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There are two events each year that i wouldn’t want to miss: one is (unsurprisingly) ars electronica, the other is the Royal College of Art show. I spent three hours there yesterday and saw only a ridiculously tiny part of the exhibition. It runs until July 2 so there’s plenty of time to have another look (note: if you fancy a visit there, the show closes tomorrow, Friday.)

First example of what’s in store:

Weird Objects for Weird Users? addresses the issue of autophobia, an abnormal and persistent fear of being alone.

Many people suffer from Autophobia. They feel extreme pain when alone, emotionally as well as physically. But they will have to be alone in everyday life. Sohui Won has created several design proposals to help these people enjoy the worst moment for Autophobics and the rest of us who are also potential patients.

Sohui first contacted several phobia societies to get to know more about the problem. Many turned them down as she is not affected by any phobia. In the end she found a specialist who help her investigate the issue.

The first object, Talk to Myself adresses the necessity for autophobics to communicate with themselves in order to know better what’s going on in their mind. The mask encloses the head of the autophobic. Inside are mirrors to look at yourself into the eyes and a simple system allows the wearer to hear only what he or she is saying.

The Phobic to Phobic object has been designed to dialogue in total anonymity with people who suffer from the same phobia, removing any fear to be judged and feel ashamed. It works via the Autophobia society. When a user picks up the phone, he or she is randomly connected to other agoraphobics belonging to the same society, they can talk and feel the other person’s movement through the surface of the phone.

The Talk to Trees is a whispering machine that transfers the movement of things of things outside of the phobic’s window into laughs when there’s enough movement outside or into whispers when there’s no mouvement.

Project page on the show website. Images on flickr.

Originally from we make money not art on June 29, 2006, 1:07pm

Life Writer, by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, consits of an old-style type writer that evokes the area of analogue text processing. A normal piece of paper is used as projection screen and the position of the projection is always matched with the position of the type writer roll. When users type text, the resulting letters appear as projected characters on the normal paper. When they push the carriage return, the letters on screen turn into small black and white artificial life creatures that appear to float on the paper of the type writer itself.

The creatures are based on genetic algorithms –developed for Life Spacies [2]– where text is used as the genetic code that determines the behaviour and movements of the creatures.

The artificial creatures can be faster or slower depending on their genetic code and body shape. The creatures need to eat text in order to stay alive and when users type a new text they try to snap up these characters from the paper in order to get energy. Once they have eaten enough text they can also reproduce and have off-spring so eventuelly the screen can become full.

The user can also push the creatures around when using the scroll of the typing machines cylinder: pushing the creatures back into the machine which will crush them or scroll the creatures off the screen alltogether, making new place for new creatures.

More images. Movie.

By connecting the act of typing to the act of creation of life, Life Writer deals with the idea of creating an open-ended artwork where user-creature and creature-creature interaction become essential to the creation of digital life and where an emergent systems of life-like art emerges on the boundaries between analog and digital worlds.

LifeWrite is part of art.ficial emotion 3.0 mentionned in the previous post. The works is too interesting not to have its own blog entry.

Originally from we make money not art on June 29, 2006, 2:46am

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The Zypad WL 1000, a new wrist-worn PC has been demonstrated to the military forces. This device, which can run Linux or Windows CE, is a hands-free computer which handles wireless networking and GPS tracking. It should be available in July for about $2,500 and could be used by healthcare or law enforcement personnel.

Links: Primidi, ZDNet

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 12:19pm

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Charlie Stross is sharing some notes from his latest project. They’re a nice glimpse into how one really smart writer thinks about the future:

6. History inserts itself into our lives, seamlessly. When did you last get through a day without hearing some kind of off-hand reference to 9/11 or the Iraq war? Kids these days are learning about Margaret Thatcher in history lessons at school. In ten years time there’ll be some other iceberg-like intrusion of History into the zeitgeist: the question is, what? (My money’s on something energy or environment related, and big.)

g to get into the head of a 28-year-old British professional circa 2016… “You were one year old when the Cold War ended. You were thirteen when the war on terror broke out, and eighteen or nineteen when Tony Blair was forced to resign as Prime Minister. You graduated university owing £35,000 in student loans, at a time when the price of entry into the housing market in the UK was over £150,000 (about 4-5 times annual income; the typical age of first time buyers was 35 and rising by more than 12 months per year). Unless you picked the right career (and a high-earning one at that) you can’t expect to ever own your own home unless your parents die and leave you one. On the other hand, you can reasonably expect to work until you’re 70-75, because the pension system is a broken mess. The one ray of hope was that your health and life expectancy are superior to any previous generation — you can reasonably expect to live to over a hundred years, if you manage to avoid succumbing to diseases of affluence.”

