Bruce Sterling's Blog, page 199

Connecting Arduino to Processing

*Hey there, fully-trained and certified electrical engineers. If you’re interested in the glamorous and lucrative art-world of blinky-lights sculpture, it’ll help a lot if you can talk an act like this.

*I also recommend buying some odd shoes to wear at galleries and shows. You don’t want a weird artist hairstyle because that might interfere with your straight day-job, but five-toed Kevlar strap-on shoes in aviation orange, those are optimal. They’re easy to kick on and off and they yell “tech artist.”

https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/connecting-arduino-to-processing/all

Connecting Arduino to Processing
Introduction

So, you’ve blinked some LEDs with Arduino, and maybe you’ve even drawn some pretty pictures with Processing – what’s next? At this point you may be thinking, ‘I wonder if there’s a way to get Arduino and Processing to communicate to each other?’. Well, guess what – there is! – and this tutorial is going to show you how.

In this tutorial we will learn:

How to send data from Arduino to Processing over the serial port
How to receive data from Arduino in Processing
How to send data from Processing to Arduino
How to receive data from Processing in Arduino
How to write a serial ‘handshake’ between Arduino and Processing to control data flow
How to make a ‘Pong’ game that uses analog sensors to control the paddles
Before we get started, there are a few things you should be certain you’re familiar with to get the most out of this tutorial:

What’s an Arduino?
How to use a breadboard
Working with wire
What is serial communication?
Some basic familiarity with Processing will be useful, but not strictly necessary.

From Arduino…

Let’s start with the Arduino side of things. We’ll show you the basics of how to set up your Arduino sketch to send information over serial.

First things first. If you haven’t done so yet, download and install the Arduino software for your operating system. Here’s a tutorial if you get stuck.

You’ll also need an Arduino-compatible microcontroller and an appropriate way to connect it to your computer (an A-to-B USB cable, micro USB, or FTDI breakout). Check this buying guide if you’re not sure what’s right for you.

Ok. You should by this point have the Arduino software installed, an Arduino board of some kind, and a cable. Now for some coding! Don’t worry, it’s quite straightforward.

Open up the Arduino software. You should see something like this….

       

Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature

*This forthcoming tome looks like it oughta be pretty happening.

*It’s a press release.

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Synthetic Aesthetics
Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature
By Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Jane Calvert, Pablo Schyfter, Alistair Elfick, and Drew Endy
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/synthetic-aesthetics

Publication date: March 31, 2014

Synthetic biology manipulates the stuff of life. For synthetic biologists, living matter is programmable material. In search of carbon-neutral fuels, sustainable manufacturing techniques, and innovative drugs, these researchers aim to redesign existing organisms and even construct completely novel biological entities. Some synthetic biologists see themselves as designers, inventing new products and applications. But if biology is viewed as a malleable, engineerable, designable medium, what is the role of design and how will its values apply?

In this book, synthetic biologists, artists, designers, and social scientists investigate synthetic biology and design. After chapters that introduce the science and set the terms of the discussion, the book follows six boundary-crossing collaborations between artists and designers and synthetic biologists from around the world, helping us understand what it might mean to ‘design nature.’ These collaborations have resulted in biological computers that calculate form; speculative packaging that builds its own contents; algae that feeds on circuit boards; and a sampling of human cheeses. They raise intriguing questions about the scientific process, the delegation of creativity, our relationship to designed matter, and, the importance of critical engagement. Should these projects be considered art, design, synthetic biology, or something else altogether?

Synthetic biology is driven by its potential; some of these projects are fictions, beyond the current capabilities of the technology. Yet even as fictions, they help illuminate, question, and even shape the future of the field.

       

Iris van Herpen ready-to-wear 2014

*Well, it’s “ready to wear” if you’re into biopiracy.

http://showstudio.com/collection/iris_van_herpen_paris_womenswear_a_w_2014

http://www.irisvanherpen.com

       

Silicon Valley Contemporary Brings Art to the Valley to Engage the Tech-savvy Collector

*”Progress being made in bridging two notoriously insular cultures.” Sounds like a good idea.

*It’s a press release.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Silicon Valley Contemporary Brings Art to the Valley to Engage the Tech-savvy Collector

February 28, 2014 (San Jose, CA) — This spring, Silicon Valley Contemporary opens its doors at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, April 10-13, 2014. The first of its kind in the tech industry mecca, Silicon Valley Contemporary places emphasis on the relationship between art and technology and a growing effort to engage the arts patrons of tomorrow.

In recent years, art and technology have successfully merged to further creativity, broadening our understanding of artistic practices and making art visible in mediums previously reserved for technologists including networked culture, interactivity, creative use of digital surfaces, and the space between image and motion. Those in the technology sector are turning to artists to address design and function issues with initiatives like Google’s DevArt, while the art world continues to embrace technology as a creative practice as in Rhizome’s “Seven on Seven,” pointing to progress being made in bridging two notoriously insular cultures.

