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.

Four carparks from around Madrid are interrupted with a geometric primitive.









Here's a video (Vimeo) and a project page.

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!

A little demo of the Artvertiser at work on a postcard. Here I'm testing the tracking in relatively low-light and during plenty of movement.


Video Postcard from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Here's a little standalone utility I put together for a couple of students while teaching at the Medialab Prado. I'm posting it here in the event someone else finds it useful..

CamshiftOSC adds network functionality to OpenCV's Camshift demo. It allows you to interactively select a region of interest within a live video stream and send the center and relative angle of that region to OSC clients (Pure Data, Blender, Processing etc) quickly and simply. In the workshop it was used for tracking the tops of people's heads but any distinct clump of pixels (an LED, a flame, a cat) can also be used.

Start it like so:

./camshiftOSC <camera index> <IP> <port>

So, if you wanted to capture from /dev/video1 and send the center of a tracked area to port 4950 to a computer 193.2.132.73 on the internet, you'd:

./camshiftOSC 1 193.2.132.73 4950

Use 127.0.0.1 if you want to send to a client on the same host.

It should compile on any Linux system with liblo and opencv installed.

To get up and running on Ubuntu or Debian systems:

sudo apt-get install libcv-dev liblo-dev

Compile it like so:

gcc -lcv -lcvaux -lhighgui -llo -I/usr/include/opencv -I/usr/include/lo camshiftOSC.c -o camshiftOSC

Be sure to play with the sliders ('VMax' especially) to get the best results.

Cheers

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

I notice that lots of people are looking for a simple and portable example of how to capture and display video from a webcam. I've written up an example in around 70 lines of code using OpenCV and C++ and posted it here in the interest that it may be useful. Because it uses OpenCV you can also use it as a capture skeleton for a computer vision application.

I've tested it on a GNU/Linux system but it should compile fine on OS\X. See the comments for how to compile and use..

Hope that helps!

The German publisher 'Gestalten' has an entry on Packet Garden in their recent book Data Flow which looks at the visual culture and divergent practices surrounding information visualisation. As an aside you may have noticed that the packetgarden.com domain is being squatted.. Sadly I never got an email from the domain hosts about it expiring and boof, the next day it was worth a lot of money.. Please update your bookmarks to use http://julianoliver.com/pg from here on!

In other news the Swiss Arts Council commissioned a text from me on Art and Videogames for a publication called 'Swiss Design in Hollywood'. Here's the English version of the text that appears in the book (in French, Spanish and English - the latter version was heavily truncated). Here's the book itself:

.

The book is designed to accompany an exhibition of the same name, curated by Patrick J. Gyger, Director of Maison d'Ailleurs the museum of Science Fiction, Utopias and Extraordinary Journeys in Yverdon, Switzerland. Maison d'Ailleurs is well worth a visit by the way, truly an astonishing and beautifully designed museum. An archive that ought to be given room on any Ark of human culture and thought..

So it followed that Marta (check out her new book!) and I went to Valencia to visit Patrick who was opening the exhibition there. It had some great prints by illustrators John Howe, Christian L. Scheurer, Deak Ferrand, Natasha Devaud, Nicolas Imhof, Brigitte Wuest, Silvio Aebischer, Simon Christen, Nadja Bonacina, Simon Otto si Alex Ongaro.

John Howe, concept artist behind a great deal of films and games, was present at the opening. Talking with him - when he wasn't autographing a stream of books - was a rare treat and I look forward to our next meeting indeed..

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..

I've just posted a video documenting the progress of The Artvertiser.

Aside from the videos below there's an additional clip of version 0.2 at work on a billboard. You can also see a new 'in world' artvert labeling system at work..

Enjoy!

I've posted footage of PacketGarden for those that have never seen it running. You can see it on Vimeo here.

Worth mentioning I'll gladly take any help I can get porting it to current versions of those other operating systems (OS X Intel and Windows Vista)!

I've made good progress on The Artvertiser software, with several live tests out in the field proving to be successful. Clara and Diego are working on the hardware, and to those ends we've ordered a couple of Beagle Boards for the handheld device (binoculars).


