Popup Dining as Distributed Autonomous Space

Popup dining could be a fun new idea in the trend of popup experiences - on-demand serendipity and practicality ranging from popup entertainment, co-housing, and co-working to popup farms on disused land.

Any range of food providers ranging from existing restaurants to individuals building cooking brands could sponsor on-demand popup dining tables in city streets and at festivals.

Consumers could pre-select the menu (including a blind prix fixe menu), and the time and location of the popup dining experience. At the appointed time and location, ad-hoc P2P urban delivery service contractors could deliver the table, food, and dining experience.

Uber-like, the Popup Dining app could show the progress of the popup table to the consumer location, and be the payment mechanism at completion.

You can even do your own guerrilla popup dining now, just order your Caviar restaurant courier delivery to a non-traditional location like a street corner (bring your own stool) or bar. 

Everything about popup dining as distributed autonomous space is modularized, including the basics of a table, chairs, food, service labor, location, labor, and level of service. Expansion modules could include engaging a local artist, musician, or lecturer from that neighborhood, a live chef station, a sommelier, a chocolatier, a vodka infusion expert, etc. Blockchain-based smart contracts could further facilitate the validated automation of service delivery for popup dining.

Popup as a life style and life as performance art!

Pluralist Narratives in Digital Art and Philosophy

Much of contemporary human endeavor involves both art and technology. Objects are both technologized and aesthetically designed. Apple forever changed the expectation of high-quality technology and design in objects. Information visualization, 3-D printing, personal data, video games, and de novo biological design (e.g.; proteins, other molecules, synthetic biology) are some examples of the strong linkage between technology and aesthetic design.

Artists, scientists, and individuals alike are exploring these new venues of information, software, personal data, biology, and virtual reality for discovery and creative expression. Online tools facilitate the process and compress the required learning curves for proficiency.

As a result, there is a shift away from the institutional production of knowledge to include the more democratized production of art, science, technology, objects, and knowledge by individuals and crowds. This helps to enact change at three levels: a greater range of interesting and useful objects and technologies coming into existence; more fulfillment and expression of human creative potential; and new kinds of knowledge and meaning-making narratives about the world.

Gaming Apps to Unlock Video Archive Footage

One of the leading digital media foundations in the San Francisco Bay Area, GAFFTA, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, held a hackathon for film-makers and developers March 21-23, 2013. The challenge was to come up with new uses for open-source video archive footage (for example from the Internet Archive).

One idea would be to merge mobile gaming, crowdsourcing, and video archives to make the archives a fun and accessible tool for telling new stories. Here are some app ideas:

App: This is not my story!
In this gaming app, person 1 (whose image or profile photo is shown) selects a video micro-clip that he or she feels is ‘not my story.’ Then person 2, matched randomly from the crowd of the app’s community members, adds a short caption to the video as to why the video micro-clip is not that person’s story. Humor would be tantamount. Other community crowd members could validate the caption (e.g.; police spam), and vote on it with ‘likes’ to determine game winners.

App: PostSecret Video
This gaming app is the video version of the successful, strikingly poignant, and deeply human PostSecret project. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard which are then posted on the web and compiled and published as books. Instead of sending anonymous postcards with ‘my secret,’ anonymous participants would find a video micro-clip that corresponds to their secret. Other community members would guess what the secret is from the video micro-clip.

App: Exquisite Video Corpse Again taking advantage of the community to create crowd art, this gaming app uses the exquisite corpse technique invented by the surrealists. In a group story telling exercise, the first person selects a video micro-clip. The second selects a second video micro-clip that is the next few frames of the story. The third selects the third, and so on. Each new person selecting can only see the story 1-2 nodes back. Again the crowd could vote on newly created video stories.

What are the Next Media for Art?

Any prominent societal ‘currency’ is taken up by artists (and technologists and engineers) as an experimental medium. "Every culture will use the maximum level of technology available to it to make art" - Scott Draves, Generative Artist.

Recent societal currencies of prominence and dominance have included technology, information, biology, and raw data. All have been taken up by artists, scientists, laypersons, and other practitioners through the ease of widely available Internet-based tools (Examples in Figure 1).

Figure 1: Digital Art, InfoViz, BioArt, DataArt

The question would obviously arise as to ‘What are the next media for art?’ (e.g.; the continually new New Media). One way to answer is to prognosticate upcoming societal currencies. Some advancing societal currencies could be 3D printing feedstock (already starting to be exploited as an artistic medium), and pink goo – having more granularity and diversity of categories in synthetic biology.

Application of Complexity Theory: Away from Reductionist Phase Transitions

Reductionism persists as a useful node in the possibility space of understanding and managing the world around us. However the possibility space is now expanding to higher levels of resolution such as a focus on complex systems. Learning and tools are ratcheting in lock-step.

