No Click Interface

I was browsing around on del.icio.us and found Dontclick.it. It is a no click interface for web pages. It reminded me of this game for Windows 3.1 that I had when I was a kid, Jewel Thief. In the game the goal was to collect jewels without being touched by a variety of other objects moving across the screen. The user's avatar follows the mouse exactly.
In the web page and the game, annoyance follows when one mouses over the wrong object: the "enemy" avatars or an unintended menu.

Art is for Eating

Browsing Jen Dunlap's site last night I refound pictures of her wonderful cakes.
They are like little colorful islands of sweets

• Funlap dot com
  
• Art is for Eating
  
• More cakes for Fischerspooner
  

4chan Pavillion in Second Life

Current Favorite Wikipedia Entries and Reading

• Microexpression
  
• Invisible Wall
  
• Perfect Information
  

Responsibility to Symmetry

I was in Jon's class the other day for our final critique. This gentleman was up to bat. He demoed a Python program he had written for real time video manipulation. What was interesting about it was, that during the demo he played a sound file in the background. At each kick in the audio, he would alter the image.
I know alot of that has to do with traditions of VJing, but at the same time it made me wonder (probably because he described the program to be a video game) if there was a responsibility to symmetry in interactions normally.
Ofcourse this could be the result of watching too much Fischinger, but maybe not.
I was also playing with Leversgame.com, by Vectorpark yesterday and I noticed the same thing.

This may be only because the fiction of the game and the stigma of scales, but they do have that stigma for a reason.
I haven't found any info on it yet. Who knows.

del.icio.us

I was talking to Chris a few days ago and he thought it was strange that I didn't really use del.icio.us. So I decided to give it another chance, I even installed the Firefox plug-in, maybe I will update it this time.

here is the link, http://del.icio.us/natehitchcock

I just threw up a bunch of stuff that I had saved, so I guess there is new content there.

Also, I am getting rid of my Myspace account, it is only for music now. Talk to me on Facebook instead.

New Chicago People

I have found two new good people in Chicago recently.

• Chris Collins
  Chris work primarily with the Internet and technology. Here is a piece of his that was recently featured at VVORK: "Tribute to Nam June Paik (w/ Default Apple Screensaver)", 2007.
  
  
• Dain Oh
  I recently saw Dain's realtime performance at En3my here in Chicago. It made me think her computer had synesthesia. It was nice and simple display of sentiment. I think there are some videos running around of the performance, but I don't know where right now.
  Dain understands Occam's Razor.
  

::edit::

I also forgot, that Rowynn Michelle has started a blog. She is not new, that is that I have known her for a while now. but now she is online. Rowynn does Voodoo anthropology in Hatti, and is working now on a show about alchemy and magic for the Meat Factory Gallery in Prague. Row knows where real magic is.

On the Denial of Code: Video Games versus JODI

"The denial of code becomes self-justifying by its own inherent creative properties"

Three Illustrations

Juul_Sartre Mash-up


Liminal Until I Feel Like It

LOOk the Movie and Soft Cinema

Look Trailer

I just have watched the trailer for this movie Look. I don't know if it was actually shot with surveillance cameras, I think that the quality would be alot worse, and the issue of having all of those cameras with mics..
But it seems like a good idea to me, though the trailer dosn't make me want to go see the movie really.

When I first got a copy of Lev Manovich's Soft Cinema, this is what ran through my head. I was thinking though that the scripts and screen plays would be computer generated and that a room full of computers would just data mine all of the footage. That would be cool, anyone could star in a movie and not even know. It would be a great surprise to go to a theater one day and see that you've become a star!

I hung up Euler's Identity in our living room

Here it is: Euler's Identity in Payne's Gray



"'It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don't know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.'" (Wikipedia)

Video Games with Emergent Goals

Video Games with Emergent Goals
(I must be into lists this week :-P)

• Endless Forest, by Tale of Tales. It is supposed to be an art work, but it seems like a video game to me. Also, it is nice that you can run it as a screen saver. I just tried it for the first time the other day because I haven't had a Windows machine in a while. It reminded me of a work that Eduardo Kac had made in 1996, titled Rare Avis. The eyes of the bird are positioned like human eyes because it was built after a mythical bird from Brazilian folklore. I have heard also that the text The Animal Therefore I Am by Jacques Derrida was half-way based on Eduardo's piece. It is interesting because the deer avatars in Endless Forest have eyes which are positioned on the front of their faces, and the only way to communicate in the game is to use predetermined animalesque movements.
  
  
• flOw, by Jenova Chen. There is also a Play Station 3 version, but I don't think that it qualifies for this list because when you reach a certain level you return and unlock other avatars. I don't actually know if this is not the case in the Flash version, but because it is a Flash game, I don't play it long enough to find out (and that is story for another post). Also, Jenova's game Cloud may qualify for this list, but every machine I have tried to run it on has frozen.
  
