What better way to defer the New Year than to send a message using the abstractmachine:crypt?
To use the service, simply enter the target email and your message. The abstractmachine server will encrypt your message for some random period between 1 and 365 days, after which it will decrypt the message and send it to the email address you indicated.
This encryption device can also be considered a temporally deferred postal delivery device. It can be used for new year’s resolutions, unreliable loved ones, or perhaps some horribly bad news that you just cannot bring upon yourself to deliver. Deferral can offer the necessary distance to make all of the above easier to manage.
The idea came from some far more elegant ideas Ragnar had, but lacking budget and time, we are currently in a little temporal deferral of our own. It can also be considered a response to Fabrice Gallis’ concept of the crypt as time-generating machine, i.e. another plot for slow real-time systems.
So, people have been friendly and sociable with the wrapping paper software. Lots of email, some links, a few pictures, and even a present! Here are a few of the public displays of friendliness :
Filed under: narcissus, code — Douglas Edric Stanley @ 03:41 am
While looking up some recent patents for my thesis, I stumbled upon what appears to be a new Google service, Google Patents. Now, the cliché about Google is that the first thing people do when they discover Google is they Google themselves. Well, I can’t really patent-Google myself, per se, but I can patent-Google my great grandfather William Stanley Jr. who generated over 100 patents, including the transformer and the Stanley Thermos, both of which are still in use today. In fact, all those white trashcans that litter telephone poles all over the world (and cause so many problems during heat waves) are more or less his fault. As with any invention, there are always more hands involved than those cited in the patent, but officially he does hold claim to the modern variant such as those found on telephone poles.
Now, for those of you thinking to yourselves that you can hit me up for money, neither I nor my family gain anything from this legacy other than the legacy — I’m a struggling artist after all, and haven’t even been paid yet for the last twogigs(you know who you are) — and in fact while we’re at it, I was actually going to ask you if you could spare a dime. Remember, these patents have long-since fallen into the public domain (my preferred distribution channel ;-). This is also the first time I’ve mentioned this in any public forum, mostly because I have been struggling with electricity for the past several years and have inherited none of those gifts that either William (or my father for that matter) possessed so naturally. So I’m a little embarassed to have such illustrious ancestors in a field for which I am so inept. In fact (oh, the shame of it all), I find digital circuits to be sooooo much easier to control than the type of electricity my great-grandfather used to manipulate, since in fact in a digital circuit you really aren’t concerned all that much with the actual properties of the electricity itself. It is mostly just a question of getting the right resistor in the right spot and then trying to program the controller to flip something on and off at the right moment, or of reading the state of some sensor that does most of the work for you. I.e. no physics required. But this paresse is also starting to show it’s limits, and I’ve been thinking about how best to provide myself with the means to move into more serious sensor work after the current job runs out.
It’s a real pleasure to finally have access to all these patents. I don’t have the time to scour them just this moment, but I had actually started the process of recovering his patents somewhat recently, only hadn’t found the time to uncover any more than the two or three well-known ones. I was planning on investigating the matter further in a few months. Now that Google, du jour au lendemain, has suddenly placed online over 70 accessible documents, it should make things a little easier.
And just look at these drawings. They’re exquisite:
Lame coder’s joke, okay, but it’s just to give notice that I really am busy right now and won’t be posting much during the holidays. It’s the last rush to finish my thesis which will be added to this space when it’s done. You can also follow progress on individual sections via the various links above.
It’s a little sad: back when I was studying philosophy, literature and all things wordly I used to be quite prolific; I even wrote a novel (egad!). Writing was such a pleasure then and I did it every day, often for long hours at a stretch. But writing this thesis, even if I know everything I want to say, is so… hard. Despite the little wonderful inspired moments, I just have so many distractions these days that it’s hard to find that time for myself to just close shop and get everything done.
