The other day my son, who is a Linux and Perl guru in my eyes, reminded me of the webcomic xkcd, created by Randall Munroe. Here are a couple of my favorite comics and a little about the article "Robot Apocalypse" from the "what if?" section.
The video below shows the exhibit in the International Gallery of Contemporary Art (IGCA). There were four artists. Here are the artists' statements from the gallery's blurb:
Oscar Font:
Oscar, aka "VJ offonoll," is an audiovisual artist from Barcelona, Spain, His interactive installations map audiovisual intervention with video projections, using sculpture as a canvas of expression. He is dedicated to exploring visual communication through nonlinear processes.
Burtner group:
Jesse Burtner:
Jesse is founder and owner of Think Thank, a filmmaking company based in Seattle. As a filmmaker and professional snowboarder makes frequent trips home to Alaska.
Garrett Burtner
Garrett is an Alaska architect and artist working in Anchorage. He is interested in the interplay of sound and pattern and how these affect the perception of space.
Matthew Burtner
Matthew is an award-winning composer, sound artist and professor at University of Virginia. His work regularly combines instrumental ensembles , computer technology, interactive eco-acoustics and multimedia.
"Akropoli" (title of the work)
At the house where the Burtner brother grew up, if you face a certain direction you will see only mountains. Then if you turn 180 degrees you will only see the city of Anchorage below you. At night one side is a dark abyss and the other is the electric town. On a sunny day in the fall one is fresh white sheet the other a gray brown sprawl. Walk an hour from our door and you could be helplessly lost in wilderness. An hour 180 degrees in the other direction and you are in urban America. AKROPOLI (mountain city) is a work about binary qualities of place. Jesse's video explores the 180 degree aspect described above using split screens and modulated time. Garrett's visual installation dissects the physical room into a theoretical space of planes and quadrants stretching far beyond the walls and enfolding the exterior spaces (mountain? city? abstract theoretical realms?). Matthew's interactive music has two parts: a headphone controller part, and a room-speaker/stones part. In the headphones one viewer listens to the wind and controls a 3-D sound navigator which introduces pulses of noise In the room, viewers will hear gentle layers of noise as they strike rocks together to make social clusters of rhythm. As the noise parts urge us towards abstraction, the wind and the room stones relocate us back in the mountain.
Jacob Mattie
Jacob is a DJ whose history of playing music is deeply rooted in the last 11 years of his life in Alaska. Jump started by working for local record shop, his musical inspirations continue to be driven by artists and producers from around the planet.
"Destiny's Dream Collage" (also uses headphones) - Mattie has created an interactive interface built of digital and analog devices. The viewer/listener place a turntable tonearm on a record to experience the composed audio/visual ensemble.
Toridamari group
Lucy Toridamari
Lucy Toridamariis a foreign soul, who glady exchanged Russia for USA as her homeland. She's in constant search of visual and verbal extravaganza, random beauty and inspiring people.
Ryohei Toridamari
Ryohei Toridamari is an international student from Japan and also a dj, who has collaborated with several art galleries by providing music.
In 1989, a research team at the University of Utah reported that they had produced unexplained excess energy during their electrolysis research. The Wikipedia article on cold fusion describes their results thus:
Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, then one of the world's leading electrochemists, [reported] that their apparatus had produced anomalous heat ("excess heat"), of a magnitude they asserted would defy explanation except in terms of nuclear processes. They further reported measuring small amounts of nuclear reaction byproducts, including including neutrons and tritium. The small tabletop experiment involved electrolysis of heavy water on the surface of a palladium (Pd) electrode..
Here is a simple example of the lab setup for electrolysis:
The media flocked to the prospect of a cheap source of energy that didn't require depletable products. But most physicists were skeptical, especially of any reaction that produced more energy than what was put in. The reported results could not be reproduced by other labs; and eventually Pons and Fleischmann were discredited. However, some groups continued to experiment, particularly the U.S. Navy and New Hydrogen Energy Institute in Japan.
