MFA IME, uncovered

i often get asked what it is exactly that i'm studying. the answers i give are as varied as the people asking. "new media", "contemporary art", "the intersection of technology and art", just plain "art" are my most common responses. the other day i found this little booklet about FMI and decided their idea of themselves was much better than anything i had come up. so here it is, straight from the horse's mouth...book...page.

Striking Writers Make Funny Videos

Object Annotation, Some Thoughts

a little while ago, i blogged about this piece i did for the art collective SFZero. i've had time to post some of the thoughts this project raised. i beg your pardon if it's a bit fragmented. this is copy/pasted directly from my notes.

goal
to tag a public object you like with a note discussing how much you like it.

experience
tagged a bronze statue of a horse with a url that lead to a blog with pictures and poems written to/about the horse. updated the blog everyday for five days with a new poem. poems were simple things, children's rhymes, a modified popular theme song and a translated/edited greek poem about a chess knight. the physical tag lasted 4 days. also, on the second day, someone left a copy of the illiad at the base of the horse. hence my decision to include a greek poem, though not necessarily one about the trojan horse.

i found the idea of giving the statue a virtual presence in addition to it's physical presence fitting. the idea of physically hyper-linking the statue to a blog played to this notion of interstitial blurring. the physical statue exists in a between-place also. the verge between the two sides of radesingel. where does the real horse exist? in some gray area between physical and virtual? does it take on a new measure of reality because of the 'sacrifice' i paid to it? this has ties to the greek idea of immortality through sacrifice. acts of honor and remembrance for the dead keep them wandering the world as shades. attention was drawn, awareness created. performance? netart? interstitial space? all of the former?

WORK THAT IS NEW

somethings i threw together this afternoon. collages made with ps from anatomical and architectural drawings. there will be more in the coming days. cheers :D

HOLLYWOOD WRITER'S STRIKE

the writers of the daily show on "the screenwriters guild strike"

On Object Annotation & Global Collaborative Art Groups

i little while a go i found this site, called SFZero, via the most excellent AVANT GAME blog and i fell in love with the concept. namely, a way to re-experience reality and the ubiquitous with a community of creative, supportive people. i've only done two tasks, so far, but the response has been better than anything i could have hoped for. i consider this community to be one of the burgeoning definitions of the contemporary art collective. :D

AUDIOOFFICE, NOV 9 10 11

audiooffice is going on this weekend in groningen. my studiomate, pascal, is in the show. if you're in the area, drop by.

Opening NOV15: RUSS NORDMAN: COMBINES

my good friend, russ nordman, is having an opening back in council bluffs, ia, from nov 15 til dec 9, 2007. russ will be showing a body of digital collages (above) made from photos he's taken of agricultural and vernacular architecture. i command you to attend. anybody want to go as my proxy?

JODI @ FMI

JODI, a duo of new media goodness, visited the singelzaal at FMI wednesday evening. well, at least the DI part did, Dirk. JODI is Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, they've been pioneers in the netart field, among a number really nice game mod pieces (i was on the edge of my seat). Check out the links, and no, you're computer isn't broken. i think. oh, and if your eyes/brains are sensitive to flashing lights and such, don't click on the the above links, go to this one: jodi at wikipedia.

FIVE LINKS FOR THIS WEEK...

I'm going to start something new this month: each week i'll post the five best links i came across during that week.

top five this week:

Downloadpedia
-open source software wiki
GameTheory.com
-podcasts on the gaming industry
Vented Spleen
-a blog by a comic creator that i recently found and fell in love with
Dwarf Fortress
-an ascii-based game for windows (ostensibly 98) about dwarfs...and a fortress...
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
-a site about the gaming industry, featuring interviews with top developers. great stuff


also, you can check out my del.icio.us/stumble pages for a more comprehensive selection of what i find. buttons are also on the right ->

cheers.

WikiPediaVision

this is very cool. it's a mashup between the google maps API and wikipedia's recent changes page, and some other stuff. it was written by Laszlo Kozma and inspired by FlickrVision.

what i'm reading

re:TODAY

McLuhan says, "once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we really don't have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interestes is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly..." pg 68, 'understanding media: the extensions of man'

look around.

