erratic semaphore

Make Fewer Decisions, Write Less Code

2012-01-17T21:08:00.004-05:00

I have two suggestions for aspiring C++ programmers:

Make fewer decisions.
Write less code.

These might seem counterintuitive at first, so let me explain.

Let's say you have a setter method for an object.

class MyObject {
public:
 void setSize(int);
private:
 int size;
}

When you implement that method, how do you name the argument? Here is one way:

void MyObject::setSize(int size) {
 this->size = size;
}

You may have also seen "int _size" or "int inSize", or maybe MyObject has a variable "mSize" instead, or any number of other combinations. I personally do it the above way because I have a thorough understanding of variable scope, and this happens to minimizes the number of unique symbols.

The important thing isn't which approach you pick, it's that you consistently use that solution. Each time you see a setter method, you should be able to write out those two lines without thinking twice. In other words, when you come across a mundane problem you should always have the same solution. You shouldn't even have to make a decision: every time there is more than one way to do something, pick the way that works most of the time, and always use it.

As another example, perhaps you have a collection of things you want to loop through. Here is the first thing I write:

for(int i = 0; i < n; i++)

Code formatting is a kind of recurring decision. What is the smallest set of rules you can formulate for the way you format code? These are two for the above line:

Binary operators are surrounded by spaces.
Semicolons are followed by spaces.

By minimizing the number of rules you have to follow, and having them cover as many situations as possible, you can reduce the amount of decisions you have to make. Maybe the above rules can be further simplified by removing the word "binary"?

Similarly important are your design pattern choices, all the way down to variable and enumeration idioms:

Always use "i" as your index variable.
Always use "n" as your terminating condition.
Always use the < when enumerating a range.

After writing the above line, you can define "n" on the line above. You'll probably need it again later. And sometimes you can even use something like boost to write the whole thing with a single idiom.

If you're ever asking yourself how your code should be formatted or whether to use < or <= for a loop condition, you're probably wasting time that could be better spent on high level decisions. When I'm using Xcode I use its terrible auto-indent feature to make sure my code is consistent, even though I aesthetically disagree with some of its decisions — it's the fastest way of normalizing my code.

Besides making fewer decisions (and, in the process, writing more consistent code), it's important to write less. Writing less means finding creative ways to use fewer symbols, fewer objects, fewer control statements, fewer loops. Writing less should never make things more complicated. Consider the two functions below:

bool both(bool a, bool b) {
 if(a) {
  if(b) {
   return true;
  }
  if(!b) {
   return false;
  }
 }
}
bool both(bool a, bool b) {
 return a && b;
}

It's an extreme example, but the point is: when you write less code, there are fewer opportunities to make mistakes (there is actually a mistake in the first one, can you see it?). In the situation above, you can simplify your code with truth table analysis. To sum the numbers from 1 to n you can (arguably) simplify your code with recursion, or the more efficient analytic version:

int sum(int n) {
 int sum = 0;
 for(int i = 1; i <= n; i++) {
  sum += i;
 }
 return sum;
}
int sum(int n) {
 if(n > 0) {
  return 1 + sum(n - 1);
 } else {
  return 0; 
 }
}
int sum(int n) {
 return (n * (n + 1)) / 2;
}

For each of those techniques, how many ways could they be wrong? Which one is the simplest?

Median Filtering in OpenCV

2011-03-17T11:10:00.006-04:00

I was just browsing through the OpenCV source to learn more about how it implements smoothing. I noticed a few interesting things that say something more general about how OpenCV2 is structured.

In OpenCV1 there is cvSmooth(), which lets you pass a parameter like CV_GAUSSIAN or CV_MEDIAN to specify what kind of smoothing you want. In OpenCV2, this function coexists with CV2-style functions like cv::medianBlur() and cv::GaussianBlur() (note that Gaussian is capitalized because it is a proper name). If you scroll to the very bottom of smooth.cpp, you'll find cvSmooth(), where it becomes evident that the newer cv::medianBlur and cv::GaussianBlur() are the implementations, while cvSmooth() is a wrapper that simply calls them.

Reading the documentation, I was surprised to find that many of the blurring functions support in-place processing. Due to the way median filtering works, in-place operation is a non-trivial property. Digging into cv::medianBlur(), you'll find:

void medianBlur(const Mat& src0, Mat& dst, int ksize) {
...
 dst.create( src0.size(), src0.type() );
...
 cv::copyMakeBorder( src0, src, 0, 0,
  ksize/2, ksize/2, BORDER_REPLICATE );
...
}

First, it calls Mat::create() on the dst Mat (in CV1, this would be an IplImage*). Mat::create() ensures that dst is the right size and type. If you pass it an unallocated Mat then this step allocates it for you, which makes it easy to use but less efficient. Then it does a copyMakeBorder(), which makes it safe to run the median filter on the edges of the image. So even if you give medianBlur() an allocated dst Mat, it's still going to be allocating a big working image for doing the blur! Finally, there's this mess of an if statement:

double img_size_mp = (double)(size.width*size.height)/(1 << 20);
if( ksize <=
  3 + (img_size_mp < 1 ? 12 : img_size_mp < 4 ? 6 : 2)*
  (MEDIAN_HAVE_SIMD && checkHardwareSupport(CV_CPU_SSE2) ? 1 : 3)) {
 medianBlur_8u_Om( src, dst, ksize );
} else {
 medianBlur_8u_O1( src, dst, ksize );
}

This is actually a really pleasant surprise. There are two things that might happen here: medianBlur_8u_Om() or medianBlur_8u_O1(). The _Om() function takes as long to run as your image is big (called O(n) time, or linear time) while the _O1() function takes a constant amount of time to run, regardless of how big your image is (O(1) time, or constant time). The O(1) implementation isn't trivial, and was only implemented in a 2007 paper. If the O(1) function is available, why not just always use that? The answer is in the if statement above: sometimes when your kernel size is smaller (relative to your total image size) it's actually faster to use the O(n) function. OpenCV has gone to the trouble of figuring out where that cutoff is, and this if statement encodes that cutoff — automatically switching between the implementations for us.

In conclusion, if you need the most blazingly-fast median filtering code ever, first you need to figure out which side of the if statement you're on (O(n) or O(1)). Then you should prepare a reusable buffer for yourself using cv::copyMakeBorder(), and call medianBlur_8u_O1() or medianBlur_8u_Om() directly.

Social Media Predictors

2011-03-14T22:04:00.002-04:00

Who is winning on the internet right now?

Let's say you watch a video on YouTube. You're the 500th viewer, and later that day it explodes to 100k views. This gives you a score of 500/100000 = .005. The next day you watch a video, you're the 500th viewer, but the video never goes beyond 1k views. So your score that day is 500/1000 = .5. Your average score is (.005 + .5) / 2 = ~.25.

Let's say the person with the lowest score is winning. Unfortunately, the only institution that's really in a position to calculate this score is Google.

libfreenect, three months in

2011-02-10T22:28:00.006-05:00

it's been three months,
we're already telling students,
"you need to threshold the depth image"
and waving around our kinect for a more complete perspective

now go get your kinect
and put it in the same spot you put it
when you first brought it home.

do you remember the feeling
of a new eye in your house?
a welcome intruder?

watch it sitting there and try to remember
the feeling that things are somehow "more 3d"
now that the computer can see it too.

when you first brought it home
was it pointing away from you?
proving itself to you,
identifying the scale of a scene
larger than itself?

it's been three months,
which direction are you pointing it now?

libfreenect

2010-11-10T17:35:00.004-05:00

is it just me, or is this kind of exciting?

not exciting because it's a new "gadget",
but because it's different kind of tool.

without the ps3eye,
the eyewriter wouldn't exist in its current form.
what should we make with kinect?
is there anything we couldn't do before?

how long until we tell students
"to detect someone,
first you need to threshold the depth image" or,
"for a full 3d map of a space,
you'll need about 4 kinects in the center of room"

how long until the new posture is "hands forward" instead of "hands up"?
"superman" instead of "surrender"?

how long until we just wave a kinect around,
get a complete 3d map of a space
feed it into our projection mapping toolkit
and start making interesting work
instead of worrying about the mapping?

and finally, what kind of work is inevitable with 3d sensing?
how long until there is a clear 3d interaction aesthetic?
and we say "i've seen this before, i bet they did it with a kinect" ;)

In Response to "Glitching vs..."

