I've decided to merge my online portfolio with my blog and host it all in one central location. From now on, this blog will appear at:
http://remotedevice.net/blog/Update your rss/atom feed here (the feed now includes all my new portfolio additions as well). Thanks for reading, Jeff
What is so sexy about the biological today? Is artistic product as fickle as our hollow markets? Worse still, is artistic product just an aid in the panic diversion of cash flows? Is art just another way to lure press coverage away from our mismanaged Computer World? Are the technologies of Cloning, Transgenics and Genomics just charismatic suck-holes seducing faux-independent art exploration? Are our artists slaves to the rhythm of the latest big boom/bust bubble, the biotechnological fad market? I would say yes, often yes. Sometimes bioart is a gateway drug, the road to harder drugs, war, creative accounting, fraud and dashed dreams. Some artists are like unwitting pimps and pushers, hooking dupes of waning cultural capital on the next ‘born to lose’ high-risk venture. (emutagen.com)
via WMMNA
Using high definition audio recordings of dolphins, the research team, headed by English acoustics engineer, John Stuart Reid, and Florida-based dolphin researcher, Jack Kassewitz, has been able to image, for the first time, the imprint that a dolphin sound makes in water. They call it CymaScope and say it reveals detailed structures within sounds, allowing their architecture to be studied pictorially.The resulting "CymaGlyphs," as they have been named, are reproducible patterns that are expected to form the basis of a lexicon of dolphin language, each pattern representing a dolphin 'picture word.' (reuters)
This week on Spark, a feature interview with Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Clay and Nora talk about the pros and cons of social media, new online business models online, and how big change comes from human motivation, not shiny new technologies. (cbc.ca/spark)
Download the podcast here (.mp3)
Old and clunky though it may be, the Space Shuttle is still awesome. This spectacular video shows a full launch-to-splashdown cycle from the POV of one of the shuttle's booster rockets.
This is what I want for Christmas. Talk about old-skool drum machines!
In the early days of silent motion pictures, it was realised that background music had a great influence on the audience. Before movies had sound, many picture theatres had special 'player pianos' to reproduce music mechanically from piano rolls. The music was meant to accentuate the mood of the film. Some player pianos were elaborately extended, with pipe organs and sound effects installed in adjacent side-cabinets, so that the accompanist could create sounds to match the action on the screen. Several of these mechanical music makers -- called photoplayers - were produced and the Fotoplayer brand was one of the most popular. Fotoplayer was a trade name used by the American Photo Player Company. From a location in the front stalls or orchestra pit, the operator of a Fotoplayer would follow the action on the screen while pulling cords and pushing buttons to make sounds that brought 'life' to the film. The cords activated such dramatic sound effects as a pistol shot, steamboat whistle, bird chirp, cymbal crash, bass drum and wind, while the buttons activated thunder, the horse trot, telephone bell, Klaxon horn, and other strange noises. The Fotoplayer, it can be truly said, comes with bells and whistles! And all this before electronics. (powerhousemuseum.com)
Not sure about the voice over, but this is actually a pretty great project. I imagine there will be a kind of tipping-point with RFID-reader ubiquity, after which using the Internet of Things will become commonplace.
8:40 am – you’re getting ready to leave home. On your desk, next to your computer, a halo of light is quietly pulsating. You swiftly flash your car keys at this mysterious device. A voice speaks out: “today, rain 14°C”. The voice continues: “you will get there in 15 minutes”. Your computer screen displays an image from the webcam located along the route you’re planning to travel, while the voice reads out your horoscope for the day. At the same moment, your friends can see your social network profile update to “It’s 8:40, I’m leaving the house”. At the office, your favourite colleague receives an email to say that you won’t be long. And finally, just as you walk through the door, your computer locks.
You personally “scripted” this morning’s scenario: you decided to give your car keys all these powers, because the time you pick them up signals the fact you’re soon going to leave the house.
What if you could obtain information, access services, communicate with the world, play or have fun just by showing things to a mirror, a Mir:ror which, as if by magic, could make all your everyday objects come alive, and connect them to the Internet’s endless wealth of possibilities?
