Hailing from the 1980s, the technology isn’t exactly new, but it has been making inroads lately in both art and engineering, being used to manufacture prosthetic limbs, car parts, furniture, and jewelry. It’s also subject of “Print/3D,” an exhibition of objects at New York’s Material ConneXion that opened this week. “3-D Printing breaks away barriers in design that are challenged by the constraints of standard manufacturing or manual production,” show curator Susan Towers told ARTINFO. While the process still has some definite kinks to be worked out, it’s already being put to revolutionary use.
Excerpt from an article written by Janelle Zara on ArtInfo
The No Image Commercials were originally conceived as a back-story for the girlfriend character (played by Busy Gangnes) in the No Image performance who mysteriously dies. The idea was to imagine this character as having a career as an actress and so she lives on in these commercial sequences. We drew from the narrative this idea that she committed suicide because she was tired of being a stay at home girlfriend. We wanted the commercials to reflect the sensibility of the stay-at-home mom.
We find that commercials targeting this demographic are very depressing. They speak to a solitary female and suggest all of the things that are lacking or need improvement in her life. You aren’t happy enough, your house smells bad, your hair doesn’t have enough bounce. We wanted to use the language and production value of high end commercials to promote these thoughts. To achieve this we worked with a team of directors, animators, photographers, stylists, and hair + makeup artists who were well versed in the language of commercials.
Artist/photographer Shinichi Maruyama and his team captured the high speed camera live action footage. Stylist Alice Bertay created a house wife inspired by typical Hassidic clothing. Co-director Jonathan Turner created all of the camera movement and 3d animation while co-director Alan Bibby assembled the pieces into the final composition and added the final coat of polish. Finally Busy Gangnes created the soundtrack, attempting to use the emotional effect of a new age sound aesthetic to pull at your heart strings and encourage the consumer to take the pill.
The Pharmaceutical Commercial references an amalgamation of commercials targeting everything from ant-depressants to Glade air fresheners. We were most interested in an existing commercial that presented a dilemma between the comfort of being inside and the dangerous, allergy-filled outside. Only a drug could help you bridge the gap. We thought this really connected with the depressed girlfriend character and her dilemma with her relationship. She was seemingly stuck inside and powerless to get out. The product the commercial is selling helps the consumer straddle that line in a state of harmony (or confinement). The room setting, designed by Shawn Maximo, incorporates objects from past, present and future Yemenwed projects. This helps to tie it further into the narrative taking place as viewers can see the similarity between the items on stage and in the commercial.
Large in size and scope, it portrays a world far beyond the one beneath our feet and reveals our familiar Milky Way with unfamiliar clarity. When we look upon this image, we are in fact peering back in time, as much of the light—having traveled such vast distances—predates civilization itself.
Seen at a depth thousands of times more faint than the dimmest visible star, tens of millions of other suns appear, still perhaps only a hundredth of one percent thought to exist in our galaxy alone. Our Milky Way galaxy is the dominant feature, its dusty arms sweeping through the frame, punctuated by red clouds of glowing hydrogen. To the lower right are our nearest neighbors, each small galaxies themselves with their own hundreds of millions of stars.
Chiang Mai, Thailand – Does Facebook exploit its users? And where is the $100bn in the company’s estimated value coming from?
This is not a new debate. It resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and academic circles, ever since Tiziana Terranova coined the term “Free Labour” to indicate a new form of capitalist exploitation of unpaid labour – firstly referring to the viewers of classic broadcast media, and now to the new generation of social media participants on sites such as Facebook. The argument can be summarized very succinctly by the catch phrase: “If it’s free, then you are the product being sold.”
This term was recently relaunched in an article by University of Essex academics Christopher Land and Steffen Böhm, entitled “They are exploiting us! Why we all work for Facebook for free”. In this mini-essay, they make a very strong claim that “we can certainly position the users of Facebook as labourers. If labour is understood as ‘value producing activity’, then updating your status, liking a website, or ‘friending’ someone, creates Facebook’s basic commodity.”
This line of argument is misleading, however, because it conflates two types of value creation that were already recognized as distinct by 18th century political economists. The distinction is between use value and exchange value. For thousands of years, under conditions of non-capitalist production, the majority of the working population directly produced “use value” – either for themselves as subsistence farmers, or as tributes to the managerial class of the day. It is only under capitalism that a majority of the working population produces “exchange value” by selling their labour to firms. The difference between what we are paid and what the market pays for the products we are making is the “surplus value”.
