When do we use the singular plural form of word?

Fish. Water. Information. Electricity. Mist. Air. Everything.

I think we use this form when we think of word as fluid, as opposed to solid or discrete entity. It makes no sense to talk of an individual water, because as a fluid, water can be divided indefinitely. It makes no sense to track an individual water, as one water gets replaced by another water continuously. As they say, you can’t step in the same river twice.

What is it like to see everything in a continuous state of becoming? We’d see only fluid.

As a language exercise, drop all plural form of word. See the thing around us as fluid.

Haiku Wifi is a neighborhood bulletin board, hosted on a router, living in the wireless cloud.

When you’re in the area and you search for wifi, you’ll see the haiku listed as network names. If you connect to the haiku network and go to any web site, you’ll see a web page where you can enter a new haiku.

Haiku Wifi is entirely self-contained on a hacked commodity wifi router. Full details and source code are up on Github.

Jonathan Dahan (check out his other hack) and I created Haiku Wifi for Art Hack Day at 319 Scholes. We exhibited it at the public opening on Saturday as the router itself, on a pedestal with instructions for visitors.

In doing this hack–and in conversations with Jonathan, Bryan Newbold, and Sean McIntyre (who lent us the router for this project)–I realized the growing importance of hacking and understanding the invisible radio signals that we use to communicate.

I believe that 2012 will be the year we reclaim our networks. The SOPA battle of a few weeks ago is a harbinger of a growing awareness that no centralized structures can be fully entrusted with our communication; even the United States cannot guarantee an open internet. The MegaUpload shutdown and Google’s new privacy policy will further push people to take control of their own data and communication.

The internet–that is, the protocols that define the internet–were created with these principles in mind. The internet was designed as a decentralized communications network with no single point of failure.

When the internet became popular in the 90s, it was presented to the mainstream as a consumption channel, like TV and radio. In the 00s, with YouTube, blogs, and social networks, we saw people pushing content back into the network. In this decade I hope to see people altering the topology of the network itself. This capability is entirely realizable with the technology architecture we have, as demonstrated by this simple 48-hour hack.

And in addition to reclaiming our network, we were able to collect some great haikus! Thanks to all the visitors who contributed!

Morning sunset on seashore
Trampoline rising hart with u
Someday waves will wake us..

Myriad lighted LEDs
Unexplained art
Thousand kinds

I built this piece for Art Hack Day this weekend at 319 Scholes.

I have been doing work with mirrors for about a year. This “analog” work is inspired by and co-evolves with my digital video work (e.g. interactive video installations with cameras and projectors/screens). I think of interactive art work as pieces which take information from the environment, process or transform that information, and then output information back to the environment (e.g. on a projector, screen, speaker, etc). The advantage of using mirrors for this work versus a camera, computer, and screen is that less information is lost in the transformation. Mirrors have maximum resolution, minimum latency, and critically preserve the intensity and angle of light. That is, when you see an object in a mirror it still looks 3D and real–like you could grab it–unlike seeing a picture of an object on a screen.

I’ve had the idea for Sphere of Water for several months. I had built computer visualizations and janky prototypes. I don’t consider the Art Hack Day version finished, but I do consider it above the critical threshold where the viewer sees it–on first impression–as the intended representation. As I was building my first prototype on Friday out of mylar, people would come by to see it and they’d stare for a few moments and then say “Oh, I see the sphere”. That is, they initially saw the materials and had to look for the intended representation. But by the end of the hackathon I had gotten above the threshold where this is reversed–where people initially see the sphere and then have to examine the contraption to see how it “actually” works.

To do this–to create a successful illusion–you need to take into account the cues that people use to make sense of the world. In this case, the tapered kaleidoscope creates the 3D geometry (the tapering bends the kaleidoscopic infinite plane into a sphere). The water is moved with a pump and lit in such a way that only the surface is visible, so that people don’t look into the water. Next a mirror at 45 degrees is placed above the kaleidoscope to reorient gravity. The cue that gravity points down is very strong in people. For the Sphere of Water, due to this 45 degree mirror, gravity points forward. Finally, the illusion only works from certain angles so I obscured much of the contraption and cut a “window” through which to see it. I also installed the piece in a small dark room (janitor’s closet) at eye level to make these concessions feel natural.

The result is that these perceptual cues cause people to see something which collides forcefully with their model of the world. To reconcile this collision, viewers need to consciously or subconsciously reexamine their system of perception and/or their model of the world. Rebuilding our view of the world is the purpose of art, as far as I can tell.

