a set of time-based graphs that convey thousands of thumbnails from YouTube movies for specific tags, such as 'joke', 'cat' or 'wedding'. the thumbnails create a kind of "heat signature" which shows the increase in activity in YouTube in the last few months. vertically, the thumbnails are positioned by the hour of the day they were uploaded, & horizontally by the day of the year.
see also flickr tag graph. & Yahoo taglines & flickr image blending.
[krazydad.com|thnkx Steve]

krazydad is back with a vengeance! awesome use of the youtube API. -ADM

The Breath of Fire is just like your normal alcohol breathalyzer but with a different output; fire. breathe into the towering black machine and see your blood alcohol content displayed in a whole new way. (mostly a column of fire up to 14' tall)

sweet hot propane. electronics hackery. mmmm.

If you go down to the South Bank in London this summer, outside the Royal Festival Hall is a wonderful installation titled PLAY.Orchestra.

56 plastic cubes and 3 Hotspots are laid out on a full size orchestra stage, each cube containing a light and speaker. Sit down on the cube or stand in the hotspot to turn on that instrument and bring 58 friends to hear the full piece. People with Bluetooth phones will be able to receive a ringtone of the piece created, as well as upload their own sound samples in September.

The production blog gives an interesting insight into the installing process & the complexity of the project.

PLAY.orchestra is the result of a collaboration between Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments, South Bank Centre Education and the Philharmonia Orchestra.

This old 110 speed toy camera not only takes neat pictures, but it transforms into Voltron, defender of the universe - when you see a 110 speed photos, they just -look- like they were taken in the 70s/80s - [via] - Link.

More:
110 film - Link.

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I saw the World Processor project at the Edge Conditions show recently. It was a really nicely presented piece, but it turns out that there are a lot more (300+!!) globes than the 30-something that made the show. -ADM

Two... two sesame street videos on the eyebeam reblog today! [ah ah ah ah ah] -ADM

Pictures with lots of things in them, but in a specific way pool on Flickr.

My reblogging stint is coming close to a close so I want to share this Flickr group I started several months ago before I leave. The qualifications for photos that go in the pool are more specific than most Flickr pools, but at the same time, open to a lot of possibilities. I think this has resulted in our photo pool having an unusually unified aesthetic driven by a fascination with having lots of things within the frame of a picture -- all while encompassing lots of different subject matter! So join up and contribute, but as a word of warning, make sure your photograph has at least 47 things. ;) -ADM

Check out some of the beautiful typography projects at Marian Bantjes' website. -ADM

Skoltz_kolgen is a plurimedia work cell based in Montreal, comprising dominique [t] skoltz and herman w kolgen. Rigorous and raucous creators,their artistic pursuits plumb the integral linkages between sound and image. Skoltz_Kolgen create liminal worlds that exist in the nebulous territory between inner and outer space. Penetrating the ephemeral skin between solid matter and the unsubstantiated, the intimate and the objective, their work conjures bewitched worlds that gestate betwixt accident and intent. This liminal quality bleeds into all aspects of Skoltz_Kolgen’s practice, from the conceptual to the technical, as they balance on the cusp of art and science. Liberated by digital media they simultaneously assume numerous positions, inhabiting a space between film, photography, audio art, and installation. Their synergistic practice encompasses expanded cinema, explorations of the subtle and visceral qualities of sound, and hybrid forms of digitally enabled synaesthesia. Architects of worlds that simultaneously inhabit us as we inhabit them, Skoltz_Kolgen inquisitively seek out the intimate material and ineffable substance of life.

I'm going to see skoltz_kolgen tomorrow night. If you're in the SF Bay Area, I reccomend checking it out. I saw them perform ‘FLÜUX:/TERMINAL‘ last year at the REDCAT and it was a really amazing performance. Tonight and tomorrow night, they'll perform an evolved version of that along with a new work, asKaa. RML is supposed to have one of the best sound systems in the area so this is really going to be a treat. Learn more at the skoltz_kolgen website. -ADM

Abstract shooter fans: Be sure to check out Grid Wars 2, programmed by Mark Incitti in Blitz Basic and available for Windows, OS X, and Linux.

The game seems to be the most famous in a series of Geometry Wars clones that use the dual-stick move-and-shoot control scheme of Eugene Jarvis’s Robotron 2084 and radiant vectorized graphics. Grid Wars 2 features a wide variety of geometric shapes along with some snakes. It’s been upgraded substantially since its first release. At World of Stuart you can read some about why the gameplay may exceed that of its visually very similar Xbox progenitor.

