MULTITUDES w/ Erostratus, Cathy, Sun Ladders
we’re playing tonight at Lulu’s, in Greenpoint, $free, starts at 9
→ 2012-02-10 
PUCK: PUCK of Ubiquitous Contextual Knowledge™
Internet-of-things / ubiquitous computing … these concepts have been central to NYTLabs thinking over the last year (and related to much of my past work 1, 2). They are old ideas, but we are finally seeing their fruition in interesting consumer products on the market.
I’m into two concepts in particular: Twine and GreenGoose. Both are looking at dirt simple, generalized hardware (particularly the mighty accelerometer) that wirelessly spit data up to the cloud. Server-side software can then contextualize that data to serve any number of social purposes, like alerting you when the mail comes (Twine) or keeping tabs on whether the dog is getting fed (GreenGoose). It hits that middle range of Greenfield’s notion of scale — the level of the room (as opposed to the individual, building, or street) — which I think is a particularly ripe area.
So in tribute I wanted to create our own version at NYTLabs (after acronym brainstorming w/ @mboggie). The idea is a small, generalized piece of hardware that you can attach to a physical thing in your world which can be programmatically assigned to monitor interesting events. It should have long battery life and report data from the accelerometer and other sensors wirelessly. Its logic should be on the server somewhere, not burned into the device, and it should have HTTP and UDP interfaces. And finally, in my twist on the concept, I want it to respond to touch, so that if you pick it up, it turns into a high-resolution controller, like a Nintendo Wii. The idea is to then have hundreds of these all over everything. I’ve been picking at this the last few months, and finally have a proof of concept running.
The core component of PUCK is the XBee. XBees rule. A network of lightweight components is in itself aesthetically appealing, and in essence, all I want to do here is hook a sensor up to one. The XBee is smart enough that this can be done without the help of an Arduino or other microcontroller, which is essential to keeping down the cost.
The path I went down and should not have is trying to figure out how to program them directly in python over the serial port. Instead, Andrew Rapp has an awesome java library and a wealth of documentation that is the way to go. I got hung up in that I didn’t just want to collect data from the XBee, I wanted to reprogram its behavior on the fly, using ‘API’ mode — this library has all that hard work in place.
In any case, the rest of the design here comprises an accelerometer, tilt switch, and LED. The tilt switch is able to wake up an XBee — it’s quite sensitive, so moving the device at all can take it from a mode where its just periodically reporting data and put it into high-frequency reporting mode. Finally, the LED just indicates when the puck is awake. When we get a MakerBot I’ll design a housing.
On the server side, I’m pushing the data into Redis and rebroadcasting it via OSC. The next step is to figure out how to architect the signal processing and the nature of the interface.
But I’m far from a hardware ninja, so I’m pleased to have something together that I can experiment with. Updates to come.
→ 2012-02-09
Some OpenPaths news: in the last couple of weeks we’ve revamped the service and launched iPhone and Android applications — it’s been exciting to hear about people using the platform again (OP on Twitter).
Flowing data posts:
“There are a lot of ways to collect your location, whether it’s for journaling and personal reflection or for sharing with others, but it can be tricky making use of your data once it’s stored behind company servers.”
OpenPaths is different.
→ 2012-02-03
Need some color on this blog. Heres some detritus from data-sketching yesterday.
→ 2012-01-13
CLUSTERING DATA IN PYTHON
[code] Python (2.6), GPL
Previously, I demonstrated clustering approximate geographic points from OpenPaths to identify places of interest. Heres the code I used to accomplish that, which can be applied to any dataset, it doesnt have to be limited to two dimensions. The algorithm is known as agglomerative hierarchical clustering because it works by repeatedly grouping the closest two nodes together, starting with each data point as a node, and ending with the entire set in a single monster node. (“Closest” is defined by any distance metric; for many applications, it will be euclidean distance, but for geographic data, Im using the haversine distance formula.) Along the way, youve constructed a binary tree which represents the hierarchical relationships between the vectors in the set. The result is a kind of ad-hoc taxonomy, and is frequently used to hypothesize relatedness between images, documents, proteins, users, etc. (heres a nice diagram courtesy Razvan Musaloiu-E.)
To use agglomerative clustering as a classifier, however, what we really want is just a flat set of clusters. It’s akin to choosing the branches of the tree that best represent the natural divisions in the data. Cut too close to the trunk and the clusters will be too general; cut by the leaves and youve got too much noise. With geographic information from OpenPaths, at least, we have a heuristic to decide what is appropriate — the platform is only going to be accurate to a quarter-mile or so, so we can look for the largest branches that do not exceed that limit. The code provides a method, get_pruned, that takes such a parameter and returns a resulting set of clusters.
Clustering packages for python are out there, but I prefer touching the code and this is a dirt simple implementation that nonetheless should prove effective for most creative coding purposes.
→ 2012-01-10
I recently sat on a panel to close out the 2011 Experimental Videoart Festival at Tribeca Cinemas. While I don’t typically situate my work as video art, it was a productive discussion to be a part of, with Kalup Linzy, known for his soap operas in drag, Columbia art professor and filmmaker Shelley Silver, and moderated by the young curator and provocateur Brittany Stanley. Of the works in the festival, I particularly enjoyed What We Call Ourselves by Sarah Scaduto, whose reenactment of childhood gestures captured on video hit similar themes to Knifeandfork’s Hand of God, and the rather musical 8 La Finale by Marco and Saverio Lanza, also seating identity in unconscious elocution. However, Andy Baraf may have been the best conversation partner, a artist from the 80s disgruntled with the tameness of form in the pieces whose own work has an awesome feedback-driven aesthetic. Many thanks to Brittany for the invitation.
