The Caravan Project funded by the MacArthur foundation:

In a demonstration phase of the project, scheduled to launch in early 2007, books will be available in traditional hardcover or paperback editions along with e-books and audio books, both available for download, in their entirety or in chapters. A large-print print-on-demand version is also under consideration as an additional format.

Participating Publishers:

Beacon Press
The Council on Foreign Relations Press
The New Press
The University of California Press
The University of North Carolina Press
Yale University Press
Island Press

Thank you Rebecca (PhD Precandidate, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan) for the info!

Screenshot… Watch the movie clip!

Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone’s sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener’s world. In the new context, some surprising behaviors take place. Listeners tend to play with objects around them, sing to themselves, and wander toward tempting sound sources. With Ambient Addition, I’m hoping to make people think twice about the sounds they initiate as well as loosen up some inhibitions.

(Media Lab thesis of Noah Vawter)…

To follow up on the relationship between dance and new technologies (previous post) find the article A Monaco, la danse a dompté les nouvelles technologies | LEMONDE.FR | 18.12.06 | Sylvie Chayette:

Cette année, deux grands noms de la chorégraphie, deux Américains qui n’ont de commun que leur immense capacité créatrice, se sont approprié ces nouveaux moyens : Bill T. Jones et Trisha Brown. Tous deux se sont également servis des compétences de l’Université d’Etat d’Arizona (Arizona State University) et de son département AME (Media and Engineering Program) qui a passé plus de trois ans à élaborer son programme “motione” avec les deux directeurs de troupes.

Find here the Monaco Dance Forum, program of Installations .pdf

Have a look at the portfolio in LEMONDE.FR

Screenshot LEMONDE.FR!

Screenshot, motione…

Petit serrement de cœur à la lecture de l’article: La revente en ligne de certains cadeaux se banalise | LE MONDE | 25.12.06 | Nathalie Brafman

Désormais, les internautes ne veulent plus s’embarrasser d’un objet qui finira au fond d’un placard. Selon une étude de WebSurveyor menée en décembre pour le compte de PriceMinister, quelque 33 % des internautes se disent insatisfaits des cadeaux qu’ils ont reçus et 14,1 % ont déjà revendu leurs cadeaux de Noël.

De fait, lorsqu’on leur demande pourquoi ils revendent leur cadeau, 47 % répondent tout simplement qu’il ne leur plaisait pas, 43 % qu’ils n’en avaient pas l’usage, 32 % qu’ils l’avaient en double et 3 % déclarent préférer de l’argent.

Revendre ses cadeaux de Noël n’est plus un tabou : 93,2 % de ceux qui l’ont déjà fait sont déterminés à recommencer si nécessaire. Toutefois, si 38,7 % trouvent l’idée choquante, déjà 38,9 % des personnes interrogées trouvent que revendre ses cadeaux est plutôt une bonne idée et qu’ils le feront probablement à l’avenir. D’autant que si 36,6 % se sentent encore gênés d’offrir un cadeau d’occasion quel qu’en soit l’état, 84 % acceptent volontiers de recevoir un cadeau d’occasion.

Aussi… NORAD TRACKS SANTA... une tradition amusante qui date de 1955…

La tradition est née à la suite d’une publicité d’un magasin de Colorado Springs, proposant aux enfants d’appeler le Père Noël sur une ligne téléphonique spéciale. Il y avait une erreur dans l’impression du numéro de téléphone. Au lieu du Père Noël, le numéro de téléphone connectait les enfants avec les opérations ” hotline ” du Commandant en chef du CONAD [Continental Air Defense Command].

Cropped image taken from the NASA website. The caption reads as:

STS090-E-5001 (18 April 1998) — Among flight day 1 activities, astronaut Richard A. Searfoss, STS-90 mission commander, sorts out food on the mid deck of the Earth-orbiting Space Shuttle Columbia. Searfoss uses velcro to attach the food packets to the trays mounted on the outside of mid deck stowage lockers. Searfoss and four other NASA astronauts are joined by two payload specialists from the academic sector for at least 16 days of Neurolab research in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Spacelab science module in the shuttle’s cargo bay. The photo was taken with an electronic still camera (ESC) at 04:01:21 GMT, April 18, 1998.

