I am off to Barcelona where I will participate in a debate entitled "Desire vs Destiny" at the Caixa Forum. My position paper , "Desire versus Destiny: the question of payoff in narrative" will be posted at this URL this coming Thursday
http://www.mediatecaonline.net/5jornades/eng
The debate reflects on a crtical transition we are making in narrative.

mini spy-type cameras strapped to the back of an eagle give scientists a closer look at the way they fly... neat!

http://media.animal.discovery.com/convergence/spyonthewild/birdtech/birdtech.html

stories for reading while you down an expresso. would also be great as text messages:

http://espressostories.com/

SCIENCE WEEK 2004
To celebrate Science Week 2004 RTÉ Radio 1 invites you to:

"The Storied Machine" is the title of this year's RTE Science Lecture, which will be delivered by Glorianna Davenport of MIT Media Lab in Boston.
Venue: Studio 1, RTÉ Radio Building
Date: Thursday 11th November 2004
*Time: 7pm

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/futuretense/

*Note: this is European Time broadcasted through Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ) - it is the Irish Public Service Broadcasting Organisation.

this photomapping app from a workshop in iceland is neat. they describe the image collection as a "sequential narrative beyond the photographic frame". basically, a gps receiver was used to record tracklogs along with the photographs and now they are presented using flash as a sort of photographic journey - images that fade in/out and move and overlap as they travel across space and time. http://www.elasticspace.com/timeland/

i found this pretty crazy first person pov movie of a fairly dangerous looking bike race through the streets of new york. maybe we need to start exporing extreme media fabrication? :) SCARY MAYHEM

check out this interview with george lucas. sure, you might groan at the dialogue in "attack of the clones" but george lucas is extremely thoughtful when talking about the symbiotic relationship between art and technology!

~b

Errol Morris has a new suite of spots for Moveon.org - portraits of Republicans who will vote Democratic in the coming election.

Is it possible to create a portrait in 20 seconds, in one topic of conversation, in a single shot style?

Are these portraits of voters or a portrait of George W. Bush?

ailsing sent along a link to the new michel gondry video this week.

while watching it i was thinking about video annotation and story representation (surprise, surprise!). there is not much variation frame to frame, night or day, scarf or no scarf, sign to bridge, city to desert, car moving to car not moving.

if i count night -> day transitions i could create a rule that generates days passed. a no scarf -> scarf rule that infers it's colder outside. a car moving -> not moving could mean stopping to rest.

but these are rules that always produce the same outcome - a more rigid interpretation than our minds might offer.

how do we get from all these bits, these details of the frame, to "someone went on a road trip" or "an escape?"

if you look at only the first frame/last frame what can they tell us about what happens in the interim?

~ b

“For myth is the instant vision of a complex process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythical dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.” Marshall McLuhan

Ancient myth evolved as explanatory narrative to situate and concretize the unknown. Since the dawn of storytelling, myth has been used not only to explain away but also to brand ideas, products and political belief systems in ways that bring them into the everyday venacular. Cast in anthropomorphic guise, myth generates order from the experiential input and output which without orderly explanation appears chaotic. Oral myth-makers of ancient times relied on analogy between external natural forces and human attitude and foible to build heros of vengeance, destruction as well as grace, love, well being. Since the advent of print and electronic media, analogy and other techniques of myth-making have been appropriated and repurposed to meet the sensibilities, desires and visions of cartoonists, fashion photographers and advertising agencies.

Attitude, an essential handmaiden to myth, promotes the idea of exaggerated stance. As carriers of attitude, the Greek gods stand virtually un-assailed. We have all experienced moments when our own attitude changes; often the most memorable changes are negative, born of frustration as when we are caught in a verbal loop with some sales person on the phone, or when our computer does something totally unexpected and destructive. Not even children are strangers to attitude and from an early age learn to experiment with the relationship between attitudinal expression and control over their environment. On closer, examination we discover that attitude permeates every nook and cranny of our interaction with the world. For instance, urban centers – NY, Boston, LA - are distinguishable by their street attitude as it is pumped out by taxi drivers, construction workers and shop keepers as well as their built form.

