May 03, 2005
Fieldworks Art-Geography at the Hammer
This symposium includes an evening of performance and a day of discussion to bring together practitioners from art, architecture, and geography to present original (field)works and address emerging relations between geographical science (including GPS, satellite surveillance, etc.) and artistic production. Program includes Trevor Paglen, Laura Kurgan, Lize Mogel, Juan Geuer and a live performance by Ultra-red. At the UCLA Hammer Museum on Thursday evening and all day Friday.
March 24, 2005
Sky Ear
Sky Ear is a non-rigid carbon-fibre "cloud", embedded with one thousand glowing helium balloons and several dozen mobile phones. The balloons contain miniature sensor circuits that respond to electromagnetic fields, particularly those of mobile phones. When activated, the sensor circuits co-ordinate to cause ultra-bright coloured LEDs to illuminate. The 30m cloud glows and flickers brightly as it floats across the sky.
November 30, 2004
Nature Ears
Weird. And if we put two of these together...?
HEAR, HEAR
By amplifying sounds, the Brunton Nature Ear II ($280; brunton.com) does for bird watchers' ears what binoculars do for their eyes. The device concentrates on frequencies commonly associated with birdcalls, thus minimizing other sounds.
The New York Times > Technology > Circuits > Recreation: Making the Outdoors a Bit Greater
October 29, 2004
ConQwest Big Game
conqwest 2004 :: big game + treasure hunt + phone cam + semacode + giant animal totems
ConQwest is a Big Game in the evolving tradition of B.U.G. (Big Urban Game) and Pac-Manhattan. The gameplay was designed by Frank Lantz, with help from Mattia Romeo.
[via gizmodo]
September 11, 2004
POD (Wind Array Cascade Machine)
Nice installation from this year's ISEA:
POD consists of an array of sixty-four movement sensors on a roof in Montreal, Canada and sixty-four corresponding light sculptures at Kiasma. As the wind blows across the roof in Montreal, the sensors gather real-time data and transmit it over the Internet to the light markers in Kiasma. The lights illuminate according to the pressure waves of the wind, showing the audience a visual representation of the pattern related to the amplitude, direction and wave motion of the wind.
Video here: www.fondation-langlois.org/flash/e/stage.php?NumPage=369
[via GTA post here with good reviews of many other ISEA works]
August 13, 2004
Soundwalk #2 - Interactive Sound Installation
http://soundwalk.org
This looks like a promising group show featuring sound installations, including a project called Real Love Stories #2 by D. Jean Hester, who did a quite excellent project called "Write On This" for the recent Psy.Geo.Conflux in NYC last spring.
Please participate in the creation of "Real Love Stories #2", an interactive
sound and video installation. "Real Love Stories #2" will be part of the
SoundWalk event in Long Beach, California on August 21.
Just tell me a story about a person or thing you have loved -- first love,
or a failed love, or the love of your life, or how you loved your parents or
your dog or your Harley or your teddy bear... How you interpret "love" is up
to you -- stories about everything from a love of cold lobster leftovers to
how a married couple met the first time to having a crush in fifth grade to
an extreme fondness for beer have been submitted.
It's easy to do: just visit my website and fill out a form:
http://www.divestudio.org/projects/love_submit.php
July 17, 2004
Broccoli browsing
Produce grower and exporter Dole has introduced a new technology service that allows a cellphone user to check vegetable information while at the store. Consumers can learn where the produce came from and how it arrived on the shelf, along with cooking tips. The service only works on produce packaged with a ``QR'' barcode, a matrix-type super-code capable of storing lots of information. The shopper needs a cellphone equipped with a camera and scanner equipment that can read the codes. For now, only Dole's broccoli has the QR code, but the company plans to expand the service to other vegetables.
