Videolab is an educational software piece that teaches and lets users experiment with concepts of digital video technology. It can be used standalone by students or as a lecturing tool by instructors. I developed this Educational Software project as part of the coursework required for my Digital Media PhD, but I hope it’ll come handy in my own teaching. This prototype was made with Processing 2.08b and was thoroughly tested on Windows, but should work on other systems as well.
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Videolab is an educational software piece that teaches and lets users experiment with concepts of digital video technology. It can be used standalone by students or as a lecturing tool by instructors.

I developed this Educational Software project as part of the coursework required for my Digital Media PhD, but I hope it’ll come handy in my own teaching. This prototype was made with Processing 2.08b and was thoroughly tested on Windows, but should work on other systems as well.

These are some of my early experiments with slit-scan photography, made while trying a Processing application I coded mostly as a learning exercise. The software allows you to either ‘scan’ your webcam image or a video file, but since using my laptop as camera is a bit cumbersome, most of the above images were made by ‘scanning’ some random videos I had around. I’ll have to try to shoot video specifically for slit-scanning - so far I found out that stable, sideways shots of slow-moving subjects work the best. (As an aside, slit-scan photography is basically one of the main techniques used by Photo-finish systems, only at very high frame rates.)

Anyway, I think the app is cool and stable enough to be worth sharing, so I made a download for Windows available - head to my Processing sketches page to get it!

Misc. links Apr 5th - May 1st

Bruce Sterling’s essay on the New Aesthetic. This is an interesting read, even if it did nothing to counter my ambivalent feelings towards the New Aesthetic. On one hand, I like it, the idea. Even if the ‘official’ blog - which I follow - feels a lot more random than a ‘movement’ should (but perhaps I’m mistaken in expecting something like a ‘movement’). I like to think that at last we figured out an aesthetic for the early twenty-first century, that it is our generation’s Futurism, this time centered in CCTV-obsessed Britain rather than in automobile-obsessed Italy. On the other hand though, I may also believe the New Aesthetic is just a bandwagon, a neatly packaged brand for journalists and lazy curators and critics. Consider John Whitney. BEFLIX. The demoscene. The comparatively long history of Glitch art. Software art. Consider Thomas Ruff’s eroded JPEGs touring the world’s art museums (museums!). Cory Archangel’s tweets about 1990s ‘New Aesthetics’. From this perspective, the New Aesthetic seems like a brand invented by the same kind of savvy people who came up with concepts such as ‘creative industries’ and made a killing living off artists and craftspersons. But then again, most art ‘movements’ didn’t ever exist as such. ¶

Journalist Alexis Madrigal calls for a post-Facebook future (mind you, what the article is really about is the increasingly diminished returns of social and mobile software). I’m all for new things, but the current situation was expected after the initial push to develop applications that leverage ubiquous broadband internet and mobile hardware with built-in sensors (mainly camera and location/GPS) pretty much consolidated. I think that now is time to take a deep breath and start figuring out what happened, what worked and why, and what it means. Bring in the academics. ¶

One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. The authors, Olia and Dagan, blog interesting stuff found in the Geocities torrent rescued by Archive Team. Funny I can’t even remember what was my old Geocities address. ¶

PHP: a fractal of bad design is a very thorough critique of everything that is wrong with the programming language. However, I don’t believe it is constructive to attack PHP developers (such as your truly) as an horde of illiterate, masochistic fools that refuse to use proper tools. Such attacks grossly underestimate the pull of PHP’s being a good enough language for web development - incredibly easy (eg. XAMPP) to get into, well documented, and widely supported by cheap web hosting providers. It’s flawed (eg. I must reemphasize the ‘well documented’ aspect of PHP’s success, given how unintuitive its function names are sometimes) but allows me to do a quick ‘sketch’ of a webpage, hit ‘refresh’ and (often enough) voilá!, it works. And it is this ‘sketching’ (a word I’m borrowing from Processing) aspect that I find vital. To go with the author’s carpenting analogies, most people are building small houses - maybe a shed, maybe a greenhouse to keep the flowers. They don’t need complicated ‘scaffolding’ like in Ruby or Python frameworks. They just need to be able to sketch. ¶

Wired’s piece on deciphering Stuxnet, a real-life spy technothriller. ¶

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera. That Canon 5D Mark III is so last year. ¶

