Earlier this week, Anne Hong, Andrew Schneider, Nick Sears and I set up the Interactive Youth exhibit at the Material Connexion. The Material Connexion is an amazing resource for anyone doing anything that has a physical presence. The show looks amazin…

” … The idea is to haul an Oldenburgized version of a 3-D computer drawing (what might be called “giant soft building outline”) out into the streets of Dubrovnik and photograph people erecting it in the style of an Amish barn-raising. Thus hard becomes soft, virtual becomes actual, private becomes public. The sculpture is not [...]

Art Fag City: featured artist
“One of the more exciting new features on AFC lands in our masthead, which will now feature a new emerging artist every two weeks. Click on the image and a page with the profiled artist and a full sized reproduction of their work. Kicking us off is the work of Nathaniel [...]

"box song and others"
work by Marc Nimoy, showing at Dangerous Curve. The exhibition opening celebration
Saturday, July 7, 2007 7:00 to 10:00 p.m.

"box song and others"
work by Marc Nimoy, showing at Dangerous Curve. The exhibition opening celebration
Saturday, July 7, 2007 7:00 to 10:00 p.m.

And this time on to L.A. for a little relaxation. Also big plans of slipping off to Vegas for a little dabble at the poker table. Better reload, Doyle, I’m on my way…

The documentation for Realidades Avanzadas is now online. I closet-coded for CONSERVAS ; Simona Levi et. al. in Barcelona during May. Curious to know what that was all about?

The documentation for Realidades Avanzadas is now online. I closet-coded for CONSERVAS ; Simona Levi et. al. in Barcelona during May. Curious to know what that was all about?

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Despite having plenty of more productive things to do with my time, I’ve been hooked on this game Desktop Tower Defense for almost two months, now. And while I don’t consider myself to be in the upper-echelon of players — I’m not ready to go Pro — I have become quite good. Maybe 95th+ percentile. Good enough to teach. So here’s some teaching, a few Desktop Tower Defense pointers that might help you — lowly DTD-plebe that you are — improve your game a bit.

1. Get your creeps on the same path ASAP, but make sure the distances they must travel to get onto that shared path are different enough in length so that the creeps are spread out as they run past your towers. When they get all clumped up together, your towers will have less of a chance to hit them.

2. Define the paths the creeps will take with cheap Pellet Towers. But place Squirt Towers where they have access to the longest lengths of path and can shoot at the flying creeps. And then get those Squirt Towers up to level 5 as quickly as possible. Level 5 Squirt Towers are crazy powerful. Get a couple of them going early in the game and you’re on easy street. But remember, a smaller number of more powerful Squirt Towers is preferable to a large number of weak ones.

3. Don’t worry about the absolute length of the path the creeps will take. Don’t fill up the screen. Make your goal getting as many level 5 Squirt Towers as possible.

4. Once you’ve got a stable base of Squirt Towers, put a couple freeze towers where they can hit creeps and flying creeps. And level them up a couple rounds. These will help, especially against the flying boss creeps.

5. The Swarm Towers are great for killing flying creeps, but don’t level them up too high too early. You’ll just take points away from leveling up your Squirt Towers. Squirts will kill flying creeps fast, too, so get those going at the beginning. Only concentrate on getting level 5 Swarm Towers when the flying boss creeps approach — but don’t ruin your game trying to kill those guys. They can be tough to kill, especially in Challenge Mode, but you’ll only loose two lives if you miss ‘em.

So, there you go.

Novel Concepts, the blog by the guy responsible for Desktop Tower Defense (and another guy), is an interesting read, as well. Their Flash piracy post is an interesting perspective on the “meme piracy” which is rampant online. (Any popular meme image or video — anything small and probably created by someone indie enough not be able to control it with lawyers — will eventually wind up on meme-dump sites like ebaumsworld — which I won’t link to because, frankly, I think many sites like this are essentially scummy and spammy and shitty. (Something Awful agrees.) Ebaumsworld is a particularly egregious case. But these sites appear to be actually quite difficult to get rid of because, of course, few people have the resources to go after them over some image or video or small Flash game that goes viral and gets popular.

