ntb

INSPIRATION:

Albert-László Barabási, author of LINKED, wants you to think about NETWORKS:

“Networks are everywhere. The brain is a network of nerve cells connected by axons, and cells themselves are networks of molecules connected by biochemical reactions. Societies, too, are networks of people linked by friendships, familial relationships and professional ties. On a larger scale, food webs and ecosystems can be represented as networks of species. And networks pervade technology: the Internet, power grids and transportation systems are but a few examples. Even the language we are using to convey these thoughts to you is a network, made up of words connected by syntactic relationships.”

‘For decades, we assumed that the components of such complex systems as the cell, the society, or the Internet are randomly wired together. In the past decade, an avalanche of research has shown that many real networks, independent of their age, function, and scope, converge to similar architectures, a universality that allowed researchers from different disciplines to embrace network theory as a common paradigm.’

Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, writes about recurring patterns and liquid networks:

“Coral reefs are sometimes called “the cities of the sea”, and part of the argument is that we need to take the metaphor seriously: the reef ecosystem is so innovative because it shares some defining characteristics with actual cities. These patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk. Whether you’re looking at original innovations of carbon-based life, or the explosion of news tools on the web, the same shapes keep turning up… when life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents”

Patrick Pittman from Dumbo Feather adds:

“Put simply: cities are like ant colonies are like software is like slime molds are like evolution is like disease is like sewage systems are like poetry is like the neural pathways in our brain. Everything is connected.

“…Johnson uses ‘The Long Zoom’ to define the way he looks at the world—if you concentrate on any one level, there are patterns that you miss. When you step back and simultaneously consider, say, the sentience of a slime mold, the cultural life of downtown Manhattan and the behavior of artificially intelligent computer code, new patterns emerge.”

James Gleick, author of THE INFORMATION, has written how the cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding and how Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.. (Its an ECO-SYSTEM, an EVOLVING NETWORK)

“If you want to understand life,” Wrote Richard Dawkins, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” (AND THINK ABOUT NETWORKS!!

Geoffrey West, from The Santa Fe Institute, also believes in the pivotal role of NETWORKS:

“…Network systems can sustain life at all scales, whether intracellularly or within you and me or in ecosystems or within a city…. If you have a million citizens in a city or if you have 1014 cells in your body, they have to be networked together in some optimal way for that system to function, to adapt, to grow, to mitigate, and to be long term resilient.”

Author Paul Stammetts writes about The Mycelial Archetype: He compares the mushroom mycelium with the overlapping information-sharing systems that comprise the Internet, with the networked neurons in the brain, and with a computer model of dark matter in the universe. All share this densely intertwingled filamental structure.

An article in Reality Sandwich called Google a psychedelically informed superpowered network, a manifestation of the mycelial archetype:

“Recognizing this super-connectivity and conductivity is often accompanied by blissful mindbody states and the cognitive ecstasy of multiple “aha’s!” when the patterns in the mycelium are revealed. That Googling that has become a prime noetic technology (How can we recognize a pattern and connect more and more, faster and faster?: superconnectivity and superconductivity) mirrors the increased speed of connection of thought-forms from cannabis highs on up. The whole process is driven by desire not only for these blissful states in and of themselves, but also as the cognitive resource they represent.The devices of desire are those that connect,” because as Johnson says “CHANCE FAVORS THE CONNECTED MIND”.

Geoffrey WEST on The sameness of organisms, cities, and corporations:
blog.ted.com/2011/07/26/qa-with-geoffrey-west/

Stephen Johnson’s LONG VIEW
nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08games.html?pagewanted=all
dumbofeather.com/blog/post/on-slime-molds-and-sewage-steven-johnson-s-origin-of-the-idea/
guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/19/steven-johnson-good-ideas?cat=science&type=article

BARABASI’s Scale Free Networks:
scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scale-free-networks

Manuel Lima’s Visual Complexity:
visualcomplexity.com

Paul Stammets Myceilum is everywhere:
realitysandwich.com/google_and_myceliation_consciousness

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A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating:
/Aaron Koblin
/Andrea Tseng
/Genki Ito
/ItoWorld
/Dominic
/Cheryl Colan
/TheNightElfik
/Paulskiart
/Grant Kayl
/blyon
/resonance
/gtAlumniMag
/Katie Armstrong
/Page Stephenson
/Jesse Kanda
/Jared Raab
/Angela Palmer
/elliottsellers
/flight404
/Pedro Miguel Cruz
/Takuya Hosogane
/kimpimmel
/Rob Whitwort

