Adhocracy » Criticism

Sí Se Puede

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 10:09:07 +0000

This documentary shows a common week of the tireless activities driven by Barcelona‘s Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH). The PAH is the organisation behind Spain’s anti-eviction movement, and has successfully resisted over 1000 evictions since it was founded in 2009. The cameras placed at the heart of the organization depict not only the post-housing bubble drama but most importantly the huge invisible work behind the PAH and the deep process of transformation and empowerment of those who participate in it. Because, those who care of people are taking care of the commons.

The Liberator 3D Printer Gun

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:57:43 +0000

Defense Distributed is an online, open-source organization that collaboratively produce, publish, and distribute to the public, without charge, information and knowledge related to the digital manufacture of arms. On May 5, 2013, DD released the files for The Liberator pistol as result of the Wiki Weapon Project. This release was met by a flurry of US governmental censures and investigations. Its 21st century, and in some countries you have the right to buy a gun, but you’re not free to make it by yourself. Is it ethics, security or pure economics?

Technology is the Answer

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:55:11 +0000

Fun Palace is Cedric Price’s most celebrated work. Whether characterised as a giant toy or as a building-sized transformable machine, the project’s interest resides in its radical reliance on structure and technology, its exemplification of notions of time-based and anticipatory architecture. With Fun Palace, Price addressed social and political issues that go far beyond the typical bounds of architecture. The famous lecture “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?” is being reproduced publicly here for the first time ever. Following Price, we suggest you to explore this place as an instrument of pleasure and enjoyment.

The Homeless Vehicle

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:51:17 +0000

The Homeless Vehicle Project (1987—89) is a device designed by artist Krzysztof Wodiczko with homeless people in New York. As a designed object this device was not only proposing to solve the accommodation issue of the homeless people but creating a tool also make visible their participation in urban space and their visibility in the context of urban economics. This project is still contemporary in the discussion of process based participatory design as well as current urban segregation in our cities.

Emancipati

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:48:24 +0000

The Emancipati Ensemble is a discursive reading instrument that addresses the needs of progressive religious practitioners who are willing to adopt new styles of learning to diversify their sources of knowledge. The instrument not only intends to assure that the subject is studied in a hyper-linked, socially-networked, and distributed form meshed with data, images, and sound, but that the subject is also presented with opposing arguments that are prepared with custom filtering and content-matching software.

DRM Chair

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:46:26 +0000

The DRM Chair has only a limited number of uses before it self-destructs. The number of use was set to eight, so everyone could sit down and enjoy a single time the chair. A small sensor detects when someone sits and decrements a counter. Every time someone sits up, the chair knocks a number of times to signal how many uses are left. When reaching zero, the self-destruct system is turned on and the structural joints of the chair are melted. That’s planned obsolescence experienced in its essence!

Collective Dictionary

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:41:08 +0000

Campus in Camps stems from the recognition that refugee camps in the West Bank are in a process of a social and spatial transformation. Despite adverse political and social conditions Palestinian refugee camps have developed a relatively autonomous and independent social and political space: no longer a simple recipient of humanitarian intervention but rather as an active political subject. This initiative aims at transgressing, without eliminating, the distinction between camp and city, refugee and citizen, center and periphery, theory and practice, teacher and student.

Autoprogettazione

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 09:40:14 +0000

In 1974 the artist and designer Enzo Mari, presented this project as an open manual with nineteen designs using rough boards, to self-made basic furniture: from tables and chairs, to wardrobe and beds. The simple design of these easy-to-assemble furniture usually required nothing more than a hammer and nails. With Autoprogettazione, Enzo Mari open-sourced the furnishing industry with a critical eye. For you to use in this exhibition, we built some units of the 1123 xP chair.

Self-Fashioning Escape Objects

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 15:53:48 +0000

Maria Papanikolaou’s artworks focus on the fantasy, the act and the attestation of escaping from an oppressive environment. Inspired by her first degree in law and her practice at the felonies’ department of Athens Supreme Court, Maria combines personal testimonies, tales, myths and historical facts in order to create artworks based on fictional escape stories. Throughout history, thousands of people have been trying to escape from slavery, fascist regimes, poverty, war, immigration detention centres and imprisonments of all kinds. In the project Self-Fashioning Escape Objects, she designs the objects these people fashioned themselves in their attempt to escape, using all available materials and ordinary, everyday items in incredible innovative ways.

Ethical Things

Mattia Spresian — Wed, 01 Apr 2015 15:23:04 +0000

It’s part of the greater dream of progress to incrementally unload burdens of our daily lives to more autonomous and smart objects. However the more information we feed them the more complex is to take decisions.

If a “smart” coffee machine knows about its user’s heart problems, should it accept giving him a coffee when he requests one? The system will be designed to take into account certain inputs, to process a ‘certain’ type of information under a ‘certain’ kind of logic. How are these “certainties” defined, and by whom? How are these autonomous systems going to be able to solve problems without objective answers? And, moreover, as the nature of ethics is very subjective, how will machines be able to deal with the variety of profiles, beliefs, and cultures?

The Ethical Things project looks at how a very mundane object like a fan, might face complex dilemmas, and can source answers and determine its behaviour by asking to crowdsourced workers. Rather than focusing on creating complex and possibly erroneous algorithmic smartness, we outsource the choice to people and allow users to set the ethical parameters chosen to find the right remote “Ethical Agent”.