Sunday, February 23, 2014

A Scientist Predicts the Future

November 28, 2013

A Scientist Predicts the Future

By MICHIO KAKU

When making predictions, I have two criteria: the laws of physics must be obeyed and prototypes must exist that demonstrate “proof of principle.” I’ve interviewed more than 300 of the world’s top scientists, and many allowed me into laboratories where they are inventing the future. Their accomplishments and dreams are eye-opening. From my conversations with them, here’s a glimpse of what to expect in the coming decades:

1. Computers Will Disappear

According to Moore’s Law, computer power doubles every 18 months. That means in a decade or so, chips will cost about a penny, the cost of scrap paper. Computers as we now know them will disappear; they will be everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous yet hidden, just like electricity and running water. The cloud will follow us silently and seamlessly, carrying out our wishes anytime, anywhere.

2. Augmented Reality Will Be Everyday Reality

Remember the movie “The Matrix,” where virtual information popped up to help inform physical day-to-day reality? Such things won’t always be the stuff of Hollywood. If the Internet is accessible via contact lenses, biographies will appear next to the faces of the people we talk to, and we will see subtitles if they speak a foreign language. (College students taking final exams will be among the first to buy Internet contact lenses.) These lenses would revolutionize the lives of actors, politicians, surgeons, tourists, soldiers and astronauts by delivering maps, scripts, speeches, translations, biographies and charts with the blink of an eye.

3. The Brain-Net Will Augment the Internet

In decades to come, we will control computers with our minds, not a mouse.The European Union and the United States are committing hundreds of millions of dollars to map the neural pathways of the brain, the next big project in science. This could alleviate the misery of those suffering from mental illness and allow paralyzed people to control computers, video games, appliances, wheelchairs and mechanical arms and legs with sheer thought.

As in science fiction, via the Internet we will be able to experience telepathy (mind-to-mind contact) and telekinesis (mind controlling matter), to upload memories, create a brain-net (memories and emotions sent over the Internet), and record thoughts and even dreams. Basic proofs of principle for all of this have been demonstrated.

This could have an enormous social impact. If memories can be uploaded, unemployed workers might one day be retrained to learn new skills. Students could take college courses while sleeping. Facebook will be full of emotions and memories. Movies may offer emotions, feelings, sensations and memories, not just images and sound.

4. Capitalism Will Be Perfected

We are headed toward “perfect capitalism,” when the laws of supply and demand become exact, because everyone knows everything about a product, service or customer. We will know precisely where the supply curve meets the demand curve, which will make the marketplace vastly more efficient.

One by one, multibillion-dollar industries are being digitized. The first was music, where digitization drove down costs and increased efficiency and competition. To its misfortune, the music industry thought people would continue buying music the old-fashioned way. As a result, Apple Inc. controls much of the music industry. The lesson is that companies are free to ignore digitization; they are also free to go bankrupt. Adapt and surf the rising digital tide, or drown.

Now, media is being digitized. In the coming decade, education, medicine and transportation will make the change.

5. Robots Will Be Commonplace

After false starts, artificial intelligence is slowly entering every day life. “Robodoc” and “robolawyer,” animated doctors or lawyers, will soon give instant, reliable advice any time of day in simple language.

As transportation is digitized in the next decade, driverless cars, guided by GPS and radar, will share our highways. “Traffic accidents” and “traffic jams” will become archaic terms. Thousands of lives will be saved every year.

The robotic industry could grow bigger than today’s auto industry. Japan, which makes 30 percent of all robots, is already building robot nurses to prepare for an aging population. Not just nurses, but mechanical maids, cooks, musicians and assistants could be part of our homes.

Humanoid robots that can think, however, have been a disappointment. Robots today, and for the near future, will not exercise creativity, imagination, experience, analysis, talent, common sense or leadership. Those traits will likely remain fully in the human sphere for decades to come.

6. Aged Body Parts Will Be Replaced

Diseased and old body parts will be replaced just as we now replace auto parts. Already from your own cells scientists can grow skin, cartilage, noses, blood vessels, bladders and windpipes. In the future, scientists will grow more complex organs, like livers and kidneys. The phrase “organ failure” will disappear.

