I put together a short promo music video-ish thing for Torrent Raiders! Music by Cursor Miner.

You may have heard about XNA. Its a framework from Microsoft designed with the intention of simplifying the process of making games. For a number of reasons, I chose to use XNA as the technological backbone for my thesis project and have been using it since the first XNA beta came out in late August. Since then, a final 1.0 version of the XNA Framework has been released and a number of community websites have sprung up around it. Here are some XNA-related resources I have found to be useful...

Heads up y'all... event alert!

This Saturday at Machine Project not only will there be the December Dorkbot SoCal, but also a launch party for the new Toys and Games themed issue of Make magazine. Recent IMD seminar guest Simon Penny and Mr. Jalopy will present and general merriment, socializing and beer swilling will occur.

In addition to that, Will and I will be bringing MobZombies, which we recently exhibited at Wired NextFest, down to the festivities for demoing (that means playing). So be there.

Also, this weekend is your last chance to see amazing artist Takeshi Murata's Untitled (Silver) installation at Machine. Its up from 12-5 on Saturday and Sunday.

Machine Project
Saturday, 5:30pm
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026

So I just stumbled across the Realtime Art Manifesto, presented last month at the medi@terra art festival by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, creators of the Endless Forest. Having finished reading it, I'm left feeling invigorated (which is what a manifesto ought to do to you).

If you are interested in creating interactive worlds/systems/experiences, read this. If you're not satisfied with what the big budget developers are feeding you, read this. If you wanna elevate the medium, go on and read the damn thing.

Realtime is a poetic technology

Sounds nice, right? There are a lot of good little nuggets here. I found a lot of it dovetails nicely with my intentions and goals for my thesis. But then, some of it I can't entirely abide by. Take Point 7's condemnation of game-related art in the contemporary art world:

Make art-games, not game-art.
Game art is just modern art
-ironical, cynical, afraid of beauty, afraid of meaning.
It abuses a technology that has already spawned an art form capable of communicating far beyond the reach of modern art.
Made by artists far superior in artistry and skills.
Game art is slave art.

Yep... they just went there. I think there is plenty of room for game-art and art-games, but their distinction is still relevant. As much as I may love Brody Condon's narcotic flying Elvises, in forsaking its medium's interactivity, it has more to do with video art than the burgeoning realtime medium whose technology it employs.

I'm sure a number of designers here at the IMD are going to take issue with this one:

The game structure of rules and competition stands in the way of expressiveness.
Interactivity wants to be free.

I could rip out half a dozen other little catch phrases, but taking them out of context might soften the blow. Read it and let's discuss.

Realtime Art Manifesto

found via abstractmachine by way of processing blogs

According to a story over on Wired Blogs, when Rumsfeld resigned on Wednesday morning, the related story became the fastest Digg submission to hit the front page (in just three minutes!). Twenty minutes later, the story showed up on Google News.

According to the Wired Blog, in speaking about it at the Web 2.0 Summit on Thursday, Digg founder Kevin Rose mentioned that "33% of the diggs for the Rumsfeld story happened when people saw the headline within Digg's Swarm and Stack tools."

Its cool to hear that the visualizations are still getting a lot of usage three and a half months after their initial release. I wish I had screenshot of Swarm when the story was breaking.

This list will doubtlessly expand as time passes. Your suggestions are welcome.

Books

Else/Where, ed. Janet Abrams
Protocol, Alex Galloway
Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Alex Galloway
Curating Immateriality, ed. Joasia Krysa

Articles & Papers
The Anti-Sublime Ideal in Data Art, Lev Manovich
Pirates of the Multiplex: On the Web, Steven Daly
Organic Information Design, Ben Fry

Software & Art

Listening Post, Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin
Packet Garden, Julian Oliver
Valence & Anemone, Ben Fry
We Feel Fine, Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar
Switchboard, Jeff Crouse
Carnivore PE, Alex Galloway
Little Brother, The Institute for Applied Autonomy

Games

Geometry Wars (Xbox 360), Bizarre Creations
Rez (Playstation 2), Tetsuya Mizuguchi
Warning Forever (PC), Hikoza T Ohkubo

I was digging through some files and found a video from this older project I did when I was in college. It was made in Director using the asFFT XTRA to do real-time analysis on whatever music was being played into the computer and used that to dynamically trigger the animation and camera moves. I began the project not knowing anything about Lingo (or 3D Lingo) and only the most rudimentry understanding of programming in general, but came out of it feeling pretty confident about approaching more complex projects.

Hey everyone... just wanted to let y'all know that I've been guest reblogging over at the Eyebeam ReBlog for the last week and I'll be doing it for another week. So direct your browser/rss feed over here for the hot links I'm serving up.

UPDATE: the archive of my reblogging stint is avaliable here: CLICKY

Swarm, the visualization of Digg.com that I've been working on at Stamen, has launched today alongside Stack. Together, they comprise the beginning of Digg Labs, a collaboration between Stamen and Digg that you'll want to keep an eye on.

Already, the visualizations have garnered enough attention from the Digg community to bring the servers down. Things may be a little funky until Digg gets enough servers up and running to handle the demand.

Swarm
Stack
Digg Labs

This summer, I am interning at Stamen, a small design studio in San Francisco. You may remember Stamen from awesome projects such as Cabspotting, Mappr, or In The News, which was featured in the first issue of Vectors. Anyhow, now seems like a good time to talk a little bit about how its all going.

Its going pretty awesome. Last night, we attended the Digg v3 launch party where it was announced that Stamen has been working on creating some real-time data visualizations for the new version of Digg. One of these visualizations is something that I made and it was shown at the party last night. Today, there is a picture of it up on flickr that has already been viewed more than 7000 times! So that's pretty thrilling.

Also, over at Geek Entertainment TV, there is an episode posted with interviews from last night with Mike and Eric from Stamen and Kevin Rose, founder of Digg, who refers to my visualization as "digg spy on crack".

So yea... digg spy on crack is going to be released sometime later this summer so I'm pretty excited to have something I'm working on get that kind of exposure (Digg gets around 800,000 unique visitors every day). Its really been an amazing experience getting to work on something like closely with the guys at Stamen who are really just the raddest.

Its been a very Flash-intensive summer so far and I've learned a whole lot of stuff already. I'm writing proper Actionscript 2.0 classes and I'm using Eclipse as my IDE. Yes, Eclipse, the free open source Java IDE. But some industrious folks have gone and made a plugin that colors and hints your actionscript! I will never write a line of actionscript in the abominable Flash development environment again. Of course, I still have to build the .swf there, but not for long. MTASC is an open source compiler you can use to build .swf's without ever touching Macromedia product! Shawn here has already got it working on his Mac and I'm gonna make sure and sort that out for my computer before the summer is over.

Oh... I also have a flickr set from the party last night