Flagons Den

Admittedly this site owner is an obvious republican - but the imagery and misinformation is interesting from an adbuster/hacking point of view. Check it out.

I also liked this cartoon - not any sort of subverting going on but lots of iconography and symbolism - I only hope Obama can live up to the hype.

I found this blog post looking for info on life logging - and it mentions a firefox plugin “Me.dium” which acts as a social browsing tool allowing you to talk to people who visit the same sites as you - a kind of online lifelogging tool.

Example of picture play

I was thinking how to utilise the life logging tool of the Cat cam (which I have ordered but it will take 3-4 weeks to come) and whether I could try to weave a narrative, or not.  I found these archives here.

I possibly could slip some illicit events into my daily life - in the name of art of course - and create an interweaved narrative.

I also checked out Flickr for any lifelogging tagged pics - there was these - but they are all conscious photographs, therefore mediated - I want a more unconscious and unedited resource - hence the catcam.

I had my first meeting with my dissertation supervisor - Mike Punt - today.  It seems there were some serious flaws in my original proposal.  Mainly due to tthe fact that a lot of the research material I had chosen he deems as scrappy rhetoric - posing questions but without any real concrete conclusions.  He gave me some interesting pointers in stripping away all the re-iterative content about cyborgs and to look at the central theme in more depth; Technology and nature.  The interconnectedness is self evident, so I shouldn’t try to separate them but what are the key aspects?

Technology as an aid/prosthesis to overcome the harshness of nature

What is technological progress? As it’s subjective. (is a sword bettered by a gun?)

Analogue vs digital  - one is easier to visualise and understand the other is more alien/ethereal, the differences in their effect on nature/us.

What happens if/when technology becomes/subsumes nature? The new biology (of digital networks)

In summary - I need to completely rethink my question, and explore my idea more fully.

I read this article in the Guardian, about ubiquitous computing and the evolution of the net.  Essentially (according to the article) the net will be recalibrated so each user will have a network the size of the current internet (!) and their belongings and household appliances will all have an IP address so they can communicate with each other.  Cyborg culture in every home, technology and humans integrated and continually connected.

Also - in the Guardian - was an article on brain implants in monkeys to overcome paralysis, which could be rolled out to humans in 5 years.  Invasive BCI, but to create a better working cyborg organism.

Well so far today I have had a two hour lecture/seminar on the development of critical theory involving an overview of the Frankfurt School, Idealism, Materialism, Marxism and the Mental Health Act of the 50’s in the USA.  The idea of a hegemony, or coerced mass culture to mask the truth of governments and enable the “mummification of the world” (Adorno).  Then I spent another two hours watching “Zeitgeist” in the library which proposes that;

1) Christianity is a myth and a lie - borrowing all its major tenets from sun worshipping cultures from thousands of years prior to it’s incarnation.

2) 911 was an orchestrated ploy by the Federal Reserve and it’s accomplices in power to enable an illegal war to make money and curtail freedoms of individuals - such as happened in 1930’s Germany prior to the rise of the NSDAP. (And WW1, WW2, Vietnam…)

3) The Federal Reserve intend to enslave the world and implant everyone with RFID chips.

It was quite a lot to absorb on a rainy Tuesday.  I am a born sceptic and so will reserve judgement on the above, but suffice to say; I don’t trust any NeoCon’s, religions, nor monetary institutions already so with all this critical theorising - here’s hoping a change is going to come.

I would like to be optimistic - I have just become a father and would hope there is a potentilaly bright future for my daughter - but I feel with the trajectory our governments our taking us, there can only be a scary outcome (think Cormac Macarthy’s The Road).  Unless… we as dissenting and questioning individuals try to intervene, interject and interrupt this path.  There is no point trying to change things through established political channels - therein lies corruption, compromised ideals and misinformation.  We need to disseminate our distrust, our genuine concern with everyone we know - to wake them from their apathetic slumbers and hope the message spreads beyond that.  We must act as catalysts for change - to attempt to alter the monetaristic, self destructive course we are currently set upon and look for a new world order.

Surely it starts with an idea, a belief that we are capable of being agents of change, that we are powerful and proactive individuals not pawns or powerless drones.  With a change in self image - possibly, incrementally we can work from the ground up to begin to at first raise questions, demand accountability and decry the misdeeds of those supposedly acting in our interests and as our delegates. I for one, will no longer tolerate the senseless barbarity that surrounds us globally - and I hope that by saying so and believing I can make a change and actively encouraging others to do the same, a new age may be plausible.

Nicely done.

Mental Typwriter (BCI Interface)

I was interested in the concept of BCI, especially after reading about the mental typewriter. This can be a non-invasive or invasive technology depending on te task at hand. Essentially a convergence of human and computer at a cerebral, thought processing level.

CatCam as worn by cat

I found this site dedicated to the CatTraq and CatCam which enables you to track your cats movements via GPS and see what they’re up to.  It is essentially feline life-logging, but may prove a useful tool as a budget SenseCam for me to use for 4D. You can buy it as a completed whole or buy the components to make your own.

I saw a programme yesterday,James May’s Big Ideas which was talking about the rise of robots and the use of A.I. to create human emulating computers.  They had built one which was a sort of virtual Beethoven - but it had flaws in it’s creativity as it just copied and regenerated patterns it had observed from reading/interpreting Beethoven’s scores.  To improve the A.I. creative thought scientists believe the computer needs authentic memories to be able to find context in which to find inspiration for, and enabling more realistic/human creativity.  They are starting to capture human visual memory in a means to build a database for reference for this purpose.  The technique is called
“life logging” where a digital camera is worn around the neck and captures a photo every 30 seconds or when it senses movement or a change of light.

Sense cam for life logging

These photos are then fed into a program which scans the images for recognisable patterns, sections and is able to signify unique events by comparing frames and shows it’s percieved order of priority through size of image on screen.

This can be seen as further convergence of man and machine - entrusting memory to a cyber storage program to enable the software to process the information to make itself more authentically human-like and capable of more emulative creative thought.  Maybe illuminating the point that any future cyborg incarnation may not be one of conjoined humans and technological hardware, but a merging of consciousness which takes place in a virtual/software environment.

project redux: I could utilise a life logging style experiment, capturing timelapse everyday over the course of a week, then either show that in a multiscreen format, digitised memories running concurrently for ready access. Alternatively I could make a sort of calendar application where you are able to revisit and re-examine the passage of time over previous days, either a sort of Flex app with a 3D interface of levels, week, day, section/event or a piece in After Effects using the 3D camera to fly through the captured images.

This ties in with my final year theme, building a body of work around the cyborg prosthesis.