Claudio Midolo / design + technology

Feeling

2009-03-11T21:36:00.000-05:00

thank you Conway for this superb link and inspiration.

Phototropic Memories: 2nd prototype

2009-03-05T23:50:00.021-06:00

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Ciao! I've been working on the second version of the prototype of the Phototropic Memories interface, this time both the Capturer and the Attractor have been realized.

The material of choice is cardboard as it enabled me to work quickly and still have a sturdy enough object as a result.

The building phase was carefully planned ahead using this schematics:

Here are some pictures about the process:

Attractor building

Phototropic Memories - Attractor second prototype from Claudio Midolo on Vimeo.

Phototropic Memories - Attractor second prototype 2 from Claudio Midolo on Vimeo.

The second version of the Attractor prototype is much smaller compared to the previous version
(150mm x 130mm x 130mm) vs (180mm x 180mm x 180mm) thus is lighter and better to handle.

Attractor 1st prototype vs 2nd one

The exterior aesthetic is still in embryonic form just for testing purposes, the next version of the prototype will include a more refined skin, probably inspired by old school Kodak Brownie cameras.

Capturer building

The Capturer half proved to be successful too, it is quite small (110mm x 110mm x 150mm) and the opening/closing mechanism seems to provide a satisfactory "grabbing" feeling.
Again, this is for testing only, the actual look of the Capturer half will match that of the other half, the Attractor.

Testing

I user tested the prototypes and I received very insightful feedback related to the way the Attractor was showing the image: "it has a screen inside and it looks like a screen too! it kills the magic of the image you want to communicate."

That made me think about the actual feeling I want to achieve with the image in the Attracgtor and I decided to experiment a little more with the visual possibilities of the interface. The Attractor is going to contain a very very small projector and playing with it and a very thin sheet of paper I witnessed a beautiful phenomenon which I would like to recreate in some way inside the Attractor, as it makes the cold "screen" feeling I was describing before vanish and imbuing the image with magic, making it less flat and more living, almost breathing.

Phototropic Memories: projecting surface experiment from Claudio Midolo on Vimeo.

Changes

As a consequence I'm going to change my plans for the implementation of the Attractor, which won't contain both a small lcd screen and a projector, but just the latter one. The Attractor will work in two playback modes:

divided - when the Attractor is not physically joined with the Capturer, typically just one person will look at the image through the front lens.

unity - when the Attractor is physically joined with the other half of the device. Typically the image will be enjoyed by two or more people.

In the first playback mode the projector will be facing the front of the device, the user will look through the front lens and see the image of the shared memory projected inside the box, onto a series of strips of very thin paper.

In the second playback mode the projector will rotate facing up this time, projecting outside the box so that two or more users will enjoy the memories together.

SuperMarko!

2009-02-27T00:12:00.000-06:00

2009-01-31T21:21:00.000-06:00

Obama

2009-01-23T17:11:00.001-06:00

Inaugural Address

By President Barack Hussein Obama

My fellow citizens: I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you've bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors.

I thank President Bush for his service to our nation -- (applause) -- as well as the generosity and cooperation he has shown throughout this transition.

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms. At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents.

So it has been; so it must be with this generation of Americans.

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost, jobs shed, businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly, our schools fail too many -- and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable, but no less profound, is a sapping of confidence across our land; a nagging fear that America's decline is inevitable, that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America: They will be met. (Applause.)

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation. But in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness. (Applause.)

In reaffirming the greatness of our nation we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of short-cuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted, for those that prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops, and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip, and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died in places like Concord and Gettysburg, Normandy and Khe Sahn.

Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions, greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.

This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week, or last month, or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed. Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. (Applause.)

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for action, bold and swift. And we will act, not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We'll restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. All this we will do.

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose, and necessity to courage. What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works -- whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.

Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched. But this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control. The nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity, on the ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart -- not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good. (Applause.)

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers -- (applause) -- our Founding Fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man -- a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience sake. (Applause.)

And so, to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born, know that America is a friend of each nation, and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity. And we are ready to lead once more. (Applause.)

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with the sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort, even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we'll work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet.

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense. And for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken -- you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you. (Applause.)

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. (Applause.)

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist. (Applause.)

To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders, nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect. For the world has changed, and we must change with it.

As we consider the role that unfolds before us, we remember with humble gratitude those brave Americans who at this very hour patrol far-off deserts and distant mountains. They have something to tell us, just as the fallen heroes who lie in Arlington whisper through the ages.

We honor them not only because they are the guardians of our liberty, but because they embody the spirit of service -- a willingness to find meaning in something greater than themselves.

And yet at this moment, a moment that will define a generation, it is precisely this spirit that must inhabit us all. For as much as government can do, and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child that finally decides our fate.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends -- honesty and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism -- these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history.

What is demanded, then, is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility -- a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task.

This is the price and the promise of citizenship. This is the source of our confidence -- the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny. This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall; and why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served in a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath. (Applause.)

So let us mark this day with remembrance of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America's birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At the moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words to be read to the people:

"Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."

America: In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

Timato - Time animato

2008-12-17T14:30:00.003-06:00

An animated clock, for more info about the project go here.

Phototropic Memories - Attractor prototype 1

2008-12-16T02:03:00.001-06:00

Phototropic Memories - Attractor prototype 1 from Claudio Midolo on Vimeo.

Addi(c)tive Bolero

2008-12-15T16:02:00.002-06:00

here's one animation I created for the Algorithmic Animation class, enjoy it ;)

Algorithmic animation - AddiCtive Bolero from Claudio Midolo on Vimeo.

A tribute to John Whitney and Maurice Ravel.

Phototropic Memories: Stadium presentation

2008-12-15T13:11:00.005-06:00

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here's the PDF version of the final presentation for this semester of my "Phototropic Memories" thesis, enjoy it ;)

Phototropic Memories (PDF)

Notes from Stadium review by Hsiang Ju

2008-12-15T13:03:00.000-06:00

The fallowing is my note of feedback, hope they are helpful.

Matt
repeated words: successful, simple, control, shape, quality
Personal reasons for making a new instrument?
What is this instrument for in reality? For personal performance?
Do you want to make it more close or more open? personal/public?
The relationship between inputs and outputs. buttons and sounds. shape

Lynn
sculpture, physical, virtual, mapping, dynamic system, data visualization
(I'm so happy that you use my suggested title! yeah~)
Why physical objects?
More possibility in virtual space, and it can put in to multiple digial output, like a book.
Strong motivation and background, clean
Fantasy of people having power as water is great

Claudio
intimate, slow down, i like, photograph, complicated
Sharing memory with a different way.
Forcing people to slow down is good.
People look like dynamic thing instead of 2d photos.
Want to see two sides of the device physically matched and synchronized

Sayoko
touching, i like, individual, memorial, event
Individual is hard to see with a drop of ink
Container's look and feel
Where it takes place impacts how it should be
Presentation of individual and collected impacts is great but it has not been reached
Display issue and make each drop more individual
What kind of feeling will viewers get, what will they think about seeing this
Time issue

Shipra
crisis, educational tool, fun, simplify, metaphor, gambling
(I like the demo)
Why is it important to understand economic at this detailed level?
How to make it fun, who are the players, what knowledge would they have before they play?
Purpose
For experts or...?

Dan
(I couldn't hear what happened during critics testing the prototype)

Suba
fun,
What is the reward of winning?
How to maintain the connection after the game
Goal? Many players? Private or public?
Collection of data from participants is challenging.
How to apply into a board game? actions in real world/ playing with cards

Eric
graffiti, mechanism, people, quality, nice
Not sure about the graffiti? Information offered?
What happens with crowdy places? Rush hour?
Openframe Work's Theo knows how to do the 3d effect easily.
Good documentation needed
Legal and security issue. Be careful.

Katrina
cool, visualization
What happens if people cheat?
A normal/ personalized ping?
Connection from ping to the web
Make it what you want it to be, not something between two media ages.
Trash cans on the street?
A project can recognized if people throwing non-recycling thing into recycling section.

Best,
Hsiang Ju

--
H J H
HsiangJu.com

John Maeda

2008-12-12T18:20:00.003-06:00

"... all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees — to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less."

John Maeda, The Laws of Simplicity

Experiment 5: Domains

2008-12-06T18:59:00.002-06:00

Brief 5: Domains
Claudio L. Midolo
Marko Tandefelt Loretta J. Wolozin
December 5th 2008

I. Idea
The device I’m envisioning will be formed starting with the deconstruction of the fundamental conceptual basis that has always existed in photography, that of the unity of the element which captures the image and the element which stores the image. The camera I’m going to create will exist in the form of a divided object, split into two halves, each one able to perform just one specific function of either capture and transmit a visual memory or attract and play back a visual memory.
While the two halves will be displaced in both time and space they will be inherently connected to each other in remote. Until the two fragments are physically separated, some rules will control both the capture and attraction processes: for example the person who holds the capture device won’t have at its disposal an unlimited amount of captures, but an equilibrium will exist, relative to the amount of the memories captured and their effective output on the Attractor device; if the person who receives the visual memories is not ready for them or has not time to dedicate to this event, then the person who holds the Capturer will have to wait, until the other person is ready again to receive his new visual memories.
From the Attractor side certain conditions will have to be met in order to retrieve and enjoy the visual memories intimately shared by the Capturer such as silence, darkness and the presence of the person who owns the Attractor half. These constrains will be present until the moment when the two two halves will be finally physically reunited as, in that precise moment, the two parts will recognize each other, opening themselves up, letting the two persons freely enjoy the intimate sharing event. It is interesting to notice that in a possible scenario of usage this system enables a powerful interaction, that of the complementarity of experiences over the shared memories; the person who captured the visual memories will know everything about their context but has never seen them before, while the person who receives the visual memories has already seen them all, but knows nothing about their context. This way the sharing event will be empowered by the common need of each person to complete their “half” memory with that of the other.
The visual memory itself will be an hybrid artifact, inheriting main features both from the Photograph and the Video; it will live as light on a physical medium but won’t be a print, it will seem to be still while instead will move over time. In reality it will be a high speed low resolution short video, visualized as an aggregation of light particles. The number of particles will be very low in relation to the actual resolution of the captured video, in the order of the hundreds, but thanks to a visual effect I discovered one year ago the image will still be coherent, just using a fraction of the actual data provided by the original video. This visual effect I’m talking about happens when our brain, fed with a blurred image, natively adds up information to it, building a more coherent, understandable picture. This technique will solve three main possible issues, the first, that of the visualization of a visual memory, which in my mind has always been a sort of short, partly clear, partly blurred moving image in which the main elements were present, but mixed with a more confused background. The second, related to the actual look and feel of the interface, as a lens will be present on the Attractor side, letting the person who uses it play with this focusing/defocusing dynamic in order to explore each visual memory almost as a magical item. The third, more on the technical side, will be the fact that I won’t need an high quality video as an input, as I’m going to use just a fraction of its actual resolution thus lowering the technical requirements for the system to run efficiently.
This project final goal will be the restoration and enhancement of digital visual memories emotional value, ultimately suggesting a different perspective over the relationship with digital consumer tools, not in the direction of productivity, guided by the elements of speed, quality and conveniency but in that of humanity grounded on emotion and meaningfulness.

II.Form
The following diagrams illustrate the system I’m creating, from a logical point of view. I’m going to provide the possible technical solution to achieve the completion of each step.

The system will start to be built upon the conceptual and physical deconstruction of the unity of any photo camera, the unity of the part which captures the image and and that which stores it. I will physically build these two halves in order to let them meet a very precise behavior, illustrated in the next diagram.

One half, the Capturer, will just be able to capture visual memories. It will achieve this using a dedicated computing platform, the Aigo P8860 and an industrial grade hi speed, VGA resolution camera such as the Matrix Vision mvBlueFOX camera. This process will be controlled by a custom c++ application. Each visual memory after being captured will not be displayed back to the person who uses the Capturer device but will be immediately transferred to the Memory Plane, a middle dimension where all the memories shared by the two person using the device are stored, waiting to be attracted by the other half of the interface, the Attractor. A wireless internet connection will enable this communication system to work in conjunction with an HTTP server and a Database application, the two elements which enable the Memory Plane to work.

The Attractor half will rely on the wireless internet connection, either 3G or WLAN to receive the attracted visual memories from the memory plane, which will be then displayed using the Aigo P8860 LCD touchscreen.
Some rules will regulate the system, each one targeted specifically at one phase. In relation to the capture phase an equilibrium will have to exist between the activity of the holder of the Capturer and that of the holder of the Attractor. If the person who holds the Attractor hasn’t seen the last n memories the Capturer has reserved for him, then the Capturer won’t be able to catch other visual memories, until the other person gives him attention again watching the memories that were previously recorded for him, finally giving the Capturer the ability to capture again.

This will be achieved using an internet connection from the Capturer which will connect to the Memory Plane which stores the most current status of the activity of the Attractor. The memory plane will return the number of new memories waiting to be seen by the holder of the Attractor, if the number is greater than a given limit, then the Equilibrium Gate will be closed and the Capturer device will inform the use with a feedback that at that time he cannot capture anything as the other person is probably not ready to give the attention his memory deserves at that moment in his live. This feedback will be available before the Capturer actually tries to capture a memory, in order to prevent the excess of frustration which would be generated if he tries to capture a beautiful moment just to later know that it wasn’t recorded because of the equilibrium rule.
This rule just to propose a solution to the inflation of the memories captured in a visual form.

Another rule will exist, this time related to the attraction phase. Certain conditions will have to be met by the holder of the Attractor to successfully initiate the attraction process of visual memories from the memory plane.
One condition will be of aural nature as the need of silence or quiet in the environment where the attraction is going to happen. This will be achieved by using a microphone and a simple volume analysis of the environmental aural setting.
Another condition will be physical as that the person who wishes to see a memory actually picks the Attractor in its hands and looks through the lens placed in the center of the interface. This will be achieved by using touch sensors on the sides of the device in combination with an Arduino Nano microcontroller to feed the sensors data to the Aigo computer.
The motivation for this is easily understandable from this example. If a person is telling you an important personal memory you want to look him in his eyes and listen carefully to his words and not look at your mobile phone screen or listening to your Ipod, you need to give the other person your attention.

A third rule will control the way the visual memories are attracted. It works on the concept of direct proportionality between the actual physical distance over the surface of the earth of the two halves of the device and the speed by which the visual memories will be attracted.
In order to better understand this concept the following example can be clarifying. Two people emotionally close to each other live very far away one from the other. Using the device I’m creating the Attractor would receive the memories of the Capturer in a very short time. This is understandable as when two persons who love each other are separated from great physical distance they want to know about the other person as soon as possible. The opposite scenario would be two persons who, again, are emotionally linked, but lives in the same house. The Attractor will attract the visual memories of the other person with a very slow pace, receiving them at a much later time than they were actually captured. This is very human too as when you live 24-24/7-7 with another person, even if you love him/her, you are always updated on what’s going on in his life, thus receiving immediately something so quotidian would just diminish its true value, while receiving it at a later time would enhance it.
This will be technically achieved using a mix of GPS and internet technologies. Both the devices will always keep the Memory Plane updated with their most current position on the surface of the Earth. The Memory Plane will inform then one half of the position of the second half and will calculate the physical distance between them. Based on that value it will set the speed of the attraction accordingly. In case the GPS is not working an IP trace-route will give the raw geographic position of the ISP server each device is connected to. This way the mechanism will work everywhere an internet connection is present.
The motivation for this rule is to enhance curiosity and novelty towards the memories a person has reserved for another person, through digital means.

Lastly when the two halves will be finally reunited, they will first recognize each other, opening themselves up letting the two holders of the two halves physically join them together recreating the object original unity. In that moment all the previous rules will cease to govern the system letting the users freely control the visual memories attraction and playback process, until the two halves will be divided again.
This will be achieved using RFID tag and reader on the devices, so they can recognize each other if put at a small distance. Magnets will be used on both devices to damp the opening of the interface. In addition to that the Attractor will have an electronically controlled locking mechanism. After the two halves have recognized each other via RFID the lock on the Attractor will unlock, revealing the magnets put on the side of the frontal aperture which will exactly match in shape and position the other two magnets put on the frontal aperture of the Capturer. When the magnets in the first half touch those on the second half they will link the two halves together, reconstituting the original unity. Technically wise this will be achieved checking through a mini Arduino board inside the Attractor if there is current flowing through the magnets.

III.Domains Map
The following map visualizes the knowledge domains which have resulted as most connected to the conceptual dimension this projects is living within.

IV.Domains

The Photography domain is where this project took its original impetus from. The changes that the transition from analog to digital technology applied to the photographic field made me reflect on the gain and losses that these changes brought with them particularly in relation to the design and conception of non professional digital cameras. Quality, speed and convenience were enhanced while the more human like aspects of photography such as implicit value, surprise and intimacy were minimized, productivity driven design was the chosen path over that led by humanity.

“The result, as the computer industry merges with other industries, is that the optimization of the psychological ﬁt between people and electronic technology, for which the industry strives, is spreading beyond the work environment to areas such as the home that have so far acted as a counterpoint to the harsh functionality of the workplace. When used in the home to mediate social relations, the conceptual models of efﬁcient communication embodied in ofﬁce equipment leave little room for the nuances and quirks on which communication outside the workplace relies so heavily.”1

From this point a multitude of connections spring to the other three domains. First Psychology, as the devices I’m focusing my critique upon are non professional cameras, tools which are used not to capture an image for profit, but just for its implicit emotional value, personal memories which the Psychology domain organizes as Explicit memories:

“Explicit memory is the conscious, intentional recollection of previous experiences and information. We use explicit memory throughout the day, such as remembering the time of an appointment or recollecting an event from years ago. Explicit memory involves conscious recollection, compared with implicit memory which is an unconscious, non intentional form of memory. Remembering a specific driving lesson is an example of explicit memory, while improving your driving skills during the lesson is an example of implicit memory.”2

A sub category of explicit memories touches more in depth the material non professional, personal photography works with, that of Declarative memories:

“Declarative memory is the aspect of human memory that stores facts. It is so called because it refers to memories that can be consciously discussed, or declared. It applies to standard textbook learning and knowledge, as well as memories that can be 'travelled back to' in one's 'mind's eye'. It is contrasted with procedural memory, which applies to skills. Declarative memory is subject to forgetting, but frequently-accessed memories can last indefinitely. Declarative memories are best established by using active recall combined with mnemonic techniques and spaced repetition”3

Declarative memories comprehend both Semantic and Episodic memories, with the latter being the ultimate link between the domains of personal Photography and Psychology, defined as:

“Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events (times, places, associated emotions, and other contextual knowledge) that can be explicitly stated. Semantic and episodic memory together make up the category of declarative memory, which is one of the two major divisions in memory. The counterpart to declarative, or explicit memory, is procedural memory, or implicit memory.”4

A connection to a different domain emerges after the analysis of how these memories living in the form of digital photographs are captured, consumed and shared, a connection to the massive field of Cultural Studies, in particular to the Material Culture subfield:

“Material culture study is, therefore, the study through artifacts and other pertinent historical evidence) of belief systems--the values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions--of a particular community or society, usually across time. As a study, it is based upon the obvious premise that the existence of a man-made object is concrete evidence of the presence of a human mind operating at the time of fabrication. The common assumption underlying material culture research is that objects made or modified by humans, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, reflect the belief patterns of individuals who made, commissioned, purchased, or used them, and, by extension, the belief patterns of the larger society of which they are a part.”5

Looking attentively with a fresh eye at the way digital personal pictures are captured, consumed and shared, it is possible to identify the specific patterns the previous definition refers to, specifically related to our contemporary society. Pictures can be captured one after the other in an, almost, infinite sequence, just partly limited by the amount of, ever growing, digital space each camera comes equipped with. As a consequence it is common to notice how many different pictures are taken of the same subject, in the search of the “perfect” shot, the one who represents the idealized version of the actual, real thing photographed. This leads to the first consequence of inflation. As many pictures can be taken and discarded, the implicit value of each one is greatly diminished. A second consequence would be the proliferation of artificial versions of personal memories, consciously built to represent the “perfect” version of the captured event.