July 12, 2004
Intern position at Intel Berkeley
URBAN PROBES
We are expanding the urban research focus at the Intel Research lab in Berkeley. As a result we will continue performing more Urban Probes and have an additional open Intern position here at the Berkeley Lab for Fall 2004. The work will focus more on building and programming actual probes that we will deploy in urban spaces. Please see details on the position and how to apply.
Also please visit the Urban Atmospheres pages for a complete overview of the research.
July 02, 2004
A dream of a 1,000-year camera
Sam Raimi wants to document a millennium
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
CULVER CITY, California (AP) -- Sam Raimi hopes to remain in film a long time after he's through making "Spider-Man" movies. For about 1,000 years.
Raimi wants to build the "Century Cam," a network of cameras that would document the United States' urban landscape for a millennium.
The proposal: Position cameras above all major American cities and shoot one frame -- a 24th of a second of film -- each day at noon. The frames would be strung together gradually to create a continuous chronicle of each city's development.
April 13, 2004
Sky Ear
Sky Ear will be a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky.
The cloud will be made of one thousand large helium balloons each responding to the electromagnetic environment (created by distant storms, mobile phones, police and ambulance radios, television broadcasts, etc.) with coloured blue, red and yellow lights.
April 11, 2004
Photo recognition software gives location
"For a small fee, photo recognition software on a remote server works out precisely where you are, and sends back directions that will get you to your destination.
You are lost in a foreign city, you don't speak the language and you are late for your meeting. What do you do? Take out your cellphone, photograph the nearest building and press send."
from New Scientist, 10 April 04
[PS: I don't buy it.]
March 19, 2004
Virtual Louvre
If you’ve read Dan Brown’s fiction thriller “The Da Vinci Code,” you probably have a craving to visit the Louvre in Paris and follow the trail of enigmatic riddles left behind by the murdered museum curator. Don’t hesitate to pay a “visite virtuelle” right now at the Louvre web site, featuring more than 60 panoramic QuickTime VRs of the museum’s interior and exterior.
In the VRs of the exterior, you can view the architectural masterpiece of the Louvre itself, as well as the stunning glass Pyramid at the museum entrance. From the VRs of the interior, explore the long parquet hallway of the Grand Gallery filled with amazing artwork and the room now closed for renovation, Salle des Etats, home of Leonardi Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and “The Virgin on the Rocks.”
February 12, 2004
RFID Tags For The Rich
from Slashdot:
Greedo writes "While reading this piece about designing 'experiences' in the Globe and Mail, I came across this interesting tidbit: If you're a frequent Prada shopper (and who on
January 26, 2004
RFID sushi
Sushi restaurants in Japan are using RFID tags in the plates to total up the costs and track inventory as it goes around on the belt:
Image courtesy of Jun Murai (and yes, that's PM Koizumi-san...).
January 17, 2004
The Unmade Bed
Funny comicstrip sendup of interactive architecture moguls Diller & Scofido, et al by Ben Katchor in current Metropolis Magazine:
View image
January 15, 2004
Graffiti Archaeology
"What is Graffiti Archaeology?
Graffiti Archaeology is the study of graffiti-covered walls as they change over time. The grafarc.org project is a timelapse collage, made of photos of San Francisco graffiti taken by many different photographers from 1998 to the present.
Using the grafarc explorer, you can visit some of San Francisco's classic spots, see what they looked like in the past, and explore how they have changed over the years."
This project was done by Cassidy Curtis. This is exactly the sort of thing we're trying to facilitate with mobile technologies -- people with camera phones mapping places with timestamps and storing them in a database, allowing others to access that database to see what places looked like previously. Funny that the exact things we were thinking about were grafitti and other public art. can't help feeling somewhat scooped...
November 05, 2003
Mobile Bristol
The Mobile Bristol Centre is part of the DTI's City & Buildings Research Centre, the principal founders are Hewlett Packard Laboratories, the University of Bristol and the Appliance Studio.
