nime paper

damn, I totally have the sick. I was making ridiculously awesome progress this whole week until bam, on friday/saturday I start in with the cough/runny nose/etc. I hate being sick. I think the last time I had a cold was 2 years ago. So fuck man, I'm pissed off.

being sick did allow me to focus on writing this paper for NIME 2005, which I was putting off because singing folk songs in a robot voice is way more fun.

my hair also makes me look like Syndrome from the Incredibles.

anyway, this is more of a personal archiving post, since I'm sure no one will read it.

Cut-Scenes

found at grand text auto, two articles: one pro, one anti cut-scene.

1. Oughtta Stay Out of Pictures By Clive Thompson at Slate

I like one of the captions, under a still of a GTA cut scene:

.. but first, a message from our plotline"

2. In defense of Cut Scenes By Rune Klevjer

I like how in this one the author chooses the scientific paper style, complete with abstract, etc.

Personally, I'm not much for cut scenes, and games that try to tell a story through them. Anyone agree with Klevjer's argument?

Sort of obvious points, but regardless it'll be interesting to see where all this stuff goes in the next few years.

to the punch

someone beat me to the punch. less work...

generate A9 panoramas:

http://brainoff.com/a9/

interactive climbing wall

another cool project from the interactive institute in sweden.

sensors on holds on a climbing wall act as an interface to a musical controler.

I think about my short-lived days as a rock climber back in utah (my friends were always better then me, and I was a tad afraid of heights...) and watching rock-climbing videos. The climbers really often times made the act of climbing look quite effortless and beautiful, and I think it would be cool to have some sort of musical representation of that. It also remindes me of this (I think) S.F. based art/music group that swings around on ropes to make what could politely be called 'abrasive' music.

it seems like kinda a strange mapping or method of interaction, this climbing wall. but those crazy swedes will do anything.

I think what would be really cool is finding one route up the wall, and having that route, and that route only, be some nice sequence of music. Makes climbing sort of more like a musical game, rather than an abstract piece... and then you could put electro-shockers on the big, easy to grip holds or something so you were forced to use the crimpers.

watch a movie of the wall in action (click the video link on the right bar when you hit this page...)

it's really pretty damn cool, you really all should check out the movie.

via we.make.money.not.art

panoramas with new A9 yellow book service

man, the new amazon a9 service is sweet.

I made a super quick and dirty panorama using php and css of Hillhurst Ave near where I live. the stitching is nill -- I just set a close margin-left tag when writing the page out to get close. Plus, I think I screwed up obtaining a couple of the images from A9...the point is the macro level though -- this service is pretty damn amazing. I want the API.

Los Angeles movie Map?

I mean, there are so many cool things that can be done with this. I keep going back to the patholog project we are/were working on... would have been amazing to tap into this database and let you search a panorama of your path with embedded content on the images...

sigh, I guess I'm going to have to figure out how to expand the 24 hour clock so I can do that project...

the quick + dirty panorama is here

link to the A9 service from waxy.

V-Cast

according to this press release by microsoft, gates and co. are teaming up with verizon, offering windows media as a format for verizon's upcoming V CAST service, which enables high quality streaming and playback of audio and video on new mobile handsets.

don't care much that verizon decided on windows media. It's a decent enough format even though I hate microsoft. Cool to see streaming content coming to phones though. I wonder if there is some type of API for this that people can get their hands on. Would have been nice to use mobile handsets for my thesis. But alas, we're not quite ready for that yet. 2-3 years minimum. And we all need to get new phones.

the thing that sucks is that verizon is still offering this content though the pathetic "get it now" service, which is basically their own closed little internet...

soundscape project

cool fm soundscape project.

http://berlin.soundscape-fm.net/

environmental sound -- server -- radio

read more here:

docs

Production Document

Potential Venues

Current Prior Art

sometimes egogoogling sucks

I will not link this, because I don't want to raise the page rank of this other Will Carter dude.

but needless to say, there is another Will Carter who in fact, is a scientologist.

http://www.myhomepage.org/willcarter/

5ives

just was reminded today how awesome this website is.

Five items on which a sticker of Calvin has not, to my knowledge, peed 1. The Magna Carta 2. Elvis’ “‘68 Comeback” Special 3. Eddie Van Halen 4. St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument 5. Denny’s™ Grand Slam® Breakfast

5ives

RIP J.C

Johnny Carson moves on.

Dana Carvey always did a good impression, but it's really hard to come up with anyone who seemed to have such a grip on a single medium like carson did. he was before my time, but I'm amazed by the legacy he left. And for some reason, even though I have no really knowledge of his life other than that legacy, I feel sad that he's gone. That is all.

backseat playground

another cool project coming out of the interactive institute in Stockholm.

here's the tagline:

So you're sitting in the back seat of a car staring out of the window - imagine that the world moving past you is a vast game engine - the objects, places and people around you are all part of an intertwining series of episodes that make up an ongoing game plot...

