Note: This part if basically me complaining, so if you don’t want to hear me complain, skip to the bottom.

Part I

I managed to collect about 10 videos of people running with a torch in my crowdsourcing effort, but only 3 of them came from the Eyebeam call.  The rest came from Mechanical Turk workers, and they all sucked.

Part II

So I ditched that idea and Aaron and I decided to stitch together a bunch of famous “running scenes” from various movies.  We actually got quite a collection, and I will still do something with these someday.  But by the time I had collected all of those, it was 1 day before showtime, and I am not enough of an AfterEffects ninja to do what we wanted to do – which was to composite an olympic torch into the hands of the runners and then make a marathon video.  So we ditched that too.

Part III

So then I decided to do something that I had promised to do, which was to make a little application that would track an IR light and insert an animated GIF of a torch into a camera feed. The IR light would be on top of a torch-like apparatus, so that when one of the olympiads entered the room, a camera would be looking at them and replacing their torch with one of the flames below.

So I spent like 4 hours making the tracking application, but then I got the torch with a single IR LED on it, and the cameras couldn’t track it.  So I went to RadioShack™ and bought 10 more, and I don’t know a thing about electronics, so I asked someone else to rig it up for me, but it didn’t work.

Anyway

Today I picked a winner for the MinimumNoise contest for Episode 2, which I am very excited about.  I also got Red5 running on my server and I will be making a new Flash recording app so that the audio quality will be better in future episodes.

Also, today we had a meeting with the nice folks from Zero01 about the 01SJ biennial in September, and it looks like we will be able to put on a pretty nice set of workshops there.  So there, this week is better already.  It also seems like Invisible Threads will be part of an online exhibition for the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. Weird.

This Saturday I will be giving a workshop on Panda as part of the Electrosmog festival at Eyebeam.

Stop-work links

• http://www.crowded.fm/
• http://prof.crouse.cc/code_for_art
• http://prof.crouse.cc/web_as_platform
• http://laborersoflove.com/about/
• http://eyebeam.org/research/project-blackbird
• http://www.jeffcrouse.info/projects/the-world-series-of-tubing/
• http://01sj.org/art/out-of-the-garage/
• http://01sj.org/2010/artworks/eyebeam-roadshow/

TV of Tomorrow is finally over.  Overall, the experience was okay.  We didn’t meet anyone who was interested in our project, and the entire festival (our presentation included) was plagued with technical difficulties leading to extremely poor image quality from the projectors.

I was very excited to find out yesterday that I was accepted to the Minneapolis Art On Wheels residency program.  So from May 17th to June 6th, I will be up in The City of Lakes (? – no good nicknames).  Phun Phact:  Minnesota is known on its license plates as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” but Minnesota actually has 12,000 lakes.  Unfortunately, class at Bennington doesn’t end until May 24 — not sure how this one got by me, but I will make it work somehow.

Immediately before that, from May 14th-16th, I will be traveling to my home town, Baltimore, to the Megalopolis Audio Festival.  I will be presenting Crowded.

The torch video is kind of crashing and burning at the moment.  We got a few good contributions from some awesome people out there (post one and post two), but unfortunately it just wasn’t enough.  We are thinking about scrapping the whole idea and using clips from famous “running” scenes in movies instead of the crowdsourced videos.  Shame.

I started what will eventually be a private YouTube at tv.urbart.com using PandaStream.  This site is currently just PHP and JavaScript.  There is now a fully-javascript Panda example where the Rails Pandastream github used to be.  Feel free to upload a video!  And for all 4 of you reading this, if you want to be part of it when I eventually password protect it, please email me and let me know.

This week was the first Web as Platform class at Bennington, where I am the computing faculty.  I realized at some point in planning that I couldn’t do both PHP and JavaScript in one term.  Although I think that JavaScript has more long-term usefulness than PHP, and is a much cooler language in general, after some serious thinking, I decided on going with PHP.  I couldn’t figure out an easy enough way of getting around the database problem.  I looked at a few solutions, like CouchDB, which is seriously cool, but

I also signed up for Dropbox, which seems very cool, but I haven’t really used it yet.

I’ve decided that I am going to make an openFrameworks addon for the Echonest API for my Laborers of Love project. What is Echonest?

