Green and Purple

Thursday again, the Farmer's market.  I replenished my supply of vegetables and fruit for the week.  Beautifully sticking out of my bag were the leafy parts of a bunch of beets.  Two people that came into my office exclaimed "Oh I love beet greens!"  and proceeded to describe a favourite way to prepare them.  I'm embarrassed to admit that I never even thought to eat the beet greens.  I always threw them out.  Oh the waste!  All these years I had missed out on some amazingly sweet yet salty and buttery leaves.  I prepared them tonight with basil, tomatoes, red pepper, shredded beets and carrots, and apples.  Dressing was olive oil, lemon, salt+pepper.   Here's what it looked like on a beautiful teal plate (made by an Emily Carr student!  Got it at the Christmas sale):

Symbiosis

One day rolls into the next.  This is the beginning of term and I come home tired, wired, with a list of evening tasks, the majority of which have to do with feeding myself or the bacteria.  As I was walking back from the grocery store with a gallon of milk and a couple pounds of sugar, it dawned on me that I was solely carrying fuel for the bacteria.  They will eat all this, I marveled.  And then I will eat the product of their eating.  And then they will populate my body and help digest what I eat.  It is a peculiar symbiotic relationship that I hadn't thought about in quite that way before.  I help make them and they help make me.

Creamy Gazpacho

Eating well today.  Harvest time is great.  Yesterday I bought about $50 worth of vegetables from the farmer's market.  I could hardly lug them home!  Enough ingredients to make some great salads and my special plan: a creamy gazpacho.  I had never made a gazpacho before but inspired by my weekly Cook's Illustrated email I gave it a go.  The recipe was pretty easy and just involved a lot of chopping which I suppose is expected.  The kicker is that you can't eat any before it "rests" overnight to develop flavours.  Well, this is the next day and the soup is fabfabfabulous.    Here is a picture of it, garnished with basil and chopped onions, pepper, cucumber, and tomato.

Ears to paper (day 338)

I listen to many audio books.  I have a twenty minute walk to work so that means I usually get forty minutes of listening per day.  That's not a whole lot given that most books are somewhere around 10 hours.  It's slower than reading but it can be multi-tasked and builds listening skills.  Currently on my listening roll are:

• Woody Allen - Side Effects and Mere Anarchy (both collections of short stories authored and narrated by WA).
• Kathryn Stockett - The Help (period piece performed by many different readers...so far engaging though not particularly lyrical or insightful).
• Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (a favourite which I've read and have in print)

I alternate between these.  Three books at a time is a bit much and puts me at risk of leaving one behind but they are each quite different so hopefully that mitigates the risk a bit.

I just finished:

• Barbara Kingsolver - The Lacuna (wonderful historical novel set in Mexico and America)
• Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go (amazing thoughtful, dreamy, tragic story)
• E.M Forster - The Machine Stops (great prescient short story about tech dependence written in 1909)

When I get tired of listening to longer books, I switch to podcasts.

There's only a few things annoying with listening instead of reading.  I can't underline, physically remember where in the book something was, quickly scan for a particular line or phrase, or easily transcribe and reference.  I also get fuddled when trying to refer to something in a book I've listened to.  Typically one says "this reminds me of something I read by..."  which is misleading and leads to somewhat embarrassing clarifications when someone follows up with "I'd love to borrow that book!"  Audio books are not easily shared.  They should be but they are not.

I have a wish list to make audio more integrated with writing culture:

• Give me the opportunity to buy the physical book at a reduced price if I've enjoyed (and paid for) the audio book.
• An easy way to 'bookmark' a bit of a book I found interesting.
• In addition to bookmarking, the ability to add audio or written notes to particular sections.
• A 'transcribe' button that automatically transcribes audio or video I'm listening to.  This could be time-limited to allow for fair use regulations to be respected.  I would also love to have that ability on youtube or vimeo.
• Integration with reference collection tools like Zotero.  For example, if I've bookmarked something I can easily add that bookmark to my list of references.
• The ability to share my audio book with anybody for specific lengths of time.

 A song for this post.

The common man (day 328)

I'd say I write to the government about 4 times a year.  Since Harper has been in power it's been more frequent.  This last bit about the census long form is so enraging I'm having trouble formulating a rational letter...I seem to quickly descend into sarcasm.  It's not hard to go there.  Harper says he's appealing to the "common man" who he claims doesn't want to fill out a long census form (which is not actually that long).   Who exactly is this common man?  I'm guessing he votes conservative.  Didn't we get enough of Joe the Plumber during the US election? 

I worked for Statistics Canada during my undergrad.  It was one of the most memorable jobs I've had.  The people there are so enthusiastic about what they do.  They LOVE data.  Just love it.  They crunch numbers all day and produce reports and are just really interested in what is hidden in there.  I learned something about the importance of proper data collection during my stint at Stats Can.  I also learned that our privacy is protected and that even if you report growing acres of marijuana there is no way that they can report you.  Nor would they want to.  They would rather know because that's their job.  They are there to inform policy and decisions.  I would love to get the long form because I know I'd be making some statisticians very happy.

I view filling out the long form as a very very small sacrifice of time to something helpful and necessary.  It's like jury duty only much less onerous.  Making it voluntary won't work because people are lazy and forgetful.  We need to get the proper distribution of data across the country to maintain accuracy.  There are people that know how to do that and we employ them.  Our head statistician just resigned.  Surely that's an important data point for Mr. Harper.  I'll help him:  It means "butt out and let us do our job.  The common man may never know it but it will help him too."

A song for this post.

Blog writing station

An addendum.  This is where I write this blog (most of the time).  The daisies, my favourite flower, are a gift from Steve.

Vacation (day 327)