One interesting thing they are working on is an episodic narrative type structure, which is the way that I've been going about forging mobile stories in my own projects. Here's thier description:

Episodic Narratives - a way of building narratives that work as fragmented and incomplete episodes, informing an overall plot depending on the journey traveled - this will be combined with both on and offline non-plot actions that will encourage players to further explore their environment and the in-game objects and stories.

Love to try this out.

link via near near future

the other powell

Hurrah! Michael Powell is stepping down today.

but as defamer notes:

While this may signal a reduction in the indecency fines that Powell hurled at Hollywood like bolts of lightning from atop Mount Olympus (the Greek mythology one, not the neighborhood above Hollywood Blvd.), we probably shouldn't hold our breath for a more fun-loving successor. And Fox should probably hold off on airing the two hour premiere of My Big Fat Obnoxious Show of Fucking and Godlessness, where Satanists with Tourette's repeatedly copulate with a King James Bible, while simultaneously trying to determine which preschooler was the product of a sperm donation made for rent money. We're not out of the woods yet.

Exactly.

happy slapping

from a boingboing post, a link to a scotsman.com article on the 'happy slapping' phenomenon. , yet another compelling case for camera phones:

Head teachers have banned children from using video phones to stop them slapping other pupils in the face and recording the attacks on their mobiles.

Man, when I was in school, we just slapped kids for the hell of it -- but now that you can take a picture of the slapping -- well, that's more the reason to keep with the slapping. The happy slapping.

another choice quote:

Superintendent Mark Newton, of British Transport Police, said: “It is a cowardly form of attack – childish but also criminal.

Sony Admits that drm has been costing it the big bucks

this article has the scoop.

Interesting to note here that the weight and size of sony, and it's ownership of two different entertainment divisions, the music group and Sony Pictures Entertainment (which owns mgm, columbia, classics, etc) have arsed it out of making any money in the personal music player market.

It's just so strange to think: here's sony, they have their hands in everything, and seem like they are in a perfect position to kick serious ass if they use their entertainment products to help them sell consumer products, and vice versa. But they are so worried that somehow people are going to pirate sony music and sony movies on sony devices, that they put drm on their walkman and make nobody want to have anything to do with it.

Makes you wonder what sort of DRM stuff is built into the PSP. From the artcile, the prez. of sony computer (father of playstation) says that management is finally realizing they screwed up, and notes the potential for the PSP to be a multi-media platform for music, video, along w/ games.

I'm dubious that the PSP is going to take a much more radical direction than Sony has in the past, but it'll be interesting to see what they do.

Fitness Celebrity

Thank God You are Alive, John Basedow

(Man this picture cracks me up...)

Also, doesn't John Batter from EA LA look a little like John Basedow?

one does not...

sorry to reblog this, but it's absolute genius.

instant replay

Marientina made a comment last semester on my final thesis presentation, with the idea that perhaps I should consider the notion of replay-ability in my project. The way things currently stand, locations hold different music files depending on what time of day, and what day of week, you are at a given location. This creates a sense of the space as a shifting, living thing, and fits more nicely into my narrative framework. However, as marientina pointed out, and glenn III also noted, such a scheme will prevent people from, for example, walking the same path everyday and hearing the same music.

While I certainly respect that idea, and relate to the desire for consistency between location and music, I'm going to try and relate now why I think this is not ideal for this specific encarnation of location-based audio.

a) You can do this with your iPod, and it will be a better experience. This is what normal portable music devices allow you to do: to be in control. What I'm trying to do is build a new type of music architecture, in a way, and allowing this element of control runs contrary to advancing that goal. I think it becomes too much like trying to pump a model of music onto a new technology, instead of thinking about how a new technology could change the experiences we have with music.

That being said, certainly there are a number of different applications that would greatly benefit from a consistency, and I'm more than certain that I've thought of, and plan to think about these applications in the future. I think the idea with this specific project, though, is to have the music space dynamic and flexible, and I'm afraid of what the static thing would do to it. I guess I'm thinking of reaching for the sweet spot of the below matrix we keep talking about, the new technology, new media. I think I'm in the "new technology, old media" category, and I'm really trying to push into that "new media, new technology" category.

b) The best way to implement such a feature would require people logging into the system and setting up a preference that would circumvent the time-based quality of the music. The wireless area of culver city is not such that it could support having all 7 songs active at unique nodes each day.

c) you can replay the music. In the space, you have to know when the section of music you like is active, and then you can reexperience it. Otherwise, you can unlock an mp3 of the stuff you like and listen to it at home whenever you want.

Kurt made a great analogy today, relating the experience people have when they walk out of a movie or musical theater or opera or something, and are humming it outside of the offical space of the original music content (the theater, etc). Then if you want more, you can go back to the theater, or you can buy the soundtrack.

I'm not trying to strike down suggestions here. this specific idea was a good one -- in fact I encourage more because it helps me elucidate my own intentions.