(Posted by Alex Steffen in QuickChanges at 09:59 AM)

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 12:13pm

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That’s what I call them. Recently I received this statement.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about.

Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own. The writing readers. The viewers who picked up a camera. The formerly atomized listeners who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak— to the world, as it were.

Now we understand that met with ringing statements like these many media people want to cry out in the name of reason herself: If all would speak who shall be left to listen? Can you at least tell us that?

The people formerly known as the audience do not believe this problem—too many speakers!—is our problem. Now for anyone in your circle still wondering who we are, a formal definition might go like this..

(Continued at PressThink)

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 12:12pm

The Panasonic Emotions Testing Line, by “nomadic” development designer Jiří Černický, is a conceptual SD audio-prosthesis that aims to grasp the issue of the emotional deficits in society.

The device is a substitute, personal container for the emotions of users who are not able, or do not want, to experience life through their own emotional perceptions. It looks like a Walkman-type device with headphones that does not play music inside, but rather outside, of the head. The device facilitates the user’s emotional communication with the world around him. It is not designed for his/her personal use only but is equipped with a tiny amplifier.

The memory of the SD Audio Player chip card contains a great amount of data containing recordings of authentic human emotions. For instance, if the user finds himself in a situation where he has to argue with someone, yet he does not want to get into confrontation and to waste his own emotions, he locates a password on his SD Audio Player representing an appropriate emotional response, which he then applies accordingly.

The SD Audio Player can also record and thus appropriate other people’s emotions: sniveling, peevishness, sobbing, moaning, crying, gradual emotional collapse, breakdown, yelling by a beaten person, the state of mind between laughter and crying, the hysterical family argument from Fellini’s film Amarcord, pubescent giggling, comforting and fondling of a baby, a feeling of well-being, enthusiastic effusions, wearing somebody out, cuddling, soothing, etc. Such recordings, including those from movies, can be further edited and modified on a computer. In this way, the user can appropriate the emotions that are conveyed by celebrities and other prominent individuals.

Via Vvork.
See also Ku: iyashikei-net by Urico Fujii and Ann Poochareon is a networked crying sculpture that allows people to communicate through the interface of tears.

Originally from we make money not art on June 30, 2006, 4:51am

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Dabbish, L., Kraut, R. (2004). Controlling Interruptions: Awareness Displays and Social Motivation for Coordination, in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 2004, ACM Press: Chicago, IL. p. 182-191.

The paper addresses the notion of awareness with an interesting angle: how would awareness displays might interrupt and then impact people’s activity (leading to performance problems. The authors used a very simple game to investigate whether “team membership influences interrupters’ motivation to use awareness displays and whether the informational-intensity of a display influences its utility and cost“.

Results indicate interrupters use awareness displays to time communication only when they and their partners are rewarded as a team and that this timing improves the target’s performance on a continuous attention task. Eye-tracking data shows that monitoring an information-rich display imposes a substantial attentional cost on the interrupters, and that an abstract display provides similar benefit with less distraction.

This study has direct implications for design:

To balance the tradeoff between the amount of information presented and the incentive to use that information, electronic communications systems could regulate the awareness information they provide based on an interrupter’s inferred motivation to use that information. For example, in designing a corporate instant messaging client, one could apply these results by presenting a workload awareness display of a target’s activities only to people
internal to the user’s project or company, and no such display to people outside the company.

y, the “away” and “busy” messages which various instant messaging clients use are too temporally coarse to provide sufficient information for synchronizing interruptions.
(…)
Displaying information about a remote collaborator’s workload helps both parties if that information is in an easy to process format and the potential interrupter has incentive to be polite.

Why do I blog this? because my research is about studying how certain awareness tools (bringing mutual-location awareness) influence collaboration in terms of producing a mutual intelligibility. Taking into account interruptability might be an issue, however, in the activities I studies, it’s less continuous so interruptions are less important.

