Transmitters

today the new knowledge on Gernsback made me wonder about a project i shelved back in 2007. i spent a good amount of time on experiments in micro-broadcasting from 2006 - 2010. i built many FM transmitters from scratch that i used to form small bubbles of influence (temporary autonomous zones). i also wanted to tap into other media such as a colleague's iTunes partition on his laptop. i could broadcast Gary's playlists and mp3s throughout the art department. much of this research came from a sense of independent media and subversion of the bureaucracy official broadcast. the fire was stoked by desire to make handcrafted and to disrupt the culture of corporatized black box culture. if you don't void the warranty you don't own it.

i was reading a lot about the early microradio movement  and getting tons of information from Tetsuo Kogawa's Polymorphous Space website. Here is a link to the famous Toward Polymorphous Radio.


in 2007 i built my first TV transmitter. i was able to transmit a picture across the room at the CADRE Laboratory reminiscent of Apollo Moon Landings video. i am reading Peter D'Agostino's anthology TRANSMISSION (Tanam, 1985)while at the Signal Culture research residency. i begun to wonder whether i should pick up this line of experiments again. as of today, there are only 7 nations that haven't really begun Analogue to Digital Switchover.

one of these is CUBA!! a really relevant place to be thinking about right now.

exciting summer... ¿break?

it was a small blessing and curse in the same breath when my boss said "Sorry we have to close your summer course due to low enrollment."

i have gotten it into my head to purchase a studio; in this depressed economy there is so much cheap real estate available down here on the frontier. one of my colleagues even told me that a professor emeritus from our department had both a dumpy old house in a poor part of town to use as a studio years back. and it looks really possible. there are literally 900sq. ft. houses here on a small lot under $15k.I really only need it to have a solid roof,and not fall through the floor. even with 15 year mortgage an 10% down the payments will be around $250 with all the trimmings or much less than renting a place from someone else. so i will miss the income from the summer job.

the blessings are that i accepted a position on the V2V project for the 2nd Ural Industrial Biennial (Ekaterinburg, Russia) and Zero1 2012 (San Jose, CA). I am leading the international teams on building the installations. we will be exporting data from the modeling of Silicon and the Titanium Valleys as we 'seek' for them. these models will be used as part of our exhibition design at each venue. pretty exciting stuff and i am getting to apply the research and explorations in 3D modeling i have been doing this past year.we are exploring lots of outputs, FDM, CNC, laser etching,maybe combinations to build the exhibitions. here are a couple of exports from this evening.

of course, a summer away from class planning is also opening other doors for me. i have started practicing with the Processing language again, studying the Unity 3D modeling engine, practicing more with the CNC, building up my local makers club, developing a theory course in the history of New/Computational Media, participating on an arts organization Board of Directors, and joining a Board for a new science and engineering museum for the Pensacola area.

i don't think i am going to get very bored...

Craig Colorusso is BOSS

I ahve had the awesome honor to hang with Craig and his project Sun Boxes currently installed at the Uni this week. Today I simulcast the event for an hour you can watch the recording and hear the discussions I was having:



Video streaming by Ustream.

21st Century Macrame: Open Source and the Maker Movement

i thought i would share the thesis statement for my lecture since i mentioned it in my first post on Kickstarter lessons. i will writing about the accompanying laboratory in this year's faculty exhibition pretty soon.

21st Century Macrame: Open Source and the Maker Movement
The re-emergence of the do-it-yourself culture as a social movement, cultural form, and genre.

In the latter half of the 1960's and throughout the 1970's, a group of independent artisans and everyday people shared a moment of intense creativity that sought to return to the 'handmade'. This group was motivated commercial culture; life had been subsumed by market, social, and industrial forms that arose post WWII. Heavily oriented around the then nascent Ecological Movement, this group sought to live closer to the earth, they encouraged the idea of sweat equity, and they desired to directly engage hands-on living. This generation spawned sewing circles, social justice movements, organic food co-ops, collectives, and communes around the globe following the Leary-ian mantra "Tune In, Turn On, and Drop Out". The Foxfire series, the myriad inexpensive 'how-to' publications form the era, and magazines like Mother Earth News are some of the artifacts that evidence the a desire for life without corporate mediation.

