15 November 2009

Andrea Zittel

http://www.zittel.org/

11 August 2008

The Man Behind Scrambled Hackz

by Eliot Van Buskirk 04.17.06
I saw a video the other day that really stood out from the rest of the links making the rounds.
It depicts a man demonstrating software that appears to parse what he's saying fast enough to reassemble the same words by pulling and reordering bits from a recorded Michael Jackson interview. The result: Jackson appears to speak the same sentence right back to him.
The man goes on to explain how the software behind this process works, and his video closes with a live performance of the software in which a performer appears to employ the beat-box method to control the playback of audio and video on a large video screen behind him, in front of what I can only imagine must be a dazzled crowd.

in Wired.

09 June 2008

Konstfack’s Forum on Creativity 2008

Did you miss Konstfack’s Forum on Creativity 2008?

Now you can view a recording.

13 February 2008

At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: NYT February 12, 2008
Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. More.

30 November 2007

Cry, robot: the android dental patient at the cutting edge

· Machines filling gaps in shrinking workforce
· Japanese market to grow to £26bn a year by 2025

The days of a guaranteed pain-free visit to the dentist may not be far off thanks to a petite Japanese woman in a pink sweater who goes by the name of Simroid. She has a limited vocabulary and a strange complexion, but the 160cm-tall humanoid robot is happy to feel your pain.

More.

23 November 2007

Illusion and the sacred

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity

13 July 2006

The Return of Me

Paralyzed Man Uses Thoughts to Move a Cursor

By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: July 13, 2006

A paralyzed man with a small sensor implanted in his brain was able to control a computer, a television set and a robot using only his thoughts, scientists reported yesterday.

Matthew Nagle, left paralyzed when he was stabbed five years ago, and the circle he drew on a computer screen by using only his thoughts.

Those results offer hope that in the future, people with spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other conditions that impair movement may be able to communicate or better control their world.

“If your brain can do it, we can tap into it,” said John P. Donoghue, a professor of neuroscience at Brown University who has led development of the system and was the senior author of a report on it being published in today’s issue of the journal Nature.

In a variety of experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, moved a cursor, opened e-mail, played a simple video game called Pong and drew a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume on a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.

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