prosthetic knowledge

Time Scanning by Donato Maniello 

A collection featuring experimental photography scan-disruptions of trees:

Capturing a moment and expand it up to the point of creating a tear that becomes aesthetic sign.

More Here

New Media - New Environments

This was my entry for the Transfer3D - Speed Show WROCŁAW, an experiment with Autodesk 1234D and a televised interview from 1967 with technology theorist Marshall McLuhan:

Brief:

Create a piece of work for the Transfer3D SPEED SHOW WROCŁAW, around the concept of 3D

Idea:

Advances in 3D imaging and technology has provided interesting possibilities to explore. In particular, there is a service which can convert multiple still digital photographs into a virtual 3D object called Autodesk 123D Catch.

With some understanding of the principles of how it works, it somehow lead me to connect to one of the most important figures in technological thought of the last 50 years: Marshall McLuhan. Having ideas with no single fixed viewpoint, employing ‘Probes’ to understand technological phenomena from various angles, and an influence from the texts of James Joyce and the concepts of Modernism, a connection can be made between both the thinker and the machine.

In 1967, he undertook a televised interview, sitting in a revolving chair in the centre of the stage, surrounded by an audience asking questions from all angles (see video embedded below):

Herbert Marshall McLuhan @ CBC 1967 from Sergey Teterin on Vimeo.

I took various frames from the footage to form the necessary collection to help create a potential model, all from various angles and different levels of proximity.

The results are a product of matching images and manually places points connecting the images to one another on particular key features of the person.

(See animated gifs above)

Result:

Admittedly, I was hoping to produce a virtual sculptural bust of Marshall Mcluhan, but the 1234D Catch service is designed for colour photography - the images I have used are black and white, grainy, and have been processed from original recording, to video, and eventually digitally processed onto online video services. Also, the subject must be completely still - it is difficult to find exact poses from various angles from someone who is in conversation with his audience throughout the recording.

Many of the attempts are, in relation to my initial plans, extremely disappointing in a representational sense, as well as some questionable orientations - upside down or positioned to the side as opposed to standing upright as would be expected.

My only consolation with the various outputs I have collected are that they still connect to the ideas of multiple viewpoints, abstract forms created from various points and time - machine vision generating pseudo-Cubism virtual sculptures.

The project should be considered a fully-finalized product, more of an experiment which, in theory, could provide other objects with continued practice, trying out different frames and combinations.

You can check some of the examples on my Autodesk 123D Catch profile here

The Digital Desk 

An experimental gestural interface developed in 1991 by Pierre Wellner combining projection and computing turning a physical desktop into a computer desktop-like environment - video embedded below:

The idea for using cameras and projectors together to form an interactive desk-top system was first proposed by Pierre Wellner. He began his PhD work by considering the potential benefits of using video in the office environment. This quickly led to the conclusion that the desk-top was the most important focus of office work and that there was great potential for any system that eased the transition between paper and electronic information (Wellner 1993). The idea was tested in a project that used video scanning to translate selected foreign words from paper documents lying face-up on the desk. 

You can find out more about the project at Xerox Research Centre’s website here, as well as this online presentation (very 90’s HTML) here

Volumetric Slitscan Experiments by Memo Akten

The slitscan technique is a well-explored method in photography and video, but this is the first time I have seen it using a Kinect camera feed, where depth plays an additional factor. Two short videos are embedded below, and they are made more fun by the music (dancing to Nina Simone’s “My Baby Just Cares For Me”):

WIP Volumetric Slitscan test 2 from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

WIP Volumetric Slitscan test 1 from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

Recursive Harmony 

Modular coding experiment by Forrest Oliphant uses popular online HTML drawing toy Harmony, turns drawings into animated fractals.

Try it out here

Idle Screenings

The Idle Screenings blog which displays entire films in sections of GIF animations. Above you can see the current screening, Avatar, with different films each day (tomorrow is The Dark Knight).

