Tomorrow I’ll be taking part in a radio debate on the subject of collaboration between artists and technicians, with the opening question: « how do artists and technicians work together ? ».

It is an odd formulation, no matter how commonplace, especially considering the obvious role form and forming play in any production of art. As if the artist came before the forming, instead of the other way around, or (even better) simultaneously. But of course, the idea itself has become so common that we have somehow taken it for granted as if by mere repetition we had somehow forgotten to distinguish temperament and disposition : art and technique are somehow, in some parallel universe that would be simultaneously our own, two disparate entities that after having been separated at birth can now be brought together in some novel embrace. That we still have to disentangle ourselves from such artificial constructs, it’s maddening. Art and the technosciences, two opposing forces brought together at last, how charming an idea — how charming, and how charmingly tedious. When do we get to move on from the preliminaries to the actual nature of our contemporary state of affairs?

I’m posting this quite late, but there are a few hours left in Anne Roquiny’s latest incarnation of WJ-S, a system she designed for audivisually mixing the web, like a DJ, or a VJ, hence « WJ ». At the Maison des métallos in Paris, Anne, along with Anne Laforet and Isabelle Arvers will be mixing the Internet while speakers of various ilk simultaneously discuss the last 15 years of artistic creation on the web.

Since I couldn’t make it up to Paris (train strikes), I’ve instead posted this pre-recorded presentation which will be mixed in with a series of links I was asked to comment. *Note: My presentation starts at 23h20.

Here are the links I discuss (in their order of appearance):

• La machine abstraite
• // user theory
• localhost
• 127.0.0.1/
• WikiWikiWeb
• Am I Hot Or Not?
• // bibliothèque universelle
• Napster
• The Pirate Bay
• // code
• Source Forge
• Google Code
• // standards
• W3C Validator
• A List Apart
• // code | art
• Every Icon
• Turux
• JODI
• Radical Software Group
• // physicalisation
• Aram Bartholl
• // zeitgeist
• We Feel Fine
• Zzzz

On Saturday, I’ll be speaking at « code_source », an exhibit organized by Etienne Mineur (cf. Incandescence) as part of the Féstival international de l’affiche et du graphisme de Chaumont. The exhibit will attack the question « what is interaction design? » through a historical survey of software, hardware, theoretical productions and games from this still-emerging field. There will also be a section devoted to the creations of art and design students from France, Colombia, USA, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, China, etc. This is where I fit into the picture, as several works from our Atelier Hypermédia in Aix-en-Provence will be documented in the exhibit (more details to come).

Several designers, yours truly included, were also asked to discuss the subject of interaction design for the French graphic design magazine Étapes in conjunction with « Code_source ». We were all asked the same set of questions related to the definition itself of Interaction Design as well as the historical landmarks that influenced us. The selected designers were: Geoffrey Dorne, Jean-Jacques Birgé, Jean-Louis Fréchin, Gabriel Jorby, Éric Viennot, Projet Mü, and abstractmachine and have just been published in the May 2009 edition of Étapes (#168). Here are a few photos of my interview.

You can read the article yourself for my full comments, but here are video links to the four historical events I chose to highlight: Ivan Sutherland, Sketchpad (1963); Myron Krueger, Videoplace (1972-); Seymour Papert, Logo (1967-); Steve Russel et al., Spacewar! (1962). These are fairly standard responses, I know, but I was dealing with an audience (graphic designers) that often confuse (contemporary) software with the conceptual frameworks that made them possible. From this perspective, some history can do little harm.

Of all the interviews, I thought that Jean-Louis Fréchin’s list was the coolest:

• Le système des objets by Jean Baudrillard « which both announces and provides a critique for the consumer society »
• The dissociation of gold and the dollar, thereby « announcing the birth of a society of immateriality and exchange »
• The personal computer (« augmenting people’s capacities and means of expression »)
• 1969, the year of the moon landing, for its’ introduction of « mass transportation (747), hyperspeed (Concorde) and networks (Arpanet) », i.e. the concerns and constructs of our present world

As well as his design studio NoDesign, Fréchin also runs the Atelier Design Numérique (ADN) at the École nationale supérieure de création industrielle (ENSCI).

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So, as I mentioned above, several works produced in part at the Atelier Hypermédia over the past 10 years will be documented at « Code_source ». Here is a list of the works (sorry, in French, but at least I’ve included some images/videos) :

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• « Web Waste », Ragnar Helgi Olafsson, 2002/4

Le WebWaste est une poubelle sur Internet. Par l’activation d’un robot-éboueur, ses utilisateurs se font vider automatiquement le contenu de leurs poubelles (sur ordinateur) dans cette décharge collective (Internet). Les document s’empilent sur le serveur de la décharge. En visitant le site web www.webwaste.net, n’importe qui peut ensuite naviguer à travers les images, textes, sons et vidéos dont d’autres auraient souhaitaient se débarrasser. On peut y chercher de l’inspiration, ou y flâner par curiosité — avec la possibilité bien sûr de récupérer des fichiers pour une consommation chez soi. Les règles sont ouverts, on peut y faire ce que l’on veut : jouer, manifester, dire la vérité ou proliférer des mensonges — c’est aux utilisateurs de choisir.

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• « ddd », Yannick Aïvayan, 2004

Dans l’Atelier Hypermédia, nous trouvons qu’il est parfois pratique de suivre le principe de « Just Fuck Around® » quand il s’agit d’apprendre une nouvelle technologie. Dans ce visualiseur/jeu, il n’y a pas eu d’autre but que d’apprendre les fonctionnalités 3D de base du logiciel multimédia Director. Ce modéliseur 3D a été le résultat d’une heure d’expérimentation avec quelques heures d’ajustements par la suite. Il n’y a pas réellement d’autre but que celle de l’exploration d’une nouvelle forme.

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• « SamplTV », Nicolas Boillot, 2003-2004

Le flux télévisuel est pris en tant que potentiel, un potentiel d’images, de mouvements et de signes. Le processus y extrait, de façon automatisée et en temps réel, toutes les parties d’images qui ont changé lors de la diffusion de l’émission télévisuelle. Il les capture et les redistribue ensuite de façon spatio-temporelle sur une boucle de vingt-quatre images. En l’exposant au spectateur image par image, il agit ainsi sur la diffusion elle-même, en gardant en mémoire et en présentant potentiellement plusieurs fois chaque fragment d’image. L’esprit hypnotisé s’habitue aux fragments, voire les attend et tente de les recomposer. Mais cet effet recherché de rémanence n’empêche pas un effacement progressif de la configuration. Car chaque fragment additionné à la boucle est présent et répété jusqu’à ce qu’un autre le recouvre et ainsi de suite jusqu’à sa disparition et son oubli.

video

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• « neo_hbscript », Naoyuki Tanaka, 2002

Lors de son passage à l’Atelier Hypermédia, Nao expérimentait principalement avec les formes interactives où image, son et jeu se mélangeaient en une seule entité audiovisuelle. Pour ses performances extra-muros, Nao a décidé de créer un instrument nomade qui nécessiterait uniquement une machine connecté à Internet pour être joué.

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• « Tetris Adventure », Florent Deloison, 2009

Tetris adventure est une variation autour du célèbre jeu de réflexion, mais se jouant désormais en ligne de commande. Il faut entrer manuellement les commandes au clavier dans la console pour faire se déplacer les pièces. Ce changement au sein même du gameplay instaure un rapport au temps différent. La réactivité du jeu n’est plus immédiate et impose au joueur de faire preuve de davantage de stratégie et de réflexion.

Il s’agit également d’un hommage aux premiers jeux d’aventure textuels (Adventure ), où le joueur devait entrer en toutes lettres les instructions.

Quelques faits intéressants à propos de Tetris adventure:

-Tetris adventure est déconseillé aux dylsexique, dixlesquique, dyslexiques. -Tetris adventure est conseillé par le Medef pour former des dactylos plus performantes. -L’homme qui a 8 doigts à chaque main est également le champion du monde de Tetris adventure.

Liste des commandes: [gauche] déplacer la pièce à gauche [droite] déplacer la pièce à droite [tombe] faire tomber la pièce [tourne] faire tourner la pièce

Tetris adventure a été conçu et présenté à l’occasion d’Eniarof 0.4, une fête foraine revisitée, qui laisse (entre autres) une large place aux détournements de jeux vidéos.

video

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• « 8=8 », Jankenpopp + TM + Nao + Abstractmachine, 2005

8=8 est un groupe de 4 programmeurs / 4 compositeurs / 4 VJs / 4 musiciens / 4 artistes. Tout les quatre apportent leur propre sensibilité esthétique et techniques dans un instrument numérique collectif: L’Hypertable. Par le déplacement de leurs mains sur la surface de l’Hypertable, images et sons sont générés, créant une opportunité unique d’improvisation musicale. 8=8 utilise l’Hypertable pour y jouer des programmes / instruments originaux, dans des contextes de concert / performance / demo.

