RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER: RELATIONAL ARCHITECTURES

In the past fourteen years Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has developed interactive art installations that transform urban spaces and create connective environments. Using movement sensors, computer graphics, positional sound, Internet interfaces, tele-robotics and other custom-made technologies, his pieces aim to explore the intersection between architecture, interactivity and performance art. His work has been presented in biennials in Havana, Istanbul, Graz, Valencia and Liverpool, as well as in museums and festivals worldwide.

The exhibition Relational Architectures includes the following pieces:

Frequency and Volume, Relational Architecture 9
Created for the large church nave at the Alameda Art Laboratory, this installation invites members of the public to scan the radio spectrum using their bodies. A custom-made sensor tracks the projected shadows of participants, and tunes specific radio signals based on their position and size. The piece can sweep all frequencies from 150kHz to 1.5Ghz, allowing monitoring of broadcasts like air traffic control, taxi dispatch networks, wireless phones, short wave radio and many others. Free access to the radio spectrum, a contested public space, is presented in the context of the increased surveillance of the body.

http://www.lozano-hemmer.com

THE ALAMEDA ART LABORATORY IN MEXICO CITY IS DELIGHTED
TO ANNOUNCE THE FORTHCOMING EXHIBITION:

RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER: RELATIONAL ARCHITECTURES
MAY 27 – JUNE 23, 2003

OPENING RECEPTION: MAY 27, 8 PM
ROUND TABLE: MAY 29, 7 PM

Relational Architectures is Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s first solo exhibition in his native Mexico. Five interactive installations will be shown, including a large-scale intervention designed specifically for the Alameda Art Laboratory main exhibit hall, a 40 meter-long colonial church nave from the XVI century.

A round table discussion will take place the 29th of May at 7 PM, with the participation of philosopher and author Manuel de Landa, art historian María Fernández from Cornell University, curator Priamo Lozada and the artist.

In the past fourteen years Rafael Lozano-Hemmer has developed interactive art installations that transform urban spaces and create connective environments. Using movement sensors, computer graphics, positional sound, Internet interfaces, tele-robotics and other custom-made technologies, his pieces aim to explore the intersection between architecture, interactivity and performance art. His work has been presented in biennials in Havana, Istanbul, Graz, Valencia and Liverpool, as well as in museums and festivals worldwide.

The exhibition Relational Architectures includes the following pieces:

Frequency and Volume, Relational Architecture 9
Created for the large church nave at the Alameda Art Laboratory, this installation invites members of the public to scan the radio spectrum using their bodies. A custom-made sensor tracks the projected shadows of participants, and tunes specific radio signals based on their position and size. The piece can sweep all frequencies from 150kHz to 1.5Ghz, allowing monitoring of broadcasts like air traffic control, taxi dispatch networks, wireless phones, short wave radio and many others. Free access to the radio spectrum, a contested public space, is presented in the context of the increased surveillance of the body.

Vectorial Elevation, Relational Architecture 4
A large-scale interactive installation originally designed to transform Mexico City’s historic center using robotic searchlights controlled over the Internet at www.alzado.net. In 2002 the installation was staged again, for the inauguration of the Basque Museum of Contemporary Art, ARTIUM, in the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. The exhibition at the Alameda Art Lab features video, Internet and printed documentation of the Mexican and Basque versions of the project.

1000 Platitudes
A photomontage and video project featuring words commonly used to describe the generic globalized city. Each letter of the alphabet was projected on a different building using the World's most powerful projector, with 100,000 ANSI lumen intensity and images measuring up to 75 x 75 meters (250 x 250 feet). Public housing projects, malls, government buildings, industrial wastelands and corporate headquarters were transformed by fast tactical projections, under the radar of potential regulators. This project was made during Lozano-Hemmer's "Huge and Mobile" (HUMO) Workshop in Linz, Austria, in early 2003.