Well here I am near the end of my vacation.  It's been both better and worse than I expected, in spurts.  You know, like life.  The first week I spent with my brother's family on Bainbridge Island.  My parents were there as well.  I have a great connection with my niece Liliane and I cherish the moments we spend together.  She's 4 now.  And for the first time, when I left and was on the ferry, still glowing from all the fun, I became sad that she would never be 4 again.  It's like I wanted to stop time, just for a little while.  I know she'll grow up to be wonderful.   I just really enjoyed being with her fun-loving, story-spinning, energetic, beautiful self.   I know there will come a time when some of that will be obscured, to surface again later to be sure, but I will miss it.
My nephew Julien is 2 now and for various reasons it's taken longer to "apprivoise" him.  I use this French word because there is no equivalent word in English as far as I know.  The closest is "tame" which I find has too much of a master-slave connotation.   The verb "apprivoiser" means to establish a relationship, to approach slowly so as not to scare, to be gentle.  Julien requires this kind of care.  I think Liliane did too but because I got to know her before there was was another child in the picture, I started earlier and things were much more calm and gradual.  With Julien I'm mindful to ask before picking him up or directing him to do something.  This time around he was much warmer and comfortable around me and he was also very funny.  I'm really loving the differences between Liliane and Julien.  How does it happen? I keep asking myself in wonderment.
The day after I came back, I was sitting in my living room sipping tea in the sunshine and, another first, I missed the hustle and bustle of the family life.  There is something about having children around that  propels in a sort of joyful momentum.  If it is indeed true that your network of family and friends has a big impact on your look and outlook, children must have a multiplier effect.  I'm painting things a bit rosier than they deserve maybe but there is something about the ebullience of youth that is hard to resist.  Still I didn't go straight back to Bainbridge as Steve suggested when I described this nostalgia to him.  I needed time to be alone and not be jostled about by chaotic waves.  I needed some boring time.  This is the luxury of only being an aunt.
The second week of my vacation did not go as well as I'd hoped for reasons I don't think I could even explain even if I wanted to share them on this blog.  Luckily, the unfathomable circumstances brightened by the third week.
One highlight was swimming in Sasamat Lake in Port Moody.  In my 14 years in Vancouver I'd never been to this lake which is a bit out of the way if coming from downtown.  It's well worth the trip.  It's a warm, clean lake in a beautiful hilly and treed area - a lot like an Ontario lake.  I'd forgotten how good it feels to float in fresh water.   Hopefully we'll go back before summer is out.
Another highlight is getting healthier.  Both Steve and I have been putting on emphasis on eating well and exercising.  We still can't seem to get a handle on getting to bed at a decent and consistent hour but maybe that's for the next phase.  We've been eating salads mostly, and doing the Grouse Grind every 2 or 3 days.  We've both lost weight but the best part is just feeling good.  I wonder if we'll be able to keep this up during the winter when the dark season seems to beg for pizza, mashed potatoes, and pie.  It does sneak up on you, the junk food slope of winter.
One disappointment was the low yield of the sour cherry trees at my friends' farm this year.  Last year the season was at least 3 weeks and I was able to get something like 16 pounds of cherries, maybe even more.   This year, it was only one weekend which I missed because I was just coming back from Bainbridge.  I still managed to order 6 pounds from them.  I wanted 8 but there were other orders to satisfy.  The disappointment was both not being able to be there to do the picking and not having as many cherries to preserve.  I made about a litre of jam.  I think I'll be able to make another litre with a couple of pounds of sour cherries I picked up at the market.   I want to make another litre because I think I screwed up the first batch by sweetening with Stevia and not quite following the procedure properly.  I noticed a couple days later that there was a chunk of pectin in the half jar I had left for myself.  I have no idea how the other jars fared but now I'm a bit worried.  It's not the end of the world, a chunk of pectin is tasty, if unexpected and weird looking.  Still if I'm to give them as gifts, I would want things to be perfect.  The thing with pectin is that you can't just add it to boiling fruit.  It needs to be mixed with sugar which I couldn't really do with Stevia powder.  I thought I could get around this by mixing the pectin with a little bit of Agave nectar and the Stevia but I now know that doesn't quite work.  The proper way to do it is to boil some water, add the Stevia and pectin and blend, blend, blend.  This mixture can then be added to the boiling fruit.  As an aside, I use Pomona's pectin which is fabulous.  I pick it up at Whole Foods.  It's also available on their web site.

I feel I should say something about the frequency of posting on this blog winding down.  I made a deliberate attempt to go offline during most of my vacation just for a mental break from the constant flow of opinions.  But even before that my postings were more sporadic than the once-a-day goal I had initially set.   The goal may have been over ambitious given the predictable life circumstances that inevitably take priority but I've still learned a lot from it.   I will write more about this in a later post.

Now I'm off to the Grind.

A song for this post.

Smartly back (day 306)

Well, the blog wagon and I have become separated it seems.  Always better to just hop back on like nothing happened.

After coming back from the residency I had to prepare a talk for Smart Graphics.  I had been thinking about it for months and had a working title ("Mobs and Choirs") but needed to spend some uninterrupted hours taking notes and figuring out a structure.   This, and answering email, exhausted all the writing energy I had, hence the neglected blog.

The Smart Graphics conference itself was wonderful.  There were about 50 people that attended from around the world: Japan, Spain, Korea, Australia, UK, US, and probably other places I'm forgetting.  All were, appropriately, smart.  And all were delightful.  The sessions were interesting and had enough time in between to foster discussion.  It included a great art exhibit/performance night which really rounded out the technical papers. It was perhaps the best conference I've been to.  This and Interactive Futures are a close tie.  But the setting of Smart Graphics  (Banff, AB) tips it over to 'best' I think.  I didn't expect to feel so nostalgic for the place but there it was brought on by the smells, the trails, the familiar haunts.  I may be going back in August for Interactive Screen.  I wonder if the nostalgia will be dampened by then.

Some highlights from the conference:

• John Bowers keynote - a wonderful stroll through a free mind's creations.  I had the delight of having many conversations with John, each one more entertaining than the next.  I'll forever be making up new units of measurements in my head now.  The best one he had was the 'Sting' which is a unit measuring how long you would walk to press a button that would discreetly get rid of a person you don't like.  Named according to the subject of its standardized unit.  I would call mine the 'Bono'. 
• Tracy Hammond, Manoj Prasad, Daniel Dixon - Art101, a tool to teach drawing.  At first I found the very idea of this tool offensive but after seeing it in action and understanding where they were coming from (a way into drawing, as opposed to a replacement for free sketching), I started to appreciate the work.  They had many people try it and held a contest at the end (I was half the jury!).  It was really interesting to see what people had managed to draw.
• Ji-Sun Kim, Denis Gracanin, Kresimir Matkovic, Francis Quek - Finger Walking as a means to navigate through virtual space.  An interesting approach that looks like fun.
• Tom Schofield - Sticking point, a visualization of the word frequency in the world's constitutions, specifically sections pertaining to human rights.  Really interesting information emerges out of this infographic.  He is currently working on an interactive version.  The one he showed was a large print (3mx1m).
• Jeffrey Ventrella - all around interesting person.  Lots of little sketches on his web site that are worth spending time with.  The work he showed was self-portraits built from a genetic algorithm based on the mandelbrot set.
• Luca Chittaro , Lucio Ieronutti , Roberto Ranon - VEX-CMS a tool that helps curators built virtual gallery tours.
• Robyn Taylor, Guy Schofield, John Shearer, Pierre Boulanger, Jayne Wallace, Patrick Olivier - Humanaquarium.  Interactive box with live musicians and projection.  Touching the box changes the effects put on the voice of the singer.  Was great to see it live!
• Qiong Wu, Maryia Kazakevich, Robyn Taylor, Pierre Boulanger, Janice Annett - Trickster at the Intersection, an interactive virtual reality piece that ran in the CAVE at Banff.  The trickster was a figure in a fantastical garden which mimicked the movements of anyone entering the CAVE.   Extremely effective at generating playfulness.   We found out later in the evening that the trickster was a real person who was observing in another room trough a webcam link.  She was motion captured as she mimicked the movements, and the data was used to drive the movements of the virtual trickster. 
• Youngmi Kim, Jongsoo Choi - Stroking a Cymbidium, a gorgeous interactive piece where stroking a Cymbidium (a plant) produces a drawing on screen.  Unfortunately the piece got damaged during shipping so wasn't actually working during the conference but I mention it here because the documentation they showed was amazing.
• Greg Pintilie, Peter Heppel , Janet Echelman - An interactive tool for Janet Echelman to build her net sculptures!
• Roberto Theron , Laura Casares - visualization of basketball game and stats.  I mention this here not so much because I found the topic interesting but because of the generated images he showed were beautiful.
• Kairi Mashio, Kenichi Yoshida, Shigeo Takahashi, Masato Okada - mixing of camera views in one image (cubist style).  I found the results really intriguing.  Would be interesting to push this to its limits and see what can be generated.  Unfortunately I couldn't find any images to link to.  Hopefully the publication makes it online.
• Ben Clayton - wonderful organizer with the BNMI.  Cheerful, funny, talented, and interesting.  He didn't present but he deserves a big honourable mention.

As you can tell by the number of highlights it's really hard to pick them out.  Just one of those moments where you're surrounded by greatness and have no idea how it happened.

Going back home was a bit sad but life goes on.  The Centre of Stereoscopic 3D needs building and this is the bulk of what I did when I got back.  Now I'm off on vacation for the next 3 weeks.  First to Bainbridge and then the Okanagan to pick some fruit.

bacterial update:  This is the season of fresh fruit and I've been making smoothies with my kombucha.  The best so far is the rose pu-erh kombucha with strawberries and mango, sweetened with a bit of steevia.  It is so delicious and fresh.  I start my meal with it and it's easily followed by a kale/beet/asparagus salad.

