Olofster

Today's experiment at the Never never lab (diy)

2010-09-01T20:48:00.000-07:00

If only they had had them at the Solvay conference in 1927:)

Ever since SXSW I’ve wanted to try this so when my friend Chris invited me over to his workshop (the never never lab) I figured I'd have a go at it. It's basically an artsy attempt to embody remote presence. Partly, I thought it would be nice for people who can't physically attend an event to have some kind of presence (instead of just watching the event on streaming), partly it's nice for speakers to get a sense for their real audience - not just the ones that bother to show up.

All you need is white paper, cardboard and a projector. Assemble a white cube and hide the projector inside. The entire cube lights up as the face of the person you skype with is projected on one of the sides. (Though you can't really tell from the iPhone pictures above - in real life you see both a luminescent white cube and the person's face - even in daylight)

Suggested use: place 10 of these in the audience and toy with where you project people from. Or put one on stage to answer questions from the audience.

Hopefully there's a second iteration upcoming incl. semitransparent glass

The artist is present

2010-06-13T17:01:00.000-07:00

OK, so I'm making an exception to good blogging etiquette by a) not writing about tech or cooking b) not applying an editorial filter to this ridiculously long post: I'm copy-pasting raw notes I took on my iPhone last month when seeing Marina Abramovic's retrospective at the MoMA - "The artist is present" - probably one of the most inspiring exhibits ever. And I seem to be in good company on that one:-) @Ladygaga quoted Marina on Larry King Live and there was a lively discussion on my facebook wall regarding what was arguably the pièce de résistance of the exhibit: Marina's 3-month sitdown with members of the public (see pic and screendump below, apparently people were breaking down in front of her).

If you've come this far in the post you're interested enough in art to read on. The only thing I've added to my raw notes below is pictures of the artwork. Where pictures were to be found that is. For some reason exhibit photos are hard to come by so I had to do with b/w pictures from the 70s. This seems weirdly antithetical - don't artists/ museums want to disseminate their work? (On a side note: MoMA what's the deal with not letting people take pictures even if without flash? I wasn't even allowed to type the notes below in the exhibit hall but had to step outside??). Note that most of the works were re-performed with live actors / models.

iPhone notes copy-paste below with bonus pictures ->

"Notes Marina Abramovic exhibit MoMA NYC march may 2010.

Elevates? Performance art to the rank of music by re enacting
performance art from the 60s and 70s as were it a musical score.

Teaches us to see in that seemingly everyday moments are abstracted
and put on display. Almost as if you froze time. Eg two people who's
fingers almost touch.

Demonstrates power of human presence via
performance art. People standing in art space has more energy than
just sculpture. The power of human sculptures. Or when you have to
pass through two people standing up.<-the tension of everyday moments.

Creates powerful moments. Eg standing almost touching with fingers or
stretching a bow with arrow at Ulay's breast.
Or live nature morte sitting at opposite ends of table just staring at
each other

Displays great moments of intimacy eg hair knots tied together. Or
breathing in each others mouths

Expiation. Purification of body. How our bodies play an important
role in mythology or pagan customs. Eg women showing genitals during
rain or men fornicating with the ground or women fondling their breats
during drought.

Reminds us of different ways of acting. Different behaviors that could
be permitted. Good use for galleries.

No performances involving water or purification?
Washing cow bones only piece with washing. One piece she washes a
skeleton. Memento mori art lying down with skeleton on top of her.
Exposes the way we use our body todo whatever. Questions the way we
interact with our bodies. She always puts herself on stage but her art
seldomly involves social interactions and only indirectly questions
social norms.

Walking across the great wall of china. To meet her former lover as
one last goodbye - the idea of making beautiful gestures of how
actions are thoughtful and produce reactions in people. Great wall of
china Simplest version of the power of gestures. How interacting with
your own body might even seem socially subversive. In one of her early
works though it's not what she does to her body that matters and what
could be subversive. She invites the audience to use her body (knives on display) as an
object thereby inverting her original line of questioning. - so you
say what I do to my body is subversive , well I'll invite you to do
whatever you please with mine.

Post sept 11 work was about engaging in energy with the audience
sounds cliche but that's what all her work is about- exposing and
creating energy

Invites people to participate in the art

Forces people to observe bodily pain

Her work likely more forceful in a retrospective (didactic ) where you
can appreciate the full consistency of her work.

Work to be sent out to schools etc where the subversiveness
and usefulness of her art would be put to work and not confined to a
gallery."

Voilà - end of raw notes. Two other pretty awesome Marina resources are the MoMA Flickr page of "The artist is present" and Arthur C. Danto's analysis in the nytimes. Unfortunately, the exhibit closed end-May but the website is still up incl. a nice interview with Marina- check it out!

