a looking-glass book

katamari damacy cosplay

also, a katamari damacy cosplay via waxy

edward tufte posts new chapter from his book

for the extreme dataspace people:

"Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations: New Chapter from Beautiful Evidence
Here is the first of several chapters on consuming presentations, on what alert members of an audience or readers of a report should look for in assessing the credibility of the presenter. Most of Beautiful Evidence is about helpful techniques in evidence presentations; these 3 or 4 chapters, however, will describe sources of corruption.

This draft will be posted for a month or so; I'd appreciate helpful comments.

Thanks,
E.T."

link

media lab europe closes

crap. this sucks. but it appears mit's media lab europe is to be no more.

dave's world link
business world link

(thanks to jen for helping me dig around on this one.)

unsecured webcams

privacy? webcams?
wanna spy on people on the other side of the world?

check out this story on boingboing. way too cool not to repost and besides, id just lose the link on my desktop somehow anyway.

(and usc is destroying in the orange bowl. 48-10. werd.)

scotland yard

as a python coded network game.

this is truly one of the sweetest board games ever, a classic game of hide and seek on a 2d plane.

this i must play, so who is in for a game sometime soon from the comfort of your own connection?

serialism?

so im reading 'dark tower 6' right now, with 7 in the mail as of tomorrow probably.

im reading it. ive been reading them as they came out since before the third book. what does this mean though, really?

kurt has just started reading them. comparing notes in some sense has been fun, but he hasn't make it to book 2 yet. and the difference between 2 and 6 is enormous.

but it got me thinking, as usual. as with my comic books, there is something here. something that no longer happens. it happened with serial novels like 'the shadow' (i found, one day, like 200 shadow novels in txt format), with 'star wars' (i have most of the novels from 94-99). it has happened with comics since 1934 (right? im too lazy to check my nerd knowledge that '34 was when action #1 came out. but im 90% sure here).

if king died (in 99 or whenever) and someone else picked it up, would i keep reading? obviously questionable, but at first thought, yes, i would keep reading.

its the story, right? not the author.

think about this for a moment.
just do me the favor. stop reading, close your eyes and really think.

think about stories vs authors vs time.

theres something there and i cant put my finger on it. but its important. it creeps into popular culture from comics to soap operas to books to news.

how do we separate the narrator from the story in our modern life.
gah. theres something here, if i could grasp it.

anyone?

'i found some of your life'

project outline

this rules. not unlike the project i started for peggy last fall and then moved it into actual production for perry before i go sick. will be done before the end of the semester.

memories

(i dont normally post personal stuff on here, thats a job for my 'real' home. but i had a dream last night that has snowballed into a lot of the things ive been currently trying to understand.)

(if youre like most people and dont care about other peoples dreams, hit 'extended entry' and read the rest of the thoughts in parens. the stuff outside the parens is the dream. the rest is my reaction.)

(last night.)
i dreamed that i was giving carter a tour of bennington. my heart swooned with pride of the school. it was more mountainous than in reality, with the campus being much bigger and more crowded.

we drove into town and walked around. as we stood in about the middle of campus, i drug her up a big hill to vapa [15 on the map] (in my dream i recalled it as the barn but then as vapa, then the vapa building, then visual and performings arts building). we walked around, exploring nooks and crannies and i tried to explain my time in the lofts there to her. it was a lost cause, but i remember remembering the tunnel to under the stage that none of us wanted to enter.

we walked into a demonstration, with many people get a lecture. i think nohaptimus was there though im not sure in what capacity.

as we left, it became obvious through listening that the lecture was radio related. i had forgotten they have a station there.

we walked back out and down and i pointed out the main building [3], hidden like a ski lodge up and to the right of the hill, hidden by trees. carter didnt want to see it, so we walked down the hill to the 'dorms' [1].

i pointed out the houses, which were more traditional victorian than the true houses. i pointed out skyes and said thats where hank lived. highways encroached all around. we walked to the 'end of the world' [20], which had been taped and re-leveled, so it was merely a small downhill spot now. the dorms where matt lived freshman year were not only gone, but highways made it impossible to even tell where they had been.

we loaded up and left.

(weirdness. i remember thinking yesterday briefly about bennington as i went to class. i didnt realize the exact power the barn and that school had on me. the importance of having a lab space, a creative space. need to mention this whole thing to mark today. we need this space here.)

(it is also exceedingly odd to remember such a space that is so far away. i am sitting in a coffee shop on hollywood blvd, thinking about the campus of a small, extremely liberal college in new england that i think i attended in a former life. that i spent a total of maybe 2 weeks living at and yet hold more intense memories from it sometimes than any of the other colleges i have attended over the last ten years.)

