cloud

By Søren Pold, 31 October, 2017
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9780262037945
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240
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All Rights reserved
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Approved by librarian
Abstract (in English)

Metainterface is about interface aesthetics and culture, and as an analytical strategy, it focuses on the tendency in art that reflects the contemporary interface; that is, on readings of artworks. In this sense, it presents contemporary art works, but it also reflects on the current challenges of contemporary interface culture in a situation where the computer’s interface seemingly both becomes omnipresent and invisible; where it at once is embedded in everyday objects and characterised by hidden exchanges of information between objects; or, what it conceptualizes as a metainterface. By bringing the tendency in artworks forward, the book aims to demonstrate how certain critical interfaces have an ability to reflect the deeper fissures within new technologies and the production of the work of art itself; an ability to show us an interface, after the interface has seemingly disappeared into ‘smart’ futures and new promises of anticipation, participation, and emancipation.

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978 1 910010 15 0
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Description (in English)

The Gathering Cloud collates research into the history and language of meteorology with current thinking about data storage and climate change. Archival material from the Met Office Archive and Library in Exeter has been studied and sifted, along with classical, medieval, and Victorian sources, including, in particular, Luke Howard’s classic essay On the Modifications of Clouds, first published in 1803.

This research material is presented as a sequence of texts and images, acting both as a primer to the ideas behind the project and as a document of its movement between formats, from the data centre to the illuminated screen, from the live performance to the printed page. In his foreword media theorist Jussi Parikka describes the work as “a series of material transformations made visible through a media history executed as digital collage and print publication, hendecasyllabic verse, and critical essay”.

This work won the New Media Writing Prize 2016.

source: http://www.uniformbooks.co.uk/thegatheringcloud.php

Part of another work
Pull Quotes

The Cloud is an airily deceptive name connoting a floating world far removed from the physical realities of data.

An estimated 1.8 trillion gigabytes of digital information are created and stored globally each year by ordinary consumers with no sense that data is physical and storing it has a direct impact on the environment.

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Description (in English)

This hybrid print- and web-based work work aims to address the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ computing through the oblique strategy of calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not. Fragments from Luke Howard’s classic “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds” (1803) as well as more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services. The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day. A small print iteration of “The Gathering Cloud” shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste. (Source: Author's description)

Part of another work
Pull Quotes

The Cloud is an airily deceptive name connoting a floating world far removed from the physical realities of data.

The fog comes on cute pics of little cat feet. Four million feline photos are shared each day. #lolcats track carbon footprints across The Cloud.

We walk on the bed of the sea of the air.

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Technical notes

This work will not work fully on phones or tablets. Best viewed on laptops or desktops.

By Scott Rettberg, 6 November, 2012
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Abstract (in English)

John Cayley's talk at the ELMCIP Remediating the Social conference "Invisible Participation" panel, where he used the ELMCIP Knowledge Base to make some important points about the function of the database in the future of arts and humanities research, imagining a future in which the documentation of a work within the database (the artistic event) is the accredited publishing event.

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By Eric Dean Rasmussen, 21 June, 2012
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Abstract (in English)

This new public cloud covers a subset of the market covered by the existing cloud. Please consult cloud market segmentation to understand the segments covered. The existing covers the traditional market (with an emphasis on managed complexity), along with all eight of the cloud market segments. It covers both public and private cloud. This new offering covers multi-tenant clouds. It has a strong emphasis on automated services, with a focus on the scale-out cloud hosting, virtual lab environment, self-managed virtual data center, and turnkey virtual data center segments. The existing weights managed services very highly. By contrast, the new emphasizes automation and self-service. When we say "public cloud", we mean massive multi-tenancy. This means that the service provider operates, in his or her data center, a pool of virtualized capacity in which multiple arbitrary users will have virtual machines on the same physical server. None need have any idea with whom he or she is sharing this pool of capacity. This does not include any of the cloud-enablement vendors nor does it include any of the vendors in the ecosystem. We expect to weight the scoring heavily towards the requirements of those who need a dependable cloud, but we also recognize the value of commodity cloud to our audience, for certain use cases. We did zero pre-qualification; if you asked for it, you got it. This is a data-gathering exercise. We do not release the qualification criteria in advance of the formal invitations; please do not ask.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2012 ELO Conference site)