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Hambre09 opened on Saturday at Calle de Atocha
24, here in Madrid. It was a super opening, a great turn-out and some fine work shown. Hambre'09 is
open until the 5th, so if you're in the area come down and check it out, if only to see an old
Madrilenan Art Deco mall before it wilts into plate-glass and brushed steel.
I've created a page documenting my contribution to the show, 'The Atocha 24 Insertions'.
I got back from Cartagena a few days ago after giving an Artvertiser workshop there with Clara and
Diego for the festival 'Mucho Mas Mayo'.
Performance there was heavily tested in the outdoors as we swapped advertisements around the
workshop area (Carrefour particularly) using a Vuzix iWear Head Mounted Display and Quickcam Pro
9000 (photos soon). When it worked it worked quite well- surprisingly so given the intensity of
Murcian sunlight.
However, on the train back I had a long think about where improvements could be made. This morning
I went through the code top to bottom and have managed to achieve at least a 2x speedup in the
tracking and augmentation. Really quite something for generic image tracking.. It's now about as
fast as ARToolKit, when tested on my Thinkpad X200, and very stable. This means we should see
significant performance on smaller devices.. I'm tempted to throw it at the BeagleBoard again..
Anyway, now it's time to get out into the streets of Madrid and take it for a drive!
I was lucky enough to get a major award at Laval
Virtual this year for levelHead. Thanks to Shirai for
picking up the award. Unfortunately I wasn't able to make it to Laval this year in person. I was in
Lima, Peru teaching at Interactivos'09.
My assistant Pablo flew in to set up the piece and it
seems he did a good job indeed.
Other winners in the first place 'Invited' category were:
YOTARO, University of Tsukuba
Copycat Hand for All, University of Tsukuba
Space Trash, Institute of Graphics and Paralell Processing, JKU, Linz
As the title suggests I'll be at The See Conference this
year in Wiesbaden presenting a paper and some of my new work. Here's a synopsis of the proceedings
straight from the site itself:
"see" is back again, driven by last year's success and the extensive positive feedback we
received. In 2009 the see conference will again bring together fields like design, art, new media
and architecture. We will explore new approaches that are being developed to confront the flood of
information and transform it into useful knowledge. As before, we've got top speakers lined up,
some of whom are Aaron Koblin of Google Creative Lab, the software artist Julian Oliver, Sebastian
Oschatz from MESO Digital Interiors and Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen Design. The see conference #4
will take place on April 18th 2009 at the historic Caligari Theatre in Wiesbaden.
Here's a little standalone utility I put together for a
couple of students while teaching at the Medialab Prado. I'm posting it here in the event someone
else finds it useful..
CamshiftOSC adds network functionality to OpenCV's Camshift demo. It allows you to interactively
select a region of interest within a live video stream and send the center and relative angle of
that region to OSC clients (Pure Data, Blender, Processing etc) quickly and simply. In the workshop
it was used for tracking the tops of people's heads but any distinct clump of pixels (an LED, a
flame, a cat) can also be used.
Start it like so:
./camshiftOSC <camera index> <IP> <port>
So, if you wanted to capture from /dev/video1 and send the center of a tracked area to port 4950 to
a computer 193.2.132.73 on the internet, you'd:
./camshiftOSC 1 193.2.132.73 4950
Use 127.0.0.1 if you want to send to a client on the same host.
It should compile on any Linux system with liblo and opencv installed.
To get up and running on Ubuntu or Debian systems:
The second edition of the Luz, Espacio y Percepcion workshops has begun!
It'll be a super few days. If you're in Madrid, drop in and witness materialisation of the
following projects:
Analog hologram matrix - Emanuel Andel
Buscando Aberraciones - Óscar Sainz / Mónica Bujalance
Caleidoscopio Mutante - José Manuel González Martínez
La sombra de la duda - blablabLAB (Raúl Nieves)
Medianeras Vivas - Belén Butragueño Díaz
Through the Looking-Glass: Opening Windows in the Wall - Manuel Sánchez Gestido
Versión_Beta - David Rodríguez
I notice that lots of people are looking for a simple and portable example of how to capture and
display video from a webcam. I've written up an example in around 70 lines of code using OpenCV and C++ and posted it here in the interest that it may
be useful. Because it uses OpenCV you can also use it as a capture skeleton for a computer vision
application.
