[DOORS] News from Doors of Perception: February 2003
desk at doorsofperception.com
desk at doorsofperception.com
Wed Feb 5 17:07:05 CET 2003
NEWS FROM DOORS OF PERCEPTION
We spent January doing er, other things, so here's a double helping of February news
from Doors of Perception
- Ivan Illich remembered
- Looking for foundations
- Flow TV samples online soon
- Living information at DEAF
- 'Eye music' in Amsterdam
- Next internet, please
- Design and mobility
- Ready for take-off?
- Greenaway in Berlin
- Risky in the Rockies
- Narcissistic in Texas
- Re-born in Monterey
- Emotional in Florida
- Methodical in Chicago
- Garbage in Europe
- Science of appliance
- Tourism information
- Designing designers in Milan
- Found in space
- Not the new Vormgevingsinstituut
- Groping in Ghent
- Silence of the music
- Powerpoint hell
IVAN ILLICH
We mourn the recent death of Ivan Illich, but celebrate one of the most inspiring
minds and lives of the twentieth century. Illich once wrote: "I believe that a
desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of
consumption; in the power of association, and the importance of local groups and
networks in opening up and supporting learning; in a lifestyle which will enable us
to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other; rather than a lifestyle
which only allows us to produce and consume". That was in 1970, thirty years before
No Logo. Illich's talk at Doors 4, in 1996, was one of the best we heard. If you have
not read Illich's writings, we commend them to you. Most of them are online.
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich.html
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-illic.htm
http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors/revamped_frameset.php?doorid=4
LOOKING FOR FOUNDATIONS
Doors of Perception will be ten years old in November this year. This struck us as a
good moment to launch a development campaign to fund a second decade of work.
Personal contacts work best when approaching foundations, so we are looking for
introductions to likely funders. If you can help us, please email:
kristi at doorsofperception.com
FLOW WEB UPDATES: TV SAMPLES ONLINE SOON
The popular video samples (by Marcel van der Drift) that kicked off each session at
the Flow conference, will be streamingly online on the flow-website soon (we hope by
the end of this week). The flow website has been updated, and the rest of the
transcriptions will follow.
http://flow.doorsofperception.com
LIVING INFORMATION AT DEAF
This year's DEAF (the Dutch Electronic Art Festival) explores the theme of Data
Knitting - the ways in which information is gathered, ordered and made accessible
through databases and archives. Installations from the likes of Sher Doruff, Lev
Manovich, George Legrady and Lynn Hershman investigate our interaction with the
complex and increasingly self-sorting dataverse, while a parallel symposium,
Information is Alive, focusing on the archive as living entity, is moderated by
Manuel de Landa. A copyright seminar, workshops, multimedia bus tour and other
goodies. Rotterdam, February 25 - March 9.
http://deaf.v2.nl/deaf/03/homepage/homepage.html
MUSIC FOR THE EYE
Sonic Lights is a festival of experimental film from abstract light renditions to
digitally manipulated video collages, featuring work by Stephen Beck, Skip Sweeney,
Stan Brakhage and others, accompanied by electronic music from the likes of Steim.
There's also a symposium for the theoretically minded. At the Balie and Paradiso,
Amsterdam, February 13 - 23.
http://www.balie.nl
NEXT INTERNET, PLEASE
Oxford University's Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy and the Oxford
Internet Institute unite to host the one-day conference, Politics of Code - Shaping
the Future of the Next Internet. Held in Oxford, February, it features speakers like
Larry Lessig and Esther Dyson.
http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/code/
DESIGN AND MOBILITY
Rotterdam will host the first International Architecture Biennial from May 7 - July
7, 2003. This large-scale event examines the issue of modern-day mobility and its
consequences for architecture and urban development. Architects, civil engineers,
urban planners, traffic experts, landscape architects, students, filmmakers and
photographers from around the world will spend two months presenting plans and
exchanging ideas. The biennale's curator is Francine Houben, partner in the Mecanoo
architecture firm and professor at Delft University of Technology.
http://www.1ab-rotterdam.nl/
READY FOR TAKE OFF?
Rotterdam may be on the move, but we were amazed to read that fewer than eight per
cent of Europeans have been in an aircraft.
http://www.eurocontrol.int/statfor/forecasts/index.html#forecast_reports
PETER GREENAWAY IN BERLIN
Film-maker Peter Greenaway launches the website of his new, multi-movie, multi-DVD
and online-game project, The Tulse Luper Project, at transmediale.03 in Berlin on 5
February, 16.00 hrs. The biggest media art festival in Germany has thus beaten its
big sister, the Berlinale Film Festival, to this treat in the converging field of
film, art and online media.
http://www.transmediale.de
RISKY IN THE ROCKIES
"What's the biggest risk you've ever taken? Did it change your life? In a time that
is fraught with danger, it may seem careless or even arrogant to take risks. Yet we
crave exploration and adventure; it is what expands our universe". Feel brave? Then
go to this year's International Design Conference in Aspen, August 20-23.
http://www.idca.org/2003/register.html
NARCISSISTIC IN TEXAS
Terrible news reaches us from Austin, Texas: "creatives" are no longer just a bunch
of narcissists making ads and websites, they have become a "new social class". Or so
argues Richard Florida, keynote speaker at this year's South by Southwest conference.