If you haven't seen the mesmerizing Geometry Wars on Xbox 360, now is your chance to grab what is apparently the best clone of it. This is interesting though because I just read last week that this guy got a cease and desist letter from the makers of Geometry Wars for his first Grid Wars game. Now he's back with Grid Wars 2, but its not avaliable on his own site... its only hosted on this World of Stuart site. Regardless, grab it while you can because it apparently one-ups its predecessor with new gameplay twists AND its even avaliable for mac. -ADM

O'Reilly's Radar has a brief write up of a "3D live motion video camera that uses LIDAR technology to get a range-finding for every pixel" - you could "scan" an area and put all the 3D data in to just about any application, wow! Link & full image.

Related:
Google video tech talk about the camera - Link.

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luckily the helvetica scenario is a very rare occurance

luckily indeed! -ADM

Instrument consisting of 126, 1950’s bakelite telephones, on 11 channels of various alternating current, controlled by midi, approx. 11 minute composition, by James Beckett.

Originally from artificialeyes.tv reblog by mail reBlogged on Aug 16, 2006, 3:31PM

UnitedVisualArtists have just uploaded on their website a video of their latest project, Echo.

The 8-minute live performance piece was commissioned by Vamp and produced in collaboration with Mimbre for a launch in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern in London.

I found the video so beautiful that i pestered UVA with questions. Ash Nehru kindly answered me.

What's the technology behind Echo?

The LED screen we used was a Lighthouse R10 LED screen, 8m wide by 11m high. We used the Point Grey Labs' Bumblebee2 stereo camera system, mounted at the foot of the stage, and used our own proprietary software (dragonfly3) to render the resulting 3D point-cloud in real time. The motion of the 'virtual camera' was scripted within D3.

How about the collaboration with the dancers, Mimbre and choreographer Flick Ferdinando? How did it go?

Because we had very little rehearsal time (5 days), the dancers assembled the performance from sequences taken from their existing show, but simplified and slowed down to create a dreamlike, 'sculptural' effect. We set up the bumblebee system so that the choreographer could select moves that worked best for the camera.

Aside from offering our opinions as to which music worked best with which moves, we exercised as little control over the choreography as possible.

Once the choreography was fixed, we recorded the performance to create a 3D video file, which was then used to sequence the camera moves.

The idea for the performance came from our original work with the bumblebee system, an interactive installation called Mirror that we presented in the Kemistry gallery in horeditch, London. The particular rendering style we used for that project was developed slightly to work better with the LED screen.

Thanks Ash!

If you're in Northern Europe, Austin or Los Angeles, chances are that you can catch up with the work of UnitedVisualArtists, they are currently touring with Massive Attack.

More Interview of UnitedVisualArtists; their video for Colder.

Recorder & Space Simulator - Thomas Demand

Last week I visited the Thomas Demand exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The artist photographs models of interiors and public locations that he has painstakingly and methodically constructed using paper and cardboard to the finest of detail – indeed is only at very close view that these apparently ‘real’ photographs reveal their ‘simulation’. Many of the interiors have a clean but mundane appearance – I later found out that Demand often reconstructs models of images he has seen in the media, a further investigation into the way we obsess over media imagery and a way of creating tension between the fabricated and the real world.

One piece I found particularly mesmerising was actually the only film in the show. Recorder is a Super-8 loop of a reel-to-reel tape machine playing a snippet of a Beach Boys melody, which becomes highly recontextualised in its newly constructed mantra mode. You can view the loop at Thomasdemand.

Further links:
At the Victoria Miro
At the Moma

"Interactive City": Middle-Class Consumer Spectacle?

(note--Michelle also blogged about the iDC thread here]

Hello All -

A pleasure to meet some of you at ISEA. A brief introduction - my name is kanarinka/Catherine D'Ignazio. I am an artist, software developer, co-founder of iKatun and the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, former Co-Director of Art Interactive in Cambridge, MA, and part-time faculty in the Digital+Media dept at RISD. I have been lurking on the list for some time now but have not posted.

I wanted to post a nagging doubt I have in light of the title of the ISEA conference theme "Interactive City" in conjunction with the ZeroOne "Global Festival of Art on the Edge" and the artwork showcased there. This is not a condemnation, more of a call to reflection for myself (who participated in a project there) and possibly for others. I would be interested to hear from others as to their thoughts on this.

