"logo_wiki identifies military, corporate, and governmental editors of Wikipedia ('the Free Encyclopedia'). It does this by tracing back the editor's IP address. logo_wiki shows recently edited 'diffs' pages (with changes highlighted) and shows who the shadowy editor is. logo_wiki does this by replacing the Wikipedia logo with the editor's logo. Military, corporate and governmental users are responsible for many thousands of unacknowledged alterations to Wikipedia pages. logo_wiki reveals this process occurring in real time."
Douglas Bagnall writes to let us know that he's made his Te Tuhi Video Game system software open source under the GPL (General Public) license. We blogged about the show a few months ago here at Window:Scene, where visitors to Te Tuhi could draw pictures that were analysed by the software and converted to videogames via a set of rules. Opening the code to the community allows these rules to be changed and shifted, but you'll need some technical savvy. With his usual deadpan humour, Bagnall goes straight from step 4, "Try ./tetuhi path/to/some/image.jpg. If everything is working, a window should pop up with a game in it.", to step 5, "But it probably isn't working, so at this point you should subscribe to the mailing list and ask there."
Christchurch will play host to a spectrum of digital artists, musicians, programmers, and designers this weekend for Tending Networks, the yearly symposium for the Aotearoa Digital Arts network. Highlights include a keynote and new work presented by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, the Seoul-based masters of flash who first came to light with their cheeky, minimal work "Artist’s Statement No. 45,730,944: The Perfect Artistic Web Site" shown above.
Stella Brennan will be discussing her most recent work, "South Pacific", a poetic micro-narrative overlaid over satellite imagery which I've previously reviewed.
Eddie Clemens, now based in Christchurch on residency, will be talking about his Pinball Lanterns installation in the Auckland Central Library space. Douglas Bagnall will show us how to "take the tedious work of experimentation, abstraction and learning out of the process of making art" via his myriad machine creations, which range from A Film Making Robot to Te-Tuhi Videogame machine and Cloud Classifier. Finally, cyber-performance group Avatar Body Collision will most likely focus on UpStage, working between countries, and the nuances of the virtual theatre.
As well as recycling code as a way to teach programming, Steph Thirion recently finished Cascade on Wheels, a data vis project attempting to translate abstract traffic stats into a more meaningful, compelling interactive. Beautifully realised in Processing, Cascade extrudes upwards, creating something akin to a spatial bar graph over Madrid - the higher the wall, the more traffic on that street. Responsive and navigable, the user is able to pan, zoom, and explore this new environment of data easily. The problem is, Cascade stops there, failing to make any statement about how, for instance, the 100,000 vehicles per day on El Prado street impacts residents, the environment, and the urban fabric.
Thirion (and the rest of the team) seemed to realise this, and came up with a second vis based on the same data, Traffix Mixer. A sound toy, where "emotion was given prominence over direct readability", Mixer does provide a nice complement to the more strictly infographic Cascade. But unfortunately, the innovative, slick interface compromises the power of the work. " Ah, i forgot how pleasant it sounds... nice to hear it again.", is one comment on the video blog. The sound of a speeding car coming up behind you - as any pedestrian or cyclist can attest- is always unnerving and ominous. Mixers sound, while aggressive, is too abstracted from its subject matter, sounding more like a track from a laptop/glitch artist.
Traffic expands like a virus. The amount of vehicles will always expand to the amount of roadway available. Its effects are also viral and ever expanding. In a landmark study in 1981, Dr. Donald Appleyard demonstrated a direct correlation between the number of friends people have on a street, and the amount of cars travelling on a given street. Even more interestingly, when asked to define their "home area", residents on Appleyard's "Low Traffic" road circled the whole street: their house, the front yards, the footpaths, and even their friends houses. With growing traffic comes growing impact, and a growing retreat. Children on the street stop playing. Adults on the footpath stop conversations. Hanging out in front yards ceases, decks stop being used, and finally in extreme situations, the front room of the house is unused, permeated with traffic noise, horns, and pollution. Traffic Mixer and Cascade on Wheels, while stunningly executed, fail to convey the impact of their subject - either quantitatively or qualitatively.
"Recognize this code?", the designer next to me flipped open a website he was working on and scrolled through a dozen lines of Flash coding. The minimal commenting, the structure a true coder would launch into a rant about. Yeah it was mine. But the site I hadn't seen before. "I've used your code for two more sites since you gave it to me". For this graphic designer, reusing a generic function to scroll through images was easy. Keep the structure the same, alter the type and colourings, and export. It just worked.
Strangely, in this information age, well commented, reusable code is a tangible asset - saving hundreds of real hours. Sites like DZone Snippets have 10,000 users tagging and submitting snippets. Prototype, for Flash developers, has been running for 7+ years now.
