Major Studio/Rouvelle/SPRING '05

Monday 3pm-8:40pm.  (Dinner break from 5-6)

2 W13th St., room 1006

 

Contact: james_rouvelle@hotmail.com

 

Course Description:

This studio course explores the concepts of Computation as well as related concepts of Information, Simulation, Ubiquitous Computing, and Interaction Design.

Warning

We will build simple circuits in this class. Students will be expected to work with (and purchase) a micro-controller such as the Basic Stamp as well as other components. The cost will be about $150 per student, but depends on what you build. Programming in Basic will be necessary. In addition to the Basic Stamp2, I will demo a bluetooth device called embeddedblue, in addition, I will demo a serial to Ethernet converter called the xport. I will also provide examples for interfacing micro-controllers to terminal programs such as: Processing, Max/MSP/Jitter, Java, and, if need be, Flash.  A good reference text for this sort of thing is Physical Computing Ð but I bet you already know thatÉ  Two other excellent texts are: Code, by Charles Petzold, and The Pattern on the Stone, by Daniel Hillis.


Introduction


We will study computation from the ground up, and implement physical and virtual computation artifacts and interfaces from aesthetic, technical, social, theoretical and political perspectives.

In addition to the weekly exercises, readings and discussions, we will complete three projects. One will concentrate on interaction and computation outside of the electric computer, this project will be presented in proposal format only.  The second project will concentrate on interface design for memory, and the other on meaningful interactions based on computation, information, and simulation using the hardware and software of your choice. We will think of concepts, simple circuit design, and any other materials covered in class as a medium akin to wood or paper and experiment with materials that can enable simple expressive computational forms. 

Students will be expected to work with Basic Stamp and various sensors/outputs as well as simple circuits. The third class will include an introduction to the Basic Stamp. Students will be expected to purchase ($150) their own materials kit and build their Stamp during weeks three through six. No prior hardware experience is necessary but students must be prepared to get their hands dirty.

The weekly assignments will include readings, summaries of readings, conceptual prototypes and electronics exercises. All weekly assignments will be archived in student web journals and presented weekly in class.

Objectives

In this course, students will read, think, sketch, design, code, solder and build. We will focus on conceptual development, prototyping and implementation of Virtual and Physical Computing artifacts from the perspective of technical proficiency, functionality, aesthetics and personal/social meaning. Readings will emphasize critical thinking, technology, social and design issues.

Readings, lectures, videos tapes and slides will augment the studio practice. Each student will keep a web journal throughout the term to chronicle and share thoughts, ideas and resources. The web journal will be updated weekly. It will serve as a repository for weekly assignments and to document the development process for projects. Include a photo and a short bio. The website will include link(s) to all weekly assignments, link(s) to your previous web work and a RESOURCE section where you will list influential web sites and tools as well as information sources.

Students will be expected to present their weekly assignments in class, speak about their work during evaluations and participate in collective critique process of the work of other class members.

 

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­

Evaluation:

 Grades in this course will be based on regular class attendance, the quality of your work, class participation, and progress.  Tardiness and excessive absences will adversely affect your grade.  Participation in discussions and critiques is mandatory.

 

Projects & Grading:

 Students will be graded by letter, A-F, on all evaluated work.  Work must be completed on time and in full satisfaction of each project goal.  Late work (assignments handed in or posted after the start of in-class critique sessions) will be automatically downgraded by one letter grade.

 

A

Well above the expectations of the course.  Outstanding participation, attendance, and exceptional progress.

B

Above average assignments and participation. No more than one absence.

C

Average execution of assignments, participation, and no more than two absences.

D

Well below average: work, attendance (two absences), projects, and participation.

F

Unsatisfactory: work, attendance (more than two absences), projects, and participation

 

 

Attendance:

Two or more unexcused absences from class may result in failure.  Two unexcused late arrivals, or early departures (eg, not returning from dinner, or other unexplained disappearance) will be marked as the equivalent of one absence.  Absence from a class is not an excuse for skipping a tutorial, reading assignment, or posting an assignment.  You are fully responsible for completing work.

 

Readings:

Readings and tutorials will often be delivered through the web - via links (URLs). Critiques will frequently be initiated from various topics covered in the readings - in other words, please use the concepts you read about in discussion of fellow students' work.

 

Food and Drink in the Computer Labs:

No.

 

Weekly Schedule

________________________________________________________________________

 

Week 1

Introductions

in class:

Introductions; course overview, resources, setting up personal/class blogg at www.blogger.com , and registration matters.

Timeline of Computing from Wikipedia

The Greatest Moments of Computer History are Speeding Up

 

Some preliminary terms:

Process: is a series of tasks that result in a goal

Computation: is the act of determining the specific tasks and the instructions to accomplish those tasks that need to be performed to reach the goal. If one can specify a sequence of tasks and related instructions which when followed will result in the completion of the goal then the problem is thought to be computable. Computation is about breaking a process into a series of tasks.  Often these tasks must be performed in a specific sequence, where, for example, the performance of task 2 is predicated on the performance of task1, etcÉ A series of tasks leading to a specific result is called an Algorithm.

Algorithm: A series of tasks leading to a specific result. Do you hear that echo?

Functional Abstraction: lets us manipulate information without worrying about the details of its underlying representation.

Data: Representation of facts, concepts, or instructions in a formalized, symbolic manner suitable for communication, interpretation, or processing by humans or by automatic means. Any representations such as characters or analog quantities to which meaning is or might be assigned.

Information: a difference that makes a difference:  a perceptible, experiential, and meaningful change of state. Information is stimuli that have meaning in some context for its receiver.  Some (if not all) kinds of information can be converted into data and then passed on to another receiver. Relative to the computer, we can say that information is made into data, put into the computer where it is stored and processed as data, and then put out as data in some form that can be perceived as information. Information must have a means of its representation. If we had the right kind of magic microscope, we should always be able to see the digits that represent whatever information is present. Information is never "just thereÓ.

Simulation: the act of transposing the internal, symbolic processes and resulting data of a computation into the sensual domain of a human.

Here are two simulations:

Hubble Spacetelescope Ð scroll down and to the left to Òhow Hubble images are madeÓ

UCSD Supercomputer visualizations

Game of Life Applet

 

Assignment:

Read:

The Computer: a tool for thought experiments Ð Frank Dietricht, Sections I and II

Prepare:

Prepare a brief (10 min) presentation on your work to present to class next time.  The point of this is for me to get to know you.

 

________________________________________________________________________

 

Week 2

On Computation and the physical world

 

First letÕs see your worksÉ.

Then weÕll review, then:

Discussion on Dietrcht Text, with examples of works mentioned in the text

Some Definitions.  Reference to Code, by Charles Petzold, and The Pattern on the Stone, by Daniel Hills.

 

Assignment: readings:

  1. The Last Question, by Isaac Asimov
  2.  God is the machine, Kevin Kelley, from Wired Magazine.

****DONÕT Worry about ----ˆWrite a brief code for the virtual Turing Machine, TM - Java Applet

 

If you would like a comprehensive review of the BS2 Ð IÕll go over this in class next time

 

PLEASE BRING YOUR PHYSICAL COMPUTING SUPPLIES TO OUR NEXT CLASS

 

________________________________________________________________________

 

Week 3

Discuss readings,

Summarize with concepts of descriptive/causative language.  General purpose computer vs. specific purpose computer.  Recursion, Finite-State Machine Concept of digital groundÉ

 

God is the Machine

 

1. Cellular automata n.) A system made up of many discrete cells, each of which may be in one of a finite number of states. A cell or automaton may change state only at fixed, regular intervals, and only in accordance with fixed rules that depend on cells own values and the values of neighbors within a certain proximity.

Cellular automata are - by definition - dynamical systems which are discrete in space and time, operate on a uniform, regular lattice - and are characterized by "local" interactions - from: (http://cell-auto.com/definition/)

 

On Finite-State Machines, from Daniel HillisÕ ÒThe Pattern on the StoneÓ.

 

 

Rechnender Raum, Konrad Zuse

 

 

Some things to think about:

  1. Realize the relationship between what an algorithm is - eg, a series of discreet tasks designed to produce a specific result, and the definition of cellular automata above. 
  2. The Boolean logic gates function as discrete cells. In other words, the computer, as currently understood as a Boolean algebra machine is an example of cellular automata. 
  3. The point of periodicity is interesting.  The flow of electricity through the computer creates a fundamental pulse, or pulses.  Our heartbeats, what other rhythms unite us? 
  4. From the description of the Turing Machine above: software (logic) dependant, independent of the hardware.  As Dietch points out: ÒWhereas nature simply is, the art object is and also exists for ourselves; thus art serves as a means for human consciousness to reduplicate itself. Art is then a method of mirroring the thinking consciousness by externalizing its content. And by becoming an external object that presents itself to the mind, art becomes the manifestation and origin of other mental activities. Therefore, the creation of art and its perception can be understood as a dialectical act of becoming conscious of ourselves. Ò

               A.  Remember that I will ask you to create a proposal for a Òsoftware (logic) dependant/independent of the hardwareÓ work in a few weeksÉ

 

The Last Question:

 

1       What is ÒentropyÓ?  HereÕs a useful definition, but I would like to point out there there are several definitions of entropy, each depending on the system that it is applied to, anyway, for our talk, letÕs go with this definition : In classical thermodynamics, the entropy of a system is the ratio of heat content to temperature, and the change in entropy represents the amount of energy input to the system which does not participate in mechanical work done by the system. This definition comes from here: What is entropy?  We might also need to know what Chaos is Ð as it is mentioned at the end of the story:  so, letÕs imagine a roulette wheel, and define a chaotic system as Ð a system in which a small change in the initial conditions (the throw of a ball, the mass of the ball, the diameter of the wheel, and so forth) can produce a large change in the state to which the system evolves.

a.      LetÕs think about this quote, from media theorist Friedrich Kittler (excerpted from Òon the implementation of knowledge, toward a theory of hardwareÓ, available Kittler Text Hub) .Òto the degree that it appears in binary code, writing gains the enormous power to do what it says. It is no accident that what we call in ordinary speech a statement is called, in programming language, a command. Whatever technical drawing simply puts before the eyes, effectively takes place.Ó

b.     LetÕs look at this old film from 1965, Logic by Machine (part 1) (Yes, this is a VERY dry film, and these mathematicians don't exactly light up the screen with star power, but I still found it very worthwhile. Part 2 is especially interesting, as they get into the philosophical and social implications of these new machines, symbolic reality, artificial intelligence, etc.
The animation is cheap but effective, and the music by Morton Subotnick (who was to become an electronic music pioneer) is creepy and sparse.
(Recommended for those with the patience for it.)

 

Some questions:

    1. Where is the energy input to the system that does not participate in mechanical work done by the system coming from?
    2. How is entropy ÒreversedÓ in the story?

 

 

How Binary Math works

 

On Logic and Switches:

 

  To the ancient Greeks, logic was a means of analyzing language in the search for truth and thus was considered a form of Philosophy.  The basis of AristotleÕs logic was the syllogism.

 

In a Syllogism, two premises are stated, with each one being assumed correct.  From these two premises a conclusion is deduced. 

 

Here is a famous syllogism from antiquity:

 

á       All men are mortal;

á       Socrates is a man;

o      Hence, Socrates is mortal.

