As of yesterday the 10th of February, 2012 Puredyne, the “USB-bootable GNU/Linux operating system for creative multimedia” is no more. The announcement came about a week ago and yesterday the mailing list was shut down by Aymeric Mansoux.

It’s a real shame as this was an environment tailored for artists. No reason other than the time needed to keep it up to date was given but hopefully it will give rise to a new OS somewhere down the line.

In response to Artreviews community announcement of user content censorship on the 6th of September I have created an online petition to gauge interest in how the community (and generally artists who use the internet) feel about this. To read the full details of the announcement email and sign the petition point your browser to:

Please forward this announcement to lists, family, friends, colleagues etc.

A protest forum thread has also started on the Artreview site called AUTHORIZED NAKED where users are being encouraged to add images of their own art which includes nakedness. Ownership of the work and it’s rights is crucial authorising artists to be naked as personal choice and effectively giving Artreview more content to censor.

Urban Echo (to my knowledge nothing to do with Urban Echo) by LUSTlab is a work for urban environments which uses common place European publicity boards as windows to vistas of other urban environments. Urban inhabitants see in real time inhabitants from other urban spaces which may be in other cities, countries or even continents.

Urban Echo brings some of (the physicality of our interaction) back to real locations, connecting public places and therefore people, cities and cultures. It extends space beyond our once concrete parameters. Webcams allow you to see into another space, mirrors allow you to see your own space. Using billboard screens and cameras, Urban Echo creates a hybrid of these two things, allowing not only see into another city but maybe see yourself transported into another city or culture. A mid point between transparency and reflection, introspection and extrospection. Placed in public areas, the screens have a variety of modes. Sometimes they create a recursive loop allowing interaction between people in multiple cities and sometimes they are just a window to another place, that might intrigue a passer by. They can connect regardless of distance, folding locations together and rearranging our perspective of public space.

Pulse by Markus Kison is a real time visualisation of emotional expressions from posts in weblogs.

Weblog entries are compared to a list of emotions, which refers to Robert Plutchik’s seminal book Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion published in 1980. Plutchik describes eight basic human emotions in his book: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. He developed a diagram in which these eight emotions, together with their weakened and amplified counterparts, form a three dimensional cone, consisting of 24 areas. The cone is the basic form of pulse, which can enlarge in the 24 directions of the different emotions. Each time an emotion tag, or a synonym of it, is found in a recent blog entry, the shape-shifting object transforms itself in such a way that the new volume represents a piece of the overall current emotional condition of surfers on the Internet.

A photoset of the work can be seen here on Flickr.

REFF, RomaEuropa FakeFactory published in Italy by DeriveApprodi and FakePress has just come out this month with some of my work in it. Yes any publication of my work is a good thing but I’m particularily proud of this one due to it being a connected/augmented publication which has used free/open culture software right through its creation, publication and how the end user interacts/reads the publication.

The publication has been published with the byline:

The reinvention of the real through critical practices of remix, mash-up, re-contextualization, reenactment.

however is itself a reinvention of what a ‘book’ such as this can be and do these days through combinations of innovative new/print media, tags of various types, augmented reality and pervasive networks. Building this publication has from the start been a collaborative process between the editorial team and contributors (artists, writers etc.) who could, through a wordpress website and a plugin designed specifically by Fakepress (more info on that here) for this style of next generation collborative publishing, constantly add to/amend/correct and ultimately compile the book as a print ready pdf for publication from the site. Now, post-publication, the website is part (the online part) of the finished book but the site has also been the ‘site’ of collaborative networking to make this very forward thinking publication happen.

The publication is essentially in three parts;

1. The print version (available here).
2. The website.
3. The iPhone/iPad app (click here to download via iTunes).

The print version contains Fiducial Markers and QR Codes. The Fiducial Markers can be used to view extra augmented reality content on the website via a computer with a webcam (click into the section Augmented Reality). The iPhone/iPad app can be downloaded and used to access the QR Codes. These connect to online multimedia including extra texts, music, videos, photos and maps of the book’s contents/authors.

The image above shows me using the augmented reality section of the site with one of the Fiducial Markers featuring my work (I don’t have a copy of the book yet so I had to improvise with a marker on my iPhone).

Above a screenshot of the iPad app and below a Flickr slideshow of the iPad app in use at the preview launch of the publication at the Share Festival, in Turin, Italy.

An innovative book of course needs an innovative foreword and who better than Bruce Sterling to write it:

Right now, the behaviors and activities commemorated in this book are bizarre. Very. They are so peculiar that they are inherently difficult to describe, because they come from the outer reaches of an emergent network-culture…Basically, they resemble the activities of time travellers. Time travellers don’t actually exist. However, they can be hypothesized. They can be faked. Time travellers would be people among us who come from a different historical epoch. By their nature, they have a different set of attitudes and expectations from our own. Time travellers would be people behaving differently, and also effortlessly. They are not being perverse, arcane or difficult. The time travellers have just as much custom and logic as we do. Their behavior would make perfect sense some day. Only, not just yet.

Read the full foreword here.