The butterfly dress is done!

– Thu, 01 May 2008 00:07 -0400

when crickets are away from home

Plant visualization where each bezier curve spawns ten more from the tip, topped off with an ellipse for the sprout effect.  View it here.

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Sign Photo, originally uploaded by swerdloff.

HAPPY 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY, SWERDLOFF DOT COM!
(There are now 88 sign photos in the sign photo gallery at Flickr… submit your own!)

UPDATE: Apparently, Swerdloff dot com is 10 and The [...]

Not all that.

Launch here.

Blog for Antorcha Guadalupana that hopefully will end ass an interactive project.
As a project for Designing for Constrains and also as part of my interest, I am developping a blog for an event that starts at Mexico City and finishes in New York is called “Carrera Antorcha Guadalupana” This is the first draft of the [...]

In instant message just now, Ethan’s gone all native amongst the Rhode Islanders.

Ethan: I need to till a big chunk of the front lawn.
Ethan: I intend to farm.
Ethan: food is spendy. I’ll make some.
Ethan: and if the deer eat it all, I’ll eat them instead.

let the camera pick my colourscolour. caries weight of words and meaning. a complexity that is astounding. and powerful. each time it is introduced into a system, it brings these things with it. how did we come to these colours? in the beginning. attached to so many things now, but what were they once, if anything at all, when they were just… the images on the left are stills from a

Botanicalls is continuing with open source initiatives on several fronts. We’re applying for the Rhizome commission and members should remember to vote…for us…so that we can continue to bring humans closer to the natural world.
There’s also serious work underway to make kits available to the public, spurred along by an upcoming exhibition in Chicago. More [...]

I’ve owned Swerdloff Dot Com for 10 years as of today.
Quite a milestone for me.

My final for my Sustainable Energy is the SolaSystem, which was co-created with Justin Downs & Florica Vlad. It’s a solar powered amplifier to be used for guitars, mp3 players, computers, or whatever you want. Right now, it’s at 14watts power at 16v, give or take 1amp, but we’re gonna upgrade the amplifier to a [...]

I  hope his contribution to humanity will be fully acknowledged and appreciated before another 102 years go by…

Some off season news in the movement to update/replace the BCS. From ESPN.com:
Big Ten Commish Speaks Out

This piece was my favorite… it is the perfect balance between impressive visual effects and simple construction. A bright light reflects off of hanging square mirror. The reflections it casts are illusive and it is surprisingly hard to associate them with the mirror as it rotates from a central point above it. When is it [...]

This past weekend, I visited Storm King Art Center for the first time. It is a 500-acre sculpture park in the Hudson Valley. It is about one and half hours from NYC by car and is sooo worth it. The sculptures are massive, and there is an incredible amount of beautiful, open visual space around [...]

Went to see Cool Calm Pete at the Mercury Lounge along with Junk Science and Bisc 1. He is probably just about my favorite rapper, although one may make a case for him needing some new material.

A link to Pete’s MySpace

0 “ICE”
Highlights from the trip: I learned a new word. Jennifer taught me how to say “ICE” which I repeated over and over. I had picked up the word “NO” last week when my mom kept saying it to me- not sure why??? So now I tell her “no” all of …
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3 [...]

Online version here (right click and hit "Play").

Java code here.

.fla file here.

Currently I only have one of the additions to my midterm project working: my homemade text to speech translator using my own voice.  It was fairly straighforward to build and program. Here's how I did it:

1) Obtain a list of every possible phoneme from the Rita getPhonemes() method.

2) Recorded myself saying every one of said phonemes and converting them to mp3s.

3) Do getPhonemes() on a piece of text

4) Read the array given by getPhonemes() into Flash

5) Each phoneme of a word is separated by a dash. Split each word into an array divided by these dashes.

6) Create a function which plays one mp3 at a time, pausing for the duration of the mp3 before moving to the next one.

In this example I used text from Michael Gira's "Why I Ate My Wife".  My original idea was to use text from my dreams, but I haven't remembered more than five seconds of any dreams I've had since I presented my final idea 3 weeks ago.

