New Media Initiatives Blog

• Over at the University, Ali Momeni’s Art for the People is becoming more active with their Art on Wheels project. From what I read in the blogs, the bikes are mostly built and the students are making more outings. There are some newer videos, but this is probably the best overview video, made back when the GRL folks were in town. I can’t wait to see more action with these bikes over the summer and during the RNC.
• Our friends over at the Brooklyn Musuem are been running a sweet little project called Click!, “a crowd curated exhibition”. Here’s the deal: people submit their photos that are about the changing face of Brooklyn, visitors like you and me vote on them, and then the top rated photos are put in an exhibition in the Museum. The submission part of the project is closed, but you can still sign up and vote for three more weeks. I’m usually pretty skeptical of sites that depend on user generated content, but it seems the enticement of getting work in the museum is a strong motivator. We learned this with the Worlds Away video project. And it is actually pretty fun to log in and see what has been submitted, to see the range of work by artists that are unknown. For someone that hasn’t been around Brooklyn much, it is a unique way to explore.

  Shelley warned me that the interface is limiting, but it seems to me the limits are perfect for the scope of the project. Plus, they’re also using mootools, which I know and love. Nina Simon has a great article on the project which you should read if you haven’t yet.

• Two posts about the internet and culture that do some hard thinking for you and make you think: The New Social Circulation: Frontline, Out of Print, and the XO Laptop Photo and Gin, Television, and Social Surplus.
• The most amazingly non-akward akward TV spots ever, featuring local circuit benders Beatrix*JAR, who are participating in a Workshop here at the Walker this summer. The duo is also participating in Bent Fest happening this weekend in the Twin Cities.
• The true power of the internet: Helen Thomas asks a tough question about Torture when no other journalist does. The internet is happy with Helen and wants to make a point to the other white house journalists. What to they do? Send her $1000 worth of flowers.

• I have a thing for “ugly”, 1996-esque sites (I think they’re awesome). Here are some of my recent finds:
  • The Best Webs.net
  • Jim Jacobson’s Home Page
  • Killer Japanese Seizure Robots! (seriously, you might get a seizure)
  • American Beauty Equipment
• The Daily Mole has a good op-ed about the problems with accessible web video for hearing impaired people. This is an interesting topic, and one can see both sides of the issue, but clearly at some point the technology will have to evolved and web video will need captions. Target lost a suit for not making it’s website accessible, so one hope major media outlets are aware of the ramifications for avoiding accessibility. One has to wonder, though, what should someone who’s putting a video on YouTube be responsible for? When everyone is a media outlet, what is the cutoff?
• The 48 hour film project moves into second life.
• This is a pretty slick hack of Canon cameras to get a very high speed shutter.
• Neat threadless shirt, “The internet was closed so I thought I’d come outside today.” Cool, except the internet doesn’t close, and right now it’s 7 degrees outside, so I’ll just stay in, thanks.

Hat tip to Paul Schmelzer for some links.

• Two blogs that I’ve recently stumbled upon are the Open Blog at the New York Times and Alpha Channel on MSNBC. Both are blogs from the developers behind the NYT and MSNBC, respectively. The entry on how TimeSelect was eliminated, partially powered by Amazon S3 is pretty interesting (if you like grid computing and the word terabyte), as is the entries on the redesign of MSNBC. It’s interesting to note that MSNBC and NYT have had blogs for a while, but not developer blogs. Welcome to the party, guys.
• The Brooklyn Museum has been doing some experimenting with Twitter and it turns into a bit of a mixed bag. Is there a phone-based opportunity here? Certainly so, but Twitter doesn’t quite seem to be the right vector. Something we’ve discussed before, bluejacking the phone number of Art on Call, might be another approach.
• Jason Kottke has an interesting post up about FFFFOUND!, which, thanks to him, is my new daily RSS post-count king. FFFFOUND! is a social image bookmarking site that has amazingly good content. Jason thinks that perhaps our curators should be looking over their shoulder:
  

  Among the many things that the internet has democratized is curating, a task once more or less exclusive to editors (magazine, book, and newspaper), art gallery owners, media executives (music, TV, and film), and museum curators. They choose the art you see on a museum’s wall, the shows you see on TV, the movies that get made, and the stories you read in the newspaper. The ease and low cost of publishing on the web coupled with the abundance of sample-ready media has made the curating process available to many more people.

