ndi

Polar Express Rolls Tonight

The Polar Express: An IMAX 3D Experience is the first full-length feature ever converted into IMAX 3D. Experience the magic beginning November in select IMAX, IMAX Dome and IMAX 3D Theatres on screens up to eight stories tall with 12,000 watts of digital surround sound.

“..the best 3-D viewing experience I've ever had. If there's a choice, try the IMAX version. Or go twice. This is a movie that doesn't wear out.” -Roger Ebert

Surveillance

Download class presentation here.

First, Meet Mark

Noah Shachtman: Big Brother Gets A Brain

Chicago to install 2,250 cameras

Hille Koskela: “Cam Era - The Contemporary Urban Panopticon”

“Surveillance-and-Society”: This is an outstanding online journal with the latest in academically-oriented surveillance research. The link here is to their “Politics of CCTV” [closed circuit television] issue, the introduction to which you might profitably skim. I have not read all of this, of course, but I did find “Webcams, TV Shows and Mobile phones: Empowering Exhibitionism” to be very good.

Face Recognition Technology

Surveillance Camera Players

iSee

Sousveillance is the inverse of surveillance, seeking to return the power of the panoptic gaze to the individual who in turn watchful eyes “from below.” [Think of the Rodney King video in which the subjects of the power gaze looked back and recorded.] List of of inverse surveillance issues.

Sousveillance Blog

Danny Goodwin: “Aerial Auto-Surveillance” [As part of my most recent photographic and video installation work, I have constructed models of the homes of some members of the current Bush administration. Derived from satellite imagery, the models are far from accurate, but represent a flat-footed and frustrated attempt to invert the lens of the surveillance apparatus.] Artist's Statement

Rhizome has a long list of surveillance art. I tried to peek at the code and copy the links here, but it's not possible. You'll have to find them for yourself, perhaps becoming a member, or visiting on their “free day.”

Foucault's original writing on Panopticism is valuable reading. Please review if even if you don't give it a good study. This is the original theory from a master theorist.

Testers Needed!

For my final project I've been working on concept I call a "star walk" which involves GPS navigation and night photography.  If anyone is interested in trying out a star walk, visit my blog, Somnambulus, then go to the star walks section, and give it a shot.  Instructions are on the site.

        -Tom K. 

For Friday: Cut-and-Paste

Listen to this as soon as you can: Creative Remix

Lasica: Excerpts from intro to “Darknet”

Sam Howard-Spink:“ ”Grey Tuesday, online cultural activism and the mash-up of music and politics“

Mash-Up [The Free Dictionary]

Bastard Pop [Wikipedia]

Mash Up Radio

Free Culture Manifesto [National Student Coalition]

Sample the Future

Bootleg Culture

Mash-Up Revolution

”Night of the Living Dead“ Re-mix

Copy-Art

Media Trips: A Blog About Re-mix

Negativland: ”The Mashin' of the Christ“

Illegal Art

David Bollier: ”Silent Theft“ [Introduction, on copyright]

Lawrence Lessig: Free Culture [audio, powerpoint or text]

Barbie-in-a-Blender

Downhill Battle Flyer Campaign

Gray Tuesday

Wired Magazine on Gray Tuesday

Creative Commons [Page on Images]

Negativland: ”Changing Copyright“

Stay Free's Illegal Art Compilation CD: Notes, plus BitTorrent address

DJ Spooky: Short essay on his remix of DW Griffith's ”Birth of A Nation“

Class Presentations For Review

Wireless
We the Media
Geo-location
Hypermediacy
Future Cinema
Echo Boomers

Cody Brown on Video Games: For Monday, Nov. 1

Assignment:

1) Read: Clive Thompson's “Online video games are the newest form of social comment” (Cheesy source, but the author is reputable.)

2) Play:
New York Defender
Al Quaidamon
The Suicide Bomber Game

3) Read: Shuen-shing Lee's “I lose, Therefore I Think”

4) Familiarize yourself with the Videogames with an Agenda exhibit.

5) Play:
The Howard Dean for Iowa Game
Vigilance 1.0,
September 12th: A Toy World

6) Print this pdf and bring it to class.