2010-08-29T17:10:00.003-04:00

A couple of days ago Evan Meaney wrote a blog post titled "Glitching vs. Processing vs. Moshing vs. Signal Interference". I really appreciate Evan's glitch work, from "Ceibas Cycle" to his writings in "on glitching", where he describes the inevitable collaboration with information theory present in all digital work. But this most recent post just doesn't make any sense.

He states that the post is inspired by the diverse work submitted to GLI.TC/H. I can understand wanting to make some loose categories to help group submissions, but the language in the post sounds like he's building a framework. He asks readers to "use this space as a means to explore and delineate, to observe and report, to enumerate...". But it's hard to do that with just four independent categories (with names like "glitching" and "processing") with no unifying structure other than the context of visual arts.

I think I understand where Evan is coming from, so I'd like to try again.

Let's start with noise.

Noise is what happens when we don't understand something. Noise can be manifest in any media: confusion about the clothing of a particular culture, inability to separate a visual foreground from background, the misunderstanding of a foreign rhythm or melody as arrhythmic or atonal. In our failure to contextualize, we create noise.

Glitch means finding noise when we expect to understand. Glitch is an experience, driven by expectation, emerging from consciousness rather than computation. Just as noise would not exist without us to misunderstand it, glitch would not exist without us to misexpect it.

Glitch art is about dwelling in and exploring these experiences, which sometimes means attempting to reproduce them. These reproductions may be executed in a variety of ways. Sometimes it will involve imitating the processes that regularly lead to glitches. This includes direct memory corruption at the byte level, redirection of streams, removal of key frames, analog interference, and circuit bending. Other times it eschews these processes, and opts to evoke the sensation by other means: through the "Bad TV" effect, or in the choice of palette, shapes, motion, melody, etc.

Most of the time, glitch art falls somewhere in between, drawing on the processes that give rise to glitches, but ultimately focused on evoking the experience by whatever means necessary.

Evan suggests that "a true glitch is not reproducible". I believe "true" glitch is unrelated to reproducibility. "True" glitch is tied solely to expectation. The reason it seems like something "stable" is no longer a glitch is simply because it's packaged as such (i.e., a "glitch") removing the possibility of expecting anything else.

That said, acknowledging that glitch is an experience gives us freedom as artists to share that experience regardless of the procedural purity of our practice. Saying that we're just "imperfect" is a cop-out based on a misguided understanding of what glitch artists are aiming for.

3D Scanning as Dense Microphone Array

2010-05-10T16:38:00.005-04:00

Sound is the displacement of matter over time.

A microphone detects sound at a single point, either via direct physical coupling, or using optical methods (as with Laser microphones).

3D scanning can also detect displacement of reflective matter over time. Using a 3D scanning setup with a very large angle between the camera and projector, very minor displacement variations can be detected. Using a high framerate camera, this displacement can be measured at audio frequencies. Every pixel then corresponds to a virtual laser microphone: instead of the usual microphone at a point, a fringe analysis microphone is comprised of N points as determined by the camera resolution.

Gaze-informed Perceptual Compression

2010-05-08T04:38:00.003-04:00

A video chat program that tracks your eye movement and sends gaze information to the other user. The other user's computer compresses the entire image heavily, with the exception of what you're looking at. To you, it just looks like the entire image is clear.

Piece for HTTP

2010-04-19T01:47:00.005-04:00

Post a link to a website online, but remove one of the Ts from "http" so it becomes "htp".
When this link is clicked, the participant will be forced by their browser to pause for a moment and reflect on the syntax of URL, adding the missing "t" by hand

Empty Art for the Web

2010-04-06T05:06:00.002-04:00

A web-enabled computer in a gallery, allowing visitors to browse the internet. A ready-made the information age.

Eigenanalysis for Lossy Compression

2010-03-24T13:04:00.002-04:00

Eigenanalysis is a method for reducing a set of data to the principle dimensions along which that data varies. In the context of imaging data, it has been applied very successfully to Eigenfaces:

Where a set of faces is broken down into a smaller set of face "prototypes" that can recombined in varying portions to recreate the original data set with a limited accuracy.

In the context of music, I can imagine that the spectral characteristics of songs have some self-similarity: portions repeat, chords are repeated in different voices and different octaves, rhythms repeat, etc. I can imagine a lossy compression algorithm that takes the frequency domain representation of a song, does Eigenanalysis on these vectors, and stores the song simply as the collection of N eigenvectors and the reduced representation of each frequency-domain chunk.

Quantization methods may be employed for further reducing bit usage due to similarity between adjacent chunks. Or different portions of the spectrum can be analyzed separately, which allows for better representation of lower frequencies and less information dedicated to higher frequencies. This unfortunately does not account for the obvious relationship between the lower and higher frequencies.

A more advanced implementation may involve doing eigenanalysis on mutiple chunks simultaneously in a moving window, or at different scales, which will help with rhythmic repetition.

The octave or overtone relationship is a little more complicated, and would require something like a constant-Q transforms to get a logarithmic frequency domain.

Google Earth Live

2010-03-16T15:13:00.002-04:00

"Google Earth Live" is a hypothetical service offered by Google in the not-to-distant future. It is predicated upon Google releasing a matrix of satellites into orbit that regularly poll large sections of the Earth at high resolution, and offering this data for free via the Google Earth interface.

When this is available, how would you use it (practically)? And what sort of art would you make with it?

The obvious: make timelapse videos of yourself as you go throughout your day, from the perspective of the satellite.

Non-Metamer Monochromes

2010-03-13T19:58:00.004-05:00

Monochromatic paintings have a tradition going back to the early 1900s, exemplified by Malevich and Rodchenko, and later by Rauschenberg.

I'd like to produce a series of monochromes that uses a single non-metamer. By non-metamer, I mean a color that has the same frequency spectrum as the color being replicated. For example, the green of a leaf, the blue of the sky, or the red of a sunset. Instead of just resembling these colors, various paints would be analyzed for their spectral response and mixed in the correct proportions so they precisely recreated these colors.

Alternative Prime Spirals

2010-03-12T21:07:00.003-05:00

The Ulam spiral is based on the idea of arranging integers in a rectilinear 2D spiral.

And noticing that certain diagonal patterns fall out that aren't explainable by simple equations that describe some of the "holes".

What other orderings might reveal interesting patterns? How about a 2D Hilbert curve?

Or maybe a 3D one? How might you continue a spiral in a cubic 3D space? Would you get diagonal planes describing the primes? How about a higher dimensional space — maybe higher dimensional planes?

Jesus Glitch

2010-03-12T13:43:00.005-05:00

The holy is often found in unexpected places. Jesus in naan, Mary in a Chicago underpass. Dan Paluska has immortalized this concept with his Holy Toaster.

Why don't we ever see Jesus in corrupted image files?

Image compression algorithms are generally rated on their ability to convincingly ignore non-perceptually-relevant features. I propose a new metric for these algorithms: how likely they are, when corrupted, to produce an image of a holy figure.

Six Pieces for Life

2010-03-12T13:43:00.001-05:00

Live like you only have until the next:

day
week
month
year
decade
century

Lossy Vector Compression

2010-02-24T09:59:00.000-05:00

An evenly sampled vector outline is essentially a 2D signal. This isn't the 2D of a raster image, where you have a 2D space with a 3D (RGB) value at each point. It's a 1D space with a 2D (XY) value at each point. You can do a frequency domain decomposition on this signal, which is the foundation for most image compression algorithms. What would it look like to do the usual compression tricks? Quantization of the amplitudes, high frequency removal, etc.?

