Three years ago, I spent the most glorious part of my life working for a radio station in Asturias, Northern Spain. They kept fishing "calamares gigantes" (gigantic squids) over there and performed necropsies of them, so I had to cover squid news nearly every week, regularly visited the city's Aula del Mar (apart from two supermarket and a naff nightclub, there wasn't much to do, anyway), a museum of repulsively smelly sea creatures and of course I was eating fried squids nearly every day.

Although it sounds terrible, I enjoyed every second of my days in Luarca.

So I decided to add a "Creatures from the Deep Sea" category to the blog.
First entry:

Marine biologists from Alaska Pacific University, will use Shadow III , a mini-submarine with a video camera and hydrophones (sonar mikes) to track Giant Pacific Octopuses.

Octopuses spend a lot of time vegging out, which is pretty boring even for scientists. Instead of waiting for hours on the surface, biologists could set up the sub to wait for an octopus to emerge from its den. The robot could thus become their eyes and ears underwater, recording the creature's every move for later retrieval.

The Shadow III sub was successfully tested in July and recorded video of a giant octopus hunting shrimp (MPEG 6MB) and exhibiting deimatic behaviour (bluff) (MPEG 3.5MB) during the test dive.

The sub will begin shadowing octopuses next year, but needs to be improved as the scientists still have to control the video camera manually. If they manage to develop an autonomous mode, the submarine would operate on its own, following an octopus using its hydrophone sensors and decide when to turn on its video camera, transmitting video to a remote receiver.

Press release, via Robots.net.

Paddy Hartley has created face corsets that alter the shape of the wearer's face. Through the corsets, the artist examines perceptions of beauty and alternative means of achieving the wearer's ideals of perfection.

The corsets have been developed with Ian Thompson from the tissue-engineering group at Imperial College London, whose research involves making and refining bioactive glass implants to reconstruct faces damaged by accidents or surgery. Bioactive glass has a very similar composition to bone, and its surface opens within hours of implantation, and allows tissue to grow into it.

Paddy, Ian and Andrew Bamji, an expert on the historical origins of facial reconstruction, will discuss during the Rearranging Face evening, which takes place on October 5 and marks the launch of a series of events at the Dana Centre (London) dedicated to exploring the future of face research. Attendants will be able to try on the face corsets, handle the bio-implants, watch footage of them in the making.

Last week, when asked about the tubes, administration officials said they relied on repeated assurances by George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, that the tubes were in fact for centrifuges. They also noted that the intelligence community, including the Energy Department, largely agreed that Mr. Hussein had revived his nuclear program.

"These judgments sometimes require members of the intelligence community to make tough assessments about competing interpretations of facts," said Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the president.

Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed. But in a statement, he said he "made it clear" to the White House "that the case for a possible nuclear program in Iraq was weaker than that for chemical and biological weapons." Regarding the tubes, Mr. Tenet said "alternative views were shared" with the administration after the intelligence community drafted a new National Intelligence Estimate in late September 2002.

The New York Times is featuring a story called Spin City about the cycling-friendly prospects of New York City. The story follows the author, Lydia Polgreen, through her adventures and wanderings aboard her trusty wire donkey.

Are psychogeographers making use of the bicycle as a means of discovering the place in which they live? Is cycling catching on here in the states like it has in Europe? Have popular conceptions regarding the danger of cycling or the potential for theft kept people from actually riding around their urban environments?

To overcome a lot of the misconceptions regarding cycling, cycling advocacy is stepping up it's profile these days. At the gardenLab show I attended last weekend at Art Center, the Los Angeles urban planners were talking about the potentials of cycling in west coast urban environments. I had a very good conversation with some of them after their talk where we thought about the contrast between east coast and west coast urban settings. Urban planners in the west are hoping for a change towards cycling as it is faster than walking, and it allows people to travel farther distances in relative ease. So far, cities like Seattle, Portland and San Francisco are the leaders for cycling communities.

