Hussein Chalayan is a designer who is creating crystal and laser dresses that are extraordinary to watch. The Swarovski site has short videos of Hussein explaining how they make the outfits and then video of them shown. It is another take on smart fabrics.
Thanks to Jennifer for this.
Live Projections is an exhibit by my colleague Liss Plat and others.
Saturday, November 24, 8pm
Latvian House, 491 College St., Toronto
Typography Kicks Ass: Flickr Bold Italic is a Flash toy that displays messages left by people using letters from Flickr. It is a “letters in the wild” toy that uses the images of letters of others. I wonder what a similar toy using the Dictionary of Words in the Wild could do?
I was asking myself how if I could use a PDA or iPod for presentations instead of a laptop and came across some articles like HOW-TO: Put PowerPoint on your iPod Photo from Engadget. The idea is that you export your presentation as a series of photos which can then be played out as video to a monitor or video project. (Note that they don’t go out as data.)
I was wondering about this reading about the now discontinued Margi Presenter-To-Go that works with the Palm line. They provide cables and stuff so you can run a data projector from a Palm PDA with enough memory. Alas they have given up on this. Will an iPod Touch version come along?
Artist David McCallum has a cool project that was featured on the CBC radio show Spark. The Warbike Project is a bicycle with a device that creates a sonnification of wireless network activity it encounters as you bike around. Bells play as the device encounters a new wifi network and so on. You can sign out the bike now at Interaccess in Toronto.
The Warbike turns this wireless network activity into sound. As you cycle the streets, you’ll hear the activity of this invisible communications layer that permeates our public spaces. Who knew that so much was going on?
Following the last post I thought I would blog some locative text and art projects.
Hello, world! is a work mowed into a field that encodes in Semacode the universal programmers greeting, “Hello, world!”
Eternal Sunset shows you webcam images of the sunset wherever it is happening at the time you visit. (This one is from Norway.)
Grafedia is a site where people can send emails with a word they have seen written in blue and underlined on the street. They then get back images associated with those words.
About Google Maps hacks for Sonar is just one post from a group blog with a lot of posts on the category locative.
Gutenkarte is built on MetaCarta and lets you see a map with the locations important to a text as Google Books does. They process the text, identify locations in the text and then map them. It would be neater if they let users run a text through.
I’m off for a vacation until August so I leave you with a photo from a set I took in Montreal (that is up on Flickr: Photos from geoffreyrockwell.) This is in the Museum of Contemporary Art where they had a show De L’?âcriture [With Writing] showcasing works in their collection with a connection to writing.
Microsoft is getting a lot of buzz for their preview of Photosynth which can analyze large collections of photos of a space (like St. Marks in Venice) and then reconstruct a 3-D space by stitching the photos. The 3-D space can be used to navigate the photos. Microsoft has a preview that runs on Windows XP SP2 and Vista.
Photosynth is based on the work of U of Washington Computer Science Ph. D. student Noah Snavely and his advisors. He has a page on Photo tourism: Exploring photo collections in 3D with a cool Java demo with datasets like the Trevi Fountain.
A related Microsoft technology demonstrated at TED is Seadragon which allows smooth scaling and transition of high resolution images so you can zooming can become navigation. See Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Jaw-dropping Photosynth demo (video).
Thanks to Matt and others for pointing these out to me.
This weekend I participated in an Interactive Matter (iMatter) meeting at Montreal. The meeting was to figure out next steps on the project after our SSHRC proposal was unsuccessful.
Lynn Hughes and Jane Tingley of Concordia organized meetings at and tours of some of new media organizations in Montreal including:
One thing that is clear is the critical mass of artists, independent game developers, historians, philosophers, and organizations in Montreal. Montreal even have a Cit?© Mltim?©dia where the city is revitalizing an old industrial quarter to be a multimedia incubator. This public investment in multimedia arts, technology, and organizations stands in contrast to the lack of interest in cultural industries elsewhere.
Patrik Svensson Director of HUMlab, Ume?• University, is giving a talk tomorrow here at McMaster.
In this seminar I will start out from a general discussion of the visual in the humanities and in the digital humanities, and a critique of traditional ‘humanities computing’ which tends to be predominantely textual. I will base my further investigation on several projects from different areas including art history, history, antrophology and linguistics. Key points of discussion include the materiality of interfaces, added values, innovation strategies, and the role of the visualization. Among relevant technologies are geographical information systems, multi-spectral analysis and virtual worlds. Digital culture also gives us highly visual study objects such as computer games, social software and electronic literature, and these will be considered. The final part of the talk deals with physical lab and studio spaces for the digital humanities. How is the visual articulated in such collaborative work spaces? It will be suggested that the humanities may benefit from working with many, individual screens in collaborative settings rather than immersive environments such as CAVEs. HUMlab at Ume?• University will be used a case study and I will describe a planned (and funded!) expansion of the lab which will add thirteen new screens to the studio space.
From the descriptions of the HUMlab it sounds like a creative space – they have paid attention to creating a space where people can meet across the humanities and IT disciplines.