1. explore-blog: “Moral: Even a well-bound book may be easily ruined at first opening.” So you know, how to open a new book – usage tips from a legendary bookbinder. Complement with Mortimer Adler’s tips on how to read a book.

    explore-blog:

    “Moral: Even a well-bound book may be easily ruined at first opening.”

    So you know, how to open a new book – usage tips from a legendary bookbinder. Complement with Mortimer Adler’s tips on how to read a book.

  2. bluprint:

    At the time I was waiting tables at Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando, FL. I was a cocktail waitress in the VIP lounge, which is Jimi Hendrix themed. I think staring at music memorabilia all day probably soaked my brain with that vibe. One day as I was leaving to go to work I saw a pile of cassette tapes laying on top of a canvas I had set near my door. I thought, “What ghosts could be hiding in those machines?” I pulled out the ribbon and tried to work with it, making some writing. I watched the ribbon curl up and it reminded me of Jimi Hendrix’s crazy hair, so that was the first portrait I made. I had never sold a piece of artwork. But selling was never that important… discovering is the fun part. by Erika Iris

  3. Re-Blogging

    I’ve only just realised this blog recently has been filling up with reblogs as opposed to original thought. There are some better examples of original thought to be found on my other blog http://themajorproject.tumblr.com, which I’m using to try and trace the progress of my final university project for this year. Which I must say is in its very early stages right now.

  4. oldhollywood: Colin Clive & Boris Karloff on the set of Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale) (via)

    oldhollywood:

    Colin Clive & Boris Karloff on the set of Bride of Frankenstein (1935, dir. James Whale) (via)

  5. wired: [via 8bitfuture]: World’s largest digital camera passes first hurdle. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will capture the largest, deepest view of the night sky ever with its 3.2 billion pixel resolution. The LSST passed “Critical Decision 1”, meaning the project can continue to work towards construction which will begin in 2014. Primary work has begun on the 8.4 meter primary mirror being built on top of a mountain in Chile. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data – about 6 million gigabytes per year, the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular eight-megapixel digital camera every night, but of much higher quality and scientific value. Its deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics. Imagine how much better this will make spying on your neighbors.

    wired:

    [via 8bitfuture]:

    World’s largest digital camera passes first hurdle.

    The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will capture the largest, deepest view of the night sky ever with its 3.2 billion pixel resolution. The LSST passed “Critical Decision 1”, meaning the project can continue to work towards construction which will begin in 2014. Primary work has begun on the 8.4 meter primary mirror being built on top of a mountain in Chile.

    The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will survey the entire visible sky every week, creating an unprecedented public archive of data – about 6 million gigabytes per year, the equivalent of shooting roughly 800,000 images with a regular eight-megapixel digital camera every night, but of much higher quality and scientific value. Its deep and frequent cosmic vistas will help answer critical questions about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and aid studies of near-Earth asteroids, Kuiper belt objects, the structure of our galaxy and many other areas of astronomy and fundamental physics.

    Imagine how much better this will make spying on your neighbors.

    (Source: news.slac.stanford.edu)

  6. proofmathisbeautiful: un: iheartmyart: Tim Hawkinson, Mobius Ship, 2006, wood, plastic, Plexiglas, rope, staples, string, twist ties, glue California-based artist Tim Hawkinson is known for taking everyday materials and altering them in imaginative ways, creating works that address broad issues about the intersection of human consciousness, nature and technology. Here, he employed a mix of found objects and common household materials—including twist ties, craft wood, staples, and packing material—which he transformed almost alchemically into a complex and awe-inspiring sculpture. Echoing the working methods of ship-in-a-bottle hobbyists, Hawkinson created a painstakingly detailed model ship that twists in upon itself, presenting the viewer with a thought-provoking visual conundrum. The title is a witty play on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, which famously relates the tale of a ship captain’s all-consuming obsession with an elusive white whale. The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson’s sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville’s epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel. Möbius Ship also humorously refers to the mathematical concept of the Möbius Strip. Named after a nineteenth-century astronomer and mathematician, the Möbius Strip is a surface that has only one side, and exists as a continuous curve. Its simple yet complex spatial configuration presents a visual puzzle that parallels Hawkinson’s transformation of the mundane materials into something unexpected. via IMA

    proofmathisbeautiful:

    un:

    iheartmyart:

    Tim Hawkinson, Mobius Ship, 2006, wood, plastic, Plexiglas, rope, staples, string, twist ties, glue

    California-based artist Tim Hawkinson is known for taking everyday materials and altering them in imaginative ways, creating works that address broad issues about the intersection of human consciousness, nature and technology. Here, he employed a mix of found objects and common household materials—including twist ties, craft wood, staples, and packing material—which he transformed almost alchemically into a complex and awe-inspiring sculpture.

