Da série Mulheres que vão fazer a sua cabeça... que começa aqui e agora.

Maria Berenice Dias, desembargadora aposentada e hoje continua ativa no mundo legislativo. Tornou-se advogada, batalhando por leis em defesa dos homosexuais. Cunhou o termo direito homo-afetivo - em entrevista pelo (chato) Jô Soares.

I'm fascinated by mechanical work performed both by humans and machines. I've found this video while searching for a documentary on sweatshops (the evil side of our techworld). But I still didn't find a really interesting one, besides the Nike's. So I took some time admiring this gigantic processes performed by global state-of-the-art factories in this program, by American TV PG, which by the way is actually called 'Extreme Mega Factories'.

Lego's for example is 100% ran by robots and working exclusively in Denmark, producing more Lego bricks per year than humans walking on the Earth. The numbers and technologies are more astonishing than I can describe here. Just watch it.

It's split in three parts. If you prefer to watch in Youtube, go here, then follow part II and part III. And enjoy it. In case you know a must-see doc on sweatshops around the world, please let me know.

I've heard of this before but knew almost nothing about it. Crazy strategies from the WWI. Found it here.

Le Dazzle camouflage, les bateaux furtifs de la première guerre mondiale

Pendant la première guerre mondiale l’armée Anglaise puis Américaine ont inventées cette technique de camouflage pour leurs bateaux qu’ils ont appelée Dazzle Painting.

C’était une époque où les torpilles tirées par les sous marin Allemands n’avaient pas de guidage automatique, pour viser un bateau il fallait que l’équipage du sous marin estime la distance, la vitesse et la direction de la cible de façon à tirer sur la trajectoire du bateau.
Le but de ces peintures n’étaient donc pas de le cacher mais de rendre plus difficile l’estimation de ces paramètres en masquant la forme exacte du bateau et en évitant toutes les lignes verticales qui facilitent l’utilisation d’un télémètre.
Ces peintures ont été mises en place progressivement après des tests positifs mais l’efficacité en situation réelle n’a jamais été démontrée.
La marine a quand même continuée à les utiliser car ça augmentait le moral et la confiance des équipages pour un faible coût.

Plus de détails sur Wikipédia et des designs de Dazzle Painting sur cette page.

An interesting view on art by a cybernetics artist, Norman T. White. This comes from his official site: normill.ca

"Art as pure self-expression doesn't interest me very much. Self-expression inevitably creeps into art, but I would prefer that it sneak in through some back-door. For me, Art comes alive only when it provides a framework for asking questions. Science provides that framework too, but 'good science' is too constrained for me. I would rather ask questions that simultaneously address a multitude of worlds... from living organisms to culture to confusion and rust. Only art can give me that generality.

I remember, in my student days, discovering the notebook drawings -- studies of clouds and faces -- by Leonardo Da Vinci. Though powerful as visual compositions, these obviously had for Leonardo a more central purpose. They were really inquiries into invisible shaping forces. Here truly was art-as-question, rooted in human ignorance, yet struggling magnificently toward understanding fundamental principles of existence.

Artistic inquiries often come down to a search for pattern, both pattern which can be seen and recorded directly through graphics, and pattern which can not. Like most artists, I began my studies with the former, absorbed in the dynamics of juxtaposed colour and form. Passionately curious about the fact that my mechanisms of seeing were a critical part of those dynamics, I found myself continually returning to studies involved with perception. An extended period of traveling in the Middle East brought me in contact with Islamic Art, which had a huge influence on me. Using interlocking visual pattern, Islamic Art talks about the logical interaction and geometry which lies at the heart of everything around us, be it visible or non-visible, energy or substance, organic or inorganic. It brought me back to thinking about invisible forces: Is it possible that all the seemingly random phenomena of the universe really derived from surprisingly few constant, basic principles interacting in a complex and out-of-phase way? Of course the "seemingly" played a big part in the question. How much does our perceptual make-up help us, or hinder us, in understanding those principles?

