libfreenect

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..."

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.

Empty Art for the Web

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

Google Earth Live

"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

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.

Jesus Glitch

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

Live like you only have until the next:

1. day
2. week
3. month
4. year
5. decade
6. century

Lossy Vector Compression

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

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.

Projection Mapping with a 3D Projector

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

"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

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

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.

The Bucket Piece

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.

3D capture in performance

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.

Face the Beat

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

Full Inbox

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

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

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.

Instruction Pieces are Self Destructive

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.