AS dangerous as it may be to generalize, it is probably safe to say that few folks think of Marcel Proust as they watch the Super Bowl. But for the advertising bowl that took place inside Super Bowl XLIV on Sunday, it was one long remembrance of things past — with candy bars, mobile phones and beer bottles standing in for madeleines.
Nostalgia is a critical component of the pitches from sponsors on Super Bowl Sunday. After all, the best way to appeal to a mass audience of 100 million or so Americans is usually to fill spots with paeans to the past along with catchy music, stars, special effects, talking babies and endearing animals.
Even so, the salutes on Sunday to bygone eras reached a peak perhaps not seen since the last time Fonzie said “Ayyyy” on “Happy Days.” The reason is, of course, the economy and the belief along Madison Avenue that tough times call for familiarity rather than risks.
How retro was Super Bowl XLIV? Let us count the ways it resembled Super Bowl XXXIV, XXIV, XIV and even IV:
Welcome to definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2009. First up - What is open source hardware? These are projects in which the creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and “board” files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source software like Linux, but this hardware centric.
Each year we do a guide to all open source hardware and this year there are over 125 unique projects/kits in 19 categories, up from about 60 in 2008, more than doubling the projects out there! - it’s incredible! Many are familiar with Arduino (shipping over 100,000 units, estimated) but there are many other projects just as exciting and filled with amazing communities - we think we’ve captured nearly all of them in this list. Some of these projects and kits are available from MAKE others from the makers themselves or other hardware manufacturers - but since it’s open source hardware you can make any of these yourself, start a business, everything is available, that’s the point.
This year, I am asking for your help - the Open source hardware page on Wikipedia is missing more projects that it actually has total at the moment. If any readers out there want to help out, review all the projects we’ve listed and please add them to the Wikipedia page so it’s a more complete resource. Also, many projects on the Wikipedia page are not “Open source hardware” but that will likely be debated, at the least - all of the projects in this guide are considered open source hardware by those who actually does open source hardware it seems.
Originally published on December 15, 2009 on Seed Magazine
by Lee Billings
In April 1965, a young researcher named Gordon Moore wrote a short article for the now-defunct Electronics Magazine pointing out that each year, the number of transistors that could be economically crammed onto an integrated circuit roughly doubled. Moore predicted that this trend of cost-effective miniaturization would continue for quite some time.
Two years later Moore co-founded Intel Corporation with Robert Noyce. Today, Intel is the largest producer of semiconductor computer chips in the world, and Moore is a multi-billionaire. All this can be traced back to the semiconductor industry’s vigorous effort to realize Moore’s prediction, which is now known as “Moore’s Law.”
There are several variations of Moore’s Law—for instance, some formulations measure hard disk storage, while others concern power consumption or the size and density of components on a computer chip. Yet whatever their metric, nearly all versions still chart exponential growth, which translates into a doubling in computer performance every 18 to 24 months. This runaway profusion of powerful, cheap computation has transformed every sector of modern society—and has sparked utopian speculations about futures where our growing technological prowess creates intelligent machines, conquers death, and bestows near-omniscient awareness. Thus, efforts to understand the limitations of this accelerating phenomenon outline not only the boundaries of computational progress, but also the prospects for some of humanity’s timeless dreams.
An interesting discussion on the work of Cindy Sherman takes place between Judith Butler and a gallery host. Butler discusses the representation and questioning of vulnerability of women in Sherman’s work, and also shares the formal pleasures she finds in the works of art. The subtitles are in French, and the discussion is in German; most of the documentary is in English with French subtitles. The segment on Sherman begins around 3:10 and carries over to later segments. I find this documentary excerpt worth noting because it offers a rare moment when a philosopher discusses works of art casually, yet with careful analysis.
I find some of Butler’s premises on performativity to run parallel with the development of Remix, and to be potentially useful to evaluate current concepts on cultural mixing. I say this without claiming that her work could be directly linked to Remix as discourse, but rather that a paradigmatic reflection on her ideas can be helpful in understanding the cultural variables in which remix culture plays out. Not sure how long the documentary may stay on YouTube, but here are the links for future convenient access:
Figure 1: A function f and its Fourier transform F(f). Both the function and its Fourier transform are complex-valued, but in graphs like this only the magnitudes of the functions are shown.
Note: An online page I discovered, which was last updated, apparently in Winter of 2000. It provides a good introduction to the theoretical aspects of sampling.
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This document is a short overview of some aspects of sampling theory which are essential for understanding the problems of Volume Rendering, which can be viewed as nothing but resampling a data set obtained from sampling some unknown function.
