Welcome to

a novel form of presenting text data on electronic media by displaying the text as a series of cascading phrases. this presentation technique has been proven to result in faster reading with greater comprehension.

[link: liveink.com & readingonline.org]

Originally from information aesthetics on July 5, 2007, 10:18pm

Mark Frauenfelder:
New Scientist reports that researchers at University of Southampton, UK, have developed a tiny electric generator that converts environmental vibrations into stored electrical energy.

The generator converts 30% of environmental kinetic energy into electrical power, and could keep all sorts of low-power devices running without batteries – particularly when alternatives like solar power are not an option.

Steve Beeby, an engineer at the University of Southampton, UK, led development of the device. He says it could power devices attached to bridges, large buildings and other structures that experience vibration.

Link

Originally posted by Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing, ReBlogged by Robert on Jul 6, 2007 at 08:12 AM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on July 6, 2007, 8:12am

Crafty blogger Sandor recycled the wheel from a bicycle into a good-looking kitchen pot rack:

The wheel came off of GT full suspension bike that I broke. The whole project cost around $15 from HomeDepot. There is one bolt that goes through the hub, and a coupling that links that to a bolt that is half metal threads and half wood threads. That’s really about all that it takes. The pots hang off of simple stainless hooks attached to the rim and spokes.

Originally from Lifehacker on July 6, 2007, 9:30am

Command-line lovers rejoice: you can use Postfix and Fetchmail to read and send Gmail from the terminal. Tech site Soup To Nuts has a no-holds-barred tutorial that runs through the entire process, which isn’t for beginners. Once you’re all set up you’ll be able to back up your Gmail messages locally using the mechanism. This tutorial is distro independent and should work on all flavors of *nix. Windows users who want to get in on the action should see our previously-posted feature on backing up Gmail with fetchmail with Cygwin. Thanks, Leslie.

Originally from Lifehacker on July 6, 2007, 8:30am

If the space between musical notes is just as important to consider as the notes themselves, how do video artists take this onboard? Cuts of black or blank video is one approach, masked shapes that leave portions of screens ‘blank’ are another, and use of transparent screens is another - when video plays it can be seen on this screen, when it isnt played, the space behind screen is still visible. Have been exploring this with Artificial Eye’s Video Mirror Units, images projected onto motorised mirrors that allow image to be sent anywhere in room ( or outdoors ). Hanging the thin ‘tulle’ fabric across a space in many places, leaves the space free and allows images to travel around and ‘collect’ nicely at various locations… seemingly hanging in space on the thin material. ( see flickr photos ).

In a similar vein, a recent celebrated fashion show used similar fabric to give a kind of holographic overlay on the catwalkers. Gorillaz did this to great effect at the MTV awards a few years ago, enabling a live performance by seemingly 3D cartoon characters in real-space. Musion from the Uk were behind that which apparently involves hi res LED screens set into the floor, which are then reflected in a very thin transparent material above it called ‘eyeliner foil’ which captures light very well.

See also : Peppers Ghost - “an illusionary technique used in theatre and in some magic tricks. Using a plate glass and special lighting techniques, it can make objects seem to appear or disappear, or make one object seem to “morph” into another.” ( good explanatory images too via wikipedia)

More Things You Can’t See
- Video underwater. ( Without decent instructions for building your own underwater cam corder holder. )
- Public Outdoor Advertising in Sao Paulo. Imagine - a whole city that bans visual advertising outdoors! Delicious photo collection of now-skeletal billboards.
- Official use of this empty building in the Melbourne CBD. The Unofficial Use though, is pixel-delicious. ‘Empty Show’ video featuring huge amount of visual work by melbourne street artists inside a great space.
- Fees to download the VJ Loops, or 30 page VJ / ‘Painting with Light’ manual uploaded by Perth’s dynamic pixel duo : http://VJzoo.com

Visual Software Bits
http://ustream.tv - Noticed people using this for the iphone launch… am sure there’s better uses for it to come - “a platform that provides live interactive video for everyone. Anyone with a camera and an Internet connection can use Ustream to broadcast to a global audience.”
- Nice photoshop color palette matching tip - use the tool to combine the palettes of stylish paintings with the palettes of photos taken, to give colours a boost.
- Final Cut studio 2 comes bundled with an application dedicated to colour correcting and enhancement, stylising for video. ( tutorial )