Today a new generational movement is flowering with many of the same goals of the 1960's and 1970's Love Generation. They are known colloquially as The Maker Movement; this group is motivated by many many of the same wishes of the earlier generation. They are decidedly anti-specialization and hands on, but they approach it with a very different set of politics—shaped by an increasingly interconnected world. Oddly enough this generation has weaved a relationship with factorization and corporations to achieve similar goals. They are at ease with any means by which they may create. The contemporary DIY peerage can comfortably outsource a new design to be manufactured via the miracles of print on demand technologies, create Frankenstein mashups of existent products, reapply older to ancient technologies as an option, or even ingeniously hack a commonly available materials to cobble into new, cheap, and functional fixes. Many of this generation's reverse engineers and hacks do this work as contemporary artists.

money in the 21st century fundraiser

more lessons from kickstarter

so i saw a predicition sometime last week that within 10 years that wallets will be obsolete. now i can see this as possible because i use applications that securely fill in my data on webforms, but PayPal is not what this post is solely about. we will get back to them in a few moments.

an interesting flaw appeared in our Kickstarter campaign this past 6 weeks. Kickstarter contracts through Amazon Payments to do the accounting on the pledges. i haven't looked into who runs Kickstarter and their attachment to Amazon, but it is an issue. Amazon Payments only takes 'credit cards', now i know the saturation of the Visa and MC brands are extensive and it is rare to find someone without at least a debit card without that sanctification. i found out, though, that i have a close friend who doesn't participate in that, and it got me to think that Amazon needs to figure out some more ways to collect money.

Amazon Payments require linkage to a U.S. bank, creating another barrier also. additionally, you must make an account on Kickstarter to pledge. these points actually put up a barrier for a few more friends and family members who didn't or didn't want to grok the web interface. we considered taking donations from people who couldn't participate for whatever reason and then apply them to the campaign from our account, but this is an issue too. it is a violation of the TOS to donate to your own cause. so you have to go find someone to do it for you, complicating the process even further.

this all is a huge deficit in the system. i actually think that we lost a few hundred dollars because of these inherent prejudices and hurdles. last week i found a open source laser cutter, Lasersaur, that is collecting donations like Kickstarter campaign, but through PayPal on their own webpage. the downside is that you lose the high profile visibility of Kickstarter with it's very involved community and all the easy buttons to plug into the other social media.

i have come to the conclusion that a fundraiser needs to be a two prong attack where you do both. you really should be trying to funnel as many people as you can through Kickstarter to take advantage of the trendy high profile nature of the platform (and the all or nothing nature of the pledge model). additionally, you need a side channel. ideally, a close friend who can collect through PayPal for you and that can make a deposit in Kickstarter for you in the case you get pressed to the wall for for your goal, which is probably a TOS violation, but what can you do other than handle it discretely.

and you definitely need a PayPal donation page immediately after the campaign closes because less than 12hours from when we closed our campaign we started having 'knocks on the door' to still participate. ah i love the procrastinators.

our kickstarter campaign was funded

portraits from look art

  
  

  

look art opens

last week the project look art—a turbulence commission—opened and it even seems like it has been well received. it has taken me a couple of days to recover, because i was testing right up to the last. my insomnia payed off; i was able to stack up the gallery and extras in time. i will wait for another post to talk about the extras.

this first instantiation of look art is three artist's take on the classic multi-user gaming format. known as a Multi User Shared Halluciantation (MUSH) or Multi User Dungeon (MUD), these socially (and usually fantasy) oriented game environments thrived at the advent of our network culture. partially an expression of the need to communicate and partially because the computing of the time could only operate with very limited graphics, these environments were (& are) the domain of text. akin to today's fan fiction or that era's choose-your-own-adventure novels, this was(& is) a highly interactive platform that were shifted toward a high level of imagination rather than a suspension of disbelief.

i proposed to use the space to explore Lewitt's art and language methodologies. my work with geometries and pattern in the space bored me and i soon found it was much more interesting to work with portraiture. i began to incorporate the social aspect into the work by painting a series of colleague portraits. the process was challenging it required me to use photo processing, automated coding, and then i spent a considerable amount of time (sometimes hours) at the end on the portraits 'correcting' the ASCII characters to build better images. in the end it was much closer to my traditional painting process than i first imagined it would be.

the other two pieces in the show are very intriguing exploratory works.

Christopher Poff has created a interactive manifesto that burdens the players with the weight of Meaning and Purpose as well as Artist and Art. Alejandro Duque is using the work to prototype out a mixed realities type of piece where he wants to connect up physical interfaces with the MUD. this is definitely an intriguing idea and i will be watching his progress closely.

if you want to go in with a guide, i would be glad to play Virgil, just drop me a line.

when it rains it pours!

YAY (mini)Maker Faire is coming to Atlanta! ...while i am in Istanbul. Wow. That was one of the fastest let downs in history.