  I don’t think curators have to worry quite yet, but it isn’t unreasonable to say that the internet has and will continue to exert influence. It also works in the other direction. Jason points out a few bloggers that have crossed over into curating gallery shows. To that list I would also add I Heart Photograph.

You’d think I’m on a posting spree. Here are three quickies for the day, finally welcoming WebWalker in the Web 2.0 era.

• Hack A Day links up Pong implemented on an oscilloscope. I’m not an electricty geek, but this is a pretty cool hack. Anything with an analog (vector CRT) display is worth looking at.
• Advertising Lab points out some beautiful irony in the NYT’s story about ad blocking.
• Information Aesthetics links up an amazing photograph and entire article on the science of boomerangs on Popular Mechanics.

• Teddy Banks, writing for Design Observer, shares some commentary on Olia Lialina’s newest article: Vernacular Web 2. The article is a great read on it’s own, and as Banks tells us, should be a must read for every web designer. Lialina’s work, My boyfriend came back from the war, was featured in the Walker’s online exhibit, Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net.

  Lialina touches on the similarties of myspace of today and the web of 10 years ago. Instead of being designed by computer geeks, it’s “designed” by teens and ameteurs, and the music is mp3s and not midi.

• And speaking of MySpace, Danah Boyd has some new thoughts posted on myspace and remix culture. Seb Chan offers some thoughts on what this means for institutions that offer graphics and resources that can be remixed (legitimately or otherwise).
• Here’s an interesting article on the paradox of large displays, written by Jeff Attwood. He quotes Dan’s Data:
  

  Users of 30-inch monitors face the terrible, terrible problem of how to effectively use all of that space. You don’t often want to maximise a folder or document window on a screen this big; either you’ll end up with a lot of white space and important program buttons separated by a vast expanse of nothing, or you’ll get lines of text 300 or more characters long, which are difficult to read.

  I use three displays at work, two on my main computer and one on the laptop. While synergy makes this a very useful setup when doing video work, it can also be extrmely distracting at times. I find it necessary to sleep my laptop so I can focus on important tasks on my main displays.

• Interactive Architecture had been quiet for a while, but they posted a brief blurb on a conference going on next week that will discuss the many implications of signage in public space. Hopefully some of the papers and presentations from the conference will make it to the web.

• According to BoingBoing, Jenny Holzer is on twitter. As Xeni Jardin says, she is perhaps “the only person who should be allowed to use twitter”. And perhaps Holzer is responding to that tittle with her latest twitt, or whatever you call it… “DRAMA OFTEN OBSCURES THE REAL ISSUES”.
• Eric recently found a super useful site full of browser widget resources for web designers. Search no more for a good photoshop template of Navigator 4.8 for OS 9! And we should also note that Eric’s firm’s work on the Adobe CS3 interactive wall has been getting some notice lately, too.
• Nate points out the creepiest photo ever on mnartists, by Mary Britton Clouse of Minneapolis. And if you’re not so keen on roosters, then you probably should avoid eating the comb of one.
• We’ve been told through the grapevine that the Walker sites work great on the iPhone. Art on Call, in particular is a pretty slick deal. You can play the tracks through the website, or if you’ve got the podcast, listen to it in iPod mode. And in iPhone news, it seems someone has finally gotten an application to run on the iPhone. It’s just too bad their typography is going to be no good.

WebWalker is getting touchy feely all over in this edition with some computer interface goodness.

