abstractmachine

• Biennale: Figures of Interactivity
• Symposium: Cinema, interactivity and society
• Venue: TAP, Poitiers, France
• Dates: November 19-21, 2008
• Schedule
• Speakers: Hubertus Von Amelunxen, Bertrand Augereau, Jacques Aumont, Yves Bernard, Samuel Bianchini, Jean-Louis Boissier, Victor Burgin, Jean-Claude Bustros, Jim Campbell, Luc Courchesne, Frédéric Curien, Jean-Marie Dallet, Anne-Marie Duguet, Masaki Fujihata, Thierry Guibert, Christian Laroche, Georges Legrady, Alain Liedts, Julien Maire, Denis Mellier, Stephan Natkin, Bernard Perron, Louise Poissant, Yannick Prié, Vincent Puig, Jeffrey Shaw, Douglas Edric Stanley, Bernard Stiegler, Steina Vasulka, Gwenola Wagon, Gene Youngblood

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.

• Festival: Pikslaverk
• Venues: The Icelandic Academy of the Arts, The Reykjavik Municipal Art Galleries
• Location: Reykjavik, Iceland
• Dates: November 6-9, 2008
• Presenters: Amy Alexander, Konstantinos Vassiliou, Loud Objects, Olle Essvik, Stefan Nussbaumer, Douglas Edric Stanley

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.“

Last week Gee Magazine sent me this copy of their magazine with a short article based on an interview I gave them a few weeks back. It’s a minor article — this interview with Marie Lechner from Libération is far more complete — but from what I can understand from my weak German, it appears accurate. Here is a link from Spiegel Online of the same article but rebranded.

 Taking the piss out of multi-touch. You’ll have to forward about 01:30 in to see the « touch-map » :

• Installation: « Discrete Clocks n°2 : Shy_Clk »
• Concept & Development: Douglas Edric Stanley
• Development Library : OpenFrameworks + OpenCV
• Exhibition: Sans_Titre 1.0
• Location: rue Emile Tavan, Aix-en-Provence
• Date: 25 October, 2008

The students have organized an exhibition to kick-start the year and asked me if I could add anything. Since I’ve been working on a series of tempermental clocks over the past two weeks on all sorts of platforms (iPhone, embedded, clock, watch, computer, etc), I figured I could throw one in for their exhbition. I’ll try to get some pictures and post them here, but basically this one is a clock that hides the time whenever it detects someone looking at it.

• Workshop: Objets interactifs : interfaces physiques et design algorithmique
• Location: Institut d’arts visuels, Orléans, France
• Artist: Douglas Edric Stanley, with Caroline Kassimo-Zhand & Olivier Bouton
• Dates: 27-30 October, 2008

Yet another workshop next week. This time I’ll be returning to the Institut d’arts visuels, a design school in Orléans, to kick-start a year-long project with a group of their students involving algorithmic objects. I’ll also be giving a conference on Wednesday, but I haven’t figured out the title yet, so I’ll post that at a later date.

Here is the official description of the project, written by Caroline :

• Atelier de recherche et de création
• Objets interactifs : interfaces physiques et design algorithmique

L’arc se propose de réfléchir aux problèmatiques en jeu dans la physicalisation des nouvelles interfaces et d’explorer l’interactivité lorsqu’elle se déploie dans l’espace ou au coeur d’un objet (installations interactives, objets communicants, scénographie interactive…).

Du palais de Tokyo au distributeurs de jeux vidéo, de nos lieux intimes aux espaces publics, une nouvelle génération d’oeuvres, d’espaces et d’objets apparaissent dans notre quotidien. Qu’ils soient vecteurs d’une expérience originale, d’information, ou tout simplement dotés de nouvelles fonctions, leur spécificié réside dans leur capacité à réagir. Ils sont dotés de comportements. Ils réagissent à nous, mais aussi entre eux, communiquent, parfois.

Qu’il s’agisse de la console Wii, d’une oeuvre d’electronic shadow, ou des véhicules de dernière génération, le point commun de tous ces “objets” est qu’ils embarquent un microprocesseur, de meme nature que celui nos ordinateurs. Cette infiltration de l’informatique dans les autres champs de l’industrie, de l’art, du design, car il s’agit bien de cela, permet de donner aux espaces, aux objets, aux oeuvres cette capacité à réagir, interagir, avec le spectateur, l’utilisateur, l’environnement.

