bored again in the grove, I sat in starbucks and read the the miami herald. There were three interesting articles I came across:
the most disturbing - a man threw his two kids out the window and the jumped out himself at the Loews Hotel in south beach
a strange phenomenon? - Hurricane betting has become [...]

Reena Jana and Mark Tribe have written “New Media Art: Art in the Age of Digital Communication”, published by Taschen, and will be celebrating the book launch with a party at the New Museum in NYC.

Hosted by: Rhizome.org and the New Museum Store
Location: The New Museum of Contemporary Art
556 W 22nd Street at 11th Ave, NY, NY
When: Friday, June 2, 6:30pm to 8:30pm

A snip from the Shredder graces the cover:

Reena Jana and Mark Tribe have written “New Media Art: Art in the Age of Digital Communication”, published by Taschen, and will be celebrating the book launch with a party at the New Museum in NYC.

Hosted by: Rhizome.org and the New Museum Store
Location: The New Museum of Contemporary Art
556 W 22nd Street at 11th Ave, NY, NY
When: Friday, June 2, 6:30pm to 8:30pm

A snip from the Shredder graces the cover:

so the cellbooth got blogged quite a big, but this one is my favorite even though i have no idea what it says. Japanese I think?
http://blog.livedoor.jp/parumo_zaeega/archives/50212549.html

here’s some things about miami that you might want to know:

what’s hot on Miami TV
1)commercials for nair “the less you wear, the more you need nair”
2)PSA’s about getting ready for hurricanes
3)Spanish language music videos
4)that buckle up commercial
Drugstores
Drugstores arrange their aisles differently here.When you walk into any CVS, the first thing you see is sunscreen, followed [...]

If i made a cellbooth down in Miami, i’d have to make it a “cell south” booth instead of a “cell atlantic” booth.

Googling about HDTV I came across this post on Douglas Rushkoff’s blog (about a year old):

McLuhan considered TV a “cool” medium, in that it required the participation of the audience to resolve those blurry black and white pixels into a real image. While film and radio enjoyed higher fidelitiy, and constituted hot media, TV was cool - and invited the cynicism and objectivity of distance.

HDTV is anything but cool, in that sense. …

While it’s true that HDTV is a high resolution, high information medium, I suspect that the growth of this “hot” medium is due to the expansion of gaming, and is driven by the “cool” participatory nature of games. In HDTV the game medium collides with TV. Both are particatory media, but in different ways. When watching TV we piece together blurry lo-resolution fragments of information to create an image. When playing games we take actions in an environment that is deliberately “incomplete”. Through our participation we explore that environment and develop proficiency in the challenges the game provides.

In gaming there’s a demand for higher resolution images, and games are often sold on just the eye candy appeal. Though eye candy alone can’t make a good game, it’s a given that Pc and console games are increasingly hi-resolution. So does this make games a “hot” medium? No, not if you take into account that games heavily involve haptics. To play a game you move through a virtual environment using a small set of buttons, a joystick, a keyboard or mouse. Once my son did an especially acrobatic maneuver while playing spider man and when I asked him how he did it he said “Oh that’s just B A A B”. Both my sons communicate in these cryptic game controller button sequences “now do a Y A and right trigger”. I’m old school. Flight Simulator gives me motion sickness and when I get ambushed in Halo 2 I often fall over backwards. I can’t help myself. My body is practically hardwired into the game space. And though I am a fossil, I’m sure that this is a general human trait. My sons may not be so spastic as I am, but they must be experiencing some sort of haptic connection with the virtual space of the game, and that physical connection is being communicated through their thumbs and a very low-resolution set of buttons.

For this sort of haptic connection to be meaningful, the game must provide a rich set of visual queues to indicate where the player is in the virtual space, and what is their physical relationship to the objects in that environment. To convey that amount of information you need hi-res visuals. There’s no point in navigating dextrously through a room full of obstacles if those obstactles are all just pink rectangular blocks stamped out in 8 bit color. Subtle physical interaction requires subtle rendering. Consider two game titles that have pushed up the visual resolution of PC games: Myst and Flight Simulator. Both are highly participatory games and have very open gameplay. Flight Simulator may not be strictly a game, but makes the point that a visually compelling environment creates the possibility for open-ended exploration. That exploration becomes meaningful largely because the player has the vicarious experience of actually exploring a compellingly “real” environment. They are able to participate in that environment in many ways, often in ways that were not forseen by the creators of the game.

It’s true that TV will be challenged and changed by the “hot” hi-res visuals of HDTV. In the long run though, both forms are radically altered by the addition of another participatory technology: the game controller.

read more

Googling about HDTV I came across this post on Douglas Rushkoff’s blog (about a year old):

McLuhan considered TV a “cool” medium, in that it required the participation of the audience to resolve those blurry black and white pixels into a real image. While film and radio enjoyed higher fidelitiy, and constituted hot media, TV was cool - and invited the cynicism and objectivity of distance.

HDTV is anything but cool, in that sense. …

While it’s true that HDTV is a high resolution, high information medium, I suspect that the growth of this “hot” medium is due to the expansion of gaming, and is driven by the “cool” participatory nature of games. In HDTV the game medium collides with TV. Both are particatory media, but in different ways. When watching TV we piece together blurry lo-resolution fragments of information to create an image. When playing games we take actions in an environment that is deliberately “incomplete”. Through our participation we explore that environment and develop proficiency in the challenges the game provides.

