Watch the videoWhat is gratitude? When do you know to be grateful for where you are? When do you know that even though you can be where you are, you can choose something else?This is a conversation in Tehran between my sister and a friend about gratitu…

Worn as a backpack, the wearable wall is a portable structure that has the conceptual flexibility to be used in a variety of situations. In thinking about self-conscious or self-managed space, there are many times in our daily lives when it is advantageous to make ourselves smaller or bigger than our actually physical form. On [...]

Here’s an Arduino program that allows two microcontrollers to communicate via Zigbee radio. The microcontroller first sets the radio’s destination address, then starts sending data when the …

kati london

improv project: doll that records and plays back audio

alarm clock project with andrew schneider, chris paretti and rocio

PingPulsePong: a networked pong controller

For my Pong Paddle …

kati london

improv project: doll that records and plays back audio

alarm clock project with andrew schneider, chris paretti and rocio

PingPulsePong: a networked pong controller

For my Pong Paddle …

WEEK 10/31 - Neural Nets
-finish coding basic neural network framework
-readrelevant sections of:
“Memory and Dreams”
“Neurobiology of Neural Networks”
“Neural Networks in C++”

WEEK 11/7 - Neural Nets
-explore spurious memories w/ neural network
-read:
Baum “What is thought”

WEEK 11/14 - Neural Nets
-explore motor sequencing with Neural network
-read relevant sections of:
“Speech and Language Neural Networks”
and “Artificial Life X”

WEEK 11/21 - Language
- more motor sequencing coding
-read:
Online papers from Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris: http://www.csl.sony.fr
Jacques Melher recent articles

WEEK 11/28 - Language
-does motor sequencing evolve language? (coding)
-conceptualize physical models
- read :
Chomsky “Rules and Representations”
Wittgenstein “Philosophical Investigations”

WEEK 12/5 - General Creativity
-integrate “language” coding with spurious memories
-evaluate and prototype physical models
-read:
“Creativity”
“The Origin and Evolution of Culture and Creativity”, Liane Gabora:
http://cogprints.org/794/00/oecc.html
relevant sections of “Information Arts”

WEEK 12/12 - End of term
-complete neural model with spurious memories and language
-finish prototyping physical models (1st draft)
-write thesis proposal

-What is creativity?
-Can it be defined?
-Is it even useful to attempt definitions of things like creativity? Multiplicities of definition, context dependent definition?
-Why is it useful?
-Why isn’t it useful?
-How do we perceive creativity in others?
-is this the same thing as defintion?
-if not, how is it different?
-Is “human-ness” an essential characteristic of creativity, is it art of the definition, the perception? Does this matter? Do definitions change? Do perceptions change? Should they?
-Can animals be creative? How is animal creativity different from human creativity?
-Is intelligence necessary for creativity?
-Is language/communication necessary for creativity?
-How does creativity happen in the brain? Is it seven omething we can pin down like that? Is it something we can emulate with a machine brain? Is there a reason to do it? Is the reason to prove something about the fundamental nature of the human and the machine? Can we even say something like “fundamental nature”?
-Could machine creativity inform human understanding of ourselves?
-(and this is really at the core) Can a machine surpass its maker?
-Is the spurious memory theory of creativity on to something?
-Where does language come in?
-Is there something special about the human brain that makes creativity possible? what?
-How does the basal ganglia reiterative ability (from Towards an Evolutionary Biology of Language) overlap/complement the spurious memory idea (from Memory and Dreams)?

Some Themes I am interested in:

-Artificial Life, Artificial Intelligence
-Emergent behavior in systems
-Language
-Subversion of capitalist system of art production
-Thought, consciousness, intelligence, creativity
-Realtionship b/t the human and the machine
-Robotics
-Embodiment; interaction w/ unpredictable world outside lab or gallery

For our Comm Lab audio assignment, Meredith and I recorded a one minute monologue and added choice sound effects. We did all of our work in GarageBand, and for two P.C. people, we were very impressed with the app - it kicked ass.

Our source material came from a monologue blogging site and our sounds came from the free sound project.

download it

The SIP Center - A portal for the commercial development of SIP Session Initiation Protocol Everything SIP (tags: sip telephony development) The SIP Center - A portal for the commercial development of SIP Session Initiation Protocol / Test Area…

We were asked to create 30 sec. spec spots for Ebay based on items we were willing to sell. Both spots we submitted were accepted. The spots were to be “homemade”. SOLID HANG made “The Grill”, with Mary Guiteras and Anna Plunkett singing, and “The Strip”, with Josh Heine shedding numerous layers of clothes. Check out the spots in our video section or on Ebay (coming soon).

For week 7 and 8’s assignment, Susan Buck and I first got together to make some plans. We decided that during the first week (week 7) we would begin to collect sounds by ourselves and then regroup. Our collections were to consist of 2 songs, and 3 sound files. My two songs were “Let Go” by Frou Frou and my favorite Moby song, that I have yet to figure out the title of. My sound effect collection consisted of some sounds that I recorded: my alarm clock, my cell phone ring and various sound recordings from the subway. (Only one of which actually came out clear enough to hear.)