 

Here is a modern syllogism, from Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland, as well as a Mathematician)

 

á       All philosophers are logical;

á       An illogical man is always obstinate.

 

Any thoughts on a solution to Mr. CarrollÕs syllogism?

 

How about:

á       Some obstinate persons are not philosophers Ð not obvious at allÉ.

 

  For almost two thousand years, mathematicians wrestled with AristotleÕs logic, attempting to corral it using mathematical symbols and operators.  Prior to the nineteenth century, the only person to come close was Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1648-1716), who dabbled with logic early in life but then went on to other interests.

  Then came Charles Boole.  I will go into BooleÕs life in more detail a bit later, but, for now letÕs consider the title of one of his most influential works from 1854 entitled: An Investigation of the laws of thought on which are founded the mathematical theories of logic and probabilities, often referred to as: The Laws of Thought.  The title of the book suggests an ambitious motivation:  Because the rational human brain uses logic to think,  if we were to find a way in which logic can be represented by mathematics, we would also have a mathematical description of how the brain works.  Remember the timing of this work, and itÕs country or origin: The industrial revolution in England.

 

  Boole invented a kind of algebra that looks and acts very much like conventional algebra.  LetÕs review a few fundamentals of algebra so that we may appreciate the genius of Boole.  When we do conventional algebra, we follow certain rules.  These rules have probably become so ingrained in our practice that we no longer think of them as rules and might even forget their names.

  The first rule is that addition and multiplication are commutative. That means we can switch around the symbols on each side of the operation;

 

á       A + B = B + A

á       A x B = B x A

 

  By contrast, subtraction and division are NOT commutative.

 

  Addition and multiplication are also associative, that is:

 

á       A + (B + C) = (A + B) + C

á       A x (B x C) =  (A x B) x C

 

  And, finally, multiplication is said to be distributive over addition:

 

á       A x (B + C) = (A x B) + (A x C)

 

 

Another Characteristic of conventional algebra is that it always deals with numbers, such as pounds of tofu, or numbers of ducks or distances that a train travels or the ages of family members.  Here is the genius of Boole: he made algebra more abstract by divorcing it from concepts of number.

 

 

In Boolean algebra, the operands refer not to numbers but instead to classes.  A class is simply a group of things, what in later times came to be known as a set

 

The + symbol in Boolean algebra means a union of two classes, and has come to be called a logic OR

The x symbol in Boolean algebra means an intersection of two classes, and has come to be called a logic AND

The 1 in Boolean logic represents  Òthe universeÓ, or EVERYTHING.

The 1 Ð in Boolean logic represents the universe excluding something.

 

Boolean Searching Ð perhaps this will make things more clearÉ

 

To exemplify this, letÕs reconsider the syllogism from the top of the page.

 

Boolean algebra provides a mathematical method for solving syllogisms.  LetÕs look at the first two-thirds of that famous syllogism again, but now using gender-neutral language:

 

á       All persons are mortal;

á       Socrates is a person;

 

LetÕs represent this in a Boolean algebraic expression:

 

  LetÕs use P to represent the class of all persons, M to represent the class of mortal things, and S to represent the class of Socrates.  What does it mean to say Òall persons are mortalÓ?  It means that the intersection of the class of all persons and the class of all mortal things is the class of all persons:

 

Hence, All Persons are mortal = P x M = P, where ÒxÓ is the sign for intersection/AND.  In case you are wondering, it would be wrong to say that P x M = M, Why? Because the class of all mortal things includes EVERYTHING that is mortal, animals, plants, etcÉ

 

To say, ÒSocrates is a personÓ, means that the intersection of the class containing Socrates (a very discrete class) and the class of all persons (a much larger class) is the class containing Socrates:

á       S x P = S

 

Because we know from the first equation that P equals (P x M) we can substitute that into the second equation:

á       S x (P x M) = S

 

By the associative law, this is the same as:

á       (S x P) x M = S

 

But we already know that (S x P) equals S, so we can simplify by using this substitution:

á       S x M = S

 

And now weÕre finished.  This formula tells us that the intersection of Socrates and the class of all mortal things is S, which means that Socrates is mortal.  If we found that (S x M) equaled 0, weÕd conclude that Socrates wasnÕt mortal.  If we found that (S x M) equaled M, the conclusion would have to be that Socrates was the only mortal thing and everything else was immortalÉ

 

  Using Boolean algebra might seem like overkill for proving the obvious fact, but Boolean algebra can also be used to determine whether something satisfies a certain set of criteria.  WeÕll look more into that in a moment.

 

So:

 

Boolean Logic. bool«ē-&n loj«ik) (n.) Named after the nineteenth-century mathematician George Boole, Boolean logic is a form of algebra in which all values are reduced to either TRUE or FALSE. Boolean logic is especially important for computer science because it fits nicely with the binary numbering system, in which each bit has a value of either 1 or 0. Another way of looking at it is that each bit has a value of either TRUE or FALSE.

 

Boolean Logic and Digital Circuits

 

Now lets make a vacation destination computer using the Boolean gates: And, Or, Xor, and Not.  The steps we need to take are to list the qualities we are looking for in a vacation destination and figure out if they are necessary Ð meaning everybody MUST have them, or generally acceptable, meaning everyone is OK with them.

 

Now lets make a list of the features that we are willing to consider.  Lets limit ourselves to five or sixÉ

 

After we have selected the features, and decided how important they are, lets create an expression for our criteria. 

In Boolean Algebra: an >>  

 

We will use brackets to clarify our logic.  Usually we will need to make a few drafts of the expression to make it clear.  When we have arrived at a clear expression, we will convert it into a virtual computer using Boolean Logic Java Applet

 

As a preliminary exercise, letÕs use the Boolean Logic Java Applet and use AND blocks and INVERTERS to construct and OR block.

 

In class Boolean Logic exercise/lab.  HereÕs the problem:  Randy Sarafin told me that he wants a male cat, neutered, either white or tan; OR a white cat, neutered, any color but white; or heÕll take any cat I can find if itÕs black.  Please help Randy by:

  1. Summarize his needs in a Boolean Expression, then
  2. Go to our new favorite toy (Boolean Logic Java Applet) and build Randy a cat computerÉ

 

 

Boolean Logic Tutorial Ð with test at the end!!! Ð but you donÕt have to take itÉ.

 

On Finite-State Machines, from Daniel HillisÕ ÒThe Pattern on the StoneÓ.

 

 

 

HereÕs more from Mr. Hillis:

 

 

Remember that I will ask you to create a proposal for a computer that does not rely on a desktop.  It will be a work of physical computing in a pure sense, where your logic will affect changes in an environment other than the motherboard of a PC.  Think about switches, connectors and registers, and letÕs think too about how the ÒthingsÓ we experience in our world as being external Ð specifically existing is a space separate from our mind Ð may actually be elements of an ongoing, recursive computation (recursion involves inserting a word inside of its own definition Ðwe are continually externalizing aspects of our own mind into an ÒexternalÓ environment in order to define ourselvesÉ  McLuhan often brought up the myth of narcissus Ð narcissus Ð whose name is from the word narcosis Ð narcotic, didnÕt realize he was looking at himself Ð how does this relate to this recursive, reflective, dialectic relationship IÕm describing?) Ð a part of our computed/built environment.  Toward this aim, lets begin to think about objects in our world as switches, connectors and registers (memory devices) Ð as coprocessors to our own computative actions, that change roles depending on who is experiencing with them.  Realize that static objects are neither.  Our physiological processes designed to take in stimuli are constantly active Ð simply because we see a chair does not mean that our eyes are then no longer sending the information into our brains that is experienced as chair.

 

An exercise could be choosing an object and defining what it is computing and how it functions as a mirror, and conveyor and register of memory.  Think about the components of computation: switches, connectors and registers.  Things that we can identify can alternate between all three states, depending on what pattern they are a part of.  Can you pick some thing and describe it as a switch, as a connector, and as a register?

 

A potentially simple example:

Found Photo Project

 

Perhaps these quotes by Francois LaChance might be useful. But first some definitionsÉ.

 

Axiom's of Francois LaChance

á       Recursion

 

 

 


Abstraction is good.  Clear communication about abstraction better.  One is of the life of the mind.  The other, of the life of the mind in a body. 


These boldly stated values are contagious.  The propagation of stances that affirm both feeling and thinking is salutary for bodies and minds contending against anti-erotic and anti-intellectual forces, positions, and effects.  Passionate theorizing fosters a culture of the question and such a culture cannot be disinterested, cannot be insensitive to the manner of posing questions, cannot neutralize inquiry.  To remind oneself of this at the outset is also to remind oneself that passionate theorizing and adequate abstraction, like appropriate technology, contribute to clarity and action.  Theory has consequences.


Abstraction transports one from the given to the possible.  As abstraction moves away from an underlying reality, a putative last instance, it moves towards a form, a portable pattern, a template.  Abstraction is akin to transcoding. In the succession of analytic and synthetic moments, in the movements of separation and recombination, a materialism is feasible, thought and bodily patterns readable.

 

 


Technology, perception and reproduction are ideologically inflected.  This itself is an ideological position.  It is a position that claims that an apparatus orients meanings.  It is also a position that redeploys points of departure in that meanings orient the apparatus.  Of course, meanings and apparatus inflect the orientation.  Such a shell game in a field of axioms, such a bending of metalevel relations, has material consequences for one's understanding and interaction with machines and systems.


Depending on how one constructs one's machines, one may be locked into two-player games and double-bind situations. (n1)   A dialectical understanding of the senses offers alternative games and a machine fuelled by its own activity.


A sensorium is a receiver and a dispatcher.  A sensorium is a semiotic machine.  Such a device is capable not only of sensation.  It remembers; it perceives.  Acts of perception as discrete somatic signals form a sequence.  Sequences and their manipulation are the basis of sorting activities and of stories.  The possibility of treating somatic signals sequentially also ensures that a sensorium can be its own translation device.  One sensory modality can "inform" another.  Indeed, cross-modal encoding acts as a material support for narrativity in cognition.  An interactive sensorium permits a functional but non-reductive approach to narration.  Narratives can serve a mnemonic function or act as an algorithm for problem solving.


For such a machine, perception is communication and furthermore the fundamental unit of human interaction is non-dyadic.  Such design criteria pose a challenge to the reproductive and perceptual models of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser and Mary O'Brien.  Adequate models of reproduction and perception require triangulation.

 

3.0

Asking a question is akin to telling a story.  Drawing a picture is like telling a story.  Both, drawing pictures and asking questions, are ways of orienting.  Both focus attention.  Of course telling stories is a way of orienting.  The circularity of these assertions depends not upon the equivalency of the products, question, picture, story, but the activities, asking, describing, telling.

3.0

3.1

As ways of orienting, all are moments of a relentless semiosis, all rework representations, all participate in some measure of transcoding.  These ways of doing are readily framed as the potential of an object.  What can be described becomes narratable and open to interrogation;  what is askable has a story.  Actions and objects correlate;  praxis bears on semantics.

3.1

 

 

Some artworks:

 

Р      We Edit Life - "Experimenters in visual perception are using computers to create weird and random patterns that never occur in real life to find out what and how people see when these patterns are shown to them. The art of computer graphics is only in its infancy yet it is already stimulating creative thought in far out areas where research is likely to get complex and unwieldy. If offers not only the means to quicken the pace of discovery but an ideal of communicating what we may discover" - We Edit Life., by vicki bennett Ð check her site, youÕll like it.