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 12:30pm

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Toewie by Jelle Husson (postgraduate in eMedia in Belgium)

Toewie is about a 3d game for pre-school children. Most 3d games are being navigated by means of the arrow keys for movement, and the mouse for looking/direction. Because this is quite complicated, especially for very young children, Toewie will be controlled differently. The idea is to build a real life puppet and put some movement sensors in it. When the child interacts with the puppet, the 3d character on screen will perform a similar movement.

Why do I blog this? I am following lately how tangible interface can be used as innovative game controllers, this is a relevant example.

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 12:30pm

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We’ve been writing about this for quite some time so it’s fun to see the NYT’s Richard Siklos wrangle with an essential reality (and find a way to work in Sumner Redstone’s fish): for all the fuss and the double-digit, sometimes triple-digit growth in online revenues, new media revenue isn’t close to material for traditional media companies. That doesn’t mean the gains and the revenues aren’t real. In fact, the inclusion of online revenue has helped some “print” units show a profit. So what does this say about the future financial impact of broadband, mobile and the like? Siklos: “The optimist’s view is that the spoils from this new frontier are still very much up for grabs. … The less-cheerful view of the traditional media companies is that all their online efforts will not translate directly into more revenue or fatter profits.”
I’ll opt for the pragmatic view: without their current investments, experiments and full-force efforts, traditional media companies wouldn’t have much of a long-term future. Period.
Still, I really liked reading about the fish.

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 12:29pm

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At my session today at Supernova, with JD Lasica (Ourmedia) as our moderator, and Jeremy Allaire (BrightCove), Jonathan Taplin (USC Annenberg Center), and Robert Levitan (Pando), I mentioned some stats and ideas, and I said I would blog those items. The are below.

The first two sets of stats focus on video hosting sites (places where users can upload video) and their use, as far as uploads and user visits or traffic. The third set of data reflects trends in the types of video we see users making and posting online, with an example or two of that kind of video.

1. Users per day/Uploads per day on a few sites we have seen info about:

ClipShack : 2200 users per day. (source: AdBright).

Google Video: 12.5 million users in month of April. (source:
089.html”>Washington Post).

Grouper: 8 million users per month (source:
PR News but on Alexa, that traffic appears to be a one time spike, where their traffic seems to hover around 3 million users per month) and 500,000 registered users (source: Alexa).

Ourmedia: 28,000 users per day (source: AdBright).

Vidiac: Streaming 2 million videos per day and 3 million users per month (source:
Silicon Beat Comment by Adam Beat)

Vimeo: 20 thousand users per day (source: USA Today, 11/21/05) and 50,000 registered users (source: Vimeo’s about pages)

YouTube: 50,000 uploads per day, serving 50 million videos per day, with 6 million users per day (source: You Tube Fact Sheet).

2. There is a list ranking the top ten video sites by market share or traffic, published by Hitwise), May 24, 2006. (Several of the traffic stats found in articles, press releases, advertising, etc., also credited Hitwise for the numbers):

1. YouTube 42.94%
2. MySpace Videos 24.22%
3. Yahoo! Video Search 9.58%
4. MSN Video Search 9.21%
5. Google Video Search 6.48%
6. AOL Video 4.28%
7. iFilm 2.28%
8. Grouper 0.69%
9. Daily Motion 0.22%
10. vSocial 0.09%

3. At Dabble, we are seeing different video genres coming up over and over. Users, as opposed to top down TV video producers, seem to work in areas that are accessible and interesting to them. They are not just copying mainstream production styles. The list below is in no particular order as far as prevalence or audience viewing. We just see them a lot:

1. Mini tv show-style — It’s Jerry Time or Ask a Ninja
2. Videobloggers: telling their own life stories like Ryanne Hodson
3. Genre guys: snowboarding or car videos
4. Commentary: Rocketboom or the Bush Blair video.
5. Indie film shorts like Four Eyed Monsters
6. Random.. silly.. funny.. ridiculous… ephemeral Tag: momwalksin tag: lipsync
7. How-to’s that actually show you how to do something in detail or teach: French Pod Class
8. Remixs and mashups: The Presidency Then and Now or Matrix Reloaded or Brokeback to the Future.
9. Interviews like those at GETV.
10. Parodies like the 8up commercial.
11. AMV or anime music videos: Loveless
12. music videos - lipsync sitting at the computer, dancing around with music playing, that in effect, remakes the artists own music video into ones the users like, that stars themselves. Here is Hips Don’t Lie.

