abstractmachine

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be spending two days participating in Fing’s Université de printemps (Spring University) entitled Plus longue la vie (A Longer Life). As you can tell by the subject matter, it’s about aging and the role of new technologies in the life of seniors, which is great for me because it adds yet another piece to the puzzle that I’m currently working on. Last year, plot worked with France Cadet, the Hacking Lab, Christian Graff and the students of the ESAA on interfacing with electric fish (cf. Workshop Mormyrophone™). Some interresting ideas emerged from that workshop, most notably Games For Mormyridae (cf. Mormyre-Pong) as well as biological random number generators. That’s the slippery part, and feeds nicely into the whole process of physicalization which I have been working on recently, especially the idea of biological computing using insects, à la crickets and moths. Also thanks to France, I will most probably be working sometime next year on making games for primates (Games For Gorillas). More on that later, but that’s the furry part. Also in progress, an ENIAROF for redesigning our anarchic form of play for the younger set. So it is only natural, now, that I turn my attentions to the question of abstract machines and play in the context of the ever-extending lifespan. Although all of the ateliers intersect the type of work I do, I’ll be participating in the atelier entitled Un habitat confortable et modulable, facilitateur de vie. The rest of the time I’ll probably just be napping because there is a lot of blah blah blah planned, which I have very little time or patience for.

• Workshop: Art numérique
• Biennale Puglia 2008, Italy
• Presenter: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Location: Bari Fiera del Levante, padiglione 152 - Regione Puglia
• Time: 16:00
• Date: 26 May, 2008

I will be in Italy next week (from Saturday evening to Wednesday morning), in the Puglia region, for a mini-workshop (Monday afternoon + Tuesday morning) on the usual: code-based art, using development tools in an artistic context, interactive installations, and the type of work we do at the Atelier Hypermédia. Of note, I will be presenting the tools we use, and in that mix will be OpenFrameworks, which might be of interest. It unfortunately is a very short workshop (not even a real workshop if you ask me), so I wouldn’t suggest crossing Italy to come, but if you’re in the region or at the festival, drop by and we’ll talk about how these tools are used.

To be honest, I’ve never been to Italy, and when Seconde Nature invited to sponsor my trip, I said to myself why not? At least the context looks pleasant.

Here is a presentation in English, French and Italian (I cannot confirm the validity of the Italian translation ;-) :

Since 1998, The Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence has been developing tools and procedures for creating art via algorithmic means, be it physical, networked, mediatic or social. This involves, principally, teaching young artists the nature of the most popular algorithmic machine — the digital computer — and exploring what sort of work can be created when we are no longer tied to pre-baked software. This short workshop will begin with a presentation of the Atelier’s tools and working methods, followed by an open discussion and demonstration for participants wishing to explore creative production in the domains of: code|art, networked objects, algorithmic media, experimental interfaces, and (last but not least) play. Time and space has also been reserved the following morning for participants wishing to spend more time exploring these tools in a practical context. Three open platforms for artistic production will be used during this mini-workshop: Processing, Arduino, and OpenFrameworks. To participate in the workshop please make a reservation at the Meeting Point.

Depuis 1998, l’Atelier Hypermédia à Aix-en-Provence conçoit des outils et méthodes de création artistique dans un monde de plus en plus traversé par la question de l’algorithme : que ce soit physiquement, à travers les réseaux, dans les médias, ou via les relations sociales. La plupart du temps, cette activité implique l’apprentissage des contours techniques et idéologiques des machines algorithmiques les plus utilisées aujourd’hui : les ordinateurs. L’objectif, par contre, n’est pas la technicité, mais plutôt l’exploration des nouvelles possibilités qui s’ouvrent dès lors que l’artiste refuse la posture du consommateur de logiciels. Ce court workshop, commencera par une présentation des méthodes et outils de travail de l’Atelier Hypermédia, suivi d’une discussion ouverte, accompagné de démonstrations pour des artistes voulant explorer la création artistique dans des domaines telles que : le code|art, les objets orientés réseau, les médias algorithmiques, les interfaces expérimentales, et enfin, les jeux. Du temps et de l’espace sera également consacré le lendemain matin pour les participants voulant passer plus de temps avec ses approches. Trois plates-formes ouvertes, conçues pour et par des artistes, seront utilisées pendant ce mini-workshop : Processing, Arduino, et OpenFrameworks. Pour participer au workshop, merci de bien vouloir réserver votre place au Meeting Point.