7. Parents Will Design Their Offspring

In a few decades, parents may be able to choose many genetic characteristics of their children. Our genes will be sequenced and recorded at a cost of less than $100. Many damaged and dysfunctional genes in our genome may be cured using gene therapy, possibly leading to genetic enhancement. Already, “smart mouse” and “mighty mouse” genes have been isolated that can create mice with superior memory and strength, and these genes have human counterparts.

This amounts to tinkering with the genetic heritage of the human race, so there must be a vigorous ethical debate about how far to push this technology.

8. Cybermedicine Will Extend Lives

The aging process may be slowed. We now roughly know what aging is: the buildup of errors, at the genetic and cellular level. Our life span might be extended if we can repair error-correcting mechanisms naturally found in cells. For example, we are 98.5 percent genetically identical to chimps, yet we live decades longer. Among a handful of genes are those that increase life spans. We will find these “age genes” soon.

In the meantime, DNA chips, perhaps placed in our toilets and bathroom mirrors, may detect telltale traces of cancer proteins and individual cancer colonies years before a tumor forms. With these tiny sensors constantly and silently analyzing our bodily fluids, the word “tumor” may be excised from our vocabulary.

With nanotechnology, scientists can target individual cancer cells and kill them, one by one, which may one day render chemotherapy obsolete. (Because there are hundreds of different types of cancer, however, we may never have a total cure for all cancers. Cancer may come to be viewed like the common cold, not totally curable, but tolerable.)

MRI machines that once filled entire rooms have been miniaturized to the size of briefcases. Eventually they will be the size of cellphones, becoming similar to the “tricorders” in “Star Trek,” capable of analyzing diseases with a simple wave over a body.

9. Dictators Will Be Big Losers

The digital revolution empowers the disenfranchised, especially people living under dictatorships. The Internet frees people to realize they don’t have to live like slaves. Dictators, who fear the Internet, and their own people, will be big losers.

Democracies usually do not go to war with other democracies. Think of the wars we memorized in grade school – all were between kings, queens, dictatorships, but never between two major democracies. Democracies are slow to anger and hesitant to go to war: Voters don’t want to sacrifice their children for the glory of a selfish king. We will still have wars, but nations will mean less in the future, and there will be fewer wars.

10. Intellectual Capitalism Will Replace Commodity Capitalism

A historic shift is underway from commodity capitalism, where goods are primarily exchanged, to knowledge-based intellectual capitalism. The cost of food relative to income, for example, has dropped steadily for 150 years. Centuries ago the king of England probably could not afford the dinner you had last night. Nations that invest solely in agriculture will most likely find their economies shrinking.

Nations that use commodity capitalism as a stepping-stone to a mixed economy based on commodity/intellectual capitalism will most likely become rich.

Toward the Future

How will we reach such a future? The key is to grasp the importance of science and science education. Science is the engine of prosperity.

Leaders in China and India realize that science and technology lead to success and wealth. But many countries in the West graduate students into the unemployment line by teaching skills that were necessary to live in 1950.

Years ago, pundits worried about a “digital divide.” It never happened, because access to computers became cheaper and cheaper. The real problem, however, is not access; it is jobs. Plenty of jobs are begging to be filled today, but those jobs require workers with a technical and scientific education. As Winston Churchill once said, “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Future of the Mind: the Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind.”

Cyber Subterfuge

November 27, 2013

Cyber Subterfuge

By MISHA GLENNY

I awoke one morning to a disturbing email from the software giant Adobe. The message warned that thieves had hacked into the company’s servers, stolen the source code for some of its software products and almost three million passwords and credit card details, among which might be mine. It included a link to reset my password.

But the link could have been an elaborate trap by criminals to infect my computer with malware and seize control of it. My first port of call was krebsonsecurity.com, the website of the tenacious cybercrime researcher Brian Krebs. Sure enough, he had posted details of the hack, and it was all true. I was instructed to click on that link and scrutinize my credit card bills for jewelry purchases in Djibouti or Moldova.

Give credit to Adobe for ’fessing up to the hack so fast. But if a company like Adobe, whose products are a core communications medium for web users, can’t keep the hackers out, who can?

The Internet has lost its innocence. Cybermalfeasance, or bad stuff happening on the web, is now so pervasive that if businesses and individuals fail to integrate security measures into their lives and operations, they are bound to regret it. And 2013 has been a momentous year for the extent and ingenuity of those launching attacks on networks around the world.

