abstractmachine

Ok people, you can stop sending me emails about Microsoft Surface. I’ve seen it already. And as I mentioned in this interview and this one the experimentation phase of interactive surfaces is over. Everyone knows that Microsoft is the pretty much the last cog in the technology wheel. When they’ve figured it out, well that means that just about everyone else has already figured it out some time ago.

I love that historical timeline on the surface web page. NO REALLY EVERYONE, LOOK, WE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE THE IPHONE. NO, HEY, WHY ARE YOU LAUGHING? IT’S TRUE! The funny thing about Microsoft is that they are still actually sincere after all these years. They just don’t get the joke. They really do think that they have invented all these technologies, only they just weren’t savvy enough to make people realize it. For example, to them, OS X’s interface is actually a rip-off of ideas they were already working on in Vista and not the other way around. Back in my little bubble world, we digital artists are always suffering from the same illness — it’s in fact our favorite sport (oh, I was doing that years ago) — but it’s even funnier to see one of the richest companies in the world fretting over their public image: gosh, if people only knew!

But kidding aside, this is a really good thing. I said in the above interviews that when Jeff Han’s solution was shown, it was officially over for surface innovation. I called them Hypertables, Hypersurfaces and Object Oriented Objects, MIT people called them Things That Think amongst other terms (and ages before me), and then before all that there was Bill Buxton and Myron Kruger. So none of this is new. But what we needed was a starting block, a sort of ok, fiddling’s over, time to use this stuff. Jeff solved the fundamental visual-gestural language, and all we had to do from there was to start using it.

I also should mention here what got cut out of the Fast Company interview, in response to the question « are hypertables the replacement for the keyboard/mouse combination? » My answer to that was « look at the Wii ». You cannot seperate the iPhone introduction from the introduction of the Wii controller. Both are looking to phsyicalize algorithms, make algorithms maleable physically, and as far as that goes, the field is still wide open. Keyboards and mice are still workable, so they probablly won’t die, no, beacause people will be writing things for a long time to come. Neither the Wii, nor the iPhone, to Surface, will help you write your blog. Maybe your video blog, but not your text blog.

Or maybe a million little things will complement the keyboard and mouse, or maybe just a half-dozen solutions will turn out to be modular enough to solve most of the things we will want to do. Or maybe Cronenberg is right, and it’ll be your body itself. But in my opinion 1) phyiscal objects are good for abstract thinking, and 2) no single object will be fully modular enough for all uses. There will not be one single system, although touch will indeed solve quite a few of the old ones. But whatever the case, the interfacing will require interfacing algorithmically. And when it comes to interacing algorithmically, nothing beats the Rubik’s Cube.

So now are finally seeing real-world hypersurfaces that we can work with. Personally I was expecting Apple to solve the commercialization problem first, and maybe they will. With that $5000+ tag, Surface still feels like vaporware. But I don’t think Microsoft will have any problems shipping at the end of the year as they predict. Trust me, this is very easy technology. For my installation at the Pompidou Center in 2004, for example, I solved my lighting problem with a 5€ bathroom lamp from the BHV down the street. Now, if I can make Hypertables with household appliances, Microsoft can probably commercialize the thing with more professional processes.*

I’m also intrigued that so many people are offering the same solution. That more or less solves the patent problem right there.

Also, Vista is running behind Surface, and while I think Vista is oh-so Mac 10.2 (which is still just a fancy NeXT machine), it’s ultimately great news that there’s a boring old operating system sitting under that coffeetable. Running Processing or Flash or vvvv or whatever on top of it shouldn’t be all that hard.

This is going to sound bad, but personally I’ve got about a five-year start on what works and what doesn’t in these touch-contexts, and plenty of ideas that have just been waiting for the technology to become a reality. But I’m also a little bored with it as well, so we’ll see if I invest a new round in this technology. Our crew has it’s work cut out for it whatever the case: neither Microsoft, nor Apple, nor Perceptive Pixel for that matter, have proposed any tangeable experience with this technology. So far, we’re just talking about « interfaces ». So artists still have a lot to offer in this field.

