. Courtesy of Christchurch Art Gallery.

Aside from its “phenomenal detail,” what’s most brilliant about “The Founder’s Paradox” is that it highlights not the morality of the players—people like Thiel and Dotcom—but that of the social, political, and economic games we’ve agreed upon. In doing so, he succeeds where others before him have failed: The board game Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of winner-take-all capitalism, but players are more likely to complain that a sibling cheated than question the ethics of the game itself.

Denny said our blindness to the cruelty of emerging systems “is exacerbated by the norms and dynamics encouraged in a world where large social networks, search engines, and other data platform businesses exist at the scale and level of societal penetration they currently do.”

He pointed to Thiel’s fondness for philosopher René Girard’s thesis that all our desire comes from what others have, but we resent them for having it. Applied to the internet age, Girard’s ideas suggest that social media such as Facebook and Instagram help quantify people’s value, increasing competition and conflict to the benefit of the owners. Thiel was the first outsider investor in Facebook, acquiring a 10.2-percent stake for $500,000 in 2004.

Simon Denny, Founders Board Game Box Cover Projection, 2017. Courtesy of Christchurch Art Gallery.

Denny does present New Zealand with an alternative to being a last resort for tech billionaires. Drawing on author Max Harris’s collectivist plan for the country, the artist created a version of Twister where the colorful circles represent policy options such as a universal basic income, a zero carbon act, and decarceration. Denny’s version of Jenga likewise allows players to join in creating a tower made of blocks printed with value statements such as “deep concern for the environment is a part of care.”

Both games require people to come together in order to play. Denny’s Jenga pieces, though, don’t stack on top of one another as you’d expect. They slot into pieces of plexiglass, making them seem precarious, built on nothing. Harris’s vision, the work implies, is not grounded in reality.

The conflict between collectivist idealism and individualist pragmatism has intensified in recent years in the United States with the likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushing back against Wall Street and big tech. But it has its own distinct resonance in Christchurch, which is still recovering from a violent earthquake that did significant damage to the city in 2011. As residents, officials, businesses, and real-estate developers make competing claims on how to move forward, Strongman said “that tension in the city between forces of financial capital and the communitarian principle of grassroots rebuilding from the community, that has been very evident in the politics of the rebuild.”

In the wake of the Christchurch massacre, new debates are being held about gun rights, freedom of speech, and New Zealand’s refugee policy.

from Artsy News