abstractmachine

• Installation: Invaders!
• Concept & Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Assistant: Stéphane Cousot
• Development Library : OpenFrameworks
• Exhibition: Games Convention
• GC ART Special: From Outer Space / Space Invaders: the Anniversary Show / 30 Years of Space Invaders
• Curator: Andreas Lange, Computer Spiele Museum
• Location: Leipziger Messe GmbH, Hall 2, Stand H11
• Dates: 21-24, August 2008
• Video: Invaders! (From the Gameworld exhibition, Laboral, Gijòn, Spain)

Update (24/08) : If you haven’t heard, this piece has stirred quite a controvery. I’m keeping the comments open for people to opine in their own manner and leisure. If you are interested, there is also significant debate here and at many other sites commenting on the affair. I obviously have a lot of things to say, and while I’m tempted to try and correct some of the most exaggerated misconceptions, as many commentators have mentioned the damage has already been done, the responsibility is ultimately mine, and it is therefore up to others now to make up their own minds.

Next week, my old piece from September 2001 will yet again be recycled, only this time in a very large scale edition, with some significant updates, all in celebration of 30 years of Invaders falling from the skies. Invaders! will this time be a multiplayer affair, with improved tracking (optical flow, yada yada yada…), a high (and low) scores leader board, and a stronger tie-in to the historical narrative that originally inspired me to make this version in the first place.

For an idea of how the physical interaction works, check out this video from the Laboral Gameworld exhibition in 2007.

This is all taking place at the huge Games Convention taking place every year in Leipzig. This year Andreas Lange of the Computer Spiele Museum was nice enough to include me in the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Space Invaders with my somewhat ambiguous juxtaposition of this mythical game and the historical events of September 11th. He has also included a selection of various artefacts of the “official” Space Invaders game which will accompagny my large-scale full-body form of engagement.

Here is the press release (read : not written by me), which for once gets it pretty much right :

Space Invaders is one of the biggest video game legends. When the game landed in arcades world-wide in 1978, it initiated a previously unknown boom. Shortly after the appearance of the blockbuster pictures “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters of the “Third Kind”, thanks to Space Invaders, millions of mostly young players could step in to save the world from the alien invaders with their joystick in hand.

Space Invaders became a legend and a global icon. It is a frequently quoted art motif and remains omnipresent in our daily life. It is still as fresh as ever. The exhibition “Space Invaders: Die Jubiläumsshow!” (Space Invaders: the Anniversary Show) would like to pay homage to this evergreen and create an experience from its historical and current facets.

In addition to a comprehensive documentation, an original Space Invaders machine naturally forms the centre of attraction. Everything is overshadowed by the interactive large installation “Invaders!” by the French-American artist Douglas Edric Stanley.

The World Trade Center attacks mark a deep cut in our recent history that is still being processed. The French-American artist Douglas Edric Stanley has found an unusual – though obvious – metaphor with his work “Invaders!”, which is based on the 1978 arcade original. In his interactive large installation, the players must prevent the catastrophe by controlling the well- known cannon at the lower screen border with their bodies and firing it using arm movements. Like the original, this trial is ultimately unsuccessful, thus creating an articulated and critical commentary about the current war strategy. In this regard, Douglas Edric Stanley sees Space Invaders as “a social tale that can be related to historical tales without losing its poetic power” (D.E. Stanley).

update (20/08): Kotaku’s had a very negative reaction to the piece, and their community seems pretty pissed off. I think there’s some confusion in there, as per usual, but you can head over to their website for more on the controversy (here and here) .

update (21/08): PC World’s Game On blog has a much more measured response to the Kotaku post. There are several other reports as well, including this slightly more accurate one from Fox News which tries to flesh out a few of the details discussed by Kotaku. NY Daily News has also apparently jumped into the fray, calling World Trade Center victims to get their response — which in my humble opinion is just as sleezy and facile as anything else I’m apparently being accused of. Ah, the slow descent of journalism into endless tautological news cycles. Count me out.

update (22/08). Here is the statement I made last night concerning the removal of Invaders! from the convention:

“After three days of a steady downward spiral in public discussion of the piece, I have just given my agreement to the organizers of the Leipzig Games Convention to simply turn off the installation Invaders! While I realize the dangerous precedent of allowing the lowest common denominator dictate what is and is not a valid form of expression, unfortunately the current tone has totally obfuscated the original aims of the piece. While I take full responsibility for the uncomfortable ambiguity of certain aspects of this work, it was never created to merely provoke controversy for controversy’s sake, and unfortunately, this is what the piece has now become. The American response to this work has been, frankly, immature, and lacking the sophistication and consideration that other parts of the world have so far shown the work. Contrary to previous reports, I am an American, and it saddens me that we as a people remain so profoundly unable to process this event outside of some obscure, but tacitly understood, criteria of purely anesthetized artistic representation. Due to these profound misunderstandings, I simply feel that from an artistic point of view, the work has lost the ability to have any valuable impact, poetic or otherwise. I have not been pressured by the Leipziger Messe, nor by the Computerspiele Museum in this decision — to the contrary, they have offered their support in defending the right of artists to speak freely, and in whatever context they may choose.”

