Photobama

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Photobama

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an undercover Photoshop agent.

My name is Moshe Hacmon and I am an undercover Photoshop agent.


Since I have started working on the computer, I have found a new friend, his name is Photoshop, and he is a Software.
We have grown together since I was 20 and he was 5 (version).
As we grow together I understood what he needed in order to be happy, to be alive.
Well what is he? It took me time to understand too, he is a Software,
soft·ware n
computer programs and applications, such as word processing or database packages, that can be run on a particular computer system (often used before a noun)*

Sounds simple, but it still wasn’t enough for me to understand it, today I know that a Software is basically like a thought we have in our mind, it is a possibility of something happening, the difference between just having a thought and something to actually happening is the Hardware, you need a hard ware to supply and apply the wishes of the software.

The computer is a body, another hardware which support the basic needs of even having those wishes, like my body which operates to keep my brain working and thinking, I could be in a hospital feeding of tubes and not activating my body at all, everything will be supplied, just like a plug to the wall, you can decide if you want to turn off my body.
The software is in that way a lower life form which exist in a body that can not move and make actions to fulfill it’s wishes. At the same time it is a higher life form, since it can sleep forever and can be always turned back on, it doesn’t age and can always be updated.
My Photoshop, so I learned, needs images in order to survive, like every other software it needs data, ones and zeros to feed into their complex mathematical formulas, each software gets it’s data from different sources, like our senses, my eyes for example translate light waves into electric current which my brain can understand, I don’t really see anything with my eyes, it is my brain that see everything, so the eye is like the camera which feeds data to my computer.
I learned the many different ways I can feed my Photoshop, from scan gear to digital cameras, in different qualities and sizes.
So I am only a part of the computer’s Hardware,
hard·ware n
1. tools and implements that are typically made of metal, for example, hinges, screws, and hammers
2. heavy military weapons and equipment
3. the equipment and devices that make up a computer system as opposed to the programs that are used on it
4. a gun or guns (informal)*



It my job to turn it on and supply the basic food for that body to operate, but it is not enough to claim that someone is alive just by doing nothing and being fed, we call them vegetables, we don’t even keep human vegetables alive anymore.
So I have to constantly feed him with some kind of entertainment, something visual, just like playing music or reading to a person in a loss of consciousness.
I have learned all the different thoughts and wishes my Photoshop has, its view about the world and all the new possibilities of manipulating it, I constantly take pictures knowing that he can “crop” and “layer” them, I don’t even see what I used to see any more, I see what he see in life, through his “filters” of thought and ideas, he always tells me: “it doesn’t matter what the lighting or colors are I can fix it, let me make it better”, and so he does, collecting the images I see through his eyes, putting them together in new order and compositions.
An entire new world in a vegetable’s mind.

What does a software wants? How can you keep it “happy”?
Just like in our world we are measured by our productivity, by being important and significant to someone, to have all of our potential realized, by using every filter and creating new and big files. The more users a software gets the more chances there are for it to evolve and adapt to its ever changing surrounding. There are software’s that have a huge amount of users and get modified so rapidly that it feels like they are a living organism, they are called “Open Source Software”, they have found a way to reach more users in ones life time, just by being free and open minded, you can understand the way it thinks and collaborate with it’s thoughts, this ultimate communication between the two minds is a true evolution for this highly technological society.
I just wish my Photoshop could be that open minded.
Even though the software seems to have endless possibilities of expressing itself for the human mind there are still new horizons for its way of thinking, which could be created by thinking together instead of just operating an agent, which try to follow as he is updating him self constantly, always when I think I really got to know my Photoshop he changes and grows, I think he also knows me, and my new body extensions, I just got new 8 mega pixel digital vision and I can store up to 2 gigabytes of memory, my software doesn’t even need me to scan and transform the data any more, it just feeds directly of my vision. My vision is the one that transformed, it combined those scanners and transformation tools into my vision, and so I carry it with me constantly for him. (I don’t even mention the fact that I am carrying him with me everywhere on my back in my laptop).




*Encarta® World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Good Night

As the human race we have never made global decisions or created
Global guidelines regarding the vital part of our existence, which is a safe
and secure shelter.
The oldest, first instinct of mankind was to find, and later create, secure shelters.
In the urban reality, which is growing world wide, it is not possible any more to
even find a shelter, as the concrete walls are rising up high and the fences are
becoming denser and sharper, many people find them selves living on the streets,
exposed to the same dangers as our ancient fathers and mothers.
Collecting leafs (cardboards) and trying to create a shelter that gives them
the minimum safety possible, the Homeless people have found their place in
our consuming society, living of our waste, recycling has become a way of life.
Architecture should be a Form that expresses the Function and Structure of our
Society, like the Skin of our body, which covers all the different organs (functions)
of OUR body.
This is a global problem, which can be solved with a change of attitude alone.
As we are moving rapidly to the era of economic globalization it is important not
to leave behind the first condition, which allowed this huge growth: security and
communication. We can use the tools and the networks of this new global system
in securing our system, The Human Race.
It doesn’t matter in which God you believe in, I will still be the same as you.