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 12:28pm

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makeTV
Despite that I absolutely loathe people calling webcasting, streaming and the like “TV” this site is interesting.

From the site:
MakeTV to Watch TV: MakeTV is a live broadcast channel open to both viewers and producers. (Wish I could copy & paste but they used Flash for the site so I can’t. Oh well..)

Essentially, anyone can plugin and stream to anyone watching the content from this site.

Strange that the stats show 0 Total Broadcasts and 0 Viewable Archives.. Wonder what the deal is..

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 12:20pm

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Split Screen
I love this (v)blog. All split screen video art. Now complete w/RSS and Enclosures..

From the site:
Split Screen is a weblog dedicated to the art of the split screen and multi-layered visuals, as seen in movies, music videos, commercials and other media based on moving images

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 12:20pm

It’s a big holiday weekend in the US and Canada, with celebrations of independence and federation happening near and far. Here in TreeHugger nation, we like to celebrate Energy Independence Day as well. Here are some of our picks for celebrating without foreign oil, dirty power and (too many) carbon emissions.

1) Boycott Exxon and take a ride on a solar-powered electric bike instead.
2) For you diesel drivers, pick up some biodiesel, like Willie Nelson’s brand, that’s made domestically.
3) Change a light bulb or two from incandescent to compact fluourescent. It really does make a difference.
4) Read up on going off the grid and then take the first baby step.
5) Buy some locally-grown, organic food. It tastes better, is better for you, the producer and the planet.

Originally from Treehugger on June 30, 2006, 2:45pm

The city of Chicago recently unveiled their Bike 2015 Plan, which they’re calling “the most ambitious bike plan in the United States.” The plan, which features a whopping 150 strategies to encourage bicycling, recommends projects, programs and policies to encourage use of one of our favorite modes of transportation. Three years in preparation, the plan will implement Mayor Richard M. Daley’s goal to make Chicago the most bicycle-friendly city in the United States. Work has already begun on 75 of the plan’s 150 strategies, including, constructing 10 miles of new bikeways in 2006 to help reach the plan’s goal of a 500-mile bikeway network by 2015, permitting passengers aged 14 to 17 to board CTA trains and buses with their bicycles, on a trial basis, so that Chicagoland high school students can combine transit and bicycle use, and providing free valet bike parking at 11 Chicago festivals in 2006. The plan will also establish a mini-grant program to support community bicycling efforts and provide secure bike parking inside five to ten city buildings, to encourage more employees to bike to work. The full plan is here and has tons more info on the eight chapters of the plan and the rest of the initiatives to be achieved by 2015. We’ve been seeing some good things coming out of Chicago when it comes to bikes lately; we hope this is just the tip of the iceberg. ::Bike 2015 Plan, ::Chicagoland Bicycle Federation press release via ::Digg

Originally from Treehugger on June 30, 2006, 1:47pm

When people residing in and around the Boston area hear the words “The Big Dig” they either laugh or shudder. The $14.6 billion dollar project was first proposed in the 1980s and with the groundbreaking in 1991, the goal was to change Boston’s downtown roadways to make it easier for traffic to get in and out of the city. Now, 15 years later, the project is finally coming to an end and we have to say the new roads are definitely more convenient. Paul Pedini worked for 11 years as vice president of Modern Continental Construction, one of the project’s principal contractors. He now lives in a 4,300 square foot home he refers to as The Big Dig House that was completed this past March. The house, located in Lexington, Mass., incorporates 600,000 pounds of recycled materials from The Big Dig. It’s built from highway panels and bridge piers salvaged from what’s known as the largest public-works project in the history of the United States. Because the project had no more use for so many of the materials, administrators didn’t want to pay to store the slabs so landfill was the other option. But for Pedini, burying perfectly good materials didn’t make sense. In his home, two concrete Inverset panels (which once formed part of a temporary ramp leading to Boston’s Tobin Bridge) hang in the rafters while a 27-inch-wide painted girder (that once helped support slurry walls along Storrow Drive) now helps brace the home’s 69,000-pound roof. “It’s kind of like Junkyard Wars meets Habitat for Humanity,” Pedini commented. The Big Dig House was the winner of the first Metropolis-sponsored Next Generation competition. For more information and photos of other materials used, visit ::Metropolis Magazine

“http://feeds.treehugger.com/~f/treehuggersite?a=5hOpHsAW”>

Originally from Treehugger on June 30, 2006, 12:05pm

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News organizations might find a good model for online citizen journalism in this unlikely place: The Joke Project.

