Mobiles in a Box: Tools and Tactics for Mobile Advocacy!: Mobiles in-a-box from the Tactical Technology Collective is a collection of tools, tactics, how-to guides and case studies designed to help advocacy and activist organisations use mobile technology in their work.

Mobiles in-a-box is designed to inspire you, to present possibilities for the use of mobile telephony in your work and to introduce you to some tools which may help you. After reading the material in this toolkit you can expect to be able to design and implement a mobile advocacy strategy for your organisation. Continue reading

Art and Code — a symposium on programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us :: March 7-9, 2009 :: Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.

Art and Code features hands-on workshops and a conference showcase for eight different creative toolkits — programming languages made by artists, for artists. Presenters include: Tom McMail, Microsoft Research; Dr. Wanda Dann, Carnegie Mellon; Don Slater, Carnegie Mellon; Ben Fry, Processing; Casey Reas, UCLA, Processing; Daniel Shiffman, NYU, Processing; Ira Greenberg, Miami U. of Ohio, Processing + Flash; Luke DuBois, Max/MSP/Jitter; Zachary Lieberman, Parsons School of Design, openFrameworks; Theodore Watson, openFrameworks; Arturo Castro, openFrameworks; Sebastian Oschatz, vvvv.org & meso.net; why the lucky stiff, Hackety Hack; Evelyn Eastmond, MIT Media Laboratory; John Maloney, MIT Media Laboratory, Scratch; DeVaris Brown, Microsoft, Silverlight; Dr. Woohoo, Flex; Golan Levin, Carnegie Mellon (Conference Organizer).

Tactical Tech is an international NGO working at the point where advocacy meets technology. We use our technical expertise to increase the impact of campaigns in social justice and human rights. Tactical Tech believes that new technologies have significant potential to enhance the work of campaigners and advocates, giving them the tools to gather and analyse information and the means to turn that information into action.

To help make this possible, Tactical Tech has, over the past four years, trained nearly 1,000 advocates and technologists in developing and transition countries in the use of technology for social change, provided consultancy and mentoring to over ten NGO movements and networks and created a suite of toolkits and guides specifically for use by advocates. Continue reading

Storytelling is fundamental to being human: itʼs how we share our experiences, learn from our past, and imagine our future.

With the establishment of the Media Labʼs Center for Future Storytelling, the Media Lab, together with Plymouth Rock Studios, is rethinking what “storytelling” will be in the 21st century. The Center will take a dynamic new approach to storytelling, developing new creative methods, technologies, and learning programs that recognize and respond to the changing communications landscape.

The Center builds on the Media Labʼs more than 20 years of experience in developing society-changing technologies for human expression and interactivity, and will now take this to the next level. Continue reading

Data Forensics (In the Landscape): A practical workshop with Martin Howse and Julian Oliver :: November 6-8, 2008; 10 am - 5 pm :: Atelier Nord, Wergelandsveien 17, Oslo (Kunstnernes Hus) :: Application Deadline: October 23, 2008 :: Participation is 500 NOK :: The workshop will be held in English.

With an emphasis on the active construction of hardware and software apparatus, the Data Forensics workshop will apply practical tools, techniques and theory to analyse [un]intentional data emissions within the city of Oslo. Continue reading

Emerging technologies have made it possible for artists to use a wide range of live, external data sources to give their work relevance and impact. Works that use these live data sources share certain strategies, values, and influences. Not only does this type of art have much artistic potential, but it can help the Web by encouraging the development of machine-understandable, Semantic data formats. What kind of tools would give some coherence to real-time art and facilitate its creation?

Switchboard is an open-source conceptual level interface to a library of data mining tools and web services, including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and many more. It is written in Java and packaged for the Processing environment. Continue reading

OpenSpime is a project of a pervasive technology infrastructure that allows individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors.

A brainchild of Leandro Agrò, Roberto Ostinelli and David Orban, OpenSpime was inspired by Bruce Sterling’s vision of “Internet of Things”. Sterling describes a new type of technological device called “spime“, a physical object that is part of the internet as it becomes trackable in space and time, through pervasive RFID communications and GPS navigation. Continue reading

A Recent History of Writing and Drawing - A collaborative project by Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich :: July 9 - August 31, 2008 :: ICA, London.

A Recent History of Writing and Drawing is an exhibition that explores the evolving relationship between technologies of communication and their users. It is a project by the programmer / designer Jürg Lehni and the graphic designer Alex Rich, curated by design historian Emily King, and involves a variety of interactive and non-interactive devices for writing and drawing.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Viktor, a large wall-drawing machine that is controlled by an adapted version of ordinary design software and powered by small industrial motors. Continue reading

Wordle is a toy created by Jonathan Feinberg for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

Create your own.

To the right are images created by others with Wordle.

HDTV Converter - Images created or edited in photo editors, such as Photoshop®, images created from camera RAW files, and images created with film scanners can not be displayed by photo players. The HDTV Converter changes these images into a DCF compliant format.

The HDTV Converter converts JPG, TIFF, PNG, PCT, and PICT images into one of three formats: (1) High quality HDTV 16:9 aspect-ratio, 1920×1080 pixel, DCF compliant format. (2) Original aspect-ratio images in letterboxed HDTV, 1920×1080 pixel, DCF compliant format. (3) Original aspect-ratio, 1080 pixels high, DCF compliant format. Continue reading