More than our culture is at stake.
Author Richard Schickel laments that we are loosing the practice of criticism.
we have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion …
blogging is a form of speech, not of writing … The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement …
Blogging is yammering, not writing, and the “democratic literary landscape” it creates is a wasteland, without standards, maps, or oases of intelligence and delight.
Josh Getlin reports on how major newspapers are shrinking their book review sections in spite of what publisher James Atlas believes is “a very robust period for publishing,” which effectively cedes critical clout to bloggers.
Literary critic Adam Kirsch observes “hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned. And the scorn is reciprocated: Professional writers usually assume that those who can, do, while those who can’t, blog.” Although his discussion focuses on literary blogs, the problem of amateurism extends to blogs of any subject.
The only useful part of most book blogs, in fact, are the links to long-form essays and articles by professional writers, usually from print journals.
Still, it is important to distinguish between the blog as a genre and the Internet as a medium. It is not just possible but likely that, one day, serious criticism will find its primary home on the Web. The advantages — ease of access, low cost, potential audience — are too great to ignore, even if our habits and technology still make it hard to read long essays on the computer screen. Already there are some web publications — like Contemporary Poetry Review (cprw.com), to which I occasionally contribute — that match anything in print for seriousness of purpose. But there’s no chance that literary culture will thrive on the Internet until we recognize that the ethical and intellectual crotchets of the bloggers represent a dead end.
Thus, blogs seem appropriate as a form of speech or a repository of links. Unfortunately, blogspeech rarely becomes conversation. Rather than a global community for debate and discourse, we have the rabble of a virtual Tower of Babel. Most discussion on blogs raises the question: How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra?
Rob Cockerham calculates at least 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways.
The internet is not the utopia of knowledge we wish it to be. Tom McCarthy, a teacher, believes that “the art of thinking is being lost because people can type in a word and find a source and think that’s the be all end all.”
Winni Hu reports that of the thousands of schools with programs providing laptops to students, many are beginning to phase out these technology initiatives. Educators have found “no evidence [laptops] had any impact on student achievement … there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.” Rather than academic growth, students “have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses.”
Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.
Even worse, art, music, physical education, and field trips are often cut to pay for computers, support staff, and constant repairs. Todd Oppenheimer highlighted the dangerous emphasis on computers in education for the Atlantic in 1997. No doubt the danger is more severe today as every classroom is becoming a ‘computer lab.’
high-tech hopes for America’s schoolchildren … are joined to philanthropic commitments to helping schools make curriculum changes. This sometimes gets businesspeople involved in schools, where they’ve begun to understand and work with the many daunting problems that are unrelated to technology. But if business gains too much influence over the curriculum, the schools can become a kind of corporate training center — largely at taxpayer expense.
The Telegraph held a contest. “The idea was to come up with a paragraph or two, no longer than 150 words, packed with as many infuriating words and phrases as possible.” R.G. Banks’ entry exaggerates typical blog fare (slightly). As new generations of students increasingly rely on the internet for gathering knowledge, we have a growing responsibility to improve the quality of online texts. Without editorial standards, accountability of sources, and clear distinctions between online manifestations of authorship and speech, the art of thinking in future generations will achieve this:
Let’s stop obsessing and get down to the nitty gritty of fleshing out the gender issues. John. I’m wanting to hear inclusiveness and ethnicity here. A raft of blue sky thinking to challenge accepted orthodoxies. The bottom line is about empowerment and at the end of the day getting up to speed working 24/7 towards a coalition of understanding through best practice. This can only be fully achieved if the glass ceiling, in inverted commas, is transformed into a level playing field where the goal posts cannot be moved without leaving a substantial carbon footprint which inevitably would consign us all to the expediency of existing between a rock and a hard place. We must pick up the ball and run because we can no longer wait for the smoking gun of the next denial of service attack to consign us all to the wheely bin of history.
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I ran across these images exploring NodeBox, which is a programming environment that can be thought of as Processing for Python (instead of Java), being developed by the Experimental Media group at St. Lucas School of Arts, Antwerp, Belgium. Emphasis is on generating 2D design and AI (instead of 3D graphics and interaction).
Percolator is a program written in NodeBox that generated the images above:
Percolator is a set of algorithms that create an artistic
composition of images, based on what’s in the news today. In short,
three things take place once the code is run:
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Harvest news from the internet: using the Google
library for NodeBox, a number of news sites are visited (CNN, BBC, Fox
News, Google News, ABC News, MSNBC, CBSNews, Yahoo! News, Wired News,
USA TODAY) and summarised with an extension of the Keywords library for NodeBox.
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Harvest corresponding images: a number of images are drawn from the Photobjects library, based on the keyword summary of today’s news.