• This one might be a bit old, but it seems Panasonic demonstrated some sort of multi-touch table a last year, as well as a gigantic interactive video wall. I don’t really know how to describe the table. The video looks very nice in 720P glory, but the narration that goes with it is worth a chuckle and the interface is just a bit weird. Translucent fish?
• Another big multitouch screen, this time from DAHAN T&S (via nuigroup via engadget). This time we get dolphins instead of fish, but my questions still remain, why so many creatures of the sea on multitouch screens? There’s no video, so I can’t tell if their dolphin talks like ours.
• Speaking of sea creatures, did someone say calamari? The iPhone is certainly putting some pressure onto the demand for multitouch, we should remember multitouch is not actually that new. Case in point, Powerbook trackpads have been multitouch for years, giving users that lovely two-fingered scrolling. Apple even owns a multitouch patent. The iPhone is taking the idea and coupling it with a screen, which is really the important part. I’m rather curious to know how it works and what kind of tech they’re using to make it happen. None of us in NMI plan on getting an iPhone for various reasons, so who’s going to be the first person to take apart their iPhone?
• And while it is not multitouch, this is a neat project: The digital newsstand. It is basically a newspaper box with a computer screen replacing the window showing todays issue. It is not entirely practical, but I certainly appreciate consistency of the visual language and presentation. If you were going to show newspapers, you might as well do it in the right box. (via Paul)

• Stats galore: Our account of google analytics has finally been updated to the new version and it rocks! It seems very intuitive and a lot more clear than the old adapted from urchin version.

  And another new stats tool we’re liking a lot is crazyegg. The heatmap tool is especially impressive, since it makes it very easy to visualize what visitors are clicking on.

• Quartz Composer tidbits: Steve Morkis over at fdiv has been doing some very interesting work writing custom patches, so far providing an xcode template, custom inspector how-to, and an apple remote patch, amongst others. I’m interested in seeing a cli patch that would send commands to the terminal and run external scripts. Very exciting, though the QC community is a little unsure about what this means in the face of Leopard.

  I also found out about another interesting app called Millicent that seems like a mash-up of Quartz composer and photoshop, geared towards creating broadcast graphics on a budget. The app is still in beta, feature incomplete and a bit buggy, but it is interesting to see the diversity of work that QC is being used for.

• Exhibition Website: The MFA Boston has an Edward Hopper show going on now and the website is rather well done, if a bit slim on exhibition info. The design is very clean and lets the iconic work of Hopper speak for itself. Allowing visitors to download images as wallpaper is also pretty nifty. Coudal noted: The ’sketchbook’ feature is more than a bit clumsy but it’s well worth fumbling around to get at the goods. Why are big museums so consistently stupid about presenting things online? The sketchbook doesn’t seem too bad to me, and I like that I can zoom in and move around. It is a bit slow and small, but the idea is a good one. It seems google maps has set the new standard for image zooming/panning, and that is a tall technical tree to climb.

WebWalker’s had a bum leg for a month, but we’re on the mend and here’s the proof.

• Web 2.0 Overboard: If you haven’t had enough of the wired/tired/expired Web 2.0 craze, here’s two gems that will knock you out (for better or worse). Check out the Web 2.0 Logo Creatr for all your missing-e and reflection needs. And if that logo is just a little too flickr-y for you, check out this grid of Web 2.0′d logos from Jean Claude Attituder. (via Fallon Planning Blog)
• Seb Chan at Fresh + New beat us to the punch discussing ExhibitFiles, a new social networking site for museum pros. Jim Spadaccini explains the concept:
  

  As a community, we sometimes redesign the wheel as there is no central place for us to find out about the best (and the worst?) practices in exhibit development. This issue is becoming more urgent as many of the exhibit designers who were active in the 1970s and 1980s are beginning to retire. Over the years, important exhibition development information is lost or stored within a museum where it can't be easily shared with the larger community.

  ExhibitFiles is more targeted at science and history museums, but there is still a large potential for use by certain types of professionals within art institutions as well.

• One of my favorite blogs, Create Digital Motion, has a great review of the Blackmagic Intensity, which lets you connect one computer’s DVI video output to another machine as a HDMI input. I don’t see any uses for NMI right now, but it is something that VJs are certainly interested in, because mixing HD can be a very expensive proposition. This thing is only , and shows up as a quicktime compatible source.
• I’ve recently been playing with scripting Adobe Photoshop, which isn’t as daunting as it sounds. I had some experience with scripting Adobe Illustrator several years ago, but at the time Photoshop didn’t have the fancy javascript abilities that Illustrator did. Overall the scriptability is very powerful; there are few things you can’t manipulate programmatically, and with scripts you have far more control than actions. Two useful resources for me so far have been PS-Scripts.com, a great community for photoshop scripting, and the PS-scripts project, which provides an extended library of utilities.