We Edit Life was commissioned in Spring 2002 by Lovebytes in partnership with the Studio of the North, funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the Regional Arts Lottery Programme. We Edit Life is now available for purchase on a compilation DVD called "Volatile Media".

This is some next-level stuff, people

 

-    Marcel van der Drift Ð doors of perception 7 videos.

 

 

Tech:

Introduction to Physical Interaction Theory

 

 

Physical Computing

BS2_Tutorial

Physical Computing: references and materials page Ð check it out.

 

Jitter: video tracking

There are some objects for video tracking for Jitter. With the standard

installation there is an object called jit.findbounds which will attempt to find

color variations in a video frame. You then can have it watch one color and

it will track it.  This object works pretty well but it can take some time to

configure.

  Also there are a number of objects that a grad student at IAMAS(Japan) created

called, cv.jit. These are a collection of computer vision objects that are much

smarter. I have done a few things with these but I haven't had a project yet

that needed them.  Here is the link for the objects.

http://www.iamas.ac.jp/~jovan02/cv/

 

 

Processing is a programming language and environment based in Java and built for the electronic arts and visual design communities.  It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook.  Used by students, artists, design professionals, and researchers for learning, prototyping, and production, it is a powerful and approachable, and dynamic language.  Give it a whirl.

 

        1. Nice intro tutorial
        2. Proce55ing in the classroom.  Check it out. Java based coding environment...
        3. Worshop/intro compares Proce55ing to flash/director - some of the code samples don't work, though....
        4. Chris Basmajian is a student of mine in IMII
        5. Toxi works in both Director and now Proce55ing - EXCELLENT STUFF - with source code!!!
        6. flight404 - Excellent work in Proce55ing - no source code....

 

Sound in Processing:

 

          1. Sonia by Amit Pitaru is a Òplug-inÓ for using either .wav or .aiff sound files in Processing.

 

Programming reference material:

  1. Notes and code samples for Variables
  2. Notes and code samples for Arrays
  3. Notes and code samples for Functions
  4. Notes and code samples for Objects

A. (solution and comparison to the object oriented assignment from Nice intro tutorial)

 

From the Processing Website:

  1. NullPointerException Ð an explanation
  2. Libraries extend processingÕs functionality.
  3. technotes offer a tour through specific topics of interest in the forum.
 

Processing Video code: will work with any video source and does not require jmyron

Color Tracker

Blob Detection

Motion Detection

Sliced Video

Liquid Video

Bubblin' Video

half a wake (ing) life (ish)...

 

Assignment: 

  1. Herbert Simon, study guide for "Sciences of the Artificial" Chapters 1 and 4
  2. Herbert Simon, Vocabulary of "Sciences of the Artificial"
  3. Herbert Simon, Chapter 1 from "Sciences of the Artificial"

 

________________________________________________________________________

 

Week 4

 

Recursion, artifice, and gestalt in the built environment

 

á       Recursion

 

Review of Graspable User Interfaces, Tangible Bits, Ubiquitous Computing, Calm Technology and Physical Computing.

1.     Graspable User Interface , (graspable can be understood as ÒavailableÓ, too)

2.      Tangible Media

 

Herb Simon Concepts: The Will to recognize pattern, The Environment as mold, Natural/Artificial (artifice).  Relationship between internal and external Ð homeostasis. The wandering ant analogy, complexity.

If the things we construct within our built environments are embodiments of mind, then can we think of objects as elements in a parallel processing scheme?

 

Dave Furcy on Herb SimonÕs Sciences of the Artificial:

Summary

The thesis of the book is that certain phenomena or entities are "artificial" in the sense that they are contingent to the goals or purposes of their designer. In other words, they could have been different had the goals been different (as opposed to natural phenomena which are necessarily evolved given natural laws). Chapter 1 tackles the following issue: Since artifacts are contingent, how is a science of the artificial possible? How to study artifacts empirically? Chapter 4, on the other hand, deals with the notion of complexity. This is necessary because "artificiality and complexity are inextricably interwoven."

Detailed outline

Chapter 1: Understanding the Natural and Artifical Worlds

Natural science is very familiar to us (especially physics and biology) but the world around us is mostly man-made, artificial. It evolves with mankind's goals. So science must encompass both natural and goal-dependent (artificial) phenomena. Chapter 1 discusses how to relate these two. There are two perspectives on artifacts, synthetic vs. analytic. The science of the artificial is really the science (analytic or descriptive) of engineering (synthetic or prescriptive).

Artifacts are

Fulfillment of purpose involves a relation between the artifact, its environment and a purpose or goal. Alternatively, one can view it as the interaction of an inner environment (internal mechanism), an outer environment (conditions for goal attainment) and the interface between the two. In this view, the real nature of the artifact is the interface. Both the inner and outer environments are abstracted away. The science of the artificial should focus on the interface, the same way design focuses on the "functioning".

Simulation is the imitation of the interface and is implied by the notion of artificiality. Simulation can also be viewed as adaptation to the same goal. It can be used to better understand the original (simulated) entity because simulation can help predict behavior by making explicit "new" knowledge, i.e. knowledge that is indeed derivable but only with great effort. Simulation is even possible for poorly understood systems by abstraction of organizational properties.

Computers are organizations of elementary components whose function only matters. They are a special class of artifacts that can be used to perform simulations (in particular of human cognition). They can be studied in the abstract, namely using mathematics. Yet, they can and must also be studied empirically. Their study as an empirical phenomenon requires simulation (example of time-sharing systems). In conclusion, the behavior of computers will turn out to be governed by simple laws, the apparent complexity resulting from that of the environment they are trying to adapt to.

 

We are constantly involved in a creative, computative, process.  We are Ògoal orientedÓ beings continually (recursively) establishing, and checking relationships with what is ostensibly an external world but what is really a constant routine to build ourselves and, by extension, the (an) environment. ItÕs as if we need to constantly make sure we are still ÒthereÓ Ð ÒthereÓ being defined by an ability to express a thought and then experience itÕs reflection, and then reflect on it. We donÕt really know about an objective, external world; we work to index ourselves in an ÒitÓ Ð to find our own reflection Ð we ping the external and come to know solely via interaction.  Objects in our built environment function as elements (think of them as subroutines), in this recursive algorithm that is the common, human process.  Objects, when considered as embodiments of mind, are processing elements intrinsically linked to the process by which we build ourselves at each moment.  We cannot have one without the other Ð we are they and they us, we are coupled.  We are recursive beings literally Ð our being is defined by our being Ð a continual process that needs artifice to function. Narcissus had trouble because he didnÕt understand that he was looking at himself. 

 

early childhood research project Ð George Forman

 

 

The Universal Computer

A famous proof by the mathematician and theorist Alan Turing in the 1930s holds that all common computers are universal in the sense that their functioning is dependent on the software and independent of the hardware. This means that an Intel-based machine (the common desktop PC) can do whatever a Motorola or PowerPC machine (a Macintosh) can do and vice versa. In fact, either of these can do what a Cray supercomputer can do, only they take more memory and more time in which to do it. After the simple logic gates are constructed (there are only three basic logic gates), the abilities of the computer are entirely a function of the programming. Fredkin's student Roger Banks put forth in 1971 a proof that the same is true of the less conventional computer architecture of a cellular automaton. Because all computers (including cellular automata) are universal, and because the engine at the bottom of the physics of the natural world is a computer of some sort, Fredkin concludes that the ultimate computer is universal (because it is a computer, Q.E.D.).

    If the ultimate computer is universal, as it must be, then we should be able to simulate or, more properly, emulate its operations by the correct programming of our own feeble computers (in the way that a good programmer should be able to emulate a Cray supercomputer using a desktop PC). All of physics as we know it should be expressible as a computer program. As Fredkin puts it,

"What cannot be programmed cannot be physics. This is a very important idea. If a process cannot be programmed on a particular universal computer, despite having enough memory and time, then it cannot be programmed on any computer. If we can't program it on an ordinary computer, Finite Nature implies it can't be a part of physics because physics runs on a kind of computer."

    The difficulty here is that there are features of our world which have long been thought to be impossible to duplicate by computer. If these feats are truly impossible for a computer, then Finite Nature must fail. However, Fredkin shows that the most problematical of these tasks -- true quantum randomness and the reversibility of computation -- are not the insurmountable barriers they were once thought to be.

 

Turing machine/Universal Computer/Finite State Machine stuff: java applet: TM - Java Applet

Article on Turing Machines Ð includes a bit of a definition of computing, ÒIntuitively a task is computable if one can specify a sequence of instructions which when followed will result in the completion of the task. Such a set of instructions is called an effective procedure, or algorithm, for the task.Ó

 

Cellular automata n.) A system made up of many discrete cells, each of which may be in one of a finite number of states. A cell or automaton may change state only at fixed, regular intervals, and only in accordance with fixed rules that depend on cells own values and the values of neighbors within a specific proximity.

Cellular automata are - by definition - dynamical systems which are discrete in space and time, operate on a uniform, regular lattice - and are characterized by "local" interactions - from: (http://cell-auto.com/definition/)

 

Here is an excerpt from Daniel HillisÕ book: ÒThe Pattern on the StoneÓ

 

 

Some definitions:

 

Narrative is the communication of meaning by means of a temporal process, it is the transformation of a sequence into a story, or specific result or meaning.  It is a FORM in which things are arranged in such a way as to produce a specific result.  It is identical to an algorithm. 

 

Narrativity is a potential for some thing to express meaning(s) within a sequence, within a narrative. Depending on the dimension of the thing (could be a word, a sound, a color, a shape, a sentence) it could also be understood as the potential of transforming any sequence into a story.

 

Gestalt is a German word that does not translate easily. It is often put to use during grad seminars at art schools across the planet and is sometimes understand as a situation where the sum is different from the parts.  It can be used to imply a transformation Ð even a sort of alchemy that occurs when certain things Ð words, images, sounds, objects of any kind, are placed in a sequence of some kind.  It means a complete pattern or configuration. The catch is the word complete. There are three parts to a definition of gestalt: a thing, its context or environment, and the relationship between them. Imagine this: I have a bunch of lava rocks around a potted cactus in my apartment. There are about ten of them. As the plant grows, I occasionally rearrange the rocks. This is not a highly charged activity. I can be pretty casual, almost absent minded, about it. But I picked each one of those rocks out of tall grass very near a smoldering volcano that was about to erupt.  Out there, when I reached for the rocks and carefully freed them from the thorny grass I am not absent minded. The volcano is smoking and while I think IÕll be OK IÕm not sure Ð there are very nervous people rushing past me as I stop. 

 

Get it? The context is really different, although the objects, the dried, lava rocks, are the same. But in considering Gestalt we say that the rocks are not the same, because the context is a part of the definition of the object. The experienced whole (the gestalt) includes the thing itself (the figural rocks) and its meaning. Meaning is derived from its relationship to the context (the ground /apartment vs near the volcano).  Therefore, the gestalt of the rocks in the flowerpot is different from the gestalt of the rocks on the ground by the volcano. The same thing applies when we are talking about ourselves or another person. We can only define ourselves in terms of relationships - that is, in terms of our interaction with the immediate environment or present context. Who defines that? Only the Òexperiencer.Ó This is also the definition of phenomenology.

