bryanboyer.com

Nintendo News Network?

In 1996 I was addicted to my screensaver. It ran as a series of transitions between novel content played at a pleasing rate; like most screensavers there was always something new to look at. This was different because the new was new, through the magic (hype?) of 'push' the screensaver, Pointcast, downloaded news content to stay evergreen and presented it in a style that could be likened to a polished powerpoint deck. If you can remember the web-milieu of Netscape 3 you know how impressive the combination of fresh content and a graphically rich display was. Previously we had seen each in separate venues, the former through the world-shrinking power of the web and the latter via CD-ROM, but the combination presented in Pointcast was a specific, hype-laden harbinger of the rich, freshly-updated online world we now take for granted.

Pointcast was the stereotypical flash in the pan but the notion of a personalized, graphical 'news channel' has persisted in the collective ether to find its latest instantiation in the Nintendo Wii. It's a curious move for a game console, but speaks directly to Nintendo's desire (implicit or otherwise) to capture the contested set-top. Anyone buying a Wii today will boot it up to find a menu offering Wii Forecast and Wii News "channels" (in game-land you can never be too literal with the metaphor) both controlled through the endearing point and click interface of the Wii remote.

Left: Category browser. Right: Manual story browser, alternative to slideshow mode.

Benefitting from the fun¹ of the native Wii interface and the context of a gaming platform, Wii News essentially performs a Reuters RSS feed². This performance is one of the most interesting aspects of the Wii system as a foundational notion and represents a return to the promise of Pointcast, but much more fun. On a casual timer news stories from a selected category fade onto the screen replete with a geo-locator and photographs if either can be mined from the article. One may allow the feed to scroll by, animating cleverly between stories with just enough variety to keep you engaged (the machine equivalent of a newscaster's eyebrows) or dive into the full text of an article. That this whole affair is the result of dynamically processing a feed of content demonstrates how impoverished current RSS readers are. To be fair, Slashdot feeds may not benefit from animated transitions and geo-locators, but nevertheless it's encouraging to see some thought into how we access specific kinds of feeds: news benefits from the accouterments Nintendo has provided, what would a tech feed benefit from most?

Left: Typical view of slideshow mode. Right: Typical story view layout with animated geo-locater.

The presence of an ambient soundtrack guides the viewer through their browsing experience and fills one of the most glaring gaps in the Pointcast experience-- that deafening silence-- with a more pleasing alternative to the constant droning of CNN Headline news. In other words, Wii News is everything that the average news channel is minus the hype, the editing, the commercials, and the fake tan. Surprisingly, however, there's still quite a lack of interaction. There's no way to customize the feed besides choosing a category (National, International, Entertainment, &c.) and no control over the speed of the slideshow. What little interaction exists is in the form of a global news browser which, while being a joy to use, is not particularly useful for anything other that briefly wowing your house guests.

Two views showing globe navigation with data loading incrementally based on zoom level.

While not benefitting the news viewer so much, the global news browser is a great, fun way to visualize the day's news in a comparative fashion. Not to mention that as a way of visualizing an entire RSS feed it's quite nonchalant, even intuitive. By showing the stories stacked up on their locations around the world, it forces one to interact with the screen-- to grab the globe and throw it into a spin Google-earth style-- to grok the totality of the news environment. This interaction is part of what makes Wii News so appealing: when you've had your fill of running on autopilot there's always a game-like, playful interaction awaiting to punctuate your experience. Even banal things like changing the text size are animated with stereotypical Nintendo cuteness. In the closed world of Nintendo, mannerisms like this escape the label of obnoxious (like zoom rects) by existing as part of a gesumtkunstwerk. In effect, Wii News is a perfect case study in proving that if you're going to do something, do it all the way and any extravagances will be allowed as simply the likely result of the system.

When changing rhe text size all of the words animate as they reflow the new text size onto the screen.

Though, quirky animations are not to be totally dismissed as they are an essential part of the acclimation process in the world of Wii. Separated by the depth of the living room and a slight latency in the cursor, using the Wii Remote to navigate the screen can be ever-so-slightly disorienting. The subtle alienating change in point-and-click dynamics that the Wii Remote presents as opposed to a standard GUI are mitigated by effects on screen and in the Remote itself. The array of sensors in the Remote allow increased reciprocity between the user's manipulation of the input device and the graphic representation of these actions on screen. Simple things like the orientation of the cursor become subtle clues that you're connected to the Wii more deeply than you think: roll the controller to the left or to the right and your cursor will rotate to follow. Mousing over buttons on screen results in simultaneous visual, audio, and tactile feedback benefitting from the vibration module in the Wii Remote. All of this escapes the status of being obnoxious because the interactions are limited-- I'm not sure that I'd want MS Word to react to me this way, but it's fine for a little browsing and the limited requirements of setting up a game of tennis. The major advance of the Wii interface may be a prolific, nonchalant application of sensor technology but it's supported-- importantly so-- by a concomitant, confluent use of reactive interface clues.

The Wii doesn't necessarily represent a great leap forward in interaction (all of its technologies have existed for quite a while). What it does best is prove the benefits of careful, steady application and refinement of technological advances to result in a congealed thing that has the power to redefine the competitive basis. In a market that is already home to a wide variety of gamers the Wii may not become a breakout, Ipod-like success³, but it does seem capable of redefining the rules of the engagement. Like Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo is clearly vying for more than just the gaming part of your life. With a set-top platform that allows for such rich interactions and clear first steps towards the performance of content, I'm anxious to see what else develops in the Wii channel browser: if there were a single dial left in my life, I wouldn't be touching it.

1. The rumors are true, the Wii is a categorically different experience. Not only in its means of control, but also in the thoroughness of the way the interface and experience have been crafted.

2. One assumes that there's an RSS feed. Though I haven't seen any explicit reference to it, a feed would be the easiest way to achieve these results.

