X-Rated Super Mario

Alaska's bad Genes

When two of the most horrible, unethical and irresponsible specimens the human race can produce appear at the top of the food chain we can easily deduce that gene disease is spreading in Alaska. Were Sara Paling and Lisa Murkowski separated at birth? Or is total disregard for the future (and present) of the human species a typical Alaskan trait? Eskimos have had time to adapt to subzero temperatures through thousands of years, but apparently more recent opportunistic invasive species like Palinians and Markowsians have suffered a serious brain freeze that has only left their greed organs intact.

This arrogant woman (take your pick, they are interchangeable) is using the power entrusted to her by her "constituents" (read oil companies, dirty power plants and other offending industries) and supported by her "fellow republicans" to prevent any measure that might protect the environment, our health and that of our children, not to mention the rest of the animal kingdom and every other species from certain destruction were she to prevail.

Maybe the very dim witted Pat Robertson has a point. God is punishing the human race for having given birth to defective specimens like him and the above mentioned abominations which are of course loudly and openly applauded by a "broad swath of industry, agriculture and energy lobbies" which are afraid any E.P.A regulation might cut into their obscene profits, GOD FORBID!

The Supreme Puppet Judges of America

It won't cease to amaze me the stupidity of a system that allows a bunch of decrepit right-wing fanatics, so called "judges", to destroy one of the greatest countries in the world by letting themselves be, very profitably swayed, by the profiteers that rape and ravage our land for the benefit of their bank accounts, their "stakeholders" benefits and the will of politicians intent on grabbing the power to curtail what we so arrogantly tout to the rest of the world, freedom and democracy.

Disguising their vomitive decision as "freedom of speech", they, with their supine ignorant vote, have managed to enthrone what is simply hate speech, hate for the future of children for generations to come, hate for the land, hate for the health of our planet, who in the hands of greedy corporations will simply be depleted and destroyed in record time, if they get their wish, since they in turn will be able to pick and choose their limp representative puppets to govern us.

I say if they get their wish, because, if we were in almost any other country, people would be in the streets by the millions, putting their lives on the line to bring down these arrogant fools who have already shown their utmost lack of respect for the human species.

Theirs is not just another legal decision, but a deadly blow to a democracy already failing, corroded as it is by the powerful interest of banks, religious right wing fanatics whose media empires mush and blend in thoughtless pulp the minds of the ignorant and hapless masses under their spell.

Am I mad? no, I am furious, mostly with myself, for having believed in the possibility of a better world, and having brought children to this world with the hope for a better life. Unfortunately, moving to a better, more respectful country, with a better, more open and most importantly, more intelligent dialogue is not a solution, but certainly to be considered, why? because the decision of these blind idiots affect not only this land but the globe as a whole.

They have, with their stamp of approval to rape, given permission fo the polluters, destroyers and economic terrorists of our world, carte blanche to do as they wish, since obviously we won't be able to exert any more influence abroad after this, the most deleterious decision, taken by public officials, elected by the power of money, since Bush's imbecile and well orchestrated decision to do, whatever it took to shape our world for ever. I am sure, dim wits like his or the likes of the Palins, the Limbaughs or the Pat Robertsons of this country must be very proud of their accomplishments.

It shames me to be part of this limp and weak society that allows itself to be abused in such obscene and unjust way, without even making a stand.

REBOOT!

Help is in our Hands

From the book: Solidarity Will Transform the World by Jeffrey Korgen

There are some points in life when every other thing is secondary. This is one of those moments, when millions of people are terrified and with a very grim future ahead.

We are all connected. Our group is like a family, we will work together for months, in some cases we will make friends forever. Our fellow student Christine Irvika, is from Haiti, let's hope that her family is well and let's keep her in our thoughts. She is part of this family.

In two days more than 4.5 million dollars have been texted to aid in this disaster. We can help right from where we are.

Call 90999 on your cell phone and text "HAITI." You will be charged $10.00 on your phone bill, the money of which will go to the Red Cross.

If you want to send goods instead, this is one suggestion, since it goes directly to the closest point of contact (their neighbors in Santo Domingo), "official aid" always takes too much time at a time when hours make a difference:

The Centers of the Company of Jesus in Dominican Rep. (Santo Domingo: Bono and Alberto Hurtado Center; Santiago: Center Bellarmino and CEFASA; Dajabón: Border solidarity) has established an aid network to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. They are accepting the following :

FOODS:
- Can Kidney beans
- Can sausages - Can Sardines - Can Tuna - Saltine crackers
- non-perishable Milk - Fruit juices in non-perishable containers - Nonperishable Foods.

