Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Processing Blogs at Dorkbot 35
Dorkbot 35
Originally uploaded by rob.purdie.
Seriously though: cat pictures and gengerative art, what's not to like?
I'm told I gave good tube map.
dorkbotlondon #35
I'll be talking about some of my recent Processing work including Processing hacks and the travel time tube map at dorkbotlondon tonight. It's a Brick Lane one, so no excuses!
dorkbotlondon
img050720-2112
Originally uploaded by piotch.
There was quite a buzz about our maps at dorkbotlondon last night. It went down very well.
Catch us at Open Tech, or catch Steve and Ben at What The Hack if you want to know more.
Dorkbot and Open Tech
I'll be at dorkbotlondon tonight, hopefully doing a 5 minute "open dork" presenting a few bottom-up/emergent GPS map visualisations related to OpenStreetMap, if that's your thing. (There will also be a short article written by yours truly about OpenStreetMap in the next issue of Architectural Design, if that's your thing).
I'll be at the UKUUG / NTK / BBC Open Tech bash on Saturday too. It's sold out now, but if you're attending then be sure to say hi. When I'm not heckling Steve Coast I'll be trying to clone a Ted Nelson so I can have one for myself.
Wireless London: Future Urban Infrastructures #3: Social Exoskeletons
I'll be at this talk. Say hi!
From the Dorkbot London blabber list:
You are invited to...
Wireless London: Future Urban Infrastructures #3: Social Exoskeletons
The last in a series of three lectures at the Architectural Association.
Talk: Tuesday 15th March, 2005, 6:30pm-8.00pm
Title: Social Exoskeletons
Speakers: Ben Russell (see below for bio) and a special guest mystery speaker.
Location: Architectural Association (36 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3ES / 0207 887 4000 / http://www.aaschool.ac.uk)To be followed by an open show and tell session: 8.00pm -9.30pm, AA Restaurant. (see details below)
All talks are free, but places are limited. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment.
This month's theme: Social Exoskeletons
The last of talk of the Wireless London talk series will look towards the future of urban infrastructures and how these might effect and develop new forms of social exchange, which in turn effect economic and political change. With a sophisticated wireless infrastructures in place, what might be the consequences and effects this might bring? How might this begin to effect social interaction and cohesion?
Speaker Ben Russell writes:
"Humans are social beings, their evolutionary success rests on cooperation, and not just cooperation within groups, but cooperation between groups manifesting in many forms, from physical trade to intangible information exchange. Traditional business mantras, efficiency, competitiveness, and aggressiveness are increasingly applicable to decentralised, devolved cooperative structures. For example, open source software and peer to peer file sharing. Collaborative tools that far from slowing things down, speed things up. As location and localisation emerges in internet applications and more physical things are formally described, local physical inventories will be amenable to the new collection aggregation methodologies (ad hoc distributed neighborhood libraries etc).
As media systems become more about distributed, discrete, and described elements and systems which process them, they become increasingly and diversely functional. Data is becoming more described and discrete, and control functions that feed off that data are becoming more sophisticated, distributed and interdependent. We may see the emergence of a new kind of real time civic cooperation, helping your fellow citizens unintentionally and immediately through the structure of these systems."
Biographies of this month's Speakers
Ben Russell
Ben Russell is the author of headmap (www.headmap.org), a blueprint for wireless location aware devices. One of the founders of the Locative Media Lab (www.locative.net). Part of the original management team of UK game physics startup Mathengine (Mathengine physics is used in 'A list' games including 'Enter the matrix', 'Unreal', 'Planetside' and 'Rainbow Six 3'. The core technology was recently acquired by Electronic Arts). Recent speaking engagements have included ISEA 2004, MIT, Banff New Media Institute at the Banff Centre, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Transmediale 04, Architectural Association, Next 5 Minutes. He is currently working for the newly formed Pervasive and Locative Arts Network a new international and interdisciplinary research network in pervasive media and locative media has been funded as part of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Ben Russell links: http://headmap.org http://locative.net http://open-plan.org
Open Show & Tell Sessions/Discussion
Each Wireless London talk event will run between 6.30 and 8.00pm with speakers and discussion, immediately followed by an open 'show and tell' session at the AA from 8.00 to 9.30.The 'show and tell' sessions are informal and open for anyone to bring along and showcase projects. finished or work in progress, that are relevant to this field. These sessions are an opportunity for practitioners, students and professionals involved in free networks, arts, wireless technologies, architecture, urbanism,
education, communications policy and local government, to meet and discuss current and future projects.If you would like to come and showcase your work, please let us know by emailing -> ps (at) wirelesslondon.info, or just come along (with your own equipment) on the day.
Agents, Behaviour, Emergence and Embodiment
Here are my online references from a lecture I gave today at UCL.
- Wikipedia on AI, includes a paragraph on "neats" and "scruffies".
- Desire-lines & Emergent paths: a light-hearted presentation of a predictive model / apparently it wasn't Berkeley, Irvine, or the Oregon Experiment who tried to use it... has anyone actually tried it?
- Craig Reynolds' boids / Steering Behaviours (the individual steering behaviour examples are essential viewing) / an HP labs tech report on not evolving collective behaviour for fish / well explained pseudocode for boids / my quick 2D processing implementation of the pseudocode (commented code and 3D version available on request).
- Pedestrian Simulation: Alasdair Turner's EVAS agents / my post on the MSc VE weblog about a pedestrian sim project in the Alps / Crowd Dynamics (the design is terrible, but click main menu and scroll down to the "Myriad" section).
- Brandeis's DEMO lab: The Golem Project / Evolutionary Design / Evolution of Buildable Objects (LEGO)
- Stigmergy: a good academic intro (pdf, HTML summary here) / Dan Ladley's termite constructions.
- Karl Sims: evolved creatures / the "blockies" MPEG / a retrospective.
- The books I mentioned, all very accessible: Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology / Mitchel Resnick's Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams / Steven Johnson's Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software.
- The software/libraries I mentioned: steering behaviours work has spun off into a free open source library called Open Steer / Breve is a 3D environment for the simulation of decentralized systems and artificial life / Framsticks doesn't require programming knowledge / there is a demo of BEAST at David Gordon's homepage.
This will all be assimilated into my del.icio.us page shortly.
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