Technoscape to Escape Velocity

Notes

Really what is at stake: We have talked about the limits of the human, the temporality of the planet... will we succeed in getting off planet? Is our technology advanced enough to get off planet? In the context of reframing our planetary geopolitics - what kind of human politics and relationships will be possible when we are off planet?

2312:

  1. One of the key crisis: saving the planets ecosystems. Can we use off-planetary asteroids as conservation spaces?
  2. The technoscape - quebe AI 

How can we map out the near future technoscape realities? What kind of human ideas of politics will emerge?

Accelerando - does not really get much off planet, but they get into ideas about getting off planet straight away. This is a bridge to understanding what might be a gateway to getting off planet. 

If we look at 2312, what is the technological platform they are dealing with? A solar system network of AI's - they have not hit a singularity yet. Humans (they are gender fluid, etc) but they still live in a way that is pretty familiar to us today. If you take the event that happens at the end of Rainbow's End (library protest, riot) - AI, emerging forms of economy - you get a completely different set of relationships. 

There is a riot taking place - 2 belief systems at odds - massive multi player online game held in an augmented reality. Biological weapon being fabricated. AI is orchestrating the riots. The biological weapon will make all humans programable to media content - brainwash the humans. Military personnel are analyzing intelligence across the network. 

Rainbows End and Accelerando look at the place we as designers would work: game platforms, AI design - designer oriented scenario. As designers, what is the design intervention we can make?

Networks:

  • companion species depending on each other to communicate in a network
  • living creature networks exhibit a similar feature set - will you always get computational networks when you look at nature?

Primordial soup or Alien AI

Will complex enough systems develop meta intelligence?

Slime mold - intelligence - computational path optimization. 

Building the tool...

After working on some experiments with the thermal camera and mapping:

I am still working on the aesthetic quality and rendering performance, but all the pieces are there. 

Thermal Imaging Experiments

Using the below rig I filmed a NY city street using a thermal camera. 

Equipment:

  1. Camera
  2. Seek Thermal Camera iPhone extension
  3. iPhone (camera)
  4. Rig (courtesy of Chris Woebken)

I first take the thermal video and use an optical flow detection library called oflow (https://github.com/anvaka/oflow) to take the brightest points in each frame of the video to be the "hottest" points:

function isHot(color) {
    return color[0] > 150 && color[1] > 150 && color[2] > 150;
}

I then run this through three.js. Instead of rendering the "blobs" I use their x,y positions to map my particle system to thier locations each frame. 

Nanotronics Microscopy

Equipment: Nanotronics nSpec Microscope with Nikon Objectives and Allied Vision Technologies GT 2750 Camera

Full link to all the videos: http://microbiome.nyc/nanotronics/

Thoughts for Thesis Writing...

General thesis writing architecture:

30 pages

The paper has to explain: what is it, why are you doing it, who is it for, and how does it work. (an expanded version of the abstract). Kinds of writing that can go in the paper:

  1. Process of thinking is something you should keep a record of. Record and documentation of the project.
  2. Recording of a conversation with your friend / explanations to your grandmother
  3. Description in the 3rd person of a person who goes through your project — to change the perspective
  4. Research
  5. A show at the Met, MoMA, etc… write a description and how it relates to what you’re doing. 
  6. Precedents 
  7. How ideas developed and how they changed from last semester.
  8. Crisis - write out the obstacles that are facing you and think your way around them 
  9. The backdrop of what you’re doing is the reality we are living in today - how is your project relevant to this world…. why are you doing this?

The paper is a form of experiment and support - this paper can include anything — anything that was included in you working out your project. 

For my thesis:

  • history of the problem
  • Writing a paragraph on the juxtaposition between Sky Survey’s and Metagenomic Surveys…. 
  • Twin study - NASA - Mason Lab

 

Follow the ideas where they take you…. 

 

Notes:

There is the (1) thesis project and (2) a larger direction that involves the design of the city, health, the living environment.