All of this should take you an 60 to 90 minutes [Quoth The Ratchet: yeah, good luck]...plus it should really tick off your roommates when you're playing these games and get to call it homework.

Daily Links (All Syndicate-able):
Avant Gaming
Antifactory
Buzzcut
Gamasutra
Game Girl Advance
Grand Text Auto
Habitat Chronicles
Ludology.org
Ludonauts
Memory Card
Reality Panic
Select Parks
Terra Nova
The Ludologist
Water Cooler Games

The Books:
Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals
First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game Homo Ludens
Man, Play, and Games
Hamlet on the Holodeck
The Language of New Media
Understanding Comics
The Ultimate History of Video Games
High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games

Net.art for Friday, Oct. 29

Net.art is the term for artists and other who have used the Internet as a locus for creative projects. There is actually a long history for this work dating back to the 1980's. Our class will only allow an overview of this field, but I'm nonetheless including a number of links that you can follow if you develop a deeper interest in this work.

Assignment:
> Please read: Rachael Greene: “Web Work” in PDF
> The overview in Wikipedia
> And explore: Histories of Internet Art, particularly net practice, where you should work through their categories [ambient zones to not.art] until you have a sense of what they mean.

There are several excellent places start:

Books:
Rachael Greene: Internet Art [And see here link list below.]
Michael Rush: New Media in Late 20th Century Art

Regular Stops, Aggregators:
Rhizome is a must stop. You can become a member of next to nothing, or visit for free during the week.
Net Art Review
NewsGrist

Leading museums with digital art portals:
WAC | New Media Initiatives | Gallery 9
Guggenheim Museum
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
MoMA | The Museum of Modern Art, New York
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Slade Museum/London

Major Exhibition/Publication Sites
ARS Electronica
Dia Art Center
E Y E B E A M
ZKM | Center for Art and Media

Links To Artworks:
Links by Rachael Greene to accompany her book.
Rhizome [Above]
Whitney ArtPort [Cool]
Stephen Wilson's monster link list.

Magazines:
Mute

Indie Cinema in the Digital Era: For Oct. 27

Digital cinema has opened a big door to indie producers. Today you can buy a camera for $4k that a few years ago cost ten times that much. And you can edit a feature film on your laptop with the same software that students use today at Carleton. But it's not just cost, it's also new forms and new opportunities for exhibition. Some examples below:

New Tools:
DV-it-yourself
Joel and Ethan Coen edit feature on same software students use in Carleton's “Introduction to Video Production”

New forms:
World's Smallest Film Festival And their Screening Room. [Competitive digital content for mobile phones and PDA's]
One Minute Film & Video Festival
Office Voodoo is an example of a new “algorhithmic cinema.” Unfortunately you can't see it in action on this site, but you can read a short description that gives you an idea of what it is. And see a very good movie about the project. May well belong in the “Future Cinema” category. Interface invites viewers to create and manipulate content. One-page description for SIGGRAPH.

Article on how online exhibition is changing indie film:
Jason Silverman: “Online Festivals Nurture Film” [Wired]

Major portals for exhibiting digital cinema:
iFilm
Atom Films
Amaze Films
FilmWatcher
Undergroundfilm
Triggerstreet
[If you have favorites in this category, let me know.]

An important fiction film reflecting a realtime esthetic and digital video logic:
“Timecode” [2000], Directed by Mike Figgis
Review in “Sight and Sound”
Commentary in “Senses of Cinema”
Interview with Mike Figgis

“Tarnation,” Jonathan Caouette's classic small indie film edited on iMovie
Caouette Interview
Official Site

National Festival of Indie Digital Cinema: Resfest
Sundance Online Film Festival
Slamdance [An alternative to Sundance]
Studentfilms

anyone want a coder?

Hi,

I'm a fairly competent computer programmer with some experience writing dynamic web pages and data analysis, image manipulation, networking, and basic (2-d) graphical programs (in Perl, Java, C, and Shell, if those mean anything to you). I have several ideas for a final project, but I'm not really compelled by any of them yet. So if you have a cool idea but are in need of someone to do grunt work (as well as possibly help with ideas ^^), feel free to pitch your idea to me.