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Collate the images: a composition is then assembled from these images using the PhotoBot
library for NodeBox. This algorithm knows things about contrast and
harmony, and typically applies rotation, scaling, overlay blends, hue
blends, and gradient masks.
The developer, Tom De Smedt, has a great article about his work with NodeBox and Artificial Creativity.
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Watch the amazing video: http://www.flightphase.com/about.html
Artist Karolina Sobecka has created a new, mobile form of installation art that breaks free from the usual constraints of projected art: indoor or static. The project is a delightful commentary on the role of the car as a hybrid indoor-outdoor space, its ability to transmit concepts from both, and the effects of technological development on nature.
“At night projections from moving cars are shone on the buildings downtown. Each car projects a video of a wild animal. The animal’s movements are programmed to correspond to the speed of the car: as the car moves, the animal runs along it speeding up and slowing down with the car, as the car stops, the animal stops also. The framerate of the movie corresponds to the speed of the wheel rotation, picked up by a sensor.”
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There have been plenty of stories about technical problems associated with municipal-level WiFi projects, but this one may be a first. The WiFi network designed to cover Bowdoin College and its neighbors in Brunswick, Maine has been put off indefinitely, due to worries over whether or not the network needs to be wiretap-ready for the FBI.
read more | digg story
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processing has several new or updated libraries including:
switchboard is a web services library to pull data from Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and more
MovieMaker makes movies of sketches
ESS handles sound samples, streams, and live audio that can be changed, analyzed, saved, etc
I now have a working version of Cubist Life that has audio functionality.
It monitors the built in mic and increases the 3d projection of the
image such that different parts of the video respond to different
spectrums of sound. I recommend whistling.
here is ted. i believe he is shouting.
i’m working on another version
that uses circles instead of boxes. see me working. it also reduces the
number of colors displayed. i’m trying to get an interactive particle
system going. but that will take time..
technorati tags:processing
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LINE FORMS HERE
photos of our interactive art installation on a 50’ x 50’ plot of land in a cow field in Tennessee. Playing on the idea of an indoor gallery space, hundreds of balls of yarn were tied, tossed, and hung to create individual pieces occupying area between poles, suggesting walls and barriers. Thousands of festival-goers contributed to the constantly changing, never static form. (its mentioned on a knitting blog) Six artists served as curators (armed with scissors) throughout the festival as the piece evolved. Designed John Crowell, Abby Goldfarb, Brandon Kaplan, Sofie Scheerlinck, Ian Trask, and Evan Wheeler, with guidance from John Bisbee and Wade Kavanaugh, at the 2006 Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. much better than last year’s installation.
Check out the Projects page to the right for the very same description you just read, as well as links to Cubist Life, a 3D video mapping application i demonstrated at Bonnaroo. Its a live-video processing application that maps the video feed into a 3D space based on the brightness of the feed. The video’s pixels are displayed as colored boxes, whose depth is determined by the pixel’s brightness. Moving the mouse along the y-axis pulls the brighter boxes away from the duller ones. The viewing perspective rotates about the displayed feed to highlight the relief of the moving image. Made using Processing with about eighty lines of code.
i also heard the following acts perform: dios (malos), devotchka, devendra banhart, bright eyes, oysterhead, death cab for cutie, cat power and the memphis rhythm band, tom petty and the heartbreakers, my morning jacket, common, neville brothers, magic numbers, dungen, clap your hands say yeah, elvis costello and the imposters feat allen toussaint, beck, cypress hill, radiohead, dr. john, dresden dolls, refugee allstars of sierra leone, matisyahu, the streets, stephen malkmus and the jicks, sun volt, sonic youth, and a little phil lesh and friends. Brooklynvegan took pictures of some of them and reviewed some performances.
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A visualization of death tolls from September 11, Iraq, Indian Ocean tsunami, and Darfur, Sudan. The visualization uses four particle systems to generate circles for each location, differentiated by size, color. Each circle represents 1000 people killed. The life of particles is the total number of deaths in thousands. The size of each particle is the sum (in millions) of the number of results from five Google searches for
death
dead
casualties
killed
death toll
to represent our collective interest and compassion for each crisis.
Due to the large death count in Darfur, the particles would not fade out before exiting the screen. So, I added methods so the particles would bounce off of the bottom and side of the window. This is accomplished by reversing the acceleration vector of a particle as it hits a point below the window (to give the illusion of compression). The acceleration increases after collision to indicate the souls’ release from their bodies. Representations of Iraq and Sept 11 quickly puff out of the window, so I didn’t give them bouncing abilities.
To engage the viewer and emphasize the concept, the user can interact with the particles using a mouse. This feature proved too disruptive to the larger circles and took away from the effectiveness of the presentation. To play on the visual idea of souls flowing from the location, moving the mouse can disrupt or pause the path of a particle, so the user can speed up release of souls or catch a few so they fade before they can exit the window. To accomplish this, a particle’s acceleration vector is altered by subtracting the current mouse location from the previous frame’s mouse location so moving slowly seems to hold the particle under the mouse and moving quickly seems to collide with it.
