prosthetic knowledge
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Daniel Sannwald’s directs a short film for Delfina Delettrez’s Fall 2013 line
Cool 3D animation short employs smooth zeitgeist visuals for jewellery range. Video embedded below:
More at Management Artists here
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The Art of Projection Mapping: John Ensor Parker at TEDx NYU Poly
Interesting 15 minute video discusses, from an artist’s point of view, a brief history of technology, art, and culture, and how that leads into the practice of Projection Mapping. Video embedded below:
As our knowledge of the natural world exponentially increases, so does our perception of reality. Scientific and Technological developments affect us as individuals and as a collective species. At TEDxNYU Poly, John Ensor Parker discusses how the art media of projection mapping can be used to generate needed dialogue on the topic.
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Pycortex WebGL MRI Viewer
WebGL in-browser interactive 3D map of the brain by James Gao:
This viewer shows how information about thousands of object and action categories is represented across human neocortex. The data come from brain activity measurements made using fMRI while a participant watched hours of movie trailers. Computational modeling procedures were used to determine how 1705 distinct object and action categories are represented in the brain.
Try it out here
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The 20th Anniversary of the SMS Text Message
20 years ago today, the first text message was sent by an engineer: “Merry Christmas”.
At BBC News, an interview is presented in text message format with Matti Makkonen, a Finnish Civil Servant who came up with the original idea. You can read the interview here
Also, why SMS messages are 160 characters long? Via The LA Times:
Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.
As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.
That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.
“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”
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HOLO Magazine
Kickstarter project to fund publishing of premium-quality Arts + Tech magazine, by the people behind the excellent Creative Applications site:
HOLO is a new magazine that explores the convergence of art, science and technology, brought to you by the team at CreativeApplications.Net (CAN). An extension to one of the most authoritative art and technology blogs, HOLO is dedicated to rich, detailed stories that demand time and attention. With HOLO we are committed to telling these stories – attentively and expertly – in a patient, spacious medium that does them justice.
Published twice per year, each issue of HOLO will be comprised of 150-200 pages and provide intimate views into fascinating studios, workshops, galleries and institutions around the world, seen through the eyes of stellar photographers and talented writers. The pace, depth and sensibility of print allows us to invest heavily in each story, and craft months of research, travels and conversations into nuanced portraits you won’t find anywhere else. In addition to extensive artist features, each issue will contextualize current trends and topics in visual essays, sweeping surveys, theory, opinion and experimental formats big and small. Each issue’s carefully curated cast of interdisciplinary artists, scientists, technologists and toolmakers will help us map exciting new territory that doesn’t need to be covered faster, but captured better.
You can find out more at the project’s Kickstarter page here
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In-Store Facial Recognition Market Research
New technology from Japan can monitor all shop visitors, discerning age, gender, and visiting frequency, and measures the data with a system called ‘NeoFace’, all with a normal PC and webcam - via DigInfo (video embedded below):
NEC has developed a marketing service that utilizes facial recognition technology to estimates the age and gender of customers, and accumulates the data, along with the dates and times that customers visit stores. This data is then used to analyze trends in customer behavior and visit frequency.
This service is provided in Japan via NEC’s cloud computing technology, only requires a regular PC and video camera, and is available for approximately $880 (70,000 yen) per month per store.
“This service is mainly intended for retailers that have several stores. It provides retailers with customer attributes based on facial images. That information is helpful for sales strategies.”
This service can also detect repeat customers across multiple stores. It uses a face detection and comparison engine developed by NEC, called NeoFace.
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The 10th Anniversary of the First Drone Kill
As this piece from The Bereau Of Investigation shows, four words that changed the course of military action were “OK. Fine. Shoot Him”:
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) usually gets all the credit for the first US drone targeted killing beyond the conventional battlefield.
But it was the military which gave the final go-ahead to kill on November 3 2002.
Lt General Michael DeLong was at Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Florida when news came in that the CIA had found its target. The deputy commander made his way down to the UAV Room, showing live video feeds from a CIA Predator high above Marib province in Yemen.
The armed drone was tracking an SUV on the move. The six terrorist suspects inside were unaware that a decision had already been made to kill them.
Interviewed by PBS, DeLong later recalled speaking by phone with CIA Director George Tenet as he watched the video wall:
‘Tenet goes “You going to make the call?” And I said, “I’ll make the call.” He says, “This SUV over here is the one that has Ali in it.” I said, “OK, fine.” You know, “Shoot him.” They lined it up and shot it.’
Eight thousand miles away and moments later, six alleged terrorists were dead. Among them was a US citizen.
Read the whole article here
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Paper Computing Technology
This relates to my previous post in a way; a ‘paper computing’ technology developed by the University of Tokyo in which you can edit a piece of special sheet by hand or by computer interface - via DigInfo:
At the University of Tokyo, the Naemura Group is developing paper computing technology, which can automatically erase, copy and print hand-drawn sketches on paper.
