Beating Heart

PhotoComic of My Bicycle Commute, 8-10-2006

2006-08-11T11:04:37Z

Link to Map:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/kml/episode.kml?episodePkValues=1180395

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Heart-rate and Elevation Over Time

[ The above photo is art. Shot on my Treo 650 cellphone.
You can download it for your desktop. Amazing Photo ]

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A bicycle commute.

...and into a mid-rise.

Heart-rate and Elevation Over Distance

Link to Map:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/kml/episode.kml?episodePkValues=1180395

Tradeshow Maddness

2006-08-10T17:45:52Z

It started with a party at the Studio Guild. Then it turned into a weekend long mad trade-show setup, exhibit, and breakdown. @ the very big and beautiful "ENK Show" http://www.enkshows.com/ at the Javits Center.

Map___http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/kml/episode.kml?episodePkValues=1176205

We set-up the jewelery display for lovely and talented Olia. Here are "before and after" shots of the booth. Thanks to Corinne, Ingri, Shula, and Amy for lending a hand.

My GPS worked inside the Javits Center b/c it had a glass ceiling. The detail of the Google Map over the Javits center shows how I was shuttling the displays from my car to the booth. The last bit of the Heart-rate shows the extent of my physical experiment at the set-up of the show.

A Road Trip and an Anonymous Hero

2006-08-04T12:20:11Z

Last weekend we drove from Atlanta to New York in a full day and a half. I tried to log all of it but the battery on my device died (of boredom). No just kidding, it was fun we listened to audio books almost the entire time. You can see the heartrate from the trip. It generally went down as the hours on the road went on and on. I've annotated it with rest stops, and a freak flat tire event.

Map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/kml/episode.kml?episodePkValues=1142806

As we pulled into an off-the-beaten-path hi-way exit we suddenly got a flat tire :((
I was both helpless and useless in the situation. I felt like some strange cripple from the future who only had use of one limb, which was attached to a cellphone and could only be used to call an "emergency road side service."

The emergency road side service wanted to tow my car to the nearest tire-shop and i'd have to buy a new tire there. It felt like a serious, serious, overkill for a small nail stuck in the tire. But b/c of policy they couldn't repair the tire, it had to be replaced, for one tiny nail. We were on the road and the spare-tire we had would not make any long journey to New York or Atlanta.
Enter stage right, our anonymous hero. I don't want to get into the synchronistic miracle that brought this roughed individual to our rescue, let us say the cosmos was conspiring with us. He pulled out the nail, plugged the tire, we filled it up with air, and all was well. We "plugged" the flat in "mechanic speak." And that's that, in 3 minutes, we where besides ourselves, all fixed. He hardly heard our "thank you's" and goodbyes and he was on his way. We made it the rest of the trip to New York with no problems.

A link to flat tire:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/kml/episode.kml?episodePkValues=1142806

So lets review so I can coin a term. When I called my insurance company's emergency road side assistance, they were very friendly and great. But they offered us an insane overkill in fixing the problem, and that's all they could offer. This is an example of "services glut." We are a services economy. And like spam exists in the information economy, "services glut" exists in the services economy. Services glut is a costly and entirely out of proportion solution to a small common problem. No national services company wants to offer small economical services. It's got to be a big ordeal, it's got to be worth some money.... This creates a "services glut" which you often take when you are under enough pressure (like when you are stranded on the road, and it's your only choice). All I can say is this guy saved our trip and made me really admire his character, and by extension American's spirit and all earthly human nature. I'm serious.

See you in New York

2006-07-29T05:50:21Z

We are driving out tomorrow in the early AM to make it to NYC in a two day drive. So see you in a bit....

White Water

2006-07-27T19:37:24Z

We took the second half of the day off and ran around the awesome mega-sized water park, White Water, just outside of Atlanta. As the heart-rate shows, the last 20 minutes we ran from ride to ride [b/c there were finally no lines when the park was closing] to get on everything we missed before.... All the relative peaks in the heart-rate are probably us actually sliding down a ride.