The interesting thing about this transformation is that line drawings as frequency-decomposable entities already have a tradition established in Harmonographs. To recreate any drawing with a harmonograph would simply require N pendulums on each axis, each with a length proportional to the square of the frequency represented (given the mathematical definition of a pendulum). You would give all the pendulums equal mass, place them at an angle corresponding to the amplitude, and then release them at the right time. This could recreate any line drawing.

The Real and the Virtual

2010-02-21T16:57:00.002-05:00

I'd like to create an installation using a standard multitouch interface. The interface would be approximately 1 m wide and fairly high resolution. It would be mounted in a table-top configuration. A small pool of water, of similar construction and equivalent size, would be sitting directly next to the interface. The interface would be running a water simulation that resembles the real water as much as possible.

3D Video Scanner for Cheap

2010-02-21T01:50:00.006-05:00

Here's a way you might try making a 3D video scanner for the cost of a webcam:

Weccam with VSYNC broken out
Bright LED or LED array
Ambient illumination

Mount the LED at approximately the same location as the camera lens. Turn the LED on for alternating VSYNC pulses. The 3D decoding process is as follows: the light intensity at every point can be modeled using the equation i = r * (a + s), where:

i is the captured intensity at that pixel
r is the reflectivity at that point
a is the ambient illumination at that point
s is the illumination due to the LED source at that point

Sampling with the LED on and off yields two equations:

i_on = r * (a + s)
i_off = r * (a + 0)

And s corresponds to distance proportionally to an inverse square law:

s(d) = f / d^2

Where f is a scaling factor that relates s to a. Solving for d yields:

i_off = r * a
i_off / a = r
i_on = (i_off / a) * (a + (f / d^2))
((a * i_on) / i_off) - a = f / d^2
a * ((i_on / i_off) - 1) = f / d^2
d = sqrt(f / (a * ((i_on / i_off) - 1)))

The values for a and f can be approximated by hand, or calibrated based on a reference plane. a must be truly uniform, but if the LED is approximately at the same location as the lens then f can be calibrated for automatically to account for its non-point-source qualities.

The disadvantages here are primarily the assumption about ambient illumination, and the simplified material model. The advantages would be the cost and utter simplicity. The fact that it relies on a non-coded point source for illumination means you can work with infrared just as easily as visible light. Furthermore, it actually relies on ambient illumination while many other systems try to minimize it.

Google Insights

2010-02-16T19:25:00.000-05:00

Projection Mapping with a 3D Projector

2010-02-11T17:25:00.004-05:00

Projection mapping is the art of working with non planar projection surfaces.

APPARATI EFFIMERI Tetragram for Enlargment from Apparati Effimeri on Vimeo.

I'd like to explore this idea with a 3D projector. Normally, 3D projection happens on a plane, which allows for a rectilinear 3D space. If you project onto anything but a plane, the 3D space will be distorted. But if you account for these distortions in advance (for example, with a 3D scan of the scene to be projected on) then you can augment the scene with an overlaid 3D form.

While installations like the video above rely on the observer's large focal distance and visual tricks (like drop shadows) for implying a depth offset, with a 3D projector and shutter glasses you can create genuine depth offsets.

Precision CD Glitching

2010-01-28T23:49:00.002-05:00

"Wounded" CDs have been prepared by artists like Yasunao Tone and Oval, encompassing the experimental and pop domains of music, respectively. In both cases, the music has to be re-recorded from the glitched CD to be heard (and in Oval's case, it is subject to further production). Why not use a laser cutter to make precision glitched CDs, allowing them to be distributed directly?

Chocolate WTC

2010-01-21T01:27:00.004-05:00

This sculpture is a September 11th, 2001 memorial, designed by C. Boym. As best I can tell, it was cast in nickel. The color and texture gives me a wonderful, terrible idea: why not use chocolate? You know, the same way we have chocolate bunnies? The target market could be Al-Qaeda. Or, perhaps it would be cathartic for those who are still recovering to take a bite out of the past.

Connected Everything

2010-01-20T16:50:00.000-05:00

Here are some things I'm going to be covering in my thesis.

All possible enumerations: "Wishing Well" by Eijssen and Klopman, "Borges" by Jochem van der Spek, Every Icon, God's Eye, Imagen, Magic Mirror, The End, 8-bit, 4-bit waveforms (also in hardware). The legal-political implications of these projects. Stéphane Mallarmé's "[dream] of a universal work, capable of encompassing all the others". Ablinger's conception of "all notes" as "white noise". Borges' Aleph. pppd and RC/NAND combinations toward the idea of a "functionally complete" synth.
Possible permutations: allRGB. If you're enumeration everything, how do you arrange it in an interesting way? Anti-gray codes?
Very long pieces: Pi house music (indefinitely long), Infinite C (indefinitely long), Soundtrack For An Exhibition (96 days), The Shapes Project, As Slow as Possible (639 years), Longplayer (1000 years)
What is music? Of all the sounds that can be made, which are musical? Is there a connection between meaningful sounds and musical sounds? Considering noise as a human-centered phenomenon, or otherwise.
McLuhan's symbiotic medium/message relationship: Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstrations. Glitch art as a method for uncovering a medium: Ceibas, MPF, CD-glitching from Oval and Yasunao Tone. The aesthetics of failure. "Looking at what's broken" is a technique regularly used in cognitive neuroscience, outlined by V.S. Ramachandran in "Phantoms in the Brain". Eigenradio. The role of transcription: ethnomusicology as a case study.
The history of MP3, the language and the logistics behind glitching compressed formats. Remixing 4'33" for a new media (Only Everything Lasts Forever).
Correspondence theory of truth versus coherence theory of truth, the connection between truth and meaning, meaning and music. MOOKDFJLAL and 241543903. Side channel attacks (especially TEMPEST), persistence hunting, and reality cracking. Buddhist "interdependent arising" as a "coherentist metaphysics". Autoloop as purely sonic coherentism. Jean-Jacques Nattiez' "symbolic web".
The role of illusion in meaning, finding patterns in noise, and the "edge of chaos": Kanizsa triangle, dalmatian and cow illusions, Christian iconography, The Holy Toaster, the face on Mars, Einstein's Brain, the golden ratio as a guiding principle for beauty in nature and art, prime numbers and the Ulam spiral and Sacks spiral, equidistant letter sequences and The Bible Code, Haiku Finder, SETI@home and the definition of a signal, astronomical patterns and constellations, geographic patterns, the Voynich manuscript as a hoax. Working with Mark Changizi on evolutionary psychology. No Noise.
Emptiness, and art everywhere: Cage's 4'33", Duchamp's "Fountain", Rauschenberg's "White Paintings" and the monochromatic tradition, including Malevich and Rodchenko. Nietzsche's "will to power" and Sartre's "existence precedes essence" as models of self-created coherentist meaning.
Noise and copyright: illegal numbers, pi in binary.

I Am Sitting in a Google Ad

2010-01-19T01:49:00.002-05:00

Set up simple web page with only the text of Alvin Lucier's famous composition, and Google text ads.

Visit the page, and take note of the Google text ads. Create a copy of the page, replacing Lucier's text with the text from the ads. Repeat this process indefinitely, or until Google starts repeating itself.

The Bucket Piece

2010-01-19T00:58:00.003-05:00

At a popular contemporary art gallery in a large city, in a small white room, place a nondescript bucket on a centered pedestal with a single light above it. A guard is stationed outside, allowing only one person in at a time. Next to the bucket is a plaque reading:

At the end of the day, any money collected in this bucket will be given to the artist. You are free to add or remove money as you wish.

This is the most elegant manifestation of the piece, but a better manifestation will get others involved. For example, donating the money to a charity instead of the artist. Or multiple buckets going to different causes. Or some kind of system measuring the contributions in real time and reporting how many children have been saved from starvation for another day.

Big Wave Surfing

2010-01-17T21:39:00.000-05:00

Why is big wave surfing so engaging?

There's something about huge waves that inspires fear. From the shore it's possible to write them off as passively destructive. But from the water, they can look positively evil. The wave itself can't even be identified — it's no specific body of water, but a general force. A collective action of the entire ocean. An unseen force manifest in a mountain of water.

