This blog post gives instructions for how to get Firmata working with both Processing and MaxMSP on Mac OSX 10.6.3. The information is current as of 8 July 2010, but is naturally certain to change. The context for this blog post is that I’m working with my university’s Computing Services staff to develop an administrator’s disk image for some new Macs that have just arrived. I prepared the information below for this crew, who are talented IT professionals that happen not to have domain expertise in arts-computing platforms. To the best of my knowledge, this information has not yet been compiled in any one place, but is rather distributed around the Internet in too many pages, some of which are out of date. I welcome comments and corrections.

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The specific list of 8 installation packages are as follows.
Detailed instructions for installing and testing these packages
can be found in the sections below.

1. Arduino IDE version 0018: arduino-0018.dmg
2. Drivers for Arduino boards: FTDIUSBSerialDriver_10_4_10_5_10_6
3. Firmata version 2.1+ for Arduino: firmata.tar.gz
4. Max/MSP/Jitter 5.1.3 or later: e.g. Max5_42462.dmg
5. OSC-route external library for Max: OSC-route_1.17.1.tar.gz
6. Maxuino library for Max v.009: maxuino-009.zip
7. Processing version 0186, processing-0186.dmg.
8. Arduino for Processing library, processing-arduino-0017.zip.

Design: Caryn Audenried for the STUDIO

In other instances, we detect a whiff of outright theft. This may be difficult to prove, or at least, challenging to litigate, particularly for ideas which have simmered in the stew of the public domain for a few years. We simply pity, or perhaps snicker at, the artist who seeks redress from a behemoth corporation like Microsoft for its callous disregard of his Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

Well, earlier this month, I experienced yet another day of cognitive dissonance in which

• I struggled to justify the value of new-media arts research to an audience of Silicon Valley businesspeople;
  while simultaneously,
• Some new-media artist friends of mine discovered that their work had been ‘appropriated’ by a large corporation.

There’s a clearly a cultural blindspot, here, folks. In the hope that these artists and others like them may receive some recognition for their pioneering prognostication and belated cultural influence, I here offer A few examples of New Media Artworks which Have Predicted the Future, Perhaps Too Successfully:

Myron Krueger (born 1942) is a pioneering American computer artist who developed some of the earliest computer-based interactive artworks. Krueger is also considered to be among the first generation of virtual reality and augmented reality researchers. Pictured at left is a scene from Myron Krueger’s landmark interactive artwork, Video Place, which was developed continuously between ~1970 and 1989, and which premiered publicly in 1974. Camera-based computer play begins here. The Video Place project comprised at least two dozen profoundly inventive scenes which comprehensively explored the design space of full-body camera-based interactions with virtual graphics — including telepresence applications, drawing programs, and (pictured here, in the “Critter” scene) interactions with animated artificial creatures. Many of these scenes allowed for multiple simultaneous interactants, connected telematically over significant distances. Video Place has influenced several generations of new media artworks, including some of my own (see, for example, my short essays, “Hands Up! The Media Art Posture“ and “Computer Vision for Artists and Designers“). By 2003, techniques for full-body camera-based interactions were considered inexpensive and reliable enough for mass commercialization. Pictured here, at right, is a screenshot of the Sony EyeToy, which was released in 2003 and has sold, according to Wikipedia, in excess of 10.5 million units. Today, the Sony EyeToy weighs a few ounces and costs just $29, and offers games featuring mass-market character properties (Harry Potter, Sonic the Hedgehog) and popular sports (basketball, football, Formula One racing, etcetera).

Michael Naimark (born 1952) is a new-media artist and researcher interested in “place representation.” In addition to his influential work exploring cinema-based virtual and immersive realities, Naimark is also notable for his advocacy of media art as a stimulus for technological innovation — having directly helped establish a number of prominent research labs including the MIT Media Laboratory (1980), the Atari Research Lab (1982), the Apple Multimedia Lab (1987), Lucasfilm Interactive (1989), and Interval Research Corporation (1992).