Map

11 minute Yoga and 11 minute meditation

2006-07-25T03:50:51Z

Making Out

2006-07-22T01:01:44Z

Well you knew it was only a matter of time before a post like this made it onto the site, a make-out session with my gf. : )

If you like this project you may also like....and a little bit of Art Theory

2006-07-21T22:27:39Z

If you like My Beating Blog, you may also like the below projects.
But before you start looking at the other projects below, let me try to paint a picture for you about art movements. I think it's interesting to see, or even try to predict, movements in electronic art and emerging media. There is no doubt in my mind electronic art is getting physical and embodied in more ways then one. There are two reasons I think electronic art is getting embodied. The first is a technological-determinist argument the second a cultural argument.

Biotechnology and modern technology is migrating into and around the body like never before. We can see examples in the form of hi-tech pharmaceuticals, embedded microchips, robotic prosthetics, biological sensors and monitors, and nanotechnology. Artists who use emerging technology are using "today's" emerging technologies. The technological-determinists argument is that technology is the driving force in this art movement. Well if you add to the above list increasingly commonplace location and GPS technology, you get all types of new maps, map-making, and subjective space projects. Multiply all of this by the internet and you get networked versions of it all. It's exciting stuff, plenty of space for artists to play with unknowns, with new forms of expression, and chaos.

The second reason is a cultural argument. One of the dominant themes in the internet and computing technology since its widespread commercial use has been the notion of "disembodiment." Like "dismemberment" it means to take the corporal body out of the picture. You can actually track disembodiment and computing much farther, but I'm not writing a lecture here, I want to make some pithy points. Virtual Reality and the internet are all about disembodiment, about "destroying space and time," "shrinking the world," making location obsolete, making the body obsolete. Raymond Kurzweil is probably the biggest cheerleader for this, he wants to download his brain into a hard-drive and live forever.... I don't understand how Consciousness can be digitized, so that's a deal breaker for me. Kurzwell's and his supporters seem to me like dreamy Conquistadors hopelessly chasing a fabled "fountain of youth" in the swamps of Florida. But I digress. Even if your not a media scholar or in the field you've seen these themes in movies and popular culture. There are great things about the disembodying aspects of the internet and computing. And likewise there are things about it which just suck. The point is, disembodiment has been a dominate trend and goal underlining research in computing and technology. Now we are seeing a backlash. Or at least the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. Many who work with computing, myself whole-heartily included, want to move back into valuing the body and respecting the insights embodiment presents. There is a trend in art to humanize technology, to value the corporal over the virtual.

So what does this mean in art and technology? It means we'll have genres emerge, or grow, and groups of disconnected artist moving in similar directions. In concrete terms we'll increasingly see projects that interfaces with the body, or uses the body as an interface. We'll see even more projects that interface with our bodys' processes and systems, such as the nervous system, glandular system, heart-rate, breathing, and etc. They will in turn be used to control robotic movements, control animation or movement on screen-based works, and they will be used to build elaborate, insightful, and expressive databases. Mix all these things with one another. Then mix them with every Internet technology that exists, and you'll probably be able to see an area that artists and technologists will be increasingly working with.

My Beating Blog and the below works are but puzzle pieces. The big picture I think is a general movement to embodiment in electronic art. I think we are getting mature as a culture regarding our technology. We are less concerned with zip and bang and are looking for the more meaningful experiences from our technological ecology. The result is a portion of the population rejecting certain aims in computing technology (disembodiment) and trying to move the culture back into a focus on the physical, corporal, and cellular level.

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BodyDaemon:
A fully-functional bio-responsive web server, of which the configuration is determined in real time by a participant's physical states as measured by custom bio-feedback sensors. And it's open source. See it at ZeroOne/ISEA2006, Festival of Art and Technology, August 7th-13th.
[ Helpfully more people will use this platform. I haven't seen it in person or anything, but I think this could be the seed for a whole genre or art and technology. Basically I can say enough about this project. ]

Bio Mapping

Bio Mapping is a research project which explores new ways that we as individuals can make use of the information we can gather about our own bodies. Instead of security technologies that are designed to control our behaviour, this project envisages new tools that allows people to selectively share and interpret their own bio data.