In gaming there’s a demand for higher resolution images, and games are often sold on just the eye candy appeal. Though eye candy alone can’t make a good game, it’s a given that Pc and console games are increasingly hi-resolution. So does this make games a “hot” medium? No, not if you take into account that games heavily involve haptics. To play a game you move through a virtual environment using a small set of buttons, a joystick, a keyboard or mouse. Once my son did an especially acrobatic maneuver while playing spider man and when I asked him how he did it he said “Oh that’s just B A A B”. Both my sons communicate in these cryptic game controller button sequences “now do a Y A and right trigger”. I’m old school. Flight Simulator gives me motion sickness and when I get ambushed in Halo 2 I often fall over backwards. I can’t help myself. My body is practically hardwired into the game space. And though I am a fossil, I’m sure that this is a general human trait. My sons may not be so spastic as I am, but they must be experiencing some sort of haptic connection with the virtual space of the game, and that physical connection is being communicated through their thumbs and a very low-resolution set of buttons.

For this sort of haptic connection to be meaningful, the game must provide a rich set of visual queues to indicate where the player is in the virtual space, and what is their physical relationship to the objects in that environment. To convey that amount of information you need hi-res visuals. There’s no point in navigating dextrously through a room full of obstacles if those obstactles are all just pink rectangular blocks stamped out in 8 bit color. Subtle physical interaction requires subtle rendering. Consider two game titles that have pushed up the visual resolution of PC games: Myst and Flight Simulator. Both are highly participatory games and have very open gameplay. Flight Simulator may not be strictly a game, but makes the point that a visually compelling environment creates the possibility for open-ended exploration. That exploration becomes meaningful largely because the player has the vicarious experience of actually exploring a compellingly “real” environment. They are able to participate in that environment in many ways, often in ways that were not forseen by the creators of the game.

It’s true that TV will be challenged and changed by the “hot” hi-res visuals of HDTV. In the long run though, both forms are radically altered by the addition of another participatory technology: the game controller.

I’ve been in miami for a week now. I’ve come to the realization the miami is like a cross between new jersey and california.

I’ve been staying in Coconut Grove where it turns out there’s absolutely nothing to do.  Today i did laundry, paid 15 dollars for eggs and toast, and did some situps.

If you are looking to convert media between formats, in my case to iPod video, you have got to check out FFmpegX. It is by far the ultimate media conversion tool out there, it will take in almost anything and convert it to almost anything else. For example, I dropped in a VOB file directly [...]

check it out:

view the awesome video at:
http://jennylc.com/cellbooth

Oy! Liverpudlians! Icon==Function and Mixed Hello will be shown on the BBC Big Screen … 37SECONDS PROGRAMME 6….THE NATURE OF THE BEAST Friday 19th May - Thursday 1st June, BBC Big Screen Liverpool, Clayton Square, L1- 1QR. Everyday at 10:00, 12:00, 14:30, 16:00 and 19:00. Special Thanks to Rebecca Lennon for pulling this all together!

Oy! Liverpudlians! Icon==Function and Mixed Hello will be shown on the BBC Big Screen … 37SECONDS PROGRAMME 6….THE NATURE OF THE BEAST Friday 19th May - Thursday 1st June, BBC Big Screen Liverpool, Clayton Square, L1- 1QR. Everyday at 10:00, 12:00, 14:30, 16:00 and 19:00. Special Thanks to Rebecca Lennon for pulling this all together!

Here are some of the more exciting things that have happened in the last few months:
- I officially have a lovely girlfriend named Bethany! She’s a beautiful young lady hailing from New York and working at Fabrica too! Daniel is in fact a very happy chappy as a result

- Bethany and [...]

Many things have happened. I had a hard time considering the best way to write about some of them… and had a good time enjoying the moment of others… (ranging literally from Death to Love)
Here it goes: Almost a month ago to the day, two friends of mine, Brett Goldin and Richard Bloom were [...]

Hey all you 20-something year old Processing-Heads out there, the Nike One commercials we did at Motion Theory are now being shown from the front page of the Processing website. Although there was a lot of C++ involved (mainly to have nicer typopraphy), the mainstay tool was Processing. Hooray, Processing is useful to a diversity of creative people! Hooray for Casey Reas and Ben Fry! Hooray for Gabe Dunne, Flux, and Matt Motal! Hooray for Motion Theory!

Hey all you 20-something year old Processing-Heads out there, the Nike One commercials we did at Motion Theory are now being shown from the front page of the Processing website. Although there was a lot of C++ involved (mainly to have nicer typopraphy), the mainstay tool was Processing. Hooray, Processing is useful to a diversity of creative people! Hooray for Casey Reas and Ben Fry! Hooray for Gabe Dunne, Flux, and Matt Motal! Hooray for Motion Theory!

Finished teaching GLArt, the intro to opengl course that I created for the ITP program at NYU. Good class, great input from the students. Here’s some student projects:

L-Systems by Geraldine Sarmiento

Forces Applied to L-Systems by Leif Krinkle

“time line draw” by Sawako Kato

video mirrors by Chris Kairalla

More at the course page: http://potatoland.com/glart/