/var/log/sysblog

Cartofictions slides posted

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:32:05 GMT

Last night I gave my lecture Cartofictions: Maps, The Imaginary and Geo-Social Engineering to a surprisingly well-attended room here at Mama, Zagreb. The talk went better than the 1.2h talk at Inclusiva-net 7 months ago (video documentation here), largely because I hadn't run amok the night before.

After the talk several people asked to see my slides and so I've made them available. You can get them here as a PDF. The folk at Mama said they'll make the audio available at some point. I'll keep you posted.

missing horse.

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 23:22:32 GMT

Hell hath no fury like a man whose laptop was recently stolen, while eating a delicious breakfast, by very clever thieves.

To cut a short story long, the $US is weak against the Euro and I need a new laptop fast, specifically the new Thinkpad T400: the ideal horse for this goucho.

If you're coming to Ars Electronica and want to make some fast money, email me and I can offer you a handsome cash incentive for buying me a laptop and bringing it with you, unboxed. Yes that's right, I just used the words "handsome cash incentive" and "fast money" on the Internet.

Oh, and if you've sent me an email at all since January this year, send it to me again..

TY FILE TY SP

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 02:40:17 GMT

FILE2008 in Sao Paulo was super. Rarely do I meet such an attentive and genuinely interested team responsible for putting an exhibition together. The tech-crew were really on-to-it and the assistants hanging out with the pieces, explaining them to people, were too: they had about 1.5k people come through one Saturday. That requires a lot of patience.

The interior design of the show was clever as were the curatorial choices overall. Anyway, FILE team, here's my belated thanks. Vivian, Paula and Daniel especially. Your festival rivals anything of its size in Europe..

Sao Paulo. Where to start - even a Paulista would ask the same. It's very diverse, at times rough, vast and complex. 20 Million humans trying to make it work in the metropolitan area (within a violently maldistributed economy) of which I met around 37. Despite being a hard-working, hard-living creed, Paulistas are socially generous; it's not a myth you can simply walk into a bar and smile your way into a fine night out.

That said, my dubious companion for most of it wasn't a Paulista. Rather, it was a certain James Powderly, ever ripe for some good old-fashioned silliness. Here's to you James. Haven't heard from you for a few days. Like many I hope you turn up soon. You were half-expecting to get shot. Let's hope my "not a foreigner and not during the games" theory stands up to your fairly respectable test ;)

A fine friend of mine Mariana hooked James up with some local writers/graffers so much time was spent with a generator, projector, laptop, camera and a laser-pointer around town at night. I learnt a lot about Pichação, the name given to a kind of street-writing that at times resembles Egyptian Hieroglyphs and is unique to Brazil (AFAIK). Each has it's own unique symbolic alphabet relative to clans. Mariana, was good to hang out with you and Lelo. Both talented and super people.. Thank you again for introducing me to Raquel and Guillermhe also.

levelHead source code released

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:10:09 GMT

After many requests and a heap of delays the levelHead source code is now publically available under the General Public License V3.0. All art assets are provided under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. See this install page for full instructions.

This is a release intended for developers and those comfortable with the compiling software on Linux systems. As yet there is no binary executable of levelHead.

More about that soon..

off to Brazil.

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:12:38 GMT

I'm off to Sao Paulo, Brazil tomorrow for the FILE festival to install levelHead.

Let it be known i'm currently looking for reccommendations of good vegetarian restaurants..

Quilted Thought Organ archived.

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:06:51 GMT

I've just cleaned up and archived documentation of Quilted Thought Organ, a sound-based game/performance environment I made in 1999, here. Yes the link to the movie works now.. Ugh.

Ubuntu blank disable.

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:29:42 GMT

While I prefer the operating system Debian for development and general computery tasks, I use Ubuntu for art installations. From my experience Ubuntu has a great track record with diverse hardware and is a reliable performer with recent versions of free software. 30 minutes and you're up and running in most cases.

One great frustration with Ubuntu in a gallery/museum context however (may be fixed in 8.04) is the aggressive screen-blanking. For whatever reason disabling gnome-screensaver and various other power-management settings relating to the screen doesn't discourage it from blanking. Yes, asking the assistant of the piece to wiggle the mouse every 20 minutes is a pretty rubbish workaround..

So, here's how to permanently disable screen blanking under X on Ubuntu (and probably any other distribution). Pop this in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart X

Section "ServerFlags"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection

It's the little things..

Found here.

levelHead v1.0 first footage (spoiler!)

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:38:52 GMT

This, the first footage of the first stable version of levelHead, was documented yesterday with a speed-run of 227 seconds ;) through the first 3 cubes.

Aside from the above Vimeo documentation, you can download the 65M OGG/Theora file here. It will play in VLC.

This video was made thanks to Blender's great new video sequence editor (finally a fast and stable Free video editor for Linux) and captured using the strangely performant 3d desktop video capture solution for Linux Bugle.

For those of you keen to get your hands on the code: it's coming soon! I still need to tidy up the literature before it ships..

anagram series: video documentation available.

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:54:38 GMT

I've documented 2 'software triptyches' I made in 2006, and one I recently finished, here.

Enjoy.

prix ars 2008

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:53:09 GMT

levelHead received an Honorary Mention in the Interactive Arts category at Ars Electronica this year.

