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Grid Pro+Quartz Composer=Sexy (2006, 3.15MB, 1:28 min)
This is a short test of Grid Pro Cocoa’s ability to play Quartz Composer files using an RSS Feed Reader and a simple camera input. Being able to mix any RSS feeds (like content from my own blog) together with live video is prety darn sexy and elegant. I threw in a little Boards of Canada just for the hell of it.

Bald and Sunny (2006, 477KB, 1.5 sec loop)
Me playing around with the builtin iSight on my Mac Book Pro and Gawker. Gawker is a free application for OS X that allows you to frame grab and compile timelapse movies from any firewire video device or your desktop. It has a few nifty network aware features so check it out.

What makes you walk away from a conversation feeling listened to? Not listened to?

Productivity blogger Marcus Vorwaller has come up with a good list of ways to increase the quality of conversations. Basically, the bottom line seems to be that tried and true Golden Rule: treat others as you would yourself. I also really appreciate the “why didn’t you enjoy the conversation” insights; it’s not always easy to pinpoint why we walk away unfulfilled.

What do you find are the best ways to make every conversation count? Thoughts to comments or to tips at lifehacker.com. — Wendy Boswell

Originally from Lifehacker on September 6, 2006, 11:30am

We have always liked Marianne Cusato’s Katrina Cottage design, a small, attractive and affordable alternative for New Orleans. Now the designer has made a deal with Lowes to sell packages of plans and materials in four different designs ranging from 544 to 936 square feet, that will cost from $ 25,000 to $ 50,000. Good for floods (no drywall) and winds up to 140 miles an hour. Selling at Lowes may not sound like a big deal, but in fact is a huge step in the prefab business- a major mainstream retailer selling architect-designed, well resolved solutions at reasonable prices. Marianne says “Design makes a difference”- So do we.::Wall Street Journal

Originally from Treehugger on September 7, 2006, 8:32am

On display at this year’s International Motor Show in Paris will be a car that embodies one of our favorite propulsion combinations. Yes, the Citroën C-Métisse is an over-the-top concept car, but it’s also a diesel/electric hybrid, a powertrain we need to see more of. Ford has also whetted appetites with its Reflex diesel hybrid concept car, which debuted at the International Auto Show in Detroit this year. While no shortage of “eco” concept cars boast fuel cell innards with little articulation of what that might actually entail, diesel hybrids are a realistic and attainable prospect, and if it takes quadruple gull-wing doors to get people amped up on them, then so be it.

Originally from Treehugger on September 7, 2006, 10:00am

Angstrom Power Inc. is a Canadian company develops and commercializes micro-structured fuel cells for a wide variety of applications. They currently offer such products as the pictured bike light, a standard micro-flashlight, and a general purpose charger. See photo after the fold for a helmet-mounted charger application. Purchase can be arranged by filling out a form. From the Angstrom website: “Angstrom’s micro hydrogen™ bike lights can be affixed to a helmet or handlebars. Each bike light runs on hydrogen that is stored in a 21cc cartridge, which provides the equivalent energy of about 10 AA disposable alkaline batteries. The only by-product is water vapor. The light provides about 20 hours of continuous run-time between refueling. Cyclists refuel their cartridges with hydrogen gas. Refueling takes only minutes to complete”. Nice to see a micro fuel cell company thinking outside the usual military or laptop box. Another Canadian company makes hydrogen electrolyzers. We think the two firms should get together to host a wind-farm to wind-farm night race. This might supplant the Iditarod sledding contest once global warming makes the snowpack unreliable.

Originally from Treehugger on September 7, 2006, 8:45am

Palazzo Grassi is currently showing “Where Are We Going?”, a selection from the François Pinault Collection.

Re-posing the question asked by Paul Gauguin at the cusp of the last century—and ironically adapted by Damien Hirst at the start of this one, “Where Are We Going?” presents some two hundred works by artists of the past sixty years. Small gallery of the works exhibited.

Olafur Eliasson’s brand new installation Your Wave Is looks quite amazing but given my love for Maurizio Cattelan‘ work, i illustrate this post with one of his wax sculptures, Him (2001) which is part of the exhibition in Venice as well. Other pieces my very pop tastes endorse: Pierre Huyghe’s Les Grands Ensembles; Takashi Murakami’s Inochi, Tamon-Kun and Koumok-kun.

In the coming years, the collection will be displayed through a series of exhibitions. After Venice, the next show will present photographs and artist’s videos, in France in early 2007.

Where are we going? is on view through October 1, 2006, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (IT.)

Via ArtDaily.

More Cattelan: 2 months of prison for liberating Cattelan’s dolls; a replica of the giant HOLLYWOOD letters installed right above the rubbish tip of Palermo; The Ninth Hour.

Originally from we make money not art on September 7, 2006, 6:03am

If i wasn’t already busy wearing this superb freckleproof cape day in day out, i’d certainly want to test Karin van Dam’s hairdryer (image on the left) when i’m in Amsterdam for Picnic at the end of the month.

