Dr. Mallin sent me this panorama from the top of Mount Grandeur in Utah. Now it’s up in the cloud gallery.
I’ve gotten some great submissions from friends – but many are too short! Please send me your highest resolution longest panoramas. Or don’t worry about it and send me whatevs. I’ll edit it to make it work if I can.
Here is what it looks like in the room. That’s Robin with River on his lap.
Last night I went down to the art and security meetup at NYU’s ITP.
We saw three rad projects.
1. Heather Dewey-Hagborg collects hair and cigarette butts from subway, streets in Williamsburg. She goes to Genspace, a bio hacking space in downtown Brooklyn to perform PCR and gel electrophoresis, etc. Sends off to get these DNA sets sequenced for specific phenotypic traits. Stuff like mitochondrial maternal region indicators ( ethnicity), eye color, hair color, freckles, etc.
Then she runs code against these to generate 3D models of how they might look. Prints those out using a full color 3d printer.
Great discussion about implications and the private or public nature of DNA vs its uses. We compared to browser DNA identified by EFF, ways government should regulate both. Also, how little we generally know about our own DNA.
2. Glenn Wester is trying to create true heads up display for augmented reality. He points out that all current AR hardware uses screens that block your vision. You don’t look at really augmented, you look at a picture of reality that is augmented.
He wants something more like a fighter jet heads up display. This involves having a tiny oled project onto a 45 deg angled beam splitter mirror. Sort of like your basic haunted house ghost room effect, but mounted to your head.
Here is me wearing it.
It works and is really cool. We tried to figure out ways to hack it, like getting light off of your clothes or trying to read reflections on your eyes, but nothing so far. Very cool if still unfashionable. I wondered if you could combine a dimmed laser picoprojector and fiber to get a low res display with less bulk up top. Â Amazingly, all of this costs around a hundred bucks.
3. Jordan Seiler presented his work removing outdoor advertising from towns. Some of this is physical work, and some is using AR.
He was VERY excited about the presentation from 2. We talked about analogues between his work and Add-Art. We got into who has the right to determine what you look at ( this is part of what underlies the justification for some graffiti). That led into wondering how folks might use AR for nefarious purposes. I brought up the possibility of racists editing out the looks of other people in the same way that buildings are treated. Jeff Crouse’s underdeveloped Unlogo Project came up as well, but we had a devil of a time remembering the name of the project.
At the end, Kyle invited folks to go see his amazing face substitution work at Eyebeam.
So I just put these eight white frames up over my dining table.
I’ve been making art for a while to put up there – but I’d like something from you. Â Everyone’s phone takes great big panorama photos. You probably go somewhere cool and take them. Can you pretty please send me some of your best panorama photos? Â I’d love to print it out and put it up there. Â I’ll send you back a pic of your photo up there and I’ll be really grateful!
I think I’ll start off with Chris Restrepo’s gorgeous infrared shot of Central Park
New media is different than old media. Books are great, and I love them – but hypertext is way way better. I love music videos – they are great, but why aren’t more of them using the amazing new tools available to us.
I want more music videos like this:
Johnny Cash – Ain’t No Grave.
This is the king I think. The song is worth it. The artist Johnny Cash – nuff said. This is a crowd-sourced participatory art music video that you can swim through in multiple dimensions.
They took a music video and gave everyone who loves Johnny Cash a way to pay tribute. Go on there and you can draw a frame from the music video. You can rate the frames of others. And then you can push your way through the dimensional space of all this and watch the video with highest rated frames or most abstract frames or any of the other dimensions they’ve carved up. It’s a beauty and executed perfectly. I hope everyone clicks through to this.
Arcade Fire – The Wilderness Downtown
This was the first new media music video I heard about. Couldn’t get a browser to run it for the longest time. It pushed the limits so far and does so many things.
Watch the video. Birds fly through all the different frames. You run along the streets where you grow up, you write a letter to yourself and watch it grow like trees. A dream.
Yung Jake – http://e.m-bed.de/d
I’m not as much of a fan of this one because the music isn’t as good, the rhymes are sloppy. This perfectly marries the content to the form though. It’s about being shared, being embedded, the new narrative of music distribution. And it shows as it tells.
RO.ME – 3 Dreams of Black
Can’t watch it – don’t have WebGL. Supposed to be good.
Ellie Goulding – Lights
Ditto.
Chris Bathgate – Big Ghost
This is the counterpoint. See, this doesn’t feel like a new video. This feels like it’s just a new trick on an old concept. 3D is so hyped and so pointless most of the time. I mean seriously, BOOKS tell stories. We don’t need 3D unless it adds something.
Hit play, and start reading.
This piece from the NY Times about stupid games really rung a bell in my head:
Stupid games, on the other hand, are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.
Continue reading Are all games stupid?
It makes me happy
I love the art blog “But Does it Float?” – it gives you just what you want. Big beautiful images.
This one struck me. The simplicity and the beauty of it, the alien quality. I was inspired.
Just like my other art, this art is open source so you can do something with it.
Want to play with a live version?
That’s Janice Boan giving us face, and I was inspired by an image I saw on a blog about people who bite designs without giving attribution. Like all of my art, the source code is open and available for you to adapt and use.
Wanna play with a live version?
Continue reading The V-A-Lizer
Now I will tell how Octavia, the spider-web city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed.
This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below: rope ladders, hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and rings for children’s games, cable cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.
Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Fantastic – the amazing art blog But Does It Float? has found an artist, Colleen Corradi Brannigan, who has been making Calvino’s cities visible. Here is a complete index of the invisible cities paintings, the descriptions are in Italian. I am in love with this great book, I’ve even written a city of my own.