The Bio Mapping tool allows the wearer to record their Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. This can be used to plot a map that highlights point of high and low arousal. By sharing this data we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.
[ Great project, making subjective maps based on how the body reacts to the environment, every city should have one.]

Pimp My Heart

Pimp my Heart is a performance/vehicle intervention that uses a HBBB (HeartBeat Bass Booster) system to amplify the heartbeat of a car driver in real time through an interface with a beefed up car audio aftermarket system.
[ Bling Bling, a fun project ]

Wild Divine

A commercially available biofeedback game.
http://www.wilddivine.com/Affiliate2/
[ I've never played this game. Have come close to buying it many times. The website documentation makes their graphics look kinda campy. But still they've taken a lot of initiative an that can only be commended. Basically they have a simple and market ready versions of their own BodyDaemon and put a marcormedia or flash type game on top of it. WE NEED MORE OF LIKE THIS STUFF. That's why I love the BodyDaemon, b/c it could open up this area to more people.

A Nightmare

2006-07-19T13:40:11Z

Last night I tried recording my heart-rate while sleeping. And I had a nightmare.
It was eerie. It probably has something to do with the juice fast. The first night of the fast my dreams were very vivid. But last night I (thankfully) woke up from a nightmare. It was also very cool in the room, so maybe that makes for bad dreams.

The Dream:
I was working as a video editor (which I indeed did when I lived in Atlanta, before moving to New York). My boss (who didn't resemble anyone I can recall from my life) had befriended a very strange "artist family." They basically made their own "Bodies" exhibits. They dried humans and then took photos of them and then made posters and postcards. It seems strange but harmless at first. I was suppose to do a documentary on them. They came to our offices to show us their work. I met them and got really grossed out, b/c I do have a weak stomach when it comes to blood and flesh and stuff like that. [ I never ever watch horror movies ] Throughout our talk it came out that the subjects in their art work where their friends, who had willingly agreed to be killed, dried, skinned, and photographed. They were a calm family [father, mother, and daughter] and said they were just misunderstood, and that the documentary would set things straight. I lost my cool at that point and told them I'm not working on the project, and then told my boss I'm not working on this.

Then the music started. The scariest music I ever heard. I was basically transported into a horror movie in my dream. I kept thinking, who the hell composed this music, it's sick, it makes everything seem so scary. My mind was of-course the composer. The music didn't stop, it got more insanely wicked. In the dream, my boss tried to back out of the project with the family. But they had already become friends and the family was feeling personally offended, and misunderstood. The father could only talk about the subjects in the artwork, when we tried to tell him we can't do this project. They were also blocking the doorway, so we had no way physically out of the building. It was a bad scene with even worse music.

I finally woke up sweaty. I took off my heart-rate monitor off and turned it off.
The data is below. It didn't really turn out, unfortunately. This technology is still imperfect... : (. But that comes with the territory I guess of working with new technology--you lose data left and right. Will have to try again.

Juice Fast Day 2, Fresh Watermelon Juice for Dinner

2006-07-19T09:43:14Z

Just a little photo of tonight's dinner.

Starting a 7 Day Juice Fast, and Watching 'A Scanner Darkly'

2006-07-19T03:25:11Z

I just started a 7 day juice fast. Yesterday was day one of juice de-tox cleanser diet fast week.
So that means 7 days of only fruit and veggie juice. It feels like quitting food, cold turkey. But when you fast and live an otherwise normal lifestyle you start to notice how much we are encouraged to mindlessly eat basically whatever.
To keep my mind off of food I went to see Richard Linklater's tribute to Philp K Dick's novel of the same name, A Scanner Darkly.
The the movie was visually beautiful, the plot was interesting, but I don't really know what to make of it overall.... It definitely had an anti-drug addict message. I was fairly light-headed while watching it so I kept fantasizing to myself that the plot revolved around eating all the greasy fried food I adore instead of drugs. It made things feel mildly relevant to my life. And also, while I watched the 1 1/2 hour movie, I scanned my heart-rate, giving me an ambiguous relationship to the characters.