For example, if you’re in Aix-en-Provence tomorrow, I’ll be listening to my friend Paul Devautour tomorrow afternoon, followed by a recording for Radio Grenouille where Paul, Jean Cristofol and I will discuss the current state of intellectual property. Our discussion will be broadcast in mid-January. You see? There we go again, more distractions…
Luckily I found an old love in the attic while looking for a book. Ah, at least I now have a soundtrack to keep me going; and thanks to some top-notch customer service from Bose, a new pair of headphones to shut out unwanted noise and bathe in all that soothing distortion (now if they could just do something about email).
P.S. Since I’ll be a little quieter than usual, I just wanted to take a second out and say : (ok, I’m gonna sound hokey here) I really enjoy all the emails people send me and although I reply to everyone, it sometimes takes me a few days weeks. But I love it, know that — and don’t forget to send pictures of your wrapping paper!
Our plot research group is currently high up in the clean air of the Plateau de Valensole in the Alpes of Haute Provence. Unfortunately, I’m stuck here at home writing and couldn’t free myself anymore from the schedule I’d already set for myself. So I’ll be participating à distance tomorrow via video conference from home. Seems I’m doing a lot of these sort of things recently, but of course for Plot it will be far more intimate than usual. In fact, I’m relishing the idea of teaching in the comfort of my pyjamas and a nice cup of hot tea — I think any teacher as invested as I am can appreciate the configuration. In fact, finding both temporally and spatially a human scale for real-time systems, is one of the implicit goals of plot, so we see no contradiction between serious research and a nice cup of hot tea.
One of the propositions that Fabrice Gallis made for this session was working specifically on machines that construct their own temporality, for example looking at a crypt as a temporal machine in the sense that it constructs it’s own specific durée, and even in this sense encloses that temporality within itself (I wonder what seepages might mean from such a point of view). One of the central propositions of Plot is that real-time is not an acceleration, but instead a temporal form, a sort of time-machine, if you will, generating its own emergeant temporality, but at multiple speeds, and not some ideal vector of absolute velocity. Although it’s been years since I studied with the infamous Jacques Derrida — and consider myself long since out of touch — I originally wondered if I shouldn’t crack open his Mal d’archive and see how it compares to Fabrice’s proposition. Now that I have, I regret it. One of Derrida’s gestures in Mal d’archive is to return to the originary scene of the archive where he finds a sort of ontological embalming that guarentees the dissapearance of the conserved object by its repetition, but also promises through this hypomnemic (and therefore technological) act of repetition a sort of future promise (a sort of impossible possibility). In probably the most indicative passage, he associates the archive with the historical arkhé, i.e. the archive as not only as a conservation of an origin, but also a commandement to conservation. I have no idea what to think of all this. All this talk of the Derridean concept of « promise » is so foreign, I think, to what we’re getting at here — ours is above all a Bergsonian concept of the temporal machine (there, I’ve said it). Again, it’s an affirmative machine, although in Derrida’s pseudo-romantic messianic vocabulary, he does make some interresting comments in a hilarious section speculating on what Freud’s method might have looked like if constructed atop the logics of AT&T and email. Here’s a translation I found online of this section which is closest to what Fabrice is proposing, « the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so-called news media. » Hmmm. Qu‘en penser ? Sure, okay, whatever — electronic media reaffirms to what extent hypomnema is a fundamental trait of our experience of (our) originality, and as such conditions our future (or its « possibility »). But Fabrice’s suggestion of a crypt goes far beyond Derrida’s typically not-this, not-that temporal structure, and allows us to actually construct temporal artefacts and systems. Hey, a crypt is a machine, it generates its own temporality. Easy enougj.
— Huh? Whazzahellwuzalldat for?
— Uhhhh, maybe it was just a long-winded way of saying: forget what I said at the last Plot…
Just in time for the holidays! abstractmachine.net offers you do-it-yourself wrapping paper! Charm your friends and loved ones with algorithmically designed decorations! Join the hip crowd and use the same algorithms as abstractmachine does. Try now, it’s free! Nothing could be easier. Just download the « abstractmachine wrapping paper » software from http://www.abstractmachine.net/wrap/, choose your own randomly generated motif, print, and wrap.