    Echoing the working methods of ship-in-a-bottle hobbyists, Hawkinson created a painstakingly detailed model ship that twists in upon itself, presenting the viewer with a thought-provoking visual conundrum. The title is a witty play on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, which famously relates the tale of a ship captain’s all-consuming obsession with an elusive white whale. The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson’s sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville’s epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel.

    Möbius Ship also humorously refers to the mathematical concept of the Möbius Strip. Named after a nineteenth-century astronomer and mathematician, the Möbius Strip is a surface that has only one side, and exists as a continuous curve. Its simple yet complex spatial configuration presents a visual puzzle that parallels Hawkinson’s transformation of the mundane materials into something unexpected.

    via IMA

  7. RBG Colourspace as a Printed Book →

    When I first saw this work I honestly thought that I was looking at a digital rendering, it was only when I read the description it twigged that it’s actually a printed book.  There’s something a little jarring about seeing the familiar RGB colourspace displayed in this way, being so used to seeing it on a computer monitor.  

    There seems to be an attempt here to translate the digital to the physical, since RGB is the colourspace used for digital displays rather than printed material which favours CMYK.

    Her other works Wood and Marble attempt a similar translation from the natural to the artificial, an act of visual trickery.  However wood and marble are already physical objects and so re-creating them in this way for me isn’t as interesting.

  8. Re-blogging does not constitute an agreement.

    pbsarts:

    Is Instagram the Best Thing to Ever Happen to Photography?

    With its ability to make boring cellphone photos look “vintage” and “artsy”, Instagram has exploded worldwide. Derided by its detractors as a tool for making bad photos worse, we take an alternate view and argue that Instagram is the greatest thing to ever happen to photography. Its simple filters and social networking features are training cellphone photographers everywhere to think creatively about their photos. Plus, the app is turning its worldwide user base into an army of photojournalists capturing striking images of the people and events around them. As the old photography adage goes, “The best camera is the one you have with you.”

    New Idea Channel episodes every other Wednesday!!!

    Let us know what sorts of crazy ideas you have, about this episode and otherwise:
    Tweet at us! @pbsideachannel (yes, the longest twitter username ever)
    Email us! pbsideachannel@gmail.com

    Hosted by Mike Rugnetta (@mikerugnetta)
    Made by Kornhaber Brown (http://www.kornhaberbrown.com

  9. We are in danger of having a whole generation that has no family albums, because people just leave them on the computer and suddenly they will be deleted. - Martin Parr My project made a bit of a departure from its intended course recently.  After weeks of focusing almost exclusively on working with objects I found myself turning towards working with photographs.  I feel it’s important to try and explain this change of course and my reasons for doing it. Firstly, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, I was struggling to find objects that worked in the piece.  I was deliberately trying to use objects that I didn’t see as having an obvious meaning as I wanted the viewers to bring their own experiences to the work and begin to add stories to see what emerged.  However, when I began to ask people to look at the objects that I had collected I found that people had difficulty engaging with them.  Also, something I had not properly considered was the fact that by photographing the objects I had in effect flattened them and this immediately changed their perceptions of the work. What I did find was that people immediately responded to the old photographs I had collected, the visual cues they provided seemed to give them the starting point they needed to build on what they saw in the photographs.  They not only began to construct stories based on what they saw in the images but some began to relate to their own experiences and memories in a way they didn’t with the objects. Initially, I had been reluctant to use the photographs in the project, or to relate the project too closely to photography.  The simple reason being that photographs have their own particular power that is quite distinct from that of an object like the ones I was already working with.  In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes talks in some depth about his idea of the punctum - being that thing that punctuates a photograph and reminds the of the photograph’s indexical nature.  The reminder that the photograph is real, he suggests gives the image a ‘power of expansion’, that in a way makes the viewer add something to it.  He cites in the book, an example of a dirt track road in a photograph by Kertesz as immediately returning him to his past travels in central Europe. Having said that, there’s no reason why the photographs can not be thought of as objects in their own right.  Before digital photography became commonplace, a photograph was always something physical, a negative or a printed image.  Although digital photography may have radically increased the number of images taken, the way we share these images has also changed drastically - instead of printing we store them on computers, post them to Facebook, show them on our mobile phones and so on.  It was important to me that the photographs used in the project could still be seen as objects, as opposed to simply images which is why they all have a back that obscures the image until they are ‘handled’.  Printed photographs, like the kind that might be kept in a shoe-box offer a possibility of being encountered unexpectedly, the experience of discovering a link to a past that is not necessarily our own.  It is unclear whether the same can be said about images stored digitally - can they be happened upon accidentally?  Questions too can be asked about their longevity - will they still be around in fifty or one hundred years time if the media they’re stored on has broken down or is no longer supported? At present I feel the work only begins to touch on these questions, but I think by relating the project to photography it acquires a focus and a power that it was lacking before.  I think the work merits further development beyond the end of this project but in order to do this I need to focus more clearly on photography and the issues surrounding it.  Specifically, I need to look at exactly what this shift from being a medium with a strong physical presence to a more ephemeral, digital medium means for how we perceive and relate to the images.

