„Home Smart Home" is a show about domestic surveillance and digital violence. A series of commercially available home surveillance cameras are distributed over the four floors of Kunstverein Rotenburg. The market for surveillance cameras in the private sphere has grown tremendously in recent years.The desire for control over private space is part of the digitally driven society marked by a loss of trust. “Everything is a camera"
By any reasonable account the worst investment in the history of AI has to be the over $100 billion that have been invested in “driverless” cars. There may be a payoff someday, but thus far there has not been a lot. By many accounts Waymo rides are still a net loss on a per ride basis, and the number of competitors even left in the full autonomy game has dwindled. Waymo runs in a few extremely well-mapped cities with mostly very good weather, but to my knowledge it’s never been tested in places with bad weather, poorly mapped roads, alternative driving patterns, etc. The generality of Waymo’s approach is very much still in question, and I am not sure anyone else is still seriously in the full autonomy game. (Tesla, for example, always requires a human in the loop.) Most of those who invested in driverless cars lost money, unless they invested early and cashed out, before patience began to run out.
But misery loves company, and the forlorn $100B may see company before the end of the decade. The Information reported today that Microsoft and OpenAI are planning a “Stargate” project to build what sounds to me like a $100B LLM plus infrastructure, targeted for 2028-2030….
In 1961 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price designed a Fun Palace building – a ‘laboratory of fun’. They imagined a building linked through technology to other spaces, accessible to those who wouldn’t normally go to arts venues or great centres of learning. Joan said, “I do really believe in the community. I really do believe in the genius in every person. And I’ve heard that greatness come out of them, that great thing which is in people.”
The original design said:
“Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky.”
Unfortunately that ideal space was never created, although there were a few incarnations of potential Fun Palaces, Joan’s Stratford Fair in 1975 among them. In 2013 we re-imagined Fun Palaces as a space that any of us could create, wherever we live – championing more equitable uses of the under-used buildings and spaces we already have and genuinely community-led. There’s a blog about how our version started here.
This first imagining was simply as a celebration of Joan’s centenary – what we didn’t know in 2013 was how many people would be excited by this idea and how many communities would take it on and make it their own, helping us grow it into a campaign for cultural democracy and the annual Weekend of Celebration it has become – local people sharing skills, creating tiny revolutions of connection.
Joan was born in South London on 6 October 1914, she died in 2002. At eighteen she won a scholarship to RADA and, having left drama school early, she walked from London to (almost) Manchester to get away from the constraints of 1930s London theatre. In Manchester she met Ewan MacColl. They worked with actors and writers, making dynamic and provocative work. Following political activism during the Spanish Civil War and WW2, the company reformed as Theatre Workshop. In 1946, they were invited by Ruth Pennyman to live and work from Ormesby Hall, which they did for eighteen months. The company toured and worked together, developing the Laban-based movement work and ensemble that became their hallmark. At the end of 1952 the company decided to return to a settled base. MacColl chose to stay in the north, Theatre Workshop moved to Stratford.
The Theatre Royal Stratford East was a dilapidated palace of varieties when Littlewood and her partner Gerry Raffles took it over in January 1953. The company renovated the building and Joan’s great causes – community and political theatre, improvisation, the working class language, the inclusion of children – helped change the face of British theatre.
She had numerous hits, most notably Oh! What A Lovely War, Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be and A Taste of Honey. Her production of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow brought Behan international acclaim. Joan worked with many artists at the start of their careers, people who later became household names including Barbara Windsor, Harry H Corbett, Lionel Bart, Victor Spinelli and Murray Melvin….
*Young people in big cities sitting on used furniture.
Machine translation:
From 1950 to today, the Aurora district, which includes Porta Palazzo - the largest open-air market in Europe - has welcomed various waves of migration, becoming a space of integration and social transformation.
With a high territorial density, which reaches more than double the Turin average, the neighborhood stands out for the youth of its population: 22.3% are under 24 years old and half of these are foreigners.
Aurora is at the center of a transformation process, which has seen the entry of new economic players and consequent social tensions. The proximity to the center and the Einaudi university campus has also led to an increase in students, but there is a perceived lack of spaces in which to gather.
The project “Borealis: an imaginary Aurora” by Kaninchen-Haus APS
With the opening of a new cultural and social space, Kaninchen-Haus responds to a need deeply felt by the neighborhood communities, associations and institutions.