En 2003, Douglas Edric Stanley crée « L’hypertable » - dispositif d’image/surface interactive. En 2005 il invite trois de son atelier à Aix-en-Provence à se joindre à lui : TM (a.k.a. Thomas Michalak), univers grouillant et mécanique ; Naoyuki Tanaka (artiste japonais résidant à Marseille) ; JankenPopp avec son monde teinté de fraises tagada et d’énergie punk ; et enfin l’univers d’ abstractmachine, plutôt sobre et conceptuel. L’hypertable a été co-produit par le CIREN, avec le soutien d’Arcadi, le DICREAM, et le SCAM.

video

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• « Mashup Machine », Pierre-Erick Lefebvre aka Jankenpopp, 2006

The mashup-machine est un instrument electronique qui prend la forme d’une boite en bois surmontée de quatre boutons lumineux. Chaque bouton de la taille d’une main permet la manipulation et le mixage intuitif de plusieurs sources multimédia aléatoires. La machine est une interface polyvalente, dynamique et expérimentale qui a été utilisée de 2005 à 2007 lors de performances AV et de concerts lives, elle a également été présentée en tant qu’installation sonore interactive lors de festivals et d’expositions collectives (Eniarof 0.2.2, Festival Emergences).

video

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• « Gameboy Pong », Antonin Fourneau & Erational, 2004

Deux GameBoy reliées par un câble sont posées sur une réplique miniature d’une table de pingpong. Les visiteurs sont invités à jouer a une version classique du jeu vidéo « Pong » (jeu de tennis). À la différence du jeu original la balle n’est pas visible par les deux joueurs en même temps mais passe d’un écran à l’autre en créant la surprise.

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• « Gameboy Nucleus », Antonin Fourneau, 2005

Partant du concept de la machine schizophrénique chez Deleuze et Guattari, le « Gameboy nucleus » est une technologie pour laquelle les facultés de commandes auraient été mises à l’extérieur de la machine construisant ainsi une machine en perpétuelle reconstitution. Autrement dit, ce « nucleus » suit un processus de « physicalisation » dans laquelle l’algorithme, le programme, ou le code, s’exprime à travers des objets tirés entre fonctionnement physique et fonctionnement logiciel.

video

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• « Objets Orientées-Objet » (workshop), Douglas Edric Stanley avec l’assistance d’Anne-Laure Schneider et de Pierre Rossel, 2005
• Workshop avec les étudiants de l’Haute École d’Art et de Design Genève avec la participation de l’Atelier Hypermédia ESA Aix-en-Provence

Ce workshop de 5 jours exploraient différentes possibilités de l’utilisation du dispositif « Hypertable » créé à l’origine par Douglas Edric Stanley pour son logiciel de cinéma algorithmique Concrescence. Trois étudiants et un enseignant ont terminé des projets pour lors de ce workshop : Pierre-Erick Lefvbre, Jana Korcjomkina, Pierre Rossel, Baptiste Coulon (dans l’ordre d’apparition des projets).

video

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• « Déplacements », Manu Braun, 2006

« Déplacements » est constitué de 24 ventilateurs formant un rectangle. Chaque ventilateur est « pixel », sa vitesse de rotation et l’intensité de la lumière de ses LED varient en fonction du niveau de gris correspondant au pixel de référence. Cet écran de ventilateurs est piloté par un ordinateur sur lequel tourne un programme simulant un automate cellulaire intitulé « Le jeu de la vie » (créé par John Horton Conway en 1970). C’est un modèle mathématique où chaque ventilateur est une cellule. «Déplacement » en tant que détournement de cet objet, composant de l’ordinateur, devenant image. Il ne s’agit pas d’un « déplacement » physique mais d’un mouvement, d’un flux.

video

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• « Fort Saint-Nicolas », Stefan Piat, 2005

Stefan Piat travaille sur la reconstitution de monuments et d’espaces en utilisant un système de mosaïques photographiques et vidéographiques qu’il relie dans des cartes dynamiques et interactives. Dans Forsinicola, Piat construit le Fort Saint Nicolas à Marseille. S’y mèle non seulement des images de formats divers, mais surtout des images avec des temporalités multiples, allant du cliché instantané à la chronophotographie (Marey/Muybridge) en passant par des ralentissements et des images-panoramiques. Le tout s’agrège dans une forme qui peut se décomposer et se recomposer selon les mouvements du joueur et du programme.

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• « Le voyage immobile », Stefan Piat, Julien Hô Kim & Digital Deluxe, 2006

Que nous habitions là où Cézanne peignait, que nous y vivions ou que nous traversions quotidiennement les paysages que Cézanne a peints, nous sommes tous un peu des habitants de ses peintures. Le studio de création Digital Deluxe a conçu et réalisé Le Voyage immobile, une invitation à partager cet héritage commun. Mais de quoi s’agit-il ? D’un module itinérant que l’on va retrouver dans l’espace public : le centre ville, les villages, les lycées, etc. qui va offrir au passant une découverte sensorielle de l’univers du peintre.

C’est le Centre européen de création et de développement culturel (CECDC) qui a lancé cette ambitieuse réalisation en collaboration avec l’association Terre active. Elle permet d’évoquer, sans chercher à la reproduire ni à l’expliquer, l’expérience sensorielle que représentait l’acte de peindre chez Cézanne. Voici donc une promenade interactive, différente, et sans bouger d’un pouce, sur les pas de Cézanne. Une balade qui, du paysage à l’oeuvre, permet d’évoquer le regard de Cézanne sur la nature, de comprendre le passage du motif au tableau.

Production CECDC / Conception et réalisation Digital Deluxe / Itinérance et tournée Terre Active

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• « Wind Draws », Pascal Chirol, 2007

Le système présenté est une installation venteuse, constituée de 15 ventilateurs disposés en cercle. Chaque ventilateur souffle en fonction d’informations fournies en temps réel par Internet et utilise le flux de stations météo du monde entier pour générer des dessins à la surface d’une feuille.

video

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• « Chessynthesis », Maxime Marion, 2007-2008

Chessynthesis est un dispositif sonore qui transforme deux joueurs d’échecs en des musiciens. Chessynthesis analyse en temps-réel les mouvements de chaque pièce sur le plateau, même celle qui se trouve dans la main du joueur. Avec ses informations, il interprète les indices tactiques/stratégiques du jeu, les tensions, les centres de gravité, et les transcode en de la musique avec de la synthèse granulaire.

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• « Episureo », Stefan Schwabe & Sebastian Neitsch, 2008
• développé à l’Ecole supérieure d’art Aix-en-Provence et au Kunstuniversität Linz

The paths we choose to follow each day, to go to work, to move around in our own homes or even the ways we move during our free-time are mostly pre-defined by architecture, human crowds or subconsciously learned behaviours. During all this, the personal space we keep around ourselves depends on the place we are at and the people surrounding us. We all need privacy but also depend on social relationships and so-for on close contacts to other humans. Our aim is to show this never-ending, pulsing conflict and the trails the participants leave in space and time.

To realize this within an interactive installation, we had to find a place where the participants would stay for quite a while and where they would have to move consciously but also relaxed. We wanted the people to naturally communicate to each other so that groups would appear and we needed them to move in a quite large radius. A swimming pool is almost perfect for this. It is like a stage you step on and just by its architectural form, it already pre-defines paths the swimmers usually follow and with which we as authors can play. On top of that the swimming and the water might relax the visitors so that they have the time and mind to concentrate on the installation. This was never been done before, so not only the visualisation of movement and the dynamics of human crowds where our main topics now, but also the difficult task to convert a public swimming pool into a huge interface.