Personal experience is understood in terms of figure and ground relationships. The immediate situation is constructed from the individual's awareness of self, awareness of the environment, and awareness of the relationship between the two. The awareness of relationship involved in a particular situation constitutes a gestalt, a meaningful pattern or configuration.

 

Constellations

 

 

But note this: Gestalts seem to have the psychological property, (or ÒaffectÓ) of ÒwantingÓ completion. In other words they are experienced as leading toward a result.  Sound familiar? Experiences that have been successfully resolved fade into the background. Those that have not, continue to absorb energy and attention, even when they are out of awareness. We sometimes call that Òunfinished businessÓ, and it can distort our present experience as well as our anticipation of the future.

It therefore follows that the relationship between environment and our self is crucial. We affect the environmental context through our interaction with it.  The narrative is the form from which we arrive at an understanding.  Narrativity is the potential of each object in our environment to express meaning(s) within different sequences. Those sequences are determined by interactions from all elements of the environment and are dynamic, and are defined solely by the ÒexperiencerÓ Ð think again of the concept of the constellation.  Experience therefore, must be defined in terms of the integrity of both sides, plus the fluidity of the interaction between the two. It seems imperative, that individuals direct their attention to the interrelationship among all things in the world. This implies a compelling curiosity that can lead to the excitement of discovery that is one of the most important goals of Gestalt.

 

A foil:

Saint Louis Design

 

Modernism

Mondrian

 

Robert Smithson and Richard Serra both believed that sculpture should have a dialog with its environment. Two sculptures of Richard Serra are shown in an urban environment - Fulcrum in the Broadgate development at Liverpool Street in London and Tilted Arc in New York - the latter has since been destroyed.

Earthworks, Cristo, Heizer, Smithson De la Marre

 

9 Evenings

Pepsi Pavilion

 

Pyroboy

HereÕs way to think about the internet: It is an open-ended, non-linear structure that can be added to and recontextualized endlessly. Do you remember the Dietricht from the beginning of my talk?  Perhaps it would be good to think of a project as a way to explore the internet as a de-centered production space, in the vein of internet bulletin boards and online interactive projects, but with a focus on developing innovative ways to expand and structure these modelsÉ. But weÕll worry about that later.

Cyberman

Stelarc Ð URL Body, PingBody, animatronic head Ð is only as smart as the person interrogating itÉ.

Stuart Moulthrop - victory garden and pax

The Sims / Secondlife

 

Game of Life Applet

cellular automata dynamics slide show - geared for the computer science major

 

ATTA (leaf cutter) ants, by Lisa Arenson

emergent ATTA ant behavior

 

Analysis of Learning: Experiences of Art and Ideas for Connections  - Walker Digital Ð various projects in informatics and emergent behavior.  All CA based.

 

 

 

Some things to think about:

  1. Realize the relationship between what an algorithm is - eg, a series of discreet tasks designed to produce a specific result, and the definition of cellular automata above. 
  2. The Boolean logic gates function as discrete cells. In other words, the computer, as currently understood as a boolean algebra machine is an example of cellular automata. 
  3. The point of periodicity is interesting.  The flow of electricity through the computer creates a fundamental pulse, or pulses.  Our heartbeats, what other rhythms unite us? 
  4. From the description of the Turing Machine above: software (logic) dependant, independent of the hardware.  As Dietch points out: ÒWhereas nature simply is, the art object is and also exists for ourselves; thus art serves as a means for human consciousness to reduplicate itself. Art is then a method of mirroring the thinking consciousness by externalizing its content. And by becoming an external object that presents itself to the mind, art becomes the manifestation and origin of other mental activities. Therefore, the creation of art and its perception can be understood as a dialectical act of becoming conscious of ourselves. Ò

               A.  Remember that I will ask you to create a proposal for a Òsoftware (logic) dependant/independent of the hardwareÓ work in a few weeksÉ

 

Assignments:

Reading:

Graspable User Interface - George Fitzmaurice's Ph.D Thesis. Explores the idea of multiple physical objects as handles for elements in a computing environment, as opposed to a single physical object (the mouse).

Virtual Perspective And The Artistic Vision: by Edward A. Shanken

Propose:

Create a proposal for a work that involves computation and interaction but does not make use of the familiar paradigm of desktop computer running softwareÉ

Think about how you use perspective, computation, and dimensionality in your work, and as a means to a specific end.   Each of you will present your proposal to the class for critique. Think of expanding the functions (input/output,logic) of the desktop computer into the physical world Ð by using common objects as switches, connectors and registers (memory).  This is a thought experiment, donÕt worry about practicality, and its fine to develop a ÒsimpleÓ project.

 

More info/ideas (posted too late, perhapsÉ. Sorry Ð but maybe it will help?)

 

ÒThe word interaction has lately been applied to just about any relationship between people or things, as though shapes interact in a Picasso painting.  More properly, the work implies deliberation over the exchange of messages.  Much experience can be understood as interaction, of course.  As a usual point of departure, on can approach interaction as a conversation.  One party acts or speaks, and the other interprets and then responds.  This distinguishes the exchange from mere transmittal.  The more that the response follows one assertion and invites another, the more engaging the interaction is thought to be.  Supporting contexts and protocols help keep this on track.Ó

Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground, MIT PRESS 2004

 

Overture:

Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita.  He mentions the plasticity of the human mind.  Patterns of stimuli on the hand or tongue can cause the brain to visualize or balance itself, its called sensory substitution.  Notice how Dr. Bach-y-Rita says that the user can visualize Òwith conditioningÓ Ð we all needed to learn to make sense of the data coming into our brains via the optic nerve.   Check out the first video, and the last one on the page Ð the one with the guy wearing a camera on his forehead.  This person is blind and has learned to see via lingual stimulation from the brainportÉ 

 

Lifelong Kindergarten Group, MIT: ÒToys to think withÓ.  We looked at this in class.

 

Etude:

Imagine if you could embed any common object with a sensor and then gather the data, process it, and produce a related output.  That output can be a monitor, a speaker, an LED or some other embedded feedback device (vibration in the back of a chair, for example). With this ÒpervasiveÓ computing, devise a system of interactivity that uses input (a sensor) Ð output and feedback.  The goal is to engage a user (cause them to create input to the system), encourage them to explore and participate with the objects (have the output of the system be clear and somehow inviting), and reward them for doing so (keep their attention, perhaps by letting them understand that their actions produce specific results that lead to an outcome).  The goal can be simply having a user realize that there is a cause and effect relationship happening and that there is a logic that evolves over time.  What we are exploring here is the plasticity of the human mind, our innate curiosity to understand pattern, and our ability and willingness to transpose.  With this in mind, try to allow the normal usage of the object(s) you select to trigger the beginning of the piece. Your concept can focus on an individual, a group, or a combination of the two.  Pay attention to (and be able to describe) the environment you are imagining as a setting for the work. 

 

 

More on sensory substitution:

brainPort Ð article from a recent NYTimes

brainPort Chronicles

papers on SENSORY SUBSTITUTION

javoice Ð Java ÒVisual ProsthesisÓ Applet Ð graphic sonification, try it, youÕll like it.

More on Visual Prosthesis

 

 

 

________________________________________________________________________

 

Week 5

Crit #1

 

A kind of review:

 

Some more words on Context:

 

on interaction

 

 

Strategies for interaction:

 

 

Related Artworks:

 

Ken Goldberg

 

MemexEngine Marc Lafia The Vanndemar Memex or Laura Croft Stripped Bare by her Assassins, Even The Vandemar Memex is a rumination on the many fascinating tropes of extended self, distributed narrative, artificial life, collective intelligence and emergent systems. The Memex, set up in the context of a game, re-assembles Duchamp, Vannevar Bush, video games and many contemporary art works putting forward the notion of a engine from which works happen. The work is structured as a series of events, organized by episodes, a tool set, narrative tracks and collective networked actions. The user first selects a code name, then an image that tells the machine something of their psychological type and soon is set along a path. Authors (www.vanndemar.com) Marc Lafia : direction, concept, story, images, interface Mark Meadows : story, design Gabriella Marks: words, images, design, play mechanics, code

 

Ghost City Jody Zellen Ghost City is a website that focuses on the representation of the city by the mass media. It is a labyrinthine environment through which viewers can navigate, either following the linear narrative that unfolds by moving from page to page, or they can delve into the non-linear chaos of random links. Each space is made up of appropriated images and texts. The images are culled from various print media sources. The texts are either found passages from urban theory or specifically written poetic musings on the city. Rather than present static images, Ghost City is a collage of moving parts. It is a pulsating grid of flashing images that loop indefinitely. The viewer is an urban wanderer moving through the site, step-by-step, page by page. One moves forward and back retracing one's steps within the urban grid, discovering new spaces and new meanings. One clicks on a word: "walk," "time," "space" or an image of a silhouette, a shadow or a fa�de. The movement freezes, a color flashes and you are someplace else. One by one a new grid of images appears. Some seem familiar. Have you been here before? Ghost City is about memory, and about travelling through time and space. The time is infinite. The space is finite. Yet the time and space of Ghost City metaphorically relate to the experience of the city where people walk and talk and interact. Within the confines of Ghost City visitors can pause and think and move backwards and forwards. Ghost City is a city of fragments. A memory. A ghost of reality. A ghost city.

 

Wax Web is an interactive narrative 3D environment that is based upon and distributed via the internet. It goes back to Blair's 1991 electronic movie ÈWax or the Discovery of Television Among the BeesÇ. Scenes from this film are interwoven with image, sound and text elements to build an associative net of references where the linear story is no longer valid. Depending on the interaction with the viewer, the elements gather to build new narrative threads and generate new interaction possibilities. By shifting into virtual space, the movie turns into interactive cinema.

 

IsAnyOneThere?  Stephen Wilson. A Voice Activated Tour of San Francisco Via its Pay Telephone. Overview For one week a computer telemarketing device makes hourly calls to selected pay telephones, engages whoever answers in conversations about life in the city, and digitally stores the conversations. The installation later allows viewers to interactively explore the city via a database of these recorded calls and digital video of life near the phones. It appropriates the often intrusive computer-based telemarketing technology and uses it in a new way, involving people who don't traditionally participate in the art world in an event that probes the diversity of life in the city and the relation of truth to fiction.

 

Virtual >> Physical:

 

 

 

o             Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita.  He mentions the plasticity of the human mind.  Patterns of stimuli on the hand or tongue can cause the brain to visualize or balance itself, its called sensory substitution.  Notice how Dr. Bach-y-Rita says that the user can visualize Òwith conditioningÓ Ð we all needed to learn to make sense of the data coming into our brains via the optic nerve.   Check out the first video, and the last one on the page Ð the one with the guy wearing a camera on his forehead.  This person is blind and has learned to see via lingual stimulation from the brainportÉ 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pervasive computing:

 

 

 

 

 

Tech:

Embeddedblue from Parallax, Bs2, Jitter, TcpServer_Processing

 

Assignments: Reading,  Immersion and Interaction Ð Oliver Grau

 

 

 

 

 

 

Week 6

 

ÒIs a dog a place? Yes, to a flea.Ó Jamy Sheridan

 

Boolean Logic, slight return.  Based on the interesting projects you presented last week, and some questions I received this week regarding how to implement those projects I thought it would be a good idea to spend a little time on BooleÕs logic and the Integrated Circuits that can help us implement it.  To assist in this demonstration IÕve provided a hand out from Code, by Charles Petzold, Chapter 11, starting on page 102.  IÕve also brought into class some ICÕs a breadboard, and some LEDÕs to build a flip-flop Ð an example of a finite-state machine (see below). Silicon Logic Gates, The 3914 Dot Bar Display Chip Ð you can do ADC with it and it works beautifully with the Logic Gates.
Analog input:  Ridiculously Sensitive Charge Detector .  Add some relays and youÕve enough to build many projects.

