New Multitudes video by David Feinberg for “Horse”, off our album Twelve Branches (download the album $free).
→ 2012-04-01 
DATA REENACTMENT: STREET VIEW VIDEO FROM A STOLEN PHONE
My close friend and collaborator, Sue, had her iPhone stolen earlier this month. The thief had it for 5 days, after which he ransomed it back to her. In the meantime, he had it with him as he drove around LA, presumably looking for other opportunities to be an asshole.
Our phones, clearly, are really personal devices. When we talk about personal data, the mobile phone is as physical an embodiment of this as anything, a data-sensory appendage if you will. What does it mean, then, when we’ve been separated from the device? It feels like identity theft as much as the loss of valuable electronics.
So when Sue got it back, she felt a bit estranged from it. We wondered about the life her device had had away from her, which led her to use OpenPaths to take a look at where it had been. Sure enough, the thief’s home and haunts were pretty readily identifiable.
Sue had also seen the last video Id made with OpenPaths and Google Street View, and we decided to make another one with her data. However, I wanted to take it a bit further. As fun as my first video attempt had been, it’s a bit impressionistic — you just get this blitz of unconnected images. However, Sue’s data had a very clear narrative behind it. We had a collection of points that the thief had visited with the phone, so I thought we should be able to get a smooth path between them.
First, I used the Google Directions API to map the likely route that the thief would have taken between known locations, as well as filling in some intermediary points, which was @blprnt’s idea from our earlier brainstorms. One of the cool things about the Street View panorama data (described by @jaimethompson) is that it shows the linkages between consecutive images taken by the Google car. So by calculating the heading from one point to the next and heuristically choosing links between panoramas headed in the right direction, we can access all the images taken along the way. Again using heading we can point the camera in the right direction, download the tiles we want, and stitch a frame together. Applying this to the thief’s route, we got a complete reconstructed path that plays back much more like a continuous video than my previous experiment (it evens out after the frantic first 30 seconds).
It’s a bit like if Google was driving the getaway car, starting downtown where the phone was stolen, and traveling over the city until it’s finally given back. Of course, we’re leaving out the pauses when he wasnt moving, and the temporal displacement of Street View images make this a kind of a weird frankendata — while the video retains some relationship to the truth of the human interaction behind it, it remains a kind of data fiction.
Oh, and for those who prefer the written word, theres always the driving directions.
Edit: some press love from Gizmodo and Flowing Data
→ 2011-07-19
MULTITUDES: RENEGADE
As a kid, I watched Atlantis launch at night on the beach in Florida, with my grandmother, following the flame of the engines as it rose beyond view. I took it as a matter of course that awe would always play a real role in my life. Awe pulled me forward; the rumble of earth-defying engines through the sand made made intellectual and aesthetic exploration a visceral thing.
Back then, I figured that at about this time in my life Id be in a good position to go to Mars. Instead, today is Atlantis’ final flight. I get the reasons, but ultimately there’s no real economic justification for exchanging humanity-magnifying shit for the siphon of foreign wars and bailouts. It remains a profound disappointment that there isnt at least a successor program to STS — Virgin Galactic isnt quite it.
Astronauts are undeniably cool, because not only do you get rockets, you get them for the sake of science. You get fame for merit, media exposure that broadens horizons, real risk for knowledge and exploration, competition without warfare. I hope my (potential) kids get something worthy to idolize, because there are few public figures now of much value; I like my heroes trained for the job, preferably in one of those spinning centripetal force torture thingys, or at least calculus class.
But at least us kids of the 80s can have our myths in the footage we’ve got, the amazing detritus of the space program that can still evoke that awe, even if it cant push it forward.
David has a healthy fascination with this that comes up in a lot of his work (including his recent and excellent video on the photographer Vincent Fournier, also obsessed with space travel.
But I cant help but repost this, the best video ever, a collaboration between David and my band Multitudes using found NASA footage — an ode of sorts to the solid rocket booster. Punk rock expresses what words cannot. Long live STS.
→ 2011-07-08
STREET VIEW VIDEO VIA OPENPATHS API
[code] Python (2.6), GPL
Brainstorming with @blprnt this morning about what people might do with the new OpenPaths API, we thought it would be pretty awesome to see every place you’ve ever been via Google Street View.
Loading all of that up through the Google Maps interface seemed overly burdensome, so we figured there must be a way to pull the static tiles. Turns out there is (though it’s unofficial). @jaimethompson breaks it down for you.
From there, it was pretty straightforward to pull the points, scrape the images, and assemble the video. It includes points from September ‘10 to the present and a dozen or so cities, beginning in LA I think, but NYC clearly dominates. Non-urban spots arent captured well, and in Googleland it’s never winter. You might also notice that the granularity of the video increases at the end. That’s because at a certain point I start using the forthcoming OpenPaths app, which samples periodically, rather than the data from iTunes backups, which only looks at novel locations. The API pulls from both.
Want your own? I did this with python as usual — you can grab the code here if you’re interested (youll need PIL and the latest OpenCV bindings installed to export the video). This is a bit of a soft launch for the OP API as we gradually work in new features. Let me know if anyone gives it a try (especially if youre using a different language).
Noncoders fear not — we’ll hopefully be integrating something like this (but cooler and more blprnty) directly into the OpenPaths interface in the near future.
→ 2011-07-07
