Archive for December, 2007
Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’ | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News.com
Those entering online dating forums risk having more than their hearts stolen.
A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.
The artificial intelligence of CyberLover’s automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the “bot” from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.
“As a tool that can be used by hackers to conduct identity fraud, CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” PC Tools senior malware analyst Sergei Shevchenko said in a statement.
Among CyberLover’s creepy features is its ability to offer a range of different profiles from “romantic lover” to “sexual predator.” It can also lead victims to a “personal” Web site, which could be used to deliver malware, PC Tools said.
Although the program is currently targeting Russian Web sites, PC Tools is urging people in chat rooms and social networks elsewhere to be on the alert for such attacks. Their recommendations amount to just good sense in general, such as avoiding giving out personal information and using an alias when chatting online. The software company believes that CyberLover’s creators plan to make it available worldwide in February.
Robot chatters are just one type of social-engineering attack that uses trickery rather than a software flaw to access victim’s valuable information. Such attacks have been on the rise and are predicted to continue to grow.
Update 4:10 p.m. PST: Mike Greene, vice president of product strategy at PC Tools, said that the company learned of CyberLover’s existence earlier this week as part of its regular monitoring of IRC chat rooms and other places where talk about malware takes place.
Greene said that it is hard to tell how prevalent use of the program is in Russia.
“We don’t have exact statistics, but I think it’s early on,” he said.
Greene said that the perceived anonymity of the Internet has desensitized people to the fact that information disclosed in an online chat can cause real-world damage.
“People are used to not opening attachments or maybe not clicking on a link that shows up in their IM,” he said. “But this emulates a real conversation, so you more are likely to give over personal information, click on a link or send your photograph.”
Green and pleasant land
[Image: Castle Rushen, Castletown, Isle of Man, via Old UK Photos].
I was poking around for images this morning and I somehow ended up at a site called Old UK Photos. They collect old, public domain photographs of the UK (rather cheekily including Ireland) – but some of the photos are so extraordinarily beautiful, and so hard to believe that they really are photographs, that I felt like re-posting a few here.
[Image: Wiltshire, Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge, via Old UK Photos].
The fact that I’ve also been to many of these places adds a weird layer of delayed misrecognition to many of the scenes, as if stumbling upon landscapes from trips I forgot I’d taken (which is almost accurate).
The old pier in Bangor. One of the Peak District caves. Edinburgh castle.
And, of course, Stonehenge, pictured above from those years in which it hadn’t yet been fenced off.
[Image: Caerlaverock Castle, Dumfriesshire; Peel Cathedral, Isle of Man; castle in Aberystwyth, Cardiganshire; castle in Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire; Peel Castle, Isle of Man; and Ballower Mount, Ramsey, Isle of Man; all via Old UK Photos].
I don’t have all that much to say about these, in fact, other than to point out that they seem to instill something between nostalgia (for myself, an Anglo-American) and a wistful need to travel through non-automobile-based landscapes – and perhaps even a somewhat Gothicized sense of fictive possibilities, like something out of BLDGBLOG’s recent interview with novelist Patrick McGrath.
That said, then, here are some photos, with crumbling castles on distant hills and even mysterious pieces of old machinery.
[Images: Castle at Bolsover, Derbyshire; castle in Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire; bridge in Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire; the Wheel at Laxey, Isle of Man; Devil's Bridge, Aberystwyth; Templand Bridge, Cumnock, Ayrshire; The Blackrock in Cromford, Derbyshire; entrance to a cave outside Castleton, Derbyshire; all via Old UK Photos].
Some of the coastal photographs – of bays, inlets, coves, rock arches, and cliffs – seem to imply a labyrinthine island geography so complicated and ornate in its expanse, and so remote, that people still must be discovering new places there today… But then, of course, that describes the British Isles. Unless you spend all your time in Leicester Square.
[Images: Castle in Llanstephan, Carmarthenshire; Petite Bot, Guernsey, Channel Islands; La Coupee, Sark, Channel Islands; Dixcart Bay, Sark; Sugarloaf Rock at Port St. Mary, Isle of Man; the coast at the Gouffre, Petite Bot, and the harbor at La Moye Point (3 images), Guernsey; via Old UK Photos].