MEDICINES
- Oral rehydration serum - Gauzes - Cotton - Analgesic (acetaminophen, ibuprophen) - - Elastic Bandages - Antitetanic Toxoide - Human antitetanic Ganmaglobulina - Antibiotic (amoxicifilina, in suspension and/or tablets) - Antiseptic (type yodopovidona, or type soap of clorhexidina) - sanitary Towels

Please send no clothing
You can send your contributions to the following addresses:

- Bonó, c. Josefa Brea N. 65, Mejoramiento Social, Santo Domingo.
Tel.: 809-682-4448. sjrmbono@sjrdom.org
(You need to activate Javascript to see this web.)
www.bono.org.do

or

- Centro Alberto Hurtado, Av. Jiménez Moya N. 37, (al lado de
Inazúcar), Santo Domingo

In Search of the Lost Time

Charon and Psyche

I know well that many will disagree about the use of the time of our lives. Who am I to talk about this? There are many ways of visualizing the passage across the Styx, that well respected scenic river that takes us to shores beyond the everlasting fog.

I find this visualization by EA (yes, Electronic Arts, my old employee) rather amusing and interesting. For those of you who are interested in the most popular sport in the world, (no, not baseball nor your mis-called football, the one you play throwing the blimp with your HAND?) but yes, fútbol, football or soccer it is. According to FIFA football is actually played by more than 240 million people in about 200 countries.

Just to set the record straight I would like to mention that when I proposed to design the very first football computer game (for the Commodore 64) at Electronic Arts, they dismissed it as not very commercial. In fact one producer, who shall remain nameless asked me in his infinite cubiculed ignorance, if I could design some more "action" into the game, such as killing or at least maiming other players...no comment.

Well, fast forward to 2010 and here we have the game called FIFA 10 and the visualization I was talking about, called FIFA EARTH. It shows, arguably in real-time how many games are being played and have been played since its release a little over a month ago. So far, as I write this, the counter reads 136, 826, XXX (to fast to pin down, so by the time you check it I am sure it will be a very large number.) That makes for more than 2,000,000 soccer video games played every day! Do you understand my Proustian title now?

This visualizations is quite complex and immense, using streams of data not only from played games but also geo-located Tweets about them, real or virtual, and everything else related to the sport or of interest to fans. Consider for example that last year about 2 billion video game matches were played. How is that for a not very commercial game? LOL! that remark is up there with "I predict only a handful of computers will satisfy the requirements of the world" or something to that effect.

A Tetra Drachma from Athens, 450 B.C.

Not that I had become rich if I had done that first football game (which was completely designed with AI and all), but I think at least I would have one or two silver pieces to pay the price of traversing the by now, very polluted waters of the mythical river.

The Eye Writer

Tempt1

We live in interesting times, no question about that. Plague, famine, kids killing people in remote villages from their drone playstations in Las Vegas, sipping RedBull. It is quite difficult to know how we can provide an ounce of balance to a ton of misery, so that ounce must be something really special to rescue our impossibly damaged spirit.

The influx of very damaged very young humans, the broken byproduct of that biggest business which is war, ends up in the landfills of society, the eternal superfund from which some people pick up the pieces and try to put things back together, albeit in a very different way. A leg here, an arm there, an eye or two, perhaps a brain? Can we pull us back together?

I will call him Luis

While searching for an appropriate picture to help me cut through the fog I had trouble finding one of the millions of miserable children which survive doing such a thing, because Corbis Corporation, the photo "service" owns most of them. I wonder, do those children get a percentage directly deposited to their pig accounts?

I guess you get the point. What triggered all this diatribe was me thinking about what we do on a daily basis, our "job" in other words. Do we really do something useful, something that tips the balance and creates a positive change? I think one of the reasons that the Open Source movement is so important is that it is a sort of groundswell, difficult to perceive because it is so pervasive and widespread.

But this movement, so dangerous to the monopolists of the world will tumble the most arrogant of them. There is no corporation, not even the most technically sophisticated that can evolve as rapidly as thousands or millions of people working together for a common cause.

As a little sample, I offer this movie about such an endeavour, one that ends with a call to hackers all over the world to collaborate, in this and any other way that might become the glue that binds us together again, into our cyborgian future.

