Mark Frauenfelder: Today's LA Times has a short article about Tribewanted, a project to recruit 5,000 people from around the world who want to live on an island with 100 other people for a couple of weeks and build a community.

The goal: to build a sustainable eco-community and keep at bay developers with dreams of massive hotel complexes.

Memberships — Nomad ($220), Hunter ($440) and Warrior ($660) — entitle members to seven, 14 or 21 days on the palm-fringed 200-acre oasis, 100 at a time. Fees cover food, lodging and local airport transfer.

This is not for the five-star hotel crowd. The tribe will be roughing it, especially the early arrivals, who will have only tents and basic shower and toilet facilities.

"The first job for the tribe," [co-founder Ben] Keene said, "is to build for those who come later," working alongside paid Fijian laborers to build beach huts. There's no electricity, but solar energy will provide Internet access.

So far, about 400 people have signed up, ranging in age from 18 to 67. Link

Lindsay Lawson is a Los Angeles-based artist whos work I love. Her website has amazing videos, including her reenactment of the Challenger disaster. --JH

We posted the NY Times story about mock Iraqi villages in Nevada, and now here's Wired reporting on Baghdad, USA, a.k.a. the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana.

"The 4,000 guardsmen here for these late-winter exercises will encounter 500 soldiers from the 509th, 500 support staff, a dozen Apache and Blackhawk combat helicopters, 30 tank-like Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 1,000 jeeps, Humvees, and sundry other things with wheels. Commanders on the ground get video feeds from simulated surveillance planes flown over 3-D maps of the battlefield. In-game journalists produce three daily newspapers, a radio show, and a nightly reel of video highlights. More than 200 of the role-players are Arab Americans, many of them Iraqis, bussed in from around the US for extra realism. A three-week exercise can cost up to $9 million.

The environment, too, is eerily detailed. Many of the 'towns' are rough models: a handful of corrugated aluminum and wood-frame buildings with an upright drainage pipe serving as a minaret for the mosque, for example. But the most elaborate town, Suliyah – officially named Shughart-Gordon, after two soldiers killed in Somalia – has dozens of multistory concrete buildings, including a school with a playground, an open-air market, and a convincingly equipped hospital. There’s even a cemetery. During exercises, the pumps at the gas station can explode in a 30-foot fireball. Rooftop concussion cannons throw in random bursts of noise and flame. Fog machines and speakers fill the buildings with smoke and the sounds of gunfire or barking dogs. More than 900 cameras record it all."

Wow. Personally, I found myself thinking a lot about the guys who plan the structures and paths, paint the anti-American grafitti on the buildings, publish the newspapers. You know, the designers. No doubt they're masters and commanders of the persona - that singular, official version and vision of the Iraqi people that soldiers will carry into battle. But the situations in which these personas act must be quite complex: "We’ll never win by killing all the insurgents. We have to get the support of the population."

Cubic, the defense contractor involved in the training, treats combat as somewhat of an affective spectacle, while the military focuses on the minutia of everyday life:

"They’ve staged bloody aftermaths of bomb attacks, applying gory makeup to Vietnam veterans with missing limbs to make extra-convincing bomb victims. Teams of 'firemarkers' zip around the Box on all-terrain vehicles, rigging up Hollywood-style pyrotechnics for roadside bombs and explosives-laden cars. Prevatt reminisces about a mass grave they created, a charnel pit of bound mannequins with simulated head wounds. 'We put a bunch of bones and meat in there and buried it for a couple days so it would smell right,' he says.

The JRTC expends enormous resources on elaborate scenarios that try to replicate, predict, and manipulate human behavior. That can mean gunshots, but more often it means subjecting troops to hours of entirely prosaic jobs. Trainees at Polk spend days guarding gates, maintaining security at demonstrations, and placating civilian leadership. 'It’s all about building and developing relations with the locals,' says Petraeus of the Combined Arms Center. 'Knowledge of the cultural terrain is as important as knowledge of the physical terrain'."

But, really, I just have to wonder why the official JRTC & Fort Polk website prominently displays phone numbers to report child and spouse abuse or sexual assault. Is pseudo war and hatred during the day making these folks freak out on their loved ones when they get home at night?

