New Media Initiatives

We’ve tabulated the results for My Yard Our Message and the 50 winning signs are posted. The wisdom of crowds looks like it has paid off, too: the winning designs really are the cream of the crop. The top vote-getter is “peace,” by teri_kwant, with 130 people saying they would put the sign in their yard. If anyone wants to share the entire set of winning signs on another site, I’ve set up a simple widget, as seen to the right.

We were very pleased with the results of voting: Over 900 users registered to vote, and over 24,000 votes were cast. There was a flurry of voting in the first two days after voting opened, then a steady trickle, with another uptick before voting closed.

One cool feature in the project is the neighborhood aspect. We’re seeding three neighborhoods with sets of winning signs. Lindsey has more details about this in the ECP blog. To facilitate the community gallery aspect of the project, we’ve set up a signs map that we hope everyone who has a sign will use to let us know where it is. There aren’t many signs yet, but eventually there will be. To manage having many signs on the map, we’re using a handy google map plugin called Cluster Marker. This allows the map to automatically set the correct zoom level to see all the signs, but hide signs that would otherwise be too close together at a high zoom level. Every time I work with google maps, I am please with how robust and thought-out the map api is. It will be exciting to see the map flesh out as people add signs to their yards.

Time is running out to cast votes for your favorite yard signs in My Yard Our Message. Voting will officially close on Sunday the 27th. But in reality, it probably won’t actually be closed until the morning of Monday the 28th, since that’s when I’ll update the code and turn voting off.

Once the voting is done, it will take a little bit of time to calculate the totals, and prepare all the winning signs for purchase in our store. I have been hard at work at some slick mapping tools for keeping track of where signs are, and what neighborhoods have the most. Vote and stay tuned!

As someone who’s mildly interested in new media art, I’ve always felt like I’ve been watching from afar as cool work is created and tinkered with, usually in Europe, New York, or the Bay Area. Since the demise of New Media Initiatives as a curatorial department in the Walker, the Twin Cities has seemed lacking in this area of the Arts.

Fortunately, this is changing. Steve Dietz, who was once curator of New Media at the Walker, has founded a new organization called Northern Lights. They’ve just announced a new fellowship and mentorship commissions called Art(ists) On the Verge for artists working in New Media:

A total of six commissions will be awarded. Three of the six commissions are outright fellowships for the production of new work and a joint exhibition in the spring/summer of 2009 at a site to be determined. The other three commissions are part of a 9-month, experimental Art(ists) On the Verge for the development, production and exhibition of new work. The Mentorship program begins in September 2008 with an intensive 3-day “ Boot-Up” Camp, October 10-12, co-presented with MCAD. Over the ensuing 9 months, artists will have bi-weekly individual and group mentoring sessions and critical workshops by visiting curators and artists on multiple occasions followed by a joint exhibition in the spring/summer of 2009 at a venue to be determined.

There are informational meetings about the commisions in July and August for those interested. In addition to the fellowship program, Northern Lights has also been one of the partners in The UnConvention, and Steve has been working behind the scenes for a while to give the program shape. The idea of having a twin-cities Rhizome, Creative Time, or EyeBeam is exciting.

Photo by k0a1a.net. It seemed new media-esque.

There isn’t a decent web developer alive that doesn’t harbor a deep-seated hatred for Internet Explorer. For years we have dreamed about the day when we could cast off the shackles of developing for the users who are struck with a browser that predates web 2.0. We developers don’t know anyone who still uses IE6; if we did, we probably wouldn’t talk to them.

Word has recently come down of two major companies discontinuing support for Internet Explorer 6. First, it was noted that Apple’s MobileMe would work only in IE7 (and Safari and Firefox, of course). Now, 37signals has announced they are stopping support and testing for IE6 begining August 15:

The Internet Explorer 6 browser was released back in 2001, and Internet Explorer 7, the replacement, was released nearly two years ago in 2006. Modern web browsers such as IE 7, Firefox, and Safari provide significantly better online experiences. Since IE 6 usage has finally dipped below a small minority threshold of our customers, it’s time to finally move beyond IE 6. [emphasis added]

We aren’t dropping support for IE6 on any Walker pages quite yet, it still makes up about 25% of our users on walkerart.org, but the day will come. That day, not too far from now, we’ll be able to declare our long developer emergency over. Bigger players like Apple and 37signals will help make that day sooner.

Yesterday was the deadline for submitting sign designs to My Yard Our Message. We got a ton of signs over the last few days, putting us just shy of 300 signs total. We’re very happy with that number, and the quality of some of the submissions.

This morning I turned the site off for a little while to turn the voting on. Voting is now running and as of this writing, there are already 1100 votes in the past hour and a half! To vote, we ask you to consider whether or not you’d put the given sign in your front yard.