Here is an image of the setup used by the researchers in Japan:
After 1991, cold fusion research continued in relative obscurity,
conducted by groups that had increasing difficulty securing public
funding and keeping programs open. Research continues today in a few
specific venues, but the wider scientific community has generally
marginalized the research being done and researchers have had difficulty
publishing in mainstream journals.
The Japanese group has discontinued work on cold fusion, but the groups that have continued have renamed their efforts to avoid the negative reactions of the scientific community to the term cold fusion. The new nomenclature includes:
...Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) or Chemically Assisted Nuclear Reactions (CANR), also Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reactions (LANR), Condensed Matter Nuclear Science (CMNS) and Lattice Enabled Nuclear Reactions... --Wikipedia
The U.S. Navy has a library of papers on this topic at LENR-CANR.org.
What do you think -- is it the real thing this time?
As a semi-retired citizen of Second Life (SL), the virtual world, I still watch the happenings there. One of my main sources of news is the New World Notes (NWN) by Wagner James Au.
Second Life is an immersive experience and host to some of the finest, most eclectic artists I've seen. Here are some photos of the build, Twomoons Island (no longer on the grid), where JAS store is located. If you've never been to Second Life, you'll need to sign up (it's free), and download/install a viewer, to see this location in person.
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Machinima is very popular with Linden Lab, the creator and overlord of Second Life. By definition machinima is produced by fans, and this is the case with SL as well. And some of the works produced are indeed outstanding.
This first video was produced by Douglas Gayeton, whose site is called RumpleFarm; he's an accomplished multimedia director. To see the back story, check out this article in NWN.
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This second video was submitted as an entry by Nitwacket for a competition titled "Seek Wisdom," sponsored by the University of Western Australia (UWA). To me, the video oddly exhilarating:
This post is essentially an homage to director Ridley Scott. While I'm not much into being a fan, I felt it important to know more about how Mr. Scott works and what he's done after watching "Robin Hood" last night. The movie "Robin Hood" didn't do well in theaters unfortunately. But another of his pieces -- "Gladiator" -- did and is one of my all-time favorites as well.
Mr. Scott's attention to detail and his artistic vision are consistently eye-catching. And he has a talent for tying into larger, cultural themes subtly. There's also a grittiness to the movie "Robin Hood" that adds to its charm.
Today I started my post wanting to share a site that offers free 3D textures and wound up finding a for-pay application that makes lovely textures. Let's take a look.
Why 3D textures, you may ask. They're helpful for people who work with 3D applications such as Maya, 3DStudio, Daz3D Studio, SecondLife, OpenSim, and so on. They're also useful if you want a repeating pattern that looks realistic in artwork, as a background in a photo, or for your desktop. Here's a picture of a dome I built in Second Life to which I added a custom pattern.
Second Life, Alchemy Lab
CG Textures is the site that offer 3D textures, free for both personal and commercial use. In the tutorials section you can find one on tiling complex patterns. The tutorial is written for Adobe Photoshop; but, if you know Corel PhotoPaint, you can translate the instructions to that application.
While looking for a Corel how-to on tiling textures, I found this guy (Chris Pirillo) recommending Repper. (He has a text feed going at the bottom of his video image, LOL.)
Repper looked intriguing so I searched it out and found that it's no longer free, but costs €29 (≈$43) via PayPal. It works on both Windows and MAC. Here's the demo.
Still not satisfied with my offering of how to tile patterns, I found one more tutorial -- this one for open source Inkscape. While this tutorial is about cloning radial patterns, there are many other ways you can use Inkscape's cloning tool.
As an explorer of virtual worlds, I like to keep up on what's happening. Despite rumors that Second Life is dying and the metaverse has had its day, the number of virtual worlds is growing. Here's a list (2015) of the Top 10 Virtual Worlds.