TOP TEN INVENTORS OF ALL TIME

photograph by Dan Winters. article at conde nast portfolio.com

FORCE FEEDBACK GAMING VEST

via scifi tech blog and tngames

"PRIOR GOVERNMENT PERMISSION" MY ASS...

i don't normally blog about things like this, i dunno, it's just not in my nature, but this is ridiculous. the DHS is quietly moving closer to a proposal that requires prior government approval for all fliers, domestic and international. so what that means is, i haven't to petition the government for their "ok" to fly. i have to ask. the government. to fly. to travel, to move about. what the fuck kind of country do we live in? well, i guess i don't live there right now, which actually scares me even more. this policy is due to go into effect in february of 2008 and could, on a personal level, keep me from coming back into the states that summer. additionally, it allows the airlines and DHS to keep a record on all travelers, their itineraries, accommodations, the books they had with them, etc. this is my personal information, my privacy, that is no longer mine. the days when we could reasonably expect to remain private, anonymous individuals has definitely passed. land of the free. ha.

links to resources:

about the "western hemisphere travel initiative"

a blog about a public charity working to protect our rights to private identities.

a blog of an activist, working to shine the light on these 'quiet' initiatives.

NEW WORK: MERGERS

some new work created through compromise and negotiation with photoshop cs's 'photomerge' tool. essentially 'photomerge' is used to automatically make panoramic photos. a friend here at fmi is doing that exact thing. after seeing his work, i became intrigued by these auto-compositions and wondered what photoshop would do with images that weren't meant to be panoramic. the results are these, 'mergers', compromises between me and the program about me. click on the images to see the [in progress] set. comments are, of course, always welcome.

SO:CAL FIRES: MY GOD...

NASA images of the insane fires in socal. i have family in san diego. i hope they're okay.
here's a link to a bunch of charities if you can help.

HAPPY 40TH, BIGFOOT

40 years ago, tomorrow, the Patterson-Gimlin Bigfoot footage, was taken at Bluff Creek, California. here's to keeping mysteries alive. via boing boing & cryptomundo

Workshops, Lectures and Food, Oh-My!

1910: belated update: the past two weeks have been a gusty whirlwind of workshops, meetings and lectures. as a tutor of mine said recently, "blogging might be [is] a form of writing that reflects the moment" but in his case and in mine, ideas take awhile to gestate.

my first workshop was in MAX/MSP/Jitters..i guess you'd call it a program, but it's more like a tool-box, than anything else. it's a graphical environment for developing applications to interpret/manipulate raw data (numbers). it's all the rage right now (with good reason) for new media artists, mainly due to the flexibility and almost limitless possibilities it offers. i liked it a lot. the image above is of a "patch" (small program) that i wrote on the last day of the workshop. we were told to write a patch that would manipulate video based on sound/video analysis. mine takes a realtime 3d image of my desktop, and moves it around an x,y axis based on the input through a microphone. everyone was coughing a lot during the week of the workshop, getting over colds and such; the room had this ambient soundtrack, that at first was annoying and intrusive, and seemed to shake my computer. i wanted to visualize it, make it obvious. i was pretty happy with the result. though i have to admit, certain elements of the patch come ready-made. i also linked the microphone to the speakers to set up a bit of feedback. when someone would cough, the mic would pick that up, the two-channels would feed numbers to x,y coordinates for the desktop, but would also go straight into the speakers, generating weird sounds, which would feed back into the mic, and a loop was created. it wasn't a snowball effect, but it did exaggerate the movement initiatized by the coughing.

my second workshop was in a program called processing, which as far as i can tell is pretty much java, though a bit easier to understand. it wasn't my cup of... java (sorry, couldn't resist), so i didn't get too excited about it. during this workshop-week i also had three meetings, one each with my three theory tutors, and a great lecture on play/gaming in music as practiced by john(s) cage and zorn, given by my theory tutor, arie altena.

which brings me more or less to this week, the autumn break. i haven't done a lot this week besides catch up on sleep, watch movies and eat. i eat so much here, probably due to biking everywhere. i did go on a short 40km bike ride to winsum and back on tuesday with plans for a much longer ride this weekend if the weather cooperates. it's been pretty rainy & cold the past couple of days, and the leaves are falling; autumn is here.
and i'm going to go eat. <3

Christian Nold's Emotional Maps

i read about this on seed's daily zeitgeist. christian nold is trying to re-humanize urban maps by compiling data based on the emotions or sensations of city-dwellers linked to specific locations. the map above is of newham, uk, where nold blindfolded and deafened a group of high school students who then explored their environment through touch and smell. read more here.

iSight Feedback Performance

hmmm...what do you think? note: don't have your speaker up to loud for this.