On a recent drive through LA, the roadway itself took on anthropomorphic tones. Traffic on 134 West just before rush hour was light. My rental car, a darling red Mustang convertible, immediately placed me in a pleasurable grove, until in a moment my eyes lighted on a network of black skid marks that covered the left two lanes. The highway was pushing back. Not content that I would know it only from a pleasure perspective, it cried out of near escapes and tragedies. Then just as quickly it changed its tune. Turning onto the 405, traffic was still light and I found myself in the shadow and in the embrace of luscious hills. Looking out and up, I wondered at those houses, precariously perched on outcroppings, sporting in the clear afternoon light their grand views, only barely hinting at their potential vulnerabilities. All to soon, we – my car and I – emerge out of the caressing arms of the hills into a more industrial flatter section. Still we were moving, smug now not to be in the gridlocked mess of traffic on the opposite side. Miles passed, until suddenly Santa Monica announced itself on the road-exit sign, and traffic on our side of the roadway began to slow. Simultaneously, my engagement reacts – what an exceptional arrogance characterizes the LA roadway!

According to Webster, attitude applies to physical stance as well as to mental positioning:
1: “the arrangement of the parts of a body or figure : POSTURE 2 : a position assumed for a specific purpose 4 a : a mental position with regard to a fact or state b : a feeling or emotion toward a fact or state 6 : an organismic state of readiness to respond in a characteristic way to a stimulus (as an object, concept, or situation) 7 a : a negative or hostile state of mind b : a cocky or arrogant manner

Today it is rainy and wet. As I sit in the big summer room on our farm, my mind echoes with memorable sounds of similar rainy days in my childhood at our grandparents’ house where in the large family room a few of us –myself, my siblings, and other members of our extended family - would pull out a game (monopoly or pictionary), or draw our chairs up to a table for a game of cards, or sitting on the floor while-away an hour or two playing double-solitaire or spit. The echoes speak to physical engagement – the sound of feet running to start up the game, the shouting as game play became intense, the laughter that spilled out of us at regular intervals -- all integral to indoor play. That was then. Today the seductive lure of solitary engagement with the electronic screen has drawn us away from that sociable play. Guests visit our farm with their laptops and game machines, and often between meal times on rainy days, we find the summer room filled with an array of children and adults, each focused in their separate media worlds.

As Sherry Turkle vividly explores in “Life on the Screen,” the seductive allure the screen with the computer and the network beyond offers a powerful engagement with the mindful self, this self-immersive engagement opens some doors, while it closes others. Sometimes I feel that I have become a prisoner of text: my eyes weary from on-screen reading long for distant horizons, my fingers and wrists tired from typing long to be part of movable arms, and my body, constricted, almost deformed by the hours spent holding stead in a singular posture, longs for intellectual engagements that invite stretching, gesturing, dancing.

Much of the solitary intensity associated with the computer derives not from the ideals of the activity but from limitations in the input and display modes of the device. As we explore the paradigm of the Media Fabric, we imagine diverse ways of engaging with media. Today it is not hard to imagine that, in our peripatetic mode, we can engage in visual conversations using small mobile devices. Some what more futuristic is a personalized display that would allow us to mix computer and real images in front of our eyes. Still another approach, and one suggested by the summer room scenario is a media PlayTable.

In her current research, Ali Mazalek is inventing some new sensing technology to realize a sociable mode of PlayTable. As her team works on new sensing technologies, they are also concerned with fabricating the table with a look that is at once compellingly modern but also speaks to modes of play we are all familiar with such as chess and monopoly.. Given a beautiful imaging table that can be as connected as today’s PC, a set of pucks and other tangible objects that convey instructions, can you imagine what it would be like to collaboratively build a family album with several family members gathered around the table? Of course, this table could be networked with another table so extended family could share updates. Or if you prefer the table might provide a visualization for a massivly multiplayer gaming scenario where people collect pucks, design and trade player characters. I leave it to you and Ali to speculate about other engagements..

Revisiting images is like looking through a window of a house you inhabited long ago. All of a sudden you smell the smells, you hear the slight breathing of the dog in the chair, you feel the urgent call of the beach as you tiptoe down the stairs, across the main room ease open the door moving with ever increasing speed to that first beach run of summer. The air is still; as you run the waves lap at your toes until in a sudden exuberant commitment, you find your self plowing through the chilly water, diving under a running wave, finally reaching that sandbar of imaged memory. For a moment you stand – chilled, happy and at rest; you allow time to move past as you paddle through a dense collection of images before making your way back to the beach-edge, climbing up the rocks and over the sea wall, where for a moment the house sits, framed in the early morning light.




