Billy Joel is awesome.

The first link that comes up when performing a Google search for "we didn't start the fire." Each segment of the lyrics links to a website dealing with that particular topic.

THE ID PROJECT

"Based in New York City's East Village, The Interdependence Project is a grassroots, community-oriented project. We offer weekly meditation classes, lectures and discussions inspired by the Buddhist philosophical tradition and other contemplative education systems."

They podcast Wednesday night lectures and are an active network of artists and activists

for more info visit www.theidproject.com

ecotechdesignsciencerevolutionblog.

check out deltaFIRST.

work in progress.

the 11th hour

i strongly recommend seeing the 11th hour.

i don't want to preach, but i will say that it offered a philosophical, system-view of the current global crisis that went above and beyond simply showing the effects of global warming and scaring the viewer into action. it's def. worth your time.

xoxo mp

La Blogotheque Delivers

Video Blogger La Blogotheque has been capturing "Take away concerts"


Description from the website

The Take Away Shows are a Video Podcast produced by the french weblog La Blogothèque. Every week, we give away a session, shot with a band, in an unusual, urban environment.

Sessions are always filmed as a unique shot, without any cut, recorded live. We usually haven’t much time to record them, so the groups have to be spontaneous, to improvise, play with what they have with them, and with their environment, whether there’s a public or not.

The use of a single unedited shot, and real camera distance audio reveals the setting to the performers at the same time it does the viewer. The musicians are discovering and exploring their own music in this new context in real time.

Here are a few of my favorites:

The Dirty Projectors


Au Revoir Simone:



The Arcade Fire in an Elevator (note the great "magazine playing"):


Andrew Bird:

the death penalty is fucked up.

a bit on patents...

Atlantic Works v. Brady (107 U.S. 192 (1882) (per Mr. Justice Bradley):

"The process of development in manufactures creates a constant demand for new appliances, which the skill of ordinary head-workmen and engineers is generally adequate to devise, and which, indeed, are the natural and proper outgrowth of such development. Each forward step prepares the way for the next, and each is usually taken by spontaneous trials and attempts in a hundred different places. To grant a single party a monopoly of every slight advance made, except where the exercise of invention, somewhat above ordinary mechanical or engineering skill, is distinctly shown, is unjust in principle and injurious in consequences.

"The design of the patent laws is to reward those who make some substantial discovery or invention, which adds to our knowledge and makes a step in advance in the useful arts. Such inventors are worthy of all favor. It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges thuds [sic - serves(?)] rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith." (pp. 199-200)

via Patents & Nonobviousness

Make a Baby

more here

until proven innocent.

No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.

Paul Goodman (1968)

Origins

You can vote for that?

I'm not quite sure why this is taking place, but over 90 million people are voting for the "new 7 wonders of the world". Arbitrary?

Second Life Skepticism

Second Life Chairman talks about the future of second life, Blogger things it's silly.


http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=second_life_chairman_s_stump_speech_take&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1&ref=rss

It's two'fers at the Exist Tent! Let's Party!

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

from Thoreau w/ love

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
-Henry David Thoreau

Jens Lekmans' Myspace Page

Musician/ Artist Jens Lekman Removed all music from his myspace page and converted it into an internet poem



he utilizes two urls for this which are mirrors of each other
www.myspace.com/jenslekman
and
www.jenslekman.com/myspace.html

Eco Quiz

2.3 Planets for DouglasEinar (see Pat's post)

the people vote on morality issues

this is interesting

Measure your ecological footprint

here


I thought I was pretty good with my ecological footprint, but aparantly we would still require 2.2 earths if everyone lived the way I do now.

chippies post your scores

the forging of the lock

somewhere, in some city, town or hamlet, there is a child being born. somewhere pure spirit is inspired into form. and even now the lock takes shape. mighty is the anvil that forges light, sound, discomfort, pain, roughness, dampness, hunger, smells-all impinge on subconscious memory, forging the lock that bars the door to the infinite.
there is something both sad and beautiful about this-sad because it seems sad to see spirit deny itself-beautiful because self determination is beatiful. for this infant, wherever it is being born at this moment, is free, even as each member of the entire human race is born free-free to determine his destiny-free to discover the source of his being and the immensity of his power.

--- opening paragraph to "Three Magic Words" by U.S. Anderson

very interesting book thus far. can't vouch for the whole book but there is definately good stuff within the first part at least.

check it out if you want

the future of decentered, autonomous cultural networks looks very bright

read the viridian design manifesto.

