Augmented Reality (or AR, the combination of the virtual and the real in realtime and 3D through computing technology) is the newest technology hyped by software engineers, geeks and marketing gurus around the globe, especially in the handheld industry. But so far it has failed to shine with profound and critical concepts other than dull games and animations displaying 3D objects on a marker image for advertising purposes or somewhat banal and obvious hyperlocal navigation applications. Given the potential of the technology, I haven't come across one single concept yet, which gets beyond gadgetry and in fact augments and so truly improves our reality.

Not so the Artvertiser, which is a brilliant concept by the award-winning interaction designer and intervention artist Julian Oliver, realised in collaboration with Clara Boj, Diego Diaz of the lalalab and Damian Stewart. The project features Augmented Reality software (which builds heavily upon BazAR by Swiss University of Lausanne's Computer Vision Lab) and the “billboard interception prototype” that re-purposes street advertisements as a surface for exhibiting art. The Artvertiser situates the 'read-only', proprietary imagery of our public spaces as a 'read-write' platform for the presentation of non-proprietary, critically engaging content. The software can train itself to recognise specific advertisements, which then become virtual 'canvases' where artists can exhibit visual artworks when viewed through the hand-held device.

Julian Oliver’s approach to Augmented Reality is unique and outstanding. He doesn’t add another information layer to our perception process but blends out “enforced” information. As we are already overwhelmed with advertisements and information in our everyday, we haven’t come to question for whom the administrators of our cities actually allow write access to the surfaces of our cities. It seems that we’re so used the scene in our streets, that we’ve come to accept that it’s kind of a natural state. But who is in fact in control of that visual dictatorship? You can name it a violation of our visual cortext, which Oliver calls in a recent TED Talk the “true real-estate that marketers and advertisers are after, where they want their mindshare”. Thus, I think the Artvertiser project truly improves our reality of the saturation of billboard advertisements in our city streets by fading out the adverts and replacing them with art and allow artists authorship for the surfaces of our cities. It's Add-Art for the real world.

Loading mentions Retweet

Whenever we talk about climate change or planetary boundaries being overshot, discussions are held on a very abstract and hypothetical level based mostly on the predictions by scientists and researchers. It involves an immense amount of cognitive effort of any regular person to imagine these processes stretching out over time and into our future. These are not events which can be perceived with our human eyes and experienced directly with our bodies. 

The emerging field of high quality but low-budget time lapse photography has a lot of potential to be our technological prosthesis, our third eye which enables us to look into the past and observe slow occurring events more easily. By changing the timeframe, any video editor with decent skills can tell a different story, a story of our existence on this planet. Through time-lapse videos we can observe the actual rotation of our planet, gaze at the rise of Milky Way, see how the weather evolves and perceive the complexity and rhythms of our modern civilisations. Even the most convinced advocates of reason must have to admit that these images have something mythical and are extremely strong. 

In their movies (Qatsi Trilogy, Baraka) time-lapse pioneers Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke first performed the task of taking the viewer on a journey through time (and not only that!). Meanwhile, 2 decades later every hobby photographer with decent equipment can do the same and present a mythical and sublime experience of mother earth in universe on a computer screen. Whereas in most of the footages of the time-lapse communities on Vimeo or Youtube you can gaze for hours at the beauty of earth, the full communicative potential of this creative method hasn’t been harnessed so far. Good examples, which set the direction we should be heading with the time-lapse fun is Greenpeace’s short clip “breath in, breath out” or James Balog's "extreme ice survey".

Loading mentions Retweet

A short film I made about the people at the Dark Mountain Festival in May 2010, why they went and what they do in "normal" life. The festival was "...a training camp for the unknown world ahead, a festival of music and writing, thinking and doing, a chance to meet people whose ideas and stories and ways of looking at the world which can help us navigate what is likely to be a challenging and unpredictable future."

The Dark Mountain Project describes itself as "...a growing global movement of writers, artists, craftspeople and workers with practical skills who have stopped believing in the stories our civilisation tells itself. We believe we are entering an age of material decline, ecological collapse and social and political uncertainty, and that our cultural responses should reflect this, rather than denying it."

The video features the landless peasant (last seen behind Gordon Brown at his constituency speech during the general election 2010) and Julian Burton of Delta7 painting the bigger picture as well as Alistar McIntosh, an independent scholar, activist, and renowned writer of the book "Soil and Soul". 

Loading mentions Retweet

Clive Hamilton at the RSA back in May 2010.

I've seldom read a book which brings our current predicament so accurately to the point as Clive Hamilton's "Requiem for a Species". The book discusses primarily the human nature, how we deal psychologically with reminders of death and how our divorce from nature has led us on a path where a 4 degree temperature rise is pretty much certain in 2100. He also includes the obsession with economic growth and explains how this has led us to a new kind of religion or raison d'etre.

This book does not set out once more to raise the alarm to encourage us to take radical measures to head off climate chaos. There have been any number of books and reports in recent years explaining just how dire the future looks and how little time we have left to act. This book is about why we have ignored those warnings, and why it may now be too late. It is a book about the frailties of the human species as expressed in both the institutions we built and the psychological dispositions that have led us on the path of self-destruction. It is about our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the Earth - our capacity to reason and our connection to Nature - and those that, in the end, have won out - our greed, materialism and alienation from Nature. And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures. (from earthscan.co.uk)

Loading mentions Retweet

Marmaduke Dando releases his debut album Heathcliffian Surly on 3rd Sept 2010 at Hoxton Hall in London.