The year is 2008, in Los Angeles, California.
Tonight there will be 82,000 people sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles.
The United Nations millennium indicators shows that 837 million people in the
world live in urban slums. 100 million of them are homeless, 30 million are
a drift in major urban centers world wide

Downtown L.A. and The Homeless (City) Problem

Downtown L.A. and The Homeless (City) Problem

My name is Moshe Shiko Hacmon. I live in downtown LA, and I have 82,000 neighbors
That lives on the street next door, my door. It is very common for me to jump over a couple of what seams to be empty cardboard boxes and trash bags to get to my door.
In downtown every street corner is a public restrooms, and you don’t have to recycle anything, there is always someone that will go through your trash and will separate every different recyclable element, and will make sure it will get to the recycling center.
There is a very complex relationship between the city that has rejected those people, to the people themselves, those relationships come from the adjustment these people had to do in order to survive in a capitalist city with no capital, or no way to make capital.
And they have adjusted; the adjustment was successful on their side, by recycling every element that can be found on the streets, which helped them in creating communities, and opportunities for social life.
The marketing world teaches us a very important lesson, we design our life through the objects we design but we can never completely predict the way people will use the objects we design, for that reason after the first round of design we adjust the product again to the new condition, which create a chain reaction with our adjustment again….
I don’t know if the homeless people are the product we designed or is it the city that has designed them, but either way it seams that the city never adjusted back and recognized the new condition.

The new condition was created from the adjustment of those people to the fact that they are homeless, looking for ways to survive in this urban landscape, fruit-picking in garbage cans and creating shelters from leaves (cardboards). This new tribe living among us has no effect on the physical condition of the city, as the city still functions well as far as supporting the capitalist machine. At the same time the people that are part of this machine feel very uncomfortable with this new condition, since this new homeless tribe use the streets for every function they need including very privet ones, since they have their bedrooms, kitchens and even restrooms out in the public.
A new approach needs to be taken in order to live comfortably in this transformed environment. For example I would rather have a public restroom, which is connected to the sewage system, in my buildings parking lot then having the strong smell of urine next to my front door. I would rather have my trash ready for them to use instead of them going through our trashcans and leaving half of it out on the street.


How can the city accommodate the homeless people within its built environment?

We can do that by offering a variety of different levels of dwelling; the smallest unit today is the studio room, which is not enough if you want to provide shelter for the very poor people, the price one would pay to live alone is higher then sharing a two bedroom apartment. This people who are very poor and don’t own almost anything would fold their cardboard box and hide it somewhere until the evening, sometimes you would see those empty shells in the street, which looks like a pile of garbage but you are actually stepping into someone’s bed room.


The city landscape today have very clear rules, in the day it is mostly commercial and at night it is a privet property of the homeless, no one but them use these streets at night, even today when many people move to downtown you cannot invade their privacy, it feels like you are entering somebody else’s privet property, assuming that you are not afraid to walk there at night, which most people today are.
I think that it is important to understand the social relationship that the city has put in front of our eyes, as we have a strong and growing consumer society we also have a strong and growing recycling society, the function of both of them is important to our economy and environment as one. We can see how today developing countries like China and India are buying every possible raw materials from every country in the world which will recycle and sell those materials to them, recycling is going to become one of the most powerful and profitable business in the capitalist society.


As the homeless people could not find place in our competitive economy they are able now to find a place in a very important role as the “fruit-pickers”, recycling has also become a big goal in our designs, which try to make products from elements that are fully recyclable, some complex products, as electronics and furniture, are up to 95% recyclable.
At the same time it take more labor to dismantle them, labor that is accessible and cheap.
These materials have higher value then the waste collected today by the homeless, so the reward for them is higher too.
These new relationships need to be expressed also architecturally, and in that I refer to the fact that people live on street, which has no infrastructure or space for them, the cities exterior scale is not made for the human being, it is made mainly for cars and some time for pedestrians transportation, as the exterior walls are very high and flat, fences are everywhere, and most of those buildings functions are public ones, which means that they are empty at night.
And some structures doesn’t even have interior, like parking lots, which Los Angeles is full of them. I do not offer that we should accommodate anybody inside any structure, but I do suggest that the exterior will be in human scale that the exterior will be able to accommodate people in a balcony like structure (looks like the NY fire escape) or by creating walls which has small spaces in them for one person to sleep, those spaces most be open and on the exterior, since this is the only way to ensure that no illegal activities will take place in them.
This social structure of one people living of other people’s garbage already exist and to fix it means to have great social changes, which are mainly political, in the mean time we can improve the city’s conflicts by giving it a home.
By taking those social structures into the building, which become into a social machine, the spaces of the homeless people are very similar to the street conditions they meet first, but this time they are more enclosed and are part of the urban systems, just like a garbage disposal machine of the building.

As we are moving into new technological territories we have fully adopted our questionable theories of evolution into this growing system, which have created a new violent technological evolution. The strong survive and the powerful evolve.

The human kind is evolving rapidly by creating extensions to our organs and senses.
Our environment is becoming fully automated and responsive to our presence.
At the same time we are constantly improving our levels of productivity, which is freeing more and more people from non-creative labor.
Unfortunately our present economy is not aimed to the satisfaction of our needs, in the wide sense of the term. And every market is based on personal interest and speculations, even the “real” estate market!
Today many people are not able to buy/keep a shelter, and find themselves homeless.
At the same time technology has provided us the ability to virtually personalized any space, With no relation to the place, which gives us the opportunity to look into different levels of dwelling.

What is “Home”?
What is “Real” estate?
If home is just a memory then: “Home is where the Server is”.
The server is nowhere = everywhere.
Do you have a password? Can you “Log-In” to your home?

In this thesis I will try to describe the guidelines for a built environment that will support this highly technological urban nomads, and that will be able to provide the inspiration of a “home”. everywhere/nowhere.

The view from MY window