An economist’s Six Rules for Dining Out. Some of his tips seem pretty universal: seemingly strange dishes at fancy restaurants must exist for a reason and are probably quite good; listening to lots of conversation means people are waiting a lot more than eating (so loud restaurants should be skipped); and dining establishments in very good locations (eg. with lots of tourists) afford to be bad and expensive, and should often be avoided. ¶

The Brain on Love: what happens. ¶

Procrastiworking: is what I do. As for the “creative success” part, the jury’s still out. ¶

The World’s Longest Invoice. I’d have a couple of submissions for the Portuguese version. Just saying. ¶

Misc. links Dec 13th - 31st

Metafilter’s Year in Writing has given me much to read in the past and coming weeks… ¶

Our Unpaid, Shadow Work: you know that last time you bought a ticket online? Or yesterday when you filled your car with gasoline yourself? Or when you went to the supermarket and scanned your own groceries’ barcodes? You are doing someone else’s job, for free. Sure, you get cheaper tickets, gasoline or groceries because of that (do you really?), but that’s no way to run a proper economy. ¶

Makimizing shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. This is a headline on Forbes!, not The Communist Workers’ Union Monthly or something like that. ¶

Two interesting articles about fighting cognitive biases and other kinds of self-delusion: Steven Pinker would ban the idealization of the past if he happened to rule the world, while Freeman Dyson reviews Daniel Kahneman’s statistical approach to psychology. ¶

Umberto Eco’s guide to identifying fascists, written in 1995, makes the future look rather bleak. ¶

Roger Ebert tells us why movie revenue is falling. I’d say what’s surprising is that movie revenue is holding so well, at least here in Portugal. Mini-rant: Even though I’m rather able to concentrate when I go to the movies and cope rather well with other patrons’ poor civics, I find it anoying that going to the movies means quite often driving to a shopping mall in the suburbs, eating overpriced mall food, standing in line for too long to buy tickets, etecetra, the alternative being a couple of inner-city theatres that offer nothing else but waiting out in the cold, or an extremely overpriced and unconfortable bar. Please make the theatres places where people would actually enjoy hanging out, else they’ll be downloading movies off the internet and watching them at home - not because it’s cheaper but because it is better. ¶

Peyton’s Place: An interesting essay about what it’s like to lend one’s house to a TV series’ production. It didn’t go well. ¶

KidsRuby seems like an interesting tool to teach programming. And not just to kids. Similar tools using Ruby (which, from my very shallow knowledge of it, really seems the general-purpose language with the simplest syntax) include Hackety Hack and the very cool Shoes. ¶

Aaron Koblin’s The Single Lane Super Highway. I felt like twelve again, drawing badly pimped-out cars. ¶

Misc. links Sep 12th - 26th

The fiction of the creative industries by Florian Cramer. From a Dutch perspective but translates well into the Portuguese reality. The gist of it - the ‘creative industries’ hype conceals centralism (and nepotism) under a veneer of advertising, and harms both non-profit Art and independent creative businesses. Agreed! (via Ricardo Lafuente)

A Reddit group about explaining stuff in a way a five-year-old could understand. ¶

JavaScript Garden: good documentation about the idiosyncrasies of the language. ¶

Txt2re is a useful regular expression generator. Headache relief indeed. ¶

An introduction to Arduino - a comic book. Perhaps I’ll start tinkering with electronics now? ¶

This realtime face substitution demonstration is easily the creepiest video I’ve seen recently. It almost seems like a nasty device out of cyberpunk sci-fi. ¶

A selection of the best moments from The Simpsons, according to Wired. ¶

You Are Not a Photographer. Or, owning the kit and using it on occasion doesn’t make you a master - sometimes, hardly an apprentice, it seems. ¶