The big wave surfer confronts this: an unidentifiable, shape-shifting, destructive force backed by the entire ocean. They collaborate, redirecting all of that destructive energy into a single creative action. They name the unnameable.

From the shore, the ocean has no scale. There is nothing to be compared. But when you see a surfer on a wave, you know exactly big it is. Big wave surfing is the humanization of infinity.

Flash Mob 3D Scanning

2010-01-08T15:06:00.004-05:00

Pick a local monument.
Organize a flash mob via Craigslist.
Instruct everyone to take photos of the monument.
Everyone then uploads and tags their photos.
These photos are then uploaded to Photosynth for 3D reconstruction.

As a variant, people can just record video and walk around. This relies on the videos being high resolution.

3D capture in performance

2009-12-05T12:30:00.002-05:00

Capturing 3D data from moving scenes is a hard problem in itself, but the harder problem is how to integrate it with a performance in real time. First you have to hide the 3D capture process from the audience, and then you need to present something related to the 3D capture in an engaging way.

Re-projecting coarse effects can be approximated with a multi-camera system, and fine details are dangerous due to system latency.

The real question is: what can you do with 3D data that you can't do with 2D images? The most interesting idea I have: you can cast shadows on a 3D form in a way you can't on a 2D form.

Removing Image Noise

2009-12-05T11:03:00.004-05:00

Gray-level images for foreground/background are often afflicted by fine noise when they are thresholded.

I've used a few different approaches to dealing with this:

blurring before thresholding
median filtering before thresholding
morphological filtering after thresholding
distance transform after thresholding, followed by thresholding again as a more continuous morphological filtering algorithm

Unfortunately, these all have the same problem: inner corners are rounded. These algorithms can't tell the difference between a black pixel in an inner corner and a black pixel that is just noise.

Perhaps what we should really be using is something like bilateral filtering (in Photoshop, "Surface Blur"). Bilateral filtering preserves sharp edges, while blurring large undefined regions. Unfortunately, bilateral filtering creates a sort of "glow" that still has issues with corners.

Maybe we need something more like "smart blur"? It seems to not propagate across edges...

Defining Music, Again

2009-11-27T01:41:00.000-05:00

I keep coming back to this issue (previously: Defining Music). Which is fitting, considering it's a large part of my thesis. I explained the basic idea to a friend recently in a way that seemed clear, so I'd like to preserve that clarity in text.

Before Ethnomusicology, western culture believed music to be universal amongst civilized peoples. Ethnomusicology helped people see that music was more local and less global. Around the same time, Cage encouraged people to hear things for themselves as music: saying that it is extremely local, to the point of being defined by an individual.

I would like to propose a reversal to Cage's position (or, at least, his language). I believe music is built out of correspondences between sounds and other things. Over time, these "other things" have been comprised of innate human impulses, society-specific tradition, and individual preference, in that order. I would like to add "everything else" to that category of "other things". This means that music exists without humans, as sounds always have context. Individuals do not decide what is music (this is the reversal), we can only decide what is noise. We do this by identifying acontextual sounds — and the context we use for understanding sounds is continually changing. Wind chimes ringing during a cool autumn walk have a different context to us than they do when we're trying to study next to them, or trying to hear past them.

As context-creators, of the general category of conscious non-omniscient beings, we define music only insomuch as we misunderstand some of it as noise.

Face the Beat

2009-11-27T01:36:00.003-05:00

I See Beats, but with face tracking. This would solve dark room restriction, but create a host of other issues.

Recognizing Glitches

2009-09-23T11:31:00.000-04:00

Working with three-phase scanning a bit recently, I've become very familiar with the kind of glitches that emerge. Watching Radiohead's "House of Cards" video again, I understand the glitches better now than when I first saw it:

At :58-:59, Thom Yorke's neck separates from his head intermittently. This is due to the ambiguity of propagating a wrapped phase across shadows and depth discontinuities (from his jaw) which generally lend to a few possible interpretations of the data.
At 1:29-1:31, someone waves their arms about a bit. If you look at the edges of their arms, you can see "barbs" coming out, something like 3d-interlacing. This is due to the nature of phase-shift scanning as a sequential structured light system rather than a continuous/fixed system. I'm a little amazed that these artifacts exist, as they were probably using a very high framerate camera.
Throughout the video, entire scenes will jump forward and backward. This is due to the unwrapping algorithm again, and that it has to assume an absolute distance at a specific fixed point. If you get noise at that point, the entire image is shifted. I'm actually surprised this was a bug in the system they used.

Full Inbox

2009-09-03T07:11:00.003-04:00

As of this moment, Gmail offers 7365 MB of storage. To me, 7365 MB looks like an open desert, or a desolate sea. I want to fill that up, or at least craft it. What would email land art look like? What is the architecture of an empty inbox? And how can it be shaped toward an aesthetic or conceptual goal?

Email To Real Mail Converter

2009-08-20T11:36:00.003-04:00

I like this idea for an iPhone app, "Shoot It". You take a picture on your iPhone, and they print it out and send it as a postcard for you.

My favorite part is that this is an "algorithm" that involves both automated and non-automated actions. There are real people involved in pushing a postcard around. I'd like to start a service that send letters for you. You would send an email to a specific address, include a mailing address, and we would print out and mail the letter for you.

This service actually exists in reverse for older folks that don't want to deal with the internet. They can have a service print out emails for them, and send out their handwritten letters as emails.

Every Every Icon

2009-08-19T10:28:00.003-04:00

John F. Simon Jr.'s "Every Icon" iterates through all the 32x32 black and white icons at approximately 100 icons per second. Sintron's "God's Eye" iterates through all the 800x600 color images at 97,000 images per second. Jim Campbell's "The End" iterates through grayscale images using custom electronics. Leonardo Solaas' "Magic Mirror" iterates through every 720x576 color image at 25 images per second.

I propose a meta-Every Icon, "Every Every Icon". This work will include all of the above works, as well as any other variations that may be dreamed up in the future. It will accomplish this by iterating through every possible resolution, at every possible framerate, for every possible bit depth, in every possible order.

The Negativity of Noise

2009-08-18T17:49:00.000-04:00

In "Noise", Jacques Attali proposes that noise is a simulacrum of murder.

We must establish two things: First, that noise is violence: it disturbs. To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill. It is a simulacrum of murder. Second, that music is a channelization of noise, and therefore a simulacrum of the sacrifice. (p 26)

He goes on to provide a technical description for the uninitiated:

A noise is a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process of emission. A resonance is a set of simultaneous, pure sounds of determined frequency and differing intensity. Noise, then, does not exist in itself, but only in relation to the system within which it is inscribed: emitter, transmitter, receiver. Information theory uses the concept of noise (or rather, metonymy) in a more general way: noise is the term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for that receiver. Long before it was given this theoretical expression, noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it is associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague. (p 26-27)

I can't deny that there are technical definitions of noise that restrict it to the "undesired portion" of a signal. And I completely understand that a variety of cultures see noises as violent. And that we have an intuitive reaction to them as violent.

But saying that noise "does not exist in itself", and advancing the technical definitions or intuitive folk-definitions as the final word on noise seems narrow minded to me. What about noise in an epistemological context, as a human creation: without humans, there is not only no music, but no noise. It's not that noise requires music in order to be differentiated, but it requires humans to do the differentiation. This act of sound-interpretation and categorization is equally important as our technical and folk definitions.

Furthermore, I reject language like this:

In its biological reality, noise is a source of pain. Beyond a certain limit, it becomes an immaterial weapon of death. The ear, which transforms sound signals into electric impulses addressed to the brain, can be damaged, and even destroyed, when the frequency of a sound exceeds 20,000 hertz, or when its intensity exceeds 80 decibels. Diminished intellectual capacity, accelerated respiration and heartbeat, hypertension, slowed digestion, neurosis, altered diction: these are the consequences of excessive sound in the environment.