In the late 1970s Naimark was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at MIT. Working in collaboration with Peter Clay, Bob Mohl, Andrew Lippman and others from the MIT Architecture Machine Group (“ArchMac”), Naimark helped create the Aspen Movie Map (1978-1980), a landmark hypermedia installation which allowed visitors to interactively explore and navigate the roads in a small town in Colorado. The Aspen Movie Map was made possible through an “artistic abuse” of the world’s first laserdisc player — namely, by taking a device which had been intended for the storage and playback of large movies, and instead using it for random access under interactive control. Naimark, who went on to create similar maps for more than a decade, says, “One could argue that the roots of two movements went through the Aspen Movie Map in the earliest days: the roots of multimedia and the roots of virtual reality.” More information about the Aspen Movie Map can be found at Michael Naimark’s web site for the project, including a remarkable video and some additional historic writings. Below are photos showing the automobile rigs used to create panoramas of the streets, then and now.

Built with financial support from DARPA, The Aspen Movie Map artwork was awarded the dubious “Golden Fleece Award” in 1980 by then-U.S. Senator William Proxmire — a sarcastic recognition he bestowed on projects which he felt were egregious wastes of taxpayer money. Nevertheless, the core ideas of the Aspen Movie Map live on, three decades years later, in Google’s widely-used Street View service (launched 2007), a feature of Google’s networked-based mapping tools that provides panoramic views of streets in more than a dozen countries around the world.

Jeffrey Shaw (born 1944) has been active in new media arts and research since the mid-1960s. Currently the director of the iCinema Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Shaw was founding director (1991-2003) of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1988, Shaw and Dirk Groeneveld created Legible City, an interactive artwork with a sensor-enabled stationary bicycle interface, which allowed visitors to navigate and explore a 3D virtual environment by pedaling and steering. The work is well-known within the media arts literature, where it has been recognized for its advances in the poetics of immersive synthetic experiences and in the field of experimental physical interfaces.

Pictured above at right is a recent (ca. 2008) piece of digital exercise equipment from E-fitzone, a sports promotion “pilot lab” which purports to be Europe’s “first gym for interactive gaming”. An industry press article states: “According to Carla Scholten, director of Embedded Fitness, which initiated the project, ‘The idea for E‑fitzone was based on initiatives in the U.S. where a combination of gaming, entertainment and fitness training has become commonplace. It not only makes training fun, but also offers the option of creating an online account through which you can track your high scores, heart rate and energy consumption.’” It is difficult to judge from the photo, but the E-fitzone interactive cycling station appears to include a trigger-enabled joystick which Shaw’s artwork did not.

Art+Com is a collective of German new-media artist/technologists, founded in 1988, which has since evolved into a small company providing custom interactive installation projects for clients in the industry, culture and research sectors. In 1996, Art+Com developed Terravision, a networked virtual representation of the earth based on satellite images, aerial shots, altitude data and architectural data. According to the Art+Com website, “Terravision was the first system to provide a seamless navigation and visualisation in a massively large spatial data environment. Users can navigate seamlessly from overviews of the earth to extremely detailed objects and buildings. In addition to the photorealistic representation of the earth, all kinds of spatial information-data are integrated, and are streamed into the system according to the user’s needs.”

Pictured at right is Google Inc.’s Google Earth, a “virtual globe, map and geographic information program” that “lets you fly anywhere on Earth to view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings, from galaxies in outer space to the canyons of the ocean.” Google Earth was originally called Earth Viewer, and was created in 2001 by Keyhole, Inc, a company acquired by Google in 2004. One significant difference between Terravision and Google Earth, is that the newer project takes advantage of user-generated cartographic annotations, allowing users to save their favorite places, and share these with others.

It has sometimes been suggested that interactive new media art is propelled by two different strands of research: technoformalism, an inquiry which is primarily concerned with the aesthetic and experiential potentials of new technologies, and hacktivism, which is concerned with technology’s critical and sociopolitical possibilities. To the extent that technoformal artworks can be interpreted as neutral “media frames”, and are thus more easily adapted to commercial ends — as illustrated, perhaps, by the first examples in this article — it may be surprising and instructive to note that politically-challenging hacktivist work is not immune from such adaptations, either.