What doesn't work (yet):

I wrote a method which gets all the holoynyms of each word (using getHolonym()), then "crawls" all of those words and looks for their holonyms. This piece of text has a strong focus on the body so I looked for words which would return the word "body" or similar words. From there it would use the Flickr API to find images tagged with that word, then displays them in some form when the word they're related to appears on screen in the Flash movie.

Sadly the methods of RitaWN are giving me a lot of trouble even in very straighforward situations and I get an error about which I've found absolutely no useful documentation online.

For some reason, I could not get many functions in RitaWN to work, even simple ones in simple circumstances, so that and the Flickr API will have to wait.

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Chinnese. Super Super Super Awesome
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shuang
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Greek. Forgetting about your past
Download audio file (forgetting.mp3)
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Hebrew Be happy in other peoples success
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I LIKE THIS DUDEFor Collective Storytelling and Dynamic Web Development classes, I made a website that make people to tell stories. This project is called “I LIKE THIS DUDE”. I made 10 t-shirts ( will make more ) to pass on to my friends. Who ever gets…

Testy Touch is mostly built at this point. We have several interacting circuits to perform our various interactive tasks. We have a Daisy mp3 player that we bought from MAKE and put together. We have a board that interfaces with our motor controller, and we have a board that our sensors and vibrating motors connect [...]

My ITP thesis, the EM Brace, is up and running. The EM Brace is a wearable device for physically engaging with ambient electromagnetic frequencies emitted by computers and other electronics. It does so by turning these frequencies into sounds that are sent into a “bass-shaker” speaker in the back of the device. Metallic arms reaching [...]

The painting machine is working! Although its a little sensitive right now and am working on the algorithm that will make it paint better (or more realistic I should say.) So far I am getting images like this:

The painting machine is working! Although its a little sensitive right now and am working on the algorithm that will make it paint better (or more realistic I should say.) So far I am getting images like this:

Sky Gazer is an installation whose purpose is to bring awareness to the surveillance trend around the world and an increase of a self-surveillance culture often called Sousveillance.
The installation consists of a sculptural character (”SkyGazer”) that is forever gazing at the sky (or ceiling if it’s indoors.) This is taking the meaning of “Sousveillance” literary [...]

Sky Gazer is an installation whose purpose is to bring awareness to the surveillance trend around the world and an increase of a self-surveillance culture often called Sousveillance.
The installation consists of a sculptural character (”SkyGazer”) that is forever gazing at the sky (or ceiling if it’s indoors.) This is taking the meaning of “Sousveillance” literary [...]

Aiming to be finished this Thursday with the paper, presentation and working prototype.Changed the name from iPhone Classroom to Pocket Classroom.Now the “official” project web site is www.pocketlearning.orgThe paper now has images and is all formatted…

While brainstorming for final project ideas for my Art & The Brain class, I was reminded of this excellent February 2005 clip of Stephen Colbert blasting the language of art criticism in a piece about The Gates.

My thesis project is a dance performance that takes the form of a multi-channel video installation. As a choreographer, I am interested in emphasizing process, distance and mediation to expand definitions of choreography in an age of electronic communication and physical displacement. The studio process for this project consisted of working with dancers on improvisational [...]

It is with incredible pride (and about equal parts shock and bewilderment) that I report that Socialbomb is the winner of NYU Stern’s Business Plan Competition! Out of the initial 155 teams that entered, Adam Simon, Scott Varland, Mihir Dange and I took on the last three on April 25 at the competition finals [...]

It is April 26th 2008, day of our final presentation for our class Sousveillance Culture. We are presenting at a conference hosted by Marisa Olsen, our professor, at The Change You Want to See Gallery.
Here’s the official flyer for the event…

We had a great line up and am proud of our classmates who [...]

My thesis presentation is in 10 days. I’m done with everything else I need to do for my classes, and now I’m just tying up loose ends on my thesis. I’m still adding a few animation sequences, and I have more sound to incorporate.
Changing the framerates on my animations didn’t work. FlashPageFlip [...]

Morph-Inherit to the complexity Designed by Minsoo Lee / 2008.04.27…