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.
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 theBHV 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…
Filed under: rant, design — Douglas Edric Stanley @ 19:30 pm
Ok, this is one of those things that only an engineer could think of — also known as how to shave off a minute here, a minute there, when you have perfectly better things to do…
Take a look at this photo. It is my Epson R300 printer just after replacing the ink cartridge. It has just made all sorts of spugeeech, zhmurrrr, shpukwaaaaam, shazzaaaam noises. All this takes about a minute. There is a nice little screen on the right that first told me how to do things, and when I was ready it asked me to press OK. In French we say, « jusqu’ici, tout va bien » (up to this point, everthing’s going fine). And that’s when all the smuuuuunch sounds whirr and buzz and I go back upstairs to print out my document, figuring that the printer can take care of things from here.
Ah, but no. Of course it can’t be that simple…
Once I’ve shlepped my way upstairs, my computer still won’t print. Hmm. Wifi troubles? Trying pinging the damn thing. Nope. Not Wifi. So I trek back down to my printer to see what I’ve done wrong, and there I find this glorious, « user-friendly », i.e. over-zealous-engineer-message-of-love :
« Ink Cartridge Replacement. Ink cartridge replacement is complete. Press OK to finish. »
Sheesh. Couldn’t it just have pushed the damn OK button itself? Do the Epson engineers really think that I want to spend 1 minute watching my printer go whrrrr, pliiing, shmeeeeerunk? What, do they want a pat on the back? Hey printer, that was a beautiful spectacle of engineering! Good job!
And can someone tell me why on earth I have all those buttons to begin with? I remember the good-old-days of our Apple printer at school that had one button. Yep. One button. And in most instances you never had to push it, since it’s plugged into a computer. And the computer already knows how to push buttons by itself.
This is a recording of my presentation during the Symposium Audio/Espaces/Réseaux organized by Locus Sonus. In the accompagnying pdf file (destanley.pdf) you will find links to all of the films and interactive animations described during the talk. This talk is in French (why the hell am I writing this in English? I have no idea)
Here is a link to an installation that Alexis Amen and I finished for the “Salon du livre et de la presse de jeunesse” in the Paris neighborhood of Montreuil. At Alexis’ request, the Hypertable was turned into an interactive story illustrating different renditions of Little Red Riding Hood. It was a youth-oriented installation, which was interresting for me because I had been trying to find some more design-oriented uses for the Hypertable while still maintaining a certain artistic integrity. Working with children gives you some unique design constraints. I’m not 100% thrilled by the result, but it was a worthy exercise. Hopefully, Alexis and I can find another collaboration in the future where we can explore some of the design ideas we ultimately had to throw out.
Inside of Opixido, Alexis works on Piloti, which helps other artists code their works. Obviously I didn’t need to give him any pointers, at least not any pointers than those to my incoming data (bad programming joke).
This interactive manual was designed for the E-Rex, an experimental robotic screen designed at the Loboratory LOEIL for the exploration of images in a 360° space. To accompany the installation, this manual was placed at the periphery of the exhibit, giving instructions on the manipulation of the device. Significantly, the interface re-enacts the endless circular mouvements of the screen, and allows the users to manipulate the different parts of the system through interactive video illustrations.
Claude Faure is a conceptual artist who often works with puns, or “wordplay”. For Claude’s CD-Rom, produced for the City of Science and Industry in Paris, I was given free reign to design the interface as well as the interactivity, and to program the installation. The animations were designed by Claude and Vincent Faure.
Very quickly into the project, I developed an index based on the tautological nature of the dictionary: amlost all dictionaries contain the 26 letters of the alphabet themselves, along with the words used to describe the various terms. A dictionary defines itself with itself. Here, the design goal was to create, as always in my work, an adequation between the so-called “interface”, its expression, its design, and its function. There is no index “separate” from the contents, they both form a single experience of wordplay.
The interactive figures were voluntarily simple, and were culled from the various research projects I had developed at the Laboratory for Interactive Aesthetics.
The Virtual Review was a theoretical think tank looking into the evolutions of digital media (games, scientific simulation, immersive systems, computer art installations, etc) from the unique perspective of a major French cultural center, the Centre Georges Pompidou. Various theoreticians, artists, historians, researchers and developers were invited, resulting in this CD-Rom.
My job was to produce everything “to the left” of the textual commentary. Through the video, you can see the two principle forms of interaction with the video sequences.
I realized that many of the live, as well as computer designed, images could be rendered “interactive”. Slowly the idea of images as digital marionettes evolved, leading to subsequent forms explored in Asymptote and La morsure.
