This is ”ambient information” — the newest concept in how to monitor everyday data. With Ambient the physical environment becomes an interface to digital information, rendered as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color or light.

The Orb is a frosted-glass ball that glows different colors to display traffic congestion or any other Ambient information channel: weather, windspeed, pollen, traffic congestion, real time stock market trends. The Ambient Orb arrives preset to track the Dow Jones Industrial Average, glowing more green or red to indicate market movement up or down, or yellow when the market is calm. It can be customized to a set of free channels, such as market indices or weather in major cities.

http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/platform.html

The British branch of Penguin Books recently premiered a new website called We Tell Stories. The basic idea is that six authors will tell six stories over a period of six weeks. Particularly story #1, “The 21 Steps” by Charles Cumming, was told using Google Maps.
Is there a new expressive tool coming out?Could there someday be a Google Maps of Sci-Fi?

You don’t have to be blind to see that the writing is on the wall.

A PUBLIC ART PROJECT FOR THE BLIND
PORTLAND, OREGON
AUGUST – 2007
SCOTT WAYNE INDIANA

Purchase online at www.joaap.org
An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration. It pairs artists, architects, and designers with writers to address the role of the map as a political agent. An Atlas of Radical Cartography makes an important contribution to a growing cultural movement that traverses the boundaries between art, cartography, geography and activism.

Maps by:
An Architektur | the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) | Ashley Hunt | Institute for Applied Autonomy | Pedro Lasch | Lize Mogel | Trevor Paglen & John Emerson | Brooke Singer | Jane Tsong | Unnayan

Essays by:

Kolya Abramsky | Sebastian Cobarrubias & Maribel Casas-Cortes | Alejandro De Acosta | Avery F. Gordon | Institute for Applied Autonomy | Sarah Lewison | Jenny Price, Ellen Sollod, D.J. Waldie, Paul Kibel | Heather Rogers | Jai Sen | Visible Collective & Trevor Paglen

This beautiful boxed set containing ten unbound 17²x22² maps and a 160-page book of essays is immediately available from the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press @ www.joaap.org.
It is available to bookstores worldwide in January 2008 through Distributed Art Publishers (DAP) @ www.artbook.com.

The chart — compiled from data provided by the American and Iraqi governments and news media organizations (the independent Coalition Casualty Count in particular) — gives information on the type and location of each attack responsible for the 2,592 recorded deaths among American and other coalition troops, Iraqi security forces and members of the peshmerga militias controlled by the Kurdish government.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/opinion/06chart.html

Spanish telecom giant Telefonica saves etoy.CORPORATION from bankruptcy and brings etoy’s mission to the next level.

As president Francisco Serrano, announced today at Barcelona Contemporary Art Museum (MACBA): etoy wins the first prize of the VIDA AWARDS created by Fundación Telefónica to foster artistic creation based on new technologies and artificial life.

Excerpt from the jury statement:

etoy launched the Mission Eternity Project in 2005, foregrounding on the one hand respect for the human longing to survive in some way after death, and on the other a sense of irony about dated sci-fi fantasies we contrive to satisfy that desire. The Sarcophagus is one materialization of this project. It is a mobile sepulcher that holds and displays portraits of those who wish to have their informational remains cross over into a digital afterlife. The size of a standard cargo container that can travel to any location in the world, the Sarcophagus has an immersive LED screen covering its walls, ceiling and floor. There, interactive digital portraits can be summoned via mobile phone or web browser from virtual capsules that are stored in the shared memory of thousands of networked electronic devices of Mission Eternity Angels (people who contribute a small part of their personal storage capacity to the mission, currently 765 of them; to date, 2 volunteers have been accepted for encapsulation). The data spectres that populate this tenuous memorial space are composed of details of lives lived, in visual, audio and text fragments. But when they are summoned in lo-res pixellated form in the Sarcophagus, they resemble one merged personality. The massing of details that we find in archives and records that keep the dead with us has a similar compositing effect, yet the Sarcophagus is also very unlike those. It gives us access to a novel social world generated among networked computer users who have a common goal of keeping something alive, which can invoke intense feelings such as care and wonder.

