prosthetic knowledge

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Arrays and Matrices

A collection of examples from the Prosthetic Knowledge Tumblr archive on installation artworks which can be characterized by geometric or networked arrangement.

You can read more at Rhizome here

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks - Plants

Latest piece for Rhizome is a link digest around the theme of plants. Includes photography works by Binh Danh and the Plant-In City project (both pictured above), as well as Douglas Coupland, @JarroseLaPlante and Data Garden.

You can read it here

@JarroseLaPlante 

Project connects Twitter to a plant watering system - send a tweet mentioning the account name, and a few drops of water will be given to the plant. There is a webcam to see the process happen:

@JarroseLaPlante is an installation created by Félicien Goguey and Thomas Meghe. A plant has a twitter account, when you send her a tweet you water her with a few drops. Because a single tweet can’t save her, she needs the twitter users’ collaboration to grow up !

A Processing application listens to new tweets via the Twitter API. The servo motor which bring water to the plant is piloted through Arduino. Moreover a sensor enables to check the humidity rate in the pot, if it’s too high the installation is blocked, if it’s too low the plant tweets in order to alert her followers.

If you follow the plant, she can send you private messages. Only public tweets can activate the installation.

You can check the project’s website here

Plant-In City 

Art installation merges gardening and technology, creating Arduino-powered frames with sensors for plants to be monitored, and interacted with via smartphone app. From the project’s Kickstarter page:

We’re creating a space where a community who loves architecture, technology and plants can meet. Our mission is to integrate these disciplines into a new paradigm that changes the way we live and interact with nature. We believe that interacting with plants will improve our lives.

Plant-in City taps into the natural systems that foster plant life to give the plants themselves a voice. This revolutionary planter system contains built-in sensors that are activated by sun exposure, changes in soil moisture, humidity, temperature, and other natural cycles. Once activated, these sensors translate the environmental data into sounds or visuals, creating an imaginary vibrant wilderness.

More about the project can be found here

Revealed – The Capitalist Network That Runs The World - New Scientist

An interesting read (although the title is a little sensational-sounding). A study looks at the connectedness of some corporations, untangling the network to provide insightful, yet sober, understanding:

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere. But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

…

One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.

Read the whole article here

Visualization of Gene Ontology Term Tree (DAG) - Image taken from cytoscape

A Map of the first Internet (via Gizmodo)

This is Arpanet. The internet before Google. Before Flickr, before YouTube, before Chat Roulette, before BitTorrent. Before pictures of your ex-girlfriend on Facebook. An internet that you could draw a map of with only a few lines and some dots. 1972.

At this point, the internet wasn’t even the internet—still dubbed ARPANET, the Pentagon (and a handful of universities’) private plaything. As you can see, it wasn’t exactly… extensive. The network served only to link key research centers. It’s pretty amazing to think that this smattering of cables turned into the bizarre, twisted, incredibly complex nebula of porn, parody, knowledge hatred, joy, and cat videos we now adore. [Life]

British Regions defined by Telephone Calls (via BBC News)

Social networks could provide the key to redrawing the regional map of Britain, producing areas with strong social cohesion.

That’s the idea of an international team, who have created a social map of Great Britain.

They used more than 12 billion landline calls to create a map of Britons’ connections.

This social apporach to delineating regions sees parts of Wales merged with the West Midlands.

Regional boundaries are useful for governments, said Carlo Ratti, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who led the work. “But they don’t say anything about how people in those regions interact.”

His team used records of more than 12 bilion anonymised landline telephone calls, to model who Britons frequently spoke to.

Link

fuckyeahgillesdeleuze:

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. […]

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

(Martin Luther King Jr.)

The price of love? Losing two of your closest friends via The Guardian

Falling in love comes at the cost of losing close friends, because romantic partners absorb time that would otherwise be invested in platonic relationships, researchers say.

A new partner pushes out two close friends on average, leaving lovers with a smaller inner circle of people they can turn to in times of crisis, a study found.

The research, led by Robin Dunbar, head of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, showed that men and women were equally likely to lose their closest friends when they started a new relationship.

Previous research by Dunbar’s group has shown that people typically have five very close relationships – that is, people whom they would turn to if they were in emotional or financial trouble.

“If you go into a romantic relationship, it costs you two friends. Those who have romantic relationships, instead of having the typical five ‘core set’ of relationships only have four. And of those, one is the new person who’s come into their life,” said Dunbar.

More here

Mind Your Gap via mary1in

Looks Del.icio.us by Kunal Anand

The looks del.icio.us project is my first attempt to combine graphics design with programming. The concept is to see how users develop and sustain their tagging methodologies on del.icio.us. I’m not a formal art student or have a computer science degree. I’m just curious.

More here