3. Though it is doing rather well right now, it seems unlikely that the Wii's decidedly playful aesthetic will be able to unseat the reign of Xbox and PS3 in the lucrative 'adult gamer' market.

Summer Begins

Having never lived in New York City before and only rarely visited during the summer months, it's a new life here that I've already settled into. It's a summer of wheatberries, popsicles, shaded sidewalks, and sunburns. Working in the western fringes of SOHO and living deep within the gentrified carcass of Williamsburg gives me ample opportunity to enjoy the life of the street. Cambridge, a city where sidewalk cafes and for that matter any kind of street life are outlawed, has dulled my expectations for the public realm. How refreshing a loose fire hydrant cant be! The neighborhood children appear so excited to play in a stream of water that it makes one wonder if there's a corporate sponsor.

Walking

When living by foot being a 'regular' has much more meaning. The places you frequent become havens and essential stops along the way not only for the services that they offer but also for the respite. In this manner, the morning coffee is fashioned into a ritual. A winding path to lunch, during which lungs of conditioned office air are exchanged for the super-heated vitality of the city, are more about motion than sustenance. Forgetting for a moment the long hours of some deadlines which preclude these pleasures, embarking on the subway at any stop but the nearest is a specifically urban delight. These are acts of ritual: purposeful reroutings of functional plans to induldge a life your own.

Hopper's Wide Windows

Having watched a summer storm through the wide windows of Mooncake upon first arriving to the city, a certain tempo has been set for the summer which I find myself trying to recover. The place itself, situatated along the line-up to the Holland Tunnel, is an unlikely marriage of Nighthawks and infrastructure. Nevermind the fact that the food is delicious and thoughtful, Mooncake is such an unlikely triumph that it became a fixture in my routine instantly and without thought. Yet the power of place is unavoidable-- bourne true by the fact that meals taken away from Mooncake, despite being very good substitutes, are just not as nice those eaten in-house.

Pordenone, Italy

One finds a town of maybe 60,000 at the center of which a small Fascist-era piazza is filled to the brim with 5,000 World Cup fans armed with road flares, colored smoke, face paint, flags, beer, and raw pride. To an outsider, and perhaps particularly to an American, it was a surprising show of solidarity. Even I, shy of crowds and a bit jet lagged, was drawn by the power of the public body. A friend commented that "it's almost like being at the stadium," with each goal, penalty, or skillful maneuver on the piazza-sized projection screen drawing a row of cheers. Elsewhere in the town were restaurants reconfigured as auditoriums, with all chairs oriented towards large plasma screens and dinner plates uncharacteristically rested upon laps.

Most interesting, however, was the almost total lack of commercial effort. There were no tchotchke salsemen mobilized by this event. Not even drink vendors were present. Nor was there excessive commercial adornment of the screen which everyone was fixated on-- of the four sponsors which had modest banners across the top of the scaffolding one was the city of Pordenone itself! The Italians remain some of the most skilled craftsmen (and women) of public space and World Cup 2006 was simply a wonderful reminder of this.

The Undeniable Logic of Nature

Having lugged a new AC unit down from Cambridge, I've been unable to install it for weeks due to a missing part. A block away from my apartment this evening I was already so fed up with the humidity that I decided to rig something up no matter what it took. While installing the unit in the kitchen window I learned something very simple: the best way to cool off on a hot afternoon is to lean your head out the window while trying to install an AC. My problem was solved before I even plugged it in.

Vermont, One Year Out

Loggers sit in a valley at the center of town. A pit, really, with a river running swiftly through-- maybe the fastest thing in town. There's a bar or two and a 'fancy' restaurant but nothing looks that busy. The cafe is staffed by girls with things in their hair who seem more occupied by chatting than cooking. I'm particularly impressed by the fact that the possibility of an after school job is still alive and well here. Outside it's spring and the air is chilly more than cold; a little painful in the lungs but offset by a strong sun.

It's a comfortable but strange gestalt. White churches, white fences, small houses, old streets, ragged trees and territory. Views across vast expanses of land that's only nominally claimed. Horses and cows and all the things of farm life are here transposed into miniature dioramas of resistance and decay. "Live free or die."

With the sun gone hours ago and my hands still water logged, I pull out of the driveway in a rented truck. The slow crunch of tires on gravel is a familiar sound and the moon is bright enough to compete with the neon adorning a singular gas station. They give me incorrect directions and I set course for another city four hours away.

A Brief Guide To Visiting the Igualada Cemetery and Other Projects

As Boston's snowfall slowly turns everything outside into a parody of itself, as the syntax of curb and street fade into a single plane, what better time to recall the climate and company of a recent, wonderful trip to Barcelona.

It's a hard city to peg for just one vice. YK and I enjoyed the shopping and the eating (thanks be to Dana for the spicy oil recommendation) equally as much as the architecture, but the work of Enric Miralles (and and pals) was a special treat. Much different when visited in person rather than read through drawings or even photographs in a book. There are many things to do in Barcelona, so please let this be a guide only to a few select buildings-- there's plenty of other things to occupy your time.

The most useful guide for the architourist in Barcelona is Actar's yellow and black aptly-named Barcelona. It has the most thorough listing of projects, providing an address for most or at least a spot on the map. If you can't find a copy of the book before landing in Spain, you're likely to track one down at Actar's gallery/bookshop RAS in El Raval on the quaint Doctor Dou. If shopping RAS' selection tires you out, stop by MAMA Cafe-- equal parts las Ramblas and Omotesando-- for a snack.

You've traipsed through Gaudi, seen the Mies, planted a seed at the Ferrater, guffawed at Nouvel, and tried to forget ever seeing the Forum: Now it's time for the good stuff, arranged in order of distance from near to far.

