Glittery, Shiny and Highly Distracting. - Keeping Me Occupied is a Full Time Job

Whereis: lines plotted

2008-07-05T22:28:00Z

Anselm created a map of me! Apparently my life is wicked boring. His map was way cooler. Meglet’s map was INSANE.

Proposal for Whereis? for Disjecta

2008-06-24T16:35:00Z

A little submission for a small project: Very basic, wrote it in ten minutes.

Artists: Paige Saez paigesaez.org Anselm Hook hook.org

Affiliations: makerlab.com red76.com

Proposal for Disjecta Art Space for opening exhibit of the new space in NoPo

Medium: Website, Video, Google Maps, Cellphones, Processing

The artists have been working in augmented reality style art/game projects and de-mystifying technologies. For the purpose of this and many projects, they have hacked their cellphones and begun reprogramming them in novel ways. One of which involves a voluntary tracking device.

Whereis:

Now more than ever, we are being persistently watched by governments and corporations- this is done in a manner of already familiar ways- via our purchases with credit cards, video surveillance and online transactions and activities to name just a few.

Using geo-location triangulation via cell towers everyone can be tracked by their cellphone- plotting daily movements for anyone with the device.

Surfacing this inherent stalking capability the artists have offered to be tracked in real-time for the remainder of their lives, by hacking their phones and creating a database of all of the movements that they make across the landscape.

The artists have devised a means of displaying this activity in real time, plotting our lives in linear form on to the walls of the space and then forever more on our website: makerlab.com/projects. The project will be open and free for everyone to take and use to make their own tracking devices at the exhibit.

Furthermore, we would like to invite other people to plot their lives with us-using the same software we created. The result would be that there is an organically generated painting of each persons daily lives overlapping each other with the movements mapped and translated into a piece simultaneously. Each person will be represented as a shape, color or line. To participate in this little piece please write me at paige @ g mail dot com

From Andy

2008-06-22T00:15:00Z

Dorkbot PDX: Arduino Workshop

2008-06-18T19:42:00Z

Hey all! DORKBOT PDX at PNCA

Don’t forget the date!

This sunday at PNCA from 2-6pm in Room #205 Main Building Dorkbot Arduino Workshop.

Learn how to make kinetic/robot/interactive/wearable art projects.

inspiring links:

http://www.arduino.cc/playground/ http://www.botanicalls.com/network.html http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Projects/ArduinoUsers#sonicPingPong

http://dorkbotpdx.org

Donald Delmar Davis’s (the teacher of the workshop) photo stream

OnGallery by Ben Foote of PDX Stump

2008-06-13T04:35:00Z

Benjamin Foote, a dear friend, collaborator, and makerlab founder has moved in next door to me and started a gallery. The gallery opens on July 3rd and will feature the work of local and national and international interactive digital and analog artists. There is no formal call for work out as of yet, but you can get in touch with him and submit work here: callforartists@ONgallery.org

Blogged Blogging across many blogdoms

2008-06-04T21:09:00Z

Red76

2008-06-04T16:31:00Z

Paige and Sam are going to San Jose for the 01’s Festival

Weclome to ToolShed Days Day-to-Day.

In the fall of 2007 Red76, in collaboration with the staff and students of the CADRE Media Laboratory at San Jose State University, began investigating the possibilities of the online collaborative platform Second Life as a means towards engaging radical social histories and contemporary socio-political dilemmas. Surrounding a series of dialogues and public actions – entitled ToolShed Days – three discrete projects were implemented; Second Home, Befriend a Recruiter, and Defense Co-op. For the ZeroOne Festival in San Jose, California Red76 will discuss these projects, and the interests and ideas that grew out of them through a series of formal and informal public initiatives. Walks, lectures, radio broadcasts, impromptu sign-making sessions, mobile photo studios, and more will be some of the means in which the ideas manifest from ToolShed Days will make their way into public space in San Jose. All of the groups activities will be somewhat improvised day-to-day as a means of creating a formulaic conversation with the random interactions that take place between the group and the public at large. Regular schedules of the groups activities can be found by dialing a toll-free hotline number (1-888-339-4496), which will be updated each morning, and at times throughout the day.

Red76 in San Jose- Just call me

2008-06-03T19:21:00Z

1-888-339-4496

Welcome to Second Home

2008-06-03T17:18:00Z

Red76 and Toolshed Days at San Jose 01's Festival

2008-06-03T17:04:00Z

Red76 is in San Jose for the 01’s Festival

This photo is from the 2006 01’s Festival Photo Gallery Karaoke Ice photo by Soda Spuds

The group has been working all year long on some freaking amazing projects. The festival events outline that we are proposing here is only a small snippet of all the work that Sam Gould, Gabriel Mindel-Solomon, Laura Baldwin and countless others put into this years projects.

Background information on Toolshed Days can be found at http://www.red76.com/pleasetext.html

Here is the tentative schedule of events

Day One – (Wednesday, June 4th – starting in the early a.m. at Montalvo) A long walk into (more likely around) SJ [from Montalvo] wherein people may join us, or meet us at our destination. The walk will parallel the walk members of Home had to take after their post office was shut down due to the mailing of “obscene materials.” Homeites had to walk to the Lakebay post office, the next town over, to deliver the newspapers they published, and any other mail they wished to send out of the area.

When we arrive from our walk into San Jose we’ll meet at a destination to be figured on later. We hope to talk about how far people will go to disperse information, and what is, and how do we, value the information we tend to disperse so ready nowadays.