The purpose of Mobile Bristol is to provide an experimental test-bed for technology and user value research in pervasive mobile media. The vision of the test-bed is to provide a digital canvas over the city onto which rich situated digital experiences can be painted and new commercial ventures can be explored. As you walk through the city a diverse range of digital media experiences such as soundscapes, games, interactive media and art bring the city alive and augment the ambiance of the physical places.
September 26, 2003
Radio Tags Provide Guidance
This could also be easily used to embed stories and narratives.
From Technology Research News September 24, 2003:
University of Rochester researchers have found a new use for the radio frequency identification tags that manufacturers are aiming to use to track products like cartons of milk and sweaters. These radio ID tags contain small radio transponders that broadcast unique identification numbers. Radio receivers in retail stores and warehouses could monitor the tags in order to track inventories in real time. The Rochester team has reversed the standard setup by making the receivers mobile and the transponders fixed. The arrangement, dubbed Navigational Assistance for the Visually Impaired (NAVI), can provide location information for the visually impaired and for other kinds of navigational assistance applications like self-guided tours. The system includes a set of permanently mounted passive transponders and a reader/playback device carried by the user. Rather than tipping off an inventory system when a specific item is near, a transponder trips a particular CD track when a playback device comes within range. The system could be a low-cost alternative to global positioning system-based schemes for providing location-specific information and pedestrian navigational assistance. The system could eventually be used in self-guided tours of places like museums, and as a way to give people directions in complicated and confusing buildings like medical centers. The method could be used in commercial products in less than two years, according to the researchers.
September 19, 2003
Story Beads: a wearable for distributed and mobile storytelling
Master's Thesis by Barbara Barry at MIT Media Lab (2000)
Abstract:
Stories take hundreds of different forms and serve many functions. They can be as energetic as an entire life story or as simple as a case of directions to a favorite beach. Storytelling processes are challenge and changed by technological developments in the worlds of text and image manipulation. The invention of writing changed the story from an orally recounted form which was mediated by the storyteller, to a recorded exact version, instead of a fleeting experience, a spoken weaving of the storyteller's tale. The story became an immutable object. In cinema stories are told with a sequence of juxtaposed still images moving at a speed fast enough to fool the eye into seeing a continually changing image instead of one image after another. Television eventually coerced storytelling into 30-minute segments linked together, week by week, over a season broadcast to a large audience. The invention of the computer allowed storytelling to become flexible within a smaller granularity of content. Using the computer capabilities for storage and manipulation of information, authors can design stories and present them to different viewing audiences in different ways. Mobile computing, like the technological developments that came before it, will demand its own storytelling processes and story forms.This thesis defines a specific storytelling process, which I call "Transactional Storytelling." Transactional Storytelling is the construction of story through trade and repurposing of images and image sequences.
"StoryBeads" are wearable computers designed as a tool for constructing image-based stories by allowing users to sequence and trade story pieces of image and text. StoryBeads are modular, wearable computer necklaces made of tiny computer "beads" capable of storing or displaying images. Beads communicate by infrared light, allowing the trade of digital images by beaming from bead to bead or by trade of a physical bead containing images.
My thesis proposes a tool for mobile story creation that will produce a unique storytelling process for constructing image-based stories.
Life archive
"Camera specs take candid snaps"
Story from BBC NEWS:
Soon your sunglasses could help you capture all the important moments of your life. A prototype pair of sunglasses with a camera built in to them has been created by Hewlett Packard researchers. "It means you now have a wearable camera which nobody will notice and can take pictures while being involved in events," said Huw Robson from Hewlett Packard. But experts say there could be privacy implications if this sort of technology becomes part of everyday life.
Frame your shots
The sunglasses developed at the Hewlett Packard labs in Bristol in the west of England sport a camera that constantly takes images of what a wearer sees. The camera also has an off-switch to preserve privacy.
This is part of the story of electronics becoming smaller and embedded in everything and cheap enough so that people can afford it
Huw Robson, HP Digital Media Lab
"If you are capturing your life as you walk around and you can simply and easily filter through that when you get home and get the important shots, that is going to be of great value to people," said Mr Robson, manager of the Bristol Digital Media Lab.
