August 31, 2004
something random
just some left over bits from a poster:
http://noah.cx/closeness/
Posted by knowuh at 05:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
aspen photos
just a few photos from the aspen trip. notice there are no pictures of the people or the actual conference. ... maybe i can post some of those at a later time..
Posted by knowuh at 02:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 28, 2004
last day idca
so i think yesterday when i posted my update of the conference so far i might have been overly critical. its been a great conference, with maybe a few unfortunate speakers. i think yesterday i wrote my blog entry just after listening to an especially bad speaker. i might have also woken up on the wrong side of the bed.
the weather here is super sunny, and beautiful today, and t fell like the whole conference has been great. tonight we get to watch Peter Cho’s animated typography interpretation of war of the worlds. i am really excited about that.
the downfall of the conference so far (besides the occasional terrible speaker) has been the hysterically priced sandwiches. $15.00 for a sandwich. maybe that’s normal aspen prices. any way this evening is a $38.00 bbq. the food prices are ridiculous here.
so i have to say it again, aspen is completely beautiful.
this morning there was frost on the ground when i went out taking photographs. but now its very mild, and amazingly sunny. if this town was not so expensive, i would seriously consider living here.
Posted by knowuh at 07:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 27, 2004
idca update
i am having an overdose of architects presenting their work accompanied by techno tracks, and offhand remarks about beautiful women. also there is too much work about illuminating the façade of buildings, at first i thought it was interesting and cool, but literally four people have presented similar ideas.
the one talk i really liked this morning was from the folks over at graft
up until today though, i had been extreemly happy with the conference. there have been some fresh presentations.
reverse chronological summary of the conference so far:
friday morning there were:
wolfram putz, hernan diaz-alonso, and jan edler.
wolfram's talk was probably the most intersting, their company graft seems like a groovy intersection of hippy commune and ultra-chique charge you lots of money archetecture brand. their work was quite exciting, and was presented quite well.
stepping back to thursday:
Thomas Levin Princeton media professor. Spoke amazingly well about the era of surveillance, and more interestingly how media is picking up and becoming more invigorated by surveillance. It used to be the case that photographs were used to present reality, or index reality. This is no longer the case, clearly, as demonstrated by photoshop, and amazing cg imagery. This has been replaced with the notion that ‘live’ surveillance type video is ‘reality’. Also spoke about panoptical prisons, and how it does not matter in the psychology of surveillance whether or not some one is actually watching you, so much as it matters if you believe someone has the power to observe you without your knowledge. Mentioned Jimmy Vosch as an artist who works with the language of surveillance as installation work.
Christian Moeller: an artist who is all over the map. Perhaps my favorite example of his work was something he did in LA. He posted an advertisement for six news anchors. He then interviewed candidates, having them be judge on how long they could keep a pose of a believable smile. Computers mediated the judging. When the actresses could no longer hold a smile, the computer would buzz, and doc points from them. They were able to hold fake smiles for upwards of 1.5 hours.
Christian also introduced me to the music of Oscar Sala
Drew schnurr concert: infinite pianos. I might have just been impressed with the sound of five concurrent grand pianos on the stage at once. The pianists were great. Schnurrs electronic resynthesised sounds were less interesting maybe. I really enjoyed the concert. The man behind me did not, and kept sighing very loudly, and crumpling papers in his hand, and yawning, and twitching and generally made a fuss. I have a message for the world: if you are not enjoying a movie, a show, performance, or event, do yourself and the rest of the audience a favor, and leave. It made it difficult for me to focus on the music occasionally because he was such a fussy child. I had fantasies of writing ‘leave if you don’t like it’ on the back of the program guide, and handing it to mr. Twitchy. But I refrained
now way back to wed. pm:
introduction by Benjamin Bratton. I loved the way this dude stringed words together. His talk was inspiring, not because I necessarily believed that he was making sense, but because he was deriving interesting phrases at a remarkable rate. He was a comfortable speaker, who was totally into saying implausible things with alliteration. Some of my favorite benjiminisms:
The main feature, function, and product of a city is proximity.
Software is architecture.
Cities are software.
Mobile phones mean that cities are mobile.
Interface is the mediation of points of contact.
He said a lot of other cool random inspiring things that reminded me of Nicholas Negroponte.
Joachim Sauter: first of all this guy presented using the OS X finder instead of something like powerpoint. His presentation was really nice looking, and well choreographed.
* films in space. For example, took 3d model of berlin, and superimposed old movies in the locations where they were shot. Placed movie frames in the location where they were taken. Results were pixel volumes which were highly seductive.
• installations with hackers, where abandond buildings would have lights placed inside each room (sort of infront of each window). The lights were computer controlled. People could interact with buildings by dialing a phone number, entering some text.
• Some sculptural things I have forgotten.
• Theatrical piece using projectors to control the costumes of the actors. (patterns of the costumes, and colors of the costumes could change.. nothing else on the stage was affected by the costume projectors. The stage itself was animated archeological study of a WWII era bunker.
Posted by knowuh at 03:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 25, 2004
why trackbacks?
ok so i definitely am such an old man, and so not down with this whole blogging universe.
finally i asked some one to explain trackbacks to me. i am still not convinced that i actually understand what they are, or what they do, but i have some foggy notions.
mostly to test my understanding, i am posting a link here to a friends blog.
here is trevors bike ride photos
feel free to leave me educational comments.
