input/output

We found it to be a pretty joyous viewing experience to see a group of spectators for a kinetic art display transform into exhausted (and a bit dirty) but inspired guides for a travelling expedition by Polish creator Karina Smigla-Bobinski.
Namesake of pioneering computer scientist Ada Lovelace (previously), the artist likens her freely floating helium balloon studded with charcoal spikes that leaves a tracing of its interactions on the walls, floors and ceilings (plus the audience) of its singular gallery to the way Lovelace and other computer engineers, like Vannevar Bush, came to understand algorithms and networks. There is a record of interaction and the membrane and its behaviour is bound by the rules of physics and the way the participants try to influence it but there’s a significant chasm in intention, result and record that’s worth reflecting on. Learn more at the link up top.

alwato

Via one of the usual suspects, we find ourselves acquainted with the life’s work of nineteenth century American abolitionist and futurist Stephen Pearl Andrews, an early advocate for a living-wage who proposed that workers receive man-hour credits in exchange for their labour—based on difficulty or repugnance of their job—rather than a salary based on how much the employer thought he could exploit the employee—with his outline and synopsis of Universology and Alwato (1871).
Similar to the idea of consilience popularised by biologist and educator E. O. Wilson, Universology’s aim was the revelation of the unity of all scientific disciplines and how everything knowable emanating from an unbroken chain of events, traceable back to the beginning of time. In as much as Andrews was a champion for workers’ rights, he was also an anarchist and rejected the interference of the church and state in human affair and established a short-lived utopian colony in New York City called the Unity Home, regulated by the idea of the Pantarchy—as opposed to the patriarchy, being one the first Americans exposed to the writings of Karl Marx whilst regrouping in England having been chased out of Texas for his anti-slavery sympathies. Though Andrews’ fundamental ideas many have been repackaged and resold with new distribution rights in various different context, it seems no one appreciated much the philosophic language Andrews found necessary to construct to disburden words the weight of past associations and etymology, called Alwato, Universal Speech—not that Interlingua, Esperanto and others didn’t have the formation of an ideal society as their raison d’être, it’s just who ever heard of such a language. Learn more by visiting the links up top.

7x7

true blue: synthetic, petroleum-based dyes go into a billion pairs of jeans a year but one company is committing to natural, indigo denim, via Things Magazine

scyphozoa: Ernst Haeckel’s (previously) exquisite jelly fish

through a different lens: a collection of the photography of Stanley Kubrick

electronic engineers’ master volume ii: vintage 1985 tech company logos and resources from Marchin Wichary, who also sets them to a screen-saver—via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals

notability, fame, notoriety: watch Time magazine create its cover for the Age of the Drones edition

hela: the immortal Henrietta Lacks (previously here and here) is honoured in the US National Portrait Gallery

bell-bottom blues: voice-over artist Ken Nordine narrates some trippy Levi’s advertisements from the 1970s 

local 226

Over fifty-thousand Las Vegas hospitality labourers with membership in the Culinary Workers’ and Bartenders’ Unions are set to stage a strike for the first time since 1984 unless their employers—the casinos and resorts—can provide guarantees that their livelihoods will be supplemented and enhanced by automation, not replaced by it.
While some might be quick to point out that the cocktail servers, cleaning staff and receptionists by going on strike are not giving their bosses a compelling argument to retain their services since robots won’t presumably demand better working conditions, it’s also worth noting that robots presumably also don’t pay taxes or have reason to go on holiday or irrationally gamble. What do you think? In a transactional economy, I suppose such redundancy is inevitable (and even enviable, if done right) but workers should leverage their power while they have it in order to better manage their transition to collaboration.