Actually, I’m reminded of something I read a few years ago in a book called The Dragon Seekers: How an Extraordinary Circle of Fossilists Discovered the Dinosaurs and Paved the Way for Darwin – which is that a particular stretch of British coastline, near Lyme Regis, is full of fossils.
The book opens with the story of Mary Anning, an amateur “fossilist” – she made an income selling bits of backbones and fragments of mastodons, jigsaw puzzle-like pieces of species that no longer exist – who stumbled upon, if I remember correctly, the body of an ichthyosaur – but only because there had been a landslide. Without that tidally inspired collapse of a nearby cliff, Anning perhaps would never have found her fossil; it would have remained buried in the cliffside for years – decades, centuries – to come.
- Although she had an eye for fossils, she could not find them until they had been exposed by weathering – an achingly slow process. But when wind and rain and frost and sun had done their work, she would find them, peeking through the surface. Others were buried so deeply in the cliffs that it would be aeons before they were ever discovered.
The idea that the fossils of as yet undiscovered creatures still lie buried somewhere in the cliffs of Dorset is almost overwhelmingly interesting.
In any case, the bottom two images are from Bangor, Wales, where my brother and I once stayed in a youth hostel and ate soup. We hiked outside of town one afternoon and we looked up at a tree covered in drooping sleeves of loose vegetation, then we fell asleep on a hillside in some farmyard nearby, jumping over a fence and lying down amidst lichen-covered rocks and small bushes.
In fact, I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I was reading The Lord of the Rings and so the whole experience was tinged with an air of the mythic.
[Images: Garth's Pier in Bangor, Caernarfonshire, and a view of Bangor from Anglesey, via Old UK Photos].
Anywho, the old lighthouse at Corbiere, on the Channel Island of Jersey, makes a nice painterly silhouette in this next photo.
[Image: The lighthouse at Corbiere, Jersey, Channel Islands, via Old UK Photos].
And the old paths still whirl and turn through hills, leading somewhere, going everywhere.
[Image: Moulin Huet, Guernsey, Channel Islands, via Old UK Photos].
All of these images, plus a few more, are also saved in a Flickr set I put together this afternoon.
(The title of this post paraphrases a line from William Blake’s poem Milton. Meanwhile, it may not be entirely related to the images in this post, but I do recommend giving at least a quick read to BLDGBLOG’s interview with Patrick McGrath for some thoughts on the literary impact of these – or similar – landscapes).
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 23, 2007, 12:29PM
Life Spectulatrix - Augmented Architectures
Here’s one of Augmented Architecture’s prototypes that I saw at the ACADIA07 earlier this year. “Life Spectulatrix” is an evolutionary physical skin based on digital environmental feedback retrieved through the webspace. Architect Nancy Diniz describes how it becomes a “universally situated living piece” through its own evolutionary behaviour in relation to global environmental information as well as local interaction.
“Augemented Architectures” is : Nancy Diniz, a licensed architect and a PhD candidate at the Bartlett and a tutor at the Department of Architecture at ISCTE in Lisbon and Cesar Branco, a computer science engineer working for VSNL as a Solutions Architect based in London, UK.
Originally from Interactive Architecture dot Org by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 17, 2007, 4:39PM
Monolith Moderne
[Image: The Kaiser Shipyard's General Warehouse, photographed by Jon Haeber; more images here. View larger!].
This perforated monolith – all 158,000 square feet of it – stands on the waterfront in Richmond, California, north of Berkeley, part of the Henry J. Kaiser shipyards. It was photographed here by Jon Haeber.
I emailed Haeber a few weeks ago to find out more about the structure – and the building has a fairly interesting backstory.
For starters, its architect is apparently unknown, although it is rumored to have been designed by John B. Anthony. Anthony, Haeber explained, “did work for WWII ship baron Henry J. Kaiser in the same period that the warehouse was constructed, so it would be reasonable to assume that he played an integral role in the design, especially considering its similarities with his other designs.” For instance, Anthony also built the quasi-futurist Art Moderne Joseph W. Harris House in Berkeley.