Roxy Paine at Madison Square Park

Roxy Paine has three new stainless steel sculptures on display in Madison Square Park (map). While less conceptual than some of his other work, these sculptures are pretty beautiful and are sited particularly well in the small oasis of green between the tall office buildings on 23rd street. Watching the light change on them last night made me wish there was a time-lapse video of each piece over the course of a day.

Paine showed a similar sculpture in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. He has done some really interesting process-oriented work in the past creating machines that make paintings and sculptures based on a set of variables. See links below for some of that work.

Madison Square Park Conservancy - Includes a video interview
James Cohan Gallery
Ronald Feldman
From Grand Arts:
- SCUMAK (Sculpture Maker)
- PMU (Painting Manufacturing Unit)

Tim Wu, On Copyright's Authorship Policy

"It has long been the stated aspiration of copyright to make authors the masters of their own destiny. Yet more often than not, the real subject of American copyright is distributors, book publishers, record labels, broadcasters, and others, who control the rights, bring the lawsuits, and take copyright as their industries' 'life-sustaining protection.' This paper offers a new theory and defense of the role of authors and authorial copyright in the copyright system. I argue that the device of making authors rights-bearers can seed new modes of production in the industries under copyright. Rights-bearing authors can, in other words, help unsettle industry structure, by taking their rights to competitive disseminators or new modes of dissemination. Recent examples include the role of authorial rights in the rise of open source software and creative commons, while older examples include the rise of competing publishers in 18th century England." - Tim Wu

Via BoingBoing

God? Dad?

Life 2.0

Scientists research creating new forms of life.

via drew.
via kb.
via newsweek.

via 100th chippies post.
word.

Where science meets culture: Phylotaxis

An autonomous news feed for science and culture:

Phylotaxis

I am a strange loop.

To talk about desires as if they existed is a shorthand. When you come down to it, so is talking about apples as if they existed. In a sense, apples don't exist--all that exists is particles and their interactions.

But living creatures aren't privy to particles, because life resides on a level so far above them that no being could survive if it concentrated on that level. To survive, living creatures find shortcut descriptions of the world's regularities. Therefore, smart living creatures believe, and believe equally strongly, in apples and desires.

Douglas Hofstadter
(Seed, #9, p72)

thought you'd all find this interesting

this guy locked himself in his studio for a month straight with a webcam attached to a paintball gun. go check it out

Life Explained in 3 Minutes 58 Seconds

Le Grand Content is a video by Clemens Kogler and Karo Szmit. It can be watched on Kogler's site or on YouTube. I highly recommend downloading the video off of his site, turning off all of the lights and watching it full-screen with the volume turned up.

The video is inspired by/based on Jessica Hagy's blog Indexed, and showcases Hagy's witty view of our lives. Kogler and Szmit's treatment of Hagy's material raises it to the next level. The video clearly references the PowerPoint world we now live in and presents its simple "ah-ha" diagrams in a visually stunning manner with a beautiful score and narration in English with a heavy but pleasing accent. The animation is sophisticated, subtle and deserves multiple viewings.

Indexing Our Lives

"I was just reading Alec Wilkinson's story in the New Yorker about Gordon Bell's quest to archive his life. For more than three years Bell has been saving recordings of his voicemails, phone calls, computer and web usage as well as wearing a SenseCam and having a, "pleasant, determined, and resourceful woman," scan all of his documents and apparently anything else (t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters)..."

Read the entire post

Summer of Love Brand

A few quotes from a NYTimes article about the reemergence of the Summer of Love "Hippie" Brand that has been reemerging recently, and how the media created/ shaped that moment in youth culture history.

"The flowers may have faded, and rents in the Haight may have gone through the roof, but the Summer of Love brand continues to extend. Instead of aging gracefully into kitsch, it has solidified into canon."

"Like any brand, Summer of Love nostalgia champions its own brandedness, or exceptionalism, separating itself to an exaggerated extent from what came before or after. In this separation the past is seen as a purer image of the present, shorn of vulgarity and invested with possibility. The past points to a more utopian future than the one it actually became."

“Nostalgia is a corrupting emotion,” he said. “You’re imagining a lack of contradiction in the past. You’re imagining something that wasn’t true. It’s a longing to be a child again, to have magical thinking about the world.”

