Tech City is London’s answer to Silicon Valley, an initiative to turn East London into a leading technology hub. The heart of the scheme, Old Street’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’, is about to be joined by Google as they plan to open a seven-story building near the station next year. Focused on training and product demonstrations, the new space will give Google an opportunity to help technology start-ups and encourage them to adopt Google products and services.
In addition to their main London offices in Victoria, Google have also bought office space in Central Saint Giles near Shaftsbury Avenue, and made their first venture into retail with the Chrome Zone in PC World on Tottenham Court Road. There’s no doubt that Google are expanding rapidly, and London looks set to be a big part of their plans.
Ok, it's a slightly sickly trailer, but I'd like to see the film. I think the lesson will be that doing what you enjoy can lead to great things, even if other people don't get it at first. When this man was a kid he was considered a weirdo because he liked playing with puppets, but ended up creating a character that was globally popular. I bet a lot of people who have made money out of Elmo would have been the type to take the piss out of him, and I bet their kids love Elmo.
This September I went to the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, an annual event featuring projects that mix “provocative art, technology and intellectual thinking” as they call it. At the end of 3 full days, I feel I’m sorted for the next 3 years. My journey to Linz was actually a time travel experience.
The theme this year was "ORIGIN - How It All Begins” in collaboration with the Cern Center to show the research about the origin of the world.
It explains why the moment we question ourselves where are we came from, it’s when we’re actually going forward.
An excellent example is one of the Android-Theatre project by Hiroshi Ishiguro who worked on one of the most challenging dreams of our time: the idea of recreating a robot that looks exactly like a human.
I have always been fascinated by Science Fiction movies like I, Robot and Gattacar novels like “Do robots dream electric sheep? Or music videos like “All is full of love” by Bjork with that love-sex sequence between two robots, so I was really excited entering the oldest and tallest Gothic church in Austria to attend “Sayonara”(Goodbye).
After climbing almost 200 steps in a spiral staircase, I arrived in a semi dark room where two actors were facing each other on stage seated in their chairs. I knew that one of them was a robot but I couldn’t immediately figure out who was who.
Is it the blond girl seated on the right or the Asian woman on the left?
I knew that the audience was doing the same puzzle game as me. I looked at their skins, their mouths and their hands… confronting each other and making bets in my mind. I pointed all my invisible money on the blond sleepy girl. As soon as they started to speak I realized that the Asian girl had a robotic voice, you could feel that it was not coming from “inside” her. Even
I thought my “mind game” was solved, but then a new one began when they started a conversation about dreams, feelings and future. The piece actually explores the relationship between a dying girl and her android companion.
I can shyly say I felt like if I was going to visit a corpse. I have never experienced so many feeling at the same time during a play. Fascinated, attracted and repulsed at the same time. Also, I was in a church, symbol of a religious explanation to our existence and now I was brought to think in term of redefining the human existence related to a robot. What does it mean to be human? What truth is? Whow!
I left the place completely amazed and without having a lot of time to digest it all, I decided to add some more ingredients to the big information soup I was dealing with and went to have a look at one of the winners of Prix Ars “May the Horse Live in me, 2011 / Art OrientéObjet (FR) ” where a woman decided to mix her blood with the horse’s plasma… …but that’s another story.
From “I, Robot”.
Detective del Spooner to Sonny:
Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
We could add: Can a robot act? Can a robot make you cry? What about your toaster?
Did you see this last week? Someone modelled "a brain watching videos from youtube", and then cross referenced it with a real person watching a video from youtube to guess what they were (kind of) looking at.
Anyway, for no good reason I thought I'd write my phone number on a pebble and chuck it down the beech. Who's going to find it? There's millions of them, but you never know, it could be the start of an adventure!
Yesterday I got this text:
No way! Someone's found the pebble, and not only that they've texted the number on it. Would I do that?
So after a couple of texts to establish neither of us are mental (sort of a shame, but we'll see) Paul the finder is going to post it back to our office.