 

Here is some stuff from a few weeks ago:

 

Boolean Logic. bool«ē-&n loj«ik) (n.) Named after the nineteenth-century mathematician George Boole, Boolean logic is a form of algebra in which all values are reduced to either TRUE or FALSE. Boolean logic is especially important for computer science because it fits nicely with the binary numbering system, in which each bit has a value of either 1 or 0. Another way of looking at it is that each bit has a value of either TRUE or FALSE.

 

Boolean Logic and Digital Circuits

 

Now lets make a vacation destination computer using the Boolean gates: And, Or, Xor, and Not.  The steps we need to take are to list the qualities we are looking for in a vacation destination and figure out if they are necessary Ð meaning everybody MUST have them, or generally acceptable, meaning everyone is OK with them.

 

Now lets make a list of the features that we are willing to consider.  Lets limit ourselves to five or sixÉ

 

After we have selected the features, and decided how important they are, lets create an expression for our criteria. 

In Boolean Algebra: an >>  

 

We will use brackets to clarify our logic.  Usually we will need to make a few drafts of the expression to make it clear.  When we have arrived at a clear expression, we will convert it into a virtual computer using Boolean Logic Java Applet

 

As a preliminary exercise, letÕs use the Boolean Logic Java Applet and use AND blocks and INVERTERS to construct and OR block.

 

In class Boolean Logic exercise/lab.  HereÕs the problem:  Randy Sarafin told me that he wants a male cat, neutered, either white or tan; OR a white cat, neutered, any color but white; or heÕll take any cat I can find if itÕs black.  Please help Randy by:

  1. Summarize his needs in a Boolean Expression, then
  2. Go to our new favorite toy (Boolean Logic Java Applet) and build Randy a cat computerÉ

 

 

Boolean Logic Tutorial Ð with test at the end!!! Ð but you donÕt have to take itÉ.

 

On Finite-State Machines, from Daniel HillisÕ: ÒThe Pattern on the StoneÓ.

 

 

An example of a finite-state machine is an arrangement of logic blocks called a flip-flop

 

We Train to the MediumÉ

 

Where is this guy? >>Head Mounted Display: HMD

 

IMMERSION

The feeling of presence, of 'being there', surrounded by space and interacting with available objects. The point of view in the immersive world is omni-directional. Immersion is enveloping, a 360 degree surround, that is physical rather than cognitive. For Joseph Nechvatal, immersion in a Virtual Reality work implies a unified total space, a homogeneous world without external distraction, striving to be a harmonious whole. He identifies 'two grades of immersion: (1) cocooning and (2) expanding within which, when these two directions of psychic space cooperate ... we feel ... our bodies becoming subliminal, immersed in an extensive topophilia ... an inner immensity where we realize our limitations along with our desires for expansion.'

 

 

Illusion Ð immersion Ð a quest for the perfect illusion.  Polysensuality.  Immersion means a few different things to different contingencies.  For our purpose it will relate to artworks that envelope an viewer and turn them into an immersant Ð in the commercial world of electronic gadgetry immersive simply means polysensual Ð experiences that you can hear, see, touch, etcÉ  The major difference between the two is that in the art world the immersant is completely within the artwork so that any references to the ÒoutsideÓ world are solely in the mind.  In the commercial application, you are sitting at your desk and are working with your materials Ð but your materials have more ÒhandlesÓ.  This difference is very important, as immersive art is sometimes considered to be a radical shift from traditional art disciplines in that it (immersive art) makes critical/dialectical inquiry difficult.   Why?

 

ÒWe donÕt know who discovered water, but it certainly wasnÕt a fishÓ Marshall McLuhan

 

  Think about visiting the gallery or museum Ð think about things within a frame, think about a frame of reference Ð its all about perspective and dialecticism that results from that.  IÕve mentioned the idea before that the things we make are embodiments of mind Ð we have a will to build into our environment in order to perceive our thoughts externally and consider them dialectically.  In order for this to function, there is an implication that we will be able to triangulate.  The issue of triangulation within an immersive environment is significant because all of your stimuli is coming from the immersive environment Ð where is the frame?

 

SPACE

spatium = [Latin] space Space or Outer Space are the seemingly empty places (vacuum) between planets and stars. Space is not really empty, but the material in space is so dilute that it is hard to detect it. Space looks black. A particular camera or detector cannot observe all kinds of radiation (such as all colors of light, infrared and ultraviolet radiation, radio waves, and X rays), so if a bright object happens not to emit radiation of the kinds that the camera can detect, then the picture looks like a picture of outer space.
www.sunspot.noao.edu/sunspot/pr/glossary.html

A space is a particular frame of reference for an object. Specifically, it defines the transformations that are applied to an object to put it into the frame of reference.
www.davidgould.com/Books/Glossary.htm

Most minimally, any film displays a two-dimensional graphic space, the flat composition of the image. In films that depict recognizable objects, figures, and locales, a three-dimensional space is represented as well. At any moment, three-dimensional space may be directly depicted, as onscreen space, or suggested, as offscreen space. In narrative film, we can also distinguish between story space, the locale of the totality of the action (whether shown or not), and plot space, the locales visibly and audibly represented in the scenes.
www.mhhe.com/socscience/art-film/bordwell_6_filmart/student/olc/glossary.mhtml

So, Space is a means, and not a mere setting. ÒTo speak of Ôproducing spaceÕ sounds bizarre, Ò wrote the critical theorist Henri Lefebvre in 1974, Òso great is the sway still held by the idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling itÓ.

Memory, like Space, is a frame of reference Ð see the excerpt above from Dan Hillis on finite-state machines.

 

LOCATION

a point or extent in space
www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn

ÒPlaces (locations) emerge at crossovers between infrastructures.  Where one flow prompts, regulates, or feeds another, development occurs.  Where the boats met the trains great cities grew.  Electronic communication has intensified, not undermined, the hubs of activity.Ó Malcolm McCullogh, Digital Ground, MIT press, 2004

Char Davies Osmose  video explanation

 

And This Guy ?  If his eyes are twitching, heÕs definitely >>

 
Dreaming Ð the mechanics of immersion


What is the deal with dreams, anyway? Why do we dream at all for that matter? According to Joel Achenbach in his book Why Things Are:

 

The brain creates dreams through random electrical activity. This electrical activity is concurrent with Rapid Eye Movement (R.E.M.). (Rapid eye movement sleep occurs at several points during the night. Most people experience three to five intervals of REM sleep per night, and brainwaves during this period speed up to awake levels. If you ever watch a person or a dog experiencing REM sleep, you will see their eyes flickering back and forth rapidly. In many dogs and some people, arms, legs and facial muscles will twitch during REM sleep. Periods of sleep other than REM sleep are know as NREM (non-REM) sleep.

REM sleep is when you dream. If you wake up a person during REM sleep, the person can vividly recall dreams. If you wake up a person during NREM sleep, generally the person will not be dreaming.)

Random is the key word here. About every 90 minutes the brain stem sends electrical impulses throughout the brain, in no particular order or fashion. The analytic portion of the brain -- the forebrain -- then desperately tries to make sense of these signals. It is like looking at a Rorschach test, a random splash of ink on paper. The main points here are that the brain pays attention and becomes cognizant of changes in state over time Ð it is not cognizant of stasis. The only way of comprehending it is by viewing the dream (or the inkblot) metaphorically, symbolically, since there's no literal message.

This doesn't mean that dreams are meaningless or should be ignored. How our forebrains choose to "analyze" the random and discontinuous images may tell us something about ourselves, just as what we see in an inkblot can be revelatory. And perhaps there is a purpose to the craziness: Our minds may be working on deep-seated problems through these circuitous and less threatening metaphorical dreams.

Here are some other things you may have noticed about your dreams:

 

Grasping

 

ÒOne important characteristic of the sensors in your skin is referred to as the Rate of Adaptation. Most human mechanoreceptor cells respond to a change in the external stimulus (pressure, temperature,...) by producing voltage pulses across neurons. Immediately after the change in external stimulus, these pulses begin to appear. Over some time, the pulse rate declines and eventually returns to the original passive level. The rate of adaptation is the rate at which the mechanoreceptor pulse rate returns to normal after a change in stimulus. Simply put, sensors with adaptation do not provide information about static signals - only about changing signals. To use such a sensor to sense a static quantity, like roughness, it is necessary to make the roughness produce a time-varying contact force on the tactile sensors in the fingers.Ó

 

We are twittering machines.  This cognizance of activity is used by subsystems of our bodies, think about the physiology of grasping something:

 

 

Mechanical Grasping

 

 

On Seeing:

 

Banana

 

All objects absorb and reflect light in predictable ways. By measuring how much light an object absorbs in some colors (or wavelengths) and reflects in others, we can tell a lot about that object. For instance, suppose there are three bananas on a tableÑone is dark brown with a wrinkled and leathery appearance, one is dull yellow in color with a smooth skin, and the third is pale green with a slick and shiny textureÑwhich would you pick to eat and why? Noting its color and texture, most people would choose the yellow banana because these characteristics indicate it is ripe.

The banana example illustrates a concept basic to the art and science of remote sensing. The various colors (or wavelengths) of light that bounce off the banana and travel to your eye allow you to determine whether the banana is ripe, and you never have to touch the banana to make that judgment. This is similar to how Òremote sensingÓ works. (The term Òremote sensingÓ refers to the use of an artificial device to make measurements or observations of an object from a distance.) By observing and measuring things like color, shape, and texture, scientists can learn a lot about EarthÕs environment.

 

 

Image

In Ways of Seeing, John Berger stipulated that 'image' means a 'sight which has been created or reproduced ... detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance and preserved.' In other words, an image is an aspect of culture, not nature. Since images are made by humans, they embody 'ways of seeing' -- i.e., the assumptions, desires and values of the makers.

 

In Art/Science and DNA Structure , Dr. Root-Bernstein writing on the possibility that the visual representation of Watson and CrickÕs double-helix may be wrong, states: ÒWhat too many scientists, writers, and illustrators have overlooked-or do not understand-is that images are ÒunderstandingÓ. The visual form in which a theory is represented becomes a working model of that theory, whether it is accurate or not.46 What becomes familiar through visual repetition becomes the basis for our aesthetic appreciation and sets our standards for judging the rest of a field, be that field science or art.

 

Again, We train to the Medium

 

 

 

Predictable is a key word in that description. The vast majority of 3-D graphics are created by applying the notions above Ð the illusion of 3-D is created by representing light on surfaces. What happens when predictability is diminished? on the physiology of seeing When what we see defies our assumptions weÉ.. adapt, and work to understand what is going on.  Illusions are defined as erroneous mental representations.  When we can compare illusory images with non-illusory images it is relatively easy to differentiate between the two. 