Innovation continues to alter our digital environment at breathtaking speed. And like all entrepreneurs, the criminals, spies and so-called hacktivists seek to exploit the changes in the architecture of the Internet — and in our behavior — for their own purposes.

The problem is that it’s not just thieves. In the past 10 years, state and nonstate actors — intelligence agencies, terrorist groups and cybermilitary operatives to name but a few — have become engaged in dubious practices on the Web. If we didn’t appreciate that before, Edward J. Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency have made it very plain.

Those in the cybersecurity industry who are trying to protect you now face a huge problem: ascertaining exactly who the perpetrator is when an attack happens. Criminals learn from hacktivists; cyberintelligence agents pick up tips from criminals, and in the background, military strategists are testing potential enemy defenses worldwide. This means the virtual world is awash with subterfuge, malware and deception.

They engage in this activity on the Surface Web, the part of the Internet that you and I can see — or, more accurately, those websites which can be indexed by search engines like Google or Bing. But the hackers, cybercops and criminals also make use of the still-weirder world of the Deep Web. The Deep Web is several hundred, possibly thousands, of times larger than the Surface Web, and a small but significant percentage of it is used as a place for criminal and hacking networks to hide. Within the Deep Web, there are places where users can swap files and information that are very hard to reach if you have not been granted access. Most computer users have no idea that the Deep Web exists.

The Silk Road, a website selling narcotics and extreme pornography, existed only on the Deep Web until the F.B.I. brought it down this fall and arrested one of its alleged founders, 29-year-old Ross William Ulbricht, better known in the business as “Dread Pirate Roberts.” To browse the “eBay of drugs,” as Silk Road was dubbed, the visitor would have to enter the Deep Web via the TOR network, a free system designed to prevent the monitoring of web activity and an important tool for those suffering from political persecution.

The existence of complex systems of communication beyond the Surface Web makes it hard to grasp exactly what is going on in the world of cybermalfeasance. It includes three primary areas of activity: crime; commercial and political espionage; and cyberwarfare and sabotage.

It’s often tough for law enforcement and analysts to identify where one activity ends and the next one starts.

In addition to these categories, there are two gray areas: hacktivism, notably by the group Anonymous, whose members appear to be motivated more by ideology than money, and whose zeal frequently takes them beyond the law; and intellectual copyright theft, a hugely vexing question for the creative industries, with no real solutions in sight.

The most familiar crime is the so-called high-volume, low-impact phenomenon of credit and debit card fraud. Despite occasional horror stories, credit card fraud remains at a manageable level for both the industry and consumers. In 2012, fraudsters got their hands on some $11.5 billion worldwide by stealing credit card data, but this crime has been falling steadily since the second half of the last decade, as most major territories around the world have adopted the so-called chip and pin system. The exception to that trend is the United States, where credit card fraud continues to rise steadily — a direct consequence of the lamentable failure of card issuers, banks and regulators to introduce chip and pin systems. U.S. cards continue to rely on magnetic strips that are easily copied, and on signatures, which are farcical as a security measure.

Still, card fraud is essentially an inconvenience, not a threat. The bigger threat comes from the occasional breathtaking heist, when hackers access databases with large stores of credit cards. The Adobe hack was one such case, and actually modest by some standards. In February, for example, criminals sucked a staggering $40 million from A.T.M.’s in at least two dozen countries around the world, in just 10 hours.

Using sophisticated hacking techniques, the gang broke into the database of the processing company in India and lifted the cap on hundreds of prepaid credit cards they had purchased in advance. Associates around the world then gutted A.T.M.’s of far more money than armed robbers could ever hope to get from a physical bank raid.

The case also suggests how levels of cybercriminal organization are rising. The lone-wolf hackers who dominated such activity a decade or so ago are being eclipsed by more disciplined groups that identify specific targets, usually companies, for their attacks.

This accounts for one of the most important recent developments in cybercrime: the emergence of a vibrant secondary market in “Zero-Day exploits.” Zero Days are glitches in software unnoticed by their manufactures. Hackers can use them as digital wormholes through which to crawl into a system and take control of it.

