B-E-Art

OpenFrameworks is the next generation open source, cross platform, c++ library, which was designed by Zachary Lieberman (US).
The library is still unreleased (now in pre-release), but their site is already operational.

While we wait here is a video about openframeworks:

made with openFrameworks.

PS: WordPress seems to be hostile to videos that are not in youtube or google videos… so I just guive you the link to the video… :(

Nutrient Information

PS: this apple pie was made with 50% of love and 70% of greed by Candie and Elodie. Seriously, thanks for this delicious pie.

I have recently read at Digital Tools a post presenting the Don’t Click It website and an article about the QWERTY keyboard. Accessing the Don’t Click It website for the first time was a strange experience: I had to get used with the idea of not using the click button, at the beginning it was quite annoying. The site has some interesting data about the click culture pointing its starting point as being a technical issue when computers and navigation were particularly poor. But clicking did enter into our contemporary culture and does represents a voluntary action, unlike Don’t Click It presents this gesture when speaking about Spam, banners and annoying advertisings. If we should follow Don’t Click It literally, we should not use the keyboard anymore, since the mouse is an extension of the keyboard (it’s like the arrow keys for navigation and return key for the click, and a computer can work with no mouse but can’t work with no keyboard). The mouse is just a pointer on the screen space allowing the user to navigate easily.

I started then to think about the possibility of building a click free interface. I started then to build a small sketch using Processing based on the Don’t Click It propositions: gesture reading and time control (you will see the beta version soon here). Once I got it done, I realized that click free interface might not be the best for speed performance: the gesture is way bigger and you need to learn each gesture - that could change from one interface to another. And I suddenly realized: Palms, PDA and Pocket PC already used mouse free interfaces, and sometimes even keyboard free. I have a Palm Zire 71 (old school nearly) and I remember learning to write with the pen and learning all the shortcuts wasn’t easy. I always had to open the reminder application to remember how the gesture should be done (and sometimes I just couldn’t reproduce it). As a result: I notice that I type faster with a keyboard then doing all kind of gesture that approach in a very poor way handwriting (I write so bad on paper, I don’t know how teachers do to correct my essays or even read theme). Then I thought, but palms are not the only devices that are mouse free, we have mobile phones and tablet PCs. And I remembered when I was teenager I used to text message a lot, so much that I could type a text message faster then on a regular keyboard (I used to take class notes on my cellphone). But today I type faster on a keyboard then on a mobile phone, I think it’s a meter of training and practice - and a cellphone keyboard and a computer keyboard are quite similar in concept: keys pressed to reach a symbol. Then I thought on video games, they do not use keyboards… Well somehow, yes, they are. We press the control buttons to make an action/movement.

And when I was thinking that mouse was the black sheep of Human-Machine interaction (translating a real movement to a screen movement) I realized that I totally ignored a brand new trendy object: Nintendo’s Wiimote: thanks to its accelerometers and to its built in infrared camera you can use it without pressing any buttons. Playing Zelda for instance, you just need to grab your Wiimote like a sword and your Nunchuck as a shield . In Wii Sports, you play box like if it was for real. Those gestures are way more easy then the old school key combinations (like for instance Up - Up - Left - A - Right - L1 - L2 - Left - R1 - A - Start - Select - Down - X - O - A - B - R2 - L1 so you can jump backwards).

PS: No buttons were pressed during the footage of this video.

I don’t think that Don’t Click It is a bad research, I agree that it’s interesting for future technologies to think what are the possible solutions to avoid to use the present devices and standards. Some researches might get us more practical solutions then just moving the problems. I’m thinking on mind controlled computers.

A little word about ecology and eco-participation…

I was looking for cartoons and series that I used to watch when I was a kid. And I realized something. Some of the cartoons I used to watch had a strong message.

I am thinking on Captain Planet.

I loved that cartoon… And now I’m realizing that there is nearly 20 years that people warn us about the harmful activities done by mankind.

Here is Captain Planet’s intro:

Note that 4 continents out of 6 are represented by characters, Antarctica being unoccupied and global politics required to put USSR instead of Oceania.

