The conversation thing

Don’t know if you’re familiar with the John Maeda’s laws of simplicity, but www.phillipsdepury.com is sooooo illustrating these laws.

Good campaign for the conspicuos consumption that Louis Vuitton represents …. Perfect illustration for feeling disoriented in the real “unbranded” life …

Interesting that Takashi Murakami was commishioned for this campaign. The so called new Andy Warhol of the last decade has made a good point for the Vuitton brand.

James Hopkins at Max Wigram Gallery, 99 New Bond Street, London

Panorama festival in Karlsruhe starts on Saturday and is for the next 6 months. A lot of interesting experiments are to be seen there. You might be fooled that it is a simple display of photographic panoramas collections, but you would be soo wrong: The festival gathers interactive artists that make use of panoramas display in their work.

The Wooster Group come with an interesting experiment on an interactive 360 degrees war film. Now how about that? How about choosing your own point of view, and not the director’s?Other artists, such as Bernd Lintermann and Joachim Böttger with Globorama 2005 explore inedite visualization of the Earth.

Interactivity is the key.. I want to go there. Program here… take a look.

How would you feel about a movie that lets you control not the plot, but the place you observe the action… You could listen to the two main characters or just slip away on the corridor and see what is happening in the garden… Do you think this shift in visualizing the film is possible in the next 5 years?

Four grad researchers Kyle Buza, Luis Blackaller, Takashi Okamoto, and Kate Hollenbach from MIT have presented at FlashForward conference, a new graphics environment called E15. As Maeda says on his blog, E15 attempts to bring together the best of the power intrinsic to the Web, full-performance graphics processing, and a fully interpreted environment with dynamic class loading.

There’s a video on this site, looks amazing if I am imagining the right things. Anybody knows more about this E15 or has some more documentation on it?

for those of you who already have a phd in information systems, computing or maths, this job might be of great interest

deadline October 4th.

“This is an exciting opportunity to join the Multimedia Group as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the EPSRC MC² (MPEG-7 Content Modelling Communities) project. MC² aims to develop a software platform for enabling user communities, such as those found on YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us and Wikipedia, to create multimedia metadata collaboratively. The successful applicant will work with Dr Harry Agius (the Principal Investigator), Professor Marios Angelides (the Co-Investigator) and Cambridge Imaging Systems (the project partner).

Applicants must hold a PhD in a relevant discipline, have experience with software development and research methods, and be competent with XML (prior experience with MPEG-7 is not necessary since it is XML based). Good research writing and oral presentation skills are also expected.

Situated in Brunel University’s leafy suburban campus in west London, the School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics is made up of over 100 academic staff and was awarded a 5 in the last RAE for the ‘international standing’ of its research, making it an advantageous environment for researchers.”

Full description here

Ars Electronica launched a land art project. Linz designed its spaces for messages for above. Meaning … the sky

A project from 2002 of the same Lev Manovich, with a daring(for its time) approach on browsing video content. Tagging visual information such as: contrast, automated velocity computing, while having means to navigate through a vast database of videos and audio files enables the spectator to choose themes and switch perspectives while enjoying this new type of eclectic cinema movie.

I am not actually convinced by this project, now seeing it at over 4 years distance, even though the idea has seen implementation - google video e.g. has done something relevant in this regard. The idea is truly valuable as the amount of video content exceeds at this point the possibility of indexing it in a normal fashion, but the visuals for the project are not that impressive.

A couple of days ago at Ars Electronica took place a super interesting conference of Lev Manovich on the theme of “The Infinite Expansion”

An extras from the AEC website: “Lev Manovich will present a brief cultural history of how a computer was gradually turned into a machine for media simulation and new media invention between early 1960s and late 1970s (Sutherland, Nelson, Engelbart, Kay, Negroponte, and others). He will argue that today we are dealing with unforeseen result of this transformation: that is, the constant invention of new media by designers, programmers, computer scientists, and artists has replaced creation of content. Thus, media is finally indeed became the message. More precisely: constantly changing and expanding media possibilities became more culturally important than content.”

I wish I was there…. eeeh

Lev Manovich, Negroponte and Meyrowitz were my influences a couple of years ago. Little by little I redescover the people behind the books and the way they evolve in time. Some people just manage to stay agile and alert.