Legacy post from Near Future Laboratory.

Contradictions like these abound in many retail establishments that prohibit cameras while they also use 2-d barcodes that require people to use cameras to read them

Sorry for the silence here but the last few weeks have been super hectic because of various projects. So, as a quick summary of what I’m up to:

As the name of our Laboratory implies, we’re very interested in the hands-on, pragmatic ways in which one can imagine and then create things from and for the near future. In that sense, we design products and the like. Stuff. We make stuff. They are just things from and for the near future. Which shouldn’t be a prob…

In a week’s time the gang will convene in Detroit to create a product catalog of things from the future. We’re putting our Design Fiction insights, experience, skills and moxie to the task of imagining — what are the things one might see in some future fictional catalog of stuff.

Time for presenting summer project outcomes! In July and August, I spent two months in the Media Design Program department at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. As I mentioned few weeks ago, the project was called CURIOUS RITUALS: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday and focused on the pos…

“Zombie Media”, as defined by Jussi Parikka:

From a paper being presented at the SecureComm conference in Italy by Tom Chothia and colleagues at the University of Birmingham, which investigate how users who participate in BitTorrent swarms for popular files are likely to have their IP addresses logged by monitoring companies within three hours.

It would be generous to say that privatesquare was ever released. Instead, the source code was made public with a long and twisty blog post and a flurry of screenshots. I’ve told a few people about my installation of privatesquare but since I haven’t had the stamina to run a service for strangers (and a free one, at…