The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as an anonymous artist’s collective dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. For more than a decade, the IAA has created tactical media technologies, including various forms of “contestational robotics”, which are intended to extend the autonomy of human activists. In 1998 the IAA developed GraffitiWriter, a small “tele-operated field programable robot which employs a custom built array of spray cans to write linear text messages on the ground at a rate of 15 kilometers per hour,” whose “printing process is similar to that of a dot matrix printer.” GraffitiWriter provoked controversies on a number of occasions; for example, during an award ceremony on live Austrian television in 2000, at the height of Austrian governor Jörg Haider‘s xenophobic campaign against immigrants, GraffitiWriter went scandalously ‘off-script’ and printed the activist slogan Kein mensch ist illegal (“No person is illegal”).

IAA’s subsequent project, StreetWriter (2001-2004) consists of a substantially larger computer-controlled industrial spray painting unit that is built into a van or trailer. The system is capable of printing text messages hundreds of feet long, and as wide as a lane of traffic. StreetWriter was developed in order to protest the militarization of robotics and the privatization of public space through corporate messaging. In 2004, for example, the project was deployed in protest of the first DARPA Grand Challenge, where it printed Asimov’s first rule of robotics (“A robot must not kill”). Video of the IAA StreetWriter can be seen here.

In mid-2009, the sports apparel manufacturer Nike and its PR agency, Wieden+Kennedy, commissioned Pittsburgh design studio DeepLocal to create a similar device, Chalkbot, for use in its “LIVESTRONG” advertising campaign for the 2009 Tour de France. The Chalkbot system was used to print inspirational messages sent (via SMS and the Web) by Internet users, as well as Nike’s campaign slogans and logographs. The Institute for Applied Autonomy group was not involved in (or informed about) Nike’s appropriation of its Streetwriter concept, and posted a press release stating their objection to “the corporate appropriation of ‘outsider’ research projects without acknowledgement of the amateur, collective, hobbyist, and activist communities upon which projects like Chalkbot are built.” Deeplocal posted a response to this, asserting the value of Chalkbot for spreading messages of hope for cancer survivors, and more generally for connecting a very large public, so directly, to such a messaging device.

In autumn 2009, British new-media artist Chris O’Shea was commissioned by FACT (Foundation for Art & Creative Technology) and the Liverpool City Council to create an interactive public artwork for the BBC Big Screen Liverpool and the Live Sites Network. His project, Hand from Above, featured the hand of an enormous and mischievous “deity” which appears to tickle passersby, pluck unsuspecting pedestrians out from their surroundings, and perform other whimsical actions. Hand from Above premiered on 23 September 2009 during the inaugural Abandon Normal Devices Festival, and in May 2010 was awarded an Honorable Mention for interactive art in the Prix Ars Electronica, the world’s largest, best-known, and longest-running competition for experimental computer arts. Hand from Above has since been shown in Tokyo at Roppongi Art Night, at the invitation of the British Council Japan and Mori Building. Subsequently…

On 25 June 2010, a new interactive billboard went live at Times Square in New York City. Designed by interactive agency Space150 for Forever 21, as announced by industry magazine FastCompany.com, the billboard featured “a model walking in front of an image of the crowd below. And then it gets interesting: The model occasionally leans over, and appears to pluck someone out of the crowd. Sometimes, they stink, so she tosses them.” (This interaction is pictured above.) “It’s an over-used expression, but this really is cutting edge technology,” said James Squires, director of technology, Space150. “Computer vision is … very new and it’s going to be incredibly effective when Times Square shoppers find themselves being picked up by giant models.”