• Article: Purpose Machines, Douglas Edric Stanley
• Journal: Switch 24

I’ve had a few requests recently, asking me to write about various subjects — gaming, contemporary art, code aesthetics, interfaces, and some other subjects I declined to write about, simply because I had nothing to say. Ethan Miller wrote me yesterday to let me know that at least one of these has finally been published, namely an article I wrote for Switch a few months back, in response to the subject of their (then) upcoming issue entitled “re-purposing”.

As usual, I didn’t really answer the implied subject — artists re-purposing technology for artistic use. Instead, I more or less proposed re-purposing as the definition of contemporary technology itself, and therefore a larger epistemological issue beyond mere aesthetic concerns. Anyway, it has what I hope are some clarifications on how I read programming within the larger framework of temporal machines, and something about its ontological(ly variable) nature.

I ran into the organizers of the Gamerz exhibit this evening on my way back from the workshop. They asked, « Did you see ? » « See what ? » « Your interview in Joystick magazine! » Cringe… Oh god, I’d forgotten about that. Then they really started to laugh as they realized that I hadn’t seen the picture they used. « Well, you’ve got a big picture in there with a funny helmet on your head ». Oh my. I forgot that anyone who wants to can grab my pictures off flickr, which is actually a pretty good thing for my ego now that I think about it. I’m going to have to learn to live with my mug one of these days.

The interview is okay. I talk a little about code, teaching, and games in no particular order. Pretty fluffy. It was nice to talk about a lot of young artists’ work though. If you don’t already read Joystick, it’s no use buying the magazine. The articles are pretty bad. They didn’t mangle my interview, so that’s very nice of them, but they didn’t put much in there to begin with so whatever. The article that it’s connected to (on experimental gaming) is pretty strange. The first half basically apologizes to the gamer fanboys for bothering them about some obscure subject they probably won’t care that much about. Kind of a strange way to write if you ask me. But what do I know? I write a blog.

Last week, Friends of Ed. very nicely sent me a review copy of Ira Greenberg’s book Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art (ISBN: 159059617X).

One of the questions I consistently have to field is « are there any good books to read if I want to learn Processing? ». My answer is usually, well, Casey Reas has a book coming out, as does Daniel Shiffman, and then there was some other book announced by Friends of Ed. Unfortunately none of them are out yet, but they will be soon… So Friends of Ed. is the first out of the gate apparently, and I know that Casey’s book has been finished for a few months. I also read a bit of Daniel’s book quite a while back and it too looked great, so I have feeling all three will be out in the next few weeks.

First, the good news: it’s a good book, written in a very clear style that I can comfortably recommend to my French students (oui, si vous arrivez à comprendre l’essentiel de ce blog, vous arriverez à comprendre ce livre). But even more important for me: it’s a big rugged book. It’s a learning book (as opposed to a reference book, such as Casey’s), so you might want to wait until it goes paperback, but as for us at the Atelier Hypermedia, we’ll be quite happy to have a big strong book to throw around. Especially when there are so many great recepies in there. We’ll be dog-earing many pages, meethinks. Chapter 11 on « Motion » is worth the price of admission alone: it gives you all the basics you need to know about making things move around using all the basic rules of gravity, collision, reflection, etc. And Chapter 13 is a fairly good introduction to d*3 that we will probably use as an introduction in the atelier. So all-in-all, it’s a good classroom book, which appears to be by design. You can easily teach around this book.

He also has a nice take on the basic « Hello World! » introduction to programming. Indeed, what is the equivalent of « Hello World! » in Processing? In electronics, that’s easy: a blinking LED. In 3D, tradition says that it’s a rotated cube. But in Processing? What’s the basic shape that says, hey, look, I too can draw shapes through code. Greenberg calls his version « Hello Earth! », and I like it:

Other good news: Ira Greenberg jumps right into object-oriented programming almost from the get-go. You learn about the environment and what buttons to push, you draw some lines, you draw some shapes and curves, and then you’re making objects. This might sound a little daunting, but it’s actually a necessary evil and the number-one mistake that I made in my currently whimpy on-line offering of Processing tutorials; a mistake I will promptly rectify before classes start in October. As we discovered this year, especially thanks to Pascal Chirol’s excellent diploma work, you can’t do anything interresting in Processing without a basic knowledge of objects.