Harry Potter-style, just five years away! telegraph | via

Peter Baldes' animations are very great. You have to see them. I also like his new animation, Joan Jonas, Vertical Roll, Sliced vertically, which is included in the gifshow curated by Marisa Olson. --JH

Awww! Brian Blomerth's video strictly for kittens. So Cute!

--JH

The fictional reenactment of my American Idol audition! ;)

This is very funny. --JH

Graffiti Research Lab's Throwies at the Maker Faire

James Powderly sat down with me and walked me through the process of making throwies. They are easy to make and fun to throw on things. Graffiti Research Labs brought in a bus and they let people make throwies to throw on things. In this video (see original post), James explains that throwies are more than little lights to throw around. GRL takes it conceptually deeper by exploring political issues around prison time for graffiti artists and bringing those issues to communities in a gentle way...

Previous Throwie Articles: howto, throwie talkies, on/off tabs, and motion sensitive. Thowie instructions and interesting discussion is over at instructables and for subscribers, here is the Digital Edition Throwie Article. I used a few seconds of footage from two GRL videos that you can watch here and here. Both vids are great. Go watch them too! Click here to get the video (MP4) delivered automatically with iTunes. This video will play on PC/Mac/Linux/PSPs and iPod video devices - Link. Make Podcast. [Posted by Bre Pettis on MAKE Blog]

Hikers with GPS receivers have mapped out previously uncharted trails between Santa Clarita and Palmdale in northern Los Angeles County, California, the LA Daily News reports. The maps, which were tentatively approved by the county's Regional Planning Commission this week,...

people hike in LA? cough cough . . . seriously? cough . . . --JH

A California appeals court kills Apple's efforts to unmask an anonymous source who'd leaked inside info to two blogs, rejecting Apple's argument that the bloggers aren't covered by reporter's shield laws. In 27B Stroke 6.

AP - Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says he has leg-pressed 2,000 pounds, but some say he'd be in a pretty tough spot if he tried.

Urban Eyes

HTTP Gallery is pleased to present Urban Eyes, an intermedia project by Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva. Private View: 1st June 2006 7-9pm; Exhibition: 1st June - 9th July 2006, Friday- Sunday: 12 noon-5 pm; Unit A2, Arena Business Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY; tel: + 44 (0)20 8802 2827; info[at]http.uk.net

Urban Eyes uses wireless technology, birdseeds and city pigeons to reconnect urban dwellers with their surroundings. The Urban Eyes feeding-platform stands in one of London's public spaces. By landing on the platform, pigeons tagged with RFID chips send aerial photographs of their locality to surrounding Bluetooth-enabled devices. In this work pigeons become maverick messengers in the information super-highway, fusing feral and digital networks. HTTP Gallery provides an interface to the project, mixing live and documentary footage and offering visitors an opportunity to experiment with Bluetooth.

Being one of the last remaining signs of nature in a metropolis such as London, the urban pigeon population represents a network of ever-changing patterns more complex than anything ever produced by a machine. However pigeons' movements are based on a one-mile radius around their nest. Any pigeon you see everyday shares the same turf as you. Urban Eyes crosses and expands human mobility patterns offering to reconnect you with your neighbourhood.

In the 1960s, situationists Debord and Jorn composed psycho-geographic diagrams of Paris, which described navigational systems based on their drift through the city. For this, they used Blondel la Rougery's Plan de Paris a vol d'oiseau, a bird-eyes map of Paris. Inspired by this methodology, Urban Eyes enlists our feathered neighbours to establish a connection between the bird-eyes view of the city as now distributed by Google Earth and our terrestrial experience. [Related]

About Marcus Kirsch and Jussi Angesleva

Marcus Kirsch holds an MA in Interaction Design from Royal College of Art. He was invited to the 2004 Seoul Biennale and as exhibiting artist and to last year's Rotterdam International Film Festival and DEAF Festival. He was awarded a silver Art Directors Club NY and a fusedspace.com award in collaboration with Jussi for 'Urban Eyes'.

