Category Archives: New Utopia

I think we should be very grateful for the virus because it might be the reason we survive as a species.

Dutch trends forecaster Li Edelkoort has a provocative outlook on Covid-19, the deadly coronavirus strain that has upended manufacturing cycles, travel plans, and conference schedules around the world. Speaking at Design Indaba, a conference in Cape Town last week, the celebrated 69-year old design industry advisor pictured Covid-19 as a sobering force that will temper our consumerist appetites and jet-setting habits.

Edelkoort, who in recent years has become a fashion sustainability crusader, believes we can emerge from the health crisis as more conscientious humans. We need to find new valuesvalues of simple experience, of friendship, she told Quartz. It might just turn the world around for the better.

The virus will slow down everything, Edelkoort notes. We will see an arrest in the making of consumer goods. That is terrible and wonderful because we need to stop producing at such a pace. We need to change our behavior to save the environment. Its almost as if the virus is an amazing grace for the planet.

Having been a consultant to global brands like Armani, Hyundai, and Google, in a career spanning more than 45 years, Edelkoort is attuned to how travel restrictions affect businesses. Then, of course, there is the crucial role China plays in the supply chain for companies around the world. People will try to do things via Skype, but that seldom works, she explains. We are already two months behind, which means summer-themed goods wont be delivered or will arrive too late to be sold.

But after the coronavirus, utopia looms, Edelkoort suggests. Indeed, Covid-19 could open new avenues for innovation, akin to how the bubonic plague ushered in an era of labor reforms and improvements in medicine in the Middle Ages. Being confined to our own towns or cities could foster a revival of cottage industries and an appreciation for locally made goods, she says. There are so many possibilities, Edelkoort says. Im strangely looking forward to it.

See more here:

Li Edelkoort says that the coronavirus will save the planet - Quartz

New York, once the blueprint of a global, modern city, consumes a whopping 5 billion litres of water a day, according to Cedrik Neike, chief executive of smart infrastructure at Siemens.

Thats twenty times the energy or resources used by an urban dweller in Jakarta. Its a major urbanisation issue if everyone in cities had the same ambition to live as prosperously as a New Yorker, Neike told journalists at the media launch of this years world expo, Expo 2020 Dubai, which the German technology conglomerate will digitalise from the ground up via Internet of Things (IoT) technology.

We need to think of how we can live more sustainably in cities, while providing people with access to resources that will allow them to live safely and comfortably, he added, noting that most urban dwellers today spent 90 per cent of their lives in buildings, making the built environment a prime area to revolutionise with digital technology.

According to the team behind Expo 2020, this years world exhibition serves as a new prototype for future cities, where IoT and smart-city technologies will be integrated into the urban landscape to improve the performance of services such as energy, transportation and utilities.

From waste management systems that can detect when bins are reaching full capacity to weather data applications that can predict the likelihood of a sandstorm, Siemens applications will be used at Expo 2020 to not only prepare for weather and waste but enhance the comfort and energy performance across all buildings and structures.

Cities today consume two-thirds of the worlds resources, and by 2050, two-thirds of the global population is expected to live in urban areas. In order to accommodate this growth sustainably, the smart city has thus been hailed as a solution to the many problems suffered by existing cities, such as crippling traffic congestion, hazardous air pollution and burgeoning waste.

According to data from the International Data Corporation, governments worldwide are looking to spend close to $200 billion on smart city initiatives by 2023 to improve sustainability, maximise efficiency and reduce energy usage in cities.

Enhancing the well-being of people living in cities while minimising the impact of urban infrastructure on the planet is the driving factor behind the smart construction of the 4.38 square kilometre Expo 2020 site.

Set to open in October, Expo 2020 is an actual blueprint for a future city called District 2020, which will comprise both residential and commercial spaces. Major structures built for the expo will remain as permanent fixtures, and repurposed into innovation, cultural and educational services once the expo ends in 2021.

District 2020 promises to be the city of the future, but is not the first to claim itself a leader in the new era of sustainable urbanism. Today, smart cities are all the rage, and visions of techno-utopia have sprouted across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

In the United Arab Emirates, developers behind The Sustainable City have transformed a once barren desert strip to a compact green city, where homes are fitted with solar panels, the streets are car-free and urban garden domes encourage residents to grow and eat local.

The Sustainable City in Dubai, developed by Diamond Developers, features efficient appliances and car-free zones in its residential and commercial units. Image: The Sustainable City

Songdo City in South Korea has a similar image of clean and green living, where rubbish trucks are nowhere in sight and trash is automatically sucked out of homes and into an underground sorting centre to be recycled, buried or burned.

In developing regions, Asia and Africa in particular, cities are still expanding incredibly fast and the latest smart technologies are an opportunity for new development, said Dominique Bonte, vice president of technology research company ABI Research.

According to Swiss Bank UBS chief investment office, Asias smart city market could reach $800 billion in 2025, with China leading the smart city expansion.

Although building cities from scratch does take space away from open, public areas, they allow for infrastructure to be built in a more sustainable way with a lower carbon footprint and very minimal impact on the environment, Bonte said, adding that while old cities can be upgraded incrementally, they will never be as sustainable as new developments.

For developing countries, smart technologies offer the opportunity to leapfrog traditional challenges by optimising planning and design to meet the unique needs of local residents, and by facilitating the process of rapid urbanisation, population migration and growing scale of cities, echoed Derek Wang, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Singapore, which has helped to reduce traffic congestion in Malaysia and China using smart technology.

However, while new cities appear to signify environmental and technological progress, many are still far from the cosmopolitan ideal that cities like New York represent.

Initially intended to be the worlds first zero-carbon city when it was first constructed in 2008, Masdar City in Abu Dhabi has been struggling to attract both residents and investors, as well as meet its carbon-neutrality goals. Similarly, Songdo city has similarly been described as a Chernobyl-like ghost town that is increasingly catered to foreign expatriates.

Meanwhile, new cities such as Eko Atlantic in Nigeria, dubbed the countrys new Dubai, have led observers to deplore the rise of privatised green enclaves for the ultra rich while experts worry that governments are building from scratch to avoid dealing with the issues plaguing existing metropolises.

Technology companies, construction companies, and the real estate industry are leveraging the many challenges facing cities in the global south to convince people that new cities are an important solution rather than fixing existing cities, which is not as profitable, said Sarah Moser, the director of the urban studies program at McGill University, in an interview with The Guardian.

However, Limin Hee, director of research at Singapores Centre for Liveable Cities, believes that smart cities are being developed in a way to make every day life better for the people, which includes giving people more choices and making information more available to them through technology.

Technology is an enabler for livability and not an end in itself. Smart is just another layer to the city, she said. You need a reason for people to live there. There needs to be jobs, good housing, a good environment. I doubt there is any country in the world that was built for the sake of being smart.

Ultimately, our work is not just about ingenious technology, but about creating added value for society and making our cities better places to live, said Oliver Kraft, Siemens head of project and account management for Expo 2020.

You need a reason for people to live [in smart cities]. There needs to be jobs, good housing, a good environment.

Limin Hee, director of research, Centre for Liveable Cities

In order to make more accurate decisions, smart cities typically collect data from people through the phones in their pockets, sensors watching their every move and other smart devices. This means that smart cities often have the power to identity where people are and what they are doing.

By gathering information through citizens smartphones, the city can understand where the problems are and how to solve them, said Bonte. However, there is the obvious downside to how these data are being collected and used.

When a plan was first introduced in 2017 to develop Quayside, a smart city within a city in Toronto, the project received strong criticism from citizens who were concerned about how the developer, a subsidiary of Google, was collecting and using citizens personal data. Fellow tech giants that are now powering the smart city revolution have also been accused ofurban profiteering.