1. An API that powers great recommendations for your users by understanding every song, review and news article on your music site.
2. Upload any song and receive an XML ‘musical score’ detailing tempo, beats, time signature, song sections, timbre, key, and other musical attributes.
3. Your users want more than a static artist page. Connect them to everything on the web and become their first source for all things music.

It’s feature #2 that is particularly interesting to me and I think it will make a nice little OF addon.  Unless someone has already done it…  I haven’t looked into it yet.

At the end of the month, I will be going to Troy to give some talks at RPI as part of a collaboration with the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) that sits on RPI’s campus.  The talks are 2 hours long!  One at an animation class, and one at a web design class, I think.  I will be talking about mostly my installations, and getting into some of the technical stuff behind what makes them work.

As I type, I am sitting in JFK, waiting for my delayed flight to San Francisco for the TV of Tomorrow conference.  This week, Aaron and I have been working on our presentation for the conference, but with all of the other stuff going on, we didn’t get very far, and we are going to have to do the bulk of the work in SF.

I am pretty much done gathering material for Episode 2 of Crowded, and Episode 1 is also dangerously close to being released.  It’s about fucking time!

As part of the Mixer:Olympiad, we have been collecting videos of people carrying the “torch”.  From the site:

Eyebeam is running a torch relay as part of opening ceremony for MIXER: OLYMPIAD, and we want you to carry the torch for a leg of it!

To be exact, we want you to download the PDF file attached below and print it out with a color printer, attach it to something torch-like (a stick, handle, pole), and make a video of yourself running with it. If you don’t have a color printer, try to get something close to the same color. Your video should be no longer than 1 minute. The video should start with you entering the frame from the left, and end with you handing off the torch to an unseen person out of the frame to the right. This is important because we will edit the videos together so that the relay (handing off the torch) looks more or less continuous. But beyond that, it’s pretty much up to you what you do.

If you want to be part of the video, you can either submit it using this form, or find the task at Mechanical Turk and get paid for it!

I applied for MAW residency with a new idea that I am pretty excited about, and started on Harvestworks New Works application. The pressure is on to find something to do after Eyebeam, so wish me luck!

Finally, I started playing with MIDI in Ableton Live, which is tons of fun.  Look forward to some Hall & Oates remixes soon.

This will make you LOL.

In non-geeky news, I also made it back to Topman this week to buy some clothes for my SF trip, and it is really a great store.  The clothes there just fit so much better than any other comparably priced stuff in other stores.  Highly recommended.

Aaron and I are just finishing nailing down our plans to go to San Francisco for the TV of Tomorrow festival.  After some initial confusion, we have decided that our presentation will be on March 4th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street (Corner of 3rd & Mission).

I have been working with wunderkind Michael Schieben on the Laborers of Love project, trying to install FFMPEG-PHP on my server.  Eventually I gave up and contacted the creator, who has been very helpful.

Meeting at WARP – went well.  I wrote a little wrapper for Chipmunk for the project that we might be doing for them, but I got caught up in that and didn’t end up making a usable demo.

We also started serious planning for the Eyebeam Mixer. Aaron and I are in charge of organizing a torch relay.  Check out some more info on the recruitment page.

Crowded is going well.  raging81 ended up winning the MinimumNoise contest to edit the first episode, but I also hired another worker, flakolefluk to make an intro sequence. Here is the result:

The new episode is underway. The theme is all about MT workers helping each other.

This particular HIT will be used in the second episode, which is about fostering camaraderie between MT workers. One of the great things about MT is the diversity of the workers and the diversity of the experience that they bring. How can we use this to benefit the workers, not just the requesters.

I also had a nice meeting with the Wardenclyffe people about the POP magazine project that I helped out with.  Sounds like there could be some more interesting work there.

I will be giving a workshop as part of the ElectroSmog festival on PandaStream, “an open source solution for video encoding and streaming”.

Weeknotes are “about reflecting on your work, your achievements, and what’s on deck.“   Simple.

It has been 145 weeks since I started as a fellow at Eyebeam – arguably the beginning of my professional career.  So, what happened on this 145th week?

This Week

This week marked the beginning of the end of the Eyebeam Fellowship process, which started way back in November. On Monday, several applicants Skyped in and gave presentations about their applications.  Due to a confluence of factors, just this week we made our final recommendations to Amanda, the director of Eyebeam.  Surprisingly, it was a relatively easy process.  The applications were fairly strong, but the decisions just seemed to come easily for the committee.