(i dont understand the combination of memory and location. not remembering a specific time but understanding another part of the world so throughly it become a feeling. you can imagine yourself walking through that space, remembering your actions there. its what happens when you think of a place, not a time. and it is happening to me with bennington right now. and apparantly it has been happening since some time last night.)

(im on this huge nostalgia kick right now, along with time, location and memory. part of this i think is psychological aftereffects of being sick, part is my thesis, part is trying to remember where i have come from and where im going. more on this later, im sure.)

***

(about 10 minutes after posting this, 20 after writing it, i went and found all the links to the bennington map. i would like to point out that i originally called the 'end of the world' the 'edge of the world'. but that it was all typed up straight from memory, though with all the links, its easy to think i assembled it with help from the map. i feel like that would be cheating somehow and i feel like the story is less pure now. but i wanted badly to give context. and what exactly does that bring to memory?)

'white noise'

showing at the red cat until halloween, theres a show called 'white noise'.

from their page:
"White Noise considers disruptions and interferences on the visual, sonic and structural landscape. Artists in the exhibition capture easily overlooked or hidden elements in the everyday perceptive field. Although "white noise" is a term commonly linked to sound frequencies, the exhibition will play with notions of what is perceptible and imperceptible in video, photography and sculpture. White Noise includes works by Artemio, Stefan Br�ggemann, Felipe Dulzaides, Rub�n Guti�rrez, Rodney McMillian, Tercerunquinto, Laureana Toledo, and Shirley Tse."

i'm going to try to hit this, let me know if you are. either we can meet there or at least talk about it later.

things we read

this isnt a comprehensive list, but it is some sites i check out on a regular basis that usually have some connection to classes in some sense or another. this is by no means comprehensive, and at midnight, watching kurt play nes batman, im sure it wont even be a good list.

so add your links in comments. and then we will never have to 're-post' stories found on these other sites. (cause it seems we all already read them anyway, so lets generate some original content.)

slashdot
boing-boing
penny arcade
ign
gizmodo
(scott will hate me, but) fleshbot [not work safe]
gamespot
we make money not art

nes

i took today to relax a little. and play (with kurt), a ton of nes emulated on the dreamcast. this is such an ingenius thing.

but more than that, we reminsced about all the old nes games that were impossible (ones like tmnt). and then, to further waste time and abuse ourselves, we made it a mission to beat the batman nes game. even with infinite continues, 3 hours later, we are still only on board 3-3. my thumb has the imprint of the 'a' button from the dreamcast controller and my back is sore.

ive been thinking a lot about nostalgia. this def ties into that; im only interested in (re-)playing the games i owned and played as a kid. i want to revisit those places; im not interested in exploring 'new' worlds on the nes.

thats really kinda weird to me. im still trying to process why this is the case.

im also trying to resist the lure of jumping and shooting through caves and hanging from pipes. whoever designed this game should get a caning.

more search madness

i posted this a few weeks ago on wwmx and searches. then kurt posted his comments after curtis and stephen spoke.

now i found this article about google.

its interesting to note:
the system i proposed in my paper is built on the idea of sorting based on a subjective, opinion-based collection of textual data.

(what follows is complete conjecture on my part)
but the vast majority of searches are for factual data. we use the web, when searching as an encyclopedia. (there are exceptions, of course.) do we need another way to markup/recognize fact from opinion? we can all agree that led zeppelin's third studio album was 'III'. but we can't agree on what their best album was. ('houses of the holy' or 'II')

can my system be applied to factual data as well? what would happen?

and where is the almanac for the web?

zombies everywhere

i swear. everywhere i turn these days, zombies.

funny

from slashdot (ive just got too many of these links these days, dont i?):

Mac Zealot Translator-o-matic
Apple have come up with some innovative products, but their market share remains tiny. Sadly, though, many buyers have been mislead by the marketing and eye-candy, and desperately try to justify their overpriced purchases to themselves on forums around the Net. Let's see what they really mean...

"MacOS X is everything Linux wants to be."
"Despite the fact that Linux is just code and can't WANT to be anything, I truly believe that it'd love to be a single-vendor, single-platform, sluggish half-proprietary OS with dwindling market share. Linux would love to throw away its impressively growing corporate takeup for that."

"Apple hardware is for real computer lovers."
"It's no hassle to use a plethora of keyboard combos to make up for the patronising one-button mouse. Despite the fact that my hands have FIVE fingers, and multiple-buttons make Web browsing so much more pleasant, I prefer my computer to be treat me like a special-needs child."

"Aqua makes me so much more productive!"
"My non-techie friends drool over the transparency and scaling effects, even though UI research has shown that they add practically nothing to getting real work done. It feels like KDE 2 on a Pentium 200, and I can't change to a light and fast WM, but those drop-shadows must make me work so quickly!"

