Ryan Varga made this excellent mini-doc about the Toronto Mini-Maker Faire which I and my family attended last weekend. It was an awesome display of wit and intelligence and talent – and all of it open and inclusive.
I love the ethos of the Maker culture and wholeheartedly embrace the idea of knowing what the fuck is going on inside our gadgets – so we can make our own and better and more individualized creations.
Time to pump some humanity into the culture of tech which we find ourselves swimming in. If the future is, as Ray Kurzweil suggests, inevitably headed toward a Singularity where our machines become sentient and we become our machines we’d better be damned sure our humanity goes along for the ride.
Ostensibly it is about the core reasons why she, and others, are pursuing the growth and development of the open source hardware movement – but her talk touches on much deeper concerns we all share with respect to personal creativity and our quest for community. Whether you are a Maker geek or not it’s a great talk to watch and share with others.
All this week over at Gizmodo they’ve put their focus on enhancements to the human body in a series of posts under the heading This Cyborg Life.
I’ve written here before about some of these possible futures we are rapidly entering and how we have, through our technology, achieved a greater role in our own evolution. Our tech, our media and our culture are all extensions of ourselves. One of the guest writers at Gizmodo is Aimee Mullins, who’s also been featured in this blog, and her thoughts are both provocative and inspiring. If you don’t read anything else today you must> read her post How Abled Should We Be?
Today they posted a video about a man named Tony Quan, a grafitti artist who is paralyzed from Lou Gehrig’s disease and only able to move his eyes. As you’ll see in the video he is now able to continue his public works – from his hospital bed – using a low-cost open source DIY system called EyeWriter, which uses off the shelf gear to create a head mounted device that tracks his eyes allowing him to paint (via projectors) massive scale tags.
We’ll see more of this personalized innovation come to the fore as people in their maker workshops and garage labs create extensions of themselves in tech and media and share it with the rest of the world. What may at first have been seen as singular project for an individual will quickly and easily be shared and embraced by the rest of the world – often with people finding further unanticipated uses and applications that further drives the initial innovation forward – carrying all of us along with it.
I’ve been sharing emails with my friend Bryan during this past few busy weeks about a number of topics of common interest and human enhancement has been one of them. The pattern of rapidly emerging linkages between ourselves and our machines (with our limbs, our eyes, our minds, and the rapid expansion of not just our technical ability to achieve these things but also our developing cultural acceptance of it all) is impossible to ignore. Integrating technology and the human species is not the fearful Borgian dystopia of popular SF narrative – it’s our future. Yes, there are caveats and concerns to be heeded but the emerging generations of users will be integrating their democratized home brew inventions directly with their bodies, becoming one with the tech that used to be a mere extension of self.
Check out the Gizmodo posts and ponder how you would alter or upgrade your present existence.
Here’s another one for the Home Made Future department: I found this over on Gizmodo – back in August some amateur radio enthusiasts sent up a balloon with a tracking package and an HD video cam.
The footage they captured – the first successful amateur hi-def video from the edge of space – is extraordinary.
Pay attention around the 6:20 mark – that’s when the balloon pops.
These aren’t the only folks who have been doing this sort of thing. makers and amateur scientists have been sending up an increasing number of near-space expeditions.
It won’t be long before more fucking insane inspired dudes in lawn chairs start aiming to attain orbit.
Old tech re-purposed – new tech applied in unexpected ways – limited only by human imagination and passionate souls with way too much time on their hands – all of it is a recipe for a very interesting future indeed.
Fuck the jet packs, baby, I’m fillin’ the RV with helium and goin’ on a real vacation. Yee haw!
I'm going to be slowly making some changes to the website both in format and content - and I'm pretty sure even the URL will change.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.