So thanks Microsoft. I guess I’m trying to say thanks for being so reassuringly tweed coat and making this technology feel like Daddy’s old jalopy…

The abstractmachine:synchronizer is the latest of the practical, rapidly developed, small-scale algorithmic tools that I’ve been working on as of late — along the lines of abstractmachine:wrap, abstractmachine:crypt, and abstractmachine:background. Like those programs and protocols, it was designed to be a machine that you could use in some practical capacity, despite its particularities ;-)

The idea is very simple: each participant downloads a plug-in for Firefox from the abstractmachine website and installs it into their browser. Once loaded, this system allows for people to navigate their browsers collectively, with each click onto a new page or site carrying the entire synchronized community along for the ride. Collective navigation, synchronized surfing (hey, sounds like an olympic sport), active/passive web flanerie…

From the documentation: The Synchronizer is a system for synchronizing browsers. It allows all of its users to synchronize with each other by literally « getting everyone on the same page ». Pages are called « settings » so as to emphasize the temporary and spatial nature of collective travel. When a user changes a setting by entering a new url, this changes the collective setting for everyone else; i.e. everyone’s browser moves to the new setting.

For more information, and detailed installation/usage instructions: head to http://www.abstractmachine.net/synchronizer, ou aller sur http://www.abstractmachine.net/synchroniseur pour les instructions en français. Also note that while the instructions are only in French and in English, the plug-in itself contains several languages, including Polish(!) and Icelandic(!), and more should be on the way soon. Translation participation is welcome. Contact me for details (it’s only a couple of lines, nothing special).

Please note that this is a public beta, and although we have already tested the system for the past month, we have only done so as a small group and not all that professionally. Don’t be suprised if real-world use with many more synchronizers doesn’t reveal some hidden design flaw. Be sure to post comments here for any suggestions/complaints you might have.

And finally, for those that want to access the backend of this system, for example in order to create some dynamic client in Flash ;-) or Processing, there are full instructions on accessing the public API at http://www.abstractmachine.net/synchronizer/backend.php.

Note to readers. Please observe that I am just about to condemn myself from all future speaking engagements by unabashedly biting the hand that feeds; even worse — coward that I am — from the comfort of my little countryside home, after-the-fact, far from stone’s throw. Whatever. Let the chips fall where they may. Some things just have to be said.

I’ve just gotten back from a very strange festival, of the likes I’ve been avoiding for quite some time: Flash Festival, a very well-produced, well-intentioned festival + prix, but with an absolutely vaccuous artistic core. It suffered from being what in French can be considered the worst of all insults: gentil. I say « gentil » and « vaccuous » not because of the invited artists — I have nothing but esteem for many of the speakers, amongst them Christophe Bruno, Michael Sellam, Jean-Louis Boissier, entre autres. But in reality these artists had very little to do with the themes and orientation of the festival, which for its part seems above all to revolve around that very ambiguous thing: the artistic prix. And when it came to the actual prix itself, and the artistic values it defended, I am here to say here are the nails, and if you don’t have the courage to do it, give me the hammer and I will nail that coffin shut for you.

Oh and, as much as I like anonymes, it’s not « net art », which is normally spelled « net.art » by the way, even if in 2007 most people have more or less dropped the term. Net.art traditionally maintains a critical approach to the web as a medium, or form, not just as a means of distribution. Please, oh pretty please, can we bury the cultural CD-Rom past of France once and for all? Maybe we could call Mexico and see if they have any room left next to the landfill with all the E.T. 2600 cartridges. There is still this echo of desire that the web will become a pure means of transmission of cultural artfacts, i.e. what in France is called édition: books, magazines, comic books, music, cinéma, … Works that can only be approached from the point of view of its « content », and for which the technological underpinnings have become ubiquitous or banal. The current political climate seems to reinforce this view, making it all the more incompatible with the web 2.0 (or call it what you will). The technological field is still shifting and has not yet coalesced into any one format. I have mentioned it before here, and I will mention it here again and again, but the current powers-that-be are trying to form a wall around content-based media precisely because it is terrified of new algorithmic forms of expression.

At one point, someone for whom I have too much respect to name here, got up on stage and commended the festival for being one of the « last few » to defend works of this sort. Perhaps it should, in fact, be the last. While I know it’s sometimes hard to hear, and we would all like to assume some larger conspiracy, the fact of the matter is that it is also just as often the case that artistic institutions die because it was their time to do so, and that there is some public money that is better spent elsewhere. Most of the Flash-inspired festivals have either died, or matured into something far more complex than some Adobe love-fest.

