Différance Engine

Had an “art” idea:

Take Derrida’s Différance lecture and run it through google translate, translating from French to English and back again. Repeat until the translations remain unchanged. Voila!

Click on this image for the poster sized version.

Filed under: art, personal, projects

O, Canada

A month or two ago I had some work of mine (a collaboration with Shirley Shen and Andrea Brennen) on display at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. The show was called Actions: What You Can Do With the City. From the CCA’s call to action:

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents the exhibition Actions: What You Can Do With the City, an exhibition with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.

The proposed project, was sparked from an early art piece by Gordon Matta-Clark called Odd Lots. In the project, Matta Clark mapped out a series of tiny plots of land in New York that because of their shape or size, were “valueless”.

For our contribution, called Super Neutral,  we proposed that a carbon credit market could be used to connect small projects with small design firms. Individually, the projects could be tiny, but taken together you might see changes on an urban scale.

All photos Michel Legendre ©CCA. More photos, courtesy of the CCA can be found here.

Filed under: architecture, personal, projects

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

As part of my hiring package at Microsoft, I got a very modest stock award. Those of you who know me also know that I have never owned any stocks in my life and also usually don’t have any savings.

However, these are tough economic times and I’d at least like to keep track of how the stock I have (it’s not much and it’s all in one company) is doing. I’d also like to keep track of it with a daily reminder, a daily notice that fits in with my other daily activities. For me this means twitter.

What I want is something pretty simple. A twitter account that I can follow that will update me on Microsoft’s stock price daily. Now there are a number of twitter stockbots out there. Generally, however, you have to ask them for a stock quote. (Which defeats the whole push model of twitter to begin with) After searching for 5 minutes on the internet and not finding a solution, I decided to build my own.

I took an rss feed from QuoteRSS.com and then used TwitterFeed.com to tweet it to a new Twitter account. I think it’s all working, and it literally took about 10 minutes from start to finish. The only annoying part was having to create a new twitter account; this seems really dumb.

In the same way that I can build and manage my RSS feeds, I’d really really like be able to create virtual twitter accounts. Twitter isn’t just about looking at other news sources or information outside of myself. Twitter should be able to deliver stuff that I can curate.

I need a Yahoo Pipes for Twitter.

Filed under: personal, programming, projects, technology

Props

I uploaded a few of the rough renders I did for the props I designed for the Productivity Vision Video. I modeled them all in Rhino, rendered in Max. And then had them milled out of acrylic at a local shop out here.

This is the clear desk monitor that one of the office workers uses:

A keyboard/slate device:

More here.

There’s a pen and the cell phone (which has some detail) on a harddrive that just crashed. Once I can recover it, I’ll post those too.

I also loaded a hi-res version of the video to YouTube.

Filed under: architecture, technology, work

Populations

As promised here’s a few snapshots of the work done in the two day Rhinoscripting Workshop in Portland. (Scripts, on the way)

Images: Raha Talebi

Images: Robert Petter and Darin Harding

Images: Peter Burns

More pictures here.

Filed under: architecture, programming

Portlandteau

I’m back from Portland after a Saturday of vacation and a two day Rhinoscripting workshop. The whole trip was a ton of fun. I really like that town.

The workshop went really quickly, but we had some talented students. They were really ambitious and even tried to fabricate some of their ideas.

They’re sending me their work this week and I’ll post some of it here.

Filed under: architecture