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Jonathan Harris

ilteris — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:09:43 +0000

Jonathan Harris gave us a brief presentation at ITP about his latest works. He means a lot to me in terms of introducing me to the world of parsing and visualizing data. I still remember his 10by10 that he did back in 2004. Here are some notes that I took from the presentation:

I consider myself a storyteller, people have a lot in common in the world. seeing the gaps between the people, language gap, ethnic gaps, sexually gaps, educational gaps. we use those gaps to make communities. make paintings, take photos are things that we do express, to find things in common. self-expression leaves foot steps with the new web technologies.

passive observation. it doesn’t directly ask people questions. people don’t know they are watched. you don’t have the interview’s paradox. anthropologists dilemma with talking to natives.

surveillance. youcan use survelliance to find beauty.[we feel fine]

[universe] ancient greek stories from skies. constellations. what would it be like if we draw constellations on the sky today? page metaphors doesn’t work anymore, storytelling becomes more important. graph and nodes and representation of those nodes in different shapes.

find a manner of presentation that suits into the content of the presentation. we feel fine, human qualities.

helps connect the presentation.

universe, it is more literal,
question start with the question.

how you can answer that question with getting data.

he does the sketching on paper, never used computer for experimentation. use it as a tool.

am I interested in building a tool? yes I am but it’s hard to build a tool that gives insight. he tries to stay away calling it science. storytelling, there is no synthesizers that bring blogs etc.

After the semester.

ilteris — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 06:00:34 +0000

This blog became something in the back streets of my mind. I started to collect everything on a wiki rather than a blog. Also the time to document things kind of forgotten in the sake of building the projects itself.

separation and division

ilteris — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 14:20:59 +0000

I have realized that setting up a wiki is not the best idea ever. Since I set that up, I felt kind of divided between there and here. This is truely effecting my documentary abilities(hah) overall. Since the human(that’sme) is hesitant in his nature, putting on different options is not the best thing sometimes. I am still trying to systemize it and hopefully put it somewhere soon.

Alive again.

ilteris — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:42:40 +0000

So after 2-3 months of summer sleeping, let me say hi again. Yes, the school starts on Tuesday! It is going to be a tough final year. Bring it on!

Stefan and I were talking about the subject of pioneers of Generative Art today, a subject which came up talking about Joshua Davis’ situation, and this reminded me of Philip Galanter. Check artificial.dk interview with him. He puts interesting perspective to roots of generative art there. Also It is funny because he was an instructor here at ITP couple of years ago! Guess what, Daniel Shiffman was his student by then.

spring semester is over

ilteris — Fri, 05 May 2006 20:24:46 +0000

It has been a productive semester to say. Especially I have improved my coding skills in every way. I have a great understanding of Object Oriented Programming now. Not only that but also I have a good grasp of knowledge in topics like data mining, web crawling, physics simulations, particle systems and what not.
So here are the url of classes that I have taken this semester;
Programming from A to Z
Nature of Code
Live Image Processing and Performance
and I also took Digital Sound Lab and Midi which was quite disappointing for me.

naumann and a few words about participation in an art piece

ilteris — Mon, 01 May 2006 08:01:01 +0000

Tristan Perich reminded me a different approach that I didn’t think in general, maybe because I was taking it granted as it is what it is:An Interactive piece. The question arised from his post to the list asking for an example of successful interactive art. The thoughts are generally collected around the transparency of the piece, how much easy it is to grasp for the audience, how smart it is by its message. Tristan’s reply to me was interesting. He mentioned when the user understands the piece is interactive it puts whole relationship into different level, more like a product-consumer relationship. So the idea is interacting with the piece without understanding it is actually interactive. He gave the example of Bruce Naumann’s video corridor. I googled it and come with different readings.

The piece which is dated early 70’s, is a 50cm wide corridor, where the user sees a video at the end of the corridor which turns out he is seeing himself from the rear. Kinda disturbing experience as Chris Gibbins puts it. This article is also good for showing different kinds of internet based art from Lieberman and Napier. So the question that still left in me is: What kind of relationship, or better yet, what kind of experience does an art piece bring?

I am also going back to Cage back and forth these days. I am interested in his approach to an art as an experimentation, disabling the intention, subjectivity of the artist.

Computer Vision related Processing applications

ilteris — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 05:38:21 +0000

I have been keeping those in my browser for a while now. Better to keep them here instead of there. Those might be helpful for what I am thinking to do for my final of Programming from A to Z. I am thinking to use video sensing at this point, but we’ll see.

This comes from all the way from Japan: Computer Vision with Proce55ing. I haven’t checked out the applets in details, but the names seem quite explanatory. There are bunch of stuff here from temporal differencing to background subtraction from clustering to pixel analysis.

Dotimpac.to sample apps : Those examples are not necessarily related to CV but there are some samples that are using video. Also I am always curious what people are doing other side of the globe, so I am happy to find these. The links are mostly gathered from processing.jp and Takashi Maekawa!

KrazyDad’s page has some nice processing examples as well.

Reas’ classes

ilteris — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 08:10:30 +0000

Tracing boids brought me great resources. First of all I have discovered the classes that Reas is teaching at UCLA with the help of Michael Chang one of his former students. This guy is really talented, he has done lots of great projects at his undergraduate and I am sure he is going to rock no less in the future. So Reas is teaching couple of classes, here is his page that has the listing of the classes.

networked objects

ilteris — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 06:16:19 +0000

This is the class that I was going to take but dropped because of my health problems back in the time. I ordered my xport yesterday, I am excited :) Also I was on the floor today, playing with my arduino board and basically trying to make it work. In the end it wasn’t working but I was still happy because it just gave me a break from only-coding world. Also the news is Sparkfun starts to sell those and they cost only 30 bucks! Rob told me their ability is kind of restricted though, I might hook myself up another board and play with it in the summer since the program thinks to give the pcomp class with arduino’s next semester.

Apart from that, the flash news is, yes I have ordered an xport and thinking to do a a project where network involves for the end of semester. I really want to get my hands dirty with physical networks.

MIT ambient intelligence group

ilteris — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:49:41 +0000

This looks kind of interesting, could be a way to pursue for phd,actually it looks like it IS the way for me to go. I have checked out the lady behind it, Pattie Maes, the class she is giving ambient intelligence and the syllabus looks really promising. Lot of doors ready to be opened from there. Thinking briefly, I am interested in building objects that close the gap between audience and the device and which is promised to make our life easier, this group seems a nice environment to work with.