A song for this post.

Massaged nutrients (day 290)

Dr. Fuhrman says Kale, Watercress, Collard/Mustard/Turnip greens are the most nutrient dense foods and we should be eating them more.  He put cheese and butter at the bottom of the list, along with...doughnuts!?  That was depressing.   While in Montreal I was mentioning to Leila how Kale may be nutritious but it's a bit hard to eat -- lots of chewing and the texture not so great.   She said "massage it!"  Massage it?  I googled it.  Sure enough massaging is an accepted way of tenderizing a tough green.  And it's fun.  Just add a bit of oil and salt to the cut and de-stemmed greens and massage away for 3-4 minutes.  It gets really green and some brine is released.  If you let it sit for a half hour afterward, it gets even more tenderized.  I adapted a kale and root vegetable recipe found by the google search, to match what my mom had in her kitchen.  It was the best kale salad I've ever had.  I've made it twice since then.  Dr. Fuhrman also says the salad should be the main meal.  This salad makes that a pleasure.

A song for this post.

Resident home (day 289)

The last day of the residency was June 9th. We toured the NFB StereoLab in the morning. They have a great setup with many passive polarized projection systems matched with SANDDE 3D drawing stations. That week they also happened to be testing out the Panasonic twin lens 3D camera. The Director of Photography didn't give it great marks mostly because of bad compression artifacts and poor performance in low light. When I saw the footage I didn't think it was that bad. They were just starting to work with it and it was a pre-production model so it is quite possible their opinion will change. But for $22,000 the expectations are high.
In the afternoon, Valerie Walker of Studio XX interviewed Leila and I for her radio show. She is a skilled interviewer and it was great to talk with her about the project. The interview will air shortly. I'll post a link as soon as it does.
The rest of the afternoon and early evening, we packed up the studio and transferred files.  We ended the day at Mochica, a Peruvian restaurant on St-Denis.  Great food as always.  I will miss the easy access to delicious food, the warm nights, and the street level terraces.  Such great sounds.

I finally got around to posting a partial documentation of the work done at Oboro. It doesn't include most of the sounds that we recorded, and that were used during the artist talk in a live mix. What it does show is a trio of lungs breathing at different rhythms, with distinct videos and breath sounds. The three breath sounds match the breathing rate. Anyway, here it is. I'll post more as it becomes available.


lung trio from Maria Lantin on Vimeo.

Bacterial Update:  It has been a while since I posted a bacterial update.  I was slightly worried about going away for almost three weeks but everything worked out fine.  I put the Kefir grains in a dormant state in the fridge with twice the amount of milk I would normally give them.  When I took them back out they recovered right away and I would say are going through a growth spurt.
For the Kombucha I started a new brew about 6 days before I left and just assumed that the brew would be ruined when I got back but that the scoby would be fine.  Turns out the brew was fine, quite fine.  It was a batch I brewed with Pu-Erh tea and red rose buds.  You can really taste the roses (yum!). I just started a new brew today, Pu-Erh tea and Chrysanthemum flowers.

A song for this post.

A few left (day 284)

June 4 (day 9) -- 
(written on June 5)

The new build of the Touch was posted already!  I got the textures working and now we have many lungs with distinct videos.  The next step is to get them breathing at different rhythms.  I'm not exactly sure how I'll do this yet.  Right now the instancing is done at the group level (whole lungs) and the animations are on its components.   That separation may be an issue.

We also got the communication going between the graphics and the sounds.  It was a thrilling start but it still needs work to sound good.

We ate at L'Express and met Glen Lowry there before showing him the studio and our progress so far.  We ended the evening recording the Montreal night ride with the soundfield microphone.  Right at the end of recording a group of girls out for a bachelorette party wanted to be recorded.  It was a really kind of sweet and joyful encounter.

June 7 (day 10)
(written on June 8)

This was the last day before the presentation the next day.  We prioritized the things we wanted to get done and all our priority lists were longer than humanly possible.  Nevertheless we set out to do the first things first and munched on cacao nibs to keep the momentum.

My priority was to get the lungs breathing in sync with the breaths.  Zoe had isolated four examples of each person's breath (miles, leila, zoe, maria).  Unfortunately in the end I wasn't able to use Zoe's own breaths because they were too quiet.  I matched the other breaths with the lungs by stretching the animation keys to match the length of the breath clip.  I combined the animation transformations with those of the geometry instancing.   It all worked well except for the transparency of the lungs which, for various reasons I won't go into now, didn't follow the breath properly. 

Thea kept working on the stereo videos.  Miles worked on foreground sounds and Zoe worked on background sounds.

Dinner was a bit scattered because we had to get back to the studio quickly.  Miles and Jocelyn went to Schwartz.  Leila and I took out some sushi.

June 8 (day 11)
Everyone put finishing touches on their little bits and pieces.  Leila went out and shot some last minute urban video which I felt we needed to balance out the more natural shots.  We moved the whole project over to the big gallery space.  It looked much better there and had room for many people to sit, move around, listen, look.  The Oboro techs were so gracious and amazing to arrange to move the project.  It all went smoothly.

In the end I didn't manage to do more than three pairs of lungs for the visuals.  One was mapped with a video of wind in the leaves, one with Montreal part and cityscape, and the other with pelicans swimming in the Bow river.  They each had their own rhythm.  To scale it to more than three lungs I'll have to redesign and offset the bad design choices of a sprint to deadline.

Zoe had a really great background audio composition which played while Miles added some foreground sounds like laughing, uncertainty, like it/don't like it, humming, etc via OSC messaging.  It sounded a bit cacophonous at times but I think it worked well for a crowd feel.  The stabilizing breath sounds helped offset the chaos a bit.  I really enjoyed walking around to all the speakers and listening to the individual voices speak or hum, and the returning to the centre to hear it all together.

Once again no pictures.  I am embarrassed by this.  The event was documented by others so I'll try to get some pictures from other sources.  Just before I archive the files tomorrow, I'll make a video of the lungs breathing.

I'd say about 15-20 people came to the artist talk.  Lots of great questions and discussion afterward.

We finished the day at an Afghan restaurant nearby.  Great food.

A song for this post. (an unexpected nostalgic group favourite one evening)

A few good lungs (day 279)

June 2 (day 6)
More recording in the studio.  It was a slow start with a discovery that all our previous recordings had been somehow faulty.  They didn't sound bad or anything, just inaccurate in the soundfield aspects.  A couple of hours later the problem had been located and we were able to record.  We had a list of sounds to individually record:

• words and phrases of uncertainty
• yawning
• dialogue and gossip pronouns (I, you, we, us, together, they, them)
• throat clearing
• breathing
• humming

It took about a half hour to record per individual.   We then recorded group sounds like footwork on the wooden floor, skin rubbing, and Tibetan chimes and singing bowl performance.  We finished the day at a Portuguese Grill.  Yum.

Miles in the recording booth. ←

June 3 (day 7)
A great day.  The new build of Derivative was posted and I was able to have multiple lungs breathing using geometry instancing.  It looks great.  The Macbook Pro I'm working with doesn't seem to have any problems dealing with the load so far.  I was so happy to see the multiple lungs breathing I forgot to take a screenshot or make a movie.  As I said enthrall is inversely proportional to documentation in my case.   At first I thought the multiple lungs looked kind of busy but when projected large the feeling was different.  We displayed them in conjunction with a collection of breathing sounds and it created a kind of reverent space.  I liked it a lot.

