Zazaziza

Finally we got the EL sheets. Now what? Freakin hell.

The Hungries are back! and are squatting Zazaziza! For those of you, dear imaginary readers, who perhaps have been living outside our minds for the past 2 years, the Hungries are a kinky family of self-recursive plush monsters obsessed with the concept of storage.

As it turns out, we happen to know the fine folks who designed them, real nice people. Check out the Hungries website at http://hungries.zazaziza.com.

Above: Moon Eclipse. Plate 497, Natural History album, Compañia Nacional De Chocolates, 1980s.

Machine: Turns energy into work.
Rube Goldberg (RG) machine: In a convoluted and seemingly absurd way, turns energy into work no one cares about.

After many imaginary diatribes, fights and long discussions, Zazaziza decided that RG machines needed a proper classification system. As with everything in life, we encountered many grey areas, borderline RG machines and plenty of non-sequiturs, but decided to continue our intellectual pursuit just the same.

In any case, for those visitors forgiving enough to read a stream of consciousness outburst badly disguised as structured thinking, here are some categories we think could be useful as a proto-framework in the study of Rube Goldbergian phenomena:

1. Purpose

Along life we may encounter machines that are Rube Golbergian proper and proud of it, machines that are proud of having a supposedly beautiful noble purpose (as delusional as that might sound), and machines that do not have a clue whether they are RG-compliant or not.

1.1 Run of the mill(ish): Those that unabashedly go great lengths to do something deemed futile. This constitutes presumably the bulk of obvious, in-your-face RG machines out there, at least in terms of popularity and media exposure. –Example: Pitagora Suitchi (info, YouTube clips)

1.2 Nihilistic: Those that do absolutely nothing, and produce that nothing in an exquisitely obfuscated, and probably proud way too. –Example: The Do-Nothing Machine

1.3 Unintentional: Those machines armed with wishful thinking and overambitious goals that usually presume their own usefulness. Ultimately, contraptions in this category thoroughly fail as efficient machines, but behave beautifully as flawless, classical RG machines. –Example: Web 2.0 software machines? national legislative branches of power?

2. Time scale

How long does it take for the machine to finish its process and yield its inefficient result? seconds? minutes? eons? are RG machines the ultimate form of procrastination?

2.1 Faster-than-you-can-blink contraptions: Some machines can operate at blazing speeds, using absurdly complex arrays of components to produce innocuous work with uttermost efficiency (time-wise.) Think of Moore’s law meets RG machines. –Example: Microprocessors, ephemeral man-made chemical elements.

2.2 Long now-compliant: Those RG machines that are in no hurry at all to finish their processes. –Example: Evolution.

2.3 Open ended/infinite: Self-assembling spontaneous machines that can lie dormant for centuries, their end result is usually completely unpredictable (but futile) and is often a one-off type of thing. If only they weren’t infinite and human race wasn’t on the verge of extinction, we could find out if they do come to an end and what happens then.
–Example: Egyptian pyramid curse mechanisms activated by archaeologists opening tombs.

3. Spatiality

Physical or geographical boundaries almost always affect the behaviour and outcome of RG machines. Admitedly, this category is a bit dodgy, but come on, you’ve already read this far… just go on.

3.1 Contained: Your garden variety of RG machine that comes to life in a garage, workshop or some contained space no larger than a 2 storey house.

3.2 Continent-engulfing, solar system-wide, etc.: Is the butterfly that flaps its wings in the Amazonian forest causing–via chaos theory–Godzilla to sneeze over Tokyo part of an RG machine?

3.3 Evil nano-level or a bit bigger RG machines: self-explanatory. –Example: Molecular switches and sensors made from RNA

3.4 Networked: Those machines that are scattered around the globe, usually each part or node of the machine can be considered an RG contraption itself, which affects all other nodes. The work produced by each module remotely triggers the next one and contributes to the whole RG machine. –Example: Baynham & Tyers RG machine. Notice the part where mobile phones are used to connect 2 parts of the machine (scrub to 2 minutes 10 seconds.)

4. Reality Layer

Is the machine made out of molecules? is it a watchable, touchable, lickable entity? does it only exist as an abstract information-processing assemblage? Do you often hear voices alerting you about the location of RG machines no one else can see?

4.1 Tangible: you know.

4.2 RG machines of the mind: Imaginary RG contraptions and psychological mechanisms of individual and collective nature that can involve awkward social interactions, hallucinations and bouts of OCD.

