I am pleased to introduce our new guest reBlogger, Michael Frumin. Mike is an R&D Fellow at Eyebeam where he has worked as the lead developer on Fund Race and reBlog. Before coming to Eyebeam, he was a founding member of a team of hackers doing experimental financial research.

Mike will be picking the posts published on the Eyebeam reBlog for the next several weeks.

This picture screams "only in America!"

Web logs offer a way to cut through online clutter. But how do you keep track of all the blogs?

Cory Arcangel, Rachel Greene, Jonah Peretti, Mark Tribe and Lawrence Rinder talk about the death of Net Art.

Infinite power supplies, 87-pound house cats and dehydrated water do not exist. Yet people continue to be fooled by online hoaxes. It's that time of year again, so watch out. By Joanna Glasner.

from 1902 to 2004 [via] 

"commonplace wearable technology can be used to characterize the face-to-face interactions of employees�and to map out a company�s de facto organization chart"... and also predict who in the company should marry each other.

Rhizome announces Paul Johnson"Score" an upcoming exhibit at Postmasters: "New York artist Paul Johnson creates sculptural computer
consoles which are autonomous networked video game systems. Although conceived as games, they cannot be played or won. Instead, these games are "self playing" via computer software. They acquire resources from one another mutually affecting their respective worlds. Without the audience interaction, the networked games generate unpredictable narratives unfolding in real time.

I am in awe. A truly great, usable implementation of treemaps.

"By using a team of military advisors, the video game company Kuma tries to predict the world's next hot spot and develop a game episode "within four weeks of the event being on CNN." In the new game Kuma/War, gamers can try their hand at catching Saddam.

"teaching our youth early to accept commands and kill" (my pal nate)

"We use Text-Mining methods for automatic gathering and analysis of projects."

A new system will help the sightless find the nearest exit, spot a pal or read a book. All they need is a laptop wired to a camera incorporated into a pair of glasses, a headset -- oh, and don't forget the microphone and scanner. By Louise Knapp.

Same html page rendered dozens of times by applying different css. A good example of why folks should code all of their design in style sheets.

The Open Mind World project uses word games that you can play to help computers learn. That is, while you are having fun trying your linguistic skills, you can help to improve the activity of artificial intelligence interactivity.

more like "choose your own adventure" stories than interactive fiction [via] 

open source p2p entres

A cheap handheld computer created by Indian scientists is launched after a delay of nearly three years.

A project to collect digital photographs of 16,000 points on the globe is gaining momentum. It's also giving thousands of people who shelled out for GPS devices something to do with them. By Joanna Glasner.

get notified of new pages matching search terms [via] 

I can't get past level 38  

Geomaps of social software networks are sprouting up all over the net. Now there's GeOrkut, a density map of the Orkut population of users who input their physical locations. This project might be the most detailed of them all, as you can even make out some highway systems that lead to member's cities and towns. Even Friendster has an interactive mapping tool with Ben Russell's Blogosphere - more info here. Next up would probably be to integrate Mapquest with the US postal service and email to see a plot of how many physical letters vs. emails reach their final destinations.

Looks like the entertainment lobbyists are winning their battle against peer-to-peer networks. The Senate passes one bill that would impose jail time for sharing as little as one file, while the House considers another that would lower the bar to take people to court. By Xeni Jardin.

A post on Dottocomu includes links to videos of the Enryu Japanese rescue-robot tearing the doors off of cars, moving steel girders and demonstrating humanity's hubristic attempt to supercede the Creator's unique right to create life. It's sacrelicious.

Link

(via Engadget)

How they missed my butterfly I'll never know

P.S. 1 is starting an online radio station where it will present original shows with contemporary writers, artists and musicians as hosts.

FutureMe lets you address an email to yourself and set a date in the future to have it sent -- pass an email to yourself in ten years reminding yourself about your vow to never, ever drink peach schnapps again and see how well you're faring.

Link

(via Ambiguous)

Don't leave the house low of power!!!

The Israeli military is equipping its
forces with a new range of spy drones small enough to fit in a soldier's backpack.

Flight404 has re-launched.
And it's AMAZING.

This is a cool page

hw robo - 0 notes - the CMUcam Vision sensors - very inexpensive

"Place Lab is a software base and a community-building activity that facilitates widespread adoption of low-cost, easy-to-use user positioning for location-enhanced computing applications."