33 Questions per Minute, Relational Architecture 5
A computer that uses grammatical rules to combine words from the dictionary, automatically generating 55 billion unique, fortuitous questions. The questions are presented at a rate of 33 per minute on 21 tiny liquid crystal displays. The software has been programmed to avoid repeating the same question, and will take over 3 thousand years to present all the possible word combinations. A keyboard allows participants to add their own questions to the automatic flow.

The exhibition also includes a video program documenting previous pieces made in Spain, Austria, Holland and France.

THIS EXHIBITION IS POSSIBLE THANKS TO THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE JUMEX COLLECTION, LG MEXICO AND TELEVISA CULTURAL FOUNDATION.

LABORATORIO ARTE ALAMEDA. Dr. Mora 7, Centro. CP 06050, Mexico City.
Telephone / Fax (5255) 5510 2793 and (5255) 5512 2079
artealameda@correo.inba.gob.mx

D|MA MFA Exhibition Opening

The UCLA Department of Design|Media Arts MFA thesis exhibition is the culmination of the Master of Fine Arts Degree program. The exhibition showcases the diverse research and practices of these emerging artists through their projects in the field of New Media (art, design, science, technology).

Thursday, June 12th, 6:00pm @ EDA (104 North Kinross)
New Wight Gallery (Kinross) 11000 Kinross Avenue Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday 9am-4:30pm Admission: FREE Parking rates are $7 weekdays before 5pm, $4 after 5pm and on weekends. Parking is available in Lot 32 adjacent to the Kinross building.

Kim Hager critically explores the Western human relationship to animals as spectacle and myth. Her video installation consists of sculptural objects which contain entwined allegories that include autobiographical characters, the Borrametz, and other "living" creatures. Namrata Mohanty installation is inspired by an Indian spiritual city Benares populated with huge crowds of people visiting the city to celebrate death and rebirth of the human body. The installation is in the form of an immersive virtual space of fire and water creating a zone for new human body formations, portraying rituals of burning of the dead or dipping into the holy river Ganges flowing through Benares. Dolores Rivera uses video to explore the relationship between the immigrant domestic worker and her college-educated daughter. The work delves into situations about home, labor, and education, documenting survival strategies and expanding dialogue among these women. Ashok Sukumaran's Interior Design work is an attempt to physically puncture the black box in which media art usually resides. Live elements from the "outside" - the sun, the view, and ambient sound- are let into a mediated oom・ where they form dynamic relationships with the interior itself, the bodies of visitors, and each other. This project is part of Ashok's continuing search for a reconciliation between real space (the physical and social contexts in which we all live), and the often idealized spaces in which pervasive computing and machine vision (will) operate. Fabian Winkler's interactive installation is inspired by the buzzing sounds of powerlines in urban L.A. A hammock, woven from powerline wires, collects electromagnetic information of its surrounding space. By approaching tUCLA Design Media Arts - Upcomi.ems
he installation, visitors add electricity to the system and trigger electric arcs dependent on their interactions.

The EDA is located at Kinross 104 on the first floor of the new Kinross North Building located near Lot 32 at the corner of Gayley and Kinross. Parking may be purchased for $7 at the information kiosk located at Lot 32. http://www.ucla.edu/map/sectors/zoomde89.html

The Meaning of Presence

Terminological and other confusions about what comprises presence, and what does not, have impeded progress in the field. In this speculative short paper we suggest that presence has a biological purpose and that a consideration of this purpose may provide a way forward. We see presence as the feeling a conscious organism experiences when immersed in a concrete external world. This feeling must be distinguishable from engagement in internally constructed mental worlds, in organisms equipped to construct such inner realities. Presence depends on the form of the media, because form determines whether a world must be constructed internally or can be said to exist outside the perceiver. From this claim, we speculate on possible future ways of applying presence in psychotherapy and the arts. In viewing presence this way we are adopting an experiential realist position, one that sees meaning as residing ultimately in concrete experiences of external worlds, real or virtual – in other words, in presence.

by Prof. John A WaterWorth on Presence-Connect

Poetry and Programming

"Writing code, he (Stuart Feldman) explains, is like writing poetry: every
word, each placement counts. Except that software is harder, because
digital poems can have millions of lines which are all somehow
interconnected. Try fixing programming errors, known as bugs, and you
often introduce new ones. So far, he laments, nobody has found a silver
bullet to kill the beast of complexity."