The picture on the ceiling responds via motion-tracking to the swimmers in the water. Depending on their movements, their speeds and their distances to each other, the visualisation changes and with the help of an underwater loudspeaker variant sounds are generated. Abstract graphics slowly appear and get more and more complex after time, showing trails, movements and the group dynamics in the pool. To picture the whole movement and not only the one of each single swimmer, sometimes a kind of current appears that influences the whole visualisation.

video

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• « Node City », Lei Zhao, 2008
• développé au studio Lentigo, ENSBA Marseille avec l’assistance de l’Atelier Hypermédia ESA Aix-en-Provence

La ville est complexe, en perpétuelle mutation. Les flux d’images, d’information et de déplacement superposent en strates. Dans Node City, on se déplace à l’intérieur de ses strates via un système de navigation corporelle : autour de notre corps une projection au sol nous immerge à l’intérieur d’une carte que l’on peut explorer tout simplement en se déplaçant. Via un système de surveillance, on repère les promeneurs et leur propose un carrefour mobile de vidéos à explorer; en se baladant on découvre les différentes strates audiovisuelles de la ville.

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• « Shades of White », Tomek Jarolim & Bruno Péré, 2008
• avec la collaboration du Ballet Preljocaj

shades of white, mêlant danse, images et son, a été pour le festival les affluents au pavillon noir d’aix-en-provence, en collaboration avec bruno péré. l’idée principale est une évolution de la lumière blanche au travers de ses trois composantes colorées : rouge, vert et bleu. les projections sont la seule source de lumière pour les danseurs sur scène. elles sont diffusées au sol, sur le mur du fond, voire les deux.

la majeure partie de ces histoires colorées est programmé, puis exportée en vidéo et montée sur logiciel vidéo. voilà un petit résumé sur ce que l’on a essayé de symboliser par ces temps colorés :

le rouge est le commencement, comme une naissance hésitante et fragile. le vert correspond à la création d’un espace hésitant, une sorte de paysage sans dimension. le bleu est le résidu, après l’explosion blanche des trois couleurs réunies.

tantôt au mur, tantôt au sol, la lumière est image. l’image est matière. le mouvement du corps évolue avec un espace coloré qui se raconte peu à peu. rouge. vert. bleu.

video, video, video

With that in mind, here then is my open letter to Christine Albanel, the Minister of Culture, in which I ask her to rethink her position on this current cultural war:

Madame la ministre, demain vous reprenez les débats concernant votre proposition de loi « HADOPI ». Vous nous dites que cette loi est là pour nous protéger, nous les artistes, via une réponse « graduée » et « pédagogique » qui viserait le rétablissement d’un rapport plus équitable entre le public et les créateurs. Il y a eu beaucoup de débats sur cette loi, concernant principalement la question des libertés fondamentales des citoyens et de leur droit d’accès à l’information — autrement dit les conséquences de cette loi en partant du point de vue du consommateur (de la culture). Mais j’aimerais apporter un autre point de vue, partant cette fois-ci du point de vue de l’artiste.

Pour les artistes, cette loi ne répond pas à nos véritables problèmes. Elle en crée même des nouveaux. Ce n’est pas le public en tout cas qui doit nous faire peur, et ce n’est surtout pas le public qui nous empêcherait de créer. Il y a un déséquilibre, peut-être — mais tôt ou tard, nous finirons par nous retrouver. Il serait absurde dans tous les cas d’imaginer un quelconque antagonisme entre les artistes et leur public, encore moins un public de plus en plus demandeur de créations artistiques. Non, la véritable tension se trouverait plutôt entre les artistes et les acteurs qui en vivent — l’industrie culturelle. Il s’agit d’un problème parfaitement classique mais qui nécessiteraient aujourd’hui des renégociations autant sur les nouveaux moyens de diffusion que sur les nouveaux moyens de création. Je dirai même qu’il faut d’abord régler les problèmes du droit de la création, avant de se poser la question de la diffusion. Nous avons besoin de votre aide dans cette rééquilibrage, qui commence par l’arrêt des abus des mêmes systèmes de protection qui étaient sensés nous protéger et que vous déclarez défendre.

L’artiste d’hier n’est pas celui d’aujourd’hui et encore moins celui de demain dont nous ne devinons même pas les contours. Votre loi ne prend pas en compte ces changements; pire, elle fait perdurer un régime d’oppression artistique qui depuis longtemps empêche l’émergence de nouvelles formes qui ne rentreraient pas dans ses modèles de propriété intellectuelle. Où est-il marqué dans votre loi que les artistes du remix, de la détournement des média anciens, seront protégés contre les pratiques draconiennes des industries culturelles qui gardent ces « propriété » tel un cerbère contre toute réappropriation, notamment celle qui leur insufflerait une nouvelle inspiration ? Car c’est ici que les lois supposées nous protéger sont devenues des lois servant à étouffer nos créations. Combien d’artistes doivent être attaqués par les avocats des « majors » avant de réagir en notre défense, en nous proposons des actions (peu importe la forme) qui encouragerait les créations de demain, tout en respectant celles d’hier ? Les formes de censure dont nous souffrons sont avant tout économiques, mais finissent par devenir des formes de censure esthétiques, et qui se transforment même dans certains cas (que je connais malheureusement trop bien) en de la censure politique. L’économie ancienne de la culture nous étouffait, et c’est aujourd’hui qu’enfin nous nous débarrassons de ces lobbies qui ne sont rien d’autre que des défenseurs de la monoculture. Ce sont alors les lois elles-mêmes du droit d’auteur qui doivent être changées, celles créées pour une ancienne forme de création (et de sa diffusion). Et c’est aux anciens gardiens de la citadelle de la culture de s’adapter à la nouvelle donne, et surtout pas l’inverse.

Enfin, ce n’est pas en avançant les dates de sortie des DVD que vous aller inscrire les français dans les enjeux du XXIème siècle. Oubliez la vidéo à la demande, car le public lui-même s’est transformé. La notion de consommation culturelle a muté : ouvrez votre navigateur et vous verrez que l’internaute ne se contente plus de consommer les films, désormais il cherche à en être acteur, se situant quelque part entre curateur, commentateur, et créateur avec une part de moins en moins important de consommation. N’importe quelle loi proposant une harmonisation d’un monde technique et culturel ancien avec le monde nouveau doit commencer par assumer cette nouvelle donne d’une production culturelle en éternelle mutation et bidirectionnelle. Il faut protéger cette nouvelle forme de consommation, cette nouvelle forme de jouissance culturelle, contre les anciens modèles économiques qui sont, malheureusement, incompatibles avec elle. Le public est dans la même posture que nous les artistes, il cherche à créer.

C’est ici d’ailleurs sur ce dernier point que je diverge avec ceux qui prônent la création d’une licence globale : celle-ci est peut-être une solution, mais une solution uniquement temporaire. La licence globale prolonge elle aussi un modèle désuet, basé sur l’idée d’une consommation (passive) des contenus, comme s’il s’agissait de petits paquets de CD ou de DVD, mais distribués sans le support. Alors que l’avenir se trouve plutôt dans des formes audiovisuelles mutantes et algorithmiques qui ne peuvent même pas s’identifier dans telle ou telle copie puisque son raison d’être c’est justement de perdurer dans une adaptabilité permanente. Comment rémunérer correctement ces nouvelles formes tout en encourageant leur distribution ? Nous ne savons pas encore et c’est encore moins votre loi qui nous aidera puisqu’elle est ouvertement hostile aux algorithmes, qui sont suspectés de vouloir détourner ce DRM que même l’industrie culturelle a fini par abandonner. Nous les artistes ont bien moins peur des algorithmes, car nous comprenons que c’est grace à eux que nous oeuvres de demain fonctionneront.

Permettez-moi madame de vous faire une suggestion. Actuellement, vous pouvez téléchargez gratuitement et en toute légalité le film « RiP: A Remix Manifesto », distribué sur Pirate Bay sous la licence Créative Commons CC-BY-SA ou que vous pouvez visionner directement sur le site du National Film Board of Canada. Je vous le recommande très fortement, notamment pour ces valeurs pédagogiques concernant le rôle de la réappropriation dans l’histoire des expressions culturelles. Vous verrez, par exemple, que les droits que vous défendez ne sont peut-être pas aussi propres que vous ne le pensiez. Mais dans ce film, vous trouverez surtout un modèle d’action à la fois politique et artistique, via Gilberto Gil le célèbre musicien et ancien ministre de la culture brésilien : « Nous cherchons toujours à donner aux gens, aux enfants, accès. La nature même de la création, c’est le partage. Tout vient de quelque chose d’autre, c’est comme une réaction en chaîne » (01:12:58). Le rôle d’un ministre de la culture c’est la défense de la culture, de sa création et de son partage. Regardez la magnifique bibliothèque, encore plus grande que celle d’Alexandrie, que les amateurs d’art ont créé grâce au réseau de partage peer-to-peer. Est-ce que les grands industriels de la culture, que vous protégerez que vous le voulez ou non en passant cette loi, peuvent en dire autant ?

