Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Videographer: Commissioned artist and friend of Eyebeam, Jason Jones of Not An Alternative
Maurice Chittenden
WELCOME to Cold War City (population: 4). It covers 240 acres and has 60 miles of roads and its own railway station. It even includes a pub called the Rose and Crown.
The most underpopulated town in Britain is being put on the market. But there will be no estate agent’s blurb extolling the marvellous views of the town for sale: true, it has a Wiltshire address, but it is 120ft underground.
I'd be going for the wine cellar suggestion.... read on! -- amc
seems that the LSO are only now catching up with Konrad Becker (of Austria's Netbase) who wowed audiences on the ISEA2004 ferry cruise with his super mario remixes :) http://www.isea2004.net/mainframe.php?id=xs_becker -- amc
The Sunball, a "solar appliance" due out in mid-2006, is an example of something I expect to see quite a bit more of in the coming months and years: a renewable energy system combining a novel design with promises of easy installation and use. I have no idea whether the Sunball will perform up to the claims made by the manufacturers, Australia's Green & Gold Energy, but in many respects that's secondary. What's important is that we're now seeing more kinds of renewable energy systems aimed not at hobbyists and those willing to fiddle with clumsy tech, but at people who want something relatively stylish (whether the Sunball meets that criteria is a matter of taste, of course) and something relatively "plug and play." Building-integrated photovoltaics are another example, albeit a less-radical departure.
The technology of the Sunball is unusual, but not unprecedented. Rather than a flat panel, it uses fresnel lenses to concentrate sunlight onto an arrangement of high-efficiency cells, increasing the amount of light hitting the cells. This allows the Sunball to be less-costly than standard pv, with an estimated cost of AU$1,400 (about US$1,050) per 330 W peak unit. We've talked about solar concentrators before, but the previous examples were clearly meant for larger-scale power generation; one advantage of solar concentrator technology is that it can produce more power in a limited space than normal photovoltaic panels. What's novel about the Sunball is that it's meant for home users, particularly those who don't want to cover their rooftops with black glass panels.
The manufacturers have handy calculators and maps for figuring out whether the Sunball will produce cost-competitive electricity in a given location in the US or Australia. As noted above, the units aren't yet shipping, so early cost estimates -- US$6,000, without rebates, for an installed 4-unit system able to supply half of a typical household's power -- may be way off. And while the Sunball is less-clumsy than traditional flat solar panels, neither is it a particularly wonderful example of industrial design. In short, even if it's a flop, it will blaze the trail for subsequent competitors.
The era of the solar panel is over; long live the age of solar design.
(Via Treehugger)
(Posted by Jamais Cascio in A Newly Electric Green Sustainable Energy, Resources and Design at 05:24 PM)
Here's your incentive besides listening to a bunch of very interesting people talk about this topic on everyone's minds: FREE DRINKS, you cheap, lushes!!
For those of you in or near New York this week, I hope that you are able to come along on Thursday. It would be great to meet you and its bound to be a fun evening! --AMC
We're all moved in and expecting two more resident artists to join Jan Gerber this week. In the meantime it's culture politics as usual in Lower Manhattan as you can read in the text below. Lots of promises and no money:
October 31, 2005
Arts Groups Pessimistic Over Prospects for Culture Downtown
By ROBIN POGREBINFor downtown arts groups struggling with the void left by the 9/11 attacks, a 2002 "blueprint for renewal" seemed full of promise. Drafted by the agency in charge of rebuilding in Lower Manhattan, it pledged to develop "a critical mass of dynamic, enticing and diverse cultural venues" there.
The agency, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, also promised to help cultural institutions in the area - and those that might be thinking of relocating downtown - to find the sites and the money they would need to expand or move.
Three years later, the development corporation has accomplished practically none of the above. The number of cultural groups, including libraries, below Canal Street now, according to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a nonprofit advocacy organization, has plummeted to 112, from 200 before 9/11. The $45 million that the development corporation set aside last May for cultural groups that are not part of the master plan at ground zero has yet to be distributed."
...Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
extract from NYT article -- AMC
Brooke, thanks a ton for your great selections.