"Clearly that means that you get a lot of images and part of the problem that we are solving is how do you sort through those images to find the good images among all the junk," he told the BBC programme Go Digital.
To tackle image overload, the HP system captures information about images, called metadata, too.
This extra data keeps track of how and where a picture was taken and can spot if a subject was walking or turning.
The system also inspects images to see if people are smiling or looking directly at the camera lens.
"That sort of information can help us with the image processing," said Mr Robson, "to look at pictures and qualify them."
"This lets us judge whether they are good pictures in terms of composition and how well are they framed, but also in terms of the timing," he said, "is it the right sequence of images?"
The images can be processed in a handheld computer attached to the sunglasses or on a conventional home computer.
Disturbing trend
The camera glasses have already been tested in the real world. One triallist used them to take images of their children playing catch, while another wore a pair while playing football.
"This is part of the story of electronics becoming smaller and embedded in everything and cheap enough so that people can afford it," said Mr Robson.
But some are concerned about the notion of people being able to secretly take candid snapshots of the world around them.
"It's a cool piece of technology but frankly the idea of people wandering around wearing sunglasses photographing me all the time is really disturbing," said technology analyst Bill Thompson.
"HP need to look at the implications on privacy and stuff like that before they flood the market with these."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/3111004.stm
September 05, 2003
Sub-Media
From the Washington Post: Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page A01
A Tunnel With a View -- and a Profit Metro Looks at New Technology for Ads to Boost Revenue By Lyndsey Layton
"Metro officials seeking ways to increase revenue are hoping there's a light in the middle of the tunnel. The transit system is considering selling advertising space inside subway tunnels, using a new technology that creates mini-movies that appear to float in the darkness outside the train windows. The technique relies on a series of illuminated panels that give the illusion of motion to a passenger on a train rushing past, much the way the images in a child's flip book appear to move. "
From Sub Media's website:The Submedia audience isn't just captured. It's locked in place. Voluntarily. And as anyone who's ever been on a subway car will testify, one of the greatest challenges is knowing what to do with your eyes. Most people look out the window. At nothing. That's where we do our stuff. Suddenly the blackness is broken by an illuminated, animated 20-second show. Your show. Your message. Alone in the space. It catches the eye. Then takes it for a ride....A Submedia installation is a static medium that's fully animated. It's the reverse of traditional movie projectors. With a movie, film moves past a shutter and is projected for a stationary audience. With our technology, the audience moves past stationary film and shutters.
The idea was hatched by an astrophysics PhD candidate at Columbia University back in the mid-1990s. It has grown to include a crack team of specialists. Kodak, the No. 1 supplier of backlit transparencies. Photobition, the world leader in large-format, photo-realistic digital printing. And Parsons Brinckerhoff, a world leader in transit engineering.
http://www.sub-media.com/
August 30, 2003
Responsive Architecture
An interesting student project from Parsons School of Design as reported recently in Metropolis Magazine. How about some ideas for making our new lab responsive.
Parsons students transformed their lobby with walls that change configuration depending on activity in the room. In the lobby of the school's Design and Technology department, Witzgall's students mounted two deceptively simple polycarbonate panels, donated by Polygal, into a garage-door track in the ceiling. They sit side by side, partially blocking passage between the lobby's elevator and the hallway beyond. When someone approaches, embedded sensors trigger the panels to move toward the perimeter walls. These temporary walls remain parted during periods of high traffic, and return to the center of the lobby when there is none. The very nice panels also react to cues other than lobby gridlock. Each includes 128 LEDs linked to microphones in the department's two computer labs. The LEDs light up within a grid to graph the volume inside: the X-axis represents time; the Y-axis marks the activity level. Brightline lighting systems donated fluorescent fixtures, which create an ambient color wash that is programmed to change throughout the day with the class schedule.