The Eyewriter from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Open Frameworks, F.A.T., Graffiti Research Lab, graffiti legend Tempt1 and of course EyeWriter got together to produce that ounce of energy for each and everyone of us...

Here is the how to and all the good monopoly-breaking stuff for those DIY's among us. Keep on DIYing...!

Ευγένιος Σπαθάρης και Σωτήρης Σπαθάρης

Angel Who Recites Poems for the Death of Heroes

I intended to write a note about Eugenios Spatharis (Ευγένιος Σπαθάρης), since it is him that revived an ancient art for a new generation, including those who only saw the shadows projected on the television cave. But I though better to step back a few years, to understand where all this comes from and have perhaps a better idea of where it is going.

In his Memoirs, Sotiris Sphataris (Σωτήρης Σπαθάρης ) Eugenios's father, relates, with painful honesty, the events in his life and time that made him, what I consider, a master of one of the most important expressions of visual storytelling, since our beginnings as cave dwellers until this time of new media, convergence and interactivity, words and phrases which lose meaning as rapidly as a passing shadow.

Behind the White Screen is a perfect title for his memoirs. A screen which not only represents the canvas of the artist, but the medium through which art and life truly interact with those lucky enough to be entranced by its magic.

Sotiráki, as his mother called him, had a life worthy of a Greek tragedy or a Charles Dickens novel, of extreme poverty, abuse and misfortune, of daily beatings by a drunken father who used him as a beggar since he was 5 years old.

But then one day a white screen went up in town. Some oil lamps were lit behind and as the shadows danced and played and fought, a door opened in Sotíris heart that never closed again. And through it a whole spirit of a people came alive and multiplied in thousands of other hearts and minds.

In Plato's dialogue between Sócrates and Glaucon, the allegory of the cave represents a world devoid of ideas where fiction reigns supreme in lieu of reality, a perfect allegory for today, where virtual reality or VR is touted as the new world, where we, as the chained people of the cave, even farther away from the exit, are to spend the rest of our lives, our cones and rods tickled by the bits and bytes that illuminate our fool's paradise.

But from its royal beginnings in ancient China (Han Dynasty), shadow puppets brought stories to life, reflecting the wants and needs, the hopes and fears of people, from emperors to beggars. The shadows liberated people from the chains giving voice to the silent, joy to the sad and fear to the mighty. The cave was opened for the common people and like a virus spread all over the world.

They came to Greece during the Ottoman Empire and as is common with all theater arts, involvement with it was considered a disreputable profession, akin to prostitution whose practitioners were regarded as the lowest of the low, even though on the other side of the screen, people of all walks of life and fortune would enjoy their characters played and mocked, disrobed and challenged.

As a young kid in love with shadow puppets and its Karagiozis character, Sotiris had to suffer many a beating, simply for being them. In a time when a mother proclaimed that she would rather see her son dead and buried than becoming a puppeteer, Sotiris love for the art surmounted every obstacle in his way, in a truly odyssean fashion. And so a living legend was born.

His art did not die with his passing in 1972, it lived in his son, Eugenios Spatharis which carried the tradition until a few days ago, when he also traveled on, May 10, 2009.

The light still burns behind the white screen, waiting for the shadows to appear and the show to begin.

The Birth of a Notion

It is quite refreshing to see and hear here and there little voices accumulating like streams coming from our inner well, in route to the Great River we call life. There is a saying in Spanish: "cuando el rio suena, piedras trae", which I would try to translate as: "when the river sounds (or sings, or roars), stones bring". Any language, saying, or poem gets lost in translation, but there is that other language without words, which is expressed in a warm handshake, not the business lock which signals our enslavement to terms, but the one that simply proclaims our human nature.

My friend Douglas Rushkoff made this little film, which in its simplicity (production not withstanding) communicates in a very direct way, a longing, a hope that maybe, just maybe, enough rocks tumble down the river in unison to recover the lost sense of self which has been stripped from our bones and soul or whatever you want to call the consciousness emerged.

Here it is for your tickling pleasure, thanks Douglas

Life Inc. The Movie from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

Our Earth

In this age when, rather late, politicians still argue if we should cut military budgets to dedicate a pittance to saving our planet and our species from destruction we could look back 30 years ago (in fact we could look back centuries and find the same concerns, albeit more timely) when visionary and designer, poet and engineer, R. Buckminster Fuller stated that we must work together as a crew if we are to survive on our planet, "spaceship earth." (from where his quotes are taken)

Bucky, as he was known, worried about the lack of education and understanding necessary to effectively take care of our planet and its dwindling resources;

...Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too often inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to dare to think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially easier to go on with our narrow, shortsighted specialization’s and leave it to others---primarily to the politicians---to find some way of resolving our common dilemmas.