Mir:ror is as simple to use as looking in the mirror - it gives access to information or triggers actions with disarming ease: simply place an object near to its surface. Mir:ror is a power conferred upon each of us to easily program the most ordinary of objects. The revolution of the Internet of Things suddenly becomes a simple, obvious, daily reality that’s within anyone’s reach.
Enter the Mir:ror. (violet.net)
Some creep just sent a legal threat to the lab where I work because a student bittorrented some software for research. Which is one reason why I was so happy to hear about this project (which, it turns out, was itself threatened and taken down by another legal department only one day after launch).
Last week, two M.A. students from the Piet Zwart Institute went live with the Firefox Application Pirates of the Amazon which placed a "Download 4 Free" link on top of Amazon product pages directing users to .torrent tracker files for the item from the Pirate Bay. The project was intended as a parodic commentary on e-commerce and the distribution of information and products online. After one day of activity, Amazon sent a legal notice requesting that they take it down, and the students complied. Even with this retraction, Pirates of the Amazon received a vehemently oppositional reaction when blogged on digg and CNET, and now the students are using the original project website to document these discussions. According to a recent post to the mailing list nettime, professor Florian Cramer and open source programmer Jaromil, who supervised the project, are seeking statements of support for Pirates of the Amazon. While legal action will not be taken against the students, Cramer and Jaromil want to enlist support in the face of the conservative tone found on the digg and CNET threads. Considering how much labor, outreach, and discussion has occurred around issues of copyright and the distribution of information over the past few years, the comments (which range from "That's just evil" to "Oh for god sakes can crooks be any more pathetic") are difficult to believe. If anything, they signal the need for more work to be done in the fight for free culture. For those who would like to submit a statement of support, contact mail [AT] pirates-of-the-amazon.com. (rhizome.org)
Proof-of-concept for an augmented reality pet running on an iPhone. Via Games Alfresco.
Looks like Adobe is cooking up some pretty cool tools for everyday video manipulation and animation...
This demo illustrates our research to bring interactivity to video editing: Our system analyzes videos using computer vision techniques, enabling interactive annotation, browsing, and even drag-and-drop composition of new still images using video footage. This is a joint research project of Adobe and the University of Washington. (vimeo.com)
David Shrigley is a writer and illustrator from Glasgow. Check out samples from his sometimes unsettling (and often hilarious) books at his website, davidshrigley.com.
H/T: Ms. B
Pipilotti Rist's lush multimedia installations playfully and provocatively merge fantasy and reality. MoMA commissioned the Swiss artist to create a monumental site-specific installation that immerses the Museum's Marron Atrium in twenty-five-foot-high moving images. Visitors will be able to experience the work while walking through the space or sitting upon a sculptural seating island designed by the artist. (moma.org)
A review of Ira Lingston's Between Science and Literature, by Stephen Dougherty:
Or is it more like that which Karen Barad has been crafting and clarifying for nearly a decade? If performativity theory shall ever succeed at "meeting the universe halfway," which is the title of Barad's new book about performativity and quantum theory, then it needs to think in new ways about how matter comes to matter. In her theory of agential realism, Barad seeks to move beyond both Foucault's analytic of power and Butler's performative elaboration in order to explain how discursive practices help to produce material bodies. As does Livingston, Barad sees the world as a whole rather than divided up into culture and nature, or words and things. She also struggles rather monumentally to warp philosophy and science, working the grain of existing warps (especially quantum physics), so as to forge her way towards what she calls a "performative metaphysics" - one where the things that humans work upon are granted agency in their own right as "intra-acting 'components'" of ontologically inseparable phenomena. For Barad, following Niels Bohr, "the primary epistemological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather phenomena" ("Posthumanist" 815). As she elaborates, on her agential realist account "phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of 'observer' and 'observed'; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components... (EBR)
Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase's investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of our pockets. He's made some unexpected discoveries along the way. (ted.com)
Geograph British Isles is a crowdsourcing project that "...aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland." They just got their 1,000,000th photograph today. It's called, "Minor road near Aberuchill." Here it is:
Geograph British Isles
The Image Fulgurator is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.
In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others. (juliusvonbismarck.com)
Posts
All Comments