RedNose Studios: Amazing work by Chris Sickels

i found this work by chris sickels today, just stumbling. he has some beautiful pieces. enjoy.
i especially like this one; the modern man.

Bike:Trip:Two, Ambition Strikes

View Larger Map

Um, so... 131 km/81.9 miles roundtrip, almost 14 hours. We didn't think it'd take that long, but the national park was great and we lost track of time. i'll post more about the trip when i've had a chance to rest. cheers.

jump here for flickr photos

UPDATE: THE STORY :910: biketrip2: we started late, around 1030 or so, because most of us had stayed up all night in the finest tradition of an international student house. originally we were five, myself, lavinia (from romania), jasper (dutch, my student manager), freddy (german), & pettik (turkish), but when only lavinia and i made it out of bed and onto our bikes. :) so off we went. the northern dutch countryside is beautiful. clean, well-kept fields, fat-short sheep, placid cows and little mini-canals running all over the place. our destination was a national park called lauwersmeer in the northwest on the border of the provinces groningen and friesland. the trip there was pretty idyllic; the weather was a perfect autumn day and we found a great balance between blindly exploring the bike paths (fietspaden) and knowing which way to go. once we arrived we rode around the bike paths for a couple of hours, exploring the wetlands and watching birds. i saw a lot of heron, geese, and huge cormorants. we then decided to eat at this little restaurant. i had a pannenkoeken, or dutch pancake, though it's the american pancake's much larger, thicker plate-sized brother. and then we noticed the sun going down. whoops. well, needless to say we got lost a bunch of times in the dark, went in circles twice, and finally found the right fietspadden to follow. a high note: got to see a bunch of meteors :D
we arrived safe and sore in groningen around 1130pm. a falafel met patat later and i crashed.

I RAN OVER A PIGEON TODAY.

they're everywhere and they're not very smart. i was riding my bike and normally the pigeons wobble away from you or, gasp, fly away from you, but not this one. oh, no, of course not. he ran at me, launched himself into the air, went promptly under my wheel and then flew off, apparently unharmed.

scared the crap outta me. i have burned in my head this sensation of white wings and a bump. anyway, this photo has nothing to do with the pigeon. i took this in the market the other day. apparently there were 184 miljon (million) of something to be celebrated. any guesses?

suicidal attack pigeons are my bet.

update: those numbers are actually 18,4 (18.4) million and it's the lottery jackpot.

The Wet & Wild Route

View Larger Map

after dinking around with this for an hour, i finally got "my" google maps to work. enjoy.

WET & WILD

okay, maybe not so wild, but definitely wet. today i decided to see what sea i could see...or something. the north sea being the closest it wasn't much of a choice. it was ~70km roundtrip, roughly 40 miles, it was wet, it was cold, it was brilliant. :D more pictures after the jump.

rainy saturday project

it rains a lot here, my bag isn't water proof. this is my solution because i'm too cheap to buy one for 50 euro. more after the jump.

Drawings by Preschoolers Expressing Their Feelings

via boingboing today. i thought this was too perfect to pass up. there are more pics after the jump.

bots & vids

259: wow, long time no write in here. my head's too fuzzy for this at the moment, but i'm going to plow ahead for a few ticks and then go make some tofu n'noodles. i just meet w/karen lancel, the core-teacher for ime. it was great. i think. :) ok, i've deleted three possible sentences, so i'm going to go make food and then come back. don't you kinda wish you knew what i was going to say, but didn't? me, too.

ahh, much better.

so, my meeting with ms. lancel went very well. had a quick/intense discussion about the underlying foundations of my work. she asked some very poignant questions, one in particular that stopped me flat. not many questions have been asked of me (about my work) that i haven't been able to answer after the briefest of pauses. it was a nice shock. a very nice shock. it's interesting, though, how often the only way we feel we can help one another is by sharing our own particular way of negotiating reality.

i've also uploaded a number of videos: most from robodock. enjoy the madness.

