Data. Yesterday I made a website for the club I’m starting: DATA. I’m excited. Fun things are in the pipe and hopefully we’re making real progress towards transforming Computation Arts into a community of “artists and hackers”.
Today I went to a ‘workshop’ at the Sensor Lab. An interdisciplinary design PHd student at Concordia wants to create “intelligent” wearables, ultimately for medical applications, but for now he’s just interested in exploring ideas. It’s not quite a workshop, it’s more of a discussion group centered around his dissertation. We sat in a circle and hashed out abstract technical concepts like “granularity” of computation, distributed vs. serial, mesh networks vs. point-to-point, using the intrinsic qualities of material, cameras vs. ‘ordinary’ 1-dimensional sensors, power-usage vs. speed and complexity, and embedding sensors and processors intelligently i.e. in seams, ruffles, and bumps intrinsic to the fabric. Now I’ve got somewhere to toss around the theoretical notions I’ve been playing with in my head and to learn more about engineering, the design process, and wearable computing on Fridays!
Earlier today I met with the TML’s “Ozone” software team. We’re transplanting the media-system that we built for Remedios Terrarium into the lab. Freida Abtan presented her latest work, which I’d already seen at Mutek. We talked about future Jitter development inspired by techniques that Freida has been playing with and JS’s new system for routing OSC data between networked computers. In July and August I’ll be working as part of Ozone on meaningful mapping for “state evolution” [I’ve discussed the ‘state engine’ before] and (i) modularizing existing: + (ii) exploring new: feature extraction algorithms. ‘Mapping’ seems to be the most important creative activity in this practice of building “reactive” systems. Being able to set-up mappings seamlessly between computers (thanks to [pattrstorage]) will do a lot to grease the creative process and my job in particular. I’m particularly excited about exploring techniques for extracting meaningful data from audio signals (mainly from microphones). We’re also taking time-lapse video of vines growing in the lab and I’ve been brainstorming techniques for using this video to monitor the state of the plants and thus the room. Using plants as long time-scale sensors.
In other news: Calculus II started today + I’m moving in with Navid Navab for a month on July 2nd + I’ll be participating in the 2008 Minds and Societies summer school “conference” for two weeks starting the 28th? (I think). The website is down as of my writing this. The theme (this year) is “minds in societies” (that is, social cognition, perhaps the most boring branch of cognitive science) and “societies of minds” (more interesting, though I hope I don’t have to listen to too much talk about the ‘extended mind hypothesis’). I’m in for some exciting experiences – at least in one branch of my life – this summer methinks.
