New Media Initiatives Blog

Danah Boyd has a really good look at the social divisions that are emerging in the use of Facebook and MySpace:

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other “good” kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we’d call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, “burnouts,” “alternative kids,” “art fags,” punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn’t go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. Teens who are really into music or in a band are on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

She also discusses the role that aesthetics play in this breakdown:

This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but it is pretty clear to me that aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

I should note here that aesthetics do divide MySpace users. The look and feel that is acceptable amongst average Latino users is quite different from what you see the subculturally-identified outcasts using. Amongst the emo teens, there’s a push for simple black/white/grey backgrounds and simplistic layouts. While I’m using the term “subaltern teens” to lump together non-hegemonic teens, the lifestyle divisions amongst the subalterns are quite visible on MySpace through the aesthetic choices of the backgrounds.

This lines right up with what I found when I talked to some of the WACTAC teens a few months ago. I’m still contemplating what this means for a museum, or any institution that wants to reach audiences. We need to be all-access and blind to class lines. Yet, at the same time, there is also a drive to maintain the and re-enforce the image (brand) of the institution itself.

It may all be moot, though, because some people tend to think that there is a saturation point for all this social networking / web 2.0 activity, and it is quickly being approached.

Roger Dooley at Futurelab:

…the rising tide of total time spent online (number of users and hours per users) has lifted a lot of boats, but inevitably online activity will become a zero sum game. People who spend more time on one activity will cut back other online participation by the same amount.

and Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion:

However, there is definitely a bubble and therefore a crash coming. It's not financial. It's not related to the level of noise or startups. This crash is personal. We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore's Law.

I think the lessons are clear, extend beyond social networking, and can be easy to implement. Don’t try to grow a community where one doesn’t exist. Go to where the community already is. Make the information that users want free of any sort of restrictions. Don’t make me sign up for an account, everyone I already have too many. Don’t make me give you my email, I already get enough junk. Let me as the user choose how much I want to interact, and reduce all possible barriers to interaction.

It is not often I find exciting Microsoft products on Slashdot, but there are exceptions to the rule. /. linked up a Popular Mechanics article on Microsoft Surface. Surface is a fancy multitouch table that Microsoft has been working on in semi-secrecy for a while. In addition to being multitouch, it also features proximity detection so it can talk to your phone (bluetooth) and camera (wifi) and other devices when you put them on the table.

Gattis took out a digital camera and placed it on the Surface. Instantly, digital pictures spilled out onto the tabletop. As Gattis touched and dragged each picture, it followed his fingers around the screen. Using two fingers, he pulled the corners of a photo and stretched it to a new size. Then, Gattis put a cellphone on the surface and dragged several photos to it -- just like that, the pictures uploaded to the phone. It was like a magic trick. He was dragging and dropping virtual content to physical objects. I’m not often surprised by new technology, but I can honestly say I’d never seen anything like it.

It looks and feels a lot like CityWall and some of Jeff Han’s work, but it does not appear that Han has worked with Microsoft. One of the notable differences between Han’s tables (which are pricey) and Surface is price. Surface is supposedly going to be on sale this year for $5,000 to $10,000. The article mentions commercial applications, but I would think that education and museums would also have a huge interest. While I wouldn’t be able to afford one for my home, $10,000 is a very accessible price point for a museum.

Whiz-bang aside, the table also reminds me a bit of Pac Man. I also wonder if it can run linux. I’m actually sure that when this comes out, there will be a linux distro that includes a Pac Man knock-off.

EDIT: Create Digital Music has some commentary, as does Chris O’Shea.

Continuing my research into multitouch environments, I came across a project I had not seen before. It is called CityWall, and it is located in Helsinki, Finland:

The content displayed on the CityWall is periodically organized into themes or events that are currently taking place in the city such as festivals, carnivals or sports events. The CityWall is designed to support the navigation of media, specifically annotated photos and videos which are continuously gathered in realtime from public sources such as Flickr and YouTube. To contribute content to the CityWall please send pictures and videos via MMS or email to post@citywall.org. Alternatively, tag your media on YouTube or Flickr with ‘Helsinki’ and we will pick up your media and display it here on the CityWall.

It looks like a combination of some of the social networking work the Brooklyn Museum is doing and a beautiful multitouch environment. The video notes that the screen works both during the day and the night. I am a little foggy on how that works with a FTIR screen, but if UIx has worked around the daylight problem, it would be extremely useful. I will just have to go to Helsinki to find out.