Dal 1998 l’Atelier Hypermédia di Aix-en-Provence (Francia) ha sviluppato delle utilità e dei metodi di creazione artistica in un ambiente, che si esso fisico, sociale, virtuale o mediatico, sempre più segnato dalla questione numerica e dagli algoritmi. Nella quasi totalità dei casi la padronanza di questi ambienti dall’apprendimento degli algoritmi e dalla padronanza dei software: in poche parole da una conoscenza approfondita del computer. L’obiettivo, tuttavia, non è il tecnicismo ma l’esplorazione delle nuove possibilità che si aprono nel momento in cui l’artista rifiuta il ruolo di consumatore passivo di software. Il workshop comincerà con una presentazione dei metodi e delle utilità di lavoro dell’Atelier Hypermédia; seguirà una discussione aperta accompagnata da dimostrazioni per gli artisti che vogliono esplorare la creazione artistica nei seguenti ambiti: codice/arte, oggetti in rete, media algoritmi, interfacce sperimentali, e i giochi. Per chi volesse approfondire, inoltre, queste tematiche potrà richiedere la continuazione del workshop nella mattinata del 27 maggio. Durante il workshop saranno utilizzate tre piattaforme libere: Processing, Arduino, et OpenFrameworks. Per partecipare al workshop è richiesta l’iscrizione presso il Meetng Point.

Thomas sent me this link to a rap about coding HTML. I thought it was pretty funny. To bad I didn’t have the link for class last Friday:

So it got me thinking about some other code songs:

Which was probably inspired by Joe Wecker’s DeCSS Decryption Song, which also has lead to this MIDI version of the DeCSS Decryption algorithm (for more information, visit David S. Touretsky’s Gallery of DeCSS descramblers).

On the purely cultural side of code, geeks, and computers, there’s always ytcracker and MC Frontalot:

Which led me to this song, which is kinda ok (euh, maybe not):

I could go on and on, but at least it gave me an excuse to link to this cheezy rock song which tortured us in the 80’s. To be honest, it isn’t really about the same kind of code, but who cares — I mean come on, check out that hair!

Just added a Twitter feed to my blog. I’ve been resisting for a while now, but finally gave in. I like how I can just grab bits and pieces of conversations, emails, code, ideas, documentation and so on, and throw them into the mix. And the size is right. Let’s try to give it a few weeks before giving up again. That, or before I plug my randomizer into Twitter… hey there’s an idea.

• Conference: Des idées et des arts
• Location: Amphithéâtre Charve, Université Saint Charles, Marseille
• Address: 3, place Victor Hugo 13003 Marseille
• Un séminaire du Master Médiation Culturelle des Arts, Université de Provence, Marseille
• Dates: 21, 28 April 2008; 5 May 2008
• Time: 17.00 - 19.30

I’ve been invited to speak tomorrow in Marseille for a conference series on the relationship between the art work (« l’oeuvre ») and its reception (participatory, interactive, relational). Anyone who knows me, knows my hostility to these terms, so for my part, I will be trying to politely move beyond them, which seem to me very tied to some old debates from the 80’s and 90’s, especially here in France. I will instead propose a model that includes interactivity but without situating it either at the work’s inception, nor at its terminus.

These conferences will be published later by the University of Provence.

