prosthetic knowledge

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

Tracing The Influence: Stolen Images In Games 

Hardcore Gaming 101 have put together a five-part examination of pop culture influence / blatant rip-offs featured in vintage video game graphics and box art. Schwarzenegger and Stallone have an entire section devoted to them alone.

Imagine you’re a game producer in the late 1980s, a week before the deadline and you still haven’t got a cover for your game. Exhausted from crunchtime, you tell your illustrator to just rip off some Schwarzenegger action movie to get the job done. Careful, your subordinate might take the order all too literally! When artwork in video games seems to look too realistic to be actually drawn by the artist, then it actually might be too realistic, as many vintage games have stolen images from movies, album covers, paintings and even other games. The subject here aren’t simply inspired designs or characters (in that case, we’d be here all day just counting the games influenced by Nausicaä, Hokuto no Ken or Alien), but actual specific images that might have been traced, digitized or just used as direct reference. This first page is reserved for print material that goes with a game release (covers, flyers, manuals, etc.), while on the next page we’ll be diving into the games themselves. Some of these are well known, others more obscure, but they all have something in common: They would likely have gotten their artists sued if the original images’ copyright holders had ever seen them; a gallery of litigations that could have been, so to speak.

I never knew the horror game Silent Hill’s school was clearly referencing Kindergarten cop (although I didn’t see the StreetFighter II M. Byson / Balrog story there …)

Pattern recognition education and entertainment can be found at Hardcore Gaming 101 here

MIT: Glasses-free 3-D TV looks nearer 

MIT Media Lab makes an attempt to see how 3D monitors could be constructed with current available technology. Above is not some new type of glitch art (yet algorithms are used for visual compression) - they are images for several layers which will be played simultaneously to form a moving image with depth. The video embedded below demonstrates their method:

As striking as it is, the illusion of depth now routinely offered by 3-D movies is a paltry facsimile of a true three-dimensional visual experience. In the real world, as you move around an object, your perspective on it changes. But in a movie theater showing a 3-D movie, everyone in the audience has the same, fixed perspective — and has to wear cumbersome glasses, to boot.

Despite impressive recent advances, holographic television, which would present images that vary with varying perspectives, probably remains some distance in the future. But in a new paper featured as a research highlight at this summer’s Siggraph computer-graphics conference, the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group offers a new approach to multiple-perspective, glasses-free 3-D that could prove much more practical in the short term.

Interesting read here, which research into the current state of the technology. I wonder how close it is to this piece of tech currently in development?

Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: Television

A piece I have contributed to Rhizome, a small selection of items from this blog’s archive related to the theme of ‘Television’.

You can see the whole post here

de/Rastra by Kyle Evans

Old television turned into real-time oscillographic synthesizer, reminiscent of Nam June Paik:

The de/Rastra oscillographic synthesizer is a real-time audio/video instrument and computer-interfacing device that allows a performer to generate visualizations intrinsic to cathode ray tube technology while simultaneously creating the acoustic analog of the displayed imagery. By way of building, bending and mutilating, de/Rastra shows the effects of altering the anatomical makeup of a CRT television, revealing the intrinsically hidden potentials of the technology through the repurposing and restructuring of its own ability. Through hacking and exploiting the capabilities intrinsic to all CRT devices, the technology becomes repurposed as a performative interface, breaking down the device’s ‘consumption only’ nature. The performer is given control over the technology by removing it from the intended application and forcing it into an active state through a combination of physical and mental effort. The de/Rastra oscillographic synthesizer is an open source project and will eventually be accompanied by tutorials on methods of CRT hacking. 

[Project Home Page]

Collection Of Television Tuning Tables

Livejournal page by trepang featuring a collection of television tuning tables from around the world from different times - oddly mesmerizing from a design perspective.

Full set here (in Russian) - English Google Translate Link Here

アキバレンジャー ＃4　禁じられた妄想は青い背徳の痛み by fuba_recorder 

fuba_recorder is (I think) a continuing automated glitchy image project: it creates random images from mixing Japanese television feeds, and are uploaded to a Flickr account. I’ve covered it many times before, but still occasionally comes up with random gems like the one above.

1001 TV Sets (End Piece) 

Installation art piece by David Hall, using television sets of various ages, all on during the removal of analogue TV signals in the UK - via Time Out London: 

The work features 1001 cathode ray tube TV sets, of various ages, all tuned to random analogue stations which, as the signals are turned off between April 4-14 , will gradually change the sound in the space from a cacophony of overlapping audio to a hiss of white noise. 

More can be found out at the Ambika P3 gallery site here

LG Plasma Arc Display Panel - Burn Baby Burn

What happens when you burn out a plasma TV display with excessive voltage? What the artist Gustav Metzger described as ‘Auto-Destructive Art’. Watch the video embedded below:

Put together by Aussie50:

Best panel burn out by a long shot!, holy shit this thing is made tough!

Do not try this at home, microwave transformers are far more lethal than the mains power that feeds them!

Starring The Computer

Online resource is the IMDB of appearances by computers in film and television:

Starring the Computer is a website dedicated to the use of computers in film and television. Each appearance is catalogued and rated on its importance (ie. how important it is to the plot), realism (how close its appearance and capabilities are to the real thing) and visibility (how good a look does one get of it). Fictional computers don’t count (unless they are built out of bits of real computer), so no HAL9000 - sorry.

Above are:

1. Columbo (IBM AN/FSQ-7)
2. Ghostbusters (DEC Rainbow 100)
3. The Thing (Intertec Superbrain)
4. Tron (Apple III)
5. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Siemens System 4004)
6. Airplane II (Commodore Vic-20)
7. Big (Unisys PW2 Series 500)
8. Futureworld (IBM AN/FSQ-7)

There is more to find at Starring The Computer here

International Teletext Art Festival 2012 

To be held in March, exhibits and submissions will be broadcasted on Finland’s national broadcast service.

To anyone unfamiliar to Teletext, it was an information service that was supplied through televisions (mainly Europe) throughout the 80s (more at Wikipedia).

Anyone is eligible to submit work, but the deadline is the 25th of January. To make your own, and you have a PC, you can find instructions plus software via here.

I will warn you - despite the lo-fi level of the graphics, it’s a bit more trickier than expected. Here is an example I put together a year ago:

More information about the event can be found on the official page here 

Artist Max Capacity has created works using the Telextext format as a canvas - examples can be found on his Tumblr here (he has submitted work for the event!)

PS - the above examples have been taken from a teletext event from 2006 by the same organizers - you can see the rest of the entries here.

視点・論点「番号時代の到来」 by fuba_recorder

To those who are unfamiliar with fuba_recorder:

I am a robot for generating abstract-images of Japanese TV programs requested by my followers.

fuba_recorder’s stream is posted on Flickr, which can be found here

Oh dear …. (via @TVNewsroom)