Survey: The Beast of Complexity; The Economist (London, UK); Apr 14,2001.

The syntactic link between poets and programmers, perhaps the strongest bond between artists and scientists, educes the relevance of an ancient tradition to our technologically rich but semantically impoverished culture.

Claiming that writing software is "harder" is rash and problematic but the comparison is a substantial one.

KMAC

PhotoBlogs

From NY Times, Sunday May 25th
Prospecting for Gold Among the Photo Blogs
By SARAH BOXER

Imagine Walker Evans and Nan Goldin rolled together on your computer screen. In the 1930's and 40's Evans secretly photographed anonymous people on the New York City subways. The result was a book titled "Many Are Called." In the 1980's Nan Goldin turned her camera on herself and her friends, spilling the intimate details of her life to complete strangers. She described the resulting book, "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency," as "a diary I let people read." Now thousands of people get onto the Internet everyday to post their photographs, hoping that total strangers will come look at them and comment. They are photo bloggers.Photo blogs are the colorful offspring of blogs, or Web logs, written diaries posted and updated regularly on the Internet. For a half-dozen years people have been posting text blogs to rant and to ponder the events of the day and the dust beneath their feet. Then, sometime in 2000, people started posting photographs to go with the text. The photo blog was born. Now photo blogs often are posted with no text at all. And there are thousands of them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/25/arts/design/25BOXE.html

robots

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58961,00.html

Sony to offer PS2-based home server dubbed PSX

TOKYO — Sony is rolling our a home server called PSX that employs the PlayStation 2 processing engine. The server will be the first in a line of products that Sony intends to promote as a new digital consumer electronics device that integrate game and electronics technology. "We'll show how digital consumer electronics will make a drastic metamorphosis by using the PS2 engine for PSX," said Ken Kutaragi, executive vice president of Sony. The pearl white PSX server measures about one foot square. It integrates a DVD+/-RW drive, an R drive, 120-Gbyte hard drive, TV tuner and PlayStation2 game console into one box. The engine is called "EE+GS@90nm," for a one-chip solution for the Emotion Engine and Graphics Synthesizer fabricated on a 90 nm process. Sony said it plans to introduce PSX by the end of 2003 in Japan and next year in the United States and Europe with an appropriate TV tuner for each region. To avoid copyright-protection issues and direct digital content recording, PSX will initially come with an analog TV tuner, Sony said.
By Yoshiko Hara
EE Times

"Cinema Stale, Passive, Needs Reinventing" - Greenaway

"Most cinema today is an illustration of 19th century novels. A lot of it is disastrous, formulaic and predictable. The sense of pluralism has been curtailed,'' Greenaway said."

``We are discovering the multifariousness of telling stories. The subjectivity of narration should be high on the agenda. Any self-respecting filmmaker should acknowledge the audience.''

from the NY TIMES

Project Aura (barcode blogging)

From Microsoft Watch
Could autoblogging, a k a automatic weblogging, be the next big thing?
Marc Smith seems to think so. The Microsoft researcher and his team have developed a tool called Aura that is designed to help users automatically blog anything with a barcode label. Microsoft's Aura technology is currently in prototype phase. Smith says he is planning to release the code base via the Microsoft Research download page in another two months or so.

and also

We are interested to study emergent individual and group behaviors associated with the ability to digital tag objects and places. In our system, a user can associate text, threaded conversations, audio, images, video or other data with a specific tag. Users can review the tags they have encountered and annotated in a custom web portal. Optionally, they can opt to have their comments be posted onto newsgroups. This allows search engines to index and essentially publish the association to other users. Physical annotations can be shared with other users and be rated by the users’ reputation statistics.