Increasingly, however, it makes more sense to sell them. Zero Days fetch from $10,000 to $250,000, and the market is not defined as illegal. Buyers come from everywhere — governments, spy agencies, criminal gangs, cybersecurity companies and the military are all eager to purchase them. For many cybercriminals who have done their apprenticeships in credit-card fraud or hacking systems, selling Zero Days is low risk, not especially onerous and very lucrative. Negotiations take place in the nether regions of the Deep Web or offline, for security reasons.

Once in possession of a Zero Day, the task of planning a targeted attack becomes much easier. And as most people in industry are now aware, the growth in criminal activity affects business worldwide. Government departments, charities and N.G.O.’s, corporations and small enterprises alike are now subject to regular targeted attacks, tailored very precisely. At first glance, the numbers are remarkable. This year, BP’s chief executive, Bob Dudley, revealed that his security department registers 50,000 attacks a day. Gen. Keith Alexander, double-hatted chief of the U.S. National Security Agency and the Department of Defense’s Cyber Command, testified to Congress that the Pentagon has to deal with 10 million attacks daily.

Most of these are mere irritants, digital flies that can be swatted with ease. But among them are a few bugs that are able to penetrate the epidermis of a networked system and inject debilitating poison. These attacks are generally very cheap to mount, but the costs can be devastating. This year, the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of pro-Assad hackers, started to specialize in attacks with eye-popping consequences. In late April, the S.E.A. successfully hacked into The Associated Press’s Twitter account and used it to post a false report that the White House had been attacked and the president wounded. In the subsequent two minutes, the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index lost $136.5 billion in value. The index recovered immediately, but the incident reflected the disproportionate impact that a very simple intrusion can have.

At the same time, some of the figures bandied about by politicians, police officials and intelligence agencies regarding the damage wrought by cybercrime have been greatly exaggerated. The cybersecurity giant McAfee announced this summer that losses in the United States to cybercrime could be up to $120 billion. Compare that to the $1 trillion worldwide figure that President Obama cited in 2009, with McAfee again as the source.

By contrast, thanks to Gartner, the computer consultancy and research firm, we have a much more precise idea of how much we are spending on cybersecurity. In 2013, global spending on protection will reach $67 billion, and by the end of the decade it is predicted to exceed $100 billion.

The biggest game changer this year, however, was not the costs, but the information leaked by Snowden about the extraordinary extent of the digital espionage activities of the N.S.A., notably in conjunction with its British partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, or G.C.H.Q.

The moral high ground, carefully constructed by the United States on the indiscriminate hacking and spy programs run by the Chinese and the Russians, has crumbled. Snowden’s countless dossiers have demonstrated beyond doubt that the United States has been engaging in precisely the type of systematic espionage that it accuses Beijing and Moscow of undertaking.

Michael V. Hayden, former chief of the N.S.A. and of the C.I.A., argued rather controversially in London in late September that there was nothing illegal about the N.S.A.’s activities and that nobody in the United States was unduly concerned about the Snowden revelations. That was damage control. The United States has lost the moral high ground, and the recent disclosures of its surveillance of the phones, email and browser of the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, not to mention the semi-state oil company, Petrobras, may well come back to haunt Washington.

Each week seems to bring a new revelation from the Snowden files, one more embarrassing than the next. Particularly awkward was the news that the United States has been listening to the phone conversations of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. It is hard to assess how much of the targets’ indignant reactions is genuine and how much is just strutting in front of an outraged domestic public. But there are signs that the leaks are having an impact on global telecommunications policy.

Partly as a consequence of the criminal, espionage and military activity across the Internet, the issue of who controls the web has recently moved up the agenda of the International Telecommunication Union. The issue of who actually runs the basic infrastructure is being contested at the I.T.U. by a group of nations led by Russia and China, which seek to exercise ever-greater control of the web on their territory. Brazil and India are sympathetic to attempts to wrest greater control from the United States in particular, and the Snowden affair could help them.

And therein lies the paradox: the spread of malfeasance on the Internet is the result of its openness, but this very openness may also be the best way to combat the threats.

Misha Glenny is a British journalist who writes about cybersecurity, organized crime and southeast Europe. His most recent book is “Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 28, 2013

An earlier version of the biography with this article misstated the author’s most recent book. It is “Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia,” not “McMafia: Seriously Organized Crime.”