Apparently it will also be on show at the Ars Electronica Centre in September.

Thankyou jury!

Interview in TAGMAG available for download

Fri, 23 May 2008 16:00:44 GMT

I recently gave an interview for TAGMAG 6 as part of their feature on Augmented Reality. It's quite an interesting issue surveying AR from a cultural, philosphical and artistic perspective.

Get it here

If you're in Den Haag region come to TAG<> and play the best version of levelHead yet alongside some great work by other aritsts like Theo Watson and Jan Torpus.

levelHead at Homo Ludens Ludens. Day 2

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:44:37 GMT

As promised, here's a gallery of images of levelHead in action on day 2 of Homo Ludens Ludens. As you can see they were taken by a far better photographer, utilizing a special feature of the camera known as 'autofocus'..

levelHead at Homo Ludens Ludens. Day 1

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 22:13:00 GMT

Last night at the opening was the first time levelHead has been seen in the wild. As such it's been extremely revealing watching people play it, something I've done for a few hours today.

The response has been very enthusiastic and almost all people seem to 'get' the interface pretty much immediately (with the exception of one woman using the camera to explore her nostrils on the projection at a rather inopportune moment).

That aside I'm surprised at the breadth of variance in the capacity of people to record and recall information about the room they were last in. Of the 50 or 60 people I watched play levelHead, I twice saw people demonstrate alien-savant powers in this regard, completing the first cube in under 2 minutes. Almost everyone I watched took their capacity to navigate effectively quite personally, even at times stopping to make mental notes before moving to a connecting room.

One thing I'm greatly enjoying about this piece is the ever presence of hands, made gigantic, carefully holding the cube complete with little world inside.

Aside from changing all the in-game dialogues to Spanish, I'm clear on the few tweaks I'll make for SonarMatica at Sonar08 in June. One thing is certain, the cubes will need to be an extremely durable plastic.

I've uploaded a little gallery of people playing on day 1 of Homo Ludens Ludens, one that expresses most of all just how little I understand our new Ricoh GR Digital camera (or perhaps photography in general). I'll make another one of people playing tomorrow on return home.

levelHead developments

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:56:32 GMT

It's been a good couple of weeks working on levelHead, in preparation for the Homo Ludens Ludens (aka "Man, the player") exhibition at LABoral, Gijon, Asturias, Spain.

The controls are far more robust and a great many bugs have been slayed (in a caring and respectful way). There are now 3 playable levels and a bunch of user-notications and other goodies that aid navigation.

At the 11th hour pix came on board to migrate the tracker from ARToolkit to ARToolkitPlus, which has worked splendidly: tracker stability is far better than it was with my previous ARToolkit implementation.

While working together he chose to go on a bug hunt, chasing in particular a graphic glitch where two rooms were being drawn at the same time. I'd written the first version with the intention of just one room being drawn at a time (one marker to be tracked for simplicity) but with the aid of a stencil-buffer he managed to make the use of the likely occurence that two or even three rooms can be seen at once:

.

Development hasn't all been in code, I also have some lovely new cubes:



So at the end of a fairly fierce two weeks of programming, levelHead is ready to be unleashed on the Asturians, where it will be installed for 5 months. For those that can't make it to Gijon, levelHead will next be exhibited at Sonar, Barcelona this year.

More about that later.

Cartofictions: Inclusiva-Net keynote, 08.

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:00:52 GMT

Here's a video of my Inclusiva-Net Conference, Cartofictions: Maps, The Imaginary and GeoSocial Engineering.

It's around an hour long. Note that it has one or two mis-placed slides at around 34mins. This aside the editor did quite a good job.

Abstract:

From the earliest world maps to Google Earth, cartography has been a vital interface to the world. It guides our perceptions of what the world is and steers our actions in it. As our knowledge about the world has changed, so have maps with it (or so we like to think).

In this lecture Julian shows a darker side of map-making, covering various reality-distorting effects innate to the graphic language of cartography and how they can be easily exploited for gain.. In doing so Julian positions cartography as an abstract and influentual creative practice, rich with the power to engineer political views, religious ideas and even the material world itself.

Enjoy!
Cartofictions: Julian Oliver keynote, Inclusiva-Net, Madrid '08 from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Be sure to check out some of the excellent projects that came out of Inclusiva-Net this year - super stuff ppl, it was a pleasure teaching working with you all.

Big thanks to the Medialab-prado team for making it all happen.

Perceptual Play: Optical Illusion Art as Radical Interface

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:29:38 GMT

.. that's the name of my latest paper, prepared for the Homo Ludens Ludens conference at Laboral, Gijon, Spain in mid April. It'll be published in the symposium book alongside the work of this esteemed bunch.

Download it here. You're free to reproduce and distribute it under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

Out of interest I'd prefer to use a license like the GNU Free Documentation License for my papers but I can't find anything that comes close while remaining suitable to theory.

If you have any ideas I'd be glad to have an email from you.

first artvertiser tech demos

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:54:41 GMT

More Artvertising..



The below two videos show basic live image substitution of a postcard, seen by my webcam.

This clip demonstrates playing a movie 'on' the postcard and this video demonstrates cycling through a variety of images while attempting to emulate the local lighting conditions.

It's still not as stable as I'd like but nonetheless it's getting there.