A collaboration of /Jason Silva and /Notthisbody incorporating
/elliottsellers
/flight404
/dangoods
/proxelltv
/kimpimmel
/undream
/brighteyecinema
/hsgn
/beeple
/cerealspiller
/Tim Borgmann
/Shawn Knol
/Andrew Filippone Jr.
/Felix Norton-Barsalou
/Daniel Zagórski
/urbanintdesign

Creation besides being the opposite of annihilation, is the constant state of readjustment, repurposing and in that way curating into a becoming – whether that be particles of thought, or feelings reflected in the bits of virtual representations. So we are just recontextualizing to reveal some patterns and point out to what is less obvious when we are glaring at the pieces from close and in their silo.

Notthisbody in collaboration with Jason Silva

Our friends at Immersive Tech, a non-profit advocacy and network hub for immersive technologies, invited us to present at the “Era of Experience” – an informal evening of presentations and conversations by leaders in the space. It touches upon the subjects of data, interfaces and telesynaesthesia.

See the post and presentation on Metamaps.

After a successful 10 week mission to Haiti, the Floating Doctors have been docked in Roatan, Honduras for the last 6 months. This video provides a personal glimpse into their day-to-day operations, as well as what they’ve learned thus far, how they’ve grown as an organization and what lies in the near future.

CREDITS::

What is Polytopia?

..a ground of engagement for all the ideas, initiatives, visions, predictions and prophecies that were spoken about there – a common ground of mutual respect.

Content: wildcat, spaceweaver, starwalker & notthisbody
Mapping: notthisbody & gavinkeech

@ the TransVision 2010 conference in Milan

Join the conversation on SpaceCollective here, here & there.

…an exploration in creative problem solving.

As part of DIYDAYS LA 2011, I participated in “Wicked Solutions for a Wicked Problem” (WS WP) works to bridge the gap between technology, storytelling and problem solving within a collaborative environment. Over the course of 48 hours, our “core team” of programmers, designers, storytellers, community leaders and researchers worked to contextualize the wicked problems in education through the lens of narrative and storytelling.

The presentation below is a synthesis of the work and thinking that all the participants contributed to. Contribute yourself on the Wicked Solutions wiki.

Thanks to our upstairs neighbors and colleagues at Immersive Tech, a non-profit advocacy and network hub for (guess what) immersive technologies, I was invited to give a presentation preceding the “Tech Enablers” panel, as part of the “Era of Experience” – an informal evening of presentations and conversations by some of the leaders in the space. In my presentation I touch upon the subjects of data, interfaces and telesynaesthesia, to a packed house of 120 people and 2000 viewers live online, thanks to TechZulu‘s coverage of the event.

My talk is about 13 minutes long and starts 2 minutes in. Big shout out to Nathan for giving me the opportunity to speak and all the excellent panelists and participants who showed up to the event.

enhancement’ is the ‘key of any flowcycle’. non destructive yet capable of ‘decay values which fluctuate from relative minimas/maximas based on context’ … this is the foundation of knowledge federation, as it’s linked to all complexity and simplicity that has chaotic harmony to experience and create life with and from and beyond – emergent marketplaces derive from environments amplified for life and creativity in evolution.

designed by @gavinkeech + @entpm

#Inforhythms are aural representations of annotations or metadata of information. In collaboration with Gabe Noel of Vosotros (which by the way has some great music, all licensed Creative Commons, we have started initial experiments of assigning tonal values to specific sets of metadata.

Listen to “IEML tonal values GEN001 explained”

Download HERE

We have started by assigning aural information to the elements of IEML (information economy meta language). IEML is a representational language created by Pierre Levy (@plevy) that can act as a coordinating language between multiple ontologies. It is a system to represent and express facets of our subjectively experienced, unique worldview. Since it is meant to be understood by a computer (and is expressed in a notational syntax), the core elements combine exponentially and opens the possibility (theoretically at this stage) to compute the semantic distance between meanings.

We are at the beginning of our explorations into #inforhythms – a potentially retooling of our auditory perception through the creation of aural metadata representational systems, with the intent to create usable AR (or #aurec) interfaces that allow us to perceive, experience and interact with the multiple auras of metadata always surrounding us. More to come soon.

Presented by @goonth (Gunther Sonnenfeld) at the Reinvention Summit 2010

content: Gunther Sonnenfeld
prezi: IMS.

