Can anyone save me some time and brainwork and suggest why this makes me feel a bit icky? Perhaps an experiment in Cloudthink , Cloudcriticality, Cloudmeanness?
: ) Ruth -----Original Message----- From: info <[email protected]> Reply-To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Subject: [NetBehaviour] THE CLOUD – BROADCASTING HUMANITY Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:56:47 +0000 (sent to the list from Alex Haw) THE CLOUD – BROADCASTING HUMANITY There’s new weather ahead – inhabitable digital weather, rising above London, sometime soon. The CLOUD is a vast collaborative project to build a new spatial communications platform for the London Olympics in 2012. Designed by a global team of experts, it proposes a giant aerial cluster of transparent occupiable inflatable spaces saturated with intelligent LED technology, fed by real time information from all over the world. The CLOUD fulfils London’s potential to host the world’s first truly digital Olympics, a hymn to the democracy of the web, and the diversity of the city. The project celebrates our new age of digitality – a monument to Code rather than Carbon, flickering with feeds from around the world and fund-raised by a collective humanity self-organising around social networks. Like clouds themselves, the CLOUD arises from local conditions but effortlessly transgresses borders and boundaries, nourished by contributions and communications from communities collaborating across space and time. Visitors lend their presence, their thoughts and their energy, able to ascend London’s ethereal artificial apex by foot or bicycle, the potential energy of their descent transmuted into electricity powering this great new climate towards carbon-neutrality. The CLOUD also innovates Joerg Schlaich’s world-class cable-net structures a step further, with exceedingly slender elements and absolutely minimal material used to engineer an astronomical volume – a delicate yet robust filigree of reliable high-tech components, its ingredients familiar, their composition radically new. Its luminous LED surfaces will be fed both by user-generated content – “the People’s Pixels” – and by Google’s vast databases, spatialising vast ranges of information like energy use, decibel levels, spectator numbers, medal tallies, transport patterns, mobile activity, internet traffic etc. Like a cloud itself, the project has grown from many smaller elements, collecting partners and experts from around the world, forming an ever-shifting collective stretching across countries and timezones. The core team includes atmos, carlorattiassociati, the SENSEable City lab (MIT), Tomas Saraceno, Google, Arup, Sclaich Bergermann, Agence Ter, GMJ and Studio FM. The advisory committee includes writer and critic Umberto Eco, lead BMW designer Chris Bangle and architectural visionary William Mitchell. atmos first collaborated with MIT on a project for the Milan Triennale involving, appropriately, the clouding of smart glass for privacy; a short initial video of Spacebook is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYE5EXpgmN8 The CLOUD was initially conceived and coordinated by Carlo Ratti of carlorattiassociati - Walter Nicolino & Carlo Ratti; the team includes: atmos art/architecture group MIT Senseable City Laboratory urban research cluster Tomas Saraceno artist Joerg Schlaich lightweight-structures expert ARUP engineering group Agence Ter landscape architects Studio FM graphic designers GMJ visualisation experts Advisors to the team include Umberto Eco, Marco Santambrogio, Chris Bangle, Giuliano da Empoli, Antoni Muntadas, William Mitchell, Paul Richens, Gianluca Salvatori, Caterina Ginzburg, Liza Fior and Margo Miller. Related upcoming atmos projects include an installation of a new version of Weather Projection (synchronous social sunlight) in London in January and a performance of Lumiskin (luminous responsive enclosures) in February. For more information, please email Alex Haw at [email protected] or [email protected] All the best, Alex QUOTES Alex Haw (atmos) : The CLOUD proposes an entirely new form of observation deck, from which one can not only connect to the whole of London but the whole of the world, immersed in the gusts of weather and digital data. Like all tell-tale signs of brooding weather, the CLOUD is a display system. It is both screen and barometer, archive and sensor, past and future. The patterns of its animated skins offer a civic-scale smart meter for the Olympic Park and for London as a whole, sign-posting particular events, transport patterns, weather forecasts, timetables and footage which can be real-time or decades old. The CLOUD epitomises our global transformation from the age of steel and