Ramesh Raskar joined the MIT Media Lab in 2008, where he heads up the Lab’s Camera Culture research group. For some time, the researcher has drawn inspiration from another MIT professor, Harold Edgerton, a pioneer of stop-action photography, who famously photographed a bullet moving through an apple in 1964. Decades later, Raskar and his MIT crew have taken photography to a new level, creating imaging hardware and software that can capture light as it moves. They can visualize pictures as if they were recorded at a rate of one trillion frames per second. His cutting edge work in femto-photography is all on display above.
In 1995, a group of 5th grade kids in Helena, Montana got together and made a PSA for the Internet (above). And, man, were they hip, with their techno music and their “by the time I’m in college, the internet will be your telephone, television, and workplace.” In the annals of overblown predictions and technological hubris, mid-nineties internet-fever will go down as the ultimate exception. These kids even anticipated the cute cat mania that would infect the internet forever. Of course, none of them could have foreseen the Twitter revolution, the Facebook decline, rubbable gifs, or spherical panoramic views of Mars, but that’s just quibbling.
It really is astonishing to look back a mere seventeen years at what a primitive technology the internet was. Of course it wasn’t necessarily evident at the time that the online world would indeed become our “telephone, television, and workplace,” and some naysayers, like astronomer and hacker-catcher Clifford Stoll, called BS on the hype. In a 1995 Newsweek articletitled “The Internet? Bah!,” Stoll wrote:
The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
In 2010, Stoll was forced to retract, commenting on Boing Boing coverage of his sourpuss skepticism with:
“Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.
But who could blame him? This was the age of such clunky Web services as AOL, which promises much in a 95 ad below, but ultimately delivered little.
Not all web advertising in 1995 looks so dated and silly. AOL’s competitor Prodigy, which fared even worse, certainly had a better ad agency. Their 95 ad below, featuring Barry White, is a romp.
All of this reflection warrants more wisdom from a chastened Clifford Stoll, who in a 2006 TED talk says: “If you really want to know about the future, don’t ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don’t ask somebody who’s writing code. No, if you want to know what society’s going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.”
A theory: one of the drivers of our current wave of nostalgia—lo-fi analog hiss and pop in music and readymade vintage filters in digital photography—is the loss of imperfection. Increasingly powerful technologies render sound and vision too slickly pristine, glossy, hyperreal, and thus impersonal and alien. The latest episode of PBS Arts’ “Off Book” series (above) features a trend toward disrupting digital overproduction by deliberately exploiting the weaknesses in new technologies. Glitch artists makes use of “naturally occurring” (so to speak) corruptions of software, or create their own corruptions in a process called “databending”—opening images as text files, for example, and adding and/or deleting information from the image.
Unlike punk rock, to which glitch is compared by one of the artists above, some glitch art requires a fairly sophisticated understanding of digital technologies. For example, video artist Anton Marini describes how he writes his own software to produce glitch effects. But since virtually anyone can access a pc and standard text and image-editing software, it remains a fairly democratic aesthetic, similar to the bedroom technologies that enable almost anyone to produce and distribute their own musical compositions. There are sites offering tutorials on how to create your own glitch art and even a Flickr account called Glitchbot that will automatically generate glitch images for you, like Hipstamatic or Instagram will convert your careless snapshots into intriguing vintage artifacts. Sound too easy? Maybe, but so was Duchamp’s urinal. Context, as always, matters, and whether glitch art is “art” may ultimately become a historical question. At the moment, glitch images, video and music offer a way to humanize all-too-inhuman corporate products and technologies.
You know the architecture of Paris when you see it. But what makes Parisian architecture distinctive? What visual elements come together to produce a particular urban landscape? Five scholars from Carnegie Mellon and the École normale supérieure are trying to give precise answers to those questions. And they’re taking a novel approach. They’re running a large repository of geotagged imagery from Google Street View through a proprietary algorithm and then identifying the distinctive architectural elements for each locale — the street signs, windows, balconies that make a city unique. Their experiment (all summed up in a short abstract here) covers Paris, London, Prague, Barcelona, Milan, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Paulo, Mexico City, and Tokyo.
Damon Horowitz, a philosophy professor and “serial entrepreneur,” recently joined Google as an In-House Philosopher/Director of Engineering. Prior to his work at Google, Horowitz co-founded Aardvark, Perspecta, and a number of other tech companies. In this talk at Stanford University’s 2011 BiblioTech conference on “Human Experience,” Horowitz explains why he left a highly-paid tech career, in which he sought the keys to artificial intelligence, to pursue a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stanford (the text of the talk is available here).