The idea, of course, isn't to substitute images on arbitrary postcards but on big billboards, bus-stops and sign advertising in cities. I do have a clip of a substitution of a road-side sign but it's a bit rubbish due to it being quite dark at the time.

As opposed to (most) other augmented reality techniques - which use specially designed black-and-white fiducial markers - here the image itself is the marker.. This is much more processor intensive than normal marker tracking.

Naturally I'd love to see this working on a mobile phone but having played with a Nokia N95 recently - perhaps the best-specc'd phone for this sort of work - it's clear that fast image detection is well beyond the scope of current phone hardware; at least at more than a few frames a second. That's not to say standard augmentation using fiducial markers doesn't work fine on such a phone (like those used with ARToolkitPlus)..

Nonetheless, a UMPC built into a pair of binoculars is probably a bit more fun out on the field anyway.

Announcing new project: The Artvertiser

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:57:28 GMT

This is a project I've been dreaming up for a while. Only until recently however have developments in both computer vision and mobile hardware platforms made it possible to produce.

Here's the blurb:

The Artvertiser is a computer vision project exploring live, locational substitution of advertising content for the purposes of exhibiting digital artwork.

The Artvertiser takes Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as exhibition space. The Artvertiser is an instrument of conversion and reclamation, taking imagery seen by millions and re-purposing it as a surface for presentation of art.

By 'training' a computer to recognize billboard advertisements, logos and other images of commerce, that content can then be 'replaced' with alternative material when seen through a specially engineered digital video device. If an internet connection is present at the site, it can be documented and published in on line galleries such as Flickr and YouTube.

So far the software component is coming along well. It is already possible to perform live substitution of billboards with images, 3D models or movies when seen through a sufficiently good camera. To get this far I've written a C++ application ontop of the excellent image tracking library Bazar that supports substituting the detected image with an OpenGL surface upon which I can draw video (live or from file) or static imagery.

Working with Clara Boj and Diego Diaz - also competent practitioners in Augmented Reality - I hope we can add a network component such that when an 'artvert' is seen in the wild it can be published to Flickr and/or filmed and uploaded to YouTube and similar video hosting services.

Soon I hope to upload videos of early trials of the system out in the wild.

Fijuu2 published in Chinese Art+Sci publication.

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 17:41:11 GMT

Name: Contemporary Art of Science and Technology
ISBN: 978-7-03-020415-8
Press name: Science Press
Language: Chinese
660 pages (62 pages in color)

We're on pages 319 and 320 next to a couple of great works. Here's a scan the editor was kind enough to send us:



.. and here's a scan of the cover:

Streaming video-textures with OpenGL and OpenCV

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:31:38 GMT

I recently spent some time looking around the hinternets for a simple method to stream live video, captured using OpenCV, from a webcam or firewire camera, to textures on one or more OpenGL polygons, windowed with something light like GLUT. Having found nothing that acheives this, and seeing that lots of people were trying, I wrote a program in C that does.

Why OpenCV? OpenCV offers advanced texture processing and analysis: being able to find natural features in images on OpenGL surfaces offers up many interesting possibilities.

The trick was just to pass correctly scaled (power of 2), captured IplImage data to glTexSubImage2D every frame. It needed to be correctly formatted and bound beforehand.

Get the source code here, licensed under the GPLv3. It will compile on a Linux system. OpenCV, FreeGlut and OpenGL are needed. You'll need hardware accelerated 3D too..

Enjoy!

q3apd 06 Installation documentation archived

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 11:49:54 GMT

The q3apd project has been properly archived, with the inclusion of the LoveBytes06 Festival video documentation and galleries, here.

Artist of the month

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 13:37:30 GMT

Hyperform Net Gallery has been kind enough to make me Artist of the Month for December 07, focussing on levelHead.

Big thanks to all those involved at Hyperform.

Jean Poole writes on my work

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:35:00 GMT

Jean Poole was commissioned by Arnolfini to write on one or two aspects of my work over the years. Here's the text.

Thankyou Jean!

Blender Manual: Modeling to Rendering

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 15:55:12 GMT

Here's a manual I wrote introducing the basics of modeling, texturing and rendering using the excellent open-source software Blender for the FLOSSManuals project.

Later on I'll post a section on the Realtime Game Engine part of Blender toward the ends of rapidly prototyping game/3D interface ideas.

If you're interested in translating this manual into languages other than Dutch (Walter Langelaar is working on that) pls get in touch!

levelhead: first beta footage.

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:25:57 GMT

I've just finished the first beta (really an alpha) of my little AR/tangible-interface game levelHead. Admittedly there's not much up on the project page yet, but here's a YouTube video that conveys the general idea pretty well. It still has glitches but i'll iron those out soon enough.

At some point i also want to look into the idea of using invisible markers (have a few promising possibilities there) or full colour picture markers (also possible, though requires much more CPU braun).



Here's a better quality video in the OGG/Theora format (plays in VLC).

Enjoy.

PacketGarden for Ubuntu 7.04

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:09:22 GMT

Here are packages of Packet Garden for Ubuntu 7.04.

To install just download, double-click and go. You might want to install dpkt and pycap first (also found at the above link).

schiele redux

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:51:28 GMT

fun with beep.

