This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer. It doesn't mean that we'll never sit around mindlessly watching Scrubs on the couch. It just means we'll do it less.

The Architectural League of New York invites architects, artists, designers, technologists, engineers, urbanists, or teams thereof, to submit qualifications for an exhibition that will critically explore the evolving relationship between ubiquitous/pervasive computing and urban architecture. The League will commission five to seven teams to develop urban interventions–to be installed in and around New York City in spring 2009–that will imagine alternative trajectories for how various mobile, embedded, networked, and distributed forms of media, information and communication systems might inform the architecture of urban space and/or influence our behavior within it. Commissioned projects will receive support ranging from $5,000 to $25,000.

The exhibition continues the League’s commitment to supporting original research into the implications of ubiquitous/pervasive computing for architecture and urbanism. In fall 2006, the League, along with the Center for Virtual Architecture and the Institute for Distributed Creativity, presented “Architecture and Situated Technologies,” a 3-day symposium organized by Omar Khan, Trebor Scholz, and Mark Shepard, that brought together researchers and practitioners from art, architecture, technology and sociology to explore the emerging role of Situated Technologies in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. The project continued in winter 2007 with the publication “Urban Computing and Its Discontents,” the first of nine pamphlets to be published over the next three years that explores how our experience of the city and the choices we make in it are affected by mobile communications, pervasive media, ambient informatics and other Situated Technologies.

FringeWare is pleased to announce our in-store presentation of Austria's culture-jamming heroes from "monochrom" magazine, currently travelling throughout North America on their 1998 "monochrom bringt amerika den sozialismus tour". The illusive and infamous "der jg" and company of media subversives will appear for a special signing of their publication, and also spin as DJs for a show featuring "a really strange mixture of austrian and german music scores..." FringeWare will provide the beer.

These organizations tend to be tech-oriented, "driven in part by a set of microelectronics technology trends that have sent shock waves through many industries, from publishing to music and movies." [Link]]]> http://weblogsky.com/2008/04/social_enterprises.html http://weblogsky.com/2008/04/social_enterprises.html Business Community Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:23:14 -0600 Chronicle, in the just-released "green crush" issue, is about sustainability and gaming. The article mostly focused on an interview with Pliny Fisk, who's thinking hard about serious, robust sustainaqbility games and how they might work. [Link]

Fisk has been thinking hard about how to build a green game that's engaging and fun but with serious real-world implications, such as location-specific modeling of the balance that sustainability requires. One kind of game would focus on and simulate real city environments. It would explore models that maximize efficiency and minimize the environmental impact of the built environment. Fisk sees four flows that would be relevant: materiality flow, energy flow, information flow, and monetary flow.

"Any one of those things can work related to the others," he says, "but they can also work independently. One measure of a city, from an information standpoint, is how much of the information network is actually reinforcing that place. How many newsletters and how many organizations and how many information sources are actually supporting and talking about the city, its people, its business?" There are also social information flows. "You could link people based on similar attributes and needs and so on. It's very much a peer-to-peer and can be a place-oriented way of operating." So an eco-game might include a city-centric social network.

From now on your critiques cannot start with a compliment. That means no more "That looks great" or "Your drawing blows me away."

I am making this rule because the comments are too shallow. You are not getting into observation or analysis or interpretation of the works. Just saying something is good or bad and then giving your advice is OK as far as it goes. But I would not be fair to you unless I demand a more professional level of communication. My job is to make you the best prepared you can be for your creative career!