The people and resources that 319 Scholes brought in for this hackathon were very helpful for production. I made several trips to chinatown for materials–mylar, front-surface acrylic mirrors, and water-proof LED ribbon (it’s so helpful that these materials can still be acquired a few subway stops away, without having to buy online). I used the laser cutter provided by Fabricator’s Guild to cut the mirror to the exact angles that I needed, and to cut the foamcore supports. Many of the materials were shared and repurposed by other participants in the hackathon. Nova Jiang and Olov Sundstrom used my leftover mylar to create a beautiful light box to display their 3D fabricated sculptures.

There was lots of cross collaboration on projects. Also over the weekend I built Haiku Wifi with Jonathan Dahan. I helped various people with coding their projects, and also received advice about materials and mechanics on Sphere of Water–what glue do I use to waterproof the lights, how do I keep the pump from flipping over, etc. Sofy Yuditskaya, art materials genius, was especially helpful.

The mix of backgrounds present in this community are extremely powerful. I come from a more technical background (math and computer science), so I’ve learned so much from people with more art, design, and architecture backgrounds about how to effectively deliver a concept to viewers. When you’re dealing with lots of technicalities you sometimes miss the human factors like scale, putting things at eye level, understanding how people flow through a room, and other details which really make a piece work. This combination of disciplines along with a powerful drive to create new realities is the most exciting thing happening in New York City!

Here is a Quartz Composer / Core Image port of the animated quasicrystals that have been going around recently.

It runs in realtime at 60fps at 1440×900 on my old Macbook Pro.

Unfortunately the video compression really kills this :’(

Here’s the source code for the Core Image kernel. It’s very simple!

Or download the Quartz Composer file.

If you see something, say something. This is the message of a nationwide campaign by Homeland Security to encourage citizens to report suspicious activity to authority figures. But it can also be seen as a call to action, to be conscious of what we see in the world and to share it with others.

I’d like to start a citizen’s photoessay platform to share what we see. If you see something, say something.

Here is something that I was seeing today, the toy section at KMart by Astor Place.

This weekend I hosted a sleepover hackathon at my apartment as hurricane Irene swept over New York City.

Scott, Bryan, and I participated in the Node.js Knockout, a 48-hour global competition to produce something cool with Node.js. Node.js is an up-and-coming web server which is particularly good at handling real-time interactivity. For example it’s very easy to make a web-based chat room or multiplayer game using Node.js.

Inspired by Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols, we decided to make a collaborative environment for exploring the collective unconscious. We spent a few days before the competition and Friday night discussing how best to do this in a way that we could accomplish in 48 hours. We settled on a collaboratively edited web of images.

On Friday night we play-tested using Google Docs to make sure the concept would work.

Worried that we’d lose power by Sunday morning, we worked extra hard all day Saturday. This pushed us to finish a working prototype by Saturday night.

But with Irene causing us little disruption, we were able to play-test and further polish the site all day Sunday. We were pushing features right up until the deadline at 8pm EST but it wasn’t as much of a last-minute scramble as these hackathons usually are.

Psyche is a web of serendipitously inter-related images reflecting participants’ whims. Participants collaboratively explore the collective unconscious, adding images and drawing relations, creating symbolic and aesthetic clusters.

Check it out! If you enjoy it, please vote for us in the competition.

I recently returned from a ten day vipassana meditation retreat at a meditation center in rural Massachusetts. For ten days there was no speaking, reading, writing, physical exercise other than walking and stretching. Basically no activities other than meditation. Here was my daily schedule:

The meditation technique is called vipassana, where passana means “to see” and vipassana means “to see things as they really are”. It is a traditional Burmese technique with Buddhist origins. The center I went to was established in 1982 by S.N. Goenke and his followers. Goenke had previously achieved great success teaching vipassana in India. The Massachusetts center was the first center he established in North America and there are now about 100 centers worldwide.

The entire course is taught through audio and video recordings of Goenke. During group meditation sessions, Goenke’s audio track leads guided meditations, which progressively teach the vipassana technique over the ten days, the “how”. In the evenings, there are videotaped, hour-long discourses where Goenke discusses the theoretical underpinnings of the technique and its relationship to Buddhism, the “why”.

These recordings are both the strength and weakness of this course. Strength because Goenke is a gifted teacher who has designed a beautifully optimized curriculum. His instruction is perfectly delivered in a hypnotic tone with just the right amount of repetition. This instruction combined with the disciplined setting and schedule allows an extremely deep exploration of the meditative state, perhaps as deep as one can hope to achieve in ten days.

The weakness is that the recordings, especially the video discourses which were recorded in 1991, are fixed and due to the setup, dehumanizing. The teacher cannot cater his discourse to the audience and you cannot question the teacher because he isn’t present. There are assistant teachers whom you may ask clarifying questions (one of the only exceptions to no speaking), but I found this to be an inadequate. I felt that the pervasive recorded setup stripped the assistant teachers of any authority.