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:37:23 GMT

Dilemma: Hotel in foreign country and must wake up very early. Phone critically low on battery, charger missing, hotelier appears to be asleep and no alarm clock in sight. Very tired, reasonably inebriated.

Fix: Write a script that emulates the sound of my phone's alarm before passing out:

# simple alarm script.

# requires the program 'beep'

# turn up your PC speaker volume and use as follows:

# 'python alarm.py HH:MM'

import time

import sys

import os

wakeTime = sys.argv[1].split(':')

while 1:

  time.sleep(1)

  if time.localtime()[3] >= int(wakeTime[0]):

    if time.localtime()[4] >= int(wakeTime[1]):

      os.popen('beep -l 40 -f 2000 -n -l 40 -f 10000 -n -l 40 -f 2000')

Unprepared Architecture at Interactivos

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 13:56:07 GMT

Aside from moving country I've just finished developing a project at Interactivos at the excellent Media Lab Madrid. I tried to spend as much time as possible there but alas had chores like setting up a new apartment. Nonetheless I had a lot of fun.

Simone Jones was one of the instructors - someone who has a great deal of experience with electronics, especially in the context of motorised cameras. Because my previously offered project proved to be unfeasible in the time frame and Simone wanted to work on something, we decided to team up.

We threw around several ideas, mostly to do with 'editing' the existing architecture of the exhibition space by adding an extra room seen only through a CCTV like display - a kind of a haunting. However, as the lighting conditions of the space were changing so frequently in the days leading up to the group-show, we couldn't pull this off. For this reason we decided to work small - really small.



The idea was simple, augment a solid cube with 6 little rooms such that the cube becomes a tangible interface for navigating through an architecture: a mind-game - "How are the rooms connected?"

I added some code to ARToolkit so that it could support occlusion - ie hiding virtual objects 'behind', or 'inside', real objects and used a simple mask object to aid the process.

Here's a little clip in the OGG Theora format (plays in VLC) that perhaps better explains it all.

Simone and I are already talking about a large version of this for a later show. In the meantime I'm adapting it into a small game where you must help a character to escape the block by leading it from room to room: by turning the cube you select the next room the character will enter. Several cubes can be used so that when a character is finally led to the exit door of one cube it will jump to the entrance of another cube (or 'level') placed nearby. I plan to make this puzzle game around 5 cubes long. More about that later..

The exhibition uses a Sony EyeToy on an Ubuntu Linux system. Worth mentioning is that I used the super Rastageeks OV51x-JPEG drivers: a 640x480 webcam on Linux for less than EUR40? Look no further!

Addendum 19-06-07 For a long list of reasons I have never found character animation a very satisfying task - probably due to me being quite horrible at it. For this reason I'm very open to collaborating with a good character animator on this project. The data needs to come from Blender via the osgCal3D exporter (shipped with recent versions of Blender).. Get in touch we me by interpreting this image.

parallel universe sim gaming

Sun, 20 May 2007 16:52:33 GMT

In the last few years quantum physicists and mathematicians have told us there may well be ground to the old "many worlds" theory - that there might be several different versions of any given dimension, or groups of dimensions, at the same time. Hugh Everett III is perhaps the most well known proponent of this theory.

Perhaps a many worlds gaming system would involve several players with the task of governing one simulated world each. Each world starts out with an equal number of objects and agents all of which begin as perfect temporal copies of the next. Gameplay might involve triggering/steering chains of events to the ends of creating the least synchronous world - ie. sequences of highly unlikely events. The world with the least eventful similarity within a given period of time will create a branch, and that player wins. At the point of a branch, identical copies are made and the game begins again, continuing from the point of that new branch.

Perhaps the notion of 'entanglement' could also be used as a strategic means of playing great similarity to an advantage: by successfully mirroring an event in another player's world entanglement could be triggered, giving the antagonist brief remote control over events therein.

While it could easily take on the form of a 2d game or orthographic sim-like title (like Habbo Hotel) the real work would be in creating a procedural event modeling system with an internal sense of consequence and wide potential for very absurd outcomes. Scenarios for an opening game need not be large at all - ordering a falafel or getting a haircut could give plenty of material to begin with.

12-05-07 Updated for clarity.

2ndPS2: Second Person Shooter (for 2 players)

Sat, 05 May 2007 12:30:00 GMT

[...]

more ioq3apaint

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 01:56:54 GMT

Here are a few galleries, broken up into categories based on when the images were taken during the cycle of action. I think what's in here is a little more interesting than what's seen in the earlier video as it also gives coverage of some live palette manipulation.

beginnings

fields

instants

endings

residency at Georgia Tech: ioq3aPaint

Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:23:11 GMT

The piece I made while serving as Artist in Residence at Georgia Tech finally concluded to be 'ioq3aPaint'; an automatic painting mechanism using QuakeIII where software agents in perpetual combat drag texture data as they fight, rendering attack vectors as graphic gesture. Here's a short clip (64M, 4"50', Ogg Theora) of one of the many iterations. It will play in VLC:



The exhibition was breif but the opening night and talk brought many thoughtful questions. Game designer and theorist Michael Nitsche was responsible for alot of great commentary, some of which he wrote about here.

ioq3aPaint develops upon q3aPaint quite heavily, introducing a fresh palette and providing audiences with the ability to cycle through palettes in real time.