Only I wanted to explore invisible forces using those same invisible forces. Beginning in 1966, I began to build kinetic electronic devices, which I referred to loosely as "machines", deliberately contrived to have minimal visual appeal, yet a strong behavioral dimension. I was fascinated by the idea of a device which had an unpredictable "life of its own", a set of internal rules and cycles which gave it a characteristic behavior somehow accessible to onlookers. In various works up to 1976, this fascination found expression as moving light patterns on large grids of light bulbs. The generating system inevitably consisted of digital logic circuits, interconnected in a way which presented a logical question. These circuits would then go about answering that question, but the answer would be unpredictable and never complete. Individual light patterns might repeat, and the texture of pattern might be a constant, but the actual sequence of patterns would be non-repeating... as least as far as the human eye or brain could tell. I liked the fact that no photograph or video could record the full essence of the piece; one had to be present with the work to fully appreciate its behavior. By varying the logic circuits, I was able, from 1966 to 1975, to create ten or twelve machines which all generated complex behavior from simple principles. Then, in 1976, prompted perhaps by momentous events in my life (work on a major art commission, and the birth of my daughter, Laura), I suddenly became tired of generating disorder from order, and decided to attempt something much more difficult: artificially finding order within disorder!

The day my daughter was born, I celebrated by buying my first computer, a "Motorola D-1". It wasn't much of a computer (a little over 200 bytes of memory, no high- level language, and a slow, unreliable interface to an audio cassette recorder for program storage), but for me it presented a formidable tool for my new direction of exploration. Whereas before my questions were phrased in a permanent "hard-wired" way, I could now create situations where the machine could modify itself, since the old circuits were now expressed as inherently mutable software.

My first major project with the little D-1 computer was a perception machine, called "Facing Out Laying Low", or "FOLL" for short. The thing was a kind of robot, since it had a limited capacity for self-determined motion. It couldn't, however, move about in a room, but simply rotate itself on a vertical axis, and move a light-sensing scanner on a horizontal axis. The machine was programmed to learn the ambient light patterns of the space in which it was placed, and to look for significant deviations in those patterns. By remembering the coordinates of such deviations, it was able to learn the traffic patterns of passers-by within the space. Because it could only look in one direction at a time, it had to constantly re-scan the areas where it found activity in the past, occasionally checking inactive areas, "just in case". If a formerly active area ceased to live up to expectation, it was gradually forgotten. FOLL's only mode of output, other than motion, was its non-verbal voice. It expressed its "surprise" with a fluctuating trill, whose tonal patterns reflected its level of stimulation and excitement. Internally, the computer was continuously adjusting thresholds of sensory significance; it would just as easily tune out areas of constant high activity as low ones. Although the machine's behavior was generated by a fairly simple program, the combination of its present and past experience was inevitably unique in some subtle way, and FOLL's responses were seldom predictable.

I continued to work on Facing Out Laying Low, on and off, for a number of years, gradually expanding its memory and updating its internal computer. In that process, I switched from light bulbs to motors, pulleys, and gears, as principal output devices. I knew this would shorten the life expectancy of my creations, since mechanical parts wear out faster than light bulbs, and are much harder to replace. The fact was, I was discovering the beauty of wear and break-down. It was another aspect of loosening control.

I also decided I liked the sound of gnashing gears and clanking parts! I suppose it was a reaction to the way computer technology was developing around me at the time. There was this fascination with dematerialism, all in the name of speed and efficiency. As the 70's came to an end, artists were starting to use computers in a big way. But there was a boring aspect to this otherwise exciting invasion in that 99.9% of the art-work done on computers was limited to graphics! The essential aspect of the computer was forgotten in a rush to make the pixilated computer screen work as well as paint and paper. Rarely did artists realize that a computer's unique strength was its ability to play with such existentially-crucial forces as logic, neg-entropy, probability, introspection, and paradox. To my dismay, the standard saying among artists became: "Oh, the computer... it's just another tool."