"OSX shows that Apple is committed to open source."
"OpenDarwin.org and its community of about 27 is surely not just a token gesture by Apple. Pretty much nobody uses pure Darwin, and all the crucial components of the system are closed and require me to spend money just to get major OS updates, but they're really helping the community somehow."

"You get what you pay for with Apple hardware."
"My iBook was made by in Taiwan by AlphaTop and has design and build quality flaws (needing foam sheets jammed in to stop the common problem of the keyboard scratching the screen). But it's silvery and cost far more than an x86 laptop of better spec, so it must be much higher quality!"

"...blah blah MHz myth blah..."
"Although there's truth in PPC being more elegant than x86, it's crushing that the top-of-the-range 1.5 GHz chip is slaughtered by the equivalent 3 GHz Pentium 4. However, Steve Jobs showed some vague Photoshop filter benchmarks at the last MacWorld, so being a leprotard, I'm convinced."

yeah. im not picking fights or anything.

grouphug

i dont like posting random links. i think, for the most part, link lists are a waste. but this is such a great idea that i wish i had thought of. a perfect use of technology and a firghtening result.

http://grouphug.us/

random, anonymous confessions by people, sent in and posted.

these are the weird things we can do simply with the internet. who says it is all about tracking and big brother?

digging for nuggets of wisdom

and raise your hand if you think that we have too much data already?

(i raise my hand)

here it is from the end i dont agree with really - data mining. from the nyt (the google link, kellee) and slashdot.

im not saying that this isnt important, but it doesnt inspire us to create better data. it allows us to continue to be lazy and expect (hope) that software and algorithms will catch up with the glut of crap we are creating.

blog comment spam removal

from slashdot:

mattwarden writes "The back-and-forth between spammers and mortals continues. Anyone with a MovableType blog that is even remotely on the map has no doubt been hammered lately with comment spam, comments made on entries by a script or program in an attempt to increase search engine page rankings. Prior to today, one had to manually delete each of these comments. No more! Jay Allen has developed a plugin for MovableType that removes these spam comments based on a blacklist (of both hostnames and regular expressions) and intercepts new spam comments before they are made. There's even a one-click link included in the comment notification email that makes it easy to de-spam your blog."

now, im all for this type of thing. but this again goes back to the conversation i have been having with kurt and will. the owner of the site decides what is spam. is this an all or nothing deal? can you have a system that filters junk without discarding it? is there an adavantge to keeping everything? esp when it effects things like page rankings?

once again

seamus blackley is my man....
tell it like it is

filtering

yes, yes, yes. all summer i have said 'filtering is crucial. once you enable the world to create content, how do users find it? what does this do to the shared experience? it decentralizes art as we know it.'

all fine and good i suppose.
but it seems microsoft has been eavesdropping. and they have begun filtering and massaging their newgroup data.
linky

it is cool. except, like most of the work we do, it scares me as well.

longhorn using semantic network

in this review of a new build of longhorn, contacts are managed in a 'carousel' view. its nothing but a semantic network with the user at the middle. the screenshot and explanation is near the bottom of the article.

peter greenaway interview

i know many of you arent fans like i am, but its a decent interview with this genius of a man about films and cinema.

"I would say there has been no cinema yet. Nobody has yet made a film. I think the best we can manage is a version of illustrated literature or recorded theatre...Virtual reality, the IMAX screen, the whole digital revolution is going to allow us to make actual cinema. You might recall that occasion when Eisenstein, of all people, said to Walt Disney that Disney was the only man that really made films, because the entire filmic universe was created completely within his imagination, and not with reference to the real world. "

'top five, dead or alive'

ok, fine. i quoted nas a my header. sue me. the rest of the post is relevant to the title. keep reading.

i was in hollywood/highland with will this afternoon in a bookstore selling arts books. old art, photo, film, script books...he thumbed through architecture, while i looked at spines of art books. i commented on how i would love to hear the people and items that have influenced all of us. whether its film, books, people, art...whatever. what are the (top 5) creative works in the world that have influence you and your work? (5 is standard, more or less is fine. just going for meaningful and managable.) reply in the comments please.

michael mateas

scott pointed these (1) links (2) out to me at the beginning of the semester. then classes happened. i hadnt forgotten, but with the semester winding down, i have begun thinking about next year.

i feel like i have been slightly skitzo in the stuff i have looked at this semester.

it all comes down to the same thing i was feeling at vcu - i care about relationships. not necessarily romantic ones (though usually thats my focus), but how two people relate and deal with each other.

sadly, facade isnt available for download yet (fall 2003). it looks like something right up my alley - in fact, witnessing a couple's relationship crumble at party sounds right. the fact that this is touted with: "This work is unlike hypertext narrative or “interactive fiction” to date in that the computer characters actively perform the story without waiting for you to click on a link or enter a command." so it one-ups my work for michelle this semester (though that isnt saying a ton).