Disposable perfected memories seems a tight but coherent definition of such panorama.

Going on to the second point of this analysis, how these disposable perfected memories are actually consumed? Well they are instantly consumed, as soon as the picture is taken is immediately displayed back to the person who captured it who enjoys it for some seconds before storing it on the camera hard drive, ready to be shared with the rest of the world.

Disposable perfected immediate memories is the updated definition of such panorama.

Lastly, how these memories are shared? Thanks to the advancements of the web technology the most popular trend in digital photographs sharing are those web sites which enable each user to deliver his images, virtually, to the rest of the world.

Disposable perfected immediate world delivered memories is, not only the definition of such panorama, but also a hint to the direction our society has been carefully pointed to, a direction which leads to a place where everything is fast, easy, painless, cheap, effortless, comforting, ready to be consumed, but totally and desperately deprived of the value of humanity... a path to self destruction.

“Successful interaction design requires a shift from seeing the machinery to seeing the lives of the people using it. In this human dimension, the relevant factors become hard to quantify, hard to even identify. This difficulty is magnified when we try to look at social consequences. Will the computer lead to a world in which our concept of individual privacy is challenged or changed? Will online addiction become a social problem to rival drug use? ... ”6

As a designer, paradoxically as it may sound, the only way I can react to such a situation saturated with “wrong” objects is to create a new one, a Post-optimal Object whose conception and design follows the perspective Anthony Dunne illustrates in the seminal Hertzian tales:

“The position of this book is that design research should explore a new role for the electronic object, one that facilitates more poetic modes of habitation: a form of social research to integrate aesthetic experience with everyday life through “conceptual products.” In a world where practicality and functionality can be taken for granted, the aesthetics of the post-optimal object could provide new experiences of everyday life, new poetic dimensions.”7

The device I’m envisioning lives within the intersection of the four major domains I’m taking into account: Photography, Psychology, Human Computer Interaction and Cultural Studies; it precisely resides in the tiny, but incredibly fertile design territory determined by Episodic memory, Personal digital photography, Slow technology and Material culture. The object I’m going to create will be designed to counter attack the current design trends in the digital non professional photographic field. First of all it won’t be user friendly, will be neither comforting nor consumable. The person who uses it will have to take a risk and sacrifice some of its time in order to commit to the experience the device proposes. A precise set of rules will be in place in order to re enact in the system I’m creating the same pattern that always appears in any respectful human to human interaction, a pattern which can be synthesized by the following statements:

When one person tells something important to another person, one person talks and the other listens and then, if needed, reacts.
When one person tells something important to another person, the two persons commit to the event, giving each other their attention.
When one person tells something important to another person, the setting surrounding the event needs to be adequate to the intimacy of the moment.
When one person receives the attention of the listener, it needs not to overflow the listener with information, but proceed step by step, respecting an implicit equilibrium in the discourse.

Ultimately the device I’m creating won’t let the user perform but rather feel.

V.References

1 Dunne A. Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, (1999), 2.

2 Kolb & Whishaw: Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology, (2003).

3 Tulving, E., & Schacter, D.L. Priming and human memory systems. Science, (1990), 301-6.

4 Tulving, E. Precis of Elements of Episodic Memory. Behavioural and Brain Sciences, (1984), 223 – 268.

5 Schlereth, Material Culture Studies in America, (1982), 3.

6 Winograd T. From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design, Stanford University, (1997),
http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/acm97.html

7 Dunne A. Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, (1999), 20.

VI.Credits
An immense thank you to Katherine Moriwaki for the support.

Experiment5 - Domains (PDF)

Experiment 4: User scenario

2008-12-06T18:11:00.003-06:00

Brief 4: User scenario
Claudio L. Midolo
Marko Tandefelt Loretta J. Wolozin
November 23rd 2008

I. Diagram
The following diagram illustrates the various components of the Lossy Light Memories prototype system from a logical and technical point of view.

User scenario

To Claudio Midolo
PathosCam , Inventor
Myrtle ave, 11206, Brooklyn, NY

Hi, my name is Ricardo Villareal, I’m a young film director from Buenos Aires and I’m writing this letter to you, as you’re the person who invented the PathosCam, in order to express my feelings about it and report my experience using the device you created. Everything started when, surfing on the Internet on the photography and film blogs I usually check to be updated on all the novelties in the field, I casually encountered a link entitled: ”PathosCam, a camera for two”. That title stimulated my curiosity as I was trying to imagine what that could possibly mean! Reading the blog post it was clear that it was a device to be used by two emotionally linked persons, in order to capture their memories and emotion in a visual form and remotely share them being sure that their memories would be directed just to the other person and not to anyone else. I was kinda confused by that article, but I was also so intrigued by the magic-like aura surrounding the device that I decided to give it a try; I googled PathosCam and arrived to your website where I finally understood the project more in depth: the PathosCam is like a camera cut into two halves, the Capturer and the Attractor. The person who holds the capturer is able to capture its visual memories in form of a “breathing photo”, which, as soon as it is recorded, is immediately transferred to a middle plane in between the two halves called Memory Plane, a digital space where all the memories shared by the two users float in time. I also understood how the Attractor side can attract these visual memories and display them back to the holder of the Attractor, in a very special, almost magical way. I spent quite more time understanding the rules that controlled this system as the Equilibrium gate, the Environmental and Presence conditions, and the Rule of distance, which controlled the speed of the attraction of each new memory based on the actual physical distance between one half and the other, it was tough but after a while I got it! The more I was diving into the details of your idea, the more I was captured by it, so I decided to go on and order one of these PathosCam for myself.

I chose the wood block I wanted it to be carved from and I picked one that was remembering me of the wooden tiles that used to be on the floor of my parent’s house in my childhood, I don’t know why, but I was just attracted to it! I chose the names to be put on the two small metallic plates which will identify each half as “Ric” and “Nina”, I won’t tell you why I picked that name, is enough to say that Nina is a very important person for me. Next the hard part... I must confess I was expecting something cheaper, but I guess you have to invest something more than what you would spend for a normal digital camera in order to have it manually crafted and with such special kind of features. It was nice from you to inform me that the process would have taken more than a month in order to actually build and test my PathosCam, but I was more than happy to wait as you know, the more you wait the best it is when you finally get it! I remember then, the day when it finally arrived... it was such a surprise! I opened the box and found it... I must admit I was expecting something smaller... but it was so strange looking and so beautifully crafted that I just fell in love with it almost immediately! I followed the instructions to set it up and after some twenty minutes everything was up and running, in test mode.

I was able to use the Capturer part, named “Nina”, to grab some images while the Attractor half, “Ric”, was immediately attracting them and showing them back to me, how strange and beautiful they were! They looked like a pulsing stream of light carrying back to me my memories from the past, I was really surprised by it. After one hour spent playing with it, checking everything was working fine, time arrived to exit test mode and switch to Memory mode. I pressed the specific toggle at the bottom and suddenly the two boxes lit up to then slowly get dark again, that was the signal telling me the Memory mode was active. The next day Nina arrived at my apartment and I told her I had a gift for her, I said it was an Attractor for our memories. She looked at me like she was talking with a crazy man, but she was also very curious about it. She started to believe me as soon as I showed her the PathosCam; I explained her how the system would work and what we would be able to do with it and she was immediately into it, she took the Capturer , opened it up and closed it. As soon as she closed the Capturer’s doors a light filtered through them and she felt a vibration through her hands. I told her that was the signal saying that she had just successfully captured a memory of us!

She wanted to see it immediately on the Attractor, but I explained her that the Attractor was sensitive to the actual distance of the two halves; as the memory was captured while the two pieces were very next to each other, it would have been attracted with very low speed, thus it would arrive to the Attractor at a much later time. She was confused by it and said she wanted to see it immediately I said her the only way to see it immediately was to physically join the two halves, she agreed and when we recomposed their unity we were able to see the memory she had just captured in the form of mesmerizing light particles. In three days I had to be in Sicily to work on a documentary about the sicilian immigrants who migrated to Argentina during the 19th century and Nina really liked the idea of putting the PathosCam at a test for the following three months while I working there in Italy.

Three days later, at the airport, I kissed Nina and then proceeded, giving her the Attractor “Ric” while keeping for me the Capturer “Nina”. I reminded her how important were her for me and assuring her that if she prepared the right conditions in the environment where he wanted to use the Capturer, she would be able to attract the memories I reserved for her for sure. We kissed and then I took the airplane which would have taken me to Palermo, the main city in Sicily. I passed the next months working on the documentary and capturing many memories for Nina... some of them were beautiful places, people I met, details, or just something that was touching my feelings. I just had to open the Capturer’s doors to let the memory come in and close them, I felt a vibration and saw the light, I knew I got it!

My only concern was whether, without any kind of viewfinder or compositional tool, I had really recorded what I wanted to and not something else! Just one day I wasn’t able to open the doors! That was crazy, I was thinking the device was broken, but suddenly I realized that some time before I read on the instructions that that event can happen, specifically when the other person hasn’t seen the previous ten memories you’ve sent her. Probably Nina was busy during the previous days; the next day I was able to open the device again, Nina was ready for my memories again! Finally arrived the day I could finally get back to Buenos Aires, during my time inn Italy I learnt how Sicily could be beautiful, but just for a short period of time.

I was so excited to see Nina again. She was at the Ministro Pistarini waiting for me, and I couldn’t have been imagined a better person to wait for me at my arrival. We arrived home and, we spent some time as we weren’t spending for three months... you know! We woke up the next day and I was dying to see the memories I captured for Nina! She told me that initially she had some difficulties to make the Attractor work as she had to find the right conditions in order to start the attraction process.

After some unsuccessful trials she put it in her bedroom, next to her bed. She told me how magical it was when, going to sleep, she would turn off all the lights and all the loud stuff and... ! the Attractor would light up from within and a light glow would appear inside the box! Then she knew it was starting to attract some new memory from me, so she used to took it and held it in her hands, looking through the lens. Initially she would see some small “fairies” (as she likes to say, to me they are still light particles, probably this is a professional disfunction as I’m a director and I work with light...) carrying various colors, grouping in the middle of the back of the device and suddenly moving to certain spots, slowly forming a regular grid of moving colors from which the memory image used to emerge! She was literally crazy about it! I asked her if she did it regularly and she answered that she used to do that every night before going to sleep. She forgot about it just one night, when she arrived home so tired for the work that she just fainted on the bed. I told her that probably that was the time when I found impossible to capture some memories with my half, as the Equilibrium gate was blocking me because she already had some previous new memories to look at before I could send her even newer ones.

I asked her to bring there the Attractor as I wanted to see the visual memories I’d sent her during my trip to Sicily as I had never seen them before, but she replied that I had to prepare the right environment in order to attract them. I remembered her that joining the two halves together would let us see all the memories without any kind of limitation or condition to meet so she ran into the bedroom, grabbed the Attractor and came back to me at full speed, as she wanted to know all the details about each memory, as she had already seen all of the memories, but knew almost nothing about their context.

As we were putting one half next to the other we noticed they in some way synched, recognized each other and let us open them up, rejoining them into their original unity. A pulsing glow appeared, fragments of light scattered across the screen, showing us pieces of our shared emotions condensed into breathing images.

Experiment4 - User scenario (PDF)

Marcos

2008-11-26T12:58:00.001-06:00

I ran into the project now known as “Lossy Light Memories” on a November evening one year ago. If I had had the device then, I would have likely used it to keep a record of the Asian girl lost in her own memories and her iPod or the man half-dressed as a clown coming home that rode with me into Brooklyn, or the humble but inescapable coziness of the apartment I was visiting, or the smiles of Clio and Claudio (my guests) over memories of Italy and the best lasagna you can make with ingredients found in New York.

“Lossy Light Memories”, however, was then only a vague idea in Claudio’s mind (an idea so powerful as to hook me completely, but still only an idea, nonetheless). Therefore, we only took a regular picture and I sent an e-mail to Claudio, exactly one year into the future, using futureme.org.

A year went by, a year in which I could have used the machine many more times, a year in which I made mine more fully than ever the other person that should have this device.

And then, on a senseless Sunday night in which my only company was a bottle of gin and a pack of cigarettes to go along, Claudio reintroduce me to “Lossy Light Memories”. We discussed into the early hours everything from memory to the logarithmic nature of human knowledge, until the gin was finished and I wanted nothing more than to have Claudio’s “Lossy Light Memories” machine on me to capture that moment and send it to someone that cared.

The email I had sent to Claudio from the past arrived the next day.

Nothing more fitting. This is what “Lossy Light Memories” is all about. Moments too magical for our rational selfs to deal with. The past coming knocking to remind us of what we were and what we have become. People faraway that become so close by a wink of destiny.

Claudio’s device is not a mass consumer object. It cannot even be misused. However, to the people it is intended for, it is the perfect technological device. So perfect, indeed, as to be considered a work of magic.

As I was sitting to write this, the person which I would most like to give the other half to, wrote me a brief reminder of her existence. As a post script she added: “I have two images that I would send to you through our magical device, one would make you laugh and inspire you to come up with a character for a movie or something, the other would make your skin crawl and would speed up your heartbeat because of its how overwhelming and exact it is”.

I have no doubt.

All through my life, before meeting her, before meeting Claudio, before sending emails into the future, I have been obsessed at capturing the beauty of the essence of human experience in film. I am my own tragic hero: even though someday I might, Claudio has already done it for me, in a way that will not be outdone anytime soon.

Technology, thus, stole from art the moments, the memory and the people that make being human exciting and gave it back to those ready to understand it.

* * *

From the film: Carolina and her world, 2002. Dir: Marcos Villaseñor

"When I was a kid, I had this fantasy in which one day someone knocked the door and, when I opened it, I found a white envelope. When I opened it, I found it had pictures inside. Those weren't pictures of boring birthday parties, or hollidays, or model portfolios, or the proof that your parents are cheating on each other. No. They were pictures from the future.

"I would then try to imagine how tall I would be, who I'd be hanging out with, where would I be and, especially, what would I be feeling when the picture was taken.

"I guess that if my fantasy would become true today and I could send my pictures now back to Guadalajara and back to 1989, I wouldn't be dissapointed at all.

"Actually, the more I looked at them, the more I would like to be the girl I am now. This happy grl with no fears. This girl that knows that hapiness is in deciding to do what you really want.

Tropism - Loretta Wolozin

2008-11-24T04:05:00.003-06:00

" When I push back and reflect on what you’ve invented, I think of the concept of tropism: moths, for example, move tropically to light. So – maybe – your invention is ‘phototropic.’ "

Loretta Wolozin

---

A phototropic, pathostropic camera which entangles emotions in floating light clusters.

---

"photocamera/pathoscamera"

Elena Midolo

OpenGL Blending modes Processing test application

2008-11-19T19:41:00.004-06:00

I was experimenting with OpenGL blending modes in Openframeworks when I suddenly realized I was doing it without any kind of reference. On the Processing forum I came across this post about a Processing applet created by the great Ira Greenberg specifically created to experiment with OpenGL blending modes more freely.

I fired it up and I was surprised by its semplicity and power, it really helped me a lot. I added some simple functionalities to it and the result is here.

Thank for your code Ira, it rocks!

Marcos

2008-11-10T21:22:00.005-06:00

"Our lifes are nothing but collections of pictures, of postcards without a name and address lost in the postal service of our memories, letters without an adressee that float until they dissapear in the train station we choose to get off life. I assume that is why we're image fetichists, true semiotic animals, sons of film, TV, and photography.

I think the best way to get to know people is not seeing their photo albums time and again, but understanding instead why they organized their images in the way they did and why they keep those and not others. In this sense, knowing the sensations the person you love felt on his or hers first trip to the beach is way more important than knowing the date or the color of the bathing suit. I also value much more images that are apparently banal than those which are sterotypes of "images to share" (weddings, baptises, graduations, births, divorces, birthdays). Everyone can know why he or she remembers his or hers prom night, but probably not why he or she keeps a strong memory of the impression caused by a video on the tongue seen in kindergarten. These memories, those we're not forced to keep, are eventually those which sculpt our dreams and those that best represent who we are. If I were to define myself in a single image, I would most certainly use one of those."

