Shooting Wide Open

Washington Post, A Gadget’s Life

The Post has a cool little interactive graphic on how different gadgets sales have trended since 1980. MP3 players have trended down and digital cameras have plateaued now that smartphones are on the rise. The radio DJ in me found it fascinating that even though boomboxes and tape players have pretty much died, there is still a healthy if unimpressive number of radios sold, and radio prices haven’t fallen nearly as much as that of other devices.

The only things that have steadily increased in this period are computers and camcorders (guess multifunction devices are too expensive or still not that good).

In this vein, here’s a video in which small French kids try to make sense of old technologies like floppies and vinyl (“an old CD,” which I suppose is true) that are less than 30 years old:

(Thanks Jenni!)

Trimpin: Sound of Invention

Sound and electronic artist Trimpin (New Yorker profile) came in to talk to my video art class, and we did a short little performance on the spot that turned out to be similar to one of his early pieces. We brought in various sound-making objects and as Trimpin tapped on the keys of a typewriter, we made our sounds for our respective keys. It was fun, if a bit imprecise, as fleshy humans are known to be… I think I might use the footage of the typewriter for an unrelated video.

Afterward, he talked to us about his work, which he thinks of mainly as sound art, but which usually involves complex set-ups of analog and digital objects assembled to be interactively auditory. The most memorable one for me was also the silliest – he tells of finding a cannister of recording wire and, unable to find a player for this obsolete technology, of outfitting a small unicycle clown toy with a little backpack holding a tiny amplifier speaker with a the head from a record player trailing behind the clown. He then held the wire taut across a room and let the clown cycle down its length, playing what was recorded on the wire as it went, with varying levels of intelligibility depending on speed. That to me is a great example of how simply we can alter and rework technologies and presentation of media if we just thought hard enough (creatively enough?) about it.

In a similar work, he makes metal shavings, mixes them with alcohol and paints the stuff onto a regular sheet of paper. After it dries, he uses a record head from a record player attached to a mic to record his voice onto the paper by simply moving the head across it. Viewers can then use a play head to move across the paper and hear his voice on headphones. So simple! I love these little things more than his large scale projects, the most widely known one being the guitar sculpture in the Experience Music Project in Seattle. The smaller projects seem less about impressiveness than about illuminating underlying principles, which to me has always been the more striking experience. So what if something is huge and expensive if it doesn’t really change your perception of things, doesn’t give you a new way of looking at things?

For him the week was a week of giving slideshows all over campus multiple times per day, and he seemed to appreciate the more active, spontaneous (and noisy!) interaction in our class. Next quarter, he’s co-teaching a course with Terry Berlier to build a bunch of the structures that will be used in the performance of Gurs Zyklus in May, and I’m really hoping to be in it. Terry’s teaching my sculpture class this term and is a fun instructor – the two of them together is irresistible. I hope I signed up in time. His description of the project is utterly discombobulating in the best way: fire organ, water drops spelling out names, steam, sound… !!

What!

We have built a camera that can look around corners and beyond the line of sight. The camera uses light that travels from the object to the camera indirectly, by reflecting off walls or other obstacles, to reconstruct a 3D shape.

The device has been developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group in collaboration with Bawendi Lab in the Department of Chemistry at MIT. A laser pulse that lasts less than one trillionth of a second is used as a flash and the light returning from the scene is collected by a camera at the equivalent of close to 1 trillion frames per second. Because of this high speed, the camera is aware of the time it takes for the light to travel through the scene. This information is then used to reconstruct shape of objects that are visible from the position of the wall, but not from the laser or camera.

Sounds completely kooky, but you can’t ever underestimate those wizards at MIT.

Now is the time. The time to get rid of real singers in favor of holographic projections. Of course this has to happen in Japan… We can only hope that motivational speakers and politicians are next. Maybe even CEOs.

I just had to post this after I saw android actors on Conscientious Redux

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

In all of these Carr-like articles we are talking about constant new digital stimulation, right? Not simply use of devices to, say, do work. It’s not really so much digital stimulation as stimulation period? If that’s the case it seems as with many things, to come down to an issue of self-control and discipline, whether you can resist the draw of the internet for the sake of your own health or sanity…

I saw this on Engadget: (Chinese comprehension recommended but not required for those who like to decipher graphics)

Apparently China is about to build huge buses that basically swoop over passenger cars, carrying riders on a raised level. The video of a short presentation given by one of the, I assume, design team claims that the vehicle can track white lines on the road and thus does not need rails. Supposedly each vehicle can also carry up to 1200 people, if I’m understanding him correctly. That sounds a bit high, and makes me wonder how the cost scheme is going to work if they don’t run at full capacity most of the time. Not to mention how in the world sidewalks would accommodate that number of people waiting for one. Sounds like it would take a good 15 minutes just to load one.