4.3 Virtual, software-based: Truckloads of lines of computer code to produce antiwork. It could refer also to computer simulations of physical RG machines. –Example: Using IM to chat with a person seated next to you, especially if gossiping, The incredible machine (computer game.)

5. Systemic meta relationships

How RG machines relate to their environment and among themselves.

5.1 Zombies: Apparently useful, efficient, God-fearing machines in their own right that unknowingly work as sub-processes for meta RG machines.

5.2 Metamothers: RG machines that produce RG machines. Ad nauseam.

Unsurprisingly, many pesky, incongruous afterthoughts remain in the air. For instance, if all machines are ultimately RG machines, or part of a cosmic RG machine, as we hinted at once, then RG machines aren’t that especial and you would have to ask yourself what would be the value of such a taxonomy. At this point everything seems very confusing. Dear imaginary reader, can you think of more/better examples and extra categories?

Scenario: Subject A and subject B are wearing t-shirts, the Goodbye t-shirt combo, to be precise. For some reason outside the scope of this weblog, subject A has to leave, leave for good, you know.

Okay, subject A and subject B are acquaintances of some kind, so, as humans often do, they decide to give each other a sappy, dramatic goodbye hug. Subject A gets on the steam train, or some other romantic-sounding means of transportation, leaving subject B lonely and real sad.

All of a sudden, subject B notices that the glowing image on subject A’s t-shirt appears to be glowing on his boring t-shirt now! (they both have been drinking, it’s late at night and it’s dark, mind you.) What could this possibly mean? Can it be a good omen? subject B wonders, while the copied image on his chest slowly fades until it becomes just a memory. Somehow, subject B’s sadness increases tenfold.

Well, it’s obvious that right from the start subject B knew what the Goodbye t-shirt combo does, so he can’t possibly be surprised, can he? Apparently, the t-shirts act as sadness amplifiers of some kind. Maybe subject B is into that sort of thing, we don’t know.

What about subject A? She is staring at her stupid battery-powered glowing t-shirt as the steam boat she’s in cruises along the river. Alas! the t-shirt doesn’t look one bit as fun as it did when she wore it for the first time. Freakin’ sadness amplifiers! they really work!

Thanks a lot Catalina y Mario (subjects A and B)

Donald Norman once wrote something about how the Amish aren’t necessarily against ‘modern’ technology, as sometimes the stereotype seems to picture them. As observed by Norman (among many others), they usually wait a little bit longer (centuries, perhaps) to check if any new technology has any nasty side effects on people, before deciding to use it. Somehow that concept inspired us to think about a persona, for whom the time span of technologies and their nature (analogue, digital, psycho-holographic, whatever) mean absolutely nothing.

So, what will life be like for the average Amish/Mad Max variety of human in 2250? We imagine this person building things for his own community by mixing mechanical and animal-powered devices from the 18th century with 21st century mobile phones, repurposing and hacking VHS recorders, Michael Faraday inventions and whatnot. Would this rogue element be expelled from his community? No clue, we don’t do the forecasting thingy here!

Pictured above: testing direct camera-less techniques for taking analogue screengrabs using Polaroid instant film. Work in progress or meaningless deviation for/from the Somethingscopes series.

From the Zazaziza dusty archives we have managed to unearth an old Kazumba t-shirts video; it shows a mysterious hand holding different ultraviolet and white light-emitting devices that wildly excite paths of photoluminescent molecules along their way!!! Okay, no amount of exclamation signs will make this one look exciting, but here it is anyway for documentation purposes.

The first exploration in the Somethingscopes series is the Polaroid flower, a mechanism of gears, rubber bands and a USB-powered motor that makes spin a circular arrangement of Polaroid filters.

The Polaroid flower is based on the principle that light, as a transverse electromagnetic wave, can be polarised, that is, instead of having it going in all directions, there are ways of making it disperse in only one direction. Polarisation is also the principle behind LCD screens, which means that this kind of screens use Polaroid filters in order to make the liquid crystal arrange visible.

So, what happens when a series of Polaroid filters overlap? the answer is that they further filter down lightwaves depending on their rotation, and in certain combinations they can filter specific frequencies (colours).

When an observer uses polariser lenses oriented perpendicularly to the direction of the light coming from the screen, that light is blocked; however, if between the screen and the polariser lenses there are additional filters oriented at different angles, the overall blocking effect of the polariser lenses can be cancelled out in specific areas.

Hopefully, some of the above will make more sense after watching the video below. The next step for the Polaroid flower is to make it augment or react to what is happening on the screen.