  If you’ve got photoshop CS2, the Scripting folder in your install has all kinds of goodies to learn from (the pdfs in your install are not copy protected like the web versions). And Adobe’s ExtendScript Toolkit app is actually useful for writing and debugging the scripts. I hope to post more on scripting Photoshop (and After Effects?) in the future.

It is Friday and we haven’t posted in a while, so here’s a semi-juicy WebWalker. There’s more in the pipes, too.

• Web 2.0 Strip Generator - Looks like our designers are out of a job: we’ll just modify this and plug in the Walker font, and voila! Walker Identity a la Web 2.0 (so you know it’s gotta be BETA!) -Nate
  Justin notes: They could use a designer to fix their hideous justified type, so we designers aren’t totally out of a job yet.
• Software Kaleidoscope - A very fancy display from Samsung combined with a video camera and some processing work. Make sure you check out the movie. I wonder how many interesting projects get made at trade shows to just show off some technology and then never see the light of day again. -Via Brent
• Lola Running Very Quickly - Speaking of Processing, Daniel Shiffman has been working on a system he calls Most Pixels Ever which is a library for spanning processing projects across multiple screens relatively easily. In this demo, he’s taken every frame from Run Lola Run plays it as a giant grid of changing frames. Quite the interesting way to look at time based media. -Justin
• Social Media Marketing for Small Business (And non-profits?) - Search Engine Land has a great article on why social media is useful for business and how to do it. There are some great tips in there, and many museums are working on these issues. It is something I will expand upon during our workshop at Museums and the Web 2007. -Justin

Let’s see, it’s Friday morning… haven’t posted in forever… must be time for WebWalker!

• The Quartet Project is built on the very cool idea of mixing multiple inputs - sound, movement, motion capture - into multiple outputs: virtual instruments, and even a projected virtual dancer. The cast of Quartet comprises of a dancer, a musician, a motion controlled robotic camera, and a 3D virtual dancer. It looks like a lot of custom development for this, tied together with MAX/MSP. The Project Outline section has more details on the performance.
• You won’t generally find these opensource advocates linking to Microsoft, but this is actually a cool project and they’ve got an API so you can plug into it for your own site. Asirra is an alternative to the widely-used CAPTCHAs involving wavy and distorted text that PETA’s blog described as being “torture devices for dyslexics“. MSR calls Asirra a “HIP” (Human Interactive Proof) and it involves quickly classifying pictures of pets as either dogs or cats - so easy a child could do it, but difficult for computers without some serious processing. Just another tool in the constant arms race against the spam bots…
• WordPress continues to make my life better: the team has just released (finally!) a central repository for plugins. What used to be a rather complicated process - “1. I know there must be a plugin for this… 2. What was that site again? 3. Man, how can I be sure this is the latest version? Who’s the original author? 4. Cross fingers and download.” - is now reduced to “1. Go get it from WordPress plugins.” Sweet.

WebWalker is back from a little nap. Here’s some things to spruce up your Friday morning.

• Best news so far this year, Stanford University’s Henry Lowood has taken over the IGDA Preservation SIG, which aims to finally work towards preserving the history of video games. For me personally, this is the most important thing happening in the museum realm today. He’s also heading a panel at Game Developer’s Conference entitled “Ten Games You Need to Play”. -Brent
• Speaking of video games, word has come down that musical mastermind Brian Eno will be producing the soundtrack for Spore. Or, rather, he’ll be designing the algorithm that generates the music for Spore. I was excited about this game before, but now I can feel like I’m getting a real cultural experience when I waste away my hours in it. [via CDM]
• If you were at Piotr’s lecture last night, he mentioned a few sites that contain his work. His first site is The Spleen, but you’ll want to head directly to Inward Vessels or Outward Vessels, since the main page doesn’t seem to be working right now. Secondly there is Simple Math at simplemath.mcad.edu. To listen to and download the work of the labor camp, head to laborcamp.mcad.edu. And finally, don’t forget his work in Gallery 9, which is extensive.

Christmas has come and gone, but this post is still going to be Christmas related, unlike some blogs that have self-imposed moratoriums on such posts. My Mother always told me Christmas is a season, not a day, so I feel within respectable guidelines posting these things.