Europe has always been a head of the US for cycling. I would have to assume that oil prices have an effect upon this, but also the basic urban layout of the European cities. Cars were not the basis for development here. Movies like The End of Suburbia attribute the poor urban planning in the US to a car based society. Having a friend in school for urban planning, he attests to this from his own history classes. In his program, new urban structures of getting back to walking and cycling based communities are pushed.

Burning Man takes the progressive attitudes of the west coast cities and the urban building techniques of Europe to develop it's urban way of life. Burning Man's area is huge, the climate is hot and there are a lot of possibilities for getting knocked down while you ride. I often regarded the urban nature of the event as a west coast set-up for cycling. Broad streets for service vehicles, large expanses of desert to cover to get from one place to the next, but only the bike is accepted as transport (except for mutant vehicles, but not everyone can have one). What this shows is a re-occurring experiment in contemporary development for eco-friendly travel in large urban settings. What is found here can be implemented in other urban contexts, which would theoretically make all urban settings much more cycling friendly.

While Larry Harvey and the rest of the Burners would like for the ideals of Burning Man to make it back to urban settings, it's much harder than it seems. It is hard to make the leap to cycling as a primary form of transportation because it seems as if the whole world is against you. As Lydia Polgreen attests in her article, it can be dangerous, the weather can be miserable, you might get mugged and you'll probably be sweaty. Or not. Even though she tells tales of this, she concludes after a ride that she "has never felt better". As artists that make use of the city, it seems as if we should be at the front of pack for riding around. Interactive events like Critical Mass and Burning Man, articles in the New York Times and movies (as a start), the potential for creating cycling friendly environments are in the artist's creative hands.

Dog people have come a long way in a short time. We're still a bunch of loons, but an aesthetic evolution is definitely hitting the friends of the canine. Or maybe it's that dogs are becoming more popular among a design savvy crowd. Either way, I'm thrilled to learn that Crypton Fabrics has launched a William Wegman collection that features doggy depictions in classic modern patterns.

The other day we put up a photo of Darius' security cameras from the back alleys of Shoreditch in London. Here's a photo of another recent Darius and Downey project - two lampposts (one real the other one not) who seem to have found their true loves. Sadly this piece only lasted on the streets for less then an hour.

Dan Witz is one of the main inspirations behind the Wooster Collective website. It was in the days immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, that we first came across Dan's painted shrines that he placed at the bottom of a group of lampposts in our neighborhood (the West Village of New York). A little investigation lead us to Dan. After learning about his Hoodie project done back in 1994, we were hooked. (Check his website for photos). In the last few years it's been an incredible pleasure for us to get to know Dan. Here's his report on his "Summer Vacation":

The Poietic Generator is an experimental system based in France which enables a large number of people across the world to participate in real time to the emergence of an ever changing collective image.

The PG is accessible 24 hours a day over the web without any plug-in. Experiments consist of short sessions announced a few days before in order to bring together at the same time as many participants as possible (with the help of Transactiv.exe).

In the field of biology and cognitives sciences, Francisco Varela (CNRS / Ecole Polytechnique - France) describes as "autopoietic", a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production, transformation and destruction of components that produces the components which :
i) through their interactions and transformations regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them ;
and ii) constitute it as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. (Maturana and Varela, 1979).

The last collective session of the PG was Saturday, october 2nd, 2 :30>5 :30 PM (Paris time). There will be more sessions announced there very soon.

(Via Netlex)

I can't tell if these are satire or collectibles: the Cadbury Yowie "Forgotten Friends", plastic figurines of the passenger pigeon, the Hawaiian 'O'o, the Stellar's sea cow and other victims of the Sixth Extinction.

If they're real, I find them incredibly more disturbing than my idea of tattooing pictures of endangered species on our skin. I mean, giving your kids action figures of dead species is, well, let's just say if this is a spoof, I bow before superior weirdness, but if it's for real, I bow before yet another sign that global capitalism is far stranger than anything we could have hallucinated.