// Douglas Edric Stanley, http://www.abstractmachine.net

Zzzz (a.k.a. Bonne nuit les Tweets, a.k.a. Goodnight Sweet Tweets, …) is a Twitter visualizer built in Processing that tracks Twitterers as they count their electric sheep. It grabs the latest tweets that use “zzz” or “zzzz” and animates them with some simple vector-based graphics. It’s as simple as that.

One of the more obvious things about Twitter is its’ whole zeitgeist vibe. I’m currently fascinated along with everyone else about the evolving nature of this latest fad beast. Twitter is not just one thing, as our recent 140 character sketches hopefully made clear. People are using it as a chat service, I used it last summer as my own private AP wire, it’s used as a link-sharer, a help-wanted system, a job-hunting system, well-wishing, hate-mongering, and so on. Again, this is all the obvious stuff.

One of the knee-jerk reactions to Twitter concerns its’ narcissistic tendencies, à la Flutter — in other words the whole vanity of it all. And sure, this is indeed one aspect of it, as was the case when blogging came along. But as it is an emerging phenonomenon (although perhaps just a fad), I’ve found it interesting to follow pricisely this narcissistic aspect, and noticed as part of this reading the charming human touch of people saying good night not only to their peers, but to the equivalent of the stars, the world-at-large — a kind of mini bottle-to-the-sea. That is indeed pure vanity, vanitas, or vanité from vanus, a.k.a. « empty, void of meaning »; I am going to sleep, I am turning off my communications medium and I am communicating this fact to you. I have nothing to say but merely, goodnight, which is a structural communication or perhaps a close cousin to the speech act: herein ends our ability to communicate. But again, this speech closure ritual has a certain poetic quality in that it is addressed at once to one’s peers, but also in a public medium to a public at-large, as a form of address to ones-not-known. I suppose there are many blogs out there that say “I’m too tired to blog”, and literature is filled with examples of writers on the edge of sleep. But once I’d noticed this trope on Twitter, it was amazing to see how consistent it is, even across languages that do not even share the “Zzzz” form: all day long, people are saying goodnight, and in many different countries. If I had done a map visualizer along the line of Smule’s Ocarina, one would probably be witnessing a steady progression around the globe.

I actually started work on this a few weekends ago, but I didn’t have the time to finish it as Eniarof came around (more on that later) and took all my time. I know the graphics are a little hokey, but I actually like it that way. I originally tried something more sophisticated, but while doodling in a vector graphics program I came up with this idea and it stuck.

Oh, before I forget, I should also mention that there is a stripped-down TwitterSearch code example over at the Happy Code Farm on getting Twitter searches into Processing. It deals with the whole applet sandbox problem which Daniel Shiffman discusses over at Learning Processing. You can start from there in order to make your own Twitter zeitgeist visualizer. If you want something more complex with the possibility of digging into profiles and getting specific tweets, there are some Java objects out there (Twitter4J and Java-Twitter), and Brenda Moon went even so far as to send me an in-progress version of a romeFeeder example she’s working on (thanks Brenda!). But in the end, my needs were far simpler and getting search xml off of Twitter is amazingly easy (despite the fact that I lost a good 24 hours trying to figure it out, RTFM!). It took little more than a simple thread and the type of xml code we worked with in the Programmation Web workshop in February.

And finally, although this visualizer should work with the current Twitter API restrictions, there is no guarentee that I won’t hit my quota since everything is streaming through abstractmachine.net because of the sandbox issue. I’ve tried applying for an API bandwidth increase, but couldn’t figure out the form. It says input IP’s as CSV (Comma-Separated Values?) but something as simple as that of course needs an example for dopes like me. I’ve sent out a request to Twitter, but if someone could explain to me what a CSV is supposed to look like, the comments section is open.

Oh, and for anyone who has not had the pleasure of meeting The Sandman (Ulysse), Gros Ours, Nicolas and Pimprenelle, here is a special accordian-themed « Bonne nuit les petits ». Faites de beaux rêves !

I have been invited to take part in a new department at the Haute École d’Art et de Design Genève exploring the emerging field of Media Design. Anyone who reads this blog should be able to see the affinities of what I do at the Atelier Hypermédia and the announced objectives of this new department. Although officially I will be intervening in the field of algorithmic design in its various manifestations, as well as specifically in the world of experimental game design, there are many other fields that this department (and its sister department Spaces & Communication) deal with that I too dabble in, so I assume I will be working on some of those projects as well.

To head off a question I can see coming : I will not be leaving my position at the École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence. I am currently starting up some important development projects in Aix-en-Provence (more on that later as it becomes official) and so, for the moment at least, I will be intervening merely as an invited lecturer to begin with the 2009-2010 session.

However, this does mean that I will be holding a lot fewer workshops in the future. I know that these workshops are very popular, but unfortunately these intense sessions are often too numerous and more importantly too frustrating to all involved because of their transitory nature. That said, if you are looking for brilliant and motivated young artists to run workshops on art & code, or the physicalization of objects, I can (and often do) recommend a whole slew of people I have worked with and trained over the past several years who are in many ways more competant than I.

Added note to all those across the pond who are looking for a more economic means of getting a quality higher education: over here in Europe, where institutions and infrastructure still work the way they’re supposed to, higher education fees are amazingly reasonable. Although currently in France major efforts are underway to model the education system on — gulp — the American University model, for the moment these suicidal tendencies have yet to give sway. Whenever I work over in my home country I am absolutely appauled by the fees, often up in the $20,000 range and beyond. Although I’m currently paid peanuts, I at least can take some consolation in the affordable cost of studying with me (these two factors of the equation probably have something to do with each other, by the way). So comparatively, the 320€/semester of this new department seems perfectly reasonable, especially given the fact that Geneva is an amazingly expensive city, along the lines of New York, Tokyo, etc. I don’t know if those fees apply to swiss students only or are a flat rate, but whatever the case they’re definitely far less that the fees which have gone totally out of control back in the States. Given the hard times, it’s perhaps time to reset the tuition fees along with the rest of the economy.

Here is the English announcement of the two new departments. En français plus loin.

• NEW MA PROGRAMMES IN DESIGN
• OFFERED BY HEAD – GENEVA
• CALL FOR APPLICATION

• MEDIA DESIGN
• 4 full-time semesters / 90 ECTS
• http://head.hesge.ch/spip.php?rubrique424&lang=en

The Media Design Masters programme is addressed primarily to students / designers, principally active in the field of new digital media (interaction, internet, game design), wishing to extend and develop their practical work. It also permits creators operating in closely related fields (graphics, fashion, architectural design) to expand and question their discipline by incorporating into it the approaches, tools and the potential for expression and communication of emerging technologies.

This professionalizing programme, unique in Switzerland, aims to train designers whose skills are based on the mastery of techniques, critical reflection and aesthetic evaluation. It provides the opportunity to invent and develop mechanisms, products or applications, as well as their content, through the employment of the codes and tools specific to digital technologies and networks.

Based on the fact that digital technology is a universal intercode making it possible to unify and to create crossovers between the different fields of media design, the programme covers the whole range of visualisation, modelling and communication processes involved with the new media. The teaching, which highlights the importance of the code and programming, encourages convergence of the different media design fields to which the students’ projects bélong : interaction design, dynamic data visualisation, digital fashion design, locative and mobile media, electronic publishing and publications, digital performance and real time.

• SPACES AND COMMUNICATION
• 4 full-time semesters / 90 ECTS
• http://head.hesge.ch/spip.php?rubrique423&lang=en

The Masters in Spaces and Communication programme is addressed to students / designers for whom space (interior architecture / space design) or visual communication (graphic design, web design, video, signage) constitute the principal fields of activity and who wish to extend and develop their practice. It also permits creators working in closely-related areas (architecture, industrial design, typography, photography) to expand and question their discipline from the angle of an overall communication incorporating the spatial components.

The programme combines the capacities of graphic design and signage with those of space design and architecture following a multidisciplinary logic and a combined practical perspective. This Masters gives priority to the field of concrete spaces while still leaving a significant place for the use of new virtual media technologies and resources. It offers the chance to experiment and to develop real, ephemeral or lasting projects, in connection with the major cultural structures, companies and economic events (forums, fairs or shows) and the international organisations based in Geneva.