My experience over the ten days was all over the map. It included excruciating physical pain (sitting for ten hours a day leads to extreme back and leg pain) and frightening emotional confusion (from subconscious issues brought to the surface by the technique combined with not being able to structure my thoughts with conversation or writing). But it also included insight at the experiential level (as opposed to just intellectual insight) and a few profound experiences. I left the retreat feeling very balanced, very centered. By practicing patience and listening with such extreme discipline over these ten days, I feel that I have more capacity to connect with other people and with life.

I will perhaps write a later post going into my experiences in detail, but for now I will give a few practical tips if you feel like this is a journey you would want to take.

1. Make it your own experience. Goenke talks about the experience being unique for each person, but not enough in my opinion. Some of his conclusions which he says are “clear” and “universal” I found not to be so. He’s the only source of intellectual input you have, other than your own thoughts, so this can be confusing. Just remember that you should listen for his wisdom but you do not have to frame your experience through his perspective.
2. Whenever possible, meditate in the meditation hall. My friend Charles, gave me this off-hand advice just before the course started and it made all the difference. When you’re in the hall, as opposed to meditating privately in your residence, you will get energy and inspiration from the other meditators. This is very helpful when you’re in pain or tired and you just want to give up and lie down. To get the most of your ten days, make a strong determination to always meditate in the hall.
3. Go ahead and fart in the meditation hall. Or burp, cough, sneeze, etc. It’s part of the detoxing process which your body will go through as you “untie knots” in your mind. Also, for this reason, bring a good water bottle and drink plenty of water throughout the day.
4. Keep in mind that you cannot seriously hurt yourself sitting. So do your best to keep a good, straight posture, then work through the pain. Sleep whenever possible. Sleep is when your muscles rebuild themselves and you will need strong core muscles to sit properly for ten hours a day. Goenke will talk about the pain being caused not just by the body but by the mind, which is more practical than it sounds. Much of my muscle tension I found to be connected with being antsy; only when I calmed my mind was I able to release these muscles. Finally, a technique that I used during breaks to release muscle tension is to lie flat on my back or my stomach, then imagine that I was a puddle getting flatter and wider, like a pancake when you pour it onto the pan.
5. Prepare mentally and physically a few days before. Shift to an earlier sleep schedule. Whatever your normal meditation practice time, double it. Quit alcohol, caffeine, etc. beforehand so you don’t have to deal with any withdrawal symptoms while you’re at the course. This is really serious work, make sure you are at the peak of your health, physically and mentally, before committing.
6. Stay the entire ten days. I wanted to leave at some point almost every day. The tenth day is especially important and cathartic, as you’re allowed to talk with fellow students and you find out that you’re not the only one who was in pain, or thought you were crazy, or disagreed with some teaching, or wanted to leave, etc.

I’m currently teaching a workshop at ITP called Psychedelic Video Manipulation in Quartz Composer. There’s a fantastic community of QC plug-in developers who are truly extending the functionality of QC. I’ve listed the developers I know of here. Please let me know if there’s anyone I should add to the list!

To install a QC plug-in, place the .plugin file in this location:

HD/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Plug-Ins/xxx.plugin

CoGe

CoGe is an open source VJ application that uses Quartz Composer heavily. In addition, the CoGe developers publish some Quartz Composer plug-ins, including CoGeWebKit which lets you control a web browser and get its output as an image. I’d like to use this to create QC compositions which automatically load videos from Youtube.

Kineme

There are a bunch of useful plug-ins on this page. In particular, there are several plug-ins for integrating with hardware, including the Kinect, WiiMote, and Apple Multi-Touch devices. Also fun are Speech Synthesis (text to speech) and Freeboard (receive keyboard input as a string instead of lots of booleans). I also recommend Kineme’s QuartzCrystal, a $26 application that lets your render QC compositions as movies. You could alternately render movies using this technique if you have Quicktime Pro, but overall I like QuartzCrystal for the convenience.

Tom / bangnoise

Some really fun plug-ins here. My favorite is datamosh, which lets you manipulate video compression artifacts. I recommend getting the recent beta version of datamosh, at it has features like bloom and support for up to 10 videos (in Settings in the Inspector). To run datamosh, you will have to tell QC to run in “32 bit mode”. Select the QC application itself in the Finder (in HD > Developer > Applications), run File > Get Info, and check the box “Open in 32-bit mode”. Also Tom’s video delay plug-in is useful for experimenting with slit scan effects.

v002

A project of vade and bangnoise, several useful plug-ins here. Of note is the screen capture plug-in which lets you select an arbitrary region of your screen and use this live as an image in QC, which is useful for piping in graphics from another application (if the application doesn’t support Syphon).

