Too Much Information

Alex May just put up a sample of his latest interactive performance instillation which he demos with a dancer.

Shadows of Light from Quadratura on Vimeo.

I saw an Australian dance performance last month here in Berlin called Glow which was a floor dance also with real-time interactive dance visuals.

I like this direction VJing is taking. Slightly above the mundane random images with effects layer on.

10/GUI from C. Miller

This is a great TED talk from Tim Berners-Lee who created the internet. Here he talks about Linked Data and the importance of sharing and linking data.

Just as with his first break-through, the hyperlink, he realises that its the links that make things useful. To take this on step further the linking is how we embed mean into web documents. The same applied with data. Data by itself is not as useful as data linked to other data and this linkage is meaningful.

Linking was only half the story and Tim doesn’t talk about the importance of standardising the data format, which by the way he also underestimated with HTML and why web developers have had a nightmare with different web browsers interpretation of HTML. Data formats is the less exciting half of the equation but is going to be just as critical. Especially with numbers like dates, currencies, measurements (and their metrics) etc. I’m thinking (hoping, praying) that we’ve learnt our leasons from HTML and people know when and how to draw up a standard for data formats before this thing explodes.

This TED talk by Tom Wujec shows ways that visualising ideas helps to solve the problems. The “Visual Strategy Planning” idea, where a team maps out the entire problem on a wall, together, is a bit like a mind-map and is a nice interface to information.

It also has ramifications for learning in that new concepts could be presented to students as a map instead of a linear text.

I’ve been inspired by a great lecture, The Web that Wasn’t by Alex Wright, which traces the history of precursor ideas and thinking that ether lead to the web or where ideas much greater than the Internet is right now.

Here are some of the ideas that were missed out on and I believe are sill possible with internet technology today: Read more…

The “science advisors” used on the movie Minority Report (3 stars from me coz it had Tom Snooze in it) teamed up with some techys and made the hand gesture interface real! Who needs a touch screen when you have this…

They are using some funky tech gloves there to get the motion detection but what would happen if they mixed in a simple webcam and this software…
Read more…

This summer I hung out in the Czech Republic in the lovely town of B?ha?ov with Sonya. Tina and her boyfriend Phill dropped by and Julia so, inspired by the movie Zombie Lake (1981), we decided to make a music-video called Making Fools, which is now up on Sonya’s website. It is my first completed track (so far, and not really indicative of what I’m into but it was made in one day with on a nasty hangover).

I just stumbled across the SIMILE project form the famous MIT and, as the screen cast above proves, they have some hot stuff to play with both online for your website and software extensions for FireFox and Thunderbird. This is almost enough to switch back to Thunderbird from the tired old, doggy Mail (Mac)!

I have got to get the lyrics!

This is a great little video that explains what RSS is about. I’m always looking for these sorts of things to help people with the “tricky” stuff about the web.

(by the way you can subscribe to this site if you like :)