This cartoon clearly shows us that we did harm nature but we have to concentrate all our strength to protect Earth, and this independently of the political point of vie. I think the discussion was lunched long time ago but the due attention is starting to be given by international community. Well at least this cartoon was useful for something (I heard many times my parents say “stop watching TV and go do your homework” they were right :p ops).

So let’s try to pay a little more attention on our impact on ecosystem.

Like this our successors will watch Pingu and understand why everything is white and what are those strange creatures… :p

Bonus, some of the cartoons I used to watch:

[youtbe=http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=9z3IsXWX4xU]

For now… That’s all folks…

I’ve decided to write this post in order to try to give an answer to Eggshell Robotic question “Tesseract / Hypercube - Mechanical Possible?“… The main reason to make a post on my blog rather then making a comment on Eggshell Robotic’s post is mainly the fact that I wrote a lot… and I use images and links… so here it is :

A hypercube is basically 8 cubes organized using the same logic as we use to build a square (2 dimensions) with strokes (1 dimension), and to build a cube (3 dimensions) with squares (2 dimensions)… We take the first cube, join its 6 faces with one face of 6 other cubes… then we go to the 4th dimension by joining all faces that are next to each other… The 8th cube is used to close the hypervolume…

It might be easier to explain it comparing to the cube construction… We have 6 squares (2D) we take one to use as center. We join 4 other squares around the one in the center… (still in 2D)… Now we rotate the 4 new squares to the upper dimension in order to link theme (now we are in 3D) but the cube is not closed, therefore we have a 6th square to close the missing face of the cube… Here is a site showing part of the process.

Now… Imagine a creature that has a 2D perception of the world…. He can only move in 2 dimensions. Now let’s imagine that one of those 2D perceptive creatures live on one of those 4 faces that will rotate to the third dimension of our future cube… When we add his world (the square) to the rest of the cube path, our dear creature will see a huge augmentation in his world… Imagine, in an imperceptible laps of time he sees his world size multiplied by 5 (scientists would get crazy!)… But when we build the 3rd dimension by rotating the cube faces, the creature will see his world size become 5 times smaller and it will not be able to have a perception of the rest of the cube (scientists get crazy again and then they will start research and they will create some hyperspace theory advancing the 3rd dimension)… In fact this creature can’t build a cube… Because he lives in a 2D world (and a cube is, by definition in 3D)… so even if he gets to build a cube, he will only see a bi-dimensional section of it… and he will observe that the rest of the material used to build the cube just “disappears”…

With us it works the same… We have a 3d perception (for spacial dimensions, the 4th being time - or the ability to percept the changes of our space)… If we want to build a hypercube we need 4 spacial dimensions (plus time)… So we could build an hypercube but we won’t be able to see it in its totality… We only see a 3D projection of the hypercube…

What we see in this animation is a hypercube that remains still in our 3 dimensions and that is manipulated in the 4th dimension… To have that resultant movement, we have to be able to manipulate the 4th dimension of the hypercube, if we suppose that we reach to build a hypercube, we would be able to manipulate the 4th dimension… To do so, we need hyper dimensional engines… Really complicated (in my eyes…)

But what forbids us to inspire ourselves with the hypercube transformations to find new ways to move? Nearly nothing (except the physical constraints and costs)… To be honest I like the idea presented in Eggshell Robotic… And who knows, maybe sometime in the future we don’t play hyper-rubicube?

Here I am, back home again, in Aix en Provence, after a two week trip to the Netherlands. In a future post, I’ll be giving more details about the 12th edition of Sonic Acts. I’ll also present Yolande Harris, English artist in residence at the Montevideo institute in collaboration with the STEIM (STudio for Electro-Instrumental Music, located in Amsterdam), working with sound.

Coming week, in the Aix en Provence School of Art, we will have Sonotorium, 3 days with conferences about sound and art.

The first day, February the 25th, Jean-Paul Ponthot, headmaster of the Aix en Provence School of Art, will present “Idéologie du bruit” (Ideology of noise). Then Bastien Gallet will held “Le son et ses dehors” (Sound and its outsides). Finally, Christina Kubisch programmed a sound projection.

The 26th, Alexandre Castant will start with “Le son, l’image et son double” (Sound, image and its double). Jerome Hansen will continue with ““Le problème d’image“ des arts sonores, une généalogie en trois zones de contacts” (The sound art “image problem“, a genealogy in three contact zones). We’ll finish the day with Kaffe Matthews‘ performance.

