This is the first post I’m writing from Microsoft’s Connector Bus. It’s a biofueled transportation system for MS employees and it’s awesome. Two blocks from my house, I hop on a wi-fi enabled bus which takes me
to work.

I’ve been really busy with mundane stuff, lately. Just moved into a new house and evenings are now filled with unpacking.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying (very unsuccessfully) to write a chapter for a new book coming out on Digital Design & Education. Neri Oxman is set to write a chapter, as well as Larry Sass and Kostas Terzidis at the GSD. My chapter is, of course, on Rhinoscripting. The book will be in Spanish, but I’m allowed to publish the material in English.

So as a rough draft of my chapter, I think I will do as a series of instructional blog posts on the rhinoscripting blog. I don’t use rhino as much anymore or teach it, which is a pity, since McNeel is based in Seattle. But I would like to unload what little I’ve learned about Rhinoscripting to people who might use it. I’m way behind on the new explicit history stuff, but that’s going to be awesome for scripters.

Watched The Diving Bell and Butterfly yesterday.

The movie, directly beautifully by Julian Schnabel, is based on a book of the same name. The book, a memoir, was written by Jean -Dominique Bauby. Jean suffered a stroke in his 40’s which left him completely paralyzed except for his left eyelid; his brain function and hearing remained, a condition known as “locked-in” syndrome. He painstakingly learned to communicate by blinking, and, one single letter at a time, wrote his memoirs.

To say the film is touching, might be an understatement. It is an incredibly moving story told in a simple and powerful way. And when the end of the movie comes, and the credits show huge hunks of glaciers melting and falling into the ocean– but in reverse, and you are piecing yourself whole as well– it is very difficult to keep a dry eye.

You should see this movie.

Sorry I’ve been away from the blog for so long, folks. I’ve been driving cross country from Cambridge to Seattle. It was a wonderful, amazing trip which I will write more about in subsequent posts. In the meantime I wanted to share three videos, stolen from three friends. I’ll show the videos first, and then talk about relevance. (Many thanks to the friends I’ve looted.)

1. Ratatat has a new album coming out. T, has been feeding me links to leaked songs (and this video) and the album promises to be awesome. Much less dance-able (to the dismay of the young-uns) but clever and infectious as usual. Here’s a video to their song, Mirando, made from snippets of the movie Predator:

2. Allen showed me this amazing video for REM’s song Imitation of Life. The video is built out of single 30 second clip that’s played forwards and backwards, but zoomed into to provide a continuous song crafted from moments and reversals:

3. Last but not least, Eva, a former co-worker, recently posted this video about manipulating video via objects in that video. The video is quite beautiful and the source (which I had delicious’ed earlier) is a little more academic, but continues bringing home the bacon.

So the connection between these three videos is that one of my current assignments is to think about time-based interfaces. Specifically timelines and calendars. But, we’d like those interfaces to feel more like the “infinite canvas” (the pan and zoom demo in my last post). Something elegant and intuitive. So I’ve been looking at interfaces with some notion of time represented in them; time represent linearly, time represented circularly, time as discreet moments, and time as a continuum. Success would be to make something that’s easier to use than a calendar, and more powerful, a task that many many applications have taken on.

I remember the first time many years ago when I was working for AMNH that I had to write some php scripts to parse through old ANWR temperature data and build a website with a calendar. It sucked. Months have different lengths. Years can have different number of days. And when you get beyond that, weekends and holidays (although they’re just days, too) are qualitatively different than other days. What I mean to say is that from our Roman calendar to Christian holidays to “American” work week our experience of time is very dependent on soft culture. It would be great to have something malleable to help me manage my experience of time.

So here are the nice-to-haves of a new calendar app:

1.See multiple timelines simultaneously. This includes one’s own paths, as well as timelines of friends, family, and co-workers (your entire– and I hate this phrase– social network).

2. Attach tags, data, descriptions or any sort of media to a piece of time. And be able to reorganize and share those blocks.

3. Shift between views based on task. If I’m in a “to do” sort of mood (i.e. at work), then show my calendar prioritized accordingly.

Right now, I’ve got this vision of colored ribbons in space, like the Ace Combat dogfight replay.

So I guess some of the stuff my group has been working on at Microsoft has been ‘released’ to the public. (Demoed by Bill yesterday!) Here’s my boss Ian demo-ing one of our recent projects:

Full Story: http://gizmodo.com/390400/microsoft-touchwall-surface-for-the-common-man

Saw this video today:

Animation has come a long way thanks to computers. Ever since Final Fantasy (which I had to see in theaters), they’ve been pushing pretty far into the uncanny valley. (Computer have also caused the reverse to be true as well. The future is in the valley, apparently.) Even the kid’s stuff is unbelievably polished.

So it’s only natural that an opposite sort of animation gain in popularity, raw and process-oriented, like this in-situ animated graffiti or whiteboard animations or even (gasp!) sand paintings. Please to enjoy this amination! (ty, Dan)

Campy, yes. (You should see the sand painting set to Vivaldi…) But there’s something so anti-art about it, that it must, in fact, be brilliant– albeit naively so.

