Gray Area’s epic board member and extraordinary digital artist, Aaron Koblin launches The new Arcade Fire ‘music video’ as an HTML5 project. http://thewildernessdowntown.com/ (prepare to close all other programs and browser windows and sit back and enjoy!!!)
The Wilderness Downtown Chrome Experiment Overview http://www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire/
Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering… this Chrome Experiment has them all. “The Wilderness Downtown” is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used To Wait” and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.
Our friends at the MiT senseable City Lab have have a new project premiering at the Venice Biennale. They have developed a new prototype of an amazing robot that could save our ocean!
By autonomously navigating the water’s surface, Seaswarm proposes a new system for ocean-skimming and oil removal. Seaswarm uses a photovoltaic powered conveyor belt made of a thin nanowire mesh to propel itself and collect oil. The nanomaterial, patented at MIT, can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil. The flexible conveyor belt softly rolls over the ocean’s surface, absorbing oil while deflecting water because of its hydrophobic properties.
Seaswarm is intended to work as a fleet, or “swarm” of vehicles, which communicate their location through GPS and WiFi in order to create an organized system for collection that can work continuously without human support. Because they are smaller than commercial skimmers attached to large fishing vessels, they are able to navigate hard to reach places like estuaries and coast lines. Seaswarm works by detecting the edge of a spill and moving inward until it has removed the oil from a single site before joining other vehicles that are still cleaning. Oil is “digested” locally so that Seaswarm does not need to make repeated trips back to shore, which would dramatically slow collection time.
The fleet uses cutting edge nanotechnology to solve current environmental problems while envisioning long-term solutions for the future. With a new design strategy we can revive and preserve the quality of our oceans.
The Copenhagen Wheel which is featured in our current exhibit, SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures has won the US James Dyson Award. The project will now go on to compete for the global prize.
MIT graduate Christine Outram was the force behind the Copenhagen Hybrid bike wheel. She is speaking at GAFFTA tonight for the SENSEable Cities Speaker Series
If you can’t make it tonight- Check out the video of Peter Hirshberg’s interview with Christine. They discuss what inspired the project and her experience in sharing the project with the mayors of the world.
An Event Apart and Mix Online are hosting an small size app challenge contest, promoting the use of Apps that utilize only ten kilobytes or less of overall deployment file size.
Contestants can use jQuery, Prototype or Typekit libraries without it counting to their overall file size. The overall prize pool is appropriately valued at $10K, and will be distributed to one grand prizer winner, three runners up and nine honorable mentions.
The Judges include Jeffrey Zeldman, Jeremy Keith, Nicole Sullivan, Eric Meyer and Whitney Hess.
The competition ends on the 25th of August, 2010… so get going or check out some of the great projects already submitted.
San Francisco event producer Mark “Spoonman” Petrakis (@spoon2u) wrote on his pARTy/SCIENCE blog about his visit to Gray Area for the opening…
My second visit to GAFFTA was on June 11th for the opening night of a festival co-produced by GAFFTA and KQED called “City Centered” – a festival of “Locative Media and Urban Community.” … Friday night’s gallery reception was for a show called “SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures.” It featured a range of projects generated since 2003 by MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory. These projects looked at how data could be extracted from various sources and used to interpret and contextualize patterns of human and technology-mediated behavior. It’s high-end research-based creative work – abstract and “clean” but with some clever surprises as well. This type of work seems very much in line with the projects being done by GAFFTA’s local team of artist/developers. The SENSEable Cities show remains up until August 11, so GO check it out.
That same night I reconnected with new media vet and GAFFTA board member Peter Hirshberg, who played a leading role in the birthing of the enterprise. He introduced me to GAFFTA’s Executive Director, Josette Melchor. As the conversations continued, I ended up being among the last to leave that night. Here is a link to a presentation the two of them did for TEDX Silicon Valley this past spring.
SATURDAY day consisted of a “free” locative media symposium held at KQED with panels that addressed both its political and social applications. Unfortunately, I could not attend. I will try to locate a report somewhere.
SUNDAY was the Art Walk day from 10am-4pm. Ten curated projects had been funded and were mostly positioned around the Taylor and Market intersection. As I had been up till dawn that morning, getting my “fuzzy” self into the city by mid-day was an indication of my determination not to miss what was happening.
