Laura Fernández and Marcos García are the content and program managers at Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain, positions they have held since September 2006. In Spring 2006 they initiated Interactivos? as part of the educational program they ran at Medialab Madrid from 2004 on. Both are Fine Arts graduates.

via http://www.artgraphics.ru/best/winners.html

Nick Anderson / Houston Chronicle

Recent advancements in the field of urban computing and visualization of electronic traces left by people in the physical space are more and more raising privacy issues. After a time where they’ve been carried out by public bodies, artists and research labs, some private initiatives and private research projects are now taking the lead, which raise the concerns even more than in the recent past.

The Guardian tackles that issue in an article about Bluetooth watching yesterday. The Cityware project in Bath is indeed looking at how people move around in cities by using scanning devices in certain locations unknown to the public. Bluetooth signals coming from devices such as mobile phones, laptops and digital cameras are captured and help to pinpoint people’s whereabouts in a now classic way. The main problem of course is that urban dwellers are then tracked without their consent, which leads privacy activists to qualify this kind of project as “yet another example of moronic use of technology”.

(Space syntax analysis from the Cityware project showing people using mobile phones (red) and cameras (blue) in an urban location (Bath Abbey))

So what are the elements at stake? Some excerpts from the article:

“ The Bath University researchers behind the project claim their scanners do not have access to the identity of the people tracked. Eamonn O’Neill, Cityware’s director, said: “The objective is not to track individuals, whether by Bluetooth or any other means. We are interested in the aggregate behaviour of city dwellers as a whole. The notion that any agency would seriously consider Bluetooth scanning as a surveillance technique is ludicrous.” But privacy experts disagree, pointing out that Bluetooth signals are assigned code names that can, to varying degrees, indicate a person’s identity.

Many people use pseudonyms, nicknames, initials, or abbreviations to identify their Bluetooth signals. Cityware’s scanners are also picking up signals that are listed using people’s full name, email address and telephone numbers.

Some claims there are solutions to these problems but harmful scenarios can be considered:

“Vassilis Kostakos, a former member of Cityware who now does Bluetooth experiments on buses in Portugal for the University of Madeira, accepted such tracking was a problem. “We are actually trying to fix this,” Kostakos said. “If a person’s phone is talking to a scanner, then they should be told about it. Any technology can have good and bad consequences. In many ways, I think the role of a scientist is to point out both. I agree this is complex and I agree there are harmful scenarios.”
(…)
Kostakos said he could foresee complex ways in which criminals could exploit the technology, adding: “I recently tried to look at people’s travel patterns across the world, and we [saw] how a unique device which showed up in San Francisco turned up in Caracas and then Paris.”“

Why do I blog this? the article covers the ambivalence of that topic and how each stakeholders (researchers on one side and privacy activists on the other) have their own concerns and claims. Following the advancement of the field or a certain amount of time, I do agree we have no answers so far. Since lots of the studies so far have focused on “counting” people and measuring flows, it’s interesting to note that it’s not the first time urban planners are looking at intimate part of city dwellers’s lives. For example, the use of trash content analysis is an important method for that matter, which seems to raise less concerns, although it can also be invasive (but less relational since it’s easier to connect a Bluetooth ID to an email than linking a trashed Big Kahuna Burger to your social security #).

A bit more surprising is the article conclusion with this weird assertion: “some scientists using the technology describe a future scenario in which homes and cars adapt services to suit their owners, automatically dimming lights, preparing food and selecting preferred television channels“. It’s always weird to me to see this kind of engineer nonsense popping up again and again over time. Nonetheless I find it interesting as this sort of automation is a recurring dream that shows the perpetuation of bad ideas in design over time. It’s been few months that we’re discussing these issues with Fabien or Julian. Concerning the use of electronic traces, I am less interested in how it can help automating processes and depressing stuff like the one described above.

(Photo by Andrew Huff)

This skeleton of melted audio cassette tapes was created by artist Brian Dettmer. Titled "Skull #11", we wouldv'e also accepted "Phantom of a Hot Summer's Dashboard" - Casette Tape Skeleton on Flickr

More:
Old books sculptures (also by Brain Dettmer)

Worth a watch.

Matthew Yglesias over at The Atlantic points us to this eye-popping chart from A Better Way to Go, a USPIRG Education Fund report published in March 2008. Download the report here. It's a good one to have on-hand. A few factoids to accompany the chart:

• Since 1956, federal, state and local governments have invested nine times more capital funding in highway subsidies than in transit.
• In 2004, state governments spent nearly 13 times more public funds on highways than on transit.
• The process for securing funding for new transit lines is far more onerous and less certain than for highway projects, with the federal government generally picking up a smaller share of the tab for new transit lines than for new highway projects.

