I called my friends voice mail tonight on my way back from the floor: “Hi, Its me. you’re not going to believe this; I’m so homesick that I went onto the internet to check for airfare, then I realized I don’t know where home is, so I just sat there looking at the screen not sure where to go…

I just wanted to hear your voice in hopes of finding something familiar for a moment. . .”

Last night Caleb, Patricia, Scott, James, Gretchen, and I went to the see the New York Philharmonic at the Lincoln Center. An amazing performance by Russian pianist Radu Lupu.It was so soothing to hear live and acoustic music for a change… a change o…

Here’s my project proposal for Urban Computing:

One of the themes that I’ve been interested in is the shift from matter to bits disrupting the necessity of urban density. So I started thinking about what that density could provide that would, in turn, be valuable to the exchange of bits - some edge that the city [...]

What are all these people looking at? After seeing some feather flying around and looking up, I saw it as well - a hawk in the middle of the city!

Here’s my project proposal for Urban Computing:

One of the themes that I’ve been interested in is the shift from matter to bits disrupting the necessity of urban density. So I started thinking about what that density could provide that would, in turn, be valuable to the exchange of bits - some edge that the city had over suburban sprawl when it came to data. The answer, of course, is the pervasive access to the internet. Because there are so many wifi nodes in such a small space, it becomes possible to be connected almost everywhere.

Similarly, physical piracy of movies and music, which still outstrips digital piracy by a wide margin, takes advantage of the density and anonymity of cities to create an underground market. The digital underground is, of course, file sharing, and largely bit torrent at this point. But bit torrent also mirrors the primary disadvantage of the physical pirates - it’s only really easy to get popular things, while obscure media is only available through official channels. (I love the irony that the most pirated things are also the most purchased, and the ones the RIAA and MPAA are the most concerned about.)

I want to take advantage of the wifi abundance and the anonymity of the city to setup simple web servers to seed media torrents over open networks. The goal is to set up several nodes seeding the same content, to increase download speeds, and they will ideally be remotely accessible, so that the media could be easily changed (tho, at the moment, battery power will dictate how long they will be active). It will be an invisible sort of graffiti, using the data itself instead of an abstracted message.

They have to be disguised, of course, to prevent tampering. My idea was to hack a Linksys router and file storage into a pair of old shoes, and toss them over light poles near open wifi, appropriating a traditional feature of the city to help spread media that may not be gotten otherwise. I haven’t settled on content yet, but it will probably be things that are not otherwise available, but should be seen or heard - ideally on the topic of the freedom of information.

Well, that’s my idea. I’d love to hear your feedback, as it was only one of several directions I thought of going in. (I also considered having the web servers only serve their data locally, but I couldn’t come up with a good reason for it, or why anyone would connect to it in the first place. So there’s that, too.)

YouTube - Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us

Can we make this video searchable, linkable, machine readable? Unfortunately, not yet.. Hopefully soon.

Global Voices Online recently featured my thesis proof of concept:

Global Voices Online recently featured my thesis proof of concept:

One of the great problems with working on some sort of design thing is that, after several days in Illustrator (which I have come to absolutely ADORE!), I can’t even really SEE what it is that I’ve made any more. I’ve done 8 variations on the Capacitor logo, and I seriously don’t know which color [...]

Interesting conference coming up in NYC on Biology and Art. Opening talk by Wim Delvoye, creator of Cloaca. The rest of the talks pair an artist with a scientist in a related field. Theo Jansen will be there!

Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One?
Sponsored by: The New York Academy of Sciences

This [...]

here are 4 new mp3s of my ‘neo-appalacian psychedelic’ band ‘chrysanthemum’

hooray! my geranium bloomed!

WHAT
Andy, Aichen, and I play to build a living lampshade entitled “Lumen” for our final project in Living Art. The idea would combine the two definitions of the word lumen, both as an SI unit of luminosity and as a central cavity of a tubular organic structure. “Lumen” will mimic the kinetic movements of [...]

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They talk!, by doryexmachina.
Adam, Scott and I have been bashing away at getting our XBee friends talking. They do! Sometimes. Occasionally. When they feel like [...]

