B) Cloud of Cards Processing Library

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Project developed by Christian Babski (fabric | ch)


Cloud of Cards Processing Library consists in the unification of three different API dedicated to online files and folders manipulation and the development of an additional fourth one specific to the needs of the Cloud of Cards kit and the Inhabiting and Interfacing the Cloud(s) research project. The overall final package has been adapted to the Processing development language and linked to the open-source cloud software ownCloud.

Additional behaviors are included that can also be used in relation to ownCloud (or Nextcloud), for both its server and clients. These additional functions are the implemented results of the design research process, linked to an ethnographic study about the cloud user experience.

Through the use of this new library written in Processing and linked to other open-source tools, it is now easier for a wider public to experiment, sketch and develop alternative interfaces, visual or physical applications for the cloud. In particular, the communities of designers and makers that are used to the Processing language.

A Personal Cloud (evolution)

Note: “A Personal Cloud” (working title) is part of a home cloud kit, which was described in a previous post and that will be composed by four various artifacts, both physical and digital.

The kit will be distributed freely at the end of the project.

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The “alternative version” of the cloud (client, interface) and the way we interact with it is still under development.

Strongly connected to the ethnographic field research that was achieved earlier during the research process regarding cloud usages, the purpose of this project is to exemplify a different way of handling or even playing with one’s data and files in the cloud, as well as to demonstrate an implementation of “I&IC’s OwnCLoud Core Processing Library” that will also be part of the final delivery “cloud kit”.

“A Personal Cloud” is also in tight connection with the objects controllers project, “My Data Controllers” (working title as well), because these networked objects will directly interact with the files and data contained in it.

 

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A version of OwnCloud developed with the help of “I&IC’s OwnCloud Core Processing Library” and containing five root folders, each with a singular automated behavior.

I&IC’s OwnCloud Core Processing Library (evolution)

Note: “I&IC OwnCloud Core Processing Library” (working title) is part of a home cloud kit, which was described in a previous post and that will be composed by four various artifacts, both physical and digital.

The kit will be distributed freely at the end of the project.

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motivations_usages_problems_01_02

One processing project with one cloud, while the server (OwnCloud) can still be accessed by a regular interface (OwnCloud client). The upper part (white) is the “network/server side” of the project (OwnCloud), hosted on a Linux server, while the bottom (grey dots) is user or “client side”. It can consists in connected objects or environments, interfaces, visualizations of different sorts.

 

The I&IC’s Owncloud Core Processing Library is now composed of a “client side” component and “server side” component (IICloud’s Addon).

The “client side” part of the library (“user side” vs. “network/server side” in the illustrations above and below) can be used from Processing, in order to get access to OwnCloud server(s) and manipulate files. The benefit of the core library resides in the fact that it mashups all together a set of heterogeneous functionalities in one single library (it has been therefore renamed I&IC OwnCloud Core Processing Library as it is more closely related to our research).

Bratton H. B. (2016). The Stack, On Software and Sovereignty

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(…). In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User.

Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling — not only computational forms but also social, human and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks”, in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention. (…).

 

Note: recently published by the MIT Press — as well as quoted as a work in progress by Lucien Langton in a post back in 2015 — comes this book by Prof. Benjamin H. Bratton.

It consists in a comprehensive analysis, both technical and phylosophical of what we could call “The Cloud”, yet what Bratton describes as a world scale “stack” consisting in 6 layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User (and which interestingly is not so distant to our own approach considering the user, the interface, the infrastructure and the territory).

Old web today, by Rhizome

(…) Today’s web browsers want to be invisible, merging with the visual environment of the desktop in an effort to convince users to treat “the cloud” as just an extension of their hard drive.

In the 1990s, browser design took nearly the opposite approach, using iconography associated with travel to convey the feeling of going on a journey. Netscape Navigator, which used a ship’s helm as its logo, made a very direct link with the nautical origins of the prefix cyber-, while Internet Explorer’s logo promised to take the user around the whole globe. (…)

By Rhizome.org

“Pictures of Clouds”, 1995

I found this quite funny yet revealing diagram related to the paper “A brief history of cloud computing” (already mentioned earlier on this blog), by Maximiliano Destefani Neto. It describes the time, back in 1995 according to Mr. Neto, when “Pictures of Clouds” started to appear in technical drawings about networks and the then emerging network computing (grid computing started to be a buzz word around the same time).

The purposes of these schematic “clouds” were to synthesize “too complicated for non technical people to understand” parts of the infrastructure into one image/logotype. It was the icon of the cloud! And it revealed to be a clever choice, because it probably helped to keep the whole infrastructure “blurry”, “hidden”, “invisible” or “un-understandable”… “It happens in the cloud“, this fuzzy technological arrangement and therefore you don’t really need to explain it.

 

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Now in 2015, we’re almost fully immersed into these “clouds”. Literally living in them, through them, … but they still remain blurry!