A new kind of architecture reacts to the human movement within it.
By David Sokol
The Metropolis Observed
April 2003
Parsons students transformed their lobby with walls that change configuration depending on activity in the room. By crafting spaces that allow only certain movements or behaviors, designers have long played the role of social engineers. Witness New York's Central Park or postwar Corbusian housing blocks, both intended to "purify" urban dwellers. At the Parsons School of Design, students of visiting instructor Beatrice Witzgall's Architectural Intervention Collaboration Studio have completed a final project that responds to users as well as subtly influencing them. The installation rearranges itself--and the surrounding space--in response to human movements and traffic patterns.
In the lobby of the school's Design and Technology department, Witzgall's students mounted two deceptively simple polycarbonate panels, donated by Polygal, into a garage-door track in the ceiling. They sit side by side, partially blocking passage between the lobby's elevator and the hallway beyond. When someone approaches, embedded sensors trigger the panels to move toward the perimeter walls. These temporary walls remain parted during periods of high traffic, and return to the center of the lobby when there is none.
"We've talked about these two panels as characters wanting to belong," says Jennifer Wheatley, who is studying multimedia and broadcast design at Parsons. "When somebody's there, they get out of the way. They're very nice." Unlike something as passive as automatic supermarket doors, however, the installation in turn affects people's behavior. As obstacles, the panels force users toward the sides of the lobby during low traffic times, allowing passersby to discover seating and exhibition spaces that they may otherwise have walked past.
The very nice panels also react to cues other than lobby gridlock. Each includes 128 LEDs linked to microphones in the department's two computer labs. The LEDs light up within a grid to graph the volume inside: the X-axis represents time; the Y-axis marks the activity level. Brightline lighting systems donated fluorescent fixtures, which create an ambient color wash that is programmed to change throughout the day with the class schedule.
Witzgall, who has been developing this "responsive architecture" in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab since 2000, criticizes architectural vocabulary for being slow to adopt technological innovations. Despite the buzz generated by computer-aided design, "information technology is still considered an additional layer, not something that can reconfigure space according to how people occupy it," she says.
After the Parsons installation comes down, Witzgall has more responsive architecture to build. She is working on a proposal for New York's Union Square subway station and a design-build project with former MIT Media Lab associates. However, redefining social engineering takes time. "The technology mostly exists," Witzgall says, "but people need to develop an understanding that it can escape its virtual identity and develop physical presence. Technology can recognize people's behavior, activity, and movement--and it can change the way people communicate, interact, and inhabit a space."
July 10, 2003
GBA game with sun sensor
There's a new Game Boy Advance cart out in Japan that has an on-board light sensor. The main character uses a "sun gun" that the user has to charge up by actually going outside to collect sunlight...cool.
More info here.
July 09, 2003
July 07, 2003
"Theater That Uses the City as a Stage"
Upcoming site specific performance piece in NYC reported in the NY Times(thanks peggy):
From the top of One Times Square, where the ball drops on New Year's Eve, to the Chrysler Building to the Roosevelt Island tramway, Deborah Warner had scouted locations since October. The search was not for a film but for an environment in which to place a site-specific performance installation called "The Angel Project." That project, which Ms. Warner regards, quite simply, as "a walk," is the theatrical feature of Lincoln Center Festival 2003, which starts next week.
While the Kirov Opera is filling the Metropolitan Opera during the festival, theatergoers taking part in "The Angel Project" will be led one by one at five-minute intervals through an individualized journey to nine locations, many in the area of 42nd Street. The walk is scheduled to begin on Roosevelt Island, where people will be given a guidebook to follow as if on a kind of theatrical treasure hunt.
Everyone goes on the same journey, but, Ms. Warner said, each person "will see something entirely different by virtue of the canvas being so huge." The audience will help to define the experience. It is, she said, "like inviting somebody in, giving them a key to a house and leaving them to it."
