Something about this really bothers me and something about it really cracks me up. It reminds me of indie cinema- sorta psychadelic and out there, yet totally banal and cute. Like seventh grade whippets. Yeah, just like that.
I think i’m scared. But I also feel like I wanna go home and cut holes in a rug, put it on my head and imagine I have my own army.
Dear scary man(woman?) with a carpet on your head. Please don’t unleash your army on me for thinking you are funny. I mean ya no harm.
http://formtroopers.com/ beautiful visualization based loosely on bubble gum
Hey everyone I am going to try hard and pick back up with my life now that school is done!
I wanted to post some links to images from the final exhibit since I just got them.
I did my final thesis work on interaction design, the cyborgian state of our existence and socio-techno interaction in daily life. I looked particularly at the impact on craft, hacktivism, art and diy movements and discussed the implications on our sense of self and identity.
Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine, Quilt 2009 by Paige Saez
I Made You a Wearable Computer, I Hope You Like It, T-shirts by Paige Saez 2009
My thesis Everyday Practical Magic brings together my research in social media, experience design, and anthropology,
with my experience as a maker of material objects and hence, a facilitator of intimate exchanges
between people, objects and the media. Through the work of Donna Haraway and Clay Shirky I
outline the conditions of our political identity as cyborgs. I highlight the tremendous impact
networked cultures (mobile and internet) have had on our understanding of social ritual. I describe
three projects completed over the last four years that laid the groundwork for this paper and
my thesis exhibit.
Using Wittgenstein’s writings on meaning and use in his Philosophical Investigations, I point to the
political power of language in shaping cultural understanding of different kinds of economies.
I illustrate the work of two other like‐minded collectives; Superflex and The Center for Tactical Magic,
and clarify what happens when art‐making, cultural activism, and communication technologies collide.
Through Henry Jenkins’ work on Participatory Culture, I elucidate the hybridity of social
media and art and describe the difference between interaction and participation.
I rely on Jerry Saltz’ review of The Generational: Younger than Jesus to explain my and other millennial artists work as evidencing a trend towards anthropology,
sociology and ethnography. Then I summarize the simplistic process, yet complicated context of the
work I created for the Practical Everyday Objects exhibit. Finally, I point out that art itself is a social
media that emerged through use, and shapes the world around us.
There are a bunch of images on my flickr account here: paige’s flickr
Geek warning: This post is a bit of a total geek out but in any case here’s a bit of code that some of you might find useful. For the rest of youzes here is a pretty picture:
Yesterday I ended up writing a small piece of code to determine what timezone code a person is in. This was not as trivial as it sounds.
In fact it was a learning experience about how complex our organization of time is – living on a sphere and all. Timezone maps are not country maps, in fact time-zone maps are a complicated politic cleaving apart regions that have a minimum number of people – like some kind of crazy voronoi diagram of clusters of human populations. Country boundaries play a strong role, but timezones are more like a mold that has grown over the existing history of a landscape. Alberta has a time zone that juts into Saskatchewan just to capture one town. Argentina slices timezones horizontally towards the South Pole to conserve sunlight for farmers. Chile doesn’t give a damn and puts all of Chile in one gigantic vertical strip of a timezone – so that in the winter it is dark at 6:00 in Santiago but sunny at 6:00 in Tierra Del Fuego. In other places of the world things like small islands show up more clearly than in country maps because each island tends to be a well defined separation of human populations and thus a good opportunity to have a single time zone code. A lost history is left traced in palimpsests here of residual boundaries.
help the voronoi are invading
If you look at the zoneinfo article on Wikipedia you can get a sense of what is going on here : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoneinfo
The backstory is that the OpenBSD folks wanted help to automate configuration of timezones for installs. What we did was take the geolocation of their IP and use it to look up a timezone code.
There are 27000+ polygonal boundaries that make up the timezones. And there an odd 370+ timezones including all the various cases.
The goals were:
I did fix one bug which was that in asking MapServer to spit out .png files it was palettizing the colors into an 8 bit deep image – whereas I needed 9 bits… So I had to ask mapserver to print out a tiff. If you see any other bugs….
Here are the source files in any case:
You can build it by typing
gcc timezones.c
And you can test it running with a longitude, latitude pair – for example:
./a.out -114 53
Which should return to you a string showing the time zone you are in.
The way it works is that I read in a timezone shape file from this place
http://koordinates.com/layer/751-world-time-zones/
This was piped to the following program:
http://civicmaps.org/maps/layers.rb
Which instructed my mapserver to generate a special kind of cloropleth map – which can be seen here ( but don’t bother because it chews my machine ) :
http://civicmaps_dontbother.org/cgi-bin/mapserv?map=/www/sites/civicmaps.org/maps/x.map&service=WMS&WMTVER=1.0.0&REQUEST=map&SRS=EPSG:4326&LAYERS=lowboundaries0&FORMAT=image/png&STYLES=&WIDTH=2048&HEIGHT=1024&BBOX=-180,-90,180,90
This data file can now be used as a bitmapped query interface for discovery of unique time zone codes as done above – or as done in ruby here :
http://civicmaps.org/maps/longlat.rb
You need ImageMagick installed.
If you wish, you can convert the image into a ppm file or something and embed it directly in the C program. Or memory map it and have a query gateway to it… that would be fastest.
re-posted from Leah Buechley’s Flickr
Makerlab News! Anselm + BNMI + Mountains (Mt. Rundle)
Anselm moved to Banff to work at the Banff New Media Center. He is the lead mobile engineer in the Advanced Mobile Research Lab. The ART Mobile Lab is a research initiative created in 2005 to enable research into mobile and location-based media design, art, technology and cultures of use. In particular, they focus on media created for outdoor spaces and communities – innovative technologies, interactions, and experiences designed for remote locations from cultural heritage sites and wilderness areas to urban parks. Their primary activities include technical R&D (mainly software development for mobile devices), content creation, design research, participant ethnography and audience evaluation, and mobile media outreach and training.
He climbed Mt. Rundle and shot this video.
“this was a total of 6 hours; 4 or more hours up and then 1 to 2 hours down. i found the best place to park was literally at hole #1 on the golf course below; and this is where the trail head is ( you have to walk across the edge of the green near the spray river). the first portion of the hike is easy – to the big gully – from there it gets to be quite vertical to the top of the tree line. from the top of the treeline it is bare scree and strenuous although at least you can see your goal so that helps provide a sense of time. ”