Climatologists have confirmed it is now too late to avoid certain global warming and that a shift to a low or zero carbon economy is thus vital. This implies an urgent transition to renewable energy sources as well as radical adaptive measures, which collide against established industrial monopolies. This episode gathers several geoengineering patent applications, and through these documents presents the history of these emerging technologies and the private interests, actors, think tanks, and corporations behind them. Within the debate of climate change mitigation, geoengineering—the technological management of weather patterns and carbon capture processes—occupies an especially politicized place. It has slowly ...

Abstract Browsing is a project that consists of both software and physical objects. The browser plugin is a free software that you can easily install. When you turn on the plugin, you can surf the web but all web content is reduced to abstract compositions (colored rectangles). It shows the skeleton of the web. It’s like seeing an X-ray of a building, showing the structural elements. Web pages are built of many elements, information is organized and categorized. Things we use every day but are not aware of. Invisible parts. Websites are constantly tweaked to maximize their efficiency, separate from aesthetic ...

Dean Johnson, futurist and head of innovation at Brandwidth, explains how the Internet of Things relies on continuity of experience. 2:02 — About Dean Johnson and what he does 5:14 — Mobile technologies 8:50 — How we developed our first gadget 20:27 — How does an iBook work 21:05 — Urban environments 23:50 — Libraries 25:42 — How do we actually interact with content 37:26 — Why the iPad was so popular and successful 42:19 — Back to the future

Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice is an accessibility guide geared toward small-scale arts nonprofits and the potentially expansive publics these organizations serve. It details specific ways in which disabled people are excluded from cultural spaces and offers possible solutions to those barriers. Moving away from historical and juridical definitions of accessibility, this guide considers the unique capacity of small scale arts organizations to meet the needs of disabled communities. It engages principles of disability justice to think through what can urgently be done to create more equitable and accessible arts spaces…

In his letter to Ada Augusta Lovelace of July 2, 1843, Charles Babbage writes: “I like much the improved form of the Bernoulli Note but can judge of it better when I have the Diagram and Notation.” He is referring to the last in a set of notes written by Lovelace that interpreted the Analytical Engine, the first fully automatic and universal computer, invented by Babbage in 1834, although never actually completed during his lifetime. She appended these notes to her translation of an article written by Luigi Federico Menabrea after he had heard Babbage present a paper on the ...

Two topics emerge from the third session of Taming the Horror Vacui. One is apparent, the other is fleeting. One is sought, the other is coincidental. Centred around the guided tour given by city planner Emiel Arends in Rotterdam in June 2020, the event firstly deals with the ways in which wind shapes the city and the city shapes the wind. The locations in the tour, explains Arends, are examples of how the city landscape interacts with its aeolian one, and is marked by specific architectural interventions. Rib’s focus on the material language of the city joins Haseeb Ahmed’s ongoing ...

Aidan Quinlan is a designer who also teaches “A Handmade Web.”

This next-to-last issue of Taming the Horror Vacui, titled Air Aggregation, brings together artworks and air. Haseeb Ahmed’s art installation at Rib and the wind tunnel at its center have been used for experiments and workshops throughout the entire long-term artist’s program. Expanding on this approach, this publication collects annotated images of artworks brought to Rib by Piero Bisello to be tested in Ahmed’s wind tunnel in June 2021. If wind and air are the mediums of choice in Ahmed’s art, the aggregation of different practices can be seen as his modus operandi. The outlook of Rib as an institution hosting ...

The purpose of this workbook is not to tell you how to write alt- text. There are many existing resources that provide guidelines and how-tos (you can find a few listed in the Tools section). Our primary intent is to put alt-text on your radar (if it wasn’t already), to get you thinking about it creatively, and to explore a few of the key questions that come up when translating images into text. We hope these exercises make clear that, like all accessibility practices, writing alt-text requires ongoing practice, learning, and collaboration. The needs and wants of blind and low vision people ...

The notion of artificial intelligence may seem distant and abstract, but AI is already pervasive in our daily lives. Anatomy of an AI System analyzes the vast networks that underpin the “birth, life, and death” of a single Amazon Echo smart speaker, painstakingly compiling and condensing this huge volume of information into a detailed high-resolution diagram. This data visualization provides insights into the massive quantity of resources involved in the production, distribution, and disposal of the speaker.

At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions of human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Nonetheless, they are inscribing and building those assumptions into a new world, and will increasingly play a role in how opportunities, wealth, and knowledge are distributed. We offer up this exploded view map and essay as one way to begin seeing across a ...

The Anthropocene Issue is a special series of short videos shot during the “Anthropocene Curriculum,” campus held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, from November 14 to 22, 2014. The program brought together more than a 100 people from various disciplines around a series of workshops, presentations, and talks. It included, among many others, specialists in climatology, geography, law, history of science and technology, architecture, and art to discuss the concept of the Anthropocene. This special series presents the week-long gathering with a set of close-ups, interviews, group discussions, and informal conversations with some of its participants, launched over two ...