Ben Gaulon of Recyclism and Katherine and I are running a joint workshop at ISEA 2009 in Dublin, Ireland on August 22nd at the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art. Workshop is 30 EURO (for basic materials, etc..) or 25 EURO for Students - CHEAP!

We’ve put together this signup form so you can sign up for our workshop, please enter your info below.
Details about the workshop are here.

“DATA Workshop 4.0: Scrapyard Challenge meets E-Waste Workshops”

Participants will build simple electronic projects (both digital and analog inputs) out of found or discarded “junk” (old electronics, clothing, furniture, outdated computer equipment, appliances, turntables, monitors, gadgets, etc..) in order to create audio/visual outputs. At the end of the day, the workshop participants will demonstrate and present their creations in a performance / presentation open to the public. No electronics skills or any experience with technology is necessary to participate in the workshop

Web Designer extraordinaire, Jeffery Zeldman (half-seriously) reveals the secret of successful project management:

The trick to great projects, I have found, is (a.) landing clients with whom you are sympatico, and who understand language, time, and money the same way you do, and (b.) assembling teams you don’t have to lead, because everyone instinctively knows what to do.

One can only wonder what prompted the comment.

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thehumanprinter creates CMYK prints of your photos by hand.

Unlike any other printer thehumanprinter creates unique, individual images each time it prints. Following the same process as a digital printer, thehumanprinter generates the printed product by hand. Throughout the printing process thehumanprinter assumes the role of the machine and is therefore controlled and restricted by the process of using CMYK halftones created on the computer.

Pretty Back-to-the-Future-esque, but the church in our hometown (Medway, MA) was struck by lightning and caught on fire!  (this morning, me thinks)

Apparently moments later the the steeple FELL OFF and crashed on the ground.

Big Dig & JJ got the call while they were out having breakfast (JJ’s home for a wedding).  They ditched pancakes just in time to take this pre-steeple-collapse pic.

More pics here.

(via jonathan crowley)

Okay, the kerning is off, but it’s still pretty cool.

From One, Many

The Museum of Wisconsin Art is proud to showcase some of the state’s best printmakers in

“FROM ONE, MANY: Contemporary Wisconsin Prints”

This is an original MWA exhibition and the range of print media will be matched only by the diversity of artists: established practitioners will be on display beside younger, up-and-coming artists.

Sneak Preview Friday July 10th, 10:30AM featuring an artist talk with collaborating exhibitors Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern.

Exhibit will run July 10 - Aug. 30

Attists exhibiting are:

John BALSLEY, Larry BASKY, Brad CORSO, Bob ERICKSON, Ray GLOECKLER, Lisa HECHT, John HITCHCOCK, Jayne REID JACKSON, Dara LARSON, Gregory MARTENS, Colin MATTHES, Jessica MEUNINCK-GANGER, Mark MULHEARN, Frances MEYERS, Dorota BICZEL NELSON, Michael NITSCH, Gaylord SCHANILEC, Paula SCHULZE, Jan SERR, Nathaniel STERN, Christine STYLE, Ken SWANSON, Paul YANK and Rita YOON

caro:

Weren’t some people talking yesterday about CAPTCHAs that made great band names?

Just got word that I have been accepted for a NEA International Media Artist/Filmmaker Residency at Squeaky Wheel for this Fall.  I’ll be creating more toys for Alchemy of Light.

In essence, we urged that the city think of a database as a thing, similar to a bench, a tree, a light post, or fire hydrant. And that a .nyc domain name be assigned to each database. The great thing about giving a domain name to each database (or other “thing”) is that you can then have a conversation about that database.