That said, Greenberg’s actual use of objects in the book is a little thin. Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 each have a quick section near the end that gives some practical experience, but he rarely uses it in the rest of the examples that I explored. Although I have to admit that I didn’t read the book in it’s entirety, from my quick perusal it seemed to me that the examples don’t use objects enough. It would have been great to base pretty much everything you do after chapter 8 on object-oriented approaches. I find that what my students really need are real-world examples of not only how to use objects in programming, but also why you should use them and the general approach to using objects in your program. (Want to make a game? Start with the objects…) I know that’s a pretty tall order, one that an introduction to Processing might take a whole book to dispense, but I still find that it’s an important missing link for my students; i.e. one of those hurdles that once you get over it, everything seems to open up. But like I said, it’s rare to find an introduction to programming tutorial with so much use of object-oriented code (including my own), so I’m probably just being too picky.

Another complaint that I have is chapter 3, entitled « Code Grammar 101 ». It starts from good intentions: list all the syntax that will be used throughout the book, declaring variables, creating functions, loops, conditionals, conditional operators, relational operators, arrays, switches, ternary operators, while loops, do…while loops, … I hope you get my point: that’s an awful lot of stuff to learn before you actually do anything with the program! My method is exactly the opposite: open up the program, click here, click there, have fun, then go back and learn the basics; or even better yet, learn them while you’re having fun making stuff. Isn’t that what Processing was designed for anyway? I.e. getting started with a minimum of fuss?

Here’s my advice on how to read the book, and in fact my first assignment to my students that will be working with this book over the summer:

1. Open the book at Chapter 4 on page 59. Avoid the rest of the chapter…
2. Turn directly to Chapter 5 (page 144)
3. Read the rest of the book

There is also a nice annex at the end of the book giving some basic trigonomety, and a pretty damn good description of bit-level operations and why they can make your video analysis faster. I actually wish he would have explored this subject even more, but that’s okay, as I can take over from there, at least with those adventurous enough to make it out to Aix-en-Provence next semester.

Again on the positive side, there’s a good section on raster-image treatment, showing you all the basics of working with a photographic image. It even shows you how to export your results, instantly transforming you into an image-filter designer, à la Photoshop.

Strangely missing from this book are discussions of external libraries. This is normal I suppose, because you can’t really trust externals to stay put while a book is being published; one of the great things about having a stable release of Processing is that books can now comfortably be published without fear of unuseable code. Nevertheless, for my money Processing really takes off as an artistic tool when you’re outputting and inputting to and from various destinations and sources. We try to get to sound input, or video and PDF output almost from day one. The lack on an in-depth discussion of PDF export (in fact, I didn’t see any discussion of PDF, but I might be wrong) is actually very strange given the purely visual concentration of this book: all the examples are oriented to give you a basic understanding of how to draw stuff. If you’re drawing stuff, you probably want to print out to PDF at some point.

A nice follow up « expert » book might be how to take all this basic knowledge of drawing stuff and show how to plug it into everything else. Real World Processing, Processing vs. World, or whatever. Of course, this is the way we work at the Atelier Hypermedia already, and in fact how we intend to teach processing starting this October. Some of that material will be directly on-line, of course. How to make high resolution prints via PDF, importing real-time data on-the-fly from the Internets for a web-based visualizer, installing an interactive wall with a video projector and camera tracking, channeling Oscar Fischinger with the MovieMaker video exporter, creating a visualist set with live audio analysis, etc. Of course, that’s my approach, and maybe there’s a whole group of people out there that don’t want to know any of that and are perfectly happy drawing bouncy, spindly lines. And when it comes to drawing hundreds of wiggly, springy lines, this Processing book is perfectly competent, and even taught me a trick or two.

Thanks Ira! Thanks Friends of Ed.!

P.S. Note to students of the Atelier Hypermedia: don’t forget to download the files for the book which you will find in the on the editor’s website (link). Some of the code is pretty long, and not all that fun to input by hand. A lot of this code is cool, and is a pretty good sell for the book. The image below is a screenshot from one of the examples. The editors should have put up online applets of all this stuff, since it’s all based on basic Processing methods and therefore should all work within applets. But what do I know, I’m not a publisher.

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…

A few weeks back, the cool French journalist Marie Lechner asked me to collect a list of interesting YouTube videos. I was originally going to do something more interresting than what I came up with, but I was busy travelling and so I quickly scraped together this fairly traditional list along with a there-goes-the-professor-again accompanying verbiage. Even if you don’t read French, the videos are fairly explicit: there’s insolent stuff, code stuff, remix stuff, political stuff, etc. Here’s the link: Playlist #1 par Douglas Edric Stanley. If you want a translation, Google will do it for you here: link.