That's some bot attention well deserved

Ben Goldacre to meet the now infamous Jim Wightman

International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance: Cameraphones, Cyborglogs, and Computational seeing aids.

"It's the new Googling for Manhattan's politically minded elite: Fundrace.org organizes campaign contributions by address".

hack it up

The police chief in a Malaysian state threatened Tuesday to arrest people who spread rumours via their mobile phone short message service and charge them with sedition or threatening national security, the national news agency reported via Borneo Bulletin.

Minor scuffles broke out between police and opposition supporters in northern Terengganu state on Monday night after crowds gathered outside two buildings following rumours that pro-government "phantom" voters in Sunday's national elections were being brought there, local media reported.

Supporters of the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, which lost control of the state as part of a landslide election win for Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's National Front coalition, wanted to confront voters whom they believed had been bused in to cast ballots illegally.

Casinos are enlisting technology to track and reward their best customers.

Been looking a bit more into GPS mapped photography and came across the GeoSnapper, which enables users to upload and distribute accurately geo-referenced digital photographs. This is a bit like the Degree Confluence Project, but is more focused on images that have embeded GPS tags in them. I was interested in finding out a bit more how GPS enabled phones integrate GPS data into their images and found this link that explains how this guy extracted the GPS info from EXIF encoded images! Nice. So if you can encode them in this format, then it shouldnt be long until this is a standard feature on most consumer grade digital cams.

"BannedMusic... grew out of the Grey Tuesday protest. The project has two goals: first, to make it impossible for the five major record labels to use legal threats to stifle music, as they have done so many times in the past...."

The Bent Festival is a weeklong exploration of the art of circuit bending.

New heights in bar beer-ad-intrusiveness: 3D beer bottles that leap out of 52" flat panels and hover on the bar.

The system, from X3D Technologies in New York City, allows the virtual drinks to jump up to a metre in front of the screen. They can be viewed with the naked eye from anything up to a 120 degree angle.

Link

Let it be known that big media bought it, and webloggers exposed it

GIMP 2.0 released

maybe you'll end up with a celebrity's hard drive! [via] 

"WiFi.Bedouin consists of a small backpack containing an adapted 802.11b access point, RF amplifier, custom power supply and a PowerBook G4 running.... MovableType... a custom chat application, Apache 2.0, the Tomcat Java Servlet Container, and WiJacker"

LiTraCon is a "common" concrete stone-block that turns out to be light conducting through its embedded glassfibers. From one side to the other light passes the stone without any significant loss and illuminates the darker side of the stone. Shadows are transmitted and shown in precise shapes on the opposite surface.

Did I ever mention that I used to be in a band called "the Slowes", that was all music written by a CGI script + recorded in my bedroom??????

Armed with video displays and circuit boards, artist Jim Campbell looks at time, memory and human perception. Kendra Mayfield reports from Palo Alto, California.

it's clearly a human pretending to be a bot, but Wightman won't admit it

Obsolete.com put together a nice list with short descriptions of some of the seminal electronic musical devices of the last 130 years.

This is a really interesting article about how hackers are using clever search terms to turn google into a great hackers tool.

andy's unleashed the genius again: Zork via IM

The Art of Asbestos and the five-legged pony from Dublin.

Segregation is a big problem in massively multiplayer role-playing games, leaving some players adrift in almost deserted worlds while others cavort with dragons. Attendees at the Game Developers Conference hope to solve that dilemma and others. By Michelle Delio.

from the brilliant designers at Gamelab [via] 

It has often been the case that the advanced amateur/hobbyist has made culture-changing discoveries, and not the official or industrial scientist or researcher (think Shawn Fanning). In the spirit of innovation and friendly exploration, legendary net.artist Heath Bunting has organized 'Do It Yourself Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid Day (DIY DNA DAY),' happening 10 April, 2004 in Bristol, UK. Among the possible participants for this afternoon of 'display, exchange and information,' are Australians Anne Munster (who could show her video 'Let's Pretend to be Scientists') and Niki Sperou (of 'GMO Cook Up' fame). Bunting, persistently interested in creating open, democratic contexts, has assembled a web site with a number of tutorials and links for those considering attendance or wanting to get involved. Though the materials can seem tongue-in-cheek (a manual on how to extract your own DNA or a downloadable 'Copyright Yourself' form), a scan of news headlines about biotechnology suggests that the only thing tongue-in-cheek about biotech discourse is that one can now graft a tongue or cheek onto another living organism. Seriously. -- Rachel Greene

http://irational.org/heath/DIY_DNA_DAY/

using one of the more esoteric open-source projects I've ever seen [via] 

This sort of suggests to me that the penal system can't remove the distribution.

