An-nyong/Hi

The Whitney's Christiane Paul is co-curating the Incheon Digital Arts Festival (warning: excessive flash menus), in Incheon, and has invited levelHead to be part of the show.

I'll be in town for just a few days setting up in time for an opening on the 7th of August. If you are (by some slivver of statistical improbability) in Incheon this time of year, stop in and see the show!

It looks like a fine lineup of work indeed..

I've been a vegetarian for most of my life. I also travel one or two weeks a month around Europe and abroad and while travelling I'm lucky enough to be treated to dinner. Often I find myself rejecting a plate of fish or meat offered to me, even after having made it clear I don't eat either.

It's at this point someone on the table will ask me a slew of questions around my dietary choices, a topic I'd rather avoid during a social gathering. To these ends I've written a little Q+A sheet to save people the bother.

"Why don't you eat meat? (1)"

Only to make you feel so awfully guilty about what's on your plate that you will want to strike up a debate with me, vainly hoping to crush me in a hurricane of reason and common sense that will consume the entire duration of this social gathering, alienating everyone present and ruining the evening.

"Why don't you eat meat? (2)"

Because animal meat reminds me too much of human meat and I'm really trying to quit

"Why don't you eat meat? (3)"

Because everytime I eat a cow, a puppy dies.

"Why don't you eat meat? (4)"

Why don't you live in Luxembourg?

"Why don't you eat meat? (5) Meat is a natural part of the human diet."

People started eating meat out of necessity in harsh conditions, not because braised duck-liver with a sprig of rosemary was a hit at parties.

Our bodies reflect that we haven't done it for long: unlike cats, sharks and dogs, we have never killed animals with our own hands and/or teeth. We've had to invent weapons to do so, the same weapons we used to kill other people.

Just as I do not need to kill other people, expanding or defending territory, I don't need to eat animal parts to be a healthy human.

"What's the ethical difference between eating plants and animals? Both are living. Research suggest plants feel pain".

The broader picture is that it's ecologically more sane to eat plants directly than chopping down hectares of forest to grow plants to feed them to C02 burping cows and pigs, some of which will become tissue, some of which will be eaten by humans, all at the great expense of oxygen, electricity, diesel and life. If an ethics here is to include a reduction of suffering, eating parts of plants rather than those of animals is the better bet.

All said, the difference for me is still largely personal. Prior to becoming vegetarian I lived on a small farm; I've killed and dismembered many animals. I've also killed and dismembered many broccoli. The result of my findings is that I empathised closely with animals while killing them, especially when using a knife. I didn't (and still don't) empathise with broccoli, regardless of weapon.

"If you were trapped on a desert island, and were starving, would you kill and eat animals?"

If it was a desert island there wouldn't be any animals to eat.

"If you were trapped somewhere there were animals, and were starving, would you kill and eat animals?"

Quite likely.

"If we don't eat cows they will breed and take over the earth"

It is getting late..

"It's rude to refuse the food of local cultures when offered to you, regardless of your beliefs."

It's ruder to insist on making my personal dietary choices the principal topic of discussion during a social dinner.

"Cows, sheep, pigs are part of the human food chain."

Any so-called 'food chain' reflects dietary context; I don't need to eat meat to survive in my 21st century, largely western, dietary context.

Regardless, if you think paying people to prod cows, sheep and pigs into the back of a truck, drive them scared out of their minds for miles in their own shit, lead them into a large building with men in white overalls bearing stun guns and knives reflects anything as congenital as a 'food chain', you're out of your depth..

"Supporting the Dairy Industry enslaves animals too. You're eating cheese."

You're right. I was vegan in the past for 5 years or so and while quite healthy I became thinner than I'd like. Since living in Europe I've also come to really like some of the cheese I encounter. Nonetheless, this does make me something of a hypocrite and I intend to transition back to veganism one day, this time with a better diet.

"Don't you miss meat? It must be hard always having to restrain yourself from gorging on it every once and a while."