Here are a couple of videos of recent field tests:

Callao, Madrid, 18M AVI
Heinrich Heine Platz, Berlin, 16M AVI
Alexander Platz, Berlin, 51M AVI

Nokia and Google, if you're reading, feel free to send me some hardware so I can target your platforms (Nokia, your N96 and Google, an HTC Magic +/or Texas Instruments OMAP34x-II MDP Zoom w/Android would be lovely. TY!)..

8 countries and 30 planes later.. i'm far too lazy to write a travelogue!

anyway, let this post signify my good intention to touch this page more often.

Last night I gave my lecture Cartofictions: Maps, The Imaginary and Geo-Social Engineering to a surprisingly well-attended room here at Mama, Zagreb. The talk went better than the 1.2h talk at Inclusiva-net 7 months ago (video documentation here), largely because I hadn't run amok the night before.

After the talk several people asked to see my slides and so I've made them available. You can get them here as a PDF. The folk at Mama said they'll make the audio available at some point. I'll keep you posted.

Hell hath no fury like a man whose laptop was recently stolen, while eating a delicious breakfast, by very clever thieves.

To cut a short story long, the $US is weak against the Euro and I need a new laptop fast, specifically the new Thinkpad T400: the ideal horse for this goucho.

If you're coming to Ars Electronica and want to make some fast money, email me and I can offer you a handsome cash incentive for buying me a laptop and bringing it with you, unboxed. Yes that's right, I just used the words "handsome cash incentive" and "fast money" on the Internet.

Oh, and if you've sent me an email at all since January this year, send it to me again..

FILE2008 in Sao Paulo was super. Rarely do I meet such an attentive and genuinely interested team responsible for putting an exhibition together. The tech-crew were really on-to-it and the assistants hanging out with the pieces, explaining them to people, were too: they had about 1.5k people come through one Saturday. That requires a lot of patience.

The interior design of the show was clever as were the curatorial choices overall. Anyway, FILE team, here's my belated thanks. Vivian, Paula and Daniel especially. Your festival rivals anything of its size in Europe..

Sao Paulo. Where to start - even a Paulista would ask the same. It's very diverse, at times rough, vast and complex. 20 Million humans trying to make it work in the metropolitan area (within a violently maldistributed economy) of which I met around 37. Despite being a hard-working, hard-living creed, Paulistas are socially generous; it's not a myth you can simply walk into a bar and smile your way into a fine night out.

That said, my dubious companion for most of it wasn't a Paulista. Rather, it was a certain James Powderly, ever ripe for some good old-fashioned silliness. Here's to you James. Haven't heard from you for a few days. Like many I hope you turn up soon. You were half-expecting to get shot. Let's hope my "not a foreigner and not during the games" theory stands up to your fairly respectable test ;)

A fine friend of mine Mariana hooked James up with some local writers/graffers so much time was spent with a generator, projector, laptop, camera and a laser-pointer around town at night. I learnt a lot about Pichação, the name given to a kind of street-writing that at times resembles Egyptian Hieroglyphs and is unique to Brazil (AFAIK). Each has it's own unique symbolic alphabet relative to clans. Mariana, was good to hang out with you and Lelo. Both talented and super people...

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..

I've just cleaned up and archived documentation of Quilted Thought Organ, a sound-based game/performance environment I made in 1999, here. Yes the link to the movie works now.. Ugh.

While I prefer the operating system Debian for development and general computery tasks, I use Ubuntu for art installations. From my experience Ubuntu has a great track record with diverse hardware and is a reliable performer with recent versions of free software. 30 minutes and you're up and running in most cases.

One great frustration with Ubuntu in a gallery/museum context however (may be fixed in 8.04) is the aggressive screen-blanking. For whatever reason disabling gnome-screensaver and various other power-management settings relating to the screen doesn't discourage it from blanking. Yes, asking the assistant of the piece to wiggle the mouse every 20 minutes is a pretty rubbish workaround..

So, here's how to permanently disable screen blanking under X on Ubuntu (and probably any other distribution). Pop this in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart X

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection

It's the little things..

Found here.

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've documented 2 'software triptyches' I made in 2006, and one I recently finished, here.

Enjoy.

levelHead received an Honorary Mention in the Interactive Arts category at Ars Electronica this year.

Apparently it will also be on show at the Ars Electronica Centre in September.

Thankyou jury!

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.