  • Disfigurement of human life by industrialization and modern life. 
  • Homeostatic systems -- that which exits in balance 

 

Random links:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Machinery-Life-David-Goodsell/dp/0387849246

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/science/ligo-gravitational-waves-black-holes-einstein.html?_r=0

https://www.google.com/search?q=diatoms+in+the+ocean&espv=2&biw=1224&bih=539&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiqzejw3rHLAhVCrD4KHaiFAwAQ_AUIBigB#imgrc=_

https://paleonerdish.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/an-introduction-to-diatoms/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite

Technical Progress

Experiments

Using a hacked web-cam I experimented using IR camera.  

There is some quality issues with the hacked camera. I think a higher resolution camera would have better results. See the left image vs my hacked web camera on the right. 

Research

New Prototypes:

Pipeline Updates:

  1. Researched IR and thermal cameras but still not sure which camera is best suited given time, money and tech specs. Miguel is meeting with the MIT PI from Camera Culture tomorrow to get a better sense of the best camera for our needs.
  2. I need to do some stitching together of code to get all the video distortions complete
  3. I need to use GPU particles systems rather than CPU systems to get the "edges" of the video mesh to "speak" to the particles 

Flow Fields in Three.js

“What is a flow field? Think of your Processing window as a grid. In each cell of the grid lives an arrow pointing in some direction—you know, a vector. As a vehicle moves around the screen, it asks, ‘Hey, what arrow is beneath me? That’s my desired velocity!’”
— Dan Shiffman, Nature of Code

We are using Flow Fields to elucidate the environment with the movements of the microbes.

I am using a paper called "Computational Fluid Dynamics of Sponge Aquiferous Systems" as a scientific reference and pulling some artistic license as to how microbes may move in an urban environment. 

Taxonomical Mapping

Notes on Mandelbrot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x81lv4xfyNo

http://www.fractalforums.com/3d-fractal-generation/true-3d-mandlebrot-type-fractal/

http://tilde.club/~david/m/#zoom=6.292011834319527,3.4&lookAt=-0.6,0&iterations=85&superSamples=1&escapeRadius=10.0&colorScheme=pickColorGrayscale

https://github.com/coded-aesthetics/mandelbro

http://www.coded-aesthetics.com/

https://processing.org/examples/mandelbrot.html

http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/index.php/generative-art-links/

http://sub.blue/fractal-lab

http://davideriboli.isiaurbino.net/arte-generativa

INFOGRAPHIC INSPIRATION

Diatoms:

GEOTEMPORALITY

Scales of time: the very small and the very large; horizons of perception and action

Geotemporality is bound to materiality.

What is it to be human in the context of geological and planetary time?

How are humans formed by, perceived by, agents acting across different scales of time?

Finding connections to the laws that govern our planet, universe, etc.... 

Engineering at the planetary scale.

Potential energy - the potential to act in time. 

Basin of attraction - explored all of the phase potential - exploring different pathways. 

The set of points in the space of system variables such that initial conditions chosen in this set dynamically evolve to a particular attractor. An attractor is a set of states (points in the phase space), invariant under the dynamics, towards which neighboring states in a given basin of attraction asymptotically approach in the course of dynamic evolution. 

How do designers explore different pathways? "If you hold a hammer, all the problems you see is a nail."

Individuals are actually networks. And those networks span across space and time. There is time at the human scale. And there is time beyond the human scale. 

"All living things need an atmosphere around them, a secret circle of darkness..." --Nietzsche 

Ballard:

Psychic memories of our evolution... "the oldest memories on Earth, the time codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we've taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories--from the enzymes controlling carbon dioxide cycle to the organization of the brachial plexus and the nerve path-ways of the Pyramid cells in the mid-brain, each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in the face of a sudden physico-chemical crisis."

FROM STAR TO PLANET TO CRYSTAL TO MICROBE TO STAR

FROM STAR TO PLANET TO CRYSTAL TO MICROBE TO STAR

Map of node points on the Earth - Network connectivity on our planet. 

Microbe Inspiration