Syphon

Syphon is a technology that lets applications share images with each other with high performance. It is supported by many VJ applications as well as Jitter, OpenFrameworks, Unity, and QC. The QC plug-ins let you serve images from QC to use in other applications, or take images in to QC from other applications. If you need to capture video in real-time from QC, serving the video through Syphon and capturing with the Syphon Recorder is probably your best bet performance wise.

Open Emu

Open Emu is a console game emulator that supports NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, etc. It has a QC plug-in which lets you emulate these games within QC, sending input in and getting out an image. In addition the NES emulator has some extra inputs that let you glitch out the game in various ways.

openFrameworks / Quartz Composer bridge

Lets you write QC plug-ins using openFrameworks. Useful for post-processing your existing oF projects, or writing new plug-ins. (Haven’t tried.)

1024

Box2D physics engine plug-in and some Kinect and computer vision plug-ins among others. (Haven’t tried.)

Quartz plug-ins from Google

Plug-ins for interacting with the ambient light sensor and motion sensor built in to the MacBook Pro. (Haven’t tried.)

Climb App

Extra image window plug-in, CSV importer plug-in.

I love chapter 4 of Michael Leyton’s Symmetry Causality Mind, titled Representation is Explanation.

The premise of this entire book is that we only have access to the present. Our experience of the past is constructed by our minds based on shapes in the present which we can use to causally infer the past. These shapes range from graffiti on the wall which we infer was the trace of the artist’s hand movement to arrangements of neuronal matter (memories) which we infer were caused by an episode in the past.

Note the distinction: we do not have access to the past, we only have access to a shape in the present (a memory) which we use to infer the past.

Our behavior co-opts this property of the universe. It’s useful for me to have a model of the past, so I habitually create shapes to represent my experience, recording memories in my mind, in writing, etc. so that in the future I can look at these shapes to infer the past. In Leyton’s words, “the writing of memory alters an object in order to determine the past that will be inferred from it.”

This process is beautifully illustrated in the movie Memento. The main character, due to a mental condition, can’t create long-term internal memories so he needs to create all of his memories externally by taking polaroids, writing constantly, and storing memories in other people, for example the clerk at his motel who tells him his room number (and has rented him several rooms).

Our model of our self is often as a contained entity which has persisted through time, apart from the world. But taking Leyton’s perspective, I see myself as a “pattern integrity”, newly existing at every instant of the present, which reads from memory within my body but also smeared across external space, to determine its co-evolution with the world.

This morning I was reading The Quantum Biologist’s post on peacocks and peacock spiders. I was struck by the existence of higher-level pattern integrities which use memory in the same way. As argued above, a human only has access to the present, so we set up systems (e.g. memory recording) by which a model of the past can be inferred, so that we are more adept at steering our path in the world. Likewise, the evolution of a species only has access to present. It has no direct access to what has worked or not worked in the world. So when it makes decisions, i.e. when mates are chosen, it uses features of the present to infer the past.

Evolutionary biologists argue that a peacock has huge feathers for the sake of having huge feathers. That is, the peacock’s huge feathers impress peahens because they show that they are successful enough to grow and carry around huge feathers, an otherwise useless feature.

In this way, the peacock’s feathers are a memory by which the peahen can infer the peacock’s past. This behavior is self-reinforcing. By mating with a peacock with impressive feathers, it is likely that the peahen’s chicks will also develop impressive feathers and have a better chance of finding a mate. The feathers serve as a memory for the entire lineage of peacocks.

This memory system is not just a crude “I made it” signal, but has evolved into its own elaborate language.

A footprint in the sand and a word written in the sand are both memories that allow us to infer the past. The difference is that the causal processes leading to the footprint are much more intrinsic to the world, depending on things like feet and gravity. The word, on the other hand, draws on a specific causal history that has been propagated and elaborated by a rich history of causal feedback loops, the evolution of the language.

The peahen’s aesthetic value system, which involves the patterns of “eyes” on the feathers and the way the feathers move, is likewise not intrinsic to the world. It is a specific language that the evolution of the species, when seen as a pattern integrity, has developed to store memory.

The idea that art is about self-expression is relatively modern.

I found a delightful story in the book I’m currently reading in a chapter about spontaneity and creativity.

In some older cultures, artists create sculptures by carving them out of bones. Except the artist is not seen as the creator in our modern sense. Rather, the final form is already in the bone and the artist just carves away the excess to reveal that form.

People don’t blame the artist if the sculpture doesn’t turn out well. Instead they say things like, “Sure have been some strange bones lately.”