My name is Marmaduke Dando Hutchings and I am a singer of morose ballads and frisky jigs. I write about all the horrors and beauties of the modern world, and bark them back at it with my dear band on the cold and regimented performance stages of London. I am originally from Portsmouth on the south coast of England, born and raised there until the dull glare of the capital became so unbearable that I fled towards it. (from: marmadukedando.com)

Lyrics of "If This Is Civilisation":

The snivelling remains of humanity,
Scooped up off the floor and served back to itself.
Masticated already in preparation,
For the toothless masses of this dying nation.

If this is civilisation, I want no part in it.

To think one can comprehend so little,
Yet live in such complexity is nothing short of a riddle.
The deeply satisfying myth of progress,
That faceless object that offers divine purpose.
If this is civilisation, I want no part in it.

Another day, another horror.
No one seems remotely bothered.
Sat there all day twiddling little machines,
Sucking on dicks of men they've never even seen.

If this is civilisation, I want no part in it.

I would burn my right hand in a slow fire,
To change the future before we expire,

If this is civilisation, I want no part in it.

The division of labour has outsourced your mind,
The spunk's gone dead, you can't fuck for your life.

If this is civilisation, if this is civilisation, if this is civilisation, if this is civilisation,

I want no part in it

Loading mentions Retweet

Paul Kingsnorth's talk at UNCIVILISATION, Dark Mountain Festival 2010 in Llangollen, Wales (29.5.2010). His speech (of which I missed the first 3 minutes) was part of the "Time to stop pretending" panel.

"Paul has worked on the comment desk of the Independent, as commissioning editor for opendemocracy.net and as deputy editor of The Ecologist. He is also an award-winning poet, and an honorary member of the Lani tribe of New Guinea. He has written for most UK newspapers and many other publications at home and abroad, and appeared on radio and TV. Paul's first book, One No, Many Yeses (Simon and Schuster, 2003), an investigative journey through the 'anti-globalisation' movement, was published in six languages in thirteen countries. His second book, Real England, was published by Portobello Books in 2008. His debut poetry collection, Kidland, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. In 2009 he co-founded of the Dark Mountain Project." (from www.paulkingsnorth.net)

The Dark Mountain Project: http://www.dark-mountain.net/

Loading mentions Retweet

Speech of Vinay Gupta at last weekend's intensely inspiring UNCIVILISATION, Dark Mountain Festival 2010 in Llangollen, Wales (29.5.2010). His talk was part of the "Time to stop pretending" panel (pls excuse the shaky and somewhat out of focus recording...)

Gupta was born in 1972 and is a partner at Buttered Side Down - a risk management consultancy focusing on systemic risks like state failure and economic collapse.

The Dark Mountain Project: http://www.dark-mountain.net/
Vinay Gupta on twitter: @leashless

Loading mentions Retweet

In addition to Matt Logue's Empty L.A. Ross Ching has taken the idea one step further, combining retouching with time lapse photography. 

Ross describes his work as follows:

I live in Los Angeles. I drive in Los Angeles. I think about traffic a lot in Los Angeles. A few months ago, I discovered Matt Logue’s Empty LA photographs. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but every time I was stuck in rush hour all-hour traffic, I found myself thinking, “What if tomorrow everyone’s car disappeared.”

What would that scene look like? How would people react? How quickly would the atmosphere rebound from centuries of fossil fuel emissions?

So I took Matt Logue’s still photography concept and applied it to something that I do best — time lapse. I built a story around the idea of us being shackled to this ball and chain; this love-hate relationship with whom we spend so much time with here in LA.

PS. Driver who goes 60 mph in the fast lane — I still hate you.

More info about the video editing: rossching.com

Loading mentions Retweet

Sean Stiegemeier (@sstieg) has shot some breathtaking timelapse images of the volcano that messed around with air travel in Europe in April. Perfect choice of music with icelandic artist Jonsi (Sigur Ros). Here's Sean's description to his video:

So I saw all of these mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of, so I figured I should go and do better. But the flights to get over took forever as expected (somewhat). 4 days after leaving I finally made it, but the weather was terrible for another 4. Just before leaving it got pretty good for about a day and a half and this is what I managed to get.

Wish I had more time. I missed all the cool Lightning and the Lava of the first eruption. But I figure this will just be a trial run for another day.

I am of course accepting sponsors to send me back there for more please...!! haha

Music: Jónsi - Kolniður (jonsi.com)
Canon 5d mkII
HUGE thanks for the Motorized Dolly via MILapse (vimeo.com/milapse). Details are to come soon so stay tuned...

Loading mentions Retweet

My next book on the reading list: Alan Weisman's "The world without us" published in 2007. Jennifer Schuessler from the New York Times Book Review gave it the following recension: 

"Weisman imagines what would happen if the earth’s most invasive species—ourselves—were suddenly and completely wiped out . . . Weisman knows from the work of environmental historians that humans have been shaping the natural world since long before the industrial age. His inner Deep Ecologist may dream of Earth saying good riddance to us, but he finds some causes for hope . . . it’s the cold facts and cooler heads that drive Weisman's cautionary message powerfully home. When it comes to mass extinctions, one expert tells him, 'the only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting."

Loading mentions Retweet