Her installations, drawings and photos are exhibited until Oct.7, 2006 at the Wetering Galerie, in Amsterdam.

Via artbbq.

Worth the pampering trip as well: Ángeles Oliva and Toña Medina’s Dolor Intenso, an installation that uses hairdryers-MP3 players to explore the relationship of repression, admiration, devotion and identification that exists between an idol and his/her fan.

The KaskPam, Import/export Marseille (image on the right), by Lydwine Van der Hulst, offers visitors an acquastic submersion in the sounds of Marseilles. Put your head inside the hairdryer and listen to an audio stream transmitted in real time from the sea wall at the Port of Marseilles (Port Autonome de Marseille, or PAM in French). Musical interludes interrupt the stream of sound with concerts and other compositions imported/exported from Marseilles.

Originally from we make money not art on September 7, 2006, 7:23am

A quadruped robot dances to an electro-environmental soundtrack performed live by a group of singing insects in a big glass box. Small work for robots and insects by hostprods .

Originally from VVORK at September 6, 2006, 06:20, published by Marisa S. Olson

Originally from Rhizome.org on September 6, 2006, 9:57am

Subtopia points to Rafael Estefania’s photo journal of San Pedro prison, home to about 1,500 inmates in La Paz, Bolivia (Spanish version.)

Inside, there are about 200 children playing, market stalls, restaurants, hairdressers and even a hotel. Facilities range from miserable to luxurious. There are no guards, no metal bars on the cell windows. Prisoners have to resolve their problems through representatives elected democratically.

Inmates have to pay for their cells, so most of them have to sell groceries, work as laundry staff, carpenters, shoe-shine boys, TV repairmen, etc.

Few of the inmates are convicted killers - 80% are there for drug-related offences. Only about 25% are actually serving a sentence - the rest are awaiting trial.

Tourists used to be allowed in, but the tours were stopped because many people were coming to buy cocaine, said to be the purest in the country.

Originally from we make money not art on September 6, 2006, 6:34am

Architect Rem Koolhaas and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist interview over sixty artists, architects, and writers for 24 hours…straight.

Originally from Metropolis Magazine on September 5, 2006, 12:00am

Occular Witness is an artistic research-project that springs from Arijana Kajfes examinations of what light really is and what it consist of. The project attempts to stake out the limits of human vision and examines how information is malleable and how meaning is formed through image in a time when information is abundant and our culture is saturated with layers of processed imagery.

The installation i saw during ars electronica was meant to look like a “laboratory” with several stations that each examines diverse processes of light and the eye’s perception of light.

One of the pieces of Occular Witness is Monochromeye a kind of hat that covers your scalp and eyes and reduces vision to basic monochromatic color readings of the environment. You have to wear a fingerholder fitted with one red, green and blue lightsensor that measures light as you point your finger at something. It feeds back the color information to two tricolored (RGB) light diodes that emit two beams of light straight into your eyes.

When i tried it on, nothing happened as long as i stayed in the gallery, but going out of it, passing under the stairs and reaching the outside made the experience much more enjoyable. Nothing spectacular, but having my mode of recognition reduced down to only three kinds of light was incredibly soothing and playful, although i should have tested it during a much longer period of time to really appreciate its effects. And of course i really like the alien coolness it gave me.

Arijana Kajfes conducted the project at the Smart Studio, Interactive Institute.

Images on flickr.

Originally from we make money not art on September 6, 2006, 8:53am

Forget Katie. This is the guy America should be watching.

Originally from I’m Just Sayin’ on September 6, 2006, 12:52pm

Originally from Life as an Artificial Lifeform on September 7, 2006, 2:20pm

Josh Wolf, the young California video blogger and freelance journalist who was imprisoned August 1 for refusing to turn over videos of a political protest to a federal grand jury, has just been freed on bail by a federal appeals court, exactly one month later.

Wolf has left the Dublin prison facility, but he hasn’t left the community he found there. Yesterday, before once again thanking those who have supported him while he was inside, he wound up his statement before the press:

I’m sure that many of you are curious about my experiences being imprisoned in Dublin; I have been very fortunate and much of my time incarcerated was actually quite positive. While locked up, I met many fellow prisoners who are truly stellar individuals and a observed a community which is actually one of the healthiest that I have ever lived in. To my friends in Unit J2, thanks for everything and I wish you all the best of luck.

In an effort to help get the stories of those incarcerated out into the world, I have started to develop a not-for-profit organization which will be known, for now, as prisonblogs.net – the project is dedicated to giving a voice to the voiceless, and is something that I am very excited about. Expect more details about this initiative in the coming weeks.

For more on the story of Wolf’s release, see the San Francisco Chronicle and his own website.