July 3, 2003
Theater That Uses the City as a Stage
By MEL GUSSOW
From the top of One Times Square, where the ball drops on New Year's Eve, to the Chrysler Building to the Roosevelt Island tramway, Deborah Warner had scouted locations since October. The search was not for a film but for an environment in which to place a site-specific performance installation called "The Angel Project." That project, which Ms. Warner regards, quite simply, as "a walk," is the theatrical feature of Lincoln Center Festival 2003, which starts next week.
While the Kirov Opera is filling the Metropolitan Opera during the festival, theatergoers taking part in "The Angel Project" will be led one by one at five-minute intervals through an individualized journey to nine locations, many in the area of 42nd Street. The walk is scheduled to begin on Roosevelt Island, where people will be given a guidebook to follow as if on a kind of theatrical treasure hunt.
Everyone goes on the same journey, but, Ms. Warner said, each person "will see something entirely different by virtue of the canvas being so huge." The audience will help to define the experience. It is, she said, "like inviting somebody in, giving them a key to a house and leaving them to it."
Strange and often startling things will happen at the various locations, as rooms in the buildings chosen are animated and become the equivalent of interactive museum installations.
Because ticket holders will move at their own pace — the trip should take from two to three hours — there may be some unintentional overlapping among visitors. The size of the audience will be limited. Despite the fact that the project will run for the entire festival, from Tuesday to July 27, on most days from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., only 2,350 tickets will be sold — at $90 apiece. A limited number of student discount tickets will be available at $20.
Ms. Warner, best known in New York for her productions of "The Waste Land" and "Medea" (both starring Fiona Shaw), has directed plays and operas on the widest diversity of international stages.
Her work ranges from one-person shows like "The Waste Land" to a spectacular "Coriolanus" 10 years ago at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, with 50 actors, 250 extras and 15 horses. These productions and others have led to Ms. Warner's ranking as one of Britain's most innovative directors.
Those previous ventures dwindle logistically next to "The Angel Project," which will have to allow for New York's multiplicity and traffic, human and motorized. Theatergoers will proceed by foot and by subway to the sites. Some 40 performers, most of them nonprofessionals (many pretending to be angels), will work in two shifts along with 20 production assistants to create the project.
A version three years ago, at the Perth International Arts Festival in Australia, sprawled through 13 buildings. It has been a far greater challenge for Ms. Warner to choose locations in New York and to persuade people to open their buildings to her world of theater. As she edged toward the preview performance next Monday, she said: "I can't think of a more difficult city to do this in. It's dizzying, but I'm also excited by the possibilities."
Ms. Warner described the journey as "a silent communion" in which people can find "a poetic relationship with their city." As she said, "There isn't a room at the end of the project where everybody gets together and discusses their experiences." After the walk, the project is "your own rightful property."
"It uses architecture as a framework to reopen imaginative space," she said. "Where other forms use words, we directly use architecture." The project plays off "the heights and depths of the city," and the goal is to see buildings — some familiar — as if for the first time.
Ms. Warner offered clues as to what might be held over from the Perth production. There, one room was filled with "living lilies planted in a garden of snow" (though the snow was actually salt). In another room, a fax machine continually spewed pages of "Paradise Lost."
Although she made it clear that the project "will be unique to New York," its roots go back to "The St. Pancras Project" at the London International Festival of Theater in 1995. For that, she reopened the long-abandoned but still palatial Midland Grand Hotel next to the St. Pancras rail station for "a fantastical walk."
In 1999, the piece continued to evolve as Ms. Warner and her collaborators regrouped at the empty Euston Tower office building in London. This "Tower Project" filled the top three floors with sights and sounds, including winged angelic figures and a striking view of a miniaturized London below.