Experiment 3: Impetus

2008-11-04T13:40:00.012-06:00

Brief 3: Impetus
Claudio L. Midolo
Marko Tandefelt Loretta J. Wolozin
November 3rd 2008

I. Idea
The device I’m envisioning will be formed starting with the deconstruction of the fundamental conceptual basis that has always existed in photography, that of the unity of the element which captures the image and the element which stores the image. The camera I’m going to create will exist in the form of a divided object, split into two halves, each one able to perform just one specific function of either capture and transmit a visual memory or retrieve and play back a visual memory. While the two halves will be displaced in both time and space they will be inherently connected to each other in remote. Until the two fragments are physically separated, some constrains will limit both the capture and playback processes: for example the person who holds the capture device won’t have at its disposal an unlimited amount of captures, but a limit will exist, regulating the proportion of the memories captured and their effective output on the receiver device. From the receiver side certain conditions will have to be met in order to retrieve and enjoy the visual memories intimately shared by the “capturer” such as silence, darkness and the presence of the person who owns the receiver half. These constrains will be present until the moment when the two two halves will be finally physically reunited as in that precise moment the two parts will recognize each other, opening themselves up to letting the two persons freely enjoy the intimate sharing moment. It is interesting to notice that in a possible scenario of usage this system enables a powerful interaction, that of the complementarity of experiences over the shared memories; the person who captured the visual memories will know everything about their context but has never seen them before, while the person who receives the visual memories has already seen them all, but knows nothing about their context. This way the sharing event will be empowered by the common need of each person to complete their “half” memory with that of the other.
The visual memory itself will be an artifact similar to a photograph, it will live as light on a physical medium but won’t be a print, it will seem to be still while instead will move over time. In reality it will be a high speed high resolution short video, played back in a specific way exploiting both its spatial and temporal qualities. Two immediate effects will be those of adding a sense of motion and the enhancement of the curiosity a single shot will be able to excite, as each visual memory will have much more moving details than a still photograph The look and feel of the interface will be almost “magical” to encourage a suspension of disbelief to let the users focus on the experience itself and not on the actual technology that make it happen. The final goal will be the restoration and enhancement of digital visual memories emotional value, ultimately suggesting a different perspective over the relationship with digital consumer tools, not in the direction of production, guided by the elements of speed, quality and conveniency but in that of humanity grounded on emotion and meaningfulness.

II.Form
The following diagrams illustrate the system I’m creating, from a logical point of view. I’m going to provide the possible technical solution to achieve the completion of each step.

The system will start to be built upon the conceptual and physical deconstruction of the unity of any photo camera, the unity of the part which captures the image and and that which stores it. I will physically build these two halves in order to let them meet a very precise behavior, illustrated in the next diagram.

One half, the Capturer, will just be able to capture visual memories. It will achieve this using a dedicated computing platform, the Aigo P8860 and an industrial grade hi speed, high resolution camera such as the Silicon Imaging SI-1280F- M & RGB MegaCamera. This process will be controlled by a custom c++ application.
Each visual memory after being captured will not be displayed back to the user of the Capturer device but will be immediately transferred to the Memory Plane, a middle dimension where all the memories shared by the two person using the device are stored, waiting to be attracted by the other half of the interface, the Attractor. A wireless internet connection will enable this communication system to work in conjunction with an HTTP server and a Database application, the two elements which enable the Memory Plane to work.

The Attractor half will rely on the wireless internet connection, either 3G or WLAN to receive the attracted visual memories from the memory plane, which will be then displayed using the Aigo P8860 LCD touchscreen.
Some rules will regulate the system, each one targeted specifically at one phase. In relation to the capture phase an equilibrium will have to exist between the activity of the holder of the capturer and that of the holder of the attractor. If the person who holds the attractor hasn’t seen the last n memories the capturer has reserved for him, then the capturer won’t be able to catch other visual memories, until the other person gives him attention again watching the memories that were previously recorded for him, finally giving the capturer the ability to capture again.

This will be achieved using an internet connection from the capturer which will connect to the Memory Plane which stores the most current status of the activity of the Attractor. The memory plane will return the number of new memories waiting to be seen by the holder of the Attractor, if the number is greater than a given limit, then the Equilibrium Gate will be closed and the Capturer device will inform the use with a feedback that at that time he cannot capture anything as the other person is probably not ready to give the attention his memory deserves at that moment in his live. This feedback will be available before the capturer actually tries to capture a memory, in order to prevent the excess of frustration which would be generated if he tries to capture a beautiful moment just to later know that it wasn’t recorded because of the equilibrium rule.
This rule solely to propose a solution to the inflation of the memories captured in a visual form.

Another rule will exist, this time related to the attraction phase. Certain conditions will have to be met by the holder of the attractor to successfully initiate the attraction process of visual memories from the memory plane.
One condition will be of aural nature as the need of silence or quiet in the environment where the attraction is going to happen. This will be achieved by using a microphone and a simple volume analysis of the environmental aural setting.
Another condition will be physical as that the person who wishes to see a memory actually picks the attractor in its hands and looks through the lens placed in the center of the interface. This will be achieved by using pressure sensors on the sides of the device and a small, low quality, cheap camera which will perform a simple shape recognition algorithm in order to detect a pupil looking through the glass.
The motivation for this is easily understandable from this example. If a person is telling you an important personal memory you want to look him in his eyes and listen carefully to his words and not look at your mobile phone screen or listening to your Ipod, you need to give the other person you attention.

A third rule will control the way the visual memories are attracted. It works on the concept of direct proportionality between the actual physical distance over the surface of the earth of the two halves of the device and the speed by which the visual memories will be attracted.
In order to better understand this concept the following example can be clarifying. Two people emotionally close to each other live very far away one from the other. Using the device I’m creating the attractor would receive the memories of the capturer in a very short time. This is understandable as when two persons who love each other are separated from great physical distance they want to know about the other person as soon as possible. The opposite scenario would be two persons who, again, are emotionally linked, but lives in the same house. The attractor will attract the visual memories of the other person with a very slow pace, receiving them at a much later time than they were actually captured. This is very human too as when you live 24-24/7-7 with another person, even if you love him/her, you are always updated on what’s going on in his life, thus receiving immediately something so quotidian would just diminish its true value, while receiving it at a later time would enhance it.
This will be technically achieved using a mix of GPS and internet technologies. Both the devices will always keep the Memory Plane updated with their most current position on the surface of the Earth. The Memory Plane will inform then one half of the position of the second half and will calculate the physical distance between them. Based on that value it will set the speed of the attraction accordingly. In case the GPS is not working an IP trace-route will give the raw geographic position of the ISP server each device is connected to. This way the mechanism will work everywhere an internet connection is present.
The motivation for this rule is to enhance curiosity and novelty towards the memories a person has reserved for another person, through digital means.

Lastly when the two halves will be finally reunited, they will first recognize each other, opening themselves up letting the user to physically join them together recreating the original unity. In that moment all the previous rules will cease to govern the system letting the users freely control the visual memories attraction and playback process, until the two halves will be divided again.
This will be achieved using RFID tag and reader on the devices, so they can recognize each other if put at a small distance. Magnets will be used on both devices to damp the opening of the interface. In addition to that the attractor will have an electronically controlled locking mechanism. After the two halves have recognized each other via RFID the lock on the attractor will unlock, revealing the magnets put on the side of the frontal aperture which will exactly match in shape and position the other two magnets put on the frontal aperture of the capturer. When the magnets in the first half touch those on the second half they will link the two halves together, reconstituting the original unity. Technically wise this will be achieved checking through a mini Arduino board inside the attractor if there is current flowing through the magnets.

III.Next steps
I’m actually waiting for the Aigo computer to arrive. Sven has agreed to sponsor the Aigo devices and that’s great! In the mean time I will start to create the system logic on my laptop computer just scaling it down in order to simulate the behavior on a smaller, weaker machine. I’ve asked Sven where I can work with wood and he pointed me to the fine art department, where a wood shop exists and Chris Hennelly works, I will contact him very soon. As the device I’m creating deals with emotions I want it to be shaped out of a warm material such as wood. In addition to being warm it is also easier to work with than plastic and metal and... I’ve always wanted to learn to work with it so, what a better chance?

the fabulous mLog

The ILog (http://www.owlproject.com/) interface is really what is inspiring me and guiding me for the look and feel I want to achieve. It is quite cryptic and obscure, but very stimulating from a curiosity point of view. Besides that the first motion picture cameras were made out of wood, so I want to follow the tradition of those giants!

Lumière Cinématographe [1895]

(Actually looking at this Lumière camera it is astonishingly similar to the image I have in my mind about how the final look of my device will be!).

Experiment3 - Impetus (PDF)

Lossy Light Memories : Midterm presentation

2008-11-04T09:57:00.006-06:00

more details (and a full scale version of the embarrassing picture of me), download the:

Lossy Light Memories - Midterm presentation (PDF)

Experiment 2: Implementation

2008-11-04T09:47:00.003-06:00

Claudio L. Midolo
Marko Tandefelt Loretta J. Wolozin
October 17th 2008

Current thesis concept

Lossy Light Memories lives within the domains of visual memory, emotion and that of our relationship, as human beings, with technology. This project first motivation emerged from the differences I noticed taking place within the transition between analog photography and its digital counterpart during which, gradually but incessantly, surprise has been traded for immediacy, quality and speed have been preferred over unique visual identity and intimacy has been overshadowed by convenience, ultimately letting the already very homogeneous non professional photographic design panorama to be lead by the value of productivity instead of humanity. The design choices taken by the leading manufacturers in the photographic non professional market explicitly show this situation; all the cameras are proud to display the same high performances: they are fast, the quality of their picture is increasing exponentially and their price is dropping more and more while time passes. Some new cameras even claims to be able to connect to the internet so in addition to instantly play back the shot, they are able to instantly share it with virtually the rest of the world. Looking at this panorama more in depth it is clear how the digital devices that are supposedly created and designed to capture and store our emotions condensed in a memory crystallized in the visual form of a photograph, just mimic and enhance those elements of productivity, those parameters which, during the era of analog photography, discriminated a device into a being considered either a professional device or a non professional device; a device for the masses. As a consequence at the present time the access to photo cameras able to perform as well as those professional ones that just some years ago were considered to be at the highest level of performances is broad and relatively easy to reach, but a pattern has started to emerge, that of the lost of humanity among this race towards quality, speed and convenience. Cameras are not designed to be closer to the nature of the shot they are taking, of the memory they are recording but just to be faster, better and cheaper, disregarding completely those possibilities that the very digital medium would be able to disclose, guiding non professional photography towards a design perspective closer to emotions and human , not economical, values.
The design I’m going to propose in order to, hopefully, solve or ,at least , sensitize the photographic community toward the issues formerly mentioned is that of an actual digital camera. The device I’m envisioning will be formed starting with the deconstruction of the fundamental conceptual basis that has always existed in photography, that of the unity of the element which captures the image and the element which stores the image. The camera I’m going to create will exist in the form of a divided object, split into two halves, each one able to perform just one specific function of either capture and transmit a visual memory or retrieve and play back a visual memory. While the two halves will be displaced in both time and space they will be inherently connected to each other in remote. Until the two fragments are physically separated, some constrains will limit both the capture and playback processes: for example the person who holds the capture device won’t have at its disposal an unlimited amount of captures, but a limit will exist, regulating the proportion of the memories captured and their effective output on the receiver device. From the receiver side certain conditions will have to be met in order to retrieve and enjoy the visual memories intimately shared by the “capturer” such as silence, darkness and the presence of the person who owns the receiver half. These constrains will be present until the moment when the two two halves will be finally physically reunited as in that precise moment the two parts will recognize each other, opening themselves up to letting the two persons freely enjoy the intimate sharing moment. It is interesting to notice that in a possible scenario of usage this system enables a powerful interaction, that of the complementarity of experiences over the shared memories; the person who captured the visual memories will know everything about their context but has never seen them before, while the person who receives the visual memories has already seen them all, but knows nothing about their context. This way the sharing event will be empowered by the common need of each person to complete their “half” memory with that of the other.
The visual memory itself will be an artifact similar to a photograph, it will live as light on a physical medium but won’t be a print, it will seem to be still while instead will move over time. In reality it will be a high speed high resolution short video, played back in a specific way exploiting both its spatial and temporal qualities. Two immediate effects will be those of adding a sense of motion and the enhancement of the curiosity a single shot will be able to excite, as each visual memory will have much more moving details than a still photograph The look and feel of the interface will be almost “magical” to encourage a suspension of disbelief to let the users focus on the experience itself and not on the actual technology that make it happen. The final goal will be the restoration and enhancement of digital visual memories emotional value, ultimately suggesting a different perspective over the relationship with digital consumer tools, not in the direction of production, guided by the elements of speed, quality and conveniency but in that of humanity grounded on emotion and meaningfulness.

Experiment/research objective
The core experiment I’ve chosen will focus on one aspect of the prototyping process specifically that of implementation. The goal I’m trying to achieve through this experiment is that of successfully build an test the technological framework that will enable me to have a solid ground to build my design upon. It is basically a system to record a video and transmit it remotely to another connected client on the network.

Design questions
What are specific working design questions you are attempting to answer by conducting this experiment?
Whether it is possible to create a system able to record high resolution, hi speed video and send it to a remotely connected client over a TCP network.

Experiment/research description
I’ve started this experiment trying to find the best environment that would have enabled me to achieve this first, preliminary goal and, in perspective, would let me further expand the system in any direction the design would lead me to. First I tried using Processing (Java) and Apache. The combination of the two worked very well but when I started playing back videos with resolution higher than 320x240, the video output became slow and unresponsive exposing the problems of the Java platform in terms of fast video playback and manipulation. In order to find a solution I started working with the Openframeworks library by Zachary Lieberman and Theo Watson, a collection of c, c++ code that let non hardcore c programmers experiment with graphics, sound, video and many other advanced features of the language. In a small time I created the basic application that, with the support of Apache and MAMP, is able to record, transmit and playback a high resolution, high frame rate video.

Results & Conclusion
The experiment proved to be successful, the c language seems to provide the performances and flexibility I’m going to rely on later in the project.

VII. Next steps
The next experiment will be about the possible look and feel of the Lossy Light Memories device, dealing also with the new emerging concepts of physical distance as the controller of the speed of the transmission of the visual memories from the recorder to the receiver and the quantum nature of the interface itself.

Aigo, possible platform

2008-10-30T22:48:00.000-05:00

Live video chat by Ustream

Digital Photo Frames are booring

2008-10-26T09:22:00.003-05:00

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"As Westinghouse realizes that the digital photo frame market is about as over-saturated as possible right now, not to mention just how boring the whole notion has become, it has resorted to pulling in a "world renowned" name in photography in order to help push its forthcoming line."

via engadget

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Distance Lab

2008-10-22T23:22:00.003-05:00

This is extremely connected to my research, should contact them at a good stage.

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Open Studio 004

Slow Technology

Thursday 13 November 2008 / 12 noon - 5 pm
Horizon Scotland / Forres, Scotland
Free of charge, spaces limited (see below for booking information)

Interested in what's going on at Distance Lab? At our "Open Studio" events we show you how we're pushing the limits of technology and design to overcome the disadvantages of distance. We also expose you to some of the most innovative research ideas and personalities from other parts of the world.

The theme of this event is Slow Technology, an extension of notions from the "slow food" movement into the design of new technologies. Instead of speed and efficiency, slow technology emphasises the quality, locality, and humanity of the total experience.

Distance Lab researchers Costas Bissas and Tomoko Hayashi will describe our ongoing endeavors in the realm of "slow technology", including Neuromantic, a project that aims to encourage rural modern life through the use of new technologies without altering the authenticity of the environment, local uniqueness and resources.

Special guest speaker:

Glorianna Davenport
MIT Media Laboratory

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Everything every time everywhere

2008-10-16T21:52:00.005-05:00

Everything is connected, every time and everywhere.

The reality emerges from the interactions of every single particle with every other, floating on a lattice of possibilities. Dimensions are layered on top of each other interacting as a fluid.

We, as human beings, don't escape this principle. We're all synchronized and even if we're not conscious of it, we're still always experiencing the effect of such condition.

"An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

Laplace – Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, Introduction. 1814

Ideas

2008-09-22T15:39:00.006-05:00

we never want to suffer, this way we will never be happy

+

the camera pov must be as similar as possible to human pov -> 50mm lens, but a deeper research on this is needed.

+

using Canon 40d as camera:
hdmi out to dvi male
adapter dvi male to dvi female oppure direttemente hdmi female to dvi female
dvi female to rca
rca to video capture interface ... sounds too convoluted

Experiment 1: Role

2008-09-22T15:28:00.003-05:00

Experiment 1: CORE Role
Claudio L. Midolo
Marko Tandefelt Loretta J. Wolozin
September 22nd 2008

Lossy Light Memories - Thesis - Core experiment 1 - user scenario from Claudio Midolo on Vimeo.

Current thesis concept
Lossy Light Memories is about bringing back those emotional elements characteristic of analog photography such as surprise, value, magic and intimacy which have been lost during the transition to the digital photographic medium. The chosen form is a digital device split in two halves intimately linked together though displaced in both time and space. The first half will just capture and remotely store a visual memory, while the second half will be able to make it emerge from the oblivion lighting it up to be enjoyed.

Until the two halves are physically separated, some constrains will limit both the capture and playback processes, while when the two halves will be finally reunited all the constrains will cease for a limited amount of time in order to let the two users freely evoke their shared memories.

The visual memory itself will be an artifact similar to a photograph, it will live as light on a physical medium but won’t be a print, it will seem to be still while instead will move over time. In reality it will be a high speed high resolution short video, played back in a specific way exploiting both its spatial and temporal qualities. Two immediate effects will be those of adding a sense of motion and the enhancement of the curiosity a single shot will be able to excite, as each visual memory will have much more moving details than a still photograph.

Constrains will be present both in the process of capturing a visual memory and in that of showing it back. For example the capturer won’t be able to record memories sequentially, one immediately after another, but some time will pass in between each capture in order to limit the their potential over flood and their consequent devaluation; each capture will be very precious. From the receiver side, the visual memories won’t be always accessible as programs on televisions, but they will require certain environmental conditions (silence, darkness) to be met and an active commitment from the person who wishes to enjoy them (holding the interface with the hands, keeping it close), thus adding value to each single memory evoked.

The look and feel of the interface will be almost “magical” to encourage a suspension of disbelief to let the users focus on the experience itself and not on the actual technology that make it happen. The final goal will be the restoration and enhancement of digital visual memories emotional value, ultimately suggesting a different perspective over the relationship towards digital consumer tools, not in the direction production, guided by the elements of speed, quality and conveniency but in that of humanity grounded on surprise, emotion and meaningfulness.

Experiment/research objective
The core experiment I’ve chosen will focus on two aspects of the prototyping process specifically those of ideal role and look and feel in the form of a video user scenario. The goal I’m trying to achieve through this experiment is that of the exploration and visualization of what for now in my mind is the ideal form that synthesizes both from a conceptual and interaction perspective all the core elements of the project, completely discarding the implementation side of it as it would be just a burden and useless limit at this stage.
Design questions
What is your current macro design question? A macro design question expresses your overarching design goal, what it is that you want to discover with your thesis.
As I’ve already specified at the end of the first part of this paper my overall ideal goal would be designing a digital tool able to restore and enhance the emotional value of digital visual memories, ultimately suggesting a different perspective over the relationship towards digital consumer tools, not in the direction production, guided by the elements of speed, quality and conveniency but in that of humanity grounded on surprise, emotion and meaningfulness.
What are specific working design questions you are attempting to answer by conducting this experiment?
The concept I’ve in my mind is clear, motivated, strong, beautiful and useful, but I want to see it ideally implemented in a complete user scenario to have a glimpse of its true potential, possible flaws or new working perspectives.
There are many other strict design question I pose periodically to myself regarding this project such as:
How the capture/reception flow of interactions will work? Which kind of metaphores and imaginaria I’m going to reference in order to create them. How the constrain system will work on them. Do I want a conscious capture mechanism or not? If not how to select relevant memories? What would I lose what would I gain from this?

