The Virtual State of Jefferson

The Virtual State of Jefferson (above) by Ethan Miller and myself is being included in an upcoming show at Southern Oregon University's Schneider Museum of Art.

The State of Jefferson is a proposed 51st state that would be carved out of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Many residents of this region feel alienated from the rest of their state and see the movement either as a tongue-in-cheek protest or a serious libertarian movement towards self-determination.

The Virtual State of Jefferson is a wireless router. Laptops, iPhones, and Blackberries can connect to the internet through the router and browse the web. Whenever a webpage displays the address of a town that is in the proposed borders of the State of Jefferson, the router changes the state name to be "Jefferson." In this manner, the "City of Ashland, Oregon" website automatically becomes the "City of Ashland, Jefferson."

The Virtual State of Jefferson explores how the internet has become one of our primary windows for viewing the world and how the realities it presents can be authoritative, fictive, self-deluding, and enlightening.

Addendum:

Here is an example of how the router changes the web pages it servers. Immediately below is the results typically given when searching for "ashland, oregon" on Google.

click to enlarge

However, when using The Virtual State of Jefferson router to connect to the internet, these are the results that are returned:

click to enlarge

Clouds, clouds, clouds

Super Mario Clouds (2002)
Cory Arcangel, modified game cartridge

cloud.s (2009)
Jason Sloan, twitter-fed generative art

[via Rhizome]

clouds of clouds (2008)
Miguel Leal & Luis Sarmento, Flickr-fed generative art

Andy Baio's "Faces of Mechanical Turk"

Mechanical Turk is Amazon's new service where you can post a task you want completed, along with the amount you'll pay for it, and folks will do it--Amazon calls it "artificial artificial intelligence." The service is named after an 18th century chess machine hoax.

Andy Baio decided to post a task for the mechanical turkers to reveal their faces. Here's his request:

Upload a photo of yourself holding a handwritten sign that says "I Turk for ...", filling out why you turk. For example, "I Turk for Cash," "I Turk for My Kids," "I Turk to Kill Time," or whatever else you like. Be honest, be funny, be whatever you like.

As a good faith gesture, here's my photo.

If you have a webcam, you can simply go to Cameroid to snap a photo from your web browser, download the JPG, and upload it below. (Don't worry if the text is backwards, I can fix that myself.) DON'T provide any identifiable information, like your name or email, since that's a violation of MTurk policy.

The result will be used in a collage that can be found on my personal weblog, http://waxy.org. By uploading your image and accepting payment for the image, you give permission to me, Andy Baio, to use your image in all forms and media for any lawful purposes. (That's just cover-my-ass language. I'm almost certainly only going to restrict it to this one project.) The collage will show up there shortly after the HIT is complete. Thanks, everybody!

Baio originally offered $0.05, but then raised it to $0.25 and finally to $0.50.

Click here to read what Baio says about the project.

Mona Lisa via genetic programming

[via Leisure Guy]

Roger Alsing writes on his blog:

I created a small program that keeps a string of DNA for polygon rendering.
The procedure of the program is quite simple:

0) Setup a random DNA string (application start)

1) Copy the current DNA sequence and mutate it slightly
2) Use the new DNA to render polygons onto a canvas
3) Compare the canvas to the source image
4) If the new painting looks more like the source image than the previous painting did, then overwrite the current DNA with the new DNA
5) repeat from 1

Now to the interesting part :-)

Could you paint a replica of the Mona Lisa using only 50 semi transparent polygons?

That is the challenge I decided to put my application up to.

The image below is the result of that test:

Unfinished Swan

Unfinished Swan is an interesting take on a first person "shooter" game.




[via Make]

Telephone games

I've always loved the telephone game (and I'm currently working on a telephone-game-like project). Incidentally, the preceding Wikipedia link goes to an article called "Chinese Whispers," which unfortunately seems to be the British Commonwealth's more-or-less derogatory name for the game.

Yuko Mohri's Taiwa-Hensokuki (2006-08), above, is a computer speech-to-text/text-to-speech loop that continually degrades over time. One computer transcribes the other computer reading aloud text, and then the computers swap roles and the transcribed text is read aloud with the other computer now in the role of transcriptor. The result is printed out in real-time on a nearby printer to keep a record of the conversation


Jürg Lehni's Apple Talk (2007), below, seems to be a remake of his earlier Analog Information (2002). Very much like Mohri's work, Lehni's has two computers speaking back-and-forth so that information slowly corrupts.


[via Make]

Studio 360 on New Media art

This weekend the public radio show Studio 360 had a interesting segment on new media art. The piece focuses Jonathan Carroll, who collects computer-based art, and deals with the difficulty tech-based art has had finding a commercial niche.

Here's the segment's audio:


Here's one of the works in Carroll's collection:

Eye Contact, Rafael Lozano Hemmer

Eye Contact shows 800 simultaneous videos of people at rest. When someone walks in detectable view, the miniature video portraits "wake up."

My hard drive is experiencing some strange noises

Gregory Chatonsky's project uses sensors to translate (using Pure Data) the vibrations from a malfunctioning hard drive into sound.

