[from Salon, via The Guardian]

Bush’s mystery bulge

The rumour is flying around the globe. Was the president wired during the first debate?

Dave Lindorff

Friday October 8, 2004

Was President Bush literally channeling Karl Rove in his first debate with John Kerry? That’s the latest rumour flooding the Internet, unleashed last week in the wake of an image caught by a television camera during the Miami debate. The image shows a large solid object between Bush’s shoulder blades as he leans over the lectern and faces moderator Jim Lehrer.

The president is not known to wear a back brace, and it’s safe to say he wasn’t packing. So was the bulge under his well-tailored jacket a hidden receiver, picking up transmissions from someone offstage feeding the president answers through a hidden earpiece? Did the device explain why the normally ramrod-straight president seemed hunched over during much of the debate?

link to Guardian story

(from the transcript of tonight’s debate):

Mr. Bush: The truth of the matter is if you listen carefully Saddam would still be in power if he were the president of the United States. And the world would be a lot better off.

This is a three year program. There’s about fourteen of us newly enrolled this year -

Here’s the “Before” picture:

(Huge Blow Up)

Three years from now, we’ll get an “After”.

I remember seeing Oliver Stone’s Wild Palms on TV – a sort of strange mix of 3D holographs, invasive television and melodrama from 1993. Here’s a summary:

Oliver Stone’s cyberpunk Wild Palms TV miniseries owes perhaps more to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks than it does to the writings of William Gibson (who actually makes a small cameo appearance in the film).

The plot involves a monopolistic media company in not-so-distant future out to control to the United States through technology and the media. (Its leader is an ex-science fiction writer/Texan billionaire, basically a mixture between Dianetics leader, L. Ron Hubbard and former presidential candidate, Ross Perot.) The corporation is opposed at every turn by a group of rebels fighting for individual freedom.

Although the plot is confusing at times, Wild Palms is suitably bizarre watching featuring state-of-the-art special effects.

Somehow, class discussions here in the Interactive Media Division keep reminding me of this series – I want to watch it again. Unfortunately, it’s only out on VHS on Amazon – DVD seems much more appropriate. Or maybe I can find some footage online – it seems like something that would be kept alive by people curious about technology – ie, internet users. But maybe the acting or the story was worse than I remember and it’s been left to die. That doesn’t usually seem to stop people who love media about technology and media! Here’s a favorable review of Wild Palms, comparing it to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Erik Davis, of Techgnosis draws some of the same parallels in his article on Wild Palms, “Nothing is Real“:

When it’s rolling, Wild Palms becomes a symptom as much as a story, capturing the giddy sense of slipping into a future where an unholy alliance of technology, media, and pure power are tugging apart the dense social dream of the world (and letting some hungry ghosts loose in the process). For all its obscure excess and arch dialogue, Wild Palms has the courage to push TV postmodernism beyond Lynch’s secret handshakes or MTV’s depthless flash to a techno-ontological engagement of the medium’s own nascent future as virtual reality.

Here’s a fan-based synopsis of the show built with screenshots.

http://razghul.ice.org/misc/zoom/zoom.htm

Apart from the dimestore surrealism, there’s something amazing about this. Certainly it’s hypnotic, but it also embodies an experience that’s in some way orthogonal to quicktimeVR.

How to divide time? And how to make it interactive?

For Eric Loyer‘s Interactive Media class, I have an assignment to develop an “Interactive Clock” in the next two-three weeks. I was thinking of alternative ways to slice up time, and what other kinds of symbols and meaning you could place on top of the movement of moments.

The I Ching seems perfect for that – an aged system of divination according to the juxtaposition of symbols, meaning is created as disparate forces are aligned.

How to apply the I Ching to a clock?

An hour is 3600 seconds. If you apply the 8 trigrams, that’s 450 moments. You could have a clock face like so:

o

o   o

o     o

o   o

o

with each of the eight trigrams running around the edges. But then how would you manage synchronicity? You could ask the user to click on an interface of the same eight trigrams, on a moment by moment basis creating a hexagram.

But I would rather decrease choice and increase serendipity with this project.

So I could use the individual lines. There are two types of lines in the I Ching (I’m not going to use changing lines in round one for this project). I wondered if someone else had done any work in this area: Google: I Ching Clock. I found something called I Ching Connexion, with an I Ching Clock in it. It’s a class Mac app that doesn’t run 100% smoothly in my OS X system here, but from what I can see, two tri-grams are hanging on either side of a yin-yang, and as the seconds pass, change builds, eventually forcing the evolution of the hexagrams. You can click on the clockface at any time to see what the current reading is.

Each hexagram reading is built from six lines. Maybe the user clicks six times, each second being a different hexagram displayed onscreen? But that’s not a clock primarily, and the assignment is to build a clock.