The teaching emphasizes the interactions between the different professional fields : exhibition design, design of commercial spaces and services (stands, show-rooms, concept stores,…), signage and graphic design in the public space, event design and corporate identity.

These Master programmes attaches prime importance to research, and benefits from numerous institutional and private partnerships on the national and international level. Supervision is provided by versatile and multidisciplinary teams of lecturers, professionals, creators, researchers and invited contributors.

Deadline for application: 29 May 2009

• Qualification awarded: Master of Arts HES-SO in Design - major Spaces & Communication / Media Design.
• This qualification is internationally recognized.
• Fees: CHF 500.- / 320 Euros per semester.
• Language: teaching is given in French with additional contributions in English.
• Collaborations: two other majors of the Master of Arts HES-SO in Design are offered by ECAL – Lausanne (Art Direction and Product Design).

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

• DEUX NOUVEAUX PROGRAMMES MASTER EN DESIGN
• OFFERTS PAR LA HEAD – GENÈVE
• APPEL À CANDIDATURE

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

• ESPACES ET COMMUNICATION
• 4 semestres à temps plein / 90 ECTS
• http://head.hesge.ch/spip.php?rubrique423

Le programme Master Espaces et Communication s’adresse aux étudiant-e-s / designers, suisses ou étrangers, dont l’espace (architecture d’intérieur / design d’espace) ou la communication visuelle (graphisme, webdesign, vidéo, signalétique) constituent les terrains d’action principaux et qui souhaitent élargir et approfondir leur pratique. Il permet aussi à des créateurs actifs dans des domaines connexes (architecture, design industriel, typographie, photographie) de développer et d’interroger leur discipline dans la perspective d’une communication globale intégrant les composantes spatiales.

Espaces et Communication croise les compétences du design graphique et de la signalétique avec celles du design d’espaces et de l’architecture dans une logique multidisciplinaire et une optique de pratique concertée. Il vise à former des designers dont les compétences se fondent sur le développement de concepts spatiaux et communicationnels innovants, sur la maîtrise des savoirs et des savoir-faire, ainsi que sur une réflexion critique et éthique. Informé par les apports théoriques des sciences humaines, valorisant le potentiel créatif de chaque étudiant-e, ce master original, unique en Suisse, offre la possibilité d’expérimenter et de développer des projets réels, éphémères ou durables, en lien avec les grandes structures culturelles, les entreprises et manifestations économiques (forums, foires ou salons) et les organisations internationales implantées à Genève.

L’enseignement met l’accent sur les interactions des différents champs professionnels : design d’exposition (exhibition design), design d’espaces commerciaux et de services (stands, show-rooms, concept stores,…), signalétique et graphisme dans l’espace public, design d’événements et communication institutionnelle (corporate identity).

• MEDIA DESIGN
• 4 semestres à temps plein / 90 ECTS
• http://head.hesge.ch/spip.php?rubrique424

Le programme Master Media Design s’adresse prioritairement aux étudiant-e-s / designers, suisses ou étrangers, dont les nouveaux médias numériques constituent le terrain d’action principal (interaction, web, game design) et qui souhaitent élargir et approfondir leur pratique. Il permet aussi à des créateur-rice-s actifs dans des domaines connexes (graphic, fashion, architectural design) de développer et d’interroger leur discipline en y intégrant les démarches, les outils et le potentiel d’expression et de communication des technologies émergentes.

Ce programme professionnalisant, unique en Suisse, vise à former des designers dont les compétences se fondent sur la maîtrise des techniques, la réflexion critique et l’évaluation esthétique. Il offre la possibilité d’inventer et de développer des dispositifs, produits ou applications, ainsi que leurs contenus, en mettant en œuvre les codes et les outils propres aux technologies numériques et aux réseaux.

Basé sur le constat que le numérique constitue un intercode universel permettant d’unifier et de croiser les divers champs du media design, le programme concerne l’ensemble des processus de visualisation, de modélisation et de communication impliquant les nouveaux médias. L’enseignement, qui met l’accent sur l’importance du code et de la programmation, favorise la convergence entre différents champs du media design dans lesquels s’inscrivent les projets des étudiant-e-s: interaction design, visualisation dynamique des données, digital fashion design, médias locatifs et mobiles, édition et publications électroniques, performance numérique et temps réel.

Ces deux programmes Master accordent une importance primordiale à la recherche et bénéficient de nombreux partenariats, institutionnels ou privés, noués au niveau national et international.
Leur encadrement est assuré par des équipes polyvalentes et pluridisciplinaires d’enseignant-e-s, de professionnel-le-s, de créateur-rice-s, de chercheur-euse-s et d’intervenant-e-s invités.

Délai d’admission: 29 mai 2009

• Titre délivré: Master of Arts HES-SO en Design - Orientation Espaces & Communication / Media Design
• Ce titre est internationalement reconnu.
• Coûts: CHF 500.- / 320 Euros par semestre
• Langue: la langue d’enseignement est le français, complétée par des apports en anglais.
• Collaborations: ces deux orientations master font partie intégrante du Master HES-SO en design qui offre également deux autres orientations à l’ECAL – Lausanne (Art Direction et Design de produit).

Last week, Stéphane Cousot wrote a basic library for communicating between Processing and Pinguino. While you’ve probably heard of Processing before (since you’re reading this blog) you’ve almost certainly never heard of Pinguino. It’s one of the roll-your-own projects that we are developing here at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art in order to fill our own needs. It is loosely based on the Arduino platform, most of all its philosophy, but redesigned around PIC microcontrollers with integrated USB. In other words, it’s our in-house Arduino.

The project is in its first year of development and experimentation, and a lot remains to be ameliorated, most of all the editor and the installer. But as in the past we have found that the best way to mature our technologies is to use them in our own work as if they already work (or at least as if they will work), we figured that we would just jump in head first and start developing all the various pieces, even while we’re in the middle of building crazy festivals like the next Eniarof. So while Stéphane is here for Eniarof, I decided that it would be best to put him to work on developing a Processing Library to connect up directly with the Pinguino circuits various projects are building for their attractions.

Jean-Pierre developed the original solution using the libusbJava wrapper to libusb. This is not a virtual serial port, but direct communication with the USB bus. Stéphane then took this solution and built the basic library that we will use to further develop the communication protocol between Processing and Pinguino. One of Jean-Pierre’s original ideas for his platform was to build a default mode that would allow Processing, Pure Data, Python or one of the many other languages and environments we use, to directly command the Pinguino. There is something similar to this idea in the current Firmata protocol built in to the Processing Core Libraries. But we’re still a long way from getting there. For the moment we just have a simple protocol to get pin states, change pin states and send/receive more generic, or non-pin related messages.

Here is a video of Stéphane running his demo:

And some photos:

But now that hipster pop acts such as Röyksopp are reportedly referencing the work (I have my doubts) and given that some time has gone by, it is perhaps finally possible to post this video which I have already been showing to crowds at various talks over the past few months. It’s actually not that great of a video, but it does shed a little more light on what actually was going on in Leipzig. As it has been reported elsewhere, there was something of a disconnect between the public reaction to the piece on-site, and people’s reaction on-line. Playing it was apparently very different than just reporting on its visual aspects, especially the types of images at the end of the video, I assume, where you can see the full extent of the damage of the buildings as the game matches ever more closely the historical progression of events (planes, impact, fire, structural damage, jumpers, etc). It would obviously be better to release a more complete video tracing the way in which the game itself mapped the historical events back onto the 8-bit classic, but given that the Games Convention itself wasn’t really the ideal place for this type of analytic meditation anyway, I’ll just go with this video testimony of people playing it, as it was presented. Some people only saw either the Kotaku image, or the Laboral Video, which made for another form of disconnect as people didn’t understand what was actually going on and therefore what the fuss was all about.