How visual memories will physically present themselves to the receiver?
What are the most common scenarios of usage of the tool? Two persons emotionally linked which live far away from each other? How the memory sent to the other person will be precious if the other person is far away and not present in the memories? How to define preciousness in this scenario.
Another scenario may be two emotionally linked persons living close to each other, this scenario is less problematic on one side as probably the other person will be part of many memories, but the value of them may be diminished as they will be fully accessed from both the users more frequently.
A third scenario may even be a single person who wants to use this as a personal visual diary. This scenario seems to be the most satisfactory one as the two parts overlaps in one.
What if a person wants to direct a memory to more than one receivers? Do I want this?
The ideal form for the encoder, receiver would be a symmetrical object which evokes its unity when the two halves of it are apart from each other and suggest a way to physically reunite them once the two users meet again. Right now I’m fascinated by the idea of using a stone or wood block as receiver and a sheet of paper as receiver. Their union symbolizes the writing, the oldest and most fundamental way to fixate in time memories and visual memories thus it is resonating with my concept, but I wonder if it will be technically feasible to achieve.
Are the people I’m going to direct this project to aware of the loss has taken place from analog to digital photography? Are they feeling it? I have some past experiences about it confirming my vision, but probably a survey might help me to find new perspectives on this.
Who are the giants I can refer to regarding this project?

Experiment/research description
The nature of this first core experiment is a video user scenario which can be found at
http://vimeo.com/1789778
I created a simple cardboard physical prototype to simulate the actual form factor of the device and I digitally enhanced it using a laptop computer programmed with a custom made java application. These are the steps I took in order to complete this first prototyping phase:

Instruments used to build the receiver and the encoder
The encoder

The receiver

The encoder and the receiver

For the encoder I chose a box shape as it had almost the ideal right form factor I’m envisioning and it incorporates a type of interaction which fits my current idea which is that of opening and closing a box in order to record a visual memory, without any way to rationally compose the shot, living the moment instead of building it.
The receiver was a simple piece of paper, with a blue stroke running around to visually match its half, the encoder. The paper immediately suggest a pattern of interactions that I consider important to the function the receiver should fulfill. The user will be able to touch it, feel it in its hands, move it, rotate it, watch the visual memories emerging from it.
This physical prototype was used to simulate an ideal user interaction, documented in a video form. The video illustrates an ideal setting for the experiment, that of two persons in love, who don’t live together, and meet one afternoon to spend some time together in a park. The boy has the encoder with him and is capturing some moments of their romantic meeting with it. When the afternoon is over the couple split. Later at night the girl is almost falling asleep when she notice the receiver glowing in the dark. She approaches it and touches it and as soon as her finger touch its surface, a visual memory emerges from the darkness and she enjoys it, and after that another one and another one. The girl is very touched by them as they represent very precious moments that she can see breathing again in front of her eyes. They are not staged or rationally composed, but they are genuine and natural, carrying a strong emotional value. After some time the visual memories fade away leaving the receiver glowing less and less brightly. The girl goes to bed happy to have witnessed again in such a special way the moments passed with her beloved one.
Results & Conclusion
This experiment was extremely valuable as it offered me the possibility to see a glimpse of the possibilities of the device I have in my mind, and I loved them. It is really a powerful hybrid of photography and moving pictures, taking from both of them some very powerful elements, without exploiting them so much to fall in their realm, becoming either a photograph or a video; the visual memory is not a photo neither a video, but is the two of them recombined together in a new form.
The results were of qualitative nature as they were mostly emotions and they confirmed my core perspective over digital photography. Mimicking the traditional analog cameras faster, better and more conveniently hasn’t enriched and fully exploited the possibilities of the digital medium; other more interesting and human compelling ways exist get the best out of it.
The visual memories captured and later retrieved generated immediate surprise and attention in the user who tried this first prototype. The interface itself was perceived as strange, original and almost magical. The moving quality of the visual memories was appreciated as it enabled the user to explore each capture spatially and temporally, giving her more time to appreciate tiny details that boosted the emotions those visual memories were carrying.
The interaction pattern were a bit confusing, more work must be done in the look and feel, refining the way the usage metaphors I’ve chosen are implemented.
A need for a name has emerged, how to call the interface? how to call the experience? how to call the two halves of the device, why? Which kind of imaginarium I’m extracting this concepts from? (Ancient Greece mythology can be a powerful source).
VII. Next steps
The next experiment I’m planning to take is that of trying to explore the technical possibilities available to actually create the Lossy Light Memories device. Once found these information build the simplest and cheapest setup to prototype all the parameters and interactions that were taken for granted during the first core experiment.

Experiment 1 : User Scenario (PDF)

Experiment 1: User scenario proposal

2008-09-20T10:06:00.004-05:00

I first chose to experiment implementing the most basic setup for a prototype of the project in order to be sure about the technical possibilities available to work with, but after the Monday class I changed my mind and right now I would like to create a user scenario able to illustrate one of the possible form of look and feel and role the object I'm designing might have. The implementation side of it will be ignored this time as I want to be completely free to imagine usage and interactions without technological boundaries.

(Experiment 1: implementation) no more changed to User scenario

2008-09-15T10:47:00.003-05:00

test is processing (java) is a working environment for the project:

test movie capture capabilities
test movie making capabilities
test movie send/load over network capabilities
test movie playing capabilities

and report results in the paper for Loretta.

Marko's precedents connections

2008-09-14T02:27:00.006-05:00

Seppo Renvall

connections:

"Many of Renvall's works are about very ordinary events. In fact, the artist says that he only makes art from the reality he knows and is familiar with personally. The works also attest to Renvall's genuine interest in people. In many of them, the depiction of private experience succeeds in revealing something genuine about humanity in general..."

"... Renvall's works are also informed by a social and political consciousness that stems from private experience... Renvall also takes a critical attitude towards commercial cinema and television, and the idea of man propagated by them."

from drummachine.com

Jari Haanpera

connections:

"Haanperä is interested in analog technology but does allso use digital technique. He is interested early 20th century technology romanticism/mysticism as well as phenomenons of our time. He uses whole scale of moving image from precinematic methods to videos and 35 mm fiction films. He fades the line between dream and reality and observes surrounding world in that light."

from drummachine.com

Chris O'Shea's "Out of Bounds" installation

connections:

the idea of an image emerging from the darkness and spatially explorable is very insightful and pertinent to my thesis investigation.

Michael Naimark

connections:

the chosen aesthetic of the SEE BANFF! is very close to my concept for the physical design of the interfaces I envision as I want them to be warm, ancient and magical.

Casio Exilim Pro EX-F1 + wifi data plan as prototype tools

2008-09-14T01:26:00.006-05:00

It seems the Casio Exilim Pro EX-F1 would be a very good tool to have in order to prototype my thesis concepts.

It offers goof both spatial and temporal resolution to play with:

1920 x 1080 spatial resolution
60 fps temporal resolution

shooting a 5 sec video at 60fps and playing it back at 10fps gives as a result a duration of 30sec at full hd resolution.

the only problem is that probably it wont interface to be used as a live camera to a pc... cannot be remotely controlled.

other possible solutions are industrial vision cameras via firewire

or finding a way to capture the hdmi output of the camera.

As for the internet wifi connection the Verizon data plan seems to be the fastest one.

Temporal and spatial resolutions

2008-09-13T02:53:00.008-05:00

Think about the Ken Burns effect

+ very slow motion video (recorded with hi speed camera 60+ fps) -> high temporal resolution
+ very hi resolution sampling of recording (5mp+) -> high spatial resolution

exploring these dimension in the Ken Burns perspective to retrieve the visual memory, make it emerge, live and fade away back in time.

from a quick research there are some available camera that shoot 500fps at .25 - 1mp but I would need something like 100fps - 5mp.

The Red Scarlet would be the perfect one

3MP at 60 fps ->3000$ :'(

otherwise the cheaper Casio EX-F1
capable of 1920 × 1080 (FHD, 60 fields per second) -> 2K res at 60fps for 999$
or 512 × 384 (300 fps, 30-300 fps) -> with such low spatial resolution the ability to explore the picture spatially is partly lost.

Marko additional ideas

2008-09-12T15:45:00.003-05:00

MARKO’S FEW COMMENTS TO CLAUDIO:

- Digging deeper to the idea of Film Grain Texture

- Digging deeper to the idea of "Zooming"

- The larger idea of "sharing" a photo, wanting to share an experience/personal matter

- Time/temporal elements/present moment, things ABOUT to happen

- Memory (human vs. machine), "selective" memory etc

I did see, indeed, a beautiful warm quality with the images from custom made visualizer, almost Rembrandt/candlelight/religious/spiritual..

UNCERTAIN

- Whether temporal displacement of images will be beneficial/working/understood/felt, as more as a concept...

- physicality of "Visor", yet, might be ok though if carefully planned, or some other physical experience, representations

- (wheel of Lomotype/shot left/right stereoscopic images which rolls in front of your eyes, as a fleeting moment, visor, 3D/Warm/organic).

FEW PRECEDENTS TO CHECK OUT

- Check out Seppo Renvall's pinhole camera VAN in Helsinki.. hard to find materials though

- Also Jari Haanpera's light/media archeological installations..

- Rozin/Tom Igoe infrared flashlight reveal project with Maglite (REVEALING)

- Michael Naimark's Banff stereoscopic tour/device

Algorithmic Animation : Linear + Non linear by Doris Yee

2008-09-11T01:45:00.001-05:00

check the video my colleague Doris Yee has created to illustrate the linear vs non linear motion topic, it is wonderful!

Algorithmic Animation : Linear + Non linear motion

2008-09-10T22:27:00.003-05:00

Here are some videos that document linear motion and non linear motion, where :

Linear motion is defined as a motion during which at any given time it is possible to predict the position of the moving object along the path from the starting point A to the destination point B.

Non linear motion is defined as a motion during which it is impossible to exactly predict the position of an object along the path between the starting point and the destination point.

Video documentation

Linear motion 1

Non Linear motion 1

Non Linear motion 2 - Super MiMi

Linear motion 2

Non Linear motion 3

Linear motion 3

Non Linear motion 4

Non Linear motion 5

Algorithmic Animation: Intro

2008-09-10T22:17:00.008-05:00

"Making things breathe"

This Fall I've the pleasure to be among those lucky students who made it into the Algorithmic animation course at Parsons, taught by Ayah Bdeir and Zach Lieberman.

During the course we're going to explore the intersections of code, animation and physical computing in order to create beautiful moving things, both on screen and in the physical world.

I love it.

Lossy Light Memories

2008-09-08T01:59:00.004-05:00

Lossy Light Memories
Claudio L. Midolo
Marko Tandefelt Loretta J. Wolozin
August 25th 2008

I. Concept
This paper is meant to be a preliminary document about the process I will go through in order to realize my thesis project at Parsons, The New School, during the academic year 2008-2009. The title for this paper has been chosen as it successfully incorporates the two main elements that currently drive my investigation. The first core definition of “Light Memories” is strongly linked to the concept of Photography, not only from a physical and technical point of view, as Photography is a medium who lives through Light, but also from an emotional standpoint, as the images produced thanks to the photographic medium fixate moments in time as well as contexts, dynamics which can, ultimately, be considered precious visual memories. The “Lossy” attribute is directly borrowed from the digital technology software jargon usually referred to a specific way to compress digital data having as a result a lower quality, but still useful, copy of the original. From the combination of these two concepts emerges the main topic of my research embodied by the lost of values which gradually took place during the transition from Analog to Digital Photography. A solution to this issue is what I set to be the final result of this thesis process, in the form of an actual interface to be used by the wide public audience.

II. Introduction
The art of capturing images, and with them emotions and memories, has always fascinated me since my early childhood. I remember I had my first contact with this strange world made of black boxes, strong lights and long lenses when I was five years old. At that time I was living in a flat and I used to spend a lot of time in our neighbours’, Carmela and Caco, house as my mother and father were both very busy working hard to make a living for my sister and I. As a result I became very close to both Carmela, who eventually got to be as a real grandmother, and to her son Caco, who is like an uncle to me. It was in that very apartment that I entered the magic world of photography as Caco was a professional working in the field and I couldn’t resist the innate impulse to enter his private laboratory in order to explore it and play with his tools ultimately messing them up!
The years passed but I always kept alive in me this fascination for that peculiar craft that among many other was the only one capable of capturing an instant from the continuous stream of time in the same way human eyes do with visual memories.
“There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.” 1
Growing up I had no other contacts with Photography. High school years passed in a glance followed then by my first real negative education experience, that in the Computer Science degree program at Milan Politecnico, ended with my conscious withdrawal. At that time I naturally started exploring the intersections between visual arts and computational media and one year later I officially started to learn Design at the IED academy in Milan, enrolling in the Digital Design program. It was during that period of time that I started exploring Photography as a mean to create and manipulate those visual elements that were the essential building blocks of many of my visual communication projects. First on my own and then with the precious help of Caco the doors of photographic knowledge were opened to me revealing a marvellous and wide panorama. My first personal camera was a cheap digital one and the photos I was taking with that tool were pleasing but the more I was using it, the more I was feeling that I needed something more “manual” in order to really learn the basics of Photography as almost everything in that camera was automatic. It was with the purchase of a digital reflex camera that I discovered the meaning and the power of those words that just some time before were arcane to me such as aperture, shutter time, white balance ... Thanks to that interface I really started playing more directly with light and it is the tool that I’m still currently using after four years. At that point in time my personal photographic experience was almost exclusively based on digital cameras, I was just loving the ease of use, speed and quality even a beginner like me was able to achieve with little effort thanks to the superb design and technology of those digital interfaces. Given my little experience I was superficially considering analog cameras just as things of the past; they were slow, convoluted and, more importantly, they were not able to immediately visualize the result of a given shot, thus my interest in them was fairly limited. This situation began to change during a trip to Berlin, during which I randomly encountered a very special analog camera, a Lomo-camera, which started to erode my superficial assumptions about Photography and digital technology in general. That strange, little device was funny looking, made completely in blue rubber with plastic lens and it didn’t even have a viewfinder! In order to take a shot you just had to point at the subject, press the shutter button and hope it was caught on film... at first I was considering it more a joke than a real tool, but then what a surprise when looking at its results! The images captured by that device were so genuine, spontaneous, maybe with lower quality than those of my fancy digital camera, but absolutely imbued with life.
“The medium is the message.”2

III. Motivation
From that moment on I started exploring the analog medium and now I own several analog cameras as well as a digital one. What I’ve learnt so far has helped me building a more critical perspective over digital technology and its relationship with the analog counterpart. One of the assumptions related to this subject that I feel most is that in the transition from analog to digital medium, specifically in Photography, has not only changed the way images are captured, processed and memorized, but, more importantly, has, gradually but constantly, modified the way we approach to the photographic practice: how we interact with the camera in order to take photos, how we look at them, how we share them, what value we attribute them. One example of this deep shift is the explicit, obvious, but not broadly perceived sacrifice of surprise in favor of immediacy. The first and foremost feature designed and marketed when the first consumer digital cameras came on the market in the mid nineties was the ability to take a photo and immediately show it back in order to evaluate its quality. The feature encountered a great success and was included in all the following evolutions as it successfully satisfied the great demand coming from the users to eliminate the long, time and money consuming process of develop and print the images captured on film at the local photographic laboratory, similarly as Polaroid did with the introduction of the instant developing film cameras during the fifties. All this convenience came with a price, that of the sacrifice of the element of surprise. As the pictures can be immediately accessed and evaluated in the same place, same moment they have been taken with no effort and additional costs, it is easy to imagine that the practice of taking a shot over and over until the “perfect” one is finally captured has become very popular and widespread. The emotions of surprise and suspense emerging from the discovery of the results of a film shot time ago were lost for good.
Other two key features brands like Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony are always pushing to the limit of are those of quality and speed, the first in terms of resolution and the second seen as the overall capturing, processing and memorizing time the device consumes at each shot. Not surprisingly the users react positively to these technological advancement, even if they are not truly genuine as, for example, the quality of a picture is more related to that of the lens which captures it more than the resolution of the camera sensor. The pictures are larger and larger, can be scaled up without losing too much detail spending less and less time capturing them, but how do they look? There is really little or no difference between an image taken with two digital cameras in the same price range. Taking two DSLR as example a Canon 40D or Nikon D300 and looking at the images they produce it is clear that the difference between them is little more than just the brand they carry on their body.
“Even more fetishized is "film look" itself -- the soft, grainy, and somewhat blurry appearance of a photographic image which is so different from the harsh and flat image of a video camera or the too clean, too perfect image of computer graphics.”3
The images produced digitally have stunning quality, but they all look and feel the same, while film used to give each shot a distinctive quality, thanks to the different chemicals used to produce or process it. Post production digital image manipulation suites like Adobe® Photoshop® are powerful tools that can enhance and transform each digital photo boosting its characteristics, empowering its qualities and fixing its weak points, but they are incomparable to the implicit character a specific combination of film, camera, lens and develop and print techniques can give to a given shot. One last argument about the shift the digital transition has brought in the photographic world is related to the way pictures are viewed and shared. Thanks to their immaterial, electronic, numerical nature, and to the wide spread computational information network known as the Internet, the images captured with a digital camera can easily reach a world wide audience. So called “Web 2.0” services such as the popular Flickr enable anyone with a digital camera, or tools to digitize its shots, a computer and Internet connection and no proficiency in database/web technologies, to share its images with the rest of the world in a glance. The popularity of these services is growing together with the astonishing success of digital consumer cameras; in any given minute, on the Flickr website, thousands of images are uploaded and shared with anyone present on the net. While this is great on one side, as it democratically enable any image maker to show its creation to the same audience a world known professional can reach, the trade off is that of loss of intimacy and social value the sharing of a picture used to generate. When all these contemporary technologies were yet to be implemented and distributed to the wide public audience, the sharing and viewing of pictures was a very intimate and social event. Usually one picture was given as a gift to a particular person and the act of giving and receiving the gift involved just those two individuals. Another occasion would have been the leafing through the photo album together with friends or family, another hint of the social yet intimate nature of the photo sharing and viewing activities in the past. Surprise, magic, unique character and intimacy, all of these features that once characterized the photographic experience are slowly but constantly fading away, leaving an immediate, high speed, high quality, world accessible Photography behind them. Probably desirable and ideal for business or worker professionals, but surely not fully true to the very nature of the images that every day millions of people try to condense their precious and intimate memories in.

