In the last days of my trip to Berkeley California I realized that I hadn’t planned some sort of pilgrimage through Silicon Valley. Honestly, my geographic knowledge of the West Coast is close to nil. Assuming the Bay area was too expansive to cover in a 6 day trip, I didn’t think about the possibility to drive in search of the monoliths of the computer industry in the area. It was only after a day trip to San Jose, after a 2 hour tour of the Winchester Mansion, that we made the wrong turn off of the main highway and had to do a U-Turn at the entrance of eBay that I realized how snugly fit all the cities of the Bay Area really were. But by then it was too late. At that point, The only thing I could do was look through the area map and only imagine where in Cupertino Apple Computers might be, or Google’s Mountain View camp. I could almost imagine how the majority of headquarters of these famous sites might look with their low-rise expansion of buildings scattered across lush green grounds, maybe a small knoll with the companies logo modestly displayed. I’d be back someday, and maybe it was too soon to start making these type of recent-history pilgrimages, I thought to console myself.

Perhaps the least conventional of them all might have been the headquarters of Craigslist, which I had seen on television before. Craigslist is housed in a modest 4 story San Francisco style house in the Sunset District. What attracted me to Craigslist was what I had been hearing about Craig Newmark, the listings’ founder. It was known that unlike the other pirates of the Silicon Valley, Craig was not out to conquer the world, but more simply to put the idea of neighborhood into the internet-where people help one another for the benefit of all - contrary to current money making schemes. Furthermore, I read in wikipeadia that unlike most companies out there Craigslist had no plans to maximize profits - making it a very peculiar for-profit company and perhaps one of the more humble of all vestiges on the web today.

There is more trivia on the wikipedia entry for Craigslist if you care to learn more. The section “Significant events for Craiglist” highlight some interesting facts such as their eBay auction bid that won them the rights to beam 2 million classified ads into outer space. Craig’s comment was, “We believe there could be an infinite market opportunity”.

Another interesting thing I discovered on Craigslist.org was their “Best of” list compiled by readers… These are a few from Craigslist’s Best of …New York City. Reading them now is starting to make me home sick

…

20 Apr 2008 - who put the dead bird in my mailbox? - w4m

19 Apr 2008 - KERMIT SEEKS PIGGY

17 Apr 2008 - Ibanker seeking romance

12 Mar 2008 - Silda Spitzer, I will totally do you. - m4w

27 Feb 2008 - OK . . . I give up . . . just fuck me like a whore

07 Feb 2008 - Fingered on the RED line - Columbia University - w4m

25 Jan 2008 - Dear Star Wars ex-boyfriend, my vag is sore

10 Jan 2008 - Replying to w4m casual encounters ads? A little feedback ..

26 Dec 2007 - No, really - someone come get this horrible Chili Beer

18 Dec 2007 - fancy being lavished during the holidays?

02 Dec 2007 - To the person who broke into my car last night

26 Nov 2007 - Wanted: Heart Surgeon for 1/2 Day Gig - No Pay

21 Nov 2007 - Help me keep the shell people alive.

11 Nov 2007 - Why Must You Bother the Nice Women?

23 Oct 2007 - We met for a drink and you caught me making out with a man - m4w

11 Oct 2007 - To the gentleman who called me a depreciating asset

14 Aug 2007 - Diola lle, lovers of Middle Earth - w4m

…

Jackson Pollock’s “Number 14: Gray”(1948). Museum of Modern Art, NYC

I’m amazed that for the New York Times, Obama’s Democratic Party Nomination is still a “black” and “white” issue. Before I even go there I would like to point out that neither of the two main stories really focus on what Obama’s camp is experiencing, he is after all the victor. The two main stories “Clinton Ready to End Bid and Endorse Obama” and “Many Blacks Find Joy in Unexpected Breakthrough” only talk around his victory, this doesn’t surprise me since the New York Times has endorsed Hilary Clinton. In the Clinton focused story they did however put a small odd and unglamorous photo of Obama -read between the lines- in the backseat of a car.

But what really bothers me is the second article, one that paints a single-sided picture of the Obama supporters, in an weak attempt to draw distinction between the supporters, who can all empathize if not truly sympathize with what his victory mean for someone not of the typical mold. Can you imagine if Hilary would have won, would the New York Times have written “Many Whites are Glad…”?! Seriously, this kind of reportage really dates the Times, it sets them a couple decades back at least. This “black & white” story comes across as subterfuge when we should be looking a lot deeper into what this presidential race is about: a change that is at the core of many people’s hopes, not just for those who look the same, but for all who feel the same.

Raise your hand if you’ve been feeling it for way too long now.

