Ratchet Up

Nostalgia for Spring Street

I lived in New York in a Soho loft all through the 1970's [apart from the clothes, the best of decades], and I still feel half a New Yorker. Now that the streets are alive with the sound of protest, I wish I were there again. The image above, one of my favorites, was found at the Ruckus Society. The picture below on the right is nicked from Jason Kottke's protest picture gallery, mostly because I saw Zhang Yimou's "Hero" last night and it evokes the film's color scheme and preoccupation with billowing silk. Only now in front of Foot Locker the crowd has beaten its swords into pink plush hats. [This is probably the Code Pink group.]

Anyway, there are a number of places showing pictures from the events:

Anti-Bush Banner at the Plaza.

Search for "RNC" tags on Flickr and you get these pictures.

No RNC!: the Official Photoblog of Events Surrounding the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Michael Constantino's Meccapixel. [Via CoolHunting.]

Remember Josh Kinberg preparing his "Bike Agains Bush"? Well, he got arrested when he was demonstrating it to MSNBC and it won't see the light of day for the convention. If you have the Bitorrent client installed [and you should], you can see a movie of his arrest here. And Yuri Gittman, about whom the Village Voice recently did an article? Anybody know how he's doing? [Arrest link via James Vivian.]

New York Times Interactive.

RNC Convention Bloggers, WeSeeRNC, IndyMedia RNC Coverage. [This group via Boing Boing.]

Paper Tiger Television.

Infothela: Pedal Computing in India

"Infothela is a mobile unit meant for providing and exchanging information through fax, internet, telephony etc. It will serve the purpose of education, entertainment, and provide agriculture based information, weather information, health care information, government information, etc.
The idea of designing an infothela is to provide, exchange information at village level where fruits of modern technology have not reached yet. The factor of mobility is of utmost important here as the thela can move from place to place in a day and one or more cluster of villages which are situated 3-4 kms apart in general and thus the thela can provide its services to all those villagers.

The thela will generate a self-employment avenues (just like PCOs) for urban and village population. It is a self-sustaining project aimed to deliver information and spread knowledge among poor masses.

It is basically a pedal driven vehicle just like a common cycle rickshaw and there will be a personal computer on board which will be connected to internet using wireless technology. It is designed keeping in mind the village conditions in the country where electric power is not available all the time. So a pedal generator is designed in such a way that while pedaling, battery will keep on charging for running the on board computers and equipments. The battery power pack for Infothela has been developed.

It is also designed to accommodate diagnostic equipments like blood pressure testing machine, blood sugar testing machine, and some other primary health diagnostic and testing equipments."

[Infothela]
[USA Today]

Is Your Avatar Having End-of-Summer Clothing Blahs?

If so...

Perhaps you should consider the new fashion line by London's real-world design heavy, Mrs. Jones. They have developed a full couture line for female avatars.

Check out their Digital Couture in the mostly-sensible warm-weather "Love, Set & Match" look. With sizes for big girls, too.

Or if you want to rev up the autumn tiger in you, consider their Street Fashion line.

Purrrrr.

And European girls today?

• 20 percent of mobile users send snaps of themselves in new outfits to friends to see if they like them.
• 18 per cent take pictures of shoes or clothes on display for the same reason.
• 5 per cent take pictures of snappy dressers that they see on the high street to copy their style.
• 15 per cent frequently pull out their camera-phones to photograph the sides and backs of their hair,
• 10 per cent use their camera-phones as a mirror to check their make-up.
• 4 per cent even resort to getting the phone out in the middle of a restaurant after dinner - to check their teeth.
• More than 20 per cent use their phone to capture details of a new property, and 15 per cent send pictures of new furnishings to partners to get their opinions.

[Via Cool Hunting & Picturephoning]]

Artist's Statement No. 45,730,944

The Full 360

If you've hung around the Ratchet much, you'll know I'm fond of 360-degree images. They're a picture form unique to the video screen and can look gorgeous with the rear illumination that monitors offer.

In case you haven't looked into how 360's are made, they're mostly created with a camera directed at a spheroid mirror reflecting the surrounding environment. The camera on the right is a typical outfit. The resulting image is then encoded and played back as a Quicktime VR, a special program just for this purpose. They produce a big image file and typically play best on a high speed connection.
I'm always surprised to discover that often people don't realize you can do more than just rotate the on-screen Quicktime VR image. The controls at the bottom of the frame allow you to pan up and down, and zoom in and out. [I always check to see if I can find the tripod of the camera--or even some sign of the photographer--by panning down as far as possible.]

The camera rig on the left is a new way of creating a 360 using multiple Cannon S60 cameras. The individual images are "stitched" together digitally. I have not read any commentary on its advantages, but it seems as though you would get a lot more pixels using multiple image sensors.

You can check out some pictures made by this new Kaidan EventCam at the Democratic Convention. They were taken by photographer Chris Ramiriz and published in the New York Times.