I reject it because it's conflating two very different phenomena: noise, and damaging sound. Saying that noise is a source of pain, and then giving examples of loud sounds and high pitched sounds is just giving noise a bad name by association. If I play a Bach chorale at 80 decibels, it's going to do just as much damage as "noise".

Ignoring Africa

2009-08-18T14:36:00.000-04:00

I'm always a little surprised when I read things like this:

All music can be defined as noise given form according to a code (in other words, according to rules of arrangement and laws of succession, in a limited space, a space of sounds) that is theoretically knowable by the listener. Listening to music is to receive a message. Nevertheless, music cannot be equated with a language. Quite unlike the words of a language — which refer to a signified — music, though it has a precise operationality, never has a stable reference to a code of the linguistic type. Itis not "a myth coded in sounds instead of words," but rather a "language without meaning." It has neither meaning nor finality. (Noise by Jacques Attali, p 25)

Pranks and Pragmatism

2009-08-17T15:34:00.000-04:00

Some excerpts from "African Rhythm and African Sensibility" by John Miller Chernoff.

African drumming is renowned for the ability to express the tonal structure of their spoken languages, to the point where rhythms are imbued with complex semantics. A great illustration:

During my first day practicing with Gideon, I was following him well until he suddenly performed a rather complicated series of rhythms and then went back to the basic rhythm he was showing me. A few minutes later a man who passed at that moment returned with two bottles of beer. (p 75)

There is a short passage discussing the difference between "false meaning" and "intended meaning", due to a prank:

Ibrahim Abdulai's son Alhassan, who was assisting in my instruction displayedgreat ingenuity duringan extended prank in which he tried to confude me in my work by inventing false meanings to fit many rhythms in Takai [a dance/beat from the Dagomba in northern Ghana]. Many of the rhythmic styles a Takai drummer beats are played only to make the music more interesting, but the language Alhassan supplied matched the rhythms so perfectly that I began to think Ibrahim was withholding the meanings. When I persisted in my questions, he said, "We have a general name for the whole Takai drumming, but only a few of the rhythms have names. In Zhem [another Dagomba dance/beat, played "during the "installation or funeral of high chiefs"], all the drummers will be making speeches, but in Takai the rhythms are mainly to make the dancers strong. The name given Takai is for the different rhythms combined together, and all the rhythms are equal. Anyone who wants to tell you words for these rhythms is lying. Anytime I want, I can just listen to the sound of the dondon [an hourglass-shaped talking drum] or gondon [sic? "gongon"] and compare the music to something in the Dagbani language [of the Dagomba], but it is not the same as making speeches. As for the styles you have been learning, I am the one who has been bringing all these styles when drumming Takai, and I am the right person to give them meaning, but I have no name for them. So how can another person give them meaning or say that this style says this or that style says that while I was not making speeches when I got those very styles?" (p 76)

Another example is given of a "false meaning" for a dance, Bangumanga, that is regularly accepted by "junior players":

The drum language is Bem bo ma, be pam boma je ("They will search for me, but they will not see me"). One false meaning is Man daa yeli, mam bi lan yeli ("I said it; I don't say it again"). The meaning is a "secret" because of the seriousness of the war. In its truth, Bangumanga recalls the blood that was shed in the war... (p 206)

Sometimes the meaning of rhythms is simple misunderstood.

If you play gagedega instead of gagedegi when executing a phrase on Atsimewu [a tall drum that acts as a lead], or if you miss the pitch when beating a dondon, you may have a more serious mistake than you think. Indeed, one of the reasons why repetition is so important in African music is that repetition of a rhythm often serves to clarify its meaning. When rhythms change too abruptly, the music can lose some of its meaning... (p 80-81)

This tendency to court misinterpretation can be heard just by listening to the complex polyrhythms of any West African dance:

The effect of polymetric music is as if the different rhythms were competing for our attention. No sooner do we grasp one rhythm than we lose track of it and hear another. In something like Adzogbo or Zhe, it is not easy to find any constant beat at all. The Western conception of a main beat or pulse seems to disappear, and a Westerner who cannot appreciate the rhythmic complications and who maintains his habitual listening orientation quite simply gets lost. [...] Actually, if we try to apply Western notions of bars and time signatures, the music seems much more complicated than it really is. [...] The individual rhythms are simple, but the way they are combined can be confusing to Westerners. (p 46-47)

I see these stories as beautiful metaphors for, and examples of:

Information having a noisy character (the beer story)
The difference between intention in sending and receiving
Our ability to find structures that have a different cause than we expect
Repetition as the foundation of meaning, a type of contextualization that allows us to separate "signal" from noise
The interaction of repetitions producing more complex structures than the sum of their parts (in the case of polyrhythms, it's their least common multiple)
Our ability to misunderstand a system based on the wrong contextualization (the last example of Westerners misunderstanding polyrhythms)
Combinatorial music in general

Crowdsourcing Glitches

2009-08-16T02:02:00.004-04:00

I'm interested in the possibility of destroying data through natural processes. I've already explored this a bit with Future Fragments, where quotes from friends were carried in their pockets and destroyed over the period of a summer.

Another interesting system that naturally destroys information over time is the human mind (memory). Consider the possibility of crowdsourcing distortion: for example, with Mechanical Turk, create a task that plays a subset of a song that the worker is then asked to repeat. These responses are then averaged to create an approximation of the original tune.

This task takes advantage of our ability to hear melodies. We can also treat the mind as a more generic digital signal processor: ask each worker to recall the midi pitches of each note. Or better: portions of the mp3 encoded audio in hex. Besides the auditory system, we can also take advantage of the visual system. Ask each worker to recall and draw the audio signal (at a sufficient scale).

These tasks would be especially interesting in the case of people like Ben Pridmore, who is able to quickly memorize large amounts of data (e.g.: 364 playing cards in 10 minutes). I imagine his memory slowly degrades. It'd be great to see what a compressed image looks like that is memorized slightly incorrectly, and watch it degrade over time.

Stars and Bubbles

2009-08-11T12:37:00.000-04:00

Astronomers have recently realized that galaxies are distributed in a sort of "frothy" or "bubbly" structure. That is, the large scale structure of the universe can be described as consisting of strings of galaxies with big spaces in between.

A projection of this structure onto the sky of any planet should look highly web-like as well. From these webs, we've created constellations. One of the features that has helped give rise to similar constellations from separate traditions is locality: 參, the ancient "three stars" asterism from Chinese astrology, matched the belt of the Greek constellation Orion. Within traditions, "guideposts" are also established, creating a coherency to the stellar structures.

Various religious traditions have identified constellations as prophetically or genetically relevant to their beliefs. In 1884, Joseph Seiss laid out his "Gospel In The Stars" system, describing the relevance of the zodiac to Christianity. Authors like John Kotselas will argue that the structures act to justify belief in Christianity. Today, new patterns are identified and the old ones still argued.

Salience as Local Entropy

2009-08-05T15:38:00.003-04:00

Based on a suggestion by Romann Weber, regarding an alternative definition of visual salience.

There is an image I comprised of integers in the range R
The probability of a specific value c from R occurring in I, Pr_I(c), equals the number of pixels with the value c in I divided by the total number of pixels in I
There is an image S that is a sub region within I
The entropy of S with respect to I is equal to the negative sum of Pr_I(p) * log(Pr_I(c)) for every pixel p in S

Using this metric, an entire image may be analyzed by moving the sub region S about the image. Also consider different sizes of S, and the possibility of use both a moving S and I within the actual image.

Instruction Pieces are Self Destructive

2009-07-27T21:17:00.000-04:00

Not directly destructive, but they can inspire the audience to create similar work. This happens in the DIY community as well: not only does it provide inspiration, but also encouragement. Art transcends its usual limitations when it is re-appropriated by non-artists and integrated into a life practice. Furthermore, when individuals look to "art" and see only their life practice, the "art" loses its audience. I would like to make more self destructive art.

