The Impakt Festival officially begins next Wednesday, but in the weeks prior to the event, Impakt has been hosting numerous talks, dinners and also a weekly “Movie Club,” which has been a social anchor for my time in Utrecht. Every Tuesday, after a pizza dinner and drinks, an expert in the field of new media […]
It’s been a busy couple of weeks working on the EquityBot project, which will be ready for the upcoming Impakt Festival. Well, at least some functional prototype in my ongoing research project will be online for public consumption. The good news is that the Twitter stream is now live. You can follow EquityBot here. EquityBot […]
https://pastebin.com/raw/WPdrw7b6 security %0 h4ck you bitchesss !
For my latest project, EquityBot, I’ve been researching, building and writing code during my 2 month residency at Impakt Works in Utrecht (Netherlands). EquityBot is going through its final testing cycles before a public announcement on Twitter. For those of you who are Bot fans, I’ll go ahead and slip you the EquityBot’sTwitter feed: https://twitter.com/equitybot The initial code-work has […]
Overview Water Works is a project that I created for the Creative Code Fellowship in the Summer of 2014 with the combined support of Stamen Design, Autodesk and Gray Area. Water Works is a 3D data visualization and mapping of the water infrastructure of San Francisco. The project is a relational investigation: I have been […]
In my ongoing research and development of EquityBot — a stock-trading bot* with a philanthropic personality, which is my residency project at Impakt Works — I’ve been researching various emotional models for humans. The code I’m developing will try to make correlations between stock prices and group emotions on Twitter. It’s a daunting task and one […]
This week I traveled to Berlin for Polycon. No…it’s not a convention on polyamory, but a porject developed by my longtime friend, Michael Ang (aka Mang). Polygon Construction Kit (aka Polycon) is a software toolkit for converting 3D polygon models into physical objects. I wanted an excuse to visit Berlin, to hang out with Mang and […]
I’m doing more research on EquityBot —the project for my Impakt Works residency, which I just started a couple of days ago. EquityBot is a stock-trading algorithm that explores the connections between collective emotions on social media and financial speculation. It will be presented at the Impakt Festival at the end of October. It will also […]
I’ve been blogging about my Water Works project all summer and after the Creative Code Gray Area presentation on September 10th, the project is done. Phew. Except for some of the residual documentation. In the hours just before I finished my presentation, I also managed to get Life of Poo working. What is it? Well, an […]
My exciting news is that this fall I will be an artist-in-residence at Impakt Works, which is in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The same organization puts on the Impakt Festival every year, which is a media arts festival that has been happening since 1988. My residency is from Sept 15-Nov 15 and coincides with the festival at […]
In my ongoing Water Works project — a Creative Code Fellowship with Stamen Design, Gray Area and Autodesk — I’ve been working for many many hours on code and data structures. The immediate results were a Map of the San Francisco Cisterns and a Map of the “Imaginary Drinking Hydrants”. However, I am also making 3D prints — fabricated sculptures, which I map […]
Last week, I posted an online map of the 67 Emergency Drinking Water Hydrants in San Francisco. It was covered in SFist, got a lot of retweets and coverage. I felt a semblance of pride in being a “citizen-mapper” and helping the public in case of a dire emergency. I wondered why these maps weren’t […]
Did you know that San Francisco has 67 fire hydrants that are designed for emergency drinking water in case of an earthquake-scale disaster? Neither did I. That’s because just about no one knows about these hydrants. While scouring the web for Cistern locations — as part my Water Works Project*, which will map out the […]
How do you construct a 3D model of something that lives underground and only exists in a handful of pictures taken from the interior? This was my task for the Cisterns of San Francisco last week. The backstory: have you ever seen those brick circles in intersections and wondered what the heck they mean? I […]
This summer, I’m working on a Creative Code Fellowship with Stamen Design, Gray Area and Autodesk. The project is called Water Works, which will map and data-visualize the San Francisco water infrastructure using 3D-printing and the web. Finding water data is harder than I thought. Like detective Gittes in the movie Chinatown, I’m poking my nose […]