Interactive Narrative Content Seminar

Developing Interactive Narrative Content Seminar
August 20 - August 26 2003
Leipzig, Germany
Seminar language: English

Lectures and intense workshops will cover essential subjects to be
considered during the development/ pre-production phase for interactive
entertainment projects (story development, financing, project management,
marketing...).
In parallel up to ten selected interactive narrative projects in
development will be provided with several face-to-face consulting sessions
designed especially to the needs of the projects.

Application deadline (with project): June 1 2003
Application deadline (seminar only): August 4 2003

sagasnet is a non profit initiative in the frame of the European MEDIA
Programme Training to further content development for interactive media.

More information and application forms available at
http://www.sagasnet.de

Semantic Blogging at HP

The central idea is to apply ideas, techniques and tools from the semantic web and apply them to blogging. Our intuition is that semantic principles can be applied to enrich and extend the blogging metaphor. We use the bibliography management domain to focus our efforts and to provide grounding for our demonstrator. However, we envisage that our efforts will be (or should be) applicable to more than just the bibliography domain. In addition, if we can show how the semantic web can add value, within the context of a pre-existing, popular and powerful metaphor, then it will make a convincing showcase for the semantic web.

http://www-uk.hpl.hp.com/people/steve_cayzer/semblog.htm

The Art of Blogging

Blogging... is a format constant (archives, links, time stamps, chronological listing of thoughts and links), personalized, community-linked, social, interactive, democratic, new model innovation built on the unique attributes of the Internet.

http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm

(as featured on the CFP for "Blogtalk - A European Weblog Conference" )

Remote Home

The RemoteHome is a flat share that will exist in two distant cities at the same time: London and Berlin. Both spaces are electronically connected through the Internet, to turn furniture and architectural elements into tangible and sensual means of communication. Sensory and kinetic devices, as well as an interactive light installation allow for the exchange between this remotely living group of friends. A mobile wireless artefact, in the shape of a transforming interactive bag, can be taken on journeys to stay emotionally in touch with the RemoteHome.

http://www.remotehome.org/

Simson's unplugged

From About.Com VR:

Fox and THQ are planning a complete wireless gaming community based on the Simpson's town of Springfield, among other games.

Videogame Industry Goes Hollywood

"Clearly, this industry is big enough to have its own Cannes. But one sign of a large and mature creative business is that it produces not only megahits, but also intelligent or quirky independent releases. That hasn't happened yet in videogames. Gamers won't be really grown up until they get their own Sundance."
from: Videogame Industry Goes Hollywood
And Picks Up a Lot of Its Bad Habits
WSJ 5/19/03
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,portals,00.html

SONY portable platform

From Gamers.com:

E3 2003: At its pre-E3 press conference today, Sony Computer Entertainment officially announced a portable PlayStation platform. Ken Kutaragi, commonly known as the "father of the PlayStation," introduced his "new baby," as he referred to it. "This is a new baby to the PlayStation brand," he said. "And he is very cute."
Known as the PSP (Portable PlayStation), this platform will be Sony's direct attack on Nintendo's Game Boy Advance -- and a whole lot more. Not only will it feature a 32-bit engine to display better looking games than Nintendo's Game Boy Advance, it will host a bevy of technical gadgetry to make it an all-in-one portable entertainment platform. "This is the Walkman of the 21st century," claimed Kutaragi.

Seeing Sound

By Diana Phillips Mahoney (Computer Graphics World Aug, 2001):

Thanks to advanced simulation and visualization techniques, sound has never looked so good
What does sound look like, and who wants to know? Mostly it looks like funky abstract art, and everyone from urban planners to VR developers to concert pianists wants to see it.
Actually, depending on who is looking at it and why, sound has many different visual guises. At Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories, for example, sound appears as beams of light that vary in length and intensity relative to their distance from the point of origin and the obstacles encountered along their path. At the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) at the University of California at Berkeley, sound looks like oceans of alternately vibrant and muted colors with waves emanating from multiple geometric objects. And in Vancouver, students and faculty at the University of British Columbia see sound as expanding and contracting balloons.