As for some of the comments I made during my talk on the proximity+distance double-step artists need to maintain with industry, a few clarifications are in store. For one, let it be known that I think that Flash is a great animation program, perfect for people wanting to make stuff like this. It’s also great for cool on-line stuff like this. And during the awards there was a very slick site that won the commercial category: crazyhorse. I can without reservation see the use of Flash for all that stuff. But this is not what Flash is being groomed for. It is currently in the middle stages of a full-scale assault as a closed platform for protected content (ignore recent open-source annoucements, c’est du bluff). And as a platform, it not only is wrong-headed, it is out-and-out dangerous. Can someone explain to me why Microsoft/Explorer has nothing but haters for all the damage it did to the web back in the 90’s, whereas Adobe/Macromedia/Flash has nothing but admirers? Flash is not just about animation anymore, it is about the « full experience ». Are graphic designers really that myopic? The commercial strategies of the two platforms (concerning the web at least) are exactly one and the same: dominate the landscape and become the de-facto web standard, only privately owned. A private standard for the public. A strategy based on protocols as the nexus of control. Are we really that politically naïve?

Also, a word of advice on the role of sponsors in artistic institutions. Many people asked me about this after my talk (cf. Etienne’s comment). I’m all for sponsors — who isn’t? — it’s an absolute win-win for everyone. But there are limits on what that sponsorship gets you.

To explain myself, let me tell you a story about a childhood friend of mine: Jonathan. Jonathan just stepped down from over a decade of stewardship of one really kick-ass festival for digital video shorts. Everyone knows this festival. It’s been all over the world. It’s got a magazine. It dominates the landscape in its own way. Now, I know Jonathan very well, I should because the two of us started our own television show when we were just 16 years old. And back then, he already knew exactly how to work with sponsors. When to say yes, when to say no. Back when we were 16 he was convincing music companies to give us exemptions for music video fees, and he was sending back the tapes of the synthpop wannabies the labels were trying to push on us. He’s got guts that guy. So ten years later, it came as no suprise to me to learn that he had quit what was quickly becoming a world-renowned festival, in part because his partner lacked artistic integrity. As just one example, Apple wanted stage-time to present whatever software it was presenting in the 90’s — in return for the large donations it was making to the festival. I give you this, you give me that, right? Wrong. While his partner caved in, Jonathan knew right away that it was poisoned fruit, promptly quit and started his own festival, leaving the previous one in the dust. Lesson? Street cred and artistic integrity goes a lot longer than you might suspect. People can smell a dirty deal, even Apple, who quickly decided to back Jonathan’s new festival.

You would figure that the Centre Pompidou would balk at inviting Adobe on their stage not only once, but twice. I can understand the pairing in other contexts, like Siggraph, or whatever, but not at the Pompidou. This is not a trade-fair, this is an arts center. They don’t need that kind of funding, do they? They already funnel a huge chunk of the public arts budget already, they can’t be that desperate. I might be wrong on this, maybe Kodak or Canon demo their new cameras at the opening of each photography collection at the Museum of Modern Art, or give out free prints to the participating artists (yeah right). Or perhaps we could look at existing hybrids such as the Hugo Boss Prize — but even there I have a hard time imagining models walking around the opening at the Guggenheim with the new underwear collection. Well, now that I think about it, that might be funny. I’ll have to see if Victoria Secret has its own arts competition…

So let that be a reminder that we need to be techno-power conscious just as in previous battles we needed to have a class consciousness. Today, class consciousness has become public final class consciousness (lame coder’s joke), i.e. an understanding of the social role of programming structures and their function in shaping discourse. Within this context, artists are neither neutral, nor necessarily in a position of inferiority. Processing nicely held its own yeasterday, and I thought it looked pretty damn slick next to Adobe’s offerings. Especially the OpenGL stuff, the PDF examples (more Adobe there), and its interfacing with robotics and sensors of all sorts. Sure, Processing’s built on Java, and that wasn’t officially open-sourced until only a few months ago. Maybe Sun is just a lame competitor to Adobe, and open-sourced because they had to. Maybe. But we still need to be very careful in the current political climate, especially here in France. Meanwhile Silicon Valley itself is embracing open-source en masse (and gasp as an economic model!) while most of the big media companies (outside of the big French holdings) are dropping DRM like it was the plague. Allez la France, encore un effort!

