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May 2006

May 02, 2006

I try to read regularly the great blog by UB School of Informatics student's Kevin Lim (focuses on Web.2.0. software as social technologies) that is called theory.isthereason (http://theory.isthereason.com/), and I liked very much, some weeks ago, his idea of lauching a contest that involved using as many Firefox tabs and windows as possible and playing with memory saturation (2 blog entries: there http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=742 and there http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=744). While net.artists try to be smart at crashing people's browser with a lot of artyness (cf. Jodi), some people just do it to themselves for fun. I really like the visualization results, a crazy representation of our psychotic ways to deal with time and information on the Internet. Also I am happy because they fuel the new category I invented (maybe...) in my net.art entry on Wikipedia: "browser art" (http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/12651.html).

A Flicker photo group was created for the occasion (http://flickr.com/photos/tags/furiousfirefoxtabs/). Here are some of the results:

http://flickr.com/photos/tags/furiousfirefoxtabs/

 

http://flickr.com/photos/tags/furiousfirefoxtabs/

 

http://flickr.com/photos/tags/furiousfirefoxtabs/

  Check out the Flickr group for techie explanations.

Keywords: blog, browser art, firefox tab contest, flickr, kevin lim, network, theory is the reason, visualization

Posted by camille.pb | 0 comment(s)

May 03, 2006

Well, at least, I am the first to introduce it in Wikipedia in my net.art entry (http://elgg.net/camillepb/weblog/12651.html). If Wikipedia still can make you happy, then we should not criticize it too much, uh? Hmm.

The proof that I have used the term in Wikipedia (sample of article):

The proof that I have NOT coined the term:


Posted by camille.pb | 8 comment(s)

May 09, 2006

My friend Masashi told me about the Japanese emoticon (or "facemark") frenzy today. The emoticon codes are already widely spread in the bulletin board/online communities culture. But the Japanese have developed this into a real form of ASCII Art. They take advantage of the fact that they are constantly moving between several alphabets (Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji) in everyday use; in computer practice, they seem to have a very developed practice of symbols in general, often using English and even Greek (and of course special iconic characters) to add to their emoticons. Also, the originality of their practice is based on the fact that they generally use symbols that are 2-bits (contrary to English, which basic alphabet is 1-bit).

There is a huge list of emoticons, or "facemarks" on this website: http://staff.aist.go.jp/k.harigaya/doc/kao_lis.html but that can also be found on the "Emoticon" wikipedia entry that devotes a whole chapter to "East Asian Style" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoticon). Here are a few (click for larger image):
 
japanese emoticons on wiki

The best website is the Facemark Animation Gallery (check out the blue menu on the right sidebar)! http://www2j.biglobe.ne.jp/~tatuta/_FRAME3.htm
http://www2j.biglobe.ne.jp/~tatuta/_KANI.gif    http://www2j.biglobe.ne.jp/~tatuta/_KOO.gif    http://www2j.biglobe.ne.jp/~tatuta/_KHANIWA.gif  http://www2j.biglobe.ne.jp/~tatuta/_KBIEN.gif

Masashi told me that the art of ASCII was not a new thing for Japanese: there is an old tradition of drawing with characters, a sort of age-old popular equivalent of Apollinaire's calligrams. He did a drawing for me in that "calligram" style. It is based on 2 sentences (they don't mean anything):
he no he no mo he ji: ‚ւ̂ւ̂à‚Ö‚¶
tsu ru ni ha maru maru mu shi: ‚‚éƒjƒn››ƒ€‚µ
 
masashi's drawing


Also, last reference, a bulletin board where people post up their ASCII art portraits (famous people or not), that they programmed or did by hand (mostly by hand apparentlyon dokoaa.com : check out sidebar on the left, click on any link to discover treasures. Here is Schopenhauer (who looks more like Beethoven than anything else):
 

Keywords: ascii, ascii art, bulletin boards, emoticons, facemarks, japanese, masashi

Posted by camille.pb | 7 comment(s)

May 14, 2006

Turbulence's spotlight  (http://turbulence.org/spotlight/cm/community-of-words.htm) was recently dedicated to a project created by two Brazilian researchers (Silvia Laurentiz & Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel):  "Community of Words" (http://www.e-gallery.com.br/cp/). It is a dynamic semantic map of lexical behaviors. The applet database needs to be fueled by input use. It implements the "The Theory of Emergence" (a process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules. See more on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence).

"The project consists of creating conditions for a system of words to be able to present emergent patterns, or observable macro-behaviors. It is a multi-user system on the web that processes through an environment where the users are invited to write line by line their poems, and they also can observe, interact, change  and move their poems in a 3D interactive space."

