igargoyle

Disney Distributing Cyberpunk?

The irony of Disney distributing a major motion picture whose secondary plot involves massive unilateral corporate control, propaganda, and monopolized consumerism is too juicy to ignore! The corporation's name, BNL, stands for Buy N' Large, and the consumers buy and get large.

I was inspired to write about Pixar's Wall-E by the fantastic blog, wiki, and forums at http://www.cyberpunkreview.com. Therefore, this synopsis focuses on the Cyberpunk themes of Wall-E's secondary plot, which is the story of humanity. The primary plot of Wall-E is an animated romantic comedy between robots, who have the ability to learn and have emotions. The secondary plot has computers and robots with a similar suggestion of machine intelligence that is very reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In Wall-E, humanity has moved off a heavily polluted Earth, which travels in a space colony aboard a starship. The ship's captain receives all his information from the corporate-programmed computer, who then relays news to the society while reading a teleprompter. Like the talking heads of his passengers' video chats, these broadcasts are Orwellian in their framing and ubiquity. He is also controlled by information provided by a combination of a computer, recordings from a mashup of a Coprorate CEO/US President, and a HAL 9000-esque computer; replete with the same red, glowing eye. This cyclops is the ship's autopilot, provides spaceship status reports, and acts as First Mate. It mutinies against its human captain similar to HAL 9000 in 2001 and V.I.K.I. in I,Robot.

The BNL corporation that literally provides life support systems and educates humanity's youth. Their only semblance of face-to-face communication is screen-based, like a two-person holographic video chat. This Heads-Up Display mediated communication is used even by physically adjacent people. They don't touch or see beyond their screens. They don't see what is around them. They are seated and sated by convenience and the holograms, which reminds me of THX-1138 and The Matrix. Everyone is overweight because their only physical movements involve consumption; drinking meal shakes or buying into the latest trends, which are also broadcast from a central computer. The computer intervenes in the physical world through robots, and once triggered, secret automation routines are very difficult to override- even by the figurehead human captain, who is a corporate puppet. He discovers a secret recorded message that is also similar to 2001. Like I,Robot, Wall-E posits that rogue intelligent robots are not only prone to revolution against humans, but against themselves as well.

My original thoughts and members' comments are here:
http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=982

Mixed Reality Exhibition: SIGGRAPH & SL

PR:
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ACM SIGGRAPH SpaceTime Student Gallery in Second Life Gallery

Opening at SIGGRAPH 2008 Wednesday, 13 August at 5 pm PST

For the first time ever, the ACM SIGGRAPH SpaceTime Student Exhibition will be holding both a physical and a virtual opening at the SIGGRAPH 2008 conference in Los Angeles.

In a reflection of the integrated nature of the 2008 conference, the SpaceTime Student Gallery will be integrated throughout the ACM SIGGRAPH Village this year. To further underscore this concept, the ACM SIGGRAPH Education Committee has partnered with the Otis College of Art and Design to extend the SpaceTime Gallery into the virtual world via Second Life. The Otis SL gallery will include virtual versions of both the animation and print work from the physical gallery. To introduce this virtual gallery to the SIGGRAPH public, there will be an official opening on Wednesday, 13 August at 5 pm PST at the SpaceTime Student Gallery in the ACM SIGGRAPH Village at the conference.
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Mixed Reality Cartography Corset

A wearable device for Gordan Savicic's "Constraint City: The Pain of Everyday Life", includes: "A chest strap (corset) with high torque servo motors and a WIFI-enabled game-console are worn as fetish object. The higher the wireless signal strength of close encrypted networks, the tighter the corset becomes." Whether it is meant to be painful or pleasurable seems unclear.

I suggest exploring the link below to glean the project's conceptual background. I find its discourse reminiscent of Stelarc's. I do share the artist's interest in sensing the electromagentic waves permeating our environment; even to the extent of mapping it to haptic feedback. However, regarding the restriction of the public through normally undetectable information layers, I do not share his tenet that secure WiFi networks are as actively constrictive as this project asserts. Perhaps wireless security cameras and traffic lights are even more controling than secure WiFi, since private citizens should have the right to encrypt their networks from the public without suspicion of conspiracy.

[Link via Make:]

GeoLogging BurningMan

Marc Merlins 2007 GeoLog Map
Marc Merlins 2006 GeoLog Map

[2007 Playa map links via BoingBoing]

Spacesuit Art

Imagine a “very stuffy” museum. The images all over every wall are too much to process. Except for one small Flamenco dancer on the only canvas in one whole room of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. It was the only image Bradley Pitts related to. In a site-specific piece, the architecture at first dominated him, but in “Presence” (2002), he grew to fill the space; eclipsing it. Within 3 minutes, the fabric draped around the aerospace artist inflated to 12x12x9 feet. Then, after 2-3 times the duration, he disappeared into the deflated membrane on the floor. Marshall McLuhan described media as the extensions of mankind, including clothes which extend the thermal regulation of the body by the skin. With a Master’s Degree in what amounts to Spacesuit design from MIT, Pitts deals with the spaces on both sides of the epidermis and beyond. His works harken back to the days when scientific exploration was as much a meditation on personal philosophy as universal fact. Another performance, “Body Flux” (1996), suggested similarly soft skins of survival. Compartmentalized by womb-like isolation with voyeuristic vulnerability, it enveloped him in clear plastic, blinded him with cameras over his eyes, and collected his gasses and waste for an hour. Pitts feels that although the manned space program has aided a plethora of scientific and industrial experiments, it is a shame how much aerospace research has contributed to militaristic applications.