Here’s the Röyksopp video by the way:

If it’s true that Röyksopp is referencing my piece, that’s very cool, especially since it’s a great song. Again, I have my doubts since many pop acts don’t really use imagery all that critically, pull $#!¥ in from any direction, and therein pastiche everything into one big self-same pile. It’s always frustrating to see the extent to which music videos often end up whitewashing the images they reference. There is a long history to this tendency, although there is perhaps one recent notable exception: Justice’s « Stress » which was able to reference Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and recontextualize it with a new political charge which it successfully maintained throughout, going so far as to provoke significant debate in France concerning the ontological status of the image (Is it protest? Is it glorification? Is it criticism?):

Pulling all this back to the Invaders! debate, I actually had an interesting public conversation with Louis Bec last november at the Biennale Figures of Interactivity while presenting this work. According to Bec, there are certain complex calculations in mathematics that require the introduction of a « zone d’ombre» in order to be resolved, and that if you do not in fact include this shadow region, the equation becomes incalculable. Bec tried to draw an analogy by suggesting that September 11th had become culturally unthinkable, and that in order to re-render it imaginable so as to process it, a certain « zone d’ombre » is required, which he suggested comes here in the form of a historical reconstruction (or simulation) of the event which reconstructs the violence in a highly symbolic form so as to able to process it. He went on to create similar analogies with animal simulations of violence and combat in play, and so on. That last part is actually part of the general narrative gamers often use defending the role of violence in video games and I don’t know if I want to get lost down that path because the argument hangs on a certain subtlely that often gets lost in translation. But beyond this idea of simulation, for Louis, the ambiguity of this work « on violence » is merely one of the pre-requisites of needing a shadowy region in order to render the violent act re-thinkable.

It’s in French (désolé pour ceux qui n’en parlent pas) and it handles the usual suspects (code, teaching, gaming, and on-line tutorials). As it turns out, a lot of people use my cours sur la programmation dans Processing. So Weecast wanted me to talk about them and tried to convince me to make some videos for their site which is all about online tutorials (en français, sorry). Just last week I had people from Brazil, Spain and two schools here in France describe how they use my online courses. All that’s great, but the classes are kinda old and really need some updating, and most of all, should be video tutorials. The problem is of course that I only have so many hours in the day and I’m in the middle of a gazillion other projects. For me to take time out right now I need some sort of context where I can get paid for the time taken away from other projects. So at first I was very interested at Weecast’s proposal: remaking my Processing tutorials into video webcasts that I can get paid for. Their model is pretty reasonable and the prices are low. But therein lies the rub, and the ethical dilemma. I personally would prefer either some sort of advertising model or some sort of sponsorship when it comes to making on-line classes on Processing, because Processing is ultimately free software (as in freedom as well as in beer). These are all old dilemmas, I know, but I still feel like they haven’t been resolved. As I mention in the interview, imagine having to pay a few bucks to learn how to use sound in Processing. As we say in French, c’est un peu vache (”it’s kinda cow”?). For the moment I’ve suggested to Weecast: hey, find some public funding or sponsorship so that we can make those specific classes free. But I’m not so sure that’s really a model. Hmmm.

I dunno, a sort of ambiguous issue for me. Anyone have any other ideas?

Antonin Fourneau and I are gearing up for the next Eniarof which begins construction next Monday and will open March 27th and 28th for two evenings of fun (18h-24h), open of course to any and all publics (animal, mineral, vegetable, fantasmagorical, whatever). I’ll post more at a later date concerning Eniarof itself, what it is, etc, but for the moment I will simply mention that we have some great special guests this year, including Nicolas Boone (cf. BUP) and Etienne Cliquet, along with previous eniarofers (cf. Charcutrie Brilliant), the students of the Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, and finally all the various stragglers and hangers-on who will throw up attractions with whatever means they can muster. This will all be taking place at the École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence and we’re open to all sorts of propositions, so if you want to join in on the fun, make yourself known and we’ll figure something out. Make sure you read the Dogme Eniarof first, as it gives the general theme of that-thing-otherwise-known-as-eniarof.

Anyway… long story short, before I get submerged by the Eniarof beast, I wanted to post a fun attraction my daughter and I made in a couple of hours for Eniarof. She’s 12, has seen every digitalinteractiveroboticgenerative thingamajig you can throw at her and really could care less. Twenty million screens and a gazillion sensors? Yeah whatever. It networks halfway across the globe and into space? Hasbeen. When she was four she shook the third arm of Stelarc, at five she was introduced to a man named Naut Humon, and over the years has met all sorts of other wonderful extraterrestrial constructs. Zzzzz. Next! So what could I possibly propose to peak the interest of a been-there-done-that 12-year-old? Actually, for years she’s been asking me to make something that matters, you know, something people might actually care about, like, for example, something with horses. I actually do have a wonderful installation along these lines (think Elephants, Stallions and Giraffes) but which has yet to find the right exhibit/curator, so she waits and waits still. So I finally gave up waiting, and as Eniarof was coming up we found a few available hours and created a horse simulator we are calling Henniraof. The functions of this horse simulator are simple: you wear various iterations of horse heads and bodies made out of cardboard, and prance about in an arena we will build for the occasion with similarly low-budget materials. Add one webcamera, one Optical Flow algorithm, a MacMini, some speakers and some horse noises and you have yourself a really fun horse simulator.

I’ve included a link to the downloadable software. Remember, this was made very quickly and while it could be far more sophisticated this would totally defeat the purpose as an Eniarof attraction. Rule one when making an Eniarof attraction: once it works good enough for people to have fun with it, you should stop and move on to the next attraction. Rule two: do whatever it takes to get to rule one.

Added note, the source code will probably not work in your OpenFrameworks installation, since I’ve done some nasty hacking into my version of OpenFrameworks. When the next version of OpenFrameworks comes out its’ OpenCV module should have Optical Flow integrated in the basic installation; I’ll re-compile at that point. Sorry about that but I’m too busy right now. Until then, the code is simply listed here as a reference. Again, sorry…

That said, we plan to add Optical Flow into the next iteration of the OpenCV Processing Libraries which should actually be pretty easy to do in and of itself. It’s really just cleaning up the current library, updating to the new OpenCV release, and fixing some major architectural mistakes we made (impossible to use multiple instances, etc) in the first library that will take time.

The horsehead construction formula was designed by Lola in just a couple of minutes. Basically I left the room to get some industrial-sized staples and when I got back she’d designed this brilliant system, so I take no credit for the design (other than some vague notion of genetic influence). All of the elements are both structural and visual. The black tape reinforces the solidity, designs the look, and simultaneously protects users from the sharp edges of the big staples (it also helps keep the staples from ripping).

Ingredients:

• Cardboard box
• Tape (black gaffer tape gives great contrast with the brown cardboard)
• 4 x Necrobutcher-sized staples (or just cut coat-hangers into staples, whatever)
• Pliers (for working with the staples)
• Cutting knife or scissors

Steps:

1. Get a box.

1. Flatten the cardboard box by identifying the natural seam where the box was glued together and tear at this point. This should give you a flat piece of cardboard to work with.

1. Identify the ugliest side and remove it. In my example, I’m removing the side where the handle was torn off (probably through use — those eggs must have been pretty heavy). Keep this piece, we will use it later for the horse’s mane.

1. Fold the remaining sides together to make the horse’s head shape. You will probably figure it out pretty quickly by looking at the photos, but the basic idea is to make an elongated horse head by folding the two side-flaps over one another. I recommend folding the lower flap over the upper flap.

1. Chose the strategic points for the four staples and place the black tape on both sides (inside and out). Try to position the back staples at a strategic point: not too close to the edge of each flap so as to risk tearing the cardboard, but high enough to be used as the horse’s eyes once covered with tape. This is a judgement call, but you don’t really have to be all that perfect about it. We noticed that as long as you get the eyes close enough to the position of true horse anatomy eye sockets, imagination takes over.

1. Push the staples into the cardboard (using pliers, or an industrial staple-gun), fold the ends down as flat as possible, and place a piece of tape over the staples, in order to protect whomever from scratching/cutting themselves on the staples. Remember, Eniarof is an event open to animals of all ages, so let’s try to avoid meaningless accidents (thereby leaving room for meaningful ones). Of note: once you’ve placed the two staples at the horse’s muzzle your structure should be pretty solid and you’ll be able to work fairly easily on the rest of the horse head.

1. In order to make your horse even more solid, and simultaneously build his/her bridal gear, wrap one long piece of tape around the nose.

1. Cut out the ears. I suggest first making a drawing on the pieces you want to cut. I also suggest using the cutout from the first ear to draw the second ear. This should give both ears the same size/shape.

1. Create the mane with whatever scraps you have remaining and attach them with tape.

1. The method you use to make your viewport is up to you. Here I’ve started cutting from where the original handle-hole was cutout and simply cut horizontally to the same length on the other side. I then wrapped the edges with tape so as to avoid tearing the cardboard and eventually cutting the players’ own muzzles. Make sure that your viewport is large enough for the eyes and the nose. Note that you should now be able to see through the hole at the horse’s nose on the other side.