But if they can get the kinks and the accident prevent worked out (driving in China isn’t exactly orderly, and I assume they’d need to implement a truck lane), it’s a clever plan to take advantage of existing infrastructure to reduce pollution. I doubt it’d really reduce the amount of passenger car traffic though.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to see any on my trip since I won’t be in Beijing, but even if I was, they are hoping to have the tech side of things wrapped by late August and begin construction by the end of the year, so I’m too early for once. Cross my fingers that there’ll be something on it at the Expo though.

What would you call this sort of vehicle? In fact, if you have a clever name for this thing, drop a note by the end of the month and the cleverest name gets this little volume (catalog to this exhibition). (I’m sure it already has a name, but I bet it’s not clever.)

A little fledgling program called Color a Sound, which uses pictures drawn on transparency to trigger sounds. It’s not overly impressive at this point, but I’d like to think that with a little more development, it could result in some creative musicking.

Color a Sound from blair neal on Vimeo.

At the least, tech makes consumption more about making and less about out of the box. Reminds me of Marc Levoy’s Frankencamera (watch out! web 1.0 site coming up!), which NPR
did a little piece on last year. It’s not what most people have time or patience for, but who knows what weird efficient things we’ve got up our own sleeves.

Either way, I really like the idea of the Edit button in programs. Instead of just being able to set certain parameters for predefined functions, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to change the function in a fundamental way? I suppose if your programming chops are good enough you can do that now by designing your own stand-alone program, but I’m hoping this will become easier for laymen. It’s not quite there yet, but the idea is seeping into consumer programs like Max for Live.

Combine this with the touchscreen technology (Max for iPhone?) and it could all get very visually appealing and interesting.

Hey, computers weren’t all that impressive when they first came out either. We’re still at the beginning of things – you don’t tell a five year old that his drawing sucks, right? Check back in 10 years…

A couple of months ago I peeked in on the public demo portion of a Tech x Journalism iPad app developing workshop given by Hacks/Hackers. While most of the apps were useful in a way that didn’t really push the envelope that much, one that wasn’t so realized stuck with me the most. It’s called Ephemera – the idea is to insert user generated visual info into Google Maps.

The idea is specifically centered around ephemera like menus and event posters that have some sort of nostalgia value or are quaint to look at, but to me the broader idea is more interesting. How can we organize and make searchable not just ephemera but photos of locations in a way that is easy to search on the time dimension? Don’t you wish you could go to Google Maps and enable some sort of historical search that would tell you whether your dry cleaners used to be an independent arts space?

Maybe I’m assuming this is more appealing than it actually is, but I think it would be very powerful to search visually by time as well as space. It’d certainly be useful to some extent in researching cultural topics, serving as a sort of window into spatially overwritten history. It’s not applicable to the far past, but I wish it was – I was researching the John Day fossil beds before my Yellowstone trip and wanted to focus on the period of time from 20 to 14 million years ago. It was surprisingly hard to narrow down results in any meaningful way. (Too bad the Google search parameters don’t allow you to enter millions of years… What websites were the apatosaurs community reading?)

With something like this though, execution is key; I don’t think we can just lay Flickr over Maps and leave the viewer to sort through thousands of photos per address. Wiki time indexed database of photos?

I been learning the ropes on a stereo Holga, but in the process of acquiring one I looked at a lot of possibilities, including the Loreo 3D converter and an old Pentax beam splitter. None of them really seemed all that worthwhile considering how bulky and optically meh they were. But then there’s the other extreme – cutting apart and welding two cameras together, which seems a bit overkill when you consider what older technology is out there (via Horses Think).

As for viewing the images, it’s a bit costly to shoot slides for slide viewers, so I’m leaning toward the old fasioned stereoscope with printout cards. There is of course, cross-viewing by naked eye on a computer screen, but somehow it always leaves me feeling even more ridiculous to Ooo and Ahhh cross-eyed in front of a computer than to Ooo and Ahhh while a gigantic wooden structure sits in front of my face.

Click through these two presentations and you get a pretty good sense of the web today. First, the first five slides of this article on the weak spots of tech giants pretty much sum up the tech world today in a few sentences. As for the first assertion that Google doesn’t get social networking, I’d add that the reason Google doesn’t get social is that Google doesn’t get user interface. Changing settings in Gmail or Docs or any of the apps is painfully Web 1.0. C’mon Google, what’s with the ugly unintuitive interfaces?