I found an interesting blog today: Touch. According to the about:

Touch is a research project looking at the intersections between the digital and the physical. Its aim is to explore and develop new uses for RFID, NFC and mobile technology in areas such as retail, public services, social and personal communication.

NFC, or Near Field Communication, in a nutshell is the technology that will some day let us pay for a Coke or pump a parking meeter with our mobile phone. Or, perhaps, wave our phone at a piece of art and hear the Art On Call stop and an image on our phone’s screen. If you’re wondering why a blog about wireless communication is called touch, it is because NFC generally requires very close proximity, often requiring the access card or phone to touch the receiver.

Dig back through the archives, there are some great posts, such as RFID Form Factors and A Graphic Language for RFID. This one is definitely going in my RSS reader.

Photos borrowed from Touch

Prior to heading to MW2007, I sat down with some of the WACTAC teens to discuss Myspace, Facebook and social networking in general. I thought I had a good handle on things (since I have, in fact, used Myspace). I figured a talk with the experts would fill in any gaps I was missing.

Download Social Networking Discussion MP3

Much of what I learned is interwoven in the notes I prepared for our workshop at MW2007. Here are some of the highlights, according to WACTAC:

• Myspace is old news
• Facebook is where all the cool kids are
• Some kids don’t even use email these days, sticking to myspace or facebook
• Kids consume a lot of media, therefore use a lot of media
• When multiple people add content to social accounts for institutions, let people know who’s doing the update
• Don’t use a different account for different departments
• Make groups and encourage people to join
• Make use of bulletins and notes
• Keep things up to date, nothing is worse than an out of date profile or events

The big thing that I took away from our chat was that it seems that Facebook is becoming the favorite among more technically savvy users. It seems due to the more refined design and permissions system that it enforces. So all the web designers who hate myspace because it is ugly can rejoice; smart users are shying away. Facebook is also more strict about who can create and hold an account. I heard from some people at MW2007 that their attempts to create a “person” for their institution were rebuffed, and they were forced to create a group instead. While that doesn’t fit with the paradigm that has happened within other social Web 2.0 applications, it does seem to be one that is more sustainable for users in the long run.

I just created a Walker Art Center group on Facebook. The acebook APIs seem interesting, and something Myspace does not offer to my knowledge. It is something I might play around with in the future.

Please note that this is a rough cut and basically unedited. I am adhering to the “quick and dirty” principles we discussed in our workshop. A big thanks to the teens that participated in the discussion:

• Willy Schwartz
• Basanti Miller
• Mark Severson
• Ricardo Ortiz-Vasquez

Also thanks to Witt Siasoco and Megan Leafblad for setting the discussion up.

Party People Photos was back in action at After Hours last week, and I promised more technical details of the new features. The big change this time around was automatic uploading to flickr. After each photo was taken, it was transfered, processed, uploaded and finally displayed on-screen in the lounges. I ended up re-writing all the transfer and processing scripts to work better, and they all functioned without problem.

After a photo was taken, it was saved to a folder on the capture iMac. A script started by launchd watched the folder and transfered the file via rsync to my workstation. The files were transfered to my workstation rather than directly to the display computers for two reasons.

Photoshop
Once the files got to my workstation, another script watched the incoming folder and sent all incoming jpg files to Photoshop. We wanted the process all the images to make sure they looked their best. Cameron, one of our photographers, developed a handy action for the photos that would give them more contrast and punch. The easiest way to automate this in photoshop is to use the script events manager to run an action on every file that is opened ( File > Scripts > Scripts Event Manager… ). The easiest way on OS X to get a particular application to open a file is to use the open command with the -a argument. The -a lets you specify the binary that you want to use to open the file. Otherwise, you’re at the mercy of whatever program has associated itself with jpeg files. Here’s the script:

#! /bin/sh

# this script takes files from the 1_incoming directory and tells photoshop to open them
# should be called by launchd which will be watching the 1_incoming folder
# photoshop should be set to perform the action on open new document

while true; do

myls=`ls /Volumes/Patience/_after_hours/1_incoming/`

	if [ "$myls" != '' ] ; then
		for myFile in /Volumes/Patience/_after_hours/1_incoming/*.JPG
		do
			/usr/bin/open -a /Applications/Adobe\ Photoshop\ CS2/Adobe\ Photoshop\
				CS2.app/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Photoshop\ CS2 $myFile
			sleep 2
			mv $myFile /Volumes/Patience/_after_hours/2_incame/  2>&1 > /dev/null
		done
	fi
	sleep 10
	#take care of pesky .DS_Store files, which can pop up from the Finder
	find /Volumes/Patience/_after_hours/ -name .DS_Store -exec rm -f {} \;
done