In the blink of an eye, that same scene changes subtly: two youngsters sit on the on the porch quietly reading the newspaper. You laugh at their grown-up stance as your mind clicks back to images of an earlier time when Annie was about 2 and Russell 3; Annie – in her water wings - was being smeared with suntan lotion swim and Russell was learning where to pee, if he had to pee out doors. You move past them. The house sucks you back in as the smell of bacon intensifies. The kitchen is now filled with adults and children of various ages waiting to help transport that first meal of the day out to the porch. Now memory shuttles backwards again to another house filled with another generation of young and old. The bacon is still cooking but there are no waves lapping the shore. Like clear water running over smooth brown river rocks with dappled light catching and playing with the edges, memory augmented by a few images shape-shifts our lives, reconfiguring our time-past with our time present, opening us up to the most complex, sensual undercurrents of self and selves.

Media Fabric invites you to dip into the ocean of stories. Aisling Kelliher in Us++ extends the ways in which we can construct such stories in our everyday lives and explores modes in which we may travel back in time. Aisling, how does Barbara's mindful approach support or not your thinking about narrative construction?

In our research, we frequently ask “essential” questions about creativity and storytelling: what is it? Is it essential to human life? What are its essential features? How can technology optimize access to creative opportunity?

Creativity can be more or less broadly defined, but it is more often than not associated it with the activity of making “art.” In my own work, I find “intelligent play” aptly characterizes my activity of videoing, constructing and presenting cinematic narratives. While play covers a broad spectrum of activity, intelligent play connotes that the engagement is both “mindful” and that it evolves. Intelligent play takes us on a journey, engages us in a process, invites us to use our imagination, knowledge and skills, in the interest of some vague end-game that we cannot precisely define, know in advance or totally control. While we can situate this intelligent play in the interest of a general out come -- we might choose to write a story, make another painting, edit a movie, or compose a song – the activity of play requires us to optimize from moment to moment many variables that have to do with our immediate insight, our intuitions, our skills. In intelligent play, the creation of any particular artifact can last over any number of sessions, but generally we know when we have finished. Many years ago, when someone asked me when did I know that the movie I was working on was finished, I suggested that “you know when you are finished because you can see all the fundamental flaws in the work and you feel the need to move on, to start again.” However, when you start again, you do not start with an entirely blank slate; rather you take with you your knowledge from practice and the memory of those fundamental flaws you recognized in your prior work. In this sense, making of art engages you in a conversation with yourself that can last a life-time.

Improvisational artists – Jackson Pollack, Jonas Mekas, John Cage and many others – recognized that improvisation was perhaps the penultimate artistic paradigm for intelligent play. While these artists worked with particular media, they all sought to let go of any assumptions about how their work would proceed. Improvisation and spontaneity are critical to our vision for the media fabric. Like mindfulness, improvisation is a state most human beings act in most of the time. And yet, most media tools today are anything but improvisational. They do not suggest, they do not act as partners.

For the past many years, in different guises, Paul Nemirovsky has studied non-idiomatic improvisational action. Paul’s perspective on real-time media construction and exchange is essential to resilient engagement with the media fabric. Rather than thinking about what you want to make, planning and then constructing an artifact, media fabric promotes a “just do it” approach to intelligent play. Paul’s work has focused on analyzing principles that distinguish real-time improvisational media performance, and on building a machine architecture, the “emonic environment,” based on these principles. In user studies with this system, Paul will be able to better understand how “multi-level focus,” “distributed responsibility and control” and context responsiveness can provide naïve and experienced media-makers with a compelling framework for creative improvisational exchange.

Paul, can you give us a detailed example of how you might make music with some other people on the network using your system?

This was such a deep story…I slept on it. I was challenged by the idea of necessary empathy, to capture with an understanding that creates a real connection between the maker and the subject. I think this is the difference between making a documentary vs. a surveillance reel. The emptiness of the surveillance reel is it gives the viewer no clue as to how to understand what is being watched. The capture in documentary gives the audience a ‘map of why’ a way to look at the video and create an inference path that is (not completely) but generally correlated with the inference path of the documentary maker. I agree. In some instances video lacks a connection to real life. As Aisling pointed out, in surveillance video the purpose of the collection stays neutral until and event occurs in real life after the recording has happened. There is a theft in the building that makes the recorded moment on a particular day suddenly relevant. I think another instance of emptiness is the zoning out during shooting that we talk about. The camera is recording and there is a feeling that both everything and nothing is being recorded. I think it is the alter ego of the Jean Rouch “greis” that you told me about a few weeks ago – while Rouch talks about connected grace that demands empathy, the zombie recording misses all the connections or is overwhelmed by so many that it is difficult to distinguish clear path of inference from all the noise. more soon…

I empathize with your desire to be mindful of the other - what are those moments we would like to experience when a boy who likes to draw takes it upon himself to become Picasso or Pollack? and from what vantage point, for how long?