The festival's imagination of the "Interactive City" seemed to be characterized by a spirit of play which feels increasingly oriented towards middle-class consumer spectacle and the experience economy. To give you an example of some art experiences that were possible at ISEA:

- eating ice cream and singing karaoke
- calling an old person in San Jose to talk about whatever you might
have in common with them
- pressing a button on a machine and getting an artsy plane ticket
with your photo on it
- drifting through the city as if it were a sports field via applying
sports plays in urban space
- visualizing your social network via bluetooth as you go around the
conference and talk to your friends
- watching/listening to noise music made by people riding skateboards
around the conference
- listening to an erotic sci-fi narrative about san jose on your cell
phone while riding the train
- flipping light switches to make a one-word message in public space
- viewing colorful 3D representations of wireless digital data

So, my questions to the artists, the organizers, the attendees and everyone else is - is psychogeography/locative media work simply R&D for a new generation of entertainment spectacle? Or, what are we actually trying to do with these ideas of "play" in urban space? Who gets to play? And what about the interactive cities in Iraq and Lebanon and elsewhere? Why didn't we address war, security, militarization and terrorism as aspects of the contemporary interactive city? For me, running around making the city into a
sandbox, a playground or a playing field feels increasingly irrelevant and irresponsible.

A gentleman invited to drift with us summed it up nicely "Sorry, I can't go with you. I have to work here until 8PM and then I have to go to my other job."

What are your thoughts?

Thanks,
kanarinka [kanarinka at ikatun.com] [from iDC: Interactive City: irrelevant mobile entertainment?]

Responses:

Kevin Hamilton
Sarah Kanouse
tobias c. van Veen
Brad Borevitz
mollybh at netspace.net.au
Daniel A Perlin

Make sure to check out the responses linked at the bottom here. Definitely an interesting and important discussion. -ADM

via chamorro bible, thanks for the tip!

Today is an important milestone in the history of biofuels; the first 60,000 tonne load of palm oil based biofuel leaves Malaysia for Germany. The government is proud, and is working on cloning and replanting strategies to increase yield to one tonne of fresh fruit bunches per hectare and 26% extraction rate. Demand (and prices) are climbing . Meanwhile, 87% of deforestation in Malaysia was due to the creation of new palm oil plantations. Brazil is being turned into a soybean plantation Canada is going sea-to-sea canola. Biodiversity is trampled and food costs soar to keep our cars running as if nothing has changed. As of today it has- cute local Bio-willie or grow-your-own biofuel has gone big business. ::Malaysia Star

Mike Kuniavski, the curator of ISEA's interactive C4f3, picked up his five favourite projects of the festival. One of them is Mission Eternity by etoy, a white 20 foot sarcophagus that hosts a screen made of 17'000 LED lights and the ashes of the first Mission Eternity Pilots (who contribute their personal data and mortal remains). The sarcophagus was created from a shipping container and is used to archive and transport the "massive body of information" left behind after our death.

In Mike's words: The basic notion is to use the power of networked digital technology and inexpensive storage to keep aspects of us alive after we're dead. On one conceptual level, it externalizes the network of memories and documents we leave behind, and places them into a digital world, which is projected into the physical one as a shipping container sarcophagus filled. The sarcophagus is simultaneously a display, an environment and metaphor, and as it ages, etoy will replace the LEDs with the ashes of the people whose digital selves they manage.

Under the protection of thousands of Mission Eternity Angels (the living who provide a few mega bytes of their digital storage capacity) the Mission Eternity Pilots travel space and time forever. The Angels should be willing to share at least 50MB of disk space to host Arcanum capsules - the data of ME Pilots. A social back up solution establishes a p2p network that guarantees transparent long-term storage of data. The system and therefore the pilots only survives if Angels donate space.

The short-term plan (2006-2016) is to install an interactive city of the living and the dead that reconfigures the way information society deals with the conservation and loss of memory, time and death.

Sources for the images: digital brainstorming, etoy blog.

More afterlife projects:
Michele Gauler's Digital Remains; Auger and Loizeau's Afterlife; Merel Vantellingen's Spinning Tops.

