#opensourceecology

Check out this project by upcoming Guest Lecturer Marcin Jakubowski - speaking at the MFA AC+D Studios on November 4th!

We've teamed up with the Open Source Ecology team to assist in creating OS Icons! In our first week, we've knocked out almost 50!

http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Icon_Source.

You can check out our crowd icon design process here: http://opensourceecology.org/pattern-language-icons-2/

[INFRASTRUCTURE FICTION/THESIS RESEARCH]

//All watched over by machines of love and grace\\

This was an interesting film recommended by one of my Tutors. 

Without going into too much detail the film is basically about thinking of the world as an eco-system that needs to be balanced, either by nature or human intervention. And the dream that one day a self organising system will rise. 

It talks about many different ideas relevant to our group scenario which I've tried to briefly summarise below. 

THE ECO-SYSTEM AND NETWORK LOOPS

Eleanor Townsley's theory that the brain is actually an machine powered by an electrical energy. This energy is complex and is connected to nature and linked to all animals... The Eco-system. This energy is constantly moving yet always returns to a balanced state.

The great universal law of equilibrium or 'the default setting'.

Every action we take has consequences that feed through the system and return to shape our future behaviour (feedback). Computers could see this feedback which was named 'feedback loops'.

another word for this feedback is NETWORK LOOPS

network loops can consist of physical systems, electrical systems, biological systems, internal medical systems etc.

the founders in cybernetics started to map these actors and link the behaviour of machines and humans in mathematical formulas.

an ecologist called Howard Oden used this information to produce a machine which could predict when the feedback loop needed to be intervened to bring the feedback back to an equilibrium.

At the time some researched in cybernetics and ecology believed these theories were a vision of a new world, one without the authoritarian exercise of power and the old political hierarchies. A vision that was different from past ideology which mirrored how order was created in nature. 

BUCKMINSTER FULLER

Buckminster Fuller's 'the operating manual for earth and space' was also published around this time (1969). This related to his geodesic dome principle. each part that made up his done was small and weak, but together form a strong structure. This principle (which was also copied from nature) can be used to manage society's.

fuller believed that people shouldn't see themselves as members of nations or classes of hierarchies of power. But instead people should see themselves as equal members of a global system.

Fullers manifesto - the world should be seen as one giant spaceship built by people but managed by computers. This makes the spaceship the important object (the system) and not the individual. Politicians always think that can control the system but a system should be able to find its own natural order just like the Default Setting theory. 

NEW SOCIETY AND THE COUNTER CULTURE 

During 1967-1971 there was a huge counter culture following Buckminsters idea. 500,000 americans left the large cities and set out to build there own experimental communities. 

One of the biggest migrations in human history

These people used Fullers experimental Geodomes to build new homes and adopt his scientific ideas as new principles which created communes.

communes deliberately had no hierarchy of control or power. 

'everyone has there own part to play in this new ecosystem which is created equal'

precedent - Ecotecnics (synergia commune). These people created a society based on understanding ecosystems and more importantly understanding interrelationships and balance.

creating an organisational network acting as one.

BIRTH OF THE DESKTOP COMPUTER 

The first pioneers in computers believed that in the future society would develop the same communes but on a global network scale which would link together in a system that would find its own natural order (the default system).