As well as using a camera and computer, this system uses a laser and UV light, making it possible to work directly with the hand-drawn sketches using the computer.
So for example, the user can leave only the edges of hand-written characters, creating 3D like text, or draw a figure by hand and color it in automatically.
You can find out more at DigInfo here
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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
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Augenzeichnungen (Eye Drawings)
Created by German artist Jochem Hendricks, a project started in 1992, where the artist would wear a helmet with eye-tracking technology, recording the eye movements and printing the results - from Media Art Net:
Eye-drawings, «Augenzeichnungen», are drawings done directly with the eyes, without the slightest interference of the hands - the organ of perception being turned into the organ of expression. By means of technical aids (infrared-, video-, and computer- techniques) human eye movements are traced and digitized during the visual process of looking at something, so as to be able to do an ink-jet print out of these movements eventually. The body of works called Eye-drawings not only investigates the process of looking at everyday objects in the form of photographs or real three dimensional items, but primarily circles around issues of research and the visualization of abstract motives and processes e.g., time, reading, writing, drawing, light, and afterimage, culminating in the denial of the gaze: nothingness - the invisible is made visible by means of a trace.
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DARPA’s Pet-Proto Robot Navigates Obstacles
Darpa inspires Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid becomes closer to reality:
In this video, the Pet-Proto, a predecessor to DARPA’s Atlas robot, is confronted with obstacles similar to those robots might face in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). To maneuver over and around the obstacles, the robot exercises capabilities including autonomous decision-making, dismounted mobility and dexterity. The DARPA Robotics Challenge will test these and other capabilities in a series of tasks that will simulate conditions in a dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environment. Teams participating in Tracks B and C of the DRC will compete for access to a modified version of the Atlas robot for use in the 2013 and 2014 live disaster-response challenge events. For more information on the DRC, please see: http://go.usa.gov/VfA.
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Corrupt.epub by Benjamin Gaulon
We have already seen some glitch projects involving the Kindle, most notably ‘56 Broken Kindle Screens’ by Sebastian Schmieg which was a print-on-demand / ebook of photographs of broken Kindle screens, and KindleGlitched by Benjamin Gaulon which was a collection of physical Kindles presented as readymade art.
Benjamin has created another Kindle glitch project, one which lets you corrupt any .epub file:
Corrupt.epub is an online data corruption software allowing users to load and glitch electronic books (epub format aka electronic publication). Following the project KindleGlitched [Hardware Glitch], KindleGlitcher corrupt electronic publications on a software level [Data Bending].
Fom this page: kindleglitcher.benjamingaulon.com you can upload and corrupt an EPUB file (Max 2Mbyte, NOTE: Corruption can take a really long time, 5 minutes is nothing! Check the log of your epub to see how far it is). The last 3 uploaded books are available for download on the project page.
This project was commissioned by Jeu De Paume for the online exhibition “Erreur d’impression. Publier à l’ère du numérique” at Le jeu de Paume (Paris) 2012, curated by Alessandro Ludovico.
You can find out more about the Corrupt.epub project and create your own here
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“ [Interviewer]: I think when most people think about synthesizers and computers, the last thing they imagine is something organic or natural. What does it mean for you to use these “artificial” technologies as a mirror to hold up to nature?
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King: It’s funny, because a computer is made up of silicon, one of the most abundant elements on Earth, and copper, which is found in abundance in the Earth’s crust, is used for circuit boards. These are natural elements, which we don’t think of as natural because they are encased in plastic, but their ‘essence’ is organic in the beginning. So in a sense, once you know this fact, you dont think of the hardware as artificial. The funny thing is with the mirror idea, you’re essentially showing nature how it looks in a new outfit (plastic).—Interview with King Britt at Create Digital Music on his latest project with Data Garden, “The Bee and The Stamen”, which combines electronic audio with nature …
… also an interesting thought for the day …
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IRIS by HYBE - Light Conditions
The makers of this interactive installation / LCD Canvas got in contact again to demonstrate their work in different light conditions, and also reveal a bit more about the hardware used in it:
Expandable Matrix of Transmissive Monochrome LCD (90x90mm), Custom designed Arduino compatible controller board, DMX512, SPI, Kinect /
IRIS is a unique media canvas with matrix of conventional information display technology - a monochrome LCD. Through the phased opening and closing of circular-segmented black Liquid Crystal, IRIS can create various patterns and control the amount (size) of passing lights. IRIS is an interactive medium for visual simplicity which uses the passage of ambient light, not emission of light itself.
It is a selected and supported work by Da Vinci Idea Program(2012) at Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon, KOREA