After work I prepared for my second Code for Art class at Parsons.  We are currently in the “c++ crash course” section of the class.  I was over-ambitious in thinking that I could get through nested loops, casting, arrays, structs, “scope” and pointers all in one class.  I think we just barely made it through Arrays. So everything else will have to wait until this Tuesday.  It seems like I’ve got a good bunch of students this semester, although I think I might have scared some of them away with my first class, in which I assumed that they were all completely comfortable with Java/Processing.  I scaled back the class considerably, so hopefully I won’t lose any more students.

The gang at TV of Tomorrow asked for a schematic for the World Series of ‘Tubing, so I put together this little drawing.  You may not be able to tell by looking at it, but I spent way too much time on it.  Emma is still working on negotiations with the people at Vuzix to possibly get us some augmented reality goggles.

I made some minor improvements on the POP magazine server application to prepare for upcoming projects that will use the same types of techniques. In addition to doing SURF marker recognition, which only uses shapes, I will be implementing some color matching features.  The POP application was finally approved by Apple and launched, with is exciting.

On Wednesday, we had the first meeting about the upcoming Eyebeam Mixer.  In attendance was the video art group Cheryl, a representative from NYC Resistor, Kyle Lapidus of LoVid, Erik Fabian, Bennett Williamson, and Paul Amatai – the creator of the Mixer.  We had a great talk about some of the aspects of the Mixer, the theme of which is “Olympiad”.  Aaron and I were put in charge of spearheading the Torch Relay project, which is top secret for right now, but won’t be for very long.

Cass and I bought a shitload of American Apparrel shirts for an (another) upcoming top-secret project.  Stay tuned for more info.

On Thursday there were more Fellowship presentations, including a bunch of friends of mine: Aaron Meyers, Jon Cohrs, and Hans-Christoph Steiner.  Instead of having the regular first-Thursday-of-the-month Project Blackbird meeting this week, we decided to go to the Reggie Watts/Tommy Smith Radioplay on the 18th.  Should be great.  That evening I had a few beers with Aaron to celebrate him getting through his Fellowship presentation.  I also bit the bullet and bought a legit copy of Ableton Live with which to make new mixes.

On Friday I met with Roland Gebhardt about potentially doing a new website for him.  I suggested he use indexhibit. After that, we had the final fellowship review meetings, and then I met with Stephanie to discuss what we will be presenting at CAA.

On Saturday, I worked on getting a matrix transformation from SURF descriptors in openFrameworks.  This will be useful in many upcoming projects, but it is proving to be difficult.

Finally, just today I met with Aaron to discuss a meeting tomorrow at Warp Records.  We will be doing some work for them at some point.  I also discovered MinimumNoise – a crowdsourcing platform for audio work.  I set up a job to crowdsource the editing of the first episode of my Crowded radio show.

On Deck

Tomorrow is the meeting at Warp Records. In the afternoon, I will be e-working with intern/collaborator extraordinaire Michael on some final additions to the Laborers of Love project. We want to have the project in a presentable because on Thursday I fly out to Chicago to meet Stephanie so that we can present it at the CAA New Media Caucus.

On the 18th, Aaron and I will be going to Materials for the Arts, a magical place in Long Island City where groups donate all kinds of wonderful things that you can just go and take.  Aaron and I went there previously to get materials for Praying@Home.  I had to write some long-overdue thank-you notes to the people and groups who donated the materials that we took last time.  This is one of the conditions for coming back.

Monday evening I will be prepping for Code for Art on Tuesday.  Whenever I find time, I will be trying to conquer the problem of getting a matrix transformation from SURF descriptors, and trying to find time to work on the new World Series of ‘Tubing site.  I was working pretty hard on the site two weeks ago, but couldn’t find time this week.  Despite many attempts, I couldn’t get my head around CakePHP, so instead I made my own MCV framework using the Smarty template engine, PHPActiveRecord, BlueprintCSS, JQuery, and JQueryUI.  And then the Zend GData extension is int there too for YouTube data API access.

It’s application season!  Coming up: FileLux, HarvestWorks, Ars, Future Generation, and Megapolis