Even to this day, twenty years later, very few artists have discovered that the computer is far more than a tool. A tool is a device designed to perform a set of very particular functions. On the other hand, the functionality of a computer is open ended. Its full scope is not, and can never be, fully understood, even by its designers. The entire notion of information processing is a cipher, expanding as consciousness expands, its fullest significance always remaining beyond our grasp. It is as though we have accidentally hooked ourselves onto the tip of a horn of the beast at the heart of the existential labyrinth. Part of the problem lies in the word, "computer", itself. The name implies willfulness and constrained result. It would be far better to call it "fun-house mirror", so that we are reminded how it can take our intention and throw it back to us as a surprising metamorphosis. Potentially, that metamorphosis provides a conceptual bridge to a wholly new pattern of thought and investigation.

Thanks to the "fun-house mirror" effect, my work has been able to liberate itself from tight human control and expectation. Another part of that liberation is a liberation of context. I believe that for too long, society has clung to the idea that art galleries are integral to art practice. The result has been the alienation of large sectors of a society who feel intimidated by the highly controlled, self-conscious aura of the average art gallery. My projects in the last ten years have therefore included strategies to bring art to all people of a given place, especially those people who would never enter a gallery willingly. Often, the most effective way to do this is by presenting the work in non-gallery settings, anonymously, without labels or explanations. In this way, the work, itself already released from strict control, is set loose into a social situation which is further open-ended. Hopefully, some form of the question at the heart of the work rubs off on the people which encounter it."

The above text was submitted to Arte No Seculo XXI,
a symposium held recently in Sao Paolo, Brasil,
for publication on their soon-to-be-released book and CD.

Re-printed with the kind permission of Diana Domingues.

Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Nise da Silveira, Maya Deren...

New course starting tomorrow at Artscience with Cocky Eek & Maja Kuzmanovic

“The ultimate goal of farming is not growing of crops, but cultivation (…) of human beings.” — Masanobu Fukuoka

In his essay Plan/Plant/Planet, Terrence McKenna proposed that plants could represent organizational principles for life in the 21st century (McKenna 1992). What would our response to climate change be if the majority of humanity embraced the slowness, introspection and resilience of a vegetal culture, working with whole life-cycle systems, renewable technologies and other characteristics of plant life? Plants are able to both sustain themselves and replenish their surroundings – from purifying the air and fertilizing the soil to recycling waste and producing energy.

The interconnectedness of the human and the vegetable has been a recurring theme in art, science and religion for millennia. Think of Hildegard of Bingen’s Viriditas, The Voynich Manuscript, Andy Goldsworthy’s poetic works, Clive Backster’s bio communication experiments, or the imaginative crescographs by Jagdish Chandra Bose and Randall Fontes.

Nowadays, at the crux of art and culture, gardening and technology we might be able to comprehend how plants can become organizational principles for our lives in the turbulent times of the 21st century. How do we instill the values of a vegetal culture into today’s fast-paced, predatory consumer societies? How can we intertwine pre-industrial, even archaic relationships between humans and plants with new technologies? What is the range of possible human-plant interactions, beyond the merely functional food and fuel? Can we invoke a vegetal future through alternate realities and storytelling? What can we learn from ethno-botany (the study of cultural uses of plants) to inspire contemporary techno-artistic experiments?

In this research project, we look at how can ethno-botanical stories (of the past, present and future) seep into reality of everyday life. One of the possible approaches is to design an alternate reality narrative (ARN) - an immersive story that evolves through the interaction with the layers and audiences. The stories could be encountered online - through games, apps and websites - and in the physical world – in objects, surfaces, gardens, farms, parks and green spaces in cities. Each encounter could serve a different  purpose; a game might get players to think about what it is to be a plant, whereas a garden might teach visitors how to grow their own food. These encounters are not isolated. Information can flow between the different parts of the narrative, with plant sensors feeding data into a game, game and website interactions being displayed in the real world, through augmented reality devices, physical materials and artifacts. By straddling the online and offline world, the realms of gamers and of gardeners, Borrowed Scenery aims to engage people in an immersive story that can reinvigorate the relationship between humans and plants, culture and nature. The story embraces the participatory capabilities of digital technologies, and is told in a multitude of turbulent ecosystems, while being grounded in hallowed cultural traditions.