Just by chance, we decided to drop in on an event that caught my eye yesterday. It was a reading at KGB bar in the East Village arranged by the new MFA in Design Criticism at SVA. The topic was food and 3 professors from the new department read their criticism from a podium near the bar. To my surprise the Senior Curator of the Design Dept in MoMa, Paola Antonelli was there and she read her article on Pasta, Paul Lukas read about the butcher meat chart design, and Akiko Busch read about the vegetable peeler, which we missed since we arrived after her reading. Overall I thought is was a great idea that should be carried over to art criticism. I mean, wouldn’t it be so much different if the art critics would have to face a crowd and read their criticism? I would figure that it would make critics a bit more conscious of their writing given the fact that it would be presented in front of a live audience, an audience who can immediately react to their words or not.

I also happen to be watching CoolHunting the other day when again, Paola Antonelli was in one of their videos, a video discussing “Design and the Elastic Mind”, her recent curatorial project at the MoMa. I didn’t mention this earlier but I think she will also be teaching in the department, this just adds to the list of heavy weights over at SVA. By the way, the department is still accepting applicants for fall 2008. And I think that the next DCrit reading will be at the end of June , check back on their website for more info. (I almost forgot to mention, there is a big conference on Design, The Arts and The Political being held in October at SVA. More about that later)

Maybe I’m late to report this craze, but a recent spam post tipped me off to “reborn dolls” listings on ebay - baby dolls made to look like hyper realistic babies. I Googled and found this site MBB Creative Doll that has the tag-line of: Art that Captures Life. I don’t really know how to categorize this post? Is it art? games & toys? science & tech? pop culture? All of the above it is!

Meet Big Dog, designed by Boston Dynamics for DARPA. One blogger called it “amazing”, I call it creepy. When I was young I used to fantasize about a future flourishing with robots in all shapes and sizes, but during these wartime years here in America I feel less comfortable with our military’s effort to sanitize war by leaving the dirty work to robots (along with the already active mercenary groups and independent war contractors).

Dirty work drones have been in use now for some time, carrying out assassination missions in many part of the world. By their standards, some of the robot mission are considered “successful”, meaning they killed the person they were hunting, while other not so glorious missions tell eery stories like this one in the UK’s Guardian of innocent villagers’ homes being blasted to pieces in the middle of the night, like this case in Pakistan where 18 villagers were killed, including 4 children. Just Google Preditor Drone and countless other stories will pop up.

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4 of the last post here at Bureaux have been about war, so we decided to end the week with another, this one for the robotics and ethical design debate.

“DARPA’s Robot Dog Project”, Defense Industry Daily, July 2007

More of the war-focused designs by Boston Dynamics can be found on their website.

In December 2001, Dean Kamen unveiled his latest invention, The Segway, a two wheeled battery powered scooter that can take people -umm- around the block and back? Not much more efficient than the other two wheeled invention called the bicycle. Many people still see them on the street or on TV and are befuddled by it’s awkwardness.

A couple of months before the Segway is released, American and British forces invade Afghanistan in retaliation for the Sept. 11th bombings, the day is October 7, 2001.

Two years later, March 20, 2003, with the war still being fought in Afghanistan, US decided to invade Iraq. The events that unfold still continue to change the course of world history.
Still the Segway slow to ship at with it’s hefty price tag, $6,000, where do you park it? At the end of 2003, Segway recalled the 6,000 units sold because of power/safety issues, a technological glitch that only made matters worse given that they company projected that they would sell 50,000-100,000 that year.

Fast forward 2008, we’ve been at war for 7 years now. The two wars are still raging, draining life from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from America, despite the lies and lack of progress. A conundrum, a pretzel. Can you fast forward war? I’m sure a great many Americans would love to tiVo the whole thing, fast forward and erase. I’m digressing -sort of, however remote these two diverging stories do eventually collide… in this CNN video report, Segway comes to the service of returning amputee veterans… On the surface technology seems to have saved the day again, but I don’t think that’s the end of it.

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Stories linked in this post:

“Amputee vets see eye-to-eye on Segways” by Paul Courson
May 5, 2008 CNN Video

“Segway sales haven’t transported maker” by Dawn Kawamoto
Sept 29, 2003, C|Net News

Browsing internet radios, we have been hooked on BBC’s The Forum. It’s a weekly 45min talk show hosted by Bridget Kendall that discusses various topics with guest of diverging minds: scientist, artist, writers, anthropologist, philosophers,  etc. and scholars thereof. It’s nice to get a big picture on various topics relate, both historically and contemporaneously, a clear indication they are all tugging on different threads of one cloth. The only issue I have with the show is that it isn’t archived, so you have to catch it weekly otherwise it’ll be gone next week. I discovered that after wishing to replay a show from 3 weeks ago which talked about time being “like a river”/time travel being possible in the future, and how, even going back as far as the Greek’s, we’ve been on the hunt for the theory of everything.

*Also at the end of the show they invite one of the guest to suggest in 60 seconds and idea to change the world. This weeks idea is one that relates to the of “power through individual consumption and choice”, a power that can start with vegetarianism. (May 4, 2008)