Category Archives: M – projects

Drone Eat Drone (by Ken Rinaldo)

 

As many who study technology and the issues of borders know, drones in particular have become the weapon of choice, for crossing borders and carrying out undeclared war. These drones and the technology they employ, are playing an increasing role in world politics and in particular the military industrial complexes in the United States and increasingly worldwide.

As lobbyist work to fund more military robots and we are on the cusp of autonomous drones, which can algorithmically come to decide if a person is an “enemy combatant” of not, this work critiques the businesses such as IRobot (producer of military robots and the domestic Roomba vacuum cleaners) with the drone manufacturers General Atomics. The work questions and challenges the act of continuous war and the affect on populations especially in regions targeted such as Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen where the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/) out of the United Kingdom, that over a nine year period, out of 372 flights 400 civilians were confirmed dead, 94 of them children.

This work questions the notion of borders, where you can have a few countries or businesses lobbying governments to purchase and use new technologies, that also fundamentally challenge the notion of national autonomy and borders. The work is itself an autonomous robot, as it uses the intelligence programmed by the artist, who has highjacked thee digital programming and logic of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, which shares many algorithmic similarities to military robots. It conflates the land of other countries with the terrain of your living room (home) and seeks to join and help others understand the relationships between domestic consumer goods and the military industrial complexes, which increasingly manipulate, control and create foreign policy, through military robotics and autonomous killing machines.

 

Ref: Drone Eat Drone: American Scream, Ken Rinaldo – AntiAtlas

Just In Time Watch

 

JIT Watch offers the solution to that problem. JIT Watch is a thinking watch…

It is integrated into the user’s Personal Area Network and has the capability to connect via Bluetooth with e.g. cell phones. This provides the watch with the following services: The watch knows the wearer’s actual position coordinates via GPS, GSM-tracking or other techniques. In addition to that the cell phone enables a data connection with the www. Appointments with site coordinates can thus be synchronized. They were entered in advance e.g. into the cell phone or into the computer with a calendar tool like iCal. Furthermore the watch can access web-based navigation-, timetable- and traffic information services.

 

Ref: Just in Time Watch – Martin Frey (via betaknowledge)

Marc Böhlen – Projects

WaterBar, 2011-2013

 

Without a doubt computing has changed private and personal lives. But how has it, might it, change the public realm?

The installation WaterBar is a public water-well designed for the post-sustainability age when clean water is simply not good enough.

WaterBar geoengineers mineralized water. It begins with a cleaning stage via an anthracite filter followed by a remineralization stage through a filter bank with select chemical properties. Water in contact with these filters receives measurable trace elements of magnesium, iron, calcium and other elements. But the filters also share, though origin and history, a connection to place. Water travels the world in endless cylces of evaportion and rainfall. A drop of water in Africa today may be a drop of water in Europe in the future. Waterbar accellerates the global flow of waters through many regions of the planet, and produces a drinkable water mix in the process. WaterBar includes quartz-rich granite from Inada by Fukushima, home of the latest devastating high-tech catastrophe; sandstone from La Verna, Italy, where St. Francis cared for the poor; marble from Thassos Greece, source of art and architecture and the beginning and possible end of democracy; limestone from Jerusalem/Hebron, Israel, a place of eternal conflict and shared hopes; and basalt from Mount Merapi, Indonesia, an unpredictable, active volcano. An internet-scanning, text-processing control system continuously circulates water through these filters, exposing the water to trace elements of the minerals and rocks. An algorithm mixes these remineralized waters in proportion to the intensity of related problems found in pertinent realtime online news to a daily mineralized water mix, the catch of the day. This mix is then offered for public consumption as an antidote to the bad news on water of the day, and available only as long as limited supplies last.

 

MicroPublicSpaces, 2009-2011

 

MicroPublicPlaces (mpps) are a response to two strong global vectors: the rise of pervasive information processing technologies and the privatization of public matters. Mpps bend information systems to offer better access to what we all need: air, water, quiet places, information and more.

 

 A Nature Interpretation Center with Second Thoughts, 2002 – 2003

UNSEEN is a nature interpretation center with second thoughts. Set in the Reford Gardens of Grand-Métis on the Gaspé Peninsula of eastern Québec, the multi-camera real time machine vision system observes select plants indigenous to the region. The Dogwood, the Wild Sarsaparilla, the Harebell, the Foamflower, the Wild Columbine, the Garden Columbine, the Alpine Woodsia, the Lowbush Blueberry and the Canadian Burnet are under continued observation during the entire summer. Using data analysis and classification techniques, the system searches for instances of these plants. Short texts depict factual knowledge on the select plants. Over the course of the summer, however, the flavour of the texts changes. As the initially sparse garden grows luscious, the system alters the nature of the texts from descriptive to hypothetical, confronting the visitor with imagined future plant scenarios. Which types of knowing are valid here? UNSEEN is a patient observer designed to make you unfamiliar with plants.

 

Fridge Companion, 2001 – 2002

Fridge Companion is an information appliance designed not to make domestic life easier but warmer. It monitors ambient temperature in and outside of the refrigerator, maps the data over time and gives, at its owner’s request, periodic but very informal lectures on the laws of thermodynamics, including love.

 

Ref: RealTechSupport – Marc Böhler

ADM8

Ongaging finance in its most recent and complex developments, RYBN has undertaken the construction of its own trading bot, designed to invest and speculate on the financial markets. Using an online broker service to directly access the markets, this autonomous program can trigger orders as well as buy and sell stocks. Its decisions are taken with the help of an internal algorithmic intelligence system and can be influenced by a wide range of external, arbitrary parameters. The whole decision system allows the program to foresee the next moves in the markets while it tries to identify and anticipate the relevant and effective patterns within the financial chaotic oscillations. Along with its computations and performance, the robot’s activity is monitored, recorded, and visualized within dynamic mapping. A panopticon of information unfolds that is formally similar to the control rooms of the stock exchanges’ back offices.

The whole program is designed and distributed in open-source format, in contrast to the black box of the algorithmic and high-frequency trading.

Ref: ADM8, RYBN