We ended the day at Sala Rosa, where they have great food and a performance space upstairs.  After eating we took in a Vaudeville show by Les Filles Electrique upstairs.  And what a show it was.  They really made us feel believe all the tricks.  It became such a magical place by the end of the show. There were some great visuals and projections. In one they projected talking faces on someone's face. A surprising result of a morphing face. In another they had a box made out of semi-transparent scrims with someone inside. Very interesting 3D kind of effect when projected from either side.

A seance right at the beginning of the show. ←

June 4 (day 8)
A somewhat unsatisfying day.  My goal for the day was to get varying videos playing in the instanced lungs.  I got close to a solution but ran into a slight hitch.  I was trying to fill a texture array that I could use in the shader for the lungs.  After struggling with how to do this, I posted to the forum and was delighted to get a response very quickly again!  How amazing that is.  The next build of Touch will include a quick and good way for me to fill my texture arrays.  It makes for a slow process but not one altogether unrewarding. 

Meanwhile, Miles processed the audio samples we've been recording, getting them ready for automatic generation of soundscapes based on OSC messages that I'll be sending him.  Hopefully we get to that bit tomorrow. 

Leila, Thea, and Zoe all went out to record stereo video with the new Canon Xacti cameras.  We'll take a look at the footage tomorrow.

We also have some more time in the recording studio tomorrow afternoon.  Now that I write it all down, it may be that some of these things don't get done.  Who knows.  Getting more material at this stage is both great and daunting.

We ended the day at a Lebanese restaurant called Daou.  Amazing food.

A song for this post.

Failure, Success, Failure... (day 276)

My goal for today was to get a few pairs of lungs breathing independently, or at least visually distinct from each other.  Getting instancing working in Touch took me a little while but it worked and in the end I had a little group of identical lungs breathing.  But the animation on the lungs looked wrong because the instancing broke the pivot point of the objects.  So my little success turned into a pretty big failure as I tried to alter the pivot on an instance basis, to no avail.  I finally decided to write to the Derivative forum.  Lo, I heard almost right away from one of their developers who said it's a bug.  He'll be releasing a workaround in a day or two.  I was almost relieved to hear that my defeat was not solely from rust.  The workaround involves writing a shader to rectify the order of transformations.  Since I had to write a shader for the lungs anyway, it's not such a hardship.  Rather more like a prod.

Tomorrow we spend the majority of the day in the recording/listening studio.  It is the last day in the studio so hopefully we will record everything we'll be needing later on.

I found one thing that Vancouver is better at than Montreal: Public Transit.  I never realized how smooth and uncomplicated Vancouver's system is until I came here and tried to find my way around a maze of different systems for the bus, metro, and different regions.  So many frustrations later I had to admit to myself that it couldn't solely be my unfamiliarity making this a scene out of The Castle.  And it's expensive!  $5.75 to go one way from where I'm staying in St-Hubert to the Plateau in Montreal. 

We played the Tulip Theory production song in the studio today.  This song became our theme song when Steve Nichols played it over and over again, particularly when things were tense or tedious.  Here it is:

A song for this post.

Happier Here (day 274)

Getting here may have been work but being here does not feel like work at all.  I find myself out of my usual context into another one that is strangely familiar.  The language is familiar, people's faces are familiar, the way people move is familiar.  The parts of my body that remember Quebec awaken and start dancing with each other again.  It's a bit awkward at times but the dance is getting more limber and smooth.  I look around and it seems that people are happier here.  I said as much to Leila and she said "maybe you're the one that's happier here".  Indeed, smiling people see other smiling people.  I admit that being away from a steady flow of emails and being able to concentrate on production and creative work is like a summer morning after a fresh rain. 

I've been trying to remember to document the experience.  Documenting is not something that comes naturally to me and if I'm really enthralled by something I usually forget to document.  Likewise, failed experiments rarely get any kind of treatment.  Still, here is a spotty photo doc of some of the activities we've done so far.  I've had to at least get this much written down before the details are forgotten.


May 25th (day 1)
We spent the day getting settled and learning about the soundfield ambisonic microphone.  We had plans to take the mic to a bird sanctuary in the evening but it ended up being too windy and the Vancouver part of the team was silently grateful for this reprieve.  It had already been a long day.  Leila took me to The Liverpool House in St-Henri for dinner.  Amazing dinner.  Amazing dessert.

	A sculpture I came across on my first walk towards Oboro from the Metro station.  It was in front of a very regular Montreal walk-up.  I wondered how it came to be. ←
Dessert at The Liverpool House in St-Henri. →

May 26th (day 2)

A very hot day.  We spent the late morning and early afternoon recording birds (and flowing water) at the bird sanctuary in LaChine, by the rapids.  A great time was had by all.  When we got back we heard some of the samples in the recording/listening studio.  There was some pretty great footage in there.  We then made plans to go see Hubble 3D at the Imax but these plans were thwarted because the late show was in French and it was better for Miles to see it in English.  We ended up at Leila's for an impromptu homemade dinner.  Extreme goodness. We finished the meal at an ice cream parlour near her place where we ran into Lynn Hughes and Alain Thibault.  Walking back to her place, we stopped and got a dozen St-Viateur bagels for the next day's lunch.

	Red-winged black bird at the sanctuary. ←
Zoe and Miles recording. →
	Zoe, Miles, and Stephane learning about soundfield workflow. ←
Leila with the plated food. We ate outside on her deck. Menu was Stuffed Portobello mushroom with blue cheese, basil and tomato; Grilled asparagus with reduced balsamic; Tomato cucumber salad with Tzatziki; Gin&Tonic with Basil and Mango. →

May 27th (day 3)
Today we recorded many sounds including:

• group laughter
• individual laughter
• banter
• sounds of uncertainty
• breathing, slow and fast
• random phonemes
• singing bowl, tibetan bells
• "I like it", "I don't like it" both normal tone and whisper

The computer I will be using for the residency finally became ready.  I did some preliminary account setup things.
We tried again to make it to the Hubble 3D show but last minute tasks got in the way.  We made it an early night and I had dinner with my mom.  Sorry, not pics.  It's too bad because there were some pretty hilarious moments in there.  I'll post some sounds when I have them.

May 28th (day 4)
While Leila was wrangling camera purchases at Concordia, Miles and I parallel-played on our respective computers.  He played with speaker setups and sounds, and I played with lung graphics.  Just as I was thinking of a lunch break around 2pm, Chantal came in and said a curator from Glasgow would be touring through at about 2:30pm.  Miles said we should still have a quick lunch.  As we were eating lunch Leila arrived and we told her about the curator.  We decided to get something ready to show.  Much like the impromptu meal of the day before, Miles and I took the ingredients we had on hand and put something together that wasn't bad at all.   The previous day's recordings were very interesting when mixed with images of the lungs breathing and mapped with video. I think we surprised ourselves and it was a wonderful ramp into another stage of the residency.
That afternoon I tried the Sonic Bed by Kaffe Matthews.  It's a bed surrounded by speakers which when laid upon gives a kind of sonic massage both auditory and bodily.  Very interesting.  There is currently a call out for compositions for the bed.
In the evening we went to a Gregorian Chant performance by the Ensemble Scholastiques Neumatiques.  It was amazing.  We finished the evening at an informal gathering of people performing noise music at which Zoe was performing.

	Waiting for the sonic bed. It was popular. ←
Zoe performing in funky Montreal loft. →

A song for this post.

The busyness of going (day 263)

Getting ready for the Oboro residency.  The thought of being away for almost three weeks is both exciting and frightening.  I've resigned myself to not being ready but being ready enough.  What I most look forward to is the spark of creativity coming back, from sputter to more like sparklers you put on a birthday cake.  Something happens when the day to day is interrupted by something other than tragedy or sickness.  Threads are lost and others find each other.  That's interesting and unpredictable.  It's too bad the physical constraints are such that these kinds of interruptions are necessary.  Don't think the irony of leaving such an amazing research lab to do creative work escapes me.

