August 10, 2004

'till next year, ARS!

Here are some pics from ARS Electronica 2004, which finished 2 days ago.

Some great reviews of the festival over here and at the NY times

It's been great being here in Linz, we where treated really nice by everyone. On the day after the closing of ARS, we could spend some time chatting with Brad Paley and Jeff Han, exchanging ideas and discussing extensions for their project TraceEncounters, which I find fascinating. On the way out Brad gave me a signed print of Alice in wonderland visualized through TextArc. woha! Great times, and I'm definitively looking forward for next year's Prix.

Dan left for Tokyo this morning, and I'm hopping on a train tonight headed to Ivrea, Italy, where my new home awaits. nervous? oh yeah!

October 31, 2003

Kopenhagen.dk: In conversation with Casey Reas

Casey Reas talks about this year's Ars Electronica Festival and his child project, Processing which final 1.0 release seems will be out there anytime soon. Regardless the context of it, this quote by John Maeda let me thinking a lot. "When you use other people's software you live in somebody else's dream". Which I can hook-up with Reas quoting Alan Kay in the festival's catalog: "The ability to "read" a medium means you can access materials and tools for others. The ability to "write" in a medium means you can generalte materials and tools for others. You must have both to be literate. In print writing, the tools you generate are rethorical; they demonstrate and convince. In computer writing, the tools you generate are processes; they simulate and decide." How far have GUI's gone? how far has the whole abstraction of the system gone? Everyday I see people pushing more and more into breaching the world of zeros and ones with the world of colorfull icons. While that gap continuosly grows bigger and bigger, we are starting to see that everything around us starts looking exactly the same. Yes, it is not about teaching ourselves how to talk to a computer but about teaching the computer how to talk to us. But when we talk about expression, are we going to teach the computer how to express ourselves? It is excellent to focus on just building the tools, but if we really want to inspire people by letting them "live our own dream" we are not contributing then with anything. On the other hand we want to focus on just performing? excellent, but who builds your tools? Me? I rather build my own brushes, explore my space for new pigments. Afterall, in my opinion, those environmental qualities that are most influential in one's work are superbly interesting. Yes, the media is NOT the message, but that's the question of which one was first, the chicken or the egg. None of them make any sense without each other. There needs to be a balance. The media shapes the message, the message makes the media.

August 15, 2003

Siggraph 2003 San Diego - the aftermath

Below I post some of the works I was able to assist to and found mostly interesting at Siggraph last month. This are presentations/installations I assisted in the first 3 days. Considering that this is a huge event, and the fact that I missed the last 2, this is probably less than 1% of what happened there this year. Emerging technologies. every work in this pavillion was really inspiring, these are some of them: The Augmented Composer Project: the Music Table Body Brush - review at cnn ElectAura-Net Food Simulator - review at bbc The Dimension Book The OmniGlobe; a selph contained spherical display system Real time motion capture for Interactive Entertainment Presentations: ILM on creature critters & clones Computer Animation Festival All of it was awesome - I should have bought the DVD!!! Courses Building Physical Interfaces; Making Computer Graphics Interactive Cross Cultural User-Interface Design Papers TreeJuxtaposer What I whish I could have seen: All web graphics presentations. Augmented Reality presenbtation by Nasa Ames Resarch Center Computer Graphics for Large-scale Inmersive theaters Finding Nemo; Story, Art, Technology and Triage - a presentation by Pixar Studios All art installations starting on the 4th day The Matrix Revealed - presentation on Reloaded SFX backstage. As you can see, the scale of this event is huge. I will make sure next year in L.A. I assist to the full 5 days of it. Not a single minute can be wasted there. Of course, if you are a digital craftsman be sure to submit your work there! deadlines are probably closing in january, and if your work is selected, among others, you may get passes for the full conference!

April 18, 2003

Space and Place, The perspective of experience

This book seems to have been around for 25 years already. I was in the midst of an internal brainstorming ecstasy about the reasons why we become so emotionally attached to places (either geographical or virtual), when I suddenly run into this book in a bookstore in San Francisco. The author, Yi-Fu Tuan, in the first chapters covers a whole spectrum of different interpretations of "space" and "place", how different cultures view, experience and understand them. Later on he adds the concept of time and how the three of them interact with each other. It talks very cleverly about how we are oriented in space, place and time, how is it that culture influence our conception of that. Tuan suggests that "space" is freedom and "place" safety. Although space will be eventually transformed into a concrete place as it acquires definition and meaning. A big factor he points out that will contribute in that transformation is how intensive, sometimes intimate and valuable are the experiences we live in those spaces - not how long we stay in them. It is definitively a very inspiring piece and although it wasn't written contemplating virtual spaces, you can clearly see the big connection throughout every chapter. more at amazon more on Yi-Fu Tuan