Among the projects I saw..
The Tenderloin Tech Lab is a busy neighborhood technology training center, which showed some interesting neighborhood-related location projects; one that mapped existing Wi-Fi networks and another that tracked nearby decibel levels. There was also a web project that captured sound narratives of Tenderloin residents and lab users.
Stefano Corazza’s virtual reality installation over at the legendary Luggage Store Gallery, put you in the POV of a seagull requiring you to use your wide-spread arms to fly over San Francisco.
Some faculty members from Georgia Tech had come to demo “Urban Remix” – a free iPhone app which allows you to easily record sounds and take photos and upload them to a central server which an on-site sound designer then downloaded and remixed live. As a live event producer always looking for new ways to engage audiences, this is the kind of development track that I find especially interesting.
Several blocks away on O’Farrell between Van Ness and Polk, radio producer Krissy Clark’s “Block of Time” had you standing in front of marked doorways as you called a cell phone number and listened to a story specific to that historical spot.
Matthew Roberts’ “Simple Steps” sent folks walking the neighborhood with a simple digital camera attached to their arm and automatically capturing images of the rarely noticed space over their heads.
I had several extended conversations with various attendees and artists, and left not only appreciative of the considerable effort that went into presenting the festival, but also for the existence of this new Bay Area arts organization that had the vision to even conceive it!
Art Practical, the Bay Area’s preeminent online magazine devoted to the visual arts, had a fantastic review of SENSEable City Lab’s SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures
The Copenhagen Wheel via Wired (http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/12/mits-senseable-city-lab-brings-formula-one-technology-to-bicycles/)
SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures
SENSEable City Lab
Jun 11 – Aug 11
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
Review by Laura Cassidy Rogers
“SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures,” currently on view at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, includes fifteen visualization projects by researchers at MIT that translate real time data from cities around the world into vibrant representations of density, volume, movement, and exchange. These visualizations are intriguing both as artistic creations and political devices. They demonstrate in practical as well as imaginative ways that matter and energy circulate and change form, and showcase the power of visual culture in helping policy-makers manage the multiple aspects of our networked lives.
Information abounds on every wall of the expansive 4,600-square-foot Gray Area gallery. A vinyl linear motif in shades of blue streams between projections of light and sound, like the lines of an avant-garde musical composition. This is a clever twist on exhibition wall labels that sets a cohesive, interconnected tone to the works on display.
MIT researchers at the SENSEable City Laboratory have seamlessly equipped smart phones, buildings, furniture, cars, and bikes to collect user data in user-friendly ways. Many of MIT’s visualizations take the aggregated data and map patterns of public life, as in currentCity (2009), New York Talk Exchange (2008), and Real Time Rome (2006). The resulting depictions contain bold colors that express the intensity and dispersion of collective action across the plane of each respective city. Though much livelier than pie charts and bar graphs, they remain flat, reminiscent of abstract paintings. While beautiful, the awesome displays of color tend to distract from and obscure the underlying data analysis and data-collecting gadgets…
What: Ocean Revolution Benefit
Where: Gray Area Foundation for the Arts
55 Taylor St. San Francisco, CA 94102
When: Thursday, July 29th, 6:30-9:30PM
How: Tax Deductible Donations are requested $20-$10,000 http://bit.ly/TORF2010
6:30 – Drinks, Registration
7:00 – Presentations begin with never before seen footage taken by J (and team) from The Gulf
7:15 – J presents on his travels & new programs created by Ocean Revolution
While the cap is now in place, and the flow may be under control, the work for the ocean remains.
Earlier this month Dr. Wallace “J” Nichols traveled to the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe to understand first-hand the horrific conditions facing sea turtles during and after the devastation that recently occurred in the gulf. As part of a response team focused on sea turtle rescue and rehab efforts, J is now learning what can and should be done to help save the turtles. In one month he is returning from his trip and he needs our help.
To celebrate J’s efforts and raise money for future research trips we invite you to join us at the Ocean Revolution Benefit on Thursday, July 29th here at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. In addition to supporting J’s remarkable work in the Gulf, you’ll be learning about positive changes we can make in the gulf with your help.