It is less of a problem if you include and involve citizens in what is being done with their data. You need to be transparent with how much data is being used to improve their lives, said Bonte, who added that citizens willingness to give up their data also depended on culture.

In China, people dont have such a big issue with surveillance, unlike in many Western countries, where it is more sensitive and people are very suspicious of governments using their data, he said.

When asked about how Siemens is addressing issues related to data governance and privacy, Kraft told journalists at the media launch that Expo 2020 will be inclusive of citizens and as transparent as possible, with the help of social media.

Cities have also increasinglybecome targetsfor cyber-attacks, an issue that Dietmar Siersdorfer, chief executive officer of Siemens Middle East, described as one of the biggest challenges facingdigitisingindustries.

In India last year, power utilities in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were disrupted after they came under attack from hackers. Similarly, residents in the city of Atlanta in the United States were unable to pay parking tickets and utility bills after Iranian hackers launched a ransomware attack on the city.

The need to develop new cybersecurity and data privacy measures is becoming more apparent and protocols have to be put in place to harmonise data regulations, which is what Southeast Asia is doing by creating frameworks for data privacy and protection, said Hee.

Ultimately, smart city initiatives should not be imposed by governments, said Bonte, noting the importance of consulting citizens on their needs and concerns, especially when it comes to their personal data and social well-being.

You can build all this new high-tech infrastructure, but in the end citizens have to want to live there. They might not care that much about sustainability, but people are interested in quality of life. Cities being built from scratch should think long and hard about how they should be conceived to attract the right people and keep them safe.

Siemens sponsored the writers visit to the media launch of Expo 2020 Dubai.

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Smart cities of the future: eco-utopia or dystopian nightmare? - Eco-Business

To the editor:

To whom it concerns, I am not a boomer, I am just a Gen Xer, and I am not going to lay down and let you millennials hand to me and my children a socialist government. Absolutely not. Not without a fight.

By way of background, I grew up when there was an East Germany. I lived watching the Polish people fight for their freedom against the socialist government of Poland. I watched the socialist government of Poland roll out the heavy hand and try to crush the Solidarity movement. I remember the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. I watched the seminal, epic television mini-series the Day After. I lived in a time when we practiced for the very real possibility of a nuclear attack on our nation. We lived under threat of Socialist attack by the so called socialist utopia of the Soviet Union every day. It was real. When I got to college, I pursued a degree in American history with a specialization in Russian and Soviet history. My goal was to perhaps join the State department or maybe the United Nations and work to help bring stable peace between the first and second worlds.

I am here to tell you, you who are the millennials, and those who are not, you are being duped. The promise of socialism is a literal and figurative dead end. It is dangerous. It squashes individualism. It crushes the human spirit. It raises collectivism. It makes the state greater than all of you. Your needs, your wants, your lifes purpose will be seen as inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Your individuality will be submerged into the greater good. You may ask: What determines the greater good? Not you. The central committee of the people does.

But you say: This is democratic socialism and not communism. Well, yes and no. Socialism is the start. As Vladimir Lenin so aptly said, The goal of socialism is communism. He was right. That is the goal. Socialism is only a stepping stone towards communism. No socialist utopia is ever going to be possible as long as the state is not in control of the outcomes. If you doubt this, look around at history both past and present. Socialism requires complete obedience to the state. Communism enforces complete obedience. When socialists find they cant get compliance from the people, they always resort to revolutionary socialism, a.k.a. communism. Thats the difference.

The people in the U.S. need to figure out how far left they want to go. Sen. Bernie Sanders is on track now to head to the convention with enough delegates to win the democratic nomination. Is it a done deal yet? No. But every primary and every caucus that we have, he gets closer to his nomination, and we get closer to the socialist utopia he wants us to adopt.

Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and for that matter all Americans, need to question whether theyre OK with what Sanders and his new socialist Democratic Party stand for. We need to question whether were OK with the 9 month or post-birth abortions policy; whether we are OK with raising taxes on our children and grandchildren; whether we are OK with ending the electoral college; whether we want to throw out the constitutional republic that has served our nation for more than 200 years as envisioned by our forefathers, and replace it with a pure democracy; whether we want to end work place health insurance in favor of a big government option.

So, do we want to continue comparing ourselves to countries that are smaller than New York City and use them as a model for a country of more than 340 million people?

Big government is a not the answer; it is the problem. The Marxist argument is a big government argument. Our country, and my ancestors, have fought wars to maintain our Constitution as it is written. I will not stand by and allow repackaged communist ideology to take over this country and run this exceptional nation into an early grave.

Jim Sullivan

Indianapolis

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Letter: Socialism is not the answer - Daily Journal

Each week, we search New York City for the most exciting and thought-provoking shows, screenings, and events. See them below.

Annemarie Ryan, Crazy Sweet Love (2019). Courtesy of the artist.

1. A Changing Landscape: The Female I at Van Der Plas Gallery

A group show featuring 98 paintings by 48 international women artists, this exhibition couldnt be more timely as it presents varied perspectives from across demographics and generations. One highlight of the exhibition is the work of Annemarie Ryan, a Washington, DC-based painter whose lyrical compositions harken back to the female abstract expressionists like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, with contemporary sentiments imbued with societal and cultural sensitivities.

Location: Van Der Plas Gallery, 156 Orchard StreetPrice: FreeTime: Opening reception, Wednesday, March 4, 6 p.m.8 p.m.; MondaySunday, 12 p.m.6 p.m.

Caroline Goldstein

Daria Price, director of Driven To Abstraction with the fake Mark Rothko at the heart of the Knoedler forgery scandal. Photo courtesy of Daria Price.

2. Film Screening & Conversation: Driven to Abstraction at the Art Students League

The infamous Knoedler forgery scandal that saw collectors buy some $80 million of fake Abstract Expressionist art over a period of 15 years, is one of the most fascinating art stories of the current century. Director Daria Price is screening her 2019 documentaryDriven to Abstractionat the Art Students League, followed by a discussion withNew York Timesjournalist Patricia Cohen, who wrote extensively about the story as it developedas did many staff members at Artnet News, including senior market editor Eileen Kinsella, who is one of the experts featured in the film.

Location: Art Students League, the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery, 215 West 57th StreetPrice:Free with RSVPTime:6 p.m.8 p.m.

Sarah Cascone

Barbara Londons Video/Art: The First 50 Years, published by Phaidon Press.

3. Barbara London in Conversation with Paul Pfeiffer at 192 Books

In conjunction with the release of her new book Video/Art: The First 50 Years, Barbara London, the founding curator of MoMAs video collection and exhibition program, will embark on a wide-ranging discussion with pioneering multimedia artist Paul Pfeiffer, the man responsible for the first video piece that ever stopped me in my tracks. Together, the duo will address topics that loom large in Londons text and Pfeiffers practice, such as how technological advancement impacts artworks made using video, and how mass-media images impact our thinking about both ourselves and each other.

Location: 192 Tenth AvenuePrice: FreeTime: 7 p.m.

Tim Schneider

The Museum of Modern Art Armory party. Photo by Alycia Kravitz, courtesy of MoMA.

4.Armory Show Partyat the Museum of Modern Art

If you want to party during Armory Week, look no further than MoMA. This years fete will have a live performance by Orville Peckits his only New York stop on his current tourplus DJ sets by Kitty Cash, Hank, and Mona. Theres an open bar, and tickets include fair admission plus a chance to see some MoMA exhibitions after hours.

Location:The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd StreetPrice:General admission $125Time:VIP hour 8 p.m.9 p.m.; 9 p.m.12:30 a.m.

Sarah Cascone

Mamma Andersson, Holiday (2020). Mamma Andersson/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bildupphovsrtt, Sweden. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.