¡you! yes, you. you need to go. unless you are accompanying me to Turkey this is a special thing, i was at Maker Faire 1 and 2. do not miss this opportunity.

http://www.makerfaireatl.com/Atlanta_Mini_Maker_Faire/Home.html

the Kickstarter campaign marches on

i am discovering that fundraising is a game in the truest sense. it is not that i am specifically looking for loopholes to game Kickstarter. i have just come to the conclusion that the whole nature of raising money for a project is actually a quest based resource gathering system with tons of variables. I can compare it to a kind of puzzle quest that requires solving to unlock the next in the quest line. fundraising requires a balance of tone and honesty; no glory-hounding but not feel embarrassed about saying that we really believe this to be a cool project. and the way you say it is so different in formality and tone depending if you are addressing the Dean, a friend, or a philanthropic agency.



we are about 10 days from the deadline and very close to 50% which has raised our visibility on the Ks webpages considerably. i believe that if we can get a few more bucks from several people—can you spare a $10, friend?—that we will be well on the way to getting on the front page. we have pulled ahead of two CNC projects as of this week which is no mean feat because those project are very important right now.

so...
if you are one of my readers/friends even a $1 helps so please consider donating. here's the link

Jeff Koons Must Die!!!

My awesome colleague Wayne Madsen turned me onto a video game project of Hunter Jonakin, Jeff Koons Must Die!!!. The project is an 80's style arcade FPS.

Besides the obvious fact that this is a little slice of awesome sauce, the JKMD is part of a fine Oedipal tradition in the Arts. The project is definitive exploration of the metaphorical slaying of a Father figure to transcend to the next level. The last work I can remember that evoked such a reaction in me was Erased DeKooning.

"What if you were locked in a museum overnight, with a rocket launcher, during a Jeff Koons retrospective?"

.

Jeff Koons Must Die!!! The Video Game from Hunter Jonakin on Vimeo.

Hunter is a recent graduate of Florida State University. You can see all his web presence here.

seeking performers & activists in Istanbul

in a post from last week, i mentioned the Touchstone workshop project from Mr. Bricolage which was picked up by the curators of ISEA 2011.

the focus of the project is to build a platform/instruments and working with communities rather than making an artifact or specific performance. Stone and i want to release the idea to the world as a creativity tool at this phase.

we are seeking to partner with a Turkish or international performance or activist group who we could guide in building the low cost hacktivist sound generators. Mr. Bricolage is working on securing the funding for hardware and logistics of getting ourselves and materials to the conference and soon we will be announcing fund raising campaigns.

we specifically seek groups interested in using our design of wearable device for mobile and tactical sonification of the performance space. ideally, we would like to work with a local Turkish performers. if you know of some group who might be interested in an extremely low cost or no-cost workshop to build new sound tools for their work, please contact us at:

info [at] mr-bricolage [dot] us

Rozendall's Contract for URL based works

Rafael Rozendaal has just published a contract for selling URL based works. This is very telling and interesting. It seems that animated GIF's were the toast of this year's Armory Show in NYC. SO how the hell do you sell URL based work? well here's Rozendaal's site or you can join the Facebook group open for public discussion on the matter.

project selected for ISEA2011 (Istanbul, Turkey)

well now we did it! Our sonification project for ISEA International 2011 was accepted. We have proposed a workshop to work with activists and performers (or both) to develop wearable tech workshop to sonify the object the actors/agents touch. We are still working on a better title but for now it is code named 'Touchstone'.

from our proposal:

"Mr. Bricolage, Asmuth and Stone, propose a DIY wearable technology workshop at ISEA 2011 for activists, performers, and interested parties. The workshop will consist of demonstrations, discussions about strategies for use, and most importantly a hands on workshop to build Touchstone devices. The culmination of the workshop will be a local performance and/or action.

Touchstone is a mobile and tactical media broadcast platform worn on the hands of performers and activists. Touchstone is an strategy for contesting the urban/performance landscape rather than a product.

The technology of Touchstone is built upon audio exciter circuits embedded in gloves which transform the hands of an agent into broadcast transmitters. Touchstone agents activate objects as a temporary/ad-hoc public address systems, by simply pressing their palms against it. Touchstone is a discrete technology platform: (1) it is virtually invisible on the garb of a performer/agent and (2) it is light and flexible; agents or performers can easily move (or escape). Moreover, it is a cinch to produce; the system does not require advanced electronics knowledge and is easily assembled from surplus, inexpensive, and/or widely available consumer technology."

more images here

Studies for My Past Life as Yuri

over the past two weeks i have been trying to return to my artistic roots and also influence it with an impression from early in my life. the artistic root is that of drawing; specifically i am doing a sort of self portraiture in graphite. and by sort i mean that i am choosing to influence the portraits with early impressions on my personality. recently, my obsession of the EVA (or spacesuit) and all things cosmo- or astronautical has been a real focus for me. i have motives for a very grand experiment that i am not quite ready to unveil publicly, but a way that this obsession has manifested is that i started to make avatars for my online life using the famous space pioneers. the twist and art in this comes from my treatment of the images. i have been compositing pictures of myself into the photos. through the magic of computer imaging i become Yuri Gregarin, Alan Shepard, etc.