I've tested it on a GNU/Linux system but it should compile fine on OSX. See the comments for how to
compile and use..
The German publisher 'Gestalten' has an entry on Packet
Garden in their recent book Data
Flow which looks at the visual culture and divergent practices surrounding information
visualisation. As an aside you may have noticed that the
packetgarden.com domain is being squatted.. Sadly I never got an email from the domain hosts about
it expiring and boof, the next day it was worth a lot of money.. Please update your bookmarks to
use http://julianoliver.com/pg from here on!
In other news the Swiss Arts Council commissioned a text from me on Art and Videogames for a
publication called 'Swiss Design in Hollywood'. Here's the English version of the
text that appears in the book (in French, Spanish and English - the latter version was heavily
truncated). Here's the book itself:
.
The book is designed to accompany an exhibition of the same name, curated by Patrick J. Gyger,
Director of Maison d'Ailleurs the museum of Science Fiction,
Utopias and Extraordinary Journeys in Yverdon, Switzerland. Maison d'Ailleurs is well worth a visit
by the way, truly an astonishing and beautifully designed museum. An archive that ought to be given
room on any Ark of human culture and thought..
So it followed that Marta (check out her new book!) and I went to Valencia to visit
Patrick who was opening the exhibition there. It had some great prints by illustrators John Howe,
Christian L. Scheurer, Deak Ferrand, Natasha Devaud, Nicolas Imhof, Brigitte Wuest, Silvio
Aebischer, Simon Christen, Nadja Bonacina, Simon Otto si Alex Ongaro.
JohnHowe, concept artist behind a great deal of films and games, was
present at the opening. Talking with him - when he wasn't autographing a stream of books - was a
rare treat and I look forward to our next meeting indeed..
TheBeagle Board is our first target platform for the
binoculars of The Artvertiser project. Right now I'm deep
in documentation reading about how to cross compile for the device using Open Embedded.
It's a pretty incredible device, ARMv7 Cortex-8 CPU, low power drain (just 5V @ 2A), OpenGL ES
support, DSP chip, HD video capable, DVI and TV out for just EUR116.00..
Aside from the videos below there's an additional clip of version 0.2 at work on a billboard. You
can also see a new 'in world' artvert labeling system at work..
I've made good progress on The Artvertiser software, with
several live tests out in the field proving to be successful. Clara and Diego are working on the
hardware, and to those ends we've ordered a couple of Beagle
Boards for the handheld device (binoculars).
Here are a couple of videos of recent field tests:
Nokia and Google, if you're reading, feel free to send me some hardware so I can target your
platforms (Nokia, your N96 and Google, an HTC Magic +/or Texas Instruments OMAP34x-II MDP Zoom
w/Android would be lovely. TY!)..
Last night I gave my lecture Cartofictions: Maps, The Imaginary and Geo-Social
Engineering to a surprisingly well-attended room here at Mama,
Zagreb. The talk went better than the 1.2h talk at Inclusiva-net 7 months ago (video documentation
here), largely because I hadn't run amok the night
before.
After the talk several people asked to see my slides and so I've made them available. You can
get them
here as a PDF. The folk at Mama said they'll make the audio available at some point. I'll keep
you posted.
Hell hath no fury like a man whose laptop was recently stolen, while eating a delicious breakfast,
by very clever thieves.
To cut a short story long, the $US is weak against the Euro and I need a new laptop fast,
specifically the new Thinkpad T400: the ideal horse for this goucho.
If you're coming to Ars Electronica and want to make some fast money, email me and I can offer you
a handsome cash incentive for buying me a laptop and bringing it with you, unboxed. Yes that's
right, I just used the words "handsome cash incentive" and "fast money" on the Internet.
Oh, and if you've sent me an email at all since January this year, send it to me again..
