photo - 0 notes - Infrared basics for digital photographers

Loretta Lux, a 34-year-old German artist, has realized that a light touch is sometimes the most effective technique for digital enhancement.

Nintendo on the APPLE newton handheld....maybe the best home hack ever?...

We're happy to announce the winners in our GET CREATIVE!: Moving Images Contest. Last fall, we asked aspiring filmmakers and flash artists to create a short film that explained the mission of the Creative Commons. Our panel of judges has selected the top three entries and they're all terrific. We want to thank everyone that entered, everyone that helped spread the word, our judges for taking time to help us with the contest, and most of all thanks and congratulations to Justin Cone, Sheryl Seibert, and Kuba & Alek Tarkowski.

THE AGE OF NEUROMARKETING HAS DAWNED| By now, most of us in the appropriately concerned corners have heard at least something about Emory University's neuromarketing research center, the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences. The latest innovation in a never-ending quest to decode consumer behaviors, the institute uses Emory University Hospital’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) equipment to scan the brains of human subjects on behalf of corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, K-mart and Home Depot. |Douglas Rushkoff|

Okay. I try not to use this phrase too often, but this is just wicked frikkin cool looking... "It is a continuation of the Japanese animation, "Shinzou Ningen Casshern" which was broadcast back in 1973."

Well since this year is a leap year - I thought it might be useful to get some background on why leap years exist. One thing I didn't know what that "The longest time between two leap years is 8 years. Last time was between 1896 and 1904. The next time will be between 2096 and 2104." If you are stumped on this one - read up, it's good to know that there are other people out there who make websites about this conundrum.

though there have been some great analyses online, this is one of the best i've seen in print

"This year, approximately $12.9 million is available for grants through the Commerce Department's Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) for Fiscal Year 2004."

as we long suspected, that shit is just there to fool tourists

the time-lapse pregnancy and aging woman are amazing 

Old school computer print ads

Can't we figure out a way to hack this thing?

The Art of Abstraction, opening in Spain, puts the work of hackers right alongside Picasso and Dali. By Michelle Delio.

Hip hop over ringtones............

C-trl.com got 300 old macs and built a sort of video wall.



"Obsolesence is just lack of imagination."

including several great interviews 

Based on the concept of flash mobs, the sudden Internet-organized gatherings, a lecturer has arranged for his students to build a "flash mob supercomputer."

An increasing number of scholars are turning their attention to the video game, creating graduate programs, conferences and journals devoted to game studies.

some badass TiVo hacking, from the RSSTV guy 

Conor O'Boyle, a regular DATA attendee, just released his excellent online flash-based music mixer called "Loop Tracks". It's one of the only net-based music mixers I've seen which could be legitimably used in live performance. You can experiment all day and never produce the same sound or mix twice.

does EMI have a case? not as strong as you'd think 

Abe from Abstract Dynamics has a wonderful post on Le Parkour and social constraints in the city, with a very beautiful illustration. Maybe his post will be transformed like mine was by Google, into an aleatoric place for conversation by freerunners. More on this eventually...

they offer an unusual list of benefits 

one flower's life story, very impressive work 

This week's featured content is the entire World66 travel site. It features comprehensive guides built by vistors in a collaborative fashion and the site also features tools like the popular visited states and visited countries apps seen on weblogs like this. The photos, guides, and generated images are all licensed under commercial-friendly Creative Commons licenses, allowing people to share the places they've been and build upon the information shared on the site.

math stats - 0 notes - Visualizing Statistical Concepts

Four useless, self-indulgent design stunts for Wired.

telecom - 0 notes - the telecrapper 2000 telemarketer interception system

Eytan Adar, Li Zhang,Lada A. Adamic,and Rajan M. Lukose of HP Labs, Information Dynamics Lab have been studying the diffusion of memes through the blogosphere. If you are interested in the patterns and dynamics of meme-transmission, examining the way certain ideas and posts travel from blog to blog can serve as an ongoing memetics experiment. In "Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace", they describe "a new ranking algorithm, iRank, for blogs." Check out this applet that enables you to see the way memes travel from blog to blog over time: The Blog Epidemic Analyzer.

Dr. Michael Bull is the world's leading expert on the societal impact of personal stereos. Bull wrote the definitive treatment on the Walkman, and now he's turned his attention to the iPod. A Q & A with Leander Kahney.