i started doing this to riff on how to let the impressions of the 'space race' effect my art work; it soon became obvious to me that i am very interested across much of my work in identity and role play. the composite photographs of my face in the role of astro-colonialist created a really interesting way for me to consider what i want to do with these 'heavy' influences. the creation of this alternate reality, also gave me an excellent focus when i have had to do demonstrations of digital manipulation in the class room. i could talk to the act of fakery as an art, an art exploring roleplay, identity, and personality. i developed a nice an extensive narrative of my shadowy past connected to the early ballastics history of Germany, the Soviet Space program, and eventually recruitment to the NASA program as i built sample images and websites to demo the software for my students.

the photoshopped images were excellent foils for this discussion and a pleasant way to riff as i mentioned before. i examined them with a critical sense over the last few weeks, i saw that the composites had a sort of distance and flatness in the digital form. they seemed to be conceptually flat and distant; and i wanted to manifest these ideas in the real world in a real way. really get on the stage if you will allow me to extend the the acting metaphor a bit more.

i saw that they need to be made of whole atoms, not just electrical traces on the medium, so i remade the composites once more by drawing them in graphite and larger than life. i consider these two as studies in this roleplay. i have ideas on how to bring even more life to the idea and images which i may share at a future date. i told a colleague that the drawings are making the fake into reality for me. it is a complex relationship/process between the tangible material (paper, graphite) and the oversized format. it brings a life to my fantasy land, my youthful desire to be a rocketman.

Study for My Past Life as Yuri(Number 0001) 2010 Graphite on paper. 36x25 inches.

Study for My Past Life as Yuri(Number 0002) 2010 Graphite on paper. 35x34 inches.
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spam art is the new black

have you ever received a beautiful spam message? i have received examples that have been puzzling, engaging, clever, poetic, and even one supposedly from the Office of Homeland Security (bless those Nigerian scammers). yesterday a most comely example of spam came to my in-box. the filter did exile it to my junk folder, but because of the subject line that referenced twitter i felt the need to just check on it. i found a very attractive image built from text forms and underscores(only a few were links):



sure. that's right. it wanted me to go to sites which would have installed keyloggers onto my machine whilst it was selling me knockoff Viagra and Celebrex, but i am intrigued by this idea of the aesthetically pleasurable spam message. i started to think that this might be a good class assignment... spam art

impromptu Glitch Art lecture in the lab on Monday

first solder

tonight everyone of my 18 electronics novices successfully assembled a Blinkenlights kit! i am truly excited by the possibilities. i wrote a diatribe on the nature of public art, culture jamming, and intervention. i am tempted to publish the rant here.

manifestos!

what happened to the manifesto as a form of art? the form: manifesto, is a counter culture anti-academic relief valve to the obscenities of life. it is theory that takes more the shape of poetry than rationality and logic. is the manifesto dead because of the consumerist post-utopia we live in?

i suspect that this is because manifestos are dangerous. they are compelled question the authority of systems to which we grow dependent and blind. they compel us to criticize the criticism and critic! i think i will require my students to include a manifesto in their portfolio websites this semester. extra points for obscenities and irrationality.

viva la MANIFESTO!

stupid fun club and current tv

i was thinking about old friends the other day and i remembered a fun event James Stone and i helped coordinate last year with Mike Winter, a principal with the Stupid Fun Club(SFC), a Berkeley entertainment-gaming-think tank. Mike had made an interrogation machine known as the docuBot which would ask you questions culled from interrogative methodologies.

DocuBot was unveiled during the regular Tuesday night openings at the SJSU School of Art and Design. it was a great time. we had a room which we had draped the room with all black fabric, the bot had an impossibly bright light which shown at the interrogated subject from what you would call the 'face' of the machine.participants could only enter one at time for the DocuBot ran the 2min sessions.

Ali and i dressed as agents of (what i dubbed) the 'Dept. of Homeland Robotics'—black suits and shades and he had a SRL to take pictures of the crowd! we DHR agents also handed out invitations to be interrogated (i need to find out if Ali has picture of us in our disguises). it was a stunning success and we had a line all night.

fast forward to the recent past(last week sometime)
i was checking in on the SFC website. they now have a manifesto (which i need to write about soon) and they have an email to sign up to beta test SFC projects. of course, i signed up. a few days later, i was invited to join the beta event code named "the Creation Project", a crowd sourced narrative that is being made into a high value television production for the Current TV network. they are going to start shooting the pilot this week, so i am a bit of a late comer, but i am really intrigued by the concept. they have designed a small social network to develop the entire program. the characters, setting, plot lines, costumes, artwork has been a crowd sourced project where they directly respond to the input, creativity, and feedback of the membership. i am finding the niches where i can contribute and there are some really interesting questions being posed such as: how the voting effects the actual production and whether good writing will be subsumed by the 'noise' of the crowd.