1) Here is Masaaki (aka Anchorsong) from Tokyo, playing live with an MPC2000 and a Triton keyboard, building the tracks as he goes along. More great clips here and here.
2) Here is Daltron from Melbourne, playing an incredible live drum solo on the MPC4000 (it's a MySpace video. I'd say it's worth typing in your password, but not worth registering specially...)
3) Here is Pete Rock sampling, remixing and singing along with 'Love is a Battlefield'
4) In this report on an Atlanta beat battle, there's no live MPC action, but it provides several answers to the age-old question: 'What the hell kind of face am I supposed to pull when my music is playing on big speakers, people are listening, and I don't have any gear to fiddle with?'
5) Here is the old-school version - making beats on an Emu SP-1200. Love the sliders.
6) Here is DJ Shadow talking about his ancient MPC60, the machine he made 'Endtroducing' on. The clip has cruddy sound and Shadow always comes across as pretty irritating, but it's history.
7) Here, speaking the international language of Akai, is French producer 20Syl, with a step-by-step guide to making laid-back MPC/Rhodes/Loops hip hop for expensive Parisian bars.
8) Here is Just Blaze putting together a big horn sample and some beats. It's nice to see that even big name producers spend most of their time stroking their chin thinking: 'Hmm... This sounds OK, but what am I going to do next?'
9) Here, DJ Quik talks eloquently and at great length about his custom MPC3000.
10) If you've actually read all the way to the bottom of this list, then here is a treat to say thanks.
(via 16pads and everyone else who posted these in forums...)

Its a great list and all, but it misses this critical video... thanks to Will for the reminder. -ADM

Lukas at WFMU posted up MP3s of what volcanoes sound like when fed through a MIDI synth - "What do volcanoes do when they are not busy erupting? Researchers from Italy and Ecuador have recently discovered that these huge buggers are really composing music, much in the vein of Iannis Xenakis. Honestly, these scientists are just tired of looking at numbers and graphs all the time, so they turned seismographic patterns into musical scores and then play them using a cheap MIDI interpreter." [via] - Link.

Related:

• MIDI Control - Music equipment language isn't just for audio anymore. MAKE 07 - Page 158.
• HTML to MIDI - What does a site sound like? - Link.
• MIDI articles, how-tos, projects and more - Link.

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This Optimus Prime felt puppet is awesome and looks pretty simple to build, thanks Andrew! - Link.

Related:

• Make your own Chewbacca puppet - Link.
• DIY iPod sock puppet - Link.

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this one goes out special to Noah. -ADM

Filed under: Gaming

User-created games are nothing new, but now that they've got a nice Web 2.0 buzzword to glom onto, maybe they can amount to something. Microsoft is developing a new app to allow hobbyists to build their very own playable titles for Xbox Live. The program, called XNA Game Studio Express, will cost $99 a year, and will be available for Windows XP and Vista. Apparently the toolset is a heavily trimmed down version of the one available to actual developers, and will still require at least basic programming skills, but users will own their work. Peter Moore calls it "our first step of creating a YouTube for videogames." He also added "I'd love to send a royalty cheque to a kid," but we'll believe that when we see it. It doesn't sound like anything incredibly complicated will be possible with the system, but if YouTube video bloggers are any indication, you don't need snazzy effects -- or necessarily talent -- to make it big on the Internet.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

hmmm... maybe we'll see an xbox demoscene arise out of this. Very cool news. -ADM

For their installation Light from Tomorrow, UK artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead have installed light sensors in the Kingdom of Tonga, which is situated just across the international date line. Tonga is about 20 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time (PST), the time zone that California is in. The sensors stream the information about the distant brightness to a light box at the exhibition space, providing the visitors with a "visceral sense of the distant places to which the internet connects us". It also brings up some interesting questions about the notion of time zones and simultaneity of the world. Or does this light come from the future after all? The sensors will apparently be moved to New Zealand soon.

Well-known artist Jim Campbell is actually showing two pieces, one of which is the quite amazing "Wave Modulation". Being a part of his "ambiguous icons"-series, the work is exploring the "edge-condition between legibility and abstraction". What you see from the front is a blurry black-and-white image of a wave crashing probably at the shore of an ocean. During the course of 20 minutes, the image gradually changes from a moving image to a still one, playing on the notion of still time as the time of nature. What was actually more fascinating to me was the fact of how the image is being created: It's basically a matrix of white LEDs sitting behind a piece of frosted acrylic. The individual LEDs are rather far apart, so without the acrylic one would probably just see isolated flickering lights. Seeing it through the acrylic though, which should actually be obscuring the image due to it's blurryness, the low resolution image transforms into an even lower-resolution image that we can actually perceive and which even takes on the strange materiality of an old photographic or film print. Perception through double abstraction.

