There are two amazing Kickstarter projects that need your support, help these two teams reach their goals!

Jeremy Diamond and Denny Silverthorne of Smiley Guy Studios are looking to raise funds to produce an animated short film as a tribute to the work of illustrator Bruce McCall.  The short film, Love in the Time of Dendur, is based on a cover of The New Yorker that depicted two mummies, having their photo taken by another mummy in front of the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  More details about this project and how you can DONATE can be seen on their Kickstarter page.

Liz Gallo and David Goorevitch are also working on a project that needs your support!  The Love Gun uses directional speakers to focus songs in a specific direction.  With The Love Gun, even the dullest streets will turn into spaces for people to connect and dance!  To learn more about this project and DONATE, you can check out their Kickstarter page.

Good luck teams!

CFC Media Lab Guest Faculty member, Kate Raynes-Goldie, will be speaking at the 32nd Annual Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners – Privacy: Generations on the Plenary panel: “Where are we now? The inter-generational shift in privacy perceptions”
For hundreds of generations privacy has been recognized as a fundamental human right in Israel.
Today, privacy stands at a crossroads. The existing legal and regulatory frameworks, in the EU, US, and OECD, as well as in Israel, date back to the 1980s and 1990s. They predate a new generation of technologies including mobile devices, biometrics, RFID, cloud computing, indeed, the Internet itself – which has swept through the marketplace with such force so as to destabilize laws and regulations. They have seen shifts in the perception of privacy among a new generation of users, who post personal information and communicate with friends and colleagues on social networks. Policymakers all over the world realize that this sea change calls for a new generation of governance.

Join us in Israel, a land melding old with new – from the religious, cultural and historical heritage of Jerusalem, to the high tech start ups of what has become known as “Silicon Wadi”.

- Yoram Hacohen, Head of ILITA

Privacy: Generations runs from October 27-29 (October 29: closed session for regulators)

PROGRAM: www.privacyconference2010.org/program.asp
SPEAKERS: www.privacyconference2010.org/invited.asp

Sarah Samesh, CFC Media Lab Alumnus (2007), has launched an art project as part of an artist residency in Salvador, Brazil. She will be presenting the work in Sao Paulo this year and carrying out another version of (dis)location in Sao Paulo as part of an artist residency.

(dis)location – Salvador explores geographies of various communities in Salvador, Brazil through the oral narrative of  local inhabitants. 5 narrators take you on a tour of their respective neighbourhoods as part of a personal trajectory into the practice of their daily life.

The central concept in this work is that perception is dynamic, depending on our condition and position in time and space. The exploration of physical, psycho and social geographies, expresses a desire to deepen perception as part of an engagement to make social realities visible.

Visit (dis)location at: www.dislocation.br.com

The theme of the art gallery this year was BIOLOGIC: A Natural History of Digital Life. One of the most stunning works on show was fellow Canadian, Philip Beesley’s Hylozoic Soil (video) (assisted by Rob Gorbet, brother of our own Matt Gorbet!), an artificial forest made of clear acrylic and driven by a distributed network of sensors and actuators. Also impressive was Petko Dourmana’s Post Global Warming Survival Kit, an infra-red video installation experienced entirely through night-vision goggles.

The boundary between art and technology is often blurred in the emerging technology area. For example the University of Osaka Human Interface Engineering Lab was showing off their Funbrella. An umbrella that has been modified to be able to record and play back the tactile sensation of different types of rain falling on it (including a rain of noodles, or stuffed cats and dogs). Or the Crystal Zoetrope, a 3D laser-engraved, well…crystal zoetrope. Beautiful.

Of course one of the most exciting parts of the emerging technologies section is seeing brilliant ideas and techniques that are simply executed and well within the capabilities of most artists to use in their own work. This year was a big year for tactile interfaces. The Photoelastic Touch project uses the light distorting properties of transparent rubber moulds and a polarization filter to create a tactile touch overlay on a LCD screen. Carnagie Mellon was showing a new scratch based interface for mobile devices called Scratch Input , which allowed users to place their mobile on any surface and scratch the surface to control the device (it does this using a microphone, and some audio analysis to detect gestures). Micah Kimo Johnson developed a very impressive technique called GelSight for capturing the texture of an object and using it on 3D virtual objects. Finally, Tachilab was showing a sort of side-scrolling game called Twinkle, which let the user guide their projected character though real-world objects and obsticles using a hand-held LED projector connected to a webcam.

