Stories in Digital Media

Shamus Young’s impressive journey for an automatically generated cityscape by night. Watch it here or read the details here.

Hi, some weeks ago I read that Wolfram Research is planning to contend Google’s supremacy on Internet.

The initiative is reported in The Guardian, and comprises a knowledge search engine based on natural language entries. For that purpose Stephen Wolfram believes his scientific and mathematics engine might give better results in answering normal and usual questions than any of the current search engines. Wolfram is the developer of Mathematica®.

Wolfram published a book with what he calls a new kind of science, which is a good reading to get more information and context about the person behind this project. The book is available here.

The engine is coming soon: Wolfram|Alpha

If you are interested on you can  follow the project: here

This engine sounds like a step forward in fulfilling the Asimov’s all mighty computer: Multivac.

Hi, this is my comeback part two.

Hanging around in Internet I visited Lev Manovich website.

Manovich recently published a new book, I guess by now many of you have already put your hands on it and devoured it piece by piece, however to my surprise nobody has posted it here . Right now that many are in the process of Master Thesis writing this text, free available online, might be of special interest.

Manovich is one of the most quoted researchers of contemporary media studies and has a particular interest for data mining, and data bases that recently has led him to what he calls the ‘software revolution’.

Below the link to download the book

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/11/softbook.html

Enjoy a TV feature about Grace Murray Hopper from 1982.

EDIT: Btw. Today is Ada Lovelace Day!

An early experiment for digital news distribution.

April 18th, 2009 @ Caligari Theater in Wiesbaden

We will explore new approaches that are being developed to confront the flood of information and transform it into useful knowledge

Speakers will be Aaron Koblin (made that Radiohead music video), Sebastian Oschatz from MESO and others.

Tickets for students are 40€. Drop me a line if you want to join so that we can order tickets together (it’s a cinema anyway).

Big Dog is freaking me out, with it’s surrealistic natural movements (check out the trousers it has – looks like two small people are desperately stuck inside of it. Point is, that you know there are only those two legs and no corpse. I am shivering.) At the same time one can also give lots of kudos to the developers from an engineering point of view. Look at the lunge it makes when it’s kicked or on slippery ice.

As an accompanying literature I suggest this Telepolis article (sorry, only in German).

HI, currently at the Reina sofia museum there is an interesting exhibition called Máquinas&almas, souls&machines, a very appropriate to name to discuss in our digital media times . The aim at this exhibition is to explore those blurry areas where art and technology meet and melt, for that purpose they propose us a trip through the work of a generation of people whose pieces marked remarkable milestones in defining limits and positions in new media practice and critique.

Material : a short video about it and a photo gallery here.

Digital Media rocks!

A nice link:

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/dmal

and a nice “workshop” with videos:

http://workshop.softwarestudies.com/

Did you ever ask yourself how to play around with your webcam ?

Two years ago I started a small project to track a certain color range within the frames grabbed from my webcam using real-time image processing. So I came across the Open Computer Vision Library for C/C++, in short OpenCV, developed by Intel and published under a BSD License. As an example : The built-in facetracking algorithms are definitly the favorite toys of our Federal Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble.

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