Petervan's Delicacies - Issue #134

The very best

About Jamais Cascio's BANI framework, more relevant than VUCA these days. Shameless plug: I am working on a virtual multimedia workshop on this framework, with a specific focus on possible responses.

About the Yak Collective and its first Great Work. Have a look how indie consultants disrupt McKinsey, BCG, Bain, etc.

About the autopsy of the end of the experience economy. See also my own post from Jan 2020 on "The End of Experience".

About  the triple-H population and their common vested inte­rest as a postindustrial class. Fascinating!

A rather bleak opinion on the loss of sensory experiences. IMO also an opportunity to amplify those experiences to resonate at a non-cognitive level as well.

Quarantine is the future big tech wanted us to want. How long before we want out?

“It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead…

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it's not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it... Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. We built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that's to build.

Listen now (18 min) | In which I shamelessly draft off Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build essay and suggest an approach to how, what, and where to do the building. I also have a framework I call the builder’s cone to think about it in a useful historical context. 1/ If you’re in tech, you’ve probably read Marc Andreessen’s essay

A newsletter about urbanism and technology

Data and Society

As we shelter in place in the pandemic, more employers are using software to track our work — and us.

Zeitgeist

Tight floor plans, “sanity” walks, and the people you miss seeing: They turned up in your homemade maps of life during the coronavirus pandemic.

With the cruise industry on life support, fleets have put to sea for an indefinite stay with many of their crewmen trapped on board.

Innovation

Analyst Paul Smith-Goodson interviews Professor John Martinis, who had recently resigned from Google which sent ripples through the entire quantum community. Paul thought more detail was needed, and Professor Martinis agreed to clarify the record.

How does our universe work? Scientist Stephen Wolfram opens up his ongoing Wolfram Physics Project to a global effort. His team will livestream work in progress, post working materials, release software tools and hold educational programs.

Future of work

David Whyte’s poem “Sometimes,” from the book “Everything Is Waiting for You." Animated and scored by WaitWhat, and played to open Session…

The reports arrive thick and fast these days. From the big end of town, glossy 100-page monsters with stylish graphics and ‘seven key takeaways for the future of work,’ that land in your inbox with…

Internet Culture

OLAFUR ELIASSON has been a long-time fan of KEVIN KELLY’s writing, though the two had never met before they came together amid the fray of the Digital Life Design conference in Munich.

FinTech

Currently at a test net stage dubbed as “Baklava”, the Celo foundation’s alliance for prosperity aims to provide digital financial services to anyone in the world who has access to a smartphone…

COVID19 and the Decentralization of Money One key lesson from COVID19 is that we need a lot more decentralization. This is especially true when the center is as inept at managing the crisis as the US...

Savings and remittances are powerful anti-poverty tools. Tech giants and nonprofits are launching an effort to build digital payments and banking services worldwide.

The e-RMB has reportedly been adopted into the monetary systems of several cities

AI, Robots, Algorythms

https://ainowinstitute.org/

Virtual worlds.

Discussion of the 1950 paper by Alan Turing that proposed what is now called the Turing Test. This is one of the most impactful papers in the history of AI a...

The Nooscope Manifested: AI as Instrument of Knowledge Extractivism. By Matteo Pasquinelli and Vladan Joler (2020)

What if we could generate complex movements for arbitrary robots with arms and legs interacting in a dynamic environment in real-time? Such a technology woul...

The video shows a self-righting behavior of the four-legged walking robot Charlie, developed by the Robotics Innovation Center (RIC) of the DFKI. The behavio...

RigNet: Neural Rigging for Articulated Characters Zhan Xu, Yang Zhou, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Chris Landreth, Karan Singh ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 3...

Digital Ethics

In October 2017, Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto set out to plan a shared vision for Quayside, a fundamentally more sustainable and affordable community resulting from innovations in technology…

Weird (Cyber)Space

Art related

NL | Bekijk de compilatie van de aflevering van Present at home, de online rondleiding doorheen de expo 'Stephan Vanfleteren - Present' in het FOMU. Van…

Set design: Rarebytefiend Director of Photography: Clamber.org Sound and FX: Clamber.bandcamp.com Lighting Assistant: John Thompson

In the multiplayer game Occupy White Walls, users design fantasy exhibition spaces, from slick, minimalist studios to bizarre and impossible rooms.

Full track: https://clamber.bandcamp.com/track/variform-gallery-preview 6 layers of slo mo video shot at Portland International Airport.

Friends from Academy

Corona In The Garden Video - Patrick Baele

Aesthetics

Out of Blueprints

Internationally renowned artist Do Ho Suh works across various media to produce drawings, films, and sculptural works that explore notions of memory, displac...

Watch an extended preview of the Costume Institute’s 2020 exhibition, About Time: Fashion and Duration. The exhibition will trace a century and a half of fas...

Strelka Mag — Exploring new urban conditions. The online magazine of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.

Music/Sound

Very chilly. Loving it.

Awesome mashup of Nile Rodgers' Chic and Iron Maiden. HT Nektarios Liolios

For real nerds

It’s 2019 and the internet is everywhere. Our phones are smart, as are our contracts, watches and cars. The World Wide Web is so prevalent in our lives, you would be forgiven for thinking that the…

HT Frank Poncelet

Other

China: We discovered a new virus. America: So what? China: It's Dangerous America: It's only a Flu China: Wear a Mask America: Don't wear a Mask ...