IV. Methodology
The result of this thesis research will be the creation of an interface able to capture images, while keeping alive those qualities faded away in the transition between analog to digital Photography. The form that can synthesize this concept is that of a split object, a camera both divided in time and space. The one of the fundamentals that has always represented the technical and conceptual core of the photographic practice is the unity of the lenses and of the film, of the element which captures the image and that which stores it in time. Once the photographer clicks the shutter button it opens in a given time at a given aperture letting some light pass through and reach the sensitive film in the back which retains a visual impression of the scene which was taking place in front of the camera lenses.
The mechanism: stamped black tin, Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood, A lens The shutter falls Forever
Dividing that from this.4
I plan to subvert this logic, exploiting the implicit qualities of the digital medium not to simply mimick the traditional analog camera behaviour but using them to translate the digital image into the form of a visual memory. The device I envision is composed by two distinct parts: the first able to capture and transmit the image and the second able to receive and visualize the images taken by the other half of the device, in a very specific fashion. The taken images will be displaced in time, as the receiver will get them at a later, not specified, moment than they were captured, as well as in space, as the receiver can be anywhere an Internet connection is present. While the time passes the images will slowly emerge on the surface of the receiver and live there for some moments to then fade away to, maybe, reappear at a later moment, in a continuous cycle.

The two halves of the device are implicitly linked and one receiver can visualize just those images coming from the capture device it has originally linked to. I’m here using the term “image” to refer to a medium able to hold a visual memory and not specifically to a static, photographic-like image. The capture device will be able to record a limited amount of visual memories; once it has used all the available space two options will be possible: wait some time so the “buffer” frees some space for new visual memories or meet in person with the holder of the receiver and reunite the two halves together. In that very moment all the space will be freed on the capture device and all the visual memories will be freely accessible on the receiver for a certain amount of time.
In order to implement this concept I’m going through an iterative process both experimenting with value fiction designs to test to the limits the fundamentals of the idea and, once arrived to a solid conceptual stage, start the real implementation which probably is going comprehend elements of physical computing, network, user interface and visual programming.

V. Research
These projects represents precedents that can be linked to the Lossy Light Memories project from both a conceptual and technical perspective:
The Moment Camera
“Sometimes, a very short subsequence, or cliplet, can capture the moment, while still allowing the imagination to fill in what happened just before or after the bit of action. Just as a still image forces the viewer’s imagination to fill in what is left out, such short cliplets serve a similar purpose..”5
The Moment Camera project is very insightful particularly because of the peculiar technique and approach to capture a “moment” and the attention reserved to the tension between the elements of still image and video. Using a continuously filled and updated short video buffer, a Cliplet, the Moment Camera should be able to record a moment from time, not in the form of a single image but in that of a very short video. This would still allow the viewer to interpret something very similar to a still shot but enhanced with a layer of motion and dynamics.
Exploring Design Concepts for Sharing Experiences through Digital Photography
“In this research, we aim to explore meaningful design directions for future photography applications with a focus on the experiences around sharing. We review a wide-rage of photo-related applications, extracting emerging patterns of different photo-related interactions to inform a framework for their discussion.”6
This project is particularly relevant as it presents a thorough and up to date research about the currently most popular ways to capture, share and edit photographs as well as related academic projects and emergent patterns of interaction.
Sharing Digital Photographs in the Home through Physical Mementos, Souvenirs, and Keepsakes
“People now easily share digital photos outside the home via web publishing and gift-giving. Yet within the home, digital photos are hard to access and lack the physical affordances that make sharing easy and opportunistic. To promote in-home photo sharing, we designed Souvenirs, a system that lets people link digital photo sets to physical memorabilia. These mementos trigger memories and serve as social instruments;”7
The core concept that links this project with the Lossy Light Memory one is the shared attention reserved to the way visual memories in the form of digital files are brought back from the virtual world to the physical one through some kind of visualizer that resides in the intimate space of a home. The Souvenirs system is an interesting attempt to restore the intimacy and social nature of visual memories sharing lost in the transition from film photography to digital photography.
Computational Photography
“Computational photography combines plentiful computing, digital sensors, modern optics, actuators, probes and smart lights to escape the limitations of traditional film cameras and enables novel imaging applications. Unbounded dynamic range, variable focus, resolution, and depth of field, hints about shape, reflectance, and lighting, and new interactive forms of photos that are partly snapshots and partly videos are just some of the new applications found in Computational Photography.”8
The Computational Photography paper is a precious repository about the latest research of the intersection of computing and digital photography. While the technical details and techniques can be distant from the focus of the Lossy Light Memories project, they are insightful as they clearly present various paths that can be possibly useful to translate a still photograph into a breathing visual memory.

VI. Map

--- put map image here ---

VII. Prototype
The following documentation is about the very first, early physical prototype realized during Summer 2008. While absolutely simple it successfully incorporates the major concepts that constitutes the core of my current research such as:
The user who captures images cannot directly see them but has to wait
The user who captures images have a certain amount of shots available
The images can be seen just on the visor device at a later time
The visor is an object that can only visualize the pictures taken by the capture device
The visor is an object who lives in the home
The visor and the capture device are displaced in time and space
The images are not print but they keep their light nature
They images are ephemeral, they cannot be seen forever or placed on a wall, they emerge from time in the visor

The capture device is a 60x60mm analog camera called HOLGA

The images are saved on 60x60mm VELVIA positive film

The visor device is a custom made positive film visualizer

The visual memory is lit from the past

When I first saw the images via the custom made visualizer I was deeply surprised. Just seeing them for the first time off the screen, not only printed on paper but temporarly lit up made me appreciate their ephemeral nature and the value that it carries with it and inspired me to refine the concept of Lossy Light Memories.

VIII. Conclusions
I’m deeply motivated to take this project to its full growth and expansion as I really feel that the current situation of, not only Photography, but more in general digital technology is critical. The consumer market is flooded by devices that offer the same functionalitis and share the same values: to get very high quality output, very quickly and very cheaply ... but I fell something is missing. With today’s digital camera it’s easier to capture “the perfect shot” in any given situation, but what is the perfect shot compared to the surprise and value of a long awaited, physical visual memory? I will go on exploring this topic refining it further in order to successfully bridge the technological and emotional gap that exists in between the analog and digital dimensions of the photographic practice.

Bibliography

1 Yamamoto, Tsunetomo and William S. Wilson. Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai. Kodansha International, (2002): 68. 2 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge, (2001) : 7.3 Manovich, Lev. THE PARADOXES OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY. Photography After Photography.Exhibition catalog. Germany, (1995)..4 Gibson, William. Agrippa (A Book of The Dead). http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/source/agrippa.asp.5 Cohen, Michael F. and Richard Szeliski. The Moment Camera. IEEE Computer, (2006). 6 Jung, Heekyoung and Kay Connelly. Exploring Design Concepts for Sharing Experiences through Digital Photography. Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Designing pleasurable products and interfaces. Finland, (2007). 7 Michael Nunes, Saul Greenberg and Carman Neustaedter. Sharing Digital Photographs in the Home through Physical Mementos, Souvenirs, and Keepsakes. Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Designing interactive systems. South Africa, (2008).8 Ramesh Raskar, Jack Tumblin, Ankit Mohan, Amit Agrawal, Yuanzen Li. Computational Photography. EUROGRAPHICS, (2006).

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Lossy Light Memories (PDF)

Vocabulary

2008-09-08T01:41:00.002-05:00

I feel the need to develop a vocabulary for the thesis project constitutive elements. For example, how to call the two halves of the split device? how to call the reunited device? how to call the visual memory? is this photography? is this video?

Try to look to the Greek Mythology imaginarium for insights.

ideas

2008-09-08T01:38:00.004-05:00

The visual memories emerge from the past on the visor just in certain environmental/temporal conditions as for example just in the dark, in the silence, no movements, same day it was taken.

Reference to isophone -> less external stimuli, more attention to the visual memory

Maybe capture audio too? parts of it? only the frequencies that matter most for the emotion part of the memory and less for the understanding of it.

Use hi speed digital cameras as primary input for the visual memory, give the possibility to the user to capture a given amount of memories each memory lasting a given amount of time.

The user can pause the "recording" of the memory keeping a button pressed (rough editing capability).

How the visual memory is going to be visualized? it has to live in a physical object, better if not a flat screen, better if a projection.

I want

2008-09-04T22:33:00.001-05:00

Memories that breathe.

Agrippa (A Book of The Dead)

2008-08-28T23:48:00.014-05:00

William Gibson opens his poem with:

"I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound this book together."1

The book he's referring to is an old photographic album containing images from his past, from his childhood.

image courtesy of The Agrippa Files

It inspired me this reflection relative to my thesis project

The more time passes the more the memory is revealed.

Once perceived it sublimates, dissipates in time to be later rediscovered again.

Consider the role of the viewer, as powerful as that of the photographer.
The photographer compresses, the viewer decompresses and elaborate.

The mechanism of shooting

Technology as the mechanism, how it affects our life and memories

References:

[1] Gibson, William. Agrippa (A Book of The Dead).

Hexagon Brush - Processing code

2008-08-22T01:03:00.003-05:00

Here's the link to the Processing code to try the hexagonBrush application. It can be interesting also if you're trying to draw a grid of hexagons through code.

HexagonBrush code

soundFishing - Poster

2008-08-21T23:02:00.001-05:00

This is the poster of the soundFishing project presented in Vienna at the 2008 edition of MobileMusicWorkshop.

All the documentation is available here on this blog at:
claudiodt.blogspot.com/search/label/soundFishing

Lossy Light Memories - Draft

2008-08-20T18:53:00.009-05:00

Lossy Light Memories

Claudio L. Midolo
Marko Tandefelt Loretta J. Wolozin
August 25th 2008

I. Introduction
This paper is meant to be a preliminary document about the process I will go through in order to realize my thesis project at Parsons, The New School, during the 2008 academic year. The title for this paper has been chosen as it successfully incorporates the two main elements that currently drive my investigation. The first core definition of “Light Memories” is strongly linked to the concept of Photography, not only from a physical and technical point of view, as Photography is a medium who lives on top of light, but also from an emotional standpoint, as the images produced through the photographic practice fixate moments in time as well as contexts, dynamics which can ultimately be considered precious visual memories. The “Lossy” attribute is directly borrowed from the digital technology jargon usually referred to a specific way to compress digital data having as a result a lower quality, but still useful, copy of the original. From the combination of these two concepts the main topic of my research emerges embodied by the lost of values which gradually took place during the transition from Analog to Digital Photography.

The art of capturing images, and with them emotions and memories, has always fascinated me since my early childhood. I remember I had my first contact with this strange world made of black boxes, strong lights and long lenses when I was five years old. At that time I was living in a flat and I used to spend a lot of time in our neighbours’, Carmela and Caco, house as my mother and father were both very busy working hard to make a living for my sister and I. As a result I became very close to both Carmela, who eventually got to be as a real grandmother, and to her son Caco, who is like an uncle to me. It was in that very apartment that I entered the magic world of photography as Caco was a professional working in the field and I couldn’t resist the innate impulse to enter his private laboratory in order to explore it and play with his tools ultimately messing them up!
The years passed but I always kept live in me this fascination for that peculiar craft that among many other was the only one capable of capturing an instant from the continuous stream of time in the same way human eyes do with visual memories.

“There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man’s whole life is a succession of moment after moment. If one fully understands the present moment, there will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.” 1

Growing up I had no other contacts with Photography. High school years passed in a glance followed then by my first real negative education experience, that in the Computer Science degree program at Milan Politecnico, ended with my conscious withdrawal. At that time I naturally started exploring the intersections between visual arts and computational media and one year later I officially started to learn design at the IED academy in Milan, enrolling in the Digital Design program. It was during that period of time that I started exploring Photography as a mean to create and manipulate those visual elements that were the essential building blocks of many of my visual communication projects. First on my own and then with the precious help of Caco the doors of photographic knowledge were opened to me revealing a marvellous and wide panorama. My first personal camera was a cheap digital one and the photos I was taking with that tool were pleasing but the more I was using it, the more I was feeling that I needed something more “manual” in order to really learn the basics of Photography as almost everything in that camera was automatic. It was with the purchase of a digital reflex camera that I discovered the meaning and the power of those words that just some time before were arcane to me such as aperture, shutter time, white balance; thanks to that interface I really started playing more directly with light and it is the tool that I’m still currently using after four years. At that point in time my personal photographic experience was almost exclusively based on digital cameras, I was just loving the ease of use, speed and quality even a beginner like me was able to achieve with little effort thanks to the superb design and technology of those digital interfaces. Given my little experience I was superficially considering analog cameras just as things of the past; they were slow, mechanical and, more importantly, they were not able to immediately visualize the result of a given shot, thus my interest in them was fairly limited. This situation began to change during a trip to Berlin, during which I randomly encountered a very special analog camera, a Lomo-camera, which started to erode my superficial assumptions about Photography and digital technology in general. That strange, little device was funny looking, made completely in blue rubber with plastic lens and it didn’t even have a viewfinder! In order to take a shot you just had to point at the subject, press the shutter button and hope it was caught on film... at first I was considering it more a joke than a real tool, but then what a surprise when looking at its results! The images captured by that device were so genuine, spontaneous, maybe with lower quality than those of my fancy digital camera, but absolutely imbued with life.

“The medium is the message.”2

II. Motivation
From that moment on I started exploring the analog medium and now I own several analog cameras as well as a digital one. What I’ve learnt so far has helped me building a more critical perspective over digital technology and its relationship with the analog counterpart. One of the assumptions related to this subject that I feel most is that in the transition from analog to digital medium in Photography, has not only changed the way images are captured, processed and memorized, but, more importantly, has, gradually but constantly, modified the way we approach to the protographic practice: how we interact with the camera in order to take photos, how we look at them, how we share them, what value we attribute them. One example of this deep shift is the explicit, obvious, but not broadly perceived sacrifice of surprise in favor of immediacy. The first and foremost feature designed and marketed when the first consumer digital cameras came on the market in the mid nineties was the ability to take a photo and immediately show it back in order to evaluate its quality. The feature encountered a great success and was included in all the following evolutions as it successfully satisfied the great demand coming from the users to eliminate the long, time and money consuming process of develop and print the images captured on film at the photographic laboratory, similarly as Polaroid did with the introduction of the instant developing film cameras in the fifithies. All this convenience came with a price, that of the sacrifice of surprise; as the pictures can be immediately accessed and evalueated in the same place, same moment they have been taken with no effort and additional costs, it is easy to imagine that the practice of taking a shot over and over until the “perfect” one was finally captured became more and more popular and widespread. The emotions of surprise and suspance emerging from the discovery of the results of a film shot time ago were lost for good.
Other two key features brands like Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Sony are always pushing to the limit of are those of quality and speed, the first in terms of resolution and the second seen as the overall capturing, processing and memorizing time the device consumes at each shot. Not surprisingly the users react positively to these technological advancement, even if they are not truly genuine as, for example, the quality of a picture is more related to that of the lens which captures it more than the amount of pixels on the camera sensor. The pictures are bigger and bigger, can be scaled up without losing too much detail spending less and less time capturing them, but how do they look? There is really little or no difference between an image taken with two digital cameras in the same price range. Taking two DSLR as example a Canon 40D or Nikon D300 and looking at the images they produce it is clear that the difference between them is little more than just the brand they carry on their body. The images produced digitally have stunning quality, but all look and feel the same, while film used to give each shot a distinctive quality, thanks to the different chemicals used to produce or process it. Post production digital image manipulation suites like Adobe Photoshop are powerful tools that can enhance and transform each digital photo boosting its characteristics, empowering its qualities and fixing its weak points, but they are incomparable to the implicit character a specific combination of film, camera, lens and develop and print can give to a given shot. One last argument about the shift the digital transition has brought in the photographic world is related to the way pictures are viewed and shared. Thanks to their immaterial, electronic, numerical nature, and to the wide spread computational information network known as the Internet, the images captured with a digital camera can easily reach a world wide audience. So called “Web 2.0” services such as the popular Flickr enable anyone with a digital camera, or tools to digitalize its shots, a computer and Internet connection and no proficiency in database/web technologies, to share its images with the rest of the world in a glance. The popularity of these services is growing together with the astonishing success of digital consumer cameras; in any given minute, on the Flickr website, thousands of images are uploaded and shared with anyone present on the net. While this is great on one side, as it democratically enable any image maker to show its creation to the same audience a world known professional can reach, the tradeoff is that of loss of intimacy and social value the sharing of a picture can generate. When all these contemporary technologies were yet to be implemented and distributed to the wide public audience, the sharing and viewing of pictures was a very intimate and social event. Usually one picture was given as a gift to a particular person and the act of giving and receiving the gift involved just those two individuals. Another occasion would have been the leafing through the photo album together with friends or family, another hint of the intimate and social nature of the photo sharing and viewing activities in the past. Surprise, Magic, Unique character, Intimacy and Sociality, all of these features that once characterized the photographic experience are slowly but constantly fading away, leaving an immediate, high speed, high quality, world spreaded Photography behind them. Probably desirable and ideal for business or worker professionals, but surely not fully true to the very nature of the shots that every day millions of people try to condense their precious and intimate memories in.

Bibliography

[1] Yamamoto, Tsunetomo and William S. Wilson. Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai. Kodansha International, (2002): 68.

[2] McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding media: The Extensions of Man. Routledge, (2001) : 7.

First meeting with Marko, a sound confusion!

2008-08-11T18:02:00.009-05:00

photo by Sebastian.Exploratorium

To do:

List all the characteristics of analog photography both from a design point of view and user point of view.

List all characteristics digital photography.

Compare the two.

Is something missing, lacking in digital photography compared to film one?

Graphic map about all related to this thesis problem.

Look all the projects in http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi?search=photography&IncludeBlogs=2

If so:

what is missing and how is affecting the value of the photographic practice.

As the photographic object is digitized, dematerialized, how this influence its fruition. (Critic design - Hertzian Tales - A.Dunne).

How to restore the lost component, propose a solution, it must be democratic, shocking, groundbreaking.

How to:

Explore photography history.

Look for optical experimentations through the ages.

Go back to the core of what photography is, wipe out all the current concepts (how traditionally photography is perceived and designed) and focus on the core features and aims of this practice, then try to think about the various possible paths to accomplish it maybe using other metaphors (right now we're using the metaphor of target and shoot - maybe there are other more interesting?) - create a photo, whose nature is not photographic!

We also talked about:

Harmonic resonance, how everything is connected and interwoven, human consciousness program.

The difference of photography and filming. Their limitations and points of intersection.