Ohio Does It! ::: 9/11 Tribute ::: We Love Hillary

[Kaidan Company]

Eavesdropping on Pennsylvania Station

[Audio by Jad Abumrad at Radio Lab]

Junior's TV: But What Goes In The Slot?

Magic Bike: Yuri Gitman's Mobile Wireless Hotspot

"Magicbike is a mobile WiFi (wireless Internet) hotspot that gives free Internet connectivity wherever its ridden or parked. By turning a common bicycle into a wireless hotspot, Magicbike explores new delivery and use strategies for wireless networks and modern-day urbanites. Wireless bicycles disappear into the urban fabric and bring Internet to yet unserved spaces and communities. Mixing public art with techno-activism, Magicbikes are perfect for setting up adhoc Internet connectivity for art and culture events, emergency access, public demonstrations, and communities on the struggling end of the digital-divide. [...] Magicbike aims to weave wireless infrastructures into an existing mobile and socially active cultural fabric, bicycle culture. [...] Magicbike turns common bicycles into WiFi hotspots. The end effect creates bicycles that broadcast free WiFi connectivity to their proximity. The technology behind this is not complex. Magicbike is simply a creative configuration, or reconfiguration, of widely available computer, bicycle, and WiFi gear. WiFi antennas mounted on the bike's frame feed into a laptop embedded into a specially outfitted bicycle side-bag. The bike's embedded laptop is configured to be a wireless repeater and hotspot. The bike receives its uplink connection either from the cellular network or from far-off WiFi hotspots (with the help of its mounted antennas). With this uplink connection from any one of various sources, the bike is able to serve-up its own Internet connection. [...] Wireless bikes are a tacitly surrealistic Ready-made that playfully reframe our assumptions about the interplay of technology and art. The tradition of Ready-made objects in modern art is credited to start with Marcel Duchamp’s “Roue de Bicyclette” or “Bicycle Wheel,” his first "Ready-made.""

[Magic Bike]

Typographic Sprawl

Here's a very nice experimental font from Belgian designer Brecht Cuppens. It renders individual letters into graphic maps shaped by the density of topographic elements like plots of land and roads. The cool thing is the way he got them to fit together so that you can spell out an entire landscape. The scale of this font is necessarily large, so I have simply typed "RU" in the example above. Download the font and write your yourself into the Belgian countryside.

[Sparwl]
[Download the font in .ttf format here]
[Via Eyebeam reBlog]

Open Source Media Project

My nose is twitching at what looks like the way early start of something big. If you want to figure out what it is by exploring a diagram of the idea, start here. Otherwise, loop back and check this out when you're done with this post.

J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter have begun collaborating on a big vision for what they are calling an Open Source Media Project. The idea is to create a massive repository of personal media. 'Unlike other initiatives that are pure-play stand-alone Web sites, Open Media's vision is to bring personal media to millions of desktops through playlists, video jukeboxes, visual albums, and built-in media libraries" is how J.D. Lascia puts it. And this is his mission statement:

"We are in the midst of the greatest boon in grassroots creativity in ages. Tools once available only to a professional elite are now being taken up by everyday citizens. Just as weblogs brought millions of people into the media ecosystem, so too are new tools empowering individuals to create video, audio, playlists, and other works of personal media and to share them with a global audience.

The personal media revolution is turning visual. Digital stories, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, fan films, Flash animations, student films, parodies of Hollywood films — all kinds of short multimedia works have begun to flower. Alas, the most compelling ones are scattered across the Web or hidden away on thousands of PCs, laptops and closed networks. These works deserve a wider audience.

Open-Media.org is an open source media project that seeks to expose, preserve, and advance works of grassroots creativity (chiefly, but not limited to, amateur video). Individuals, communities and organizations have begun telling digital stories that enthrall, entertain and often move audiences to take positive action. Plain text or the cool detachment of "objective" media do not come close to matching the emotional power of multimedia stories laced with personal narrative.

Open Media is three things in one:

• an open-source platform to bring personal media to the desktop;

• a destination Web site, to launch soon at www.open-media.org;

• eventually, it will evolve into a not-for-profit organization dedicated to advancing amateur, hobbyist, and semi-professional visual works licensed under a Creative Commons license."

Marc Canter elaborates:

"Open-Media.org which would enable folks to access the HUGE repositories of public domain and Creative Commons content - that's out there.

And to help build our own huge repository of CC content.

First we'll start off with upload sites - which will enable folks to start getting their stuff into the 'archives'. Then we'll provide Jukeboxes and Image Albums (much like what's in the gutter of my blog) that have built into them these huge repositories.

Bascially we're making sure to make it REAL easy for folks to utilize media in their everyday lives, school and work.

The idea is that common APIs and Schemas get established that are then supported by the notion of a 'personal media server'. This code gets baked into all sorts of existing platforms, devices, etc. - while also being given away - in multiple languages.

We'll make sure that these 'media servers' are supported by several major, large scale systems - and then sprinkle the pixie dust to the wind - and see where it lands."

If you're interested to see how this develops, check out Lasica's site, Canter's site, or join their wiki by contacting one of them.