Life as an Artificial Lifeform

I have had enough of doing secretly behind closed door dirty little things with code and such so since the state of affair is at the point where I wanted it originally over a year ago but also much further and somehow not as far I decided to make the future progress on the live site. Now this is all cryptic and such because there is no content - no meat so to say and I will not make more eyes look on it then needed. Generally its maybe a 0.1b then anything else but as right wing newstalker Bill O'Reilly so lovely proclaimed - when technology fails: fuck it we will do it live... So if you know what I am talking about have a look - if not - forget about it there will be a proper announcement when we reached 1.0...

Posted by fALk at 17:17 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Your business model is about to fail in an epic drama because over the last 10-20 years you have not invested into new ideas, you have not looked beyond your faith of the economy flushing you with cash, you have not even invested in good content. You got into a spiral of self fulfilling prophecy - ever worst content to please the ever shrinking lowest common denominator. And worse of all you have tried to buy out ideas from outside your scope, tried to humiliate those that don´t work with you, tried to stop any content business model that isn´t formed around your believe of distribution of media power. You close your eyes when its aparent that copying things from one media to the other has never worked and will never work as most different kind of medias have a completely different underlaying social behaviour, modelled on that a completely different user interface and so dear old media fusing your failed business model with a social model that is not even build to be a business model and try first and foremost to generate ad revenues by connecting people and giving them an very expensive chat window on their tv screen which they interface - wait for it - with an iphone or similar network enabled device - this dear old media is so falling flat on its face (not even to mention that a remote control is also not the best input tool to engage in socialising activity of any extended sort). Please get it and stop your desperate attempts to save your failed business by trying to mimic real innovation that is about the people first and foremost and money only as an enabler. Try to see were your old business model can help future generation, heck become an archive and let people search in the past - and even charge some administrative fees for it or do live broadcasts or even just let people rent your facilities to make people powered media - but please see the light and see that people want real interaction, people want to publish want to speak their own voice and the TV or a dead tree newpaper is not the medium to deliver that - it was never designed to do that and to make it work is like trying to transform a school bus into a first class ultrasonic airplane that can carry 2000 people at once.

A response to the aptly titled article "TV+Social Network=?" on the wall stree journal.

Posted by fALk at 12:26 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was in Toronto for the blinkenlights project I meet up with Brian T. Moore - one of the local VJs and a heck of a community organizer there. He put on a VJ Jam in his awesome residence and invited the vjs of Toronto to play. I was honored to play there too. CommandN is a local video podcast that has shot the show - even so they did some factual mistakes (like calling me mr blinkenlights) they still pulled off quite a nice episode about the event. And the heavy psychedelic visuals across Brians face where an exception. Just before the interview there was about the best collaborative mix (together with one of the lead programmers for Houdini - whos name I forgot but I will write about his selfwritten "VJ" software that he developed for Pixar) on that screen that I have ever attended. Sadly that part has not made it into the podcast.

Posted by fALk at 17:58 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I looked over it when it appeared on mogreens blog, but then clicked on the play link and was blown away. This must rank as one of the best mash up videos of all times. And its more - this has the possibility to be played live. If you are a vj and you are using samples - take notice of this video. Its would be Live Cinema at its best: Message, Story Line, Style, Energy. Did I say it fucking rocks?

Posted by fALk at 17:43 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Die prototypen treffen sich am Donnerstag im Quartier fefi. Mehr info auf der offiziellen Webseite:

prototypen.com/familie/betriebstreffen_herbst_08

Posted by fALk at 15:49 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

After getting some frustrations with the old movable type installation and lots of broken links and an outdated spam system I have taken steps to upgrade the private ProtoBlogs to MovableType 4.2.
The installation went smoother then I thought with the exeption that I actually had to restructure the site a bit and that means a devastating loss of links from external sites. If you are an external site deep linking to an article on prototypen.com/blog/ this link will very likely not work anymore, maybe you have the time to find it again and update your link (one can dream right? ;).
The new structure is much better but I would have loved to avoid this problem and it will cost us probably a lot of traffic. In return all articles are now under their category and google is most likely able to rank our content better in the future. Furthermore Categories have their own rss feeds and all the other niceties that I have not dug into that can make it to our blogs now.

Update: old deeplinks working again..... its double content now (old and new links) - I know that google aint liking that much but better then loosing the links I guess...

Posted by fALk at 13:38 | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

    A couple of fake adverts for the Diebold Voting machines that are to rig the presidential election in one week. I love them all. I have no idea where they came from - just found them on some forums somewhere on the web someday.

Posted by fALk at 11:02 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This guy puts electrodes to his face muscle and has electric shocks delivered through them so that they move to some beepy electronic music. Somehow cool somehow scary. Reminds me a bit of the scene in the Animatrix "The Second Renaissance" where the robots make all kind of horrible experiments with humans to see how they work so they can manipulate them - only that the humans are doing it to themself and taking the robots work away...

Posted by fALk at 10:51 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I will give my Live Cinema Lecture on Sunday at 13:45 at the "Die Verstärker" music conference and fair at the e-werk in Erlangen / Germany. The Lecture will be a bit shorter then usual (I hope) clocking in at one hour and in return might be more digestable for the short attention span croud. I will give the talk in german as this will be a 99% german audience. After my talk fRED and some visual Berlin people will talk about VJ networks. Also there is a a "state of the art a/v" talk and "how to produce your own loops" workshop going on in addition to lots of copyright/left and more music orientated lectures. You can get more information prices etc. at the Die Verstärker website.