Absolut sound sculptures

Absolut Vodka has sponsored two sound art installations: Absolut Quartet in NYC and Absolut Choir in Stockholm. Both installation are interactive via the web.

I have mixed feelings about corporate sponsorship of art. It is helping artists create and promote their artworks (and corporate sponsorship of museum exhibits has certainly become common-place). But imposing the vodka's name on the artwork's titles seems too intrusive to me. At least it isn't as obnoxiously promotional as some corporate art events.

Absolut Quartet (see video above) is the more interesting of the two works. It seems inspired by the Animusic "Pipe Dream" computer animation (see below), which became an urban legend (claiming that "Pipe Dream" was a physical sculpture).

[Via Make]

Complexification

Complexification is an interesting (and well designed) site that I found via Make Magazine's blog. It is a gallery of generative artworks done in the Processing programming language by Jerry Tarbell. If you check it out, be sure you not only view the static images but also launch the applets so that you can trigger Tarbell's generative algorithms and see new artworks being formed.

A thought that has been in the back of my head lately is how New Media art often seems to be automatically considered Contemporary. But that isn't always the case... for example, generative art (such Tarbell's) is often focused on formal aesthetics in a way that I'd characterize as Modern.

I suppose the temporal names all these art categories have (new, contemporary, modern) does nothing to help clarify... Many, many people (including those who should know better) seem to think that Contemporary refers to a time period (i.e., art being made today is Contemporary because it is contemporary). But that's not really any more true than all art today is Modern because we're modern. Post-Modernism seems to confound as well... more than once it's been argued to me that there can never be another art movement because everything that comes after Modernism will be post-modern (I usually counter by pointing out by the same logic we're all making Post-Impressionist art). And of course the cherry on top is the Pre-Raphaelites who were founded 300 years after Raphael's death.

Incidentally, the Wikipedia currently has a particular bad definition of Contemporary Art. I spent a week or two discussing it with the folks who edit the entry... I managed to convince them to mention the idea that Contemporary doesn't not simply mean "art made today." But overall, the entry tries to describe the movement as a moment in time. For example:

The institutions of art have been criticised for regulating what is designated as contemporary art. Outsider art, for instance, is literally contemporary art, in that it is produced in the present day.

The idea of outsider art always makes me a bit queasy. I find the category patronizing and overly focused on the human-interest aspect of the artists' lives (i.e., the artist is insane, has a low IQ, a murderer, etc.). Oddly, while I agree most "Outsider Art" isn't Contemporary Art (because the intention behind the art isn't really Contemporary), faux-Outsider Art (which is Contemporary) was a fad for a few years recently. If this seems wrong-headed, consider this... a child's scrawling might be reminiscent of of Picasso or a Pollock, but that doesn't mean the child is a Modern artist (because the child isn't trying to address Modern concerns).

Desk Set

Back in the early 90s I saw Desk Set, a Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn movie, on TV. The story is about a computer expert (Tracy) who is setting up a system for storing a TV network's research department's archives. I thought the representation of computers was ridiculous.

I happened to see the movie on TV again last year, and immediately began thinking (or perhaps, just simply replaying my earlier thoughts) about the unrealism of the movie's computers. The idea that people could simply type an English phrase (e.g., "What is the annual rainfall in the Sahara?") into a computer and get an answer is just crazy! While watching the movie I brought up the IMDB to look up facts about the movie... and I did a Wikipedia search on ENIAC (the computer that the movie's EMERAC seems to be spoofing).

And suddenly I realized that technology has caught up to the movie's speculative fiction... today we can simply type a question into our computer and have it bring up the answer. (And, incidentally, the annual rainfall in the Sahara is below 25mm). The movie suddenly seemed to have a fairly sophisticated idea of computers: garbage in/garbage out (i.e., if given faulty data, the computer will return faulty data), programming bugs, poorly worded questions giving undesired answers, etc.

I remember wondering about all sorts of things as a kid and knowing that I'd never know the answer--the barrier to researching the information was simply to great for matters of idle and passing curiosity. The internet has changed that, and these days I consult the Wikipedia at the slightest impetus.

In the early world wide web days (perhaps 1995?), there was a guy who kept a log of what he ate for lunch every day... it was the first thing I saw that resembled a blog and seemed quite striking (for it mundaneness & humanity) at the time.

In the spirit of that lunch diary, here is what I looked up on Wikipedia in the last seven days (a fair percentage of these entries represent the research for the book chapter I'm writing on randomness, and not idle curiosity):

ENIAC
Bitter Sweet Symphony
Cranberries
Cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator
Democratic Party, United States presidential primaries
Arsenio Hall
The Arsenio Hall Show
Talk show
Dick Cavett
FLOPS
Radioactive decay
Random seed
Hardware random number generator
Pseudo random number generator
Jackson Pollack
Pecan
Hickory
Iraq
A Year with Swollen Appendices
Lagniappe
Meret Oppenheim
Linear congruential generator
Pseudorandom number generator
Random number generator
Zinc toxity
Prejudice
Omega-3 fatty acid