Spacesuits in Science Fiction have the luxury of looking slimmer than the Michelin Man in 1960’s moonwalk media, but they’re not strictly fictional. Bradley Pitts proposed a hybrid of several svelte designs so perhaps future astronauts revisiting the Moon en route to walks on Mars will not be using 50 year-old-plus designs. “Klein Suit” (2001) combines tighter-fitting concepts that date back to the Space Race themselves, but were not developed by NASA; perhaps due in part to the materials technologies available during the era. Every person has points on their skin that do not stretch when their bodies move. Lines drawn between these points are Lines of Non-Extension (LoNE). In 1964 A.S. Iberall proposed “The LoNE Restraint Layer”, tracing those lines with cables to cage in the body from being torn asunder in a vacuum, while maintaining mobility. Seven layers of snug Spandex that would make even David Lee Roth uncomfortable have also been found to help protect humans in a vacuum. Paul Webb proposed the “Space Activity Suit” (SAS) in 1971. The body breathes through the skin as well as the mouth and nose. Maintaining pressure is important not only for vacuum safety, but for blood circulation and its Oxygen concentration as well. While the Earth’s atmosphere exerts a certain pressure on us, it contains other gasses. If the body is provided with pure Oxygen, it can be done at lower pressure than our atmosphere.

G-suits help maintain pilots’ circulation when they experience multiples of Gravity’s force during certain maneuvers. In 2003, the Libelle Anti-G Suit by Prospective Concepts suit replaced the external pumps mounted within aircraft and their requisite octopus of hoses that interface to other suits. Water enclosed in channels moves via natural hydraulics to push blood automatically around the wearers’ extremities. Suits of many kinds have been designed for performing different tasks underwater, in multiplied gravity and lack thereof. “Klein Suit” combined the results of Iberall and Webb, 3-D scans and plastic molds of Pitts for his experiments: “The SAS provides the basic relationship between mechanical couterpressure, material tension, and radius of curvature. Combining results from Iberall and Webb defines material geometry and area of exposure.”

His wearable art tests the maxim that if you look far enough into space, perhaps you’ll return to your vantage point. This philosophy can be interpreted as karma, a cyclical universe, and introspection to name a few. In “Donning the Void”, Bradley performed mundane tasks; keeping the vacuum of space around his arm within the cloth, rigid cylinder and flexible rubber gaskets that comprised his “Vacuum Cuff”. In “Focus” he is designing an internally mirrored mask where the two focii of an ellipse focus the image of each eye into the other. Rather than seeing two separate eyes, the brain would perceive a composite third eye, or “Introspective Optics”. Preparatory models for “Focus” in turned balsa wood and Aluminum comprise physical conceptual "Objects of My Meditation” (2004).

He drew our attention to the work of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff and her binaural recordings, which use stereo microphones on or in the ears. Physically separated to approximate the shape, size, and density of the human head, the microphones can be worn or mounted within a model. She apparently recorded herself giving a tour through a museum and produced a CD for visitors. Carrying a portable CD player, visitors expereince similar auditory spatializations as Cardiff, and might hear children but not see them due to a temporal and perhaps spatial displacement.

In “Superimposition”, Pitts linked two stethoscopes headsets together with common tubing to “slip between” each other’s ears. He tried it with two pairs of linked noise-canceling headphones, but felt the image of the two stethoscopes was more impressive than the more technologically facilitated experience. Mr. Pitts is interested in preserving the live perception of his live works. He does not want to mediate the experience of the present so much that users feel like they might be sensing something that may as well be pre-recorded. I felt the final diagram he shared with us incorporated his interests in space with shared interpersonal experience. “Light Bridge” would divert the Athens sun up to an extra-terrestrial mirror and back onto the site of an Olympiad. It summarized his presentation of multiple ways to conceptualize “reflection”.

Check out images and words by the artist at http://bradleypitts.info.

[ Article thanks to Wareaware (wearaware at yahoo.com). ]

Mars Space Suit Design

If we're going to Mars, we need new space suits. Last month, NASA announced plans to return to the moon by 2018, to use as a launching pad to Mars. In order to do so, a new space suit would be needed, and something less bulky would greatly improve the astronaut's ability to maneuver, especially as the old space suits are reffered to as "gas bags".

The proposed BioSuit will consist of a skintight body suit, a hard torso and backpack for life-support systems and equipment, and a domed helmet. The conceptual images for the project look like science fiction: sleek, color-coded spacemen and spacewomen climbing Martian windmills, whacking red rocks with hammers, and casually shaking hands.

Newman, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, who is taking up the challenge of building a new space suit based on designs made by Paul Webb in the late 1960s says "I just marvel at it, ... Every day, I look at the skin and say, 'How could this be designed so fantastically?' "

[ Link via we-make-money-not-art ]