I turned to my R.L. Wing’s I Ching Workbook. Perhaps I should use the 64 hexagrams as the moments in time, and the user simply stops the time-stream to receive a reading. But I would like to include some kind of combinatorial effect, not simply watching the marching hexagrams go by, but incorporating some measure of moment-to-moment unknowing.

Time is hierarchical: days contain hours, hours contain minutes, minutes contain seconds.

The I-Ching is somewhat hierarchical, but branching. Before I settled on the notion of using the I Ching to make a clock, I thought about offering binary choices to the user that would affect the unfolding of time. CHICKEN OR ICE? LAPTOP OR LEAF? But a clock runs whether the user touches it or not, save for winding or battery replacement. Here’s a quick and dirty idea for the assignment: create a clock that runs for five minutes, and then quits until the user clicks on a small winding key on the clockface.

Perhaps I could nail down this assignment by thinking about the number of clicks. One click and you interrupt time and pick a moment? I think I like that, better than click, click click, unless I want to build a sort of I Ching Slot Machine.

But I don’t want the whole hexagram to be onscreen with a one-click interaction. I want it to be assembled from different regions of the interface, so it’s not immediately clear what is coming. Trouble is, without arrangement, there are only these two things:

-----

-- --

Floating in space, without passion, without judgement. But maybe that’s okay – mystery solved by a click. What are these quivering lines onscreen? Ahh, they are a reading for a moment in time.

I sketched a mock-up interface, and I realized it’s going to be hard to provide the bars without making an implicit hexagram before the user clicks. So I’m thinking I might include pictures or a video in a portion of the screen, something to draw the user’s eye away and prompt their clicks.

Since the bottom part of a hexagram represents human affairs, and the top represents cosmic affairs, I’m going to order their time changing. In keeping with the numerical spirit of the system, the lines will change at these intervals:

----- - 64

----- - 32

----- - 16

----- - 8

----- - 4

----- - 2

I’m not sure what units of time I would like to use yet; I want to make it change fast-ish, but not too frenetic.

Perhaps I could use images that are inspired by the eight elements of the trigrams, and then as the user clicks on them, the “human affairs” end of the hexagram is determined; on top of that is placed a time-determined “heavenly affairs” trigram. Hmmm.

Working up my mock-up, using Google Image Search for “I Ching” (this is, of course, still the best I Ching Online Guide).

I Ching Clock Mock Up:

click to avoid cut off

The wheel in the upper left corner revolves, so each two seconds there’s a new trigram on top. In the right window, an image pops up each second. In this case, the image represents fire – clicking on that image brings the trigram behind the image, with the trigram from the top of the wheel on the left, and forms the hexagram in the lower left corner, which is explained in the text window in the right.

Can I build this in Flash? Whoosh.

A friend, Robin, just watched one of my student film drafts and suggested some changes to make it more like Guy Maddin’s Sissy Boy Slap Party. Rock!

this project seems pretty cool:

“Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens.”

I guess it is an older project, but new to me..and it won a golden Nica at Ars Electronica this past May. was thinking about this in relation to issues of communication in public and private space, eps. since we have been discussing bringing the private into the public with the even increasing use of mobile phones in Julian’s mobile media class this semester.

Placed boxes at l-system nodes, and scaling them as well. I vary the angle the branches are over time, so these structures move in a rather hypnotic writhing motion.

This is also more of a measure of when I start to worry about things, actual completion times tend to be one to three weeks, and of course tweaked until about 5 minutes before defense.

October:

Week 1: Develop system to generate L-Strings

Week 2: Avatar presentation and movement, collision detection

Week 3: Intergate Tools into larger engine, immersive hardware (immersive integration will continue through the next two months)

Week 4: Develop details of generated architecture (i.e. turn the boxes into something else), collision detection update

November:

Week 1: Texture generation

Week 2: Scale Enviornment (i.e. make world bigger)

Week 3: Add Agents, simple AI

Week 4: Thanksgiving

December

Week 1: Game rules, cartography, have immersive demo

Week 2: Game rules, preliminary testing

Week 3: – Winter Break

Week 4: – Winter Break

January:

Week 1: – Winter Break

Week 2: Assets: Terrains

Week 3: Assets: Agents

Week 4: Assets: rough completion and misc.

February:

Week 1: Integrate assets

Week 2: Integrate assets/consolidate

Week 3: Gameflow/story integration

Week 4: Gameflow/story integration

March:

Week 1: Asset/Gameplay revisions

Week 2: Asset/Gameplay revisions

Week 3: – Spring Break

Week 4: Strive for version One point zero, beta

April:

Week 1: Beta Testing

Week 2: Beta Testing

Week 3: Beta Testing

Week 4: Beta Testing