This “massive square concrete building,” we read elsewhere, though the building is very clearly not a square, was “the general warehouse, from which ships received their finishing touches – blankets, mops, brooms and all the other individual pieces of furnishings and equipment needed to completely fit out a self-contained floating vessel.” The warehouse even appears on a t-shirt.
Now, however, the buildings just sits out in the rain, doing nothing, storing air.
[Image: The warehouse at night, photographed by Jon Haeber; view original].
Haeber, meanwhile, “[has] not been in inside, and I do not know anyone who has. It is currently owned by a storage company, and they seem to be very protective of the site. I don’t believe official access is possible,” he continues, “and it’s relatively sealed.”
In any case, if you enjoy urban ruins, military history, or just interesting photography, be sure to check out Haeber’s other images of the site, including his own exploratory tour through “the below-ground galleys that adjoin the five shipways, where water was pumped out on a massive scale and the iconic ‘Rosie the Riveters’ welded and assembled hundreds of U.S. warships.”
Indeed, these drydocks “produced the most ships in the shortest time in history,” and you can read more about their wartime history courtesy of the National Park Service or Rosie the Riveter.
(Thanks, Jon!)
Originally from BLDGBLOG by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 16, 2007, 1:29PM
Sean Hanna
Sean Hanna is an interesting architect/engineer whose work I’ve been meaning to cover for some time. He was awarded a American Institute of Architects Student Gold Medal and went on to work on algorithmic & parametric design aspects of major construction projects with architects including Foster and Partners and sculptor Antony Gormley. His research is mainly in developing computational methods for dealing with complex systems in architecture, and in structural optimisation and rapid prototyping technology. I’ve selected a couple of his projects to give a sample of his work but check out his website for more details. His work is part of the currently running “Capture & Context” exhibition I posted on early this week.
BODY / SPACE / FRAME
Sean role in the BODY / SPACE / FRAME by artist Antony Gormley was in the creation of methods for generating a body formally and constructing a geometry appropriate for and structurally constructing the 25 metre high sculpture. Built out of an open steel lattice in the shape of a crouching figure, it was sited on the end of an 800 metre polder and faced outward from the coast of the Zuiderzee, Holland.
PAN_07 CHAIR
Optimised cellular structure in collaboration with Timothy Schreiber
Based on an analogy with the highly efficient cellular structure of living wood or bone, which adapts to its environment as it grows, the chair’s interior is comprised of a fine lattice that minimises weight while maximising strength. The design method combines principles of evolution and artificial intelligence to create a material that responds to its environment by growing denser in the areas required to best withstand the external forces applied when the chair is in use.
Originally from Interactive Architecture dot Org by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 6, 2007, 4:46PM
From Spark to Pixel (Part 2)
From Spark to Pixel (Part 1)
Second part of the visit of the exhibition From Spark to Pixel. Art + New Media, which is running at Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin until 14 January 2008.
Christian Partos had some impressive installations.
M.O.M. - Multi Oriented Mirror pixelises the artist’s mother’s portrait with 5000 micro-mirrors whose infinitesimal slant makes the intensity of the reflected light vary. If you stand close to the installation all you see is just lots of tiny bits of mirror. Take a few steps back and the the portrait of Partos’ deceased mother appears. The effect is really amazing. No picture of it in the press kit, sorry. I made this blurry image which might give you a very vague idea of what it was like.
Christian Partos: Visp, 2000. photo: Lepkowski Studios
The Swedish artist had another work on show, Visp, a continuously changing shape made of 5 light-wires, 30 feet long, spinning like skipping-ropes, two revolutions per second. A computer, which also revolves, switches the LEDs on and off to create animated patterns on the revolving surface. Bitmap pictures, text etc. can be sent to the sculpture via radio link. Made for the Swedish Pavilion Expo 2000, Hanover.
