Flipping the Record

This interstitial chapter considers the discourse of postmodernism as it applies to Laurie Anderson’s Big Science. Placing the concept in its historical context, the chapter ultimately downplays postmodernism, using Sara Ahmed’s feminist critique of its apparent relevance to “everything.” In recognizing what postmodernism fails to encompass or relate to, the chapter likewise notices the qualities of everythingness on the album and points out the gaps and cracks therein. It also takes up the circa 1982 concerns of the vinyl LP as a physical medium for music.

Data & Craft: The Book Beautiful in the Digital Age

<p>In 1917 Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson threw his life’s work off the Hammersmith bridge into the river Thames. Cobden-Sanderson did this for the ideal of the Book Beautiful, a book that he thought should be made for beauty, with all constituting elements considered; a book with presence and aura due to the manner in which it is crafted. In contemporary culture technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and as a result we read and interact more online than we ever have before. The ease of the internet seems to make the book redundant, yet despite this the book cannot be replaced as it is an emotive physical medium for our text. The ownership of a book is the closest relationship we can have to a text, belying the widespread prevalence of digital texts. This thesis investigates the relevance of the Book Beautiful in our technological society and explores the importance of the Book Beautiful today. One distinct importance is the collecting and ownership of books, in particular the Books Irreplaceable; those so saturated with memories that we cannot part with them. The Book Beautiful facilitates this relationship and nurtures the human side of us, retaining the associations and emotions that permeate it. One hundred years ago Cobden-Sanderson believed that only the exclusive use of the human hand can make a Book Beautiful, but today there exist digital manufacturing machines that can both facilitate the production of the Book Beautiful and facilitate its growth within our communities. To use such technology and yet retain the qualities of craft is called Digital Craft, which this thesis demonstrates is not a contradiction in terms.</p>

Data & Craft: The Book Beautiful in the Digital Age

<p>In 1917 Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson threw his life’s work off the Hammersmith bridge into the river Thames. Cobden-Sanderson did this for the ideal of the Book Beautiful, a book that he thought should be made for beauty, with all constituting elements considered; a book with presence and aura due to the manner in which it is crafted. In contemporary culture technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous and as a result we read and interact more online than we ever have before. The ease of the internet seems to make the book redundant, yet despite this the book cannot be replaced as it is an emotive physical medium for our text. The ownership of a book is the closest relationship we can have to a text, belying the widespread prevalence of digital texts. This thesis investigates the relevance of the Book Beautiful in our technological society and explores the importance of the Book Beautiful today. One distinct importance is the collecting and ownership of books, in particular the Books Irreplaceable; those so saturated with memories that we cannot part with them. The Book Beautiful facilitates this relationship and nurtures the human side of us, retaining the associations and emotions that permeate it. One hundred years ago Cobden-Sanderson believed that only the exclusive use of the human hand can make a Book Beautiful, but today there exist digital manufacturing machines that can both facilitate the production of the Book Beautiful and facilitate its growth within our communities. To use such technology and yet retain the qualities of craft is called Digital Craft, which this thesis demonstrates is not a contradiction in terms.</p>

Sustainability in the Design of an Itinerant Cultural Exhibition. Study of Two Alternatives

The sustainability improvement of museums and exhibitions is a recent concern for multiple organisations. The application of sustainability criteria is one of the most important strategies of innovation in design activities, products, and service systems. This study analyses the sustainability of two alternatives to an itinerant cultural exhibition service. The exhibition travels to 12 destinations over 3 years and is within a space of 300 m2. In the first alternative, the contents are printed and exposed on a physical medium, and in the second, audiovisual media projects the contents on the walls. Life cycle sustainability assessment is applied to evaluate the impacts in the environmental dimension and the economic and social dimensions. The calculation of indicators, such as the greenhouse gas emissions, total costs, and working time, which are referred to each sustainability dimension, is conducted. A descriptive, comparative study was performed to identify the impact factors with a higher incidence. The results demonstrate that the audiovisual exhibition is more sustainable than the printed exhibition, with a difference of 8.7%, 7%, and 6.6% in GWP100, CE, and TW indicators, respectively.

Machine Learning: A Catalyst for THz Wireless Networks

With the vision to transform the current wireless network into a cyber-physical intelligent platform capable of supporting bandwidth-hungry and latency-constrained applications, both academia and industry turned their attention to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) enabled terahertz (THz) wireless networks. In this article, we list the applications of THz wireless systems in the beyond fifth generation era and discuss their enabling technologies and fundamental challenges that can be formulated as AI problems. These problems are related to physical, medium/multiple access control, radio resource management, network and transport layer. For each of them, we report the AI approaches, which have been recognized as possible solutions in the technical literature, emphasizing their principles and limitations. Finally, we provide an insightful discussion concerning research gaps and possible future directions.

