Author Archive for audreyl

From, The Economist

The  Twitter account of Ai Weiwei, China’s foremost artist-activist, fell silent when he was arrested on April 3rd. Chinese state media suggest that he is guilty of “economic crimes” and a bevy of other reputation-killers such as plagiarism and being “erratic.” But his imprisonment is clearly a means of shutting him up. A forceful advocate of democracy and free speech, Mr Ai used his blog to confront the fictions of government propaganda. With belligerent conviction, he railed against the inhumanity of a regime with no respect for the truth.

“Twitter is most suitable for me. In the Chinese language, 140 characters is a novella,” says Mr Ai in an interview at the back of “Ai Weiwei’s Blog”, a collection of over a hundred translated pieces culled from over 2,700 posts. Mr Ai’s father, Ai Qing, was a poet who was deemed an enemy of the state in 1957, rehabilitated only when the Cultural Revolution died down in 1976. But Mr Ai had written very little himself. In fact, the visual artist barely knew how to type when he was invited by Sina, China’s largest internet portal, to write a blog for their website.

A proponent of simple, authentic architecture, not fancy forms for form’s sake, Mr Ai has overseen some 70 architectural projects, and was a consultant on Herzog & de Meuron’s “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics. Some of Mr Ai’s most memorable writings weave personal history with political and aesthetic principles. For example, his “earliest experience with architecture” took place when his father was sentenced to hard labour and re-education and the family was forced to live in an earthen pit in Xinjiang. “In political circumstances like those, living underground can provide an incredible feeling of security,” he writes. “In the winter it was warm, in the summer it was cool. Its walls were linked with America.” Mr Ai’s father raised the ceilings of this home by burrowing down another 20 centimetres, and he dug out a bookshelf that eight-year-old Weiwei considered “the best”. For these reasons, concludes the artist, “I don’t believe in ideal architecture.”

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From Nick Bilton, The New York Times

On Wednesday morning I stopped by the SoHo Apple store in New York City to purchase an iPad for a family member. As I had anticipated, a store clerk said they were out of stock and recommended that I check back the following morning. When I asked what time I should arrive, the clerk hesitated, looked around as if about to tell me a secret and said: “Well, do you see that group of people outside? They’re already here waiting for tomorrow’s shipment of iPads.”

I looked, and saw that outside the store sat a small group of Chinese men and women ready with camping chairs and apparently all the time in the world, preparing for a chilly night on New York’s streets as they waited to buy the iPad 2.

As I’ve reported in the past, there is an active trade for Apple’s latest gadgets in China, and it’s evident in New York in long lines of Chinese outside Apple’s stores waiting to buy the products — originally made in China — to send them back to that country for resale. This has been going on with the iPhone for a while. But it is a bit more complicated with the iPad because the device is in short supply, and in very high demand. This means that the resale price is much higher than it was for previous Apple gadgets. And so there is motivation for sleeping out overnight to wait for the next day’s shipment.

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From The Economist

The industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy—and society—in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time. Now a new manufacturing technology has emerged which does the opposite. Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did.

It works like this. First you call up a blueprint on your computer screen and tinker with its shape and colour where necessary. Then you press print. A machine nearby whirrs into life and builds up the object gradually, either by depositing material from a nozzle, or by selectively solidifying a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam. Products are thus built up by progressively adding material, one layer at a time: hence the technology’s other name, additive manufacturing. Eventually the object in question—a spare part for your car, a lampshade, a violin—pops out. The beauty of the technology is that it does not need to happen in a factory. Small items can be made by a machine like a desktop printer, in the corner of an office, a shop or even a house; big items—bicycle frames, panels for cars, aircraft parts—need a larger machine, and a bit more space.

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