The site is using the django-voting module to handle voting, but I’ve modified it a bit. Instead of digg or reddit-style voting, where a vote up counts for +1, and a vote down counts for +1, a vote down doesn’t negatively impact the vote count. This relates directly to the question, you deciding not to put the sign in your yard doesn’t cancel out someone else deciding to put it in their yard. In this sense, voting “no” doesn’t impact a sign, but it does allow a voter to know they’ve already made up their mind on the sign. But unlike the ballot box, voters can change their mind through the end of our voting period.

Additionally, the order of the signs on the site has been randomized in an attempt to give each sign a fair shake. Odds are signs that are closer to the front of the order may see more votes than those at the end, so the randomziation is unique for each user. The randomization that I see will not be the same as another user. Additionally, voters who view signs anonymously will see a different randomization each day. This is achieved by using each user’s ID for the random seed, or the day of the year for anonymous users.

While it would be great if anonymous users could vote, even with proper protections in place, it is possible the vote could be hijacked by someone with a lot of friends to vote for them. To prevent this, users are required to have an account to vote. We’ve made it really easy to create an account, all that’s needed is an email address. I’m still working on the verification mechanism, so users who sign up today or tomorrow won’t get a verification message from us until then. Giving an email address logs users in immediately, so they can vote right away, but if they don’t eventually verify the email address, we’ll remove their votes.

It’s Monday morning, and like many of you I’m sitting down to my computer for the day. I’ll check my email (office and GMail), see what’s new in the blogosphere (Google Reader), maybe catch up on the world a bit (Google News), and finally start my day of programming. (searching Google to see if anyone’s already written the code I’m working on ;)

You may notice a trend: Google. What would my world be like without Google? It’s an interesting thought experiment.

… except yesterday morning, it was a reality. Details are still sketchy (it may have just been Comcast?) but for an hour Sunday morning, I couldn’t reach a single Google domain. No GMail, no RSS, no search. And, in a creepy side effect I hadn’t anticipated, MANY sites were either slow, broken, or eternally loading as my browser tried in vain to pull the Google Analytics or Adsense code for the page. In short, the Internet was Broken.

It was amazing to watch myself try to remember how to search without Google. Maybe… Yahoo? No, I’ll try Ask.com. Turns out the results are terrible, at least for programming-related searches. A friend called looking for directions to a farmers’ market, and it took me a bit to remember the world beyond Google Maps. Doesn’t… Microsoft do maps? Hmm, who else… If only I could search!!

Twitter was still up, and via TwitScoop.com I could see a big spike in Google-related tweets, but I have yet to see any official word on this. Clearly big companies have downtime (Amazon was down for a few hours recently), but still… It may be time to rethink my utter dependency on “The Google”.

Last night was the big SubZero street festival portion of Zero1. South First Street was closed for about four blocks in the SoFA district of San Jose, and many artists showing off their contraptions and work had set up. I took a walk down the street several times and captured some of the work.

Graffiti Research Lab was visibly present, both with some of their work on display on the street and in the Anno Domani gallery, with a show called “The U.S. Department of Homeland Graffiti Liquidation Sale”. Some of the work was a spoof on the LED sign scare in Boston a year ago, in which GRL was quickly and wrongly implicated. So nice to see Osama Bin Laden and George W Bush giving each other the finger in LED style.

Inside the gallery DJ Spooky (aka Paul D Miller) gave a talk about his new book and remix culture. He manages to connect the dots between many the history of the remix and how embedded it has become into our culture. I didn’t stick around to buy the book, though I plan to soon, because I was headed down to MACLA for a performance of Flock.

Upon entering the performance space for Flock, you’re given a black hat with a glowing white orb on the top and told to walk up to the stage. Just above the stage, there is a projection visualizing all the orbs on-screen, and with enough distinguishing movement, you can figure out which dot represents your orb. After a bit of play, the real performance begins. Four musicians playing saxophones eventually made the way on stage, each outfitted with an iPaq connected to a WiFi network, transmitting an ever-changing score of what they should be playing. Three dancers with white orbs eventually emerged, and began moving around the stage area. Their orbs combined with the movement of the musician’s orbs changed the score dynamically. Over the course of the show the method of generating music changed, from a simple cross-screen wipe, to something akin to radar, and also a connect-the-dots style graph. The audience was pulled in one at a time by the dancers through the performance as well, and were instructed to move around and generate the sound. At one point a conga line formed, and at another several people grabbed hands and began circling one of the musicians, overloading him with notes to play. In this way, the social interaction people engaged in to generate the music was more interesting than the music itself.

There were also low-rider art bikes on display. The display was no Minneapolis Art Car Parade, but still fun to see the weird things people do to their cars. The bikes in particular looked very slick. I’m afraid if I had a bike that nice, I’d never ride it.

Another performance on the street that always had a crowed was Drone Machines, operated by “Author & Punisher” Tristan Shone, consisting of several very industrial looking contraptions that as the description notes, “require significant physical interaction from the performer” to operate:

Minneapolis Art on Wheels has also been around the festival, but they were out in force last night at SubZero, at several different locations down First street and side streets. They even had one of MAW’s bikes rigged up with GRL’s L.A.S.E.R. Tag system and a crowd gathered around watching and waiting to tag. Everyone had a good laugh when a squad car drove by with an officer glared out the window at us.