I’m grateful to the artists listed above, all of whom, in full disclosure, are friends or acquaintances. I’m also grateful to Eric Paulos, who alerted me to some important examples, and to the many others online who responded to my request on Twitter for similar instances. I learned that there are many, many examples of new-media artworks which laid the conceptual groundwork for everyday commercial products. (Want some more? How about Motoi Ishibashi and Motoki Kouketsu, whose G-Display artwork (1999) anticipated most modern tilt-based interactions. Or contrast Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s well-known media-art classic, Text Rain (1999), itself a descendant of Myron Krueger’s Video Place, with the new Word Wall “donor recognition system” (2009) by SnibbeInteractive.com.)

There’s also another question I’ve left unaddressed here, which concerns the shifting artistic (as opposed to economic) value of artwork-inventions which become commonplace tools and products. These stories are ultimately, for me, inspirational yet grimly depressing — and so for now, I’ll let the bittersweet job of making a comprehensive list of such projects fall to someone else.

For those not familiar with this phenomenon, here are the basic facts:

• About 8,000-10,000 “painting workers” are employed in a single village (actually, an urban district) to produce more than 60% of the world’s paintings. (And I’ll bet you thought the world’s largest population of artists was in Berlin or Brooklyn!)
• Some factories specialize in reproducing famous Western masterpieces; others specialize in creating literally thousands of identical units (for hotels, cruise ships, and retail outlets like WalMart, K-Mart, Ikea, etc.); and other factories specialize in painting custom reproductions of family portraits, pets, wedding photos, and the like.
• Commissioning a custom painting is done with digital images, via email attachments and PayPal, and takes about 10-14 days including shipping. Prices range from as little as $10 to as much as $1000 (for a high-quality forgery); cost factors include the size, thickness of paint, and presence of (for example) people and/or portrait faces. For a painting whose dimensions are 50cm x 40cm, one might expect to pay $30-100 US.

A painting speed competition in Dafen.

Newspaper articles, critical histories and other journalism.
(Lots of good information here.)

• James Fallows, “Workshop of the world, fine arts division.” Atlantic Monthly, 12/19/2007.
• James Fallows, “A little more about the ‘art factory village’ of Dafen“. Atlantic Monthly, 12/20/2007.
• Le-Min Lim, “China’s Factory for Fake Art Tries to Beat Slump“. Bloomberg News, 9/24/2008.
• Evan Osnos, “Chinese village paints by incredible numbers“. Chicago Tribune, 2/13/2007.
• Martin Paetsch, “Van Gogh From the Sweatshop“. Spiegel Online, 08/23/2006.
• Wong, Winnie Won Yin. “Framed Authors: Photography and Conceptual Art from Dafen Village“. Yishu- Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art.

This 7-minute YouTube video provides an excellent overview of the painting economy in Dafen village:

Example painting factories online.
(There are many others.)

• Book530
• Dafen Art
• Gold Apple Art

Western art approaches to the phenomenon.
(Interesting work which addresses this trend critically, conceptually, and/or politically.)

• Michael Mandiberg. In memory of the man in front of the tanks (Tiananmen 20 years later). 2005-2009 [More at Flickr]. Mandiberg commissioned paintings of the famous Tienanmen photograph, obtaining results which were censored or modified in a variety of ways.
• REGIONAL OFFICE design group. Self-portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen. 2007. REGIONAL OFFICE commissioned self-portraits of the Dafen artists themselves.
• Alan Butler. The Image Factory, 2009.
  Butler commissioned a painting of the first photograph above (of a painting competition in Dafen village, from Spiegel Online).
• Michael Wolf. Real Fake Art series.
• Christian Jankowski, Super Classical exhibition at Maccarone Gallery, 2007.
• Clement Valla:
  • Paintings from Wushipu, 2009.
  • 100USD-90USD-65USD, 2008.
  • “Original Copies” (RISD MFA Thesis, PDF format), 2009, pp. 24-59.
    Valla commissioned a variety of experiments, including the creation of painted feedback loops, open-ended instructional paintings, and paintings corrupted by digital transmission errors. His thesis provides an excellent discussion of the aesthetic and ethical issues.

Outsourced oil painting is the new “digital output”.