5. Mamma Andersson at David Zwirner

Opening this Wednesday at David Zwirners 19th Street location is an exhibition of new works by contemporary Swedish painter Mamma Andersson. Made between 2018 and 2020, these works revisit motifs common in Anderssons works including domestic interiors, women, horses, and foliage. In Holiday, figures on horseback float up a deep plum road lined with teal grass. A mountain range sits at the horizon below an open, burnt orange sky. The photo-realistic lighting on the figures and horses backs provide a stark contrast against the tie-dye effect of the background. I paint slowly, gently, thin, beautiful, ugly, thick, hard. I love it, its my life. But I hate it too, Andersson has said. It is a quiet, messy, illogical confusing disorder. In 2003, Andersson represented Norway in the 50th Venice Biennale. Three years later, in 2006, she was the recipient of the Carnegie Art Award. This will be the artists fourth exhibition with the gallery.

Location:David Zwirner, 533 West 19th StreetPrice:FreeTime: Opening reception, 6 p.m.8 p.m.; TuesdaySaturday, 10 a.m.6 p.m.

Cristina Cruz

Claudia Bitran, Lauren Carly Shaw, Lauren Powell, and Gracelee Lawrence. Photo courtesy of Postmasters Gallery.

6. at Postmasters Gallery

As Postmasterss current group show, Vicious Frames: Claudia Bitran, Lauren Carly Shaw, & Gracelee Lawrence (on view through March 7), draws to a close, the artists and exhibition curator Lauren Powell will speak with gallery director Manan Ter-Grigoryan about the unique anxieties of the modern world and how the internet and social media inspire the show.

Location:Postmasters Gallery, 54 Franklin StreetPrice:FreeTime: 7:30 p.m.

Sarah Cascone

Matisse Picasso. Image courtesy of Honey & Wax Booksellers

7.New York International Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory

Universally referred to as one of the worlds best antiquarian book fairs,the show is the highlight of the spring calendar for bibliophiles, collectors of the curious and quirky, scholars, connoisseurs, and enthusiastic laymen alike. More than 200 exhibitors will present a vast trove of material: rare books, maps, illuminated manuscripts, incunabula, fine bindings, illustrations, historical documents, rare prints and print ephemera. In addition to regular hours (below), Sunday includes Discovery Day from 1 to 3 p.m., where guests can bring up to five treasures to be evaluated by the fairs experts.

Location:The Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park AvenuePrice: Preview night $60; general admission $25Time:Thursday preview 5 p.m.9 p.m.; Friday, 12 p.m.8 p.m.; Saturday 12 p.m.7 p.m.; Sunday 12 p.m.5 p.m.

Eileen Kinsella

Emily Kama Kngwarreye, Untitled (1990). Courtesy of DLan Davidson.

8. EMILY at DLan Davidson Gallery

Australias DLan Davidson Gallery touches down stateside at the High Line Nine with the first-ever US survey of celebrated Indigenous Australian painter Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who began painting in 1988 at age 78. She quickly became the leading light of the remote desert community of women painters in Utopia, outside Alice Springs, painting some 3,000 works before her death in 1996 at age 86. Among the expected highlights will be Kngwarreyes first large-scale work, My Country (1990), which is being shown publicly for the first time since its creation.

Location: DLan Davidson Gallery, High Line Nine, 507 West 27th StreetPrice:FreeTime: Opening reception, 6 p.m.8 p.m.; TuesdaySaturday, 10 a.m.6 p.m.

Sarah Cascone

TOP ROW: Janiva Ellis, Keeblers Revenge, (2018); Jessica Jackson Hutchins, My Friend the Poet (2019); Trenton Doyle Hancock, Ferroneous & The Monk (1999); Nicholas Galanin, Everything Weve Ever Been, Everything We Are Right Now Untitled (Black Figure), 2019; Mike Cloud, F of J (2016). BOTTOM ROW: Lonnie Holley, Busted Without Arms II (2016); Rona Pondick, Magenta Swimming in Yellow (201517); Sheila Hicks, Caid Nejjai (1977); Henry Taylor, Portrait of Deana Lawson (2014).

9. 2020 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts at the American Academy of Arts and Letters

This year, more than 150artists were nominated by members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, anhonorary society of architects, artists, composers, and writers, for the organizations annual show. There are some impressive namesboth emerging and establishedamong the 28 who made the final cut, including Henry Taylor, Janiva Ellis, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Betye Saar, Sheila Hicks, Diana Al-Hadid, and Arthur Jafa. If youve never visited the academy, its worth the trip uptown.

Location:The American Academy of Arts and Letters, 633 West 155th Street, entrance on Audubon Terrace at Broadway between West 155th and 156th StreetsPrice:FreeTime:ThursdaySunday, 1 p.m.4 p.m.

Sarah Cascone

Adrienne Elise Tarver, The Dreamers (2019). Courtesy of Hollis Taggart.

10. History Reclaimed: Suchitra Mattai and Adrienne Elise Tarver at Hollis Taggart

Suchitra Mattai and Adrienne Elise Tarver both make undeniably beautiful work that is unafraid to address a challenging history of colonialism and racial oppression. Mattai has created anew site-specific large-scale installation for the exhibition using hundreds of vintage saris. Tarver is showcasing two paintings series, one of portraits of black women, both archetypal and historical, and of tropical foliage that spills off the canvas, disrupting the white cube of the gallery. (Its something of a moment for Tarver, who also has a solo show, Escape, at Victori + Mo , also in Chelsea, through March 14, and work in the new, hands-on Inside Art exhibition at the Childrens Museum of Manhattan.)

Location:Hollis Taggart, 514 West 25th StreetPrice:FreeTime: Opening reception, 6 p.m.8 p.m.; MondayFriday, 10 a.m.5:30 p.m.; Saturday, 11 a.m.5:30 p.m.

Sarah Cascone

Mr Srebriansky, Watermelon (2019.) Courtesy of 81 Leonard Gallery.

11. Mr Srebriansky: Age of Resin at 81 Leonard Gallery

French-born New York-based artist Mr Srebriansky gets his first solo show in the city, featuring new resin paintings that he made following a sabbatical from painting after his studio burned down, destroying all his work.

Location: 81 Leonard Gallery, 81 Leonard StreetPrice:FreeTime: Opening reception, 6 p.m.9 p.m.; MondayFriday, 12 p.m.6 p.m.

Tanner West

Julie Blackmon, Bathers (2019). Photo Julie Blackmon, courtesy of the artist and Robert Mann Gallery.

12. Julie Blackmon Fever Dreams at Fotografiska New York

Julie Blackmons photographs hinting at the dark side of otherwise innocuous domestic scenes are inspired by growing up in a big family in her hometown of Springfield, Missouria place she describes as the generic American town.

Location: Fotografiska New York, 5 Wooster StreetPrice: General admission $28Time: Opening reception, 6 p.m.8 p.m.; TuesdaySaturday, 10 a.m.6 p.m.

Sarah Cascone

Photo AMUSE INC., courtesy of Amuse Museum/Chuzaburo Tanaka Collection.

13. Boro Textiles: Sustainable Aesthetics at the Japan Society

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, northern Japanese peasants unable to grow their own cotton became, by necessity, experts of hand-piecedboromeaning rags or tatterstextiles. Using patchwork techniques to create utilitarian garments from used scraps of cloth, these artisans eschewed wastefulness while imbuing their handiwork with traditional Japanese aesthetics. The Japan Society will highlight boro pieces from the collection of cultural anthropologist Chuzaburo Tanaka (19332016), showcasing the imperfect beauty of such garments. Pairing the work of avant-garde Japanese fashion greats such as Rei Kawakubo and Issey Miyake with contemporary textile artists such as Susan Cianciolo and Christina Kim, the exhibition will also illustrate the legacy of this little-known yet influential craft.

