Artificial Eye

The worst possible scenario for me always was "what if the state has all my biometric data and can do with it whatever it wants". That is about to happen and even more as all german passport starting November 1st 2005 (in less then 4 weeks) will have an RFID chip implanted with all the data concerning your face and very soon - less then six month - it will also have fingerprints as an addition. All that stored on a remotely readable (read by anyone with a capable reader) RFID (remote frequency identification) chip. Now you might think that is not bad in itself as things on borders would speed up - until someone reads out your fingerprint and leaves behind a false trace on his murderous route, or you are protesting against the political system in 5 years time - the examples of missuse are numerous and generally the state shouldn

Little test that I don

A entry that is ages old and never got finished trying out newly betas of GridPro I decided to give it a whirl. Not the best and end of all but at least a normal loop entry from me again. The footage underneath shows a robot that is feed body parts and then builds a replica of itself that again is able to build another replica. Far away from anything dangerous it still needs the feeding and its sole purpose on earth is to replicate itself but the AI research is another little step further. Music is from Meatsock with the song called mcnothing.

According to recent studies completed at the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard University "Apparently our hunger for novelty begins with the eye itself, as the retina adapts to seek the unexpected, and ignore the commonplace". Japanese researchers have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months - the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced. Pretty soon u just wont know who around you is a cyborg, no matter how artificial your eyes are :) Music to this post is appropriately titled "pull" by soplerfo from The Ep For Dogs

As a new format on the blog we introduce mixes from time to time. Mixes are longer then the loops and mostly live mixes one of the blog members did on some occasion. They are meant to demonstrate that you can tell stories and transmit meaning inside the vj context. The first one of these is "Invokation des Lichtes" my second "fictional narrative" dealing with the TV as our main influence of spirituality and the confusion of ones believes and its soul/body split that can result out of it. Little personal feeling and observation. Technical details is one night shooting with two DV cameras, 2.5 day postproduction with Aftereffects, 5 minute live mixing with VDMX4.2beta2 and VDMX3 on two powerbooks in my living room as test - no postproduction work on the recording (so all live). Music is part of a mix done by Kraddy. WARNING: The file is 6 Minutes long and 50 MB in size. To view it you have to have a MPG4 H.264 standard conform player like Quicktime 7 - Normal MPG4 was not an option as the filesize would have ballooned to over 90Mb to still have accapable quality. I hope you can still enjoy this.

Hello again. After some absence due to real life interference I will start posting to the vjblog again... As Michael did an introduction to himself I thought to make such an entry as well - not really my thing really to see me on screen as I like to be behind the camera not in front - but what can you do. You will now see me posting until next tuesday then Michael is taking over again. Hopefully one day there will be the time again where all of us are posting at the same time not distracted by the outside world. Oh and I almost forgot the song is from Semebasta and is called jajalied

Three things grabbed my attention today: 1. The second paragraph of Declaration of Independence includes the lines, "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, sic), it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it"2. Some enterprising flash programmers have put up an animation of the location and number of american casualties overlayed onto a map of iraq which is updated daily, and 3. The iraqi resistance has a website with daily updates of their activitiesfALk has also noted on his normal blog that the americans have killed more iraqi's than Saddam... so it just makes me wonder, how long before the american public awakes from its slumber, and brings the troops home from this ill planned, cynical neo-conservative nightmare? This mix is a re:vlog of the above elements, along with musical accompaniement from a US marine hendrixing the Star Spangled Banner from atop one of Saddams Palaces, taken from one of the trailers from "gunner palace."

Is there any doubt any longer about what needs to be done? Don't u all find it A BIT ABSURD that we are supposed to be criminals now for(inducing) filesharing, ripping, mixing, burning (CD's), and some people can just get away with ripping (off) mixing (up) burning (whole cities and countries) and murder without any consequences? I cant be the only one. Music by the Presidents of The United States of America. Excuse me this forage into the protected domain...just this once, i promise :)

Hmnn...lets see, videoblogs have peeople in them dont they? Figured it was about time to come out of the closet and give u all a hint of what the exiledsurfer looks like when producing his content for the artificialeye...a self portrait, so to speak, closer to what most videoblogs are about... no speaking though, just a hot track from mashuptown, Devoutcast. Draw your own conclusions.

boingboing/craphound cyberpunk Cory Doctorow has a new book out, titled "Someone comes to town, Someone leaves town" which is a small departure and a great leap forward in style and subject matter from his previous outings in the SF genre, but which remains true to his contemporary areas of interest. Lets just say that i can't agree with him more in his framing of the freedom of access debate in a zeitgeist fairy tale of good vs evil remniscent of the science fiction trilogy by C.S. Lewis. For sound i award him the musical accompaniement of "silverocelli" by the Order of The Silver Cosmonauts whose aim is to "create a vortex of attention and sound in galactic propulsion preparation with the resulting momentary sonic gravity lens enabling ontological tweening and planetary preening." Enjoy the clip, download the book, support the creative commons :)

From wikipedia: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar is correct but whose meaning is nonsensical. If you havent noticed, fALk's favorite colour is green, that of this blog and its elements... home of where "Newly formed bland ideas are unexpressible in an infuriating way." And this time without music :)

So the truth has to come out...falk has been so busy NOT posting to the blog that i sort of put an unofficial boycott on myself since my content was filling up the site (and this is supposed to be a group project!)... but since its been soooo long, i figured, well, better get SOMETHING up... so if u could just imagine for a second that i havent been posting to the site because i suffered a Distributed Denial of Service Attack, well, u might understand why we have been so b0rk3d around here this last month. How's that for a good excuse? Music is an unreleased IDM (intelligent dance music) track from a barista named Bayrak who makes my daily fredocino in the gourmet coffeeshop i frequent in istanbul, which now has WIFI. What a great combination.

Seems everyone has been too busy with other things to get anything posted. A couple of things caught my eye this week. AgentCell, a joint University of Chicago and Department of Energy project has developed software to simulate the intracellular processes and behavior of individual cells. The software, which includes a 3D environment for the cells to move about in, is being released under a BSD license. The Patriot Act was quietly extended to grant the FBI the power to conduct searches without having to obtain Judicial order. Music: Morganistic's In The Shadow mixed with the argument from the U.S. Supreme Court hearing of Kent v. Dulles.

There's a cultural war going on that IMHO is far more determinative for our future than the superficial one being waged by the christian right against islam - a battle for our ability to communicate with one another creatively and interactively with the products of our shared culture. Todays vlogpost is a remix of the cover image from Lawrence Lessig's book, Free Culture some creative commons images, and Lost in the plot from The Dears, who took the SXSW festival this year by storm.Lessig talks, in the opening paragraphs of this phenomenal book about "Disney creativity,"--a form of expression and genius that builds upon the culture around us and makes it something different. Disney (or Disney, Inc.) ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture. Rip, mix, and burn. Most of the content from the nineteenth century was free for Disney to use and build upon in 1928. It was free for anyone--whether connected or not, whether rich or not, whether approved or not--to use and build upon, without permission. Yet today, the public domain is presumptive only for content from before the Great Depression. Lessig has been instrumental in the Orphan Works project as well, and is probably the most important contemporary legal activists fighting to maintain a common culture, and therefore our ability to collectively communicate with each other via the powerful tools that have been put on our desktop.As noted by Tom Sherman in 1996, "We are willing participants in the creation of a second nature. While the biological world is collapsing, we are busy constructing an elaborate media environment."Lets hope this environment wont collapse as well.