• De nouvelles figures de l’artiste et de l’expérience sensible
• le 21 avril 2008
• « Appareillage informatique ou ancrage affectif : du concept d’Hypermédia au percept de Déposition sculpturale ? » par Julien Honnorat
• « Antagonisme et imbrication : au-delà de la notion d’interactivité » par Douglas Edric Stanley
• • La participation comme nouveau regard sur l’œuvre
• le 28 avril 2008
• « Le spectateur dans l’oeuvre : identification, distanciation, appropriation » par Nicolas Ferrier
• « Mythologies du spec’acteur des arts de la rue » par Anne Gonon
• • Quel devenir pour les politiques culturelles
• le 05 mai 2008
• « L’action publique culturelle et artistique à l’ère de la participation généralisée » par Fabrice Raffin
• « Les enjeux de la démocratisation culturelle à l’âge de l’œuvre participative : ou que reste-t-il du spectateur-sujet quand il devient co-auteur de l’œuvre ? » par Loïc Lafargue

I’m currently playing about with Safari 3.1’s embedded font feature. It’s great, and about time. If you’re reading this blog directly from my website and with Safari 3.1+ then you know what I’m talking about. Otherwise, you’ll just have to wait until Firefox and Explorer catch up.

I’m not sure I’ve found what I’m looking for in terms of legally embeddable fonts. It actually harder than you might think to find interesting, yet readable, open fonts. If you use this feature, be careful: you cannot embed commercial fonts as this would be the equivalent of distributing them and could get you into trouble. Some web designers have complained about this, but I actually think this is a Good Thing™. We need a more developed open type community — and no, embedding fonts in Flash is not a solution — and this will only accelerate that process.

Which reminds me — there’s this brilliant project currently in beta where you can “build, share, download” open typefaces: FontStruct over at the infamous FontShop. It’s a great service, even if it still needs a lot of work. You can even embed a flash example into your blog or webpage, as in the following Pixel Cube example:

I don’t know how long I’ll be using this font (it has a lot of issues), and for the moment I have yet to figure out how to single out browsers that do and do not support this feature, in order to create the right type relationships for those that do not. For the moment, I’m figuring most cannot see these fonts, and so the sizing is all wrong. But whatever the case I think it’s great to see a community tool perfectly in sync with this complex issue, and if you think my website is now even uglier than before, please give me some time to figure out how to deal with this (welcome) extra layer.

• Workshop : Plot à la montagne
• Location : Pyrenees Aix-en-Provence, France
• Artists : Fabrice Gallis, Guillaume Stagnaro, Jean + Cristofol, Douglas Edric Stanley
• Dates : 14 - 18 April, 2008

This week Plot was supposed to be in the Pyrenées — riding rustic trains, going for walks in the mountains, playing with accelerometers and GPS, and watching The Sound of Music, Moloch and other mountain movies — but through various accidents we ended up transporting the entire mountain to Aix-en-Provence.

I’ve been working with two very handy C++ development libraries over the last two weeks: OpenFrameworks and PAlib. We started working with OpenFrameworks in the Atelier hypermédia last week — I’ll write more about that later. As for the other library, most of you probably will never have heard of it: PAlib is a library for Nintendo DS homebrew development which I ignored for too long. Antonin told me about it ages ago, I should have listened. It’s been a godsend for getting back into development for the Nintendo handheld platforms. And it’s amazingly easy to use, once you’ve gotten everything configured correctly (see below).

Of course, the library can’t do everything I want. For example, I need some pretty advanced sound capabilities, and I’m not sure the included sound functions — which do seem useable — will be robust enough. I might have to give up that library and switch to another one, or it might be the one place where I’ll have to barrel down into the registers, setup interrupts, deal with FIFO registers, etc. myself. But that’s fine, because everything else is so easy: generate the graphics in whatever — making sure you stay within a limited range of colors –, convert those images using one of the included tools (or make your own using Processing or whatever, it’s pretty easy), load that data into the sprite registers, and then let the DS do all the work: all you have to do is set the sprite’s x and y positions and the DS hardware does all the rest.

