CreativeTechnology

YMYI - Computational Aesthetics Exhibition (2008) from Joao Martinho Moura on Vimeo.

Your Life: Live

I really don't like reality TV, but I do like reality (contrary to popular belief). Qik is the latest crazy Loic Le Meur project; which lets you broadcast from your mobile telephone's videographic enabled camera device.

Make sure you sort out a decent tariff with your phone company first tho - T Mobile charged me £3 for a 1 min video call to Kooch the other day!

Anyway - Check out QIK (note the 2.0 spelling).



update - Thanks Thayer for the link (I couldn't remember where I got it from!)

Beyond The Computer Screen

This is awesome. This guy has hacked a Nintendo Wii to turn it into a head-tracking device; which in turn gives a virtual reality appeal to his computer screen.

Fast forward to the last third of the clip for the good stuff.



I must get a t-shirt printed: God Loves Hackers.

Exciting Times, Convergence and The Great Technology Waterfall

Well; these are exciting times. In the last three weeks I've been glued to my technology blogs; and the underlying theme on Convergence is one which is plain to see.

First up was some great work from adrien.noterdaem (don't be put off by the page turn effect on his site!), who has used papervision, a globe camera, and some techno-creative wizardry to present us with a 360degree interactive video.

Here's a quick youtube screengrab, but I recommend you try it out for yourself.



Next came the amazing 2nd life hybrid space project, posted below.



And now you can have your own live interweb TV station, as brought to you by the nice guys over at Mogulus. This allows you to mix pre-recorded videos with multiple live feeds. You can also add graphics and overlay audio tracks at run time... and what's great is the service is free! Could this be the ultimate narcissistic exercise? I'm quite sure myself that it'll spawn a whole new wave of rubbish content, badly executed live events and recycled projects masquerading as "the real thing". Hence I would exercise a note of caution to anybody wanting to broadcast just for the novelty value; but I doubt anybody will listen to me.

What's really exciting for me about all these things is that they are great examples of convergence. The Great technology waterfall; where we start in the reservoir of the Military, before going downstream to University land before hitting the world of Pornography then into the world of the Populous. The Military usually develop the hardware, 360degree cameras, mobile communication stations etcetera. Then the Universities get involved and develop software; such toys as iptv, distributed location independent databases and browser plugins. Then comes the great content vacuum; lots of stuff, new channels, but no message to broadcast. It is nearly always the Porn industry who are the first to hook up these bits of technology and software in order to present us with download, live broadcasts and virtual simulations of X rated content in order to satisfy the lust which is hard-wired into human nature. Eventually these developed systems disseminate into the wider realm and while multinational co-operations will always develop ways to charge you for these services; the great converging brains out there on the web will also work together to bring you the service for free. That's the part I love.


Also check out Earthmine - GPS/Google Map/ Photo mashup - still in it's early stages but looking like it'll cause quite a stir.



What we have in with these first noteworthy projects of 2008 is the coming together of technology, ideas and innovation. It is still early days, but the potential here is very exciting stuff for all. The old divisions between 'Creatives', and 'Tech-heads' are breaking down; with the key players of the now being creative-techologiests, strategic-producers and techno-planners.

Ooh it's going to be an exciting year...

Malkovich 2.0

viao-john.com

Like Ewarwoowar, I try not to post much of the work that we do at Dare, in an effort to stay sane if nothing else. This site however is definitely worth a mention as to me it represents the good side of Web 2.0. It is a site to educate, to stir up ideas while asking for a well thought out response.

If only the Tube could have captured the essence of thinking before you upload as well as this small project. This project, of course stated it's claim in planet User Generated Content (a small moon orbiting Planet User Generated Crap) right from the start in that it was for Sony - a brand holding themselves high up.like.no.other in an otherwise over saturated technology market. Claridges, rather than McDonalds contributions please.

But beyond fast food video, there are still a large range of good video sites, quality controlled and vetted for the best which I still wouldn't think twice about sending my work too. However I took ages, with my mouse hovered over the submit button on this Malkovich site. Is it that I hold careful consideration of words as a higher art than the same of images? Or is it because I was hammered into writing with a fountain pen by my primary school teacher, while told there was no right or wrong in art class.

Who cares? The fact is that web is full of pictures of nudey girls, rude boy race-car videos, User Generated Idiocy and hastily designed pages. We are much less the land of flowing milk and honey for design as envisaged by the futurists, more like conurbation riddled with more back allies than Soho. Maybe it's time creators of 2.0 sites raised the bar in their briefs for quality over quantity of uploaded content. This is a site with a challenge I've enjoyed. Touché my friends.

In the future

Will search be search? Surely the system will know you better than you know yourself and the information you crave will find it's way to you before you even go looking for it.

Flo makes an interesting point; that everything, every discreet piece of data (the time for debating the philosophy behind what we could constitute as a 'discreet piece of data' is not one to be debated at this time) will have it's own ip address. The mind starts to buckle imagining this concept and so we are forced to again reverse the role of cognitive data searching.

I am drowning in emails, yet my email application only lets me search for emails "sent from", "sent to" and, "subject containing". What if I want to search my email for a keyword I wrote in a mail to one of my work colleagues last year before summer some time. The technology is there to enable me to run some sort of search; however it has not yet been turned around to read the context within which I am working and present me the data based on second guessing what I need, when.

Web 2.0 - what a waste of time.

I am my Twitter

I am my Facebook Status Update

I am my Flickr Photos

I am a the time wasted updating all of these things.