Mercat Santa Caterina

More pictures of Mercat Santa Caterina

It's a bit of a gussied-up wholefoods-esque version of the Mercat Boqueria, but you can visit Pinotxo for a cappuccino and Santa Caterina is still only a brief walk away.

Directions:
Although it's walkable from basically anywhere in Ciutat Vella, you can also take the metro to Jaume I. Exit and walk north on Laietana, then take a right on Av. Francesc Cambo. If you miss the market from here you're blind.

Archery Range in Vall d'Hebron

More pictures of the Archery Range at Vall d'Hebron

Now converted to a soccer pitch and the worse for wear, the archery range is actually a pair of embedded structures separated by a road. The landscape forms are bolstered by a little overgrowth, as though the conceptual sewing of building to earth has become, finally, literal and real. Testament to the success of the project is the fact that it sustains disrepair and even transforms it into an original condition. The building comes to us in this condition-- it's idiosyncratic geometry intact but compounded by organic matter-- almost as a ruin from some culture not our own.

Directions:
Take the metro to Vall d'Hebron on the Green line. Exit the station to the right and up the stairs. Once you reach the surface you will be pointed down hill with a parking garage to your left. Continue in this direction down the hill until you see a soccer field on your left. Ta-da! When looking at this portion of the Miralles prokect, the other half is up the hill to your right.

Cemetery Nou in Igualada

More pictures of the Cemetery in Igualada

The cemetery has fared much better over the years and is in good condition but remains unfinished. I have not been able to track down an answer as to whether or not there are plans to complete the chapel. At the time of our visit a piece of the formwork presumably used for some of the precast elements was still on site near the property's edge.

Directions:
Igualada is about an hour and a half from Barcelona by train. According to a schedule dated Oct. 2003 the FGC (train) leaves Place Espanya every hour at :06 past the hour and returns from Igualada every hour at :39 past the hour. Check the current schedules, of course, but the trains run from 8am-10pm or so. Igualada is the last stop on the line, so tuck in for a nap or enjoy the increasingly exaggerated terrain as the train nears the Montserrat range. Once you reach the station you can either take a bus to the Poligono Industrial (industrial park) or take a taxi directly to the cemetery. (See it on a map) The taxi should cost you about 5 euros, so it's the best option. Tell the driver you're going to "Cemetery Nou" or "Cemetery Miralles," since Cemetery Igualada means pretty much nothing to a cab driver in Igualada-- a town with two cemeteries (the other one is Cemetery Vell). Either pay the cab to wait or take mental notes for walking back, because we didn't see a single cab roaming around the industrial park on our walk back. If you have a cell phone there are a collection of taxi numbers scrawled on the wall just inside the unfinished chapel.

Eatng and Working in London, if Briefly

Note: I was in London so this is now three months old. Oops. This trip was made possible by a fellowship and accompanying grant offered by the Soane Foundation based in New York, NY. I offer my thanks to both the Soane Foundation, the Soane Museum in London, and the incredibly cognizant staff of both organizations. Any and all views expressed below are mine and mine alone, I bear all responsibility-- this is a personal travelogue.

The Marketplace of Understanding

One of the things I enjoy most about visiting another place for an extended period is the chance to craft a new life, if only briefly. It’s during these trips that I do rash things like decide to exercise regularly, change my diet, dress in a new way, or just spend more time reading. On my quest for understanding the true nature of other cultures, when visiting other first world places I often gravitate to the most telling of locations: the grocery store. Inspecting a foreign grocery store will tell you a lot about the status of a people and this is how I’ve spent more of my time in Britain this year than I would like to admit. The result has been entrée into domestic England, a world never encountered on previous trips as an occasional tourist.

One trip to Marks & Spencers and I’m quite sure that the world is coming to an end. Ten kinds of juice, all in wonderfully designed packaging and featuring cleverly combined fruit flavors; socks, panties, and bras an aisle away from bread and biscuits; a third of the store given over to pre-packaged meals one of which is labeled “contains no skin or bone.” If this really is the end at least it’s all neatly wrapped in plastic.

Instant Coffee

Waking up in a mild fog of jetlag I found the cabinets of my furnished flat replete with the collected remnants of previous brief stays: half emptied and oddly assembled condiments and fixtures. Tea, yes, but I needed something stronger. I needed coffee.

My love of instant coffee came, well, instantly. With my first cup of rehydrated freeze-dried flavor crystals I was hooked. As quickly as the matte brown shards piled at the bottom of my cup had melted into a coffee-smelling liquid I had fallen in love. This has something to do with the color and texture of the actual crystals themselves, the simplicity of coffee from a glass jar, and the ease of the ritual. I wake up, turn on the socket, set my vintage 1980s “West German” water pot to boil, and the morning coffee is taken care of without the hassle of grounds or filters.

Over the course of just three days it has turned into an obsession. I’m no longer happy with any old instant coffee-- now I want the perfect instant coffee and can scarcely pass a grocery or convenience store without checking their stock. Budgens provided Cadburry mocha satchels, Marks & Spencer’s had canisters of latte powder, and Selfridge’s introduced me to the world of flavored coffees with Boater’s Smooth Vanilla. Something in the neighborhood of three month’s supply of coffee is already in my cupboard and I’m still searching.

Pork: The Fruit of the Gods

The British do not know pig like Americans know pig. The red, salty, crispy wonder that we cook in a skillet is here rendered a flabby slab of salty, pinkish gray. You can get “crispy bacon” which seems to better approximate what we know more simply as “bacon”, but the category is much larger in Britain. Put another way, there is nothing appetizing about the name “Budgen’s rindless back bacon” nor does the product itself have any redeeming factors. America: 1. Britain: 0.