Yglesias also notes:

Of course you can't bring this subject up without legions of people informing you that the gas tax pays for the highways. This simply isn't true. All the funds raised by the gas tax are spent on highways, and then a bunch of additional money is also spent on highways.

Mark Delucchi at the U.C. Davis Institute for Transportation Studies backs that up as well. In a study published last fall, Delucchi found that "current tax and fee payments to the government by motor-vehicle users fall short of government expenditures related to motor-vehicle use by approximately 20 to 70 cents per gallon of all motor fuel." U.S. drivers do not pay their own way.

After the jump is another great chart from A Better Way to Go. Anyone want to guess how many millions of dollars in gasoline cost savings and tons of carbon dioxide emissions reductions the New York City Transit produces annually?

a set of giant posters located in Madrid, London, Berlin, Brussels & Milan that monitor the noise level on a high-traffic roads. ambient noise levels are displayed via decibel meters connected to LED screens embedded in billboards, in homage to Noise Awareness Day (April 16). the posters were part of AEG-Electrolux's advertising campaign supporting its new silent washing machine. the accompanying Web site also compares decibel levels of the major urban areas on line graphs to learn more about the detriments of noise pollution.

"Local school kids are taking it a step further and are deliberately shouting at the sign in unison in order to make the numbers change. The Manager of the night club is finding the poster helpful too – he is taking photos of the sign in the early hours of the morning to show the local council that he is not making too much noise."

[link: noiseawareness.co.uk & noiseawareness.blogspot.com (blog) & creativity-online.com ]

Africa as you’ve never seen it - Pieter Hugo | Art & Architecture | guardian.co.uk Arts

"I have a deep suspicion of photography… And, I particularly distrust portrait photography. I mean, do you honestly think a portrait can tell you anything about the subject? And, even if it did, would you trust what it had to say?’

via http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1181/577757648_bc67221ffe.jpg?v=0

Paola e Bettino (2006, 4MB, 2:24 min)

By brothers Marco and Saverio Lanza.

via http://www.vvork.com/

Pleasure of Finding Things Out by Richard P. Feynman is a great explanation of how scientists think: “The science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower”

I did post on this before. Related book: Classic Feynman: All the Adventures of a Curious Character.

Related: Vega Science Lectures: Feynman and More - How flowering plants beat the competition - What Are Flowers For?

My boy Dave Woroner sent this little item along to me and I forward it with enthusiasm.

Aside from the interesting blog site for BTDTs from which this issue came, the imagery of Chinese SWAT operators chasing down Olympic terrorists with little scooters tickles my funny bone.

From Breach, Bang, Clear:

That's right. The rolling thunder that is China's eeee-light counter-terrorist unit is locked, loaded and good to go...

No word yet on whether the gadget-loving higher-ups of the US military will invest the eleventy zillion dollars necessary to develop their own electric powered individual soldier short-range expedient deployment vehicle (or EPISSED to use the convenient acronym). Even if no one else wants one, we're confident the Air Force will buy at least a couple so the zipper-suited sun gods don't get footsore on the way to their planes.

Now, all jokes aside, the Air Force really could use some Segways on their flightlines for maintainers, loaders and crews. The huge fields employed stateside and in Iraq are littered with bicycles, so why not Segways? And I remember talking to the former head of the Marine Corps' "Chemical, Biological Incident Response Force" a few years ago and he mentioned they were looking into buying Segways to help shuttle their chem-bio suit-laden troops back and forth to infected areas.

But I do always laugh at the beat cops who hum around on these contraptions (a lot of DC, and Capitol Police included) -- which any jail-fearing perp could easily outrun..."Wait! Wait! Come back here!"...

-- Christian

via http://knuttz.net/hosted_pages/Assorted-Images-20071130?2

This little guy scares the daylights out of me: a Roomba topped with an animatronic chimp head. No purpose is claimed, but I think it's safe to say it's for scaring pets and children. Does it remind anyone else of that episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force where they put Carl's head on an RC truck? Via BoingBoing.

Recently found Kevin Saunderson's Faces and Phases on beatport and d/l'ed it. He is one of the "Belleville Three" (Detroit Techno) guys along with Juan Atkins and Derrick May.

