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.

Big Wave Surfing

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

1. Pick a local monument.
2. Organize a flash mob via Craigslist.
3. Instruct everyone to take photos of the monument.
4. Everyone then uploads and tags their photos.
5. 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

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

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

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

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