Current Web 2.0 works reactively, not pro-actively. Humans are proactive in nature and so our favorite Buzz system is in fact contrary to our very being. Web 2.0 is always playing catch up.

I open a browser tab and fire up Facebook. I see the updates from my friends and work mates, however they are all 2 hours behind as I am still at work at quater past 7. I need a system which lets me know what they are up to at any given time, when I glance it.

I need location aware. I need the system to offer me what I want based on proxemics as well as preferences.

I want my favorite bar to remember how many times I have visited it, and to remember that on Fridays I like to drink Mojitos. Why do I wait for service if the bar could know that I was heading there before I walked through the door.

I want ubiquitous technology to enable my lifestyle; to allow me to dig deeper into every second of every day. I want a virtual world to exist under the skin, under the surface of this real palpable world. I want to see through this surface and interact with a world beyond. I don't want to think about this; as a bilingual person dosen't think as they switch languages half way through a conversation.

I want more than 2.0

A sign of the Times

Digital Break Up 2.0?

They say that breaking up is hard to do. And They are right. After nearly four very happy years with my other half, things have run out of steam and we've decided to go our separate ways. It's a Sunday afternoon.

Monday morning I head to work with a quiet yet manageable sadness and I am hit with a torrent of instant messages, face book wall scrawls, emails and texts from my friends all asking me if I am ok, if I need to chat, if I need to cry and I am overwhelmed with the offers of support from friends and loved ones. It took a few moments for the penny to drop. This is Digital Breakup 2.0. The news had been broadcast via a simple update from the ex, changing her facebook status from 'in a relationship', to 'single'.

I have a lot of trouble with Monday mornings at the best of times. My brain has changed gear in the days off preceding, and it usually takes until 11am Monday morning to snap back into the 200mile an hour high fly which is my working mindset for the duration of the week. I wasn't ready for this. I hadn't internalized this pivotal, yet mutural decision to split, and yet the decision had been sent out via a contact wide multi-cast, reaching my friends through our many shared friends, and so out to my work colleagues and friends and who knows how far beyond.

I decided that the barn doors had definitely been blown open and this was really it, no going back as everybody now already knew. I so joined the torrent, adding my own twitter broadcast, which in turn was picked up on the right hand side of this blog, and was texted out to those who follow the humble musings of Professor Donshades via the twitter text alert system.

So there we are; Digital Break up 2.0. No longer you email all your friends to tell them your news, you broadcast it as a Tweet or status update. You send out the signal with your rss feed and it is picked up by those friends who monitor you life via netvibes of iGoogle. For good of for bad I am not sure, however it is definitely a sign of the times.

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

Googlisation Cometh!

Interesting news today regarding Google's aquisition of Grand Central telecom. It seems that Google now want to own the network as well as provide the services. The snap above comes from this article on the notion of Googalisation.

Cunningham eat your Heart out

If only Cunningham had access to one of these. Actually, Fuck Cunningham - I want one to play with. I'm thinking some sort of sworded music video short film mash up with a web interface and in some freak-out live situation with unsuspecting reality TV style protagonists.

Strutting my Stuff in Second Life

Well, Here I am at aprox. 00:12 on 5th June, strutting my stuff as a paid by the minute podium dancer at a beach club in second life.

As if my first life isn't busy enough, with about twenty ongoing projects outside of my 9-late job as a creative at Dare. Humm....

When second life started, I signed up straight away with the promise of a fully interactive, virtual world rendered in high definition 3D; of the ilk of Doom or Unreal Torurnament 2004. What I found was a half realised community with a few geeks hanging out not really talking to each other. People would walk up to you and say:
"hello? are you real?"
very much like the Dareschool project when we ran it for a month this time last year at Dare. People rang up our lady Marjory with stupid questions:
"Hello....are you real? Would you wave at me with your left hand while cocking your right finger and putting your left thumb up your nose?"
Alas there's something in us that makes us suspicious of anything new, and seemingly too good to be true. Not surprising really, think of all the fuss over subservient chicken - was it real, was it truth of lies?

And so it's the geeks who are left to pick up the pieces, and start to make it work. And after the wave of geeks, then it becomes a new thing (think of user generated content - first it was only the geeks who actually contributed to the web, now it's like cooler than cool to have your video on youtube).

So...Second life... Here I am crapping on with a head full of Rum while watching my amazingly rendered, 3D realtime avatar Donshades Korobase dancing away and I'm chatting to the girl next to me on the dance floor and she's pretty cool...

It is us geeks who shall inherit the earth.

Free WiFi in London

This Map:


Is a neat GMaps Mashup showing everybody's favorite thing - free WiFi for you to use in Town. Not much more to say other than to point out that it's a growing map with a suggestions box, so if you find free wifi that's not on it, then email the nice people and they'll update the map.

Via E

Gondry does HP

Great.



Refreshing... Gondry brings a breath of fresh air to HP's campaign.

Freedom of Information

Old news it is, but since the original breaking news regarding the riot on Digg a few weeks back, I was browsing a few hacker forums hoping to pick up some snippets of information regarding how to Crack HD-DVD DRM in the interest of keeping information free, and being able to back up any HD-DVD content that I purchase. Suddenly is dawned on me - the interweb is a great thing.

Slow Motion

Slow Motion Samurai sword cutting a water balloon. This was captured at 6600fps using the Phantom high resolution, high speed, digital camera: spitting out uncompressed frames to an array of hard drives. Techtastic! I want one.
(via e:)