Jussi Angesleva holds MA in Audio Visual Media Culture from the University of Lapland in Finland, and MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art and has shown at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Siggraph, ZKM and Science Museum London. He has received awards from Royal Society of Arts, NESTA, from D&AD (together with Ross Cooper), Prix Ars Electronica and the Art Directors Club of Europe. He is currently working at ART+COM in Berlin, Germany and is a co-founder of new media agency Prosopon.

For more information and images, please contact Stephanie Delcroix

This project is supported by Arts Council England (London), V2 lab (Rotterdam, Netherlands) and Furtherfield.org.

Asklepius M.D. writes "According to the Washington Post, France is contemplating legislation designed to 'to force compatibility between digital songs and the different machines that play them.' Known colloquially as the 'iPod bill', it is opposed by Apple, the Business Software Alliance, and others who refer to it as 'state-sponsored piracy.' Two versions of the bill have already passed France's Senate and National Assembly. From the article: 'Under the proposed law, Apple Computer Inc., Sony Corp., Dell Inc. and other companies could have to reveal trade secrets of their software so that their songs can play on competitors' devices.'"

From the dog, tiger and pig website that is ModernPooch.com we have this amazing story.

In a zoo in California, a mother tiger gave birth to a rare set of
triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due to complications in the pregnancy,
the cubs were born prematurely and due to their tiny size, they died shortly
after birth.
The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to
decline in health, although physically she was fine. The veterinarians felt
that the loss of her litter had caused the tigress to fall into a
depression. The doctors decided that if the
tigress could surrogate another mother's cubs, perhaps she would improve.

After checking with many other zoos across the country, the depressing news
was that there were no tiger cubs of the right age to introduce to the
mourning mother. The veterinarians decided to try something that had never
been tried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother of one species will take
on the care of a different species. The only "orphans" that could be found
quickly, were a litter of weaner pigs.
The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the piglets in tiger skin and placed the
babies around the mother tiger.

Thanks to Jodi for this!

bitforms gallery has just opened an exhibition with works by Bjoern Schuelke and by R. Luke Dubois.

Drone 6 and Installation shot

Schuelke is showing 12 of his Solar Kinetic Objects, sculptures powered and adorned by solar cells, some which employ tiny red blinking lights and propellers.; Nervous a fluffy bright ball of fur that shakes, emits beeps and funny sounds as viewers move closer to it (video from Beap04); the Aerophon #4, a motorized pipe organ that responds to motion with bellows of sound and compression of the instrument’s body.

R. Luke Dubois' works explore the constructions of pop-cultural ephemera and its temporal value structure.

Billboard, a 37-minute sound installation for iPod, uses all the songs that topped Bilboard’s Hot 100 chart chronologically since August 1958. Each of the 857 songs plays for one second, representing each week the song stayed at #1.

Billboard and Academy

His video installation Academy arrays algorithmically determined visual averages of all the past Academy Award "Best Picture" winners since 1927, smearing film sets and actors together in time. In a third installation, Play, the flickering faces of every Playboy Magazine centerfold from the publication’s first 50 years (1953 to 2004) meld together, emerging with a collective portrait.

The exhibition runs until July 15, 2006, at the bitform gallery, New York.

Via see art/make art. Images courtesy of the gallery. PDF of the press release.

Reuters - A swan has fallen in love with a plastic swan-shaped paddle boat on a pond in the German town of Muenster and has spent the past three weeks flirting with the vessel five times its size, a sailing instructor said Friday.

Filed under: Portable Audio

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A survey conducted by the Piaggio Group (the guys who make Vespas) concluded that almost one in three Americans would be extremely or somewhat likely to consider using a motor scooter (like the new Piaggio MP3 pictured above) for their everyday transportation needs. Conducted during the first week in May 2006, the survey respondents indicated that they'd be willing to transfer 35% of their weekly mileage to a scooter. "Scooters" were defined in the survey as two-wheel vehicles that can reach 40-100mph, whose average cost is $2,000 or above. The survey found other strong factors motivating consumer's willingness to consider utilizing a scooter, including environmental concerns and overall cost savings. The survey found that 33% of Americans would be likely to use a scooter to reduce emission harmful to the environment, 35% would be likely to use a scooter to save $25.00 a week on gasoline. TreeHugger would prefer that potential scooter riders everywhere would consider some electric alternatives, though options like Vespa's new hybrid make us smile. Even sticking with gas-only scooters, the survey findings, when compared to Department of Energy national averages on fuel consumption, found that more extensive scooter use could save up to 14 million gallons of gas per day and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 324 million pounds per day. ::Piaggio Survey via ::Green Car Congress

Duh!! Welcome to my life ! --JH

Two days ago, curator and architect Carson Chan was kind enough to give me a little tour of the building works for the upcoming Berlin - Tokyo/Tokyo - Berlin, an exhibition that will open on June 7 and run until October 3 in Berlin at the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery).

Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo traces the cultural links between the two capitals from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day. A first part of the it has been exhibited at the beginning of this year at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.

Toyo Ito had been invited (or should i say "challenged") to design the internal architecture of the glass and steel lobby created by Mies van der Rohe in 1968.

The Japanese architect came up with a structure that is in total contrast with the usual order, clarity and simplicity design of van der Rohe's temple. Ito used the floor of the lobby as a 120 x 120 grid and covered it with a wooden waving floor, creating a striking hilly landscape. When finished the plan is to paint the structure in white and let visitor explore it at their whim. Looking forward to see the end result.

There's a few images on flickr (the nice ones are by Carson, the crappy ones i mine.)

Dotnaught writes "Honda researchers to have developed a way to control robots using human brain waves. Using brain signals read from a person in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, a robotic hand mirrored the movement of the human controller, spreading its fingers and making a 'V' sign."

This very important film about global warming has now opened in select theaters in New York City and California. We strongly encourage you to go, even if you think you'll disagree with parts or all of it (if you're going to criticize it, at least know what you're talking about). It's important to get people talking about this crucial problem and we hope that an early success will give this movie wider distribution in the coming weeks. The theaters are: The Arclight in Hollywood, the Monica in Santa-Monica, the Lincoln Square in New York and the Sunshine in New York. We'll keep you updated as it opens in other areas (starting June 2nd). To find a theater, check out the official website and don't forget to visit our friends at StopGlobalWarming.org and sign up for their virtual march. See also ::An Inconvenient Truth - Coming to a Theatre Near You, ::RealClimate Reviews the Science of An Inconvenient Truth, ::An Inconvenient Truth Trailer Available at Apple, ::Movie Review: Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"

Here's a pretty good PDF on making your own mini-hydropower plant using (mostly) things you already have around the house - Link.

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

Teen obsession with their cell phones can be a sign of unhappiness and anxiety, according to a new medical study, reports The Press Democrat.

... "The study, presented Tuesday at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto, was among the first to explore the emotional significance of teens' cell phone habits as the device becomes more entrenched in today's youth culture.

Two of every five youths in the United States from age 8 to 18 own a cell phone, according to a recent survey. Students in grades seven through 12 spend an average of an hour a day on their cell phones - about the same amount of time they devote to homework.

Dr. Jee Hyan Ha, lead author of the latest report, said heavy cell phone users involved in his study weren't clinically depressed.

Rather, Ha said, the students probably were suffering from some serious cases of teen angst. The youths may have been unhappy because of a problem in their lives or anxious about their social status. "They are trying to make themselves feel better by reaching out to others,"

he said.

... Dr. Bruce Spring, assistant professor of Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, said that in some cases, light or no use of a cell phone might actually be a more serious warning sign.

"Teens who are really anxious and depressed won't be sending messages or making calls," he said.

Accessing Texts, Visual Poetry and Architecture

MIT researchers have developed a portable Seeing Machine, a system that could aid some blind people by projecting images directly onto the retina of the eye. Project leader Elizabeth Goldring first conceived of the device ten years ago when she was blind in both eyes due to hemorrhages in her retinas. (Surgery has since enabled her to see with one eye.) A physician examined Goldring with a scanning laser opthalmoscope (SLO), a $100,000 diagnostic medical device that uses a laser to project an image on the retina and detect damage. The Seeing Machine is based on similar technology but the prototype cost just $4,000. (The image here depicts Goldring looking at "an image she created to approximate what she sees when she looks through her seeing machine at an image of a staircase.") From MIT News Office:

Recently the machine received positive feedback from 10 visually challenged people with a range of causes for their vision loss who tested it in a pilot clinical trial...