But there’s another interesting point in all of this. Desktop Tower Defense is great — horribly, horribly addictive. But it is definitely not horribly, horribly original. It builds upon the fine tradition of tower defense games that started with a Warcraft III mod (I’m told — I’ve never played WCIII). It’s almost indefinable why this version so compelling. I’ve played a few others and felt just “blah” and not interested. Partly, I think, it’s the fact that it is a phenomenon — I can talk about this game with people is a way I could never really talk about some little Flash game I’d come upon in the past. (I mean, talking about it kind of feels like comparing masturbation tips, but still — at least we’re all masturbating.) Even console games rarely have this appeal because it’s rare for me to play a game at the same time as someone else — when I talk about the new Wii Zelda, I’m either talking to people who’ve finished it or who haven’t started.

Kongregate, the new social gaming site that now has their ads all over Desktop Tower Defense (which I’m actually okay with) appears to want to capitalize on the above feelings — community around small, quickie games. Will it work? They have almost 1,000 games available right now, including Desktop Tower Defense. I’d ballpark about one out of every 1000 Flash games are compelling enough to play more than once. Game design can be hard, let’s be honest, and small Flash games necessarily follow that difficult-to-predict “pop song” model — so many bands are capable of tossing together a quick, catchy, fun track that the market gets glutted and the winners, the band that gets the hit, can be difficult to anticipate (unless there’s a giant marketing push of some sort). (I also don’t buy the “revenue sharing” business model, but that’s another post.) So Kongregate will have to get much larger soon to become viable as a business, I think — or else learn to capitalize extremely well on hits like Desktop Tower Defense. I’ve never seen a Flash game go viral quite as hard as Desktop Tower Defense has, though, so… We’ll see what happens.

Natalie Jeremijenko and I released two dozen butterflies in the OOZ garden. We helped them feed from some watermelon in the Strange Attractor artificial flowers then observed their behaviour. The Monarchs stayed at Strange Attractor longer and were more likely to leave, fly around the garden a bit and return to the [...]

Natalie Jeremijenko and I released two dozen butterflies in the OOZ garden. We helped them feed from some watermelon in the Strange Attractor artificial flowers then observed their behaviour. The Monarchs stayed at Strange Attractor longer and were more likely to leave, fly around the garden a bit and return to the [...]

hey jttoolkit hackers, you might be interested in this new tutorial that shows you how to migrate your project into openFrameworks. Be Free!

hey jttoolkit hackers, you might be interested in this new tutorial that shows you how to migrate your project into openFrameworks. Be Free!

Imagine my surprise today when I pulled out my trade magazines and consolidation invites to see that the new WIRED had come, and on the cover was a picture of none other than yours truly! It was exciting at first, but then I questioned if I should take…

June the month of really big bugs that fly at the screen. Not as much here in New York but where I go when I dream. The air cool and drifting in like a cooling blanket of freshness. Again this is a dream, kind of like that moment when the sprayers come…

Atelier Artist in Resident
Frans Masereel Centre, Belgium
prints published by Art on Paper Gallery, Johannesburg
In July of 2007, I worked with printmaker Zhane Warren to complete eleven new performative prints, while on residence at the Frans Masereel Centre in Belgium. These are part of my ongoing Compressionism series: a digital performance and [...]

Thanks to Ame for finally prodding me to upload the slides for this talk. I gave it at the Mobile Persuasion conference at Stanford a few months ago, but school and wedding preparations got in the way of blogging or…

Writing from the airtrain to JFK en route to O’Reilly Foo Camp. It promises to be an exciting weekend of meeting, developing, and general geekery. Also looking forward to a couple of quick meetings with my good friend Tao @ Swivel.com to iron out the beginning of my consulting work for the startup, which aims to yield some exciting work that will hopefully prove to be a useful toolset for hackers and data-fetishists everywhere. Stay tuned…

Time to get checked in and catch a few z’s before SFO. Be good.