...I must observe also that we’re not going to sustain life at all except by our successful impoundment of more of the Sun’s radiant energy aboard our spaceship than we are losing from Earth in the energies of radiation or outwardly rocketed physical matter. We could burn up the Spaceship Earth itself to provide energy, but that would give us very little future. Our space vehicle is similar to a human child. It is an increasing aggregate of physical and metaphysical processes in contradistinction to a withering, decomposing corpse.

But as John Denver sang in "Seasons of the Heart":

It’s hard to tell the truth
When no one wants to listen
When no one really cares
What’s going on
And it’s hard to stand alone
When you need someone beside you
Your spirit, your faith
Must be strong

What one man can do is dream
What one man can do is love
What one man can do is change the world
And make it young again
Here you see what one man can do

"Think of it. We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before-that we now have the option for all humanity to "make it" successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will b a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment."

— R. Buckminster Fuller 1980

The ethics of computers

Only six years ago the New York Times announced that a Japanese laboratory had built the world's fastest computer, ..."a machine so powerful that it matches the raw processing power of the 20 fastest American computers combined and far outstrips the previous leader, an I.B.M.-built machine." (That is 35.6 trillion mathematical operations per second)

As is true of the robotics field as well the Japanese machine reveals very different ethics and commitment than their US counterparts.

The Japanese government financed this computer to be used at the Earth Simulator Research and Development Center in Yokohama ..." to analyze climate change, including global warming, as well as weather and earthquake patterns. "

"By contrast", the article says, "the United States has predominantly focused its efforts on building powerful computers for simulating weapons, while its efforts have lagged in scientific areas like climate modeling."

Forward 6 years to June of this year and true to the double exponential acceleration towards the singularity suggested by Ray Kurzweil, CNN announced that engineers from IBM and Los Alamos (sounds a bell?) have designed a computer capable of sustaining 1,000 trillion operations per second.

Can you guess what this computer will be dedicated to?

• It will be used to help maintain the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile

So while most of the supercomputers around the world work towards solving some of the most urgent problems that we face, the US government through its military establishment keeps its accelerated pace towards our destruction.

It's Show Time

Am I ready yet?

Finally the expected moment when breaking a leg is the least of your worries, it is in fact a welcome omen!

I decided to post a slideshow, given that there are many pictures of different moments, from the preparation before the show to pictures showing the actual marionette, since many people believed that it was a pre-made video agains which the performance took place.

As I had discussed with my mentor Deborah Aschheim, this was going to be an experiment to see if the concept worked. The concept being that The Creator represented, among other things, an omnipresence that we took for granted, whose reality was ignored. The pervasive surveillance and control that is now an accepted state in the life of so many people who fail to question some very basic assumptions.

This presence whose control was embodied by the environment itself could become simply entertainment, a surface to which we have become fully accustomed and to which we in fact give our compliance voluntarily.

So perhaps conceptually the experiment worked, since as a "show" it was considered fascinating by most of the audience I had a chance to speak with. But I think that I would like to eventually construct a full scale marionette as originally planned (5 mts. tall). I am more interested in telling a compelling story that can directly connect with the stored archetypes that we carry in our brains and , because of scale and the amazement associated with seeing something so out of the ordinary, our defenses are suspended, letting the images and sounds seep undetected into our psyche.

Later on, perhaps,we will encounter in our dreams or nightmares, or worse in our waking reality, images,facts and ideas that evoke that inexplicable and uncanny feeling of the loss of our mythical innocence. Optimistically I would hope that this would result in recognizing like Pink Floyd says "the writing on the wall".

The Creator was born in Germany as a concept, or rather as a nightmare that my wife Lorena had. As artists we become attached to the object of our creation, even if it represents something as terrible as to what a post-apocalyptic scenario suggests. We treat the creator and the creature with loving care and feel both awe and compassion for them, or perhaps for what they represent. A loss of our own humanity.