Some of the key complexity-related concepts in understanding collective behavior in real-life physical systems like the burning of a forest fire include:

• Organization and Self-Organization: Self-orchestration into order in both living and non-living systems, for example: salt crystals, graphene, protein molecules, schools of fish, flocks of birds, bee hives, intelligence and the brain, social structures 
• Order and Stability of Systems: Measurements of order, stability, and dynamical break-down in systems such as entropy, symmetry (and symmetry-breaking), critical point, phase transition, boundaries, and fractals (101 primer)
• Tunable Parameters: An element or parameter which doesn’t control the system, but can be tuned to influence the performance of the system (for example, temperature is a tunable parameter in the complex system of water becoming ice) 
• Perturbation and Reset: How and how quickly systems reset after being perturbed is another interesting aspect of complex systems 

 

Complexity science is not new as a field. What is new is first, a more congruous conceptual application of complexity thought in the sense of appreciating overall continuum of systems phenomena, not trying to grasp for the specific moment of a phase transition. Exemplar of this more comprehensive systems level thinking is Marcelo Gleiser’s reframe of the Grand Unified Theory problem and Sara Walker’s reframe of the Origins of Life problem. The other aspect that is new is the idea of working in an applied manner with complex systems, particularly with tools that are straightforward to implement like the math tools of non-linear dynamics, networks, chaos, fractals, and power laws (many inspired by the work of Stan Strogatz), and Software Tools like NetLogo, a multi-agent programmable modeling environment and ChucK, a digital audio programming language.

 

Evolutionary adaptations and artificial intelligence

Art and religion are human evolutionary adaptations. Are there similar evolutionary adaptations that human-level and beyond artificial intelligence would be likely to make? Another way to ask this is whether art and religion were predictable? It seems that they were, maybe not the detailed outcomes, but that mechanisms would arise to allow for the achievement of human objectives such as status-garnering and mate selection.

Likewise, it seems quite possible that human-level and beyond artificial intelligence would be likely to make evolutionary adaptations. Utility functions could be edited in many ways. The primary area could be performance optimization, continuously improving cognition and other operations. A second area could be related to societal objectives to the extent that artificial intelligence is present in communities. Artificial intelligence might not have art and religion, but could have related mechanisms for achieving external and internal purposes.

Future Art

Art interprets, defines, and responds to the social and intellectual milieu of any era.

Impressionists reacted to the precise definition of the day, somewhat from the newtech, photography, by making things more blurry. Modern art reacted to everything having been made visible by transcending into the conceptual and abstract. What is the iconic reaction that could drive the contemporary art of today into a radical new era?

Computers, data flows, communications, machines, computation, and software are the hallmark of today’s culture. Their ubiquity and influence invites rejection and commentary, and the anticipated response has been portrayed in dystopian machine art.

Beyond the obvious rejection of the machine era, computers, software, and data provide a vibrant new medium for art. For example, data visualization could be seen as art modulated with information.

Sentiment engines have become the art and barometer of worldwide emotion, for example We Feel Fine (blogs), and Pulse of a Nation (Twitter).

The time lapse photography concept used for flight pattern visualization (US, worldwide) could be extended to other areas.

Software code base data visualization
One form of contemporary art could be the sped-up visualization of code commits to software repositories for large-scale projects. The code might look like living organisms, possibly interesting new species. The fast flash of DOS is the prokaryote to Windows 7 and Mac OS X eukaryotes. iPhone could be the raptor to the Android’s human.

L'art et la science

One third of the attendees at this weekend’s SciBarCamp in Toronto were visual artists and musicians. The aim of the event was to not only be the first Science BarCamp but also to bring together artists, scientists and technologists.

Impetus for Collaboration
Some assumptions about art and science seemed to underlie the conference sessions. The main assumption was that artists and scientists should collaborate, not just inform and inspire each others work, but collaborate. There was also the assumption that artists are interested in science and technology and in being involved as science and technology become more pervasive in society. Another assumption was that art-science collaboration is somehow quite obvious, necessary and desirable in ways that art-politics, art-economics, art-markets, art-education, art-sports, etc. are not.

Why would collaboration between art and science be obvious and natural? Abstractly, there seems to be some overlap in the goals of art and science regarding the need to create, explore, probe, understand, explain and inspire. Both also have a degree of inherent universality, a need to communicate and a use of concept and metaphor.

Concretely, there are other reasons why a collaboration of art and science would be natural:

• To provide useful information display of scientific results, even if only to scientific audiences, particularly given the very large and very small scales at which contemporary science is conducted

• To respond to the hastening pace of science and technology change making the role of artists as interpreters, translators, experiencers and arbiters more imperative. Artists have a key role in the discussion of science and technology’s impact on life and culture

• To facilitate the increasingly audio-visual multimedia world of today with streaming video, 3d web and virtual worlds all seeking innovative data display tools and metaphors

Towards meaningful collaboration…

ArtBarCamp
Would an art BarCamp work? ArtBarCamp could be a standalone event or co-located at BarCamps or SciBarCamps. ArtBarCamp could have an emphasis on doing art in workshop formats, experiencing different kinds of art and talking about art. TED and SciBarCamp include artists and the audience has an opportunity to experience art, it would be wonderful to create art as well.