Also on display at the San Jose Museum of Art are Ingo Günther's famous globes, a project called "Simveillance" about which Régine will write more in a second, and Jennifer Steinkamp's delicious colorful projections.

I got a chance to check out Edge Connections on Friday. It was a great show. Listening Post blew my mind! Check it out if you are in the area. -ADM

Some thoughts on the amorphous middle ground betwe....

Incredible photos from The Survival Research Labs show in San Jose - taken by Scott Beale (Laughing Squid) Link. Congrats to the entire SRL team!

More:
In MAKE volume 07 we profile Mark Pauline. For nearly three decades, Survival Research Laboratories has redirected the technology of industry, science, and the military to create the most dangerous theater on Earth. MAKE 07 - Page 28.

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I also took some SRL photos of my own last night. Also see my sets from the previous two SRL shows in Los Angeles: [SRL Chinatown LA] [SRL Downtown LA] -ADM

[Image: The Wind Shaped Pavilion; ©Michael Jantzen].

Michael Jantzen's Wind Shaped Pavilion is "a large fabric structure that can be used as a public or private pavilion. As a lightweight fabric structure, the wind slowly and randomly rotates each of the six segments around a central open support frame. This continually alters the shape of the pavilion, while at the same time generating electrical power for its nighttime illumination."
Rubik's Cube-like, it "starts out as a relatively symmetrical form. Then the wind begins to alter that shape randomly, with only a slim chance of ever returning to its original symmetry."
You can watch its breeze-driven shifting through Jantzen's own well-lit renderings.

Often, when asked for my background, I often refer to my teenage days in the Atari demo scene - which is equally often causing raised eyebrows and shrugging shoulders. If you don't know what "demos" are, I recommend reading up on it over at demoscene.info first...

Most of the things and tricks I know about programming I've learned between the age of 13-18, when I and my friends were not so much playing with, but trying to tickle as much weird and wonderful things out of our expensive "power without the price" hardware. Writing demos forced me to engage with and understand topics I and others hated at school, like: geometry, trigonometry, physics, electronics etc. The good thing about that was, that suddenly there was a real-world relationship for all these things, something your average teacher in these subjects often seriously lacked to communicate. For example, understanding Sine and Cosine maybe had the most profund impact on me back then, since it opened the mental doors to experiment with animation, mathematical curves (how do you draw a circle on screen in assembler?), 3D projection, audio synthesis/sampling (my brother then kindly built a 4bit sampler for me, which connected to the atari's joystick port) etc. One thing lead(s) to the other...

My point though is, the demoscene arose as informal and highly competitive platform for creative expressions using software long before the (relatively) recent (re?)current mainstream interest in "computational design/art" (in the widest possible meaning) errupted. The development of algorithms, hacks, the procedural approaches and styles created by sceners have been contributing and driven much of the aesthetics of modern video games in particular, also way before Will Wright's Spore efforts. The competitive environment and elitist culture of this scene has been providing a great nurturing ground for experimentation of computational techniques in many fields, not only graphical/audiovisual. It has been doing so for over 15 years and it also somehow has preserved a somewhat closed world.

So, the reason for this post was another public prompt to point someone to interesting demos. Below is my hastily compiled and highly subjective list

1. fr-025: The popular demo by Farbrausch
   Nothing but respect for being so dedicated to Kitsch and deliberately taking it to new extremes.
   


2. fr-019: Poem to a horse by Farbrausch
   Another Farbrausch quality and milestone production. 64KB of procedural modelling, texturing and pristine audio synthesis. I'm still getting goose bumps when thinking about how effectively Code can be used to express and store that much information as well as emotion in only 65,536 bytes. GIF banners, anyone?
   


3. I Feel Like A Computer by Melon Dezign
   Fabulous & quirky 3D pixel graphics with physics, Travolta, King Kong and a Teddy Bear. Great storytelling too!
   


4. A Deepness In The Sky by mfx
   This is one of my favourites for creating an absolute exhausting AV synch. Pure hypnosis. Strickly not for Rockers, though! :)
   


5. Protozoa by Kewlers
   Quite a few Kewlers productions have great particle effects. This one is one of them. Also a good example of creating complexity purely through good texturing work.
   