"Hello, this site is dedicated to bringing true information about the different types of antennas you can use, buy and build for Citizen Band Radio and 11 Meter DXing. From concept to construction, I have set out to provide the most technically correct in

Series of photographs that have had the text stripped from them (Neat idea, would love to see this done with a photo of Times Square.)

The music, unauthorized and available on a large scale, is something new: mass underground.

It has now been nine years since the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier gave birth to Dogme95, and the movement he began is still going strong.

"World of Awe," a multimedia project by Yael Kanarek, follows a traveler searching for an elusive treasure in an alternate universe. [Editor's note: Congratulations to Eyebeam alum Yael Kanarek for a nice write up in the Times!]

Still in development, but an interesting way to use ordinary email to build social networks.

The net vernacular term �warez� is defined by the online resource Webopedia as follows: �commercial software that has been pirated and made available to the public via a BBS or the internet. Typically, the pirate has figured out a way to de-activate the copy-protection or registration scheme used by the software. Note that the use and distribution of warez software is illegal. In contrast, shareware and freeware may be freely copied and distributed�� A riff on this paradigm is textz.com, an open archive of sometimes closed works of authorship. Curated by German artist and activist Sebastian Luetgert, the texts in the database include works by Baudelaire, Bataille, Adorno, and more technology oriented authors like Geert Lovink, McKenzie Wark and the Critical Art Ensemble. The warez on this site invoke a broad and progressive intellectual history, positioning them as analogues to software tools. Luetgert writes in an introduction to the site ��there was a time when content was king, but we have seen his head rolling. Our week beats their year. Ever since we have been moving from content to discontent, collecting scripts and viruses, writing programs and bots, dealing with textz as warez, as executables--something that is able to change your life.� If texts like �Les fleurs du mal� or �Empire� can take on the character of artifacts or inert objects sitting on bookshelves, here they are reinscribed with some of their radical potential by being positioned as critical software. In tune with other cases of anti-piracy bullying, Luetgert is currently under legal and punitive siege (for sharing Adorno, of all things!). Browse the site for textual warez and stand on the side of fair use and free culture by putting up 'Free Adorno' banners or contributing to his legal battle. -- Rachel Greene

http://www.textz.com/

Online gamblers in hiding have been a twisting thorn in the side of Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general.

Going to London to perform SimpleTEXT at the Institute of Contemporary Art with the Family Filter guys! Please come out and check out the show on Saturday nite if you are in the area! We've done some major improvements to the project that should really enhance the interaction and the music has been totally re-written by Duncan. Will put up some pictures from the show in a few days!

obsess tl ui - 0 notes - icon rosetta

Creative Commons has released a new, Music Sharing license, for bands who want to encourage sharing of their tunes.

Link

"If you send someone a copy of a recording or audiovisual work electronically without also providing your true name and address, you could be fined $2,500 and spend a year in the clink."

Floating technology of the future

from the same guy that made Grow [via] 

Douglas Repetto, organizer of the robotic performance extravaganza Artbots, says, "The 2004 ArtBots: The Robot Talent Show call for works has just gone live! The deadline for entries is May 1st. We invite all geek/artist BoingBoingers to send in their stuff! Info and entry form here."

The first International Robot Games, or ROBOlympics, organized by the Robotics Society of America, will take place on March 20th and 21st, 2004 in San Francisco, California. There will be competition for combat and non-combat robots, a World Cup Soccer, and even a robo-triathlon. More than 400 robots are registered for this robotics competition. And the winners will receive hard cash. Nature tells us the story in "Robolympics contestants shoot for gold."

More details and references are available in this overview which also includes a very nice photo of two robots, the larger one either fixing or rocking the smaller one. And for your information, ROBOlympics is not sold out. So if you are near San Francisco, it's still time to buy tickets. They cost $15 to $25. Entrance is free for children under 7.