No I don't miss it. I haven't eaten meat in so long that the smell of it provides immediate bodily confirmation that it's just nothing I would ever want to put in my mouth, no more than sticks, carpet or creamed-corn (yuck!).

"Do you mind if I eat meat in front of you? I guess it looks kind of gross."

Not at all. Thanks for asking.

Hambre09 opened on Saturday at Calle de Atocha 24, here in Madrid. It was a super opening, a great turn-out and some fine work shown. Hambre'09 is open until the 5th, so if you're in the area come down and check it out, if only to see an old Madrilenan Art Deco mall before it wilts into plate-glass and brushed steel.

I've created a page documenting my contribution to the show, 'The Atocha 24 Insertions'.



You can read about it here and see an edited video here.

I got back from Cartagena a few days ago after giving an Artvertiser workshop there with Clara and Diego for the festival 'Mucho Mas Mayo'.

Performance there was heavily tested in the outdoors as we swapped advertisements around the workshop area (Carrefour particularly) using a Vuzix iWear Head Mounted Display and Quickcam Pro 9000 (photos soon). When it worked it worked quite well- surprisingly so given the intensity of Murcian sunlight.

However, on the train back I had a long think about where improvements could be made. This morning I went through the code top to bottom and have managed to achieve at least a 2x speedup in the tracking and augmentation. Really quite something for generic image tracking.. It's now about as fast as ARToolKit, when tested on my Thinkpad X200, and very stable. This means we should see significant performance on smaller devices.. I'm tempted to throw it at the BeagleBoard again..

Anyway, now it's time to get out into the streets of Madrid and take it for a drive!

I was lucky enough to get a major award at Laval Virtual this year for levelHead. Thanks to Shirai for picking up the award. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to Laval this year in person. I was in Lima, Peru teaching at Interactivos'09.

My assistant Pablo flew in to set up the piece and it seems he did a good job indeed.

Other winners in the first place 'Invited' category were:

YOTARO, University of Tsukuba
Copycat Hand for All, University of Tsukuba
Space Trash, Institute of Graphics and Paralell Processing, JKU, Linz

Cheers!

As the title suggests I'll be at The See Conference this year in Wiesbaden presenting a paper and some of my new work. Here's a synopsis of the proceedings straight from the site itself:

"see" is back again, driven by last year's success and the extensive positive feedback we received. In 2009 the see conference will again bring together fields like design, art, new media and architecture. We will explore new approaches that are being developed to confront the flood of information and transform it into useful knowledge. As before, we've got top speakers lined up, some of whom are Aaron Koblin of Google Creative Lab, the software artist Julian Oliver, Sebastian Oschatz from MESO Digital Interiors and Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen Design. The see conference #4 will take place on April 18th 2009 at the historic Caligari Theatre in Wiesbaden.

For those of you not going be sure to catch the stream!

The second edition of the Luz, Espacio y Percepcion workshops has begun!

It'll be a super few days. If you're in Madrid, drop in and witness materialisation of the following projects:

Analog hologram matrix - Emanuel Andel
Buscando Aberraciones - Óscar Sainz / Mónica Bujalance
Caleidoscopio Mutante - José Manuel González Martínez
La sombra de la duda - blablabLAB (Raúl Nieves)
Medianeras Vivas - Belén Butragueño Díaz
Through the Looking-Glass: Opening Windows in the Wall - Manuel Sánchez Gestido
Versión_Beta - David Rodríguez

The Beagle Board is our first target platform for the binoculars of The Artvertiser project. Right now I'm deep in documentation reading about how to cross compile for the device using Open Embedded.

It's a pretty incredible device, ARMv7 Cortex-8 CPU, low power drain (just 5V @ 2A), OpenGL ES support, DSP chip, HD video capable, DVI and TV out for just EUR116.00..

Goodbye Weekend..

After many requests and a heap of delays the levelHead source code is now publically available under the General Public License V3.0. All art assets are provided under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. See this install page for full instructions.

This is a release intended for developers and those comfortable with the compiling software on Linux systems. As yet there is no binary executable of levelHead.