After our ICM class last week, Susan and I got together, exchanged sound files, and played around with Audacity and GarageBand. Our next plan of action was to individually record one minute of sound, using a combination of our sounds and music, and regroup in a few days.

At our final meeting, we had both chosen to use te subway recording, and the song “Reprieve” that Susan had chosen as one of her song selections. The song begins by talking about Manhattan, which we both felt coincided well with the subway noises.

Susan had done some fabulous mixing, and we wanted to incorporate it into our other sounds, but needed to think of a commonality. Since we both had collected an alarm clock sound, we came up with the idea of making the sounds illustrate a day in Manhattan, from getting up in the morning, to getting on the subway, and finally, arriving at your destination. We combined all of our mixes, and sound recordings, and downloaded some clips from findsounds.com to fill in any musical gaps.

Here is what we came up with, I hope that you enjoy it! Click here to hear “A Day in NY”

A doll you can choke to death. Intended as a technological negotiator of negative emotional spaces as a contrast to the all-too-common technologically mediated emotions like happiness or fun, by killing the doll the user finds a deep catharsis through a profoundly vile experience. That sentence was so long in order to make up for [...]

Principal researcher at Microsoft Research - www.billbuxton.com
Sketching and Interaction Design:
Hardware and Software have to be merged, and not kept separated. They’re not sufficient on their own. Design (as an industrial designer sees it) does not exist in software. What is quintessential design activity? Sketching. This is an activity that is seen everywhere where there is [...]

Here’s a good set of schematic symbols for Illustrator, for those wanting to avoid circuit layout programs. These do a good job, and let you work in a familiar environment. Thanks to Tarikh Korula for the link.

Software voip VoiceOne - Open Source PBX on Asterisk - PBX software voip web based gui for asterisk management (tags: asterisk redial opensource voip web gui) podcampnyc - The password is pcnyc Coming in spring 07, I think.. (tags:…

I started working on a neural network framework for experimentation. Right now it is super simple, just an input layer and an output layer with a simple perceptron based supervised learning algorithm. The network structure and training set is determined by 3 files.
Here is the interaction descrition for the applet:
program will auto-play upon starting.
press stop button to freeze training and click on individual input nodes to see how it effects output.
press play button to resume training.
After training mode is complete click on individual input nodes to see how it effects output.

Dan Shiffman’s written a nice library to access the sudden motion sensor on the macbook and macbook pro. He based it on a couple other open source libraries. Below is a code sample for it that draws a plane on the screen and moves it as you tilt the computer.

a collaboration with Ming-Hwa Lin at Stock 20, Taiwan. Address ： 6-6, Lane 37, Fusing Rd. Section 4, Taichung City, Taiwan. 鐵道藝術網路台中站 - 二十一號倉庫 [2006 /10/13~ 11/12 ] 地址；台中市復興路四段37巷6-6號…

By

Daniel, Jeff, Kate & Scott

The object of Color Code is to break the code
set by the computer, revealing its corresponding image
in the form of an Exquisite Corpse.

The code is a random combination of four colors.
The player is given nine attempts to solve the code
with hints indicating progress after each guess.

—-

At first, I wasn’t totally sure that a redo of this old (if not ancient) game was going to be significantly different or better than any other incarnation which has sprung up over the last century or so.

MasterMind, the board game, was created by Mordecai Meirowitz (an Israeli Postmaster and Telecommunications expert) and released in 1971 to claim a “Game of the Year” award in 1973; selling 50 million copies in 80 countries. Today, you can play MasterMind at hundreds of internet gaming sites.

It’s similar to a 1960s computer game called “Moo,” and similar to the game Bulls and Cows which has been traced back a century or more. Mathematicians have studied this game. It has been proved “NP complete” – or “Intrinsically interesting to play.” http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0512/0512049.pdf

It’s all here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastermind_%28board_game%29

So what was broken about this game?

After playing for a while on our cheapo plastic consumer unit we quickly realized that a quality board would be a huge improvement. It was a challenging and rich puzzle but not much to look at and the pieces were small and awkward to place. It lacked some extra measure of entertainment, some adventure – some mystique.

We had ideas from huge panels of buttons, dials and switches to a transposition from a game of visual cues to sound. We liked the idea of very tactile colored blocks with a clean interface where the player would work only with four slots.

This turned into a system with two components: A board of four cubed slots and a processing applet to track history and provide clues. One of the biggest questions was how to have the computer sense the guess entered by the player. There was no clear way to do this without a rather complicated switching / sensing mechanism to read the cubes.

We decided to take a leap of faith with photocells on the assumption that it would be possible to judge the color based on the differing opacities of each colored cube. Our first prototype used 1” glass cubes with translucent paint. The board was build with each socket having a white LED and a photocell opposite to each other.