 

These are Optical Illusions Ð they can be understood as Òerroneous mental representationsÓ due to context Ð we can immediately compare them to the things around us that we know.

 

This one is a bit more difficult to ÒexplainÓ, as it is sculptural and Panoramic, immersive.

 

Ames Room

 

When we cannot clearly differentiate between real/unreal our tendency is to develop a frame of reference, an organizing principle that makes sense out of what we are perceiving Ð as in a dream.  Again, we train to the medium.  Sometimes this can be useful

 

Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita

 

In other words:

 

Optical illusions can be experienced as such if we can have a critical perspective to understand them Ð meaning, if we can use our stored knowledge of the world to compare with what we are experiencing in one location, we can, often deduce that it is, in fact, illusory Ð when we are in an immersive environment this criticality is significantly less available so the illusion becomes, in essence, real Ð and we respond as we would to a real event.

 

Our sense of touch, our sense of sight, dreams, sensory substitution Ð what does all of this say:

 

We train to the: dreams /  Illusion Ð immersion Ð VirtualReality MEDIUM. 

 

Our conscious mind is a simulation and we have learned to play with this simulation, to develop a dialectic relationship with our autogenic (self-regulating) systems of our body for the sake of pleasure.  We can ÒplayÓ with our mechanism for creating reality. ThatÕs pretty amazing, isnÕt it?  Immersive art can be understood as a recent apotheosis of this act.

 

We make it up with every heatbeat Ð ridges on fingertips Ð physiology of grasping, holding phenomena, nystagmus, twittering constantly.

 

 

On IMMERSION:

The feeling of presence, of 'being there', surrounded by space and interacting with available objects. The point of view in the immersive world is omni-directional. Immersion is enveloping, a 360 degree surround, that is physical rather than cognitive. For Joseph Nechvatal, immersion in a Virtual Reality work implies a unified total space, a homogeneous world without external distraction, striving to be a harmonious whole. He identifies 'two grades of immersion: (1) cocooning and (2) expanding within which, when these two directions of psychic space cooperate ... we feel ... our bodies becoming subliminal, immersed in an extensive topophilia ... an inner immensity where we realize our limitations along with our desires for expansion.'

 

Images/Works:

 

Sacri Monti

Sacri Monti

Sacri Monti II

 

 

Panoramarotunda

 

Anton von Werner - Sedan Panorama

 

 

Fresco Pompeii  - 360 deg. fresco

Panorama X     - Panorama

Expo 2000    

CAVE         - Cave

 

Sensorama 1962

Stereoscope 1850

Stereoscopic Television 1960

Head Mounted Display: HMD  Headmounted from Disc

Fred Waller's ãCineramaÒ made its appearance in the USA. Similar to today's IMAX cinemas, in the 1950s it provided around one hundred cinemas across the world with three-dimensional image worlds, many of them ultra-fast moving ones  cinerama

 

Char Davies Osmose  video explanation

Telematic Dreaming  video

 Home of the Brain

Murmuring Fields

A-Volve  video explanation

Marcos Novak - Liquid Architecture

Marcos Novak

 

Some of these artists are from last weekÕs foreshortened class (snow event closed school early)

 

Ken Goldberg

 

MemexEngine Marc Lafia The Vanndemar Memex or Laura Croft Stripped Bare by her Assassins, Even The Vandemar Memex is a rumination on the many fascinating tropes of extended self, distributed narrative, artificial life, collective intelligence and emergent systems. The Memex, set up in the context of a game, re-assembles Duchamp, Vannevar Bush, video games and many contemporary art works putting forward the notion of a engine from which works happen. The work is structured as a series of events, organized by episodes, a tool set, narrative tracks and collective networked actions. The user first selects a code name, then an image that tells the machine something of their psychological type and soon is set along a path. Authors (www.vanndemar.com) Marc Lafia : direction, concept, story, images, interface Mark Meadows : story, design Gabriella Marks: words, images, design, play mechanics, code

 

Ghost City Jody Zellen Ghost City is a website that focuses on the representation of the city by the mass media. It is a labyrinthine environment through which viewers can navigate, either following the linear narrative that unfolds by moving from page to page, or they can delve into the non-linear chaos of random links. Each space is made up of appropriated images and texts. The images are culled from various print media sources. The texts are either found passages from urban theory or specifically written poetic musings on the city. Rather than present static images, Ghost City is a collage of moving parts. It is a pulsating grid of flashing images that loop indefinitely. The viewer is an urban wanderer moving through the site, step-by-step, page by page. One moves forward and back retracing one's steps within the urban grid, discovering new spaces and new meanings. One clicks on a word: "walk," "time," "space" or an image of a silhouette, a shadow or a fa�de. The movement freezes, a color flashes and you are someplace else. One by one a new grid of images appears. Some seem familiar. Have you been here before? Ghost City is about memory, and about travelling through time and space. The time is infinite. The space is finite. Yet the time and space of Ghost City metaphorically relate to the experience of the city where people walk and talk and interact. Within the confines of Ghost City visitors can pause and think and move backwards and forwards. Ghost City is a city of fragments. A memory. A ghost of reality. A ghost city.

 

Wax Web is an interactive narrative 3D environment that is based upon and distributed via the internet. It goes back to Blair's 1991 electronic movie ÈWax or the Discovery of Television Among the BeesÇ. Scenes from this film are interwoven with image, sound and text elements to build an associative net of references where the linear story is no longer valid. Depending on the interaction with the viewer, the elements gather to build new narrative threads and generate new interaction possibilities. By shifting into virtual space, the movie turns into interactive cinema.

 

IsAnyOneThere?  Stephen Wilson. A Voice Activated Tour of San Francisco Via its Pay Telephone. Overview For one week a computer telemarketing device makes hourly calls to selected pay telephones, engages whoever answers in conversations about life in the city, and digitally stores the conversations. The installation later allows viewers to interactively explore the city via a database of these recorded calls and digital video of life near the phones. It appropriates the, often intrusive, computer-based telemarketing technology and uses it in a new way, involving people who don't traditionally participate in the art world in an event that probes the diversity of life in the city and the relation of truth to fiction.

 

Virtual >> Physical:

 

 

 

o             Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita.  He mentions the plasticity of the human mind.  Patterns of stimuli on the hand or tongue can cause the brain to visualize or balance itself, its called sensory substitution.  Notice how Dr. Bach-y-Rita says that the user can visualize Òwith conditioningÓ Ð we all needed to learn to make sense of the data coming into our brains via the optic nerve.   Check out the first video, and the last one on the page Ð the one with the guy wearing a camera on his forehead.  This person is blind and has learned to see via lingual stimulation from the brainportÉ 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pervasive computing:

 

 

 

 

 

Tech:

Embeddedblue from Parallax, Bs2, Jitter, TcpServer_Processing,

 

Silicon Logic Gates, The 3914 Dot Bar Display Chip Ð you can do ADC with it and it works beautifully with the Logic Gates.  Ridiculously Sensitive Charge Detector .  Add some relays and youÕve enough to build many projects.

 

Micro Lab #2

 

 

Assignment:

 Reading:

Tangible Bits

The Last Farewell

complexity and art ÐPeter Gallanter

destruction vs. deConstruction Ð Kevin Taylor

 

 

View:

Space-telescope data visualizations, Hubble Spacetelescope Ð scroll down the right side to Òhow the hubble images are madeÓ and UCSD Supercomputer visualizations

Artworks by,

Andrea Polli

Golan Levin

 

In class Presentation

 

Micro Lab #1

Great Bs2 Tutorial

 

Tangible Media Lab of MIT

 

 

Assignment: work on Micro project.

 

Charles Halary, ÒArt and Electromagnetism: a relationship in the form of a waveÓ Ð scroll down to Art and Design Art and Electromagnetism

 

Read: The Coming Age of Calm Technology Marc Weiser and John Seely Brown on ambient technology

________________________________________________________________________

 

Week 7

Combinations and Sequences, adding memory.

 

Brief Review

Digital Logic from Play-Hookey.com Ð good job of describing and illustrating Digital Logic, both Combinational and Sequential

 

>>>

How to do potentially cool things with Boolean Logic (Combinational and/or Sequential)

Building a Transistor

***If you use the silicon chip versions of the logic gates mentioned above you will notice something: a logic 1 will be represented by 0 voltage on the output pin Ð thatÕs right.  The reason?  An aspect of chip manufacturing is that the output voltage of individual pins varies Ð sometimes it reaches +5VDC, sometimes itÕs lower.  What users of these chips realized is that each and every pin will always ÒsourceÓ, or reach exactly 0 volts.  So, to avoid instances where the output voltage fluctuation is enough to cause an LED (for example) to remain dark when it should be lit, engineers and chip designers decided to have 0 = True (1). Got it?  BTW, as Micro-controllers have the same issue (they are made from the same materials as our Logic ICÕs, itÕs a good idea to write your code with this fact in mind.

>>>

 

***In class Lab assignment:***

Please pick, or create a truth table and build a virtual circuit for it.  Please come up with a version of it that uses Òreal worldÓ inputs and outputs.  Then visit Digital Logic from Play-Hookey.com and click on any of the Sequential Circuits and build one in the simulator (simmcir , or  Boolean Logic Java Applet) of your choice.  When you have done this, call me over and weÕll talk about it.  Then, combine a Sequential circuit with a Combinational circuit

 

LetÕs discuss memoryÉ

 

Some stuff:

Mathpuzzle Ð check out the Spieker Circle Table near the bottom

C02 AND gate from IBM

Leeds Electric Ð cool surplus in Brooklyn

Science Ebooks Ð many cool links, some deadÉ

Java Applets - physics, electricity, electromagnetism, etc...

PhysicsWeb

 

An idea:

We train to the medium, any medium >>

 

Look at this: Double Helix Illustration

 

Art/Science and DNA Structure Ð Dr. Robert S. Root-Bernstein

 

Excerpt from above linked article:

 

ÒThe problem is that there is a very small but real possibility that Watson and Crick got part of the structure wrong. Oh, the base-pairing idea, the basis for how information is encoded in genes, is certainly right. Genetic engineering, if nothing else, proves that by the fact that we can synthesize almost any gene sequence we want and have it make the corresponding protein. The rungs in the ladder of the double helix are certainly right. It's the double-helix part that is a bit doubtful. And that's where aesthetics and visual conventions come in.

To understand how it is even conceivable that DNA might not be a helix, it is necessary first to recognize that scientific research, like all arts, is a process of questioning nature. In all processes there are an infinite number of possible turnings and detours one could take at any given junction that could lead to alternative end points. Imagination or oversight determines the path. Scientists, like artists, therefore try to miss as little as possible by elaborating classes of possibilities that they narrow down by a series of informed choices.6 As Henri Poincare said, "To invent is to choose," an aesthetic statement equally valid in any creative field. What therefore underpins all creative endeavors is the interplay between the elaboration of possibilities and the criteria of choice that are employed for selecting among them. If an idea is never imagined, it cannot be chosen. And to be chosen, it must fit the dominant aesthetic criteria of the field, or give rise, laboriously, to a new one.