http://www.missioneternity.org
http://www.etoy.com
http://angelapp.missioneternity.org/
http://www.telefonica.es/vida

Amazon’s long-awaited Kindle electronic book reader today get its official introduction. The Kindle is equipped with a Wi-Fi connection that taps into an Amazon e-book store, which users can access to purchase new electronic books, and Amazon has reportedly signed onto a deal with Sprint for EVDO access. The device has a keyboard, users can use to take notes or navigate the Web. Amazon may also offer subscriptions to feeds from major newspapers but the Kindle’s screen from E Ink, does not display animation or color. The device comes with a headphone jack for audiobooks, as well as an e-mail address.

Many publishing executives see Amazon’s entrance into the e-book world as a major test for the long-held notion that books and newspapers may one day be consumed on a digital device.

Based on the data gathered by Hoeckstra et al. in their study »Water Footprint of Nations« German designer Timm Kekeritz created a double-sided poster based on the idea of virtual water. One side visualizes the water footprint of selected nations, emphasizing the im- and export of virtual water. The other side shows the virtual water content of selected foods and commodities.

Virtual water content – The virtual-water content of a product (a commodity, good or service) is the volume of freshwater used to produce the product, measured at the place where the product was actually produced (production-site definition). It refers to the sum of the water use in the various steps of the production chain. The virtual-water content of a product can also be defined as the volume of water that would have been required to produce the product at the place where the product is consumed (consumption-site definition). We recommend to use the production-site definition and to mention it explicitly when the consumption-site definition is used. The adjective ‘virtual’ refers to the fact that most of the water used to produce a product is not contained in the product. The real-water content of products is generally negligible if compared to the virtual-water content.
[excerpt from waterfootprint.org]

and here you can order it.

I attended the View Conferences today talk with Rodrigo J. Lopez, principal at Neoscape, an award winning visualization studio based out of Boston and New York, where he serves as creative and art director.

He explained the audience that both in gaming and filmmaking, as well as in the realm of digital architecture and visualization, with every improvement and development in technology, new doors open to the point where the lines separating the worlds of cinema, gaming environment development and architectural visualization begin to blur.

So the storytelling, after the pure advertisement, now has conquered the realm of real estate marketing. Lopez is clear since the beginning declaring that there’re many other firm that do traditional 3D rendering and lighting better than them, but they don’t want to realize just beautiful 3D, their mission is to fall the viewer in love with the space.

Here’s the list of the …things to do to realize a great architectural visualization enhanced by storytelling:

*discovery
fall in love in love with the space, it helps a lot in the creative process and everyone involved in the film shppopuld attend this part to be inspired

*storyboarding
it helps to sell the idea and to work faster and cheper

*previsualization
importnat phase that helps doing really difficult shot faster and cheaper and laso it’s the phase when you can experiment more

*set design
usually the architect and the designer do it, but the creative job is to populate the space with furniture and people. Set dressing is really important because it can kill or leverage the story

*cameras
keep the camera simple and have always a purpose for evey movement

*lighting
important to give a mood to the image

*compositing
really delicate part also because it was an innovation of the last 4 years

*color grading
make it emotive

*editing
the most important part, it’s really the moment to put together all the pieces and tell the story

And finally 6 rules that he found useful:
- don’t fall in love with shots
- manifacture reality
- editing is preception | preception is reality
- point of view
- suggestion is more effective than exposition

The omnipresence of public displays such as LED, LCD, plasma screens, large scale projections and media facades demands a critical reflection of their impact on cities and on our perceptions of them. At the same time, they offer new and exciting possibilities for artistic and non-commercial use as well as for community development and play.

Urban Screens Manchester looks specifically at the creation of content, commissioning / funding issues, curatorship and the architectural possibilities of urban screens in the 21st century.

The conference will take place at Cornerhouse, Manchester‘s international centre for contemporary visual arts and film.

The Manchester conference is a follow-up to the first groundbreaking conference in this area, Urban Screens 2005 in Amsterdam by the Institute of Network Culture.