Marta and I just returned from Prague. One thing that struck us there was the large amount of time we spent in other people's photographs and videos, or at least within the bounds of their active lenses.

It's sadly inevitable that at some time a tourist mecca like Prague will capitalise on this, introducing a kind of 'scenic copyright' with a pay-per-click extension. Documenting a scene, or an item in a scene, would be legally validated as a kind of value deriving use, much in the same way as paying to see an exhibition is justified. Scenic copyright already exists, largely under the banner of anti-terrorism (bridges, important public and private buildings fall under such laws), but there are cases where pay-per-view tourism is already (inadvertently) working.

A friend Martin spoke of his experiences in St. Petersberg, where people are not allowed to photograph inside the subway, something enforced under the auspice of protecting the subway from terroristic attack. However for a small fee you can be granted full right to take photographs. Being that it's very expensive to have city wardens patrolling photographers it will no doubt be automated, where Digital Rights Management of a scene would be enforced at a hardware level.

Here's a hypothetical worst case. Similar to the chip level DRM in current generation Apple computers (with others to follow), camera manufacturers may provide a system whereby tourists must pay a certain fee allowing them to take photographs of a given scene. If a camera is found to be within a global position falling under state sanctioned scenic-copyright, the camera would either cease to function at all or simply write out watermarked, logo-defaced or blank images. If you want a photo of the Charles Bridge without "City of Praha" on it, you'll have to pay for it..

A newspaper reporting on a blind convention (a standard for blindness?) in Dallas talks about a text to speech device allowing blind people to quickly survey text in their local environment, further refining their reading based on a series of relayed choices. The device works by taking photographs of the scene and in a fashion similar to OCR, extracts characters from the pixel array, assembles them into words and feeds them to software for vocalisation.

Given the vast amount of text in any compressed urban environment, prioritising information would become necessary for a device like this to deliver information while it's still useful or else utility would be largely lost. The kind of text I'm talking about would include road-signs and building exit points.

Perhaps a position aware tagging system could be added to important signs using triangulated position from multiple RFID tags, bluetooth or other longer range high-resolution positioning system. Signs could be organised by their relative importance using 'sound icons', which in turn are binaurally mixed into a 3D sound field and unobtrusively played back over headphones (much as some fighter pilots cognitively locate missiles). The user would then hear a prioritised aural map of their textual surrounds before selecting which they should first read based on assessment of their current needs.

'Tapper' is a small virtual sound installation exploring iterative rhythmical structures using physical collision modeling and positional audio.

Three mechanical arms 'tap' a small disc, bouncing it against the ground surface. On collision each puck plays the same common sample. Because the arms move at different times polyrhythms are produced. The final output is mixed into 3D space, thus where you place yourself in the virtual room alters the emphasis of the mix.



I'll make a movie available soon and add it to this post.

many of you have written to me about the Blender --> PureData HOWTO i wrote up last year and how you've used it in your own projects. it's great to see this simple tute forming the basis of a few workshops and university classes now also (here's looking at you Andy!).

it seems the Wiretap site is currently down - and has been for a while. for this reason you'll probably be missing an essential ingredient of the tutorial, the pyKit Python -> OSC interface libraries.

because i'm very nice, i've archived them here until they're back online.

Beagle is an 'instant search' tool for Linux systems, and normally works in conjunction with the Gnome Desktop, which I don't run.

being able to instantly find files from the commandline is thus something i've wanted for a while. here's a simple howto for those of you that'd like instant search from the CLI. it assumes you have a Debian based system:

        sudo apt-get install beagle

create a beagle index directory:

        mkdir ~/.beagle-index

index all of $HOME:

        sudo beagle-build-index --target ~/.beagle-index  --recursive ~/

start the beagle daemon as $USER. it automatically backgrounds:

        beagled

run 'beagle-query' in the background so that it looks for live changes to your indexed file system.

        beagle-query --live-query &

now create a file called 'foobar' and search for it with:

        beagle-query foobar

the result should instantly appear.

it may be better to alias it as 'bfind' or something in ~/.bashrc and start 'beagled' and 'beagle-query --live-query &' from ~/.xinitrc or earlier.

enjoy

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.

thanks to a generous commission from Cybersonica, pix and I had the resources we needed to throw a month at creating an entirely new version of fijuu, the engine, artwork and audio got a complete overhaul.

development in such a short period of time was also testimony to the power of skype as a collaboration tool. we spent around 8-10 hours in the IM each day sending each other patches, artwork, code snippets etc right up until the point of walking out the door with Fijuu and Ubuntu on a shiny new Shuttle. if only Skype or an equivalent IM and VoIP tool had code-formatting and an sketch-block with drawing tools and SVG export..

the piece was installed at Phonica in London where it'll be on show until the 26th, alongside sister shows around London.

here are some screenshots of the finished work and most imporantly here's the sourcecode if you're at all interested in compiling it:

darcs pull http://fijuu.com/darcs

pix has put together a README listing dependencies. don't leave home without it!

fellow Kiwi Adam Hyde just sent through some snaps of a little workshop conducted in Lotte Meijer's house in Amsterdam over the snowy new-year.

we spontaneously decided to make TV transmitters according to a plan devised by Tetsuo Kogawa, a mate of Adam's. Adam and Lotte had the gear, so we got busy.