Bertoia Sounds
- Clickable sound links on this page; these are rather bell-like sounds… clangy and mechanical, but they do have an interesting personality.

Bertoia Sound Sculptures
- An online catelog of sorts. Minimalist aesthetics.

Sonic Architecture
- Works from architects/designers Bill and Marv Buchen. Many are located around NYC.

I’m looking for inspiration for the types of sounds we can make with musical tops.

SoundPlay
- Outdoor musical instruments

WindWorld
- Experimental Musical Instruments

Today we experimented with different strategies for sensing the motion of springs. The first was inspired by electric guitar pickups. I thought we might be able to create an electromagnetic pickup to sense the vibrations in the springs. We tried to create a simple electromagnet out of a nail and some transformer wire…. oh, yes… and a power drill.

We scrapped the pickup idea after measuring the resistance of the coil to be 0 Ohms. I was concerned it might short something out. Shlomit also thought we would have more creative possibilities if we used sensors rather than capturing the sound of the springs directly.

Returning to a previous sensing idea, we experimented with a flex sensors.

Flex sensors are not ideal for our application; they only sense motion in one direction and require a fair amount of deflection in order to produce a useful reading. (note for the future… measurement ranges would be useful for documentation purposes)

We also considered mounting the springs on top of a pair of joystick potentiometers to sense X-Y movement. The miniature potentiometer we tried to use for our prototype was too stiff to yield useful results. We wrapped a copper wire around the dial of the potentiometer, hoping that motion of the springs on our installation mockup would move the potetiometer and generate a varying resistance. No luck.

I’m planning on working with Eric on researching, measuring, and representing the transfer of energy from sources (like coal, wind, and solar power) to data products (like a single email or an hour of World of Warcraft). We think we’re going to focus on the connection between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy, and present the [...]

I’m planning on working with Eric on researching, measuring, and representing the transfer of energy from sources (like coal, wind, and solar power) to data products (like a single email or an hour of World of Warcraft). We think we’re going to focus on the connection between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy, and present the actual statistics alongside the theory which connects them. The final product will be both a writeup of our research and relevant theory, as well as some kind of vizualization or info graphic that makes it easy for people to understand the connection between energy and data.

Eric’s working with some folks from Sustainable Energy on a project for measuring energy use for various devices, so I’m planning on focusing on the research and data presentation.

Rejection Of .XXX Domain Praised by FRC and FocusInternet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) rejects “.xxx” domain and earns praise of such lofty organizations as the Family Research Council (FRC) for not allowing “false hope for parent…

the last time my life got thrown up in the air and I got to watch it fall all to the ground was when I moved to New York.

I sold it all, I left everything I swear I’d never leave and started all over again in a place I had many more bad memories then good.

I got here, I settled- it took months, but I did, I found a place I could be happy. I started to replace all those bad memories with good. I committed my life to this place as much as you can commit to a place and now I see things in the horizon and I’m beginning to fear the whole process might have to start over all over again. You know, I hate planning, I hate hate hate asking questions of people when I’m not sure they really know the answers; or maybe I’m afraid of their answers..

The last two or so years I’ve started to feel a shift, the moving every 6 months like I’ve done every 6 months since I was 16 isn’t so glamorous anymore, I find myself craving a sense of home and I find myself craving a partner to share it all, I find my definitions shifting in ways I never could of anticipated.

Something has changed in my fearless emotionless life, and I’m finding I crave meaning so I can find purpose.

I keep trying to let go, blah blah live in the moment blah blah, repeating to myself something ryan said to me months ago, ’someday…its going to work out…and all the bad experiences will be meaningless’

For the home stretch of my thesis (it’s all implantation at this point) i’ve decided to return to Python. It’s just much simpler and more importantly, unlike j2me, it gives me access to cell tower information. Now that I am using cell tower instead of GPS for CrowdScapes Python becomes the obvious choice. [...]

the popular screenwriter John August runs an excellent blog in which he answers a multitude of questions about writing and the creative life :: some of the writing veers toward the technical, but much of it is a rare and personal view into the craft of writing movies :: johnaugust.com

daily photo posts of Sam Javanrouh :: very straightforward and simple, like good bread.

