Culture
The googlehouse designed by Marika Dermineur, Stéphane Degoutin is an online process that builds a house with images of domestic rooms (living room, tv room...) picked up on the internet using an image search engine.
Regine's post reminded me that I am a great fan of a label/concert organizer called Burn Your Flag! in Lyon. They enable punkrockers to have thriving musical events there, with a wide bunch of underground bands that often worth it. What I particularly like is their posters they spreak around the city. Always black and white, with nice typewritings:
Great DIY attitude, great art, keep on trucking!!!!
Tomorrow begins the Exit Festival in Créteil (close to Paris) a great art exhibit where you can find artists' bricolage, hacks and tricks.
One of my favorite piece of art is Veaceslav Druta's balancoire (i.e. the swing) which is a musical swing hanging from two wheels. The user/visitor sit on the swing. While swinging, he/she triggers the play of music that can change depending on the hands positions and the swing speed:
There will also be Brad Hwang the guy who did the Incredible Strange Machines in 1993. Even though this one won't be at Exit, I cannot resist to put it here.
Using steam propulsion, Bratt Hwang constructed a huge instrument (10 meters long), consisting of 50 metal soup bowls which were suspended between floor and ceiling on metal wires. As the wires were vibrated by steam driven levers, the bowls functioned as sounding chambers. As part of the sound sculpture, the audience could eat soup from the bowls, thereby changing the quality of the sound.
Finally, Time's up (an austrian collective is also fancy) seems very appealing. Their SENSORY CIRCUS! looks good:
Sensory Circus is embodied in an interactive installation comprising an active, responsive and auto-generative audiovisual and architectonic system. The audience is central, and is principally responsible for their substantial contribution to the nature and dynamics of the whole environment
Through the different types of interaction with the components present inside Sensory Circus as well as their physical presence, every visitor mutates from a passive viewer to an active protagonist.
Sorry who the others I did not mention, there are also great!
(via), DIGITAL SHELTER KIT is a space for shelter from mobile phones.
DIGITAL SHELTER KIT focused in developed a shelter from scanscapes that provided not only a technical but also an aesthetic view to this mode of inhabitation in the context of the city. This proposal also provides a visual aid for inhabiting this new urban condition: a shelter that reveals the surveillance nature of our environment.The proposal began during a visit to New York City, where a small 'safety zone' is marked on the platform as part of that city's subway security system. Whenever people stand inside this 'safety zone' they are monitored and 'protected' by CCTV cameras. A simple yellow line painted on the floor of each platform marks the boundaries of the electronic space that provides shelter to the user.
I forgot to mention Chris O'Shea's new project: echo chamber. It is basically an interactive environment in the form of a 3D navigable soundscape that persuades people to make noises into the space and encourages the act of listening.
Echo Chamber is a world in which sound is trapped in an infinite echo. Participants can make a sound into the environment via a microphone, where the sound is then re-synthesised to amplify the intent of their actions. These sounds then travel around, leaving a trace of history from each participant. The installation becomes a more personal experience to that user as a part of them is left behind.
The sounds in Echo Chamber take on a life of their own, each sound being visualised in the form of a 3D object. Each object is known as a boid, a term for artificial intelligence algorithms that are used to describe the flocking behaviour of birds and swarming of fishes. Each boid or sound in the chamber is aware of where it is, to avoid the walls, to chase other sounds of the same species and avoid other boids
I watched La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) for the 4th time. This "photo-roman" is always a pleasure to watch. For people unaware of this chef d'oeuvre, it inspired the 1995 Terry Gilliam feature Tweleve Monkey. It's the story of a man, time traveling back before a nuclear war, attempting to secure sustenance, and a solution, to the Apocalypse. It's a micture of a human story and a science fiction film focused on the very topic of memory. I am a great fan of Marker's aesthetics (I think Gilliam respected it): the pictures, the music as well as the rythm and the editing is perfect. Each time I watch it, I discover new details.
Just finished the novel a year in the merde by stephen clarke, an account of the author's adventures as an expat in Paris. It's hilarious but I just would like to say that Paris might not represents the whole french country. Some behavior are a bit... amplified. Funny though.
(via)
Echolocation is a method of sensory perception by which certain animals orient themselves to their surroundings, detect obstacles, communicate with others, and find food. In echolocation a series of short, high-pitched sounds are emitted by an animal. These sounds travel out away from the animal and then bounce off objects and surfaces in the animal's path creating an echo. The echo returns to the animal, giving it a sense about what is in its path. A bat can determine an object's size, shape, direction, distance, and motion. This echolocation system is so accurate that bats can detect insects the size of gnats and objects as fine as a human hair. Scientists would like to know more about how bats use echolocation so they can help blind people detect objects with sound.
Why do I blog this? As I have an undergraduate degree in biology, I often think back to some relevant concepts in this field that might be useful for today's technology. Echolocation is one of those we should play with ;)
I just read a nice book by Marc Abélès: Les Nouveaux Riches Un ethnologue dans la Silicon Valley. It's in french. The author is a french ethnographer who reports us his study of dot.comers in the Silicon Valley who turns themselves from the "stingy valley attitude" to philanthropy. The most interesting part in this book is not the accounting of how those people live but the way they give meaning to gift plus the definition of venture philanthropy (i.e. the use of a business framework in philanthropy).