Sao Paulo Goes Advertising Free

"Back in December, 2006, the mayor of the 11-million-person Brazilian city of Sao Paulo banned all outdoor billboard advertising, citing advertisers' unwillingness to comply with the city's rules on what sort of billboards can be placed where. Now the rule is in effect, and Flickr user Tony de Marco has documented the eerie sight of a city stripped bare of commercial visuals."

Quote and Link from Boing Boing

...This picture set is amazing

Internet Clean Slate

Here's an article in Yahoo News about researchers potentially scrapping the internet as it currently exists.

The information about the rebuilding is interesting, but more interesting is the manner in which everyone in the article refers to the internet. It is constantly referred to as an actual physical thing, and the discussion also brings up a lot of how integrated the internet has already become in our society.

Thought you all may find this interesting.

Perhaps a little optimism from a gentleman.

Second Life Memorial for Jean Baudrillard

Ars Virtua, a gallery and new media center located in Second Life, held a virtual wake for the passing of philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. Very interesting.

The New Sound of New York

Hunter College is inviting the New York general public to submit sounds recorded anywhere in the five buroughs. Sounds are archived on a (google generated) citywide map. Have a look at www.soundseeker.org

Blight of the Suburbs

New York Times article about the "spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures" in the Cleveland suburbs. Interesting read for all the Long Islanders out there.

The Sound of Music

This piece by Andrew Demirjian tracks the stock prices of the three music mega-corporations and converts them into music. From VVORK.

Post-Post

"microsoft word doesn't understand duchamp"


and "hugsuit" by joshua schwartz

"The Great Global Warming Swindle"

This is from the latest post from RealClimate.org concerning a UK TV program that just aired entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle. Below are the YouTube videos for it, or watch the whole thing on google. Messed.

"Holy crap! That's the biggest f&$%ing squid I've ever seen!"

"Sick bro. Let's kill it!"
"Yeah dude."

Newsday- February 23, 2007

Get democracy

A Cooper Union grad and a WPI grad came together to put together a website called Democracy: Internet TV, a free press sort of sight. Check it out.

http://www.getdemocracy.com/

A sprinkle of water

This guy named Buckminster Fuller had a pretty cool idea about 80 years ago. First, the inspiration. He was at the helm of a boat cruising along after having gotten his hands dirty with grease. Must to his surprise, he found that the sea mist was taking the grease off of his hands. After a little experiment back home, he deduced that it was the mistiness that was key.

So here's his idea: have water come out of the faucet and shower as a fine mist. I haven't seen anything like this and it's been 80 years, so I was skeptical. I happened to have a little water spritzer handy and a dirty dish of encrusted pasta sauce, so I ran my own experiment. Guess the results.

Ok, so with about 20 little spritzes of water, my dish was wet enough to wipe clean. The water in the bottle was at room temperature and I didn't use any soap. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me at least a cup or two of water to clean it conventionally, compared to the table spoon or so of water I spritzed.

So what? Well, imagine all the water that could be saved by having spritzing faucets in public restrooms and apartments without dishwashers. Fuller had showers too, but I'm not such a fan of that application.

Run your own experiment at home with an emptied perfume/cologne bottle; or be messed, it's up to you.

I think I'm learning Japanese.

Some interesting statistics come from the Japan For Sustainability website. The article describes a city which has declared to practice "slow life".

"Humans live about 700,800 hours (assuming an average life expectancy of 80 years), of which we spend about 70,000 hours working (assuming we work for 40 years). The remaining 630,000 hours are spent on other activities, such as eating, studying, and leisure, including 230,000 hours sleeping. Until now, people often focused their lives on these 70,000 hours of labor, devoting their lives to their companies. However, with the "slow life" principles, we would now like to pay more attention to the 630,000 hours outside of work to achieve true happiness and peace of mind."

Also check out the insightful cartoons draw by Prof. Hiroshi Takatsuki a.k.a 'High Moon'.

Reinventing the wheel...

The developing relationship between robots and humans

Thanks to Boing Boing

Hoots callin' me?

In this week's issue of New Scientist (No. 2592) there is an article about researchers at MIT who have extended the functionality of the cell phone to include communication with other species. The project is yet another example of how researchers are using the internet to draw on volunteers or "citizen-scientists" to help them process the huge amount of data necessary to effectively monitor the environment. By calling on these around-the-world-logged-on citizen-scientists, researchers can create networks of sensor nodes (in this case, cell phones) at ever higher resolutions with minimal impact on the area under study. Granted there are problems inherent with relying on "non-scientists" to accurately collect and analyze experimental data, but the hope is that the researchers can create a clever user interface which is both instructive and intuitive, thus minimizing the potential for error.