Intelligent software is being used to spot paedophiles posing as children in chatrooms.

In a disturbing article, the WSJ reports that using cellphones to detonate explosives, as apparently happened in the Madrid bombings, is a phenomenon that is nearly impossible to stop from a technical standpoint. And the soaring use of cellphones that can't be traced back to their owners contributes to the problem.

How it works:

"A wire within a phone is connected to the detonator in a bomb. When a call is placed to the phone, an electrical circuit is completed, providing power to the detonator and setting off the explosive.

"You set up your explosive device in Berlin, or wherever. Now, you decide you don't want to be anywhere near that thing when it explodes, so you fly over to San Francisco and dial the number of the cellphone," said Greg Baur, former international director of the International Association of Bomb Technicians and Investigators. "That bomb goes off, and you're halfway around the world."

The Degree Confluence Project is a global image mapping project where people "visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures, along with a narrative describing the adventures it took to get there are then posted on this web site. This creates an organized sampling of the world." The world is split into a grid of long/lat intersection points with the object of creating a complete world map comprised of people's photos. Photographers are "confluence hunters" who go on wild excursions with cameras and GPS devices to capture images of previously un-uploaded locations. I really like the DIY aspect of the project and how it causes action from people to take the photos for a wider collective map that allows everyone to participate in a collaborative fashion. Thanks to Lisa Jevbratt for the link.

The second in an annual series dedicated to current artistic and social investigations in psychogeography.

An exhibition and gallery talk at ApexArt featuring leading art collectives

Physics students need to mix it up a bit, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes, so he organizes an annual art competition to help them do just that. By Kristen Philipkoski.

Machinista, an arts festival focusing on machine-related art, will use Creative Commons licenses for the DVD containing the winning entries. The winners will be chosen out of the 280 submissions, which are themed as "the world as seen by the machines." Since the content will be CC-licensed, we're also hoping to have it hosted at the Internet Archive so the world can download it for free -- by using your own machine, of course.

Ever wonder if the guy living next door is a Democrat or Republican? Curious about the politics of your company's C.E.O? The new FundRace.org lets you search and browse political contributions by address or name. For geographic searches: Enter your home or work address to see political contributions from your neigbors and co-workers. For name searches: Try the names of business leaders, wealthy friends, and celebrities.

You can also investigate your favorite city with the new City Maps tool. Find out if you live in a Republican or Democratic neighborhood and see which apartment buildings, homes, and offices are making the most donations.

FundRace is an Eyebeam R&D project designed to involve the public in the democratic process and provoke critical dialogue about the upcoming election. Special thanks goes to R&D Fellow Mike Frumin, who has done an incredible job as the FundRace project leader.

This is prolly why my parents never bought me a Nintendo,...

"Controlled by a central customer database, the system segments viewers by certain demographics and then automatically inserts different versions of an ad for that segment."

Pepakura Desinger is an application that converts any 3D CAD model (Maya, Lightwave, DXF, etc) into a printable fold-and-glue paper model.Link(Thanks, Dan!)

Among Web savants, TinyURL.com has become an indispensable tool for shortening unwieldy URLs before dispatching them in e-mails or IMs. They have a fanatical unicyclist to thank for the site. By Katie Dean.

Pixel RaVING...I was waiting for this to happen....AWESOME

For all the people out there that love net art

For all the people out there that like their net art will supporting materials and interviews.

for example, searches for atari and piracy  

Vivek sez, "This page is simple: an RSS parser (CaRP) is used to create a single page that lists the last five entries of Bush's and Kerry's official blogs, side by side." Link (Thanks, Vivek!)

Big files are a pain for sender and receiver. A programmer proposes a slick solution: a marriage of RSS and BitTorrent. By Paul Boutin.

If you have ever wondered what kinda art you would make if you were a ICON of early graffiti, an underground hip-hop legend, were in the movies WILD-STYLE and stranger than paradice, and had Cypryss HILL's "hand on the pump" named after you?????? Check out RAMELLZEE.

Oh,...did I mention RAMELLZEE just released his debut CD? After 22 years!?! ... PS - I helped a tiny bit on the track QUACK!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!*!