Not far off is the ability to send screenshots straight to a printer; the idea being that on the opening night of a future exhibition audience could take screenshots while the abstractions evolve which are in turn sent off to a large format canvas printer. The show itself would continue the following day as a normal painting exhbition.

If you're interested in playing around with QuakeIII as a painting tool you can get fairly far working only in the console. Play with r_fov, r_drawWorld and r_showTris especially once you've 'team s' and there are a few bots in the scene. Therein start manipulating GL functions in code/render/ and drive them by adding new keybinds to code/client/cl_input.c.

A big thanks to all those in the LCC department for making it happen - an extra special thanks to Celia Pearce for setting up the initiative in the first place. Celia is one of the few people really pushing experimental game development practices in both institutional and industry contexts, and has been doing so for some years. Cheers to that.

Fijuu2 interaction demonstration uploaded

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 01:05:40 GMT

while teaching at Georgia Tech i've been in the company of some big screens, so i took the opportunity to film a long overdue clip of Fijuu2 in use.

we'd hoped for an inset of the gamepad but i didn't have access to two cameras at the time. regardless, this clip should explain what it's all about.

get it here. It's in the Ogg Theora format. If you don't know what that is, just use VLC.

wiimote --> OSC --> Blender

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 20:30:59 GMT

While here at Georgia Tech I'm giving a class on the development of 'expressive games', and for the purpose I chose Nintendo Wiimotes as the control context for class designs. The final projects will be produced in Blender, using the Blender game engine.

Only having Windows machines at my disposal I wrote a basic Python script that exposes acceleromoter, tilt and button events from GlovePIE over Open Sound Control (which is natively supported by that application) to the realtime engine of Blender. I decided to go this way rather that create a bluetooth interface inside Blender for two reasons: GlovePIE is a great environment for building useful control models from raw input, it supports the network capable protocol OSC and I wanted to keep input-server like code out of Blender (for reasons you'd understand if you used Python in Blender).

GlovePIE however is more than I need on Linux alongwith the fact I don't have a Windows machine near me most of the time. I looked into various options for getting control data from a few different 'drivers' out over OSC and into Blender. Preferring to work in Python, I tried WMD but found it too awkward to develop with, although it is nothing short of comprehensive. I finally settled on the very neatly written (Linux only) libwiimote and wrote a simple little application in C to provide what I need. Here it is, wiiOSC.

To run it on your system you'll need libwiimote, Steve Harris's lightweight OSC implementation liblo, a bluetooth dongle (of course) and a bluetooth support in your kernel (most modern distro's support popular bt dongles out-of-the-box). wiiOSC will send everything libwiimote supports (IR, accelerometer, tilt, button events etc) to any computer you specify, whether to 127.0.0.1 or a machine on the internet.

wiiOSC is invoked as follows:

wiiOSC MAC remote_host port

For instance, to send wiimote data to a machine with the IP 192.168.1.102 on port 4950, I:

wiiOSC 00:19:1D:2C:31:E1 192.168.1.102 4950

To get the MAC addr of your wiimote, just use hcitool scan. I use Blender as my listener context but you can pickup the wiimote data in any application that supports it of course, PureData, Veejay etc. To use Blender as your listener you'll need Wiretap's Python OSC implementation and this Blender file.

Enjoy.

Packet capture collate to log

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 01:00:24 GMT

I've picked out the packet capture part of PG and turned it into a reasonably useful and lightweight logger that should run on any UNIX system (tested on Linux). Packet length, remote IP, transaction direction, Country Code and port are all logged. Packet lengths are added over time, so you see an accumulation of traffic per IP.

Use (as root):

./pcap_collate

This script will capture, log and collate TCP and UDP packets going over (eth0, eth1 etc). the argument sets the location the resulting GZIPped log will be written to, which will be updated every 1000 packets.

For this reason the script will automatically generate a new log on a new day and can be restarted at any time without losing more than 1000 packets of traffic.

The log is a dump of the dict containing comma separated fields structured as follows:

IP, direction, port, geo, length

It will filter out all the packets on the local network, and so is intended for use in recording Internet traffic going over a single host.

Ports to be filtered for can be set in the file config/filter.config

Stop capture with the script 'stop_capture'.

Get it here. Unpack and see the file README.txt.

Chess, The Music.

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 20:09:36 GMT

Two new projects are in the wings, the first of which I'll announce now.

This project takes a wooden chess-board and repurposes it as a musical pattern sequencer, where chess pieces in the course of a game define when and which notes will be played.

Each side has a different timbre to be easily distinguisable from the other. Pawns have different sounds than bishops, which in turn have different sounds than knights, and so on.

As the game progresses and pieces are removed, the score increasingly simplifies.

It'll be developed at Pickled Feet laboratories with the eminent micro-CPU expert Martin Howser.

Packet Garden 1.0 released for Linux, Windows and OS X

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 17:00:25 GMT

After several months hacking on this, I've finally released PG for all three platforms simultaneously. It's now considered 'stable'. Head over the http://packetgarden.com and take it for a ride.