I attempted to call the owl's at the website for the Owl Project, but collection was offline. You can get a feel for the interface (which unfortunately is geared towards researchers) in the scheduler section, where it appears you can schedule an experiment.

HDRI means sexy.

High dynamic range imagining (HDRI) is a method of combining bracketed exposures of digital images by a process called tone mapping. The effect is a stylized image which offerers an amazingly (un)real view of the subject. In other words, some freaking sweet photos.



A gallery with over 25,000 HDR images: stuck in customs.
A good sub-album of that album.

Ironic celebrity tatoos

A multi media presentation

Glenn Branca is awesome.

Maybe this isn't a typical Chippies post, but Glenn Branca is one awesome composer/performer - he was doing lots of very cool [what's-now-referred-to-as] noise-rock "symphonies" 30 years before it become known as a hipster music genre. He was part of [what's-now-referred-to-as] the "no-wave" movement in NYC in the late '70s and early '80s.

Check these out too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Branca
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_wave

Scrambled Hacks

This is probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

Brain Powered Machines

You NewsMergency Room Art Tube

From the Press Release:

EMERGENCY ROOM
February 8 - March 19, 2007

(Long Island City, NY - December 15, 2006) P.S.1 proudly presents
Emergency Room, a constantly evolving collaborative exhibition
conceived and led by artist Thierry Geoffroy, a.k.a. Colonel. To realize this
project, Geoffroy has invited over thirty local and international artists to
create and install new works in a range of media, all generated daily in
response to current events. Emergency Room is on view in the third floor
Archive Galleries from February 8 through March 19, 2007.

"Relevent, but less than incredible" works of art are both the expected and actual result of this experiment. The work is necessarily assembled hastily and given no time to accrue great depth, and rather than be a "great-art" experiment, it is instead an exercise in the normal media practices of the day; where the act of presenting a finished piece and "having something to show" is just as important as the content of what is being shown. The best pieces in the show raise this issue by presenting "unpresentability" and things seemingly "unfinished".





One of the most exciting aspects of this art exercise is how the directness of the exhibition relates to the directness of new creative media and their outlets (Specifically You Tube and daily Video blogs). The show itself has a daily blog which responds to the artwork which is responding to headlines from the day before, and therefore completes the whole inspiration, creation, presentation and critique cycle in about 24 hours. The show itself becomes a piece that uses artists to create work in the same manner that news reporters are asked to create news. The curator and conciever have therefore adopted the parallel roles of news producer, and the Museum has adopted the role of the Distributor.

Here are some YouTube responses to news items:




It is in the total contemplation of the exhibition itself that its depth is shown. There is a direct dialogue with new digital media and the expected recurrance time involved with those media. For the next month I can attach myself to the brands "PS1" and "Thierry Geoffrey" four days a week and get new stimuli each time. This makes my likeliness to return much higher than it would in a non-kinetic exhibition. This is not unlike the brands of "Fox News", "CNN", "MSNBC", and "McDonald's" who can be relied on not necessarily for being great, but rather just for being there.

Media Playboy Marshall McLuhan

Check out this interview with one of the original "media theorists," Marshall McLuhan. Published in the March 1969 issue of Playboy, he speaks candidly about how media forms "displace perception" - from the phonetic alphabet through moveable type to broadcast technologies. (He also hints at the Internet, with ideas of a "global village" and cybernetics.) The article has some great musings about technology and its effects on art, society, economics, etc...

Although the tone of his statements can be a bit dated at times - with his predictions of an imminent, violent social revolution (It was the late '60s, dude.) - we could say that the struggle between a culture of print and a culture of electronic media is very much still active - it doesn't feel like much has really been officially resolved since the time of the interview. Perhaps he's right about a revolution, but maybe it's turning out to be more gradual than predicted.

Some great quotes:
"Through radio, TV and the computer, we are already entering a global theater in which the entire world is a Happening. Our whole cultural habitat, which we once viewed as a mere container of people, is being transformed by these media and by space satellites into a living organism, itself contained within a new macrocosm or connubium of a supraterrestrial nature. The day of the individualist, of privacy, of fragmented or "applied" knowledge, of "points of view" and specialist goals is being replaced by the over-all awareness of a mosaic world in which space and time are overcome by television, jets and computers--a simultaneous, "all-at-once" world in which everything resonates with everything else as in a total electrical field, a world in which energy is generated and perceived not by the traditional connections that create linear, causative thought processes, but by the intervals, or gaps, which Linus Pauling grasps as the languages of cells, and which create synaesthetic discontinuous integral consciousness."