We journey alone and for many of us those early years are lonely. We long to “know” another. This desire drew me into documentary. The artist tends to be wary of any second-hand experience; don't tell me, show me. Documentary as a form and style, invites the maker to witness directly, to see, to decide when and how to capture; later, and in the instant of capture, the filmmaker reflects on "waht took place," on why and how particular people do what they do.

When you begin to film a subject or an idea, you begin a journey. The idea has some focus but the road ahead is not predictable. You need to empathize with what you choose to capture, or the result will be devoid of real life. What does that mean in practice?

The beauty of "mindful documentary" is that it builds on the awareness of the artist while it asks the artist to be mindful of the system. As the videographer adds content she also adds description about intention and interest. Can such a trail of commentary be used to stimulate our narrative imagination? shouldn't we press on and produce a fully perceptual trail? if this were possible, would we still have time to live our own lives? To tell our own stories?

You ask about your list. Some descriptions hint at a higher order of narrative imagination: for instance, medical action might mean the specific circumstance of this ambulance ride or it might reach out to encompass the lives of the many people who make up the action -- the ambulance driver, the patient, the doctor, a pregnant woman standing on the corner watching the ambulance pass by. the memory of your aunt suggests a past-present structure in which flashbacks could become a prominent marker of narrative progress.

Oddly shortly after I arrived home, a fire engine and ambulance stationed themselves opposite our house. At first I tried to connect the two, but they seemed to be operating at different but adjacent locations. The ambulance was coming to take away a drunk who had become a public nuisance. From my vantage point, 5 stories above the street level, the ambulance was a narrative focal point for observations in a neighborhood.

I have always been amazed at the sheer number of human decisions entailed in any single artwork, whether it is a documentary film, a painting or even something like a lecture. A completed work has a seamless quality that is evidence of many risks, trails, errors, recoveries, discoveries, patches, arguments, etc. As a maker of art I was always disappointed that the evidence of the decisions were encrypted in the object or relegated to my memory. I wanted to see the mental trace to understand in a new way the artistic process. More practically, once encoded the mental trace becomes a part of the medium, something that can be shared with others. I reminded of an example. My mentor in undergrad painting program used to come into my studio and put a stack of books on the desk. No words, just the stack of books. Week one – Jackson Pollock. I knew that the work was unusual. I knew that not since Picasso had a painter (re)defined abstraction. I knew the folklore of his life and the creation of his public artistic ‘personality.’ As an artist I wanted access to two things! (1) the moments of inspiration. (2) the decision trace of one artwork. One might think it is greedy or risky or potentially demystifying to see the thinking of the artist but it has the potential to be a valuable resource that practitioners can use to push the limits of their imaginations and competencies. How is knowing and experimenting with what someone thought during making a painting different from adopting their color palette? If paintings, lectures and documentaries are full of mind, why do we only consider the paint, the words and the images to be the work?

Now to get to the detailed question and shift the discussion from mindful as what's in the mind to mindful media - to digital documentary in the media fabrics…

“Can you discuss “mindfulness” as it applies to particular story elements or a story stream that might exist in the media fabric?” - Glorianna

The mindfulness of the media itself, the captured video material, can be described generally as its potential to impact any story that it might encounter. More concretely, a video clip can be associated with annotation (of descriptive nature such as a text description or of a computational nature such as code for a procedure that the clip might execute) that defines its potential role during the construction of a narrative.

Here is a short list of ways video material can be mindful:
1) it can know its relevance to different situations. --- e.g. a clip of an ambulance might be relevant in stories about car accidents, hospitals, or about a person training to be an emt.

2) it can know its effects on other elements --- e.g. a clip of an ambulance might have the effect of stopping traffic or prompitng people cover their ears.

3) it can know, relative to other clips, its narrative role (you might offer better words for this!) --- e.g. is an ambulance the site of the dramatic medical action of the story or the way a character gets transported to the dramatic medical action.