Silicon Valley Contemporary aims to be at the center of a conversation on art and technology in an effort to connect the collectors of tomorrow with the most relevant work of today. At the heart of this initiative is the appointment of Paul Young, Director of Young Projects (Los Angeles), as curator of the fair’s Moving Image Experience, a presentation of artists whose work ranges from single channel video works that span animated, narrative and performance-based pieces, to computer-based installations, 3D works and interactive projects, including the “Mutual Wave Machine” by Marina Abramovic, in collaboration with Suzanne Dikker and Oliver Hess, on exhibit throughout the fair.

A dedicated video pavilion of flatscreens replacing the usual art gallery booths will include presentations of Jacco Olivier with The Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York); Jennifer Levonian with The Fleisher/Ollman Gallery (Philadelphia); and ANETTA MONA CHIŞA & LUCIA TKÁČOVÁ with The Christine Koenig Galerie (Vienna). Additionally, artist Gary Hill will receive Silicon Valley Contemporary’s first annual Distinguished Media Artist Award.

Curator Paul Young explains the scope of the project:

The Moving Image Experience at the Silicon Valley Contemporary is designed to provide visitors with a glimpse of some of the very best examples of work by contemporary artists who are using technology in their studio practice. Each of the works on view will provide another facet of what is rapidly becoming the most prevalent language of our age–the language of the digital. At the same time we will be offering a selection of talks, discussions and presentations by a number of experts who will be providing an essential context for all the works on view, as well as touching on their lineage and history. Taken as a whole, the Moving Image Experience will help visitors see just how far technology-based artworks have evolved over the years, and perhaps suggest where they are going in the near future.

Throughout history, art has succeeded through a legacy of patronage. As tech companies continue to receive favorable investments increasing their market valuations, many have the opportunity to reinvest in culture, and choose to do so by forming corporate collections or commissioning works such as murals or site-specific installations. As the region’s premier art fair in a city home to the corporate headquarters of numerous elite tech companies including Adobe, Cisco Systems and eBay, Silicon Valley Contemporary seeks to engage a growing audience of art enthusiasts from the tech world who are eager to be the patrons of tomorrow.

By utilizing the proven technologies and business practices created by leading Silicon Valley corporations that have not yet been integrated into the traditional art fair model, Silicon Valley Contemporary hopes to breed a “next generation” art fair following this shift in the art and technology sectors. This approach will include everything from Google Glass for the arts, and the encouragement of online sales of art in the fair, to the acceptance of Bitcoin as currency at the fair, offering an equally contemporary collecting experience to compliment the work available.

Silicon Valley Contemporary Exhibition Dates and Times:
Thursday, April 10, 6:30-9:30pm | Opening Night Preview
Friday, April 11, 11am-8pm
Saturday, April 12, 11am-8pm
Sunday, April 13, 11am-6pm

Location:
San Jose McEnery Convention Center
150 West San Carlos Street
San Jose, CA 95113

Tickets:
Day Pass/$25
Three Day Pass/$40
VIP Pass/$125
BLACK CARD/$250

Tickets available at the door and online: http://siliconvalleycontemporary.com/...

Press Contact:

Lainya Magaña | A&O PR
(e) lainya@aopublic.com

       

Stewart Brand and his library for the ages

*I wouldn’t have guessed that the guy was such a ferocious Iain Banks fan.


From: Alexander Rose of Long Now Foundation

“Long Now’s Founding Board Member Stewart Brand suggested more than 70 volumes for our Manual for Civilization collection. The Manual will be housed within The Interval at Long Now, our new public space which opens to the public this Spring.

“As construction of The Interval at Long Now nears completion, our fundraising continues. We are in the final stretch of the capital campaign to fund renovations to our San Francisco space that not only houses The Interval but also Long Now’s offices.

“Writer, futurist, environmentalist and Long Now co-founder, Stewart Brand keeps three personal libraries. In the last month he walked us through all of them as Stewart carefully selected books for the list below.
Keep in mind that like Brian Eno’s list and others we’ll be posting soon, this is not intended as a standalone set of books, but as part of the larger corpus of thousands of texts that we are assembling. That collection will include submissions from Long Now members and the donors to our ‘brickstarter’ campaign to help build the Long Now’s Interval (formerly referred to as Long Now Salon).