Are virtual worlds really viable environments for work? According to a survey by Unisfair,
a global provider of virtual events and business environments, usage of
virtual environments is growing for marketing, training and
collaboration. Surveying 550 marketers nationwide, the study revealed
that 60 percent of respondents plan to increase spending on virtual
events and environments this year.
The breakdown of virtual activities outlined in the survey include
training (42 percent); customer engagement (36 percent); internal
collaboration (34 percent); lead generation (29 percent); and networking
(8 percent). Nearly half of the respondents predict an increase in
“hybrid” corporate events within two years.
This article on IBM's developerWorks page talks about the company's use of Virtual Spaces to enable immersive, global collaboration. In the summary it states that
Globalization and a challenging business environment are placing new
demands on today's enterprises. Organizations that are in an increasingly
distributed environment are striving to
provide guidance and enablement for teams working across disparate time zones.
Other uses for virtual worlds include:
Immersive education, such as what is described at Media Grid, and
Health care training and eduction, such as CliniSpace.
It being Friday, I went looking for some humor. I didn't find anything I wanted to use but these animated short films are well worth watching. Some of them aren't that short, or even funny, but all of them are beautifully done.
Love Recipe (5:12 mins) -- Amazing amount of detail
Alarm (8:50 mins) -- This animation by Mesai, a South Korean animation team, feels too long for the subject matter, but the animation techniques are done perfectly. Just look at the dynamic cloth of the curtains.
Alma (5:25 mins) -- This is a little dark, but again, beautiful work.
The controls for this editor seem to me subtle and somewhat easily broken. Be sure to put the title in first and don't change it after you've started editing or you'll lose your work. I restarted the project below 4 times (or more -- wah, wah, wah) due to errors being injected during the editing process. (I swear I can break any piece of software you give me.) It's also probably a good idea to select whether this is a "new project" or "my edited video."
Here's a breakdown of the controls:
To see a selection of video snippets and videos you can use, click (cc) in the title bar; for music, the musical notes; and for transitions between scenes, the facing triangles ( >< ). The "a" allows you to make a text page. To edit videos you've uploaded, click the camera icon. The selections are drag-and-drop.
Once you've placed the selected video in an empty square below the viewing area, you can adjust the length of the video by clicking on the bar at the top. Two brackets will appear ( [] ) that can be moved at either end. You can delete a video placed in the timeline using the small X at the right end of the top bar of the selected video. The symbols that appear when you mouseover the selected video are self-explanatory.
Drag the music selected to the bottom placeholder. Note the slider that selects original audio to favor music to music only, and that your audio selection applies to the whole music stream. There appears to be no way to control the length of the music selection. I may have missed it.
The "Q" slider give finer detail on the timeline. Not sure that it was particularly helpful.
Slide the red tab back and forth to start playback at a specific place in the timeline. Click the play button is the viewing area to see what you have.
Once you click the publish button in the title bar, it goes into a processing mode that seems to take forever. In fact it has been processing for more than half-an-hour.
The video I made from scratch using YouTube's Video Editor is entitled "City Trek." The music is "Ball of Waxx" by Dratini; I saw no credits on the video samples. Here it is --
With a nod to Google's 4th of July doodle, taking a look at street art, AKA grafitti.
Let's start with Art Crimes - The Writing on the Wall, a site devoted to grafitti. Their subtitle pretty much says it all. However, many tag (another word for grafitti) artists that start with writing on the wall and move on to successful careers in art.
An example of an extremely successful move to "serious" art is KAWS, former tag artist. In the video below are some good views of an artist's studio and what having a gallery show is like.
Grafitti is a world-wide phenomenon. I particularly like some of the Brazilian artists, such as Os Gêmeos. Here's a review of Os Gêmeos from the New York Times and a pic from the review:
Please take time to look at the slide show of Os Gêmeos' work.
One of my all-time favorite videos shows a group of Japanese artists working on a wall (uhm, large surface?) for a week:
Licensing: I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide.