4) it can know about the maker’s history for personal impact --- e.g. when I was young my aunt was an emt and once brought the ambulance to my grade school and showed us all the instruments.

5) it can know its own history of influence on the composition--- e.g. the clip of the ambulance has been used in a documentary about a hospital, a get-well movie for a sick relative.

6) it can know the history of its influence in the collection –-- e.g. ambulance clip with siren always suppresses clip of parked ambulance, its has been frequently coupled with a clip of

7) it can know why the person choose to capture it --- e.g. “that ambulance is moving so quickly…someone must be in trouble” or “I like that shade of red paint” or “I want to remember to take the free CPR class at school”

This is a skeletal list for the moment. I’m sure it can be added to and reworked! Glorianna, how might the list be different? I am definitely at the granular level and need to make a jump to story streams and higher narrative organizations.

I think your term “narrative imagination” is the right target for my understanding of “mindfulness” because when we are told a story we not only understand that individual story but also, and probably sometimes more importantly, the story it could have been.

"For many of us, recording video of our lives, exercises our desire for meaningful narrative play and remembrance." These bits and pieces of media are present and available as part of the media fabric. A core attribute of the “media fabric” is that it is “mindful.” What do we mean by this term?

Today, humans are mindful of media, but media itself – the image, the video sequence, the sound sample – is largely dumb in the sense that it cannot communicate about itself with other similar or different elements. Various bits and pieces cannot, except in very limited systems, sequence themselves into larger narrative threads. While a particular image or video is able to generate a meaningful response in a human perceiver, we are only just beginning to develop methods where-by media can seek out the human in what we might term a “mindful” way.

How many of us have experienced the frustration of not being able to recall an image that you know is some where on your hard drive at the particular moment when you imagine sharing a particular story with someone? What would our conversations be like if we could retreive and arrange media as "mindfully" as we now engage in conversation? Computers of today are severely limited by the search paradigm. Search is about finding something that you know you want; story or narrative is about going on a journey to a place you have never been before but that is none the less familiar. In the media fabric, rather than assuming you will want to ask "how can I find a particular piece of media," we need to turn the question on its head and assume that you ideally want the appropriate piece of media to find you at the appropriate time.

When we engage with the media fabric, the need is clear. Rather than dedicating our selves to particular tasks – I will capture an image now; now I will edit a sequence; and now I will publish that sequence on the www – we want to engage and share our stories using a full range of media “as if in conversation." In short, rather that be constrained to a lengthy planning or preparation cycle, we would like to act spontaneously, shaping and sharing our stories in the moment, when we have someone’s attention, in a way that invites a rich media response. This is similar to how cinema verite and other documentary filmmakers have created movies in the past -- almost. We therefore address the documentary tradition as part of our exploration of how media fabric might become mindful.

In our vision, the narrative imagination needs to drive our understanding of "mindful". In order to enable media on your hard disc and elsewhere in the vast networked media space to “mindfully” synchronize with your narrative imagination, we needs to develop an approach to representation that is itself mindful.

Barbara Barry is developing such an approach. In her thesis proposal she suggests that “The mindful documentary approach provides another “eye” for the videographer, one that attends to documentary story possibilities as they begin, unfold and resolve, and that intensifies story identification and production during real world observation.” To accomplish this, Barbara has chosen to work with the other eye that the videographer brings into the field. Properly augmented and networked, the camera can become mindful camera.

In her proposal, Barbara goes on to explain: “The term mindful imparts a dual meaning: the camera is mindful because it uses the information track of video content to identify coherent story threads within a content collection–it is mindful of the development of a content collection; and the human is mindful because suggestions by the camera help the videographer attend to the construction process while observing, recording and participating in everyday life .”

Barbara, you emphasize the need to design for partnership between the artist and the technology. Can you discuss “mindfulness” as it applies to particular story elements or a story stream that might exist in the media fabric?

This blog is 10 months old. For the first 10 months, it supported a research dialog among researchers in the “Interactive Cinema” group at the Media Lab. This week, the blog and the group have changed names. Alums of the group and fans who have followed the work of the group for some 17 years may well ask “why.” Over the course of this week, in the hope of generating a deeper dialog on the subject, I will frame a few ideas about why we found the name change essential. This text is dedicated less to the members of the group than to those who have followed our progress and are asking “why.”