Comment penser, concevoir ces objets interactifs, objets machines, et surtout leurs interfaces, c’est à dire les moyens par lesquelles ils “communiqueront” avec nous, avec le monde, entre eux. Ou s’arrete le design, ou commence la communication? ou plutot comment les deux chanmps doivent se rencontrer pour élaborer d’autres facons de réfléchir, de nouvelles méthodologies de conception pour élaborer ces objets algorythmiques? C’est ce que nous nous proposons d’explorer dans ce nouvel arc.

Jacques Francois Marchandise président de la FING, prédit que la prochaine révolution de l’internet, sera l’interconnexion par le réseau des objets. Dans peu de temps le nombre d’adresses IP (identifiant unique de chaque machine connectée au réseau) attribuées à des objets du quotien explosera et dépassera de loin le nombre de celles attribuées à des ordinateurs personnels. Nous ne pouvons faire l’économie d’une exploration des enjeux qu’implique ce constat dans nos métiers et surtout dans le métier de demain de nos étudiants.

Notre arc s’inscrit donc à la fois dans le design et dans la communication car élaborer des interphaces physiques c’est à la fois l’un et ‘autre.

Nous envisageons de travailler avec un partenaire (musée, institution culturelle) et mettre en place un moment de mise en situation et de présentation publique des projets.

Last week, we finished a week-long introductory course on OpenFrameworks. This was an advanced-level course, and considered as a pre-requisite the basic concepts explored on-line and on-site in my classes on Processing). The session was somewhat improvised, given that I’d never taught a class on C++ programming in an art school. I had to do a lot of adjustments, and we didn’t really hit our stride until the final day, when the class on pointers (apparently) tied everything together into a pretty little package, at least for those that had the courage to stick around until the end.

As it turns out, the final strategy turned out to be: just ignore the C++ part, and teach people what they need to know in order to work on their projects. From there, what they need to know can be learned from within the project. As always for us, the pragmatic on-the-job-training method always works best.

If you speak/understand French, or trust robot translators, you can check out the on-line classes I prepared for this class: OpenFrameworks, cours en ligne. So far, there are only four basic classes, but these should be enough to get you started, especially if you’ve already walked through the classes on Processing. We purposefully jumped straight from configuring the environment to building classes, vectors, and using pointers, since these are basically all the important concepts you need to know to get started in real-life projects.

Over at the Happy Code Farm you’ll also find some OpenFrameworks examples/experiments from students, as well a contribution from two researchers from the Laboratoire ERASME who came to follow the workshop. They were great and helped us figure out a couple of configuration issues with Code::Blocks in Linux. Since everything begins in the Atelier with Pong, they created an OSC-Pong in order to figure out how to work with several machines at once. They have done a lot of work with interactive video walls, multi-touch interfaces, networked museum spaces, etc, and so they needed to know how OpenFrameworks could plug into their other interfaces/spaces which often communicate via OSC.

Once you’ve gotten through these classes and examples, there are further links listed in the introduction to very-good-things® such as the OpenFrameworks wiki or the OpenFramworks forum where you’ll find the rest of what you need.

• Seminar: Programmation avancée avec OpenFrameworks
• Location: l’Atelier Hypermédia, l’École Supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Dates: October 13-17, 2008
• Time: 9h-12h / 14h-18h

As I mentioned last week, starting tomorrow I will be teaching a week-long intensive introduction to OpenFrameworks and C++ programming for artists and creative types. If you’re motivated and want to join in, let me know. Unfortunately, my blog has been down all week and I only figured out how to fix it today (Sunday), so this call for stragglers will probably be too late. But if you’re already in the south of France, we still have some room for what I called last week « des piques-assiette ». Just come with a laptop and we’ll set you up with 220V, wifi and ‘da knowledge.

As in last week, classes are en français, and we can’t make any travel accomodations. Also, this is an advanced class, so I’m going to figure that you’re already knowlegable in classes and lists. If you want to prepare, you should basically know how to program classes/objects in Processing/Java but you do not need to know C++ already. I’ll set you up with that. You should also understand how 3D works, pushMatrix() and popMatrix(), although I will of course go over all these concepts on Monday. (Si vous vous sentez perdu, vous trouverez une brève introduction sur ces concepts dans mes cours sur Processing). I’ve also started a class on using OpenFrameworks but I’m only at the introduction for now.