Presentations begin with never before seen footage taken by J (and team) from The Gulf. This will be followed by J presenting on what he saw, talking about new programs created by Ocean Revolution, and describing how Ocean Revolution will address oil, toxins, and plastics in the Gulf.
All are welcome to attend the event but we’re asking for a donation (anywhere from $20.00 -$1,000 payable at the door of the event). To attend the event, please R.S.V.P. Sarah at whatsarahsees@gmail.com; make sure the subject line reads ‘I support the Ocean Revolution.’ In addition to hearing J speak at the event, you can earn more about J’s efforts check his blog at http://wallacejnichols.org/ or follow him on twitter @wallacejnichols.
Can’t attend the benefit but still want to contribute to the cause? Online tax-deductible contributions are being accepted here via the Ocean Foundation (http://bit.ly/TORF2010)
Posted by Aaron Koblin and Valdean Klump, Google Creative Lab
Last year Google launched Chrome Experiments, a website showcasing innovative web experiments built with open standards like JavaScript and HTML5. Today Google has announced that the site now points to 100 experiments — each one made, hosted, and submitted by programmers from around the world.
Since the site launched just 18 months ago, browsers have been improving at a rapid pace, and the latest experiments have taken advantage of that. A big step forward has been the widespread adoption and support of HTML5, which is becoming standard in all modern browsers. New functionality like the video and canvas tags have made for some inspiring work. It’s hard to pick our favorites, but a few innovative submissions include Destructive Video, SketchPad, and Harmony.
If you haven’t checked out Chrome Experiments recently, do take some time to explore the work of these talented artists/programmers in Google Chrome or any modern browser.
Interactive designer and technologist Golan Levin announces his series of free code and tools created in openFrameworks and Processing, for unwarping the panoramic videos produced by the popular Sony Bloggie solid-state camera.
The inexpensive Bloggie ($160-190), in many ways similar to the Flip, is a perfectly decent little pocket camera with one exceptionally notable feature: it allows for the creation of 360-degree panoramic digital video, at relatively high resolution, at a consumer price-point. Here’s an example:
Obviously, this “donut vision” (annular) video needs to be transformed into something more useful, such as a long panoramic strip — a process variously called unwarping, dewarping, inverse warping, remapping, reprojection, rectilinearization, or simply distortion correction. Although Sony released unwarping software for Microsoft Windows, they — inexplicably — didn’t release Bloggie unwarping software for Mac OSX. Well, that’s problematic. Perhaps because panoramic imaging is considered a “niche” market, commercial tools for panoramic unwarping can be quite pricey. And although Christophe Maillot has lately released ThreeSixZero, a free OSX tool for viewing Bloggie panoramas, his project is not open-source and doesn’t export converted panoramic video! That’s the motivation for the releases presented here. Fortunately, the mathematics for polar-to-cartesian geometry conversion are relatively straightforward. Behold, a 360-degree panoramic video, remapped to a rectilinear perspective with our BloggieUnwarper software:
Projects and Source Code
Below are links to BloggieUnwarper, my open-source code projects for unwarping the panoramic videos produced by the Sony Bloggie. These projects are created in openFrameworks (a C++ library for creative coding) and Processing (a Java-based programming environment for people who want to create images, animations, and interactions). Both OpenFrameworks and Processing are free, open-source, cross-platform toolkits, optimized for visual computing, which take most of the headache out of creating graphically-oriented software. Both programming environments work across multiple operating systems (Mac, Windows, and Linux), and multiple compilers (e.g., openFrameworks compiles in XCode, Visual Studio, Code::Blocks, and more). If you’re interested in interactive art or computational design, these environments are a great way to start making projects fast.
Here’s a screenshot of the openFrameworks BloggieUnwarper software, showing the original (annular) video at upper left; the reprojected panoramic strip at the bottom; and (in the upper right) a view of the panorama from within a texture-mapped 3D cylinder:
Complete source code can be found here:
* BloggieStillUnwarp.zip (for Processing; 1.3Mb download) — This is a single-page Processing sketch which performs inverse warping on a single panoramic still image stored in the sketch’s data folder. The program supports both nearest-neighbor and bicubic interpolation, and can save out the unwarped panorama to disk. To get started, download the Processing environment here; unzip this project into your “Sketchbook” folder (in “Documents”); open the sketch in the Processing development environment, and press play.
