Colosseo: Reimagining the Roman Coliseum with type (Canon 7D) from Cameron Moll on Vimeo.

Cameron Moll has created a poster that depicts the Coliseum using type. The Colosseo is a gloriously hybrid entity, digitally produced but mechanically reproduced. The prints are these beautiful objects, but the Colosseo is also data. You can buy parts of the data as vector art glyphs, while a low-resolution digital copy flies around the Internet.

The artwork is great but I’m sharing this for the video, which first lovingly depicts and then explicitly discusses the fetishistic craftsmanship of printing the posters. In fact, the video devotes far more time to the process of reproducing the work than to the time spent creating it, which was done on a computer and much more time-consuming. (Moll has released other videos focussing the act of digital creation.)

Here’s why this fascinates me:

An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed.

Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

And yet, here are Cameron Moll and Bryce Knudson managing to impart all kinds of aura and ritual to the reproduction. The reproductions are weirdly more authentic than the original which is just a file with dubious forward-compatibility.

I enjoy this alchemy, made possible by the presence of easier reproduction techniques. It transmutes the time needed to make a letterpress work into painstaking labour when, at the moment of invention, it was labour-saving. Imagine the salespeople and inventors of these machines learning that their long term legacy would be assured by how difficult they are to use, compared to their displacing successors (yes, yes, I know there are special features of the resulting print that are unique to the process but the video is all about the process itself).

What I’m deeply curious about is what comes next. At what point will the techniques have morphed and changed to that point that lovingly submitting PDFs to be printed “by hand” on colour printer feels more authentic than whatever’s replaced it? I suppose we’re about due for dot-matrix nostalgia.

I think we’re already seeing some glimpses of that sentiment in essays like this one:

I want to make things, not just glue things together.

Mike Taylor Whatever happened to programming?

In the 1960s, the legend goes, NASA spent millions developing a pen that could write in zero gravity. The Russians used a pencil.

photo credit: christian.korsager

I couldn’t help but think of this story when I came across the following pair of headlines.

From WIRED:
Humans, Shmumans: What Mars Needs Is an Armada of Robots and Blimps

From the CBC:
Russia hopes nuclear ship will fly humans to Mars

In fairness to NASA, it’s worth pointing out that the legend is totally false. Fischer developed the Space Pen on spec and sold it to both the Americans and the Russians. A pen that can write is space in much better than a pencil – pens don’t have lead tips to break and leave dangerous particles floating around a spaceship and they aren’t flammable. After the Apollo 1 disaster, non-flammable objects seem pretty useful.

Move along, no pithy lessons about technology here.

photo credit: Spanish Flea

I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of stories away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys.

Eventually he figured out, “hang on, there’s a chip in there and I’m on a computer and there’s a network running around the building, so why don’t I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want, and tell if I’m going to have a wasted journey or not?” So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet – so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine.

Now, that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because the chip in the machine didn’t just say, “The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty,” but had all sorts of information; it said, “There are seven Cokes and three Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that.” There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their fifty cents in and not pressed the button, i.e., if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, bang! – there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? Well, obviously somebody five thousand miles away!

Now that was a very, very silly but fascinating story, and what it said to me was that this was the first time we could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from five thousand miles away you can reach into a university corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can, but it’s the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating.

Douglas Adams Q&A after a speech entitled Is There an Artificial God?

Adams is gave this speech in 1998 about something that happened a ‘few years earlier’. So let’s say 1996 or 1995.

When you get excited about things like @towerbridge, @lowflyingrocks, Google energy monitors, and Spimes, remember: the idea and the means was already there, we just had our attention elsewhere for awhile.

Taking a page from Posterchild, it’s Follow-up Friday!

photo credit: MatthewBradley

1. Sound Ecology.

Picking up on the Augmented Audio Reality post, Justin Pickard pointed me to this interview with an acoustic ecologist.

Anecdotally, there is a feeling that the increasing homogenisation of the soundscape (i.e. places all sounding the same) is speeding up, yet no one is systematically keeping tabs on this change. This is not a prompt for some kind of museum-like stance, but it begs the question, shouldn’t we be considering the soundscape as an integral part of our heritage in the same light as we do for historic building facades?

Paging Nick Sowers and Dan Hill: Imagine an app that let you walk through the city and experience how it sounded a decade ago?

2. Dubai’s Artificial Islands.

I already told you that they were drowning. Well as it turns out, no one wants to live there, either. I wonder if one of the proposed Michael Jackson memorial islands would help the situation. (No.)

3. Nurse Homes.

After finishing up the Buildings That Protest series, I came across this story about smart houses as omniscient robo-nurses. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” 2.0.

The path for the adoption of voluntary prosthetics seems to go amputees -> disabled people -> wider use? I wonder if monitoring systems for the elderly which give them MORE freedom and independence (at least, felt independence) will be the path that drives the adoption of self-surveillance technology.

4. Drones.

After I posted The Lost Drone Army, Geoff Manaugh pointed me to his piece about UAVs controlled with thoughts. Which then quickly spirals into a roving fantasy about all of the crazy things that can happen when you link machines directly to the brain.

1991 was, for me, the year that the future crossed over into the present. That’s the year that the Robotech storyline was meant to start, and I was big into Robotech. 1991 was the year that a world war would begin, a war that would nearly consume the planet, until an ultra-advanced alien ship fell out of the sky.

photo credit: Andreas_MB

You can imagine my fuzzy trepidatious fear/excitement when my Junior-High self woke up one morning to hear that the U.S.’d invaded Iraq. I didn’t mention the feeling to anyone, because, clearly that’s insane, but I harboured a secret thrill. Could this be it? Could Jack McKinney be a documentarian? (No.)

Dan Meth created a chart of Futuristic Movie Timelines and the result is instructive. It’s fun to watch these movies, knowing what we now know about the progression of technology. Not so much for the plot – the plots were never predictions – but for the set dressing. There’s two halves to the fun: stuff what’s there that we are missing and stuff that’s missing that we already have.

Both provide object lessons in how hard it is to calibrate visions for the future and serve to remind us that all science fiction is really about the present.