More about that soon..

I'm off to Sao Paulo, Brazil tomorrow for the FILE festival to install levelHead.

Let it be known i'm currently looking for reccommendations of good vegetarian restaurants..

This, the first footage of the first stable version of levelHead, was documented yesterday with a speed-run of 227 seconds ;) through the first 3 cubes.

Aside from the above Vimeo documentation, you can download the 65M OGG/Theora file here. It will play in VLC.

This video was made thanks to Blender's great new video sequence editor (finally a fast and stable Free video editor for Linux) and captured using the strangely performant 3d desktop video capture solution for Linux Bugle.

For those of you keen to get your hands on the code: it's coming soon! I still need to tidy up the literature before it ships..

I recently gave an interview for TAGMAG 6 as part of their feature on Augmented Reality. It's quite an interesting issue surveying AR from a cultural, philosphical and artistic perspective.

Get it here

If you're in Den Haag region come to TAG<> and play the best version of levelHead yet alongside some great work by other aritsts like Theo Watson and Jan Torpus.

As promised, here's a gallery of images of levelHead in action on day 2 of Homo Ludens Ludens. As you can see they were taken by a far better photographer, utilizing a special feature of the camera known as 'autofocus'..

Last night at the opening was the first time levelHead has been seen in the wild. As such it's been extremely revealing watching people play it, something I've done for a few hours today.

The response has been very enthusiastic and almost all people seem to 'get' the interface pretty much immediately (with the exception of one woman using the camera to explore her nostrils on the projection at a rather inopportune moment).

That aside I'm surprised at the breadth of variance in the capacity of people to record and recall information about the room they were last in. Of the 50 or 60 people I watched play levelHead, I twice saw people demonstrate alien-savant powers in this regard, completing the first cube in under 2 minutes. Almost everyone I watched took their capacity to navigate effectively quite personally, even at times stopping to make mental notes before moving to a connecting room.

One thing I'm greatly enjoying about this piece is the ever presence of hands, made gigantic, carefully holding the cube complete with little world inside.

Aside from changing all the in-game dialogues to Spanish, I'm clear on the few tweaks I'll make for SonarMatica at Sonar08 in June. One thing is certain, the cubes will need to be an extremely durable plastic.

I've uploaded a little gallery of people playing on day 1 of Homo Ludens Ludens, one that expresses most of all just how little I understand our new Ricoh GR Digital camera (or perhaps photography in general). I'll make another one of people playing tomorrow on return home.

Here are a few galleries, broken up into categories based on when the images were taken during the cycle of action. I think what's in here is a little more interesting than what's seen in the earlier video as it also gives coverage of some live palette manipulation.

beginnings

fields

instants

endings

while teaching at Georgia Tech i've been in the company of some big screens, so i took the opportunity to film a long overdue clip of Fijuu2 in use.

we'd hoped for an inset of the gamepad but i didn't have access to two cameras at the time. regardless, this clip should explain what it's all about.

get it here. It's in the Ogg Theora format. If you don't know what that is, just use VLC.

The HTTP Gallery in London is now showing my Second Person Shooter prototype in a show by the unassuming name of Game Play. Let's hope the little demo doesn't crumble under the weight of a thousand button-mashing FPS fans..

As soon as my commission for the Arnolfini is complete and shipped, I'll finish the _real version_. Promise.

This little sketch continues my ongoing fascination with multiple viewports, for both the visual compositional possibilities and for the divided object/subjecthood produced. I spent most of a day working on 'trapped rocket', exploring the use of viewports to contain their subject.

In this experiment I've built a 'prison' out of six virtual cameras, containing an aggressive object, a rocket trying to get out. All cameras are orthagonal to the next looking inward, in turn producing a cube. Together all six cameras jail the rocket as it toils forever trying new trajectories indefinitely.