While these projects are definitely have some high-tech behaviour, the innovation is in the concept rather than some new expensive piece of technology. Their underlying simplicity and affordability make them well within the realm of possibility for artistic use. It looks like high-quality multitouch interfaces might be well within the price range of ordinary mortals soon as well. Touchco, a company co-founded by Ken Perlin (yes, of Perlin noise), was showing off their new multi-touch material which is thin, cheap, and transparent can be placed over displays. I only hope they put it to market soon, the data you can get out of these looks incredible!

Though the show floor was smaller than normal, there were a few things of interest to our readers. 3D displays were everywhere, but they still either need you to sit in a specific location (lenticular displays. If you don’t sit just right, you get a headache), or require you to use glasses. Of these, NVidia’s 3DVision seemed popular among exhibitors, and is relatively affordable and high quality ($400 for the 120hz LCD and $300 for NVidia’s shutter glasses). Looking for 3D software, but don’t want to fork out the usual $1000+? Give the open-source Blender a try; they were showing off the new version 2.5 due out in the fall, and they have done a lot of work on the interface. Can’t afford a 3D printer? Shapeways lets you send them your model, they’ll print it in the material of your choice (including steel!), and ship it to you.

It’s no surprise that our own Darren Wershler is one of the curators of this awesome project, along with some other amazing local authors. I love that rather than saying all YouTube videos are shitty they have been finding lovely ways to use them to tell stories and share experiences through the huge – vast – expansive archive that is YouTube.

http://ryeberg.com/curated-videos/crazy-smart-typography/#author-archive

Jefferson Wright, CFC Media Lab Alumnus (2008), has written his first novel…

It is called Robot Porn.

Please go here:

www.robotporn.org

If your workplace prohibits content that could be deemed NSFW, perhaps a home viewing would be more conducive and enjoyable.

And please sign up by entering your email in the appropriate box.

Please send this virally to all your networks. This virus deserves to spread. Thank you.

Endsense is coming. DisOrder abounds.

In trust,
Faust

How to Participate:
Sign up on the website, http://www.360extended.com
Add your neighborhood and
Add your story

360EXtEndEd is created by artist, Faisal Anwar, and is presented in partnership with Toronto City and Toronto Archive for Toronto’s 175 Anniversary.

ABOUT 360EXtEndEd
360EXtEndEd is a multi-platform project, which explores a city’s evolution. We live in a city where there are infinite stories at every corner, in every neighborhood, in every house.  360EXtEndEd questions how, in this hybrid age of globalization, we perceive our relationship with the city we call ‘home’. How does a city’s life, architecture and history impact on us, its inhabitants? What happens to all our unsaid and unspoken stories, which we all carry?

360EXtEndEd has two components
Website: This is a place to tell and share stories about the city of Toronto. The website enables community-based interaction where people are invited to post stories, pictures and videos to the site. The website becomes a portal where our experiences about the city, past and present reside. It is a place to celebrate our diversity in today’s urban culture and share our relationships with the city we call home.
Site-Specific Installation: Your stories of the city will be a part of the first real-time, site-specific installation at Nathan Phillip’s Square. The installation is part of Toronto’s “My City” campaign celebrating 175 years of Toronto. The installation will consist of large-scale projections around the large dome inside the rotunda. 360EXtEndEd will take the audience through streams of visuals and provide them with opportunities to explore and find ways to connect with space and visual imagery.

The Board will meet in special session the first week October of 2007 for intensive study focused on the subject of trust within the context of network enabled relationships. As part of this process, the Board is hereby issuing a call for subject experts who can participate in the two day discussion. Topics of interest include: the changing nature of trust, security, privacy, control and protection of personal data, methods for establishing authenticity and providing assurance, management of
threats, and dealing with unwanted traffic.

Participants will be selected based on a short paper summarizing individual interests and qualifications as well as availability. The retreat will be held in Toronto, Ontario (CA) . Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by ISOC and participants should expect to arrive October 4th and depart on the 6th or 7th. Expressions of interest may be emailed to: Oct07-retreat @ elists.isoc.org and papers should not exceed three pages. Papers must received by August 24th, 2007 and the Program Committee will make their selections on or before September 7th, 2007. Subject experts will be allotted one hour for presentation on October 5th and will be included in the days round-table discussions. In order to facilitate open discussion, final presentation materials should be forwarded to ISOC no later than September 21st, 2007. We look forward to a lively and informative meeting on this important topic and encourage you to share this announcement with your communities of interest.”

Lucy Lynch
Director of Technical Projects
Internet Society (ISOC)