The space food reminds me of the project by the artiste Marti Guixé: HiBYE, 2001. He provides pills for the worksphere that accomplish the following functions / desired effects:

1. Concentrate everywhere
2. Carry nothing
3. Filter
4. Relax everywhere
5. Breath-e
6. Write everywhere
7. Switch on/off
8. Flirt
9. Approach everyone
10. Collect experiences
11. Taste local food
12. Get AURA
13. Share
14. Give Memory gifts
15. Take care
16. Convince
17. Develope ideas
18. Isolate everywhere
19. Consider everywhere as indoor
20. Drink water
21. Consume

Still thinking about cyborgs, body, machine, bio~… this image created by Erik Vervroegen for Sony Playstation is striking! Found via NEXT NATURE!!! Some idea about what it is:

Q: Can you give a few examples of next nature?
A: Yes, here are some examples.
Example 1: Products that grow in its own packaging (see how to grow an orangina bottle).
Example 2: Lots of people play games. That’s culture. But when some people start living in games and even manage to earn an income within a virtual world. Then it becomes next nature.
Example 3: The use of domestic robots is rapidly increasing. People don’t have time to look after their smart alarm clocks, toasters and vacuum cleaners anymore. They will have to organize themselves.
Example 4: The Enologix company of Sonoma, California, makes software that predicts how a wine will rate in reviews even before it is made. In order to achieve the high rating, winemakers invest in processes rooted not in agriculture but in biochemical information. Wine making becomes an information science.
Example 5: In cities like Los Angeles, it is almost impossible to live without a car.
Example 6: The global economy is such a complex system we are unable to control it. Of course people try to influence it, but we cannot completely control it. It’s a next nature phenomenon.

I have found also the post virtual missing limb.

Apparently it takes fives minutes for someone to acquire your identity! the BBC article ePassports ‘at risk’ from cloning by David Reid is quite alarming…

So how did they do it?

The chip inside the ePassport is a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip of the type poised to replace the barcode in supermarkets.

The good thing about RFID chips is that they emit radio signals that can be read at a short distance by an electronic reader.

But this is also the bad thing about them because, as Lukas demonstrated to me, he can easily download the data from his passport using an RFID reader he got for 200 Euros on eBay.

Lukas is less forthcoming about where he got what is called the Golden Reader Tool, it is the software used by border police and it allows him to read the chip on his ePassport, including the photo.

Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport’s data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip.

Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes.

The TelePresence marketing video is dreadful (it is really a painful experience for a designer!)… I courageously took two screen shots for that the project illustrates a paradox of the neo-nomads: they are mobile and/or immobile. Notice the table continuing virtually in the screen… a design decision that certainly tells something. People do not want to see technology… or they do like magic! TelePresence is a system designed by the Human Productivity Lab. Few clicks away on their website I find the post: 3D Images Floating in Thin Air … …

Our private space has shrunk beyond skin. Not only we we leave traces everywhere, but the spying business seems quite lucrative: get a wireless color dog | cat spy camera… and more… Bewildering… I’d be scared of Lysol or Ajax bleach spy-cans from now on :)… It shoudn’t be too difficult to spot the spy with a spy-tie like that though! Paranoiac? get a jamming device… Nokia seems to be the preferred brand for a spy-phone. It just cost about $3295 to get one!! Continuing on with the idea of surveillance… finally an interesting detecting tool: Portable, Magnetic DNA Detector. Researchers use magnetic materials found in computer hard drives to build chips for detecting genes, cancer, and toxins. The article is written by Kate Greene for the MIT Technology Review. information related to surveillance | bio~ | body

I am a pacifist. If humans were capable of living together, we wouldn’t need this… Anyway… This piece of information feeds my reflection on cyborgs: read the article by Wendy Y. Lawton for the George Street Journal (now Inside Brown journal): The Research group exploring limb loss hopes biohybrid will bridge gap between human and machine. Scientists based at Brown and MIT receive $7.2 million from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Dec. 10, 2004!

Now, through $7.2 million from the Department of Veterans Affairs, a team of researchers is working to restore natural movement to amputees - particularly Iraq veterans. Within five years, scientists based at Brown and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology hope to have created “biohybrid” limbs that will use regenerated tissue, lengthened bone, titanium prosthetics and implantable sensors that allow an amputee to use nerves and brain signals to move an arm or leg. WL