Marta, Adam, Lotte and I each soldered a board up, but Lotte's worked the best. the board has a little variable resistor for tuning channels and to our complete astonishment gave us a near perfect colour reception with a composite cable from a DVCam hardwired onto the board. we got around 10m of range between the transmitter and the TV before the signal was lost due to occlusions in the house itself. with a few boosters used in serial this range would be (hypothetically) exponential.

fun and games - build one yerself!

Thanks to Ed Carter and the Lovebytes folk, q3apd is finally getting a good showing in an installation context; to date it's largely been appreciated in a performance setting. Unlike prior appearances, q3apd will this time be played entirely by bots which is so far proving to be an interesting challenge.

While these bots are in mortal combat they are generating a lot of data. q3apd uses this data to generate a composition, in essense providing a means to 'hear' the events of combat as a network of flows of influence.

To do this, every twitch, turn and change of state in these bots is passed to the program PD where the sonification is performed; agent vectors become notes, orientations accents and local positions become pitch. Events like jumpads, teleporters, bot damage and weapon switching all add compositional detail (gestures you might say).

Once the eye has become accustomed to the relationships between audible signal and the events of combat, visual material can be sequentially removed with a keypress, bringing the sonic description to the foreground.

I've been working on a new environment for the piece and helping bots come to terms with the arena. Here's a preview shot. When the work goes live I'll post a video.

videos in bed, 2005.

Ljubljana, 2005

i've been working on a series of moving images designed for use on very large screens.

anagram 1



this composition takes about 10 minutes to complete a cycle and runs indefinitely. it's called "anagram 1" and is designed as an 'recombinational' triptych. it is not interactive in any way.

this is the binary [2.5M]. it runs on a Linux system with graphic acceleration. just run 'anagram1' after unpacking the archive.

here's a small gallery of screenshots.

anagram 2



"anagram 2" takes much longer than the previous work to complete a cycle and spreads the contents of three separate viewports from one to the next to create complex depths of field. using orthoganal cameras, cavities compress and unfold as the architecture pushes through itself. the format of anagram2 is also natively larger.

here's the binary [2.4M]. it runs on a Linux system with graphic acceleration. run 'anagram2' after unpacking the archive.

here's a gallery of anagram 2.

2002-3



q3apaint uses software bots in Quake3 arena to dynamically create digital paintings.
I use the term 'paintings' as the manner in which colour information is applied is very much like the layering of paint given by brush strokes on the canvas. q3apaint exploits a redraw function in the Quake3 Engine so that instead of a scene refreshing it's content as the software camera moves, the information from past frames it allowed to persist.

As bots hunt each other, they produce these paintings. turning a combat arena into a shower of gestural artwork.

The viewer may become the eyes of any given bot as they paint and manipulate the brushes they use. In this way, q3apaint offers a
symbiotic partnership between player and bot in the creation of artwork.

The work is intended for installation in a gallery or public context with a printer. Using a single keypress, the user can capture a frame of the human-bot collaboration and take it home with them.

Visit the gallery.

Some fun to be had. To start with try this:

import ossaudiodev

from ossaudiodev import AFMT_S16_LE

from Numeric import *

dsp = ossaudiodev.open('w')

dsp.setfmt(AFMT_S16_LE)

dsp.channels(2)

dsp.speed(22050)

i = 0

x = raw_input("length: ")

x = int(x)

a = arange(x)

while 1:

        # between 200 and 600 is good

        while i < x:

                i = i +1

                b = a[i:]

                dsp.writeall(str(b))

                print i,":",x

        else:

                while i !=0:

                        i = i -1

                        b = a[i:]

                        dsp.writeall(str(b))

                        print i,":",x

it's harder than you think!

here it is in python ported from some Java i found online.

here's a wifi access point brower i wrote in python for Linux users that prefer to use console applications. i
'll get around to one that roams and pumps based on the best offer.

scent.py

here's a little python script to let you know when your laptop battery is running low.

dacpi.py

this rc resources pyzor, spamassin, procmail and gnupg.

~/.muttrc

i've been playing around with creating little demo's in blender that explore it's limits for positional (3D) audio. as it goes the limits a
re near and not very interesting. regardless it's perfectly possible to create installations using point based audio. i'm working on a series of
these now. in the meantime here's a little HOWTO blender file..

PKEY in the camera window to play. ARROWKEYS to move, LMB-click and drag to aim (walk/aim stuff nicked from a blender demo file).

for those without blender, but just want to see the results, here is a Linux binary
. just make it executable (with KDE/Gnome or chmod +x file) and click or ./file to play.

