kurt

mental models + thanks M&M

While I was in Boston, I participated in 2 fMRI research projects run by my friend Maital. She sent me a few pictures of my brain so a big thanks to her for that and her hospitality while I was visiting.

Take a look:

And a word of thanks as well to her boss, Moshe Bar, a USC graduate, for inviting me to give a short talk at the weekly lab meeting about my work and the Interactive Media Division. I went much longer than the 15 minutes he had asked for, so I apologize for keeping everyone at work late on a Friday night. Thanks again, I had a lot of fun visiting the lab and sticking my head inside of huge magnets.

Art Interactive, Cambridge, MA

I found Art Interactive randomly while walking with my friend to the Whole Foods off of Mass. Ave. Naimark had mentioned an interactive exhibit in Harvard Square, but I think this is the one that he was thinking of as I actually never found anything like he had described there.

Sadly however, I was only able to find my way there later when it was closed... snuck in the first time and toured the floor of powerless exhibits, sort of like walking through an interactive art graveyard. There was a moment actually where I thought that the haptic feedback on one piece was just broken, until I looked down and noticed that it was unplugged. Ah. There was something amusing about moving amongst those sleeping machines.

The next time I went back on the weekend, I had seen a schedule for Saturday and Sunday, the entire building was closed and I couldn't even get into the lobby. So much for interactive art installations... it's nice to know that it's there, but it would be even nicer to experience it.

The Photographic Right

Since I've arrived in Boston, I've taken my camera almost everywhere to shoot. Today was the first time that I met any resistance and it came in the form of two cops that sauntered up behind me at the Davis station on the red line. They politely informed me that photography was not allowed of any public transportation in Boston, unless I went to 10 Park St downtown and was approved for a permit. Of course, then I would have to where a big yellow sign around my neck that let everyone know that I and my camera are not a threat.

"oh my father I am heartily sorry...

for having offended you."

Just found this nod on smartmobs. The main text of the post is about a mobile phone text messsaging confession service and it conveniently links to the post on the Mobile Confessional project. Go team projectCAR! (sorry about the formatting issues in non-IE browsers, our web guy did all the code testing solely in explorer. sigh.)

3rd Year Thesis Presentations

I am dynamic hypermedia dragons, here be 33 clownerstrike image paths, location reveries...

Cap'n Crunch

Some updates to make up for my lack of posting lately:

1. The custom TV project I worked on over the summer is going to be at CES 2005. It will be on the show floor, mentioned by Carly Fiorina in her keynote and demoed to the analysts. This means a ton of work for me over the next month... subtracting the holiday week and trying to be done at least a week before the show means that we actually only have 2 weeks. Yikes.

2. The same project has submitted two papers to conferences in the last month. I had less to do with the first one and more to do with the second one, though it's worth noting that the prior is an internal conference and the latter is a public conference.

3. The projectCAR has been sited/sighted on a couple blogs: we-make-money-not-art and networked_performance.
Thanks Julian for getting us out there.

4. The site projectcar.org has been registered and pointed to a server. Unfortunately that server is the one that patholog is running on right now and virtual hosting has not been figured out yet, though I must thank Will for putting the time in to play around with this. We'll have it up by Monday morning.

5. I've been driving the Mobile Confessional around, both with the team (Kellee and Garrett) and alone, and have found the experience as the driver to be revolutionary. Just last night, when I plugged in the sign in the Valley, I went from angry road rage at being stuck in traffic on the 101 (2.5 hours from Ventura to LA) to unmitigated joy when a limo pulled up aside me so that a young woman could lean out the window, scream at me and throw the horns with both her hands. At least I'm getting a reaction from the surrounding cars.

6. Finally, the major work on my thesis has been porting everything over to max/msp/jitter so that I can control each iteration, rather than wait for a breakthrough from the engineers I've been working with. This has been a painful realization for me and my reluctance to code has played a large part in the recognition delay. So the lesson here is that I don't like to change plans when that shift is going to be a major strategic re-organization. Well such is life. Time is short and I am gritting my teeth as I work on this. I feel like an architect that has been forced to pick up a hammer and a hardhat. It pains me to lose sight of the design and content, my camera cries out to me, but this is how it must be done .