Contributing Op-Ed Writer: Audiobooks and the Return of Storytelling

Amazon electric fish inspire underwater robotics

15 February 2014 Last updated at 14:33 ET

Amazon electric fish inspire underwater robotics

By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News, Chicago

Electric fish from South America are opening up new ideas in robotics.

Ghost knifefish, as they are known, put a small current through the water to sense their environment, and undulate a long fin to move around.

Scientists at Northwestern University, US, believe both features could be harnessed in a new class of autonomous underwater vehicles.

They are developing robots that will be able to swim around debris in total darkness, such as inside a sunken ship.

"Today, we don't really have underwater robots that work well in really cluttered conditions or in conditions where vision isn't useful," said Prof Malcolm MacIver.

"Just consider the sunken cruise ship. It is very dangerous to send divers into such situations where the water can be very cloudy.

"But we can learn from the electric fish. They don't use vision to hunt at night in the rivers of the Amazon basin, and their movement through the cluttered root masses and flooded forests requires incredible precision. They fit a big hole in terms of our capabilities in underwater robots."

Prof MacIver was explaining his work here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

He has studied knifefish for years, deciphering their sensory and locomotion systems.

The animals generate an electric field from modified neurons running along their spinal cord. When prey, such as aquatic insects, enter this field the fish measure a tiny change in voltage at the surface of their skin.

The perturbation is only one-tenth to one-hundredth of a millionth of a volt, but sufficient for the receptors to detect it.

"The fish have evolved an amazing system," said Prof MacIver. "Imagine your retina stretched over your entire body and what that would be like. That's the situation that knifefish find themselves in.

"They perceive in all directions. They emit a kind of radar, but it's an electric field; and the sensory receptors scattered over their entire body surface mean they can detect things coming from all directions."

The technology in Prof MacIver's lab is now simulating this enabling a robot in a tank to react to what is around it and move accordingly.

But it is the special propulsion technique employed by knifefish that the Northwestern researcher also wants to copy.

These are the ripples sent through the long fin on the belly. Undulate one way, and the fish will move forward; undulate the other way, and the direction of travel is reversed. Use counter-propagating waves that meet in the middle, and the fish will move up.

"From all our simulations, we now have mathematical relationships between things like the frequency and amplitude of the travelling wave and how much propulsion you get," said Prof MacIver. "So now we can put that into technology and get it to work properly."

Currently, the Northwestern lab is demonstrating artificial sensory and locomotion capabilities on two separate robotic platforms. The aim now is to bring them together into a single working device.

In the meantime, Prof MacIver has also been having some fun with his fish by putting them in a "choir".

Every fish produces a constant electric field and every species emits at a different frequency. So, by converting these frequencies to a sound, it is possible to make some knifefish music. Prof MacIver has developed an art installation based on 12 fish tanks.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos

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Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Photographer Michael Wolf: How to live in a megacity

Fiona Macdonald | 4 February 2014

There is a lack of escape in Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density series, currently on show at the Flowers Gallery in London. Featuring the tower blocks that have taken over the Hong Kong skyline in recent decades, the photographs are cropped so tightly they become disorientating. “As a photojournalist I was always aware of composition in my photographs, and one of the things I always liked doing was not letting the viewer be able to escape from the picture,” says Wolf. “So as soon as you have sky there, you look up and you can leave the picture in some form. It’s the same with the architecture – if you have the sky and the horizon, you know approximately how big it is, and there’s no real illusion there. By cropping it like that, I’m not describing the building any more, I’m creating a metaphor.”

Wolf’s Tokyo Compression project also allows no means of escape. Commuters are shown crammed into the subway: faces crushed against the train window, their expressions range from melancholic to anguished. “Because the train is full, they can’t leave – all they can do is close their eyes or put their hand in front of their face, or get behind the post of the door,” says Wolf. “Those are questions I’m often asked – did you get permission; what do you think people think of this? I think the statement that I’m making is greater than the individual’s privacy in this case – it’s a public space that I’m photographing, and I’m not making fun of the people.”