Excerpt of an article written by Michel Bauwens. Read it at Aljazeera
Transcendenz offers to connect our everyday life to an invisible reality, the one of ideas, concepts and philosophical questionings which the world is full of but that our eyes cant’ see. By bringing together the concepts of augmented/altered reality, Brain Computer Interface (BCI) and social networks, Transcendenz offers to live immersive philosophical experiences.
Transcendenz is the outcome of Michaël Harboun’s thesis project at Strate College. He started from a single, inspirational word: Invisible. He says: “After analysing what was invisible to our eyes and our minds, I realized there was something tending to disappear in our fast-paced, information-saturated societies…”
“The idea of Transcendenz came from a personal “design reaction” to the world in which we are living. By observing our modern societies, a certain paradox caught my interest. This paradox concerns the way we behave in time.
On one hand we are constantly trying to be efficient, organized and quick. As time is money, no time should be lost unnecessarily. We try to save every single minute and be as productive as possible, which makes us busy people.
On the other hand, in our free time, we suddenly have so much time for ourselves that we don’t know what to do with it anymore. Not knowing where to invest our time, most of us will consume it throughout technological mediums. Social networks, TV or videogames are some perfect examples. These information technologies put us in a time of connection, interaction and distraction, hence separating us from the empty time.”
“Condoms are an essential tool in preventing unintended pregnancy and stopping the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV,” PPGNW New Media Coordinator, Nathan Engebretson, said in a press release. “We hope the site promotes discussions within relationships about condoms and helps to remove perceived stigmas that some people may have about condom use. “Where Did You Wear It” attempts to create some fun around making responsible decisions.”
Distributed around community colleges and universities, the condom’s bar code can be scanned by smart phones that connect users to the website and allows them to upload their location, along with general details and anonymous reviews of their sexual experience. Users can rate their rolls in the hay on a scale from “things can only improve from here” to “ah-maz-ing — rainbows exploded and mountains trembled.”
Excerpts from an article written by Nic Halverson, Discovery News.
Matthew Lasar: The battle over implementation of the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement in Europe is heating up, while the war of words over the Stop Online Privacy Act is still in play. Rightsholders have called critics of these measures “demagogues” and “dirty tricksters,” but the critics show no sign of retreating from their opposition.
The fight against copyright maximalism has largely been negative. To offer something more positive, Public Knowledge (PK for short) has released an Internet Blueprint—six bills that the group says could “help make the internet a better place for everyone” and that “Congress could pass today.”
We’re not expecting Congress to pass them today (or tomorrow), but they’re at least an intriguing start point for debate. Here’s a quick version each.
1. Shorten copyright terms
2. Stop abuses of the DMCA
3. Cracking DRM
4. Stop copyright bullying
5. Make “fair use” fairer
…or maybe 5.
Written by Matthew Lasar, Ars Technica. Read full article HERE
The “Archive of Years to Come” is a book-ageing machine, a chrono-chamber. Inside the machine, a book lives an accelerated history, a synthetic timeline.
Spending four hours inside is the equivalent of one real year.
Having no documented history, records or past catalogues, the library, was given a “time machine”, enabling it to age its present – thus producing a new past for a humble, unevaluated, functional community library.
The chamber operates with UVC radiation lamps and high humidity levels.
The project was originally designed for the “South Lambeth” library in London (one of the Tate’s free libraries that is currently under threat of closure).
The two most powerful technologies of the 20th century—the nuclear bomb and the computer—were invented at the same time and by the same group of young people. But while the history of the Manhattan Project has been well told, the origin of the computer is relatively unknown. In his new book, Turing’s Cathedral, historian George Dyson, who grew up among these proto- hackers in Princeton, New Jersey, tells the story of how Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and a small band of other geniuses not only built the computer but foresaw the world it would create. Dyson talked to Wired about the big bang of the digital universe.
Wired: Because your father, Freeman Dyson, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, you grew up around folks who were building one of the first computers. Was that cool?
George Dyson: The institute was a pretty boring place, full of theoreticians writing papers. But in a building far away from everyone else, some engineers were building a computer, one of the first to have a fully electronic random-access memory. For a kid in the 1950s, it was the most exciting thing around. I mean, they called it the MANIAC! The computer building was off-limits to children, but Julian Bigelow, the chief engineer, stored a lot of surplus electronic equipment in a barn, and I grew up playing there and taking things apart.