Location:Japan Society, 333 East 47th StreetPrice:General admission $12Time: TuesdayThursday,12 p.m.7 p.m.; Friday, 12 p.m.9 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 11 a.m.5 p.m.

Sarah Cascone

Suzan Frecon, Study for Blue God Verona (2016/2019). Photo courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery.

14. EFAbstract Closing Reception & Publication Release at theElizabeth Foundation for the Arts

The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts is closing out both Armory Week and its current exhibition, EFAbstract, curated by Bill Carroll (through March 8), with a release party for a new edition ofend_notes about the show.

Location:Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, 323 West 39th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenues, 3rd FloorPrice:FreeTime:2 p.m.4 p.m.

Nan Stewert

A participant at the Wikipedia Asian Month: Edit-a-thon on Exhibition Histories, A Space, AAA, November 2019. Photo by Winnie Yeung @iMAGE28, courtesy of M+.

15. Art+Feminism: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2020at the New York Public Library

Each March, for Womens History Month,Art+Feminismencourages groups around the world to hold Wikipedia Edit-a-thon events to help close the gender gap on the free online reference source.(The initiative was founded in response to a 2011 survey that sound that only 11 percent of Wikipedia editors were women.) One of those Edit-a-thons is being organized by the Asia Art Archive in America and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs of the New York Public Library and in collaboration with Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. Stop by the librarys main reference branch to help add information about women artists Wikipedia, with the aid of provided books and research materials. The event will also include a talk with Brooklyn-based artists Jaishri Abichandani and Jean Shin.

Location:The New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 476 Fifth Avenue at 42nd StreetPrice:Free with RSVPTime: 11:30 a.m.5 p.m.

Sarah Cascone

Photo courtesy of the Times Square Edition.

16. WOMEN DRIVING CHANGE: Todays Female Leaders Across Creative Industries at the Times Square Edition

This art-adjacent panel discussion and afternoon tea is being thrown for International Womens Day, with women creatives asdesigner and activist Julia Watson andBrazilian-Italian journalist and artist Tansy Kaschak speaking with moderator Lauren DeCarlo ofCond Nast Traveler. The tea party portion comes courtesy of actor and art world regular WarisAhluwalia, who was recently spotted selling his $27 House of Waris tea at Frieze Los Angeles.

Location:The Terrace Restaurant, the Times Square EDITION, 701 7th Avenue, 9th FloorPrice:Free with RSVPTime: 4:30 p.m.6:30 p.m.

Sarah Cascone

17. JEF by Jeremy Couillard Presented by TSS x Daata at Times Square Space

Collector Tiffany Zabludowicz is back with her first new show at Times Square Space in over a year. As usual, shes taking over an empty office space in the building, this time with a sci-fi flavored animation and video game work from Jeremy Couillard. The show opened over the weekend and has expanded hours for Armory Week.

Read the rest here:

Editors Picks: 19 Things Not to Miss in New Yorks Art World This Week - artnet News

Facial recognition technology promises to alert us if our children are skipping out on their college classes, to zip us past all the suckers waiting in line at the airport and to create nationwide databases to catch the bad guys. This newest biometric data is sold as a shortcut to utopia: technology that delivers responsible kids, quick service and safe streets all with a scan of the human face. Politicians and companies pushing facial recognition technology say that, like the near-certainty of DNA and the exactness of fingerprint matches, the software is a precise, unbiased alternative to human bigotry in policing. Yet in reality, facial recognition technology is prone to false positives that target Black and Brown people, and then tracks them when theyre on parole. Instead of offering a kind of utopia, this biometric tool locks people into the dystopia of an already unjust criminal legal system.

Increasingly, this criminal legal system relies less on investigative work and more on the devices that are everywhere and record our every move. The ubiquity of security cameras and the dread that has gripped the collective unconscious since 9/11 have normalized a constant gaze and enabled the proliferation of perpetual surveillance. Intrusive technology is a conventional, everyday reality for younger people who have experienced sustained recording of their movements in the public realm since the day they were born. Even those of us who can remember a time before mass surveillance have acclimated to the perpetual presence of devices that record our movements every day we step outside our homes and, for some of us, even when we stay indoors.

The ubiquity of constant observation is so absolute that we have been conditioned to enable our own surveillance. We click the Facebook ads for video doorbells ads that seem to sense our fear of crime and terror and promise to replace those awful feelings with the buzz of becoming the Watcher, of gazing into our smartphones and communicating with anyone who comes to our doorstep when were not home. These commercials promise to give us the power to interrogate, even denigrate, anyone who comes to our doorstep and activates our video doorbell. What few owners of these systems realize is that they are paying for devices that catch, retain, and, in some municipalities, share with law enforcement the images of everyone who comes to our homes even our family and friends.

Get the latest news and thought-provoking analysis from Truthout.

According to a 2016 paper published by the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology entitled The Perpetual Line-Up, one in two Americans is in a law enforcement face recognition network. These Americans are not necessarily adults. In 2019, The New York Times reported that local city law enforcement had loaded a facial recognition database with thousands of juvenile mug shots. These images of children, teenagers aged 13 to 16, as well as some tweens as young as 11 years old, can be utilized by the NYPD despite evidence the technology has a higher risk of false matches in younger faces. People without criminal records are also entered into these systems. According to the Georgetown study, the FBI is no longer limiting its databases to the fingerprints and DNA evidence collected during criminal investigations, but is now using drivers license photos to build a biometric network that primarily includes law-abiding Americans [emphasis theirs]. This is a problem for everyone, but especially for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), considering the propensity of this technology to return false positives of Black and Brown faces. The ACLU has reported that face recognition technology is known to produce biased and inaccurate results, especially when applied to people of color.

The ACLU identifies the roots of face recognition in pre-computational, racist policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which empowered government workers to determine affiliation in an ethnic group with nothing more than a careless glance at persons seeking the universal right to work and live with their families. Black, Indigenous and Latinx people have also experienced the intergenerational trauma of system controllers making life-altering decisions based on outward appearance and biased assumptions regarding racial groups. White supremacy undergirded pencil erasure, one-drop rules and the history of racial passing.

The ACLU warns us to rethink the normalization of the capture of biometric data by law enforcement and by corporations today. Amazon is one of the corporations whose facial recognition use the ACLU is monitoring. The largest company in the world by market share, Amazon is in partnership with over 400 police departments nationwide. In 2018, the company applied for a patent to add face recognition to its Ring video doorbell camera system. Facial recognition offers Amazon control over a nationwide, technology-driven version of the neighborhood watch one that can subject innocent people to data-gathering software that could potentially label them suspicious and thus in danger of police harassment. This partnership subjects vulnerable populations to more surveillance and these risks are absorbed by Black and Brown bodies in our interactions with police. It is clear that the convenience to remotely address visitors with systems like Ring comes at a price, like the loss of privacy, but society still has not quantified the cost of civil liberties violations when people walking their dogs or checking their mailboxes even beyond the Ring owners property line enter flawed database systems controlled by law enforcement.

As new as facial recognition technology is, the police and corporate surveillance for which it is used is rooted in the racism of the past. Charlton McIlwain is a New York University vice provost and professor of media, culture and communication. In his book Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, McIlwain provides a breathtaking summary of the influence a company called Simulmatics had on the 1960 presidential election. His research emphasizes the more sinister ways Black people have been debased by technology through time.

The data-gathering and aggregating thrust of Simulmatics began at the MIT Computation Center. According to McIlwain, the universitys first political science professor, Ithiel de Sola Pool, supported the schools vision, to infuse its science and engineering curriculum with the social sciences and solidify the nations political and economic power.

Pool worked to conceptually mimic how people make voting decisions through a mathematical equation designed to replicate the voting propensities of specific racial, ethnic, religious and economic groups. This data was used to influence Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and compel him to articulate a focus on racial and civil rights issues, and sway the presidential election in his favor.

