Lightness - Italo Calvino

"Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still existe, but they obey the orders of weightless bits." Italo Calvino - Six memos for the next millennium (p. 8)

The Catalogue - vídeo por Chris Oakley (2004)

Single-channel video
Year of Production: 2004
Duration: 5’ 30 ”

In The Catalogue Chris Oakley presents the scenario of a perfect world of consumption, where a video surveillance system films the interior of a department store in which the individuals, together with their data, become entities-identities traceable and transparent thanks to their personal data. The individuals are followed through the crowd by motion tracking and are given graphical labels that list their purchase habits and general information regarding themselves.

The Catalogue is a symbolic rendering of the logic of a computerized market research system, which classifies individuals using a wide variety of data in order to assess their buying power and their future needs. The identity of each individual is reduced to the analysis and prediction of his or her consumption habits. The title of the work highlights the fact that each individual who meets the automatic eye of the video camera is entered in a database, a catalogue in which each person must be assigned to predetermined categories, thus assuming his or her place in the system

-Franziska Nori, IDENTITÀ VIRTUALI

link para assistir ao vídeo

artigo: The Computer for the 21st Century - Mark Weiser

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

link para o artigo completo

originalmente publicado em:
Scientific American - Special Issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks,
September, 1991

vídeo: Urbanizing Technology - Saskia Sassen / PICNIC Festival 2011

vídeo: Transmedia Design - Beth Coleman / PICNIC Festival 2011

Beth Coleman discusses critical aspects of the emergent (and emergently massive) fields of locative media and participatory design.

Coleman is the primary investigator of the Pervasive Media/City as Platform research and design lab at MIT, where she is an assistant professor of comparative media studies. She is a Berkman Center for Internet and Society Faculty Fellow at Harvard University and a Microsoft Research New England Research Fellow.