July 10, 2005
James Paterson - New York City Premiere
It was great to see James Patersons work at Bitforms immediately following Flashforward here in New York. I first learned of James's unique style when I viewed a collaboration project at Flashforward in Amsterdam. Amit Pitaru, a musician and "digital tool maker" and James presented a piece that just bowled over the crowd.
There is something really organic, and fluid about James Paterson's creations. The creations flow into each other in a sort of birth to death to birth dance.
The roundness and line quality sort of remind me of things I saw as a child in the film "Yellow Submarine".
If you are in New York City, take in the show... it is well worth the visit.
Bitforms site
james paterson
drawings/prints/animation/
nyc premiere
bitforms
529 west 20th Street
NYC 10011
212 366 6939
Posted by flashicon at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)
July 08, 2005
FlashForward NYC 2005 Finish
The FlashForward conference at the New Yorker Hotel wrapped up today. I can honestly say that it was the strongest conference yet, every year there is fantastic work but this year seems to be one of those years where new ideas and technologies are coming to the community. The addition of two Processing talks(processing.org) to the event seem to indicate that Actionscript may be hitting a wall, especially in the areas of physical computing.
Elegant and powerful Actionscripter Erik Natzke did a presentation of his work over the past 5 years and how is has evolved over that time. One of the funniest bits of Erik's talk was his tweening project that spanned hundrends of layers in a very complicated animation. Natzke's move to coding animation seemed to make all the difference to his work.
Always a pleasure to attend, Conratulations Stew and Lynda for putting on a great conference.
Posted by flashicon at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
July 06, 2005
Processing takes center stage at FFNYC
Another year another FlashForward here in New York City. FlashForward is always a great place to share and learn what is going on within the New Media community.
So what is new this year above the usually great work, is the introduction of processing into the mix. Processing is an open, vibrant community that has the ethos of reactionary thinking.
The learning of programming has never been natural to me as an artist, Amit Pitaru's analogy today of processing is the pencil of programming vs. Flash being more like an "oil brush". According to Amit, Processing is the best place to start to learn programming. Processing is used in NYU's ITP Graduate schools to do rapid prototyping as well.
Tom Igoe's presentation on physical computing had some very interesting stuff with processing and cameras. My favorite bit was the tracking of a cursor to the color in an image. This opens up so many possibilities with interacting with any hardware.
Posted by flashicon at 11:43 PM | Comments (0)
June 25, 2005
Live8
This is wonderful endevour to check out and tell your friends about.
Posted by flashicon at 10:36 PM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2005
ITP Spring 2005 show fantastic!
OK, well... I wanted to see what students are up to by attending the NYU ITP program and I am happy to report that the show was absolutely fantastic. I really have my work cut out for me.
First of all the work mirrors the NYU/ITP experience. Many of the projects come out of the discipline of specific courses, like "Networked Objects"... others come straight out of experiences with Physical Computing.
The Fourth Floor of the Tisch building is a bit like mad science meets NBA finals. The wooden floors and the monitors and computer parts everywhere give the impression that most of the exibits are freshly soldered or programmed minutes before the presentations.
After entering the space I quickly found the "Quote-O-Matic", This project relies on scanning bar codes from everyday household products, visitors are were encouraged to bring non-perishable canned food -- both to help demonstrate the project, and also to help feed New York's homeless.
James G. Robinson's whimsy was evident in the functioning of this project. I scanned a can of Cambell's Chicken with Rice Soup and came up with this quote:
"Sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn't roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don't wnat him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good dead ain't ever forgot. I never see papa when he didn't want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway." - Mark Twain
OK, so that was a bit deaper that I wanted to go, but it was an interesting link between the grocery store description and a database of quotes.
I wanted to get a minute with Yarbus 1.0 author/programmer Jason Babcock. I wanted to ask him some questions about the capabilities of Yarbus in regards to sensing blinks as mouse clicks. The combination of his software, cheap camera glasses and some sort of settings for distinguishing between a simple blink and maybe a longer "wink" might allow patients with severe strokes to communicate with a mac laptop and a pair of $100. camera glasses. Talk about your interactive telecommunications!
My next stop was at the Visual Heart Music project by Mark Buccheri. Mark had what looked like a stethascope hooked up to a laptop with his program running sound from your heart to a visual display of vectors in a kind of "Spirograph" geometry that changed with the heart rate of the user. I sat in what looked like an adirondack chair and quickly found out that my heart rate was pretty pathetic... all in all it was a really interesting project: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~mb1328/thesis/
Anyway, way too may project to blog about in one night. I will be trying out many sites, cel phone apps and other things presented tonight in the following day and this conversation will be ongoing...
Cheers to the ITP folks who kicked butt tonight!
Posted by flashicon at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)
May 03, 2005
NYU ITP Thesis Show on...
Thesis week is on for the ITP program at NYU and the presentations are really great. Here is the link: http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis. The very first presentation this afternoon was by Jason Babcock and his eye tracking software "Yarbus" here is his description: http://itp.nyu.edu/thesis/detail.php?firstname=&lastname=Babcock
There is something intrinsically interesting in where the human eye focuses in our travels. Jasons presentation briefly outlined the history of eye tracking and the current solutions for industry and commerce that cost tens of thousands of dollars. By his own description Jason worked with eye tracking for some six years, and that interest lead him to ITP and culminated in the project that took 6 weeks to complete. The solution was software based on OSX. Apparently there are many solutions for eye tracking for the PC, but this is the first for the mac.
In his demonstration Jason donned a pair of light clear sport glasses with a small camera attached and fired up the software on a Powerbook. In just a few minutes he succeeded in calibrating the software to his own eye and then immediately the software showed a small cross hair that landed on whatever the eye did.
Jean-Marc Gauthier brought up the question of whether the software was suitable for medical application such as surgery. Jason replied that the frame rate was not quite fast enough nor the accuracy up to that kind of use, but there seems to be many other possibilities. The interesting thing is that Jean-Marc did a presentation at the IMC Expo that showcased a small piece that he put together that approximated the way the eye is focused sharply in the middle of our vision and gets a bit fuzzier around the periphery.
Jason also showed the way X and Y position data could be exported for other uses. I would love to see a sort of paint program for the eye that traces the path of the exported data and perhaps changes thickness or color of line as it spends more time in a certain part of a "canvas".
The quality of the presentations seems to be quite high this year with many interesting postulations. There are other great ideas that came out today but I am most interested in Jason's software "Yarbus".
Read more on his site: http://stage.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~jsb314/blog.html
Posted by flashicon at 09:39 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2005
IMC Show Brilliant!
It is an absolutely incredible day here in Manhattan... The Interactive Multimedia Culture Show IMCExpo is just about wrapping up at the Chelsea Art Museum, catch it until the 23rd of April.
Most of the work is by students and alumni of the NYU ITP, there is a really beautiful mix of works ranging from kinetic pieces like The Wave Machine to Inhye Lee's accessible toy-like ZZMB. The work is a prelude to the upcoming ITP Spring show, with many projects in the wings.
One of the really encouraging things for me to hear was that many of the projects had moments of failure, or rather non-working states and that the environment of the ITP is welcoming of this kind of risk and struggle. The creators/students were all really great.
More review to come later when I have more time to journal.
Posted by flashicon at 02:20 PM | Comments (0)