Signals and SETI@home

2009-07-23T00:49:00.000-04:00

SETI@home is a distributed computing project scanning the sky for radio transmissions that bear traces of extra terrestrial intelligence. They define a "signal" as:

Spikes in power spectra
Gaussian rises and falls in transmission power
Triplets (three power spikes in a row)
Pulsing signals

Some of these are domain specific (Gaussian rises and falls are due to the telescope passing over a signal source), while others can be generalized. For example, triplets represent a kind of repetition. When you have two of something, there is ambiguity about whether it is chance or not. You can always fit a line to two data points. When there are three events, you can measure the similarity of the two intervals, and make at least three comparisons. Pulsing signals represent another kind of macroscopic repetition. There are really just two types of features: general (repetition), and domain specific (power spikes, Gaussian rises and falls).

Magical Situations

2009-07-07T03:51:00.000-04:00

When you see a tightrope walker, no one needs to explain what is happening. You immediately understand the risk and skill involved, and you are transfixed by it. I'd say this is a "magical" situation: understood intuitively, without explanation, with minimal cultural context. Nature creates a lot of magical things, but I have trouble thinking of many magical human creations. Fireworks? Percussion? What else?

Privacy Art

2009-07-05T01:44:00.002-04:00

Whenever you point your browser to an https page, or type your password into a box with asterisks instead of clear text, or see a small lock icon next to a form, you get a feeling of security. In these situations, a language of reassurance has evolved: lock icons, for example, tend to be golden-yellow or blue-gray. Unlike other icons, which are free to be multi-colored, locks have a restricted palette that has evolved to remind us of the physical objects, "real locks", that we trust from day to day. I propose work that takes advantage of these features in the collective net-unconscious. For example: an https website that promises to keep your data secure, while requesting only random pieces of banal information.

Other/Self and Noise/Music

2009-06-16T01:43:00.000-04:00

Trying to understand the noise/music discussion in the language of other/self: traditionally (e.g., Jacques Attali), music is to the self as noise is to the other. The primary deficit in this analogy is the non-consciousness of sound. One sound cannot approach another sound and have the realization of the "other", but an external entity is required to create and collapse distinctions.

God's Geography

2009-06-12T21:51:00.000-04:00

Clouds are perhaps the most timeless noise source ripe for induction, but with the advent of accurate mapmaking and satellite photography we can look to geography as well.

From God's Geography:

Spiritually speaking, the Australian dog doesn't have eyes to see or ears to hear (Isaiah 6:9-10). Additionally, most of Australia's interior is desert or outback, so this dog's head doesn't have much for a brain either.

Also see The Afro-Latinosaurus Rex

The Best Hack

2009-06-09T00:05:00.000-04:00

Fold a single piece of paper down the center, length wise. Open it up, and fold two corners from one short side to the center, so that the short side is parallel to the center line. Fold the two corners this creates to the center in the same manner. Repeat this once more, but folding in the opposite direction. A section of the structure should create a T shape. Throw the piece of paper with the smallest end facing forward, and it will glide.

This is the most elegant repurposing of an everyday object I know: the paper airplane.

Strange Loops

2009-05-27T17:17:00.000-04:00

Hofstadter's strange loops are a very accessible subset of coherentism. I say "subset" because self-reference, at first glance, seems to be a only one type of reference. This is only true if you make claims from a perspective. If you make non-perspectival claims, there is only self-reference (meaning is only established recursively).

Closer Than Any Other

2009-05-26T14:01:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons I appreciate Java is the way the documentation is written. Consider their definition of e from java.lang.Math:

static double E The double value that is closer than any other to e, the base of the natural logarithms.

Helter Skelter

2009-05-23T02:25:00.000-04:00

Charles Manson had an intricate interpretation of Revelations 9 that predicted he was the returning Jesus Christ, and that the Beatles were somehow involved in the coming apocalypse. From Wikipedia:

Verse 17: "And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone."

breastplates of fire = the Beatles' electric guitars
fire and smoke and brimstone out of their mouths = the Beatles' powerful lyrics, the power of their music to ignite Helter Skelter

A reminder that some more ambiguous prophetic texts are notoriously difficult to discuss in a non-coherentist manner.

Positively Divine Understanding

2009-05-21T17:15:00.000-04:00

From the Wikipedia article on the Japanese painter Hokusai, some thoughts on understanding and sharing the natural world:

"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."

The Projector's Trance

2009-05-20T01:49:00.000-04:00

The proliferation of Powerpoint and other projection-based media in both the corporate world and academia has created a subtle but persistent phenomena. Think back to the last time you saw someone prepare a projector before a presentation. There is a moment, anywhere from an instant to dozens of minutes, where the unfamiliar device is connected and turned on. This moment is not sustained solely by the person preparing the projector; it emerges from the audience's collective gaze. In this situation, the audience finds themselves in a trance-like state: eyes darting from the projector, to the the cable, to the laptop, to the presenter. They are completely transfixed by the ritual — momentarily, being-in-itself. And then, without warning, the image provides some sort of affirmation that, indeed, all is in working order. The crowd recollects their freedom. They remember that they're watching a presentation, and that they can stop paying attention whenever they want.

MOOKDFJLAL

2009-05-18T02:47:00.000-04:00

Take a photograph in your bedroom with a pillow on your head. Upload this photo to the internet (like on Flickr). Tag the file with: MOOKDFJLAL. When you search for MOOKDFJLAL you will find photographs of people wearing pillows on their head. David Horvitz, May 18, 2009

If you search for 241543903, you'll find another Horvitz creation ("people putting their head in the freezer."). It's been called a "meme", but I feel like that's a secondary characteristic of this entity. Memes have origins you can point to and say, "There, look at that — isn't it funny? That's why everybody's been copying it." But 241543903 and MOOKDFJLAL exist primarily because of the photos, not because of David's original instructions. This is coherentism in action.

Aaron Koblin Interview

2009-05-14T16:28:00.000-04:00

Aaron Koblin discussing Processing, and "Flight Patterns":

I remember the first day that I looked at the data. Within about fifteen minutes I went from cryptic numbers and letters to easily recognizable patterns. It was a thrilling experience.

Snail Mail Machine

2009-05-11T17:18:00.005-04:00

I propose a machine for fueling the enduring nostalgia associated with paper envelopes. It will sit next to your computer, and every time you receive an email it will drop a real envelope through a small slot. Every envelope will have your name on it.

It's essential to keep the technology as invisible as possible. It should not be complicated by a printer that prints the name of the sender on the envelope, for example. The idea is that someone has just dropped off a letter by your computer for you to read.

When you remove the envelope from its holder (or, perhaps, place it back inside the machine) a window should pop up on your computer that shows you the email.

Popularity Machine

2009-05-02T20:41:00.002-04:00

Collect a bunch of used disposable cameras (at least 20).
Wire simple timers (555s, 4093 RC oscillator) to the flash.
Deploy them in a crowded room during a party.

Autotune the Past

2009-05-01T00:49:00.004-04:00

Pick a famous speech (e.g.: "I Have A Dream")
Run it through Anteres' autotune.
Run the result through Microsoft's SongSmith
Share

Hiatus

2009-05-01T00:45:00.000-04:00

I've been keeping a much more regularly updated list of links, sans descriptions and analysis, on my delicious bookmarks. Perhaps I'll come back here for some analysis as I develop my master's thesis?

Two Ball Game

2009-04-30T20:33:00.000-04:00

This happened earlier today.

Get a wiffle ball and a soccer ball. Divide approximately 12 people into two teams. At any moment, one is offense and the other is defense. One of the players (the "goalie") on the defensive team guards themselves with a wiffle ball bat inside an equilateral triangle approximately 12 feet on each side. The offensive team is trying to throw the wiffle ball at the goalie. The defensive team is trying to kick the soccer ball at the player in possession of the wiffle ball.

Points are scored when the offense hits the goalie with the wiffle ball (throwing underhand from outside the triangle), or the defense hits the offensive player in possession of the wiffle ball with the soccer ball. Because the latter is a bit more difficult than the former, it might be assigned more points (but we never got that far). When a point is scored, the player it was scored by/against becomes the goalie. The former goalie throws in the wiffle ball.