Saul Griffith, PhD., wins MacArthur "Genius Grant"

boing boing had a notice about this guy today. he's just been awarded one of the $500k MacArthur grants. he's the guy behind many, many things that i've come to know and love. click his pic for his website.

Gibson Goodness

i tried to stay away from him for a long time. why? i can't explain, other than to say the awe, as voiced by others, surrounding him turned me off, completely. i have this deep seated aversion to "popular" things. i prefer to find things my way, quietly, if you catch my meaning. that was until i decided to sit down this past may and read an old, oft thumbed copy of neuromancer. i couldn't put it down. at first it seemed stiff, hard to visualize, but as it's hooks sunk deeper into me, i became to gibson idiosyncratic way of writing and i was converted. since may i've started through his bibliography in reverse. i next read spook country, not so please with it, that's not to say it wasn't good, but it seemed more of a novella or a short story taken too far. now i'm two-thirds done with pattern recognition, and i like it. a lot.

so much so, that i've started reading gibson's blog and i'm going through what information i can find about his other, non-book works. so i found this: the agrippa files

specifically this is what i thought was cool. download the appropriate format.

BRAD SUCKS

BRAD SUCKS, so says william gibson, who am i to argue?

ROBODOCK photos!

pascal and i managed to scare up some tickets for the last day of robodock in amsterdam this year. the highlight of the show being SRL, amongst other things. photos for now, more later. i'm having a hard time focusing on the screen.

Swedish Sunspot

random post of the day.

Flight of the Conchords - the humans are dead

Senator Chambers Sues God

Yep, good ol'Ernie. read the lawsuit here (pdf). I especially like item #14.
via boing boing.

BLOGGER PLAY launched

play.blogger.com

i got a notice from blogger today saying they had launched this "wonderful new service" that shows, in realtime, all the images uploaded in all the blogger blogs at that exact moment. check it out. kinda of like a zeitgeist-slideshow.

...i can't believe i just wrote that...but, check it out anyway.

1709: well, it' been more or less an eventful week. first week of classes (read: workshops) and meetings with a few professors. intro week is the same the world over, it seems. lot's of sitting around, waiting, pamphlets of papers, etc. i'm learning maya, a 3d animation program; flash/processing more animation programs. there's a electrical hardware workshop every monday (whoo-hoo!) and a bunch of theory classes. also today i start the max/msp/jitters workshop. probably the most versatile tool for the new media artist, the max programming suite acts as an blank slate between you and any hardware you can hook up to a computer. the possibilities are almost endless. there's also a free version of max called pure data. there's some history between the two, which i won't bore you with here, that you can read on the pure data website. i'll write more later. for now, check out my shared posts to the right, or a few pictures of my studio.

<3

oh, and it's raining again. and i finished 'glasshouse' and i'm onto mcluhan's 'understanding media'...

Only Mario Level to Play Itself

The Only Mario Level That Plays Itself - Watch more free videos

exceedingly fascinating and oft times subtly witty. this mario level plays itself entirely. via boing boing.

toetjes

a device for studying dynamic theory/chaos systems. DIY

morning goodie, part twee

many (duh) free ebooks from CCL to just plain open source.

an excellent flickr set of polar bear pictures to start your morning off with. courtesy of ucumari via boing boing.

MKOB

IF YOUR COMPUTER IS SLOW DON'T CLICK ON THE LINK: i am an unabashed oingo-boingo fan...most especially because danny elfman is just fricking wierd...

this made me smile :)

this made me smile...as did these

this kinda made me sad

sadness

i should have expected it, but...