Crazy photographic experiments and art pieces, the artist who uses a VAN as a camera, 3D vision, dreams and different modes of interactions (eye blink, open and hug instead of target and shoot?), one pixel camera project.

Exponential vs logarithmic curves of quantity over value, quality of photography especially in the consumer market.

The research domains and sub domains: photography, interfaces, sociology.

My first initial solution to the set problem was an open source camera platform, an idea that Marko judged to be too broad, not democratic enough and not innovative.

Think about:

Different uses of light? not only one flash, multiple of them and delayed, 360 cam.

Objection: maybe people don't value their photo... if so the project is voided -> I don't think that people don't give value to what they take a photo of. When you choose to capture something in an image is because that moment is valuable and important enough to be fixed in time.

Super hi speed sampling with a camera, having as an output a fixed image but slowly moving in time -> it will take more space but it will retain more spatiality and will change over time!

Think also about the ways we keep digital photos: usually they're kept as FILES and experienced on SCREENS. Just a very small percentage of the digital shots is printed, materialized in an object to be perceived outside the screen, this is a huge lost in value. What about a frame, a digital one, that can contain all the digital photos about a certain subject (tags) and very slowly visualize them over TIME. In this way digital files will surprisingly enter back in our physical lifes causing surprise and letting them being appreciated from a whole new perspective and added value.

Think about paper, it has been for many years the first support besides film to put photo on, but is clear it is not the optimal solution for the nature of digital files. Paper as camera, is bot a photocamera and the surface to reproduce the images and can be bent to achieve image distortion.

Scanner + laptop camera.

What about a system made of two object, a camera one who can just capture images and a display one who can just visualize the pictures taken by that particular camera, they are linked and the photo taken are JUST for the person who holds the second object.

No immediate visualization of the taken image, no automatic features, all manual

Interaction Design definition

2008-03-20T03:57:00.001-05:00

Interaction-Venice

Interaction design is the creative design of the interaction between people and devices, systems or services. This interaction usually involves the ‘new technologies’ of computing and communications.

But interaction design remains a design activity – like architectural, graphic or product design. And it concerns the social value and cultural meaning of what is designed, not only its functional efficiency and visual appeal.

I like this definition.

Design And the Elastic Mind

2008-03-07T12:02:00.005-06:00

-

I've just come across the website about the new Moma show "Design and The Elastic Mind".
I find it super interesting as it shows the History and the connection of works belonging to many different Interaction Design subfields.

Design and the Elastic Mind

the website itself is a great infovis piece too.

via fladdict

PRIMAVERA!

2008-03-04T17:25:00.015-06:00

"little fields of dreams" by "Steve took it".

So, the Spring semester has started almost two months ago and I still have not updated the blog yet...

for this semester I decided to focus on some of my interests and joined some great classes

Magic++ by Zach Lieberman
Geek Graffiti by Evan Roth
Cinema Theory and Practice by Antony Deen
Major Studio : Interaction by Katherine Moriwaki
Jazz and Animation collaboration project by Ernesto Klar and Ben Katchor

In Magic++ we're working with magicians to digitally enhance their tricks. We are using openFrameworks, an open source c++ framework that makes many difficult things easier.
Right now we're focusing on image processing and have just started to explore some basic real time computer vision techniques.

In Geek Graffiti we are using the city environment as a communication medium, first finding some kind of "system" to hack in order to spread some kind of message.

Cinema Theory and Practice is a super interesting class where we are studying the history of Cinema to understand why and how it has evolved.

Katherine is taking on the work done in the last semester in Major Studio: Interface, focusing on human-computer interactions. Right now I've started working on the phonoCamera project, a personal project I'm going to develop until the end of the semester.

Last but not least, in the Jazz and Animation collaboration project I'm working with Yael, a talented illustrator and Mark, a gifted composer, to create a fifteen minutes performance that merges Jazz and real time music visualization. Our current idea can be synthesized by the concept of "Fluid Field" ; we are imagining a sound reactive liquid surface that visualize the music that is currently being played through waves of colors. Probably we're going to work on this using vvvv as it enable us to create and manipulate a 3D environment in real time with access to audio analysis.

More info on each project to come ;)

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soundFishing postmortem

2007-12-24T08:24:00.000-06:00

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to explain the design investigation behind the creation of the soundFishing interface: a portable, semi-autonomous, digital tool that is able to analyze the sonic environment around us and extract some particular sounds out of it.
The main purpose of this project is to draw attention to those every-day life sonic perceptions that we usually don’t pay too much attention to, and to enable the individual to rediscover both the power and the value that they carry.
I like to call it soundFishing because I believe that this tool allows users to fish sounds directly from his or hers every-day life activities.
The development of this concept and the research project is here outlined.

INTRODUCTION

The initial inspiration for the soundFishing project can be tracked back to a subway routine trip from Brooklyn to Manhattan that took place in early October 2007. Usually the train is very crowded, but that morning I found myself alone and, since I had nothing else to do but wait for the train to stop at my destination, I started listening to those environmental sounds I usually don’t pay attention to. At the beginning they seemed to be just random audio events caused by the motion of the train, but the more I was paying attention to them, the subtlest the pattern became and, in the end, they really merged into a strange, yet fascinating musical piece made of rhythmical accelerations, repetitions and vibrations.

MOTIVATION

That experience had a double impact on me: first it revealed to me the real value carried by those ephemeral sonic perceptions, then it also made me think about the fact that all that “sound matter” is often silenced: it usually goes wasted because we are constantly surrounded by it, leaving us unable to really understand its value. My project tries to find a solution to this issue saving these sound fragments from oblivion, rescuing them from the world’s indifference and letting them tell a different story about it: a tale about the places we live in, the people we meet and the experiences we are going through every day. They speak to us about something that maybe we didn’t know and never noticed before.

CONCEPTS

The following concepts represent the core of the soundFishing project and its development:

Sounds as an intimate diary: the audio captured from the environment will build up a sonic diary of the events that take place during the user's everyday life.
Non conscious action: the basic difference between a traditional textual diary and this diary of sounds is that the former is created consciously by the user who has the power to personally intervene on it, deciding what and when to write something. On the other hand the sonic diary produced by the soundFishing interface is composed “unconsciously” by the user who has just the power to set the basic logical rules that will control the capturing of the sound events: the user can not decide explicitly what and when to record. I believe that the control loss embedded in the tool’s functionality can result into a surprise effect and induce curiosity towards an otherwise rather obvious final output.

Generative sampling - Automation: the nature of the interface will be intimately procedural and algorithmic as the user will define a set of rules that will regulate the recording process. The interface works on its own without any direct control: it operates as an autonomous audio filtering agent continuously browsing the environment for events to happen. Once found the sonic events in compliance with the user’s instruction, the device starts to capture the sounds. This process can be linked to Manovich’s concept of Automation:

"The numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2) allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation and access. Thus human intentionality can, in part, be removed from the creative process."

" 'High Level' automation of media creation, which requires a computer to understand, to a certain degree, the meanings embedded in the objects being generated, that is, their semantics."
"The Internet, which can be thought of as one huge distributed media database, also crystallized the basic condition of the new information society: overabundance of information of all kinds. One response was an idea of software 'agents' designed to automate searching for relevant information. Some agents act as filters that deliver small amounts of information..."
The concept of the agent Manovich refers to in his book “The Language of New Media” is very similar to that behind the soundFishing interface: they are both media softwares that analyze and filter a particular environment. In Manovich the filter is applied to a virtual environment, such as the Internet, whereas the soundFishing interface acts on a sonic layer, in order to extract some valuable data out of it.

Multiplicity: generative processes lead to multiplicity. In order to capture the essence of this concept, I consider relevant the differences between the following two statements:

"I want to record the sound of the police car siren that is now patrolling the street."
and

"I want to record all and only the loud sounds that I’ll come across in my daily routine today."

A huge difference lies between these two statements: the first sentence leads to a simple, but rather obvious, result. On the contrary, the second statement opens up to many possible results, giving the user a glimpse of the almost infinitely wide spectrum of possibilities that we come across in our daily experiences and depicting only a tiny portion of the space of potential. In a comment posted to the teemingvoid Blog on October 29, 2007, Mitchell Whitelaw noted:

"Multiplicity here is a way to get a perceptual grasp on something quite abstract - that space of possibility. We get a visual ‘feel’ for that space, but also a sense of its vastness, a sense of what lies beyond the visualization."

"Multiplicity refers to the specific space of potential in any single system, by actualizing a subset of points within it."

Expanded cinema: - Sound sharing and mixing: the audio events captured by soundFishing can be valuable to the single user – thanks to certain personal parameters - but what about their value according to other people’s subjective evaluation? Why should some people find sounds coming from somebody else’s experience interesting or even useful?
The easiest answer could be that curiosity is the reason for that. A second point is that these often extramusical sounds can be used to produce something else, a musical piece for example, a sound effect or anything related to audio remixing and production.
I believe that the soundFishing functionality can be channeled into two different outputs. The first can be the creation of a social network community like Youtube, but instead of video, audio samples taken from the users’ every-day life experiences can be shared and mashed. Another expression can be one in the spirit of Expanded Cinema, where the author defines the technosphere as a symbiosis between man and machine:
"The computer liberates man from specialization and amplifies intelligence.”
According to a summarizing analysis of his work published by a popular open source, Youngblood compares computer processing to human neural processing, where logic and intelligence are the brain's software. According to him computer software will become more important than hardware and that in the future super-computers will design ever more advanced computers.
His vision of the future is represented by the Aesthetic Machine:
“Aesthetic application of technology is the only means of achieving new consciousness to match our environment."
It is also stated that according to Youngblood creativity will be shared between man and machine. This idea can be supported by the 1010ap-fm01 case, as it is explained on the homonymous website:

"fm transposes non-metaphoric systems and grammar theory (of computer languages, abstraction and data containers) to the realm of expanded cinema. The base proposal concerns the development of a scripting language, data structures, and suitable file system for the automated production and grammatical expression of endless cinema."

According to this specific point of view, the soundFishing interface can become an extension of the human ear and memory, allowing a more powerful perception of the sonic environment and a more effective memorization of sounds in the form of digital samples. These samples can then feed another generative system which assembles them algorithmically to produce further sonic experiences.

PRECEDENTS

The Dictaphone
A sound recording device most commonly used to record speech for later playback or to be typed into print.

Microsoft SenseCam
On the Microsoft website, in the project section, it is stated that: “SenseCam is a wearable digital camera that is designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn. Unlike a regular digital camera or a camera phone, SenseCam does not have a viewfinder or a display that can be used to frame photos. Instead, it is fitted with a wide-angle (fish-eye) lens that maximizes its field-of-view. This ensures that nearly everything in the wearer’s view is captured by the camera, which is important because a regular wearable camera would likely produce many uninteresting images. SenseCam also contains a number of different electronic sensors. These include light-intensity and light-color sensors, a passive infrared (body heat) detector, a temperature sensor, and a multiple-axis accelerometer. These sensors are monitored by the camera’s microprocessor, and certain changes in sensor readings can be used to automatically trigger a photograph to be taken.”

Remembrance Agent
“The Remembrance Agent (RA) is a program which augments human memory by displaying a list of documents which might be relevant to the user's current context. Unlike most information retrieval systems, the RA runs continuously without user intervention. Its unobtrusive interface allows a user to pursue or ignore the RA's suggestions as desired.”
Forget-Me-Not
“...assume we could construct a device that accompanied the user everywhere, and which captured important data and context from his or her life. Furthermore, assume it would organize these data into a form that mimicked the episodic memory structures created naturally by the user. Needing to recall a detail from a past event, and armed with our device, the user could then draw upon his or her own, possibly fading, episodic memory, to locate similar episodes and data stored in the permanent memory of the device. In this way, the user could use the small things he or she could remember about the context of the event to retrieve the details that had been forgotten.”

METHODOLOGY

A three stages prototyping process has been followed, according to a hierarchy based on building ease, portability and power. These values have been chosen in order to successfully build and test the interface during a one month time span.
The work carried out during the first stage of the project is based on Processing, a very powerful and versatile programming environment based on Java. Processing, among many other functions, is ideal as a rapid prototyping tool. This program allowed me to build a working software prototype which embodies the main features of the soundFishing tool through a very short period of time.
During the second stage of this project I developed a hardware circuit built around a microcontroller and an audio recorder chip, achieving good portability and power.
Finally, over the third stage, I planned to take the prototype to the maximum portability and power hacking a classic iPod mp3 player - an already existing audio device which in theory could have given me the power to store a huge amount of sound data into a compact, comfortable and common object.

IMPLEMENTATION

The setting for the first prototype was a laptop running a Java applet built in Processing, an external microphone attached to it and a bag to carry them around; the logical rule implemented at this stage was telling the interface to capture all the “loud” sounds relatively to the default volume that characterized the environment.

To summarize the process, the user sets a rule – in this case based on sound volume - editing a configuration file which enables him to choose both the duration of the total recordings, the duration of the volume buffer and, more importantly, the interface tolerance in relation to the volume: in order for the sounds to be captured, the lower this final parameter is, the louder the sounds have to be in relation to the default volume that characterizes the environment.
While the software is running, it listens to the sound input coming from the microphone and continuously calculates the default environmental volume in order to define and adapt the threshold in relation to which a sound is considered a loud event and hence is recorded.

The exact same mechanism was partly implemented in the second prototype built with a PIC 16F88 microcontroller, an external microphone and a ISD5116 audio chip recorder, in fact in this setting the PIC listens to the environmental sounds through the microphone and tells the ISD chip to record it when it matches the “record all and only the loud sounds” rule.

The third prototype based on the Apple iPod could not be physically implemented due to time constrains, but all the documentation proved that the idea was feasible using an external PIC microcontroller connected to the mp3 player through the dock interface; thanks to the iPod serial communication protocol it should be possible for the PIC chip to tell the device when to record and play a target sound file.

EVALUATION

Due to time constrain only the results of the first prototype stage are available in form of digital audio files, these are some sounds “fished” in Brooklyn during the first prototyping stage:

soundFishing sounds of Brooklyn

Although the recording quality is not excellent and the form factor of the device is cumbersome, the basic rule system worked very well, recording just the sound events that matched the rule set by the user.

In order to transform this project into a working tool ready to be distributed to the public, many efforts must be put in shrinking the device to make it wearable, so that the user perceives what he is carrying around not as something detached and cumbersome but as something intimate and easy to wear.
According to this, mobile phones can be considered an interesting platform to work on as they already embody the technical and computational features needed to let the soundFishing interface run as a software application, possibly embedded in their hardwares.

The rule system has to be refined so that many different audio parameters can control the recording process, not just the amplitude but also the frequencies, thus the final output can carry a wider variety spectrum.

Finally a system to access, manage and arrange the audio fragments is desirable, so that the user can create new audio experiences from the samples captured from his or hers life experiences.

The sonic snapshots can be valuable also to other people as creative assets. Musicians and audio producers are always looking for interesting sounds and the output of the soundFishing interface can be appreciated also by these professionals.

CONCLUSION

I believe that this device is much more than an automatic sound recorder: it could, at a first glance, look similar to the old Dictaphone, but only if its technology is considered inattentively. The motivations that have led me to build the soundFishing interface and the context I imagine it can be used for as an asset can explain its features and its nature, bearing in mind the evolution that the digital devices are nowadays experiencing. This process is transforming them into objects as intimate as our personal diaries or as personal as our favorite garments.
I started this project with some clear ideas on my mind and a problem to solve: we are surrounded by sounds, sometimes they are awful and annoying, often they are sublime and inspiring, but in both cases we are losing them, not just because they are volatile in their nature, but because we usually take them for granted. We consider sound a common and unremarkable matter, therefore we don’t travel around waiting to record a sound that could interest or move us. The problem lies precisely here: in fact maybe that “common” sound can be valuable to us or to another person, it can make us laugh or remind us of an important experience or tell us something more about our life. So why not try to save them from oblivion?
The key to really grab the essence of this project is held by the concept of curiosity, a virtue that can turn something usual and useless into something unique and meaningful, a powerful entity that can open the door of knowledge to all of us.

REFERENCES

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002).
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: EP Dutton, 1971), 180-2.
Youngblood, 189.

Bradley J. Rhodes, “Remembrance Agent: A continuously running automated information retrieval system” in The Proceedings of The First International Conference on The Practical Application Of Intelligent Agents and Multi Agent Technology (PAAM '96),London, The Practical Application Company Ltd, pp. 487-95.

Mik Lamming and Mike Flynn, "Forget-me-not: Intimate Computing in Support of Human Memory” in Proceedings of FRIEND21, '94 International Symposium on Next Generation Human Interface, Meguro Gajoen, Japan.

soundFishing postmortem (DOC)
soundFishing presentation (PDF)

Sounds from Brooklyn

2007-12-22T15:43:00.000-06:00

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The soundFishing interface strikes back, I used it to capture some sounds directly from my life here in Brooklyn during the past three months.

If you want to listen to them or use them in a audio piece just follow this simple steps to get them:

- if you are using Firefox just follow this link, it will take you to a list that you can read directly from the browser.

- if you are using iTunes, open it, go in the Advanced tab, click on Subscribe to Podcast and paste this link in the window.

- if you are using other rss feed readers just copy and paste this link into your reader feed subscription area.

Use the sound samples as you want, they are copyleft.

If you are more interested in how I achieved this and maybe you want to use the soundFishing interface prototype on your own to capture sounds from your life then follow this link which explains everything you need to know about this.

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Openframeworks : Eating data at Eyebeam

2007-12-08T17:41:00.007-06:00

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I had the pleasure to join a workshop at Eyebeam host by Zach Lieberman and the openframeworks team.

The theme of the event was Eating data, and the main idea behind it was to access data published online bypassing the common APIs and capturing them directly from the html source.

The process involved Firebug, a Firefox extension, and XPath in order to analyze the page structure to discover where the interesting data is put.

for example let's try to capture the latest cnn headlines from cnn.com:

go to cnn.com

enable Firebug and start Inspecting the html document just moving your mouse around the page where the data you are interested in is put; in our case the Latest news are contained in a div with class name cnnT2s.

now open the Firebug console and try typing $x("//a") and press enter, you should get a list of all the a tags contained in the document.

thanks to this function is possible to ask question to the document using the XPath syntax.

so let's access the div which contains the latest news:

$x("//div[@class='cnnT2s']")

and all the a tags it contains:

$x("//div[@class='cnnT2s']//a")

you should get a list of all the "a" elements relative to the latest news.

Firebug is a useful tool to analyze the page, but cannot extract and manipulate the data; once you have understood which XPath question is useful to get the data you want is time to use another application to extract and work with the data, something like openframeworks!