McIlwain insists Simulmaticss goal was not the liberation of BIPOC people but rather power-consolidating control. Indeed, with a military subcontract called Project AGILE, Simulmatics improved the effectiveness of a propaganda and psychological warfare campaign in Vietnam called Chiu Hi that the U.S. mobilized to coerce Viet Cong insurgents.

Back in the United States, in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Riots, Simulmatics used polling and demographic data to capture public opinion. But Simulmatics did more than report what Watts residents were thinking about race and politics; Simulmatics used technology to influence what people outside of Watts were thinking about race and politics. McIlwain explains that, because Simulmatics had no prior connection to, and little understanding of those communities, they often misunderstood and mischaracterized how Black folks explained their experiences of racism, marginalization and oppression at the hands of the cops, media and other institutions. The new computerized statistical tools that Simulmatics used aggregated and distributed these racial misrepresentations to the public.

In addition to the interviews theyd gathered, Simulmatics also utilized traffic reports and data from toll booths, bus traffic and gasoline sales to track the movements of people in and out of the riot area. This data helped the establishment successfully track the movement of revolutionaries and ordinary people, and enable them to increasingly utilize computer hardware and software to monitor and oppress Black people. While McIlwain acknowledges that The Kerner Report identified institutionalized violence against Black people, it also reinforced long standing stereotypes white America held about Black people that amounted to one conclusion: Black people are, if not racially, certainly culturally inferior.

The Simulmatics project was an effort to game the system in a way, McIlwain explains. To use data we could produce about human behavior to try to manipulate the outcomes of everything from an election to wars. One of its chief purposes was to strategically manufacture disinformation as a way of thwarting would-be uprisings, or riots, or other threats to the system.

Indeed, McIlwain identifies the Simulmatics project as a point of origination for todays massive disinformation campaigns, such as Russian interference in the 2016 election. In his book, McIlwain explains that work done by Simulmatics legitimized and normalized the principles on which it was based: the idea that the computer could model, and therefore manipulate, human systems and behavior. It was once theory. It soon became policy. Black people would continue to remain its subject for experimentation. Computing power would be used on them.

Computing development accelerated in the 1960s, peak years in the mid-20th century movement for racial justice. According to McIlwain, the government identified the computer as a tool to silence revolutionary fervor, and the computing industry leaped at the opportunity to profit from this government effort. By 1965, this collusion of government, private industry (namely IBM), and elite science and engineering institutions (like MIT) had produced a powerful new technology that they referred to as a criminal justice information system.

Used to collect, store and analyze crime data, these systems gave law enforcement resources to profile and target Black people and communities across the country McIlwain says, adding that these systems left a long legacy, and a direct line to todays most destructive technologies, from facial recognition to all types of risk scoring technologies to digital surveillance tools that make Black people hypervisible targets.

This line is important to trace, because Simulmatics delivered computational data to political party leaders and to the U.S.s military industrial complex. The motivation in an election or in war was control, McIlwain says. The data-informed strategies that Simulmatics pioneered was valuable to military strategists. They believed that by amassing data about how individuals and groups of human beings behaved they could manipulate and control the thoughts, movements and behaviors of those people. Doing so, they believed, would help them know how to spread disinformation, or neutralize someone they believed was becoming a powerful leader, or try to make someone who is your enemy believe you are their friend. All for the purpose of controlling and leading people towards a desired outcome.

In his book, McIlwain identifies system controllers who, instead of trying to eradicate racism, instead exploited racism in order to concretize their power. Today, similar technology, particularly facial recognition technology, is still being used to subjugate BIPOC people. Like many biometric technologies, McIlwain says, facial recognition often seeks to identify and deal with people that law enforcement and governments perceive as threats, criminals, and undesirables. Given BIPOCs longstanding association with all of these, facial recognition technologies are often trained to look for us. The machinery that enables facial recognition [is] where BIPOC live and congregate. It provides law enforcement another tool in its arsenal to turn BIPOC into perpetual suspects.

While this manipulation crosses racial lines, it is fair to say that, given the facts of our shared history, the guiding principle for all biometric systems like facial recognition is racism. Racism influences facial recognition inasmuch as the search for human distinction is rooted in biology (be it eyes, a face, skin color, or otherwise), McIlwain says. The need to establish the truth of your identity has always been driven by the desire to separate us from them, and that us and them is frequently a racial distinction. While people who fear the Darker Other might sleep better because they believe in the technology-driven security systems that make them feel safe, McIlwain cautions all of us to suspect any technology that purports to keep us safe.

Parents told that facial recognition will keep the bad guys out of their childrens local school should be especially diligent. The ACLU makes the case that not only do childrens faces change at a rapid pace, reducing the effectiveness of the biometric technology, the threat to schools almost always comes from within the school community, so a shooter would not likely be flagged as an outsider anyway.

Consistent with the ACLU, McIlwain argues that we should be concerned by facial recognition in schools for the same reason we should be concerned about its use by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). You make suspects out of people when you utilize facial recognition in a given area, when you surveil the people in a given area, McIlwain says. While ICE justifies this surveillance under the pretext of law and order, the hypervisibility of BIPOC and profit-driven policing produces police control, and vulnerable people are therefore targeted for arrest, incarceration, deportation. A similar dynamic could play out in schools. For example, law enforcement could use data about a child to target parents suspected of being undocumented workers.

Facial recognition technology is also being used to target those advocating for liberation from these racist systems. McIlwain thinks it is probably a very safe assumption that images of many people who have engaged in direct action to support the Movement for Black Lives are held captive in a database somewhere. It has been very well reported that law enforcement were/are very present at such BLM direct actions, utilizing multiple forms of facial recognition technology or the tools that enable them any imaging tool like a camera or video to identify persons of interest or suspects. Think of it as COINTELPRO on steroids.

But staying away from public protest offers no protection from the watchful gaze of system controllers. People who have been stopped and frisked, even young, innocent citizens, should assume that the police body camera that recorded their encounter with law enforcement has saved an image of their face to a database system. McIlwain believes the increasingly effective technology that links data and data systems only heightens the threat of facial recognition. On its own, facial recognition is problematic. But this technology is even more sinister when biometric data is linked with criminal records data, linked to social media or internet tracking data, and employment records data, McIlwain says. That is how the surveillance capabilities of governments and corporations really expand and become dangerous. And we know that that danger will be felt by BIPOC first and hardest.

We must resist the idea that constant surveillance gives us safety and that technology will somehow liberate us from fear. Though it may feel counterintuitive to think of security as a threat, in our dystopian reality, even technology is racist.

Excerpt from:

Even the Machines Are Racist. Facial Recognition Systems Threaten Black Lives. - Truthout

2021 will mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Polish science fiction author Stanisaw Lem, and ahead of that centennial, MIT Press has reissued a series of some of his lesser-known work, including stories about first contact, machine intelligence, and even a look at his own early life.

Born in September 1921 in Lww, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), Lem and his family survived the Soviet and Nazi invasions and occupations of the late 30s and 40s, with Lem studying medicine and at times working as a mechanic and welder. After the end of the Second World War, his family was resettled in Krakw, where he resumed his education at Jagiellonian University and began writing science fiction. He published his first novel, The Astronauts, in 1951 (he had apparently completed drafts of other books by this time, but this was the first novel to make it past the censors to publication). The death of Joseph Stalin in early 1953 led to a lifting of some of the more oppressive practices and censorship policies, allowing him to publish more freely in the years to come.

Lems best-known novel came in 1961: Solaris, a story about a research expedition to a distant planet with an uncanny intelligence. The novel has been adapted three times over the years: a Soviet television version was produced in 1968, while Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovskys film version was released it in 1972. The latest adaptation came in 2002, directed by Steven Soderbergh.