Any additional comments would be appreciated.

approximeeting

nice article at the Guardian about the subtle cultural shifts being generated by cell-phone use.

textually has a good synopsis of the article, so I won't go into it here, but I will say that I'm certainly guilty of approximeeting. I don't make concrete plans anymore, hardly ever. It's typically assumed that there will be an event, or a meeting, or something, but no one feels the need to come out and explicity state time, place, etc. I wonder how business culture is reacting to what I assume is still a more or less social cultural shift at the moment. Most of my experiences with work related things still demand a certainly amount of, well... certainty. I wonder if this will change.

Although I guess in the tech world, shipping dates are always sort of approximate.

computer me

was talking to my dad today while driving, and I asked him to send me an email address I need. He changed the subject or something, or trailed off as he tends to do, then before he hung up he was like, "yeah, that address - I'll computer it to you."

I started laughing, and my dad was annoyed, but I thought that the phrase was awesome. He's not even computer illiterate or anything, but his mind must've been wandering as he thought about our computer and email.

But actually, these days "computer me" makes much more sense. I no longer email myself files much. Sometimes I do, but I think that I could easily say that I "computer" myself files quite a bit. It takes into account ftp, wireless networks, thumb drives, etc.

So "computer me" is my new phrase. I'm hoping it will catch on.

Olsen the camera, not the anorexic twin

This seems like a cool idea: position an automatic camera in the middle of some situation. The camera listens with a mic for "interesting" events such as laughter and can spin quickly around it's base.

No word yet on what exactly, other than laughter, it counts as interesting. Maybe it has voice recognition for discussions about the latest Celebrity Breakup (I'll miss you Brad and Jen), while ignoring discussions about postmodernism or what people had for dinner or what the weather is like.

I think the thing should be anthro'ed though. That might be a good wa to make sure that the camera isn't taking pictures of people's midsections or feet.

apparently right now, you are supposed to stick it on empty beer bottles. I hope this thing is robust...

Link via Near Near Future, or We-Make-Money-Not-Art or whatever that site is called.

project website

url is loction33.net

The page is basically what I hope to be a good 2nd or so draft of how I want the web presence of the project to be (other than the research aspects of it, which live in this space). I guess this site would be sort of the public face. Instructions abound, and I've more or less got the entire backend working, so people can log in and unlock mp3s and stuff from hints and clues they get while experiencing the in-space version of the project.

but I've finally been crystallizing my concept, as well as continuing the production and technology, and I wanted to get all of this up.

325 unique files

Just calculated the number of files I am creating / will create for my thesis project, location33.

the number scares me a little bit. The math breaks down like this:

1 song X 7 days per week = 7 songs
7 songs X 2 characters = 14 songs
3 versions of each song = 42 songs

each song is dispersed throughout 7 locations = 294 song fragments

each day has 3 unique hints = 21 hint fragments

each day has 1 hidden song fragment = 7 hidden song fragments

there are 3 guides that remain fixed each day = 3 guide songs

294 song fragments + 21 hint fragments + 7 hidden song fragments + 3 guide songs = 325 unique audio files

I think I'm about halfway there, although I haven't counted exactly how many I have. It's time to start taking a bit more of a brute force, checklist type approach to things now that I've got everything straight in my head.

new yorker "mashups" article

just finished reading an article over at the new yorker site about the current white-hot-ness of mashups.

Where did this all come from. Why are these things so hot right now. The article makes a case for why mashups have become more mainstream, citing a few choice examples of good mixes. Perhaps most compelling is the following conclusion the author, Sasha Frere-Jones makes:

See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.

This is a new argument to me, and a resonant one. Pop music sucks. New stuff is terrible. Christina Aguliera, Jay-Z, Linkin Park. Listening to too much is enough to make anyone give up on popular music forever. So why fight the impulse to mess with it, to try and find some hidden brilliance in juxtaposition?

I have so many thoughts about this whole thing right now, especially as I'm prepraring my entry into the creative commons mashup contest. My ears hate most of these mashups, and I think most of them are pretty sad excuses for music. What they are however, is more important than my dislike of them, as they reflect a trend towards participatory consumption, especially in the entertainment business (interactive media...?).

So I'm trying to make my entry not just be one of the inevitable put-rap-lyrics-on-top-of-existing-music (yes, Kleptones, I'm looking in your direction), and it's hard.

It's a shame here that no one is talking about John Oswald, who I'm looking to for inspiration with this project.

Oswald's stuff is incredible.

Here are some references:

Link to his Plunderphonics article

Link to his website

Link to a 534 post I made last year with sound samples included.

This Mobile Will Change Your Life

Ok, sorry for the reblog, but this seems like a really cool, simple sms based service.

Subscribers to “This Mobile Will Change Your Life” receive SMS text message orders which they must carry out immediately, in Mission Impossible-style.

Orders vary from the straightforward (“kiss the nearest tall stranger”) to the hazardous (“Walk into a police station, tell them you’re finally giving yourself up, then remain totally silent.”) to the deranged (“It’s 2am: everybody meet in your nearest cemetery dressed as zombies, then march on the town centre”).

Subscribers must commit to obeying the 10 instructions a month without fail, in return for which their life is guaranteed to change.

Link via textually

rheingold's mobile manifesto

Lots of compelling stuff in this recent thefeature.com article by Howard R.

Link