Posted by fALk at 9:48 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is what we where greeted today with from all the newsstands in town when we went outside to get some peaceful breakfast. What you see there is a still frame from the well recieved symphonie last night. Actually what you see is Willow on the left tower and me on the right tower :) I was very delighted that they choose this particular loop as it symbolizes everything the visual side of the symphony stood for. Love the two towers and the massive amount of blinkenlights - it was my favorite and aparently the editors of the newspaper saw that as well. The performance went very well (so I was not 100% satisfied with my part as per usual) but people apparently liked it a lot as there was lots of cheers and long applause afterwards (which is very unusual for a VJ I might add). I did a bit of an extension (for people wondering why it went on longer then 30 minutes) as the crowd somehow wanted some more :) (so toby as cook dumping his iPod collection on Willows computer was a very timely thing to do as this supplied some more cool music for that unexpected part as all the music was playing from her computer).
I can not state often enough that this thing comes across best when you see it live. The afterglow of the pixels on the night sky backdrop leave you with a smile everytime you see them - its such a huge scale that the light is just brightening the whole area. The towers blinking in rythm to the music is just something otherworldly.

Thanks to everyone involved to make this happen - and especially Ronny and Inge from Kraftfuttermischwerk for the perfectly fitting music - everyone asked me who the music was from - it just fit the atmosphere extremely well.

Now the installation is up for another week. A wide collection of games can be played (and work great even through the simulator (not so much through the live video as the delay is too big)) now and people play like crazy. You can still submit loops that will be added to the playlist and be played on the house and afterwards on the never dying blinkenproxies.

All information as always on blinkenlights.net

PS: Oh and we recorded everything - its already digitized and we will put it online very soon together in sync with the amazing audio... (soon is the next 2-3 days)

Posted by fALk at 3:51 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I have now finalized my setup and am testing for tonight. I am going with 4 layers. Two of those are what I call "story" layers - mostly video content telling the stereo love story. One layer is rythm loops and typography and the 4th layer is a special "pixel perfect" layer that maps pixel by pixel to the house - so I can adress specific windows without any antialiasing around them. There is one custom plugin that makes all the right connections to the house and lets me readress the output to specific screens on the house and lets me turn off one of the two buildings individually (to compensate for the mirror effect). Also there is a "blink" plugin that cycles through the screen and turns them on and of one after each other.

All in all I produced 220 fresh loops just for the house and repurposed 90 of my old loops (mostly rythm stuff) in just over a week. I don´t know if the story will come through because some of the story loops are just not working on the low resolution but I will make sure it all looks pretty tonight...

I would be more then happy for any feedback after the event.

Posted by fALk at 18:18 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We are now broadcasting live - not the greatest quality on earth (nor the greatest framerate) but at least you can get a feeling of the whole thing directly.

Posted by fALk at 18:05 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its 25 hours to go until I will go live and dance with the Blinkenlights. StereoLove the Blinkenlights Symphonie is a 30 minute audiovisual feast on the lovely blinken pixels. The music part is provided by Kraftfuttermischwerk who almost completely produced new soundscapes for this event. Before an after the the live part people will be able to interact in new ways with the house, play games have a wink at the winken cam (oh I know thats going to be extremely popular) or just enjoy being mesmerized by the giant blinking display.

All this as part of the Nuit Blanche here in Toronto with lots of other stuff going on as well.

So if you are in or around Toronto come down to the Nathan Phillips Square and see it all live Saturday October 4th 2008 at 10 pm.

If not - well the simulators are the way to go or wait til sunday to see a live recording of the whole event including the tasty music.

Posted by fALk at 1:49 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

The cheaky buggers filmed me last night without me noticing :) Look at it - its very small part of what you gonna get tomorrow. BTW I didn´t even have a contrast or brightness control in the test setup (besides Tim mentioning that on the blog) - but it helps to have tested on the house with a bad gamma curve the days before to know what works and what not.

Posted by fALk at 1:35 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

If you are making animations and want to see them displayed on the biggest screen ever with the lowest resolution ever you can roll your own and now also submit them to the team. They will be played throughout the next week starting tomorrow on the house. The sooner you send them in the higher visibility they get so get going.

1. creation tools
2. submit animations in bml format

Posted by fALk at 18:28 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday I was able to conduct the first real live test from the plaza in front of the house wirelessly live to the house and it was bombastic. While inside the headquarter on 4th floor West Tower got my mood a bit down because I couldn´t really see what I was playing couldn´t really sense how the visuals would come through - basically I was thinking nothing works its all doomed. Yet down in front of the building I found a massive lovely vibrant reactive fast screen that worked with 80% of my prepared footage. All my ideas for effects where working, the software hardware side worked and I was massively pleased and could rest well.

Now all thats left for me is making "some" more rythm loops and making my software setup stable and usable (hey I got more then 24 hours for that so p-l-e-n-t-y of time).

Thanks goes out so far to the amazing hard and software gurus in the crew - without them nothing would be possible.

I am going to post some pictures here later (hopefully)...

Posted by fALk at 15:38 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)