# added a return on the photoshop open line for clarity in the browser

Every 10 seconds, if there is a new file, and it is a jpeg, it will get sent to Photoshop. Photoshop runs the action, and saves the file to a new folder, again as a jpeg.

I used my workstation for this because it already had Photoshop installed, and I didn’t want to deal with licensing issues on another machine. I created another account that had photoshop set up just right and the launchd jobs start onload. When we set up PPP again for Picasso show, I’d love to be able to do post-processing via imagemagick, since it is command-line, easy to install and unencumbered by licensing issues.

Flickr Uploading
Photoshop has now saved the jpeg to a different folder. This folder is being watched by yet another script, similar to the last. This script does two things: copies the jpegs to our projection machines and uploads them to flickr. The copy process is mostly unchanged, though I used scp instead of rsync, since the I want to copy files one at a time. As with all the rsync or scp transfers, I just made sure I had my keys set up and authorized, and it worked fine.

Uploading to flickr was the trickiest part of the operation, but thankfully flickr provides a great API and there are a lot of libraries that simplify the process. I ended up using phpflickr. I am pretty familiar with php, and phpflickr only requires php4, which is the version of php-cli in OS X. In order to get it working, you have to apply for an API key, giving it write permission. Using your API key and the secret, you generate a token that you can use to upload with (you need all three to upload). Phpflickr provides the scripts necessary to provide the callback URL that flickr needs, even if you’re not uploading things directly from the web. It is somewhat confusing, and I’m not entirely sure I need the callback url, but it works all the same.

With the tokens all set, uploading the photo is as simple as upload, add to group, add to set. To get the ID of the group and the set, I just used the API explorer, which lists the groups and sets I visited. I had to create the set before I started uploading, though it is possible to create a set through the APIs. I also created a function in the upload script that used a word list to generate a title for each photo as it was uploaded to flickr. I am not a fan of seeing photos with names like IMG_4097.JPG, and this solved that and created some fun and funny juxtapositions.

Other notes, future
I enabled printing of all our photos on flickr, so you can now get prints if you want. In the US, flickr and yahoo do the printing through Target, which also happens to be a major sponsor of After Hours. Perhaps that is an opportunity for the future.

I still had some trouble with the camera not acting the way I wanted. Sometimes it would get into a state where it was totally locked, and the only way to reset it was to pull the power by removing the battery adapter; turning it off and on again wouldn’t do it. Due to the way that gphoto2 talks to the 10D, the capture command doesn’t fully finish, so I kill it after a few seconds. I think what was happening was that in some focus situations, the autofocus was taking too long and the camera hadn’t finished capturing when I kill the command. In the future, I am going to experiment with using a manual focus, which will eliminate that problem.

Gphoto2 was also recently updated to 2.3.0, and it now compiles without too much trickery on OS X. However, it hasn’t fixed my problems with capture on the Canon 10D. I might experiment with modifying the Canon class for the 10D a bit to see if I can get it to work.

We also had some problems with the flash not always firing when the camera went. Unfortunately, the flash we’re using doesn’t have an input for a power adapter, so we were running on batteries. It also doesn’t indicate low batteries, leaving us, literally, in the dark. For the Picasso After Hours, we’re planning on jerryrigging a wired power adapter to provide the 6V it requires.

I’ll also be setting up Party People Photos for the Free First Saturday on March 3rd. I think kids will get a kick out of it. We won’t add the photos to the After Hours Group Pool, but we will put them on our Flickr. Watch for it (or attend, it is free).

As has been mentioned here in the past, I have been tinkering with quartz composer for use as dynamic, digital signage. It is a good fit: extremely fast, can talk to the internet, usable on a lot of different systems. There are a growing number of locations within the museum where we’d like to apply dynamic signage, but off the shelf systems to do it are often convoluted and proprietary, not to mention expensive. Currently in the Walker Cinema, we use a DVD that I render in After Effects and update periodically. This affords a lot of control, but also takes a fair amount of labor to update.

