Event Archives - Near Future Laboratory

D&F: A Design & Fiction Evening

Design & Fiction

https://designandfiction.eventbrite.com

We are the Near Future Laboratory. Welcome to us.

On Thursday October 24th we would like to meet up with you to talk about design. And fiction. And the ways of approaching the challenge of all challenges, whatever it may be. We’ll talk about expressing the opportunities those challenges raise as distinctly new tangible forms. As well as the essential value of mundane design.

We’ll talk about clarifying the present. We’ll talk about designing the future. And doing both of these things with design. And fiction.

Come and enjoy. We’ll be us, and we’ll also be James Bridle, a friend of ours.
There will be two and a half free regional beers for everyone.
Space is limited because we’re in a room. Sign up on Eventbrite, or you may become deflated.

WE'RE SERIOUS: EVEN THOUGH THIS IS A FREE EVENT, YOU MUST BE TICKETED TO ENTER. PLEASE DON'T SHOW UP WITHOUT A TICKET AS WE PROBABLY WON'T BE ABLE TO LET YOU IN.

Thrilling Wonder Stories..London Edition

Thrilling Wonder Stories

WONDER STORIES 3
Live in London and New York Oct 28th

Created by
Liam Young [Tomorrows Thoughts Today]
And Geoff Manaugh [BLDGBLOG]

In Association with the Architectural Association, Studio-X NYC, Popular Science

We have always regaled ourselves with speculative stories of a day yet to come. In these polemic visions we furnish the fictional spaces of tomorrow with objects and ideas that at the same time chronicle the contradictions, inconsistencies, flaws and frailties of the everyday. Slipping suggestively between the real and the imagined these narratives offer a distanced view from which to survey the consequences of various social, environmental and technological scenarios.

Wonder Stories chronicles such tales in a sci fi storytelling jam with musical interludes, live demonstrations and illustrious speakers from the fields of science, art and technology presenting their visions of the near future. Join our ensemble of mad scientists, literary astronauts, design mystics, graphic cowboys, mavericks, visionaries and luminaries for an evening of wondrous possibilities and dark cautionary tales.

For the first time, Wonder Stories will be simultaneously hosted in London and New York and Popular Science will join the Architectural Association and Studio X NYC in coordinating the event this year. Join us for the third event in the series as we chart a course from science fiction to science fact with talks, a hands on taxidermy workshop, animatronic guests, swarm robotics demonstrations, datascapes walking tour and live movie soundscapes.

Free to all. OCT 28 1200 – 2200 at the Architectural Association London and OCT 28/29 at Studio-X NYC

The event will be streamed live streamed here and you can follow the twitter feed with #tws3

Hosted by
LIAM YOUNG (‘Tomorrows Thoughts Today’ and the AA’s ‘Unknown Fields Division’)
MATT JONES (‘BERG London’, Design technologists)

VINCENZO NATALI
Director of Splice, Cube, and forthcoming films based on J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Neuromancer by William Gibson

BRUCE STERLING
Scifi author and futurist

KEVIN SLAVIN
Game designer and spatial theorist

ANDY LOCKLEY
Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisor for Inception,compositing/2D supervisor for Batman Begins and Children of Men

PHILIP BEESLEY
Digital media artist and experimental architect

CHRISTIAN LORENZ SCHEURER
Concept artist and illustrator for video games and films such as The Matrix, Dark City, The Fifth Element, and Superman Returns

JULIAN BLEECKER
Designer, technologist, and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory

CHARLIE TUESDAY GATES
Taxidermy artist and sculptor, to lead a live taxidermy workshop

DR RODERICH GROSS AND THE ‘NATURAL ROBOTICS LAB’
Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield,to lead a live Swarm Robotics demonstration

GAVIN ROTHERY
Concept artist for Moon, directed by Duncan Jones

GUSTAV HOEGEN
Animatronics engineer for Hellboy, Clash of the Titans, and Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film Prometheus

SPOV
Motion graphics artists for Discovery Channel’s Future Weapons and Project Earth

ZELIG SOUND
Music, composition, and sound design for film and television

RADIOPHONIC
Throughout the day we will be accompanied by electronic tonalities from Radiophonic

NEW YORK EVENT

Hosted by
GEOFF MANAUGH (BLDGBLOG, STUDIO-X NYC)
NICOLA TWILLEY (EDIBLE GEOGRAPHY, STUDIO-X NYC)
POPULAR SCIENCE

BJARKE INGELS
Architect, WSJ Magazine 2011 architectural innovator of the year, and author of Yes Is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution

NICHOLAS DE MONCHAUX
Architect and author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

HARI KUNZRU
Novelist and author of Gods Without Men and The Impressionist

JAMES FLEMING
Historian and author of Fixing The Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control

ANDREW BLUM
Journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

DAVID BENJAMIN
Architect and co-director of The Living

MARC KAUFMAN
Science writer and author of First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth

DEBBIE CHACHRA
Researcher and educator in biological materials and engineering design

JACE CLAYTON AND LINDSAY CUFF OF NETTLE
Nettle’s latest album, El Resplandor, is a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai

CHRIS WOEBKEN
Interaction designer

SETH FLETCHER
Science writer and author of Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cars, and the New Lithium Economy

SIMONE FERRACINA
Architect and author of Organs Everywhere

DAVE GRACER
Insect agriculturalist at Small Stock Foods

HOD LIPSON
Researcher in evolutionary robotics and the future of 3D printing

ANDREW HESSEL
Science writer and open-source biologist, focusing on bacterial genomics

CARLOS OLGUIN
Designer at Autodesk Research working on the intersection of bio-nanotechnology and 3D visualization

[Image credit ‘Inception’ dir. Christopher Nolan]

Made Up Panel Discussion September 17 at Art Center College of Design

One week from today I’ll have the pleasure of sharing a panel discussion with my old chum Sascha Pohflepp and the eminent Norman Klien as Art Center rounds out its summer “Made Up” residency studio program. Fun. Come out and check it out!

Join the Media Design Program
Friday, September 17, 2010
3:00 to 5:00 pm
Wind Tunnel Gallery, South Campus, Art Center College of Design
950 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA 91105
FREE TO THE PUBLIC
PARKING ON SITE

AS IF: alternate realities

This panel discussion, moderated by MADE UP organizer Tim Durfee, will consider the value (or perhaps merely the appeal) of a methodology that could be characterized as: assume a set of conditions (abitrary, absurd, speculative), play it straight. Historically, alternate realities have been the realm of literature and film but what might be the effects of such an approach within a field (design) that is conventionally concerned with the cold, hard facts of the real world, of the here and now. And importantly, why does this work feel uniquely relevant NOW?

Detail from SUPERCALIFORNIA! by Sascha Pohflepp

Panelists:

Sascha Pohflepp, London-based designer and artist, was one of this summer’s researchers-in-residence. As part of the MADE UP theme, he produced the project “SUPERCALIFORNIA!” which turns the phantom futures of Southern California into compelling design fiction.

Julian Bleecker, a designer and technologist, is a researcher at the Design Strategic Projects studio at Nokia Design, and the co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory, a “design-to-think” studio.

Norman Klein is a cultural historian, critic, and novelist, and the author, with Margo Bistis, of the multi-media database/novel/website/art installation titled “The Imaginary Twentieth Century,” a historical science-fiction novel. His forthcoming book is called The Dismantling of the American Psyche: MediaBuzz, Political Branding, and Collective Amnesia: 1968-Present

“For alternative realities, I see many options in work that I have doing recently: from parallel worlds models to ‘wunder-romans’ (archival/media novels), to the misremembering of the future, and ‘the dismantling of the American psyche’…” —Norman Klein

“I have long been interested in how science fiction has influenced science fact. To me, design fiction encourages peculiar design practices in an attempt to create different sorts of near future worlds. The Made Up project promises to illuminate the future-oriented practice of design and help us understand how design probes imaginatively and materializes ideas, oftentimes through stories.” —Julian Bleecker

Continue reading Made Up Panel Discussion September 17 at Art Center College of Design

iotaSalon: The City @ UCLA

This sounds like fun.

May 6, 2010, 7pm
Experimental Digital Arts at UCLA.

iotaCenter’s mission is to inspire both new and existing artists in a historically dispersed and constantly changing technological environment.

The theme for our next iotaSalon is THE CITY. We will be investigating the way urban environments are depicted in abstract and experimental works. How does construction influence image creation? How does the urban environment surrounding an artist inform or invade their work? How does the process of abstraction change our view of the city? How have architectural tools and thinking affected abstract and experimental moving images?

Screening on 16mm ((16mm FTW!!)) as part of the historic film segment:
Sausage City (1974) – Adam Beckett
Diagram Film (1978) – Paul Glabicki
Commuter (1981) – Mike Patterson

Screening on video for the contemporary segment:
Giant Steps (2001) – Michal Levy
Communicate (2009) – Erick Oh
Berlin Skin (2007) – Kim Collmer
Continue reading iotaSalon: The City @ UCLA

Art History of Games

A short note to draw the attention of the two of you to this event that pal Ian Bogost and related/sundry other chums are putting on: Art History of Games to be held February 4th, 5th and 6th right there in Atlanta. Sounds delightful — wish I could make such things as this. I’m fond of these sorts of thoughtful considerations and probing lenses upon things that are often mistakenly trivialized — Art History and Games. Fantastic. Seems like they’ve commissioned a few games, including one involving enormous game pieces and what sounds like a cunning form of bribery.

Check out the schedule and weep with me in sorrow for not being able to attend..

Continue reading Art History of Games

Once Upon A Place.. Architecture + Fiction Event

Matthew Malpass turned me onto this curious sounding and intriguing event Once Upon A Place (haunted houses & imaginary cities) — the 1st International Conference on Architecture and Fiction, which might count as a “that’s weird” / “plate of shrimp” moment because I was just describing to Jeffrey Paffendorf, who I just met, why I was interested in architecture — and the answer is because, from my still-limited insights, most architects construct quite lovely fictions of things in the sense that these ideas of theirs will likely be materialized only in imagery and stories and renderings, which I think is a powerful skill and ability.