Together these books assemble knowledge essential for us to maintain, extend and (if needed) recreate what humans have achieved thus far. Here are Stewart Brand’s recommendations:

• Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• The Odyssey by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
• The Iliad by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
• The Memory of the World: The Treasures That Record Our History from 1700 BC to the Present Day
• The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories Edited by Robert B. Strassler
• The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War Edited by Robert B. Strassler
• The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volumes 1-4: Aeschylus Edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore
• The Prince by Machiavelli, translated by George Bull, published by Folio Society
• The Nature of Things by Lucretius
• A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
• The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World by Peter Schwartz
• The Way Life Works: The Science Lover’s Illustrated Guide to How Life Grows, Develops, Reproduces, and Gets Along by Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson
• Venice, A Maritime Republic by Frederic Chapin Lane
• The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom
• The Map Book by Peter Barber
• Conceptual Physics by Paul G. Hewitt
• The Encyclopedia of Earth: A Complete Visual Guide by Michael Allaby and Dr. Robert Coenraads
• The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
• Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
• The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde
• Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison
• The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe by Theodore Gray
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 Volumes) by Edward Gibbon
• The Complete Guide to Trail Building and Maintenance by Carl Demrow  and David Salisbury
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
• A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
• Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser
• The Causes of War by Geoffrey Blainey
• Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War by Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch
• A Short History of Nearly Everything Special Illustrated Edition by Bill Bryson
• The Past From Above: Aerial Photographs of Archaeological Sites Edited by Charlotte Trümpler
• Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
• Why the West Rules–for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris
• The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community by William H. Mcneill
• A History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel
• The Pattern On The Stone: The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work by Daniel Hillis
• Imagined Worlds by Freeman Dyson
• The Story of Writing: Alphabets, Hieroglyphs & Pictograms by Andrew Robinson
• Brave New World (The Folio Society) by Aldous Huxley and Illustrated by Leonard Rosoman (Illustrator)
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
• Infinite in All Directions: Gifford Lectures Given at Aberdeen, Scotland April–November 1985 by Freeman J. Dyson
• What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
• The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
• Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
• Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks
• State of the Art by Iain M. Banks
• Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks
• Excession by Iain M. Banks
• Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge
• The Discoverers: Volumes I and II by Daniel J. Boorstin
• Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom
• The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington
• The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman
• Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May
• Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play by James P. Carse. published by Ballantine Books
• One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism by Rodney Stark
• The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson
• The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet’s Surprising Future by Fred Pearce
• Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock
• The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian Fagan
• Medieval Civilisation by Jacques Le Goff
• The Civilization of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History, the Life and Death of a Civilization by Norman F. Cantor
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
• The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples by Tim Flannery
• The Epic of Gilgamesh The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akadian and Sumerian translated by Andrew George
• The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
• Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition) by Seamus Heaney
• How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built by Stewart Brand
• Grand Design: The Earth from Above by Georg Gerster
• The Complete Oxford Shakespeare: Histories, Comedies, Tragedies 3 Volumes
• The Merck Manual Home Health Handbook by Robert Porter
• Lao Tzu: Te-Tao Ching – A New Translation Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-wang-tui Texts by Lao Tzu and translated by Robert G. Henricks
• The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil by Heinrich Zimmer edited by Joseph Campbell
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Everyman’s Library Classics)

“To add your own recommendations of books to include in the Manual for Civilization or to vote on which suggested titles should find a place on The Interval’s shelvesjust make a donation to support the project. We look forward to your contributions!”

       

Graphene water distillation

*This is one of those developments that sound obscure and technical, but if you can clean water of impurities at low or zero cost, then water conditioning might be a bigger deal than air-conditioning.

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2014/how-to-create-selective-holes-in-graphene-0225.html

(…)

“A big limitation in existing nanofiltration and reverse-osmosis desalination plants, which use filters to separate salt from seawater, is their low permeability: Water flows very slowly through them. The graphene filters, being much thinner, yet very strong, can sustain a much higher flow. “We’ve developed the first membrane that consists of a high density of subnanometer-scale pores in an atomically thin, single sheet of grapheme,” O’Hern says.

“For efficient desalination, a membrane must demonstrate “a high rejection rate of salt, yet a high flow rate of water,” he adds. One way of doing that is decreasing the membrane’s thickness, but this quickly renders conventional polymer-based membranes too weak to sustain the water pressure, or too ineffective at rejecting salt, he explains.

“With graphene membranes, it becomes simply a matter of controlling the size of the pores, making them “larger than water molecules, but smaller than everything else,” O’Hern says — whether salt, impurities, or particular kinds of biochemical molecules.

“The permeability of such graphene filters, according to computer simulations, could be 50 times greater than that of conventional membranes…”

       

Netizens of Xinjiang

*Boy, are they ever in for it.

http://www.chinasmack.com/?p=56482

       

Dead Media Beat: Jon Ippolito valiantly battling dead media decay

*I’m reading the new book Prof Ippolito co-wrote, and it’s pretty good, even though the implications are pretty grim.

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From: Jon Ippolito

“Here are more resources for artists and anyone else keen on keeping culture alive for the long haul. All are premised on the conviction that storage is not preservation.

* Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory
First academic book on digital preservation, by Rick Rinehart and me, due out from MIT this summer.

http://re-collection.net

* Digital Curation at the University of Maine
Online graduate program I helped start to teach creators and preservers to maintain media works for the long term. Enroll in an 18-credit certificate or take courses a la carte.

http://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu

* Variable Media Network
Preservation tools and resources for artists, like the Variable Media Questionnaire and the Seeing Double emulation testbed.

http://variablemedia.net/e/index.html

* Permanence Through Change
Free book of variable media preservation case studies in variable media preservation.

http://variablemedia.net/e/preserving/html/var_pub_index.html

       

Bruce Sterling, “Using Art to Cross Borders into the Future”

*I don’t create tech-art installations every week. However, a critic has to give it a shot every once in a while, just to appreciate the difficulties.

*I’m in the Arizona State University laser-lab now, where we are busily employing the Brian Eno creative method of firing arrows, then drawing targets around the place they hit.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/03/03/bruce_sterling_s_arduino_powered_art_installation_mi_futura_frontera_my.html

(…)

“These experiential musings led me to create an interactive artwork for the Emerge festival at Arizona State University on Friday, March 7. (Disclosure: Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, ASU, and the New America Foundation.) The goal of Emerge is to make the dry and abstract “future” into something immediate, personal, and tangible, that you can get your hands on. This year’s theme is “The Future of Me”: How much agency will we, as individuals, have in the near future? Will the networks bend every effort to learn our every quirk and serve our every whim? Or will we be like an illegal migrant, who lacks civil rights and a legal ID, a guy with a lot of “future,” but not much “me?”

“My contribution to Emerge this year is a border machine, “Mi Futura Frontera/My Future Frontier.” The installation is powered by open-source software and is arranged to be at least as complex as a typical customs declaration. It’s a whirling tower of cultural images, surrounded a jittery pair of marionettes. These polite border-crossing migrants do their best to obey the gestures of the viewer of the artwork. Like most of us in the passport office and the customs waiting queue, they’re doing the best to go through the motions. But they’re puppets of a system that isn’t built for their benefit, and reactions can get out of hand.

” “Mi Futura Frontera/My Future Frontier” is about trans-national clichés. It’s about that whirlwind of superstition and stereotype that gusts up whenever you step from one legal realm to another. On the far side of a border-crossing is the soil of another nation. There’s another culture there, offering the potential prospect of another, future “me.” No matter how quickly you return from such an experience, you’re not quite the same guy. …”

       

Dead Media Beat: film

*The cinema business wouldn’t destroy its own heritage in pursuit of fast bucks, would it?

*Well, they’ve done it before. And the more you know about it, the worse it gets.

http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/429-film-preservation-20/

(…)

“The most commonly used format for digital archiving is Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology, a magnetic tape format that is most commonly used for enterprise data backups. LTO tapes are more stable than hard drives, which are subject to mechanical failure, but they’re far from ideal. Although it’s estimated that they have a 15-to-30-year lifespan, most studios assume a practical lifespan of five years. It isn’t simply an issue of tape degradation, either: The drives that read the tapes are also subject to obsolescence. Since 2000, new generations of LTO technology have been released every two years or so—new tapes and new drives—and they’re only backward-compatible for two generations. So a film that was archived to tape in 2006 using then-state-of-the-art LTO-3 tapes can’t be read by the LTO-6 drives that are for sale today. In other words, the tape drive that created an archival copy of Skyfall in December 2012 wouldn’t be able to read the original 2006 copy of Casino Royale—the technology becomes obsolete faster than James Bond is recast. To read one of these tapes, even if the data is in pristine condition, you’d have to find an older drive.

“The practical result of this is that a digital film archive needs to invest heavily in data migration to maintain its assets. Every five years or so, each film needs to be copied to new media, in a constant race against magnetic-tape degradation and drive obsolescence. This requires time and money: new tapes, new drives, staff to copy and verify the data. It’s worth it to studios, as long as they continue to make money from their libraries. But a studio that stops migrating its data will lose it quickly. If the last decade has taught us nothing else, it’s that our system rewards executives who make horrible long-term decisions for short-term results. (See Jamie Dimon.) In the analog world, most of the cost of preservation is paid when the archival print is created. But for a digitally preserved film, the cost of migration shows up every five years. Postponing it is going to be tempting, especially during buyouts, changes in management, or any of the near-constant corporate turmoil that puts huge short-term pressure on cost-cutting. Films that continue to make money are probably safe, but for bombs—whether they were genuinely terrible or interesting failures—the incentives are all wrong. Putting a significant part of our cultural heritage in a system where a five-year gap in funding means catastrophic, irrevocable loss seems to guarantee we’ll lose some of it….”