More interestingly, a recent workshop on the Processing language in Barcelona showed another trait of good code. Participants had 6 hours to do a "mod" (modification) of the classic arcade game, Breakout. The catch? No one had ever coded before.
Steph Thirion, who conducted the workshop had the "objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it." The result? A selection of totally compelling, experimental 'sketches' - as they're called in Processing - which abstract the videogame, reinterpreting it in dozens of ways. Glitchy line drawings fill the screen, green blocks flicker on and off like some pixelated Barnett Newman work, cute Tokyo inspired blocks bounce back and forth playfully. With no restraints to make something functional, and no previous experience with code, the results are inspired.
From pixels to paper, the worldwide FreeCycle network adds a twist to the notion of recycling, providing a network for people to post objects to give away, or things they'd like to have, all for free - it's "all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills." The Auckland network currently has 1782 members, with around 10 posts per day, ranging from desk lamps to paint, electric tooth brushes, and Dungeons/Dragons sourcebooks. For those working with technology hardware or music, items like older computers, laptop hard drives, stereo parts, and printers surface regularly.
While United Visual Artists produce ambitious, mammoth installations for artists like the Chemical Brothers (shown above), you can respond to music and sound with some simple Flash code.
With the advent of version 9 of the software, Adobe has introduced a spectrograph tool, capable of reading and responding to the various EQ changes in a song. This enables rich feedback - scripts for example could show deep purple for base heavy techno, and a light pink line for a high-pitched opera sonata. Programmers have responded with an array of experiments, sound toys, and visualisers like the ones from this competition on The Flash Blog.
The only problem is that live sound, either from a microphone or the input on a computer, doesn't have this ability. Programmers are restricted to responding to basic volume changes, which although simple, can still be compelling. From a dozen lines of code....
// construct mic object import flash.events.ActivityEvent; import flash.events.StatusEvent; import flash.media.Microphone; var mic:Microphone = Microphone.getMicrophone();
Opening on Friday at Window Online and On Site, thought we'd give you a sneak preview of "Interpulsator", a screensaver-based work by Annie Bradley. Coming to life when the system becomes idle, the piece embraces some of the conventions of the medium, while ignoring others - installing itself as traditional software but then 'failing' to save, allowing parts of the screen to burn in because the pixels are never refreshed. Annie provides additional tangents on her show page, ranging from the first digital watch to time-keeping stars (Pulsars) and hardware diagrams of LEDs. Available for PC or Macintosh systems.
On Tuesday, the One Laptop per Child project started production at a factory in China, mass-producing an initial run of 250,000 models that will go out to children in nations like Nigeria, Thailand and Peru, where they've already been trialled. The bright green casing looks like a rugged alien. The stylized interface is friendly and playful. It's designed for the ground-up for kids. But the team behind it are dead serious.
The OLPC project harnesses and coordinates a large network of volunteer programmers, who refine aspects like security applications which protect against large-scale attacks, compiler optimisation to speed up code-building, remote display for projectors and memory usage minimising.
Because a hard-drive is one of the top items to break on traditional laptops, the XO model features a tiny flash-drive instead. For programmers, this means a return to 80's era coding - building highly functional software in as few lines of script as possible, ditching huge 'code libraries' with big filesize footprints for tiny utilities and more custom work.
In Abuja, Nigeria, the nearest powerpoint could be a long walk away. So it makes sense that the OLPC are pedantic about electricity usage. "For us, every joule matters, and a simplistic 'oh, we mostly have most of a chip turned off, maybe' isn't good enough." The default display mode uses 1 watt of power - 1/7th of the average laptop display. Run out of power? Charge it up again with a hand crank on the side.
In the last few months, the team have put the XO through it's paces: developing hour-long 'smoke tests', tracking down obscure bugs in the kernel, localising keyboards for West Africa and Nepal, optimising rendering, and refining to stabilised builds. The prototype hardware has been tested to destruction in the factory, as well as the acid test - children on playgrounds in Peru, jungle field trips in Thailand, and the dust of Maharashtra, India.
Interactive musical score, part of the Reflexive Architecture series. Notes can be changed by touching them, and are triggered as the avatar walks around the ring of notation.
Eva and Franco Mattes - whose other actions have included spreading a virus and making up artists - here stage a more traditional homage, recreating Joseph Beuys "7000 Oaks" project.
Waco Vaco enjoys sitting in an interactive igloo structure - part of the Reflexive Architecture series. Walking towards the shelter increases the scale of it, until it's large enough for two avatars to fit comfortably in.
Waco Vaco tunnels through Sabine Stonebender's installation at Zero Point. Many artists add a Cartesian dynamic to their pieces by offering elevators, seats, or vehicles to travel through their worlds.
Waco Vaco and Window Oh drifting through Edo Autopoiesis "Resonating with Wind" sound installation. Based on the highly localised currents in SL, each windmill lifts up a red mallet, before dropping it onto the bell at the base, causing a continuously unique sound composition.