 

***Here I must emphasize that scientists, just as much as artists, are dependent upon aesthetic criteria in making their investigative choices. A considerable literature exists arguing that the choice of a problem; the criteria used to analyze its possible solutions; concepts of beauty, harmony, simplicity, symmetry, consistency; and even the skill and style with which the solution is reached and is propounded are all replete with aesthetic choices that differ in no significant manner from those made by the artist.8 As the turn-of-the-century neuroanatomist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal wrote, great scientists have a: "congenital inclination to economy of mental effort and the almost irresistible propensity to regard as true what satisfies our aesthetic sensibility by appearing in agreeable and harmonious architectural forms. As always, reason is silent before beauty."9 These words, as we shall see, certainly apply to Watson and Crick and their work on DNA. Both Watson and Crick were strongly predisposed to favor helical models for DNA from the very beginning. Upon meeting the two men in 1952 while they were developing models of DNA structure, nucleic acid specialist Chargaff wrote in his diary "two pitchmen in search of a helix."l0 Pitchmen is a pun: pitch refers to the degree of inclination or slope formed by a helix as it twists around and equally to the fact that Watson and Crick were giving Chargaff a "pitch," or sell job, to the effect that DNA must be a helix. This decision was made even before there was any evidence for it, as Watson's Double Helix makes evident. For example, Watson records that during 1952, he believed:

"The idea [of helices] was so simple that it had to be right. Every helical staircase I saw that weekend in Oxford made me more confident that other biological structures would also have helical symmetry. For over a week I pored over electron micrographs of muscle and collagen fibers, looking for hints of helices."ll

 

What too many scientists, writers, and illustrators have overlooked-or do not understand-is that images are ÒunderstandingÓ. The visual form in which a theory is represented becomes a working model of that theory, whether it is accurate or not.46 What becomes familiar through visual repetition becomes the basis for our aesthetic appreciation and sets our standards for judging the rest of a field, be that field science or art. If the visual conventions and models adopted by a field are therefore misleading-untruthful-then a lack of rigor becomes generally acceptable. Clearly, just such a lack of rigor has become acceptable in our portrayals of DNA. Just as clearly, there is an outstanding problem here, whether that problem is with the structure of DNA itself or with our understanding of DNA replication.

In sum, I have no idea whether the double-helical model of DNA is correct. That is not the point of this paper. The point is to underscore just how important aesthetic considerations-beauty, ugliness, simplicity, the connection between structure and function, and overlooking or ignoring complications-are to science. There is no objectivity here-nor, if you believe Crick about the necessity of bravely ignoring data to see the forest for the trees, can there be. But in portraying the forest of genetic structures, I have also found that there is a very real danger of oversimplification, as represented by the completely inaccurate representations of DNA replication that are found in every textbook I have examined. It is bad enough that our visual conventions are misleading, but it is doubly inexcusable when the text that accompanies the illustrations gives not even a hint as to the topological, structural, functional, and mechanistic problems that the visual conventions hide. Thus, whatever the historical fate of side-by-side models of DNA turns out to be, they have played an important role in clarifying and extending our ever-changing view of the stuff of life.

Clarification is the point. Clarification of our view of life is, in the end, what joins the sciences and arts. Arts, just like sciences, should be revealing. They must have integrity and coherence. They must give us a perspective that permits a deeper understanding of its subject. They should tell the truth, even if they must make up a fiction in order to do so. In the long run it is aesthetic criteria that set the masters of any field off from the pedants and epigones of any generation. What concerns me more than anything about the case of DNA is the way in which models, illustrations, and art itself have been subverted to the use of a theory, revealing not the inner details, surprises, and fascination of the material, but covering up its complications and controversies. There is a rich field here for the modeler and the artist who can approach the questions of DNA structure and function as an explorer and explicator because DNA is nowhere as simple as the object that so many of us now take as an icon.

And perhaps, someday, side-by-side models-the warped zipper in particular-may also become icons. At the very least, considered purely as architectural models, they are surprising and new. At the very least, Rodley, Bates, Sasisekharan, and their colleagues have been intensely creative in a purely artistic way. They have discovered something unexpected about natural forms and, contrary to Crick's opinion, what they have discovered has its own beauty. Thus, I would apply the same conclusion to their work that I applied a few years ago to the attempts artist Ken Snelson is making to model the quantum atom:

"[Have they] succeeded in [their] hopes of modeling the atom[sJ? Or [have they], in [their] search for the basic structures of matter, provided a solution to a problem that has yet to be invented? The criterion of beauty tells us nothing on this point. And in the end, it doesn't matter. What does matter is the surprising insight [they] bring to [their] invention. At the very least, we can no longer think of[DNA]. . . as we did before. Rodley, Bates, Sasisekharan, and their colleagues have expanded the universe of the possible."58

What more can we ask of either science or art, or of their surprising and explosive intersections? Ò

 

 

ARTWORKS:

 

Found Photo Project

 

Mark Napier

 

Ken Goldberg

 

MemexEngine Marc Lafia The Vanndemar Memex or Laura Croft Stripped Bare by her Assassins, Even The Vandemar Memex is a rumination on the many fascinating tropes of extended self, distributed narrative, artificial life, collective intelligence and emergent systems. The Memex, set up in the context of a game, re-assembles Duchamp, Vannevar Bush, video games and many contemporary art works putting forward the notion of a engine from which works happen. The work is structured as a series of events, organized by episodes, a tool set, narrative tracks and collective networked actions. The user first selects a code name, then an image that tells the machine something of their psychological type and soon is set along a path. Authors (www.vanndemar.com) Marc Lafia : direction, concept, story, images, interface Mark Meadows : story, design Gabriella Marks: words, images, design, play mechanics, code

 

Ghost City Jody Zellen Ghost City is a website that focuses on the representation of the city by the mass media. It is a labyrinthine environment through which viewers can navigate, either following the linear narrative that unfolds by moving from page to page, or they can delve into the non-linear chaos of random links. Each space is made up of appropriated images and texts. The images are culled from various print media sources. The texts are either found passages from urban theory or specifically written poetic musings on the city. Rather than present static images, Ghost City is a collage of moving parts. It is a pulsating grid of flashing images that loop indefinitely. The viewer is an urban wanderer moving through the site, step-by-step, page-by-page. One moves forward and back retracing one's steps within the urban grid, discovering new spaces and new meanings. One clicks on a word: "walk," "time," "space" or an image of a silhouette, a shadow. The movement freezes, a color flashes and you are someplace else. One by one a new grid of images appears. Some seem familiar. Have you been here before? Ghost City is about memory, and about traveling through time and space. The time is infinite. The space is finite. Yet the time and space of Ghost City metaphorically relate to the experience of the city where people walk and talk and interact. Within the confines of Ghost City visitors can pause and think and move backwards and forwards. Ghost City is a city of fragments. A memory. A ghost of reality: a ghost city.

 

Wax Web is an interactive narrative 3D environment that is based upon and distributed via the internet. It goes back to Blair's 1991 electronic movie ÈWax or the Discovery of Television Among the BeesÇ. Scenes from this film are interwoven with image, sound and text elements to build an associative net of references where the linear story is no longer valid. Depending on the interaction with the viewer, the elements gather to build new narrative threads and generate new interaction possibilities. By shifting into virtual space, the movie turns into interactive cinema.

 

IsAnyOneThere?  Stephen Wilson. A Voice Activated Tour of San Francisco Via its Pay Telephone. Overview For one week a computer telemarketing device makes hourly calls to selected pay telephones, engages whoever answers in conversations about life in the city, and digitally stores the conversations. The installation later allows viewers to interactively explore the city via a database of these recorded calls and digital video of life near the phones. It appropriates the, often intrusive, computer-based telemarketing technology and uses it in a new way, involving people who don't traditionally participate in the art world in an event that probes the diversity of life in the city and the relation of truth to fiction.

 

Poetry for Simultaneous Voices Ð Jim Rosenberg

 

The Cut-up Machine Ð an Hommage to William S. Burroughs

 

Diagrams - 5, Jim Rosenberg

 

Stuart Moulthrop - victory garden and pax

 

The Sims / Secondlife

 

Assignment:

Read: Absorbing and Squeezing Out - On Sponges and Ubiquitous Media - Bill Buxton

 

________________________________________________________________________

 

Week 8

Non-binary Combinational Digital logic.  Memory: Feedback and Flip-flops, Rhythm.

 

  ÒA chaotic system can be described as a system where a small change in the initial conditions can produce a large change in the state to which the system evolves.  Digital computers are predictable and unpredictable in exactly the same senses as the rest of the physical world.  They follow deterministic laws, but these laws have complicated consequences that are extremely difficult to predict.  It is often impractical to guess what computers are going to do before they do it. 

As is true of physical systems, it does not take much to make a computation complex.  In computers, chaotic systemsÐ systems whose outcomes depend sensitively on the initial conditions Ð are the norm.Ó  D. Hillis Ð pattern on the stone, page 67.

 

WeÕve discussed binary possibilities of working with Boolean Algebra.  What can we do using binary counting and Boolean Gates?  Whatever we want toÉ

 

  As an example of a non-binary function, suppose we want to build a machine to act as a judge of the childrenÕs game of Rock/Paper/Scissors.  This is a game for two players in which each chooses, in secret, one of three ÒweaponsÓ Ð rock, paper or scissors.  The rules are simpleÓ scissors cuts paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes scissors.  If the two children choose the same weapon, they tie.  Rather than building a machine that plays the game (which would involve guessing which weapon the opponent is going to choose), we will build a machine that judges who wins.  HereÕs the input/output table for the function that takes the choices as inputs and declares the winner as output.  The table encodes the rules of the game:

 

Input A

Input B

Output

Scissors

Scissors

Tie

Scissors

Paper

A wins

Scissors

Rock

B wins

Paper

Scissors

B wins

Paper

Paper

Tie

Paper

Rock

A wins

Rock

Scissors

A wins

Rock

Paper

B wins

Rock

Rock

Tie

 

The Scissors-Paper-Rock judging function is a combinational function, but it is not a binary function, since its inputs and output have more than two possible values.  To implement this function as a combinational logic block, we must convert it to a function of 1Õs and 0Õs.  This requires us to establish some convention for representing the inputs and outputs.  A simple way to do this would be to use a separate bit for each of the possibilities.  There would be three input signals for each weapon: a 1 on the first input represents scissors, a 1 on the second input represents rock, and a 1 on the third input represents paper.  Similarly, we could use separate output lines to represent a win for player A, a win for player B, or a tie.  So the box would have six inputs and three outputs.

  Using three input signals for each weapon is a perfectly good way to build the function, but if we were doing it inside a computer we would probably use some kind of encoding that required a smaller number of inputs and outputs.  For example, we could use two bits for each input and use the combination 01 to represent scissors, 10 to represent paper, and 11 to represent rock.  We could similarly encode each of the possible outputs using two bits.  This encoding would result in the simpler three-input/two-output table shown below:

 

Scissors =

01

Paper =

10

Rock =

11

A wins =

10

B wins =

01

Tie =

00

 

 

 

The three-input/two-output truth table:

 

Input A

Input B

Input C

Output A

Output B

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

1

0

1

0

1

0

0

1

1

0

0

1

0

0

1

1

1

0

1

0

0

1

1

0

0

0

1

1

1

0

0

 

The trick with multiple output truth tables is to first break them into multiple (in this case two) one-output truth tables, like this:

 

Truth table for Output A

 

Input A

Input B

Input C

Output A

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

0

0

1

0

1

0

1

1

0

1

0

0

1

1

0

1

0

1

1

0

0

1

1

1

0

 

 

Truth table for Output B

 

Input A

Input B

Input C

Output B

0

0

0

0

0

0

1

1

0

1

0

0

0

1

1

0

1

0

0

1

1

0

1

0

1

1

0

0

1

1

1

0

 

 

This link shows you how to convert any truth table into logic gates Truth Tables to Logic Gates - scroll down

 

Here is what the circuit would look like (made with CircuitMaker ):

 

 

 

Then we need to create another truth table to determine the final result of the game.