The last week has been a flurry of coding, as I’m quickly creating a crude but customized data-3D modeling application for Water Works — an art project for my Creative Code Fellowship with Stamen Design, Gray Area and Autodesk. This project build on my Data Crystals sculptures, which transform various public datasets algorithmically into 3D-printable art objects. […]
Along with 3 other new media artists and creative coding experts, I was recently selected to be a Creative Code Fellow for 2014 — a project pioneered by Gray Area (formerly referred to as GAFFTA and now in a new location in the Mission District). Each of us is paired with a partnering studio, which provides […]
@SelfiesBot began tweeting last week and already the results have surprised me. Selfies Bot is a portable sculpture which takes selfies and then tweets the images. With custom electronics and a long arm that holds a camera that points at itself, it is a portable art object that can travel to parks, the beach and […]
I just finished three more Data Crystals, produced during my residency at Autodesk. This set of three are data visualizations of world datasets. This first one captures all the population of cities in the world. After some internet sleuthing, I found a comprehensive .csv file of all of the cities by lat/long and their population and […]
This plaque in Pacific Grove, California, is the IEEE Milestone honoring my dad’s computer work in the 1970s. He was a true inventor and laid the foundation for the personal computer architecture that we now take for granted. Gary Kildall’s is the 139th IEEE Milestone. These awards honor the key historical achievements in electrical and […]
I’m a convert to 123D Circuits and not just because I’m an Autodesk shill (full disclosure: I’m in the residency program), but because it has the shared component library that anyone can tap into. What I’m designing is a PCB that goes to your Raspberry Pi cobbler breakout with some basic components: switches, LEDs, and potentiometers. […]
My first three Data Crystals are finished! I “mined” these from the San Francisco Open Data portal. My custom software culls through the data and clusters it into a 3D-printable form. Each one involves different clustering algorithms. All of these start with geo-located data (x,y) with either time/space on the z-axis. Here they are! And […]
I finished three final prints of my Data Crystals project over the weekend. They look great and tomorrow I’m taking official documentation pictures. These are what they look like in the support material, which is also beautiful in its ghostly, womb-like feel. I’ve posted photos of these before, but still stunned at how amazing they […]
Below is a list of the crime classifications, extracted from the crime reports from the San Francisco Open Data Portal. This is part of my “data mining” work with the 3D-printed Data Crystals. ARSON ASSAULT BAD CHECKS BRIBERY BURGLARY DISORDERLY CONDUCT DRIVING UNDER THE INFLUENCE DRUG/NARCOTIC DRUNKENNESS EMBEZZLEMENT EXTORTION FAMILY OFFENSES FORGERY/COUNTERFEITING FRAUD GAMBLING KIDNAPPING LARCENY/THEFT […]
I’ve had the Neurosky Mindwave headset in a box for over a year and just dove into it, as part of my ongoing Data Crystals research at Autodesk. The device is the technology backbone behind the project: EEG AR with John Craig Freeman (still working on funding). The headset fits comfortably. Its space age retro look aesthetically […]
While monkeying around with the Raspberry Pi and the camera and the GPIO, I took this selfie. I guess the camera was upside down! The Raspberry Pi is pretty great overall. The real bugaboo is the wifi and networking capabilities. You still have to specify these settings manually. But the cost, only $40! I have […]
I’m still recovering from my broken collarbone (surgery was on Wednesday). Today I’m definitely feeling ouchy and tender. I get pretty wiped out walking around outside with the jostling movement, so have been staying home a lot. To keep myself busy, I’ve been working on a backlog of Instructables for my residency at Autodesk. This one […]
While a resident artist at Autodesk, we are supposed to write many Instructables. Often, the temptation is to make your projects and then write the how-to-guides in a haste. Since I broke my collarbone, I really can’t make anything physical, but I can type one-handed. Besides the daily naps and the doctors’ appointments, and slowly doing one-handed […]
I had a bicycle accident on Sunday during a group ride (no cars were involved) and I smacked the pavement hard enough to break my collarbone. Ouch! The upshot is no fabrication work for at least 4 weeks. This will change my time as a resident artist at Autodesk, as I was in the middle […]
I’ve fallen a bit behind in my documentation and have a backlog of great stuff that I’ve been 3D-printing. These are a few of my early tests with my new project: Data Crystals. I am using various data sources, which I algorithmically transform data into 3D sculptures. The source for these is the San Francisco Open […]