From that came Ms. Warner's concept of "reading a building's silent text, very much the way one would read a text of a play or a score." Her exploration of New York actually began in 1996 when she and Ms. Shaw scouted locations for "The Waste Land." Looking for a place to stage their dramatization of the Eliot poem, they traveled across the city from Ellis Island to the empty 26th floor of the World Trade Center, rejected because it gave Ms. Warner vertigo. Finally, she produced "The Waste Land" at the unused Liberty Theater on West 42nd Street. Seven years later, 42nd has been renovated and the Liberty is now unseen behind Madame Tussaud's, but it will be reopened for "The Angel Project," a fact that seemed to please her. This is, she said, "the most hidden, anchorite-like, beautiful, walled-upped" building in the city.
On her return to New York, she revisited some sites, like the once elegant Cloud Club at the top of the Chrysler Building, which in the intervening time has been stripped of period detail. Another area in that building is scheduled to be one of the stops. The Empire State Building and Grand Central Station were eventually discounted because they are so well traveled. While looking for places with iconic resonance, she wanted to avoid a hint of tourism.
She investigated Grand Central from the glass walkway overlooking the station to the subterranean area once inhabited by the homeless, but she concluded that the restoration — though authentic — had made the building lose its integrity. She said there was "a marvelous viewing platform at Rockefeller Center, but it's now been merged with the foyers of the Rainbow Room." A catacombed underground electrical substation — a high-tension Frankensteinian lair on the West Side — was also rejected as not useful except for someone seeking a history of electricity in New York.
In her search she often found herself going down blind alleys. After she chose a place, it was not always available. All the sites in the three cities have been provided at no charge. For her, One Times Square was a real find, a towering structure filled with history and memories but now vacant. The electronic billboards provide the income to support the building.
From the director's point of view, the project is related to her other theatrical work, including "The Waste Land" (in its use of found space) and "Medea" (because the audience was encouraged to take away variant ideas about the play).
At the same time, the work is closely allied to environmental artists like Antony Gormley and Richard Serra. "The best theater that I saw in the last four years is in the Tate Modern," she said. "The interaction of the public with the huge installations in the downstairs space is a form of theater. If it's a living human in relation to empty space, and he's moving, I guess it's an act of theater. I don't think theater is defined by the spoken word."
As for the Angel Project, "The ticket holder puts himself in the position of performer, writer, director and possibly designer." She laughed and added, "In that respect, the ticket is very good value."
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June 24, 2003
Wireless sensor webs
Good article in Technology Review on wireless sensor webs and recent research on how they might be used. But no mention of entertainment or education apps - any ideas?
Indeed, wireless sensor networks are one of the first real-world examples of “pervasive” computing, the notion that small, smart, and cheap sensing and computing devices will eventually permeate the environment. That notion has been percolating in information technology circles for more than a decade. But now, after several years of research investments by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, and a handful of high-tech giants like Intel, the hardware and software fundamental to pervasive computing are emerging.
June 21, 2003
ReplayCam
A company in NJ is making a line of wearable cameras - set up with a 30sec. buffer for instant replay. Their tagline is" capturing priceless moments"...
WSJ summary:
The device, expected to hit stores before September and sell for $349, can record up to 48 clips of 30 seconds each, and its rechargeable battery will run for eight hours, according to Mr. Fortier. It stores the video on a removable 64-megabyte Flash memory card, which can be upgraded to larger-capacity chips. The camera part weighs less than two ounces and is less than an inch on each side; the hip pack measures about four inches by five inches and weighs less than a pound
June 15, 2003
T"o"ripspace from Tama
T"o"ripspace - very cool location based image software for mobile blogging from Tama University in Tokyo.
June 14, 2003
Ambient Devices
Ambient Devices - recent startup to commercialize work from Media Lab's Tangible Media Group.
"Ambient's VISION is to embed information representation in everyday objects: lights, pens, watches, walls, and wearables. With Ambient, the physical environment becomes an interface to digital information rendered as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color, or light. "
May 30, 2003
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.
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 MarĂa 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
May 12, 2003
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.