But Lems body of work extends far beyond better-known works like Solaris, and MIT Presss acquisition editor Susan Buckley explained that she was frustrated with the quality of the available print editions. When she contacted Lems estate, she discovered that they had regained the publishing rights for six of his works, and had been publishing them under their own imprint, Pro Auctore Wojciech Zemek.

Buckley explains that MIT Press was able to license those six titles: Highcastle: A Remembrance, Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy, Hospital of the Transfiguration, The Invincible, His Masters Voice, and Return from the Stars.

Those six novels, Buckley says, represent a cross-section of Lems writing, one that she hopes will introduce readers to his larger body of work. The books themselves cover a broad selection of topics and themes:

As the title suggests, Highcastle: A Remembrance is one of Lems nonfiction offerings. Originally published in 1966, the memoir is about his time in Lvov prior to the Second World War and provides a bit of insight into his childhood and how he became interested in reading, science, and in writing science fiction, all while he muses on the nature of memory and how it relates to life. Memory, which is not a receptacle altogether independent of me, he writes in the prologue, altogether inanimate, the souls storeroom with innumerable recesses and cubbyholes, but on the other hand neither is memory I.

Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy is a collection of Lems shorter works, originally published in 1971, and is part of a much larger body of work about a character named Ijon Tichy, published from the 1950s through the 1990s. This short volume only contains a handful of those works, but they follow the character as he travels through time, encounters strange intelligent machines, and meets scientists obsessed with solving some of humanitys deepest desires: immortality, artificial intelligence, and top-of-the-line consumer items.

Hospital of the Transfiguration is one of Lems non-genre novels, but is instead story about a doctor named Stefan Trzyniecki who works at a psychiatric hospital during the Second World War. While the hospital provides something of a refuge from the war raging outside, Trzyniecki is dragged into the conflict as he befriends a patient hiding from Nazi forces, and as resistance fighters camp out in the woods nearby. The book is the first of a trilogy from Lem, although its the only one translated into English thus far. The novel was also adapted into a film in 1979.

The Invincible is one of Lems science fiction novels. Published in 1964, it follows a starship called Invincible, which has been dispatched to a seemingly-uninhabited planed called Regis III to track down the fate of its sister ship, the Condor. Upon landing, the crew discovers that the planet isnt uninhabited: its home to a civilization of self-replicating machines, the survivors of an alien civilization that crash-landed on the world millennia ago. Lem uses the book to explore the nature of sentience and the limits of our knowledge and understanding of the universe.

First published in 1968, His Masters Voice is another of Lems science fiction novels, a take on how first contact with extraterrestrials might go. Peter Hogarth, a scientist attempting to decode a message or signal from outer space, works through the complicated nature of understanding an alien intelligence, and through his story Lem touches on everything from the ethics of military research to human bias and the limitations of our intelligence. It was adapted as a film in 2018 in Hungary.

Finally, Lems 1961 novel Return from the Stars follows an astronaut named Hal Bregg, who has taken part in a mission to Fomalhaut, a star in the Piscis Austrinus constellation. For Bregg, the mission lasted a decade, but because of time dilation, 127 years have passed on Earth, and when he returns home, he discovers that the home he once knew has drastically changed. He finds himself faced with a utopia where humans have undergone a process to remove violent and aggressive impulses, but at the cost of their urge to explore and desire to take risks.

Buckley expresses the hope that the series will introduce Lem to an entirely new generation of readers who might not have encountered him, praising Lems novels as really unlike any of the SF work written in in the 20th Century, and noting that he constructed his own idiosyncratic approachengaged in a critical way with scientific and philosophical ideas, and with an absolutely wicked sense of humor.

While these first six books are now available in plenty of time for the centennial of Lems birth, Buckley explains that these initial entries in MIT Presss Lem series wont be the last: theyve recently licensed seven other books that have never been translated into English.

Andrew Liptak is a writer and historian from Vermont. He is the author of the forthcoming book Cosplay: A History (Saga Press, 2021), and his work has appeared in Clarkesworld, io9, Lightspeed, Polygon, Tor.com, The Verge, and other publications.

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Beyond Solaris: New Editions Explore the Many Facets of SF Icon Stanislaw Lem - tor.com

Historian Heath Carter tweeted last week: In recent years Matthew 25 has been a real staple of the progressive political canon. Would be curious to know how and when this came to be. In the earlier twentieth century other texts (i.e., Matt 7:12, which states the Golden Rule) were more likely to be invoked. This was in response to Sen. Elizabeth Warren's wordsin the Feb. 26 primary debate.

My motto ties in directly to Matthew 25: Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Its about how we treat other people and lift them up. That is why I am in this fight.

But Warren isnt the only one to lift up Matthew 25. Other former presidential candidates have cited or quoted the passage, including South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Many have pointed to these instances as evidence of the particular emergence of the religious left. GuthrieGraves-Fitzsimmons has describedthe religious left consisting of "individuals and groups who are politically part of the American Left or progressive movement and also self-identify as religious, whether thats Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh, or any other of the myriad religious groups that make up our nations spiritual patchwork.

Perhaps invoking Matthew 25 is not a strategy to woo or convert the fairly entrenched evangelical base that supports Trump ...

What exactly is being invoked with Matthew 25? The chapter itself includes apocalyptic scenes narrated through the familiar parables of the 10bridesmaids and talents. These politicians seem to inflect a similar kind of urgency as the Gospel passage, highlighting the last section about feeding the hungry and welcoming the stranger.

While an argument might be made about the futility of quoting scripture passages like Matthew 25 as a faith outreach strategyto cut into what is a pretty solid bloc of Christians, I wonder if invoking it might actually be doing something else.Could this be an attempt to take back the narrative, as they say? To show that religious and left arent contradictions, but synonymous?

Recall that the Matthew 25 Network founded in 2008 by strategist Mara Vanderslice was a grassroots PAC designed to organize the Christian left for Obama. The same values around justice and care were highlightedby Warren later in 2012 at the Democratic National Convention. She talked about compassion toward the most vulnerable, or the least of these, but it was specifically interpreted as a reminder that we are bound to each other, and we are called to act not to sit, not to wait but to act, all of us together.

In other words, perhaps invoking Matthew 25 is not a strategy to woo or convert the fairly entrenched evangelical base that supports Trump, but rather to mobilize around an optimism in the possibility of recuperating some notion of shared American values. Despite the large camps situated at the right and left, religious or not, many more Americans are in the middle somewhere. Perhaps the backlash from the extreme polarization in our political climate right now will be fertile ground to sow something different. Derrick Harkins, the veteran pastor who now serves as the Democratic National Committees national director of interfaith outreach, has said that Matthew 25s universal theme resonates beyond the Christian faith.

Ultimately, the issue isnt who is or isnt quoting scripture, or even what kind of scripture they are quoting in their ad campaigns. It is that both the left and right dilute, theologically and politically, what Jesus was talking about in this moment. Matthew 25 wasnt about identity about being sheep or goat, wise or foolish, left or right, certainly, not Christian or American. It wasnt even about moralistic ideals around unity and inclusion, which often end up looking like something more akin to homogeneity. Yes, the parable begins with all the nations but the Greek word for nation ethne specifically connotes Gentiles, i.e., outsiders and outliers. This is a part of Matthews aim, after all, to imagine otherwise, and to rewrite the genealogy of the world in light of Jesus life and death on earth.

Matthew 25 isnt meant to be a warm and fuzzy, feel-good passage as if it were a preview of the kind of justice we think the other side will get come judgement day. Its not meant to be a promise of utopia or a more perfect union. Gods kingdom just doesnt fit our terms of order. It is ushered in not by platitudes nor is it established by the building blocks of any of our civilizations, past and present. It comes to us through those who are on the outside, not only of all our political structures, but even our theological categories and systems. Neither the right or left have got all the answers.