FIRST DAY

1009: first day of real classes...just eating breakfast (coffee, cheese, bread, oj), reading feeds and what does it start doing outside? rain, what else? pat, you told me it was going to rain a lot. i believed you, but living through it is something else entirely. :) in the past week, 2 days of sun, 5 of rain. oh, well.

new find: www.playthisthing.com

843am: wow, it's pouring down rain. i mean really pouring. i'm taking a movie of it. i'll try to get that and all the other movies posted tonight.

557pm: back from an entire day spent at FMI. i had class with Robert Jan Smit today. he's the resident robotics/hardware expert. he was about 45 minutes late (lives near amsterdam) and he's a lot of fun. i spent the first 45 minutes watching a dutch soap opera (see above). robert showed us a bunch of his work...we (me and one other first year, more further on) spent the first half hour tearing apart some old equipment looking for a functioning motor to tape to the side of a fish tank that Robert had filled with water and put a mirror in. the idea being that robert would project images onto the mirror which was angled to reflect the images onto the ceiling. the water made the images ripple and distort a bit, but not enough, so Robert wanted to tape a motor to the side of the tank to make high-speed vibrations. :D it was a lot of fun and didn't work right in the end, so we abandoned it. later on i helped pascal clean out our shared space, just the two of us and it's huge. i need to get some pictures of the studio tomorrow to upload and share with everyone. still working on finding a linux flickr uploader, or i can do it the hard way. met one of the other first years today: cheung hong song (enoch) from hong kong. he's 36 and pretty cool. lives in the same house as i do, upstairs, but on the same wing. i'm going to go exploring later and try to find his room. also found out that there is only one other first year, bringing the grand total IME first years to THREE. annica (de managementassitent) told me today that soon (within the week) my name and school email/website links will be up on FMI website. which is cool and makes me feel a bit more legitimate :) yep, grandma, this place exists :)

oh, and it's raining again. :D i'm going to go take a shower and eat. bye all.

ALL DRESSED UP WITH NOWHERE TO GO...

i've finally converted. i'm now running and using exclusively ubuntu and open source software! (and listening to: oingo-boingo "i'm all dressed up with nowhere to go...walking with a dead man over my shoulder...") i love danny elfman...in a platonic, toga-wearing, logic-bending way. now i'm installing all the programs that i used in windows. most of them were open source anyway and originally built for linux. plus i'm reading my gi-normous UBUNTU LINUX BIBLE provided to me by the wonderful person at Mom, Inc. :D

SO FAR SO GOOD

well, i've got ubuntu installed, now i'm updating and installing software. kinda nervous, but definitely excited. more updates later.

OPEN SOURCE FTW!

yeah, so i'm going open source today. i'm removing windows from my laptop and installing ubuntu. wish me luck!

BIKESHED ETIQUETTE

i was leaving to run some errands (pay tuition and such) went to get my lovely, harmless, innocent bike and lo, what did i see? my bike and six or so others laying in a domino-heap, all still chained to their slots, mine at the bottom. now, at first, this didn't seem so bad, until i realised that the racks are thin slots for your wheel to go into + my wheels are thin aluminium composites = my front wheel bent and crumpled like a soda can = not happy alex = 3 hours of walking around town trying to find a good, inexpensive replacement. i found a really cheap second-hand wheel, but i wasn't happy with it. it was really beat up and old, so i kept looking. in the mean time, i got on the bus with my two wheels and rode up to Zernikecomplex. After paying tuition and talking to the International Student Office (ISO), i went to the bike shop on campus and found a beautiful italian Fir wheelset with a Shimano hub for 40euro. Ontop of that, the owner of the shop bought my two old wheels, the damaged one for scrap and the other to sell for 15euro and only charged me 10euro for a new tube/tape and assembly. All in all, i bought a new wheelset for 50euro. The new wheel lives in my room now, not the bike shed. And my fiets is no longer subjected to the tortures of the rack. i found a nice quiet spot in the back next to a steel roof-support pole. that was my adventure.

so far, so good.

my actual classes will start on monday. first up is an intro to the tech lab, then on later in the week we start theory and computer visualization. then nothing else until the following week. there really aren't regular classes, just workshops and open hours for the labs. i've been filling my time with trying to get some basic BEAM bots to work (no luck so far) and learning a new program called "Pure Data" which is an open source version of a popular media IDE called Max/MSP/Jitters. Yeah, it's actually called all three of those. Oh, that and i'm working on my Dutch. . .slowly. Well, i'm going to go shower now and get ready to pay the last bit of tuition. Bye, Bye, Money. oh, i also uploaded three photos of my worktables in my room.

cheers.