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thanks to ofScraper is possible to get the data from the html page into the openframeworks application and use them as you want. The flow of operation is the following:

Create a connection
Request the html page
Convert the page source into a string
Convert the string into a Xml node
Analyze the node using XPath
Get the results as a std vector
Use the vector as you want!

The OF version with scraping enabled is available here MAC and PC
in the app folder there is an example application to look at.

I really enjoyed the workshop, Zach is a great teacher, the OF team is nice and we had a great time at Eyebeam!

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Processing: how to lower audio latency using Sonia

2007-12-05T22:37:00.000-06:00

"Latency is basically longest time that you have to wait before you obtain a desired result. For digital audio output it is the time between making a sound in software and finally hearing it."

PortAudio - Latency document

In these days I've been working on an audio project using Processing and the amazing Sonia library by Amit Pitaru.

Sonia is a powerful and easy to use tool to play,record,generate,manipulate audio in real time in Processing built on top of JSyn , a blazing fast audio synthesis and manipulation plugin for Java.

The only problem I've met using these tools is the latency with which, by default, the audio is then managed in Processing :

as you can see the default latency is almost half a second, quite a long time in audio terms.

The most basic implication of this is for example that 417 milliseconds must pass before actually hear the sound once the play button is pressed.

Researching a bit about this topic I found this topic on the Processing forum about "Sound and latency", Amit gives a hint about how to patch this problem:

"on a pc, i created a new batch file called runSonia.bat in the main processing directory, with the following two commands in it:

SET PA_MIN_LATENCY_MSEC=50
processing.exe

this will set the jsyn latency to 50ms and then run processing. if you get click-pop sounds, than increase the latency until its resolved."

This actually worked for me taking my latancy from 417ms to 60ms, a much better result:

The problem is that this is only a temporary solution, in fact the patch applies only when the runSonia.bat is first run and then Processing is evoked by it gaining the new latency settings, but if runSonia is not run , then the 417ms latency is still there in Processing.

A solution emerged in a post by Phil Burk, the creator of JSyn, linking to a very interesting document about PortAudio and latency, in which is clarified how to set a "permanent" environmental variable that controls the latency values for all the applications related to PortAudio, here's the extract:

" Macintosh:

The best thing you can do to improve latency on Mac OS 8 and 9 is to turn off Virtual Memory. PortAudio V18 will detect that Virtual Memory is turned off and use a very low latency.

For Mac OS X the latency is very low because Apple Core Audio is so well written. You can set the PA_MIN_LATENCY_MSEC variable using:

setenv PA_MIN_LATENCY_MSEC 4

Unix:

PortAudio under Unix currently uses a backgroud thread that reads and writes to OSS. This gives you decent but not great latency. But if you raise the priority of the background thread to a very priority then you can get under 10 milliseconds latency. In order to raise your priority you must run the PortAudio program as root! You must also set PA_MIN_LATENCY_MSEC using the appropriate command for your shell.

Windows:

For Windows XP, you can set environment variables as follows:

Select "Control Panel" from the "Start Menu".
Launch the "System" Control Panel
Click on the "Advanced" tab.
Click on the "Environment Variables" button.
Click "New" button under User Variables.
Enter PA_MIN_LATENCY_MSEC for the name and some optimistic number for the value.
Click OK, OK, OK. "

Thanks to this solution the latency can be set permanently on your machine.

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Disinformation 'The analysis of Beauty'

2007-11-24T18:21:00.001-06:00

via the teeming void

Thanks(for)giving

2007-11-22T23:42:00.001-06:00

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" In the United States, Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving Day is an annual one-day holiday to give thanks, traditionally to God, for the things one has at the end of the harvest season."

via wikipedia.org

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I've just celebrated Thanksgiving for the first time in my life. The day started early at 6.30 am when the alarm clock ringed in vain to wake up us, who partied until late the previous night going then to bed with the utopian intent to join the infamous Macy's Parade in the streets of Manhattan. We had to wake up very early in order to get good seats at the event, but obviously we couldn't make it and we have slept until 9.00am.

Once awaken, we met our two Friends Amy and Beth passing then the whole day in their lovely company, eating the awesome turkey and breathing a familiar atmosphere.

---

The Macy's parade turned out to be an outdoor Broadway style show with choreographies and huge balloons floating around. Everything was in the name of Macy's department store, which was highlighted even more than"Thanksgiving" ! just look at the logo of the event:

I've never seen anything like this in Italy, no department store has the power and the courage to really conquer the name of an holiday! Needless to say during the tv broadcasting of the event there were commercials which carefully instructed the audience on the gifts to buy in the upcoming Christmas and about the opportunity to start immediately shopping at 4 am to save time!

the name of the parade should be "Thanks for giving", right Macy's?

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Major Studio Interface : hexagonBrush postmortem

2007-11-21T02:36:00.000-06:00

ABSTRACT

This paper is a synthesis of the design research addressing the theme of “Instruction sets for strangers” which had as result a site specific tool named hexagonBrush. It has been designed to encourage and enable playful collaboration between strangers aimed towards the recovery of a urban public space as a medium of free communication. The research and development of this concept is outlined.

1. INTRODUCTION

The project started from the observation and documentation, over a period of twenty four hours, of the activities and interactions occurred in Union Square, a very famous and populated plaza located between 14th and 17th street at their intersection with University place, Broadway and 4th avenue in New York City.
This video shows the outcome of these observations

Instructions sets for strangers - Observations

Based on this documentation, along with the live analysis of the space, a design strategy ,which had as foundations the core concepts of play, collaboration between strangers, creativity, communication and augmenting physical space, was outlined. It then led to the creation of five different interface proposals.

1.1 Concepts

The first of the five design proposals initially prototyped was Musical Swing, a musical interface embedded in a swing located in the north west children playground area. While children could still use it as a classical swing, a musical layer was added to the traditional swinging interaction allowing kids to produce musical notes on the fly based on their swinging movements. In our vision this could trigger an unconscious collaboration between children towards the creation of unplanned, unwilled musical patterns.

The second and third prototypes named respectively Imaginary Fountain and Text Fountain dealt with the “augmenting physical space” core concept trying to open up a virtual window on the concrete made base of George Washington statue located in the middle of Union Square south. The statue pedestal is actually like a wall tall approximately three meters which blocks the vision from one side of the central area of the square to the other and vice versa; the two designs take into account this problem and try to solve it to opening a window made of virtual water or flowing text onto the concrete. This prototype was also partly motivated by the fact that Union Square lacks a real fountain, and usually fountains are a very powerful meeting site in the economy of a public space.

The fourth idea proposed was the Conveyor Belt Screen, an interface designed to visualize textual and graphical information flowing around the square floor exploiting and digitally empowering an existing architectural feature of the plaza: a series of wide stones arranged as an half ellipse running from the west side to the opposite side of the square as an ideal belt. This vast and unusual space has been already used to visualize some text and graphics in form of stone and bronze engravings but its transformation into a digital array of networked screens could really boost up its communication power, possibly not in the direction of advertisement, a visual and perceptual plague in NYC panorama.

The last interface proposal is the “Union Square brush” which soon became the hexagonBrush, the prototype that was chosen to be the final idea to further work on as it was the only one, among the other four, which comprised all the aspects of the core ideas of the design strategy.
It was designed to be a tool to promote and empower playful collaboration between strangers aimed towards the recapture of Union Square as a communication space. Basically the interface is composed by three main parts: an hexagon shaped brush, a bucket containing some non permanent pigment and a visual reference which strangers can use to plan their drawings before applying them onto the floor. The idea was inspired by a random observation at the style of Union Square floor tiling.

A detail of Union Square hexagonal tiles

These hexagonal tiles are very peculiar to NYC parks as they are used to accommodate tree roots growth under the ground and Union Square really uses them also to delimit the range of its own spatial domain as they are spread on more than 80% of the square total area but absent in the areas located out of the plaza limits. I wanted to exploit this feature as I immediately saw a strong connection between the concept of tile on a physical surface and the idea of pixel on a virtual surface. As digital tools allow to draw using arrays of picture elements the hexagonBrush tool gives the user the power to fill up with one effortless movement one tile at time allowing him to create huge non permanent drawings on the square surface, enjoyable and readable even from large distances such as from the top of a building facing the square.
These five design proposals were motivated and deeply grounded on top of the design strategy core ideas.
This video documents all the five prototypes:

Instruction sets for strangers – Five prototypes

1.2 Methodology

I would like to point out the motivations that generated the core concepts of the design strategy:
the play and communication ideas emerge from the analysis of the square very architecture, which turned out to be strongly related to that of a stage for performances in fact, throughout the day, a variety of performers use the plaza to express their arts and skills especially in the southern part facing 14th street: musicians, actors, skateboarders, photographers can easily be found there. Another hint that support these two core ideas is that the curved shape of that particular portion of the square together with the tall buildings which surround it all around make it resemble a modern version of the ancient Greek theatres, where the audience was arranged in semi-circles on upper and upper levels and the actors played in the lowest level.
The motivations of the remaining three core ideas lay in Union Square history. In the past it has always been a place where people could go and express themselves without many limitations, but now, besides performers and traders, it’s very difficult to find strangers who freely use the square as a medium of communication. This is caused by the more and more severe restrictions that regulate the behaviours and activities that take place in the square: for example anyone drawing with a chalk on the ground can be theoretically considered and punished as a graffiti writer.

These are the fundamental motivations the core ideas were generated from but besides them it’s important to mention two precedents design project which strongly influenced my research:
the Bikes against Bush project by Joshua Kinberg and the Graffiti Writer by the Institute for Applied Autonomy; the first project sees a wireless Internet enabled bicycle outfitted with a custom-designed printing device which can print text messages sent from web users directly onto the streets of Manhattan in water-soluble chalk. While the implementation is somewhat similar to the hexagonBrush, as they both use chalk to draw visual messages onto the floor, the motivations of Bikes against Bush are explicitly directed towards politics and activism and this marks a profound difference between the two designs.

The Graffiti Writer interface is composed by a remote controlled programmable robot equipped with a custom built array of spray cans to write linear text messages on the ground. Here both the motivations and the implementation of the project are far from those of hexagonBrush in fact instead of chalk the Graffiti Writer uses paint and interface was designed to allow and test remote defacement and vandalism.

From a technical point of view the following prototyping stages were quite simple but it’s useful to explore more in depth the technology which permitted to create the powerful “Digitally assisted reference” solution part of the second hexagonBrush prototype. The name of the environment is Processing, it wraps around the Java programming language making it a perfect rapid prototyping tool. It allowed me to easily create the application who takes an image as the input and translate it into an hexagon map extremely useful as a reference to draw complex visuals.

2. IMPLEMENTATION

The hexagonBrush prototype passed through two iterations, during the first one the efforts were focused on the building of the physical tool. Initially the dimensions of one hexagon tile were taken and then transposed on paper to be used as a reference to make the point of the brush out of a thick yellow 3M sponge and cheap pine wood; a wooden pole was then attached to the hexagonal point as an handle. I wanted the tool to be cheap, robust but still light and enjoyable with a fun aesthetic, as it had just jumped out of a comic book. Other two elements were chosen be part of the interface: A transparent plastic bucket was used in order to carry the pigment and some paper sheets printed with a hexagonal pattern identical to that used to lay down Union Square tiles. This last element played a major role in the prototyping economy as enabled the users to plan and collectively organize their drawings before rendering them on the floor.

Assembling the hexagonal brush

The first prototype was tested in Union Square during a pleasant sunny day in the ending of September, this video documents the results of this initial prototyping phase:

hexagonBrush – First prototype

The results of this first intervention were astonishing as many design flaws and consequent improvements emerged explicitly from the abundant interactions. First of all the problem of the initial interaction was highlighted: who starts the first interaction with a strange looking object left alone in a public space? I resolved this issue starting it on my own without using any sign or text to explain what I was doing, then more and more people became curious about my activity and started to come closer and closer suddenly approaching me asking for more information and finishing to use the tool on their own. Many other issues and opportunities of improvement , which later led to the second prototype iteration, emerged from people interactions:

Empowered mobility: It was observed that people tend to move from place to place if their drawing is very big or to find an appropriate spot.

Enable simultaneous drawings: The ideal setup would be having two brushes so simultaneous collaboration can be achieved.

Add Colors as they supply another layer of expression and are a very powerful communication tool.

Liquid instead of powder: Mixing a bit of water to powder would improve the printing detail of the brush on the tile avoiding the chalk to fly away.

Make it tougher but still light and fun: People enjoyed the playful look of the interface, but they also broke it, so we have to reinforce it while refining its aesthetic.

A very powerful and not totally expected interaction pattern emerged as people jumped on the brush, resulting in both more fun and more chalk left on the tile.

Enable the rotation of the brush: This feature was not planned in the beginning but came after one strong interaction by a young kid who started jumping on the brush. The screw that was keeping the brush attached to the pole got loose allowing the brush to rotate. This enriched the output allowing to trace big circles standing fixed as a pivot point and rolling the brush around.

Digitally assisted reference: What if a user wants to make a complex drawing but it's not skilled enough? He can use a digital reference output by an application which takes an input image and translate it into an hexagons made version of it.

The second prototype iteration was built on top of these insights, not all the changes and improvements were applied but enough to take the interface on an higher level of both interaction and building quality.
Battery Park was chosen as the location of the second prototyping round because of a problem arisen during the first prototype iteration in Union Square when the park supervisor blocked the intervention considering it graffiti and defacement menacing to emit a fine; this video shows the results of the second iteration:

hexagonBrush – Second prototype
hexagonBrush - Second prototype photos

The changes applied to the first prototype were more successful than expected, first of all the fact of adding water to the chalk highly increased both the precision and the overall look and feel of the tool, taking away the effort to leave the pigment on the ground, adding also a felt tip pen feeling to it.
The second major improvement of adding a mobile bucket really eased the whole drawing process as the user could move around, look at the drawing from different positions without having to search for the bucket to refill the brush with the pigment.

Finally the digitally assisted reference made available to everyone the opportunity to create huge, complex drawings transforming the brush in a real powerful communication tool.

3. EVALUATION

Considering the initial motivations the project was successful. Strangers were, even from the first early prototype stage, very attracted and fascinated by the tool both from its aesthetic qualities and expecially from the power it gave to them.

4. CONCLUSION

Above all I consider particularly striking the tension that exist between people desire to express themselves in public spaces and the implicit and explicit rules that deny them to. I find this project appropriate both for the physical context where it has been designed to be used into and for the metaphorical context of New York City, an environment built on top of two cardinal concepts: freedom and communication.
A tool like this can seem to be very limited but in my vision it has the power to make people open their eyes on the current status of their freedom of expression and how it could be wonderfully mixed with that of the others to collectively shape the communication environment we all live in.

Digitally assisted reference output

hexagonBrush - POSTMORTEM

Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operative Procedures

2007-11-15T02:08:00.000-06:00

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I've just found out that Wikileaks has released a non classified but reserved operative manual about Camp Delta policies towards camp management.

I find it an extremely interesting text to explore from many point of view, but tonight I started looking at it from the data visualization perspective:

the document contains 238 pages and is very dense, it would have taken days to me to cover it all, but thanks to Python I started building an application which analyze the text looking for words, choose some of them and then visualize them in a synthetic map built with Nodebox.

I found this a quite powerful process, I will go more in depth, stay tuned for the results!

Python code - txtAnalysis .1

Major Studio Interface : final project proposal --- soundFishing

2007-11-14T00:08:00.000-06:00

Summary

My final project for the Major Studio Interface will be a portable tool to capture sounds from the environment based on certain logics; I like to call it soundFishing.

Motivations

What brought this idea to life is both the combination of my curiosity and the environment where I’m currently living in; I’m deeply fascinated about the everyday sounds that surround us and the fact that usually we don’t care about them strikes me. We are constantly immersed in them and this condition denies us to perceive both their power and value.
I want to build a tool which helps to re-discover the value of these perceptions, an object able to analyze the sonic environment around us, filter it and collect precious data for us, out of our absolute control.

Domain of research

There are various research path connected to the soundFishing interface design synthesized by these key ideas:

Sounds as an intimate diary: the audio captured from the environment will be collected building up a sequence of the events happened during the user's everyday life flow.
This collection of events can then be easily related to the concept of a diary, a sonic diary.

Non conscious action: A fundamental difference lays between a traditional textual diary and this diary of sounds; usually the first is filled up consciously by the user who has the power to explicitly decide what and when write something into it. The sonic diary produced by the soundFishing interface instead will be composed unconsciously by the user who has just the power to set the basic logical rules that will control the capturing of the events to be recorded, but can not decide explicitly what and when to record. In my vision this loss of control on the tool can re-establish a sense of surprise and curiosity towards the everyday perception of hearing sounds.

Generative sampling - Automation: the soundFishing tool will be intimately procedural and algorithmic as the user will define a set of rules that will control the recording process, leaving then the interface working on its own without direct control.
The interface will act as an autonomous audio filtering agent who continuously listens to the environment for events to happen in order to start the sound capture.

This process can be linked to Lev Manovich concept of Automation:

"The numerical coding of media (principle 1) and the modular structure of a media object (principle 2) allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation, manipulation and access. Thus human intentionality can, in part, be removed from the creative process."

" 'High Level' automation of media creation, which requires a computer to understand, to a certain degree, the meanings embedded in the objects being generated, that is, their semantics."

"The Internet, which can be thought of as one huge distributed media database, also crystallized the basic condition of the new information society: overabundance of information of all kinds. One response was an idea of software 'agents' designed to automate searching for relevant information. Some agents act as filters that deliver small amounts of information..."

Lev Manovich - The Language of New Media

instead of the Internet the soundFishing explores the sonic layer of our reality.

Multiplicity :
Generative processes leads to Multiplicity... I explain it better, mind the differences between these two statements:

"I want to record the sound of the police car siren that is passing now in the street."

and

"I want to record all the loud sounds I'm going to encounter today."

a huge difference exist between them as the first sentence leads to a simple but rather obvious result, on the contrary the second statement opens a door to many possible results giving the user a glimpse of the almost infinitely wide spectrum of possibilities that exists in our everyday life experience depicting a space of potential in the Mitchell Whitelaw perspective:

"Multiplicity here is a way to get a perceptual grasp on something quite abstract - that space of possibility. We get a visual "feel" for that space, but also a sense of its vastness, a sense of what lies beyond the visualisation."

"Multiplicity refers to the specific space of potential in any single system, by actualising a subset of points within it;"

Mitchell Whitelaw - More is More: Multiplicity and Generative Art

Expanded Cinema - Sound sharing & mixing:
The audio captured by soundFishing can be valuable to the individual based on certain personal parameters, but what about its value related to other people? Why some people find sounds coming from the life of another person interesting or useful?

