Who needs to see their name in lights
when they can see it in crackers!
Updates from May, 2006 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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may
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peliom
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peliom
Turing Tables
This piece is amazing and deep.
German artist Franz John, in collaboration with sound artist Ed Osborn and programmer Brsma, makes visible this unseen data in Turing Tables.
The work:
….points instead to the consciousness that the earth is an organism, that it moves and is an organism in constant flux.
Really, I’m just posting this because it involves projecting PERL code onto the walls.
Link to press release. Turing Tables is at the Exploratorium through June 18.
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may
Reading Notes: A Year of Swollen Appendices
Because I have such a hard time remembering books that I read these days, one of my geeky habits is to circle things that resonate while I’m reading and type up whatever I’ve circled when I’m done. I then print out my notes and stick them in the book so that when I pull it off my shelf again, I’ll remember what I found interesting.
These are snippets from the last book I read, a journal that Brian Eno kept in 1995 and published the year after. I’ve never been a fan of his music. But I loved this book.
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rajbot
This is my favorite tikirobot post ever!
I’ve been working on a book preservation project, and am facinated by what previous readers thought was important or interesting. I need make a front-end that lets readers mark up the digital book, and lets other readers see those notes..
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may
that sounds really cool! let me know if you need help testing it :-)
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may, and 
may
scrapple notes
Golan Levin’s performance last Friday at the Kabuki on his super cool musical instrument / physical interface Scrapple was so intriguing that I had to dig up more info on it (and some other related projects too!) One of the things I noticed after the performance was a scrap of paper by his table which was a musical score he had scribbled before the show (and which he didn’t actually follow very faithfully but I still wish I’d taken a photo of!) I do remember however, that the first two frames looked something like this.
What was interesting to me was that inspite of my total inability to sight-read traditional music (a source of frustration when I was taking piano lessons way back when), I could sort of hear in my head what kind of sounds his scribbles and shapes might produce. Maybe because the system was so literal – it was fairly simple and worked somewhat like this
There are dots and rectangles in the sketch above but any physical object or shape could be thrown or drawn on the table (a simple whiteboard) to produce a sound! I sort of lamented not having taken any photos of the thing afterwards. Luckily, he has a paper online on how it all works.
In the process of digging up information on this, I also found some other projects that look to be pretty neat.
- reacTIVision “an open source, cross-platform computer vision framework for the fast and robust tracking of fiducial markers in a real-time video stream.” It doesn’t seem quite as elegant as Scrapple, but it’s open source!
- sonicforms another open source “research platform for developing tangible interfaces for audio visual environments.” Not a whole lot there yet, but it looks like it could be a good resource if it gets off the ground.
- A list of other tangible musical interfaces / music tables
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rajbot
I couldn’t go to the performance, but thanks for the awesome writeup!
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may
I’ll have to work harder on dragging you out next time! :-)
peliom
Blinky Umbrella
This is brilliant. An umbrella that goes blinky if it’s going to rain. Hooks into accuweather.com and is powered by a AA battery. From those crazy media lab kids.
rajbot 11:07 am on May 6, 2006 Permalink |
This is awesome! If only the ‘O’ was a pineapple….