The team who run UpStage, which we've blogged about here in the past, are conducting a walkthrough tonight at 9pm New Zealand time. Just click here at the appropriate time to view the performance and be stepped through some of the features of the virtual performance software. If you'd like to be more involved as a participant, just e-mail them for a guest login.
Bill Brown says "Has anyone noticed that Andale Mono (8pt) in the Flex Builder 2 Beta is not as small as it is in the Dreamweaver or Flash 8 IDEs? Does anyone know why or how to fix it? I need my code density!"
For a profession usually not associated with the visual, coders treat their editing typefaces seriously. Legibility and monospaced fonts are highly prized, but in the end personal choice and background play a part: "oldskool" Courier users, mac fans swearing by Andale Mono, and less pedantic users trying new faces like Microsoft's Consolas. Forums posts get heated, "Everytime I see Courier as a source editing font I get skin rash".
Syntax highlighting, a feature used to colour different types of commands to make skimming code easier, has taken on a more personal touch. TextMates theme page, where users can submit their own colouring schemes, lists dozens of choices. From "Dawn", to "Overcast", "Spectacular" to "GlitterBomb". "Argonaut" by David Lee even comes complete with mantra: "No code poet should be without their paper nautilus".
Shown are screens from CSS/PHP programmer Mike Harding, with more screens from Luke Duncalfe next week. Like to share your setup? Email screenshots to luke dot munn at gmail dot com.
Update: As promised, here's a screen from programmer Luke Duncalfe, showing a suitably busy collection of windows, from Ruby on Rails in the foreground to some XML rendered terminal style - white text on black background - and Javascript being debugged in the background (as with most images on window.org.nz, click for larger version).
In 1896, William Morris, founder of the arts and crafts movement, drew his last design, a subtle wallpaper pattern called Compton. Over 100 years later, a machine called Hektor spraypaints it on the wall of a gallery in Amsterdam. Like the original, the execution isn't perfect - the automated spraycan wobbles on it's strings and the paint bleeds, introducing an element of chance and performance that the software that created it has tried to negate.
Engineered by Uli Franke, the mechanism plays back a drawing from Adobe Illustrator using Jürg Lehni's Scriptographer plugin. Scriptographer attempts to break the stranglehold of closed, limited tools like Adobe's by creating both a software library and website that allow scripts to be posted, improved, and shared. What's more interesting is that the tools shift the creation paradigm. Instead of drawing, erasing, and redrawing, the artist now tweaks variables like "rotate", and "randomness". They also allow aesthetics which can't be achieved manually: fractal letters condense infinitely small, organic trees grow upward, letters extrude based on colour values.
Giving up control, and using words to control aesthetics is at the heart of Google Synth, created by Paul Andrew at art.gen.nz. "Based on an algorithm by Micheal Ashikmin in his paper Synthesizing Natural Textures it attempts to recreate the "target" image using the textures present in the "input" image. Some aspects can be controlled by the user, but it mostly does its own thing." Users click Random while the software cycles through a list of words, then click Generate when they're reached the word they want. Want to see what "inarticulate + merriment" looks like?
In in the early seventies, experimental German band Kraftwerk became known for building their own synthesisers. Robert Moog developed his transistorised modular version from 1964 onwards. And while not matching the innovation of these pioneers, I just built a simple Moog type synth in 5 minutes. And I'm not really a programmer.
And that, it seems, is the point. Increasingly, artists, musicians, and those working in the space between media and technology want something that provides some 'under the hood' control without the learning curve. Enter the rise of the graphical programming language - a visual approach that treats media as a series of connections - a slightly geekier version of the classic path from guitar to distortion pedal to amplifier.
Max/MSP, an early prototype for this concept, has been used for over 15 years, by artists, educators, and musicians like Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead and Richard D James (Aphex Twin). Still a popular and well supported tool, it's become commercialised, with the original coder Miller Puckette, going on to develop a very similar, and open source alternative, Pure Data.
But while creating your own sound is easy, the buzz wears off quickly when you realise what you're listening to - a very artifical sounding sine tone which is less interesting that a telephone ring. Pure Data and Max become interesting when their connections extend outside themselves, to samplers, audio triggers or further software. How about running an installation triggered by a footstep, with a constantly unique soundtrack which was played by a string section? Web cam input hooked into PD, which randomly selects part of a score and outputs to orchestral VST (virtual studio technology) plugins.
vvvv follows the same approach, substituting frames, RGB channels, and rendering commands for audio signals. While it's Windows only, the software has quickly produced some fascinating pieces. Seelenlose Automaten outputs a series of MIDI commands to both audio and video at the same time. For example, one note outputs a hi-hat sound to audio, and a 'rotate everything left' to the visual 3d model. The result is a perfectly synced generative composition.