As we all know, change is the most salient aspect of our lives. The principal of difference is the center of our perceptual and cognitive systems. For the past few years, my research team at the Media Lab has been working on an innovative new paradigm for media which we call the “media fabric.” This paradigm speaks to a profound change in the way we are engaging with media in the 21st century. As computers become more integrated into our everyday landscape, media increasingly surrounds us -- where ever we look people are taking still pictures and videos, making music, listening to music, watching movies, sending and receiving imaged messages. This vision of the media fabric builds on our relatively recent understanding that the roles of creator, editor and audience are no longer – if they ever were – distinct. Rather in our desire to learn - to create, understand and share experience - we dynamically shift between these roles, and so continuously weave, navigate and communicate original story paths through the media fabric.

Earlier explorations in the Interactive Cinema group focused on storyteller systems and helped pave the way for our current vision: in the “Elastic Charles: a Hypermedia Magazine” (’89) we offered the visitor the opportunity to make their own links through the content and share these links with viewers who followed. In “Contour,” a spreading activation story algorithm operated on meta-data objects to generate a sense of continuity through a large semi-coherent collection of media clips with which these objects were associated. In “Agent Stories” we considered how more traditional descriptions of story structure might provide useful components for personalized storyteller agents. In “Shareable Media” and “Story Beads,” we critically examined the architecture required for sharing and repurposing personal media. In “Tangible Viewpoints,” we examined how a tangible platform could provide a sociable story space.

Over the years, we have used these innovative technological platforms to present compelling environments for personalizable, conversational, learning narratives. Hastened by the increased mobility of media devices, the low-cost of world-wide connectivity between people and information, and the ubiquitous participation of people in media networks, our understanding of what we meant by “interactive cinema” has itself been transformed. Concern for the final narrative artifact – a media object, an installation, an interaction – has been replaced by engagement in process. In the process of exploring, we make anew. As we dip in and through the many streams of story so beautifully imagined by Salman Rushdie in “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” we are able to weave in and among the threads making our own unique passage that can be shared in various ways with others. As we pursued these ideas, it became clear that we needed to research the next generation narrative not as “interactive cinema” but rather as how we could advance this new paradigm which we call the “media fabric.”

Over the past year, we have identified six attributes as central to the “media fabric:” it is connected and integral to our everyday lives; it is improvisational and mindful; it is synergistic and invites self-reflection. Over the next few days, I will propose a framework for some critical discussion around these ideas and some of the specific research being done by the media fabrics team whom I now briefly introduce:
Barbara Barry “mindful documentary”;
Aisling Kelliher, “Us++ “;
Hyun-Yeul Lee, “objects with attitude”
Ali Mazalek, “play table”
Paul Nemirovsky, “emonic environment”
Lily Shrivanee, formerly in the Synthetic Characters group, has recently joined the Media Fabrics team and is working “viscous displays” at MediaLabEurope in Dublin.
Cati Vaucelles in the Story Networks Group at MediaLabEurope, Dublin is also a contributing member of the MF team with her work on “Textable Movie” and related projects.

For more information on the group members and their work, you can check out our new site

similar to the "time code" that shows up in a corner of recorded videos you can now display an equivalent "place code" if your camera collects gps coordinate information while you shoot. these people in helsinki call it "geo cinema"...
http://www.mutantfilm.com/geocinema

kevin, glorianna and i have a workshop
story representation, mechanism and context
at acm mulitmedia on october 15th, 2004, nyc.

if you want to join us for a day of discussion,
talks
and all things story ~ submit a paper!
(or just attend
...but submit a paper!)

Here is the call
see you there:)
b

barbara and i had fun making portraits of ic group members!!

eli chapman, who contributes to the ic weblog, sent me a link to a group blog that he and some friends are working on. check it out!

i'm definitely going to have a go at making one of these. for $14 as opposed to about 600 bucks for a manufactured version! what fun it will be to run around capturing steady shots all over the place.

instructions and sample movies

Eddie Elliot first developed Video Streamer as an RA in IC. Video Streamer is now very portable; check out
http://lightmoves.net/
Aisling recently pointed me to another related site (aesthetically at least) http://www.zefrank.com/dtoy_vs_byokal/index.html

please post comments!

Marie-Laure Ryan has a new article of interest.

http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/1-Ryan.htm

Here is Michael Epstein's review: Hey guys, not sure if you saw this article but it has some good moments of examination of the word space in digital media and admirable consideration of storytelling success and metaphor in several online projects (sect. 4).

i mean, non-blurred pictures.