Please note: this software is friendly-ware, i.e. if you use it, be friendly : send an email , post a link, or best of all, send a picture (please pretty-please!) of your presents :-)
I just activated a new menu item on the abstractmachine website. It’s called the randomizer and it gives you a quick snapshot of whatever’s here. Since there is over 10 years of material floating around, some of it really obscure (and even more archival documents on their way), I needed some way — if only for myself — of occasionally landing on that material, as statistically it just dissapears once it’s past a certain date. Also people kept acting suprised when they learned about some installation or prototype I built back in 1999 or whenever.
The randomizer sits right next to the currently inactive linearizer, this latter designed to take the disparate information from the various locations of the site and linearize them recursively into a thesis. So next to a somewhat sophisticated aggregator, I liked the idea of adding an unsophisticated, but easily understandable aggregator.
I’ve noticed that I basically have two types of readers: people who drill through nearly everything, including the thesis notes which aren’t even complete yet (be patient), and those that peruse the blog from time to time and occasionally wander off into the more theoretical territory that this site was designed to cover (that’s a big « theoretically », considering that I’m still not finished). Added to that the three or four other blogs that aggregate only parts of this blog, but I have no idea what those readers are doing, so I’ll just forget about them for the sake of argument. For my own website at least, I figured it would be interesting to have an intermediary menu that would connect the two main types of activity, or at least give a soft landing into the more heady stuff.
As it turns out, I liked the idea so much, that we added a similar feature on the Aix-en-Provence School of Art website Emanuel Lamotte, Josué Rauscher, and I have been tweaking over the last year or so. It’s called the Salade du jour and gives a humorous but somewhat inaccurate snapshot of our school’s activities. Humorous because nudes are mixed in with screenshots from my Processing courses and what appears to be the occasional picture of a boyfriend or girlfriend. Innaccurate because unfortunately it’s mostly the first-year students that have been feeding it images. But whatever the case, stuff that I had no idea was there suddenly becomes visible and interresting, simply because I wasn’t looking for it. Reminding me, for those that have been hanging around for a few years, of the sadly forgotten uroulette(random for your pleasure): one of the original wonders that gave us an idea of what the web was all about. Yes, before we had Google, we used to explain the web by showing people randomly selected pages: « look, a picture of someone’s coffee percolator », « oh, someone’s diary », « hmmm…, a scientific formula », etc.
Here’s the official description: « ENIAROF is a unique concept for a new form of carnaval, or « fête foraine », mixing the logic of flash mobs, gore, digital arts, classic video games, mashups, karaoke, BBQ, cotton candy, and anything weirdly kaiju-esque on a foggy night that just wants to have fun. ENIAROF (0.1) descended onto Aix-en-Provence in March 2005, followed by Paris (0.1.1), Marseille (0.1.2) and Aix-en-Provence (0.2) in late 2006. »
And don’t forget: GamerZ (bad name, fun exhibit) is still going on until this Friday afternoon (19h00). Much of ENIAROF ended up spilling into that exhibit and vice-versa.
Videos from the arcade:
{1} « MadNES »; Manuel Braun, Antonin Fourneau, Stéfan Piat; built with NES + modified controller; {2+3} « Immortal Combat »; Jean-Baptiste Alfonsi, Thomas Cheneseau, Wael Koudaih; built with Processing + camera + beamer + boxing gloves; {4} « Cui Cui Cabaret »; Cui Cui; built with carboard box + electricity + amplification; {5} « Pitch-Pong »; Émilie Brout; built with Processing + ESS + microphone; {6} « Simulateur de reportage TF1 »; Florian Deloison; built with Processing + camera; {7} « Sade »; Pascal Chirol; built with Processing + Arduino + camera; {8} « Open Your Eyes »; Marjorie Brunet, Tomek Jarolim; built with Processing + microphone; {9} « La dialectique des cailloux »; Maxime Marion; built with Processing + ReacTIvision + Live + camera + beamer; {10} « Tout le monde s’appelle Marcel Marceau »; Fabien Artal; built with Processing + ReacTIvision + camera + beamer; {11} « TekkenDrum »; Raphaël Isdant; built with Processing + Arduino + drumkit; {12} « L’ours mal leché »; Liza Gabry, Caroline Delieutraz; built with Processing + Arduino + fluffy bear.