Landscapes and Icons
May - October 2007
Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery
for Innovative Contemporary Artists
Kinsale, West Cork, Ireland
Landscapes and Icons is a duo exhibition (alongside Paul LaRoque) with 14 new digital Compressionist prints. These were made through performative scans of the landscape in Dublin and West Cork, and published by the Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery.
Excerpts from the gallery’s web [...]

As part of my gig with Microsoft Research, all of us interred here in Redmond for the summer were invited to a BBQ at Bill Gates’ home. We arrived on shuttle buses after being stripped of all cell phones, cameras, metal objects, even pens. It’s ironic that the man who amassed a fortune selling technology [...]

The Contractors got a mention on the Virtual China blog. The GFW of China is blocking the site, but the above link is anonymoused for those of us on the inside. thanks lyn!

again, for those who weren’t listening the first time it was mentioned, we’re playing the Borderline festival. More details arrived today! Friday 29 June, 10pm. 50RMB entrance. We’ll be outdoors in the mobile lab. if we’re

A close up view of a portion of the panelization. If two planes are not in the same plane, they will have an intersection line. The intersection lines that create an internal boundary within that plane compose the panel.

Now that modeling a smooth surface is becoming the norm, that is not enough for many of us. There are a few ways in making these surface. (1) 3dprinting (2) sectioning in one direction or in both directions to build a rib structure (3) Milling the surface and vacuum forming (4) the conversion of surface [...]

Art Intercom: featuring artist
Nathaniel Stern
Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City interviews Nathaniel Stern, commissioned by iCommons
“Inspired by pioneering artists in the field of Interactive art such as David Rokeby and Myron Kruger, Nathaniel Stern builds upon their work by reintroducing traditional art-making techniques to reinterpret digital records of movement. In the first half of my [...]

Hey there hello there
I’m sorry for the delay in writing this here blog. I promise I’ll try my best to keep up the slack. (er make up for slack) ((errrrr slack up the make))
So if you read the last post you heard about how my car was broken into in San Francisco and alot of [...]

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So I’m back. Arrived back last night, got into the apartment at about 1am. Not terribly tired, but satisfied to be back in New York. I would’ve arrived back a couple of hours earlier, but it turns out that Fox rental does not have a drop-off spot at the San Francisco airport — something I could’ve figured out but I didn’t even think to look. So instead of cruising in with about 45 minutes to go before lift off, I had to drop off the car elsewhere, wait for the shuttle to the airport, and then wait for the CalTran (or whatever) to the actual terminal. So I got to mill about and check my e-mail while having lunch for a couple of hours. Not too bad, I guess. But whatever. More interesting stuff occurred on this trip.

Okay. So why was I in the Bay Area all last week? For Yahoo! interviews, which I probably shouldn’t go too much into detail with except to say that I interviewed with some folks at the Yahoo! mothership and enjoyed learning about the company for a few days. They have some very cool project going on, not the least cool of which is Pipes. What can I say? Well, the Silicon Valley area down there is pleasant in a quiet, suburban sort of way. I stayed with ex-roommate Haley and her boyfriend Jonathan for a couple of nights at the beginning of the week in Mountain View and it all just felt very nice and comfortable. The night life is weak, but if you’re into staying home, it’s lovely. We mostly stayed home. Both nights: ice cream and a couple episodes of The Riches on the projector. (The Riches = The Beverly Hillbillies for the post-Sopranoes generation multiplied by the world’s worst American accent, courtesy of Eddie Izzard.) Mountain View even has that Google Municipal WiFi, so you can get a signal pretty much anywhere (though it’s often weak and you have to click through a “Hi, we’re Google!” splash screen to start surfing). Tuesday afternoon I wandered down into downtown Mountain View to grab lunch and read my book (No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy, if you care — good book: terse and bloody). Downtown MV is simple. Just a stretch of road with some clean little coffeeshops and restaurants mixed in with other businesses — not the usual strips of Jack in the Boxes you find everywhere else in the area. Nothing too crazy, but fine.