Mediacup, designed and tested by TeCo.
The MediaCup is an ordinary coffee cup augmented with sensing, processing and communication capabilities (integrated in the cup's bottom), to collect and communicate general context information in a given environment. It is an example how to equip everyday objects with computing and communication capabilities. With the MediaCup setup (consisting of several cups and other equipment) we explore the added value of computerized everyday objects.
It seems that I am in a design oriented mood today. I just ran across these Virtual Chopsticks. What's interesting here is the analysis of the processes that occurs while people learn how to use these tools.
Tools are expected to provide users with good metaphors in future interactive systems for intuitively manipulating “information” or virtual objects. Moreover, by using a "virtualized" tool, we can investigate varieties of new tools by simply changing the software parameters of the tool with a standardized interface. Through these experiments, we expect to obtain new knowledge to design a good/comfortable user interface. In addition, we also expect to analyze processes that occur while humans learn to use new tools. We adopt chopsticks for one of the trials of our technique because although they are very simple in form, they do have multiple functions.
Since Pasta and Vinegar is in a raging war with regine, I have to use a wild card: a 25 years old table which is still impressice: The Handphone Table made by Laurie Anderson in 1978. It is now part of the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France.
When the listeners put their elbows on the table and cover their ears with hands, they can hear the sounds coming through wood and bones of their own arms which, similarly to wood, have a porous structure.The principle of the performance of Handphone Table bases on the conduction of sound through bones. Stereophonic music in low ranges is strengthened and processed to the form of impulses, spread through metal bars connecting with four points on the inner surface of the table top.
Reimann, C.; Paelke, Volker; Stichling, Dirk: Foot-based mobile Interaction with Games. In: ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE). Singapore, Juni 2004
Interaction with mobile applications is often awkward due to the limited and miniaturized input modalities available. Our approach exploits the video capabilities of camera equipped smart-phones and PDA's to provide a fun solution for interaction tasks in simple games like “Pong”, “Breakout” or soccer.
Interview in Gamasutra on handheld gaming. The guy advocates for the "small is beautiful" approach.
"With handheld development, the teams are smaller than big console production, and that inherently has appeal for us. This is just because we can focus more on the creative effort, and fun factor, and also working within a small team environment, for each one of our projects. I think that's a good thing. I think that multi-year projects are a difficult thing. Console titles that are multiple years in development can be very big, and the smaller dev cycles also have an appeal, because you can learn and improve your skills, and I think there's a lot to be gained there. Also, it's a good business model for smaller developers."
A paper about IM and MSN messenger in the french newspaper Le Monde. They report that :
If your had to keep just two media, which one would you choose? 12-15 years old answered: Internet (61 %), television (49 %), cinema (35 %), radio (29 %), daily press (17 %) and magazines (9 %). (...) In France, between may 2003 and december 2004, the number of MSN messenger users went from 2.7 to 6.8 millions (from all ages).
. Besides, the paper quote the work of Anne Cohen-Kiel, the design anthropologist for MSN. Which is interesting because it is not so often that french press describes user-oriented design techniques like the collaboration of software designers with anthropologists.
A P&V reader just told me that he started a new blog about Back to the Future (in french). It's IMO one of the best resource on precisely geeky things concerning the trilogy.
Read in teledyn
At the top of the webstats, the smoking gun: 30,000 requests for the Drupal-generated RSS feed from teledyn.com (...) The way RSS is to work, everyone subscribes to a small file on your site. The critical word there is ‘everyone’. (...) Herein the black hole of RSS: If your feed works, if you are successful in attracting subscriptions on a global scale, if you do it right, you are doomed.As friends tell friends, as links lead to visits which lead to subscribers, the snowball rolls on towards that day like last Friday. RSS may have the potential to be a saver on bandwidth, but when you are getting hit once an hour or more by thousands of sites, 24,000 extra hits ads up, and it’s all the worse when so many are using broken clients that ignore the caching rules. (...) I’m not sure there is an obvious solution. We might install globally distributed caching of RSS files on behalf of the sites, isolating them from the broken clients, but isn’t that already in place? Isn’t that what proxy servers for AOL and other ISPs do to “speed up your internet” already?...
After reading Bruce Sterling's last bookI was wondering whether it a great one or just one of the clancy-like novel you read in the hall of a railway station. I have always been a great fan of sterling's work but this book is a bit different. First because sterling does not tell us a story about the future (well, that's notmuch of a problem for me) and second because of the plot. I really appreciated Distraction his previous novel, in which the plot was fuzzy. Here it's a even fuzzier, you get it at the end (which I found cool). I liked the book, especially because:
This review is a bit of a mess
(via) Wimbledonization: This is a term used to describe London's financial prowess through analogy with the world's number 1 tennis tournament. Just as in the tennis where British players seldom do well, so with the City of London, British banks are not the reason why the City is so successful.
