So I just woke my wife up at 4am because I thought the Flux Factory WordPress site had been seriously hacked and content deleted. Every page I visited had randomly generated Viagra drivel all over it, looking bleak indeed. I was imagining that some hacker might be in the admin role at that very moment, corrupting the SQL database that is the lifeblood of any blog, and which frankly rarely gets backed up. It’s an easy way to lose months of work.

Thus Christina had to get out of bed and provide me with passwords, with a view to do an emergency blog database backup. But then I checked the pages again and the Viagra spam was magically gone. A test on two other computers revealed the site to alive and well. Which leaves only one conclusion: My work laptop is infected, interestingly enough with a virus that is inserting its own toxic HTML into valid HTTP requests. I can only imagine what it might do to my entered passwords.

Ugh. I’m currently scanning disks with AVG Rescue on a USB stick and anticipating changing a lot of passwords, fair punishment for being too lax about security and maybe downloading the occasional file of ill repute.

Remember, kids: Scan and backup, duck and cover!

Update: Turns out the problem is on the Flux server after all. There is a nasty WordPress infection known as WordPress Pharma that will inject Viagra spam into web pages, but oddly enough only as they are presented to search engines. So the database etc. is untouched but I need to hunt down those rogue PHP files and exterminate them.

If you’re fortunate enough to be in New York anytime between now and June 11, 2011 you should make every effort to see Ryoji Ikeda’s “The Transfinite” installation at the Park Avenue Armory. It’s a massive audiovisual experience in two parts which should convince the most sceptical of audiences that maybe this whole “new media” thing has something going for it after all.

On the occasion of a recent graduate show students from Berghs School of Communication in Sweden have conducted a series of interviews with some very bright people about the fear of failure. Predictably, many responded with the old adage: “Embrace failure.”

While undoubtably true, that idea requires some translation in order to make into one’s personal practice and to most students it seems tremendously unhelpful. So Milton Glaser’s comments stand out by going far beyond simple encouragement. Instead he outlines an excellent argument for why the fear of failure leads to stagnation: If you only do what you’ve already proven to be good at, in the future you will always be asked to do that type of specialized service. As a result creative development ceases and rot sets in.

All creatives develop their own arsenal of tried-and-tested tricks. I’m certainly guilty of that. But I am always most impressed by people who take chances with their work and trust their instincts. I am also most pleased by my own projects when I feel they go beyond what I already know. So I for one think Mr.Glaser’s advice is damn good advice.

Make sure to watch the whole thing, it’s some of the most useful 7 minutes and 30 seconds you’ll spend this week…

Workshop with Studio Mode & MakerBot: Interactive Parametrics

This weekend I’ll be teaching the Interactive Parametrics Workshop with Studio Mode (Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons) and MakerBot (represented by Bre Pettis). We’ve been planning this for a while, but since it’s happening during my residency at MakerBot we thought it’d be fun to focus on the MakerBot as a possible output method. Our thanks to Bre and the MakerBot crew for supporting the workshop!

With a good mix of architects and code-hacking designers as our participants it should be an interesting weekend. We will be posting the resulting code examples and STL models after the workshop.

Read the rest of this entry »

The NODE crew from Frankfurt has announced the followup to their successful NODE08 festival. I will be co-curating the NODE10 exhibition with Eno Henze, a collaboration I think will have some interesting results.

November 15-20, 2010
Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany

The purpose of the inter-media forum is to facilitate a cross-border exchange between interactive media, digital art and generative design. The ‘NODE – Forum for digital Arts’ emerged in 2008 from an initiative of developers and users of the programming language vvvv, which is mostly used to create artistic and creative software projects. But NODE is more than just a large-scale vvvv user meeting, the NODE – Forum for Digital Arts gathers people working across the disciplines of applied and artistic media in a week-long event.

The focus of this years NODE10 is the investigation of cultural consequences of a post-industrialised, technological society. The exhibition ‘abstrakt Abstrakt’ thus deepens the discourse surrounding technology and society. Participants look into the subjects through workshops and talks combined with subsequent symposiums and live performances.

NODE10 – Official site
NODE10 on Facebook
NODE10 on Twitter

Deadline: 31.08.2010

This year you are definitely invited to participate the NODE Forum for Digital Arts again. So don´t hesitate and send us your work, which could be from screen to wall to everything. Please send us your proposal including the following information:

- detailed contact information
- title of your work
- context of creation (personnal project, schoolwork, professional)
- description of your work
- duration, resolution, sizes, tech rider
- screenshots, photographs

only as pdf to: node@vvvv.org (subject: submission)

For all other materials please send your documents to:

NODE – Forum for Digital Arts
Niddastrasse 84hh, 60329 Frankfurt, Germany

I just finished a very satisfying workshop at Shakerag in Sewanee, Tennesse. It was inspiring to spend a week writing code surrounded by craft makers doing everything from pottery and book binding to embroidery and twig geometries. It reminded me that no creative practice exists in a vacuum, but stands on the shoulders of the collective knowledge produced by all the makers that went before.

My thanks to all the great people at Shakerag, and especially my studio assistant Greg Pond (an excellent sound artist and sculptor.) Between the awesome food, great company and inspiring conversations it was a week well spent down South.

