This is a cross-disciplinary project about tagging online video with audiotags. I found it via John Maeda’s Simplicity Blog. Amber Frid-Jimemez -graduate researcher- and Emma Lindsay -undergraduate artist- will work in close collaboration at MIT medialab on the project. Both, the topic and the medium seem to be a very smart design decision. Check out: Emma on Relationships.
I am reading EVERYWARE, the new book of Adam Greenfield, at the moment. It is about the everywhere presence and sociocultural impact of information and technology, formerly coined as Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Communication, Mobile Computing, Ambient Intelligence. I have not finished yet, but I was very happy to find the Arduino hardware platform via Arduino Homepage this morning while reading blogs about Arts & Tec:
Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple i/o board, and a development environment for writing Arduino software. The Arduino programming language is an implementation of Wiring, itself built on Processing.
Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can be communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.
Arduino received an Honory Mention in the Digital Communities section of the 2006 Ars Electronica Prix.
Joseph Weizenbaum (Berlin, January 8, 1923) is a professor emeritus of computer science at MIT.
In 1966, he published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA which demonstrated natural language processing by engaging humans into a conversation resembling that with an empathic psychologist. The program applied pattern matching rules to the human’s statements to figure out its replies. (Programs like this are now called chatterbots.) Weizenbaum was shocked that his program was taken seriously by many users, who would open their hearts to it. He started to think philosophically about the implications of Artificial Intelligence and later became one of its leading critics.
[Source: Wikipedia]
Today I received an email kindly asking for promotion of a german movie project about this great pioneer in computer science and AI. The latest news, additional information and footage are accesible via the project’s website. The official date for the premiere of the movie is 17th of November at Friedrich-Schiller Univiersity, Jena.
I continued my previous nomadic research on phone spotting. Being in Paris I checked frequently my environment (1) while using the Metro, (2) being part of a technology-related symposium and (3) walking longer distances at urban sidewalks. Back home I checked the crowd (4) being at a live concert of Matthew Herbert. People listening to Matthew Herbert’s postmodern definition of Pop may be a very special “technophile” target group. The results are:
(1) Metro: ~ 10-15 phones with activated bluetooth
(2) Tec-symposium: >>20 (150 participants)
(3) Flaneur: ~ 3-5 (forget this in a rural place! remind: it was PARIS)
(4) Post-Pop Concert: ~ 8 (not in Paris, it was in MANNHEIM, 300 visitors)
If you are interest into this kind of research you should read e.g. the paper of O’Neill et al., Instrumenting the city: developing methods for observing and understanding the digital cityscape presented at UbiComp2006. MIT medialab is running a project on Reality Mining, too.
I was lucky enough to visit this year’s SONY CSL Open House in Paris. The lab located in Paris is the one and only european laboratory of SONY concentrating on research on the borderline between art, science and technology. The annual symposium and exhibition shows recent results of the researchers to invited people and also the public. The lab is working since 10 years on robotics, language evolution, reflexive creativity, cultural interfaces, social interaction, etc. I like to refer the interested reader to the full description of this year’s program here.
My personal highlights of the events are here, just a few snapshots and teasers:
I had the possibility to be part of Atau Tanaka’s installation Net_Dervivé. The walk thru the quartier around La Bastille looked like this from my ego-perspective. In parallel my walk and visual impressions have been recorded and visualized for the audience in a kind of GoogleMap mashup.
Kaplan explained in a great talk the motivation for a cooperation with young design students in order to develop gadgets for a Robot’s playroom - including a video of a swimming AIBO. I missed the live demo but made some pictures of AIBO’s brandnew clothes.
And finally I put my hands on the Lumen, a device for generating organic animations based on an array of movable light guides.
On saturday there had been several roundtables where experts in the field discussed on a common topic. I was part of the Robots as an interactive medium discussion which ended up in the good old issue: embodiment, pros and cons.
Unfortunately, I missed the further roundtables since I was already in a rush to meet further researchers, entrepreneurs, artists being located in Paris. Yes, the european capitol of arts and science is definitely worth a visit!
Further reading: Detailed information, people, publications at SONY CSL.
The september issue of WIRED contains the magic formula: How to build your own Web2.0 Startup!
Via: Good old WIRED.