    We are in danger of having a whole generation that has no family albums, because people just leave them on the computer and suddenly they will be deleted. - Martin Parr

    My project made a bit of a departure from its intended course recently.  After weeks of focusing almost exclusively on working with objects I found myself turning towards working with photographs.  I feel it’s important to try and explain this change of course and my reasons for doing it.

    Firstly, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, I was struggling to find objects that worked in the piece.  I was deliberately trying to use objects that I didn’t see as having an obvious meaning as I wanted the viewers to bring their own experiences to the work and begin to add stories to see what emerged.  However, when I began to ask people to look at the objects that I had collected I found that people had difficulty engaging with them.  Also, something I had not properly considered was the fact that by photographing the objects I had in effect flattened them and this immediately changed their perceptions of the work.

    What I did find was that people immediately responded to the old photographs I had collected, the visual cues they provided seemed to give them the starting point they needed to build on what they saw in the photographs.  They not only began to construct stories based on what they saw in the images but some began to relate to their own experiences and memories in a way they didn’t with the objects.

    Initially, I had been reluctant to use the photographs in the project, or to relate the project too closely to photography.  The simple reason being that photographs have their own particular power that is quite distinct from that of an object like the ones I was already working with.  In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes talks in some depth about his idea of the punctum - being that thing that punctuates a photograph and reminds the of the photograph’s indexical nature.  The reminder that the photograph is real, he suggests gives the image a ‘power of expansion’, that in a way makes the viewer add something to it.  He cites in the book, an example of a dirt track road in a photograph by Kertesz as immediately returning him to his past travels in central Europe.

    Having said that, there’s no reason why the photographs can not be thought of as objects in their own right.  Before digital photography became commonplace, a photograph was always something physical, a negative or a printed image.  Although digital photography may have radically increased the number of images taken, the way we share these images has also changed drastically - instead of printing we store them on computers, post them to Facebook, show them on our mobile phones and so on.  It was important to me that the photographs used in the project could still be seen as objects, as opposed to simply images which is why they all have a back that obscures the image until they are ‘handled’. 

    Printed photographs, like the kind that might be kept in a shoe-box offer a possibility of being encountered unexpectedly, the experience of discovering a link to a past that is not necessarily our own.  It is unclear whether the same can be said about images stored digitally - can they be happened upon accidentally?  Questions too can be asked about their longevity - will they still be around in fifty or one hundred years time if the media they’re stored on has broken down or is no longer supported?

    At present I feel the work only begins to touch on these questions, but I think by relating the project to photography it acquires a focus and a power that it was lacking before.  I think the work merits further development beyond the end of this project but in order to do this I need to focus more clearly on photography and the issues surrounding it.  Specifically, I need to look at exactly what this shift from being a medium with a strong physical presence to a more ephemeral, digital medium means for how we perceive and relate to the images.

  10. Kinect

    Having been working without the Kinect for some time in order to try and work out the other code I would need for the project.  I came back to using the Kinect as a means to move the objects.

    Having been working primarily with OpenFrameworks to control the Kinect, I had to use a different library in order to make it work with Processing.  I was keen to re-create the sense of picking-up and putting down an object which I’d had in the OpenFrameworks code so I looked for an example that would allow me to measure the depth values of the Kinect.