March 7 - 11, Austin, Texas.
http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/
RE-BORN IN MONTEREY
North American conferences seem to be getting weirder and more apocalyptic by the
week. What's going on? The theme of this year's TED conference, for example, is
"Rebirth". February 26 - March 1, Monterey, California.
http://www.ted.com/theconference/2003
EMOTIONAL IN FLORIDA
A culture is surely in deep, if not terminal, crisis when engineers start talking
about the design of emotions. Now Don Norman is at it. "In the past year I've been
catching up on the scientific work in emotion", he write. "The result is a new theory
of emotion, with implications for the development of autonomous machines and robots
as well as to design". Professor Norman is a great man but this is . . . sad.
http://www.chi2003.org/plenary.html
METHODICAL IN CHICAGO
Reassuringly, some feet remain earthbound in the US of A. Chicago's Institute of
Design has announced the launch of a one-year, methods-based professional degree for
mid-career designers, called the Master of Design Methods (MDM).
http://www.id.iit.edu/grad/mdm.html
GARBAGE IN OLD EUROPE
An exhibition called "Everything Garbage", at the Bellrive Museum in Zurich, is
accompanied by a conference called "Desire for cleanness, or lust for dirt?" February
6 through May 11.
http://www.german-design-council.de
SCIENCE OF APPLIANCE
"To maximise the value of (information) appliances, products from many vendors will
need to work together harmoniously in new and unexpected ways, requiring cross-
industry collaboration to discover and realize that value". Nice to see that
unbounded optimism still exists in the world. The first international conference on
appliance design involves such interaction design luminaries as Bill Sharpe, Bill
Moggridge from Ideo, Bill Gaver at the Royal College of Art, Lars Erik Holmquist from
Viktoria Institute, Sweden, and Tom Rodden at Nottingham University.
http://www.appliancedesign.org/1ad/
VAGUE IN VIENNA
A design school on "touristic information de luxe" takes place in Austria this
summer. "The focus is on investigating, evaluating and re-designing conventional and
digital information for visitors to a city like Vienna who move around on foot or by
using public means of transport or taxi. Special attention is paid to content
enriching a city experience with regard to its history, presence and future".
Findings will be presented at the international Vision Plus seminar at Lech/Arlberg,
September 18-20.
http://www.iiid.net/
FOUND IN SPACE
A seminar on "Orientation in Space", run by the German Design Council, and including
Eric Spiekermann as keynote speaker, takes place at the Public Design tradeshow in
Dusseldorf on February 13.
info at german-design-council.de
INFORMATION SOCIETY WEBSITE
The European Commission has launched a research networking website for its
Information Society programme.
http://www.cordis.lu/ist/rn/home.html
NOT THE NEW VORMGEVINGSINSTITUUT
A new organisation, the Premsela Foundation, has been set up in Holland to
"strengthen the social, economic and cultural role of Dutch design". We are asked to
call the new entity "Premsela" - and not to say that it's the new
Vormgevingsinstituut (the former home of Doors which closed, amid much fuss, in
2000). Premsela's director, Dingeman Kuilman, remains the Doors of Perception
Foundation's chairman until March.
http://www.premsela.org/
SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT DESIGN
This seminar on sustainable innovation looks at ways to create sustainable products,
services, and product-service-systems. 27-28 October 2003, Stockholm, Sweden.
http://www.cfsd.org.uk/events/tspd8
DESIGNING DESIGNERS IN MILAN
The fourth edition of Designing Designers, for industrial design course leaders, is
at at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, April 9 - 14, is organized by
Milan Polytechnic's Faculty of Design.
Apply to: designing.designers at polimi.it
GROPING IN GHENT
Do you think on, or with, your feet? New developments in a variety of disciplines -
ranging from philosophy, to medicine, to cognitive science - argue for "a revaluation
of the body as actively involved in processes of world making rather than a passive
decoding machine". So elucidates the announcement for a conference called
Multiliteracies: The Contact Zone which takes place in Ghent, Belgium, 22-27
September 2003. Email: kranenbu at xs4all.nl
http://memling.rug.ac.be/aila
SILENCE OF THE MUSIC
A large picture of the great composer's nose accompanies the homepage of this homage
to the relationship between John Cage and Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, "architect,
photographer, writer and music maker, from 1985 up to his disappearance ..." Esoteric
images accompany an ... event ..., which "explodes his musical creativity to the
highest level of the human sensitivity ... a message of peace and social rebirth for
all human beings on the Earth". Whatever it is, it's in Rovereto, Trentinio.
http://www.asa-art.com/cage2003.html
POWERPOINT HEAVEN AND POWERPOINT HELL
"Ian Parker in The New Yorker magazine states that according to Microsoft estimates,
more than 30 million PowerPoint presentations are made each day. If we assume some
relatively conservative meeting parameters of four people per presentation, a half-
hour presentation on average and the wasted time due to a poor presentation is one-
quarter of the presentation time, we arrive at a waste of 15 million person hours per
day. At an average salary of $35,000 per year for those attending the meeting, the
cost of that wasted time is a staggering $252 million and change each day".
http://www.clicktoaddtitle.com/
http://www.communicateusingtechnology.com/articles/wasting_250M_bad_ppt.htm
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