October 23, 2008 at 11:37 pm · Filed under design
After my entire camera kit was stolen in Shanghai from a famous live jazz club there (situated, of course, in the middle of the french expat community), I was waiting for the next purchase. Wanted something that is light enough to fit with my travel gear, and yet offered near-pro capabilities… and most importantly, doesn’t give me a heart attack if stolen, lost, damaged again (yes, I have heard of insurance… thank you… but the hassle… the hassle…). So, finally have settled for a Olympus E520 for the meantime, until the DSLR market stabilizes with the next upcoming series of 20 MP+ cams, post-summer next year perhaps? Can’t be that far, since Canon pretty much opened up the market there with their new Canon EOS 5D Mark II (brilliant… absolutely brilliant! — check out the video here). I mean, ISO 25,000 capabilities + HD Video capture…?!!!
October 16, 2008 at 2:42 pm · Filed under design
Every time I get back to my amateurish coding and learning the potential of Processing, I am always surprised and fascinated how just a few lines of even bad code provide complex and occasionally pleasing results. And this is even before I have gone properly into more complex ideas of emergence, dynamic systems and other theories I want to explore visually. Theory w/out words? I suppose being rather visual in orientation, it helps me think when I can directly see the outcome of what I am doing emerge in front of me. So while playing around with recursive functions today and I came up with this by writing about 20 lines of quite messy code using mostly simple random equations. Thought it would be nice to show the screenshot here as a starter to my long road to mastering the interface of aesthetics and underlying code — the plan eventually is to develop a database of “palettes” that can be used for various projects. But meanwhile, here is a quick example (with just a little color correction post-factotum):
October 12, 2008 at 3:14 pm · Filed under design
I just returned from Bombay a month back where I was doing a photo shoot (or should we call this pixelography nowadays?) of the city. The aim here was to create a portrait of global cities in terms of what I call ‘-dividualism’ — that which precedes the individual. We have seen too many picture of smiling faces, or more specifically, too much photography of teeth. Of individuals and teeth; of the National Geography imaginary of smiley faces of the exotic world that we grew up on. But for anybody who stays in a giant city such as Bombay for more than a few days will know that in such an enormous metropolis, most of the people we never can or will experience as individuals. Rather, it is the non-linear mass of collective movement, flows, moorings, accelerations, trans- and interactions that we experience. This is what I call the “-dividual city.” (See a wider theoretical history of the dividual at the P2P Foundation.) (FLICKR has the full series if you click on the image):
October 12, 2008 at 12:46 pm · Filed under design, technology
For a while, I have been pondering on this: can I create a bunch of extremely stupid automatons (actually, a tweak on Finite State Machines), that co-exist independently and making self-contained selfish decisions, and yet create an ecosystem that seems to be making smart decisions?
The idea is simple: I create a set of microprograms (I fondly call them ‘brats’!), each of which have their own selfish agendas, decision processes, survival rules, and their own I/O probes that constantly monitor the surroundings for resources they need (and perish soon if they don’t find them)… and then I spawn each variety of agent multiple times and see an overall behavior emerge.
The first set of such agents are already sweating their necks, making highly stupid decisions… and yet surviving, but my goal is to now take it a step further.
I now I want to go in two directions:
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Matti is a researcher, designer and visual artist working with emerging digital technologies globally. He is currently dayjobbing as a Teaching Fellow in Digital Culture at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and spends time shuttling between London, Helsinki and the rest of the world.
Soum is a new media technology architect, ex-mixercast founding member, filmmaker, photographer, and a general wanderer who lives partly in London and rest of the time in Mumbai. He builds scalable web sites, dabbles in emerging technologies, and spends rest of his time in various film and photography projects.