AIM: ferret taskforce
email: smitht@carleton.edu

--thomas smith.

Big Project Topics

Tom Kettenmann: deviantart.com
James Vivian: iPod universe
Ben Sowell: Northfield locative media project using photos [tentative]
Ebony Winston: Video Blogging

Digital EFX in Cinema

Sorry to miss class Friday. Trustee meeting times moved around so that my presentation on the future of the arts at Carleton came during our class period.

Here are some interesting new things on Robert Zemekis' "Polar Express" that speak directly to digitization and special effects. I have pulled them together in a PDF in anticipation of links going stale, but they're new this week, so I am sure you will find them. By the way, it would be an interesting project to pull together materials on digital cinema, particularly digging through some of the cinema tech mags and other resources to create an in-depth exploration of the whys and how tos.

But here's a proposal: what if I buy us all tickets to see this at its opening as an IMAX 3D film? I'd love to go as a group. Let's be sure to talk about this Monday. I'll try to find out when tickets are available in this number. I'll be looking for a commitment from you if you opt to go. But how could you miss this?

New York Times
Newsweek
Polar Express Movie Website
Trailer

And then there is Graham Robertson's Able Edwards. "Using 40 Hours of Mini-DV tape and a Canon XL1 in weekend shoots over the summer, Robertson and co-producer Scott Bailey created a story of scientists who clone a cryogenically-frozen entertainment mogul in an attempt to revive the glory days of an economically-challenged space colony."

Del.icio.us Links: NDI

I'm starting to put things up on our Del.iciou.us links tagged "ndi." Once I have sense of your research and project interests, I'll send things along as I find them. I've decided to post them all here, rather than send them individually. That way, you'll all have some things to look at and consider. Why don't you do the same thing, too. Let's get these links jangling. And be sure to download them through RSS into your newsreader. [Del.icio.us NDI]

Syllabus For Remainder of the Class

Wed., Oct. 20: Wireless

Fri., Oct. 22: Digital Cinema

Sean Cubitt: Digital Filming and Special Effects [e-reserves]
Michael Allen: Impact of Digital Technologies on Film Aesthetics [e-reserves]
Lev Manovich: Image After "The Matrix" [Word doc]
Speaking of Lev Manovich, one of the leading theorists of new media today, I am including here a link to my own informal reading notes of his major "Theory of New Media." It's just not possible to read this book, but if you would like to discuss some of the ideas gleaned from this outline, we can. Please read through this over the next days.

Mon., Oct. 25: Indie Cinema

Wed., Oct. 27: Future Cinema

Fri., Oct. 29: Net Art

Mon., Nov. 1: Videogame Theory

Wed., Nov. 3: Exam

Fri., Nov. 5: Open

Mon., Nov. 8: Surveillance

Wed., Nov. 10: Surveillance

Fri., Nov. 12: Surveillance

Mon., Nov. 15: Projects

Wed., Nov. 17: Projects

Assignment for Friday, Oct. 15: Hypermediation, Flow & Screen Culture

Download presentation for this class in PDF.

As life increasingly is absorbed into a landscape of screens, our critical paradigms need to change. We are no longer in a world of discrete media objects, so much as pervasive screen environment where a topic like Iraq is refracted through advertising, news, fiction, and parody, genres which echo, ramify and influence one another. Medium specificity is melting away. At the same time, our screens host multiple forms at once: ticker news along the bottom, graphics, live hosts, moving image boxes: a real explosion of constantly transforming and mutually-reinforcing modalities. It's this new image world that we'll explore today, by considering three key ideas: hypermediation, flow, and the multi-form screen.

Please reading carefully the following for class on Friday:

Robert Schrag: Invasion of the Screen People. A good, short overview.

This new Eyetrack study has the latest word on how we actually look at our new multi-form screens. Read a summary of the findings here and here...and explore the site. This is particularly illuminating, and surprising.