Additionally: it might make more sense if both balls may be either kicked or thrown. It might also be easiest to play this in a court, where the soccer ball cannot be lost when it misses a target (or with multiple soccer balls).

Indirect Indirection

2009-04-28T19:21:00.010-04:00

Along the lines of Kopyfamo' (or at least sharing the aesthetic): use the various "this is a hosted image" images as profile/avatar images. Alternatively, collect these images and upload them to various image hosting sites. For example (Hosted on tinypic.com):

Energy Meter

2009-04-22T23:40:00.003-04:00

Hack multimeter such that:

It runs off an adapter that plugs into the wall.
It senses and displays the current flowing into it.

An energy visualization that fulfills its purpose whether plugged in or unplugged. One of those near-paradoxes.

Piece for Ingenuity

2009-04-20T00:19:00.001-04:00

Count every hair on your head.

Piece for Internet

2009-04-11T13:10:00.000-04:00

Click on every advertisement you see.

Cheap Fraud

2009-04-06T08:46:00.000-04:00

From the wikipedia talk page on Kyle MacDonald, my Google-rankings arch-nemesis and proponent of the "one red paperclip" project:

how can one man get all kinds of attenoin because of a paper clip when there are starving and dieing every day this gives the message that if you do a cheap trick you will be rewarded but if you live a honest life and try to work for what you have you get scorned

No it doesn't. Cardboard boxA 17:40, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Piece for ESP

2009-03-28T23:34:00.003-04:00

Focus on the idea, "odd numbers".
Continue focusing, and roll a die.
If the outcome is odd, today is a day for ESP!
Do this each day, and keep a running tally of your results.
If the outcome keeps moving towards "odd", this life is a life for ESP!
Or you need new dice.

Piece for Anonymous

2009-03-22T01:13:00.005-04:00

Next time you come across a personal blog of someone you've never met, bookmark it and check it frequently. Do your best to understand where the person is coming from, and leave thoughtful comments. Do this without letting it become creepy.

Piece for a Car Thief

2009-03-14T19:33:00.005-04:00

Discover a defining characteristic of these cars used to catch car thieves. (Perhaps RF signals used for controlling and monitoring the car.)
If it is possible, enter the car without breaking into it.
Say: "This is not my car." loud enough for the embedded microphone to record it.
Exit the car.

Four and a Half Billion Years of Solitude

2009-03-08T16:53:00.000-04:00

This is the only good poem I've ever written.

cinder in the sky;
enrapt by the earth,
sighs for a suicidal
 slip.

(the moon one night
 stared back at me
 with blood on its face,
 awaiting another wedding)

(2006)

Harry Houdini

2009-03-07T14:49:00.000-05:00

Things I learned from the Wikipedia article on Harry Houdini:

Sometimes things work, but they don't always
When they don't work, the solution may be hidden in a kiss; or not working may have been part of the plan in the first place
Sometimes it's important for people to see the process, and other times it's more alluring for it to be hidden
The possibility of death is intriguing

Piece for Beer and Keyboard

2009-02-19T21:21:00.002-05:00

Spill beer on your keyboard.
Open a text editor.
Clean beer off your keyboard.
Save the text.

Realization, 2/19/09:

yt czzz SWE3 de CDaqdzcdzDSAcx n bvcvcxz vr5 CDSZAZSAsadaSADAAsazzsaASDaasdsZzxczrewazzxA

Unknown Passwords

2009-02-12T03:51:00.000-05:00

My friend Byeong Sam sometimes uses his Latin-covered keyboard to type Hangul. I asked if there are any connections between the Latin consonants and the way they are used to form the Korean characters — he said no. Furthermore, there are some passwords that he knows in Korean but are stored using Latin characters. He doesn't really pay attention to what these passwords are, just the gestures that form them.

Cage vs. Pascal

2009-01-26T11:01:00.000-05:00

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating... We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them not as sound effects but as musical instruments. (John Cage, 1961)

Le bruit a sa musique que la musique ne connaît point. (Pascal)

Piece for DNS

2009-01-26T02:16:00.002-05:00

Potential additional constraints:

You are limited to the .com top level domain.
Domain names may include a-z, 0-9 and the hyphen, must start with a-z and may not end with a hyphen. (See RFC 1034)
Get kicked out of domaintools.com's bulk check:
Security : Client may be too resource intensive. You have reached your daily lookup limit.

Ways of Defining Music

2009-01-21T12:55:00.000-05:00

The "is-ought" problem is common to meta-ethics and linguistics. In meta-ethics: are we describing how people act, or how they ought to act? In linguistics, some people describe grammar while other prescribe grammar. I imagine the same approaches to understanding music:

Descriptive definitions of music, which take into account various musical traditions and extrapolate common themes within and between them.
Prescriptive definitions of music, which involve reflection and thought-experiments — philosophy, really — sometimes accompanied by experimental compositions.

To explore the first without the second is superficial, and to philosophize without context is unrealistic.

1/26/08: "Noise" has the same issue, describing how the word "noise" is used is very different from prescribing definitions. Describing things can be difficult, but prescriptions can get really messy. It's probably best to set out a goal for a prescriptive definition before seeking/giving one. Prescriptions might be about: unifying themes of descriptions, offering a new definition that illuminates others, expanding or restricting the dominant contemporary definition...

Naked Mail Distortion

2009-01-18T19:03:00.003-05:00

A method for destroying data: send optical discs in the mail, with no protection, back and forth between two locations. The data may be collected each time and noted for future reference. Potential subjects include compressed and uncompressed media (audio, video) and written texts. Consider also a iterative/recursive algorithm where the distortion provides a decision for a chance operation: the CD contains a list of addresses, and every time an address is lost the CD is sent to that address.

Travis the Arborist

2009-01-15T22:12:00.000-05:00

Travis, from Moorhead Minnesota, is spending the night in my apartment. He's looking for work protecting things from breaking branches covered in ice. I asked him "What are the strangest problems you've run into?" and he said:

People think they own trees.
People think they can control nature.

He seemed to be really into the trees he worked with, but was excited about the prospect of going to school for business administration. So I asked him: if he didn't have to work, what would he do?

It's hard work, so if I didn't have to then I wouldn't. I'd take care of my own, of course, but I already do: mostly, I leave them alone.

From-To

2009-01-10T12:58:00.005-05:00

Half-formed instruction piece using directions from Google Maps.

In the form of images (paths) or as text (directions).
Cities might be chosen at random or based on some principle.

Principles:

Only very small cities.
Only capitols.
Cities with the same name.
Cities with some other shared characteristic: crime rate, population, longitude...

Presented as prints or on a screen/projection, rotating through possibilities. These things make me think about how we can get from one place to another, and the ways in which we connect things in time, space, and using other labels.

Let Go

2009-01-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

Only everything lasts forever.

Ablinger, Repetition, and Meaning

2008-12-27T15:08:00.000-05:00

...redundancy produces information. And from here, it is not a long way to entropic noise as information in Shannon's sense. It was Arnold Schönberg who stated that variation is necessarily a form of repetition as at least something must return between variation and variation. And he thus shifted his attention from the changing aspect of music to the continuous, the repeated. Ablinger's attitude is something like the hidden, reverse secret of the same story: that each repetition is also variation, that there is necessarily always something changing—that, in other words: repetition does not exist except as an abstraction.

From "Static's Music - Noise Inquiries" by Christian Scheib

Repetition and redundancy do produce information, and information is meaning. However, this ability is not unique to repetition. Repetition is a subset of a larger meaning-producing process: the formation of relationships. I would argue all meaning comes from relations and connections; epistemology is relational. Repetition is a method of creating relations by separating similar events in space and time.