Crumpets

Totally by accident, I literally ran into crumpets displayed at Tesco Express. There were situated at eye-level on the end of the bread row and such began my second British love affair. A bit like the bastard child of a pancake and a waffle, the crumpet features a smooth, crispy-when-toasted bottom and a pockmarked top filled with small holes formed by yeasty bubbles escaping in the oven. The contrast between crispy and supple makes eating the crumpet a delight of texture, primarily, but also a good medium for whichever jam or jelly you fancy. The things we know as “English Muffins” in America are a poor imitation of this pleasure. America: 1. Britain: 1.

The Tube

Later, during the morning commute, the tube is a scene: a man’s eyes and nose have found their permanent home on his face as if arranged by head-on collision, a woman with a shiny chin, girls who find love stories in the distorted reflections of curved glass, boys who are obsessed only with trainers. A poster claims that 2004 saw 583 injuries and 5 deaths.

Abundance

Things that London seems to have in abundance lately: Starbucks, nectarines, body odor in the tubes, and multiracial babies.

The Soane Museum

With days spent in the research library, attic offices, and far reaches of the museum, this time in London is my first introduction into the sometimes arcane worlds of historical preservation, curation, and all of the issues that research into these areas entail. Example one: white gloves. There come, when traveling, moments which mark true departure more than physical dislocation. This is not a condition of merely experiencing something different, but knowing one has stepped definitively into a new world. It wasn’t the towering shelves and teeming archives of original source material that described to me a previously unknown world, but the mode of care and slowness that one switches into when putting on a simple pair of white cotton gloves.

Having spent a good chunk of time researching the Soane Museum using published sources it was, of course, amazing to suddenly have access to the real thing. Not just the actual interior of the building, which I had visited before and is easily accessed with a small donation, but the drawings themselves. And the backs of the drawings too, which were sometimes even more informative. Always with the help of my gloves, I spent two weeks sifting through the leaves of unbound volumes and larger ink and wash drawings documenting the development of the houses at nos. 12-14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In particular, my interest is in the location of Soane’s professional offices at the back of his personal house and how, over the years, these two entities twisted together. This will be explained more when I have finished producing the actual work I set out to do.

Thinking about the good fortune of my privilege as I wandered the crypt of the museum on a Monday, when it’s closed to the public, I recalled an unlikely parallel. Earlier that morning I had rode through the Queensway tube station on my way from Notting Hill Gate to High Holborn. At the time Queensway was closed for renovation following the summer bombings so it was usually deserted. On this morning, however, when we passed through Queensway at a deferential crawl there was a lone worker wandering the quay in a hardhat. Access to the private life of a museum, then, is a bit like occupying a closed subway station: one feels the thrill of access to the off-limits, one knows the world is rushing by outside, and one enjoys the cloistered security of being inaccessible. Described to me as a “mansion of margins” by Ben Cerveny, working at the Soane House is to know the margins of the margins and occupy them with joy.

And also

Any trip is made better with the company of friends to guide you, especially when they’re adventurous nomads or knowledgeable locals. Thanks to Haiyan (and steve!), Hanna, Rod, Dan, Celia, and Matt

Gregory A. Carafelli: In The Making

Note: Gregory hosted my website for many years before I recently moved it to another host. It's fitting, then, that the first post for this site at its new home is dedicated to him. Consider this an un-requested introduction to a book of his work not yet published.

Photograph by Gregory Carafelli.

It’s an odd way to look at the work of a photographer, but Flickr has made the tag cloud a new standard of analysis. Looking through the tags associated with Gregory’s work, I’m surprised to find a string of adjectives and nouns, but not a single verb.

Cemeteries, shipyards, empty lots and alleyways: the aesthetic project that Gregory is crafting cannot lay still. The broken, the sad, the empty or overgrown may be the things of Carafelli’s photography but the subject of his work is more simple and more revealing: process. Gregory’s attention is for things and people in the throe of it. Dare I say it that he doesn’t aim for beauty so much as truth. In capturing the process of things, beauty is a side effect and a bonus for the efforts. The real potential is in his ability to lay bare the true nature of things, to claim as beautiful that which may not otherwise be considered beautiful by giving us a glimpse of something in the making. In examining the coming together or falling apart of things Gregory searches for the encompassing truth of their existence. This is the infatuation with decay: that in its worn down state lays the concurrent potential for a skeletal understanding and an echo of glorious totality.

Seeking this truth in his images, Gregory’s work evokes the quiet emotion of the destroyed and deserted through careful reminders of human presence. Layered graffiti, shatter-proof glass put to the test, creeping greenery, and even jittering dusty light are all the traces of life (or its possibility) which remain in even the most forgotten site. These are not images of the broken and abandoned, but the just broken, just abandoned.

The shine of a factory in its last stages of rot, a lonesome match caught just after ignition, projects forgotten and abandoned. Gregory’s photographs frame soft and crumbling walls absent of human habitation as often as they do quiet tangles of conversation floating on a backdrop of smoke and film grain. It’s his concern for the doing of things that lets Gregory photograph raucous transvestites just as well as rotting breweries without presenting a schizophrenic body of work. When Gregory turns his camera to a human subject it is rarely for the typical task of a portrait-- finding the essential truth of a person or marking an event. Instead, his images of people assemble the quiet moments between here and there: decisions, hesitations, regret and desire. In the end it’s not the individuals that are the point and this is why I hesitate to call them portraits. Gregory refers to these people as The Young Thousands: the nameless-- sometimes faceless, the ones in the making. Here, as with his images devoid of human presence, the emotional terrain is always in motion.

It is my hope with this brief introduction to Carafelli’s work that the viewer comes to understand his photography as an aesthetic project rather than a collection of thematic images. If there’s one thing fitting a photographer who has devoted himself to exposing the process of things, it’s that Gregory’s project, in the end, is making the scene.

Photograph by Gregory Carafelli.

By way of explanation

Things are slowly being reinstated. Today there's a new and half functional site. Indyjunior is still here and in desperate need of an update. The export functionality on movabletype is a disaster and so I've lost my archives in their maleable format. Instead they have been quarantined as static pages in the orphaned directory.