VidVox Noise
Amongst the relentless pixel-chatter at the vidvox.net forums, can be found links to the VDMX 5 beta, which is smokin along nicely, the VDMX museum and a guide to integrating Quartz Composer patches into VDMX. Quartz Composer comes bundled with all Tiger OS X operating systems, but has to be installed from the developers pack to allow making your own visual toys. However, even within installation, the quartz files produced will run on any OSX Tiger system within quicktime, or application using quicktime. Harnessing this, the vidvox QC wiki has over 30 example FX and patches free for use. QC patches can be used as clips, FX or a Font Synth in VDMX 5 ( meaning text triggered in VDMX will be sent through the QC patch, then back to VDMX for outputting ). Sample QC effect ? Implementation of the classic ‘Stargate’ slit-scan effect. ( Now with vertical and horizontal modes, Flip, Freeze, manual Scan, Rate and Angle controls. )

Originally by jean poole from { { { { - - Sky Noise — >>> on July 6, 2007, 1:25pm

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): The Informational Tab extension shows a thumbnail preview of the opened site in the tab bar.

Informational Tab has a few customization options such as the size of preview, location of the close button, tab height, and location of the status bar. Additionally, Informational Tab literally shows a live preview so when you scroll the web page you will see the small preview scrolling, too. Informational Tab is a free download for all platforms with Firefox. For previews when you hover your mouse over a tab, check out Tab Scope or Tab Preview.

Originally from Lifehacker on July 6, 2007, 7:30pm

Looking to get away for the weekend but don’t want to hop on a flight or drive 10 hours to do so? Web site 71Miles is designed to make regional trips a breeze and touts itself as “the definitive guide to weekend trips around major cities.”

Fact is, at this point that’s far from the truth, as 71Miles currently only covers weekend trips for Northern California and the D.C. Metro area. However, the idea behind 71Miles is promising, inasmuch as a site dedicated to compiling short weekend trips and making such trips easier to take would be incredible. Until 71Miles expands their coverage (which they claim to be doing), does anyone know of a web site covering similar territory?

Originally from Lifehacker on July 6, 2007, 4:00pm

Tribute to Reggie (excerpt) (2007, 52MB, 2:51 min.)

The Yes Men are a group of culture jamming activists who practice
what they call “identity correction”.
On June 14th 2007 they have posed as representatives of Exxon-Mobil
and the National Petroleum Council in Calgary, Alberta, delivering a keynote
speech presenting a new product - Vivoleum- a new fuel made from the
deceased human bodies of climate-change casualties.
‘Tribute to Reggie” was a promo video for the event.

Originally from DVblog on July 7, 2007, 2:01am

smoke (excerpt) (2007, 7MB, 56 sec.)

‘A symbol of the human desire to monumentalize ideas in physical form,
the Empire State Building is a subject of Mark Napier’s artwork in the past four years.
This icon of American hegemony is key to exploring shifting structures of power,
specifically the transition from steel to software as the medium of power in our time.’
In Smoke, a generative software installation projected on the bitforms gallery wall.
Images from the show -here.

Originally from DVblog on July 6, 2007, 2:00am

will the summer make good for all of our sins? (2006, 35MB, 4:14 min.)

Exquisite music video for the Icelandic band múm.

Originally from DVblog on July 5, 2007, 2:00am

Public Performedia Collective

Intermedia Art Show (a collaboration between the International Festival of Contemporary Art, Experimental Art I.M.A.N. and Gallery Zero Berlin) :: Performance: July 7, 2007 ; 8:00 pm :: Artists: Alexandre A.R. Costa & Jorge Fernando dos Santos: Public Performedia Collective & Lucky Zulu + Hugo Paquete (sstfm) :: Portugal.