It is fitting, and part of the mystery of our lives that we simply accept things as they happen. The performance took place in Linz, of all places. Linz, the birthplace of Hitler bears everywhere you turn and in spite of the efforts to conceal it, an atmosphere of sadness which even the clowns and street performers and musicians who entertain tourists and passerby s fail to diffuse. At our graduation ceremony, Virgil Wong had invited a pair of these street musicians to perform for us. It was interesting to see how the director of the Institute felt so uncomfortable as they sang beautiful but obviously sorry laden songs filled with nostalgia for what is not, sang in a language which nobody spoke but which everyone understood.

Ir Rays

A few posts before I mentioned our amazement at the strength and penetration of the infrared LED's that we are using as the beacon for our performance. I just took a screen grab of what the webcam was recording as proof that I was not seeing visions. You can clearly see the veins on the hand. I really like the shot. It reminds me of the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy

"The reality of our century is technology: the invention, construction and maintenance of machines. To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. Machines have replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras."
--László Moholy-Nagy

The Small Bang!

Here the Creator is kneeling down since the high-torque spine servo is not powered up.

It has been quite an ordeal to get to this point. In fact a couple of years to be exact. But finally the creature moves, and not only moves but seems to have a life of its own. I will not post video until after the performance but I am very excited by what I see. Philip and I crack up laughing every time it moves because it is so life-like.



But come to think of it, what is happening (philosophy purists will probably disagree) is that life in fact has been transferred and conserved as energy in a different form. This is not something new to me. I consider any work of our hands to partake of this mysterious force that we call life, otherwise how would it inspire us or elevate our spirit?

When I see a painting (in reality, not a reproduction) by say, Vermeer, the emotion I feel is a product not only of the formal beauty, but of being in the presence of time standing still, a few years of someone's life (which just happens to be a master) condensed and trapped like a genius in a bottle. I, the recipient of this gift, am the vehicle necessary for this alchemical process to occur. I release the energy contained in the matter of the painting.

The order of the particles, held by resinous mediums, crystallized by the passage of time which conform the external appearances of the scene resonate and I believe connect me in the most direct form with the creator of the work of art, in the same way that we are in intimate connection with the writer that is sharing her thoughts and life experiences with us.

This is, has to be, an energy transfer that could probably be calculated by an Einstein, but I prefer to simply shed a tear of joy when I find myself in front of the work of art. That is what art means to me.


In case you have not seen a previous post this is what the Creator's creature looks like. Here Lorena is getting some exercise and getting fit to withstand the wild and strenuous performance ahead, after all it is all her fault since she created the Creator. Playing god or goddess does not come cheap. You can see a little animation here

The OZ connection

The software is finally (well...) done. I mean it is totally functional, does what it is supposed to be and it is absolutely beautiful to look at. The design is old-school, meaning lean, efficient and therefore aesthetically perfect on my book. Thanks to Philip for never being satisfied. In fact every day there is some internal change that makes it run faster or adds even more functionality.

I will provide pictures of the UI in full operation as it grabs puppet positions, controls lights, sounds etc. It feels a bit like those old music sequencers which were so intuitive and logical and therefore easy to use, yet produced any result that your imagination demanded. This is the case.

These are some current pics of the UI before anything is loaded. The puppet figure is just a place holder until the cameras, both for tracking and for position display are connected.



This last shot shows the tracking grid. All the application is done modularly so that everything can be customized, such as the resolution of the grid which in this case represents the size of the stage, basically 6x8 meters. Every cell triggers different responses from the Creator based on the performer actions and timing.

Out of Sight

A few more days and we will be driving up the east coast to NY. I hate to think of all the gas we will burn, but I am sure it will be less than taking a plane, no to mention the cost. Nowadays it is impossible (and this is good) to do anything without minding the consequences in the bigger picture of life as we know it. I feel that finally a swell of inconformity is rising against the many tyrants that rule our world, including our inner one.

Back to business. The weight of the eyes proved too much for the tiny springs, so I decided to encase the spring inside a sturdier one and on top of that I put a couple of coats of latex to hold it together and still be flexible. That proved an overkill. The eyes became too stiff and did not respond to the movement as expected. So I carved them from an ultralight foam, and gave the a few coats of liquid gesso. After sanding them they had just the right look and weight to be supported by the tiny springs.

On the left the amputated wooden eye vs. the light foam eyeballs shown at the end of the spring. The toothpick became the optic nerve and it is passively string-controlled for the basic position and orientation of the eyes. They work beautifully and add a lot of expressiveness. The strings are connected to the end of the neck, so that when the Creator bows its head or kneels, the eyes "relax", and when he stands up they perk up very nicely. As everything puppetry and theatrical, their exaggerated irritation is understandable, given the great effort to see and make sense of an utterly absurd world.