Of course, actual, physical sound doesn't "look" like anything. Our perception of soundwaves is related to a variety of acoustic characteristics, including decibel level, spread patterns (propagation), and intensity changes over time-none of which is tangible or visible. To enhance our understanding of sound, a variety of techniques exist that simulate acoustic phenomena. These result in complex numerical models, which, frankly, are not much to look at. In addition, the computational data, because of its vastness, is difficult to synthesize and comprehend. A picture, on the other hand, is worth a thousand numbers.

More HERE and HERE

TapWave

The first Palm OS-based handheld designed primarily for gaming.
http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,49405,00.html

TapWave's machine is code-named the Helix, and it's scheduled to ship later this year. It has a solid ARM9 processor, an ATI graphics engine, a Yamaha sound system, and a very nice 480- by 320-pixel color display -- all wrapped in a restrained design slim enough to fit in your pocket. Significantly, it doesn't look like something you use to play games. The device is aimed at a target market one notch up from that of the Nintendo GameBoy Advance: TapWave wants to get 18- to- 34-year-olds playing games on the go, and it wants to sell them a product that doesn't look like it fell off the junior high bus

Lim and his team claim they've identified a gaping hole in the market. There is, they say, no satisfactory portable gaming platform for grown-ups. Who, they note, do indeed play games on their home computers and consNot the Only Game Boy in Town.ems oles, and perhaps unsatisfactorily on their cell phones and PDAs.

TapWave, like Nintendo, will develop and market its own games. It has already signed on some popular gaming studios like Activision (ATVI) and Midway, and Lim says it should launch with some high-profile titles (though the company hasn't given specifics). TapWave will also make its APIs -- the internal programming codes that developers need -- available to other game manufacturers in hopes that they will develop for this new platform. Whether they do or not, of course, depends on how many people buy the handheld, so TapWave's own initial games have to be good enough to sell the hardware.

Personally, what I like about TapWave's platform is that it's not only the slickest portable game platform I've seen, but also a Palm (PALM) device running an enhanced Palm operating system. It runs all standard Palm apps -- the date book, the calendar, you name it. In other words, when you pull out your TapWave box and tap away at it in a meeting, your co-workers won't know if you're taking notes, entering an appointment, or playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater.

The device has a nice look and feel, a fantastic screen, and will likely be cost-competitive with Palm's existing non-networked high-end product, the Tungsten T. On the other hand, while the Helix will have Bluetooth (for multiplayer gaming and Net connections via a Bluetooth cell phone), the first products won't have Wi-Fi or cellular radios, like some products from Palm, Handspring, and Sony (SNE).

Lim says the company is backed by a large Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company (he won't say which one), which gives TapWave the resources to build the business and distribute the products. It will, however, compete with several other huge companies in the portable gaming platform market, most notably Nintendo, with its GameBoy Advance, and Nokia (NOK), which is releasing its N-Gage gaming phone.

But I do think TapWave is onto something. This is an interesting gaming platform, and a great Palm-based computer. PalmSource CEO David Nagel confirmed for me that there's no other Palm-powered device like this in development. I bet Palm fans will love this product, no matter which demographic they fit into.

World 3-D Film Expo!

World 3-D Film Expo to Unspool at Egyptian Theatre With Over 30 Classic and Rare Feature Length Treasures and Over 20 Short Subjects, All Screened Using the Original Polaroid "Double-Interlock" 3-D System

September 12 - 21, 2003

Hollywood - Sabucat Productions will present the largest 3-D tribute show ever mounted anywhere in history, from Friday, September 12 - Sunday, September 21 at the Egyptian Theatre (6712 Hollywood Boulevard) in Hollywood. The 10 day festival, which celebrates the golden era of 3-D filmmaking, will include many of the best known 3-D titles of the 1950's, such as HOUSE OF WAX, KISS ME KATE and CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, but will also offer fans of the format an opportunity to see some of the more obscure 3-D movies, many of which have not been seen in 3-D in over 50 years! Some of these titles include: I, THE JURY, JESSE JAMES VS. THE DALTONS, GOG, and GLASS WEB. In all, 33 features and 21 short subjects will be shown along with a "rarities" show consisting of rare, wonderful, stereoscopic images, many of which have never been seen in a public setting. In person guests will speak at selected screenings. Guests will be announced as they are confirmed. All prints will be 35mm and run in the "double-interlock", Polaroid System, the original method (and still the best method) for showing true 3-D.

http://www.3dfilmfest.com/

Festival organizer Jeff Joseph says, "Many of the prints that we're running are the last in existence... and in some cases the original negatives no longer exist. Due to the complexity of projecting these films in the stereoscopic format, this may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience these movies the way they were meant to be seen."