Here's a cheat sheet to the four central terms in David Bolter's Redmediation, from which we'll be reading.

After reviewing the terms above, dig into David Bolter's Remediation. It's on e-Reserves in the Library. Read sections on Television, Web, Ubiquitous Computing and Convergence. [And the other chapters, if you're interested.] This is the key reading for today.

Here's a light, journalistic article on the competition between networks to have the hottest onscreen sports displays.

Webnote is Hot

Try this, and be sure to write and save. Here's how.

test

Test blog

Micro-Radio Conference

Here's info on the Micro-Radio Conference and associated events. I talked with the curator and the artist doing this project today. Unfortunately, they will not reserve spots in their workshop, primarily because they want to be fair to people who may be coming from out of town. So we are free to register on the day of the conference, first come, first in. I'm still planning to go, but can't arrange for reservations.

Mapping Project

With the advent of wireless, GPS [Graphic Position Systems], and other technologies, new ways of imagining and understanding place are emerging. We are going to undertake a project exploring location-aware [or "locative"} media and mapping. To get started, please read through these two excellent introductions to mapping.

The first chapter from Michael Wood's "Seeing Through Maps" is one of the best available introductions to the philosophy of mapping. It's an inspiring and mind-expanding read. [Download PDF]

Anna Oliver's "The Use of Maps in Contemporary Art" also provides both foundational ideas, along with encouragement to think of maps in personal, conceptual ways.

Below you will find a mix of sites that speak to mapping, locative media projects, geo-position and photography, and the like. Expect the list to change and grow over the next several days. You're welcome to suggest additions as you discover them, of course.

World-Wide Media eXchange: WWMX
An Atlas of Cyberspaces- Historical Maps
Information in places
Theorizing the Radical Potential of Location-Aware Mobiles
del.icio.us/tag/locative
headmap
Transmutable: 93 Photo Street Screen Shots
Geocaching - The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site
the Degree Confluence Project
Multimedia Mapping Software - MediaMapper
Amsterdam Real Time - Waag Society
plazes.beta
IN-duce: DE-duce
MapMemo
HappySnapper
Steve Dietz' Links to Locative Media
Wikipedia: Map
Wikipedia: Psychogeography
Wikipedia: Cartography
GPS PhotoLinker [Software]
TopoZone

indymedia excitement

Scary things.

According to Slashdot and indymedia.org, some Indymedia hard drives and maybe computers were seized by UK authorities at the request of the FBI this morning. Here is the Indymedia thread about it. One theory is that it was about links posted to this story in the UK Guardian about the Bush family and connection to Nazi financiers. But that doesn't seem likely to me... why not try to get the Guardian to take it down instead? There are other theories in the thread above.

Crazy...

So yeah, I thought I'd post about this because I just found out and we were mentioning indymedia just Wednesday.

Update: a link to a Wired story from Sept 1st, about the Secret Service talking with Indymedia..possibly a connection. here. The link to the Guardian thing sounds like it's definitely not it... it was only mentioned in one post on the indymedia center web site. I was so surprised by it, though, that it stood out. Blar.

Here's an entry in Wikipedia about Indymedia.

-thomas smith

We the Media Outline Thursday Evening

Here's the outline [html] or [Word document] with your contributions as of 8.30 PM. Let's get them all in. See you tomorrow. Pluse some other things below of interst. Browsing and searching for licensed photos at Flickr

Click "Sagem" at this site for a 30-second film about nomadicity, visual language and globalism.

Talk by Lawrence Lessig at a conference this week--MP3 version. Everyone's main man on copyright.

We the Media Outline Project: Due Thursday and Friday

Yet another way to be collaborative. Since We the Media is such an important new book, let's work together to make an outline of it. It's easy. The book has 12 chapters, and the class has 13 people. I'm assigning a chapter to each person, and letting James Vivian off the hook this time, since he has done some valuable organizing on our first photo project. We'll get him in the future.