The focal point of the entire universe of the Creator is ultimately its creature. Regardless of the external appearance, which only a parent would love, the important thing is that which radiates from it and communicates its presence. This electronic soul is extremely simple yet fascinating. We started creating the tracking beacon using standard IR (infrared) LED's. We were having problems achieving the necessary brightness to be detected at a long distance. On top of that, since the creature moves around the stage wildly shaking every part of its body and sometimes lowering its head it was important that the beacon be visible in all circumstances. Adding the half-pong ball (sanded to paper thin) helped the angle spread of the light but we thought that it would cut the light considerably.

And indeed our first tests confirmed that. So we bought the super-wide angle IR LED's in the hope of solving the angle problem and still retaining the strength of the light. (see the previous post on that here)


Now comes the ignoramus part, which if we had done a little more research would have been avoided. All the webcams we tested have an internal filter that blocks IR, not exactly sure why (have not had a minute to explore that). So we proceeded to dismantle the lenses to remove such filters. (unfortunately we were so engrossed in doing so that I forgot to take pictures of the process!) This tested every sense and the steadiness of our hands, not to mention memorizing the order and orientation of every microlens. In fact, in the case of our wide-angle camera shown previously, after removing the IR blocker, we had to rearrange all 9 lenses and spacers in any imaginable way until we hit on the right one. Philip which has much better eyesight ended doing the final assemblies and it was nerve wracking to watch, almost like a brain surgeon removing a micro tumor.

The original beacon, which we will use as a backup since it is even brighter because it has more LED's to begin with.

Well, then we were up for a big surprise, in fact we are still amazed at what we saw. First of all, the camera with the exposed film in place (to filter most of the visible light) not only saw the light, but it was as bright as pointing the camera to the sun! At this point we realized that both the standard LED's as well as the wide-angle ones work practically the same. You could turn the beacon even 180 degrees (in other words showing the back) and the camera would still see it very brightly.

But then we were in shock. By holding the IR device in our hand we observe something amazing. We could not only see the light going through our hand, we could see every vein as well! very much like x-rays, except we could not see the bones. Again, the surprise was such that I forgot to take pictures of this, but tomorrow I will. We even put the thing inside our mouth, but the cheeks were way to thin for the strength of the light. This immediately brought questions about the safety of this light which we had not considered.

So I have been reading papers and reports by organizations such as The International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection, but have found little indication of danger at that level. However, although LED's are classified as IR-C are supposed to have a minimal penetration of the skin, while IR-A which is labeled as hazardous is said to penetrate the skin only a few millimeters. So something is odd here. More food for thought.

A Tale of Two Masters

First napkin sketch of the user interface

The intermediate stage of the motion control system has closely followed
the original concept although of course it has been greatly improved.

I would like to quote from the introduction to my Master's Thesis "Roboethics and Performance":

"Being as we are at the verge or perhaps in the middle of that threshold or bifurcation of our own destiny, it is hard if not impossible to observe with parsimony the course of action. In that liminal state where turbulence becomes organized into myriad eddies and flows and the “singularity” approaches, every theory or hypothesis seems to have some validity since the information or data we analyze is particular to our point of view and seldom encompasses a bigger picture. Gregory Bateson , reminiscing about the Macy conferences, goes further by suggesting that we never know the world as such. He states that “We are our epistemology” since we only perceive and understand the world through what our sensory apparatus allows.

However the birthing environment of the open network where data itself acts as a “controlling agent” is beginning to show a pattern that is itself fed back into the system, and once the critical threshold is achieved, some theorists suggest it will give raise to the emergence of a machinic consciousness.

The ability to enhance our body and mind utilizing radical nanotechnology beyond therapeutic practices, and the recent advances in bioinformatics and prosthetics as Katherine Hayles suggests, opens the discourse about the posthuman condition. All the “ecological variety” at the dawn of this new era, with the consequent interbreeding, is creating an explosion of possible species raising profound ethical questions and forcing us to rethink our position in the evolutionary sphere."

As some recent studies of the brain suggest*, there is not one but two control centers of control and command which work independently and actually incommunicated from each other even though both work towards a common goal.

The software that Philip Forget and myself have designed works as one of those control centers. The other stems from the independent actions of the performer which by interacting with the environment under surveillance by the Creator produces a synergistic feedback loop.

I am very excited by the software part of the project. It is in my biased opinion the best tool that I have seen in robotic puppetry control (not that there are many, mostly in research projects like mine). Although at first some closed systems were briefly considered, like National Instrument's LabView, to control servos based on image processing and other sensor input, the price and steep learning and development curve ruled it out early on, not to mention my dislike of anything that is not open source.

When Philip learned that I was using the MAKE microcontroller to drive my project and suggested that we use Flash as the controlling software I was right off skeptical. Not having used Flash in a couple of years I was not aware of recent developments.

He was of course referring to FlashDevelop, which is an open source ActionScript 2/3 and web development environment which integrates seamlessly with the Adobe product. This has allowed us to implement exactly what we wanted in a record time and in a very efficient and elegant way.

Our system is essentially a motion-sound-image-video-light sequencer/controller, driven in this case by image processing, but could as well be driven by any other sort of input. The heart of the system is a MAKE microcontroller which is directly controlled by the software right out of the box.

The screen capture above shows the position editor on the left and the corresponding key frame editor on the right. Each position is a collection of expressive movements achieved by "training" the marionette and recording the position, travel and speed of a group of eight servos. The sliders on the top right control or feedback both position and speed for each individual servo. The block below house the smaller sliders for light control as well as the sound control. The placeholder image is an automatic capture of the marionette position.

When played, the timeline runs thorough all the movements, light states and sounds that correspond to such moment of expression. The modules missing in the screen above are the library module and the main GRID which is the area under surveillance by the camera and which triggers actions defined by both timing and position of the performer or other beaming object (the performer wears an infrared beacon).

It is our intention to release the software once completed as an open source project under Creative Commons.



*Washington University School of Medicine (2007, June 21). Brain's Voluntary Chain-of-command Ruled By Not One But Two Captains. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 15, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2007/06/070619134802.htm

The Cyclopean Eye

The tiniest springs I could find in my "this could be useful" parts bin

The eyes are an important means of expression of the "soul" of a person, animal or character. The only external organ that connects directly to the brain through the shortest possible path.
The eyes of the creator move nervously as he scans its surroundings. Its world. They are animated by a simple spring mechanism that responds to the smallest movement. I did not know it was going to be so challenging to do this, except that, as we have found out, scale matters. And the smaller the scale the more critical the elements become.

The springs proved to be too weak to support the weight of the eye,
so I added a coat of latex to strengthen and stiffen it a bit,
but it proved to be a little too much so I ended up burning the latex away.
The residue that it left iwas just the right amount.

Lorena irritating the eyes

Of course the real "eye" of the Creator is up in the sky, or rather the ceiling in this case. This cyclopean eye that sees and controls everything is more and more a pervasi and accepted fact of life, in our streets, our buildings and even our homes, not to mention the "real" and inaccessible eye in the sky who observes and analyzes our every move, both as a species as well as individually when the need arises.

A very wide angle camera (76 degrees) was the choice after a good deal of research, and it proved to be the right one. I like that it is flat and although the base actually sucks if you are going to use it on a desk or a monitor it is perfect to tape to the roof and adjust the angle precisely. I needed a wide angle because the ceiling at the venue is not very tall and the camera must cover at least a 10x10 mt performing area, the world of the Creator, its Tartarus.

HP 2 megapixel camera, 76 degrees FOV

Related to the eyes or rather vision system is the light. Not the infrared light that the camera detects and processes but the actual "stage lighting". For quite a while I thought I was going to have to finagle a small lighting system form the theatre department at my university but since that was not very promising I started looking around for solutions.

I must say I am very happy with the outcome. I bought some inexpensive 12 LED flashlights at the local supermarket and hacked them (literally) so as to keep only the front portion. The advantage, in this case, of a cheap Chinese product is that it was very easy to solder to it, unlike more sophisticated models. The beam is extremely bright and is easily controlled by the microcontroller. So I have 4 "spots" with different color lights (a color filter on the LED's) to dramatize the scene and automatically create different moods according to the moment.

I got the plastic flexible contraption to where I attached the light base from one of my many "possible useful things" boxes. I wish I knew what it is or where it came from, maybe someone does becasue it is extremely practical for this and I am sure, other, applications. I suspect that it might belong to some fluid dispensing system.

The following are the very first tests with my new lighting system. I love it! absolute and precise positional and intensity control.

