Name: Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture
Saturday 3 December: presentations by Matthew Fuller, Jon Bird, Andy Webster
15.00-18.00 Free entrance
Oudenoord 275 (use the entrance at the back) Utrecht, Netherlands
Calculation Space by Matthew Fuller
Software has an acknowledged impact on cities and space. Some parts of towns look like they just dropped out of a CAD program. Other spaces, like airports and border crossings treat people as good or bad data to be sorted. Modern societies depend on the ability to abstract and quantify particular parts of life, to turn them into numbers, things that can be known by numbers, and then feed that knowledge back into living and non-living matter. As mathematics and matter become more closely interwoven, can we distinguish a politics or culture of calculation? Hip Hop, childrens games and speculative software offer some interesting clues.
More Paskian Strategies by Jon Bird and Andy Webster
The Crystalpunk Workshop earlier picked up on the work of cyberneticist Gordon Pask and his unique theories about communication. Today Jon Bird and Andy Webster will present their Pask inspired work. In the 1950-1960ties Pask build crystal computers, electro-chemical contraptions that evolved sensors tailor made to environmental input. In 2002 Jon Bird was involved in constructing an electronic circuit that evolved into a radio: to teh surprise of its creators it started to pick up and transmit signals from a nearby computer. Andy Webster is an artist who has worked with Jon Bird on a project in which they recreated an electro-chemical computer.