Participants used the machine to view 10 examples of Goldring's visual language. A majority -- six -- interpreted all 10 "word-images" correctly. "They responded really well to the visual language," Goldring said. "One woman told me she would love to see recipes written that way."

They also used the machine to navigate through a virtual environment, raising the potential for "previewing" unfamiliar buildings a person wants to visit...

All of the participants reported that the machine "may have the potential to assist their mobility in unfamiliar environments," according to the Optometry article. Concluded Goldring: "A couple of them said they'd tried every seeing aid available (magnifying devices, etc.), and this was by far the best, even in this rough, rough shape.

" Link [posted by David Pescovitz on Boing Boing]

del.icio.us network
I just discovered the network feature in del.icio.us. Add me to your del.icio.us network if you want lots of links to js news and tutorials, php news and tutorials, web video, net art and other crap.

If you maintain del.icio.us bookmarks, let me know and I’ll add you to my network :-)

Michael Bell-Smith
MBS has a show up at Foxy Production (ends May 27 extended through June 3 (thx Barry)) and he’s had a review of it in the NYT. Congrats! Read Tom Moody’s take on it.

The GIF Show
A very belated link. oops.

The GIF Show, an exhibition opening May 3rd, at San Francisco’s Rx Gallery, takes the pulse of what some net surfers call ‘GIF Luv,’ a recent frenzy of file-sharing and creative muscle-flexing associated with GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format files).

Initiative for the Renaming of Names in Cambridge

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things is a highly original research organization based in Boston, whose mission is to invent and distribute new practices of political engagement in everyday life. This June, they are inviting members of the public to join them in a series of renaming expeditions in Cambridge, which will result in the publication of a new map of The City Formerly Known as Cambridge.

To rename a street, park, square or other part of Cambridge, MA, simply attend an expedition and fill out a form to justify your reasons for renaming. The first expedition takes place on June 1st at the public opening ceremony of the newly redesigned Porter Square plaza. As soon as it is officially named, it will be renamed! [blogged on GUERRILLA INNOVATION]

Yesterday marked the beginning of Institute for the Futures annual Tech Horizon conference. I have really been looking forward to this event since I got to meet so many visionary people at the last IFTF event.

Larry Smarr the Director of California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology was giving the first keynote tonight about telepresence and its social implications. And by telepresence he is talking about videoconferencing systems where the technology has intuitive interactions and the present difference between interactions face-to-face and a videoconferencing interaction will not be sensed – also called transparent telepresence.

He had some really interesting perspectives on processing power, storage capacity and bandwidth which will surpass human capabilities within the next 10-15 years and enable real time human level telepresence.

To give an example of his views of technology surpassing human capabilities is the eye-to-brain communication which is being done at about 1 gigabit/sec, a bandwidth speed introduced to the mass market some years ago but has yet to reach Internet Service Providers portfolio.

A possible social change with real time human perception level telepresence technology would be that humans have less real contact and would travel less. A scary forecast which I could see happen from a corporate point of view or the gaming room of teenagers chatting with friends, though studies has also concluded that the usage of current telepresence systems of remote interaction only encourages the drive to meet the people at the other end in real life.

If that study will reach the same conclusion when future telepresence systems gets similar abilities of real life human presence will be up for debate.

The Domestication of the Ambient Intelligence Space

"[...] By defining digital borders, the vision of digital territory creates a continuum between the physical world and its digitised counterpart. The construction of digital boundaries consolidates the gateways already established between these two worlds. This paradox will be catalysed by the implementation of a growing number of bridges between the two environments. Location-based services, radio frequency identification tags, body implants, ambient intelligence sensors, etc. will permit the implementation of a trustworthy environment and therefore the domestication of the ambient intelligence space by the individual. The vision will facilitate the transition through a traditional society that coexists with an information society, to a single society whose citizens have accepted and adopted the fusion of physical and digital realities. In this future society, people will still be able to control and manage distance from others with new tools provided by ambient intelligence space technologies." From DIGITAL TERRITORY: BUBBLES by Laurent Beslay and Hannu Hakala.

dont copy that floppy..........thx jacob

OMG! --JH