This year’s winner of Ars Electronica Prix under Interactive Art category is the Image Fulgurator. It’s a pretty cool project, once you understand what it is. It took me 3 or 4 times to go over the description:

In principle, the Fulgurator can be used anywhere where there is another camera nearby that is being used with a flash. It operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. The intervention is unobtrusive because it takes only a few milliseconds. Every photo another photographer takes of an object at which the Fulgurator is also aimed is affected by the manipulation. Hence visual information can be smuggled unnoticed into the images of others.

The image above has been “fulgurated”.  Can you tell?  I sure couldn’t.  Maybe I’m just that thick.

Thanks to Hansi for showing me.

Page three of ten. Mang pulls a quick one on the satyr and ‘yoinks’ his pan flute. While celebrating, he accidently stumbles over a resident Narnian.

Today is the day for the big Stand Up To Cancer show, at 8pm EST and PST on NBC, ABC and CBS. This is a big day - the first day in the rest of our lives - in that we are making a commitment to rid this planet of Cancer. There have been lots of discussions on politics in the last few days, but Cancer attacks Democrat and Republican, working and jobless, young and old, rich and poor, American and citizen of the world.

This effort, to fund great projects with potential, that perhaps don’t fit the critiera of the drug companies who are making sure we have cures for ED and stomach aches.

I’m standing up for my mother-in-law who survived Breast Cancer, for my cousin who survived Hodgkin’s, for the little girl across the street who, thank god, we just learned is cancer-free after 15 months of treatment at Memorial (and at age 3!). I’m standing up for my wife’s cousin, who his wife and 2 kids lost to Cancer at 35. Cancer kills, and it’s time we kill Cancer.

What can you do?

As I mentioned in this post, you can add a widget to your site that funds Stand Up To Cancer.

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Nothing like a new place for a new lease on life. GROWING continues to continue. view it now.

• An interview with Maurizio Cattelan (2005)
  "I never purposely decide to create a scandal, to provoke. As I was telling you before, images sometimes manage to anticipate the future, and maybe that’s what scandalizes the public—not to recognize themselves in what they see. I’m not really interested in provocation. I am interested in people’s reactions, though: a work of art is not complete without the comments, the words, and ideas of whoever happens to be in front of it. They are the ones who create the work. I don’t do anything: art doesn’t exist without points of view and different interpretations."
• London from above, at night - The Big Picture - Boston.com
• Internet Traffic Begins to Bypass the U.S. - NYTimes.com
  Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control. --> Read more...

via Jay Carney @ time-blog.com

The FireEagle badge has been up for a week and I have users checking in from Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Moscow and Isle of Man. Oh also Iowa. Very cool.

I’ve been using ZoneTag to update my personal FireEagle location, which I figured out has a ‘continuous upload’ mode, so I don’t have to take an unnecessary picture to report my location. This has the unintended effect of making my badge perpetually current. This would be very eerie if I was updating my exact, instead of approximate location. I’d try updating exact location but the GPS kills my phone — plus it’s not so hot in the city.

On the accuracy end of things, my location badge is only as accurate as the service writing to FireEagle. In the case of ZoneTag, although I am Brooklyn Zonetag insists on putting me in “New York, NY”. Passing that information to Yahoo maps gives me a map of the Upper West Side. That still shows that I am in the five Burroughs area and not Iowa but I don’t like the misleading implication of the pinpoint map. One way around this may be to implement the “i’m in this general vicinity” map overlay box like on the FireEagle website.

Finally, i’ve always been interested in passively recording location so without any extra effort I can see all the places i’ve been the past year. I could do this with my badge except that it runs on a pull from the FireEagle API. It only requests my location if someone loads the page where the badge is embedded. So a log entry is inserted only when the badge is loaded. If I have changed my location ten times in the past day but my badge (embedded in my blog) has not been visited even once, those locations will be lost. To that end i’ve written a cron that periodically loads up my blog every once in a while so I don’t loose any locations. Now I can generate a dynamic places i’ve slept map.

i had several topics for today’s post, everything from a review of labor day centered around the concept of reconnecting with old friends, to a play by play of last night’s first improv lesson, to a philosophical pondering of whether or not it’s ok to continue to live in your 30’s as you did in your 20’s. But honestly i don’t have the stamina to go into any one of those in detail. so let’s do some bullet point quick hits.

1. Improv = awesome. totally random, my sisters new roommate is in the class. crazy talk. I have already planned out my next 6 months around taking more improv classes, and stressed about missing a class for a course i haven’t signed up for yet because of thanksgiving. now that’s planning!

2. PT visited this weekend and we went to a VERY poorly attended A’s game:

 

the thing is, i sort of prefer oakland when there aren’t that many people there. no lines for food, easy to get to the BART, good times. PT and I spent most of the afternoon pretending to be jerks from boston. a stretch, as you might imagine.

3. My friend from high school, Huntley, was also in town. I hadn’t seen Huntley since college, and it’s probably been 10 years since we spoke. Despite that, we were able to have a fun evening, catch up, and went from: “so what are you doing now?” to “I think that growing up is about making tough choices and closing off paths” in 3 hours or so. We also went out in the Marina, and despite my PR attempts that it’s “not bad”, i still don’t want to go out there. ever. again.