but where he is trying to code this interaction, i am interested in it being immersive, perhaps with actors. same concepts, but why reinvent the wheel? we are speaking of stories that could take place in real life. why not use the tools we have gained over the last thousands of years and instead focus our efforts in technology to ways to enhance the story. as opposed to reinventing it?

but im not turning my nose up at this work - i certainly think there is a huge place for ai's that can pass the turing test (this from the guy who about a year ago madly wanted to build a bot for aim). so im not opposed, just wondering if thats the best place to look and work right now to make exciting interactive narratives.

back to thinking and reading.

digital game based learning

i know most of us read slashdot on a regular basis, but this is so revelvant to our program and some of the work people have done recently (kurt, im looking at you specifically), that i couldnt not post this one.

digital game based learning

marc davis @ ucla

his talk brought up a lot of interesting points for me.

at first, i was excited by the idea of a better and easier toolset to use to create videos. this soon soured as i realized he was looking to mass produce video for the masses.

i will agree that everyone has the right to create video, just as everyone has the right to create poems or paintings or writings.

does this mean that everyone has the right to have said work published and available for comsumption? does the idea of having 500,000 channels or millions of videos created a day worry anoyone else? i cant keep up with the world now. what happens when we have too much data? when every single person thinks their life story is all important?

i am not trying to sound elitest. i am concerned of oversaturation of media. too much and not enough of it being quality. kurt and i spoke at length in the parking lot. how do we ensure quality work? (example: virtually no high school english class covers material post-1970. im sure there are a variety of reasons for this, but i fail to believe that one of them isnt that there is a huge glut of work out there since 1970. how do we determine what is good when even the most popular books are outsold on a regular basis by a single issue of a magazine?)

on top of this, how do we create a great set of tools which will allow videos to be made easier and more quickly without creating pre-packed mass appeal crap? is it possible?

video hasnt skyrocketed yet because of the equipment and complications involved to make a high quality piece. it take a lot of people, a lot of time and a decent chunk of change still. what is the incentive to allowing it to evolve into a solitary artform that can be done for virtually no budget?

when you have that much media being create, who will watch it? how can we approach video (or any time based media) so that it can be absorbed in fragments. looking a photo might only take me 30 seconds, but to watch a video, odds are it will take much longer. the closest solution to this puzzle piece i have seen is viola's pieces at the getty. you could look, leave and come back and see the difference. in 'reinventing' how we view video do we need to throw away narrative to be able to get a similar enjoyment out of it (similar to traditional studio art)?

many many thoughts (including a statement i find slightly absurd: 'we should teach video/video editing to everyone in school' [there are so many other things i consider more important; it seems egotistical to assume video as one of the most important things a person could learn...i think logic skills and storytelling on a more generic level would be much more useful than straight filmic communication.])

viola at the getty

went with mike and will and john (my roommate) to take pictures for block and check out this exhibit. as viola is one of the pioneers of video art and the fact that he is still producing and supporting himself as an artist 25 years later is impressive in itself.
the show topped that though.
the passions series uses a special (dv) camera shotting at 300 frames a second. this allows him to capture an amazing amount of data in a short timeframe, which he then slows down (i am assuming to 24/30 frames a sec) and projects on plasma screens off of dvds.
i have seen a fair amount of video art coming out of the kinetic program at vcu, where the video half (as opposed to the animation half) was very focused on experiemental video art (animation focused on experimental animation, surprise surprise).
these pieces were better than almost anything i have previously seen.

they were strong conceptually, drawing from renaissance religious paintings. but even more than that...there was a video we watched before going through the exhibit. it had interviews with viola discussing his work.
so much of it was trying to capture that space inbetween seconds, in between time. the idea of understanding a person.

and that, in a nutshell, relates to so much of my own personal work. the idea of relationships, of people, of moments. and he captured so much of that so well, i was awestruck.

i certainly think it can continue to be pushed forward. but what a great point to come in on.

how can we push it? can we add sound? (the pieces were silent, as the sound would have droned because of the speed issues.) for viola, the question was 'what is passion and how can i show it?' for me, the question is 'what is identity and how does it impact others through time?'

it was interesting to note his production decisions - framing, color, depth cues, composition, lighting.

it made me want to make more video art, to continue to push myself and not let myself get too absorbed here at usc in production of 'traditional' ways of doing things. this was an issue when i decided to attend usc. i need to bring my art history books back in may and make sure i stay grounded to the experiemental art side of things too.

theres so much to say, after you have seen a great museum show. just do yourself the huge favor of going to see this show before it closes on april 27. please.