Author: MK

An engineer at the University of Southern California has developed a robot that will construct buildings by squirting cement from a nozzle and then smoothing it out with a trowel, creating layers and layers of cement to form walls.

The article at New Scientist talks mostly about the innovation possible for the construction industry, but I was more intrigued by the last line, from an architect: “I believe that aesthetically there’s a great potential to make things that have never been seen before.”

This is true, and I immediately began thinking of art installations that make use of automated machinery to create an end product (most notably, the vacuum-sealed, nearly-human turds generated by Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca, which he sells for $1,500 each).

I’d like to hire this cement-spewing robot to build my art. The act of building is a performance, which I’m sure is as mesmerizing as any factory assembly-line video, and the resultant structure becomes part of an installation in a gallery or off-site.

But what about the sacred “hand of the artist”? I could build a structure out of concrete myself, I suppose, but I’d be much more interested in asking a robot to do my bidding and then seeing how closely the structure matched my vision. Computers only do what you tell them to do, and learning that particular kind of clarity that machines need is an interesting exercise. (Would it assume I wouldn’t give it anything structurally impossible to do? Does it just stop working if it gets confused?) The hand of the artist comes in here in the form of delivering orders. (Something I’ve become fond of since acquiring a couple of megaphones.)

To borrow one of Istvan Kantor’s lines: All power to the machines!

This weekend, Montréal is hosting a festival of films about art. Sometimes art films about art, or documentaries about art, but it’s all art all the time.

One of the films is about lomography, and the Lomographic Society International is here in force, loaning out lomo cameras to anyone, giving you free film, and a copy of the resulting prints. I borrowed the “traditional” lomo, but with the new fancy “colorsplash” flash (that has a nifty colour dial that lets you manipulate the colour of your flash, and create some low-fi special colour effects in your resulting prints.)

The cameras are sleek objects, fetish objects for any urban hipster who wouldn’t be caught dead with a Pentax K-1000. Nothing complements your Banana Republic duds better than a camera in milky white plastic with a velcro strap and pull-cord shutter release.

While not untrue, the above is the sort of nasty, holier-than-thou sort of thing a photographic purist might say. But since I’m not a purist, and have been caught inside Banana Republic on more than one occasion, I find the cameras charming, fun, and most of all desirable. Serious thought went in to making these cameras seriously fun. But not much sneaks past savvy consumers these days – they know when they’re being marketed to, and will knowingly participate, acknowledging openly that good design and a slick website worked.

And the most brilliant ploy of all – get the cameras into people’s hands so that they can touch and feel the good design and then *know* that they want them – is a good one, and I acknowledge openly that the tactic playing out this weekend at the festival is working on me.

The most enchanting thing about the lomo cameras is their elegant repackaging of the tried and true analog methods (light strikes emulsion, chemicals render details, resulting in an image on a piece of paper).

But there is only one hair in the soup – analog requires patience, and money. Even with the proliferation of one-hour photo places, photo developing at the grocery, the mall, the drugstore – you still have to wait, you can’t erase the bad images, you don’t know until it is too late if you did it wrong, and it can cost up to 20 bucks a pop to get those images in your greedy little hands. My definition of fun never included going to the photo lab. (and make no mistake, we’re talking about fun with photo here, leaving photo-as-high-art aside for a moment.)

It’s reflexive now, when in a social situation and everyone is snapping away, to ignore the yellow dots in front of your eyes and peer into a tiny screen to see how the shot turned out. “Ohmigod, I look like a refugee! Delete it!” Threats, more pictures, more beer ensues. Outrageous moments are captured and instantly verified for their blackmail potential later. (Catch this {{popup mk_beer.jpg mk_beer 200×150}}precious image of me being force-fed an $8 Heineken at a local strip club.)

(And who says you can’t take really bizarre photos with a digital camera? Especially if you drop it in a lot of water and dry it out with a hair dryer.)

I suppose I will wait and see how my prints turn out on Monday before I decide to fall for beautiful design or instant gratification.

So, dear reader, there’s all these very cool maps and diagrams you can easily access, which will show you the intricacies of the social networks that you belong to. Friendster and Orkut, arguably the two heavyweights, have come under particular scrutiny.

This is a marvellous time vacuum and I like nothing better than to zoom in on maps of Manhattan and see where all the Orkut users live. Or know who Ben Discoe’s friends are on Friendster, and their relationships to each other.

However, I’m more interested in tracking how information is passed from person to person. (Maybe this is the same thing, but I’d reckon it isn’t – there are those to whom I’d send information, that I wouldn’t link to on Friendster or Orkut.) I’d like to see a diagram of this information sharing. For example: someone recently forwarded me the URL to the Isometric Screenshots project. I’d received this URL months before, and thought to myself, “wow, poor X is way behind.” But is he? Who gave it to him? Aren’t they behind too? Who started it? When did it start? What does the branching tree that would be the email trail look like?

There’s two things that interest me here.
1) Why forward? A lot of people forward me cool links (like the Isometric Screenshots). They took a split second to decide that I would be interested in this information and send it on. This sharing impulse, where you don’t really have anything to say except “wow, cool” is interesting because you wouldn’t bother to pick up the phone and call someone to tell them to go check it out. You’re saying to yourself “OK MK, but of course they would forward a link via email and not call you and tell you “OK, double you double you double you…”” But wait! It’s similar to how I’ve heard the texting impulse described – you wouldn’t call someone to say that there’s a sale on at H&M, but you would text that information to your friend. It’s information that you want people to know about, but not so much so that you would go through the whole “hi, how are you, ya I’m fine” stuff to get there.

2) Who starts it and how does it die? To borrow from the Tipping Point (sorry, I know you’ve all read it and are maybe tired of it, information fatigue, if you will) the people who start it might be “Mavens”, holders of the information, or “Connectors”, people who have mastered the weak tie and act as our social glue (meaning they have massive address books). I suppose those who start these forwarding frenzies might be Maven/Connector hybrids. I’d love to know the average life cycle of these kinds of phenomenon.

I’m sure someone out there has grand theories on all of this, charts and graphs maybe too. All I could find on Google was how to track email forwarding for spam and marketing and other nefarious purposes. If you know of any legitimate information, ie. people figuring this out for fun and not profit, please post it in the comments. I’ll keep digging.

And now, two of my favourite forwards that I have received multiple times over the years:
The Superfriends in “Whazzup”
I Kiss You!!!!

Enjoy them, for the fiftieth time. And no, I don’t remember who forwarded them to me first.

Happy Birthday, Sara Diamond!
You can send your birthday greets to sara at codezebra dot net.