Sippey.typepad.com offers a rather snide dismissal of Grey Tuesday. Needless to say, his judgement is immediately called into question when he deems The Grey Album "unlistenable" (I do agree it is overrated. But then again so is Prince's Black Album.....

Turning the English language into a musical tongue, one word at a time.

Amazing little puzzle that dates back to comdex and the birth of personal computing. Took me a little while to get it, but I didn't have as much trouble as bill gates did!

"By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people's attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity."

"The other day, Steve Gillmor wrote about BitTorrent and RSS and how they could be combined to create a disruptive revolution.... we shouldnt use BitTorrent to carry RSS, we should use RSS to carry BitTorrent."

I found this link to the SPOLUS project a while back but somehow lost it. It involves a live webcam pointed at a bus station in the Czech Republic. The idea of the project - as I've read from the site - is to connect people using the transportation system in three ways: 1) capturing visitors waiting for the bus and displaying them on a public screen, 2.) capturing commuters as they get off a bus at the stop, 3.) and allowing online visitors to the site to see the photos and write messages to the commuters - both those waiting and arriving - on the public screen. The site has some good screenshots of what I mean, but the project seems a bit ambitious for its own good. It would have been interesting to see it working and to know if the pedestrians really could influence the online participants?

Please join Carl Goodman at the Museum this friday, February 27 from 6 - 8 pm for a reception honoring BLIP: Arcade Classics from the Museum collection. During this time, tokens allowing you to interact with these touchstones of digital entertainment will be free and unlimited. Also at the Museum at 7:30 that evening is the theatrical DJ/VJ Martial Arts extravaganza, Hop Fu: Behind the Remix.. While this is a ticketed event, i have a few freebies. Let me know soon if you would like one.
More information
How to get here

Will I see you this weekend at the New School?

Critics of the music industry's copyright rules stage an online protest. About 200 websites will post DJ Danger Mouse's popular remix that combines The Beatles' White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album. By Katie Dean.

kottke.org is grey today because I believe that musical sampling without prior consent of the copyright holder should be legally allowed because it enriches our society more than harms it. Late last year, a DJ named Danger Mouse took The Black Album by Jay-Z, mixed it with samples taken from the Beatles' White Album, and produced The Grey Album. He sent the album to a few folks and now --...

George Nelson famed American design and writer of the seminal design book "How to See" used to give himself small projects to keep the way he looked at the world fresh. One such project was to try to find the numbers 0-100 somewhere out in the world and photograph them in their natural environment. I wonder how he'd feel about this web site that has a guess the letter game based on brand names

"UMBRELLA.net is a project exploring transitory or ad-hoc networks and their potential for causing sudden, striking, and unexpected connections between people in public and urban space."

"For peer network developers your options boil down to one of two extremes if you wish to avoid liability: Centralized control over all content on the network to identifty and prevent unauthorized distribution, or fully decentralized..."

Meet the animals of the London Underground (Fun Tube map constellations)

A pair of radio shows in two countries are painting urban soundscapes by tapping directly into the headphones of people on the street. By Leander Kahney.

"His low-cost vision-testing and lens-manufacturing inventions could dramatically improve life for billions of people in developing countries who cannot access, nor afford, prescription glasses."

To Get The Word Out About Your Independent Project

GEO URL ICBM ADDRESS SERVER| GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.|So This is Mass Communication?|

The ACM Multimedia Interactive Art Program is looking for exhibition submissions, short papers, and full papers.

"The Drift Table allows people to float slowly over the British landscape from the comfort of their own home. The distribution of weight on the table controls the slow scroll of aerial photographs displayed on a central viewport."

Inquiry Forms for Visual Arts and Film/Video are now available online, and must be submitted by March 15, 2004. Those interested in grants for Performing Arts and Emerging Fields will be eligible to submit Inquiry Forms in 2005.

"C-level is a cooperative public and private lab formed to share physical, social and technological resources. Its members are artists, programmers, writers, designers, agit-propers, filmmakers and reverse-engineers."

"Our Howtoons are designed to encourage children to be active participants in discovering the world through Play-that-Matters -- fun, creative, and inventive -- and to rely a lot less on mass-consumable entertainment."

Combine a flash mob and a distributed computing collective and you get a Flash Mob Supercomputer! The first one takes place in San Francisco.

