An Exceptional Invitation

CFP: Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts, September 3-6, 2006, Dartington: An international invitation and call for participation in a major conference for practitioners and scholars working with digital resources in the Humanities and Arts.

This year the renamed DRHA Conference - Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts - is choosing to bring a new dimension into its standard range of digital projects and interests across the major disciplines of the humanities (archaeology, history, literature, languages, linguistics…) by offering an exceptional invitation to practitioners and scholars working with digital media across the creative, visual, performing and media arts (music, performance, dance, visual arts, gaming, media…). Continue reading

When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide

“…My talk today is about “glocalization,” one of the most grotesque words that academics have managed to coin. The term itself has many interesting roots in economics, social networks and performance studies…Glocalization is the ugliness that ensues when the global and local are shoved uncomfortably into the same concept. It doesn’t sit well on your palette, it doesn’t have a nice euphoric ring. It implies all sorts of linguistic and cognitive discomfort. This is the state of the global and local in digital communities. We have all sorts of local cultures connected through a global network, resulting in all sorts of ugly tensions. Designers who work with networks must face these tensions and design to take advantage of the global while not destroying the local. This is a hefty challenge and one that i want us to dive into.

I want to talk about what it means to connect the global and local together in technology and how this affects the design process. I want to talk about why social software must address glocalization in order to succeed. This means thinking about all sorts of squishy stuff like language, economics, policy, culture, social relations, and values. These are not just issues for marketing or business; they directly affect how people use your technologies and, thus, how you must design them..” From G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide by danah boyd, O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, March 6, 2006. Continue reading

A visual exploration on mapping complex networks

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.

Not all projects shown are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they arenÂ’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

So far, VisualComplexity features 304 projects.

VisualComplexity
Manuel Lima
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/index.cfm Continue reading

Tangible Weather Channel

Tangible Weather Channel is a sculptural apparatus that enables the participant to input the remote location of a loved one and interprets its real-time weather information as a way of creating an emotional connection. Rather than employing traditional graphical representation, Tangible Weather Channel renders weather information into a multi-sensory experience by using natural elements such as water, air and sound. By materializing weather dynamics on intimate sites to mediate what occurs in another place, Tangible Weather Channel encourages the participant to establish links with his/her experiential memories of a specific place and to create a sense of closeness to via touch and contemplation.

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Panel Discussion TONIGHT!

Panelists: Adam Greenfield, Preemptive Media (Beatriz da Costa, Brooke Singer), and Michelle Teran; Moderator: Helen Thorington–DATE: March 15th, 7:00 p.m.; PLACE: Emerson College, Bill Bordy Theatre, 216 Tremont Street, and LIVE ONLINE.

Emerson College and New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc./Turbulence.org announce the second panel discussion in their series, Floating Points 3 [FP3] that will address the subject of “Ubiquitous Computing” or “Ubicomp”, where computing and wireless capabilities are so integrated into the fabric of everyday life (clothing, cars, homes, and offices) that the technologies recede into the background and become indistinguishable from everyday activities.
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Difference Continue reading

Surveillance in the Internet of Things

“I was recently asked to consider how the new surveillance is (or might) operate in the era of networked Things. It’s not a hard one to think through, but I reflected upon the role that visual surveillance has played in reshaping and refashioning physical space and thought maybe visual surveillance doesn’t matter so much any more. Video surveillance was once all about “the man” having more power to see and reveal than those who were being watched. It was easy to grow wary of video cameras and their use, particularly by private entities whose cameras captured activity in public space, especially when there are no formal accountability protocols. I could get hopped up about that, certainly. I spent a day with the Institute for Applied Autonomy back several years ago, helping map out surveillance cameras in Manhattan as part of a wonderful exhibition that Eyebeam put on called We Love New York. It was about mapping the ways in which public space becomes a space that surveilled in a problematic way. It’s too secret, this surveillance.

Log files and Arphids are what we have to worry about, not video surveillance. In the Internet of Things, it’s a web hit in an access log that’ll send you to the big house. Continue reading Society of the Spectacle (2.0): Surveillance in the Internet of Things by Julian Bleecker. Continue reading

Five Merit Scholarships Available

Responding to Gesture and Bodies: Design for Physically Based Interactive Art: Call for Applications: Five Merit Scholarships available for emerging artists to take a one-week course with award-winning interactive artist Camille Utterback. These awards are designed to help artists learn and understand the technologies behind creating Physical-Digital Interfaces and to create a critical context in which to make these works. Scholarships include: Full tuition, materials, lodging and three meals a day for the duration of the course. Winning applicants must provide for their own travel.

Concept: In this workshop students will explore digitally based interactive art that engages human gesture and bodies. The main goal of the workshop is to help students develop a critical context for their own interactive work, and to demystify the technologies behind this type of work - expanding each studentB9s vocabulary in the type of work he/she can do. Students will learn about video tracking technology, working with sensors, potentiometers, microcontrollers and other forms of input, processing, and output. Software used in demonstrations may include Flash, Jitter/Max MSP, Processing, and Basic (for microprocessor and sensor control). For more visit >> Continue reading

Watch Your Dreams Come True

We all have dreams, but are we really living up to them? You can change your life and be responsible for your and your family’s future. The European Green Card Lottery (EUGCL) has fulfilled many dreams. People today are living their European dream only because they took 5 minutes of their time to register for the official EU Green Card Lottery in the EUGCL web site. Make a difference in your life. Click here and watch how dreams come true. If you register now you have great chances to be one of this year winners. Registration is easy through our website. Join the EUGCL winning team! Here are 9 facts about the EU Green Card Lottery Program

1. 50,000 people and their families will become Europeans.
2. Winners can live and work in the EU.
3. Official Société Réaliste program.
4. One person out of 70 wins the Green Card (statistically).
5. Easy online registration and assistance.
6. Double chances for married people.
7. In 2005, 3.2 million people failed to complete the application correctly.
8. Registration is done online only.
9. You are almost there… Continue reading

Being “in” a Pervasive Network

“As the Internet pervades more physical space and more social space it is likely that objects in the world will become able to connect to the network and participate in the web by disseminating and receiving data communications. As “things” participate within the Internet and once the Internet soaks through physical, geographic space a differentiated kind of Internet may arise. The Internet of Things sets up a different set of relations to social practice (we will be “in” a pervasive network) and a different set of relations to space (the Internet will be co-occupied by both social beings and things.) This shift generates new possibilities for integrating networked things into the Internet. This workshop addresses this shift by considering its characteristics in relation to an existing, prevalent set of practices and technologies currently in existence variously referred to as “the social web” and “Web 2.0.” We then proceeded into four groups to conduct design scenarios in order to further explicate our understanding of a world in which things are connected, networked participants within a pervasive, wireless, mobile Internet. We conclude that there is a significant opportunity for designing compelling usage scenarios for such a near-future Internet of Things world and recommend a follow on, intensive, multi-day workshop/retreat to continue contributing to this important topic.” From Report from the Blogject Workshop at LIFT06 [blogged by nicolas on pasta and vinegar] Continue reading