Correspondance Romano

Note: Below is a selection of emails from a summer spent studying at RISD's Palazzo Cenci. For a number of reasons I've been thinking about Rome lately, so absent the ability to visit this summer I've dug up these letters. Upon returning from that trip I summarized my time in this post but should note that I've since grown quite fond of the place.

Mon, 3 Jun 2002

From: bryan boyer
To: 
> can you send me the checklist by tuesday.

- Durable map of berlin, preferably something that has a light
lamination to it.

- Erasable pen

That's it.

I am exploding with allergies.

-bryan

Fri, 14 Jun 2002

From: bryan boyer
To: 
Rome is buttery; rich and thick in color and variety, different around
every turn; heavy and dense. Actually, because the same passage ways are
shared by people, scooters, and cars I think Rome feels far more dense
than even Tokyo. The city is laid out with seemingly no order and it's
easy to get lost in little back streets. It's also very small, causing
me to miss my destination quite a few times because I thought I hadn't
walked far enough when in actuality I had walked past it.

I miss you.

-bryan

From: bryan boyer
To:

I sat by the window on the way back from Ostia, which was a mistake
because it was unbearably hot. Italy has these weird pine trees that are
really tall and mostly just trunk. They're topped with a wide, flat poof
of pine needles and look like Dr. Seuss trees.

I finished one roll of holga shots.

-bryan

Tue, 18 Jun 2002

From: bryan boyer
To: 
> you write funny little notes.

Am I dying? this is what i had to ask myself yesterday. Went to the
vatican in the morning and fell asleep when i got back around 1:00pm.
Was haunted by terrible dreams and vague body pains for the next 18
hours before finally waking up this morning. I am unsure of my condition
but believe it to be allergy related. Looking into finding an english
speaking doctor tomorrow.

You would love it, everyone has these fancy cameras and pose when we're
on site as if they're taking Really Important Pictures. I wonder how
many of them could tell me what SLR means.

-bryan

From: bryan boyer
To: 
Rome is hot and claustraphobic.

The architecture program has been pretty interesting so far. Half of the
students are from RISD and the other half are from various other schools
around the US and the world. We did one pin up with interpretations of
the site in any format and one of the girls started her presentation
with a poem. She didn't call it that outright, but that's what she
wanted it to be. (My sneaking suspicion of her inner-poet was confirtmed
this morning when I heard that she enjoyed a toni morrison lecture last
night) This girl, ********, is particularly obnoxious and loves to use
phrases like "random but not so random," going so far as to correct you
and re-insert the extra four words if you snip it to "random" when
discussing her project.

This morning I woke up at 6:00am and went to breakfast. I had to draw a
picture of an orange sitting in a cup when I temporarily forgot the word
for orange juice. It would be an interesting thing to try, ordering in
foreign countries only with drawings and collecting the results. I keep
wanting to say "vorrei una caffe sil-vous-plait."

give *** my best.

-bryan

Wed, 19 Jun 2002

From: bryan boyer
To:

I am being drafted into service as a bartender but italy has no limes,
only salami.

-bryan

From: bryan boyer
To:

In many ways Rome is the mother of all problem spaces. Pretty much any
architectural or civic problem one could imagine has been addressed here
except, I should point out, the issue of dog poo + cobble stones. The
hours are nice; I wake up early, cruise around, nap in the afternoon,
and then work again at night. It would be even better if I could get
more cold water. I usually drink my water at room temperture, but in
heat like this all I want are a few ice cubes showing their battle scars
in my glass-- melting, melting, melting.

One thing that struck me yesterday while waiting for a bus, and this may
be related to having watched Airplane so many times as a child, is that
Rome is, in a lot of ways, the most Hollywood-set kind of place I've
ever visited. I spot a nun, now a friar, now a Father walking this way
and that. They wear baseball caps, carry breifcases, talk about airplane
reservations, and generally wheel around town like normal citizens.
Every time I see one of them I stop in my tracks and think, "oh, there's
the pope. lucky me." It's never the Pope. Someday I'm going to spot
everyone's favorite religious raison.

The facilities here for EHP are amazing. I can see why people have
complete culture shock when they return to the states because, honestly,
this is some sort of academic Olympia. It's perfect. The library works
on the fucking honor system. I mean, come on. There are no locks on the
bedroom doors; there are flowers and trees in the courtyard; wine flows
like wine; and while you do have to do real actual work
for the academic half of this whole episode, it's kind of just
incidental, just a way to get you outside and thinking about the place
you're in: the world's largest magnet of Cured Pork Products and Olives.

-bryan

Fri, 21 Jun 2002

From: bryan boyer
To:

There are two things which I see everywhere on the streets of Rome:
underwear and dog balls. This city is littered with dogs, most of them
small and cute, but the rare large dogs are not neutered and have large
genitals.

The Italians love lingere possibly as much as they love canine genitals.
Everywhere there are underwear shops. Most of them have the manequins
turned with their asses to the window, displaying some line-thin thong
or other cotton-blend invader. Most of the underwear is rendered not
sexy by the lucite manequins they're displayed on and the usually
unkempt display window they're housed in, but this doesn't keep me from
wondering why the hell there are so many shops. Who is wearing all of
this underwear?

-bryan

From: bryan boyer
To:

Italy is about all of these things: cured meats, standing up to
drink your coffee, stiffling heat, mid-day naps, skulls in churches, hot
men in suits on scooters, Ananas, and cheap groceries.