Gritty, direct, occasionally straight-up acid house-sounding, but where it's diverging into techno is the use of noise and potentially grating samples. Percussive sounds such as hats and claps rarely vary. It's just pow-pow-pow-pow while low-res samples growl and wail (well, not really, it's more musical than that). Nowadays software makes it so easy to add randomization and subtle filtering to the percussion so these hits sound deliberately minimal, when it was really probably the best the machines could do. (Am guessing it's mostly the 909 drum computer since the hats sound like samples of hats rather than synthesized hats.)

Was searching around online for the Virgin (sublabel) disc from 1988, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit that introduced the Belleville Three and others to Europe. Surprisingly it seems not to have been reissued. Would love to hear that time capsule and imagine how it sounded to ears unfamiliar with these musical strategies. I actually know people who think electronic pop music innovation started and stopped with Kraftwerk but that's just wrong.

[Related: Pitchfork interview with some of the innovators.]

[Unrelated: Philip Sherburne on the malaise in the current dance scene. I am not feeling this because I am not producing tracks for the dance floor. It's still fun for me because I have no rules to obey.]

Lucas Gonze:

Now consider that internet music businesses have to compete for investment capital with internet businesses that don’t pay royalties. Craigslist, Google search, and Twitter do nothing but move bits around!

Lastly, returning to the conversation about netlabels the other day, I want to point out that netlabel and other net-native music doesn’t have a lot of listeners, but as long as it stays clear of copyright infringement it can have economics just like Craiglist, Twitter etc. Maybe not at that scale, but definitely at that level of profitability.

And I know that people on the business side of internet music see net-native music as a joke. That’s right big shots, I’m talking to you specifically. Make free and legal music popular enough for your traffic to scale and you can have the grail — an internet music product that makes sense as a business. Which is exactly what Phlow-Magazine is working on by slicking up the presentation of those sources.

Victor Stone comments on the above post:

Maybe not at that scale, but definitely at that level of profitability.

Does anybody, anywhere doubt that at some point

1) a ‘net native’ artist will actual break. iow, do we really think Brad Sucks has hit the ceiling?

2) when that artist breaks without any “industry” juice, not even sxsw, the margins will be ginormous, the flood gates will open.

These things are stupendously obvious things to me. Does anybody out there question these certainties?

Relatedly, Gonze posting on the cc-community list:

In reality, the benefit [of allowing commercial use] is to maximize upsales by empowering businesses to build support systems for your music.

I highly recommend following the blogs of Gonze and Stone if you want to know where ‘net native’ (and eventually most) music is going.

“Dust Cover”, 2008 and “Double Santa”, 2005 by Roe Ethridge.

Get surprisingly good sound from disposable picnicware with this easy to make and inexpensive Styrofoam Plate Speaker. Thanks go to José Pino for the original article in Make Magazine.

To download Styrofoam Plate Speaker MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.

Check out the Styrofoam Plate Speaker article MAKE 12 "Styrofoam Plate Speaker" & You can see that in our digital edition.

Living in New York has made me very suspicious of giant, looming cranes. Sure, it's partly because they have a tendency to fall down, but it's also because the presence of a crane signifies a new high-rise billion-dollar piece of crap is about block out the sky. But then along comes something like Dinner In The Sky, a "what won't the rich spend money on" idea wherein the crane helps celebrate the sky by hoisting a table full of diners up into the air and serving them a luxury meal. What dinner wouldn't taste better while dangling 500 feet above the ground? What says "I Love You" more than suspending your family and friends over a treasured monument? And what screams "our company has more disposable income than yours" quite like an evening floating in the air with the Board of Directors and a bunch of Star Wars characters?

And what is the perfect food to eat in this situation? I say there's a certain yin and yang purity to eating foods up high that were dredged from the depths. Yes, sushi!

via http://img210.imageshack.us/my.php?image=458360195bb2d376255bkg4.gif

Rent a wreck (2005, 21 MB, 3;13 min.)

Suburban Kids with Biblical Names is a swedish band formed
in December 2003 by Johan Hedberg and Peter Gunnarsson.
They make and record their music in the hallway or the storehouse
at the home of Peter’s parents. Johan makes simple drafts of the songs
and then Peter polish them and turn them into shiny pop songs.

David Rokeby, A Very Nervous System, Image via: David Rokeby

“Is art running out of ideas? Artists forced to explain modern art”, runs the headline of Tom Lubbock’s piece in the Independent yesterday. After discussing viewer experience and publicity interpretation of Martin Creed’s Work No. 850, a performance work in which relays of young runners sprint one at a time from one end of the central Duveen Gallery to the other, he breaks down the problem as such:

What we’re up against here are two of contemporary art’s guiding imperatives. Rule 1) Justification by meaning: the worth and interest of a work resides in what it’s about. Rule 2) Absolute freedom of interpretation: a work is “about” anything that can, at a pinch, be said about it.