Images from the Flickr pool:
More videos to come from those two locations, but I have just a few weeks left to finish my thesis, so enough ENIAROFing for me.
I’m madly editing videos and posting them on the ENIAROF account on YouTube. When I’m finished, I’ll post them all here. Videos from the other attractions, for example from the AmaZiNg mUd wResTlInG or the Cabaret Cui Cui will be posted by other ENIAROFers on the same account. We have also started an ENIAROF Flickr pool and people have started adding their photos.
While you wait for all that wonderful media, you can amuse yourself here with the ENIAROF 0.2 Video Arcade Emulator. You can play it directly online here (link), just scroll down to « ENIAROF 0.2 Video Arcade Emulator » and click « PLAY! ». Or you can download the eniarof02.gba.zip file file here (link), for which you will need a Gameboy Emulator.
Don’t expect much. It’s quick & dirty and was built in my free time (not much) during the ENIAROF Workshop.
Source code will follow once I fix a little bug in the serial communication (for those using my uart.gba code, note that I am currently writing into the wrong serial register — I found the error, I just need some free time to fix it). I also need to make a nicer Processing client for GBA<>Processing communication.
Special thanks goes to Manuel Braun and Stéfan Piat who created all the icons and sweated over adapting them to the tile-constraints of the Gameboy.
I’ve just come back home from ENIAROF. As people say here in France, « c’était énorme » (and in fact we heard quite a few people say it on their way out). If you’re anywhere near Aix-en-Provence tomorrow, you really should drop by. 16h00 -> 23h00, and probably later into the night ;-)
It costs anywhere from 1€ to 6€, depending on the roll of the dice. And you get a special prize of course if you roll a six.
I don’t know how to blog it without sounding full of myself (what’s new, right?), but this year’s ENIAROF is just plain amazing. And FUN. The Eniarofers have really made something wonderful, and Antonin Fourneau’s concept has further proved its generative force. The « attractions » just kept piling up, one after the other into the night, each one more wonderfully absurd than the next and yet perfectly logical in-the-world-that-is-ENIAROF. In fact, we probably could have just stood back and watched the thing build itself, thanks to the DOGMeNIAROF and indeed much of the non-electronic attractions did just that. Karaoke and Mud wrestling was back, this time joined by a very peculiar form of concert: the « CuiCuiBox » where three performers rock out with the Amps set to 11 in a tiny cardboard box with just enough space for a few people to squeeze in and just enough headroom to pogo and headbang to your heart’s delight. Now, 2/3rds of CuiCui make up 1/2 of 8=8 (got that?), so of course we thought it was totally cool, but it really was. They’ll be there again tomorrow night, with the Amps set to 11 1/2. Promise…
But my favorite of all the attractions, way beyond our own (I’ll post videos and photos online of those once I’ve gotten a little sleep and had some time to film), was Makemoo’s « Brouette Tuning », which is nothing more than a tricked out wheelbarrow with a huge bass hooked up to an mp3. Ok, that’s funny, but damn if the thing doesn’t work perfectly to add that little extra punch to the evening. Party getting dull? Just add the « Brouette Tuning ». The wheelbarrows (in fact there were two - creating wonderful mashup possibilities) just naturally migrated through the carnaval and popped up wherever people need a big FUNKY boom bass to get things moving again. So easy to pick up a wicked wheelbarrow and wheel it wherever you want to get ’da party started.