• Pentagram redesigns Christmas. Pretty interesting idea, and the results are a mix of intrigue, ah-ha and ha-ha (but no hint of ho ho ho). See also: The New York Times reports, or listen to Michael Bierut with Kurt Andersen on WYNC’s Studio 360.
• Everyone in my family elf’d themselves (yes, that is me). It truly seems that user generated content has hit the mainstream when this kind of site is a smash hit.
• If you’re not reading the Adobe blogs, you should be. John Nack posted about The Secret Life of Smart Filters yesterday, which is an interesting read. I’m always interested in the history and inside workings of Photoshop. Arguably, Photoshop is one of the most indispensable and influential tools used in the process of creating new media work.
• Time Magazine’s Person of the Year (hint: it’s you) has generated some controversy in the blogosphere. Whether or not you think it was a good choice, you should read the last page of the magazine. Andy Was Right:
  

  But YouTube is Pop art in a form far closer to Warhol’s original, uncorrupted vision than he could ever have imagined. And 15 minutes has been replaced by a new prophecy: “On the Web, everyone is famous to 15 people.” Appropriately enough, many people share authorship of that one.

We’ll be back in 2007.

• “Design of ordinary things to palaces of art seeks our attention and our dollars.” - Great conversation about the Design Economy on Minnesota Public Radio’s Midmorning show today. Tom Fisher of the UofM’s College of Design is a guest on the program.
• Beth blogged about a “teachable moment” regarding the creative commons. It is also a handy hint to consider what license to put photos under on Flickr.
• Peter Kirn of CDM brings us news of a “Stripped-Down, Bootable Linux OS for Visual Performance, Installation” called pure:dyne. which sounds very promising for PD lovers. In addition to PD, processing runs on Linux, as well as Flash player. When will we see a live CD with that?
• Regine at We Make Money Not Art has a round-up of new media organizations and non-profits that are worthy of support. Rhizome is running their community campaign right now and it might be time to renew your membership.

CC on light by yamabobobo. Animated gif from Rhizome. p:d screenshot from CDM.

Like Paul Schmelzer's Centerpoints, WebWalker is a compilation of interesting stuff--things that catch our attention but don't necessarily generate a full post. We'll be publishing this column every couple of weeks so if you've got things to share, please send your ideas to any of the WebWalker authors. We'll be sure to thank you for the link.

What’s in a name? WebWalker was first launched in May 1999 by Steve Dietz, founding director of the Walker's New Media Initiatives department. WebWalker was a "newsletter about the Walker Art Center Web sites and digital culture on the net." The last issue (#28) was published April 23, 2000. An archive of the previous issues–minus #22-27 which appear to be lost in the ether–can be found in WebWalker archive.

• She's not quite the Dolphin Oracle but Ms. Dewey is a search helper that aspires to rule your world (would we expect anything less from Microsoft?). Not very useful and of questionable entertainment value, Ms. Dewey is a better example of viral marketing than an interesting search interface. In the end, Ask.com (formerly Jeeves) is more useful and Google’s under the radar Web 2.0 search, SearchMash, gives better results. (Robin)

• The Walters Art Museum recently launched Integrating the Arts: Mummies, Manuscripts and Madonnas, an educational unit built with Pachyderm 2.0. Pachyderm is an open source multimedia authoring tool designed to make it possible for content experts with limited technical knowledge to publish rich-media presentations. Integrating the Arts is a model project meant to demonstrate Pachyderm's potential. Stay tuned to see how Walter’s museum staff and teachers use the tool. The Walter's project was directed by Sandbox Studios. (Robin)

• In the rapid-fire Web (Bubble?) 2.0 world, it seems like a new site pops up every hour. How can you possibly keep up with them all? TechCrunch is good and has in-depth writeups, but MoMB is better for pure reach. It’s the Museum of Modern Betas! (ironically, still in alpha.) (Nate)

• Get into the Christmas spirit by decorating someone else’s Christmas tree via the web. Matthew Knight of de-construct has set up a little site where visitors can suggest decorations to be placed on the tree. A new decoration each day. (Justin)