Italian food gets boring after a while no matter how much better it is
here then in the US. Frankly, I just don't want to eat a whole plate of
the same thing. Lunch food, on the other hand, is quite inventive and
fun to order. The pizza places all cook their pizzas in a big rectangle.
When ordering you direct the person behind the counter, who is holding a
pair of scissors, where to cut. They cut a long strip and then cut the
strip into some managable chunks, slap it on a plate, and you're on your
way. Sandwiches are almost always pre-made, ready for your selection. I
also enjoy making use of the grocery store which is a block away and the
markets which are a bit further but have better produce. The fruit here,
by the way, does not have the shelf life of that in California. Either
this is good because it means they have fewer chemicals, or bad because
it means most of my strawberries are moldy before I get a chance to eat
them.

-bryan

Mon, 24 Jun 2002

From: bryan boyer
To: 
The sky is alight with summer showers and everyone has just raced
outside to feel it on their skin. While cooking dinner, the kitchen window framed a
rather startling view across the courtyard: a palette of ochres,
yellows, and terra cotta made alive by darkened skies preparing for
rain.

As soon as the first thunder rang, everyone was raciong down the wide
stone steps to see what Roman rain is like. It only rains a few days a
month here, and it hasn't rained yet, so this was kind of a big event
for the people of the Cenci. The surprise of rain may have had something
to do with the drinks we had before this whole thing happened. A round
of strong caiphrinias may have had something to do with the level of
excitement created by this natural event.

The thunder is what inspired everyone to run downstairs, but the
lightning is what I like most, you know. I stood watching it, only
visible in the smalle crack between a few buildings, that sliver of sky
lighting up blue and purple.

-bryan

Tue, 25 Jun 2002

From: bryan boyer
To: 
The cookies I just bought say:

"Ancora un piu stelle Ancora un pie buoni"

which translates as:

Add a little bit of stars, Add a little bit of goodness.

-bryan

Thu, 27 Jun 2002

From: bryan boyer
To:

I just got back from a walk all around rome. Every other night or so I
try to take a walk through a part of the city I haven't been to yet. I
just leave my door and start walking until I get tired. Then I sit down
and write some notes before heading back. On the way back to my dorm
this time I found a gelato place, so I ordered ananas & anguria,
pineapple and watermelon, my two favorite fruits. Watermelon gelato is
rare here, this was the first time I've seen it. It was a perfect
combination of flavors, the watermelon giving a cool feeling and the
pineapple adding just enough tang to make it exciting.

-bryan

Mon, 1 Jul 2002

From: bryan boyer
To: 
> The ******* boys visit NYC.

They're funny and quite nice. I met them during my wild days in the
valley, riding it out in KP incubator space. They came to our "parties"
which were just free food and bad jokes about soap and XML... 
Anyway, the ******* guys live with their mom, or parents, and run the
whole thing out of the garage. it was all just a joke. and then people
liked it.

-bryan

From: bryan boyer
To: 
I am sweating graphite. I feel gross.

Fri, 19 Jul 2002

From: bryan boyer
To:

Via mare. By the sea. I wouldnt be surprised if they mean it literally,
putting each package in its own little innertube and setting it adrift,
alone to navigate the straights of Gibralter and make it to the eastern
seaboard. Hopefully, however, they will put it on a boat and shepard it
back. One month supposedly. I am scared.

-bryan

A Weekend in San Ardo, CA

Elevation: 459 feet above sea level.
Population: 501 (+9, briefly).

[images lost]

Walking Cambridge

Last spring I was thinking about the rural existence. At the time I took note of the following:

The flaneur is a farmer with different shoes. The wanderer, the walker, the one who experiences the environment around them with glee-- this person exists in a forrest of skyscrapers and town-homes equally as well as the empty vistas and dusty oaks of the countryside.

Rural: agricultural, country. Inhabited and conquered, in some sense, but not broken. The rural is a place where man's presence is left on the ground as much by absence as it is by presence. The cloistered courtyard siting of a farmhouse and its outbuildings, a row of trees planted to block the wind, the sound of an airplane lazily echoing off foothills, even the linear patterns of a crop or the trodden memory of cattle. These are the accumulated traces of human inhabitation spread thin across the brown land between here and there. It's quiet but not lonely and, in an inversion of the urban, gains its interest from extreme sparseness instead of high density.

Now, here in Cambridge, the weather becomes nice again and I find myself just walking. A whitewashed Concord Lane; "West Point, Harvard, Virginia;" two dog grooming salons; "noodles, espresso, ice cream, sushi." Later: a bus barrels by and standing in the front is a trench-coated woman looking for all the world like Selby's Sara Goldfarb.

Out and about a new grocery store is discovered. A nice side effect of buying frozen edamame before walking home is that you can sling the bag of groceries over your shoulder allowing the frozen mass to counteract, if barely, the rising mercury of the falling sun.

5 Days, 500 miles

Of Hilltops and Eyelids

Shining through one's eyelids the sun is bright enough to tinge the field of vision a bloody orange which forces the brain to overcompensate and cast the world into a faint but opposite blue. One awakes with these alien eyes in a slightly different world, askew but not unknown, and instantly begins the slow return to chromatic acuity. These are napping eyes draining themselves of an accumulated gray as quickly as the mind shakes its sleepy slowness to remember where it is and what it’s doing.

Of Dynamite and the Sea

South of Carmel and folding upon itself in increasingly dense plica, the road begs one to lift their foot from the pedal and their eye from the road. It's lucky that these come in pairs since the snaking ledges offer views as grand as they are contorted. From these habitable traces of New Deal dynamite and pick axe: a rabid sea, an unexpected river, a brief canopy of trees... blue. The horizon an inflected gradation violated only-- and only briefly-- by a red hawk hanging in the coastal breeze. This is a place (or a life) formed by a precious, precarious balance: perfection so total, so complete that it can only be experienced as a traveler, as one passing through. If destiny manifested itself upon these cragged shores it has since built aesthetic shipyards, laid plans, and now quietly begs for an extension, if only visual, to the place where the horizontal slips imperceptibly into vertical.