    The book Making Things see by Greg Borenstein was really useful for helping me to understand how to adapt what I had been doing in OpenFrameworks to Processing.  I followed the tutorial that explained how to track the closest point to the Kinect (in this case the user’s hand).  I found that substituting the mouseX and mouseY co-ordinates for the Kinect’s closest point value worked well in general but due to the nature of the Kinect, lacked the precision of mouse movement.  I tried to smooth out the range of Kinect values by averaging the last ten values which improved movement a good deal.  The code used is shown below :

    // IN SETUP

    float nearThreshold; // declare a float to hold the near value

    float farThreshold; // declare a float to hold the far value

    float closestX; // a float to hold the closest X value so far

    float closestY; // a float to hold the closest Y value so far

    int [] recentXValues = new int[10]; // an array to hold the 10 most recent x values

    int [] recentYValues = new int[10]; // an array to hold the 10 most recent y values

    int currentIndex = 0; // an int to hold the current index of the array

    float closestValue; // an int to hold the closest depth value so far

    PImage depthImage; // declare a PImage to hold the depthImage

    // IN DRAW

    kinect.update(); // get a new frame from the Kinect

    closestValue = 8000; // 8000 is the maximum possible depth value of the Kinect - so anything detected will be less than that

    int [] depthValues = kinect.depthMap(); // create an array of depth values

    depthImage = kinect.depthImage(); // depthImage is the Kinect depth map

    for (int x = 0; x < 640; x ++) { // for every pixel in the array

    for (int y = 0; y < 480; y ++) {

    int i = x + y * 640;

    int currentDepthValue = depthValues[i]; // put the depth value into the array

    if (currentDepthValue < nearThreshold || currentDepthValue > farThreshold) { // if the current depth value is not within the set range

       depthImage.pixels[i] = 0; // make the pixel of the depthImage black

       }

    if (currentDepthValue > nearThreshold && currentDepthValue < closestValue && currentDepthValue < farThreshold) { // if the current depth is within the defined range and closer than the last closest value

    closestValue = currentDepthValue; // make the closest value the current value   

    recentXValues[currentIndex] = x; // add the x and y co-ordinates to the array

    recentYValues[currentIndex] = y;

    recentCloseValue[currentIndex] = closestValue;

     //println(closestValue); // print the closest value to the console

       }

       }

       }   

    currentIndex ++; // add one to the value of current index

    if (currentIndex > 9) { // if the value of current index is greater than 9 then reset to 0

       currentIndex = 0;

       }   

       closestX = (recentXValues[0] + recentXValues[1] + recentXValues[2] + recentXValues[3] + recentXValues[4] + recentXValues[5] + recentXValues[6] + recentXValues[7] + recentXValues[8] + recentXValues[9]) / 10; // calculate the average value of x from the previous ten values

       closestY = (recentYValues[0] + recentYValues[1] + recentYValues[2] + recentYValues[3] + recentYValues[4] + recentYValues[5] + recentYValues[6] + recentYValues[7] + recentYValues[8] + recentYValues[9]) / 10; // calculate the average value of y from the previous ten values   

       if (avgCloseValue > 400 && avgCloseValue < 1000) { // if the closest value is in this range

       bPickUp = false; // object is being ‘picked up’

       bPutDown = true; // object is not being ‘put down’

       fill(255, 0, 0); // ellipse fill is green

       } 

       else if (avgCloseValue > 1000 && avgCloseValue < 1400) { // if the closest value is in this range

       bPickUp = true; // object is not being ‘picked up’

       bPutDown = false; // object is being put down

       fill(0, 255, 0); // ellipse fill is red

       }

       else {

       bPickUp = false; // if the current depth value is outside either of the above ranges

       bPutDown = false; // object is not being picked up or put down

       noFill(); // ellipse has no fill and is therefore hidden

       posX = 0;

       posY = 0;

       }

       posX = map(closestX, 0, 640, width/3, 1280); // map the value of closestX to the width of the screen

       posY = map(closestY, 0, 480, 0, 800); // map the value of closestY to the height of the screen

      // TRACKER —————————————————————————

      ellipse(posX, posY, 25, 25); // draw an ellipse to indicate to the user where their hand is

    I was able to adapt the example to create different conditions depending on the distance between the user’s hand and the Kinect.  So if the user’s hand was too far away from the Kinect they couldn’t influence the movement of the objects at all but if they were to move in closer they could ‘pick up’ the objects and move them around.  I found though, that around the point where depth value changed from being close to far could again be quite erratic.  I tried to use an average of the depth values in much the same way I had the x and y co-ordinates to smooth it out a bit, I think this did help a little.

    I’ve found however that the depth readings from the Kinect tend to be quite erratic anyway, points jump about even if nothing in front of the Kinect is moving.  I think that perhaps what I’m trying to do is perhaps a little two specific for using the Kinect, as it seems to work best with larger, more gestural movements.