In short, meanings are arbitrary, but compulsory. And this double bind holds almost universal sway. Whenever you learn that a work explores or investigates or raises questions about something, that it’s concerned with issues around this or notions of that or debates about the other, you know you’re in its grip.

It’s weird how people can’t resist. If you want to make art sound serious, this is simply the way you do it. Read any gallery wall-caption or leaflet or catalogue, and see how long it is before the writer commends the work solely on the basis of what it’s about. And then note how it is isn’t really about that at all.

Lubbock goes on to discuss two examples in which the expressed meaning of an artwork limited its interpretation. The piece is a great meditation on the act of viewing and criticism and well worth the read in its entirety. So much so, in fact, that Jonathan Jones at the Guardian responded today with his own thoughts on the subject, reducing these ideas to vast generalizations about art that needs interpretation. “It is a vice of second-rate art to come with its own eloquent explanation attached.” writes Jones, “If an artist can translate the meaning and purpose of a work into easily understandable words, it means one of two things. Either the artist is lying, in order to ease the way with patrons and funders; or the artist is a fool.”

Come on. Now artists who attempt to explain their work are liars seeking a quick buck? The argument makes no sense, and Jones doesn’t even try to support it, citing no examples where he found this to be the case. The writer then goes on to identify public art as the source of all these art-that-needs-its-own-explanation troubles in Britian, an awfully Eurocentric view considering American art suffers from the same issues, and receives a fraction of the public funding.

Interestingly, Jones uses a quote from a Jackson Pollock grant application as a guide for how artists should describe their work. “The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state, and an attempt to point out the direction of the future, without arriving there completely.” writes Pollock, nearly 60 years ago. Jones says he likes the statement because it doesn’t tell us what to think and indeed, the artist himself described an interest in passive viewers who didn’t bring “subject matter or preconceived ideas…to the work“.

But the difference between Pollock and many artists working today, is that Pollock intended the dialog between the art and its audience to be one way. Certainly, that way of thinking still has its place, though the very fact that the turn of phrase “limits the conversation”, is frequently applied to art making and statements suggests a far different intent for art and an evolved discourse. While text lacking explanation may have suited Pollock, exhibition labels and artist statements today often seek to involve the viewer in other ways, so vagueness may not always be appropriate. Interactive artist David Rokeby provides the best example I can think of in this regard, writing very clear, often “explainy” statements.

Very Nervous System is the third generation of interactive sound installations which I have created. In these systems, I use video cameras, image processors, computers, synthesizers and a sound system to create a space in which the movements of one’s body create sound and/or music.

I created the work for many reasons, but perhaps the most pervasive reason was a simple impulse towards contrariness. The computer as a medium is strongly biased. And so my impulse while using the computer was to work solidly against these biases. Because the computer is purely logical, the language of interaction should strive to be intuitive. Because the computer removes you from your body, the body should be strongly engaged. Because the computer’s activity takes place on the tiny playing fields of integrated circuits, the encounter with the computer should take place in human-scaled physical space. Because the computer is objective and disinterested, the experience should be intimate.

Clearly, the vague Jackson Pollock-esque statement isn’t appropriate for this artist, and Rokeby’s specificity, which only continues in the statement certainly isn’t hurting the art.  I’m simply not convinced explanation or content gets in the way of art — though I will agree that there is no replacement for its experience.   And, in this regard, I can’t imagine there’d be much descent.

via http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Retro-Futurism/96557

DT contributer emeritus Chris Michel gave us a heads up about a series of photos over at Gizmodo that show details of the aftermath of the B-2 crash in Guam a few months back.

Here's one of them:

Composites have afforded amazing performance capabilities in modern aircraft but they are nasty when they burn. The fibers get airborne in a fire and can get into the lungs of those who might inadvertantly breath the smoke -- which is why crash crews are careful to wear respirators even after that flames die off.

Messy, ain't it?

(Gouge: CM)

-- Ward

Here's one I've been holding onto for a rainy day, (from 2007) celebrating one of the greatest actors to ever live. Coming next: Jackie Chan Fight Scenes (Probably after Rocky Month is over)

Author: JamesNintendoNerd
Keywords: jackie chan stunts action cinemassacre
Added: March 18, 2008