plans for Zer01

i have accepted the job being the coordinator for the commissioned project/collaboration with Montalvo/CADRE/Mongrel for Zer01. Although, i am not ready (or able) to discuss the project, i can tell you that it has to do with telecommunications technology and switching. i am really looking forward to the project for all of the challenges in hardware, coordination, and of course the festival itself as the reward after our investment.

i had a chance to visit with Richard Wright and Graham Harwood on a ride around the Silicon Valley earlier this year. i really appreciate the Mongrel collective's sensibility about the ways culture can be strengthened by the continual mongrelization of tools/memes/populaces. additionally, i am really inspired by the ways they have demonstrated resourcefulness, quick-prototyping, détournement, and poltical understanding of media technologies.

more Share documentation:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2858775#2858775

and...

muses: Share SJ

last night was the inaugural meeting of Share San Jose; Share is a worldwide community that gathers monthly to make communal music and art. Participants bring their portable equipment, plug into our system, improvise on each others' signal and perform live audio and video. SHARE furnishes the amplification and projection.

revelations

my secret: i happen to be a big fan of sound art. from about age 10 or 11, i was one of those millions of people who were influenced by the local independent radio station. 'my' station is WMNF, a completely independent user supported community station in the heart of conspicuously conservative central Florida. i first discovered Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and the Word of "Bob": J.R. "Bob" Dobbs on WMNF.

last night, i was very interested to talk to the Share 'participants' but within moments of being there it was abundantly apparent that i should become a maker. this was a little strange because despite my absolute love of noise art; i am not a musician. i bombed in elementary school when trying to learn an instrument and ham-fistedly beat on a cheap electric guitar in my teens. my friend Ethan Miller spent a few minutes with me to install an algorithmic sound program called ChucK. the programming is done on the command line but, it will take me some research to pickup some fluency.

¿dirt style?

and so with absolutely no pre-planned platform, they asked if i wanted jack-in to the mixing board and i said yes. i picked up random samples from my favorite ccMixter site the Freesound Project and mixed loops using Quicktime. on top of this I layered my text to speech synthesizer and read my theories on art practice into the mix. do i need to invest my time in one of these complex sound programs? maybe not.




my 'ow' sample built from Sumanguru Gyra Jones upload :
and asample of the jam (yes that's the woot-ow loop in minute 3):

a Temporary Autonomous Zone in World of Warcraft

A few months ago, I approached my colleagues with the idea that we could do a perfomance on the platform World of Warcraft based on the theories of Hakim Bey the anarchistic writer who wrote about the courageous acts of art making and intervention without arrogance or ceremony. The text is a beautiful description of those who take the chance and create for the sheer thrill of being in it.

The ideas behind TAZ is to take charge and be in the moment. Coupled with the critical reflections about the romanticisms of neo-medievalism* inherent in the platform(more..)

Ars Virtua Guild Lives!

last night, the first WoW office hours were instantiated. several Ars Virtua Officers met and were able to establish the Ars Virtua Guild. Here is a shot of our founding members. this is the first step into our further exploration of WoW as a mixed reality and art platform iniatives. here are some more shots from our nList flick group.

for the HORDE!

molecules that matter

The Molecules That Matter show opens this weekend at the Tang Museum, Skidmore College. I am exhibiting my soft sculpture titled Fluoxetine. Here's a clip from the press release:

"SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. —Ten of the 20th century’s most profoundly
significant organic molecules will be the stars of an unusual and innovative new
exhibition called Molecules That Matter, on view Sept. 8, 2007–April 13, 2008, at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.
In spotlighting ten molecules whose common element is carbon—a magnificently multitasking element—the exhibition will illuminate the science of the molecules and their historical impact, and will heighten both dimensions with a provocative selection of material artifacts and contemporary artworks related to each molecule.
“This mix of science, art, and material culture is quite experimental, and unlikely to be found in either art or science museums,” says John Weber, Dayton Director of the Tang Museum. Weber co-organized the show with Ray Giguere, the Skidmore chemistry professor who proposed the original concept and serves as the exhibition’s co-curator and scientific overseer.
For Giguere, the exhibition represents an important look at the history of organic chemistry and an exciting new way to introduce non-scientists to the vital but invisible role that chemistry plays in their everyday lives. “Molecules That Matter explores our expanding knowledge of the invisible world of molecules,” says Giguere. “Throughout the 20th century, our knowledge of the molecular level has significantly defined our world, and even life itself. How we have changed as a result of this remarkable molecular evolution is the overarching story the exhibition conveys.”

Junkbot Safaris

Dumpster Dives and Junking for Bot parts
I have been going out on Junkbot Safaris looking for pieces and prts for the robots I want to build. I put a simple scrapping tutorial on instructables.com to help the people who want to come to my seminar. The Engineering Dept. does a bang up job of up dating equipment regularly and before the recyclers come, it usually sits for a week or two. As far as I can tell it is a win-win, the dept. has pays less because the waste load is reduced and we get 'monetarily' free materials. And if you dispose of your scrap with a proper recycler it is a responsible act as well.