The Eyes of the Poet

One of the films that most impressed me when I was a young aspiring filmmaker was undoubtedly Un Chien Andalou and its memorable eye-slicing scene was particularly impressive to me. Whenn I was seven years old I had had my left eye cut by a piece of glass thrown to me by a childhood friend which required seven stitches right next to the pupil. This event changed my life forever and I believe in a positive way as I look back (pun not intended).

First of all the impact on my psyche was considerable. Since all eye operations occur with your eyes wide open, it is inevitable to see what it is being done, even if you are under total anesthesia, like I was.

The surgeon did not believed me at first when I told him that I had seen all the operation until I started describing in detail what I saw. This images were burned in my mind in a very permanent way, and for many years, until my young adult age the sequence of events (the operation itself) would run unannounced like a silent film of yore. When this happened I had to immediately stop whatever I was doing and change to something opposite of that, for example if I was alone I would try to find people, the more the better, like a crowd. But when I was in a crowd or a party and the film started to run I had to immediately find a place where I could be alone. Only then would the operation fade and let me go on with my life. Then one day this vanished never to come back again.

My sight never recovered and so I would see very clearly with my right eye and completely out of focus with my left, since the stitches distorted the pupil. This became extremely useful when I was a cameraman, since I did not have to close my left eye when shooting like everyone does. The main reason you would close the eye that is not looking through the viewfinder is to prevent confusion as to which image you are supposed to be seeing. The view from the lens would never be the same as the naked eye and therefore the mix of both images would be very disturbing to some people. However, my two vies were so radically different that I was able to use the out of focus image to my advantage. The left eye could (barely) see that which was outside the frame and therefore I would be aware of something that was just going to happen around and could pan to frame it or to avoid it.

Back to the creatures eyes and the relationship with all of this. I, and apparently Lorena, my wife, as well have lived and still do in a close relationship with the dream world, which as you know is not always your "dream world" since nightmares and surreal events can be pretty scary. It si just that we have both decided to turn these experiences into the stuff of art, bringing this parallel universe into the "real" world for other to see.

The touch of the Godess

The credit for the Creator's flesh and blood must go to Lorena, who with her hands brings to life the creatures of our nightmares, the future that we have already created even if we ourselves are not quite there yet to suffer the consequences, but getting very close...

Plasticine, plaster gauze and Papier-mâché is the skin of its face

Make up time

Hmmm, definetely some resemblance...

The Creator gets its make-up treatment. It was eerie to see how it resembled the original Creator's head, that you can see in the background. It was like seeing a clone emerge from another dimension. And God said, "Go ahead and multiply!"

Re Cycle beneath the wheel

The Creator stage in progress

People, myself included, talk about reducing our "carbon footprint", a term about to disappear from overexposure the same way any word repeated over and over loses its meaning as it is replaced by noise. At the same time we blog about it, consuming terawatts of carbon producing power exacerbated by the inefficiency of bloated operating systems, the apparently innocuous white screen of Google, by the energy consumed by the avatars in virtual worlds that need to be kept virtually alive by the server nodes and the computers around the world that hum incessantly without any hope of ever being silent.

Our self-made society has plugged a cannula into our collective vein, to transfuse itself into the mind of the machine, which like a life support system we cannot disconnect, or at least we think we can't, that is, until the plug is pulled by the system itself when no longer needs any more information, other than the one it itself generates.

WW II direct interhuman syringe.

That is the story of The Creator with which we are trying to portray, using puppetry as a transference medium, the stark reminder of our self-dependency. Who or what controls who or what?

On to the practicum.

Since I detest plastic and the many woes and sickness that has come as a result of its indiscriminate use, I try to target it as a primary candidate for recycling, which is just a palliative approach to the real problem. In any case, I took the vacuformed package of the "energy saving" bulbs that we use nowadays, and just as I was about to send it into its recyling path, I noticed a form which reminded me of ancient alchemical apparatuses which I needed to create for the robotic-marionette stage. So here is the process:






The background, built over the "hardware cloth" is semi-translucent, with the most translucent parts being the "genetic" containers which will transmute common information into a panacea.

A digital projector, fed with data generated imagery will fill up the vessels as well as create the fluid digital environment where the Creator lives.


Here is the very first test as seen from behind, where I am trying unsuccessfully to line up, scale and correct the angle distortion. As you can see I missed the mark by a few centimeters. I am now in the process of positioning the elements as close as I can to the target, given the limitations of inexact everything.