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I went to see this exhibition of Sinta Tantra, beautiful blend of installation and poetry.
You can also see the high quality video here. 

Scattered House, Usman Haque & Adam Somlai Fischer from cesar harada on Vimeo.

“[source] Scattered House is an architectural experiment founded on a truly contemporary notion of space, where issues of ubiquitous connectivity, family diasporas, design-by-occupant, and public control technology come together in an installation assembled from inexpensive electronic toys and gadgets. 
We are inviting members of the public to visit the Hungarian Cultural Centre and contribute to elements of the “house” —  they can either bring toys and gadgets that will become part of the amalgamated whole or we will also have a selection of items that they can try hacking themselves. Architects and interaction designers Adam Somlai-Fischer and Usman Haque, authors of the online manual “Low Tech Sensors and Actuators” [download 1MB], will be on hand to advise and assist in this process, as well as Bengt Sjölén, artist from Stockholm.
The three day event will be suitable for families and accompanied children, as well as design (or non-design) students who would like to be part of the event. The public will help design and build fragments of the interactive “Scattered House” which will be exhibited internationally later in the year. People will be able to open up toys and gadgets (that they have either brought along or which are provided for them), gain a simple understanding of how they work, and learn how to connect them directly into the installation themselves.  
No experience is necessary, though enthusiasm for hacking open toys is welcome!”

It was a brilliant experience, I just regret I don’t have so much footage of the installation at the Hungarian Embassy, but a lot of interview instead, so here is a quite similar experiment the same people did, if you want to see more in detail the hacked electronic components: 

Reconfigurable House 2 at Place@Space at Z33.be from Adam Somlai-Fischer on Vimeo.

So many times I felt technology isn’t empowering but something heavy we are supposed to drag everywhere, a painful extension. It has to be magic so we want to have it always… Does it fullfill us in any way? Why do I miss it?
Maybe I feel like this today because, the people at the airport have forgotten my bicycle somewhere between Paris and Madrid, my painful phantom limb… I am so sad… empty…

[source : technology review]

This week, IBM announced plans to build the world’s largest “noise free” nanoelectronic fabrication facilities in Switzerland. By shielding equipment from external electromagnetic, thermal, and seismic noise, the new facilities should help advance research in a wide range of fields, such as spintronics, carbon-based devices, and nanophotonics, says IBM.

“Once you move into atomic-scale research, you are dealing with very low energy levels, and so you need very sensitive instruments,” says Kaiserswerth. And the more sensitive the instrument, the more responsive it is to disturbances in the environment. “Every time we bought a new piece of equipment,” says Paul Seidler, IBM Zurich’s science and technology manager, “we would find ourselves having to think hard about which lab was most suitable.” {by Duncan Graham-Rowe for Technology Review, Friday, June 27, 2008}

[source of the image]

I find this very interesting that IBM needs this kind of facility for new technologies : seeking an absolute model of precision to cope with Moore’s law as if it was a production imperative… I think I am going in the precise opposite direction of IBM, by letting entropy increase, extremely noisy architecture. Giving space to nature and openess in the experiment we might obtain non-mesurable yet invaluable results.

Still I think a clever compromise between chaos and order must be found, the Urban Space Station Sofia (june 2008) in Madrid is one, but I can’t stop thinking of alternatives, or derivated, that may be more in the “jungle” direction, even more open, cheaper, progressive, informal… The way is open in front of us.