blog (category: tech)
crazy do-loops, mental poots
I twittered this morning to talk about laundry, a-mung other things. Could be one of this life's low points.
Gab for gab's sake.
In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario.
-- Kevin Kelly We Are the Web, Wired, 13.08 (August 2005)
Nor is it always meaningful.
technological significance and technological novelty are rarely the same--indeed, a given technology's grip on our awareness is often in inverse relationship to its significance in our lives...we are wrong to associate technology solely with invention, and that we should think of it, rather, as evolving through use.
Steven Shapin, What Else Is New? (The New Yorker), found via Heather Rae's Ductless on the Cleantech Blog
So, now I prolong the insignificance by commenting on it using a different medium.
The day for blogging about blogging and podcasting about podcasting is long gone.
-- Chris Pirillo, 10 Ways to Eliminate the Echo Chamber
Sure it is.
George Clinton called it Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis. (YGIAGAM (Your Google Is As Good As Mine.))
ingenuity: progression, projection
Cleveland's 3rd annual Ingenuity Festival is already a week past, and I haven't yet squeaked about it here. I wrote half an entry the week prior, intending to promote the fest and my part in it, but I was too tangled and busy preparing, and left it undone.
In Ingenuity's first year, I walked through the festival a few times and paused for some music. I spent a lot of time at last year's 2.0, digging great music/dance (DJ Spooky and SAFMOD beat me up,) art installations, and goodfun (get-down in the rain,) and did a brief Capoeira performance with Shakthi and Taliesin on stage with Moises Borges and his band.
This year we made a somewhat bigger Capoeira roda for the festival's opening Samba of 1,000 Drums parade, but that was mostly just a break for me on Thursday evening before returning to my cube at CleveMed for a late night, prepping software and devices for the next day's Cavani/FES/CleveMed collaboration.
Friends from the Cleveland FES (Functional Electrical Stimulation) Center (Katie, Andy, Juan, and Dimitra) asked if CleveMed and I would like to work with them in a collaboration with the Cleveland Institute of Music's Cavani String Quartet. Over a number of months we experimented in acquiring EMG from the musician's muscles while they played (using CleveMed's BioCapture and Kinesia systems), and capturing motion data with FESC's equipment to generate model~animations.
Day-of-show -- at CleveMed in the morning and State Theatre in the afternoon -- was one of the most stressful I've known, but everything really just came together by evening performance-time, and both shows were about as good as I could've hoped. The members of Cavani are amazing musicians and people, and their delivery of Dvořák's "American" was beautiful. The devices and visualizations provided another (sometimes stunning) dimension to the music, as hoped. All of the projections, stage calls, queues, and speaking parts (probably the root of my greatest stress) went smoothly, as a result of focus, attention, and generosity from everyone involved.
Photo by Imagine24 (Some rights reserved.)
More pics: 1,
2,
3
I owe thanks in a lot of directions: FESC friends and colleagues, the Cavani musicians, the stage management and ops people at Playhouse Square, my supervisor, Craig, (both granting me this freedom and for life-saving pair-programming assistance in the final moments,) the rest of my conspirators at CleveMed for making top-notch tech, and Rich Weiss from Ingenuity for gluing us together with logistics and motivation.
I'm already looking forward to next year's festival, and forming vague plans for a project. The intersection of art & tech is one crossroads where I could set up shop, (or at least be happy just hanging out on the curb.)
ripping, lovehate, subsumption
I've been using the scanner at work tonight to rip (-- not rip as in tear, but rip as in analog-to-digital --) old papers.
Payslips, journaling, coffee-infused/stained notes. I'm trying to go paper-less, (-- not less as in free, but less as in less.) Post-rip, I'm shredding (and, if not recycling, not regretting.)
I skim through each file to name it for archival. The last one tonight, now Notes_TalkingMusic_04.gif, has a quote scrawled:
Duckworth: Are you one of those people who thinks that a lot of the technology is a waste of time because it subsumes you?
-- William Duckworth, Talking Music
dorkbot-cleveland
I think Pittsburgh City Paper's recent State of Art article was my introduction exposure to Dorkbots; I must've missed Tech Futures covering Dorkbots coming to Cleveland nearly a year ago.
(Wikipedia:Dorkbot): Dorkbot refers to a group of affiliated organizations worldwide that sponsor meetings of artists, engineers, and designers working in the medium of electronic art.
So, yes, CLE has one, now:
dorkbot-cleveland presents a free, informal gathering of artists, engineers and programmers in the greater-Cleveland area, to show their work. There's a mailing list (but no blog,) and there's been one gathering at the defunct HealthSpace Cleveland (apparently with Rich Weiss of Ingenuity, Case Weatherhead's Fred Collopy, and video artist Kasumi on the bill.)
simulation software
Simulating leadership, from Seb's Open Research blog notes an interview with Clark Aldrich: Simulations and the Learning Revolution.
The future education-oriented uses of simulation software that Aldrich mentions are quite interesting, but what sparked me the most was his description of virtual products, or "web-deployed mock-ups of actual products." The Flash Simulation page contains some relatively simple but telling examples.
Say I'm looking to buy a new digital watch. I browse an online catalog with typical descriptions and pricing, but now with links to manufacturers' sites pages that have a virtual (Flash) version of the watch, so I can actually test the features and, though I can't actually hold the product, evaluate its interface.
Or better yet, say the watch I've purchased has, embedded, a tiny RFID transmitter chip. I bring it close to my computer, which receives RFID signals, and hop onto the manufacturer's site where this virtual product also has an interactive tutorial to walk me through its features. No more reading tiny-printed, pedantic instruction sheets...
Afterthought: are there simulations for heavy machinery? Gaining proficiency on those machines must cost a fortune in fuel.