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

Chair: Vagner Whitehead
Panelists: Barbara DeGenevieve, Doug Ischar, Stephanie Rothenberg & Jeff Crouse

Saturday 2/13/10 from 2pm – 3:30pm
Columbia College Chicago – 916 S. Wabash Ave, Room 150

Panel Abstract: While it is arguable that looking at pornography online equates actual sexual acts performed with the aid of computer communication technologies, the connection between mediated visual stimulation with desire exists. It is possible that a percentage of the people looking at porn and partaking on cybersex (from the traditional chatroom text, to emailed pictures, cam2cam, MUVEs, etc), consists of artists. Their interaction with these technologies and other beings interested in similar activities could potentially inform/influence their artistic endeavors. This panel aims to examine the varied form in which artists explore and present sexuality and the Internet in their works.

While on the subject, Aaron and I are still looking for an intern to help us with the super-exciting new version of World Series of ‘Tubing.  We have tentatively scheduled a performance at a super hip new venue in Brooklyn.  So, if I may horrifically mix some metaphors, the time is right to get on this bus on the ground floor.

For all of you listeners out there who just can’t wait for ep1 to drop:  have patience!  It will arrive soon!

• Go to Craigslist
• Do a search
• Copy the URL
• Go to Earthify Beta
• Paste the URL
• GO!

The one problem is that it doesn’t remember the location and zoom level of the Google Map when you bookmark a search. This is annoying because part of what makes Housingmaps great is that you can zoom in to see only the location you are interested in.

WELL NOT ANYMORE! I fixed it! http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/65745

This little Greasemonkey script will add the lat, lon, and zoom to the “Link” element of the page.  Then, when you come back, it will move and zoom the map.

Yeah, it’s kind of a very specific need.  But there it is.

Incidentally, I recently discovered the awesomeness of MixCloud and uploaded the majority of my mixes there. Check ‘em out.

Facebook event

Date: Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Location: The Change You Want to See
Street: 84 Havemeyer Street
City/Town: Brooklyn, NY

Upgrade! NY continues its series on open source as it relates to activism and creative practice.

Within activist and creative practice there is a range of models for mobilizing the labor and creativity of the crowd (aka “crowdsourcing”). Both practices experiment with a spectrum of autonomy and control within those models. From distributed design to distributed fundraising, MoveOn to Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcer issues a call and creates structure for participation.

What role do individual motivations and collective goals play within these structures? What are the ethical, social and political implications of distributed labor?

Panelists include xtine, artist, educator and creator of the Mechanical Olympics; Jeff Crouse, Eyebeam senior fellow, artist, technologist and co-creator (with Stephanie Rothenberg) of the Invisible Threads virtual jeans factory; and Beka Economopoulos, online organizer, consultant and curator at The Change You Want To See Gallery.

This event will take place at The Change You Want to See, 84 Havemeyer Street, Brooklyn.

Upgrade! NY is co-produced by Eyebeam and Not An Alternative.

This is a prelude event to the conference, The Internet as Playground and Factory: a conference on digital labor at the Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York, NY, November 12-14.