Prerequisite for this document is a basic understanding of Fourier Analysis on an intuitive level. You have to know that a function f(x) in the spatial (or time) domain has a counterpart F(f) in the frequency domain. Any function satisfying some simple properties can be written as a weighed sum of harmonic functions (shifted and scaled sine curves), and (F(f))(s), called the Fourier transform or spectrum of f, gives the weight of the harmonic function of frequency s in f.
Images still from
Vicent van Gogh, 1833 - 1890 Self-portrait With a Straw Hat, 1887
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Footage taken on March 2009
I’m officially making available online an ongoing video project, which was started in March 2009:http://navasse.net/renditions/
More videos to be uploaded periodically so make sure to check my main website from time to time.
Excerpt from the project page:
RENDITIONS “The Museum Series” offers a perspective on how works of art are displayed in museums.
Each video project explores the relation of video footage and photo-stills. This formal juxtaposition is designed to offer an open-ended reading of the visitor’s relation to the work of art.
Jeremy Douglass (left) and Lev Manovich (far right) demonstrate how to analyze data on the Hyper Wall at Calit2.
The Cultural Analytics seminar took place at Calit2 on December 16 and 17 of 2009. The event brought together researchers and students from Bergen University and University of California San Diego. The two day event consisted of research presentations and demos of software tools.
Part One of Hyper Wall Demonstration during Cultural Analytics Seminar at Calit2, San Diego, December 16-17, 2009. Introduction to principles of Cultural Analytics.
I will not spend much time in this entry defining Cultural Analytics. This subject has been well covered by excellent blogs such as Open Reflections. For this reason, at the end of this entry I include a number of links to resources that focus on Cultural Analytics. Instead, I will briefly share what I believe Cultural Analytics offers to researchers in the humanities.
Part Two of Hyper Wall Demonstration during Cultural Analytics Seminar at Calit2, San Diego, December 16-17, 2009. Analysis of Vertov’s motion in scenes from Man with a Movie Camera.
This emerging field can be defined as a hybrid practice that utilizes tools of quantitative analysis often found in the hard sciences for the enhancing of qualitative analysis in the humanities. The official definition of the term follows:
Cultural analytics refers to a range of quantitive and analytical methodologies drawn from the natural and social sciences for the study of aesthetics, cultural artifacts and cultural change. The methods include data visualization techniques, the statistical analysis of large data sets, the use of image processing software to extract data from still and moving video, and so forth. Despite its use of empirical methodologies, the goals of cultural analytics generally align with those of the humanities.
One thing that separates the humanities from the hard sciences is the emphasis of qualitative over quantitative analysis. In very general terms qualitative analysis is often used to evaluate the how and why of particular case studies, while quantitative analysis focuses on patterns and trends, that may not always be concerned with social or political implications.
Part Three of Hyper Wall Demonstration during Cultural Analytics Seminar at Calit2, San Diego, December 16-17, 2009. Jeremy Douglass analyzes comic books.
What Cultural Analytics is doing, in my view, is bringing together qualitative and quantitative analysis for the interests of the humanities. In a way Cultural Analytics could be seen as a bridge between specialized fields that in the past have not always communicated well.
Consequently, when new ground is being explored, questions of purpose are bound to emerge, which is exactly what happened during seminar conversations. As the videos that accompany this brief entry will demonstrate, the real challenge is for researchers in the humanities to engage not only with Cultural Analytics tools and envision how such tools can enhance their practice, but to actually embrace new philosophical approaches that blur the lines between the hard sciences and the humanities.
Part Four of Hyper Wall Demonstration during Cultural Analytics Seminar at Calit2, San Diego, December 16-17, 2009. Cicero Da Silva explains his collaborative project, Macro.
To be specific on the possibilities that Cultural Analytics offers to the humanities, I will cite two demonstrations by Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass.
Lev Manovich at one point presented Hamlet by William Shakespeare in its entirety on Calit2’s Hyper Wall, which consists of several screens that enable users to navigate data at a very high resolution.
When seeing the entire text at once, one is likely to realize that this methodology is more like mapping. To this effect, soon after, we were shown a version of the text in which Manovich had isolated the repetition of certain words throughout the literary work.
This approach could be used by a literature scholar to study certain linguistic strategies, such as sentence structure, by an author. Let’s take this a step further and say that it has been agreed that a contemporary author is influenced by a canonical writer. How this supposed influence takes effect can be evaluated by studying certain patterns of sentences from both authors by isolating parts of literary texts for direct comparison. One could then evaluate if the supposed influence is formal, conceptual or both: perhaps the contemporary author might make ideological references that are clearly linked to the canonical author, but which are not necessarily influenced at a formal level; or it could be the other way around, or both. In this case, quantitative and qualitative analysis are combined to evaluate a case study. In other words, pattern comparison is used to understand the similarities and differences between two or more works of literature.