Public Performedia: This Project combines a live performative act, done In-Situ (City of Berlin), with a post-concert within the realm of electronic music / Experimental Intermedia Art Show. This Performance that begins a continuous process, and that culminates in an Intermediate experimental art show, will be established by the contextualization of the artists and their performative actions within emblematic buildings of Berlin (interiors and / or external sites).

Project Description (Live Art Work): Immobility, silence and disguises are key - concepts in this process, developed through an interrogative perspective of the daily social paradigm of our days in the deep of the wild “Business world”, metaphorically referenced by the elements that these are holding and let fall and for the movement of the city itself, collected in the show in video audio and worked in digital Interfaces in real time.

Conclusion: Intermedia Art Presentation (Post-Live Art Work in Berlin):
In conclusion there are clearly two phases in question: the first one happens in a perspective of an investigation In-loco and In-Situ (during which Video Audio recordings are performed with the participation of audiences and the performing intervention of the Artists). The second moment happens with the Intermedia Presentation / Concert.

The video audio registrations on the mentioned action are worked in real time in an audio-visual/ Intermedia presentation (a minimal performing proposal and a subscription through the universe of electronic music) as exemplified by the following registrations included in the demonstration DVD herewith.

www.iman-arte.blogspot.com
www.publicperformedia.blogspot.com

Originally by jo from networked_performance at July 5, 2007, 15:23, published by Miguel Amado

Originally from Rhizome.org on July 5, 2007, 2:05pm

“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.” - Robert A. Heinlein

Originally from Lifehacker on July 6, 2007, 7:15am

For my inaugural post to this blog, I’d like to write about something I’ve been thinking about lately, and hopefully begin a discussion on it. Namely, what to make of geotagged audio samples and recordings. In case you’re not familiar with the term, geotagging is the practice of assigning geographic coordinates to a piece of media like a recording or photo as a form of metadata. In one incarnation, such as on the Freesound project, geotagged samples are layered over Google maps, allowing one to zoom in on any spot on the planet and potentially find samples tagged to specific geographic locations. As numerous startups and one very large corporation (beginning with a ‘G’ and ending with ‘oogle’) have realized, the commercial potential of geotagging is huge. But we hear less about its scientific potential and, of importance here, its aesthetic potential.

Scientifically, geotagged audio has potential in areas such as the environmental sciences. As one example, imagine taking annual recordings of a section of forest over many years, studying the variations or declines in population of certain bird species via their prominence in the recordings. This has likely already been done, but then imagine putting those incremental recordings into the public sphere via an application like Google Earth.

Of course, as an artist, I am primarily interested in the aesthetic potential of this technology. Currently on Freesound (and hopefully soon on Google Earth too), one can navigate around a map of the world, looking for and listening to geotagged samples, downloading them if one is interested in using them further. However, once the geotagged sample is downloaded and separated from its coordinates, it becomes just another field recording without any accompanying data. For a geotagged sample or recording to be of value compositionally â�� as a geotagged sample tied to a specific place and not just an anonymous field recording â�� the metadata must be maintained for compositional use. This is where we apparently reach the edge of current development: tools for working compositionally with geotagged sounds off of a network have not really been developed. There is a multitude of approaches to using this type of material, from composers interested in ecoacoustics to installationists wanting to tap ‘global’ recordings in some improvisatory way. What I’m getting at here is the need for a discussion (hopefully to take place below), about the aesthetic and technical issues surrounding geotagged audio, and tools that composers/artists would like to see available for making the best of this material.

If you were to make use of geotagged audio, what would you use it for? What kind of interfaces into a geotagged audio database would interest you?

Originally by peter from Networked Music Review at July 4, 2007, 15:59, published by Lauren Cornell

Originally from Rhizome.org on July 5, 2007, 11:15am

“Box” (2006) is a multimedia boxing performance by Paul Litherland. Using gloves hooked into wireless gameboy controllers, two boxers control videos via programs written using MAX/MSP/Jitter by Patrice Coulombe.