Starting today is Amanda McDonald Crowley, who became Eyebeam's new Exectuive Director last month. She wanted to reBlog, and who am I to object?!!?
Prior to joining Eyebeam, McDonald Crowley served as the Executive Producer of the 2004 International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA2004), developing the event from concept to major conferences, exhibitions, performances, concerts and site specific installations on a ferry in the Baltic Sea and locations in Estonia and Finland. In 2002-03 she was an arts worker in residency at Sarai: the New Media Initiative in Delhi, India and was Associate Director for Adelaide Festival 2002. From 1995 to 2000 McDonald Crowley was Director of the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), an organization with a national brief to foster links between the arts, sciences and new technology.
take it away AMC.
On this cute, geek-out note... Happy Halloween! And I now sign off to make way for the next reblogger du jour. It's been fun!!!
In two recent projects, Rogers Marvel Architects (RMA) has shown that safety can be integrated in subtle and beautiful ways.
In 2002, the Battery Park City Authority hired the RMA team to oversee their streetscape improvement project.
Even the sidewalks assumed protective powers. Existing cobblestone band that surrounds much of the World Financial Center were used to install a core of collapsible concrete in front of the benches. It is sturdy enough for pedestrians but is designed to give under the weight of anything heavy, like a truck bomb (image above).
RMA also infused security qualities in benches that act as both furniture and illumination. The bench is luminescent depending on the angle of the sun; at night, it is lit by LEDs. The benches form an axis, from the site of the future Ferry Terminal to the World Trade Center site. The elements on the other axis are stainless steel and glass shade structures that are lit from below. Interlayers in the glass bounce the light back down at night so that light pollution is minimized. One structure provides a shelter at the new dog run; another provides a structure for security workers.
RMA then worked on the New York Financial District Streetscapes + Security project.
At the Wall Street intersections, RMA used retractable bollards. However, at Broad Street, tangles of utility lines below the street made this solution nearly impossible. So they came up with a rotating disc that sits level with the ground. With bollards lined up across it, the 20-inch deep disc rotates to allow vehicles to pass by when necessary. In a nod to the surrounding historic buildings’ heavy old doors, the bollards are made of bronze and double as benches (picture above).
Via The Architect's Newspaper. More images and information in ASLA.
The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs. Each week we ask our bloggers to choose their top posts, which we bring to you in one easy-to-read weekly post. You’ll find links to the hottest posts from the past week after the jump including the Macromedia MAX ticket giveaway and exclusive Treo 700w information.
The first European satellite to be designed and built by students has launched successfully from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia's northern spaceport.…
Reblog's 1.0 announcement promised "push-button republishing for the masses", and we've been doing pretty well following that track for the past year or so. Last night, we pushed the button on Reblog 2.0. The concept behind the software has always been a form of attention cagefight: many feeds go in, one feed comes out. Reblog closes the loop between piqued interest and publishing by making the act of marking a link for publication a one-step affair. We've long thought this was a pretty interesting addition to the standard functionality of an RSS reader, and I'm surprised to see that in late 2005, there's not a lot of other software that performs the same task.
reblogging about reblog! check out the new version...
Doesn't this count as spam?
The memo come out as junk to me. If anyone can read it, let me know.
"All U.S. passports will be implanted with remotely readable computer chips starting in October 2006, the Bush administration has announced",CNET News reports."Sweeping new State Department regulations issued Tuesday say that passports issued after that time will have tiny radio frequency ID (RFID) chips that can transmit personal information including the name,nationality,sex,date of birth,place of birth and digitized photograph of the passport holder.Eventually,the government contemplates adding additional digitized data such as "fingerprints or iris scans."
Passports to get RFID chip implants
Seith Weiner has created a vehicule piloted by a fish and propelled by 2 drive wheels, each driven by its own servomotor. The fish steers the vessel by its movements. A camera above the cockpit tracks the movements of the Terranaut (that's the name of the fish-pilot). Its location is then wirelessly transmitted to a remote processing station where the data is converted into motion commands and transmitted back to the motion controller of the vehicle.