The German-born photographer, who won a first prize in Daily Life in the 2009 World Press Photo competition for Tokyo Compression, is seeking to express something about city life in his work – rather than exploit his subjects. “I try to put myself in their situation – I would look at the whole project and if the project was meaningful it wouldn’t bother me,” he says. “I know of projects in Japan that other photographers have done, where they take pictures of salarymen at midnight taking the last train home, totally drunk out of their minds, lying unconscious on the train platform, and I think that’s terribly unfair. It doesn’t say anything, and it’s a form of voyeurism that I would be against. I wouldn’t do that.”

Wolf moved to Hong Kong in 1994, working as a photojournalist for Stern magazine for eight years. He started on the Architecture of Density in 2003, just as his wife and son left the city due to the Sars outbreak. “For the first three weeks, I photographed the buildings in total, as a whole,” he says. “I would come home every evening and then I would scan the negatives and print them out – and since my wife and son were gone I had the whole house to myself. I’d put out these 11x14in prints on the floor and look at them and move them around, and at some point I just took one of the architecture pictures and folded it – folded away the sides, and folded away the top and bottom so I just had this pattern-like image.”

The Architecture of Density is not just a series of abstract images: within the pattern, tiny details can be seen, hanging laundry or silhouettes behind blinds disrupting the geometry. Wolf captures private lives spilling over into public space. In his book accompanying the project, he says that he lives in an apartment building like those he has shot for his project. “My building, which is 22 stories high, is set in the middle of what seems to be a forest of high rises. When it gets dark and the lights go on in the tens of thousands of apartments that surround me, I often sit at my window and look into the rooms of my neighbours. Intimate and anonymous at the same time.”

For his Hong Kong series, Wolf gained access to buildings opposite for a direct vantage point; with a 2006 project, Transparent City, he applied his “no-exit photography” to Chicago with another sniper-style approach. Standing on rooftops with a long lens at dusk, he photographed the buildings – and the people inside them. “I was fascinated by looking into these condos and offices – and I thought that would be an interesting continuation of my architecture, but instead of being just about the surface, it would be about looking in,” he says. Wolf cites Edward Hopper as an influence: “This idea of being able to observe people who don’t know they’re being observed. Of course, one has this big responsibility at that moment, what one shows or doesn’t show. Everyone asks: ‘What did you see in Chicago? Did you see sex, did you see fights?’ And of course, it’s so banal. It’s people coming home, they’re tired, they sit in front of the TV and eat something.”

Wolf balances his architecture photographs with a series of tiny images showing fragments from Hong Kong’s streets, collected in a new book, Hong Kong Trilogy."I started off on the architecture, but parallel to that I worked on the back door, which is the beginning of the Hong Kong Trilogy,” he says. “So I had the overall view of this architecture, and I always combined it with things going on behind these buildings, in the back alleys.”

Wolf decided to move towards more project-based work in 2003, leaving Stern magazine and photographing a collection of chairs he had picked up from Hong Kong’s streets. Giving up photojournalism allowed him to follow his interests: “There’s not much room in mainstream media for this roundabout way of looking at things. You have to think too much, and it takes too long to really figure out what is meant – a magazine wants things you can understand in a second, and they have to be loud and to the point.” Instead, he focused on lost laundry, mops and gloves “combined by little topics, the cards and little strings which people attach to the pipes in the back alleys”.

After Wolf’s wife was offered a job in Paris, he moved to the French capital – but couldn’t find the street culture he craved. So instead he went online, searching Google Street View for tiny events – from bicycle crashes to people giving the finger to the camera – that cut through the clichés. “Everything which is messy – it isn’t there in Paris, because it’s like a movie set,” he says. “I was unhappy, I didn’t want to go out – and out of a reaction to that, I just decided to explore the city using Google Street View.” He flips the perceived view of Paris, finding moments that seem to mirror famous images (in one, two people embrace in the street, reflecting Robert Doisneau’s ubiquitous photograph Le Baiser de Hôtel de Ville).

Away from Street View, Wolf explores a cityscape made up of mops left by workers or labyrinths formed by ventilation pipes. “The Hong Kong Trilogy is about being able to decipher the city, being able to read the city based on the vernacular, and it’s something that can be applied to any city more or less,” he says. “If you’re in tune with these things, it just makes walking through a city a much more interesting experience than if you just go to the Eiffel Tower – or in Hong Kong, if you just go to the Star Ferry – if you’re aware of the everyday culture, cities become very rich visually.”

lunar crater architecture

Sunday, February 23, 2014