1. All horses should have a name. Naming your horse is a pretty easy affair. Remember, nothing is superfluous. Here we’ve chosen two names based on the cardboard boxes’ original packaging information: « Boulette » was the name of our first horse, and « Calibre » our second, although I now regret not having retained « Oeuf » from the packaging. Living in France it would have been easy to name our horse « Picard » or « Carrefour » (wheras in the States I suppose it would be « Kellogs », « Joe » or « Safeway », depending on where you shop), but then you’d have a lot of horses all with the same name, so « Boudin », « Tripes », « Sponges », or « Spam » is probably a better bet.

1. Voilà, you now have a horse puppet. Download the software, set up your camera and go get all jiggy wit’ it.

So last Friday, we decided to take him up on his offer and explore Twetching™ during our Friday meetup at the Atelier Hypermédia.

Here are a few examples of code with links to their authors:

float i;PImage a=loadImage("http://tiny.cc/Rdn0Z","jpg");void draw(){i+=0.01;translate(50,50);rotate(i);scale(sin(i)2);image(a,-250,-250);} //@destaouel

import ddf.minim.;AudioPlayer player;Minim minim;minim=new Minim(this); player=minim.loadFile("http://tinyurl.com/cty59k");player.play(); //@FlorentDeloison

float x,y,t;int h=100;void setup(){size(h,h);h/=2;t=0;}void draw(){x=h(sin(9t+1)+1);y=h(sin(8t)+1);point(x,y);t+=0.01;t%=TWO_PI;} //@benoitespinola

int c;void draw(){frameRate(c%120+1);background(++c%2==0?0:255);} //@tomekjarolim

void draw(){for(int i=3;i<500; i+=random(0,i)){rect(3+i,i,i%24,i%34);}} //@budoubuda

float x=2,i=random(1),y=2,j=random(1);void draw(){background(0);ellipse(x+=i,y+=j,10,10);if((x>99)||(x<1))i=-i;if((y>99)||(y<1))j=-j;} //@benoitespinola

float j;void setup(){size(99,99,P3D);}void draw(){j=second();rotateZ(j);translate(j,j);fill(j*4,j*3,j*2,j);box(10);} //@FlorentDeloison

float i,j;void setup(){size(99,99,P3D);}void draw(){j=random(0.1,1);rotateZ(i+=0.1+j%1); translate(i+j,i+j);fill(j*300);box(10*j);} //@FlorentDeloison

PFont f=createFont("Serif",25);background(0);textAlign(CENTER);textFont(f);text("vendredi 13 février 1984",1,1,99,99); //@destaouel

void draw(){for(int i=0;i<500; i++){rect(3+i,random(0,100),10+i,10);}} //@budoubuda

int u=100;int v=0;void setup(){size(u,u,P3D);}void draw(){background(0);v=++v%u;for(int i=0;i<1000;i++){curve(0,50,i,i*2+v,i*4,i*2+v,u,u);}} //@AmmmO

void draw(){for(int i=0;i<width;i++){colorMode(HSB);noStroke();fill(random(255),255,255);ellipse(random(width), random(height),4,5);}} //@ destaouel 

int x,y;int c=-16777216;void draw(){frameRate(600);if(c>-1)c=-1;stroke(c);point(x,y);c++;x++;if(x>100){x=0;y++;}if(y>100)y=0;} //@tomekjarolim

void draw(){background(0);for(int i=0;i<100;i=i+2){stroke (random (0,255),random (0,255),random (0,255));line (i,i,i,1);line (i,i,1,i);}} //@FlorentDeloison

int i;void draw(){color[]c=new color[3];c[0]=color(255,0,0);c[1]=color(0,255,0);c[2]=color(0,0,255);background(c[i]);i=++i%3;} //@tomekjarolim

int c=-16777216;void draw(){if(c>-1)c=-1;background(c);c++;} //@tomekjarolim

PImage i=loadImage("http://tiny.cc/RpZTS","jpg");void setup(){size(743,1155);image(i,0,0);rect(315,335,40,1);} //@abstractmachine

void draw(){colorMode(HSB);stroke(millis()%360,28*9,255);line(mouseX,mouseY,pmouseX,pmouseY);copy(0,0,width,height,-5,-5,width+9,height+9);} //@abstractmachine

String[] s=loadStrings("http://tiny.cc/2W8tj");println(s); //@abstractmachine

The whole process was a lot of fun, and an excellent pedagogic exercise. We only played around for about an hour, which was probably enough. But I have a feeling we will be doing more « exercises » like this in the future. We do a lot of theory in class, and try to mix that up with play, technical information, project critique, and open discussions. Since what the Atelier Hypermédia basically does is treat code as a « plastic » material, useable in any artistic context (i.e. considering the code itself a possible form of artistic exploration), games like this are really what we are all about. But I was struck by the level of mastery students displayed of the basic rules of Java syntax, and the collective part of the session was a real eye-opener on how good the students have gotten at collective coding. Talking about code is a Good Thing™®, coding with ten or more hands in and Even Better Thing™®. Just afterwards we had a great session with a young artist presenting her project, the exercise being: how would you develop her installation ? There too, the students showed a great capacity at collectively designing the project, even when discussing the complex details of the code. The trick, apparently, is playing such arcane and thick subjects fast and loose, and thereby ignoring the preciousness of the form itself of the code, and doing it collectively, and as a form of play. It’s an intellectual bait and switch which in the end allows for a rigorous form of play.

Some space was reserved yet again this year for the Atelier Hypermédia at the Festival Gamerz. Gamerz is a festival that explores the relationship between art & video games. This edition was co-curated by Isabelle Arvers who appears to be helping this promising little festival power up to the next level.

I’m a little late with this one, given that I was trapped in the snow in my little village for several days. I actually missed the opening and had to assist the last days of the Atelier Hypermédia’s contibution via lots of ftp and sms. Debugging and adjusting variables over cellular is not really my idea of fun, although it’s certainly not the first time. So I’ve only now been to the exhibit to actually see/document the works (and fix a couple bugs).

• Our first contribution is from Florent Deloison, a 5th year student at the school and who is presenting his installation « Recession Kid »: an 8-bit role-playing romp through the fun of mass-layoffs, offshore banking, slum landords, and free-wheeling stock market pimping. While the game harkens back to old-skool RPG’s, it adds some minor sophistications to the genre by indexing the gameplay to real-time fluctuations of various on-line data, ranging from live stock market values to weather conditions on wall street.

• The second installation is called « Twiist » and is a game from Jane Antoniotti which, while intended as a conceptual work, is actually quite fun to play. We built this one from the ground up in about three days when our previously planned installation went AWOL. Adding snow into the factor, I consider this quite a feat. Jane’s idea was to build a game using the Wii Balance Board, transforming it into an un-balanced board. Basically, during gameplay, the board periodically de-axes its center of gravity, and the player has to twist themselves into various improbable contorsions in order to re-produce, on screen, the ideal image of beauty. For Gamerz 04, Jane decided for a decidely Baywatch edition for the beauty model.

While making « Twiist », we wondered why Nintendo had never thought of this idea, for example by tying the Balance Board into their underwhelming Photo Channel. In the Atelier we were playing Flow on a Playstation 3 last week and were wondering, in a similar vein, why there aren’t any decent uses of the the Wiimote as simple and obvious as WiiPlay. Anyway, in Jane’s Twiist, the game was programmed to dynamically adjust to whatever photo is fed into it, and could easily be integrated with some simple OpenCV-style face detection + blob detection from within one’s own photo library. So any photo library could feasibly be fed into the game. There are in fact many potential variations to Jane’s game and would be pretty easy to program. Too bad we don’t have easy access to WiiWare (along the likes of the iPhone App Store, or even Microsoft’s XNA Creator’s Club), otherwise we would have been happy to port it to the real Wii. Again, the industry’s overprotective economic model is confounded with a contemporary version of shooting oneself in the foot. Nintendo has called one of their series « ArtStyle », with one of their games looking suprisingly similar to this old program created in 2004 in the Atelier by Yannick Aïvayan. Given that on rare occasions what we design is not so dissimilar, it makes no sense to me why we can’t distribute on that platform. But there you go, again: business models. But I’m rambling…

Of note: both games were built with Processing and Twiist uses Osculator to pull the data off the Balance Board and send it to Processing via Open Sound Control. For those looking to use the Balance Board, be careful of this little gem: early Balance Boards (April-May 2008) send their data out strangely and Osculator can register two of the four pads. This makes no sense of course, since the board works fine on the Wii itself, but there you go. Be forewarned. Camille Troillard, the creator of Osculator, has just sent me a beta test of the latest incarnation which fixes this problem. He is still testing, but my version works and on a balance board that previously worked incorrectly.

