MonthDecember 2003

Not so tranquil

All I can do in this game is spin around in circles and get sea-sick. Maybe it would be better if I had a normal mouse instead of a trackball. But it’s an interesting concept:

From the server… The TQworld servers customize a unique game and soundtrack based on how well you’re playing. You’ll never play the same game twice and no two players see the same levels.

…to your computer… Your customized game experience arrives instantly through the internet and into the tranquility Game Browser on your computer. The data that’s sent for each level is quite small and you won’t have long “loading…” delays like other on-line games. This small burst of data only occurs between loading levels. tranquility doesn’t require a continuous net connection while you’re playing.

…to the subconscious. This is where the our magic happens. As you play tranquility, you’ll subconsciously synchronize with the visual and audio patterns.

Cool t-shirts

monkey-attack

Interesting t-shirt shop: users submit designs and vote on designs, and the highest rated become limited edition t-shirts. I want the one above, but it’s sold out. I requested a reprint, though. Oh, all their shirts are on sale for $10 until Monday. Via Josh.

Also interesting is Zazzle, which seems to be like Cafe Press only with more colors (via E-Sheep)

Corporate magick

Zen Werewolf has a post compiling some techniques for hexing corporations (are you working on this for the Disinfo book, Zen?). Personally, I think trying to do some work with bargaining with the egregores might be more effective. They’re powerful.

Note: the original version is now gone, but here’s Wes’s updated version.

Idea: video art project

Thus far I’ve not thought much about what to actually do with video graffiti. As far as I’m concerned, the medium is the message. I’ve been more concerned with figuring out how to do it, assuming content will follow (hell, I don’t know if I even want to do it… I’d just like to see it happen).

But, Tate’s got an interesting idea (not exactly graffiti, though): he remembers seeing a documentary about a video art project from the 80s where an artist setup video cameras and projection screens on busy street corners in two cities (San Franscico and New York, possibly). The projectors and cameras were connected via sattelite. They were left on for three or four days. The project wasn’t announced… people only discovered them by accident. “Say you’re walking down the street and see a projection of a street scene on the side of a building. You stop to look at it for a while. In the other city, somebody stops to look at the projection of you looking at them. At this point, neither side knows the projection is live. I think that moment of discovery would have been uncanny.”

So the idea is this: with web cams and wifi (and a homemade projector) this sort of thing could be done much cheaper now. Tate suggests doing this, only keeping within one city (I say, perhaps even in the same neighborhood). I was thinking it could also be done in coffee shops or bars, not announced and just sort of setup in a corner out of the way or something.

BTW, check out Tate’s newly redesigned blog. Especially the picture-blog section Detritus.

Video graffiti, video projectors

A couple weeks ago I metioned the idea of video graffiti, and the expense of video projectors, to Sauceruney. He sent me this link: build your own LCD projector. They link to a guy who claims to have built a 8,255 lumen projector for under $200. Sounds too good to be true.

I’ve been poking around looking for rental information for projectors and plasma screens but haven’t come up with much… everyone wants me to call them to get a quote. I did find one place with some numbers online but lost the link. It would run about $800 to rent a 5,000 lumen projector for a day through them. And I think a 2,000 lumen was about $200… so building one seems like the way to go.

After seeing Steve Safarik‘s Laser Space Wars at Dorkbot last week, I realized that shooting for perfect video quality might be too much at this point. Although Safarik’s laser stuff is also quite expensive (the mirrors for his project cost $2000), I realized that other light experiments could produce interesting results. Particularly interesting about Safarik’s work is that it’s interactive (it’s just an arcade game, but interesting none the less). See also: LaserMAME (link currently down) and More Laser game anyone?

The Control Manifesto

Part of an online serialized novel by Ran Prieur. The Control Manifesto is part of chapter 2.1:

The fact that nature permitted control to emerge out of it, is evidence that chaos wants to be controlled. The fact that we are destroying nature proves that control is superior to chaos. “Environmentalists” who complain about toxins and species extinctions are misunderstanding the whole situation. There can be no middle ground. If chaos is preferable to control, we should go back to being animals, copulating in the green grass and eating roots and berries. If control is preferable to chaos, we must exterminate all biological life.

Apocalypsopolis by Ran Prieur. Mirror here.

(thanks Brenden)

Burning Man founder on San Francisco mayor race

Larry Harvey talks politics. Apparently, Barlow’s words about Burning Man were not lost on Harvey (or he’s been thinking about this a while)

You don’t have to feel co-opted. You don’t have to say that things have got too big, that money talks. You don’t have to hide in a subculture and not speak to your neighbors. Big money doesn’t have the power to co-opt us. Arnold Schwartzenager’s not the man to tell us what to do. We can collectively express ourselves. Now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, we, united as San Franciscans, can teach the United States of America what it can become. And, hey, I’m not even a Green, but I’m voting for Gonzalez on December 9th.

Idea-blogging: games as musical interface

I’m gonna do some idea-blogging over the next few days, trying to get some ideas out there for some feedback (or at least so I don’t forget them).

I’ve had this “games as musical interface” idea for a couple years. A number of “generative” and “fractal” music programs out there (check out this listing). Mostly the interfaces consist of typing in numbers, moving sliders around, or dragging something around the screen randomly. These don’t seem like engaging interfaces.

The idea of using games for an interface isn’t new: this guy has a 3D fractal music game: however, I’ve never been able to get it to run on my computer, and now I can’t even find the download on his web site. My idea is to use a series of constantly changing classic games clones – Pacman, Space Invaders, Tetris, etc. The position of different game objects act as the random data for a music and graphics generator, making it easy for almost anyone to create music and visual compositions; even if they’re not good with music or at playing games. It also creates a game in which the goal is not to “win” but to create interesting music. This could also work as a multi-player game, with the data being split between the two players.

One important aspect is that the “voices” should be configurable. Output to MIDI, or to a set of samples (a la MOD tracking programs) .

A bit of a head-trip feature I’d like to see in the game: the games constantly morph into each other. One minute you’re playing Tetris, moving a block around, and then suddenly the blocks you’ve stack start to look like a maze and your block is pac-man. Then ghosts show up and eventually the whole game is Pac-Man. You play this for a while, then it starts to turn into Space Invaders. Which then turns into Astroids. The changes are random, Tetris sometimes turns into Astroids or Space Invaders instead of Pac-Man.

Jeremy Winters doesn’t think Max/MSP is powerful enough to create something like this. I would like to see it done in Flash, but I kind of doubt that’s possible either.

See Also

Audience Participation in Music

More audience participation in music

Rushkoff’s reading list

Reading list for Rushkoff’s Interactive Narrative class at NYU’s ITP program.

If thy toe offends thee, cut it off

About a year and a half ago I wrote a story about a women who cut off her toe to fit into a pair of shoes. My writing workshop said they weren’t sure it was believable.

Here’s a NYT story about women having toe surgery to fit into shoes : “With vanity always in fashion and shoes reaching iconic cultural status, women are having parts of their toes lopped off to fit into the latest Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos. Cheerful how-to stories about these operations have appeared in women’s magazines and major newspapers and on television news programs.”

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