Meanwhile, in whatever pockets of calm I can find, and in whatever interesting company I find myself, I'm bouncing off ideas about crowds, the topic I will speak about at Smart Graphics.   The management of crowds is especially interesting to me right now and I realize I've been thinking about this for a long time.  I was even thinking about this during my PhD. But back then I was into local rules influencing morphology.   That's still interesting but there's the other way around too - the context influencing the local behaviour.  I'll be looking for a way to map the ideas and sources I've collected in the past few months into some sort of map. 

A song for this post.

More frames and nibs (day 257)

As luck would have it, someone's been reading my blog that knows a lot about S3D with prosumer cameras.  He recommends either the Kodax Zi8 or the Sanyo Xacti Full HD line.  Turns out the sync problem is not as bad if the frame rate is higher, which makes sense.  They can be controlled with an infrared remote.  Both models can do 60fps at at least 720p.  I'll recommend these to Leila and we'll probably try one of them out during the residency.

On a completely different topic, I have a new addiction: Raw Cacao Nibs.  Deliciously crunchy cacao goodness.  Totally addictive, versatile, with a mellow stimulant.  Apparently they're a healthy snack too, though I view this as a bonus rather than a reason.  I ordered a Kilo from Earth Notions. 

A song for this post.

Inaugural spin (day 256)

The tech session with the stereoscopic rig went really well.  About 15 people came and for over two hours Marty talked about the technical aspects of the rig and took questions from the participants.  There was lots of great feedback and many said they would be interested in coming back and spending some time experimenting with the rig.  We ourselves will be spending some quality time with the rig in the coming days getting ready for the Western Economic Diversification announcement of the S3D Centre taking place at Emily Carr on May 20th.  We'll be filming the event with the rig and showing the live footage on a 3DTV LCD (Hyundai S465D).

I taped a lot of the session today but I haven't had time to upload the footage.  In the meantime here is a photo taken from an iPhone of Marty and I looking at the live stream for the first time.  The next shot is an older one of my first time seeing the rig at Kerner in late March.


Many people deserve thanks for making this session happen.  The Kerner team for getting the rig up here in time and helping organize some of the session logistics.  Marty Brenneis especially for so generously providing so much information to the assembled group.   And Rick Overington, for heroically wrangling technology and traffic to make sure everything worked in the end.
Our industry partners also deserve many thanks for their invaluable contributions and support: Panavision, Codex, Cine-Tal, Sony, Fujinon, Evertz, Silicon Imaging.

A song for this post.

Now in stereo (day 255)

Marty Brenneis from Kerner arrived at the lab today!  He's here for a 2 day visit and to help us put the stereoscopic rig together.  He's the engineer that built the rig.  It was really exciting to see the rig being come together and to see the live stream from the cameras on our new 3DTV.  Tomorrow we're having a tech session and Q&A mostly for internal technicians but also some technicians from IATSE.   May 20th is the official WED announcement of the funding for the Centre.

We'll be filming the session tomorrow so I'll post some pics and perhaps some videos.   I'll also put together a list of the rig components.

A song for this post.

A progressive discovery (day 252)

There is a glimmer of hope in our search for a low cost solution to stereoscopic video capture.  One of the technicians at Concordia found the Canon Vixia HF S200 camcorder which can record progressive (24p) video in HD and has a LANC terminal.  With any luck they will be better synced than the TG1s.  Having progressive recording means faster motion (like sports which we've been recording) will be better quality.

We haven't addressed the issue of post-processing at all.  I suspect this will be another hurdle.  With the TG1 footage we ran into a lot of codec and audio issues which never really got resolved.  The Canons probably record in AVCHD just like the Sonys.  Hopefully the tools got smarter in the interim.

That's it for today.  Just an equipment update.  I've been busy planning for the stereoscopic tech session happening on Tuesday in the lab.  Here's to hoping everything comes together.

A song for this post.

The whale tried to warn us (day 251)

Maybe the whale was warning us of the impending stock market bungee jump.  It's possible.  The word on the street is that someone typed billion, but meant million, in a sell order.  The risks of txt'ing your sell order can't be overstated.  What better image than the fail whale for such a warning.  Alas, we were all too mesmerized to listen.

And mesmerized is a good word for it.  Turns out that a big sell order like that, erroneous or not, triggers android traders to sell without thinking (not that they could).   Then the meat-based traders get in the action and boom goes the market.  Mesmerizing indeed.  We've created an unpredictable monster and someone kicked it accidentally.  So fragile we are.

The stock market is the biggest hive experiment we have.  I'm personally fascinated by the stories we project on the movements of our pet monster.  Oh he yawned!  It must mean that the crisis in Bolivia is not that important.  Uh oh, he burped.  It must mean that interest rates will rise.  From the inside of the cage, it must be the same with just a bit more nuance.  I want to know who really understood derivatives.  Was it like feeding our monster some re-processed waste?  I think we did that with the cows and it didn't turn out so well.

Will Friday be boring?  It's hard to beat the last two days.

A song for this post.

A grey in shallow waters (day 250)

A grey whale swam into False Creek this afternoon.  Never has this happened before.  I was in meetings all day and missed the real time announcement.  No doubt, twitter was overheating in the local geo.  By the time I found out, it had gone back to open sea.  I went down to the docks to talk with the Aquabus guys and they told me how amazing it was to see a big animal like that so close.  They say it was about 13 meters.  Here is the CBC report.

The big question is why this has happened.  Is the whale healthy?  Is this just random?  Was it a message (a la Douglas Adams)?  Is this related to the whale that washed up on shore, starved to death? Is it related to what is happening in the Gulf?  I have this notion that whales talk to each other over great distances.  I have no idea if an oil spill would be a topic of conversation but I'm guessing it might be?  Still that probably wouldn't have anything to do with False Creek.  The CBC report seems to imply this is a normal migration route and the whale was just curious or something.

Anyway, I'm sorry I missed the whale but I hope it's happily swimming with some stories to tell.

A song for this post.

Resounding sanity amidst frustration (day 248)

Leila tried using the Sony TG1s with the digi-dat remote but she said it was highly frustrating to have to wait for the moment where the initial sync is less than 1ms.  It breaks all spontaneity and creates a lot of tension when trying to get a good shot.  She was shooting a soccer game with 10 minute periods so fiddling with the cameras for 5-6 minutes was too frustrating to be worth it.  She did get some footage but we didn't have time to look at it today.  In any case, it looks like we'll have to find another solution, or other cameras that are better synced than the ones we have.  We do have the Silicon Imaging cameras but are still waiting on the field recorder.  Hopefully we'll have it soon and can use the setup during the residency.  Time is getting tight but hope lives on. 

We also tried to make the singing bowl resonate without being struck.  Miles used a piezo vibrating at the same frequency as the bowl (~457 Hz).  The results were interesting but not as successful as we'd hoped.  The bowl would resonate a little bit at some specific spots but not to the point of giving the rich sound of stroking or striking the bowl.  Miles will keep working at it.  It's possible we could use a mix of vibrations or some kind of amplifier to create the effect we're seeking.

Lastly, today I came across this interview with Father Miguel D'Escoto, former President of the United Nations. I had never seen or heard him speak before.  Sometimes the strength and sanity of older humans are awe-inspiring.  Miguel D'Escoto has that awe-inspiring quality.  I think there is a lot of truth in what he is saying about the way we name things to normalize them.  We name wars and they become crusades.  We name groups of people getting killed and we forget they were ever individuals.  I also liked the way he talked about being unashamed to stand up for 'Mother Earth'.  It is not us that are insane.  We should care. 

