tripping to 01sj: a recap

i am back from the 01sj biennial for a week and i starting again. 01sj was undoubtedly an energizing experience even with injury and insult that modern air travel is today(another post for another day). i met some amazing new friends caught up with old friends, marveled at what was done by all, and got to eat some damned good and inexpensive Mexican Food.





eleven highlights of the trip in no particular order of preference:
1. one on one interview with Miguel Palma, sculptor, installation artist, mechanical genius, and hell of a beautiful soul. Miguel and I shared some ciders and much discussion of the ideas, aesthetics, and ethics. the next day he met me for a continued discussion and private tour (and videoed) of his installation at the Thompson Gallery at SJSU.

2. performance by Zoe Keating—haunting, lyrical, absolutely beyond belief cello concert!

3. A Machine to See With—the new mobile device augmented reality game/experience from Blast Theory. WOW! WOW! WOW! truly fun, i deeply took on the cinematic, stereotype offered to me and with all due intensity scared the hell out of my 'partner' (a player who I met during the game play). honestly i was deep and intently playing the role, it was too much for the other person and they ran away. brilliant!

4. assisting, artist, Sarah Lowe assemble her ghost cones—just in time for the Absolute Zero street fest! eek!





5. i-Weather—another one-on-one with the artists! i-Weather is a realtime artificial acclimatization application to allow you to sync your circadian rhythms to a network of similar synced individuals. Christian Babski and Patrick Keller gave me an individual tour of the concept, structure, and the software used to build a multiple platform light generator that runs from orange to blue light in order to help you match bodily systems to the i-weather network.



6. touring South Hall with my in-laws–seriously amazing people with amazing insight and personal experience, it is always such a joy to share my understanding of art with their wisdom.

7. lunch with the folks of Leonardo—during a break in the Global Warning Symposium a Leonardo staffer invited me to dine with speakers and the board of Leonardo

8. SloDog—eating sausages made by the SloDog team and harassing the cyclers as they cooked the tubemeats

9. the countless others who gave me short interviews and laughed with me about my camera rig. and all i learned from my prototypes and using my new mobile device to broadcast. many new evil plans are a foot from the notes i have.



10. being asked to participate on a panel about gender identity from the Trading Voices team—i was asked to be part of the discussion panel on gender equality, role play, and transformation by the members of the TV team.

11. couch surfing the Casa Shatner with the Socks Inc team—partay, partay!

there was so much more! what a few days! i think i was up at 7-8am everyday and not to bed before 2am any of the days...

shouldrCam assembly & more testing

I made good progress on the shouldrCam assembly today.

i am testing the voice to text option in my new droid

i am testing my new droid phone. it has a voice to text option. this was 1 pass, very impressive.

This is the droid I hav been looking for

It's here...
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

it works!

Servo pan/tilt update

Pan/tilt rig is in. Here's the cam sat upon it.

CS5 reflections

it has been slightly over 3 weeks since i downloaded the CS5 suite for my laptop and I am not too impressed with the performance on my relatively new Mac (less than 6 months old). i am running:

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,2
Processor Name: Intel Core i5
Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 3 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Processor Interconnect Speed: 4.8 GT/s
Boot ROM Version: MBP61.0057.B05

the new suite really bogs my computer down even when doing simple things like making animated gifs. i also have had problems with the availability of tools common filters and tools (lighting effects for heaven's sake!) in the Ps 64bit version so i have had to down grade the performance to access them. and in my opinion Dw CS5 makes basic site setup less user friendly. it confused my mid-level students who had become quite comfortable with the Basic Tab; not a great idea Adopey!

i am going to suggest to my students that yes the content aware clean up tools are really sexy, but for day to day use I find that CS4 is a fine tool. it pretty obvious that we will need a few more hardware revisions to make this work smoothly, so my recommendation for the student is to go get a deal on CS4 for the mean time. or buy a really tricked out desktop.

more projection of shoulder cam

so unfortunately it appears that my servo rig won't be here until Tuesday, gack! so i pulled out Sketch-up to get an idea of the appearance. i still need to add in a back pack and the wires are hard to draw. here are the current images.

01SJ chicanery

so i am setting up my rig for 01SJ and i showed the laptop carrying device i am going to use for transmitting my remote communications. I have decided that I need a front facing camera as i eluded to in yesterday's post. i decided this afternoon that will shoulder mount a cam with pan/tilt using Arduino and a Wii-chuck. i found a generous soul named Andrea Salvatore, who has uploaded his code and example here.

awww, who knows maybe I will put it on a hat, yet.

impromptu Glitch Art lecture in the lab on Monday