Igloo Panorama

General - 3 Comments » - Posted on May, 10 at 6:14 pm

Here’s a panorama from inside an igloo just outside Igloolik in Nunavut. You can click and drag to pan and use ctrl and shift to zoom in and out. That’s my brother on the right and also notable are our most gracious hosts on the opposite side and smoke hole at the top of the igloo. The temperature outside was about -14 degrees Celsius (7F) and it was quite cozy being inside out of the wind and all bundled up.

(The QTVR panorama will take a few moments to download. You need QuickTime installed to view it.)

Make your own swine flu!

General - No Comments » - Posted on April, 30 at 4:25 pm

You can use my Post-It Note DNA Synthesizer applet to make swine flu in your very own home (some assembly required).

The applet visualizes genetic sequences in colours matched to the popular sticky notes. It can be used as a guide for making your very own stick-up sequences!

DNA Synthesizer applet with first line of recent H1N1 swine flu

Photos of using the synthesizer in 2007 (when avian flu was de rigeur)

Page St Garden Spring Gigapan

General - No Comments » - Posted on April, 29 at 10:57 pm

Click on the image below to go to my Page St Garden Spring Gigapan. This is a relatively small one from the front of the garden — it’s composed from only 55 images. In the GigaPan you can see the native garden and Strange Attractor on the right and the area with succulents on the left. Please add snapshots to identify the different plants!

Page St Garden Spring Gigapan on gigapan.org

Strange Attractor Opening Pictures

General - No Comments » - Posted on April, 29 at 10:47 pm

Here are some pictures from the Strange Attractor opening at the Page St Garden. The opening for humans was on Saturday but the insect visitors decided to come on Sunday!

Thanks to the garden for continuing to host Strange Attractor and particularly Michael and Gabriel! The garden is interested in having other artists create works for it. You can get in touch at the Page St Garden blog.

Page St Opening picture set on Flickr

Update: also check out the Page St Garden Spring Gigapan taken the day after the opening.

Found Connections Video

General - No Comments » - Posted on April, 29 at 9:51 pm

A short video of our installation of Found Connections at the TV of Tomorrow Show 2009.

Found Connections lets participants discover the social relationships between characters in a narrative (in this case a TV show) by interacting with each other through a “virtual mirror” augmented reality display. The relationships between the characters are shown using animated lines between them and dialog from the story is shown on screen. The character “puppets” have a cutout for the mouth, giving you a chance to act out the dialog and become part of the show!

Thanks to Karl and Josh for getting back together to work on Found Connections! David Bamford was part of the original “4 Lost Guys”. Thanks to the crew at TV of Tomorrow and particularly Julie Andersen and Tracy Swedlow for inviting us to participate.

Opening for Strange Attractor at Page St Garden

General - No Comments » - Posted on April, 23 at 9:22 pm

There will be an opening / garden party for the Strange Attractor installation at the Page Street Garden in the Haight this Saturday following their Spring Workday. The ongoing installation is a chance for Strange Attractor to interact with the urban ecosystem — animal and human.

Strange Attractor Opening
Page St Community Garden – Page St between Webster and Buchanan (map), SF
Saturday April 25 – 1-3pm

Garden pictures:

Artists’ Reception for Found Connections at Yerba Buena

General - No Comments » - Posted on March, 9 at 12:15 pm

The Artists’ Reception for Found Connections and other artists’ projects at the TV of Tomorrow Show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will take place from 5:30-6:30pm on Tuesday March 10th. This event is open to the public and is your chance to see Found Connections! Found Connections will be installed for the two days of the TV of Tomorrow Conference — the reception is the chance for public viewing.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — 701 Mission St (across the street from SF MoMA)
Artists’ Reception — Tuesday March 10th, 5:30-6:30pm

Found Connections at TV of Tomorrow 2009

General - No Comments » - Posted on March, 2 at 12:17 am

An updated version of my Found Connections project will appear at the TV of Tomorrow conference in San Francisco March 10th and 11th.

Found Connections is an interactive installation where users can explore the social network of television characters in an augmented reality video display. Each user is given a “paddle” with a tracking marker printed on it. A video camera tracks the markers and overlays graphics representing the characters and their relationships from the TV show in the virtual mirror video display. As different combinations of
characters are detected in the space the complex relationship between them is revealed.

This installation presents an alternate way for fans of the television show to discover the relationships between their favorite characters and creates a hybrid virtual/real space where television characters and viewers can exist together.

Here’s a picture of the installation at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Found Connections at NYU ITP

Strange Attractor at Page St Community Garden

General - 1 Comment » - Posted on February, 20 at 12:54 am

I’m in the process of installing my Strange Attractor project at the Page St Community Garden in the Lower Haight in San Francisco. Strange Attractor is a modular system of artificial flowers designed to be visited by butterflies and other animals. By seeing how the animals react to different designs we can get a sense of what they prefer and perhaps understand better how they perceive the world.

Here’s the text from the poster I plan to put up outside the garden:

Do butterflies like blue or red flowers? Do they appreciate art? What does the world look like through their eyes?

The artificial flowers at the front of the garden are designed for butterflies and for you. Which designs do you like? Which ones do you think butterflies and other animals will prefer?

Strange Attractor is an artwork that interacts with its environment and becomes part of the urban ecosystem.

Some pictures from the urban jungle:

Dorkbot talk a success!

General - No Comments » - Posted on January, 20 at 8:01 pm

There was a huge turnout at last week’s Dorkbot… sorry to those that left for lack of space!

Below is the GigaPan I took during my talk. The GigaPan robot happily snapped away while I showed some of my work and discussed the aesthetics of gigapixel imagery.

This is a GigaPan image. Drag the image to pan, double click to zoom in, shift double click to zoom out.
Open full screen viewer
View on gigapan.org

Here are some links related to my talk:

Gigapixels: Practice and Aesthetics Photo Collection on Flickr – I used these as my slides during the talk
Mangtronix user profile on GigaPan.org – GigaPans I’m sharing online
Canada Day mosaic – Mosaic technique instead of blending
GigaPan Systems – the commercial company where you can buy a GigaPan robot
My other projects – In case gigapixels wasn’t enough

I’m headed to Nunavut in May. Expect more GigaPans! Feedback is always appreciated. Thanks to Karen and the Dorkbot SF crew for organizing, and Rudy and Monkey Brains for hosting.

Michael Ang

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