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)

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.

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.

Visit Flong, Golan’s Blog.

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

Syzygryd is a soaring metal sculpture measuring 60 ft in diameter and 13 feet high, spiraling out to three touchscreen-operated controllers that anyone can use to dynamically compose music. The interface is intuitive and visual, allowing anyone from a 5 year old to a 105 year old to become a musician. The sculpture itself consists of three curving metal “arms” which spiral towards the center of the space into a tornado of increasingly larger and larger aluminum cubes. The cubes are lit from within by 1.5 kilowatts of LEDs, and the lights are sequenced to the music as it is created. The entire sculpture responds to how you play it!

Former Gray Area resident Ryan Alexander and visual programmer extraordinaire shares some of his stunning work on his newly launched site.

Check out his “slice of the internets” and learn why we’re fans.

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Fabrication on Syzygryd is going strong over at NIMBY. The past couple days have seen the central structure really become a thing. With a combination of ratchet straps, ropes, cables, turnbuckles, zipties, carabiners, quick links, a trained aerialist, and some skilled welding, the main support columns for the central structure are now together and standing on their own! It took about a dozen dedicated people working late into the night a couple times this week to make it happen. Oh, and lasers of course to make sure everything was perfect.

For those that couldn’t make it to the worknights, they could follow along at home as some of the work was livestreamed and of course people snapped pictures of the process. You can check out the full galleries here, here, and here as well as check out some of the highlights below.

Photo by Cubes (with Simon’s camera)

Photo by Dan Garcia

Photo by Ian Baker

CNN launched ‘Home and Away: The fallen in Afghanistan‘ with help from our friend’s at Stamen Design.

A note about the project from Eric Rodenbeck:

We’ve been working with our friends at CNN for almost a year on a project that is live as of today, a mapping of coalition casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan called Home and Away and live on CNN.com.

The project is a sobering look at the human cost of two wars in the Middle East, and as such we’ve worked within a restrained and sober palette of blacks, whites and greys. CNN has hooked the maps up to CNN iReport and we’re hearing stories of people using the map to post memories and share stories about their lost loved ones. It’s not been the easiest subject material to work on, but we’ve come away with a keen sense of the human face of these conflicts and hope you’ll take the time to look around a bit at the stories that these kinds of maps can tell.

Wallace J. Nichols, Sarah Kornfeld, Jake Dunagan, and Stuart Candy, are a hybrid art- science-futures collaboration. Their installation Plastic Century is an interactive installation created for the California Academy of Sciences that explores the relationship between plastic, people, and the environment over the 100 years since the birth of Jacques Cousteau. The installation will be at the California Academy of Sciences June 3rd and June 10th. The Plastic Century Team is currently in residency at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), in San Francisco.

Who were the suave guys who first made the first marketing plan for the plastic age to come? It’s easy to imagine an industrial-era confection sold to us by Mad Men — slick, cynical, ambitious, and poised for ruin.

But let’s look closer.

The following comes from a pioneering book, first published in 1941, envisioning the Future of Plastic.

“Plastic Man” [sic] will come into a world of colour and bright shining surfaces where childish hands find nothing to break, no sharp edges, or corners to cut or graze, no crevices to harbour dirt or germs … The walls of his nursery, his bath … all his toys, his cot, the moulded light perambulator in which he takes the air, the teething ring he bites, the unbreakable bottle he feeds from … all will be plastic.
–Plastics, Yarsley & Couzens 1941, p. 154

Seventy years on, and the child dreamed up by Yarsley and Couzens in 1941 has come true. Our babies have all of their needs met by plastic. This much is certain. But whether our lives are that much safer, cleaner and better is far less clear. Our sterile, perfectly rounded, and edgeless plastic lives are not safer. In fact the opposite is true:

- People are polluted with chemicals showing up in human sperm abnormality, premature puberty, increased risk of breast cancer due to endocrine-disrupting compounds (phthalates and parabens) in skin care and shampoo products.

- Children face increased risks of cancer, reproductive disorders and concerns about brain development using baby bottles and pacifiers due to BPA.

- Plastic pollution can be found in varying amounts in every ocean basin, every beach in the world, and inside one third of endangered leatherback sea turtles.

- Plastic production has been increasing on an exponential curve for over a century, and is now around 250 Million tonnes per year, and still rising. A negligible percentage has been recycled and all of it still exists on Earth.

Was this really the future we wanted for ourselves? Were we mad? Or perhaps we were simply caught up in the momentum of an industry so exciting and full of potential that it seemed like it could single-handedly reinvent society — which, indeed, it has. Yet Victor Emmanuel Yarsley and Edward Gordon Couzens were not Madison Avenue advertisers, but applied chemists from Britain; scientists who really believed in the beauty of the world they were helping to create through plastic: “a world in which nations are more and more independent of localized natural resources, a world in which man, like a magician, makes what he wants for almost every need, out of what is beneath him and around him: coal, water, and air.” (Plastics, Yarsley & Couzens, p. 158)

We now inhabit the world we supposedly wanted then. We donʼt have to wash the dishes. (Itʼs better we throw them away?) We have plastic straws. (Those paper ones leak?) We have plastic forks and knives. (Weʼll never cut ourselves again?) Everything we wanted turns out to have a hidden cost: our dreams are biting back. This plastic age is one of ironies at every turn, now revealed as a dangerous and unsustainable vision, a failed utopia. And, over the decades, the idea of making life safer, softer, and rounded with plastics has become a total Faustian nightmare.

In order to extract ourselves from the vortex of a plastic century, we must envision a post-plastic society. But this society will have “edges”. Edges represent responsibility, reality, opportunities and the mature understanding that we cannot live in a plastic bubble. Our addiction to plastic is directly related to our fear of being hurt through exposure to the “harsh realities of life”.

Fear of edges led to a plastic addiction that is choking the biosphere. Itʼs time to bring back edges.

Hereʼs a simple place to start:

1. Use and reuse glass, ceramic and metal containers. Refuse plastic bottles.

2. Teach your kids to use real forks and knives – theyʼll be fine! Add a full set of real flatware to your glove box, backpack or laptop case.

3. Are you really happier with a straw? Your new mantra: “Iʼll have a glass of tap water please. No ice, no straw, thank you.” Loving edges doesnʼt need to mean being edgy.

4. Donʼt order collagen or silicone implants. Your evolving natural edges are most beautiful.

For the future of our planet, for the chance to live in a post-plastic society, let’s reclaim our world and its edges from the Mad Men, scientists or not. Letʼs all meet in that world where we are not “Plastic People”, but human beings, alive, and unafraid.

Humans fill uncomfortable moments between thoughts, not with spaces of silence, but instead with principally three noticeable sounds: “and”, “uh”, and “um”. “AUU” explores the spaces between our thoughts, as well as the use of the three common words that mask these silences.

All sounds were designed using KYMA, and mapped to the Wacom Tablet for performance. Originally performed and recorded for 8 channels, this mix was balanced for stereo. Download the score at Deece