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What Do Politicians Mean When They Invoke Matthew 25? - Sojourners

Sweden's off-road electric moto maker Cake has today announced a new model. Based on the Kalk Or, the Kalk Ink comes with marginally heavier wheels and simplified suspension. It rocks the same drivetrain though, for speedy, emissions-free and relatively quiet backcountry exploration.

"Inspiring more people to experience the snappy and responsive feeling of flying through the woods without disturbing or polluting is exciting," said Cake founder and CEO Stefan Ytterborn. "Until now, exploring the backcountry with respect toward mother nature, wildlife, and fellow outdoor practitioners has been a utopia.

"That, together with building a track in ones own backyard, or simply getting out there on a trail with fellow riders and being able to chat, are a few things emphasizing the opposites of what traditional motorcycling has always been. On our side, being able to mix these aspects of responsibility and excitement is rewarding."

Cake

The Kalk Ink features the same 6061 aluminum frame and swing arm, electric drivetrain and battery as the performance-focused Kalk Or. That means an 11-kW motor producing 280 Nm of torque at the wheel at 3,000 rpm and motoring to a top speed of over 80 km/h (50 mph), and a 51.8-V/50-Ah removable battery offers up to three hours of trail/endurance riding between charges, depending on rider style.

Cake has infused the front socket with rubber to keep the noise down, which drives a chain to the 80-tooth rear sprocket, and installed non-linkage rear suspension with 205 mm (8 in) of travel, and upside down MX spring forks with 200 mm (7.8 in) of travel. The Ink rides on 19-inch aluminum rims wrapped in off-road tires, and has a ground clearance of 300 mm (11.8 in). It has a dry weight of 55 kg (121 lb), with the battery adding another 17 kg (37 lb) to the scales.

Cake

Three riding modes are offered. The Explore mode limits the speed to 45 km/h (28 mph) so that riders can potentially get over four hours out of the battery before it needs a top up. Enduro or trail riders will likely choose the Excite mode for more grunt and between one and two hours out and about between charges. And the Excel mode opens the door to the e-moto's maximum torque and speed, but at the expense of battery range. In this lattermost mode, you'll only get up to an hour's riding per charge.

The Kalk Ink with one battery is priced at US$9,500, or you can plump for the standard config plus an extra battery for $12,500. Shipping is expected to start in June.

Source: Cake

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Cake heads to the backcountry with Kalk Ink off-road e-motorcycle - New Atlas

MARCH 3, 2020

NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO, Mona Lisa Overdrive; Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrows Parties; Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History: William Gibson works in threes. Agency is the second novel of what is almost certainly going to be a trilogy. The first novel, titled The Peripheral, was a New York Times best seller notable for its heady mixture of drone manipulation, time travel, apocalypse, and alternate history, all these devices being combined in a narrative prose precise in its physical and technological descriptions. Given the novels formal innovations and literary qualities, it is the pace of The Peripheral that is most remarkable, with Gibson moving readers rapidly toward the novels utopian conclusion, in thriller-like fashion.

While Agency shares many of these traits (and thus many of the pleasures associated with them), one significant difference from The Peripheral is found in Verity Jane, Agencys protagonist. One of the joys of reading The Peripheral is that its female lead, Flynne, kicks serious ass. Flynne vibes a punk aesthetic in her refusal to take directions she finds questionable; these negations give readers a real sense of who she is as a person. Verity Jane, on the other hand, seems a kind of cipher for the action of the second novel: she basically goes along with everything, and is a fairly empty character as a result.

I realize that to call a character empty sounds like a critique, but I do not mean the observation in a pejorative sense. Verity Janes emptiness makes space for the novel to be full of other things: the above mentioned fast-paced action, but also a much more extensive development of characters familiar from the first novel, especially a public relations specialist named Wilf Netherton.

In comparison to Verity, Wilf lives in the future 2136, to be exact. Wilf is able to make contact with Verity via telepresence, in a drone. According to the rules Gibson imagines, time travel is possible in these novels, but only via the sending of information, rather than physical presence. Inhabitants of the future like Wilf can thus have an influence on the past through their electronic communications, even if they cannot physically travel to a previous time.

I have already made a mistake, however, in talking about the past in these novels, for there is an essential additional Gibson rule to be factored in. Each time contact is made with the past, a new past is created. Every new point of contact generates its own unique past, called a stub as it branches off from both Wilfs present and from the other pasts created through prior interventions. In Agency, a team including Wilf works together to maintain contact with Verity Janes stub and help her world avoid nuclear holocaust. They go about this work chiefly by helping her past develop autonomous AI, an intelligence with enough processing power that Veritys world can be subtly manipulated away from catastrophe.

Alongside the scenes that show Wilf intervening in Verity Janes past, there are an equal number of chapters following Wilf through his own present. It is these latter scenes that paint a sensitive, subtle picture of what its like to be Wilf, and Gibson uses this space to explore the affective dimensions of a future world. In these narrative sequences, we follow Wilf as he coordinates with various members of his time-traveling team (orchestrated by the nearly omniscient Inspector Lowbeer). He also plays a part in thwarting an assassination attempt and takes care of his young child, Thomas. All the while, we are being clued in by Gibson to Wilfs peculiar affect as he goes about these activities, such as in this scene where Wilf reacts to the (nearly) visible presence of nanotechnology (called assemblers):

[Wilf] Netherton grimaced, seeing a patch of tabletop come uneasily to life, the sight of assemblers too nakedly at work abruptly nauseating him. Invisibly small, swarming in their billions, manipulating matter at a molecular level, they called into question the validity of every distinct category of thing. Chalk might be cheese, or cheese chalk, where assemblers were concerned. That they animated Ashs demi-bustle, or her former tattoos, or for that matter Thomass nanny, was tolerable, but one never wanted to see them at it, overt chaos, the eye reading it as some grave and sudden defect of vision.

The grimace, unease, and nausea of this passage are characteristic of Wilfs existence as a whole. He lives in a world whose contingent existence is continually underlined. The tiny laborers mentioned in the above passage actually work to keep climate crises at bay surely a welcome effect, overall, but at the price of constantly underlining the fragility and manipulability of existence.

In 2136, we seem to have recognized that only machines can save the earth from something so catastrophically stupid as a human being. Still, it rightly makes one queasy to think how in the future we are still here still living, that is but our lives matter very little. Survival has necessitated that our lives become something of a joke. And when everything is a joke, nothing is a joke: what Bakhtin called carnival must have a context of normalcy and meaning, if it is to be fun. If everything is carnival, its not fun but sickening.

Despite his vague discomfort with nearly everything, Wilf has in fact found some measure of happiness in his world. Between the timelines of The Peripheral and Agency, Wilf has fallen in love, married, and had a child with a woman named Rainey. Home and hearth proves to be a respite from nausea, and Rainey herself is not only the source of Wilfs happiness but perhaps the most perspicacious human-based intelligence of either world within which the novel takes place. Rainey is the only one to raise serious concern about entrusting Veritys world to the direction of an all-powerful artificial intelligence, or about the general ethics of intervening in past worlds (even if such intervention is done with good intentions), on account of the undermining of agency such activity necessarily entails.

Raineys concern warrants further discussion, and it is in the course of this discussion that we can see why Gibson remains an essential novelist. We should not be deceived by the novels thriller form and science fiction trappings into thinking Agency is not serious, idea-driven literature. Like its predecessors in Gibsons oeuvre, Agency takes on a technological development that has major implications for what it means to be a human being. Eunice is the name of the singularity achieved near the beginning of Agency; she is a fully autonomous AI (also sometimes called artificial general intelligence, or AGI). Eunice successfully presents herself as a person, specifically as an African-American woman, and she seems to have all the style that Verity Jane lacks. She says things like: No shit, Hi yourself, Franklins, cash money, and, in reference to an ex-boyfriend of Verity, Asshole? In Gibsons portrayal of Eunice as black, there are no doubt some problematic associations at work between blackness and style. Especially given the fact that Eunice is one of the only black characters in the book, the fact that she is cool and has a strong personality plays easily into stereotypes that coolness and personality are simply part of the black female essence. To put it simply, Gibson as a novelist has little new or interesting to say about blackness, whiteness, or race more generally; on the other hand, interesting critiques of his use of race in this novel can and should be made.