A big thanks to: Jerub for detailed testing of the OS X PPC port, Marmoute for the OSX PPC package, Ababab for providing PPPoE test packets and extensive beta testing of the Windows port and for his feature suggestions, Davman for beta testing the Windows port and for some fine feature requests, Krishean Draconis for porting/compiling Python GeoIP for Windows, pix for optomisation advice, Marta for both her practical suggestions and eye for aesthetic detail, Atomekk for his early testing of the Win32 port and for the Win32 build of Soya, Jiba for Soya itself and all the other people that have sent bug-reports and hung out in IRC to help me fix them. A big and final thanks to Arnolfini (esp Paul Purgas) for the opportunity to learn alot about packet sniffing , this thing called 'The Internet' and a fair bit more about 3D programming along the way. I've really enjoyed the process.

Now for something completely different..

it has a home on the Internet, but it's still not Net Art.

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 02:22:58 GMT

[...]

dpkt and pypcap for Debian and Ubuntu, PPC and i386

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 15:43:20 GMT

In the course of coding Packet Garden I've resourced several external libraries, two of which deal with the packet capture part. One is Pypcap, an excellent Python interface to tcpdump's distribution of libpcap and another is dpkt.

As there were no Debian or Ubuntu packages I've packaged them and added them to a new repository where i'll host third party software i package for both these platforms in future.

packet geographies

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 14:12:20 GMT

As it eventuated, some measure of feature creep set in, but let's hope it's positive. The Arnolfini have given me more time, so I'm gladly taking it.

One addition is that Packet Garden now reports the geographical location of the remote machine you're accessing with 97% certainty, drawing information from an updated database on the host. This image shows it in action.

Detecting the geographical location of a remote host presents an interesting problem; IP block ranges are assigned to countries, but companies in those countries tend to do business over borders. So, while 91.64.0.0 might be an aggregation assigned to Deutschland, It is 'owned' and dealt out by an ISP called Kabel Deutschland. If the ISP were to expand into the Netherlands, there is nothing stopping Kabel Deutschland giving out German IP's to Dutch customers. It's at this point that taking a WHOIS lookup literally is the wrong approach.

I recently discovered that Maxmind provides a database that provides a reasonable level of accuracy under the LGPL and a Python interface to their GeoIP API. Right now this only works under Linux, but should work under OS X just fine. The Win32 version may have to wait until I can compile the lib for that plaform.

packet garden update. the final sprout.

Fri, 27 Oct 2006 20:35:45 GMT

A thousand lines of code since I last wrote, and a few hundred away from finishing Packet Garden. It's a matter of days now.

The UI code still needs some TLC - you can hear the bugs chirp at night - but there's now a basic configuration interface that saves out to a file and a history browser for loading in previously created worlds. Here's a little screenshot of the work in progress showing the world-browser overlay and the result of a busy night of giving on the eMule network.


Due to the vast number of machines a single domestic PC will reach for in a day of use I've had to do away with graphing whole unique IP's and am now logging and grouping IP's within a network range, meaning all IP's logged between the range 193.2.132.0 - 193.2.132.255 would be logged as a peak or trough at 193.2.132.255. This has exponentially dropped the total generation time of a world, including deforming the mesh and populating the garden world with flora. While I saw it as a compromise at first actually closer to an original desire to graph 'network regions'; in fact I could even go higher up and log everything under 192.2.255.255.

and then there was life..

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:35:03 GMT

.. well, sort of.

Packet Garden is coming along nicely, though there are still a few challenges ahead. These are primarily related to building a Windows installer, something not my forte as I primarily develop on and for Linux systems. Packet capture on Windows is also a little different from that of Linux, though I think I have my head around this issue for the time being. So far running PG on OSX looks to be without issue. I'd like to see the IP's resolved back into domain names, so that landscape features could be read as remote sources by name. While in itself possible it's not something that is done fast enough as each lookup needs to done individually.

One thing I've been surprised by in the course of developing this project is just how many unique IP's are visited by a single host in the course of what is considered 'normal' daily use. If certain P2P software is being run, where connections to many hundred machines in the course of day is not unusual, very interesting landscapes start to emerge.

Basic plant-life now populates throughout the world, each plant representing a website visited by the user. Common protocols like SSH and FTP will generate their own items, visible on the terrain. Collision detection has also improved, aiding navigation, which is done with the cursor keys. I've added stencil shadows, a few other graphic features and am on the way to developing a basic user interface.

Previously it took a long time to actually generate the world from accumulated network traffic, but this has since been resolved thanks to some fast indexing and writing the parsed packet data directly to geometry. The advantage of the new system is that the user can start up Packet Garden at any point throughout the day and see the accumulated results of their network use.

Here are a few snaps of PG as it stands today, demoing a world generated from heavy HTTP, Skype, SoulSeek and SSH traffic over the course of a few hours. More updates will be posted shortly.

first screenshots of packet garden

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:26:15 GMT

Mid this year the Arnolfini commissioned a new piece from me by the name of Packet Garden. It's not due for delivery yet (October), but here are a few humble screenshots of early graphical tests.

I'll put together a project page soon, but in the meantime, here's a quick introduction.

A small program runs on your computer capturing information about all the servers you visit and how much raw data you download from each. None of this information is made public or shared in any way, instead it's used to grow a little unique world - a kind of 'walk-in graph' of your network use.

