More Than Recommended

The UCLA Hammer has an astonishing retrospective of artist Lee Bontecou.
Bontecou Exhibit at the Hammer

Mapping Will Wright

"But the bigger thought in my mind is the fact that we're inventing and adapting to these alternate topologies--social topologies, basically. It used to be that you knew your neighbors and maybe your coworkers--the people in your physical vicinity. In some sense our phone network is kind of pretty closely mapped to that physical topology. As we move onto the Net, we have an entirely different set of topologies that are based around special interests and forums and bulletin boards, chat rooms. And online games are their own kind of form of topology. And so we can have groups of friends that I know in the office, and my neighbors, and also ones that are playing this online game with me, or ones that hang out with at this particular website that reflects my hobby, and that I interact with over a bulletin board."

from Q&A: Mappping Will Wright on Gamespot.com

GDC scholarships

IGDA's GDC Scholarship Program Now Accepting Applications
---------------------------------------------------------
The IGDA has just launched the 4th annual Student Scholarship Program.
Twenty-five college students will be awarded complimentary full access
passes to the Game Developers Conference. Students can now apply online.
The deadline to enter is Wednesday, January 28, 2004. Recipients will be
announced in early February 2004. Applicants are required to be full-time
college students (or equivalent) and IGDA student members for
consideration. The IGDA's Education Committee and board members will judge
scholarship applications.

New Class open to EVERYONE!

Public Authoring in the Wireless City

Urban Tapestries is a framework for understanding the social, cultural, economic and political implications of pervasive location-based mobile and wireless systems. To investigate these issues, we are building an experimental location-based wireless platform to allow people to access and author location-specific content (text, audio and pictures). It is a forum for exploring and sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving and annotating ephemeral traces of peoples’ presence in the geography of the city.

Urban Tapestries allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. People will be able to add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

We have recently completed a Public Trial of our prototype – participant feedback can be found on our project weblog – and will be posting evaluation and future directions in the near future.

http://www.proboscis.org.uk/urbantapestries/

IGDA on Campus

USC and their program of Information Technology Program have invited
the LA Chapter of the IGDA to USC. The program has three minor
degrees in video games and is working on a major. The facility
maintains extremely well equipped game labs each with PS2s, Game
Cubes, Xboxs and high end game PCs at every station, and other state
of the art equipment.

Time: Tuesday, Dec. 16th. 7PM.
Place: USC campus in room OHE540

This is the fifth floor of Olin Hall of Engineering.

Campus map (Olin Hall is in square 5B):
http://www.usc.edu/assets/maps/upc_map.pdf

Taking phone pics without permission illegal in Hungary

Hungary moved on Thursday to stop users of new camera mobile phones from taking and sending snapshots of people without their permission.
Regulators around the world are trying to get to grips with the spread of camera phones and their invasion of privacy.

link

"Mobile Connections" in Manchester

The futuresonic04 International Festival of Electronic Music and Media Arts shall explore the theme of mobile connections, bringing together media artists, musicians, game developers and technical innovators working in wireless and locative media, to present a range of artistic projects, workshops and debates.

Just as recording enabled sound to be heard apart from the place and time of its creation and radio made possible remote listening, so a new generation of communication media is now reconfiguring perceptions of space and time, and transforming the nature of the art object and the musical event.

The emergence of locative media art, predictions of the imminent bursting of the 802.11 bubble, and the introduction of location based services for mobile phones have brought into focus a set of interests concerned with wireless and locative media, and have created a space that increasing numbers of artists are starting to explore.

mobile connections will explore how wireless technologies enable place and location to be experienced in different ways, and look at the diverse ways in which artists have pushed the limits, and solicited unexpected or unforeseen results, from communication media past and present, from the radio and turntable, to mobile telephony, streaming and wireless LAN.

'04 open house

so,

a) the lab is done (for all intents and purposes)

b) we have some projects

c) we have an entire month before next semester, a time we can use to make more stuff

we need to have an open house early next semester -- get ourselves on the map, have some fun in our new space, etc.

I challenge everyone to get something done over the break, be it finishing up an existing project or prototype, getting their servo motors running like a charm, polishing off a performance piece, or programming some stupid / fun toy or game. Something. The lab is open, and if you're not here, well...most of you have laptops anyway, so no excuses. Let's get some stuff together and show it off.

On the Farm

This Saturday, December 6, 2003, at the Center for Land Use Interpretation Los Angeles, Sam Easterson will talk about the exhibit, currently on display at the CLUI, ON THE FARM: LIVE STOCK FOOTAGE BY LIVESTOCK, and will discuss his work of outfitting wild and domesticated animals with videocameras.

Talk begins at 7PM. Admission is free. Space is limited, so arrive early to be sure to get a seat. For location and direction information go to:
http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/contact/contact.html

A CLUI Independent Interpreter Program Event. More info: http://www.clui.org/

The CLUI Los Angeles Exhibit Hall is open noon to five PM, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, or by appointment. Admission is free.

re-invasion

Japanese game machine maker Taito Corp said on Friday it plans to restart sales of "Space Invaders" in the United States, almost 25 years after the game first appeared in video arcades.

link

TunA

from this wired article:

"Media Lab Europe, research partner to MIT Media Lab, is testing tunA, a software application that employs Wi-Fi to locate nearby users, peek at their music playlist and wirelessly jack into their audio stream. Pronounced like the fish and signifying music "tunes" and "ad hoc" file sharing, tunA is being designed for wireless PDAs, cell phones and even its own hardware device."

"When alone, a tunA-enabled device functions like a regular MP3 player. But around others like it, the interface displays other in-range users, identified by the avatar of their choice. Avatars appear or disappear automatically as users go in and out of range."

"Clicking on others' avatars lets you see whatever personal information or messages they want to share with the world. It also displays their playlist and the song they are listening to at that moment so you can decide if you want to tune in."

"There's also instant-message capability, the possibility to change skins and a virtual stalking feature: You can bookmark not only songs, but also people."

now why didnt we think of this?

Tom Jennings: Story Teller

Mark Allen's (C-Level, LAATHC) new gallery space, Machine opens this Saturday afternoon, December 6th from 1-4pm with "Story Teller" by Los Angeles artist Tom Jennings.

Story Teller is an experimental narrative about British mathematician/code breaker Alan Turing told using obsolete media -- perforated paper tape, teletype, phoneme-speech, glowing phosphors and ink-on-paper. The text is encoded 8 bytes per inch on a 700 foot roll of paper tape, which runs through a variety of cold war era technology on a daily eight hour journey from spool to floor.

Historian of cold war computing and archivist of obscure and extinct technologies, Mr Jennings is the founder of FidoNet, the largest amateur computer network in the world, as well as a recipient of Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award.

LA SIGGRAPH Meeting on The Haunted Mansion

The Los Angeles chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH is having its December meeting on the visual effects of The Haunted Mansion. The meeting is sponsored by Side Effects Software, the makers of Houdini (probably the best visual effects animation software out there, in terms of particle systems, etc.), and also, Sony Pictures Imageworks will be recruiting at the meeting. The meeting is next Tuesday, 9 December.

As always, there is a social hour from 6:30pm-7:30pm, and then the program usually runs from 7:30pm-9:30pm. This month it's at the Bradley Hall at UCLA.

Again, if anyone wants to go and needs a ride, let me know . . .