Borealis will be a location where different entities and realities will be able to compare and collaborate. The space will offer hospitality to heterogeneous segments of the public who will be able to take advantage of services previously absent in the area: meeting centres, study rooms, art galleries, food redistribution hubs, markets and coworking for third sector organisations, and will have the possibility of propose new initiatives that respond to their needs, acquiring skills and influence in planning the future of the neighborhood, thanks to a participation program mediated by professionals of culture and social innovation.
Who is the project aimed at?
The Borealis project aims to involve specific targets of citizens and vulnerable groups, often on the margins of cultural enjoyment: young inhabitants of the neighborhood, migrants and asylum seekers, young people with disabilities, female communities, groups of students. Art thus becomes a tool not only for training, but also for social inclusion and individual redemption, capable of raising awareness of the importance of fighting any type of discrimination by supporting empathy towards others.
Furthermore, the new Borealis space, whose programming will be coordinated with the Multiculturalism Forum of the Circumscription7, will allow the spontaneous generation of opportunities for dialogue and intercultural collaboration.
Project name: Borealis: an imaginary Aurora Proposing organisation: Kaninchen-Haus APS Area of intervention: Environment & Sustainable Communities
AI will lower the cost of goods and services, because labor is the driving cost at many levels of the supply chain. If robots can build a house on land you already own from natural resources mined and refined onsite, using solar power, the cost of building that house is close to the cost to rent the robots. And if those robots are made by other robots, the cost to rent them will be much less than it was when humans made them.”
From 1968 to 1999 have been manufactured around 7,500 units of the K67 all around Yugoslavia. Some of them were also exported to Poland, Japan, New Zealand, Kenya, Iraq, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The system permitted unlimited configurations and variations, therefore is perfect for different types of adaptation and programs. You might find the Kiosk K67 in the collection of the Museum of Architecture and Design MAO in Ljubljana.
K67 as an installation by Marjetica Potrč in Modern Gallery Ljubljana. | Photo via Next Stop Kiosk
Kiosk K67 was also adapted for different uses, from border patrol stations, ski lift ticket booths, flower shops, to retail and fast-food stands. And after more than 50 years it is still present and becoming popular in many cities.
The first K67, which became a part of the design collection of MoMA in 1970, was at the beginning set on the 53rd Street sidewalk. It got finally its place in the museum during the MoMA exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980as an object of mass design.
The catalogue from the exhibition Systems, Structures, Strategies in the Museum of Architecture and Design MAO, Ljubljana.
Maja Vardjan, our of the curators of the exhibition Systems, Structures, Strategiesin the Museum of Architecture and Design MAO,describes why the K67 is so persistent in many cities. She evaluates it as a piece that with “its position between architecture and industrial design, embeddedness in the framework of a modern city and society, the rituals of daily life, and, last but not least, its persistent capacity to reinvent itself.”
The reinvention of K67 in Berlin in 2018. | Photo by Marc Brinkmeier
The ability to reinvent itself makes the kiosk fresh in many settings and configurations. Martin Ruge created a kioski in Berlin. He brought one of the K67 although the transportation was difficult and the connection with freshwater, sewage and electricity to the Mykita building took more effort than expected. But he thinks it was worth it. And freshwater, sewage and electricity shall become matter of the new design issues for K67 to solve in the future.
The metamorphosis as a constant change of shape, idea, social and political reality shaped K67 to the point that is again in use. As Maja Vardjan said, a kiosk is phenomena, always alive and never the same.
From: Rich Kulawiec rsk@gsp.org Date: March 13, 2024 22:19:03 JST To: Dave Farber farber@gmail.com, Warren Gif Subject: Re: [IP] Re robots are about to get really good counterintuitively quickly
(For IP if you wish)
The AI folks are doing the same thing that the IOT folks are doing: don’t bother to seriously test anything, just ship it and forcibly conscript everyone into being part of their beta test…then blame the device/robot/LLM/etc. for everything that goes wrong.
They’re also going to copy the IOT practice of abandonment: what’s going to happen to everything deployed in the field when these companies get tired of supporting it and declare that it’s hit EOL, or when they go out of business? What’s going to happen when third parties jump into the market, offering updates/fixes that may or may not actually be updates/fixes? Do we all just get to live indefinitely with same kind of detritus that the IOT has foisted on us?
One of the big problems with LLM-style AI is that it’s impossible to find all embedded erroneous or malicious behavior until it manifests itself. In other words, if I trained a dinner-making robot that it should just make dinner as expected unless it was asked to do so by a guy in a sweater and stocking cap, both with broad horizontal red and white stripes (I’m describing “Waldo” here) – in which case it should grab two steak knives and plunge them into him… how would anyone be able to tell until it happened? No human being is capable of detecting that anomaly in the billions of coefficients that make up the model.
