From garnethertz at gmail.com Wed Mar 29 07:38:38 2006 From: garnethertz at gmail.com (Garnet Hertz) Date: Wed Mar 29 07:38:45 2006 Subject: [dorkbotsocal-announce] DORKBOTSOCAL12 - Machine Project April 1st 2006, 1pm: Dagett, Spellman/Stow, Lew: "Visualizing the Invisible" Message-ID: DORKBOTSOCAL12 Machine Project April 1st 2006, 1pm Dagett, Spellman/Stow, Lew: "Visualizing the Invisible" *** April 1st 2006 - 1pm (Saturday) *** Machine Project *** 1200 D North Alvarado Street *** Los Angeles, CA 90026 *** http://www.machineproject.com -- [ O V E R V I E W ] If a theme for this event had to be chosen, I'd pick "Making the Invisible Visible". This month's event will feature a good variety of work from a number of different angles: social software, locative media and digital cinema. Mark Daggett, most well-known (perhaps) as being part of the Radical Software Group that won a Golden Nica at Ars Electronica 2002, will be presenting "Balance Bar" - a browser extension programmed to allow any user to editorialize any web page anywhere on the Internet. Naomi Spellman & Brandon Stow from 34 North 118 West will be showing "Interpretive Engine for Various Places on Earth", a system that uses outdoor wireless network connections to design a custom-built narrative specific to geographical location, including factors like weather conditions, the physical environment, nearby locales, and historic events. Michael Lew will also be presenting: he's a media artist and research engineer that primarily works on expanding cinema, and has a background in electrical engineering, artificial intelligence, performance and filmmaking. Come on out - bring your friends. This event is free of charge. If you would like to make a donation to our kind venue-host (Machine Project), bring some dollar bills and watch them get sucked up in the money-sucking-machine. Also, the last number of lecture events have been filled to over-capacity, so if you want a chair, it might be a good idea to come at 12:50. ------ [ P R E S E N T E R S ] -- Mark Daggett "Balance Bar" "In my artwork, I primarily make tools for use by others. The tools that I create are computer applications, which are commonly referred to as "social software" or "art applications". My ongoing social software research is in the area of "independent interfaces," a term I coined to describe my artistic production and academic research. (The term also is the title of my related book project.) Independent interfaces are artistic augmentations to conventional technology that help people understand how social software can alter their lives in positive and not-so-positive ways. My interfaces are developed to illuminate and measure the often-elusive effects of social software on our culture. A good example of my work in social software is an on-going project called the "Balance Bar" (http://www.collcoll.com/balancebar/). The "Balance Bar" is a simple browser extension programmed to allow any user to editorialize any web page anywhere on the Internet. The "Balance Bar" will literally insert your comments/article/rant directly onto whatever web page you would like to expound on. The "Balance Bar" was developed to address the increasing need to "balance" the one-sided and isolated worldview that much of our media sources produce." Mark Daggett is an artist and programmer, whose work has been shown in museums, festivals and exhibitions around the world. His work has shown in the Whitney Museum, the Princeton Museum, P.S. 1, the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria, and the Transmediale festival in Berlin, to name a few. As a member of Radical Software Group, he was part of a team that won a Golden Nica award for the project Carnivore at the 2002 Ars Electronica Festival. Daggett have been nominated for several prestigious awards, including a 2006 Rockefeller New Media Grant, and a Webby Award, which is sometimes called the Oscars of the Internet. Major media sources have covered Daggett's work, including the New York Times, Le Monde, WIRED Magazine and Surface Magazine. He is presently Creative Manager for Revver a Social Software company based in Hollywood. -- 34 North 118 West Naomi Spellman & Brandon Stow "Interpretive Engine for Various Places on Earth" Naomi Spellman and Brandon Stow will discuss The Interpretive Engine for Various Places on Earth, a project with Jeff Knowlton. A work in progress, this generative narrative relies on outdoor wireless Internet connection to tell a story specific to user location. Data such as weather conditions, the physical environment, nearby locales, historic events ? all specific to the current location and time ? are retrieved from online sources and fed into a scripted story structure. The negotiation of remote databases uncovers larger issues of social control and power among governmental, commercial, and academic interests. 34 North 118 West is a southern California based collective focusing on site specific experimental works utilizing digital media, computation, and internet resources. Through telecommunications and mapping tools, one of their concerns is to expose or call to light the debate around control of and access to information. Their work has been shown at Futuresonic <4> (Manchester, UK), the LA Freewaves Festival (Los Angeles), and the Art in Motion in Festival (Los Angeles). The "interpretive engine" will be shown in the Fresno Metropolitan Museum's Off-site series, June - August 2006. Naomi, Jeff, and Brandon are affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Computing Arts Program at UC San Diego. -- Micheal Lew Human behaviour control "I will be presenting some ongoing research project about "Human behaviour control". Combining the electronic art attempts of tapping into the nervous/muscular system (roachbot, Stelarc, Artifacial expression) and the influence of video game control into live interactive entertainment, I will present a project where live actors can be controlled by the audience. It's better than Office Voodoo, the Sims or reality TV. After a background talk surveying the field, I will present a demo with live actors of my work-in-progress prototype." Michael Lew is a media artist and research engineer, with backgrounds in electrical engineering, artificial intelligence, performance and filmmaking. From 2001-2004, he was a Research Fellow at the MIT Media Lab Europe in Dublin, Ireland, investigating what happens to the film form when the medium becomes computational. Michael's interactive film installations and live experimental videos have been shown in electronic art festivals across Europe and the US. Michael obtained his M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), with a masters thesis on software agents from the AI Lab, Motorola Labs in Paris, France, for which he was awarded the Logitech 2000 prize. In 97-98, he was developing architectures for MPEG-2 video streaming at the Technion Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. ------ [ M O R E _ I N F O R M A T I O N ] Map to DORKBOTSOCAL12 / Machine Project: http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?ed=eZDrvOp_0ToiS8la6vHBH5OFfQ3.LmII34nqpRTULQ--&csz=90026&country=us&new=1&name=&qty= Please contact Garnet Hertz if you are interested in giving a presentation at an upcoming DORKBOTSOCAL event. 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