We will each read a chapter in a format that easily allows drag-and-drop text, something the PDF version I linked to earlier doesn't do. As you read your chapter--and most are just 20-30 pages--simply drag-and-drop the key theoretical formulations into a Microsoft Word document. Use your own judgment about what is important, but generally leave out the narrative parts, the extended discussions of specific cases, etc. Let's try to collect the key insights. And pull them all together into our own version of New Digital Image Cliff Notes.

I'll be happy to pull them together, format and then distribute to the class.

I have done the Preface, a chapter and the conclusion to the book, which you can download here. Notice that I put an ellipsis at the end of each complete section. Like this: [...] I put my own into Verdana typeface at 10 point with a Chapter title in bold.

You'll see this is way easy, thanks to drag-and-drop. How about having them done by Thursday at 5 PM. I'll pull them together and distribute them immediately. And we can read and discuss them in class Friday.

Brown 1
Evans 3
Gorman 4
Hsu 5
Kettenmann 6
Kochan 7
Miles 8
Slabaugh 9
Smith 10
Sowell 11

Here's the link to a source for this book that you can drag-and-drop into Word.

And here's a download of the We Media diagrams we discussed in class.

We the Media: Assignment for Wed., Oct. 6 & Fri., Oct. 8

Below are links to four key chapters from Dan Gillmor's "We the Media." This is a much talked-about book these days, getting reviews and good comments everywhere. Let's read as much of this for Wednesday as you can, and all for Friday.

Chapter 1: From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond
Chapter 2: The Read-Write Web
Chapter 7: The Former Audience Joins the Party
Chapter 12 [Conclusion]: Making Our Own News

Link to the full page of downloads, and to the blog for the book.

Spinblogging

I've noticed in the process of immersing myself in the blogosphere, that there seems to be a trend for bloggers to take mass media news events and spin or re-spin them in their blogs. It's an interesting jump from the huge powerful corporate and political entities spinning the latest turn of events to put them in the most favorable light possible to individuals spinning for their own sake--either for their own agenda, to try and uphold what they think is the truthful or just, or another one of the myriad reasons an individual tries to reauthor a text. Like to shamelessly plug their own blogs, for example.

-James Vivian

Life Caching [Assignment for Monday, Oct. 4]

The image here is of the camera that Vannevar [sounds like "beaver"] Bush imagined for his Memex [see below]. It's the first intimation of life caching, an idea explored in the projects and writing below.

"Human beings have always been interested in personal media capture to sample and archive their experiences. The technology to support this endeavor has progressed from diaries and painting, through pocket cameras, to the current era where capture is digital, and sound and image recording can be supplemented with such data as temperature, heart rate, location, web pages visited, compute/device usage logs, etc. A large proportion of multimedia research has focused on the representation, archival and transmission of media related to isolated events – single / groups of images of a party, a video of a graduation ceremony etc. This workshop will focus on an emerging area of research that deals with the continuous archival and retrieval of all media relating to personal experiences. The continuous archival paradigm fundamentally alters our relationship to biological memory, since analysis of such media powerfully augments human memory. Personal storage of all one's media throughout a lifetime has been desired and discussed since at least 1945, when Vannevar Bush published As We May Think, positing the “Memex” device “in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” His vision was astonishingly broad for the time, including full-text search, annotations, hyperlinks, virtually unlimited storage and even stereo cameras mounted on eyeglasses. In 2004, storage, sensor, and computing technology have progressed to the point of making Memex feasible and even affordable. Indeed, we can now look beyond Memex at new possibilities." [CARPE 2004]

Read and explore the following material for class Monday:

Point. Shoot. Kiss It Good-Bye

Trendwatching: "Life Caching"

MyLifeBits Project

MyLifeBits PowerPoint in PDF

Lifeblog by Nokia

Removable Media For Our Minds

This Is Your Life [SenseCam]

SenseCam Personal Image & Data Recall

What Was I Thinking?

Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences [Columbia University]

Steve Mann: Wearable Computing: A First Step Toward Personal Imaging

RAW - An Audio/Photographic Tool

Jim Lewis: Memory Overload [Brief]

V. Bush: As We May Think [1 page excerpt]

Donald Norman: The Teddy, 1992

LifeLog

Pentagon Revives Memory Project [Of Darpa's LifeLog project, above]

Word and Image in Multimedia

Remember our talk about hypertext? And particularly word and image? He's an excellent new overview of perspectives and sites. It's absolutely up to the minute...the definitive introduction to this work. But it's more than that, it's a series of links to major presenters of new media.