A song for this post.

Preview day and night (day 245)

Another day, another preview of things to come.

We spent the a good part of the afternoon working with the cameras and the remote again.  After giving up on finding another set of cameras by going shopping locally, we decided to give our current setup another chance.  We got as scientific as we could with imprecise tools and calculated the drift to be about .6ms per minute with a period of about 15 minutes.  So after 15 minutes they get in sync again.  Once they are in sync we have about 5 minutes to shoot before things are too far out of sync to be usable.  This is an estimate and would depend on the speed of motion in the scene.  So it's workable but certainly not amenable to spur of the moment shooting.  Leila will test it out this weekend.  In talking with Sean, he said that he's had the same issue with recording sound and video separately.  The oscillators were just slightly out of sync so the sound and video didn't match up.  Luckily with sound you can play around a bit and get things to match.  Not so with video.  We haven't found video editing software that will manipulate a sub-frame level.  Changing the frame rate to be a fractional number would not work.

We spent the later afternoon brainstorming some ideas about Breath I/O.  Here are the notes (not edited):

Lungs jostling/bending
Moving around forming clusters, groups, fights, collaborations.
Number of lungs - individual to couple to quartet to nine to multitude (varying)
Environment - rain, wind, snow, vidéo windows in bg
Internal video associated with personal internal space. External video associated with public videos.
When lungs touch each other could generate traces
External videos can affect internal videos (a mixture)
Lines in space delineating groups and boundaries
Breathing patterns affecting video speed and direction
Video particles or atmospheric around the lungs maybe more visible when they are actively breathing. Somehow visualizing sharing of the same air.
Sometimes lungs not having video (tuning out?)
Death/decay (line drawing?)
Events like a bird flying through. Each set of lungs associated with an event that can get triggered. Internal event or external event.
Provoke tenderness in viewer.  A sense of protecting.
Resonance, sound, visual resonance, synching, harmony/disharmony, oscillations that are sometimes in sync, oscillations that affect each other. Rhythms, ebbs and flows, events affect the patterns.

The day ended with the Grad Show preview night.  I toured about a third of the show before going home.  I'll see the rest during the week when it's a bit less busy.  It was great to see the MAA student work all in one place.  The official opening is tomorrow night.

A song for this post.

Sing Dance Eat (day 244)

Matching a tuning fork with the singing bowl didn't quite work.  Partially it's because the tuning fork is simply too small to make the bowl resonate and partially because the bowl does not resonate at a perfect B Flat.  I think if the first thing is remedied perhaps the second would be less relevant.  I think we would have better luck working with a piezo to induce a kind of resonance.  What I'd like to see is the bowl getting to resonance without the need for the wooden stick.  That way it becomes a kind of actuator for the interactive piece.

In the evening we attended two interactive dance performances in the IDS.  Both were great and made use of different kinds of motion tracking techniques to interact with text and type.  There are three other performances tomorrow (4, 6, and 8pm).

We ended the day at Boneta which we found out is part of Dine Out Vancouver.  The food was absolutely amazing.  A great deal for sure.

So again, not exactly a success-filled day but not a bad day altogether.

A song for this post.

Oscillating and Resonating (day 243)

Leila and I spent the afternoon testing the LANC twin remote with the Sony TG1 cameras, then shopping for other cameras that would work better than the TG1s.   It was a futile attempt.  In the end we ended up with a nice assortment of chocolate from Xoxolat, and a singing bowl from Maiwa.  Not a bad day altogether.

So what about the LANC twin remote.  It works as advertised but our TG1 cameras have mismatched oscillators.  We have yet to do the precise calculation but it's somewhere around 1ms per minute.  This is a lot.  And it's hard to get them to be in sync at startup.  On average it seemed to take about 15 power ups to get a sync better than 4ms.  We may try to make the LANC 3D Master which is capable of manipulating the frame rate to compensate for the oscillator mismatch.  The 3D Master has an open source hardware design.  I have no idea if the TG1 are even capable of responding to the frame rate manipulation of the 3D Master.  There doesn't seem to be any way to find out beside making the remote and checking.

We went to the Sony store to see if there would be other cameras that we could test for a match.  No luck there.  The cameras we were interested in either had a design flaw which prevented the physical connection of the remote, or weren't available at the store, or weren't able to be taken out of the box for testing. We looked at Canon cameras too but none seemed to have a LANC connection.  Maybe their higher end cameras have this.  So we are a bit stuck.  We could go higher end but the higher end cameras tend to be bigger so cannot have a inter-axial distance of human scale. 

The singing bowl will be used to generate sounds and perhaps be part of the interface for the Breath I/O work.  We will go to Long & McQuade tomorrow and see if we find a tuning fork that will resonate with the bowl.  The bowl resonates at B Flat which a quick search reveals could be heart, crown, or solar plexus chakra.  There is an intriguing NPR report about B Flat which claims it can stimulate alligators to bellow, and is the note hummed by black holes (yes, black holes).   Guess that means black holes make alligators bellow.  There's also a nice bit in there about a room that resonates at B Flat (a room mode).  This site has an interactive orchestra piece in B Flat.  There doesn't seem to be any agreements on a mapping between chakras and tones which makes sense I suppose.  Anyway, B Flat sounds good for  now.

A song for this post.

Suiting up to fight (day 242)

Is it a coincidence that there's been a few movies about vigilantes lately?  Movies like Defendor and Kick-Ass that have flawed real-life superheroes take the restoration of justice into their own hands? Defendor was bittersweet.  The superhero, a little slow but honest, was looking for Captain Industry.    Kick-Ass I think was supposed to be funny but it left me feeling uncomfortable.  The portrayal of a killer young kid (9 or 10?) was a natural progression of other violent movies we see but I don't think it's a progression we should be proud of.  Surely there is a better role model for young girls between that and Britney Spears. What I did like about the movie was the fact that the superheroes found and created each other.

Someone taking justice into their own hands is a familiar theme in movies but what I'm seeing is the bringing down of the hero to the level of the every day person.  I wonder if this is a response to latent anger in the population.  Even the term Robin Hood tax being bandied about lately is interesting in that respect.  The vigilante movies are still using very personal motivations for the superheroes so maybe I'm reading too much into them.  Is there a point at which the clumsy everyday hero decides to take on more than 'bad guys'?  Maybe the superhero trope is just an extension of individualism and it never amounts to much.  We'll have to see where it goes.

Here's a game based on the flawed superhero theme (via pardenarden).

A song for this post.

Life Support (day 238)

I took a breather today.  After attending the Masters of Digital Media graduation ceremony (which was awesome), I arrived home around 4pm and decided to make some tea, eat some chocolate from chocolate arts, and spend some time with a book that I've been meaning to re-open: "The Art of Projection" edited by Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon.  A few pages in I started to get some ideas about the screenshots and snapshots I've been collecting.  I started to think of what it feels like to be observed by my own computer.  At the beginning I was self-conscious, then I became annoyed, then oblivious, then embarrassed, then impatient.  As the shots pile up, I've become somewhat anxious about what the end game is.  What will I do with all these?  Steve asks me every now and then.  I've always replied that I didn't know.  Today I had an idea.  The sketch is below.  A LCD screen shows a video of the screenshots, and the top of the screen where a camera would usually be, a miniature projector projects the portrait snapshots onto a suspended concave structure (textured material, probably paper clay).  In between the two, embedded in a supporting plinth is an organ-like inflatable structure that 'breathes' (mechanics and electronics inside the plinth).  The sound is similar to a life support respirator in a hospital.  I'm not clear on the form of the breathing structure.  Probably amorphous.  I'd like it to be uncanny, like an organ.  With an affect similar to the organic game pod in Cronenberg's Existenz.