The mapping is based on a database that organize its entries according to "formal similarities" and cognate relationships in the words, and relational factors between the different poem inputs.

I haven't tested this further than input 3 meta words 'hapax' 'findability', 'environment'. Here is how they appear the first 30 seconds of their input (then they are processed in the database and appear only according to the semantic rules of the map).
 
http://static.flickr.com/45/145838080_f20189353b.jpg?v=0

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A few seconds later: 
 
 
http://static.flickr.com/52/145838083_f10a86def1.jpg?v=0 
 
Apparently you can experiment with 'positioning' your poem in the 3D environment and help 'visual patterns' emerge. I don't understand yet what the relationship is between the demand for "poetry" input and the re-arrangment of words according to frequency lexicon units.  The emergence of 'visual patterns' seem to be only association of words taken from the inputs. If you write lines, they will be deconstructed by the database logics into lexicon units. Why do they ask for "poetry lines": is it the best textual environment to understand emergent patterns?

The only use of inputing actual 'lines' is to provide the program with syntax examples that will be processed visually. But the process is really driven by a factor of fragmentation that prevents getting interesting results. Maybe it's the mix of Portuguese and English that is startling. Maybe it is because there is not enough contributions...


Keywords: community of words, Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel, Silvia Laurentiz, spotlight, theory of emergence, turbulence, visualization

Posted by camille.pb | 1 comment(s)

 (Justin Katko will be a performer there and I will be a flaneur!)

ProvFlux festival : http://www.pipsworks.com/provflux2006/provflux2006.html

PIPS is pleased to announce the 3rd annual Provflux, a weekend-long event dedicated to artistic and social investigations into urban reality and imagination.

Provflux is created to be an interdisciplinary gathering for all people interested in urban interventions, networking technology, on the ground issues and solutions, game play, and planning. This year's Provflux will be a small glimpse into the creative and social potential of new ideas and technologies that are becoming part of our urban reality.

Within this context, Provflux hopes to create a space for imaginative and innovative solutions to a sometimes homogenous and uninspiring urban landscape.

This third year of Provflux is proud to host a broad range of artists, mappers, thinkers, architects, and visionaries, all who will be presenting their visions of the city. The public is invited to participate in these artistic and social investigations into urban reality and imagination.

 

http://www.pipsworks.com/provflux2006/prov06images/pf06_city_boat.jpg

 

 more on psycho-geography here on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeography

Keywords: event, exploration, festival, intervention, mapping, performance, provflux, providence, psycho-geography, urban planning

Posted by camille.pb | 3 comment(s)

May 23, 2006

 a colored map containing words from a user-chosen website, visualized in the context of relative online frequency. words that appear often online are given a darker background-color. words that appear often in the text but rarely online are given a bigger font-size.
see also power of words & parsing the state of the union & power of words & document icons.
[outer-court.com & similar beffa.org]

Tested solipsistically on this blog: snapshot ci-dessous & link here: http://blog.outer-court.com/text-color/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fe 

Keywords: information aesthetics, reblog, social software, statistics, text processing, visualization, word frequency, word popularity colorizer

Posted by camille.pb | 3 comment(s)

May 24, 2006

My friend Melanie runs the French version of MyVideo (an equivalent of YouTube but with the social frame of Vimeo, and where you can upload up to 100MB of video - per month I guess but I am not sure), that has just been launched. I posted a goodbye video to Buffalo, because I am about to move out. In the background, touching sounds by Justin Katko. See here: http://www.myvideo.fr/watch/14940 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keywords: buffalo, justin katko, MyVideo, social software

Posted by camille.pb | 6 comment(s)

May 31, 2006

Neenstar Mai Ueda reading her "domain poems", consisting of an endless series of remarkable url (domain names) - see on YouTube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ovRRxch-HiE&search=mai%20ue

 

mai ueda 

 

She says on the neen poetryisnotover.com website, dedicated to computing poetry: "Domain poem is a book, sentimental and emotional poems that are presented as dancing domain names on 150 pages.Having a new rule to a poem, giving a spacial award to a word by putting .com at the end, playing with limitation to expands the effect of it, as we did old days with Haiku."

mai ueda 

The text is downloadable in .pdf via onestarpress there: http://www.onestarpress.com/v2/pdf/ueda_150_ok.pdf

www.maiueda.com / www.neen.org

 neen logo on neen.org/demos

Keywords: domain names, domain poems, event, mai ueda, neen, urls

Posted by camille.pb | 0 comment(s)