On the Road, if Only Briefly

A cruise ship where it doesn't belong, a hidden female sphinx, iced coffee, peonies in a window. The illicit touching of copper skin, golf course/park, muddy roadsides and almost-brushfires, the pain of walking on sharp rocks, clouds, constellations both real and artificial, potato pancakes from purchased potatoes. The death bedroom, smelling a quarter mile of redwoods, giant eucalyptus, carnitas, a lemongrass disaster but 10 limes easily devoured. Camel? The sleeping ducks; the saltmarsh shrews; a plane landing; the sun falling; and then, also, just rocking out.

The Numerology of California

101, 280, 85, 101, 156, 1, 46, 101.

Hisorhi Ishii on Ambient Interfaces

Having waived out of the Digital Media class, I'm taking Toshiko Mori's Innovations in Structures as an elective this semester. The class is set up as a series of guest lectures to increase the dialog between architects and engineers. According to Mori, this class is, in some respects, a continuation of the work from Immaterial/Ultramaterial. This week was the first guest lecture presented as a discussion about "life at the border of bits and atoms" by Hiroshi Ishii. Ishii's Tangible Media group at the MIT Media Lab has been working on exciting projects. Sensetable, Topobo, I/O Brush, and SandScape are just a few amongst many that you may have seen before.

While Ishii covered a number of topics, most relevant to the audience here was his brief discussion of architectural space as interface. In all of his work Ishii is interested in the convergence of input space and output space. In architecture this becomes manifest in projects like I/O Bulb that propose a architecture-scale application of the sensetable technology to effectively add a parallel layer of computational actionability to normal physical actions. This sort of thinking points to interesting possibilities but ultimately one wonders about the viability of large scale, centralized, environmental computing. Even Ishii's own work tends towards an object scale, focusing instead on multiple and task-specific projects.

Ishii implicitly acknowledges this in the specifics of the architectural projects he showed, primarily Ambient Fixtures. What I find compelling about the project is its focus on the periphery, ambient experience of information as a counterpoint to the dominant, center-focused interaction we're used to. It's not surprise that Ambient Devices is a spin off from Ishii's group at the Media Lab, given that they are beginning to implement some of the ambient informational technologies that Ishii is concerned with.

With architects more and more considering information and various media as an important part of their buildings, Ishii's five points about the ambient interface of architectural space are good to think about.

Browserless Information should be glancable and require no navigation
Calm Should be seamless with the environment
Persistent connection Information must be current, and regularly updatable
Decision driven data Should be personalized and summarized to help users make decisions quickly and easily. "Should I bring an umbrella with me today?"
Private Information should be encrypted for privacy

The first hints of these ideas are just starting to emerge in architecture with projects like UN Studios' recently completed Galleria in Seoul, South Korea and Diller+Scoffidio's Blur building from 2002. While neither project addresses information at the personal scale, they respond more broadly to environmental factors. Indeed, as a building made of mist, Blur relied on wind and barometric sensors to help keep its cloud localized over a steel skeleton. Sensors communicated environmental conditions to a central computer which then adjusted the rate of flow to an array of nozzles covering the skeleton allowing for real-time compensation for strong winds and other disruptive conditions. In effect, the building took advantage of ambient sensing to make constant decisions defending itself from the environment.

If Blur is using ambient technology to act in its own interest, UN Studio's Galleria operates solely for the entertainment and attraction of the public. Currently the building records the day's weather and replays this footage as a slow motion sunset depicted via a facade of 5000 frosted glass discs backed with LEDs. Ishii mentioned that the Hancock Tower in Boston displays a prediction of the next day's weather based on the pattern of lights at night, but the Galleria can go one step further. Displaying the previous day's weather is pure entertainment, but with enough data built up the building could begin to use previously recorded weather videos as a premonition of what's to come. Based on forecasts, the facade's computer could search though its database of recorded days and find a past day that closely matched the forecast. Animating the facade with this video content would then give passersby an idea of what tomorrow might be like, instead of what has already passed today.

What's most promising about Ishii's conversation is that there may be a future without video projections on loop or random LCD screens regarded as avant-garde. Implicit in all of his work is the notion that static computing is boring. Computational power, storage space, and bandwidth are reaching a point of abundance that makes invention easier and, importantly, more realizable. If we’re currently living life at the border of bits and atoms then I look forward to a future of dual citizenship.

The Space/Time of Coffee

Note: This was originally posted with images which were subsequently lost. They will eventually be re-instated.

Illy Coffee and Domus Magazine co-sponsored a competition encouraging designers to think about the new ways of enjoying an coffee. "It is meant as an opportunity to discuss the presence of "Break-spaces and dialogue" in modern urban life."

My proposal tries to re-imagine an awkward space that exists in all buildings with elevators: the upper floor elevator lobby. There's a small margin of space between the elevators themselves and the actual office. Illyvator (blame Jeff for the name) animates this space by making it part of a network of impromptu espresso bars.

ILLYVATOR brings you a lift by turning an elevator into a roving espresso bar for tall buildings.

Instead of capitulating to something nasty in the break room or spending time to make a trip down to the sidewalk, ILLYVATOR brings the break to you. ILLYVATOR reclaims boring elevator lobbies and activates them as social space: a network of impromptu espresso lounges throughout the building centered around the enjoyment of great coffee.

Pressing the button to call ILLYVATOR begins an interlude. While dispersing fresh espresso into the lobby spaces is certainly important, ILLYVATOR's greater effect comes in the form of social interactions that ripple through the life of the building. Emboldened by the sensual, social experience of ordering and drinking coffee, the staid office elevator lobby is converted into a locus of chance meetings, conversations, and flirtations: the times of our lives.

Everyone loves expresso, but one ILLYVATOR per building is probably enough. The other elevator shafts continue to function as people-movers.

