Orchid Project

When ‘cool’ gets it wrong Hi-tech fire alarm in safety halt Google-owned Nest halts sales of its Nest Protect fire alarm after the firm found that users could accidentally disable the device by waving their arms. Read more:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26879987 Sent from a mobile phone.

Virilio suggests that if the thought that goes into the invention of the jet airliner is revolutionary, then the thought which emerges from a plane crash is ‘revelationary’. The accident is not simply the negation of a substance, it is the production of a synchronicity which lies hidden within that substance, the flashing up of […]

The global spread of technologies which enable people to see, hear, know and act at a distance are considered by Virilio, in his more gnostic moments, as a kind of demiurgic recasting of the world. The profane destiny of humanity is to resurrect within its collective psyche an archaic dream of divinity and become god-like […]

Now that Flight MH370 has been declared lost in the Indian Ocean, the search for the remnants of the crashed plane takes on a new dimension. There is a gap between the official knowledge, based on a mathematical inference concerning the plane’s speed, flightpath and fuel volume, and the empirical knowledge of the human senses. […]

We have two recently accepted publications on our work investigating team coordination through a mixed-reality game probe. AtomicOrchid has become somewhat of a key research platform in ORCHID to trial Agent-based technologies in a real-world setting, involving people in the role of field responders and HQ coordinators. There’s a short video on AtomicOrchid on Vimeo […]

I’ve recently added an online editor for provenance statements at https://provenance.ecs.soton.ac.uk/tools/editor/. This is a plain text editor that highlights the Provenance Notation syntax and provides tab completion for many common statements. If you are using TextMate or Sublime Text and want the same functionality, you might also want to check this blog post.

 When Flight MH370 shut off its transponder, it disappeared from Malaysian radar and was declared missing. Before the disappearance could be called a crash, the possible locations of the plane had to be computed. An Inmarsat comms satellite first picked up an automated signal from the plane’s satcom link at 02:11, receiving 8 hourly ‘pings’ […]

For Paul Virilio, the accident as a philosophical idea tracks back to Aristotle, who in his Metaphysics conceived of it as a property which has no necessary connection to the substance of a thing. So, a plane crash is a chance event which interrupts the inevitable spread of air travel around the world. Virilio deconstructs […]

Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 has been missing since 8th March 2014 and has still not been found. It was seen taking off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport at 00:41 local time and was due to hove back into view at 06:30 as it landed at Beijing Capital International Airport. In the interval, it was scheduled […]

Accident or terror attack? When Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 disappeared from civilian radar screens over the sea, it reappeared in public consciousness as an ‘unknown quantity’, a ghost aircraft, the object of rumour, speculation and prayers. What is astonishing is that it has breached the informal yardstick used by disaster response teams – the one […]