Mij Fiets

the conclusion of my first week of studies is nearly at hand. not much has happened in the way of school, though monday we had a meet/greet. most of the faculty for my program, IME, weren't there and i was the only first-year IME student there. There are two second-years, a Dutch guy, Pascal Petzinger and a lady from France, Berthe Salegos. Other than that it was the usual introductory thing: "state-your-name-and-the-nature-of-your-business", and, "do you have any ve-guh-tAH-bles to declare?" well, okay, maybe not that last part. i'm not very funny first thing in the morning after a night/early morning of international student parties. actually, that and collecting electronics gear is about all i've done this week. i did find a comic shop, the proprietor of which is one "Bob" who is dutch and speaks engels with an VERY british accent, but is like most comic-shop owners: very laid back and very cool.

i also found a great electronics-gear store for all my needs called "okaphone", and the dutch version of a thrift store. they're called "koopwinkels" ("sale-shop" i think, my head's a little fuzzy right now, but coffee's trying to change that). one in particular, "mama-mini" is definitely an almost exact copy of goodwill/sal-army we have in the states. all of that combines to make for a cheap supply of electronic guts and parts for BEAM bots, etc. all for now, tot ziens! ('tot-scenes' "see you later") as always, click on the photo to see more!

Seam Carving

found this through reader via hackzine.com. there's no such thing as image integrity despite the commonly held assumption that photos never lie, one which, i think, we are quickly letting go of. this is definitely one of the best examples of the subjectivity of perceptions that i've seen in a while.

TUCKED IN

FINALLY! access to the intertubes! This is just a quick re-surfacing to show you photos and let you know we're both doing well. it's 2 am here, we've both just spent the last three hours on the phone talking to family and i'm falling asleep typing. enjoy the photos and as always click on the yellow column in the top left picture to see a slide show. yes, those are my dorm hallways. - a.

oh, and i just finished reading "the atrocity archives" by charles stross, a totally random find at the simplon jongerenhotel (hostel) that we stayed at.

Groningen

HELLO WORLD: We're in Groningen, but having a hard time finding free wifi. Right now we're paying for time at the library, so updates will be irregular. More later, of course, and despite what M says I will survive without regular web access...for a bit. :} that's the martini tower above...drink jokes aside.

random note: if you like good fiction read william gibson's Spook Country; i just finished it.

Sorry it's been so long between posts, but finding the time to sit down and organize hundreds of photos and then think of something to say about them is well... hard. We're doing great, it's actually our last day in Amsterdam and because we're exhausted from all the walking around we're taking it easy in our favorite little cafe, Latei. They've got amazing, organic food/coffee and free toilets (a huge plus) and wifi. :D Click on the image above to see a slide show of some of the photos I've uploaded so far. More later, and love always. - A.

Landed...

We've landed in Amsterdam. Click above for some pics. I'll post more when we have a chance.

Thanksgiving ala Burroughs

random youtube find. enjoy.

NASHVILLE!

So I just got back (yesterday morning) from a quick trip down to Nashville for work. I took a painting from the gallery I work for and installed it in a home. 12 hour drive, 15 minutes of work, not much sleep. Luckily I have relatives there and got to spend the night and a bit of the next day with them. They took me to some of the hotspots in Nashville and here are the pics. Click on Athena's forehead to go see em.

TICKET-BE-BOUGHT!! No turning back now. Just yesterday I purchased my ticket for the Netherlands. My gf and I are going to go to Paris for a week and then back to Groningen to get me settled. 30 days and counting...

Spreek het Nederlands?

Yeah! In six weeks I'm off to The Netherlands, specifically The Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen, Groningen. There I will be a graduate student in the department of Interactive Media and Environments. :D I'm extremely excited and extremely nervous. I've a lot to do before then, but not as much as I had originally thought. Wish me luck.