Wired: Did that experience influence how you thought about computers later?
Dyson: Yes. I tried to get as far away from them as possible.
Wired: Why?
Dyson: Computers were going to take over the world. So I left high school in the 1960s to live on the islands of British Columbia. I worked on boats and built a house 95 feet up in a Douglas fir tree. I wasn’t antitechnology; I loved chain saws and tools and diesel engines. But I wanted to keep my distance from computers.
Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments including the keyboard, drums and maracas, a cymbal, and the debut of an adapted guitar built from a couch frame. The quadrotors play this “couch guitar” by flying over guitar strings stretched across a couch frame; plucking the strings with a stiff wire attached to the base of the quadrotor. A special microphone attached to the frame records the notes made by the “couch guitar”.
These flying quadrotors are completely autonomous, meaning humans are not controlling them; rather they are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.
Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is home to some of the most innovative robotics research on the planet, much of it coming out of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab.
This video premiered at the TED2012 Conference in Long Beach, California on February 29, 2012. Deputy Dean for Education and GRASP lab member Vijay Kumar presented some of this groundbreaking work at the TED2012 conference, an international gathering of people and ideas from technology, entertainment, and design.
The engineers from Penn, Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev, have formed a company called KMel Robotics that will design and market these quadrotors.
Video Produced and Directed by Kurtis Sensenig
Quadrotors and Instruments by Daniel Mellinger, Alex Kushleyev and Vijay Kumar
Kyle Munkittrick: Mass Effect is epic. It’s the product of the best parts of Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and more with a protagonist who could be the love-child of Picard, Skywalker, and Starbuck. It’s one of the most important pieces of science fiction narrative of our generation. Mass Effect goes so far beyond other fictional universes in ways that you may not have yet realized. It is cosmic in scope and scale.
Sci-fi nerds have long debated over which fictional universe is the best. The Star Trek vs Star Wars contest is infamous into banality, with lesser skirmishes among fans of shows and books like Battlestar Galactica, Enders Game, Xenogenesis, Farscape, Dune, Firefly, Stargate, and others fleshing out the field. Don’t mistake this piece as another pointless kerfuffle among obsessive basement dwellers. Mass Effect matters because of its ability to reflect on our society as a whole.
Science fiction is one of the best forms of social satire and critique. Want to sneak in some absolutely scandalous social more, like, say, oh, I don’t know, a black woman into a position of power in the ‘60s? Put her on a starship command deck.
Most science fiction, even the epic universes in Star Wars and Star Trek, pick only two or three issues to investigate in depth. Sure, an episode here or a character there might nod to other concepts worthy of investigation, but the scope of the series often prevents the narrative from mining the idea for what it’s worth.
Mass Effect can and does take ideas to a new plane of existence. Think of the Big Issues in your favorite series. Whether it is realistic science explaining humanoid life throughout the galaxy, or dealing with FTL travel, or the ethical ambiguity of progress, or even the very purpose of the human race in our universe, Mass Effect has got it. By virtue of three simple traits – its medium, its message, and its philosophy – Mass Effect eclipses and engulfs all of science fiction’s greatest universes. Let me show you how.
Behind the Screen Overlay Interactions: Behind-the-screen interaction with a transparent OLED with view-dependent, depth-corrected gaze. Presented at Microsoft TechForum 2012.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an article regarding encryption, use of clouds, backups and other advice:
Our lives are on our laptops – family photos, medical documents, banking information, details about what websites we visit, and so much more. Thanks to protections enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the government generally can’t snoop through your laptop for no reason. But those privacy protections don’t safeguard travelers at the U.S. border, where the U.S. government can take an electronic device, search through all the files, and keep it for a while for further scrutiny – without any suspicion of wrongdoing whatsoever.
For doctors, lawyers, and many business professionals, these border searches can compromise the privacy of sensitive professional information, including trade secrets, attorney-client and doctor-patient communications, research and business strategies, some of which a traveler has legal and contractual obligations to protect. For the rest of us, searches that can reach our personal correspondence, health information, and financial records are reasonably viewed as an affront to privacy and dignity and inconsistent with the values of a free society.