I’m preparing for my presentation on Processing this Sunday at Flash Festival 2007. For this conference I’ve adapted a very sturdy presentation system I started in Lingo way back in 2000. The conversion has been relatively painless, except for the occasional details.

Thanks to Marius Watz and VitaFlo I’ve been able to make a nice Mac OS X full screen application that can open other windows on top of it. Usually Processing runs full-screen applications Java-style, i.e. on top of all other windows, including the dock & menu. But since I want my Applet to be a launching-pad for several websites, videos, and applications, I needed a different solution. Marius’ proposition only removes the menu & dock; this allows for many different solutions for what I want, several of which I’m exploring this week.

But one thing that was bothering me was the operating system’s imposed drop shadows. Mac OS X adds these love-em-or-hate-em shadows for a pseudo(d*3) look, but because of my design choices I wanted them gone. I first tried Window Shade X, but that was lame because it’s a system-wide hack. When you think about it, it’s just a simple application parameter; for example, applications built directly in Apple’s Cocoa environment have drop-shadows as an option that you can just check off from within Interface Builder:

So after a quick search in Apple Developer Forums on removing drop shadows in Java, I found the following code that is fairly easy to adapt to any Processing Applet :

import com.apple.cocoa.application.NSApplication;
import com.apple.cocoa.application.NSWindow;
import com.apple.cocoa.foundation.NSArray;


public void setShadow(String windowTitle, boolean isShady)
{
  final NSApplication application = NSApplication.sharedApplication();
  final NSArray windows = application.windows();
  Enumeration e = windows.objectEnumerator();
  boolean done = false;
  while (!done && e.hasMoreElements()) {
    NSWindow w = (NSWindow)e.nextElement();
    if (w != null && windowTitle.equals(w.title())) {
      w.setHasShadow(isShady);
      w.invalidateShadow();
      done = true;
    }
  }
}

You just have to include this code into your applet, and then call:

void setup() {

  size(500,500);
  setShadow("", false);

}

There should also be a way to remove shadows via the info.plist, but I wasn’t able to get the right combination.

If you analyze the above code, basically what you have is a hook to the Cocoa platform that looks through all the windows for the one that contains your Java applet. Once you’ve found it, you can easily deactivate its shadows.

As you may or may not have noticed, I was teaching last month at the Chicago Art Institute. I met some pretty amazing people while there, but the person who really stood out for me was the very charming Iraqi artist Wafaa Bilal (cf. http://www.crudeoils.us/) who was preparing an interesting online performance entitled Domestic Tension: all throughout the month he has been living at the Flatfile Galleries where — via a locally housed server — you can chat with him, watch a live video feed of his life in the gallery, and shoot at him with a collective remote controlled gun.

Now, if you somehow think this is either lame (your call) or disturbing (whatever), you should at least know that while Wafaa is enacting this mostly symbolic performance in (relative) comfort as an art student in the United States, the rest of his family is very much enduring the real deal back home — and with very real casualties. So while it is symbolic for us in one way, it is symbolic in an entirely different way for him.

It is also interesting to frame this performance within the larger context of the displacement of the American discourse on casualties and friendly fire in Iraq: there is no longer the whimpy media smoke-and-mirrors proxy-debate that skirted shamelessly around the issue of cadavers within the video frame. The original debate (constructed pro and con by the pentagon) on how to honor lost american solders, has now transformed into a count not only of full cadavers and dead football players, but of all the missing body parts that will never be coming back. And on the backs of those incomplete bodies, we are finally feeling the weight of the enormous the narrative of the Iraqi body count, and particularly the breadth of this body count, i.e. it’s no longer about numbers, it’s about demographics.

Although I tend to yawn at on-line performances, especially heavy-handed ones, somehow I fell for this one. I suppose it’s the ambiguity of the whole thing (and the good nature of Wafaa) that warms me to it. Of course this work references some far more hardcore pieces of Chris Burden such as when he locked himself in a locker for several days, shot at planes, or had a collegue shoot him in the arm. Wafaa is also making some very broad strokes towards other famous works in the construction of an American mythology, for example Beuys’ I like America and America Likes Me.