"The upsurge in drug taking is intimately related to the impact of the electric media. Look at the metaphor for getting high: turning on. One turns on his consciousness through drugs just as he opens up all his senses to a total depth involvement by turning on the TV dial. Drug taking is stimulated by today's pervasive environment of instant information, with its feedback mechanism of the inner trip. The inner trip is not the sole prerogative of the LSD traveler; it's the universal experience of TV watchers. LSD is a way of miming the invisible electronic world; it releases a person from acquired verbal and visual habits and reactions, and gives the potential of instant and total involvement, both all-at-onceness and all-at-oneness, which are the basic needs of people translated by electric extensions of their central nervous systems out of the old rational, sequential value system. The attraction to hallucinogenic drugs is a means of achieving empathy with our penetrating electric environment, an environment that in itself is a drugless inner trip."

"Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of the electric media, which forge environments and cultures antithetical to the mechanical consumer society derived from print. Print tore man out of his traditional cultural matrix while showing him how to pile individual upon individual into a massive agglomeration of national and industrial power, and the typographic trance of the West has endured until today, when the electronic media are at last demesmerizing us. The Gutenberg Galaxy is being eclipsed by the constellation of Marconi."

"People are beginning to understand the nature of their new technology, but not yet nearly enough of them--and not nearly well enough. Most people, as I indicated, still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. Because we are benumbed by any new technology--which in turn creates a totally new environment--we tend to make the old environment more visible; we do so by turning it into an art form and by attaching ourselves to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it, just as we've done with jazz, and as we're now doing with the garbage of the mechanical environment via pop art.

The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day. In the midst of the electronic age of software, of instant information movement, we still believe we're living in the mechanical age of hardware. At the height of the mechanical age, man turned back to earlier centuries in search of "pastoral" values. The Renaissance and the Middle Ages were completely oriented toward Rome; Rome was oriented toward Greece, and the Greeks were oriented toward the pre-Homeric primitives. We reverse the old educational dictum of learning by proceeding from the familiar to the unfamiliar by going from the unfamiliar to the familiar, which is nothing more or less than the numbing mechanism that takes place whenever new media drastically extend our senses."

"It's always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it. But most people, from truck drivers to the literary Brahmins, are still blissfully ignorant of what the media do to them; unaware that because of their pervasive effects on man, it is the medium itself that is the message, not the content, and unaware that the medium is also the message--that, all puns aside, it literally works over and saturates and molds and transforms every sense ratio. The content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb. But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by nonartists."

We are evolution.

The timescale for evolution is dependant on the lifespan of an organism. In the Dec/Jan 2007 issue of Seed, Dunn discucsses the implications of this, and forecasts a very bleek future - sans humans. Check it.

Giant Steps

Critical Path

I just started finishing reading Critical Path by R. Buckminster Fuller. When I bought it, the clerk at the book store said "This is the most important published work since... the bible." We'll see how that goes. Thought I'd post this quote from the introduction.

"History shows that, only when the leaders of the world's great power structures have become convinced that their power structures are in danger of being destroyed, have the gargantuanly large, adequate funds been appropriated for accomplishing the necessary epoch-opening new technologies. It took preparation for World War III to make available the funds that have given us computers, transistors, rockets, and satellites to realistically explore the Universe. "

Free Culture!

I just finished reading Lawrence Lessig's "Free Culture". I recommend reading it, though I don't really agree 100% with all of his suggestions. The value of the book for me was simply the detailed description of exaclty what is going on right now in regards to copyright law, and how in the past, radical new technologies have been confronted with similar roadblocks.

In the book he suggests there be a required registration for people who want copyrights. This enables any person to browse and know definitely what is copywritten, and what is in the public domain.
This is good for people who need to make money off of large creative investments and can't afford to be sued by copywrite holders. I however, will continue operating under the assertion that no one actually ever owns anything he creates, and therefore cannot stop anyone from using it, my own work included.

The more disturbing aspects of the book are that they highlight how the whole radical end of the copyright battle is being waged only out of greed and the desire for institutional perpetuation. A very sad state of affairs.

160 K chip about the size of white blood cell

Ny Times article here