I’m still amazed at Nintendo’s hardware style. I always loved how the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance were just tiny little processors, surrounded by all these well-chosen chips dedicated to putting sprites and tiles on the screen, and generating the necessary beeps and boops. I’m all for specialized chips and processors, and I think think they’re going to be even more important as we move more as a society towards serious power conservation. So I love these crazy japanese designs and extreme efficiency. But it also amazes me the extent to which the DS is just a souped-up Gameboy Advance. It’s exactly the same strategy they came up with for the Wii: start with the previous platform (Gamecube), and tack an interesting interface onto it with some minor audiovisual improvements. Also, make sure there’s N64-style 3d graphics capabilities. This of course is great for me: all the original registers that I know all-too-well are still there, but with an added processor for handling the second screen, and new functions for handling Wifi, the stylus, and so on. There are also more sound channels, and even some of the old-skool Gameboy sounds are still hanging around (which is really tempting me right now in the current project). But again, I haven’t gotten around to the sound yet because that’s when the real work starts. For now, I’m just having fun finding new movements for the stylus.

It’s also interesting, after sitting through the (eye-opening) iphone sdk video, and now playing around with the DS touch interface, to see how far we have all come on physical gesturing, no matter what the input format. I’ve found myself adding a lot of iPhone-style touch gestures using the very limited input of the DS, which is very eerie for me, because a lot of these gestures hark back to efforts I made back in the 1990’s (remember when CD-Roms were all the rage?). These gestures take on new meaning for me, now that they’ve been placed into this new historical perspective offered by the Wiimote and the iPhone. For example, a lot of the work I did with Claude Faure (see video) was already playing with the physicality of the interface. This was quite clear to us, even then. But that said, this work takes on new meaning now that all these gestures have come of age — or are simply breaking out in all their pimply pubescent enthusiam (it all depends on how much you like or dislike these new semiotics).

The DS, the Wii, and the iPhone are important indicators on where we’re at on this subject. For example, there was a very prescient moment in the iPhone video (you’ll find it at 00:40:23) where the ‘undo’ function is converted from its previous semiotics of ctrl-z (remember F7=SAVE anyone?) into a simple shaking of the device itself. Okay, okay, I know what you’re thinking — this is just a gadget-geek-moment, a golly-gee-wow somewhere up there at the level of sophistication of the blink tag (thanks Netscape). And probably after we’ve all transformed into premature parkinson’s sufferers after shaking our iPhones all day — with some new neurological disorder similar to what keyboards did with carpal tunnel syndrome –, we’ll have had enough of all this goddamn gestural computing. But I still find it amazing to think that ctrl-z can be transformed so easily into a simple flick of the wrist. The same goes for the game they showed at 00:41:03, « Touch Fighter ». There, the iPhone itself is the joystick — uh, yeah, Douglas, I think that’s what the guy already says in the video — and it will be hard to go back after that realization, just as it is now hard to imaging gaming (and DJ’ing) after having played with the Wiimote.

Anyway, to get back to the development nitty-gritty, how do you develop for the DS from a Mac? Since I explained this already to Benoit this afternoon in the Atelier, I should mention it here for later reference. You need to:

• make sure you have installed xCode (free)
• follow the instructions of either: Nintendo DS development for Mac or PAlib Wiki Mac OS X (the later worked fine for me)
• download this PAlib xCode Project template and install as instructed (this will allow you to create a new PAlib project from the “New Project” menu in xCode)
• create a new project in xCode and “build” it
• find a workable emulator to test before loading the “program.nds” file onto the physical DS (no 100% solutions here — I’m currently using NO$GBA from Parallels running Windows inside of my Mac, since I was too lazy to get any other emulators working on my Mac)
• buy some sort of programmable cartridge for copying your program to the DS