NOTE: firefox and camino seem better than safari at rendering the visualization
P.S.:
I received a greenlight today for exhibiting the currently-unnamed 3-d video mapping applet you can find below. It will be modified so that the projection into 3-d space is determined by pixel brightness and sound levels around the installation. It will be shown at TN’s Bonnarroo Music & Arts Festival in various spots so it will respond to live performances. Hopefully a sizeable portion of the 100,000 attendees will experience it. The installation will use a mac, microphone, DV camera, lcd projector, walls, and white bedsheets. I will update with lots of photos, etc, of the video project as well as the sand, bamboo, and rock installation I am working on.
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heres dfhf.
see more examples
or
enter an address for a graph (made with processing)
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Here are some demonstration sketches I put togeather with Processing for a presentation last week. I’ll put up my final project (a data visualization) once its finished. Processing is an open-source language and environment for doing neat stuff easily.
Orthdir demo:
This applet draws a series of boxes with user-manipulable lighting, viewing angle, and orthographic projection.
Move the mouse to change the directional lighting.
Click and hold the mouse to zoom in.
Press ‘1′ and move mouse to change camera position.
Press ‘2′ and move mouse to alter orthographic projection of the boxes.
Cam demo:
This applet takes live video from a camera and translates the pixels into a three dimensional space based on pixel brightness and mouse location along the x axis.
Move the mouse left to right to alter the distance pixels are mapped along the z axis.
Cam uses your computer’s default capture device.
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blackpool lights - ep [self released]
jim suptic from the get up kids
black heart procession - the spell [touch and go]
unfortunately not a murder mystery concept album (like their last)
*beirut - gulag orkestar [ba da bing!]
balkan gypsy baroque carnival
grandaddy - just like the fambly cat [v2]
fuzzy pop rock
sound team - “movie monster” [capitol/emi]
anthemic space rock
*charlatans uk - simpatico [sanctuary]
dreamy powerpop on top of dub/reggae beats and piano, clav, organs, synths
zach hill and mick barr [5rc]
zach hill of hella/ladies and co. bring more frenetic rambling
neil young - living with war [reprise]
hate bush? we have the album for you!
*matmos - the rose has teeth in the mouth of a beast [matador]
thumping sexy robot music made from synths, samples, and household items
carey ott - lucid dream [dualtone]
a little bit country, a little bit britpop, a lot of rock
mittens - fools on a holiday [bodies of water arts and crafts]
short morsels of twangy catchy rock
snow patrol - eyes open [a&m]
upbeat rock recalls 90s alternative
*bob ricci - not a christmas album [music deals]
reincarnation of weird al for modern pop culture. .parodying u2, lfo, pink, shania twain, …
illegal substance - sampler [selfreleased]
is he a lost beastie boy? or just an impersonator..
holy shit - stranded at two harbors [uunited acoustic]
dreamy lofi drenched in reverb
**art brut - bang bang rock & roll [fierce panda/downtown/banana]
they sing “its not irony, its rock and roll” with their balls on walls
violins - pink water [contraphonic/no karma]
brit rock with their balls in their pants
**the ark - state of the ark [rebel group/emi]
head shaking, playful arena glam anthems from sweden
helvetia - the clever north wind [the static cult]
nice downtempo indie pop
languis - other desert cities [pehr]
atmospheric shoegaze meets 80s new wave
bruce springsteen - we shall overcome the seeger sessions [columbia]
the boss tackles classic country and bluegrass without rehersal (filed under BOSS)
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mammoths melting out of the ice!?! - meow hit lot dood [self released]
multi-instrumentalist collective playing instrumental songs with strings and occasionall electronics
persephone’s bees - a peek into the underworld [columbia]
an underworld of sexy rock with a russian accent
aphex twin/afx - chosen lords [chrysalis/rephlex]
a block of yellow - grow up or grow out [around sounds]
britpop rock ep
the five mod four - whiskers [contraphonic music/no karma]
chicago rock outfit. sometimes witty
a whisper in the noise - as the bluebird sings [transdreamer]
eerie
*the lovely feathers - hind hind legs [equator]
full length from these lovely canadians
the presets - beams [modular]
electrodancerock
nicky click - you’re already a member [crunks no dead]
sassy electropop
*men women & children - s/t [reprise]
like the sour skittles of disco rock
shearwater - palo santo [misra]
okkervil river’s “other band”
v/a - selections from monsieur gainsbourg revisited [verve/forecast]
a few covers featuring the rakes, cat power, feist, michael stipe and more
**serena maneesh - s/t [playlouderrecordings]
norweigan group recalls the noise pop of eric’s trip and my bloody valentine
yonder mountain string band - s/t [frog pad/vanguard]
eclectic americana
look down - 24/7 dance force [afternoon]
pinbacky dance rock
human television - look at who you’re talking to [gigantic]
really neat packaging
walking bicycles - disconnected [high wheel]
female fronted indie rock
saves the day - sound the alarm [vagrant]
sound the alarm theyre still through being cool
orbit service - songs of eta carinae [beta-lactam ring]
dark and spacey
jolie holland - springtime can kill you [anti]
no it can’t!