It is this kind of an application where Quartz Composer can work well. Any quartz composer movie can be saved as a quicktime movie, but there are some limitations:

• no mouse and keyboard events
• no contents download from Internet (RSS feeds, images…)
• edition of the input parameters of the compositions

Notice that second one? That’s the doozy if you want your quartz comp quicktime movie to use an RSS feed to get the text.

There is a simple workaround, though, and that is to simply download the RSS feed to the local machine before you open the movie in quickitime. You simply build the composition (before saving it as a movie) to look for that file on the local drive. Here’s a quick command to grab our RSS feed and save it:

/usr/bin/curl http://calendar.walkerart.org/news/today.wac > /tmp/today.html

And then your path for the RSS feed inside quartz is:

file://localhost/tmp/today.html

Problem one solved. This lets us manually open up the quicktime movie and export it to any format quicktime can export to. Once you have it in that format, you can transform it, play it or transfer it with much more ease.

I’ll post about how to automate the whole process in the future, and the problems that occur when you try to deal with HD resolution screens. In the meantime, here is a short demo of what I have been able to achieve with quartz composer and our identity system (a work in progress).

In the process of looking for digital signage software this afternoon, I ran across this great hack using a keynote developed by Kendrick Erickson and Eric Perrino at the University of Minnesota. Essentially, they pulled info from the school’s database and used XSL to translate it and insert it into Keynote’s XML-based file format. They also used a mac mini to do the displaying, since, of course, Keynote runs only on the mac. Even geekier, Kendrick and Eric managed to turn the display on and off from the mini via serial and (presumably) a cron job.

I have often wondered why I haven’t seen more signage developed using OS X, since it’s superior display capabilities make it extremely well suited for this type of application. As Kendrick and Eric note:

Other benefits such as OS X’s BSD foundation made it easier to update slide content from Crimson and develop supporting software. We’ll also be able to expand the capabilities of the display framework later on by developing custom software using the Quartz 2D engine or OpenGL directly.

It is something we’re looking into.

One of my favorite sites, Photojojo, has a roundup of a few different photobooths (they forgot us). The first is very similar to Party People Photos, in that it uses projection to display the shots immediately and has been installed in another museum.

The ability to print photos is a nice touch, since the only thing people like more than seeing themselves on the screen is getting some free personalized schwag to take with them. Of course, if someone really wanted to, they could visit our Flickr page to download and print a photo on their own. The photo’s from Mark’s setup at the Whitney also have a very nice lighting quality, much like ours, which makes all the difference in the world. Their photos are more true to form of the old style black and white photobooth, whereas ours are a more modern fashion-esque interpretation. It also looks like Mark’s setup was a more self contained, appliance-like box rather than the more ad-hoc approach we used. Perhaps we can use the instructions to make our own for the Kara Walker Preview Party. I hope to have automatic uploading to Flickr part of the installation at that point, too.

And, just to make a friendly jab at the Whitney, our installation was three days before theirs. Neener Neener. Sadly, I didn’t see any photos of Ivanka Trump at our party. In Minnesota, we’ve got Al Franken or Prince, neither of which showed up.

A user group for Max/MSP has been formed in the Twin Cities. The first meeting was last month at Acadia Cafe and from what I hear, it was a resounding success. Topics included getting Max/MSP to talk to Quartz Composer, motion tracking with jitter, and how to safely generate and save files from within max. There are some demo files on the group’s wiki to corroborate.

The next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Tuesday the 12th of December, once again at Acadia Cafe. I’ll be demoing how to use Max/MSP to talk to the command line using the shell external. I’ll show some of the techniques I used for the capturing component of Party People Photos, and give a brief intro to the command line (on OS X) and some possible areas of expansion. If you plan on attending, visit the group’s wiki and edit the page with your name to let us know you’ll be there.

The meeting is followed by the Tuesday Night Music Series for Improvisers and Experimentation, which is always an interesting experience. I’m very pleased to be a small part of the group and hope that it can contribute to new media art in the Twin Cities. If you know of any other user groups or gatherings like this, please post them in the comments.

We Make Money Not Art has an interview with Burak Arikan up, who is the lead developer of OpenIO and Pinkie. Prior to reading the interview, I had no idea what either were, but they sound very cool, like most things that come out of the Media Lab:

Pinkie is a network based electronics prototyping board. Pinkie has been designed to easily compose sensors and actuators that reside in different locations. Pinkies are inherently invisible, they hide behind the structures and only serve as facilitators to interface the physical world to the digital network.