(much tweaking of moveable type followed this posting)
Posted by knowuh at 09:12 PM | Comments (0)
idca aspen
i am in aspen colorado
it is really pretty here. like fairy-tale-land. All the trees are really tall, and perfectly christmass tree shaped. and the mountains have triangle like peaks. i could go on and on about the scenery.
i am here because john is speaking at the international design conference, so carlos and i are lucky enough to come long and attend for free.
so far the conference is fun, very small and intimate. probably less than 75 attendies are here, but everyone is very social.
i will be here until sunday. durring that time i will try and listen to speakers and possibly write some code with carlos at night. early mornings we will try and hike, bike and see sights.
the plane trip here was excellent. amazing visibility the whole way. i remember being somwhere above vermont, and thinking i could still see the arm of cape cod.
our hotel is actually a ski lodge like condo. its cute. the only thing is that it does not have a high speed internet connection, despite advertisements stating otherwise.
at the moment i am super sleepy, so i am not sure how much code i will be writing this evening.
Posted by knowuh at 08:55 PM | Comments (1)
August 24, 2004
a tiny bit of research
i have been doing some research actually. i know its hard to believe. any way, i have been reading some papers about image catogorization, image organization, and things like that. the gist of my research right now has to do with sorting and searching through digital images. part of the processes of finding images relies on the work of james dai, in tying in the common sense database and wordnet taxonomy to image keyword annotation.
in addition there is a whole lot of automatic annotation which can happen in the database. simple things like histograms of pixel values, etc. it should be easy to automatically identify an images formal attributes such as contrast, brightness, and texture.
finally my research has been dealing with how spacial metaphores and techiniques can be applied. I have been examining concepts such as image proximity, and image containment, to bring notions of aboutness, similarity, and sets to image organization and searching.
it was also brought to my attention that i should answer the question "why" why would some one want to organize and search their images. i am currently focusing on story telling and presentation.
i have been writing demo code, and creating sketches, and reading mostly. some images from the posters and code can be found here
Posted by knowuh at 10:56 AM | Comments (0)
August 20, 2004
1970's cultish fun
last night stacie and hannah and i went out to the paradise and saw the polyphonic spree. it was just like the partridge family on acid. the lead singer was, as described by stacy, like a cross between jim morrison and jesus.
i was also reminded a little of watching the lawrence welk show.
any way it was fun, and luckily the show got out early enough for me to get to sleep by around 12:00.
Posted by knowuh at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)
my beautiful morning.
this morning i woke up wonderfully and early.
i had a nice bit of bread and some chia, and was at school by like 7:00 am. this would have been a great way for me to jump start my day, however i squandered that time configuring this blog so it looked sort of like the rest of my webarific universe.
i guess i learned a few things in the process, so it was not a total loss.
hmn, apparently i am less shy now about rambling about nothing in my blog.
Posted by knowuh at 09:48 AM | Comments (2)
August 18, 2004
oldies
today has been all about listening to old (1980's) tunes.
i am not sure why, but i was craving camper van bethoven, xtc, and billy bragg.
what does that mean?
Posted by knowuh at 06:52 PM | Comments (0)
random geek tips to myself
a few quick notes to myself about today
* jave is a funny java application which allows mere mortals to create ascii art and figlet formatted text. pretty cool.
* lyX is a wyswg latex editor.
* to configure os X to allow ssh connections to forward X11 packets, be sure to edit /etc/sshd_conf and allow X11 forwarding (duh!)
* if your fink installation complains about X11, you should install the developer CD X11 libs.
* if your fink installation continues to complain about X11 try sudo dpkg -r --force-all system-xfree86 system-xfree86-42 system-xfree86-43:
* recursively getting files with wget wget -r -np (thats no parent, thats crucial) --http-username --http-password
Posted by knowuh at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)
August 12, 2004
distributing random CD's
ben and i decided to take all our cds that we used in preparing our radio show, and decorate them. so last night we stenciled all manner of stuffs onto about 30 or so cds. we took some pictures too. tonight hopefully we will be distributing them around town. this is similar to the time capsule project. more news about how it goes later this evening.
Posted by knowuh at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2004
vacationland
this summer has been so much fun for me. i think summers should be fun. i have a hard time working when the weather is so wonderful, and such wonderful people are around me. summer is time for play. this summer has been one of the best.
this weekend for example, i spent two glorious days with hannah. i can't remember what we did, because i am always dizzy and deliriously happy when i am with her. we walked a lot, and kissed a lot, and they were just two more of the most fantastic days of my life. we had brunch on a roof in charlsetown on sunday.
i took monday off. my friend andrew and i took a day trip up to the northampton area. i was visiting my stepfather, because he just opened a new bakery with his wife. the bakery looks and smells beautiful. its in florence, and apparently had a great first week. we were also visiting with our friend sarah who is pregnant. i had not seen her in a while, so that was great. we took some pictures we all went swimming and had a few great meals together. it is so beautiful out there. i can definitely imagine living out there. its so wonderful. there is a loose plan in the works to have everyone move out there together later on in life.
the only problem with my lala-land summer is that yesterday i got a sort of stern talking to from my advisor. which was a total buzz kill. it looks like i am going to actually have to start working on research soon. i actually received four frowny-face sticky notes, which i placed on my monitor. (public humiliation...)
the question is, do i hunker down and focus now, or do i enjoy summer while i still can?
Posted by knowuh at 11:32 AM | Comments (2)