See it at EXIT BIENNIAL 2 : Traffic, Exit Art, NYC, through Dec 23, 2005.
Very very related: Augmented Fish Reality.
Related: the roachbot and Fish, plant, rack.
Via interactive USC.
Well, the USB Sake is not as eloquently named as the USB Mamory, it can’t detect ghosts, it doesn’t smell like fish, and it’s no, um, a plate of spaghetti... but like the others, it’s from SolidAlliance so we loves it just the same. But that peewee 256MB capacity makes it almost an insult to the world’s most lethal fermented beverage. We likes ours dry and with a shaved cucumber slice.
[Via Akihabara News]
A plan by Dutch justice officials to establish commercial call centres in jails was greeted with disbelief last week. The Dutch Association of Cell Centres deemed the plan "totally unacceptable", in particular if inmates are drafted in to sell insurance policies, such as theft coverage.…
Dare Obasanajo has an interesting post on mashups and money:
One of the things that had me scratching my head about the panel [the Web 2.0 panel on mashups] is that it seemed to have skipped a step. Before you talk about making money from mash-ups, you have to talk about how people providing the data and services mash-ups are built on make money.
Yes – and if you’re the publisher of a newspaper, that’s exactly why you want to be out collecting data from your users. Mashups make it a lot easier (and fun) to access and consume data, but the key to groundbreaking work is still the underlying data, not the interface.
This is funny. Are you a hurdler or a caregiver? Note: "The personas are about being innovation rather than merely doing innovation." Brought to you by Ideo.
The first sentence grabbed me: "We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?" Don't have time right now to read how he defends this statement. Would rather go hear Brian Homles at 16 Beaver tonight (see next post)...
TONIGHT: 7:00 PM-- Kolya Abramsky w/ Brian Holmes - "Disentangling the Future from the Past: Internationalism, World revolution and World War."
Bob Hanner works in the world's oldest profession, he tells us. He's a taxonomist. (He quotes Genesis 2:19 to make his point, where Adam names every living creature.) Bob's quest is to name, classify and index as many species as possible - globally, roughly 1.7 million species have been named and categorized... but this is a small fraction of the 10 to 100m species biologists speculate actually exist.
Hanner's fascination is with the idea of DNA barcoding. Paul Hebert's work on mitochondrial DNA has taught us that animal species can be told apart via the COI subgene in cell's mitochondria. While this technique doesn't work on plants (they don't diverge quickly enough in evolutionary terms), these sorts of DNA "barcodes" have allowed biologists to determine that half a dozen different species of leeches around the world were actually one species, spread throughout the world via human trade routes. These barcodes have also allowed biologists to discover that one species of butterfly were actually ten separate species, with different larval development cycles and food preferences.
Hanner envisions a handheld barcoder that can take a tissue sample, sequence the mitochondrial DNA, and upload data to a Google-like DNA search engine. In his vision, it's a $10 purchase at Radio Shack, and that there's a penny tax on each DNA reading, which goes towards a global effort to produce a taxonomy of all species. One immediate application for this technology? Studying the world's dwindling fishing stocks, which are a critical source of protein for the developing world - are the larvae we see from food species of fish or other species? Are the fillets we see in the market from the species we think they're from.
If you're interested in DNA barcoding, you may want to read Jamais's earlier piece on the subject.
(Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Unlocking the Code Science, Systems and Technological Breakthroughs at 01:47 PM)
From Street Tech, Gareth Branwyn says: "NanoMask [is a] nanoparticle-coated filter mask designed to 'arrest and eradicate...undesirable agents.' Send before midnight tonight, and they'll also toss in a free ebook ("H5N1 Virus: How to Protect Your Family Against the Coming Pandemic"), AND if you buy the family pack of 5-color-coded masks, they'll throw in a free bottle of snake oi...er... ImmunAssure, the 'amazing virus-fighting tablet.' Wait, I thought the mask had already killed the virus dead on contact. Oh well, best not to think too hard here." 
the CommonCensus Map Project is using the votes of visitors to show the range of influence of US cities.
thanks Biewald
I added a small amplifier that I found on some toy speakers to increase the sound volume and quality. Don't worry, I respect others when I play music. It's my school backpack first and foremost.Link (via MAKE: Blog)
Everything shown is from a thrift store except for the eyelets/hinges/clasps, which came from a local hardware store. The strap is a modified women's belt, and the boombox had a damaged speaker cover that I replaced with that rabbit.