I should perhaps briefly explain my interest in this phenomenon. Of course, there is some very provocative conceptual art which investigates and appropriates these painting resources, such as that by the artists linked above. This is challenging and (in my opinion) necessary work. From my standpoint as an arts educator, however, I do not believe it is adequate for students to be made aware of such clever projects in blogs like this one. Instead, I believe it is essential to directly expose students — particularly those who consider themselves to be painters — to the actual use of this inexpensive, new, internet-enabled “means of production”, and thereon to crucial aesthetic and ethical questions about authenticity, labor, and the cultural logic of mass customization in today’s global economy. They must cause one to be made, once, themselves. They must understand the implications, by being implicated in the process.

Most of my undergraduate students self-identify as painters. Many of them harbor charming ideas about the “aura” of original paintings, which allows them to distinguish their works from “banal”, machine-produced prints. But too few are aware of this extraordinary revolution in their own trade, in which the majority of the world’s paintings are now mass-produced by a superscaled “human machine”. And very few, if any, yet appreciate that the cost of having a JPEG image skillfully painted in China is roughly the same price as having it printed on the HP Designjet in our school’s Digital Print Lab — or that the process of commissioning such a painting over email, is barely more complicated than pressing Command-P. (Perl script, anyone?) I am convinced that our young painters must confront these facts directly. This coming September, in my introductory Electronic Media Studio class at Carnegie Mellon, I’ll be exposing my freshmen Art students to this, in their first week at university — when their Photoshop assignments (a “fiction or forgery” collage, or a “retouched self-portrait”, perhaps) are “printed out” (surprise!) in hand-applied Chinese oils. I’m hoping this will be an eye-opening introduction to art school, and one that makes them think hard about what it means to be a painter in 2009. Stay tuned!

Thanks to Clement Valla and Winnie Won Yin Wong for invaluable pointers for this post.

The BBC orchestras have been getting an unusual and highly conceptual workout of late. I have been mulling over the contrast between two particular works which are bookends for advanced uses of the professional orchestra.

Consider, first, the performance of John Cage’s famous silent piece, 4’33″, by the full BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican, London in January 2004. Cage’s work

“was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece throughout the three movements. Although commonly perceived as ‘four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence’, the piece actually consists of the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed.” [Wikipedia].

[An additional copy can be found on YouTube here.]

In contrast to this is Sam Taylor-Wood’s video work, Sigh, in which a composition by Anne Dudley is performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra. Or, apparently performed, as the orchestra, minus their actual instruments, mime the piece precisely as their muscles remember it. In the video installation, which premiered in October 2008, the music is heard as a backdrop. A spokesperson for Taylor-Wood states:

“In a dark, rundown studio, the members of the orchestra sit in their everyday clothes. They start to play a piece of music, sawing and blowing the empty spaces where the instruments should be. Although the music is clear and audible, the absence of the instruments renders the sound oddly incorporeal. It’s a private, ghostly performance.” [London Evening-Standard]

Taylor-Wood’s work follows on the heels of her similar (and remarkable) project Prelude in Air, which focuses on the re-enactment of a solo cello work. Both videos evoke a form of sympathetic synaesthesia (or vicarious kinesthesia, if you will) in which the mind of the viewer fills in the missing instrument, an illusion which could only be made possible through the use of consummately professional performers.

And so we have two unusually intense works:

• Cage’s 4’33″ at the Barbican: All of the instruments, none of the sound; and
• Taylor-Wood’s Sigh: None of the instruments, all of the sound.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

As I lack a very substantial connection with tapestry and porcelain, I confess to admiring Stewart’s synopsis of this quote even more than the original quote itself: “some bloke who had to do something praxis-y so his sons could do something theoria-y so their kids could do something poesis-y.”