Taken loosely, repetition may be considered relation-formation in its entirety. There is a good reason not to define repetition loosely, however: we have an intuition for the "abstraction" of perfect repetition. This intuition might be defined as: multiple events produced as similarly as possible to each other, varying only in their spatio-temporal manifestation. When Mozart is performed today, it is contextualized (and thus meaningful) in relation to every other Mozart performance past (as well as many other things, including all of music history). However, these modern performances are not repetitions of previous performances — and any new performance is not a repetition of the theory and influences related to it — but it is still meaningful.

Piece for Post

2008-12-26T20:16:00.006-05:00

Mail an empty envelope to a friend.
Without opening the envelope, they should put it in a new envelope and send it back to you.
Without opening their envelope, you should put their envelope in a new envelope and send it back to them.
Repeat until the Post loses the envelopes, or refuses to carry it.

How to Save Your Life

2008-12-17T00:12:00.000-05:00

Two approaches to saving all of your experiences on a hard drive somewhere:

Create a device that is able to capture any experience and store it to a remote location.
Take a tool that already stores every action performed while using it, and reshape your life until all your experiences surround that tool.

Speech

2008-12-14T19:52:00.003-05:00

Using a Microvox text-to-speech module, generate every possible vocal sound sequence. Potential interpretations:

A panoglot box.
A lying box.
A truth-telling box.
A future-predicting box.

Instruction Piece for Printer

2008-11-28T00:21:00.002-05:00

Find a paper towel.
Remove the carriage from your printer.
Clean the carriage with the paper towel.
Return the carriage to the printer.

Defining Music

2008-11-12T22:39:00.000-05:00

"Music" has always been "meaningful sound"; but the definition of "meaningful sound" has not always been the same.

Pre-Cage: meaning is found in your local culture. One culture's music is another culture's noise.
Cage: meaning is found in your personal experience. One person's music is another person's noise.
Post-Cage: meaning is found in contextualization. There is no noise, only sound that is more or less contextualized.

12/27/08: I still agree with the distinction between the three stages above. I'm less certain about "music" being "meaningful sound". By extension, "art" is anything with meaning. However, there are many things that people with pre-Cage (pre-Duchamp) — or even Cagian/Duchampian definitions of art — would call "meaningful" but not "art". The beep of a crosswalk has a meaning, but is not often called "music". Is there anything in common between Cage calling the crosswalk beep "music", and a pre-Cage audience calling Debussy "music"?

Have we ever called meaningless things "art"? Very briefly, when Cage or Duchamp were busy with 4'33" or "The Fountain". With those transitional exceptions, then, "art" is a subset of "meaningful things".

Three sets:

A Art.
M Meaningful things.
U The universal set.

Three steps (where ⊂ means "strict subset"):

Pre-Cage: A⊂M, M⊂U
Cage: A=M, M⊂U (not quite right, because of the crosswalk problem)
Post-Cage: A=M, M=U

1/22/09: Music is not necessarily "meaningful sound", but music is "named" the same way meaning is "named". Naming, and meaning, has always come from contextualization, but we've imagined contextualization differently over time.

Pre-Cage: societies are the contextualizers, deciding what is meaningful, what is music, etc.
Cage: individuals are the contextualizers (remove society).
Post-Cage: nature itself is the contextualizer (remove the individual), and humans identify subsets of these relationships.

Transcoding-based art (i.e., visualization, sonification...) and highly analogical explorations (e.g., VJing as an analog to DJing) can be heavily Post-Cage in that they acknowledge the many possibilities, and that they are sampling a subset of those relationships.

8/18/09: Attali has a note on these ideas in Noise, p 25:

In fact, the signification of music is far more complex. Although the value of a sound, like that of a phoneme, is determined by its relations with other sounds, it is, more than that, a relation embedded in a specific culture; the "meaning" of the musical message is expressed in a global fashion, in its operationality, and not in the juxtaposed signification of each sound element.

In short, while considering the origins of music, he identifies the pre-Cage contextualizers (society/culture) as bestowing meaning upon music.

Capacitive 3D Screen

2008-11-11T06:06:00.002-05:00

Lay strips of a transparent, conductive material behind a sheet of glass onto which you are rear-projecting. Use the conductive strips for capacitive sensing, and recovering distance and position from the screen.

8/18/09: This is actually really common, I just hadn't heard of it. Whoops.

Escape Time Life Visualization

2008-11-02T14:52:00.003-05:00

Use an escape time algorithm to visualize the distribution of boards for the game of life. The main issue: identifying two independent variables that can be used to generate the boards. One approach is to use subdivision: look at the {x, y} point in binary and interlace the bits.

The Same Old Song

2008-10-31T06:12:00.003-04:00

An instruction piece and concept album:

Make friends with 3 street musicians.
Record them every day for 3 weeks.
Make 3 songs, where each song consists of the 3 weeks mixed together.
Do this in 3 different cities.

April 12, 2009: The accessible version.

Slow Motion via Bandwidth Throttling

2008-10-20T14:26:00.003-04:00

Create a film meant to be viewed in slow motion. Stream it across a connection that is throttled at exactly the right bandwidth so the video plays in slow motion. Alternatively: add an element of interactivity by creating a force-sensitive sheath for the network cable running to the display computer. When a participant steps on the sheath, the bandwidth is further throttled — "choking" the network connection. Instead of creating a video, consider using YouTube videos. Every time a video loads completely, choose a new one at random.

Bring the Noise

2008-10-10T10:48:00.002-04:00

Pick a YouTube video.
Train a Markov chain on the comments.
Generate a new comment with the Markov chain.
Post that comment to the video.
Pick a new YouTube video and repeat.

Piece for Facebook

2008-09-28T16:22:00.004-04:00

Register a Facebook account.
Friend request only your real-life best friend.
Confirm every person who sends you a friend request.
That real-life best friend is not allowed to answer your request.

Two Pieces for the Louvre

2008-09-20T15:22:00.004-04:00

Cover every piece in the Louvre except the Mona Lisa.
Cover the Mona Lisa.

Craigslist Matchmaker

2008-09-12T16:43:00.001-04:00

Apply TheGreatHatsby principle to Cragslist personals. Conversations would probably have to be filtered manually.

Automated End User

2008-09-12T14:42:00.003-04:00

Record key presses and mouse movements over a long period of time for a single user. Then, simulate the user using a Markov model acting as an attractor. Variation: No modeling, just repeating. Record mouse movements and key presses while writing an application to play back mouse movements and key presses. When complete, start the playback program based on the recorded data. The program will write itself, and then execute itself, indefinitely.

Faux Stereo Video

2008-09-12T13:34:00.002-04:00

To get stereo video you normally need two cameras. Another alternative: for a static scene, move one camera in a straight line to the right and play back the video twice, with the left one delayed slightly.

The Eternal Questions

2008-08-23T21:19:00.000-04:00

I've had a text file by this name sitting on my desktop for a while. It's a big list. Here's an excerpt:

love and hate. how do you explain them? what inspires them?
humility and selflessness, and evil, sin, and pride
knowledge, and wisdom
what is god? christianity, spinoza/buddhism, hiduism, taoism and pantheism
faith as something reassuring
free will and determinism
redemption and salvation
suffering and misunderstanding
epistemology: what is the foundation of logic? does every epistemology making a negative claim contradict itself? what axioms do we start with? do we take in everything, or a subset?
desire
can we overcome confirmation bias?
what can we do? for the starving? the hurt? the egotistical?
interdependence and independence: is one an illusion?
do we have an essensce? why do we feel like we do?
morality/shoulds/"supposed to". origins and humanism
the nature of time. cosmological origins and the present (is time an illusion?)
evolution
the brain and consciousness
government and anarchy
originality and newness
naivete and optimism
sincerity
do people change? what causes people to change?

One Rule

2008-08-17T23:22:00.000-04:00

You may
grow
barter
buy
inherit
anything
except
time.

The Earth has a Rash

2008-07-16T16:38:00.000-04:00

Most Spam Ever

2008-07-01T18:39:00.002-04:00

Make a mission out of receiving spam. Distribute an email address all around the internet. Register with as many forums as possible, and make your profile public. Ask people to forward spam to you, and write to the original address indicating you would like to receive their notifications.