On Wednesday Haley celebrated her 24th birthday — woot! — so she made arrangements at a restaurant in San Francisco for a bunch of people from Apple (Haley and Jonathan are both Apple employees). After taking a quick nap (and doing some mindless web-surfing), I drove Jonathan, Hatim, and Nick up. Hatim, it turns out, also lived in Austin and volunteered with AMODA for a while (after I stopped). We’ve actually seen each other perform live sets on at least a couple of occasions and he’s friends with the Notenuf folks, as well. Weird. So. Yeah. So we drove up to this crazy Italian seafood place and met a bunch of people — including ITPers Josh Dickens and interactive underwear specialist JennyLC. Caf&eacute Sport, the name of the place. Pronounced “Café Sport” or “Café Spore?” Who knows. Regardless, a great place. Right near Columbus Avenue downtown. Lots of pasta. Seafood. Crazy interior design: patterns and colorful this-and-thats on every available surface, including the ceiling. Oh, and a drunk Danny Glover. While we ate he came in, I guess to pick up some food. He took some photos with with staff and a couple people, hung out for a bit talking, then stumbled out and got into his SUV-Jeep thingie and cruised off (I saw this because I followed him out to hit an ATM — and out of a desire to glean through proximal osmosis a richer understanding of dealing with bomb-rigged toilets and Mel Gibson). And then after dinner, some desserts and then drinks at some bar. And then back to Mason’s and Melissa’s place at the edge of the Mission district for sleep.

So. Thursday morning Christin landed in town, so I grabbed her at the airport and we grabbed lunch at some spot on Market a friend of hers had recommended. Then we went down to 826 Valencia (McSweeney’s HQ and “the Bay Areas largest independent pairate supply shop”). The place is fun. Lots of stuff to touch and look at. And books to buy to benefit the org. Christin even got a good mopping (and I’ll leave you to contact her for the details). Then we drove around for a while. A long while, actually. We zig-zagged north up to the Golden Gate Bridge and drove over to Sausalito to look back across the Bay at the city and take some photos. Then south south south: We stopped in Santa Cruz to get some ice cream at a place recommended by Haley and watched the surfers for a while. And drove on down past Monterey to the Big Sur area where we finally stopped and got dinner at the Big Sur Inn — a large log cabin sort of affair tucked amongst the redwoods and, oddly, no sea view. But great. We would’ve just stayed the night, but they were full so we drove back up and (after losing our way a couple of times) finally got a place on the outskirts of Monterey. A place with a fireplace and the, um, shower actually in the living room. With a kind of Tudor-style tapestry as a shower curtain. And angels frescoed into the paint on the ceiling of the tapestry. And this was a Super 8 motel, not Larry’s Discount English-Style Overnighters. Very, very odd. I’m not really used to showering in the living room of any residence. But I’m okay with that.

Our room. Note the shower by the TV.

So driving the coast… Yes, Pacific Coast Highway Route 1 is awesome, especially if you’re lucky enough to be driving in the late afternoons and evenings as we were. It’s rugged. Cliffy forested mountains just fall right off into the water most of the way and the road curves along ridges of flattened rock along the edges. And people do die on these road by losing control and sailing off towards multi-story drops into the rocky sea. But it’s great. If you have a rental car (or just a car), I highly recommend it. There are even a handful of small mostly empty beaches along the way which are quiet and very nice.