My list will be followed in the next few days by people far hipper than I, such as Anne Laforêt, Vincent Epplay, or Michaël Sellam.

We’re still waiting for some stragglers, but here are some of the videos we have online from the ENIAROF group on YouTube and the ENIAROF Pool on Flickr. For more information on ENIAROF, read this article by Marie Lechner (Les nouvelles lois de l’attraction, or translated into English: The New Laws of Attraction), or visit the ENIAROF Blog. Most of the electronic work you see here is the result of a two-week workshop using Processing, Arduino, and Wiring. The rest are propositions by various artists and contributors to ENIAROF, for example Dekalko Studio, M2F, or a theatre troupe/military camp from Belgium that went by the title « Cookies Koolkies ».

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.

• TV Show: Tentations.06
• Station: Canal+
• Date: 4 November, 2006
• Time: 12h05 - ???

Christophe Ecoffet sent me an email to let me know that the documentary he recently produced on Régine Débatty’s visit to Villette Numérique 2006 will be aired on November 4th some time after noon. It is only a 4-minute documentary fit into an hour-long show, so don’t be suprised if you have to wait until the end of the show to catch Régine. I have no idea how I’m going to record it, because my digital recorder only works on over-the-air digital, and I just realized that they don’t have Canal+ on that system yet. I don’t really watch TV — I just ask my computer to record Métropolis every saturday night and send it over to my iPod. TV is just one or two shows for me. If someone could record it… I actually have done tons of interviews for television, probably about three our four a year since about the year 2000, and I never seem to get a copy.

As for the « petite histoire » : Christophe asked me to analyze on camera Régine’s work, which I did, and I was predictably very nice and polite about her blog because honestly I think she’s doing something great over there at we-make-money-not-art. But I was also in a grumpy mood (I don’t like television), and hadn’t gotten much sleep (apprently my hotel doubled as a brothel via the room above mine - thump thump thump). With no sleep (and no you pervert, no sex either) the grump took over and I dissed on everyone else, including the camerman (who was even grumpier than me) and rambled on about all sorts of subjects. It was pretty incoherent probably. I don’t really know what Christophe kept in and what got cut out. 4 minutes is pretty short, and the documentary was about Régine, don’t expect to see my unphotogenic mug all that much (probably for the better). Maybe I don’t need a copy after all ;-)

Oh, and what is Tentations.06 you ask? Well, we have this guy here in France named Ariel Wizman who is pretty much the ultimate in cultivated-insolent-cool-obnoxiously-sohpisticated-lowbrow-hipsterism. Apparently he has a new show on Canal+, but I stopped keeping up to date with his activities ever since he left Radio Nova. So it’s fluff, but usually fluff about pretty cool shit and usually worth watching. That said, I haven’t watched any of his documentaries in ages because I’m a little to busy to waste my time in front of the TV. If I want to watch crap, I’ve already got YouTube.

I should mention that just after the interview, Régine introduced me to Jean-Baptiste Labrune who is a researcher working in « Creative Epistemology ». Jean-Baptiste is apparently creating a Dorkbot Paris, which is great news. He’s a very affable fellow and definitely hip to what’s cool in interactivity, sensors and whathaveyou. So we’ll have to keep an eye on that.

Update : I was busy working and wasn’t able to tape the show. Did anyone by any chance tape it?

Abstractmachine is currently the design special guest over at New Italian Blood. As I previously mentioned, it is a short-but-sweet portrait of what it is that I do over here at www.abstractmachine.net (link). As I probably won’t be posting much for the next couple weeks while I write my thesis, and since so many people have been visiting this site since the ZeroOne festival, might I suggest people head over there. Of course there is also a lot of information in the archives (see above), including stuff you can play online, and video documents of most of my work.

Just a quick note to say there is a short paragraph on my hypertable in The San Jose Mercury News this morning. You can read it here: link.

But what I really want to point out here is that — although it’s nice to be quoted in my hometown’s big paper (I’m still holding out for the Los Altos Town Crier) — the quote they attribute to me is not something that I would ever say, at least not with that wording. “What you need to know is that anything digital can connect to anything else that is digital,” what a load of crap. What you are reading there is what the journalist understood from what I said, and that’s a whole different can of worms. I’ve been interviewed by the press for enough years to know that they fudge things far more than any artist would ever dare to, all in the name of clarity. But in the process, they make some of us sound like idiots. Thanks for the publicity Joe (who’s actually a pretty nice guy, as these things usually go), but next time just record it, or leave it out, thankyouverymuch…