The last day, February the 27th, will start with “La forme comme traversée” (The shape as crossing) presented by Christophe Kihm. The next conference will be “Son et déraison” (Sound and unreason) by David Zerbib. To enclose the conference week, we will watch Philippe Franck’s selection of films:

“Luc Ferrari face à sa tautologie, 2 jours avant la fin” (2006, 52min) by Guy-Marc Hinant and Dominique Lohlée;

“The movement of people working” (2003) by Phill Niblock.

This morning was marked by two conferences and a performance in De Bali.

The first conference “The Diorama Revisited”, presented by Erkki Huhtamo, treated about Diorama and many “ama” ending words (like panorama, diaporama, futurama…) history.

You can find here videos from the performance “Digit”, done by Julien Maire, where Maire printes sentences passing his finger over white paper. He uses the words as lines to draw.

The third morning conference was a round table about yesterday’s drone performance. The participants were with Stephen O’Malley, Joachim Nordwall and CM von Hausswolff, moderated by Mike Harding.

The afternoon started with the conference “INTERACTIVITY AND IMMERSION” held by Jeffrey Shaw and Marnix de Nijs.

Jeffrey Shaw presented different technologies to produce images providing an immersion experience and the ways to interact with this devices. He mainly focus his conference around the iCinema center. He presented Cave immersion (projections on the wall, roof and floor) and cylinder immersion environment (the viewer is in the center of a cylinder, the images are projected on the cylinder wall’s) and spherical modular video cameras (cameras that films 360°).

Marnix de Ni presented some of his works:

Exercise in immersion is a 3D immersion experience game where the user wares a suit to travel inside a virtual world superimposed over the real space. The player is free to move around, interactivity is controlled by it’s movements.

Beijing accelerator is an interactive installation with a rotating video projection. The viewer sits on a rotating chair with a joystick (that controls the chair rotation). The objective is to syncronize the chair with the image.

Run motherfucker run is an interactive installation inviting the visitor to run within one of the 25 scenes mostly shot at night in the Rotterdam area. The device, a roller carpet, tends to slow you down by increasing running resistance. This piece is about adrenaline and the expirience of speed.

You can find this post http://www.sonicacts.com/wordpress/?p=109 too.

Today, February the 21st 2008, was the opening night for the 12th edition of the Sonic Acts Festival, in Amsterdam - Netherlands. The festival takes place in 4 different localizations: the Netherlands’ Media Art Institute, also known as Montevideo; the Melkweg, the Paradiso and the De Balie.

The night started at Montevideo, where we could enjoy the exhibition opening. In there, we can see the instalations from Ulf Langheinrich (Soil - 2005 - and OSC - 2006)

Julien Maire (Low Resolution Cinema - 2005 - and Exploding Camera - 2007)

Boris Debackere (probe)

and Kurt Hentschläger (Scape - 2007).

After that, in De Bali, we could watch Stan Brakhage’s film Dog Star Man (1961-1964,73’00), in parallel we could experience the live performance done by the Drone People(Joachim Nordwall, Mika Vainio, Hildur Gudnadöttir, C. Spencer Yeh, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Stephen O’Malley and BJ Nilsen). The live performance is a 4 hours succession of individual performances. No rules were defined except to be alone on the stage and to end like the beginning.

Post done for the festival, you can see it here

Coming weeks, I will be following as a volunteer blogger the 12th edition of the Sonicacts festival… I’ll be publishing posts here in my blog and in the festival’s site.

With the development of technology, touch interface became fashion in today’s geek society.Jonny Lee (previously quoted in this post) developed his own multi touch device using a Wiimote, here is a video explaining it: Touching tools appear for all kind of things, video games, palmtops, mobile phones, DJ devices, remote controls, cash redraw screens, etc.This technology first appear for a single touching point, but now, we start to see multi touch technology - with more then a single point.Here is a video from a group called iBand using a Nintendo DS and two iPhones as instruments.

The idea is not new, other tools using touch, and multi touch interfaces exist, like Korg’s KaosPad, mini kp and Kaossilator.  Groups of artists also worked with touch as an interface. It is the case for Ractable, the video speaks by itself, so check it out: