Kazys Varnelis's netlab research blog

Atemporal design, this time Swiss style.

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:27:32 -0500

Atemporal design, this time Swiss style.

Atemporality in big budget pop music. Lana Del Rey - Video...

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:04:53 -0500

Atemporality in big budget pop music.
Lana Del Rey - Video Games

"There’s a photo of a guy who got tattoos to match those found on Otzi, aka The Iceman, who died more..."

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:02:03 -0500

“There’s a photo of a guy who got tattoos to match those found on Otzi, aka The Iceman, who died more than 5,000 years ago in the Italian Alps. Mike Goldstein, the guy who got the tattoo, said the series of 10 simple lines arranged in groups of four, three, and three served to remind him that you don’t have to be incredibly important during your lifetime in order to be important. “It reminds me that I can live however I want,” he says in the book. “I don’t have to work in an office or wear a tie, as are the expectations of our culture. I can walk across the Alps and die in a swamp, and that’s OK.””

- Boing Boing (via heterochronia)

If Facebook, Google Plus, and YouTube Were Built in 1997....

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:00:00 -0500

If Facebook, Google Plus, and YouTube Were Built in 1997....:

Three important contemporary web sites, recreated with technology and spirit of late 1997, according to our memories.

Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.03 and a screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels, running under Windows 95. We recommend using a Virtual Machine or appropriate hardware, connected to a CRT monitor. If such an environment unachievable, it should be possible to experience the piece with any browser that still supports HTML Frames. The transfer speed of our server is limited to 8 kB/s («dial-up» speed).

~ olia & dragan, December 2011

Play it Again, Corb

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:03:29 -0400

It’s rather tragic that the Fondation Le Corbusier insisted that this replica of Ronchamp in Zhengzhou be destroyed. It would have been his most important work, and a great example of atemporailty today. Via Zoohaus.

A Small World

Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:35:21 -0400

Models by Michael Paul Smith. See his Flickr Stream.

Star Wars on Earth

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:14:37 -0500

More atemporality. This time Star Wars characters in appropriate real world situations. See here.

on digital photography

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:28:00 -0500

The role of the family photo changed at a glacial pace over its first hundred years. Initially they emulated paintings, the subjects formally posing for long exposure times. The Kodak Brownie and Instamatic made photography portable, allowing for more casual photographs to be taken. Still, a degree of formality was necessary and photographs were expensive objects, largely serving to mark special occasions and the passage of time.

Today, digital photography allows us to seamlessly see ourselves growing older and our children growing up. If, thanks to Facebook, Generation Y is the first generation that will not experience the phenomenon of losing touch, the next generation may be the first generation whose entire lives will be traceable online. Today’s NYT Magazine has a story on the relationship between digital photography and childhood today, the latter becoming a training ground for immediated reality.

With personal history that fine-grained, can temporality continue to function anymore? Or does it disperse into the IPTC code of the camera?

Todd Baxter Photography

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 13:20:00 -0500

The work of Todd Baxter. Atemporal art often demonstrates a collision of past visions of other times.

via:

aggregat456:

nevver:

Todd Baxter

Cell phones show human movement predictable 93% of the time

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:28:04 -0500

Cell phones show human movement predictable 93% of the time:

Researchers use cell phone data to suggest that human movement is predictable up to 93% of the time.

How to be a Retronaut

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:09:23 -0500

There’s some good material for the #atemporality project over at How to be a Retronaut.

Why People Use Pay Phones

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 08:58:05 -0500

The New York Times looks at the remaining pay phones in the city and why people use them: read here.

Accidental Flickr maps

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:25:12 -0500

A New Scientist article looks at a data visualization project that used Flickr tags and images to produce maps of the world.

Cyberwar on Critical Infrastructure

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:21:26 -0500

Wired tells us that McAfee just issued a report indicating that critical infrastructures worldwide are under near constant attack from nations like the United States and China. Is it just a matter of time before this Cold War surfaces? Read more here.

Google Knows Where You Are

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 23:34:00 -0500

Google recently applied for a patent to sniff out where wireless users are located based on the packets they send. See here. Via Slashdot.

Project Alpha

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:58:00 -0500

The Wall Street Journal reports on the NYSE’s Project Alpha, its new high-speed trading hub being built in New Jersey. While I blog this, I’m listening to a fascinating lecture by Kevin Slavin on high-frequency trading. The transition of M-C-M’ to M-M’ that Jeffrey Nealon suggests operates at the base of capital today is not only free of commodities it is free of any kind of human place, which is reduced now only to electronics located at the intersection of real estate values and latency.

The phenomenological world of non-places that we saw in the early 1990s (and that was undone by wireless communication technologies) proves now to have been a rehearsal for a world run by non-places from which humans themselves are absent.

On the iPad and Networked Books

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:14:10 -0500

My friend and next-door neighbor Frank Lyman put this video up at the blog for Coursesmart, his start-up specializing in digital textbooks.

This is a much smarter version of Apple’s book reader and really seems to work as a textbook-replacement app.

As I watched it, I realized something else which I hadn’t thought of. When used as a networked book, the iPad may well be on at the same time as a laptop or a desktop computer. The disconnect between the two will be the tricky thing to handle. Will you want to have the ability to copy text from the iPad and put it in the other machine? Or is that disconnect going to be productive?

On the down side, Dan Visel over at the if:book blog laments that the iPad locks us down with a proprietary system. Indeed it does and, as Dan says, “maybe technology’s become something we let others understand for us.”

Not only that, I had hoped that iWork might be rewritten as a set of tools that would allow easy construction of media-rich books for the iPad, but that didn’t happen. So much for the Netlab’s next book being on the iPad (a crazy thought I had).

Also disappointing is that reading on the iPad in the Apple book app is such a solitary experience. All the research that people like the Institute did on networked books was ignored. A pity. Still, I have faith that Coursesmart, other companies, individuals, and even open source efforts will compete with Apple’s book system. That will be a good thing.

DHS Page on Fusion Centers

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:01:29 -0500

DHS Page on Fusion Centers:

What sort of response should the Netlab have to fusion centers?

On Bloomberg Terminals

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 21:35:00 -0500

“11. Bloomberg Terminals.

Because they led Wall Street to believe it was invincible. If you wanted to play the futures market on the commodity price of bulk clams in Manila, the Bloomberg machines could do it. If you wanted to leverage egg prices in Bulgaria against the long bond in Brazil, and pay for it in yen, they could do that, too. Hell, if you wanted to eventually self-finance a run for mayor of New York City, underwritten by the idea that information is currency, and the fact that these terminals had become the mandatory desktop toy for every budding financial master of the universe, you couldn’t invent a better A.T.M. They were all-knowing, and all-powerful. Still, for all their financial wizardry, there was also the law of unintended consequences: If you give enough monkeys enough typewriters, you may get Shakespeare. But if you give enough electronic monkeys enough high-tech typewriters, sooner or later you’ll definitely get a financial meltdown.”

One of the 100 reasons that Vanity Fair gave for the market collapse of 2007.

From one of my favorite blogs, Socializing Finance.

Some Background on MP3s

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:23:10 -0500

Eric Harvey’s Social History of MP3s.

An article on how young people have been conditioned to prefer the low audio quality of MP3s.