Open I/O works like a peer-to-peer file sharing program, rather then sharing media files in your PC, you share data sensed from your physical environment. While Pinkies are organizing the low-level information (e.g., sensing the world), Open I/O is for higher concepts such as managing distributed devices, collaboration, and social networking.

This sounds to be a very interesting project. It seems like the floodgates are starting to open on small hardware devices that are open and easily programmable. Since there are so many of these devices, it seems only natural that they need social networking.

For an upcoming project, we want to capture high resolution digital still images onto a computer from a camera. This is a technique used quite often in stop motion animation. A digital still camera is a very inexpensive way to capture images that are many, many times higher resolution than the HD video they will eventually be a part of. A simple method would be to capture a large amount of images onto a camera’s storage card, download them, and them import and compose them in a compositing program such as After Effects.

However, for this project, we need the image capture to be triggered not by the button on the camera, but by the computer the camera is connected to. I initially looked at both FrameTheif and iStopMotion because they support digital still cameras and have an applescript library. However, both have spotty support for remote capture and would want to grab onto any other cameras connected to the system (such as a dv cam). Eventually, I found the gphoto project on sourceforge.

(more…)

One of the projects Brent and I are working on lately is a facelift to the AOC site - as the number of artworks in the system has grown, the page has become more and more difficult to navigate. Keep your eyes peeled for some fun AJAX paging, better layout, and (finally) a search function.

The biggest problem - and one of the most useful pieces, so we had to solve it - was how to get a single search to look for a keyword in the AOC data as well as the associated Walker exhibition data. Up until now I’ve been using very awkward separate connections to each database to integrate their data, and finally today I stumbled on dblink. Now I can keep the two databases separate but allow them to share queries and data. AOC and Walker, sitting in a tree…

Art on Call also has some upcoming enhancements for the phone-based side of things: a few “interactive” features we’ve been planning since the beginning but only now have time for. Should be really cool.

We’ve been looking around for a while at which of our current projects could benefit most from adding some AJAX pieces like sorting, dynamic sub-refreshes, quick menus, etc. The jury’s still out, since we don’t want to do it “just to do it”, but now I know what tool I want to use: the just-released Google Web Toolkit.

The toolkit basically lets you write and debug(!!) your AJAX application using your favorite Java IDE (they provide nice hooks for Eclipse). While developing you can test it in an integrated “browser” in the JVM — access to debugger — or in a standalone Javascript/HTML web browser. Also important, they integrate support for manipulating the back/forward button stacks so those finally can do the right thing in your AJAX page. Sweet.
Lots more reading and investigating to do on my part, but this is huge. I’ve had some exposure to Google Maps API and been impressed with the functionality, and it seemed obvious that something like this was going to follow. It’s different than I thought (Java) but makes sense. They claim comparable code sizes and speed compared to hand-written AJAX, but the development / debug cycle will be so much quicker it makes some performance hit worthwhile.

Danah Boyd’s take on why MySpace worked. The short answer is Subcultural Capital. The longer answer is in an essay on Boyd’s site that I’m excerpting below. Initially the essay sets up a history of Friendster and MySpace which is a good read in itself but moves into reasons for success later.

It is not about technological perfection.

Portability of identity doesn’t matter. Easy-to-use interfaces don’t matter. Visual coherence doesn’t matter. Simple navigation doesn’t matter. Bugs don’t matter. Fancy new technologies don’t matter. Simple personalization doesn’t matter.

Before you scream “but it does to me!” let me acknowledge that you’re right. It does matter to you. The question is whether it matters to the masses. And it doesn’t. Especially for teens.

…

Friendster focused on simple and narrow, giving users very limited options and cracking down on all hacks. For a long time, they took away features rather than adding them. They worked to mainstream-ify, to be equally generic to all users. MySpace added features all the time, making it a game to see what had changed, to find new ways of navigating the site. Hacking the site became a cultural phenomenon with websites being dedicated to hacking techniques (brought to you by fellow cultural participants not O’Reilly). MySpace let users define the culture.

It’s worth noting I found a link to Boyd’s essay and an interesting read about podcasting stats on the Powerhouse Museum’s Fresh + New blog.