(for further extinction culture, check out Swift as a Shadow... and thanks to Will for the link!)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 11:57 AM)

Hayes Solos Raffle and Amanda J. Parkes are the creators of Topobo, a building kit with kinetic memory. That means the creations remember and playback the way you push and pull them. Build a creature, teach it how to walk, it walks. Taking the ideas behind Legos and Capsela to a new level, Topobo is fun and subversively educational! Currently a project in Hiroshi Ishii's Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, hopefully one day Topobo will be commercialized.

via PCHP

Kelly Heaton is an artist who uses original software and found objects in her sculpture and installations.

Live Pelt is a multimedia installation based on the transformation of 64 Tickle Me Elmo dolls into a coat.

Fashioned from the toys pelts and electronics, The Surrogate coat provides full body vibration and is designed to be a substitute lover.

Desecration and fetishism are consistent throughout the narrative of the installation, which relies on the American fur trade history. The Trapper collects Elmos through eBay; The Industrialist performs the skinning; and The Taxidermist stuffs and mounts their heads. The Alchemist solders the electronic viscera and seeks clues to the mystery of life. Other characters, The Sociopath, The Debutante, and The Fashionista, interact with the coat and its accessories at various stages in The Surrogate s development.

Live Pelt continues Heaton's series entitled Bibiota that includes Reflection Loop and Dead Pelt in which 400 Furbies have been re-engineered into a coat for Mrs. Santa Claus and a wall of reactive eyes and mouths.

From Sexblo.gs < Feldman Gallery, via del.icio.us / joshua.

Last year in late October, an unbelievable qigong stunt caught the world's attention. Three men dragged a truck loaded with 100 passengers a meter across a Taipei parking lot. While towing a meter isn't very far (even with a 10-ton load) the size didn't matter as much as the method. They pulled it with their penises.

As of 8:42 this morning, the top headline on Google News was a blog. That’s a first as far as I know.

The algorithms have spoken, and the most relevant source of news on the 2004 Presidental debate isn't a "news organization," it's a guy with a brain and a text editor. Looks like Dave Winer might win his bet.

Flickr is a great online photo sharing app that allows you to tag all your photos with a Creative Commons license. We've blogged about it in the past and interviewed the founder as well. Today they launched an entire area of their site devoted to showing off all the photos within their system that are tagged with each license. If you jump to any of the "see all" links below, you'll find a stream of photos that are even searchable, within license type.

What's great about Flickr exposing this functionality is that it makes the thousands of licensed photos readily available. Say for instance I want to find photos of last week's Gilberto Gil-David Byrne concert in New York? Just drop into one of the popular licenses and search for a keyword. Flickr also exposes their innovative keyword tagging system among licensed files. Here are what the most popular tags look like on attribution-noncommercial-sharealike photos, allowing you to browse photos containing those keywords.

While we've been plugging away at copyright licensing it appears, at least according to our recent press hits, that Creative Commons is starting to hit a critical mass. Two high profile features came out today: one about legal downloads at the Internet Archive released under a Creative Commons license (in next month's PC World Magazine), and another from eWeek, about how well our licensing is catching on. There are many more stories coming out every day about Creative Commons, and then, of course, there's next month's big mention in WIRED.

Untitled, 2004, HTML, 340 x 594 pixels

The Wall Street School of English in Tokyo has adopted the QR barcodes on promotional T-shirts. QR barcodes enable modern mobile phones to read the barcode, and jump directly to a mobile website.

From Japan Today.

"Open-Clothes" is a community started in 2000 by Japanese fashion enthusiasts who wanted to decentralize the fashion process. The community allows tailors to find business partners and showcase their creations, while potential buyers can scrutinize, comment and purchase the garnment online. Customers can contact producers directly and order items of clothing "made to measure."

Offline, the community holds events like exchange or study meetings, factory inspections, clothes exhibitions, etc. About 4,500 people are members of the community where everybody can participate for free and without any obligation.

"Open-Clothes" supports the entire value-creation chain in fashion making and provides new opportunities for small companies who would otherwise find it too difficult to survive in the wake of globalization.