  
• The Sims, ofcourse, by Will Wright. I have only played this game a couple of times, but I do identify with in at the level of a toy, which is what Will calls it. Interestingly enough, I think that this is a border line case, and for different reasons than Jesper Juul (and to borrow his term :-) thx!) does. I think this because there are certain social limitations that the gamer brings to the table during play. It is easy to think that there are more in-game goals in The Sims because there are social ideals that relate to real life, and to the players.
  

More on this topic later I think.

Favorite Wikipedia Entries

Here is an update of my current favorite Wikipedia entries..

• Consciousness Causes Collapse
  
• Markov Chain
  
• Liminality
  
• Axiom of Choice
  
• Commedia dell'arte
  

Nice Illustration

found here

I tried to make my name with the corners of css frames one time. This is cool too. It is made with rounded corners from Google. Check the source for more info.

Fuck the Artist's Intentions!

I found this image on an old hard-drive that I haven't used in a while..
Apparently there is a 35mm picture of it somewhere, but this is all that I have right now.
The story is that Pablo and I decided that this was a good thing to write on his wall as a collaboration, back in 2004.. We actually commissioned this girl who was hanging out at the time to draw it for us. It was pretty cool. Her name was Dot, so she had her last name changed to Com. Dot Com.
She signed it, and there is a drawn on frame around it that Pablo Insisted on.. but they can't be seen in the picture here.

Tropical Iconography in Video Games

I have noticed that at the beginnings of alot of video games, all of the imagery is tropical. I don't know why. At one point I had found a petition-style movement to only make video games with blue skies and green grass, I don't have the link anymore.
My friend, and roommate, Pablo Gaviria, who is from Barranquilla, has expressed the idea that truth in the tropics is often very much about magic and fiction. I have also understood this to be the case after reading Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoirs. (Though the closest I have ever been is when I lived in Florida).

Fridges are the New Salon

Constantly evolving and advertising new states.

International Klein Blue: the website

http://www.international-klein-blue.com/

im not really sure who owns this site but it is all about being trueish.

— Color coordinates —
Hex triplet #002FA7
RGBB (r, g, b) (0, 47, 167)
HSV (h, s, v) (223°, 100%, 65%)

from the colour's wikipedia entry


Blue World!

Surfing with Internet Pirates in the Digital Tropics

Surfing the Internet is like making sketches.
Romantic landscape painters went into the world to make paintings and decide what they wanted to paint. Now we can call anythng found a piece of art work and everything about surfing is saved on our harddrives. We are always making found works of art, but some of them aren't good and some of them are. Surfing the Internet is like making landscape sketches, once we make a good sketch we can take it back to our studio and make it into a painting.

Here is a video I found that I like alot.
Its new title is, "No Weather".

The Internet and the Earth

Word Pro0cessors like to capitalize the word "Internet" because it is like the Earth. It is a proper noun, the name of place.

NEWISH MUSICS BLOG

my new music blog
with links and photos and everythang!



click it!

Open Studio MIT

drinking wine and making blogger posts ....
..
http://openstudio.media.mit.edu/

check it.
..
also i have a new logo..



hails yeah

the art of the brick... holy sh1t!1

By Nathan Sawaya.
This man has the best job in the world. He is amazing.
Though I am not sure why he isn't posting his work on Brikshelf..








the man is a damn rockstar.

Obama Drawing?

F.F.F. as hail

also, im back in chicago now. living in rodgers park.
my phone is dead, so you should myspace message me if you want to hangout.

Immersiveness and Simulation

Immersion into simulation seems to be the solution. The trick, if I can put it in such a drear sort of way, is to create a world which does not collapse under scrutiny.. or maybe to not scrutinize the world in general...
Functionality of words and forms seems to be taking hold of everything... I think that this, with religious texts excluded, was brought to the forefront of post-war culture by the dvent of computer programming. Actualy functionality was offered to ease suffering. Computers use a words to create architecture, limiting of possibilities through creating possibilities. Computer code can create something from nothing. All realities may exist at once in parallel... and it is not descriptive but normative... not only is it normative, but it is normative for each individual.


Massively Single-Player Online Role-Playing Game, SPORE by Will Wright

Massively Single-Player Non-line Role-Playing Game, by Félix González-Torres

I'm not actually sure how recursive SPORE is, because I haven't played it yet, but the term Wright created for it is impressive (MSORPG).

To stand up to the chaos (the world) by means of words and forms- Nicolas Bourriaud

Some of us just keep on painting....

Caspar David Friedrich

Valery Grancher

Weather Icons

I found this cool collection of weather icons which I will probably use to make a video...
here

some of my favs...