My policy is to make sure the area is as clean or cleaner than when I arrived.They know that folks like me are on salvage operations. A sure way to get them to lock down this valuable material is to make a big mess of small parts for someone else to clean up. Please be kind to those who allow you access to this material. Here's an image from my tutorial.

insert images

For the next bot seminar I want to get as many folks to part out old devices as possible. We will probably have to do a two part seminar. Part A: Salvage, Part B: Bot Construction.

t-shirts part deux

this week nList partied down again in the silkscreen lab. Vera developed an awesome design and we came together this time for our first 2color screen print. The process of screening was ardous. on our first day we were plagued with problems with the emulsion not once but, three times. late in the afternoon i had to call it quits i was tired and it was going to take several hours to prepare the screens anew.



Ethan, Shao, and i put our heads together, did some error analysis, and re-planned. we came back together on Thursday evening. we worked hard to get the base coat onto the rest of the shirts, and in the nick of time too because at the end of our run the emulsion started to break down. And almost excatly the same thing happened with the second color. i am not buying that emulsion again.

the absolutely awesome thing is that the team worked incredibly well together and i have nothing but thanks an kudos to them.

in other words, WE ROCK!

Many thanks (in no particular order) go to:
Vera
Kyung
James
Cookie
Ethan
Shao
Xiaoqing
Danielle
Julia

update: starry starry night

telemetry: beware, faint-of-heart, i have a cantenna and i know how to use it. herr Morgan loaned me his cantenna for the the event and the FREAKIN' thing is a cannon!! thank you JM! yesterday, i was also able to hax me Motorola Q into a broadband modem as a redundancy.


software: took a giant leap forward tonight. in the space of a few hours and two pizzas, dear friends and collaborators Rebecca, Wayne, and Ethan worked out most of the bugs and we actually have a running version as of now.

video:is coming along. i found a cd file originally made with Director from the SOHO site; whereas the cd won't run anymore because of the platform, it is chuck full of video and text files that i can import into my vids.

here's one for sh**s and giggles:


we march on: look for a near realtime upload of images friday night into saturday morning as i record the event.

a night at the Montalvo

hopefully it will have as happy an ending as the Marx Bros. film. about two weeks ago i proposed a reiteration of my Occulus project for Starry, Starry Night a star party featuring art of the heavens and astronomy at Montalvo Arts Center.


my conception for the temple
The project is a public video projection installation during the Starry, Starry Night event using Montalvo Arts Center's architecture as backdrop/projection screen and allowing the public a glimpse into the often overlooked complex connection to the Sun, the nearest star to the Earth.

there is tons to do and no time; i was luckily able to quickly assemble some of the CADRE fellows to assist me:
Sarah Lowe - materials and construction
Wayne Madsen - code warrior (kinds like Chuck Norris)
Ethan Miller - code warrior (kind like the Terminator + Gary Cooper)
James Morgan - telemetry and spiritual advice
me - logistics and video editing and worrywart

and this project also couldn't be realized without the generous support from:
Steele Hill, SOHO Media Specialist
Joseph B. GurmanFacility Scientist, Solar Data Analysis Center
Solar Oscillations Investigation (SOI) team and especially:
Philip H. Scherrer, Principal Investigator
Deborah ScherrerEducational Outreach, SOLAR Center Stanford University


the sun now! near-realtime images!
courtesy of virtual solar observatory

sf three minute film festival entry

slow progress for democracy accompanied by flipper

is our response to the slow progress of democracy of the western
hemisphere, the trapped feeling that one gets watching the clock,
knowing that it is wrong and staring in the face of the opinion of
the world. this steady sabotaged march is marked by nostalgia for the
past and an almost cruel misunderstanding of web 2.0. god bless the
french and their democracy, god bless the dolphins and live secure in
the knowledge that it only takes 2.5 minutes to make a 3 minute movie.

the pierres
Thomas Pierre Asmuth
John Pierre Bruneau
James Pierre Morgan


a screenshot until the film premiere

robotics workshop

we had an overwhelming number of successes today. the room was packed! Mike and his suped-up machine that hops like a low rider. Wayne and Lauren going with the perpendicularly-opposed drive, James had great success triggering the critter with his mag light, and so many others it escapes my electron addled mind. the photos of course are linked to the nbsp flickr group

many people asked, when is the next one? I am eager to try a project called the symet which is a symmetrical junkbot that is autonomous. autonomous, in that, it uses a solar cell so it searches for it's own "food". and "junkbot" meaning that we can salvage (ie free) many components from our garages, the thrift store, Aunt Mabel's attic, etc. start looking for discarded microcassette and cassette players, old pcb's, and anything else you want crack the case on. (on another project, I recently built FM transmitter using on materials scavenged from old pcb's!)

and lastly, I want to game these critters and the future bots. Obviously there is the race. what else could we do? I wanna see the nitro-fuel funny robot races between Lauren's and Wayne's 'wheeled' versions. send me your suggestions. I think we should have some games in the next couple of weeks. And I challenge Mike and anyone else to see who can make their bot jump higher, just like the low-riders here in O-town. Any volunteers want to judge?