Originally by mail from VVORK at July 5, 2007, 06:53, published by Lauren Cornell

Originally from Rhizome.org on July 5, 2007, 11:21am

“One of the Best Places for Artists, Curators and Dealers to Meet”

With over 7m registered users, Second Life is an online virtual world complete with land, residents and a growing economy developing one of the largest art communities on the internet. The site’s money-making and marketing potential to reach a new, younger audience is already being tapped by major corporations such as BMW, Adidas and Sony, which all have a presence there. Entire countries have also established virtual outposts. The Maldives was the first nation to open an embassy on Second Life’s ‘Diplomacy Island,’ where visitors can consult an ambassador about visas, trade and other consular issues. It was quickly followed by Sweden, while online embassies for the Philippines and Macedonia are under development.

Museums, universities and non-profit-organisations are getting involved as well. In the art world, the Andy Warhol Foundation has helped fund exhibitions and projects in Second Life, such as ‘Mixed Realities,’ an annual juried competition set up in 2004 with Turbulence.org, a group that has supported art on the internet since 1996, to commission five new online art works.

Continue reading Art makes a scene on Second Life: The online virtual world is becoming one of the best places for artists, curators and dealers to meet, by Helen Stoilas, July 4, 2007, The Art Newspaper.

Originally by jo from networked_performance at July 6, 2007, 16:10, published by Miguel Amado

Originally from Rhizome.org on July 7, 2007, 10:41am

Becoming Animal is an interactive performance piece developed by Minimaforms for this years Faster than Sound Festival in Bentwater’s K9 building in Suffolk, England.

The project develops the story of the mythical three headed beast Kerberos, guardian of the underworld. The objective of the piece is to create an environment of performance through the collective participation and conversation of the Kerberos and participants in the event. Each participant’s presence stimulates the three heads of the Kerberos triggering behavioral interactions and exchanges. Interactions are expressed through sounds, facial expressions and general activity of the Kerberos. The continued dialogue between users and the Kerberos will demonstrate emotions such as love, hate and anger. Participants are given custom dog masks and are encouraged to interact with the Kerberos and each other. This collective playfulness will construct interactions that evolve and Become Animal.

For Images and More info:
http://www.minimaforms.com/project/becoming_animal.html

Originally from Rhizome.org Raw at July 5, 2007, 20:12, published by Miguel Amado

Type work
Genre work
Keywords artificial life

Originally from Rhizome.org on July 6, 2007, 12:55pm

Yasutaro Mitsui with his own steel humanoid, early ’30s.

Via Hugo Strikes Back (information about the picture found in Book review: Loving The Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots.)

Originally from we make money not art on July 7, 2007, 5:06am

Today our home rely on a network of cables, pipelines and connections. Most of the information we have access to is passing through these “roots.” ASCII-Code curtains, by Dutch designer Nienke Sybrandy, visualize the information network in a tree, using the very codes that represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that work with text.

Via Beton & Garten. I tend not to read blogs written in a language i cannot understand but there are exceptions, Beton and Garten is one of them.

Originally from we make money not art on July 6, 2007, 12:58am

Astronauts have it tough. Sure, they get to float in Zero-G and wear cool spacesuits and drink all the Tang they want. But we all know it can be lonely out in space. We feel for you, space men. (And women.) So we’ve thought of something that would help: giant binoculars. You know, so you can see us down here waving at you.

Fortunately for those astronauts, we’re not the only ones down here trying to make the world a little less lonely. Flickrvision swoops around the Google globe Superman-style, pausing every few seconds to show a photo that somebody, somewhere in the world, uploaded to Flickr just minutes ago.

People all over the world take photos, and Flickrvision tracks the worldwide photographic zeitgeist.

Our recent world tour showed us an adorable couple at the Great Wall, mermaids on parade at Coney Island, an Italian castle, and a hummingbird in Ohio. Wouldn’t that make the cold, vast, emptiness of space feel a little bit more warm and cozy?

Flickrvision

p.s. Turn Flickrvision to 11: try the new 3D version and hit the full-screen button.
p.p.s. From the makers of Flickrvision, comes Twittervision!
p.p.p.s Make Flickrvision your screensaver!

rder=”0″ cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”0″>

 Link to this | Filed under Websites.

Originally by photojojo from Photojojo on July 6, 2007, 12:39am

Originally from Transmaterial on July 8, 2007, 1:09pm