Saturday, February 17, 2007

Human-Future Interaction


Jason Tester debuts his manifesto on Human-Future Interaction on IFTF's Future Now Blog!
Very cool Jason! As the future media artifacts designer at IFTF, Jason is the cultural heir to Bel Geddes' New York World's Fair 1939 Futurama exhibits. Here's a link to Jason's vision and his iFuture artifact. His work will figure prominently in my upcoming book on the Institute For the Future called Performing in the Future Tense where I look at how the future is being framed as a performance. I want my ifuture now!

Sunday, February 11, 2007

Anthropology of the Contemporary

Paul Rabinow and company have created a Collaboratory for inquiry into new practices in the human sciences. The emphasis is on bio-power and the ethnographic analysis of biotechnology and nanotechnology.

Their blogs are worth keeping up with:
On the Assembly of Things

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Upcoming Conferences

Upcoming conference at Western States Communication Association (WSCA) next week and I'll be chairing two panels. I'm excited that two of my favorite colleagues, Andy Wood of San Jose State and Jason Tester of the Institute For The Future, will be on the following panel with me:

Envisioning Future Media Spaces and Users: Augmenting Social Freedom or not?

In Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999), Lawrence Lessig discusses the increasing legislative umbrella that new technologies of software and hardware now hold over our freedom of action on a daily basis especially in the devices that circulate popular culture from ipods to Google tools. However, this control does not occur through the actions of public legislation; instead, in the name of protecting their intellectual assets, corporations are embedding restrictions into these devices without debate. Actions that were formally legal and free for example, such as copying a video on one's TV, may cost in the future with the advance of digital TV. To what extent will new media restrict our cultural expression or our political freedom? Media spaces (whether analog or digital) are multimedia environments connecting geographically dispersed spaces (Bly, S.A et al, 1993)*. Building from that stance, the panel explores the imagined and real affordances (the allowance or prohibition of daily action) that new media spaces allow, embed, or forbid. How can media spaces or their users augment social freedom in the future? The panel engages this topic with perspectives based on envisioning the future of ubiquitous media and computing in urban spaces, the aural enclaves of the Ipod, and the emergence of Dark Mobs.

A new pic of me-Cheerful yet introspective

Cool Links

Networked_Performance
Explores intersection of performance and ubiquitous computing

Paul Dourish
Great researcher of the ubicomp space

A blogging reincarnation

Well, it's nice to start a new blog to focus on my research interests in forecasting, futures research, ubiquitous computing, internet research and their intersection with performance genres and the stories we imagine, circulate, imitate about the future, the digital future.

Of course, I'll be sharing photos of my family. My little girl Amieh just turned one! And she loves clocks so I'm thinking of getting her a book by Peter Galison on time and the influence of clocks on Einstein. Of course, I probably won't expect her to read it for awhile but I have envisioned her as a brilliant empirical researcher already!

L'hitraot

Lonny J Avi