6. Final Audition by Plastic
   If you want to see the power of modern graphics cards and like metaballs, you'll like this one. Maybe the best (and most) realtime metaballs I've seen.
   


7. KKowboy by Blasphemy + Purple
   This one created paradigm shift in the demo scene and gave rise to productions more dedicated to graphic design skills, rather than geekery. From 1998, everything is software rendered.
   


8. We Cell by Kewlers
   Another biology inspired production. No mindblowing effects, but overall great flow.
   


9. Medium by Einklang
   This is the only demo Einklang ever did. Great AV synch and a major influence to my own Macronaut.
   


10. b10 by Zden Satori
    Now this, dear reader, is the PERFECT synesthesia. Every musical element has its own visual counter part. CAUTION: Epilepsy warning!
    


11. d796 by Kosmoplovci
    2001 space odysee in black & white. Headphones are adviced and try to watch it all.
    


12. Chimera by Halycon
    This production needs you to take some time out. Amazingly simple and stunning ambient visuals. It shouldn't be last in the list, but it is since it's the perfect chillout.

Thank you Toxi for posting this awesome list! I'm working on downloading them all... the image above comes from #3 on the list which I will go ahead and highly reccomend you all grab immediately. -ADM

Here is a great old TV ad (which also appeared in the 'Moog' movie) featuring Edd Kalehoff, the man who composed the theme tune for 'The Price is Right'...

Everything I Do is Art, But Nothing I Do Makes Any Difference is a playable level for the popular first-person shooter video game, Half Life 2. I made this as a direct response to the installation work of Pat Rios. Pat and I are pretty close friends, and we have worked together on projects in the past. As often happens between two young guys working towards similar ends, we've formed a pretty interesting relationship of competitive support, simultaneously feeding off one another's ideas while at the same time trying to outdo the other.

Pat's installation consisted of an entire room basically filled with crap. Drawings, notebook pages, photos, half-a-dozen video monitors, two computers, a huge desk, a bar booth, sticky hands, etc., etc. His schtick is pretty much 'everything I do is art.' I think he definitely pulls it off, but when he asked me to do some sort of performance for the closing party, I thought, well, what better way to respond than to create a virtual replica and just blow it all up? After all, if everything you do is art, that's kind of like saying nothing you do is art; everything's on the same level.

That condition goes along well with a video game, where everything is basically without consequence. If you die, just start over and everything's back to the way it was. Also, I think the meticulous care and attention that goes into re-creating a specific environment, countered with the destruction and nihilism of blowing it up parallels our friendship quite appropriately.

Hah! I love this concept... and its well-executed too... that is to say, he brings out the rocket launcher and gravity gun at the end. Go straight to the video here.

Reilly also created a follow-up, Everything I do is Art, But Nothing I Do Make Any Difference Pt II, which meticulously recreates the entire three floors (50,000+ square feet) of this years 2006 Undergraduate Exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This time, some of the enemies from Half Life 2 have crashed the opening and you've gotta destroy art to get your health back! -ADM

finally live. a massive display of lights on a 8-story architectural facade in Los Angeles that mirrors the patterns of people entrying the building. the interactive walkway consists of a luminous field of embedded LED lights with pressure sensors. all lights on the facade & walkway respond to the presence of visitors in real time.
see also target interactive breezeway.
[electroland.net & electroland.net (movie)|via calendarlive.com & we-make-money-not-art.com]

Definitely gonna have to check this out when I get back to Lala-land... -ADM

Artist Karolina Sobecka gave me a ride in her car yesterday, which she is driving around as part of her performative installation Wildlife. On the backseat of the car there is a powerful projector which is beaming a tiger on whatever happens to be parallel to the car. The animation of the cat is directly linked to the speed of the car, so when Karolina hits the throttle, the tiger starts running along as if on a leash, leaving behind baffled pedestrians. There are also sensors for cars that pull up in direct proximity which will also be represented by smaller animals.

To her, the tiger is like an avatar the the car which creates a poetic juxtaposition between the "grittiness" of the city and and the luminescent figure of the cat on the wall. She wants to remind people of how much most technologies draw both their inspriration and (quite literally) power from nature. Another aspect is the fact of our relation to nature within the cities and potentially predatory animals that are coming to the cities, like the coyotes of Los Angeles or the bear that recently appeared in Germany. How much of nature would we really want to have around us?

Being one of the recent drive-by-projection projects (see related links) and being exhibited in California, it's almost ironic that the animals return through cars to San Jose.