1. Guidelines for showing the expression change:
   • Avoid making a fast body move while changing the expression.
   • Change your expression before or after the body move.
   • Don’t lose the expression change in an active secondary action. (E.g., clothing catching up with a body move.)
2. Don’t try to tell too much in one drawing. Work out the idea over a series of drawings.
3. Don’t let facial expressions conflict with dialogue: The idea behind the words should suggest expression.
4. Be sure you have the right staging to show all the expression in your scene to best advantage:
   • Long Shot, medium shot, close up.
   • Straight-on, 3/4, Bird’s eye, + Worm’s eye views.
5. Have you the right expression to show what your character is thinking? Are all the parts of the head & face related to this one idea?
6. The expression of the idea behind the words must be captured throught the whole body as well as in the face. But remember: that expression originates in the eyes.
7. It is the change of shape of the eyes that shows what the character is thinking, It is the thinking that gives the illusion of life.
8. Avoid looking up (worm’s eye view) for a frown unless it is a sinister domineering frown.
9. Don’t hide a smile with the head tilted down too far, or behind a big nose or mustache.
10. Eyes in close-up should move 3 frames ahead of accent.
    
11. In a blink, eyes should close 3-4 frames ahead of accent.
12. Always remember: in character animation, all the different parts of the character – head, eyes, mouth, body & limbs, clothing – start and stop moving at different times, and move at different rates. [...] In other words, the starts and stops for different actions will overlap.

I love the precision of Johnston’s specification. Three to four frames’ worth of time, in traditional 24fps animation, is between 125-160 milliseconds. Considering that “the consensus in the modern kinesiology community that Simple Reaction Time, called SRT, takes an average of 150 milliseconds to decide to take an action”, we see that Johnston is using subtle modulations of eye animation to allow his viewer enough time to come to the same conclusion as his animated characters.

One of the shortcomings I’ve felt with my Opto-Isolator interactive eyeball sculpture is that it seems a little… less intelligent than I would like. I think Johnston’s rules about oculesic anticipation explain why. I need my robot to respond to actions 150 milliseconds before they happen! Given the machine’s fixed reaction time of 30 milliseconds for its vision processing, and another 20-50 milliseconds to overcome inertia in the motors, I can see that I’m really starting to have a serious need for an OEM version of Gondry’s one second time machine….

“Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View.

On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…

Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.”

The CMU School of Art, where I teach, is committed to exploring two emerging areas of artmaking: (1) the intersection of arts and technology; and (2), so-called “contextual practice”, or “art-in-context”, in which our students are encouraged to look beyond the white box (gallery) and the black box (theater) to discover and create new audiences for their work in the outside world. Street with a View is a perfect example of a project that touches both areas, not just for the way that it claims Google’s mapping technology as a new artistic medium, but because of the new audiences that it creates: from the high-school marching band and RPG swordfighters which Ben and Robin convinced to participate in the tableaux, to the neighborhood spectators who wondered why scores of costumed people were flooding their back alley, to the people performing Google searches on the Internet who will accidentally stumble upon their intervention. Congrats Ben and Robin!

By “diverse”, I’m referring to the range of media represented by the projects cited in Schaffer’s article, which include prints, music videos (like Aaron Koblin’s treatment for Radiohead), and all kinds of interactive software. Perhaps unintentionally, though, the roster of artists in her article is exclusively male. Schaffer interviewed me (among others), early on, seeking my suggestions for the article, and so it’s possible that I’m partly responsible for this oversight. But searching around this evening, I was dismayed to discover a complete lack of resources compiling infosthetic art or other visualizations by women; indeed, the single and only Googlewhack for “women in infovis” turns up this dreadful chestnut (…”InfoVis is from Venus, SciVis from Mars”). In the hope that this blog post can help correct the situation, I am moved to point out the significant (and evidently underrecognized) contributions to infoviz by artist/designer/researchers like Lisa Jevbratt, Fernanda B. Viégas, Sheelagh Carpendale, and Jana Diesner, along with newcomers like Stefanie Posavec and Stefanie Gray. In this vein, I also highly recommend the work of artists producing wonderful and provocative visualizations entirely without computation, such as Rachel Whiteread, Stacy Greene, Portia Munson, and Kathy Prendergast, among many others!