This iteration/generation of the Polytopia Project map (derived from notthisbody’s conversation mapping +) was designed by utilising the raw information distributed to me in Australia, as it emerged in Italy, during the lead up to the Polytopia Presentation to be handed out (printed) at the TransVision 2010 conference.

notthisbody, wildcat, spaceweaver and starwalker over the course of the weekend (back in the day), sent live voice recordings and ongoing ‘generational conversation maps’ of their discussions which consisted of distilled analysis of core values for what the Polytopia Project encompasses.

Working along side them over the couple of days and integrating the highly distilled, yet raw information from their live analysis of terms, fundamental values of what the polytopia project stands for, was a great experience and one i was stoked to be involved with.

The Polytopia Project map gen010 can be downloaded here …
http://bit.ly/pp_map (PDF)
http://bit.ly/ppmap_img (JPG)

PP MAP GEN010 designed by  @gavinkeech

neglecting the physical distance, their presence was felt, as we were all focusing on delivering ideas into touchable articulations.

the mind tries to find connections, but when something is so emergent and necessary to progress minds, examining how accessible something is, can be a contradiction you need to be mindful of, and naturally we are.

as we push forward, others pull with the flow.

how we choose to take the rhimozatic timelines forward will depend, somewhat on how others live their lives. which type of life is best?
you can choose. we are all individuals with the emergent connection to the collective. this stuff needs to be felt. not just rationalised.

languages beyond the word will evolve to accommodate the requirement for extensibilities.

cross-posted from SpaceCollective

I had the pleasure to meet several other polytopians in the flesh recently at the TransVision 2010 conference in Milan. It was both an excuse to get together after working for so long on the net, as well as a chance to suss out current ideas, attitude, approaches and thought happening in the transhumanist community.

Although we were not initially going to present, after the first day we felt that the Polytopia Project fills a void of sorts…a ground of engagement for all the ideas, initiatives, visions, predictions and prophecies that were spoken about there – a common ground of mutual respect.

We created a map, over the next two days, and gardened it until we felt comfortable with a distilled presentation of some of the fundamentals of what we agreed a polytopia(s) to be.

This map can be seen as continually evolving – as the conversation continues to grow around these concepts we will be modifying and adding in more layers to the map, including multiple aesthetic representations of the content.

The presentation below is the same content as the map above. Best viewed in fullscreen.

Content: wildcat, spaceweaver, starwalker and notthisbody
Mapping: notthisbody

This book is a collection of essays from artists, designers, psychogeographers, cultural researchers, futurologists and neuroscientists brought together by christian nold to explore the political, social and cultural implications of visualising people’s intimate biometric data and emotions using technology.

The theme of this collection of essays is to investigate the apparent desire for technologies of Emotion Mapping, using a variety of different approaches. In addition to the essays, interspersed throughout the book, are the images of the printed Emotion Maps as well as photos of the participatory process. The aim being that this combination of practice and theory will allow us to imagine the social, economic, cultural and political implications of creating a public Emotional Cartography.

…it comes natural to ask and reflect on what will be the future of Emotional Cartography. Will it become mind control, mobile phones, interactive maps, revolution, public consultation or brain augmentation? But, perhaps, the most important aspect of Emotional Cartography is the way in which it creates a tangible vision of places as a dense multiplicity of personal sensations, which we are not normally aware of. The complexity and diversity of these experiences presents a fundamental challenge to all our formal notions of representational politics. Furthermore, the bottom-up process of identifying communal matters of concern, starting from personal sensations, suggests the possibility of an alternative body politic of place.

Download HERE

Christian Nold is the creator of Biomapping, a revolutionary methodology and tool for visualising people’s reactions to the external world.  Over the last five years, over 2000 people have taken part in community mapping projects in over 25 cities across the globe.

Bio Mapping functions as a total inversion of the lie-detector, which supposes that the body tells the truth, while we lie with our spoken words. With Bio Mapping, people’s interpretation and public discussion of their own data becomes the true and meaningful record of their experience. Talking about their body data in this way, they are generating a new type of knowledge combining ‘objective’ biometric data and geographical position, with the ‘subjective story’ as a new kind of psychogeography.

Conceptual Framework for Online Identity Roles by Venessa Miemis

inspired by wildcat2030 / (FH(_)-Friendship in Hyperconnectivity) & panarchy

co-designed by @venessiamiemis & @gavinkeech

Visit interactive version of The Database of the Self in Hyperconnectivity

Download pdf version