Michael Ang

This past July I drove from San Francisco to Anchorage and beyond. Spent Canada day on a beach outside Vancouver and did a three day kayaking trip through icebergs in Prince William Sound.

I took a prototype GigaPan unit with me and took a few rather large panoramas.

mangtronix GigaPan page

I moved back to San Francisco (though currently in Vancouver en route to Alaska… see the next post). Had the chance to take Strange Attractor to a meadow full of wildflowers in Northern California. The meadow was filled with several species of butterflies. There were white butterflies (positive ident forthcoming) feeding on the minerals in the mud at the edge of the meadow. I installed Strange Attractor and several butterflies came to visit over the course of a few hours. The white butterflies seemed to prefer the white laser cut flowers. The preference of the butterflies for the flowers seems to vary with the species but more tests would be needed to confirm this.

Aside from the “results” it was interesting to see the flowers out in a natural setting and wonder what role technology has in a mostly wild location.

Flickr photo set

I took some pictures at the Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One? conference presented by the New York Academy of Science.

I hadn’t realized that Theo Jasen had used a genetic algorithm to get the lengths for his beach animals. There are 11 sections in each leg that contribute of the shape of the motion. If he had tried 10 possible lengths for each of those sections the possibilities exponentially rise. So he wrote a program to try some different possibilities, see how well they met the criteria, then use those as the basis for a new generation of possible solutions. The net effect was to navigate through the space of possible solutions in an evolutionary way. All this on an Atari!

A lot of thought provoking discussion in the talks. Awesome to see some of the scientists presenting their work and having some of the same enthusiasm as the artists. The talks on animal locomotion and how visual representation affects the teaching of science were standouts for me. Michael Joaquin Grey kind of blew my mind with his combination of conceptual, aesthetic and entrepreneurial work. Still processing…

The mission of Habana Labs in Brooklyn is to research, develop and apply technology related to ecology and sustainable energy. Their focus is on empowering local communities to take part and their approach is very hands on. At their third in a series of workshops on wind power the focus was on the electronics needed to convert kinetic motion (e.g. from a wind turbine) into useable electrical energy. Using mostly scavenged motors about 40 people were able to build small generators to convert rotary motion into electricity. Felt really good to see people getting their hands dirty and sustainable energy becoming less abstract.

There were a lot people taking pictures, including a video crew from ITP. There should be more documentation documentation up on their site soon.

Habana Labs Flickr photoset

Took a break today and went to the opening of [silence] at Gigantic Art Space. The show runs through Feb 24. (The link for the show is to the "current" page at GAS… too bad there’s no permalink for current events!)

Douglas Repetto has his Puff, Bang, Reverb installed and there was a nice installation of speakers making standing waves in water by Douglas Henderson. I’d like to go back when it’s quieter at the gallery. It was packed for the opening (which I hear is its last, sadly).

It was also an excuse to try out my new Canon G7 camera. Great little machine and I’ll be putting it through its paces soon enough!

Pictures from [silence] at Gigantic Art Space and also the same set on Flickr.

I like having my pictures on Flickr and another copy on my site. Almost at the point where a single script uploads to both places! One thing I’m trying to do lately is write my own little scripts to make myself more productive. At some point I’d like to make it all integrate automatically with this blog.

Water_Speaker.avi (xvid)

(Wow… I’m behind on the blogging thing.)

There was way too much to see since the conference/symposium/festival was so ambitious, with events happening at many different venues. After the fact I was sorry to have missed the Interactive Cinema series that was curated by Michael Lew among others.

