Tom Igoe: Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects (2007)

Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when devices that you’ve built start to talk to each other, things really start to get interesting. Through a series of simple projects, you’ll learn how to get your creations to communicate with one another by forming networks of smart devices that carry on conversations with you and your environment. Whether you need to plug some sensors in your home to the Internet or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other creations, Making Things Talk explains exactly what you need.

This book is perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest. Maybe you’re a science teacher who wants to show students how to monitor weather conditions at several locations at once, or a sculptor who wants to stage a room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. Making Things Talk demonstrates that once you figure out how objects communicate — whether they’re microcontroller-powered devices, email programs, or networked databases — you can get them to interact.

Each chapter in contains instructions on how to build working projects that help you do just that. You will:
* Make your pet’s bed send you email
* Make your own seesaw game controller that communicates over the Internet
* Learn how to use ZigBee and Bluetooth radios to transmit sensor data wirelessly
* Set up communication between microcontrollers, personal computers, and web servers using three easy-to-program, open source environments: Arduino/Wiring, Processing, and PHP.
* Write programs to send data across the Internet based on physical activity in your home, office, or backyard
* And much more

With a little electronics know-how, basic (not necessarily in BASIC) programming skills, a couple of inexpensive microcontroller kits and some network modules to make them communicate using Ethernet, ZigBee, and Bluetooth, you can get started on these projects right away. With Making Things Talk, the possibilities are practically endless.

Published by O’Reilly, 2007
ISBN 0596510519, 9780596510510
426 pages

Key terms:
serial port, Bluetooth, RFID, Digi-Key, ASCII, Mac OS X, Arduino, serial communication, telnet, ZigBee, personal computer, breadboard, HTTP, Ethernet, myFont, Linux, accelerometer, rssi, sensor, potentiometer

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Critical Art Ensemble (1994-2006)

The Electronic Disturbance (1994)

The Critical Arts Ensemble is a virtual collective. This collection of essays and short pieces examines the changing rules of cultural and political resistance: “The current technological revolution has created a new geography of power relations — as data, human beings confront an authoritarial impulse that thrives on absence. As a virtual geography of cognizance and action, resistance must assert itself in electronic space.”

Publisher Autonomedia, May 1994
ISBN 1570270066

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Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (1997)

In the age of global, nomadic capital, the CAE attempts to lay the foundation for the growth of nomadic resistance. Utilizing the tools of its enemy, the CAE suggests that a new cultural and political resistance is possible. Fusing a situationist-influenced concept of contestational art, an understanding of the parallel nature of cultural and political action borrowed from Gramsci, and a hacker’s deep understanding of how new technology functions, ECD is a launch point for debating the nature of power and resistance in the information age.

Publisher Autonomedia, May 1997
ISBN 9781570270567

commentary (Stefan Wray)
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View online, cont. (La Résistance électronique et autres idées impopulaires, French)

Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness (1998)

Having elsewhere explored the dimensions of social and political control in electronic culture, the Critical Arts Ensemble here turns full frontal towards the body, arguing that utopian promises of virtuality are simple distractions from the real project: the deployment of biotechnologies upon the bodies of citizens in the service of the transnational order.

Publisher Autonomedia, March 1998
ISBN 9781570270673

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PDF (Η μηχανή της σάρκας: Εκδόσεις των ξένων, Greek)

Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (2000)

Essays in cultural politics and technology from the collective authors of Electronic Disturbance, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Flesh Machine. Chapters in this new volume include “Electronic Civil Disobedience and the Public Sphere,” “The Mythology of Terrorism on the Net,” “The Promissory Rhetoric of Biotechnology,” “Observations on Collective Cultural Action,” “Recombinant Theater and Digital Resistance,” “Contestational Robotics,” “Children as Tactical Media Participants,” and “The Financial Advantages of Anti-Copyright.”

Publisher Autonomedia, April 2000
ISBN 1570271194

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The Molecular Invasion (2002)

Having exhausted the possibilities for geographic colonial expansion, as well as reaching the fiscal limitations of virtual space, capital begins its invasion of a new frontier — organic molecular space. The Critical Art Ensemble began mapping this development in Flesh Machine (Autonomedia, 1998) by examining the use of reproductive technologies and their promise for achieving an intensified degree of control over worker and citizen. The Molecular Invasion acts as a companion to this first book by mapping the politics of transgenics, and offering a model for the creation of a contestational biology, as well as providing direct interventionist tactics for the disruption of this new assault on the organic realm.

Publisher Autonomedia, April 2002
ISBN 1570271380, 9781570271380
140 pages

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Marching Plague: Germ Warfare and Global Public Health (2006)

The sixth Critical Art Ensemble book offers a radical reframing of the rhetoric surrounding germ warfare. After refuting the idea that massive biological attack is a probable future occurrence, the book goes on to argue that biological weapons programs primarily serve the economic interests of the military-security complex, squandering resources needed to fight the massive loss of life each year from emerging infectious diseases. The book also includes two appendices examining the case of the U.S. Justice Department against Steve Kurtz, for which the original manuscript of the book was seized in the state’s investigation.

Publisher Autonomedia, 2006
ISBN 157027178X, 9781570271786
148 pages

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Anna Bentkowksa-Kafel, Trish Cashen, Hazel Gardiner (eds.): Futures past: thirty years of arts computing (2007)

In decades past, artists envisioned a future populated by technological wonders such as hovercraft vehicles and voice-operated computers. Today we barely recognize these futuristic landscapes that bear only slight resemblance to an everyday reality. Futures Past considers digital media’s transformative impact on the art world from a perspective of thirty years’ worth of hindsight. Herein a distinguished group of contributors—from researchers and teachers to curators and artists—argue for a more profound understanding of digital culture in the twenty-first century.
This unprecedented volume examines the disparities between earlier visions of the future of digital art and its current state, including frank accounts of promising projects that failed to deliver and assessments of more humble projects that have not only survived, but flourished. Futures Past is a look back at the frenetic history of computerized art that points the way toward a promising future.

Published by Intellect Books, 2007
ISBN 1841501689, 9781841501680
128 pages

Key terms:
ARTstor, ontologies, Semantic Web, UCSD, iconography, art history, WordNet, digital art, Toyo Ito, Charles Rufus Morey, Princeton University, Kersale, synsets, University of Birmingham, Christian Art, Georg Nees, Medieval Art, software art, Jean Nouvel, intranet

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