To this effect, Jeremy Douglass’s presentation of a comic book is important. He explained how by seeing an entire publication of a comic book story one can study how certain patterns in the narrative come to define the aesthetics for the reader.
While the reader may be able to experience the story in time, by actually reading it, the visualization of the comic book in grid-like fashion–as a structural map–allows the researcher to apply analysis of patterns and trends that may be more common in flows of networks to an actual narrative. Again, in this case we find quantitative and qualitative analysis complementing each other.
As noted at the end of the article “Culture is Data” (also provided below) from Open Reflections, it appears that Manovich is at times understood to argue that one should privilege quantitative over qualitative analysis. This proposition implies an either or mentality by certain researchers that needs to be reevaluated. Janneke Adema explains his answer better than I ever could:
But, on the other hand, won’t we loose a sense of meaning if we analyze culture like a thing? Manovich argues that this is of course a complementary method, we should not throw away our other ways of establishing meaning. It is a way of expanding them. And it is also an important expansion, for how is one going to ask about the meaning of large datasets? We need to combine the traditionally [sic]humanities approach of interpretation with digital techniques to find out more. And again, meaning is not the only thing to look at. It is also about creating an experience. Patterns are the new real of our society.
The most important thing to understand when evaluating the videos available with this entry is that one need not have a hyper wall to do research with Cultural Analytics methodologies; many of the tools can run on a personal computer. It’s more about adopting an attitude and willingness to do research by way of combining quantitative and qualitative analysis. At the moment I am evaluating the implementation of Cultural Analytics in my research on Remix.
Revising my evaluation of mashups led me to this journalistic piece from June 13, 2006 by Scott Conroy from 60 minutes. It is mentioned here mainly for historical purposes, as some things discussed have obviously changed since the feature was produced.
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Teens don’t have to work very hard to be entertained anymore. Rather than trekking to the record store, they can buy their favorite music with a few clicks — and maybe try out something new while they’re at it. Reality TV, the preferred genre of many, is always on the air. They don’t even have to get up from their chairs to share photographs and gossip with friends.
American society has been assigning all-encompassing labels to generations of young people for a long time. The tendency to pigeonhole a diverse group of individuals is, in some respects, dishonest — not every Flower Child spent the ’60s tiptoeing through tulips, and many members of Generation X surely thought flannel best confined to the realm of the lumberjack.
Tim Etchells (born 1962, lives and works in Great Britain) City Changes (2008) inkjet prints
As part of my residency at the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, I visited a number of museums in the City of Gothenburg. I was not alone in this trip. I travelled with Melissa Mboweni, a contemporary art curator from South Africa, who was also a Correspondent in Residence.
This entry includes brief notes on some of the places we visited while in Gothenburg. This is also the last entry of my travels in Sweden. Other details of my research will appear in longer texts to be published at a later date in the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions’ Spana magazine.
On the afternoon of November 9, our first stop was Gothenburg’s Art Museum (Göteborgs Konstmuseum), where we were greeted by Curator Johan Sjöström. We spent sometime with an exhibition he curated on Ivar Arosenius, a prolific nineteenth century artist. The exhibit features 250 works, which, as Sjöström explained, was a selection from a larger body of work. Arosenius was a Swedish artist who grew up in Älvängen, a small town north of Gothenburg. He died in January 2, 1909 at the age of thirty due to complications of Haemophilia. I was overwhelmed by the amount of pieces on display–as I realized that an entire day would not allow for anyone to view properly all of the works. Sjöström explained that Arosenius would at times produce several pieces in one night.
“Bollywood,” an exhibit on the film industry in India, at display at the Museum of World Culture until May of 2010.
The next day, November 10, we visited Världskulturmuseet (The Museum of World Culture). Our host was Cajsa Lagerkvist, Head of Exhibitions and Research. We spent the morning with a few of her colleagues discussing the museum’s mission. I realized that the institution was unlike any other I had visited up to this point, as it focuses on what Cajsa and her colleagues referred to as contemporary global issues. This premise is rather open ended, and gives the museum, in my view, quite a bit of freedom to develop exhibitions that are sensitive to the ever changing facets of globalization.
South African Curator, Melissa Mboweni, during her lecture at the Museum of World Culture
At the time of my visit they featured an exhibit on Vodou, and another on Bollywood. I was told by our hosts that last year the museum enjoyed 240,000 visits, and that many people who attend are younger than thirty. It became understandable why the Museum of World Culture emphasizes education as part of their mission. During that afternoon, Melissa Mboweni and I presented our research to curators of various museums in the city.
Facade of the City Museum of Gothenburg
On the morning of November 11, we visited the Stadsmuseet (City Museum of Gothenburg). Curator Christian Penalva and Project Manager Charlotta Dohlvik, along with three of their colleagues took us around the numerous galleries. The City Museum is in essence a hybrid of collections that fit well under the term cultural history. It holds a number of important archeological pieces from the Viking era as well as artifacts from the early days of trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; it also hosts an impressive collection of Swedish theatre and dance costumes.