FILE2008 in
Sao Paulo was super. Rarely do I meet such an attentive and genuinely interested team responsible
for putting an exhibition together. The tech-crew were really on-to-it and the assistants hanging
out with the pieces, explaining them to people, were too: they had about 1.5k people come through
one Saturday. That requires a lot of patience.
The interior design of the show was clever as were the curatorial choices overall. Anyway, FILE
team, here's my belated thanks. Vivian, Paula and Daniel especially. Your festival rivals anything
of its size in Europe..
Sao Paulo. Where to start - even a Paulista would ask the same. It's very diverse, at
times rough, vast and complex. 20 Million humans trying to make it work in the metropolitan area
(within a violently maldistributed economy) of which I met around 37. Despite being a hard-working,
hard-living creed, Paulistas are socially generous; it's not a myth you can simply walk into a bar
and smile your way into a fine night out.
That said, my dubious companion for most of it wasn't a Paulista. Rather, it was a certain James Powderly, ever ripe for some good
old-fashioned silliness. Here's to you James. Haven't heard from you for a few
days. Like many I hope you turn up soon. You were half-expecting to get shot. Let's hope my
"not a foreigner and not during the games" theory stands up to your fairly respectable test ;)
A fine friend of mine Mariana hooked James up with some local writers/graffers so much time was
spent with a generator, projector, laptop,
camera and a laser-pointer around town at night. I learnt a lot about Pichação, the name given to a kind of
street-writing that at times resembles Egyptian Hieroglyphs
and is unique to Brazil (AFAIK). Each has it's own unique symbolic alphabet relative to clans.
Mariana, was good to hang out with you and Lelo. Both talented and super people...
This is a release intended for developers and those comfortable with the compiling software on
Linux systems. As yet there is no binary executable of levelHead.
I've just cleaned up and archived documentation of Quilted Thought Organ, a
sound-based game/performance environment I made in 1999, here. Yes the link
to the movie works now.. Ugh.
While I prefer the operating system Debian for development and general computery tasks, I use Ubuntu for art installations. From my
experience Ubuntu has a great track record with diverse hardware and is a reliable performer with
recent versions of free software. 30 minutes and you're up and running in most cases.
One great frustration with Ubuntu in a gallery/museum context however (may be fixed in 8.04) is the
aggressive screen-blanking. For whatever reason disabling gnome-screensaver and various other
power-management settings relating to the screen doesn't discourage it from blanking. Yes, asking
the assistant of the piece to wiggle the mouse every 20 minutes is a pretty rubbish
workaround..
So, here's how to permanently disable screen blanking under X on Ubuntu (and probably any other
distribution). Pop this in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart X
This, the first footage of the first stable version of levelHead, was documented yesterday with a speed-run of 227
seconds ;) through the first 3 cubes.
Aside from the above Vimeo documentation, you can download the 65M OGG/Theora file here. It will play in
VLC.
This video was made thanks to Blender's great new video sequence
editor (finally a fast and stable Free video editor for Linux) and captured using the strangely
performant 3d desktop video capture solution for Linux Bugle.
For those of you keen to get your hands on the code: it's coming soon! I still need to tidy up the
literature before it ships..
I recently gave an interview for TAGMAG 6 as part of their feature on Augmented Reality. It's quite
an interesting issue surveying AR from a cultural, philosphical and artistic perspective.
If you're in Den Haag region come to TAG and play the best
version of levelHead yet alongside some great work
by other aritsts like Theo Watson and Jan Torpus.
As promised, here's a gallery of images
of levelHead in action on day 2 of Homo Ludens
Ludens. As you can see they were taken by a far better photographer, utilizing a special
feature of the camera known as 'autofocus'..
Last night at the opening was the first time levelHead has been seen in the wild. As such it's been
extremely revealing watching people play it, something I've done for a few hours today.
The response has been very enthusiastic and almost all people seem to 'get' the interface pretty
much immediately (with the exception of one woman using the camera to explore her nostrils on the
projection at a rather inopportune moment).
