thoughts on mapping

Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who's come here to identify the
planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses.
What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said,
the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The
structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it.
Corporation as life form. Not the Edge lecture again, I said
- From William Gibson's "New Rose Hotel"

If we were to represent a Corporation, computer program, or network graphically, the most most common way is to depict its blood: the individual nodes that comprise it, the connections, and the information flowing through it. Like an x-ray or CAT scan of the organism, this method depicts the internal structures accurately. However, how do you depict the movement of this organism?

The first step would be to define the space it inhabits. We define our dimensions as degrees of movement, which also happens to be all that is needed to acurately describe our unique position. True, non-organic life exists in the same 4 (3 spacial, 1 temporal) dimensions as us, though these values have little meaning to it since its degree of movement are different. To show it moving would be to show the changes in each of its degrees of freedom: the number of nodes, the number of connection, information flow, influence, etc.

The video video above was created charting random data, but could be applied to any number of non-organic organisms.

Mon, Jan 28, 2008  Permanent link

The Uncharted Internet

Doing research on a school I stumbled on an older part of their website that seemed to contradict their current school message (sorry for the lack of details, but I dont want to offend the particular school). Suffice it to say it got me thinking about another way scan the internet.

The traditional way is to follow links. Start at a site, and crawl your way outwards. It's efficient and charts how most people explore the web. However, what if you moved from website to website like a password cracker, trying reasonable combinations of directory name or html file names. It would take a while and the bots may get banned from a few website, but it would give you a picture of the unlinked Internet. I would be really excited to see the results. What do people keep hidden? What seedy back alleys exist that no outsiders are meant to see?

Thu, Jan 17, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: internet, bots

dimension 1 _concept
Project: Emergence and Navigating Space

Peter Eisenman's work has been described as a critique of and by calculations. Many of his forms required substantial calculations and analysis of the site: the topology, the history, the environment, the circulation, stacking procedures and space filling. Ultimately though, none of these calculations directly contributed to his final form. He in now way directly used his studies to find solutions or to create a more appropriate or efficient form. Do all calculations have to have a clear purpose, or can they just raise questions, inspire, and look good?


What if we lived in space like this? What would it look like inside?
Is there space inside this structure?
I propose to create an environment out of lines and calculations. Each calculation will form a part of the environment, but it will in no way influence it's overall look, improve its efficiency. My hope is that some processes will yield to interesting spaces.

These are some of the structures that will form the environment. They are based off of very simple rules of lines: bending, twisting, looping, boxing, kinking, spiraling, phase-shifting, copying, splitting, branching, forking, shrinking, growing, expanding to a plane, or becoming a tunnel. An algorithm, working over many iterations, will take lines of dimension 1 and shift them to dimension_ .

Wed, Jan 16, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Emergence and Navigating Space

Two picures of the Internet
Project: Emergence and Navigating Space

I present in this post two pictures of the Internet. Both depict data and the inherently invisible connections and transmissions of data that make up the Internet. The first picture has a strict depiction of the internet, a literal road map of connections. Unfortunately, I feel the map is like a cross section of a building that strips the space of any cinematic experience. Data Flow captures the atmosphere and excitement of the internet, it's more art that is a lie to tell the truth.

Social Network Fragments

Below is a picture from Social Network Fragments, a project done by MIT's the Sociable Media Group. The project charts connects between people on emails, contacts, and subscriptions to listgroups. The broad view on the top shows that the internet is actually quite tribal, that is people tend to form dense connections between their closest friends, and few connections between clusters. Looking closer you can see the complexity of each cluster.

I feel like when we navigate pages on the internet we're like birds in a flock, we only see the pages we've navigated to in the last 24 hours, it's hard to grasp the immensity of the place, which this does well.





Data Flow

Data Flow, a project by D-Fuse, also depicts the data of the internet, or rather it draws its influences from it. "The work explores and traces the hidden data that exists on the internet and the invisible nature of these elements", as a video of the project shows.

Tue, Jan 8, 2008  Permanent link

Sent to project: Emergence and Navigating Space

Fractal Programming

In honor of this year's Fractal Art contest I've decided to post about my experiences learning how to program fractals from one of Clifford Pickover's books on the subject.

I was initially struck how most fractals have a purely 2D output. In a sentence: you choose particular equation and chart the results of it on a real vs imaginary Cartesian plane and if you choose the right equations and limit said equations to the right values and you assign colors to right values, interesting pictures emerge. Yes, there is a lot of work involved, but the process is primarily about exploring mathematical equations. Fractal artists are more explorers than anything.

As I am most interested in 3D programming, Mandelbrot and Julia fractals are of less interest. However there are there types of fractals which are more useful, primarily because they work with objects rather than pixels. EDIT: I've recently discovered Quaternionic fractals, which create 3D fractals in Julia/Mandelbrot manner.

Branching
Interesting results emerge when you specify when and how a path or object should change its path or sprout new buds, tendrils, etc.











Tessellation Automata
TA requires that you define a grid (in 2 or 3 dimensions) and populate it with several objects (usually pixels). With each cycle of a program you determine if a pixel will give rise to offspring or die.










Packing
With packing you simply define an area and begin filling it randomly with objects so that every object must be as large as it possible can. As the space fills up, you the objects become smaller.

All of these work in 3D, and occur in nature.

Thu, Jan 3, 2008  Permanent link

The Mechanical Phylum

I recently read an article by Manuel DeLanda discussing Non-Organic Life and the Mechanical Phylum. Simply put, anything that crosses thresholds can be thought of as an organism. This includes waves moving through water, rocks forming stratas over millennium, yo-yos, simple circuits, and computers.