a day at the CDC

the CDC has a public space & face. the public space includes a gallery space for a permanent and rotating exhibit. we had to go through an extensive security check that included a x-ray scan and physical search of our vehicle that was worth every bit of the inconvenience. the current visiting exhibit is from the National Holocaust Museum; Deadly Medicine tracks the 20th century Eugenics movement across the world and how it was used during the Nazi years. amazing stuff; i was not aware how large the movement was across the planet.

the permanent exhibit is about the history of the CDC. some of the artifacts include: an iron lung, tools for collecting small pox virus, level 5 'blue suits', and a lounging 6 foot mosquito called Betty. a tour group was getting a chance to put on the hazard suits, I am so jealous. I propose a nList field trip! they do a Disease Camp for High Schoolers, maybe we can talk them into a college-level course.


they have a giftshop (which I am already planning some suggestions for new products), i was able to get some goodies including a plush cold virus for my 7 month old cousin.

crack that (iPhone) case!

cute! my fave 3rd party Mac parts dealer will be cracking open the iPhone tomorrow. they are the smartasses who wear buttons that say "no I won't fix your iPod" (they will teach how to do it yerself).

get live updates of the iPhone surgery photoblog at:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone

>>>>>>>>>>from my email>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
--3-- Live iPhone Disassembly

We will be live blogging the disassembly of an iPhone shortly after
its release at 6:00 EDT on Friday, June 29. The live stream of photos
will use the same AJAX technology that the rest of our site is built
on. Your browser will update with images as soon as we take them,
without the need to refresh the page.

To be notified as soon as we begin disassembly, enter your email
address here:

http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone

The live disassembly will begin tomorrow afternoon at the above
address. Stay tuned!<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Wayne holds the antenna for the first broadcast of nList TV

the first broadcast

last night John and i met to prototype the TV transmitter. John has some experience at electronics and so he brought a breadboard and drew out the schematics for the transmitter. he then put the components together and we hacked a rca cable for input.

our testing was going poorly until we realized to check our source, sure enough the displays had not auto detected. we immediately saw a transmitted image and spent the next hour tuning the transmitter. an antenna is going to absolutely necessary and we want to prototype an amplifier as soon as I return from my travel.

and as a bonus i was able to make the FM transmitter broadcast through out the room while John was scaring up a cable.

vivoleum!

the future of energy, the history of energy.

just simply amazing, i know they don't need adverts from me, but i want to offer props. and if you don't know this you really should.

http://www.vivoleum.com/event/

ok so i never said i was an early adopter

i was introduced to Quicksilver yesterday in my quest for a one interface tool to mashup my twitter and plazes usage (oh yeah and someone already did twazes, damn scooped again! ;])

ok back to QS, may i please put this down in writing for all of the blogosphere, OMFGods is this coooool! so this little tool has made me rethink interface and get really excited about scripting for the apple OS. The tool is really amazing about providing access to many of your programs through one interface. For the last day i have already been using QS to post tweets and write emails without the hunt and click for separate programs.

you should try it, their tagline about making OS X more amazing is not BS.

twitter + plazes = ??

i have been trying to mash up my main two social network tools twitter and plazes so that it isn't a chore to keep current with both. i found several solutions including a php script that parses the rss feed which i installed on my web server. this solution was exhibiting a bug which i still don't understand so it would post a tweet of 'Error' everytime i ran the script.

i looked for other rss into twitter solutions and came across two from the freakitude blog. the article mentions rss2twitter.com and twitterfeed.com. both services are offered free of charge to the community (yay!!). i had trouble parsing the plazes atom feed through rss2twitter.com but twitterfeed.com's product worked great.

i am going to continue to work on a stand-on-my-own/custom solution because both services only update every thirty minutes and i am not thrilled about the amount of titling that twitterfeed.com is placing in the tweets.

if the plazes api gets released soon i can look for solutions in the other direction twitter into plazes. if i can make this happen, maybe the cutesy web name should be called twazes (wonder what we get when we crossbreed this with flickr? twazkr of course).

a bonus is i was inspired to add the 'what am i up to' feed from both of my services to the side bar for the kN blog.

the silkscreen day

we met about 10:30 and I showed the early birds how to stretch a screen and coat it with the emulsion. next I went over how to prep an image and then we burned the 'rez' design in a screen I had prepared earlier. then we set to printing; by this time lots more folks had shown. many people took turns both assisting me and some actually being brave and pulling their own prints.

Wayne mixed a beautiful grey that proved super popular. Xiaoqing's art looked awesome and many people put it on their shirt. lastly, we pulled some prints of XJ's design on RIves BFK (we are thinking about selling them at the street fair that Anno D will be doing later this summer). think about designs we could hawk at the fair! we can work on full color designs.

heres some sweet shots from the day http://www.flickr.com/groups/nbsp/

sweet &nbsp; photo

the silkscreen was curing and caught this really interesting light

tshirt poll

Vote for your favorite 'rezzing' design. click any image for a detailed look-see.

Which 'rez' tshirt should we print?
	rezzing01
	rezzing02
	rezzing03
	rezzing04
	rezzing05
	rezzing06
pollcode.com free polls

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the poll has closed the results are: rezzing01 wins with 32% of the vote