The 3.2M non-interactive, realtime project runs on a Linux system and is downloadable here. You'll need 3D graphics accelleration to run it. I wrote a script that took a gazillion screenshots and so here's the overly large gallery that inevitably resulted. Here's also a 7.4M, 1 minute clip in the Ogg Theora format.

it's in the Ogg Theora format (plays with VLC), is 84M slim and has a couple of minutes playing time.

this video is pretty much a record of the piece as it was exhibited at Lovebytes06, the game autoplaying continuously for two weeks.

there is no human input in this work, four bots fight each other, dying and respawning, over and over again. one of the four bots sends all of it's control data to PD which in turn is used to drive a score. it's through the ears of this bot that we hear the composition driven by elements such as global-position in the map, weapon-state, damage-state and jump-pad events. For this reason game-objects and architectural elements were carefully positioned so that the flow of combat would produce common points of return (phrases) and the orchestration sounded right overall.

The scene was heavily graphically reduced so as to prioritise sound within the sensorial mix.

we have a multichannel configuration in mind for the future, whereby each bot is dedicated a pair of channels in the mix. the listener/audience would then stand at the center. perhaps we would remove video output altogether, so that all spatial and event perception was delivered aurally.

get it here.

it's 40M and in the Ogg Theora format. if you don't know what that means just use the VLC player.

get the video here.

if you can deal with Flash, here's a YouTubed version.

videos in bed, 2005.

Nam June Paik passed away on Sunday. He'll be missed.

Nam June really opened up the screen.

We all reserve the right to be astonished; every time we're astonished the world proves to be larger than we are. This is something we need to affirm in the course of life. Skeptics, you might say, are connoisseurs of astonishment, their tastes are just a little more rarified than others.

Today I was astonished, so much so I had to break from the reflexively secretarial trend of my del.icio.us account, to add a new entry, "extraordinarily-stupid-ideas".

What was the harbinger of this radical departure from dry topics like "howto", "software" and "architecture"?

The Neverending Billboard.

It actually made me feel a little sad upon first witness, a lonely and very real casualty of the internet boom.

The logic appears to travel down this garden path:

I create a site in which people can advertise their products and services by paying for space within an infinitely large internet 'billboard'. While the board is infinitely large, units of my real estate are at a fixed price (mo ho ho ho). People will regularly return to my infinite billboard and choose from which of the plethora of logos they will click, by doing so staying informed with the very latest in online products and services.

Is that the space marked 'Reserved' really there for a buyer working night and day on their logo, one that will surely outshine competition on the worlds most scalable roadside sign?

About time I confess that this is/can be a blog. here goes.

Fijuu, young wine, Krsko.

Just returned from giving a short talk and performance at the very well facilitated Mladinski Center. Marta worked the sequencer brilliantly, while I noodled on the meshwarp instruments. The sequencer was the star of the night - locals coming up later and toying with it for hours afterwards. Later we headed off up into the hills to a vinyard where the fine folk from MC roasted us Chestnuts and told us Bosnian jokes (no, not jokes about Bosnians) We were given a very special performance there by a local programmer, but for the integrity of my hosts, I'll keep it secret..

FRAKTALE IV


Blind Passenger Oliver Van Den Berg (an on board flight recorder)

Went to an edition of the exhibition series FRAKTALE at the Palast Der Republik here in Berlin, which closes for public entry alogether tomorrow. The exhibition was truly excellent. The show was sparsely distributed throughout one wing of the otherwise completely desolate shell of the Palace's former glory. Sound from a video of an RC Helicopter thrashing to itself to peices on the ground moaned throughout the building, a stubborn machine grieving at it's incapacity. Some very beautiful structural interventions (I wonder whether they will launch the bike at the beginning of this helicoid) .

A day later and I'm still haunted, underscored perhaps by the fact the entire Palace is being pulled down to be replaced by a reconstruction of a 14C Prussian Palace that existed there formerly. Despite the fact that the Palast der Republik is riddled with asbestos it does seem ironic that one heritage site is being pulled down to make way for a reconstruction of a building that once existed in the same location. I'm sure there's more poltical custard and soggy money to this story, but from the perspective of a badly disguised and poorly researched tourist, it does seem a bit strange.