I like to make cool things

Today I had the last presentation of the first year of my Master’s degree in Multimedia. Therefore, for the next couple of months, I want to do nothing, hear nothing, read nothing in which acronyms are an essential part of communication. But still, I did learn quite a lot in the last ten months, and go the chance to work in cool stuff. The major highlights: The first major work we were challenged to do was an e-book prototype. Me and my collegues Diana Carvalho, Eduardo Massa and Vitor Dioniso did A Cor, an e-book actually based on my documentary Words and Thoughts in RGB. We were asked to consider a futuristic e-book reader, therefore the e-book (which was actually put together the pretty common Adobe Acrobat) has some functionality still not found in current readers, such as color and the assumption there’s a touchscreen. You can actually download the e-book (it’s in portuguese, though - 10MB), but I advise you to actually open it with Acrobat Reader instead of the unbloated susbtitute you love, because the interesting things (draggable surfaces, pop-up, tiered text) only work there. We also intended this as a demonstration of a product concept I believe in: very cheap, short e-books about very specific subjects, the readable/interactive equivalent of the microdocumentaries. Change Your Habits Today, done with Diana Carvalho and Eduardo Massa, was our answer when asked for an “interactive video” in which real and unreal footage are merged. Above you can see the non-interactive (here for HD), linearized video which I shot with my good friend Ana Margarida Carvalho. The final work, which is Heavy, has multiple layers of interactive Flash content my group colleagues added, so in a way this video doubles as its own ‘website’. In the second semester I found myself another workgroup. Along with Juarez Braga, Manuel Almeida, Mariana Figueiredo and Marta Leal I did a mobile application called POC (don’t ask), which is an event-based social network. The kicker is that our app offers no way to chat or send messages to your buddies - you wanna talk with someone, you go attend the same event (in our prototype events consisted only of musical gigs). Of course, in order to prevent POC from being a robust stalker tool, you actually have many privacy choices. But we sure had some fun discussing the outrageous ways a social network could work. Finally, today we had our last presentation. Keeping the same group that did POC, we were supposed to come up with an interactive installation, and so, after weeks of brainstorming, we came up with a display for the Faculty of Engineering Museum’s archives, which contain 19th century educational models in a closed climate-controlled room. In order for visitors to be able to ‘see’ the objects kept there, we made a touchscreen browser which controls a rear projection display with all the information about the selected item. Today’s presentation was about the concept though, and the display isn’t actually there (yet). We hadn’t an actual touchscreen controller (we had to do with a laptop and a mouse), and had to improvise the rear projection screen with sheets of paper. But still it went well as a demonstration of something that can be very easily and relatively cheaply be implemented in similar places. Looking in retrospect, all this is hardly cutting-edge. I think that’s beside the point. There’s often a pressure to do with the most recent technology, that’s true, but I believe sometimes true innovation gets lost in that process. While I think a C64 Twitter client might be taking it a little too far, I think most innovation comes from the hacking of well-established technologies (just think of the low quality of games released for fresh new consoles), else it’s all eye candy and little use.

Object oriented

Processing - Bounce

During the last couple of weeks I’ve been learning Processing, another tool in my Master’s degree’s utility belt. My workgroup is supposed to deliver a big project in one month and Processing will be our programming language of choice. I’ve meant to learn it for a long time, but there’s nothing like real need to get me to actually do something. So I bought my first programming book in nearly a decade - Daniel Shiffman’s Learning Processing (which besides being a good manual I found a very fine primer on computer programming) - and got on with it.

You can see the results of my first half-decent experiments → here, and I’ll be adding more as I go on. Be careful though - I did some experimenting with (annoying) sound too. All things Processing are actually Java, so there’s a slight chance you might need to install Java on your computer. Enjoy!

Software engineer Shamus Young documents how he created a generative city. This is the sort of project I have to think about at my master’s, I wonder if you can do it in Flash (of course you can, so let me rephrase it: I wonder if I can do it in Flash). Anyway, Shamus predicted he’d spend thirty hours in this, so with my knowledge of software engineering I predict I’d take… twenty times as much? Not taking into account things always end up taking twice as much time, no matter how lenient, the original prediction, this means I’ve better be more modest in my goals… A procedurally generated house?
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Software engineer Shamus Young documents how he created a generative city. This is the sort of project I have to think about at my master’s, I wonder if you can do it in Flash (of course you can, so let me rephrase it: I wonder if I can do it in Flash). Anyway, Shamus predicted he’d spend thirty hours in this, so with my knowledge of software engineering I predict I’d take… twenty times as much? Not taking into account things always end up taking twice as much time, no matter how lenient, the original prediction, this means I’ve better be more modest in my goals… A procedurally generated house?

Source: shamusyoung.com