Despite the lack of legal protections against the search itself, however, those concerned about the security and privacy of the information on their devices at the border can use technological measures in an effort to protect their data. They can also choose not to take private data across the border with them at all, and then use technical measures to retrieve it from abroad. As the explanations below demonstrate, some of these technical measures are simple to implement, while others are complex and require significant technical skill.
In the embryonic, ever evolving era of social media — when milestones come by the day, if not by the second — June 8, 2010, has secured a rightful place in history. That was the day Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, was browsing Facebook in his home in Dubai and found a startling image: a photograph of a bloodied and disfigured face, its jaw broken, a young life taken away. That life, he soon learned, had belonged to Khaled Mohamed Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria who had been beaten to death by the Egyptian police.
At once angered and animated, the Egyptian-born Ghonim went online and created a Facebook page. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” It took a few moments for Ghonim to settle on a name for the page, one that would fit the character of an increasingly personalized and politically galvanizing Internet. He finally decided on “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”
“Khaled Said was a young man just like me, and what happened to him could have happened to me,” Ghonim writes in “Revolution 2.0,” his fast-paced and engrossing new memoir of political awakening. “All young Egyptians had long been oppressed, enjoying no rights in our own homeland.”
Image: Wael Ghonim, photo by Sam Christmas. Written by JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS, NYT. Continue reading HERE
As part of a health and wellness campaign targeted at women, the Scottish Government is offering a “drinking time machine” app that reveals users’ supposed future faces.
The Scottish government is launching a health and wellness campaign aimed at women, encouraging them to “drop a drink size.” (Men, on the other hand, are doing just great, thank you very much, and are encouraged to keep up the fine work.) Part of this governmental effort includes a free downloadable app that functions sort of like a police sketch artist in cahoots with Dr. Oz. Simply upload a photo of your face’s current incarnation and the “drinking time machine” app will do the rest. Never mind who’s president 10 years from now; you’ve got red, broken cheek-veins, bloodshot eyes, a bloated, splotchy face and deeper wrinkles.
This app was designed to appeal to women’s vanity in encouraging them to take smaller glass sizes when drinking. Apparently, Scottish women all too often exceed recommended alcohol consumption guidelines. It should be worth noting, of course, that of the 1,318 alcohol-related deaths in Scotland in 2010, 909 of them were male and 409 were female.
Quayola is a visual artist based in London. He investigates dialogues and the unpredictable collisions, tensions and equilibriums between the real and artificial, the figurative and abstract, the old and new. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances.
Quayola’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; British Film Institute, London; Royal Albert Hall, London; Gaite Lyrique, Paris; Church of Saint Eustache, Paris; Forum des Image, Paris; Grand Theatre, Bordeaux; Palais des Beaux Arts, Lille; Empac Centre, New York; Yota Space, St. Petersburg; MIS, Sao Paulo; Casa Franca, Rio de Janeiro; BAC, Geneva; Sonar Festival, Barcelona; Elekra Festival, Montreal and Clermont Ferrand Film Festival.
Strata #4 is a multi-channel immersive video-installation commissioned by Palais de Beaux Arts in Lille. The subject of this work is a series of iconic pieces from the museum’s Flemish collection, focusing specifically on Rubens’ and Van Dyck’s grand altarpieces. Strata #4 is the result of a study and exploration of the paintings themselves, delving beneath their figurative appearance and looking at the very rules behind the composition, color schemes and proportions of each piece. It is a precise process aimed at creating new contemporary images based on universal rules of beauty and perfection. Documenting the improbable collisions between classical figuration and contemporary abstraction, Strata #4 aims to create an harmonious dialogue between worlds that may appear very distant from one another, but in fact share so much in common.
“Strata #1” is an audio-visual installation that explores the icons of Rome’s renaissance architecture and focuses on the layering of times, functions and representations.
Through sound and visual effects, “Strata #1” concentrates on the collective imagery of particular buildings, reflecting upon the stratified historical meanings they detain in the western society through time.
A rotating ceiling is inhabited by a computer-generated particle system. The latter moves and behaves in relation the sound, coexisting harmoniously with the surrounding architecture. The video environment created within the installation becomes a hybrid between a real architectural space and an abstract two-dimensional pattern: a new space in-between the real and the artificial.
In a dynamic dialogue between sound, image and architecture, the installation plays with history and its image, giving life to a process of metamorphosis which transforms structure and function of the original architectural space. Assuming different meanings, the represented ceiling appear under a new perspective that focuses on their images rather than their historical and architectural significance.