I’ve been very busy the last two weeks, sorry for everyone I’ve yet to reply to. Basically, I’m in the middle of about a dozen different projects. Working on a dozen simultaneous projects is a little more than my usual half-dozen, and since no one really pays me well enough to just concentrate on one big project, adding to that the fact that most of the current projects are pro bono, well… everyone will just have to wait in line. sorry ;-)

The great news from all this activity, is that Stéphane showed up for our latest session Sunday afternoon with a working version of the Processing OpenCV library running on Windows. This was just in time for the two-week long rehearsals we started today, in order to finalize Wolf Ka’s latest dance piece. Since Wolf wanted to run everything off of a PC, it was a good excuse to give our OpenCV library a second real-world test run before unleashing it onto the wild. Especially since we have to have this piece ready by early April.

We found a few crazy things just in time, and will probably find a few more, but so far everything is running great, almost immediately, even better than I expected, and we were able by the beginning of the first afternoon to start working on the dance+algorithms, as opposed to plugging things in and banging on the machines. I’m thrilled as to how quickly you can get a full kick-ass tracking program up and working with an absolute minimum of code. Totally cool, that. It’s all in line with the attitude of offloading the ugliness — Processing-style — and just getting to work on the essentials; but not too much, making sure not to dumb things down.

We’ve also taken the opportunity of going through all the original OpenCV examples and documentation, compiling directly in C/C++ through GCC, just to understand how the library works at the most basic level. As it turns out, it’s not all that hard, but we’ve just started a new phase of this research, so we’re still only just getting started — which is pretty exciting for me because I’ve already begun to imagine million little crazy things I can do with this library. Anyway, things like face tracking are an absolute shoo-in for the first beta release (thanks Guillaume), as well as movie import (.avi), and some simple brightness/histogram magic for treating images — either before you analyze them, or just because you want a fast Photoshop style filter inside of Processing. We’re also working on object tracking, but I haven’t gotten around to Kalman predictive filters, as was suggested here in the comments, but I’ll get around to it — it’s just a question of figuring out how the various available examples approach the problem and making it a natural integration into Processing. A lot of Stéphane’s and my work have involved debating how to make the whole process very Processing-like, both simple & modular.

Oh, I should mention that the rehearsals with Wolf are taking place at the beautiful Pavillon Noir, the national dance center recently created by/for Angelin Preljocaj. If you’ve visited Aix-en-Provence recently, you should know what I’m talking about, it’s absolutely unavoidable. Since this time we are working with dancers, it nice to be in an actual dance studio, as opposed to some dingy basement at the Art School.

I should also mention that I have two great students with me, Stefan Schwabe who is currently on loan this year from the design school in Halle, and Fabien Artal, a veritable personnage of the Atelier over the last three years. I’ve been lucky these past few sessions to have a steady stream (but small enough to be manageable) of extremely competent students who transfered to the school with a very specific understanding of what it is we’re trying to accomplish, which is very important in my case, since the Atelier Hypermédia is not always the easiest thing to explain to an art student. It is actually thanks to this current push of students that we have been able to take on some of the more ambitious projects of the Atelier.

• Colloque: Esthétique speculatives
• Organisation: Stéphane Trois-Carrés, CEDAR
• Location: L’école supérieure d’art du Havre
• Dates: January 21st & 22nd

I’ll be in Le Havre for the next two days, participating in the colloquium on “Speculative Aesthetics”, which in reality just means a meeting of the various multimedia professors of french art schools. This will be the seventh meeting of this type, the first beginning in 2000 at the Villa Arson in Nice.

While it is not yet clear where and when exactly I will be talking, I hope to discuss with my french colleagues a certain number of subjects, most of them revolving around open teaching: i.e. using the network to share techniques, documentation, and as a tool for collaboration on projects. This involves Processing, Arduino and eventually OpenFrameworks, but also the tools we use to document our activities using these platforms, and their technical documentation.