FOODTRACER

Adding to the culinary thread started below this is a project which is very related to what we have been talking about in class. Take a look:

Food Information Transparency from gusepo on Vimeo.

Transparency and Sustainability

Image Source:http://graphico.free.fr/hfr/pollution.jpg

Last class we briefly mentioned the issue of responsibility as designers, and I asked about the carbon footprint of an avatar (which you can see here) as an example of the kind of issues which designers/engineers of this New Millenium must be aware of.

Leonardo Bonnani who teaches Future Craft: Radical Sustainability in Product Design at MIT Media Lab has created Sourcemap, an open source project that is a model of transformative Design.

Where do things come from and what are they made of?

The Fractal Path

Our Fractal, Algorithmic Nature

Being as we are at the verge or perhaps in the middle of that threshold or bifurcation of our own destiny, it is hard if not impossible to observe with parsimony the course of action. In that liminal state where turbulence becomes organized into myriad eddies and flows and the “singularity” approaches, every theory or hypothesis seems to have some validity since the information or data we analyze is particular to our point of view and seldom encompasses a bigger picture.

Gregory Bateson, reminiscing about the Macy conferences,1 goes further by suggesting that we never know the world as such. He states that “We are our epistemology” since we only perceive and understand the world through what our sensory apparatus allows.

However the birthing environment of the open network where data itself acts as a “controlling agent”2 is beginning to show a pattern that is itself fed back into the system, and once the critical threshold is achieved, some theorists suggest3 it will give raise to the emergence of a machinic consciousness.

Introduction to Roboethics and Performance, Arturo Sinclair, 2008

1 It was at the Macy Conferences that Norbert Wiener coined the term ‘cybernetics’.

2 Manuel Delanda, “War in the age of intelligent machines” Swerve Editions, New York 1991, p163

3 Hofstadter ,"Godel, Escher, Bach" Zenon Pylyshyn, Mind Design Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing

Stelarc

Stelarc's Handswriting "Evolution"

Maki Gallery, Tokio, 22 May 1982. Photo by Akiro Okada

“…Working in the interface between the body and the machine, he employs virtual reality, robotics, medical instruments, prosthetics, the Internet and biotechnology. Stelarc’s art includes physical acts that don’t always look survivable-or as science fiction novelist William Gibson puts it in his foreword, “sometimes seem to include the possibility of terminality.” (From Stelarc, The Monograph, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2005)

Is the actor, artist, filmmaker, farmer, soldier, different in any fundamental way in terms of the reality of his/her life? Are the players of online games, a stripper in Second Life, an Ebay entrepreneur, living a life less “real” than the banker, the Jihadist or the Olympic marathon runner? And if so, what or where is the difference? Is it in the space where the performance takes place, is it the intensity of pain or pleasure or the time spent in a particular activity that defines reality? if not, then what? How is performance different from real life (RL)? How is RL different from virtual life (VL)? How do both coexist? Other than questions of embodiment, which many theoreticians deal with, they are in a certain way indistinguishable from each other. In Koyaanisqatski, architectfilmmaker Godfrey Reggio evidences how humans are part of the pattern or flow of information that constitutes the world at large. The utilization of technical means such as high speed or time-lapse photography allows Reggio to discover and reveal those things that make us who we are in the time and place where we find ourselves, in this “life out- of-balance”.

From "Roboethics and Performance"
Arturo Sinclair, Krems 2008

Ethics of SL Research

I was thinking about the reading for this week - I know, my post is a little late in the game, but keeping up with life is tough these days. The ethics of chatlogging go me thinking about internet ethics in general, not just SL. One of the things that's been drilled into me is that there is no expectation of privacy in any location where other people exist, virtual or otherwise. To me, it would be the same thing as writting down what someone said on thier cell phon while walking in front of me. I wouldn't do it simply because I don't really care who's doing who or who got drunk, or what color the new shirt from the Gap is, but it's my understanding that anything said publically is fair game for research purposes. No, you can't record them and play them for others to see, but is a transcript of chat so different from eavesdropping. I suppose the difference is in the fact that it will be used for research which does require informed consent.
So what's your feelings on this? Is there an expectation of privacy in SL. Even in Anthro we often use data and change the name of the individual for quotation purposes, especially in a public/group setting where expectation of privacy is diminished. Do you feel there should be an expectation of privacy? How do you think this plays into the change in behavior between the human and the avatar?

Well, there are my rambling thoughts, any thoughts on them?