Myra and I met to come up with three ideas for our final project. We talked about why we were both interested in TV and making it more interactive. And then we worked backwards to brainstorm a few ideas that would accomplish the same ends. Here’s what we came up with:

SerendipiTV is [...]

Another version of the musical speech patch. I spoke with Peter last week about fffb~ and made it work — to some degree.

I ran into trouble finding the frequency bin with the maximum energy. Jonathan Marcus helped me with a solution to that problem using the zl object.

The patch makes some sounds now, but still not what I hoped for. I wanted a patch that would highlight the musicality of recorded speech. I expect it would work better on some voices than others, but so far it just sounds “random.”

• When the .wav file is silent, the patch plays the last frequency in the frequency transform list (to fix, I will need to detect that case and turn off the cycle~ object)
• I tried testing the patch with the cycle~ object as an input, thinking that a pure tone would be a good way to test the patch’s ability to recognize frequencies. As I changed the frequencies of the cycle~ object going into the patch, there were some spots where the pitch detection “blew up” and returned to the highest frequency in my list.
• More experimentation needs to be done with voice recordings to see how they respond. I will post some results soon.

Using the patch
- Enable the DAC
- Click the “open” message to load a file into the sfplay~ object
- Click the “1″ attached the sfplay~ object to start playback
- The following controls modify the output: transform strength, wave volume, and transform volume
- “Transform Strength” controls the scaling of the values coming out of the fffb~. Increasing the transform strength with cause larger numbers to be packed into the frequency bin energy list. This primarily affects the height of the peaks on the multislider display.
- “Wave Volume” and “Transform Volume” adjust the relative sound levels of the original .wav file and the transformed signal. Set transform volume higher than wave volume to emphasize the transformed sound.

A Proposal for a Mobile Project in the Urban Landscape
:: My ::
hactivists, corporations, the man, tourists, flickr’ers
:: The Intervention ::
I will be placing stickers underneath corporate logos

When people shoot the logos and send them to the appropriate address, they will get a message in return. The message might contain facts about the corporation.
:: The [...]

Dub Reggae: Origins and Influence

The origins of Dub reggae trace back to the 1950’s Kingston Jamaica, where local DJs would load up trucks with turntables, p.a. systems, and massive speakers to create mobile “soundsystems” for parties and concerts. Originally playing American R&B/Motown records and radio stations, soundsystem DJs moved towards focusing on local musicians [...]

Art Presentations for Tactical Media
I decided it would be best to focus on a few “projects” that Garcia and Lovink specifically point out as demonstrative of a recent tendency toward “scaled-up ambitions” since tactical media practices of the 90’s
Telestreets is a decentralized network of over 200 pirate television stations utilizing both old and new technologies [...]

… huge topic … … edge/peripherial cams, cylindrical/drum/barrel cams, face cams (groove or slot in face) … … receives motion from the cam … different ends … attached, roll, etc … … shaft that has a bunch of cams … car engine … Ferrari has sliding cam shaft … more efficient at different speeds

… different from a fastener screw … sort of like an inclined plane wrapped around a cylinder … used to raise things … pitch is what distance the screw goes up with one revolution … is (2*pi*r)/p …where r is the length of the handle … typical values are MA=600 … 30-50% are lost to friction though … … left and right threaded screw connected by linkage … used to control tension of cables … lead screws are used in in clamps, vices, lifting heavy things … 90% efficiency .…

At the beginning of the 1980s, artists like King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock), Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Philip Smart, Overton Brown, and Lloyd James a.k.a. Prince Jammy have produced a breadth of work that has firmly and legitimately defined ‘dub’ as not just a collection of ‘one off’ discs but a genre all of its own. England [...]

comprises a wide variety of works. What connects them is the underlying design approach. Most of them are based on that were specifically engineered to . The authoring of software is understood as the primary design activity, output media as derivatives. This way of working lends itself to many creative fields. In the following cases it is demonstrated with an emphasis on , , and .