For example, think about the police department’s crimes database, and let’s take Mayor Bloomberg’s lead and call it “­crimes.data.nyc.” By giving it an intuitive name - http:/ /www.crimes.data.nyc - ­you facilitate the work of ­programmers, but you also create a market place for that database. So at the crimes.data.nyc­­ URL you would find: ­

• Detailed description of the data
• A link to download the raw data
• An ongoing conversation of how it “might” be used if only this or that was changed or added
• Comments and possibly a discussion by people who object to it containing too much information

• A suggestion that a particular field should require privacy access­

• Notations as to the different apps where the data has been used
• A civic advocate / entrepreneur match program for locating people with similar interests and a desire to jointly develop apps based on the crimes.data.nyc ­data set.

Learn more about this and see our council testimony.  (Commons Photo courtesy of equinoxefr.)­

Learn more about the Campaign for .nyc on our wiki pages. ­­­

Katherine and I are both invited faculty for the GOSH Summit next month at the Banff Centre in Canada. GOSH = Grounding Open Source Hardware - and it should be an interesting place to meet people involved in this growing field as well as work on some potential projects during the week. If you are going, we look forward to meeting up! More about this event as we get closer to the date.

1) progress / innovation is not always where or what you think it is -- and does not
is it necessary to project yourself into the future? is it necessary to do it? who are you to say what the futures of other people should be?

2) uneven development
tensions, ambiguities and contradicts are constitutive of technologies

3) whether and how children today are different today than we were
going beyond "digital native" rhetoric

4) what kinds of enabling techniques let people be creative in their own ways, over time?

what's new:
children have new developmental challenges to face
1) share-ism: a predilection for sharing before working things out on their own
2) border-crossing: moving between worlds

drawing from Douglas Repetto: stepping back as an educator; being humble; having no fixed idea (about what is a robot)
In contradiction to the discourse of the grand evangelizers, who create environments for other people to design in. This is difficult without acknowledging that you are the god and creator of those environments. Vs making spaces for people to meet to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. Sometimes more like theater. These may be the best holding structures to allow people to be makers themselves, and not just monkeying around environments or having to endorse discourses by "those who know better."

Here is a scan of a 48 year old Kodachrome slide, a street scene in Burma. Other than dust removal, I have done no additional processing to the image:

A Burmese Street Scene

The colors are vivid and clear, the photo could have been taken yesterday. In contrast, here is an Ektrachrome slide, taken 2 weeks later on the same trip:

A Hong Kong street scene

Note how all the blue information has disappeared, and the picture has taken on a strong reddish tint. At the time, this was a full color image! Apparently it took Kodak years to realize that Ektachrome slides would lose most of their color, even when stored in dark. By that time, it was too late for many photographers.

Even extensive post-processing can only do so much. At least it is possible to reduce the overwhelming red hue, and recover a little bit of the remaining green and red pigments:

My grandfather purchased many commercial slides to fill out the records of the trip. Some of these commercial slides have fared even worse:

The Colosseum, Rome

At least they’ve decayed in interesting ways! I intend to do something interesting with the hundreds of extremely decrepit slides that look like this.

I could not help thinking that I am probably the last person who will ever physically handle these slides. Chances are that scanning technology won’t really improve sufficiently to justify ever scanning these slides again, and the Ektachrome slides will eventually fade away entirely.

A lot of today’s media face the same fate: DVD-R’s are this generation’s Ektachrome, with a viable lifetime much, much shorter than originally thought (5 to 10 years). The only way to keep digital media current seems to be continued copies onto newer and newer media, but even hard drives are not a good archival medium (lubricants in the bearings of a hard drive will eventually freeze up if the drive is not powered up for more than a year).

Keeping media alive is major effort, and one that is time-critical. Once the physical media has degraded, the effort quickly becomes so great that it will mostly never be made. Unfortunately, digital media seems to lack the equivalent of a Kodachrome, a stable medium that will last into future generations.

Ocean swimming pool in Saint-Malo France. I love how at high tide the pool slips back to ocean, leaving only the diving platform poking above the water, like some concrete sea monster. There is great flickr group with many more beautiful pictures of the pool.

Photo Source: Le Bruce on flickr

(via Gizmodo – Robot Parkour Ad by Nike – Nike ad parkour)