Chaos for communication

This work shows that chaotic signals with different power spectrum and different positive Lyapunov exponents are robust to linear superposition, meaning that the superposition preserves the Lyapunov exponents and the information content of the source signals, even after being transmitted over non-ideal physical medium. This work tackles with great detail how chaotic signals and their information content are affected when travelling through medium that presents the non-ideal properties of multi-path propagation, noise and chaotic interference (linear superposition), and how this impacts on the proposed communication system. Physical media with other non-ideal properties (dispersion and interference with periodic signals) are also discussed. These wonderful properties that chaotic signals have allow me to propose a novel communication system based on chaos, where information composed from and to multiple users each operating with different base frequencies and that is carried by chaotic wavesignals, can be fully preserved after transmission in the open air wireless physical medium, and it can be trivially decoded with low probability of errors.

An Extraordinary Journey: The Memoirs of a Physical Medium by Stewart Alexander

This is a revised and updated version of Alexander’s book published in 2010 under the same title. The changes are minor; there are some additional reflections on the subject of Spiritualism by the author, but mainly they consist of additional accounts from sitters who have taken part in séances with Alexander since the original publication. Some appear in additional chapters described as “seminars,” reported chronologically, but in fact they are also witness accounts of séance experiences. The most significant addition, in terms of reporting startling new phenomena, is the Epilogue provided by American journalist and author Leslie Kean. There is no index. I found this book very readable. Also, having read it, I would find it difficult to disagree with the descriptions of Alexander by the late David Fontana (who provided the Foreword) and Annette Childs (who provided An Appreciation) as a person of integrity and dedication, as well as intelligence and good humour; in fact, “a true gentleman” (p.xxiii).

Digital reality and ontological status of digital technologies

In the article, based on the analysis of the definition of the category of reality, as well as the main trends in the development of non­classical philosophy, the legitimacy of introducing the concept of digital reality into the scientific and philosophical language is substantiated. The basis for asserting the existence of digital reality in the structure of the universe is a specific set of properties of digital technologies (digital objects), which distinguishes them from other objects of the universe and determines their special existence. In the article, based on the highlighted properties of digital technologies, they are defined as functional objects that perform operations with information presented in discrete form (measured in bits) by executing programs (algorithm) on a physical medium.

Fossils from the Future

<p>The future surrounding our world is unknown and difficult to foresee. There is a desire to communicate the innumerable amount of data produced from advanced scientific research about our present and predicted world into mediums that are comprehensible to the general audience. </p> <p>This research explores the opportunity for data to be translated into an easily interpretable visual and physical medium. By using a procedural system, this allows for an undetermined number of outcomes to be explored efficiently, including those which are initially unknown or cannot be perceived. This is in contrast to traditional 3D modelling software, where the designer must fully control and manipulate the finer details of a model. </p> <p>In this research portfolio, a Research Through Design methodology is utilised to enable practical experimentation based on a design criterion, incrementally developed alongside the progression of the experiments. Through screen-based visualisations, the possible products of a procedural system are presented as a morphological timeline¹. The designer’s implementation and influence of this procedural system guide the direction of this timeline through parameter manipulation, without having a precise vision for the output. </p> <p>Through extracting models at desired points along the morphological timeline and applying a voxel-based 3D printing approach on the Stratasys J 750 to encapsulate them in resin (VeroClear), the models are introduced into the tangible dimension. This translates the screen-based model into a physical fossil to communicate information through a tangible medium. These fossils intend to elicit discussion around production of artefacts that are not yet known or cannot be perceived. Acting as a viewpoint, the procedural system may visually anticipate these products before privileging the physical. Hence the 3D printed object is provided as a new spatial understanding to communicate information. </p> ¹ Morphological Timeline: A frame based timeline within the software Houdini that visually simulates the possible variations in form.

Fossils from the Future

<p>The future surrounding our world is unknown and difficult to foresee. There is a desire to communicate the innumerable amount of data produced from advanced scientific research about our present and predicted world into mediums that are comprehensible to the general audience. </p> <p>This research explores the opportunity for data to be translated into an easily interpretable visual and physical medium. By using a procedural system, this allows for an undetermined number of outcomes to be explored efficiently, including those which are initially unknown or cannot be perceived. This is in contrast to traditional 3D modelling software, where the designer must fully control and manipulate the finer details of a model. </p> <p>In this research portfolio, a Research Through Design methodology is utilised to enable practical experimentation based on a design criterion, incrementally developed alongside the progression of the experiments. Through screen-based visualisations, the possible products of a procedural system are presented as a morphological timeline¹. The designer’s implementation and influence of this procedural system guide the direction of this timeline through parameter manipulation, without having a precise vision for the output. </p> <p>Through extracting models at desired points along the morphological timeline and applying a voxel-based 3D printing approach on the Stratasys J 750 to encapsulate them in resin (VeroClear), the models are introduced into the tangible dimension. This translates the screen-based model into a physical fossil to communicate information through a tangible medium. These fossils intend to elicit discussion around production of artefacts that are not yet known or cannot be perceived. Acting as a viewpoint, the procedural system may visually anticipate these products before privileging the physical. Hence the 3D printed object is provided as a new spatial understanding to communicate information. </p> ¹ Morphological Timeline: A frame based timeline within the software Houdini that visually simulates the possible variations in form.