I just received Daniel Shiffman’s book Learning Processing, A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction. It’s great, and absolutely (finally!) a book I can recommend wholeheartedly for people wanting to learn how to program in Processing. As its’ name suggests, it’s a beginner’s book — so if you’re already clear about most of the basics you might want to try one of the other two books, although there are some excellent advanced chapters on integrating Java, using video and sound, as well as grabbing data off of the Internets.

I was one of the early-draft readers of this book, and was immediately struck by its tone: Daniel is obviously a teacher and clearly has some experience teaching programming to people who normally wouldn’t be inclined to program: creative types. The book starts right off with getting to work inside the environment and keeping it simple. I also think that Casey Reas‘ book is very good in this respect, as opposed to Ira Greenberg’s book which takes a little while before getting started. Now, there are some dangers to this approach, and Shiffman’s book also feels a bit too much like you’re following a fairly standard linear trade course: learn A, then B, then C, … That’s okay because the goal is to teach you everything-you-need-to-know and to keep you on track. But while it starts off quickly and gets right into the heart of things on page 1, it can get a little dull after a while because of that same linear structure. It is not as devoted as Greenberg’s book, for example, on exploring the visual possibilities of the software, although there is — of course — some of that. Also, the design of the book is a little ugly — Daniel, your book has the design of a “Java Programming” manual!. This is compared to Reas’ book which has a nice encyclopedic feel to it (it should be clear by now that I like horizontal texts) and allows for some jumping around. So this is really a classroom book, if anything, or at least reads like one, for a standard american-style course on Interaction Design.

There is one little detail that I absolutely love, and insisted he keep in the book despite some hestiation, precisely because it’s so unabashedly dopey: Zoog, Daniel’s Processing equivalent for the infamous “Hello World!”.

Zoog is totally lame, and totally cool. I love Zoog. I want a t-shirt.

I would definitely recommend it for a question I am asked quite often: teachers often write to me and ask what book they should read in order to prepare for a class on programming. If you’re teaching Processing, this is a good one to read from A-Z. If you know everything in there, as well as in the online supplements (I even think these should have been included in the book, cf. Learning Processing Tutorials), you pretty much have all the answers your students will undoubtedly throw at you in class. Again, this is obviously written by someone who has some classroom experience making real-world interactive installations and prototypes.

For my part, I’m still waiting for that crazy off the wall book of a totally different ilk made for what I think is Processing’s strength: its compactness and simplicity. So I guess I’ll just have to write that one myself (more on that later). Also, we really need an Arduino book now. Making Things Talk by Tom Igoe is great, but is not as good of a learn-the-basics book as any of the three main Processing books which are all three of them excellent for getting you started.

• Seminar: Introduction à la programmation avec Processing
• Location: l’Atelier Hypermédia, l’École Supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence
• Dates: October 6-10, 2008
• Time: 9h-12h / 14h-18h

Starting monday of next week I will be shifting gears a bit and concentrating an entire week to getting the students up to speed on Processing with all the basics they will need to know in order work in the Atelier Hypermédia throughout the rest of the year. This basics class will be followed by an advanced class the following week on OpenFrameworks. If you’re motivated and want to join in, let me know.

The difference this year is that we are returning to a formula we had somewhat abandoned at the school concerning technical introductions: cram all the basics into one intense week, hence freeing up the rest of the year for workshops, experimentation, research, theoretical exploration and individual projects. We used to run the school following this formula in the good-old-days®™ and it was a blast. I hope we can find some of that fun, anarchic energy this time around.

This also allows students from outside of the school and general idlers, hangers-on, or what we here in France call “pique-assiettes” to follow the training as well, since they can usually spare a week or two from their home institutions. We had originally planned to have quite a few students and even professionals (designers, artists, whatever) participating this year — I so didn’t place out a call out of fear that too many would come, as in the past — but so far only a few have made themselves heard. There is no waiting list, but I do appreciate getting an email beforehand letting me know if and why you attend to crash the party. There are no fees or requirements for loafers, but we do ask you to bring a laptop.

Classes are in French, oui, tout sera en français, and we can’t make any travel accomodations at this late date. Sorry. If you want to prepare, there are some on-line classes on Processing that you can follow here: Processing - cours en-ligne.