Kraftwerk: From Dusseldorf to the Future (With Love)

I am visiting Düsseldorf next week. Although the city is well known for fashion and exhibition, I found an interesting book about it in the realm of music.. Especially for people like me who dont know and can't follow what music is going which direction....

Book Description from Amazon.com

The future of modern music began in Dsseldorf in1970, when an avant-garde German band, the Organisation, re-invented themselves as Kraftwerk. In so doing, they set in motion a train of events that has inspired and informed every musical shift over the last20 years. Yet Kraftwerk remain the most enigmatic force in modern music. Fiercely private and notoriously reclusive, their internal operations have long been carefully shielded. Now Tim Barr traces the development of Kraftwerk's unique vision--from their roots in Germany's avant-garde in the late60s, through the triumphs of their "Trans-Europe Express" and "Man Machine" albums in the70s, to their current position, three decades later, as one of the most influential pop groups of our time.

Drawing on exclusive interviews, Barr examines Kraftwerk's crucial role in shaping a new kind of urban music: one that propelled us all into the world of rap, electro, house, techno, and their myriad hybrids. Tim Barr's work appears in The Face, URB, Replay, and Detour.

Telepresence - From economist.com

Here is a good article at economist.com about telepresence, a better form of videoconferencing. Link is here http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9687655

"FOR most of the 23 years Kenneth Crangle has spent at Hewlett-Packard, a big computer and printer company, he was a typical road warrior, constantly travelling for business. He was usually miserable. He hated the jet lag. Then came 9/11, shoe bombers, SARS and bird flu. His daughter became sick, exacerbating his reluctance to travel. There must be a better way to meet and do business, Mr Crangle recalls thinking. So he started work on an alternative.

The result is something called “telepresence”, which HP and other technology firms are just beginning to sell. It is basically a spruced-up version of videoconferencing, but its creators insist that the technology is so improved as to be unrecognisable. Users still communicate via live audio and video feeds, but the speed and quality of transmission have increased, and the screens have grown and multiplied, in order to create the illusion that the two parties to a conversation are not continents apart but at opposite ends of the same table (as in the picture above). The aim, telepresence's boosters say, is to get participants in such meetings to forget, or at least stop caring, that they are not in the same room..."

Institute for the future IFTF

" The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is an independent nonprofit research group. We work with organizations of all kinds to help them make better, more informed decisions about the future. We provide the foresight to create insights that lead to action. "

Check their website http://www.iftf.org/ and weblog http://future.iftf.org/ and you can find some interesting insights...

1910 predictions of 2000 in French art - From boingboing.net

Again i find it very interesting what people in past imagined about our present.. Link is here: http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/feuill/index.htm. Here you may find an example for an early imagination of skype or video chat below....

1966 prediction of home computer in 1999 - From boingboing.net

It is very interesting how people predicted pc to be in our time... See Google video at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4796674762025998102