Takeshi Murata is probably best known as a media and video artist, but after seeing “Untitled (Pink Dot)” (2007), I suspected his aims and interests, if not his practice, may intersect with my own. While I have been told that my own work resembles film in some ways, in many cases I find the similaries end with the aesthetic. In Murata’s work I find the opposite: While the aesthetics may not be at all similar, he has a series of works in which I find the mechanisms familiar. (more…)

Trust no oneDeep Throat, The X-Files

“Security” for network communication can basically (at least for our purposes here) be split into two distinct paradigms: Secrecy and verification. Secrecy entails encoding a message for transmission such that if the message were to be intercepted by a third party it would appear to be unreadable; The canonical example is the ROT13 “substitution” cipher. Verification is the process by which the contents of a message can be reliably determined to have not been modified in transmission (for example via a Man-in-the-Middle attack); The most common form of cryptographic verification is the Digital Signature. Digital Signatures are also an example of one type of “Asymmetric Cryptography” in which one of the primary benefits (usually at the expense of speed) is the ability to freely publish one-half of the complete cipher (hence the term “Public Key” cryptography). (more…)

As described here. Now in YouTube form! 2-1.mov (click me!).

Here it is installed at UCSD Open Studios 2009! (click me too!). Here’s the statement that accompanies it:

First in a series of video installations that attempts to break down the narrative style of popular contemporary and classic games. As narrative devices in popular games have moved from story and player-driven narratives toward “open world” designs, it has exposed the current state of artificial life (the computer controlled players, animals, etc) as extremely rudimentary. This was not nearly as obvious in classic games, for instance in Super Mario Bros., as time in these games generally moves forward as the player-avatar (Mario in this case) progresses in space from left-to-right. That is, enemies that are some screens ahead of the player don’t yet exist as the entire world is instantiated by the actions of the player.

As an attempt to explore the notion that the world exists as at the pleasure of the player-avatar, and critique the current state of alife in contemporary games, I have created a narrative that focuses not on Mario, but instead on a lone “Goomba” in world 2-1 of Super Mario Bros. 2-1.avi makes use of a “tool assisted speed run” (a complete play-through of the game assisted by software tools), created by “kimz”, as Mario’s movement through the game world from start to completion in 5:20.

re: Daylight recorder

Cool idea – some questions: Does it light the whole room in order to simulate the lighting one would experience at a different time? Also – why does it offset by 12 hours? Those of us who wake at noon are more like 6 hours off from other people, who might wake up at 6AM.February 23, 2009, by Amy A.

Amy, I think you’re definitely right about the variable temporal offset. In reality I think I’m also on a 6-hour offset, to be honest. I started thinking about how I might best represent this, and it occurred to me that while my own personal offset may function well in a particular installation format, it may be a more interesting project if I were to take a step back from the concept as a personal gesture and look at it as legitimately functional software. (more…)

I take a perverse pleasure in writing ASM code. Recently I’ve been working with Playpower to develop some reasonable work-flow for developing a series of NES carts. There is a team of students trying to get proper C libraries compiling useful code for the NES, but while working on the hardware side of things I have re-visited the “un nes” project that I had done during my time in CADRE, and so I’ve had a creeping interest in writing ASM again.. (more…)

A one or two-piece device that uses and optical eye (or webcam, etc) to gather the “average color” of the sky. If placed in a location with a clear view of the sky it will gather the changing color of the sky over the course of a day. The second piece of the device plays back the color-data via a series of multi-colored LEDs. (more…)

How much data do you carry around on a daily basis that lives outside a computer? I bought a new cheapo memory stick the other day and started trying to enumerate my daily haul of gigabytes:

• 16gb flash drive
• 4gb flash drive
• 16gb iPod
• 2gb MicroSD (phone)
• 120gb external hard drive

Grand total:  158gb of data (more…)

Hackers are more likely to have cats than dogs (in fact, it is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature).The Jargon File, Appendix B.

Let’s be honest here, this is an excuse to post pictures of my cat, Sugar. But aside from that I enjoy this quote because rather than thinking about how exactly it is that cats express the “hacker nature”, I’m more interested how the “hacker nature” is expressed by humans in such a way that it is equally applicable to felines. Is it “merely” an appreciation for un-inhibited curiosity? Or would one assign the other traits commonly associated with hackers to a cat? (more…)

Recently I started using the multi-protocol chat client Pidgin. No, not that one, the other Pidgin. (more…)