One input can come simply from curiosity, another because these sounds can be used to produced something else, a musical piece for example, or a video game sound effect or anything related to audio remixing and production.

In my vision the soundFishing output can be redirected into two different directions. The first can be a social network community as Youtube, but instead of video audio samples taken from the life of every user can be shared and mashed. Another direction can be one in the spirit of Expanded Cinema:

"Youngblood defines the technosphere as a symbiosis between man and machine. The computer liberates man from specialisation and amplifies intelligence (pp180-182). He draws comparisons between computer processing and human neural processing (pp183-184). Logic and intelligence is the brain's software. He predicts that computer software will become more important than hardware and that in the future super-computers will design ever more advanced computers (pp185-188). His vision of the future is the Aesthetic Machine: "Aesthetic application of technology is the only means of achieving new consciousness to match our environment" (p189). Creativity will be shared between man and machine."

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"fm transposes non-metaphoric systems and grammar theory (of computer languages, abstraction and data containers) to the realm of expanded cinema. the base proposal concerns the development of a scripting language, data structures, and suitable filesystem for the automated production and grammatical expression of endless cinema."

1010ap-fm01

By this perspective the soundFishing interface becomes an extension of the human ear and memory, allowing a more powerful perception of the sonic environment and a more durable memorization of sound in the form of digital samples.
These samples can then feed another generative system which can assemble them algorithmically to produce new and unexpected sonic experiences.

Design Issues

"The Data Avalanche

Another important consequence of having a computer with us all the time is the ease with
which information can be gathered. Data can be ‘beamed’ to us from nearby electronic devices or from the PDAs of other people we encounter, where and when we encounter them. And since the PDA is itself active, it can be commanded to pick up information automatically, as data become available, without the need to issue explicit instructions each time. The range of data we might proﬁtably gather automatically is enormous: receipts from sales transactions, telephone numbers dialled, even overheads from presentations we attend. These are all things we might ask our PDA to capture, just in case the information might be useful someday. But there is an obvious snag.

Information overload is already a familiar problem we all have to contend with. When
these extra data start ﬂowing in, the task of organising them will become even more daunting. It is unlikely we will suddenly ﬁnd the time or develop the inclination to index all of it. In any case, we often don’t know what information we have been given. For example, we often receive information that some person, or some system, thinks will be useful to us — we then ﬁnd we can’t ﬁle it away because we have not read it, but nevertheless we are reluctant to throw it away, just in case it might be needed.

Much of this information snowstorm will be difﬁcult for the computer to index automati-
cally on our behalf based simply on its content. For example, sketches, photographs and video
are notoriously difﬁcult for computers to analyse. It looks like intimate computers, when used as automatic data gatherers, could make our lives much harder. If this is the prospect, then we still won’t be able to make good use of the information we encounter — and just won’t bother to collect it.

Context as a Retrieval Key

Fortunately, the very features of PDAs that contribute to information overload can also
come to the rescue. The user’s context can itself provide a valuable key for indexing information automatically. A detail from a past event in which the user was involved might be difﬁcult to recall, the name of a document, for example. But the context of the event can be easier to remember. For example, we may be able to recall: the place where the document was received, the people present when it was handed over, or the task being carried out at the time."

Mik Lamming and Mike Flynn
“Forget-me-not” Intimate Computing in Support of Human Memory

Precedents, Resources

Brad Rhodes - 'Remembrance Agent'

Microsoft Research Cambridge - Sensecam

Mitchell Whitelaw - 'More is More: Multiplicity and Generative Art'

Lev Manovich - 'The Language of New Media'

Gene Youngblood - 'Expaned Cinema'

M. Lamming and M. Flynn, 1994 - 'Forget-me-not': Intimate Computing in Support of Human Memory. In Proceedings of FRIEND21, '94 International Symposium on Next Generation Human Interface, Meguro Gajoen, Japan.

hexagonBrush: second iteration video

2007-11-05T20:42:00.000-06:00

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Here's the video we could not show today in class because of "DA TIMEKEEPA" problem...

It shows the hexagonBrush interactions occurred in Battery Park City and Battery Park on November 4th 2007.

enjoy it ;)

get the better resolution version here

photos of the prototyping day at Battery Park here

George W. Brush!

2007-11-04T02:20:00.001-06:00

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here are some drawing references for the upcoming hexagonBrush second prototype and interventions.

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Major Studio Interface : hexagonBrush

2007-10-30T23:53:00.000-05:00

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So after the Observation and the first round of prototypes Ana, Cher and I decided to focus on the hexagonBrush design.

here's the video of the first prototype

hexagonBrush fit very well in our design strategy made of:

PLAY

COLLABORATION BETWEEN STRANGERS

CREATION

COMMUNICATION

AUGMENTING PHYSICAL SPACE

The idea came out observing the tiles that were embedded into the floor of Union Square.

These tiles come in hexagonal shape and are arranged in a hexagonal tiling pattern, thus dividing and arranging the ground surface in a very different way than classic square/rectangular tiling, allowing to perceive the space in a different way.

They are also localized just in Union Square area, almost 80% of the square surface is covered with them.

Looking at them we started thinking about their relationship with the pixels we can find on every digital screen and started wondering...

"What if a person can use a tool to fill up with one movement one tile at time with colour?
This can transform the square in a huge, public surface for drawings!"

Well... the fact is that Union Square IS a huge, public surface for drawings, the problems is that people is forgetting it and laws are starting to become more and more severe regarding this practice considering it graffiti or littering.

So we want to create an interface that goes in the opposite direction, allowing people not only to recover their freedom to draw but also to use the whole square as a canvas; children has done this for ages but never with a site specific tool and a reference to plan their designs.

After the first prototype we noticed a number of features of the hexagonBrush to improve and implement :

Empower mobility

We observed that people tend to move from place to place if their drawing is very big or to find an appropriate spot.

Enable simultaneous drawings

The ideal setup would be having two brushes so simultaneous collaboration can be achieved.

Add Colors

They supply another layer of expression and are a very powerful communication tool.

Liquid instead of powder

Mixing a bit of water to powder would improve the printing detail of the brush on the tile.

A plastic board reference instead of sheets of paper

A bigger reference is needed for more than one person using it. It should be made of plastic and not paper as it must be reusable.

Make it tougher but still light and fun

People enjoyed the playful look of the interface, but they also broke it, so we have to reinforce it while refining its aesthetics.

A very powerful and not totally expected interaction pattern emerged: people jumped on the brush, resulting in both more fun and more chalk put on the tile, we have to work on this too.

Enable the rotation of the brush

This feature was not planned in the beginning but came after one very strong interaction by a young kid who started jumping on the brush. The screw that was keeping the brush attached to the pole became loose allowing the brush to rotate.

This enriched the output allowing the following users to trace big circles standing fixed as a pivot point and rolling the brush around them.

Digitally assisted reference

What if a user wants to make a complex drawing but it's not able enough to do it? It can use a digital reference, going to a website or a digital interface on site, upload the target image of the drawing and get a hexagon-made version of it ready to "render" on the tiles.

Example Here

Major Studio Interface : 5 prototypes for Union Square

2007-10-24T00:16:00.000-05:00

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Last week Katherine gave us a tough mission:

1- Observe Union Square in order to find out its special features and how people interact in and with that space.

2- Find and follow a design path based on the observations.

3- Design five "working" prototypes, give them to the people and see what happens.

My team was composed by two brave ladies Ana and Cher and me; the assignment was perilous, the environment hostile and the time scarce... these are the results of our fatigues :)

Union Square - OBSERVATIONS

Union Square - FIVE PROTOTYPES

Right click and save them if they are too big
Enjoy them ;)

proceduralSampler --- soundFishing

2007-10-11T19:22:00.000-05:00

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One of the things that fascinates me about New York is the incredible amount of strange sounds you can hear just walking around the city.

I've built an application in Processing + Sonia that analyze the input audio coming from the microphone and , if an event happens, it will immediately start recording it.

So now I can just go around and the computer decides by itself when to start sampling sounds and for how much time... arrived home I just have to listen to what I've ( unconsciously ) recorded.

It's a bit like to go "fishing" sounds :)

here's the web page on my school's server about this project.

here you can download the application; use, modify it as you want ;)
it runs on Linux, OSX and Windows.

the only thing to avoid in the setup of the application is to use an internal microphone and built in speakers... with this setup probably you will record also the playback of your recordings so try to avoid it or if you want to experiment go for it ... the results can be interesting!

There are some podcasts of sounds sampled where I live in Brooklyn, I just left the application listening to the street's sounds all night long, in the morning I got these results.

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Major Studio Interface : PortableMonitor / Practice presentation

2007-09-29T15:47:00.000-05:00

Abstract
(video here)

PortableMonitor is a value fiction design of a digital empowered adhesive tape.

It works as a multitouch visual interface.
It can be resized on the fly by the user just adding or subtracting tape to the initial configuration.
It can connect to other computer and use them as source of computing power.
It recharges itself through solar energy.

PortableMonitor features

1- Classic tape look&feel
2- Digital visual output
3- Configuration conscious
4- Touch sensitive
5- Self energy supplying
6- Computing powered
7- Networked
8- Tough

Structure

We imagine the inner structure of the tape as particle based.
Each particle is an independent object capable of all the required features.
The particles can then be grouped as layers of functionality.

Features related technologies

Digital visual output:

Epaper video

Epaper Technology

Configuration conscious - Computing Powered - Networked:

Smartdust

Motes

Touch sensitive:

Touch sensitive Epaper

Peratech, Digital Print CIC solution for NASA

Self energy supplying - Tough :

Powerfilm

Super tough nanotube threads

Problem

Classic paper can be cut in almost any point of its surface.

As portableMonitor is made of various layers of tiny electronic devices it can't be cut on all of its surface thus a problem of Cutting resolution rises.

It can be solved setting up cutting areas and non cutting areas or making the devices that compose it so small to be equivalent to the fibers of traditional paper.

Collateral application

One pixel camera

portableMonitor - POSTMORTEM

Urballoon

2007-09-27T17:04:00.000-05:00

Urballoon is an urban media space: a balloon equipped with a projector and wireless connection to the web that enables people to submit content online and broadcast it in public spaces.

Share your thoughts or media with people near the balloon by submitting materials from this site.

Submissions are now being accepted to be projected during the Interference exhibition at Eyebeam from September 27- November 26, 2007.

This is another great application of balloon as a communication interface

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Defetto Perlin Noise

2007-09-26T16:45:00.000-05:00

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My friend defetto is featured on dataisnature for his latest experiment using Perlin Noise in vvvv.

He used noise values to deform a hi-res 3D mesh grid then applying various cromatic palettes using a multiply renderstate.

The article is here

The full image set is here

Check them out! ;)

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Superpatata

2007-09-26T16:42:00.001-05:00

Talking about balloons...

here's an interesting post from Pixelsumo who talks about a pressure sensitive balloon lamp

More on playful lighting, this time its Superpatata, a squishy light from Hector Serrano
for Droog Design. Created from latex, salt and a fluorescent bulb,
Serrano explains “I wanted to let the user control the intensity of the
light just by touching it. As you squeeze the light, the bulb moves
around in the salt, and gets brighter as it gets closer to the surface.
That’s what the product allows you to do - play with light.”

Superpatata can be used as a lamp but also as a pillow, antistress
device, an object to warm your bed. The superpatatas can be easily
stacked on top of each other.

via: Pixelsumo

Major Studio Interface : 5 Scenarios with Tape

2007-09-26T16:29:00.001-05:00

Carrie Mae Kreyche

Claudio Midolo

Sandhya Moraes

Value Fictions

1. Form conscious Tape

2. Portable Monitor

3. 3D Scanner/Texture recorder

4. Chat tape enabler/virtual communicator

5. Invisible wrap tape

Precedents:

3. 3D Scanner/Texture recorder

"Contact 3D scanners probe the subject through physical touch.

A CMM (coordinate measuring machine) is an example of a contact 3D
scanner. It is used mostly in manufacturing and can be very precise.
The disadvantage of CMMs though, is that it requires contact with the
object being scanned.

Thus, the act of scanning the object might modify or damage it.
This fact is very significant when scanning delicate or valuable
objects such as historical artifacts. The other disadvantage of CMMs is
that they are relatively slow compared to the other scanning methods.

Physically moving the arm that the probe is mounted on can be
very slow and the fastest CMMs can only operate on a few hundred hertz.
In contrast, an optical system like a laser scanner can operate from 10
to 500 kHz.

Other examples are the hand driven touch probes used to digitize clay models in computer animation industry."

Wikipedia

4. Chat tape enabler/virtual communicator

5. Invisible wrap tape

Future Watch: An Invisibility Suit

via: Sandhya

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Sky Ear

2007-09-20T00:02:00.001-05:00

This is a project Katherine Moriwaki spoke about during my presentation.
It is related to my Value Fiction research as it focuses on the usage of balloons as floating physical pixels.

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Sky
Ear is a one-night event in which a glowing "cloud" of mobile phones
and helium balloons is released into the air so that people can dial
into the cloud and listen to the sounds of the sky.

The cloud consists of 1000 extra-large helium balloons that each
contain 6 ultra-bright LEDs (which mix to make millions of colours).
The balloons can communicate with each other via infra-red; this allows
them to send signals to create larger patterns across the entire Sky
Ear cloud as they respond to the electromagnetic environment (created
by distant storms, mobile phones, police and ambulance radios,
television broadcasts, etc.).

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The balloons are enclosed in a carbon fibre and net structure 25m in
diameter tethered to the ground by 6 cables and held aloft at a height
of about 60-100m where it will remain for several hours.

Using mobile phones people can listen to the actual sounds up high, the
electromagnetic sounds of the sky as well as streams of "whistlers" and
"spherics" (atmospheric electromagnetic phenomena that are the audible
equivalent of the Northern Lights). Of course, the action of calling
the cloud changes the electromagnetic environment inside and causes the
balloons to vary in brightness and colour.

For more background to the project and test flight stages please click here.

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Sky Ear
has had two successful launches, in Fribourg, Switzerland (July 4,
2004) and Greenwich, London (September 15, 2004). For photos of these
two events, please see the images section

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Source: Haque

Value Fictions : Balloon!

2007-09-19T23:47:00.001-05:00

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Here's the research I did as an assignment for Major Studio - Interface class:

I had to find a common object, study it and then propose some way to digital-empower it... this is what came out :)

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Shopping in 1999

2007-09-12T13:05:00.000-05:00

From the film 1967 1999 A.D., a short sponsored by the Philco-Ford Corporation, showing what home shopping would be like three decades in the future. Although they missed the frenetic pace of today's online shopping experience—the housewife's browsing looks almost leisurely—they guessed correctly on the abundance flat-panel screens (with multiple monitors, no less), even if they were off by about a decade. Oh course, they didn't quite put together that we'd still be using keyboards for input.

This is somewhat related to visions of the future proposed in the interface class like those of Vannevar Bush.

Watch

Via ComputerLove

Designer Statement

2007-09-09T21:39:00.000-05:00

Design saved me

When I started doing design, I really didn’t know it was “design”.

I still remember that time - it was four years ago - when I left the Informatics Engineering study degree at Politecnico, and for the first time in my life I felt lost, with a lot of time on hand and nothing to do with it.
But at that time something magical happened: the same day I left the Engineering department I randomly found a magazine in a store called “Computer Arts”, which immediately attracted my attention.
The images I saw inside fascinated me at the point that I started to wonder if I would also have been able to do that kind of stuff.

Then I started doing graphical experiments with Photoshop, an activity which helped me to channel my frustration and gain new skills. Since then I began exploring the design world using the web as a resource for inspiration and knowledge, each time learning on my own how to use the specific tools I needed to accomplish my projects. If you wonder why I’m telling this to you, here is the answer: this is the first and uppermost reason that makes me want to “design things” ; I do it for myself, because it’s a passion.

Three years have passed now and, in order to find other reasons that drive my work as a designer, let’s fast-forward to yesterday evening :

Believe it or not, but for the first time in three years I finally had a theoretical assignment to fulfill, as the former design school I went to was very practical and we had never to speculate on theoretical themes and issues.
They have always been floating in my mind but now, for the first time, I can summarize them on a list of inspirational issues based on the works I’ve been doing over the last few years and on the projects I would like to carry out in the future:

-Inner communication
-How you see yourself
-Music
-Sound + Graphics
-People creativity
-Computers + Nature / Culture + Nature
-Memory + Emotions
-Physical world + Virtual world
-Socialization
-Social Activity
-Play / Ludic Activities
-Knowledge Share
-Politics
-Spaces / Loci
-Democracy
-Computers outside the box
-Networked Objects
-Human Movements + Kinesic
-Remote Communication
- Tools for Curiosity

---------------- 31 January 2008 edit ----------------

- Tools for Curiosity

- Intimate interfaces

- Real-time creativity

- Visual music

- Freedom of expression (GRL)

- Democracy/Open source governance

- Open source devices

- Videogames/Imagination

---------------- END 31 January 2008 edit ----------------

These issues can be linked into four major aims:

- to BRIDGE REAL AND VIRTUAL WORLDS, mixing them together rather than making them fight each other.

- to EXPLORE YOUR INNER SELF thanks to the digital media that have the power to capture and show yourself to yourself.

- to BUILD BEAUTIFUL AND SIGNIFICANT SYSTEM OF RELATIONSHIPS through the collection of data and the successful mapping of them onto new system of values.

- to TRY TO MAKE THE REALITY WE LIVE IN BETTER, allowing people to have access to knowledge and stimulate social activity towards politics and democratic dialectics.

The reading assignments surprised me, as I found in them many suggestions that I had already thought on my own and helped me to focalize on drawing the contours of myself as a designer.

For instance, I almost totally recognize myself in the “Interaction Designer” figure Terry Winegrad wrote about in his essay “From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design”, because I know I have the skill of a graphic designer, programmer, video designer, but I didn’t know how they could fit in just one craft.

Another thing in which I can recognize myself in the lecture submitted is in “The Pillow” by Anthony Dunne, because, until now a design centered approach is the way I designed most of the things I’ve done, which I used to label as “experiments”.
Value fictions are not only important but vital for design ... if design was just user centered it would be totally boring.

I think that we, the people who have the privilege to work with the digital media, must be aware of the power and responsibility that lies in our hands, since we have to master information in the information era.

Download Pdf here

Ta da!

2007-09-06T21:40:00.000-05:00

Welcome!
this is my MFA DT blog for those not so familiar with US scolar system the degree for which I'm studing is a Master in Fine Arts (MFA) with major in Design and Technology (DT) ... in less words I'll do superstrangecrazyhopefullywonderful stuff with computers and other fun things!

more to come...