That aside I'm surprised at the breadth of variance in the capacity of people to record and recall
information about the room they were last in. Of the 50 or 60 people I watched play levelHead, I
twice saw people demonstrate alien-savant powers in this regard, completing the first cube in under
2 minutes. Almost everyone I watched took their capacity to navigate effectively quite personally,
even at times stopping to make mental notes before moving to a connecting room.
One thing I'm greatly enjoying about this piece is the ever presence of hands, made gigantic,
carefully holding the cube complete with little world inside.
Aside from changing all the in-game dialogues to Spanish, I'm clear on the few tweaks I'll make for
SonarMatica at Sonar08 in June. One thing is certain, the cubes will need to be an extremely
durable plastic.
I've uploaded a little gallery of
people playing on day 1 of Homo Ludens Ludens, one that expresses most of all just how
little I understand our new Ricoh GR Digital camera (or perhaps photography in general). I'll make
another one of people playing tomorrow on return home.
It's been a good couple of weeks working on levelHead, in preparation for the Homo Ludens Ludens (aka "Man, the
player") exhibition at LABoral, Gijon, Asturias,
Spain.
The controls are far more robust and a great many bugs have been slayed (in a caring and respectful
way). There are now 3 playable levels and a bunch of user-notications and other goodies that aid
navigation.
At the 11th hour pix came on board to migrate the tracker from
ARToolkit to ARToolkitPlus, which has worked splendidly: tracker stability is far better than it
was with my previous ARToolkit implementation.
While working together he chose to go on a bug hunt, chasing in particular a graphic glitch where
two rooms were being drawn at the same time. I'd written the first version with the intention of
just one room being drawn at a time (one marker to be tracked for simplicity) but with the aid of a
stencil-buffer he managed to make the use of the likely occurence that two or even three rooms can
be seen at once:
.
Development hasn't all been in code, I also have some lovely new cubes:
So at the end of a fairly fierce two weeks of programming, levelHead is ready to be unleashed on
the Asturians, where it will be installed for 5 months. For those that can't make it to Gijon,
levelHead will next be exhibited at Sonar, Barcelona this year.
Here's a video of my Inclusiva-Net Conference,
Cartofictions: Maps, The Imaginary and GeoSocial Engineering.
It's around an hour long. Note that it has one or two mis-placed slides at around 34mins. This
aside the editor did quite a good job.
Abstract:
From the earliest world maps to Google Earth, cartography has been a vital interface to the
world. It guides our perceptions of what the world is and steers our actions in it. As our
knowledge about the world has changed, so have maps with it (or so we like to think).
In this lecture Julian shows a darker side of map-making, covering various reality-distorting
effects innate to the graphic language of cartography and how they can be easily exploited for
gain.. In doing so Julian positions cartography as an abstract and influentual creative practice,
rich with the power to engineer political views, religious ideas and even the material world
itself.
Be sure to check out some of the excellent projects that
came out of Inclusiva-Net this year - super stuff ppl, it was a pleasure teaching working with you
all.
Big thanks to the Medialab-prado team for making it all
happen.
.. that's the name of my latest paper, prepared for the Homo Ludens Ludens conference at
Laboral, Gijon, Spain in mid April. It'll be
published in the symposium book alongside the work of this esteemed
bunch.
Download
it here. You're free to reproduce and distribute it under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 2.0 License.
Out of interest I'd prefer to use a license like the GNU Free Documentation License for my papers but I can't
find anything that comes close while remaining suitable to theory.
If you have any ideas I'd be glad to have an email from you.
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Hambre09 opened on Saturday at Calle de Atocha
24, here in Madrid. It was a super opening, a great turn-out and some fine work shown. Hambre'09 is
open until the 5th, so if you're in the area come down and check it out, if only to see an old
Madrilenan Art Deco mall before it wilts into plate-glass and brushed steel.
As an aside you may have noticed that the
packetgarden.com domain is being squatted.. Sadly I never got an email from the domain hosts about
it expiring and boof, the next day it was worth a lot of money.. Please update your bookmarks to
use 
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