→ 2011-12-21
NYC VERTICES:
In several recent posts, I’ve talked about experiments with personal geographic data collected via OpenPaths. In those examples, location is treated in absolute terms, latitude and longitude.
However, I am working toward something here. Most of my past work has been concerned with the relative qualities of place, the psychogeography that isn’t necessarily keyable to coordinates (see our article in Urban Omnibus). Presently, I’m developing some analytics to try and bridge that gap.
The first order of business is to begin thinking about location in terms of place. Place is a concept that is relative to the context of the individual — but using geodata we can at least identify significant patterns that suggest loci of activity.
Starting from my path data, I used a clustering algorithm (I’ll post the code next) to construct a network graph of my arrivals and departures around the city. What you see here are the locations of all of my “significant” places around the city, over the last 6 months or so. NYT Labs is the big green point up top — home is purple toward the bottom. The lines show the strength of the connections between them (eg, from home I’m most likely to go to the lab).
The conceptual shift here, and I think it’s an important one, is to begin to treat location as behavior. More to come.
(drawn with python)
→ 2011-11-23
It’s been an unexpected honor to have my reflected mug appear in this week’s issue of TIME magazine. The NYT Labs Reveal project, for which I wrote the software but to which Alexis, Ted, Justin, Matt, Agnes, Will and Michael Z all contributed concept, design, and production, has been chosen as one of the 50 best inventions of the year. In print it’s page 72; online here (subscription required). I love that they’ve organized things by size — the mirror is 76 centimeters.
Here’s the clipping
→ 2011-11-21
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“1923”
This piece is from my set in Korea, performed at Kunsthalle. It’s the first work I’ve generated using the musical notation system I’ve been (sporadically) developing, called Braid. The software outputs OSC, which here I’m converting to MIDI and routing to a MeeBlip synth. Other than a bit of EQ and reverb, you’re hearing the raw output.
It’s not fully realized by any means (neither technically nor compositionally, and the eventual intent is to play this music instrumentally), but I’m happy with this first step. I takes me somewhere else, emotionally, than I can get to when writing on the bass. In general, it sounds very different than anything I’ve ever produced, save my early pieces at the CMC, and in fact this is a return to some of those interests.
The formal thrust here is about processes, a la Steve Reich, which are a part of the DNA of so much of the music I love, from Glenn Branca to Liturgy, Harmonia, or Oval, or Tristan Perich or Florent Ghys, or Zs, Live Footage, or … This kind of thing hasn’t shown up too much in Multitudes (but it’s definitely in there). But with Braid, I’m embedding it into the bias of the notation itself.
This summer back at Eyeofestival, I had the pleasure of talking with Casey Reas. The formalism in his work owes an acknowledged debt to process-oriented visual artists like Sol Lewitt, but he said Reich was just as much an influence. Processing is, among other things, a powerful realization of the ideas born in this aesthetic.
What’s the musical equivalent? I get into trouble here, because of course there are a trove of amazing audio software platforms. Most are elaborate visual interfaces with a set of biases I’m not interested in conforming to. The great code-based environments, SuperCollider, ChucK, RTcmix, etc, including Max/MSP and PD, are primarily concerned with timbre these days (is that fair to say?), as are hardware hacking / circuit-bending noise-centered operations. But is there something to be said for Max without MSP? I think I’m moving backwards in my software interests, or at least it’s been kind of challenging to round up MIDI gear. In any case, Braid is to be my personal Processing for musical processes. If it gets mature enough, it could be a public project down the line. (Props to Tristan for solving this with his chips.)
→ 2011-11-20
I’m humbled that Multitudes’ Twelves Branches makes an appearance on Hank Shteamer’s awesome blog, Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches. It’s a nice feeling when someone gets what youre trying to do and thinks you made it at least some of the way there (see last post). Oh, and let’s not forget that STATS totally kills.
→ 2011-11-14
At a workshop at Google today, along with members of the CENS lab at UCLA, discussing participatory sensing and mobile data collection. Particularly excited to learn about Funf, an awesome initiative at the MIT media lab that opens up the possibilities of using Android devices as sensors.
→ 2011-11-14
I have a bit of a brain crush on digital humanities theorist Rita Raley at the moment — we met at UCSB a year ago, but I just recently read “Walk This Way: Mobile Narrative as Composed Experience”, an essay of hers published in the book Beyond the Screen last year. In it, she discusses Hundekopf, a Knifeandfork project conducted in 2005 which is one of our favorites. Raley’s essay is one of the better analyses of locative narrative that I’ve read, and it certainly situates the themes with which Sue and myself were preoccupied far more lucidly than my own attempts at prose. She understands mobile narrative as a mode of writing rather than navigation or annotation and one that engages the city as a “temporal process rather than spatial entity”, very much on my mind recently when researching rhythmanalysis. She closes with this, which is as much of an inspiration for my work as anything:
“When a participant receives a text commanding her to look around, there is a sense in which that command is more open than closed, at least insofar as there is an interpretative gap between instruction and execution. That gap is the site of ambivalence, the uncertainty of meaning, and thus open to improvisation and experimentation.”
→ 2011-11-13
Multitudes w/ STATS, Noxious Foxes, Zvoov
Union Pool, Brooklyn
album release show for Multitudes’ Twelve Branches
→ 2011-11-13
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
Seoul is amazing. Wonderful people, wonderful food. Big up to Live Footage, everyone who came out, and I hope to be back.
Here’s an audience capture of a Live Footage Squarepusher cover, at GOGOS2.
→ 2011-11-12
