girlwonder

Hello again, Girlwonder! This missive reaches you from Sweden, where I’m on my way to Umeå. I’ll be spending a month here doing a fellowship with the HUMLab at the University of Umeå. Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking at the Umeå Institute of Design fall conference organized by Matt Cottam, along with Russell Davies, Dave Vondle and Matt Ward, and next month at the Critically Making the Internet of Things conference. It’s a delight to be back, to come a little bit earlier in the winter this time around… I came last year to Umeå to speak at the Media Places conference, which kicked off a friendship with Patrik Svensson, the head of the lab, and fomented the idea of delving into some digital humanities research here. Also, my family background is largely Scandinavian, with the Swedish branch of the family originating not far from Umeå: where no one will ever mistake me for Italian, everybody looks like me in Sweden.

There’s lots to catch you up on, much of which I’ll write about in the next few weeks. I spent the summer in San Francisco, writing my dissertation from a desk kindly provided by Adaptive Path, with a few intermittent weeks in Princeton for dissertation boot camp and summer barbecuing. We had a reunion for the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy in September, which I followed with a visit to Milan and London. The school year is rolling again at Art Center College of Design, and I’m teaching writing and advising thesis year students in the Graduate Media Design Program. And I turn 40 in 15 days, a milestone birthday that portends to be the start of an amazing decade. I will be in Sweden, maybe at the Treehotel, maybe in Berlin. And amidst the writing and movement, I’m applying for academic jobs.

My friend Fred Scharmen and I wrote a piece for Domus titled “Architecture Needs to Interact,” about better crossovers between architecture and interaction design — or for that matter, all of the design disciplines. It gave us a chance to reflect upon some of what he learned as an master’s in architecture student at Yale, and what I was exposed to as a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

Give our op-ed a read and let us know what you think.

Nicholas Negroponte’s books The Architecture Machine and Soft Architecture Machines are long out of print and often quite expensive. Following the links above will provide you with digital versions of the books.

A quick note that I’m presenting today at UC-San Diego at Designing Geopolitics. I’m giving a talk called “Intelligence in Search of A Body” on Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group as a part of the session titled, “Data as World, World-Image, World-Making,” with along with two people I admire greatly: Lev Manovich and Kelly Gates. Thank you,  Benjamin Bratton, for having me.

I’m on at 4 p.m. or so and it’s streaming live. Afterwards, there’s a discussion, also streaming live.

Walt Mink was a terrific band from St. Paul in the early 90s. They were named after a psychology professor at Macalester did a great cover of Pink Moon, they did a great couple albums, they were great live…

Thanks to Willfully Obscure, I heard something I’ve not heard since 1992, hanging out with my then boyfriend Andrew, a bike mechanic: their demo tape! Best of all — All-Nite Grocery, their song about going shopping at Rainbow Foods in the middle of the night. “10 Second Head Start!” Listen to it here.  Walt Mink – All Nite Grocery

And if you’re really a Walt Mink fan, visit Willfully Obscure and download the album there (and note that Candice, their beautiful and awesome bassist actually posted in the comments!

My last two Saturdays involved reciting poetry out loud in some unusual ways. The first episode: a manifesto, a bubble and a monster.

Two weeks ago, I participated in the Emerging Territories of Movement event at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. I was one of 15 people asked to deliver a manifesto—my group was “Urbanizing Technologies”—to a crowd of about 150 people inside a big, inflated bubble (provided by Raumlabor, one of my favorite architecture/urbanism groups). The day was magical: an exploding day of spring green and sunshine, of listening and arguing and drawing and talking.

I stood on a chair and took the mic in my hand–and realized that I was shaking with adrenaline. I shouted my manifesto, then followed it up with my favorite e.e. cummings poem, one that I’ve (largely) memorized, and that age 18 as a student in Düsseldorf, Germany, I stood on a chair and shouted it to my fellow high school students.

Photo by Enrique Ramirez

The manifesto, with the attendant images:
1. Technology always perpetuates the flow of capital: it is inevitable

2. Circulation equals communication

3. Technologies and transactions always microsize in tandem

4. As they seep into us, they colonize us from the inside out

5. We must hyperbolize and hypermobilize

6. To fight it, we must get small like the tiny technologies

7. We must atomize into a million dusty fragments

Then onward to e.e. cummings. In the middle of it, I noted, “I’m shaking.” I was.

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not.  Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victum(death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
-electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish
returns on its unself.
			          A world of made
is not a world of born-pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence.  We doctors know

a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go