Why do this (especially because there is no sound)? It looks like Idle Screenings is an experimental content delivery platform using screensavers, animated GIFs and Powerpoint presentations:

Idle Screenings works to investigate:

• The ubiquity of consumer access to digital content
• The devaluation of content as it becomes broadly distributed
• Content containers as content

More about Idle Screenings here

RELATED: Movie in GIF format explored with full version of John Woo’s The Killer [link]

Twitter By Post

Giles Turnbull experimented (with willing volunteers) to reply to his Twitter followers by postcard:

Twitter is the contemporary postcard—social updates that are limited by size, but not imagination. For a month, with a billion stamps, our correspondent moved his tweets from the laptop to the post office, and rediscovered the joy of mail.

Like all the best ideas, this one popped into life unexpectedly. 

“How about doing Twitter by post?” I wondered to myself one morning.

“Would it work? How? Would it be fun?”

With the help of some willing collaborators, I decided to put it into action, and find out.

It worked like this: everyone involved sent me their postal address, while I headed down to the local Post Office and bought a job lot of stamps. Most of my helpers were here in the UK, but some were in the U.S., one in Australia, and one in New Zealand. I worried about how long the whole thing would take, what with having to wait for international posting times. But I needn’t have worried.

You can see the whole article and more examples here

One Coffee Cup a Day | 30 Days 30 Cups by Cunicode (via Adafruit Industries)

Experimental project to see if a coffee cup could be designed and made within 24 hours (often with curious results):

One Cup a Day project is an experiment on creativity and rapid manufacturing, by ideating, designing, modeling and making available for production and purchase a coffee cup within 24 hours, everyday during one month.

My personal favourite (predictably) is the Low Resolution Cup:

All designs are available to buy or, if you have access to 3D printing facilities, you can download each cups designs 3D files to make your own.

More information and examples here

Marshal McLuhan – The Medium Is The Massage CD Re-Issue (via DJ Food)

Marshall McLuhan’s experimental LP will be released next month:

And here it is! After at least 18 months since I supplied a quote to Noah Uman for his reissue of ‘The Medium Is The Massage’ celebrating 100 years of McLuhan‘s record of the book, it finally dropped through the letterbox this morning. It’s gorgeous, full deluxe mini LP style CD sleeve, 40 pg booklet and all in the style of the original.

I’m sharing page space with some pretty esteemed commentators too: Warhol, Woody Allen, Steinski, Don Joyce, Jello Biafra, DJ Spooky… The CD is out on Five Day Weekend (who also have releases from Edan, Mr Chop and the ’80 Blocks From Tiffanys’ DVD) on December the 12th. Well worth it, a unique record, history, literature, social commentary, cut and paste and comedy all rolled into one.

More photos here

killer.gif by Olli Tapio Leino (連藹理)

An experiment, converting John Woo’s “The Killer” film into a long animated gif, complete with soundtrack:

GIF89a was the standard format for images, mostly porn, distributed in bulletin board systems (BBS) in 1990s. Many remember the characteristic appearance of dithered low-colour images saved in GIF89a format, optimized to take as little space as possible to facilitate distribution over pay-per-minute modem connections or on 3,5” high density diskettes (1,44Mb). Contemporary internet culture still makes use of GIF89a as short animations embedded on websites. As the history of moving image formats is defined by JPEG and GIF89a is deemed ‘incompatible’ with the properties of moving photographic image, the aesthetic range of the latter in a cinematic context has remained unexplored.

killer.gif consists of John Woo’s 1989 classic Hong Kong triad movie The Killer (喋血雙雄), broken into 1747 GIF89a animations, divided according to color spectrum modulations. While this is to facilitate optimisation to a restricted palette, allowing distribution on diskettes, it also creates an alternative punctuation operating sometimes in parallel, sometimes in a stark contrast to the cinematic language of the director John Woo and the producer Tsui Hark.

killer.gif critically interrogates remix culture by claiming independent status based on a seemingly simple format conversion. However, by way of conversion, killer.gif proposes a McLuhanian experiment in alternative technohistory. While the disappearance of photographic detail into the tingling visual surface of Floyd-Steinberg dither initially distances the audience from the narrative the patterns that emerge from the GIF89a optimised presentation cast new light on the triad killer trying to come clean.

Soundtrack and subtitles are left untouched to control the experiment to focus on visual surface only. For this submission the conversion has been recorded and exported into a Matroska Media Container file to facilitate easy screening. Please note that at the curator’s request it can also be screened directly from GIF89a format or presented as a video installation.

More screencaptures can be found here