A song (clip) for this post.

You lookin' at me? (day 237)

Morgan Rauscher defended his thesis yesterday.  I was one of the faculty members on his committee.  He did very well and was an interesting person to talk to as always.  The best part of his thesis is the project which has two parts: Zeugen and Mind Machine.  Zeugen is a large suspended board with 32 half faces (eyes and nose) whose eyes follow the people currently looking at them.  The faces are backlit and turn on and off according to an algorithm that I'm not quite clear about.  There is a half-mirror in front of the faces which becomes more of a mirror when the faces are not lit.  There are servo motor sounds from the eyes tracking the viewers' faces.  The back of the board is open and shows the mechanics and electronics of the work, as well as the netbook that controls it.  Morgan calls this open source.  I've seen this work a few times in different instantiation but this was the first time I saw it with the half mirror.

After being with it for a while it started to make me think of social media.  The board is a kind of screen and the faces are looking at me and I'm looking at them and at the same I'm looking at myself.  And it's all quite ordered.  The whole thing is self-conscious in a mechanical and somewhat unnerving way. 

The piece will be on display during the Graduate Exhibition May 2-16th at the Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University.  I recommend.

A song for this post.

Craigslist poets (day 234)

Penny Leong, one of my graduate students, defended her thesis today.  She did really well.  The topic: acts of giving on craigslist free stuff section.   She analyzed the ways in which people phrase their listings and conduct the actual exchange.   Her thesis project will be exhibited in the Charles H. Scott gallery from May 1st to May 14th.  It will be a participatory display of objects that exemplify the categories of giving that she has identified.  Her process blog documents some of the objects (and categories) that will be on display.

In came out during the defense that Veda Hille produced a musical with Geoff Berner called "Do You Want What I Have Got?: A Craigslist Cantata", that played during the Push Festival.  I wish we both would have seen it!  I think it might be playing again in some form on May 2nd at the Arts Club Theatre. 

A song for this post (from the cantata).

Booked on the weekend (day 233)

I finished the book "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".  It was a quick and entertaining read.  I'm curious about how well it works as a movie.  It's the first of a trilogy but I'm not sure when I'll be able to convince myself to take a full day to read again.

The other book that I finished a while ago and forgot to mention is "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster.  Jaron Lanier recommended it during his talk at SXSW.  The book was written in 1909 so is in the public domain.  It's set in a futuristic world where humans are living underground, each in separate apartments fully managed by the Machine, which has become something like a God to them.  Birth and Death are managed and travel is not desirable.  "Ideas" are the most valuable currency (if you read the book you'll understand why I put ideas in quotes). The short story is about the gradual decline of the machine as the inhabitants gradually become ignorant and complacent about its maintenance.  An amazing tale even if it was written today.  The fact that it was written in 1909 is almost unbelievable.

I was a panelist at the Diane Farris Gallery on Saturday.  Hank Bull was a fellow panelist and Lili Vieira de Carvalho was moderating.  The topic was social media and art.  It was interesting to hear Hank talk about the beginning of network art in the 1970s when artists were using the telephone, the photocopier, and the precursors to the fax machine and video phone.  He said something that stuck with me: when it became clear that artists would be able to link to each other in a great network around the world, the belief and hope was that there would be large collaborative works, no longer individual works.   I'm very much paraphrasing from memory and I wish I remembered his exact words.  He also said it's worth noting that it's called social media, not socialist media.  This is after some discussion about the role of corporate interests in web 2.0.   It was interesting to me that the optimism of the early 70's has been partially realized in the sense that the technology is more available than ever but there has also been the disappointment of losing control of the medium.  Overall, a pretty good panel.   It probably would have been more balanced if Kris Krug had been able to be the third panelist.  We needed a convert I think. 

A song for this post.

Blog interrupted (day 231)

We interrupt this blog for a riveting novel...the girl with the dragon tattoo.  We will be back after this low tech interruption.

A song for this post.

Smart and juvenile (day 230)

I finished the Jaron book.  He finished off with a discussion of how neoteny is the reason we are so smart and juvenile all at the same time, and a discussion of post-symbolic communication in virtual worlds.  Yes the book takes a turn away from a critique and toward an exploration of the pleasures of morphing, concrete communication, and the development of language.   In the end what I retain from the book is his belief that there is no need to elevate technology to the level of humans or debase humans to the level of technology.  There is no philosophy that will fit all the ways in which we need to think about these things and the important thing is not to get trapped.  I appreciate the way he discussed his research at the end of the book.  There was something really sweet about it.  Like a kid really enjoying the space to think about what is possible still.

I wonder what it would be like to tune out of web 2.0 for an extended period of time.  What would I miss?  What would be richer?  What if the whole world had to take a 2.0 break for a month?  What does that feel like?  Is it like the silence you hear when the electricity goes off and nothing is buzzing anymore?  Or is it the silence that makes your foot wiggle and makes you run to the nearest pub?  For me, the thought of the world tuning out from 2.0  brings the most insight about the true value of what has been created through it.

Now I have to find my next book.

A song for this post.

Everyone's talking (day 229)

I feel I should write something positive today.  I've been on a vicarious rant about web 2.0 lacuna for a few days now.   So what could possibly be good about the overload of everyone talking at once on the internet?  Well for one we can stop being ignorant of the real level of discourse in the world.  This is a call for action and one that I think is being heard.  iTunesU is a great thing, and so is YouTube Edu.  The YouTube Screening Room is also great.  Vimeo is a breath of fresh creativity every time.  The fact that I don't have to pay for all this greatness sometimes feels wrong and not sustainable but the greatness itself is inspiring.  I believe books will be transformed, especially textbooks, and I'm looking forward to that but that's not really web 2.0.  I hope for a resurgence of newspapers in a new form but I'm not sure it will happen.  These days when I pick up a paper I realize how good it feels in my hands and how it has some pretty good content, well put together in a visually comfortable medium.  Sometimes the simple things can bring an exquisite state of unexpected relaxation.  I believe newspapers can be that in some kind of digital form on some kind of reader.  I hope they survive long enough to get there.  I think people might pay for good content again soon.  Perhaps if our data plans stop being so expensive.   I think open government platforms and applications are interesting initiatives and I welcome anything that can get us from Farmville to HereVille. 

A song for this post.

If your friends jump off a bridge (day 228)

Jaron Lanier says that every advertisement is a failure of the hive mind.  He doesn't like the hive mind or advertising so I don't think either one wins in this statement.  It is interesting that so much faith has been put in the hive lately when we know that the hive slices both ways.  Crowds can topple walls and can loot stores.  Thinking as a unit does not equal wisdom.  It's just a stable state that could be any stable state.  There's no particular reason to assume it's the optimal solution.  And often we don't even know the question we're asking of the hive anyway.   When the hive speaks the assumption is that it's uttering the answer to something.  Once again Douglas Adams was prescient.

It's pretty clear that complex problems are probably left to good old analysis and experiment by domain experts.  Even the example of the NetFlix prize is not a good example of hive computation.  A gladiator style winner take all model is not optimal in terms of evolution of a solution.  It's an example of a crowd of smart and hungry researchers, that's all.   As far as I can tell we are far from anything resembling optimized hive computation.  In fact, research shows that we have great influence over each other when trying to reach consensus and local influences can prevail, preventing a convergence to the correct solution.  Still the idea of hive computation is so attractive that we want to believe it.  We want to believe that magically a crowd not only could but will come up with solutions to hard problems like global warming, and unstable economic systems.   Like Douglas Adams says, the simple existence of the human race expresses solutions all the time.   The problem is that as a species we're short-sighted and we want to be liked.  And I'm pretty sure the former doesn't get better at the crowd level.