(Thanks, Paul!)

you probably would have fallen for it too

A competition to help New York City "seek out and identify new ideas for public street lighting". The winning design may "become a new street lighting standard for the city". The registration deadline is March 12th.

An exhibition curated by Christiane Paul at Art Interactive in Cambridge, MA.

learned a new word from e-rock on this site...."faxel". "faxel" equals=fake pixel. this is a cool faxel animation

This show, entitled "Self-Made Objects", is a showcase in Barcelona, Spain of Roger Ibars' excellent work. Hacked game controllers connected to everyday objects like alarm clocks and other household items. I wrote about Roger's work back in November when he had a piece in a collective design show at the Digital Hub with Nintendo Light Guns connected to desktop clocks. The best thing about this piece (pictured above) is that the Nintendo controller is hooked up to a Sony alarm clock. Hope the folks in publicity don't find out about this one. If anyone can make it to see the show, let me know how it turns out!

The current issue (#113, Digital Screens) of Canadian art magazine Parachute describes some of MTAA's work in an article by Valérie Lamontagne called The Screen of net.art. Other artists discussed in the article are Peter Horvath, Grégory Chatonsky, Brad Todd, Entropy8Zuper, and jimpunk.

There is also an article devoted to thing.net's founder and artist Wolfgang Stahle.

This could be construed as a vanity post I suppose (hell, this entire blog could be considered a vanity project), but it's good to see an international art magazine devoting an entire issue to the impact of digital processes of creation and presentation on contemporary art. Having net art as one of the main themes of the magazine confirms my feeling that the editors are serious about documenting and analyzing contemporary digital art practices.

knitPro is a web application that converts logos into knit patterns. Why spend money on DKNY, Nike, or GAP apparel when you can knit your own? The project was created by Microrevolt.org to protest sweatshop offenders.

Music students learn the art of the scratch BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- DJ Chi bobs his head to the hip-hop rhythm, one hand skipping over the vinyl record, the other on the mixer. Possum, Raydar, Moses and the other DJs in the room listen to his beat.

* Weaving flexible transistors into textiles!

* Self-diagnosing buildings!

* Swarm mechanics!

* The father of electronic art, RIP!


All of it, right this way.... Link

The BBC's celebrity stock exchange website, Celebdaq, has picked up a Bafta for best online entertainment site.

The latest diversions for kids sing, chat and even puke at the American International Toy Fair, and most of the stuff depends on computing power to supply the fun. Michelle Delio reports from New York.

typography - 0 notes - symbolproject - collaboratively designing ideographic glyphs

The movie, music and software industries stick the FBI seal on their products in hopes that would-be pirates think twice before distributing their content illegally. It's a big waste of time, critics say. By Katie Dean.

As you may know, Urban Tapestries is one of my dissertation case studies, and they have a weblog where you can discuss issues of technology, public authoring and social knowledge.

As part of their continuing research after the public trials, they have set up interesting discussion topics like: Collaborative Cartography and Location Sensing, Citizenship and the Public Commons, Mobile & Pervasive; Spatial & Temporal, Sensory Stimulation, and Filtering Out The Noise.

I'll be commenting there for sure, and it would be great to hear what other people think!

Participate in the International Video Art Festival in Public Spaces presented by the National Center for Contemporary Art.

completely bizarre.

typo - 0 notes - what the font -- identifies fonts in windows

Once a year, members of the National Microcar and Minicar Club meet to show off their fully-restored pint-sized vehicles. Wouldn't the roadways of America be a lot more fun to look at if people drove microcars instead of SUVs? The 2004 meet will be in Huntington Beach in July. Link

This is great. Search for a keyword restricted by zip code. For example, wifi and 11201 gives you hotspots in downtown Brooklyn.

ui - 0 notes - all about 2d barcodes

you can restrict file type to RSS/XML

When a new piece of malicious code rears its ugly head, antivirus researchers spring into action. They've been a bit busy lately. By Michelle Delio.

Robotics Society of America President and Robolympics founder David Calkins tells BoingBoing:

"While in Japan, I saw the coolest thing ever! Fighting robots. But not in the traditional Battlebots sense. Imagine rock-em sock-em robots, only fully articulated and computer controlled. It's called Robo-One and it's amazing. 15" tall androids belt each other boxing style until one falls down. These mini androids are as articulate as the Sony Curio, Honda ASIMO, or Fujitsu HOAP - only guys are making them in their apartments for about $3000, rather than 10 Million. I've uploaded a bunch of videos to give you an idea. Robolympics is sponsoring a Robo-One match in San Francisco in March - along with Battlebots, sumo bots, and others. Watch these videos!"