glass to a lighter, faster, more intelligent and more responsive age of Digitality. The CLOUD proposes a new digital weather system for London - and the world - lifting humanity high above the city into an ethereal space flickering with real-time connectivity. Inextricably intertwined with software, the CLOUD binds diverse activities together in one central space, its rain a gentle ambient drizzle of data. Like CLOUDs composed of minute droplets of water vapour, the London CLOUD aggregates a million myriad particles of humanity and information, its particulate powered by the people. Each luminous droplet of the CLOUD simultaneously represents a person in the city and a community from another nation - a varying real-time portrait of humanity and everyday Olympians. The CLOUD will be built by a collective rather than corporate effort, with each pixel of its vast information system co-owned in a grassroots global-timeshare scheme, each small-scale contribution helping to keep the lamp of London aflame. The CLOUD aims to be a symbol of global ownership, built through a bottom-up, distributed fundraising process. Many small contributions from several million people quickly amount to a vast sum – as witnessed by the Obama campaign’s fundraising. The CLOUD, like the weather, recognises no boundaries, connecting everyone across time and space, promising a space of physical and informational freedom un-tethered from the restraints of land, tradition and nation. The CLOUD symbolises the modern English spirit - fleet-footed and dynamic, light yet powerful, airy and diverse. Yet it also collects, and symbolises, the entire world. Everyone from around the world will be able to contribute to the CLOUD – whether through the bodily presence of their visit or by their contributions towards a particular sphere and their ownership of a single LED, helping to keep the lamp of London aflame. The CLOUD offers a real-time beacon for the 2012 Games, and for the broader climate of humanity. It is a monument to the Games and to freedom itself, empowered by the emancipations of knowledge and technology. People can choose to ascend to the CLOUD by foot or bicycle – each individual footstep contributing to a vast collective energy-harvesting effort. It will be a vast, collective, energy-harvesting effort. The people's energy, coupled with solar energy collected through on-site and off-site photovoltaic cells and various energy saving strategies will allow us to reach carbon neutrality, whereby the Cloud produces all the energy it uses. People power the CLOUD; their activities compose its rainfall, their energy-harvested descent provide its electricity. London, with its diversity and tolerance, unites countries; the CLOUD unites all people. Carlo Ratti (Massachusetts Institute of Technology & carlorattiassociati) : Our main idea is to apply to architecture some of the processes that are currently revolutionizing the digital world. It is about CLOUD computing but also about self-organizing processes. We would like the CLOUD to become a symbol of global ownership, built through a bottom-up, distributed fundraising effort. Our team works as a CLOUD and in the (digital) CLOUD- it goes beyond the old, traditional idea of Promethean architects and artists. After a kick-off meeting in London, we have been working for three months in a networked way, spread over five continents and ten different time zones, brought together by the power of the Internet. The team was not assembled based on physical proximity or the history of past collaborations – but simply based on the quality of each contribution, regardless of geographic location. We can build our Cloud with 5 million pounds or 50 million. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached. Dan Hill (ARUP) : The CLOUD develops Arup’s ongoing interest in the idea of the ‘civic-scale smart meter’, generating a structure that acts as a real-time feedback loop on the performance of urban activity within a civic framework. The CLOUD synthesises data drawn from the Olympic Games in real-time, with broader cultural narratives about industry, energy, innovation and connectivity. This data could be visualised as ambiguous spectacle, using the effects most redolent with the landscape and locale (CLOUD, smoke, steam, fog, mist, water, wind, mechanical engineering, data). The CLOUD's experience is physical and visceral, all about altitude, atmosphere, and exposure to the climate. Yet it is also digital, virtual and electronic, it is skin threaded with an addressable 3D matrix of LED pixels, alive to the touch, rippling in response to data and presence. As people climb the CLOUD and survey the city through these veils of glowing data, augmented