The City Museum also supports contemporary activities. At the time of our visit, it featured selections of the Gothenburg Art Biennale, titled What a Wonderful World, curated by Celia prado and Johan Pousette. We had a very animated discussion as Penalva explained the museum’s interest in implementing innovative approaches to exhibiting. The museum is considering how the concept of interactivity as defined in new media practice can be beneficial to the development of future as well as already existing exhibitions.
Main exhibition gallery at the Maritime Museum
During the afternoon we visited Sjöfartsmuseet (The Maritime Museum), where we were greeted by Curators Britta Söderqvist, Linda Noreen and their colleagues. They took us around the different exhibitions while explaining the special role of the museum in Gothenburg, which is important given that the Little London ( a popular reference) is a port city. Like the other museums, the Maritime Museum places an emphasis on youth education. Noreen, specifically, heads a project titled “Shoreline,” in which young citizens are encouraged to reflect through art, writing, and other creative forms of communication on what it means to live in a port city. Much of this activity is extended online.
A Virtual Aquarium display at the Maritime Museum. Direct camera feed from the ocean.
In general, the curators appear invested in exploring new forms of display. At the time, a historical exhibition of the port was on view. The idea was to present information and material in similar fashion as would be found in a working space. One display that caught my attention was a “virtual aquarium,” placed on one of the working tables (see video above). The aquarium actually is a camera feed from the sea presented on a large screen, also available online. Instead of viewing fish in a large container, the visitor can observe them in their natural environment and therefore get a sense of actual marine life.
Another place that we visited on the early evening of November 10 is Gothenburgs Konsthall, which is one of the venues hosting the Gothenburg Biennal. Curator Stina Edblom showed us around. There were quite a few good pieces in the exhibition, but I will only name one in this case, to be brief. I was particularly taken aback by Tim Echels’s “City Changes” (2008), [see image at the top of this entry]. The work consists of colored inkjet prints of a simple story about a small town. As the story is edited, the changes are recorded in different colors. Each draft is displayed in linear fashion from left to right across two gallery walls. Anyone who has a consistent relationship with writing will find Echels’s obvious–yet unexpected–focus on the act of editing quite refreshing.
Admittedly, since I struggle with ongoing edits of my own, I could not help but notice how meaning changed from one draft to the next; but I also wondered about edits that were between the drafts. Upon closer reflection, one could contemplate the possibility that the changes from one version to the next were deliberate to emphasize the flux in meaning as process, rather than trying to get a specific point across. The edits (additions and deletions) became metaphors for the physical changes in a town. Things were constructed and demolished according to the moment described within each draft. “City Changes” exposes our anxiety in trying to pin down meaning, in making it stable and fixed, when in reality ideas and their forms of manifestation are always prone for constant change.
Given my own tendency and focus on Remix as discourse, I could not help but wonder on how Echels was in some way exposing principles of selectivity: one of the basic elements necessary to develop a critical voice in a time when appropriation and recycling have become the most efficient forms of production at all levels of culture, especially the fine arts.
Our visit to Gothenburg was swift but fully packed. The purpose was to expose both Melissa Mboweni and myself to different curating approaches. Given that my own practice is in the arts, I have to admit that I learned quite a bit about aesthetics in museum display. Art exhibitions tend to be minimal in their approach, always showing only what is essential in order to do justice to the work of art. But I found the museums I visited in Gothenburg to be much more creative in their displays. This can definitely be a good thing, if the venue has a critical mission in the enrichment of culture.
“Space Junk Spotting, by Saso Sedlacek, Software Mashup of Google Earth and a NASA database of space debris.
As part of my residence at the Swedish Traveling Exhibitions, on November 6 I visited Mejan Labs, an art space dedicated to supporting projects that critically reflect on diverse forms of technology. The art space is located in the heart of the city of Stockholm. Director Peter Hagdahl and Curator Björn Norberg greeted me upon my arrival. We spent sometime discussing the history of media, and how Mejan Labs is part of the ongoing development of new media art practice. In just three years, Mejan Labs has become an exhibition space worth noting outside of Sweden. I learned about it almost as soon as its first exhibition was launched. It was quite a treat to be able to visit it and meet its founders in person.
At the time of my visit, Mejan Labs featured three works that focused on Astronomy, or on the earth in some abstract form. “Earth and Above” on view from November 5, 2009 to January 12, 2010, presents the works of three artists, “A Space Exodus” (2008) by Larissa Sansour, “No Closer to the Source” (July 20, 1969) by Lisa Oppenheim, and “Space Junk Spotting” by Saso Sedlacek.