I was picking up food from a fast food restaurant one day, and an old man told me that he is happy that I'm "taking the music to the streets." That practically brought a tear to my eye.
Google vs. China!!!
RSA Europe 2005 RSA's cryptography guru Burt Kaliski has warned the US' planned introduction of electronic passports represents a long-term challenge for the security industry.…
Next stop for RFID, your passport.
"UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts." Noncommercial, educational purposes only. Free, free, free to see and share.
RSA Europe 2005 Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, ex-chairman of Qinetiq and a former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee which oversees UK security services, told the Register that international agreements on security and technology are needed for the good of the business community and wealth generation, rather than as a tool against terrorists.…
well, we always knew this. easier to sell the ID card to public as an anti-terrorist device though rather than a tool to help big business make more $$$.
Concealed hearing devices of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This photograph shows the Rhodes Audiphone in use. The model holds a flexible sheet of vulcanite, adjusted to a convex shape by means of cords, between her teeth. Sound was gathered through the fan area, then traveled via the upper teeth to the inner ear by bone conduction. The cords kept the fan under tension, providing for better vibration. The sound device on the model's lap is a folding "Dentaphone," a similar bone conduction hearing device.
The EFF has broken the tracking code for the Xerox
DocuColor. The DocuColor prints a faint 15x8 grid of yellow dots on every page. To see these dots you need a
magnifying glass. You can also use a blue light to make the dots appear black. The EFF page has a built in application
for decoding the dots which hide the time, date, and serial number of the printer. The EFF also maintains a
list of printers which do or don’t have this
“feature”.
[via BoingBoing]
eeek! of course my first entry is about human tracking...
and, thanks mike for the intro below. looking forward to my daily dose of blog reading/dispersing for the next 2 weeks. i will try to keep my own "babbling" to a minimum -- but can't promise nuthing.
Thanks Benj for a great 2 weeks. Up next is Friend-of-Eyebeam Brooke Singer.
Brooke Singer is a digital media artist who lives in Brooklyn. Her most recent collaborations utilize wireless (Wi-Fi, mobile phone cameras, RFID) as tools for initiating discussion and positive system failures. She is focused on emerging technologies not only because they are fun but also because they are malleable and contingent. She is currently Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY Purchase. She is also a co-founder of the art, technology and activist group Preemptive Media.
go for it B!
Hey, it's been great reblogging but now time for me to clock out. On to whoever they've tapped next.--bg
When I first saw the link to this story, I thought it was yet another illuminated nanospheres zapping cancer report; after all, lots of places appear to be working on that technology, so we should start seeing more results in the months to come. This one turns out to be different, however: University of Delaware researchers have put together a system that quite literally blows apart cancerous tissue with minimal damage to nearby healthy cells. The research was reported in the journals NanoBiotechnology and Oncology Issues.
In the NYT/IHT, there is a good article about As gadgets replace toys, what’s in it for kids? By Michael Barbaro. It’s about an important trend: adults’ and kids’ artifacts like high-tech gadgets are now tending to be the same.
the push to sell consumer electronics to preteens is touching off an animated debate about whether the products qualify as toys, as manufacturers contend, and whether it is wise to break down one of the last barriers between children’s play and adult technology.
For decades, toy makers have designed products that allow children to mimic adult behavior, but it was, in the end, always make-believe. No matter how many electronic bells and whistles the latest toy truck had, it was still a toy. But with the latest crop of electronics for children 6 to 12, there is little pretending. The adult’s product and the child’s are often one and the same.
Why do I blog this? this trend is interesting, artifacts like cell-phones, digital video camera, DVD players are now used by both; how this is reflected in their design? and what would be the impacts of this: will kids drop kid-centered design and prefer the adults version?