Raise hands if you know the madman called Herr Felix Kubin. According to his own Felix Kubin lives and works against the gravity with Sci-Fi Pop/Noise/Animation Films/Radio Plays/Experimental Broadcasting. He’s really an eccentric fella, he’s released some really experimental and wacko stuff before.

These two tracks are taken from his new CD with the Dutch trio Coolhaven called “Suppe für die Nacht“, However there was already a single released with the same songs (and no I didn’t know it beforehand, just chose 2 songs and lo they were already released as a single), anyways he’s called these 2 songs Melancholic 40s Schlager vs. Psycho Freud Gabba, well pretty original and spot on really. The first one begins with the absurd lyrics “I wash my hands in the waters of the toilet/I wash my hands in the waters of your tears/and every time I see you smile/I feel like drowning in the Nile.” hugely contrasting the cheerful music. The second song is really psycho gabba, but it’s so loveable, I don’t know what he says after Waschzwangmama, but it’s stuck in my head. The third one is from 2000’s Hotel Supernova 12″ and it’s one of the best Felix Kubin songs I’ve ever listened, I don’t know how to label this song so you should listen to it yourself, sleazy electro mixed with some kind of eclectic soundtrack music. You’re really a madman Herr Kubin, I salute your excellency.

I was just listening to Kubin's Hotel Supernova only minutes before seeing this blog entry... no lies! If I remember correctly, Kubin got an honorable mention at Ars Electronica a couple years ago for his album Matki Wandalki. My favorite is his "Tesla's Aquarium" album with vocalist Pia Burnette. -ADM

Thanks to an ad campaign from conservation organization Vida Silvestre, giraffe and elephant are together at last! -ADM

Here is something interest that I found inspiring. It’s not ‘graphic’, but it is design, and it does move….

Ben Hopson, an off the beaten path thinker about how products should function…

Really interesting contraptions here that would make an awesome avenue for creating definitely unique motion ‘graphic’ design work.

YouTube user hardy2006us has a nice collection of Yellow Magic Orchestra videos.

Lots of late-70's futuristic computer graphics and blue screen action! -ADM

Every four years the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) meets to discuss mathematics and to present Fields medals. For the 2006 ICM, which is being held in Madrid in August, new events are being added, including a fractal art exhibit. The purpose of the ICM 2006 Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest is to select some of the artwork for display in this exhibit.

This one above kinda reminds me of Jared Tarbell's Bubble Chamber -ADM

Furthering the Aesthetics of Body Projection

APPARITION II (World Premiere) Klaus Obermaier X Ars Electronica Futurelab :: 16-17.9.2006 (Sat-Sun) 8pm :: Auditorium, Kwai Tsing Theatre Details.

The camera based motion tracking system developed for APPARITION uses complex computer vision algorithms to extract the performer's moving outline or shape from the background to provide constantly updating information for a body projection as well as qualitative calculations of certain motion dynamics, e.g. speed, direction, intensity and volume. The information derived from these calculations is assigned dynamically to the real-time generation of visuals that are projected either directly back onto the body and/or as large-scale background projection. The precise synchronization of projections on the background and the bodies result in the materialization of an overall immersive kinetic space or a virtual architecture that can be simultaneously fluid and rigid, that can expand and contract, ripple, bend and distort in response to or an influence upon the movement of the performers.

Make sure to check out the videos over on the Apparition II website... good looking stuff... -ADM

"Gesundheit" is one of our cocktail robot projects for Roböxotica. Roböxotica is the first (and inevitably leading) festival concerned with cocktail robotics. monochrom organizes it in cooperation with Shifz.
Link

Douglas Edric Stanley's abstractmachine.v87D6 installation at the Transvergence exhibition of ZeroOne looks pretty cool. It includes 'cubed', a Rubik’s Cube®-driven interface that generates breakcore(!). See also this interview with Douglas Edric Stanley on wmmna -ADM

Someone has hacked a midi port onto their Nintendo DS Lite. So far it works as an XY controller and they're working on a sequencer. If only there was a way to interface it with Electroplankton! -ADM

From the NY Times:

A video compilation of the scenes in movies which used the Wilhelm Scream. And for those who don't know what the Wilhelm Scream is: (via Digg)


[UPDATE] Mike points out this page, which links the Willhelm Scream to Sheb Wooley, famous for recording novelty chart topper "Purple People Eater".