Dimensions can be assigned to these organisms for each degree of freedom. A light switch, a battery, and light is an organism with a "point" degree of freedom: it is either on, or off, and therefore exists in a point space. An oven occupies a point in one-dimensional space (it's freedom is confined to a linear temperature). A pendulum occupies a point in two dimensional space, and bicycle, DeLanda notes, has about 10 degrees of freedom. In other words, there are only 10 aspects of a bicycle that separates it from a static object. It therefore exists in 10 dimensional "phase space," depicting this phase space would require collapsing 10 dimensional to a space we can view. I like the terms Non-Organic Life and Mechanical Phylum, since as we clearly dont require organic life to have even the slightest consciousness, non-organic life should not have to start with AI.

I find this concept most interesting as it applies to bots or web crawlers. When computer programs are competing to solve a problem their "movement" and the very space they inhabit it made at the discretion of the programmer. I've discussed this process and how this space can be thought of as architecture in a previous essay.
A glass structure is charted in two dimensional phase space. The orientations of the glass shards is the structure's degree of freedom, charted in a line.

Another interesting dimension (no pun intended) of bots is that they can be thought to exist in multiple "universes." If you create a bot, Q, to roam through a set of data, you can duplicate not only Q but the space it lives in. You Therefore when charting Q's location you must not only specify its position according to these degrees of freedom, but you must specify which Q in which universe you are describing. DeLanda neglected this in his essay but I would consider it a part of phase space.

So if we can think of bots as part of a phylum, is there an architecture to their space? Does architecture apply only to humans? Is there an architecture to the space bacteria or worms live in?

Order out of Nothing

DeLanda's essay also brings up an interesting note about order arising with no guided influence. Rocks are organized into similar stratum though nothing more than the chaos of our universe. Similarly, the planets of our universe formed in the same way. If the planet we stand on and the environment we live in creates order out of nothing, why is it so hard to imagine that it eventually created rudimentary life, or rather, rudimentary life created itself.

Thu, Jan 3, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: bots, ai, technology, Virtual Reality, Architecture, computers

DARPA Urban Challenge

This weekend DARPA handed out $3.5 million to three teams competing in a driving version of the Robot World Cup. The vehicles had to navigate a staged urban setting, obeying California traffic laws and avoiding stunt drivers, all without any intervention by humans.

The winner, named "Boss", came from Carnegie Mellon University and perhaps won due to gutsier decision making.



MIT's vehicle, pictured above, failed to avoid another car reversing away from a traffic jam and plowed into the back of it.

DARPA hopes to replace a third of the US Military's vehicles with autonomous ones by 2015.

Tue, Nov 6, 2007  Permanent link

Evolved Virtual Creatures

Over a decade ago, a team of scientists and programmers created a virtual environment and populated it with creatures, letting natural selection take it's course. The results were quite impressive.

Wed, Oct 24, 2007  Permanent link

Brain Readers, ECO House, and the Otaku

Researchers from the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at Keio University in Japan have developed a brain-computer interface that enables users to control the movements of Second Life avatars without moving a muscle.

It's a brain wave scanner, and as the video shows it surprisingly good control over your avatar in Second Life for a device that doesn't need to be glued to your head (though it is a little slow).






Shuhei Endo has been doing some interesting work with geodesic dome structures. One of his larger projects is the ECO House, a huge bean shaped geodesic dome with grass growing around much of the outside. He said it keeps the inside 10 degrees cooler on the inside without air conditioning (I dont know if it's Celsius or Fahrenheit). The ECO House encloses 9 tennis courts in one snaking bean shape without any obstructing walls or columns. He did a kindergarten in a similar fashion though at a much smaller scale. I like how it makes children sized overhangs.






Kaichiro Morikawa gave a talk on the Otaku subculture in Japan on Monday. It was primarily an anthropological talk, though near the end he started making some great parallels between the internet, architecture, and user generated content. Otakus are the anime and manga obsessed citizens of Japan, and have created districts in Tokyo with distinct architectural and design styles based on the Otaku's needs and personalities. The buildings in Otaku districts are more private than contemporary buildings, yet also offer places to display user generated content such as fanzines and "garage kits."

How we design buildings and structure cities is primarily based on global trends (the glass and steel of modernisms for example) or "capitalism translated in to space" (giving the biggest buildings and central locations to rich corporations). These two design methodologies often dont reflect the subtle needs of subcultures. The internet knows this all too well, and it is this feature of the internet that has given rise to so many diverse groups. How can architecture catch up?

Tue, Oct 16, 2007  Permanent link
Categories: architecture, Virtual Reality, computers, japan, technology

Chat Circles

Judith Donath lectured today at Broad Art Center today, and for those who missed it, she's the director of the Sociable Media Group in the MIT media lab. She described a few of her projects, most of which are based around Second Life. My favorite project was rather old one, but one that suggests how we could communicate on the web.

The project is called Chat Circles, and is similar to simple chat program like AIM or Google except that the user must place their circle avatar in a specific location in a large, scrolling, 2d window. All other people catting on the system are represented by circle avatars, though you only see the messages of the people nearby. While this might lead to some people being able to snoop in on your conversations, the power of this method is that suddenly your chats have a focus. On aim, each of your conversations carry the same attention-weight. (which can be appealing, I suppose) However, with Chat Circles you can definitively announce (as in real life) who you are paying the most attention to. You form more tangible groups, you hang out.

On a related note, she talked of a study that says people are more likely to lie if they are communicating to an avatar with a face than if they are communicating purely by text. Go figure. It has something to do with the fact that when you see a human face, you enter into a social mode, where you try more to impress people rather than stick to facts.

Tue, Oct 9, 2007  Permanent link