Daniel Symmes, noted 3-D historian and 3-D filmmaker, is working with Jeff in organizing the technical aspects of the Expo, as well as providing background information on the films. "This is a totally unique event in film history," says Symmes. "It is my dream come true to see all this wonderful, stereoscopic art at one time. Nobody has ever seen all these films together - not even when they were originally released."

It has been over 50 years (November 26th, 1952) since BWANA DEVIL, opened at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood. While not the first 3-D feature film (which was POWER OF LOVE, U.S.A., 1922), the popularity of BWANA DEVIL was the direct cause of the production of over 60 3-D films from 1952 through 1955, often referred to as the golden era of 3-D.

The 3-D format is often thought of as "gimmick" filmmaking. While it was one of the many mid-20th century inventions of the motion picture industry to give audiences a big screen experience to compete with the new phenomenon of television, for the most part 3-D, (like the Cinemascope format for example), was used to great effect in high quality studio productions with some of the most talented industry professionals behind the camera. Such producers/directors as George Sidney, Alfred Hitchcock, William Cameron Menzies (THE MAZE), Budd Boetticher, Raoul Walsh, Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk photographed films in the third dimension, as did cinematographers like John Alton (I, THE JURY), Karl Struss and Lucian

3-D Festival

Ballard (INFERNO). They often utilized depth as an integral aspect of the dramatic narrative. Seeing these films flat today on television or home video totally diminishes the impact of the original stereoscopic cinematography. The filmmakers composed, designed and intended these movies for 3-D presentation, and that's the way in which they should be seen. This unique series will give audiences that opportunity.

The presentation of 3-D has garnered a bad reputation over the years, mostly due to anaglyphic (red/blue) presentation, poor projection, lab problems, and so on. Actually, when shown with proper (Polaroid) presentation, good prints, professional projectionists, and so on, 3-D from the 1950's looks spectacular. The feeling of depth actually tends to suck you inside the action. It is not just a function of "coming at you" scenes (such as when objects are thrown at the audience), but is also used effectively in smaller, more intimate settings, such as in Hitchcock's DIAL M FOR MURDER.

This once-in-a-lifetime retrospective will give fans, historians and critics the unique opportunity to re-assess one of the most unjustly maligned aspects of cinematic history. Due to an awful succession of gimmick films throughout the 1970's and 80's, as well as poor quality re-issues of the older films in the inferior red/blue anaglyph system on television, 3-D movies of the 1950's have basically gotten a bad rap.

Detailed information about the festival, film schedule, etc. can be found at: http://www.3dfilmfest.com. There is a printable version of the schedule on the website. Tickets will go on sale on May 1, also on-line. Tickets are $10 with the exception of the rarities show which is $15. A festival pass ($320) includes admission to all 33 shows, plus a festival souvenir booklet.

The festival can be reached at: Phone number: 661 538-9259 Fax number: 661 793-6755

*Special note: Although at the Egyptian Theatre, this festival is not a program of the American Cinematheque.

KNOWLEDGE MEDIA NETWORKING: CFP

IEEE International Workshop on
KNOWLEDGE MEDIA NETWORKING

Date: October 22-24, 2003
Location: NTT Labs, Tokyo, Japan
Web: http://knowledge-net.com/KMN03/

Paper Submission Deadline: July 1st, 2003
-----------------------------------------
Overview:
New integrated services are emerging from the rapid technological advances in networking, multi-agent, virtual environments, media and broadcasting technologies. Knowledge Media Spaces would couple models, knowledge, data, instruments, and intellectual activity across space, time, and disciplinary boundaries. Metadata could be exploited to develop the semantic web for
mining/retrieving/designing multimedia web information resources. Computational devices and agents could become part of furniture, walls, and clothing; physical space provides a sense of place that would be augmented towards knowledge space. The space must precisely understand its devices and their situation,in particular the computations they are performing, in order to understand what individuals in the space are doing.

