"a symposium on the effects of climate change in the global south and post industrial nations"
The Silent City Collective is “a symposium on the effects of climate change in the global south and post industrial nations” – its well worth a watch – if you haven’t already then check out the Silent City Collective site and make sure you make it to the Exhibition just off Brick lane this May. My good friend Cara Nahaul is curating along with Emily Whitebread.
The collective
A reaction against exhibitions such as ‘Earth: Art of a Changing World’ hosted by the RA which tend to present a classless vision of ecological justice made in the West, prioritising the needs of the developed nations over all others.
Silent City will be a symposium that addresses the issue of climate change with a particular focus on its impact on the Third World. It will comprise a line-up of interdisciplinary programmes, which together will explore climate change as an environmental crisis that requires a development solution.
There is a growing need to address the global geopolitics of environmentalism. Typically, climate change events have failed to address these issues that concern both the global south and post industrial nations. In light of this, many people have become apathetic and disillusioned about the prospects for change.
Silent City demonstrates that climate change is no longer a scientific debate or a protest march but a pervasive aspect of all of our lives; aiming to provide a different experience to explore these serious issues.
Someone sent me this random streetview find – Pliers revenge!
Next Friday I fly out to Bangkok, Thailand for a month of sun. Just wanted to shout out thank you to all the people that have given advice, helped me prepare and the few that are coming with me – I will update the blog a few times while out there – stick a few photographs on flickr etc and then do a proper photo dump etc when I am back, hardly taking any technology so should be a change from the normal! I was hoping to refresh this blog style but I haven’t got round to it – I updated my homepage but thats about it.
Thailand Here I come!
P.S. Silent City Collective site is coming soon 😉
Far from being a google promoter, I do like this. Google Apps Script opens up google spreadsheets to scripting – Just like Macro’s etc in Excel, but with Javascript. This effectively opens up a world of online data processing and analysis that would have not been easily possible within a browser before hand, especially suiting web-devs its nice to see an amount of custom programmability going into semi-democratised tools.
I can see applications ranging from replacing my SEO QUAKE’s list parameter check to many many web marketing, analytics, data crawling and recording processes, all of which you could do in ms.excel, yet more accessible here. This isn’t a big deal, but landed on my lap this morning so here’s the share 😉
Is funny how technology develops…it takes a while for the lag to catch up I suppose. I like this novel pursuit of new interfaces between humans and technology, I can’t help thinking it wont end up used at all like it is shown here though, I see this more useful to warfare, body electronic metrics and gaming than for personal devices like mobile phones. I could be wrong though, anyway I like the idea of Microsoft Skinput, at least the projection part!
Over the years I have used a whole bunch of Music Libraries, streaming programs, download tools, websites and formats for maintaining a way of listening to music I liked and as good as they have all been, not a single one has been perfect. I am currently with Spotify, which is the current best (or I wouldn’t be with it) that I have seen, which is good for its simplicity, range of available songs which are stream-able and ultimately is currently cleaning up because it was early to jump to a new model for music sales. Give it a few years and most of the media we used to pay for on disks, tapes, digital download will be streamed to us (or streamcached) – its a way the industries can move forward with technology instead of battling it and millions and millions of pirates. Games, tv, films, music will all become services fed to whatever technology we want them fed too, putting the control of the flow of data back in the hands of the owners, reaffirming ownership laws and creating a new dynamic between creative arts and media consumption.
This I think is a given at this point, but anyway. I wanted to write this post to put down some ideas I have had recently after I started using a few new music services. So this really is just an idea dump more than anything (if you haven’t a lot of time just JUMP TO THE IDEAS and perhaps you can tell me what you think in a comment!) If I had intentions to move into music software perhaps I would write something along these lines, but to be honest I would prefer if Spotify or similar invested some of their first few years profits and did it :p
CUDA on Nvidia cards rocks. This box’s ATI was hardcore about 9 months ago, but even though the latest ATI card’s are the world’s best in performance, and by no means bad, NVIDIA’s CUDA changes anything for anyone who uses a pc for more than facebook. SUPER is a video converter that does prettymuch every type of video to any other type of video, its good, but its slow. Dreadfully slow. I have the best AMD from 9 months ago, which dispute its flaws is no small chip but encoding video takes an absolute age.
After seeing a post (cant find it now typically) last week on tricking software into using the gpu instead of the cpu for doing things like 3D renders I randomly did a search not knowing anything about GPU video converting – turns out theres already software in market. Badaboom converts video using any CUDA friendly nvidia graphics card, at a supposed 20 x the speed. ATI’s version – Avivo has a ton of mixed reviews on the net, people saying it doesnt even use the GPU it uses the CPU, I am not sure either way – but DAMN CUDA is an ace in the hole for Nvidia.
With real time rendering engines, video converters and scientific modelling software already using and abusing the GPU what will this mean for the Personal Computer of the 2010’s? More to the point are ATI going to follow them down this path? I doubt it personally, they will focus their efforts as they seem to have been on the multi-display, media, gaming rich end of the market. I don’t follow the whole graphics card war thing to be honest but I would put my money in NVIDIA right now. With cloud computing and gaming coming to us via a pc things like CUDA gpu clustering and this whole program-open aspect to the cards is going to line them up well for both sides of the telephone/optical cable.
Of late I have been listening to a bunch of dubstep music and I am completely addicted to the track B-Complex Beautiful Lies, check it out:
Posted in Music Tagged Dubstep, Music