When you want to use someone else's photo or photographic image in your latest creation, it's not safe to use just any old picture you find in a Google search. This is especially true if you want to sell what you're creating. By using any image you find, you may be treading on someone's copyright toes.
As lovely as they are, Flickr images, and images posted to other user galleries, can be just as tricky. Most users aren't that interested in (but they will be if your work goes viral) or knowledgeable about what rights to grant, if any. If you've found the absolutely perfect picture to mix into your work, best to contact the user who posted it and ask permission. Tell her/him what you're working on and how you will use the picture. And save a copy of the email granting permission to use it.
It's much safer to use Wikimedia Commons where only free, non-commercial content is allowed. The terms of Fair use are clearly defined and allow commercial use in derivative works; take a look at this page for detailed information: Commons:Reusing content outside Wikimedia.
On the page cited above is the following information, which most applies to an artist's wanting to use someone else's photo for derivative work:
CC-BY
In the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY), re-users are free to make derivative works and copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, even commercially.
You must attribute the work to the author(s), and when re-using the work or distributing it, you must mention the license terms or a link to them. You may choose whether to make future modified versions available under CC-BY.
In the Creative Commons ShareAlike license (CC-SA), re-users are free to make derivative works and copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, even commercially.
When re-using the work or distributing it, you must mention the license terms or a link to them. You must make your version available under CC-SA.
CC-BY-SA
In the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), re-users are free to make derivative works and copy, distribute, display, and perform the work, even commercially.
When re-using the work or distributing it, you must attribute the work to the author(s) and you must mention the license terms or a link to them. You must make your version available under CC-BY-SA.
There is also public domain, which one would think is open for any use. But every country has its own rules. Here's what Wikimedia says about public domain:
Content marked as public domain (or local equivalent, e.g. "may be used for any purpose") is material believed to be out of copyright, either because of expiration of the original copyright, or because the material has been explicitly released into the public domain by its creator(s).
Note that inalienablemoral rights and other restrictions may still apply in some countries for some uses.
It is common for publishers to take public domain works and republish them under their own copyright. This may be legal, but it does not affect the public domain status of the original image. If you tag the image with its origin (where you got it and where it came from originally) and the name of the creator, this can help us if a dispute with such a publisher arises later
Following a search on Wikimedia Commons for "green man" I selected the 2 images on this page (one is at the top).
Russel Wills [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
If you have an inquiring mind and like to be surprised, take a look at Science Daily. Here are the titles and links to 4 of the articles available now:
New Light Shed On Explosive Solar Activity -- "Extreme solar activity can lead to severe space storms that interfere with satellite communications and damage electric power transmission grids on Earth."
Looking at the last article, about solar activity, reminded me that I've been wanting to know how the quest for power generation by fusion is going. Fusion promises to produce power cleanly, with no radioactive waste for disposal or threat of reactor meltdown. But developing a reactor that produces more energy than it uses has been a problem.
This site ITER ("The Way" in Latin) gives some very good information about fusion. ITER is an actual device; the demo is being built now. Take a look at the 60 years of progress page:
Steady progress has been made since in fusion devices around the world. The Tore Supra Tokamak that is part of the Cadarache nuclear research centre holds the record for the longest plasma duration time of any tokamak: six minutes and 30 seconds. The Japanese JT-60 achieved the highest value of fusion triple product—density, temperature, confinement time—of any device to date. US fusion installations have reached temperatures of several hundred million degrees Celsius.
Achievements like these have led fusion science to an exciting threshold: the long sought-after plasma energy breakeven point. Breakeven describes the moment when plasmas in a fusion device release at least as much energy as is required to produce them. Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 70 percent of input power. Scientists have now designed the next-step device—ITER—which will produce more power than it consumes: for 50 MW of input power, 500 MW of output power will be produced.
Fusion research has increased key fusion plasma performance parameters by a factor of 10,000 over 50 years; research is now less than a factor of 10 away from producing the core of a fusion power plant.