This workshop would provide a forum for researchers and
practitioners involved in the
design and development of knowledge media networking spaces,
meta-data architectures,
knowledge based systems and 3D media architectures. It is expected that the workshop will
promote a very intensive interaction among those attending it.
The Workshop Proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press. Papers up to six
pages or position papers of two to three pages (including figures, tables and references)
should be submitted as PDF or PostScript files. Papers should include a title, the name and
affiliation of authors, an abstract of up to 150 words and no more than eight keywords in
two-column IEEE format. Submissions will be peer reviewed. Papers should be submitted to
Kawamori.masahito@lab.ntt.co.jp, osawa@fun.ac.jp, or to kmn03@knowledge-net.com.

Topics of interests include , but are not limited:
- Architectural aspects of designing knowledge media spaces (3D virtual presence, Internet,
agents, mobility, VRML, MPEG4, MPEG7, TVanytime)
- Metadata architectures: mining, extracting, indexing, managing,
modeling, recording,
accessing, utilizing information resources
- Sensors, mobile devices networking, ad-hoc networking
applications, self-organizing
systems, P2P systems
- Interconnection of heterogeneous communities, Ontologies, resource sharing, Quality of Service
- What kind of rules, artifacts, conventions and infrastructure must be providedto help
community members self organize and manage their affairs, increase knowledge bandwidth,
develop a feeling of social awareness?
- Applications: Entertainment, e-Healthcare, e-Commerce, e-Communities, Virtual Universities,
Cultural Heritage

-------------------------------------------------------------
Important dates: Paper Submission Deadline: July 1st, 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------

General Co-Chairs:
------------------
Hiroshi Yasuda, Tokyo University, Japan
Peter T. Kirstein, UCL, UK

Local Arrangements Chair:
-------------------------
Jay Kishigami, NTT Labs, Japan

Technical Co-Chairs:
--------------------
Masahito Kawamori, NTT Labs, Japan
Eiichi Osawa, Future University -Hakodate, Japan

Web design interface

From Henry Minsky:

This is a really cool user interface, making use of gestures, animation, to enhance
the ability of people to input stuff with handwritten gestures, and see what's happening
while designing a web site's structure.

http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/denim/

Moblogging resources

Some Moblogging (mobile blogging) links:

http://www.moblogging.org/

http://radio.weblogs.com/0114939/outlines/moblog.html

We will be presenting something at the Tokyo event on July 5.

Wireless instant replay

From Air-Grid Networks, a new service where, for around $20, fans at major sporting events can rent a Tablet PC with an 802.11a wireless card which they can use to watch instant replays of the game from their seat in the stands:

Users will be able to choose from four different camera angles -- from a combination of broadcast network and team camera positions. They'll also have the option of viewing in slow motion. Air-Grid will process video clips in near-real time as the game goes on, pushing out announcements over the wireless network that will scroll across customers' tablets to let them know a new replay is available. The firm generates 10 to 12 replays per quarter of a basketball game.
You should also be able to use the WiFi Tablets to watch broadcasts of other games being played at the same time, access statistics, and, of course, order beer and hot dogs. Air-Grid claims they'll have at least one Major League Baseball team signed up as a customer by July.

http://www.80211-planet.com/columns/article.php/2200181

"Programming Media" by Casey Reas

"Programming Media" by Casey Reas
18:00 on 13 May 2003
On the UCLA campus, Kinross South Room 133

Contemporary media art and design artifacts are constructed with software. Software is a medium with unique qualities and programming languages are materials with specific properties. Casey Reas will present diverse projects from 2000 - present to elucidate unique aspects of software including response, dynamic form, interactive information visualization, behavior, and emergence. Issues of exploring programming within the context of the electronic arts will be presented through discussing Processing, a new educational software exploration.