reality interfaces overlay multimedia visualisations onto the CLOUD'S view of London. In contrast to the rich industrial history of this site, the CLOUD produces streams of data rather than plumes of smoke, the 'new smokestacks' of our burgeoning and emerging digital post-industrial economy. The CLOUD is the boldest manifestation of contemporary design practice, an innovative proposal that will forever change the face and climate of our great new world. Matt Brittin & Obi Felten (Google) : When Carlo Ratti approached our founder Larry Page, we chose to collaborate because of his bold and visionary concept, and because of the fit with Google's mission of organising the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful. We particularly like the idea of the CLOUD in the sky above London displaying information to the city and beyond, which makes it a powerful symbol for the openness and diversity of London, befitting the first truly digital Olympics. Google will provide useful and visually interesting content for the digital display, via Google tools such as Google Trends, Google Maps and Google Latitude. For instance, we could provide a custom feed of (aggregated and anonymous) searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time 'barometer' of the city's interests and mood. We plan that Google will provide free advertising on Google search and YouTube for the project, particularly to support the fundraising call to action to 'donate £1 for 1 pixel'. This will reach millions of Internet users in the UK and beyond. Joerg Schlaich (Schlaich Bergermann und Partner) Having worked on lightweight structures for many decades, we can easily build this great CLOUD, on budget and on time for 2012. Many tall towers have preceded this, but our great achievement is the high degree of transparency, the minimal use of material and the vast volume created by the spheres - all on exceedingly slender columns. Though buffeted by wind and the elements, the CLOUD will not shake – secured by the same modern damping technology used in Japanese skyscrapers to resist earthquakes. The CLOUD is a delicate yet robust filigree of reliable high-tech components, its ingredients familiar, their composition radically new. The CLOUD’s lightweight structure is extremely cost effective. Minimising material also means minimising material costs - and construction time, since most parts can be preassembled on the ground. This lightweight structure employs in its construction skilled labour from across the UK, creating jobs vital to the current economic climate. Benefits rain down from the CLOUD. LINKS www.raisethcloud.org main information portal [email protected] questions & comments http://www.facebook.com/raisethecloud Links to coverage thus far http://twitter.com/raisethecloud Collective aggregated tweets from the unbuilt building http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ7GqDzyGA Video #1 : concept http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmEBFWXMImM Video #2 : overview http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/technology/8350770.stm BBC exclusive http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2009/11/the-cloud.html Dan Hill post on City of Sound www.atmosstudio.com Alex Haw / atmos holding page http://senseable.mit.edu SENSEable City website http://www.carloratti.com Carlo Ratti / Walter Nicolino website http://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com Tomas Saraceno gallery website http://www.arup.com ARUP website http://www.sbp.de/en/fla/mittig.html Schlaich Bergermann website http://www.gmj.co.uk GMJ website www.studiofmmilano.it Studio FM website http://www.weatherprojection.co.uk Weather Projection http://www.vimeo.com/7219368 Lumiskin . . a t m o s . . . . . . . . 14 bacon street . london . e1 6lf . uk . . m +44(0)7815.040.619 (ah) . +44(0)7984.820.788 (fv) . . www.atmosstudio.com . [email protected] . . . THE CLOUD for the London Olympics 2012: www.raisethecloud.org . . + http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYJ7GqDzyGA + http://www.vimeo.com/7553509 . . . LUMISKIN : http://www.vimeo.com/7219368 + http://www.lumiskin.net . . . WEATHER PROJECTION : http://www.weatherprojection.co.uk . . . atmos have been awarded the ARUP residency, working with FACT in Liverpool . . . http://www.amazon.co.uk/XS-Extreme-Ideas-Small-Buildings/dp/0500342512 . . . http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=F_3uldilFG4&fmt=18 . . . this e-mail & any attachment is privileged and confidential . . if you are not the intended recipient, please delete the message and notify the sender . ta . . _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
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