Link

Feeling overly humanized? Let this Flash-based barcode-generator dehumanize you a little: apparently this UPC decodes to "32-year-old male, 173 lbs, 5'10", living in the US."

Link

(Thanks, Liz!)

The MIThril wearable computing project (profiled earlier here) is developing a conceptual and technical framework for context-aware cellphones. A combination of locative and environmental sensors prompt the handset to behave appropriately to the user's immediate context.

Thanks to Stewart from the UNC team!

As a fan of digital media both as a physical form and existing on your computer (via the web or dvd), I love that MOCA hosts a Digital Gallery on their site. It's accessible to every/anyone with a connection regardless...

I think not, try gluebalize my friend

"I'm rocking on your dime," says the panda bear. The bear is sitting at a bar, a beer and a cigarette in front of him. His flat silhouette appears on a t-shirt by Geoff McFetridge, a young designer based in Los Angeles.

Boing Boing pal Justin Hall sez: "Ostensibly a story about the Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego last week, it's secretly a reflection of my own struggle to manage my attention span when I have access to the internet and I'm surrounded by hyperactive geeks and I'm supposed to be listening to straightforward in-person presentations but the twitchy nature of communcations online suits me more readily." Link

"Interactive Tele-Journalism is a platform (under development) for supporting the creation of low cost, live interactive television news progams."

Robot Beckhams mounted on Segways join human team-mates for the first football match of its kind.

Troy Hurtubise has completed the basic work on a new, super-advanced grizzly-bear-proof suit.

The guy auctioning off 867-5309 (made famous in the forgettable hit 867-5309/Jenny) is collecting eBay bids despite the fact that Verizon says they won't transfer the number because number portability wasn't supposed to confer ownership (and hence the right to sell) to its customers.

But there's a question of whether the number can even be transferred to the winner once the auction ends Feb. 22. Verizon says there's no question: It can't. Individuals do not have ownership of the numbers given to them, a Verizon spokesman said.

Link

(via Fark)

art img video - 0 notes - video feedback (like fractal art)

Feting the technical wizards behind films, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognizes a digital audio workstation, a robotic camera system and gives a lifetime achievement to the guy who did some cool 3-D work.

peter identifies how it's usually only small companies that are nimble enough to make something useful from their research

Including high school dating, physicist collaborations, and sexual contacts.

Ted Nelson's 1974 book Computer Lib / Dream Machines.

I've always liked Ted Nelson. The man has passion and vision - he's always been willing to fight the power, no matter how cracked people think he is :)

It's a toaster! It's a modem! It's a toaster! It's a modem! Washington gives a green light to Internet access via electrical sockets.

Asimo goes on show in London's Science Museum, showcasing Honda's prowess in humanoid robotics.

"Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy?" Protocol has the answer, and chapters on net art, hacking, and tactical media.

The Brady campaign's spoof site might be more real than the official NRA sites. From the disclaimer: "This website is in no way affiliated with the NRA. But the quotes are actual quotes and the facts are actual facts and the insane positions on legislation, well they are real as well."

Is it just me, or do most weblogs look the same these days?

Thomas Angermann's other blog doesn't look like everyone else's - and it's got some really interesting content. Right on.

This video went around 2-3 years ago, and I am more that happy 2 C people linking to it again!!

Kelly Heaton's Live Pelt (A woman's coat made from 64 Tickle Me Elmos "trapped" on eBay.)

A performance where speech, shouts, and songs are augmented in real-time by custom software.

MoneyBee is a distributed computing application that is used to make financial forecasts- especially stock prices. MoneyBee is similar to other P2P applications like SETI@home. However, MoneyBee uses Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Neural Networks to improve the distributive computing process. MoneyBee is based in Germany but welcomes
participants from across the world.

Thanks to Trisha from the UNC Team!

The MIT will host on Saturday, March 13th the 5th annual Grassroots Use of Technology. During the event about 150 people working in community organizations, unions, and progressive advocacy groups will gather to discuss themes like open source software for nonprofits, technology solutions for community building, cyber-campaigning, blogging, e-advocacy, etc. To register or simply donate go to the website of the event.

(Thanks Liat and Rich!)