I missed the first day of Zero1 due to an flight scheduling snafu that was totally my fault. From the reports I’ve read and the people I’ve talked with, it sounds like I missed out on some cool stuff. That said, I did make it to San Jose early yesterday morning and visited a few of the exhibitions. Rhizome already has some great coverage so I am not going to duplicate their thoughts.

Having not read much before visiting, I was expecting the exhibition to be very much in the realm of new media and digital technology as the primary focus. The show straddles the fence between technology as a driving factor in the creation of work, vs digital technology as the being only an enabling factor in much of the work. Its a good balance that seems to accurately represent the way many new media artists think; they dabble in many forms.

I would best describe Tantalum Memorial by Harwood, Richard Wright, Matsuko Yokokoji as a monument to retro computing, but it’s meaning makes it more solemn and morbid. It consists of several strowger switches, which a computer dials into and plays back recorded messages from London’s Congolese community’s circulating conversations. Strowger switches were the mechanical devices invented by Almon Strowger to replace human telephone operators. Strowger switches use Tantalum, as do many modern day electronics, including cell phones. Tantalum is mined in Congo, and is the source of considerable strife there, causing the deaths of many thousands in wars relatively underreported in western media. You can listen to the recording on a set of headphones. The sound of the switches echos through the gallery as if counting the rising death toll.

Global warming and climate change are themes that loom large in this exhibit and Zero1 in general. Rising North by Jane Marsching and the two other works by her address global warming more directly than perhaps any other work in the festival I’ve seen so far. The work consists of a almost sci-fi video showing the sea levels around the world rising, the mega-cities of the world shrinking and eventually being encased in some sort of biosphere and floatation device. The encased cities then move and converge at the north and south polls, the places on earth that will remain suitable for human habitation when much of the temperate zones become too warm. Watching the work, I can’t help but be both fascinated by the idea of moving entire land-masses and horrified that rising sea levels and temperatures is a future we are destined to see.

Ways to Wave is a virtual and physical sculpture; it exists both in the gallery and in a different form in Second Life. Participants in the gallery move the petals of the flower-like interface in the gallery, which effects a scene in Second Life projected on the screen just behind the sculpture. The movement of the petals also impacts a changing audio composition. There is supposed to be a way to visit the sculpture in Second Life, but I haven’t attempted that. It is an interesting way to bridge the physical and the virtual, and I’m always a big fan of work that encourages you to interact with it.

If/Then is Piotr Szyhalski’s contribution to the exhibition and the festival. Installed in the gallery and in changing locations around the festival are dispensers that drop leaflets designed by Szyhalski. The leaflets reference leaflets distributed by the US Military’s Psyops department in the Iraq and Afghanistan War. Visitors are encouraged to take some leaflets of leaflets that drop onto the gallery floor. The set of leaflets I received have the text “ Honor will never be regained, no matter what the cost”, printed in both arabic and english on the back, with pictures of Saddam Hussein and Thomas Jefferson on the front. The dual meanings of this are disturbing if unavoidable; Saddam Hussein will be remembered by many as a disgraced dictator, and the US has lost much of it’s honor and credibility in the world because of the war our government started in Iraq.

I’ve got a few more posts in store about the festival, so stay tuned.

I’ve just made a minor tweak to My Yard Our Message. You can now download the full resolution jpeg file for each sign as well as embed the signs into another page or blog, just like I am doing here.

All the signs for My Yard Our Message must be licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike License to be submitted to the project, so we are obligated to make the files available to all. They always were, but not easily accessible. Now we’ve got a link right there under each sign for the file.

For the embed, I’m using an iframe which is certainly the easiest method to getting a nicely formatted widget on the page, because it avoids any CSS inheritance problems that a Javascript and document.write solution might have. The downside is that it is not always compatible with every blogging or HTML authoring solution out there, due to the way some have a tendency to filter HTML. Regardless, it is good enough to satisfy most user’s needs.

University of Minnesota professor Ali Momeni and his students are on their way to San Jose’s Zero1 Festival later this week with their mobile projection units. The mobile projection units are GRL-inspired work bikes equipped with a computer, projector, generator and all other necessary gear for outdoor projection mayhem, which will be used during The UnConvention. The group has set up a new blog, Minneapolis Art on Wheels, to document the exploits of the trip. They’ve loaded up the bikes into a cargo van and are caravanning across the western United States.

Before he left, Momeni told me he was curious to see if they could project onto the face of Mt. Rushmore. I’m not sure if they’ll pull it off, but the latest updates from the Badlands are pretty close; pure projection geek porn.

I’m heading out to Zero1 later this week and will be blogging about the festival and hope to meet up with Momeni and his students for some fun in San Jose.