 

 

Input A

Input B

Output

 

01

01

00

01

10

10

01

11

01

10

01

01

10

10

00

10

11

10

11

01

10

11

10

01

11

11

00

 

As above, here is the truth table

 

          Input A

          Input B

          Output

0

1

0

1

0

0

0

1

1

0

1

0

0

1

1

1

0

1

1

0

0

1

0

1

1

0

1

0

0

0

1

0

1

1

1

0

 

Truth table for Output A

 

          Input A

          Input B

Output (A)

0

1

0

1

0

0

1

1

0

1

0

1

1

1

0

1

0

0

1

0

1

0

1

0

0

1

0

1

1

1

 

Truth table for Output B

 

          Input A

          Input B

Output (B)

0

1

0

1

0

0

1

1

0

0

0

1

1

1

1

1

0

0

1

1

1

0

1

0

0

1

0

1

1

0

 

 

HereÕs the resulting circuit:

 

 

 

 

Logic Gates made from Legos

 

Building a Transistor

 

Electron Wrangling for beginners Ð Mark AllenÕs course at the Machine Project in LA Ð check the lecture notes:  concise, helpful.

 

Sequential Logic

 

An idea:

We train to the medium, any medium >>

 

Look at this: Double Helix Illustration

 

Art/Science and DNA Structure Ð Dr. Robert S. Root-Bernstein

 

Excerpt from above linked article:

 

ÒThe problem is that there is a very small but real possibility that Watson and Crick got part of the structure wrong. Oh, the base-pairing idea, the basis for how information is encoded in genes, is certainly right. Genetic engineering, if nothing else, proves that by the fact that we can synthesize almost any gene sequence we want and have it make the corresponding protein. The rungs in the ladder of the double helix are certainly right. It's the double-helix part that is a bit doubtful. And that's where aesthetics and visual conventions come in.

To understand how it is even conceivable that DNA might not be a helix, it is necessary first to recognize that scientific research, like all arts, is a process of questioning nature. In all processes there are an infinite number of possible turnings and detours one could take at any given junction that could lead to alternative end points. Imagination or oversight determines the path. Scientists, like artists, therefore try to miss as little as possible by elaborating classes of possibilities that they narrow down by a series of informed choices.6 As Henri Poincare said, "To invent is to choose," an aesthetic statement equally valid in any creative field. What therefore underpins all creative endeavors is the interplay between the elaboration of possibilities and the criteria of choice that are employed for selecting among them. If an idea is never imagined, it cannot be chosen. And to be chosen, it must fit the dominant aesthetic criteria of the field, or give rise, laboriously, to a new one.

 

***Here I must emphasize that scientists, just as much as artists, are dependent upon aesthetic criteria in making their investigative choices. A considerable literature exists arguing that the choice of a problem; the criteria used to analyze its possible solutions; concepts of beauty, harmony, simplicity, symmetry, consistency; and even the skill and style with which the solution is reached and is propounded are all replete with aesthetic choices that differ in no significant manner from those made by the artist.8 As the turn-of-the-century neuroanatomist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramon y Cajal wrote, great scientists have a: "congenital inclination to economy of mental effort and the almost irresistible propensity to regard as true what satisfies our aesthetic sensibility by appearing in agreeable and harmonious architectural forms. As always, reason is silent before beauty."9 These words, as we shall see, certainly apply to Watson and Crick and their work on DNA. Both Watson and Crick were strongly predisposed to favor helical models for DNA from the very beginning. Upon meeting the two men in 1952 while they were developing models of DNA structure, nucleic acid specialist Chargaff wrote in his diary "two pitchmen in search of a helix."l0 Pitchmen is a pun: pitch refers to the degree of inclination or slope formed by a helix as it twists around and equally to the fact that Watson and Crick were giving Chargaff a "pitch," or sell job, to the effect that DNA must be a helix. This decision was made even before there was any evidence for it, as Watson's Double Helix makes evident. For example, Watson records that during 1952, he believed:

"The idea [of helices] was so simple that it had to be right. Every helical staircase I saw that weekend in Oxford made me more confident that other biological structures would also have helical symmetry. For over a week I pored over electron micrographs of muscle and collagen fibers, looking for hints of helices."ll

 

What too many scientists, writers, and illustrators have overlooked-or do not understand-is that images are ÒunderstandingÓ. The visual form in which a theory is represented becomes a working model of that theory, whether it is accurate or not.46 What becomes familiar through visual repetition becomes the basis for our aesthetic appreciation and sets our standards for judging the rest of a field, be that field science or art. If the visual conventions and models adopted by a field are therefore misleading-untruthful-then a lack of rigor becomes generally acceptable. Clearly, just such a lack of rigor has become acceptable in our portrayals of DNA. Just as clearly, there is an outstanding problem here, whether that problem is with the structure of DNA itself or with our understanding of DNA replication.

In sum, I have no idea whether the double-helical model of DNA is correct. That is not the point of this paper. The point is to underscore just how important aesthetic considerations-beauty, ugliness, simplicity, the connection between structure and function, and overlooking or ignoring complications-are to science. There is no objectivity here-nor, if you believe Crick about the necessity of bravely ignoring data to see the forest for the trees, can there be. But in portraying the forest of genetic structures, I have also found that there is a very real danger of oversimplification, as represented by the completely inaccurate representations of DNA replication that are found in every textbook I have examined. It is bad enough that our visual conventions are misleading, but it is doubly inexcusable when the text that accompanies the illustrations gives not even a hint as to the topological, structural, functional, and mechanistic problems that the visual conventions hide. Thus, whatever the historical fate of side-by-side models of DNA turns out to be, they have played an important role in clarifying and extending our ever-changing view of the stuff of life.

Clarification is the point. Clarification of our view of life is, in the end, what joins the sciences and arts. Arts, just like sciences, should be revealing. They must have integrity and coherence. They must give us a perspective that permits a deeper understanding of its subject. They should tell the truth, even if they must make up a fiction in order to do so. In the long run it is aesthetic criteria that set the masters of any field off from the pedants and epigones of any generation. What concerns me more than anything about the case of DNA is the way in which models, illustrations, and art itself have been subverted to the use of a theory, revealing not the inner details, surprises, and fascination of the material, but covering up its complications and controversies. There is a rich field here for the modeler and the artist who can approach the questions of DNA structure and function as an explorer and explicator because DNA is nowhere as simple as the object that so many of us now take as an icon.

And perhaps, someday, side-by-side models-the warped zipper in particular-may also become icons. At the very least, considered purely as architectural models, they are surprising and new. At the very least, Rodley, Bates, Sasisekharan, and their colleagues have been intensely creative in a purely artistic way. They have discovered something unexpected about natural forms and, contrary to Crick's opinion, what they have discovered has its own beauty. Thus, I would apply the same conclusion to their work that I applied a few years ago to the attempts artist Ken Snelson is making to model the quantum atom:

"[Have they] succeeded in [their] hopes of modeling the atom[sJ? Or [have they], in [their] search for the basic structures of matter, provided a solution to a problem that has yet to be invented? The criterion of beauty tells us nothing on this point. And in the end, it doesn't matter. What does matter is the surprising insight [they] bring to [their] invention. At the very least, we can no longer think of[DNA]. . . as we did before. Rodley, Bates, Sasisekharan, and their colleagues have expanded the universe of the possible."58

What more can we ask of either science or art, or of their surprising and explosive intersections? Ò

 

 

Lab Assignment:

 

Go Through: Chapter 14, ÒFeedback and Flip-FlopsÓ, from Code, by Charles Petzold.  Using Boolean Logic Java Applet , or CircuitMaker Download (for PC only), build the sequential logic circuits in the chapter.

 

Some Artwork and other things IÕve been meaning to show youÉ

 

electronet Ð amazing site for art and electronics, please scroll down to the category Art and Design and read Charles HalaryÕs article: Electromagnetism and Art; a relationship in the form of a wave.

 

Leeds Electric Ð cool surplus in Brooklyn

Science Ebooks Ð many cool links, some deadÉ

Java Applets - physics, electricity, electromagnetism, etc...

PhysicsWeb

 

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Stephen Vitiello

 

Tom Jennings

 

Eric Sokolofsky

 

Mark Napier

 

Ken Goldberg

 

MemexEngine Marc Lafia The Vanndemar Memex or Laura Croft Stripped Bare by her Assassins, Even The Vandemar Memex is a rumination on the many fascinating tropes of extended self, distributed narrative, artificial life, collective intelligence and emergent systems. The Memex, set up in the context of a game, re-assembles Duchamp, Vannevar Bush, video games and many contemporary art works putting forward the notion of a engine from which works happen. The work is structured as a series of events, organized by episodes, a tool set, narrative tracks and collective networked actions. The user first selects a code name, then an image that tells the machine something of their psychological type and soon is set along a path. Authors (www.vanndemar.com) Marc Lafia : direction, concept, story, images, interface Mark Meadows : story, design Gabriella Marks: words, images, design, play mechanics, code

 

Ghost City Jody Zellen Ghost City is a website that focuses on the representation of the city by the mass media. It is a labyrinthine environment through which viewers can navigate, either following the linear narrative that unfolds by moving from page to page, or they can delve into the non-linear chaos of random links. Each space is made up of appropriated images and texts. The images are culled from various print media sources. The texts are either found passages from urban theory or specifically written poetic musings on the city. Rather than present static images, Ghost City is a collage of moving parts. It is a pulsating grid of flashing images that loop indefinitely. The viewer is an urban wanderer moving through the site, step-by-step, page-by-page. One moves forward and back retracing one's steps within the urban grid, discovering new spaces and new meanings. One clicks on a word: "walk," "time," "space" or an image of a silhouette, a shadow. The movement freezes, a color flashes and you are someplace else. One by one a new grid of images appears. Some seem familiar. Have you been here before? Ghost City is about memory, and about traveling through time and space. The time is infinite. The space is finite. Yet the time and space of Ghost City metaphorically relate to the experience of the city where people walk and talk and interact. Within the confines of Ghost City visitors can pause and think and move backwards and forwards. Ghost City is a city of fragments. A memory. A ghost of reality: a ghost city.

 

Wax Web is an interactive narrative 3D environment that is based upon and distributed via the internet. It goes back to Blair's 1991 electronic movie ÈWax or the Discovery of Television Among the BeesÇ. Scenes from this film are interwoven with image, sound and text elements to build an associative net of references where the linear story is no longer valid. Depending on the interaction with the viewer, the elements gather to build new narrative threads and generate new interaction possibilities. By shifting into virtual space, the movie turns into interactive cinema.

 

IsAnyOneThere?  Stephen Wilson. A Voice Activated Tour of San Francisco Via its Pay Telephone. Overview For one week a computer telemarketing device makes hourly calls to selected pay telephones, engages whoever answers in conversations about life in the city, and digitally stores the conversations. The installation later allows viewers to interactively explore the city via a database of