Open-Clothes received Awards of Distinction at the 2004 Ars Electronica.

R gine Debatty blogs on Near Near Future and Smart Mobs.

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in WorldChanging Guests at 11:51 PM)

There is an interesting trend coming out of India, where people are using comics as a tool of development communication in remote regions and villages. Here's a report by Frederick Noronha.

Sharad Sharma runs one such initiative, and "his network called World Comics India held workshops in the remote areas of tribal Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Tamilnadu, and the North East. Charkha, which has been providing training to rural journalists since 1994, started using cartoons and comic strips in development communication in 1997. The Bangalore-based Communication for Development and Learning recently came out with a slim book titled 'Devtoons: Cartoons for Development'." World Comics is now coming out with a journal of such comics.

Trying to get my hands dirty while WorldChanging, I run the other such initiative. One of our stories, The Doppler Effect, deals impassionately with the Hindu-Muslim riots in Godhra (Gujarat) and The Towers Of Silence with the decline of Parsi population in India.

(Posted by Rohit Gupta in Global Culture Art, Music, Fashion, and Travel at 12:07 AM)

ASCII, like fire, purifies. At least that's what New York artist Yoshi Sodeoka of group C505 hopes. Watching this latest project, ASCII BUSH, currently spotlighted at turbulence.org, one can see the similarities between the element and the protocol governing character interchange: alphanumerics twist through footage of two State of the Union addresses like tongues of flames. Sodeoka has filtered video from two generations of Bush presidents, offering online two lengthy addresses (January 12, 2003, by the incumbent George W. Bush; and March 6, 1991, by his father George H.W. Bush) rendered entirely in ASCII characters. The audio evokes a synthetic ambience, while numbers and letters pulse and converge, stitching together these presidential talking heads. According to the project notes, Sodeoka aspires '...to make art from the debris of our culture by recycling these dreadful and painfully long presidential oration(s)'. Quite possibly, these ASCII movies are closer to the true state of the union than the propaganda offered in the source materials. - Lewis LaCook

http://turbulence.org/spotlight/ASCII_BUSH/#

A few weeks ago we heard a rumor about this, but (sigh) we neglected to inform you for lack of any tangible evidence. Well, now it’s official, Rooster Teeth Productions will be using the in-game Sims 2 movie maker to create a series of clips titled, The Strangerhood. If you’re not familiar with their previous work, Red vs. Blue (based off of Halo), you have got to check it out. It’s available on DVD, but you can find it easily enough by searching the web. And if that series is any indication, The Strangehood is really gonna bust some guts. To view the debut episode, just visit the link below.

A new exhibition at London's Science Museum asks whether the widespread use of digital enhancement to "improve" faces in photos suggests the kind of face people will choose to have in the future.

Britons spend over 225m on cosmetic surgery and 25,000 people undergo treatment each year. Research into DNA engineering suggests there could be a time when what we look like will be genetically programmed.

Professor Sandra Kemp, the curator of the exhibition, fears the bombardment of digitally enhanced images in the media and on our PCs will lead us to lose the features which make the face unique.

"Lots of people don't have sticky photo albums anymore. Their pictures are held digitally and they can be altered on Photoshop. People are enhancing their faces all the time. We are subtlely being conditioned by the digital face and heading towards a face which no human being could have been born with. This face is smooth and narrow, with a small jaw, big lips and manga Japanese eyes for the females."

But the wider repercussions could be more significant. The exhibition hints that alterations to the face can have a huge impact on our conception of identity.

Future Face at the Science Museum runs until 13 February 2005.

From BBC News.
See also The Guardian article asking whether we sill use the advances in plastic surgery techniques to remake our identities at will.
Related: Life in Plastic.

Geram pop group Supersmart had released an album in ringtone format for mobile phone.

Now German punk bank Wizo is to release their new album on a USB memory stick. The stick will contain 5 songs in MP3 format, a video clip, pics etc. The 64MB stick costs 16 euro.

From PaidContent, via Unmediated.

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