Go see Iron Man. It’s good clean fun.

Not sure how I missed this. But it’s great.

Images from apartmenttherapy.com

Victor and Rolf’s new store in Milan has just one simple concept, executed perfectly. Designed by architect Siebe Tettero with SZI Design in Amsterdam, the store is just killer.

Recently, I saw this site called geosim philly.

Virtual Philadelphia is a leading 3D online virtual city mirrored off the Center City of Philadelphia, PA, full of historical landscapes and buildings, hundreds of years of culture and one of the most beloved US cities.
Today, Philadelphia is a vibrant city cultivated with restaurants, boutiques, museums, nightlife, modern residences and developed commerce – definitely a premier place to live in or to visit.

GeoSim compiles gigabytes of aerial photos, street images, laser scans and geodetic measurements of Philadelphia to build an accurate 3D city model, capable of providing a genuine life simulation of the physical streets, buildings and urban landscape with the “look and feel” of a real city.

I don’t know much about how this project actually works. I have this feeling that it’s cooked up by the Philadelphia tourist board. After hearing architects get all “schweaty” over Secondlife and having it not pan out into anything that dramatically impacted design, I’m reluctant to call this stuff relevant.

So it may not be relevant… but it seems to be an interesting way to ride the Bilbao effect. I think they’re going for a Digital Bilboa Effect. It’s a less expensive and less risky way to draw tourists into the spaces of the city’s downtown area. I wonder what will happen when a new building is built. Will the proposals be vetted through the digital downtown?

So I wasn’t even supposed to mention what my group (at my new job at microsoft) was doing until they went public. (whoops!) Those of you who I’ve given details to, please don’t go running to microsoft’s legal department.

Well, now they have. Officelabs.com now has a public site. It’s a little bare and boring… we’re treading quietly for a bit, but when I’ve worked on something cool that can be published there, I’ll let you know!

In the meantime, check out these two “remixes”.

The first is an except from Martin Arnold’s new film Alone.

The second is High Noon redone.

In the comments to the last post, virtualnexus pointed out an artwork that I hadn’t seen before, but (from images I saw…) I think I would really like. The piece reminds me of few things. First, Gerhard Richter’s Mirror Painting (Blood Red), a monochromatic painting in red on the back of a large, figure-sized piece of glass. I saw it at SFMoMA many years ago and, for something so minimal, it was creepy as hell….

Speaking of blood, I just watched Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive. It’s not as good as Ichi the Killer, but it’s got the best ending in a movie since Tarantino’s Death Proof. The movie is pretty extreme so if you gross out easily, you might want to pass on this one. (I also checked out Day Watch, but I’ll save that for another post.)

Anyway, the other image that popped into my head when I looked at Richard Wilson’s piece was the opening scene of Ghost in the Shell 2. These opening credits are unbelievable! Traditional Japanese a capella frames these fetish-ized robotic Bellmer dolls. The result is a jaw dropping tour de force that I have difficulty intellectualizing because the emotional output is so raw. (Wait for the use of reflection/water in the video)

This doesn’t do it justice (you need the high res version… watch it full screen on YouTube), but you get the idea:

Anyway, the whole point of Miike and Richter and GitS2 is the mixture of sublime and grotesque that makes me think that they aren’t diametric opposites but instead separate points on a continuum that loops back on itself. (I wonder what would happen if tried to make something as gross as I could.)

Trend note, I’ve seen this resurgent interest in John Waters (and Water’s pop/gross/white trash obsession). You don’t know whether to cry, laugh, or barf. I wanted to show you this site as an example, but the photos have been taken down…

This is my first post from Seattle! I’m in company housing in Kirkland. It’s pretty posh, in a corporate way, but I’m comfortable and adjusting well.

Today’s treat is a little video from Erika Janunger a student at the Konstfack College of Art and Design in Sweden. It’s a little cheesy, nothing you haven’t seen before in music videos etc. But the video is elegantly done and starts to radiate a few ideas.

Before I left and on the plane over here I finished up a few more sci fi books. Blade #1 The Bronze Axe was pretty fun. That and Black Legion of Callisto, both from the 70’s had the same odd (over compensating) take on masculinity… although the idea of the Omnicompetent Man has been in sci fi for quite a while.

I also read a collection of short stories from Frank Herbert. All written in the late fifties and sixties, presumably while he was writing Dune. They all show an obsession with bureaucracy, politics and economics that when done right is like reading an issue of The Economist from the future; and when done wrong is painfully bad. The first story, which is good, is called “The Master Saboteur” and features a multi-bodied, multi-gendered race. It was written in the late sixties… about the same time that Ursula K. le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness was winning the H&N awards.

What’s so exciting to me in these examples is seeing gender-hyperbole being played out in pulp, while gender ambiguity happens in the “mainstream”. (I use quote because this is sci-fi, still.) I realize that this might be news to me only because of my straight male ignorance, but I think it might be evidence of other cultural polarities which can play out in a single genre.