The following are some useful links that came up in the course of the week, reposted here for convenience.

• Classes and objects:
  - Shiffman’s Processing tutorial about objects
  - Shiffman’s Particle Systems tutorial
  - How my Dog learned Polymorphism
  - Java Tutorial: Object-Oriented Programming Concepts
• Processing.org Tutorials section
• wiki.processing.org (tutorials, hacks, documentation)
• 3D geometry generation: Toroid
• Fabbing and 3D printing:
  - Meshlab 3D model viewer
  - unwrappingLib for polygon unwrapping
  - Unfold Fab project for 3D printing ceramics
  - Hemesh library for complex 3D meshes
• Book: Getting started with Processing

We also had some fun with Arduino that made me realize I really do need to pick up some more physical computing tools.

Jer Thorp: NY Times: 365/360

Processing visualization head Jer Thorp is putting his money where his mouth and publishing 7 pieces of code in 7 days, free to download and experiment with. Judging from the three that he’s released so far they’re not your standard 20-minute sketches either:

1. GoodMorning! is a Twitter vizualization, showing users around the world popping up on a globe as they utter the magic words “good morning”. With a little geocoding and spherical mapping thrown in, this is a sweet sketch
2. NY Times: 365/360 uses the New York Times open data API to retrieve news stories for an entire year and draw connections between them. The results combine complexity with elegance for that true infoporn look.
3. tree.growth revisits that old classic, the L-system tree. Thorp uses colors and abstract “leaves” to great effect.

With such a strong start, one certainly looks forward to seeing the next four sketches to come. It’s not so common to find sketches of this complexity freely available, so they’re a great study for users who are on the threshold of making more complex applications.

Create an interactive type experience. Experiment with animated and interactive approaches to typography, applying computational strategies for animation.Tell a story or make the user create their own story.

Work in groups. Make the result printable. The challenge is to make a static object become alive, transform and move over time. Key goal: Engage – interact – surprise.

Examples: Typographic animation, text scrollers, dynamic letters, emotional typography, automatic layouts, type as pattern, randomized fonts.
Deadline: Presentation Thursday 27.11.

• Thinking with type
• Type + Code
• Teaching Type
• I Love Typography
• Typographyserved

• Peter Cho: Typotopo
• Peter Cho: Thesis
• Hudson-Powell: Responsive Type
• Lego Font Creator
• Michael Schmidt: Genotyp
• Vítor Quelhas: Dyntypo
• Ricardo Marxer: Caligraft
• Nicolai, a modular font

Lukas Vojir: Processing Monsters

Czech Processing hacker Lukas Vojir has come up with a great project to test out your coding skills: Make your very own Processing Monster!

Essentially, these “monsters” are little black and white interactive sketches, in which all manners of strange dark creatures stand ready to react to the user’s poking and prodding. It’s surprisingly effective in its simplicity, once again reminding you that simple narrative devices are often the best.

Lukas is currently soliciting collaborators who want to contribute to the online bestiary, if you have a minute I would definitely recommend giving it a go. Now, if only I had the time to make that scary multi-tentacled squid beast…

For more about Lukas Vojir, take a look at his portfolio site rmx.cz or his Tumblr blog.

A new online storage contender: Dropbox

Digital nomads and data paranoiacs everywhere tend to be big fans of online storage, and I am no exception. I’ve been using Box.net to share large files with clients and colleagues for a long time. It’s a great service with a nice GUI, with good support for sharing files. Their service record is excellent, I’ve never had any with service outages or trouble uploading.

However, the storage limit on the basic Box.net plan is only 5 GB for $7.95 / month. They offer an upgraded plan with 15 GB, but I’m not prepared to pay $19.95 every month for a few gigabytes. I’d be happy to pay up to $10 / month, but in return I want enough storage that I can use it without worrying about running out of space. 50 gigs or more would be sufficient for that purpose.

Shopping around, I’ve found JungleDisk to be a great solution for genuine online backup. It’s based on Amazon AWS storage, and users are charged according to actual storage used. I currently store 14 gigabytes, which last month cost me a measly $3.56 for last month including transfer fees. Compared with the one-off $20 purchase of the software, this is a very reasonable option.

JungleDisk uses a desktop application for its operations, so it’s well integrated in the native file system and supports automated backup tasks. I have it set up to safeguard key folders like current projects, office documents etc. I can also access files interactively through a cached network drive, which allows me to download old projects and large media files even while travelling.

Dropbox is a new storage service that has only just come out of beta, and it looks very promising so far. It combines a dynamic web interface with a desktop application, providing the best of both worlds. The software sets up a sync’ed folder on your computer, so that editing folder structures and uploading files is as easy as copying files around your file system. Files uploaded through the web interface will be downloaded and sync’ed with the local folder.

The web interface allows you to set up file sharing with other Dropbox members. So far a few features are missing that would make it easy to share files with non-members. There is a public folder that you can use to provide public URLs to specific files, but it still lacks the important feature of sharing public folders.

According to a recent blog post Dropbox plans to offer 2 GB for free and 50 GB for $9.99 / month, or $99.99 / year. Sounds like just the right deal for my purposes. I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops. But even if I end up switching from Box.net I’ll probably keep JungleDisk for backing up larger projects.