Thomas McIntosh with Emmanuel Madan and Mikko Hyninnen, Ondulation, 2002. Photo: Lepkowski Studios
Ondulation, by Thomas McIntosh in collaboration with Mikko Hynninen and Emmanuel Madan is a truly hypnotizing composition for water, sound and light. A two-ton pool of water is set in motion by powerful loudspeakers. Waves travel across the basin, rising or falling in response to the sounds. Lights, bouncing off the moving surface, send reflected ripples over the walls of the gallery. The surface of this “liquid mirror” is slowly shaped by the sound into a kind of 3D expressions of the music which in turn become reflections on the wall. The simultaneity is such between the sound and light waves that we are left with a sense of seeing the sound and hearing the image.
Shiro Takatani (whom you might remember for a work Vicente recently reviewed: LIFE: fluid, invisible,inaudible… ) had some lovely installations and that’s is too bad for you if you can’t go and see the exhibition in Berlin because, once again, the press kit snubbed him. Chrono, a fiberglass cone recreates the exactitude of each pixel of an almost infinite number of fish-eyed images of skies shot in one day in Australian desert. Camera Lucida was commissioned for the retrospective of the nuclear physicist Ukichiro Nakaya (1900-1962) by the Museum of Natural History at Riga. Nakaya was the first to perform a systematic study of snow crystals and their different shapes. Camera Lucida is an intimate piece using fibre optics to explore the micro building blocks of nature.
Dumb Type, Voyages, 2002. Photo: Jirka Jansch
Takatani is one of the founders of Dumb Type. The Kyoto-based collective is showing Voyages, a work which brings to light the feelings of uncertainty and dislocation that accompany today’s shifting realities. Images of nature and other scenes are projected upon a narrow panel on the floor, circles showing a network of flight routes are superimposed. Visitors are invited to remove their shoes, step on the panel and embark on a journey through these multilayered realities. By adjusting their upheld palm to “catch” a projected circle, they can bring a “handheld” image into focus.
Joachim Sauter, Dirk Lüsebrink, ART+COM, The Invisible Shapes of Things Past, 1995–2007. Photo: Jirka Jansch
Joachim Sauter and Dirk Lüsebrink (Art + Com) had a room filled with architectural objects and sculptures generated from existing film stills, using a method they developed in the ’90s and which they call The Invisible Shapes of Things Past. The project enables users to transform film sequences into interactive, virtual objects.
In The Invisible Shapes of Things Past stills of a film sequence are arranged in a row in accordance with the camera movement with which they were shot. Thus, a straight camera movement produces a cube-shaped object and a pan a cylindrical object.
Gregory Barsamian, The Scream, 1998. Photo: Jirka Jansch
Gregory Barsamian uses relatively simple technoloty (strobe lights and motors) to transform his dreams into 3D animations. Using the idea of the zoetrope, the 19th century automated flipbook, Barsamian utilizes strobe lights synchronized to objects mounted on rotating armatures to create series of rapidly changing images. For each flash of the stroboscope, one sculpture representing a stage of the metamorphosis follows after the other, giving the impression of a constant transformation of its shape. Through the “persistence of vision,” the human mind transforms the images into the illusion of motion. An animation without the film.
Video of one of his pieces.
The Scream is a self portrait which concerns the issue of mind clutter: bits of unwanted information, songs and sound loops, images and nonsense syllables. In this piece a head emits a scream. The mouth widens and widens not stopping until the head turns inside out revealing some of the detritus within.
Image on the right: Greg Barsamian, No Never Alone, 1997. Photo: Jirka Jansch
The name of another of Barsamian’s installation, No, Never Alone, is taken from a Christian spiritual. A central figure is shrouded and thus blinded. The figures surrounding it are constantly taunting it for its intentional blindness. Hands dangle a carrot in front of it as well as show it an eye chart that it obviously cannot see. Another pair of hands holds an open book on whose pages dances a blind dervish while hands clap in time.
Here’s a slideshow of the exhibition. Please do not forget the credits for each image if you use any.
Originally from we make money not art by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 7, 2007, 2:41AM
Technology Review: Toyota shows new violin-playing robot
Compared to a virtuoso, its rendition was a trifle stilted and, well, robotic. But Toyota\’s new robot plays a pretty solid \’\'Pomp and Circumstance\’\’ on the violin.