Originally

from jameswagner.com

reBlogged

on Sep 2, 2006, 5:21PM

Originally from unmediated on September 7, 2006, 12:28pm

Is it really any wonder that ABC/Disney is involved with a lying piece of propaganda B.S.? Here’s a little reminder of what this company is all about:

Originally from I’m Just Sayin’ on September 7, 2006, 1:21pm

Originally from 3quarksdaily on September 5, 2006, 6:43pm

Originally from 3quarksdaily on September 7, 2006, 1:42pm

Apart from the ShiftSpace presentation, the other Pixelspaces talk i really enjoyed was by James Powderly and Evan Roth (US) from Graffiti Research Lab. They developed the project at eyebeam in New York.

I didn’t get this project at all before ars electronica. I kind of read about it here and there and thought “mmmh! throwing luminous thingies at buildings? So what?” But i discovered during their talk that there’s more behind G.R.L. and i liked what i heard. A lot (though i wasn’t really convinced by the “let’s throw some luminous thingies at the tram” performance.)
My notes from their talk:

Roth explained that his fellowship at Eyebeam was based on a previous work: his thesis project at Parsons, the Graffiti Analysis system which makes visible the unseen movements of graffiti artists in the creation of a tag.

Powderly worked for a robotic company in New York and was until then thus only used to working on “leaving marks on the rocks on Mars.”

Their works has a lot to do with the hacking mentality. They don’t define themselves as graffiti artists but rather as graffiti engineers, a bit in the style of Q, the gadget guy who devised accessories for James Bond. Their work is an extension of the graffiti and aims to provide graffiti writers, street artists and protesters with new tools in order to help them take back public space and challenge corporate culture. All their work is OS, that was one of the requirements to work at Eyebeam.

They gave us an overview of the works they found most inspiring:

Zoetropes, by the Toyshop Collective, repurposed bicycle wheels animated and inspired by the zoetrope, a XIXth century device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures.

Darius Jones, a graffiti artist from Brooklyn, whose work is characterized by a perversion in the use of existing systems. He clearly has a certain eye for creating romance in unexpected places, making the city fall in love with itself. Street signs falling in love; images of the signage brought into 3D space, at street level; surveillance cameras surveilling themselves, etc.

Mark Jenkins, based in Washington DC, used mostly tape as its material. He leaves his tape kids all over the city as gifts to the world.

Such pieces are very temporal, they stay there only a few hours and their traces live on on the web. He ended up using LED Throwies as well (see his Jesus). His “embedded” works are a big success as well. For example his Homeless Guy makes us look back at ourselves and at how we interact with each other.

Banksy, “the exterior paint specialist”.

Both Banksy and Jenkins have taken over surveillance cameras.
“Boring”: Banksy used a fire extinguisher to paint the letters on the wall of a building because he didn’t think much of its architecture. He emptied the extinguisher and filled it with red paint.

They showed also images of Banksy’s works in zoos. The artist is known for sneaking into the penguin enclosure at London Zoo and painting ‘We’re bored of fish- We wanna go home’.

Hacks in museum (some of the pieces he hung in some museum are now listed as part of the permanent collection. “Vandalized oil painting”. GRL showed some of Banksys’s films. He tags up for a very interesting reasons. Apparently policemen wear caps that hide their eyebrows. Apparently eyebrows are such an expressive part of our face that it’s best to leave them in the shadow. But it means that policemen cannot easily see what’s up.

These artists have online equivalents: the Velvet Strike Team who conceptualized during the beginning of Bush’s “War on Terrorism” a collection of spray paints to use as graffiti on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the popular network shooter terrorism game “Counter-Strike”.

A walk series of stencils.

Graffiti artists use the web a lot to document their work. Which can lead to some problems as some of them have been arrested via their MySpace page, some have even been busted out of their MySpace page.

Now how does the work of Graffiti Research Lab fit into this?

They want to provide graffiti artists with the tools that would allow them to compete with corporate advertisers. Powderly even added that the most interesting things done using the throwies or the Night Writer have been done by others with the help of GRL sometimes (as with the Throwie Talkie, a Throwie hacked to blink graffiti messages in morse code, an idea of Pat & Ward Cunningham) but often without it. A search about throwies on google shows that it’s not about GRL anymore.

Jose Luis de Vicente asked them about their concern for the sustainability of the Throwies (each of them is equipped with a tiny battery). GRL seemed to be very concerned with the problem. They developed a solar-powered throwie but as it’s 7 times more expensive than the “regular” one, it wouldn’t be affordable enough for artists. Usually throwies do not stay in the environment as people like to throw them then they want to take them back home as a souvenir. But here again comes the problem of recycling: do we know if these people recycle the batteries correctly?

GRL gave a second talk during the Forum I – Interactive Art presentations. You can download the podcast.
Many images found on wooster collective and visual resistance.

Originally from unmediated on September 7, 2006, 12:11pm

Originally from 3quarksdaily on September 5, 2006, 7:07pm