So.

I love the sound of this event and what it might actually contain. And I’m sure Portugal is lovely in the Fall..

6th Swiss Design Network Conference – "Negotiating futures. Design fiction."

From the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA (NYC) in 2008.

negotiating futures. design fiction.
6th Swiss Design Network Conference
October 28 – 30 2010 in Basel, Switzerland

It’s super far off (but not the calls for stuff), but this upcoming event next year looks intriguing!

Designers see the world not simply as it is, but rather as it could be. In this perspective, the world is a laboratory to explore the contingency of the existing and the thinking in options. Imaginations of the contra factual are a key source for the creation of alternative political, technological, social, or economic constellations of artefacts, interfaces, signs, actors, and spaces. At the same time, strategies of materialization are pivotal to shift the boundary between the fictional and the real and to finally bring possible new realities into being. The conference addresses the questions of how fictions are designed and how the multiplicity of possible new futures is negotiated and realized.

Important dates 2010

March 08th – Call for papers
April 18th – Deadline paper abstracts
June 3rd – Notification of acceptance
July 18th – Deadline papers
July 18th – Call for workshops
September 27th – Registration
Oktober 28th – Conference opens

Continue reading 6th Swiss Design Network Conference – "Negotiating futures. Design fiction."

Mobile Media 09 at UCLA D|MA

Short note to call your attention to an event at UCLA’s Design Media Arts department beginning this Thursday evening, November 12 with a keynote by the barely containable Kevin Slavin (area/code), following on with three panels on Friday November 13th (damnit..) beginning at 10:30a and some workshops (all listed here) — as of this writing, there will be an iPhone SDK workshop, a workshop on Python + Arduino + Nokia N900, and a OpenGL ES Primer workshop, all held on Saturday run through the wonderfully grassroot-y LA Public Schools.

Continue reading Mobile Media 09 at UCLA D|MA

Conflux Festival 2009 Call Proposals

Conflux is having their 6th annual Conflux Festival! The deadline for submissions is soon — August 15th. At last year’s Conflux we brought our “Drift Deck” technology and had a swell time! Several years back, we did WiFiKu — we walked the streets of New York City neighborhoods and digitally scanning for the names of WiFi “Hot Spots” (Hot Spots…how quaint) and constructed a visual map containing Haiku from these found names. That was back when wireless networks were not as quotidian as they are today and we were all trying to make sense of this new puff of network leaking out into the streets. This year — who knows?

CONFLUX FESTIVAL 2009
CONFLUXCITY CALL FOR PROPOSALS
http://confluxfestival.org/

Conflux, the art and technology festival for the creative exploration of urban public space, is pleased to announce the 6th annual Conflux Festival will take place from September 17-20, 2009 and will be hosted by New York University.

In keeping with its commitment to urban artistic exploration, community participation, shared knowledge, and critical civic engagement, Conflux will organize a user-generated open format event on Sunday September 20th, 2009 from 10am-6pm.

Through an open submissions process, ConfluxCity will provide a platform for artists, urban geographers, technologists and others to organize and produce innovative activities dedicated to the examination, celebration and (re)construction of everyday urban life.

Drawing inspiration from Burning Man’s creed of radical self-reliance and BarCamp’s philosophy of openness and participation, ConfluxCity will adopt an open-space approach in which participants will be expected to organize, promote, and host their own activities and events. To facilitate this format, the Conflux Festival headquarters and website will serve as a central communications hub directing festival attendees outward to individual event websites and locations.

To submit a proposal to participate in the festival, please see the submission guidelines at the Conflux Festival website: http://confluxfestival.org/2009/submit-a-project/.

The deadline for submissions is August 15, 2009.

http://confluxfestival.org/

Upload Cinema – Visions of a Future

via erwinvanderzande

An interesting proposition — show shorts that are found online, like on YouTube or Vimeo or wherever in a proper, normal, human bricks & mortar theater. That’s what Upload Cinema in Amsterdam does and, darnit..if I was there, I’d go every month.

Update: The viewed films can be seen online now.

On February 2, 2009 they will be showing short films and clips according to the theme “Visions of a Future” which I had the good fortune to be the guest editor and curate, along with a few other folks. Part of the duties I agreed to was to provide some introduction. As I’m not in Amsterdam and am someplace rather warmer and drier, I cobbled together a rash-dash video introduction which doesn’t say much, but sets the mood.

Upload Cinema Visions of a Future Intro from Julian Bleecker on Vimeo.

I had an evening, after a day in the studio, to put this together and I really have no video production skills and, on top of that, my aspirations were pretty high. I thought about what I might say that would tie the event to my design fiction thinking, but that’d mean pulling together a few remarks and I thought it’d be more fun to be fun.

The high concept, which — after a few test compositions and some editing and rendering I realized would take me into the wee hours of the morning — is that the Odyssey from 2001: A Space Odysseyhas a custodian/superintendent who is called Hal and misunderstandings between him and HAL evolve from there when Hal, the Super, overhears Dave and Frank talking about disconnecting HAL.

Anyway..I blame the Porto.

Continue reading Upload Cinema – Visions of a Future