April 02, 2003

Back Home

I finally arrived home last Monday and I'm still trying to overcome jetlag. Cherry blosoms are on it's best which helps overcome the sadness I had for leaving San Francisco. I had really, really good times over there. My friend Tori worked her best to make me feel at home. And man she did a good job; I never wanted to leave! FlashForward was a blast. Had tons of fun and really enjoyed hanging out most of the time with Sean Voisen. Sean is an excellent dude, really humble guy. He was able to put up with 3 days of listening to me go crazy, without ever punching me in the stomach for nonsense talk. Was able to meet up also with the Dura Brothers - which was really nice too. They are both very cool guys. The conference? Awesome, this was my 3rd FF and it was definitively the best so far. The most outstanding moments where: * Kevyn Lynch's keynote: packed with new stuff coming from the mothership * Dave Yang's and Collin Mooks OOP sessions: very interesting to see how they both aproach design patterns in different ways * Grant Skinner's Film Festival: because he really deserved it. * Sam Wan's presentation: I love his style, very very clear, but sofisticated at the same time * Phillip Torrone's gadget marathon: very very cool. * Thomas Wagner: games in flash never looked better * Vas Sloutchevsky's interfaces: When we thought branded flashy interfaces where dead, here come Vas to probe we are all wrong. * Eric Natzke's closing: reverences to THA man. What I missed from the conference: * Dave Yang's Q&A: OUch! I'll never forgive myself for that! Sean told me it was excellent, just both of them and a bunch of other people from Macromedia, including Nigel Pegg, discussed in a very friendly atmosphere the future of AS. Would love to hear from them more about what happened there! * Robert Penner: Had so many questions for him. I know he was supposed to speak but somewhere sometime before the conference, his session was canceled. * Branden Hall & Joshua Davis: I know the dynamic duo has been one very bussy with work, and the other learning how to be a father, but I really missed them not showing up on stage

March 01, 2003

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

As soon as I finished this book, it flew out of my hands. I was already really inspired by it as soon as I got to the second page, and the time I finished it, I had talked so much about it that Matty immediately took it away from me. Although pretty intense in names and dates - if you take a peek at the index, you'll realize that it's not only Lick's story the one that the book focuses on, but mostly everyone who influenced in the history and development of the personal computer and the web as we know it today. The book will take you to the origins of computer science, interactive computing and networking, and dramatically narrate all the huge efforts, dreams and ideas of all the people that helped make - and are still making today - in the creation of "The Dream Machine". A beautifully told history lesson. more at amazon.

November 25, 2002

Devcon Japan, links

Quick links to some of the presentation material showed here last week: Object Oriented Thinking in ActionScript, Fumio Nonaka - babelfish translated Connecting Flash and Application Servers with Remoting MX, Tomohiro Ueki - babelfish translated Dreamweaver and Fireworks Users Group session, Naoyuki Makura - babelfish translated Macromedia links: Macromedia DesDev Center, Devcon2002 - babelfish translated Keynote presentation - babelfish translated day 1 summary - babelfish translated day 2 summary - babelfish translated

November 21, 2002

Devcon Japan - Day 2

Although having their session all in a video playing in the background, and the presentators on stage just talking about it, Furi-Furi Company showed a really slick instant messaging app they worked on for AOL. They say they started with that mainly pc based, and suddenly decided to take it to i-mode. So they came up with an instant messaging application between i-mode and pc. Now they said they got bored of it and just added a flash interface to it. neat! They later added some VJ randomization engine to the flash movie and projeced it in the big screen in the room... and there they where, instant messaging from a cell-phone to the big screen. Very japanese, although they gave the address for people to interact with it from the audience, no one really did:P All they needed is one to start, and the rest to follow...but it never happened. In one of the last sessions, Tomohiro Ueki had a great intro to Flash Remoting which was really simple to follow until the last 5 minutes, when running out of time he hurried up the pace and probably got a lot of people lost besides me:P Pretty wierd that Macromedia decided to have Mike Chambers's session on advanced Remoting in the morning and Ueki-san's intro on Remoting at night. I would have gotten so much more of both if they had been in the reverse order:P I'll try to come up with a more detailed report on all that happened over there during the weekend.

November 20, 2002

Devcon Japan - Day 1

Really exciting first day over at the Cerullean Towers in Shibuya. Of course Yugo Nakamura did the honors again. You know what to expect from him already. Although his presentation hasn't changed much along the years (I've seen him already a bunch of times) each time I leave one of his presentations I feel I can get home and suddenly take over the world. Very, very inspiring. They guys from Bascule had a really nice session on Flash Communications server too. They have just published this very good tutorial at macromedia desdev japan (if you don't read japanese... patience, I'm pretty much sure they'll come up with an english translation for that soon) Ok. please give me some time for a full review later this week. I've taken a ton of notes, which I now will have to patiently translate into one coherent language (if you see my notebook, you'll just find a bunch of scribbles where you wouldn't really be able to differentiate english from japanese from spanish or klingon)

November 18, 2002

Devcon Japan

I've been really looking forward for this event since I first heard of it, and even more after I heard about the great one they had last month in Orlando. Although I'm a (little bit) active among the international community, It may sound a little bit wierd, but I'm not that much in contact with local developers/designers. I bet it's going to be great. There's a ton of sessions which look really interesting. more info over here; Oops, sorry, nihongo only:P

November 11, 2002

Ohayo Bascule

In a reminisense of a classic japanese game; "daruma-san ga koronda" Bascule comes up with a very simple game powered by FlashCom - Ohayo players. The objective; grab the bear's honey while he is looking away. The fun part is that it's grabing the motion level from your webcam (you'll need one to participate in the game). Stay still when he turns around! else... smack!

December 31, 1969