With each day of network activity a new world is generated, each of which are stored as tiny files for you to browse, compare and explore as time goes by. Think of them as pages from a network diary. I hope to grow simple plant-like forms from information like dropped packets also, but let's see if I get time..

I'm coding the whole project in Python, using the very excellent 3D engine, Soya3D.

Here's a gallery which I'll add to as the project develops.

second person shooter at http gallery

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 12:24:10 GMT

The HTTP Gallery in London is now showing my Second Person Shooter prototype in a show by the unassuming name of Game Play. Let's hope the little demo doesn't crumble under the weight of a thousand button-mashing FPS fans..

As soon as my commission for the Arnolfini is complete and shipped, I'll finish the _real version_. Promise.

new paper uploaded

Mon, 24 Jul 2006 16:08:44 GMT

The slightly unweildy title is " Buffering Bergson: Matter and Memory in 3D Games, soon to be published in a collection of essays called 'Emerging Small Tech' by The University of Minnesota Press.

The paper was actually written some time ago and I've been meaning to upload papers I've written to this blog. Let this be the first.

one day study: trapped rocket

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 19:55:46 GMT

This little sketch continues my ongoing fascination with multiple viewports, for both the visual compositional possibilities and for the divided object/subjecthood produced. I spent most of a day working on 'trapped rocket', exploring the use of viewports to contain their subject.

In this experiment I've built a 'prison' out of six virtual cameras, containing an aggressive object, a rocket trying to get out. All cameras are orthagonal to the next looking inward, in turn producing a cube. Together all six cameras jail the rocket as it toils forever trying new trajectories indefinitely.

The 3.2M non-interactive, realtime project runs on a Linux system and is downloadable here. You'll need 3D graphics accelleration to run it. I wrote a script that took a gazillion screenshots and so here's the overly large gallery that inevitably resulted. Here's also a 7.4M, 1 minute clip in the Ogg Theora format.

transISTor lecture notes uploaded

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 14:43:49 GMT

For those of you that weren't there, here are the lecture notes, in HTML, of the first half of my day-class at the FAMU in Prague.

Thanks to CIANT and to the students for a fun and productive day.

pay per click tourism

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 13:36:32 GMT

Marta and I just returned from Prague. One thing that struck us there was the large amount of time we spent in other people's photographs and videos, or at least within the bounds of their active lenses.

It's sadly inevitable that at some time a tourist mecca like Prague will capitalise on this, introducing a kind of 'scenic copyright' with a pay-per-click extension. Documenting a scene, or an item in a scene, would be legally validated as a kind of value deriving use, much in the same way as paying to see an exhibition is justified. Scenic copyright already exists, largely under the banner of anti-terrorism (bridges, important public and private buildings fall under such laws), but there are cases where pay-per-view tourism is already (inadvertently) working.

A friend Martin spoke of his experiences in St. Petersberg, where people are not allowed to photograph inside the subway, something enforced under the auspice of protecting the subway from terroristic attack. However for a small fee you can be granted full right to take photographs. Being that it's very expensive to have city wardens patrolling photographers it will no doubt be automated, where Digital Rights Management of a scene would be enforced at a hardware level.

Here's a hypothetical worst case. Similar to the chip level DRM in current generation Apple computers (with others to follow), camera manufacturers may provide a system whereby tourists must pay a certain fee allowing them to take photographs of a given scene. If a camera is found to be within a global position falling under state sanctioned scenic-copyright, the camera would either cease to function at all or simply write out watermarked, logo-defaced or blank images. If you want a photo of the Charles Bridge without "City of Praha" on it, you'll have to pay for it..

spatial indexing of signage using text-to-speech reader

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 11:32:04 GMT

A newspaper reporting on a blind convention (a standard for blindness?) in Dallas talks about a text to speech device allowing blind people to quickly survey text in their local environment, further refining their reading based on a series of relayed choices. The device works by taking photographs of the scene and in a fashion similar to OCR, extracts characters from the pixel array, assembles them into words and feeds them to software for vocalisation.

Given the vast amount of text in any compressed urban environment, prioritising information would become necessary for a device like this to deliver information while it's still useful or else utility would be largely lost. The kind of text I'm talking about would include road-signs and building exit points.

Perhaps a position aware tagging system could be added to important signs using triangulated position from multiple RFID tags, bluetooth or other longer range high-resolution positioning system. Signs could be organised by their relative importance using 'sound icons', which in turn are binaurally mixed into a 3D sound field and unobtrusively played back over headphones (much as some fighter pilots cognitively locate missiles). The user would then hear a prioritised aural map of their textual surrounds before selecting which they should first read based on assessment of their current needs.

'tapper'

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 00:53:25 GMT

'Tapper' is a small virtual sound installation exploring iterative rhythmical structures using physical collision modeling and positional audio.

Three mechanical arms 'tap' a small disc, bouncing it against the ground surface. On collision each puck plays the same common sample. Because the arms move at different times polyrhythms are produced. The final output is mixed into 3D space, thus where you place yourself in the virtual room alters the emphasis of the mix.