This unique video joke site — launched recently by a Web editor with whom I’ve been working, along with a couple of documentarians — captures short clips of ordinary folks telling their favorite jokes on the street or in other simple settings.

The jokes are rated from “squeaky clean” to “extremely naughty” and are fairly timeless, although they occasionally dip into current news. They held a “DaVinci Code” joke day, and they’re scheduling a Bush joke day for July 4.

If you’re in the mood for a laugh, check out the site’s archive and index. They also blog their jokes.

All in all, it’s a creative approach to a universal subject, with viral potential and a sensible business model (video syndication).

So where does the citizen journalism come in? It’s in the fascinating underlying motivation for the project, which refers to itself as a “joke-u-mentary.” The creators clearly are not just having fun. They’re also exploring the folkloric quality of humor, and compiling intriguing statistical findings.

Furthermore, they’re also trying to to capture something inimitable about the joke-telling process — for instance, by dwelling on the teller’s own reaction in the seconds after the joke ends. Perhaps that’s what’s most compelling about this site: the nicely affecting way it puts a face to a story.

Imagine now if news organizations were to try to capture the same feeling for local coverage. They could gather short, thematically organized video clips of residents talking about anything from favorite pet tales to local history, from gardening tips to hometown heroics. That could make for compelling content, even if captured not by professional cameramen or journalists, but rather by the residents themselves using fixed video recording facilities (a la StoryCorps’s idea for recording “outposts” — see their FAQ).

These video outposts could be in a location(s) anywhere in town, such as in a local community center, a library, or perhaps in the lobby of the news organization’s headquarters itself, all with nice promotional opportunities. I’m no video technician, but I’m thinking it could be housed in a compact, phone-booth sized space: a simple digital camera setup, posted guidelines or theme suggestions, a single push button to start the tape rolling, and a countdown clock for the finishing point.

I think a local news audience would love it. Perhaps someone out there could give it a try and let the rest of us know!

Meanwhile, this guy walks into a bar …

Originally from unmediated on June 27, 2006, 6:36pm

Originally from Tinselman on May 30, 2006, 5:03pm

Working long hours in the lab, cancer-immunology researcher Jahan Khalili was inspired one night to create light fixtures using x-ray film. A DNA or Proteomic x-ray film forms the exterior of this innovative lighting design, which is structured to be hung from the ceiling.

The typical fixture is 16″ tall by 12″ in diameter, weighs 3 pounds, and is comprised by x-ray film, thread, wire, adhesive, and a lamp fitting 120v. According to Realm Dekor, the X-Ray Lamp is “perfect décor for those who appreciate the unique graphic quality of everyday surroundings.” [via Realm Dekor; suggested by Josh Rubin, New York.]

Originally from Transmaterial on June 23, 2006, 7:56pm

3M’s Novec 1230 fire protection fluid looks exactly like water, but does not cause the type of damage associated with water when putting out a fire. It can be used to protect rare exhibits, electronic equipment and other delicate items without causing any harm. In fact, items can even be immersed in the agent. The fire protection fluid will quickly evaporate, safeguarding these items - and leaving them unaffected.

Novec 1230 is a fluoroketone which serves as an advanced halon replacement. The fluid has zero ozone depletion potential and the lowest atmospheric lifetime for halocarbon alternatives: 5 days. (The closest alternative is 33 years.) It also has a Global Warming potential of 1, 99.9% lower than any halocarbon agent acceptable for use in occupied spaces.

Extinguishing via its cooling effect, Novec 1230 fluid works as a gas, yet it is a liquid at room temperature. Because it isnot stored or shipped from the factory in pressurized cylinders, Novec 1230 fluid is easy to handle and charge. Novec 1230fluid systems allow for more efficient use of space, requiring about the same number of cylinders as conventionalhalocarbon agents. Novec 1230 fluid also has the greatest margin of safety for use in occupied spaces. [via 3M; suggested by Truels Wissneth.]

Originally from Transmaterial on June 15, 2006, 9:31pm

Originally from Tinselman on June 28, 2006, 1:55pm