Mr Krax finds a voice of his own

2009-08-24T07:56:00.001-07:00

Krax finally found a voice of his own, or rather became the unvoice of the Sweden social web-barcamp. Thanks to Henrik's ruby magic in the car and my cardboard craft the night before, he could read all tweets hashtagged #mrkrax in the main tent. Check out the Linux wizard below trying to figure it all out.

Update: Ted posted a really good summary of sswc on his blog (Swedish only).

3 favorites from Music hack day Stockholm

2010-02-07T20:56:00.000-08:00

Last weekend my friend Henrik Berggren organized the Swedish edition of Music hack day in Stockholm. 30+ hacks were churned out in 24h, all for the love of music - so here come three special ones, chosen mainly for their aesthetic appeal.

Radio Free Hackday is a wonderfully analog creation for online music discovery. Simon Hohberg and Robert Böhnke replaced the power supply of an FM radio with an arduino hooked up to a computer (see pic above). The arduino tracks the position of the frequency display and lets the user toggle between music from different cities or music of different genres (based on the Citysounds.fm and Soundcloud api:s). The music is transmitted to the device via an FM transmitter hooked up to a computer. Kudos for enhancing legacy electronics! I guess the inverse of their hardware hack would be to keep the radio intact but have a multi-frequency transmitter stream your friends playlists on different frequencies. (Or if you're lazy and stick to one frequency, use twitter as a commandline / remote control to change what's being streamed e.g., @radiofreehackday #olofster_playlist.) But then again, where's the fun without the arduino?

Matthew Ogle's HacKey takes your last.fm username and tells you what keys define your musical taste in colorful pie charts. Matthew writes that he wanted to build something "utterly useless" but I beg to differ. The data becomes really interesting once you start comparing your taste to other's - see below a comparison of my favorite keys vs. that of a friend's (I never really use last.fm so not sure how accurate the chart is for me, but I'm not surprised Henrik is a C major).
Olofster

vs. Henrik:

Would be really fun to see tempo and beat data added to this. Alternatively, if given another 24h I bet Matthew could could tell us what the musical mood is of the last.fm userbase - or even see if there is any seasonality in it as there seems to be in the Boston Common flickr pictures (btw, this is a great visualization, you get the point immediately without losing any of the rich detail in the raw data). I bet B-flat minor is a winter favorite. Anyhow, now I know which key I am: C-sharp major.

Last but not least, the guys at Winston Design, Alexis, Joel and Arvid, put together an extremely slick app, Holodeck, which enables artists to create a web presence drawing upon Soundcloud, Songkick, Tumblr and Last.fm. Very clean. And a great name too:)

Really? Google does direct mail?

2010-01-10T11:36:00.000-08:00

Lo and behold what I received by snail mail the other day - a quick adwords-for-dummies guide combined with a 600 SEK (roughly $85) get-started slush fund:) Very curious what the ROI is on this one

Following or followers?

2009-11-23T18:41:00.000-08:00

(via Avi Flombaum, via Rus, via the New Yorker :)

Cooking for looking loves your submissions

2009-10-19T03:40:00.000-07:00

Some of you might have stumbled upon a fun blog of mine recently - Cooking for looking - an attempt to define culinary surrealism - making food that tastes great but doesn't necessarily look like food. (Or making a dish that looks like a different kind of dish e.g. looks just like a burger but is actually a dessert - I challenge you to make that one!:=) . I had been doing this for some time myself and was then encouraged by friends to spread the surrealism online.

These kinds of blogs have grown in popularity recently and the Times even ran an article on Cakewrecks the other day. Now, Cooking for looking is somewhat of the opposite of Cakewrecks - or thisiswhyyourefat.com for that matter - (I follow both) in that you show off your culinary bravado rather than your #fails. So good luck and share your creations on cookingforlooking at gmail.com. Oh, and check out the edible garden ... before the edible mummy wrecks it all.

Sousveillance v.s. the Art of forgetting

2009-02-24T20:17:00.000-08:00

I had an article published in one of Sweden's main daily papers Svenska Dagbladet today. The article contrasts two different approaches to protecting oneself against surveillance: The first approach relies on law and due process (Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's idea of attaching life expectancy tags to data) while the second (Steve Mann's WearComp) has a slight anarchist bent - a sousveillance everyone-watching-over-everyone-type strategy. Feels quite timely in the midst of the heavily publicized trial against Pirate Bay.

