Bruce Sterling at ArtFutura 05
Published by Rudy De Waele October 24th, 2005 in UncategorizedNext weekend you can find me at the ArtFutura, the digital art and new media festival of reference in Spain. The festival offers a wide range of activities between October 27th and October 30th - workshops, conferences, performances, special presentations and a powerful audio-visual program. Last year, I had the chance to hear Howard Rheingold explaining his Smart Mobs.
I am specifically looking forward to the conference of Bruce Sterling: Living Objects, Sensitive Spaces about his new book “Shaping Things”.
Cyberpunk icon Bruce Sterling is without doubt one of the most important science-fiction writers in the last twenty years. He is currently “Visionary-in-Residence” at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.
His new book, Shaping Things, is a treatise on how location and wireless technologies (RFID, wireless) with online database promise to redefine completely our vision of everyday objects.
Sterling offers a brilliant, often hilarious history of shaped things. We have moved from an age of artifacts, made by hand, through complex machines, to the current era of “gizmos.” New forms of design and manufacture are appearing that lack historical precedent, he writes; but the production methods, using archaic forms of energy and materials that are finite and toxic, are not sustainable. The future will see a new kind of object — we have the primitive forms of them now in our pockets and briefcases: user-alterable, baroquely multi-featured, and programmable — that will be sustainable, enhanceable, and uniquely identifiable.
Shaping Things is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepreneurs and financiers — and anyone who wants to understand and be part of the process of technosocial transformation.
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I’d love to hear Bruce Sterling speak.
I discovered his work when I read an article he wrote on Cyprus for Wired Magazine a few years ago (1999/2000?). I didn’t even realise he led a double life as a science fiction writer until I sent him an email asking where I could read some more stuff he’d written and he actually took the trouble to reply!
Funnily enough, I’m actually rereading his novel “Heavy Weather” at the moment. With all this year’s hurricances, the scenario he describes in the book may (worryingly) not be too far off the mark.
“Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years” is worth a look too, if you haven’t read it already.