Horowitz offers fellow techies a formidable challenge, but a worthwhile one. In saying so, I must confess a bias: As a student and teacher of the humanities, I have watched with some dismay as the culture becomes increasingly dominated by technicians who often ignore or dismiss pressing philosophical and ethical problems in their quest to build a better world. It is gratifying to hear from someone who recognized this issue by (temporarily) giving up what he admits was a great deal of power and societal privilege and headed back to the classroom.
Horowitz describes his intellectual journey from “technologist” to philosopher with passion and candor, and concludes that as a result of his academic inquiry, he “no longer looks for machines to solve all of our problems for us,” and no longer assumes that he knows what’s best for his users. This kind of humility and intellectual flexibility is, ideally, the outcome of a higher degree in the humanities, and Horowitz uses his own trials to make a case for better critical thinking, for a “humanistic perspective,” in the tech sector and elsewhere. For examples, see Horowitz’s TED talks on a “moral operating system” and “philosophy in prison.” Complicating Google’s well-known, unofficial slogan “don’t be evil,” Horowitz, drawing on Hannah Arendt, believes that most of the evil in the world comes not from bad intentions but from “not thinking.”
In a related Stanford talk (above) from the same seminar, Marissa Mayer, former Vice President of Consumer Products at Google, discusses how she incorporated the humanities into product innovation at Google. The first female engineer at Google (and its youngest executive at the time of this talk), she has made headlines recently, becoming the new CEO of Yahoo.
Back in March, we told you about the launch of The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive, which makes available thousands of papers belonging to the man who galvanized the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, before eventually becoming the leader of the nation. Partly funded by Google, the archive lets you revisit important moments in Mandela’s life — his Early Life, his Prison Years, and his Presidential Years.
That Digital Archive offers one way to tell Mandela’s story. Now here’s another. The creators of the web site Mandela Story launched a short video yesterday that looks at Mandela’s life through the lens of social media. And it’s meant to raise a serious question: “Would Mandela have spent 27 years in captivity if he (and others) had access to the same technology, social media platforms and tools as we do today?”
It’s short and certainly creative. And if it speaks to you, you should check out Rembrandt’s Facebook Timeline, a clip created by The Rijksmuseum that imagines the social life of the great Dutch painter.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus and share intelligent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.
The discovery of the South Pole is a story whose hero seems to change with every telling. Sometimes it’s Robert Scott, sometimes Norwegian Roald Amundsen, and, most recently, Scott’s protégé, Sir Ernest Shackleton. All three—and geologist Sir Douglas Mawson—are essential characters in a series of early 20th century expeditions to a forbidding territory nearly inaccessible to the average human being. Now, Google has opened up the Antarctic for everyone to explore from the safety of padded office chairs, comfy couches, and coffee-shop seating. Google Street View was launched in May 2007 and has since expanded its scope to give the average user visual access to some fairly remote and exotic locations. Google’s World Wonders Project provides astonishing views of an ancient Zen Temple in Kyoto and the coasts of Dorset and East Devon in England, among many other stunning sites. Most recently, Google Street View has made available 360-degree views of the wooden huts used by Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton a century ago during their Antarctic expeditions. (Start your tour here.)
Both Scott’s and Shackleton’s huts have been preserved intact as historical sites by New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust. The explorers’ tools and supplies, in their original arrangement, are on full display in detailed panoramic images of the huts’ interiors—a departure from the typical exterior perspectives of Street View. Also viewable in the Antarctic series of views is the Cape Royds Adelie Penguin Rookery, the world’s southernmost penguin colony and home to many thousands of Adelie penguins. Like all Street View images, including the Scott and Shackleton huts, the Rookery views are static—images of bygone moments frozen in time—but they are no less breathtaking for it.
The image below shows the interior of Shackleton’s hut and all of its belongings.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Anathem) is a hardworking man. In addition to not getting any of his sci-fi novels made into movies, hanging out at Google, writing some of the most fascinating nonfiction in print or online, and being awesome, he’s working on a project called Clang, a first-person swordfighting game, and he’s funding it through Kickstarter. As of yesterday he exceeded his goal of $500,000 with over 9,000 backers. And why not? Like most of Stephenson’s ideas, it’s brilliant.
Stephenson—a self-described “swordsmanship geek”—explains in the video above why he’s decided to create a realistic sword fighting game, in a gaming scene riddled with high-tech first-person shooters. And even though Stephenson admits to being only a “casual gamer,” as you can see, he’s deadly serious about the development of Clang. Watch him test several different medieval weapon designs to replicate the weight and feel of a real blade and create the intense interactive experience of games like Medal of Honor and Metal Gear Solid.
Stephenson and his team are making use of a cutting-edge tracking technology developed by a company called Sixense, which promises very low latency and “unparalleled precision.” The Clang team are confident that their tracking technology, embedded in the Razer Hydra game controller, will bring the thrills and challenges of Medieval sword fighting into the hands of fellow geeks very soon.
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