* BloggieVideoUnwarp.zip (for Processing; 20.2Mb download) – This is a single-page Processing sketch which unwarps a Quicktime video stored in the sketch’s data folder, and exports an unwarped version of the video — either as a new Quicktime movie, or as a folder full of still images. Parameters for the unwarping (such as the optic center) are loaded from a settings file. The audio from the original file is (regrettably) not maintained; see my notes below about audio. (Please note that the bulk of this download is a 20Mb demonstration video.)
* BloggieUnwarpOF.zip (for OSX & openFrameworks, 52.7Mb download) — This is a complete openFrameworks project for viewing, projecting, dewarping, and exporting panoramic videos shot with a catadioptric reflector like the Sony Bloggie’s. This project is built for Mac OSX 10.6.3, using XCode, and openFrameworks v.0.061, which is available here; be sure to download the FAT version. The project makes use of the ofxOpenCv and ofxXmlSettings addons which are included in the download. To avoid compilation errors, install the project at the same hierarchical directory level as the various “example” apps which come with the FAT download. There is some additional information about getting OF set up on Snow Leopard here. This project is available two ways:
o as a project on Github or
o download BloggieUnwarp for OSX here (52.7MB) as a zip file.
NODE10 – “Forum For Digital Arts” will take place between the 15th and 20th of November with an extensive festival program consisting of exhibitions, symposium and workshops at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.
The focus of this years NODE10 is the investigation of cultural consequences of a post-industrialised, technological society.
The exhibition ‘abstrakt Abstrakt’ thus deepens the discourse surrounding technology and society. Participants look into the subjects through workshops and talks combined with subsequent symposiums and live performances.
The purpose of the inter-media forum is to facilitate the cross-border exchange between interactive media, digital art and generative design. The focus of this year’s event will be the investigation of cultural consequences of a post-industrial technological society. The exhibition “abstract abstract – the systematized world” will serve, within this context, to deepen the discourse on technology and society.
The selected works of art exhibited under the heading ‘abstract Abstract’ aim to decipher the systems of abstractions enmeshed in our Lebenswelt, such as, for instance, the use of digital image creation within the full creative scope of software technology.
In lectures followed by symposia, international artists, cultural workers and technologists will grapple with current and fundamental tensions between art, technology and society – and with the related issues. The vvvv group provides a comprehensive program of professional and elementary level workshops for a wide range of users. In the workshops, specific hardware and software solutions, as well as new ideas and concepts for media installations, will be presented and discussed.
The declared intention of NODE e.V. i.G. is to foster digital culture in art, society, science and research. The association includes members of the vvvv developer and user community. VVVV is a software project that employs graphical programming language to media installations as serves the purposes of a variety of designers, artists and agencies. The vvvv group is responsible for the vvvv development.
Call for Entries
Deadline: 31.08.2010
We want to know what you are working on. So don’t hesitate to submit your works, which could be from screen to wall to everything. If your project fits in form and content we might place it around the forum venues, but NOT necessarily in the exhibition. So You are cordially invited to participate in and contribute to the NODE Forum for Digital Arts.
Please send us your proposal including the following information:
- detailed contact information
- title of your work
- context of creation (personal project, schoolwork, professional)
- description of your work
- duration, resolution, sizes, tech rider
- screenshots, photographs
pdf only: node@vvvv.org (subject: submission)
all other documents:
NODE – Forum for Digital Arts
Niddastrasse 84hh
60329 Frankfurt
Germany
Curators of the exhibition: Eno Henze, Marius Watz
Curation of the workshops: Joerg Diessl (vvvv group)
Organizer: NODE e.V. in cooperation with the Frankfurter Kunstverein & the vvvv group.
Further information / Contact: NODE e.V. (in foundation); node@vvvv.org node.vvvv.org
Credits:
Creative Director: Andreas Koller
Director (Trailer): Michael Seiser
Animation (Trailer): Johannes Timpernagel, Michael Seiser, Julien Simshäuser
Sound Design (Trailer): audionerve.de / Jochen Mader
Organization Committee David Brüll, Ingolf Heinsch, Thomas Hitthaler