It was very pretty but didn’t too work. Our paint job on the cubes wasn’t uniform; the sockets were not constructed identically; the sensor readings were all over the place. We needed to get each of the 24 cubes to read the correct color in each slot every time.

While RGB sensors would probably have been the most effective solution, there wasn’t the time or know-how to implement them within the deadlines we had been given. Instead, we doggedly pursued the photocell idea, this time with acrylic cubes and a more precise circuitry. Translucent paints wouldn’t provide enough difference in hue so we tried printing label covers for each cube, allowing them to match as closely as possible. After much trial and error, we coaxed it into working – though never at absolut 100% it’s pretty damn close.

The Processing applet was at the same time evolving from a simple method for tracking the game’s progress into a visual puzzle inspired by the cadavre exquis (esquisite corpse). This brought the player more rewarding feedback and a goal separate from the central gameplay.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse

The end result was a re-invigorated, if not new, life for an old game. It seems to be fun to play both in the usual manner and in a new more tactile, more visually dynamic, and more inviting way. I’m quite happy with the results on this. Daniel, Jeff and Kate were most wonderful to work with so I hope we’ll do some more. Already, there’s talk about building our Color Code into a kiosk / photo both.

Heather, Zach and myself created a one-bit mechanical adder (with a carry function) that runs on marbles. I found the basic design online and we modified it to our purposes. Zach and Heather used cardboard, foamcore and genius to prototype the flip-flop mechanism, then mounted each on a cardboard box, adding ramps and chutes to carry the marbles through the system. The flip-flops tilt to the left to indicate zero, and to the right to indicate one. So the top indicator denotes binary 1, while the bottom indicator indicates the carry bit, or binary two. Here’s a movie that I made of the adder in action, before I decked it out in rave-wear.

The plan going forward is to implement the design in wood, with additional bits (maybe eight or 16) and a subtraction function. It would be interesting to add a crank mechanism that carried the marbles back up to the top, perhaps in a single turn. This would allow for multiplication.

Thanks to an idea from students in my icm class (see Catherine’s “greedy game-animated sprite”), I developed a Processing library that grabs values from Apple’s sudden motion sensor. The library is a JNI implementation of Unimotion by Lincoln Ramsay. It hasn’t been tested on an intel mac, so let me know if it [...]

Watch the videoJonny Goldstein has started an incredible live, interactive video-phone-chat called reinventingtv!! You can chat, watch Jonny and his guest, listen on the phone, ask questions from the guests, watch videos and discuss projects.On this ep…

Well, we finished it finally. It ain’t the prettiest thing in the world, but hey! It’s just a prototype afterall. The functionality works perfectly! Documentation is posted at http://www.chootka.com/itp/pcomp/intro/catFeeder/.

Daniel Shiffman, a professor at ITP have made this Led dispaly which light up the itp student’s mug photo. Shiffman I personal think it is a strong critic of the realistic photography.

fullview Originally uploaded by 0×000000. breadboard/arduino setup, wired to a dc motor and push button. This is just a simple lab that demonstrates how to wire up a dc motor, and control it’s direction by reversing the current going through it…

If you think the color of your car is “cranberry”, you should read this

//code for two sensor to turn brighter or lower two lights.

int potPin = 0; // Analog input pin that the potentiometer is attached to
int firstpotValue = 0; // value read from the pot
int secondpotValue=0;
int firstled = 9; // PWM pin that the LED is on. n.b. PWM 0 is on digital pin 9
int secondled=10; //PWM pin that the LED is on.

void setup() {
// initialize serial communications at 9600 bps:
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop() {
firstpotValue = analogRead(0); // read the pot value
secondpotValue = analogRead(1);

analogWrite(firstled, firstpotValue/4); // PWM the LED with the pot value (divided by 4 to fit in a byte)
analogWrite(secondled, secondpotValue/4); //PWM the LED with the pot value.

Serial.println(firstpotValue); // print the pot value back to the debugger pane
Serial.print(’\t’);
Serial.println(secondpotValue);
Serial.print(’\t’);
delay(10); // wait 10 milliseconds before the next loop
}

***********************************************************************

Phones for That Other System - New York Times (tags: voip redial phone wifi skype)…

click for video

created with ruth sergel and josh fleig
code here.

I visited the new Lucasfilm campus at the Letterman Digital Arts Center, in the Presidio (San Francisco). Very sedate, conservative environment, with no obvious signs of anything related to cinema. However, there is one statue on the grounds, of Eadweard Muybridge. Here’s a picture of Amy, Nik & myself next to it:

Everything seemed very natural. [...]

The kings of junk e-mail are trying new ways to get around spam filters. I received one recently that was weirdly poetic, apparently using some kind of grammar-aware automatic sentence generator. Follow the link to read it, and enjoy…

If a freight train caricatures some paycheck about another light bulb, then a freight train defined by [...]