But when it comes down to it, I have actually only seen the Burden performances via short crappy videos which grow their semiotic gravitas precisely out of of the crapiness of the video qua deficient document. Much of the 60’s and 70’s performance art has been tainted by this documentation process. I’m thinking precisely of the spic-and-span Los Angeles exhibit last year at the Pompidou Center where the contrast was particularly annoying. Coming back to Wafaa’s current plight under the gun makes me wonder to what degree the crappy webcam refreshing every n seconds helps to construct the mythology of the performance.

I had promised to Wafaa that I would post something about this performance, but I couldn’t get a decent enough connection until now to check it out myself. Watch the following video from Day 8 to get a sense of their troubles keeping the gun online:

If you haven’t figured it out yet, plot is fueled by its own internal folie. And yet we are perfectly serious about this folie, case in point our new pop song « L’ôde au lent » (cf. attached mp3). For some reason, I have a strange feeling that we will be joining Zlad! for the honor of this year’s Eurovision-reject, but at least our song has the originality of combining a manifesto on slow real-time machines with Bataille’s infamous quote on sex: « l’acte sexuel est dans le temps ce que le tigre est dans l’espace » (de La part maudite, 1949). Hey, you need a catchy chorus, right?

I actually had very little to do with this song other than (pitiful) backing vocals. Although it was recorded on the final day of the three-day « Samedi Plot » (i.e. « Plot Saturday »), it was actually written on a beautiful jetty on the Mediterranian two days before. Keeping with tradition, this year’s Saturday Plot took three days to complete (Wednesday + Thursday + Friday), and I was only able to participate in the final day which took place at the amazing artist’s collective Cap15 in Marseille. This was unfortunate, as the participating plotters created an impressive roster of inventions, interventions, itineraries (and pop songs) throughout the entire 3-day Plot Saturday.

Eddy Godeberge and Fabrice Gallis, for example, were inspired by Bataille’s notion of expenditure and prototyped several interesting mechanisms for generating power via lost energy: pistons that expand when frozen, a contraption for generating electricity from the lateral movements of a car going bumpity-bump on a country road (enough at least to play an mp3 walkman), circuits that open and close by collecting rainfall… One of the ideas here being that slow real-time systems will eventually be designed and built using organic materials, rather than silicon and copper. Algorithmic machines built with plants, waterflow, moss, geological stratatification, but also children running in a parc, soccer matches, workers readjusting their seats during a boring meeting, sexual acts of various sorts, etc.

In continuation with Plot explorations in (dis/continuous) space and time, we beta-tested my follow-up to the abstractmachine:crpyt; this time a plug-in for Firefox I’m finishing up right now entitled the abstractmachine:synchronizer. It‘s already working pretty well, and I’ll post more here when I’m finished with the beta testing period. Some of the plotters asked me how to program for Firefox; here’s (in my opinion) the best place to start: Firefox Toolbar Tutorial from Born Geek.

We were also joined (for Saturday Plot song + dance) by Wolf Ka (i.e. res_publica) who came down from Paris for a few days to visit the Atelier Hypermédia and work on his next project. More on Wolf later when he’s done, but you can begin by checking out this beautiful danse performance he choregraphed with lab_au entitled « man in (e)space » (photos + movie).

And finally, Caroline Duchatelet showed us a series of architectural lightworks that are spatially and temporally just at the edge of imperception. For this work, she designed a lighting system with Fabrice and Guillaume which allows her to modulate flourescent tubes over infinitely prolonged periods.

You can find more mp3’s over at the Samedi Plot entry on http://www.plotseme.net. For example, these recordings (ex: les petites têtes, fantomas, naine blanche, and more…) from Blaise Cendrars which (thanks to a PureData patch) called us up periodically on our cellphones. Or you can listen to Fabrice describing a trip plotters took on the first day of Saturday along the Medditerranian coast via the Petit train de la côte bleu (highly recommended, the train-ride itself that is, but also hanging out with Fabrice on a regional mediteranian train).

 L'ode au lent: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1057)