Open Source Publishing is a recently founded graphic design agency that uses only Free Software tools. Closely affiliated with the Brussels based digital culture foundation Constant, OSP aims to test the possibilities and realities of doing graphic design using an expanding range of Free Software tools. On the way, they produce some great designs, test [...]
Written with Usman Haque (http://www.haque.co.uk/)
Commissioned for the Architectural League of New York Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series (http://www.situatedtechnologies.net/)
Published 2008
Also available as a pdf with illustrations by David Cuesta,
Table of Contents
Preamble
Seven Constraints
Discussion of the Seven Constraints
1. Build rather than design
2. Materials must come pre-broken
3. Make joints
4. Rubbish is the root of virtuosity
5. Collaborate with collaborators
6. Copying [...]
MF: How do you figure ‘the body’ or the biopolitical in your discussion of viruses? Clearly it would be possible to simply fall into the trap of equating computer viruses with biological ones, to mistake the metaphor for the thing named. On the other hand it is possible to trace the ways [...]
This text was originally given as a talk at the ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Helsinki in 2004. A version was published by the Digital Research Unit at Huddersfield University in 2006. Here is a pdf version of this text.
http://www.interfacekultur.au.dk/enhed/aktiviteter/fuller/fuller_softness
1
‘Technological progress’ has generated many new materials, and incorporated computation into many levels of their fabrication. This has established the possibility to create a new diversity of spatial forms and to begin to identify experimental methods of construction that weave the foundational abstraction of computation into their fabric. Once the joints are in place however, [...]
What makes software jump? What words, what styles of thought do we need to understand running code and the multi-layered compositions it is part of, and how, if at all, does software establish relations with what might termed freedom? Such questions, of how to act in and understand complex technologies and live situations [...]
There is very intriguing book from 1893, with a second edition in 1905. Maurice d’Ocagne, a Professor at the l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées’s ‘Le Calcul Simplifié par les Procédés Mecaniques et graphiques’’1 subtitled ‘a history and description of instruments and machines of calculation, tables, abacuses and nomograms.’ Much of the book is exactly that: [...]
Is talent important in net art? This group of works gives us the answer. Let us remember that the name Talent was that of an ancient coin. What is a coin but a condensed power to take something out. The possibility to move a thing, an action, a power, from one state into another, to [...]
MF: What are the questions you are asking about the structure of the
web, and about the software that is being developed to use it that
suggest the approaches to it deployed in WebTracer?
NP: Well aware of the legacy of webmapping as a supposed demystifying
device and fetishised formalistic perversion of form I do not intend [...]
No matter how hot to trot a government gets for privatisation there’s one aspect of the state that they always balk at parcelling up and flogging off - war. Now, a challenge to this professed monopoly on mass violence and its attendant technologies is coming from an unexpected quarter - artists. In Europe [...]