Of that small slice of projects I encountered, here’s what stood out:

• The SRL show was great. See my SRL show review.
• Karaoke Ice was one of my favourites. Reminded me of a Burning Man art car with higher production values and a slightly more cohesive vision (of robot squirrels and ice pops).
• Playas: Homeland Mirage which uses a game engine to recreate the town of Playas, New Mexico which was bought by the Department of Homeland Security and turned into a training camp.
• Four movie screens with corresponding chairs tracking heartbeats (sorry, forget the actual name). I liked the idea of showing a narrative from several perspectives in a non-linear way. I still have no idea how the heartbeats influenced the movies, but the way the screens were set up so you couldn’t see all at once was great.
• Winner of the “best mapping” award goes to Gorbet Design for their P2P lightboard installation. Basically there is a marquee with 125 lights and a corresponding panel across the street with 125 ordinary light switches. Each switch is mapped directly to the corresponding light. People got it intuitively and the fun came from writing different words or making different designs. In the South Hall there were several projects where to me the mapping between the input or interaction and the output could have been stronger. In general I think simpler is better — have the depth in your piece come from interaction using simple controls/gestures.
• Skatesonic by Cobi Van Tonder augmented skateboards with microphones and sensors to create different sounds. The installation was really impressive, with some ramps and a little half-pipe. The sounds I liked best were the ones that were the uneffected microphone sound from the skateboards. Cobi had an impressive Max/MSP patch driving the whole thing. I was tempted to try it out, but I prefer my boardsports in the water (which is much softer than the ground, given suitably low velocities).
• Digital Kakejiku was a fantastic set of projections on City Hall. They took up the entire space, inside and out, and were really beautiful. The patterns changed slowly enough that if you stared and tried to see them change, you could barely perceive it. But after looking away for a few minutes you would look back and have the whole scene transformed. People sat there for tens of minutes at a time and it created an interesting social space when otherwise it would have been empty of people. My favourite moment was when the roving laptop band (about 5 people with shopping carts, battery, video projector and inflatable screen) started setting up and the (presumably) Japanese duo inside City Hall looked out with a kind of “huh?” expression and started conferring with each other. Once the laptop/vj band was set up and rocking out, they went down, had a peek over the shoulders of the band (who, like many laptop performers, seemed completely oblivious to the outside world) then just smiled, hung out, and walked away.

Image from Garth Webb via srl.org

ISEA 2006 was this past week in San Jose. I hadn’t been to San Jose in awhile. In fact, the last time I was there a friend of mine got arrested for felony possession of a juggling torch. So I’ve been kind of down on San Jose.

But the lure of SRL and boatloads of new media art was too much to resist, and the free passes I lucked into certainly helped.

The SRL show was great. I’d never seen them perform before, though I did get over to their shop a few days before on an errand and snuck a preview at some of the machines. The V1, Pitching Machine and Sparkshooter have to be my favourite machines, though it was pretty wild when the Shockwave Cannon started knocking leaves off the trees above the audience.

Most of the audience seemed to be there for the spectacle. I did feel there was a protest of mechanization and violence buried in the performance, and a certain love for the machines themselves. Usually in SRL shows there is violence but it’s only machines in the ring. This time there were two people inside a little car with oxyacetalene cannons on top driving among the robots. The most tense moments had to be when the car was hit by a two-by-four from the pitching machine (crushing one of the steel tubes on top) and when it was pushed directly against the barrel of the V1.

Check out more media on the SRL page for Ghostly Scenes of Infernal Desecration.

I went to Philadelphia yesterday with Chrysanthi (one of the choreographers/dancers from the ITP-Dance Collaboration). Nice town. It was nice to see the sky for a change, and the place was palpably at a much slower pace. Nice and relaxing. Had a nice dinner and hookah session at Shouk just south of South Street. You can see why some New Yorkers would move out here. Cheaper and still spitting distance to NYC.

Philly pictures

The ride on the Chinatown Bus was interesting as always. The chitown bus is remarkably cheap (e.g. NYC to Philly return is $20) but it definitely isn’t Greyhound. So far on every trip I’ve taken the driver has stopped for gas in the middle of the trip (and NYC->Philly is only 1.5 hours). I’ve heard tales of gang warfare between the bus lines and drivers getting shot. The price is certainly right if you’re in an adventurous mood.