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

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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

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