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.

Gigapixels Talk at Dorkbot SF

General - No Comments » - Posted on January, 10 at 7:55 pm

I’m talking at Dorkbot in San Francisco this coming Tuesday (Jan 10). I’m presenting some of my work with gigapixel imagery. If you’re in SF come check it out! Info about the talk below. The other talks are Joe Grand – The Projects of Prototype This, Paul Cesewski (aka Paul da Plumber)- Fun is the Universal Language, and Marc Powell – Delicious Corpse. Check out the talk details on the dorkbot sf site. One thing I’ll show is a refined version of my Hope, Alaska GigaPan.

dorkbot-sf
People doing strange things with electricity

time:
7:30pm Tuesday
13 January 2009

place:
Monkeybrains
984 Folsom St (@ 6th) 2nd Fl
San Francisco CA 94103

Directions

FREE ADMISSION but DONATIONS to our hosts much appreciated.

Dorkbot SF glow in the dark T-Shirts will be for sale! $20 cash

Michael Ang – Gigapixels: Practice and Aesthetics
Creating images with gigapixel (1 billion pixel) resolution is now within the reach of anyone with a digital camera and computer. Picture taking robots such as the GigaPan (developed by CMU and NASA) and modified telescope mounts can automatically take many overlapping pictures of a given scene. The individual pictures can be automatically stitched together to create a large final image. What are the aesthetics of this increasingly accessible medium? How does stitching together many small images differ from taking one very large one?

Michael (aka “Mang”) first used the GigaPan in the summer of 2007, when he took a prototype unit to Alaska by pickup truck. This talk presents some of his work with robotically assisted photography. Practical aspects of creating large panoramas will be presented as well less straightforward uses of the technology.

Mang holds a BASc in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada and a Master’s Degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications program. His interests include the intersection of technology, art and physical experience.

http://www.michaelang.com
Mang’s pictures at gigapan.org

Working at the Internet Archive

General - 2 Comments » - Posted on January, 7 at 9:37 pm

I’m now (since November) working at the Internet Archive. Been interested in the place for years — great to be aboard. Currently working in the nascent Access Group helping to improve access to the Archive’s remarkable store of human knowledge

The Archive now has more than one million searchable and downloadable books. These books can be read online and I’m working on improvements to our online book reader.

Here’s an example of our beta embeddable book reader:

You can also read a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from 1900 or John Muir’s Travels in Alaska. Just two examples out of many books available!

If you want to use the bookreader or embed it on your site you can see the technical documentation. It’s open source and the book data is open too. It’s all part of the Archive’s vision of universal access to human knowledge.

Michael Ang

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