2005



the first person perspective has always been priveledged with the pointillism (or synchronicity) of a physiology that travels with the will in some shape or form, "I act from where I perceive" and "I am on the inside looking out". in this little experiment however, you are on the outside looking in.

in this take on the 2nd Person Perspective, you control yourself through the eyes of the bot, but you do not control the bot; your eyes have effectively been switched. naturally this makes action difficult when you aren't within the bot's field of view. so, both you and the bot (or other player) will need to work together, to combat each other.

there is no project page yet, but downloads and more information are available here.

1999-2000


this was my first successful foray into the use of games as performance environments.

it project uses a modified QuakeII computer gaming engine as an environment for mapping and activating audio playback, largely as raw trigger events. it
works well both live and as an installation. I later implemented this project in Half-Life.

the project webpage, and movie are here.

2002/3. designed by Katherine Neil, Kate Wild and myself. built by the EFW team.



EFW is a Half-Life modification set in the real Australian Woomera detention center. playing as a detainee in subhuman conditions, the goal is to escape.

EFW has appeared in television, newspapers and online journals worldwide. EFW was publically condemned by the Australian Minister for Immigration (the man
responsible for the racist detention regime in Australia), Phillip Ruddock.

Screenshot above (and entire map) developed by Steven Honnegger.

Read more on the project website.

2001->3 selectparks team.


acmipark is a virtual environment that contains a replication of the real world architecture of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne Aust
ralia. acmipark extends the real world architecture of Federation Square into a fantastic abstraction. Subterranean virtual caves hang below the surface,
and a natural landscape replaces the Central Business District in which ACMI actually resides.

It was inspired by the capacity of massive multiplayer online games such as Anarchy Online to create both a sense of place and a sense of community. It is
the first multiplayer, site-specific games-based intervention into public space.

upto 64 players can play simultaneously and though there is a free Win32 client, the game is best played on site at the ACMI center in Melbourne.

visit the project page here or check out this movie.

sadly there wasn't money for a Linux/OSX port and parallel development for these platforms was out of the question as we were sponsored to use Cr
iterion's Renderware.

pix and I, 2004.



fijuu is a 3D, audio/visual performance engine. using a game engine, the player(s) of fijuu dynamically manipulate 3D instruments with PlayStation2-style
gamepads to make improvised music.

fijuu is built ontop of the open source game engine 'Nebula' and runs on Linux. fijuu (we hope) will one day be released as a live CD Linux proj
ect, so players can simply boot up their PC with a PS2-style gamepad plugged in, and play without installing anything (regardless of operating system).

Among several appearances, fijuu was performed in Sonar2004 and received an Honourable Mention at Transmediale2005.

read more about the project, see screenshots/movies etc here.

pix and i 2003.



q3apd uses activity in QuakeIII as control data for the realtime audio synthesis environment Pure Data. we have developed a small set of modules that once installed into the appropriate directory, pipe bot and player location, view angle, weapon state and local texture over a network to Pure Data, which is listening on a given port. once this very rich control data is available in PD, it can then be used to synthesise audio, or whatever. the images below are
from a map "gaerwn" that delire put together as a performance environment for q3apd. features in the map like it's dimensions, bounce pads and the placement of textures all make it a dynamic environment for jamming with q3apd. of course any map can be used.

to use q3apd first grab the latest Quake III point release. we used version 1.32. make a directory called 'pd' in /usr/local/games/quake3/, or wherever quake3 is installed on your system [this is the default install path on a Debian system]. then, cd into this new directory and unzip this package of modules ensure that this machine is on the same network as the box with PD on it. run the q3apd.pd in PD on this machine [ping it to be sure]. in the terminal, exec Quake III with:

yourbox:~$ quake3 +set sv_pure 0 +set fs_game pd +devmap (yourmap)

once the map is loaded pull down the console in q3a with the '~' key and type:
/set fudi_hostname localhost
/set fudi_port 6662
/set fudi_open 1

'netsend', an object used in PD and MaxMSP systems to send UDP data over a network, is is now broadcasting. at this stage you should see plenty of activity in the pd patch on the PD machine. enjoy!

system requirements

machine 1 --> Linux / Acellerated Graphics Card / Quake III Arena / ethernet adapter or modem

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

Nam June really opened up the screen.

While rummaging around the crypts of selectparks recently I came across an old work Chad and I cobbled together in a fit of glad madness one night in 2001.

Somehow we had managed to run a KyroII graphics card (a big-shot brand 5 years ago) on the wrong drivers. When I say wrong I mean drivers for an entirely different chipset. Poking and scratching, we were able to run the game Half-Life, and immediately an impossible 2D landscape splintered and bloomed around us. We decided at the time to call it 'Glitch Machinima'.

Find the film here. Accompaning music was added later (can't you tell)...

Original SP page here.

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?