I don't think we should entirely give up on hive computation at all.  I agree with Jaron that we should study it with a clear focus - what is it good for and how to we set it up for success.  Undoubtedly, there are certain problems that stated in a certain way might be ideal  for the hive but without a clear study we'll keep fumbling and believing a false god.

A song for this post.

The verdict is in (day 227)

When Skype came along it seemed like a good idea and it was.  Even older and regular folk use it, they love the video chat.  It keeps families in touch.  Great.  Can't argue with that.   When Twitter came along I never had the thought it was a good idea.  And I routinely hear regular folk say 'why would I want to do that?' in reference to Twitter.  Like it or not, Twitter has a ambiguous value proposition.  Even when you're on it you wonder what it might be.  Like Google Wave, it suffers from being a solution without a well distributed problem.   I think my experiment with Twitter is done, and my conclusion is that there is simply not enough content to keep me interested.  There is too much to wade through and the effort to sort it all out is not worth it in the end.  I'd rather keep up with my RSS feeds and get more in depth content.  The last piece of evidence to let go of Twitter was deliberately being without it for a week.  I felt better without it.  I logged on again briefly to see the difference and I immediately felt triage stress.  I do enough information triage during a regular day.  I don't need more of it.  I need less.  I need the Amazon recommendation engine for the chatter of my friends.  Either that or I need to seriously constrain the friend definition.

I'm a big fan of Google Reader.  There are probably lots of equivalent services out there but the basic idea is that I read my feeds and if I like something I share it with my friends.  They do the same.  It's a nice way to see what everyone else has triaged.  It's distributed triage.  Typically the volume is fairly low so it doesn't add a lot of work to see what they've shared.  I can also keep my own lists of things I thought were interesting.  There are two differences between Google Reader and Twitter that keep me with the Reader.  It's lower volume, and deeper content.  There is something so contrived about the restricted number of characters to a Twitter post.  You can be as clever as you want, it still comes out like half a thought if the underlying context is at all rich.    So for now I'm with RSS and I'm shunning Twitter.  We'll see if peer pressure changes this in the future.  I'm certainly in good company it seems.

Still beyond a tool vs tool diatribe, what is it that I really want out of information tools?

• I don't want to be presented with irrelevant information or idle chatter.
• I want the information to be linked with interests that I've already flagged either implicitly or explicitly.  
• I want to know what my friends are thinking but not necessarily in real-time.
• In fact, I rarely want information as a push mechanism.  I prefer to pull my info.
• I want ambient displays for the creative works that my friends are involved with.
• I want to know about events that are connected to my close friends, or my community.
• I don't want to be invited to events outside of my geographical area.
• I don't want to be invited to be a fan of anything.
• I want easy direct channels for personal requests.
• I want in depth reporting of current events.
• I want time-stamped dynamic geo-tagged information on demand.

 A song for this post.

A taste of last minute (day 226)

Today was the last day of the Ed Pien installation at the Museum of Vancouver.  It was there for three months and even though the museum is barely two blocks away I waited until the last day.  I regret this very much now for two reasons: it was amazing and I would have loved to go again, and I would have loved to convince others to see it.  The mostly blue paper sculpture was intricately painted and cut.  You could walk inside and look through multi-layered and coloured cutouts.  There was a large cylindrical room with a circular video projection up above, with animated ink drawings.  The feeling  of the projection was moon-like.  The paintings on the paper structures where mythical human/animal combinations.  Between two cylindrical structures was a thin hallway that shimmered and waved as you walked through.  It's hard to describe the form but the feeling was of being outside at night with a kind of melding of human and wildlife, very mythical, and reverent.   There was neutral ambient sound.  I took many pictures.

The other half of the exhibition was crafts from Canadians and South Koreans.  That too was amazing but for a different reason.  I was awed by the combined person years of expertise in the room.  The objects were each precious and precisely executed.  I enjoyed seeing all the different materials: glass, metal, wood, thread, felt, clay.  I bought the catalog and even though I'm glad I have some record of the artists in the show, it doesn't come close to the great way the whole was put together.

Later in the afternoon Liz and I went to Chinatown and I was able to pick up some dried flowers for my tea: Chrysanthemum, red rose buds, and Osmanthus.  We ended our excursion at Arts De Chine, a tea shop at the corner of Pender and Columbia.  I wanted to buy more Pu-Erh tea and had a notion that I would buy some as a gift for someone else.   He had many to choose from and explained the different regions, companies and ages.  I settled on one and we sat down for a Gong Fu Cha style tasting.  I mentioned that I was looking to buy some as a gift and after asking a few questions he wondered if the person might not prefer the Iron Buddha oolong tea.  After tasting it, I agreed that this was indeed a delight that they would enjoy.  It was fragrant beyond belief even (especially?) after several steeps.  The fragrance lingered in the most pleasant way.  Of course with the tea I had to get a clay tea pot.  I'll season the pot before giving away.  If you are looking for a great tea shop in Vancouver, this place is definitely a great experience.  High quality teas, friendly instruction, and no pressure sales.

A song for this post.

No really, is it all great? (day 225)

I'm slightly stunned that I haven't posted since Wednesday.  I had a late night Thursday and by Friday evening the virus had made a slight comeback, a warning that rest was a priority.  We have family visiting this weekend too so making sure I could be fit enough to entertain was important.  Like being out of town, being sick is about a 25% drag on an otherwise normal day. 

I've been thinking about Web 2.0 since listening to the Jaron Lanier book and also talking to people about it to see if some of the ideas resonate.  There haven't been many takers so far although it's entirely possible I'm not doing a great job explaining the ideas.  Plus there are so many ideas in the book that it's hard to summarize.  Either way, I've been trying to take a more objective look at what I think about Web 2.0.  One of the side effects of listening to his book has been a sort of permission to be more critical of the social web and hive mentality.  Do I really enjoy all this social networking or am I doing it because I feel I have to?  Jaron is particularly concerned with younger people who are slaves to their online identity which is different but entangled with their offline one.  He claims the most successful people are the one who view their online identity as a fabrication (creation?) and groom it as such.  In any case, there is maintenance needed on online identities and there are potentially many that require maintenance and perhaps concordance.  I've recently taken a break from twitter and I felt a decrease in stress from it.  I've not been updating my Facebook identity as much lately either, partially because I've been a bit disenchanted with the less personal feel of FB and the constant barrage of Farmville or Cafe World announcements.  On the whole I can't say I'm particularly enthused about social networking sites and I miss the personal style of web pages of yore (at least the ones that were updated regularly).  The comments on YouTube and most news sites are very discouraging and routinely make me lose heart in humanity but so does Sarah Palin having supporters for a White House bid.   These are merely side effects of the presence of ignorance in the world but I'm sure that the amplification of that signal does not help.  Jaron speaks about this trolling kind of behaviour and claims it is due to the level of anonymity that's allowed (and prized) on the web.   Whatever it is, it's pervasive and sometimes feels like walking down a dark downtown street at 3am, weaving around drunk, collectively stupid teenagers.  The question that Jaron is asking seems to be "have we backed ourselves into a corner?"  It is possible that the directions taken by Google, Facebook, Apple and other big players may be de-emphasizing the better parts of human nature by devaluing original content and making a business model so dependent on ads.  Are we indeed eating our own long tail?  In a world where physical labour will be increasingly done by robots, the world of ideas and creativity should be gaining importance, not losing.  I would say it's more common for people to view the web as a place to be entertained than to create.  We rehash more than we hash.  And I agree with Jaron, this is a worrying trend.

Next up, some thinking about how it might be different.

A song for this post.