Map

My Rosebud Smells Like Fish

2006-07-16T21:33:36Z

When you travel to a foreign country for a long time you eventually begin to miss things. Food. Not food, but certain foods. Everyone has their certain ones. When you immigrate the same thing happens. You miss and crave certain foods--but its for the rest of your life.

I have such a food, a certain love, it's a particular sun-dried salty fish called Vobla. Any russian knows what Vobla is. I would describe it as resembling American Beef Jerky, but made from fish rather then beef.... Asian cultures have similar snacks made from dried seafood of every kind. I know this b/c I've tried them all, looking for my "Rosebud" as Citizen Kane looked for his childhood sled. But the particular taste is not the same. Like wine, and grapes from which it's made, a salt fish's taste depends on where on the planet it lives and what species it is. So in the States, this fish can only be found in a rare Russian deli.

So all this is fine and dandy. I've found a deli that has it. But the thing is this guy smells strong. Like garlic, its scent dies your hands and everything it touches. And like the finest French cheeses, the stinkier it is the more the French love it. Except I'm not in France, or in Russia. So everyone within ear-shoot of my indulgence files their complaint with me about the fine smelling delicacy. It's the story of many immigrants, far from their birthplace, defending their chance to eat a meal which lives so vividly in their memory but so rarely graces their palette.
On a different set of shores, certain foods become a sharp and spiney relic to be eaten in haste and solitude, so as not to smear the cultural fabric on which you sit.

Out of Range on Lake Conasauga

2006-07-10T23:36:42Z

Map
It's funny how nature calms you down. We went camping at Lake Conasauga, located at 3,150 feet, near the summit of Grassy Mountain. It's the highest lake in Georgia. The name "Conasauga" is derived from the Cherokee word kahnasagah, meaning "grass," "sparkling water," or "strong horse," according to various sources. It is one of the best camp sites i've seen in the US. I'd go back there before exploring other campsites in Georgia. I logged a nice strole around the lake.

I read the famous [or infamous, depending on your political bent and according to wikipedia] Tom Wolfe's little not-so-well-known book, "From Bauhaus to Our House." I haven't been able to finnish any of his other books, in print form or in audiobook form, so I can't really speak about his work in general. But this little book should be required reading for architects, art students, and the general public who takes an interest in design and art history. It's a very smart book examining some of the rarely scrutinized origins of modern taste and style. Basically, he took a nice long poop on European and American art snobbery and all the unspoken premises it employs to bulldoze its opinion into an accepted aesthetic. He doesn't exactly make an 'emperor has no clothing'' argument. It's more like a well researched and witty poop.

So while reading it, on our little campsite picnic table, i started seeing where some of my misgiving comes from towards high fashion and some of the culture around contemporary art. His thesis in a sound bite is that Modern art tries to code itself out of reach of middle class' comprehension. In fact, it busies itself at insulting middle class ideals and world-views. [Think of Joe Shmoe saying "I can do that, this is art?" to an abstract Picasso or to a Pollack paint-splatter painting.] Read his book for more details, it's far better worded then anything I can do on my blog. But if you like things like multicolored plastic thumb-tacks, Ben Franklin postage stamps, car camping, air mattresses, and wrapping things in aluminum foil you may not like the thrust of a lot of contemporary art and fashion.

But the take-away isn't any of this. Well, there probably isn't a take-away, just a handful of observations. Its difficult to look at something with fresh eyes. My cellphone had to be out of range and discharged before I could get relaxed enough to just let inspiration seep in. The art of wrapping sweet potatoes in foil and then cooking them on the campfire coals should not be lost to time.

Laps in the pool

2006-07-10T23:28:30Z

A wet experiment in the pool. Well, it didn't turn out so hot, the gps and heartrate came out a little funny. Will try again later.

July 4th Fireworks and Family

2006-07-10T18:21:10Z

Not too much to say. Had a good time with the family. My sister made grilled fish taco and then we lit some fireworks. Playing with fire, always a personal favorite. Video at the bottom....