Also of note, both games use heavy doses of Polymorphism for more variation and evolution in the gameplay. Basically, if you are going to be doing any moderate to serious game design, you should know classes, objects, inheritance, and polymorphism. I have an old blog post on this subject.

Two other notable works at Gamerz, and from Atelier Hypermédia alumni to boot:

• Antonin Fourneau’s R+R (at the Galerie Sextius), a totally killer head-banging apparatus where you don a heavy-metal-approved wig, and violently bob your head up and down, provoking ear-splitting guitar riffs that (with the proper frenzy) pump it up to eleven.

• Manuel Braun and Virginie Le Gall’s « Fais-moi mal », a masochistic punching ball with an integrated speaker+accelerometer+arduino: as you punch the ball, the ball cries out for more. Probably one of the more gadgety installations by Manuel, but fun nevertheless and well-designed.

There are many other interesting installations, for example France Cadet’s Sweet Pads or Paul Destieu’s installation at the art school gallery which I can only describe as an autistic tennis match: the machine throwing and catching its own tennis ball, all day long. Er, uh, maybe that’s tautological tennis? Tennis recursion loop?

And finally, there appears to be a promising evening on January 28th with a contemporary take on the endlessly recycled ideas begun by Radúz Çinçera’s « Kinoautomat ». This time, the interface is your mobile phone: the film « E1000 » asks you to turn your cellphone on before the movie begins, and to use it in order to interact with the movie.

It’ll run at whatever resolution you’re at.

It’s nothing special and I just whipped it up in OpenFrameworks in just a few minutes so don’t expect much. But it makes for a nice background fishbowl sort of thing, especially on a big flatscreen TV. Apparently, the abstractmachine project is moving more and more into interior decoration ;-)

In a couple hours we’ll be starting a four-day workshop using Julien Gachadoat’s Vision Factory platform. This one’s gonna be purely experimental folks, so come prepared with lab coats, flame retardants, and a whole ‘lotta patience. Julien has whipped up a crazy-but-cool server-client system for collective livecoding using a little OSC + Processing client for delivery of the code to the mothership. Should be interesting.

I made the mistake of introducing class/objects on the final day, in a pretty funny class on fur, hair and tufts which I’ll have to reproduce in some form or other. I should have started directly with objects, as we did in the Algorithmic Design project we initiated last month in Orléans. In my experience, it’s easier to learn class/objects from day 1, rather than day 3, or week 5. Once you’ve become lazy programming spaghetti code, it’s too hard to break it off into objects. No matter how ugly it is, once comfort has settled in, it’s simply too easy to get stuck in linear thinking. That must have something to do with the brain’s natural tendencies. However, if you start from day 1, you stay organized, people tend to understand the code better, and probably can make cooler monsters. Alas! We did things ass-backwards, and the students’ code mastery suffered as a result. But a few of the monsters are fun nevertheless :

Monstres Aixois

I’ll be heading to Geneva tomorrow for a talk on Wednesday morning, followed by a mini-workshop in the afternoon at the CCC. We will be discussing the role of algorithms, software, and machines in the changing political landscape of our contemporary societies. There will obviously be some discussion of code and hacking in there, but I also want to discuss the role I think games and/or « electronic ludism » (i.e. the larger context of play and algorithmic machines) can play in future political/citizen intervention.

I’ll be travelling tomorrow to Poitiers for what looks like a very rich roster of speakers discussing… oh yes… the subject of interactivity. Cough.

Oh, and apparently Ségolène Royal will be giving an opening pep-talk (oui, oui, that Ségolène Royal), which probably has something to do with the fact that she is currently the president of Poitou-Charentes where the conference is being held. You might also have noticed that she is currently making a bid to for the leadership of the French Socialist Party, so I don’t know how much to bet on her appearance.

I haven’t completely finished my talk yet, but from what I have so far, it looks like I’ll be sticking with this resumé that I sent a few weeks ago to the organizers:

L’image du monstre

Il y a trois ans, lors d’un précédent colloque à l’ÉESI sur le cinéma et l’interactivité, j’ai argumenté pour une approche “hydraulique” de l’image en mouvement : une approche dynamique autour d’une image fluctuante qui prendrait en compte notamment la fluidification que les machines algorithmiques apportaient à l’image. C’était une hypothèse intéressante, mais qui n’osait pas aller jusqu’au bout. L’épine du problème était une insistance à maintenir notre relation nostalgique avec la trace photographique à l’intérieur de l’image, face à l’horizontalité des nouvelles formes de stockage comme les bases de données qui ont tendance à brouiller les figures qui s’y trouvent.

Depuis, mon optique s’est totalement transformée. L’objet n’est plus pour moi un simple jeu de re-juxtaposition permanente, il est devenu un jeu de mutation, avec des images-croissance qui poussent à partir de n’importe quelle extrémité de la « Chose ». Il se peut qu’il y ait encore des traces anciennes dans cette image, mais ces traces jouent un tout autre rôle, et nourrissent la bête tout autrement. Je vois désormais dans cette image nouvelle une forme de « monstruosité » qui pousse à l’intérieur des images, et descend jusque dans les entrailles du GPU lui-même, ne remontant à la surface de l’écran pixelisé que le temps d’un court affichage.

Accepter le monstre dans l’image, transforme notre approche de celle-ci, et transforme aussi ce qu’on entend par figure, mimesis, et enfin narration. Cela change également les champs d’exploration qui permettent de saisir plus fermement les phénomènes que je considère comme les plus pertinents pour ces transformations, à commencer par les jeux vidéo.

• Here is the symposium’s valiant attempt at an English translation, which makes absolutely no sense to me, and I wrote the damn thing. The words are right, it’s just that the meaning got lost in there somewhere. Apparently, my French is hard to translate, or perhaps just plain hard to understand:

Three years ago, during a previous conference on cine-film and interactivity at the ÉESI, I put forward the outline for a “hydraulic” approach to image in motion: a dynamic approach hinged on the fluctuating image ,which, notably, could factorise the fluidising import that algorithmic engines have brought to the image. It was an interesting hypothesis, which was just not bold enough to go all the way. The bane of the problem being insistence on maintaining our nostalgic affinity with the photographic trace within the image, at the hands of the horizontality of the new storing configurations, like those involving data bases, which tend to scramble the figures present.

Since then my assessment has been turned around. I no longer view the object as just a game of constant re-juxtaposition; it has become play on mutation, with image-growth sprouting from just about any appendage of the “Thing”. It is just possible that old traces still linger in that image, now however, they play a completely different role and feed the beast with different fodder. In this novel image, from now on, I can see a form of “monstrousness” germinating within the image, and getting right down to the entrails of the GPU itself, coming up to the pixelized surface of the screen for only a brief moment of display.

By accepting the monster in the image our approach to it becomes transformed, thus transforming that which we understand as figure, mimesis and finally narration. It also changes fields of inquiry which sanction and capture phenomena more securely and which I consider as being the most relevant for these transformations, starting with video games.

I’ll be in Iceland starting tomorrow (cool!), and all through the weekend for the Pikslaverk festival which is part of the Pixelache network. I’ll be presenting the abstractmachine.vb7d8 on Saturday and apparently also talking about the usual (code&art) on Sunday.

Ok, fire up all your Iceland-is-bankrupt jokes and post the best ones in the comments: so far, anyone I tell I’m leaving for Iceland comes up with some lame bankruptcy joke that isn’t even funny. Apparently the mere fact that Iceland went bankrupt is funny. I don’t get the joke, but maybe that’s the nature of this crisis: even the bankruptcy jokes fail? Someone sould collect them all somewhere and do something with them, just as a reminder that jokes should generally be funny. So if anyone wants to give me some good ones…

Here’s something I grabbed from the Lorna/Pikslaverk website:

“The Pikslaverk 2008 conference is the Icelandic component in the international network of Pixelache conferences. It is organized by Lorna (the Icelandic organization for electronic arts) in collaboration with The Icelandic Academy of the Arts and The Reykjavik Municipal Art Galleries. Through a series of lectures, presentations and performances, this year’s conference will continue Helsinki’s theme on education and act as a precursor to Bergen’s them on Free, Libre and Open Source Software by focussing on artists’ use of computer programming code to create works of art. Invited and selected guests will present a variety of views regarding issues relating to artistic applications of computer programming code.“