Images: Quayola
Music: Autobam
Bitscapes is a multi-screen installation exploring and challenging the ambiguity of realism in the digital realm. Natural landscapes from the wilderness of western Australia slowly deconstruct. By losing their “photographic skin”, the illusion behind their realistic appearance is revealed.
Commissioned to mark the first anniversary of ‘Lovebytes at Millennium Galleries’ – a permanent plasma screen gallery curated by Lovebytes with the Sheffield Galleries Trust (2006)
Direction/Design: Quayola, Chiara Horn
Sound: Giorgio Sancristoforo
Coding: W. Kosma
Excerpt from Natures series
The Natures project consist in a series of multi-screen installation pieces and a live audio-visual performance in collaboration with musician Mira Calix and cellist Oliver Coates. Natures explores the dialogue between “the natural” and “the artificial”, creating a world where these two elements coexist harmoniously. Interpreting plants’ organic behaviors, computer-generated elements become part of the natural world and viceversa.
Commissioned by Faster Than Sound and Aldeburgh Music (2008)
Design/Animation: Quayola
Music: Mira Calix, Oliver Coates
Producer: Joana Seguro (Lumin)
Assistants: D. Knowles, G. Berton, Y. Li, G. Korossy, P. Marquez, Mokhtarzateh, M. Gil, G. Gremigni, G. Polizzi
The Art of Google Books was conceived by Krissy Wilson after spending a great deal of time sifting through Google’s digitized books, trying to match the texts of exposed binder’s waste in nineteenth century children’s books with their texts of origin.
The aim of this project is twofold; to recognize book digitization as rephotography, and to value the signs of use that accompany these texts as worthy of documentation and study.
Ultimately, the startling and diverse adversaria of Google Books merits examination and exhibition.
The Scale of the Universe is a visualization created by Cary Huang. This interactive scale of the universe shows the relative sizes of “everything” from the micro to the macro.
Evgeny Morozov: The other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the “cyberflâneur,” it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”
Intrigued, I set out to discover what happened to the cyberflâneur. While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today’s Internet suggests that they couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media. What went wrong? And should we worry?
Written by EVGENY MOROZOV, New York Times. Continue HERE
Evgeny Morozov is the author of “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom.”
Image above: Gustave Caillebotte’s “Paris Street; Rainy Day,” from 1877.
Magda Gallery: Yongliang is a resident of Shanghai, China who depends heavily on his a camera and a laptop computer to make his art. Using only these tools—and a knowledge of traditional Chinese painting traditions—Yongliang invents urban scenes that depict skyscrapers under construction, freeway systems, electrical power plants, and bustling urban corridors. His compositions starkly reveal the impacts of technological progress that China has undergone over past decades.
Yongliang is among a generation of young artists who came of age after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and therefore embraces a level of artistic freedom that is not common among past generations of Chinese artists.
Yang Yongliang combines ancient Chinese art techniques, such as shui mo painting and calligraphy, with photographic elements of modern urban Shanghai, arranged in the traditional composition of Chinese landscape, to produce artworks with a perfect balance between fragility and danger, beauty and cruelty.
We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it’s becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don’t scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge’s new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power. David Weinberger — senior researcher at the Berkman Center and co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab — talks about some important take aways from his new book “Too Big to Know.”
Woman, Art & Technology is a new series of interviews on Furtherfield. Over the next year Rachel Beth Egenhoefer will interview artists, designers, theorists, curators, and others; to explore different perspectives on the current voice of woman working in art and technology. I am honored to begin this series with an interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson, a true pioneer in the field who has recently produced !Women Art Revolution- A Secret History.
Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in a era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. She has been honored by numerous prestigious awards including the 2010-2011 d.velop digital art and 2009 SIGGRAPH Lifetime Achievement Awards. Hershman also recently received the 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an award which supported her latest documentary film !Women Art Revolution – A Secret History.
The lack of Corporate and Governmental transparency has been a topic of much controversy in recent years, yet our only tool for encouraging greater openness is the slow, tedious process of policy reform.
Presented in the form of a Soviet F1 Hand Grenade, the Transparency Grenade is an iconic cure for these frustrations, making the process of leaking information from closed meetings as easy as pulling a pin.
Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna, the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.
Whether trusted employee, civil servant or concerned citizen, greater openness was never so close at hand..
The Transparency Grenade was created in January 2012 by Julian Oliver for the Studio Weise7 exhibition at Labor 8, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, curated by Transmediale 2012 Director, Kristoffer Gansing.
The body is made of Tusk2700T, a highly resilient translucent resin, printed from a stereo-lithography model made by CAD designer Ralph Witthuhn based on a replica Soviet F1 Hand Grenade. Metal parts were hand-crafted from 925/1000 sterling silver by Susanne Stauch, complete with operational trigger mechanism, screw-on locking caps and engraving.
Icarus’ album, Fake Fish Distribution (FFD), uses generative and parametric software techniques to create 1000 unique records. FFD comes in the form of a vast array of structured variations on the album’s musical content, feeding unique versions to each unique listener.
The album is available as a limited edition, via the normal medium of music distribution — the media file download — with each of the 1000 versions only being sold once and in sequential order. Upon purchase, you become the owner of that unique version.
FFD is encoded as 320 kbps mp3 files, contains no digital rights management software. and will play in any digital music player able to handle mp3 playback.
OK, so it’s not real spaghetti — it’s a computer visualization of the complex magnetic field that creates Earth’s magnetosphere — but it sure looks tangled.
Using the awesome power of a Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer, a team of space physicists are unlocking some of the biggest mysteries surrounding how the sun’s magnetic field interacts with our planet’s magnetosphere. They basically want to understand what happens when global magnetic fields become tangled to the extreme.
Space physicists categorize these interactions under “space weather,” and they are responsible for some of the Earth’s most powerful (and beautiful) atmospheric events.
“When a storm goes off on the sun, we can’t really predict the extent of damage that it will cause here on Earth. It is critical that we develop this predictive capability,” said Homa Karimabadi, a space physicist at the University of California-San Diego (UCSD).
Chordpunch was set up to explore the many and moving forms of algorithmic music. That might mean a computer program generating every note you hear, or new electronic music inspired by algorithms, or human beings following interesting rules with musical outcomes. We aren’t too dogmatic, and mainly release recordings as documents of algorithmic activity rather than programs. But we hope to generate a lot of excitement.
The name itself could refer to playfully punching harmony a friendly hello, or outright rejecting it in favour of raw timbre. We might imagine an early computer world of card punching, or punching in an aurally devastating instruction sequence. And we might quote John Cage from 1969: ‘Computers are bringing about a situation that’s like the invention of harmony. Sub-routines are like chords. No one would think of keeping a chord to himself. You’d give it to anyone who wanted it. You’d welcome alterations of it. Sub-routines are altered by a single punch.’
Golan Levin is a creator, performer, innovator, engineer and MIT graduate whose work has been seen around the world, and FITC gave you the opportunity to ask him anything via Reddit. Golan has answered your questions in the video below, which was created by James George (@obviousjim) and Jonathan Minard (@deepspeedmedia), artists-in-residence at Golan’s lab who are researching new forms of experimental 3D cinema.
The work of James George and Jonathan Minard explores the notion of “re-photography”, in which otherwise frozen moments in time may be visualized from new points of view. Despite the sometimes wildly moving camera, the video was in fact shot with a stationary Kinect-like depth sensor coupled to a digital SLR video camera. To compose their shots, the filmmakers developed custom openFrameworks software that aligns and combines color video and depth data into a dynamic sculptural relief.
In a process of “virtual cinematography”, James and Jonathan rephotographed Golan’s 3D likeness — selecting new angles, dollying, and zooming — to compose new perspectives on the data as if playing a video game. Fixed camerawork is thus transformed into a malleable and negotiable post-process, in which shots can be carefully recomposed to highlight and inflect different latent meanings.
This experiment developed out of concepts and collaborations born at Art && Code, a conference on 3D sensing and visualization organized by Golan’s laboratory, the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Artist-hackers assembled to explore the artistic, technical, tactical and cultural potentials of low-cost depth sensors, such as the Kinect. As an outcome of the conference, James George, a creative coder interested in cinema, and Jonathan Minard, a documentary filmmaker interested in new-media technology, are now collaborating on the development of open-source tools and techniques for augmenting high-resolution video with depth information.
Monitor showing the ageing process
Humidifier + humidity meter
marshall mcluhan, understanding media
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