We will work towards a functioning public experiment including both online and physical components, with a compelling narrative connecting them into a coherent and inspiring whole. The most promising experiments will have the possibility to be included in a larger ARN developed as a part of the European project PARN (physical and alternate reality narratives).

by Nam June Paik (from Eine Data Base, La Biennale di Venezia German Pavilion 1993)

Para você que lê música e entende alemão. Não é o meu caso, mas este livro me pareceu extremamente interessante, assim que o tive nas mãos. Por Josef Matthias Hauer. Um dia não muito longínquo eu vou entender tudo de teoria musical.

It was an innocent experiment. Tesla had attached a small vibrator to an iron column in his New York City laboratory and started it vibrating. At certain frequencies specific pieces of equipment in the room would jiggle. Change the frequency and the jiggle would move to another part of the room. Unfortunately, he hadn't accounted for the fact that the column ran downward into the foundation beneath the building. His vibrations were being transmitted all over Manhattan. For Tesla, the first hint of trouble came when the walls and floor began to heave (ref 1). He stopped the experiment  just as the police crashed through the door. It seems he'd started a small earthquake in his neighborhood smashing windows, swayed buildings, and sending panicked neighbors rushing into the streets. The police had frequently responded to complaints about Tesla's unusual activities.
Although Tesla was not the first to discover resonance he was obsessed with it and created some of the most incredible demonstrations of it ever seen. He studied both mechanical and electrical versions. In the process he created an artificial earthquake, numerous artificial lightning storms, knocked an entire power plant off line in Colorado, and nearly caused the steel frame of a sky scraper under construction in Manhattan to collapse. Tesla realized that the principles of resonance could be used to transmit and receive radio messages well before Marconi. In fact, many knowledgeable sources now credit Tesla as the inventor of radio rather than Marconi. This includes the Supreme Court which in 1943 ruled that Tesla's radio patents had preceded all others including Marconi's . Tesla was a one-of-a-kind neurotic genius who had a profound influence on our technology and culture. He was obsessed with germs and the number three yet his inventions almost single handedly enabled the creation of our modern AC power distribution system. He was a contemporary of Edison and for a time worked for the famous inventor. Unlike Edison (who Tesla considered something of a bumpkin), Tesla used theory and calculations as well as experimentation to conduct his research and was the more modern of the two in his approach. He was also far more interested in pursuing his inventions for their own sake than in becoming rich and famous. Unfortunately, Tesla's obsession with pursuing grand ideas and projects proved to be his undoing. He became convinced that energy could be transmitted through the air without wires and spent a small fortune on a demonstration project. He built a giant Tesla coil in Colorado Springs which used electrical resonance to build up incredibly high voltages and caused fantastic lightning shows. Unfortunately, his dream of transmitting wireless power was never commercialized and, partly because of it, Tesla ended dying a poor man .
The mad scientist stereotype came from Tesla. Tesla's Manhattan Lab was a mysterious place with buzzing electric arcs, eerie lighting, and bizarre contraptions. The lab undoubtedly inspired mad scientist scenes in 1930's horror pictures such as Frankenstein, with Boris Karloff, in which high voltage arcs are used to give the monster life. Although Tesla never attempted to create life he did create the first radio controlled robotic vehicles and claimed that one day robots would free humanity of drudgery work. He also claimed to have invented a powerful death beam. For entertainment, Tesla once convinced his good friend Mark Twain to test out a vibrating platform in his Manhattan lab. Twain took him up on the offer and found it to his liking. When Tesla commanded Twain to come down off the platform Twain refused because he was having a good time. A few minutes later Twain ran from the device. It seems that Tesla had deliberately neglected to tell Twain that the vibration tended to cause diarrhea. Had Tesla been less eccentric and more interested in personal fortune he would have avoided the grandiose projects which were his undoing. If he had simply avoided making outrageous statements, he would have had more scientific credibility and easily overshadowed Edison. Today, Tesla would be far more famous and the subject of resonance would probably receive far more attention in science textbooks. Resonance was certainly one of  Tesla's greatest passions and, like Tesla, seems almost too mysterious to be real.