Just in case you like it (and provided you read Swedish :-) feel free to check out some of my previous essays:

About Jewish identity in Diapora (whether defining one's identity is desirable)

Why predicting the future is a vain exercise (basically a discussion of Nassim Taleb's wonderfully entertaining books The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness)

What Nietzsche and Finkielkraut have to say about the use and abuse of History and what it means for contemporary anti-semitism

Happy to hear what you think!

Mr.Krax and Sweden social web camp

2009-08-21T04:49:00.000-07:00

Heading down to Sweden social web camp with my friends Henrik Berggren and Ted Valentin and our new pal Krax. Krax hatched in the family kitchen late yesterday evening and has yet to learn how to speak. We're doing our best to remedy that by the time we arrive at Tjärö in the archipelago in southern Sweden.

Creating the illusion of biking in the sky

2009-05-17T16:08:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday I attended the NYU ITP grad student's open house and came across this marvellously analog project by Marios Diamantis - an upside down bike - check out the video I took from the exhibit below (note that the TV is upside down too and that he's pedaling backwards). Still can't make up my mind whether this is functional or dysfunctional. There is an officially sanctioned video here. Enjoy.

Innovation In C

2009-04-24T22:04:00.001-07:00

Tonight I participated in the miracle of Terry Riley’s 'In C' (to borrow an expression from Louis CK) at Carnegie Hall. 'In C' is an amazing piece. This is what the score looks like:The rules of the game are as follows: All performers play the same page of 53 melodic patterns in a sequence but with each musician having the freedom to determine how many times to play a specific sequence before moving to the next. Any kind of instrumentation is possible.

Basically the entire piece is improvised which is neat as each musician chooses when to phase in or out. But what’s really neat about it is that it gets you thinking about innovation. We tend to think of innovation as a one-man show. (And even in cases in which we say that organizations innovate we don’t really think it’s the group being creative). Here, on the other hand, the individual’s contribution isn’t interesting – what’s interesting is how the group innovates. It’s the interaction between individuals that creates musicality. As Terry Riley puts it in the performing directions:

“One of the joys of 'In C' is the interaction of the players in polyrhythmic combinations that spontaneously arise between patterns. Some quite fantastic shapes will arise and disintegrate as the group moves through the piece,”

Note that Riley writes “as the group moves through the piece”. 'In C' strikes me as the perfect example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Music flows from the interplay of patterns that "spontaneously arise". I tried to think of any digital equivalents during the performance but came up blank. Not sure mashups meet the bar. Any suggestions? (Listen to a sample?)

PS: Also, if you will, why not consider 'In C' as a metaphor for (internet) business. It seems dead easy to perform (I’ll probably regret saying this), but in principle anyone who can read rhythms can do it – much like anyone with basic programming skills can put together an app. Provide the platform and have others do the legwork

w00t! Soundcloud!

2009-04-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

Eric and Alex at Soundcloud just raised $3.3 mn. Supercongrats to the most brilliant team ever!

Self-surveillance

2009-04-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

My flip arrived a couple of days ago. I have been flaunting it to my friends and realized what it means to be a product advocate. I have relished in recorded conversations, jokes, smiles and heated debates (no worries I keep them to private as I was born into a generation obsessed with privacy). Now I’m just waiting for proper audio and video search so I won’t have to tag everything in my lifestream. Even better of course if it had enough memory for me to hang it around my neck and not worry about capturing all the fun going on. Highly recommended.

Blood, sweat and tears

2009-02-10T20:30:00.000-08:00

I finally got the CNAME in order (48h propagation through internet servers) and here it is: olofster.com

Cribswapper launch upcoming [BETA]

2009-01-08T19:18:00.001-08:00

Wrapping up for the launch of Cribswapper tomorrow at 01.09 pm. Going to be fun indeed to see how it'll be received. The somewhat odd launch time is designed to look good when put next to tomorrow's date, i.e. 09.01.09. as in Cribswapper official launch, 09.01.09 at 01.09 pm.

Now of course I just realized that tomorrow's date is 01.09.09 in the US, 09.01.09 is the way my Swedish partner in crime Lukas Gratte would have it. So perhaps we'll go live at 09.01pm rather....
Cribswapper official launch: 01.09.09 at 09.01 pm?

Healthy reminder?

2009-01-06T10:56:00.000-08:00

Successful start-ups can be run by seasoned professionals and need not be internet-based, but seem to require $$$ in funding

Yammer

2009-01-05T18:45:00.000-08:00

Twitter with a business model

Dj Koze

2009-01-05T06:47:00.000-08:00

I've been listening alot to DJ Koze since New Year's in Berlin and would be eager to hear a classical ensemble like Kroumata do a live set of say "I want to sleep". Could turn out just as good as early Philip Glass music: Contrary Motion or Two pages?