Day Two – (Thursday, June 5th – throughout the day, various locations around San Jose) We will be setting up a mobile portrait studio that we’ll make available on street corners around San Jose. A sign will read, “Free – Home Photo Studio.” We mean Home, Washington, and Second Home, of course. We’ve printed up a 8ft. x 6ft. full color vinyl banner featuring a photo of Joe’s Bay taken in Home, Wa. People can get their photo taken as if they were in/at Home. We’ll e.mail them the portrait. At this time we’ll be able to give them copies of the Home edition of the Journal of Radical Shimming and direct them to the Second Home project.

Day Three – (Friday, June 6th, 5pm – at the laundromat up the street from Dakao [sp?]) We are planning a Skype Laundry Lecture talk with Steve Lambert and Jeff Crouse (two fellows over at Eyebeam in NYC) who built out the letter generator for Befriend a Recruiter.

Day Four – (Saturday, June 7th 3pm – Caesar Chavez Park) Aaron Hughes, the Great Lakes chapter head of Iraq Veterans Against the War is flying out from Chicago to take part in a presentation we’ll set up in Caesar Chavez Park, across from the museum. The presentation will include other vets discussing their recruitment and war-time experiences, discussions about the IVAW, and Aaron and I will be discussing the Befriend a Recruiter project and the role and available use of the mock-recruitment center in Second Life.

Apart from these activities we plan on doing a lot of work on the spot, setting up Liberty Hall’s wherever we may be to have impromptu discussions regarding themes raised in conjunction with the ToolShed Days ideas.

We’ve incorporated a blog within the ToolShed Days website to chronicle all of this chatter, as well as install means to upload on the fly – such as a cell phone mp3 interface wherein we can “call-in” to the ToolShed Days blog with current thoughts and post the audio. And, of course, we have the 800# for people to know where we are up to the minute for them to come and join in on the conversation with us.

Red76 toolshed days blog

2008-05-25T16:53:00Z

will go here dammit!

Classifying Experiences

2008-05-21T19:31:00Z

link to full PDF of the poster

From 2006. I KNOW. But it is still pretty awesome data visualization for understanding user experience. Thinking I should print it up REAL BIG and bring it to work. Then whenever someone needs some educatin’ we can whip out the big poster.

This beautiful poster was made by Stephen P. Anderson, who

“explores all things related to business design, strategy, and great customer experiences.”

he blogs at poet painter

Iconfinder- no brains?

2008-05-21T17:25:00Z

Well now, why not?

Actually the iconfinder service is pretty cool. Like Google for Icons right? Yeah, I get it. Only not nearly as exhaustive yet. It is MUCH faster and less painful than doing a google search for images.

I can’t wait to see what will be possible when the gaps in the content are filled in. And it’s kind of annoying that I can’t just SEE a listing of what they actually have rather than doing a ton of dead-end searching with no results.

I could use their tag cloud though- Now isn’t that just a wee bit dated? I just got schooled on tag cloud heuristics last week- digg article on this
damn lemme tell you- be sure you have a really good reason for this or be prepared to be swatted. Be prepared anyway, actually. I sound harsh, I realize- just thinking outloud.

I keep trying to remind myself “Just cause you can do something…doesn’t mean you should.” Don’t get me wrong. I like tag clouds (scroll down- see the pretty!). But they have a very limited utility. They are crappy for actually finding something, anything, since they are totally impossible to read. I added a tag cloud to the bottom of this blog because, well, what the hell else can I do with all those delicious tags? I am not actually going to ever sort or use them. Too much work. So I will slap them on things and call it art. mmmmm. art.

Other than this minor flaw of how to find out if Iconfinder has an icon or not, I am pretty pleased with their service.

But I digress. What I wanted to say was that someone needs to make a nice set of shiny web 2.0 brain icons right now. Don’t forget to add the shiny.

Our paper money is un-constitutional. No kidding

2008-05-21T15:46:00Z

Anselm sent me this yesterday- maybe came off of Slashdot or Digg?

In any case apparently people are really upset because they figured out that our money is impossible to comprehend if you are blind, they went to the government about it and a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the U.S. Treasury Department is violating the law by failing to design and issue currency that is readily distinguishable to blind and visually impaired people. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a 2006 district court ruling that could force the United States to redesign its money so blind people can distinguish between values. NEW YORK

My question is how did it take so long for something like this to make headlines/get into a court of law or has this been an ongoing battle? It’s perfectly obvious that our money is totally discriminatory. The shape and size of our paper currency does nothing at all to help blind people figure out the denominations at all. Each bill is the same size, shape and weight as the next. The only way you can tell what denomination it is is by LOOKING at it. The article does a decent job of describing the situation and I am hoping that this will lead to a redesign- but it is a pretty big stretch.

When I was 19 I went and lived in Holland for 8 months- It was the first time I had spent any significant time out of the United States and while there I of course used Dutch currency- which was not only beautiful to look at but was also designed accessibly with braille and different sized denominations:

Dutch money from way-back:

Thoughts on Interaction Design- John Kolko and friends

2008-05-21T15:38:00Z

I was doing a little research the other day and ran across this book called Thoughts on Interaction Design by John Kolko and a handful of other authors. You can buy it online, and they also offer it free as a PDF. So far I have read two chapters and I love it.

Note that:
This is not a book detailing a pattern library this is a book detailing a pattern of understanding.