Thomas Swiss, et al: "Word and Image in New Media Literature"

Flickr Stuff, and Spectropolis

For Mac users with iPhoto, there is a new Flickr/iPhoto utility out.

Everyone's Talking About Flickr, including here.

Fliction.

Best single source to put in your newsreader about picture-phoning.

The sleeping slideshow.

Wouldn't we like to be in NYC for Spectropolis this weekend. It's all about locative media and the city. You may find exploring this site will give you some ideas for mobile phone audio blogging. Like following a stranger for 24 hours.

non-drm copy of assigned reading

Hi all,

It annoyed me that I wasn't allowed to print out the assigned reading, so I converted it to postscript and back again and the resulting printable pdf is here. Of course, none of you are going to sell copies of this on the black market, right? I'll try and remember to take the pdf down in a few weeks.

Have fun!
-thomas smith

Globalization Assignment: Due Friday, Oct. 1

1. Required Reading: From Lisa Cartright and Marita Sturken's "Practices of Looking": Chapter 9, "The Global Flow of Visual Culture"―Available here in PDF.

2. Resource: My lecture materials in PDF form for Manuel Castells' "Rise of the Information Age" and Thomas Friedman's "Lexus and the Olive Tree."

3. Assignment for Friday: From among the resources below [or using other similar ones that you may know or discover] identify a website [or two or three] and write a theoretically informed paper of no more than a single page, double-spaced, on the ways in which it utilizes new media forms. In the links below you will find a host of links to interesting sites. [You should be able to write this without having fully absorbed reading #1 above...but do plan to read it in the near future.] Turn in your essay by posting it to your own blog, or linking to this assignment page with a comment or a trackback.

World Revolution: Indigenous Peoples

Julia Scheeres: "Pics Worth a Thousand Protests" [Wired]

Portal to Indigenous Websites

4. Not required, but a good backgrounder: Peter Lentini: "New Cultural Agendas"

A Quote about Blogs

The funny thing is that Manovich wasn't even directly talking about blogs when he said this in his book.

"What was private became public, What was unique became mass-produced. What was hidden in an individual's mind became shared.

Interactive computer media perfectly fits this trend to externalize and objectify the mind's operations. The very principle of hyperlinking, which forms the basis of interactive media, objectifies the process of association, often taken to be central to human thinking. Mental processes of reflection, problem solving, recall, and association are externalized, equated with following a link, moving to a new page, choosing an image, or a new scene. Before we would look at an image and mentally follow our own private associations to other images. Now interactive computer media asks us instead to click on an image in order to go to another image. Before, we would read a sentence of a story or a line of a poem and think of other lines, images, memories. Now interactive media asks us to click a highlighted sentence to go to another sentence. In short, we are asked to follow a pre-programmed, objectively existing associations. Put differently, in what can be read as an updated version of French philosopher Louis Althusser's "interpellation," we are asked to mistake the structure of somebody's else mind for our own."

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media pg. 61

--August

Prof. Schott News

At the library's e-reserves, the password to get into the materials for this course is: "cams" [stands for Cinema and Media Studies, our department title].

Here's a cool new use of Flickr tags: making lemon pie. This could be adapted in more conceptual ways, too. Hint.

Announcement of the forthcoming magazine, JPG, has a brief manifesto: "They're called "photobloggers" - a sloppy term for sloppy times. [...] JPG Magazine is for photographers like us who fall somewhere in between the strict definitions of "amateur" and "professional." People who, enabled by new technology that makes imagemaking and self-publishing easier than ever, have fallen in love with photography and sought out others with the same passion."

On Photomemeing: I'm having trouble, and wonder if others are too. I have signed up as part of the group, and uploaded my first picture and tagged it "fluid" but it does not appear on the Photomeme page. Can someone help? Anyone else like this?