We got back to SF Friday evening and gathered the troops together for sushi at Sushi Hana, a place Gunn recommended — he knows the owner. Ilteris, Karl, and Andy had arrived into town on Thursday from their wacky cross-country adventure (which involved, amongst other things, the partial destruction of two rental cars and one poor deer and also involved Ilteris going into shops in the more rural parts of this country asking for either handguns or dynamite which, frankly, sounds like the set-up for gimmicky scene in a pre-Sicko-era Michael Moore doc). So that treo showed up along with Myra(!), whom they had come across totally by coincidence at a pizza place called, appropriately enough, “Escape from New York.” Mason, Melissa, Gunn and his girlfriend Jill, Christin, and I rounded off the roll call. Good sushi. Those salmon rolls with the lemon slices on them (I always forget the name) are the best. I love sushi with fruit in it… (Silhouette in Austin would stick apple slices or strawberries into their rolls if you asked — awesome.) So we ate and then moved to a bar to finish the evening. Christin and I were exhausted, so we split early.

And that pretty much wraps up the adventure.

What else to say? Um. How about this: I hate parking. Driving I’m okay with at this point because of the novelty, frankly (I never drive in NY). But — oh, sweet holy monkeys — I hate that feeling like we had when we came into town for Haley’s birthday, when we had to just creep along from street to street for a half-hour trying to find a place to put the car, holy fuck. I love subwaying and walking from place to place. It’s somehow refreshing. Anything else?

Oh, crap! The Monterey Aquarium. Forgot about that. Okay, I’ve been before, but Christin hadn’t, so we stopped in Friday afternoon. The big deal? The new otter exhibit. Oh, boy, otters. They’re good. When we first found them they were all kind of sleeping and being boring, but when we stopped by again before feeding — silly, silly, silly. Otters twirling in the water. Otters playing with purple balls. Otters pressed up against the glass and mugging for the crowds. Otherwise, I’m not sure we had a favorite spot. The touching pools were cool — you go and poke at defenseless starfish and sea cucumbers and such. The patios along the waterfront were nice, too. The ocean right along there is populated with a mix of sea birds, seals, and dudes in kayaks drifting around. Oh, and it turns out there is an ugliest fish ever (with a deceptively charming name). My favorite fish is, of course, the hammerhead shark. Saw some of those. Yeah.

Otter!

Penguins!

Seals (and other critters)!

Starfish!

Chrisin!

The end.

For those in Beijing on the evening of Friday, June 29, we have a special treat for you…

THE CONTRACTORS will be performing LIVE at the 2007 Borderline Festival sometime between 9-10pm.

2 Kolegas Bar 两个好朋友酒吧
Inside the Drive-in Movie Theater, Liangma Qiao Road n. 21 (North side of Dong Feng Road, 300m west of Dong Feng Qiao)
地址: 汽车电影院内 - 亮马桥路 21 号 (东风桥西300米路北，汽车电影院内)
Tel: 0086-10-81964820

First conceptualized for the 2007 iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik Croatia, The Wireframe Series: Sentimental Construction #1 is a site-specific, publicly performed architectural structure made of rope. It is an ephemeral arrangement that, nonetheless, carves out space and frames its context; it is ’sentimental’ in the tensions it creates between sadness and playfulness, nostalgia and possibility, [...]

For Broad Cast Response, I captured the entirety of the 1990, teen angst, pirate radio movie Pump Up the Volume, then broke it down into a diptych of all the spoken “no”s and all the spoken “yes”s in the film, respectively. The resultant installation, which continuously flows in and out of a synced, monosyllabic debate, [...]

My Blue Flower was featured in the Art Work column in MAKE Issue 10. The article is called Illuminated Circuits and focuses on artists who use electronic circuits for both their form and function. I’m in there along with Peter Vogel (one of my personal heroes).

My Blue Flower was featured in the Art Work column in MAKE Issue 10. The article is called Illuminated Circuits and focuses on artists who use electronic circuits for both their form and function. I’m in there along with Peter Vogel (one of my personal heroes).

Bringing the Maker Faire home:

Thanks once more to the entire Maker Faire team for a great time (and the banner).

In related news, according to the official site, Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be airing the Maker Faire segment on Wednesday, June 13. Watch for the makers!