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This sounds really fascinating:

British artist Roger Hiorns covered everything in an old condemn flat with blue crystals:

The walls and ceilings are covered in blue copper sulphate crystals, their rhomboid facets glinting in the gloom. Silvery shards of cold light spangle and wink and beckon. Every surface is furred and infested; big blue crystals dangle like cubist bats from the light fittings. Little wonder the flat has been abandoned: you’d move out, too, if the crystals moved in.

Hiorns began by reinforcing the walls and ceiling, and tanking the flat with plastic sheeting. Then 70-80,000 litres of copper sulphate solution was pumped in through a hole in the ceiling from the flat above. Weeks went by, until the temperature of the solution dropped, and the crystals began to precipitate. Finally, any remaining liquid was pumped back out, to be recycled by the chemical industry.
 

I’d imagine it’ be like stepping into some sort of alien planet in one of those horror sci-fi movies.

From the Guardian

Daily Show: The Best F**king News Team Ever

Oh, did I mention I went to the DNC last weekend in Denver?  I flew in via LA (thx Julian!), figured I’d crash with Danny for a day or two to check out the Obama-themed street-arty party in Danny’s gallery space (Manifest Hope gallery) and then maybe try to scam my way into Obama’s keynote?  The gallery was unbelievable, which turned into a block party Wed night with Cold War Kids + Clap Your Hands + Silversun Pickups + Z-Trip which turned into an acoustic show with the aforementioned plus Johnny Deathcab / Postal Service and the girl from Small Wonder (??) all emceed by Sarah Silverman… which eventually turned into a No Data style dance party (hence the 1000 upskirt shots).  I was up till 5am, slept two hours, biked over to the DNC (hobo bike!) to volunteer and ended up working the security line for 11 hours (!!) to earn my way in to see Obama’s speech. Just an amazing amazing weekend.

Anyway, buckets of Flickr pix here:

How much longer will we use the term “contemporary art”?

I guess in the old sense the term “contemporary art” is already long gone. It is of course still used by the traditional art museums, magazines and commercial galleries. But this only means that it is used to protect a territory that has already lost its meaning, relevance and energy. There is still money to be made on it for galleries. Customers want a guarantee that an image is contemporary art and not, say…, photography. For the museums the term has a Disney or Las Vegas effect. And this is the whole story. “Contemporary art” is like “French cuisine” or “rap music”. The term will still be around as long as people can make a profit from it, which is OK, but the interesting stuff is made outside of this context, in relation to the net, to cities, to society, to fashion, to whatever… and does not need to be labeled.

One Question Interview.

HC Gilje’s wind-up bird(s) is an environmental sound work installed in a forest in Lillehammer, Norway. It’s a flock of mechanical woodpeckers that communicate via XBee radios, spread out through the forest.  I love this line in the description: “Initial tests indicate an attraction: it took 15 minutes for a real woodpecker to join a [...]

Carlo Longino of MobHappy has a quick post about a grill he saw at Lowe’s that came emblazoned with a 1-800 number providing the customer with a feature-by-feature voice walkthrough of the grill in question.

While not the sexiest application of mobile technology, it’s nice to see companies getting hip to using the mobile phone as a tool rather than merely a communication device.

Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Spore is coming to Europe & Japan on Friday, Sept 5th- two days later for North America.

If  u can’t wait til then, download a version from EA Games, to activate on the 5th. (caveat: u gotta re-download and re-pay after six months.)

A nicely made advertisement for Meetup

• MultiTouch - Modular MultiTouch LCD
  wow. yes. a product to blew everybody else’s home-brew multitouch away.

• MultiTouch - Modular MultiTouch LCD
  wow. yes. a product to blew everybody else’s home-brew multitouch away.

HERE WE GO . . .

"I was glad to meet you at Musikfest, and later, thrilled with the wonderful job you did. You are an excellent writer, photographer, and interviewer all rolled into one: quite a combination."
-- Ann Whipple, Publicist, Musikfest 2007

"Thank you for your great interview. You did a great job."
@ The 110th Anniversary of Downing Park
-- Jean McGrane, City Manager of the City of Newburgh, NY

"Thank you so much for all the space and time you took with the article. The interview is great and Mystique did a great job with the photos. Can't thank you enough. You should also know that several people have already phoned me to say they read and enjoyed the article."
-- Mary Ann G. Neuman, Photographer, "Somebody's Sister" Series

"Wow, the interview went really well. I enjoyed hearing the artists responses, and found out a little bit more about each artist I had not know before. Thank you for all your support!"
-- Virginia Walsh, Director, Ann Street Gallery

"Val, thank you for posting the great interview with Linda and Jacqui at our show opening . . . I'm glad your interview got into some of the more contemplative and spiritual aspects of why we do what we do."
-- Karl Leitzel, "Far & Near Horizons" Group Exhibition World Tour from the International Plein Air Painters (IPAP) and Landscape Artists International (LAI), Founder of LAI

"I'm finally home and have been meaning to call and THANK YOU for the wonderful feature that you did on me." -- Judi Silvano, Jazz Vocalist/Composer/Producer/Educator

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This may be a rant but read it for your own knowledge and good.

I just took little time to read EULA of Google Chrome and I am boiling, not that I wasn't prepared, but the fact that people are going to pass the fact they are actually slaves to Google while browsing with Chrome, many have no clue about the consequence of just clicking I accept in a standard EULA page. Honestly tell me I am right when I feel NSA is much better than Google. Before pasting what I read let me say WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF.. If you are a google fan boy/girl.. god help you.

"The software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the services and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. You agree to receive such updates (and permit Google to deliver these to you) as part of your use of the services."

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