I'll make a movie available soon and add it to this post.

wiretap's pyKit archived

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 22:45:24 GMT

many of you have written to me about the Blender --> PureData HOWTO i wrote up last year and how you've used it in your own projects. it's great to see this simple tute forming the basis of a few workshops and university classes now also (here's looking at you Andy!).

it seems the Wiretap site is currently down - and has been for a while. for this reason you'll probably be missing an essential ingredient of the tutorial, the pyKit Python -> OSC interface libraries.

because i'm very nice, i've archived them here until they're back online.

beagled

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 18:55:38 GMT

Beagle is an 'instant search' tool for Linux systems, and normally works in conjunction with the Gnome Desktop, which I don't run.

being able to instantly find files from the commandline is thus something i've wanted for a while. here's a simple howto for those of you that'd like instant search from the CLI. it assumes you have a Debian based system:

        sudo apt-get install beagle

create a beagle index directory:

        mkdir ~/.beagle-index

index all of $HOME:

        sudo beagle-build-index --target ~/.beagle-index  --recursive ~/

start the beagle daemon as $USER. it automatically backgrounds:

        beagled

run 'beagle-query' in the background so that it looks for live changes to your indexed file system.

        beagle-query --live-query &

now create a file called 'foobar' and search for it with:

        beagle-query foobar

the result should instantly appear.

it may be better to alias it as 'bfind' or something in ~/.bashrc and start 'beagled' and 'beagle-query --live-query &' from ~/.xinitrc or earlier.

enjoy

q3apd lovebytes06 video added.

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 10:58:15 GMT

it's in the Ogg Theora format (plays with VLC), is 84M slim and has a couple of minutes playing time.

this video is pretty much a record of the piece as it was exhibited at Lovebytes06, the game autoplaying continuously for two weeks.

there is no human input in this work, four bots fight each other, dying and respawning, over and over again. one of the four bots sends all of it's control data to PD which in turn is used to drive a score. it's through the ears of this bot that we hear the composition driven by elements such as global-position in the map, weapon-state, damage-state and jump-pad events. For this reason game-objects and architectural elements were carefully positioned so that the flow of combat would produce common points of return (phrases) and the orchestration sounded right overall.

The scene was heavily graphically reduced so as to prioritise sound within the sensorial mix.

we have a multichannel configuration in mind for the future, whereby each bot is dedicated a pair of channels in the mix. the listener/audience would then stand at the center. perhaps we would remove video output altogether, so that all spatial and event perception was delivered aurally.

get it here.

new fijuu2 video added

Thu, 25 May 2006 21:41:24 GMT

it's 40M and in the Ogg Theora format. if you don't know what that means just use the VLC player.

get the video here.

if you can deal with Flash, here's a YouTubed version.

fijuu2 commissioned for CyberSonica06

Sun, 14 May 2006 00:16:19 GMT

thanks to a generous commission from Cybersonica, pix and I had the resources we needed to throw a month at creating an entirely new version of fijuu, the engine, artwork and audio got a complete overhaul.

development in such a short period of time was also testimony to the power of skype as a collaboration tool. we spent around 8-10 hours in the IM each day sending each other patches, artwork, code snippets etc right up until the point of walking out the door with Fijuu and Ubuntu on a shiny new Shuttle. if only Skype or an equivalent IM and VoIP tool had code-formatting and an sketch-block with drawing tools and SVG export..

the piece was installed at Phonica in London where it'll be on show until the 26th, alongside sister shows around London.

here are some screenshots of the finished work and most imporantly here's the sourcecode if you're at all interested in compiling it:

darcs pull http://fijuu.com/darcs

pix has put together a README listing dependencies. don't leave home without it!

silent tv and snow.

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 17:21:40 GMT

fellow Kiwi Adam Hyde just sent through some snaps of a little workshop conducted in Lotte Meijer's house in Amsterdam over the snowy new-year.

we spontaneously decided to make TV transmitters according to a plan devised by Tetsuo Kogawa, a mate of Adam's. Adam and Lotte had the gear, so we got busy.

Marta, Adam, Lotte and I each soldered a board up, but Lotte's worked the best. the board has a little variable resistor for tuning channels and to our complete astonishment gave us a near perfect colour reception with a composite cable from a DVCam hardwired onto the board. we got around 10m of range between the transmitter and the TV before the signal was lost due to occlusions in the house itself. with a few boosters used in serial this range would be (hypothetically) exponential.

fun and games - build one yerself!

weapons of deconstruction

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:53:41 GMT

q3apd at Lovebytes

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 04:07:04 GMT

Thanks to Ed Carter and the Lovebytes folk, q3apd is finally getting a good showing in an installation context; to date it's largely been appreciated in a performance setting. Unlike prior appearances, q3apd will this time be played entirely by bots which is so far proving to be an interesting challenge.

While these bots are in mortal combat they are generating a lot of data. q3apd uses this data to generate a composition, in essense providing a means to 'hear' the events of combat as a network of flows of influence.

To do this, every twitch, turn and change of state in these bots is passed to the program PD where the sonification is performed; agent vectors become notes, orientations accents and local positions become pitch. Events like jumpads, teleporters, bot damage and weapon switching all add compositional detail (gestures you might say).

Once the eye has become accustomed to the relationships between audible signal and the events of combat, visual material can be sequentially removed with a keypress, bringing the sonic description to the foreground.

I've been working on a new environment for the piece and helping bots come to terms with the arena. Here's a preview shot. When the work goes live I'll post a video.

interrupted portrait

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 01:58:40 GMT

videos in bed, 2005.