future pigeon - the echodelic sounds of future [record collection]
freak dub? psychadelic reggae? afrobeat punk? death disco?
nofx - wolves in wolves’ clothing [fat wreck chords]
no kidding punk
blanket music - love translation [hush]
twee pop. one disc of originals, one of covers
the fever - in the city of sleep [kemado]
rolicking dark carnival
demolition doll rods - there is a difference [swami]
ballsy, smokey female rock
bedroom walls - all good dreamers pass this way [baria]
dreamy slow soothing rock
the like young - last secrets [polyvinyl]
some seroius, some fun
the little killers - a real good one [gern blandsten]
not like the big killers
*rose merlberg - cast away the clouds [double agent]
‘i wanna fall asleep to her voice.. is that creepy?’ asks tauwan
anatheallo - floating world [nettwerk]
somber, brooding, seven member collaborative
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If you like violent movies, you should move to Korea. Not because we don’t like you, but because arthouse violence is all the rage there. On April 28th Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, the 3rd of Park Chan-wook’s revenge series, is released on DVD here in the states. They are pretty intense (see incest, violence).
I asked him if violence, even imaginary violence, was perhaps an exaggerated response to this virtual new world, an extreme form of human contact. “Because of capitalism, relationships between people and their communities — family, or clan, or region — have largely broken down”… The characters in his films, he said, were “bound to feel lonely and isolated from the world.” That is why he often shows them communicating by e-mail or mobile phones, instead of actually seeing one another. “This puts a distance between people, leading to misunderstandings, which is interesting.”
From the New York Times Magazine article. He is a philosophy major.
Update: In the of “being the man” and “keeping people down” the NYT is charging cash money for the article. Try these less compelling ones instead.
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rennick - to the skies [pathways]
i thought we already got morrisseys new album. and it was no longer the 80s
*the concretes - in colour [astralwerks]
yum brit pop
*the rakes - capture/release [v2]
a british the_ band
*be your own pet - summer sensation [ecstatic peace!]
like the yeah yeah yeahs with a bass guitar
matthew sweet and susanna hoffs - under the covers vol. 1 [shout]
dig their new versions of smash hits and rediscovered gems!
victory at sea - all your things are gone [gern blandsten]
piano based pop
battleship - s/t [on on switch]
noisy rock
mono - you are there [human highway/ temporary residence]
ambient instrumentals
*norfolk and western - a gilded age [hush]
rustic pop songs with a saloon swing
voxtrot - s/t [cult hero]
jangly rock both catchy and edgy
*maritime - we, the vehicles [flameshovel]
promise ring and dismemberment plan widowers finally find a sound of their own
rahim - ideal lives [frenchkiss]
bass-centric angular rock with brass
geoff farina - already told you [southern]
spare, mellow guy with guitar
submarines - declare a new state! [nettwerk]
drum machine indiepop
lyon - hold me close ft. lady l [single] [self released]
prophet of eternal testament - s/t [angel boy]
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oops. forgot to post last weeks adds:
the rewinds - s/t [livewire]
southern power pop
end of fashion - s/t [capitol]
australian power pop
tom brosseau - s/t [loveless]
cozy, twangy folk
south - adventures in the underground journey to the stars [young american/yam]
dreamy brit pop
pretty girls make graves - elan vital [matador]
first album with new keyboardist
velvet teen - gysmkid [slowdance]
heavier sound than previous releases. less synthpop more glitchy lap-pop
aloha - some echoes [polyvinyl]
heavier sound than previous releases. less indiepop more prog rock
a whisper in the noise - as the bluebird sings radio e.p. [transdreamer]
dark rock with eerie strings and horns. includes a haunting dylan cover
the flaming lips - at war with the mystics [warner bros]
new lips!!!!!!!
morrissey - ringleader of the tormentors [attack/sanctuary]
serious crooning
the cribs - mirror kissers [wichita]
three song teaser for upcoming album
tanakh - ardent fevers [alien8]
subdued, delicate thirteen piece chamber rock ensemble
v/a - invaders [kemado]
its all heavy; high on fire, comets on fire, fucking champs, dungen, wolfmother, etc.
v/a - see you on the moon! [paper bag]
kids songs performed by broken social scene (puff the magic dragon), sufjan, junior boys, mark kozelek, hot chip, and more
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