The conversation thing

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?

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.

I am begining to love BBC they’ve got the most interesting news about this industry… Nokia has launched today the new music and games download service, challenging both rival handset makers and mobile phone network providers. Most importantly, the iPhone. It was about time. BBC reads the store will charge 1 euro ($1.40; 70p) per single track and from 10 euros for an album, while games will cost between 6 and 10 euros.

It is interesting to observe the competition in this area. Nokia is one of the best mobile producers (proud 2ys owner of a 6680 ) still, I’ve noted that while their mobiles are good and reliable and always with the latest technology, they lack some features in usability. For instance, Nokia’s good-to-everything button needs clicking on it, while Sony Ericsson’s small joystick is sooo flexible and silent and interaction friendly. Same tool, lack in usability. I cannot argue though … Nokia is one hell of a resistent mobile so maybe some features need to be adjusted so as the poor mobile will not to crush into pieces at the first big encounter with the floor

I love Nokia, and my next mobile will most probably be a Nokia, but I’d like them to improve in this “cool” interaction area. Not to misunderstood me, it’s not that they don’t have the features, but usability for interaction features is still a little behind competition.

For this launch, they’ve thrown a big event NokiaGoLive . Liveblog for it can be read here 5 mobiles are released: N95 8GB / 5610 Xpress Music / 5310 Xpress Music / N81 / N81 8GB

Another Go Play event is held today and on the 30th in Singapore

Haven’t got an invitation, nor a ticket to Singapore or London… promise at their next 5 mobile launch to be among the ones invited

Ned Beauman on TheBlogArt&Architecture raises one very good question: why not use art in computer/console video games and what artists could be placed in this context.

Well, I’de loooove a videogame based on characters of Bosch. It’s so surreal ( quite interesting for his age ) that would apply perfectly for our own time’s imagery.

Other artists that would be perfect are Arcimboldo, Dali; Gaugain would do nice for a 2d game, Mondrian would be interesting for a pacman :).

Also considered Warhol and Rauschenberg but they are too modern and too visually violent for me to play for hours …

One video game that uses art and play and I simply loooooooooove is Nintendo’s Electroplankton. Toshio Iwai is a good example of an artists that combines visual art and music in a commercial game.

BBC again with a very good interview with Vinton Cerf

Antonio Altamirano, Internet Marketing Consultant at Accenture posted a key question yesterday on LinkedIn on what will the next three years bring to us technology wise …

Someone talked about changing the country global internet infrastructure, so that services will go to another level, another answer was that innovation on interfaces is probably already signaled by the launching of Nintendo Wii, iPhone and Microsoft Surface. Virtual world technology, like Second Life, was also mentioned, WiMax and Ubiqutous Computing.

What I think will be the necessary move in the next 2 or 3 years is the tag based file organization. The folder style for data storage on computers is so last century. Even my mom needs to associate text files to different folders, or associate different type of files to photos, and searching through one year of normal vacations photos in my computer becomes impossible. I actually feel the need to organize my files tag-based. Microsoft and Mac OS XI I am counting on you on this one !

That’s what I’ve discovered in the last 30 minutes: three interesting projects all developed at MIT and a designer that helped build one of the websites.

1. Openstudio is more or less a site about artists that draw online. One setback - using Java is kinda limiting your own possibilities of expression. But the concept “OPENSTUDIO is web + art + community + economics.” goes far beyond drawing as it also includes art transactions and posibility for negociating jobs for the registered artists. Some of the founders Amber Frid-Jimenez, Annie Ding and Burak Arikan.

2. Along with Open I/O, OpenCode, OpenSpace and OpenTag, Openstudio belongs to PLWire at MIT, namely The Physical Language Workshop

PLW kinda puzzled me with one concept: audio tag … now what is that? Some sort of answering machine over the internet? Why tag? I do have to digg a little more to see precisely.

3. What else? A very funky project, haven’t got the time to see it through but the name is puzzeling Emma on relationships

And 4. the designer Takashi Okamoto in charge of designing the plw site. Same japanese/academic visual minimalism. Worth browsing as the sites abunds in all sorts of visuals so different than what can be seen on Romanian market. Not thouroughly commercial, rather a breath of unconventional fresh air.

Isn’t browsing fun ?

Casey Reas and Ben Fry will release a book on their renowed program Processing at MIT Press this September. I have worked a little bit with Processing, it is really fascinating, point is Romania has no market for it. Or maybe I just haven’t got the insight so far.

The book will turn interesting to designers and developers, I’d like to have one copy when it’s released.