So I am going to Burning Man this year. Part of me thinks it is the wrong thing to do, but that part of me is a wus who needs to shut the hell up. I am going with the most futurey camp out there, Imagenode! I have always had respect for these guys. Great music, awesome technology, and the right mix of art and geek.
Getting the camp ready has been a task. Lots of fundraising parties, lots of carrying things and soldering, soldering and more soldering. Making the sign required the soldering of almost 1500 LEDs and 4500 resistors for voltage regulation.
I have always been more of a biology person, but I have yet to find an easily applicable and robust use if biology in art. While the design and planning of a large scale LED project requires in depth knowledge and experience the actual fabrication techniques can be picked up with a little practice. I have already learned lot from TwinA and Spec, and I pick up more all the time. Inspired, I will try to put together a light sculpture of my own next week. Something a bit smaller scale I think.
Thanks to pink tentacle for posting this Apocalyptic view of Tokyo. Is this what we have to look forward too? Maybe. Does this mean we should bomb Iran, North Korea and Syria. Mmmm I’m not so sure. The first world certainly doesn’t lead by example and sometimes I think the only reason why this hasn’t happened yet is that the apocalypse would be bad for buisness.
Check out the future of gaming. The best aspect of Spore, in my opinion, is that it is an asynchonous MMO. That is to say that the content comes from the user community, but you don’t actually interact with other players. This keeps things fresh but play can be casual.
In my coding class we were talking about web server based programs. First everybody thought that big mainframes were going to do all the work and terminals would be nothing more than a portal for keystrokes and other input.(There was no such thing as a mouse back then.) But then things started to change when Apple released the first PCs. I actually did some consulting for a guy named Daniel Alroy whose claim to fame was an article, written when I was in diapers, about how desktop machines were going to be the next big thing. Indeed that trend has proven true. I can assert that mainframes and supercomputers became marginalized to specialized applications until the internet took hold.
Anyway these trends got me to thinking about how modern games take full advantage of both huge servers and powerfull desktop machines. Games like World of Warcraft and Second Life maintain environments for huge rosters of people. The gamer interacts with that server based world and maxes out the PC’s graphics capabilities in displaying the server based game. Spore is a reflection of that where the server side of the game actually explores the world of content created by the gamer and serves it to other users.
Yep, cyborg sharks. DARPA blah blah blah. Just like that movie blah blah. There, I mentioned the cyborg sharks. Oh yeah. Blah blah Joke about not feeling comfortable swimming in the ocean. Of course, the latest thing is that Homeland Security is replacing the Air Marshals with cyborg Snakes on a Plane!
Do you know what sharks spend their time doing? Looking for food! How long can you get a shark to follow a boat without eating before it gets tired or better yet gets frustrated and learns to ignore the stimulus? Cyborg sharks… Just domesticate sea lions and use them like dogs. Or, better yet, spend the money on public education.