Operations are supported by small water tanks for supply and waste on the roof of ILLYVATOR. Refills occur in the elevator penthouse as needed.

ILLYVATOR's wall of cups acts as pragmatic storage and also meters the building's caffeine requirements. Each floor is served cups from their own column. Columns with blanks represent floors who are working too hard...

... or not hard enough?

Baroque Ghosts

Note: This was originally posted with images which were subsequently lost. They will eventually be re-instated.

I've always found programming satisfying because it's essentially a problem solving activity. Flash is one thing, but coding in a 3D program is much more exciting. Most contemporary 3D software packages have some kind of scripting language built in and I've been using C4D's COFFEE language to write some very basic scripts that generate graphics in three dimensions.

As far as programming goes, the script used to make these entities is so basic it's almost embarrassing that I'm discussing it. Starting at 0 the script picks a random point in space within a 200 unit radius and draws a spline to it. Then it does this same action again and again until you tell it to stop. This results in a meandering line (b-spline, if you're interested) that curves in all three dimensions. I've run the script twice and made two of these spline jumbles. In the images below one is seen in red and the other in black.

Beyond the simple task of 'designing' the code, the primary task with a project like this is to edit the results into something aesthetically interesting, which essentially means picking revealing viewing angles.

These two jumbles which are occupying different positions in space are then connected with a loft. Essentially this means connecting point 1 on the first jumble to point 1 on the second jumble, point 2 to point 2, and so on until all the points are connected across and you have a surface that spans from the first jumble to the second. Below you will see the key lines of the lofted surface drawn as dashed lines.

Finally, after we've found an angle that's good and set up the lofted surface it's time to render. If you're interested I've included the COFFEE code used to generate these graphics below, otherwise enjoy some more ghosts:

And now some COFFEE:

// creates an object called "Spline"
// if one does not exist and starts adding randomly placed points
// which are positioned relative to the axis.
// updates on refresh, so hit play and watch the curve draw
// then hit stop when you've had enough
// portions poached from: http://www.nthd.org/nthd/

main(doc,op)
{

//get document info
var doc = GetActiveDocument();

var obj, pointCount, points, backupTags, variableChanged;

if (!doc->FindObject("Spline")) {
        println("making a new spline");

        //create new spline
        obj = new(SplineObject);
        pointCount = 2;

        //fill create null points
        points = new(array,pointCount);
        obj->SetPoints(points);

        // try to set the spline type....
        var container = obj->GetContainer();
        container->SetData(SPLINEOBJECT_TYPE,3);
        obj->SetContainer(container);

        // now that we've modified the spline we need to tell the mothership
        // and before doing that we'll set up a rig to deal with low
        // memory conditons
        //create messageing object to tell spline points were added
        variableChanged = new(VariableChanged);
        // create the backup
        backupTags = new(BackupTags);
        backupTags->Init(obj);
        // set change
        variableChanged->Init(0, pointCount);
        //if the update failed, restore to saved data
        if (!obj->Message(MSG_POINTS_CHANGED, variableChanged)){
                backupTags->Restore();
                return FALSE;
        }

        // actually position the points
        obj->SetPoint(0,vector(0,0,0));
        obj->SetPoint(1,vector(100,100,100));

        //Insert the object into scene
        obj->Message(MSG_UPDATE);
        doc->InsertObject(obj,NULL,NULL);
} else {
        println("already got one");
        obj = doc->FindObject("Spline");
        
        //println("It's ",obj->GetPointCount()," long.");
        pointCount = obj->GetPointCount()+1;

        var currentPoints = obj->GetPoints();
        currentPoints[pointCount-2] = nil;

        
        // now that we've modified the spline we need to tell the mothership
        // and before doing that we'll set up a rig to deal with low
        // memory conditons
        //create messageing object to tell spline points were added
        variableChanged = new(VariableChanged);
        // create the backup
        backupTags = new(BackupTags);
        backupTags->Init(obj);
        // set change
        variableChanged->Init(0, pointCount);
        //if the update failed, restore to saved data
        if (!obj->Message(MSG_POINTS_CHANGED, variableChanged)){
                backupTags->Restore();
                return FALSE;
        }

        var r = new(Noise);

        var rx = r->SNoise(time(),time(),time());
        var ry = r->SNoise(time()+1,time()+1,time()+1);
        var rz = r->SNoise(time()+2,time()+2,time()+2);
        var mod = 1000;

        println("placing point at ",rx,", ",ry,", ",rz);

        // get the previos point
        var prev = obj->GetPoint(pointCount-2);

        // position it
        obj->SetPoint(pointCount-1,vector(prev.x+mod*rx,prev.y+mod*ry,prev.z+mod*rz));


        // Finally, update object in display
        obj->Message(MSG_UPDATE);
}

} // end script

And if you're still here: something else that's scripted.

Steve Reich, Jeremy Hollister, Coldcut

Note: Unfortunately, the video file discussed here was lost in a recent site update.

Tonight I came across my copy of Gasbook 9 - Insect and sat down to watch a few of the pieces on the DVD. This video by Jeremy Hollister has always been my favorite on the disc, if not one of my favorite motion graphic pieces in general. Watch the full video.

Stills from the excellent music video for Coldcut's remix of Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" directed by Jeremy Hollister:

Click to view the video (29mb)

Hollister in an interview with Shift.jp:

Architecture always fascinates me and I think that modernist buildings such as those by Saarinen and Niemeyer (even though he seemed to a have certain level of disregard for how some of the buildings would work in practical use) are beautiful studies of form and contrast in space. I thought that it would be interesting to explore these ideas of form and space through the live action using different architectural icons, vast spaces and minimal action from the model/actress to enhance this. We used the white fields of color to anchor the visual theme, restricting the palette to white and blue. The goal was to create an abstract visual soundscape of repeating key themes with slight changes, mirroring the tonal variations in Reich's compositions.