The 152-centimeter (five-foot)-tall all-white robot, shown Thursday, used its mechanical fingers to push the strings correctly and bowed with its other arm, coordinating the movements well.
Toyota Motor Corp. has already shown robots that roll around to work as guides and have fingers dexterous enough play the trumpet.
Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe said robotics will be a core business for the company in coming years. Toyota will test out its robots at hospitals, Toyota-related facilities and other places starting next year, he said. And the company hopes to put what it calls \’\'partner robots\’\’ to real use by 2010, he said.
Bioluminescence
Bioluminescence is a collaborative audio/visual project with Lesley Flanigan and Luke DuBois.
The voice has a unique role in our musical culture, bridging the linguistic and the semiotic in a way that transcends instrumentality through a highly personal embodiment of musicianship. The recorded female voice, in particular, has been the subject of academic investigation following its role in aesthetics (Adorno), cinema and psychology (Silverman) and feminist theory (De Laurentis). In electroacoustic music, the voice has a privileged place in our canon, providing a boundless source of material for sonic exploration from the tape works of Berio, Dodge, and Lansky through the composer-performer repertoire of Joan LaBarbera and Pamela Z.
Our collaboration centers around an extensive investigation of the possibilities of the improvised voice in tandem with electroacoustic processing, focusing on the possibilities of detemporalization and memory evoked through the use of looping, time-stretching, and spectral processing. The interplay between the two performers (one singing, one processing) takes the metaphor of the voice as impulse and the computer as filter and creates a dense palette of evocative sounds and images derived entirely from the voice of the singer. Video.
Originally from Networked Music Review by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 7, 2007, 3:12PM
Funky Forest
Funky Forest is a digital interactive ecosystem created by visual and motion graphics designer Emily Gobeille and interactive artist and designer Theodore Watson. Created for the Cinekid Festival in Amsterdam, the installation is a simulated experience where visitors manage the resources to influence the environment around you.
By diverting streams of water flowing on the floor different parts of the forest grow. If a tree doesn’t get enough water it withers away, but standing against a wall and pressing your body into the forest creates new trees based on your shape and character. As you explore and play, you discover that your environment is inhabited by sonic life forms who depend on a thriving ecosystem to survive. The installation is beautifully illustrated and colorful with an array of lifelike sounds, making it a truly fun and imaginative experience.
Originally from Cool Hunting by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 7, 2007, 4:00PM
The Legendary 6 hour Breakout Hackathon
game mod from steph thirion on Vimeo.
I’ve just spent a couple of weeks at Visualizar helping out with conceptual and technical development of projects.
In the first couple of days a few people mentioned a video one of the artist’s at the workshop had made. Ben Fry said “you have to see it” and pointed at Steph Thirion.
Ben was right. The video documents a 6hr workshop run by Steph in a Postgraduate Diploma in Graphic Design course at Elisava, Barcelona, in March this year and it is very special.
The workshop concept was simple: take an existing Breakout-like game (made by Steph in Processing), give it to the students and encourage them to simply change numbers and alter code statements until it either breaks or does something interesting.
The result is surprising: as though Breakout has been freed from a need to make sense and is dreaming of its own pure potential.. A warm homage to the game if ever there was one.
To quote the project page.
Game Mod was a six hour long workshop with the objective of showing the participants that it is not required to understand code to experiment and play with it.
Although they had no experience in coding, the task of each participant was to make a mod (modified version) of a game built in Processing.
Great stuff, testimony that creative programming can result from an open-minded, truly intuitive manipulation of code.
Grab the original game source-code here, and have a hack at it yourself. The source for the mods you see in the video can be downloaded here. If you come up with something you think’s interesting, let us know.
Check in on Steph’s site for updates on his new project, Cascade on Wheels, made during the Visualizar workshop. If you’re in the Madrid area, come and see it at the exhibition at Medialab Prado itself (28.11.07 - 28.12.07)
Fine work Steph and students. This is going into the archives. [blogged by Julian on SelectParks]
Originally from Networked Music Review by
reBlogged by michael on Dec 7, 2007, 4:29PM