Then there’s that Netflix internal presentation about the future of the company, its competitors, and different content delivery systems – streaming vs ad-based free (ie Hulu), etc. Most presentations are boring, but this one is a page turner.

Content distro

A couple of interesting little details are buried in there – apparently they are in favor of a 3-strikes type law against piracy, but at the same time, want to push for net neutrality to ensure the best broadband speeds for every potential customer. Ah, complicated corporate motivations. But more importantly, now that they’ve gotten big into the back catalog streaming business and have their eyes set on mobile users, they consider all sorts of content providers to be competitors. Interesting how Google, Hulu, Apple, Amazon and Netflix all seem to have similar designs on dominating the selling of content, but the social apps are relatively unchallenged still. It’s been Twitter and Facebook for a while now, with no hint of anything changing.

The difference seems to be that the content these companies are wrangling for is for the most part top-down type content. Produced, polished, and with some significant financial backing, while the content on social networks is user-generated and personal. Hence Zuckerberg’s big privacy fiasco.

User-generated

So where does user-generated public content stand? There are venues to host this type of content aside from Youtube or Vimeo, Flickr or blogs and the like? Netflix certainly doesn’t think that content separate from these large hub-like stores has a chance, even with big budget movies like Avatar. Is the divide really that entrenched? You’ve made something that’s not meant to be purely personal, yet you’re either drowning in a mass of bad Youtube videos or you plug into a Big Player to distribute. At the moment, viral videos aside, there’s no getting around the fact that as always, we want some sort of filter for quality control, not to mention there’s a social benefit to watching popular content – you can talk about it with other people. If everyone climbed into their own little niche, the only place we’d find a community of likeminded people who’ve seen what we’ve seen would be the net.

More uniform web standards (a la Apple’s attempt with HTML5) is one step toward standardizing pooled content for all platforms, but that seems to only help with the problem of making content look palatable, not with finding viewers once it is. Or is it? Perhaps I’m just a bit too short-sighted to see where this can go. Tantalizing as they are, mobile content-consumption devices like the iPad don’t necessarily change where we we get our content from. I want a way to browse a collection like Youtube and filter for subject as well as aesthetic taste or quality standards without resorting to deference to the Big Players. For example, with graduation on the horizon for some of my peers, how might I be able to find short films made by MFA documentary film students all over the country without having to know of and search for each director individually?

Where’s the Hub?

This goes back to some of the ideas and questions raised in our collaborative blogging endeavor about the future of photobooks – how will distro work and how will artists monetize in the land of self-publishing? It’s that same debate about the indies vs the gatekeepers. I’m afraid that at least in the near future, the only way to make a living as a content-producer is still to distribute via a Big Player, at least until you are fairly (very) well-established. I’ve mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand, putting your content in other people’s hands is risky (albeit, let’s face it, relatively low risk for most), but on the other hand, I know people who keep their “serious” stuff off Flickr and I’m not sure what to think since for us, it is more likely to be seen on Flickr than when it’s sequestered in the “safe” cave of the website of a relative unknown, where you no longer have the Flickr community to tap into. Seems like a shame.

Furthermore, how do we prevent Big Players from trawling little pools of creativity and siphoning off the cream to use for their own profit? There seems to be no defense for someone more high profile reworking an idea put forth initially by an unestablished individual. But I suppose that has always been the case, and it’s why people tend not to think out ideas or works in progress publicly. It’s less of an issue when you debut a completed work, more of an issue when you are working through ideas. It’s too bad, but on that point I am willing to cede defeat. Human nature, you win.

Semantic isn’t enough

The more general question is about the processes we employ to find “good” content. Where are the filtering and sorting tools that allow me to connect with individuals whose existence I’m completely ignorant of? When, essentially, do we get a real live working semantic web in which I can search for pure content and not just keywords or abstractions?

But we also need more than just the semantic web. For the most part we seem pretty unable to get away from a linear greatest hits/top ten/best of mentality, and the more I think about it, the more it seems influenced by the structure and weighting of search results. Does it matter that there are 423,985,239 results if nobody goes past the 3rd or 4th page? Google’s algorithm may have been groundbreaking years ago, but now that the semantic web is starting to circle for landing, it’s looking a bit old. I’m not sure that we can utilize a super content-aware web optimally without new ways of displaying organizing and thinking about search results. Why don’t we have more cloud-like results where spacing and size matter, and transparency, layering or toggling screens a la Spaces plays a role? There’s a lot of room for design at this table – visual literacy applied to information and data? This does seem like a problem that devices like the iPad can help solve.

(Thanks to Todd Walker for the links to many of these things.)