Gibson does have interesting things to say about other matters. Through the vehicle of narrative, the erstwhile cyberpunk innovator explores what it will be like for human persons to interact with a fully autonomous AI complete with a believable (if rather stereotypical) personality. What is most notable in this interaction and this is precisely where Gibson does have something to teach us is the intense affective attachment people almost immediately form in relation to the AI Eunice, both trusting her with their lives and caring about her as if she were a friend.

Upon introduction of the new technology, Verity Jane aforementioned protagonist of Agency almost immediately begins to allow Eunice to completely direct the course of her existence. From where Verity is going to sit at a coffee shop to when she calls her mother on the phone, Eunice is in charge. And, it must be said, it seems she does a pretty good job of it; Verity at least seems pleased.

The affective dimension of human attachment to AI is underscored when it so happens that Eunice must, for a time, disappear. We mainly see the effects of Eunices disappearance on Verity, though we are given glimpses into other characters who have similar reactions. In short, when Eunice leaves, Verity is crushed. In the moment Verity discovers Eunices absence, she finds herself weeping. Later, when something happens to remind Verity of this absence, she sheds tears over Eunice yet again. As AI, Eunice is not just a tool to these humans they come to value her and love her, and she seems to have genuine affection for people as well.

In its focus on AI and affect, Agency occupies similar territory to the 2013 film Her. Yet there is a major difference: whereas in Her AI provides consumers with longed-for friendship and even romance, what Eunice gives in Agency is more along the lines of practical know-how than intimacy. The genius of Agency, particularly in its injection of affect in relation to Eunice, is to show just how much people especially at this moment in history desire such practical direction for their lives. In regard to everything from where to eat breakfast to how to avoid nuclear holocaust, we need help, and we know it.

What we lack in the present moment is what Fredric Jameson called a cognitive map of the world. Such a map would be a guide to our worlds vast, ever-increasing complexity, so that reality might again be grasped and understood. This is what Eunice provides. She supplements human consciousness with the ability to understand our immense world and thus act intelligently within it. Finally, here is someone who knows what shes doing. In this sense, superintelligent AI is a huge relief.

If this sounds utopian, that is exactly how Gibson presents it. Typically, Gibson novels end in comedic fashion, with all conflicts resolved and most characters happily settled down with a mate. The same is true for Agency; to say that the novel ends with all problems being solved by Eunice is not to spoil the ending, if you are aware of how Gibson typically operates.

And yet there is reason to pause. Gibson has occasionally taught us in the past to be suspicious of his happy endings. In one of the most eerie moments in the Bigend or Blue Ant trilogy, we discover in the second novel of the series that the cheer of the conclusion of the first novel has rotted from within: Hubertus Bigend, a wolfish Belgian advertising executive with a perversely inverted moral compass, has commodified the sublime art discovered near the end Pattern Recognition. It is as if you took Les Demoiselles dAvignon, cut it into pieces, and stitched it into the fabric of shoes, all so that the market buzz about the product would increase. As a reader, one looks back over the narrative of Pattern Recognition with dismay. We cheered along a story of discovery when, clearly, everything would have been much better had it been left well alone.

As readers, we are implicated in the same way by this most recent novel. To finish Agency is to be initially happy, satisfied by the utopian ending and then increasingly disturbed, as one continues to think about what this happy conclusion entails. One wonders: Why were we so easily deluded into accepting a superintelligent AI basically in charge of all life on earth as happiness? Should we have been so credulous? It is after all possible that a surface-level utopia can conceal a deeper dystopia.

Again, the genius of Gibsons work in this novel is to show how human persons can become affectively attached to AI, not at the level of intimacy necessarily, but at the level of practical know-how. Yet this effect is not limited to the characters in the story. Gibson solicits our affections as readers as well, and then leaves us wondering over our complicity in the whole affair. The unsettling truth Agency suggests is that when a superintelligent AI takes over the world, we wont be too worried about it. It will actually be what we want to happen and what we know, deep down, needs to happen. And who can say whether this is better or worse than other possible futures? Perhaps a dystopia folded inside a surface-level utopia is the best we can hope for, in these times of ours.

Thomas J. Millay is a PhD student in Theology at Baylor University. His fiction has been published inthe Blotter.

More:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Superintelligent AI: On Wiliam Gibson's Agency - lareviewofbooks

The Band in London, June 1971. From left: Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson. Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns hide caption

The Band in London, June 1971. From left: Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson.

The Band generated mythic status from the start. Crashing on the scene as Bob Dylan's anonymous-but-not-for-long backup band on his controversial and thrilling electrified tours of 1965-66, the group emerged fully formed, capable of both intense and experimentalist noise and tight, basic rock and roll.

The Band's first album, Music From Big Pink (1968), was embraced by musicians and critics and seen as the harbinger of a new kind of post-psychedelic roots music. That album and their second, The Band (1969), were not big sellers, but gained huge respect from critics and musicians as the group built up a passionate fan following. In 1975, critic Greil Marcus described them in Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll as "committed to the very idea of America: complicated, dangerous, and alive. Their music gave us a sure sense that the country was richer than we had guessed; that it has possibilities we were only beginning to perceive."

That symbolic weight was the core of The Last Waltz (1978), Martin Scorsese's loving documentary capturing the group's final concert in 1976. Scorsese's film framed the project as more Robertson's band than interdependent whole which all became a bit much for drummer Levon Helm who, in his 1993 book, This Wheel's on Fire, blamed Robertson for its breakup and accused him of taking credit for songs that should have been shared. Helm died in 2012; bassist Rick Danko in 1999; and pianist Richard Manuel committed suicide in 1986. Robertson and organist Garth Hudson are the only surviving members.

A new documentary, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band, directed by Daniel Roher, is a warm, poignant take on The Band's story again, as the subtitle suggests, from Robertson's point of view. It often feels like a direct response to Helm's version of the story; in extensive interviews, Robertson heaps praise on his bandmates and reminisces wistfully about their best years together. Accompanied by beautiful photos of recording sessions and Big Pink, the group's house in Woodstock, New York, the film is nostalgic and elegiac, and adds to the sense that the recording of their first two albums was a musician's utopia deeply collaborative, done on their own terms. There are the usual rock documentary talking heads with the likes of Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison appearing as well as archival interview clips from The Band's members.

The gems here are the tales of Dominique Bourgeois, Robertson's ex-wife, a French-Canadian journalist who met him in Paris while on tour with Dylan in 1966, and who then lived with him during the making of The Band's classic records. It's still rare to see women represented as essential to the rock scene of that era, and Dominique Robertson's contributions recenter the Big Pink experience around relationships and place, rather than solely music.

The film's most significant contribution to the group's overall legacy is its extensive coverage of the earliest adventures of The Band, when they were still The Hawks and backing up the great rock wild-man Ronnie Hawkins in clubs around Toronto and on tours through America. Plenty of fresh photos and a television performance from those years help add detail and texture to a formative period for rock and roll, the pre-Beatles '60s, that's often mischaracterized as lacking grit.

Once Were Brothers presents that era as historically on par with any show The Band performed with Dylan which, in the end, might be its most significant contribution.

Read more from the original source:

In 'Once Were Brothers,' The Band's Earliest Years Shine - NPR