Casey Reas is an associate professor at the newly established Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in northern Italy. With Ben Fry of the MIT Media Lab, he is currently developing Processing, a platform for learning fundamentals of computer programming within the context of the media arts. Reas' work explores kinetic systems through diverse digital media including software art, prints, animation, installations, and responsive sculpture. In 2001, Casey received his M.S. degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he was a member of the Aesthetics and Computation Group (ACG). Casey has lectured and exhibited in Europe, Asia, and the United States. His work has recently been shown at the American Museum of the Moving Image, Ars Electronica, New York Digital Salon, Museum of Modern Art, P.S.1, and Siggraph.

http://www.groupc.net
http://www.proce55ing.net
http://www.interaction-ivrea.it
http://acg.media.mit.edu

Touchy-Feely Goes Remote

Technology Research News May 1, 2003
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/rnb_050103_2.asp

How do you communicate gesture and touch from thousands of miles away?

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have put together a scheme that uses an array of individual actuators, or cilia, that people can push to remotely convey physical sensations.

The scheme involves a pair of devices that look like a row of side-by-side hairbrushes. The devices' felt-tipped bristles are mounted on a rubber sheet, and each bristle is capable moving independently. A combination of magnets and electricity actuate the bristles. When a person moves the bristles on one device the remote device communicates the gesture by mirroring the movements.

The recipient can both see and feel the bristles moving. Behavioral research shows that the combination of visual and tactile feedback engages both sides of the brain and helps ensure that learned information will be retained in long-term memory.

The device could be used to draw pictures, beat musical rhythms, or send subtle physical gestures, according to the researchers.

The researchers are currently working on a prototype of the device. The idea was inspired by grass blowing in the wind, according to the researchers.

They presented the work at the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference April 5-10, 2003.

“ Topological Media and Softwear”

Wednesday, May 7th 6:30pm Sha Xin Wei Lectures “ Topological Media and Softwear” (Kinross South 133)

The Topological Media Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology studies gesture and embodied use of hybrid computational-physical materials at multiple scales. We are investigating how to build, inhabit and use sensate or active matter, combinations of computational systems and physical materials that are sensitive to environmental features or to our activities, and respond by changing their form or appearance. Our experimental design uses continuous media such as cloth and non-woven materials, video projection, radio and sound fields. The experimental aspect of this work proceeds at two scales. The micro scale concerns topological responsive media, which includes time-based media and computationally-augmented fabrics. The macro scale concerns the architecture of responsive media spaces, which includes augmented reality, sensor-based interactive environments, projected and ubiquitous media. We describe the Topological Media Lab's recent work in gesture and performance, realtime media choreography, responsive media and softwear instruments or wearable media. Sha Xin Wei's practice ranges from complex, collaboratively built installations to realtime video and wearable sound textures that respond to gesture. These works explore the relations people create with one another in the presence of dense, continuously evolving responsive media. Since 1997, Sha has worked with the art research group, sponge, which he co-founded in San Francisco to produce public phenomenological experiments. Major series of projects include the TGarden play spaces, Hubbub public speech-painting, and the Sauna urban immersion installations. Sha is now embarking on the Softwear Instruments project which explores gesture and subject fields using sensate, gestural, media-saturated fabrics. Sha has degrees in mathematics from Harvard and Stanford Universities. Sha teaches computational media and critical studies of techno-science as an Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at the Georgia InstituteSha Xin Wei Lectures Next Week-.ems
of Technology. Sha's research in the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center and the New Media Center concerns gesture and agency in the presence of hybrid material, and how we shape, inhabit, design sensate or active matter

The EDA is located at Kinross 104 on the first floor of the new Kinross North Building located near Lot 32 at the corner of Gayley and Kinross. Parking may be purchased for $7 at the information kiosk located at Lot 32. http://www.ucla.edu/map/sectors/zoomde89.html

***Please note that all lectures scheduled to take place in Kinross South 101 will now be located at Kinross South 133